Filed under: Wireless
Just months after hearing that San Franciscans would be forced to deal with the
collapse of a
seemingly inevitable citywide WiFi access plan, wireless addicts in St. Louis will be mourning similarly. Apparently, grandiose plans laid out by AT&T this past February have now been throttled back quite a bit, as the outfit has announced that it will not be covering the city's 62-square miles with wireless internet. Instead, the firm will be "building a WiFi pilot project in the downtown core and expects to have it in service early next year." It seems that the main issues with completing the initial goal were the inability to find a "cheap way to power the network's transmitters," and you know, figuring out how to spin this into a profitable enterprise.
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Filed under: Wearables
We've seen a
plethora of
shirts made for more than just satisfying a core necessity in life, but a team of
scientists over at the CSIRO's Energy Technology Division are hoping to have "power shirts" at your local flea market (or other fine establishments) within five years. By using piezo electrical materials, the garb could reportedly "produce electricity as you move," enabling users to juice up their DAPs, mobiles and
air conditioned pants just by staying active. Other potential applications include powering battlefield-related equipment on soldiers and monitoring systems on the elderly, but making sure it can handle the oh-so-intimidating wash cycle remains a challenge.
[Via
PopGadget, image courtesy of
CSIRO]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Filed under: Cellphones
According to a Boy Genius Report that shows an alleged leaked advertisement,
Rogers could be launching the iPhone on its network on December 7th. You're gonna need to take this with a big grain of salt though: the depicted iPhone doesn't show the Rogers logo on the actual iPhone, a red bow effect awkwardly cuts through text on the iPhone, and some comments point out that the Rogers logo is drawn incorrectly. We're leaning towards Photoshop job at this point -- what happened to
the trademark dispute? -- but if it's true, Canadians could be looking at paying $499.99 of their dollars plus signing up to a three year contract in order to pick up their own iPhone. Is the border really that far?
[Thanks, Rich]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Oh Ballmie. Poor Ballmie. Always getting hassled by the media. Some of these quotes are pretty funny, though. My favorites include:
3. "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches."
7. "Google’s not a real company. It’s a house of cards."
and 8. "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."
Ten Absolutely Stupid Quotes By Steve Ballmer [Learn More About Your Linux]
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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video
Golden Crystal Technology's KI-T12 didn't quite make the cut for the infamous
keepin' it real fake list, but even though it's not a straight-up rip, there's no denying the similitude. Interestingly enough, this isn't even the first time we've seen a gizmo
take a note from Nokia's 7260, but this particular copycat simply handles DMV, MP3, MPX and WMA formats, features a wee 1.5-inch color display and includes a built-in FM tuner to boot. Furthermore, you'll find six equalizer presets, your own electronic pet game (
Tamagotchi, reincarnated!) and a text viewer. Per usual, you'll have to send in an inquiry to find out how much these things run, but honestly, why would you want to do that?
[Via
PMPToday]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and Chuq Von Rospach of Chuqui 3.0 spend a lot of time and effort trying to deny the fact that there exists a potential (and for that matter reality) for significant amounts of User Generated Content, or UGC. In a way, they are correct. The amount of pre-produced professional grade content we consume has probably only marginally increased, as has the production.
The train of thought and grand take-a-way of the two editorials is that we need to get out of this mode of thinking that if “we build it, they will come” and create content. It isn’t, they argue, just that people are too busy to create content, its that they have no inclination to create content, nor the ability. There are only a finite amount of folks with talent, and while the technologies may enable those folks to be found easier, in no way should we think there is value lurking in the average internet user.
In essence, odds are you (yes, you there reading this), are useful primarily as a media consumer, and we should all deal with it and move on.
Chuq points to the 1% rule, best aggregated by Ben McConnell at the Church of the Customer Blog. He references several studies of communities like Yahoo, and Wiki projects by Comscore and others that essentially show that only 1% of a community typically contributes content to that community, the rest simply acting as consumers.
This metric holds true only when you consider the entrenched images of what we’ve traditionally considered content. If you look to examples like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Twitter, that 1% rule is completely shattered completely. If you remove the pre-conceived notions of what we’ve always considered content in the past, and look at the utility of data being generated by these systems of people, we discover that there is value in the average user.
How is this possible? What am I talking about? Let’s break it down with Twitter and Facebook, to start with. Twitter, in the sense of the content the system produces, is a pool of largely unorganized and non sequitur thoughts emitted effortlessly from the teaming masses. When one begins to start to classify and group the data based on geo-data or meme-tracking, though, utility begins to emerge. Primary sources’ first hand accounts of important events, folks to meet with in your area, and those with which you can do business. Likewise, with Facebook, there are tens of thousands of ways to interpret, use, and re-distribute the data entered into your profiles and related data fields into useful and entertaining ways - and 100% of the active userbase is involved in the content creation process.
