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Hey look..... a giant iPod. (I wonder what apple is thinking about this tablet thing, when the chinese finally start making them cheaper than a six pack.)
get ready for sub $200 mini laptop folks. This will change everything ($300 iPod? who is going to buy that? $800 laptop? yeah right? etc.) the whole landscape of "digital media" will be entirely different 2 years from now.
http://www.pocketables.net/2009/08/more-photos-of-unknown-android-mid-surface.html#more
http://www.pocketables.net/2009/08/unidentified-android-mid-makes-an-appearance.html -
Mr. Analyst says Apple is going to have a final design ready in the next six weeks, and the device would then be announced in September for a November launch. The Apple tablet may also break your bank, costing you a whopping $699 to $799. But for those big bucks you'd get a device that would be able to, among other things, play high-definition video. While other features might be nice, it sounds like the Apple tablet's video capability is the feature to beat. The anonymous source says the device's video quality "is better than the average movie experience."
...
Late last week, there was also a rumor the Apple tablet would launch with a secret software project codenamed Cocktail. The software is rumored to be a development in conjunction with the major music labels, and would be "a new type of interactive album, which will combine photos, lyrics sheets, video clips, and liner notes, all gathered into an interactive booklet."
http://www.pcworld.com/article/169476/apple_tablet_prototype_is_real_nov_launch_expected_says_report.html
(yeah whatever...cocktail schmocktail... -
Lyre project: Open Hardware music player and recorder running Rockbox firmware
Lyre is a project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player (DAP) and recorder, for use with Rockbox firmware. Read more about Lyre here.
Status
We are looking for ways to get/produce a cheap and world available Open Hardware. We are now working closesly with ARMopendous.
Using this site
- Read the news on our blog;
- If you are a developer, get all the tecnhicall information on development page;
- Post any question, sugestions, etc, on support forum.
http://mp3.generationmp3.com/2009/08/25/lyre-project-baladeur-mp3-specialement-concu-pour-rockbox/
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Whilst tracking Kindle sales is like guess work, tracking US e-book sales is a bit easier, the above graphic shows US e-book sales from Q1 2002 – Q1 2008. Whilst there was a healthy upward trend, the last 5 quarters (Q4 2006 – Q4 2007) only showed a 17% increase in sales according to industry statistics compiled by The International Digital Publishing Forum. However just in the last quarter alone, the industry saw an explosion, up from $1,887,900 in sales in Q4 2007 shooting up 23% to $2,460,343 in sales in Q1 2008.
I think the most interesting results will be Q2 2008, if we see another 20% spike in sales like we saw in Q1 2008 then it’s quite reasonable to theorise that the Kindle is having an effect on e-book sales in the US.
http://blogkindle.com/2008/06/the-kindle-effect-has-the-kindle-effected-us-e-book-sales/
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David Byrne: Kindle DRM means "you are f*cked"
David Byrne describes his experiences using the Kindle DX while on tour: nice device, crappy DRM, not worth it.Here's where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files -- Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. -- but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they're converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can't share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle. No doubt, as with MP3 and iTunes, book publishers would only agree to this system if people couldn't share their purchases. As we know, Apple has relented on this, and has taken DRM off many of their music files. But which ones? How do you know? Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books -- if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are fucked. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.There are other e-book formats out there (EPub is being touted as a cross-platform format, but still, ugh, with DRM)...We're linked now, which is how we use these things that represent our inner selves -- as social connectors. Take that ability away, the ability to exchange stuff that represents us, and I'll bet some of the "value" of these kinds of e-books goes too... the social interconnectedness value, not the dollar value.
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Intel has worked with the industry to develop a new specification for integrated audio that is capable of delivering the features and high-end performance of an add-in audio card. Intel® High Definition Audio (Intel® HD Audio) is capable of playing back more channels at higher quality than previous integrated audio formats. In addition, Intel High Definition Audio has the technology needed to support the latest and greatest audio content. By enabling enhanced usage models, Intel High Definition Audio, available with the Intel® Express Chipsets, will also change how computer users interact with sound.
