Category: News

Don’t get us wrong, enabling the Ovi Store was a pretty sweet add-on in the last update — but the second N900 push in just a single week features a list of fixes and changes that should put smiles on a few owners’ faces, too (and a few devs’ faces, for that matter, while they wait for this payment bug to get patched up). This time around we’ve got full support for Swiss keyboard layouts, better compatibility with 3-branded SIM cards, support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 in the handset’s Mail for Exchange service, and a handful of performance and usability tweaks for Ovi Maps. It’ll be available both over-the-air and via PC download in a phased global rollout over the next day, so keep checking; no need to get all crazy about it if you’ve already installed the first update, though — you’ll be automatically alerted when this one’s ready for you.

Nokia N900 gets its second firmware update this week originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 01:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Among copyright experts and copyright policy folks, it seems widely recognized that the US Trade Rep’s “Special 301” review process has been a massive joke. Last year, at an event discussing copyright, even folks from the US Copyright Office laughed off the Special 301 report. Historically, what it’s been is the entertainment industry putting together a list of countries that don’t have draconian enough copyright laws, and it gets the USTR to complain about them and put them on a “watch list” of sorts. Pretty much everyone who understands these issues knows it’s a complete joke, but unfortunately there are lots of people who don’t understand these issues, and it lets diplomats and politicians make laughable claims like saying that Canada is a hub for piracy — and the press almost never questions where that information came from because it sounds all official.

So it’s nice to hear that apparently the USTR is opening up the Special 301 review process to the public (slightly) in not just asking for written input, but also holding a public hearing for the first time ever (via Michael Geist). That said, I’m not convinced this will really make a huge difference. Since this is a discussion about what foreign countries are doing with their copyright laws that doesn’t directly affect most of the American public directly (though we can be concerned about the fallout). So who’s going to take part? The usual suspects form the industry will, asking for increased protectionism designed entirely to prop up their business models, rather than actually looking at a country’s copyright laws. But will others really have enough to say? KEI plans to submit something, and does a good job cautiously praising the slightly more open process, but worrying about whether it will actually make a difference.

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Remember our post about the T-Shirt with WiFi Detection? Sure you do and you love that shirt I just know you do, but sometimes it gets cold outside and you can’t wear it No worries we found a solution for that.

Now you can have your own Cap that Detects WiFi just like the T-Shirt did it will show you the strength by bars on your Cap. Of course it will not tell you that you can use this network but at least you know where you could find some WiFi when you need it.

The WiFi Detection Baseball Cap will find WiFi 802.11 b/g and that makes it a great tool to find some friends that need Wireless internet like people with iPhones or netbooks.

Go check out this awesome WiFi detector Baseball Cap.

British manufacturer Lotus released yesterday the details of the car which will enter the 2010 Evora Cup. The car will make its first appearance at Birmingham, on Thursday the 14th, 2010. Designed by Lotus Motorsport, the car is eligible to compete in a number of different national and international series, including endurance and sprint racing.

The Evora Cup car comes equipped with a new 4l V6, which develops 400 hp. The engine, mid-mounted, is paired with a Cima six speed sequential paddle… (read more)

Science visualization doesn’t get much awesomerer and old school than this. We should put a bunch of these together near the North Pole, to keep the Russians from stealing it. [Caleb Charland courtesy of Michael Mazzeo Gallery—Thanks David ]

CT&T, a Korean car manufacturer, has launched its four-passenger Multi Amphibious Vehicle. The electric car is designed to tackle most conditions on land and water. With a top speed of 40 mph on the road and 10mph on water, the performance of this car can be considered sufficient for any urban commuter.

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Are we getting closer to our catastrophic annihilation?

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (based, appropriately enough, at the University of Chicago) has kept track of our impending doom for over 60 years. They use a clock to represent our current time, where midnight is complete catastrophe. Back in the good old days, this meant something prosaic like global nuclear conflagration. Nowadays, there are plenty of other things to add to the list, including global climatic collapse, avian swine ebola, and grey goo. The current time is 11:55pm. Uncomfortably late.

There’s no real metric with which to judge the “time”. The clock has an hour and minute hand, but no am/pm indicator, so in principle it can represent a total of twelve hours of unique settings. [For the sticklers, the clock in some sense lacks a unit of time; we need some other information to interpret what one of its minutes represents.] If we assume noon is “zero risk of annihilation”, and midnight is 100%, one approach would be to assume each advancing minute brings us 1/720 closer to our doom. This would mean that we presently have just under a 1% chance of ending it all. If we were to run through the last decade 200 times in a row, would we completely screw ourselves at least one time? This doesn’t sound all that unreasonable to me. Surely the odds were comparable to this during the Cuban missile crisis? (Although then the clock was at 11:53pm; it reacts to events on a relatively long timescale). The closest we’ve ever come to midnight was in the period 1953–1960, when both the US and the USSR were busy testing Hydrogen bombs. It was 11:58 pm. You might think we’re easily ten minutes earlier now, but the clock presently stands at 11:55pm. We’ve made some progress, but not nearly enough. In all likelihood, the clock was meant to be symbolic. And the main message is that we are minutes away from catastrophe, so let’s all shape it up.

