Continue reading Via Motors E-REV hybrid trucks power your commute and the job site too (video)
Via Motors E-REV hybrid trucks power your commute and the job site too (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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mPlayer -- the cross-platform, open source media player -- ported to webOS originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
My advice for the new year: go East and South, young man and woman ... and investor. America, Europe, and Japan are stagnant and ponderous. More and more, in the coming years, the real moving and shaking will happen elsewhere. "2011 will be the year Android explodes!" cried a recent headline, citing a new Broadcom chipset that will reportedly make sub-$100 unsubsidized smartphones ubiquitous. Maybe so, but I second MG's skepticism: North American carriers will fight this tooth and nail, and even when they lose, we'll still have to wait for the three-year contracts that are status quo here to finally die. If that chipset is real, though, the headline's not wrong; Android will explode ... in the developing world, where virtually all phone service is pre-paid. (As, ahem, I predicted 20 months ago.) There's a larger trend here. Mobile phones and 3G service became ubiquitous in Africa so rapidly in part because they never had to compete with landlines. Kenyans flocked to mobile-phone money transfer services, because they had no consumer banks: now M-Pesa, the largest, handles money equal to a mindboggling 10% of Kenya's GDP every year. (The US equivalent would be $1.4 trillion/year. By contrast, PayPal handles less than $100 billion/year worldwide, of which mobile-phone payments are but a small fraction.) 
The Canon DSLR / MP3 player / speaker is both more and less than it seems (but mostly less) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Dec 2010 23:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It seems, at least at first blush, that we are out of the slimy gullet and into the potentially less dangerous teeth of this recession. Joblessness is still high but folks I know who are working in IT and CS are in high demand. People are hiring, but not out in the open, and shoppers, as evidenced by this year's holiday season, have a little bit of cash. But CE manufacturers, back in 2008, pulled into their turtle shells and haven't come out. The past few years have passed in a slothful haze and I'm worried that 2011 will be another year of negative innovation. Consider what happened this year: we saw a load of Android phones, we saw an iPad and a new iPhone, and saw some tablets. That's it. 3D TV was a flop, most other product lines saw little or no improvement, and generally CE industry sat this year out. CES, if all portents can be believed, will be a bust as well. People ask me every year what my favorite gadget is. That's almost impossible to answer. Sadly, for me, it's like asking a proctologist about his favorite patient: they all sort of blend together and none of the experiences are very nice. So what is my favorite gadget? The gadget that truly stood out? It's the freaking Parrot AR.Drone. That's right. A toy. Here's why, and here's what manufacturers can take away from this toy. 
Google, as you may have heard, is making a big push into local advertising. It is currently offering $100 million in AdWords credits to new small businesses that sign up and promotes Google Places results for all local searches. Quite frankly, this is scaring the shit out of competitors like Citysearch, Yellowbook, SuperPages, WhitePages, and Yelp. They all rely on Google search results for people to find a good portion of their listings, and if Google displaces them collectively for local business listings, their businesses will be destroyed. In local, Google is already a big snowball getting bigger and bigger. So how do they fight back? They enter into an anti-Google alliance, of course. The company organizing this alliance is Yext, a New York City startup which specializes in pay-per-call advertising for local businesses and dashboards to help them manage their reputations and listings online. On Monday, it will launch a new feature called "Tags" which will let small businesses highlight their names with a little tag and customizable message across about a dozen local listings sites. Launch parters for this "Tag Alliance" (I like my name better) will include MapQuest, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com, SuperPages, White Pages, MerchantCircle, and Topix, with more to come.
It looks like at least one security team has their finger on the pulse: LinkedIn, after hearing about the Gawker Media hack, obtained the database of email addresses and cross-checked it against every member of LinkedIn. If a match was found, the account was immediately deactivated and an email sent to the user, forcing them to change their password.LinkedIn shows technical savvy, deactivates Gawker-compromised accounts originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 15 Dec 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
