Oh well. So much for the big G trying to throw their weight around to convince the big C to give a little on their censorship stance, following the hacking attacks. Google will most likely close its search engine business in China, google.cn.
They’re going to make an orderly exit, and take steps to protect their employees there. Does China care? Not really. They can (and have) created their own search engines that are more compliant with their way of thinking.
Communication in today’s computer networked world comes in different forms and most of us have use more than one: e-mail, Facebook, IM, RSS feeds, etc. Many times, we have multiple accounts. I know I do! Checking them all can be daunting or at least near impossible as more of them gain more real-time streams.
Startup Threadsy aims to consolidate this comm into a single web-based client. I had a chance to test out Threadsy and found a slick app, that unfortunately was pretty ‘busy’ due to the number of streams that it tried to consolidate. But that’s no fault of Threadsy.
I set it up to check 1 e-mail account, Facebook and Twitter. Threadsy does what we all do – prioritize. In their case, they prioritization translates directly to screen real estate. Email takes up more space than my Twitter feed, although Twitter direct messages come through in my larger consolidated feed, which I like.
You can reply to messages directly from the Threadsy interface, although I did notice there was no way to mark an e-mail as spam.
Threadsy is great for people who want to simplify, but I’m not about to give up the power I have with Gmail, or Facebook’s interface. I already (at least subconsciously) prioritize my different communication streams, and like the separation I have. In time, if an app (or perhaps Threadsy) can incorporate that power and ‘learn’ from my usage how I prioritize streams, then perhaps I’ll switch.
I’ve got 10 invites that I can send out, and am posting them to my Twitter account. First come, first serve.
You may already be immune to those Sprint commercials that keep using the term “4G”, but the reality is that they may have a 4G WiMax network in a lot of cities, but no phones! Well that’s about to change this summer with the introduction of a new 4G smartphone.
There’s a good chance too that it’ll be an HTC running Android. Sweet! [Well, if you're a Sprint customer] Here’s hoping that it’s a Pre/Droid/iPhone-class gadget.
With the recent update to Google Docs that allows users to not only create documents, but to upload existing ones, there are a few companies that are taking advantage of that to spawn new services. One such company is Memeo.
Memeo Connect is a desktop application for Macs and PCs that syncs up your Google Docs to your desktop. This is perfect for the road warrior who likes to work on docs while flying, or the company that wants to reduce bandwidth usage, and improve the responsiveness of working on docs.
Memeo Connect costs $9/user/year, and seems to be geared to small companies. However, Memeo would be well served to offer a free version for personal use, as they can probably get an uptick in sales from individuals who like it enough to push for their employers to adopt it.
Without needing a media streamer device, the Netgear PTV100 Push2TV gadget can display anything from a laptop with Intel’s Wireless Display technology. The PTV1000 is a small lightweight box that connects to your HDTV via HDMI and connects to your laptop wirelessly via 802.11.
The PTV1000 can also connect via AV composite.
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $99.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Google rolled out its latest product, called Google Buzz [announcement], this time in the social networking arena. Buzz is built into Gmail and has tight integration with your e-mail inbox.
You can share links, photos and videos directly from within Gmail and it uses your existing set of Gmail contacts. You can see what your friends are sharing and Buzz also recommends items based on your activity.
MvixUSA has updated their flagship media center product, the Ultio, to now include DVR (digital video recording) capabilities. The Ultio Pro plays back Blu-ray quality 1080p hi-def video, photos, and music on your high-def TV via HDMI and stores it all on its internal hard drive which you can get as large as 2TB.
And now, the Pro can record video on the fly from your cable/satellite TV, your camcorder or from DVDs, instead of acting just as a repository. The Ultio Pro is a virtual Swiss Army knife of video, image and audio formats including: mp4, avi, iso, asf, wmv, flv, mkv, rm, ts, mpg, vob, mp3, wma, aac, ogg, flac, jpg, bmp and gif. To see the full list, download the Formats PDF from MvixUSA.
And of course, the Ultio Pro plays back media from your network and the Internet, including from your computer and from services liks Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and more.
Buy now!
Price: $169 without hard drive; $384 with 2TB drive. (You can buy the barebones version and insert whatever sized drive you’d like.)
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
While cleaning up some old bookmarks today, I ran across a company that was acquired by Twitter which lead me to one of the owners Twitter’s feed. The last item in the feed then pointed me to a brilliant web experiment called Readability which is a arc90 lab experiment that provides a bookmarklet that you simply copy to your modern web browser’s toolbar. As you surf the web and find an article really worth reading, click on the bookmarklet and the article reloads in a reader friendly interface providing options to return to the original page and email or print the article. Read the rest of this entry »
Apart from USB 3.0, there’s another new spec/update that you should keep an eye on, and that’s HDMI 1.4 [original press release]. Oh yeah, didn’t know those had versions, did ya?! Yes they do, and it can become quite confusing as products with the older technology remain in stock on store shelves.
Read the rest of this entry »
Mozilla has released the latest version of Firefox, 3.6, and it claims a 20% speed improvement over v3.5. I just installed and startup certainly seems a lot faster. I’ve also noticed an improvement in memory usage.
New features include improved security features like anti-phishing and anti-malware detection and warning, improved JavaScript performance, support for new CSS features like gradients.
But the feature that I particularly like is a new type of theme called Personas which you can preview and install without a restart of the browser. Just visit GetPersonas.com, browse the over 30,000 themes, then simply roll your mouse over a swatch to see your browser immediately take on that theme.
If you don’t already have Firefox, you can download it for PC, Mac or Linux from www.firefox.com.
