14 new stories on The Next Web today |  |
- Samsung Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Suit Emerge
- Messy Mac Address Book? You need Contacts Cleaner
- Nokia shuts down Ovi Music Unlimited service in Finland, other countries to follow? [Updated]
- Samsung TV Apps Surpass 2 Million Downloads
- Labels fight piracy by letting you buy songs as soon as radio starts playing them
- Want to access Facebook from within Gmail? Now you can.
- Mobile app developers, an opportunity: The Mobile Premier Awards
- 5 must-have gadgets for the geek family
- 5 Must See Videos from the Web This Week
- Silicon Valley Uncovered: Foodspotting celebrates 1 year and $3 million, but why is the Android app still in beta?
- Canada prepares for the electric car. Are we ready?
- App Store Classics: Bebot – more than the sum of its parts.
- WordPress 3.0 Surpasses 30 Million Downloads
- Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily gets a Twitter account
- Facebook apps can now access your phone number and home address
| Samsung Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Suit Emerge Posted: 17 Jan 2011 03:57 AM PST Two new Samsung Android handsets, the Samsung Galaxy Ace and the Galaxy Suit, have emerged in clear (but small) leaked photos, showing the next handsets to carry forward the popular Galaxy range of smartphones. You may recognise the Samsung Galaxy Ace, we featured it recently when it circulated numerous internet blogs known only as the Galaxy S Mini. The specifications are mostly unknown but it is said to sport a HVGA (480 x 320 pixels) screen, run Android 2.2 and feature Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, MicroUSB, 5MP camera, and MicroSD card support. The phone will be known as the Samsung S5830 and it will is thought to run Android 2.2 at launch (although this is not confirmed).
Also revealed was the Samsung Galazy Suit, a device also know as the S5670. Looking to be just as small as the Ace, if not smaller, the Suit will probably be a slight variation of its Ace counterpart, providing a smaller alternative to Samsung’s larger Galaxy S smartphones.
Both handsets are set for a Mobile World Congress unveiling, we expect more information on these handsets to become available before then so check back for more updates. |
| Messy Mac Address Book? You need Contacts Cleaner Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:48 AM PST
Things get even worse when syncing with on-line address books and mobile devices. Then you get a very messy address book (sync services are incredibly difficult to do right). Even though on-line services like Plaxo and Google do have automated ‘de-dupers’, they’re not very intelligent and often your address book is in a worse state after using their services. Even Apple Address Book does have built-in de-dupe functionality, but again it’s not very clever. However now there’s a very cost-effective solution that works remarkably well and just “does the right thing”. Contacts Cleaner is an amazing little program available through the newly launch Apple Mac App Store which will go through your address book and sensibly merge, delete and clean up your contacts. It does sensible things with duplicated contacts and fields and removing unwanted data through an easy to use interface. Many of the cleaning features have several options, but the default is generally the right. Contacts can be changed individually or by checking the “fix all similar” box, anything with the same issue will be fixed in one go. Quirks
Contacts Cleaner does sometimes get a bit confused if you fix something directly in Address Book while it’s running, but that’s easily fixable by stopping the app and restarting (and for good measure exporting and re-importing again). Scanning almost 4,000 contacts takes around 15 seconds, but saves you hours of fixing things manually. For once, an app really does “what it says on the tin”. Contacts Cleaner costs £2.99 and is available now in the Mac App Store. |
| Nokia shuts down Ovi Music Unlimited service in Finland, other countries to follow? [Updated] Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:38 AM PST Updates at the foot of the post. According to E’s Phone Blog, Nokia is to shut down its Ovi Music Unlimited subscription service in Finland, with it possible that the company might close the service in other markets also. Nokia offered a one year subscription to Ovi Music Unlimited with the purchase of new Nokia mobile phones, allowing its customers to download as much music as they wished and keep the tracks once the subscription period ended.
