Here’s a quick look at the Motorola Devour, the brand new MotoBLUR from Verizon. While my video doesn’t look nearly as good as Megan Fox’s, below, I’m here to tell you that this is another winner from Motorola. Full review later this week. → Read More
In the summer of 2009 MySpace hired Katie Geminder, Facebook’s Director of User Experience and Design, as an SVP. Her primary job was to assemble a “swat team” of leading outside designers and user interface experts and re-imagine MySpace from the ground up. That team was made up of four people – including two former Apple designers and one ex-Facebooker – and worked out of a conference room in MySpace’s San Francisco offices for six months. They were creating a new site, located at remakingmyspace.com, and it was going to launch sometime right about now.
RemakingMySpace was going to be a new version of MySpace with every piece of legacy stuff thrown out the door. Users and employees would be solicited for input – to get new ideas and vote on already submitted ones – to rebuild the service brick by brick. Most of the work over the last six months was spent reimagining the design in various ways that would be shown to users, and building tools for the submission and consideration of new ideas. And “users” was broadly defined to include input from artists and bands, advertisers, etc.
It was bold, controversial and progressive, say some sources. And now it’s also very, very dead. → Read More
Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.
At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. → Read More
You can get this functionality in an iPhone app (onOne), but it probably kills your battery, and besides: in photography, more accessories equals more glory. So check out this little doodad — it hooks onto your camera’s hot shoe and beams a signal to a little LCD monitor, where you can adjust aperture, take an exposure, and so on. → Read More
Neil Young, the CEO of iPhone game startup ngmoco, wants to “amass enough scale” to accelerate “away from the pack.” He just raised a $25 million series C round and acquired Freeverse, another top iPhone game developer, to help ngmoco keep moving forward. The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, and existing shareholders Kleiner Perkins, Norwest Venture Parters, and Maples Investments also participated. The new round brings the total raised to $40.6 million.
The startup consistently pumps out new iPhone games which have been downloaded millions of times. Two of its games alone—TouchPets and Eliminate—have been installed 9 million times, and hundreds of thousands of people play every day. Last year, ngmoco switched to free-to-play games with in-app purchases for virtual goods through its Plus+ social game network. → Read More
There are people out there who take to World of Warcraft‘s Auction House like NYU Stern graduates take to Wall Street. The Auction House, for those unawares, is a place where WoW gamers can buy and sell in-game items using in-game currency. It can be incredibly complicated, and there are entire guides dedicated to “playing” the Auction House in order to make money. I’ve made a fair bit of coin by merely buying items at one, low price, then re-listing them on the Auction House for a new, higher price. → Read More
Microstock photography giant Fotolia is launching a new site, called Flixtime, that allows users to create simple video slideshows. Similar to the simplicity of Animoto, Flixtime allows you to produce 60-second videos from your photos easily and quickly.
Once you register for a free account, you’ll be upload your own photos or stock photos from Fotolia’s selection of images. You can also upload your own music, or choose from Fotolia’s stock music collection. And you can add text to any slide as well. → Read More
We all know that sleeping is a good thing. It refreshes us. It gives us that “get-up-and-go” we need. There have been studies going back about as far as I can remember that an afternoon nap makes you more productive. The latest research finally gave me a sophisticated way to describe the afternoon powernap: “a biphasic sleep schedule”. Telling your boss that you are pursuing a biphasic sleep schedule to maximize afternoon productivity is sure to be met with a better response than just telling your boss that you’re taking a nap. → Read More
No one likes the food at San Quentin State Prison. That’s the gist I get from reading its reviews on Yelp. Yes, it’s on Yelp.
Maybe this shouldn’t be all that surprising since there is a museum that you can take a tour of (and they occasionally do private tours). But if you read over the reviews, a number of them are from people who have family inside or have been in themselves. Sure, they could be lying, but it’s still kind of humorous. California’s oldest prison, with the largest death row in the country, is being actively reviewed on Yelp. → Read More
In the first half of this year Adobe will release Flash 10.1, which will add support for the countless Flash apps around the web to many mobile devices, including Android. That sounds exciting, but it’s still unclear just how well these Flash apps will perform on mobile devices — for one, there’s the matter of processing power, but there are also issues with screen size and input methods. Now Taimur Asad over at Redmond Pie has installed a pre-release version of HTC Desire ROM (which includes Flash) onto his Nexus One to get an early look at how Flash will perform on the device. And for his first test, he’s put Zynga’s massive hit FarmVille though its paces. We’ve embedded his video walkthrough below.
