King Jim hits back with their new folding digital memo, the Pomera DM25. This travel-friendly device is equipped with a 5.0-inch 640 x 480 TFT monochrome LCD screen, a 105MB of internal memory, an SD/SDHC card slot, a mini USB port and is powered by 2x AAA batteries. The Pomera DM25 will be available from March 8th for 29,400 Yen (about $317). [Product Page]
If you have 20 minutes, you should watch Valibation. It’s a short film directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson (he’s done a Harold and Kumar movie but this is nothing like that) that shows how being addicted to your phone can turn into a disease where the phone actually becomes a part of you. It’s dark, it’s weird and it’s revealing—would we want our phones to be a part of us? That’s not an automatic no, right? More »
Earlier today, Pandora announced that it will be instituting a limit on the hours of free streaming mobile users can utilize. This move comes from increasing royalty costs, with the service trying to strike a balance between meeting extra costs and allowing users to have free access to streaming music. This change won’t affect many users, according to Pandora.
According to Pandora, limiting the hours of free streaming music is not something the service wants to do, with it being “contrary to our [Pandora’s] mission.” It has to do this, however, due to an over 25-percent increase in royalties since 2010, which the service has to pay for per track played. Among this price increase is a fairly large rate increase of 9-percent in 2013, with another jump of 16-percent expected by 2015.
This change will not affect the majority of mobile users, however, with Pandora reporting that those who listen to more than 40 hours of free music per month represents under 4-percent of its active listeners. To put 40 hours in perspective, with an average song time of 4 minutes per song, users will be able to stream 600 songs for free before having to pay, and the monthly rate is more than reasonable at just $0.99.
For those who don’t want to put up with the hassle of paying $0.99 after hitting their free listening limit, a Pandora One subscription is also available, which will also get rid of the advertisements. Under the $0.99 option, users will still have to listen to ads. The change goes into effect this week, and users will be alerted when they near their free listening cap.
[via Pandora]
Pandora limits mobile users to 40 hours of free streaming per month is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Facebook is apparently marking down gifts from its marketplace in order to get more people to use it. Not only that, but you’ll also be given the option to “give a gift” whenever your friends get a new job, a promotion, or give birth to a child. Facebook is going to great depths to market its own marketplace. Perhaps it should utilize its own, newly updated custom audiences tool. It could benefit from better targeted marketing, and it can’t really boast about the success rate of its tool if its own marketplace isn’t doing so well.
The mark downs were discovered by CNET, and they seem to appear when you want to send a gift to a friend for their birthday. It seems a bit desperate because the message that you’re greeted with is, “Send a gift of $5 or more and get $4 off.” That’s a whopping 80% markdown. Yes, the company is willing to lose money in order to get more people to try out their marketplace, which they hope in the future will bring in the returns it had lost. Facebook’s marketplace doesn’t generate the revenue it wants, so its hoping these specials will turn that around.
Alongside essentially turning part of its marketplace into a Dollar Tree store, Facebook is trying various methods to get its marketplace some publicity. Special sales will emerge around certain holidays, like Christmas or Valentine’s Day, and there will most likely be sales centered around the seasons (keep an eye out during Spring and Summer time). However, Facebook does deserve some credit for reminding people to give gifts to those who have something special to celebrate. It’s a bit of a guilt-trip, but it is smart.
So if its your co-workers birthday, or your acquaintance’s birthday, you can give them a small, little treat to brighten up their day and show them how thoughtful you are. A nice cup of coffee can go a long way in terms of your relationship with your peers, and it’s only going to cost you a dollar.
[via CNET]
Facebook marking down gifts as much as 80% is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
An artist's concept of a proposed Mars flyby spacecraft equipped with an inflatable habitat module.
(Credit: Inspiration Mars)
A wealthy space tourist announced plans today to launch a high-risk manned flight to Mars in 2018, sending a man and a woman on a bare-bones 501-day round-trip flyby, passing just 100 miles above the Red Planet before heading back to Earth.
Dennis Tito, the first private citizen to fly aboard the International Space Station, said he will provide two years of funding to support the Inspiration Mars Foundation, a nonprofit he started to execute the proposed venture. Additional money will be raised from private sources.
“We have 50 years of experience,” he told reporters during a news conference. “We can do things a lot faster, we just need a commitment. I’m not worried about getting this done from that standpoint. The vehicles are there, we have time to get it together.”
In a statement, Tito said his organization is “engaging the best minds in industry, government, and academia to develop and integrate the space flight systems and to design innovative research, education, and outreach programs for the mission.”
“This low-cost, collaborative, philanthropic approach to tackling this dynamic challenge will showcase U.S. innovation at its best and benefit all Americans in a variety of ways.”
