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Did Microsoft Just Kick Apple Out of the Living Room? If you want to see what the Apple TV will look like, I hope you were tuned to Spike at about 1 p.m. Eastern today, because we got a pretty solid picture of the rumored device: a powerful all-in-one entertainment hub with a hands-free interface that smartly integrates live TV with a wealth of streaming and downloadable media.

I'm speaking, of course, of the Xbox One, Microsoft's freshly unveiled new game console. Except it's so much more than a game console. The Xbox One is intended to be the command center for any and all media you experience through a TV screen. Sure, the Xbox 360 already had that job, but the One is a considerable upgrade. First of all, Microsoft uses a genius interface: your voice. While voice commands on mobile devices (exemplified by Siri) are often inappropriate for many situations, they make a lot more sense when you're sitting on the couch in the privacy of your home. Cracking the Interface Xbox Won?

Programming

Digital trends - emergent. Wolfram|Alpha Blog: 2010 Year in Review. Posted by As we bid adieu to 2010, we want say thank you to all of our loyal blog readers and commenters. Today we’re taking a look back at some of 2010′s most popular Wolfram|Alpha Blog posts. 2010 was a year full of product releases, such as Wolfram|Alpha Widgets and new data for everything from movies to taxes. These selections are only highlights of the topics we’ve covered in 2010. If you’re feeling really nostalgic, or if you’re new to the Wolfram|Alpha Blog, we invite you to read more in the archives. January: Just in time to tackle a common New Year’s resolution, we released “New Physical Activity Data in Wolfram|Alpha”.

February: After reading “Computing Valentine’s Day with Wolfram|Alpha”, there was little doubt that we speak math, the universal language of love. March: Ever wonder which country consumes the most coffee or sugar? April: In April we were excited to finally be able to share “Stephen Wolfram’s TED Talk: Computation Is Destined to Be the Defining Idea of Our Future”. May: The Optical Illusion That’s So Good... - experimentalist. 10 Apps to Watch in 2011. There are more than 200,000 apps in the Android market. There are more than 325,000 apps available for iOS devices. Even the fledgling Windows Phone 7 app marketplace already has greater than 5,300 apps. Throw in the wide world of web applications and, forget about it: you'd need many lifetimes to try them all. However, there are just 10 apps you really should keep a very close watch on in 2011.

The list below represents the 10 applications — for mobile and the web — that Mashable editors think will be worthy of your attention in 2011. Let us know in the comments which of these picks you agree or disagree with, and which applications you're excited about for next year. 1. The Daily is the News Corp’s iPad-only newspaper that is set to launch in January with each daily edition costing $0.99 to download. -Vadim Lavrusik, Community Manager 2. Since Drop.io was purchased and disbanded by Facebook, there’s certainly a need for free, web-based, acount-less and super simple file sharing. 3. 4.

Kik Messenger | Free real-time texting for all. Samsung Reveals Its New TVs, PCs, Smartphones and Tablets [LIVE] The 'New Yorker', March 29, 2010 - The Top 10 Everything of 2010.

Simulation

Group Texting Service GroupMe Raises $10.6 Million in Funding. It seems as if the idea of mass texting strikes a chord with more than just teenagers — group texting startup GroupMe has just scored $10.6 million in Series B funding in a round led by Khosla Ventures (with participation from additional new investors, including General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital, and previous investors Lerer Ventures, Betaworks and SV Angel).

GroupMe, which was born back in May during TechCruch's Disrupt conference, is a super simple SMS-based and device-independent servicetool that essentially lets users create chatrooms on their phones, thereby mitigating the confusion that comes from conversing with a group of friends via text. The simple idea, however, apparently is palatable to investors. This new, far heftier chunk of change will be used to expand the startup's team and to build new product offerings, according to GroupMe. The idea of group-texting is not unique to GroupMe — among other services, Brightkite and Fast Society have taken that plunge.

Social media

Dr. Tae — Your Skateboarding Physics Professor — 닥터태. Facebook's iPhone App Adds Another 1.6 Million Users In The Last 3 Days. Gadgets Bring New Opportunities for Hackers. Best of 2010: The Year of Understanding Influence. InShare561 2010 was the year where we revisited not only the definition of influence, but also deeply explored its meaning in today’s social economy. What represented an ongoing series of virtual global summits on the topic, influence was scrutinized as a way of better understanding its role in new media.

It goes beyond academic study however. Influence permeated the realm of the masses and suddenly, we the people, were gifted with the opportunity to voice what moved us. With the pervasiveness of social media, we were learning, and sometimes confusing, the differences between influence and new found, micro fame, celebrity and popularity. Unlike so many terms in Social Media, influence is not a new word invented or reinvented to suit the times. The text book definition of influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself. Effect… Please read and share… - Exploring and Defining Influence: A Study with Vocus.

The Best Way to Use the Last Five Minutes of Your Day - Peter Bregman. By Peter Bregman | 9:27 AM January 3, 2011 Julie Anko*, the head of a division of a retail company I work with, was at risk of getting fired. Here’s the crazy thing: she was a top performer. She had done more for the brand in the past year than any of her predecessors had in five years. The problem was that she was a bear to work with. But none of that was the problem for which she was at risk of being fired. I was asked to work with her, and my first step was to interview everyone with whom she worked in order to understand the situation and share their perspectives with her. “This is the same feedback I received at my previous company,” she said, “it’s why I left.”

I’m often amazed at how many times something has to happen to me before I figure it out. There’s a simple reason for it: we rarely take the time to pause, breathe, and think about what’s working and what’s not. If a person can do that well, everything else takes care of itself. It only takes a few minutes. Google nears deal to buy Groupon: report.

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Coke Targets Teens With Black Friday SCVNGR Promotion - experimentalist. 2011: The Year of the Personal Robot? What does 2011 hold for the field of robotics? Plenty, if 2010 is any indication. This will not be the year that mobile, artificially intelligent robot nurses assume the responsibility of caring for the world's growing elderly population, but it does promise to be a pivotal time for the development of the underlying technology that will enable safe and reliable automated elder care, not to mention other services that robots are expected to perform in the coming decade.

Thanks to a standardized platform introduced in 2010, roboticists can now collaborate as never before. Last May, Willow Garage, a Menlo Park, Calif., maker of robot hardware and software, released a test version of its personal robot platform. The PR2 includes a mobile base, two arms for manipulation, a suite of sensors and two computers, each with eight processing cores, 24 gigabytes of RAM and two terabytes of hard-disk space.

*Correction (1/04/11): This was edited after posting.