Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has promised �150m to provide better mobile coverage in the UK, 'cos that's just what we need to stimulate the economy.?
Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/03/not_spot_coverage/
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We've Gone Native! — At Untappd, we strongly believe in mobile web apps and their ability to look, feel, and function just like native apps, but without the hassle of having to download something. But there does come a time when you reach the limitations of the mobile web and have to move to a native platform.
LiveLens MFT adapter brings aperture control to Canon EF lenses originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Fiddy Cent gets into the headphone game with SYNC by 50, countdown to Ford lawsuit begins... now originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | CommentsSource: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/01/fiddy-cent-gets-into-the-headphone-game-with-sync-by-50-countdo/
Andy Zaty of the Bullish Cross blog has done some interesting analysis on the AAPL stock price around Apple's keynote events, and he found that for next week's event, the pattern seems to have fallen apart. During the past four iPhone releases, Apple's stock price has risen in the rumor-filled run up to the unveiling, as investors are taken in by the excitement and interest surrounding the possibility of a new iPhone. Then, once the event happens, the stock usually falls off a bit (though obviously in general, it's risen over time). This time, however, the stock price has fallen, almost 17% from where it was at a few weeks ago.
Why is that? Hard to say -- it could be that most Apple events are pretty mysterious, but on this one, rumors about the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5 have been flying around for a while already. It's also true, according to the research, that Apple's events don't have as big an effect on the stock price as they used to. As big as AAPL has gotten, more and more investors are somewhat savvy about the whole process, knowing that Apple's fate doesn't really depend on what it announces at any big event.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what happens with the stock price, both over the next week in the lead up and after the event. I don't actually give out financial advice (and this post shouldn't be considered as such, obviously), but I suspect we won't see too big a jump or fall over this keynote -- all indications are that besides a new iPhone announcement, this event will likely be business as usual.
Pre-event AAPL trading bucks trend originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/30/pre-event-aapl-trading-bucks-trend/
Want to know who didn't spam all your friends and piss you off? Napster.If you're going to compete with infringement, you have to not be significantly more annoying than infringing systems. Coming in second, just behind that comment (and only a few comments down on the same page), was Rob Sheridan, discussing how poorly this reflects on Facebook and how it suggests little understanding of how and why people share information:
This also speaks to an issue with the direction Facebook is going, which I saw a couple blogs highlight the other day: Facebook's vision of "frictionless" sharing (apps that indescriminately auto-share everything you do) takes away what makes sharing valuable: Selectivity. When I share something online, it's because it's something I found interesting and think that my friends or followers would also find interesting. That gives it value, because I'm actively selecting what I think is worth sharing and what isn't. I look at hundreds of things on the internet every day, but only find a handful that I think are worth passing around. If Facebook is telling my friends every single thing I watch on YouTube and Netflix, and every song I listen to on Spotify, etc, those aren't valuable shares for anybody. It's just spam. Taking the selectivity out of sharing feels like a step way backwards in an internet that is becoming very much about social curation and noise reduction. If one of my friends has heard a new song - or even a hundred songs - that they like so much they want to share with me - that's great. But every single song they happen to listen to? Who wants that? I know there are millions of narcisistic over-sharers out there who will lap these abilities up, but it just makes me want to stay the hell away from Facebook.To Spotify's credit, within days of this hubbub, the company upgraded the software, and it now has a "listen privately" option which is somewhat prominent. Unfortunately, the default is still the other way, the explanation for how the integration works is still unclear, and the "listen privately" option only lasts as long as you have Spotify open. Next time, you have to "listen privately" again. The default should be the other way around.
So, out of curiosity, exactly how many nat'l stories of this bullshit do we have to hear before we're magically allowed to suggest there might be a systemic problem? No one is suggesting that every officer of the law is a shithead.And finally on the insightful side, we've got :Lobo Santo quoting Oscar Wilde in response to my post about a call to get rid of anonymity online, because only bad things happen when people are anonymous:
What IS being suggested is that the backlash against videotaping police activity is bullshit because there are enough of these stories to warrant review from every possible source possible. In Chicago in particular, there are many officers who are downright gleeful about the way they can screw with people. I know a couple of them. They used to be friends of mine.
Now they aren't....
