Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/17/galaxy-s-ii-coming-to-sasktel-next-month-we-embark-on-northward/
Galaxy S II coming to SaskTel next month, we embark on northward migration originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/17/hp-ships-50-wifi-mobile-mouse-gives-your-bluetooth-radio-a-bre/
Continue reading HP ships $50 WiFi Mobile Mouse, gives your Bluetooth radio a break
HP ships $50 WiFi Mobile Mouse, gives your Bluetooth radio a break originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jun 2011 09:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Fresh off a $23 million round of funding, Social gaming company CrowdStar is launching its first mobile-only social game, Top Girl. As you can see from the headline, the free game, which is launching for iOS, targets female gamers interested in shopping and fashion.
While CrowdStar offers another female-focused game on Facebook, It Girl, the two games have no connection. Top Girl is a mobile role-playing game that allows players to create a fashionable avatar and then climb up the fashion social ladder, collecting money by doing modeling jobs, buying new outfits, and going to clubs.
The core gameplay is around the modeling job, where as you work more,you earn coins and cash and are able to buy better clothes. The game also has a dating feature, allowing users to flirt with a virtual boyfriend.
The game actually doesn’t require Facebook integration and is utilizing OpenFeint’s (a fellow YouWeb company) plug and play social gaming platform more iOS. And Top Girl isn’t totally devoid of social features. For example, players will see a leaderboard of fellow players who have accumulated the most clothes.
As CrowdStar CEO Peter Relan has told us previously, he believes interactions on mobile social games will be different from social gaming on Facebook, necessitating the need to create new titles. We saw this trend with Zynga’s newest CityVille game ‘Hometown’, which was announced yesterday.
Relan says we can expect more mobile titles from CrowdStar in the coming year, with three mobile games already in development. And the company will expand these titles to Android as well as iOS.
Ah, the pleasures of describing a computer problem over the phone, doubtless experienced by many of the people reading this post. And while most of us have only had to deal with tech support questions to help our friends, family, and dorm-mates, there are plenty of businesses that face the same challenges every day — and for them, money is on the line. And now Screenr, a company that offers a web-based screen recorder that lets you make screencasts directly from your browser without requiring additional downloads, has an answer.
This week Screenr is launching Screenr Business, a service that makes it very easy for any site to integrate the company’s browser-based screencast technology. In other words, they’ll make it super easy for your customers to file support tickets by video.
Say you have a standard support site for your product, which includes basic help information and a submission form where customers submit descriptions of their problems — descriptions that often aren’t very specific or may be difficult to understand. Using Screenr, you could now embed a button at the top of your support site that invites users to quickly capture a screencast of their issue, which they can then immediately send to your company’s support staff. Pretty cool.
That’s not the only use-case, either: CEO Adam Schwartz says that they’re seeing companies use the tool for internal software development (QA people don’t have to manually write out how to reproduce a problem, they can just take a video). The service is also often used in companies for internal collaboration, allowing coworkers to share a product demo without requiring a meeting.
In addition to the aforementioned widgets that can be easily embedded, Screenr also offers an API that allows for deeper integration (Stocktwits is one company that’s already using this).
As for pricing, Screenr Business is free for 15 days, then charges on a monthly basis with plans starting at $19/month (more expensive plans include more options, like analytics, custom branding, and API access).
Google has just announced a new feature for its core search engine that sounds like it will be very helpful: a new kind of related search result that’s based around lists. Starting today, when you run a general query like, say, “Greek philosophers”, Google will actually present a list of top Greek philosophers instead of queries that are simply similar to that one.
Okay, so it isn’t the kind of announcement that’s going to make you scream from the rooftops, but it’s a subtle and important difference. Previously, for the query “american authors” you would have gotten suggested searches including “famous american authors” and “american literature”. Now you’ll also get a list of some of the top American authors themselves: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and a half-dozen others.
Google’s post says that the feature also works for a variety of other query types, like movies (you’ll get a list of actors). I just ran a query for “Jelly bean flavors” (which was not one of the examples) and got a list that includes Green Apple, Coconut, and Blueberry. Neat.
Google’s post notes that this is actually based in part on Google Squared, the feature it launched in Labs two years ago that presents search results as structured data. At the time Squared seemed overly ambitious (the structured results didn’t seem very reliable), but obviously it’s come a long way.
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