Category: News

It sounds nice: Turning your notebook trackpad into a gesture area for shortcuts, like instantly searching, with a squiggle of your finger. But you have to learn a whole series of strokes, so it’s like Palm Graffiti all over again.

In practice, if you learn all of the gestures, it basically works like Quicksilver on a Mac, except with a trackpad instead of a keyboard. Press a button to activate gestures, then draw what you wanna do, which, theoretically, happens instantly. The onscreen graphical pop-up even kinda looks like Quicksilver’s. But it’s not nearly as fast, and it’s kind of a strange abstraction for a laptop that’s one step to the side, and two steps backward, with your shoelaces tied together.

Scrybe is a firmware update with Gesture Suite 9.4, if you have the right Synaptics trackpad.

Synaptics Previews Scrybe™ – The Revolutionary Next Generation in PC Touch Interfaces

Scrybe Gesture Workflows Enable Intuitive Touch Experience

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – January 4, 2010 – Synaptics Inc. (NASDAQ: SYNA), a leading developer of human interface solutions for mobile computing, communications, and entertainment devices, today announced beta availability for Scrybe™ gesture workflows, the next-generation advancement in TouchPad™-based interfaces for PCs. Scrybe leverages finger movements to create fluid gesture shortcuts intended to boost productivity and efficiency by getting more work done with fewer steps. Scrybe delivers a powerful gesture engine to PC manufacturers who want to utilize the latest gesture technology to enhance the overall user experience.

Scrybe, part of the newest Synaptics Gesture Suite (SGS) 9.4, allows PC OEMs and end users to personalize gestures to link task-oriented workflows for Internet, media, entertainment, and productivity applications that result in a more efficient, productive, and fun user experience. Scrybe also introduces customizable gesture symbols for communicating with a PC that enable users to perform complex tasks using the TouchPad alone. For example, selecting a word or phrase by double-tapping and then tracing the “?” symbol can automatically launch the browser and perform an immediate directed search for the selected word or phrase. This advanced gesture feature provides faster results and eliminates typographical errors. The personalized gesture suite can be used to run presentations or enjoy digital media, provide controls for play, pause, previous, and next commands and to advance through music lists, photos, and more. A user can also use the personalized gesture suite to rotate, crop, tag, rate, and enhance images, as well as perform Windows system functions — all without ever lifting a hand from the TouchPad.

“Synaptics’ innovative Scrybe gesture technology introduces a revolutionary way to use the TouchPad that promises to fundamentally change the very foundation of the human-computer relationship,” said Ted Theocheung, head of the Scrybe program and director of Synaptics PC and Digital Home Business Unit products. “Scrybe technology demonstrates Synaptics’ innovative leadership and ongoing commitment to providing a richer user experience that is focused on increasing overall productivity for PC users.”

Scrybe is optimized for multi-touch TouchPads, but also supports existing single-touch TouchPads in the market. The updated Synaptics Gesture Suite 9.4 with Scrybe technology introduces a number of new multi-touch gestures and an improved graphical user interface. SGS 9.4 includes media control gestures for stop, play, rewind, fast-forward, next, previous, and jog dial advance; productivity gestures to zoom, fit to window, flip, and redo; as well as Windows 7 system gestures and Windows Touch compatibility modes. The improved two-finger twist rotate is simpler and can provide free rotation capabilities that work well with all other gestures in the suite. A new SGS API provides software application developers with a method to make use of all the latest technologies to deliver a richer application experience.

SGS 9.4 with its Scrybe workflow technology will ultimately simplify and streamline TouchPad control and enable customized features to make personalizing the TouchPad easier than ever. Users can launch the SGS control panel from the system tray with one click, then discover and customize settings utilizing the available short help videos which clearly demonstrate and explain how each gesture works. Intelligent contextual pop-up tips help users to discover all of the TouchPad capabilities and explain how to apply them to make using the computer easier and more fun. The clearer, easier to use interface and extensive help system reduces support calls for PC OEMs and increases productivity for users.

Availability

OEMs can obtain SGS 9.4 with Scrybe through their Synaptics sales representative. End users can visit www.uscrybe.com to sign up for participation in the beta program and learn more about Scrybe and qualifying TouchPad-compatible hardware. Beginning today, Synaptics will offer this “technology preview” beta version of SGS 9.4 with Scrybe via software download to end users with existing notebooks that utilize a Synaptics TouchPad. Synaptics anticipates strong participation in the beta program by end users and will conclude downloads of Scrybe once it has been determined that a sufficient number of downloads have occurred to collect sufficient usability data. More details on Scrybe are available by visiting www.uscrybe.com.

Tweexchange, once a marketplace for Twitter handles (that operated against Twitter’s TOS) is now a site where you can check whether or not the username you had in mind for your new Twitter account is still available.

