Author: Serkadis

Nikon just fired off its first pre-PMA camera announcement with the new Coolpix P100 superzoom, which packs a five-way stabilized 26x optical zoom lens in front of a 10.3 megapixel CMOS sensor with ISO 3200 sensitivity, Backside Illumination and Active D-Lighting. Yeah, it’s not quite the 30x zoom from the new Olympus SP-800UX, but the lens can also do macro shots at 0.4 inches, and there are in-camera HDR features, a 40-shot pre-shooting cache, and a 3-inch 460,000-dot tilting LCD. We’re also told the P100 shoots 1080p video, but we don’t know anything about frame rates or formats yet — we’re looking for more, we’ll let you know. Should be out in March for $400; peep the full PR after the break.

Continue reading Nikon Coolpix P100 joins the superzoom party at 26x

Nikon Coolpix P100 joins the superzoom party at 26x originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Keeping with the pre-PMA announcements, Nikon also launched the S and L series of cams just now — the S stands for “Style,” and L stands for “Life.” The Ls are the low-end of the bunch — Life is apparently cheaper than Style — and you’ve got two choices: the $280 L110 superzoom, which has a 15x optical zoom lens in front of a 12.3 megapixel sensor and a 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD, or the $130 L22 compact, which has a 3.6x zoom and a 12 megapixel sensor, and comes in many colors because low-end camera have to come in rainbow colors or the Best Buy people won’t say they’re any good. Nikon says the new $299 S8000 pictured above is the most notable of the Style line, mostly because of its 10x zoom, 720p video, 921,000-dot LCD for previewing. Yeah, not bad at all. After that it’s just incrementally sadder steps down the features scale: the $249 S6000 has a 7x lens and a 230,000-dot LCD, the $200 S4000 adds touchscreen controls to its 3-inch 460,000-dot LCD but has a 12 megapixel sensor and a 4x zoom, and the $149 S3000 has a 2.7-inch LCD, a 4x zoom, and probably isn’t interesting to you at all. Unless it is, in which case you can look at it in the gallery, read the PR after the break, and just generally party the night away.

Continue reading Nikon kicks out new Coolpix S- and L-series cams

Nikon kicks out new Coolpix S- and L-series cams originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Grey’s Anatomy’s Ellen Pompeo showed off the first public picture of infant daughter Stella Luna – cradled by proud papa Chris Ivery — on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Tuesday.

She’s a cutie!

“Avatar” – Um filme e um monstruoso sucesso. No primeiro fim de semana de estreia, arrecadou 77 milhões de dólares, muito mais do que os estúdios esperavam que o filme atingisse. “Avatar” não só um filme brilhante como tem a mais poderosa mensagem ambiental do ano.

Conquistou já nove nomeações distribuídas por várias categorias, incluindo nelas melhor filmes e melhor realizador do ano (James Cameron). Aqui vos deixo a minha oferta deste maravilhoso filme.

WebTuga – Caricatura de Jack Sully (Avatar)

The un-profitability of video sites has become a cliche — high infrastructure costs and advertising challenges have combined in a way that even ostensible winners, like YouTube, can’t necessarily make the finances work (though Google keeps saying that YouTube will be profitable real soon). On the startup side, new video companies hoping to reach consumers are pretty scarce. But Barrett Lyon, founder of startup called 3crowd, said he wants to change the economics of online video.

San Mateo, Calif.-based 3crowd is starting with two products, CrowdMonitor and CrowdDirector, which help companies manage the content delivery networks they use to distribute their videos. Instead of sending all their content through one CDN, which can become “a single point of failure,” or struggling to manage traffic across a couple CDNs, 3crowd allows you to efficiently distribute your traffic across a “crowd” of CDNs. Using monitors placed throughout the network, 3crowd load balances your traffic based on factors like performance and pricing.

The company will be announcing a number of other products that push its vision forward in the coming months. Lyon didn’t get specific, but he said one of his goals is to remove the pricing barriers for online video are “holding innovation back.”

“If bandwidth becomes affordable to the point where people make money from running video, that’s going to be a huge change to all kinds of stuff,” he said.

Lyon has experience in this field, having previously founded content delivery network BitGravity, as do his angel investors Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, who co-founded Digg and video site Revision3.

Oh, and here’s where the name comes from: 3crowd is actually Lyon’s third startup, and the third startup for a number of other members of his team.