So how does it look? Passible, at best. Some of Asad’s finger taps don’t seem to register properly (though he admits to not knowing how to play, so he wasn’t always clicking in the right places). → Read More
Exciting news, friends. I’ve just come back from the future, and I have some news to share. In the year 2050, the United Nations will hold a “Remember Blogging?” panel, and it will be chaired by the encapsulated head, à la Futurama, of Cory Doctorow. There will come a time in the panel when Doctorow’s head turns and says, “Now, blogging wasn’t all shits and giggles. Some of it was truly dreadful. Par example…” This will all be done in Mandarin Chinese, of course, which replaced English as the lingua franca of the world in 2035. Anyhow, Doctoro’s head will say, “You see, I seem to remember a post on reasonably popular tech blog CrunchGear that described some sort of wire-frame shoe. It was rubbish.” → Read More
Sometimes I’m assigned stories and I’m like, “Really? If you insist, boss.” This is one of those stories. It’s a collection of sidewalks, or derivatives, that “work while you wait.” Yup. → Read More
Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. Royal Pingdom recently reported that Twitter passed one billion Tweets a month last December and measured about 1.2 billion in January. On a daily basis, Royal Pindom was measuring 27 million Tweets a day back in November, 2009. But the latest data comes from Twitter itself (after attempting to strip out spam Tweets).
In January, comScore estimated that Twitter.com attracted almost 75 million unique visitors worldwide. But the number of messages going across Twitter is perhaps a more useful metric because it cuts across all third-party Twitter clients as well. At its most fundamental level, Twitter is a communications service, and 50 million messages a day is certainly a healthy number. What Twitter doesn’t say is how many of its users are responsible for those 50 million Tweets, or on average how many Tweets a day comes from each user. I’d love to see the distribution of Tweets across heavy, medium, and light users. → Read More
Well this is pretty neat. There’s a junior high school (well, grades seven through nine) in Halifax that has started something called the Wii Fit Plus Club. It’s an attempt to get kids fit, as you might imagine. → Read More
There’s a changing of the guard taking place at social software company Jive. Co-founder and CEO Dave Hersh will be stepping down from the role to allow board member Tony Zingale to take over as interim CEO. Hersh will continue at Jive as chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Zingale was most recently the president and CEO of enterprise company Mercury Interactive, which was acquired by HP. Prior to Mercury, he was President and CEO of CRM provider Clarify. Jive’s board of directors has begun a search for a permanent CEO, and is currently evaluating candidates for the position. → Read More
In three months, developers will flock to San Francisco’s Moscone Center for Google I/O, a two-day event put on by the search giant with an emphasis on highly technical sessions. Google has already outlined the main themes of its conference sessions: Android, Chrome (including Chrome OS), and the Enterprise, with other topics will including Google APIs, App Engine, and Google Web Toolkit. Google I/O runs from May 19-20, and we’ve got ten tickets to give away.
To win, let us know in the comments why you absolutely must make it to I/O this year. If you’ve been developing for Android, built a Chrome extension, or used some of Google’s other technologies in a project, include a link to your application/web service for bonus points. We’ll go through the comments tonight and pick the best responses (make sure to include a valid Email address when you submit the comment). → Read More
The Chinese hacker saga continues, with some pretty huge news having emerged in the past few hours. U.S. authorities have identified, so they think, the sole person responsible for the underlying code used on attacks on Google and others. He’s a “freelance security consultant” in his 30s, and he was able to take down almighty Google by exploiting a previously unknown hole in Internet Explorer. Being an Internet Explorer public relations guy must be pretty difficult. → Read More
As my sainted old father always says “It’s a stinking world because there’s no law and order anymore! It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done. Oh, it’s no world for an old man any longer. What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.” Well fear not, my sladky old pee! The Seniors Go computer is for you! For a mere $879 you get a large-letter keyboard, trackball mouse, and a zoom system for seeing your screen all horrorshow like with those starry old glazzies. You also pay $19.95 a month for support and live help, as needed. → Read More
http://www.collegehumor.com/moogaloop/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1929452&fullscreen=1 See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. I don’t really get a rise out of College Humor stuff but this one was too good to ignore. I especially like the old man yelling “Racism!” near the middle. → Read More
Back at CES in January, Palm announced that webOS 1.4 and all of its video recording talents would be hitting Pres and Pixis around the world starting in “February”. Flash forward a few weeks, when a supposed snapshot of an internal Sprint scheduling sheet indicated that it would all start rolling out on February 15th. February 15th has, of course, come and gone — and our Pres remain un-updated. Fear not, however – if the rumor mill doesn’t fail us a second time, we can still expect the update to roll out this month. → Read More
