Toshiba have just announced the arrival of their new TV – what must be the most powerful TV in the universe. It’s called the Cell TV and is available in 55 or 65 inch versions. Don’t it look good?
Well it’s the insides that I’m more concerned about. They have crammed in multiple eight-core processors which all combine to make it more powerful than ten average desktop computers and 143 times faster than rival televisions. Impressive right? Toshiba think so too.
The possibilities of what we can do are really endless,” said Scott Ramirez, vice president of marketing for Toshiba’s TV group, during a press conference.
The TV is also connected to the internet via WiFi or an Ethernet cable allowing content to be downloaded and streamed. You can also browse the net and hold video calls by using the inbuilt video camera and microphone.
2010 has been dubbed the year of 3D TV, well this TV has a processor which makes normal TV ‘jump’ out of the screen at you. This includes things like football which was thought too complex and fast-paced to be made 3D just a few years ago.
This TV will go down in the history books as a turning point in home entertainment, home computing and technology in general.
Over the past week, Yelp and Google have been in heated debates concerning Google acquiring the service which was founded by two former PayPal employees and allows users to submit reviews of their local services. After days of deliberation both parties had agreed on a price – half a billion dollars. It seemed that everyone was quite happy with the deal until the CEO of Yelp Jeremy Stoppleman notified Google over the weekend that the deal was off.
What happened?
Well nobody knows for sure but it must have taken something big for Yelp to walk away from half a billion dollars and pressure from internet giant Google. My guess is that another offer has been tabled. Obviously, Yelp wan to keep their cards close to their chest should this deal fall through and need to go back to Google. Perhaps one of Google’s rivals such as Microsoft or Apple have decided they want Yelp?
Reading a great article from NY Times about drivers and texting messages got me thinking about some of the obvious and wrong things that happens in our lives and we choose to ignore them. The article refers to what I think it’s an important news for Utah’s citizens: Texting behind the wheel can take up to 15 years of prison. Sounds too much for you? Too little?
Here’s an important part of the article: “The new law, which took effect in May, penalizes a texting driver who causes a fatality as harshly as a drunken driver who kills someone. In effect, a crash caused by such a multitasking motorist is no longer considered an “accident” like one caused by a driver who, say, runs into another car because he nodded off at the wheel. Instead, such a crash would now be considered inherently reckless.
“It’s a willful act,” said Lyle Hillyard, a Republican state senator and a big supporter of the new measure. “If you choose to drink and drive or if you choose to text and drive, you’re assuming the same risk.”
I really like the last phrase, if you choose to text and drive you are assuming the risk. Isn’t that the real problem? People that do not take full responsibilities about their own acts? If you decide to text while you are driving, how can you be absolutely certain that you are not causing and accident? Are you decided to bet your life on it?
Also the NY Times posted a video about this topic, the distracted drivers and the common behaviors. That includes a small review for a research made by a Utah university, simulations about driving and texting and how and where do they focus while they are doing these tasks all together.
The law sounds great for me, but if you start thinking about it, you will find several legal holes in it, the most important one: You can easily detect drunken drivers with a breath analyzer, but how can you detect a texting driver? Also the law doesn’t say anything about calling during driving nor using other devices, like GPS.
What do you think? Do you think that these accidents should not be consider as such since you can prevent them?
Why do people go online? I know, it is a general question that could lead to several answers and also might depend on several factors as well, that also is dynamically changing according to the day or particular moment. But at Ruder Finn Intent Index are trying to simplify this question, analyzing common areas that men, women, youths and seniors could choose to go online.
The results are very interesting, here are some quick facts:
More than twice as many people go online to socialize (82%) than to do business (39%) or shop (31%).
72% of people go online just to become part of a community.
More men (42%) than women (36%) go online to do business.
Women (91%) are much more likely to go online to socialize than men (73%).
A majority of youths 55% go online to just to play games.
More than half of seniors (65%) go online to be a part of an online community.
Almost half (48%) go online to entertain others.
And even more, if you want you can also review the full results with more specific data.
How do they collect this data? Well this report is updated on quarterly basis, the sample is a minimum of 500 American adults. The index is calculated on the basis of how frequently this people is going online for 295 reasons or intents.
82% go online to socialize. No surprise there, where it would be Facebook if that wasn’t true?
72% go online just to become part of a community. What can you say about it? Maybe a constant feeling of people to be included in some group, or self esteem issues?
55% of youths go online just to play games. Well I didn’t see that number coming, I was hoping around a 30% maybe? And the rest to socialize.
65% seniors go online to be a part of an online community. I’m not sure which age represents “seniors” but it is a great thing that elders are always trying to catch up with technology.
Well I guess bad guys sometimes just get caught. That was the case for this Chinese guy that trying to attack a rival using a Denial-of-Service attack generated an Internet collapse in most of China (People = 1.300 millions, that’s right 1.3 billion people). The attack occurred last May,and the responsible of this attack: 23 year-old that owned private gaming servers and since he wasn’t doing so good in business decided attack his rivals, ending up taking down primary DNS servers in China.
To make a quick review about the story: A Chinese guy (with the surname of Bing) from a cotton factory offered online gaming with some private servers that he bought. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, there are thousands of these types of unlicensed gaming servers. And of course, this underground business usually involves some underground behaviors; Bing’s servers were being attacked by other gaming servers rivals, causing him to lose money. So he decided to strike back their rivals with some DDoS attacks.
