Author: Serkadis

Google shared a new video to its Project Glass YouTube channel today, featuring physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel, one of the Google Glass “Explorers,” visiting CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He uses Glass to conduct a Google Hangout with his class from the site.

Vanden Heuvel discusses his adventure further on his blog.

Slayer guitarist and songwriter Jeff Hanneman passed away on Thursday leaving one of the biggest holes in the metal community since the loss of Pantera’s Darrell Abbott. Interestingly, Thursday also saw a partial reunion of Pantera, when vocalist Phil Anselmo and bass player Rex Brown joined Anthrax at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards to perform the Pantera classic, “This Love”.

This is a pretty big deal for Pantera fans holding out for a reunion, which appears highly unlikely as long as Anselmo and Vinnie Paul (Pantera drummer and Darrell’s brother) aren’t talking. At least it was something.

The performance was dedicated to Hanneman, and once “This Love” concluded, they launched into Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.

The guys at StuntBear have put together, “Aussie Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Bloke,” promising “deep SW references” throughout. Which ones can you find?

If you enjoyed that, they also have a Cantina Band rock cover on SoundCloud.

[via reddit]

There’s no way you’ve ever seen skills like these with a remote control helicopter.

Just nuts.

[via reddit]

In writing about the plethora of startups, devices and strategies that companies large and small are throwing at the internet of things, I’ve been thinking about market size. Cisco says it will generate $14.4 trillion in profits by 2022. GE says it will add $10 trillion to $15 trillion in GDP by 2030. These numbers are hard to be believed. For example the federal government only brought in $2.45 trillion in tax revenue in 2012.

But there’s also the question of how to measure the market or the value. Do we count the devices themselves? The dollars spent on platforms and services that tie connected devices together? What about subscriptions to wireless networks? In GE’s case it’s counting dollars saved by implementing better data gathering systems. But the whole idea of trying to measure what is fundamentally a technological shift as a market baffles me.

There’s no question the internet of things is going to be big, but to separate the reality from the hype its worth looking for hard data. If not at market size or potential profits, then let’s just try to see where people are in terms of interest in the products. For example, check out these numbers from a March Yankee Group survey of about 2,300 people.

That seems like a relatively small percent of the population planning on buying a new connected device in the next six months. And the numbers are somewhat odd, in that I don’t think even 5 percent of users are planning to buy a new smart meter –something utilities tend to provide. So I’m taking this data with a grain of salt, but I am looking for good ways to think about the market size and understand how rapidly people and companies are adopting connected devices into their homes and business processes.

This is a real trend, but it’s clear we’re still at the beginning of the massively hyped shift that will lead to real value creation. I just don’t know how to measure how much.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Smart Grid Apps: Six Trends That Will Shape Grid Evolution
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Key technologies for the smart city

One of the popular videos on reddit today comes under the headline, “I went to check out Google Palestine, entered random Arabic letter and clicked ‘I’m feeling lucky’. This is the result.”

One user comments, “Thank you so much op. I have been searching for this video for years.”

Another responds, “Same here. I’ve never seen it before though.”

Well done, Google.

Oct. 10, 2007 is the day I threw off the chains locking my music. I purged the last DRM-protected file from my personal catalog — and not by stealing. I purchased every track, and getting them Digital Rights Management-free wasn’t easy six years ago. The base collection started from CDs. The problem: Songs purchased from iTunes, starting in April 2003. Later, Apple offered facility to remove copyright restrictions. Meanwhile, I repurchased some tunes, or just did without them.

But chains remain. Every video purchased or rented for download is DRM-protected. Far worse are ebooks. There, the unsung hero — your advocate and champion — is JK Rowling. In late April 2012, she released the entire Harry Potter series as ebooks, DRM-free, baby. Rowling is more than a hugely successful writer; she stands up for readers, too.

HTML5 Ruin

You can take a stand also. May 3rd is “International Day Against DRM“. That’s right, today. There is good reason now, as rights protection is headed to HTML5, and it’s helluva controversy, too.

“There is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium‘s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards”, Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Peter Eckersley and Seth Schoen explain. “The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped”.

