TKO!
LoL by: josh brothers
Picture by: Unknown
Facebook 2.0 for BlackBerry images leak out
Facebook for BlackBerry is getting ready for a fresh update soon. According to these leaked screenshots it shows that version 2.0 will be seeing a complete UI refresh along with – and finally – Facebook Chat. Other improvements that are expected to arrive are the ability to View friends’ profile info, pages and friends lists. […]
Related posts:
- BlackBerry Storm 3 specs leak out…
- Facebook 1.5 for BlackBerry officially goes live!
- Images: Upcoming HTC phones with dedicated Facebook button surfaces
Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs
Hey, look, at this point, we just want ourselves some good, old-fashioned copy and paste — but we’ll give Microsoft some credit for looking a year (or two, or ten) beyond that watermark at what could be coming down the pike for human-machine interaction — and specifically, how phones could play a role. In a presentation and promotional video pulled together this week, Microsoft Research boss Craig Mundie shows how you could tilt your smartphone to control a bubbly, colorful look into your personal life on your desktop machine and how you could snap a photo and then drop the handset onto a Surface for instant transfer (perhaps a bit like HP’s Touch to Share), among other gems. Of course, this is all pure research at this point — it’s any guess whether these comments could make the jump to production, and if so, when — but it’s fun to watch. Follow the break for video.
[Thanks, Jake]
Continue reading Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs
Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Google Search Updates: Less Content Farm Spam, More Recipes [Google]
Two awesome things are happening with Google’s search engine. First, Google is finally going after the content farms that flood their search results with posts that care more about SEO than content. Wanting to filter that noise out, Google is pushing forward a new search algorithm which identifies posts from those types sites and lowers their search rank. That makes it harder for these sites to make it to the top of a results page for any given search string. It will affect approximately 12% of all queries on Google. More »
This Is the Last Launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery [Space]
Today, Discovery reached for the stars for the last time in history. The launch almost got canceled because of a last-minute computer display problem, but the engineers saved the day a couple of seconds before the launch window deadline. Here’s the video of the launch. More »
Web access is critical, Clement says
Federal cabinet minister Tony Clement says expanding access to the internet in Canada is “critical.”
Finding the right place when you need it
Over the past few months, we have launched several new mobile search features for iPhone and Android-powered devices that make it easier to find local businesses. In the US, we launched an “open now” feature which lets you filter local search results to show only businesses that are open right now, based on their listed hours. When you’re hankering for pizza at 1 o’clock in the morning, this can be really handy:
Other local search options available globally include filtering by star ratings (find a highly-rated restaurant for your first date) and by distance (especially handy when you’re on foot).
You may have noticed other improvements as well, like the addition of images, reviews from around the web and bigger buttons for viewing a map or calling a business directly. Each business’s open hours are also shown in the result snippets.
If you haven’t used local search recently, now is a great time to try it out. Just go to www.google.com in your browser, tap on the “Places” link at the top of the page, and do a search. You can also access these features when searching for businesses on Google Maps for mobile on Android devices.
Posted by Yoshi Matsumoto and Keiji Maekawa, Software Engineers
1 killed in crash near Canora
One person is dead following a head-on crash on Highway 9 south of Canora, Sask.
Android Market adds e-books; movies and music soon to come?
The Android world’s been a-buzz this last week over a few new Android Market URLS, including http://market.android.com/music/ and http://market.android.com/movies/. In case you thought there was nothing to this tip, guess again: the third member of this trifecta (http://market.android.com/books/) has gone live. That’s right, visitors to the Android Market can pick up Glenn Beck’s mile-a-minute thrill ride The Overton Window for a mere $9. We hope that takes some of the sting out of the fact that a Google Music launch wasn’t part of this month’s Honeycomb event — although if we had to wager a guess, we’d say that the company will have Music and Movie offerings soon enough.
