Filed under: Internet

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0, Web

Back from the dead? Yahoo Upcoming gets some surprise feature love

by Nik Fletcher Nov 22nd 2009

It's been a number of months (if not longer) since Yahoo showed any love to its Upcoming events service. Since acquiring the service in October 2005, the service has seen just one re-design - and few additional features since. However, in a largely-uncovered announcement earlier in the week, Upcoming now offers a new Jumpstart feature that scans your Pandora, last.fm and iTunes libraries and then follows your favourite artists on the service - alerting you to forthcoming gigs listed on Upcoming.

Whilst other services, including last.fm, allow you to easily view your favourite artists, it's an interesting addition to the Upcoming service - and hopefully means that Yahoo are now looking at ways to build on a largely unloved product.

Tags: events, last.fm, upcoming, yahoo

Filed under: Internet, OS Updates, Google, Open Source

Google's Chrome and Android operating systems will converge sooner rather than later

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 21st 2009

Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, spoke to some reporters yesterday, after the Chrome OS presentation. Citing the common WebKit and Linux code found in both operating systems, he said "Android and Chrome are likely to converge over time."

"We're reaching a perfect storm of converging trends where computers are behaving more like mobile devices, and phones are behaving more like small computers," Google said in a statement responding to questions on if and when the two operating systems would converge.

Sergey's frankness on the matter is a little odd and must be part of a very recent internal about-face, considering Google CEO Eric Schmidt said only a few days ago that there was space for both operating systems and no need for conflict between them.

It would make sense though. Mobile devices are becoming more PC-like. PCs are certainly becoming more mobile (excluding the brick-like gaming laptops of course). With mobile data packages from AT&T, Verizon and other international providers regularly dropping in price, Chrome OS and its fast, easy access to everything in the cloud would make for one, sad, lonely Android.

[via CNET]

Tags: android, chrome OS, ChromeOs, cloud, mobile

Filed under: Internet, Video, Google, Web

Google introduces machine-generated captions for YouTube videos

by Brad Linder Nov 19th 2009

Google has given users the ability to caption their YouTube videos for a while now. But that can be a cumbersome, time-intensive process and most of the millions of videos hosted on YouTube are uncaptioned. That could change soon, as Google is beginning to roll out a new automatic captioning system that will analyze speech in videos and create machine-generated captions.

This means that users who are hard of hearing will have an easier time using YouTube. And because Google can translate text into 51 different languages, it means that you'll have a much easier time understanding those German and Japanese videos you're so fond of watching.

The technology for the machine-based captions is the same as the tech that allows Google Voice to automatically transcribe your voicemail messages and send them to you as emails. That is to say, it's not perfect, and we can expect to see a fair number of mistakes in YouTube captions for the foreseeable future. But this is an excellent start at making web video significantly more accessible.

Automatic captions are only available on a handful of YouTube channels right now, including Google, YouTube, PBS, National Geographic, MIT, and UCLA. A wider release is scheduled soon, with auto-caps expected on English videos by the end of the week.

Tags: automatic captions, AutomaticCaptions, captions, online video, OnlineVideo, youtube

Filed under: Internet, Video, Google

YouTube 1080p roll-out begins

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 19th 2009

We've just been tipped off that 1080p or 'the highest-quality HDTV standard' has begun to appear on YouTube.

So far there doesn't seem to be a way to search for the high-high definition videos, and the only example I have is a Nokia video of some poor, disadvantaged Indonesian farmer -- but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before YouTube/Google officially announce the changes to their video player.

In the meantime, if you find any videos that have been enabled for 1080p playback, share them in the comments!

The Nokia video is included after the break, if you want to see what the quality looks like.

[thanks to Revo for the tip!]

Tags: 1080p, hdtv, youtube

Filed under: Internet

Beginning of the end for the Internet in the UK

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 19th 2009

Often lauded as the 'CCTV state' and 'the most surveilled country in the world', the UK may soon deliver a killing blow to the Internet as we know it. Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing is reporting some leaked legislation from the UK government that would remove any kind of freedom or privacy that the Internet grants its users.

The proposed amendments to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act would allow the Secretary of State (or 'Pirate-Finder General') to alter the law on an ad-hoc basis without approval by Parliament (the UK's Senate).

Cory goes on to site the potential repercussions of these proposed changes:

1. Immediate remedies for copyright infringement -- jail sentences and removal of Internet access can be meted out purely at the discretion of an unelected official (that is most likely under the sway and pay of media lobby groups).

2. The raising of pirate-hunting militia -- the Secretary of State could "confer rights" to music labels and movie studios to help them protect their works. It would be within the rights of the copyright owners to compel ISPs, schools and businesses to hand over details of those using their network for 'nefarious' purposes.

