The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘makes-it-easier’

Moshi Moshi! I’m not a huge headset fan but these are some of the coolest accessories I’ve seen in a while. All of these devices, the 04i, the 03, and the 02, connect to PCs or iPhones either via Bluetooth or 3.5mm cable. The 04i acts as a stereo Bluetooth speaker as well as a speaker phone.

Original post:
Moshi Moshi: Native Union makes Skype/iPhone headsets fun again

It’s been almost 2 years to the day when Apple released Aperture 2.0 , and this morning the company announced that the third iteration of the photo editing and management software is available . Some of the new features include Faces, Places and Brushes, many of which will be familiar to people using iPhoto ‘09. With the new version, Apple makes it easier for people to step up from iPhoto to Aperture, while still providing professional photographers with a powerful program for editing and managing their libraries

Read more here:
Apple launches Aperture 3 – retails at $199, upgrades for $99

Last year, Box.net acquired a small company called Increo without giving much insight as to what they’d be doing with the technology. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that acquisition: Box.net is launching a new integrated Flash file viewer, allowing users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.

From a technology standpoint, Box’s new viewer has a lot in common with the converters you’ll find on Scribd and DocStoc: it takes documents and makes them readable in a Flash-based viewer, so you don’t have to worry about installing any extra software to view the file. This makes it easier to share files among coworkers and access them from other computers.

Of course, one issue that you’ll find with many small businesses is that they use files with proprietary formats — things like accounting spreadsheets, statistical reports, or patient data. To deal with these, Box has built its platform with extensibility in mind. For now, they aren’t supporting these proprietary formats (though they say the 20 formats they do support cover 95% of the files stored on Box). But they intend to quickly build out modules for new formats, and will help the developers behind proprietary apps build support for their own file formats. Finally, Box intends to offer tools to the public, so the community can develop modules to support even more formats.

Aside from the viewer, Box has been showing strong growth over the last year. CEO Aaron Levie says that in 2009, Box’s reveneue from its enterprise offerings grew by 500%, and the service is now up to 3.5 million users with over 100 million files stored. The company now staffs 70 employees. Levie recently wrote a guest post for us describing how the enterprise is moving to the cloud (and obviously Box is one player looking to welcome them).

Boxee fans, today’s your lucky day: the service has just released its Beta to the general public. You can download the new version of the streaming video hub here.

The new version is really a complete overhaul of the app — it’s received a new, sexier UI that makes it easier to browse through the service’s content (and anything you might have saved locally too). Niceties include the ability to filter a show by season and episode and easier sharing using Boxee’s social features. There’s a lot that’s changed in the background too, including a switch from OpenGL to DirectX and support for hardware-accelerated video decoding for Windows users.

Today’s launch also brings with it some new content partnerships, including TV.com, blip.tv, and IGN. Unfortunately, the Boxee/Hulu cat and mouse game continues. Boxee says that some Hulu content now works in the app, and they’re working to get the rest of it added.

The Beta has been a long time coming — we first saw pictures of it back in June, when it had a planned September release date. It was finally unveiled in December, with a projected CES launch date (which they hit). Now the Boxee team says they want the 1.0 release to debut at next year’s CES.

Boxee has been making a lots of waves at CES, primarily with its new Boxee Box — a hardware device built specically to let people stream content to their TVs using the service. The device will sell for under $200 and comes complete with a QWERTY remote.

If you’d like to get a feel for Boxee, or are setting it up for the first time, check out this new guide that was put together by Howcast and Boxee.

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We recently wrote about the alpha launch of Spreezio, a platform that makes it easier for shoppers to make deals with local merchants. Today, the shopping engine has launched a new version of the site with a complete redesign and more intelligent technology.

Here’s how Spreezio works: you sign up as a shopper, and browse Spreezio’s product database, which includes over 35 million items, to find what you’re looking for, using the category icons or search bar. Once you’ve found a corresponding item, you can indicate how much you’d be willing to pay for it or what percentage of discount you’d expect in order to get you to go out and buy it from the merchants who can supply it. You then can send out your deal proposal to the local merchants (which Spreezio will locate on a map) and once they get back to you accepting or rejecting your proposal, you can decide if you want to make a short trip and purchase the item(s) either way.

Consumers get a more intelligent engine to not only bargain with local merchants for their desired items, but also local merchants get qualified leads from the inquiries (without the added expense of sales and advertising). The new interface has been upgraded to return only the best accepted or counteroffered deals from local merchants, weeding out some of the less attractive or expensive deals. And to increase the value of their offer, local merchants are allowed to offer “freebies” like free gift wrapping, free delivery, and more in their responses to win customer business, so it is not just based on price.

Of course, in order for the shopping engine to be appealing to consumers, it needs a large amount of retailers to sign up. In the past few months, Spreezio has accumulated a list of over 100 national, well-known retailers to accept or counter shoppers’ offers, including Macy’s, Nordstroms, Best Buy, Target, and Sears.

Marketed as an antidote to the recession, the shopping engine could work if enough consumers and merchants engage with the site. The idea is sound but the startup’s biggest hurdle will be gaining a loyal following in an already crowded online shopping engine field.

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Google’s Marissa Mayer has discovered the ‘delete’ button on Twitter, but much like you can find deleted web pages using Google cache search, you can also uncover removed tweets by using Twitter Search. So what did she tweet that was so bad that it needed to be removed?

