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<title>Haaze.com / Niki / Voted News</title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com</link>
<description>Test Web 2.0 Content Management System</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:10:11 +0000</pubDate>
<language>en</language>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Thunderbolted, Sandy Bridged MacBook Airs in June]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=thunderbolted-sandy-bridged-macbook-airs-in-june</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=thunderbolted-sandy-bridged-macbook-airs-in-june</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:10:11 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>bodialq</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=thunderbolted-sandy-bridged-macbook-airs-in-june</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Newer! Faster! Sandier!(Credit:Apple)Right now you can have an ultra-portable MacBook or one with up-to-date guts, but you can't have both. But that's apparently changing, if rumors are to be believed.The latest from parts suppliers in Asia indicates that Apple is set to begin mass production of Thunderbolt- and Sandy Bridge- (with Intel Graphics, natch) equipped MacBook Airs late next month, to debut on sales floors in June (which corroborates reports we made back in February).The news comes from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, from Concord Securities, who gave his take on the Air production to AppleInsider. In addition to being fairly consistently in-line with the rumors department, a summer refresh of the Air makes sense: Its low price point and lightweight design make it ideal for students, and June is around the start of back-to-school shopping. The Air is small, but we could see Apple sacrificing a USB port to make room for Thunderbolt, because with an adapter it can do the job of both.Kou didn't offer any information on pricing, but it would make sense if Apple kept the pricing and product matrix similar to the one the Air enjoys now, starting at $1,000 for the base 11-inch model and sliding up to $1,600 for a fully loaded 13-inch version.Other stats, such as storage capacity and graphics, were also not volunteered, but we're guessing slight bumps in both as SSD drive prices have been dropping. If Apple can find a way to squeeze a 128GB SSD drive into its entry-level 11-inch Air with an i5 processor and Thunderbolt then it could give other ultra-portable makers, like Samsung and Toshiba, real competition.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Mortal Kombat: Dying for a reboot]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mortal-kombat-dying-for-a-reboot</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mortal-kombat-dying-for-a-reboot</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:10:28 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Gpritchard2121</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mortal-kombat-dying-for-a-reboot</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Warner Bros. Interactive)Does the most iconic fighting franchise of all time come back with a vengeance Or is this one resurrection better left letting the coin credit countdown run out Jeff: If isn't broke, don't fix it. We've all heard the tired cliche, but now more than ever game developers are reaching back to a game's roots as inspiration for franchise reboots. The most recent example is the latest incarnation of Mortal Kombat. The 2D fighting is back, along with the series' genre-defining iconic finale, fatalities. Mortal Kombat is a gift to the loyal MK fan. Anyone who grew up playing one of the classic Mortal Kombat arcade cabinets in the '90s will instantly feel right at home. The nostalgia is laid on thick at times with handfuls of inside jokes, references, and other &quot;-alities.&quot; We were also impressed to find that Mortal Kombat packed in a significantly deep story mode. While most fighting games go light on the narrative, MK successfully thickens the experience with in-game cinematics and dialogue beyond the trivial character intros. There are also hours upon hours of challenges here, including new &quot;Test Your&quot; modes including &quot;Might, Sight, Luck,&quot; and more, not to mention the new double and triple tag team versus modes. Mortal Kombat (photos) Graphically speaking, the character design in Mortal Kombat is nothing short of spectacular, with each unique fighter sporting a painstaking amount of detail. Speaking of pain, the new Mortal Kombat is more brutal than ever, properly taking advantage of current-generation hardware that delivers each gruesome blow, crunch, splat, and thud. Characters bleed and swell over the course of a match and their wardrobes rip and burn.We were partial to the collection of character-unique X-ray moves that slow the action down to give players a biology lesson or two, showing bones snapping and organs rupturing. (Credit:Warner Bros. Interactive)As we mentioned above, fatalities are back. Instead of flipping through move list printouts, the team at NetherRealm Studios has conveniently listed special moves and fatalities in the pause menu, providing easy access in the game. There's even a fatality trainer mode that lets you practice your favorite &quot;FINISH HIM!&quot; moment without all the pressure. For an in-studio demo of Mortal Kombat that includes two fatalities, tune in to this week's episode of preGame!Dan:It's the game that parents, newscasters, and legislators love to hate, so it's not surprising that Mortal Kombat makes a return appearance every few years (or even more frequently). After all, labeling something as forbidden fruit is the easiest way to attract the game's target demographic of young males. Yet, the latest incarnation of Mortal Kombat seems overly conservative, if anything. Sure, there's plenty of violence and some bloodletting, but other than improved graphics, it's not that much different in concept than the 1992 original. Since then, we've become so jaded by the more realistic violence in games, movies, and TV, that the fatalities in MK seem almost quaint and retro by comparison. Not that I'm complaining' to truly up the stakes, the game would need to move in the direction of &quot;Hostel&quot;-like torture porn, and there's a point beyond which that becomes self-defeating. Like Street Fighter IV and other recent fighting games, the characters here are 3D renderings trapped in a 2D plane' think of the classic satirical/geometric novel &quot;Flatland,&quot; but with more beheadings. (Credit:Warner Bros. Interactive)Being only casually familiar with the main characters and lore of the game's universe (but the image of the late Raul Julia as M. Bison is forever burned in my brain), a handful of things kept my attention for at least a few days. ThePS3 version has two important bonuses over theXbox 360 game. On the PS3, you can play in stereoscopic 3D, which definitely adds to the experience in this genre, and that version also has a very cool exclusive character: God of War's Kratos. Finally, I will never forget the triumphant match where, by randomly mashing a few buttons after defeating my opponent, Kratos performed a little-known variation on the infamous Fatality move: my foe was transformed into a kicking, screaming infantalized version of himself, as the screen proudly proclaimed &quot;Babality!&quot; <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Maker of driving app miffed at RIM's takedown]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=maker-of-driving-app-miffed-at-rims-takedown</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=maker-of-driving-app-miffed-at-rims-takedown</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Mar 2011 07:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>chrmartsmh</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=maker-of-driving-app-miffed-at-rims-takedown</guid>
<description><![CDATA[PhantomAlert&amp;39's app running on a GPS system, where it remains available.(Credit:CNET)The maker of a controversial mobile app that critics contend helps drunken drivers avoid police says his company is getting a raw deal from politicians and app marketplaces.Up until last week, driving-alerts application PhantomAlert had been available on Research In Motion's BlackBerry App World. PhantomAlert CEO Joe Scott is miffed that the software has been taken down by RIM, in a decision that was not shared with him. &quot;It's just sad, we never got contacted by the senators or anyone else,&quot; Scott said in an interview with CNET this morning. &quot;We're more than just DUI checkpoints. We do school zones, speed bumps, and we're endorsed by over 35 police departments.&quot; PhantomAlert's takedown follows a letter published last week by a group of U.S. senators urging Apple, Google, and RIM to remove applications they said encouraged drunken driving by supplying users with information about DUI checkpoints.The initial letter, which was drafted by Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), urged the three technology companies to self-police their mobile application stores, removing applications that contained things like a database of driving under the influence (DUI) checkpoints, and real-time alerts of their presence to app users. So far, only RIM has complied with the request, pulling down an unspecified number of applications that met these criteria including PhantomAlert as well as crowd-sourced speed-trap finder Trapster. CNET reached out to RIM for comment on how many apps were a part of that sweep and if any have been given a reprieve, but the company declined to comment.Meanwhile, Apple has not addressed the original letter, and Google told CNET last week that the description of what these apps do did not violate its Android Marketplace policies. CNET's congressional sources say the senators have not provided an exhaustive list of apps to the three companies, but have cited examples and asked the companies to search their database of applications and remove those that are of the type described.Since PhantomAlert's removal, Scott says he's been in contact with RIM, though the company has been unwilling to bring it back on the market. Scott said he worries what kind of precedent this sets for the group to go after other tools that surface such information.&quot;What's scary about this is if people start tweeting about (police checkpoints). Are they going to go after Twitter, are they going to go after Facebook I don't think that's the right approach.&quot; Don't feel too bad though. Scott says the exposure from this has boosted downloads of the application on other platforms by as much as 8,000 percent and paid subscriptions by around 3,000 percent, including in Google's and Apple's mobile marketplaces, as well as on various GPS devices where it can be installed. A similar effect has hit other application makers that provide information on police checkpoints alongside other traffic-related information. Fuzz Alert, which also serves up the location of DUI checkpoints, has remained safe since Apple has not taken action to remove such applications.(Credit:Fuzz Alert)One of those is Fuzz Alert, which remains exclusive to Apple's App Store. Owner Steve Croke, who CNET spoke with, said that his application has seen a dramatic surge in popularity, trending near the top of the navigation category in the App Store following the attention. Even so, Croke said that DUI checkpoints play an incredibly small part in his application's features and data sourcing.&quot;Less than 5 percent of the traps in my system are DUI checkpoints,&quot; Croke said. Instead, the application aims to alert users to intersections with red-light and speed cameras by sending out audio notifications when in range of known locations. Croke also said that the DUI checkpoint feature was not the reason he made the app in the first place.&quot;Never was the intent to make someone screw with the DUI checkpoints. It's basically alerting people that the smart thing is to not drink and drive, and being in this space I see all the bad things about it,&quot; Croke said. &quot;If I can keep one guy from not putting a key to the ignition, I think I've had a big win.