YouTube Adds Auto-Captioning Feature

YouTube announced a new automatic captioning (Auto-Caps) function today for English language videos on the service. The site will now be able to automatically generate subtitles using speech recognition technology.  It will also allow video owners and publishers to upload transcript texts for their videos.  The uploaded text will not require any timing data, as the Auto-Caps function will figure out when the words are spoken in the video and display the captions at the correct time. Cl...
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The Browser Is The OS: Google Announces Chrome OS

Google announced its Chrome OS operating system today, which should be released in about a year.  The basic concept here is that the operating system will be a free, lightweight, fast-loading, self-updating platform to take advantage of your computer's hardware and get you connected to the internet via a browser-like interface. Google is already working with netbook manufacturers to define specs for future Chrome OS computers.  (Think netbooks with tiny flash-memory hard drives - the idea...
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30 To 50 Updates To Google Docs Expected In A Year

President of Google's Enterprise Division Dave Girouard is talking major smack about Google Docs being able to completely replace Microsoft Word in a year.  (To be fair, though, in the same breath he's also admitting that the online word processor isn't quite up to the task yet.) So, what's going to happen?  What killer features can we expect? We've been dying to go fully virtual and make Google Docs our sole document tool since it came out... Unfortunately, there are no specifics ...
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Instapaper Now Allows Direct Download Of Websites To Kindles

Instapaper has a new feature that allows the web pages you have marked to "read later" to be saved in a Kindle-readable format that can then be transferred to the Kindle via its USB connection. The big bonus here is that it's absolutely free.  It might not be the best solution for daily news items - the paid subscription route is probably a better for that - but could definitely come in handy for longer articles you just don't have the time or desire to read in front of your computer. ...
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Google Rumored To Acquire Gizmo5

The Washington Post is reporting that Google is rumored to be acquiring VoIP company Gizmo5 in an important move that, if true, will result in serious improvements to both Google Voice and Google Talk. You may have heard of Gizmo5 in relation to Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis' recent IP lawsuit with their former company.  In that lawsuit, Skype settled with the founders regarding charges that royalties were not being properly being paid to Joltid, which owned crucial back...
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Creative’s Zii Released: The World’s First 1080p Blu-ray Quality Handheld Media Processor

Creative spinoff ZiiLABS has cooked up a new system-on-a-chip architecture for high-demand, low-power, mobile media applications. Expect to see this chip in portable media players, e-book readers, smart phones and netbooks in the near future. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW9rUfejLss] The Press Release: ZiiLABS Introduces ZMS-08: The World's First 1080p Blu-ray Quality Handheld Media Processor New ZMS-08 StemCell Processor Offers Faster, Lower-Power Single Chip Solut...
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Rupert Murdoch Would Like To Abolish “Fair Use”, Remove All News Corp. Content From Search

News Corp founder and CEO Rupert Murdoch announced via his Sky News Network that he believes that the doctrine of Fair Use could be challenged in court and “barred altogether”, and that he is open in the future to removing News Corp content from Google in a bid to start charging directly for content on the Internet. Asked why News Corp. hasn’t already  made its sites invisible to Google and other search engines (easily done, through robots.txt), Murdoch replied: “I think we will….but that...
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New Asus Tablet-Laptop Touchscreen Netbook Now On Sale in US

The new Asus Eee PC T91MT is now available on Amazon.com (in white only) for $532.00. We're not necessarily sold.  But for those who absolutely have to have touch-screen capability and who really need the ability to flip their monitor around to use their laptop in tablet format and who don't mind a significantly smaller screen size, lower processor speed and less storage space than the cheaper 1000-1009 series, then this just might be the netbook for you. Unfortunately,  touch-screens ...
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The New Mimo “Mobile Slider” USB Monitors Are A Perfect Netbook Accessory

` Here's a gift idea for anyone planning on giving somebody a netbook this year, or who may have given one last year:  Mimo has 2 new portable model monitors that hook up to your netbook via USB and don't require an additional graphics card.  To us, these look like they could be the perfect companion for the smaller-screened netbooks. With the same basic features as Mimo's earlier models  (the monitors have a display size of 7 inches, 800 x 480 resolution and are connected via USB 2.0), the 71...
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The Pangolin Backpack From Cyclus Is Like Wearing a Protoss Reaver On Your Back

Made from recycled truck tires and manufactured in Colombia, the Pangolin Backpack from Cyclus has sliding segments that enclose an area roughly the size of the dragon egg from Eragon.
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The Twitter Times: What We Thought Twitter Was Going To Be Before We Joined

