Author: Serkadis

While the United Nations Climate Conference (COP15) was taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark, Brazil’s National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) held the country’s first ever wind-only energy auction. On December 14, around 1,800 megawatts (MW) were contracted with energy from 71 wind power plants scheduled to be delivered beginning July 1, 2012. The wind power auction has reinforced Brazil’s success in generating electric energy from renewable sources, which currently represent 85.4% of the country’s electricity supply, according to preliminary data from the 2009 National Energy Balance, conducted by the Energy Research Corporation (EPE).

Over 7,000 MW of wind power are expected to be installed this year in the U.S. That’s down from 2008’s record 8,545 MW, but that still would make it the second best year in the history of the industry. Not bad, at a time when the rest of the economy tanked and the value of your primary financial policy driver became all but worthless.

Two rather successful venture capitalists, Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, have been at the forefront of bucking the ridiculous claim that VCs only invest in companies that have patents, as both have spoken out about how patents tend to stifle innovation, and how their portfolio companies are often held back by patents, rather than helped by them. It looks like both of them are also quite aware of how copyright gets in the way of basic innovation as well. Brad Feld has a post up about how he created a Pandora station based on Fred’s blog post detailing his top albums of the decade. Pretty cool, right?

Well, the problem is that Brad sent Fred an invite to this “station,” and Fred is traveling for the holidays in Argentina with his family. So, because of ridiculous demands from copyright holders that make it so Pandora is only available in the US, Brad gets informed that Fred cannot access the station that Brad created for Fred solely due to ridiculous copyright holder demands. Yes, even though Fred almost always accesses Pandora from the US, but just happens to be in Argentina this week, Pandora says he can’t listen to the station that Brad created for him. Brad makes a good point, that any human can understand why this situation is silly, but computers still can’t quite figure it out, noting: “The level of interaction of human and machine is high, although the level of sophistication is pretty low.” As for Fred’s summation of the situation? “Rights holders fuck everything up.” Indeed.

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We told you two weeks ago that Samsung Omnia II was available for pre orders in Argentina through the carrier Personal. Finally, that Windows Phone have arrived to those lands and users can adquire it trough Personal. The plans available are the same that we told you in previous post.

Source: emovilPRO

This post was submitted by teo.

Finally. Over a year after iPhone users got their native Yammer fix, Android has an official Yammer application available on Android Market. The application, while still fairly basic, comes with support for most of Yammer’s core functionality. If you use Yammer and you have an Android phone, you’ll want this app. We can’t link directly to the app because Google still hasn’t launched a strong web presence for the Market, but you can find it by running a query for “Yammer” from your phone.

The new application is actually derived from the codebase of Yowl, a third party app for Android that Yammer acquired a couple months ago. CEO David Sacks says that the application has been off the Market since the acquisition, primarily so that the team could fix a few issues. Now it’s good to go.

While a mobile application isn’t totally essential to using Yammer (you can use SMS, and the web app works well enough from mobile browsers), they sure make life easier. The Android application can automatically notify you when you have new messages, and you can leave it running all day in the background (on the iPhone you have to set up Push notifications). We’ve relied heavily on Yammer since its launch at TechCrunch50 2008, and this will make things much easier for those of us who have made the jump from the iPhone (or something else) to Android.

I’ve been playing with the app throughout the day and found it to work well overall, but it isn’t perfect yet. I found a bug or two (for instance, whenever I try to jump back in a message I’m writing to correct a typo, the whole message disappears). And there are some features that aren’t in the app yet, like the ability to granularly control which messages should issue an audio/vibrating alert. Sacks says the app will definitely be upgraded with more features in the future.

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It’s been a while since we first saw the $199 NorhTech Gecko hit the scene, but the AA-powered netbook looks to finally be hitting US shores in proper fashion, and the crew at Lilliputing just got their tester. Inside it’s no great shakes, with a 1GHz Xcore86 processor, 512MB of RAM, an 8GB SD card, and an 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 display — but almost every component can be swapped out for a more powerful variant, including the processor. That’s certainly intriguing, especially for the education market NorhTech is targeting, but we’re mostly on the edge of our seats waiting to find out how long those AAs last under some real use. Check one video after the break and another at the read link.

