LG Korea unveiled two new mobile DTV devices that are headed for the U.S. in 2010. The first is an upgraded version of the LG Lotus equipped with a long antenna and an integrated digital TV tuner. For those that have forgotten this rather forgettable phone, the original LG Lotus is a boxy QWERTY clamshell that launched on Sprint in late 2008. And, if a boxy cell phone with an ungainly antenna doesn’t suit your fancy, then perhaps a shiny, black portable DVD player with a built-in 800 channel DTV tuner may. No word on pricing or availability but both devices are expected to get the official nod from LG’s US division at CES 2010 next week in Las Vegas.
The last time I tried biscuits from Trader Joe’s, it was a disaster. Not only were the baking directions on the package terrible, the biscuits looked and tasted bad no matter what you did. Often, TJ’s stocks very good ready-make products, but perhaps bake-from-frozen biscuits were not the way to go. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt where biscuits were concerned and picked up a tube of their new Buttermilk Biscuits.
Unlike their predecessors, these were in the refrigerated section of the market and come out of the tube round and ready-to-bake, just like other brands of refrigerated biscuits. They baked up well with the directions given on the packaging, though I had a slight preference for the slightly darker color of the batch I baked at a higher temperature. They were tender and rose well, but were not particularly light or flaky. This lack of flakiness can be partly attributed to the fact that they’re made with shortening (great for tenderizing) and not butter (better for flakiness). The lack of butter also hurts these biscuits in the flavor department: they’re pleasant, but not buttery at all on their own.
Huge improvement over the last attempt, but I still prefer my homemade biscuits – especially since they don’t take long to make. Still, these aren’t bad and make a great addition to a bowl of soup, chili or gravy in a pinch. But a little more butter flavor (which I added by slathering them with butter myself) and they’re even better.
At my last Boulder Community Hours (or Random Day, or Bunker Hours, or whatever the latest branding of “office hours” is), I spent 15 minutes with Joel Gratz who runs the great site Colorado Powder Forecast.
Even though we only spent 15 minutes together, Joel sent me a nice comment:
“Office hours is such an amazing resource – many thanks for making yourself and others available to the community. This must be a unique concept in the professional, non-academic world! “
Thanks Joel! And if you are a skier in Colorado, this is a must read site either by email, RSS, or Joel’s twitter stream. And Bunker Hours for me for 1/26 still has plenty of slots in case you are interested.
But wait, there’s more. Josh Larson, a TechStars graduate now working at NewsGator, also writes a great blog titled Colorado Weather. Josh has an uncanny ability to predict the weather on the front range better than – er – most weathermen. It could be that he used to work at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center – or maybe he’s just that good. Apparently, Ari Newman, another TechStars graduate and CEO/founder of Filtrbox asked Joel if he was more accurate than Josh. Joel graciously replied that they are good friends.
But wait, there’s more. When on a long, cold run with Kelly Taylor of The Fuel Team (now owned by PR Newswire), he told me about the new Vail iPhone app named Realski that is an augmented reality trail map of Vail Mountain. Since I haven’t skied on Vail recently, I haven’t been able to test it out but if you are an iPhone user on Vail, try it and tell me how it rates.
Give, give, give — that’s all I (and other social web users) do. We share a lot of information about ourselves these days, and we get a lot out of that experience (monetarily speaking, the companies that provide the social web environment get even more). But I hardly know what happens to my status updates, comments and photos. Where do they go, how do they get spread, and who has access to them?
I think it’s about time for a personal dashboard to track and view what happens to what we share online. This would have two primary uses: 1) Privacy: I’d have a better idea of what’s publicly known about myself, and 2) Analytics: Like any content publisher, I’d be interested in checking my stats and trends.
Current Examples
There are already some services that give me glimpses into where my data goes and who sees it:
You can get analytics of who your Twitter followers are and how they respond to your content through services like this one from Ad.ly and PeopleBrowsr.
Facebook has a somewhat buried privacy feature called “How others see you” that allows you to look at your profile through the eyes (and privacy settings) of any other user.
LinkedIn has a “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature that can get a little creepy, but shows potential overlaps with people who may be in your line of business.
