Technology And Gadget News Tech-Point.Info

ATV Powered By a Jet Engine Could Be Batman’s Golf Cart

Batman normally likes to stretch his legs and have trunkspace for a few accidental dead bodies. But he might pilot an ATV powered by a jet engine on a weekend at the links.

John Carnett modded brand new Polaris RZR 2-seater ATV with a grey market, 40-year-old turbine. The result is a 114db joystick-driven vehicle that spews out 1300°F exhaust to achieve around 60MPH. And it sounds glorious.

Our only regret is that Carnett was too sane to take his jet ATV over any sweet jumps. Give him time, though. A guy who builds stuff like this has to be slipping a bit. [PopSci]

iPhone 3.1 SDK Available Now

The 3.1 version of the iPhone SDK is available now, bringing a couple new fixes like having the OS simulator "more closely matching the device." There are also new Interface Builder, XCode and Dashcode changes. [iPhone Developer]

SkyGrid Links Its Financial Firehose To Twitter

SkyGrid, the nifty, free financial news aggregator, is now publishing a stream of news on Twitter, letting users follow breaking business news headlines via the microblogging network.

The news aggregator, which only features stories about publicly traded companies, not only has an comprehensive Twitter feed for news stories, but the site also has Twitter feeds that are broken down by sector. So users can follow SkyGridHealth or SkyGridEnergy for sector-related news. SkyGrid currently has separate Twitter feeds for 8 different industries. SkyGrid says that the Twitter feed may be especially useful to users who want to access SkyGrid on their mobile devices.

Similar to TechMeme and Google News, SkyGrid clusters related news stories based on keyword analysis, what they’re linking to, etc. SkyGrid also tries to determine the sentiment of each article - red for negative, green for positive.

As we wrote in our earlier review of the services, SkyGrid is an incredibly useful tool, especially now that it is free. But the one element that is missing from SkyGrid is coverage of larger private companies, like Facebook. In order to become a serious competitor to popular aggregators like Techmeme (which also has a Twitter firehose), the site will need to expand its range of coverage. But especially for people in the financial services industries who use Twitter as a news source, SkyGrid is on the right track to providing users with real-time valuable financial news.

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

iPhone OS 3.1 Beta And SDK Already Rolling Out To Developers

It looks like Apple has already started sending out the beta version and SDK for the next iteration of the iPhone OS, 3.1, to developers.

The iPhone 3.0 software was released just about two weeks ago, ahead of the iPhone 3GS launch. By most accounts it’s pretty stable, though some users have been having battery issues. That’s why it’s a bit odd that Apple would iterate up to version 3.1 already, instead of something like 3.0.1, which it tends to do for minor updates and bug fixes. Could we be seeing a larger update to the OS already?

I’m told that there’s nothing much of interest in the release notes to indicate anything major that is new or changed.

Here’s the text of the email being sent from Apple:

iPhone SDK 3.1 beta and iPhone OS 3.1 beta are now posted to the iPhone Dev Center. These versions are for development and testing only and should be installed on devices dedicated to iPhone OS 3.1 beta software development. Please read the iPhone OS Pre-Install Advisory and the iPhone SDK 3.1 beta release notes before downloading and installing.

Update: I’m hearing a few reports that one change is that MMS is turned on by default. Perhaps AT&T is getting closer to turning it on as well in the U.S.

[thanks Michael]

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

Twitter Revamps Following and Followers Pages

Twitter has just rolled out an update to the pages where you browse the list of people you’re following and those following you. These pages – which you get to by clicking the following/follower counts on any user profile – now come with a whole lot more information about other Twitter users.

For example, on the page listing your followers, Twitter now shows a check mark of the people you follow back. There’s also a pull-down menu that includes options for direct messaging them, sending them an @ mention, following them (if you’re not already doing so), or blocking them.

Meanwhile, on the page listing people you follow, there are options for sending them a mention, unfollowing, or, if they follow you, sending them a direct message. Both on this page and on that of your followers, you also get to see each user’s bio.
(more...)

The Original Ethernet Cable and Cable Diagrams

BoingBoing Gadgets found this photo of the original original Ethernet cable at Xerox PARC, devised by Bob Metcalfe so he could rig up a local system for sharing things digitally.

The diagram below illustrates part of what he tried to set up. What it doesn't show, unfortunately, is how slow the network would have been compared to the average home network now. In your face, Bob. [BBG]

Meebo Tries to Fill “Moments Of Boredom” With An Ad Network For Partner Sites

How do you advertise on a Web-based instant messaging service without interrupting conversations and annoying the hell out of users? Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg thinks he has the answer: “There is a moment of boredom while they are waiting for a response, that is when they click on ads.” He’s observed this based on how people interact with the ads which began appearing on Meebo.com last March. Today, Meebo is creating an ad network across partner sites which use its new Community IM service, which ads a Meebo IM bar at the bottom of participating sites.

