Filed under: Home Entertainment

Personally, we can only imagine what a $300,000 speaker setup sounds like. But you -- we know you're eager to pick up the Epilogue Speaker System (previous edition shown) and rub it in the faces of everyone else, right? Regardless of whether you answered that truthfully or not, Goldmund (those same cats who actually had the nerve to create a $17,000 Blu-ray player) has introduced the latest version of the aforesaid system, which will now be built specifically for integration into the Goldmund Media Room. Pretty though they may be, we have a sneaking suspicion you won't be getting much bang for your buck with these -- but then again, what do our virgin ears know, anyway?

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Apparently the hit CBS show, CSI:New York, is becoming a hot bed to show off your web apps. Earlier this season, Linden Labs’ Second Life played a role in two episodes, and in tonight’s episode we’ll be treated to an appearance by Microsoft’s Photosynth.

Anthony Zuiker, creator of CSI, saw the technology while visiting the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA and decided it was perfect for his crime solving empire.  The technology can take multiple different images of an object, and looking for similar points, it stitches them together to make a 3D model of the location that you can explore inside of the software, zooming in on different details.

In tonight’s episode, the New York CSIs use the software to reconstruct a crime scene from all sorts of pictures, getting an accurate 3D model.  Technicians from Microsoft worked with the producers closely so that the software could do it’s own work in the episode.  As the application has not been released to the public yet, this will be the first opportunity for many people to get a good idea of how the software works.

If you prefer to catch the episode at a later time, you will be able to find it in full on the CBS website by tomorrow.

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The fifth Sun Startup Camp(SM) will be hosted by Sun Startup Essentials on May 4-5 2008 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

What is it? Startup Camp is an interactive “unconference”, i.e., no large conference panels all day. Instead, Startup Camp involves leader-moderated discussions that everyone is free to contribute to.

Interested participants may also publish topic ideas for discussion sessions and view those that others are proposing by visiting the Discussion Ideas page.

Register for FREE here.

Confirmed Speakers/panelists include:
Pete Cashmore
Jonathan Schwartz
David Berlind
Om Malik
Matt Marshall
Brian Solis
S. Neil Vineberg
Jason Hoffman

The event also includes SpeedGeeking, where startup founders can compete in the Best Startup Contest by presenting a 5-minute pitch of their business to VC led groups of peers. The top 3 participants who receive the most votes win prizes such as a new server, a 24″ monitor, or an iPod Touch.

Start off Startup Camp by joining Mashable’s Pete Cashmore and Kristen Nicole for brunch on Sunday morning (May 4th, 2008) from 10 - 11 am.

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Filed under: Peripherals, Portable Audio

Something's really wrong with the world if more than a few months pass by without a new iPod alarm clock from iLuv, so we suppose everyone's a-okay for a few more months now. Announced today, the firm has introduced its first pair of HD Radio clocks, and sure enough, one of 'em plays nice with Cupertino's darling. The i169 would be that player, which offers up a mostly black motif, dual stereo speakers, remote, iPod dock, AM / FM / HD Radio reception, an auxiliary input and dual alarm settings for good measure. As for the currently available i168, it provides most everything you read up there sans the iPod compatibility, but then again, it only demands $89.99. What about the i169, you ask? It'll set you back a cool $169.99 when it lands in "early May." Full release waiting after the break.

Continue reading iLuv kicks out i168 and i169 HD Radio alarm clocks

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theodp writes "I don't want my GTV. Excerpts from a newly-published Google patent application for Targeted Video Advertising: [1] 'Users may be allowed to skip particular commercials, but required to watch or accept a set number of commercials in order to watch a program. The required number may be, for example, a set integer, such as 11 commercials.' [2] 'The system...may also require the user to fully watch at least four promotions before the program will continue.' [3] 'The profile includes some demographic information of the user, such as income, age, and gender. This information may be obtained when the user registers for the video service.' [4] 'A commercial with the interactive format is an advertisement that requires user interaction to be completed (e.g., a survey).' Yikes."

This is only at the application stage, but it's difficult to see this getting anywhere. There are already interstitial advertising systems online that do exactly what appears to be described in this patent. But, even more to the point, in the past when companies have patented concepts such as preventing people from skipping over commercials, the backlash has been pretty loud.