GNU Project founder Richard Stallman calls DRM “Digital Restrictions Management”. In a post on the GNU website, he asserts:

Allowing a few businesses to organize a scheme to deny our freedoms for their profit is a failure of government, but so far most of the world’s governments, led by the U.S., have acted as paid accomplices rather than policemen for these schemes. The copyright industry has promulgated its peculiar ideas of right and wrong so vigorously that some readers may find it hard to entertain the idea that individual freedom can trump their profits.

Price-Fixers

He’s spot on. Publishers demand onerous digital rights mechanisms that defy fair use-laws that prevent people from sharing content they purchase for personal use. Take ebooks, for example. If I buy hardcover or paperback, I can share with family, or even friends. But not ebooks. DRM restricts usage to a single user account. If my daughter at college wants to read the same book, she must buy another copy.

Isn’t that a form of price fixing, a practice that U.S. antitrust law prohibits, since DRM compels even members of the same household to buy more than one copy of a title when using separate accounts on different devices. Buyers can read Kindle books on any device running Amazon’s software, for example, but rights restrictions limit or prevent sharing the titles with, say, family members on their separate accounts.

In a competitive market, particularly a growth one, competition should loosen rights. That’s what happened with digital music, where DRM ruled early on but today is all but gone. Consumers benefit from the ability to share music within a household. Ebook publishers generally grant no such rights. Same applies to Hollywood-produced movies and TV shows.

U.S. antitrust and trade laws are supposed to protect consumers from harm. What’s not harmful or anti-competitive about onerous DRM? If rights restrictions come to HTML5, music freedom could give way to chains. Again.

Stop EME

The Free Software Foundation’s “Defective by Design” campaign asserts:

EME would be an irreversible step backward for freedom on the Web. It would endorse and enable business models that unethically restrict users, and it would make subjugation to particular media companies a precondition for full Web citizenship. Just as Flash and Silverlight are finally dying off, we should not replace them with the media giants’ latest control fantasy.

Furthermore, EME contradicts the W3C’s core values. It would hamper interoperability by encouraging the proliferation of DRM plugins. It would fly in the face of the W3C’s principle of keeping the Web royalty-free — this is simply a back door for media companies to require proprietary player software. It is willful ignorance to pretend otherwise just because the proposal does not mention particular technologies or DRM schemes by name.

I agree. If you do, too, sign FSF’s petition “We don’t want the Hollyweb”, opposing EME.

Photo Credit: Nomad_Soul/Shutterstock

When was the last time you talked about Acer? Never? Me too. The company, which is the fourth largest PC maker in the world by the way, announced the Acer Aspire R7 this morning. It’s a mighty morphing Windows 8 portable. Like the Lenovo Yoga, it features versatile hinges that allow the computer to take different forms.

The Aspire R7 is not the next big thing. No one is going to buy this thing. But that’s probably just fine.

The Acer Aspire R7 is a halo device. It’s an attention grabber. It’s advertising in the form of product. It’s Acer’s proof to the other big players and startups alike that the company can still hang. It’s designed to sit pretty in the showroom window and entice buyers to come inside to the dealership. It is, in automotive terms, the Chevy Corvette of Acer’s lineup.

Dealerships prominently position the Corvette outside their doors. It’s not around back with the Chevy Econoboxes. It’s right out front. It draws attention. It gets buyers near the door and talking about the brand. It will never outsell the Impala. In fact it’s designed to help sell the Impala.

Expect to see the Acer Aspire R7 on electronic store retailers’ end-caps and nowhere else. Just maybe, with this hot portable occupying prime real estate in Best Buy, more buyers will view Acer as a serious computer company rather than a list of competitive specs available at good price.

Every company produces these high-end products to get the blood moving again. Remember the Dell Adamo XPS? That $2,200 netbook was once displayed at CES on a turntable protected by a bulletproof cube of glass. It was “technically” available for sale, but Dell didn’t expect it to sell en masse. Sony had the uber-high end Qualia line from 2003 to 2005. With prices ranging from $1,400 (MiniDisc player) to $25,000 (SXRD video projector), these products were more of a design exercise than legitimate push into the upper echelon of consumer electronics.

Back to Acer.

The company’s Wikipedia page says it best: Acer sells “inexpensively-targeted” computer electronics. The products are available from nearly every retailer. Acer is, in short, the Lee Jeans of computer: They’re perfectly acceptable, available at Walmart but not a brand that generates excitement.

