The Social

• Yahoo Mash: When getting social isn't enough
  

  Let's hope Yahoo has finally learned that the maxim "If you build it, they will come" simply does not apply to a social network.

  The Silicon Valley mainstay and onetime Microsoft shopping-spree target is quietly shutting down Yahoo Mash, its latest foray into creating a general-interest social network like ...

• Report: Facebook screenplay based on book
  
  

  If an anonymous source is correct, the confirmed screenplay-in-the-works about Facebook's origins by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is tied to a forthcoming book about the social network by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich.

  Independent Harvard alumni publication 02138 reported on Friday that the film rights to ...

• With 'followers,' Blogger gets--surprise!--more social
  
  

  Follow that blog!

  (Credit: Google)

  With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google's Blogger did the same.

  A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to ...

• Yahoo Mash gets smashed, bashed, quashed
  
  

  My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

  (Credit: Yahoo)
  
  

  File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

  An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our ...

  
  
• $10 million for mobile media company BuzzCity
  

  BuzzCity, a mobile networking and advertising start-up based in Singapore, on Thursday announced a $10 million investment by South African media company Naspers.

  BuzzCity has developed a mobile social-networking product called MyGamma, but it's not hoping to take on Facebook. MyGamma is geared toward "unwired" customers--those who have a ...

• Digg town hall: Local news options, forums on the way?
  
  

  Digg has always made its message clear: it's not social news, it's democracy.

  The company's executive team--founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson--thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users "dugg" a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided ...

• 'Facebook: The Movie': Now, who should play Mark Zuckerberg?
  
  (Credit: Facebook)
  
  

  If a recently created group on Facebook is to be believed, entertainment stalwart Aaron Sorkin--creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men--is working on penning a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about the origins of Facebook. Someone claiming to be Sorkin's researcher ...

  
  
• 'Lonelygirl15' creators unveil new Web show, 'The Resistance'
  

  The guys who created Lonelygirl15--the scripted Web series that fooled many viewers into thinking it was the real video diary of a cute 16-year-old girl--are back with a new project.

  The re-branded "LG15" production company Eqal, helmed by Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett, unveiled LG15: The Resistance, a spin-off ...

• Technorati acquires 'online magazine' Blogcritics
  
  

  Technorati Media, parent company of blog search site Technorati, has acquired Blogcritics.org. The newly purchased site is a user-fueled "online magazine" for bloggers that was already a member of the newish Technorati Media ad network.

  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Technorati has said that it ...

• Reddit now lets you create your own social news site
  

  After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday....