Intel HD Audio delivers significant improvements over previous generation integrated audio and sound cards. Intel HD Audio hardware is capable of delivering the support and sound quality for up to eight channels at 192 kHz/32-bit quality, while the AC‘97 specification can only support six channels at 48 kHz/20-bit. In addition, Intel HD Audio is architected to prevent the occasional glitches or pops that other audio solutions can have by providing dedicated system bandwidth for critical audio functions.
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/hdaudio.htm
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3634
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_High_Definition_AudioIntel High Definition Audio (also called HD Audio or Azalia) refers to the specification released by Intel in 2004[1] for delivering high-definition audio that is capable of playing back more channels at higher quality than previous integrated audio codecs like AC97. During development it had the codename Azalia.
Hardware based on Intel HD Audio specifications is capable of delivering 192-kHz 32-bit quality for two channels, and 96-kHz 32-bit for up to eight channels. However, as of 2008[update], most audio hardware manufacturers do not implement the full high-end specification, especially 32-bit sampling resolution.
Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows XP SP3[2] include a Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) class driver which supports audio devices built to the HD Audio specification. Mac OS X has full support with its AppleHDA driver. Linux also supports Intel HDA controllers, as do the OpenSolaris,[3] FreeBSD[4], NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems.
Like AC97, HD Audio is a specification that defines the architecture, link frame format, and programming interfaces used by the controller on the PCI bus and by the codec on the other side of the link. Implementations of the host controller are available from at least Intel, NVidia, and AMD.[5] Codecs which can be used with such controllers are available from many companies, including Realtek,[6] Conexant, and Analog Devices.[7]
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Those cheapo all in one, integrated computer suppose to have 32bit audio by now.
eight channels at 192 kHz/32-bit ? That's high end recording studio for you. -
Foxconn Developing Inexpensive, Arm-based Smartbooks
Foxconn Technology plans to launch its first smartbooks next year, which are mini-laptops that use microprocessors from Arm Holdings normally found in smartphones.
Smartbooks are similar to netbooks except that they don't use Intel's popular Atom microprocessor nor other x86 processors.
Foxconn has been asked by telecommunications companies in China and elsewhere to develop smartbooks due to their low prices, said Young Liu, special assistant to the CEO at Foxconn, on the sidelines of an Intel press conference in Taipei.
They're attracted to the price range of a smartbook, US$100 to $200, he said. "That's a lot lower than a netbook," he said. "There will be a lot of demand for a sub-$200 device."
His company is working on "less than five" smartbooks right now, he said, declining to name a specific number. The devices, codenamed Qbooks, use a few different Linux operating systems, including one similar to the Intel-backed Moblin OS and one developed by Foxconn. The company is currently looking into Google's Android mobile OS for possible use as well, he said.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/171560/foxconn_developing_inexpensive_armbased_smartbooks.html
(Foxconn is the biggest ODM in the planet. The people who apple also contracted out to make iPhone and laptop.) -
Nokia doing linux. seems to be working very good (new processor)
They could start selling this on the cheap after 10-12 months -
"British chip designer ARM is launching an outright attack on Intel with the launch of a 2GHz processor aimed at everything from netbooks to servers. ARM claims the 40nm Cortex A9 MPCore processor represents a shift in strategy for the company, which has until now concentrated on low-power processors for mobile devices. In the consumer market, ARM is pitching the Cortex A9 directly against Intel's Atom, claiming the processor offers five times the power while drawing comparable amounts of energy. 'It's head and shoulders above anything Intel can deliver today,' ARM VP of marketing Eric Schom claims. However, it has one major hurdle to overcome: it doesn't support Windows. 'We've had conversations with Microsoft and you can imagine what they entail,' says Schom."
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/09/16/1527209/ARM-Attacks-Intels-Netbook-Stranglehold -
Cheap crappy iTouch competitor here we come....!
