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Posts Tagged ‘News’

A Paintbrush Stylus for the iPad [VIDEO]

07 Jan

Finger painting on the iPhone and iPod has become something of a phenomenon, thanks to apps like Brushes [iTunes link] and SketchBook Pro [iTunes link], and the work of high-profile artists like David Kassan, the New Yorker’s Jorge Colombo and David Hockney. In fact, Paris’s Pierre Berge-Yves St. Laurent Foundation is currently running an exhibition featuring Hockney’s iPad paintings until January 30.

But not everyone loves finger painting on the iPad. Like actual finger painting, it’s awkward and imprecise. Unfortunately, the current range of styluses for the iPad aren’t much help — instead of your finger, it feels like painting with a large, round eraser tip.

Which is why I was excited to discover Artists, a new kind of stylus that more closely resembles a paintbrush. It’s made with a long handle and soft bristles, which the creator, @nomadbrush, assures interested parties is “incredibly responsive.”

While it doesn’t look like the brush will necessarily provide the precision myself and others are looking for, it could very well prove more intuitive for artists used to traditional tools.

We’ll have a full review when the stylus comes out in February. Check out the video above in the meantime.

[via Gizmodo]

More About: artists, design, ipad, ipad stylus, stylus

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Drupal 7 Released, With Improved UI and Semantic Technology

05 Jan

drupallogo150.jpgThe popular open source content management system Drupal releases its latest version today. Drupal 7 has been three years in the making, with code from thousands of contributors from over 200 countries.

Drupal 7 includes a number of improvements to both performance and usability. The enhancements to the UI mean easier administration, update management, accessibility and content creation. There's also a new image editor that allows users to re-size and crop photos without having to leave the platform.

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In order to help website performance, Drupal 7 offers advanced caching, content delivery network and master-slave replication. It also includes a new automated testing framework with over 30,000 built-in tests, something that will allow users to check the integration of patches and modules in order to help maintain platform stability.

Drupal 7 also features RDFa semantic technology as part of its core. The design of the platform embeds semantic metadata that will make machine-to-machine search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa will be able to give search engines more details not visible to humans, such as latitude and longitude of a venue. According to Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert, "Adding semantic technology to Drupal core will make a notable contribution to the future of the web."

The Drupal platform has seen increasing adoption, powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including a number of quite prominent ones, including WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.

Discuss

 
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iPod Nano Watch Project Makes Kickstarter History

17 Dec


The iPod nano watch kit TikTok+LunaTik is now officially the most successful Kickstarter project of all time.

The all-or-nothing funding site has had its fair share of successes in the past, but the TikTok and LunaTik multi-touch watch kits are on another level. The project reached its conclusion late Thursday evening, bringing in a staggering $941,648 from 13,511 backers in just 30 days. That figure is all the more impressive when you consider that TikTok+LunaTik’s original goal was only $15,000.

The project itself was born after Scott Wilson, the founder of the Chicago-based design studio MINIMAL, first saw the new iPod nano. When we spoke to Wilson last month, he explained it was clear that the device could be a great wrist watch, after seeing the size and shape of the new nano. Wilson wasn’t alone. To date, scores of companies have brought their own iPod nano watch straps or kits to market.

When the success of TikTok and LunaTik became clear, Wilson took measures to ramp up production at the factories in China. Through the course of the project, Wilson has offered up additional updates on the status of the kits, created a website for interested users who missed out on the Kickstarter pledge bonanza at Lunatik.com and promoted other worthy Kickstarter projects.

When speaking with Wilson, it was evident to us that he recognized that actually manufacturing and distributing LunaTik and TikTok would be a massive undertaking. Coordinating with the factories, preparing packaging and handling shipping are not trivial tasks, especially when talking about an order of this size.

Earlier this week, just ahead of the project’s closing date, Wilson uploaded a video compilation of his trip to China, showing off his hands-on time with the manufacturing process.

These updates and this “inside look” at how something moves from concept, to prototype, to finished project are part of what we think makes Kickstarter so special. Beyond just acting as a great way to raise funds, the ability to share updates and include backers in the journey is unique. Aspiring entrepreneurs are encouraged to take notes on Wilson’s approach to making the most out of Kickstarter.

As a backer of this project, I can’t wait to get the final product in my hands — and on my wrist. What do you think about Kickstarter’s potential for funding small and large scale projects?

