By Luke Anderson I grew up living in the middle of nowhere, so I’m used to dealing with bugs and strange creatures. Of course, no one likes mosquitoes, since they leave you with itchy tiny bumps. There are plenty of contraptions that promise to rid your yard of the pests, but few actually perform. So what […]
By Luke Anderson
I grew up living in the middle of nowhere, so I’m used to dealing with bugs and strange creatures. Of course, no one likes mosquitoes, since they leave you with itchy little bumps. There are plenty of contraptions that promise to rid your yard of the pests, but few actually perform. So what if I told you there was something that was proven to get rid of up to 600 bugs per hour? Would you want something like that in your yard? What if I told you that bug-killer was a bat?
Yes, the average bat will eat around 600 bugs, including mosquitoes, per day (or night rather). With a easy Bat Conservatory you keep a few bats hanging around (bad pun alert!) your yard , and thus keeping the area bug population at a minimum. If you don’t mind the bats being around at night, then install this Bat Conservatory made from Western Red Cedar for around $55.
By Luke Anderson Novelty USB flash drives are dime a dozen, but this one really hits the nail on the head. Okay, I seriously apologize for the horrible puns, but I just couldn’t resist. At least I didn’t go with the other one about your personal getting nailed. This Nailed USB Flash Drive is actually one of […]
By Luke Anderson
Novelty USB flash drives are dime a dozen, but this one really hits the nail on the head. Okay, I seriously apologize for the horrible puns, but I just couldn’t resist. At least I didn’t go with the other one about your computer getting nailed.
This Nailed USB Flash Drive is actually one of the more costly and pointless drives I’ve seen in a while. It doesn’t have any fancy design or crystals, it just looks like a nail. A 1GB drive is going to set you back nearly $47. I think I’ll pass.
This post is syndicated with permission from Gadgetoholic.com Going green is the latest huge thing for companies and product manufacturers. Many different items we use with our computers are getting more energy efficient. The gear is also being built with materials that have less of an impact on the environment– certainly a good thing. Fabrik has announced […]
Going green is the latest massive thing for companies and product manufacturers. Many different items we use with our personal are getting more energy efficient. The gear is also being built with materials that have less of an impact on the environment– certainly a good thing.
Fabrik has announced what it calls the world’s most eco-friendly external hard drive this day called the Fabrik SimpleTech [re]drive. The drive enclosure is made from recycled aluminum and bamboo. Fabrik packages an Energy Star power adapter with the drive and the actual package material the [re]drive ships in is made from 100% recycled materials.
The [re]drive has 500GB of storage and promises 25% faster data transfer with its Turbo USB 2.0 connectivity compared to standard USB 2.0. Both Mac and Windows users can use the [re]drive and it ships with automate backup software for archiving important data. The SimpleTech [re]drive is available today for $159.99.
By Andrew Liszewski It’s taken us years and years to finally shed those annoyingly-curved CRT monitors and Televisions, but Microsoft apparently feels that we should not only return to curved displays, but one that features a full 360 degrees of imagery. This week they unveiled their Sphere prototype which works just like the company’s Surface technology, […]
By Andrew Liszewski
It’s taken us years and years to finally shed those annoyingly-curved CRT monitors and TVs, but Microsoft apparently feels that we should not only return to curved displays, but one that features a full 360 degrees of imagery. This week they unveiled their Sphere prototype which works just like the company’s Surface technology, but applied to a spherical interface and display. The technology and hardware needed to run the Sphere is a bit more advanced than what Surface uses, since it has to warp the images and the interface so that it looks correct when projected onto a dome, and as a result Sphere won’t be moving past the research project phase anytime soon. And as gimmicky as it might seem, there are some cool applications that come to mind like an interactive globe (as demo’d in the video) or a superior way to watch and interact with 360 degree videos and panoramas.
The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday’s over-hyped launch of stealth search startup Cuil, which was quickly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods. This was entirely the company’s own fault. It pre-briefed each blogger and tech journalist on the planet, […]
The hype cycle now lasts less than a day. Take yesterday’s over-hyped launch of stealth search startup Cuil, which was swiftly followed by a backlash when everyone realized that it was selling a bill of goods. This was entirely the company’s own fault. It pre-briefed each blogger and tech journalist on the planet, but didn’t allow anyone to actually test the search engine before the launch.