Tomorrow (1/14) at 10am EST the minute hand will move. You can watch it live. The big question is: which way will it go? On the one hand, the cold war seems reasonably contained, Obama has articulated a vision of a nuclear-free world (the first time a sitting US President has done so), and the world seems relatively peaceful at present. On the other hand, Pakistan and India are relatively unfriendly neighbors, North Korea is not a paragon of stability and good governance, and all three now have nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Iran seems hell bent on joining the nuclear club, and the Middle East is the usual quagmire. Perhaps even worse, global warming continues to be debated and questioned, while we continue to dump greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and change our planet.

Over the last two years, has our catastrophic demise approached or receded? We’ll find out what our friendly Atomic Scientists think in a few hours. But I’m curious to know what our readers think.

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It’s no surprise that mega stores, such as Wal-Mart, are bad for America. From the environment to shutting out small local stores, mega stores are to blame for many of our woes. These mega stores have a monopoly on our economy and safety is often compromised. In order to offer endless rows of cheap products, quality standards are abandoned. Consider the recent recall of pet food, that caused many people to lose their loved pets. Truthout reports:

First, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it suspected that some toxin had been mixed into the wheat gluten that was used to thicken the canned meats. Second, an independent lab reported that it had found rat poison in the recalled cans. Third, Menu Foods pointed a finger at a shipment of wheat gluten that had been purchased from a supplier in China. Although rat poison was later replaced as the main culprit by a chemical named melamine, the story line had now taken shape: cheap and adulterated Chinese products were poisoning Americans, their children, and their pets.

The problem goes beyond pet food…all those cheap products need to come from somewhere, and profit is the of the up most importance:

Some Chinese toothpaste makers had used diethylene glycol, a component of brake fluid and antifreeze, as a sweetener. Some Chinese toy makers had coated their products with lead-based paints. Some Chinese farmers had fed unapproved drugs to catfish that were bound for U.S. dinner plates. Some Chinese slaughterhouses had mixed “oversulfated chondroitin sulfate” into the pig intestines that were used as the raw material for the blood thinner heparin.

Without Chinese manufacturing, our mega stores would fold.

Since Google Wave’s launch, we’ve seen a slew of real-time, short-form collaboration tools.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as “a Twitter-like project collaboration tool,” and it fits right in with this trend.

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This app allows users to share text, tasks and files. Much like topics in Quora, activities in Teambox can be followed by users who need to stay updated, publish updates to their team or view the related stream of information. Projects are invite-only, and users can choose who the collaborators will be and determine permissions for each person.

Communications occur through threaded topics. Participants in a conversation are notified via email when their topic is updated. Tasks are updated in series of comments and act as to-dos that can be assigned, modified and completed.

The app further allows for sharing files of any size, and profile pages allow supervisors or others to see what a particular user has been working on lately.

The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration – including distributed teams – we can see this application going over very well.

Best of all, Teambox is a free and open source project. The app is built using Ruby on Rails, and while the web version of the app is perfect for small- or medium-size teams, larger companies can host Teambox on their own servers – which might also be good news for users and admins concerned with data security.

These distinctions set Teambox apart from Basecamp, a popular product from 37signals that also provides web-based project management tools.

Although the web app is completely free, Teambox also offers paid features, such as server installation for self-hosting, customer support and white-label versions.

What do you think? Is Teambox’s Twitter/Basecamp mashup something you could use at your company or for a group side project? Let us know what you think of the application in the comments.

Or, for a bonus round of backstory, check out the ReadWriteWeb Spain interview with founder Pablo Villalba.

Discuss

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This trailer is unbelievable, you guys. IMAX Hubble 3D is the story of the Hubble repair, and the visuals are stunning beyond any teal fantasy jungle you could imagine. Just watch it. [YouTube]

Social software — software that gives companies and individuals ways to interact and share information — has quickly been winning the interest of companies looking to track progress and share knowledge better among their employees. A number of software offerings already cater to large enterprise customers. But Joincube, a new startup from Argentina, is now targeting smaller companies.

Since its October launch, the company has signed 100 such customers mainly in the US and Europe.

It’s easy to be (justifiably) skeptical of yet another player entering an increasingly crowded space. A few days ago, social software company Jive Software announced that it increased revenues by 85% in 2009 (reportedly to $30M) and added marquee customers such as SAP, Qualcomm and Kaiser Permanente. And another player in the space, Socialtext, recently announced a record quarter.

