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<title>Haaze.com / tithasperie / All</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:10:55 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
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<title><![CDATA[Samsung to release Nexus S across all Canadian carriers]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-to-release-nexus-s-across-all-canadian-carriers</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-to-release-nexus-s-across-all-canadian-carriers</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:10:55 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-to-release-nexus-s-across-all-canadian-carriers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Nexus S heads to Canada where it will be offered by all carriers.(Credit:Samsung)Samsung is taking the Nexus S north of the border this spring and releasing the handset on all major Canadian carriers.Much like it did with the Galaxy S series of smartphones, Samsung should use a blanket approach for the handset. So instead of releasing exclusive devices or handsets tailored specifically to the various wireless providers, Sammy will keep the Nexus S's stock Android 2.3 interface. According to Samsung executives, the phone will ship to Canada later this month with an early April sell date. Pricing has yet to be announced, but I would expect it to fall in line with the $199 currently supported by T-Mobile. What's more, some carriers could offer it at a lower price with a three-year agreement.For some of the newer Canadian players such as Wind Mobile and Mobilicity, this device will help expand their smartphone lineups with a reputable handset. And we may see the Samsung follow suit here in the United States. Already there are signs that the device is headed to other carriers such as Sprint, which is rumored to be announcing a Nexus S with WiMax support atCTIA later this month.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Manilla vs. PageOnce: Building better bills]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=manilla-vs--pageonce-building-better-bills</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=manilla-vs--pageonce-building-better-bills</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:10:11 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=manilla-vs--pageonce-building-better-bills</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Manilla collects all your bills and financial statements. Its accuracy is good--but not good enough.(Credit:Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)The bill organizing service Manilla launched at Demo this week. The pitch: it's a portal for your household bills. It will collect bills from your service providers, as well as bank statements and other financial data for you, and remind you what's due, to whom, and when. Furthermore, it'll keep records of all your bills and statements for you securely. It should work with nearly any billing company, and in some special cases, you can use it to turn off your paper bills, doing your bit for the environment.  Using Manilla to receive and file electronic statements (called &quot;bill presentment&quot; in billing industry lingo) is far superior to asking your service providers to send your statements to e-mail, where they're highly likely to get ignored or accidentally spam-filtered (trust me on this). That's probably why only a small percentage of consumers allow their paper bills to be turned off. Having a single, dedicated, junk-free site for financial transactions makes more sense. That's what Manilla is.  It also makes some bottom-line sense for business. It costs about 73 cents to process and mail a paper bill, according to Manilla CEO George Kliavkoff, compared with nearly nothing for providing Web access to show the consumer an online statement.  On the other hand, businesses do get something for that 73 cents. They get to stuff your bill envelope with upsells, marketing materials, and pitches from partners. Manilla will offer an online version of that channel to businesses that decide to use it (like Comcast, at launch). For other billers, the service will just log in to users' accounts on their behalf, get their billing data, and present it to them on Manilla.  Those other, non-signed-up billers, which make up the enormously vast majority of businesses, in fact might find that Manilla is not such a fantastic deal for them. Customers who sign up for Manilla are likely already online-savvy users. They're already going to business Web sites to view, and maybe pay their bills. On those Web sites, business cannot only market to their customers (as they can via snail mail), but can also track what they're doing, offer surveys, and learn more about them. Once a middleman presentment service like Manilla is their online destination, the businesses lose that direct channel to the customer--until they get on board, like Comcast did, and start using the marketing channel.  So while the businesses of America figure out whether they should do a deal with Manilla, should you consider using it Maybe, but you can probably do better. PageOnce has iPhone and Android apps that let you see your financial to-dos anywhere. Once the service adds bill pay, you&amp;39'll hardly need a computer for managing your money.