Closure of the service, once known as Comes With Music, was detailed in a leaked document from the Finnish mobile giant, highlighting that on January 1, no new devices would be shipped with the unlimited music subscription. Existing customers in Finland would also be restricted from renewing their one-year license. It appears the Ovi Music Store will remain open, it is currently the subscription services that are affected. It’s another blow for Nokia, which intended on delivering a music service that could rival Apple’s popular iTunes platform – the service was moved to the Ovi brand in attempt to popularise the service to end users but today’s developments look to have confirmed its efforts had failed. We have reached out to Nokia to confirm the news, more on this as it develops. Update: Reuters has confirmed that the service will be shut down in 27 countries, Nokia believes its customers want DRM-free music which will remain available via its Ovi Music Store:
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| Samsung TV Apps Surpass 2 Million Downloads Posted: 17 Jan 2011 02:06 AM PST
Demonstrating the demand for applications on Samsung’s Smart TV’s, the number of apps downloaded doubled since November, offering 380 applications (259 of which are free) to its customers in over 120 countries around the world. Whilst it took 268 days for the store to reach one million downloads, it only took 53 days to reach two million, with consumers downloading an average of 100,000 applications every five days. Samsung is well known for supporting its developer community, the company regularly schedules events and meetings for Samsung Apps developers so that they can ask questions and understand the tools made available by Samsung.
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| Labels fight piracy by letting you buy songs as soon as radio starts playing them Posted: 17 Jan 2011 01:51 AM PST
Paid Content UK reports that the move by Universal and Sony is designed to beat the piracy problem caused by songs currently being played on the radio up to six weeks before customers can download them from music stores like iTunes. The labels have found that searches for songs on Google or iTunes peak two weeks before they’re available to buy. As a result, the public has grown bored of, or pirated, a song before they have any chance to actually buy it. The move to instant availability is long overdue, in my opinion. The practice of “setting up” a song with weeks of pre-release airplay may have made sense in the pre-online music stores days as it maximised first weeks sales, leading to a high opening chart position. As soon as Napster came along, the idea of anything but instant gratification being acceptable to the music-buying public died. It’s quite surprising that it’s taken a decade for major labels to start to make the move. Both labels will begin selling all singles on the same day that radio starts playing them from next month.PaidContentUK, Image source |
| Want to access Facebook from within Gmail? Now you can. Posted: 17 Jan 2011 01:01 AM PST
If you are one of those Gmail users that constantly has one tab open to keep on top of the onrushing torrent of electronic mail you receive and another to check on the latest updates on your Facebook feed, you might be surprised to learn there is a way to integrate Facebook into your Gmail account by way of the Google Labs experiement “Add any gadget by URL”. Just follow these easy steps (provided by Instant Fundas) to integrate Facebook from within your Gmail account: 1. Log in to your Gmail account and click the ‘Settings’ link at the top right of the screen. 2. Click the "Labs" tab, locate "Add any gadget by URL". Enable the option and click ‘Save Changes‘ at the bottom of the screen.
3. You will now have an option added to the Settings page entitled ‘Gadgets‘. Click this option and enter the following into the field provided, clicking ‘Add’ to save: http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/104971404861070329537/facebook.xml 4. You will now have an new widget added to your Gmail sidebar. To load the widget, click ‘Expand‘ and you will be presented with a Facebook Connect button. 5. Connecting your Facebook account will require permissions to access your account, click allow and your Facebook feed will be loaded inside Gmail’s main body. If you aren’t happy with permitting access to your account, it might be worth staying away from this widget or monitoring the application if you do use it. |
| Mobile app developers, an opportunity: The Mobile Premier Awards Posted: 16 Jan 2011 11:53 PM PST With so many applications submitted to the App Store, Android Market and other smartphone marketplaces, getting your application noticed can be tricky. Instead of relying on getting your app featured on an App Store or picked up by a reputable outlet to gain momentum, there are a number of ways to promote your app and get it noticed, one of these being AppCircus; a global platform showcasing the most creative and innovative apps that allows you to demonstrate your app in action during some of the most influential international events in the mobile/tech scene.
