Pure Digital founder talks of Flip Video’s future

When we got wind of Cisco’s $590 million acquisition of Flip Video-maker Pure Digital, we immediately came to grips with the fit. After all, Cisco’s been dying to pull another Linksys for some time now, and what better to expand its consumer electronics presence than with a cheap-o camcorder that’s ripe for the addition of WiFi. Bigwig (and Pure Digital founder) Jonathan Kaplan recently sat down to talk about the product’s future, and unsurprisingly, he definitely mentions the integration of Cisco’s “strengths” into the handheld camcorder. Furthermore, he’s hoping that an entity as large as Cisco can get the Flip Video line overseas, and he’s also quite big on “building the brand.” The takeaway? Don’t be alarmed when a WiFi-equipped, streaming-capable successor hits the scene at CES 2010, complete with automatic upload-to-YouTube functionality.

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Pure Digital founder talks of Flip Video’s future originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter integration could come to OnStar

We know you’ve been losing sleep just wondering how on earth General Motors plans to get OnStar users to keep on using once their free year is up, but apparently someone up top has been doing a bit more than just mulling. Gearlive received quite the interesting survey from OnStar this week, with a paragraph clearly explaining how Twitter integration would work should it come to the in-car alert / communication system. Essentially, the system could be programmed to read back tweets directed at you and convert your voice to text in order to upload new tweets. Envision this: you tweet that you’re headed to Forks, Washington, and you ask your thousands of followers to name a good place to buy garlic. Magical, no?

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Twitter integration could come to OnStar originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mobile technology even makes 20-somethings shudder… sometimes

We’ll go ahead and warn you that a lot has changed since 2007, but if anything, the surge in Twitter users and the overwhelming growth in social networking would likely strengthen these findings. The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just revealed some rather interesting stats from its study of age groups and their connection to mobile technology, particularly when looking at the “Ambivalent Networkers” group. Said clump is comprised mostly of males in their late 20s, which are stereotypically connected to their handsets at all times with a smile to go with it. According to the research, however, the majority of this group agreed that “taking a break is definitely a good idea,” which was around ten percentage points above the average in the other four groups. We know you’re about to tweet this to your 27 year old brother-in-law, but think twice before you knowingly hurt his soul like that.

[Via ArsTechnica]

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Mobile technology even makes 20-somethings shudder… sometimes originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sonar hopes to power social featurephones, we get a demo

As with any trade show, flashy, high-end products have a tendency to steal the lion’s share of the spotlight at MWC — but the fact is, featurephones still outsell traditional smartphones by an order of magnitude. Companies like INQ are betting the farm on the belief that today’s ultra-connected generation of Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook users are ultimately going to pick fashionable, cheap, easy-to-use handsets over the complexity of an iPhone, G1, or Omnia. There’s something to be said for that — most people don’t know the model of their own phone, after all, and have no interest in learning how to download and install an app, let alone learn an entire mobile operating system. Plus, for the youngest members of this profitable group, there’s a lot of price sensitivity — smartphones are typically out of reach.

If startup Sonar has its way, that’s where its new platform comes in. The idea was to fundamentally rethink the way average consumers — you know, the ones who are plugged into three, four, or fourteen social networks and don’t know a G1 from a P1i — use a phone to communicate, and they’re ready to show off their efforts for the first time here at MWC. We had an opportunity to sit down with Sonar’s founders this week for a tour of the system, and we’re pretty stoked about what we saw. Read on.

Continue reading Sonar hopes to power social featurephones, we get a demo

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Sonar hopes to power social featurephones, we get a demo originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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INQ’s next handset will get further up in your social networks

INQ's next handset will get further up in your social networks

INQ’s first handset, the INQ1, got cozy with your friends on Facebook, letting you check their updates and let them all know what’s happening in your ‘hood while making Skype calls and checking your e-mail. The company’s coming back for more with the ingeniously named INQ2, pledging to add Twitter support into the mix in a move to get more social network-agnostic. No further details are available at this point on what (if any) other services the upcoming handset will interact with, or whether it’ll have a somewhat more original name, but you can be sure we’ll keep you updated.

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INQ’s next handset will get further up in your social networks originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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