The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is currently running a Star Trek exhibit with all sorts of whimsical items from the various TV shows and movies. A few devices, in particular, look mighty familiar to present-day gadgets. → Read More
ITV.com is leaping aboard the social media bandwagon to encourage realtime interaction around this afternoon’s FA Cup final between Everton and Chelsea FCs. The broadcaster has integrated updates from Twitter and our old friends AudioBoo in an FA Cup Buzz microsite. The site uses Twitterfall to keep track of tweets about the match, with an added enhancement; a tool developed by thruSITES will track which of the players are generating the most chatter on Twitter at any given moment, with sliders for each player showing who’s the most talked about. Fans will also be able to share their armchair commentary (and really bad jokes) using AudioBoo, a service which is rapidly becoming a darling of the mainstream media for making it so easy to transform an audience from passive consumers to active participants. After the match, fans will be able to scrub along a timeline in the thruSITES buzz tracker to see which players caused most response at crucial moments – a sort of crowdsourced, visual post-match highlights package which, from the other perspective, will give the clubs a direct tap into public sentiment around their players. A viewers’ backchannel is not a new thing – just watch the hashtags trend when Britain’s Got Talent or The Apprentice is on. However, this is possibly the first time a British broadcaster has attempted to integrate the backchannel into its online coverage. It’ll be interesting to see if any cross-channel promotion will be in place, i.e. if the TV commentators will direct viewers to contribute to the FA Cup Buzz site. Dominic Cameron, MD of ITV.com, says that if the FA Cup Buzz experiment is a success, the broadcaster will be looking for more “new and interesting ways” to engage football fans. Meanwhile, if all this engagement isn’t enough to slake your ADD-driven thirst for social media sports apps to distract you from the match, you can play along with Football3s, a realtime fantasy football game developed by Mint Digital, which also integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Chatzy. Enjoy the match! CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Best Before Media Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
And you thought the South Carolina v. Craigslist story was dead.
If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voice sees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share.
When Craigslist management was facing a criminal investigation for listings on the site they did the smart thing. They talked about the law, and they pointed out that the real smut was on other sites that were being ignored by the South Carolina Attorney General. If you really want hard core porn and prostitution, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out, check out Village Voice’s BackPage.com.
That’s all body fluids under the bridge now, of course, since a federal judge smacked down McMaster and forbid him from stalking Craigslist management. → Read More
Warning: It appears that a worm has hit Twitter-the tweet will say “Best Video” with a link to “http://juste.ru.” If you see this in a tweet, do not click on the link. It’s unclear exactly how the worm is spreading. But from the look of Tweets about the virus, if you click on the link, you account could be compromised and spammed.
According to reports on Twitter, users who clicked the juste.ru video link had their account compromised and passwords stolen. Further details about the virus are limited but Twitter’s official spam account was updated this morning stating that Twitter is aware of the issue and making steps to resolve the virus. The Tweet also warned users to not click the Best Video link. → Read More
Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.
Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Cheng admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Cheng says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly.
(List after the jump). → Read More
When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service.
Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT. → Read More
Each Friday for the foreseeable future, we’ll be showcasing a handful of recently launched applications from the iPhone App Store. Generally, we’ll highlight the best apps to hit our inbox, shining a guiding light on the gems that might otherwise get lost in the endless torrent of app releases. Unfortunately, the best apps to hit our inbox this week .. really weren’t very good. Read. Comment. Enjoy. → Read More
Tired of the long hours you spend preparing your Wiimote for charging? So much of our short time on this Earth, wasted in removing the rubber shock jackets and lining up the charge points — the best days of our lives gone! Well, no longer. Penguin United has an induction charger lined up for release during E3 that looks pretty hot: just drop the Wiimote in the charger slot and it immediately starts charging right through the sleeve. Very sci-fi — sorry, I mean SyFy. → Read More
Over the last 15 years or so, most of us have adapted to the new forms of communication that pervade the web, ditching letters (and in many cases, phone calls) in favor of rapid fire IMs and Email. But there’s still at least one formality embedded in most of us that’s been hard to overcome: the personal signature. The simple act of signing a document, silly as it may seem in an era of fingerprints, photographs, and passwords, is something that has been engrained in us. And while signing a digital document with an “Okay” button or check box may be legally binding, they’re so basic that it makes the gesture feel insincere.
Cue the digital signature – handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign. Now RightSignature, a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier. → Read More
Thank god. The absurd and arbitrary limitation of running three apps at a time on Windows 7 Starter edition has been lifted, although all the other ways in which it sucks are still intact. When they announced the six different flavors of Windows 7, everyone gaped at the punishing 3-app limit, wondering how Microsoft intended to justify it when so much rides on Windows 7 being a good choice for netbooks and nettops. There are still many pieces missing, and the blog post announcing the change goes out of its way to make this clear.
So for the record, what isn’t included in the Starter edition? → Read More
While I won’t go as far as the press release does in calling this unlockable content “unprecedented” and “incredible,” it certainly is something I’d be happy to grind levels for. The Transformers game itself is coming out June 23rd on pretty much every platform, but the PS3, 360 and PC versions will be the only ones with these great bonuses. We’re talking episodes of the original series here, people.
Too bad they don’t have an unlockable that turns you into Soundwave… in real life. → Read More
Is it confidence or hubris? Hackintosh company Quo Computers is looking to set up shop right in Apple’s back yard (well, down the street a little too), and for some reason they think their fate differ from Psystar’s. The difference, they say, is the quality of their products, despite the fact that those products are expressly forbidden by Apple’s OS X EULA. Still, it’s hard to get mad at these bushy-tailed little entrepreneurs when they say stuff like “I’m hoping that Apple sees the value in what we are doing.” → Read More
Similar to a light saber but more Nintendo-y, this DIY beam katana seems to be an actual working device, although I question its lethality. The creator won’t reveal his secrets, but I think it’s pretty clear there’s some kind of little smoke generator and one of those green high-powered lasers involved. Get a couple more high-powered ones or a mirror setup in there and you could actually start burning through some junk, though admittedly not at a true beam katana rate. → Read More
Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here.
The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc. → Read More
Assuming you are European and never have more than a head-sized bag of garbage to throw away, this Dustbot appears to be the perfect trash-related companion. I believe the idea is that an army of these things will lurk in every city and constantly collect garbage, eliminating the need for garbage trucks to come to every home. It navigates via GPS and can be summoned by a text message — sounds like some people I know. → Read More
Google’s head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, will join the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, according to a report by the New York Times. McLaughlin will assist former Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, who President Obama appointed as CTO in April.
McLaughlin has been leading Google’s public policy efforts for quite some time now. According to this blog post, he was the first member of Google’s policy team in 2005. → Read More
Just in case you have some DVDs or Blu-ray discs laying around, Amazon wants ‘em and is willing to give you a gift card for ‘em. All you have to do is head over to Amazon and print out a shipping label. The discs do have to be worth more than $10 and in good condition. They don’t want your nasty-ass used discs. → Read More
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