Bit.ly provides analytics for the shortened URLs it creates, so if you share a Bit.ly link you can find out when, where and how people found it.
Privacy
Web users are becoming more aware of privacy issues, though random conspiracy theories may actually be better circulated than legitimate changes, like Facebook’s recent privacy settings change that made much of its users’ content public by default. Still, when we live so much of our lives online it’s hard to know what’s private and whether services are treating our information with the proper respect.
In an emotional and compelling guest post on TechCrunch over the weekend, Angstro founder Rohit Khare complains that social networks and application developers over-complicate and under-deliver on privacy. His conclusion: “Enforce your ToS [terms of service] and obey others’ ToS — or else stop setting unrealistic expectations and just let users have their data back!”
Just knowing where your information goes would help us out of this mess. Eventually, some kind of centralized and independent identity dashboard where you could actually manage, control and delete that information could be the next step.
Analytics
In some ways, this idea would be an evolution of the ego search. Today we look at how many web pages display our name, and how high we rank on Google. Tomorrow, we could look back at everything we’ve emitted to the web, and where it’s traveled. It would be even neater if this hypothetical dashboard functioned like the Internet Archive, so we could get a time capsule about what was known about us online at any one time.
I ran some of these ideas by open web advocate Chris Messina, who compared them to a “digital food chain” in the manner of the whimsical and informative annual reports put together by Daytum founder Nicholas Feltron. Messina commented via email,
How you get to that place, though, well, that’d require a lot more transparency into where data goes, where it comes from, and having some kind of omniscient player standing in the ether and able to track all this stuff. Without owning the stack yourself, I’m not sure the privacy gods would allow such a system to exist.
Messina suggested that if this were to work, users could eventually even sell insights about their personal data to advertisers. But that’s a whole new level, where people’s motivations for sharing would become knotty and gamed.
The one big downside of a service like this would be if it got too good — by enabling you to reverse-stalk the people who are stalking you online. If there’s a single person on a certain city block who accesses my Twitter feed through TweetDeck three times per day, that’s probably worth being left out in the 1s and 0s in the ether. After all, one of the core ideas of the Internet is to allow some semblance of anonymity, right? You don’t want to infringe on people’s ability to consume information.
The American Bald Eagle is the United States National Symbol. It was chosen as our national symbol in 1782 and was chosen over the Golden Eagle because it lives on on the North American Continent while the Golden Eagle also lives in Europe. When born it is truly an ugly duckling, but in four to five years it will turn into a beautiful bird that inspires you when you view it in flight. If you study about this beautiful bird you can learn some very interesting facts.
There are eagles all over the world, but the American Bald Eagle only lives on the North American Continent. The Bald Eagle is not bald it develops white head and tail feathers around the age of four or five. They stand at a height of 2 ½ – 3 feet tall and weigh about 10-14 pounds. Their wing span is 6-8 feet.
Bald Eagles mate for life, but if one dies the other one may or will choose another mate. Some eagles may live 30 years or more in the wild.
A Bald Eagles nest (aeries) is nearly always located in a tree that will be taller than 75 feet. A pair of Bald Eagles may take as long as six weeks to build a nest the first time. The nest is made of sticks and lined with twigs and green grass. The heaviest nest ever found was one ton. The nests may be as tall as five feet and the diameter could also be as large as five feet. There was a large nest found in Ohio that was eight and a half feet across and 12 feet tall. Occassionally the nests become to large for the trees and will topple the tree.
A female Bald Eagle lays 1-3 eggs and raises one brood of eaglets a year. Both female and male eagles will sit on the eggs. If the eggs are destroyed she may lay some more eggs. It takes the eggs four weeks to hatch.
Eaglets are covered with gray fuzz and require a great amount of food. Both parents feed the chicks. Bald Eagles normally eat fish (fresh and solt water fish), but will sometimes eat snakes and smaller birds, rodents and rabbits. There eyesight and diving ability help them catch food. They can fly with four to eight pounds of food in their grasp. Bald Eagles have long sharp orange beaks and curved talons to hold their prey. Because of their large size they require a large hunting area.
