I’ve come across quite a few Santa Claus imposters in my time. Most of them were easy to spot: there’s the funky smell that has more in common with aftershave than cookies; the squeaky voice that would make any reindeer snicker; or, most often, the fake beard that looks like a giant cotton ball and droops in all the wrong places.
But last Tuesday, I met the real Santa. Big as a house. Able to list off a dozen varieties of cookies in one breath. Six foot, eleventy-three inches tall. Smelled like candy canes. And a voice that was somehow both jolly and booming at the same time. So, of course, we grabbed a camera and asked him what makes St. Nick tick. Be sure to stay tuned until he discusses the tension between real and ‘designer’-bearded Santas. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang almost didn’t happen today, as technical problems tormented the hastily assembled pre-holiday hoedown. Will Kinect save Microsoft? No, says Robert Scoble. Will Facebook and Apple destroy our freedom as they capture our identities and lock us behind a pay wall of our own choosing? Yes, says identity leader Dick Hardt. Gillmor had other ideas, but spent much of his time below decks trying to wrangle Kevin Marks’ up and down Skype connection. This is a long show, about as long as it takes to set up Apple TV and the new iOS version 4.2 on a chain of iDevices, but in the end something about it works. Enjoy while you’re waiting for the turkey to cook, and a Happy Thanksgiving from the Gang.
Video Ahead → Read More
I thought we’d get a Hello Kitty tablet before anything else, but today Onkyo Japan has announced a Snoopy-themed Windows tablet [JP, PDF] for the local market (Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit, to be more exact). Buyers will get a rebranded Onkyo device with a Snoopy drawing on the back, a Snoopy stylus, and a special “Peanuts” case. → Read More
Bizness Apps CEO Andrew Gazdecki checked in to tell us that they’ve joined the admittedly very crowded market of DIY iPhone app development platforms, but says they can do it from start to finish for just $39 a month, obviously a highly competitive price.
The fledgling company has just scored an undisclosed round of seed funding from two angel investors, namely Build.com CEO Chris Friedland (see his reasons for investing here) and founder and CEO of Collegescheduler.com Robert Strazzarino. → Read More
As the holiday shopping season gets into full swing, Google has released a study examining how consumers shop for laptops, netbooks, e-readers and tablets. The search giant interviewed around 4,000 respondents and used analysis of clickstream data from Compete’s 2 million US internet users. We’ve embedded the study below but here are some of the findings that we found most interesting from the report.
In terms of interest, new devices like tablets and e-readers are getting attention in terms of searches on the web. In terms of unique visitors to each category, tablets saw 1328% growth and eReaders saw 114 percent growth. Netbook’s visitors dropped by 50 percent and laptops dropped by 9 percent. → Read More
USB 3.0 is slowly but surely making its way into the mainstream. Buffalo in Japan today announced [JP] a total of four memory sticks with USB 3.0, with 8, 16, 32 and 64GB on board. The new devices only support Windows XP/Vista/7 machines though (you’ll get just USB 2.0 speed for Macs). → Read More
App store analytics provider Distimo took its monthly look at the world of mobile application stores, and this time zoomed in on the differences between Microsoft‘s Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and Windows Marketplace for Mobile (6.x).
For you information, Distimo gathered data on all major app stores, but the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace data specifically was collected from 1 November until 22 November 2010, in the United States only (the store launched at the end of October 2010). → Read More
Web designers have to deploy their finished work in a web browser so perhaps it makes sense to move the design tools themselves to the browser too.
That’s the thinking behind BuildorPro, which claims to be the first browser-based, web design and development environment with built in HTML/CSS tools. Or, for seasoned web designers out there, think Coda or Espresso but in the cloud. The app, from the London-based startup Buildor, is currently in closed invite-only Beta but we have 300 invites to give away. → Read More
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better than the Jimmy Wales Chrome extension, 4Chan founder Christopher Poole has taken the whole unintentionally hilarious Wikipedia donation thing one step further and done us a solid by posting a Wales-esque “Personal Appeal” banner at the top of his own site.