The next influential international event? Only Mobile World Congress. That’s right, AppCircus are currently looking for the very best app submissions with a view to announcing the top apps at The Mobile Premier Awards, due to be held in Barcelona on February 14. There have already been a large number of submissions, the last count on January 14 topped 450 entries. If you are involved in a startup or a developer who wants a top international jury (including our very own Patrick de Laive) to select your creation amongst 19 other finalists, have the opportunity to showcase your app in a 3-minute pitch live at the event in Barcelona in front of investors, operators, media companies and other influential mobile personalities – time is running out, as submissions for the awards are closing on February 18. The nominated apps for the Mobile Premier Awards 2011 edition will include the various winners of the AppCircus series of events across 2010 but also the best apps from the AppCircus Categories. To enter, you are required to submit your app into the AppCircus Categories but remember that there are a lot of categories to choose from, so make sure you check it out and select the appropriate one for your mobile app before submitting. Registration for the Mobile Premier Awards closes tomorrow (at Midnight CET) so make sure you submit your app as soon as possible. To register, click this link and fill out the registration form. Best of luck!Image Credit |
| 5 must-have gadgets for the geek family Posted: 16 Jan 2011 09:39 PM PST It’s been a kid weekend, for me. While I don’t normally focus on family-friendly tech, the events of this weekend (movies and family time and Internet, oh my!) have made me realize that there are 5 things that are indispensable tools that every family should have. That said, I’m sure you have your own, but here’s my list: Netflix
What becomes the quandary, at least for us, is deciding how we watch the content that we watch on Netflix. Do we invest in a Roku box? Maybe an Xbox 360? Or the Apple TV could be a great choice. As of yet, we’ve not settled onto any one device, so we’re typically watching via the MacBook Pro or some other computer in the house. We’ll make our decision soon, but not just yet. We just know that it’s $9 per month well spent. Netbooks
The joy of netbooks for the kids is in all of the things that we tech types tend to find annoying. They’re simple, they’re cheap (for the most part) and they’re small. In other words, they’re perfect for kid hands and to help them learn how to properly use a computer. Mix a netbook with a locked down copy of Windows 7 and you’re about as safe as any computer can get. Flip-style Video Cameras
For as long as I can remember, my kids have wanted to take pictures. Instead of handing over my fairly expensive Canon to their munchkin hands, I toss them the Playtouch and let them go crazy with it. While I typically end up with fifty pictures and a few minutes of video of my dog walking across the room, they still have a great time when we hook up the HDMI to the TV and look back at their “work”. Good MP3 PlayersMaybe this seems like a cop-out, but it’s really not. The fact of it is that music does indeed soothe the cranky 6 year old just as much as it does the savage beast. Now sure, you could go buy the cheapest mp3 player on the market, but you’re going to get what you pay for. Investing a few dollars in to a simple, but well-built (the iPod Shuffle and Samsung’s Galaxy Player come to mind) mp3 player will serve you well for years to come. Not only are they rigid enough to handle the bumps that will inevitably come, they also have controls such as volume limiting that really are important when you’re placing speakers only a few millimeters away from your kids’ ear drums. eBook Readers
Load them up with kids books. There are loads of them available for purchase, and even more available for free across the Internet. Just do yourself a favor and watch what they are reading. Just because they’ve taken an interest doesn’t mean that it’s all fair play. So that’s my list. What’s on yours? Anything that your family simply can’t do without? Let me know in the comments. I’ll be here, watching movies and reading what you say. |
| 5 Must See Videos from the Web This Week Posted: 16 Jan 2011 08:55 PM PST What do you love doing on a Sunday night? I love nothing more than to cuddle up in front of the fire catching up on my favourite videos from the web. Here are my top 5 from the past week: 1. 3D No glasses by Jonathan Post -Joke or real? 2. How To Be Alone. 3. Girl Falls In Mall Fountain While Texting. 4. Japanese marathon fail. 5. Josh Groban Sings Kanye West Tweets. |
| Posted: 16 Jan 2011 06:14 PM PST Foodspotting, the app allowing you to share pictures and locations of your favorite food, had its one year-old birthday party last night. The company, which recently announced $3 million in funding from BlueRun ventures, is popular not only amongst early adopters, but has 550,00 iPhone users worldwide and over 289,539 foods shared to date. I sat down with the cofounders Alexa Andrzejewski (Adaptive Path), Ted Grubb (Get Satisfaction) and Soraya Darabi (New York Times) and asked them how people sharing their favorite foods will amount to generating revenue. Alexa’s answer was that they are concentrating on making the product the best it can possibly be before thinking too much about revenue, but much like Foursquare and Gowalla the business model comes down to partnerships with food vendors and location deals. Afterwards I asked some party revelers what they thought of the app, most loved it and were avid users, but some (like the couple at the end of the video) found the Android app (still in Beta) difficult to install. A year on and Android app still in beta? Why? |
| Canada prepares for the electric car. Are we ready? Posted: 16 Jan 2011 06:03 PM PST
2011 is said to be the "year of the electric car" and will bring consumers a flood of impressive EVs from manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota and Porsche. One of the hotter designs is coming from Tesla. Electric cars are sexierCanadian gadget geeks and gear-heads alike should be excited for sexy new models like the Tesla Roadster Sport 2.5, an electric car that destroys the previous perception that electric cars were slow-moving two-seater minis. But wait.. Is Canada ready for electric cars?Anthony Haines, Chief executive of Toronto Hydro, voiced his concerns about the impact of electric cars to an audience at Ryerson University back in September of 2010. Haines stated that if ten percent of Toronto residents converted to electric cars, the current state of the grid couldn't handle the load. Energy companies in Ontario will be investing $7 million to a university lead center for urban energy over the next five years, preparing the cities for the influx of electric cars. A product that the province of Ontario expects will grow to five percent by 2020. Ryerson's new Centre for Urban Energy will use the funding to search for new and innovative ways that cities can produce more energy; how to distribute energy cleanly, how less energy can be used and new improved ways to store energy. Major Canadian cities such as Toronto suck energy from many miles away causing choke-points in the process as Ryerson's Ravi Seethapathy points out. He also says "Ideally, renewable energy should be put in the city". However, as it stands now, Seepthapthy says the systems aren’t currently wired to handle it.
