Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Cowon 3D is the 1080p-playing, 4.8-inch PMP that just jumps out at you

Cowon 3D is the 1080p-playing, 4.8-inch PMP that just jumps out at you

As far as 3D goes, we can still take it or leave it, but what's really got us intrigued about Cowon's latest effort is the promise of full 1080p video playback. Ally that to a HDMI output and up to 64GB of flash storage and you've got yourself a pretty potent portable media station. The Cowon 3D PMP offers an 800 x 480 resolution on its own 4.8-inch display -- which is touted as the world's first 3D visualizer on a PMP that doesn't require glasses -- plus a battery rated to last for 10 hours of video, 45 hours of audio and up to 300 hours on standby. And, in an upgrade from the recent X7, this new device also has WiFi connectivity! Launch is scheduled for December 10th in Cowon's backyard of South Korea, with prices coming in at KRW499,000 ($431) for the 32GB-equipped 3D PMP and KRW589,000 ($509) for the 64GB version.

[Thanks, Kunal]

Cowon 3D is the 1080p-playing, 4.8-inch PMP that just jumps out at you originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 03:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple forces PhotoFast to abandon 256GB upgrade kit for MacBook Airs

Apple forces PhotoFast to abandon 256GB upgrade kit for MacBook Airs

Remember that peppy aftermarket 256GB SSD upgrade from PhotoFast that easily smoked (on paper anyway) the SSD found in Apple's latest MacBook Air? It's been halted upon Apple's request before it ever went on sale, similarly to those HyperMac batteries before it. 9to5Mac first reported the news based on a source close to the company and we just confirmed it directly with the PhotoFast GM2_SFV1_Air product manager. The risk of losing access to Apple's product licensing program was just too grave a threat to ignore. So, enjoy your 160MBps max SSD transfer rate and 128GB top-end capacity MBA 11 owners, you'll get that storage and 250MBps sequential read/write speed bump only when Apple's good and ready to provide it themselves -- possibly sooner, we're told, if PhotoFast is given the green light to start sales after Toshiba's SSD modules (Apple's MBA partner) are available for purchase.

Apple forces PhotoFast to abandon 256GB upgrade kit for MacBook Airs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Nov 2010 04:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Curated.by Launches Public Beta, Brings Collaborative Curation to the Web

Curated.by Launches Public Beta, Brings Collaborative Curation to the Web

Curated.by - a collaborative curation tool that helps users organize anything and everything with a link, from Wikipedia to Tweets to this here blog post - announced the launch of its public beta today.

The space is heating up, with Storify and Keepstream both making their own efforts, and it will be interesting to see how Curated.by's latest incarnation (it was previously a tool to curate Tweets) pans out in the burgeoning realm of content curation.

Sponsor

Curated.by offered an introduction to the public beta on its blog today:

If you joined us early during our beta, you will notice that many things are different today. Not only did we changed our UI but also the way you collect, organize & discover content on curated.by.

The idea behind curated.by, remains the same. We are a growing collection of topics and interests, edited, organized and curated by everyone. A place that makes it easy to follow a specific topic or an evolving story, something that is still very difficult today.

Now, instead of dragging and dropping Tweets onto the Curated.by page, you tag content by bookmarklet or using a Chrome extension. Curated.by Founder Bastian Lehmann told The Next Web of the old "Bundler" tool that "Most people didn't like it, it was too much work".

We got in touch with Jim England, co-founder of Keepstream, who explained in an email that Curated.by, Keepstream and Storify are all "carving out unique niches on the manual curation front." Curation, he told us, is a space that is "definitely heating up", because as time goes on, users will start following more and more people until it becomes unbearable.

"There will reach a 'breaking point'", wrote England, "where many people will become frustrated with the amount of content they are missing from the firehose and will look to curated sources on particular topics to keep up-to-date."

Both Keepstream and Curated.by started out as social media curation tools, with the differentiation that Keepstream was more personal, while Curated.by was more collaborative. The most recent change - wherein Curated.by changed its focus to links - could be a step backwards.

"Our vision of curation is to connect to actions you are already doing on your social networks (favoriting, retweeting, and liking).  We think that these actions are already curation... individuals are screening and sharing only the best content with their networks, so why don't we take advantage of that?" wrote England, adding "Copying and pasting links is good for stuff you miss, but I don't think it should be the primary input method."

For us, the new incarnation of Curated.by reminds us of a Web we once knew, where content, including websites and not just tweets and Facebook "Likes", were organized into categories for browsing.

What do you think - will a more generalized form of curation, such as the one offered by Curated.by today, take off? Or should we stand atop the shoulders of Twitter and Facebook and go on with our curation from there?

The point may be as moot as whether or not curation is an inherently solo or collaborative effort. Perhaps there is room for both.

Discuss


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Plug an HTML5 Photo Editor Into Your Site With Aviary Feather

Plug an HTML5 Photo Editor Into Your Site With Aviary Feather

aviarylogo.jpgAviary, a New York startup that provides web-based media editing tools, has announced today that it now offers a simple photo editing widget that can be plugged-in to any website with ease. Called Feather, the tool uses HTML5 to let users quickly and easily remove red-eye, add text, crop photos or perform other simple image editing tasks.

Aviary says that the service is free to use but will include premium features later. The tool puts an emphasis on customizability now and will be entirely open sourced later. Site owners can choose between a floating, draggable widget or a lightbox and site visitors can edit images without ever leaving a publisher's page.

Sponsor

aviaryfeather.jpg

Aviary says 9 partner sites will launch Feather integration within the week: Digital Youth Network, Everloop, Fashism, HowMutch, Hyper Public, Market Publique, Rrripple, and Saw You At Sinai and online shopping platform Shopify.

The downsides to integrating 3rd party services like this include:


  • the risk of down time that an implementer has no control over

  • that changes could be made by the tool creator that don't suit the implementer well.

In response to this concern, Aviary writes the following in its announcement blog post.

In general, our plan is to update Feather with new features every two-three weeks. We plan to inform you in advance of any new feature or option that is available and will provide a testing and feedback platform for you to let us know what works best for your site. We will never introduce a breaking change without giving you ample lead time to make an adjustment and without providing legacy support.

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Chinese man plays MMO on titanic screen, pleads for higher pixel density (video)

Chinese man plays MMO on titanic screen, pleads for higher pixel density (video)

Never mind your 103-inch plasmas or Guiness Word Record-holding stadium displays, real gamers do their thing on LCDs that span a cool seven thousand and five hundred square meters (translated into imperial measuring units, that's... a lot!). What you see above is a little glimpse of an MMO enthusiast with a big passion and no less sizable wallet. The gent in question was displeased by the fact a competing guildmaster in the Chinese MMO Magic World Online 2 got to play in an IMAX theater, and therefore decided to one-up him in the only way possible: by hiring Beijing's crazily oversized display (titled "All Beijing, look up!") for a little session of supersized gaming. Jump past the break to see it on video.

Continue reading Chinese man plays MMO on titanic screen, pleads for higher pixel density (video)

Chinese man plays MMO on titanic screen, pleads for higher pixel density (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Nov 2010 04:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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