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Posts Tagged ‘Confidence’

Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus first hands-on!

We just had a chance to play around with the new Palm Pre Plus (and Palm Pixi Plus), and we must say — they’ve made some solid improvements to these devices. We’re going to focus on the Pre, since it’s really had the bulk of the changes. Firstly, it’s now a Verizon branded (and bound) phone, which should bump the status of the device in many people’s minds. The company has also improved the action of the slider mechanism, which is now way, way snappier, and clicks into and out of place with a confidence-stoking solidness. Palm has also changed the keyboard a bit, getting rid of the orange coloring, and revamping the action of the keys, making them far clickier (and maybe a bit more raised). The feel is closer to the Pixi, and that’s a really good thing. Of course, they’ve added an additional 8GB of storage, making the internal capacity 16GB, and Palm is going full steam ahead with gaming on the device thanks to its PDK. Check the video (which will be up soon) and gallery below for the full story.

Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus first hands-on! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars

Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars.

The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition.

Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.

So what made the deal go sideways? We’re working on that. From the information we’ve gathered, there is currently no other suitor seriously looking at the company. For now Yelp intends to stay independent. We’re betting that someone – Apple, Microsoft, etc. – came to Yelp with an offer for a strategic deal gave Stoppleman the confidence to say no to Google. But who that partner is and what they offered isn’t something we’ve been able to track down.

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Palm Pixi clears FCC with Verizon frequencies and WiFi in tow

If you were looking for just one more reason to ditch Sprint then this could be it. A CDMA-flavored Palm Pixi just cleared the FCC — yes, another one — and we can say with confidence it’s not coming to Sprint this time around. Better yet, Palm’s model P121EWW matches up with that P121 code we saw leaked a while back for Big Red (Sprint’s model is P120EWW), and this sucker got tested for 802.11b/g WiFi. Looks like that Sprint ad touting the Pixi’s non-existent WiFi was more than just wishful thinking. With webOS-powered Palm gear already confirmed on Verizon for “early next year,” are you really going to make the jump to a WiFi-less Pixi on Sprint knowing what’s on the way? And more importantly, can we expect another terrifying series of ads targeting Sprint this time instead of AT&T?

Palm Pixi clears FCC with Verizon frequencies and WiFi in tow originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back To Mono: It’s Time To Splice The Streams
I went to a birthday party this weekend where I ran into a Facebook guy, a smart guy who asked me to go off the record. In fact, the whole party was supposed to be off the record. So I ignored the off the record part by insisting that I already knew the thing I was being told, and then I told him on the record what I thought was about to happen for Facebook. This being my usual m.o. which is to insist on not being NDAed except for things I don’t really want to talk about anyway, like the next version of Office.

That way, I can just make up what I want to have happen, never breaking any confidence and yet at the same time painting as plausible picture of assumed reality that it is hard to deny or in fact slow down. So here’s what I told the Facebook guy: the company has at most 3 months window to absorb FriendFeed and open the Everyone News Feed, and if that’s true (again, making all this up) then the messaging about how that’s going to work must begin immediately, like in two weeks. Then I went home and saw MG Siegler’s post and Scoble’s remake of Frenzy on FriendFeed.

OK, so I was off by two weeks. The noise about the death of FriendFeed is already off the charts, and the proof is in the lack of rejoinder from the FriendFeed team. As in: of course FriendFeed is not dead, and here’s what we’re going to do to remake Facebook in the next few weeks. Actually, that is indeed the message from Twitter, what with Lists and ReTweets and the return of Track just as soon as, well, sometime next year or so. No need for FriendFeed real soon now, because these Lists will soon be carved up and meshed together into an authority stream by the 3rd party developers.

