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In this T2 remix, Skynet Symphonic, John Connor saves the world to a hypnotic dance beat largely composed from cinematic sounds. And on an a slightly related note, Linda Hamilton could kick Arnold’s butt any day. [reddit]

Celebutante Tila Tequila has sent out at least 160 tweets since the death of her fiancee, Johnson & Johnson heiress Casey Johnson, last week. While the reality starlet has fallen under fire for appearing more like an attention-seeking leech than a grieving widow, Tila says she’s turned to social networking and paparazzi photo-ops to deal with her grief because she has no one to talk to.

“Why do I tweet so much? Even BEFORE Casey passed away? BECAUSE I HAVE NO FRIENDS! THERE! THE TRUTH COMES OUT! Just pray 4 her please!” she posted on her Twitter account over the weekend, The Huffington Post reports. “PPL say I need 2 get off twitter & grieve with friends & family…WHERE? I DONT HAVE ANY! Casey was my only family & my Dogs! Worst day ever,” she added.

She has no family? Wait, didn’t Tila make a public announcement just last month claiming that she’s elected to be a surrogate for her childless brother and his sister-in-law?

The petite former MySpace pin-up has spent the better part of a week slamming her so-called “haters” in bitter Tweets and postings across the blogosphere. Her targets have included Casey’s childhood friends, Nicky Hilton and Bijou Phillips, who called in a police escort to retrieve the socialite’s two dogs from Tequila’s care last week.

Tequila told her followers the dogs were going to be euthanized, a claim Nicky and Bijou deny. Tequila has also criticized the Johnson family for torpedoing her now-axed appearance on Larry King Live.

Boston, MA (Vocus) January 12, 2010 — The Jenzabar Foundation today announced that it has opened the nomination process for its third annual Student Leadership Awards. The awards will honor ten student-led campus groups or activities that have made a significant impact beyond their own higher education institutions serving others.

»Read the full press release at International Business Times

The following Xbox 360 games are now ready for direct download from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace:

Content: GRAW 2
Price: Check pricing for your region
Availability: All regions Japan
Dash Text: (Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB) This game supports English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Download the manual for this game by locating the game on http://marketplace.xbox.com and selecting “See Game Manual". You are the Soldier of the Future 2.0. All systems have been upgraded to give you more power and control on the battlefield. Lead your team of elite Special Forces for the first time on US soil. You are the last line of defense and must do what it takes to be victorious. There are no refunds for this item. For more information, see www.xbox.com/live/accounts.

Add GRAW 2 to your Xbox 360 download queue

Content: Kane and Lynch: Dead Men
Price: Check pricing for your region
Availability: Not available in Korea and United States
Dash Text: This game supports English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. Download the manual for this game by locating the game on http://marketplace.xbox.com and selecting “See Game Manual". A flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath forced together on a violent and chaotic path seeking redemption and revenge. There are no refunds for this item. For more information, see www.xbox.com/live/accounts.

Add Kane and Lynch: Dead Men to your Xbox 360 download queue

Also, Xbox LIVE members in Japan, can now purchase Raiden4/雷電Ⅳ

With the launch of the Nexus One, the future of mobile gaming on Android looks bright.  Sporting a 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm that has on-chip graphical capabilities, the Nexus One is packing some promising 3D potential.  Future Android phones are likely to match or upgrade the speed to compete with HTC’s newest phone. In addition, the 3.7 inch OLED screen is very nice and has incredible contrast ratios.  Furthermore, it has about 25% greater pixel density than Sony’s beautiful 11-inch 1080p OLED screen.

On the other hand, one of Android’s advantages, namely backgrounding apps, could come to the rescue.  We’re starting to see hardware accessories for the iPhone go hand-in-hand with a software package on the device, but this only works when that app is open.  On Android, we might see third-party accessories that hook into games via a backgrounding “connector” app.  If a company like MadCatz made a slick controller that went along with an API to control games, and that became an industry standard, it could give Android gaming a major edge.

Ultimately, I think the direction Android is going will attract some great games.  It’s a powerful platform, and the upcoming devices are, as Google coined, “superphones.”  There’s a problem with the fractured versions of hardware and Android revisions, but if the market is fertile enough, developers will bite the bullet.

Source: MediaPost

Please allow us to introduce ourselves…

We’re two PhD students in Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley. Back in March of aught-nine, we started a little blog called “NCBI ROFL” in which we posted real scientific articles with funny subjects from the PubMed database (which is housed by the National Center for Biotechnology information, aka NCBI).

Initially, our fans were mostly grad students. But over time, our following grew, and now we are happy to be joining the Discoblog family. If you’re not familiar with us, here are a few of our most-loved posts:

Accidental condom inhalation.

Does garlic protect against vampires? An experimental study.

