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Posts Tagged ‘Outset’

Mediagazer: Techmeme Launches Memetracker for Media News

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera just launched Mediagazer, a new memetracker for topics related to media news. This new site will be based on the same technology as Techmeme, memeorandum, the gossip site WeSmich and the baseball memetracker Ballbug. The content on Mediagazer will be edited by Megan McCarthy.

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As McCarthy notes in her announcement, “media business is in tumult” and this is a news vertical that lends itself to memetracking. Not only are there lots of interesting news stories from a large variety of sources, but these sources all tend to link to each other a lot, which makes it easier for the algorithm to find related stories.

Mediagazer is the first new service that Rivera’s team has launched in four years. As both Rivera and McCarthy note, the team has spent the last four years learning about what works (and what doesn’t). Based on this experience, the team has “outfitted the site with the latest iteration of our automation engine, and have launched it from the outset with a dedicated human editor.”

It will be interesting to see how Rivera’s team will manage the overlap between the tech news and media news sites. Currently, for example, this VentureBeat story – which is about both the tech and the media business – is featured on both sites.

Unlike Techmeme, Mediagazer doesn’t feature a leaderboard, but there are mobile sites for smartphones and feature phones.

Judging from what we have seen so far, Mediagazer will surely become another must-read site for anybody interested in the media business, be it blogging, e-book or the state of the newspaper industry.

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DoD eases ban on thumb drive use for US military, our enemies rejoice

Betcha didn’t know that USB flash drives weren’t allowed in the US military. Or maybe you did — you know, considering that one with Japan-US troop deployment maps went missing in mid-2008. Oops. At any rate, the Department of Defense has reportedly lifted said ban, but as with anything related to The Man, gobs of red tape will be involved. For starters, they won’t be reintroduced “wholesale,” instead being reserved for “mission essential applications.” We’re also told that the drives themselves must contain specific security features, and administrators will be able to track the use of ‘em from the outset. For those unaware, the ban was originally put into place just over a year ago after virus-laden USB keys disrupted military networks, presumably flashing Blingee’d faces of Kim Jong-il onto CIA surveillance screens. Or not, but that’d be pretty hilarious.

DoD eases ban on thumb drive use for US military, our enemies rejoice originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New Twitter AR App Powered by Geotagging API

Some six months ago, we had a small conniption over an augmented reality application for Twitter on the iPhone.

With the release of Twitter’s geotagging API, however, users were bound to see more and better AR apps for the popular microblogging service. Twitter 360 has just come up on our radar, and it looks like a dream from the outset. But will its features live up to user expectations?

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Back in the day, we wrote of TwittARound, “You can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are. To accomplish this, TwittARound uses a combination of the iPhone’s compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS to determine the location of tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed.”

Sadly, Apple wouldn’t allow the app in the App Store and would only work on a jailbroken 3GS.

How, then, does this new hotness compare?

First, it’s not a full-featured Twitter client. The team plans to add more features as time goes by, but with so little time between the official geotagging API’s announcement and this application’s debut, we’re clearly looking at a case of “launch early, launch often.”

On startup, the app updates a user’s location automatically, and it also allows for an “invisible mode” during which the user isn’t discoverable through digital means.

For users who have enabled the geotagging feature in Twitter, the app annotates tweets with location information. That users’ friends can then see, via augmented reality, the location from where that user’s last tweet was posted.

The Latest Tweets mode shows the latest tweets of followed users and the location from where they were posted. When a tweet is selected, the users sees a blue arrow indicating the direction and distance to the location from where the tweet was posted.

In Locate my Friends mode users can find their friends, again with a blue arrow showing the distance and direction to a friend’s location.

Moreover, Twitter 360 plays nicely with Google Maps:

Currently, the app is available on 3GS devices only. And yes: It’s made it to the App Store.

Check out this nifty demo video, and let us know what you think in the comments:

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EA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Large-scale layoffs have been hitting everywhere in the past year, and Electronic Arts is now no different: according to Gamasutra, the game publisher announced today that it will lay off 1,500 workers by April 2010, after posting a year-to-year decrease in revenue and a net loss of $391 million.

About 1,300 of the freshly unemployed individuals will result from the full closure of some of EA’s facilities. This will cost EA money at the outset, but they estimate that by dropping the facilities they stand to save about $100 million annually. According to EA CEO John Riccitello, the cuts are happening in “targeted areas,” so the company can focus up on its bigger, more lucrative games.

EA has kept up well with the iPhone platform and has released some of its most popular titles to the App Store, such as The Sims 3, Rock Band, and Spore. Consumers still pay a premium price for them, however. For example, Rock Band costs $9.99 and comes with only 20 songs, and charges 50 cents for each additional song. Still, Rock Band ended up selling well, so maybe we’ll be seeing more of EA in the App Store in the coming fiscal quarters.

EA also announced today its acquisition of Playfish, whose primary business is Facebook games, for $300 million. Hopefully out of the layoff ashes rises some brutally addictive social-based game for the iPhone.

