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| Google Web Elements brings Google's greatest hits to your site
May 27, 2009 at 8:59 pm
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|   Google launched a new feature called Google Web Elements today at its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco...
 Nearly everyone around the TechCrunch office is a Mac user, and we've been waiting rather impatiently for Google to port over its Chrome browser since its debut (for Windows only) last September.  Google and Salesforce.com said today at the Google I/O Developer Conference that their platforms as a service will talk with one another. Using the libraries provided by Force.  StatPlot is the newest project of sports statistic aggregator StatSheet and you're likely to enjoy it whether you're a sports fan or not. The site makes it easy to assemble attractive, dynamic charts for sports statistics in minutes.  After a short period of downtime this morning, which had me up in arms since I use the service on an everyday basis, personalized portal Netvibes has rolled out a new feature: Multiple Personalized Pages.  At their GoogleGoogle reviews I/O event today, the search giant launched a new product called Web Elements aimed at making it easier for web developers to be able to embed Google products on their pages.
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| Philippe Kahn's Fullpower demos motion-sensing ear-piece
May 27, 2009 at 8:42 pm
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|  Philippe Kahn showed off a motion-sensing ear piece at the AllThingsD conference today. For the past five years, Kahn's startup Fullpower Technologies has been developing a system that can track your motion. They've now built the accelerometer-based technology into a ear piece that serves as a cell phone headset.  At All Things D, my friends at Fullpower did a demo of a accelerometer-equipped headset that can pick up a call by tapping it in a different way than you tap a regular headset.  Philippe Kahn's history of entrepreneurship is nearly as old as the PC itself. He developed software for the Micral N, one of the earliest commercial personal computers, back in 1973.  LG's certainly been known to dabble in the third-dimension, and while we're still waiting for it to ship those "one or two" 3D TVs this year, at least we're confident that it's getting closer.
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| AT&T begs customers to stick around for faster network
May 27, 2009 at 8:40 pm
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|  The cruelest, truest moment in iPhone: The Music Video is when New York Times gadget guru David Pogue sings, "So what if it's AT&T?" A bit of audio doctoring mangled Pogue's "AT&T" in sputtering mimicry of a bad connection. My own AT&T iPhone fails to connect in many areas where my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry never hiccups.  Immersion (known for creative input experiences) demoed a fairly interesting new haptic experiment its working on -- a virtual, iPhone-like keyboard that not only responds with sound and vibration...  Electronic Arts is launching its Sims 3 game across as many platforms as it can next week. But one of the most interesting to watch will be the game's debut on the iPhone.  They start as a mild tremor at first: rumors of an Apple Phone and rumblings about Web 2.0, whispers about touch interfaces and flash storage. Then, in what seems like an instant...  There are already a few services that make it easy for you to share links to videos on Twitter, including TwitVid.com and TwitVid.io, but they're getting a serious new competitor today: ImageShack.
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| Good Technology buys Intercasting to strengthen mobile email
May 27, 2009 at 8:36 pm
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| Good Technology, provider of mobile email services, has bought Intercasting, maker of cell phone software that aggregates and serves social networking data, to strengthen its offerings and challenge Research in Motion, the leader in the space. In particular, the company hopes to become more competitive in the mobile email space.  Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz sat on the hot seat in an interview with Kara Swisher at the AllThingsD conference. Bartz managed to deflect and disarm tough questions with her sense of humor.  2:52PM Walt: AT&T says they're doubling the speed. I'm not trying to cause a fight between you and AT&T. Does that mean I'll be able to use it like a laptop? 2:52PM...  Thanks to the emergence of superphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and the T-Mobile G-1, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for mobile data services.  Semantic ad technology provider Peer39 is announcing the closing of its Series C round to the tune of $10.5M, pushing the total amount of funding raised to over $22M....  When it comes to social networking applications available on the iPhone, there's more than enough to go around. In fact, you could probably fill up all nine available pages with apps in this category alone.
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| Microsoft fortifies Windows 7 kernel with overrun buster
May 27, 2009 at 8:34 pm
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|  Microsoft engineers have fortified the latest version of Windows with a feature designed to make it significantly harder for attackers to exploit bugs that may be lurking deep inside the operating system. The safeguard is called safe unlinking, and it's been dropped into a part of the Windows 7 kernel that allocates and deallocates chunks of memory. Safe unlinking performs a series of checks before entries are removed to make sure attackers aren't trying to exploit the operating system using what's known as a pool overrun.  Here's an exhaustive roundup of all the changes we've noticed between Windows 7 build 7000 and Windows 7 build 7100. Screenshots included. Earlier this month, Microsoft made the Windows 7 Release Candidate build publically available.  Windows: Service Pack 2 is officially available for download, bringing better Wi-Fi and BlueTooth connectivity, processor compatibility, native Blu-Ray support, and faster search to Windows Vista.  How slow are government agencies at adopting new technologies? So slow that the U.S. Army is planning a major upgrade of its information systems - to Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows Vista OS.  One step forward, one step back: just as we were getting ready to celebrate Microsoft's decision to remove the three-app limit from Windows 7 Starter Edition, we're hearing...
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| D7 Interview: Mark Cuban
May 27, 2009 at 8:33 pm
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|   Mark Cuban was lucky enough to make billions on Internet video during the Web 1.0 bubble, and smart enough to cash out before it burst. He's spent a bunch of that money on high-profile purchases like a basketball team and a Gulfstream. But much of his investment and energy since then has been directed… away from Web video, and toward conventional video, in the form of movies and television. Cuban's portfolio companies make movies and television shows, and distribute them to movie theaters and television sets.  Facebook held a conference call at to announce it sold 1.96% of the company for $200 million to Russian tech firm Digital Sky Technologies, setting the startup's valuation at $10 billion.  The tech world is an interesting one when it comes to companies making money. Some at the top like Microsoft, Apple and Google are raking in billions in profits every year.  Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz says the company will launch an application store for Java software. Sun hopes to cash in on its large Java install base by making the store accessible through the Java update system...