They have superior eye sight. They can see 1½ miles away. Theyh can also see both forward and sideways. Their flying speed is 30 – 35 miles an hour, but can their diving speed can be up to 100 miles an hour.
They are the top of the food chain making them more vulnerable to toxic chemicals found in the environment. Because of this vulnerability and the desire for their feathers at one time they were being hunted and killed
to the point of near extinction. That is why they were put on the Endangered Species Acts.
If you have ever watched a Bald Eagle soar across the sky you will realize that this bird is very special and we need to do all we can to preserve it for us and for future generations.
Thirty seven years of teaching school is in my past and my future is full of hope and promise.
The number of cutting-edge British technology companies created from universities has collapsed in the last year, and many start-ups that did form were forced to turn to foreign investors, according to a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph. Between 2005 and 2008, on average 210 start-ups were formed each year based on academic research in university labs. However, the rate likely dropped to fewer than 50 new firms in 2009 — the lowest level since the U.K.’s Higher Education Statistics Agency began tracking spinoff activity. An increasing number of companies that raised capital sourced it from overseas investors, as domestic venture firms and private investors focused on keeping existing ventures afloat during the recession.
University TTOs around the U.K. report that their commercialization efforts have been affected by the financial crisis. Tom Hockaday, managing director of ISIS Innovation — Oxford University’s technology transfer arm — says only three new companies were formed this year, and two — Zyoxel and Oxford Yasa Motors — had to tap investors from overseas. “There’s no shortage of money in the world,” Hockaday says. “It’s just a reflection of things locally.” Tony Raven, director of research & enterprise services at Southampton University, confirms the trend. Southampton, which normally would fund two to five start-ups each year, did not fund any new companies this year. Nevertheless, “in good times and bad times the good companies will get funding,” Raven says. “The quality threshold has gone up.”
The IPO window for biotech companies remains mostly shut. VC firms are so busy propping up — or weeding out — existing portfolio companies during the recession that they have little energy and cash to fund new start-ups. And the so-called “patent cliff” facing big pharma is approaching fast: One third of approved drugs will go off patent by 2012. All of this adds up to an environment in which academia is positioned to play a key role in refilling pharmaceutical companies’ pipelines. “We are incubating a deal with pharma now,” says Dale Larson, director of biomedical systems at the Cambridge-based nonprofit research institute Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. “In the past, they wouldn’t have looked at this technology until three years later.”
Both the technology that is the subject of the impending deal, and a second collaboration with Pfizer, Inc., are based on life sciences tools that can help pharma companies find flaws in their drug targets earlier so they can minimize the number of dollars spent on a candidate that will ultimately fail. Partnering with a pharmaceutical company is attractive for academic and nonprofit researchers, Larson and others say, because those drug makers have deep enough pockets and a mature enough infrastructure to keep promising technologies from being left on the research shelf. “If this drug gets approved, we will get a percentage of sales in the low-single digits. If it’s a billion-dollar drug, that gets very interesting,” says Todd Keiller, director of technology commercialization at the University of Vermont. Keller is referring to the school’s licensing deal with Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics for a drug target that has completed clinical trials and is awaiting approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Jon Soderstrom, the head of the TTO at Yale University, says a big uptick in pharma collaborations is just around the corner. “We actually had a surge of interest two years ago, because a lot of the later-stage drug targets out there in industry had just gotten so expensive for pharma and they were looking for cheaper alternatives.” When the market crashed and biotech companies’ valuations took a nosedive, pharma went hunting for bargains in the marketplace instead. Soderstrom thinks the big drugmakers have picked through the available later-stage assets and will seek more partnerships with academia. One phenomenon that has made academic labs increasingly attractive is that universities are reclaiming “distressed assets” — drug targets formerly licensed to small biotechs that were dropped to conserve cash. “These drug candidates often have large investments already from venture capital firms, so they are somewhat de-risked,” Soderstrom says. Yale has received calls from big drugmakers inquiring about those valuable returned products, he adds.