The company’s founders have a good pedigree, and have developed a one-of-a-kind way to index the Web cheaply and at big scale. But creating a massive index is only half the battle. A good search engine has to bring back the best results from that haystack as well. Here Cuil falls short, as we pointed out an hour after the site launched and we could actually check it out.
The story swiftly turned from Google-killer to Google’s lunch (make that an amuse bouche). The results Cuil returns aren’t particularly great, and sometimes totally off the mark. For instance, a search for “Cuil” doesn’t even bring up a link to itself on the first page of results. (See screen shot at end of post).
And when Cuil tries to pair images with sets of search results, it often chooses seemingly random images to accompany a set of results. For instance, “Wordpress” is associated with what looks like a TV newscast team and “TechCrunch” is paired with a Gmail logo. And I have no idea who that person is next to the results for our “About” section.
Paul Buchheit posted a message “Maybe Cuil isn’t supposed to be good. They must know that the results are bad, but they launched anyway. Maybe they aren’t trying to build a full search engine, but just want to demo their crawling+indexing technology with the expectation that someone will purchase the company and plug in superior ranking.” . . . —Where “someone” = MSFT, who has already shown that they’re willing to pay a lot for non-functional search engines. - Paul Buchheit —That is what I was thinking, too. - Robert Scoble —You’d think they’d work toward getting something relevant if you search on “cuil launch” - Michael Markman —It’s the only thing that makes sense when you look at how bad the results are. You don’t roll out something like unless you are just showing off the interface. - Kevin Bondelli —Would also explain the weak branding. Who cares, if it’s just going to get plugged into something else? - Chris Baskind —Not very good results at the moment I will say - shinchi via twhirl —It must be so hard to launch something in a realm where there isn’t much tolerance/patience for incremental improvement. The bar in this space is high and consumers are very picky. Look at Yahoo. Their search is actually pretty damn good. However, they keep losing share. - Sacca —agree with Sacca - also, I thought the people behind Cuil had already sold some search technology to Google and hence they wanted to try it out on their own this time - so if anything they’d have more intent than others not to flip. - Adam Kazwell . . . —Google Killer? I don’t even need to look to know the answer - Mike Reynolds . . . —It’s humiliating IMO. The results are thin and the images absolutely wrong. Not good is one thing … Cuil seems a cut below not good right now. - AJ Kohn . . . —IMHO there have to be better ways to show off your very own crawling+indexing technologies than opening up to the public and getting thrashed for not delivering what people anticipate when you dub your service search engine. I’ve a hard time believing that the cuil/cuill guys did not know what they were doing though … Were they pushed to release by financiers? Were they in dire need of usage data? - Mustafa K. Isik
If you’re going to feed the hype cycle, you’d better be able to deliver. Because it only lasts about 20 seconds if you don’t.
Not content with a Computer on each desktop, Microsoft wants to see each available surface become a personal screen. It has already developed a multi-touch Surface Computer (which is being used in AT&T stores), and turned that vertical in a multi-touch wall. Now, it’s latest project at Microsoft Research is a Sphere (see […]
Not content with a Computer on each desktop, Microsoft wants to see each available surface become a personal screen. It has already developed a multi-touch Surface Computer (which is being used in AT&T stores), and turned that vertical in a multi-touch wall. Now, it’s latest project at Microsoft Research is a Sphere (see video above).
A prototype of the spherical display is expected to be unveiled this day. On of the features is the ability to “send to dark side.” When you place your hand on an image and press, it sends the image to the other side of the sphere, where a collaborator might be standing. The video also shows a globe mapped onto the sphere, some video playing in a crystal-ball effect, and Pong-like game. (Todd Bishop at the Seattle PI has more details). Now, if they could only put Google Earth on that thing.