Bing spent nearly u$s41.000 on these attacks, renting 81 servers only for this task, but they were ineffective. So they decided to ask for more help, that’s when the attacks collapsed DNSPod that not only served for Bing’s rivals servers, also serves several Internet companies in China.
Although police rarely have the jurisdiction or training needed to pursue such a case, officials confirmed the detention of four individuals, including Bing. Here’s the official report.
These attacks are not uncommon in these days, as we’ve said in this previous post. It is a good thing that authorities are tracking down these criminals.
Its official, Facebook, the social network that started out as a noting based at Harvard has now grown to have over 250 million active worldwide members. Astonishing.
The momentous figure was officially announced on the official Facebook blog by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Just a few months ago they celebrated reaching the 200 million mark by launching the non-profit organization Facebook for Good. Now however, they are changing tactics for what should be a huge blowout party –they’re doing nothing except carrying on with their work.
Apparently, they are now trying to make the service more accessible on mobile devices as the growth of Facebook is now largely coming from international countries where people are more likely to access the social network on their mobile devices like the iPhone or Blackberry.
“Today as we celebrate our 250 millionth user, we are also continuing to develop Facebook to serve as many people in the world in the most effective way possible,” Zuckerberg wrote. “This means reaching out to everyone across the world and making products that serve all of you, wherever you are–whether through Facebook Connect, new mobile products and the other things that we are building.”
As we have seen with Twitter, failure to keep the ball rolling can lead to growth rates dropping like a rock. Facebook seem to be doing a good job. The next six months will be a challenge because as a ball gets bigger, its harder to roll.
Yes, I know, you probably didn’t even think about a walkman in a long time; and most likely it’s been a real while since you’ve seen one, but Sony’s is -NOT- celebrating the release of their first Walkman 30 years ago.
Sony is still trying to make a revolutionary product release that they didn’t have particulary since the first portable audio player hit the market. They are having a rough year (first annual loss balance in 14 years) and they don’t have so great expectations for next year either. Most of the hopes are placed in PlayStation 3 (mainly based on two things, the release of the slim version and waiting for the blu-ray to become a real home standard), and also the portable new console PSP Go!
Getting back to the walkman’s story, here’s a quick and funny image that a friend of mine sent me today:
I wanted to share with you a very, very cool set of posts from Scott Hanselman: Building your own arcade cabinet. This I’m sure fulfills almost every man’s dream, that spent a lot of time with these magnificent toys.
Within the articles Scott will guide you to the entire process about how to build this machine. Including all the tips regarding to the materials used, where to buy them, etc:
Here’s a video that gives you a tour to the entire process:
Here are some of amazing facts about it:
Cost = $441. Yep, only 441 dollars. But there are some disclaimers about it, for example, the monitor was recycled from an old one. But still, sounds like a great number to me.
The work hours took him around 24 hours total, divided in six weeks. I know what you are thinking, if you start building it right now, by this time tomorrow you’ll have it all set
Don’t tell me that you are not considering the idea!
Recently I’ve posted about an interesting stat of the blogsphere: Over 95% of current blogs in Internet are abandoned, and one of the reasons that I’ve mentioned is the existence of Twitter. Well, I guess similar stats always comes in two. A study made from the Harvard Business revealed a lot of stats regarding to Twitter users, including one related to their users and how they abandon twitter.
10% of the Twitter accounts hold the 90% of the tweets available every day, and most of the users that register themselves usually uses one or two tweets and leave the account completely. Here are some other stats from the report:
So, what we can say about this inconsistency in blogs and twitter? People that start a blog and/or a twitter account but they never update it again… well I’m sure that the answer is one thing, perseverance it’s not a quality for most of us. Specially when we have some expectations and we don’t see a quick result, like I mentioned about blogs and how people relate to that as a “financial independance” and rapidly get disappointed.
The NY Times published an interesting article about a very surprising (at least for me) statement: Around 95% of existing blogs are abandoned completely. According to a study made by Technorati, only 7.4 million of the 133 million blogs that the company tracks down had been updated in the past 120 days. Meaning that 95% of blogs existing on Internet are abandoned and never updated again.
Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.
But why is this happening? Why people just suddenly looses motivation to write or share experiences, information, articles, etc? The article also remarks that people usually confuse the idea of blogging as a fast way to financial independence and rapidly find themselves discouraged.
But, besides the possible financial disappointment, is it twitter related to this? In a small way, I think.
Over an year ago (maybe more) when I started to hear about Twitter I found this short comic (from Gapingvoid), metioned also on an old post of mine about Twitter:
For some cases, I’m sure this is a very realistic comic. After all, Twitter it is a way of micro blogging, share information and (current) experiences. And it is easier and simpler to keep updated your Twitter account instead of your blog. It is the same? Absolutely not.
Blogging is so much richer, states as a permanent document (Twitter also does, but not so friendly to review them), or even as your historical experience in a given subject. It’s all about sharing: information, opinions, expertiece, experiences, etc etc.
Its official, 
Yes, I know, you probably didn’t even think about a walkman in a long time; and most likely it’s been a real while since you’ve seen one, but Sony’s is -NOT- celebrating the release of their first Walkman 30 years ago.
Recently I’ve posted about an interesting stat of the blogsphere: 
The 