(I can't wait sub $200, completely open source android based Digital Audio player that with WiFi.)September 17, 2009
Rockchip Android MID concept to be released by RAmos?
Still disappointed that last month's mystery Android MID was eventually identified as just a Rockchip concept device? If so, then there's a good chance that Chinese PMP maker RAmos may be able to pull you out of the depths of despair next week with its announcement of an ARM-based Android MID capable of supporting 1080p MKV (H.264/VC-1), AVI (XviD/DivX), and other video containers/formats at bitrates between 30-40Mbps.
The teaser image you see here accompanies a news release about an event scheduled for next Friday (September 25th) that will no doubt be the stage for the official unveiling of what many are speculating will turn out to be the Rockchip concept. Though only a portion of the device is shown in the teaser, what can be seen sure looks identical to the Rockchip unit shown in previous photos and videos (and for the last time, no, it isn't the SMiT MID-560). Everything from the silver trim and rounded corners to the vertically off-centered screen all seem to match up perfectly.
Rockchip's RK2808 chipset may not necessarily be inside the RAmos MID, as 720p (not 1080p) has always been cited as the chip's main strength, but it's only an 8-day wait until we know for sure.
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Not the most exciting PMP news, but it’s worth mentioning. The MP Navi “Eye Touch” PMP is a 4.3-inch touchscreen player with oh-so typical, even Chinesy looks. We don’t hear WiFi or GPS built-in but we’re pretty sure it’s a very solidly built device. It also at the fairly low price of $114 or its Korean Won equivalent. Not much more details has been announced.
http://www.pmptoday.com/2009/09/17/eye-touch-mp-navi-is-a-basic-touchscreen-pmp/ -
Laser microphone!
(remind me to not talk so much in a smokey room, they can measure the particulate vibration...maybe...)Video: Laser/smoke microphone promises the world's most accurate sound capture
By Loz Blain
06:41 September 23, 2009 PDT
The quest for ever more realistic sound reproduction seems set to move to a whole new level. Traditional microphones convert sound to electrical signals by measuring the deflections that sound vibrations cause in a diaphragm. But each diaphragm has its own weight, inertia and resistance, which colors the sound that gets recorded. So American digital audio pioneer David Schwartz, who invented the MP3 sound format, has come up with a novel new type of microphone that virtually eliminates the microphone's mechanical interference with the sound. The laser/smoke microphone uses a laser to measure the deflections that sound makes in a steady stream of smoke - which is virtually weightless. Prepare for a new wave of high-fidelity microphone technology. Read More
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Transfering entire content of hardrive will be so much easier after this. Forget one or two album, how about swapping entire personal library?
Your entire library in less than 50 seconds.
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/09/27/1427241/Apple-Behind-Intels-USB-Competitor
recently discussed Light Peak, Intel's upcoming, optical interconnect technology that boasts data transfer rates of up to 10 Gbps. While some have speculated that Light Peak will directly compete with USB 3.0, Engadget has now unearthed information that indicates the idea for the technology originated from Apple, who apparently asked Intel to develop it. "According to documents we've seen and conversations we've had, Apple had reached out to Intel as early as 2007 with plans for an interoperable standard which could handle massive amounts of data and 'replace the multitudinous connector types with a single connector (FireWire, USB, Display interface).' ... Based on what we've learned, Apple will introduce the new standard for its systems around Fall 2010 in a line of Macs destined for back-to-school shoppers — a follow-up to the 'Spotlight turns to notebooks' event, perhaps. Following the initial launch, there are plans to roll out a low-power variation in 2011, which could lead to more widespread adoption in handhelds and cellphones. The plans from October 2007 show a roadmap that includes Light Peak being introduced to the iPhone / iPod platform to serve as a gateway for multimedia and networking outputs."
http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/None/1813.htm
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I want build a Google Wave collaborative music blog. Anyone else want in?
