Category: News

I don’t think this is one driving school anyone would recommend, but Peter Griffin’s wife apparently thought Grand Theft Auto will teach him a thing or two about city driving. And what do you know, it sure

One of my favorite French cat style websites OhMyCat posted these beautiful photos of a traditional Japanese cat bed known as neko chigura. Based on a design for an infant cradle, each neko chigura is handcrafted using rice straw, which keeps kitty warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

This video shows how the beds are made, with help from some gorgeous feline assistants:

If you can’t see the video above in your email, click here to watch it on the site.

Neko chigura beds are available in five sizes ranging from 4,000 Yen ($43 US) to 17,000 Yen ($184 US). I’ve never seen these in the US, but would love to find one.

Congratulations to Juanita from Washington, D.C., winner of the December Moderncat giveaway! Juanita’s cats Tasha and Squirrel will have a blast on their new mahogany Catemporary Cat Tower and matching shelf from The Refined Feline. Have fun kitties!

With the clock ticking on tomorrow’s unveiling of the Nexus One, it seems most of the focus has been on the hardware and plan details (see below). But looking at the Nexus One as just another Android phone that Google happens to sell is to miss its potential significance as a hardware platform for Google’s increasingly popular software offerings. Specifically, the Nexus One could have big implications for Google Voice and Google Apps.

One of the ways that a Google-branded phone makes the most sense is as a platform for the company to expand the functionality and user base of Google Voice. With the Nexus One launch, we may see Google Voice open up to more users, and we might also see the introduction of long-awaited number portability to the service.

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Ok – so in addition to the Boulder events, I also go to Bay Area events.  I’ve got a Return Path board meeting on 1/21 in the Bay Area and that evening Matt Blumberg – Return Path’s CEO – is going to be presenting at the great Startup2Startup series that Dave McClure puts on with the help of his glorious sponsors.

I’ll be there along with a bunch of other great folks (I even paid my $90 for my ticket).  Matt’s got a fascinating story and Return Path is another company in my world that had an awesome 2009 and is poised for a phenomenal 2010 (how’s that for adverbs adjectives.)  Matt will be talking about the history of Return Path (dating back to 1999), lessons he’s learned, and best practices in email deliverability.

If you don’t know Matt, he’s got a great blog titled “OnlyOnce” (since you can only be a “first time CEO once and this is Matt’s journey.”)  Some special secrets about Matt – he was on the FeedBurner board so he can tell you funny stories about Twitter’s COO and he’s run two marathons with me so he can tell you funny stories about things I say after 4+ hours running.

January 21st, 6pm – 9:30pm at the Garden Court Hotel on 520 Cowper Street in Palo Alto.  Sign up now.  Be there or be forever destined to have email deliverability issues.

Enough with the calendar stuff.  I promise my next post will be a long essay about some obscure topic that will generate a lot of controversy.  Or maybe I’ll just list out the marathons I’m going to run in 2010.

Daily Random Recipe

INGREDIENTS:

• 435 g / 15 oz can crushed pineapple
• 4 bananas, peeled
• 2 cups orange juice
• 1 t vanilla

METHOD:
Drain the crushed pineapple and reserve the juice. Line a large casserole with plastic wrap, and spread the drained pineapple evenly over the plastic. Place the peeled bananas around the edge of the casserole dish. Place the casserole dish in the freezer for several hours or until fruit is thoroughly frozen. In a blender or food processor, combine the frozen fruit, reserved pineapple juice, and the remaining ingredients, and blend until smooth. Serve immediately in chilled glass.

Serves 6

Rumour:A brief two-sentence post over at The Boy Genius Report claims today that Palm’s two webOS handsets, the Pre and the Pixi, are “beginning to appear” in Verizon’s inventory system, with Big Red having ordered 200,000 units of each model. For the mathematically-challenged, that means they’ll have 400,000 in total ready to unload.

The question this raises, of course, is whether this is good news or bad? Given that Palm and webOS were both hyped (mainly by an excitable tech press) as giant-slayers after their initial introduction, an order of this relatively small size could indicate Verizon does not share those expectations and isn’t planning to promote Palm’s new babies on the same level as their New Sensation, the Android-powered Motorola Droid – despite apparently getting upgraded models. Of course, it could also just mean that they’re being cautious. We’ll have to see how it plays out once the expected CES announcement is made…

People found this blog today by googling “Jon Sciezka,” “Daniel Pinkwater,” and “EB White”. It’s only because I’ve talked about them, of course, but it makes me happy to think that their fans might end up here. If you like books for boys, I got you covered. If you like silly books with heart, I got you covered. And if you like stories set in New England featuring pigs, be patient — I’m working on it.

Ed and Jillian
Jillian says they are a real-life couple, so if that’s true, that’s cool. Ed comes out and they smooch and it looks more real than a lot of couple reunions on this show. Ed says he’s extremely glad that he came back and he’s so happy. He says he knew he was going to propose in Spain. They talk about the proposal and smooch some more, but Jillian seems to be kissing him weirdly. Am I alone in this?