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British model Katie Price has wed boyfriend Alex Reid….less than a year after ending her Posh n’ Becks-like marriage to ex-husband Peter Andre.

According to her publicist, Alex and Katie married in a “private, simple” ceremony in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Katie, 31, has been dating the 34-year-old professional boxer (an accused crossdresser) for around seven months.

Ex-husband Pete was furious after he dropped their two kids off with Katie for the weekend only to discover she had jetted off to Sin City to get hitched — leaving their three kids at home with a nanny.

“We are very much in love and look forward to the future together. We can’t wait to get back and celebrate our marriage with our friends and family who we know fully support our wishes,” the newlyweds said in a statement.

“Their decision to marry has not been made with any pre-conceived commercial plan or media deal in place, and their reason for getting married is purely down to their love for each other,” a statement from the couple’s publicist added.

3Crowd, the new startup from BitGravity co-founder Barrett Lyon, is ready for its close-up. Until now little was known about the company, other than that its backers include Jay Adelson, Kevin Rose, Storm Ventures, and Greenwich Technology Associates. Now the company is talking: 3Crowd is looking to change the way people use content delivery networks, with a goal of making it both cheaper and easier to use these CDNs by making them part of a unified ‘cloud’. At least, that’s the first thing 3Crowd is hoping to do — the company’s future goals are even more ambitious.

3Crowd’s first product is setting out to help users manage their content across multiple CDNs at the same time, using rule sets to determine which CDNs should be tapped depending on variables like the user’s location and which content they’re accessing.  The product also looks to make it easy to actually deploy your content to these CDNs — you have to create the account with the CDN, but 3Crowd can then walk you through a wizard to get things going. Lyon says that this changes the process from one that would typically require a programmer to one that’s managed through a clickable wizard.

So what’s the benefit from being able to easily spread your content across multiple CDNs? For one, you aren’t dealing with a single point of failure. But the rules-based platform also gives you more flexibility as to how you’d like to distribute your content. If you found a CDN based in the United States that was cheaper than the alternatives, you could use that while still maintaining your content on a premium CDN serving users abroad. You could also set up the system to have a secondary CDN kick in if your traffic hit a certain threshold. The system also makes it easy to jump between CDNs — find a better deal on one, and you can jump to it with fewer headaches than you would have had otherwise.

As the co-founder of the CDN BitGravity, Lyon obviously has experience in this area. He says that one of the issues with content delivery networks is that they can become prohibitively expensive for successful sites. He explains that as your site grows, CDNs may be able to help you quickly serve your content to all of your new fans, but there’s a good chance your income isn’t scaling as quickly as your CDN costs are. 3Crowd ultimately hopes to make it much cheaper to achieve massive distribution.

There are still plenty of unknowns, though. 3Crowd is still in private beta and will remain so for the next few weeks, and Lyon didn’t want to get into the service’s pricing (he says it will be “very affordable”). Lyon also promises that there’s much more to 3Crowd’s vision, though he wouldn’t get into the details yet.

My hunch is that the company will eventually look to make switching between CDNs a near real-time affair — imagine being able to dynamically swap between CDNs based on which one is cheapest at a given moment (this would be especially powerful if you could target CDNs during traffic drop-offs, when bandwidth might be cheaper, though that assumes the CDNs will cooperate).

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I’m here at the Facebook Technology Tasting, where the social network is showcasing their newly open sourced PHP technology, HipHop. The new technology effectively transforms PHP into C++, resulting in a significant savings of CPU cycles on web servers. Facebook is streaming the event live, and we’ve embedded the live stream below.

Facebook Senior Open Programs Manager David Recordon kicked off the event by walking the audience through some of the challenges Facebook faces, particularly with the dynamic pages it has to generate. He spoke about some of the benefits of various programming languages, and also the CPU costs of each. As it scaled, Facebook encountered problems with PHP, including high CPU and memory costs and difficulty developers faced to build extensions.

The solution Facebook came up with is HipHop for PHP, which started as a hackathon project from a single developer named Haiping Zhao (though he had some team members as the project progressed). The technology transforms PHP into C++, using g++ to compile it.

Facebook has found that the technology uses 50% less CPU with equal traffic on its web tier, and 30% less CPU usage with doubled traffic on its API tier.

Facebook started deploying HipHop six months ago (initially it was only on internal servers). It’s now been ramped up to 90% of Facebook’s production servers.

