Filed under: Displays, HDTV

Check it: Sony's unloaded a nice foursome today with its all new (but eerily familiar) W4000-Series lineup. Available in 32-, 40-, 46- and 52-inch sizes, the newest members of the BRAVIA family all feature a 1080p resolution, Picture Frame Mode, BRAVIA Engine 2, BRAVIA Sync, XMB, 24p True Cinema, USB Photo Viewer, 178-degree viewing angles, a built-in DVB-T tuner, VGA port and a trio of HDMI connectors for good measure. The 32-incher gets stripped down a bit with the omission of Live Color Creation, a 10-bit panel, PhotoTV HD, and x.v.Color -- all of which are included on the larger models. Unfortunately, Sony's keeping quiet with regard to pricing / availability, but we'd certainly keep an eye out for any strange new shelf inhabitants over in Europe.

[Via Pocket-lint]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

Filed under: Displays, HDTV

Check it: Sony's unloaded a nice foursome today with its all new (but eerily familiar) W4000-Series lineup. Available in 32-, 40-, 46- and 52-inch sizes, the newest members of the BRAVIA family all feature a 1080p resolution, Picture Frame Mode, BRAVIA Engine 2, BRAVIA Sync, XMB, 24p True Cinema, USB Photo Viewer, 178-degree viewing angles, a built-in DVB-T tuner, VGA port and a trio of HDMI connectors for good measure. The 32-incher gets stripped down a bit with the omission of Live Color Creation, a 10-bit panel, PhotoTV HD, and x.v.Color -- all of which are included on the larger models. Unfortunately, Sony's keeping quiet with regard to pricing / availability, but we'd certainly keep an eye out for any strange new shelf inhabitants over in Europe.

[Via Pocket-lint]

 

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

What it does

TheUnFunded.com is a community for venture capitalists where they can discuss and rate startup companies. TheUnFunded was inspired and created in part due to the community TheFunded where entrepreneurs could vent and discuss venture capitalists. TheUnFunded is a bit of the same, the site discusses startup companies and is far from generous with the company ratings. The companies are rated on five factors” the strength of the team, operating experience, market opportunity, pitching effectiveness, and competitive differentiation. The highest score for each category is five and the ratings posted on the site and visible to visitors show that most companies have scores under 2. Besides the ratings users can comment and express their opinions of the startup company and choose to agree or disagree with other users. You can search for companies by region and add a company to be evaluated. Users must be venture capitalists to join the community. It seems as though there is a great deal of bashing in the community. TheUnFunded is a place where venture capitalists can vent.

In their own words

“I admit it. I am jealous.

After seeing the sense of community and camaraderie that TheFunded.com has created for entrepreneurs, I knew that I had to try to replicate it for my fellow venture capitalists. After reading such insightful reviews of my peer VC's -- where they have been called "nutcases," "stupid" and "rude and arrogant"-- I knew I needed to create a venue for VC's to provide equally insightful analysis on entrepreneurs .

Venture capitalists see thousands of pitches a year. And while we've "compared notes" and collaborated amongst ourselves informally before, TheUnFunded.com was built to help break down the barriers.

Enjoy!”

Why it might be a killer

TheUnFunded has an attractive interface and the site is easy to navigate. The location search filters are useful for users who are looking for a specific company. It is good to have a breakdown of the rating system so that users can see exactly how others are calculating the final score or each startup company.

Some questions

It seems as though this site may just be for venting and not have any constructive value. Although users can have an anonymous identity venting may be best done in private.

Updates


 » original news

Filed under: Features, Portable Audio, Portable Video

We've had the good fortune of putting a Sony NWZ-A829 through its paces over the last few days. Remember, that's Sony's top of the line, 2.4-inch, QVGA Walkman with stereo Bluetooth A2DP and 16GB of flash. With Sony CEO, Howard Stringer, ceding portable audio victory to Apple, we had high hopes for the NWZ-A829 as an out of the box video player. After all, Howie said 9 months ago, "We have worked very hard to catch up so that in the age of video we will not suffer as much as we did in audio." So how did it do? See our take after the break.

