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Posts Tagged ‘score-at-home’

SanDisk has revved its line of tiny Sansa Clip players — now called the Sansa Clip+ for those of you keeping score at home — and, thankfully, hasn’t changed too much from the already-great device (see our Sansa Clip review here ). The control pad’s now square instead of round and there’s a microSD expansion slot included for good measure, so you’ll be able to add up to 16 extra gigabytes if you like. At around 15 hours, battery life seems to be about the same as before and there’s still a built-in FM tuner, voice recorder, and extended file support (MP3, FLAC, Ogg, Audible, Rhapsody, etc.).

The rest is here: 
SanDisk rolls out new Clip players, say hello to the Sansa Clip+

NEC announced a total of seven “green” video projectors for the Japanese market on Friday [JP]. Each has different specs, but the one characteristic all devices have in common is the low level of energy consumption, which stands at just 0.6W in standby mode (down from 3W for the previous projector series from that company)

See more here:
NEC floods Japan with 7 new projectors

Amazon has a pretty solid deal on an HP MediaSmart Home Server. Found elsewhere for over $550, you can get your hands on it for $450 until September 3rd. It was briefly priced at $419.99 direct from HP but that deal has expired and it’s now $600

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CrunchDeals: HP MediaSmart Home Server for $450

Wow. Twitter has responded yet again to the whole @replies fiasco (that’s now four posts for those keeping score at home). Once again, this one is juicy. To be frank, this is exactly the post Twitter should have put up from the get-go. But it didn’t, and that led to this whole mess.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone leads off by talking about the confusion among users about the change that was actually made. This was of course entirely Twitter’s fault and Stone doesn’t back away from that. “I did not do my homework,” he says, and noting the company screwed up from a communications perspective. True.

Stone then he goes into what exactly the problem is, and it’s two-fold: First from a product design perspective, the @replies system never really made sense for people you don’t follow. While the default setting was to have this feature off, some 3% of users turned it on, but at times would be confused about it. The second problem remains the more pressing one: The 3% of users who did turn this on were straining Twitter’s servers. This is because every time someone would @reply someone else, Twitter had to scan the entire system to see who had what setting turned on to see which update to place in which timeline. Makes sense.

It’s still not entirely clear what Twitter’s solution for this is going forward. Stone notes that “we cannot turn this setting back on in its original form for technical reasons and we won’t rebuild it exactly the same for product design reasons.” But he does say that the uses cases people loved about the feature will be returning “new and improved.” That seems to suggest an entirely new feature (option 2 from the Twitter post yesterday).

I’m still concerned that this new feature will complicate Twitter in a Facebook-style way, but we’ll see. At least they’re saying the right things today. Even if I’m not entirely convinced that by Stone saying he didn’t do his homework on the technical side, he’s not actually more or less saying, “the dog ate my homework.”

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One thing we all do at TechCrunch: spend a lot of time on various social networks and other websites. But it’s our job, people. We get paid to screw around on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, FriendFeed and about 6,000 other sites all day (quick tip, if you want to try out a service but don’t have a user account, try TechCrunch/Password, there’s a solid chance it will work). But when I’m spending time on these sites I notice that a lot of you are awfully active, too.

Most of you have actual jobs that require you to complete tasks that don’t include uploading pictures to Facebook, updating your Twitter status, or listening to music on iMeem. But from where I sit some of you seem to be little more than social network processing machines. More than a few of you may need a little intervention of your own (if you can’t look away from the CrunchCam, for example, we’re talking about you). So be truthful in our anonymous poll. How many of the symptoms below are you willing to admit to? How much time do you waste every day on the Internet?

* Have mixed feelings of well-being and guilt while at the computer.
* Lose control of time while on the computer; want to quit or cut down, but are unable to.
* Neglect friends, family and/or responsibilities in order to be online.
* Lie to your boss and family about the amount of time spent on the computer and what you do while on it.
* Feel anxious, depressed, or irritable when your computer time is shortened or interrupted.
* Use the computer repeatedly as an outlet when sad, upset, or for sexual gratification.
* Develop problems in school or on the job as a result of the time spent and the type of activities accessed on the computer.
* Have financial problems due to on-line purchases or gambling.
* Become tempted to get involved in relationships with strangers, which may put you at risk for victimization or jeopardize your safety.

How Much Time Do You Really Waste On The Internet Every Day(online poll)

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Creating a social network for scientists is not a revolutionary idea—Academia.edu, Ologeez, and Lab Meeting are all startups that have developed variations of communities for researchers and scientists to share their works. ResearchGATE joins the group by offering a free LinkedIn-like professional network that allows scientists to connect with other colleagues, discover new methods, papers, and people and then collaborate using applications built specifically for researchers.

On ResearchGATE, scientists can create Facebook-like profiles where users can list their education, work experience, skills and interests and attach research papers. Users can add professional contacts by searching for other researchers who have the same focus. ResearchGATE also gives users the option to engage in online discussions by joining or forming groups. ResearchGATE also offers a few applications that help connect scientists in the virtual world. ReStory, similar to GoogleDocs, allows users to collaborate together with colleagues to write and edit documents. ReMeet lets users schedule meetings and conference calls online and ReVote enables users to create surveys and polls on topics. ResearchGATE is planning to roll out several new features in the near future including virtual conferencing and a job board.

The site also offers a powerful search capacity that scours its internal resources and all major external research databases, including Pubmed, Citeseer and others, to find research papers. ResearchGATE also suggests similar papers written about a topic when users upload their own papers, giving users an easy easy to find like-minded individuals and papers. And based on the profiles of other members, ResearchGATE can suggest other scientists, groups, and resources to users.

Currently, ResearchGATE, which was launched earlier this year, has a user base of 50,000 researchers from 196 different countries. More than 40,000 papers and documents have been uploaded to the site and there have been 1100 groups formed around different subject matters. For example, over 100 Influenza specialists formed a research group to discuss the outbreak of the Swine Flu. And more than 1300 researchers from different disciplines formed a group to discuss research methodology and practices. According to the site, ResearchGATE’s groups center mostly around the disciplines of biology, medicine and computer science.

Competitor Labmeeting, lets scientists upload all of those documents, organize them, search them, and share them. Academia.edu also lets scientists connect with each other and provides a useful news feed of papers, conferences and project news and allows users to stay up to date on current events in their field. What makes ResearchGATE’s site useful is not only its its ability to share documents but to be able to connect with scientists all over the world on issues of interest. By suggesting users with similar interests, the site does a lot of the networking work for users. Of course, one of ResearchGATE’s biggest challenges will be recruiting large numbers of scientists to the site. ResearchGATE is hoping to do this by forging partnerships with universities and research institutions and already has a few on board including The University of Georgia and the Medical School of Hannover, Germany.

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