Twitter just announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs, the company behind GeoAPI.com. GeoAPI is a service that allows developers to easily add geolocation data to their apps. Twitter just launched its own geotagging API a few weeks ago. Even though a number of mobile and desktop Twitter apps like Seesmic Web and Birdfeed support Twitter’s geotagging API, only a very small number of users are currently making use of this feature.

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According to Twitter founder Ev Williams, the company “will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities.”

It’s important to note that the Mixer Labs GeoAPI is not tied to Twitter. GeoAPI offers tools like a reverse geocoder that can take GPS coordinates and turn them into human readable information and a service that can find media files and status updates related to a specific place on Flickr, Twitter or YouTube. Mixer Labs also offers an iPhone SDK. Judging from Twitter’s announcement, the GeoAPI will continue to work while Twitter figures out how to best integrate its current geotagging API with Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI.

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Did you ever have a dilemma about what type of a package to wrap something in? I did and I came up with the perfect solution. I know this is going to be a hit.

Every year I make cute little gifts for my grandchildren, they range in age from 2 to 15 years. This year I made reindeer food for the little ones and didn’t want to just put it in a baggie. I decided to use a mason jar and jazz it up a little.

Kathy Zengolewicz

Here is what you will need to make this decorative jar:

• An empty glass canning jar (any size)
• A swatch of Christmas fabric
• 1 inch red satin ribbon
• Rickrack (optional)
• Double sided tape
• A hot glue gun
• Fabric glue

First, cut out a piece of fabric to wrap around your jar. Measure and cut the rickrack for the top and sides and set aside.

Wash and dry your mason jar. Make sure that the jar is thoroughly dry before applying the fabric to the glass. You might want to give it a quick wipe with a little bit of alcohol to take off any grease.

Put some double sided tape, in the middle of the jar and wrap it around three quarters of the jar. Affix the fabric to the tape, placing the band of tape in the middle of the fabric. Peel the top back and apply glue to help the fabric stick. Do the same with the bottom of the fabric. Smooth the print with your fingers to remove any creases.

Let it dry for a few minutes, then put a strip of red satin ribbon around the top and bottom of the cloth and run it around the entire jar. Use the double sided tape to hold the ribbon in place. Hot glue the rickrack to the ribbon and let it dry.

Use the top insert in the lid and trace a piece of fabric to cover the lid. Cut out the fabric, add a little bit of hot glue and put the outer lid back in place.

Now you have a decorative container in case you want to make reindeer food. Or you can use it for anything. I made a few and I use them to give gifts of peppermint sticks. I have receive lots of compliments on these jars. You will too!

Post from: Blisstree

Decorative Mason Jar

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.

GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc.

Geo-location has been a hot topic these last few months with contenders including Foursquare, Gowalla (which recently took a hefty amount of funding in), Stalqer, Seesmic Web, and many more applications.

It’ll be interesting to see how companies like SimpleGeo will thrive in the space now, especially since a lot of SimpleGeo’s data is Twitter and social network based.

Mixer Labs actually started out as TownMe, a site that is a comprehensive guide to pretty much everything that’s relevant at the local level, from restaurant reviews to the best schools and hospitals in town.

It’s good to note that Mixer Labs are all ex-Google employees. CEO ELad Gil and Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver were both on the Geo panel at our Real Time Crunchup in November.

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

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A member of the FCC’s five-person commission, Mignon Clyburn, has sent out a letter today in response to Verizon’s earlier reply regarding questions surrounding its gargantuan $350 early termination fee on so-called “advanced devices,” and in brief, it looks like this issue is far from tied off. Her choicest quote is that she found Verizon’s answers “unsatisfying and, in some cases, troubling,” noting that customers are already paying “high” monthly fees and suggesting that the public interest isn’t being served when someone gets slammed with a three-digit cancellation charge mid-contract. She also straight-up calls the company out on its claim that customers aren’t being inadvertently charged when the press the web button on their phone without an appropriate plan, saying that “press reports and consumer complaints strongly suggest otherwise.” Commissioner Clyburn’s conclusion? “I look forward to exploring this issue in greater depth with my colleagues in the New Year.” Dum dum dummmmm. Follow the break for the full text of the letter.

[Thanks, Daniel P.]

Continue reading FCC commish says Verizon’s ETF response is ‘unsatisfying and, in some cases, troubling’

FCC commish says Verizon’s ETF response is ‘unsatisfying and, in some cases, troubling’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today’s bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the holiday season.

