Category: News

Chris O’Donnell alerts us to a post from someone who originally thought things like Trent Reznor’s massively successful Ghosts I-IV business model experiment was a good thing, but who is now worried about the eventual consequences of somehow segregating fans. The argument is that only a small group of true fans will buy these really high end offerings, that include certain things that other true fans will recognize, making them part of an elite tribe. The fear is that these tribes will exclude those who don’t pay up for the super duper deluxe versions.

It’s an interesting theory, but I don’t think there’s much to support it in reality. First of all, as a recent excellent Hypebot piece explained, true fan tribes are nothing new, nor is the fact that many will shun outsiders or newbies until they’ve really shown themselves worthy of acceptance. So I don’t see how this is particularly different. Also, a lot of these super deluxe packages aren’t necessarily about stuff you can “wear” that would be noticeable in gatherings. On the whole, it just doesn’t seem like that much of a problem. There will always be elitist fans and some will always snub less enthusiastic fans. I don’t see how that changes now that those more enthusiastic fans have more ways to support the artists they love.

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Small local businesses are different from enterprises and Internet startups. They may not have anyone to sit around working out their media buys. They may not want to splurge on ad creation. But they do want to advertise to potential buyers who are nearby.

iPromote, which already operates a Web-based local ad network for small businesses, has extended its reach onto mobile phones. For a minimum of $5 per day, iPromote will serve display ads — that means they’re not counting clickthroughs, they just show the ad and hope for the best — to mobile phones near an advertiser’s place of business.

CEO Michael Barr said in a prepared statement that this is “a major breakthrough for local businesses that can now access mobile advertising to directly reach new customers in their local area.” Mobile ads today are a small percentage of the online ad market, but no one seems to doubt that over the next few years, mobile ads are a guaranteed growth area. Especially if mobile ads prove more effective than outdoor advertising at getting shoppers to come in from the sidewalk.

Barr said it’s “a tremendous opportunity for iPromote.” No argument there. What we want to know is how tremendous.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got time to kill over Christmans, give iPromote’s automatic ad generator a spin. Punch a URL into the box on iPromote’s homepage, and it will mix images from that site with pictures from a stock photography database to create both Web and mobile display ads. (Remember, these are designed to get a brand name in front of consumers, not to get them to click.) You can edit the result, the premise being that it’s easier than starting from scratch. iPromote’s software put a ChaCha logo in place of ours, but we like the Guy From an Old Painting.

iPromote, headquartered in San Luis Obispo, California, was founded in 2003 and is privately funded. The company has an estimated 16 employees.

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Background checks are simultaneously one of the coolest and one of creepiest things you can do on your iPhone. Intelius made a splash at the most recent DEMO conference (co-produced by VentureBeat) with its DateCheck app, but users have to pay anywhere from $10 to $200 for each background check.

BeenVerified, on the other hand, released an app a few days ago providing three free checks per week. It sounds like iPhone owners are getting plenty of use out of that offer.

Since BeenVerified released its app on Dec. 18, the company says it has been downloaded and opened 54,423 times. It’s ranked 50 on the iTunes list of most popular free apps, and seems to be gaining steam, with 18,203 downloads yesterday, compared to 7,084 the day before. Those users have performed 110,829 background checks so far. (BeenVerified sent me those numbers at around 1:30 Pacific time today.)

The New York company’s data includes criminal records, property records, social network accounts, and more. You can check one of your iPhone contacts with just a click. But if you want more than three checks a week, you have to upgrade to BeenVerified’s premium service, which costs $8 per month.

BeenVerified launched its web-based background checks in September 2008. It has raised $800,000 in funding. Get the app here.

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Filed under: Budget, Hatchback, Fiat

Last month Fiat head Sergio Marchionne put Chrysler’s five-year plan on everyone’s plate to digest. This month he’s done the same with Fiat’s 2-year plan. One of the first items to come out is that the dinky Fiat 500 will get an even dinkier motor: the 0.9-liter, 2-cylinder turbocharged MultiAir gasoline engine.

Right now the smallest engine on offer in a 500 is the SOHC, inline 4-cylinder, 1.2-liter petrol with anywhere from 68 to 74 horsepower. The new unit will muster 65 horsepower in its naturally aspirated guise and 80 to 105 horsepower with the turbos on board. In addition to the reduced carbon dioxide output, the engine is lighter and more fuel efficient.

The news here isn’t the output – the base three-door Fiesta, for example, has a 68-hp, 1.3-liter engine in the UK, and the Peugeot 107 has a 1-liter, 68-hp lump described as “zippy” – it’s the size of the engine. While Ferrari tries to see how much power it can extract from a slightly smaller engine, Fiat, on the other hand, appears to want to see how small it can build an engine and still extract anything.