Calculating Lost Profits in IP and Patent Infringement Cases, a 690-page hardcover reference and companion online resource center, brings together the comprehensive body of knowledge on lost profits damages and delivers a definitive resource for IP professionals, tech transfer execs, financial experts, and attorneys. Written by Nancy Fannon, owner of Fannon Valuation Group, and other industry leading experts, Calculating Lost Profits delivers a thorough analysis of current case law and valuation methodology that form the basis of damage awards in IP and patent infringement cases. This must-have resource and comes with 24/7 access to the online edition, which includes the full text of relevant court opinions, a searchable PDF version of the book, plus bonus content and updates as they are released. It’s your go-to resource center for everything on lost profits damages, and is available from 2Market Information with a $50-off discount. CLICK HERE for full details.
2009 has certainly been a storied year for the auto-industry. While allowing GM and Chrysler to keep their doors open during a trying time, the bailouts weren’t without drawback however; both companies are now in a come-from-behind situation with regard to brand imaging and consumer perception. Ford has actually greatly benefited as far as those two factors are concerned by being the only U.S. automaker to not require a bailout.
Chairman and interim CEO Ed Whitacre, Jr. has certainly taken GM in the right direction by hitting the reset button on the company’s management team – including naming Microsoft’s CFO Chris Liddell to manage the purse strings in Detroit. James Bell, executive market analyst for Kelly Blue Book, also feels that the company is coming back in a strong way and ought not to be ignored.
Whitacre intends to to pay back the almost $7 billion in federal loans sooner than anticipated, and according to Bell, the reduction in costs that GM was able to secure by way of the bankruptcy makes that possible. He also points out the fact that GM has fantastic products rolling out and that no shopper would be wise to shun the company prior to checking out their line.
A director of research over at IHS Global Insight has concerns, however, of GM losing market share to the point where they will hold a less than 17% share in 2012. GM estimates its share for that period to be about 20%; on par with 2009. To maintain market share, GM must convert Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, and Saab loyalists over to other GM brands, and therein lies the concern.
Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne, whose company now runs Chrysler, has a tough challenge ahead with respect to product strategy. The company was helped little by Daimler during their separation and Cerberus Capital Management’s strategies drove the company head-first into bankruptcy. Chrysler does however, have a new Jeep Grand Cherokee planned to roll out soon, but that’s it. While the mid-sized SUV market is not exactly bursting at the seams, it also still remains to be seen whether Fiat-based vehicles will have any appeal to the American market.
George Magliano of IHS, says expects Chrysler’s share to dip from last year’s 11%, to 6.9% by 2012. This would put Chrysler behind Nissan and Hyundai/Kia and will be the tiniest of the top seven automakers that supply the U.S.; a position that could put Chrysler’s mere survival in jeopardy.
It also appears that Chrysler’s loan will not be paid back anytime soon.
Lévénement qui en est à sa 2ème édition, sest déroulé du 19 au 24 décembre 2009. Les Abranis, le groupe de rock kabyle, a eu l’honneur d’animer la soirée d’ouverture, durant laquelle un hommage a été rendu à de grandes figures de la chanson et musique amazighe : Cherif Khaddam, la joueuse de l’Imzad Amérioudh Fatma, la virtuose joueuse de Tindi de Tamanrasset Badi Lala, et bien sûr aux regrettés Athmane Bali et Katchou.
17 troupes venues de Kabylie, des Aurès, du M’Zab et du Grand Sud, retenues après des sélections locales, étaient en compétition. Ce festival tombait à pic, car il coïncidait avec l’ouverture de la saison touristique du Grand sud. Les touristes déjà présents ont eu à découvrir une semaine durant, une facette du patrimoine musical amazigh, et des instruments comme l’Imzad et le Tindi.
Abdessalam Abdenour, chercheur-linguiste, Ounissi Mohamed Salah, chercheur en culture des Aurès, Farida Aït Froukh, anthropologue etc, ont animé en parallèle des conférences sur différents thèmes ayant trait au patrimoine matériel et immatériel amazigh. Aït Froukh a notamment mis en exergue le rôle avant-gardiste de la chanson et des productions kabyles sur les communautés amazighs. Ces chercheurs ont insistés sur le rôle que doivent jouer les moyens audiovisuels, pour la sauvegarde et la protection de l’immense patrimoine musical amazigh.