Visitors to one of the 85 partner sites which have implemented the Community IM product (including Current TV, DailyStrength, Flixster, and Webs.com) can chat with their IM buddies without leaving the sites. Today, Meebo is introducing new ad units which pop up along the bottom left of the browser, beginning with ads for the Toyota Piou and AT&Ts. For the Toyota ad, a little car icon pops up on the left of the Meebo IM bar, away from all of the chat activity on the bottom right. If you click on the car, a larger ad 900X400 pixel rich ad overlay opens up which can show a video or any number of interactive ads. “When they click we do not take them away from the conversation,” says Sternberg. During the whole time people is watching the ads, they can still chat with their friends through the Meebo IM column on the right.

These ads are similar to VideoEgg’s Twig Ad bar, except they are integrated directly into each site rather than use a frame overlay. But the opt-in nature of both types of ads are part of a general trend of giving consumers control over when and how marketing messages are presented to them.

Meebo says its IM service reaches 50 million people a month and can target ads on age, gender, or location. Sternberg says Meebo is seeing 1 percent clickthrough rates on the ads. But he is not without competitors. AOL is planning to offer its own IM bar to external sites through its Socialthing for Websites service, which presumably will also be connected to its ad network. The exchange with sites is that they get social IM features without having to reinvent the wheel, and they get a share of any IM-based ad revenue as well.

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

Twitter Rolls Out UI Changes To Simplify Your Social Connections

Twitter has just quietly rolled out a set of changes to its user interface on the “Following” and “Followers” sections of its website. These changes will clearly make it easier to manage who you follow as well as take actions, such as @replying someone or direct messaging them, directly from the page.

There are two new views for looking at these areas. “List” is a compact list of the followers, while “Expanded” offers more details including that user’s last tweet and their real name and location. On the Followers page, there is also a button that allows for one-click following of users who already follow you.

What’s interesting about these icons is that they appear to look exactly like icons that Apple uses for OS X — including some of the ones on the iPhone. Could this mean that we’re about to see a revamped mobile version of the Twitter site? Who knows, but it could sure use an overhaul.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Computing Classic: The Kitchen Computer

The 1969 Kitchen Computer by Honeywell was not just a fancy cutting board. It was meant to store recipes, even recommending meals from ingredients on hand. The problem is, you had to know binary to use it.

The machine's designers assumed that housewives would do all the cooking, and yet, also assumed they'd be open to learning binary: is the Honeywell Kitchen Computer the most or least sexist computer ever made? I don't know. I do know its the most beautiful minicomputer I've ever put my eyes on. The plastic chassis hid so much of the 150 pound machine's weight in its black pedestal. Then again, it could have been a lot bigger, had it had an actual user interface that wasn't binary: The $10,600 price set by Neiman Marcus included two weeks of programming lessons in a language known as BACK.

The machine itself was a 16-bit minicomputer—the class right below mainframes—and its official name was actually the H316 Pedestal. It was part of the Series 16 lineup, based on the DDP-116. (A machine most notable for its use as ARPANET Interface Message Processors, early machinations that ran the predecessor to the modern internet.)

It had 4KB of magnetic memory, expandable to 16KB, which was pre programmed with a few recipes. Its system clock was 2.5MHz. It took 475 watts to operate.

Dag Spicer, curator from the Computer History Museum, says, "None were ever sold."

He adds, in an article at Dr. Dobbs, that in the late 1960s, "with that kind of budget, the solution would likely be a live-in chef or the traditional 3x5 card file, no?"

Indeed.

[Wiki, The Computer History Museum, Dr. Dobbs, Old Computers.com]

The Computer History Museum is a wonderful place. If you're in northern CA, I recommend you find a way to stop by. We'll be running pieces from their collection as an ongoing series called Computing Classic. Special thanks to Fiona Tang, John Hollar and the amazing Dag Spicer for their help.

Excellent Special Effects or Terrifying New Sewer Creatures? You Decide

This video purports to be of some unknown creatures in the sewers under Cameron Village in Raleigh, North Carolina. It's probably some early viral marketing for a movie. But! What if it isn't? Oh god, what if it isn't?? [io9]

ClackPoint Brings Voice, Document Sharing To Google Friend Connect

Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.

The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat.

As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room. You can try out the gadget for yourself here.

While the gadget could probably be used in a business setting, I suspect most businesses will stick with products like WebEx for their serious calls. That said, this would be perfect for more casual group meetings where real identities are still important (for example, a meeting discussing plans for your childs’ soccer team). For more, check out the Google blog post introducing the gadget. You can also find a full directory of gadgets available here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Digg Tries Again To Bury Dupes

Since its inception, one of the biggest problems with Digg has been that users often submit the same content over and over again. This makes it harder for cool content to become popular because some users digg one submitted story, while some digg another. Today, Digg is releasing “several major updates” to its duplicate (known as a “dupe”) detection system.

