Category: News

Merry Christmas, folks! If we were to put together a list of the things that Palm fanatics like all of you wanted for Christmas, more apps would be on just about everybody’s list. The good people at Palm know that and spent Christmas Eve pumping more apps into the App Catalog, with several new ones landing on our doorsteps. And as per usual, we’ve got the list for you, and it’s after the break.

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Tall, dark and handsome, and oh so fine!! These men embody many women’s definition of sexy.  Here are some of the finest men from the continent.

Great looks, great bodies, and a strong sense of determination and passion to make a difference in the lives of those around them.  We had a hard time choosing the sexiest ones so we put them all there for you to enjoy in random order.  Pick your sexiest man.  Who would you make number one?

Jamati Online has been running an annual highlight of some of the sexiest African women around the world today.  Each year it gets harder to pick a handful from the large numbers that are out there. Our focus this year is on women who are either making a difference through the careers that they have chosen, or are using their fame and fortune as a platform to highlight the plight of others and help garner support for them.

These women are not set up in any particular order.  They are beautiful, strong, and African and we are proud to claim them all. Tell us who you think should be number one.

Back in the fall, we told you about NYC’s BigApps competition, which encouraged technological innovation to benefit government and civic engagement. Public voting for the submitted applications opened this week.

One of the submissions to come out of this competition is Blocks and Lots, an interesting app and API that essentially expose all the property records – more than 5 million records, total – for New York City. For site owners, there’s a customizable widget that can be embedded in just about any kind of site.

Sponsor

Blocks and Lots’ API allows developers to integrate detailed property information into any web or mobile application. Sample code is available in PHP and JavaScript.

Blocks and Lots comes from BlankSlate, an NYC startup offering a web platform and set of read/write APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web apps. The company provides capabilities such as data, file, user and payment management through REST APIs.

Using the same platform, BlankSlate was able to gather the city’s data files from 45 file sources from three different city agencies, import them and instantly export APIs. This process took just a few days.

For example, you can use the Blocks and Lots widget to dig into the property valuation for Ellis Island, which is apparently worth about as much as Zynga these days.

In the near future, Blocks and Lots will add location-aware iPhone and Android apps (i.e., the user’s mobile device will automatically retrieve property data depending on where the user it), and enabling the writable APIs to add user-generated content to the city’s data (e.g., photos, documents or text).

To vote for Blocks and Lots – or any of the other apps submitted in the BigApps competition – check out the app gallery and voting rules.

Discuss

My family laughed at me for wearing this shirt with my Santa Claus hat, but I’m just waiting on the tricks to begin tonight when the senate votes on health care reform. Maybe I’ll get my third Christmas wish list item or maybe there will be more tricks up the elephant’s sleeves. I guess I’ll find out sometime tonight. Anyway, to ChicagoNow readers, happy holidays to you and yours!

 

Updated 1/2/2010: I finally got a chance to read about the health care bill in full. Originally I found this article on The Chicago Tribune‘s site, but I can’t locate it anymore. Here is the same article on Yahoo News “A comparison of House, Senate health care bills” by Erica Werner and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar if you want to know what the new health care bill brings us in 2014. I am definitely pleased with the results.

Here’s hoping that the December holiday season (Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, Solstice, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, Festivus) renews your sense of wonder for a whole year to come. Postings to Cosmic Log will resume on Monday. In the meantime, here are some Web links to see you through the long weekend:

Wondering about the ‘Star of Wonder’
Telegraph: Angels can’t fly, scientist says
Planetary Society: Happy Christmas on Mars!
AIR: Our shrinking solar system and ‘Horton Sees a Pluto’ …(read more)

Merry, Happy and Joy, everyone! 2009 was a wonderful year in The Kitchn. I was so happy and inspired to be in the company of my fellow bloggers. Each week offered an opportunity to discover, explore and conjure up new tastes, handy tips and useful tools. Here are a few of my favorite posts.

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Someone anonymously submitted a decent writeup by John A. Byrne, the former editor-in-chief at Business Week who recently left (amid the shakeup due to Bloomberg buying the magazine) to start a new media effort called C-Change Media. In this blog post, Byrne argues that the media complaining about Google sending them traffic is biting the hand that feeds them. There’s really not much new in the writeup, which runs over the same ground we’ve covered for a few years now, but it’s a nice succinct summary of the situation:

Rupert Murdoch’s protestations aside, there is no doubt that Google is driving vast amounts of traffic to websites run by traditional media companies. In recent years, most of BusinessWeek.com’s growth came from search optimization and direct traffic. Up until only three years ago, the number one referring domain at BusinessWeek was always a portal until Google’s popularity replaced Yahoo Finance and MSN Money as the top referrer. Search–largely Google–now accounts for some 45% of the traffic at BW.com, up from less than 20% in 2006. That simple little box is driving vast amounts of advertising inventory (and therefore revenue) to the site. It’s a similar story everywhere else.