More About: ipod nano, kickstarter, lunatik, tiktok

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How Twitter Users Changed in 2010 [CHARTS]

16 Dec


Twitter signed on more than 100 million new users in 2010. As they get acclimated to the information network, significant changes in usage are bound to take place. That’s exactly what social media monitoring company Sysomos found when comparing Twitter usage in 2010 to 2009.

What stands out the most is that more Twitter users have much higher follower and following counts.

Twenty-one percent of Twitter users now follow more than 100 people — that’s up from 7% last year — and 16% now have more than 100 followers, according to Sysomos, which looked at over a billion tweets from 20 million users in 2010 and compared them against data gathered in 2009.

Twitter users in 2010 were much more likely to provide a bio (69%), detailed name (73%), location (82%) and website URL (44%) as part of their public profiles. All of those percentages are more than double what they were in 2009, which means the average Twitter user has become more comfortable with sharing personally identifiable information about themselves.

Sysomos also found that 80.6% of Twitter users have made fewer than 500 tweets, which likely points to the relative newbie status of the average Twitter user. Also noteworthy is that 22.5% of users are responsible for 90% of all tweets.

The report highlights other Twitter-related behaviors, including popular keywords in Twitter bios, and analyzes how the friend-to-follower ratio changes as follower and following counts increase. We’ve included a collection of charts from the Sysomos report below.

Twitter Stats 2010

Twitter Growth

Users with Bios

Users with Detailed Name

Users with Location

Users with Website URL

Change in Friends

Change in Followers

Follower to Friend Ratio

Friend to Follower Ratio

One Word Tag Cloud

Two Word Tag Cloud

Reviews: Twitter

More About: social media, stats, sysomos, twitter

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Google Explores the Human Body With HTML5

16 Dec


Google has just soft-launched its latest browser experiment, the Google Body Browser, which is basically Google Earth for the human body.

Think of it as a three-dimensional, multi-layered browser version of those Visible Man/Woman model kits. Or a virtualized version of Slim Goodbody, if you will.

Google showed off the app at the WebGL Camp. WebGL is a cross-platform low-level 3D graphics API that is designed to bring plugin-free 3D to the web. It uses the HTML5 Canvas element and does not require Flash, Java or other graphical plugins to run.

If you visit bodybrowser.googlelabs.com in a supported web browser, you’ll get a three-dimensional layered model of the human anatomy that you can zoom in on, rotate and search.

WebGL support hasn’t hit mainstream browsers, but the beta versions of Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox all support it.

Once you’ve got a compatible browser, visiting the Body Browser home page shows off the human body. You can adjust the various layers of skin, muscles, tissues and the skeletal system.

What’s really cool is that if you type in an organ or bone or ventricle system, you are taken directly to that area in the anatomy, zoomed in. You can turn labels on or off and the app supports multitouch so users of trackpads (Magic or otherwise) or multi-touch mice can zoom in with ease.

This is a pretty cool display of new web technologies. Presumably the use case is for the healthcare industry, but educators and students can benefit from this kind of demonstration too.

[via PeriVisioN]

Reviews: Firefox, Google, Google Chrome, Safari

More About: google body browser, HTML5, webgl

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Survey Shows That Fox News Makes You Less Informed

16 Dec
A survey of American voters by World Public Opinion shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. One of the most interesting questions was about President Obama's birthplace. 63 percent of Fox viewers believe Obama was not born in the US (or that it is unclear). In 2003 a similar study about the Iraq war showed that Fox viewers were once again less knowledgeable on the subject than average. Let the flame war begin!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



 
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Senator: New net neutrality plan worse than “doing nothing at all”

16 Dec

We're five days and counting from the Federal Communications Commission issuing new net neutrality rules. Nobody beyond insiders at the agency has seen the draft Order in question. But Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has a message for the Commission. If the Order exempts wireless broadband from any nondiscrimination provisions, it might be better to put the whole matter off.

"I am very worried that the draft Order does not do enough to preserve that openness," he wrote to FCC Chair Julius Genachowski. In fact, as presently written, it could do "more harm than doing nothing at all."

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Facebook on Track for $2B Revenue in 2010 [REPORT]

15 Dec


Forget the $1 billion figure thrown around earlier this year; sources close to Facebook financials say the social network is close to reporting revenues of $2 billion for 2010.

If these reports are accurate, Facebook’s annual revenue would have more than doubled since last year, when the company made around $800 million.

While astronomical compared to most startups’ revenues, these figures are hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with Facebook’s advertising and virtual currency advances in the past 12 months.

The company now competes with Google for online ad dollars from major brands as well as small businesses that need targeted marketing with high ROI. In fact, Facebook serves around 50 billion display ads per month and is on track to serve 1 trillion display ads for all of 2010.

