Andre Huard

Continue reading Firefox Home 'coming soon' to iPhone, will sync with desktop browser

Firefox Home 'coming soon' to iPhone, will sync with desktop browser originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 21:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You two just aren't cut out for this.

Thanks to Jerrian & NF!

In this work Needless Markup questions our preconceived notions of arms with alternative ways of visualizing the body. The viewer is confronted with the spectacle of a woman who inexplicably is missing an arm with the subtext "click image to zoom," a reference to today's oil-based economy and refrigerators.

Thanks to Leica! Original is here!

Today at Google I/O, the company made the announcement that everyone was waiting for — Google TV. While some glitches in the demo (with the Bluetooth keyboard) prevented it from being a “wow” moment, the implications are pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising to the 4 billion TV users worldwide.

Google noted that while computer usage is huge with 1 billion users, and mobile is even bigger with 2 billion users, TV is the real massive medium with 4 billion users around the world. Further, Google notes that people spend 5 hours a day on average in the U.S. watching TV — and that’s more than ever before. Then the real stat came out. 70 billion dollars. that’s the annual ad spend on television in U.S. alone.

Video should be consumed on the biggest, best, and brightest screen in your house, Google says. And while they’re not the first to attempt this, Google thinks they can get it right. There are four things they’re focusing on:

• With Google TV, you’ll spend less time finding, more time watching
• We’ll also show you more ways to personalize content
• We’ll make existing TV much more interesting
• This is much more than a TV

“TV meets web. Web meets TV” is the slogan Google is going with for this new endeavor. It will work as a new box — you’ll just hook up your existing cable or satellite box to it. All the hardware will include a keyboard and a mouse — but it will work with Android phones too. And you can use multiple Android devices to control the same TV — no more fighting over the remote.

You can also use the Android devices to speak to your TV — voice search on the TV.

Google TV is built on Android (2.1 right now, but they’ll upgrade it later). It runs Google Chrome for the browser. And yes, it has Flash (10.1).

Also cool, since Google TV is Android-powered, Android apps will work on the TV. With the device, there will be two app frameworks: web apps and Android apps. A new SDK for the Google TV is coming as well. And YouTube has a new product they’re launching for Google TV: YouTube Leanback — this is an optimized way to use YouTube on a big screen.

Google TV will be open sourced in both the Android and Chrome source trees.

Google has partnered with multiple device makers to bring the product to market. There will be three Google TV devices. Sony will have TVs and Blu-ray players with Google TV built in. Logitech will have a companion box. Intel will be powering all the devices with the Atom processor.

Google has also partnered with Dish Network — there will be an enhanced Google TV experience with it. And they have a retail partnership with Best Buy.

These will all launch in Fall 2010. But the platform won’t launch for developers until 2011.

As a bonus, as Google showed during its demo, Google TV is one hell of a way to search for “MILFs” from your couch (see pic below).

Looks like that orgasmo perfecto was a little too perfecto!

Thanks to Isabel, Josefina, Javier and Carlota!

To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company's taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large -- which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It'll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge. On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can't say we've really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they've got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.

Google Wave opens doors to public, asks old friends for new chance originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hotmail, Microsoft's webmail service, has improved a lot in the past two years. Hotmail is now a modern web application that no longer traps users's data and focuses on important things like speed, usability, fighting spam and integrating with other communication services.

The latest Hotmail update, that will be released as part of Windows Live Wave 4, tries to show that Microsoft finally managed to develop a better email service than Gmail and, in many ways, succeeds.

Hotmail improved its spam detection algorithms and it's now able to tweak some parameters based on your actions. Hotmail can now flag messages as spam even after you've received them.

Another interesting improvement is that Hotmail categorizes messages, so you can quickly find the messages from your contacts, messages from mailing lists or notifications from social networks.

Hotmail no longer has limitations for email storage and the main reason is that large attachments can be stored in Windows Live SkyDrive. "With Hotmail, we've combined the simplicity of sending photos through email with the power of Windows Live SkyDrive so that you can send up to 200 photos, each up to 50 MB in size, all in a single email. You can send all your vacation photos at once without worrying about attachment limits," explains Microsoft. This is an important feature that's missing from Gmail and it's surprising that you can't upload photos to Picasa Web Albums or upload documents to Google Docs directly from Gmail.

Microsoft also integrated Hotmail with Office Web Apps, so that documents can be previewed and edited online, without having to install an office suite. Now that attachments are stored in a single place, the total attachment limit for a message is 10 GB, while Gmail offers about 7 GB of storage for all your messages.

Hotmail added many of the features that used to be available only in Gmail: conversation view, full session SSL, watching YouTube videos inline, but Microsoft managed to make some improvements. The active view feature doesn't work only for YouTube, it's enabled for many other sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn), so you can accept invitations or reply to a Twitter message directly from Hotmail. There's also a feature that lets you create a single-use password for signing in on public computers.

Google has a lot to do to catch up with the new Hotmail, but that's a good thing. Competition is what makes products better.

The Onion posted a funny video about an imaginary Google service that whispers targeted ads into users' ears. The main benefit of the service is that it lowers the cost a phone, but the ads aren't very subtle.

As voice recognition software becomes more powerful, it's quite likely that phones will be able to convert a conversation into text in real time and offer related information, including links to maps, events, email messages and even ads.


In 2008, Google's AdSense blog posted an April Fool's Day joke about AdSense for Conversations, "a new type of monetization solution that puts the 'context' in contextual advertising. In just a few simple steps, you can begin displaying ads that are relevant to the topics you're discussing -- in an unobtrusive screen above your head. Anyone taking part in the conversation can hit the ad with their hand to immediately take advantage of the product or service being offered."

{ via Jérôme Flipo }

University researchers have taken a close look at the computer systems used to run today's cars and discovered new ways to hack into them, sometimes with frightening results.

Sick of silicon? It is getting a bit played, so maybe it's time to shift some paradigms, and Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer thinks that pure proteins deoxyribonucleic acids are where it's at. He's demonstrated a way to force DNA to create shapes all by itself, a process he likens to a puzzle that puts itself together:

It's like taking pieces of a puzzle, throwing them in a box and as you shake the box, the pieces gradually find their neighbors to form the puzzle. What we did was to take billions of these puzzle pieces, throwing them together, to form billions of copies of the same puzzle.

Right now the waffle-shaped structures he can form aren't particularly useful, but going forward the hope is that nearly any type of circuitry could be made to build itself in massive quantities at next to no cost. It sounds exciting, promising, almost utopian -- exactly the kind of research that we usually never hear of again.

Update: We've had a few people commenting on the inaccuracy of the word "proteins" above, so it's been fixed and we hereby invite all you armchair molecular biologists to get back to curing cancer already.

Self-assembling DNA circuits could power your next computer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 May 2010 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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