The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘custom’

Check out this custom made iPhone app that robotics student Robert Stephenson created.

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DIY: Control your Hexapod robot with your iPhone

As immature as it sounds, I was originally suspect of Line 6 products because I did not like the name of their Variax guitar line. (Whew, glad that’s off my chest). But while working on an audio project a while back, I picked up a Line 6 TonePort UX2 amp simulator/tone modeler in order to record some guitar parts.

See the original post here: 
Review: POD X3 Digital Guitar Amp Modeler

So Skullcandy headphones sound good, that’s pretty much a given. And while the styling is cool and everything, they seem a bit..

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Custom Skullcandy headphones look, sound great

If you just bought a Canon Rebel T1i , get thee to the camera store.

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Canon launches the Rebel T2i for $899

Back in 2007, we wrote about Groovle, a site that lets you skin Google with your favorite image, and serves results through Google’s Custom Search. It seems that Google wasn’t much of a fan though: the search giant sought to take control over the domain name, alleging that it would confuse users. Today comes word that their request has been denied by the National Arbitration Forum, in what Groovle believes is only Google’s second such defeat.

Google initially sent Groovle an Email on July 29 demanding that they hand the domain over. In response to Google’s initial complaints, Groovle modified the site design to make it more distinct and added a disclaimer to explicitly say it was not affiliated with Google, but that wasn’t enough to placate them. It’s not hard to guess why Google was concerned. Groovle, while not simply a typo away from Google’s name, does share quite a few letters in common, and the primary purpose of the site is to search Google’s index.

Groovle’s defense includes a number of arguments, but the one that resonated with the NAF is that its name stems from the words “Groovy” and “Groove”, rather than “Google”. It may not sound like a big difference, but those extra letters proved to be enough to win the case. From the decision:

Respondent contends that its domain name is sufficiently differentiated from Complainant’s GOOGLE mark. Respondent argues that the disputed domain name is not a misspelling of Complainant’s mark; Respondent asserts that the disputed domain name contains the significant letters “r” and “v” which serve to distinguish the sound, appearance, meaning, and connotation of “groovle” from Complainant’s GOOGLE mark. Furthermore, Respondent contends that its alterations clearly transform the predominant word of the domain name to “groove” or “groovy,” not GOOGLE. Respondent contends that these alterations are sufficient to distinguish its domain name from Complainant’s GOOGLE mark. The Panel agrees and finds that Respondent’s domain name is not confusingly similar to Complainant’s GOOGLE mark under Policy ¶ 4(a)(i). See Google, Inc. v. Wolfe, FA 275419 (Nat. Arb. Forum July 18, 2004) (“The domain name is not confusingly similar to Complainant’s GOOGLE mark. The dissimilar letters in the domain name are sufficiently different to make it distinguishable from Complainant’s mark because the domain name creates an entirely new word and conveys an entirely singular meaning from the mark.”).

Groovle also notes in the filing that Google has brought forty-nine UDRP complaints to the NAF, and another sixteen to the World Intellectual Property Organization, over the Google trademark. It has only lost once before now, in the case of “Froogles.com” (which is what the decision quoted above refers to).

Of course, Google can simply cut off access to its Custom Search if it really wants to. Its Terms of Service includes relevant passages like “Google may change, suspend or discontinue all or any aspect of the Service, including their availability, at any time, and may terminate Your use of the Service at any time.” But even if that happens, Groovle can switch to use a different search API, like Yahoo’s BOSS or Bing.

Other options for customizing your Google experience include WebMynd, which lets you tweak the appearance and layout of your Google search results (Groovle only affects the initial landing page — your search results have the standard layout).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Since the official launch of our integration between CrunchBase and Facebook Connect in November, we’ve seen 19% (5,087 out of 26,850) of our edits come from newly registered, non-anonymous users. Even after the predictable spike around the announcement, we’ve seen a sustained and growing percentage of our edits coming from these users.

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so we thought it would be fun to give some credit to those users most actively involved in keeping CrunchBase up-to-date and accurate (apart from our internal team of course – it just wouldn’t be a contest). The top ten startup gurus are now highlighted in the right-hand column on the CrunchBase home page, and you can also view the full list to find out where you stack up. We’re planning to completely open up registration (without requiring Facebook Connect) in the near future as well to further broaden the field.

