Filed under: Desktops, Laptops
NVIDIA said to be prepping Ion 2 for late 2009 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsFacebook ad metrics (click-thru rates) still abysmal, despite known click-fraud problem - http://ping.fm/o8S9X
TubeMaster++ makes grabbing streaming videos and music incredibly simple. As long as TubeMaster++ is running, it will grab nearly every kind of media you watch over your internet connection thanks to its ability to scan the incoming data and not rely on the browser itself. Whether you're watching a video in Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera, as soon as you start watching it, TubeMaster++ will begin capturing it.
You can save files, play them back right in TubeMaster++ and convert them. What formats can you convert into? A better question would be what formats can't you convert into. You can convert audio formats into WAV, MP3, OGG, and AC3, among others. Video can be converted into dozens of formats and presets for mobile devices including the Creative Zen, iPod, Blackberry, PSP and PS3, various mobile phone sizes, and more universal formats like AVI and MPEG4.
TubeMaster++ does lose one feature from its predecessor, because of dependencies it has on installed software it is no longer portable. The trade off will be more than worth it for most people however as the new version is more stable, offers more features, has a built in video and music search engine, and has dropped upgrade requirement to download from adult video-sharing sites. TubeMaster++ is freeware, Windows on! ly, and requires Java Runtime Environment and WinPcap (both of which are included in the installation if you don't have them.)
"Tourist Remover" cleans up your vacation photos
"Tourist Removed" is a web app that will remove other tourists from the photos you took of landmarks while on vacation as a tourist. All you have to do is take multiple shots of the same location, and Tourist Remover will only keep the bits that stay the same. It's like diff for photos!
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Great post by @glenngabe - Facebook or Just Face-Look? Are People 55+ Really Using Social Networking Websites? - http://ping.fm/I11Lp
Filed under: Cellphones
NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a "top five" manufacturer before 2010? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Need a little more proof that Intel's got some fly SSDs about ready to roll? We have confirmation from Micron that it's working on new and improved 34nm chips in capacities of 8, 16, and 32Gb. These lovelies are 17 percent smaller than the previous rainbow colored flash delights, and are faster too, offering 200Mb/s transfer speeds and when combined into an SSD, able to keep up with SATA 6Gb/s transfers. This press release confirms the chips will show up in flash memory from Lexar, but we're guessing that official Intel announcement can't be far off now.Filed under: Storage
Micron's smaller NAND chips mean more, faster flash memory in the same old enclosures originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading Video: Mobinnova élan sporting a custom Tegra UI
Filed under: Laptops
Video: Mobinnova élan sporting a custom Tegra UI originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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BBN Technologies was recently awarded a $29.7 million contract to develop a universal text engine that will capture intelligence and render it usable to humans as well as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Officially called the Machine Reading Program, this new system will "automatically monitor the technological and political activities of nation states and transnational organizations - which could mean everything from al-Qaeda to the U.N." for the US military. BBN expects there may also be many useful civilian applications for its new reader. The company has also developed a real-time audio stream called the the BBN Broadcast Monitoring System that automatically transcribes real-time audio streams and translates them into English.
With this new project, BBN hopes to "develop techniques that can generalize across the linguistic structure and content of diverse documents to extract relations and axioms directly from text rather than relying on a knowledge engineer to encode such information." Here's how it will work:
Although it is not immediately clear when (or if) this new machine reader will be available to civilians, we are certainly looking forward to trying something like this out. Some paranoid types will believe this is nothing more than "the man" trying to spy on us, but those people need to realize everything we do online is being watched by someone. If you are really concerned about your online privacy you should secure important data on your computer, call your government leaders and try to change privacy laws, or stay off the Web altogether.
Researchers, medical professionals, consumers, students and others are all likely to benefit from such an application. Not having to spend unnecessary time searching through mountains of information on the Web for something relevant makes life easier and allows us to be more productive.
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Socialtext is currently offering a free white paper entitled "5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration." It explains how collaboration solutions (a.k.a. Enterprise 2.0) can "dramatically reduce enterprise cycle times and costs. These results may be critical to survival in difficult economic times, and the right collaboration solution is the easiest, most cost effective way to achieve them."
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Over forty sessions across six conference tracks cover the latest trends in Enterprise 2.0 technology innovation and organization-wide change: Enterprise 2.0 in action; social tools for the enterprise; foundations for Enterprise 2.0; new ways to work (Organization 2.0); and community engagement through social media.
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This first stable version available for purchase ups the ante by allowing groups to collaborate on a workflow via the Share Maps feature, as well as adding direct access to Flow from within Adobe applications.
Flow was created with the help of visual designer Mark Coleran, who is known for his work on films such as The World Is Not Enough and the Bourne series. Though it's aimed squarely at creative professionals, Flow is probably the most advanced workflow manager out there, and is well worth a closer look by almost anyone.
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During its public beta, Flow was already being hailed as a cutting edge way to organize workflows. On top of the slick interface for creating a workflow map, features such as automatic time tracking, visual search and versioning made it something of a designers dream.
But for managing the projects that actually used the workflow you just created, Flow was limited to purely individual use, since it had no robust method for sharing a workflow map among a team.
Enter "Share Maps", the most expansive addition to Flow's public debut. The new feature makes room for creating a workflow group that can all have access to the same map. In addition to enabling real collaborative workflow creation in Flow for the first time, Share Maps means project managers can now join in. That's sure to make it something more friendly to enterprise use.
The next integration should place Flow one step closer to becoming an essential utility for designers during their work. An Adobe CS4 Flash Panel now included in the package allows users to access their workflow maps directly inside Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign or Flash.
GridIron Flow can be bought through the site for $299 per single license or $399 for three. 1.0 also now supports both PCs and Macs, and there is a free trial as well for those who are still curious to give it spin.
