gBox: Give The Gift Of DRM-Free Music

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

gBox is a new take on selling digital content. Instead of emphasizing sales directly to consumers, gBox is encourages you to create wish lists and buy gifts for your friends and family. To kick-start the service, they’ve sealed a pretty big deal with Universal to be the retailer for their new “Open MP3″ experiment into DRM free music. In a move that’s a snub to Apple’s iTunes, Universal will be buying Google AdWords for their music, linking people to the gBox site to buy their artists’ music. gBox will be expanding to other forms of digital content in the future.

gBox is not only a destination retail site for digital content. It also has an embeddable gift box widget to show off what you want to your friends. Your friends can then buy it for you directly from within the widget. It will be available as a general embed or specialized for 7 of the big social networks (no Facebook). Their current offering, music, will go for 99 cents per track and $9.99 per album (to stay competitive with iTunes). You have to have a gBox account to receive a gift, but not to buy one.

Considering people already pay 99 cents to send their friends virtual gifts on Facebook, I’d expect buying a real song to be an attractive proposition. It also seems like a missed opportunity for a network like MySpace, which runs on Snocap.

You can download the content after its bought for you, but need a special gBox plugin to control the downloads since some content partners (Sony, Iota) will be selling music with DRM. This makes the offering somewhat disappointing, because the plugin will only work for IE (FF on the way) and not on the Mac.

gBox was started in June as an angel funded spin-off from Navio systems. They’re a 20 person company based in Cupertino, California.

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Toshiba's 320GB 2.5-inch hard drive: a world's best for laptops

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Step aside Fujitsu, there's a new 2.5-inch hard disk champ on the block by way of Toshiba. A world's first 320GB 2.5-inch drive, in fact. The MK3252GSX drive spins a pair of 160GB platters at 5,400rpm with an 8MB buffer and 12ms average seek time over a 3Gbps SATA interface. So yeah, it's just 20GB more data that the Fujitsu 300GB disk but that HDD spins at just 4,200rpm. Better yet, The Tosh drive stands just 9.5-mm tall -- a full 3-mm less than Fujitsu's 300 gigger; that's about as thin as it gets in these 2.5-inch laptop drives. Look for the 320GB disk as a factory shipped option around November when Toshiba starts turning 'em out for mass production.

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Sony's Bravia VPL-VW60: the SXRD black pearl with 35,000:1 contrast

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

September 20th: know it home cinema buffs. That's the date Sony releases their SXRD followup to the VPL-VW50 "Pearl" projector in Japan. The new Bravia VPL-VW60 projects a 1,920 x 1,080 image with a 35,000:1 contrast ratio and 1,000 lumens courtesy of its (¥42,000 / $367) 200W high pressure mercury lamp and trio of 0.61-inch SXRD chips. It's also quieter than its predecessor at 22dB while packing a pair of HDMI-CEC class HDMI jacks supporting 1080/60p, 50p, and 24p. Best of all though, Sony managed to seriously up the specs while cutting the introductory list price nearly in half to "just" ¥441,000 (about $3,858).

Gallery: Sony's Bravia VPL-VW60: the SXRD black pearl with 35,000:1 contrast

[Via Impress]

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Stanford's EyePassword helps fight "shoulder-surfing" at the ATM

from Engadget by Paul Miller

Gaze-based password entry might sound like a chore -- and we can't say we find the fact of aligning our eyes with an on-screen ATM keyboard all that practical -- but if it means we can finally avoid that awkward moment at the cash machine where we block the keypad view from that shifty-looking sixth grader standing next to us, it just might be worth it. Stanford University has folks working on just such a solution to the dreaded "shoulder-surfing" at ATMs, and has come up with EyePassword. They're testing some systems that track your eyeballs in a variety of ways to perform PIN input, and while the resulting study shows that input times are slowed a little, the system does indeed make "eavesdropping by a malicious observer largely impractical." Of course, there's no telling when something like this will hit your neighborhood deli.

[Via New Scientist ]

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Mess of circuitry unlocks iPhone, software solution next?

Posted Aug 21st 2007 1:02PM by Sean Cooper

Welp, 'tis done friends, but we're going to have to wait a week for all the gory details to be released. Geohot and his crew of trusty fiddlers have apparently found a solution for sorting the iPhone for worldwide consumption by hardware unlocking the beast. We've seen a video, and know he's been well involved with iPhone shenanigans since day one, but until we see it in our hand color us excited but not sold -- though we're stoked that they report a software based version may be on the horizon. But in the unhappy event that it ends up being hardware unlock only, you can use this week to brush up on your soldering skills. We're gonna be all over this in the coming days so know that the minute we know more, you will too. Peep the vid after the break.

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