[Source: Carscoop]

2010 Fiat 500 first model to get company’s new 0.9-liter engine originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Holidays will no doubt bring many new Xbox 360 owners, so now is a good time for me to do a quick round up of some resources that can may help new those owners get the most of that new purchase.

Once you have your console connected it to your TV, be sure you are getting the best possible picture. This Xbox.com support article goes over the various types of connections that the Xbox 360 supports, and can help you get the best looking picture based on the cable you are using. The best tip I can offer you is if you are using a Component Cable (the one with red, green and blue video connecters) make sure the switch on the cable going into the Xbox 360 is set to HDTV. Again, read the support article and this can help you to make sure you’re getting the best picture possible based on the connection type you are using.

Once you are all set up, be sure to connect your console to your home network. This support article walks you through the options.

Now that you have the console online, you can sign up up for a free Xbox LIVE Gamertag. This will allow you free access to all the latest system updates, game demos, game add-ons, Arcade games and much more.

With your new Gamertag, you can now sign into Xbox.com and browse the Xbox LIVE Marketplace directly in your web browser. From here you can easily add items (like free demos) to your download queue. If your Xbox 360 is turned on, and signed into Xbox LIVE, your downloads will begin immediately. If not, the next time you turn it on the downloads will automatically begin. You can get more information on background downloads here.

If you need immediate Xbox 360 help, hit up my friends on the official Xbox support Twitter account. They’re just waiting for your @ replies!

For great family fun, gather everyone around the Xbox and play the special Holiday edition of 1 v 100 LIVE this Saturday, December 26th. It’s a free and fun way to see if that family know-it-all really knows all.

Here are some resources that new Xbox 360 owners may find helpful:

The Official Xbox 360 support site. Start here before going anywhere else.

The Xbox LIVE Marketplace on the web. Use your computer to browse the marketplace.

The Xbox forums. From game help and discussion to console questions, this is a good place to interact with members of the Xbox community.

If you want to hear from top game developers, as well as learn a little about what happens behind the scenes at Xbox, you should subscribe to my weekly audio podcast. (via iTunes or Zune.) It’s a fun way to learn about new games, things about the Xbox 360 you may not know and much more.

Finally, you may want to follow me on Twitter, where I often post about new demos and other items of interest for gamers.

Have fun with your Xbox 360 and I’ll see you online!

Edit: Read the comments for some good reader tips!

All of the editors at WMPoweruser.com wish to convey our season greetings to all our readers and their families. May your Christmas be filled with love, peace and many great gadgets

From the WMPoweruser.com team.

El futuro eléctrico del fabricante de deportivos italianos está todavía más cerca según la revista Quattroroute. El 599 GTB híbrido en el cual el consejero delegado de la marca, Amadeo Felisa, confirmó que estaban trabajando durante el pasado Salón del Automóvil de Frankfurt verá la luz en marzo en Ginebra. Este modelo montará un motor V12 acoplado a otro eléctrico situado cerca del eje trasero y alimentado por un paquete de baterías de ion-litio.

Como también se sabía por las declaraciones del presidente de Ferrari, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, el prototipo hará uso del famoso sistema KERS de recuperación de energía cinética que la marca ha estado probando en sus coches de Fórmula 1. La misión principal de todo el sistema eléctrico será la de reducir los consumos y emisiones de forma que Ferrari pueda cumplir con las próximas normativas anti-contaminación europeas.

Para conseguirlo, la ayuda del motor eléctrico y del sistema KERS permitirán proporcionar energía para funciones como la del arranque y parada del motor automáticos (Start&Stop), así como una dosis extra de potencia para las aceleraciones pero sin aumentar el gasto de combustible ni emitir más CO2. De hecho, los beneficios podrían llegar a traducirse en una reducción del 30% en el consumo urbano, pasando de 27 litros a los 100 kilómetros a 17.

Las baterías, por otra parte, aprovecharán la frenada regenerativa para recargar energías, del mismo modo que hacen los coches de Fórmula 1 de la marca. Por otro lado, aquellos que teman por la pérdida del carácter de Ferrari en los próximos modelos no deben preocuparse, puesto que Montezemolo ya confirmó en Frankfurt que cualquier producto híbrido será “fundamentalmente un Ferrari“.

Vía | Motor Authority

At our Realtime CrunchUp in November, Bazaar Labs showed off their iPhone application Flixup, which scans Twitter to create aggregate scores for movies. Tonight, just in time for the busy Christmas movie-going season, they’re launching the website for the service.