Geeking out on how awesome it is going to be.
http://code.google.com/apis/wave/ -
Sure, I only have few time. But I am tired surfing entire internet trying to find good stuff. I want all the good stuff on my blog front page.
Maybe we can crash wave using the entire music blog scene... heh.. -
Android developers pledge to make open equivalents to Google's proprietary apps
Google's legal threat against an open source Android developer who made a replacement phone firmware that ran faster than Google's own slow-and-poky version has sparked a commitment to replace all of Google's proprietary apps with free alternatives. Cyanogen, an Android dev, made much-loved Android OSes that bundled in Google's default apps, like Google Maps, and Google says that this violates their copyrights and has ordered him to stop. They're probably right as a matter of law, but this is infra-dumb as a business question: Google's default Android OS is very slow, and shipping these improved OSes only makes the pitch for Android more attractive.
Irate Android devs aim to replace Google's proprietary bitsGoogle, however, appears to be significantly less permissive on this front than Microsoft. The company's legal department objects to the Cyanogen mod on the basis of its inclusion of Google's proprietary software. They sent Kondik a cease and desist order compelling him to remove the mod from his Web site. The Android enthusiast community has responded fiercely, condemning Google for taking a heavy-handed approach. Even Google's own Android team appears to be frustrated with the legal department's zeal. After the news about the cease and desist broke, Google developer Jean-Baptiste Queru posted a message on Twitter suggesting that he could be pursuing alternate employment opportunities.Kondik expressed disgust with the entire situation, but has been working with Google to find a reasonable resolution. He remains optimistic that he can accommodate Google's requirements and still make his mod available to users. In a blog entry posted Sunday, he explained how he plans to move forward. The Cyanogen mod will no longer include Google's proprietary applications. Instead, users who have "Google Experience" phones will back up those applications to external media and will restore them after installing the modded ROM. He is building a special tool to facilitate the backup and restoration process.
(I am sure HTC would love to hire this guy.) -
"iTnews reports that researchers from Australia and Singapore are developing a wireless ad-hoc mesh networking technology that uses mobile handsets to share and carry information. The mesh network will make use of Bluetooth or Wi-fi to swap information between handsets — even if the mobile phone network was offline. One potential scenario could be during an emergency where the mobile phone network was unavailable or clogged. In a city centre, users could set up the network to share information, video, photographs and, depending on the final client applications, even locate friends and loved ones. One benefit of developing such a technology would be that users sharing content between their devices would use the wireless communications technology already built into their phones and not bandwidth from their mobile provider. The researchers from the National ICT Australia and Singapore's A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research hope to demonstrate the technology within two years, according to NICTA project leader Dr Roksana Boreli.'This is an early stage in the research project,' she said. 'We are addressing how you would quickly establish trust between devices, how you would discover them and share the information,' Boreli said."
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/10/01/202210/A-Mobile-Phone-Mesh-That-Can-Survive-Carrier-Network-Failure
They will never allow this technology. Who needs Telcos then? Get bunch of friend and phones together and start hooking up together for free. -
I picked up one of the friends of the 100,000 Google Wave invites today, now I wait patiently for it to activate.
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If you get one of those account that let people in, can you let me in too?
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Random news related to P2P and pop music
http://empoprise-mu.blogspot.com/2009/10/observations-on-band-that-has-undergone.html
The Guardian looked at the band recently, 40 years after "In the Court of the Crimson King" was released:
In the Court of the Crimson King was the masterpiece that essentially launched progressive rock, which was the dominant genre in high-end British pop for the next seven years. Until The Dark Side of the Moon, it was the definitive prog-rock album. And yet, singled out as it was by punk rock as an emblem of all that was bloated and overblown with modern rock, it never quite received its due.
And if Robert Fripp et al are card-carrying members of the RIAA, they may want to reconsider their membership:
The revival of interest in an album that has been scarcely fashionable from the late 70s through to the 90s is partly due to online filesharing.
