The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘sexiest’

You’ve been adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing all day long.

Originally posted here:
Mathletes appreciate the Pi shower curtain

Plex’s main menu, shown with the optional Aeon skin As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time.

Go here to see the original:
Interview: We talk to the lead developer of Plex Media Center for Mac OS X: It was doing Boxee-like stuff before Boxee was cool

During flu season, one place to check for the level of outbreaks is Google Flu Trends, which extrapolates outbreak levels from the rise in flu-related searches. Today, it launched a more detailed view which maps flu levels across 121 cities in the U.S., including New York City, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. So you can now check to see how your city is doing comopared to past years, or see if it’s a good idea to travel to Chicago in January.

As it turns out, after an early spike in flu levels last October, the country is experiencing a relatively low level of outbreaks overall. What happens next is still anyone’s guess, though, because this year’s H1N1 flu strain is new. It could just turn out to be a mild winter, or e could see a more severe outbreak like there was in 1957, when a new strain also hit the country.

Another comparison is to the 2003-2004 flu season, when the disease spiked in December rather than October. Who knows why the trend spiked early this year? #Iblameglobalwarming.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Back in November, we wrote about the launch of Plancast, a new service by TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson that’s perhaps best described as “Foursquare for the future.” Since that time, the service has gotten much more useful as it now has a bunch of active users. And with things stable, the team is ready to roll out three of the most requested new features: User tagging, Facebook event importing, and search.

Search is the most obvious addition. You can now search the entire service for not only events, but also for users simply by running a query in the new search box that resides in the upper right hand side of the top bar. Searches run fast, and Plancast smartly breaks up results into “Users” and “Plans.” For example, if you search for “Mark,” you’ll see a list of all the Marks using the site, as well as the few plans with “Mark” in the title or description. Searches can also work by location too. If you search for “San Francisco,” you’ll see all the plans taking place in this city. But it’s worth noting the search currently only works for upcoming plans, not one that have taken place in the past.

From a technical perspective, Plancast search is using Sphinx, an open-source engine that’s one of the most popular among PHP developers, Hendrickson tells us.

User tagging is another new feature that adds a useful element to the service. When you set up a new plan now, you can tag another Plancast user in it. For example, if you filled out that you were going to a bar with “+parislemon” (my username on the site), I would be automatically added as a guest of your event. My user name would also be hyperlinked in the title so anyone could click on it to see my profile. Naturally, there are some people who could abuse such a feature, but Hendrickson notes that you can turn off this tagging in the settings.

There are also two separate syntaxes you can use for people tagging. The aforementioned “+” parameter adds a user to an event. But if you use the “@” symbol, made popular by Twitter, it will simply bring the event to that person’s attention and won’t automatically add them as being a part of the event. This is a pretty clever way of notifying someone about an event without presuming that they’re going with you. In the future, Plancast wants to extend this tagging beyond site users to be able to link these tags to users on Twitter and Facebook as well. Since the service is tightly integrated with both of them, that makes sense.

Speaking of Facebook, the third new feature may be the most useful one to help Plancast grow. Plancast now supporting the importing of Facebook events. Anytime you RSVP to an open event on Facebook, and have your Facebook account linked to your Plancast account, it will automatically import it along with any details present. This importing functionality is even able to add other Plancast users who have also RSVPed to the event in the “With” area of the event. These imported plans then link back to the original Facebook event page.

And while it may be slightly controversial, Plancast is turning the feature on for users by default. The thinking here is that it will help new users get into the site because they’ll already have some plans from Facebook imported that they can play around with on Plancast, Hendrickson notes. And you can opt-out in the settings, if you choose to.

There’s another upside to this Facebook importing. Currently, the most annoying aspect of Plancast is duplicate events. This is a problem that many sites face since users don’t realize that someone else has already added the same event that they’re adding. Hendrickson notes that their working on a solution for this, but Facebook imports should actually help because they run queries based on the Facebook event unique URL to make sure it hasn’t been imported into the system before. If it has, they simply add that person to the already existing Plancast event.