Chris asks them about the future and they say that Jillian is coming to Chicago for awhile and move in with Ed. They have family reunions and weddings to attend this summer and then she’s moving on September 1st. They say they will probably get married in the next 12 months. Wow, bold.

Audience question time. The first girl asks about the mankini shorts. Seriously, dude. It looked like he stole Jillian’s bikini bottoms. Second question is about bedroom problems and they say there are no more bedroom problems. Chris then gets the line of the night in, “A great country & western singer once said, ‘Love, it don’t come easy.’” Snerk. I heart Chris Harrison.

There is no announcement about the next Bachelor, which is interesting. I hope it’s Reid or Jake. You can vote at ABC.com. Thanks for reading, gang! See you back here in the fall!
Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded question: Is The Bachelorette rigged? One need only look at this spring’s Bachelor finale to see similar soap opera-ish antics: the show’s star dumped the winning girl for the runner-up.

Speculation like this is to be expected when real-life seems so much like drama. Perhaps that goes to show that people who watch soap operas aren’t missing as much real-life as we think. Nah, I don’t know anyplace where everyone has been married or involved with everyone else at one time, as in a soap.

Here’s how the Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski moment unfolded: first, Jillian had to reject Kiptyn. Then Jillian had to reject Reid, in a surprise return. Then Ed came on for the ultimate question.

“I want to be with you forever. I want a family with you. I want you to give me a hard time when we’re 80-years-old. Jillian, will you marry me?”
Ed said tonight “There’s nothing that would prevent me from getting down on one knee” that may not be the case.

And when Jillian rejected Kiptyn saying “In the mean time, I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.”

Unfortunately there is no post Finale interviews from Bachelorette , so we have to wait and see the direct reactions form Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski (if any) to prove whether they are still together.

Related posts:

1. Jillian And Ed, Jillian And Ed Swiderski Still Together Ed and Jillian Jillian says they are a real-life couple,…
2. Jillian And Ed, Jillian And Ed Still Together Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded…
3. Jake Pavelka, Jake Pavelka Biography Jake Pavelka: I didn’t go in pushing. The show does…

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Just a quick PSA: if you’re rocking a ContourHD, you should head over and update the firmware. The configuration options available on the ContourHD 1080p (mic volume, EV +/-, autofocus mode) are now available for your 720p version. If Peter convinced you to buy one back before the 1080p was available, now you will no longer feel left out from our exposure value changing parties.

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It’s always great fun to watch shows like CSI enhance video surveillance footage. Sometimes it’s the most entertaining part of the hour-long show. But those clunky systems used by American police forces have nothing on the Chinese equipment featured in the video above. This shit is amazing. It could probably read the serial number on the Hubble Telescope.

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You’ve probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo’s filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow’s New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one – to make video interesting.

Sponsor

Like Tubechop, Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service’s transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, “At some point, longer videos become useless. It’s the metadata and the fact that we’re allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool.”

The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a Mechanical Turk package. For $20 dollars per hour of video, you can have speeches, events and podcasts transcribed. The company plans on creating a premium service and launching on additional video platforms in the months ahead. For now, Speakertext offers the following benefits:

Attribution & Monetization: Says Mireles, “Video piracy often happens because users can’t get the clips they want from the original publisher. We’re building a monetizable search strategy for video publishers.” Because Speakertext just sets the original video to a new start point, there is no need for a new file to be uploaded by a secondary publisher. In this way, the secondary publisher highlights the content they want and the original publisher maintains credit, links from search and potential revenue channels.

Accuracy: Stop for a moment and think about the quagmire of misinformation swimming across the web right now. From religious figures to political candidates to CEOs, there is no shortage of misquotes in the media today. If you want to be a transparent company, government or influential entity, video transcription is a great way to dispel myth from fact. The company will also crowdsource transcription accuracy in a method similar to that of the Worldwide Lexicon Project.

Education and Research: Video has been a boon for visual learners. Now, rather than simply searching titles and descriptions, transcription will allow users to find valuable educational resources. The company is already speaking to open courseware proponents to increase access to quality materials.

Mireles points out that Google is currently in the process of automating captions for YouTube. Says the startup founder, “We have no doubt whether searchable video like this will be the standard in 5 years. We just want it to be us that does it.”

Speakertext will launch to the public at 5pm PST tomorrow evening at speakertext.com.

Thanks to David Cohn for the tip!

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[Thanks, Gavin]

Viliv’s HD5 PMP leaked ahead of CES, packs Windows CE, 32GB of storage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony just expanded the Alpha DSLR with the new A450. It’s got the same 14.2 sensor and BIONZ processor as the A550, but it doesn’t have the fast-AF live view focus system or flip-out LCD screen — you’ll be looking at relatively small 2.6-inch fixed screen. Price doesn’t seem to be official yet, but we’re hearing it’ll come in under $1,000, so it could deliver some decent bang for the buck. Great — but we’re hoping we’ll hear some more about those rumored 3D Alphas later this week. Hit the read links for some more pics.

Sony launches Alpha A450 DSLR originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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