3. Pirate-hunting duties could be forced upon ISPs -- not merely content with perusing ISP records, the Secretary of State could force ISPs to act as gatekeepers. You can imagine how it might impact your surfing experience if a copyright lawyer is forced to peruse each and every one of your emails to check for plagiarism...

Cory goes on to cite other implications, but you should probably just go and read the article itself. And as he says, if you're a Brit, or even if you know a Brit -- this is serious news. You can't really expect something like this to make it through government... but really... who knows?

[via Boing Boing]

Tags: copyright, digital rights, DigitalRights, freedom, police state, PoliceState, privacy, UK

Filed under: Internet, Search

Good for only a week: $10 cashback with Bing!

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 19th 2009

You need a PayPal account, and you have to spend $25, but good until November 25th 2009 you can claim $10 cashback thanks to BING!

The list of participating stores is huge -- Ebay, BestBuy, Barnes & Noble amongst others -- so it shouldn't be a problem finding something to spend $25 on, especially with the holiday season now upon us!

The only 'tricky' thing is you need a Microsoft Live and PayPal account. But most people have one or both of things already, right?

The offer's landing page suggests it's only available to those that received the offer in their email -- but it worked for me, and I didn't receive an email! it could be 'fixed' at any time, so you probably want to go and claim your cashback ASAP.

How much money is Microsoft going to throw around to steal a portion of the lucrative search industry? Perhaps more importantly, as Google and Yahoo fight to keep their large stakes, we users must be ready to mop up the incentives and special offers!

[Thanks to Paul for the tip!]

Tags: bing, cashback, hgg, special offer, SpecialOffer

Filed under: Internet, Humor

The power of popular culture: 'unfriend' officially enters the American language

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 19th 2009

Did you even know that there was a New Oxford American Dictionary? I didn't. But with their recent addition of 'unfriend' to the American language, that might soon change. Maybe this was their way of leaving the realm of obscurity... and into hilarity!

"It has both currency and potential longevity," says Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program. She goes on to add that it has real 'lex-appeal'. Quite. I get the nagging feeling that the senior lexicographer for the NOAD might be short and blonde and very American. Here in England, new words don't enter the language without ratification by a round-table of 12 bearded and wizened lexicographic geriatrics.

There's quite a long list of runners-up. Amongst others: hashtag (always thought this was a bit ambiguous... but perhaps that's my drug-dealing background...), sexting (don't make me explain this one), zombie bank (sadly not a L4D reference), deleb (a dead celebrity apparently). A complete list is available on the Oxford University Press blog, if you want a bit of a giggle.

I wonder why they opted for 'unfriend' rather than 'defriend'. Or maybe defriend is British-English, and unfriend is 'Merkin-English...

What other words do you think we can expect to see in the New Oxford American Dictionary in the coming years? Retweet? Bloggable? ('Weblog' is already in the NOAD!)

Tags: dictionary, facebook, social networking, SocialNetworking, words

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Microsoft

Look out! Outlook wants to become your new social media and collaboration hub

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 18th 2009

It's been a long time coming, and perhaps a little too late, but you can now track your friends' and colleagues' social networking activity in Outlook 2010. Dubbed the 'Outlook Social Connector' (OSC), the functionality is available right now to all Office 2010 Beta testers.

The list of much-needed features that OSC brings to Outlook is long and juicy. 'Activity Feeds' is the new social media technology, collating the activities of your contacts into your Outlook screen. LinkedIn support is included in the current beta version, but there's no mention of anything like Twitter or Facebook support yet.

There's also neat functionality to show you all of the attachments sent between you and another contact, a communication history that shows you your recent emails with that contact, Next year, there will be added connectivity with Windows Live Messenger! There are numerous mentions of 'extensibility' and an easy-to-use developer kit, however, so I'm sure lots of other add-ons will emerge in due course.

For enterprise users there's even a SharePoint 2010 interface! Actually, does anyone really use Outlook outside the enterprise environment? Do social media 'gurus' use Outlook?

There's a little introductory video after the break, from the Outlook Team Blog!

Tags: collaboration, connectivity, outlook

Filed under: Internet, Video, Web

Hulu gets into the music video biz -- one artist at a time

by Brad Linder Nov 18th 2009

While YouTube, MTV, Vevo, MySpace, and other online video sites compete for the title of "Hulu for music videos," it looks like Hulu is hoping to get in on the action itself. Hulu has made a name for itself as a destination site for professionally produced TV shows and movies. Sure, it's only available in the US, and it doesn't have nearly as many TV episodes or movies as you can find from your friendly neighborhod BitTorrent tracker. But Hulu is 100% legal, the ads aren't that annoying, and the video quality is pretty good.