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” -Oscar WildeOkay. Jumping over to the funny side of the great divide. Coming in first was That Anonymous Coward, in response to the story about UK collection society, PRS, fighting with music stores over whether or not they should have a license to play music in stores (you know, the music they're helping to sell). TAC pointed out the obvious:
Free music promotion is killing music sales....Coming in second, believe it or not, was Dark Helmet's pitch perfect attempt at doing a typical troll post, which successfully used the official word of the day:
Mike, this is the kind of story I just shake my head at. Your obvious attempt to paint several countries in the northern hemisphere with the same brush is so transparent it's a wonder your freetard sheep here still support you. Just because some of these countries are in Europe and there is a court that holds over them, painting the court with the broadbrush and calling them "European" just underminds your cause.There were a lot of other funny comments this week, so we'll go with three editors choices (and it was tough to narrow it down to just three, but here we go). First up, we had HothMonster on the story about the FBI breaking up yet another of its own bombing plots. Someone argued that the guy was a real threat because he'd written anti-American stuff on a website and said he wanted to participate in terrorism, to which the Hoth responded:
But what more can you expect from Pirate Mike, the broadbrush terrorism-apologist and his merry band of freetard child-porn producers?
(You know what? This is actually kinda fun....)
well we all know people do everything that they say they are going to do on the internet.He said it on the internet. He's definitely going to do it.
I mean sure he didnt have a target, weapons, knowledge to make weapons, money to buy weapons, or any criminal contacts but he said he hated the government and wanted to kill all the bastards in power on the internet. So obviously he was a real threat.
Now if you excuse me I have to go fuck a gaggle of supermodels on a pile of money before i jump my lambo over the grand canyon
The Pharoah sat upon his throne, ending a speech to his people of the city.And... finally, my absolute favorite comment of the week, coming from Rabbit80 on the thread debating the whole theory of how many monkeys and how much time at typewriters is needed to recreate the works of Shakespeare:
"Let it be written, so let it be done!" he ordered. "Scribe?"
"I cannot, sire. The use of scrolls has been forbidden across the lands."
The pharoah stood with a look of shock upon his face. "Banned? Who dares to countermand me??"
"Lawyers," the scribe swallowed. "Three thousand years from now, a company will copyright the word 'scrolls' making use of that word an offense. They will sue us and empty our coffers."
"That's ridiculous!!! What about the word papyrus? Can we use that?"
"No, sire. Someone else owns that word, too." The scribe returned, obviously nervous.
"What about 'paper'? Can we say that?" The pharoah inquired.
The scribe shook his head. "No, sire. 'Paper' will also be owned."
"What about chiseling on walls? Can we at least do that??"
The scribe looked around, eventually nodding and relenting his argument.
The pharoah, now pleased, stood up and stated. "So let it be chiseled, so let it be done!!"
... And that's how we have rocks chiseled in Egypt...
Ffs... Please stop the bickering. The monkeys have already created the works of Shakespeare - and it took us only 5-7 million years!Indeed. Problem solved. So onward to another week of posts...
In the US, there is no plan to constitutionally ratify the agreement. Indeed, this will likely be the main focus of the US signing statement. The document will be an argument to Congress that the executive can pass this agreement alone – legally binding the US to a trade agreement without no congressional authorization – because, according to the Executive, ACTA is fully consistent with current US law.Thus, the administration argues that there doesn't need to be a Senate review because no laws will be changed. This is, of course, wrong, since ACTA (1) does not align itself fully with US laws and (2) massively constrains Congress's ability to change certain intellectual property laws in the future. Furthermore, this basic argument is ridiculous. The President is only allowed to sign executive agreements that cover items solely under the President's mandate. Intellectual property is not. It's clearly given to Congress under the Constitution.
Roman Stanek has backed the "right thing" at the right time twice during his career in tech. Is he now onto his third??
Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/30/gooddata_not_selling_but_ipoing/
Microsoft is teaming up with the OpenNebula project to create infrastructure-as-a-service clouds combining open source software and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. While Microsoft has traditionally been no friend to open source projects, Redmond’s attempt to gain broader acceptance of Hyper-V has led it to submit drivers to the Linux kernel and to support several Linux-based operating systems.
But supporting Linux isn’t really enough. Virtualization is increasingly being used by businesses to deploy Amazon-like infrastructure clouds within their own data centers, using a mix of hypervisors and cloud automation software. OpenNebula, cloud software released under the Apache License, was already supported by VMware, Xen, and KVM, but not by Hyper-V. That will change in mid-October when a prototype of the Hyper-V and OpenNebula integration components will be released under the Apache license, says OpenNebula project director Ignacio Llorente.
“Microsoft is providing support and technical guidance to [the] OpenNebula open-source project to add and maintain Hyper-V on the list of officially supported hypervisors,” Llorente writes. “The integration will support both variants of Hyper-V, namely in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Disk images will be managed using a shared storage server (e.g. SAN) and standard POSIX calls from the OpenNebula server. OpenNebula will additionally leverage the networking management functionality provided by Hyper-V. The integration will not require the installation of new services in the nodes, making [it] quite simple and rapid to build an OpenNebula cloud on existing Hyper-V deployments.”
