When it comes jumping on new trends in technology, CNN, like most other mainstream media sources is usually fairly slow to act. Sure, they’ve been hyping up Twitter non-stop for the past several months, but that was only after everyone in the tech world had already been talking about it for a long time. But one thing that hasn’t yet caught on in the tech sphere, but apparently has on CNN, is the use of “Bing” as a verb.
Check out this article about the most dangerous celebrities to search for on the web. The opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.” Um, “Bing Jessica Biel”? Aside from it sounding oddly sexual (insert badda-bing joke here), it’s a little odd to see that on CNN.com before it has really entered the tech lexicon. Sure, Microsoft wants everyone to use it as a verb to be like Google, but there’s obviously a big difference between a company wanting something to happen for branding, and it actually happening. → Read More
Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders. → Read More
Er – Samsung? What’s with the silhouette? Pictures of the Omnia II are readily available. Hell, the device itself is available in some parts of the world. Oh well. While the previously rumored launch date of August 23rd has come and gone, the Verizon Omnia 2 shouldn’t be too further off – at least, so says Samsung Mobile USA. BGR reader Pandabarr spotted this new “Coming Soon” page within Samsung’s walls; while there’s no new information tucked within, they do offer you the opportunity to “Be the First to Know” the new details by signing up for their mailing list. Given Samsung’s track record, “First to Know” here probably means “First to know, after blog readers”. → Read More
You’ve been waiting for it. You’ve been talking about it. You’ve sent long, rambling letters to Jodie Foster about it. You’ve been calling your local Congresswoman about it: It’s the Sony Daily Edition e-reader with built-in wireless. Erick Schonfeld is on the scene live and we’ll be reporting once the doors open at 10:30am EDT. → Read More
Despite being one of the first companies to bring the idea of small, cheap, no-frills computers to market, ASUS doesn’t think the whole smartbook idea is going to take off. As such, we’ll see no smartbooks from ASUS anytime soon. → Read More
We’ve been seeing a lot of projects and startups trying to speed up RSS feeds. Today, a service is launching that addresses some of the issues with a different user-interface. Lazyfeed, the realtime interest feed reader that launched last month in private beta at our Real-Time Crunchup, is opening up publicly today for anyone who wants to sign up.
Instead of signing up for a long list of blogs and news feeds, all you have to do on Lazyfeed is type in a topic and Lazyfeed will show you the most recent posts and articles with that tag from the one million blogs that it now indexes. (This number is up from 100,000 blogs at launch). Headlines and excerpts containing that tag appear in the main window, and if you want to follow that topic, you can save the tag in a column on the left. As you save more tags, your interests appear as a list, which reorder themselves according to the latest posts. → Read More
Mobile browser Opera Mini has clocked up more than 25 million downloads via GetJar, the mobile app market backed by Accel Partners. That makes it GetJar’s most popular app ever. The latest version of Opera Mini (v4.2) has been downloaded 7.5 million times since the beginning of the year, which is not too shabby. Opera Mini is also making Firefox eat dust in the mobile world. Firefox has been promising a full-blown mobile browser for a year, but Mozilla users are still waiting, although Mozilla has released Fennec 3, a beta version of its open-source touch mobile browser. Meanwhile, Opera Mini users are enjoying a pretty advanced browser which also runs Flash. Its popularity shows that mobile users are clearly not satisfied with the standard browser they tend to get thrown in with their cellphone. → Read More
Only a month after rival comment system JS-Kit launched Echo, a real-time comment system, Disqus is striking back with its biggest upgrade since the service launched. Along with a revamped comment system, Disqus 3.0 is also what CEO Daniel Ha calls a “conceptual reconstruction” for the service: Disqus will now be split into two separate but complimentary products, called Comments and Profiles, in recognition of the way two distinct sets of users have been using the commenting engine.
For those who just got worried about losing the Disqus they know and love, fear not: the service isn’t changing all that much. The Comments product has been revamped, but it’s still the commenting engine that bloggers can embed using a few lines of Javascript (we’ve embedded the new comment system below this post if you’d like to try it out for yourself). The new product here is Profiles, which Ha says is designed to cater not to blog administrators, but to empower the people who are actually out there leaving comments. → Read More
While we’re not exactly impressed with the overall look of Samsung’s upcoming budget-friendly touchscreen, the S3650 Corby, that doesn’t keep us from getting excited when it gets caught behind a camera lens. The design of the battery cover is ever-so-slightly different than the one we saw before, implying that this may be a prototype.
