YouTube Starts Testing New Live Streaming Platform http://t.co/cuOh4iF
Monday 13 September 2010
Wednesday 7 April 2010
Wears my money fool
Man donates suitcase with £60,000 in it by mistake
An elderly man mistakenly donated a suitcase containing $100,000 (£60,000) to his local second hand shop, sparking a police hunt for the bargain hunters who bought it.
The cash had been sown into the lining of the suitcase
The man who donated the bag apparently realised his mistake when his wife told him that she had been keeping their life savings in the old suitcase.
Staff at the Salvation Army shop in Beaconsfield said that the man had returned to the store to plead with them to find the case. However, it had been sold two days earlier.
Brad Halse, a spokesman for The Salvation Army, said the shop was trying to trace the buyer through recent credit card transactions.
But he said with the cash sewn into the lining, it was possible the buyer did not even know he or she had hit the jackpot.
"Any person could have bought the suitcase and be completely unaware that there's anything in the lining," Mr Halse said.
"They may not be planning to use the suitcase for six months, or they could be on a plane today."
However, police investigating the case have since arrested a man and a woman for failing to return the cash.
Officers have also recovered most of the money, which had been put into several different bank accounts.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
Sunday 21 March 2010
Larry Page turns 37 on Friday. The billionaire co-founder of Google has a lot to celebrate. In 12 years he and his business partner Sergey Brin have created one of the most powerful companies on the planet, seen off rivals big and small, and emerged as the kings of the internet.
Life in the digital world, however, moves quickly. Last week Page and Brin’s crown passed — for who knows how long — to a 26-year-old rival who has every intention of keeping it.
Hitwise, the internet industry tracker, announced that Facebook had dethroned Google as the world’s most popular website. For the week ending March 13, the social networking site set up by wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg got more traffic than Google in America. It was a milestone likely to be revisited as Facebook and Google limber up for what looks set to be this decade’s defining technology battle.
“Google must feel very threatened by Facebook,” said one leading Silicon Valley entrepreneur last week. “It’s the first viable competitor to emerge since they became dominant. They have come at it from different angles, but the bigger Facebook gets, the more they compete.”
Like all the great tech fights — from Microsoft v Google to Apple v Microsoft — this is at heart a philosophical conflict. Microsoft made its fortune by dominating the PC landscape, but for a long time it sold its products like Henry Ford sold his Model Ts.
It didn’t “get” the internet and chose to dismiss Google as an arrogant upstart. When the world moved online Microsoft was left playing catch-up.
Similarly, Google now faces the challenge of another idea whose time has come.
Google’s algorithms have ordered the chaos of the internet with mathematical exactitude and become the default method for finding things online. Zuckerberg thinks this is all very last decade.
Facebook now has more than 400m active users — making it, some say, the third most populous country in the world behind India and China — and is at the forefront of a new way of finding information. In Britain, it has 23m users, close to one in three of the population.
They share everything from wedding snaps and jokes to film reviews, restaurant and holiday recommendations. “Discovery” is the buzzword in social media — that feeling of finding something that’s been recommended by people you trust. Now Facebook has the critical mass to make discovery a viable alternative to conventional search engines.
“All this data that people are sharing potentially allows social networks to gather this information and use it in interesting ways,” said Augie Ray, analyst at Forrester Research. “When you are looking for a movie recommendation, what you want to know is what people like you think. A bunch of kids who rate Twilight with five stars is no use to me. What about middle-aged men who have shown an interest in art films? What are they watching?”
Another big threat to Google is the fact that much of this information will not appear in a Google search. Google wants everything to be open and searchable, the more information it can mine the more useful it becomes.
Facebook is a walled garden — you sign in to your account and can choose the what, how and who of what you share.
Inside Facebook the attitude to Google seems spookily similar to Google’s attitude to Microsoft. The company would not comment for this story.
“We don’t typically opine on the findings of third-party research firms,” said a spokesman. But privately, the gloves are off.