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Filed under: Laptops

We're still hearing reports of MacBook Air overheating woe, well after an EFI update in April that was meant to address some of those problems. While hot computers are nothing new, the MacBook Air starts shutting down cores and offloading processes when things get bad, which means users are faced with aggravating stop-start freezing until they can manage to cool the computer off -- or just put it to sleep and let it "rest." Apparently some people have traced this back to the age-old misapplied thermal grease problem, but that's hardly a solace for the average consumer trying to convince Apple to fix this thing for them. We took a MacBook Air that was acting up into the Genius Bar and Apple claimed it couldn't reproduce the problem, though we have heard cases of Apple replacing the computer for users. We'd be curious to know just how many Air users are having trouble, and if the X300 is experiencing anything similar, so let us know in the comments.

View Poll

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Stan wrote a fairly simple rant, this morning.  This rant rings true with me as well. I haven’t gone so far as to enumerate my personal Firefox issues here with a Mashable piece, but my followers on Twitter and FriendFeed are likely all to familiar with the battle I’ve had browsers in trying to find something that works fairly well on my brand new laptop.

Louis Gray and Chris Pirillo suggested that I try Safari. I did, and while it performed fairly solid, on my Vista laptop, it was just about as slow as Internet Explorer (not to mention it mangled nearly every WordPress post I attempted).

Adam Hirsch keeps recommending I switch to Flock for more stability. I’ve tried that, but while I think it’s an innovative new browser that solves a lot of problems, I just can’t get past the way it rather mangles Twitter status updates in the built in sidebar - and the stability for me isn’t better than FF2.

I’ve tried, like Stan, the FireFox 3 Betas, and my crashes have diminished from multiple times a day down to about once a day.

Still, I have to wonder if there isn’t something better.  I live in my browser, almost literally. Judging from the comments on Stan’s piece, there are a number of you who live in the browser and have similar experiences.

Given the fact that our browser is becoming now, more than ever, the center of our world, I’m left to wonder if it isn’t time to start paying for a browser.  Granted, FireFox isn’t currently hurting for money.  But given that my livelihood depends on me being able to reliably browse the web, me paying upwards of $100 would be worth it to me to get better performance.

With that, today’s poll asks:

n
For a browser that runs quickly and doesn't crash, would you be willing to fork over some cash?
• Yes, it's worth it to me to pay for a browser.
• No, browsers should always be free.
View Results

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A study that will appear in tomorrow's New Scientist magazine found that social media sites, blogs, and instant messaging services were better at connecting people and providing warnings during emergencies than traditional sources of such information, according to the Telegraph. Dr. Leysia Palen, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado, led a research team that studied uses of social media during last fall's wildfires in California and last spring's shootings at Virginia Tech for the report.

During the wildfires, the team found that people were using Twitter to spread updates about where the fires were to friends and family, and Google maps mashups were hacked together to keep people informed of new fires and schools and businesses that were closed. This information was was being disseminated far more quickly than via official governmental channels, according to the report.

"The mass media were unreliable, the study found, as they struggled to access remote areas from which website users with an internet connection could easily report," writes Andy Bloxham. The mainstream media was seen to be focusing on "sensational" aspects of the fire as well, according to Palen, such as homes of celebrities that were caught by the fire.

While local authorities were still trying to organize after the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, a Wikipedia page accurately describing the shooting (according to Pelan) was online within 90 minutes of the first deaths. Students created the now famous "I'm OK at VT" Facebook group a scant 20 minutes after the Wikipedia article and began using the social network to connect family and friends. (From personal experience, I can tell you that many of my friends were on Facebook within hours that day trying to track down a mutual friend who attends the school.)

As we previously reported, the role of citizen journalism has begun to be recognized by mainstream media outlets during these tragedies. During the wildfires in California, for example, CNN's i-Report section saw dramatic growth and was eventually spun off as a standalone site.

"Members of the public play an absolutely critical role in disaster response. Now we’re seeing what happens when you superimpose a technological layer on top of that," Palen told the Telegraph. "Instead of rumour-mongering, we see socially produced accuracy."

We've noted that as the Twitterverse grows, it has become an amazing vehicle for the dissemination of breaking news because it breaks down the news cycle to mere seconds. We predicted that Twitter would "become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs." In February we reported that news of an eartquake in the UK first broke on Twitter and just a couple of days ago we wrote about the ways in which journalists can use Twitter (though not many yet are).

Yesterday we reported that use of mobile technologies by non-profit organizations on the ground is skyrocketing, and the Telegraph makes mention of the American Red Cross using Twitter to exchange local information during disasters. As mobile and social media tools become more prevalent in our lives, they will be used more and more as points of distribution for breaking news and emergency information. It is not surprising that social networks and social media sites are the first place people turn during a disaster -- online tools are fast, personal, and the web community is large -- and that is a habit that is only going to increase.

Filed under: Storage

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