Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be available at least through the end of the year.” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011.
But before that happens, Google is also promising that “there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year.” So if you have been one of the seemingly few users who has been using Wave a lot, there will be a way to get the data you created out of it. It’s not yet clear what format this will be in, but we’re going to assume some sort of standard export file type. → Read More
If you doubt the efficacy of the new Pearl e-ink displays, take a look at these comparison photos. It looks like a pretty serious difference to me, although we’re still talking dark grey on light grey as opposed to black and white. I didn’t alter the pictures other than cropping them; take this comparison with a grain of salt, as it’s not exactly scientific. → Read More
Skip ahead to 4:25 unless you want to know how the whole setup is achieved. I want to make that PWIIIIIIIIIIIING my ringtone. Make that my pwingtone. I like the “honey is that you?” after the launch. Does anyone else have one of those things in their backyard? [via Hacked Gadgets and Make] → Read More
Harman Kardon has teamed up with Land Rover to make the new Range Rover Autobiography rock out. The new Harmon Kardon Logic 7 HD will be standard equipment in the Autobiography model, and will be available as optional equipment on Land Rover’s other models. The Logic 7 is 5.1 surround sound setup with a total of 1200 watts, delivering sound to 15 channels and 19 speakers including a 200mm front door woofer, and a subwoofer built into the rear quarter deck. Nothing like a little stereo power to blare out the annoying sounds of nature. Read the full press release after the jump: → Read More
Just a little something for those of you looking to pick up a DVR or set-top box to put in your pipe before you smoke it. Roku just dropped the prices of its SD, HD, and HD XR boxes to $59.99, $69.99 and $99.99 respectively. That’s $30 off; not bad. Take a look at our recent comparison of set-top boxes if you’re unsure; the Roku is a nice deal if you’re a Netflix streaming user and don’t want to access a local video library. Of course, we’ve got that Apple event coming up on Wednesday — you might want to wait until then, just in case. → Read More
If you’re running a website — be it a world-famous news portal or a personal blog — there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time poring over your stats. There are of course plenty of services available to help with this, including the hugely popular Google Analytics. But the older systems tend to have lengthy lag times before they’ll generate a report, whereas services like Chartbeat show things as they happen. Given how quickly things spread across the web these days, the future is clearly real-time, and today sees the public launch of another powerful analytics service called Reinvigorate.net.
After logging into the site you’ll see an overview page which displays the number of currently active visitors, active pages, and a graph of your traffic over the last few hours, all of which update in real-time. If you’d like to drill down more, you can jump into a separate Traffic tab, which includes stats like your daily and monthly visitor counts, bounce rates, and a breakdown of how much traffic each page is drawing. → Read More
Why do I get the uncanny sense that a lot of technology bloggers will soon be out a job? In the grand tradition of single serving niche sites like WhatthefuckshouldImakefordinner and Whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy comes Itsthisforthat, an easy way to generate responses when you need to explain to your parents, relatives, etc why you’re eating ramen for breakfast, lunch and dinner instead of going to law school. “So, basically, it’s like a new social platform for government corruption …” → Read More
The EPA is revising the window stickers seen on new cars to more accurately reflect the capabilities of electric and hybrid vehicles. They’re also proposing, rather boldly, that a big fat letter grade head the sticker, ranging from A+ (for plug-in electric vehicles) to D (for Veyrons and R8s).
The Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers has condemned the stickers, accusing them of evoking “school-yard memories of passing and failing.” Yes, well, that’s kind of the idea. → Read More
I think I liked Google Voice better back when it was hard to get an invitation. Back then it worked most of the time, and the infrequent outages were tolerable given how useful the service is overall. But over the last week the service has become spotty at best, and unusable at times. Given that I ported my phone number to Google I don’t have much choice but to soldier on in the short term – but Google needs to figure this out fast or they’ll lose me as a user.
What happened? In June Google Voice opened up for anyone to use, and there was clearly a surge of new people trying out the service. For the most part it weathered that storm. But last week Google launched Google Voice for Gmail, allowing users to make and receive calls right from the browser. It’s awesome. Truly useful. 1 million calls were made from Gmail in 24 hours.
