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Thursday, August 23, 2007

Digital Cameras: Olympus Rolls Out Stylus 820, 830 and 1200, a Trio of Pretty, Pocketable Minishooterso

from Gizmodo by Charlie White

Olympus, trying to set a record for the number of cameras introduced in one day, also updated its Stylus line of point-and-shoot cameras with three colorful new models, the 820, 830 and 1200. All of them have what Olympus calls an "all weather" body, image stabilization, shadow adjustment goodness, and now they all have face detection to help you focus on what's really important.

The Stylus 820 is a bargain-priced $249.99, and it has a 2.7-inch viewscreen, a 5x optical zoom and 8-megapixel sensor on board. Spend 80 more bucks ($329.99) and you get an 8-megapixel Stylus 830 that now has dual image stabilization, combining both digital image stabilization (which we haven't been too impressed with on its own) with good old mechanical sensor-shift stabilization. Olympus says this trickery can smooth out camera shake and also somehow reaches out and stabilizes subjects who are moving around a lot. Got kids? Good luck with that. For that wizardry you sacrifice .2 inches on the LCD viewscreen, slightly smaller at 2.5 inches.

That Stylus 830 shares a cool feature with the Stylus 1200, called In-Camera Panorama, just like what was introduced on the Olympus SP-560 UZ. Instead of futzing with putting together all those groups of panoramic shots in an image editing application, this baby can take three pictures for you as you pan across a scene, and then stitches them all together for you right there inside the camera. Neat. That 12-megapixel Stylus 1200, the top of the Stylus group for $349.99, gives you a faster f/2.8 lens (the other two are f/3.5) but for that you have to give up a bit of zoomosity; it packs a 3x optical zoom instead of the 5x of the other two Styli.

All three of these pocket-sized point-and-shooters will be available next month. [Olympus]

Wireless: Plantronics Calisto Pro Can Do Skype, Landline and Cellphone

from Gizmodo by Jason Chen

This Plantronics Calisto Pro set takes your standard Bluetooth headset and adds in landline and Skype dialing, which means you get the big three (Skype, home, cell) all in one dorky-looking device. The base station has a USB connector to hook into your PC for Skype and Yahoo calls, a DECT 6.0 handset to handle landline calls, and the headset to connect to both these plus a cellphone. The price for all this convenience while you work at home in your underpants? $279 starting September.

SpiralFrog: Free Music Alive And Hopping

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Remember SpiralFrog that free music download service that announced itself nearly a year ago? Well, after slowly releasing invites to Canadians, we received a private beta invitation.

SpiralFrog originally made a splash when they sealed a deal with Universal BMG to give away free downloads of some of their songs in exchange for a share of on-site ad revenue. Later they closed a deal with EMI and have since added a bunch of smaller labels totaling over 700,000 songs. However, now we know a little more about how their free system works.

Songs on SpiralFrog are not ad-supported through interstitial advertising or free in the sense that you can bring them anywhere. Instead, you get DRMed songs (WMA) leased to you for a free 30 day membership (or you can buy on Amazon). You can renew your membership, and the lease to play your songs, by answering survey questions (# concerts per year, how you discover music, etc). All that data helps SpiralFrog know what kind of ads to serve on the site.

To keep the whole system secure, they’ve locked down the download process end to end DRM controls. First you have to get a download manager, and then ensure you have Windows Media Player 9.0 or up. The system is kind of annoying and only works on Windows machines since it uses Microsoft DRM. Although, Microsoft DRM has already been cracked. The DRM requirement also means the songs only play through Windows Media Player, making them unportable. Unlike other DRM setups, though, there doesn’t appear to be a limit to the number of computers you can download to as long as you set SpiralFrog up on them.

Once the system is in place, you can search for artists and download their songs/videos individually. The songs are queued in a download manager and stored locally by artist and album in your SpiralFrog folder. The system seems to have intentionally been crippled so you view more advertising, with downloads happening one at a time and only while on the site. Using the site, I was able to download a bunch of songs and play them with no problem, but other early beta user have had trouble.

I don’t know if SpiralFrog will be able to sustain their business off of on-site advertising and affiliate music sales. A lot of other services are simply going DRM free, not download free. Blogmusik also recently went legit in France, but the US courts and music industry are a lot harder to sway. However, limiting the lease time on the songs means they can continuously tweak what hoops their users need to hop through to keep playing the music they download. For now it may be a simple option if you want a (legal) source of free tunes.

