Archive for: internet
Back in the early 90’s there was this song, “Things That Make You Go Hmmm…”. It’s this song that I sadly have to reference when mentioning the Twitter Peek. Unlike the song that had some redeeming qualities this doorstopper is the clunkiest piece of technology I’ve seen yet (a disclaimer, I do not own one).
This product is made by Peek. The same company brought you the horrors that were the Pronto Peek and the Meet Peek. I’m not sure why I would want any of these devices since my smartphone does it all, and when I’m not at my mobile, I’m at my desk.
Perhaps therein lies the truth. It’s not geared towards me, the tech savvy geek, but rather the Twitter uninitiated.Despite the millions of users, there are still many demographics who have not embraced it. What a simple bridge to get them to join.
Clever plan or failure upward? Too early to tell, but one thing is for sure, based on their past successes, the Twitter Peek might make a small splash.
The Twitter Peek can be purchased on their website or via Amazon.
Heard of Twitter? Sure the whole world has by now. Lone tribes on far islands have heard about Twitter. This massively immersive and widely used micro-blogging network has become a staple for both our personal and professional lives. The world seems to still be feeling the “Twitter effect” as industries adapt their existing messages to fit the fast paced world of this social network.
But do you ever feel like you’re being left behind? Perhaps not enough time to get the right message in a timely fashion? Now there’s a solution to that.
Twuffer presents itself as the buffer between you and your timed messages. By using the web application, you are able to preset messages on a timed schedule to be released on your network at the times you think most important. The possibilities of this type of functionality are as endless as your creativity.
The web app is easy to use and can serve you to better time your announcements, set reminders for yourself or others, engage in timed online activities, or, as the site suggests, make it appear as if you never sleep. The practicality of this app seems pretty straightforward.
The application is currently in beta, but your able to explore what it has to offer pretty seamlessly. I suggest you give it a try to announce regular days when your podcast or blog post will go live, or perhaps some other similar campaign to see if Twuffer is right for you!
Today finding the music you want, when you want it has been channeled to using sites like the Amazon store or iTunes. Sometimes, when looming for an obscure song that is not mainstream, you’d be lucky to find it. This frustrating experience paired with the perceived greedines of corporate music labels has forced many of us to find our music on peer to peer networks or bitorrent sites such the Pirate Bay.
Songbeat360.com is an amazingly innovative way of integrating a music player with a music search. Now you can listen to your favorite songs while searching for more. You are essentially still building your own station, much like Pandora or Last.fm, but on this music player you have the ability to download your music immediately.
Bypassing the need to go to the likes of Amazon or iTunes may please some, but does the pricing compare? Based on the site, the application is an Adobe Air app, and comes with 25 free credits. Credits are used when a search is done, and searches are supposedly capable of returning up to 500 results, ensuring you will fond what you need. For further credits, those can be purchased via a stored credit card. For $15 you receive 1000 credits for more music, which breaks down to a whole lot less than $.99 per song on the iTunes store. This is of course assuming you find what you want in one search.
Is the next revolution to your music search? I’d say know, but it’s definitely interesting. The pricing alone is attractive, and if the quality is the same, I can see this web app becoming extremely successful.
A while back, the Finnish government announced that it was making high-speed internet access a legal right for all of its citizens. They have a point in making such legislation.
Because the Internet is playing a bigger part in work, education and society everyday it’s essential that everyone has access to it. Now the Swedes are adopting the same approach by promising their citizens 100 MB broadband in just over ten years. Imaging how many movies you could download with that!
In all seriousness though, I think this is great news. When the web grows more complex and starts to broadcast SuperHD videos (due in the next few years) we’ll need a seriously fast connection to keep up. At them moment, the base connection in Sweden is 20kb/s which is extremely slow. You’d have to go back to 1998 to get an internet connection that slow by using dial-up. I don’t even want to imagine loading a web page with that – let alone download a movie.
So come 2010 all the Swedes will be downloading ABBA at lightening speed!