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| Immersion demos new multitouch, haptic keyboard at D7
May 27, 2009 at 8:30 pm
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|  Immersion (known for creative input experiences) demoed a fairly interesting new haptic experiment its working on -- a virtual, iPhone-like keyboard that not only responds with sound and vibration, but some kind of feedback that recreates the feeling of actually moving your fingers across a keyboard... Electronic Arts is launching its Sims 3 game across as many platforms as it can next week. But one of the most interesting to watch will be the game's debut on the iPhone.  Here's a first look at Sirius XM's forthcoming iPhone app, culled from a PowerPoint stack published in SEC documents today. CEO Mel Karmazin presented the slides to investors at Wednesday's shareholder meeting. There are already a few services that make it easy for you to share links to videos on Twitter, including TwitVid.com and TwitVid.io, but they're getting a serious new competitor today: ImageShack.
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| IBM goes judicial over second strategic exec exit
May 27, 2009 at 8:27 pm
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| IBM has apparently moved to block a second strategically important employee from joining a systems competitor. The giant is reportedly suing to stop former mergers-and-acquisitions chief David Johnson from joining Dell, the world's joint second largest provider of PCs. Dell dismissed "characterizations" of his role at the company as speculative, adding it respects the trade secrets and intellectual property of others." Johnson is a 27-year IBM veteran. Immersion (known for creative input experiences) demoed a fairly interesting new haptic experiment its working on -- a virtual, iPhone-like keyboard that not only responds with sound and vibration... Electronic Arts is launching its Sims 3 game across as many platforms as it can next week. But one of the most interesting to watch will be the game's debut on the iPhone. They start as a mild tremor at first: rumors of an Apple Phone and rumblings about Web 2.0, whispers about touch interfaces and flash storage. Then, in what seems like an instant... There are already a few services that make it easy for you to share links to videos on Twitter, including TwitVid.com and TwitVid.io, but they're getting a serious new competitor today: ImageShack.
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| Zooming in on extrasolar planets and hunting for oceans
May 27, 2009 at 8:14 pm
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|   Just like the moon and other planets have phases due to their orientation relative to the sun, planets orbiting distant stars have phases, and we've now observed these for the first time. Separately, researchers are demonstrating that similar principles can be used to find oceans and continents on other planets.  Remember all those LCDs LG flooded us with at CES earlier this year? Another set of them is shipping, the LH55 models in sizes ranging from 37- to 55-inches. These don't...  This week, we revisit some classics from your (and your grandfather's) childhood, iPhone browsing gets upgraded, and I play what it probably the best 3D multi-animal hunting game available for the iPhone.  At what appeared to be a totally wild and awesome search for Wheel of Fortune contestants in a mall, Vanna White confessed on camera her deep love of gadgets, particularly her excitement about Slingbox and the new Slingbox app for the iPhone.
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| Time-warp to 2004, pay $4,500 and get Twitter.com
May 27, 2009 at 8:12 pm
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|  For the entrepreneur out there building a time machine, here's a way to put your device to profitable use. Go back to 2004 and buy the domain Twitter.com for $4,500. A reader recently pointed me to the Internet Archive entries for the site - here's the domain for sale in all its latent glory. Twitter, of course, didn't even start with its current name...  Another Twitter scandal, this one involving Germany's presidential election: FT: The internet communication craze that has swept the world has caused a political furore in Germany...  Palm's official Twitter account just tweeted about testing out yfrog, the image / video sharing site -- and as you might expect from a manufacturer, it wants to share pictures snapped with its own equipment.
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| Sergey Brin On Newspapers, Breaking "Page's Law" & Bing As Name Of Microsoft's New Search Engine
May 27, 2009 at 8:06 pm
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|  Google cofounder Sergey Brin turned up at a session for the press at the Google I/O event today and took questions on Google's relations with newspapers, cited hopes of breaking "Page's Law" of software sluggishness and even one about what he thought about the expected name of Microsoft's new search engine, Bing. Below, a summary of his remarks, along with some video.  If you're a serious search hound who often clicks through to Wikipedia pages that Google digs up, then you'll love Googlepedia. This free Firefox add-on splits your Google page in half: On the left are your regular Web results...  Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told the All Things D conference crowd she'd be happy to do a search deal with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on three conditions: “If there’s boatloads of money...  It's been a while since rumblings of Kumo, Microsoft's codename for its new searching engine offering, made the rounds. From the looks of things, that's about to change… Big time.  Microsoft (MSFT) will spend $100 million re-branding search engine as Bing. The TV, radio and print campaign from agency JWT will try to persuade consumers that Google (GOOG) doesn't work as well as they think.
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| New Intel Core i7 CPUs show up unannounced
May 27, 2009 at 8:00 pm
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|  Intel's Core i7 has become somewhat of a mainstay in the most recent wave of gaming rigs, but it's been quite awhile (in processor years, anyway) since we've seen any new siblings join the launch gang. We'd heard faint whispers that a new crew was set to steal the stage on May 31st, and those rumors are looking all the more likely now that a few heretofore unheard of chips have appeared online. The 3.06GHz Core i7 950 is shown over at PCs For Everyone with 8MB of shared L3 cache and a $649 price tag, and it's expected that said chip will replace the aging Core i7 940.  Okay, so maybe this isn't actually for your iPod, per se, but Idea International's colorful audio afros just seem to click with Apple's vivid line of shuffles and nanos.  It's hard to say if our harmless threats influenced the MSRP here, but either way, we'll take it. MSI has finally (finally!) come clean with a set price on its succulent X-Slim X340...  With more and more evidence pointing to Apple's 2009 iPhone lineup consisting of three distinct models, the Royal Bank of Canada is the second investment firm to predict...
