Google is getting some major national exposure for both its AppEngine platform and Google Moderator, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The White House is using Moderator, hosted on AppEngine, to determine which questions President Obama should answer at an online Town Hall meeting on Thursday.
In just a few hours 6,932 people have submitted 7,037 questions and cast 236,048 votes on the site – which proves out the AppEngine promise that you can build highly scalable applications with little effort. The top question, based on votes so far, is “As a student, who like so many others works full time and attends school full time, only to break even at the end of the month. What is the government doing to make higher education more affordable for lower and middle class families?”
Google also hosts the President’s video message for the meeting, on YouTube. I’m surprised he’s not wearing a Google tshirt, too. Google should be paying him an endorsement fee for all this promotion. → Read More
Microsoft announced today that they are making it easier to develop applications and games for the Xbox platform, with new tools in their XNA Game Studio kit. The updated kit includes better video and audio API’s, which will allow more games using the Avatars and LIVE Party content to be developed. Microsoft also stated that their improved Xbox 360 Development and Test Kit hardware will have improved debugging memory, which will allow developers to produce games faster and more effectively. → Read More
There you are, sitting in your basement with your headset on, getting ready to record the latest episode of your kick ass Transformers podcast. You glance at your Feedburner stats and wonder, for the millionth time, why your subscriber volume has remained so low for so long. Maybe it’s because no one can understand you, what with your crappy headset mic? → Read More
MySpace has just launched its official toolbar, giving users immediate access to their MySpace activity notifications regardless of what site they’re currently browsing on the web. MySpace has been testing the browser plugin since last year (we originally wrote about it in December), but it was only available to a limited number of users. Beginning today, it will be available internationally to all users, and the site will begin to publicize it.
The toolbar is available on Windows for Firefox and IE users, as well as on Mac for Firefox (there’s no Safari support yet). You can grab it on this page, which also includes a nifty interactive demo of the toolbar so you can get a feel for it before installing the plugin. → Read More
Short Version: Shaun White Snowboarding Road Trip for the Wii is a must-have game for anyone who owns a Balance Board and is even remotely interested in snowboarding. → Read More
That kooky Mark Frauenfelder over at Boing Boing is always making crazy stuff. His latest invention is what he’s calling the Clubhouse Strummer: a homebrew quasi-guitar thing. You know, for kids! → Read More
“A camel is a horse designed by committee.” (source)
The camel/horse quote (no disparagement to camels meant, of course) perfectly captures the problem when too many people have input into a product. Seth Godin talks about how the Walkman would never have been built if Sony had asked its customers what they wanted (see Purple Cow). A few days ago Robert Scoble talked about how a Porsche would be a Volvo if they let their buyers decide on features: “if you asked a group of Porsche owners what they wanted they’d tell you things like “smoother ride, more trunk space, more leg room, etc.” He’d then say “well, they just designed a Volvo.””
The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. feature creep. boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device.
So I’m surprised that Facebook, which has stared down its users so many times in the past, is folding on the most recent redesign flareup and reverting back to some old features. Just because, oh, a million people demanded it. → Read More
Seagate announced a new product line today, the Black Armor NAS. Targeted at small businesses, the new device has hardware level encryption and is available in 2, 4, 6, or 8TB capacities. → Read More
Facebook has just posted a lengthy letter to its users on its official blog detailing some of the changes we’ll soon be seeing on the site’s recently-redesigned homepage.
Included among the new features are live updating to the homepage stream, which will make the homepage truly real-time (previously it would show up-to-the-minute results, but only when you refreshed the page). The feed will also begin to include photos tagged from your friends to the feed – something that I’m very surprised wasn’t included when the new homepage debuted (photos are often the first thing I check when I log into the site). Users will also have more control over what items from third party applications will appear into the stream (apparently users have been complaining that these have had too strong a presence in the current version). → Read More
When Google Streetview was given the green-light by the UK’s Information Commissioner last July, it appeared as if sanity had prevailed. Despite the protests of Privacy International, which pops up like a Meerkat every time Google or another tech company tries do do something innovative, the Commissioner ruled that it was “satisfied” that Google’s Street View photo-mapping would have safeguards to avoid risking anyone’s privacy or safety. But then Google made two major errors when it launched Street View last week. It has not covered up the faces of many people on the maps, or the number plates on their cars. And it has not photographed the house of Google’s UK MD – because he lives in a private road. As we say in tech: FAIL. Given how the largely right-wing UK press would act once it smelt blood, Google is now facing a perfect storm of protest that could hobble Street View – but with it the chances for Europe to join the tide of positive innovation that the release of publicly editable data is going to have on society. Now a formal complaint about Google’s Street View has been sent to the Information Commissioner (ICO) by Privacy International citing more than 200 reports from members of the public identifiable via the service, and it now wants the ICO to look again at how Street View works. As if it hadn’t already. But as Google boss Eric Schmidt has said “We agree with the concerns over privacy. The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.” In other words, as fast as people complain to Google that they have been seen on SV standing on a street corner, or they found their house, Google is allowing them to be removed from the system. So how long will PI’s list of 200 last? Probably less than a week. But no matter. PI wants the whole thing switched off. This is not to lightly dismiss some real concerns. The BBC reports that a woman who had moved house to escape a violent partner was recognisable outside her new home on Street View. But do I wonder if Google is being disingenuous. Surely it’s system could have been more thoroughly checked before going live? Could it possibly have contemplated → Read More
Short Version: A good, solid, cheap PMP with decent battery life and built-in speaker. → Read More
It’s amazing that children ever managed to survive the 50′s. Between the shoe fitting x-ray unit that leaked radiation so badly it caused brain cancer, the skull impaling lawn darts, children must have been dropping like flies. Luckily, the most questionable item out there, the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, was only available for about a year. → Read More
eBook readers are here to stay, and if you’re a CE company you’d better have one if you want to stay in the game. Samsung Electronics will soon be rolling out their Papyrus ebook reader in the US and UK. Will the touchscreen make this a Kindle killer? → Read More
Former CNET cofounder and CEO Shelby Bonnie founded Whiskey Media in 2007 as a platform to build media and entertainment content sites. The company, located in stunningly beautiful Sausalito, California (north of San Francisco) has no outside shareholders pestering them for a quick exit – the five cofounders, all former CNETers (Shelby Bonnie, Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy) have funded the company to date with less than $1.5 million. I recently had lunch with Bonnie to talk about how Whiskey Media is doing. It has quietly grown in the last year and a half, and the team is preparing to unveil a number of new sites this year.
