Mozilla Labs is debuting new personas today – extensions that add lightweight themed skins to your Firefox browser – enabling you to personalize your user experience according to your mood without interrupting your browsing sessions. The Personas for Firefox add-on was first introduced in late 2007, but has now expanded to include hundreds of artist-created designs in a variety of categories, according to a blog post announcing the new sets.
I like custom skins / themes and the fact that Mozilla is taking steps to make it easier for people to adjust the look and feel of their browser according to their mood, but somehow the announcement made me cringe a little (much like this Labs experiment did). I would rather see Mozilla focus on improving the speed and usability of its browser than offering its users ways to add eye candy, particularly now that the browser wars are heating up again. Firefox needs more innovation, not decoration. But then that’s just me. Some people love eye candy more than speed. → Read More
Counternotions has a thought-provoking essay about the future of iPhone naming, pointing out that we can’t very well have an iPhone 3G++ or an MacPhone 4G Pro floating around. According the Apple naming principles, the only thing they could do is call it the iPhone Pro if there were any material changes in the usability – i.e. pro features – and/or feel. Otherwise, it will probably just be called “iPhone 3G” aka iPhone 3G 2G yet be considerably different than iPhone 3G 1G aka iP3G1G. → Read More
SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.
The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.
We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result. → Read More
It seems that FED (field emission display) technology is not going to be the successor of LCD and plasma. Toshiba gave up on FED and SED, respectively, as early as January 2007. The company stopped a joint venture with Canon, which also seems to have more or less stopped development in that area (at least there were no FED or SED-related news from Canon in the last couple of months).
Now FED gets the Sony axe, too. → Read More
Micro-blogging is getting micro-payments. Tinker, the micro-blogging topic tracker from Glam Media which we covered in depth last night, is now live. The service tracks specific topics on both Twitter and Facebook, and allows these “event” streams to be republished as standalone widgets on blogs and other sites across the Web. I’ve embedded an example below showing the subsequent Tweets about our original article.
With the launch, Glam Media is also creating a professional micro-blogging network for journalists and bloggers who want to sign up to cover specific events or topics via Twitter or Facebook. It will be called the Tinker Micro-Bloggers Network. This will be a vetted subset of Tinker users who are advertiser-friendly. Glam is working on a micro-payments system to share revenues with approved micro-bloggers from ads in their associated widgets and Tinker streams. → Read More
Lauren AKA the girl from the Windows commercial is really Lauren De Long, a SAG-eligble actor with special skills including cheerleading, stage combat, and ear prompting. Giz and TechFlash tracked her down and she informed them that she is under NDA for her involvement in Microsoft’s laptop taste test. So she wasn’t an average girl picked up off the street, BangBus style [Editor's Note: DO NOT DO A SEARCH ON THIS], to purchase a laptop for the Redmond marketing department. Who knew?
Hell hath no fury like a fanboi scorned so a number of sites have already offered Ms. De Long a great MacBook in place of the poorly reviewed HP she purchased. → Read More
Cellmania, a company that builds and licenses the software that drives many mobile phone stores, has launched a new platform called the Android Content Storefront for Android phones that will allow carriers and manufacturers to install their own, customized app stores on Android phones.
While Android phones already offer Google’s official app store, Cellmania CEO Ronjon Nag says that many carriers and manufacturers are looking for a way to offer their own stores, where they can feature localized content and sell media like music, ring tones, video, and graphics (none of which can currently be sold through Google’s store). The store also supports a variety of different payment plans, including subscriptions, charging purchases to the user’s phone bill, and ‘in-app’ purchases, which allow users to purchase virtual goods and other services from directly within the app.
As an added bonus to developers, Cellmania’s storefront includes software that can convert J2ME applications (which are common on many other mobile phones) into Android executables. → Read More
Cellmania, a company that builds and licenses the software that drives many mobile phone stores, has launched a new platform called the Android Content Storefront for Android phones that will allow carriers and manufacturers to install their own, customized app stores on Android phones.
While Android phones already offer Google’s official app store, Cellmania CEO Ronjon Nag says that many carriers and manufacturers are looking for a way to offer their own stores, where they can feature localized content and sell media like music, ring tones, video, and graphics (none of which can currently be sold through Google’s store). The store also supports a variety of different payment plans, including subscriptions, charging purchases to the user’s phone bill, and ‘in-app’ purchases, which allow users to purchase virtual goods and other services from directly within the app.
As an added bonus to developers, Cellmania’s storefront includes software that can convert J2ME applications (which are common on many other mobile phones) into Android executables. → Read More
Sweet mercy! Is this the soul of the new machine? A breathless post on 9to5mac points out that it is generally possible to run Skype on AT&T’s 3G network. Their question: “IS THIS THE END OF THE VOICE CARRIERS?”
I’ve been trying to download the flipping thing all morning so I can’t quite report on the accuracy of these claims but I suspect this is user/programmer error more than THE DEATH OF ALL CARRIERS EVERYWHERE! → Read More
Now that Google has come out of the closet with its proper venture capital fund, dubbed Google Ventures, I’m curious as to how many people will be going to googleventures.com today, only to find that the domain name is neither owned or operated by the company. We’re not sure if this is an oversight or if Google has actively tried but failed to claim ownership over the domain name, but the fact is googleventures.com was first registered back in 2004, and that it’s currently supposed to expire in June of this year.