“Google is not representative of the future of technology in any way,” one Facebook veteran said to Wired magazine, the industry bible, last year. “Facebook is an advanced communications network enabling myriad communication forms. It almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”
Now it’s Google’s turn to feel the heat from a younger and brasher company. Zuckerberg believes that a billion people will one day be on Facebook. If he hits that number, Brin and Page could face their worst nightmare: Google could be the new Microsoft.
ONLY a fool, though, would write off Google. A closer look at the numbers shows that Facebook has a long way to go before it can be said to be ahead of Google in any real sense.
Hitwise’s figures show that for the week ending March 6, more Americans typed “Facebook.com” into their web browser than “Google.com”. But the numbers ignore Google-owned Gmail and YouTube and the full picture is far more complex — and more favourable to Google. YouTube alone was the fifth most visited website during the period recorded, according to Hitwise, and a lot of its videos end up embedded on Facebook pages.
This is no reason for Google to rest easy, however, and perhaps the statistic they should most fear is Facebook’s astonishing growth. Visits to the site have risen 185% over the past year. During the same period, Google’s traffic rose only 9%.
Nielsen, the analyst, has a different take on the rise of Facebook to Hitwise. By its measurements, Facebook is the third most visited site on the planet with 2.5 billion hits in February compared with Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3 billion.
There is, however, another figure that Google is watching very carefully — the amount of time spent on Facebook. Last month people spent 46.1 billion minutes on the site, according to Nielsen. The firm’s closest rival was Yahoo with 18.6 billion minutes. Google came in third with 11 billion. The analyst calculates that Facebook now accounts for one in every six minutes spent online in the UK and the US.
All this matters because the number of hits and amount of time users spend on a website are what determines the amount of money advertisers are willing to spend on it. Traffic usually equates to revenues.
In some ways Google is less threatened by Facebook’s time eating than some of its rivals. The less time people spend on Google search the better for the firm. It’s about speed. People want to plug in their query, get the results and move on. Google has won its huge following by being the best at that. But if search migrates away from Google, and Facebook starts eating up time spent on YouTube, Gmail or Google Maps, the search giant has a problem.
Alex Burmaster, of Nielsen, said social media was changing the way people use the web to find information, products and services. Stories on news sites such as Times Online are now as likely to be found via a Twitter link or a Facebook post as a Google search, though he added that finding things online is still primarily done through search engines. “The death of the search engine is greatly exaggerated,” he said. “But when it comes to time, it’s not just Google that Facebook is challenging, it’s every website out there.”
ODDLY, as Facebook gets bigger, the internet is looking smaller. Facebook and Google (with YouTube, and Gmail) now account for more than 17% of internet activity — nearly one web visit in every five. The runners up are losing ground, leaving the possibility of a world where Google and Facebook slug it out as the Coke and Pepsi of the internet universe: both sides battling for the title “The Real Thing”.
Google has made several unsuccessful attempts to head Facebook off at the pass. The firm lost out on a deal to Microsoft. It made a pass at Twitter but was rejected, and its latest solo effort — Buzz, a social media service attached to its huge Gmail email service — suffered a disastrous launch.
Email users found they had been signed up unwittingly and personal information had been shared with their contacts. Last week, Pamela Jones Harbour, the US Federal Trade Commissioner, slammed the launch as “irresponsible”.
It’s still early days for Facebook, no matter how many fans it has. The private company expected to generate $1 billion (£666m) in revenue this year. Google’s sales in the last quarter alone were almost seven times as large.
Kurt Scherf, analyst at Parks Associates, said it would be foolhardy to count out Google. In terms of making money “those cold calculating algorithms that Google turn out are still way more effective than people at the moment,” he said.
But he acknowledged that social media was creating enormous new possibilities for Facebook. “One of my interests is interactive TV. Imagine how powerful it would be if Facebook is on your TV telling you 80% of your friends like a certain show,” said Scherf. “The big question is who is going to mine this information. In terms of pure revenue we are not seeing the execution from Facebook. I’m not saying that they can’t get there, but it’s not happening at this point.”