Continue reading NorhTech Gecko netbook loaded up with AAs and booted

NorhTech Gecko netbook loaded up with AAs and booted originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone, App Store

I was just watching CNBC and saw a commercial for a special called “Planet of the Apps: A Handheld Revolution!” The one-hour program looks at how the launch of the Apple iPhone in June of 2007 gave birth to a revolution in mobile technology. The main site lists some highlight from the show, including a piece on Heroes actor Greg Grunberg and his “second job” as an app developer (he’s one of the people behind the Yowza! app). From the press release:

Apps are everywhere. In less than two years, the app craze has taken over. These small applications – or apps – that fit on our mobile phone do everything from helping us accomplish mundane tasks to keeping us entertained while we wait for the bus.

Apps are popular and profitable. Studies estimate, the Apple iPhone apps store alone generates about $200 million a month in sales. Innovative and often addictive apps are changing the way we work and live.

Welcome to Planet of the Apps: A Handheld Revolution. In this hour we’ll look at how apps have changed our lives, meet some of the creators behind them, and figure out just how big a business they really are.

CNBC’s “Planet of the Apps: A Handheld Revolution!” will premiere on Thursday, January 7th at 10PM, and repeats at 1AM. No comment on the cleverness of the show’s title, or lack thereof.

TUAWCNBC to air ‘Planet of the Apps’ on January 7 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“Government 2.0” has been a big buzzword of 2009, with thought-leaders like Tim O’Reilly and The Sunlight Foundation showing the way. It’s a movement that pushes public institutions to use technologies that have thrived in the last five years like social networking and blogging to foster closer relationships with citizens. This entails being more open with data, and encouraging regular people to transform it through mashups and apps for use by others.

A few city governments have made good on their pledges to be more transparent. San Francisco unveiled DataSF, a central clearinghouse for data collected by the city, and showcases some apps here. New York City went a step further, launching a full-on apps contest through Betaworks-backed startup ChallengePost.

It’s been almost three months since the contest launched, and several interesting applications have turned up. Here are a few, and you can check out the rest here. (To be clear, some of the data for these apps is collected through the government like with Bookzee and some of it is bootstrapped.)

Primospot: Hands down, the biggest pain of owning a car in a major metropolitan city is finding a place to park. Primospot is building a database of all parking regulations in Boston and New York, so you can figure out where you’re legally allowed to park now or in the near future. Primospot generates maps like the one above, showing what’s in the red zone and not. Primospot can also send you text messages for when your parking space is about to expire and you can search for parking in the near future (in case you’re working during the day and want to figure out where to park when you go out at night.) And, in case you don’t think it gets any better, you can also compare parking garage prices in real-time. The company just launched an iPhone app called iPark, so you can record where you’ve parked in case you forget it.

All in all, it seems like a very helpful app and one that’s sorely needed in a public transportation-asphyxiated city like San Francisco. The user interface could be a smidgen better. I’d rather see markers showing how much of the curb is available for parking rather than noting a single point along several blocks. It’s a helpful start and the team has been very aggressive in adding features every month.

Bookzee: This app helps you find available library books nearby. You can search for books either on the web site or through the iPhone app and it will show you which nearby libraries have it available. Again, it’s only available in New York. San Francisco’s library system has its own online search, through it could benefit from a facelift and some mobile availability.

Taxihack: Rude taxi drivers better watch out. This app lets people leave Twitter-style mini-reviews of drivers using their medallion number. The interface is barebones for now, but it’s a big step up from the old way of reporting poor taxi drivers. (That was to call 311 and testify before the Taxi & Limousine Commission.) Now if only there was a way to take photos of medallions and pull up reviews, Google Goggles-style. That’s for another day…

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Some people are surprised to learn that many cats can’t tolerate cow’s milk. While a kitten may be able to digest mother cat’s milk, it can be a very different story when it comes to cow’s milk. Lactose intolerance occurs when a cat is unable to break down the sugar in milk.

Symptoms of lactose intolerance in felines can include vomiting and diarrhea. Cats suffering from lactose intolerance may drink extra water to make up for dehydration. While some dairy products can cause diarrhea in sensitive cats, digesting other dairy products can have the opposite effect. Cheese may cause constipation in cats!

If a cat is fed a lot of dairy, skin irritation may also occur. If you’re concerned that your cat is lactose intolerant, talk with your vet and play it safe by not feeding dairy products. Visit the pet store for cat-safe milk substitutes like Cat-Sip that contain essential dietary requirements like taurine. Though my cat longs for ice cream, he’ll accept Cat-Sip!

Do you give dairy products to your cat?

(Image via flickr/Ryan Wick)

Post from: Blisstree

Is Kitty Lactose Intolerant?