A l’occasion de ce festival dailleurs, l’Imzad était à l’honneur. Cet instrument, peut-être millénaire, est le symbole targui par excellence. Il est fabriqué par les femmes et son utilisation est exclusivement féminine. Cest une sorte de violon monocorde (corde fabriquée avec du crin de cheval), qu’on frotte avec un archet en crin également, tendu entre les deux bouts d’une « branchiole » arquée. La caisse est une carapace de courge vidée, l’ouverture étant fermée avec de la peau de chèvre pour la sonorité de la corde. L’autre instrument fut le Tindi. C’est une percussion faite avec du bois creusé, la face vide est recouverte de peau de chèvre tannée. Il est également réservé aux femmes, qui tapent généralement à deux dessus.
La clôture du festival fut animée par Amérioudh Fatma avec son Imzad, Aghrib Ahmed avec sa Tazamart (flûte traditionnelle en roseau ou en métal), avant de céder la place une fois de plus à la chanson kabyle avec Rabah Asma pour clôturer la soirée en apothéose. Il faut relever la considération dont jouie la chanson kabyle, puisque c’est avec ça que le festival fut ouvert (Abranis) et fermée (Asma). Pour rappel, Aït Menguellet était linvité dhonneur du 1er festival.
Concernant le palmarès du concours, la troupe Taziri de Khenchela s’est distinguée en remportant le 1e prix pour le chant, la musique et sa prestation sur scène. La troupe Mazal de Béjaïa a quant à elle, remporté le prix de l’interprétation musicale. Ces deux troupes seront aidées pour sortir leur premier CD.
Une bonne nouvelle pour Tamanrasset, le festival sera institutionnalisé. Sans compter quune rencontre internationale est prévue du 14 au 16 janvier 2010 sur l’Imzad. Il est question dinsérer celui-ci dans la liste du patrimoine universel (UNESCO).
It’s been a bloody decade for the music industry. Among artists, musicians, labels and startups, few can claim triumph. Expectations have been humbled and the list of failures has been long, as the broadband Internet has compounded the business’s inherent problems. The desperation has resulted in a blame game: labels blaming piracy, musicians blaming labels, innovative ideas killed by lawsuits, and consumers justifying file-sharing habits by broadly blaming an industry they felt had ripped them off for years.
But as the industry continues to shrink, most parties concerned are realizing that it’s more productive to dispense with blame and start cooperating. Musicians are looking to startups and technological tools for constructive solutions, and becoming more self-reliant to earn a living. Labels that once sued startups are now working in concert with them, sometimes investing in ideas nearly identical to the ones they pursued in court a few years ago. Many new business models seem to accept piracy realistically. In the coming decade, the antagonism seems ready to yield to cooperation — mostly because all parties concerned don’t have much of a choice anymore.
Industry observers seem to agree that a transition is finally taking place. BigChampagne CEO Eric Garland told NPR recently that industry execs soon may be wishing they could just blame piracy for all their problems, signaling some acceptance after a decade of adversarial struggles. Meanwhile, onetime Gang of Four bassist Dave Allen offered this thoughtful essay earlier this month, expressing exasperation with musicians who haven’t adjusted to the changing climate while anticipating a “punk rock” moment in which artists thrive by embracing technological innovation. And although the RIAA declared a year ago that it would stop suing file-sharers, it hasn’t followed up on its promise to pursue them aggressively through other channels, perhaps fearing another PR nightmare.
With any luck, the blame game will be a vestige of an industry’s painful decade-long transition. Consider that the music industry’s target audience now includes high school and college students who were younger than 10 when the original Napster ushered in the era of massive file-sharing. Many have never been to a record store and are part of a generation that spends less time enjoying music as a standalone activity and more time multitasking with music in the background.
No company, no label, no lawsuit, no musician can be blamed for that. A seismic shift has taken place, brought on primarily by technological innovation, and that simply doesn’t make for good scapegoating. (As Garland told the Houston Chronicle last week, “We thought the problem was piracy, but it turns out the problem was the Internet.”)
