Category: News

There’s always a bit of a mad flurry amongst the Palm community whenever a new webOS update is pushed out, as the techies and uber-fans dig deep and try to discover every little change. Rod Whitby of WebOS Internals tweeted out a particularly interesting observation: two new binary packages have appeared in webOS as of the latest version 1.3.5: opengles.ipk and opengles-omap3.ipk.

What does this mean? It means that GPU support is inching ever-closer for the Pre. As a famous philosopher or something once said: sweeeeeet.

It’s a train wreck.

Before we actually discuss the rumor, let me just say that having a product called 3D is misleading when it’s not actually 3D in any way but that it exists in a three-dimensional space. Really. People these days hear “3D” and they don’t think “Hmm, like the 5D?” — no, they think “OMG Avatar!” So keep that in mind, Canon.

But as for the rumor itself, it’s actually kind of interesting. Apparently the 3D will be aimed at wedding photographers (!) and will incorporate new sensor technology to increase dynamic range and high-ISO clarity.

The specs are listed over at Canon Rumors as:

• 16.7mp FF
• 7.2 µm pixel pitch
• DIGIC V
• Small magnesium alloy body similar to the 5D2

I’m not entirely convinced, but it might be cool. There’s probably room in Canon’s lineup, and a low-noise camera that isn’t full frame might be a big seller among the portrait/wedding crowd. Nikon has the high-ISO crowd wowed right now with the 3Ds, if I’m not mistaken.

If it’s going to be announced, it’ll be at Photokina in September. That leaves plenty of time for further rumor-mongering.

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All over the social Web these days, there’s a race to get as many friends, followers, readers, or subscribers as possible—most of them people you don’t know. As location-based social applications like Foursquare and Gowalla grow, they’re broadcasting your location to all those people, connecting you in one more way to a lot of people you’ve never heard of. As our “circle of friends” grows out of control, we wind up more public than we mean to be, sharing information with everyone just to be able to share it with our real friends.

New location app Rally is different, though. There’s no way to add Rally friends from Twitter or Facebook or anywhere else, because as Rally sees it, those aren’t really your friends. The only way to find someone on Rally is to look for them, which seems to be an effective way of narrowing the scope down to people you know. By intentionally stripping down the friend graph, and making friends come only from Rally, real friends can keep up with each other and keep everyone else out.

Other than that, Rally works a lot like Foursquare or Gowalla, letting you check in at a given location (restaurant, movies, etc) so your friends know where you are—you can even include a picture with your check-in information.

If you see a friend is somewhere, you can click “I’m on the way,” and let them know you’re coming to hang out. There’s also a bit of the game aspect, with users able to earn badges and the like–even more badges than Foursquare, potentially.

While Foursquare and Gowalla could be used the same way as Rally (letting you select friends one at a time), they’re integrated with Twitter and Facebook and encourage you to push all your location data into your other networks. So Rally’s not the only application that can restrict who gets your information, it’s the only one that doesn’t give you another option. The intent of Rally, more than the uniqueness of the use case, is what makes Rally notable.

Forcing users to rebuild their friend graph is a risky maneuver, and it remains to be seen if Rally can work on a large scale and do well enough to convince people to seek out all their friends on the service. It’ll be interesting to watch the company over the next few months to see how it fares.

Rally’s business plan is simple, as co-founder Sol Lipman told TechCrunch: using location to serve advertising. The potential with location-based ads is huge—you could walk by a store and find its coupons for the day, or see the happy hour specials at every bar within a six-block radius of you. Foursquare and other companies are making these kinds of deals, and Foursquare has already raised $1.35 million to extend into 100 cities, while Gowalla’s already got $10.3 million in the bank.

For right now, Rally is iPhone-only (available in the App Store), and is only usable for those in Santa Cruz, Calif. But the company says it’s going to be expanding both platform and location availability.

Rally is based in Santa Cruz. Many members of the startup team were on the team that created 12seconds, a short-form, video-based social network.

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If the iPod touch is a gateway drug for future iPhone users, then Apple should feel confident that it will have plenty of future iPhone users after this holiday season. From an analysis of App Store downloads during December 25th, it seems that the iPod touch was a hot, hot gift this Christmas.

According to the latest data from mobile analytics firm Flurry, downloads of apps to iPod touch devices spiked significantly on the 25th—not only far above the average download rate throughout November and December, but 172 percent higher than the spike in downloads to iPhones. App downloads typically track slightly lower for the iPod touch versus the iPhone according to Flurry’s data, which counts whenever an app that uses Flurry’s metrics API launches for the first time. On December 26, iPod touch downloads topped iPhone downloads even while trending sharply down towards more normal levels.

What is a “Brief” post?”