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Weird Science says think green, but don’t go green (or slouch)

Green products as the new Diet Coke: How humans respond to making choices perceived as ethical or good has been one of the rather unfortunate discoveries in the psychological sciences. If people are reminded of positive choices—shown a diet menu or something similar—they’ll tend to behave better. Once they actually make a positive choice, like ordering a diet Coke, they feel like they’ve done their bit and are licensed for poor behavior. Hence the supersized fries that often accompany the diet soda. Well, apparently, green products have arrived, or at least reached Diet Coke status. “People act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products,” write the authors of a study that will appear in Psychological Science. “However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products.”

Sit up straight when you write that!: A bit more weird psychology. Apparently, slouching will make you less likely to believe positive statements about yourself. On the plus side, it makes you less likely to believe negative ones, too. Researchers instructed subjects to sit up straight or slouch as they listed positive or negative qualities about themselves. A short while later, a test suggested that the subjects felt more confidence in what they wrote, both positive and negative, if they had been sitting up straight.

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Cartoon: For a Massive Fee, I’ll Show You How to Do It Right

I’m not sure what it is about social media. Here we are in this field that’s still emerging/exploding (or “explerging”, to use the trademarked term from my upcoming book, premium podcast, and $4,000-a-seat webinar) and constantly morphing. Yet there seems to be this powerful drive to lay down absolute laws about what works and what doesn’t.

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Blogging? You should be posting twice a day. No, actually that’s too often; it abuses people’s attention. Wait, actually that’s not often enough; other people will eat your lunch. Actually, blogging’s dead, so move to Twitter, where you absolutely must follow everyone who follows you, unless you absolutely mustn’t, so don’t, unless you do. And when they do follow you, sending them an automatic direct message will either lift you into the Twitter elite or damn you to eternal ridicule. Possibly both.

I’ve fallen prey to this temptation myself, so I say all of this with a certain amount of chagrin. But I hope I’m on the road to reform: embracing my uncertainty, and vacillating with confidence.

(By the way, the title of Chris Brogan’s smashing blog post inspired the Neanderthal’s line in this cartoon.)

More Noise to Signal.

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The rock of redundancy: Ars reviews Guitar Hero 5

The first Guitar Hero title was released in November of 2005—that’s almost four years of Guitar Hero. We’re on the fifth sequel, if you count World Tour as the fourth title, which Activision apparently does. This may be called Guitar Hero, but you can use your microphone, and you can hook up your drum set. This is more World Tour 2 than it is Guitar Hero 5, but admitting that might mean that Band Hero would seem even more redundant when it comes out.

And of course, we’re not even counting the Nintendo DS titles, nor the band-specific releases like the bargain bin-tastic Guitar Hero: Aerosmith and the completely metal Guitar Hero: Metallica. The quality may be all over the place, but the strategy is clear: this series is going to be slammed down your throat until you choke. Besides, if you buy this, you’ll get Guitar Hero: Van Halen for free! If that doesn’t show you the kind of confidence everyone has in both of these releases, I don’t know what will.

The music blares, the notes come down, you play plastic instruments. Rhythm games are now a known quantity, and the novelty has certainly worn off. Is there enough of a jump here to justify the price of a new game, or are you better off buying more tracks for the Guitar Hero or Rock Band you already own? Let’s find out.

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IT admins: users’ online antics greatest threat to security

Hackers don’t have to work very hard to steal information from people and organizations—people are pretty willing to give it away. Social networks and other Web 2.0 sites are making it ever easier for Internet users to accidentally share too much information or become victim to phishing scams, leading to security research firm Sophos to warn IT admins on how to handle employee use of these services.

A majority of sysadmins—63 percent—told Sophos that they worry about employees sharing too much information on social networking sites. This could potentially put the corporate infrastructure at risk, especially if they reveal too much about the company, not to mention details about their personal identities. According to Sophos’ research, this worry is justified—33.4 percent of business users have been spammed on a social networking site and 21 percent have been phished there. (23.6 percent and 27.9 percent, respectively, said that they had no idea either way. That should really inspire some confidence.)

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