Cisco is in the business of sending bits from one place to the next. Therefore, anything that will allow them to play to their strengths, namely data access, is important. That’s why they bought Flip and that’s why they just announced this odd business tablet.
It’s basically an HD tablet running Android with full video conferencing and email and media access. Obviously there’s no price and they’ll be shipping in 2011, if they ever ship.
This is definitely not a consumer-facing product. It will be part of their Communications package that they sell to business users. My thinking is this won’t ship at all, but that’s just a hunch. Perhaps they’ll farm out the manufacture to an OEM for mass production, but don’t expect it in your local Best Buy. → Read More
Ok, so this is legitimately great. Ninety percent of the stuff I write about… meh. It’s called the Pivot Power, and it’s a electrical outlet that changes shape, allowing you to snake it around corner, shoes, the giant Xbox 360 power supply, and other obstructions. Pretty amazing, this. → Read More
Got a SIM you need shaved down and you don’t trust your shaky hands to cut it? Brando has you covered. For only $25, you can now buy a sort of cutter that does the dirty deed for you. Brando
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The long dalliance between investors and Foursquare appears to almost be consummated. According to a Tweet by Foursquare board member Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, about an hour ago he was “approving the wire transfer heard ’round the world.”
That would be the wire transfer from the new group of investors led by Andreessen Horowiitz, as we reported a few weeks ago. Despite being one of the hottest startups around, or perhaps because of it, Foursquare took along time to close this round. Mostly that was because the company got distracted by acquisition talks with Yahoo and Facebook. When I asked Foursquare CEo Dennis Crowley about this drawn out process ten days ago, he responded, “You don’t have to rush through it.” → Read More
This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. Well, maybe.
A report today in Bloomberg citing two unnamed sources claims that Verizon Wireless will be getting the iPhone in January. Yes, Verizon, iPhone, January. Naturally, all the companies involved are declining to comment on the record, but Bloomberg sounds pretty confident in the report thanks to their two sources “familiar with the plans.”
This information is close to what the Wall Street Journal was reporting back in March which stated that a CDMA (the type of network Verizon uses) iPhone would be entering production later this year to be released at some point after that. There have been many earlier reports as well. Some dating back years — and some of those may have very well been negotiating tactics by Apple to score a better deal when re-upping with AT&T. → Read More
Yup, humanity has peaked. This is the Sound Blaster World of Warcraft Tap Chat, um, thing. You use it to tap to chat while playing the game. → Read More
As you may have noticed, Twitter has been having a rough month. Due in part to traffic from the World Cup, Twitter has had its worst month in terms of uptime in a year. The Fail Whale has been out in full force, and it’s partially Twitter’s own fault as they’re trying to overhaul their internal network during this time of high traffic. And today they’ve announced another move to help deal with network strain: an API rate limit cut.
And this isn’t a minor rate limit cut either. Twitter is taking the default limit from 350 and cutting it to 175. And they’re slashing the rates in half across the board. This means that everyone from the smallest Twitter sites to those whitelisted will be affected. Even Twitter’s own mobile properties (which use the same API) are being forced to deal with this cut. → Read More
Now this is a CPU cooler! It’s the Cooler Master V6GT, and for whatever reason it has a LED strip up top for… no reason? Whatever~! → Read More
Do you remember the cool “self-destructing” USB drive Fujitsu teased back in April last year? The device, which offers timed data deletion to prevent unauthorized access, was shown on both Fujitsu Japan’s and Fujitsu America’s website, and today the company in Tokyo finally [JP, PDF] named, spec’d and dated it for end consumers. → Read More
Last year we wrote an in-depth feature on Pivot, a Microsoft Live Labs technology that helps make sense of interconnectedness between objects on the web. The underlying premise of Pivot is to view relationships between “collections” of individual information on the the web. Many of the connections between items on the web aren’t necessarily tangible, but Pivot helps crawl massive amount of objects on the web and produces sleek visualizations of all that is connected. Today, Microsoft is using the technology to power Silverlight PivotViewer, which is now available for download. PivotViewer lets the user visualize thousands of items at once and then organize and navigate them within a rich media application.
