With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.
This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut. → Read More
Lots and lots of Big Red’s customers (not to mention potential defectors from other carriers) are getting really excited about the purported launch of an Android-powered, Motorola-made mobile for Verizon. New images of what was originally known as the Motorola Sholes, and more recently rumored to be named the Motorola Tao, have surfaced on the Interwebs. → Read More
Behold, the Pioneer BDR-205! Thrill to the 12x write speeds on double layer Blu-ray media! Marvel at the 50Gbytes of storage capacity! Be amazed by the low, low price of $250 United States dollars! Click on through to read the entire exciting press release! → Read More
You know what? Your phone could play Crysis at a high resolution with the settings cranked way up, and I wouldn’t really care all that much. But coax it into playing SNES ROMs? I’ll take three. With a bucketful of elbow grease and more tech know-how than anyone should be allowed to have, Konttori (One of the Maemo project managers) and the DRNokSNES team have managed to squeeze a full-blooded emulator onto the Nokia N900. No, no – this isn’t the first time we’ve ever seen an SNES emulator on a phone. Hell, just about every major platform has an SNES emulator of its own. But get this: it has TV out support. Oh – and because jamming away at the keyboard might get old after a while, they went ahead and threw in Wii controller support for good measure. I think I’m in love. Now, how about some MAME? [Via EngadgetMobile] → Read More
For only $22,500 you can own the robotic hand shown in the video above. That’s nothing for a piece of NASA history. This impressive early prototype demands an important place within robotics history as the first motorized dexterous robotic hand. It represents one of the early steps towards making robots more anthropomorphic. The Omni-Hand was designed and built in the early 1990s by robot pioneer Mark Rosheim with funding from NASA contracts NAS8-37638 and NAS8-38417. Two prototypes were made. The first was a “test bed” whose features were then incorporated into this complete unit. Both had the same power and control system. → Read More
Colorado Springs: Home to 415,000 people, scary-ass gravity-defying boulders, and, as of this morning, AT&T’s 850 Mhz 3G Network. As we saw in San Francisco and New York last month, Colorado Spring’s towers have now been tweaked to dedicate the 850 Mhz spectrum to 3G data rather than TDMA, which theoretically ups the number of simultaneous users the data network can handle. We’re still not quite sure how effective this upgrade is at solving the bottleneck that sprung up right around the time the iPhone launched – but we’re just happy they’re trying. → Read More
CellPhoneForums.net member Cathy was kind enough to post information regarding two new HTC hotfixes, one for the Touch Pro2 and the other for the Diamond2. → Read More
Man alive, there’s only a few topics I write about with any regularity here: e-books, World of Warcraft, sports, and robots. I’m not even a fan of robots, and yet I always get assigned the robot stories! Like today, I wake up and see this assigned to me: new WowWee robots. What? Oooh, WowWee, I know them. → Read More
(These guys are excited that they might soon be able to buy the Sprint Touch Pro 2 without declaring bankruptcy.) Good news, everyone! According to some dude on the internet who heard it from another dude — and a bunch of people who have already managed to get the deal — the Sprint Touch Pro 2 is going to see a huge price drop as early as tomorrow. How huge? Like 44% huge. They’ll be dropping it from the wallet-crushing price tag of $350 down to the much-more-reasonable (and now standard amongst smartphones) $199. One thing worth noting here is that this essentially price matches Sprint’s Touch Pro 2 to Verizon’s, which was previously the cheapest by far. That leaves just AT&T and T-Mobile up at the higher price – so as it stands, a GSM Touch Pro 2 will set you back nearly twice what a CDMA model will. Update: Maybe not. → Read More
HP’s printer division, long a cash cow, is being folded into its PC division after sales of printers and ink fell this year. Most companies broke out their printer divisions once they realized they could make a lot of money there but now that HP is beating Dell, the company may see a good reason to bring printers and PCs together. → Read More
Japan’s No. 1 crap gadget maker Thanko surprisingly announced a new device today that doesn’t look too crappy: The DIGITAL MP4 AudioPlayer AV [JP], a portable media player that houses a digital camera. The device comes with 8GB of built-in memory (miniSD cards are supported and works only with Windows XP/Vista. → Read More
If you’re sick of tiny, unobtrusive laptop speakers then boy-oh-boy does LaCie have something for you. → Read More
Korean electronics giant, LG, believes there is an entire segment of mobile consumers who’ve been left out in the cold, i.e. the mainstream public, when it comes to touch screen phones. In other words, not everyone wants a full-fledged (read: “complex”) smartphone, but most people do lust after a touch screen. In light of this disturbing realization, LG has announced its newest mobile device, the Pop (GD510), which was designed to provide a simplified, touch gesture-based experience for the rest of us. → Read More
Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it’s seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth. Today, Facebook has an answer: Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground.
Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends. → Read More
It may not do much – it’s basically a feature watch with stopwatch, alarm, and 24-hour time – but it’s nicely designed. This Casio, called the Poptone Cubic Puzzle Watch, comes in blue or black and has buttons stacked up, Tetris-style, on the bottom. → Read More
The original Chumby was soft, cuddly, and cute. The new Chumby One is uptight, all-business, and commercial. I hate it. → Read More
Amazon’s taken $35 off the Garmin nuvi 850 GPS system, from $200 down to $165 (today only) with free shipping. The nuvi 850 features a 4.3-inch touchscreen, voice recognition, and a built-in FM transmitter. → Read More
When your smartphone drops from $299 ($199 with contract) to $79 over a summer, you have to wonder what’s going on. Two rumors are circulating this AM, one that Palm is laying off folks, perhaps in the Windows Mobile team.
UPDATE from Palm: “We are not laying people off. As we continue our transformation we are better aligning our staff with our business objectives.”
The estimated sales for the Pre topped out at 375,000 somewhere in the 810,000 range (Palm reports it sold 810K units last quarter and states at least half of those where Pres) at the end of August and they went from $299 ($199 with contract) to about $79 in about eleven weeks. While this might be normal for a feature phone – the subsidy kicks in once they’re sure that the early adopters who simply must have the LG Chocolate have had their fix – this isn’t good for a smartphone that was supposed to be the lead invasion force for a new WebOS smartphone renaissance.
UPDATED with word from Palm. → Read More
School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.
The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it. → Read More
Good for Sanyo Japan that the word “portable” isn’t really strictly defined in the projector space. Because I have no idea why the company calls its new projector, the LP-XM150 announced today [press release in English], portable: The thing weighs 9.7kg. Last month, Sanyo presented a device that somehow deserved the name, as the LP-XU106 weighs just 4kg. → Read More
