Monday, April 20, 2009
You've probably seen the commercials comparing the Subaru Stella to the BMW Mini. The commercials are lame if you ask me, I don't see any comparisons to begin with so of course they can dish out tons of incomparable features.Fuji Heavy Industries, parent company and maker of Subaru automobiles, has just announced its plans to begin testing prototypes of its Subaru plug-in Stella electric vehicle, which will be introduced in Japan this summer. Furthermore, the company has managed to boost power output from 40kW in the previous iteration to 47kW, and it also stripped away some unnecessary weight and fine-tuned the output management system. There's no mention of a price or expected launch date in North America.
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Adobe is working to bring its Flash web animation and video viewer to the living room via a new run-time system for HD TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other connected living room devices.
This is all part of bringing Internet content into the TV viewing experience.
Adobe has signed up a host of partners to support the technology, called the Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home. The new platform is available now to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and the first devices and processors that will support it should be available in the second half of the year, Adobe said.
Partners that have signed on to support the new version of Flash are Atlantic Records, Broadcom, Comcast, Disney Interactive Media Group, Intel, Netflix, STMicroelectronics, The New York Times Company, NXP Semiconductors and Sigma Designs.
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Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The deals comes after IBM withdrew its offer to buy Sun earlier this month.
"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a statement. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."
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Today sees the public launch of Tweetie for Mac, the desktop-based big brother of what many consider to be the iPhone's best Twitter client. People have been playing around with a beta version of the app for the last few days since the initial preview last Thursday.
In other Twitter news...
Late last night, former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block tweeted out that he had done some research to attempt to quantify the "Oprah Effect" - that is, the number of users who signed up for Twitter after Oprah featured the service on her show on Friday. The number he came to was about 1.2 million new users.
Labels: adobe, auto, flash, iphone app, online tv, oracle, subaru, sun microsystems, tweetie, twitter
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Personal savings site BillShrink has a new feature: a gasoline pricing database that directs you to gas stations based on the route you take on your daily commute, not just how close you are to the stations.The Web app isn't just for finding prices. It actually helps you plan your refueling stops along the way. You start by telling it about your car and its mileage, and your home and work addresses. You get back a results page that shows you a Google Map of all the gas stations along your route. You can zoom in and out to expand or limit the search area.
Beneath the map is a listing of all the gas stations BillShrink was able to find, followed by their location, price, and amenities.
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The PC Gaming Alliance has issued its state of the industry report for 2008 and it makes for interesting reading for those who think gaming is all about consoles like Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.
Here are the highlights:
The PC is the largest single platform for games with annual worldwide revenue of about $11 billion. This is more than any of the console and portable systems from Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
In emerging markets such as Asia and Eastern Europe the PC has become the de facto platform of choice for games as console systems have not had major penetration in most countries.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are the leading products for both revenue and profits. Several Asian MMOGs are generating over $100 million in annual revenue after 5+ years on the market. World of Warcraft is generating over $1 billion in annual revenue.
In 2008, two major new subscription MMOGs (Warhammer Online and Age of Conan) sold over 1 million units at retail.
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Epson America has just released its new document camera known as the Epson DC-06 which is able to deliver flexibility, ease-of-use and affordability to today's K-12 classroom. This $399 device comes with an easy USB connection which enables educators and teachers alike to hook up to one of the new feature-rich Epson PowerLite 85, 825 and 826W projectors or alternatively, to a computer using included software for easy operation. The Epson DC-06 document camera will come with XGA resolution that allows you to show off detailed reproductions within a 10.7"x 14.3" capture area, making it a snap for educators to share information from text books, journals, models, and even 3D objects to keep students riveted.
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A few years back, a company called Infinium Labs introduced a new game console, The Phantom. It was going to change the face of PC and video gaming by offering a downloadable catalog of titles available by subscription. It was an aptly named product: The Phantom never shipped.
Yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a similar sounding service was announced: OnLive. The major differences between The Phantom and OnLive seem to be that first, OnLive doesn't deliver games to your house, it delivers output (more on that in a minute) and second, OnLine doesn't appear to be vaporware.
Game publishers could also frequently update their games on OnLive by changing the code running on the servers. If one part of a game is too hard, the publishers can simply patch that part and then everyone will play the new version the next time they log in. Publishers can also pull the plug on games that aren’t selling well without taking a big inventory hit.
You'd have no control over these changes, since the game doesn't exist in your house. So if you liked that challenging part of the game, you'd lose it (rather than opting not to patch, as you would now).
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And here is a link to The Ultimate Guide for Everything You Need to Know About Twitter >>One of the guidelines is as follows:
Twitter will allow you to import e-mail lists, contacts from instant messaging services, and you can find your friends on their search engine. The best way to build a list of interesting people is to go to the Twitter search engine at search.twitter.com and plug in your interests. This will then spit tons of people back out at you that you can choose to follow. Twitter will also give you some suggestions for people to follow.