Microsoft previously ensured Hyper-V interoperability with OpenStack, another open source cloud computing project developed by NASA and Rackspace. Hyper-V is taking on an increasingly important role in Microsoft’s Windows platform, and will be featured in next year’s Windows Server 8 as well as in the Windows 8 desktop OS.
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Aloha! You know where I wish I were right now? That's right, Maui! You know who else is in Maui? Some of the Google Social team. Note: I am really jealous of anyone who is a Googler in Maui right now, because it sure beats being someone who has to write about being a Googler in Maui right now. According to unpaid blogger Michael Arrington, I'm not alone in my jealousy, as some other people who worked on Google+ apparently weren't included in the Maui offsite, and "wish they were." Makes sense.Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/dhGfRC4yWws/
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The great game developer Double Fine has released an app for the App Store, and it's related to their very popular game Psychonauts (which recently arrived on the Mac App Store itself), but it's not, unfortunately, a port of the game. The Psychonauts Vault Viewer is instead sort of an ancillary add-on to the title, a compendium of all of the game's "memory vault" animations, along with new commentary from the game's creators Scott Campbell and Tim Schafer. It's interesting but if you've never played Psychonauts, you probably won't find a lot of enjoyment in the app itself. If you love the game, the app is like an extras DVD, with lots of game content and some other features.
Vault Viewer is a free universal app, available now on the App Store. We've seen quite a few game companies use Apple's platform in this way, creating ancillary apps to their main games, and making use of the mobile platforms as a sort of a "second screen" for players either while they're playing or for a game on another platform. I wouldn't be surprised to eventually see a full iOS game from Double Fine, but for now, this is what we've got.
Double Fine releases Psychonauts app originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/29/double-fine-releases-psychonauts-app/
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Source: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/nokias-bright-spot-luxury-handset-maker-vertu-09292011.html
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HP is clearly overcome with buyer's remorse over its acquisition of Palm, and the future of the former mobile company and its webOS software hangs in the balance. Who will rescue it? Believe it or not, VentureBeat claims that Amazon is already in negotiations with HP to acquire what's left of Palm.
Quoting a "well-placed source," VentureBeat notes, "HP is currently looking to rid itself of Palm as soon as possible, and that Amazon is the closest to finalizing the deal, among a ...
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techreport/all/~3/90PCzozUn6Y/21750
Asus Eee PC 1025 treads a Cedar Trail through the FCC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110930/19470416156/atkrays-favorite-techdirt-posts-week.shtml
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Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/01/large-alphadog-robot-runs-like-a-horse-scares-people/
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Should you launch at Launch? (Or TechCrunch Disrupt? Or Demo? They?re all pretty similar).
This year I launched two major new products at conferences: Careers 2.0 and Trello, and both times, it was totally worth it.
First, a little background. There are three popular conferences where you can launch new products: Launch, TechCrunch Disrupt, and Demo. They all work the same way:
If you get in, you will have a chance to give a demo on stage for exactly six minutes. There will be some celebrity judges who will give you a few sentences of honest feedback about your startup. (Here?s how our demo went down).So, are these conferences worth it?
Let?s look, individually, at the two big promises of the conferences: exposure to VCs and exposure to the press.
Are VCs at these conferences? Absolutely. Does going to one of these conferences get you funded? It?s complicated.
I?ve been tossing around the word fundable without defining it. Every entrepreneur thinks their ?Mint.com for Laundry Tickets? is the most fundable idea ever, and all VCs should be dying to invest, if they would only sit still for the brief 62 minute demo!
No. Technically, whether you?re fundable has to do with things like traction, the total size of the opportunity, the quality of the team, whether you build moats (?), and a bunch of other gibberish that VCs like to tell themselves in their heads so that they don?t think they?re just spinning bottles.
But it?s too hard for an entrepreneur to evaluate their own fundability. So here?s a working definition of fundable which is all that matters for you as an entrepreneur:
So, that said, if you don?t know any VCs and think you might have a fundable company, a conference like Launch or Disrupt will get you your first intros.
Now, on to the other promise: Press and publicity.
It is possible, nay, common, to launch at one of these conferences and get NO press whatsoever. Zero. Nada. At Disrupt you?re guaranteed at least one mention in TechCrunch, but you?ll soon discover that TechCrunch?s tech-industry insiders may not really be the audience you need.
Yes, there are a lot of journalists at these conferences. Disrupt probably had about 200. When we launched Trello this week, you know how much press we got?
Four stories.
And every one of those stories came because I knew the reporter and emailed them before we launched, and pre-briefed them on our product under embargo.
