Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, have been named to President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). According to a statement released by the White House, PCAST is an advisory group of the the country’s foremost scientists and engineers who will help the President and Vice President form policy related to science, technology, and innovation.
The council includes a who’s who in the science and technology fields, with leaders in climate change, medicine, physics, chemistry, and computer science all holding positions on the council. The group is co-chaired by John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Eric Lander, Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project; and Harold Varmus, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, former head of the National Institutes of Health and a Nobel laureate. → Read More
That’s right, folks. Earlier today, Vodafone Spain officially launched the highly anticipated HTC Magic (con Google, for you Español speaking readers). While it may not be got for free (read: 139€ for the phone on the cheapest plan w/ mandatory 18 month contract) like its UK sibling (expected to launch in early May), the real point is that it is here, now (in Spain at least). I’d have filled the rest of this post with witty Spanish jokes, but that would require me to know more Spanish than “siesta” and “fiesta.” Salud! → Read More
Straight outta Compton (yes, Belkin is located in Compton — interesting factoid for your next dinner party) comes Belkin’s $30 CushDesk. It’s a hard-top work surface with a padded underside that sits on your lap, allowing you to work on a notebook up to 17 inches in size without scalding your nether regions. → Read More
Just as the technology world is on the verge of bucking physical media for digital storage, G.E. might have extended its life with a laboratory breakthrough. A G.E. lab has been working since 2003 to find materials and techniques to increase the reflectiveness of the holograms so they are actually readable by optical lasers. The breakthrough involved a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of the holograms, which puts the optical media nearly in the range of Blu-ray drives and one step closer to holding a crapton of data. → Read More
RiceHigh, bless his or her heart, claims to have the scoop on everything, but specs for the upcoming K-7 DSLR. As I mentioned the other RiceHigh, bless his or her heart, claims to have the scoop on everything, but specs for the upcoming K-7 DSLR. As I mentioned the other week, the nomenclature for all Pentax SLRs going forward will be dropping the “D” and simply going with K-x. → Read More
It looks like Jeopardy! contestants will be the latest in a long line of humans being replaced by computers if IBM has its way. Big Blue has developed a supercomputer named Watson that’s apparently able to compete on the famous game show with human-like mental quickness as it pertains to answering questions. → Read More
As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.
I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Open Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.
This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail. → Read More
Less than a week ago MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe still felt secure in his job. Fast forward to today and DeWolfe is out and a new CEO, Owen Van Natta, is starting his first day on the job.
And he’s already got two lieutenants, either of which could easily be the CEO: former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO (he has /mike at MySpace and was one of the first 3,000 members) and Jason Hirschhorn is the new Chief Product Officer. MySpace cofounder and President Tom Anderson, who’s currently leading the product team, is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” Hirschhorn was formerly the Chief Digital Officer at MTV Networks and was most recently the head of Sling Media Entertainment Group. Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn are pictured left to right above.
Those execs that are still left at MySpace are meeting the new team for the first time today (I’d pay good money to listen in on that). Later in the afternoon they’ll lead an all-hands meeting.
The full press release is below. → Read More
Looks like Amazon is unloading some first-generation refurbished Kindles at $299, a so-so savings over a new second generation unit at $360. → Read More
Conde Nast is shutting down its glossy business magazine Portfolio, two years after its launch. Conde Nast famously poured $100 million to launch the publication, which went on an expensive hiring spree in 2007 in its attempt to take on Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. The magazine always seemed to me to have an unhealthy fixation with Wall Street and the hedge fund boom over other industries, but as Wall Street cratered nobody wanted to read those stories anymore. The drop in print advertising, down 26 percent in the first quarter, didn’t help matters either.
Portfolio saw itself in the same vein as the Fortune magazine of the 1930s, filled with lush photographs and long narratives. But that formula doesn’t work in an age where business is about speed, not leisure or luxury. It also doesn’t work in an age where monthly magazines in general are increasingly challenged by the wealth of instantaneous business news available on the Web. (And you thought the daily newspapers had it tough). Portfolio’s insistence on favoring its print over its Website content also helped to hasten its demise. If you are going to start a magazine these days, the Website has to come first. The magazine companies still don’t realize this simple fact. → Read More
The hackers of 4Chan have succeeded in completely gaming Time Magazine’s online poll for its Time 100 list of the most influential people on the planet. At the top of the list is Christopher Poole, aka Moot, the founder of the 4Chan online forum, whose members used some coding to get his name to the top of the list. Not only did they help moot win the poll, but they also arranged the next 20 names to spell out “Marblecake, also the game.” Marblecake is a lewd sexual reference, but is also supposedly the name of the chat room where one of 4Chan’s online collective actions, Project Chanology, originated.