&quot;Croke said the inspiration for the app stemmed from him getting a speeding ticket on a stretch of road that had a photo radar device near his house. That particular time he wasn't paying attention and blew right past it. &quot;It just dawned on me that this is the perfect app to alert someone to be aware of where you are,&quot; Croke said. Croke also believes himself to be lucky that he didn't spend the time or the effort developing his application on RIM's platform, and says the company's actions are a big turnoff to him. &quot;My first reaction was 'Wow, I'm glad I didn't develop for that platform,'&quot; Croke said. &quot;That would crush a business.&quot;Siding with app makers like Croke and Scott is the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), an advocacy group for small businesses. Following the original letter, ACT said that the senators had missed the point.&quot;The suggestion that the government should compel Apple, RIM, or other mobile application stores to block programs that simply allow users to report information based on location is misguided at best,&quot; said Morgan Reed, ACT's executive director, in a statement last week. &quot;Taken to its conclusion, that would require blocking apps like Foursquare and Loopt.&quot;In a follow-up letter addressed to Schumer and published earlier this week, ACT President Jonathan Zuck noted that the data being used in apps like PhantomAlert is being furnished by law enforcement agencies:&quot;I understand from your letter and further press activity that you consider apps like PhantomAlert and Trapster to be in conflict with the public interest on the issue of traffic safety. I respectfully suggest that you may have been unaware that law enforcement agencies are legally required to publish data featured in these programs. Moreover, they believe the widespread dissemination of this information effectively serves to reduce speeding and improve traffic safety.&quot;Zuck went on to say that the mobile app industry is growing, and that most developers are in America, which means that cutting apps could send jobs overseas. &quot;If the mobile application storefronts begin to pull apps outside of the regular regulatory environment or terms of service agreements simply to respond to any extra-governmental missive, we fear it will harm growth here, but more importantly lead to aggressive action abroad where other governments may see such action as a tool to curb U.S. competitiveness.&quot;Not everyone is siding with the app makers though. Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, son of Vice President Joe Biden, and Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler sent a letter to Apple and Google earlier this week. In it, the pair urged the companies to flat out ban such apps, referring to them as &quot;nothing more than an overt method of circumventing laws that were specifically enacted to save lives,&quot; and a &quot;'how-to' guide to evade DUI checkpoints and endanger the lives of innocent citizens on our roads.&quot; That approach has been met with similar responses from the two companies: Apple not issuing a public response, and Google once again saying that the claim had not provided specific examples.Mobile application marketplaces continue to face censorship issues, and are a point of competition among the companies that create and control them. Each of the three companies has its own policies on what is and is not allowed, but all bar anything illegal or that encourages illegal behavior. Though the gray area with these applications in particular has further demonstrated that there is a subtle difference in approach. While Apple has so far been seen as the most conservative of the bunch, keeping out some applications that competitors like Google have allowed for sale, it now sits in the same camp as the search giant, while RIM has gone in a different direction. As Fuzz Alert's Croke noted, this could change a developer's inclination to put in the sometimes considerable resources necessary to get an application developed and published. That doesn't mean Apple's and Google's application stores are safe havens for applications like these. As the two companies spell out in their storefront guidelines, things change.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[In the lab, designing the ultimate biofuel bug]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-the-lab-designing-the-ultimate-biofuel-bug</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-the-lab-designing-the-ultimate-biofuel-bug</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:10:37 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>chdresource</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=in-the-lab-designing-the-ultimate-biofuel-bug</guid>
<description><![CDATA[CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--To reinvent the fuel business, engineers at biofuel start-up Joule Unlimited tinker with tiny life forms all day.The four-year-old start-up is on the front lines of a branch of biotechnology that taps into the wealth of knowledge from genome sequencing and powerful computer tools to start from scratch and ask: if you wanted the ideal fuel, how would you make it The answer they've come up with is a diesel secreted by a genetically engineered microbe in flat plastic bioreactors. The only inputs for its &quot;biofactory&quot; organism are sunlight, pumped-in carbon dioxide, and some nutrients. Building a microscopic biofuel factory (photos)  Joule Unlimited has a long way to go before it's a commercial home run. But a look at its business strategy and labs here demonstrate the possibilities of biotechnology in reshaping the liquid fuels industry. After disappointing progress in making ethanol from agriculture wastes or grasses, much of the public attention has turned to plug-in electric vehicles to make transportation greener. But replacing petrofuels and chemicals with plant-based sources is still very much part of the picture. Joule Unlimited was co-founded by venture capitalists at Flagship Ventures who took a &quot;blue sky&quot; approach to making biofuels at scale after investing in two other biofuels start-ups also using techniques from synthetic biology--Mascoma and LS9.Rather than use algae or shuffle the genes of industrial workhorses, such as e.coli bacteria, Joule is doing metabolic engineering of cyanobacteria or blue-green algae, which is thought to have evolved 2.9 billion years ago and is the granddaddy of all water-splitting photosynthetic organisms.During a meeting at the company's offices, in what Cambridge calls &quot;Life Sciences Square,&quot; Joule Unlimited's senior vice president of biological services (and the company's first employee), Dan Robertson, shows me a thick Department of Energy report that identifies a number of barriers to making fuel with algae.The bio-engineers at Joule set out to address all of those barriers, Robertson said. Instead of growing biomass and then extracting the fuel from it, Joule and others want to make fuels secreted directly from micro-organisms. Instead of feeding sugar--typically from sugar cane--to e.coli and then fermenting the solution to brew alcohol-based fuel, Joule has designed a system of continuous fuel production. Algae wasn't pursued because so much water needs to be removed and it's harder to engineer.&quot;In one place, the light is being absorbed and the carbon dioxide taken up where you can get carbon molecules to ultimately make your product,&quot; Robertson explained. The cyanobacteria in bioreactors produce hydrocarbons, which are siphoned off from the green-colored water solution. There's no feedstock to procure and ship or even biomass to gather and then process. The company is running a pilot facility in Texas, where it is trucking in carbon dioxide for testing purposes. For future sites, it intends to get CO2 from an industrial partner. Emissions from a coal-fired power plant could be fed to the cyanobacteria after normal scrubbing of mercury and arsenic, Robertson said.Bug controlBreeding specific organisms, such as e.coli, for specific purposes has been going on for decades. But advances in biotech are allowing biologists to manipulate organisms with far finer control and speed.In Joule's case, biologists are optimizing the metabolism of cyanobacteria for their purposes. Instead of taking food and sunlight to make more of themselves, the natural pathways of Joule's genetically modified organisms have been altered to produce alkanes, a hydrocarbon to be mixed with diesel fuel. They have even been programmed with a &quot;carbon switch&quot; to shift their metabolisms from making more of themselves to making fuel. Joule envisions starting up production of its microbes in its bioreactors and, once they reach a certain density in water, operators will add ingredients to get the organism's metabolism to start pumping out alkanes.&quot;You essentially co-opt the carbon that would be used for something else (to make fuel) and make the organism feel that it's OK,&quot; said Robertson. &quot;It's all very controlling.&quot;In the lab, engineers re-create real-world conditions to isolate different strains by tweaking carbon dioxide, sunlight, and nitrogen levels. For example, one specialized machine allows an engineer to simulate the sunlight conditions for a whole day, representing different seasons and changing temperatures. With each test, engineers get closer to the optimal gene combinations for different conditions. Since the bioreactors would be placed in different locations, the company has settled on somewhere between 10 and 20 strains, after constructing some 4,000 strains, according to Robertson.Biologists spend more of their time designing tests or isolating DNA on gene databases, rather than actually performing lab tests, Robertson said. &quot;Because so much genome sequencing has already taken place, there's an immense database available arranged by the chemistry that they do,&quot; he said. &quot;There are lots of tools at our disposal, so we can rapidly test things.&quot;Long road to pipelinesJoule Unlimited is just one of many companies in the race for a better biofuel technology. The Department of Energy's ARPA-E agency is funding many research efforts in &quot;electrofuels,&quot; which make fuels directly from electricity, sunlight, and water. There are dozens of other companies pursuing completely different approaches, such as thermochemical processes. Analysts at Lux Research call synthetic biology is the &quot;flashiest&quot; technology vying for the lead. Joule Unlimited has high potential, but it still has to prove that it can move from a small-scale operation to commercial scale, Lux Research said. Specifically, it lacks partners and it will require a lot of capital and land to reach cost parity with today's petrofuels, it said in a recent report.The company's next step is to build a 10-acre demonstration plant located at an industrial facility, such as a power plant or waste water facility, which it expects to do by mid-2012. Then it plans to start construction of a facility larger than 1,000 acres at the end of 2013 that would be able to make 12,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year. When fully scaled up, it would make 15 million gallons a year of fuel.The cyanobacteria need nutrients, including nitrogen and trace amounts of minerals, to be fed into its bioreactors. And to be commercially successful, its bioreactors need to be engineered for low operational costs and maximum production. Next door to its labs, engineers are designing the actual hardware for growing the fuel, another key part to whether the company will be able to scale up.Although Joule's employees clearly see the power of metabolic engineering, they are very cognizant of concerns over genetically modified organisms, said Robertson. Its bioreactors will run for six to eight weeks' then the solution is flushed out, the actual organisms are burned, the bioreactors are sterilized, and a fresh medium is put in, he said.Even with Joule's impressive technical achievement and three patents, it still has a ways to go before it will make a dent in reducing fossil fuel use and pollution. But if the biotechnology techniques it and others are pursuing bear fruit, the face of fuels in the future may well be a petri dish, rather than an oil well. Updated at 1:15 p.m. PT with corrections. The bioreactors will be made from plastic, not glass, and Joule's demo facility is using trucked-in CO2.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Jon Bon Jovi: Steve Jobs killed the music business]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=jon-bon-jovi-steve-jobs-killed-the-music-business</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=jon-bon-jovi-steve-jobs-killed-the-music-business</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:11:32 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>jermaimmmi</dc:creator>