And, by the way, those are some very big files. Remember that the original album only had five songs; none of this 2 minute 30 second stuff. Even the titles of the songs ran on for miles; it wasn't until later that they'd learn to write short titles like "Elephant Talk."
I haven't heard any of the songs from the album in years, but my favorite part of the album was a small snippet in the title track, right after they changed key from D to E with a massive sonic blast...followed by some very quiet noodling...followed by - another sonic blast. Classic. -
The invite I got hasn't been activated yet. The first 100,000 got 5 invites and those invites will become active some time soon (hopefully). If it does materialize and I get invites I can hold on to one for you.
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'The way traffic moves over the Internet has changed radically in the last five years. Arbor Networks next week will present the results of a two-year a study, drawing on more than 256 exabytes of Internet traffic data, that found that the bulk of international Internet traffic no longer moves across Tier-1 transit providers. Instead, the traffic is handled directly by large content providers, content delivery networks, and consumer networks, and is handed off from one of these to another. You can probably guess what some of these companies are: Google, Microsoft, Facebook. Arbor says there are about 30 of these 'hyper giant' companies that generate and consume about 30% of all Internet traffic.'
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/16/1555228/Internet-Traffic-Shifting-Away-From-Tier-1-Carriers -
Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format
http://www.pcworld.com/article/173789/google_editions_embraces_universal_ebook_format.html
"Google announced on Thursday that next year it's launching an online e-book store called Google Editions where users will be able to buy digital books that can be read on a range of gadgets, including e-book readers, laptops, and cell phones. Press reports out of Germany, where it was announced, note that Google plans to offer up half a million e-books from the get-go. Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group, said, 'The market leader, Amazon, built its position with a closed device, Kindle, which is limited to reading and buying eBooks. It will be interesting to see how well it stacks up against Google's strategy of delivering e-book capabilities via the Web to any device that can connect to the Internet. This gives Google a vastly larger addressable market than what Amazon has built up with Kindle so far.'"
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/16/1539203/Google-Takes-On-Amazon-With-Own-E-Book-Store -
CIA Invests In Firm That Datamines Social Networks
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It's part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using 'open source intelligence' — information that's publicly available... Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn't touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what's being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords. 'That's kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,' says company senior vice president Blake Cahill. Then Visible 'scores' each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. ('Trying to determine who really matters,' as Cahill puts it.) Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface."Apropos: Another anonymous reader writes points out an article which makes the point that users don't even realize how much private information they're sharing over these services.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/10/20/1444256/CIA-Invests-In-Firm-That-Datamines-Social-Networks
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I TOLD YOU SO ..... -
AUO demonstrates 6-inch flexible electronic paper, pledges production for next year
If e-paper is ever really going to have a chance against tree-paper it's going to have to get a lot more flexible. We've seen multiple demonstrations of bendable wares from LG and even big daddy E Ink, but AUO is the first to pledge mass production of the stuff (since the Readius went bust), starting in 2010. The company has demonstrated a 6-inch flexible display offering 16 shades of gray and a contrast ratio of 9:1, which sounds terrible but is actually slightly better than the Kindle's 7:1. The company is also showing off a 20-inch non-bendy version that should also hit production sometime next year. When will either get the hammer treatment? That remains to be seen.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/20/auo-demonstrates-6-inch-flexible-electronic-paper-pledges-produ/ -
omg.......can somebody build NORMAL gadget already...
FFS. how hard is it not to get clever about it...
