Dani Pedrosa will be hoping to turn the table in the MotoGP championship next year, despite the fact that he is not currently listed as a main contender for the title in 2010. Looking at some tough competition from Yamaha duo Valentino Rossi and Jorge Lorenzo, as well as Ducati’s Casey Stoner, the Spaniard received at least one good news prior to his new MotoGP campaign.
According to Spanish reports, the Repsol Honda rider recently got rid of a screw that was inserted in his hand … (read more)
The new Kia Venga will go on sale very soon and, even if the parent manufacturer revealed the car at the Frankfurt Auto Show and a lot of people got the chance to see it in all its glory, fans are still searching for some video footage with the vehicle.
Well, wait no more as the South Korean manufacturer finally rolled out the first video with the Venga that emphasizes the some important attributes of the car: more interior space panoramic glass roof, start-stop systems, Euro 5 e… (read more)
Loved-up duo Russell Brand and Katy Perry are celebrating the new year at the Taj Mahal. The pop star posted a photo of herself and the British funnyman Russell Brand cuddling in front of the sacred site in Agra, India on her Twitter.com page Tuesday, joking: “He built this for me…”
Katy and Russell have yet to confirm recent tabloid reports claiming that they are engaged. The “I Kissed A Girl” singer doesn’t appear to be sporting a rock on her ring finger, her fans seem to believe the news — many have posted their congratulations to the stars in Tweets.
Italy’s famous Mille Miglia vintage road race, to be held from May 6 to May 9 next year, has already collected a record number of entrants, with more than 1,400 registrations from all over the world so far. It seems the romantic image and excitement of the race is capturing the interest of an international audience, and 2010 should prove a great year for the cars on offer.
According to Mille Miglia organisers, many precious and rare cars will be participating this year, with more models represented than previous editions, including vehicles from past races. The 2010 Mille Miglia will pass through the town centres of Bologna, Assisi, Spoleto and Rieti, and will also pass through Viterbo, Siena, Florence, Modena, Reggio Emilia, Parma and Cremona on the return. The success of the uphill trial at Terminillo in 2009, will be repeated again in 2010.
Source | Autoblog.it
Social gaming has done wonders for Facebook and the market is one of the fastest growing and the most profitable in the web industry. But can Google do the same on YouTube? It remains to be seen, but a patent application that just surfaced indicates that it’s at least thinking of it. Filed earlier this year but published this month, the application focuses on a new layer of interactivity within the videos which seem to be geared towards creating games based on those videos.
“Some examples of annotations are graphical text box annotations, which display text at certain locations and certain times of the video, and pause annotations, which halt playback of the video at a specified time within the video,” the application, discovered by Bnet, reads.
Annotations have been available for YouTube videos for a while, but they’ve been static until now, just plain text boxes with no interactive component. Not even basic links are enabled in them. This may change though, with ‘invisible’ annotations which control playback, like the pause one, and with others that link to a certain portion of the video or other videos depending on the user’s actions.
“Some annotations, e.g. a graphical annotation (such as a text box annotation) comprising a link to a particular portion of a target video, are associat… (read more)
Bernie Ecclestone is known as a person who often speaks his mind about a certain matter, and seldom changes his opinion about things; or favorite drivers. Although admitting his enthusiasm over seeing Michael Schumacher back in Formula One, the commercial rights holder of the series is not shy of naming Sebastian Vettel as his personal favorite for the world title.
I predict Vettel will be the next Formula One champion, Ecclestone was quoted as saying by the German newspaper Bild…. (read more)
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Danielle with a baby carriage?
Pop star Kevin Jonas tied the knot with former hairdresser Danielle Deleasa, 23, in a Disney-esque ceremony — complete with glass slippers and fairy tale themes — at Oheka Castle in Long Island, New York on Dec. 19. (We all know The JoBros have ties to Mickey & The Gang, so it should come as no surprise that the ceremony looked like something you’d see at The Magic Kingdom……) Now that’s he’s a married man, the no-longer-a-virgin Jonas Brother, 22, is eager to get an early start on fatherhood, according to a new tabloid report.
“They’re planning to start a family very soon and it could even be a honeymoon pregnancy,” a friend spilled to The Sydney Herald this week. “They’re basically putting it in God’s hands and even though they’re young, they are both ready to start having children.”
Care to get up close and personal with Niihau? How’s about an overview of Tuvalu? Surely you need a helicopter shot of Pakatoa Island to get your morning started right, yeah? If so, and you’re too lazy to hit up the World Wide Web, there’s a better-than-average chance that an older National Geographic magazine has exactly the elixir you’re searching for. Problem is, sifting through every single issue since 1888 takes a fair bit of time — time you’d rather be spending in an obnoxiously long security line as you await your flight to Ushuaia. Thanks to “modern technology” and “storage innovations,” said quandary can now be resolved quite simply. Nat Geo is offering every last piece of information it has ever published on a portable 160GB HDD, and amazingly 100GB is free for you to manually add to the collection. Too bad this $199.95 device wasn’t available before Christmas, but hey, at least you’ve now got something to blow those Santa Bucks on.
National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Despite the huge problems it encountered in 2009, Opel’s new registrations grew 31 percent in Germany during the current year, which means that GM’s unit reached the highest level in four years. Basically, it all happened thanks to government incentives, Reuters wrote, which encouraged buyers to migrate towards fuel efficient and smaller cars.
