The Engadget Show Live! with Omar Khan, Rock Band 3, and more! Sony Takes On Kindle With Two New E-Readers -- E-Books -- InformationWeek. The Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch will have enough memory to store about 350 books and battery life of about two weeks. Sony plans to launch on Wednesday two new versions of its electronic reader, taking direct aim at the Amazon Kindle. (click image for 3 large pix) Sony's Reader The Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition are scheduled to go on sale at the end of the month and cost $199 and $299, respectively, a person who had been briefed on Sony's plans told InformationWeek Tuesday.
The Pocket Edition will have a five-inch diagonal display, and the Touch Edition, which will have a touch-sensitive screen for navigating through books, will sport a six-inch screen, which is the same size as the older Sony Reader. Sony also plans to lower the prices of best-selling e-books to $9.99 from $11.99, matching Amazon's prices for books purchased for the Kindle.
The new Sony e-readers will use the same E-Ink screen technology that's in the Kindle and older Sony Reader. Sony Adds 3G Wireless To E-reader -- E-book Readers -- InformationWeek. The Sony Reader Daily Edition is taking on Amazon's market-leading Kindle with a built-in wireless connection and support for the open E-Pub standard. (click image for larger view) Sony Wireless E-Book Reader Sony on Tuesday launched a wireless edition of its electronic-book reader, closing a key feature gap with Amazon's market-leading Kindle. The Sony Reader Daily Edition is the third e-reader introduced by the consumer electronics company in as many weeks. However, the latest model is the only one with a built-in wireless connection that enables people to buy digital books directly from Sony's eBook store. With the Reader Daily Edition, Sony now has three products at different price points: $199 for the Reader Pocket Edition, which has a five-inch diagonal display; $299 for the Reader Touch Edition with a six-inch display; and $399 for the Daily Edition, which sports a seven-inch display.
Sony Netbox SMP-N100 Streams Netflix, YouTube, And More For $130. Logitech excited about Google TV, Revue set-top box. By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY FREMONT, Calif. — Every day, tech gear maker Logitech (LOGI) churns out an average of 376,000 computer mice in every conceivable color, shape and size. If the company is known for any one product, it's the mouse, the little PC navigator that's the hallmark of office desks all over the world.
But now, Logitech wants to be more dominant in the living room, courtesy of Google (GOOG) TV. It's partnering with the search giant on Google's initiative to bring the Web to the TV-viewing experience. A new Logitech set-top box, scheduled for release in the next few weeks, will bring Google and the complete Internet to your set. Logitech already makes powerful, pricey TV remotes, and it leads the market for PC webcams. Much like the mobile Web before the iPhone, TV makers are only beginning to make the Internet available on television sets. Logitech says Google TV will be different. Jump-starting the market With Google TV, Logitech could face its biggest challenge. Apple Special Event Preview: Prediction Time. ‘Tis the season to update the iPod line, but that’s not all we expect out of Apple’s Sept. 1 special event.
We’ll be there tomorrow at 10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET to give you the full scoop on all the company plans to unveil. As you might expect, rumors abound, ranging from a revamped cloud-based iTunes that will deliver streaming video to a whole new Apple TV called iTV that will run iOS for $99. Since it’s fun to guess what Apple’s up to, we’ll turn our preview into a game, predicting what rumors just might become a reality. iPod touch with Facetime, iPod Shuffle with display Likelihood: 99 % If Apple wants to make FaceTime a standard it needs to have more than one device with two-way video calling capability.
Likelihood: 70 % Ever since Apple acquired Lala, we’ve been waiting for Apple to roll out a more connected iTunes with wireless sync and all sorts of other cloud-based goodies. iTV with iOS Likelihood: 50% When we say 50 percent, we don’t mean that it’s a toss up for this happening at all. Tour of SimpleGeo reveals why location services can’t get along. Last week I finally got to visit one of the companies that’s getting a lot of attention inside the location-based service world. No, it’s not Foursquare or Gowalla.
It’s SimpleGeo, headquartered in Boulder, CO. But one thing I’m interested in is why all these services don’t share data (I wrote about that in Techcrunch recently). You know, TripIt doesn’t talk with Google Maps which doesn’t talk with Foursquare which doesn’t talk with Gowalla which doesn’t talk with Bing Maps which doesn’t talk with Trapster which doesn’t talk with my running and cycling apps which don’t talk with Waze which doesn’t talk with Glympse and on and on and on. In the interview and tour with SimpleGeo’s CEO (SimpleGeo plays intermediary for companies trying to build location-based services) he gives a good explanation of why these companies haven’t gotten along: 1. Their databases describe locations differently, so matching databases is hard. 2.