The website works just like the app. The main page shows the “Top Movies” based on the amount of talk on Twitter. For example, right now Avatar leads the pack by far. Flixup’s Buzz meter also shows if the talk about the movie is positive (green), neutral (yellow), or negative (red). Avatar is not only being talked about the most, but it’s also very clearly green, which is impressive (it’s definitely worth seeing if you missed our screening of last week).

And just like the iPhone app, Flixup works better if you sign in with your Twitter account (via OAuth). If you’re signed in, when you click on a movie title, you can see the conversations about the movie on Twitter that your contacts are having. You can also click to see all the conversations on Twitter about the movie. And you can rate the movie (on a 1 to 5 scale) or say if you’re interested in seeing it or not and tweet all that out with the click of a button.

On the individual movie pages you can also get additional details about the film and see its trailer. And Flixup features its Rotten Tomatoes score as well. This is appropriate since when the iPhone app was previewed, we called it the “Rotten Tomatoes for Twitter movie talk.”

You can find Flixup’s free iPhone application in the App Store here.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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The wait has been long, but now there’s finally a means by which to connect your dear, yet almost buttonless, iPhone or iPod touch to a Bluetooth keyboard for some more intense finger tapping action. The project that delivered us this teasing video back in February has at long last reached the application stage, where simple commoners like us can use it to synergize our gear — provided we’ve had the wherewithal to free it from Cupertino’s overbearing clutches first. The BTstack Keyboard app is now available in exchange for $5 at the Cydia store, so if you want to be the first to write a bestseller on his or her iDevice, there’s no time like the present.

Want to connect your iPhone and Bluetooth keyboard? There’s a (jailbroken) app for that originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Budget, Hatchback, Fiat

Last month Fiat head Sergio Marchionne put Chrysler‘s five-year plan on everyone’s plate to digest. This month he’s done the same with Fiat’s 2-year plan. One of the first items to come out is that the dinky Fiat 500 will get an even dinkier motor: the 0.9-liter, 2-cylinder turbocharged MultiAir gasoline engine.

Right now the smallest engine on offer in a 500 is the SOHC, inline 4-cylinder, 1.2-liter petrol with anywhere from 68 to 74 horsepower. The new unit will muster 65 horsepower in its naturally aspirated guise and 80 to 105 horsepower with the turbos on board. In addition to the reduced carbon dioxide output, the engine is lighter and more fuel efficient.

The news here isn’t the output – the base three-door Fiesta, for example, has a 68-hp, 1.3-liter engine in the UK, and the Peugeot 107 has a 1-liter, 68-hp lump described as “zippy” – it’s the size of the engine. While Ferrari tries to see how much power it can extract from a slightly smaller engine, Fiat, on the other hand, appears to want to see how small it can build an engine and still extract anything.

[Source: Carscoop]

2010 Fiat 500 first model to get company’s new 0.9-liter engine originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hi, Jack. Have you ever heard about the role lutein, found in highest amounts in kale and spinach, plays in vision or eye health? I just watched a video (it’s 23, second from bottom on p.1) by Robyn Openshaw (the self-named Green Smoothie Girl) and she claims that she had really bad eyesight in college. Since then she’s had two to three handfuls of raw spinach a day (in smoothies) and she says that now her eyesight is 20/15. On another site, it says you’re supposed to cook the greens to release the lutein, so now I don’t know what to think.

Robyn Openshaw is misinformed about vitamin B12, saying in Part 2 of her GSG-SMOOTHIE 2.0 video that you can get it from brewer’s yeast, aloe vera, or a steak once every three years. Whether green smoothies improved her eyesight, I really have no idea. If they did, it could be any number of things in them, not just lutein.

All that said…Yes, lutein is thought to be good for protecting the eyes. I did a little research to see if lutein is better absorbed from cooked or uncooked spinach and it appears to be better absorbed from cooked, though the difference is not great according to this abstract.

It also appears that luetin is fat-soluble which should mean that eating some fat with foods high in lutein would increase its absorption. Fat soluble molecules are often better absorbed when cooked, but the one abstract above, the best one I could find, indicated that this is not the case for lutein.

Tell us. We want to know. I, for one, got nothing. Just beer. But it was an amazing beer called Stiegle.

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There are a lot of Christmas classics, many of which are now but a click away, in a cavalcade of online video clips available from movies and television.

While I style myself as a Scrooge, each and every one gets to me right where it counts–most especially the first I posted below: Judy Garland at the peak of her promise, singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the movie, “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

Every time I hear it, all is right with Judy and with the world

Which it wasn’t and it’s not, but the clip will make you believe it for a moment.