As recorded music formats have evolved and consumer tastes have changed over the years, musicians and businesses have made adjustments and persisted. The smartest and best-suited for survival have not only weathered storms, but in some cases have distinguished themselves by seeing technological changes as opportunities. And in the coming decade, with any luck, cooperation will be rewarded more than antagonism, and constructive thinking will replace scapegoating.
An artist’s conception shows New Horizons at Pluto.
NASA’s New Horizons probe passed a key milestone today on its nine-year journey and is now closer to Pluto, its primary target, than it is to Earth. But it still has more than five years and more than 1.5 billion miles to go.
The 1,054-pound (480-kilogram) piano-sized spacecraft blasted off for the solar system’s most controversial dwarf planet almost four years ago. New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, and thanks to a gravitational boost from Jupiter, it’s closing in on Pluto at the rate of 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) per day. The probe is due to zoom past Pluto and its three moons on July 14, 2015.
It’s no secret that I’m a supporter of allowing more skilled immigrants into the US. The arguments against it make little sense and are usually thinly veiled racism against foreigners. Plenty of studies have shown that skilled immigrants help create new jobs rather than take them away. And barring skilled immigrants from coming into the US just means that they end up working for non-US competitors, rather than helping US companies grow. It’s hard to fathom a reason to be against increasing skilled immigration, other than being racist or economically illiterate. Now, that said, it’s also no secret that the H-1B process that is one of the main (though not only) routes for skilled technology foreigners to work in the US has some serious flaws and is often abused. But the response should not be to end the H-1B program, but to fix the abuses.
All that said, I’m somewhat horrified at the reports (which a whole bunch of you are sending in) about a judge ordering three anti-H-1B websites be taken totally offline. I disagree heavily with those three sites, and think that they are misleading in the extreme, but the order to take them offline goes way overboard. The judge even went further and ordered Facebook to disable the Facebook page of one of the sites.
At issue are libel and copyright charges from a company named Apex, which these sites accuse of abusing the H-1B process. Given that I’m very much against the abuses, I’m all for exposing those who abuse the process. Now here’s where things get weird. The main issue is that these sites posted a copy of what’s supposedly an employment agreement from Apex, and the discussion “alleges that employees will find it difficult to leave Apex because of its contract terms.” Apex claims that this is defamatory, and notes that it had three “consultants” refuse to report for employment because of it. Yet… it also claims that it holds the copyright on the documents. In other words, it admits that the documents are real and legitimate. Otherwise it wouldn’t hold the copyright. Thus, it’s hard to see how the two charges can stand together. Either the documents are false and defamatory, or there’s (potential) copyright infringement and the documents are accurate in portraying Apex’s contract terms. So which is it?
Unfortunately we don’t know, because the judge has shut down everything.
What’s not at all clear is why the judge would completely shut down all three websites and the Facebook page. If there are problems with just this document, order an injunction against that document. Completely shutting down all three websites goes way too far, and seems to go well beyond what either defamation law or copyright law should allow.
“Joaquin Baldwin is an Annie Award nominee director and animator from Paraguay. Living in Los Angeles, he is now finishing his MFA in animation at UCLA. He has received over 50 international awards for his animated films Sebastian’s Voodoo and Papiroflexia, and also several grants including the Jack Kent Cooke full Graduate Scholarship in 2006.”
And here is a bonus chat between Joaquin Baldwin, director of Sebastian’s Voodoo, and Lucas Martell, director of Pigeon: Impossible.
Posted in animation, Comedy, Fun, funny, NFB, Video, YouTube
This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we’ve explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization. The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web. We’re including Augmented Reality in this category, as we think it’s a key element of where the Mobile Web is heading circa 2009.
In April we reported statistics from browser company Opera showing large growth on the Mobile Web. According to Opera, there was a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. What’s driving that growth is devices like the iPhone, new mobile operating systems like Android, and hot applications like Augmented Reality.
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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!
Apple Dominates Mobile Web, But Android on The Rise…
We named Apple our Best Bigco of 2008, mostly due to the success of the iPhone and accompanying App Store. By most statistics, Apple is in a fairly dominant position in the Mobile Web. At the beginning of the year we reported data from AdMob (a leading mobile advertising marketplace) showing that Apple has a 48% market share of smartphone traffic in the United States. That figure doesn’t just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch too.