Congratulations, you’ve reached the end of your holiday list and have only one person left — unfortunately, they’re the one that never leaves the living room. With eyes constantly glues to the screen, a simple sweater or even the finest Williams-Sonoma has to offer just won’t cut it. Luckily, we’re here to help, especially if that poor soul is limited to some old school XGA projector, juggling multiple remotes or still waiting to make the jump to Blu-ray. Dig in after the break and see what will distract them from the HDTVs unnatural light long enough to say thanks.

Continue reading Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Home theater setups

Engadget’s Holiday Gift Guide: Home theater setups originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Green Energy Reporter will be back after the Christmas break.

About that Google shopping spree, which has seen the company buy six companies since August: It’s actually only four companies so far.

That’s because Google’s plans to buy video compression outfit On2 have been held up by disgruntled shareholders. And the company’s plans to spend $750 million on AdMob, the mobile ad start-up, can’t go through until federal regulators sign off.

That may take a little longer than Google (GOOG) would like. The company announced today that the Federal Trade Commission has asked for more information–formally, a “second request”–as part of its review. From a post on Google’s Public Policy Blog:

…we know that closer scrutiny has been one consequence of Google’s success, and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the past few weeks. This week we received what’s called a “second request,” which means that the FTC is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal.

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the FTC will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile advertising space will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. And we’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

Google was well aware that it was going to face regulatory scrutiny on this deal; in fact, CEO Eric Schmidt says the company assumes regulators will now look at every big deal it makes, simply because it’s Google.

And also because Google’s competitors are doing their best to make sure there is regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft (MSFT), which knows a thing or two about regulatory headaches, helped slow down Google’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick for a very long time. And it’s quite clear that Redmond intends to holler loudly in Washington about other deals. Googlers tell me they also believe AT&T (T) agitates against them.

I’ve tried getting Googlers to guess at how long they think the AdMob deal will take to clear, but they’ve been pretty reluctant to do so. “I thought DoubleClick would take a few months, and it took more than a year,” one would-be bettor told me recently. “I’m not making that mistake again.”

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On the 10th of December a tongue-in-cheek demo of a failure of a HP webcam was published on YouTube. The video shows the failure of a software which is designed to recognize the speakers face and react so it is always centered on the face.

The failure is that the software does not recognize a black persons face, while it clearly identifies the white persons face.

In the meantime several other videos appeared that further analyze this situation. It appears that a person with very dark skin is not recognized unless there are perfect lighting conditions, since the camera cannot distinguish between the facial features.

This only adds oil to the fire on the issue of the facial recognition in biometrics IDs. It is now proven that facial recognition can fail miserably on a nice chunk of the world population.

Does this mean that black people should not use biometric ID’s. What do you think?

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A Simplified Analysis – Can you Forge a Biometric ID?

Japan, Asia | Incredible Ruins

In Japan, ‘Hostess Bars’ are bars where men pay to be flirted with. Attractive women sit by them, pour them drinks, stroke their thighs, pay them compliments, and these girls can make a fortune from big-spenders seeking to impress them with the most expensive champagne and caviar. Of course, not all Hostess Bars make the grade and the ones that don’t pull in the businessmen by the bucket-full end up as ‘Haikyo,’ a Japanese term for ruins.

The Akeno Gekijo haikyo in Ibaraki is something of an oddity in Japan, as one of only a few actual strip clubs. Of course there are similar venues; hostess bars, soaplands, love hotels, but they each cater to a slightly different crowd and provide a slightly different flavor of tawdry service. To find a straight-up strip club complete with central podium, viewing seats, and dancing poles seems a feat beyond expectation. But there it is, on a small back-road in a quiet rural area surrounded by bamboo, half-burnt to the ground and buzzing with mosquitoes.

The stripper poles still stand though it has been some time since anyone has taken a swing on them.

Written by Japanese Haikyo expert and explorer Michael John Grist. More about this place and other Haikyo can be found on his site here.

Ever been cut off by a bad driver and wished you could have given them a piece of your mind? Well, now you can. Virginia startup CarPong recently launched and is letting users write short messages to other drivers.

The site is simple and like most other social networking sites you must be registered to use it. Users can either send a message to a particular license plate or receive notifications on messages for up to three plates. All of this is done on a user profile page on the website, similar to a Facebook profile.

Here’s how the service works: To send a message, users are required to enter a license plate number and the state in which the vehicle is registered. They are then able to leave a message up to 250 characters. If the owner of that vehicle is registered on the site, they will receive the email instantly. However, if they aren’t, the message will go live on the site, become searchable and eventually be delivered if that driver ever joins. Users are also able to follow their own plates as well as others and be notified when those plates receive messages. For example, a father might be “following” his college daughters license plate to make sure she isn’t driving like a maniac while at school.