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| MySpace CEO: Google Deal Less Than Half Our Revenue
May 27, 2009 at 8:00 pm
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| An interesting exchange in this afternoon's interview with Owen Van Natta, CEO of MySpace, and Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. Asked about MySpace's $900 deal with Google (GOOG), Van Natta said it is important, but not that important.  A couple of years ago, MySpace was the hottest thing on the Web. But that was a couple of years ago. Now the social network has gone cold: It is losing its audience to Facebook and other sites...  Microsoft's new iPod competitor, Zune HD, enjoys speculation, Google talks about how your browser is your computer when HTML 5 goes widespread, and AT&T speeds up their 3G network.  After learning that everyone who attended the Google I/O conference was getting a free Android phone, were you upset that you weren't here? Well I have good news. But it will cost you.  Online advertising server software maker OpenX Technologies today announced a $10.4 million third round of venture funding, bringing total investment in the company to nearly $31 million since mid-2007.
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| ATamp;T may have influenced citeAmerican Idol/cite final vote
May 27, 2009 at 7:58 pm
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| Telecom giant AT&T stands accused of attacking the very foundations of American suffrage and decency, after allegedly tainting the results of the country's largest democratic election - voting for American Idol. The New York Times has reported that AT&T - one of the show's largest corporate sponsors to the US edition of Pop Idol - helped ease series winner Kris Allen to victory by providing free text messaging and "power texting" lessons at parties organized by Allen fans in his home state of Arkansas.  OK, just because I live in California doesn't mean that I am a fan of the eye-liner-wearing Adam Lambert, who lost out last week to Kris Allen of Arkansas in the American Idol finale.  Fellow iPhone users may occasionally grumble about AT&T's network coverage, but this week the company stands accused of a much more serious issue: swaying the American Idol result towards an undeserved win for Kris Allen.
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| Jon Miller and Owen Van Natta
May 27, 2009 at 7:49 pm
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| A couple of years ago, MySpace was the hottest thing on the Web. But that was a couple of years ago. Now the social network has gone cold: It is losing its audience to Facebook and other sites, and may well lose a very lucrative search deal from Google (GOOG). Fixing MySpace is the chief priority of Jon Miller, the former AOL boss who was brought on as News Corp.'s chief digital officer in March. About a month after that, Miller brought on former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta and a new management team to run MySpace, displacing the site's founders. Thanks to the emergence of superphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and the T-Mobile G-1, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for mobile data services.  Is Google SkyNet? In A Word: Yes [FastCompany] Now Twitter is bad for newspapers, too [Miami Herald] Spending on ads inside of videogames will reach $1 billion by 2014...  There have already been more tech IPOs in 2009 than in 2008 [WSJ]TechCrunch still says Last.fm gave away user-data. Last.fm still denies it. [PaidContent]Google exec says YouTube costs are lower and its revenues are higher than Hulu's.  Is Meebo moving into email? The web-based chat service already centralizes instant messages from AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk, Facebook, MySpace, and more. Folding in emails from different accounts across the Web is a logical next step.
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| American Idol results: Adam Lambert was robbed!
May 27, 2009 at 7:48 pm
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| OK, just because I live in California doesn't mean that I am a fan of the eye-liner-wearing Adam Lambert, who lost out last week to Kris Allen of Arkansas in the American Idol finale. But you have to love a good conspiracy theory. Lambert was the favorite going into the show, in spite of his ambiguous sexuality compared to the homespun, folksy and much more mainstream Allen. Allen himself was flabbergasted when Ryan Seacrest announced the winner. I wrote a "sore loser" post about how it might be possible that crowdsourcing failed us and 100 million votes might have gotten it wrong.  Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is expected to take the stage tomorrow at the D: All Things D conference and debut Redmond's new search brand, codenamed Kumo. No one knows... Fellow iPhone users may occasionally grumble about AT&T's network coverage, but this week the company stands accused of a much more serious issue: swaying the American Idol result towards an undeserved win for Kris Allen.  Microsoft's planning to relaunch its Live search engine under the name "Bing," a recent report suggests. Bing will debut with a massive ad campaign costing upward of $100 million...
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| Germany Gripped By Twittergate, As Presidential Election Results Are Secretly Tweeted
May 27, 2009 at 7:40 pm
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|  Another Twitter scandal, this one involving Germany's presidential election: FT: The internet communication craze that has swept the world has caused a political furore in Germany, where the country’s parliamentary elders will on Thursday launch a probe into twittering MPs who broke decades of tradition and leaked news of the president’s re-election. Palm's official Twitter account just tweeted about testing out yfrog, the image / video sharing site -- and as you might expect from a manufacturer, it wants to share pictures snapped with its own equipment.  The race to be one of the Palm Pre's first Twitter apps is already packed. That's according to Palm (PALM) developer community manager Chuq Von Rospach, who is sifting through applications for early access to the Palm Mojo software developers kit.  There is a heated competition taking place for which Twitter/Facebook desktop client is the fairest of them all. We've written about about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop...
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| Video Interview: Biz Talks Twitter Business Models
May 27, 2009 at 7:37 pm
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|  I caught up with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone today on video at the AllThingsD conference to ask him what business models might emerge for the company. In the video above, he talks about different things Twitter can do to help marketers connect with consumers, such as selling verified accounts (something he mentioned onstage last night). But there is is a broader approach which he also hinted at last night: Another Twitter scandal, this one involving Germany's presidential election: FT: The internet communication craze that has swept the world has caused a political furore in Germany...  Just as her promotion to social editor was being announced this morning, Jennifer Preston posted her first tweet. She introduced herself and asked "How should @nytimes be using Twitter?" At that point...  As many of us know, the usefulness of Twitter lies in the user's ability to find, refine, and engage with a network. Most of the invalid complaints about the service revolve around signal-to-noise ratios; of course you...