Finding the frequency of Fido’s farts.

Harry Potter and the curse of headache.

A woman’s history of vaginal orgasm is discernible from her walk.

Hungry for more? Explore our post archives. And for even more info, check out or FAQs.

We’re still accepting submissions! Please email [email protected] with funny articles!

Two of the biggest trends we tracked last year were Mobile Web and Internet of Things. In a new series on ReadWriteWeb, which we’re calling Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things, we’ll explore how these two important trends are converging and look at some cutting edge example products. We start with barcode scanning…

Internet of Things is when everyday objects become connected to the Internet, via technologies such as RFID tags, sensors and barcodes. One trend we saw expanding in 2008-09 was mobile phones being deployed as readers for barcodes.

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Increasingly, smartphones such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices offer applications that allow you to scan a barcode on a product or object and get more information about it.

The Technology

Barcodes are similar to RFID tags, in that they both hold data. RFID tags are generally more functional and flexible than barcodes. Also RFID tags can be read/write, whereas barcodes cannot. However the big advantage for barcodes is that they’re cheaper, therefore we’re more likely to see scanning as a consumer activity ramp up in the U.S. via barcodes.

The most popular form of 2D barcode is the QR Code (the QR stands for "Quick Response"), which became popular in Japan and is now gaining traction in the U.S. and other markets.

The Products

In a series of posts written over September 2008, Sarah Perez analyzed the then burgeoning "scannable world." As Sarah explained, barcode scanning is not a new technology on the Web. One of the first examples was :CueCat, a cat-shaped barcode reader from the late 1990s. It linked a user to a website by scanning a barcode in an article or other printed matter. CueCat never took off because it required a separate piece of hardware, but now in 2010 smartphones are the hardware.

There’s also no shortage of software circa 2010, such as ScanLife and the NeoReader app described in Part 2 of Sarah’s Scannable World series. Other barcode reading apps are listed in Part 3 of that series.

There are a variety of use cases for barcodes on the Web. They include Semapedia.org (a non-profit project that aims to augment the physical world with Wikipedia data), QRContact (contact management via barcodes), and barcode wearables such as p8tch ("Think of it as a TinyURL you can wear"). But none of these is likely to become widely used in the mainstream, at least in the near future.

What Will be The Tipping Point?

In Japan, barcode scanning is already a popular activity thanks to the culture of using mobile phones for just about everything. In the U.S., where the Mobile Web took longer to ramp up, barcodes are yet to catch on. However there’s one market where barcode scanning could become a mainstream activity in the U.S. and other countries. No, not magazine publishing – although there are valid advertising use cases there. We’re talking about scanning retail products using your mobile phone.

By the end of 2009, a lot of barcode scanning apps had gained popularity in the iPhone and Android, in particular. In November we listed our picks for scanning and other mobile shopping apps to test over Black Friday.

There is no clear winner yet in the shopping barcodes market, but here are some applications you may want to try:

• RedLaser (iPhone app getting rave reviews)
• ShopSavvy (popular on Android)
• The Amazon Mobile app; see also SnapTell, owned by Amazon
• StoreXperience
• CardStar
• pic2shop
• Point Inside (good review on CNET)
• CompareEverywhere (Android)
• ZXing Barcode Reader (Android)

Thanks to followers of @rww on Twitter, who suggested some of those.

Will Consumers Adopt Barcode Scanning?

As well as adoption by retailers, another big question is: will consumers want to interact with real world products using their mobile phones? I suspect they will, once they begin to see compelling reasons for doing so – which will probably involve getting the best deals and being able to do advanced shopping comparison very easily.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Google is active in barcodes. Google’s Favorite Places program allows local businesses to put a sticker on their products which features Google’s logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading “We’re a favorite place on Google.”

Barcode scanning and its applications will grow during 2010, meaning more and more real world data will be connected to the Internet and accessed on your mobile phone. There are many apps trying to entice consumers to wave their mobile phone in front of products, so let us know your favorites in the comments.

Image credits: clevercupcakes; Stan; ScanLife

Discuss

Square Enix isn’t gonna let that bad review (qjnet/news/hong-kong-mag-rates-final-fantasy-xiii-4/10-biggest-swindle-in-history.html) get its sails down, at least not before Final Fantasy XIII hits the United States. To bring some (positive) hype for the game, a Final Fantasy XIII tour

Ed Whitacre is confident that the government made a wise investment when it decided sink money into GM and that American taxpayers will see a profit off of their investment, and sooner rather than later. He believes this so much so that he even made a promise to Nancy Pelosi to the same effect. The company promises to have a $6.7 billion loan paid back by June, but the company will have to go public in order for taxpayers to see a profit; the government holds a 61% stock in the company. The market value of GM would have to reach $67 billion for the public to recoup any investment.