Video chat rooms at Ustream

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If you’re a registered broker or work for firm that sells any sort of investment products, you’ll want to think twice before blurting out anything that could be construed as investment advice on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has updated its guidelines for interpreting the rules that govern how brokers present advice to the public to cover online social networks; and, in some cases, the guidelines rely on social network monitoring and archiving technology that doesn’t even exist yet.

The new guidelines have two broad effects on the way financial firms use social media. First, the new rules attempt to take the traditional distinction between marketing a brand and hawking specific investment products, and to enforce it in online venues that sport a constantly evolving slate of features and functionality, and where the lines between the personal and the professional—or, the personal and the promotional—aren’t always clear.

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Filed under: Software, How-tos, Productivity

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator — in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking within a certain context, say a file within a Finder window. To create a customized service, all you have to do is launch Automator and select “Services” from the “Choose a template for your workflow” window, and then insert your own service from there.

Here are five customized services for to install on your own Mac.

Attach to Mail
In the Windows world, right-clicking on a file(s) brings up the option to “send to,” and “mail recipient” is one of its options. The result is your attachment(s) showing up automatically attached in a new email message window. This service does the same thing in Mac OS X with Mail.app.

• On the right hand pane, select service receives selected files or folders in Finder.
• Now, drag “New Mail Message” (from the Mail.app actions in the library) over to workflow pane (on the right side).
• Save your workflow with a name that make sense — like “attach to message” — because this is what will appear on the contextual menu when you right-click a file.

Print Selected Files
Similar to the mail service, this service provides a print option in a contextual menu so that you can right-click on selected files and print to your heart’s content.

• Service receives selected files or folders in Finder.
• Now, drag the “Get Selected Finder Items” from the Finder actions in the library over to the workflow pane.
• Likewise, drag the “Print Finder Items” from the “Utilities” actions to the workflow pane.
• Save.

Create Thumbnail
This service will thumbnail re-size your selected images.

• Service receives selected image files in Finder.
• Now, drag the “Get Selected Finder Items” from the Finder actions in the library over to the workflow pane.
• From the “Images” actions, drag the “Create Thumbnail Images” action to your workflow pane. Within this action, you can specify the suffix that will be appended to the file name, as well as thumbnail size.
• Save.

Start Keynote Slideshow
This service will open the selected Keynote presentation in slideshow mode.

• Service receives selected files or folders in Finder -From the Finder actions, drag the “Open Finder Items” to the workflow pane.
• From the Keynote actions, drag the Start Keynote Slideshow action to the workflow pane.
• Save.

Bit.ly shorten a URL
Courtesy of Alexandre Hamez, this service allows you to right-click and shorten a URL using the bit.ly service.

• You can download the service here.
• After downloading, move the file (named “bit.ly.workflow”) to the “Services” folder, which is also where you’ll find all of your services. The path to this folder is ~Username/Library/Services.

These are just a few examples of customized services that you could create in Automator, but by no means are they the only ones. If you’ve got a favorite service of your own, be sure to share it in our comments below!

TUAWFive customized Automator services to help save you time originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since it looks like GT5’s still another decade or two away from release, racing gamers need everything they can to survive the wait, and this is just about the most creative way we’ve seen to do that. At a glance, Nokia’s Ovi Maps Racing looks like a pretty simple, standard 2D racer with an overhead view, but its secret sauce lies in the map: it can turn pretty much any street in the world into a racecourse. The game lets you chart out your heated battle using nothing more than Ovi Maps data and your finger, meaning Manhattan, Prague, or your folks’ quiet, peaceful neighborhood are all potential targets for your high-speed bedlam. Seems like a great way to inject limitless replay value into an otherwise plain-vanilla racer, doesn’t it? It’ll work on any of Nokia’s Symbian^1 (formerly known as S60 5th Edition) devices, and — for now, anyway — it’s free. Follow the break for a quick promo video.

Continue reading Nokia’s Ovi Maps Racing now available, makes the world your course

Nokia’s Ovi Maps Racing now available, makes the world your course originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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China Mobile’s OPhone platform goes 2.0, supports WinMo API… wait, what? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’re walking down the street. Your phone buzzes, a map or a screen overlay pops up and you’re shown a note left in that location by one of your friends – along with an ad for your favorite pizza. Walk into the pizza place and your phone buzzes again – your friends have something to say about the guy behind the counter. That might have sounded far-fetched a few years ago, but it doesn’t so much anymore, does it?