<category>Marketing and advertising</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=jon-bon-jovi-steve-jobs-killed-the-music-business</guid>
<description><![CDATA[It's always dangerous to have an emotional relationship with a business. Businesses change, often driven by innovation. Or merely the desperate desire to make more money.So there is something rather touching in the notion that Jon Bon Jovi--he who named a band after himself--still feels emotional about the very process of buying music. A process he believes that Steve Jobs has ruined, nay, destroyed, nay, killed.In comments to the Sunday Times magazine (actual story is subscription only), he offered this nostalgic version of what the music business truly is: &quot;Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album.&quot;Now, I know that many people did precisely this on holding their first ever Floyd album, their first ever Sabbath album. Some even did it with Madonna.Still, Bon Jovi, who generally seems like a very nice man, feels very deeply about jackets. For he believes people today miss &quot;The beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it.&quot;Bon Jovi doesn&amp;39't think Steve Jobs is magical.(Credit:CC Zana Stardust/Flickr)Beauty may well be in the eye of the jacket-beholder. However, I know that many bought one particular Scorpions album--&quot;Lovedrive&quot;--whose jacket featured a man, a lovely girl, and some chewing gum, and imagined rather more than the record delivered. But that, I suppose, is the risk one takes when one judges an album by its cover.Bon Jovi, though, reportedly described this period of music history in very Jobsian terms: &quot;Magical.&quot;And yet he accuses Steve Jobs of being the scorpion in the decline of jacket-based music purchases: &quot;I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: 'What happened' Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.&quot;There will be some who feel his pain. There will, however, be many who will feel less sympathy. They are the people who have donated countless albums to Goodwill, albums that they bought just because the jacket looked cool--though the music turned out to be a touch rancid.To blame Jobs for introducing the quaint idea that you can listen to a piece of music before you buy it seems a little like blaming a shoe store for inventing the ridiculous notion of trying on a size 10, just in case it's really a size 11.As businesses change, we all lose something along the way. I fear, for example, that when The Beatles came along, there were many classical musicians who railed at those who had invented such dreadful technologies as amps and electric guitars.Gone, for them, was the magical time when you put on a tux, went to a chilly concert hall, and listened to something miserable from 17th century Germany. Yet the practice still survives, in some form or another. Just as some people will, no doubt, still care about album covers more than albums.But business gets us all in the end. One minute Blockbuster has you paying late fees, the next minute it's the late Blockbuster. One minute Bon Jovi is a rock band, the next it's recording something blessedly close to country music. To give Steve Jobs a bad name because of that seems a little sad.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[preGame 44: Nintendo 3DS in-studio' Yakuza 4' Homefront]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-44-nintendo-3ds-in-studio-yakuza-4-homefront</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-44-nintendo-3ds-in-studio-yakuza-4-homefront</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Mar 2011 07:11:06 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>icolorcy</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-44-nintendo-3ds-in-studio-yakuza-4-homefront</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Inside the iPad 2: chip brings 50% browsing boost]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=inside-the-ipad-2-chip-brings-50-browsing-boost</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=inside-the-ipad-2-chip-brings-50-browsing-boost</comments>
<pubDate>Sat, 12 Mar 2011 08:10:04 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>varsanyala</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=inside-the-ipad-2-chip-brings-50-browsing-boost</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Wondering what makes thatiPad 2 you just got tick and how much faster it is than the original iPad Anandtech, iFixit, iosnoops, and UBM TechInsights have provided some answers. Processor performance: Let's address this first--for obvious reasons. Apple has already been very public about the dual-core 1GHz A5 processor--a step up from the single-core chip in the original iPad--and the chip's &quot;up to 9X faster&quot; graphics&quot; (Apple's ad copy). And the verdict from an independent review &quot;CPU [Central Processing Unit] performance...we found to be a healthy 50 percent faster than the A4 in the original iPad--at least in Web browsing,&quot; said Anandtech in a &quot;performance preview&quot; of the iPad 2. (More detailed benchmarks here.) But a boost in raw &quot;clock&quot; speed is not the reason, according to iosnoops. &quot;The new Apple A5 processor...may offer twice as many cores as the Apple A4 processor featured in the first generation iPad [but] it appears that each processing core is actually clocked at a slower speed,&quot; said the review site. iosnoops continues. &quot;While doing some early iPad 2 benchmarks, the team discovered by chance an interesting tidbit: the A5 doesn't run at 1GHz like the Apple A4, but is instead clocked around 890MHz (the speed of the A5 does not seem to be constant, and varies depending on the apps running on the iPad 2).&quot; Whatever the case, the iPad 2's performance is considerably better than the original iPad. &quot;The iPad 2 is much faster. Web pages load quicker, the OS is more responsive, and applications even launch faster,&quot; said Anand Shimpi, who heads up Anandtech, responding to an e-mail query. That said, it should be noted that the Motorola Xoom (with an Nvidia processor and graphics) surpasses the iPad 2 in some browser benchmarks, according to Anandtech. Graphics-specific performance: And the new Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX 543MP2 graphics processor On certain benchmarks, an increase ranging from 3X to 5X, according to Anandtech. Here's what that review site said about one benchmark--the so-called &quot;fragment lit triangle test&quot;: &quot;While the PowerVR SGX 535 in the A4 (original iPad) could barely break 4 million triangles per second in this test, the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 in the A5 manages just under 20 million. There's just no competition here.&quot; Gamers rejoice! Apple&amp;39's A5 processor is paired with 512MB of system memory from Samsung--which also makes the A5 chip, according to UMB TechInsights. On the right is the Toshiba 16GB flash memory chip. (Credit:iFixit)Chip manufacturer: And who makes the chip The A5 &quot;is definitely manufactured by Samsung using their 45nm (nanometer) process,&quot; said UBM TechInsights. System Memory: The iPad 2 has 512MB of memory--not 1GB like Motorola's Xoom. That said, this is twice the amount of the original iPad, which had only 256MB of system memory. Flash Memory (storage): IFixit shows a Toshiba TH58NVG7D2FLA89 16GB NAND Flash memory module. Other silicon:Broadcom BCM43291HKUBC Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM tuner combo chip ST Micro AGD8 2103 gyroscope ST Micro LIS331DLH accelerometer Broadcom BCM5974 CKFBGH capacitive touch-screen controller <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Florida, Carolinas getting smart grids in $500M push]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=florida-carolinas-getting-smart-grids-in-500m-push</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=florida-carolinas-getting-smart-grids-in-500m-push</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Mar 2011 08:11:15 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>TonyMontac</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=florida-carolinas-getting-smart-grids-in-500m-push</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Progress Energy is moving forward with its plan to spend $500 million to upgrade two of its electric utilities in Florida and the Carolinas to a smart-grid system.Together the two utilities provide electricity service to over 3.1 million customers. The Raleigh,N.C.-based company is paying for the upgrade in part with a $200 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The grant came out of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and is part of the high-profile push by the Obama administration and many state leaders to upgrade U.S. electric grids.The project is also a boon to IBM's efforts to grow its presence in the potentially lucrative industry of smart-grid analytics. Progress Energy plans to use IBM's WebSphere software platform as a tool to integrate distribution management and demand response systems. Big Blue has also been hired to help install and implement the systems in conjunction with Progress Energy, IBM announced today.IBM has run several pilot programs to test smart-grid systems in the past four years, including a consumer-level one in North Carolina in 2009 which found that on average, the introduction of smart-grid technology and smart meters cut electricity use by 15 percent.In the case of Progress Energy, however, IBM's services will concentrate on equipment and system upgrades, analytics, and management that will enable the company's utilities to better control things like voltage levels, as well as electricity distribution across power lines.IBM is one of a number of blue-chip companies getting into the smart-grid industry in recent years through software and services. Many of them have done so by buying smaller companies with existing technology, as is the case with Johnson Controls' purchase of EnergyConnect, Honeywell's purchase of Akuacom, and Siemens' acquisition of Site Controls.