Author: Serkadis

Retweeting is one of the several phenomena that have just evolved on Twitter simply as more and more people have started adopting it. Like many of the best features on Twitter, you could argue even the service’s purposes, as it wasn’t planned on, it was a good tool so people used it. A couple of months ago, Twitter decided to make it a permanent featu… (read more)

I experimented with a couple of ways of making donations for Haitian relief today. First, I visited the Red Cross web site and made a donation with a few clicks. It asked me for my credit card number and I entered it. Then it presented me with a thank-you note and a receipt, which I printed. It felt good, but it wasn’t necessarily a rewarding experience.

Then I visited my FarmVille game on Facebook. I’ve been playing the free game for a while now. The game’s publisher, Zynga, makes money from the game when you buy virtual goods, such as farm animals or tractors. I had never purchased anything until today. When I got to the game screen, it asked me if I wanted to donate money to Haitian relief by buying white corn seeds.

I proceeded to do so. I didn’t have any Zynga coins, so I had to buy those first. I went to the payments page and chose Boku, a mobile payments provider. I entered my mobile phone number. Then Boku sent me a text message. I responded by sending a text message with ‘Y’ in it to verify the transaction. The bill for the transaction will appear on my next cell phone bill. Meanwhile, I was able to buy the Zynga coins and then buy the white corn seeds. Zynga will make a donation on my behalf toward Haitian earthquake relief. The game asked me if I wanted to share the fact of my donation with the rest of my friends. I rarely do so with FarmVille, but in this case I went ahead and authorized it. Now my friends who see the message may make donations as well.

If you compared these two methods, it’s clear to me which one is more rewarding. Now, whenever I plant white corn seeds on my farm, I’ll remember the Haiti relief fund. Hopefully, this kind of donation will be popular not only in a time of disaster, but during relative calm as well. It’s a blessing for Haiti that it has become so much easier to make donations online.

Zynga said yesterday that its earlier Haiti meals-for-kids program in FarmVille and other Zynga games had already generated $1.2 million in donations for Haitian kids. And starting yesterday, it added the Haitian relief donation to FarmVille, Zynga Poker, and Mafia Wars. Those three games have 40 million daily active users, and 100 percent of the proceeds are being donated to Haiti relief being headed by the World Relief Programme.

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Here’s a handful of Friday’s noteworthy stories:

Text-to-donate total exceeds $10m – I think we’re onto something
New technology helps to remotely monitor the health of the elderly around the clock
Thanko’s Spy Button Camera gets an upgrade
Mathletes appreciate the Pi shower curtain
Interview: We talk to the lead developer of Plex Media Center for Mac OS X: It was doing Boxee-like stuff before Boxee was cool

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Since the royal unveiling of HP’s six new Elitebooks and ProBooks last week, the Elitebook 8440w (w standing for workstation) has been making the review rounds, and receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from the chaps at Notebook Review, LAPTOP and Computer Shopper. All were impressed by the Core i7-620M and NVIDIA Quadro FX 380M power that’s been crammed into the 14-inch chassis, but unsurprisingly that causes some warm underside temperatures. Other than that, the 8440w received high praise for its durable gunmetal-build and “exceedingly” comfortable keyboard, but the touchpad was noted as being too small. Actually, the guys over at Notebook Review even go as far to say that the laptop would be “absolutely perfect” if that pad and its buttons weren’t so squished. Now that’s quite a bold statement. All in all, the 8440w seems like a solid and very mobile workstation, but hit up the sources if you’re dying to know more about the $1,650 rig.

Filed under: Laptops

HP EliteBook 8440w lives up to its “workstation” title, says the reviewing masses originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Motorsports, Humor

Rhymes with hall of fame, doesn’t it? And yes, the 24 Hours of LeMons Wall of Blame (WoB) is exactly that – a place to forever honor (forever being a relative term) those cars and teams that have made LeMons such a freaky good time. Here’s how the lazy fat cats good people at LeMons explains the inspiration for the WoB:

“LeMons stuff never lasts: Cars explode or are hauled off by angry wives. Teams break up due to Sawz-All fights and/or prison terms. Brilliant themes become tired after the fifth time around for a Mr. T costume. But starting today, a rarified handful of LeMons over-underachievers will be immortalized forever through the LeMons Wall of Blame. Each inductee will be honored with a plaque made of Chinese lead, to be hung at LeMons HQ next to such other priceless artifacts as the original Noch Einer Scheiß-E30 stencil and Judge Jonny’s first powdered wig-an object equally redolent of history, stale tobacco smoke, and scalp smegma.”