If it turns out it’s not, you’ll get a list of possible alternatives. As a bonus, and thanks to a partnership with domain registrar and hosting company GoDaddy, you’ll also get to see which domain names related to your desired username are still available. Users can register or backorder domain names through GoDaddy straight from the site.

When a Twitter username is ‘pending removal’, you can also opt to be notified as soon as it becomes available (Twitter deletes usernames 60 days after their suspension). Note that the latter service will set you back $5.

The new Tweexchange is a product from Blast Applications, a New York-based developer of iPhone, Facebook and Twitter apps.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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It’s the end of the decade. And like some people, you might be thinking about New Year’s (or Decade’s) resolutions. But instead of hitting the gym more, you could consider volunteering your time for a cause or organization. If you’re not sure where to start, there are a number of startups using technology to connect volunteers with organizations who need their time and energy.

For those who have not volunteered in the past and are looking to get more educated before giving your time, check out VolunteerMatch. The San Francisco based company holds monthly one-hour “How to be a great volunteer” webinars that a free and easy to register. Topics covered include: training and screening tools non-profits use, how to evaluate if an organization is a good fit for you, potential stumbling blocks volunteers might encounter and how to overcome any obstacles that you may face along the way. The next webinar is scheduled for Jan. 14, 2010. If you’re interested, you can register here.

If you’re looking for an easy and customizable way to search for volunteer opportunities in your area then check out iParticipate, which was started by members of the entertainment industry to promote volunteering. The site offers a clean user interface that makes finding a volunteer opportunity in your area quick and easy. After searching in the Boston area for “animal” volunteer opportunities, it generated a list of 100 possibilities – everything from shelter caretaker to fostering animals. For those looking to get more specific, the list can be filtered by cause, distance or post date. iParticipate also integrates with Google Maps and plots search results.

Many volunteer opportunities require time commitments every week. For those looking for a more relaxed volunteer opportunity, then Extraordinaries has created an innovative mobile or web browsing volunteering system. The company allows people on the go to complete tasks using their cellphones for organizations or causes by committing just a few spare minutes a day. One task available is sponsored by KaBOOM! who is looking for volunteers to help them map playground locations in an effort to determine which need to be rebuilt. By simply taking a photo of a playground and uploading to the Extraordinaries site, the task is complete for that volunteer. The company also gives organizations and causes a simple way to create tasks leveraging either a maps or photo format, such as the one described above.

Another mobile opportunity to volunteer can be found at Give Work, an iPhone application developed by Samasource and Crowdflower – both helping to bring key resources to refugees via the internet. The app is similar to the Extraordinaries concept and asks users to volunteer a few minutes of their time to help refugees by using their mobile phones. Users ares asked to complete onscreen tasks that could include tagging a map or tracing a road. The refugees are training to complete these same tasks, so by volunteering you generate money to continue training and the campaign, which is an effort to help refugees in Dadaab, Kenya – the world’s largest refugee site.

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The largest U.S. TV maker, Vizio, will use SiBEAM’s wireless networking technology in its flat-panel televisions to transfer video within the home.

This is a big endorsement — on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas — for the fledgling technology, since Vizio will build the wireless networking modules into its XVT Pro liquid crystal display TVs shipping in the summer.

The Vizio deal is important because it cracks SiBEAM’s chicken and egg problem. To be useful, the wireless modules have to be connected to both TVs and the source devices such as game consoles, Blu-ray players and other equipment. The TV makers have waited for the source companies to add the modules, and visa versa. It will still be some time before any wireless networking technology becomes a true standard, but SiBEAM’s news shows it is making progress.

SiBEAM has been shipping the technology since 2007 and it is one of several contenders to create high-speed wireless networking in the home. The wireless networking is faster than Wi-Fi, though it has a shorter range, and is able to replace wires that carry high-definition video from one device to another.

Best Buy, LG, Panasonic and Sony have been shipping products with SiBEAM’s 60-gigahertz wireless transfer chips. The chips can transfer data wirelessly at 10 gigabits per second, or many times faster than Wi-Fi. But the technology has a range of about 10 meters and doesn’t really go through walls.

SiBEAM leads a WirelessHD consortium trying to establish the technology as a standard. It competes with the WiGig Alliance, which is fusing Wi-Fi and 60-gigahertz technology, and WHDI, a standard supported by Amimon that uses 5-gigahertz technology. John Lemoncheck, chief executive of SiBEAM, acknowledges the different standards may be confusing for consumers.

“The WirelessHD standard is becoming a reality in the market,” said Lemoncheck.

Lemoncheck says four more consumer electronics makers will join Vizio in 2010, with products shipping in 2011 and 2012.

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Mobile analytics firm Flurry is teaming up with web market researcher comScore to help measure the audiences for mobile apps.

