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Facebook Location Feature »
Facebook is dominating evcerything these days, from computers to mobile phones, even to television sets which have online capabilities. It seems Facebook is growing as one of the biggest selling points for technological imnventions. The latest innovatirom the social networking masters is their location feature. Not sure what it’s all about???? Well thenk check out [...]
Fujifilm Finepix Z70 »
The beginning of the year is the time for all Digital companies to unveil their newest cameras for the year ahead. Fujifilm is one of the companies never to disappoint and one that always delivers a solid, reliable design year after year. In 2010 they have not let us down with the release of the [...]
Wi-Fi and OLED touchscreen-equipped Samsung CL80 P&S leaks out before CES »
It looks like Samsung has at least two CES-bound cameras. We already saw product shots of the NX-10 and now here’s pics of the pocketable CL80. Depending on its MSRP it might be a hot cam, too. It seems nearly everything has leaked out about the CL80. We know it comes packing Wi-Fi, which can be used to upload pics to Flickr, Facebook, Photobox and Picasa directly, and the entire backside is a 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen. A 14MP sensor is behind a 7x wide angle zoom lens and of course it can shoot 720p video. Now all we need is to see some sample pics and shots of the touchscreen interface to pass judgement. But so far, so good. Only one week and a couple of days until CES, anyway. [ DPReview forums via electronista ]
Hollywood made $10 billion in 2009. In better news, only 5 billion years till the sun runs out of fuel! »
On the face of it, today’s story that 2009 was Hollywood’s best ever (so thanks for rewarding creativity, America), raking in some $10 billion, should be good news for a few people. It should be good news for the movie studios, which will now invest that money in yachts, caviar, human growth hormone, and sequels to today’s sequels. It should be good news for theatre owners, who were concerned that people would stop going to the movies as a result of the recession. Not so! (As if they didn’t have a precedent to cite…) It should be good news, in a weird way, to people who pirate movies and bleat that their doing so isn’t harming the industry one bit. What I’m wondering is, do these figures take inflation into account? Should they? I remember when AC Milan transferred Kaka to Real Madrid last summer Sky Sports, which is UK-based, was all, “This is a world-record transfer fee!” (The fee agreed upon between AC Milan and Real Madrid was 67.2 million euros.) The thing is, Sky Sports converted that currency amount, 67.2 million euros, into pounds sterling, which worked out to 68.5 million pounds. A few years prior, in 2001, however, Zidane went from Juventus to Real Madrid for 78 million euros, which, went at the time was converted to pounds was less than 68.5 million pounds. Basically, between 2001 and 2009 the pound sterling had lost valued compared to the euro, so when you converted the 2009 transfer fee into pounds it looked bigger than it actually was. Then you have to take into account the relative inflation of both currencies between 2001 and 2009. Back to my point: is $10 billion in 2009 dollars really anything to get excited about? I mean it obviously is, here and now, but when we’re talking records these things really ought to be clarified. If something cost $10 in 1940, for example , it’d cost $15.07 in 2009. See what I mean? Oh, who cares. Hollywood made a bunch of money this year. Hooray and so forth. Let’s drink wine . Time to write my screenplay about a college chemistry professor who bilks the government out of tax revenue by claiming liquor store purchases as “chemicals” for his classroom, and thus a write-off.
TenYears: Single Most Innovative Product of the Decade »
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: The Trek Thumbdrive In 2000, something strange happened. Overnight, we changed the way we carried data. Those of us coming up in the 1990s first used floppy disks then CDs and then Zip drives and generally the transfer of large amounts of data was a Sisyphean task. I personally still remember sending our entire university newspaper paper to the printers on a Zip disk. That year marked the launch of the Trek ThumbDrive, the world’s first usable USB storage device. You could slip it into a computer, drag over a few files, and pop it back out. You could drop it into a bag or pocket and it was cheap enough to lose – at least in theory. Thumbdrives would max out at about 256MB in 2000, but that soon changed. Now we can carry 32GB in our pockets – more than the entire computer system running that selfsame student newspaper back in 1997. If you’re asking why this made our gadget of the decade, think about it: the same flash technology in these drives is now ubiquitous. We have MicroSD cards the size of a fingernail. We have MP3 players as thin as a few business cards. Flash memory is so popular that’s it’s become scarce, with manufacturers buying up huge stocks prior to launching new product. It has removed delicate moving parts from the design of almost all electronics. Few devices in our purview have changed the way we work, play, and communicate in the way flash memory and