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
I hadn’t realized it until just this second, but it’s been way, way too long since we’ve seen a monstrous carrier leak. I suppose after the heavily-detailed data dumps from the likes of AT&T and T-Mobile in 2009, the carriers have been tightening their grip. Fortunately, that hasn’t kept what looks to be the majority of Cricket’s 2010 product line up from leaking out. → 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 petabytes/month this year to 327 ptetabytes/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 petabytes/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
The rumors were true: Adobe and Google are tightening their partnership, seemingly both warily eying Apple in the process – and Mozilla plays a role in this story as well.
Concretely, Adobe has announced that its Flash Player will be included with future versions of Google Chrome right out the gate, so users will soon no longer be required to download and install a third-party plugin to make it work with the open source browser built on top of Chromium.
Furthermore, updates to Flash Player will be delivered directly via Google Chrome’s updating system, ultimately minimizing security risks that tend to surface when using outdated software and components. → Read More
The Dell Precision M4500 is serious. Seriously powerful and expensive that is with the Core i7-920XM Extreme CPU and an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800m GPU along with a max of 16GB of RAM and dual SSD hard drives. But even the base $1,549 model still offers enough power to get most any task done with CPU cycles to spare. → Read More
Man, it’s a big day for ol’ Red when it comes to software updates. All signs are indicating that the near-mythical Android 2.1 update for the Droid is beginning to trickle out right this second, and now they’ve announced that the BlackBerry Tour 9630 is getting bumped up to OS 5.0. → Read More
This morning, over two dozen major tech companies, civil rights organizations, lawyers, and privacy advocates banded together to launch Digital Due Process, a coalition that is focused on helping modernize digital privacy laws. Specifically, the coalition is looking to revamp the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which defines the laws that govern online privacy and how law enforcement can retrieve information from online service providers. ECPA was approved in 1986, when the Internet was in its infancy, and the coalition contends that it has become confusing and doesn’t include enough safeguards to protect user data. Among the coalition’s members are AOL, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Salesforce, Loopt, AT&T, the ACLU, and the EFF.
Here are the four core principles on the DDP website: → Read More
Western Digital here,
While other companies are just announcing their large 2.5-inch drives, we’ve started shipping ours and wanted to thank everyone involved with the industry-leading Scorpio Blue 750GB 2.5-inch hard drive: the engineers for crafting the drive, the bean counters for pricing it well at $149, but most importantly, you, the consumer. It was you that pushed us to stuff even more storage capacity in the small 2.5-inch form factor and demanded a quiet and battery-efficient drive. Thank you. → Read More
Hey you! The one holding your breath until the Verizon Droid gets Android 2.1! Exhale. Inhale. After a surprise delay of about two weeks, it looks like Android 2.1 is finally hitting the Motorola Droid today. → Read More
App store analytics startup Distimo is diversifying its business model and broadening its current offering of reports for operators and handset manufacturers with a new product dubbed Monitor. This solution enables mobile application developers to collect and analyze relevant statistics about their works across app stores.
Bonus points for not charging and not requiring developers to insert custom code in their apps. → Read More
While I’m not sure I really need weather in an augmented reality shell, I’m sure, after waking up in a strange, sunny city after a long bender, it could be useful to point your iPhone to the sky and get your current location and weather report. Barring that, it’s a nice proof of concept.
The app, called Meteo360, has three modes. When you hold the iPhone flat it shows a weather map. When you hold it up to the sky you see the city you’re in and the current weather, and when you hold it upright it turns on the camera and overlays weather information over the current scene. → Read More
Even with the 3DS Nintendo is always moving forward with one foot in the past. [via Reddit] → Read More
Say you’re making popcorn but you hate watching the bag expand in the oven as it cooks and you hate it when you have to think you have to touch the bag before it’s done. You know what I’m talking about, right? Well now researchers in Japan have added a 10.4-inch LCD to a microwave, creating the CastOven. It plays Internet streams.
Why did they really make this thing? Heck if I know. I guess they really like Internet TV. It runs Adobe Air and is “compatible” with Macs and PCs. → Read More
When Google shut down its Chinese search operations and moved them to Hong Kong, it placed its search results outside the so-called Great Chinese Firewall. China immediately started blocking politically sensitive search queries, just as it does for all Web content outside the firewall. That was a week ago. But reports are coming out of China today that censors are turning up the heat on Google, and “searches on any topic delivered an error message,” according to the Telegraph
One blogger in China says all searches on Google return the “white screen of death” and result in a connection reset. Although some Tweets from inside China say they have no problems with Google being blocked. → Read More
MuleSoft, a startup that develops open-source technology integration services, has raised $12 million in Series C funding from SAP Ventures with Bay Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating. This funding brings the startup’s total funding to nearly $30 million.
Founded in 2006, MuleSoft, provides software, support, and services for open-source technologies. The company offers Tcat Server, an application server that simplifies management, application provisioning, and diagnostics tasks for Tomcat developers and administrators; Mule ESB, an open source enterprise service bus, which enables to create and integrate application services; and Mule Data Integrator that simplifies data integration and transformation tasks. → Read More
