Montag, 24. Januar 2005

Booq Vyper XS Laptop Case. When a product is backordered until April after launching in December, that's usually a sign of two things: the product is going to be pretty good, and that people are just a step away from flinging their own filth at each other. But congratulations to Booq Bags, whose Vyper XS molded ballistic nylon laptop sleeve for 12-inch laptops is way backed up[~]that's gotta feel nice. If you'd like to get in line for the hard-shell, almost form-fitted case, then go give them your $40 and get ready to wait like everybody else. Product Page [BooqBags] [Gizmodo] 5:18:12 PM    comment []

Rumor: Googlephone ?. Just read an article on Times Online about a rumor that Google is possibly working on a broadband telephone network. The article also mentions something about Skype, but there is no reference mentioned about the connection between Google and Skype. I keep wondering if it is good for Google to go to so many different markets. It seems that MSN and Yahoo are getting closer to Google in terms of search technology, and if Google looses the war in that field their empire may shake. Update: also posted on Slashdot. Update 2: Andy also blogs about this. [The VoIP Weblog] 5:15:54 PM    comment []

New virus levels Symbian phones. The same rule applies to every platform, everyone should know this by now. It[base ']s freaking 2005. Unless you[base ']re 100% sure what is, simply do not open any mysterious files, especially ones literally asking to be opened. So if you[base ']re one of the ones who ran patch.sis, which claims to be a Symbian OS patch that needs to be installed, you[base ']ve probably already noticed that your phone crashed. Oh, and it may not even turn on anymore, too. So, what you had was Gavno, and if you had Gavno.b you may have given it to your surrounding friends who for god knows what reason left their Bluetooth on discoverable mode. See to it that they don[base ']t give it to anyone else, yeah? We might pity these people, but we[base ']re starting to see this as Darwinian natural selection for gadgets. [Engadget] 1:26:51 PM    comment []

A Media Center in Your Pocket. Olga Khariff explains in Business Week why the cell phone is about to become a viable alternative to some other gadgets. As new and improved capabilities are added to cell phones, they will become competitive threats to a host of products, from MP3 players to laptop computers. And as the cell phone takes on a more central role, the consumer-electronics and PC markets could find that demand for their stand-alone products slackens. As cell phones improve over the next two years, they will also start playing a major role in the home. Soon, they will act as a remote-control devices, orchestrating the use of other home electronics. [Smart Mobs] 11:44:23 AM    comment []

Thanko Head Massager. Using the amazing power of USB, this head massager/space squid can make the average sad office worker so excited she pops her gnome hats right off. You can power the device off of two AA batteries as well, but then how could you expect it to transmit your innermost desires back to the mothership database? Also, I could have sworn we've covered this delightful bit before, but even so, it's worth talking about more than once. Product Page [Thanko via SorobanGeeks] [Gizmodo] 11:40:15 AM    comment []

Motorola Developing Whole Line of Razr Phones. BusinessWeek has confirmed that Motorola is working on a whole suite of V3 Razr-like phones, including a candybar model (as we've mocked up) and versions that will come in a variety of colors. They also mention that three-quarters of a million V3s have been sold since November[~]it's clearly a breakout product. And BusinessWeek has learned that the company is hard at work on a whole family of Razr-like phones in various shapes and colors -- including the Sliver, a candy-bar-shaped Razr -- to be announced later this year. Motorola Sharpens the Razr Edge [BusinessWeek via MobileTracker] [Gizmodo] 11:39:07 AM    comment []

PChome Touch-1 Skype USB Handset. Skype is our babydaddy around here. I don't use it much for making calls to real phone numbers, but Denton practically cried when he made a Skype call over a hijacked Wi-Fi connection in the middle of Tokyo[~]it was one of those great moments that happen when our disaffected attitude about technology takes a break and we can really geek out over something with proper perspective. So I wouldn't be surprised to see lots of these new PChome Touch-1 Skype USB handsets around the Gawker manse. It's just a phone[~]a corded one at that, although a cordless version is on the way[~]but it makes and receives its calls using the SkypeOut service. It's $700 Taiwan dollars, which works out to be about 22 bucks. PChome Touch-1 Skype USB Phone [eHomeUpgrade] [Gizmodo] 11:37:40 AM    comment []

