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Posts Tagged ‘Batches’

Plastic Logic QUE proReader pre-orders halted?

We’re not going to engage in too much wild speculation on this piece of information, but there are certainly a few raised eyebrows in Engadget-land right now. Apparently Plastic Logic is no longer offering pre-orders of its QUE proReader, as a tipster of ours discovered while trying to push through his order of the $799.99, 8GB / 3G version of the large-screen device. According to the order page “Pre-orders are sold out. QUE will be available online and in select Barnes & Noble stores this summer.” This of course comes on the heels of news that the company would be further delaying the ship date from mid-April to summer related to “fine-tuning” and “enhancing the overall product experience.” So our minds aren’t exactly at ease, as we’re trying to understand why a company wouldn’t just caveat pre-orders by letting people know there’s been a run on supply — though it’s possible that Plastic Logic is doing separate batches for mail order and in-store, and just needs to pace themselves. We’ve reached out to the company for comment, and we’ll let you know as soon as we hear back.

[Thanks, Clive]

Plastic Logic QUE proReader pre-orders halted? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Top Ten Ways To Fix Google Buzz

Google Buzz was pushed out the door too early and force-fed to users by placing it in Gmail. The launch has been marked by both privacy and usability issues. But the team at Google behind it, led by Bradley Horowitz, is working hard to fix problems and respond to user feedback. In fact, earlier today, Horowitz pointed people via Buzz and Twitter to an official Google product idea site for making suggestions to improve Google Buzz. The site is powered by Google Moderator, which lets people suggest ideas and then vote them up or down.

Below are the top ten ideas and feature requests on the site right now, which already has 13,607 votes on 338 ideas from 692 people. They range from making comments more manageable to fixing Twitter update imports so that they are more realtime to better filters and a ReBuzz button.

1. “Collapsible comments.”
2. “Allow me to “star” or “favorite” a buzz to read later just like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups and Twitter.”
3. “Fix the Twitter feed so they update in realtime instead of hours later in giant batches.”
4. “A “ReBuzz” button that forwards someone else’s buzz (including links, photo’s, etc. but not reactions) to your followers with a @reference to the original poster.”
5. “Move “Mute this post” from the menu to the Buzz item itself (e.g.: next to ‘Like’ etc.).”
6. “Buzz filter. Some people may not be interested in posts coming from certain sources (e.g. Twitter). It would be nice to have a simple way of filtering those out.”
7. “Labels. Or any other way to group either people or buzzes (or both?) into categories. The ability to group information or people according to topics or personal preferences, etc.”
8. “Allow multiple links in one buzz and let me add photos after adding a link. Currently only allows one link, and must add all photos before the link, or the photos option disappears.”
9. “View the stream chronologically, without bumping buzzes back to the top every time a comment is added.”
10. “More options for sharing posts from Buzz to other places”

Hmm, sounds like people want it to be even more like FriendFeed. What’s your top feature request for Buzz?

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Artificial nose becomes coffee analyzer, sniffs out KIRF Starbucks venues

Artificial schnozzes have been sniffing foreign objects for years now, but rarely are they engineered to sniff out specific things. A team of researchers from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign have done just that, though, with a new snout that acts as a coffee analyzer. Reportedly, the device can “distinguish between ten well-known commercial brands of coffee and can also make a distinction between coffee beans that have been roasted at different temperatures or lengths of time.” The significance here is that this distinction is incredibly difficult to make, and it could one day help coffee growers determine whether batches are as good as prior batches on the cheap. More importantly, however, it could help the modern java hunter determine whether or not they’re walking in a corporate Starbucks or one of those “branded” kiosks with two-fifths the menu. Brilliant, right?

Artificial nose becomes coffee analyzer, sniffs out KIRF Starbucks venues originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Photo Tagger Alerts You When A Picture Of You Appears On Facebook, Tagged Or Not

Israeli facial recognition tech startup Face.com made quite a splash when it launched Photo Finder, its first Facebook app, back in March. It soon followed suit with a new app called Photo Tagger, a tool that is capable of finding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums even if they remained untagged by users.

The auto-tagging app was only available in private beta so far, but today the company is debuting the public version of Photo Tagger. It’s free of charge, and it’s awesome.

Here’s how it works: after you install the app on Facebook, you can select any public album (either their own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial recognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identified as such. Confirmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.

You have to try it out to see how it works for you, but Face.com claims faces can be recognized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures.

This turns Photo Tagger into quite an impressive social search engine for faces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy notification tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.

Face.com says the private alpha edition of Photo Tagger attracted over 30,000 users and identified 5 million faces on Facebook within three months.

For an alternative, take a look at what Polar Rose is doing.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

Yesterday we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we pick out our top 10 from your choices.

We’ve chosen the 10 in two batches. Firstly, the services that got the most number of mentions. As expected, these are well known apps that millions of people are using (or will use when it’s launched, in the case of Google Wave). We didn’t want this to be purely a popularity contest though, so we’ve also selected 5 lesser known web apps or services. Those apps all got multiple mentions and in our estimation they’re each worthy of being labeled ‘exciting.’

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Note: we offer the full list of apps voted for at the bottom of this post.

Top 5 Apps

1. Twitter 25 votes
2. Gmail 17 votes
3. Google Reader 11 votes
4. Google Wave 11 votes
5. Facebook 6 votes

This was fairly predictable, with Twitter well out in front. There’s been such excitement and activity around Twitter this year, that nobody could really argue against Twitter being the most exciting web or service around in 2009.

