Archive for June, 2008

Canadian iPhone 3G plans lack unlimited data

Friday, June 27th, 2008

It will cost you north of the border.
(Credit: Apple)

If you think AT&T’s iPhone 3G service plans are expensive, just consider what Rogers is forcing on our Canadian friends.

Friday, the carrier announced its service plans for the iPhone 3G, none of which include unlimited data use. …
Original post by Kent German and software by Elliott Back

Yahoo ups annual domain registration fees

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Starting July 1, users who have registered domains with Yahoo’s small-business site will see their annual fee for the service jump from $9.95 to $34.95.

The news came in form of e-mail for anyone who has registered a domain with Yahoo Small Business, and a Yahoo representative …
Original post by Holly Jackson and software by Elliott […]

Solar power to set sail in space

Friday, June 27th, 2008

On earth, people are beginning to use the sun’s light to power their houses, office buildings, and even gadgets. Now, outside of our planet, the sun’s energy is going to be utilized for something else–space travel.

If NASA can successfully implement solar sails, which have been referenced in …
Original post by Holly Jackson and software by […]

Google data-sharing gets authentication option

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Google now supports the open OAuth standard for sharing data through its Google Data interface, a move that could make it easier to tap into information stored at Google property.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

The Google Data API (application programming interface)–GData for short…
Original post by Stephen Shankland and software by Elliott Back

Google gadget turns PC into media server

Friday, June 27th, 2008

The Google Media Server gadget can send audio and video from a Windows PC to another device.
(Credit: Google)

Google has released a software module that can turn Windows PCs into devices that streams media files to other devices.

The Google Media Server is a gadget that works on the …
Original post by Stephen Shankland and software by […]

Google starts move to ad-friendly iGoogle

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Google users are starting to see an updated interface to the iGoogle home page, according to the Google Operating System blog.

iGoogle lets users select various modules such as mail, photos, games, or a to-do list; it competes chiefly with My Yahoo but also with sites from rivals including Netvibes and PageFlakes.

As expected, the revamped iGoogle […]

Bill Gates bids farewell to Microsoft

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates joins CEO Steve Ballmer at a town hall event Friday, Gates’ final day as a full-time Microsoft employee. Bill Gates’ farewell speech to Microsoft reminded employees that the company knows how to come from behind as well as to lead. …
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Bill Gates bids farewell

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates joins CEO Steve Ballmer at a town hall event Friday, Gates’ final day as a full-time Microsoft employee. Bill Gates’ farewell speech to Microsoft reminded employees that the company knows how to come from behind as well as to lead. …
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Bill Gates bids a teary farewell to Microsoft

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Bill Gates said a teary goodbye on Friday to Microsoft, the software maker he built into the world’s most valuable technology company. Redmond, Washington–Bill Gates said a teary goodbye on Friday to Microsoft, the software maker he built into the world’s most valuable technology company based on the ambitious…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Movable Type users get Seesmic plug-in

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Movable Type users looking to get simple video comments on their blogs have access to a new plug-in today from the folks at Seesmic. Once installed commenters can add both text and/or video underneath someone’s blog post, similar to what’s been available for WordPress users since late April. The plug-in joins similar ones for Disqus, […]

Track best sellers with SmashBuys

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Like top ten lists? You might like SmashBuys, a link aggregator of the best selling items on the Web. Sites included are Amazon, iTunes, VGchartz, and Downloads from Webware’s sister site Download.com. There are nine in all, and clicking any link will send you straight to the product page. You can also hover over any […]

Search ads trigger trademark lawsuit from rival

Friday, June 27th, 2008

In a case that spotlights the growing importance of search engines to commerce, NameSafe has sued a competitor, LifeLock, for trademark infringement involving ads placed next to search results.

