On Thursday 8 January 2009, then 18-year old Mahoud Samed Almahadin (aka Matt Connor aka Agent Pubeit) took off his shirt, proceeded to rub vaseline all over his upper body and subsequently used it to hold toenail clippings and pubic hair. He then ran into the New York Scientology building, tossed some books around and smeared the mixture on objects.
After his greasy raid, Mahoud Samed Almahadin was charged with burglary, criminal mischief, and aggravated harassment as hate crimes. Weeks later, 21 year-old film student and Anonymous member Jacob Speregen was charged with the same crimes, bar burglary, because he had filmed Almahadin carrying out his prank. → Read More
We’re big fans of Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develop iPhone apps. But the one gripe we had was that Mobile Roadie was limited to the iPhone platform. Today, out wish came true as Mobile Roadie is launching functionality for Android phones.
The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. The apps can provide users with access to news, music, live and recorded video, photos, event listings, and more. The apps also feature integration with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook. → Read More
Google Buzz is now two weeks old. I decided to hold off on writing about it (beyond my overview on launch day), until I had a solid amount of time to play with it and gather my thoughts. Now I have. And now I will.
My reasoning for holding off is pretty simple: I was confused. For the first few hours I was sure it was the best thing ever. Then I was certain it was the worst thing ever. The truth, not surprisingly, is likely somewhere in the middle. Google Buzz is a service with a ton of potential, but the execution of it is so bad right now, that’s it’s at points completely unusable. → Read More
It took them four days, but Apple is finally explaining its surprise decision to remove nearly all “sexy” content from the App Store. Once again, the morsels of information come from Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller, who spoke with the New York Times for an article published earlier this evening. None of it is too surprising, but Schiller’s unconvincing explanation as to why some applications like Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit app and Playboy will be allowed to remain on the store is sure to anger plenty of developers.
So why did Apple decide to pull these sexy apps?
“It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see”
I don’t get GPS in cameras. There have been times (not many, but there have) when I’ve been out taking pictures and don’t necessarily want the whole world to know where I was. Casio’s new EX-10HG camera is going to take that option away from me, with their new GPS-enabled point and shoot camera. → Read More
The idea of having a 64GB card in your camera is a strange one. I take a fair amount of pictures in RAW, yet I rarely if ever run up against the edge of my 8GB card. I mean, you’re shooting digitally and regularly offload your pictures, right?
The only situation I can think of where this might be useful is one where you literally have to shoot thousands of pictures in a row (somehow the battery must last that long) without ever switching out a card or dumping them into your image editor. When was the last time you took four thousand pictures in one go? → Read More
Email overload is a pain for many reasons, but above all, the worst thing about an overstuffed inbox is the fact that you sometimes miss messages you shouldn’t have, or you forget to keep in touch with the people who are important to you. If you’ve run into these issues before, a new Y Combinator-funded startup called Etacts might be exactly what you’re looking for.
Etacts is similar in some ways to CRMs like Highrise and SalesForce, but founders Evan Beard and Howie Liu say they’re focusing on helping people stay in touch, rather than on teams looking to complete sales. The service’s home screen features a list of people you know, ranked by how often you communicate with them via Email or phone. The list includes information like the total number of times you’re interacted with each person and when you first began talking with them online. Most important, it lets you know how long it’s been since you last contacted them, and lets you set regular reminders — if you go too long without talking to someone, the service will send you an alert. → Read More
How delightfully meta. It’s not real, unfortunately. [via bookofjoe and OhGizmo!] → Read More
This rather unconvincing video shows a current project of DARPA’s, in which a jet is accelerated first by regular propulsion, then ramjets, then scramjets — eventually pushing the vehicle to a ridiculous Mach 6. That’s somewhere around 1700-2000 meters per second, or ~4000MPH. That’s if they can keep the thing from breaking apart. Wikipedia tells us that “while very short suborbital scramjet test flights have been performed, no flown scramjet has ever been designed to survive a flight test.” That’s not very promising.
The video is years old but it’s news because they’re planning a test flight for April. The landing site is actually just a place in the ocean they’re going to let it crash, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing these things overhead any time soon. → Read More
What with tablets looming large on the horizon, one could be forgiven for thinking MIDs might be reaching the end of their usefulness. But when you put something like this in front of me, I can’t help but get excited. ABXY buttons and a real D-pad? Yes please. 4″ 800×480 screen, 8GB of built-in storage, 600MHz ARM A8 processor? Man, this thing will be a mobile gaming powerhouse if it isn’t super expensive. The Moblic E7 is still pretty much a cryptogadget right now, though. No pricing or availability is indicated on the Moblic page, so I’m just going to guess randomly. I’m going to say… $600 and available in the Summer, probably not in the US. Doesn’t that sound realistic? [Image and find: CarryPad; via Engadget] → Read More
There’s a story going around right now that the development costs for Apple’s A4 chip, which powers the iPad, might be as high as a billion dollars. Let’s not get carried away here. Apple licensed the CPU and GPU from ARM, and the A4 shares a lot of elements with the Tegra 2.
The billion dollar investment here is for designing a chip “from scratch.” Is that really what happened here? → Read More
Just last week, HTC announced the Legend. As the epic name implies, it’s essentially the “Hero 2“; its got the jutting chin, the rounded corners, and HTC’s software signatures all over it. The primary difference, outside of a minor (but still worthwhile) hardware spec bump, is the design of the body; carved from a single block of aluminum, it’s ridiculously light weight, super strong, and drop dead gorgeous.
While we somehow managed to over look it whilst roaming (almost absurdly) huge halls of Mobile World Congress, our buddies at MobileBurn spotted a display case showing off examples of the unibody shell as it steps through the manufacturing process. → Read More
The UK government plans to invest £200m into digital, biotech and advanced manufacturing businesses. It’s put in £100m into the pot, but the other £100m will come from the European Investment Fund. The money will be invested in technology businesses “where there are significant growth opportunities”.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the UKTI-organised Global Investment Conference today: “The fund, seeded by the government, is bringing private venture capital to growing enterprises. It is already providing £125m of funding to high-tech, low-carbon businesses. From today, a further £200m will be available for life sciences, digital and advanced manufacturing.” Science and Innovation Minister Lord Drayson said: “Private funds have matched the Government’s investment and money can now flow into promising technology companies.”
Technically speaking that brings the total UKIIF investment to £325m. The UK Innovation Investment Fund was announced last June. → Read More
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.
But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really? → Read More
Sweet merciful fates, the continued existence and use of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is getting as much publicity as the Linux-vs-Windows debate. If you’re interested in this story, and we all know you’re interested or these stories wouldn’t keep popping up, there’s an interesting examination of the reasons for MSIE6′s prolonged existence online for your perusal. The usual suspects — slow-moving change-averse mega-corporations on protracted refresh cycles, cheapskates, and ignorance — are rounded out by at least one surprising addition. → Read More
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
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