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/20/watch-spring-design-alex-push-the-web-to-e-reader-format-video/
Browse to whatever web article / Google book / Wikipedia entry you want to enjoy, press the center button, and watch as Alex "prints" the page to the e-reader screen up top for a more comfortable reading experience. We'll admit we're a bit surprised to see a working model already -- hopefully this is a sign of good things to come sooner rather than later. Video after the break. -
Amazon profit surges 69%
E-commerce giant blows past Wall Street's expectations, with growth attributed to sales of the Kindle. Amazon reduces prices of the e-reader to $259.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/10/22/technology/Amazon_earnings/?postversion=2009102306 -
Here’s what the Lausanne researchers concluded: over the first few generations, the bots had quickly evolved to successfully locate the food, while emitting light randomly. This resulted in a high intensity of light near food, which provided social information allowing other bots to more rapidly find the food. Because the bots were competing for food, they were quickly selected to conceal this information. Surprisingly, the bots never completely ceased to produce information. The researchers attributed this unexpected result to the strength of selection in suppressing information. They found that the strength of selection declined according to a reduction in information content. This produced a stable equilibrium with low information and considerable variation in communicative behaviors.
Because a similar co-evolutionary process is common in natural systems, the Lausanne researchers suggest that the relationship between evolutionary selection and information content “may explain why communicative strategies are so variable in many animal species.”
Using robotics to study communication may help overcome some of the difficulties of performing experimental evolution with social animals, since there is a distinct lack of fossil evidence for changes in communication skills over time. Communication is very important for social organisms to ensure their ecological success. For example, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowdon offers a perspective on what the early environmental conditions may have been that led to the hominid communicative explosion. His research into the world of nonhuman primates suggests that while apes and monkeys in the Old World tend to be relatively silent creatures, the New World is home to much noisier monkeys such as tararins and marmosets that vocalize more frequently to “show more richness of development and learning in their vocal patterns, and that appear to transmit more information with the sounds they produce than do any of the Old World primates.”
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Asus to launch a $180 smartbook in early 2010
Asus CEO Jerry Shen says that the company will launch a smartbook during the first quarter of 2010. There aren’t any further details, but smartbooks are typically defined as low power, 3G-enabled ultraportable laptops with ARM-based processors. There’s no word on whether the Asus smartbook would run Windows CE, Linux, or Google Android, but the company did briefly demonstrate a Google Android-powered netbook this summer before deciding it wasn’t ready for the world to see and hiding it away.
The prototype was based on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor which enables long battery life, and integrated GPS, 3G, WiFi, and graphics capabilities. But it’s not at all clear whether the upcoming Asus product will be built on the same platform as the early prototype.
Shen says the new device will run about NT 6,000 which is roughly $184 US.
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Century Japan's New FireWire to SATA - IDE Dongle
There are plenty of USB to SATA - IDE dongles available, and very few SATA - IDE to FireWires. If you're desperately looking for one, search no more! In November, Century Japan will launch the CRAISFU2, a FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 dongle supporting SATA HDDs, and both 3.5” and 2.5” IDE HDDS.
This dongle is only available in Japan, but can be ordered soon online via GeekStuff4U.com
http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news-19216-Century+Japan's+New+FireWire+to+SATA+-+IDE+Dongle.html -
Going Head To Head With Genius On Playlists
"Engineers at the University of California, San Diego are developing a system to include an ignored sector of music, dubbed the 'long tail', in music recommendations. It's well known that radio suffers from a popularity bias, where the most popular songs receive an inordinate amount of exposure. In Apple's music recommender system, iTunes' Genius, this bias is magnified. An underground artist will never be recommended in a playlist due to insufficient data. It's an artifact of the popular collaborative filtering recommender algorithm, which Genius is based on. In order to establish a more holistic model of the music world, Luke Barrington and researchers at the Computer Audition Laboratory have created a machine learning system which classifies songs in an automated, Pandora-like, fashion. Instead of using humans to explicitly categorize individual songs, they capture the wisdom of the crowds via a Facebook game, Herd It, and use the data to train statistical models. The machine can then 'listen to,' describe and recommend any song, popular or not. As more people play the game, the machines get smarter. Their experiments show that automatic recommendations work at least as well as Genius for recommending undiscovered music."
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/11/05/227236/Going-Head-To-Head-With-Genius-On-Playlists -
we are rolling, soon the chinese will start hacking android with ease and stamping cheap hardware like it's Kmart blue light sale.