Google had its doubters too.
How to become the net’s biggest draw
1984: Mark Zuckerberg is born in White Plains, New York.
2004: In February, Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm. The site is for students with Harvard email addresses only, but by March it has added Stanford, Columbia and Yale. By December Facebook has 1m users.
2005: Facebook raises $12.7m from Accel Partners. It adds high schools and international school networks. By December it has 5.5m users.
2006: Facebook raises $27.5m from Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and others. Facebook Mobile is launched. By the end of the year it has 12m users.
2007: Facebook opens a virtual gift shop and advertising becomes a growing part of the business. Developers are invited to make applications for the site. In October Microsoft pays $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing the company at $15 billion. Microsoft squeezes out Google to do the deal. User numbers pass 50m.
2008: Facebook passes the 100m mark. It opens Spanish and French sites and a translation service for 21 languages. The US presidential debates are co-sponsored by ABC News and Facebook.
2009: Even Facebook isn’t immune to the stock market rout. Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian group, makes a $200m investment that values the company at $10 billion. However, the number of users continues to soar — to more than 350m by the end of the year — and Facebook makes its first profit.
2010: For the week ending March 13, Hitwise says Facebook.com passed Google.com, making it the biggest draw on the net for the whole week for the first time in its history. The company now accounts for 17% of the time people spend online in Britain and America, according to Nielsen. User numbers have passed 400m. Profits are thought to be $1 billion a year. Speculation mounts that Facebook will start looking to raise more money from a stock market float.
2007: Facebook opens a virtual gift shop and advertising becomes a growing part of the business. Developers are invited to make applications for the site. In October Microsoft pays $240m for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, valuing the company at $15 billion. Microsoft squeezes out Google to do the deal. User numbers pass 50m.
2006: Facebook raises $27.5m from Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and others. Facebook Mobile is launched. By the end of the year it has 12m users.
2005: Facebook raises $12.7m from Accel Partners. It adds high schools and international school networks. By December it has 5.5m users.
FACEBOOK NEWS
2004: In February, Zuckerberg and co-founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin launch Facebook from their Harvard dorm. The site is for students with Harvard email addresses only, but by March it has added Stanford, Columbia and Yale. By December Facebook has 1m users
Saturday 20 March 2010
APPLE NEWS
Final Cut Studio at the Oscars
12 Mar 2010 20:08
CNET News reports that 9 out of 10 of this year’s nominees in the Documentary Feature and Documentary Short categories used Final Cut Studio to make their films, including category winners “The Cove” and “Music by Prudence.”
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
IPAD NEWS
Apple now accepting iPad app submissions, get your jumbo-sized beer drinking simulations in before launch day
March 19, 2010.
Apple just announced to developers that it's now accepting iPad applications. From the sound of it, applications submitted now will have a shot at being reviewed and approved before the iPad launch next month, though since most all apps developed so far have only been tested in the emulator, this is more of a "feedback" round for devs looking to be ready for the launch without actually testing their apps on hardware themselves. Apple says that "[o]nly apps submitted for the initial review will be considered for the grand opening of the iPad App Store," so you probably shouldn't wait around -- unless you've got one of those iPad test units headed your way, or you're a hardware-testing purist that will wait for the iPad launch to start testing apps and miss one of those cushy spots on the opening day iPad App Store. Either way, we can't really imagine we'll be seeing true 3rd party iPad app greatness until a month or so after the launch, but who are we to talk down a "gold rush"?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Friday 19 March 2010
APPLE NEWS
Apple World’s Most Admired Company
4 Mar 2010 18:30
For the third year in a row Apple has been named the World’s Most Admired Company by Fortune Magazine — this year by the widest margin ever. What makes Apple so admired? Fortune explains: “Product, product, product. This is the company that has changed the way we do everything from consume music to design products to engage with the world around us.” Apple also ranked #1 in Innovation among all companies.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
IPAD NEWS
iPad Available in US on April 3