Pantone Your Coffee

Pantone Your Coffee

Posted in Random by Jon at 3:19 pm | Share This

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Ever wonder how dark/light to make your coffee/tea? Ever get a scolding cup of joe thrown in your face by your over zealous boss for not having just the right amount of milk in it?

Well, for £7.50 (around $15) you can color coordinate your morning beverage of choice.

[Product Page] Available in late September

StartUp Profile: SmartSynch

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

Who: SmartSynch, whose smart meter technology uses broadband networks like AT&T's (T) to connect electricity meters to utilities, expects to bring in $20 million in revenues in 2007. To date, the company has raised $57 million in funding from a long list of investors including Nth Power, JP Morgan Partners, Siemens Venture Capital, and Duke Ventures. CEO Stephen Johnston said SmartSynch isn't looking to raise more funds just yet, but that it will be aiming for another round in six to 12 months.

Why: The established "smart grid' cleantech company is hardly a startup anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't still trying to innovate. In February, SmartSynch started selling a residential version of one of its meters that is already being used by 10 utility customers (check with your utility and see if they offer it). Next year, the company plans to add a wireless local area network (LAN) chip into the meter (probably ZigBee) so utilities could possibly monitor and even turn off specific networked appliances such as pool pumps or a thermostat. Kind of like Mom and Dad Utility turning off your lights for you.

What: Smart meters and smart grid technology are important because the electricity grid is one of the most unintelligent networks around. To get the grid to be smarter, more robust, equipped with 2-way connections and able to work with supply and demand, billions of dollars of investment will be made into intelligent grid technology over the next decade.

SmartSynch uses IP-based networks like AT&T's or even muniFi networks, which the company says costs less, is more easily upgradable and just generally makes more sense than other systems, which use proprietary networks. Companies like Eka Systems and Trilliant Networks use wireless mesh to do metering.

Where: Jackson, Miss.

When: The company was founded in 2000.

ImageTrail - google adwords inside search results

Looks kinda desperate for a viable revenue model

http://picturesandbox.com

Interior Design: Light-Emitting Wallpaper Does Just What it Says

from Gizmodo by Addy Dugdale

I can't tell you much about this wallpaper, except for that I think it rules the school. It's basically a two-dimensional light source that switches on and off. Please, someone put Jonas Samson's idea into practice, because I'd have no hesitation in putting this up in my bedroom. Just one question, though: does it come in a roll? [Design Scoops]

Mempile's TeraDisc fits 1TB on a single optical disc

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

We've heard a lot of talk about the death of optical media, but for inexpensive high-capacity storage, it's pretty hard to beat -- which is why the TeraDisc, from Israel's Mempile, look like it has such promise. Eschewing the reflectivity principles in current optical media entirely, the TeraDisc system uses light-sensitive molecules called chromophores to create hologram-like matrices that can be used to store a full terabyte of data on a single disc using a red laser -- and Mempile says that an eventual transition to a blue laser system will enable storage capacities of up to 5TB. The company is hoping to get a prototype ready in 18 months, and plans to ship the first version a year after that, priced around $3,000 for the drive and $30-60 for a 600GB disc. No word on the price of those 1TB discs, but you can bet they won't be cheap.

Read - Mempile website
Read - In-depth article about TeraDisc at The Future of Things

iPhone Safari does NOT support Flash (of ANY flavor)

Source: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/designingcontent.html

scroll down to near the bottom

Unsupported Technologies

You’ll want to avoid using Flash and Java for iPhone content. You’ll also want to avoid encouraging users from downloading the latest Flash to their iPhone, because neither Flash nor downloads are supported by Safari on iPhone.

Safari on iPhone does not support:

window.showModalDialog()
Mouse-over events
Hover styles
Tool tips
Java applets
Flash
Plug-in installation
Custom x.509 certificates

http://picturesandbox.com

Rubik's Cube solvable in 26 moves or less

from Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

David Pescovitz: No matter how scrambled a Rubik's Cube may be, it can be solved in 26 moves or fewer -- by a supercomputer anyway. The previous record was 27 moves, but Northeastern University computer science grad student Daniel Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed new algorithms to save a step in the process and optimize the problem for a supercomputer. Their next step is to bring the magic number down to 25, which is still 5 more than the minimum number of steps that most researchers believe is possible. From Science News:

After 63 hours of calculation, the supercomputer found that it took no more than 16 steps to turn any random configuration into a special configuration that can be solved using only half-turns. And since those special puzzles can be solved in no more than 13 steps, this approach showed that 29 steps were enough to solve any Rubik's Cube.