Android Kills iPhone in China
Huawei, one of China’s big homegrown corporations, is reporting sales of its own Android phones with 3G connectivity of up to 100,000 units. The figure comes after a month of the phones being on the market. Huawei has also announced its intention earlier this year to sell its brand of Android phones on T-Mobile U.S.
Huawei released its first Android smartphones on Oct. 6 and has become the third-largest supplier of Android 3G phones, said sources.
In June, Huawei showcased the Android-powered U8230 smartphone at CommunicAsia 2009 in Singapore. The U8230 smartphone offers both full and half QWERTY keyboards on its 3.5-inch LCD touch screen.
The new handset uses Google’s Chrome Internet browser, which supports a variety of Google applications such as Google Maps and Google Talk in addition to Google Search. The battery has the longest life of any of the Android-powered handsets currently available, China Knowledge reported earlier.
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Somebody's master thesis on music mapping software.
http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/
data,MusicBox includes both content-based and context-based information. That is,
it uses some characteristics of the audio content of songs, in addition to textual information that
describes the music (e.g. editorial information, user tags, genre class). It’s important to use both
kinds of data in order to be able to:
• display relationships based on actual audio content, which contextual data ignores
• deal with music that has no contextual data (either because it is new or unpopular)
• capture the cultural significance of contextual data
• treat music at the track-level (instead of the artist/album-level)
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I personally think the map is a bit hard to use. it looks like a blob of dots. -
'Android kills iPhone in China'? Kinda misleading headline, given it's about selling 100,00 units in all of Europe. They'll have to ramp that up considerably to match iPhone's Q2 sales of 3.8 million.
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this is fun. I like the idea...
may be about 12 minutes worth of fad out of 15.Esquire Launches First Augmented Reality Magazine
"We've seen augmented reality applications for years (and seen the GE windmill replicated in PopSci), but now Esquire Magazine seems to be trying to show off the undying value of print by launching its 'AR issue' — which, from the demo video, looks pretty cool. Applications include a 3D cover with Robert Downey Jr., a weather-changing fashion portfolio with The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner, a time-sensitive Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman with Community's Gillian Jacobs, plus a song, a photo slideshow, and a face-recognition ad from Lexus. From the behind-the-scenes geekery: 'Advancements to further involve the user were happening even as we produced this issue, and while motion-sensor recognition already exists, so-called "natural-feature tracking" technology could soon put you inside AR without any googly-looking [note: not in the Google sense] boxes at all.'" -
The biggest electronic conglomerate in the planet is going android. This ought to be fun.
I start to think Microsoft will be in trouble in a decade or so if they don't fix their product strategy.
http://msmobiles.com/news.php/8767.html
Samsung wants to take on iPhone and this is the highest priority of this Korean corporation now. However obviously Windows Mobile is too outdated to help in this endavour so Samsung is focusing now on Android that is developing very quickly and is available already in version 2.0 with free turn-by-turn GPS navigation. Android gets new major version each year while for that utterly incompetent Microsoft it takes 4-5 years to release new major version.
Samsung is a hardware company and its overlays on top of Windows Mobile were not that innovative as HTC's TouchFlo3D and HTC Sense, so huge ($170 billion in yearly revenues) Samsung corporation was all the time playing catch up with HTC ($4 billion in yearly revenues). -
Implantable Silicon-Silk electronics could mean LED tattoos
Tattooing dates back to at least Neolithic times and has experienced a resurgence in popularity in many parts of the world in recent years. Advancements in tattoo pigments and the refinement of tattooing equipment has seen an improvement in the quality of tattoos being produced. Today it’s possible to get ink that glows under UV light, but a new technology could see tattoos that emit their own light. Researchers have been able to build thin, flexible silicon electronics on silk substrates that almost completely dissolve inside the body, paving the way for embedded LED tattoos that offer much more than just aesthetic appeal
http://www.gizmag.com/implantable-electronics/13334/ -
Respected Developers Begin Fleeing the App Store
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/09/11/19/164229/Respected-Developers-Begin-Fleeing-the-App-Store
"Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, the long-time Mac software developer known as 'Rogue Amoeba' and other respected App Store developers have recently decided to discontinue their work on the platform, citing their frustration with Apple's opaque approval process. Continued issues with erroneous and snap rejections of applications and APIs are prompting more and more developers to shun the platform entirely. Though there are tens of thousands of other developers who have pumped out over 100,000 apps for the platform, continued migration away from iPhone development will most likely result in lower quality software." -
heh heh heh...and who exactly uses Bing? I never see anybody on my meter except brief few days last year.