MiamiHerald.com: Technology

• High-resolution satellite launched in California
  A super-sharp Earth-imaging satellite that can detail an area the size of a baseball diamond's home plate from space has been launched into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the Central California coast.
• Going, going gone: JetBlue auctions flights on Web
  JetBlue Airways Corp. is auctioning off more than 300 roundtrip flights and six vacation packages this week on eBay, with opening bids set between 5 and 10 cents.
• Old Web idea of micropayments finally finds a home
  Seventeen-year-old Alexis Corocan spends about $5 a month on clothes, accessories and eyes of various shapes and shades for her online persona on IMVU, a popular Internet hangout.
• Advertising group opposes Yahoo-Google pact
  A group representing big-spending national advertisers said Sunday it sent a letter to the Justice Department asserting an online ad partnership between Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. will stifle competition and likely raise prices.
• Google reigns as world's most powerful 10-year-old
  When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
• Aruba Networks declines after analyst downgrade
  Aruba Networks Inc. shares fell Friday after an analyst downgraded the stock to "Equal Weight," saying that despite strong sales, ongoing capital investments are limiting the company's ability to increase its earnings.
• Report: Samsung working to acquire SanDisk
  Samsung Electronics Co. is pursuing an acquisition of U.S. computer memory card maker SanDisk Corp., a South Korean online business newspaper reported Friday.
• National Semi earnings down on tax rate
  National Semiconductor Corp., which makes chips that regulate power and perform other functions in gadgets, reported Friday its first-quarter profit fell 7 percent from a year ago due to a higher tax rate.
• Picks and pans: ‘Soul Bubbles,' ‘Okami,' ‘Castle Crashers'
  SOUL BUBBLES
• Microsoft deploying in-store customer-service reps
  As part of its new $300 million marketing campaign and image makeover, Microsoft Corp. plans to deploy its own customer-service representatives at retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City to help people with their PC purchases.
• Nokia warns 3Q market share will fall; shares dive
  Shares in Nokia Corp. tumbled Friday after the leading cell phone maker said its third-quarter global market share will decline from second-quarter levels because of aggressive price cuts by its rivals.
• ‘Space Siege' and ‘Too Human' reflect ‘Diablo' roots
  It's a strange coincidence that "Space Siege" and "Too Human" would arrive so close together. Both are sci-fi takes on the "Diablo" dungeon-crawler formula (minus the random dungeons), and both deal with the balance between humanity and cybernetic enhancement.
• Tech firms fare better than most in jobs slump
  Technology appears to be one of the least hard-hit sectors in an economy beset by unemployment at a five-year high.
• Russia's MTS to sell Apple iPhone
  Russia's number one cell operator MTS said Friday it has signed a deal with Apple Inc. to sell the iPhone in Russia.
• Summary box: Google still feeling lucky at 10
  HUMBLE START: Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on Sept. 7, 1998, after unsuccessfully trying to sell their search engine for a couple of million dollars. They set up shop in their Stanford dorm rooms with just four computers before moving their headquarters to a garage owned by Brin's future sister-in-law.
• Fantasy-sports fans get another outlet - for free
  A new online sports news and entertainment site, OPEN Sports, has signed a multiyear deal to make legendary NFL quarterback John Elway its spokesman for the site's fantasy-football products.
• Gas prices blamed in some insurance scams
  In yet another sign of the tough economic times, a new report suggests that rising fuel prices may be responsible for more vehicle owners staging the theft and vandalism of their gas guzzlers, presumably so they can downsize to smaller automobiles.
• Sony recalls laptops for possible overheating
  Sony Corp. is recalling 440,000 Vaio laptop computers worldwide because of a wiring flaw that could cause overheating.
• Sinking Yahoo: Shares drop to nearly 5-year low
  Yahoo Inc.'s stock sank to its lowest level in nearly five years Thursday, magnifying the challenge facing the Internet company as its management tries to justify their rebuff of Microsoft Corp.'s $47.5 billion takeover bid.
• SeaChange's 2Q beats Wall Street views by 2c
  SeaChange International Inc. reported fiscal 2009 second-quarter results that beat Wall Street's estimates late Thursday.
• Cablevision completes first phase of WiFi buildout
  Cablevision Systems Corp. said Thursday it has finished the first phase of its wireless network buildout in New York and remains on track to complete the project in two years.

Slashdot

• Prions Observed Jumping Species Barrier
  palegray.net writes "Nature is reporting on new findings that prions jump species barriers. Believed to be responsible for ailments such as Creutzfeld-Jakob disease and 'mad cow' disease, prions are thought to disrupt biological processes by causing normal proteins to fold abnormally. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston have observed infectious prions from hamsters causing abnormal protein development in mice, along with a range of other observations on prion actions in test tube environments. From the article: '... they also found that when a prion jumps species, it produces a new kind of prion. "This is very worrisome," says Claudio Soto, who led the research, published in Cell. "The universe of possible prions could be much larger than we thought."' Sounds like another good reason to donate your spare CPU cycles to projects like Folding@home."

  

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• IsoHunt Petitions Canadian Court For Copyright Blessing
  A Cow writes "As an act of self-defense, the popular BitTorrent site isoHunt has decided to file a petition to ask the Court of British Columbia to confirm that isoHunt — and sister sites Torrentbox and Podtropolis — do not infringe copyright. isoHunt owner Gary explains to TorrentFreak: 'Our petition summarizes BitTorrent technology, its open nature and a whole ecosystem of websites and operators that has developed around it, that CRIA does not own copyright to all files distributed over BitTorrent or on isoHunt websites, and we seek legal validation that we can continue to innovate within this emerging BitTorrent ecosystem on the Internet.'"

  

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• The Complete History of Nintendo
  SlappingOysters writes "Gameplayer are running a comprehensive feature on the history of Nintendo that runs through all 119 years of their existence, from humble card maker to gaming powerhouse. It is documented in chronological order and includes a stack of trivia about the company that will be thoroughly enjoyed by all Nintendo fans. As an interesting side note, it links to a sister article that explores how Mario can improve your sex life."

  

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• The Open Source Humanoid Robot and Its Many Uses
  ruphus13 writes with a story about the open-source centric Willow Garage project (last mentioned on Slashdot early last year), which is making progress in creating helpful humanoid robots for household use. From the article: "PR2 is the mobile hardware design for Willow Garage robots, featuring stereo and laser sensors ... Senior citizens are a big part of the target audience that Willow Garage is aiming for. "All industrialized countries are facing aging populations that require assistance and care to remain independent into old age. By 2020 close to 20 percent of the US population will be over 65," the project leaders say. "These numbers are even higher in Western European and Asian countries." Willow Garage is aiming to produce several types of assistive robots." The PR2 robots are capable of performing critical tasks like cleaning rooms and bringing beer from a refrigerator."