Founder Tony Mastrorio notes in a recent blog post that the service isn’t just for denouncing bad driver habits, but has other social possibilities too. For example, you can now drive by a good looking women and send her a message or let someone know their brake light it out. There are several more useful services for the site as well. My favorite is that drivers could learn when their vehicles have been towed, improving an archaic archaic process that usually leaves a driver not knowing when their car was moved or where it now resides. For businesses, it could allow business owners to track their fleet of vehicles — bringing a new meaning to those stickers on mack trucks that say “How’s My Driving – Dial …..”

Currently, the company is generating revenue through online advertising. However, as users are only allowed to follow three plates, a future revenue model will involve charging a small fee for users wishing to follow more than three plates.

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We’ve got Facebook accounts, Twitter accounts, Delicious accounts, Flickr accounts and more, all vying for our constant attention and maintenance. All that means learning new systems for different applications with different purposes, remembering to use each service, and generally spending quite a bit of time keeping everything going.

That’s where Yoolink, a great new service, comes in. It’s a mix of tools like AddThis and ShareThis, bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious, and social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Its first and simplest use is as a universal sharing tool – as you’re browsing the Web, you click one button to share your current page with any or all of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn and more. There’s a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer, and a bookmarklet that works across browsers, so no matter what you use, Yoolink will work for you.

There’s also a section of the site, for every Yoolink user, that’s your own personal bookmarks reservoir. Every time you share or bookmark something, it gets saved into your Yoolink account, meaning Yoolink can replace Delicious or Diigo for you, although it also supports saving pages directly to Delicious.

Yoolink also pulls in all of the links and sites being shared, and creates a page full of the most popular things people are sharing, which has exciting potential. If one tool can be used to share things to all of the sites we already use, Yoolink (or whoever pulls this off) would be able to track, with incredible accuracy and size, what the Web as a whole is really talking about. As it is now, sites like Yoolink only track what’s shared using their tools, so the data is segmented across various apps; if one could dominate, the implications would be great.

What I really love about Yoolink is how devoted it is to working with the ecosystem of apps you already use. You can sign up via Twitter or Facebook, thus saving the creation of yet another account. There’s a WordPress plugin that lets you post your bookmarks on your blog and share them with your readers. Yoolink also supports Bit.ly links and Gravatar images, all of which means joining Yoolink requires almost no extra work for users. Yoolink’s product isn’t necessarily unique, but the ease with which it lets you work and the simplicity of getting started certainly is.

Though this social bookmarking from Yoolink is new, Yoolink has been around for a while, particularly in Europe. Its Yoolink Pro product lets employees of a company share and discuss various items and topics internally, creating a private social network.

With these new features, Yoolink is trying to extend its reach to the average user and make the Web a little more social, and a little more inter-connected.

Yoolink is a Paris-based company with six employees. It raised $800k in funding in 2008.

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From left: Seoul Nat’l Univ. / Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci / AP

Glow-in-the-dark puppies, a naked “Mona Lisa” and gay-penguin parenting were among the weirder science stories of 2009. But wait … there’s much, much more.

So much weird science … so little time. It’s time to look back on the past year’s research and pick the winners of the 2010 Weird Science Awards.

In previous years, the top Weirdies have included glow-in-the-dark cloned cats and the rediscovery of an ancient marijuana stash. But if you think those stories are weird, this year’s candidates kick it up a notch. Heck, we’ve got glow-in-the-dark puppies and mushrooms as well as poop armor and gay penguin parents. (The last subject turns out to be surprisingly controversial.)

The problem is, there are so many deserving candidates that it’s hard to narrow them down to a manageable list of finalists. We’ve put 30 on the ballot, plus a few extra honorable mentions, and it’s up to you to decide which 10 topics win 2010’s Weirdies.

If you’ve ever believed that semantic search is meant exclusively for researchers, then Meaning Tool might prove you wrong. Through Popego, the semantic search engine allows you to add your online profile and interests such as “gadgets” or “current news”. From here, Meaning Tool serves you entertaining content from across your social graph. ReadWriteWeb took a look at how the tool works and how it just might bridge the gap between scholars and social media junkies.

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Meaningtool – Demo from Popego on Vimeo.

Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. As mentioned, you define your categories of interest by creating search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. Similar to Open Calais, the service appears to use the linked data standard to retrieve data via dereferenceable URIs on the web. From there you can search text in any Romantic language to produce relevant words and categories. Categories such as “technology” and “security” are then shown in a pie chart to represent the percentage of relevancy the text has to these key categories. The system also offers a tag cloud of relevant keywords and key concepts. And finally, Meaning Tool extracts entities such as mentioned companies, people and places.