But building a reliable, affo… [Read more]
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Mars, the Red Planet, is actually pretty drab underneath
Facebook plans on making marketing much more easier for companies. It has announced that its custom audiences tool, which was released back in September to let marketers create more relevant ads for users, has received an update that will help marketers to create better, more targeted ads to attract users with. This tool will combine the help of 4 companies, Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai, to help businesses with their online/offline marketing.
Those companies will dig through data from loyalty programs that users signup for. They will pair the data from the users’ shopping history with the information on their Facebook profiles to find their interests. Facebook’s custom audiences tool also lets businesses target more specific categories to find their target audience. There will be categories like “soda drinkers” or categories for people who bought a specific car model. The companies assure users that marketers will not have access to their private information.
Facebook provides two successful examples of its marketing campaigns. The first is Castle Auto Group. They saw a 24x return on their ad costs when they used a combination of Facebook offers and custom audience categories to deliver ads to both a targeted audience along with their existing audience. The second is Kingnet, a game developer based in Hong Kong, who saw over a 40% decrease in cost-per-installs for its video game. It was able to do so by appealing to a targeted audience rather than random Facebook users.
This new change in marketing strategies should be very beneficial to Facebook’s ad revenue. Facebook,however, wants to assure users that their private information will not be given to marketers. It also says that users will be able to opt-out of ads that they do not like via the ad’s control menu or through the help center. Users will also be able to give feedback on the targeted ads.
[via Facebook]
Facebook makes targeted ads easier for marketers is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Outbox wants to turn all your snail-mail into digital mail, which you can view, sort, and share on your iDevice.
(Credit: Outbox)
Mail service as we know it just doesn’t work anymore. Too much junk. Too much hassle sorting, scanning, and/or filing the stuff we need to keep. And, let’s be honest, so much of what arrives in our mailboxes could — some would say should — arrive electronically.
Austin-based startup Outbox wants to make that happen by digitizing all of your physical mail and delivering it to you electronically on your iPhone or iPad, or your PC.
Interesting proposition, wouldn’t you say? Think about it: no more daily trek to the mailbox followed by the daily armload of junk into the trash can. Instead, everything gets intercepted and made digital, thus allowing you to block what you don’t want and archive what you do.
It works like this: Three times per week, Outbox collects your actual mail from your actual mailbox. (This works only with locked boxes. Interestingly, the company makes a copy of your key based on photos supplied by you.)
That mail gets opened, scanned, and stored. (Packages are delivered outright to your front door.) You can then view it via the Web or your iDevice, where you have options for organizing, archiving, sear… [Read more]
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With 3D printing on the verge of going mainstream, you can manufacture almost anything.
You can now add a 3D-printed car to that list.
The Urbee 2 is a three-wheeled hybrid assembled entirely from parts spat out of 3D printers, reports Wired. Just as Makerbot and Form 1 have changed the way we perceive manufacturing, Urbee is seeking to change the way we build cars.
Urbee is the brainchild of Jim Kor and his team at Kor Ecologic, a company solely dedicated to the future of 3D vehicle manufacturing. Their website expands upon their grand vision for the future of the automobile.
Kor’s aim is to make the cars of the future light, energy-efficient and easy to manufacture.
The manufacturing process of the Urbee takes place entirely inside RedEye, a 3D-printing facility that was also used to produce the world’s first 3D-printed motorcycle. Kor says one of the virtues of 3D printing is the added flexibility that’s impossible to produce with sheet metal. Instead of producing a multitude of parts that would be assembled later, the 3D printers can spit out a single, unibody part that makes manufacturing simpler. Kor simply uploads the models for each part into the printers, and 2,500 hours later, Kor has all the plastic parts he needs to assemble his car.
Kor has assurances that the Urbee will be perfectly safe to drive out on in the road. “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor tells Wired. “We want the car to pass the tech inspection required at Le Mans.” And the car isn’t entirely made of plastic. The engine and the base chassis, of course, will be made of steel.
Good luck, Urbee. You may look like an oversized computer mouse, but you’ve come a long way from the days when you looked like this.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
(Credit: Screenshot by Christopher MacManus/CNET)
In the “Star Wars” universe, Jedi and Sith usually settle a score with a good old-fashioned lightsaber duel. Even though all six movies featured lengthy confrontations filled with sizzling sabers, George Lucas never showed an angle of how that type of fight would appear through the eyes of a dueler.
Independent filmmakers The Stunt People created a first-person perspective video of Darth Vader fighting against a bearded Jedi who looks a lot like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Kyle Katarn. The clip runs short, but it may just inspire more excitement than the saber swinging that goes on in the real movies.
Choreography group Saber Combat developed the action, and the actors used modified Hasbro Force FX sabers to give the skirmish a real feel.
“Star Wars” enthusiasts might want to keep their expectations simple as some rather … [Read more]
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