5 Mar 2010
Apple today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April. Beginning a week from today, March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
APPLE NEWS. :-)
AppleInsider has rounded up its stable of "people familiar with the matter" and squeezed them for info on Cupertino's plans for the near term. Firstly, they've heard that a 27-inch version of the currently available 24-inch LED Cinema Display is on its way, sporting a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and targeted for release "by June." The more exciting tip from those in the know, however, relates to the well aged Mac Pro and its future upgrade path. Apple has apparently firmed up plans to offer 6- and 12-core options (to replace the current 4- and 8-core variants), though the star of the show internally is said to be Intel's Xeon 5600, rather than the similarly specced Core i7-980X that had been rumored. This seems to be motivated by the fact the i7 beast can't do dual-CPU configurations, which are necessary to offer a dozen cores. Pricing for the single Xeon CPU model is expected to be close to the current $2,499 starting sticker, but release dates still elude us.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
3D invisibility cloak fashioned out of metamaterials
March 19, 2010
Those HDTV manufacturers did tell us that 3D was going to be everywhere this year, didn't they? Keeping up with the times, scientists investigating potential methods for rendering physical objects invisible to the human eye have now moved to the full three-dimensional realm. The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology has developed a photonic metamaterial that can make things disappear when viewed from all angles, advancing from previous light refraction methods that only worked in 2D. It sounds similar to what Berkeley researchers developed not too long ago, and just like Berkeley's findings, this is a method that's still at a very early stage of development and can only cover one micrometer-tall bumps. Theoretically unlimited, the so-called carpet cloak could eventually be expanded to "hide a house," but then who's to say we'll even be living in houses by that time?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Charlie Miller to reveal 20 zero day security holes in Mac OS X
March 19, 2010
Say, Charles -- it's been awhile! But we're pleased as punch to see that you're back to your old ways, poking around within OS X's mainframe just looking for ways to remotely control the system, snag credit card data and download a few interoffice love letters that are carefully stashed 15 folders down within 'Documents.' The famed Apple security expert is planning yet another slam on OS X at CanSecWest, where he'll reveal no fewer than 20 zero day security holes within OS X. According to Miller, "OS X has a large attack surface consisting of open source components, closed source third-party components and closed source Apple components; bugs in any of these types of components can lead to remote compromise." He also goes on to reemphasize something he's been screaming for years: "Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town." In other words, Apple users are "safer" (due to the lack of work that goes into hacking them), "but less secure." So, is this a weird way of applying for a security job in Cupertino, or what?
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Thursday 18 March 2010
LG / SKY 3D NEWS
LG no longer selling 15,000 3DTVs to Sky TV, Britons breathe a sigh of indifference
March 17, 2010
Why is this man so down? Is it the crooked hat? Or the long hours spent with the same flat expression on his face? No, the fact of the matter is that Sky's plan to outfit pubs the breadth and width of the island nation with 3D televisions has fallen flat. Yesterday LG announced that the satellite provider had purchased some 15,000 sets with the hope of hooking folks on the technology before launching its in-home service later in the year, but now the company's pulling back, instead saying that deal involves the channel selling pubs 3DTVs through a third party. And we're sure that pub owners are going to jump at the chance to buy expensive new displays and scores of 3D glasses so customers can drop them in pitchers and / or break them while playing darts or whatever goes on over there in the land of Pete Doherty and excessive surveillance. LG's statement is after the break.
Show full PR text
LG Electronics UK (LG), a leader and technology innovator in consumer electronics and appliances, clarifies its agreement to supply TVs for British Sky Broadcasting Group's (Sky) forthcoming 3D TV service.
LG is currently working with Sky to bring 3D TV to pubs and clubs throughout the UK and Ireland. LG will supply 3D TVs nationwide to support the launch of Sky 3D, Europe's first 3D TV channel. The channel goes live in pubs and clubs from April 2010.
A previous release issued on 16th March 2010 referenced a commercial deal to supply 15,000 3D TVs to Sky.