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China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has had a reputation from very early on as being a source for downloading infringing music and movies. In fact, in 2005 when the company went public, many in China claimed that the availability of music and movies was why Baidu was so popular. In fact, we wondered if by going public, it would put pressure on the company to block those links. Later evidence suggested that Baidu was heavily involved in promoting unauthorized content (potentially even hosting it itself). And while the company has promised to remove links, they seem to reappear almost immediately (and only indexed by Baidu). Not surprisingly, Baidu has been sued many times for copyright infringement.

However, one such case, brought in the US was recently dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. The plaintiff claimed that Baidu could be sued in the US because it was listed on NASDAQ, but the court found nothing to support that and dismissed the entire complaint.

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While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain popularity. Part of that prediction was informed by a recent interview with Metaio Marketing Director Lisa Murphy.

Sponsor

ReadWriteWeb first covered Metaio in early November when the company was set to release its editable consumer application Junaio. While products like Layar and Wikitude offer users a chance to passively view location-based notes and text, Junaio is the only service that offers non-coders the opportunity to edit layer content.

While Junaio is certainly its most popular product, the 6-year-old Munich-based company earns revenue by working with commercial clients like Lego, Popular and GM. Often described as “augmented reality marketing”, Metaio specializes in markerless tracking for advertising clients where a printed codes prompt a 3D webcam experience.

In the same way that consumers can generate their own QR codes via sites like Kaywa, is it possible that markerless AR tracking will one day yield a codeless creative experience? Honestly, it’s fine to hold up an Ikea catalogue and see a 3D sofa, but what good is a so-called immersive environment if the user is held captive in a passive consumer experience?

Says Murphy, “We chose to focus on the social aspects of Junaio by offering image sharing, oAuth and Facebook integration.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the company may open up the interface for further exploration. In keeping with its commitment to the social, we’re hoping Metaio finds ways to incorporate user-generated SketchUp creations in Junaio as well as an all-purpose AR tracking generator. In other words, rather than just interacting in an immersive environment, we’re hoping non-coders can contribute more than their eyeballs.

Discuss

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Remember that time you left your phone in the car on a cold night when you went to dinner, and when you got back to it, the battery was nearly dead because it had gotten so cold? Yeah, that would be happening a lot if you had an electric car that didn’t take temperature into account. And so the testers of BMW Mini Es are finding out in cold weather: range seems to be reduced by half in 23° temperatures.

The Volt, as Matt discovered, has a battery heater to keep the electrical system at a decent temperature. Seems an elementary feature to include in an electric car, and maybe these tests will convince BMW that it’s necessary.

On the other hand, we may be looking at a bit of a delay before all-electric cars are truly practical for the average family, seeing as if you can’t rely on it to get to work and back on some days of the year, there’s not much reason to buy one.

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So, you want to play some Super Nintendo games. You’ve got some ROMs, but you don’t want to play it on one of the many devices already out there. No, you want to drop some serious cash on a homemade version of a portable player. Well, this guy has got your back. Or at least your wallet.

To me, it is totally worth it to buy the emulator for your phone. But if you’d really rather have a custom-made portable SNES, then hit up this guy’s ebay auction. I think I’ll be passing though. I understand that the guy wants to paid for his work, but a starting bid of $550? The build quality just isn’t to command that type of price. I’ve seen some really elegant mods, and retrospectator9, you are no Ben Heck.

[Via Technabob]

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Most of us have had some sort of noise in our ears from time to time. It could be a high pitched tone or buzzing – but some people experience this type of noise each and every moment of their day.

According to the American Tinnitus Association, tinnitus affects 50 million people in the United States and 12 million of them experience sound so bothersome that it’s disabling. The BBC reports that around 1% to 3% of people in the United Kingdom also have tinnitus that is “significant enough to reduce their overall quality of life.”

Tinnitus strikes any age group, any walk of life, but some lifestyles contribute a higher risk to developing it than others. Professions that involve loud sounds, even music, are among them. Famous musicians who have talked about their tinnitus include Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, Al Di Meola, Liberty DeVitto, Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, and Phil Collins (Metallica’s Lars Ulrich Lives with Tinnitus).

Right now, there is no treatment for tinnitus and researchers are working to find what causes it. However, according to a new study, published in the most recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, music may help some people with the problem.

Thirty-nine patients with chronic tinnitus were divided into three groups. One group listened to modified music therapy, which involves their listening to their favorite music with certain notes removed. These notes matched the tones of the sounds they heard as a result of the tinnitus. The subjects in the other two groups either listened to  a dummy version of music therapy or received usual treatment.