NameSafe, which like LifeLock sells services designed to protect customers against identity theft, alleged its rival used NameSafe’s name in …
Original post by Stephen Shankland and software […]

Digg updates candidates section: Ralph Nader is one unpopular guy

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Whose campaign reigns supreme? Diggers like Barack.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Today Digg pushed out an update to its popular candidates section, the part of Digg that tracks all things politics.
While mostly a house cleaning move to get rid of campaign drop-outs, there’s some fun data to play with using the four other listed candidates alongside John McCain […]

Viigo 3.0 beta chases Yahoo Go 3.0 beta

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Viigo's flagship RSS reader is now only one data destination of many.
(Credit: Viigo)
Another Yahoo department has cause for concern. Up until last week, Yahoo Go was top dog in the mobile widget arena, pulling everything from weather, news, and finance to local listings, Flickr photos, and search onto Yahoo Go 3.0 beta, the company’s rich […]

Daily Debrief: What to expect with the new iPhone release

Friday, June 27th, 2008

In Friday’s edition of the Daily Debrief, CNET News.com’s Tom Krazit and I talk about the July 11 release of the iPhone 3G. Apple has been notoriously tight-lipped about the details, but Tom says there are a few known factors. For one, every customer will have to …
Original post by Kara Tsuboi and software by […]

Princeton University to publish Kindle textbooks

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Another prestigious school is embracing Amazon’s Kindle e-reader.

Princeton University has announced that it will start printing Kindle-edition textbooks this fall, according to a story in The Christian Science Monitor.

Princeton follows Yale, Oxford and the UC Berkeley in creating textbooks for the Kindle. In the United States, there

Original post by Greg Sandoval and software by […]

Orbitz paves the way to enterprise open-source contributions

Friday, June 27th, 2008

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/linux_unix/Orbitz_paves_the_way_to_enterprise_open_source_contributions’;
On Monday, Orbitz Worldwide will announce the creation and release of two open-source projects, Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite. Though there […]

Gates: Yahoo deal unlikely

Friday, June 27th, 2008

During his last day as a full-time Microsoft employee, Microsoft’s Bill Gates told Tom Brokaw he does not think a deal with Yahoo was likely. NEW YORK–Microsoft’s Bill Gates told journalist Tom Brokaw he does not think a deal with Yahoo was likely, CNBC reported on Friday. …
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

I can’t stand anonymity in the gaming industry

Friday, June 27th, 2008

As I searched for something to talk about today, I came across this article from Joystiq featuring a discussion by Will Wright about Spore and the gaming industry.
For those of you who don’t know Will Wright, he’s not only the creator of Spore, but he’s also the creator of the Sims franchise, and arguably one […]

Icahn blog to talk more on Yahoo

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Investor activist Carl Icahn is gearing up to share another round on his “views about Yahoo and its management shortly,” according to a posting on his Icahn Report blog Friday.

Icahn, who filed another preliminary proxy just the other day, has yet to file his definitive proxy. The definitive proxy …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and […]

Icahn aims for Yahoo fireworks before July 4

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Update 1 p.m. PDT, with more information on the timing of Icahn’s definitive proxy and alternatives.

Investor activist Carl Icahn is expected to file his definitive proxy by July 4, signaling whether he will ultimately run a dissident slate of directors to unseat a majority of Yahoo’s …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by […]

‘.wow’: ICANN to allow almost any domain suffix

Friday, June 27th, 2008

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has accepted a proposal allowing companies, cities and others to use almost any suffix they want for a web address. At its meeting in Paris, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, a not-for-profit organization that…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Virgin Mobile USA buys Helio for $39 million

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Virgin Mobile USA will pay $39 million in stock to buy operator Helio, the company said Friday.

The deal ends more than a month of speculation that the two troubled mobile virtual network operators would combine forces. As part of the purchase, Virgin Group, which owns Virgin Mobile USA, and …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and […]

Offshoring: India still No. 1

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Bangalore remains on top as the global outsourcing leader but with prices on the rise in India, locations like Beijing and Auckland are catching up fast. Bangalore has retained its position as the ideal global delivery location for businesses, according to a new report from IDC. The…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Gates predicts Yahoo deal unlikely

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Microsoft’s Bill Gates, in an NBC interview with Tom Brokaw, said a deal with Yahoo is unlikely, according to a CNBC report Friday.

Yahoo fell 1.64 percent to $21.02 per share in morning trading, despite the broader markets gaining ground in early trading.

