The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘popular’

It seems like nearly every computer accessory maker has a line of SSDs now and Plextor just joined that club with two SSDs. The company showed off its upcoming models at CES 2010, but now both the 64GB and 128GB options are available — for a pretty price. Pricing is inline with other current options available

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Plextor’s first SSDs are now available for your consumption

Back in October, Google changed the mobile navigation space when it launched Google Maps Navigation for Android. While the product itself is solid it also has one killer feature: it’s free. This has forced the makers of other non-free navigation tools to scramble to convince users their products are still worth paying for. Verizon is the latest to do so with its VZ Navigator 5, launching tomorrow.

So what would make it worth paying for? Verizon has a few new features in this latest update, but one of the ones they are touting the most is social media integration. Specifically, you can now update your Facebook status by way of VZ Navigator. This in and of itself isn’t that interesting, but you can also send out your location to Facebook with this feature, apparently.

While Facebook has yet to launch any major location functionality itself, a few third parties including Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Nokia have leveraged the network for their location-based products. But VZ Navigator’s Facebook integration might be the most meaningful yet, as we could actually see people who use the service sending their location to their friends on Facebook. In other words, customers could start using this integration to make Facebook more like the popular location services such as Foursquare.

Of course, unlike the popular location services, VZ Navigator isn’t free. Using it will cost you $9.99 a month or $2.99 for 24-hours of usage. But with that price you also get other features, namely turn-by-turn navigation. With this new version, Verizon has also added new “enhanced” points of interest that show up on their maps with details about the place. There is also now crowd-sourced traffic information that Verizon claims will make traffic reports more timely and accurate. Overall, the look and feel of the application has been updated as well.

Another nice feature is that if you need roadside assistance, you can send your location and number with the click of a button.

VZ Navigator 5 will be available tomorrow for the BlackBerry Curve 8530, the LG enV Touch, the HTC Touch Pro2, and the Samsung Omnia. The plan it to roll it out to other smartphones on Verizon’s network in the coming weeks, we’re told. Verizon builds VZ Navigator in association with TeleCommunication Systems.

A WebOS port of the popular GB/CGA emulator is pretty rocking’, even though it only runs at 90% speed on a good day. The hackers who figured all this out will get it back up to speed shortly but don’t expect to download this at the Apps Market or whatever Palm is calling it

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Mario Kart (and more) for your Palm Pre

Just a quick reminder that today is the last day to submit your nominations for our third annual Crunchies Awards. We’ve received over 100,000 nominations so far, but just in case you’ve forgotten, go here right now and add some more. You have until midnight PT tonight.

Once all the nominations are in, the Crunchies Committee will choose five finalists per award category. From there, the popular voting will begin on December 21 and run through January 6, leading up to the live ceremony Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PT the Herbst Theater in San Francisco which we’re pleased to be co-hosting with GigaOm and VentureBeat. The full rules are here.

Again, nominations end tonight at midnight, so get them in.

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Earlier this week, Microsoft showed off the Twitter functionality it’s building into the newest version of Bing Maps. The feature shows tweets on a map. But that requires the new Bing Maps beta, which requires Silverlight. If you prefer to use Google Maps, you can also easily see geolocated tweets on your maps thanks to tweet stream RSS feeds that include geolocation data in them.

Simply load up Google Maps, grab the Twitter feed of anyone who checks-in and tags their location, and insert that URL into the search box on Maps. On the map, you’ll see a collection of blue markers indicating where the tweets were sent from (here’s an example). Clicking on any of these markers brings up the tweet itself in a bubble overlay. And in the left side column, you’ll see the a timeline of the geolocated tweets.

You can add these feeds from several users and Google Maps will remember them, so you can see a collection of your friends’ tweet locations. And it even works for Lists feeds.

Also cool is that this same process works on the iPhone. You’ll have to copy a feed URL to get it to work, and again, copy it into the search box, but it displays on the map nicely.

The Bing Maps Twitter location integration (below), looks much nicer as it’s natively built in with things like user icons, and the ability to display tweeted pictures. But again, it also requires Silverlight, and you can’t easily filter by things like Lists.

[thanks Peter]

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Given the flurry of reports last summer about the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal, it would have been reasonable to assume that the two parties had actually completed their negotiations. As it turns out, the details of the deal had yet to be worked out. Today, Yahoo and Microsoft have issued a joint statement announcing that they’ve “finalized and executed the definitive Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement and License Agreement.” From the release:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! believe that this deal will create a sustainable and more compelling alternative in search that can provide consumers, advertisers and publishers real choice, better value, and more innovation.

“Yahoo! and Microsoft welcome the broad support the deal has received from key players in the advertising industry and remain hopeful that the closing of the transaction can occur in early 2010.”

Of course, the deal is still under investigation by the Department of Justice, so nothing is in the bag yet.

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Twitter’s official spokesman Mark Logan recorded a video of himself responding to common user complaints about the popular service. In it, the man bluntly tells users that the company doesn’t really care whether you leave or not.

Not to worry, it’s just a spoof video produced by Comedy.com, which is not so surprisingly all about comedy on the net.

In all seriousness, Twitter actually suffers from far less downtime than it used to, the odd fail whale notwithstanding, and its revenue stream is more like a couple of millions of dollars.

But that doesn’t make this video any less almost funny.

(Source: Digg)

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

Fox News held a fair and balanced debate over Modern Warfare 2, the popular new FPS that lets you play a CIA operative tasked with helping Russian agents clear terrorists out of an airport. In the game, it turns out that the Russian had turned on you and forced you to kill innocents in the airport. It’s a depiction of USA-funded terrorism. It is not a murder simulator.

The debate here, if it can be called that, seems to rotate around the correlation between video game violence and real violence. The old man in this debate mentioned an American Association of Pediatrics statement.

Video and commentary after the jump.

Oh noes! IDC has estimated that Apple sold 1.21 million Macs last year, down 12.4 percent since last year. This puts Apple under Dell, HP, Acer, and Toshiba, in order of popularity. Dell went down 18.9% while Acer popped up 51%

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Apple is now in 5th place in PC sales, under Toshiba

Not content to let others do the heavy lifting, Pure Digital, now part of Cisco, has added Flip Channels to their popular - and surprisingly useful - FlipShare software. The software is pre-installed on every Flip devices (we have the HD) and the Channels are yet another way to upload and share your videos in the interwebs.

Videos sent to your channel can be viewed at FlipShare.com or using the FlipShare iPhone app, also available today. The software also supports DVD authoring and standard sharing with YouTube and MySpace. I sent a video to myself using the service, a real cinematic magnum opus. You cannot formally embed videos sent to channels - you can embed them on the sly using the actual HTML or grabbing to a site like Posterous - but obviously you can embed videos sent to YouTube.