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| Cisco touts 'self as Unified Computer System pioneer
May 27, 2009 at 7:33 pm
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| Cisco Systems has been talking about its Unified Computing System, code-named California, so much for months now that it is hard to remember sometimes this mega product is still not shipping. Turns out Cisco is its own first beta test customer, and the company's IT brass Wednesday was talking about its own plans for deployment.  Handheld PC pioneer OQO appears to be dead, or nearly so. But it's not just OQO that's going away—the MID as an idea looks dead too, and I suspect that even Intel knows it.  Navigation devices are everywhere and just keep getting better and better thanks to the 3D maps provided by the likes of Tele Atlas (owned by TomTom) and NAVTEQ (owned by Nokia).  Rich Miller over at Data Center Knowledge just blew my mind with his list of the number of servers various companies run. Spurred by the news that Rackspace has 50,000 of them...
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| Palm Pre camera used, results shared at long last
May 27, 2009 at 7:28 pm
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| Palm's official Twitter account just tweeted about testing out yfrog, the image / video sharing site -- and as you might expect from a manufacturer, it wants to share pictures snapped with its own equipment. For the entrepreneur out there building a time machine, here's a way to put your device to profitable use. Go back to 2004 and buy the domain Twitter.com for $4,500. A... Another Twitter scandal, this one involving Germany's presidential election: FT: The internet communication craze that has swept the world has caused a political furore in Germany... There is a heated competition taking place for which Twitter/Facebook desktop client is the fairest of them all. We've written about about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop...
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| Virtual Chat Room TinyChat Adds Video Conferencing And Screen Sharing
May 27, 2009 at 2:57 pm
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|  TinyChat, the simple, free web-based chat room we wrote about here, is now adding video conferencing and screen sharing to its list of features. Once you create a chat room on TinyChat's site, TinyChat will generate a unique URL that you can share with whoever you choose to invite to the virtual chat room. When users click on the link, they will enter the interface and will be able to input messages, change their usernames and enable video and audio conferencing. Powered by Adobe Flash, the video conferencing feature allows up to 12 different users in the chat room.  A report released by PLoS Biology traces the history of the vaccine-autism scare in the US, and suggests that both historic accident and poor public relations efforts...  Today during its keynote address during Google I/O, Google showed off its Latitude location-based service running on the iPhone. This is notable because so far, Latitude hasn't been available on the huge popular smartphone.  Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is expected to take the stage tomorrow at the D: All Things D conference and debut Redmond's new search brand, codenamed Kumo. No one knows...  Microsoft pulled a very weird move of announcing the Zune HD yesterday while scheduling the release date two seasons (summer, then fall) away. But there's a reason: the E3 gaming conference is next week.
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| Pics: Google Latitude On The iPhone — But It's Not A Native App
May 27, 2009 at 2:50 pm
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| Today during its keynote address during Google I/O, Google showed off its Latitude location-based service running on the iPhone. This is notable because so far, Latitude hasn't been available on the huge popular smartphone. Instead, not surprisingly, Google opted to focus on getting it running on Android. But it's coming, soon, with the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software this summer.  Google Earth has proven to be a powerful and useful tool for combing the Earth. The virtual-earth application has helped solve a plane crash mystery, was used for a marijuana bust and lets you explore Disneyland Paris. Thanks to the emergence of superphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and the T-Mobile G-1, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for mobile data services.
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| Android 2.0 "Donut" features demoed at Google I/O
May 27, 2009 at 2:41 pm
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|  We're still trying to get used to the overwhelming joy of having Cupcake installed on our G1s, but it's full steam ahead over at Google where engineers are already slaving away on the Donut branch that'll eventually come to be known as Android 2.  Today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Vic Gundotra, the VP Engineering for Google has a special surprise saved for the end of the show: A free Android G1 for everyone in the audience.  We're here at Google I/O, the search giant's annual developer event in San Francisco. The first day's keynote address is happening right now, and we'll be covering it live. Find my notes below.  New search engine Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now. Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query.
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| The Mystery of the Zune HD
May 27, 2009 at 2:40 pm
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|  Microsoft pulled a very weird move of announcing the Zune HD yesterday while scheduling the release date two seasons (summer, then fall) away. But there's a reason: the E3 gaming conference is next week. Why should that matter? Because Microsoft left a lot of things in the unsaid pile. Here's a quick recap of what we do know:  Microsoft has announced the Zune HD, a multitouch device with a 16:9 OLED screen, a Web browser, and HD radio support. We dig through the details and talk with Microsoft about why the Zune "platform" will soon be as important as the Zune "device.  Its official, folks. The Zune HD is real and is slated to drop this fall. All the rumored specs are here - 3.3 inch 480 x 272 OLED capacitive touchscreen display, built-in HD Radio receiver...  Get ready for Zune HD versus iPod Touch in a battle set for this fall when Microsoft will take the wraps off of its first touchscreen portable media player (PMP), the Zune HD.  Recent rumours that Microsoft has been secretly working on a new Zune Portable Media Player (PMP) were true, because the firm's officially unveiled the range's latest model.
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| Seminal password tool rises from Symantec ashes
May 27, 2009 at 2:34 pm
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| More than three years after Symantec unceremoniously pulled the plug on L0phtcrack, the seminal tool for auditing and cracking passwords is back with a set of new capabilities. Starting Wednesday, L0phtcrack 6 is available from the same team of hackers who introduced it to the world a decade ago. The program was pulled from the market in late 2005 shortly after it was acquired by Symantec, presumably because its offensive capabilities didn't fit in with the company's portfolio of defensive products and services. A report released by PLoS Biology traces the history of the vaccine-autism scare in the US, and suggests that both historic accident and poor public relations efforts...  At the Google I/O conference for web developers, Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra highlighted five of the big improvements that he said Google is most excited about in in HTML 5...