In the war between the traditional media brands and Google, the old cliche about biting the hand that feeds you is certainly in play. Some of the complaints from media can be attributed to sour grapes. Many incumbents resent that most efforts to find information on the Web no longer starts with a brand. It starts with Google which is largely brand agnostic. So, in effect, Google has become this massive transaction machine, and as everyone knows, transactions are the antithesis of relationships. If a brand wants a relationship with its audience, Google is getting in the way. It’s how Google was able to siphon nearly $22 billion last year in advertising from traditional media. And it’s the most obvious proof that media brands have diminished in value. People are more routinely turning to Google to get information, rather than a brand known for its expertise in a given area. They’ll google (yes, I’m using Google as a verb) leadership before going to The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, BusinessWeek, or Harvard Business Review. They’ll google President Clinton before going to The New York Times, Time, or Newsweek. Why? Because they trust Google to serve up unbiased results; because they want to see what is generally available out there and not tied to a brand, and because most brands no longer wield the power and influence they did years ago.

Instead of complaining about this and threatening to block Google from crawling a site, media companies would do well to step back and more fully understand what they really need to do: rebuild the relationships they have with their readers, viewers, users. To offset the massive transaction machine that Google is, media brands need to focus on restoring relationships with users. That’s why “user engagement” is not an idle phrase to throw around but is essential to making a brand successful online. Original content isn’t enough. Gee-whiz tech tricks aren’t enough. Neither is a fancy design or a search trap gimmick. You need an audience that is deeply and meaningfully engaged in the content of a site, so engaged in fact that many of those users become collaborators, and that requires tremendous amounts of work and editorial involvement with the audience.

Indeed. It’s the point we’ve been trying to make for ages. Newspapers were always in the community building business. They would bring together a community of folks and then sell their attention to advertisers. That was the business. But they thought they were in the news delivery business, and that’s confusing them — leading them to do things that are anti-community and anti-relationship (registration walls, paywalls, etc.) that actually harm the value of the community and limit that. Thus, people are going elsewhere for community — whether it’s other media publications or social network sites — and newspapers are lashing out at the wrong party: the one who sends them traffic.

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We need a better American citizen.

Found under: Sprint, WiMAX, Windows Mobile, ,

Its not just Verizon that seems to be working hard on 4G technology. Sprint is also pushing its own 4G version and it looks like the company is ready for a big announcement next year. On January 6 right after the Google Nexus One phone should be revealed Sprint will also launch a hot phone. The company has a must-attend event scheduled for CES in which Dan Hesse and Steve Ballmer will launch a very hot device. The phone possibly manufactured by LG should be Sprints first W

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We hate to be the bringers of bad news, but it looks like the Archos 9 might be serving as a bit of a morality tale, showing why and how PC hardware and software might not be quite ready for the large form factor tablet experience. That’s not to say there aren’t some plusses to the device pointed out by UMPC Portal in its review, like the great build quality and style of the tablet, the sensitive, flush touchscreen, and some great connectivity, but the sum seems less than its parts. The primary blame can be laid at the feet of the 1.1GHz Atom Z510 processor, which is sluggish and single-threaded, and Windows 7 Starter, which is lacking in the standard Windows 7 tablet functionality. We don’t know all the reasoning at play here, but the result is a slow computer with a hacked-on touchscreen keyboard at a $550 pricepoint that doesn’t the hit handheld UMPC size sweetspot and can hardly stand against a netbook in cost or utility. Sounds kind of mean when we say it like that, doesn’t it?

Archos 9 reviewed: too big, too slow, too ‘Starter’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Found under: Verizon, LTE, 4G, ,

One of the most important Verizon Wireless plans for 2010 is LTE. The new 4G network should bring consumers better download and upload speeds and Big Red will want to launch it in as many markets as possible next year. And it looks like Verizon means serious business when it comes to LTE. The company has scheduled a webcast event for January 20 2010 at 1100 AM ET which should give you more details about the upcoming 4G wireless devices. Verizons future LTE handsets will use th

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A map prepared for Michigan’s Great  Lakes Offshore Wind Council shows areas of high wind power production potential in the state’s offshore waters.