TUAWEA to lay off 1500 workers, close some facilities originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Five Apps for the cyclist

Filed under: Cool tools, iPhone, App Store, App Review

Apple products and the bike go together well. They seem to appeal to the same sort of folks: evangelistic, committed aficionados willing to pay any premium, to be brutally honest about it. Oh, and let’s not forget, they love to talk at length about these objects of their affection at parties. You know who you are. You’ve got a copy of Colorado Cyclist in your bathroom.

So it seems like getting the iPhone working for you on the bike would be a no-brainer. And it pretty much is. Here are five apps that I’ve found I like, most centered around the fact that the iPhone’s built-in GPS gives cyclists the kind of on-bike information they want, and the après vélo experience they crave until the next fix, I mean “ride.” From the outset, you’ll need a bike mount, if you want to take advantage of these apps’ functions en route. Otherwise, the iPhone slips just fine into a jersey pocket, and will hold a GPS lock even though a ziploc sandwich baggie. Mount-wise, pickings are slim, but there are a few out there that are relatively low-profile. Plus, battery life can be a problem. Most endurance athletes are out there for hours at a time, and GPS tracking can quickly drain an iPhone battery. if you take care to turn off everything non-essential, you may be able to get that whole ride in. Or, you can do what this guy is doing; he’s building an iPhone bike mount with power. Maybe now the iPhone can make its RAAM debut.

On to the apps!

1) Ascent Mobile. I have a warm place in my heart for Montebello Software’s Ascent. If I harken back to the old days, Garmin could barely be bothered to come out with a Mac version of its then-popular TrainingCenter software and had shunted all its Mac users to MotionBased. Ascent came through with elegant desktop software that tapped into the data side of the bike geek. Finally, a place to really churn through the routes and elevation, while watching your heart rate, speed and cadence throughout that quad-shredding ride. You can zoom right into your loop post-ride and slice and dice the data to see any element of it you like. What’s more, Ascent really made it look good. By the time Garmin came out with its watered-down and feature-hobbled Mac version of TrainingCenter I was so over Garmin software. I used it strictly for the route-upload function and kept everything else on Ascent, with an online version stored on MotionBased for route sharing (though I’ve since moved from MotionBased to RunningAhead now that RA has GPS upload.) So I was thrilled to hear that Ascent was coming out with Ascent Mobile, $9.99US.

Ascent Mobile gives you all the relevant data you could want on a ride, plus lots of ways to check out your ride right on the iPhone afterward. Best of all, it naturally syncs with the desktop version of Ascent, sold separately. Can I let go of my trusty Garmin Edge 705? Quite possibly. We’ll see where this little relationship goes. (Oh, and yes, Erica, it gives your max speed.)

2) B.iCycle. Ok, maybe you’re more of a “just the facts, ma’am” kind of rider. We’ve got one for you, too. B.iCycle, $9.99US, is a simple, GPS-based tracker that gives you some easy stats during your ride. It saves your tracks for later viewing on a map, and gives you all of the essential features you might want, without too much feature clutter. It has a nice map view for on-bike routing, and a way to email your route to yourself afterward. Think of it as a very inspired bike computer.

3) Bicycle Gear Calculator. Ok, grease monkeys, this one is for you. It’s obviously not intended for on-bike use, but half the fun of the sport is the tinkering you get to do with your bike while you’re not on it, talking about it at parties, or relentlessly reloading chainlove.com for the next steal. Now you can talk gear ratios with ease. Input chainring size, sprocket size, and crank length and all the relevant math is done for you. Plan ahead for a big hill ride and get your bike properly geared so you look like Laurent, Stefano, or Marco (may he rest in peace) on those hills. $4.99US at the iTunes store.

4) iMapMyRide. iMapMyRide is another GPS tracker, but is borne out of the website mapmyride.com, which is the sister site to mapmyrun.com, a favorite of mine, pre-Garmin Forerunner. The nice thing about this app — other than the fact that it’s free — is that it is built to work well with the website, which is a great place to discover new routes and make connections with other like-sported people. I can’t say the app itself is revolutionary in any way, but if you’re already multi-sport and have been taking advantage of the MapMyFitness community-based functions, iMapMyRide may be a useful way to go for you.

5) TrailGuru. I didn’t want to leave the mountain bikers completely out of the loop, so here’s something for you singletrackers. I’m not entirely sure how this differs from some of the other GPS-based tracking software, but the community associated with it seems to be more interested in off-road use, so you may find that you discover new and interesting ways to tear up the trails near you. It seems to be a fave around TUAW, so I’d be remiss not to mention it. If you have experience with this app, let us know in the comments.

I’m still working on integrating the iPhone into my fitness endeavors. I admit I love my Garmins (yes, I have both the Edge and the Forerunner.) And I can’t imagine I’d be brave enough to do with my iPhone what I did with my Forerunner 305: put it under my swim cap at the start of a triathlon. But you never know. If you ever see a fellow race participant with what seems to be a very oddly-shaped head under that swim cap, come and introduce yourself to me.

TUAWFive Apps for the cyclist originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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