The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘corner’

You know how when you play someone’s guitar for the first time at a party and one string is way high or low and you start to tune it and find that the guitar is total garbage and can’t be tuned anyway and so you play “Closer to Fine” on an untuned guitar in the corner of the part and people are all like “Who’s the douche playing Indigo Girls in 2010?

Read the original: 
PolyTune: The Violent Femmes tune all their guitar strings at once on the bus

USB 3.0 is just around the corner, with us having reported about more and more compatible devices in the last few months. And now Taiwan-based PC accessory maker VIA has readied the so-called VIA VL810 SuperSpeed Hub Controller , the world’s first USB 3.0 hub controller. It supports data transfer speeds of  up to 5Gb/s and features one upstream and four downstream  ports

Go here to read the rest:
The first USB 3.0 hub controller is here

TVs with Internet connectivity are nothing new , but this is pretty cool: As the world’s first TV makers, Panasonic and LG are cooperating with Skype to incorporate the software, which will make it possible to video chat in 720p HD quality, into TVs.

Read the original: 
Panasonic and LG plasma TVs to offer 720p HD video chats via Skype

Today, Twitter moved into a new, much larger office in San Francisco. The space, which was previously Bebo’s SF office, is right around the corner from their old one.

A few members of the Twitter team spent much of the weekend decorating the new digs with a number of Twitter-themed elements like birds and @ symbols. Check out some of the pictures being posted to the web by Twitter employees below. And yes, there is a DJ booth — and apparently vanity mirrors in the toilet stalls.

[photos: flickr/ryansking, twitpic/caroline, yfrog/robey, twitpic/wfarner, twitpic/jennadawn]

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Up until now, Foursquare, the hot location-based service, has only let a handful of developers play around with its API. Starting today, the company is formally unveiling it, hoping that a robust app community will form around their data.

Here’s the way they’re describing it:

The foursquare API enables developers to build applications that interact with the foursquare platform. You can use the API to create new ways to check-in to foursquare or visualize the data generated by the foursquare community.  Our API is still a work in progress and we look forward to your feedback and suggestions!

In announcing the API, Foursquare has also created an app gallery to show what’s already been built ontop of the API so far. Included in this gallery are:

• Foursquare Android, the open-source Android app (our coverage here)
• SocialGreat, a venue popularity tracker (our coverage here)
• MobZombies, a location-based Zombie check-in game
• PeekMaps, a way to view your friends on a map on Peek Mobile devices
• FourTap, links London subway card swipes with Foursquare data
• YipIt, a way to find nearby deals in New York
• A Foursquare WordPress plugin
• Ul.timate.info, a way to send geo updates to Firefox
• Last Night’s Checkins, a diary-creator for your Foursquare checkin history

Another third-party app just announced is Layar with support for Foursquare. The augmented reality browser has a new beta version with functionality that allows you to use your mobile device to look around and see Foursquare venues around you. You don’t even have to have an account with Foursquare for this to work, so it seems like it could be a good way to convince new users to sign up. If you do have an account, you can checkin to venues right from within Layar.

That’s a pretty good list of third-party support considering that access to the API has been very restricted up until this point. The opening of the data is likely to be important for Foursquare in the long run. Foursquare is getting traction with users putting information into its system, but a real explosion could come if third-party developers start making some great apps on top of the service. Obviously, we’ve seen that type of community swarm around and feed services like Twitter.

Foursquare has also already set up Google Groups to use for both documentation and developer discussion purposes.

[photo: flickr/indienate]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

How to hide that subwoofer in the corner of the room DIY: This cabinet conceals a dark secret Luxury wine vending machine Observe these delicious ravioli sponges Breaking: A six-year-old is trapped in a homemade helium balloon over Denver [UPDATE] Amber Alert GPS device keeps kids close

Read more:
Daily Crunch: Attic Hideout Edition

If you’re on the fence about having a baby, consider the fact that you can dress it up however you please. Case in point, this very excellent handmade Link outfit that a user over at the Crafster forums whipped up.

More: 
Zelda-fy your baby with this handmade Link outfit

Good news, pre-paid fans! You’ve got a new handset coming to your corner of the market. We can’t promise anything for sure, but we’ve got good reason to believe that Virgin Mobile will be getting the LG Rumor 2 sometime in the coming weeks.

Original post: 
LG Rumor 2 headed for Virgin Mobile?

Mother’s Day is just around the corner and those of you who are on top of your game have probably already sent a card and arranged to give your mom a thoughtful gift of flowers, candy, or a gift certificate to a spa. For those of you out there who have done none of the above, Animoto, a startup that automatically generates high quality slideshow/music videos from a set of photos, offers you the ability to make a heartfelt video greeting that would warm any mother’s heart.

The site features a Mother’s Day card that allows you to submit a handful of photos to automatically create a sentimental video-slideshow set to your mom’s favorite music. It’s an easy, quick and and innovative way to show your Mom how much you love and value her on Mother’s Day.

Animoto, which launched in 2007, also helped users make creative slideshow greetings cards on Valentine’s Day and and over the holiday season. Animoto offers a nifty service and does a nice job of spicing up photo albums, with little effort needed on the users’ part. Competitors include RockYou and Slide.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

For a while now, we’ve been tracking a number of companies who are hard at work trying to build the ultimate social networking desktop app. We’ve talked about TweetDeck, Twhirl / Seesmic Desktop, AlertThingy, and there are many more especially if you also include the ones that focus only on Twitter (Tweetie, Nambu, Twitterific, etc.).

Another horse in this race that barely gets a mention is Sobees, probably in big part because of the fact it’s only available for Windows users (with the latest .NET framework, moreover), although it doesn’t really deserve to be below the radar this much at all.

We covered the company’s social network aggregator when it entered public beta, and wrote that they were aiming to attract a mainstream audience for their software, which enables users to manage a fairly wide variety of web apps and social networking services from their desktops. It’s a nifty companion that plugs into Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and many more web services, but I’ve always felt it was far too overloaded with features for me to use it on a daily basis.

So I was interested when the company set out to build a stand-alone client for Twitter, Facebook and Twitter Search. And just as they were working on that, Facebook launched its Open Stream API so they made thankful use of it quite rapidly and converted the API to .NET and integrated the stream into the new client. The software is now in alpha and publicly available under the name bDule, and it’s definitely worth checking out even if you only use one of the two services it supports.

Soon, we’ll do a feature-by-feature comparison for all the existing social desktop applications, but for now let me just say Sobees is very much worthy of being included whenever someone talks about Facebook / Twitter clients. As mostly all of the apps mentioned on top bDule is a bit of a memory drain, and at times renders a bit slow, but the UI is really well thought-out (love the different templates you can switch to in just one mouse-click) and it does what it’s supposed to do really well.

Too bad it’s Windows / .NET only, because I’m sure there’s an audience out there that’s looking for just this type of app.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.