Sunday, May 30, 2010

OpenWays makes your smartphone a hotel room key, provides a different kind of 'unlock'

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/30/openways-makes-your-smartphone-a-hotel-room-key-provides-a-diff/

For years now, hotel chains have been toying with alternative ways to letting patrons check-in, access their room and run up their bill with all-too-convenient in-room services. Marriott began testing smartphone check-ins way back in 2006, and select boutique locations (like The Plaza Hotel in New York and Boston's Nine Zero) have relied on RFID, iris scanners, biometric identifiers and all sorts of whiz-bang entry methods in order to make getting past a lock that much easier (or harder, depending on perspective). This month, InterContinental Hotels Group announced that they would soon be trialing OpenWays at Chicago's Holiday Inn Express Houston Downtown Convention Center, enabling iPhone owners to fire up an app and watch their room door open in a magical sort of way. Other smartphone platforms will also be supported, and as we've seen with other implementations, users of the technology will also be able to turn to their phone to order additional services, extend their stay or fess up to that window they broke. There's no word on when this stuff will depart the testing phase and go mainstream, but we're guessing it'll be sooner rather than later. Video after the break, if you're interested.

Continue reading OpenWays makes your smartphone a hotel room key, provides a different kind of 'unlock'

OpenWays makes your smartphone a hotel room key, provides a different kind of 'unlock' originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 May 2010 01:31:00 EDT. Please see our t erms for use of feeds.

Permalink Switched  |  sourceHospitality, USA Today  | Email this | Comments

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Friday, May 28, 2010

Shogo 10-inch Linux tablet is a Qooq minus the recipes -- and the feet (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/28/shogo-10-inch-linux-tablet-is-a-qooq-minus-the-recipes-and-th/

Shogo 10-inch Linux tablet is a Qook minus the recipes -- and the feet (video)
Last year's Qooq tablet hardly made much of a splash in the gadget industry, despite its cooking prowess and silly little feet. Now, the manufacturer behind the device, Realease, is shaving down the appendages and ditching the recipes to create the Shogo, a 10-inch, capacitive-touch Linux tablet. Two models will be offered with Freescale processors, one with the i.MX37 and another with the faster i.MX51, and much of the device's functionality will be provided through a webkit-based browser. We're a little unclear about the distribution plans here, as it really sounds like Realease would prefer to sell this thing in bulk to businesses than individually to shlemiels like us, but the thing apparently could go into mass production within a few months. Will it? Let's just say we're not quite as excited about that possibility as Charbax gets in the demonstration video below.

Continue reading Shogo 10-inch Linux tablet is a Qooq minus the recipes -- and the feet (video)

Shogo 10-inch Linux tablet is a Qooq minus the recipes -- and the feet (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 12:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceARMdevices.net, Realease  | Email this | Comments

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Shuttle opens US pre-orders for pricey Core i7-based J3 SFF PC

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/28/shuttle-opens-us-pre-orders-for-pricey-core-i7-based-j3-sff-pc/

Shuttle teased us just under a month ago with its Core i7-powered J3 desktop, and now that little bugger is finally up for pre-order in the States. The J3 5800P workstation is easily one of the most powerful small form factor PCs this planet has ever seen, boasting a six-core Core i7 980X Extreme Edition CPU, your choice of NVIDIA Quadro or ATI FirePro professional graphics, up to 16GB of DDR3 memory, room for two SATA hard drives, an optional Blu-ray drive, plenty of ports and a 500-watt power supply. Somehow or another, all of that fits into a chassis that measures just 8.5- x 7.5- x 13.1-inches, and if you've been looking to downsize without taking a hit in the performance department, you can finally do so starting at $1,899. The journey begins right there in the source link -- good luck keeping it below three large, Yes Man.

Continue reading Shuttle opens US pre-orders for pricey Core i7-based J3 SFF PC

Shuttle opens US pre-orders for pricey Core i7-based J3 SFF PC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 12:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceShuttle (J3 5800P), (J1 4100P), (G2 7600P)  | Email this | Comments

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CHART OF THE DAY: The Half-Life Of A YouTube Video Is 6 Days (GOOG)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-lifecycle-of-a-youtube-video-2010-5

A video on YouTube gets 50% of its views in the first 6 days it is on the site, according to data from analytics firm TubeMogul. After 20 days, a YouTube video has had 75% of its total views.

That's a really short life span for YouTube videos, and it's probably getting shorter. In 2008, it took 14 days for a video to get 50% of its views and 44 days to get 75% of its views.

Why? In the last two years, YouTube has improved its user interface, which helps videos get seen early on. Also, the world has gotten more adept at embedding and sharing videos in real-time via Twitter and Facebook. (And there's probably more video to choose from.)

What's this mean for publishers? For one thing, publishers should have advertising/monetization schemes ready to go for their videos right when they're published, because the hits come early.

It also means companies should be actively uploading videos to YouTube, says David Burch, a rep at TubeMogul. He notes that major companies like the NBA have been good at getting clips on YouTube quickly. If they didn't act fast, then they could miss an opportunity to get eyeballs.

chart of the day, youtube video lifecycle, may 2010

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PrintConductor Prints Documents in Batches Without Opening Them [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5549041/printconductor

PrintConductor Prints Documents in Batches Without Opening ThemWindows: Got a host of PDFs, Office documents, or, heck, AutoCad documents to print out? Load them into PrintConductor, and you can batch print them without opening the apps they came from. Better still, you can print them all to PDF.

PrintConductor doesn't require much more explanation. You can team it with the Universal Document Converter print driver to batch-process all your documents into PDFs, but you can also use your own virtual printer driver, like doPDF. If you're planning to print the same batch of documents more than once, you can save your queues to a file for later loading.

PrintConductor is a free download for Windows systems only. Already have a batch PDF conversion process you prefer? Share it with your fellow document shufflers in the comments.

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