And when it comes to revenue from virtual currency — revenue that comes, in a roundabout way, directly from Facebook users themselves — Facebook is seeing more cash all the time. The blockbuster success of casual games from studios such as Zynga add up to more coin in Facebook’s coffers when users pay with Facebook Credits; for every dollar the user spends on Facebook Credits, the social network gets 30 cents.

Virtual currencies aside, the lion’s share of Facebook’s revenue still comes from advertising and marketing — a game that Facebook is really just beginning to play well.

Right now, Google and Facebook are both ramping up for an epic battle for location-based ad dollars, especially where small and medium-sized businesses are concerned. How Facebook performs in 2011 may have a lot to do with how it competes in offering a compelling and effective location-based marketing platform for businesses of all sizes.

Reviews: Facebook, Google

More About: facebook, facebook credits, Revenue

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Infochimps Acquires DataMarketplace.com

14 Dec

We’re pleased to announce that Infochimps has acquired DataMarketplace.com. We’ve been admiring what they have been doing for awhile now, so we jumped at the opportunity when it presented itself. Datamarketplace.com is a Y-Combinator funded company, founded by Steve DeWald and Matt Hodan at the beginning of this year, with the original vision to be the “Amazon for structured information.”

When I met with Steve to chat about his vision, it was apparent that our two companies shared many of the same philosophies and visions for the future of Big Data. Hell, even our platforms are built upon many similar foundations and tools, like Ruby on Rails and Heroku. So, the transition has been smooth, and the site is already running on Infochimps servers.

From the Co-Founder and CTO of DataMarketplace.com, Steve DeWald:

Data is one of the most valuable assets in the world. We use it for decisions every day, and enormous industries are built around compiling and organizing it. It costs almost nothing to share, but despite that there is no single pervasive marketplace for buying and selling data. That’s the problem we tried solving with Data Marketplace.

It’s a problem because the fragmented nature of data creates friction for those wanting to share it. As a seller of data, there’s no easy or standardized way for to monetize it. Often times the expectation is to sell it in an expensive research report and have the raw data separately available by request. That’s fine, but that’s only capturing a fraction of a fraction of percent of all the useful data that people could be selling. Likewise there’s a lot of data people want to be selling that potential buyers can’t find. As a consumer of data, I often search on Google for the data I’m looking for, though frequently the data I want is behind a pay-wall and keywords are not being properly indexed for search. All these problems could be solved for the betterment of humanity with standardized and open marketplace for data.

Although Matt and I have moved on to other projects (I’m selling custom made suits online), I am happy to be putting our work in the hands of the talented team at InfoChimps, which has built the world’s largest open marketplace for data.

Thanks for the kind words, Steve.

We’re excited to integrate DataMarketplace.com into Infochimps. As Nick Ducoff, Infochimps CEO, says:

Just as Salesforce recently extended their brand with database.com, we’re extending ours with DataMarketplace.com, which fits well into our overarching strategy to be the destination on the web for data and data services.


Q & A’s relating to acquisition:

If I have uploaded my data to DataMarketplace.com, what’s going to happen with it?

Will it still be available for purchase, and will I receive my royalties? All datasets that are available on DataMarketplace.com will soon be available through Infochimps.com, and will continue to live on DataMarketplace.com. Customers will still be able to browse and purchase the data, and we will ensure that you receive your royalties from sales of that data.

What will happen to my user account on DataMarketplace.com?

Your account will still survive on DataMarketplace.com, and you will soon receive an email with details on how to login at Infochimps.com. It’s important for us to maintain the DataMarketplace.com community, and we will notify you of any changes to your account in as few emails as possible.

What will happen to the Data Requests on DataMarketplace.com?

We will continue to support the data requests feature on DataMarketplace.com, and we do not plan to remove or change any of the requests that are on the site at present. We will notify requesters of changes to their requests or their account.

 
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Astronomers Find Evidence Of Other Universes In Cosmic Microwave Background

13 Dec

Signatures of bubble collisions in CMB

Stephen Feeney at University College London and colleagues say they’ve found tentative evidence of four collisions with other universes in the form of circular patterns in the cosmic microwave background.

In their model of the universe, called “eternal inflation,”  the universe we see is merely a bubble in a much larger cosmos. This cosmos is filled with other bubbles, all of which are other universes where the laws of physics may be dramatically different from ours.

Ref.: http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1995: First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation

Also see: Penrose claims to have glimpsed universe before Big Bang

 
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