Archive for: July 8, 2009

Part Twitter, part Steam community, and part Facebook, Raptr is a social network that gives gamers a place to connect with one another over the games they frequently play. In addition to providing gamers a platform to meet one another and connect with others who play the same games they enjoy, Raptr also gives you a way to see the games you most commonly play and enjoy. The service allows you to notify your friends when you start up a game, message your friends in and outside of game, discover new games your friends are playing, and review the games you already own. 
Raptr has been around for a while and has grown significantly since its inception. In its early days, the site only allowed you to track the games you were playing and share them with other Raptr members. The service has since branched out and now tracks more games on more platforms and allows you to share the games you play on Twitter and Facebook.

If your friends aren't Raptr members but are your friends on another social network, you can still share your status with them. You can even alert them when you make big hardware changes to your system, so Raptr can make sure your gamer friends are envious of the new video card you just installed. Best of all, Raptr will share your in-game achievements automatically with your friends, whether you unlocked a weapon in Team Fortress 2 or earned a medal in Gears of War 2. ...

The New York Philharmonic will introduce a new 'Mobile Giving' program at its 2009 Concerts in the Parks, which makes it the first U.S. orchestra to fund-raise using text messaging.

Audience members can send in $5 donations by SMS, which will then appear on the donor's cell phone bill. Each audience member can send up to $25 total, by way of five $5 donations, per monthly billing cycle. In addition, fans can download a Mobile Giving Widget at nyphil.org/give, which they can then add to personal Web sites or social networking pages.

The 2009 New York Philharmonic's Concerts in the Parks, conducted by Alan Gilbert, will take place on July 14 in Central Park, Manhattan; July 15 in Prospect Park, Brooklyn; July 16 in Van Cortlandt Park, The Bronx; and July 17 in Central Park. Additional free indoor concerts will be held on July 18 in Staten Island and July 20 in Queens. For more information, go to nyphil.org/summer; fans can also follow the New York Philharmonic's Twitter feed at twitter.com/nyphil.

The latest threat to the U.S. government? A botnet made up of roughly 50,000 infected PCs. The computers started attacking government Web sites on Saturday and managed to take the FTC's site offline on Monday and Tuesday.

"The [Department of Transportation] has been experiencing network incidents since this past weekend. We are working with the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team [US-CERT] at this time," a spokeswoman for that department told ComputerWorld.

A number of other government sites, such as the Department of the Treasury's site, have been targeted as well. The botnet is using distributed denial of service attacks. Says ComputerWorld:

Such DDoS attacks are relatively common, but a few things make this week's incident unusual. The botnet code behind the attack does not use typical antivirus evasion techniques and does not appear to have been written by a professional malware writer.

Slowly but surely, Research in Motion is clawing its way into the mobile app race. The company has announced it has doubled the number of apps available in its BlackBerry App World online store to 2,000, according to Bloomberg.

That's still well shy of the 50,000 odd apps you can find in Apple's App Store for the iPhone platform. It's also too early to declare that RIM is losing the war; remember that the BlackBerry has had third-party apps available for years now in other stores like Handango, whereas Apple's App Store is about to have its one-year anniversary.

But the App Store has changed the game considerably. Now consumers expect to buy apps right from their devices, and from a central location. RIM still has a little time to improve BB App World before consumers catch on--but not much.

Google has offered access to maps of the surface of Mars for a while, but now there's an iPhone app for that. The Mars Flyer app works on the iPhone and iPod touch, and lets you check out a detailed topographic map of the red planet. From there, you can set start and end points for a "flight route," and then check out high-resolution color photographic imagery as you fly around the surface.

The app also lets you queue up a soundtrack of songs from your iPod music library. The developer has tuned the app to work on older and newer iPhones, and said to expect "incredible" performance on the new, faster iPhone 3GS. Mars Flyer costs $3.99, requires iPhone OS 3.0, and is available in Apple's App Store.

Those predictions that Michael Jackson's memorial service would be the biggest Internet event ever were off by a bit. According to the numbers that are trickling in now, it wasn't even the biggest Web event of the year so far.

It was big, sure, but not Obama big--and, heck, not even Michael Jackson big. The service is being described as the Web's third largest event behind the inauguration and the first new of Jackson's death, a week and a half ago.

Facebook saw about 800,000 status updates during the event--compared to the 1.8 million that mentioned the President's name during his January inauguration. CNN had 781,000 of the service, versus 1.3 million for Obama. Akamai, meanwhile saw 3,924,370 on its Net Usage Index for News during the service versus the 4,247,971 during the first news of Jackson's death.

All Things D has even more numbers from the three events.

Wow. It's WoW--for Twitter. It's not endorsed by Blizzard or Twitter, or really anyone, for that matter, but for those who are sick and tired of leaving their virtual world to take advantage of all the Web has to offer, microblogging has finally come to World of Warcraft with TweetCraft.

The app lets users send and receive tweets (assume that Twitter lets the service continue to use that word), upload screenshots via TwitPic, and auto tweet game status updates. If all of that functionality doesn't convince you to download the service, surely the dramatic trailer above will.

Q: I created a picture background (somehow) on my Windows XP login screen. My question is, how do I reset it? - David Gardyne.