But this answer wasn't good enough to set a new record. Last year, Silviu Radu of the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden showed that any Rubik's Cube can be solved in no more than 27 steps. Kunkle and Cooperman realized that to set a new record, they would need to eliminate three steps.

Their existing method had established that all but about 80 million sets of configurations could be solved in 26 steps or fewer. By searching through all possible moves starting from those relatively few configurations, they succeeded in finding a solution for each one that took 26 steps or fewer.

Link

Previously on BB:
• Video of tot solving Rubik's Cube Link
• Table shaped like huge Rubik's Cube Link
• Michel Gondry solves Rubik's Cube with feet Link

500 Web APIs

from ProgrammableWeb by John Musser

With this week’s addition of Google’s latest APIs we now have an even 500 APIs cataloged. Over the past two years this list has grown 10 fold from the original 50 we had listed in 2005. And connected to these are 2250 mashups built using hundreds of API combinations.

Using our Top APIs for Mashups pie chart you get a sense of which APIs have been mostly frequently used in our mashup sample with the top 10 APIs being Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, VirtualEarth, Yahoo Maps, eBay, 411Sync, del.icio.us and Yahoo. You can get a sense of this by viewing our directory of APIs by Mashup Count.

If you view them sorted by category here’s the breakdown of those categories with the most competing APIs (top 20 categories):

If you want to get a sense of which major providers offer the most APIs, check API Scorecard.

WEB OS RUNDOWN: 45+ Web Operating Systems

August 22, 2007 — 09:42 PM PDT — by Andrew Min — Share This

Facebook wants to be the operating system for the web, it says, and this week’s changes to its email system are a tiny part of that puzzle. But there are many more web operating systems hoping to bring all your usual desktop applications online in one place. Some replicate the entire desktop, while others are startpages with info from around the web - here are more than 45 of our favorites.

Remotely Hosted WebOS

AstraNOS - Picture Windows 98. Then picture an OS X dock. Then picture a night sky. Then throw them all together. You now have a pretty good picture of AstraNOS.

BeDesk - Basic wrapper for other online tools.

cmyOS - Free hosted webtop powered by eyeOS.

Desktoptwo - Not only do you get 1GB of space, you get a fully-featured OpenOffice.org suite. No, not a basic online editor that has simple formatting options. The full OpenOffice.org 2.0 suite from Sun, converted into a Java applet.

DoxBoard - Slick WebOS with some basic features.

GCOE X - Nice WebOS with a powerful terminal and support for the iPhone.

eyeOS - Beautiful webtop powered by the eyeOS software.

Glide - Online operating system with support for BlackBerry, Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and iPhone users.

G.ho.st - With 3GB of space, FTP access, and Zoho Office support, what’s not to like?

goowy - Great webtop with your own email account (@goowy.com), IM, 1GB of space (via Box.net), and much more.

jooce - Slick invite-only online OS.

mybooo - Invite-only webtop with a ton of features.

myGoya - Nice WebOS with PIM features, a media player, and much more.

OOS - Basic online operating system that offers a personal webpage.

Parakey - Not much is known about Blake Ross’s newest invention, but we do know that Facebook liked it enough to purchase it for an undisclosed sum.

Psych Desktop - GPLed webtop with a powerful UNIX-like console.

Purefect Desktop - Web desktop with a powerful IDE.

SSOE - Flash-based webtop a lot of features.

StartForce - Powerful WebOS with tons of apps and features makes the descendant of Orca Desktop a hit.

Xindesk - File sync, a powerful API, and much more are included in this great WebOS.

Webdesk - This Indian webtop includes 1GB of space, POP3 client, PIM, and a nice modules API.

Webdows - We don’t know how long it will take Microsoft to sue these guys, but it’s a real enjoyment in the meantime. It has XP and Vista styles (including a few Vista effects), FTP, file sharing, IM, and much more.

Widgets Gadgets - AJAX desktop with tons of apps and a working API.

YouOS - File sharing, powerful shell, and 700+ applications are all available with this wildly popular operating system.

ZimDesk - Slick WebOS with tons of apps.

Self-Hosted WebOS

eyeOS - One of the most popular webtops on the planet, eyeOS boasts tons of apps, a booming community, and a lot more features.

