The iPhone is great, but it’s small. The iPad is bigger; you can cradle it, like a lap harp. Behold, Air Harp!
If fart apps are what the iPhone is all about, Air Harp is what the iPad is all about. You can sit there, with the device in you lap, and simply strum. You get 2 octaves (15 strings) of tones in G Major. → Read More
Remember textbooks? Yeah. Forget about textbooks. Students at Seton Hill University are all getting iPads and access to all their textbooks on the iBook store. I’d say it’s one of the biggest changes in pedagogy since the move from the one-room schoolhouse.
TUAW has a tip from a Seton Hill student who sent in a memo that said: “Students will be able to download their textbooks to their iPads from the iBook Store. In addition, iPads can be used as phones and for air and file sharing, as well as note-taking.” Gone will be the days of lugging a huge calculus book from room to room and I can only imagine the mixture of joy and dread as textbook publishers realize the grey market for used textbooks is dead but, in its place, a new pirate market will appear overnight. → Read More
Hurray, it’s cat and mouse time again! iTunes 9.1 was just released, and it looks like Apple has taken yet another step (or two) in their endless fight against jailbreaking. Take this with a grain of salt for the time being, but we’re hearing a lot of early reports that jailbroken devices will not sync with this latest iTunes release. → Read More
The RCA Airnergy AirPower is curious little device. It is supposed to harvest WiFi signals and convert them into usable energy, which is then sent out over a USB cable to charge a gadget. Yeah, think of the possibilities. But while the technology really does exist and has been demonstrated, it seems a little to easy. Apparently RCA is serious about the product line and has ditched the name Airnergy in favor of AirPower and is now showing off a slightly more polished look than the ones seen at CES 2010. → Read More
More 3D broadcasts are sweeping across Europe. The next countries up are Belgium and Poland. They follow the UK and Germany—oh, and the U.S. → Read More
Earlier today, Adobe and Google announced a partnership that integrates Flash right into future builds of Chrome. At a time when Flash is under fire from both Apple and HTML5 advocates, this is a huge win for the technology. But one thing that wasn’t clear from Google’s post on the matter (and Adobe’s comment to us) is what this means for the upcoming Chrome OS. So I asked.
“We plan to bring these benefits to Chrome users across all platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Google Chrome OS,” a Google spokesperson tells me. In other words, yes, this deep Flash is coming to Chrome OS. → Read More
Imagine if you walked into a used car dealership and knew exactly how much the dealer was skimming off your purchase. I don’t want to draw a parallel between used car sales and the mobile ad marketplace, but it’s an industry, like many, that could use more transparency. Burstly, an ad manager service, wants to do just that.
The company, a reincarnation of .App/Ads, just raised $1.8 million in series A funding from GRP Partners (Mark Suster is a partner) and Rincon Ventures. That values the start-up in the eight-figure range, according to CEO and founder Evan Rifkin. Burstly emerges from closed beta today and offers a full service, open platform (an open SDK structure) to help iPod touch and iPhone app developers optimize their advertising revenue streams, use a variety of ad networks or exchanges, directly sell or buy ads from other developers, run in-app purchases, rotate different content into ad slots and more. In addition, Burstly can support any ad size on the iPad and video interstitials.
The company doesn’t expect to be profitable for more than a year, but it could be a game changer in mobile advertising. → Read More
Well, we can’t say we didn’t see this coming, but the official SanDisk Xbox 360 flash drive cost $40 — for 8GB. Yeah, that’s a little expensive considering 8GB can be had for less than half of that. Thankfully Microsoft actually did something pro-consumer for a change and is allowing any ol’ flash drive up to 32GB work the same way. → Read More
PQI was one of the first companies to out a USB 3.0 flash drive back in 2009 and it’s back again with a 2.5-inch USB 3.0 external hard drive. You should know the drill by now. Nearly all of these hard drives are the same. The H566 comes either in 320GB, 500GB, or 640GB flavors and utilizes USB 3.0 to transfer files at speeds that max out at 5.0Gbps while providing backwards compatibility with USB 2.0. The drive dons a rather sexy metallic silver casing and ships with data encryption tools for the aluminium hat-wearing folk. → Read More
There’s a lot of excitement about Twitter’s first conference, Chirp, which takes place next month in San Francisco. In fact, the tickets for the event, despite their $469 price, have been selling out quickly (they’ve been releasing them in waves). And today brings great news for those still clamoring to go: there is a new type of ticket, and they’re significantly cheaper.
Today, Twitter is putting on sale tickets for the second day of the conference for only $140 (yes, 140, like Twitter’s character limit). To be clear, this is just for the second day of the conference, but for those on a budget, it’s a much better deal to be able to take part in the event. The second day is the hack-a-thon event taking place at Fort Mason in the city. And it actually begins at 7 PM PT at the end of day one of the event, when Twitter buses people over from the Palace of Fine Arts, where the day one events (including the major keynotes from Twitter execs) take place. → Read More
Twitter has just rolled out a new homepage that’s a marked improvement over the current offering, and does a much better job at capturing what the service is all about. The new site features a ‘See who’s here’ section that introduces new Twitter users to some of the celebrities and brands they can find on the service. It also includes a new, constantly updated section for Top Tweets, which are algorithmically selected interesting tweets (Top Tweets also has its own Twitter account here).
