After the BGR first announced to the world that Verizon and Vodafone would have exclusivity to the Thunder, the WSJ did a little more digging and managed to find out that the device will launch in Q3. That’s it for now.

What it does

AntennaSearch.com allows users to search their area to find out the number of cell phone, paging, microwave, and various other towers that exist around them. Site visitors enter their address, and from there, they can see how many registered and non-registered towers currently exist in the area. Site surfers can also search how many future towers may go up in their area in the future, and by whom, as stated in filed and pending tower building applications. The site suggests that the information found on AntennaSearch.com can be used for personal research to determine which cell phone providers are the best, as well as for general research and planning purposes.

In their own words



Why it might be a killer

Why it Might Be Killer:

This site has potential to appeal to the health-conscious, as well as the curious. It may not be the most exciting site, but it definitely provides accurate information. The question is whether that information is particularly in demand and useful.

Some questions

Who may find this information of particularly useful? What other information could be added to the site to enhance its value? Could the site be developed more to offer a more interactive experience for the site visitors?

Updates


 » original news

The music search engine and Internet jukebox, Songza, lets you seek out any song on the web and stream it immediately. In January of this year, we announced the site's partnerships with Seeqpod and Skreemr, which allowed them to grown their online library to 28 million songs. Now, Songza grows again with a launch of a new Facebook app and the arrival of a Songza API.

The Songza Facebook app lets friends see what each other are listening to on the Songza web site. Whenever a song is added to your playlist, that information is posted to your mini-feed and your profile page. Your friends can then click the link to the song to be taken to the Songza site to listen to it for themselves. In order to use the Facebook app, you have to first sign up for an account at Songza.com

Songza in the Mini-Feed

Along with the Facebook app, Songza is now also offering RSS feeds for the site's top-played songs, the featured songs list, and each user's playlist of newly added tunes, which is found on the user profile page. With that last one, the user playlist feed, you now have the ability to add Songza to a lifestreaming service such as FriendFeed, for example.

The last part of the Songza announcement involves the launch of their API. By using the API, developers can build custom widgets and applications based on Songza data. The API can be used to access the featured songs list, a user's playlist, and the last ten songs a user has added to their playlist. At the moment, Songza isn't imposing any limitations on the number of times requests can be made to the API, but they do remind developers that their feeds only update every 15 minutes, so there isn't much point to polling more often than that. 

Because Songza finds its music on the internet, it can be useful for locating more obscure artists or live performances. And since the service doesn't allow for downloads, only streaming, it's legit. They even pay artists based on how many times a song was streamed via licenses with the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC). However, the best thing about Songza is that you can listen to a song as many times as you want in its entirety, unlike Last.fm, whose on-demand service lets you play any particular song, too, but only in full three times before receiving a prompt to purchase it.

What it does

Internet TV just got easier, and 5tvs.com brings it to a new level by letting site visitors browse television stations that have Internet feeds from all over the world. The website takes visitors to a Google map, where they may see where all of the television stations come from, including London, Delhi, Miami, and Buenos Aires. Users can select any city, and immediately watch news from that location. Users also have the option to complete other functions, such as search through Internet TV channels like ESPN, watching one of the uploaded videos, and, for those over eighteen, viewing the posted Adult TV programs.

In their own words



Why it might be a killer

This site has the potential to give surfers a conglomerate of interesting information, particularly in regards to connecting them to international television stations. However, some of the television stations are difficult to connect to. It is an inventive concept that with a bit of tweaking, can be very successful.

Some questions

Should there be a checking system to ensure all television stations can be adequately accessed? What other international television stations can be added to the site? What other internet TV categories can be added as well?

Updates


 » original news

The past 24 hours have been thoroughly intriguing. It hasn’t been very long since Yahoo and Microsoft ceased their deeply fouled rendezvous with a reversal from Redmond. And though Yahoo seems to have staved off a shareholder mutiny in post-prod, at least for the short term, it is now forced to contend with a purportedly peeved Carl C. Icahn.

As many have now learned, the billionaire investor now claims himself as a shareholder of the Sunnyvale-based Web giant. And in this newfound role, he strongly suggests to the Yahoo board that they reconsider a purchase by Microsoft. (Semi-official word from Microsoft is that the company has “moved on” from its buyout attempt.)

Now, we heard yesterday from Yahoo’s chairman, Roy Bostock, as to the company’s aversion to Icahn’s suggestive hostility play. Yet in the hours following Yahoo’s initial volley, word has also escaped the CEO’s desk, according to Dawn Kawamoto of CNET News, intended to update the executive and working classes at the company as to his own thoughts about the week’s unexpected developments. Naturally, Jerry writes mostly in the collective mindset of “we.” As in, “what’s best for us to do,” not, “what’s best for me to do.”

In reading Mr Yang’s response to Icahn’s quite explicit letter (whose openness seems a bit refreshing, given Microsoft and Yahoo’s elusiveness and general passive aggressiveness in their correspondences of the last few months, no?), one might be forgiven in thinking that Yang is playing a propagandist. And not a very good one. He mentions to the broad employee base of Yahoo to disregard rumors and speculation and to continue to do “what we do best.” Over and over again. Odd? Odd.

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Not much has changed in terms of the chassis redesign for the MacBook other than what we learned in April, but now we have a rough estimate as to when we will see them in stores. The redesign of the chassis is necessary to accommodate the new Intel processors, which require a “socket B” logic board. According to AI, the Commercial Times is reporting that two Taiwanese manufacturers will be splitting the LCD panel orders and that they will launch sometime in Q3. Nothing else was revealed.

Let freedom ring

The laser turns 48 today! (Just as important, if not more so: It’s also Megan Fox’s birthday. She turns 22.) Crazy! To celebrate this, Wired has put together a list of some of its best laser-related stories, everything from laser-etched iPhones to 100 kW Naval weapons.

No, it’s nothing to get too excited over, but perhaps you have nothing better to do on this crummy Friday than troll random blogs looking for a way to kill a few minutes. We’re here to help in that regard.

What it does

The recent release of the FriendFeed API will most likely bring about a host of new applications for the increasingly popular FriendFeed site. FriendFeedmachine is one of these new applications that has been designed to allow users to keep track of their actual friends by making sure that they aren’t drowned out by followers who make more noise. Basically, FriendFeedMachine works by allowing users to apply filters to their FriendFeed account and in that manner stop missing messages from their close friends. The site also provides a different way of commenting, opening items from within a web page and it allows users to mark items as read or unread.

In their own words

“FriendFeedMachine was born out of a desire to streamline the information that was flowing out of FriendFeed, in effect to "Orga-noise". The functionality of the site will continue to grow over time as more features become exposed through the FriendFeed API and other services (Twitter integration on the way!!).”

Why it might be a killer

Those familiar with FriendFeed will know that as the site has grown in popularity, certain followers have drowned out true friends which defeats the whole purpose of the site. By allowing users to distinguish between who you follow and who follows you, FriendFeedMachine makes using FriendFeed a better experience.

Some questions

A similar functionality would obviously be great for Twitter as well. When will they be launching a similar site for Twitter?

Updates


 » original news

Filed under: Laptops

While OLPC tries to wise up to the real demands of the market and build a cheap laptop that people actually want -- which means Windows XP for most -- Walter Bender, OLPC's former president of software and content for the project is taking his open source Linux-based Sugar OS and has started up a new non-profit to aid its development. Bender still has the vision of an open source learning OS, and plans to give Sugar full support for other low-cost platforms like the Eee PC. Ooh, burn.

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