Fenestela - There’s still quite a few bugs to be ironed out in this French WebOS, but you get a cool XP interface and basic PHP apps.

Psych Desktop - GPLed desktop with a powerful UNIX-like console.

Purefect Desktop - Web desktop with a powerful IDE.

Virtual-OS - Includes powerful API, web server sync, forum integration, and offline AJAX support.

ZKDesktop - Powerful open source Java-based WebOS.

Remote Desktops

DesktopOnDemand - A fully featured Linux-based desktop with Gnome, Gaim, AbiWord, Evolution, GIMP, WebDAV, VNC, web login, and much more.

Free Live OS Zoo - Java applet

Nivio - Subscription-based ($12.99/month) service that offers Windows XP, Adobe Reader, iTunes, Google Talk/aMSN/Windows Live Messenger, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Nvu, and much more. All through a Java-based web interface.

Startpages

See also: 14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature

Favoor - Basic startpage with a nice folder option.

iGoogle (formerly Google IG) - Great startpage with the most amount of apps I’ve seen for a portal.

iStyled - Simple startpage with basic customization.

ItsAStart.com - Customizable page with basic features.

Live.com (formerly Start.com) - Basic news page backed by Microsoft.

My Yahoo! - Yahoo!’s entry into the startpage market isn’t bad: it offers news, Yahoo! Mail notification, podcasts, videos, and photo galleries to your startpage.

Netvibes - There’s a reason everyone uses Netvibes. It has tons of apps, tabs, skins, and a great interface.

Pageflakes - Popular, easy-to-use page with a simple interface.

Schmedley - Powerful startpage with tons of features.

Webwag - The main appeal here isn’t the widget on demand feature (a quick way to build a widget for the site of your choice), the toolbar, the apps, or the content directory. It’s the External widget feature, which allows you to convert and add Netvibes and iGoogle widgets to your Webwag page.

Widgetop - Nice looking AJAX start page.

yourminis - Great start page with tons of apps and a bunch of skins by the creator of goowy.

–

For more in-depth reviews, check out 10 Web Operating Systems Reviewed over on FranticIndustries.

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Design Concept: Tilting Vase Lets You Know When It Needs Water

from Gizmodo by Charlie White

If you have trouble remembering when to water your plants, you might be interested in this self-tilting vase design concept that gets horizontal when its plant gets thirsty. Once it's properly hydrated, this pewter container stands up—albeit at a somewhat tilted angle—held up by the weight of the water within. Simple, yet elegant. [Yanko Design]

NEW Zune for $149 on Woot, took a disappointing 21 hrs to sell out

VideoEgg SNIPES At YouTube: Who Thunk It First? Maybe Old TV Guys

from GigaOM by Om Malik

YouTube last night said it’s offering a new kind of embedded in-video advertising that’s going to help its parent company, Google (GOOG), and its media partners make money off what has thus far been a fallow field — online video.

YouTube’s in-video advertising techniques have resulted in many pointing out that VideoEgg, a San Francisco-based startup that goes through identity changes more often The Talented Mr. Ripley has already offered these kinds of ads. (It’s a Facebook-ad network now!)

VideoEgg is “welcoming” YouTube to the party, pointing out that Google’s YouTube is imitating them. That’s nothing new, however. The text-links-as-ads were someone else’s idea, too, but Google ended up making billions off of it. Nevertheless, it is interesting to point out that the source of inspiration for the in-video ads of both VideoEgg and YouTube is actually a business they are both trying to take to the cleaners: broadcast and cable television.

If you watch baseball games on Fox or some of the cable networks like TBS, they use a technique (known as “snipes” in broadcast lingo) in which a promotional ad is overlaid on top of the regular broadcast stream. GE Co. (GE), parent of NBC, has a patent (United States Patent 20070143786) that talks about advertising based on this methodology.

A technique is provided for advertising. The technique includes a combining of two or more video streams to form a unified video stream and broadcasting the unified video stream. At least one of the two or more video streams is a program content stream comprising program content that is filmed by a camera and at least one of the two or more video streams is an advertisement material stream comprising advertisement material.

Does this patent apply to Internet video? I am not sure, but if it does – oh boy, have we got trouble. Wired News’ Epicenter blog also points to patents filed by VideoEgg. Interestingly, this whole issue might end up becoming a patent nightmare

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