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| mCubed's RipNAS Statement now available in Europe
May 27, 2009 at 2:29 pm
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|  mCubed's RipNAS Statement may be unique, but it isn't apt to be widely adopted -- at least not with price points like this. Hailed as the first SSD-based CD ripping NAS device, the product is also available in a traditional HDD form, though both handle automatic ripping, NAS duties and media streaming...  HP's got more additions to its Mini netbook lineup coming your way with the 1101 and 110 XP / Mi. All three models sport a 10.1-inch widescreen LED, autosync software for easier connectivity to your primary PC, and the standard 1.  Ah, Spring. The season of vacations, beach attire and VAIO updates. We already heard that Sony was giving its VAIO P netbook a dose of Windows XP and an optional 256GB SSD, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.  This one's been on the books since September of 2007. Now it looks like the first retail product based on Intel's Canmore System on Chip (SoC), aka the CE 3100, will...  MSI's Wind U115, the huggable, lovable, notable, and ultraportable hybrid SSD/HDD is now available to faithful readers in the UK and Japan. It's been spotted making the rounds on the Interwebz in the £450 - £500 (approx.
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| Google toys with plug-in free YouTube
May 27, 2009 at 2:25 pm
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| Google I/O Google has mocked up a version of YouTube built around the HTML5 video tag, playing mini-movies inside a browser sans plug-ins. Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra demonstrated the mock-up during a keynote speech this morning at the company's Google I/O developer conference in downtown San Francisco. But he stressed there are no definite plans to move YouTube to such an architecture. Today during its keynote address during Google I/O, Google showed off its Latitude location-based service running on the iPhone. This is notable because so far, Latitude hasn't been available on the huge popular smartphone.  After we reported that Time Warner's (TWX) board is supposedly meeting tomorrow to finalize plans for an AOL spin-off, a couple commenters came up with an interesting...  Windows only: Fresh on the heels of the Google Chrome 2.0 release comes an unofficial portable version from German blogger Caschy—who put together the last portable version of Chrome.  There's one big Web 2.0 question we'll never know the answer to: Could YouTube have survived on its own? There are a handful of industry-changing Web 2.0 names including MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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| Stop the presses! AP News for iPhone is a mess
May 27, 2009 at 2:25 pm
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|   My, my. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Associated Press has updated the AP News app for the iPhone and iPod touch. They took a mildly aggravating program and turned it into a mass of bugs, freezes and GUI mistakes. Let's start from the beginning. The iTunes store notified me that AP News 2...  According to a Both North Carolina and Virginia have or are hurrying to instate tax incentives for projects such as this one, which will cost around twice as much as what Google or Microsoft would typically invest in a data center.  This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia. The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store...  More supposed details are leaking out about the next version of Apple's 3.0 software update for the iPhone and iPod Touch set to be unveiled next month. The latest buzz, via the site Open Salon, is over direct downloads of TV shows and movies.
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| Apple offers free iPods, upgrades MacBook
May 27, 2009 at 2:22 pm
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| Apple has launched its annual buy-a-Mac, get-an-iPod Back to School program in the US, and confirmed to The Reg that the same program will be available in the UK from Thursday, May 28. The offer is open to college students and faculty and staff members at all grade levels. To get in on the giveway, qualifying folks will need to buy an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or Mac Pro (no Mac minis, sorry) and an iPod at the same time, then apply for a reimbursement of the iPod's purchase price. The full collection of fine print can be found here (PDF).  As college students across the country try to recover from the 2008/2009 school year, Apple has just kicked off its back to school promotion for the coming year. The deal is nothing new - buy a Mac...  Metrics firm Nielsen calculates the Web traffic numbers it reports to the public by closely following the activity of a subset of users and then extrapolating them to the size of the general population.  Mo'Minis, an Israeli-based startup that provides developers a platform to create mobile games and entertainment applications, has secured $1.5 million in Series A funding from BRM Capital.
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| 5 Things I Want to Know about Bing
May 27, 2009 at 2:19 pm
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|  Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is expected to take the stage tomorrow at the D: All Things D conference and debut Redmond's new search brand, codenamed Kumo. No one knows for sure if Microsoft will stick with the Kumo brand for its latest search effort or go with another title. Earlier this week, the name Bing started looking more likely than Kumo after AdAge on Monday released a report claiming Microsoft plans an $80-100 million advertising campaign to drill the name Bing into the minds of users everywhere. Microsoft's planning to relaunch its Live search engine under the name "Bing," a recent report suggests. Bing will debut with a massive ad campaign costing upward of $100 million...  You know you're at the D conference (hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of All Things D) when you're chilling in the lobby of the Four Seasons and Woz and his wife peel up on tandem Segways.  After we saw some rumors about this over the weekend, Facebook today confirmed that it will receive a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading Internet investment groups in Eastern Europe.
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| Google Web Elements: Add YouTube News and Google Comments to Your Blog
May 27, 2009 at 2:11 pm
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|   At their GoogleGoogle reviews I/O event today, the search giant launched a new product called Web Elements aimed at making it easier for web developers to be able to embed Google products on their pages. Essentially, Web Elements is a one-stop-shop for Google's product widgets, which until this point were often buried in odd places.  Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz is on stage at the WSJ's D7 conference right now. You can read John Paczkowski's live blog here, and we'll embed the video once it's up. But in case you're wondering, Bartz has already dropped an F-bomb on stage.  During today's Google I/O keynote, the company unveiled a new set of widgets collectively called Web Elements that are sure to spread across the web like wildfire. The widgets allow users to quickly integrate some of Google's most popular products... At the Google I/O conference for web developers, Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra highlighted five of the big improvements that he said Google is most excited about in in HTML 5...
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| Pricey Pro Tool Photo Frame Jazzes Up Images
May 27, 2009 at 2:10 pm
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|  When you want to add a bit of pizzazz to your photos, try one of neat tricks that pro photographers and scrapbookers use: put creative edges and frames around your pictures. OnOne Software's PhotoFrame ($160, 30-day free trial) 4.0 offers a nice variety of easy to apply borders, textures, frames and other edge effects.  DreamStream [App Store] is a new piece of software for the iPhone and iPod touch that gives you a personalized wireless portable picture frame. It can access photos you have on your phone...  Microsoft snuggled a little closer to its US movies-on-demand buddy Netflix on Wednesday by rolling the firm's streaming content into Windows Media Center. Netflix subscribers...  Microsoft is announcing today that its Windows Media Center can now show more than 12,000 movies and TV shows from Netflix's library of online video rentals. The videos...  Easily my favorite app on the Android platform is Imeem. It's simple, fast and powerful, allowing you to listen to a huge range of music for free. And now it's coming to the iPhone, we've learned.