Yep. There was not a single reporter, from the 200 that were registered, at Disrupt who saw our presentation and said, ?Oh cool, I?m going to write about that.?
You know why? Because there were dozens of companies launching in two days, and reporters usually file one or two stories a day, so they all focus on one or two companies they find interesting (and at this last conference, they mostly wanted to talk about Arringtongate).
That said, you can get exactly the burst of publicity you need from launching at one of these conferences, if you do it right. You have to:
We did all that and leveraged 6 minutes of fame into 130,000 eyeballs.
The thing entrepreneurs often forget about news media: It?s supposed to be news. They want new things. As a startup, you are only going to have two or three new things that happen, ever:
That?s it. Those are your chances to get news. Under no circumstances can you expect to be covered because you take a walk in the woods with potential employees... you?re not Mark Zuckerberg. (Unless you are, in which case, Hi Mark!) You?re not getting font changes on the home page covered, unless you used to work for Mark Zuckerberg.
In short, you only have two or at most three chances to got coverage unless there?s Mark Zuckerberg involvement.
Well, wait, there?s one more way. If you are very lucky, you will have some famous people involved in your company, and some of them will have tawdry affairs with prostitutes that are captured on video. That will get you a fourth story. Otherwise, you?re not news. Get over it.
Also important: the news cycle is 12 hours, tops. If you call journalists the day after you release your product, it?s not news. They won?t care. You have to call them two days before you launch, tell them you?re going to launch in two days, and offer to pre-brief them, so that they can run their story when it?s actually newsworthy. The bottom line is that you have to get all your coverage within a period of a few hours which means you have to plan ahead and work hard. This is not the time for incrementalism. Don?t worry about DDOSing your own server. There?s no choice: you can?t spread out the newsworthiness of your launch.
Because there are so few opportunities for a startup to get press, you have to make the most out of each one. That?s why I am still a big believer in ?the big launch? even though the Lean Startup ethic today is all about trickling things out to your users bit by bit and pivoting a million times.
Here?s the story of Trello. We wrote the first line of code last January. By the time we hit 700 lines of code, the product was useful, and we immediately started dogfooding it in-house. We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.
We didn?t do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched.
I couldn?t stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I don?t want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.
Still, I do, firmly, believe that a completely new product has to go through what Steve Blank calls customer development to find ?product/customer fit.? I.e., you have to get real people really using your product and you have to watch them and listen to them and make changes to make your product better, and you have to do this very, very early.
How did we reconcile this? Through the old fashioned method of a closed beta. We got a hundred of our best friends to use Trello and tell us what they thought while we iterated and polished and improved.
So the thing we launched, nine-month-old Trello, is really kind of slick. And we got a little initial bit of publicity for it, but then that publicity became massively viral. So those four news stories caused a few people to check out the product, and they liked it, because it was AWESOME NINE-MONTH-OLD TRELLO, and they wrote amazingly nice tweets. Thousands of amazingly nice tweets.
So, the story so far: if your product is really good, launching at one of these conferences is an incredible catalyst. If your product is ?meh,? it won?t help.
But wait?there?s one important, bonus reason to launch at a conference, and it?s a good enough reason to do it even if you don?t need the publicity or the VC at all.
It?s all about your team.
When you launch at a conference, you have an incredible hard deadline. This deadline forces you to ship. It forces you to make decisions about what has to be in version 1.0. It's actually an incredible team-building exercise to work your butt off, together, for the weeks leading up to the conference.
The morale boost you?ll get will be incredible. After months of toiling away, the feeling you get from seeing real-world people actually start using your product is the best feeling you will ever get as a software programmer in your professional life. These are the great moments that make it all worthwhile. We *made* something. People used it. It matters.
It's like sex, with clothes on.
The members of our team who came out to San Francisco for Disrupt (including two summer interns who skipped a week of classes to join us) had a blast. It was the best week, ever. The members of the team who stayed back in the office, watching the conference piped in over the Internet, had a blast. It was the best week, ever.
Work has to matter.
The stuff we create can?t just be bits on a hard drive.
Brett, Daniel, Bobby, Justin, Ian, and Aaron built something with their bare hands that will be a part of how the future works.
One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.
This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. That?s why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. It?s all about shipping.
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
GNOME 3 released, ushers in an interesting amalgam of iOS and OS X originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 06:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/toxel/~3/xwS8kJb-DbY/
Electronista:
Nexus Prime, Droid HD, Vigor show in Verizon Cellebrite unit — Nexus Prime and more tracked in Verizon system — Three flagship Android phones Verizon have surfaced in the Cellebrite catalog system that both confirms their Verizon attachments as well as that they will ship soon.
