Samsung announces 64GB SATA II drives in 2.5, 1.8-inch varieties
Monday, November 05, 2007
iriver's P10 shipping in December?
Read
Sunday, November 04, 2007
Edit Your Images Online With Splashup [Image Editing]
Inflatable Solar Arrays: Up To 25X Cheaper, Feature Cool 'Puffy' Look [Solar Power]
Unfortunately, the design does have its drawbacks. For one, the inflatable mirrors would be fragile and less efficient than traditional methods due to the unique shape and the effects of wind on the non-rigid frame. So, in reality, the true cost effectiveness of such a set up is still unknown. Still, Cool Earth hopes to make solar power as cheap as non-renewable power within the next three years. [Cool Earth via Eco-Geek]
MIT developing carbon-free, stackable rental cars
via Engadget by Joshua Topolsky on 11/2/07
Friday, November 02, 2007
Will Privacy Concerns Take the Boom out of Online Ads?
Add to this upcoming announcement, recent frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, and private equity investments such as the $100 million infusion into Specific Media, what you have is a online advertising (bubble or) boom of unprecedented proportions.
Much of this fervor is inspired by behavioral targeting, where advertisers can use sophisticated cookie technology to highly target ads to individuals. The same behavioral targeting approach, however is beginning to risk the ire of privacy advocates and is coming under extreme scrutiny by the US Government.
Privacy Groups are proposing a do-no-track list, which is I guess a web version of the dubious, Do-not-call list. According to Advertising Age , "Privacy advocates say current standards for collecting such data, such as the Network Advertising Initiative, don't do enough to safeguard consumers against the potential pitfalls of data collection, and that most consumers don't understand how such data is being used."
The debate, which so far seems to restricted to the Beltway crowd is starting to spill into the mainstream press. This being the political season, and privacy concerns being politically-popular fodder, expect to see more noise level, which might result in if nothing, increased headaches for online advertising companies.
The groups backing this Do-Not-Track-List are your usual suspects: the Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Federal Trade Commission is going to host a Town Hall entitled "Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology" starting today.
Google is responding by setting up a Google privacy channel, and attending the FTC Townhall. Other advertising industry executives such as Dave Morgan, chairman of Tacoda, a company owned by AOL dismisses their concerns and says this is an "advocate looking for a cause." (What's ironic, is that his dismissive attitude is in sharp contrast with his corporate master, AOL's willingness to play ball. "We want to make the opt-out process as simple and transparent as possible," Jules Polonetsky, AOL chief privacy officer was quoted by WebProNews.
He might be right - most of us are irritated by advertising and find that most of the time it is irrelevant. Better focus of advertising with certain degree of annonyminity is acceptable to many if not all Internet users.
But that kind of behavioral targeting might soon take a backseat to more individualistic targeting. Facebook's social advertising plans revolve around leveraging user information and their relationship information - something that should give a chance to privacy/consumer advocates to get their bullhorns ready, volume turned to maximum.
$200 Linux PCs On Sale At Wal-Mart
Placid sends in a Wired blog entry on Wal-Mart's new sub-$200 Linux-based PC. Wired calls it "a custom distribution of Ubuntu Linux," and the AP identifies the distro as gOS, made by a small company in Los Angeles. Wal-Mart began selling Linux PCs in 2002 but they have been out of stock for a while. From the Wired blog: "It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Consolidate Your Phones with GrandCentral [Screenshot Tour]
There's been all kinds of talk about the web-based, all-in-one phone management solution GrandCentral since we first heard about it, but it's been closed to new users ever since Google acquired it. If you've been dying to see what all the hype's about but didn't get signed up for GrandCentral on time, today we'll take you step-by-step through everything GrandCentral has to offer.
First off, here's a quick rundown of what GrandCentral is and what it does for those who don't know. The quick version: GrandCentral gives you one number that, when called, can ring all of your phones (or only certain phones, depending on your settings and the contact who's calling). It also provides you with one central voicemail inbox, including web access to your voicemail management along with the traditional voicemail checking via phone you're already used to. Best of all, it's completely free of charge.
The actual GrandCentral interface is—well—kind of ugly, but luckily for them, it's got a lot of functionality packed in (and surely Google's designers are working on cleaning it up as we speak). Now that you've got a basic idea of GrandCentral's one-number concept, let's take a closer look at the nitty gritty.
