Archive for July 7th, 2009

In news that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Michael Jackson’s sobering memorial service this morning will go down as one of the most watched web events, ever. As we reported earlier, the social web was well prepared for today’s ceremony, with sites including MySpace, Ustream (in partnership with CBS), Facebook (in partnership with CNN), and Hulu offering live streams, most of which also allowed viewers some way to interact with each other.

It’s still a little too early to determine just how widely watched the ceremony was, especially since traffic was distributed across many sites, but we’re already beginning to see some staggering preliminary numbers.

In the time window from 12AM to 4PM EST, Web analytics company Omniture reports that CNN saw:

• 72 million page views
• 10.8 million unique visitors
• 8.9 million live video streams

CDN server logs also indicate that CNN saw a peak of 781,000 concurrent live streams at its peak.

Nothing too remarkable about Sony’s latest HD camcorders, but the new 64GB HDR-CX520V and 32GB HDR-CX500V are solid updates nonetheless. Identical apart from the built-in storage, both feature an Exmor R CMOS sensor with BIONZ processing that should offer solid low-light performance and decent 12 megapixel stills, Optical SteadyShot with a new active mode and three-way shake cancellation, Face Touch autofocus that allows you to simply point at faces to prioritize focus in order, and, most notably, 60p output, which’ll interpolate your footage to 60 progressive frames per second when connected to a compatible HDTV. Not a bad piece of kit, but they’ll cost ya: the HDR-CX500V will run $1,100 and the HDR-CX520V will be $1,300 when they arrive in September.

Filed under: Home Entertainment

Sony unveils two new 1080p Handycams originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter! Everyone wants a piece of it. Tomorrow, we’ve heard, blog search engine and ad network Technorati will unveil a new site called Twittorati: “where the blogosphere meets the Twittersphere.”

The site, which we haven’t seen yet, will show what top bloggers are tweeting about, and compare topics to blogosphere trends. The site will also, according to a press release we’ve seen, allow visitors to filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading blogosphere and Twitter trends. It sounds like it may be somewhat similar to Federated Media’s Exec Tweets.

Technorati Top 100 bloggers will be featured at launch, and it will expand to include more authors over time. The site was produced in partnership with Sawhorse Media, publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven. Infinity is sponsoring Twittorati.

More details when we actually see the site.

Writing letters to elected officials and government organizations is a time-old part of political activism. More recently, citizens had the option of using email vs. snail mail to send out correspondence. Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook.

The Actions tab on an organization’s Facebook page will let visitors immediately send letters to Federal or state officials and will automatically match them to federal and state legislative officials, based on the addresses they enter. One of the other important functions of Actions is its ability to capture names and emails in an external database for later emails and fundraising. Grassroots Enterprise says the beauty of the Actions offering is the ability to for users to interact with the technology without having to download a separate application. And the “Actions” page is customizable for individual pages, enabling organizations to feature their own actions for their specific causes.

The HTC Magic a great device in many ways — particularly if you’re into Android and whatnot — but is it still great at $200? TmoNews seems to have obtained some paperwork stating that T-Mobile USA’s second Android set will retail for a whopping $199.99 on a two-year deal, some $20 more than the original G1 at launch. Granted, the myTouch rocks a few more features in firmware and packs more onboard storage, but otherwise, it’s the same phone minus the keyboard — and as much as we hate to bring it up, the $99 iPhone 3G effect is something that T-Mobile so far seems to be failing to recognize and properly respond to here. At $100, this is an awesome phone, but $200 could end up being a tough sell. That said, here’s the scoop on preorders: existing postpaid and FlexPay customers are allowed in on the action (T-Mobile has a habit of giving current customers first dibs on new stuff) and should receive their phones some time between July 29 and August 3; otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the proper national launch in early August.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