We first covered the company in October 2007 with the launch of Political Base. It was, and is, notable because it’s built as a “structured wiki” – freely editable by anyone, but the data isn’t just one big unstructured blob like you see on Wikipedia and other wiki sites. Each section of a page is a separate silo, making it much easier to slice and dice data, and cross link around the site. Political Base was the primary inspiration for how we structured our own CrunchBase database of people, startups and venture funds. → Read More
Uh oh, Meebo – it looks like you might finally have some decent competition in the Android IM client space. Palringo, makers of the iPhone IM client of the same name, has released the first beta of their Android port. Like the iPhone application, Palringo for Android supports MSN, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, Jabber, Gtalk, Gadu-Gadu and Facebook chat. It’ll also allow you to send picture messages to any contact, or share your location – a feature which seems a bit extraneous, considering that countless other services with the same purpose (including one built into the Android platform out of the box) are putting a ton of effort into coaxing people into sharing their location without any significant success. Palringo for Android lacks one killer feature in its current beta state that made its iPhone counterpart stand out: voice messaging. On the iPhone port, you can record messages and send them to any one on your contact list. If they’re on Palringo, it’s played within the app – if not, it’s sent over as a link. It’s a godsend when your fingers are aching from blasting away on that itty-bitty keyboard all day. Fortunately, this isn’t too big of a deal right now, as the only Android phone on the shelves right now has a nice, finger-friendly physical keyboard. But when the touchscreen-only HTC Magic drops in April, many a fingertip around the world will be cryin’ for voice messaging. → Read More
Movie recommendations have most often been through word of mouth, but Netflix wants you to work harder to talk about the movies you watched over the weekend. The Netflix Updates application for Facebook users allows you to share your movie ratings with friends and view friend’s ratings through your news feed.
I am expecting the common reactions: “But I don’t want everyone to see my ratings!”, “I hate Facebook!”, “I hate change!” As with any Facebook application, you can control what your friends see. You can have Facebook prompt you before publishing any stories from Netflix Updates, or you can have Facebook update automatically without prompting. There is also an option to have your stories posted in one-line, short, or full. I put mine to one-line because I don’t want to contribute to the clutter already on my friend’s news feeds. → Read More
Since being a lousy parent seems to be all the rage these days, here’s another weapon for your doing-the-bare-minimum arsenal. It’s a baby pillow—see how it contours to your child’s neck—that has a built-in MP3 player and speaker. Presumably you’d put your baby on the pillow (well, it’s merely a render, so you won’t be doing any of this, as a matter of fact) while you sleep, watch TV, gamble or whatever it is that parents today do when their baby is asleep for a few minutes. Anyway, you lie the baby on the pillow, and out comes either A) a pre-recorded voice that whimpers “please stay asleep for 30 minutes so mommy and daddy can rest” or B) soothing music that you’ve downloaded from The Pirate Bay. (Best not to use that I-Doser stuff!) → Read More
Trusera, a ‘Health 2.0′ site founded by former Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, is facing tough times. The startup is nearly out of money, and Schorsch says that unless it can raise more funding by the end of April, it will have to shut down on April 30.
Trusera launched ten months ago, offering users a community where they can share their stories about how they’ve dealt with health conditions. Instead of simply segmenting users into different groups according to the disease they are dealing with, Trusera also takes other information into account, including a user’s hobbies, location, and age. Using this data it tries to match users up with each other, so that their experiences and tips can be shared with the people who stand to gain the most from them. The other benefit of this matching system is that users can elect to receive Email updates whenever a new match submits a story or tip, which means that users don’t have to worry about constantly searching the site for new information. → Read More
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