The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘race’

NBC is driving people on the Internet crazy by tape-delaying coverage of the Olympics until primetime. Okay, maybe it’s only driving Henry Blodget crazy, and everyone on Twitter.

Well, not everyone on Twitter—68 percent, according to a recent reading I took on Twitter Sentiment. Roughly two thirds of Tweets about the NBC Olympics are negative. Some examples of the venting occurring on Twitter about NBC’s delayed Olympics coverage:

NBC sucks. Why the hell is the Olympics not live

Watching the #Olympics on #NBC since I love watching hours old tape of events I know the results of.

What’s the point of watching the women’s downhill super combined when you already know that Lindsey Vonn crashed because half the people you follow on Twitter decided to spoil the race earlier in the day when it actually happened? Sports need to be shown live because half the drama is in the outcome. The excitement just kind of fizzles otherwise.

Everything else is realtime, NBC can’t expect the country to just wait for Bob Costas to start rolling tape.

I like the idea of LED lights, as I’m sure you do, too. Like you, I dislike the inefficiencies of incandescent bulbs, although I like the bright, warm light they produce

Continued here:
Acriche unveils first 100 lm/W AC LED light

Oh boy, I hope this is true. I’m shooting with an XSi, and it’s a great camera, but damn would I like to have me some movie-shooting ability. The T1i was a bad bet for that because it shot at 20FPS , which is ridiculous, but this new T2i allegedly has selectable frame rate modes

Read the rest here: 
Successor to Canon’s T1i entry-level DSLR coming next week?

Forget the on stage interview at Le Web today – we ask the tough (not really) questions of YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley backstage afterwards.

What does one do when the company you’ve cofounded sells to Google for $1.65 billion? You have fun, that’s what. In addition to his full schedule at YouTube, Hurley has invested in a Formula 1 racing team and cofounded a fashion site called Hlaska.

My main question is what Hurley’s going to do next: “Once you’ve blown all the money from YouTube on the race cars and the fashion company what will you do for your next startup to make it all back again?” His answer? Skip to the 1:40 mark.

Off camera I asked Hurley about the whole tattoo thing in Israel. He didn’t have too much too say other than “it was sort of cool,” or something similar.

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

JanRain has always been on the forefront evangelizing OpenID, the decentralized authentication method for the new Web, as a founding member of the OpenID Foundation. But the company is not a non-profit, and aims to turn the deployment of online identification technology in enterprise environments into a viable business.

JanRain just got a vote of confidence from three U.S.-based venture capital firms: we’ve learned that the startup has recently raised a $3.25 million Series A round of financing led by DFJ Frontier with participation from RPM Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.

JanRain’s flagship product is RPX, an SaaS platform for on-site acceptance of OpenID accounts for registrations and other activities, which as you may know can just as well be your MySpaceID, Windows Live ID or your regular Facebook, Google, Yahoo! account. It’s worth noting that RPX is a solution that works both ways, as it also enables users to publish their activities on client’s websites to multiple social networks.

According to JanRain, its solution is already being used on more than 170,000 websites today, including those of Sears, Kmart, FOX News, Scout24, Universal Music Group and EMI Music.

The software comes in three flavors: a free version that supports up to 6 interface providers and includes basic profile data, and two professional versions, the cheapest one starting at $100 a year. There’s a clean overview of available plans and corresponding pricing on the RPX product website.

JanRain is really one of the only horses in this race, but the adoption of OpenID hasn’t exactly been stellar so far. Investors are now betting millions on the assumption that the Silicon Valley, founded in 2005, has what it takes to effectively mass market and sell authentication systems to website publishers based on OpenID and other online identity technologies.

Would you?

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

I thought December was supposed to be a quiet month, where people go on vacation, and companies don’t launch new things. I was wrong. This week is shaping up to be a very busy one for Google as they could have as many as three substantial launches in three days.

Monday: Tomorrow morning, the company is holding an event in Mountain View, CA to talk about the evolution of its search product over the years. That may sound ho-hum, but they are also promising to introduce a “few new features that we hope will change the way people search in the future.” Presenting will be no less than Google VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, and Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra. All heavy hitters.