Steven Rattner, former head of the Treasury’s auto task force, said that GM has progressed to such a point where a full return is vary likely possibility, but the amount of the return lies largely on how long the Treasury decides to hold the stock before selling.

Many believe that things in the American auto industry are looking up. Erich Merkle, president of automotive analytics firm Autoconomy, also mention that even if the investments in GM and Chrysler do not turn a profit, they were a good idea, as they helped deter economic catastrophe.

-By: Stephen Calogera

Source: CNN

Startup PBWorks, which was formally known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has steadily added innovative, real-time features to its platform, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging and tapping into the real-time stream. Today, the startup is launching a PBworks “Template Store” that lets users adopt pre-built apps and workspaces that anyone can distribute.

With over 25 different apps, the template app store will include PBWorks forms and community-generated templates. Companies can create, share, and apply workspace templates to solve specific business problems or manage specific industries, including advertising and PR. PBWorks offers apid and free templates.

PBWorks, which had an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses with a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. With a real-time makeover, the platform became more attractive. So if a user is editing a page and realizes that he or she needs the input of other team members, the user can request fellow employees to join the appropriate page using IM Collaboration, start a Live Editing session, and use Voice Collaboration to initiate an instant conference call.

Currently, PBworks manages 50,000 wiki groups with over 3 million users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams at over a third of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University.

Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext.

And of course, we can draw comparisons to Google Wave, Google’s much-hyped new collaboration platform.

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

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According to just released Dow Jones LP Source figures, U.S. private equity fund-raising closed out its worst year for fundraising since 2003, with 331 funds raising a mere $95.8 billion in 2009. That’s down 68% from the $299.9 billion raised by 508 funds in 2008.

Zooming in on the past quarter (Q4 2009), Dow Jones LP Source figures show PE firms raised $20.5 billion in 75 funds, down 80% from the $102.7 billion raised by 188 funds in the fourth quarter of 2008.

Jennifer Rossa, managing editor of Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst, isn’t overly optimistic for 2010 either, and says we’ll not be seeing a return to levels seen before the economic downturn even though limited partners are likely to become more active this year.

Leveraged buyout and corporate finance funds raised just $53.7 billion across 133 funds last year, a 73% drop from the $195.5 billion raised by 204 funds in 2008. Despite that drop, it remains the biggest slice of the capital pie. Mega funds (funds of $6 billion or more) had most difficulty raising capital in 2009. Six mega funds raised $14 billion, but more than half of the year’s total for mega funds was raised by a single firm, Hellman & Friedman, which raised $8.8 billion for its seventh fund last year.

One silver lining in the report: the secondary market was the only subsector of private equity to turn in a strong performance, collecting $17.5 billion in 2009, up 83% from 2008 and a new record.

It wasn’t a stellar year for venture capital either, as you may have heard. Still, Dow Jones LP Source says, VC firms did not have as difficult a year as buyout firms. Venture fund-raising fell 55% to $13 billion across 120 funds from the $28.7 billion collected by 204 funds in 2008. In the fourth quarter, 21 funds raised $4.4 billion, a 56% drop from the same period last year. We’ve spotted an increase in VC funding deals in Q4 2009 based on CrunchBase data as well.

A few of the big winners in 2009 were New Enterprise Associates, which raised $1.2 billion, taking the total amount raised to date for the firm’s 13th fund to $2.5 billion, and Norwest Venture Partners which closed its 11th fund in the fourth quarter after raising $1.2 billion. Outside of Hellman & Friedman’s mega fund and Goldman Sachs Private Equity Group’s secondary fund ($5.5 billion), the fund that closed on the most capital last year was TA Associates’ eleventh fund, collecting $3.5 billion for its $4 billion fund in 2009.

(Image via Flickr / Oxfam International)

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

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Most online publishers are at least vaguely familiar with affiliate programs, which can help them generate revenue from the stores and products they link to. Unfortunately, actually managing accounts with these programs can be a bit of a pain, and many people simply forget to use them. VigLink is a new startup that’s looking to help by automatically inserting affiliate links whenever you link to a product from your site. The company has just disclosed a $800K funding round it raised last summer that was led by First Round Capital and Google Ventures, with a number of angel investors including Reid Hoffman, Dipchand Nishar, Niel Robertson, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Carlos Cashman, and Micah Adler.

For those that aren’t familiar with them, affiliate programs are often offered by online retailers who pay you a commission to drive traffic (and purchases) to their webstore. Amazon is best known for their program, but many other businesses now feature them as well. VigLink looks to help you use as many as these programs as you’d like with a minimal amount of effort. The site is currently in a private beta, but plans to launch publicly in the next few months.

