Adobe gives web designers more power with Flash Catalyst
With two new products available in beta testing today — Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder 4 — Adobe is hoping to reinvent the way that websites and applications are built in the Flash format.
Flash sites (which may be most familiar to your average web surfer through the fancy sites that Hollywood studios put up to promote movies) are often the richest in multimedia and graphics, and they also tend to be carefully designed. However, … Continue Reading
Nvidia trumpets success of its Tegra cell phone processors
Nvidia is becoming a real player in portable mobile devices as the industry embraces its Tegra processors. The company is announcing today that some of the world’s biggest gadget manufacturers are designing mobile devices using the Tegra chips.
And the interesting thing is, the first major adopters of these chips for mobile Internet devices, or MIDS, are expected to be cell phone carriers, not the computer makers who are Nvidia’s traditional customers.
At the Computex … Continue Reading
Biggest video game maker Activision Blizzard kicks off E3 announcements with plan for financial domination
Activision Blizzard webcast a press conference today, highlighting the games it expects will generate millions and millions of sales for the company this year. The event was the first of many from game companies at the E3 conference.
While other companies are touting their new titles solely from the gamers’ view, Activision Blizzard spent its time pitching its financial performance to analysts, describing the overall drivers that are enabling it to become the largest independent … Continue Reading
Sony's PSP Go: boasts wider screen, but still no "touch"
Details of the latest version of Sony’s PlayStation Portable, the PSP Go, keep leaking out.
If the details are correct, this new device will be one of the headline grabbers among all of the new developments at the E3 game show next week.
Engadget reports that Sony will announce the PSP Go on Tuesday.
The gadget has 16 gigabytes of internal flash memory for storing games, videos and music. And there is no Universal Memory … Continue Reading
Anticipating E3: the video game giants prepare to show their cards
The E3 video game trade show gets under way Monday, and is expected to draw more than 40,000 people with a new grandiose format.
Held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, it will be much more like a Las Vegas extravaganza than the boring, press-focused shows that drew 4,000 or so people last year. And yes, those booth babes (below) will be back, as well as 3,500 journalists.
(Listen to my NPR Weekend Edition interview … Continue Reading
Bing demo video
Microsoft says Bing, the company’s new search engine, will launch on Wednesday, June 3, after a few delays this week. Even if I get Bing to load, I’m too old to spend the weekend typing up a review. But I had Microsoft send us this video clip to study til the youngsters post.… Continue Reading
Universal virtual currency wars begin: Facebook payments system now testing live
Third party applications on Facebook are beginning to test out the social network’s new, in-house payment system, presaging what has been described as a wide-ranging war among many companies to offer a single, universal virtual currency. There’s been no formal announcement of a launch yet, but an implementation is already live on an app called GroupCards, as spotted by TechCrunch earlier today.
It works along the lines of what we first heard earlier this month. … Continue Reading
Another Googler to help run Obama's tech efforts
Andrew McLaughlin, Google‘s head of global public policy, will be joining President Barack Obama’s administration as the deputy chief technology officer, according to a report in The New York Times.
This adds to the already numerous ties between Google and the Obama administration — chief executive Eric Schmidt is on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, former Googler Katie Staunton is director of citizen participation, and Sonal Shah (previously of Google.org) is … Continue Reading
Roundup: Atari loses $319 million, Microsoft's Bing fails to bring the bling
Here’s the latest action:
This must be Botched Launch Week — You can ogle our pretty screenshots of Microsoft’s new search tool, Bing. But most of the world still hasn’t been able to connect. Microsoft PR says Wednesday June 3 is now the official launch date.
Botched launch week part two – Nokia’s Ovi Store seems to be up and running, after its own rough start.
Tough times for an old game brand — Atari … Continue Reading
Facebook opens public profile comments and likes to the public
Facebook made a seemingly minor change to how its public profiles work earlier this week. Previously, if you were logged out of Facebook you could still see public pages and the first names and thumbnail photos of fans but not any of the comments from users. Now, when fans of these promotion-focused profiles leave a comment or click on the thumbs-up “like” button, these comments are publicly viewable. Similar to the previous logic, last names … Continue Reading
Funding and numbers – young entrepreneur's best advice
Video interview: Erica Douglass sold her million dollar web hosting company at the age of 26. She speaks about finding funding, knowing your limitations, and how to get started in technology and also describes how important it is to keep in control of the numbers in the company even if you are neither interested or skilled in economics.