Map Wars (visiting Bing’s imaging center) Everytime I fly I look at who is sitting next to me and wonder “I wonder what he/she does?” Last week on the way to Boulder a guy was sitting next to me and he had a Dell laptop with Windows 7 loaded, and was doing Outlook email. I thought to myself “I bet he works for Microsoft.” Turns out he was. It was Eric Waldman, who does licensing for Bing Maps. We talked for the next couple of hours about the industry, and what he sees as the good things and problems. He told me a story of how Microsoft was doing something that had never been done before: they are flying planes over nearly every inch of the United States in the next 18 months.
He also made sure to point out that Microsoft’s on-car cameras are sharper than the ones Google is using and that Bing Maps includes at least four different imaging types: on road photos, 45-degree low-altitude aerial photos, high altitude plane photos, and satellite photos. You can see that all when you visit a map of the Golden Gate Bridge, for instance. Blog. Pearltrees beta 0.7.2 rocks! We had one obsessive goal last month: improving your web-browsing experience! So, what’s new? 1/ Speeeeeeeeeeeeeed! Fewer clicks: no more click to update the detail window, a mere mouse-over is enough!
The pre-fetch effect! While you are browsing a pearltree, we will pre-load the other pearls. 2/ Clear, Crystal clear! It is always a great challenge to make everything clear. Tool tips to the different buttons around the pearlsanimations to explain the meaning of certain actionskey information and zoom on pearls’ title when the detail window is closedFull-screen videos in the browser. 3/ The more the merrier! You may have already invited or tried to invite some of your friends but we didn’t make your life easy for that. 4/ A better display for your pearltrees You may have encountered some pearltrees that look like big palm trees or big wheels.
What do you think of this new release? Filed under: Community, Platform by pearltrees on July 9th, 2010. “Twitter track on steroids” announced by TweetMeme founder. If you follow Steve Gillmor you know he loved a feature that used to be in Twitter, that he called Track. It let you ask Twitter to shove you real-time info.
It was turned off as Twitter tried to deal with its scale problem. But now Twitter is bringing back real-time streams. I’m using a pre-release version of TweetDeck that shows tweets coming into its columns in real time. It moves fast. And that’s the problem. So, how do we keep up? Well, Nick Halstead has an answer he calls DataSift. It is in final stages of development, he told me, and will be available to developers in the next month. Costco's New Electric Car Opportunity - Forbes.com. Shifting To A Clean Energy Economy - Forbes.com.
EmotionML: Will computers tap into your feelings? | Deep Tech. For all those who believe the computing industry is populated by people who are out of touch with the world of emotion, it's time to think again. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardizes many Web technologies, is working on formalizing emotional states in a way that computers can handle. The name of the specification, which in July reached second-draft status, is Emotion Markup Language. That might sound alien to the cold calculating ways of a computer. Let's face it, compared with most computer interaction, HAL 9000 sounded positively genial in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when he said, "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that. " But the Multimodal Interaction Working Group that's overseeing creation of the technology really does want to marry the two worlds. Some of the work is designed to provide a more sophisticated alternative to smiley faces and other emoticons for people communicating with other people.
Indeed, some are betting they will. A dark side? Samsung Seeks to Bring 'Apps' to TVs. iPlod: Apple's music player goes into decline. The invitation to Apple's event tomorrow at the Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco shows an acoustic guitar with a sound hole in the shape of the Apple logo. Seasoned watchers of the company know that this is the time of year when the iPod gets a refresh, yet there's a shadow over the digital music player that turned Apple from an also-ran computer company into a force in the technology world. Sales figures for the quarter to June showed 9 million sold - the lowest quarterly number since 2006.
The iPod, launched in October 2001, looks to be in terminal decline. Apple is unworried - sales of its iPhone and iPad are booming - but the drooping figures for the digital music player market are a concern for another sector: music companies. The music industry had looked to the iPod to drive people to buy music in download form, whether from Apple's iTunes music store or from newer competitors such as Amazon.
Advertisement ''Instead, we're seeing a curve resembling that of a niche technology.'' Email overload? Try Priority Inbox. Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer People tell us all the time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply.
Today, we’re happy to introduce Priority Inbox (in beta)—an experimental new way of taking on information overload in Gmail. Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”: As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Or buttons at the top of the inbox to correctly mark a conversation as important or not important. GetJar - Appsolutely Everything for Nokia, BlackBerry, Android, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Palm.