Today Hulu is announcing a deal with music label EMI. No, you won't find music videos from all of EMI's artists. Just one: Norah Jones. There's a new Norah Jones channel on Hulu with a few dozen videos including music videos and concert clips.

While this could certainly be the start of something big, right now it's pretty small. As much as I'd like to see Hulu become a one-stop shop for all-things web video, it seems like Vevo is much further along in working out partnerships to actually supply a fair amount of content. Now if only the site would go live.

Update: The folks at Vevo just annoucned that the service is set to launch on December 8th.

[via NY Times]

Tags: hulu, music-video, music-videos, online-video, vevo, youtube

Filed under: Internet, Microsoft, Browsers

IE9 unveiled. Faster, more standards-compliant -- DirectX accelerated!

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 18th 2009

It's only three weeks into its development, but Internet Explorer 9 has officially been unveiled today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). In fact, as I write this now, they're still talking about IE9 and other tech advances over on the Microsoft PDC09 website.

Their goals with IE9 seem pretty obvious from the graphs shown in their presentation: faster, more standards-compliant website rendering. If you look at the slide above, lower is faster. And that's just three weeks into their development of a new browser and web rendering engine!

They're also including 'hardware accelerated' rendering using your graphics card using the DirectX D2D technology. Whether you're trying to perform funky stuff with CSS3, Javascript or DHTML, IE9 should render things a lot faster.

There's a big video (that requires Silverlight!) after the break. It explains and impressively-demonstrates the new DirectX D2D speed-up.

[via GeekSmack]

Tags: browser, directx, ie9, internet explorer, InternetExplorer

Filed under: Internet, Windows Mobile, Mobile Minute, Browsers

Opera 10 Beta for Windows Mobile released

by Paul O'Brien Nov 18th 2009

Over the past few years, Opera Mobile has become the browser of choice for the majority of Windows Mobile users. Shipped as the default browser on many devices and available as download for others, Opera Mobile addresses the many failings of the preinstalled IE browser with better performance, variable zoom and text reflowing as well as a polished and intuitive UI.

Pushing the mobile browser closer to a desktop grade experience is the promise of Opera's latest release, Opera 10 Beta for Windows Mobile.

The Opera Mobile 10 Beta overhauls the look and feel of it's predecessors and is similar in design to the Opera 10 desktop browser as well as the Java based Opera Mini 5 beta. The UI overhaul brings Opera's offering across all of it's platforms in line, as well as providing a great range of features from the desktop platform including Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, a password manager and Opera's server side compression technology, 'Opera Turbo'.

I've had a try of the new browser and it does indeed feel more consistent in style with Opera's Java based offering, no bad thing as Opera Mini has always made excellent use of the available screen real estate. Performance seems great and the UI seems intuitive. Some features found in previous releases don't seem to have made it into version 10 yet - we spotted a lack of device rotate support and no support for multitouch zoom on the HTC HD2, but Opera does look set to maintain it's class leading position on the Windows Mobile platform.

The Opera Mobile 10 Beta is available for free download now from the Opera website.

Tags: Browser, Opera, Opera Mobile, OperaMobile, Windows Mobile, WindowsMobile

Filed under: Internet, P2P

Ding dong the torrent's dead -- Pirate Bay's tracker closes down

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 17th 2009

In rather shocking news this morning, The Pirate Bay (TPB) has shut down its torrent tracker. The search engine remains, but instead of dishing up torrents it will instead serve as a magnet-link repository.

TPB cites that the concept of the BitTorrent tracker is dead. "There is no need to run a tracker any more" says their blog. Long-live DHT and PEX -- dynamic, decentralized torrenting technologies!

What this actually means for you and I -- the implications -- is that you need to make sure you have an updated torrent client, like uTorrent or Azureus. Something that supports DHT and PEX. Most of you will already have these technologies enabled by default -- you just don't know about them. In fact, even with this rather dramatic announcement, you probably won't realise any difference in your download speeds.

Piracy will continue as normal, don't worry.

It's simply the end of an era. Perhaps more interestingly, TPB have been talking to other tracker owners and torrent-download sites. They're pushing for everyone to move away from trackers and towards decentralization.

Whether this is simply a 'viva la piracy!' move, or a more sinister strategy by their new owners remains to be seen.

[via TorrentFreak]

Tags: piracy, the pirate bay, ThePirateBay, torrent, tpb, tracker

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Photo, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Wally is a kick-ass, connected wallpaper changer for Windows, Mac, and Linux

by Lee Mathews Nov 13th 2009

There are plenty of wallpaper-changing applications out there, and plenty of them can tap into photo sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket for access to a plethora of images. Still, not many of them are quite as well-connected as Wally.