We’re also excited to announce a few new ways for you to keep up to date with the latest CrunchBase data. First, there are now two Twitter feeds that are updated with funding rounds and acquisitions as they are added to CrunchBase; just follow @CB_fundings and @CB_acquisitions on Twitter. We’ll be adding more feeds in the future – suggestions about which ones you would find most useful are welcome. If you’d like to keep visitors to your site advised of the most recent happenings in the startup world, we suggest that you embed the Twitter widget by pasting the following code in the location of your choice: Acquisitions; Funding Rounds.

If RSS is more your style, you now have the ability to create a custom RSS feed based on pages on CrunchBase that interest you – maybe the Nexus One, for example. Every page in CrunchBase has a “Follow” button that will add all major milestones for that person, product, or company to your custom RSS feed. The feed will appear on your account page (you’ll need to create an account) and you can import it to the reader of your choice as well. Just don’t tell Steve Gillmor.

Your customized feed, on your CrunchBase home page or in your RSS inbox:

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

Every minute, approximately 20 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube, so it won’t surprise you if I say that it’s impossible for any human being to watch everything on there in the span of one lifetime – provided anyone would even want to.

The standard of quality of videos that are uploaded to YouTube or other video sharing platforms like Vimeo or Blip.tv is subject to debate, as is the ability for the operators of the websites to put in such good filters that the best videos across a variety of categories get featured rather than the most popular (most viewed) only.

VidQue, for one, aims to build a better mousetrap by applying what you could refer to as a social filter to videos shared online.

VidQue functions in large part as a video bookmarking and distribution app, enabling users to save videos to their custom pages with a single click, and easily share them with their friends on Twitter or Facebook. At the same time, VidQue puts a lot of focus on video discovery, allowing users to watch videos based on their personal “Video Feed”, which is a listing of the latest videos saved by their peers or basically anyone they decide to follow.

The essence of the service is based on the premise that popularity rarely equals quality, and VidQue instead algorithmically analyzes trends and peer reviews in order to showcase the best videos on its main category listings (e.g. Technology). Thus, the startup claims, each user gets treated as a unique individual which in turns makes for a more “successful and rewarding video discovery experience” over time.

VidQue is entirely bootstrapped, but CEO Lukas Dryja informs me that the fledgling company will now start looking for external funding to be able to grow.

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

The more Google products you use, the more data it collects about everything you do online—your search history, your emails, the blogs and news sites you read, which videos you watch on YouTube, your news alerts, tasks ,and even shopping lists. For some of these, you need to explicitly grant Google permission to keep track of data associated with your profile. But it’s hard to keep up with everything Google is tracking.

So now the company is launching a Google Dashboard, which will give you a high-level summary of everything Google knows about you by virtue of the Google products you use. This might include how many emails are in your inbox, recent subject lines, which YouTube video you’ve watched lately (yes, all of them), appointments on your calendar, and more.

If you want more detailed data, it sends you to the particular data repository for that product. And for security purposes it does not create a second database of all the data, it just brings it up in your browser without restoring it server-side.

The Dashboard is only for Googel products which require you to sign in with your Googel account. It does not include cookie-based data Google collects through DoubleClick ads or other ads. For that, you need to go to the Ad Preference Manager, which has its own issues.

You can see the list of all the products the Dashboard keeps track of below.

Account & profile
Web-history
Gmail
Docs
Calendar
YouTube
Blogger
iGoogle
Latitude
Reader
Talk
Health
Orkut
Picasa
Shopping List
Voice
Contacts
Alerts
Finance
Friend Connect
Tasks
Custom search engines
Mobile Sync

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

Building upon the success of the custom ATI Xenos GPU that’s found in the current Xbox 360, Microsoft and ATI have apparently already struck a deal to continue using ATI chips in the next generation of Xbox consoles, according to Fudzilla .

Original post:
ATI to power next-gen Xbox?

If you find the full version of Madden ( see review here ) to be too expensive, complicated, or both but you still long for the thrill and prestige of legally-licensed NFL players and teams, then you’ll be happy to know that Madden NFL Arcade will be here sometime in December.

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Madden NFL Arcade coming to XBLA and PSN for $15 in December