Labels: BillShrink, education, epson, finances, gaming, pc, twitter, WoW
Saturday, March 21, 2009
It's true, I have a Facebook profile much like everyone else online these days. I like it. I like the different things you can send to people and it's nice to be able to see what everyone is up to. I don't like the cheesy apps where people send me tupperware, but what can you do. I also hope they don't allow people to start modifying the look of their pages like on MySpace. I hated that! I know people like to be unique, but Facebook is a profile about you, how much more unique do you need to be? Anyway. PC World has an article up today titled, "10 Facebook tips worth reading".
One of the tips is about the gmail add-on. It shows everyone you email who also has a Facebook account. I admit I do know about that and I do have it plugged into my e-mail account. It has helped me to see which publicists and artists also have Facebook profiles and in some cases I do add them as a friend. That way they can see if I have written about them and I can keep up with their news.
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A company profile that was just submitted: Middlespot, another startup taking a crack at making the web search experience more visual, joining the likes of SearchMe and Viewzi.
Like its counterparts, Middlespot aims to enhance searching for websites, images, news, Amazon and even Twitter by returning screenshots of results rather than just text links.
Their mission... "We believe searching is an iterative activity of evaluation and interpretation that doesn't end with the presentation of a linear list of text only results. It's why we're building the tools to make the activity of search more effective."
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Song.ly
Share & Discover Music on Twitter!
Type in a song title or mp3 link to tweet. Your followers will get a short link to a page allowing them to play the song right in the browser without having to download it first!
They have a button widget you can add to you blog posts which will allow people to tweet an mp3 if you have one embedded. But as far as I can tell it takes some manual work for the blogger in each post because you have to add the mp3 url to the button. Optional fields include the artist and title which of course would be quite helpful to a listener so I know I'd add them even though they are only optional. So I don't know, maybe I'll try added the tweet song.ly button to some posts in the future, but I doubt I'll add them every time.
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In the same week that Samsung Mobile launched its own online movie and television entertainment service to challenge the likes of iTunes, Netflix and Xbox Live, Apple Inc. has moved to up the ante by announcing the wider availability of high-definition (HD) films through its popular iTunes Store.
Offered up for either full purchase or rental, Apple's new selection of 720p content will continue to grow alongside future studio releases and already includes relatively new movies such as comic book adaptations Punisher: War Zone and The Spirit along with action titles Transporter 3 and Bangkok Dangerous.
Prices for high-definition movies available through iTunes – on both PCs and Mac systems – are positioned at $19.99 USD for a full purchase, while high-definition rentals cost markedly less at $4.99 USD and older HD titles are priced at $3.99 USD.
But as I have been complaining about in the past. There is not easy way to put the movies you buy on iTunes onto a DVD to watch at home. You can only ever watch them on a computer. Yes, you could hook your computer up to your TV but that is annoying. I'd rather buy the DVD and be able to watch it wherever I want.
Labels: Apple, Facebook, hd, itunes, middlespot, search, song.ly, twitter
Friday, March 6, 2009
A site devoted to providing iPhone software for those who object to the Apple monopoly has announced plans to start charging for applications, presenting the possibility of real competition in app provisioning.The Cydia website has been providing tools for unlocking, or "jailbreaking" iPhones, as well as non-Apple-approved applications to run on them, but from today users can pay for their software too in a development that threatens Apple's monopoly and long-term business model.
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Text Art - the brainchild of artist Marius Watz – only requires a budding Dali to type a message of up to 40 characters into their phone, before the application translates the text into a "unique piece of MMS art".
Nokia didn't say precisely how this is achieved.
The picture can then be sent to your pals or set as your phone's wallpaper. Alternatively – if you're really vain – it could be uploaded to a printing website, slapped onto a huge canvas and stuck up on your living room wall.
The Text Art application is only available for the E71 and can be downloaded for free online.
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TwitteReader puts the updates of those you're following on the micro-blog service in a familiar skin, turning favorites into stars, tracking read and unread tweets, and letting you quickly reply or link from one location.
You can log in to access your Twitter account at the project site below, which does, of course, require handing over your login credentials to a developer's site—the developer says, however, that TwitteReader "will never store your password." Got your own web space? Download the TwitteReader package and roll your own reader.
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Barnes & Noble has acquired e-book seller Fictionwise.com for $15.7 million, as it makes another attempt at running an e-book store.
The cash deal, announced Thursday, is part of Barnes & Noble's plans to launch its own e-book store later this year, despite its lack of success with a previous attempt years ago.
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Social timelines are going mainstream (see AOL/Bebo), but startups are pushing them to the next level. Today, Lifeblob, the Indian startup working on ways for you to visualize your life on the net, is introducing a refreshed version of its social timeline creation tool. With it, you can easily patch together a visual representation of your life's most memorable moments by timestamping certain events and enriching them with photos, text and videos. The end result can easily be shared on a variety of social services, or embedded into any blog or web page (example below).
It's an invite-only service for now, but we have an unlimited amount of invite codes for you. It's simply techcrunch and you can use it to sign up here.
Labels: barnes and nobles, google reader, iphone app, lifeblob, nokia, techcrunch, text message, twitter, twittereader
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