Continue reading Video: Hands-on Sony's NWZ-A829 Walkman with Bluetooth

 

Permalink | Email this | Comments

---

OK, it’s now officially too overwhelming to keep covering all the jokes that are sprouting up everywhere, so I’ve decided to make a quick selection of some I find particularly well executed.

5. Destructoid turns to Foxtoid - The folks at Destructoid were always great when it comes to making fun of mainstream media, and this time is no different. Have a problem? Kid not doing well at school? Wife cheating on you? Blame the video games, man!

4. World Of Warcraft: Molten Core. If you have never played the game, skip this one. If, like me, you’ve spent endless days and nights in that damn instance (I was totally slacking though, enhancement Shaman ftw), it’ll make you laugh (and the addiction will resurface, hitting you like a ton of bricks. I almost bought another month.) Check the site out, there’s even a trailer there.

3. The Mahalo Daily Steve Jobs interview. Ok, the punchline is a bit stale, but the introduction is cool. They would have had me going if I haven’t seen 12438 April fools jokes today.

2. Revision3’s flipped videos - nifty idea. Seemingly, nothing is wrong with the site, but all the videos are flipped, which is particularly cool when there’s text on the video. NoitanggiD, anyone?

1. Betamax to HD-DVD - this actually made me laugh out loud. As ThinkGeek put it, “many folks that recorded home movies between the year 1975 and about 1984. Think Air Supply, Pat Benatar, and ‘Who Shot JR?’ and you’ll get the idea. So we took a trip to Awesome Town and picked up this nifty Betamax to HD-DVD converter - at a price that shouts “Totally Tubular”. Betamax and HD-DVD are like a match literally made in heaven (you know, that place you go when you die?), and now you can get a slice for yourself.” I don’t know about you, but I’m ordering one of these babies right now.

What are your favorites for this year? Please share them in the comments.

ShareThis

What it does

Are your wheels always turning? If they are you should see if your ideas are worthwhile. At WorthIdea.com users can express their ideas and see if they are indeed good ideas. A user at WorthIdea.com can register their idea by listing the title, topic, price, description, and translation. The idea is public during the access period when users can vote, reject, and comment on the idea. After the free access period the ideas that are not rejected become worth-ideas that now must be bought in order to use. Other users with a problem can visit the site browse through the worth-ideas and then buy the ideas they find useful. WorthIdea.com connects users with problems with users with solutions. You can search through the ideas which are organized by category: society, technology, business opportunities, company, and science. There are then subcategories to help users find specific ideas. The site is available in Spanish and English. If you are always thinking innovatively, you can start benefiting financially from your brilliant ideas at WorthIdea.com.

In their own words

“In the well-known society of information and knowledge we are living in, we are convinced that everyone of us has the duty and the right of being an innovation and development promoter. How? Expressing our opinions, saying what we need and what we think it could be done to improve the world. But nowadays we don’t have the platform to make our ideas be heard/for our ideas to be heard. WorthIdea want to become that global platform to make all our dreams come true.

This platform will help people who need ideas to improve their business or even start new ones. With low cost they will be able to profit from the whole knowledge of WorthIdea users, being able even to suggest specific topics to the users.

We were waiting for you. Welcome to the WorthIdea Community.”

Why it might be a killer

WorthIdea.com has an attractive interface. The site is well organized and easy to navigate. It is great that WorthIdea.com users a filter for the worth ideas. The community decides which ideas are worth ideas so that only good ideas are available. The categories and sub categories are useful so users can find the worth ideas that interest them. Connecting problems with solutions is one of the great benefits if the internet and the more sites that connect people and have them help each other the better.

Some questions

What is the standard cost of a worth idea? Will WorthIdea.com expand to include more languages?

Updates


 » original news

A new service, Sniffu, has developed a new cell service that gives people an electronic map showing the location of their friends, writes The Times of London.

The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) can be accessed by Facebook or cell phone and is already popular in Scandinavia. Sniff is run by Useful Networks, which is owned by Liberty Media.

