December, 2009Archive for

Free Screen-Sharing Web App Means No Hassle Tech Support For Mom

LogMeIn Express is a free screen-sharing web app that allows you to immediately share your computer screen with up to 100 viewers without any registration hassles or sign up costs. The app has has an extremely simple interface.  If you would like to share your screen, it prompts you to download and install a small app.  To view another shared screen, you simply type in a 12-digit code. LogMeIn, which went public in July, has had successes recently with iPhone apps for remotely accessing and ...
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Blippy.com Is A Social Networking App For Your Credit Card

Blippy.com may be the stupidest idea ever destined for greatness and potential world domination.  It's a social network for spending habits.  According to founder Philip Kaplan, It answers the question "What are your friends buying?" The screnshot below provides a glimpse at what the world of socially networked credit cards will look like (image via Techcrunch): Central to the idea is that users will assign only one of their multiple credit cards to publish results on the system.  Th...
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Skype App For Nokia Smartphones In Beta

Skype announced today that they will be releasing a limited beta version of a native Skype client for Symbian OS, the operating system of most Nokia smartphones. The app will allow free skype-to-skype calling internationally, as well as access to the popular Skype Out service.  It's a 6 mb download. Supported phones and download links: * Symbian S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 devices * Nokia E71 * Nokia E63 * Nokia E66 * Nokia N82 * Nokia E51 * Nokia N95 * Nokia N95 8GB * Nokia ...
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Insurance Industry Lobbying Group Offering Facebook Gamers Imaginary “Currency” To Oppose Health Care Reform

Virtual bribery is now a reality.  Business Insider is reporting that insurance industry lobbying groups are offering Facebook gamers in-game currency to oppose Obama's health care reforms. The practice is already fairly common - companies like Netflix have long offered in-game currency for trying their products. The anti-health care reform program, called "Get Health Reform Right" asks gamers to take a survey, which then automatically generates an email to the user's Congressional Rep...
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New Dragon Dictation iPhone App Is Free (For Now)

Dragon Dictation, the market leader in voice to text dictation software has just released an iPhone app, which integrates with the device's messaging, email and clipboard functions. All speech to text processing by the app is carried out in the cloud on the developer's servers. Functionality of the app is straightforward: you press the button and start talking.   After recording, you can edit the resulting text before sending or saving. Since the processing is carried out remotely, ...
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Apple In Talks To Purchase Music Startup Lala

Apple is rumored to be close to completing the acquisition of three-year-old Palo Alto music start-up Lala. There's a lot of speculation on what this could mean in terms of the evolution of iTunes and the iPod, iPhone ecosystem.  Lala is a cloud-based music library and player— it allows users to store and stream their own music online and stream it without downloading. This would allow Apple's users access to their music libraries across multiple devices, reduce the need for large hard...
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Google Wants To Take DNS Duties Away From Your ISP

Google has just announced its  Google Public DNS service.  This service allows users to replace their standard DNS server configuration with its own option. The argument here is that Google's infrastructure will supply faster result times than an ISP's own DNS server, and that Google will do a better job of keeping its domain database updated. Using Google Public DNS should be as simple as entering 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 for your DNS server in your Internet connection settings.  The service is f...
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Chrome OS’s Secret Printing Solution: Don’t

One of the most difficult aspects of launching a new operating system is making sure that it has all of the drivers necessary to work with the wide range of peripherals and hardware that users are likely to attach to their machines. Standards have appeared lately for many of these devices (USB drives, mouses, keyboards, monitors, etc.).  Printers, however, remain frustratingly unstandardized.  Almost every printer requires a unique driver that allows it to communicate with the operating s...
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Wonderfactory Demo For Sports Illustrated Shows The Tablet Future Of Magazines

The Wonderfactory teamed up with Time, Inc. to produce the following example of how tablets will push the boundaries of the new media experience for publishers and advertisers.  This is clearly along the lines of what Apple has in mind for the iTablet, but it's also a pretty convincing version of what the future of rich content browsing will look like for everyone. (And yes, it's just a demo, so those perfectly manicured disembodied hands in the demo aren't real.  Are kind of creepy.  Aren't ...
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Square Offers Smartphone-based Credit Card Processing

Square is a new credit card payment processing system for use on smartphone devices (currently only the iPhone) that is now in beta testing. The physical unit, seen in the picture above, is a one-inch diameter slim plastic box that plugs into a device's standard 3.5 mm audio jack. The software allows for payment approval, records signatures and can email or sms a detailed receipt (as below) The system can accept payments up to $60.  Square gets a percentage of every transaction charged th...
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Financial Blog ‘Seeking Alpha’ Raises Additional $7 Million

Financial blog Seeking Alpha announced that it has recently closed a Series B round of $7 million, led by Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital and DAG Ventures. Seeking Alpha has over 4 million unique visitors per month, based on its own Google Analytics stats. In May 2009, Seeking Alpha launched Instablogs, a blog platform for members to create their own finance related blogs, which are accessible through the Seeking Alpha site.  There are now over 2,000 of these publications. Simulta...
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Acer To Release Ten New Android Phones Next Year

Beginning with the Acer A1 Liquid smartphone, which was announced last month, and which should ship before the end of the year, Acer has now announced that it will be releasing a total of 10 new Android phones in 2010.  The company is hoping to capture 6-7% of the world smartphone market next year. The Liquid A1 will run Android 2.0, have a 1GHz processor, 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera, aGPS, and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. via New Cell Phones
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Groupon.com Raises $30 million In Second Round

Groupon, the Chicago-based group discount shopping site, has raised $30 million in second round financing from Accel Partners and New Enterprise Associates. They had previously raised $5.8 million from New Enterprise Associates and angel investors. Groupon is now available in 26 cities, including New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.  The new investment will be used to market the site to new customers and expand the service to additional cities. The concept of Groupon is that i...
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Facebook Hits 350 Million Users, Updates Privacy Features

Facebook hit 350 million users last night, the site announced to its users in an open letter from founder Mark Zuckerberg.  Also announced was the removal of 'regional networks' (cities, countries, etc.), which were found to be a security and privacy hole that was not well understood by users.   Previously, all members of a regional network had complete access to each other's information as a default choice.  Now, users will have the choice of making their information available to friends, f...
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