Talay Robot will document your tweet, give it a soundtrack, Twitvid the results (video)

Tweet a message @talayrobot and something magical happens. An ST Robotics arm whirs to life inside Sony Music's London HQ and starts transcribing your words of wisdom unto a glamorously lit whiteboard -- in the finest handwriting font its designers could find! Best part is that the whole thing gets filmed and the video is sent back to you within a matter of minutes, equipped with an audio clip from Sony's Talay Riley. Yes, it's a promotional stunt, but it's also undeniably one of the coolest intersections of robotics and social networking we've yet seen. Skip past the break for some video examples or get tweeting and create your own.

Continue reading Talay Robot will document your tweet, give it a soundtrack, Twitvid the results (video)

Talay Robot will document your tweet, give it a soundtrack, Twitvid the results (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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David Sacks: Yammer Wasn?t a Pivot and I Still Love Geni (TCTV)

Yammer founder and CEO David Sacks came all the way from his office upstairs from us to talk about his new $25 million round of funding. We discuss a lot of interesting things in this clip including why Sacks says Yammer wasn't everyone's new favorite word, a pivot; why he still loves Geni, the company Yammer spun out of that we don't hear nearly as much about; why more social-media-for-the-enterprise companies haven't taken off; and his defense of the freemium business model. Make sure you stay to the end, when I ask Sacks about a rumor floating around Silicon Valley that he tried to put a deal together with Yammer and Twitter back before the company even launched. Bonus: Sacks- as tactfully as possible- says what TechCrunch's Yammer usage tells us about our company culture.

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Google's HTML5 e-book begins to appear in newspapers

In yesterday's copy of the Los Angeles Times, a print version of Google's new 20 Things e-book has been found. The clipping relates to the Cloud Computing chapter of the book, but the chapter number doesn't match up.

This is an obvious, and genius step for Google. Not only are they capitalizing on the book's great illustrations, but they're also dragging the untechnological masses kicking and screaming into the HTML5 future. The reader sees the print advertisement, loads up the website... and sees an e-book that looks just like a real book!

Less obvious, but more impressive, is the fact that Google isn't pushing Chrome as the only choice of modern browser. The 'What Browser?' site that the e-book points to features a Windowsesque 'Browser Ballot', with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera all being shuffled randomly.

It looks as if Google might be taking a leaf from Microsoft's Beauty of the Web book. Looking at the bigger picture, an up-to-date Web is infinitely more powerful and interesting than a crusty and antiquated Web. Everyone stands to gain from an HTML5-enabled Web, including Google.

Filed under: Google, web 2.0, Browsers

Google's HTML5 e-book begins to appear in newspapers originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 06:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hum-Bucking Pedal Juice Powers Guitar Effects Pedals

Bzzzzzz hummmmmm krrrrrzzt! Those are familiar sounds to the electric guitarist, and they’re caused (respectively) by a dirty/dusty jack socket, a mains hum and a simply plugging in the jack to the amp. Sanyo’s Eneloop Pedal Juice won’t help with your clumsiness or lack of hygiene, but it can cut out that hum, and it [...]

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Foki vacuum footwear concept lets you walk in Roomba's shoes

They may not be the first vacuum shoes to emerge in concept form, but these so-called Foki shoes from designer Adika Titut Triyugo are certainly the most stylish -- at least in an ASIMO chic sort of way. They also boast a few new tricks not seen before, including an LED display on top that indicates how much dirt you've picked up, and a unique deign that allows them to be completely folded up when not in use. Of course, "concept" is the key word here, but we've got to guess there's an untapped market out there for wearable appliances. Dust Buster gloves, anyone?

Foki vacuum footwear concept lets you walk in Roomba's shoes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 05:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dockstar FreeAgent hacked into inexpensive emulation masterpiece (video)

Hello, multipurpose! Seagate's Pogoplug-based FreeAgent DockStar -- at least at a glance -- isn't much good to those who aren't buying up DockStar HDDs. But if you dig a little deeper, you'll realize that this minuscule adapter packs a 1.2GHz Marvell processor, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM. There's also a smattering of USB ports and an Ethernet socket; add that all up, and you've got a hacker's playground. One Hunter Davis decided to see just how much he could squeeze out of this here peripheral, which can be widely found for as little as $25 nowadays. Thanks to a copy of Debian Linux, a good bit of programming know-how, a DisplayLink USB-to-VGA adapter and a USB sound adapter, he was able to concoct a homegrown emulation console that could handle nearly everything he threw at it. 'Course, you'll have to spring for those other parts if you don't have a house full of random doodads, but once he figures out how to install a battery and make the entire setup portable... look out! Head on past the break for an in-action video.

Continue reading Dockstar FreeAgent hacked into inexpensive emulation masterpiece (video)

Dockstar FreeAgent hacked into inexpensive emulation masterpiece (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 17:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wikileaks Spill: Catalyst for New, More Open Style of Governing?

Despite talk of dire consequences for U.S. foreign policy and military intelligence, online publisher Wikileaks Sunday began releasing more than 250,000 leaked cables between 274 worldwide embassies and the U.S. State Department. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange calls the leaked cables "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain" on the organization's website.