Now there’s the Acer Aspire R7. The Internet is excited about this computer. Gizmodo says they’re not ready for its level of crazy. But crazy is good. Crazy gets attention. And crazy sells.

Acer is losing marketshare. The company was the second most prolific computer maker in 2009, second to only HP in global sales. It ended 2012 in fourth place, after HP, Lenovo, and Dell. Worse yet, sales and shipments are still trending down.

The consumer marketplace has changed a lot since Acer was near the top. Like Giz said, we’re not ready for the R7′s radical design. But I for one can’t wait to see what else the firm is capable of producing. I would be totally on board with a similar Windows 8 computer albeit one that’s a touch less crazy. And now I’m looking to Acer to provide that where I wouldn’t have even considered the company before.

Oh, and Acer did announce new lower-end notebooks today. Engadget covered them. They’re good, but nothing exciting — which is just about right for Acer.

When your cloud provider closes up shop without warning — like cloud database Xeround did earlier this week — a two-hour outage suddenly doesn’t look so bad. Thankfully, the marketplace for business-focused cloud services has to date been relatively free of such sudden closures (the consumer space not so much), but one has to assume Xeround won’t be the last to fold.

Think about how many other cloud database services, platform-as-a-service offerings and — if you can count that high — software-as-a-service applications have launched in the past few years. If the 75-percent-of-all-startups-fail statistic applies equally to cloud computing as it does to other sectors,  we’re about to see a lot more sad emails to users warning them to move their data or find a new provider within the next month.

It sucks to think of adopting a new, presumably useful service as a significant risk, but that’s exactly what is if your data is trapped in some proprietary format or can’t be easily exported. The tide may be turning, though.

We can’t recreate cloud services, but maybe we can extend their lives

According to Mike Driscoll, founder and CEO of cloud-based analytics service Metamarkets (see disclosure), one of the major problems with cloud services is today is that they’re just not designed to be easily replicated. This creates problems when customers — particularly large enterprises — approach cloud providers with contractual conditions that harken back to the era of actual on-premises software. Essentially, they want the cloud version of a software escrow account that would place the service’s source code with a trusted third party and, should the company cease operations, would allow the customer to keep running the service on its own infrastructure.

For now, the response has been to push back on those requests because it wouldn’t really be possible to run the service anywhere other than where it’s currently running. Driscoll said many SaaS applications today — his own included — are “fairly monolithic in the way they’re architected,” which means there’s a strong dependency between the applications and the cloud operating system on which they’re running. He thinks it’s possible that hybrid cloud deployments could help solve the problem (e.g., what OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Amazon-Eucalyptus theoretically would allow for), but that a feasible hybrid model is probably a few years out.

However, services like Metamarkets, also require a centralized data model (a la Bloomberg terminals) so much of the value is lost if customers all run their own versions on their own servers. For situations like this, he’s heard it proposed that service providers could put cash rather than software into an escrow account, and the cash would pay for a skeleton crew to manage the service for a year, let’s say, so customers would have ample time to find an alternative.

Until things some of these mitigation strategies get figured out, it’s probably more of the status quo for cloud adoption. Small businesses will likely assume more risk and rely heavily on cloud services, while larger companies will use them for non-mission-critical applications or when they’ve received adequate assurances of security and stability. “When you’re GE or JPMorgan,” Driscoll said, “you’re never going to create a dependency on any application that can just get unplugged.”

How insurable are you and your cloud provider?

Maybe the answer is to adopt but protect. I used Xeround’s closure as a reason to catch up with CloudInsure, a cloud-ratings firm that I first covered as it was just starting in 2011. The idea behind the company is to serve as an actuary for insurance providers that want to get into the business of insuring cloud computing customers like they previously have with managed hosting customers and general purchasers of IT equipment.

The way it works is by analyzing some 140 factors about both the user and the cloud provider(s) in order to assign a risk score. So, a high-risk user (e.g., one with highly regulated, very valuable data) might cost more to insure even though its cloud provider is rated as a very low risk. The inverse could be true, too, where a low-risk user could choose to deploy on a high-risk cloud service. Founder Drew Bartkiewicz said CloudInsure covers IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers, and the financial stability of the provider is among the variables its models consider.

