Hasta La Gadget!

While the rest of the world has yet to taste the sweet elixir of free voice calls from its email supplier, US-based Gmailers are having their fun extended for a whole new year. Back in August, Google made it possible to dial up voice numbers in the US and Canada for free, and now, in the true holiday spirit of keeping users happy and advertising dollars flowing, Google promises to keep that service free through all of 2011. And if it decides to extend it into 2012, we could have free calls until the end of the world.

Gmail’s free voice calls will be available through all of 2011, still only in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Dec 2010 03:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We got a brief glimpse of Google’s body browser at the Chrome event earlier this month, and wouldn’t ya know it, the violation of privacy simulator / learning tool is hanging out in Google labs. A browser with WebGL support is required, which means Firefox 4 and Chrome 9 betas (or Chrome 8 if you enable it in the “about:flags” menu). The visualization options are interesting and the search tool works like a charm, so… why not? Exactly.

Continue reading Google body browser now getting down and you know it’s you know it’s crush grooving

Google body browser now getting down and you know it’s you know it’s crush grooving originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on February 21, 2008 by CyberNet.

Google has always had lofty goals of providing wireless Internet to the masses, and a recent article in the Wall Street Journal shows they continue to have interest. This time around, it involves balloons. Yes, balloons.The talk is that they are going to either partner with or purchase a company called Space Data Corp.

Space Data Corp. is a company that currently uses balloons to provide “specialized telecom services to truckers and oil companies.” They launch about 10 balloons a day in areas in the Southern United States.  These balloons go up about 20 miles into the stratosphere and carry electronics which act like a mini cell phone tower and provide Internet to people below. They say that each balloon can cover “thousands of square miles below.” Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

There are a few problems with the balloons though, and the first is that each balloon is only good for about 24 hours.  Once it gets high up into the atmosphere, it ends up bursting. The contents of each balloon cost about $1500 and once the balloon pops the gear comes down to earth via parachute and then people are sent out to find them, using GPS devices (they get paid $100 for each transponder they collect). Simply finding enough people to launch all of the balloons (they currently pay farmers and crews at smaller airports $50 per balloon) could be tedious.

So why does Google have interest in the company? According to The Wall Street Journal, “Google believes balloons like these could radically change the economics of offering cell phone and Internet services in out-of-the-way areas.” Rural areas likely wouldn’t be where Google would stop.  According to the balloon company, they say with just 370 balloons, the whole country could have access to a WiMax broadband network. Using traditional towers, 22,000 of them would be needed. There’s quite the difference between 370 balloons versus 22,000 towers and while it sounds a little off-the-wall at this point, there could be some real potential here with balloons

Thanks for the tip Google!

Source: Gizmodo

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This article was written on July 22, 2008 by CyberNet.

There are a lot of great applications that are coming through Apple’s App Store for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but one of my new favorites would have to be the 100% free WordPress for iPhone. You might recall that TypePad users have had a blogging tool since day 1 of the App Store launch, and that program was also “free.” The catch, however, was that you are required to have a paid subscription to TypePad which is a minimum of $5 per month.

The WordPress application, on the other hand, will work with multiple WordPress.com accounts and any WordPress blogs you’ve setup on your own servers. The only requirement is that you be running WordPress 2.5.1 or higher.

How well does it work? It took me less than 30 seconds to get it setup on my iPhone, and it does almost everything that I would want from a mobile blogging client. You can add photos, manage existing posts, and even see a live preview of what it will look like on your blog using the embedded Safari browser.

One of the first things that popped into my head after using this is how great it would be for photo blogging on-the-go. You can snap a bunch of photos on your iPhone from within the WordPress software (or pull from your camera roll), write up a quick post explaining what the people are seeing in the images, and publish it to a blog. Want to restrict who can see the post? No problem, just password protect it right from the iPhone. To be honest I plan on creating a free WordPress.com blog just for posting photos in this way.

Right now there’s just one downside when using this for photo blogging. Images are uploaded at the medium resolution (640×480) which may or may not be something you want. In the future I’d like to see it offer a full resolution upload option, but the scaled down photos are faster to upload when you’re on-the-go.

Aside from that there are just a few other things I’d like to see this include:

• Comment management – being able to approve/pull comments would be handy.
• Search posts – right now you can see up to the most recent 50 posts on the blog, but that is it. At the very least you should be able to search through past posts, and possibly navigate through “pages” of recent posts.

WordPress for iPhone Homepage
WordPress iTunes Link (opens in iTunes)

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It’s been mostly bad news about content blocks for Google TV since the platform launched in late October, but it sounds like Sony’s staying optimistic: Hiroshi Yoshioka, head of the company’s TV division, told the New York Times that Sony’s Google TV sales have been “in line with expectations,” and that “it might take a little longer for users to really start having fun” with the new platform. What’s more, Yoshioka also said Sony’s TV group and Google collaborate more on Google TV devices than Sony Ericsson and Google do on Android phones, which sounds insane to us — but perhaps not entirely surprising, given that the Xperia X8 is only just getting Android 2.1.

Of course, all this cheerleading from Sony comes against the backdrop of Google asking TV manufacturers to delay several planned CES Google TV product introductions while it reworks the software and tries to negotiate with the networks on continued content blocks, so “expectations” could mean almost anything, really — especially since Yoshioka didn’t provide any hard Google TV sales numbers and later said that Sony’s TV business would fail to meet its targets and struggle to become profitable this year. Ouch. We’ve got a feeling we’ll be hearing more about all this at CES one way or another — stay tuned.

Sony says Google TV sales meeting expectations, TV division working more closely with Google than cellphone group originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 10:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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