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| Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz: We'll Sell Search To Microsoft If We Get "Boatloads of Money"
May 27, 2009 at 2:09 pm
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| A very brief update on the state of search talks between Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO): Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz acknowledges the companies are talking, but says she would only consider selling search for a very large sum. Specifically, "boatloads." Here's her quote, elicited during an interview at the D7 conference in Carlsbad, Calif. "If there's boatloads of money, and there's the right technology, and the information we would have to have, then yeah….it's that simple." Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz is on stage at the WSJ's D7 conference right now. You can read John Paczkowski's live blog here, and we'll embed the video once it's up. But in case you're wondering, Bartz has already dropped an F-bomb on stage.  Yahoo, "frankly, could use a little management." Uttering those words during a conference call to discuss her appointment as CEO, Carol Bartz ushered in a new era at the Internet's perennial underachiever.
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| Unravelling the history of the vaccine-autism scare
May 27, 2009 at 2:09 pm
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| A report released by PLoS Biology traces the history of the vaccine-autism scare in the US, and suggests that both historic accident and poor public relations efforts on behalf of medical authorities have left a significant chunk of the US trusting personal anecdote instead of scientific analysis. In the span of less than a decade, the public went from being blissfully unaware of thimerosal, the mercury-based preservative that was used in a number of vaccines, to a place where death threats against vaccine advocates are now issued with frightening regularity... Today during its keynote address during Google I/O, Google showed off its Latitude location-based service running on the iPhone. This is notable because so far, Latitude hasn't been available on the huge popular smartphone. TinyChat, the simple, free web-based chat room we wrote about here, is now adding video conferencing and screen sharing to its list of features. Once you create a chat room on TinyChat's site... Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is expected to take the stage tomorrow at the D: All Things D conference and debut Redmond's new search brand, codenamed Kumo. No one knows... Microsoft pulled a very weird move of announcing the Zune HD yesterday while scheduling the release date two seasons (summer, then fall) away. But there's a reason: the E3 gaming conference is next week.
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| Google opens Java-soaked cloud to world+dog
May 27, 2009 at 2:08 pm
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| Google I/O Google's Java-fied App Engine is now open to world+dog. In early April, the company added the Java runtime to its App Engine - a (semi-)free service that lets you build and host web apps on Google's very own cloud distributed infrastructure - but it was only available to 10,000 of the web's most eager Java coders. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz says the company will launch an application store for Java software. Sun hopes to cash in on its large Java install base by making the store accessible through the Java update system...  Josh Catone is a writer, editor, and entrepreneur from Providence, Rhode Island. He is a social media enthusiast and the founder of the web's largest Ruby on Rails community, Rails Forum.  New search engine WolframAlpha launched this weekend to high praise and traffic-as well as the obligatory comparisons to Google (NSDQ: GOOG). But it's not the first new search engine to surge coming out of the gate.  There's no official announcement (yet), but Google tells Search Engine Land that it's made several improvements under the hood of Google Blog Search. In an email conversation...
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| Ubisoft closes a year of expansion and profits for game business
May 27, 2009 at 2:08 pm
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|  Ubisoft reported fiscal year results with good sales growth and a decent profit despite the recession. For the year ended March 31, the French game publisher reported sales of $1.47 billion, up 18.4 percent from $1.3 billion a year earlier. Net income was $95.6 million, down 37 percent from $152 million a year earlier...  Throwing a curve ball, Curt Schilling's 38 Studios acquired game developer Big Huge Games today for an undisclosed price from game publisher THQ. That's a bit of a shift for 38 Studios, which was founded by former Boston Red Sox pitcher Schilling.  It's not all that easy for a video game publisher to diversify away from good-old-fashioned-street-violence-racing-mayhem. Take-Two Interactive Software reported its results...  Conservative political pundit Tucker Carlson is planning to launch a political news competitor to the Huffington Post, reports The Hill today. The site will be called TheDailyCaller.
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| Yahoo's Bartz Drops F-Bomb At D7!
May 27, 2009 at 2:05 pm
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| Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz is on stage at the WSJ's D7 conference right now. You can read John Paczkowski's live blog here, and we'll embed the video once it's up. But in case you're wondering, Bartz has already dropped an F-bomb on stage. In a discussion with Kara Swisher about whether Bartz is too old to understand the Internet, Bartz leaned in to Kara and said, "f--- you." Much applause, says AllThingsD's Peter Kafka. Yahoo, "frankly, could use a little management." Uttering those words during a conference call to discuss her appointment as CEO, Carol Bartz ushered in a new era at the Internet's perennial underachiever.  Microsoft, according to some, is having success with its Laptop Hunter ad campaign. Personally, I think the ads are laughable at best and purposely misleading at worst.
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| Portable Chrome Updates with Chrome 2.0's Speed Improvements
May 27, 2009 at 2:00 pm
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|  Windows only: Fresh on the heels of the Google Chrome 2.0 release comes an unofficial portable version from German blogger Caschy—who put together the last portable version of Chrome. Like before, you can simply extract the setup file to a folder on your drive and run the ChromeLoader executable to launch the regular portable application, or IncognitoChromeLoader... Today at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Vic Gundotra, the VP Engineering for Google has a special surprise saved for the end of the show: A free Android G1 for everyone in the audience. Thanks to the emergence of superphones like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and the T-Mobile G-1, we have seen a steady increase in the demand for mobile data services.  I'm a little surprised that Microsoft is rolling out newish functionality on Live Search given that the Kumo launch is immanent. But the Live Search blog announced that sports stats and scores will appear in a "one box" like presentation when events...