Twitter’s homepage is important because it’s typically the first thing people see when they visit Twitter for the first time (once you’ve created an account and signed in, the service automatically directs you to your Twitter feed). Twitter last refreshed its homepage last summer, when it started featuring its search engine front and center (you can see a screenshot of the old page below). This introduced users to the site’s powerful real-time search, but it didn’t do a particularly good job explaining exactly what Twitter was. → Read More
Old news, but worth mentioning for a hot minute. You know that Major Nelson’s Xbox Live account was hacked at the weekend. Look, people are panicking in the streets! → Read More
There may be a simpler explanation behind the increased blockage of Google search results in mainland China today than a deliberate government crackdown. It seems that the Great Firewall of China which automatically filters out a long list of objectionable material on the Web from ever entering China is mistaking Google for Radio Free Asia, one of the sites blocked by China.
According to a Google spokesperson who just got back to me, this seems to be what is happening: → Read More
Panasonic may have a penchant for plasma TVs, but that doesn’t mean they’ll abandon the production of LCD TVs anytime soon. The company announced [JP] a total of six new LCDs today, all of which are part of the new VIERA D2 series. According to Panasonic, the main selling points of these models are the design and the LED backlights. → Read More
Startup Buddy Media, a company that provides social media management tools to brands, has raised $2 million in funding from previous investors including SoftBank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Ron Conway, and Bay Partners. Buddy Media previously raised $8 million in funding.
Buddy Media offers brand marketers and agencies and all-in-one social media management system to help create, manage and track social campaigns on Facebook and Twitter (the client will also offers functionality for MySpace and other social networks). With regard to Facebook, the platform lets agencies create, manage and track Facebook Fan pages to drive and increase user and brand engagement. Users don’t need to have any prior FBML knowledge to create pages on Facebook and can create sleek and interactive pages fairly easily. Buddy Media’s Twitter Management System, which we wrote about here, lets marketers measure and identify Twitter trending topics around a particular brand, related topics and competitors. You can also track performance and trends for a brand and entire industry across Twitter with easy to view data on followers, mentions, and re-Tweets. → Read More
Tron Legacy comes out right before Christmas this year, but it’s probably best if you see the first movie before the sequel. This trailer should get you in the mood. It did it for me. Oh, and FYI, Tron is supposed to be released on Blu-ray in November, but there quality high-def digital copies lurking around torrent sites and usernets thanks to HDNet broadcasting the movie in high-def. → Read More
Pretty neat deal on Amazon today. When you buy BioShock 2 (for Xbox 360), and add BioShock 1 to your shopping cart, you end up getting the latter for free. Or, in English, buy BioShock 2, get BioShock 1 for free! $60 for two pretty good games isn’t a bad deal at all. I don’t see the deal mentioned on the site anywhere, so you’ll have to add both to your cart to see the savings. I just did, and it works, so there! → Read More
As smartphones like the iPhone and Android take over the mobile Web, the amount of data traffic going over cellular networks is expected to grow 40-fold over the next five years. UK firm Coda Research Consultancy forecasts that in the U.S. alone mobile handset data traffic will grow from 8 terabytes/month this year to 327 terabytes/month in 2015. That amounts to a 117 percent compound annual growth rate.
A lot of that data will come in the form of mobile Web browsing, with the biggest contributor expected to be mobile video. By 2015, mobile video will account for 68.5 percent of all mobile data usage in the U.S. (or 224 terabytes/month). Coda estimates that 95 million mobile handset subscribers in the U.S. will be watching video on their phones in five years out of a total of 158 million mobile internet users. → Read More
Imagine every positive and ugly opinion about you— from your mother to that awkward co-worker you rejected at the company Christmas party— centrally located on one online profile. Sound scary? It is.
Today, Unvarnished makes its beta debut. It’s essentially Yelp for LinkedIn: any user can create an online profile for a professional and submit anonymous reviews. You can claim your profile, but unlike LinkedIn, you have to accept every post, warts and all. And once the profile is up there’s no taking it down.
I asked co-founder, Peter Kazanjy, “Will you ever give users the option to take down their profile?” Kazanjy’s reply: “No, because if we did that, everyone would take their profile down.” Thus Unvarnished is a service that depends (and ultimately profits) on digital paranoia and our growing anxiety when it comes to our online identity. Doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies but (as Mike Arrington points out in “Reputation is Dead”) it is perhaps a logical evolution of social media. The site’s fundamental concept is not new (ikarma.com, Jerk.com) but Unvarnished has the best interface to attract a large community of professionals. Here’s the good, the bad and the truly ugly: → Read More
Best Buy‘s move to the UK has been known for a little while now, but, to quote Jim Ross, business has just picked up. Other stores in the UK are planning how to best confront the store when it makes its debut this spring. (The first one opens in May.) Luckily for the local guys, Best Buy doesn’t exactly have the best reputation out there. Fair or not, that’s the way things are. → Read More