thumbdrives have. They made massive amounts of storage available and disposable. They, in a real sense, changed the world. Runners Up The Danger Sidekick Before 2002 you either had a feature phone – essentially a phone that you could make calls and maybe play some Java games – or a smartphone – a phone that could run applications. Danger introduced the T-Mobile Sidekick on October 1, 2002 and changed all that. The phone let you send email and instant message, all in a package far more accessible – feature-wise and price-wise – than any smartphone. It was, in a sense, the first mainstream smartphone for the masses and it became a longtime fan favorite for years. Even after some high-profile problems the Sidekick is still going strong. Gmail Free email was nothing new. Odd ways of organizing your email was nothing new. What was new was all of the storage space Google offered to the average Joe, forcing others to follow suit. Gone were the days of “premium” webmail accounts – you got 1GB. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it: With an initial storage capacity offer of 1 GB per user, Gmail significantly increased the webmail standard for free storage from the 2 to 4MB its competitors offered at that time. 2MB? What did we do before Google? Sony Reader Before the Kindle, before the Nook, the Sony Reader was the only ereader in town. It didn’t do much of note nor was it particularly popular, but it paved the way for competitors and it showed Sony that they’d have to step up their game if they wanted to even be on the field. They were the first movers but they didn’t get the advantage, an parable for any and all manufacturers out there with something amazingly new. Our take Matt : Let’s not forget the Harmony Remote either. Before these Internet-connected remotes came along, you would have to spend hours programming a universal remote with codes printed in size 4 font. The innovative little company was eventually bought out by Logitech, but thankfully not much as changed. Doug : I have to agree with the T-Mobile Sidekick here. I can’t remember the last time I had a bigger tech boner about a particular product. The thing that made it so unbelievable was that it wasn’t priced outrageously at the time. If memory serves, the hardware was $250 and my monthly service was $30 for voice and $20 for unlimited data. I did a lot of web development back then and I still remember the first time I used my Sidekick to add a new user to one of my client’s e-mail systems while waiting for my luggage halfway across the country. Unreal. And never, ever, ever have regular people ogled a phone as much as they did the first Sidekick. There was nothing like it — that swiveling screen, especially. Devin : I just want to throw my weight behind Gmail and cloud apps here. I may not even use them, but I see them as being fuel for the next generation of computing. Flash memory has for sure enabled a huge amount of devices in the last decade, but cloud apps will power the next decade. Greg : As the resident mobile nut, it’s only appropriate for me to consider something from the mobile space to be the most innovative. I could cheat and default to the iPhone purely for the sake of stoking a flamewar in the comments below, but I won’t. Instead, I’ll go with SMS – otherwise known as text messaging; while technically a product of the 80s, SMS truly came to fruition in the naughts. In the past 9 years, we’ve gone from sending less than half a billion texts a year to over 80 billion – and that’s in the US alone. It paved the way for Facebook updates, tweets, and microblogs, killed the long form letter, and has completely overhauled how we, as a populace, communicate. Nicholas : I sincerely believe the word “innovative” has lost all meaning and should be eliminated from the English language. I have no time for it, and it seeing it instantly causes my renal glands to secrete exotic poisons. Call me when someone invents a simple water purifier that can treat water on the spot. That’d be helpful. Oh, and innovative.
Why are people falling victim to Facebook scams? »
The beauty of essentially quitting social networking, as I have, is that I don’t have to worry about all of the associated nonsense . “Facebook’s new privacy settings cause uproar.” Really? Not if you quit the site it doesn’t. “Malicious programs causing social network malaise.” Again, not an issue if you’re not all-consumed with tweeting every 10 seconds about what you’re eating for breakfast. To roll back the cynicism a tiny bit, there are a few ways to keep yourself safe on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot. • Please don’t make your password “abc123.” You do know that a “bad guy” can run your account through a wordlist and have access lickety split, right? • Don’t click on random links even if they’re from your friends. “Twenty percent off scented candles! I have to click on that link!” Just assume everything and everyone is out to get you. I think that’s it, actually. Come up with a proper password and don’t go around clicking random nonsense. And here’s a personal tip: if any of my friends see a message from me on Facebook and Twitter, assume it’s fake. I logged into Facebook for the first time in a long time on Tuesday, and found a message from someone from September. Oops! Now watch as my accounts get hacked. Whatever.
World of Warcraft’s new dungeon finder just made life worth living again »
For me, the best part of Patch 3.3 in World of Warcraft is the new dungeon finder. I’ve used it a bunch in the past couple of days, and can say this: PUGing is now fun (though it’ll change the way we look at guilds). PUG stands for pick-up group, a term to describe a ragtag collection of players thrust together to run though a dungeon, or instance. Prior to this latest patch, setting up a PUG was a pain the the ass: you’d join a specific chat channel then submit yourself to a pretty rubbish queuing system. It would take an awful long time to get five players together. We’re talking 30+ minutes. Inconvenient, yes. You’d get prepared to run a dungeon, have all your potions and items and whatnot on you, then enter the queue… then you’d wait. And wait and wait. Needless to say, by the time you got a group together, you were often no longer in the mood to run the dungeon. And then you’d find that the group itself was rubbish. Not fun, no. The new system changes things. The biggest change is that the dungeon finder looks across servers, so even if your server has, say, only 100 people in it (for argument’s sake), that’s no longer a problem. You’re no longer handcuffed by your server’s inadequacies! The queueing system has also improved, and dramatically. Now you select your role in the group (damage-dealing, healing, or tanking), then the system scours several servers to find other plays queuing up for the same dungeon. What used to take 30+ minutes to set up now takes around 10. I say that as a damage-dealer (Warlock); healers and tanks, being more rare, are placed into groups even quicker. (Groups consist of three damage-dealers, a healer, and a tank.) Like I said, I’ve used the new system several times since the patch went live. I couldn’t be happier. Within 10 minutes of entering a queue I’m fighting my way through the game’s dungeons. Yes, this is what I do with my life, such as it is. But the new dungeon finder may change the way people look at guilds. Before, you’d join a guild so you can get to know a bunch of other people who you’d run dungeons with. It was a lot quicker for a few guildies run a dungeon than sit though the old PUG system. But now that you can have a dungeon run up and ready in just a few minutes, why bother with a guild? This is especially true of people who like to play the game alone like I do: I have no interest in asking my fellow guildies “hey, what’s up guys?” If I can find a group in a few minutes, then be done with a dungeon in double-quick time, why put up with all the drama of a guild? This only speaks to pre-endgame raiding, of course. That’s a whole different animal where being friends with people and knowing what are people’s motivations (what gear they’re after and so on). So there you go. Running dungeons is infinitely easier, and faster, now, but it may change the way people look at guilds. Are they even worth the trouble now, especially at lower levels?
PS3 Slim was supposed to have network storage (that is, no local hard drive) »
Did you know that, at one point, Sony considered constructing the PS3 Slim around the concept of network storage? That is, instead of there being local storage (hard drive, memory cards, etc.) you’d store all of your data on Sony’s servers then retrieve said data over the Internet. Now that would have been radically different. Of course, Sony decided against the idea, primarily because it would have cost too much money to set up and maintain the required servers. It’s a shame, because as slim as the PS3 Slim turned out, it could have been so much slimmer! Well, all of this according to a recent interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia. Sony also said that it could have made the PS3 Slim even slimmer by moving the power supply (see: the Xbox 360’s power brick) outside the system. That was ixnayed, too, because it would have made it “harder to use freely.” I don’t know about you, but when I place a video game console in its spot, it doesn’t leave that spot until the next generation rolls around. So I officially don’t understand why Sony didn’t go with the power brick idea—it did with the PS2 Slim! Now, the network storage thing, yeah, that I can understand. Money aside, it’s a pretty foreign concept for console owners. “So I have zero control over my saved games? That’s not cool.” What happens if Sony’s servers explode and an earthquake knocks over the backup storage facility and a tornado destroys the backup’s backup facility? Then what? Flickr
Thanko rolls out not one but two spy cams »
Tokyo-based USB gadget maker today started selling two spy cameras, the so-called Camera Cap [JP] and the LED Spy Light [JP]. While it’s a bit of a stretch to call the latter a spy accessory, the bizarre cap can surely be used for undercover reconnaissance and other shenanigans. As to be expected, both gadgets are kind of silly and powered by USB. The camera cap shoots video with 640×480 resolution and at 25fps. It has 4GB of internal memory (enough to store 50 minutes of video), weighs 130g and has a battery life of 2.5 hours. You can connect it to your Windows machine via USB. It’s available over at Geek Stuff 4U for $134.47 . The LED Spy Light looks more like a conventional flashlight than anything else. It has a small camera that shoots video with 640×480 resolution (at 30fps) and pictures with 1,600
Time Inc’s “Manhattan Project” Is A Tablet Magazine »
The magazine business is hurting just like all print publications. And even if their Websites are popular, they generate one tenth the ad revenue of the print side. Since last summer, Time Inc has been working on a “Manhattan Project” to create a digital magazine for the new breed of color tablet computers soon to come to market. (Condé Nast is also working on a similar concept). Today, I got a sneak peak at a demo of the tablet magazine designed for Sports Illustrated. The demo was shown on an HP table computer with a touchscreen, but it could easily be ported to an iPhone or an Apple iTablet, whenever that becomes available. The idea is to create something so beautiful and fluid that readers will actually want to pay for it. The cover takes up the full screen and you tap it to show a table of contents with thumbnails of the actual layout, which you can rearrange to read in any order you like. To flip through the pages you swipe with two fingers, and you can also tap to get a navigational timeline at the bottom. There is also a navigation wheel which lets you share stories via email, Facebook, or Twitter, favorite a story, go to related videos or photos interviews, other articles, or stats such as live scores.