Filed under: Found Footage, iPhone
What other recent TV show (Big Bang Theory aside) has given geeks as much cred as Chuck? The hourlong spy-dramedy returned with first-run episodes this week, but promptly threw a wet blanket on our enjoyment by… well, just look. No matter what Andy Ihnatko’s experiments demonstrated, I don’t think a pile of white rice is going to fix this.
Past episodes of Chuck have featured an all-knowing classic Mac, a thinly veiled dig at our favorite iCEO and a weaponized G5 tower, much to our delight. We’ve been loyal fans, NBC, but we must protest the wanton cruelty shown to an innocent smartphone in this scene: it’s brutal, it’s damp, and it will not stand.
[Apologies to our international readers for the US-only Hulu clip. Once there's a geographically agnostic version of the video available, we'll link to it.]
TUAWFound Footage: That sinking, gonna-need-a-new-phone feeling originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Verizon Wireless is the US’s largest wireless carrier, and it’s renowned for its good network coverage. At the same time, Verizon’s top-end consumer smartphones have been represented by its aging collection of Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. The Apple iPhone went to AT&T, the Palm Pre to Sprint, and the first generation of Android devices to T-Mobile. But Verizon has finally struck back, taking the first Android 2.0 Device and releasing it with some Apple-like hype. Ars has gotten a hold of a Droid, and we’ve taken it (and the Android 2.0 platform) out for a test drive.
With the release of the Motorola Droid, Verizon Wireless takes a shot directly at the iPhone. Featuring an eye-catching 3.7″ WVGA screen, the same speedy ARM Cortex A8-based processor that powers the Pre and the iPhone 3GS, and a modern smartphone OS, the Droid is definitely a phone to be reckoned with. But is all this enough to make this phone your daily companion?
We don’t know a lot about driving cars really fast, but we do know one thing: this guy sure does seem excited about the prospect of a touchscreen-driven, QWERTY-equipped slider smartphone with webOS, from struggling handset manufacturer Palm. Apparently at some point during the race somebody from Sprint confirmed that they’ll be outing a launch date in the “next couple of days.” We like the sound of that.
[Thanks, Leo B. and Kenny]
Read – PreCentral forums
Read – Sprint’s NASCAR landing page
Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds
Palm Pre makes conspicuous appearance at large gathering of cool people originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 May 2009 04:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | Email this | Comments
Hey, remember the Nuvifone? Sure you do — it’s Garmin’s entry into the wide world of smartphones. You know, the company’s Linux-based, proprietary OS phone that’s heavy on GPS integration? Well according to a recent report, plans to launch the device in the first half of 2009 have stalled, with the company stating that it will be pushing the window back towards something closer to Q3. President and COO Cliff Pemble expounded on the difficulties of building a smartphone from scratch during a conference call with analysts, noting “Smartphones are complicated and bringing one to market that’s built totally from the ground up on a custom Linux platform is not an easy task.” If you’ll recall, the original announcement of the Nuvifone was way back in January of 2008, with a planned release in Q3 of that year — placing this new launch a full 12 months out from the intended street date. We’re all for competitors in this market, but it seems like maybe the folks at Garmin jumped the gun with all these dates they’ve been dropping on us — missed launches don’t exactly promote confidence.
[Via PMP Today]
Filed under: Cellphones
Garmin delays Nuvifone G60 yet again, Q3 launch now planned originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 May 2009 12:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the state of the smartphone industry, study new stats showing Facebook’s international market penetration, review ‘The Oprah Effect’ on Twitter, check out a new product called Google Me, analyze the closure of Web 1.0 icon GeoCities, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
Sponsor
Subscribe to Weekly Wrapup
You can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSS or by email (form below).
RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:
Follow ReadWriteWeb on Twitter
Web Trends
The State of the Smartphone: iPhone is Way, Way Ahead
A new industry report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some unique insights into the smartphone industry as of right now. Because their firm focuses not just on iPhone, but also on Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME, they have the ability to see platform-spanning trends, instead of just those tied to Apple. So what can we learn from their deep dive into their company’s data? Anything surprising? Actually, what the report confirms is what we’ve been hearing for some time now: the iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.
Facebook Goes International: Sees Impressive Growth Rates in Africa and Asia
According to data compiled by O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook’s active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network. With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook’s current growth.