Depending on the insurance policy, insured companies would receive monetary remunerations to mitigate against an outage, breach or closure that required them to pay penalties to customers or regulators, or to move to another cloud provider. Insurance broker Lockton is already offering a cloud insurance product through the International Association of Cloud and Managed Service Providers, and has a partnership in place with CloudInsure, as well.

CloudInsure has solidified quite a bit since we last spoke, established some significant partnerships and, Bartkiewicz told me on Thursday, is about ready to make its service a lot more public.

The insurance model could prove to be a really big deal, especially if it helps smaller cloud providers gain a foothold that will allow them to flourish. Right now, a prudent CIO might decide to opt only for services from companies he assumes aren’t going anywhere — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM and the like — when insurance might make it a little easier to take a risk on something that might pay bigger dividends.

Besides, it’s not as if being part of a large vendor is always a sign of stability: VMware bought and then sold an app-development technology called WaveMaker in a two-year timeframe, but it just as easily could have killed the business rather than try to sell it. I have reached out to Amazon Web Services to discuss the circumstances under which it would ever consider terminating a service, but have not received a response.

The internet never* forgets

When you look at the topic of web service closures beyond business applications, you actually see just how perplexing and possibly problematic it is. Screenshots might exist of services such as Google Reader and Posterous, but myriad dependencies on other services might make them impossible to recreate even if you had the source code. Unique file formats and other development decisions could present problems for digital archivists trying to preserve the web in a way that’s accessible by future generations.

“This is a case where the internet is more forgetful than the things that came before it,” Driscoll quipped. “The internet never forgets, until it does — and then it forgets everything.”

Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM. Om Malik is also a venture partner at True.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tom Baker.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Quality of the cloud: best practices for ISVs
• Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

If at first you dont’t succeed… Microsoft is reportedly developing a new Surface tablet with a 7.5-inch display. NPD DisplaySearch analyst Richard Shim told CNET on Thursday that an upcoming Microsoft slate will feature a 7.5-inch screen with 1,400 x 1,050 resolution, which works out to 223 pixels per inch. His supply chain sources say mass production schedules are currently being discussed, but the new Surface won’t launch this year.

Continue reading…

A high school track team from Columbus, Texas was disqualified when a runner pointed to the sky after crossing the finish line. The issue is being discussed as possible religious discrimination, though the reason given for disqualification was not based on religion, but because the gesture was deemed “an unsporting act”.

I’m not sure that Tim Tebow has even been penalized for this before, despite doing it all the time (though he has drawn taunting flags in the past).

FOX 26 has a report on the outrage that has ensued (via caintv):

Houston weather, traffic, news | FOX 26 | MyFoxHouston

The University Interscholastic League, responsible for handing out the penalty, has issued a statement on the matter, saying:

The UIL is composed of four geographic regions across the state of Texas, each of which are divided into six conferences in UIL track and field. A total of 24 regional track meets are held statewide and conducted by local meet officials, selected by regional sites.

At the Region IV Conference 3A Track & Field regional meet held on Saturday, April 27 at Texas A&M Kingsville, a relay team from Columbus High School was disqualified by local meet officials for an unsporting act at the conclusion of the boys 4 x100 meter relay.

The meet official indicated the athlete crossed the finish line and gestured upward with his arm and finger and behaved disrespectfully toward meet officials, in their opinion. In the judgment of the official, this was a violation of NFHS track & field rule 4-6-1. The regional meet referee concurred with this decision and the student was subsequently disqualified. There is no indication that the decision was made because of any religious expression. This was a judgment call, as are many decisions of meet officials in all activities.

According to NFHS rules, once the meet is concluded, the results become final. Neither the UIL nor NFHS have rules that prohibit religious expression.

The UIL takes situations such as these very seriously, and is continuing to investigate the matter fully.

It’s Friday and time for a few laughs. Towards that end, we run our caption contest on Fridays, with cartoons drawn by Diane Alber, our favorite data center cartoonist! Please visit Diane’s website Kip and Gary for more of her data center humor.

First, we must announce the winner of the “Into Every Life, A Little Rain Must Fall” cartoon: Congrats to reader “Dday,”who submitted, “I ‘m pinging in the rain, just pinging in the rain.”