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Mefeedia: HTML5-compatible video on the rise]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mefeedia-html5-compatible-video-on-the-rise</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mefeedia-html5-compatible-video-on-the-rise</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:10:14 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>orvalluppr</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=mefeedia-html5-compatible-video-on-the-rise</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The debate between using Adobe Flash or HTML5 for online videos could be winding down, but the war among different video formats is heating up.A whopping 63 percent of all videos on the Web are now HTML5-compatible, compared to only 10 percent just a year ago, according to video-sharing site Mefeedia. Instead of relying solely on Flash to display their videos, many more Web sites are adopting video formats that can run directly in HTML5-compatible browsers.The majority of the sites uncovered by Mefeedia are using H.264, the most common video format since it's also compatible for playback using Flash. Google's VP8, or WebM, video codec is second on the popularity charts, followed by Ogg, aka Ogg Theora.With Apple's no-Flash requirement, Mefeedia says that sites such as YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip TV, and Vimeo are among those striving to support video on iOS devices. Specifically, mobile devices now represent 5 percent of the traffic to Mefeedia's site, up from 1 percent a year ago.Although HTML5 has shot up in popularity as an alternative to Flash, the array of video codes supported within HTML5 are themselves battling for dominance. H.264 may currently be the most common among the three on the Web, but lately it's divided different companies against each other.Google recently dropped a bombshell by announcing it would no longer support H.264 in its Chrome browser and would instead push for its own WebM codec. Many in the industry decried the decision, but Google justified it by saying that H.264 carries with it some hefty royalty fees, while WebM is open source. Apple and Microsoft are members of a patent pool called MPEG-LA that actually licenses the code for H.264, while Mozilla and Opera are stuck paying the licensing fees.The debate over HTML5 video formats is one that could be with us for awhile. This means that for the time being, many Web sites will need to continue to support more than one format for their videos. In Mefeedia's eyes, &quot;Web video is maturing and becoming more complex.&quot;To compile its findings, Mefeedia analyzed the videos indexed on its site (around 30 million from more than 30,000 video sites). The index includes videos from such content partners as Hulu, CBS, and ABC as well as videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion. Mefeedia specifically looked at videos that can play within HTML5's &quot;video&quot; tag, which in most cases means videos encoded using H.264.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Stream your own video content to iPads with JetStream HD]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stream-your-own-video-content-to-ipads-with-jetstream-hd</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stream-your-own-video-content-to-ipads-with-jetstream-hd</comments>
<pubDate>Sun, 27 Feb 2011 08:10:14 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>winbugpnos2u</dc:creator>
<category>Gaming</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stream-your-own-video-content-to-ipads-with-jetstream-hd</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In a world of cloud-based applications and media, it seems very 20th century that it's been difficult to stream movies and TV shows from collections on our home computers or media servers to mobile devices like iPads and iPhones.But a new product called JetStream HD is aiming to change that dynamic. Launching at Demo Spring 2011 in Palm Desert, Calif., this week, JetStream HD combines hardware and software to serve up your personal media to aniPad, and in the near future to other devices like iPhones andiPod Touches, and possiblyAndroid tablets.JetStream HD is a new product that could give users an easy way to stream all kinds of media from their home devices to an iPad.(Credit:JetStream)JetStream HD users who pay the one-time $199 fee will get a special appliance that they connect via an Ethernet cable to a Wi-Fi router in their home. Any content from a home computer or media server that they want to view on the go is then captured wirelessly--or through a USB connection--and streamed over the Internet to their iPad. JetStream HD requires a visit to Apple's App Store for its dedicated iPad app, which authenticates the user, ensuring that only they can view the content.The idea here is that users should be able to access all their rich media any time they want no matter where they are. JetStream CEO Grant Hall argued that while other services like Stream to Me and Air Video offer personal media streaming, they depend on software running on a user's home machine and therefore can be hamstrung if that computer lacks sufficient horsepower. As a result, Hall suggested, they cannot usually stream in high-definition.By comparison, he said, JetStream HD can do just that, utilizing video conversion technology embedded in the appliance to boost the quality of the movie or TV show to HD when it arrives on the mobile device. That means, Hall said, that users should have no problem getting the quality they're used to from content like Blu-Ray movies stored at home.At the same time, viewing video content in HD on the mobile device is meant to be continuous even if a user moves their iPad from a Wi-Fi connection to 3G--if they have a 3G-enabled device. JetStream HD auto adapts to the bandwidth available, Hall said, meaning that users generally have a seamless experience even if they move outside a Wi-Fi network. If the bandwidth available drops, users &quot;may see [the] picture soften slightly,&quot; Hall said.In addition to video content--either movies, TV shows, or a user's personal own videos--JetStream HD can also stream photos or music. In that, it is similar to what another product called Pogoplug does--send a user's personal content to mobile devices via an appliance that plugs into a wireless router in the home. Pogoplug will also soon make it possible to stream video.Scrapes for metadata Another feature of JetStream HD is that its software is designed to search the Internet, scraping for metadata related to the content that is available for streaming. They will see lists of content available from their home computer or media server and related information such as genres for their movies, the season and episode number for any TV show, and cover art for music. The JetStream software also provides search options so users can enter keywords and find content they're looking for, Hall promised.And if new content is added at home, it will automatically be added to the database, meaning that it will instantly show up as available on the mobile device.The appliance has two USB ports, allowing users to plug in two external hard drives or thumb drives. In the future, Hall said, the service is likely to be configured so that a USB camera could be plugged into the appliance, allowing for applications like a security system where users can see what's going on in or around their home at any time via their mobile device.Hall said that JetStream will begin taking orders for the product this week and it is expected to be released in April or May. The Canadian company is funded through a combination of the founders' own money, some support from the Canadian government, and investments by family and friends. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Stack Exchange launches programmer recruiting site]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stack-exchange-launches-programmer-recruiting-site</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stack-exchange-launches-programmer-recruiting-site</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:10:11 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>advavouck</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=stack-exchange-launches-programmer-recruiting-site</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Stack Exchange, the company behind Stack Overflow, the influential-among-programmers Q&amp;A site, is taking another stab at a revenue model for the service by launching a jobs board for its users at the Launch Conference in San Francisco today. It's the first presenting company at this conference. (There is a live video feed from Launch on Ustream.) Previously, Stack Exchange had charged for the hosting of &quot;white label&quot; Q&amp;A sites, but that model didn't work. In April of 2010 the Stack Exchange sites became free. Influence of the Stack Overflow site (the biggest of the company's sites) then grew quickly' the site has 11 million programmers a month using it, CEO Joel Spolsky claims. Now the company is trying to turn the revenue stream back on.  Stack Exchange is launching Careers 2.0, a job board for developers, with an emphasis on helping hiring managers find programmers with good reputations among other programmers. In other words, the top users of Stack Overflow. Careers 2.0 profiles include a lot of data showing the job seeker&amp;39's rating on Stack Overflow. (Image edited to showcase ratings features' click on image for original screenshot.)(Credit:Stack Exchange) The business model for Careers 2.0 is not uncommon for a recruiting service: it's free to use for people looking for jobs, but those doing the hiring pay for access. People pay not by the job post, though, but just by length of access. One week is $500, for example, which &quot;ought to be enough to find a good programmer,&quot; Spolsky says. There's no free trial, but there is a money-back guarantee if a customer can't find a good candidate, he adds.  What makes Careers 2.0 interesting is that it illustrates the growing importance of online reputation for job seekers' see also Honestly.com. Also, it shows how any site that helps users create a professional reputation might be able to make money, at least until its users start including verifiable reputation scores in their resumes, thereby saving recruiters the expense of paying for resumes sorted by reputation. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. There is a lot to be said for getting a form of peer review alongside a resume or job application. It is exactly the information a hiring manager might want and precisely what isn't available in any reliable way today. Recruiters can find candidates' managers can interview them' but you can't really know what a person's real contributions are unless you have an uncommonly good network of people that include the candidate's coworkers at previous jobs. Spolsky says that Q&amp;A sites like his are even good for wallflower employees--people who might not be very visible to others or who might have sparsely-populated profiles on people-rating sites like Honestly or LinkedIn. He says that with only three or four good answers, a technical professional can earn an impressive online reputation. Also, Spolsky says, people who are trying to scrub a damaging online search engine result might find that participating in Q&amp;A sites is a very good way to rise in the rankings and push older misinformation or personal attacks off the top of the search results. Unless people start gaming the reputation scores on Q&amp;A sites in a sick form of job-hunting Survivor (&quot;I'd better not rate Joe's answer highly, I might want the same job he'll be up for some day&quot;), managing online reputation on sites like Stack Exchange and Quora could become a key career-building skill. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[SudoGlove: Bend index finger to accelerate car]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:11:10 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>maralyn45</dc:creator>
