The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘progress’

William Shatner will shill almost anything, and we love him for it. Now he is putting his promotional talents to work for Myouterspace.com, a social network for sci-fi geeks, gamers, animators, writers, and actors. In other words, people who couldn’t get into MySpace.

Actually, the site seems less like a social network than a way to crowdsource sci-fi movie and game projects. Depending on your specialty (animation, acting, writing, music) you register on one of six “planets.” Projects are designated as different “starships,” which recruit talent from the different planets. Shatner promises to monitor the progress of each crew, although it is not clear what that means or how they will be rewarded. If you are not groaning already at the stretched metaphors, Shatner explains how the whole thing works in this video which I nominate for the sorriest special effects anywhere.

Watching the video, in which Shatner is trapped in a dorky spaceship on a barren moon, I can’t help but think that inside he is screaming, “Khaaaaan!!”

For the past several weeks, there have been quite a few whispers around the web about a new service called Burbn. Besides having a great name, the service is apparently in a very hot space right now: location-based services. I say “apparently,” because the service is still very much a stealth project. But it’s not so stealth that they can’t get a seed round of funding.

Burbn has just closed a $500,000 seed round, we’re hearing. According to sources, both Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz participated in the round. From what we can tell, right now, Burbn is just a one-man shop: Kevin Systrom, a former Googler. With the funding, you can probably expect that to change soon.

So aside from potentially being the location space, what is Burbn? Well, the current splash page where you can sign up to get for information, tells us a little bit more: “Burbn is a new way to communicate + share in the real world.” While that may sound like Google Buzz or a handful of other services, the key to that is “in the real world,” again, this reeks of location.

We’ve also heard that the site currently being tested is a mobile web app that uses HTML5 to work in both iPhone and Android browsers. Monitor their Twitter feed for more.

For quite a while now, I’ve been following the progress of the Pandora , an open-source handheld for music, movies, and games. It’s hard to stay excited, though, when there’s the constant threat of the thing ceasing to exist. That seemed to be a risk for a while, but now we’re being told that all the hurdles are jumped and the thing will start rolling off the assembly line any moment now

View original post here:
Pandora open-source handheld is go

Got a Kindle? Get thee to the British Library! Not only are they giving away a ton of old 19th-century literature in e-book form, but they’re a special “first edition” e-book with the original typeface and illustrations baked in. The 1800s encompass nearly all of my favorite literature, so this is actually making me want a Kindle pretty bad right now

The rest is here:
British Library to give away thousands of classics away as e-books

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this extensive HD video tour of International Space Station . You better enjoy the ISS while you can.

More here:
The ISS gets its own HD video tour