Social networks as they exist depend on the number of friends you start off with and thus you expand your network based on your existing network and grow from there. For many, not having an online presence makes it heard to start a social network when there is no online network to utilize to start. For many this can be frustrating and for many becomes the reason why they do not adopt the social scene. What if there was simply a network that didn’t rely on existing friendships and paired you with new people based on your profile to participate in unique shared experiences?
6Rounds is the answer and the unique network is sure to make a splash in the world of social engagement.
The network itself is designed to be a fully interactive experience incorporating the best of micro-messaging and video networks. There’s now a space for those not interested in hosting entire video shows, or who lack friends to build on a social profile on
Facebook or
Twitter.
6Rounds functions as a completely unique and diverse network that no user will get the same experience from their engagement. The network allows users to come together in a “live” setting where they will be challenged with “using a combination of webcams, real-time games, social activities and media engagements, we present a wide range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, Facebooking and Youtubing, to shopping together and beyond,” says the site.This sound a little like speed dating with the entertainment provided, and none of the relationship awkwardness attached. I can see how this would be appealing to both veteran and new entry supporters of social engagement.
The network is free and looks to combine the best of social networking, instant messaging, and video content to create an ever changing user experience.
“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” – Roasalia de Castro
This famous quote and many others like it inspire hundreds of thousands of people to buy a big backpack, a pair of Levis jeans and hit the road every single year between college and ‘life’. Yet, sleeping in a bus stations isn’t too appealing. And seeing as this is a technology site I thought I’d offer a solution – CouchSurfing.
Couch Surfing basically means living life to the fullest and recharging your batteries on people’s couches. And now there is a social network by the same name that is dedicated to finding you a place to lay your head down at night. They now have more than one million members who are travelers and hosts willing to let you spend the night on their couch. All you have to do is take out your iPhone while you’re on the coach to Budapest, do a little search and give whoever lives there a call to see if you can do a spot of couch surfing. Easy.
The site covers in excess of 55,000 cities in over 230 countries all over the world so no matter where you’re going you’ll find somewhere.
Seeing as Crenk is a start-up review site, it occurred to us during our day of endless pondering that many of you may be interested in working for a start-up. But getting in with one can be tough. By their very nature start-ups are small and have a tight knit staff; normally friends who spotted a gap in the market or had a great idea.
Staruply is basically a job site that serves only to advertise jobs in start-ups where YOU can apply for them. Many of the jobs are for things like PR, development and editing. The homepage has the most recent jobs posted by start-ups looking for staff. This list of jobs gives you basic information such as if it is telecommute, fulltime and the salary.
Start-ups can also post jobs for free by using the ‘Post’ option along the top of the site.
Given the recession, many are out of work but have loads of marketable skills. With thousands of people turning to the internet for employment, you better be quick about applying.
In summary: This is a very useful site for the young glossy-eyed graduates and experienced professionals alike.
Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook are some of the internets biggest names. All of them have huge online presence with millions of hits every single day. Their names have become so well known that even elderly people who have never sat at a computer know what they are. Ever think about their electricity bills?
Me neither, until I came across a report by MIT which states that they are easily spending $30 million per annum on electricity. This is to keep their servers up and running. First they have to power the servers. Then comes the technology that runs them and all the cooling and networking systems in between. A tall task with an even taller bill.
This report suggests a way in which these companies could save on their electricity bills.
It doesn’t offer a green solution of cutting back, rather it suggests that they constantly change which servers power their machines on a daily, even hourly basis.
So for example, the cost of electricity could rise in the US for any given reason so they shift the workload to servers in Belgium where the electricity is cheaper on that particular day.
While this would be a costly investment to begin with, it should pay off. After all, the total energy usage by the internet’s servers is set to go up four times within the next decade. Time for the big lads to make a big decision I think.