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| 86 Iconic Images Ruined With Technology
May 27, 2009 at 2:00 pm
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|  For this week's Photoshop Contest, I asked you to alter famous and iconic photos by placing technology where it doesn't belong. We have some absolutely awesome results, so onward! Check out your top three winners and then a gaggle of hilarious images in our Gallery of Champions. First Place — Born on Bord  The jury's still out as to whether technology M&A activity will pick up in the coming weeks, but here's one deal that's just been completed: Interactive voice recognition...  Ever since the Nintendo Wii took the video game market by storm with its motion-sensing controller, next-generation user interfaces have become a big attraction. Canesta is one of the companies trying to upstage the Wii with a 3-D vision system.  Publisher Conde Nast gets plenty of well-deserved criticism for its slow embrace of technology and the Web, but some of its individual titles do some interesting stuff.
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| Ingres and Red Hat unite to thwart Ellison's Sun love
May 27, 2009 at 2:00 pm
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| Open source database vendor Ingres might stand a better chance at taking on the enterprise with Oracle fixing to swallow developers' favorite MySQL along with Sun Microsystems. To help, it's begun forging alliances with open-source operating-system companies. Red Hat and Ingres have been sniffing around each other for the past few weeks. Ingres in mid-April said it was signing up as a charter member of the Open Source Channel Alliance created by Red Hat and Synnex, an IT distributor with more than 15,000 channel partners in the US, Canada, and Mexico, to drive open source solution sales.  Cheap valuations and glimmers of economic recovery are tempting cash-rich technology companies to seek acquisitions, and the second half of 2009 could see some steady dealmaking.  Open source developer Bruno Lowagie is about to set a remarkable precedent in the F/OSS world by restricting any government body in his and my home country, Belgium, to use any product that makes use of technology originally developed by him.
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| Intel's new Nehalem-EX CPUs rock servers with eight cores, 16 threads, infinite sex appeal
May 27, 2009 at 8:10 am
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|  What's that, you have an array of six-core CPUs in your rack? That is so last year. You're going to feel pretty foolish when all the cool admins start popping eight-core chips up in their closets this fall.  As soon as Nokia's IT teams - surely they have more than one - began rolling out the company's answer to Apple's iTunes store last night, Ovi began spewing error messages.  Last year was arguably "The Year of the Netbook." Unfortunately for AMD and NVIDIA, they were left on the sidelines as the netbook market picked up steam in 2008. The...  With Advancd Micro Devices admitting that it's getting ready to launch its "Istanbul" Opteron six-shooter, Intel can't afford to let AMD monopolize all the talk about x64 processors.
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| JMicron to debut new NAND flash controller at Computex, could cut SSD prices in half
May 27, 2009 at 7:44 am
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|   Taiwan-based chip manufacturer JMicron is reportedly preparing to make a splash next month at Computex 2009 when it debuts its latest breakthrough NAND flash controller. The JMF612, successor to the company's JMF602 pictured above, represents one of several technological advancements that could combine to substantially reduce Solid State Drive (SSD) pricing in the near future. The JMF612 is designed for a new breed of SSD drives that will be smaller, faster and cheaper to manufacture. This one's been on the books since September of 2007. Now it looks like the first retail product based on Intel's Canmore System on Chip (SoC), aka the CE 3100, will...  We've seen NVIDIA's Ion placed within a nettop, a motherboard, and now (at long last), a laptop. Yep, the machine you're inevitably peering at above (Lenovo's S12) is both the company's first 12.  Review From the outside, the Wind U115 looks like your average 10in Small, Cheap Computer - which makes the fact that MSI has managed to squeeze in not one but two storage systems all the more impressive.  We already got a pretty good look at MSI's new 12-inch Wind U200 at its debut at Computex in Taipei, but the folks at NewGadgets.de have had a chance to spend a bit more quality time with the not-quite-a-netbook...
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| Cameron wants techies to open up Parliament
May 27, 2009 at 7:38 am
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| Tory leader David Cameron would welcome some key technological changes to the way that Parliament makes its business available to the public. That is just one thrust of proposals for modernising government, which he set out in a speech to the Open University in Milton Keynes, yesterday. He expressed his concern that lack of interaction between government and those governed was leading to alienation from the political process, and was adamant that the system needs to reconnect through major structural change. What's that, you have an array of six-core CPUs in your rack? That is so last year. You're going to feel pretty foolish when all the cool admins start popping eight-core chips up in their closets this fall. Taiwan-based chip manufacturer JMicron is reportedly preparing to make a splash next month at Computex 2009 when it debuts its latest breakthrough NAND flash controller.  Is Google SkyNet? In A Word: Yes [FastCompany] Now Twitter is bad for newspapers, too [Miami Herald] Spending on ads inside of videogames will reach $1 billion by 2014...
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| No Erotic Services? No problem for prostitutes on craigslist
May 27, 2009 at 7:28 am
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|  Erotic Services is long gone and has been replaced by a new and improved "Adult" section. But what changes does this new section really bring? Not many, it turns out, as prostitutes are still listing their services there and elsewhere on Craigslist, just with more creative wording and less explicit pictures. The relative safety of their profession after the changes, however, may be up for debate.  Craigslist is going head-to-head with the state of South Carolina in what can only be described as a bizarre legal battle. The online classifieds company is suing Attorney...  Craiglist dropped the erotic services section from its site a week ago, after public outrage at a medical student who used it to lure prositutes into hotels where he would rob and sometimes murder them.  South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster is the target of a federal lawsuit filed by Craigslist. The classified site wants a restraining order barring him from bringing charges over its adult listings.
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| Sage reseller goes titsup?
