Archive for: October 6, 2009

Endtone has launched Disconnect Tone for BlackBerry smartphones in RIM's online app store, BlackBerry App World. Disconnect Tone lets users know whenever phone calls are over--or when calls are dropped unintentionally due to carrier network snafus.

Why would you care? Because it removes the whole "Hey, are you still there? Or are you just bored? Hello?" aspect of trying to figure out if a call was just disconnected. It also means you don't have to glance over at the phone while behind the wheel.

The app includes music, celebrity voices, and sound effects as disconnect tones, and lets you assign tones to specific contacts as well as a default disconnect tone for your entire address book. I could use a "Hallelujah" chorus at the end of a particular acquaintance's call, now that I think about it. Endtone Disconnect Tone 1.0 costs $4.99 and is available now in BlackBerry App World as a 723KB download.

Microsoft announced the retail launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 earlier this morning, and today the company said that the new Windows Mobile Marketplace will debut with 246 apps. That's more than the 195 apps we saw on our HTC Pure phone yesterday--but hey, the launch is today, after all. More than 753 software developers are on board to supply more apps to the marketplace, Microsoft says.

According to Microsoft, the launch apps include Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Twikini, WunderRadio and ZAGAT, as well as Sudoku, "Guitar Hero World Tour" and the "PAC-MAN" series.

Windows Mobile Marketplace is Microsoft's long-awaited answer to Apple's on-device App Store. Of course, Windows Mobile phones have had third-party apps for years; stores such as Handango sell thousands of them, and Mobihand just inaugurated a new Windows Mobile app store last week. But Apple raised consumers' expectations to believe that they should get a comprehensive app store built into their phones.

At launch, Marketplace already outstrips the Palm Pre App Catalog, which has a little over a hundred apps. It still has a way to go to match the BlackBerry App World (over a thousand when I last counted), Android's app market (more than 7,000) and, of course, the Apple App Store (85,000 at last count.) With an established platform like Windows Mobile, the big question will be whether Microsoft can corral existing developers into their store with compelling terms and an easy submission scheme.

Okay, maybe it's not magic, per se, but this new project from a group of students in China may be the next best thing. PhotoSketch turns rough sketches into an image composite using stitched together pictures it finds whilst scouring the Web. The results are not short of astounding.

The students explain the project thusly,

We present a system that composes a realistic picture from a simple freehand sketch annotated with text labels. The composed picture is generated by seamlessly stitching several photographs in agreement with the sketch and text labels; these are found by searching the Internet. Although online image search generates many inappropriate results, our system is able to automatically select suitable photographs to generate a high quality composition, using a filtering scheme to exclude undesirable images.

All in all, a fairly astonishing little project, and if it works half as well as the video seems to indicate, you lot can expect a call from the folks at Adobe.

Google's aesthetic sense has long tended toward the minimal, something that Microsoft seems to be fighting against with the introduction of the sometimes overwhelming search engine Bing. The company is apparently working on a new design for its own search page, which may well be a direct response to the MS design sense.

A new "experimental" page currently in the testing stages, shows a completely blank page, save the Google logo and a search bar. A move of the mouse, however, will reveal the page's text--which, even when revealed, is still missing a few key elements, including the Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky buttons.

No word on any plans for a wide scale rollout.

Hot on the heels of a mobile Flash rollout, Adobe today announced that it would be bringing its near-ubiquitous Web publishing software to the iPhone, albeit in a slightly roundabout manner. The company has introduced new tools, which will let developers export Flash projects as iPhone apps.

The principle iPhone/Flash problem still remains, however. iPhone owners still won't be able to run Flash while Web browsing--the tools do, however, give developers a chance to bring their work to the popular handset.

"All we're doing is enabling output from our tools to a native iPhone app," Anup Murarka, the company's Director of technical marketing for mobile and devices told PCMag at the Max conference in San Diego.

Microsoft yesterday confirmed reports that thousands of Hotmail passwords had been leaked to the Internet over the weekend. The software giant plans to block user access to the compromised accounts until their owners reclaim them.

The attack, Microsoft speculates, was likely the result of account phishing. "Over the weekend Microsoft learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were exposed on a third-party site due to a likely phishing scheme," the company wrote in a statement. "Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers. As part of that investigation, we determined that this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts."

The company reiterated its recommendation that users change their passwords every three months, adding, "Phishing is an industry-wide problem and Microsoft is committed to helping consumers have a safe, secure and positive online experience."

As your collection of tunes grows, it gets more and more difficult to organize files from different sources, ripped with different programs, and downloaded from different music stores. Pollux is a free app for Mac OS that can help you tidy up the metadata for each track, which in turn makes it easier for you to find a song you're looking for when you want it, make playlists, and organize your tunes.