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Long outplayed by two Indian brothers, Hasbro finally delivers a huge counter blow to Scrabulous, one of the most loved games on Facebook. Scrabulous fans in North America will see the following message when they try to play the game: Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like […]
Long outplayed by two Indian brothers, Hasbro finally delivers a massive counter blow to Scrabulous, one of the most loved games on Facebook. Scrabulous fans in North America will see the following message when they try to play the game:
Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.
Hsbro has long contended that Scrabulous infringes on its trademarks for Scrabble. It licenses the North American digital rights for Scrabble to Electronic Arts, which announced its own Facebook version of the game earlier this month. (RealNetworks owns the international digital rights, and is not taking as aggressive a stance against Scrabulous).
Last week, Hasbro filed suit against the owners of Scrabulous, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla. The same day, EA publicly launched its officially-sanctioned Scrabble game on Facebook. (See screen shot below, which I took that day).
Hasbro and EA planned their moves very methodically and waited patiently for their opportunity to strike. Perhaps EA felt that it could not compete with Scrabulous other than by taking it out at the knees. Scrabulous boasts 509,505 daily active users. EA’s Scrabble Beta has 14,956 (after only five days). Now, the question is whether Scrabulous fans will boycott the official version of Scrabble on Facebook or switch over to satisfy their word lust.
Update: EA’s Scrabble app seems to be down on Facebook. Maybe they weren’t ready for the surge in traffic.
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With the election rapidly approaching, it’s getting hard to keep track of all of the political news swirling around the web. Perspctv, a new mashup from developer Vineet Choudhary, utilizes 14 web services to try to bring all of the news together in one place. To monitor current political news, the site searches for the […]
With the election rapidly approaching, it’s getting hard to keep track of all of the political news swirling around the web. Perspctv, a new mashup from developer Vineet Choudhary, utilizes 14 web services to try to bring all of the news together in one place.
To monitor current political news, the site searches for the terms “Obama” and “McCain” in Twitter conversations, news articles, and blog posts, and displays updates in real time. Results are presented in attractive graphs, and each candidates’ popularity can be viewed as a function of time.
The site’s most glaring flaw is that it determines popularity by measuring the number of times each candidate’s name is mentioned, without taking the word’s context into account. Obviously, many of these mentions are negative - Obama’s lead across every metric probably isn’t an accurate measure of his popularity. People might just like to speak about him more often.
Choudhary says that he’s looking into integrating some kind of natural language algorithm to help separate positive comments from the negative ones, but for the time being we’ll have to settle for this unrefined analysis. And while there might be no significant correlation between Twitter mentions and a candidate’s chance of winning the election, Perspctv is still a good looking site that’s fun to play around with.
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By Jonathan Kimak The University of Tsukuba in Japan is creating a treadmill that’ll help with the rehabilitation of people who have had strokes or other similar illnesses. The immersive dome has a visual range of 270 degrees that will grant the person on the treadmill to feel as if they are in a different […]
By Jonathan Kimak
The University of Tsukuba in Japan is creating a treadmill that’ll help with the rehabilitation of people who have had strokes or other similar illnesses. The immersive dome has a visual range of 270 degrees that’ll grant the person on the treadmill to feel as if they are in a different environment.
It’s too bad that this is only being developed for use in hospitals as I could see this becoming a hit in the gyms if there were a multitude of environments to choose from. I can think of running alongside marathon runners, or running against olympic athletes or even running through a futuristic society being chased by killer robots as good ideas for this technology.
WidgetBucks, a widget-based advertising platform that has seen explosive growth since its launch last October, has implemented a new feature that allows users to created customized versions of their widgets. Users can select from a selection of over 125 pre-generated designs, or they have the ability to upload their own art to modify their widget. The capability to […]
WidgetBucks, a widget-based advertising platform that has seen explosive growth since its launch last October, has implemented a new feature that allows users to created customized versions of their widgets. Users can select from a selection of over 125 pre-generated designs, or they have the ability to upload their own art to modify their widget.
The capability to create branded widgets at no extra charge should appeal to a number of bloggers who have avoided using the ads because of their generic appearance. WidgetBucks continues to see impressive growth, with an estimated 1 billion impressions and 100 million one-of-a-kind visitors monthly.
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