This week we present “May Flowers.” Diane writes, “Since last week was April showers, I thought it was only natural to have May Flowers.” Enter your caption suggestion below.

The caption contest works like this: We provide the cartoon and you, our readers, submit the captions. We then choose finalists and the readers vote for their favorite funniest suggestion.

The winner will receive his or her caption in a signed print by Diane.

For the previous cartoons on DCK, see our Humor Channel.

The mobile industry has painted a familiar picture of the past 12 quarters: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis on Thursday published what may be the best chart we have seen to date in terms of illustrating just how polarized the mobile phone industry is right now, where the top eight phone branded vendors are concerned. On one side we have Samsung and Apple, which have combined over the past three years to mop up an increasingly massive portion of mobile industry revenues. On the other side we have Nokia, HTC, LG, BlackBerry, Motorola and Sony — which all seem to be going nowhere fast. Evans’s eye-opening chart follows below.

Continue reading…

In the latest installment of "Being Biden," the Vice President tells the story behind a photo taken with Senator John McCain, just before speaking at the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Sedona, Arizona. Listen:

read more

At a press event in New York City on Friday, Acer announced new mobile products running Google Android and Microsoft Windows 8. The company showed off the $169 Aspire A1, which runs Android and is meant for one-handed use. The new Aspire P3 is a convertible Windows 8 Ultrabook that works as a tablet or laptop due to a unique hinged dock with keyboard.

The new A1 is targeted to budget-conscious shoppers. Similar to the HP Slate 7 at the same price, the A1 cuts corners that keeps it from using premium components. Acer is keeping costs down with a 1.2 GHz quad-core chip from MediaTek and includes only 8 GB of internal storage capacity. Customers can expand storage through a micro SD card or spend $50 more for a 16 GB model. The 7.9-inch display uses the same 1024 x 768 resolution of Apple’s iPad mini; it also has the same 4:3 aspect ratio.

Even with a lower range of specs, the A1 has all the features you’d expect in almost any useful Android tablet: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, a 5MP rear-facing camera that can capture 1080p video at 30fps, a front-facing camera, micro USB 2.0 and microHDMI ports. Acer says the battery is rated for seven hours of use, which is a little light for this category, but not awful either.

I’m more intrigued by the Aspire P3, partially because I liked the Acer Aspire W510 Windows 8 tablet. That was powered by an Intel Atom, but the new P3 has your choice of either an Intel Core i3 or i5 processor for improved performance. Of course, there’s a hit in battery life — I saw a good 12 hours from the Atom-based units; more with the keyboard dock — but Acer says six hours of run-time is possible. I expect that will rise a bit when the next-generation of Core chips, called Haswell, arrives in June.

The 3.06-pound Aspire P3 has an 11.6-inch IPS display with HD resolution. Instead of a traditional keyboard dock, the slate slides into a hinged case. That allows the screen to be propped up while also offering a standard chiclet keyboard. Unlike the dock of the W510, there’s no secondary battery in the P3 dock. Overall, the device looks like a large iPad in a keyboard case.

Acer says the price of the new P3 is $799.99 for the Core i3 model, which is available now.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace
• Research In Motion: future scenarios for its fate

Ranking in search engines, particularly Google, is not getting any easier, but how often are you considering the search engines around the globe? Many in the industry see international SEO as only gaining in importance.

Do you think it’s more important for marketers to optimize for different search engines around the world than it used to be? Share your thoughts in the comments.

A recent report from BrightEdge indicates that the majority of search marketers think that it is becoming more important for sites to rank in global search engines. According to the firm’s survey, six out of ten believe it will become either “more” or “much more” important this year, compared to last year. 36% said “more,” while 27% said “much more.”

“SEO marketers at global companies aspire to reach customers worldwide, and drive leads, revenue and traf!c through global SEO initiatives,” says BrightEdge in the report. “Looking beyond a single country also helps them demonstrate a greater ROI on marketing investments. Not only does this boost marketing ROI but also maintains global brand consistency while accommodating local nuances. A global concerted approach to SEO marketing addresses these needs.”

Respondents were specifically asked about Chinese search giant Baidu, with 31% saying it would be much more important to rank in Baidu in 2013, and 10% saying “much more important”.