The solution sounds fairly intensive. “To better understand the nature of the problem, we analyzed the types of duplicate stories being submitted. Most common are the same stories from the same site, but with different URLs. Our R&D team came up with a solution that identifies these types of duplicates by using a document similarity algorithm,” Digg’s Director of Product Chris Howard writes in a blog post. He goes on to say that there will be a follow-up more technical post to explain a bit more about how this actually works, but says that it has proven to be a reliable system so far.

But the really tricky stuff comes when people submit the same story from a different site. This is a gray area because of course some sites have different takes on the same topic, and whose to say which is more Digg-worthy than another? Digg now says it will scan for descriptive information such as the story’s title to see if something very similar is already in the system. But still, it’s a gray area.

At least the submission process should be faster now. Digg will run these dupe checks after you enter the URL but before you enter the description, which saves a step in the process. It claims this dupe detection will take only “a few seconds.”

And if you ignore the dupe algorithms and submit dupe stories anyway, Digg is watching: “We’ll also be monitoring when certain Diggers choose to bypass high-confidence duplicates and will use this data to continue to improve the process going forward.”

[photo: flickr/yogi]

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

Flickr And Twitter are Now Officially Sucking Face

Earlier this month, Flickr started flirting with Twitter integration by allowing users to link their Flickr accounts to their Twitter accounts. The experiment was only for email uploads, which simultaneously created a Tweet with a short http://flic.kr link back to the photo on Flickr. Now that integration is an official feature called Flickr2Twitter.

In addition to email uploads, Flickr now lets you Tweet out any photos directly from the site. After linking your accounts, whenever you click on the “Blog this” button on any photo on Flickr, your Twitter account will be one of the distribution options. This works for both photos you’ve uploaded and other photos you find on the site. I have a feeling you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon.

Developers who want to add Flickr as a photo option to desktop and mobile clients can use Flickr’s existing APIs. (You can learn more here). Once that happens, Twitpic and yFrog will have some company on those clients as a pull-down option.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

What Went Down At Rackspace Yesterday? A Power Outage And Some Backup Failures.

As many of you know, a lot of the sites that use Rackspace as their hosting provider were down for about an hour yesterday. That’s because Rackspace went down. Apparently, it was a power outage at a data center that caused it, an incident report that we’ve obtained explains.

While Rackspace has backup systems in place, a series of events apparently caused those backups to fail, resulting in the servers going down. Here’s the key nugget:

The breaker on the primary utility feeder tripped, initiating a sequence of events that ultimately caused a power interruption in Phase I and Phase II of the data center. All systems initially came up on generator power without customer impact. The ‘A’ bank of generators, which support UPS clusters A and B in Phase I and UPS cluster E in Phase II, then experienced excitation failure which escalated to the point where the generators were no longer able to maintain the electrical load. Rackspace then attempted to switch to our secondary utility feeder, but was unable to do so due to an issue in the Pad Mounted Switch (PMS). At approximately 3:15pm CDT, power supply through UPS clusters A, B and E was lost when the batteries in those clusters discharged, and equipment receiving power through those clusters experienced an interruption in service.

The service says only one of its nine data centers were affected by this failure, but many high profile sites collapsed as a result, including EventBrite, Justin Timberlake’s site and Michelle Malkin’s popular political blog. As Rackspace noted yesterday that “We owe better, and will deliver.”

Below, find the full incident report.

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

More Analysis on the Korean Rocket Launch

Really interested in what kind of nuclear rocket capability North Korea has? The Bulletin does a really in-depth analysis of the latest launch, based on released and carefully reasoned interpolated data.

It's quite interesting, with well-thought-out logic that points to NK obtaining parts and knowledge from Russia. In short, they probably don't have quite as good a capability for delivering the payload as previously thought. [The Bulletin]

FriendFeed Feels Pretty, Oh So Pretty

FriendFeed now lets you individualize your account with six new designer themes. When you select a theme, your FriendFeed account will always include your theme, and other people looking at your profile page will see it in whatever theme they have chosen.

FriendFeed says that it plans to allow users to customize themes down the line as well as give users the ability to create an entirely new theme. Twitter and Gmail also let you add themes and designs to your homepages but some of FriendFeed’s themes have a nicer design, in my opinion. On the other hand, Gmail has a good amount of variety when it comes to choosing a theme. The advantage to Twitter’s themes is that you are able to choose multiple designs in different colors.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Flickr2Twitter: Flickr Enters the Twitter Stream

Flickr has just released their long awaited feature for posting photos to Twitter. It’s been in beta over the past few weeks, but now it’s live for everyone.