Well, well, it looks like Camangi’s WebStation is finally making good on its shipments. The first of Gear Diary’s two pre-orders arrived and the gang has been more than happy to put together quick unboxing video for us to enjoy. It’s a pretty standard box with equally customary assortment of packaged accessories, suction cup stand (pictured) notwithstanding. The 7-inch Android tablet looks pretty matched with the Nook in terms of overall size, but by design that lends itself to having a larger overall screen. Not much in the way of impressions at this point, but if you’re the type of person who can be satisfied with a video and a handful of product / comparison shots, hit up Gear Diary for the still frames and stay tuned after the break for the “moving pictures” version.

Continue reading Camangi WebStation lands in American hands, promptly unboxed on video

Camangi WebStation lands in American hands, promptly unboxed on video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve never tried yoga before, make 2010 your year to finally give it a try. Yoga has several benefits, both mental and physical.

If you’re feeling stressed, taking time out for a yoga session can work wonders for you. When you practice yoga, you’re living in the moment, focusing on your body or breathing, not demands of others or worrying thoughts that may cross your mind.

Yoga keeps you busy with poses that help make you stronger. You may not think that yoga can help you gain strength, but anyone who’s tried the downward-facing dog pose will argue with you! Many yoga poses give you the opportunity to use muscles that aren’t often worked very hard. In the end, you’ll gain strength and tone your muscles.

Practicing yoga may even help keep your heart healthy. New research has shown that heart rate variability (beat-to-beat changes in heart rate) is higher in yoga practitioners than in non-practitioners. Heart rate variability is a sign of a healthy heart. Other studies have shown that yoga, along with meditation, can reduce blood pressure and risk of heart disease. Yoga has also been proven effective for low back pain!

If you’ve always wanted to try yoga, but felt intimidated, just take a deep breath and walk into a beginner’s yoga class with your mat and some comfortable clothes. No one is going to watch you and make fun. They’ll all be busy concentrating on getting their own moves down. If it makes you feel better, take a place in the back so you don’t feel watched. Plus, you won’t always have to go to a class. Once you learn the basics, you should be able to practice at home. However, attending class is good motivation for some.

Are you going to try yoga this year?

(Image via stock.xchng)

Post from: Blisstree

Yoga for the New Year

Before we actually discuss the rumor, let me just say that having a product called 3D is misleading when it’s not actually 3D in any way but that it exists in a three-dimensional space. Really. People these days hear “3D” and they don’t think “Hmm, like the 5D?” — no, they think “OMG Avatar!” So keep that in mind, Canon.

But as for the rumor itself, it’s actually kind of interesting. Apparently the 3D will be aimed at wedding photographers (!) and will incorporate new sensor technology to increase dynamic range and high-ISO clarity.

The specs are listed over at Canon Rumors as:

• 16.7mp FF
• 7.2 µm pixel pitch
• DIGIC V
• Small magnesium alloy body similar to the 5D2

I’m not entirely convinced, but it might be cool. There’s probably room in Canon’s lineup, and a low-noise camera that isn’t full frame might be a big seller among the portrait/wedding crowd. Nikon has the high-ISO crowd wowed right now with the 3Ds, if I’m not mistaken.

If it’s going to be announced, it’ll be at Photokina in September. That leaves plenty of time for further rumor-mongering.

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All over the social Web these days, there’s a race to get as many friends, followers, readers, or subscribers as possible—most of them people you don’t know. As location-based social applications like Foursquare and Gowalla grow, they’re broadcasting your location to all those people, connecting you in one more way to a lot of people you’ve never heard of. As our “circle of friends” grows out of control, we wind up more public than we mean to be, sharing information with everyone just to be able to share it with our real friends.

New location app Rally is different, though. There’s no way to add Rally friends from Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, because as Rally sees it, those aren’t really your friends. The only way to find someone on Rally is to look for them, which seems to be an effective way of narrowing the scope down to people you know. By intentionally stripping down the friend graph, and making friends come only from Rally, real friends can keep up with each other and keep everyone else out.

Other than that, Rally works a lot like Foursquare or Gowalla, letting you check in at a given location (restaurant, movies, etc) so your friends know where you are—you can even include a picture with your check-in information.

If you see a friend is somewhere, you can click “I’m on the way,” and let them know you’re coming to hang out. There’s also a bit of the game aspect, with users able to earn badges and the like–even more badges than Foursquare, potentially.

While Foursquare and Gowalla could be used the same way as Rally (letting you select friends one at a time), they’re integrated with Twitter and Facebook and encourage you to push all your location data into your other networks. So Rally’s not the only application that can restrict who gets your information, it’s the only one that doesn’t give you another option. The intent of Rally, more than the uniqueness of the use case, is what makes Rally notable.

