It’s a shame, really. The mysterious MID running Android that’s been popping up over the last two weeks has finally been caught on video. It looks and runs wonderfully, but it’s just a concept from Chinese chipmaker Rockchip. The device was built to showcase Rockchip’s new RK2808 720p-decoding chipset. It’s unfortunate that the 5-inch MID is only a one-off. Check out the two videos of it in action after the jump. → Read More
RightsFlow, a startup that manages music licensing and payment services, has raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from Originate Ventures. Launched in 2007, RightsFlow helps online music services, record companies, distributors and artists license music and lyrics while also managing payments for the rights-holders.
RightsFlow says that the funding will be used to develop new products and services, one of which will be launched this fall. Currently named “Clearance Form” (I’m told this name is temporary), the product will be a consumer-facing site that will help coordinate payments between the licensee and licensor. So if a cover band or artist wanted to obtain the licensing rights to a particular song, they could go to the site to find and pay for the proper license. → Read More
Sony’s first official netbook, the VAIO W, has been poked and prodded by Darren Gladstone over at PC World. You’ll recall that the $499 machine features pretty standard netbook components, with the added bonus of the slightly-faster 1.66GHz Atom N280 CPU and a 10-inch 1366×768 resolution screen. Let’s check out the highlights and lowlights, shall we? → Read More
Normally, you probably wouldn’t consider drinking your own shower water after you had used it, but throw a couple of plants in there and you may well reconsider. Or, perhaps you’ll react like the Drudge-ushered Daily Mail commenters and say stuff like “WHAT IS THIS GARBAGE, I EARN THE RIGHT TO WASTE WATER AND I’LL BE DAMNED IF SOME EGGHEAD SCIENTIST SAYS OTHERWISE.” → Read More
Gather ’round, mobile-lovin freaks girls and boys, Samsung is bringing some back-to-school love over to Verizon on September 8. For under a penny shy of $100 (after MIR $100 w/ 2yr contract), you can be your own superhero and get yourself a shiny new Samsung Rogue (u960), complete with QWERTY landscape slider, touchscreen display, 3MP camera, GPS, and good ol’ 3G connectivity (EV-DO style). Not Intense enough for you? Love things like WWE, explosions, and arm-wrestling tigers? You could save yourself a few bucks (it’s $29.99 after MIR $50 w/ 2yr contract) and go for the Samsung Intensity (u450) instead. Packing a QWERTY slider and yesteryear’s standard features (1.3MP camera and Bluetooth), everyone can afford to increase their Intensity. via BGR → Read More
While past rumors indicated that Sprint’s Touch Pro 2 would be shipping out beginning September 3rd, a just leaked document makes it seem like things have slipped back a bit. → Read More
Realtime search for the most part is still mostly about searching Twitter. So it is probably a good idea for fledgling realtime search engines to make it easy to share specific Tweets found in the search results back on Twitter. Since most of the results are Tweets, and search is just another form of navigation and discovery when it comes to the realtime stream, you want to be able to retweet directly from your search results.
OneRiot already does this, and today Collecta is adding a similar sharing feature. Although, Collecta also lets you share any result on Facebook, Mixx, Reddit, Delicious, and Stumbleupon as well (but, oddly, not on Digg). Collecta launched last June. → Read More
Now THIS, my friends, is a mod. An enterprising Finnish fellow has gutted a super old Mobira Talkman cell phone kit and installed a home theater PC inside of it. That’s impressive, yes, but what’s more impressive is that he fit a USB hub, Wi-Fi card, sound card, and a 128×128 OLED screen into the handset. Oh, and it works for VOIP calls to boot. → Read More
Sanyo has today announced a new mobile projector for the Japanese market, the LP-XU106 [press release in English]. The device is the brightest in its weight class (under 4kg), producing a respectable 4,000 lumens. It’s sized at 334.2×257.5×78.4mm and weighs just 3.4kg. → Read More
MetroPCS has been around since 1994. Windows Mobile has been around in one form or another since 2000. You think at some point their paths would have crossed, right? Nope – not until now, at least. Live images of the Samsung SCH-i220 Code have just leaked out, and there it is, emblazoned across the top of the device: the MetroPCS logo. Running WinMo 6.1 on a QVGA display with EVDO, a 2.0 megapixel camera, and a QWERTY keyboard, it’s not exactly mind-blowing on the hardware specs front – but a smartphone is a smartphone. Current rumors pin this launching sometime next month, though there’s no word yet on pricing. [Via PhoneNews] → Read More