<category>Social</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sudoglove-bend-index-finger-to-accelerate-car</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The glove in the SudoGlove system contains flex, force, and vibration sensors, plus a 2D gyroscope on the wrist.(Credit:Jeremy Blum) Here's one case where giving the finger while driving is a very good idea. The index finger, that is. Bending it makes the remote-controlled car in the SudoGlove system accelerate. Tilting your hand turns the car. Pressing your ring finger makes it go in reverse. Pinkie pressure turns on the headlights, siren lights, and siren sounds. Clapping honks the horn.  Jeremy Blum wears the glove and control module (click to enlarge). (Credit:Jeremy Blum)  The SudoGlove, designed and built by engineering students at Cornell University, allows wearers to control a modded RC car using hand gestures. But it has implications for any hardware containing a wireless transceiver, says Jeremy Blum, a Cornell junior majoring in electrical and computer engineering and one of the students who worked on the SudoGlove as a final project for an information science class.  &quot;All the processing is done on the glove side of the system, and simple 8-bit control values are transmitted that can be used to do just about anything on the control end,&quot; Blum told CNET. Just the other night, Blum created a computer interface that can be controlled by the glove. He'll display it and the hand-controlled RC car at BOOM 2011, Cornell's technology and innovation showcase, on March 9. But unlike other gestural gloves that can be used to control virtual objects, the SudoGlove (so named for the Sudo programming command) is aimed at bridging the gap between users and traditional hardware devices.  &quot;By removing the distance between the user and traditional hardware devices,&quot; the students say, &quot;our goal is for SudoGlove to feel more like an extension of the body as opposed to an external machine.&quot;   To make the SudoGlove, Blum and peers Joe Ballerini, Tiffany Ng, and Alex Garcia outfitted a standard RC car with an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller and other electronics components. An XBee wireless module receives commands from the glove, and an Arduino Pro Mini processes them and tells the reworked car what to do.(Credit:Jeremy Blum) The tricked-out Reebok glove got a flex sensor, two force sensors, a vibration sensor, and a 2D gyroscope on the wrist. The glove sends data to a battery-operated control module worn on a belt holster.  In all, the project involved 250 hours of combined labor, 150 feet of wire, and 600 lines of code. Even in a world where technology increasingly bows to the will of motion, that might seem like a lot of work to go into a toy car. Then again, maybe it's a small price to pay if the simple bend of a finger drives all of our gadgets one day.          Leslie Katz    Full Profile E-mail Leslie Katz   E-mail Leslie Katz If you have a question or comment for Leslie Katz, you can submit it here. However, because our editors and writers receive hundreds of requests, we cannot tell you when you may receive a response.   Submit your question or comment here: 0 of 1500 characters       Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and myriad other digital distractions. As a co-host of the recently retired CNET News Daily Podcast, she was sometimes known to channel Terry Gross and still uses her trained &quot;podcast voice&quot; to bully the speech recognition software on automated customer service lines. E-mail Leslie.  <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[GE pitches halogens as incandescent bulb stand-in]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ge-pitches-halogens-as-incandescent-bulb-stand-in</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ge-pitches-halogens-as-incandescent-bulb-stand-in</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:10:56 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Fernada</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ge-pitches-halogens-as-incandescent-bulb-stand-in</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Halogens in the shape of a traditional bulb can be about 20 percent more efficient than incandescent lighting.(Credit:General Electric )You can include halogens to the list of lights that can replace traditional incandescent bulbs. General Electric on Monday announced a line of halogen lights, which are available now, in the shape of the familiar incandescent which up to 22 percent more energy efficient. A 2007 law created mandated efficiency levels for home lighting, which is expected to lead to fewer incandescent bulbs, starting with the 100-watt incandescent next year. Governments in other countries have set similar lighting efficiency requirements, which has led to more options for efficient lighting.Compact florescents and large LED bulbs are expected to meet the mandated efficiency levels. Halogens for general lighting or spotlights will comply with U.S. and global efficiency laws as well, GE said. It sells two-packs of the halogens bulbs for between $4 and $7.Halogen is an incandescent technology which offers precise dimming and crisp light, said John Strainic, global product general manager of GE Lighting in a statement. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[What should Nokia do]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=what-should-nokia-do</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=what-should-nokia-do</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 04 Feb 2011 08:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>resirman52</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=what-should-nokia-do</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Nokia N8 is a good start, but Nokia needs to do more in the smartphone space.(Credit:Josh Miller/CNET)It's hard to know what to make of Nokia these days. Though it still holds a huge worldwide market share and sells more phones than its competitors, it doesn't quite capture the buzz it once had, and its presence in the United States has dwindled. Sure, the Finns maintain a healthy business selling low-end handsets in emerging markets, but over the last three years, smartphones are where the action is. And though Nokia still succeeds in that space occasionally--we quite liked the Nokia N8, for example--its strategy has been rather unclear.To its credit, Nokia is aware of the problem. At last September's Nokia World, company execs vowed to &quot;shift into high gear&quot; and &quot;fight back in smartphone leadership.&quot; How exactly that fight will unfold remains a popular point of debate in the wireless industry--many analysts have urged Nokia to join the Android family--but up until now, Nokia has kept its cards close.Come next Friday, however, Nokia will fully outline its new strategy at an investor meeting in London. CEO Stephen Elop announced the February 11 meeting during the company's quarterly earnings call last week. Elop didn't get specific, but he set off a wave of speculation when he said the company needs to &quot;build or join a competitive ecosystem.&quot;&quot;The game has changed from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems,&quot; Elop said during the call. &quot;And competitive ecosystems are gaining momentum and share.&quot; Immediately, some Nokia watchers theorized that the company would announce that it was developing a handset based on Windows Phone 7 or Android.Such a move would be surprising, considering that as of late the company has been mildly dismissive of Android while continuing to promote Symbian and the developing MeeGo platform. But with the market throttling forward at rapid speed, Nokia may have decided the radical change is necessary. So what could its options beStay with MeeGoFrom what I've seen, most of my tech journalist colleagues are advocating this path. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, for instance, doesn't see an OS switch to Microsoft happening. Similarly, PCMag's Sacha Segan and Eric Zeman at Information Week also urged Nokia to develop MeeGo as a worthy competitor to Google and Microsoft.Though I agree that this is the most likely scenario, I can't say that it excites me. Experienced Symbian users may love Symbian, but the OS can be maddening for everyone else. Sure, Nokia did give Symbian 3 a nice upgrade on the N8, but it needs to do more. And though I'm always a fan of customer choice, MeeGo just doesn't spark my interest at this point. It could be really cool, and I'm hoping that it is, but Nokia needs to deliver real MeeGo handsets soon.AndroidThe most unlikely of the three, I'd say, but still not impossible. Indeed, jumping into Android would entail risks. The OS is growing fast and it's attracted the attention of major players like Motorola, HTC, and Samsung. Nokia would be arriving late to the party and its rivals will fight to keep the leadership positions they've assumed. On the other hand, Nokia could play an &quot;always late, but worth the wait&quot; role.Windows Phone 7Honestly, I wouldn't mind if Nokia went this route while also developing MeeGo.Windows Phone 7 is new and it has its growing pains, but the OS has a lot of promise. Nokia could benefit by getting involve with an OS from the ground up, and Microsoft--which is Elop's previous employer, by the way--could use the exposure from an industry giant.Whatever happens, we'll know for sure next week after Elop breaks the news in London. CNET also will be at Mobile World Congress a few days after that in Barcelona, Spain, where Nokia will kick off its presence at the show by holding a press conference February 13.What do you think Nokia will do Take our poll and leave a comment below.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Monty Python's Cow Tossing: Fetchez la vache!]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=monty-pythons-cow-tossing-fetchez-la-vache</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=monty-pythons-cow-tossing-fetchez-la-vache</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:10:42 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>bintterazmwes</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=monty-pythons-cow-tossing-fetchez-la-vache</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Monty Python Cow Tossing offers some unique twists on Angry Birds, but comes up short in the graphics, sound, and humor departments.(Credit:Zed Worldwide)Talk about a can't-miss idea: an Angry Birds-style game based on the cult classic &quot;Monty Python and the Holy Grail.&quot; Instead of flinging birds at pigs, you fling French cows (and other presumably French barnyard animals) at King Arthur and his knights. Sprinkle in clips from the movie and some unique gameplay twists, and you've got pure gaming gold.In theory. In reality, Monty Python's Cow Tossing (also available for iPad) is missing that certain...special...something [cue music].The game works on the same basic principle as Angry Birds: fling stuff at your enemies until you've destroyed them. In place of a slingshot and a limited supply of birds, you've got a catapult and unlimited animals.So where's the challenge if you have unlimited &quot;ammo&quot; It took me a while to figure this out, but the knights (i.e. your targets) are piled atop a battering ram that slooowly creeps toward your stronghold. If it gets there, you lose the level.You can adjust the height and placement of your catapult, though I rarely found this to be necessary. What's more, various power-ups (and occasional power-downs) drop from the sky at regular intervals' if you time your shot so that your &quot;weapon&quot; hits one midflight, it immediately gains (or loses) an advantage.What do the various power-ups/downs do You'll have to squint at the game's tiny help pages to figure it out. One example: fling a turkey at a falling axe and it turns into two projectiles (body and, um, severed head) instead of just one.All this should add up to great fun, especially for a die-hard Python fan like myself, but Cow Tossing comes up short in the most important area: gameplay. Maybe it's because everything onscreen is so tiny, or because the herky-jerky framerate makes the action awkward, but the game just doesn't &quot;feel&quot; right.I will say that after I got through the first 10 or so levels, which are extremely easy, things started to get more interesting, and I started to enjoy it more. But I still couldn't escape that feeling of something being missing. I guess I expected more humor, or at least some Python-ish sound effects (mostly you just hear explosions). Monty Python's Cow Tossing needs less tossing and more Python.At 99 cents ($1.99 foriPad), the game won't break anybody's bank. It did, however, turn me into a newt. (I got better.)<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[preGame 39: Sony NGP wrap-up' InFamous 2]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-39-sony-ngp-wrap-up-infamous-2</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-39-sony-ngp-wrap-up-infamous-2</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:10:50 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>minisa</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=pregame-39-sony-ngp-wrap-up-infamous-2</guid>