Unlike many other semantic search services, your satisfaction with results as a researcher, marketer or general consumer weigh heavily on how you train the system. To find out more about the semantic web, check out our article on semantic search’s myths and realities. To add some of your own interests to Meaining Tool visit meaningtool.com.

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Just a few weeks ago Motorola’s Droid, available exclusively on Verizon Wireless, was raising the public’s awareness of Google’s Android mobile operating system. Now Google is preparing to release its own branded handset, the Nexus One.

By all accounts, the new phone, manufactured by HTC but prominently branded as a Google phone, is a “Droid killer.” Describing his brief experience playing with the new phone, Jason Chen of Gizmodo said the Nexus One will “certify (Google) as the premium Android phone brand out there right now. Even though it doesn’t have a hardware keyboard, it basically beats the hell out of the Droid in every single task that we threw at it.”

Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, agreed. “For sure, it’s a Droid killer,” he said. “Droid is just a really clunky design in my view.”

A ‘Really Fast Phone’

Two things stand out on the Nexus One, Sterling said: Screen quality and speed. “It has a really big screen, even though the handset itself is not much bigger than a conventional handset,” Sterling said. “And it’s noticeably high-resolution.”

Even more striking, “It’s really, really fast,” Sterling said. In Chen’s testing, the speed difference was most noticeable in loading web pages.

“In loading a web page over Wi-Fi, the Nexus One loaded first, the iPhone 3GS came in a few seconds later, and the Droid came in a little while after that. This was constant throughout many web-page loads, so it’s indicative of something going on inside with the hardware,” Chen wrote.

While Google’s search business and free online and desktop apps have been consumer-oriented, conventional wisdom has been that Android was a platform play, not a consumer one. So the news that Google will sell its own phone has confused some observers.

‘What the Heck Are They Doing?’

“I’m not sure what to make…

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by Margaret Swink

So Copenhagen is over, with forests mentioned in one paragraph of a politically ambiguous “Copenhagen Accord” and an incomplete REDD agreement stapled on the back with major safeguard and finance issues still unresolved. Clearly, high hopes of a deal that might save the world’s forests and reduce the 15-20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and degradation will have to wait, at least till next year’s December meeting of the UNFCCC in Mexico City, if not beyond.

So along with many other people, you might be wondering, what happens now for REDD and for the world’s tropical forests?

Not much it seems. Forests remain under threat for all the same reasons that we’ve historically cut them down—illegal logging, industrial agriculture expansion, and destructive “development” projects. At least for one more year, business as usual is certainly going to continue and tropical forests will probably continue to be lost at the shocking rate of one acre per second.

Things are going to keep moving, however.

The UNFCCC process will continue as the REDD working group meets again in Bonn in June to work out technical issues, hopefully starting where they’ve left off in Copenhagen and further strengthening key provisions rather than going back to square one. Political negotiations will continue at least through Mexico City—a continuation of the process that started in Bali.

As Kevin Conrad, executive director of the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, aptly put it to the AP:

“It’s depressing,” he said. “It means I’ve got to spend another year … coming to meetings and talking about the same things.”

Various other processes intended to address the rapid destruction of the world’s tropical forests will also continue, but without resolution of critical environmental and social safeguards (notably including recognition and respect for indigenous people’s rights) that a Copenhagen forest agreement might have provided. The most notable of these include the U.N.-REDD initiative, the World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, and new initiatives started to help countries with “REDD readiness” planning.

This proliferation of initiatives, plus the consideration of a U.S. Senate climate bill with its large REDD provisions linked to dodgy offset approaches, results in a divide and conquer approach for forest protection—keeping advocates of a more rights-centric and environmentally friendly approach sorely stretched.

But the most depressing fail for the forests out of Copenhagen is the lack of binding targets to reduce fossil fuel emissions and start to halt climate change. If global temperatures rise above 2 degrees C, most scientists predict that tropical forests will be profoundly affected, experiencing extreme droughts, increased forest fires and other catastrophic weather events. Even if a separate deal to reduce deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries had been agreed upon, the lack of commitment to deep fossil fuel emissions in a legally binding climate change agreement would continue to threaten the world’s forests.

We can’t save the forests if we don’t save the climate. And that means that REDD without a larger climate deal is no deal at all.

Related Links:

Copenhagen coal in the stocking?

What you need to know following the Copenhagen climate summit

The Copenhagen Accord: A Big Step Forward

Today I had the tree main Windows Mobile Verizon phone. I wondered, maybe I should make a video to put them head to head and maybe help you guys make your choose this holiday a lot easier.

I would Go with the Omnia2 because it is nice, fast and has software to the infinity number(just kidding). The only fault I hate about the device is the standby freeze and the never ending error massages, but I bet that all of the problems can be fixed with an update/flash.