Pollux isn't the first app to do this. TuneUp and TidySongs can also scrub your iTunes library and make sure that your files are properly categorized and organized. Unlike TuneUp and TidySongs, Pollux is free. Pollux doesn't do some of the unique fingerprinting and song matching online that TuneUp and TidySongs do, but it's exceptionally good at taking songs with fragmented metadata and completing it automatically.

One of Pollux's best features is that it cleans up track data as the song is added to iTunes, so you don't clean up your entire library only to mess it up again when you rip a new CD. Once you have Pollux downloaded and installed, running the app sets it loose on your iTunes library. It's completely automated, so you don't have to update each track manually or approve each change that Pollux wants to make to your library.

Pollux works by analyzing each song's metadata and completing it if the app has enough information to go on. If ...

Twitter has joined the Social Media Challenge at DonorsChoose, an online charity that connects Internet users with classrooms in need. The challenge is a month-long initiative intended to leverage the power of the Web in order to bring in more donations. The program brought in $270,000 last year and now has the backing of the popular micro-blogging site.

"It's easy to get involved. You can pick a Twitterer to support or you can create a giving page of your own," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post.

The site allows teachers to create their own pages with details about what type of supplies they need for their classroom. It can be anything from $1,925 for netbooks in North Carolina, $286 for recycling bins in Kentucky, or $783 for Civil War textbooks in Tennessee. You can fund an entire project or give as little as $1 to help get someone started.

One of the projects for which Stone is soliciting funds is "Making Science Fun!", which will help kids in a high-poverty school in Arkansas.

"The fourth graders need sets of books about simple machines, properties of the earth, electricity, and matter as well as hands-on activity tubs for each topic," Stone wrote. 'The letters the kids write to you after donating are their own reward."

Stone's wife Livia, a wildlife rehabber, is also raising funds for projects in California.

In addition to Twitter support, the challenge is also teaming up with Hewlett-Packard, which is contributing $250,000.

...

MySpace has named Mark Rosenbaum as its new chief financial officer, a week after it selected Alex Maghen as its chief technology officer. Rosenbaum previously served as a consultant to MGM, and has held positions at Gemstar-TV and tvguide.com. He'll be based at MySpace headquarters and report to CEO Owen Van Natta.

"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both startup culture and mature businesses, and is well suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a statement.

Last week, MySpace selected Maghen at CTO. Maghen previously served as CTO for MySpace Music. He has also served as CTO for Yahoo Entertainment and MTV Networks.

I think I know what your iPhone needs: bigger ads. Google on Monday announced that ads displayed on high-end smartphones like the iPhone or Android-based devices will show up just like they do on computers.

When Google launched a mobile version of its AdSense program, most phones could only display a smaller version of the ad on their screens. Smartphone screen sizes, however, have grown in recent years, providing Google with a little more real estate.

Google launched AdSense on the iPhone and Android phones in June, and these phones will now have the ability to display full-size ads, Google said.

"These phones have full HTML browsers that can show ads designed for a computer," Google said in a video demo.

Google pulled this off with the addition of a new JavaScript snippet that is "specifically optimized for mobile to reduce latency on high-end mobile phones," Google said in a blog post. "Furthermore, this new snippet will allow publishers to select additional ad unit sizes from common AdSense formats.

If you're targeting users with all different types of phones, not to worry. "We'll automatically detect if the user is browsing with a high-end phone, and instead of serving a smaller mobile WAP ad, we'll return a larger ad optimized for high-end mobile devices," Google said.

Good and bad news for shopaholics: Amazon today announced the release of its new Mobile Payment Service (MPS), an app that lets customers purchase products via their phones, with one click.

Amazon customers can make one-time payments, make purchases via 1-Click, get refunds on transactions, get payments authorized, and cancel payments. The feature can be implemented on any site with Amazon FPS APIs already integrated. Clicking on the Pay With Amazon link will bring you to a cobranded Amazon Payments page. Once the transaction is complete, you're returned to the original Web site.

October 22 is going to be an interesting day in technology.

Not only is it the day that Microsoft launches its new Windows 7 operating system, but it will also be the day that the Federal Communications Commission officially unveils proposed rules regarding net neutrality.

The commission's monthly October meeting will focus solely on "a notice of proposed rule-making on policies to preserve the free and open Internet," according to note distributed this morning.

Chairman Julius Genachowski made headlines last month when he announced that the commission would formally address net neutrality - the idea that everyone should have equal access to the Web.

Genachowski proposed two additions to the FCC's existing Internet Policy Principles, a set of four principles released by the agency in 2005 that serve as a framework for broadband Internet access. The first addition would prevent ISPs from discriminating against particular Internet content or applications, while allowing for reasonable network management, while the second would ensure that ISPs are transparent about network management.

The rulemaking would also make those principles official rules. Last year, Comcast appealed an enforcement action by the FCC over network management because, the company said, the FCC based its decision on the principles, which are not official FCC rules, and are therefore not enforceable.

Then FCC chairman Kevin Martin disagreed with Comcast's assessment, and said that the principles were indeed enforceable.