This is the first interview on Entrepreneur Corner from Women 2.0. More interviews from Women 2.0 are … Continue Reading
Reactions positive on federal cybersecurity chief, but privacy a concern
Positive reactions from the security industry are coming in response to President Obama’s decision to set up a high-level cybersecurity coordinator within the federal government.
Obama said the coordinator — pointedly not named czar, which sounds dictatorial — would lead an effort to beef up both defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. The coordinator would not take over the cybersecurity role, but rather facilitate different parts of the government, such as the FBI or the National … Continue Reading
Games: Another reason why Twitter needs filters
There’s a game on Twitter right now called Spymaster — I’m not exactly sure what it is because I haven’t joined. I just know about it because a lot of people I follow on Twitter are playing it, and one gets the impression that any action they take in the game (“assassinating” each other or whatnot), gets tweeted back into their followers. Apparently, there are settings in the game to limit the tweetspam, but nobody … Continue Reading
The universal currency wars are coming
We’ve seen much speculation in the past month about Facebook’s impending virtual currency tests. Its initial forays will be, by all accounts, relatively simple and small. But it’s the potential of “what Facebook could do” that has everyone talking. Yes, it’s cool that in the short-term, application developers will be able to use its “credits” currency to make money, and it’s nice to see Facebook making a smart business decision, but there’s a larger and … Continue Reading
Apple sub-$900 clone maker: "They probably will" sue
On Monday, a startup company alled Quo Computer plans to open a retail store in the Los Angeles area. Quo will sell computers that run Apple’s Mac OS X operating system on Quo-designed hardware. The company fully expects Apple to sue them.
Quo’s three models — named Life Q, Pro Q, and Max Q — will probably start at less than $900 for the Life Q, according to a CNET report. The store, scheduled to … Continue Reading
Peeling back another layer of detail on Microsoft's secret gesture-control system for games
We reported recently that Microsoft was preparing to announce a gesture-control system for the Xbox 360 at the E3 show in Los Angeles starting Monday. Now we’ve peeled back another layer of the secret.
The motion-sensing control system that Microsoft is working on is key to its attempt to win back market share from Nintendo. We’ve heard that Microsoft is not only working with 3DV Systems on this but also one of 3DV’s competitors, Prime … Continue Reading
'Separating the men from the boys' in Government 2.0
Updated
Everyone knows the internet is critical to getting elected nowadays, especially after it played a crucial role in President Obama’s success. But you need to do more than just throw up a Facebook page and a Twitter account, said Obama campaign advisor/Twitter investor Chris Sacca (pictured on the left). At last night’s Startup2Startup event on “Government 2.0,” Sacca told the crowd that politicians shouldn’t just think of online social networking tools as “yet another … Continue Reading
LAN security provider Nevis short circuits, sells assets
Nevis Networks, provider of products used to secure local-area networks, has filed for bankruptcy after a drop in demand. Based in Mountain View, Calif., the company has also come up against tough competition from Microsoft and Cisco Systems. It will offload $500,000 in assets, but it owed $50 million to 49 creditors, reports VentureWire.
Nevis had raised $32 million in capital from BlueRun Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and NewPath Ventures. It isn’t the only network … Continue Reading
Bing downtime means nothing yet
Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine — whoops, they’re now called discovery engines — has served some sweet-looking pages to a few lucky people since Steve Ballmer’s henchmen threw the big switch yesterday. But most of us have only seen blank pages or the “Coming Soon” page above.
Our readers took a few screenshots. Search Engine Land was able to do head-to-head tests of Bing versus Google. Mike Arrington reported from the Google I/O nerdapalooza in … Continue Reading
What's next: Signatures as a Service?
Signature blocks, those lines of text some people include at the bottom of their email messages, are as old as the web itself. Some of the earliest emails included primitive signatures; perhaps Major Raymond Czahor earns the dual honor of first email signature and first screamed message: “CHIEF, ARPANET MANAGEMENT BRANCH, DCA”. Plain vanilla signatures include name, title, company, and contact info. Interesting ones contain jokes, quotes, and other colorful items that convey something unique … Continue Reading