Go-L Shufflufagus. Introducing the Go-L Shufflufagus. 5,000 terabytes of solid-state storage, vapor-chilled batteries with nanoceramic stickulon paper booster, and 256-character display (on the back; pictures available upon signing of NDA). (You rock, Betty.) [Gizmodo] 11:33:15 AM    comment []

Atari XL Screenshots. This is how Photochoppers rolled in the olden days: Put hood on Atari; take a screenshot; develop film; paint edits on prints with watercolor; invent scanning device to transfer image into digital 16 color file that spanned 200 floppy discs; upload to BBS over 300 baud modem, giving yourself enough ratio to download ever phreaker howto; bear witness to the first recorded invocation of the term 'ROFL.' You've Come a Long Way Baby [Core77] [Gizmodo] 11:32:21 AM    comment []

Bellster P2P VoIP Creates Free Calling to Regular Phones. Jeff Pulver, founder of VoIP service, Free World Dialup, has begun a new project called Bellster. The concept is to create a peer-to-peer voice over IP service that terminaties IP telephony calls through people[base ']s home PCs and personally owned telephone lines. It[base ']s a communal spirit that reminds me of the white bicycle plan during the free-love era in Amsterdam. But this time you are letting people use your phone: I make calls for free using your phone line, you make calls for free using my phone line[sigma] All. Over. The. World. Share and Enjoy! [The VoIP Weblog] 11:31:01 AM    comment []

Aurora Calls it Quits. Today guests should have been enjoying breakfast in sun-drenched Brazil, but instead P&O has finally called it quits on the malingering cruise ship Aurora and it's 104-day 'round the world cruise. As we previously reported, the ship has struggled with engine troubles since the scheduled departure date and never managed to get past the English channel, so guests spent most of the week in less-than-sunny Southampton before packing their bags and returning home today. To ease the disappointment, P&O is refunding passengers their fares (which ran up to £42,000 per passenger) and 25% in compensation. The delay and cancellation are estimated to have cost P&O £22m, and it is too early to say how much the repair of the ship will come to. But the managing director of P&O, David Dingle, played down the likely damage to its international reputation. He said: "We don't anticipate any lasting damage providing we do the decent things by our passengers and move swiftly to repair the ship, both of which we are doing." It's actually been pretty amusing to check in on the Aurora webcam all week to see where they might be; the view has never changed much from the shot above, captured today. On the upside, passengers who chose to stick it out for the week while repairs were attempted did score a rather unusual free week-long holiday in Southampton... [Wanda Lust: First Class Travel Blog] 11:30:26 AM    comment []

Back Seat Gaming. Backseat Playground , developed by John Paul Bichard, Liselott Brunnberg and Oskar Juhlin at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, is a mobile gaming research project that will enable kids to play with the world outside their window from the back seat of a car. This augmented reality game uses a digital compass and a GPS-receiver to connect the game to the passing landscape. By aiming the device towards objects, players can defend themselves against creatures or pick up magic artefacts. 4 core areas are investigated: 1 Episodic Narratives: a way of building narratives that work as fragmented and incomplete episodes, informing an overall plot depending on the journey traveled. It will be combined with on and offline actions that will encourage players to further explore their environment and the in-game objects and stories. 2 Real World Game Engine: where the game engine is embedded in the "real" - using GIS database objects as game objects and assigning game properties to these real objects. This will allow objects in the real world to function as game objects with multiple properties, like the ability to combine objects, to query them, affect the narrative and allow the player to collect resources from the real environment. 3 De-focusing technology: how to turn the player's attention away from the small screen and onto their everyday surroundings through the use of lightweight mobile devices. 4 Fuzzy Learning: to encourage children to explore their environments through "real world" gameplay. Thanks John! [we make money not art] 11:28:00 AM    comment []

Mobile learning game. Waag Society is developing Frequency 1550, a "mobile learning game". The citygame, using mobile phones and GPS-technology, will transport 11 to 12 year-old students to the medieval Amsterdam of 1550. The Amsterdam UMTS-network is interfering with a different time period: the Middle Age. The city's bailiff gets in contact with the 21st century Amsterdam. He thinks the players are pilgrims coming to 1550 Amsterdam to visit a relic: the Holy Host associated with The Miracle of Amsterdam. He promises an easy access to citizenship if players can help him retrieve the holy relic which recently got lost. GPS makes allow teams to know the position of other players and objects. They have to demonstrate their knowledge of medieval Amsterdam by doing location-based media-assignments on the city's history, they get in virtual phone contact with characters that provide information on locations and on the disappearing of the holy relic. The pilot will take place in 2005 from 7 to 9 February. Via In-duce 's new list of mobile phone games. [we make money not art] 11:25:16 AM    comment []