By June 2009, Apple’s share of smartphone traffic in the U.S. had surged to 64%. Perhaps more significantly though, Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone traffic had increased to 47%. This is important, because internationally other smartphones were utilized much more than in the U.S. before the iPhone arrived.
However, Apple can’t afford to rest on its laurals. Google’s mobile OS Android has been making rapid progress. According to the latest Admob statistics available, for July ’09, requests from the Android Operating System increased 53% month over month and Android now has 7% worldwide OS share. The iPhone OS dropped slightly to 45% worldwide and 60% in the U.S.
Bigco Initiatives & Trendy Startups
All of the big Internet companies have strong Mobile Web initiatives. We discussed Apple and Google above.
Earlier this month Facebook announced a mobile expansion of their Facebook Connect platform. "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" enables developers to add a Facebook Connect button to their apps in order to make them more social.
Probably of most interest is watching the up and coming Mobile Web startups. We’ve had our eye on Brightkite for some time, but perhaps the trendiest startup right now is Foursquare. It’s a location-aware social app for the iPhone, but only available in a limited number of countries currently.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. As we noted in August, it is in everything from mobile apps to kids toys. Many people think that “AR” will soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about “social media” and “Web 2.0” before that. That remains to be seen, but there’s no denying there is a lot of interest in AR right now.
As we reported at the end of August, the AR apps are starting to flow into Android (the early leader in this space) and iPhone devices. We reported that the Paris Metro Subway was apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then came a new Yelp app with AR, which any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Presselite, the company that made the Paris Metro Subway app, followed up with a London Bus app for the App Store.
Conclusion
Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. Many of our readers have smartphones nowadays, a good proportion of them being iPhones or Android devices (our statistics prove this). And there is no shortage of mobile web applications flowing into the App Store and Android’s marketplace – not to forget Nokia and other prominent mobile manufacturers.
What’s perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we’re seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It’s been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come.
Not only has acupuncture been shown to be effective at reducing hot flashes in breast cancer patients, but it may also improve their sex drive and sense of well-being. Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital compared acupuncture with drug therapy for reducing hot flashes in breast cancer patients.
The study, published in the Journal of Oncology, is the first randomly controlled trial to compare acupuncture and drug therapy for hot flash treatment.
Many breast cancer patients receive chemotherapy and five years of hormone therapy. Side effects of the hormone therapy include hot flashes and night sweats. The drug often used to manage the effects of hormone therapy is venlafaxine, but that drug has its own side effects: dry mouth, decreased appetite, nausea and constipation.
Researchers compared acupuncture and drug treatment with 50 patients from oncology clinics at Henry Ford Hospital. Obviously, a study involving acupuncture versus drugs can’t be blind, but patients were randomly assigned to receive either acupuncture or venlafaxine treatment for 12 weeks. While the group taking drugs received 37.5mg orally each night for the first week and then 75mg for the remaining 11 weeks, the acupuncture group received treatments twice each week for the first four weeks, then once each week for the last eight weeks.
After 12 weeks, patients in both groups stopped therapy. They were followed for one year, and the patients kept a diary to track hot flash frequency and severity. They also completed surveys for mental and overall health.
The study findings revealed that both groups experienced an initial 50% decline in hot flashes and depressive symptoms, showing that acupuncture is as effective as drug therapy. Yet, two weeks post-treatment, differences emerged.
In the absence of treatment, the drug group experienced a significant increase in hot flashes while the acupuncture group still had minimal hot flashes. Patients who received acupuncture didn’t feel an increase in hot flashes until three months after acupuncture treatment had stopped.
Hot on the heels of last night’s release of webOS 1.3.5, Palm has released the Software Development Kit for the latest and greatest version of webOS. You can go read all the nitty gritty details here, but to our mind the best news is that the emulator can now receive keyboard shortcuts to simulate shaking and tilting – which means it will be a heckuva lot easier to develop games that involve tilting the phone.
Also improving those games, the "fastAccelerometer" API, which can "increase the frequency of accelerometer events from 4Hz to 30Hz." Previously, you could only get accelerometer data 4 times per second – not nearly good enough for proper control. Increasing that to 30 times per second will help a lot.