Why some Canadians thought the Canadian government was killing the electric carBack in 2007, due to Canadian regulations on "low speed vehicles", a Canadian electric car manufacturer called Zenn was relegated to exporting its cars to the United States, Mexico, Europe and the province of British Columbia. CBC's Rick Mercer (Canada's version of Jon Stewart) highlights in the video below, that Canadian adoption of the low-speed EV's needed to happen province by province since jurisdictional restrictions varied across the country. Transport Canada authorized Zenn in 2007 to produce the vehicles but it washed its hands of whether the car was street-legal, passing the responsibility of each individual province and territory to handle the legislation. This ultimately left Canadians wondering if the arrival of electric cars would ever actually come to fruition and prompted the folks at the Green Party (an environmentally focused political party) to suggest that the Canadian government was deliberately killing the electric car. All in all the main issue was speed and since the low-speed vehicles didn't meet the crash standards for regular vehicles, the government prohibited them from reaching speeds over 40 km/hour –causing cars like the ZENN to be limited to slower public roads.
In September of 2008, it was announced that Vancouver city council had approved the low-speed electric cars to drive on streets which had a speed limit of 50 km per hour, a victory for low-speed electric cars that were now able to be driven on most city streets. It was also permitted in OakBay on Victoria Island and selected parts of Quebec. Federal and Provincial Governments embrace electric cars
By 2009 there was a shift of public perception, and despite the negative buzz previously surrounding electric cars in Canada, provincial governments began to make the arrival of electric cars a priority. Both electric and hybrid cars were now fast enough to travel on highways — low-speed cars like the Zenn (designed for urban use), remained on slower public streets. In 2009, Ontario government was the first province to partner with Better Place, a global provider of electric vehicle networks and services that is aiming to help accelerate the growth of EVs. Ontario also announced (in 2009) that it would be purchasing "500 of the new cars for government use" and offering "rebates of between $4000 and $10,000 for plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles and July 1, 2010." The rebates will vary by province but Canadians will likely continue to see government kick-backs for supporting a cleaner choice of vehicle. And as public quick-charging stations begin to sprout up across Canada, it will hopefully encourage more Canadians to choose electric. Why would you buy one?In a recent study conducted by IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBV), IBM spoke with both automobile industry executives and consumers in the United States, to reveal the current climate of opinion regarding electric vehicles. IBV asked customers their motivations behind why they may purchase one; higher oil prices and sustainability concerns being the two biggest factors driving consumers towards this new generation of car. CBC, Image: Electric Car, The Green Party, IBM, The Star, Image: Tesla |
| App Store Classics: Bebot – more than the sum of its parts. Posted: 16 Jan 2011 02:22 PM PST s On launching Bebot you're presented with a cute little retro looking robot which 'sings' as you move your fingers around the screen. This is instantly fun. He bends down to hit the low notes to the left of the screen and leans back to hit those highs to the right, and if you move your fingers vertically the filter opens up so that the sound really zings, positively encouraging you to put him through his paces. Kids love it and being a big kid myself, so do I.
A single tap on the plus or minus icons to the bottom left of the screen shifts you up or down an octave at a time. Double tapping the icon on the bottom right of the screen opens a menu and it's here you realise what lies beneath the surface of this little app. There are some splendid sounding presets in here, but if you fancy creating your own sound there are four different oscillator types available with some simple controls to sculpt the sound, in addition to an effects section with echo, overdrive and chorus controls. It's a pretty straightforward process which makes it a cinch to create a screaming lead synth sound, a nice mellow string sound, or almost anything in between.