Sure sounds like… something! Realizing just how sub-mental most LeMons fans are, the 24 Hours of LeMons HQ has gone ahead and selected six teams to be inducted into this year’s WoB class. Then, based off the results of the poll below (and a poll from some other site) an additional ten teams/cars/personalities will be selected as this year’s class members. Expect future WoB classes to consist of just ten teams total, but as LeMons has been around since 2006 and they just bothered thinking up the WoB before the start of their fifth racing season, there was lots of catching up to do.

One last little note before you jump and vote: Those of you planning to stuff the ballot box by voting early and often should know that this vote in no way resembles a democracy. Think of it as an autocracy that flashes a democratic face for the cameras. In the end, what Chief Perp Jay Lamm says, goes. See Rule 1.1 for clarification. Now jump.

[Source: 24 Hours of LeMons]

Continue reading 24 Hours of LeMons greats to get immortalized on Wall of Blame [w/poll]

24 Hours of LeMons greats to get immortalized on Wall of Blame [w/poll] originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We all know that Final Fantasy XIII did well enough to break some sales record upon its launch last year, and in fact even helped boost numbers of a particular console. But was it well enough to

Sure, all the cool kids might have moved on webOS these days, but the venerable PalmOS hasn’t totally kicked it yet — a company called Aceeca is actually releasing two Garnet-based devices later this year. If you don’t remember the entire sordid saga, the source code for PalmOS actually ended up with Access, which now licenses it out to other companies — including Palm, as it happens. Confusing? Yes. So is the idea of forking over $199 for the Aceeca PDA32 Garnet, which packs an unnamed ARM CPU, a QVGA screen, and an SD expansion slot into a case that’s “taller than a Palm TX and about twice as thick.” Oh, and you’ll have to pay extra for “wireless options.” Sounds like a winner — we’d actually advise you to go with the PDA32 CE, which runs Windows CE 5.0 and probably looks a lot like a Samsung Blackjack if you squint just right and drink enough rubbing alcohol. Corporate customers get some dated hardware of their own from Aceeca: the MEZ1500 Garnet, which will run a steep $499 and keeps the QVGA screen but adds a bigger battery, a faster processor, and an expansion bus for various optional barcode scanner, RFID readers, and so forth. You’ll have to pay extra for WiFi and Bluetooth on this one too, and you can also get a WinCE 5.0 version, which is apparently some kind of hilarious vaporware no one’s been waiting for. Sadly we don’t have any pictures of this gear, but we’re dying to check it all out — can you say “iPhone killer?”

PalmOS lives on, Aceeca releasing two devices this year originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yes, you surmised as much. Gran Turismo 5 is delayed yet again because it’s still not finished. No less than Polyphony Digital big boss, Kazunori Yamauchi, confirmed this fact in an interview with USA Today.
 
 
 

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The Short Version: If you donate to Haiti relief by SMS by texting “HAITI” to the number 90999, or by texting “YELE” to 501501, we will match your donation multiple times. Just leave a comment telling us how much you donated, and we will take care of the rest. We are currently matching donations 14 times.

Over the past couple of days, while trying to carry on with “business as usual,” I’ve personally found it hard to focus on tech, gadgets, and all of the CES 2010 goodness that we have yet to bring you, as the world is focused on the disastrous aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. We’re sure you’ve seen the imagery, but if you haven’t, or if you aren’t quite sure, I encourage you to watch this AP report:

Gear Live & Friends Will Match Your Haiti SMS Donations!
We felt it was time to do our part to help, so with the support of a bunch of Gear Live friends, we are announcing that we will match SMS donations made by Gear Live readers and viewers. As many of you know, the Red Cross has made it super-simple to donate $10 to help out by simply texting the word HAITI to 90999. In fact, this has been so successful that it’s already earned $11 million in just a few days. That is fantastic – but the damage to the country is far greater than that, and every little bit helps. So here’s what we’re gonna do:

Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:

• David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) and Roger Rustad (wondering network guru) will personally match up to $600 $1200
• Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking fame will match up to $500
• Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
• Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
• Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
• Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
• Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
• Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
• Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
• Hadley Stern and Apple Matters will match up to $100
• Xavier Lanier and Notebooks.com will match up to $100
• Amisha Gandhi-Lanier and Served Raw will match up to $100
• Kevin Urie from Social Media Club Seattle will match up to $100
• TechieDiva.com will match up to $50
• Eric Siegfriend and DanceHop will match up to $50

In total, so far, that’s $4500 $5400 $5650 $6550 $6700 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve fifteen seventeen times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 $160 $180 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!