So, have yourself a Merry little Festivus now, and enjoy four others too:

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

“It’s a Wonderful Life” (colorized version, last scenes)

“How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (not the Jim Carrey horror show):

“The Brady Bunch” (Christmas minisode)

“Seinfeld” (”Festivus” episode)

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Our fellow Internet freedom advocates at Electronic Frontiers Australia are gearing up for an important fight in the new year as the Australian government proposes mandatory national Internet filters with a secret blacklist. EFA is looking for volunteers and colleagues — particularly Australians, but they can use help from outside Australia as well — to help take on this critical issue. As Lelia Green wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald, the censorship proposal risks “legitimating a range of repressive policies pursued by some of the globe’s least accountable governments.”

In 2006, the New York Times reported that the People’s Republic of China was defending its Internet censorship and surveillance practices by claiming that they were not particularly different from those of other countries. The Times reported that a Chinese official argued (in the newspaper’s paraphrase) that “the controls [China] places on Web sites and Internet service providers in mainland China do not differ much from those employed by the United States and European countries”.

“If you study the main international practices in this regard you will find that China is basically in compliance with the international norm,” [Liu Zhengrong] said. “The main purposes and methods of implementing our laws are basically the same.”

[…]

“It is clear that any country’s legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information,” he said. “We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front.”

This argument sounded like a weak rationalization in 2006, and the Times noted various qualitative differences between Internet restrictions in the PRC and those in liberal democracies. But researchers have told us that governments around the world, including Australia’s, seem eager to chip away at those differences. The forthcoming book Access Controlled from the OpenNet Initiative, according to its authors, reports on an alarming trend where “Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states.” The OpenNet Initiative researchers have also noted that governments are increasingly looking to other countries’ practices as precedents. Soon illiberal regimes’ claims that Internet censorship and national firewalls are a widespread international norm could ring less hollow. Some year soon, it may be sober fact rather than rationalization.

EFA’s fight against Internet censorship in Australia is crucial. We hope Internet users around the world will join it.

Background checks are simultaneously one of the coolest and one of creepiest things you can do on your iPhone. Intelius made a splash at the most recent DEMO conference (co-produced by VentureBeat) with its DateCheck app, but users have to pay anywhere from $10 to $200 for each background check.

BeenVerified, on the other hand, released an app a few days ago providing three free checks per week. It sounds like iPhone owners are getting plenty of use out of that offer.

Since BeenVerified released its app on Dec. 18, the company says it has been downloaded and opened 54,423 times. It’s ranked 51 on the iTunes list of most popular free apps, and ti seems to be gaining steam, with 18,203 downloads yesterday, compared to 7,084 the day before. Those users have performed 110,829 background checks so far. (BeenVerified sent me those numbers at around 1:30 Pacific time today.)

The New York company’s data includes criminal records, property records, social network accounts, and more. You can check one of your iPhone contacts with just a click. But if you want more than three checks a week, you have to upgrade to BeenVerified’s premium service, which costs $8 per month.

BeenVerified launched its web-based background checks in September 2008. It has raised $800,000 in funding. Get the app here.

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I’m a lucky guy. Doing what I do, it feels like every day is Christmas morning because gadgets are arriving all the time. OK, Santa doesn’t exactly deliver them — either that, or he sub-contracts to FedEx and UPS, but you get my point. Between evaluation devices and the best gadgets I purchased throughout the year, Christmas itself doesn’t usually bring me any new toys. Since I’m in the minority, I ask you: what gadgets are you hoping that Santa puts under your tree tonight? No, no… mythical products such as Apple Tablets don’t quite count.

Drop a comment with what you hope to see under the tree upon waking up tomorrow. Who knows — if you leave your wishlist early enough, you just might leave someone a little extra time to find what you’re looking for! We’ll check in tomorrow morning and see what gadget goodies everyone got. For now, I wish you all a happy holiday and hope you get every gadget on your list. Thanks too for all of the super community spirit and support that you all bring to the site. Peace!

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Retro Mac, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

The creators of Commodore 64, that emulator app that eventually gained Apple’s blessing, emailed to say that they have released a brand new version [iTunes link] with some brand new (old) C64 games to revisit. The gist of this one is that you can buy C64 ROMs to play through in-app purchases, but right out of the gate with version 1.2, three different games are free: Bruce Lee, Laser Squad, and Samurai Warrior. So if any of those ring your nostalgic bell, you can go jump in on the app now — it’s $1.99.

If you want to add in some extra games, it’ll cost you 99 cents each, but they’ve now made Alleykat, Uridium, Paradroid, Stormlord and Nebulus all available that way. Unfortunately, not all emulator developers have been able to secure such a deal with Apple, but C64 enthusiasts have to be excited about what’s available with this one.

TUAWCommodore 64 1.2 released in the App Store with three new free games originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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