There’s plenty more here, including proper app placement in the media partition and some squashed bugs. Developers, go give it a go (unless you’re a 64-bit Windows user) and let us know if your life is changed.
“Please, Slow Down” public safety spot – Click above to watch the video
Auto crashes are giant, complex things. There are lots of factors that influence the outcome, virtually all of them variable and dependent on human input and decision making. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t good at wrapping our minds around such a thorny ball of applied physics. Australia’s Roads and Traffic Authority has enlisted Professor Ian Johnston of Melbourne’s Monash University to break it down for the back of the class.
Pushing a tagline of “Please, Slow Down,” Professor Johnston brings his work at the University’s Accident Research Centre to bear with an effective and visually arresting demonstration of how big a difference five little kilometers per hour (that’s 3.11 mph) can make to a panic stop. It’s a message well delivered, but we would argue that good road safety is more about driving at reasonable rates of speed for the conditions (traffic, weather, road type, vehicle type and skill level). Click through to the jump to check it out for yourself. Thanks for the tip, Mike!
Troubled golfer Tiger Woods has reportedly checked into a suburban Phoenix treatment facility for sex adddiction.
The world’s No.1-ranked golfer has entered the posh and upscale Cottonwood de Tuscon Center one month after his public image was shattered by a sex scandal linking Woods to more than a dozen women aside from his wife of five years, Elin, X17 Online claims.
“He has been there for a few days since his handlers forced him to enter the program. They feel that if he blames his cheating on addiction, the public will forgive him,” a source told X17 Online Tuesday.
The source explains that “Tiger wants to get back on top. He agreed to put golfing on hold so he could show the world how badly he feels about what he’s done and to prove that he wants to correct the problems that led to his infidelity.”
In related news, an explosive new report today painted a disturbing picture of the night that Tiger crashed his car outside his family’ Windemere, Florida home — but the golfer’s agent insist the story is an “Internet hoax.”
According to the account, written by famed sports columnist Furman Bisher, doctors at the hospital allegedly told Tiger that he had to fly to Phoenix to meet with a plastic surgeon for reconstructive surgery on his face — which is why Tiger didn’t meet with police directly after the accident. Bisher claims to have heard the blow-by-blow account from an IMG agent who works with Steinberg.
Glad I found this forum…looks like a great bunch of folks on here helping each other out!
I am technically still DX’d with only Metabolic Syndrome and have not done enough in the past to deal with this and am currently dealing with a Kidney scare.
So, this year, in 2010, I want to change that and get serious before IT gets MORE serious.
Figured it might help to put this in writing to hold myself accountable.
Here is my baseline…At some point in the future, I expect to look back at this and and be like pffffftttt!!!
DEC 2009 Labs:
Weight: 250
Height: 6"3
Age: Turn 40 in March..ugggh!
Meds: Metformin XR 500mg x 2
A1C: 6.3…controlled, but not good :confused:
Base Metabolic Panel:
Glucose, Serum: 122 🙁
BUN: 15
Creatinine,Serum: 1.27…the absolute TOP of the lab’s ref range:(
eGFR: >59…this is all that is on the lab report, but I calculated estimates myself, using several different equations…my results ranged from 67 – 72…not sure how impaired this is considered and whether it can be improved.:confused: :confused: :confused:
BUN/Creatinine Ratio: 12
All others within lab reference range
Hepatic Function Panel
All results within lab reference range
Lipid Panel
Cholesterol Total: 246
Triglycerides: 524
HDL: 32
These are just terrible…hoping for dramatic improvement this year.
CBC with Differential Platelet:…nothing abnormal in these
Urinalysis Gross Exam
Specific Gravity: 1.021
PH: 6.0
All other NORMAL except…
Protein: 1+ 🙁
Creatinine, Urine: 205…still within lab reference range
Microalbumin, Urine: 361.3 😮
Microalbumin/Creat Ratio: 176.2 😮 Obviously need to get these checked further, but I’m hoping it’s mostly due to dehydration and that this test was an outlier…Kidneys have always been normal in the past…this is a bit scary, considering how high it is for the first time.
This week 
We named Apple our 
Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. 
