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Friday, October 24, 2008

Toshiba's NB100 netbook photographed in the wild

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/430327675/

Filed under: Laptops

Oh sure, you've seen a brief glimpse of Toshiba's NB100 (a pre-production unit, at least) at the company's own Mobility Conference, but things just feel a little different when the spotting goes down in the wild. The LXF Team was lucky enough to get their camera on Tosh's UK-bound rig, and while nothing was tremendously shocking, it was called out for boasting a "boxy, but sturdy construction that looks like a shrunk-down 'serious' laptop." Check out a finalized unit beside an equally cute Aspire One in the read link below.

[Thanks, Mike]

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SNL does multitouch comedy to perfection with CNN's 'Magic Map'

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/430333162/

Filed under: Displays

Saturday Night LIve's Fred Armisen takes CNN's "Magic Map" to its logical -- and hilarious -- conclusion. What would happen if New Hampshire got moved down to Mexico? Two more pics after the break, and video hopefully coming soon.

Update: Country... we've got video.

Continue reading SNL does multitouch comedy to perfection with CNN's 'Magic Map'

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Thursday, October 23, 2008

MySpace Music Signs IODA, Gains 6,000 Indie Labels And 50,000 Artists

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/JZX2Abk1-KM/

MySpace Music continues to sign key music deals - today they announced the addition of the no. 2 independent music aggregator, IODA, to the platform. Orchard, the no. 1 indie aggregator, has been on board since the launch.

IODA brings music from 6,000 labels and 50,000 indie artists like Cake, Billie Holliday, Ray Charles, The Stills, Tokyo Police Club and Broken Social Scene.

MySpace now claims to have more than 2 million indie music tracks.

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Weblogs, Inc. Three Years Later: Impressive Page View And Revenue Growth

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/8UXNn_q8ELA/

Earlier this month News Corp. celebrated the three year anniversary of the acquisition of MySpace. Today, AOL does the same for the Weblogs, Inc. blog network they acquired in October 2005.

Since the acquisition, AOL says, the Weblogs, Inc. blogs (which include Engadget, TMZ, Download Squad, TUAW, Joystiq, Autoblog and others) have seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix. In October 2005, the blogs had a U.S. audience of 1.4 million unique visitors and were generating about $6 million in revenue. Today its 13 million uniques and revenues of about $30 million.

In short, it was one of AOL’s better acquisitions.

See the screenshots and Powerpoint presentation below for more details.

Third Anniversary Weblogs Inc _ AOL 11

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Social Desktop Aggregator Sobees Launches Public Beta

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-HNzaWesZvc/

Switzerland-based deskNET is debuting the public beta version of Sobees today, an application that aims to bring the web to a personalized desktop environment. We first came across Sobees when they presented their project in the DemoPit at the TechCrunch50 conference.

While many startups are heading in the opposite direction by trying to take the best of the desktop experience inside the browser, Sobees’ goal is to aggregate various web applications and services into a customized desktop environment instead, including search, weather updates, RSS feeds, YouTube videos, social networking sites, etc.

The bootstrapped startup wants to provide a seamless user experience fit for a mainstream audience when it comes to accessing online content or handling repetitive internet tasks, without the need to constantly switch between browser windows, tabs and multiple desktop apps. Customizable start pages like Netvibes, iGoogle / Google Desktop and MyYahoo are the biggest challengers, as well as the widgets you can add to your Mac or Windows Vista desktop.

Sobees also boasts a number of social features like interacting with friends, sharing data and news articles, as well as integration with video and photo sharing services. Sobees allows you to update your status messages across Facebook and Twitter, and also enables you to drag and drop media files and easily transfer them to a variety of services, e.g. dragging pictures to the desktop environment and uploading them directly to your Flickr account. Ubervu has a similar approach.

Sobees plans to make money from search monetization, advertising and selling branded modules.

Sobees sports an excellent design and has obviously paid much attention to the usability of the service (the ribbon menu is really cool) but one has to wonder if there’s a real need for this type of service. As fancy as it may be, it doesn’t solve a real problem, not one I’m aware of anyway.

Another barrier to take into account is the fact that Sobees can only be installed on machines running Windows Vista / XP with the yet-to-be-distributed .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 for now, although a Silverlight build is currently on the roadmap. I also experienced some problems launching and accessing the application after installing.

I embedded a demo video below which gives a good overview of the main functionalities (sexy voice over included).

CrunchBase Information

sobees

Information provided by CrunchBase

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