Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/234375791/
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Wireless
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/234402971/
Filed under: Cellphones
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/234713458/
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Samsung -- not satisfied with people using their TVs and set top boxes to, y'know, watch TV -- has announced its See'N'Search set-top box. Separate from its Media Center Extender and RSS-enabled HDTVs, this box pores over channel guide info and closed caption metadata to find and suggest accompanying video or websites from the internets to go with your episode of Bold & the Beautiful. This is better than actually getting up and using a computer to find Youtube spoofs, because it's automatic, and accessible via the remote's "More Info" button, which can then send said info to a phone or PC via Wi-Fi. With a press release short on details of how this tech will get out of Samsung's R&D center and into our home theater, we're not throwing out our HTPCs just yet.
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Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AVc/~3/234870882/facebook-adopts.html
I am a big fan of using reputation as the central measure of spam. Reputation means many things to many people, but I am using the word in the context of an aggregated measure of many inputs taken together to establish a message senders' reputation. That's how a company I'm invested in, Return Path, does it. They are the leader in email whitelisting and deliverability. Their premise is simple. Measure every known mail sender's (ip address) reputation based on a slew of inputs, including complaint rates, unsubscribe compliance, e-mail send volume, unknown user volume, security practices, identity stability, etc and create a Sender Score. Once you know a sender's reputation (sender score), you can provide a host of services to mail senders and recipients that help both sides make sure that users get the mail they want and don't get the mail they don't want.
Facebook is mimicking that approach with the viral marketing channels in its Facebook platform. Inside Facebook reported yesterday that Facebook has rolled out a reputation system that dynamically determines how many notifications and invitations a Facebook app can send per user per day. Right now, it's relatively crude and relies upon the following items:
Like everything Facebook does, this system will evolve and get better and more sophisticated. But the bottom line is this. If you use best practices, play by the rules, don't upset users, and deliver percieved value, you'll get to send more. If you don't, you'll get to send less.
I think this is a very smart move by Facebook that will result in a better experience for everyone.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232707864/
For a blow-by-blow, on how the teenage hacker compromised MediaDefender’s own defenses and why he felt compelled to disseminate its secrets on the Web, read Dan Roth’s story “The Pirates Can’t Be Stopped” in Portfolio. (In case you have not seen it, the story has been out for a few weeks). The hack ended up increasing MediaDefender’s costs by 28 percent, including nearly $1 million in legal fees and “service credits” it had to offer to unhappy media customers. Here’s an excerpt from the story, which shows how exposed the company became to the righteous teenager (who refers to the company as Monkey Defenders):
One file contained the source code for MediaDefender’s antipiracy system. Another demonstrated just how deep inside the company they had gone. This file featured a tense 30-minute phone call between employees of MediaDefender and the New York State attorney general’s office discussing an investigation into child porn that the firm was assisting with. (MediaDefender refused to comment for this story.) The phone call makes clear that the hackers had left a few footprints while prowling MediaDefender’s computers. The government officials had detected someone trying to access one of its servers, and the hacker seemed to know all the right log-in information. “How comfortable are you guys that your email server is free of, uh, other eyes?” an investigator with the attorney general asked during the call.
“Oh, yeah, yeah, we’ve checked out our email server, and our email server itself has not been compromised,” the MediaDefender executive said.
But, of course, it had.
“In the beginning, I had no motivation against Monkey Defenders,” Ethan tells me. “It wasn’t like, ‘I want to hack those bastards.’ But then I found something, and the good nature in me said, These guys are not right. I’m going to destroy them.”
And so he set out to do just that: a teenager, operating on a dated computer, taking on—when his schedule allowed—one of the entertainment world’s best technological defenses against downloading.
The story also has some good details on how MediaDefender went after the Pirate Bay.
It’s a cautionary tale for media companies everywhere. Treat file-sharers like pirates, try to clamp down on them, and they’ll always find new ways to fight back. There are too many of them. They are smarter than the media companies and the industry’s digital lapdogs. Treat them like consumers, and they’ll respond better.
(Photo via Casey West).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/232822578/
New Y Combinator startup TipJoy is designed to make it even easier to get people to click that tip button. Readers are not required to create an account or have a PayPal account to leave a tip, so there is little friction to them getting started. If they want to leave a tip they just click the button and type in their email address. I’ve added a tip button below to show how it works - any money we receive we’ll be distributing back to other bloggers who add the button, and/or donating to charity.
If you leave a tip as a new user, you start to build up an account debit. You can eventually pay that off via PayPal (TipJoy keeps 2%), although no one comes after you if you choose to skip out on the bill. You can also start to ask for tips on your own site, and anything people leave for you offsets what you’ve given to others.
If you want to cash out of your tips you can choose to either receive an Amazon gift card or donate the amount to charity. For now, you can’t receive cash since the company wants to avoid becoming a regulated money transfer service. In the FAQs they suggest they’ll be adding this functionality eventually.
I like the service because it creates a network around the idea of tipping for content. Users are both tippers and tippees, keeping a balance that they pay off eventually. I also like the fact that people don’t have to pay off that bill. It creates an interesting psychology where people find it very, very easy to leave the tip, and then may feel guilted into paying off the bill. At the very least, TipJoy is an interesting human psychology experiment.
The service has a number of options for integrating buttons and graphics on to the site. I imagine they’ll be adding plug-ins and other tools as well over time.
