Been on pins and needles since Google unveiled its long awaited Music Beta service at I/O? Good news: it seems that the non-Xoom owners among us are finally getting a crack at the thing. We’ve received reports from numerous tipsters that El Goog has finally started delivering invites to those who signed up through the site, letting even more users upload 20,000 of their favorite jams to its cloud-based storage locker. If you’re one of the lucky ones, please sound off in the comments below — and if not, be sure to read our hands-on review of the service while you wait.
A promotional video of Apple CEO Steve Jobs introducing the first Apple retail store back in 2001 shows how much has changed, and how much is still the same.
GigaOM got to peek inside AT&T’s Foundry innovation center in Texas this week, and the tour came with a special treat — a first glimpse at how AT&T’s upcoming LTE network might perform when the carrier flips the switch later this year. Where Verizon’s existing network promises download speeds of between 5 and 12 megabits per second (though we’ve gotten far better and worse in practice), the publication witnessed a connection with 28.87Mbps download and 10.4Mbps upload speeds, using a MIMO antenna passing bits through both 700MHz and AWS frequencies. “But,” you protest, “isn’t LTE capable of more?” Sure, but an AT&T executive told the publication that these were meant to be real-world numbers. Still, considering all the factors and where the test was held, it’s probably best to break out the table salt for now.
This article was written on May 30, 2008 by CyberNet.
Windows only Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta has been in production for months, and yesterday it received and update that provides even more improvements and features. One of the things that really caught my attention in their demonstration video was the Flickr and YouTube integration, which automatically converts hyperlinks into embedded media. That way you can share and watch YouTube videos without ever leaving the chat window.
There are a significant number of other features that they include in this release as well. You can, for example, import contacts from other services such as Gmail and AOL, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to chat with your friends on all of those other networks. Here’s a more detailed list of features provided by the Yahoo Messenger blog:
Games are back! – Checkers, pool, toki toki boom…you know the rest. Note that your friend needs to be on 8.1 or this latest release of 9.0 Beta to play games with you.
Status message improvements – The status message menu has been split into two parts – one where you can indicate your availability (busy, available) and the other for putting in a custom message or a link you want to share.
Yahoo! Updates – Yahoo! Messenger is one of the first products to showcase what your friends are doing on Yahoo!. When a friend buzzes a favorite news story or changes their Avatar, a Yahoo! Update is displayed next to that friend in your contact list (with more detail in their contact card).
Import Contacts – Select “Import Contacts” from the Contacts menu and you can add friends from address books you have on other sites like Gmail, Orkut, Yahoo! Address Book, Hotmail, AOL and many more. We’ll pull in your contacts and make it easy for you to start talking with them on Yahoo! Messenger.
Voice in chat rooms for Vista users & faster Captcha process – We added a fix to this latest version of Yahoo! Messenger 9.0 Beta that allows Windows Vista users on 9.0 to use voice in chat rooms (and conferences).
New IM notification toast – When a new message comes in to the background window, a small notification will pop up from the lower right corner of your screen with the beginning text of the IM your friend just sent.
If you’re still not convinced checkout the video below to see if the new Yahoo Messenger 9 Beta is what you’ve been longing for. Or if you’re using Vista be sure to try their uber sweet Vista Messenger.
We spent some quality time with Google Voice on a Sprint phone, and now we’re ready to talk about it. Here are the highs and lows of Google’s new partnership with Sprint.
It takes a lot to be creepy on Craigslist. To be noticed for being shady on civilization’s greatest repository of perversion and fraud is like being the most naked woman at the strip club. But this, uh “researcher” managed it. More »
Looks like researchers have made another step towards taking Skynet live: giving robots the groundwork for gloating. A Swiss team of misguided geniuses have developed learning algorithms that allow robot-kind to learn from human mistakes. Earthlings guide the robot through a flawed attempt at completing a task, such as catapulting a ball into a paper basket; the machine then extrapolates its goal, what went wrong in the human-guided example, and how to succeed, via trial and error. Rather than presuming human demonstrations represent a job well done, this new algorithm assumes all human examples are failures, ultimately using their bad examples to help the ‘bot one-up its creators. Thankfully, the new algorithm is only being used with a single hyper-learning appendage; heaven forbid it should ever learn how to use the robot-internet.
Could Apple’s forthcoming cloud-based music service have a leg up in speed compared to its competitors? It might if a recently published patent application from the company actually pans out. It suggests that just a snippet of the beginning of a song (or movie, for that matter) could be stored locally on a device, and then be synced to the complete version in the cloud, which would let you begin playback “immediately” rather than having to wait for the usual buffering to take place. The patent application also explains that the streaming playback could be adjusted based on the type of communications network, and that there would naturally be various means to authenticate your device and ensure that you actually own the music you’re streaming. Of course, there’s no guarantee that such a system will indeed be a part of Apple’s seemingly imminent streaming service, but the patent application was filed way back in November of 2009, which certainly means it’s had plenty of time to implement it if it chose to.
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Windows only