Is this Google’s answer to the Bing event last week, where they showed off the impressive looking new Bing Maps beta product? You can bet that whatever they unveil, it won’t involve Silverlight. And I wouldn’t bet against it involving Twitter in some way, just like Microsoft’s announcements did.

Tuesday: This is far from certain, but word is that Tuesday could be the day Chrome for Mac beta finally gets released. We know the launch is imminent, as the beta version is now complete and the team has moved on to getting the left-out features working. But there is one bug that might hold up the launch (it popped up late after all the beta blocker bugs were previously eliminated).

It’s definitely worth noting that on the Chromium Development Calendar, December 8 (this Tuesday) is the date listed for “4.0 Beta to Beta Channel.” Chrome 4.0 is already in beta testing for Windows, and before that launched in early November, the calendar featured the same message. No word on the Linux build, but that could certainly go beta on Tuesday as well. Also worth noting is that 4.0 is scheduled to go “stable” on January 12, so that may be the Chrome 4.0 official launch (at least for Windows).

Wednesday: This is the day that Google will officially launch Chrome Extensions, is the latest thing we’re hearing. We noted over the weekend that at some point this week (and probably mid-week) this would happen, and it looks like Wednesday (and possibly Wednesday evening) is the day.

The one-two punch of launching Chrome for Mac beta and then having Chrome Extensions would be nice, except for the fact that Chrome for Mac beta won’t support them right away. But the latest builds of Chromium do, so everyone will be able to try out the new extensions at launch.

The Rest: So that’s the first three days of the week with possible things on each day. And if you count Sunday as the start of the week, I guess you could throw in Google CEO Eric Schmidt finally joining Twitter as another event.

Is Google going to give us a breather on Thursday and Friday? Who knows, but at this rate they’ll probably announce that they are dropping all support for IE on Christmas.

[photo: flickr/bramus]

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

Pretty big capital raise today. Clear2Pay, an electronic payments company, has secured $74 million (€50 million) to fund its next stage of growth and potential strategic acquisitions. The investment was led by the New-York based Aquiline Capital Partners and previous investors.

Clear2Pay, which is profitable, specialises in secure electronic payments and disrupts the existing legacy payment silos in banks.

This investment is taking place in the context of the sale of all shares held by Belgium VC Gimv to Aquiline. The sale has a positive impact of €2.2 million (EUR 0.10 per share) on Gimv’s last published equity value at 30 September 2009.

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

At Google I/O this year, one demo booth stood out above all others: The Holodeck. It was basically eight giant, long screens arranged in a circle that displayed Google Street View imagery. When you stepped the contraption, it was a bit like zooming around outside. Today, Google has taken the time to explain the project a bit, which it now calls “Liquid Galaxy.”

Apparently, the reason for the name change is that the booth now displays much more than just Street View. Google has made a modified Google Earth client so that you can go anywhere in the world in the device now. And you can even go to the Moon and Mars with it. “It felt more like a ride than a computer program, something between an observation-deck and a glass-walled spaceship. As a result of this totally seamless, immersive experience, we decided to name it the Liquid Galaxy,” Google writes.

While the company notes that this is still very much a 20% project for them, they are “working hard to improve it.” Hopefully that means two things: 1) Turning it into a Star Trek-style Holodeck. 2) Figuring out how to make it less than 10,000 degrees inside (thanks to all the screen heat).

Below, watch the video we took of the thing from Google I/O this year. Google notes that it’s currently touring around the world at various tech conferences. And they also apparently have a few on their campuses.

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

Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January .

Read the rest here: 
Why the little guy can’t get a break in consumer electronics and 5 ways to find a leg up

For weeks – months even – analysts have been telling Apple to make a netbook for the masses, a $299 junker designed for those who surf the web on the couch, their Cheeto-stained hands scrabbling for the TiVo remote while they incessantly refresh Reddit and hope against hope that their Craigslist Missed Connection emails them back. The Air, they said, was too expensive, designed for the frou-frou quiche-eaters of Silicon (V)alley while the MacBook Pros were too overpowered for the likes of Flyover Sally and her sad-eyed brood of younglings. They needed to sell something to the masses, something solid, American, and corn-fed

Original post:
Review: Apple MacBook