(Credit:Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Manilla is not a new pitch Manilla is a compelling idea and will likely be a strong and highly usable product fairly soon' hopefully it'll be better when it comes out of its invite-only beta. If you're really interested in consolidating your bills into one online portal right now, I'd recommend using PageOnce, a two-and-a-half-year-old, but recently updated product that I found just as easy to set up, but more useful for tracking the really important data: what you owe now and whether you have enough money to cover it.  While Manilla acts a great repository for statements and bills--it's a really good electronic filing cabinet--PageOnce does a better job of parsing your current financial status. It can get details from bank statements and bills, where Manilla will only link you to your online account or show you an un-digested Web version of most of your statements.  PageOnce is almost Mint-like in its capability to dig into your finances and get useful data from them. It doesn't have all of Mint's historical or analytical chops, but it's still quite useful--and Mint doesn't do bill presentment at all.  Unfortunately, just like Manilla and Mint, PageOnce doesn't have a direct bill payment function. Yet. One is coming, though, and from what I know of it, it'll be unique and useful. Manilla does at least dump you onto the biller's site when you want to pay a bill.  PageOnce has extremely good mobile apps, something Manilla hasn't yet shown. PageOnce makes it easy and clear to see what's happening in each of your accounts on a smartphone's small screen. There's even a calendar view that shows bill due dates. Manilla CEO Kliavkoff told me that when the company comes out of closed beta, it will also have a dedicated mobile product.  I do have to note that neither PageOnce nor Manilla are 100 percent accurate. In my tests, while most accounts I added worked perfectly, both services indicated that I had an overdue balance on my Comcast account. Genuinely concerned (I'm far too OCD to let this happen), I logged onto the Comcast Web site, only to find that my payment had been received earlier this week. Similarly, both threw an error when trying to access my Schwab account, although neither would say exactly what was wrong. Other paper-replacement optionsThere are other emerging ways to get paperless bills, but they're not quite ready for real users. Doxo, in particular, has a Manilla-like focus on replacing your paper filing cabinet with an electronic one. Customers of businesses on the Doxo network get full access to their accounts as well as all the marketing materials the businesses want to send out--the same business benefit as Manilla. Doxo is also adding a centralized payment system. Doxo, like Manilla, is in invite-only beta test now, and has only three billers set up on its system: Sprint, Kansas City Power &amp; Light, and Puget Sound Energy. For billers not on the network, Doxo does little more than provide their customers a place to store user IDs and passwords, and whatever documents they opt to scan in themselves, like Evernote with a focus on home documents.  Likewise, Zumbox is trying to replace paper bills with electronic ones. It makes it easy for billers to send bills to you without knowing either your Zumbox account ID or your e-mail. Zumbox instead creates accounts based on your postal addresses. The service seems to be fallow, as it has no way that I could see to request that billers send statements to your Zumbox &quot;address.&quot; But it's still an intriguing idea.  If you want to get and actually pay your bills online on one service today, you can look to Intuit's Paytrust. The service costs $9.95 a month, though, which is too much to pay when you consider how much money you're saving billing companies by using it. Intuit's Aaron Patzer (the founder of Mint), told me that the company is working on new consumer bill management services, but he wouldn't give a time frame for a feature or product release. It's still too earlyPageOnce CEO Guy Goldstein told me that the annual American cashflow through consumer bills is $3.7 trillion. There's limited direct revenue to be made by just showing customers those bills. It is, though, not too hard to make a few pennies each time you facilitate an actual bill-pay transaction. With that amount of money in the balance, expect to see more companies try to get a piece of that big, fat, cash pie.That's the future. If you want to use a service today to consolidate your bills, and you can live with less than perfect accuracy, PageOnce is your best bet.