The two will combine comScore’s mobile panel data with Flurry’s data on how much mobile apps are used. The companies will thus be able to offer better data to app publishers, ad agencies, marketers, advertisers, ad networks and others. The service will cover the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry mobile phones and will be available through comScore in the first quarter.

Clients will be able to get more accurate data about how consumers use mobile apps. With access to usage on more than 50 million phones, Flurry can measure real-time consumption data for apps that use its analytics system. It can show how frequently and for how long an app is used, where the user is, new versus repeat usage and other data. That lets app publishers and others better target consumers. Meanwhile, comScore offers audience measurement reports.

Smart phone usage grew 63 percent from August, 2008 to August, 2009, and app usage is skyrocketing as well. That has drawn the attention of brands and advertisers who want to reach the app users. But the key to that is collecting the right information about the users in a way that’s useful to advertisers.

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Why are there so many women veterinarians? In part because educated women are drawn to professions that are providing flexibility to combine work and careers,  Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin said in a lecture at the American Economic Association in Atlanta.

Veterinary medicine provides flexibility that women crave. (Bloomberg News)

The increase of women in various professions since 1970 has been spectacular. But why do highly educated women enter some professions and fields more than others?  “Women are 77% of all newly minted veterinarians, but they were a trivial fraction 30 years ago,” she noted. Women are 25% of all recent MBAs from the University of Chicago but are 8% of those who work in venture capital. Among young medical doctors, 41% are female, but the fraction in public health, pediatrics, dermatology, psychiatry, immunology and obstetrics and gynecology is far higher than in surgical specialties and cardiology.

Some of this has nothing to do with hours and workloads, said Goldin (who hasn’t had any children). Women are more likely, for instance, to be labor economists than macroeconomists. “But in other cases the decision is largely governed by a desire for career and family and involves a trade-off between earnings and aspects of the job such as work flexibility over the year, week and day.” Women are trading pay to get workplace flexibility, she suggests, and are drawn to professions where it’s relatively easier to do that.

“The goal of ‘career and family’ for college women is a relatively new one historically,” she said. “Only with cohorts born since circa. 1950 and graduating college in the early 1970s could many college graduate women have even considered having a career and family.”  For previous generations, there was a choice –sometimes career OR family, sometimes family THEN career.

Drawing from data on Harvard graduates and on University of Chicago MBA grads, Goldin contrasted MBAs to veterinarians. Fifteen years after college, among those women who have kids, 23% of MBAs weren’t working, versus 3% of MDs and 14% of lawyers. “The MBA lure for women is large; incomes are substantial even though they are lower than those of their male peers. But some women with children find the inflexibility of work insurmountable and leave or become self employed,” she said.

“If women are ‘fleeing’ the corporate and financial sectors, they have been flocking to professions in the health field, particularly veterinary medicine,” she said. “Why? The demands of professional training have not changed. But the practice setting has. Small animal clinics open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week, with no evening and no emergency hours have proliferated. Being a veterinarian has prestige, equivalent to that of a physician. Like some physicians there is considerable room for part-time and flexible work. The training period is less than that for doctors. Veterinarians work lower hours than MBAs and engage in more part-time work sooner in their professional lives.”

And vets earn a lot less money than MBAs, and thus give us a lot less money if they work part-time. “The vets win the horse race but they lose the rat race,” she said.

Washingtonians have seen the last of Jim Zorn. The Washington Redskins fired its disgraced head coach shortly after the team returned to Redskins Park following a season-ending 23-20 loss to the San Diego Chargers early Monday, The Washington Post has learned.

The loss ended the Skins’ worst season in nearly 15 years: the team finished with a 4-12 record.

It was Redskins Executive Vice President/General Manager Bruce Allen who announced that Zorn has been dismissed and will not return as the franchise’s head coach in 2010. In a statement, Allen, who has been team General Manager for three weeks, said he “felt it was necessary to not waste a moment of time building this team into a winner.”

(Good luck with that, buddy…..)

Allen explained that his three-week game observation period was all the time he needed to make the decision that Zorn needed to go.

“The status quo is not acceptable. I felt it was necessary to not waste a moment of time building this team into a winner.”

Zorn was 12-20 over two seasons as head coach of The Washington Redskins. He was 6-18 in his last 24 games and still had one year left on his contract.

At the start of each year, while the days still feel a little long, it’s a good time to make sure your kitchen is in tip top shape. You might have already done The Kitchen Cure, but post-holiday is a great time to run down this quick kitchen checklist to make sure your space is ready to take on all your culinary adventures in the new year!