It’s not exactly like other photo tweeting services like TwitPic, which lets you sign-in using your Twitter account. To use Flickr2Twitter, you first need to sign-in to Flickr, and then authorize the service to post to your Twitter account, which can be done from your settings page.

Then, you’ll be able to use the “Blog This” button that accompanies each photo to post it to Twitter, along with a customized tweet. Like an increasing number of other services, Flickr2Twitter uses its own URL shortener: flic.kr.
(more...)

High Gear Media Scores $5.5 Million For Auto Media Network

High Gear Media, the publisher of automotive media sites, has secured $5.5 million in Series B funding led by DAG Ventures with Accel Partners and Greylock Partners participating. The company raised $6.5 million in Series A funding in November 2007 from Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

High Gear will use the funds expand its media network and acquire other media properties. High Gear owns and operates 38 auto websites including TheCarConnection.com, GreenCarReports.com, AllCarsElectric.com and
AllAboutPrius.com.

The network’s sites aggregate automotive content from around the web and syndicate content to other automotive websites and news sites such as Yahoo! Autos, The San Francisco Chronicle and Glam Media, among others.

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

Firefox 3.5 Soars Past A Million Downloads. Approaching 100 Downloads A Second.

Mozilla today released Firefox 3.5 into the wild. Not surprisingly, it’s flying off the virtual shelves. And unlike when Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 last year, its servers are staying up and reliable, so the rate of downloads is pretty incredible. This site, run by Mozilla, shows the download stats for the new browser. Overall downloads are now approaching 1.3 million worldwide, with over 350,000 of those in the U.S. But even more amazing is the number of downloads occurring each second, it’s ranging from 59 to 95 right now. Again, that’s every second.

Outside of the U.S., the browser is moving quickly in Germany, France and the UK. The claim is that it’s much faster than the previous iterations of Firefox, and based on just a quick run-through of my favorite sites, I’d say that is in fact the case. Though, to be fair, it’s hard to know if that has something to do with the fact that just about all my browser plugins are not yet working with this version.

Not surprisingly, the emphasis on speed in this version of Firefox is on its JavaScript performance. Both Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari have been making headlines recently claiming to be the fastest browsers in this regard. As you can see in the SunSpider test chart below, it appears that Firefox has made huge strides since the slow days of Firefox 2, and has now more than doubled performance over even Firefox 3. As Apple recently touted in a press release: “Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.”

So how does 1.3 million downloads in a few hours stack up against its rivals? Well, the most recent browser to offer a major upgrade was Safari, which claimed 11 million downloads in 3 days. But those numbers are tricky because Apple includes Safari updates in its regular OS X software updates, so pretty much all OS X users were at least asked to upgrade after its launch. Still, Apple claimed that of the 11 million, some 6 million were users on Windows machines. And Firefox also pings users to do auto-updates when a new version is available.

Despite its launch hiccups, Firefox 3 set the Guinness World Record for software downloads last summer. In just 24 hours, over 8 million people downloaded the browser around the world. We’ll see how this version stacks up.

You can watch the live-updating chart and map for Firefox 3.5 downloads here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

TBD’s Deadpool Date Finally Determined

Back in 2007 I did a column on TeeBeeDee, a social network aimed at baby boomers. I’d spent some time looking at the space, and thought TBD was the best designed site, avoiding Eons age restrictions and fascination with death and building something a bit broader than Gather. The site borrowed heavily from what worked on sites like Yelp and Facebook, the design was delightful and it gave you fun, addictive get-to-know-me activities. I was also incredibly impressed by its founder Robin Wolaner. (Pictured)

But there was still a central question: Would a social network aimed at baby boomers appeal to the demographic? As it turned out, no. The site is shutting down. Below is the letter to users from Wolaner.

A Message I Didn’t Want to Send

June 30, 2009

I regret to have to inform you that TeeBeeDee will be shutting down by July 13, 2009. We thought we had raised sufficient money to get us to a sustainable business, but many factors changed in the 2 years since our launch. As you have no doubt noticed in the past few months, we lacked the resources to continue developing the product to meet the needs of our community.

We will have much to say to you, and to each other, in these next two weeks. Just as we’ve shared the experiences of our lifetimes here at TeeBeeDee, we will be sharing this goodbye. For me, I can say that the people I have met at this site, and those with whom I’ve worked these past years, have been a revelation. I have learned so much from so many of you. We have thrilled to marriages, and romances, and lifelong friendships, and support to those in need. Anyone who says “virtual” friendships are less than real ones, didn’t spend time in this community.

Kat has posted tips about how to save what matters to you at TBD. And 500 TBDers have already joined a network at Ning: http://www.teebeedee.ning.com to stay connected.

As the founder, I’d like to close by saying that while our business opportunity proved disappointing, the contributions from our members rarely disappointed. I am proud to call so many of you my friends, and thank you for caring about TeeBeeDee.

Robin

Founder/CEO

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