The subjects who listened to the modified or dummy music, listened for an average of 12 hours per week for the length of the study (one year). The results showed that those who listened to the modified music reported that they had a significant improvement, drop, in the ringing in their ears than those who listened to the dummy music.

This was a small study and just a start, but if the results can be reproduced, this could be a boon to the many people who experience the annoying and sometimes debilitating problem.

~~~

Image: iStock.com

Post from: Blisstree

Music Therapy Promising for Tinnitus

We’ve been hoping that we could make a switch to the SB Nation family of blogs before the Rose Bowl on Friday night, and our wishes have been granted.

Officially, we’ll be moving to our new home sometime Wednesday.  This will not be much of an issue to you, our loyal readers, as the website’s address will be the exact same.  However, if you want to comment at our new site, you’ll need to sign up at SBNation.  You can wait until we launch and sign up directly through the BBC.

But this means a lot to us.  We’ll be able to do our Live Chat during the Rose Bowl from our new home, and we’re all excited about that.

Thanks again for your support and your love for all things Buckeye!

Jeff at The BBC

Chile, South America | Eccentric Homes

When searching for a coastal respite in Valparaíso, Pablo Neruda related the following specifications to his friend, Sara Vial,

“It may not be too high or too low. It must be solitary, but not in excess. I wish neighbors were invisible. I wish I did not see or hear them. Original but not uncomfortable. Very light, but firm. Neither too big nor too small, far from everything. But close to the stores. As well, it has to be very inexpensive. Do you think I can find a house like that in Valparaíso?”

Miraculously, “La Sebastiana” fit the vast majority of his requirements. Originally constructed by Spaniard Sebastián Collao, the structure brimmed with character. The third floor had been a birdhouse, the terrace had been created to serve as a heliport, and the house was capped by a tower. Windows with pristine views of the ocean and city resembled ships’ clerestories.

The one drawback: Neruda felt it was too large. After three years of finishing and quirkily furnishing the house, Neruda and his third wife, Matilde Urrutia, moved in with joint-owners and close friends Doctor Francisco Velasco and his wife. It was agreed that Neruda and Urrutia would occupy the top two floors and tower while Velasco and Martner would reside in the lower portion of the house. Neruda later joked that he had gotten the worse half of the bargain, “I bought nothing but stairs and terraces,” knowing full-well that these features afforded him a nearly 360-degree vista of the bay.

La Sebastiana served as the poet’s residence at the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda was so greatly inspired by his dwelling that he penned a poem in her honor,

I established the house.
First I made it from air.
Then I hung the flag in the air
and left it hanging
from the sky, from the star
from clarity and from darkness…

And so it remained until Neruda’s death. However, immediately following the military coup in 1973, La Sebastiana was ransacked in retaliation for Neruda’s outspoken support of the previous regime. Thanks to private and public funding the house was returned to its original condition and an interpretive center was created in the garden area, both of which opened to the public in 1991.

Further to this morning’s news, webOS 1.3.5 is now officially available for Sprint Palm users and the full changelog has been posted on Palm’s support pages (Pixi here, Pre here). No GSM or Bell love yet, so far as your correspondent can discern. Thanks to Palm’s use of a new compression method, it weighs in at a tiny 13mb and now has a new “unpacking” step when installing.

The most interesting fixes? Posted after the break, along with the Pre changelog.

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it’s the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December, ReadWriteWeb’s writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain popularity. Part of that prediction was informed by a recent interview with Metaio Marketing Director Lisa Murphy.

Sponsor

ReadWriteWeb first covered Metaio in early November when the company was set to release its editable consumer application Junaio. While products like Layar and Wikitude offer users a chance to view location-based notes and text, Junaio is the only service that offers non-coders the opportunity to edit images and text on multiple layers.

While Junaio is certainly its most popular product, the 6-year-old Munich-based company earns revenue by working with commercial clients like Lego, Popular and GM. Often described as “augmented reality marketing”, Metaio specializes in markerless tracking for advertising clients where a printed codes prompt a 3D webcam experience.

In the same way that consumers can generate their own QR codes via sites like Kaywa, is it possible that markerless AR tracking will one day yield a codeless creative experience? Honestly, it’s fine to hold up an Ikea catalogue and see a 3D sofa, but what good is a so-called immersive environment if the user is held captive in a passive consumer experience?

Says Murphy, “We chose to focus on the social aspects of Junaio by offering image sharing, oAuth and Facebook integration.” Nevertheless, she acknowledges that the company may open up the interface for further exploration. In keeping with its commitment to the social, we’re hoping Metaio finds ways to incorporate user-generated SketchUp creations in Junaio as well as an all-purpose AR tracking generator. In other words, rather than just interacting in an immersive environment, we’re hoping non-coders can contribute more than their eyeballs.

Discuss