Just go ahead and click on “Read Now.” I. dare. you. → Read More
By now you will have heard about the first official Angry Birds Day when lovers of that crazy iPhone/Android game come together to celebrate the ongoing war between the birds and the pigs. However, well placed sources told us yesterday that something big was going down on that day, specifically in London’s Trafalgar Square. Now, this is becoming a big venue to launch big games, especialy console games. Here’s the spectacular Halo Reach launch with guys in JetPacks earlier this year.
There is speculation that Angry Birds for Windows Phone 7 will be anounced on the day. There is also speculation that the game’s developer, Rovio Mobile, will launch a games console version or that it will spin out a movie. Actually personally I think that maybe, just maybe, something different is going on. Here’s why. → Read More
Now that Diaspora, which is building an open-source distributed social network, has launched in private alpha, I figured it’d be a good idea to remind you that there are several alternatives to that particular Facebook alternative, some of which have been around longer and in more advanced stages of development.
Note that there may be more initiatives that I haven’t heard of or simply didn’t or forgot to mention, so this is by no means an exhaustive list. Also, all of these deserve a full review, so I refrained from making quick-and-dirty comparisons between all of them. → Read More
Sling Releases SlingPlayer For iPad Video Hands-On: Hexbug Spiders Review: Rampage, Menace, Spitting Out Fire Star Trek-themed Home Automation Center Is Star Trek-Themed Gran Turismo 5 Review Round-up: Yeah It’s Good (But *How* Good?) The Black Friday Survival Guide → Read More
It seems as though Q&A network Stack Overflow has put the $6 million in funding it received back in May to good use, crossing the 10 million unique monthly visitor mark as of yesterday. While sites like Quora bank on the winning Q&A model being on one big monolithic site, Stack Overflow is showing success by carefully separating the Q&A game into different communities, launching 34 different sites on topics as diverse as Bicycling, Cooking and IT Security. → Read More
Google/Samsung’s well-leaked follow up to the Nexus One — the Nexus S — has once again shown up in some super-secret spyshots, this time, however, we’re treated to a close-up look at its curved display.
Yes, those wonderful folks over at XDA have managed to get their hands on some top-secret pics of the upcoming device, including the yet-to-be-announced Android Gingerbread release.
Notably, they confirm that Gingerbread will, indeed, be v2.3 of Android. Although we pretty much knew that already.
Their tipster also confirmed (well, sort of) some of the specs, which you can see after the jump. → Read More
New startup Zediva attempts to circumvent all the licensing hassles experienced by streaming video services like Netflix, iTunes and Hulu through operating more like a traditional movie rental store, except online.
The catch? ”We don’t rent digital copies of a movie …” → Read More
Just the other day, we saw the boxer-briefs with built-in radiation-blocking fig leaf. If that was a little too Biblical for you (or you just didn’t like the style), check out these sweet 4th Amendment shirts, printed with a metallic dye that will show up on scans. → Read More
If you’ve been holding off downloading Hot Buns for Beginners* from the Android Market, for fear that it may not be about baking, then Google have some great news for you: the Android Market will soon include a content rating system.
In an email sent out to developers today, Google outlined the new policy (you can find it here), which involves a self-rating system where the developer places their app into any of four categories, specifically: “All”, “Pre-teen”, “Teen”, and “Mature”. → Read More
It seems like just last month that Sony dropped the price of the PSP Go from $250 to $200. Wait, it was last month. And now they’re dropping it to $150, with three games included? Who’s in charge over there?! → Read More
We’ve talked a lot about Diaspora, the open-source Facebook-alternative, in recent months. One of the reasons for that is the massive success they had raising money on the crowdsourced fund-raising site, Kickstarter. The project raised over $200,000 from nearly 6,500 backers in just 39 days. Now a new project has already blown that tally out of the water: an iPod nano-based multi-touch wristwatch.
Scott Wilson, the founder of Chicago-based product and design studio, MINIMAL, set out with an idea: to create two watch enclosures for Apple’s latest iPod nano. He wanted the TikTok to be a low-end model ($35) and the LunaTik to be high-end ($70). So he put his project on Kickstarter with a goal of raising $15,000. So how is he doing?
Well, he’s raised $341,895. And he still has 22 days to go. → Read More