Sniff says only consumers who give their permission could be electronically tracked by the service and plans to charge users about 75 pence in the UK (about a buck) for each location “sniff”, with the results for mobile customers sent by return text.

It looks like the first Facebook application to apply premium charges to customers’ mobile bills.

In many respects, it’s not unlike what Loopt is doing with its friend-finder features, but the Facebook aspect looks like a new twist.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

First, this is not an April Fools joke post. Biggs does those, not me.

This is ApriPoco, a small helper robot created by Toshiba. It can learn how to accomplish any number of tasks using its built-in infrared sensor, like turning on the TV, useful for the elderly (or lazy).

There’s a reason why ApriPoco looks as childlike as it does. Its developers know how frustrated people can get when a machine doesn’t perform as expected, so what better way to prevent undue robot harm by making it look as innocent as possible?

This particular model is only meant for research purposes, but Toshiba is said to be mulling over creating a similar one for commercial release.

“Robot, do this week’s Endorsement for me. I’m busy trying to figure out how to move abroad.”

One of the lessons we’ve learned from Al Gore is that it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. We all like to tool around in our SUVs, but too much driving leads to global warning. We must all take responsibility for our own carbon emissions.

The same goes for online privacy, except that there the problem is storage rather than carbon emissions. We all want more and bigger hard drives, but what is going to be stored on those drives? Information, probably relating to other people. The equation is simple: more storage equals more privacy invasion.

That’s why I have pledged to maintain a storage-neutral lifestyle. From now on, whenever I buy a new hard drive, I’ll either delete the same amount of old information, or I’ll purchase a storage offset from someone else who has extra data to delete. By bidding up the cost of storage offsets, I’ll help create a market for storage conservation, without the inconvenience of changing my storage-intensive lifestyle.

Government can do its part, too. If the U.S. government adopted a storage-neutral policy, then for every email the NSA recorded, the government would have to delete another email elsewhere — say, at the White House. It’s truly a win-win outcome. And storage conservation technology can help drive the green economy of the twenty-first century.

For private industry, a cap-and-trade system is the best policy. Companies will receive data storage permits, which can be bought and sold freely. When JuicyCampus conserves storage by eliminating its access logs, it can sell the unused storage capacity to ChoicePoint, perhaps for storing information about the same JuicyCampus posters. The free market will allocate the limited storage capacity efficiently, as those who profit by storing less can sell permits to those who profit by storing more.

Debating these policy niceties is all well and good, but the important thing is for all of us to recognize the storage problem and make changes in our own lives. If you and I don’t reduce our storage footprint, who will?

Please join me today in adopting a storage-neutral lifestyle. You can start by not leaving comments on this post.

What it does

FuseCal is a service that allows users to sync all of their calendars so that you can get all of your events and schedule information from one master calendar. Everyone’s schedule can get hectic from work engagements to personal events but the reality is you must stay organized and FuseCal helps you do that. You can add any type of iCalendar to the service. You can take a look at some iCalendars at the Apple iCalendar library. Once you have found a calendar you want to add you simply copy the url to the file and paste it into FuseCal. You can also add tags to your calendars so they are easier to find. You can even subscribe to calendar event feeds and choose the events you want to subscribe to. You can subscribe to a calendar by choosing a calendar that supports iCalendar feeds such as: windows calendar, Microsoft outlook, and google calendar. When a calendar changes your calendar is instantly updated so you can be sure that your calendar is up to date and accurate. FuseCal makes being organized easy.

In their own words

“FuseCal™ makes it simple to stay up to date with any calendar on the web. We sync events to your personal calendar program, and send you updates when they change.”

Why it might be a killer

FuseCal.com has an attractive interface. The site is easy to navigate and explains the service well. It is great that FuseCal offers users the option of subscribing to events and iCalendars. FuseCal has the potential to be very popular because the application provides a service that is needed by most everyone. Staying organized is a challenge that many people face and need help with.

Some questions

FuseCal could feature a testimonial section where users can declare how wonderful and useful FuseCal is. A five minute video is a bit long and when I went to see the screencast it wasn’t playing.

Updates


 » original news