TipJoy was founded by Abigail Kirigin and Ivan Kirigin. The company blog is here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/233041326/
But Nuconomy is also approaching analytics in a new way to try and put more meaning into the data that is thrown back at users, meaning that in many ways it will be more useful than even those hugely expensive alternatives. Dan Farber took an early look at them last year and wrote a little bit about the approach. In general, though, they’re moving beyond the simple page view model to measure different types of activities. And they are digging a lot deeper on both the user side and contributor side.
Beyond The Page View: Correlation and Contribution
For example, Nuconomy is designed to consider the impact of widgets, Ajax, Flash, mobile, etc., which don’t generally show up in page view metrics. And they are also measuring everything on both a contributor level (think analytics by author in a blog) and user level (people on the site).
Correlation is a big party of Nuconomy, which shows how things on the site affect other things. Do more posts/articles mean more page views? Does one author get more comments but less page views? How do photo uploads affect the number of comments? And so on. See image above for how it is presented.
Two Way API
Nechmad says that existing analytics services don’t do anything to help sites make changes, or provide direct input into decisions. Possibly Nuconomy’s most important feature is a two way API, allowing your site to make changes automatically depending on input from the service. Today humans have to view the data, analyze it and then make changes based on that. With Nuconomy, changes can be made without humans slowing things down.
New Funding
Nuconomy raised a $300k seed round in April 2007 from Yossi Vardi, Shlomo Nehama and Uzi Tzuker. Today they announced another round, estimated at $3 million, from WPP.
Nuconomy is currently in private beta, although it is being tested by some of the largest portals and publishers in Israel. They are opening up another 400 slots for beta testers today. Integration is through the API or via a simple java embed. They are also planning to release a Wordpress plugin in the next month or so. During the beta period Nuconomy is free. Eventually they will charge a small fee for sites with more than a couple of million unique visitors per month.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/231939037/color-tile-optical-i.html
You might have seen this shaded gray squares illusion before. Squares A and B are the same shade of gray. (It was created by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT.
Here's a similar illusion with colored squares. The "blue" tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the "yellow" tiles in the top of the right cube.
Don't take my word for it. Use an image editing program with a eyedropper to see for yourself. I used Photoshop's eyedropper tool to take 5x5 samples and found that both the "yellow" and the "blue" tiles are C:50 M:40 Y:40 K:5.
Take a look at the brown tile in the center of the top face and the yellow tile in the center of the side facing slightly to the left. They're the same color.
UPDATE: The color tile illusion is one of many excellent illusions created by R. Beau Lotto.
Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AVc/~3/231587786/the-internet-fi.html
Four years ago, Howard Dean and Joe Trippi showed everyone how powerful the Internet could be as a campaign and fundraising tool. This year, it seemed like it was not as important.
But the news yesterday that Obama's campaign was loaded with cash and Hillary's was strapped showed that in the end, the Internet is the most powerful fundraising vehicle of them all.
The following charts come from a NY Times story this morning.
While this graphic doesn't show how much of this money came directly from the Internet, we all know that no fundraising technique "scales" like Internet fundraising.
Hillary's campaign has used the Internet well but not brilliantly. Obama's campaign has done a better job and his personality and candidacy is much better suited to the medium. And the net result of that is that he sits in a stronger position right now because of it.
Nokia 6220 classic: redefining the definition of 'share' Converged device offers excellent imaging capabilities, navigation and advanced sharing features At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nokia introduced the Nokia 6220 classic, a full-featured device that combines a 5 megapixel camera with A-GPS functionality to give new meaning to the phrase "to share". High quality images and videos can be snapped, tagged, edited and shared online, phone-to-phone or even viewed on a television. The Nokia 6220 classic is expected to start shipping in the 3rd quarter of 2008 in selected markets with an estimated retail price of 325 euros, before taxes and subsidies. The highlight of the Nokia 6220 classic is its 5 megapixel camera with Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss optics - on par with many single purpose digital cameras on the market today. With its high-speed HSDPA connection updating blogs or uploading photos and videos to favorite sharing sites like Share on Ovi or Flickr can be done right from the Nokia 6220 classic. A-GPS functionality allows photos to be 'geotagged' - making them easier to search and share. Images can also be viewed on a television screen with the integrated TV-out feature, sent from phone to phone via wireless Bluetooth connection, or viewed in full color on the phone's large 2.2 inch display. "The Nokia 6220 classic will help web 2.0 novices and experienced bloggers snap, save and share pictures and videos easily. Saving, tagging and uploading pictures can now be done on the phone, seconds after the picture has been taken," says John Barry, Director, Connect devices, Nokia. "The Nokia 6220 classic, with its 5 megapixel camera, auto focus and xenon flash is a credible and reasonably priced alternative to single- purpose digital cameras and has the added benefit of A-GPS for location tagging, Nokia Maps and possibility to upgrade to full navigation." The Nokia 6220 classic comes loaded with the new Nokia Maps 2.0 application which helps consumers find the best routes or explore any city for new restaurants, hotels, tourist attractions and other points of interest. The pre-loaded WidSets service brings web content directly to the device via mini-applications called widgets, providing quick and easy access to news updates, games and web communities. As a full- featured converged device, the Nokia 6220 classic also includes internet browser, email, music player, FM radio with RDS and up to 8 GB of memory. In addition to its imaging capabilities, the Nokia 6220 classic enables Adaptive Multi Rate - Wideband speech coding technology, giving a more natural sound to human voice in phone calls. It helps when having a conversation in a noisy environment such as in traffic or public place.
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/232797282/
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/233034630/
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/233048831/
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio
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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/233081351/
Filed under: Laptops
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