Android Market adds e-books; movies and music soon to come? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Intel refutes Apple exclusivity for Thunderbolt I/O, LaCie and Promise detail first Thunderbolt peripherals
We can think of a pretty good reason why Apple might have a head-start when it comes to Thunderbolt-capable machines, but Apple doesn’t actually have a timed exclusive on the technology, at least according to Intel PR. The company told us that while it’s currently targeting an early 2012 launch for Thunderbolt with other OEMs — whereas the new MacBook Pro has Thunderbolt right now — there’s nothing stopping other manufacturers from launching machines with the 10Gbps interconnect a good bit earlier if they so desire.
In related news, the first Thunderbolt peripherals have just been formally announced — the Promise Pegasus RAID array we saw spitting out 800MB / sec video streams, and the LaCie Little Big Disk. The former will come in four-bay and six-bay variants, topping out at 12TB of magnetic storage when it arrives in Q2, and the latter will boast a pair of Intel 510 Series SSDs — which, by the way, have yet to be formally announced — in RAID 0 for 500GB of storage in total. PR after the break.
Intel refutes Apple exclusivity for Thunderbolt I/O, LaCie and Promise detail first Thunderbolt peripherals originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Facebook Pulls Plug on Breakup Notifier
Sorry Facebook stalkers–all 3.6 million of you. The popular social network has pulled the plug on Breakup Notifier, a recently introduced that promised to let you know when one of your friends changes their relationship status to single.
After a good round of online criticism (the word "creepy" was bandied about an awful lot), Facebook has apparently pulled the plug on the third-party app. Here's a note that the site sent to the app's creator, Dan Loewenherz,
To ensure positive user experiences on Platform, we run routine automated screens that take user feedback, machine learning and various algorithms into account and remove spammy applications. For example, if an application is making an inordinate number of stream.publish calls and receiving a large number of user reports, it may be removed by our automated systems to protect the user experience and the Platform ecosystem.
Facebook has since issued a statement to the effect that it didn't so much block Breakup Notifier as tweak it, in order to "provide a positive user experience." Here you go,
We have automated systems in place to ensure apps on Facebook Platform provide a positive user experience, and we’re currently looking into the issue with “Breakup Notifier”. Additionally, we did not block the “Blackmail Yourself” app. Some features were temporarily disabled this week as we worked with the developer to ensure the app complied with all of our policies, but it has been and continues to be accessible.
Android Market e-books goes live; music and movies to follow?
The Android Market has never had any specific ban on carrying and selling straight up text documents, and users could search through the market and find apps that were, in effect, standalone e-books. Now, however, there is a section dedicated specifically to e-books which currently features around 500 titles from publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, W.W. Norton and Co., Hachette, and more.
The URL for the site, market.android.com/books, was discovered by Android Guys last week, and the site noted that URLs for /music, and /movies worked and resolved to the Android Market.
Thursday is the first day the /books URL began landing on a real market page.
Get Your Heinz Ketchup In A Bottle Made From Plants
Forget the distinctive glass bottle, most of the Heinz ketchup sold today comes in plastic containers. But a new partnership with Coca-Cola will soon see the company switching to something much more green: bottles made from plants.
Aptly called PlantBottle technology, the new material is nearly indistinguishable from regular plastic and remains 100 percent recyclable, but it’s made from 30 percent plant-based materials. Currently the process utilizes sugarcane from Brazil.
“The partnership of Coca-Cola and Heinz is a model of collaboration in the food and beverage industry that will make a sustainable difference for the planet,” Heinz Chairman, President and CEO William R. Johnson said in a statement. “Heinz Ketchup is going to convert to PlantBottle globally, beginning with our best-selling 20-ounce variety of Heinz Ketchup, which will reach consumers this summer.”
Coke has been using PlantBottle since 2009, while the first Heinz PlantBottles should be hitting store shelves in June, accompanied by the tag line “GUESS WHAT MY BOTTLE IS MADE OF?”
Slice and dice your recipe search results
As a second-generation Indian who has grown up in the United States, I’ve developed a taste for great home-cooked Indian food, but not a knack for how to make it. Somehow my cooking efforts result in foods that taste over-spiced yet bland at the same time. My parents follow the art of cooking by intuition, where the right amount of each spice is measured out by gut feel, but that’s never worked very well for me. As a math geek and computer engineer, I prefer to work with concrete numbers and instructions, including when cooking, so today I’m very happy about a new feature that helps me find recipes online: Recipe View.