In Germany, Opel’s sales were up 31 percent to 339,000 units in 2009, a market share increase to 8.9 percent.
Meanwhile, Ope… (read more)
It’s not like we needed any confirmation for it, but the motor racing website that announced two days ago that Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet Jr. will sign a 3-year deal with Campos Meta Formula One team admitted the report was a hoax.
The aforementioned report linked the 3-year contract Piquet would have signed with the Spanish team with his father purchasing as much as 15 percent worth of share of Adrian Campos’ team. In addition, the report suggested several Brazilian sponsors … (read more)
Article Tags: Met Office, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10, World Temperatures
Pressure on the water supply network in Northern Ireland is at an all-time high because of burst pipes and running taps caused by the freezing weather.
The cold snap has taken its toll on the water supply, leaving thousands of householders and businesses struggling to get by without mains water.
And there is no sign of an end in sight to the province’s ice storm as the Met Office predicted that high winds in the next few days will make it “bitterly cold”.
Northern Ireland Water said a major incident team was co-ordinating response teams across Northern Ireland to find and fix burst water mains.
Source: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
TenYears: Unexpected Success Stories
TenYears: Biggest Losers in Tech
Japan’s $2 million rescue robot is a hummingbird
It’s a pen! It’s a bullet! It writes upside down and underwater! It’s a bullet pen!
For men on trains: Japanese company sells anti-groping gloves
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Comedy Central has pulled the plug on The Jeff Dunham Show after just one season.
The sketch comedy starring the nation’s premier ventriloquist will not be returning next season despite its debut as the most-watched series premiere in the cable network’s history, drawing 5.3 million viewers, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Tuesday.
‘We have no plans to renew the series at this time,” a Comedy Central spokesperson said.
The network will continue to work with Dunham — the ventriloquist who is one of the highest-grossing standups in the country — as part of a development deal. He will star in another special for the network targeted for fall 2010, following his blockbuster 2008 special seen by 6.6 million viewers.
By Jon Stokes, Senior Editor, Ars Technica
All signs indicate that the e-reader is to CES 2010 what the razor-thin LED-backlit TV was to CES 2009—a technology whose time in the commercial spotlight is now at hand, and which will make a huge, multi-vendor push into the market in the coming year. A whole raft of e-reader devices and technologies will be on display at next week’s CES—were I to cover all of them, this article would run for many pages. This being the case, in this short preview I’ll offer a quick look at three of the most promising e-reader efforts that we’ll be watching closely for this year’s CES coverage.
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By Benjamin Sarlin, Contributor, Daily Beast
While Avatar may represent the future of filmmaking, a current Star Wars-related Internet phenomenon signifies how the Aughts’ DIY mashup approach has changed popular culture.
On paper, the viral video making the rounds recently is bizarre even by Internet standards: a 70-minute review of 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace delivered by an elderly schizophrenic who talks like a cross between Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill.
“Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son,” the narrator begins. “And while my son eventually hanged himself in the bathroom of a gas station, the unfortunate reality of the Star Wars prequels is that they’ll be around forever.”
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By Liz Gannes, Blogger, NewTeeVee
Over the past two years, developer Ron Ilan built a site called Totlol that features a moderated selection of YouTube videos appropriate for kids. He hoped to build a business on it — and actually started charging membership fees earlier this year to avoid shutting the site down for lack of money. This week Ilan is crying foul, saying YouTube prevented him from his preferred business model, advertising, by changing its terms of service.
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By Jade Colbert, Writer, thevarsity.ca
On November 13, Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students on “How to Destroy the Book,” as part of the National Reading Summit held at the ROM.
Doctorow has a pretty impressive bio: co-editor of Boing Boing, former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, visiting Senior Lecturer at Open University, and New York Times bestselling author.
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By Chris Ziegler, Editor, Engadget
The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft (MSFT) is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original “Palm PC” branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton.
3Com (COMS) subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it’s going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy.
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By Eric Savitz, Blogger, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
Motorola (MOT) may be planning to announce a pair of new phones at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.
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Google’s Nexus One phone will evidently have a couple of interesting features, according to new documents leaked to the Gizmodo blog.
Google plans to sell the Google-designed, Android-based phone by itself. The unlocked and unsubsidized phone will sell for $530. Meanwhile, T-Mobile plans to sell a subsidized version for $180 with a two-year service contract. The phone service with 500 minutes of airtime per month, text messaging, and data is $79.99.
Details are being closely watched since the Nexus One it uses Google’s Android operating system and it is the first such phone designed by Google itself. The strategy reflects Google’s desire to take the entire design of the phone into its own hands in order to ensure a quality experience and to make sure the phone is unlockable, a key feature that users want in the name of greater consumer choice.
Those who use Family plans, Flexpay, SmartAccess and KidConnect subscriptions must buy the phone unlocked in order to use those plans still. You can have up to five Nexus One phones per Google account. Google plans to sell the phone at Google.com/phone.
If you cancel the plan before 120 days, you have to pay the subsidy difference, or $350. For some reason, Google made sure in its terms of service agreements that buyers knew that the maker of the phone was HTC, not Google itself. TechCrunch also noted in a post that Google may be planning an automated backup service for the Nexus One phones.
Earlier today, we noted that T-Mobile and Google are expected to announce the Nexus One on Jan. 5. [screenshot credit: Gizmodo]
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