Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook may have delivered a decent quarterly financial report yesterday, but that apparently did little to quell investor concerns about the company, which only went public earlier this year. Facebook’s stock took another tumble today, falling $3.03 to $23.81. That 11.3% decrease in stock price led to Facebook’s stock hitting a new all-time low, and it doesn’t seem like the stock is going to recover anytime soon.

Despite the fact that Facebook did post a profit and did report a growth in the number of users for Q2, that apparently wasn’t enough for Facebook’s investors. Revenue did grow in Q2, but not as much as it did in Q1, which gave investors some cause for concern. That isn’t the major problem Facebook’s investors have with the company’s direction, however, as it seems that many of them are concerned about Facebook’s mobile ad growth. As far as they’re concerned, Facebook isn’t making nearly enough money from mobile advertisements, while more and more Facebook users are accessing their profiles from mobile devices.

The result is a stock price that now sits at nearly 40% below the price it started at when Facebook initially went public. Any way you slice it, that isn’t good for the company or current investors – though it may be good news for those waiting to jump in when the price is low. Indeed, CNET is reporting that this week has taken quite the toll on Mark Zuckerberg’s pocketbook, with the Facebook founder losing a mind-numbing $3 billion since Wednesday. It’s going to be a long and bumpy ride for Facebook in the coming weeks and months, but at the very least, it should be pretty interesting for outside observers.

[via USA Today]

Facebook stock hits new low as Zuckerberg loses billions is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We’ve seen a variety of hacks and mods based on the Etch-a-Sketch, but none of them messed with the way it makes images. That’s exactly what Christopher Monaco did. He built his own take on the drawing toy, but instead of aluminum powder he used LEDs.

Because Monaco built his toy from scratch, the project is quite complicated. He used a variety of electronics from Sparkfun and Digikey, including an ATmega328P microcontroller, four 8×8 LED matrices and a MintyBoost kit. Then he designed the logic and the drivers for the board and the matrices, wrote custom software and made his own enclosure. Here’s the product of his efforts:

The funny thing is that the toy is more technically advanced, yet functionally worse than the original. But as with most hacks and mods, half the fun is in building it. Plus Monaco can always improve on his model, maybe make a larger one with different colored LEDs and so on, and before you know it he’ll have an LED version of Photoshop.

[via Instructables via MAKE]

Intel has clearly been busy behind the scenes, announcing a new solution that integrates 3G power amplifiers directly onto radio frequency circuits. The resulting SoC is smaller in size, is more power efficient, and is less complex for developers to work with. Dubbed the SMARTi UE2p, Intel believes the chip will help enable lower cost 3G handsets and spur development for the Internet of Things, allowing devices to be constantly connected thanks to the low-power 3G solution.

Intel says that the SMARTi compromises of a 65nm die that incorporates a multi-band HSPA radio transceiver and power amplifiers. Power management and sensor duties are also integrated into the solution, allowing for a direct connection to the battery. Most important, it’s compact and cost efficient enough to fit into devices such as fridges, lights, and other home appliances, further enabling the creation of an Internet of Things.

The company also hopes the chips will find their way into low-cost 3G handsets in developing markets. Any interested parties will be able to get their hands on samples towards the end of the year, and Intel says that it’ll continue to work with certain power amplifier vendors top equip smartphones and tablets with even more efficient solutions.

Intel SMARTi UE2p enables low-cost 3G is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Companies seemingly patent anything and everything, so it’s always best to take these listings with your recommended daily allowance of salt, but Apple looks to have filed for a patent relating to pairing controllers using NFC capabilities on an iPhone. It doesn’t mean that Apple is working on a game controller, but does suggest that the company is keeping all its gaming options open, entertaining the idea of pairing multiple devices using NFC and even turning the iPhone into a digital controller.

That could lead to some interesting applications for Apple, such as displaying a digital overlay of traditional controls on an iPhone while you play a game on an Apple TV or Mac. Currently games can be mirrored out to an Apple TV with an iPhone or iPad, but this patent may hint at additional controllers being used on iOS devices thanks to NFC pairing.

Gaming isn’t the sole focus on the patent, however, with the Apple looking to control all sorts of technology once devices have been paired using NFC. Rather than limit the technology to mobile payments, the company looks to turn iOS devices into controllers that could interact with cameras or various appliances throughout the home. It’s been reported several times that the next iPhone will feature NFC capabilities, and with more and more Android OEMs including it in their handsets, it seems like the next logical step for Apple.

[via IGN]

Apple patent reveals iPhone’s NFC ambitions is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

In case you haven’t already heard, Twitter was down for a little bit today. Twitter users trying to access the service got nothing for a short while earlier this morning, and while many suspected it had something to do with Twitter’s current Olympics push, the truth is that the outage was actually caused by a problem at Twitter’s data centers. Normally this wouldn’t be that big of a deal, but this case is unique because, as VP of engineering Mazen Rawashdeh says, Twitter was hit with an “infrastructural double-whammy.”

Normally when Twitter‘s data centers falls over, there’s a parallel system running and ready to pick up the slack. This time, however, both the main data center and the backup system went down at nearly the same time, wiping Twitter from the Internet until the company’s engineers could restore one of the systems. “I wish I could say that today’s outage could be explained by the Olympics or even a cascading bug,” Rawashdeh wrote in a blog post. “Instead, it was due to this infrastructural double-whammy. We are investing aggressively in our systems to avoid this situation in the future.”

That cascading bug Rawashdeh mentions was responsible for the last Twitter outage, which happened just over a month ago. The timing of this crash was pretty bad too, as Twitter had been gearing up for tomorrow’s kickoff of the 2012 Olympics. Despite today’s hiccups however, things seem to be running just fine at the moment (and have been for a few hours now), so the world’s millions and millions of Twitter users can feel free to take a collective sigh of relief.

Twitter outage blamed on data center failure is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.