  

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• 1,500-Ship Fleet Proposed To Fight Climate Change
  Roland Piquepaille writes "According to UK and U.S. researchers, it should be possible to fight the global warming effects associated with an increase of dioxide levels by using autonomous cloud-seeding ships to spray salt water into the air. This project would require the deployment of a worldwide fleet of 1,500 unmanned ships to cool the Earth even if the level of carbon dioxide doubled. These 300-tonne ships 'would be powered by the wind, but would not use conventional sails. Instead they would be fitted with a number of 20 m-high, 2.5 m-diameter cylinders known as Flettner rotors. The researchers estimate that such ships would cost between £1m and £2m each. This translates to a US$2.65 to 5.3 billion total cost for the ships only."

  

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• OS/2 Community Tries Bounty System
  Grayskull writes "The OS/2 and eComStation community are trying to get open source software ported to that platform by opening bounties and allowing people to chip in with prize money. Currently the most important open bounties are Java 6 port, Icon routines in OS/2, VirtualBox port, Extend multimedia and OpenWengo ports."

  

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• How Networks Interact - Peering and Transit Explained
  Raindeer writes to share his article about peering and transit between networks, which begins: "In 2005, AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre famously told BusinessWeek, 'What they [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain't going to let them do that...Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?' The story of how the Internet is structured economically is not so much a story about net neutrality, but rather it's a story about how ISPs actually do use AT&T's pipes for free, and about why AT&T actually wants them to do so. These inter-ISP sharing arrangements are known as 'peering' or 'transit,' and they are the two mechanisms that underlie the interconnection of networks that form the Internet. In this article, I'll take a look at the economics of peering and transit in order to give you a better sense of how traffic flows from point A to point B on the Internet, and how it does so mostly without problems, despite the fact that the Internet is a patchwork quilt of networks run by companies, schools, and governments."

  

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• India Joins Nuclear Market
  figona brings news that India will be allowed to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). A waiver was approved yesterday that provided an exception to the requirements that India sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. This means India will be able to buy nuclear fuel from the world market and purchase reactors from the US, France, and Russia; something it has been unable to do since it began nuclear testing in 1974 (which inspired the creation of the NSG). The waiver does not include terms to cut off access if India resumes nuclear testing, but the US Congress drafted a letter stating their willingness to do so. Opponents of the waiver have called it a "non-proliferation disaster."

  

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• Opposable Thumbs and Upright Walking Caused By "Junk DNA"
  quinnlynn writes "A group of research scientists at Yale discovered that the evolution of opposable thumbs and upright walking in humans is due to changes in the genome in the areas still classified as "junk DNA." Quoting: 'Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as "junk DNA." ... Researchers have long suspected changes in gene expression contributed to human evolution, but this had been difficult to study until recently because most of the sequences that control genes had not been identified. In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off.'" Yale has also recently completed sequencing the Trichoplax genome. Trichoplax has the simplest known animal genome, and it shares 80 percent of its genes (comprised of 98 million base pairs) with humanity. Professor Stephen Dellaporta was quoted saying, "We are [excited] to find that Trichoplax contains shared pathways and defined regulatory sequences that link these most primitive ancestors to higher animal species. The Trichoplax genome will serve as a type of 'Rosetta Stone' for understanding the origins of animal-specific pathways."

  

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• Cell Phone For the Blind?
  brigc writes "Here's one that's got me stumped. A friend of mine who is blind asked me for help tracking down a cell phone for him. He's interested in a flip phone with well-defined separations between the keys, and as much voice control as possible. Battery life is the only other thing he mentioned. Preferably something that would work on AT&T's network in the US. We spent part of the afternoon in a local AT&T store checking out all the flip phones they had and didn't find one he really loved. Anyone have any ideas?" There was a story some months back about a phone that would read to you by interpreting pictures from the built-in camera, but it doesn't have much information about usability. I'm sure it'd be handy to have some sort of text-to-speech option for common cell phone features like caller ID and text messaging, or even just reading menu names.

  

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• Tabula Rasa Promotion To Send Gamers' DNA to Space
  Bridger tips news that NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, created in part by Richard Garriott, is running an unusual promotion right now. Garriott is going to the International Space Station on October 12th, and he'll take with him a digital record of the DNA of various players and celebrities. The basic plot of Tabula Rasa is that Earth was attacked and humans almost completely wiped out. Garriott's promotion is playing on that idea; the hard drive with the DNA data will be left in orbit "just in case" something happens to humanity on Earth. NCSoft has been running a variety of polls and contests to include further data about humans on the hard drive. The deadline for joining the project has recently been extended to September 29th.

