Blogging company Six Apart has acquired micro-blogging startup Pownce for undisclosed financial terms. It looks like one of those acquisitions where the buyer was more interested in the people than the product — the Pownce service will shut down in two weeks. The San Francisco startup was the brainchild of Digg founder Kevin Rose, Leah Culver and Daniel Burka (also a Digg employee). It’s a micro-blogging service kind of like Twitter, but it allowed users to share much more than brief messages, including embeddable photos, videos and mp3s. Despite those advantages, Pownce’s traffic stalled while Twitter’s skyrocketed, according to data...
In a world of knobs, buttons and switches, this gesture-based light switch seems like a major evolution: it can control multiple lights at once, with a flick of the finger shutting them on and off, while a circular motion dims. It doesn't say if an insistent tapping would initiate rave mode, though. Alas, it's only a concept for now, but I suspect we'll see these for real sooner or later. User Interface Concept Light Switch [Pet Invention via DVICE]...
Here arrival time was at 11:30pm. It doesn't matter the age, color of her skin, her name, or even the fact that she had a gap where front should have been. She might be miss America one day, or she might not. It doesn't matter to this story if she did not have the finest of clothes like any other princess and her hair was not groomed. She didn't have a floral fragrance or designer shoes on her feet. None of those things mattered but what does matter is at the moment she walked into the safety that my...
I want to wish you all a happy thanksgiving and would like you to enter my latest contest, when you have a minute. I’m still giving away a few more free books! Other than that, I have a few announcements from my friends and a few new books that I just finished reading. Friend announcements Jim Kukral is one of the top internet marketers around, as well as someone who constantly provides value through video and his blog. His latest creation is called TheBizWebCoach.com, which helps small businesses solve their biggest problem, time. Small business owners do everything from taking...
Every once in while, some new gadget comes out that revolutionizes a common ordinary item. Today, the item in question is the light switch. You wouldn’t think the light switch needed any update of any kind, as it is a simple on-off mechanism designed for one purpose. The only update I have ever seen for this normal household item is the dial that dims the lights. This one concept gadget could easily be the future of light switches. It uses a touch-sensitive plate like the type found on most laptops. This square pad allows control of not just one, but...
Here he goes again! Standing in front of thousands of applauding soldiers at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, President Bush staunchly defended the US-led invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "The consequences of success in Iraq will resonate far beyond that country's borders... will resonate when your children and grandchildren begin to study the history of peace," he said. "Success will frustrate Iran's ambitions to dominate the region. Success will show millions across the Middle East that a future of liberty and democracy is possible." The president must have missed the sight of tens of thousands of Iraqis...
The hardware in Mac Funamizu's gesture-controlled light switch would be very, very simple—after all, it's just a trackpad. But it's the input methods that make this exciting: just as laptop trackpads can track gestures for scrolling, this light switch would parse them to control up a roomful of lights, either together or in unison. The lights are mapped onto the pad as they are positioned in the room, and a simple sliding motion toward or away from a specific light would brighten or dim it individually. For maximum light-dimming suavity, the circular gesture function takes control of every bulb at...
I've always enjoyed how the web gets into the holiday spirit. Google has been celebrating holidays by changing its logo to a holiday theme since 1999. And a quick look around the social web last Halloween and there were so many companies putting Halloween costumes on their logos, that there was even a contest for the best ones! And celebrating holidays (or planning for a holiday) on Twitter is also becoming a tradition but these are community-driven efforts and some have been connected with raising money for good causes. The first example and a brilliant one was "Trick...
Want to customize those gestures on your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro? Well, now you can do just that with an application called MultiClutch. MultiClutch allows you to assign keyboard gestures associated to a specific program to a gesture on the touchpad. MultiClutch works by installing a simple input manager that will catch a gesture events, looks to see what shortcut you’ve defined for it in the frontmost app (if you haven’t defined anything, it behaves in the standard manner), and performs that shortcut. Sounds kind of cool and it adds another level of ‘touch’ to the Mac platform. ...
If you're in a pinch for a last-minute gift this holiday season, chocolate covered strawberries are a ridiculous simple and well received gesture. At the DIY blog Instructables there is a step by step guide on making them with an extra section on really pulling out the stops for presentation points: it's all about the white chocolate drizzles! The accolades a well presented platter or box of chocolate covered strawberries receives is greatly disproportionate to the actual effort involved in crafting them. Barring those gift recipients with food allergies, it's tough to go wrong. Check out last minute gift ideas...
Usually when we're talking about Nokia and patents, a mention of Qualcomm can't be far behind. This time however, we're looking at something entirely less boring, fascinating even: ultra-sound sensors that detect hand gestures in the air in front of the device. Now the stretch. Nokia's chief designer, Alastair Curtis, was asked at a recent cocktail party why Nokia's N-series of multimedia devices have yet to see a multi-touch interface, Curtis replied, "We've not launched what we think is right for N-series in a touch product. You'll see in the coming months, years... what we feel is right." Curtis then...
While the solar panel in this photo is pretty much a token renewable energy gesture, Wal-Mart’s wind power commitment is significantly more substantial. Photo: Wal-Mart Stores Say what you like about Wal-Mart (and I certainly have said some less than flattering things), but sometimes the world’s largest retailer does something undeniably positive: Like make its first major purchase of wind power in the United States. Announced yesterday, Wal-Mart Stores will be supplying 15% of the electricity in approximately 360 Texas stores and other facilities though wind power, purchased from Duke Energy. Wal-Mart says that the pu......