18 months ago Yahoo! filed a sophisticated patent on VIRTUAL NOTES IN A REALITY OVERLAY and that patent was granted to the company late last week. Check out the patent sketches below.

Sponsor

The technology envisioned by the team of senior researchers who filed the application is reminiscent of now-available apps like Loopt, BlockChalk, Junaio and others. The whole vision of location, social and advertising features put together, however, may be quite unique. The patent also goes beyond location to include notes tied to mobile objects like cars and people.

Yahoo’s patent was filed in July of 2008, published as granted last Thursday and first blogged about by upstart tech news site GoRumors this morning. The same team of inventors was granted another related patent at the end of last year on an augmented reality device that would discover audio, video and other information that’s pertinent to a user’s physical surroundings and display that information on a screen overlay.

The technology described in this latest patent isn’t just location-based social networking, or Augmented Reality “air tagging” – it includes social graph analysis, permissioning, expiration dates, contextual advertising and more. It’s not just text notes, it includes methods of augmented reality with photos, videos and more. While the most popular mobile augmented reality apps on the market today focus on text on top of locations – there’s no reason why reality can’t be augmented in other ways as well.

There’s no indication that the technology exists yet outside of the patent application and sketches below, but if Yahoo! could put together such an integrated vision of location-based features then it would have a very interesting service on its hands.

This vision puts emphasis on limited visibility of public notes based on the social connections of people doing the reading and writing, on the use of the tool for communication between people more than for public graffiti, on notes tied to entities and not just to places and on advertising based on a reader’s past expressed interests. That sounds like the kind of thing Facebook might do with its inevitably forthcoming location services.

Will anything come of this patent? It’s hard to say, since it’s Yahoo, where genius flowers but then too often gets left out in the cold to die. Just two months before this innovative patent was filed, were were heralding Yahoo’s brand new Location Database API as a would-be fountain of location-aware apps. Almost two years later, though geo is hotter than ever, it seems that nothing much has come of that effort. (Please, correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Six months ago we ran an article titled Yahoo! Launches Major Challenge to Facebook Connect. That doesn’t seem like such a hot topic anymore, either. We asked Yahoo! for comment this morning about this latest patent and haven’t been put in touch with anyone yet.

None the less, these are some very interesting ideas. Someone is sure to build something like this very soon. Maybe it will be Yahoo.

Watch this space for ReadWriteWeb’s next public event and future research reports on Augmented Reality and geolocation.

Discuss

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PIMCO investment guru Mohammad El-Erian takes to Bloomberg to warn about what he sees as excessive optimism — or at least complacency– currently in financial markets.

Judging from market valuations, I sense quite a gap between consensus market expectations and key political and economic realities, especially in the U.S. If the gap isn’t bridged by the validation of the more optimistic expectations, investors may well find that January’s global equity sell-off was just a precursor to a disappointing year for several asset classes, including stocks.

He goes on to talk about a “tense” situation in Washington right now, and the potential for gridlock, causing an inability to tackle the genuinely difficult challenges of the moment.

I am particularly concerned about the surge in joblessness. In the absence of bold structural measures, most of which face political headwinds, we are looking at a period of persistently high unemployment that will disproportionately affect the young. We risk significant welfare losses and skill erosion, lower labor-market flexibility, and yet another burden on the country’s stretched public finances.

These are consequential political and economic questions. They speak to a more protracted post-crisis resetting of the U.S. economy — what Pimco labeled last year as a bumpy multiyear journey to a new normal.

What comes after banking crises? Sovereign debt crises.

All this is consistent with the academic literature on post-crisis periods. Such research reminds us of the extent to which massive disruptions — such as the one experienced in 2007-09 — expose structural cracks that, at best, can only be masked temporarily by a massive cyclical policy response.

Actually, credit to Morgan Stanley, who was ahead of the curve in predicting that this would be the story of 2010.

They produced this chart last November:

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See Also:

• And Now Comes The Part Where We Tax The Living Sh#$ Out Of The Banks
• PIMCO Slams The Brakes On US, UK, And Corporate Bond Buying, Amid Massive Debt Binge
• El-Erian: We’re Still Riding The Sugar High, Stocks Could Drop 10% In 3-Week Span

A bunch of folks have sent in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision and asking for my opinion on it. The ruling came out last week when I was traveling, and I didn’t have that much time to look at the details or think about what it all meant until now. It’s one of those cases where I see both sides of the argument, but am troubled by what comes out of a ruling in either direction. There is a real worry of a First Amendment problem if you restrict any kind of speech — but I do worry about giving corporations even greater power in influencing elections. But my real issue with the ruling goes back deeper, with the generally accepted concept that a corporation is a person. That seems like an even bigger problem, because the fact is that we don’t actually treat a corporation like a person at all. A corporation does not get a vote. A corporation cannot be put in jail (yes, its executives or employees might be able to, but not the same thing). And a corporation may not run for office. This point was brought to my attention by my friend Jeff, who sent over a link to a story arguing (in a very much tongue-in-cheek manner) that if a corporation has the same rights as a person, why can’t Google run for President.