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How to move the Firefox or Chrome cache to a RAM disk and speed up surfing by 20% or more

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive

Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare RAM. Unless you're editing large multimedia files, you're probably using only a fraction of your RAM. Why don't we use a little bit of it to speed up our surfing of the Web?

Browsers save a lot of data to the hard drive. Every image, so that you don't have to download it every time you visit a page, is saved to the hard drive. That's when you experience the 'grind' of loading (or reloading) a tab that you haven't looked at recently -- the browser is loading data from the hard drive.

With a RAM disk, you can make the browser always load from memory. This speeds up the entire browsing experience by a significant margin. The browser starts in a flash, switching between tabs feels faster, and page load times can be reduced by 20% or more!

Continue reading How to move the Firefox or Chrome cache to a RAM disk and speed up surfing by 20% or more

Filed under: Browsers

How to move the Firefox or Chrome cache to a RAM disk and speed up surfing by 20% or more originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LaCie's Hub4 quadruples your USB 3.0 pleasure

Even in their prime, USB hubs were never the sexiest part of a tech geek's shopping trip -- people would typically grab the most functional (or crazy) looking option and move on to picking out their next set of "future-proof" RAM sticks. We're not convinced LaCie's really going to change all that with its Hub4, but it sure is trying hard by giving it a curvaceous exterior and those oh-so-desirable blue USB jacks. Yes, the USB 3.0 color coding is large and in charge here, highlighting a full quartet of ports for all that SuperSpeed gear you've been stashing. Of course, you'll still need at least one 3.0 connector on your computer to make the most of this USB peripheral (otherwise you'll have a very curvy and very standard USB 2.0 hub), but if that's already accounted for, you'll just need $59.99 and the source link to get yourself connected to the future.

LaCie's Hub4 quadruples your USB 3.0 pleasure originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 07:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kisai RPM ? Tokyoflash Japan?s first community designed watch

Tokyoflash Japan is well known for their unique LED wrist watches, but their latest offering is a little different… The Kisai RPM is their first watch that has been designed based on an idea that was submitted by a Tokyoflash fan from the UK back in February. That design was then chosen by the community [...]

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ASUS Eee Note EA-800 priced at $230, launching in Taiwan this week

Woah, it was only last week that we finalized the naming scheme for ASUS's LCD-equipped note taker, yet today the company's announcing that it'll be available to buy this week in its native Taiwan. Even better news is the $230 price tag (NT$6,999), which makes the Eee Note quite the affordable little device. It's versatile too, thanks to a built-in camera and microphone for recording of notes and a 3.5mm headphone jack for playback. Running on Linux, the 8-inch tablet (1024 x 768 res) is said to be capable of 13.5 hours of uninterrupted use, which doesn't match the similarly monochromatic e-readers out there but is a decent compromise for the functionality on offer. Hong Kong should be the next market on its global tour, to be followed by Germany, Italy and Russia around the turn of the year and China and the US in Q1 of 2011.

ASUS Eee Note EA-800 priced at $230, launching in Taiwan this week originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dislike [Shoes]

Luckily for humanity, these "social network sneakers" are concepts. For now. I fear there's no fail whale in existence that will be big enough to stop the slobbering social media masses from demanding these be created via a "Like" page. More »

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Facebook ?Thinking? Of Offering Mass Contact Export Since 2004

The flames of contact infogate got stoked again this weekend with the release of a particularly inflammatory Google Chrome Extension ?Facebook Doesn?t Own My Friends.? The extension was taken down minutes after our post went up and I have still heard no word from Facebook or Google on which was responsible for the shut down (my guess is that Facebook changed its email displays from text over to images before Google could pull the extension).

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KDDI develops a zoom-enhance system for HD movie streaming on smartphones (video)

Because not every smartphone has a full 1080p resolution (yet), KDDI's R&D Labs have come up with a new method for massaging the most out of HD movie streams while on the move. You'll still be able to pummel your poor mobile device and connection with the full-res stream, should you wish it, but KDDI's innovation is in developing a system whereby you can zoom in on particular parts of the feed, have the stream cropped to your requirements on far-off servers somewhere, and then receive only the stuff you want to see onto your device. And because of your phone's aforementioned pixel deficiency, the employment of this technique will most often result in negligible picture fidelity loss, if any. The biggest benefit, however, might be to carriers like KDDI who end up having to carry less data back and forth, even if it does come at a slight server-side cost. Video after the break.

Continue reading KDDI develops a zoom-enhance system for HD movie streaming on smartphones (video)

KDDI develops a zoom-enhance system for HD movie streaming on smartphones (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Nov 2010 03:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kinect used to control Super Mario on a PC, redefine convergence (video)

If, like us, you've been waiting to see Kinect in control of a truly marquee game, your wait has now come to an end. The same fella that brought us the Kinect lightsaber has returned with a hack enabling eager nostalgics to enjoy a bout of Super Mario controlled only by their body contortions. OpenKinect was used to get the motion-sensing peripheral -- originally intended exclusively for use with an Xbox 360 -- to communicate with his PC, while a simple NES emulator took care of bringing the 25-year old plumber to life. The video awaits after the break.

Continue reading Kinect used to control Super Mario on a PC, redefine convergence (video)

Kinect used to control Super Mario on a PC, redefine convergence (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 12:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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