Nobody is Making Money Online from Susan Boyle Video (Yet)
Unless you lived in an exceptionally dark cave in the last two weeks, you probably weren’t able to escape the Susan Boyle phenomenon. According to some metrics, over 100 million people have watched the immaculately edited video of the ‘frumpy’ 47-year-old’s performance on Britain’s Got Talent (BGT) by now. While this is most definitely an interesting cultural phenomenon, the Times this week also reports that neither ITV, the network that shows BGT, nor YouTube have really been able to directly profit from this huge hit because the network and YouTube have been arguing about the terms of their advertising agreement.
Jimmy Wales: Social Web Marketing – Good for Some, Not for All
According to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, there are too many Indians and not enough Chiefs in the world of Web 2.0 marketing. “There is a lot of advice about how brands should be interacting [online],” he said in a keynote presentation at Ad:Tech San Francisco this week. “But, unless your brand is information dense, this highly interactive marketing is both expensive and useless.” The good news however, is that communities offer the best bang for your buck in this miserable economy and Wales sees return on investment (ROI) as an “incredible steal right now,” when it comes to consumer generated media.
Make Your Home Tweet Its Energy Use (Earth Day Project!)
Peter Troast, founder of Energy Circle, a company that sells energy-saving products, has created a new energy-monitoring system that sends his home’s energy usage stats to Twitter. Inspired by the open source power monitoring kit from Tweet-a-Watt, Troast’s system also sends his home’s energy data to the web, but it’s not in the form of once-a-day tweets like Tweet-a-Watt provides. Instead, his system uses a monitoring device called TED (The Energy Dectective) to create charts which are annotated by family members then tweeted for everyone to see. If you want to do the same for your home, we’ve got the info.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
A Word from Our Sponsors
We’d like to thank ReadWriteWeb’s sponsors, without whom we couldn’t bring you all these stories every week!
- Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
- Expensd, tracks your expenses for free.
- Web 3.0 Conference, semantic web and linked data, May 19-20 NYC
- Semantic Technology Conference, the future of the Web, IT, search, business.
- Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
- TaxACT lets you file your taxes online.
- Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
- Socialtext brings you 5 Best Practices for Enterprise Collaboration Success
- Calais brings semantic functionality into your website or app.
- Aplus provides web hosting services for small business hosting needs.
- MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
- Eurekster is a custom social search portal.
- SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.
ReadWriteHire
Who’s Getting Hired in Tech? Q1 Numbers from ReadWriteHire
Rapleaf’s Auren Hoffman says that hiring is harder in a downturn because the noise goes up but the quality stays the same. That’s a pretty strong statement to make, but if it’s true then it’s all the more remarkable to see which companies are making hires now.
Our site ReadWriteHire covers new hires in tech and new media. We’ve just published our aggregate numbers for the first 3 months of 2009. Who’s hiring? Software and IT companies, social media and social networking companies and marketing and advertising firms.
SUBSCRIBE TO READWRITEHIRE FOR THE LATEST NEWS ON JOB HIRES IN TECH
Web Products
Now You Can Change What Google Says About You
Google me? I’ll Google you! Google has become the de facto public record these days but most people remain in relative obscurity there and/or fear of what past indiscretions Google will expose to people who search for them. This week Google released a product, called Google Me, that aims to change all of that. For a price – though not a monetary one.
GeoCities Closure Signals End of an Era – Will Others Survive on Freemium Model?
Yahoo has announced that its website creation service GeoCities, which it acquired for $4.5 billion in 1999, will close later this year. Existing customers are being encouraged to "upgrade" to Yahoo! Web Hosting, which offers a site-building service and a personalized web address. The closing of GeoCities is the end of an era. Last June, we profiled the rise of “GeoCities 2.0″ services, i.e. website creation tools for the Social Web. Many of them will attempt to pick up GeoCities’ customers. Although, as Yahoo! itself indicated in its closure message, website building is mostly a ‘feature’ nowadays rather than a separate product. So, is this a viable business now for the likes of Weebly and Yola?
No Doubt About It – Oprah Brought Lots of New Users to Twitter
Oprah’s well publicized first tweet last Friday was definitely a boon for Twitter. According to Hitwise, 37% of all visits to Twitter last Friday were from new visitors, and Twitter’s overall share of U.S. Internet visits increased 24% on Friday. It is important to note, though, that Twitter, being the new and growing service that it is, usually gets about 32% new visitors every day, which definitely puts these numbers into perspective. Hitwise, however, also notes that Facebook’s ratio of new visitors was only 8% in March.