Pivot and Silverlight technologies are the core of the PivotViewer. Developers and designers can now use Silverlight PivotViewer to build collections and embed them on their websites. Using the Deep Zoom technology in Silverlight 4, you can zoom into high resolution content and pan around to find what you’re looking for. → Read More
First, TorrentFreak rules. Second, TorrentFreak rules. Third… Well, you know what third is! The guys over there point out that the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sorta like the ACLU for tech, will appear in federal court this week, trying to stop all those Hurt Locker BitTorrent lawsuits. The main reason is that the U.S. Copyright Group, which is just a fancy-sounding name for an otherwise unremarkable law firm, is denying justice to the thousands of individuals wrapped up in this mess. If the USCG is truly interested in justice, it would file suit against each person individually and let them have their day in court one-on-one. → Read More
Foursquare has gotten some pretty big publicity before — like in Vegas. But a new Verizon commercial appears to be completely predicated around the service. Well, provided you know what Foursquare is.
As you can see in the 30-second spot embedded below, a girl is walking around a city on her Verizon Droid phone. She pulls it out of her pocket, starts walking, and immediately begins using the device. So what’s she using on it? About 6 seconds in, you’ll see she’s checking-in to a venue on the Android version of Foursquare. She keeps using her phone as she’s walking, but we don’t see the screen until 11 seconds later. What’s she doing then? Again, she’s checking Foursquare. → Read More
You want these packs. Seriously. Gamer Grub is good. Like OMG-I-might-start-living-off-this-stuff good. So yeah, we’re giving away three packs to one hungry gamer. How do you win? → Read More
Yesterday, we posted a video showing an iPhone shopper talking to an EVO 4G salesman. That video was a little one-sided, depicting the iPhone buyer as a mindless drone who wanted the iPhone no matter what features the EVO offered. Today comes a video from the other side.
In this video, also made by tinywatchproductions using Xtranormal text-to-speed software, an owner of an EVO 4G walks into an Apple Store to try and get his phone fixed. “But this has a 4th G, the iPhone 4 is missing a ‘G’.” Just as before, the language here gets a bit NSFW. → Read More
Fifa President Sepp Blatter has apologized (!) for the terrible referring that led to Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany on Sunday. Even bigger than Sepp Blatter admitting fault, which is huge in and of itself (it’d be like Apple saying sorry over the iPhone 4 fiasco), is the news that Fifa will once again investigate the possibility of goal-line technology at a board meeting on July 1. → Read More
This charming young man, John Meyer, created the world’s first iPhone 4 strobe light. It’s already been submitted to the app store and he suggests that, contrary to popular belief, it is amazingly fun.
However, it could be fun for parties, funerals, or for setting the mood for coital relations with your lady wife, provided said lady wife is not prone to epilepsy. → Read More
The rumors were true. Today, Hulu is announcing a limited launch of Hulu Plus, an ad-supported, premium subscription service that will run $9.99 per month and includes HD access to full season runs of shows from Fox, ABC, and NBC. Better yet, Hulu Plus will work across a multitude of platforms, including PCs, the iPad, iPhone, some Samsung Blu-ray players, and soon, the PlayStation 3. The service is currently only available to select Hulu members who have been invited — you can request an invite here.
Even if you don’t have an invite, you’ll still be able to download a Hulu Plus application on the iPad, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (it isn’t up on the App Store yet — we’ll update when it is). The application will feature a limited number of episodes, but you’ll be able to get a feel what the service will be like. Hulu says that the service will launch broadly in the coming months. → Read More
This morning, there was some ruckus on the Web when Facebook seemingly flat out deleted the Boycott BP page, which has amassed some 734,000 ‘fans’ on the social network so far.
The message spread quickly, with posts going up on CNN’s citizen journalism project iReport and Desmond Perkins, who set up the Boycott BP page, alleging that Facebook singled him and members of his family out to silence him on the site via his own website and Twitter account.
Perkins promptly set up a new Facebook page, which grew to just south of 10,000 users in half a day. → Read More
In-stream advertising network Ad.ly, which launched last year, recently expanded beyond the Twitter ad model to serve ads in MySpace streams. And today, the startup is launching an ad network for third-party developers, allowing clients to serve ads to users within their applications.
Called Ad.ly for Apps, the new network allows developers to leverage an API to serve contextually and locally targeted ads to app users based on the streams they are reading and where they are located. For example, Ad.ly will allow developers who create clients to serve Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn updates to serve an ad for a local LA restaurant to a user who lives in LA or has been Tweeting about LA. → Read More
After reviewing the iPhone 4, Andy Ihnatko dropped his demo unit and shattered. Boom. Just like that. 10 hours out of the box and it’s busted. → Read More
