Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Monday, October 22, 2007

New Screens: Samsung's 40-inch TFT-LCD is Just One Centimeter Thick

from Gizmodo by Addy Dugdale

Samsung is to unveil a bunch of new screens in Japan at the end of this week, including the 40-inch beauty you see here, with a thickness of just 1 cm. The first of the Korean electronics giant's next wave of large-screen TVs, the 40-incher is as thick as a 10- to 20-inch LCD desktop monitor, and has a bezel of just 14.6 mm, reduced from 30 mm. LED backlighting reduces power consumption to around 90 watts. Another pic, and info on what to keep your eyes peeled for in Yokohama this week below.

15.4" LCD with active white-LED backlight. 22" desktop LCD with DisplayPort interface 46" digital information display (1500nits) 7" mobile display with touch screen 2.1" LCD with sensor-based automatic brightness control 14.3" plastic display 8.1"e-paper 14.1"active-matrix OLED. [via Press Release]

Western Union hopes to enable mobile money transfers, scammers rejoice

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Just when you thought those Nigerian scammers were simply running out of avenues to coerce you into cashing some counterfeit check for $4.98 billion, along comes this. Western Union is apparently buddying up with 35 or so cellphone operators to "develop a system that would allow consumers to transfer money from country to country via their mobile phones." Reportedly, the outfit has successfully tested the service in a number of US cities, and if everything goes as planned, it could launch in Q2 of 2008. Notably, it still sounds like an actual human will be a part of the process, as the system will purportedly "connect the user to a company operator to complete the transaction." Quite frankly, we appreciate the convenience of such a service, but don't you go falling for any sappy stories of long-lost cousins needing your help to funnel in millions as you ride to work, alright?

Virgin Mobile deals the Kyocera Wild Card

from Engadget by Joshua Topolsky

Virgin Mobile is officially dipping its toes into smartphone water with its latest offering, the Kyocera Wild Card. Of course, how deep into that particular pool both companies are going is a question for the ages. The Wild Card isn't exactly the most robust phone you'll ever get your hands on, though the flip-phone does offer a QWERTY keypad, dual screens, a 1.3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth integration, and a WAP browser. The hitch is that you'll have to view that browser on a 128 x 160 screen, which is painfully, embarrassingly small -- though they do throw in Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man to keep you distracted. Hey, for a price point of $99, you could do way, way worse. The phone is available now from your friendly neighborhood Virgin Mobile dealer.

Meizu's MiniOne M8 GUI showcased further, still devoid of originality

from Engadget by Darren Murph

If you had even a sliver of faith left in Meizu that it would change its copycatting ways and turn its heart to creativity, you're probably feeling quite foolish right about now. In a recent posting made to showcase even more interface shots of the MiniOne M8, we got a glimpse at the not at all familiar music interface, more insight on the calling screens and a few more looks (shown after the jump) at how it'll handle messaging. Needless to say, we can just swear we've seen a similar GUI before, but apparently, playing the ignorance card makes it easier to swallow. Oh, and the actual phone now sports a "new edge" with a somewhat grayish motif -- enthralling, we know.

Eye-Fi's 2GB SD wireless card hits the FCC

from Engadget by Darren Murph

It's taken nearly a full year, but Eye-Fi has finally gotten around to doubling the capacity of its multifaceted SD card. The Eye-Fi-2GB provides the same WiFi-enabling capabilities to any SD-ready digital camera, but this one looks to pack 2GB of capacity to handle even more snaps. From what we can tell by peeking the (apparently scanned in) user's manual, the card will be compatible with both Macs and PCs, but of course, we've no idea how much this thing will cost you when it finally hits shelves. Rest assured, we'll be finding out soon enough.

SanDisk Sansa TakeTV 8GB video player leaked

from Engadget by Ryan Block

Vanilla USB flash drives are so passé, so for those who want a little more flavor more from their generic sticks of memory, might we point you to the SanDisk Sansa TakeTV, apparently freshly leaked by way of buy.com? (It also briefly appeared on PC Mag's site and SanDisk's forums among other sites.) Sure, the TakeTV an 8GB flash drive, but it's also intended to plug into a USB dock with TV outs (and remote), which is capable of reading and decoding the DivX, XviD, and MPEG-4 video files up to 720 x 576 and 7Mbps for playback on your TV. All the old school simplicity of home sneakernet combined with the one-stop-shop convenience of a USB flash drive. Unfortunately buy.com won't tell us when it's out or how much it'll cost, so no one gets to take home TakeTV just yet.