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Nikon goes zoom crazy with latest Coolpix cams]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nikon-goes-zoom-crazy-with-latest-coolpix-cams</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nikon-goes-zoom-crazy-with-latest-coolpix-cams</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:10:36 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=nikon-goes-zoom-crazy-with-latest-coolpix-cams</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[The Verizon iPhone makes more calls]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-verizon-iphone-makes-more-calls</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-verizon-iphone-makes-more-calls</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Feb 2011 08:10:46 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-verizon-iphone-makes-more-calls</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Now that Verizon finally has the  iPhone 4, we know that you have one question at top of mind. And it's not, &quot;So what's the Wi-Fi hot spot like&quot;Rather, you want to know how well Verizon's handset performs. And better yet, is it better than the AT&amp;T iPhone 4 We don't blame you for asking either question, particularly in light of the widely-held belief the AT&amp;TiPhone experience is great until you need to make a call. I've never agreed with that theory completely, but CNET editors have endured their share of connectivity drama. So like you, we wondered if Verizon could do better. At the very least, it couldn't possibly be any worse.After a few days of use, we can report that Rig Red's handset has the overall advantage. We've already told you about our data speed tests, but Verizon also beat AT&amp;T in our tests for signal strength and connectivity. It didn't always win, and it didn't always win by a lot, but it usually connected first and offered more bars on the display. What's more, there were a couple of occasions where AT&amp;T was unable to connect at all.MethodologyTo conduct the test I went to five trouble-prone locations in San Francisco to check the number of bars on the display to see if I could make a call. In each location I dialed the same phone number and timed the connection speed. I know I looked pretty silly holding two iPhones to my head, but stranger things have happened in San Francisco. Before I get to the detailed results, there are a few caveats. Though the test wasn't entirely scientific, it mimics what real-world users will experience. Also, though the number of bars on the display is arbitrary and often unrepresentative of true signal strength, it is a measure on which most users rely (we would have used the Field Test app available on the AT&amp;T handset, but Verizon appears to have left that feature out). Finally, we were using theVerizon iPhone during a period when just a handful of such handsets were in the wild. Other Verizon smartphones were using the network, too, but our AT&amp;T phone was competing with thousands of other Apple devices in the immediate area.Stop 1: Traffic jamMy first stop was an onramp of the Bay Bridge during the afternoon rush. Though I don't live in the East Bay, I know the traffic streaming onto the bridge can be horrendous. And as drivers inch along, many have nothing else to do than talk on the phone (hands-free, of course).Verizon iPhoneNumber of bars: 5Connection time: 15 secondsAT&amp;T iPhoneNumber of bars: 3Connection time: Could not connectUnder the overpassThe next stop was a nearby pedestrian tunnel under a street. It's at ground level, but there was plenty of cement above my head to act as a barrier.Verizon iPhoneNumber of bars: 5Connection time: 5 secondsAT&amp;T iPhoneNumber of bars: 3Connection time: 7 secondsIn the boxI then tried calling from a closed elevator in CNET's offices. Though I've found our building to be wired fairly well, even the elevator (big metal boxes aren't great for a cellular signal) can be problematic.Verizon iPhoneNumber of bars: 4Connection time: 3 secondsAT&amp;T iPhoneNumber of bars: Never found a signalConnection time: Could not connectRiding on the metroI used my commute home for the fourth location and stopped on the second level of the Montgomery Street transit station. Though the BART tunnels inside San Francisco can offer good coverage, signal strength in the tunnels for San Francisco's own Metro trains is variable.Verizon iPhoneNumber of bars: 5Connection time: 3 secondsAT&amp;T iPhoneNumber of bars: 3Connection time: ImmediatelyAt homeThe last stop was an interior hallway in my apartment building. Most of the time I can't pass through without my call cutting out temporarily.Verizon iPhoneNumber of bars: 3Connection time: ImmediatelyAT&amp;T iPhoneNumber of bars: 2Connection time: 4 secondsSo on the whole, the Verizon Wireless iPhone performed better than its AT&amp;T counterpart. We had more success in making a call and the calls usually connected faster. We didn't experience dropped calls on either phone, though we know that's a sore spot for AT&amp;T users. The Verizon iPhone also won the majority of our data speed tests, but comparing voice samples wasn't quite as clear. We invite you to listen for yourself and make your own decision. And of course, be sure to check out our full Verizon iPhone 4 review.Lastly, I have to leave you with one word of caution. Though we enjoyed a better iPhone 4 on Verizon, your experience may be different. You're still using a cellular network that can vary widely by a number of factors. Also, as Verizon adds more iPhone users, performance will change. The key is to keep your hopes in check and not expect the Verizon iPhone to be without any problems. Big Red's network does have some advantages, but nothing is guaranteed.