Remember the last time Samsung went more than a few days without launching a new phone? Yeah, neither do we – so you’ll have to pardon us if we sound a bit skeptical here. When we got word that Samsung Mobile was holding their CES press conference at the ungodly hour of 7:30 A.M on the Day 2 of CES (otherwise known as Day 1 of being hungover), my curiosity was piqued. I mean, who the hell launches a new phone at 7:30 in the morning, halfway through a show? Not Samsung, it seems. → Read More
Many bloggers take December 31 each year to do a recap of their year in blogging. Google is no exception.
The multi-billion dollar company has a post today patting itself on the back for a solid five years worth of blogging. More notably, they talk about how the amount they’re blogging has increased significantly over the years. In 2009, Google had 423 posts on the Google Blog, which is just one of dozens of blogs they run. That represents a 15 percent increase over 2008. They also note that just about 14.5 million people stopped by the blog this year, which is a 21 percent increase over the previous year. Make no mistake: Google is taking its blogging very seriously. → Read More
Best Buy has a pretty good deal on Logitech’s G13 game controller at $50. It’s backordered for a couple weeks, but patience is a wondrous virtue. → Read More
Snapstream, a startup that makes a device that lets enterprises record thousands of hours of TV (from both satellite and digital cable sources) and search inside the recordings for keywords, recently launched a trending topics site for TV. Snapstream has released its top trends on TV for 2009, with the mention of “Twitter” used more often than Facebook, MySpace and other social media platforms. .
TV programs used the word “Twitter” in their programming three times more often in December 2009 than they did in late 2008 and January 2009, according to the data. SnapStream also released the top keyword mentions on TV, which are in order: Iran, Michael Jackson, Swine Flu, North Korea, AIG, Pirates, Hamas, (The) Inauguration, Ted Kennedy, and Balloon (boy). SnapStream also revealed that mentions of “health care” eclipsed mentions of “economy” towards the end of the year thanks to President Obama’s healthcare initiative. → Read More
Hurry up, sports fans, for today’s the last day you can submit a message to the KEO space capsule. The idea is to have a bunch of people write an epic message, then in 50,000 years it’ll return and give future people the messages. I have no idea how any of this works, so please direct your WTFs somewhere else. → Read More
Gotta hand it to Bloomberg for this riveting one-sentence article written by two people.
“AT&T Inc. is ending its sponsorship agreement with golfer Tiger Woods, company spokesman Michael Coe said in an e-mailed statement.”
I don’t recall seeing Woods in any TV or print commercials for AT&T but he definitely had a few big, fat AT&T logos on his golf bag. The company still has Luke Wilson and the iPhone, so sleep easy, friends. → Read More
Cnet founder Shelby Bonnie and other angels have put another $2.5 million into Whiskey Media, which operates niche media sites such as ComicVine (comics), GiantBomb (gaming), and AnimeVice (anime). The company, which has been around since 2007, previously raised about $1.5 million in angel money as well.
Whiskey Media’s sites are wiki-like content sites in the vein of CrunchBase or GDGT, which built around structured databases which can be edited by the readers. (In fact, CrunchBase was inspired by Whiskey Media’s first site, now-retired PoliticalBase). → Read More
Oh, Android – how good you have been for Motorola. It was only months ago that they were teetering on the edge of obscurity; one 350-person Android task force later, they’ve got the most popular Android handset in the lands and are being name dropped on a nearly daily basis around the rumor mill. A Chinese leakster managed to get his mitts on this (confusingly obscured) shot of an unreleased Motorola handset, and was nice enough to share it with the world. → Read More
This snazzy Bluetooth headset comes to us by way of Jaybird, which specializes in all things Bluetooth. It’s called the Sportsband. Presumably it’s for sports enthusiasts. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: Half-Life 2 Valve’s follow-up to the revolutionary Half-Life is our game of the decade not just because it’s a fantastic game, but because it is a fine example of modern gaming. It exemplifies DLC done right, community support done right, and comes part and parcel with Steam, which has helped revolutionize digital distribution for games. All this while still being the standard by which other FPSes are measured. → Read More
Two travel bloggers, Steven Frischling and Chris Elliott received friendly visits from the Department of Homeland Security this week. Why? Because both published SD-1544-09-06, the document that showed us what to expect when we flew in scardeyplanes from now on. A reaction to the pants bomber, the document essentially outlined a few points including the directive to prevent passengers from using their electronics during the last hour of a flight (I mirrored it below.) → Read More
Here we go again with another dual interface flash drive, but this time USB 3.0 is no where to be found. The Team X092 comes sporting both a USB 2.0 and eSATA interface. Of course with the eSATA interface, the drive should be rather quick and it is thanks to four data channels feeding separate flash memory modules. → Read More
Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.
The site is actually run by Moddr, a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest. → Read More
Nice fix, fella, but did you know that most of the time you can tighten the lid’s hinge? Oh, you wanted to be part of the steampunk movement. Well, you fail. → Read More
Tube or valve amplifiers are electronic amplifiers that make use of vacuum tubes to boost the power of a signal. They’ve been around for decades, and some audio freaks still love the sound they help to produce. And they look kind of pretty, too. Reason enough for Hanwha Japan to come up with the US-0498 [JP], a PC speaker that looks like a tube amplifier (but isn’t one). → Read More
We’ve always had a lot of fun with Indianapolis-based startup ChaCha. They launched in 2007 as a human powered search engine – meaning a human found you answers when you typed in a query. Pranksters, obviously, loved it. And we noted the high cost of hiring humans to basically do Google searches and return results to people.
The human powered web search never really worked out. But ChaCha evolved. In 2008 they launched a mobile version of the service that lets users ask questions via SMS. Putting a human into the mix makes sense with mobile, with poor (or no) data connectivity and hard to use keyboards. But all phones have SMS, and ChaCha had a hit on their hands (they also had the infamous Eiffel Tower incident).
And ChaCha also made another smart move. They started archiving questions and answers on their website in January 2009. 300 million of them are now published on their website – you can view and search them from the ChaCha home page. Those pages have lots of ads generating revenue, and the search engines tend to rank pages like these highly. The company serves just under a million page views to answer pages per day, they say.
CEO Scott Jones says the company has had “explosive growth” in usage of their mobile product. In fact, the company has had to take steps in the past to control that growth, by limiting the number of questions people can ask each month. Even so, people now ask ChaCha a million questions a day via SMS. They recently passed Google and ChaCha is the no. 1 SMS search service according to Nielsen Mobile. → Read More
Here’s one for the really dedicated Final Fantasy fan. The beverage company, Suntory, has teamed up with Square to offer a limited edition drink collection, featuring 16 special art cans of Final Fantasy “Elixir”. The set also contains a commemorative metal cup, presumably to drink your elixir from. → Read More
As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it.
But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. → Read More
Sir Patrick Stewart — I like the sound of that. Just for the record: he deserves it. Also, if you haven’t read his piece on domestic violence, go do so now. → Read More
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