Even fewer are cross-platform. Wally, though, is happy to share its background-rotating skills with Windows, Mac, and Linux users alike. It's built using Nokia's Qt4 framework and supports an insane number of image sources: local and remote folders (via FTP), and popular photo sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, Panoramio, Pikeo, Ipernity, Photobucket, Buzznet, Picasa, Smugmug, and Bing. You can use any combination of sources you choose by adding and removing them on the settings screen.

Customization options are plentiful, from specifying the delay between image changes to tweaking the size of your local image history store. Images from the 'net are pulled in based on the search terms you specify - and yes, you can shut off Bing's adult filter if you want to.

Wally is free and open source, and pre-compiled downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The project is also mirrorerd over at Sourceforge.

Tags: backgrounds, flickr, wallpaper changer, WallpaperChanger, wally

Filed under: Internet, Google

Google's SPDY protocol will speed up the web - and Chrome OS, too

by Lee Mathews Nov 12th 2009

Over at the Chromium blog, Google has announced a project they've been working on called 'SPeeDY.' It's an updated transport protocol for the web which improves upon HTTP, reducing latency through network-fu like multiplexed streams, request prioritization, and header compression.

"We started working on SPDY while exploring ways to optimize the way browsers and servers communicate," says the official blog post. It continues, "We want to continue building on the web's tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers."

It's not all about altruism, of course. Improvements like those Google is seeking with SPDY, the Go! programming language, and Native Client will all greatly benefit the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. After all, an OS which relies heavily on the cloud for access apps and data will certainly perform better with an improved protocol powering the client and server. It's probably a safe bet that Google would roll SPDY on their own servers early on to give apps like Google Docs and Picasa Web a performance boost on the Google platform.

Whatever the motivation, I'm all for more speed on the web. My ISP is obviously in no hurry to improve things on that front, so if Google can pull off the estimated 55% performance gain then I'm all for it. You go, Google!

Tags: chrome os, ChromeOs, google, http, spdy, speedy

Filed under: Internet, OS Updates

New Go integrates with Chrome and Chrome OS. Native, high-speed add-ons and web apps here we come!

by Sebastian Anthony Nov 12th 2009

You've heard of Chrome. You've heard of Chrome OS. Yesterday I brought you news of Go, Google's new programming language. Now... I bring you news of Native Client -- a tool that lets you run programs inside your web browser: Chrome.

A basic definition of 'Native' would be 'closer to the core of your computer'. Add-ons at the moment are executed at a great distance from your computer's processor. This is for security concerns mostly -- if the code is executed in the browser, it can't get at your core files. You're safe. But it's also slow. That's where Native Client steps in.

Google's Native Client software is special in that it runs at much higher speeds than your usual Firefox or Chrome add-ons. It runs much more like another application on your computer, rather than 'a web app' in the browser. It has security built-in that won't allow developers to program dangerous applications.

But it's not actually new. It's been around for months. What is new is that Go, Google's new language, will integrate fully with Native Client!

This means two very important things: a) web apps will be propelled to a new level of speed and complexity when coded in Go with Native Client and b) you are now looking at how applications in Chrome OS will be developed and run.

When you run programs in Chrome OS they will simply be Native Client web applications. There won't be a difference between Photoshop or Gmail, World of Warcraft or FarmVille -- they'll all be tabs in Chrome.

Everything will be a tab in Chrome.

One Google to rule them all. One browser to find them. One tab to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

[via CNET]

Tags: chrome, chrome os, ChromeOs, go, golang, nacl, native client, NativeClient

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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Filed under: Internet

Back from the dead? Yahoo Upcoming gets some surprise feature love

Google's Chrome and Android operating systems will converge sooner rather than later

Google introduces machine-generated captions for YouTube videos

YouTube 1080p roll-out begins

Beginning of the end for the Internet in the UK

Good for only a week: $10 cashback with Bing!

The power of popular culture: 'unfriend' officially enters the American language

Look out! Outlook wants to become your new social media and collaboration hub

Hulu gets into the music video biz -- one artist at a time

IE9 unveiled. Faster, more standards-compliant -- DirectX accelerated!

Opera 10 Beta for Windows Mobile released

Ding dong the torrent's dead -- Pirate Bay's tracker closes down

Wally is a kick-ass, connected wallpaper changer for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Google's SPDY protocol will speed up the web - and Chrome OS, too

New Go integrates with Chrome and Chrome OS. Native, high-speed add-ons and web apps here we come!

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