Final hardware or not, it brings a friend. → Read More
Acer’s birthed a $499 all-in-one nettop aimed at cubicle dwellers featuring an 18.5-inch screen and an Intel Atom CPU. The Veriton Z280G is, according to Acer, “perfect for reception areas, hotel lobbies, executive suites, cube environments and any office that requires an integrated, space-saving design.” → Read More
So, lets say that, despite the snags during its North American launch, you’ve got a soft spot in your heart for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone. But that price.. without any US carriers eating the up front costs, the cheapest you’ll find this thing is 400 bucks. Fear not, though, friend – you’ve got options. If you’re willing to shave some hairs from the hardware specs, Nokia is now offering a 5800-lookalike called the 5230. They’ve bumped the camera down to 2 megapixel (from 3.2), ditched the flash, and nixed the WiFi. On the upside, they’ve slashed nearly 50% off the price, bringing it down to 149 EUR ($212 USD) before contracts and subsidies. They’ve kept the 3.5mm jack and the A-GPS – plus, it comes in a huge array of colors. Nokia says to expect the 5230 in the last quarter of 2009, though they don’t specify if the US variants will be shipping at the same time. Check out a video of the 520 in the flesh after the jump. → Read More
Any one who commutes in major cities knows the value of back roads when it comes to avoiding traffic on the highways during peak rush hour times. Google Maps just added a nifty feature that will show you live traffic conditions on arterial roads (non-highway roads) in selected cities. Google Maps will also show traffic patterns on main highways as well, helping you see what the least-trafficked route is for your commute.
When you zoom-in on the city you’re interested in and click the “Traffic” button in the upper-right corner of the map, you’ll see the traffic conditions of both arterial roads and highways. The colors correspond to the speed of traffic green is little to no traffic, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic. → Read More
If you’ve never eaten at Chipotle, you don’t know what you’re missing. Really – make it a priority. They’re the only restaurant I’ve ever gone out of my way to contact, just to say “Hey! You should really open up a location in my town”. I’m confident that I could singlehandedly eat that place into a profit. Now its gotten even better. Next time I head up to the Bay Area, I don’t even have to talk to anyone to get one of these little burrito bundles of joy – I’ll just use Chipotle’s new iPhone app. → Read More
You’re telling me Snow Leopard isn’t a major update? Well affix your chapeau to your pate, sir, and go forthwith on a long walk off of a short fjord! The most important feature in Snow Leopard has been revealed and it’s a doozy. → Read More
Good afternoon AT&T BlackBerry Bold user- You’ve got an update coming later today, so be sure to frantically refresh the wireless update option on your ‘berry. The update will bring forth the following goodies: • general handset optimizations • the ability for the user to manually select whether they want their smartphone to connect to either 2G and 3G networks, depending on availability, or to connect to only to 2G networks • a download icon for AT&T’s Visual Voicemail service, plus a variety of additional icons for applications including MobiTV, Mobile Banking, Tetris and Scrabble → Read More
In conjunction with today’s announcement of a new wireless Sony Reader, the electronics giant also launched a literary clone of Twitter called Words Move Me. The site falls into the category of viral social marketing—there are links to the Sony Reader website and eBook store plastered on every page—and was pobviously rushed out before it was ready, but it shows some promise as a niche micro-messaging network centered around sharing quotes from books.
The idea is very basic. You paste in passages up to 255 characters long, add the book title and author, and post it to your stream. You can also add tags. You can follow other people, or they can follow you. When you click on an author, a book title, or another user, you see more passages from that source that have been shared on Words Move Me. So far, so good. → Read More
As if we needed yet another URL shortening service, TweetMeme is today debuting ReTwt.me in an effort to make that particular saturated field even more so. And it’s not like it does anything special in comparison with the plethora of similar services out there.
It shrinks longer links in order to make them more tweetable (and retweetable), it gives you some options to share links from its main website, throws in some analytics so you can see just how few people actually click those links you’re spreading and comes with an API.
The only slight advantage it could have over competitors like TinyURL and bit.ly is a tight integration with the TweetMeme service / button, but they won’t be exploiting that connection and keep on supporting the URL shortening services as they were before (which is obviously the right thing to do). → Read More
That other browser maker, Opera Software, has just released Opera 10 RC1 to the masses and has announced it will be debuting the final version of its upgraded desktop browser next week on September 1. You can download the release candidate and get more information right here.
Opera 10, formerly codenamed Peregrine, will feature an improved user interface, increased web standards support, bug fixes, performance improvements, and new tools for web developers. Opera 10 Final will also include Opera Turbo, the new bandwidth-booster for slow Internet connections, and a revamped Opera Mail, its built-in e-mail client. Also worth testing when it comes out: Opera claims the next version of its desktop browser will be significantly faster on resource intensive pages such as Gmail and Facebook, deeming it more than 40% faster overall than Opera 9.6. → Read More
There is a clear trend in Japan, where all the relevant new TVs come from, and that’s building devices to store programs into the hardware itself, i.e. HDDs or Blu-ray recorders. Mitsubishi appears to be especially radical in this respect, announcing a TV with both a built-in Blu-ray recorder and HDD just last week. And today Hitachi followed up by adding a total of two new LCDs and three plasmas [JP] to their Wooo TV series, with all models featuring a built-in 500GB HDD. → Read More
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