Gates prediction comes as …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by Elliott […]

Report: Apple homes in on iPod-iPhone remote control

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Apple is working on an application aimed at letting people remotely control iTunes in the home via their iPod Touch or iPhone, according to a report on MacRumors.com.

The application is described in information included with the iTunes 7.7 pre-release version that was made available to developers on …
Original post by Dawn Kawamoto and software by […]

Facebook ‘gender policy’ has grammar in mind

Friday, June 27th, 2008

A blog post from Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit early on Friday announced an update to the site that initially may seem extremely minor: after years of using the grammatically abhorrent reflexive pronoun “themself” to describe actions in members’ activity feeds (i.e. “Dwight Schrute tagged themself in the album ‘Booze Cruise ‘08′”), the social network […]

Blockbusters stomp on the long tail, Harvard study finds

Friday, June 27th, 2008

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/business_finance/Harvard_study_trashes_long_tail_theory’;
Remember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that suggested there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market’s […]

Long-tail economics favors the blockbuster, Harvard study finds

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Remember the long tail? It was the omnipresent theory that suggested there were oodles of cash to be made by monetizing a market’s disparate tastes via the web. Why sell one million copies of Led Zeppelin’s Coda when you can make a thriving business of selling two to three copies of your neighbor’s […]

GPS camera now comes with compass

Friday, June 27th, 2008

(Credit: GPS Daily)
If the question “Where am I?” is a recurring issue for you, Ricoh has added a feature to its GPS-Ready Digital Camera you may want to check out.

The Ricoh 500SE GPS camera now includes something called an SE-3 GPS module, a three-axis compass developed by Honeywell …
Original post by Mark Rutherford and software […]

Google releases string of beta Blogger updates

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Google announced Friday the release of a number of updates to its Blogger publishing platform–well, sort of. The updates have gone into Blogger in Draft, the service’s beta platform, with the expectation that they’ll eventually become full features.
The updates will seem a bit humdrum for people who don’t use Blogger, but for those who do, […]

iPhone to get MMS?

Friday, June 27th, 2008

AT& T may be getting ready to add multimedia messaging service for the iPhone, according to a new report.
The iPhone Atlas quotes an internal AT& T memo saying the telephone company will include the feature, which allows transmission of text, pictures, and potentially video to other MMS-enabled …
Original post by Margaret Kane and software by […]

California to drivers: Drop the cell phone, dude

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Next week a California law will require the use of hands-free phones and ban cell phones entirely for drivers under 18–but there’s a loophole that allows texting while driving. LOS ANGELES–Next week California will try to wrest cell phones from the hands of drivers, telling everyone from movie starlets…
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Sue Decker’s super powers

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Yahoo’s not-so-secret reorganization got its official nod today, with three new divisions created to centralize operations and report to Sue Decker. Yahoo’s not-so-secret reorganization got its official nod today, with three new divisions created to centralize operations and report to Sue Decker. …
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and […]

Lost? 6 new GPS devices to the rescue

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Makers of personal navigation devices are trying to differentiate themselves with products that do a lot more than get you from point A to point B.
Original post by Gadgets, gizmos, and video games - CNNMoney.com and software by Elliott Back

Verizon’s fiber guru talks strategy

Friday, June 27th, 2008

There’s no question that Verizon Communications hit a home run with its aggressive fiber strategy.

The fiber-to-the-home network called Fios has enabled Verizon to supercharge broadband speeds and compete against cable in the TV market.

Fios also has helped future-proof Verizon’s network. While its cable competitors buckle under the pressure …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and software […]

Zappos tries robots on for size

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Zappos.com, the online retailer with free shipping both ways, has hired little orange robots to carry your shoes.
Actually, the company, which now sells more than just shoes, has just finished outfitting it’s Kentucky warehouse with a robotic army to help fill orders, the company supplying the system …
Original post by Candace Lombardi and software by […]

AMD bests Nvidia with graphics chip strategy

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Advanced Micro Devices’ bet on a new approach to graphics chip design appears to be paying off, according to analyst Jon Peddie. This could put AMD’s ATI graphics chip unit on top again–or at least on equal footing with Nvidia, the graphics leader over the last few years.