<description><![CDATA[<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Report: Netgear CEO slams Apple's Steve Jobs]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-netgear-ceo-slams-apples-steve-jobs</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-netgear-ceo-slams-apples-steve-jobs</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Jan 2011 08:10:23 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>samunellarichardson</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-netgear-ceo-slams-apples-steve-jobs</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Josh Lowensohn/CNET)Netgear chairman and CEO Patrick Lo reportedly slammed Apple CEO Steve Jobs for his business practices on Sunday, and said Apple would have to change its closed system to compete in the future.Speaking at a lunch in Sydney, Australia, Lo reportedly said Apple would have to open its platform so it could compete withGoogle Android in the mobile space, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.&quot;Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform,&quot; said Lo.The statement was directed at Jobs' decision to take a medical leave from Apple to focus on his health. There is no indication at this point that Jobs will not return to Apple.Lo also criticized Jobs' ego, which he said led to the public trashing of Flash. &quot;What's the reason for him to trash Flash There's no reason other than ego,&quot; Lo said.In an open letter posted last year, Jobs detailed the reasons he didn't feel Flash was the right technology for theiPhone andiPad. He talked about reliability, security and performance, as well as issues related to battery life and other technological issues that would negatively affect the iOS devices. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[iTunes updated for CDMA iPhone]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=itunes-updated-for-cdma-iphone</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=itunes-updated-for-cdma-iphone</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:10:24 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Lamecheag</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=itunes-updated-for-cdma-iphone</guid>
<description><![CDATA[(Credit:Apple)Apple has released an update to iTunes that provides support for Verizon's CDMA version of theiPhone.Made available yesterday, the iTunes 10.1.2 update offers the information in its &quot;Read Before You Install iTunes&quot; note: &quot;iTunes 10.1.2 syncs music, movies, and more with iPhone 4 (CDMA model) and provides a number of important stability and performance improvements.&quot;Though not specifically detailing the other changes in version 10.1.2, Apple noted that the 10.1 update had added the ability to sync an iPhone,iPad, oriPod Touch with iOS 4.2 and use AirPlay to stream videos from iTunes to the newest edition of Apple TV. Verizon's iPhone 4 is slated to debut February 11. Current Verizon customers can preorder starting February 3. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Sony unveils 'Next Generation Portable,' the new PSP]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sony-unveils-next-generation-portable-the-new-psp</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sony-unveils-next-generation-portable-the-new-psp</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jan 2011 08:11:12 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>koremkmkrm</dc:creator>
<category>Gaming</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=sony-unveils-next-generation-portable-the-new-psp</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The new Next Generation Portable, from Sony. Known by many as the PlayStation Portable 2, the new device was announced at a live event in Tokyo on Thursday.(Credit:Sony Computer Entertainment)At a live event in Tokyo, Sony on Thursday unveiled what many had come to call thePlayStation Portable 2, its long-awaited, all-new handheld video game console. Known officially as the &quot;Next Generation Portable,&quot; the device will be available this holiday season. Sony has not yet said what the new PSP will cost.According to CNET sister site Gamespot.com, the new device will come in a brick form factor and feature a 5-inch OLED display with four times the resolution of current-generation PSPs. It has touch pads on both the front and the rear and dual micro analog joysticks. It also has both front- and rear-facing cameras and will use a Flash-based memory card. It will also offer 3G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi connectivity, according to GameSpot. On-stage in Tokyo, Sony's Shuhei Yoshida said the new device boasts PlayStation 3-quality graphics.The rear of the new NGP from Sony. The device features touch pads on both the front and the rear, as well as front- and rear-facing cameras.(Credit:Sony Computer Entertainment)Sony said that the device has an ARM Cortex A9 (core) CPU, and a SGX543MP4+ GPU. It also has a Six-axis motion-sensing system. Games that will be offered for the Next Generation Portable (NGP) include Hot Shots Golf Next, Gravity Daze, Killzone, WipeOut, Resistance, LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted, Little Deviants, Reality Fighters, and Billiards, GameSpot reported.Before unveiling the new PSP, Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Kaz Hirai also unveiled a new platform called PlayStation Suite that will ensure that first-generation PlayStation games will run on a wide variety of Android-enabled handsets andtablets. That could mean that a huge library of games will be available for the first time to Android users. Hirai also said that the Next Generation Portable is backward compatible, and will run downloadable PSP titles. And Toshihiro Nagoshi from Sega later said that it would be possible to port PlayStation 3 games to the NGP, according to Gamespot.A view of the front of the NGP, showing its dual sticks, and its front-facing camera.(Credit:Sony Computer Entertainment)Nintendo's DS has dominatedAlthough Sony's PSP line, which first launched in 2004, has sold an impressive 65.7 million units worldwide, according to independent analyst outfit VGChartz.com, it has been overshadowed for years by the much more successful Nintendo DS line of handhelds. All told, according to VGChartz, Nintendo has sold 145.3 million of its portable devices--the DS, the DSi, and the DS Lite. The slim PSP, which was released in 2007.(Credit:CNET)Sony has also tried to reinvigorate the PSP before, first with a slimmer version of the original device it put out in 2007, and then with a significant redesign that never really caught on known as the PSP Go. But neither of those devices were able to help Sony close the handheld sales gap with Nintendo.And now, of course, the new Next Generation Portable will be going head-to-head with the very-well-received new Nintendo 3DS. That well-reviewed device, which offers users 3D capabilities without special glasses, will go on sale March 27, and cost $249. It will launch with six first-party titles, including Legend of Zelda and Nintendogs + Cats, and ten third-party games, including Electronic Arts' The Sims and Madden Football' Super Street Fighter IV 3D from Capcom' Dead or Alive: Dimensions from Tecmo, and others. Still, the Next Generation Portable has a lot of people excited because of its rich collection of features. The PSP Go, which Sony launched in 2009.(Credit:Sony)But while Sony got plenty of attention for the new NGP, it did not unveil at the Tokyo event a PlayStation phone, as many had expected. It appears, according to published reports, that such a phone, which could be based on Google's Android platform, and be known as the Xperia, will not be revealed in public until next month's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Report: Net users more apt to be joiners in real life]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-net-users-more-apt-to-be-joiners-in-real-life</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-net-users-more-apt-to-be-joiners-in-real-life</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:10:06 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>breannavfd3</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-net-users-more-apt-to-be-joiners-in-real-life</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Contrasting with the stereotype of the lone computer geek, Internet users are more likely to join groups in the real world and be active in them than those who don't go online, according to a study released yesterday by Pew Internet.Based on a survey, the &quot;Social Side of the Internet&quot; report found that 80 percent of Internet users participate in voluntary organizations, compared with 56 percent of non-Internet users.Further, those who tap into social networks on the Web are even more likely to be active. Among those polled, 82 percent of the Facebook users and 85 percent of the Twitter users said they're joiners of groups. That compares with 77 percent of non-Facebook users and 79 percent of non-Twitter users who said the same.The survey found that Internet users also participate more heavily in their groups than do non-Internet users by donating more money, volunteering, taking leadership roles, and attending meetings. Church and spiritual groups were among the most popular organizations cited by those involved in a group. Also high on the list were sports and recreational leagues, consumers groups, volunteer organizations, and trade associations.(Credit:Pew Internet)Group joiners touted the Internet as an important tool for running a group. Among those polled, 69 percent said their groups have active Web sites, 77 percent said their groups organize activities and reach out to members via e-mail, and 40 percent host their own online discussion forums.Asked why they're part of a group, 59 percent of the respondents said they see group membership as way to accomplish something that they couldn't on their own. Almost the same number (57 percent) cited keeping up with news and information as another key reason.&quot;One of the striking things in these data is how purposeful people are as they become active with groups,&quot; Kristen Purcell, research director at Pew Internet and co-author of the report, said in a statement. &quot;Many enjoy the social dimensions of involvement, but what they really want is to have impact. Most have felt proud of a group they belong to in the past year and just under half say they accomplished something they couldn't have accomplished on their own.&quot;Pew's study is based on a series of telephone interviews conducted from November 23 to December 21, which reached 2,303 adults, ages 18 and older.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Rumor: Verizon iPhone to be released February 3]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=rumor-verizon-iphone-to-be-released-february-3</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=rumor-verizon-iphone-to-be-released-february-3</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 07 Jan 2011 08:10:29 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>healthcentral</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=rumor-verizon-iphone-to-be-released-february-3</guid>