The future is undoubtedly in Apps. Think about it. Over the last year thousands upon thousands of apps have been released and they are rapidly starting to replace websites views. Twitter, Facebook, iTunes and every large newspaper in the world have apps for mobile devices so people can use their services – otherwise they go elsewhere. Even those that may not are linked in with apps. Many websites have news feeds to apps such as Snaptu.
Soon, I predict that anyone wanting to book a flight, buy online or just surf the net will use apps instead. They offer all of the usefulness of the internet with all the easy design and eye pleasing qualities of software.
They’re also easier to use than internet browsers. If you want to read the news you simply click one little button instead of navigating to the page and then trying to find the kind of stories you want.
Apps are taking over a lot of my internet usage. If I want to check the weather, read movie reviews, tweet, use Facebook or search for pictures I use Snaptu. If I want to combine all my instant messaging into one I use eBuddy. It’s all streamlined, easier and quicker than using clunky browsers, not to mention they can fit in your pocket.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Web 3.0 will be App 1.5.
Undoubtedly, the recession wasn’t really hitting the internet as hard as what it was other industries. Sure we has a bit of trouble over at Microsoft but that’s because they are also a trading company in the real world. What I mean to say is that the online world was fighting off the worst of it.
In fact, companies such as eBay and Amazon actually didn’t do so bad. People began to sell their stuff when they needed the cash and others bought them because they didn’t have too much cash to splash. It was all making perfect sense until the internet could take no more as real companies started to turn their back on it.
Advertising is plummeting. A new report states that advertising on a worldwide scale is down by five percent. In America, the figure is even bigger at 7% worth an estimated 0.4 Billion dollars. Companies who usually do quite well from advertising such as Monster reported that they lost 31% compared to last year.
Wouldn’t you know it; internet giant Google is the only ad publisher to report a growth, however even this is in single digits.
Now that advertising is failing the next sector to be hit will be entertainment. Big companies that have real world trading have more of a chance of survival but for online magazines and games where they often depend on advertising alone to keep the ship afloat – there may be trouble ahead indeed.
The IDC, who released the report did have some good news however.
“We think the industry will continue to see losses in the third and fourth quarters, but the growth rates–or the loss rates, if you will–will eventually begin to improve,” Karsten Weide, program director for digital media and entertainment at IDC, said in a statement. “However, we also believe the industry may have to wait until mid-2010 until it sees real growth again.”
So 3G is what we’re all looking for in terms of surfing the web, checking e-mails and streaming video. It’s modern, cool and new – not to mention useful. It’s only starting to take off now since the release of the first touch screen smart-phones that give you HTML browsing – not like 2007 when all you could do was see mobile web slightly faster.
Now a Japanese company by the name of NTT DoCoMo (the company that first introduced 3G back in 2001, but the world failed to adopt it for years) now say that they will introduce 4G in 2010 and that they are confident that the world will get behind them this time.
“We went first and when we looked behind us there was nobody there.” Said the company’s president when asked about the 2001 launch of 3G.
However, even though the future certainly lies with 4G, I can’t see it catching on so quickly. 3G is at its height now and
basic business strategy is that you don’t stop selling until the product does. Then you move on. I admire DoCoMo’s enthusiasm but even though it’s been over eight years since they introduced 3G, it’s only been three or four for the rest of the world.
They are really starting to push what 4G can do in the hope of winning over big companies into adopting the service. They claim that it will be able to stream movies and live TV anywhere where there is a hint of service at speeds approaching 300Mbs. In summary, I would say it will be a few years until we start seeing 4G around these parts.
Called Peacekeeper, the new app makes a lot of sense for Futuremark. As one of the key brands in computer benchmarking, it’s only logical that they would want in on comparative browser testing. In Internet Explorer, you’ll be asked to install an ActiveX control – other browsers will run the test without any add-ins. Tests were patterned after real-world browsing using sites like YouTube, Facebook, GMail, and Meebo.
To see how your default browser scores, just point it to http://service.futuremark.com/peacekeeper/. Once the test completes, your score will be displayed. To test another browser, just click the button and you’ll be given a link to copy and paste.