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Report: Stolen data sold over online black market]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-stolen-data-sold-over-online-black-market</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-stolen-data-sold-over-online-black-market</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 21 Jan 2011 08:10:43 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-stolen-data-sold-over-online-black-market</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Cybercriminals buy and sell stolen information using a vast network of online stores, forums, and even social-networking accounts, according to a report released yesterday by PandaLabs.Posing as a cybercriminal to gain access to this online black market, PandaLabs researchers uncovered a world where the bad guys work together to buy and sell stolen bank account information, credit card numbers, passwords, and other products. Much of this illegal enterprise is done through online stores and forums, but PandaLabs found criminals using Facebook and Twitter accounts to set up shop as well.Though this black market is relatively open, the security firm discovered that the sellers of stolen data are careful about protecting their anonymity, demanding that their &quot;customers&quot; contact them only through IM or generic e-mail accounts that can't easily be traced.In many ways, the cybercriminal network operates like any other business. The list of products for sale sounds like a standard online shopping catalog, from cheap no-frills items to more expensive ones with all the works.Basic bank and credit card information can sell for as little as $2 a pop, though at that price the buyer doesn't get verification of the actual account balance. For $80, customers can get a credit card or bank account number with confirmation of a small balance, while $700 will buy them a guaranteed balance of $82,000, according to the report (PDF). Prices go up from there on accounts that have already been used to shop online or tap into PayPal.Here is a list of black market prices, according to the PandaLabs report.(Credit:PandaLabs)But it's not just digital data for sale. PandaLabs found cloned credit cards selling for $190, card cloning machines running anywhere from $200 to $1,000, and fake ATM machines costing from $3,500 to $35,000.Those who want to go into business for themselves can even buy money laundering services, kicking in a seller's commission of 10 to 40 percent. Like any good consultant, the sellers are available for project work where they can set up fake online stores for their customers, says PandaLabs.Competition in the black market also keeps prices from getting too high, while customers who do a lot of business can even get volume discounts. Paying for the stolen or phony items works just like it does at any online retailer. Buyers can shop at a Web site set up by the seller, adding items to their cart as they browse the different offerings. But payment is made up-front and only through services like Western Union, Liberty Reserve, and WebMoney.To protect your own data from being stolen and sold on the black market, PandaLabs offers an array of tips, including checking your invoices and credit card statements carefully, filing or destroying ATM receipts, asking a neighbor to collect your mail when you're away, never using a debit card for online purchases, and, of course, making sure you run up-to-date security software.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[CES: New Intel chip could mean $125B for PC biz]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-new-intel-chip-could-mean-125b-for-pc-biz</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-new-intel-chip-could-mean-125b-for-pc-biz</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:10:31 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>tithasperie</dc:creator>
<category>Business &amp; Finance</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-new-intel-chip-could-mean-125b-for-pc-biz</guid>
<description><![CDATA[LAS VEGAS--Intel CEO Paul Otellini said its newest processor, dubbed Sandy Bridge, will generate one-third of total corporate revenue as the chipmaker pushes &quot;processor graphics&quot; as the new PC standard. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said Intel&amp;39's Sandy Bridge chip creates new &amp;39'processor graphics&amp;39' PC standard.(Credit:Brooke Crothers)&quot;Sandy Bridge will represent over one-third of Intel's corporate revenues this year. And will generate over $125 billion of revenue for the PC industry. This is a huge, huge product,&quot; said Otellini speaking at the roll out of its 2nd Generation Intel Core processor family.And this new family of processors is enough of a change from previous products to justify those numbers, according to Otellini. &quot;This is next evolution of the PC...We've shifted to processor-based graphics,&quot; he said. That means Intel is now putting the core of the personal computer--the main processor, graphics and media engines, and memory components--all on one chip. All of that integration means better performance. &quot;With a Sandy Bridge laptop you can now convert a four-minute HD video from a laptop to a phone or aniPad in 16 seconds,&quot; Otellini said, as an example of a task that used to take many minutes and can now be done much, much faster. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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