<description><![CDATA[You may be able to get your sweetie a Verizon iPhone this Valentine&amp;39's Day.(Credit:Kent German/CNET)On the heels of Verizon's announcement of a special press conference on January 11, Boy Genius Report says a source has confirmed that Apple has blacked out retail employee vacation time for February 3 to February 6, covering a possible VerizoniPhone launch weekend.When I was a manager at an Apple Store here in Portland, this was a fairly common occurrence for big launch days. Generally these employee vacation blackout days would come months in advance, allowing our staff to make plans around those dates.This of course is only a theory, but in my experience we never had a blacked-out weekend that was not a launch (generally the iPhone orMac OS X).The regions of the United States that BGR has knowledge of have all confirmed these dates as blacked out. Verizon is expected to make the big announcement on January 11 (at 11 a.m. no less), most likely confirming they will finally be bringing Apple's iPhone to the vast Verizon network.The timing all makes sense with Verizon easing contracts to allow for upgrades, the continuous flow of parts photographs and speculation, and with Valentine's Day just two weeks later. The last remaining mystery seems to only be that of specs. Many are hoping for Apple to jump aboard the LTE 4G bandwagon and compete with 4G smartphones running Android, announced at CES. As I, and others, have noted, this is not likely, as Apple's business move to join Verizon would be to gain market share in the rapidly expanding smartphone sector.Were Apple to limit the Verizon iPhone to LTE customers, it would minimize market penetration and lose out on most of Verizon's subscriber base. Until 4G is more prevalent, Apple will most likely stick to CDMA-based versions of the iPhone. I wouldn't expect an LTE version until 2012 at the earliest.Are you making plans to line up for Verizon's iPhone Are you switching from AT&amp;T Let me know your plans in the comments!<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[CES: Electric Uno scooter doubles as a unicycle]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-electric-uno-scooter-doubles-as-a-unicycle</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-electric-uno-scooter-doubles-as-a-unicycle</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:10:51 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>ttwotimeso</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ces-electric-uno-scooter-doubles-as-a-unicycle</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Uno electric scooter is a unique beast: an electric scooter that looks like a mini-motorcycle and folds up into a Segway-like scooter balanced on two wheels. A prototype of the Uno III, the latest invention from BPG Motors, will be on display at the Consumer Electronics Show, its first public showing. It's aimed at urban dwellers, most likely in Europe, where there is a strong culture around motorcycles and scooters, said BPG Motors CEO Brad Harkavy.Uno electric scooter goes for eco-chic (photos) View the full galleryThe company plans to begin producing these electric scooters in limited quantities in about a year with mass production planned after that, according to Harkavy. It will be priced similarly to how high-end Vespa scooters are, which cost between $4,000 and $7,000, he said.The Uno III is styled like a high-performance racing motorcycle but it's much better suited for getting around town than around the race track. Its top speed is limited by scooter regulations at about 35 miles per hour and its range is 30 miles.But the Uno has some unusual features that its designers hope will add to its cachet and utility.Most dramatically, it works in two modes. In its &quot;motorcycle&quot; driving mode, it operates like a typical electric scooter. Its self-balancing mode, enabled by a gyroscopic control system, is when the front wheel pulls back off the floor and tucks itself in between two rear wheels. That unicycle-like mode gives it a three-foot turning radius and makes the scooter nimble enough to move in tight spaces. The owner could, for example, bring the Uno into an elevator and store it inside or operate in city centers where there are a lot of pedestrians, said Harkavy. A driver can shift from self-balancing to driving mode while the scooter is moving. The two rear wheels have their own suspension and electric motors, giving the driver better driving control when in motorcycle mode, according to the company.Started as high school science projectIn thecar-heavy culture of the U.S., scooters and electric bikes appeal to a small niche of drivers. But in other parts of the world, two-wheelers are far more common, making them good candidates for electrification. By some estimates, there are already 120 million electric bikes in China, a vehicle segment that has grown rapidly in the past decade. BPG Motors was founded by Benjamin Gulak who, when in high school, decided to start building a cleaner electric scooter after a trip to China, where dirty two-stroke scooters are common. It became a high school science project and then a company in 2008. It was funded in 2009 by private investors. Its scooter is less polluting than a gasoline-powered scooter because it's electric, but the designers are clearly trying to make it cool as well.The Uno III is actually the third vehicle produced by BPG Motors in the space of about 18 months. Previous designs, which brought a good deal of media interest, had the self-balancing mode but did not fold out as fully as the Uno III or have the same styling.In the last few years, a handful of companies have formed to develop electric motorcycles and scooters, but these products are still trying to get a real foothold in the U.S. Harkavy expects to find initial interest for its scooter with trend-setters in the U.S., such as celebrities, but a more receptive audience in Europe.&quot;We're definitely focused on the urban scooter buyer but someone looking for more unique vehicles and something quite stylish,&quot; he said.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Amazon: Outage due to hardware not hackers]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=amazon-outage-due-to-hardware-not-hackers</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=amazon-outage-due-to-hardware-not-hackers</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Dec 2010 08:10:08 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>riauckli1</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=amazon-outage-due-to-hardware-not-hackers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.&quot;The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European data center network and not the result of a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attempt,&quot; an Amazon representative told Reuters. Specifically, the hardware-related issue occurred at an Amazon hosting center in Dublin, which hosts the various European sites that were affected, according to the Register.Amazon ran afoul of pro-WikiLeaks activists earlier this month after it decided to kick the controversial Web site off its EC2 Web hosting service. In retaliation, some members of the Anonymous group reportedly called for action against the retailer, but so far Amazon apparently has been left alone.&quot;Simply put, attacking a major online retailer when people are buying presents for their loved ones would be in bad taste,&quot; Anonymous explained late last week in an apparent press release. The decision to spare Amazon is in sharp contrast to the DDoS attacks that Anonymous has launched against such companies as PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard for their roles in cutting off payments to WikiLeaks.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Samsung's Galaxy Tab red flag for Intel]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsungs-galaxy-tab-red-flag-for-intel</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsungs-galaxy-tab-red-flag-for-intel</comments>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Dec 2010 08:10:31 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>udanikaspencerb</dc:creator>
<category>Business &amp; Finance</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsungs-galaxy-tab-red-flag-for-intel</guid>
<description><![CDATA[No. 2 chipmaker Samsung is showing Intel how to succeed in the brave new world of tablets and smartphones. Samsung's Galaxy Tab is competitive with Apple's iPad: Samsung makes the device and supplies the main chip inside. Here, Intel is playing catch-up.(Credit:Samsung)While Intel is the largest chipmaker in the world, Samsung is No. 2. And, unlike Intel, it also has a large and successful affiliated consumer arm that churns out products like the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Not surprisingly, many of those products use Samsung silicon too.That's a vertically integrated strategy that Intel can't match. And that's not all. Samsung also supplies chips to outside customers (Intel's business model) like Apple which use its chips in outrageously popular products like theiPhone andiPad. The scary part is that the Samsung Galaxy Tab is a solid product and worthy competitor to the iPad, even besting it with features like front and back cameras--a feature you won't see until the iPad 2, most likely. (I test drove the Android-based 7-inch Galaxy Tab for about 30 minutes and was very impressed). That puts Samsung in two of the leading tablet designs on the market--one its own product. Before I go too far, let me back off a bit by saying that Intel's dominance in the hundred-billion-dollar-plus annual PC market has given it an almost unassailable lead in chips. Intel is also the leading chip supplier for the tens of millions of servers worldwide that power the Internet. The latter a nontrivial point often obscured by the glare of glitzy end-user products like the iPad (which uses Intel-powered servers when accessing Web sites worldwide).That said, Intel is obviously racing to play catch-up in tablets and smartphones, two of the fastest-growing computing markets. The chipmaker has formed a new business unit for Netbooks and tablets and CEO Paul Otellini spent a lot of time at a technology conference today explaining how it's going to eventually be competitive. &quot;It's important to keep a perspective in the early days of any market. Things change. Markets change,&quot; Otellini said today. &quot;It wasn't too long ago--2003--where virtually all of the silicon in a storage system was custom. It's grown dramatically over the intervening seven years to where we now are the predominate architecture for storage vendors,&quot; he said, implying that Intel will could eventually become a big player in tablets and smartphones. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Kin's quiet return a rarity among failed gadgets]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=kins-quiet-return-a-rarity-among-failed-gadgets</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=kins-quiet-return-a-rarity-among-failed-gadgets</comments>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Nov 2010 08:10:13 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Shilpa</dc:creator>