T-Mobile launching myTouch 3G at $199.99 on contract? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Sony’s PSPgo was some halfhearted attempt to quell incessant PSP2 rumoring (and our favorite PSP2 mockup render, above), it certainly doesn’t seem to have worked. The new rumor out and about is that the inevitable PSP2 will harbor a PowerVR GPU along the lines of what’s present in the new iPhone 3GS. The SGX543MP cited has four cores, with a rating of 133 million polygons per second at the low-end 200MHz mode that seems likely for portable use. GamesIndustry.biz calls this a “ballpark match” for the original Xbox, with some additional Dreamcast rendering enhancements for avoiding wasting time on hidden elements in a scene. They also point out that Imagination Technologies calls the chip a GP-GPU, capable of handling computing tasks in addition to graphics, and potentially giving the PSP2 the power savings of not needing a separate CPU to operate. Sure, it’s all a difficult to pin down rumor at the moment, but if anything these sort of specs show what’s possible for a new generation of handheld gaming when the likes of Sony and Nintendo are ready to give it to us. Now about a second analog stick…

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

Filed under: Gaming, Handhelds

PSP2 to be based on iPhone-esque PowerVR GPU, rival original Xbox in power? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Panasonic isn’t the first company to turn to robots as a means for dispensing drugs, but it looks like it’s set to become one of the bigger players in the still fledgling field, with it announcing today that it’s developing a robot that it hopes will rake it about 30 billion yen (or $315 million) by 2016. Unfortunately, Panasonic isn’t quite ready to actually show off the robot just yet, but it says it could be making the rounds at some Japanese hospitals by next March, and head into the United States and Europe sometime after that. It’s also not ready to do much talking about specifics, with it only going so far as to say that it “does not look humanoid” but rather looks like “a cabinet with lots of small drawers” (no doubt somewhat like the Pyxis bot pictured above), and that it’ll be able to store medical data for each patient and sort out prescriptions for up to 400 patients in about two hours. That cabinet won’t come cheap though, with Panasonic estimating that it’ll cost “several tens of millions of yen,” or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Via TG Daily, image courtesy Wikipedia / Jeremy Kemp]

Filed under: Robots

Panasonic banks on robot drug dispensers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The iPhone Dev Team has released their much anticipated iPhone 3GS jailbreak and unlock set. Last week we reported on George Hotz, the teenage hacker, who released a Windows only version of the jailbreak which could then be used to run the ultrasn0w unlock. Then he released a Mac version over the weekend. Now the Dev Team has fixed their own version, redsn0w, to work with the iPhone 3GS under Windows and OS X.

The iPhone Dev Team jailbreak isn’t much different then Hotz’s version — besides the point that the iPhone Dev Team released it. The Dev Team is a group of hackers dedicated to unlocking the iPhone and exposing all of its wonderful mysteries.

Well, this sucks. I had not yet gotten around to downloading the new Delicious Library iPhone app, which I heard was great. And now I can’t because the developer had to remove it from the App Store. Why? Because of Amazon.

A recent change to Amazon’s Product Advertising API means that apps like Delicious Library are being restricted from using it, according to Alan Quatermain. And what’s really perplexing is that this change apparently only matters on mobile devices, meaning bye bye to an iPhone app that took its developers 8 months to build.

Sure, working with Motorola for some peacetime pico-projector development is one thing, but if you really want to rake in the bucks, you’d better jump on the military-industrial bandwagon. As a part of DARPA‘s Urban Leader Tactical Response, Awareness & Visualization project, Lockheed Martin has teamed up with Microvision to develop low-profile see-through eyewear displays for providing “non-line-of-sight command and control in distributed urban operations for dismounted warfighters” based on the latter’s PicoP technology. The displays will be low-powered, lightweight, and will deliver real-time content for “increased situational awareness, such as real-time combat support and logistics.” Sounds pretty similar to the gear they were selling the Air Force years ago, no? In unrelated news, the company’s Vice President of Sales and Marketing is named Ian Brown, although we’re guessing it’s not the same Ian Brown we saw at the Hammerstein Ballroom four years ago. PR after the break.

Continue reading Lockheed Martin and Microvision developing wearable displays for DARPA

Filed under: Displays

Lockheed Martin and Microvision developing wearable displays for DARPA originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Jul 2009 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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