A link to a satirical article on BBspot about the whole Google Voice iPhone app removal brouhaha, titled “Google Pulls Apple from Search Results”. In it, an author of the comedy news site writes that Google has removed all search results leading to Apple.com from its index, and redirecting searches for “iPhone” and “app store” to the IMDb.com page for Payback.

Mayer gets quoted a couple of times in the piece as well:

Google’s official explanation for removing Apple from its search results came from Vice-President in charge of search, Marissa Mayer, “Those search results duplicate a lot of the functionality of other sites. For example, people can find cell phones on many other sites. We just think this makes it easier for our users.”

Pretty funny for much everyone, but for such a key Google employee to link to that article could be a bit offensive to some (both inside Google and Apple), hence the removal, probably. But it does show what she thinks about the whole thing, that she has a sense of humour, and which sites she tends to visit to get her news.

Update: this is very reminiscent of Randi Zuckerberg’s joke on Twitter about possibly deleted a club and its bouncer’s pages from Facebook.

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There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.

What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.

What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future.

What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics.

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Remember a few weeks ago when we wrote about former Deputy National Security Advisor Mark Pfeifle saying that the founders of Twitter should get the Nobel Peace Prize? Most everyone thought it was just a half-serious comment made on the fly. But it turns out, Pfeifle wasn’t joking. At all.

In an op-ed today in the Christian Science Monitor, Pfeifle lays out exactly why he thinks Twitter should get the prize. His argument is that without Twitter, the world would have had basically no insight into what was going on inside of Iran during the protests that broke out following the country’s controversial election. Specifically, he says that the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman in Iran whose death was captured on video, wouldn’t have gotten out without the aid of Twitter. “Neda became the voice of a movement; Twitter became the megaphone,” is how Pfeifle puts it.

He continues, “When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror. It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

While the idea of Twitter getting the same prize that Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. have all received may sound utterly absurd, when you think about it, it’s really not that bad of a point. It’s just kind of ridiculous to think of a web startup with that silly of a name getting the prize. But there is no denying the impact Twitter had in spreading information about that situation. Of course, if that spreading of information ends up mattering at all in the long run, is another story.

And, as Ashu points out in the comments, it’s kind of ridiculous that Gandhi never got the award, but Twitter might.

When he originally said it (video embedded below), Pfieifle indicated that Twitter should be considered for the prize because they postponed a planned maintenance to allow the communication surround the Iran situation to continue. Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize for the rescheduling of site maintenance remains absurd. But Pfeifle has a much better argument now.

A Facebook page has also been created to try to get Twitter the prize. Perhaps next year someone can nominate Facebook for hosting the page that helped get Twitter the prize.

[thanks James]

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With YouTube and other video sites serving up over a billion streams a day, it’s beyond contention that web-based video is not only mainstream, but has become fundamental to the web experience. Why, then, is a huge majority of web video in a wrapped in a proprietary Flash candy coating — essentially making Adobe the gatekeeper of video content? It’s worked okay so far, but it’s hardly a fertile ground for innovation, not to mention the fact that Flash is a real dog on OS X and any kind mobile browser (if it’s even supported).

The next iteration of HTML standards is poised to introduce a

Unfortunate, it seems that the powers that be (heavyweights Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, &c.) can’t agree on what format the

Whatever, let the format geeks work it out, right? I’m afraid not: there’s more than image quality and codec efficiency on the table here. H.264 is a property of the MPEG standards organization, which places it somewhere east of proprietary but west of public. Whatever its status is (I don’t pretend to understand exactly), it’s not free, and although it’s well-maintained and extremely common, many think that implementing a patented technology for a fundamental standard is a bad idea when there is an alternative.

And that alternative is Ogg Theora. While the Ogg formats (maintained by Xiph.org) haven’t taken off in popularity when compared to their MPEG cousins, they’re competitive and have the very attractive quality of being free and open source. Recent statements by Google’s __ suggesting that Theora is simply not efficient enough have been challenged, although it seems to me that there would certainly have to be some work done if Ogg were to roll out its format as a standard on this scale. Dailymotion has a corner of its site (you’ll need a compatible browser like FF 3.5) dedicated to using HTML5 and the

Not easy, is it? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The devil you know or the devil you don’t know… and you have to pay for the devil you know. Plus, of course, I’m simplifying everything to my own level — and I’m decidedly not a developer. Personally I’m rooting for an open format (I suppose x264 is out because it relies too much on H.264), and I’m sure a little elbow grease would shine Theora up but good. I’m also unsure as to the possibility of supporting multiple formats, as the tag and others obviously do (I may be missing something here).

Last, who’s to say that competition would be bad? You’ve got your open standard, free to all, and you’ve got your (perhaps slightly better) closed standard, easier to use and with better support. Fight! As long as it’s transparent to the user and it doesn’t stifle innovation, that sounds like the kind of rumble I can get behind.

This isn’t really a new battle, nor is it likely to be resolved any time soon, but discussion is ongoing elsewhere on the internet (such as at Ars’ excellent examination of the legal issues, and of course Reddit) and we may as well bring on over to the Crunch (again). Any codec nerds or patent-mongers care to chime in?

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You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

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