Twitter was followed by no less than 3 Google products, one of them as yet unreleased! (Google Wave). This shows that Google still has that aura of being ‘exciting,’ at least with ReadWriteWeb’s early adopter readers.

Facebook slipped in at number 5, so it too seems to have kept up its reputation for being innovative.

Top 5 Lesser Known Apps

6. Spotify (RWW coverage): this Swedish online music app is about to launch in the U.S. and is highly anticipated by that market. It’s so exciting that we’ve predicted it may even threaten Apple’s near monopoly iTunes product. We’ll have to wait and see what happens on that front, but Spotify certainly has a lot of people salivating! Other online music services mentioned multiple times in our poll were Blip.fm and last.fm.

7. Dropbox: this was listed as one of ReadWriteWeb’s 5 Favorite Online Storage Services in September last year. At the time it had only just opened to the public, but it has since gained many fans. Its integration with the desktop is perhaps the most exciting feature of this product. Other features we like are the sharing of folders and preservation of every revision of every file.

8. Seesmic: A number of Twitter clients were mentioned, like Hootsuite and TweetDeck. But one which has impressed us a lot in recent months has been Seesmic. In July we reported that Seesmic, previously only a desktop client, had released a web-based version and a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. Our own Frederic Lardinois listed Seesmic Web as one of his 3 most exciting apps.

9. Wolfram|Alpha: Ever since Wolfram|Alpha’s admittedly much hyped launch in May, we’ve been tracking this innovative product closely. It’s a self-described “computational knowledge engine” and while it’s not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses – which makes it an exciting app to follow for us.

10. Pubsubhubbub: With a name harder to say that ‘ReadWriteWeb,’ this new Google Code project has excited the web development community. It’s not a product, but a protocol. The project page describes it as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS)." In laymans terms, it delivers your RSS feeds to you much quicker – in near real time.

To understand the context of Pubsubhubbub and similar exciting initiatives more, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s fine analysis of Distributed Social Networking.

There you have it, the top 10 most exciting web apps and services according to the ReadWriteWeb community! Let us know your further thoughts in the comments.

Here is the full list, a snapshot taken when the original post had 66 comments (sans links, but Google – or Bing – any app that catches your eye).

Twitter 25
Gmail 17
Google Reader 11
Google Wave 11
Facebook 6
Blip.fm 4
Dropbox 4
Hootsuite 4
Wolfram Alpha 4
Pubsubhubbub 3
Scribd 3
Seesmic 3
Spotify 3
Wordpress 3
Apture 2
Boxee 2
Delicious 2
Flickr 2
foursquare 2
getsatisfaction 2
Google 2
last.fm 2
PixelPipe 2
Posterous 2
Skype 2
TweetDeck 2
Xmarks 2
Appboy
Bespin
Bit.ly
Bloom
Brightkite
Caspio
chi.mp
Cliqset
Deezer
Digg
Dizzler
Dopplr
Edmodo
Evernote
Feedly
FriendFeed
Gmail chat
GMX Mail
Google Analytics
Google Analytics API
Google APIs
Google Docs
Google insight
Google Maps
Google Notebook
Google Voice
Hype Machine
Instant XRay
Instapaper
iWantMyName
JaJah
JobTitled
Jolicloud
Jott
justbought.it
Know Thy Congressman
kreeo
Lala
Layar
LinkedIn
metafilter
mint
MobileMe
My Name is E
Nanovor
Newsmap.jp
Pachube
Parade
Peoplebrowsr
PocketSmith
Ponoko
PopUrls
Prezi
Primal Fusion
Salesforce
Shapeways
SocialText
SoundCloud
Sweetcron
Tarpipe
TimeXchange.net
Tracer
Tumblr
tweetworks
Twitterfall
urtak
W3C QA Toolbox
XCODE
Youtube

Cat pic: Mr.Thomas

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Collaboration Suite WizeHive Gets Ready to Leave Beta

“It was a nightmare.” That’s how CEO Mike Levinson described trying to organize his work with DreamIt Ventures before he set out to create the collaboration tool WizeHive. To date, WizeHive has stood out from the crowd in two ways: it’s workspaces are more customizable than many collaborative suites, and it connects better to the public Web with Twitter integration and other abilities.

WizeHive’s latest release has a new focus on document collaboration within your workspace. By fleshing out its capabilities and finalizing a pricing plan, the bootstrapped startup is preparing to come out of beta in September — hopefully with a round of funding.

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Better File Management

The biggest news for WizeHive today is its improved file uploading and management system; users can now pull in docs up to 100MB in size. Though that might be significantly smaller than some file sharing systems — Box.net handles 1GB files — the ability to upload 50 at a time is impressive. Previously, only single file uploads were allowed.

Along with the improved uploading, there’s a new file manager and revision system that does a much more robust job of handling large batches of documents. You can view the latest status on a file, copy them and you sort files included in a workspace based on date, username, filename or page.

Almost Ready

In a phone conversation, Levinson said that this is one of the last major releases for WizeHive before it will be set to come out of beta. He also said that the company is currently seeking funding, though he didn’t care to elaborate more than that.

WizeHive is currently free with no limits on users or storage space, but after consulting their current user base they have developed a pricing scheme that will be launched in September.

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