One day after McAfee warned about the dangers of corporations becoming vulnerable to hackers, we now learn that Nasa has similar concerns. Its inspector general, Paul Martin, has written a report entitled “Security Practices Expose Key Nasa Network To Cyber Attack,” and you can guess what that means. Actually, don’t bother guessing. The report warns that six of Nasa’s servers that just so happen to contain critical data are vulnerable to remote attack. And if a hacker were so inclined, he could exploit those vulnerabilities to get further inside Nasa, wreaking all sorts of havoc (say, “cripple Nasa’s operations”) in the process. Again, panic. → Read More
“Our nanogenerators are poised to change lives in the future. Their potential is only limited by one’s imagination.” Strong, powerful words from Dr. Zhong Lin Wang, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose nanogenerators could one day power a whole host of gadgets, from your iPod to your favorite tablet. The idea rests upon zinc oxide nanowires, wires that generate electricity when flexed. → Read More
I penned a blog post earlier today covering the potential impact that Amazon’s new digital music locker will have on startups that have been letting people upload their music to the cloud for years (but charge more for it than Amazon does unless they need to store literally tens of thousands of songs).
I got a response from the founders and head honchos of two of those startups in the line of fire, MP3Tunes CEO Michael Robertson, who already has a long and fascinating career (and legal history) in the world of digital music behind him, and Daren Tsui, CEO and co-founder of mSpot. → Read More
Drinking game: Take a drink for every screw removed. I guess this is less of a game and more of a way to get drunk. I’ll let you know how it goes. [via Destructoid] → Read More
After working at Disney, Proctor and Gamble, being CEO of eBay, running for Governor of California and losing, Fortune is reporting that Meg Whitman will now be joining Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a part-time strategic advisor.
Whitman joins other politicos Al Gore and Colin Powell in the role, where she will “scope investments and coach startups” at what is prehaps Silicon Valley’s most famous Venture Capital firm. Kleiner recently invested in Twitter, Spotify and Groupon, to throw out a few winners. → Read More
On Friday, we’ve shown you Twimal, a super-cute USB toy for Twitter users that can read specific tweets out loud (so you don’t have to look at the computer screen to follow your time line). But before Takara Tomy, a smaller Japanese toy company called WiZ has brought the so-called Charatter [JP] to the Japanese market, a teddy bear that’s able to do the same. → Read More
This, multiplied by a million minus 1 million Digitimes “sources” are stating that 3 million Nooks Color have rolled off the assembly line and into stores over the past year, giving the Nook Color firmly at 50% of the “iPad-like” tablet market. They estimated 600,000-700,000 sales per month in January and February during the post-holiday gift card redemption season. → Read More
This is pretty big. Rockstar’s upcoming LA Noire will be an official selection at the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s the first time a game has been accepted into the festival. → Read More
If you haven’t noticed by the amount of follower notifications you’re suddenly receiving, music snippet sharing app SoundTracking has a had an impressive 14 full days since its SXSW launch, clocking in 100K downloads from the iTunes store on March 26th.
While we’ve seen this level of app store growth with photo-sharing app Instagram (which hit similar numbers in a week), I’m going to drag out the Foursquare growth reference point (it took Foursquare seven months to get to 60K users) again to emphasize how impressive this is, especially for a music sharing service. → Read More
As we heard last week, Google is finally rolling out its much awaited in-app payment and billing system. Papaya Mobile, the developer of a plug and play technology that incorporates social gaming elements into iOS and Android games, is announcing that it is integrating Android’s in-app billing on its social gaming network.