Robot toys Takara is showing these new TERA (Takara Entertainment Robot Architecture) robots at the Tokyo International Forum. They will come in three varieties. The home security robot has a camera and sensors for motion, fire, and gas and the alarm can only be turned off through fingerprint recognition. Of course, it appears small enough to crush with one kick, but look at the face, I think it's intentionally baby-like to prevent that. The healthcare robot monitors heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, alcohol levels, and also purifies the air. The AV robot has eyes that can project the DVD it's playing. I think the little ones are remote controls of some sort. These robots won't be available until sometime in 2006. Sega's new robo entry is the canine music "emoter". The dog sings when its nose is pressed or when it's spoken to. When a hand is moved over the sensor on the dog's head, the music tempo will adjust accordingly. Somewhat creepily, the dog can also mimic human voices by electronically reproducing sounds on the same wavelengths. It will be available from Hasbro in June in North America. From Nikkei.net and Ployer . - Mia [Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women] 11:24:10 AM    comment []

Yoshida iPod cases Yoshida, the Japanese company that makes the Porter bags more expensive than the devices they're made to hold has released a series of customized iPod cases designed by celebrity designers and artists. My favorite is this whimsical little critter design by Genevieve Gauckler . At about $228, it's still a few dollars less than a 20 GB iPod. Colette (turn the volume down, LOUD Flash warning) is carrying the collection, which currently features Parisian artists. - Mia [Popgadget: Personal Tech for Women] 11:23:09 AM    comment []

Nofollow May Be a Rank Solution. I had no idea how important Google PageRank was to the business world until I did some PHP/MySQL programming for a local ecommerce retailer. The boss watched search rankings on product-related keywords for the company and its competitors on a daily basis, and you could see the immediate effect on sales of a rank move. Multiply one small St. Augustine company by one million and you have a huge worldwide economy, utterly dependent on the vicissitudes of an algorithm. Google's support for a nofollow attribute throws a wrench into comment and referral spam by adding a huge new concept to the Web: a link of no confidence. Web publishers can now link to a site without improving its PageRank. Robert Scoble enthusiastically explains one reason that people will do this: ... last year a carpet store in Redmond ripped off a lot of people. The store is now out of business, but back when it was happening I wanted to link to the store but couldn't. Why not? Because one link from my blog would have automatically put the store at the top of the search page on Google for "Redmond carpet store." Why is that? Because of my Page Rank. This sounds good, though it officially abandons the pretense that Google's search algorithm is tailored to the linking behavior of Web users, rather than the other way around. I read some search engine optimization forums this morning to see how they're responding to the change, figuring that these panicky PageRank Kremlinologists might see the implications beyond weblogging. One pointed out that the change breaks the first principle of Google's recommendations for webmasters: "Make pages for users, not for search engines." This may not be a big deal, because weblogs themselves are one big feedback loop in which humans and Google conspire to make each other happy. We feed it links to webloggers and current content; it moves bloggers up the ranks and feeds us traffic; we become more motivated to publish. do { } while (true). Wikipedia has the same circular relationship with the one true search engine: We write a thousand articles; Google spiders them and sends some traffic to those pages. Some small percentage of that traffic becomes Wikipedia contributors, increasing our contributor base. The enlarged contributor base then writes another two thousand articles, which Google dutifully spiders, and then we receive an even larger influx of traffic. Overnight, a handful of weblog companies have implemented a change that touches the entire Web: How people trade the most valuable unit of currency in the attention economy, the hyperlink. Before this change, every outgoing link on a Web page lowered its rank, leading some optimizers to view them as a leak: Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. The most far-reaching impact could be from publishers who adopt nofollow on external links to boost the effect of their internal links, taking a bajillion rank suggestions right out of Google's algorithm. The subset of the Web devoted to making as much money as possible, properly optimized to plug leaks, becomes as searchable as AltaVista in 1997. [Workbench] 11:21:00 AM    comment []