LG Electronics UK would like to further clarify the situation. The figure of 15,000 3D TVs is inaccurate. Sky is helping support its commercial customers purchase TVs direct from a UK third party.
"Supporting the roll out of Sky 3D represents a great opportunity for both LG and Sky to bring ground-breaking technology to the UK public and a significant step forward in our desire to showcase the latest TV technology in action" said an LG spokesman.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
Wednesday 17 March 2010
APPLE SALES NEWS
Mac sales up 39 percent in January and Febuary as iPod sales rebound
March 15, 2010 19:02 by Donald Melanson
Well, it looks like it's not just iPad pre-orders that are possibly be beating a few expectations -- according to NPD, sales of Macs and iPods were also up over some estimates in January and February. Citing the report, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says that sales of Macs were up 39% year over year for the two months (ahead of estimates of 22%), which should translate to sales of between 2.8 to 2.9 million Macs for the full quarter, while iPod sales were up 7% during the same period, suggesting total iPod sales of between nine and ten million for the first quarter. That latter number may actually be the more impressive of the two, as it marks the first time iPod sales have rebounded into positive territory in a full sixteen months -- although that trend could just as easily be reversed again if, say, Apple rolls out a new iPhone that cuts into iPod sales.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
XBOX LAPTOP NEWS
Student-made Xbox 360 laptop channels the Heck out of... well, you know
March 17, 2010 03:11 by Sean Hollister
Few can build 'em like Benjamin Heckendorn. Fewer still bother to try. Two college kids managed to do a bang-up job anyhow building this fully loaded, Jasper-juiced Xbox 360 laptop. With a built-in 17-inch Gateway monitor, keyboard, functioning Xbox Live camera and Wireless Network Adapter, this brick hits all the right notes -- yet remains remarkably stylish for a learn-as-you-go student project. If you agree, you can read a remarkably detailed account of how they built it at the source link, see a proof-of-completion video after the break, or even further their education by purchasing the mean machine on eBay for your very own.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
MAC NEWS
Could this be another example of online advertising presaging the onset of a hardware upgrade from Cupertino? Apple's ads on Australian tech pub PC Authority have been spotted displaying some rather peculiar price tags for its flagship mobile and desktop computers. Whereas Cupertino's Aussie online store lists the most affordable versions of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Pro at A$1,599, A$1,999 and A$3,599, respectively, the above, official-looking ads would seem to disagree. Clicking on them still leads to the currently priced (and specced) machines, but looking at them suggests that -- in the absence of some major conspiracy or a splendidly random price hike -- we're getting an early peek at the pricing of the newly updated models of each of those series. The MacBook Air has jumped by A$400 so that what used to be its costliest base price is now its lowest, while the MBP has suffered a A$300 bump in cost of entry. Then again, considering the expectation that the mobile computers will get Core i7 CPUs while the Mac Pro will get all dressed up with Core i7-980X regalia, this development is perhaps not all that surprising. The major thing to take away here is that the long-awaited upgrades might finally be arriving. We're putting our piggy banks on alert, just in case.
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
Sunday 14 March 2010
IPHONE TOMTOM NEWS
TomTom iPhone app hits 1.3, gains real-time traffic and Google local search
March 13, 2010 15:22 by Darren Murph
Here lately, Navigon has been crushing it on the iPhone GPS front. Every couple of weeks, it seems that MobileNavigator is getting yet another fantastic update, all while TomTom's lackluster offering hangs back in the land of complacency. Thankfully for us all, the outfit has just pushed out the v1.3 update, which adds real-time traffic (an unfortunate $19.99 add-on), Google local search, updated roadways, automatic music fading between text-to-speech instructions and the ability to add locations from other apps and websites. We'd still recommend Navigon's software if you're looking to buy into iPhone GPS for the first time, but this is certainly a boon for those already locked into the TomTom alternative.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
- Posted using BlogPress from mike wards iPhone 3gs
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