Update: as reader George Kirikos correctly points out, Google has filed a UDRP (Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy) case for the domain name. See the National Arbitration Forum website for details (case number 1249421).
Since the WHOIS information at this point is unprotected, hence public information, we know that the domain name was registered by a James Hung from Connecticut. Hung is the CEO of The Hive, a “global venture consulting firm comprised of business and technology gurus, entrepreneurs, and strategic partners in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa.” The domain name is not being forwarded to the firm’s website, but only displays an image saying that site is currently unavailable. → Read More
It’s certainly not the main Novatel device we’re hoping to see announced while we’re here in Vegas, but they’ve gotten the announcement party started a bit early with this morning’s debut of the Ovation MC935D. → Read More
Not to be outdone by MySpace announcing a deeper partnership with Microsoft yesterday, bringing Silverlight technology to its development platform and mobile application, Facebook and Adobe are today announcing a partnership and the release of fresh Flash client libraries to make it easier for developers to plug into the Facebook Platform inside their social applications built with Flash.
Flash has been supported since the launch of Facebook Platform in 2007 through tags, embedding Flash in Feed stories, and multiple client libraries, which have helped developers make Facebook API calls directly from ActionScript (see example on the Red Bull website). But Facebook felt the exisiting ActionScript client libraries were not up to par, so it teamed up with Adobe to tweak the open source version to support all Facebook APIs and add some features to better support authentication for both Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. → Read More
The long awaited Google venture capital fund, Google Ventures, is now open for business. The Fund is led by managing partners Bill Maris and Rich Miner.
The fund’s FAQ says they’ll invest in just about any type of startup (“consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and others”) and they’re willing to invest just about any amount you might need (“from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital”). It’s not exactly what you’d call a tight investment focus, but hey, it’s not like they need to worry about keeping limited partners happy so they can raise the next fund.
They’re also happy to invest along side other venture firms and strategic partners. No other commercial arrangement, such as a partnership, is required (so no, you don’t have to build your service on App Engine).
This is, Google says, their primary engine for venture-style investments going forward.
The FAQs also say the fund will be actively involved with investments (“We believe that our active involvement will help to create value, so we look to work with management teams to maximize the impact of our investment and their technology or innovation”). That may be somewhat over-ambitious, depending on how many investments they actually make. → Read More
Bill O’Reilly has the last word on Twitter for today. He thinks the Twitterati is crushing talk radio, by sucking up all our listener time. He thinks that’s bad; I hope he’s right and it drives Rush out of business. It won’t drive The View out of business if Barbara Walters has a say; she regularly tries to shut down the Twitversation. We’re becoming a nation divided along the Twitter faultline, forced to declare which side we’re on. This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter, and by the time I checked 10 seconds later there was three screens of earthquake tweets. Jeremiah Owyang was on the phone talking to someone in San Jose who felt it five seconds before it reached Jeremiah in the Valley. How long will it be before we’ll see an app tied to the accelerometer that registers each temblor into a realtime grid to track the pattern? Tonight I read that Twitter has changed replies to mentions, mapping more accurately to the use of the @ sign anywhere in the Tweet. This morning Bit.ly received a $2 million round for its url-shortening/data harvesting service. Not slowly but very surely the 140 character landscape is being carved up and sold off at auction. Tim O’Reilly’s VC arm led the Bit.ly round, yet another marker of the attention economy carved up into discrete chunks. Now that the VCs have corralled the @ signs and the URLs, what remains? The body of the text, the domain of Track and its wannabes. Glam Media’s Tinker is one such parlay, virtualizing keywords into event clouds and then distributing them via widgets around the Twitter nervous system. TweetDeck gives you yet another column for targeted searches, and who knows what we’ll see soon from FriendFeed and then Facebook. When Bill and Tim O’Reilly converge, you know we’re at a twitting point, where the metadata orbiting the message stream is more valuable than the initial data itself. The recent Cloud Manifesto brouhaha underlines the tactics and deceptions of the players as significantly more important than the words of the original document. When we understand our metadata, our attention breadcrumbs, our gestures can and are being harvested, syndicated, and metered back to us, will we one more time leave it to the professionals → Read More
More info! Keep in mind this update is merely an update to the rumor. It’s not a confirmation or anything like that. The anonymous source, bless him, has added some tidbits to the earlier announcement, which was slightly cryptic. For instance, “120Hz” is clarified to 120 full frames, but the camera will supposedly be limited to 60. Why? No one knows. → Read More
HP’s 2140 was supposed to start shipping with a HD display sometime last month and quick check on the site reveals that it’s still not available. Some of the personal reviews state that the low-res displays caused them to return the netbook. It makes me wonder if there’s some manufacturing issue over in China with these high-res displays. I bring this up because it appears that Dell is now offering the Mini 10 with a 1366×768 resolution screen for an extra $35, but will it actually ship on 4/15 like it says it will? → Read More
How to kill buzz: After releasing an excellent retro-remake (say Mega Man 9), offer a poorly-ported version of perhaps the series’ most treasured game. Let’s just look at the basics, here. In porting a game from the original system, you might want to consider whether said system had a joystick or a D-pad, and then use that. I guess Capcom felt this was a better solution. Not to mention this pile has L and R buttons. The NES had A and B, guys. A and B. → Read More