Samsung Galaxy Tab is Verizon Wireless’ tablet « Boy Genius Report. Apple survey hints at iTunes streaming video service coming soon? ViewSonic ViewPad 7 official: Android 2.2 and 'full' phone functionality. 31st August 2010 – ViewSonic Europe ushers in a new product category to its portfolio with the introduction of a premium capacitive multi-touch screen 7" tablet. Viewpad 7 The ViewPad 7 is a world's first 7" Android 2.2 (Froyo) tablet with phone functionality, multi-tasking capabilities and front and back-facing cameras, VGA and 3MP, resolutions respectively. Within a lightweight, pocket-sized design, this device is ideal for anyone who needs a mobile connection to the world via email and video and wants to enjoy a wide-range of applications. With full 3G and phone functionality, a full size SIM card slot and integrated Bluetooth connectivity the ViewPad 7 will support instant messaging, text/mms messaging, VOIP and standard voice calls all in a single device.
It features an easy to use familiar interface with a G-sensor that reorients the screen depending on how the device is held and access to the Google Android app store featuring over 100,000 applications. Pricing and availability. As E-Book Wars Heat Up, Borders Drops Prices Of Kobo And Aluratek Devices. Neighbortree Raises $120k For Hyperlocal Community Websites Network.
Kansas City-based startup Neighbortree checked in to tell us about their efforts to grow a fledgling network of hyper-local neighborhood community websites operated by residents. The company has just raised $120,000 from an undisclosed regional angel investment firm, notably a mere month after launching its service. Neighbortree provides free, interactive neighborhood websites to any type of residential community, including traditional neighborhoods, subdivisions, condominiums and apartment buildings. Think of it as a sort of Ning for neighborhoods. Since this requires a hyper-local approach (we’re talking physical, not virtual communities), its business depends on developing partnerships with other companies that can execute its network model at the metro or state level. Other possible revenue streams include leveraging the services offered by Neighbortree sister company Kansas City Website Design (which, obviously, designs and develops websites, mostly for small businesses).
What If UberCab Pulls An Airbnb? Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption. If you live in San Francisco and you haven’t tried UberCab yet, do it. The service, which we first covered in July, eliminates everything bad about a taxi experience. In my order, that’s flagging one down, finding the cash to pay, and being in a sometimes disgusting car. For bonus points, I always enjoy negotiating whether or not I get air conditioning in the summer in NY. UberCab contracts with black car services – mostly Towncars and Escalades. There’s a lot of unused inventory in those businesses and they are happy to work with someone who eats up that inventory. When I tried UberCab a few days ago I had to wait just 5 minutes for the car to arrive (a big Mercedes), and the overall experience was way better than a taxi. The charges are 1.5x taxi rates, and it’s worth it. The company is planning to expand to other markets, so you may not need to wait long to use it (and if they move too slow, others will pop up anyway).
What’s standing in the way of all this? Technology - Web TVs bigger for manufacturers than 3D. New Tech, d-SLRs To Drive Holiday Sales - 2010-08-30 04:12. TWICE: What are you looking at as your big holiday movers this year? Peter Palermo, Kodak: For us, pocket video remains very strong. It continues to amaze us. We find that it's not just the skateboarding 17-year-old teenagers who are doing some crazy things and trying to capture them on video to upload to YouTube, it's Mom's and Dad's.
Our pocket video cameras offer still capture, and even in video post-capture you can extract stills from videos. Consumers really aren't using them for that purpose at this point. For us, with video it seemed like a natural to have a waterproof product that was safe for consumers to take pretty much anywhere they were going to be shooting video. Chuck Westfall, Canon: We concentrate on what I'll say is a combination of style and substance. The ASP for the whole industry on compact cameras is going to be below $200 substantially whereas on Canon we're above $200, we're like $225 or higher.
Dennis Eppel, Panasonic: Obviously 3D is going to be big for us. Free iPad Scam - Free iPad offer on Facebook and Twitter is a scam. BlackBerry Patent - BlackBerry patent for physically rotatable keyboard filed. Ford Uses Wi-Fi to Customize Cars. New Technology to Lure Shoppers. Best Buy To Focus On Tablets For Holidays - Elizabeth Woyke - Mobilized. CEAs Industry Forecast found home audio is improving. Web Services: Netflix Adds More Studios to Streaming Options, by Arlen Schweiger - Electronic House Product News. Hillcrest Sees More Movement from TV, Game Companies - Digits. Intel and Orange to Reveal the Future of Entertainment at 5plus Forum -- Sept. 16, Paris - Related Stories - CEA SmartBrief.
AT&T Says $1,000 Tablets Might Make Laptops Obsolete.