Peddie …
Original post by Brooke Crothers […]

Yahoo tries going on the offensive

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Yahoo is trying to show that it’s taking hold of its own destiny again.

Phase 1 was the ad deal, under which Yahoo expects more cash by showing Google’s more lucrative ads next to Yahoo search results. Phase 2 came Thursday with a …
Original post by Stephen Shankland and software by Elliott Back

Instinctiv de-randomizer only works on hacked iPhones

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

A couple weeks ago, I pondered if early adopters of the iPod and other MP3 players were starting to lose patience with the random shuffle function. Too much black and white, not enough grey.

Instinctiv de-randomizes the random shuffle function on iPhones, but only if you "jailbreak" them …

Original post by Matt Rosoff and software by […]

Cartier pretties up MySpace with ad campaign

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Love by Cartier, an ad campaign that's not exactly for the emo-teen demographic.

When you think about “bling” on MySpace, you probably think about glitter text on profiles, or maybe Swarovski-studded Sidekicks, not Cartier jewelry. But that hasn’t stopped the legendary luxury brand from launching a promotional campaign on News Corp.’s social network.
Starting Thursday, Cartier began […]

Microsoft A.B. (After Bill)

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Economist’s Ludwig Siegele opens up one of the most important questions for the next 10 years of software: What happens to Microsoft after Bill Gates leaves?
In Ray Ozzie’s (and, perhaps, Microsoft’s) view, Microsoft’s new goal is the same as the old goal: Dominate everything. But the battle has shifted to the “cloud” […]

Yahoo’s reorg mapped out

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Yahoo announced a handful of changes to its management team and structure on Thursday. Here’s a handy guide to who’s doing what at the Web company. These changes follow an executive exodus, which Yahoo says was partly voluntary and partly driven by management decisions.

(Credit: Yahoo)
Jerry Yang…
Original post by CNET News.com Staff and software by Elliott […]

Something useful: A WYSIWYG WordPress theme editor

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. Confounded by trying to track down fancy looking WordPress themes? Check out this Web based theme editor that lets you tweak every nook and cranny of a theme then spit it back to your server to go live. You can add columns, change fonts and backgrounds, even throw in […]

I’m In Like With You raises $1.5 million, looks to game development

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

I’m In Like With You, a social-network-turned-gaming-site that caught a brief flurry of press for its eye-popping design when it launched, has just closed a $1.5 million round of venture funding led by Spark Capital. It’s the first funding the site has received since its angel round last year.
In addition to Spark, the round includes […]

ICANN adopts new Web site naming rules

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers voted Thursday to relax rules for naming Web sites.
At its meeting in Paris, ICANN, a not-for-profit organization that oversees the naming scheme for Web sites, voted to accept a proposal that will allow companies to purchase new top-level domain names ending …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and […]

ICANN adopts new Website naming rules

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN voted Thursday to relax rules for naming Internet Web sites.
At its meeting in Paris, ICANN, a not-for-profit organization that oversees the naming scheme for Internet web sites, voted to accept a proposal that will allow companies to purchase new …
Original post by Marguerite Reardon and […]

Two quick fixes for Firefox 3

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Just looking at the download count from Mozilla for the first 24 hours of Firefox 3, it looks like the browser upgrade is one of the fastest-adopted new program versions ever. Eight million downloads in the first 24 hours can’t be wrong, right? Of course, no new program–even one as heavily beta-tested as FF3–is problem-free, […]

Yahoo looking to unleash its cloud computing infrastructure

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

As part of its latest reorganization, Yahoo created a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, which is chartered with developing computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness, according to the press release. It could also lead to Yahoo getting into the business of selling pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure to developers and …
Original post by Dan […]

See paper versions of your favorite sites

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

We’ve seen what Gmail, Twitter, and Delicious look like in paper, but what about Flickr, YouTube, and others? Sean Flannagan over at Deeplinking has put together a gallery of site prototypes that have been constructed out of paper. While tools like Adobe’s Thermo and the freshly launched Balsamiq are making this less of a necessity, […]