I hope google thoroughly clean out every single murdoch junk out of their system...
nobody can hear you screaming on the net without google. haa haa...
http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/22/murdoch-microsoft-de.html#moreMicrosoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.
"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."
This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."
Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!
In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on -
Every time I hear that news corp / google story on npr I just shake my head. I kinda hope they actually go through with it just to watch the fail.
-
Holy cow, my brothers and sisters, there is God afteral.
The world will never be the same anymore if this flies.
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/09/11/27/2123243/Google-Attack-On-the-Mobile-Market-Rumored
Google is gearing up for an all-out assault on the mobile-phone market that will include a new, Google-branded handset and the first comprehensive Google phone service with unlimited free calls. "The real breakthrough, however, will come with the marriage of the Googlephone to Google Voice, the Californian company’s high-tech phone service. Google Voice gives US users a free phone number and allows unlimited free calls to any phone in the country — landline or mobile. International calls start from... just over a penny a minute. Google Voice also uses sophisticated voice recognition to turn voicemails into emails, can block telemarketing calls automatically and offers free text messaging. Google sounded its intentions two weeks ago when it purchased a small company called Gizmo5... [E]xperts are predicting that the Googlephone will be launched in the US early next year." -
I have google voice and it works great, especially with android. Not free, because of verizon, but still awesome.
If you hack it up right you can get free calls from any internet connected phone (to us # and cheap cheap anywhere else) but that hack (which I still have working) relied on Gizmo5, wihch they just bought a couple of weeks ago, and registration for new users is closed for now.
Anyway, I see that article as a realistic prediction, which is going to be amazing. Exciting times ahead.
Also, I have a couple of Google Voice invites if anyone wants one. -
sim card be gone...
FCC Preparing Transition To VoIP Telephone Network
"The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a request for public comment (PDF) on an upcoming transition from the decades-old circuit-based Public Switched Telephone Network to a new system run entirely with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. This is perhaps the most serious indication to date that the legacy telephone system will, in the near future, reach the end of its life. This public commenting phase represents a very early stage in what will undoubtedly be a very complex transition that makes this year's bumpy switch from analog to digital television look relatively easy." -
Dear Musicians – Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of The Way - by Dave Allen
I have written this essay as a prelude to the upcoming panels, both to outline my views on the subject in advance, and also as a way to organize my thoughts and past essays into one place. The debate surrounding online music distribution still evokes passion from critics and supporters alike, the most vocal being musicians who believe that I am working to make music free online and therefore deny them income from CD sales. Nothing could be further from the truth, I simply argue that musicians need to monetize everything around their musical output and stop dreaming that CD sales will one day return to previous levels; where the 2009 equation means 100k is the new 1mm, 10k is the new 100k etc. I should point out for the record that I am focusing almost exclusively on non-mainstream, independent musicians. [Although there is no reason at all that mainstream, commercial artists shouldn't be doing the same thing.]
Great read on the music industry / artists and its need to embrace new tech. -
Netbook now has hit sub $150 in china with anemic 4GB internal storage.
http://shanzai.com/index.php/bandit-gadgets/notebooks-a-netbooks/504-cheapest-101-windows-xp-netbook-ever
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Sat, Nov 7, 2009