Sunlight Foundation Funds Six “Apps for America”
Chips, dip and government data are everyone’s three favorite things to take to a party, right? Ok, so government data is actually quite boring on its own, but in these exciting times of democratized programming, government data can be turned into some pretty exciting mashups. That’s just what the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation is aiming to make more possible with its work to make government and related data more available with its new Apps for America contest. More than 40 open source applications and websites making use of that data entered the contest and this week the six fabulous winners were announced. We’ve got a five minute screencast tour of the winners below.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Enterprise
IT Consolidation Blues: CHOI Does Not Spell Choice
Oracle is buying Sun, and bankers are looking forward to the next wave of consolidation. To somebody who remembers the innovation and excitement of earlier enterprise hardware and software start-ups, this is a bit gloomy. CHOI (Cisco, HP, Oracle, IBM) does not spell “choice” for buyers, employees, or investors. Choose your behemoth. If consolidation means lower prices — and it will — buyers will be happy. But, it all sounds like cost-cutting, layoffs, and less innovation to me.
Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel, which will soon be getting a re-design.
SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL
That’s a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
As a technology news writer, you get pretty good at sizing up the potential of a new project or product pretty quickly. You think in terms of how the thing your looking at is a little like two other things you’ve seen before combined together. Or perhaps inspired by something, but with its own unique twist. And it is easy to get a little jaded, quickly cubby-holing something new just because it acts like something already out there.
I admit to doing just that when I first visited the 3deep web site.
Luckily, I was invited to talk to the CEO, Gary Griffiths, and Director of Product Marketing Henry ‘Hank’ Nothhaft Jr. (Twitter), of LiteScape Technologies, developers of the 3deep product. For the next hour, I was able to get a really good idea about their innovative new product. And although it isn’t out in beta to play with yet, it is definitely worth learning about.
Sponsor
LiteScape has its roots in building software infrastructure for programmable digital PBX and VoIP telephones. If you have ever worked in a call center, you know that a lot of power has been imbued into these innocuous little devices, from keeping track of the activity of the phone’s user, providing detailed metrics on every aspect of a call, to intelligently assisting the user with call routing and and conferencing. If you think of a call center as a living being, the PBX would be its nervous system, informing every other part of the organization with instant knowledge on how the business is doing. That sort of deep, real-time knowledge is valuable.
The idea with 3deep started simply, what if the beneficial aspects of this PBX technology could be applied to the fast-growing ecosystem of smart mobile phones? In a business environment, you might want your team to know vital information – like where you are, if you are busy, who you are meeting with this afternoon – and be able to share that without having to constantly be updating info in your Smartphone all the time. It’s already there anyway, on a call, calendar, contact list, GPS. It is almost like your phone is waiting for an application to tie that information together and share it (or as much of it as you care to) with your team.
The platform is based on two key technologies, what they call a presence platform (essentially a technology to passively ascertain status, availability, and location) together with a mobile address book which sends and receives that information with other team members. The mobile phone platforms that will be supported at launch are Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android and, of course, the iPhone.
Features of the 3deep platform will include active sharing of location, calendar (either free/busy or full), and phone state (on the phone or idle). Groups will control how much information is shared with group members. Also, the ‘active sharing’ hours can be set so that, say after work, you are not disturbed or giving your location away.
An example of how this synergistic platform can be utilized comes from Gary, he describes a recent situation where he had to contact the companies VP of advertising with a high-priority issue. The VP was on the phone when Gary looked him up in 3deep, so he told the software to let him know the moment the VP was off the phone. Within minutes the two were in contact and the issue was handled. Such alerts can be set not only for free status, but also on GPS location.. say if you wanted to meet a coworker on a work site and wanted to be alerted when they arrived.
What really gives this technology huge potential though, is that it is being developed for deployment on all the major Smartphone platforms simultaneously. Gary and Henry said all their key foundational technologies are working on each of the supported phones, with some exceptions on the iPhone which places strict limits on what can be running in the background. However, using the software on an iPhone works the same way as on other Smartphones.
3deep is still in private alpha, so unfortunately we can’t give you a beta code or technical preview yet. But we were assured we would be contacted once the beta began so that we can invite people to help test it. In the meantime, there is a contact form you can fill out for more information.
Combining two pretty great ideas in a way that is all kinds of illegal in the US, the China-produced NokiPhone N3000i looks to be a pretty straightforward iPhone ripoff with bonus N95-esque dual slider capabilities. The GSM smartphone’s got 3.2-inch QVGA screen, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, dual SIM support, microSD slot, and video recording capabilities. Price of admission is $129 right now, which according to chinagrabber is a hefty discount from its $400 MSRP. Your move, NOKLA.
[Via PMP Today]
Filed under: Cellphones
Keepin’ it real fake, part CXCIX: NokiPhone N3000i dual slider is one part N95, two parts iPhone, and six parts win originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments