Multitasking.
I’ve been reading coverage of Palm’s new device, Pre, which is being presented at CES this morning, trying to figure out whether this thing can be a real iPhone competitor (or killer).
Because, you know, it’s not about the hardware anymore; or perhaps even the feature set. Every decent smartphone nowadays has WiFi and 3G connectivity, a GPS chip and a lot of memory. You can’t beat the iPhone in this area, at least not by a lot. Furthermore, when it comes to features, you can have a great notes and calendar application or a fantastic browser, but it’s hard to top the iPhone’s applications because they already work so well (better, in many cases, than those of its competitors).
But the way you can switch between applications on the Pre caught my eye. It might be a tad too early to tell, because no one has a real, in-depth review yet, but switching between apps seems fast and seamless; all the applications can work in the background and even notify you of important events while you’re working in another app. Palm’s buzzword for this is Synergy; but marketingese talk aside, it really is a step forward towards having a real mobile computer that can handle many tasks at the same time.
The iPhone can do all that; theoretically. But right now, it doesn’t. The Pre seems to be way better with this regard.
Add to this the fact that Pre’s interface seems to be even faster, fluid and responsive than the iPhone’s, and you have a very interesting device and platform.
However, whether Palm will be able to motivate developers to start creating applications for Pre’s platform, dubbed WebOS, (and under what terms; we all remember Apple’s restrictive policies towards developers) remains to be seen. If they do, Pre will be one of the most interesting mobile devices of 2009.
[image credits: NYtimes.com]
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Ever tried out Facebook Lexicon? It’s a nifty tool that looks for occurrences of certain terms on Facebook users’ walls and creates a graph that shows how often is the term mentioned over time.
The Lexicon has been around for quite a while now, but while playing with it today I noticed an interesting occurence, which you can see in the image below. Terms like “happy birthday,” obviously, are mentioned pretty much all the time, while “Obama” has had a huge spike during the presidential elections and the subsequent victory of Barack Obama.
However, the term “sex” has an unexplainable spike on Friday, May 30th of 2008. Perhaps it’s just a glitch, or maybe I’m missing something obvious, but I can’t for the life of me remember why would people mention this word more on that particular day than any other day.
Any ideas that can solve the mistery?
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MySpace, Yahoo, and Intel have unveiled a joint plan at CES to offer consumers a way to use their favorite social network directly on the TV. Imagine a tiny application that shows up on TVs and other devices equipped with Intel’s special chipset that enables consumers to access MySpace and interact with their buddies while watching television.
Well, I’m imagining it, and I don’t see the point. It’s ok, I guess; but why would I want to do this over the television set? When you watch TV, you want to watch TV, and little else (except perhaps eating popcorn). When you want to interact, you use your computer - which is probably not that far away from your TV set.
Plus, I don’t see how this beats mobile social networking. We’ve got all these beautiful devices with large screens like the iPhone and G1, with fantastic social networking applications developed for them. With a TV, you’re stuck in one corner of the house. With a mobile, you can go anywhere and carry the social network with you.
This is a try to squeeze some life out of a notoriously non-interactive medium like the television, and - like all similar initiatives before it - it will end up nowhere. In the meantime the rest of us will enjoy social networks on our computers, handhelds, netbooks or mobiles.
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FlyCast is a nifty little iPhone application that lets you stream over 1200 radio channels, with a little twist: it can preload music while you have an internet connection and then play it even while you’re offline.
Today at CES the company has unveiled several major upgrades to the product. First, there’s Android support; FlyCast already works on the iPhone, iPod Touch and BlackBerry, and now it’s available for the T-Mobile G1 phone.
Furthermore, FlyCast now exists as a desktop version for PC and Mac; it’s an Adobe AIR application, but Linux isn’t mentioned anywhere, I’m afraid. You can download it at the official web site.
Other improvements include unlimited song skipping for over 300 channels, an upgraded program guide, Facebook Connect support, local weather info through AccuWeather.com, and support for AAC+ and Windows Media streams.
Interested in more iPhone and Android resources?
- 8 Android Apps Worth Paying for (and Some That Aren’t)
- 10 Free Music Based Games for the iPhone & iPod Touch
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read full story of "Radio Streaming App FlyCast Adds Android Support"
Nine Inch Nails are probably one of the most important music groups in the world, currently, simply because they’re paving a new way of treating their fans and understanding how the internet works and how it can be used to your advantage.
After giving away (or selling at really cheap prices) several of their latest albums, they’ve continued to surprise fans with freebies. In a blog post on the official band web site, band leader Trent Reznor says that someone “somehow managed to film a substantial amount (over 400 GB!) of raw, unedited HD footage from three separate complete shows of our Lights in the Sky tour“, and provides a link to the footage.
Many other bands *cough* Metallica *cough* would be angry at quality footage of their shows being leaked on the internet for free, but the Nine Inch Nails have simply embraced this as yet another possibility to give something extra to their loyal fanbase. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the NIN actually filmed and released the footage themselves, but it’s irrelevant; what’s important is the fact that this band understands that they provide a wealth of fun and happiness to their listeners and that most of it should be freely shared, not divided into little pieces, hidden, and sold for the highest possible price.
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Back in August 2008, Mark Zuckerberg posted on the official Facebook blog that Facebook had reached 100 million users. Now, only 4 months later, this number has grown 50%: Facebook now has 150 million users.
And, these are active users we’re talking about. How they determine this number at Facebook is unknown to me, but it probably means that users who’ve just created an account which sits idle for a long period of time aren’t included. This is huge; Facebook is growing incredibly fast, and at this pace it will will reach 300 million users by the end of 2009.
Also worth noting: Facebook was once a US-only service, but now it has users from over 170 countries. I can personally attest to Facebook’s growth in Croatia, where recent numbers suggest a growth of 100% over the last six months of 2008, with over 400,000 users. If this example is any indication, Facebook has no problems expanding internationally, in fact, it might even be growing faster than in the US.
Besides the obvious benefits of such growth, which include catching up with MySpace and increasing advertising profits, Facebook will also have to deal with scaling problems; some of their features (Chat and Live Feed, for example) simply aren’t working very well, and users are beginning to notice.
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read full story of "Facebook Has 150 Million Active Users. Whoa."
Amidst all the coverage of the new iTunes pricing structure - and the fact that purchased songs will be DRM-free from now on - not many reporters pointed out (there are exceptions, of course) that Apple is actually charging 30 cents for DRM removal from old songs.
Yes, you can burn the songs to a CD and import them back into iTunes, but the quality of the tracks will deteriorate. What’s important here is the fact that Apple is now basically admitting (remember that long anti-DRM note from Steve Jobs?) that DRM was a mistake, but they still want you to pay them for it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like paying for others’ mistakes.
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So, when you first heard about the iPhone’s application platform and how cool it was, what were your thoughts? I know what I thought: great, I can’t wait to see all the cool and useful applications we’ll see on this thing! I bet on location-aware apps to be the next big thing. I even threw some ideas around; in my delusion, I thought I could anticipate what kind of applications might get really big. But I was wrong.
Farts. Farts, folks, is where it’s at. MacRumors reveals that the top selling spot on iPhone App store for the 22nd of December, belongs to iFart Mobile, one of the many popular fart applications (I can’t believe I put those two words together). iFart’s rise to fame in the last couple of days, looks like this:
12/14 - 841 units - #76 overall
12/15 - 1510 units - #39 overall
12/16 - 1797 units - #22 overall
12/17 - 2836 units - #15 overall
12/18 - 3086 units - #10 overall
12/19 - 3117 units - #9 overall
12/20 - 5497 units, - #4 overall
12/21 - 9760 units, #2 overall
12/22 - 13274 units, #1 overall
Money earned? $9198 on 22nd of December alone.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. People like the app, it’s cheap (99 cents), it probably makes for a cool joke. And remember the popular Facebook applications, such as SuperPoke, which aren’t much more useful than iFart Mobile. It all goes to show that simple and funny always works. All entrepreneurs should keep that in mind when they fantasize about creating a hit application on an upcoming platform.
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The second alpha version of Mozilla’s mobile browser, Fennec, is now available. Unfortunately, for end users, the most important piece of information about this release is that it works only on Maemo, which is Nokia N810’s platform. So, if you’re hoping you’ll be trying this out on your iPhone or any device other than N810, sorry.
However, Mozilla did provide several desktop versions for enthusiasts and developers to play with: Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are supported.
Improvements in this version include tweaks to features already known from alpha 1, as well as these new features:
- Faster panning
- Faster zooming
- Improved responsiveness while pages are loading
- New content manipulation hooks for extension authors
- Look and feel improvements to improve usability
We’re glad that the dev team is working hard on Fennec, but we’re totally hoping Santa’s gonna grant our wish and give us a beta version (with multi-platform support) soon!
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Fennec: Here’s the VideoMozilla Gets Touchy and Feely With Firefox ‘Fennec’ MobileGoodbye, Rollyo - Yahoo Lets You Roll Your Own SearchOpera 10 Alpha: Yeah, it’s Even Faster Than BeforeAlpha: When Beta Is Not Good EnoughNsyght’s Social Search Launches Alpha8 Unusual Animals of Web Branding
read full story of "Fennec Alpha 2 Comes: Still for Nokia N810 Only"
There was a time when news aggregators (especially tech-focused) were sprouting up left and right every other day: Techmeme, Megite, Tailrank (currently down). Then, after a while, everything went quiet: not many of these gained much traction, algorithms weren’t always doing a perfect job at discovering and aggregating news from various sources, and everyone seemed to have gone back to simply following news the oldschool way: through a bunch of RSS feeds.
TechFuga is a new site that tries to breathe new life into this space. It’s an aggregator of tech news aggregators: simply put, it takes all of the aforementioned sites and many others, plus a bunch of tech blogs, and brings all that together on one page that’s eerily similar to Techmeme, with some news sources being chosen as primary and others as related news.
I have now seen enough similar sites to say the following: if you want to do this right, you need to have an editor, who’s going to manually sift through the stuff spewed out by an algorithm and sort out the important stuff from the not-so-important stuff. TechFuga doesn’t seem to do that: they combine the popurls approach, which means simply stacking a lot of RSS feeds on a page, with a Techmeme-like algorithm that chooses Top Stories.
The result is solid, but a bit too messy for my taste: there’s simply too much stuff going on here. If I’m going to go over all these news items, I might as well simply check out what’s new in my Google Reader. The Top News part of the site, on the other hand, is virtually identical as Techmeme, only less readable. So, the question is, does the world really needs a popurls meets Techmeme? It can’t hurt, but I don’t think it’s essential.
On the other hand, TechFuga really does a good job at putting all these sources of information in one place; if you’re interested in technology related news, TechFuga is a great starting point. Furthermore, they’re planning to add search as well as a “developing news” section with stories that haven’t yet been shown on the front pages of the aggregators. However, until then, if you already have a couple of favorite tech news aggregators, I’m not sure that TechFuga does enough to differentiate.
read full story of "TechFuga - How Much Tech News is Too Much?"