Andy Bechtolsheim’s cloud computing startup Arista Networks, which sells 10-Gigabit Ethernet switches aimed at handling the loads at cloud-computing data centers, has launched a new product today called vEOS (virtualized Extensible Operating System) Software. The software sits on top of their switches and glues physical, virtual, and cloud servers, using VMWare. Arista’s Network’s switches act as a link between those physical servers in corporate data centers, virtualized servers, and the cloud. With vEOS, IT organizations can now move workloads from physical servers to virtual machines and to cloud infrastructures while maintaining segmentation, trust boundaries, and policy control. The advantage to having vEOS software is that the system will bridge the virtualization gap between physical and virtual networks. vEOS will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009. Arista is the brainchild of David Cheriton and Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and more recently a bunch of networking startups which were bought by Cisco, like Granite Systems (and is an early investor in VMWare). CrunchBase Information Arista Networks Andy Bechtolsheim Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Top o’ the morning, deal hunters. Here’s a 24-inch monitor for $164 after $10 mail-in rebate. The rebate’s good until the end of the month, but even if you don’t send it in you’re only out ten bucks. It happens. → Read More
When we wrote about Facebook‘s minor design changes earlier today, we didn’t take an extremely close look at the screenshots that were embedded in the accompanying blog post the company’s design team published about the tweaks. If we had, we may or may not have noticed that they featured two nuggets that most definitely deserve a second glance, but FBhive most certainly took notice.
What did they see? → Read More
Gmail made a tweak last night that brings better contact management to the service. When you click the “To:” or “CC:” links in front of each address field, a box pops up with your contact list. It is a simple change, but it saves you from having to go to another page to find a contact.
Most of the time, Gmail users probably won’t use this feature because Gmail already gives you a list of auto-complete suggestions as you begin typing in a name into the “To:” field. These are based on people you’ve communicated with recently, and usually does the trick. But if you haven’t emailed someone for a long time, their name doesn’t pop up. It also doesn’t help if you can’t remember their name. → Read More
Facebook has made a few subtle changes to its design, which a lot of users have been noticing for the past couple of hours (thanks for telling us, y’all) and tweeting about. The two most apparent tweaks: the blue header bar now covers the entire width of the screen and rounded corners have been dropped from the social network’s web pages.
In addition, feedback on display ads has been changed from “Thumbs up/Thumbs down” to “Like/X.” → Read More
Wanna extend your existing IT infrastructure to the cloud? Amazon can help.
Amazon Web Services is today announcing the limited public beta of Virtual Private Cloud (aka Amazon VPC), a service that essentially makes it possible for customers to create their own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances to connect to their existing network over a secured VPN connection. That means Amazon Web Services is taking a major step in making its cloud computing services even more enterprise-friendly than they already were.
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels has published a lengthy but read-worthy blog post for the occasion, in which he acknowledges that enterprises tend to find it challenging to transition applications and services to the cloud when they have often invested years of resources and tons of money setting up their own IT infrastructure (datacenters, networks, etc.). → Read More
Yesterday UK-based SEO specialist Dave Naylor made headlines by detailing a significant Twitter cross-site scripting vulnerability, which allowed him to insert JavaScript code into tweets simply by adding some code to the field where an application developer would normally link to a product website. There are all sorts of malicious things people could have done to exploit the bug, like steal session cookies, create a Twitter worm or even infect unaware visitors with malware, so it’s safe to say this was a massive security threat.
Sure enough, when word got out Twitter moved to patch the bug to prevent such bad stuff from happening. John Adams from Twitter Operations even commented on Naylor’s blog to point out the hole had been closed shortly after he published his post.
Well, not quite. → Read More
Last summer, Zoho, a web-based software suite that includes document, project and invoicing management tools, integrated Google and Yahoo sign-ins, allowing users to sign into Zoho using a Google or Yahoo account. Today, Zoho is launching sign-in integration with Google Apps, letting users login to Zoho using their Google Apps credentials.
When Zoho users try to login to Zoho, they’ll be given a ‘Google Apps’ option in the sign-in box. Users can input their Google Apps domain name, and will be redirected to Google to sign-in using their Google Apps credentials. They will be given the option of authorizing “accounts.zoho.com” and will then be logged in to Zoho directly. → Read More
German free music streaming service Roccatune has officially filed for insolvency.
After weeks of silence on their situation, Roccatune CEO Constantin Thyssen has now announced the news on their company blog. He puts the blame for the insolvency on a failed round of financing. → Read More