“With roughly 540 million internet users, 900 million mobile users and 388 million mobile internet users, China is the world’s largest internet market,” says BrightEdge. “Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, is one of the most valuable gateways to this large internet user base.”

You can download the report in its entirety here. It deals with numerous topics, far beyond the topic of global SEO.

Another recent report (via MarketingCharts) from Covario found that Baidu generated three times more global paid search clicks than Yahoo/Bing in Q1.

“I no longer believe it makes sense for any company to roll out an international SEO programme to multiple countries without also having a PPC campaign in place,” writes WebCertain CEO Andy Atkins-Krüger in a post for Search Engine Land about multinational SEO. “In some cases, we would recommend leading with PPC and landing pages first, rather than full blown (and relatively expensive) international SEO.”

He adds, “There are a number of reasons why we recommend this, but one is that user satisfaction on your site can be measured much more quickly with PPC than with SEO. Behavior really matters — so if you can study it first and quickly with PPC, your SEO efforts later will work out to be much more successful. I do worry that the association of search engine warnings with SEO being ‘bad’ are beginning to stick with people who are newer to the industry, and therefore, SEO is having a health warning attached.”

Dave Davies has a great article on international SEO considerations at Search Engine Watch, in which he concludes, “While expanding one’s market is generally a good thing, what people often forget is that you still have to maintain what you have, so make sure you have the resources. Many wars have been lost simply by trying to fight them on too many fronts.”

“If you have just enough resources to dedicate to a successful SEO strategy in your own country, it doesn’t make sense to expand in that you’ll be drawing resources away from the strategy that’s keeping the lights on,” he adds. “You need to make sure it’s the right decision for your business and if it is, make sure that you’re picking the right strategies to maximize your odds of success in the shortest period of time.”

In your international optimization efforts, you may also want to keep in mind some recent changes Google has made to its indexing systems. They’re now treating some country-code TLDs differently in terms of geography vs. generic. The list will change over time, but right now, these are the ccTLDs Google is considering generic: .ad, .as, .bz, .cc, .cd, .co, .dj, .fm, .gg, .io, .la, .me, .ms, .nu, .sc, .sr, .su, .tv, .tk and .ws.

Are you increasing your focus on international SEO, or are you simply focusing on your own region? Let us know in the comments.

While I kid a bit in the headline, this is actually pretty cool: Swatch, the largest manufacturer of mechanical watch movements in the world, has created a movement that is assembled entirely using automated systems. Why is this important? The watch industry was originally gutted by the rise of cheap quartz watches, making this piece quite ironic, and this means that more people will be able to own higher quality mechanical watches from a trusted brand.

The movement, called the Sistem51, is made of 51 simple parts and has a weight that winds the mainspring. It is made of a copper, nickel and zinc alloy called ARCAP and is anti-magnetic. It’s completely sealed inside the case (making it impossible to service) but a fact that ensures it can stay out of moisture and dust. Another cool thing? Quoth Hodinkee, who got a hands on, “instead of a regulator the special escapement is set by a laser during production and never needs to be touched again.”

Sure, the Sistem51 is basically a plastic watch that costs a little over $100 and will be sold at airports around the world. However, it is an impressive step forward for the company at a time when mechanical watches are making a resurgence. Swatch has been making mechanicals for a while, to be clear, but this is the first time they’ve reduced the price, manufacturing cost, and maintained quality in this way. While it’s easy to get much cheaper movements online (a tourbillon for $24, anyone?) it’s far harder to find a solid, high quality mechanical movement from a trusted brand.

It’s great to see some affordable watches come out of Basel this year and this is definitely step forward in terms of nanomechanics.

Facebook Home has its fair share of critics. But while I personally can’t stand Facebook as a service, I am not one of them. Home takes over the user’s Android smartphone and replaces the home screen with an unending stream of full-screen Facebook photos and status updates posted by friends. The first version of Facebook’s new Android software clearly has some kinks that need to be ironed out, but Facebook has more incentive than it could ever need to get the job done.

Continue reading…

They say that every problem has its solution. For users that want to monitor changes made to files in a folder, there is definitely more than one solution available. But one of them is File Watcher Simple, a freebie that can be easily handled even by beginner users.

The application is portable, which eliminates the installation procedure and, together wit… (read more)