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Wade Roush wrote:

Boston-based stealth-mode startup Digital Lumens has raised $5 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing published December 31. The company, whose board members include Jon Karlen of Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners and Lee Barbieri of Dover, MA-based Stata Venture Partners in Dover, MA, specializes in high-efficiency lighting technology. Digital Lumens previously raised $6.3 million in May 2009, as Ryan reported.

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Goldman Sachs (GS) strategist Jim O’Neill was on Bloomberg this morning reflecting on his ‘call of the decade’ to buy BRICs. 

Not surprisingly, he’s still uber-bullish on Brazil, Russia, India, and China, but of all of those Russia he expects to be the big standout due to cheap money and high oil prices. He noted that he’s frequently bombarded with calls to drop Russia from the grouping.

While he likes the other three, he notes that they’re closer to tightening, which really just goes to show that in the mind of strategists, nothing is more important than what the central bank does. The central bank trumps all.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• The BRICs Will Power A Huge Year For Base Metals
• Russia Is The One BRIC Energy Companies Aren’t Interested In
• Marc Mobius: Here Comes Another 40% Surge For The BRICs

A startling new county-by-county review of capital murder charges in Alabama provides rock solid evidence of the arbitrariness of the death penalty. The location of the crime, these numbers show, is far more important than the crime itself in determining whether the perpetrator is eligible for a death sentence.

The report, from the Mobile Press-Register, finds that one county charges 95% of murders as capital cases (making the defendant eligible for a death sentence if convicted) while six counties bring capital charges in less than 10% of murders. Factors involved in the crime — such as sexual assault or child victims — can make it eligible for a capital charge, but there’s a great deal of prosecutorial discretion in determining exactly what charges should apply.

The arbitrary application of the death penalty is perhaps the most compelling cause for its repeal. There is simply no way to ensure fairness across race, socioeconomic status and — as these numbers show — geography.

(more…)

Article Tags: Al Ritter, CO2 Propaganda

Al Gore, a self described expert in climate change has no degree in climatology. He doesn’t even possess a teaching degree to teach first grade science, but he now claims to be an expert in yet another field. He claims that Polar Bears are in danger of extinction. He spewed his opinion about their endangered status again at the Copenhagen Cop 15 meeting. He has used his opinion and those of his supporters alone to have the Polar Bear an endangered species in the United States, and hopes to have them declared “endangered” worldwide, but can’t site credible proof of that claim.

In this sadly inaccurate video another Hollywood actor supports the WWF and Al Gore.

Source: examiner.com

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Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites in the world and one of the most heavily trafficked. Yet, it doesn’t have much of a revenue stream, in the traditional sense, and sticking to its core principles with all the content being available for everyone for free and with no advertising. Instead, it’s making most of the money it needs to operate through a yearly fund-raising campaign. This year the goal was to bring in $7.5 million in donations and Wikipedia announced just as 2009 came to a close that the sum has been reached.

“As of December 31, 2009, we have reached our campaign goal of 7.5 million USD. Thank you to all who have donated! Your continued donations will support Wikimedia’s long-term operations and growth, cover contingencies, and allow us to fund new projects and activities,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote updating his personal plea for donations.

The 2009 campaign has been running for a few months now and the sum has been gradually building up towards the set goal of $7.5 million. This was the highest goal set by the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia and other related sites, to date in the series of fund-raisers which has been running for a few years now.

After the success of last year’s campaign which saw Wikipedia get $6.2 million from donors… (read more)

American wellness expert Jillian Michaels will be encouraging women to gear up and get behind the handlebars to highlight Harley Davidson’s upcoming National Garage Party Month, the company recently announced. Harley-Davidson will reward one woman and three of her friends with a transformational weekend and an opportunity to meet Michaels, a life-long motorcycle enthusiast and licensed rider.

Learning to ride a motorcycle was an empowering experience for me, so I want to share t… (read more)

Apple is a company known for many things, but embracing copyright freedoms has not been one of them. The company loves creating new and innovative products that challenge the world’s perception of what it thought it wanted, but it then turns around and aggressively protects those products from being poked or prodded too much by curious onlookers. Some believe Apple is in the right to do this, while others feel the company could set a better example when it comes to using (or abusing) copyright legislation for its own self-serving purposes.

This is a topic that recently came up during our Premier Subscriber chat with Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Fred von Lohmann. von Lohmann pointed out that Google—a company that is often compared to Apple—has been at the forefront of the pro-innovation copyright agenda, fighting the good fight on behalf of tech companies and their users for many years. When it comes to Apple… not so much. The two companies could not be more different. Let’s take a moment to summarize some of Apple’s latest pro-DRM and pro-DMCA moves.

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Apparently, the $300-$500 million budget paid off. Right now, with over $1 billion in worldwide sales, Avatar is the third highest grossing movie of all time. It could even take down Titanic‘s $1.8 billion record. [Inquirer via Techie via boingboing]