This is just the “people’s choice” list, not the official list picked by Time’s editors, but still it makes you wonder whether the editors at Time bother to read anything on the Internet. It is pretty well-documented that the 4Chan community was trying to manipulate the poll results. Nevertheless, Time just threw up its hands and named Moot the winner. → Read More
Seeqpod, the ill-fated startup behind the kick-ass media search technology used by many music streaming and playlist services and social networking applications, appears to have cracked under the weight of litigation. At the end of last month, we broke the news that the Emeryville, CA-based company filed a petition for Chapter 11 with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California. Now it looks like the service, which many third-party developers use as the underlying foundation for their own offerings, has gone completely dark for the past couple of days.
Update: site just went back up with a maintenance notice, about 5 minutes ago (10 AM EST)
Apparently, Seeqpod at one point claimed on its website that it was having server issues and that the service would be restored once the technical problems were solved, but the site went down again after 45 minutes and has been unavailable since 10:30 PM EST Saturday night. → Read More
Walden International, an international venture capital firm headquarted in San Francisco but with a strong foothold in Asia, has invested S$2 million – Singapore Dollars – (approx. US$1.35 million) in Brandtology. The company, which has its headquarters in Singapore but boasts more offices in China, Malaysia and Australia, provides business and brand online intelligence services out of specialist-manned ‘Command Centres’.
Despite its military-sounding name, these centres actually help Brandtology customers make ‘timely and informed strategic decisions’ based on an advanced online conversation tracking system, which mines blogs, forums, micro-blogging services etc. for opinions, aided by specialists who monitor the system for clients around the clock. → Read More
Samsung finally went ahead and did what we’ve expected them to do today with the announcement of their first Android powered handset, the I7500. Better late than ever, I say. The I7500 is no slouch in the feature department with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touch-screen, GPS, Wi-Fi, and 8GB of internal memory. It’s also an HSDPA capable device with a 5-megapixel AF camera with Power LED (no clue what that is but I assume it’s flash), Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, MicroSD (up to 32GB support) and a 3.5mm earphone jack. It’s also pretty thin at 0.47 inches. → Read More
A recent poll by the Australian Communications and Media Authority found that 90% of Australian children aged 15 and older own a mobile phone. This number could be higher or lower in other countries, but I suspect it’s on par with what you’d expect in the U.S. as well. → Read More
When it comes to startups in the online personal finance sphere, most people think of Mint. But another player in the space, Wesabe, has been holding its own as well, seeing some nice growth in the past year. Which one you use is probably a matter of personal taste, but perhaps you were mesmerized by Mint’s slick iPhone app. Well, now Wesabe has one as well.
So how do the apps stack up? Well, there are two key differences: Mint’s looks nicer, but Wesabe’s is more dynamic. What I mean by that is, with Mint’s iPhone app you can only see an overview of your finances, and look at things like the budget you set up online. With Wesabe’s iPhone app, everything is editable. And that’s a nice feature because more than a few times with Mint, I have seen a transaction categorized wrong, but had to login on my computer to edit it. → Read More
Only a few devices really redefined my life: that stent, a fire truck, the Ford Fairmont, and the PlayStation are a few that come to mind right now. Edge Magazine has a great look at the history of the PlayStation, from its humble beginnings as a SNES with a CD drive to the device that changed the gaming market forever. → Read More
We’ve confirmed our story from the weekend that former AOL exec Mike Jones will become the COO of MySpace. This makes him the number 2 executive of the reorganized News Corp. subsidiary under new CEO Owen Van Natta. A third new executive may also be announced later today.
An announcement will be made later this morning. Jones and Van Natta will join Jonathan Miller, the CEO Digital Media, at MySpace’s Los Angeles offices today to address employees.
Jones is a well respected entrepreneur who founded Userplane, a video chat service that added social features to dating and other sites. Userplane was bought by AOL in 2006 for around $40 million. The acquisition was made at the time that Jonathan Miller was the CEO of AOL, and Jones knows Miller well.
As we said in an earlier post about the changing of the guard at MySpace, News Corp. is making a clean sweep of the top executives. Cofounder and CEO Chris DeWolfe is out. Cofounder and President Tom Anderson is is having “discussions” about “assuming a new role in the organization.” Our guess is that the final Cofounder, CTO Aber Whitcomb, is next to go. → Read More
Cease and desist letter be damned! Your woman is cheating on you with that Blood Efl!! Put a spy ear in her room! She talks to him! You hear! You go crazy! You go to jail! 65 dollars! Jail is fun because you’ll have time to read! → Read More