  

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• Is the US Ready For the Switch To DTV?
  tonsofpcs writes "On Monday, September 8, Wilmington, NC will be the first television market (#135) to make the switch to DTV by shutting off their analog transmitters. This forum will be posting updates throughout the coming months to keep everyone updated on how the transition works so that we are all prepared come February 17, 2009. So far, it seems Wilmington will still be going ahead as planned, despite Tropical Storm Hanna's proximity."

  

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• Why Is the Internet So Infuriatingly Slow?
  Anti-Globalism writes "The major ISPs all tell a similar story: A mere 5 percent of their customers are using around 50 percent of the bandwidth, sometimes more, during peak hours. While these 'power users' are sharing three-gig movies and playing online games, poor granny is twiddling her thumbs waiting for Ancestry.com to load."

  

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• Canadian Researchers Say Hard Thinking Leads to Big Meals
  Anti-Globalism writes with an excerpt from a story at Ars Technica, according to which "a preliminary study from a group of researchers in Quebec suggest that working on a computer may have an additional impact on our waistlines: taxing mental effort appears to cause people to eat significantly more food, even though it doesn't burn many more calories than sitting around and relaxing. The publication, published in a journal called Psychosomatic Medicine, arose from a pilot study that the researchers were performing in order to determine whether a potential connection between mental effort and eating was worth following up on."

  

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• TCP/IP Meets Physical Reality
  An anonymous reader writes "When Google is clouding the borderline between web and the desktop, a much, much smaller project is blurring the border between the Internet and the physical reality: the newly released Contiki operating system version 2.2.1. Contiki runs on networked wireless sensors that are used for anything from road tunnel monitoring for fire rescue operations to collecting vital statistics from ice hockey players. These sensors typically have as little as a few kilobytes of memory and a few milliwatts of power budget — a thousandth of the resources of a typical PC computer — yet Contiki provides them with full TCP/IP connectivity. Meanwhile, San Francisco is monitoring parking spaces with wireless technology."

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  

  

Ap/hitech/ from www.tdn.com

• Going, going gone: JetBlue auctions flights on Web
  NEW YORK - JetBlue Airways Corp. is auctioning off more than 300 roundtrip flights and six vacation packages this week on eBay, with opening bids set between 5 and 10 cents.
• Old Web idea of micropayments finally finds a home
  NEW YORK - Seventeen-year-old Alexis Corocan spends about $5 a month on clothes, accessories and eyes of various shapes and shades for her online persona on IMVU, a popular Internet hangout.
• Advertising group opposes Yahoo-Google pact
  SAN FRANCISCO - A group representing big-spending national advertisers said Sunday it sent a letter to the Justice Department asserting an online ad partnership between Yahoo Inc. and Google Inc. will stifle competition and likely raise prices.
• Google reigns as world's most powerful 10-year-old
  MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. on Sept. 7, 1998, they had little more than their ingenuity, four computers and an investor's $100,000 bet on their belief that an Internet search engine could change the world.
• Microsoft deploying in-store customer-service reps
  NEW YORK _ As part of its new $300 million marketing campaign and image makeover, Microsoft Corp. plans to deploy its own customer-service representatives at retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City to help people with their PC purchases.
• Tech firms fare better than most in jobs slump
  NEW YORK - Technology appears to be one of the least hard-hit sectors in an economy beset by unemployment at a five-year high.
• Nokia warns 3Q market share will fall; shares dive
  HELSINKI, Finland - Shares in Nokia Corp. tumbled Friday after the leading cell phone maker said its third-quarter global market share will decline from second-quarter levels because of aggressive price cuts by its rivals.
• Russia's MTS to sell Apple iPhone
  MOSCOW - Russia's number one cell operator MTS said Friday it has signed a deal with Apple Inc. to sell the iPhone in Russia.
• New music site gives fans a cut of tune sales
  NEW YORK - Being a trendsetter can be pricey. As any fashionista or gadget hound knows, the latest frocks and tech toys don't pay for themselves. But a new Web site is trying to make it profitable for music lovers to stay ahead of the curve _ by paying them when other people purchase MP3s they've bought.
• New eBay site has social, environmental aim
  NEW YORK - Most consumers probably associate eBay Inc. more with vintage lunch boxes and low-priced electronics than with laptop bags made from recycled plastic by women in New Delhi.