Had The Twitter Times been around for the past few years, I would have been far more sympathetic to the Twitter phenomenon.  Regardles, it's an idea whose time has certainly come.  The Twitter Times provides a newspaper-style way of displaying news content contained in links tweeted by people you are following on Twitter, as well as selected items from those they follow as well. The Twitter Times - Video Tour from Maxim Grinev on Vimeo. Items are sorted based on how often a particular ...
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Google CEO Discusses Future of Online News

[picture via guardian.co.uk Technology Blog] Presentation, Consumption and Organization of information is constantly on Google's mind, as was made clear by an enlightening Q & A session with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The most illuminating excerpt was in response to a question by by Harvard's Zachary Seward on what the primary news reader will look like in 5 or 10 years: Well, that person will be probably on a tablet or a mobile phone, probably the majority of the reading will presumabl...
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Apple Chief Designer Jonathan Ives Talks Design, Fabrication and Philosophy

Gary Hustwit's new film 'Objectified' tackles the issue of industrial design in today's culture.  One 5-minute section has been getting quite a bit of attention - a short piece with Jonathan Ives, chief designer for Apple.  This brief look into the secretive Apple design studio is a tech voyeur's dream.  In it, he discusses how a designer's job should be to "get design out of the way" and how his team spends much of their time working on simplifying fabrication processes in order to get more uti...
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iPhone App Developer Caught Snooping on Phone Numbers

Vampires Live, Zombies Live and Rockstars Live developer Storm8 has been caught storing users’ cell phone numbers on their servers.  This is a pretty troubling development and food for thought for iPhone owners using third party apps. One lawsuit from a user is already underway. The company is defending itself by saying the situation was caused by a "bug" in its software. Let's hope publicity on this situation will make sure it never happens again.  We're still waiting to hear Apple's public s...
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Unreal Engine Developer Kit Now Available For Download… By Anybody

Epic Games and Nvidia have announced that the previously very difficult (and very expensive) to get your hands on Unreal Development Kit for it's newest Unreal Engine 3 is now freely downloadable. Even better, The UDK is free for noncommercial and educational use.  For for-profit projects, licensing terms are 25% of all revenue over $5,000. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNQLL92bOJQ] Start your engines, kids.  Go forth and create cool stuff.   The future is bright. UDK inclu...
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Google Voice May Go Global Pretty Soon!

image from Download Squad Businessweek analyzed documents submitted by Google to the FCC regarding its Google Voice service and found tantalizing hints that the company is planning to roll out the mobile-connected Internet calling service globally. In the document, Google says it has already signed contracts with a number of "international service providers for inputs to Google Voice." To date, none of these services have been launched yet.  Contracts already signed is a pretty good sign, thou...
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Ebay Settles Lawsuit With Skype Founders; Spinoff Of Company Moving Forward

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype who sold the company to Ebay in 2005 for $2.6 billion had recently been holding up the resale of the company with lawsuits charging that IP central to the internet telephony service was owned by another of their companies, Joltid - and that Skype owed Joltid licensing fees. These lawsuits were settled today by Ebay, who agreed with Zennström and Friis to give them a 14 percent stake in their old company, which will now completely own the...
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Motorola Droid Goes On Sale Today

If you've been anywhere near a TV or tech blog in the last month, you know that Motorola's Droid is the company's newest smart phone, and the latest contender in the struggle to compete with the iPhone.  Built with the active involvement and oversight of Google, the phone runs the latest version of Google's Android operating system.  Its got a touch screen, a slide-out keyboard, a cool mouse-type thumb controller and can run any app on Android's 3,000 strong (and growing) app store. The p...
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Sweet Add-On Gives You Firefox 3.7 Functionality Now

Firefox 3.7 promises to have some nifty new features, such as improved memory handling, faster video decoding and improved stability.  But let's not forget about the important stuff  - nifty visual gimmicks!  For one of these tricks, Firefox 3.7 is going to move the progress bar from the bottom of the screen to the top of each tab. Enter this new Firefox add-on, Tab Progress Bar, which replicates this feature in the current stable version of Firefox, so you can enjoy this groovy goodness witho...
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Google Dashboard Allows Users to See/Edit The Data Google Stores About You

Google announced a new tool today that will allow users with Google accounts to see all the various data the company keeps about them and to edit or erase some (not all) of that data. According to Google, you'll soon find a link to Google Dashboard in the "personal settings" of the "my account" page. The dashboard will contain: "some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail ...
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