Forcing users to rebuild their friend graph is a risky maneuver, and it remains to be seen if Rally can work on a large scale and do well enough to convince people to seek out all their friends on the service. It’ll be interesting to watch the company over the next few months to see how it fares.

Rally’s business plan is simple, as co-founder Sol Lipman told TechCrunch: using location to serve advertising. The potential with location-based ads is huge—you could walk by a store and find its coupons for the day, or see the happy hour specials at every bar within a six-block radius of you. Foursquare and other companies are making these kinds of deals, and Foursquare has already raised $1.35 million to extend into 100 cities, while Gowalla’s already got $10.3 million in the bank.

For right now, Rally is iPhone-only (available in the App Store), and is only usable for those in Santa Cruz, Calif. But the company says it’s going to be expanding both platform and location availability.

Rally is based in Santa Cruz. Many members of the startup team were on the team that created 12seconds, a short-form, video-based social network.

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If the iPod touch is a gateway drug for future iPhone users, then Apple should feel confident that it will have plenty of future iPhone users after this holiday season. From an analysis of App Store downloads during December 25th, it seems that the iPod touch was a hot, hot gift this Christmas.

According to the latest data from mobile analytics firm Flurry, downloads of apps to iPod touch devices spiked significantly on the 25th—not only far above the average download rate throughout November and December, but 172 percent higher than the spike in downloads to iPhones. App downloads typically track slightly lower for the iPod touch versus the iPhone according to Flurry’s data, which counts whenever an app that uses Flurry’s metrics API launches for the first time. On December 26, iPod touch downloads topped iPhone downloads even while trending sharply down towards more normal levels.

What is a “Brief” post?”

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China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has had a reputation from very early on as being a source for downloading infringing music and movies. In fact, in 2005 when the company went public, many in China claimed that the availability of music and movies was why Baidu was so popular. In fact, we wondered if by going public, it would put pressure on the company to block those links. Later evidence suggested that Baidu was heavily involved in promoting unauthorized content (potentially even hosting it itself). And while the company has promised to remove links, they seem to reappear almost immediately (and only indexed by Baidu). Not surprisingly, Baidu has been sued many times for copyright infringement.

However, one such case, brought in the US was recently dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The plaintiff claimed that Baidu could be sued in the US because it was listed on NASDAQ, but the court found nothing to support that and dismissed the entire complaint.

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While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain popularity. Part of that prediction was informed by a recent interview with Metaio Marketing Director Lisa Murphy.

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ReadWriteWeb first covered Metaio in early November when the company was set to release its editable consumer application Junaio. While products like Layar and Wikitude offer users a chance to passively view location-based notes and text, Junaio is the only service that offers non-coders the opportunity to edit layer content.

While Junaio is certainly its most popular product, the 6-year-old Munich-based company earns revenue by working with commercial clients like Lego, Popular and GM. Often described as “augmented reality marketing”, Metaio specializes in markerless tracking for advertising clients where a printed codes prompt a 3D webcam experience.

In the same way that consumers can generate their own QR codes via sites like Kaywa, is it possible that markerless AR tracking will one day yield a codeless creative experience? Honestly, it’s fine to hold up an Ikea catalogue and see a 3D sofa, but what good is a so-called immersive environment if the user is held captive in a passive consumer experience?

Says Murphy, “We chose to focus on the social aspects of Junaio by offering image sharing, oAuth and Facebook integration.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the company may open up the interface for further exploration. In keeping with its commitment to the social, we’re hoping Metaio finds ways to incorporate user-generated SketchUp creations in Junaio as well as an all-purpose AR tracking generator. In other words, rather than just interacting in an immersive environment, we’re hoping non-coders can contribute more than their eyeballs.

Discuss

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Remember that time you left your phone in the car on a cold night when you went to dinner, and when you got back to it, the battery was nearly dead because it had gotten so cold? Yeah, that would be happening a lot if you had an electric car that didn’t take temperature into account. And so the testers of BMW Mini Es are finding out in cold weather: range seems to be reduced by half in 23° temperatures.

The Volt, as Matt discovered, has a battery heater to keep the electrical system at a decent temperature. Seems an elementary feature to include in an electric car, and maybe these tests will convince BMW that it’s necessary.

On the other hand, we may be looking at a bit of a delay before all-electric cars are truly practical for the average family, seeing as if you can’t rely on it to get to work and back on some days of the year, there’s not much reason to buy one.

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