A: Changing the background of the standard Welcome screen is quite difficult in XP (or Vista). It's nothing you could do by accident. You must be talking about the screen behind the username/password login box that appears if you've turned off the Welcome screen. You can change that (or undo a change) using the Registry Editor.

Click Start, click Run, and enter REGEDIT. Navigate to the key HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop. Look in the right-hand pane for a value named Wallpaper. Double-click it and delete its data (which is the full pathname of the picture used for login screen wallpaper). That will put things back to the default.

If instead you want to substitute a different picture just substitute its full pathname for the value's data. Two other values control the way the picture gets displayed. If TileWallpaper and WallpaperStyle are both set to 0 the image will be centered on the screen. Changing TileWallpaper to 1 will cause Windows to tile the image so as to fill the screen. Leaving TileWallpaper at 0 and changing WallpaperStyle to 2 makes Windows stretch (or shrink) the image so it fits. - Neil J. Rubenking.

No need to check your calendar. It is not April 1. This is not a joke. I suspect the Steves--Ballmer and Jobs--have gone to the Pepto bottle already! Google is in the operating system business and not just for phones.

"Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve."

That word is fresh from Google's official blog. It is a radical upheaval. It is a game changer. Google has just made me a friend with benefits!

Until now when you bought a computer you also bought an operating system--or at least an overwhelming majority did. The operating system provides the underpinnings that lets applications work with processors and other hardware. Purchasing an operating system is expensive. It is a significant contributing factor to Bill Gates' riches.

Google's Chrome OS promises to change that in a few radical ways. By using the words "open source" Google is screaming free. They promise it is "a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel."

Beyond that Google's OS will make programs hardware agnostic.

For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of ...

Verizon Wireless and Facebook released some quick stats about how their networks fared during today's Michael Jackson memorial service.

Between 10am and noon Pacific time today, Verizon Wireless voice calls around the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where the memorial was being held, were up 10 percent from the same time on Monday. Text message and mobile web rates were 86 percent.

Verizon also streamed MSNBC coverage on V CAST Video during the day and showed coverage on V CAST Mobile TV.

The company's networks operated normally during the event, a spokesman said.

On Facebook, meanwhile, the social networking site again integrated its service with CNN as it did for Inauguration Day, and reported a total of 733,000 status updates.

More stats after the jump.

About 759,000 Facebook users viewed the live streaming coverage of the memorial via the CNN hookup, and users were updating their status updates at a rate of 6,000 updates per minute. For comparison, there were 1.8 million status updates with the word "Obama" on Inauguration Day.

Facebook made the Facebook Live Stream Box more widely available two weeks ago, and it was also used by E! Online, MTV, and ABC News during the service.

E! Online logged 9,000 status updates and 87,000 viewers. ABC had 48,000 status updates and 97,000 viewers. And MTV had 5,000 status updates and 21,000 viewers.

Meanwhile, Michael Jackson's fan page on Facebook has grown to 7 million fans since his death, eclipsing President Barack Obama by one million.

Finally, the free Jackson virtual glove gift is now Facebook's most popular gift, with over 800,000 gloves given away.

Hulu and MySpace were also among the sites streaming the service. They did ...

Are Web site-based directions too vague for your liking? Too much of a pain to cut and paste an address from a restaurant or store site to Google Maps?

Google on Tuesday introduced a Directions gadget that will let webmasters add customized Google Maps directions to their Web sites.

"With the directions gadget, you no longer need to type and update multiple sets of text directions," Julie Zhou, an associate product marketing manager at Google, wrote in a blog post. "Let's face it: customers are only looking for directions from their specific location."

Webmasters can "pre-fill" the "To" directions field with one or several addresses. Customers can then type in their starting address and print out walking, driving, or public transit directions with one click. The gadget will also provide suggestions for vague "from" addresses.

Have a family Web site and want to help people navigate to your home from the airport. You can use simple tags like "Grandma's House" rather than your exact address to make it easier.

The gadget is available in 23 languages.

After two years of debate, Internet radio stations have finally reached a deal with copyright holders regarding royalty rates.

The price of the deal, however, will force Web radio station Pandora to limit the amount of free listening available each month, according to founder Tim Westergren.

"The royalty crisis is over," Westergren said in a blog post. "This ensures that Pandora will continue streaming music for many years to come."

The revised royalty rates, however, are "quite high" and will force Pandora to make some adjustments, he said. Users will now be limited to 40 hours of free listening per month. Those who go over 40 hours will be given the option to receive unlimited access for the remainder of the month for 99 cents. They can also upgrade to the subscription-based Pandora One.

"In essence, we're asking our heaviest users to put a dollar (well, almost a dollar) in the tip jar in any month in which they listen over 40 hours. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable--the same price as a single song download," Westergren wrote.

The debate dates back to March 2007, when the government-run Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) handed down royalty rates for Internet radio that stations like Pandora claimed would put them out of business.

Both sides went back and forth for more than two years, ultimately agreeing to a piece of legislation that let Internet radio and copyright holders hash out a deal on their own. If they reached an agreement, the CRB's rates would be thrown out.

The Webcasters Settlement Act of 2008 gave both sides until Feb. 15, 2009 to reach a deal, but to no avail. A second bill, ...