There are a few other smaller updates Plancast has rolled out with the big boys. They include password recovery, the ability to block other users (so they can’t subscribe or mention you), the collapsing of “ongoing” events on the main page, and the ability to put URL in plan titles. Hendrickson also notes that Plancast has started using a “No SQL” solution for some of their data. More tech-savvy readers may recognize that is also a solution FriendFeed is using on their backend, as Facebook’s Bret Taylor wrote about at length here. Plancast has open-sourced their version of this.

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

On December 14, one man woke up to find himself infested in a world with zombies. Or at least, he’s tweeting like it is.

This man, Gus, in Miami, Florida has been tweeting relentlessly for the past month as if the world is at and end. Or as he puts it in his bio, “Zombies are everywhere and this is my diary of the apocalypse.” Among other things, he’s documented his first zombie scratch (and relief that he was still human afterwards), his scavenging for food at abandoned gas stations, and of course, plenty of zombie sightings.

To add to the tale, Gus is even taking somewhat elaborate TwitPics of his adventure. For example, here’s a picture of a dead person (covered in blood) that Gus lifted some keys from. He’s also made a video, of some zombies apparently chasing him, that you can barely see.

Overall, a solid effort, and something that should keep the zombie-crazed Internet amused until Gus’ inevitable demise at the hands of zombies.

[thanks Franco]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

CrunchGear is live from ShowStoppers in Las Vegas and we’ll be interviewing folks from Plastic Logic, MadKatz, Iomega and more. We’ve got a nice table, some cool gadgetry, and lots of bandwidth so you can expect some quality stuff. We’ll be bringing folks up to our area for about five minutes each so take a gander and keep checking CrunchGear for more CES 2010 coverage.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Does Cisco have a shopping addiction? The tech giant has acquired a handful of technology companies in only a matter of a few months! This week, Cisco quietly opened up its purse strings once again to acquire data center security startup Rohati Systems for an undisclosed amount.

Cisco recently acquired the set-top box business of one of China’s largest cable companies, DVN, for $44.5 million. This deal was peanuts compared to Cisco’s other 2009 acquisitions including the acquisition of ScanSafe for $183 million. And last fall, Cisco announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which followed the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg in late September.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Rohati Systems was founded by five former Cisco engineers to provide data center and cloud security. Its Transaction Networking Systems (TNS) helps enable secure collaboration and policies for controlling access to data center and cloud resources without touching applications, servers, or operating systems. Rohati has made a big push recently towards security in the cloud, so perhaps Cisco will be using the startup’s technology to offer clients increased cloud-based security options. Cisco’s security offerings also got a boost from the company’s acquisition of ScanSafe late last year.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Yesterday, G4’s Attack Of The Show had our own MG Siegler on to talk about the Nexus One, Googles’ much-hyped new smartphone. MG’s early verdict? It’s “a nice little device”, and “by far the sexiest Android device [he's] ever seen”.

The 5-minute interview covers many of the phone’s new features, including voice-to-text and 3D graphics capable of rendering a mobile version of Google Earth. They also discuss the revelation that Verizon will be supporting Google’s new distribution model. And there’s even a brief discussion on the Nexus One’s ability to handle ASCII genitalia, if that’s your thing.

MG has long been on the Apple side of the iPhone/Android religious battle. But he’s giving the new phone a solid shot, and may even wind up switching to it as his primary phone (at least until the next iPhone comes out). I’m sure he’ll have more to say on the matter later this month.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Stylesight, a company that specializes in trend forecasting and product development tools for professionals in the fashion and style industries, has raised $5 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company previously raised $16 million in series A funding from Fidelity Venture in 2008.

Stylesight allows designers, manufacturers, and retailers to access the latest fashion data and images, which can then be used in online advertising campaigns, design plans, and merchandise displays. Stylesight hosts a library of millions of images from runway shows and other sources, and will give retail operations and designers reports on trends and product ideas.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Rally Software, a company that provides agile project management applications to for software development, has just raised $16 million in funding led by Greylock Partners. The brings Rally’s total funding up to nearly $50 million. The new funding will be used to hire additional engineers. Tom Bogan, Venture Partner of Greylock, will join Rally’s board of directors.

Rally’s products and services helps businesses implement Agile software development and Lean practices with the right combination of tools, services and best practices. Rally’s clients include Cisco, Microsoft, AOL, and Hewlett-Packard. Last year, the company acquired 6th Sense Analytics.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.