The company says that the new billing platform will enable 10 million Papaya users to engage in microtransactions. PapayaMobile will also integrate Android’s In-App billing into its Social SDK and Game Engine products. → Read More
While AT&T continues to exude confidence that their planned acquisition of T-Mobile will get all the necessary approvals, it’s starting to look less and less likely. Many in the industry were already a bit dubious about the deal once we worked out that the top two carriers in the US (the AT&T/T-Mo mega carrier as #1, Verizon as #2) would account for nearly 80 percent of the market share. Just days after the announcement, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse announced his plans to battle the deal. Now, New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, is looking into the matter. → Read More
The various cases of Internet use may be divided into four different classes. Though each class will be found to have many symptoms in common, yet there are variations so marked that there will be little-difficulty in placing each patient in his proper class for treatment. When this division is made and the characters peculiar to each described, it will be well to give the various local and constitutional measures which have been found useful in all—therapeutical agents which are indicated in all, and then point out the special indications which belong to each particular class. → Read More
If you’re not familiar with the famed iChair line then you’re in for a treat. The iChair is basically a case with a little chair stuck to it. When you’re ready to stand your iPhone or 1st gen iPad up on your desk you can be all like “BAM! CHAIR ACTIVATE!” (not really) and you’ve got an iPad or iPhone that’s standing the freak up by itself. → Read More
Kickstarter is really the go-to place for all things iPad/iPhone. If you have a random case you wanna sell, put it up on Kickstarter. It’s kind of a running joke with us right now because of the sheer amount of iPad products on the site. But the Cosmonaut is different. It’s actually clever.
Tablet users should understand the benefit here. Writing on an iPad isn’t like writing on paper. It’s different and as the embedded Kickstarter video explains, the experience is more like using a white board and so this stylus was designed with that in mind. The kicker (get it? because it’s on Kickstarter? nvm) is that this project doesn’t have multiple tiers of funding. Pledge what you want. There’s only 3000 funding slots open and pledges start at just a $1. Clever. → Read More
http://asset.slashgear.tv/sgplayer.swf Yowza. It’s been a while since Samsung has done anything on the software side that was particularly original — but this… this is friggin’ awesome. The idea: as an alternative to multitouch zooming, you place your thumbs on the screen and then move the device closer to or further from your face. By pulling data from the too-oft-unutilized accelerometer inside the phone, Samsung’s able to zoom the page accordingly. It’s a damned fancy demo — but would you use it? Is it any better than just multi-touch zooming to the precise point you’re looking for? Weigh in down in the comments! Let your voice be heard! Rabble rabble! [Via Android Community] → Read More
When Bob Metcalfe says that there’s a social networking bubble, we should take notice. Inventor of the Ethernet, coiner of Metcalfe’s Law, founder of 3Com, a technology pundit and publisher at InfoWorld, VC at Polaris Ventures, and now Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas, Metcalfe is one of the true pioneers of Internet technology and business.
But, in spite of Metcalfe’s sense that the social networking bubble will burst, he remains bullish about innovation on the Internet. In particular, he sees three sectors which are about to be radically disrupted by the Internet: healthcare, education and energy. That’s where we’re going next, Metcalfe predicts. So forget about your social media start-up, he advises, and focus on reinventing the education, healthcare and energy industries. → Read More
Casio today announced [JP] a total of twelve new DLP projectors for the Japanese market, all of which can produce 3D images and feature a hybrid laser/LED light source. The company will start rolling out eight “standard” models starting in Japan in May, before offering two short-focus and two high-end devices in July. → Read More
Even if you never heed any other word of gadget advice I give, heed this: Sprint has just opened up the reservation queue for their crazy new multi-screen Android phone, the Kyocera Echo. Don’t do it.. Don’t stand in line for it, either. Wait a few weeks. → Read More
President Obama spoke to Univision yesterday at one of those town hall meetings the TV networks like to organize. What’s pertinent to us here is that our president, the man who’s famous for carrying a BlackBerry wherever he goes, does, in fact, own his own computer. → Read More
They say if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. They also say if you build a better nail clipper someone, probably a very strange-looking man, will bring the nail clipper onto the subway and proceed to groom his fingers between the 36th St. and Pacific Street stops on the N train, filling the subway car with the endless, gut-gurgling sound of spent fingernails pinging off of steel bars and plastic seating. The Klhip is that nail clipper. → Read More
