Archive for: November 18, 2009

Need an e-book reader for you shiny new Motorola Droid? eReader.com today announced the introduction of a reader for Google's Android platform. It's not the first e-book reader available for the OS--I've got an app called WordPlayer installed in my phone, and it's got a small but diverse selection of public domain titles.

eReader does, however, have a large selection of for-sale books built-in. You can download the app via the Android Market, or by pointing your browser to www.ereader.com/android.

Hulu is expanding its offerings to include music videos courtesy of a deal with EMI. The company appears to be testing the waters in the space via a devoted Nora Jones channel, which features the singer's videos, concert footage, and a handful of interviews.

The deal between the two companies comes just ahead of Jones's latest release, The Fall, due out next week. More EMI offerings will follow--and the site will continue to add further offerings from Jones. No names of specific artists beyond Jones have been mentioned, however.

The site's senior vice president, Andy Forssell, told The New York Times,

In the end, we thought the best starting point that fit with our mission, and with what our users expect, is a good mix of content, some music videos, long-form content and interviews, everything we can get for an immersive experience around certain artists.

Hulu's chief competition, YouTube, already has deals with all four majors.

New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video

The angsty teenage vampire craze hit new heights (or depths, depending and who you ask) this week when a live stream of the upcoming Twilight Saga: New Moon's red carpet opening in Westwood hit nearly three million viewers. Three million! And Michael Jackson didn't even have to die to make it happen.

The coverage was an exclusive deal between MySpace and Ustream. Said the former of the event, "It was a huge success breaking the record to become the highest amount of viewers to tune in to a Ustream red carpet live webcast. It also set the record as the farthest reaching webcast for Ustream with over two million uniques."

Opera Software is throwing in big with its revamped mobile browser interface--which is a good thing. The company just unveiled Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile devices, which mimics the UI changes already present in the Opera 10 desktop browser and Opera Mini 5 beta mobile app.

Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows Mobile features the Safari 4-like Speed Dial launch screen, with graphical representations of frequently accessed Web sites. It also includes tabbed browsing, a password manager, and Opera's latest Turbo server-side compression technology.

The new beta works on Windows Mobile 6.5, 6.1, 6.0 and 5 Pocket PC handsets, including brand new models like the HTC Touch Pro2, the HTC Pure, and the AT&T Tilt2. For more information or to grab a copy of the beta, visit www.opera.com/mobile.

Over the past few years, I've reviewed several versions of Handmark's Pocket Express app for PC Mag. One of my favorite features was MobileCierge, which lets you call someone to help out with just about anything--from finding a hotel to helping you get your car keys out of a locked trunk.

Now Handmark--wisely, in my opinion--has separated that feature and is selling it as a standalone app called MyAssist for the iPhone and BlackBerry OS. For $9.99 per month (or $99.99 for an entire year up front), MyAssist's personal assistant service is staffed by experts for restaurant referrals, roadside and travel assistance, and medical care. It's open 24/7 and works globally.

The assistants can also help score tickets to events, plus offer information, research, and directions to destinations. The app is available with a 7-day free trial for the BlackBerry at www.myassist.com, and will soon hit Apple's App Store.

Netflix on Monday launched a mobile phone app for five Nokia-branded phones. The app lets users search for titles, manage their queues, and watch previews. The app is available via Noka's Ovi Store in the entertainment category, and works on E72, E71x, 5800, N97, and N97 mini phones.

The two companies are also running a promotion that could net one winner a home/mobile entertainment package, which includes a one year Netflix subscription, Nokia Booklet 3G, Nokia N97 mini, 42" Flat Screen HDTV, Surround Sound System, and Xbox 360. Sign up online before the December 18 deadline.

Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm were scheduled to go live on Microsoft's Xbox Tuesday, and Facebook showed off a few images from the console's interface.

"The Xbox Facebook integration allows you to take part in some of the most popular activities on Facebook directly from your living room on your television," Facebook said in a blog post. "With Facebook for Xbox, you can update your status, browse updates from your friends and view photos on the big screen. You also can link your Facebook profile to your Xbox Gamertag to find your Facebook friends and connect with them on Xbox Live."

The Facebook app is available for the Xbox 360 now via a system update. Users can control who sees their activity on the console, Facebook said.

Looking for more relevant results from Google Image Search? The search engine giant on Tuesday unveiled a new Google Labs experiment that gathers similar results together and displays them in bubble-like groups, or swirls.

For example, if you search for "Paris" you see layered results: The first features pictures of the French city, and the second shows photos of socialite Paris Hilton. Click on the Paris, France collection and it will "swirl" open into a circle of images, which become larger as you mouse over them.

Google likened the effort to its Wonder Wheel, which allows users to explore related search queries.

"Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups," Google wrote in a blog post. "Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images—they are the most relevant groups of images."

The search currently works with about 200,000 searches, and Google plans to add more in the near future. To access it, visit the site in Labs.

In other search news, Google also introduced a new way to display URLs in search results.

Is MySpace in the process of adding imeem to its music roster? TechCrunch reported on Monday night that the social networking site is "in late-stage negotiations" to purchase the music-streaming Web site for an undisclosed amount. The deal is apparently awaiting final approval from several stakeholders.

Spokespeople for imeem and MySpace said they could not comment on rumors.

In August, MySpace purchased music discovery service iLike for a reported $20 million. MySpace chief executive Owen Van Natta said at the time that iLike's recommendation engine was of particular interest.

Last month, MySpace and iLike joined Google's music discovery service—as did imeem. The offering is a music-search feature that will include in Google search results streaming music clips from partners like MySpace, Lala, Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody.

Imeem said it joined Google's service because, "We believe this partnership will bring more people to imeem and introduce a much wider audience to legal music services that make it easy -and fun--to discover music."

 

Thanks to yesterday's NASA tweetup, in which 96 very lucky Twitter members got to view the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis from close up and live-tweet about it, Twitter traffic spiked at the hour of launch, with nearly 3,000 tweets mentioning NASA, according to Trendrr.com, a service that tracks social media trends.

Coverage from the NASA Tweetup participants, which includes links to images, video, and blog posts, as well as commentary condensed to 140 characters, can be found by searching for the hashtag "#nasatweetup" on the Twitter site . Actually, the participation of these "space tweeps" owes more to astuteness than luck, as the first 115 to sign up for the event (through Twitter, of course) on October 16 were chosen. This was the fifth NASA space shuttle tweetup, but this one has gotten by far the most attention, as the space agency has realized the value of social media as a publicity tool.

It may not have taken a rocket scientist (or aficionado) to have guessed that the Atlantis launch of mission STS-129, with its attendant NASA tweetup, would cause a spike in Twitter traffic. What is a bit surprising, though, was that the Atlantis launch was not the most-tweeted NASA story of the past week—that honor goes to last Friday's announcement of the discovery of water on the Moon, which scientists detected in the plume of debris kicked up by NASA's LCROSS spacecraft they had deliberately crashed into the Moon. More than 3,500 tweets mentioning NASA were sent within an hour of the announcement (once again, according to Trendrr's data). It makes sense that this discovery was the big NASA Twitter story of the week, when you consider that the presence ...

After several months in private beta, Adobe on Monday unveiled Beta 2 of its AIR online apps platform. The Adobe AIR 2 beta, runtime and SDK, is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it boasts new capabilities and tighter integration with the desktop, Adobe said. Adobe also announced the availability of Player 10.1 on Adobe Labs.

"This is the first time we have sim-shipped for all three major operating systems for both AIR and Flash Player (also in beta) and represents a major step forward in delivering on the promise of the Open Screen Project," Adobe said in a blog post.

After talking with customers and developers, Adobe decided that AIR 2 would focus on: providing deeper integration with the operating system, making developers more productive, and improving performance, Rob Christensen, a senior product manager on Adobe AIR, wrote in a separate blog post.

Among the additions to AIR 2 are: open documents with default application; mass storage volume detection; native process API; microphone data access; multi-touch and gesture events; global error handling; enhanced printing support; updated WebKit; improve IPv6 support; DNS lookup; more efficient CPU usage, and more.

A full list of the additions is available online.

The beta is available for download now on Adobe Labs.

With the advent of "citizen journalism," anyone with a camera, an Internet connection, and a few questions can become a member of the fourth estate. But how do you know if this reporting is accurate?

YouTube on Tuesday introduced a new portal, dubbed YouTube Direct, intended to provide news organizations with a more organized way to find and use homemade videos about the day's major news stories.

Let's say a tornado touches down and wipes out a Midwestern town, a politician makes a newsworthy comment at a voter meet-and-greet, or a traffic accident has brought a major highway to a standstill. A news team might not be able to make it to the scene immediately, but you had your camera out and captured the action.

Now, through YouTube Direct, you can submit your video to the news organization of your choice and that station or Web site editor can choose whether to use or decline your footage via a private dashboard. The result? "Citizen stringers," YouTube said.

"Built from our APIs, this open source application lets media organizations enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites," YouTube wrote in a blog post. Submitted videos will remain live on the owner's own YouTube channel "so users can reach their own audience while also getting broader exposure and editorial validation for the videos they create," YouTube said.

The platform was built with news organizations in mind, but YouTube said it can be used for any organization looking to source video content. "Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials," YouTube said.

ABC News, the Huffington Post, ...