Remember that quick story about MSI pondering an ebook reader? Yeah, it seems it is and will be based on Nvidia’s Tegra mobile platform. According to Digitimes, the reader will sport a 9-inch grayscale screen and will be out sometime in the first half 2010. That’s all. Move along here. Nothing more to see. It’s just another ebook reader. → Read More
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re one of the creative minds at Smule; you and your team have had a series of back-to-back successes, and your audience has come to expect a certain things of you. They expect the utmost highest design quality, for it to be music-related, and — perhaps worst of all — some level of maturity. When expectations are high and narrow in focus, how are you supposed to unleash your creativity?
If you’re Smule, you go and establish a second company as your first company’s evil twin. Then you release an application involving zombies in bikinis. → Read More
If you’re a computer science graduate a year out of college, there probably isn’t a celebrity you’d be more excited about knowing than Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. So when he takes a minute to record a video with you to prove to your younger brother’s friends that you actually got a job at the company, it’s something you are pretty proud of. And the fact that Zuckerberg does this kind of thing is one of the reasons why Facebook wins. Watch the whole video with Dan Muriello here. → Read More
Do you need a streamer in your life? An HD media player? MLB, Netflix, and Amazon content? You, sir or madam, are in luck. Roku has announced the Roku SD player for $79 and added the HD and HD-XR models for $99 and $129 respectively. The Roku SD player connects to the TV using the included and familiar Yellow-Red-White video/audio cable. In addition, the Roku SD player incorporates Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) and an Ethernet port for easy broadband connectivity. With the Roku SD player, customers can stream their favorite movies and TV shows to their TV at up to DVD quality. The Roku HD and HD-XR players feature High Definition streaming capability, connecting directly to any TV using HDMI or Component video (both products also include S-video or Composite video outputs as well). The Roku HD-XR adds the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11n dual-band, giving customers who have adopted this router technology improved connectivity range and better overall wireless performance between the Roku HD-XR and the home network. The Roku HD-XR also works with legacy routers and can often boost Wi-Fi range inside the house. Finally, the Roku HD-XR includes a USB port for future use. I’ve been using the old streamer for a year now and I’m pleased but I worry that this is a bit limited in scope for most users. $79 bucks for SD, though, isn’t too much to ask. → Read More
Pioneer has showcased the Floating Vision at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (that ended Sunday), another 3D display that doesn’t require you to wear glasses (yawn) to view 3D images. It’s not bad at all though, even though visitors flocked to Sony’s booth to see their stereoscopic 3D display (which was a bit cooler).
You can connect the Floating Vision to a PC via USB 2.0 to view images or videos “floating” over the display (5.7 inches, 640 × 480 VGA resolution). What’s pretty cool is that you can “interact” with the image, as the device detects your hand movements. It’s also possible to “control” an image with your voice (the device has a mic on its front). Both Windows PCs and Macs are supported. → Read More
Just so everyone knows, there’s a Woot! Off going on right now. Perfect timing too as it’s just before the holiday shopping season. So load up Woot! in a dedicated tab, sit back, and enjoy the ride for the next day or so. → Read More
Amazon has launched a hosted relational database service, Amazon RDS, as part of the suite of services available at AWS. The new service is a hosted MySQL database instance with the full capabilities and access rights as a normal self-hosted DB. As a hosted solution, instances are easily created and available almost immediately. Pricing stars at $0.11c per hour for the smallest scale specification, and is available now on the AWS site.
Unlike completely elastic hosted DB services, which abstract a large-scale cluster into a shared environment for customers, the Amazon model is to step up or down through tiers of service based on requirements. The tiers of service (with names that seem to be inspired by a fast food restaurant menu) and pricing are: → Read More
T-Mobile jumps feet first into the no-contract, unlimited everything arena with its new “Even More Plus” plans, ranging from $30 per month for 500 voice minutes to $80 per month for unlimited voice minutes, text messages, and internet access. Family plans are also available for between $50 and $140 per month. → Read More
Cisco has added another company to its coffers with the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September.
ScanSafe provides software-as- a-service (SaaS) Web security solutions for large and small businesses. Tom Gillis, Ciscos’s VP and general manager of its security technology business unit, said in the release that the acquisition would help further Cisco’s vision “to build a borderless network security architecture that combines network and cloud-based services.” ScanSafe’s service will be integrated with Cisco’s AnyConnect VPN Client, a virtual private network (VPN) product to offer a cloud-security service. → Read More
Browser maker Opera has released its latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report this morning, claiming that there was a huge surge in mobile web usage past September.
Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes. → Read More
Tire maker Bridgestone isn’t the first company that comes to mind when thinking about electronic paper, but the company has been experimenting in this field for quite some time now. Today, Bridgestone claimed that it has developed the world’s first flexible e-book reader [JP]. The device, which is pictured above, uses electronic paper (instead of, say, an LCD) and will display the content on the screen even after you turn it off. → Read More
Reality Digital, a provider of white-label social media platforms for brands, is introducing a new spin-off service today called Spotlight. With the new offering, the company makes its entry into the market of online video management and distribution platforms.
This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie. → Read More
Streaming music startup Spotify has confirmed that its CTO has left, effective today. Andreas Ehn tweeted about his departure this morning, in a move which has taken observers by surprise. The company is currently prepping a big launch in the U.S., a watershed which would normally suggest that this is a moment to have all hands on deck. Losing your CTO right now is probably not the best timing, to put it mildly.
However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they’d “like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work” and “everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!” I’m sure this isn’t meant to sound back-handed but Ehn’s tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture. → Read More
Tomorrow at the eComm Europe 2009 event, Brussels-based provider of international VoIP origination services and telephone numbers Voxbone will be officially announcing that its global phone number service iNum now supports high-definition voice calling between Skype (which now boasts over 521 million users worldwide) and dozens of VoIP networks.
Voxbone will be transcoding between Skype’s wideband SILK codec and the HD codec G.722, with support for additional codes planned for the future. → Read More
On the heels of its recent acquisitions of microtransaction platforms Twofish and N-Cash, Live Gamer, an online marketplace for players to trade and buy video game virtual goods, is seeing success in managing virtual economies for online games, virtual worlds and social networks. In conjunction with game makers, Live Gamer’s platform lets online game players trade virtual goods they earn in games. The company is using Twofish and N-Cash’s micropayments technologies to power commerce in these gaming marketplaces.
Gaming customers including Everyplay (Finland), friendscook, Fotochatter, Hangout, Hooked and Radius IM (United States), ph03nix (Canada) and GPM (Korea) are using Live Gamer’s virtual goods exchange to power an economy platform around their games. Live Gamer’s platform includes virtual currency and virtual item systems, inventory management, publisher-sponsored secondary market trading, analytics, fraud management and support features. → Read More
Gazopa, a search engine that uses features from an image to retrieve similar images, has been in private beta since it launched during TechCrunch50 last year. To recap, Gazopa lets users upload a picture, enter a URL of an image, create a drawing or right-click on an image anywhere on the web (via a plug-in) and retrieves similar images. A thumbnail of a video is enough to look for similar videos.
Results are mainly filtered through analyzing the color and shape of the object or person pictured. Upload a picture of a red car, for example, and Gazopa will find pictures of similar cars on the web – without you having to type any keywords (search via keywords is also possible though).
Since September 2008, more than 40,000 users have tested the service, which entered open beta today. And Hitachi America, the company behind Gazopa, has used customer feedback to improve the quality of search results, tweak the site’s design and add a number of features in the past year. → Read More
Browser maker Opera has released its latest ‘State of the Mobile Web’ report this morning, claiming that there was a huge surge in mobile web usage past September.
Last month, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini (which is now serving over 500 million pageviews per day on average on a wide range of mobile devices), up 11.5% compared to August 2009 and more than 150% compared to September 2008. The Norway software developer also claims more than 2 petabytes of data is now processed by its servers on a monthly basis. That’d be 2,000 terabytes. → Read More
We’ve spent the past several months closely tracking the progress of Chrome for Mac. Well over a year after its release for Windows, there hasn’t been so much as a beta version for Mac (or Linux, for that matter) yet. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin expressed his displeasure with this last week. But Brin also noted that he was using the pre-beta version of Chrome for the Mac, but warned that it was unstable. After months of using Chromium builds (the open source browser that Chrome is based on), I decided to give the developer version of Chrome for Mac a try once again. The results have been very good.
While recent Chromium builds have been a little shaky with a mixture of UI failures, bugs, and a nasty habit of “Chromium Helper” (the name of separate tab processes in Chromium) eating up your CPU, Chrome itself feels much more stable. It would seem that at some point recently, Google flipped the switch to push Chromium 4.0 releases into the Chrome for Mac developer channel. These don’t come daily like the Chromium builds, but only seem to pop up as an upgrade option when a stable build is found on the Chromium path. For example, right now, Chrome for Mac is 4.0.223.11 whereas Chromium for Mac is currently 4.0.226.0. → Read More
Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute is steadily expanding, with a new outpost opening up in Seattle. The startup incubator, which just completed its first successful “semester” in Silicon Valley, recently announced expansions to both Washington DC and San Diego, California.
The program was first announced in March 2009. It is a semester-based startup camp for very, very early-stage entrepreneurs and students who have basic ideas for potential startups but have not yet founded a company. 198 founders applied to the program. 79 were accepted, and 66 graduated. 31 companies have been incorporated by these founders so far, and a handful have actually launched (including Skimble and Molo Rewards). → Read More
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