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For more control over the screenshot, you can also invoke Talon from Aviary's web site, where you can manipulate the image quality, set the screen resolution, and decide if you want to capture the entire page or just the part that would be above the fold. In the next version, users will also be able to set which browser and OS to take the screenshot from (which should be great for web designers who want to test their creations).
One problem with the Firefox plugin, however, is that it doesn't capture Flash content, and that, of course, is a deal-breaker in many cases. Using the 'aviary.com' prefix to capture Flash content works, but you can't select a specific moment in a video to show in your screenshot, for example. For this, you still need desktop based tools like Jing or Skitch, which a lot of us here at RWW use. Though they can't capture a complete web page that goes beyond the fold, you can use another desktop tool like Little Snapper, which makes it pretty easy to capture complete web pages at once.
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A new study from BabyCenter shows that mothers' social media use has increased 462 percent over the past three years. The same group's mobile web usage is up 348 percent over the same period of time. And these moms aren't just keeping tabs on secretive teenagers. They're networking for themselves, finding answers online, and sharing stories about their offspring. The two-part study was conducted between 2006 and 2009 in conjunction with NovaQuant. BabyCenter also conducted a series of 18 in-depth surveys between January and June of 2009
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This "21st Century Moms Report" states that the number of mothers using social networks has risen from 11 percent to 63 percent since 2006. And there's good news for brands who are using the same networks. According to the BabyCenter press release, "Forty-four percent [of moms on the social web] use social media for word-of-mouth recommendations on brands and products, and 73 percent feel they find trustworthy information about products and services."
As far as hardware is concerned, almost all moms - 91 percent - say they never leave home without a mobile device. More than half say they have replaced traditional photo albums with online photo-sharing services. And moms are also the primary console gamers in the household after the birth of a first or second child.
Health an important vertical for digital moms. Again, the report reads, "In online communities, children's health issues are the leading topic of interest in online communities (91 percent), followed by childhood development tips (79 percent)." Mothers are also seeking out expert medical advice, parent-to-parent wisdom, and product reviews via social media.
As Gen X and millenial women and men come of age and start families, their technological preferences are applied to new aspects of life, as well. Longstanding sites such as BabyCenter and niche startups such as LilGrams are in excellent positions to serve the needs of digital parents and connect them to brands, hopefully in ways that are relevant, helpful, and innovative.
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Upon the appearance of a tenuously connected web of blogs, sites, wikis, and forums, many were excited about the refreshing availability of public channels for dialogue between ordinary Americans and policy makers when it comes to deciding what the 21st century American government will look like. On the other hand, the participation in these initiatives has been dwarfed by what one might see on ICanHasCheezburger. In spite of what could be seen as lackluster citizen response, The Open Government initiative's final drafting phase, which was to have closed already, has been extended until July 3.
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When President Obama's office issued his memo on open government earlier this year, the document stated that transparency, collaboration, and participation were called for to improve the government's efficiency and effectiveness.
The first phase of this program was a public online brainstorming session, which began May 21 and ended June 2. According to an Office of Science and Technology Policy blog post:
Some suggested creating a government-wide intranet and social networking tool to share contact information, resources, and otherwise facilitate collaboration. Others looked to flexible, third-party Web 2.0 tools, such as Wordpress, Wikimedia, Ning, and Drupal to strengthen collaboration. Still others recommended the use of Strategy Markup Language (StratML) to enable potential partners to more easily discover each other based upon common missions, visions, values, goals, objectives, and stakeholders.
While the site stated that mere thousands of participants were logged, it also contained language indicating that the most enthusiastic and engaged users were federal employees already working within government agencies.
An Open Government Dialogue page was then created - and largely ignored by users - as a second phase for discussion in this initiative toward openness.
What started off as a good idea apparently devolved into typically polarized flame threads and partisan insults. Serious suggestions about healthcare reform received comments numbering in the single digits, while politically weighted one-liners about Sarah Palin prompted hundreds of responses. Moderation of inappropriate or irrelevant topics and comments seemed as absent from the discussion as the deep thoughts of policy wonks who could have helped elevate the conversation. The Open Dialogue was closed, according to the site, on June 26.
An Open Government Directive page for a drafting phase has now been extended until July 3. Although the OSTP blog states that "well over 100 drafts of open government recommendations" were submitted by users, contributors number just 201 users, and fewer than 1,000 ratings have been registered by the site.
For example, what should have been a hot topic (enabling citizens' participation in government using new media) on the wiki-like MixedInk site only had 18 contributors.
Although measuring engagement isn't necessarily always a numbers game, when online debate, collaboration, and conversation is a stated goal of a project, it would seem that a higher percentage of the target audience (Internet-using Americans) should have been involved, if only through comments and ratings.
Millions of Americans have Internet access - around 75 percent of the population, according to a Nielsen report - and around 70 percent of those users are also using social media, according to a study from MarketTools. Even if we generously estimate the number of Open Government Dialogue participants at 10,000, the results are disappointing:
As the Open Government project's third phase draws to a speedy close, we are left wondering whether the initiative ran too silent and too deep for the average American to know or care about it, let alone feel that he or she could contribute to a meaningful, measurable dialog.
Do you think the U.S. government did an adequate job of publicizing its Open Government efforts? Do you think political and technology bloggers with a critical mass of traffic should have done more to spread the word and encourage user participation, much in the way that music television channels consistently harass youngsters to "rock the vote"?
Do you think that trends of citizen apathy have finally peaked to a point that - even when tools for participation are free and available via a simple Internet connection - no one cares enough to weigh in?
Or do you think that engagement measurement for this project is skewed, that meaningful and representative conversation actually has occurred through the Open Government websites? We look forward to reading your thoughts and encourage U.S. citizens to drop by the drafting phase website, as well.
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