May 27, 2009 at 7:24 am
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| Exclusive BDE International Ltd lost its reseller partner status with software giant Sage on 15 May, and told around 100 staff to go home just three days later, The Register has learned. Amid the turmoil, the company's non-executive director Bruce Fraser quit BDE International Ltd - which trades as BDE Group - on 16 May, according to records obtained via Companies' House. What's that, you have an array of six-core CPUs in your rack? That is so last year. You're going to feel pretty foolish when all the cool admins start popping eight-core chips up in their closets this fall. Taiwan-based chip manufacturer JMicron is reportedly preparing to make a splash next month at Computex 2009 when it debuts its latest breakthrough NAND flash controller. Is Google SkyNet? In A Word: Yes [FastCompany] Now Twitter is bad for newspapers, too [Miami Herald] Spending on ads inside of videogames will reach $1 billion by 2014...
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| Is Google SkyNet? In A Word: Yes
May 27, 2009 at 7:23 am
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| - Is Google SkyNet? In A Word: Yes [FastCompany]
- Now Twitter is bad for newspapers, too [Miami Herald]
- Spending on ads inside of videogames will reach $1 billion by 2014 [DMW Daily]
- Mock-ups of the the fifth-generation iPod nano [iLounge]
- People over 55 are quitting Facebook [Inside Facebook]
- Facebook wants to hire a “Manager, Payment Systems” [Inside Facebook]
- The Twitter founders favorite tweets [Valleywag]
- Topsy is a Twitter search engine based on re-tweets [TechCrunch]
- A sneak peak at Yahoo's new homepage [SEL]
- Tech employment shrinks again [Epicenter]
- Yahoo's head of video quits [NewTeeVee]
- A cheaper Nintendo Wii isn't coming [WSJ]
- Trend: Magazines selling iPhone apps [PaidContent]
According to a Both North Carolina and Virginia have or are hurrying to instate tax incentives for projects such as this one, which will cost around twice as much as what Google or Microsoft would typically invest in a data center.  Location-based information is rapidly increasing in importance. There are lots of location-based social networks, such as BrightkiteBrightkite reviews and Loopt, as well as a slew of great location-based iPhone apps.  Move over Pandora, the Pope's got an iPhone app. Released last week, the app, called H2Onews, is part of a Catholic news wire project (same name) sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.
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| ICO tells cops to behave on CCTV
May 27, 2009 at 7:20 am
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| The Information Commissioner's Office is poised to tell the Home Office to rein in police demands that pubs and clubs install CCTV cameras as a pre-condition of their licences. The issue came up back in February when it emerged that the Metropolitan Police were pressuring a pub in Islington to install cameras in order to guarantee their co-operation in a licence request.  Readers hungry for an IT angle to the unfolding MPs' expenses scandal will be cheered by today's news that taxpayers have been paying thousands of pounds to tart up a flat occupied by AOL Connie...
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| Apple quietly updates $999 MacBook, again -- goes back to school with free iPod touch
May 27, 2009 at 7:20 am
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|  Shh, don't tell the press but Apple just bumped the specs on its entry-level white MacBook again. The bump measures in at just 0.13GHz on the processor, 133MHz more oomph from the DDR2 SDRAM, and an extra 40GB of disk space. Still more is more better especially when it's free $999. Apple also took the wraps off its back-to-school deal which nabs a decent discount on Macs (up to $200 off MacBook Pro) and tosses in an iPod touch to sweeten the deal.  Apple released a stealth upgrade of the entry-level MacBook this morning. The white MacBook, still priced at $999USD, now has a 160GB hard drive, a 2.13GHz processor and a slight increase in RAM speed -- 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM.  After two years of watching iPod sales pass it by, Microsoft has drawn a line in the sand and says it has a new Zune with hardware features to thwart the iPod touch, including a multi-touch display.  Microsoft officially announced the Zune HD today, confirming the earlier rumors and fleshing out the hardware side a bit. It's clearly going to go head-to-head with the iPod touch...  If you're craving an ultra-sensitive tablet computer, but you're not willing to wait for the rumored Apple tablet to materialize, you could always build your own version.
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| White MacBook specs quietly bumped
May 27, 2009 at 7:18 am
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| Apple released a stealth upgrade of the entry-level MacBook this morning. The white MacBook, still priced at $999USD, now has a 160GB hard drive, a 2.13GHz processor and a slight increase in RAM speed -- 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM. The previous version, released back in January, had a 2.0GHz processor with a 120GB hard drive and 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. Other features on the revised MacBook remain the same, including the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card that we wrote about a few months ago. Shh, don't tell the press but Apple just bumped the specs on its entry-level white MacBook again. The bump measures in at just 0.13GHz on the processor, 133MHz more oomph from the DDR2 SDRAM, and an extra 40GB of disk space. New search engine Topsy, which has been in stealth development for three years, launches, well, now. Before Google, search engines like AltaVista determined relevance based on how well a web page matched the query.  It's official: Ireland is about to fall to Street View's all-seeing eye, as this photograph from Tramore, County Waterford, proves: The sighting confirms local reports that Street View is operating in Cork...  Google Chrome is a browser whose only claim to fame (aside from being a Google product) is its speed and simplicity. In fact, some would claim that Chrome is simple to a fault...
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| Kutcher threatens to stop Twittering
May 27, 2009 at 7:15 am
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|  Ashton Kutcher said he might give up Twitter if the Web site's parent company participates in a reality show. "It's all fun and games until somebody gets stalked," Kutcher wrote in a Twitter posting late Monday. Variety magazine reported Monday that San Francisco-based Twitter.com had partnered with TV producers Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment on an unscripted show that would be "putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."  Just as he did with the Google rumor before it, Twitter founder Biz Stone ended speculation that Twitter had its own TV show in the works by leaving the door open to a range of TV land possibilities for the microblogging service.  Because Twitter Search is a nifty tool for finding short product reviews and links to longer ones, we think that the SF-based startup could make a killing by selling ads against Twitter search results pages.  What has 32.1 million users, a $255 million valuation, an unscripted TV series and no revenue stream to speak of? Twitter, whose founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone will be interviewed on stage at D: All Things Digital tonight.
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