Of course, without several next-generation AI and content processing algorithms, we won’t automatically see something as polished as a Wall Street Journal feature article or an HBO-produced special coming out of a set of Twitters or Facebook profiles, but the value is there - and it is generated by the users, refined by computers. The point remains, though, that UGC is here.
What makes the value (entertainment and business) of these tools exist? Several things: deviation from the norm (or the fad factor), the unique, timely, and utility of the content, and the fact that the content creation is seamless and effortless for those making it.
Yes, I’m talking about the value of 2.0. My misgivings of Facebook being a huge time-sink aside, when you look at how the data is created (often as effortlessly as viewing the data), you have to sit back and wonder at it a bit. The aggregation and re-application of the data generally takes place behind the scenes, and through the course of using these utilities, valuable content emerges.
So, given this revelation, what are we faced with? Instead of mourning the “myth of UGC”, instead in designing and upgrading new content systems, look for ways to make the introduction of the user generated portions to be as effortless as utilizing the data. Look for ways to improve and make more efficient the users time, not something so cool that the new system will be worth the time-sink you hope it to become. Think Twitter and Utterz, not World of Warcraft and MySpace.
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Filed under: Cellphones
History buffs and cellphone aficionados, take note: a couple of wireless picturephone prototypes (circa 1993) have recently been acquired by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and should soon be available for all to gawk at. Reportedly, the institution joined with Daniel A. Henderson to get ahold of the two devices and related documentation, which were built to take advantage of a picture / video receiving technology known as Intellect. Notably, this ain't Mr. Henderson's first time donating wares with varying levels of
historical significance, as he's also responsible for the Casio Z7000 and
Atari Portfolio that are on display. Interested in checkin' the duo out for yourself? Go on and circle summer 2008 on your calender.
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Filed under: Portable Audio
Look out Apple, Microsoft, SanDisk and anyone else who actually gives a damn about DAP design, features and quality: Best Buy still has a horse in this race. We were positively floored by the unadulterated horror of last year's
NS-DVxG DAP from Best Buy's in-house Insignia brand, and now here comes the Insignia Kix to provide a low-cost, 1-inch screened entry to Insignia's shoddy lineup. The player supports MP3, WMA, WAV and Audible, sports an FM tuner, runs for 30 hours on a lithium-ion battery, and stores 1GB of your tunes for $60. We suppose we can't rag on 'em for building a USB mass storage device, but that's about as positive as we're going to get for this one.
[Via
dapreview]
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
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Fast growing movie-centered social network Flixster has been making the rounds with potential buyers, we’ve heard from multiple sources. And IAC may have submitted a letter of intent in the last week or so.
The San Francisco based company has had a meteoric rise since launching in January 2006, although Comscore suggests growth has stagnated over the last few months - worldwide unique visitors went from just over 12 million in May 2007 to just 8.4 million in September, a drop of about 30%. Compete and Alexa show a similar decline beginning in May, but with a subsequent full recovery and then some.
IAC’s offer, we’ve heard, may value the company at $150 million. However, IAC has a tendency to do complicated investment deals where they get a minority or majority stake in the business v. an outright acquisition. They own a majority stake College Humor/Vimeo (same parent company) and GarageGames, and a minority stake (rumored at 25%) in iLike through an investment by subsidiary Ticketmaster.
Flixster may not be very interested in a partial buyout, but interest from IAC could lead others to enter a bid, too. More on this as it develops.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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Billed as “humanity’s last remaining hope against computers” Bug.gd is aiming to build a collaborative search and answers database of computer bugs.
The idea is simple enough and addresses a real problem. A user is presented with an error message, they search bug.gd to see if anyone has solved it. If someone has a solution great, if no one found a solution then not so great; however Bug.gd is betting that when they can’t deliver a solution, the user will ultimately find one. Users get a reminder email in 48 hours requesting they post the solution (presuming they found one) so others can benefit from this knowledge, providing a fluid and regularly updated collaborative database of problems and solutions.
The service is free to use and ad-free. Bug.gd is looking to build revenue from corporate intranet sales of bug.gd tools that will provide a centralized in-house database of bug fixes. An API for submitting and querying against the bug.gd error database is currently being built.
It’s a simple idea that could work, although the results are really dependent on users being generous enough to share bug fixes. The Bug.gd has been seeded with 60,000 error messages and solution from Microsoft (that’s a scary number in itself) and is slowly adding new solutions daily.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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