The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘lifestyle’

Atari has announced Test Drive Unlimited 2, coming in the Fall to Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. While the first version of the game contained both online and offline modes, this new version “is ‘always live,’ with automatic updates and seamless online/offline integration.

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Test Drive Unlimited 2 promises to seamlessly blend online and offline play

Short Version : It costs a bundle, but the Soyuz is a fantastic backpack.

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Bag Week: Chrome Soyuz weather-proof laptop backpack

Shocking study coming out of the University of Minnesota that says Wii Fit won’t get you into shape , despite what you may think.

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Shock study: Wii Fit alone won’t get you into shape (nor is it supposed to, by the way)

Equintek, an international game development company founded by a group of international investors and entrepreneurs, has invested approximately $1 million in Friends Around Me, a yet-to-launch mobile social networking service with added geo-awareness.

I had a brief chat with one of the startup’s co-founders, Miami-based founder Egor Lavrov, to learn more about the app. I learned only a little about the company’s plans, and much more than I needed to know about Lavrov.

Lavrov, who immigrated to the States after becoming an Internet millionaire in Russia at a young age – he sold his first company at age 16 for just south of $2 million – told me the app will be unique in the U.S. in the way it enables people to acquire new friends, rank users, handle group chat functionality and virtual currency.

That’s fairly vague of course, but the startup aims to launch its first app for iPhone/iPod Touch by the end of this year and on other platforms like Android and BlackBerry in the first half of 2010. According to the fledgling company, the experience of mobile versions of existing social networks and other ventures is simply sub-par (even though Facebook is the highest ranked iPhone app in the App Store), so it’ll be interesting to see what’s so different about what they come up with.

I searched the Web for more information, and found more than I bargained for about Lavrov, who’s quite a colorful character. Check out this bit in a profile of Moscow’s nouveaux riches written back in 2003, for instance:

Lavrov and his 21-year-old wife both write Web logs that focus primarily on their acquisitions, their lifestyle, and their disdain for the poverty in which most Russians live. Lavrov has a $2.5 million custom-designed house outside Moscow, believes that a car should cost no less than $150,000–though a watch can be a little less expensive–and claims that Moscow is the world capital for what he calls “luxury entertainment.”

The man’s personal website boasts pictures of himself in private jets and helicopters and his wife, Russian-Dominican model Lourdes Espinal, while his YouTube account is an utter goldmine of videos of a man showcasing his wealth, driving fancy cars and partying at exclusive night clubs. Last year, he set up a contest called Tattoolizator where he would tattoo the highest bidding company’s logo on his hand (Engadget scored pretty high).

If the video below is any indication of where his mind is at, other mobile social networks have nothing to worry about. Or do they?

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The U.S. unemployment numbers are out today, and most headlines will show that the U.S. unemployment rate in November was 10.0 percent, down from 10.2 percent in October. That number is depressingly large, but even that under-counts the true number of unemployed. For instance, it doesn’t count those people who don’t have a job and have given up looking for one, or those who have found marginal part-time work but still can’t make ends meet and are still looking for a full-time job.

The government keeps stats on all of these “marginally attached workers” and people “employed part time for economic reasons” (rather than by choice). If you add all of those people in, the total unemployment rate in the U.S. is 17.2 percent, compared to 12.6 percent a year ago. The only good news is that number is down from 17.5 percent in October.

To explain all of this (and I guess to remind people why it’s important to budget in these trying times), the folks at Mint prepared the video below. Despite its attempt to be lighthearted, it’s probably the most depressing cartoon you’ll see all month.

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In the interest of bringing Ron and Fez ’s fantastic radio show topics to a more tech-minded audience, I propose the following: games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band , while fun and, generally speaking, “good,” will not save rock music.

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Rock music is dead, and all the Rock Band in the world won’t save it

Samsung has just announced a pair of LCD monitors with built-in TV features that promise to “eliminate the line between work productivity and HD entertainment,” according to the press release.

Read more here: 
What’s missing from this press release?

Sorry, but social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd. I’m 23, and have all but quit Facebook (I stopped tweeting a few months ago), but that’s more of a function of me being an anti-social cad than anything else. Why? It seems the older crowd—people 25 and older—has given social networks the unmistakable stench of being not cool. Why would an 18-year-old kid want to mimic the lifestyle of a 30-year-old?