Recipe View lets you narrow your search results to show only recipes, and helps you choose the right recipe amongst the search results by showing clearly marked ratings, ingredients and pictures. To get to Recipe View, click on the “Recipes” link in the left-hand panel when searching for a recipe. You can search for specific recipes like [chocolate chip cookies], or more open-ended topics—like [strawberry] to find recipes that feature strawberries, or even a holiday or event, like [cinco de mayo]. In fact, you can try searching for all kinds of things and still find interesting results: a favorite chef like [ina garten], something very specific like [spicy vegetarian curry with coconut and tofu] or even something obscure like [strange salad].
In the past, you only had one way to specify your recipe searches—with the text you type into the Google search box. Now you can also filter search results based on your ideal ingredients, cooking time and calorie count using the recipe tools on the left hand side of the page. For example, I can now find vegetable biryani recipes (an Indian rice dish) that include cauliflower and take less than an hour to make:
We like to “eat our own dogfood” at Google—meaning we like to test our own products and features ourselves before releasing them for public consumption. With Recipe View, we’ve taken this more literally than usual. Here’s Google Chef Scott Giambastiani to demonstrate how he uses Recipe View to find great recipes for Googlers:
Recipe View is based on data from rich snippets markup, which we first introduced at Searchology in 2009. If you’re a recipe publisher, you can add markup to your webpages so that your content can appear with this improved presentation in regular Google results as well as in Recipe View. Recipe View is part of our ongoing efforts to enrich the search experience using structured data, and this release is an exciting technical milestone for our team since it’s first time we’ve built a brand new set of search tools based off of rich snippets data.
Recipe View is rolling out now in the U.S. and Japan, and we’ll be adding more countries in the future. We look forward to making further improvements and building more views so you can “slice and dice” your results for other types of searches as well. Bon appetit!
Posted by Kavi Goel, Product Manager
First Tegra-optimized Android game, Sumurai II, goes live
Of the dozens and dozens of Android device on the market, Samurai II: Vengeance was built for just two of them. So far. The game is believed to be the first major title developed independently for optimization on mobile devices running a dual-core processor.
What Is Thunderbolt? [What Is]
Along with snappy Sandy Bridge processors and beefy GPUs, Apple’s new MacBook Pros have a superfast, versatile new I/O tech called Thunderbolt. Whazat? More »
Cats Adore, Manipulate Women
Cats attach to humans, and particularly women, as social partners, and it’s not just for the sake of obtaining food.
Google Integrates Easily Filtered Recipes into Search [Recipes]
Google’s rolling out a Recipes search filter into its web results, allowing last-minute dinner finders to sort by ingredients, cooking time, and calories, and using recipe sites’ own internal language to bring out the recipe you’re hoping to find. More »
Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office available to all
Many of you already use Google Docs for editing your documents, but there are still many people that are tied to desktop applications and haven’t experienced the numerous benefits cloud applications to bring. To help bring more people to the cloud and take advantage of features that result, we’re happy to announce that Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available to everyone. Google Cloud Connect is a free plugin that improves Microsoft Office 2003, 2007 and 2010 on Windows PCs. It adds simultaneous collaboration, revision history, cloud sync, unique URLs and simple sharing to the Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint applications:
Take it for a spin on your Windows PC by downloading the plugin.
To learn more about how Google Cloud Connect can help businesses, check out the more detailed post on the Google Enterprise Blog.
Posted by: Shan Sinha, Google Apps Product Manager
Update: Many of you have also asked about availability for Macs. Unfortunately due to the lack of support for open APIs on Microsoft Office for Mac, we are unable to make Google Cloud Connect available on Macs at this time. We look forward to when that time comes so we can provide this feature to our Mac customers as well.
The most expensive car crash in history
It’s always a joy to hear of a suffering millionaire, so we just had to share this one with you.