Uh oh. That’s when the trouble started. About 30% of my inbound calls have the caller muted – they can hear me but I can’t hear them. And outbound calls are worse. In the last 24 hours at least 75% of them failed completely. Either it never starts ringing, or it rings a couple of times and then dies. In fact, I called Google PR to give them a heads up on this story and that call failed too. As did a second attempt. → Read More
Korea has their first Android tablet. Called the “Identity TAB”, the new device runs a 1GHz Snapdragon cpu, and sports 8GB of internal memory. The tablet has a 7-inch screen, a DMB TV tuner, gyro-sensor, a 3 megapixel camera, and an SD card reader. At this point, it appears that we probably won’t see the Identity TAB here in the US, but KT (the Korean reseller for the tablet) is recommending the device for people looking for a e-Book reader or web tablet. Sales start today a 300,000 Won (about $250.00 US). [via Akihabara News] → Read More
If there is a father of social media in Silicon Valley, it may be Reid Hoffman, the Stanford and Oxford educated entrepreneur best known for co-founding LinkedIn in December 2002. Hoffman, currently the executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner in the venture firm of Greylock Partners, saw the future before almost anyone else.
Grasping the Internet’s shift from a platform for data to one for people, Hoffman not only started the very first contemporary social media business back in 1997 – a dating service called SocialNet, but also was an angel investor in Friendster, Facebook and Zynga as well as the former CEO of LinkedIn, the 78 million member strong business social network which is currently adding a million new members every 10 days. Indeed, back in 2003 the Hoffman – in partnership with his friend Mark Pincus, the founder of Zynga – paid $700,000 in an auction for an intellectual patent on social networking, thereby making him, in a sense, the owner of the idea of social media itself. → Read More
Last April, adventure travel marketplace EkoVenture, relaunched as Zozi, with a focus on a local activities instead of exotic travel. Shifting the focus to promoting deals on local activities such as kayaking in San Francisco Bay, cocktail classes in Atlanta, or floating down the Delaware river in an innertube is aimed at reaching a broader class of consumers.
The company just closed a $3 million series A investment. ZIG Capital, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, LaunchCapital, and individual angels including Larry Bock and Dave Dolby. → Read More
Google Reader has been my go-to RSS reader since October 7, 2005. How do I know? A new update to the service today tells me that and a few other interesting tidbits about my reading habits.
Technically, the big news of this update to Reader is a new fullscreen mode. I guess it’s nice to have in certain circumstances (just hit “f” to activate it). But to me that’s a little ho-hum. Much more interesting to me are a few of these new statistics they’re dishing out. → Read More
Wanna get some good lulz around the office? Convert your parent’s old typewriter into a USB keyboard. That and the ol’ stapler in a Jell-O mold prank. → Read More
Fashism, a fashion site where you can get instant feedback on your outfits has taken the next logical step to the iPhone and just hit the app store. The Fashism iPhone app extends the concept behind the site, which involves getting collective advice on your fashion decisions in realtime. Says founder Brooke Moreland on the motivation behind the site, “I was shopping with my husband and wanted some feedback before I made the decision, I’m kind of indecisive about clothes and I know other people are too.”
Sort of like a Daily Booth for fashion, Fashism launched in September 2009 (during NY Fashion Week) and is competing in the same space with the considerably less glossy Gotryiton. And Fashism has built a solid community around outfits, with over 80k unique visits a month and over 15 k users with accounts. According to CEO Moreland what’s been really popular lately is “Is this appropriate for?” “Should I buy this dress?” “They’re not always nice, but they’re constructive,” she says. → Read More
The Droid X’s vaunted HDMI out seems to be of extremely limited utility at the moment, as a Motorola developer has said that it is only ever active within the Gallery application on the phone — essentially limiting it to media recorded on the phone, or media you’ve managed to slip in there. Wait, what about using a Netflix or YouTube app? And what if you want to watch a .MOV or .AVI off your SD card? While it’s not exactly a crippling issue, it is bothersome in phone the tagline for which is “Droid does.” Not as bad as that refresh rate cap issue on the EVO, though. That would have really bugged me. Of course, you’ll likely be able to get around it once a safe and reliable workaround or root method is distributed (contrary to early reports), but it still sucks for the end user who doesn’t want to have to worry about this kind of thing. → Read More
Hope you have some extra cash. Xbox Live is getting slightly more expensive starting November 1st in the US, Canada, and Mexico. The single month charge is increasing to $9.99 from $7.99, three months will cost $24.99 from $19.99 with the yearly plan increasing to $59.99 from $49.99. Why? Microsoft isn’t saying but we have some ideas. → Read More
Not much to see here besides cases for the unannounced and unreleased iPod nano — or shuffle. → Read More