That said, while I would remove the idea that a corporation is ever “a person,” that doesn’t change the fact that I would be careful about limiting any type of speech — including a politically motivated movie, which was at the heart of this case. Instead, I tend to think that the problem is one of information (not money) asymmetry. And while it may appear idealistic, this is the sort of thing that the internet is helping to combat, even if it takes time, and there are some losses early on. In copyright policy, it’s true that the entertainment industry has still been able to push through laws in its favor over the past few years, but a lot more people are paying attention to the issue, and the changes that are getting through are of much lower impact than what they used to regularly get through. I don’t think that the entertainment industry would be able to push through the kind of massive sweeping changes that it has successfully pushed through in the past. Instead, I tend to agree with Julian Sanchez, in discussing a recent conversation with Larry Lessig, that points to a more organic way to respond to corporate influence on politics:

Look at it this way: We don’t get draconian copyright policies because the RIAA and MPAA actually have more money, all told, than those of us who’d benefit from a more balanced intellectual property regime.  They’re richer, of course, but there’s a lot more of us. The problem is that their resources are already pooled, and they’re far more acutely aware of which side their bread is buttered on. That’s the asymmetry we need to address. And as Clay Shirky has so cogently argued, we may finally have the means to do so, because for the first time in human history, we have in the Internet (and Web 2.0 especially) a mass medium that is simultaneously good at enabling interactive conversations (as the telephone does) and groups (as magazines or television did).  The costs of processing and disseminating information have fallen dramatically over the past decade, and now the same is happening to the costs of organizing people and coordinating action.

That’s why I think Lessig’s focus on public finance as a silver bullet is less likely to bear fruit than an array of solutions that exploit transformative technology–something he’s so keenly analyzed in his writing on Free Culture. My colleague Jim Harper’s Washington Watch project, or the efforts of the folks at the Sunlight Foundation, are one part of the solution: Backroom deals are typically held in the back room for a reason. Sites like ActBlue and Slatecard are another, because they make it easier for a national audience to punish bad actors in their local races.

This doesn’t mean that corporate influence has been — or ever will be — neutralized. But it does suggest that it’s becoming easier for the voices of those actually impacted to speak up and make themselves heard. It will take a lot of effort — and certainly, corporations are often a lot more tied into the levers of power, but there is more of an opportunity for groups of people to use information tools to their advantage, and to counter efforts by anyone, whether its corporations or individuals, to push through harmful legislation. It may seem idealistic (and, it is), but the unintended consequences of barring speech seems like it could be much worse.

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Irkutsk [EN] regional portal Babr.ru published [RUS] photos of a police raid [EN] of the Baikal Environmental Wave. The organization is fighting against reopening highly polluting Baikalsk cellulose plant [EN] located on the bank of the Baikal Lake, the most voluminous freshwater lake in the world.

areview.co.cc: A high level meeting to discuss law and order situation in Karachi has been called today. Interior Minister Rehman Malik will also attend the meeting. On the other hand, Prime Minister Yoursaf Raza Gilani telephoned MQM leader Altaf Hussain and the Chief Minister Sindh Syed Qaim Ali Shah to discuss the law and order situation prevailing in Karachi. PM and Altaf Husain have agreed to continue the process of political reconciliation. The PM advised the CM Sindh to take measures to bring Karachi’s situation back to normal. Earlier, a meeting between the President and the PM in the presidency reviewed several issues including the ongoing wave of violence in Karachi, implementation of decision on NRO and the progress in war on terror. It was decided that concrete steps would be taken to improve the law and order situation in Karachi. President Zardari has spoken to Sindh Provincial Minister Zulfikar Mirza and Aga Siraj Durani.In the telephonic conversation, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and MQM leader Altaf Hussain agreed to take steps to normalise situation in Karachi. They agreed to take action against land mafia and criminal gangs.