In order to make sure your newly minted synth masterpiece sounds as awesome as possible when you play it, Bebot gives you a selection of scales to lock to. If you turn the note grid on, the app overlays a series of coloured vertical lines. Yellow lines represent a whole octave from the next nearest yellow line and the black and white lines correspond to the black and white keys within the scale, in the style of a piano keyboard. You can also put together your own scale very easily and adjust whether the app slides or snaps to the next note. Lastly, you have a 'zoom' slider which adjusts the density of notes when you play.
This all means you can't hit a bum note. I like that. A lot. I can't fault Bebot really – it'd be nice to be able to save a performance as an audio file, and perhaps have a couple more types of synthesis available but it's not a deal breaker. Sure, there are plenty of other far more comprehensive sound synthesis apps available these days, but Bebot already has everything it needs to keep me coming back for more of its robotic synthy goodness. |
| WordPress 3.0 Surpasses 30 Million Downloads Posted: 16 Jan 2011 11:57 AM PST
WordPress employs a counter on its website, counting each and every download of the WordPress software, and with WordPress 3.1 on the horizon its staggering to think just how many blogs there are in use, hosted in numerous countries around the world.
WordPress 3.0 broke the 20 million barrier in October, adding 10 million extra users in just under three months, but it isn’t the only WordPress property performing well for the Automattic, the company created by its founder Matt Mullenweg. WordPress.com, the commercially run arm of the popular blogging platform is growing incredibly fast, with 6 million new blog signups in the past year. WordPress.com saw its total pageviews for the year stand at 23 billion, up an impressive 53% from 2009. Media uploads also doubled to 94.5 terabytes of new photos and videos, while new posts were up 110% to 146 million. Mobile WordPress blogging was as on the up also -the company's userbase for its mobile apps increased 700% to 1.4 million in 2010. We got in touch with Automattic after Royal Pingdom picked up on stats published in late December that revealed that the WordPress.com now accounts for half of all WordPress blogs around the world. The 30 million downloads of WordPress 3.0 helping to account for the other half. The download counter isn’t necessarily indicative of the true amount of active WordPress blogs currently installed on servers worldwide but it is still a huge number. We have reached out to Automattic to see if it can shed any light on just how many WordPress installations are in use.TechieBuzz, Image Credit |
| Murdoch’s iPad newspaper The Daily gets a Twitter account Posted: 16 Jan 2011 07:00 AM PST
First we saw an image of what the newspaper will look like and now it appears to have got its own Twitter account. Just spotted by 9to5Mac, @daily is an officially verified Twitter account, meaning that Twitter has handed it to the holder of a trademark related to that name. Also, the account is only following one other user – one Greg Clayman, who just happens to be heading up development of The Daily. There are no tweets yet, no avatar and just over 100 followers at the time of writing, but it certainly looks like this will be the place to watch for official information about the title. Why should we care much about The Daily? Rumour has it that the magazine will be the flagship launch title for a new Apple subscription model that will allow users to easily obtain regular new issues of iPad magazines and newspapers with an automatic recurring payment. The development of this system is rumoured to be the reason for The Daily being pushed back from a mid-January launch.9to5Mac |
| Facebook apps can now access your phone number and home address Posted: 16 Jan 2011 05:14 AM PST
It’s worth noting that Facebook is only making this data available if you specifically approve it – apps you’ve already approved won’t have automatic access to the information. So, next time you install a Facebook app, look out for the “Access my contact information: Current Address and Mobile Phone Number” permission request. There are perfectly legitimate reasons why a Facebook app might want your home address and phone number. If it’s an address book app or some kind of telephony app, for example, that data would be incredibly useful. While it’s easy to imagine particularly disreputable developers selling your contact information on to unwanted marketing mailing lists, Facebook itself requires developers to only request data they need to operate their apps, not to sell data on to third parties and to display a clear privacy policy. So, now more than ever, it’s important to check the permissions and read the small print of any new Facebook apps you install. |
As Canadian energy companies prepare for a wave of electric cars about to hit the grid, the dialogue about the 
WordPress 3.0, the most recent self-hosted version of the world’s most popular blogging platform WordPress has surpassed 30 million downloads today, crossing the barrier earlier this morning.
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