Now, while I’m thrilled to read this news, there are a few caveats. It’s not like 15-to-24-year-olds are not using the Internet anymore. (No, they’re using YouTube to listen to music, and using Rapidshare to download TV shows.) And a lot of those older users (25+) are responsible for the growth of Twitter of late.

Not entirely unexpected, but still weird to see it confirmed and acknowledged: the federal tax administration in Belgium, my home country, is keeping tabs on citizens (article in Dutch) via their Facebook and Netlog profiles and their activities on eBay and other social networking sites.

Accountants are quick to point out the watchdogs can’t actually use any of the public status updates, photos and videos from users as proof in case of a dispute, but apparently your lifestyle as you depict it online can prompt an investigation when it doesn’t seem to add up to what your official income is.

The local version of the IRS, the BBI, has already admitted that it actively tracks activity from citizens online to sniff out tax avoiders. To quote director Karel Anthonissen: “It’s technically possible, it’s legal, and it’s happening.”

Just in case they read blogs too: I’m getting paid to write this article and I will make sure to report the income, mr. Anthonissen! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to jump in my Maserati and drive to our second house on the coast.

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Tweetmeme is on a tear. According to Compete, the Twitter-centric link tracker went from nowhere in February, 2009 (with 26,000 unique visitors) to more than tenfold increase in March (to 385,000 uniques). Nick Halstead, The CEO of UK-based Fav.or.it, the company behind Tweetmeme, tells me he is tracking closer to 200,000 uniques a month based on yesterday’s visitors, but that he is adding 50 percent a week. Tweetmeme seems to be pulling way ahead of the other Twitter link sites such as Twitturly or Twit Links. Any way you slice it, Tweetmeme is doing something right.

The site shows the most popular links on Twitter ranked by a combination of the number times the link has been Tweeted (shown as a big number beside each headline), recentness, and momentum of Tweets. It also categorizes different news stories based on the title of the post or article, the underlying domain, and hash tags within the Tweets. You can sort by Comedy, Entertainment, Gaming, Lifestyle, Science, Sports, Technology, or World & Business. You can also sort by news, Images, or videos. It pulls together 200,000 links, images, and videos every day now. And you can follow what is makes it on Tweetmeme’s homepage via Twitter itself by following the @Tweetmeme account or sub-accounts for each channel such as @tm-technology or @tm_comedy.

Today, it added OAuth, which lets you sign in with your Twitter account and retweet headlines without leaving the page. It also launched a toolbar, which will be controversial because it opens up the underlying link within a Tweetmeme URL and frame much like the Diggbar does. Instead of showing how many times the story has been Dugg, the frame shows a count of how many times the story has been Tweeted along with a “Shuffle” button (equivalent to the Diggbar’s “Random” button) that will take you to another highly Tweeted story.

I am not a big fan of the toolbar in principle, but I can see why Halstead added it. It keeps people on Tweetmeme and drives more activity. At least, it can be easily closed. But with every site adding its own frames these days, pretty soon there won’t be any room left for the actual destination site you are trying to look at.

What I am a big fan of, though, is that after a recent relaunch, it just keeps adding features. A few weeks ago it added a”live” tab which shows the most Tweeted links stream onto the page much like FreindFeed now handles your personal activity stream. Thankfully, you can set it to stream only stories that have been Tweeted at least 5, 10, or 20 times. Even setting it to 5 links is unreadable because the stream moves down too fast, but at 10 or 20 its becomes more manageable and addictive in that you can watch the most popular links in the Twittersphere stream by in real time.

This live stream of relevant headlines is much more immediate even than what you find on Techmeme, which can take hours to change meaningfully. With so many sites gunning for Techmeme’s crown as the ultimate arbiter of what news is being talked about the most on the Web (I wrote about one such attempt earlier today), the real threat is going to come from somebody like Tweetmeme, which plays to different strengths. The question is whether Twitter will be a better place to mine for buzz than blogs, news sites, or the rest of the Web.

Right now, I’d say the answer is no. Not because Tweetmeme doesn’t surface the most Tweeted stories, but because everyone on Twitter seems to be obsessed with linking to stories about Twitter! For instance, right now 6 of the top ten headlines on Tweetmeme are about Twitter acquisition rumors. To be fair, that was also the top story on Tehmeme for most of the day. But at least Techmeme has moved on (to Kindle rumors!). Will the stories on Tweetmeme ever become more relevant and timely than on Techmeme? If I were Gabe Rivera, I’d start worrying now.

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