Update: This whole thing sound familiar? It might, SanDisk announced its USBTV initiative at CES this year, so it looks like this is the first resulting product. Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.

Samsung's 40-inch 1080p LCD TV panel -- just 0.39-inches thin

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

With Sharp, Hitachi, and LG.Philips all announcing ultra-thin LCDs we were beginning to wonder, where's Samsung with their world's first / biggest / thinnest boasting? No more. Meet the 10-mm (0.39-inch) thin, 40-inch LED-backlit, Full HD LCD TV panel which covers 92% of the NTSC color gamut while consuming less than 90 watts of power. That profile easily bests the crazy thin measurements we've already seen. At the moment, however, no price or production run details are available. That could change on Wednesday when the panel goes on display at FPD International in Japan.

Samsung's 5 megapixel G800 gets launched, available next month

from Engadget by Chris Ziegler

Is it a phone, or is it a camera? Until recently, cameraphones were unquestionably still just phones with chintzy cams tacked on, but it looks like we're finally getting to the point where the lines are truly blurred. Samsung's new G800 slider is now official, packing a 5 megapixel autofocus camera in a rather attractive metallic form; that in itself isn't terribly notable, considering we already have a handful of 5 megapixel handsets on the market. What is notable, though, is the added bonus of a xenon flash and 3x optical (yes, optical) zoom. Heck, from the back, you can barely tell it's a phone at all. Add in the usual goodies like Bluetooth, HSDPA, and a generously sized QVGA display, and Samsung has a winner on its hands -- or at least it would have a winner if only it'd launch stateside. Our far luckier European brethren, meanwhile, can lay their hands on this sucker starting in November for a to-be-determined price. [Via Unwired View]

Casio Exilim EX-V8 reviewed

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Steve's Digicams has a review up of Casio's Exilim V8, a slim 8.1 megapixel point-and-shoot featuring a 7x optical zoom, and a YouTube optimized H.264 video output. Key points of the review highlight the large 2.5-inch LCD on the back, decent movie recording quality -- it goes up to 848x480 at 30fps -- and some excellent camera shake / blur technologies, all crammed into an ultra compact case. On top of that it shoots some good photos, and has a relatively decent response time: in fact the only niggle Steve found was the fiddly controls. At only $299, sounds like a steal.

[Via Photography Blog]

Vinod Khosla Shares His Portfolio

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

Vinod Khosla gave a speech down at Sand Hill Road yesterday in which he offered the most detailed description of his portfolio companies that we've heard. Breaking it down into four categories — the war on oil, the war on coal, efficiency and materials — he discussed at least 32 portfolio companies that he hopes will shape the future of energy and fight climate change. He showed off a list of 26 companies in March.

As Khosla put it, "Hopefully we'll see a hundred portfolios like this. I'm happy to share all my strategies so we get more people," to have portfolios with a large amount of diverse energy companies. At the event, he used a PowerPoint slide to showcase his portfolio companies, and more recently posted a similar slide on his web site. Though the two slides are actually a bit different, here are some of the lesser-known companies from both lists: efficiency companies Seeo, Newco1 (is that a placeholder name?), and PAX Streamline (just called Streamline on this list); water companies Quos and NanoH2O; biofuel company Ethos (although a biofuel company called Kior was on the other list); and plastics companies eChromics (which he referred to as Soladigm on the other list) and Calera.

My Listening Habits This Year

from A VC by Fred

Joelaz did this for me. It's spot on. This is my year in music. Wow. Thanks Joelaz!

Here's a link to a larger view of this.

UPDATE: Joelaz says you just give this service your last.fm login and you can get one of these for yourself.

Flickr To Add Online Photo Editing Tools Via Picnik

From: TechCrunch: Michael Arrington

Fotoflexer may be my personal favorite among the many online photo editing tools, but Flickr has chosen Seattle-based Picnik to handle the long requested photo editing feature for Flickr users.

Currently, you can rotate photos on Flickr, but the editing stops there. When the new tools launch, users will be able to edit photos more extensively using the Picnik Flash based tools (see our review here).

The deal has been signed and implementation will occur sometime in the next few months, Flickr told me yesterday. Users will be presented with an edit option on the photo page. Clicking it takes the user to a new Flickr photo edit page, with the Picnik tools integrated via an iframe. After editing, users can add the edited photo to their Flickr account or, if they are a Flickr pro user, overwrite the original.