Check out several different views of the web-based GrandCentral inbox and web management interface in the gallery below. Clicking the play button in your voicemail inbox will, obviously, play back that voicemail message, but it also drops down a ton of other functionality to help you act on that voicemail.
Before you play back a voicemail, GrandCentral displays the caller (clicking their name, if they're in your address book, takes you to their contact information), the time the call was made, and the caller's number. You can flag any message (I wouldn't be surprised to see this turn into a star once Google finishes re-branding it) and sort messages by any of the fields.
Once you play back the message, you can add unknown callers as new contacts and adjust settings on your current contacts, including the phone type (home, cell, work, etc.) or group (family, friends, work, etc.—these will come in handy with GrandCentral's other features). If the call was from a telemarketer or someone you don't want to be able to contact you, you can choose to either mark the call as spam, play a "number not in service" recording, or always screen the caller next time the number calls.
The integrated email features are also pretty fair (though who knows where it could go if it integrates with Gmail). You can forward voicemails to any email address or reply to voicemails by email. So imagine getting an hilarious voicemail from a friend that you want to share with another friend, or you got a voicemail from your co-worker and an email reply would be more efficient than calling back.
Calling contacts from the GrandCentral web interface is as simple as clicking the call button and choosing which phone you'd like to route the call to .
Then of course when you're in calls, you can take advantage of features like ListenIn, which lets you listen to voicemail messages as they're left (like an old-school answering machine). Likewise, here are several other simple and worthwhile features you might want to take advantage of if and when you decide to become a GrandCentral user (and don't forget how you can get free calling anywhere):
GrandCentral is already an excellent solution to a problem that most of us didn't know we had, but I do have a few features and improvements I'd like to see. For example, the interface is atrocious. Most likely it'll get the regular Google treatment before it re-releases, meaning that—while it probably won't be snappy—you can count on it being clean and easy to navigate. Other features I'd like to see include:
- Integration with the new Gmail Contact Manager
- Reply to voicemail by SMS
- Map user address or phone number location rather than mapping the area code
Whether or not you've got access to a GrandCentral invite, you can reserve a GrandCentral phone number beforehand. If you've been using GrandCentral regularly, we'd love to hear about your experience in the comments. Likewise, if you haven't tried it, let us know whether or not you'll be reserving your own number and why.
Transform Cellphones Into a CCTV Swarm
holy_calamity writes "Swiss researchers have developed java software that has bluetooth-capable camera phones form a distributed camera network. Each phone shares information on visual events with its neighbours and can work out the spatial position of phones around it (pdf). The software will become open source sometime next year, and the creators say it could be used to make a quick and dirty surveillance system. 'The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's. In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy. They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres. In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MOTO Q 9h Coming Tomorrow on AT&T for $200 [Announcements]
Sony's X-Ramen Rader Finds Hot Noodles Wherever You Are [Specificity]
Mitsubishi Unveils 27-Million-Pixel, 340-Degree DLP Panorama Screen Room [Gigantic Screens]
Your BlackBerry Curve Can Record Video via BlackBerry OS 4.3
The still image camera of your BlackBerry Curve will soon transform itself into a proper video camera thanks to new BlackBerry 4.3 update that's due very soon.
That means if you have own a BlackBerry 8300 Curve, you'll be able to capture video clips with your BlackBerry phone in addition to still images.
Video recording feature are probably integrated in the latest BlackBerry Curve models like the BlackBerry 8320. Thanks CrackBerry.
EZfetch Wireless HD Digital Media Player gets official
[Via eHomeUpgrade]
It's Official: Netflix (NFLX) Destroys BlockBuster (BBI)
For a few minutes, it seemed BlockBuster's Total Access plan might actually post a problem for Netflix: After all, the in-store pick-up and drop-off just seemed so convenient. Well, the results are in, and the answer is "no."
As Peter Kafka reported yesterday, BlockBuster's Total Access subscription business got crushed in Q3, with subs declining by 500,000. Netflix's subscriber base, meanwhile, resumed growth, climbing 286,000. Analysts are now justifiably fretting about the growth of subscription business overall (it shrank for the first time), and Netflix's next challenge is to figure out how to thrive in a digital-delivery world.
But in this latest example of how hard it is to transform a physical-world business model to compete with a focused online competitor, the word "BlockBuster" need never again come up on a Netflix conference call. That fight is over. (The final insult? Netflix's market cap is 2X Blockbuster's)
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