Now, what if you don’t have any money to donate? We will make it easy. Just comment with a link to an article on from any of the following websites that you found interesting or helpful, and we will donate $10 on your behalf:

Gear Live, Notebooks.com, AskDaveTaylor.com, Gear Diary, Mobility Minded, Technologizer, WindowsPhoneThoughts, Served Raw, SlashGear, or GeekRoom.

I have to give a big thank you to my pal Xavier over at Notebooks.com. He came up with the idea and invited me to donate. I then asked a few friends, and never thought we’d get the support that we did, so we kicked off our own campaign. Together with Notebooks.com, we have $10,500 $11,400 $11,650 $12,550 $12,700 in matching donations for your SMS contributions!

The time is now! Leave a comment after donating, tell your friends, forward this around, and share this on Facebook and Twitter using the buttons at the top of the article. Make us spend every penny of the matching funds that are available.

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We’ve pointed out in the past how unfortunate it is that so few browsers recognize the sarcasm markup tag in HTML, because sarcasm sometimes gets missed in text. Apparently some random company is trying to fix that by creating an explicit sarcasm punctuation mark, called the SarcMark, made up of a squiggle around a dot. I’m hoping the whole effort itself is sarcastic, because the company has apparently registered a trademark on it (no, you can’t use that punctuation!) and is trying to get you to pay $1.99 for a special app to let you use the mark. What a great deal! I’ll buy 6!

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Last night, 200 entrepeneurs and investors from around Silicon Valley convened for the Founder Showcase, a quarterly startup event for seed stage companies that’s put together by Adeo Ressi’s TheFunded. The winner of the event, as voted on by the attendees is a new startup called MightyMeeting. MightyMeeting allows you to use your smartphone to host a PowerPoint presentation while you’re on the go, and also lets you manage your library of Office and PDF files from your phone.

The application seems best suited for people who often have to give presentations at a moment’s notice, but don’t want to be chained to their desks. Here’s how it works: first, you upload your presentation files to the service, which supports PDF and PowerPoint files. You can upload through a web interface, or via Email using a secret Email address. Once you’ve got your presentations in the cloud, you can easily share them directly from your phone using a native iPhone application or a web app (each meeting participant receives a link via Email or SMS message).

But unlike a standard file sharing service, the link you send from MightyMeeting isn’t just a link to the file — it’s actually a link to a presentation that you can control remotely. Clicking the link brings the attendee to a browser-based viewing window on their PC or mobile phone. Then, when you flip to the next slide on your phone, the change will be made on the screens of everyone else in the presentation. You can use a simultaneous voice call to communicate, or an integrated chat function. You can conduct the presentation from either 3G or a Wi-Fi network. And if you want your presentation to go viral for some reason, you can share it with Twitter and Facebook directly from your app.

MightyMeeting sounds like it could be a lifesaver for last minute meetings, but you’re going to have to remember to keep your archive of uploaded presentations current — it would be nice if there was some way to tie this into Google Docs and similar cloud based services. Also see Fuze Meeting, which offers support for mobile presentations.

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Everyone is getting into the URL shortening game these days. Google, YouTube, and Facebook are just a few joining the likes of the established players such as Bit.ly. And now Microsoft is jumping in. But there’s something weird about their URL.

As the UK blog My Microsoft Life noticed, some of Microsoft’s Bing employees have begun publicly tweeting with the binged.it URL. Seattle PI confirmed with Microsoft that it has been used internally and is likely to be made public soon. But the odd thing about binged.it is that it’s actually one character longer than Bing’s own domain, complete with the .com part. Sure, many Bing search query URLs are going to be much longer, but then why not just shorten them using the Bing.com domain or something smaller? I don’t know how much Microsoft paid for the Bing domain, but I’m sure it wasn’t cheap. And wasn’t part of the point to be shorter than Google? Why not spring for bin.gd or something?

Google’s shortener, goo.gl, is 5 characters. Facebook’s is 4 characters. Bing’s is 8 characters. Bing.com is 7 characters. Fa.il.

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