To start using VigLink, publishers simply drop a snippet of JavaScript into their pages. Then, whenever the publisher links to a valid product (say, some shoes on Amazon), VigLink will automatically convert that standard link into an affiliate link. The publisher still determines which stores and products they’re linking to — VigLink simply modifies that link to include the proper affiliate program URL.

VigLink further streamlines the process by maintaining its own account with these affiliate programs, and any publishers using VigLink are housed under these accounts. This makes it relatively easy for a publisher to get started (they don’t have to sign up for anything other than their initial VigLink account). But I’m not sure it’s a foolproof setup: if one publisher using VigLink starts behaving badly, there’s a chance that the affiliate program being abused will ban the entire VigLink account, which would affect all publishers using it.

CEO Oliver Roupe says that the company is being as transparent as possible with affiliate programs to make sure that doesn’t happen. He also says that VigLink has a system that constantly monitors its publisher sites for spam, even long after they’ve signed up for the service (he likens it to the system Google’s AdSense uses).

VigLink generates revenue by taking a percentage of the affiliate fees it generates (the company hasn’t settled on an exact amount yet). Roupe wouldn’t comment on any features that are in planning stages, but I suspect that they’ll eventually help publishers monetize by suggesting when they should insert affiliate links at logical places in their blog posts (say, when they mention a product). Likewise, VigLink could potentially offer a feature that would poll all of the affiliate programs in its system before inserting an affiliate link to determine which one would generate the most money for the publisher.

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

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Filed under: Concept Cars, Detroit Auto Show, Hybrid, Hatchback, Hyundai, Electric

As promised, Hyundai brought its Blue-Will Concept along for the festivities this week at the Detroit Auto Show. There’s not a whole lot more to say – the car was first debuted back in April at the Seoul Motor Show and we’ve heard all about its plug-in hybrid drivetrain. Still, this is the Blue-Will’s U.S. introduction and therefore is the first time we’ve personally laid eyes on the car.

To recap, the Blue Drive architecture that Hyundai unveiled at the 2008 Los Angeles Auto Show is a strong parallel system, that is capable of driving the vehicle under electric power alone, using the internal combustion engine or some combination of the two. The electric motor/generator is rated at 100 kW and Hyundai claims a range of 40 miles on an single electric charge

Want to know more? Check out our high-res image gallery of live photos below and click past the break for the press release.

Continue reading Detroit 2010: Hyundai plugs in the Blue-Will

Detroit 2010: Hyundai plugs in the Blue-Will originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I'm not sure I'm reading this correctly, but there may be a peaceful resolution to the clove cigarette ban controversy (see here and here for background):

 Kretek International Inc., importer and marketer of Djarum clove cigars, withdrew its lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the distribution and sale of clove cigar products, following statements by the agency indicating it will only take enforcement action against products that meet the legal definition of a cigarette.

Kretek in September 2009 filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking a declaration that a ban on flavored tobacco products applied to cigarettes rather than to cigars. Then, on Dec. 23, 2009, the FDA placed a question and answer document on its Web site regarding the regulation of flavored tobacco products, which Kretek said makes it clear that the FDA will only be taking enforcement actions against tobacco products that meet the legal definition of a cigarette. 

The U.S. Department of Treasury already determined that Djarum clove cigars meet the legal definition of a cigar, and as such, the FDA's document provided Kretek with the assurances it was seeking through its lawsuit, the company stated. Because of this, Kretek decided to drop its legal action, while reserving its option to re-file at some future date.

"FDA's Q&A will benefit the entire industry," Kretek CEO Mark Cassar said in a statement. "We did not want to see three years of cigar product development negated by a hasty interpretation of the ban on flavored tobacco products and I am pleased that the agency has not only taken the time to get this issue right, but has also decided to share its views with the entire industry." 

So is that it?  Clove cigarette producers/importers can just repackage them as cigars in order to import them, and the dispute is resolved?  I don't know, that all seems too easy.

Japanese carmaker Daihatsu is facing new economic difficulties on the Chinese Market. The company has announced its withdrawal from the joint business with its Chinese partner, FAW Jilin Automobile Co.

The joint-venture (FAW Daihatsu (Jilin) Body Parts Co., Ltd. – FDJB) was established to manufacture automotive parts and Daihatsu Motor Co. owned 50% of it. This stake will now be transferred to FAW Jilin Auto, as a result of a change in the Japanese automaker’s sales plan for Chin… (read more)

Brando has succeeded in coming out with yet another USB toy that we don’t need, but we want anyway. The USB Esc Keypress Light is a giant ESC key that works as a USB soft light lamp. Just press it and the lamp will switch between on and off. The USB Express Key Light retails for $16.

Peugeot’s new logo and brand

Lifestyle, Communicating, Entertaining, Passion …

We are very proud to share with you today Peugeot’s new logo and brand platform in an exclusive unveiling.