But a newcomer specifically targeting smaller businesses may still be able to carve out a niche for itself. For example, Zoho, a bootstrapped company with most of its employees in India and China, has more than 2 million users of its applications primarily within small businesses. Given the fact that it sometimes competes head-to-head with the likes of Google and Salesforce.com, the company was able to surmount some formidable obstacles.

According to Joincube’s CEO, Mariano Rodriguez, the company’s focus on ease of use and customer service will be key in differentiating it within the small-business market. Mariano says that a typical customer purchases a 50-user subscription package ($39 per month) and is up and running quickly thanks to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. As an example of the type customer the company is targeting, he cited a law firm that was able to quickly integrate the software into their work processes in order to collaborate on creating legal documents for clients without a lot of effort expended on training and IT support.

According to Mariano, the company is currently working on pre-integrating some third party applications — such as VoIP conferencing –as a prelude to releasing a public application programming interface (API). Also, since customer acceptance has progressed faster than the company anticipated, it is exploring new, more aggressive sales strategies in order to take advantage of a window of opportunity it sees in the small enterprise space.

Though the company faces many challenges, not the least of which is the growing interest in the social software market from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, its focused strategy could continue to bear fruit. One thing the company should consider is integrating its offering into one or more of the SaaS ecosystems — Intuit, Netsuite, or Salesforce.com, for example — in order to leverage their captive user bases. Either way, Joincube offers one more option for small companies to take advantage of the benefits of social software: greater productivity and collaboration.

Joincube is based in Buenos Aires. It was founded two years ago by eight engineers who bootstrapped the project with $100k of their own funds.

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Cadillac aprovecha el Salón de Detroit para presentar el prototipo de una futura berlina de lujo, el XTS Platinum Concept. Un modelo con el que Cadillac pretende ofrecernos un vehículo grande y potente, aunque una de las novedades es que su motor V6 está emparejado a un sistema híbrido lo que le convierte un modelo más eficiente.

En el exterior del XTS Platinum Concept destaca, además de su longitud unos 5,17 metros, varios elementos como un pequeño alerón en la parte trasera que incorpora en el centro una luz de frenado o unas defensas que le da un aspecto más elegante, además de unas llantas de 20″.

En cuanto a su interior ofrece todas las comodidades que se le puede exigir a cualquier berlina de lujo como unas espaciosas plazas traseras o unos asientos de cuero Premium junto con un sistema de entretenimiento que añade un buen sistema de navegación y una conectividad que permitiría al propietario de este Cadillac poder trabajar tranquilamente desde su propio vehículo.

El Cadillac XTS Platinum Concept equipa un motor V6 de 3,6 litros que desarrolla una potencia de 350 CV con un par máximo de 400 Nm, sin embargo lo más característico es que cuenta con un motor adicional eléctrico que se alimenta directamente de unas baterías que se pueden recargar en cualquier enchufe convencional. Esto supone que pueda funcionar en trayectos cortos con el motor eléctrico y en un modo combinado. Además utiliza la tecnología Magnetic Ride Control de Cadillac que combina con la tracción integral permanente que utiliza el vehículo, contando también con control de arranque en pendiente.

XTS Platinum Concept

Fuente | Cadillac

Looks like those early-adopted Push2TV adapter won’t be so lonely after all. We received a handful of tips that certain Best Buys were selling their Intel Wireless Display-compatible “Blue Label 2.0″ laptops a bit early — nowhere near us, unfortunately — and now comes pictorial proof from the forums of Notebook Review. This 13.3-inch Sony Vaio S was allegedly caught wearing a $1,049.99 sticker and housing a 2.26MHz Core i5 with integrated graphics — no NVIDIA GPU here, and we gotta figure that’s hurting the displayed Windows Experience Rating. The official launch of the Best Buy-customized Vaio S is next week, along with a number of other WiDi-enabled laptops.

Best Buy lets out the WiDi-enabled Sony Vaio S a week early originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last week, Rockstar was in the center of a controversial post in Gamasutra, where it was alleged that the company had been giving unfair working conditions to their laborers. Now, Rockstar has responded to the issue, albeit

A massive 1MV grid-connected solar power system is ready to supply power to the auction facility in Bordentown, NJ. The system is said to be the largest solar powered carport structure in the United States. Constructed in an area of 13,000 square meters, this carport includes 5,880 solar panels of 170W capacity. The whole panel structure is connected through 11 separate inverters to ensure that removing a single solar array does not disturb the entire energy supply. This means even in situations when one of the solar arrays is unable to supply electricity, the rest of the system can supply 90% of the total energy to the carport.

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