Business terms around the deal are not being disclosed at this time. Picnik is self funded to date.

Friday, October 19, 2007

Flickr Launches New Geotagging and Places Pages

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

When I heard that Flickr was making announcements this evening, I assumed it was the long awaited integration of video into the service. That isn't happening (it will soon, though), but they are making significant upgrades tonight around geotagging and a new area of the site is launching called "Places Pages."

GeoTagging Updates

Flickr first launched geotagging for photos a year ago - to date 29 million public photos have been geotagged, with 150,000 new ones coming in each day. They aren't making any changes to the way photos are geotagged (using Yahoo maps), but they are updating the results pages for searches.

The existing pages don't show large numbers of geotagged photos effectively; the new pages do a better job by placing actual tags from photos on a world map. Users can quickly find photos based on tags and geotagged information. Enhancements to navigation are also being introduced.

Overall, the enhancements are good, but the real win here comes when devices auto tag photos via GPS devices. Until then, most users can't be bothered with taking the time to add the appropriate meta data.

Places Pages

Now this is more interesting. Flickr is launching "Places Pages," which are dedicated pages that provide users with specific information about places. We've uploaded an overview PDF to Scribd, here.

Pages are built around the Flickr concept of "interestingness," but based on places and tags. So China/bicycle shows popular photos of bicycles taken in China. Paris/architecture is another example. Any of 70,000 places can be viewed, optionally followed by any tag. Flickr is also adding in additional information on the place, such as weather and local time, as well as relevant Flickr groups.

The product will get better over time, too. Eventually users will be able to adjust pages by time or season, so pictures from New York in the Fall can be viewed, for example. Or pictures from a specific event that happened in a city.

Flickr now has over 1 billion photos and 37.7 million unique monthly visitors. 2.5 million news photos are uploaded daily by 15 million registered users. I wonder if founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield ever wish they hadn't sold out to Yahoo so quickly, for just a rumored $30 million or so in 2005…

Compulab's EM-X270 brings DIY to smartphones

from Engadget by Sean Cooper

Compulab may start a trend in the do-it-yourself world with its introduction of a fully functional -- less screen -- handheld computer. Starting at $122 you get the basic module running an Intel Xscale CPU up to 520 MHz with either Linux or Windows CE and for a bit more cake can add cellular radio, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, camera, or VGA touchscreen to your handset. Of course, you'll need to design yourself a nice housing as they don't seem to carry any, but hey, that's half of the DIY fun right there. Good luck with those projects, and if you make something cool send us your pics.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Five iPhone Apps We Can't Wait To Install

from Silicon Alley Insider by Dan Frommer

Now that Apple is officially opening up the iPhone and iPod Touch to third-party developers, we thought we'd give software companies some projects to work on. Here are five iPhone apps we can't wait to get our hands on.

Adobe Flash: Adobe's ubiquitous plugin is installed on some 99% of PCs, but 0% of iPhones. This would let iPhone users play Flash-based games, navigate Flash-based Web sites, watch Flash-based video, and load Flash-based ads.

RSS Reader: Read the newspaper on the subway with one hand. Web-based RSS reading is possible using the iPhone's Safari Web browser, but it requires an Internet connection to load content. A real RSS reader -- like our favorite Mac-based reader, Vienna -- which stores feed content on the iPhone for offline reading is a no-brainer.

IM/Chat: Adium is hands-down the best instant messaging client for Mac, and would make another great app for the iPhone. Chat on AIM, Google Talk, and a dozen other IM networks with one piece of software. Even better: Skype, iChat, or a similar app that can handle Internet audio and video chats. Apple's wireless partner AT&T would hate this -- who needs cellphone minutes anymore? -- and this would kill the carrier's pokey EDGE data network, but could work great over wi-fi, and eventually, a 3G connection.

Slingbox: So far, the iPhone's video watching is limited to whatever is on YouTube or iTunes. How about streaming live television from your home cable connection?

Remote Desktop: Left an important file at home? Whether a lightweight VNC ("virtual network computing") app or a full-fledged version of Apple Remote Desktop, it would be handy to be able to access your home computer via iPhone. Such apps already exist for Palm Treos and other smartphones, so porting to the iPhone couldn't be too tricky.

Readers: Any other apps for our wishlist?

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