One of the first proposals for a major offshore wind project in America’s freshwater has surprised Michigan regulators and begun to stir opposition from onshore property owners. But the company behind the proposal says it has the potential to help right Michigan’s struggling economy with new jobs and leadership in wind energy development.

First disclosed last month, the Scandia Wind proposal to install 100 to 200 wind turbines two to four miles offshore in Lake Michigan for a 1,000-megawatt project comes after a September report by the state’s Great Lakes Wind Council.  That report outlined high potential areas in the state’s Great Lakes for wind power, while recommending turbines be placed as least six miles offshore.

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Found under: Google, Nexus One, Android,

Googles own Android phone the Nexus One is going to be available on January 5 on an invitation basis. In other words Google will decide who can play with the phone early next year while T-Mobile will start selling the device at some point later on.In the mean time we have all the specs as they have been conveniently leaked right before Christmas. So check them out folks and decide for yourselves if the Nexus One is worth buying 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED screenHSPA 900170021

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If your family is anything like mine, your holiday traditions include a moment when the presents are unwrapped, the Tofurky (hey, it’s my family) is eaten, and everyone drives to the theater to a catch a movie. But how will you decide what to watch?

Well, if you want to see which movies the masses are talking up on Twitter, or what your friends are recommending, you should check out a new site called FlixUp. The team is putting the final touches on the site, and it should go live either tonight or tomorrow morning. (I’ll update the post once it’s available.)

Bazaar Labs, the San Francisco startup that created FlixUp, started out by releasing an iPhone app earlier this month. The company compares its website and app to Rotten Tomatoes, the site that aggregates (mostly professional) movie reviews. There are other review aggregators out there (I’m a big fan of Metacritic), and those sites often include a place for users to post their own reviews. What’s missing however, is a site that measures the general population, or at least a sizable subset, not just select critics.

That’s where FlixUp comes in — it pulls in movie-related comments from Twitter, then calculates both how “hot” a movie is (basically, how many people are tweeting about it) and whether those comments are positive or negative. For example, I see there’s a thermometer showing that the movie Avatar is getting the most buzz right now. The thermometer is green and is adorned with a happy face, so I know that most of the comments are positive. Meanwhile, New Moon comes in second when it comes to buzz, but the thermometer is yellow, so the comments are more mixed.

You can also bring up the actual tweets about each movie. Of course, you could do this via a search within Twitter itself, but FlixUp says it uses an algorithm called the “Twitter Noise Assassin” to focus on higher quality, useful comments. And you can limit yourself to what your friends are saying about the movie, which strikes me as particularly useful. I’m usually curious about what people I know think about new movies, but if I’m not checking Twitter right after they make a comment, there’s a good chance I’ll never see it. You can also post your own comments to Twitter directly from FlixUp.

The website doesn’t really offer a ton of new features compared to the mobile app, but it’s important nonetheless, since it makes the app available to non-iPhone users. Bazaar Labs plans to add more social data soon, like updates from Facebook and MySpace. It also plans to release apps for topics other than movies.

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BlackBerry users are still fuming over the near-total collapse of e-mail this week, and the impact on manufacturer Research In Motion could last a lot longer than a New Year’s Day hangover. Users got an early piece of coal in their stockings Tuesday when many BlackBerry smartphones — now deemed “Crashberries” by some wags — stopped sending and receiving e-mails.

BoxTone, a mobility management software provider, said the outage started between 3 and 4 p.m. Tuesday and reached a critical state by 7 p.m. “At each of our customers, BoxTone detected a greater-than-normal quantity of users with messages pending, based on our learned baseline of what is normal for each server and carrier, and immediately generated a warning alert to our customers before the flood of user calls,” the company said.

On Wednesday, RIM released a status update, explaining the outage and apologizing to users. The problem appeared to be a software glitch in new versions of BlackBerry Messenger. Users are advised to download the latest version, 5.0.0.57, which solves those problems.

A Security Threat?

“A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas,” RIM’s statement said. “Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure.”

BlackBerry users weren’t mollified by the announcement, judging from angry comments on the popular Crackberry blog. In a post entitled “WOW … just WOW,” one user wrote, “BBM causes a system-wide crash?!?! Glad RIM isn’t responsible for y’know, security or Wall Street or something.”

Indeed, a major outage on the eve of Christmas…

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