<category>Mobile &amp; Electronics</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=kins-quiet-return-a-rarity-among-failed-gadgets</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The resurrected Kin is back on Verizon, with some changes under the hood.(Credit:Verizon)Like any other business venture, gadgets fail--some quietly and others spectacularly.For Microsoft's Kin though, its return this week marks a rarity in the tech world: a product that, despite a strong push from its maker, simply didn't get off the ground, but is then brought back from the dead. No, it's not being touted as the hottest, newest phone by carrier Verizon, which a Microsoft exec once told The New York Times played a part in the device's sales woes the first time around. Rather, it's being offered up for sale alongside phones that did not meet such a quick demise.The real question is whether anyone in their right mind would buy a Kin now that it's back. Microsoft has very clearly moved on from the prospect of the Kin and focused its efforts on the further development ofWindows Phone 7, which launched stateside earlier this month and is headed to Verizon and other CDMA carriers next year. Windows Phone 7 brings things to the table that the Kin does not, like an app store, more hardware variety, and software updates that promise to fix bugs and add features like copy and paste. There's also a bigger issue, which is that the Kins that Verizon is now selling are dramatically different from than the ones that came out the first time around. Not in the hardware, but in the software.Neither Microsoft nor Verizon would speak to CNET about whether the new version included bug fixes, or the promise of fixing bugs if they cropped up, but a Verizon representative confirmed that features like the Kin Loop, Kin Spot, Kin Studio, and social-networking integration have all been removed, along with the automatic back-up feature that would sync media and other information up into the cloud. These were all things that separated the Kin from other feature phones.Because of these changes, Verizon is smartly positioning the Kin as a feature phone, as opposed to a smartphone. That's a far cry from the device's original introduction, which was somewhere in between the two. Arguably one of the Kin's weakest points was its steep data pricing, which came closer to the smartphone class. That's something Verizon has since remedied with a leaner data price that is half the cost of the one the Kin launched with, and can be had at a lower entry price. It's worth pondering if such a plan would have given the Kin more of a chance the first time around.Few other gadgets have made a return after being shelved. Many companies fix things from failed products and bring them back as new products with a different shell. Something like the not-even-launched Palm Foleo arguably ushered in the Netbook form factor.As for a true return from the dead, in recent years one of the best examples is Polaroid's digital film, which the company famously discontinued, prompting a group to produce its own replacement. Polaroid then surprised everyone by producing new instant cameras, though ones that used film from Fujifilm. The comparison might be a tad unfair considering Polaroid film enjoyed years of popularity prior to its demise (unlike the Kin), and that it was more a victim of a major shift in technology as film went from analog to digital. Still, some of the same parallels can be drawn with the Kin. Consumer buying habits have made a strong shift towards smartphones, as recent research from Gartner pointed out. Carriers have also attempted to make the transition a little easier with multi-tier data plans that can get users in the door for under $20 a month, as opposed to what was once the standard $60 or higher. While the Kin may no longer be in that tier of products, those spare Kin units may be snapped up during the holidays by people looking to get a feature phone with a decent music player. The simple answer for all this may just be that Verizon had a bunch of phones sitting in a warehouse somewhere. The new question is how long they'll stay there. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Google TV roundup: The first wave of products]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-tv-roundup-the-first-wave-of-products</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-tv-roundup-the-first-wave-of-products</comments>
<pubDate>Thu, 11 Nov 2010 08:10:20 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Celina</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-tv-roundup-the-first-wave-of-products</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Google TV had tons of hype in the run-up to its mid-October launch. Now that we've had a few weeks to live with the first wave of released products, we have a better idea of what Google needs to fix and which products (if any) are worth considering.What Google needs to fix A lot of our early reviews of Google TV products may seem negative, but that's doesn't mean we aren't impressed with the platform's potential. Google has laid the groundwork for a lot of great functionality, but until it addresses its long list of outstanding issues, it's appeal will be limited to early adopters.Work out a deal with major TV networks or work around themThe main reason mainstream users want a product like Google TV is so they can watch free streaming content from sources like ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and Hulu. And all of those destinations are currently blocking Google TV from streaming video. It's not an easy issue, especially since it appears that major TV networks don't want you streaming free content to your TV. If Google can't work out a deal with the content providers, it may have to find a way to work around them, otherwise much of the appeal of the Google TV platform will be lost.Fix search and TV guide informationWe generally take Google's searching prowess for granted, which is why we were so surprised by the lackluster search results on Google TV. Google currently doesn't search Netflix's streaming titles, which is arguably the most important collection of online video available. We also found Google TV guide information to be frequently inaccurate, even on mainstream shows like &quot;The Daily Show&quot; and &quot;The Colbert Report.&quot; For Google TV to live up to its promise, its search and TV info need to be near perfect.More supported cable/satellite boxesTo really take advantage of Google TV, you need full cable/satellite box integration. That allows Google TV to schedule recordings and season passes directly from its interface, without even accessing your cable/satellite box's user interface. That kind of impressive functionality is currently available on a limited number of Dish Network DVRs, but it needs much wider adoption for Google TV to take off.More and better appsCompared with other streaming-video boxes, Google TV's initial rollout of apps is unimpressive. Worse, the included Netflix interface is several generations behind competition, like the Apple TV, Roku XDS,Xbox 360, andPS3. Google needs more apps in general, and the existing ones need to be as good as they are on other devices.Get the Android Marketplace up and runningGoogle has already announced that the Android Marketplace will be coming to Google TV in 2011, and the earlier the better. The ability for third-party developers will help the paltry app selection and possibly open up Google TV devices to services that nobody's thought of yet.Better stabilityThe first screen we saw when we completed the setup on the Logitech Revue was an error message. We just saw too many crashes and bugs with the Google TV software during our testing period, and mainstream users won't tolerate that in a living room setting. Further testing with the Sony NSZ-GT1 seemed to indicate that the first firmware update has improved of our initial problems, which is a step in the right direction/What products are available Even with all the problems we listed, Google TV products still have a lot to offer for early adopters who can put up with the quirks. Right now, there are essentially three products available with Google TV built-in. Logitech RevuePrice: $300Read the review | Check pricesAdvantages: Least expensive Google TV option' wireless keyboard is the best Google TV controller yet' built-in IR emitters obviate the need for IR blasters' built-in Harmony functionality for controlling a TV and AV receiver'iPhone and Android controller apps are already available. Disadvantages: Had network performance issues during our testing period' adds another box in your home theater cabinet. Outlook: Despite its issues, the Logitech Revue is the best choice for early adopters looking to check out Google TV, thanks to its excellent wireless keyboard.  Sony's NSX-GT1 seriesPrice: $600-$1,400Read the review | Check prices Advantages: Google TV integrated into an LCD, with no extra box required' works with over-the-air HDTV signals. Disadvantages: Expensive upfront cost' Sony's controller can be frustrating to use' requires physical IR blaster to control other products' TV's image quality is only so-so. Outlook: If you're an early adopter looking to buy a new LCD and aren't picky about image quality, Sony's NSX-GT1 is the most capable Internet-connected TV ever made.  Sony NSZ-GT1Price: $400Review coming soon | Check prices Advantages: Google TV integrated into a Blu-ray player' speedy Blu-ray load times. Disadvantages: Sony's controller can be frustrating to use' requires physical IR blaster to control other products. Outlook: Sony's NSZ-GT1 combines Blu-ray and Google TV in a single box for a relatively low upfront cost, although we think most early adopters will prefer the Revue. Related resourcesGoogle TV FAQFree 'Conan' on Google TV: It works, with quirks <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Microsoft lets Hotmail users set encryption by default]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-lets-hotmail-users-set-encryption-by-default</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-lets-hotmail-users-set-encryption-by-default</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Nov 2010 08:10:35 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Sophia01</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-lets-hotmail-users-set-encryption-by-default</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Hotmail users can set the e-mail service to automatically use https for their sessions.(Credit:Microsoft)Microsoft announced today that it is offering Hotmail users the ability to take advantage of encryption when using the free e-mail service.  To enable full-session HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) for Hotmail you can type in &quot;https://hotmail.com&quot; or set it as the default for e-mail, calendar, and contacts at https://account.live.com/ManageSSL. Previously SSL was only used at the time of sign-in, but now it's available from the start until a user logs off, a Microsoft spokeswoman said.  Also starting today, SkyDrive, Photos, Docs, and Devices pages will all automatically use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption.  Enabling HTTPS means Outlook Hotmail Connector, Windows Live Mail, and the Windows Live application for Windows Mobile (version 6.5 and earlier) and Symbian won't be available, Dick Craddock, group program manager for Windows Live Hotmail, wrote in a blog post.  Google has always offered Gmail users the ability to use HTTPS and made it the default setting in January, and offers it as an option for Google Docs as well.  The Microsoft encryption announcement follows new security features Microsoft added in September that make it harder for e-mail accounts to get hijacked and easier for victims to recover them if that happens. <br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Intel creating first chip for outside manufacturer]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=intel-creating-first-chip-for-outside-manufacturer</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=intel-creating-first-chip-for-outside-manufacturer</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Lilly01</dc:creator>
<category>Business &amp; Finance</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=intel-creating-first-chip-for-outside-manufacturer</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Intel traditionally builds chips for its own use, but it's now branching out to create one for another manufacturer.Intel will create chips based on its 22-nanometer technology for Achronix Semiconductor, Achronix announced today. This marks the first time Intel is designing a chip for another manufacturer and may indicate that the chip giant is looking to do some contract manufacturing for outside customers.Based in San Jose, Calif., Achronix will use Intel's 22-nanometer chips to develop its own Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are integrated circuits that can be programmed after they've been manufactured, allowing customers to adapt them for their own needs. Known as the Achronix Speedster22i, the new FPGA will see as much as a 300 percent gain in performance, 50 percent lower power drain, and 40 percent less cost than FPGAs build on 28-nanometer technology, Achronix said. Geared for telecommunications, networking, industrial, and consumer markets, the FPGA is expected to drive such applications as 100G and 400G Ethernet networking and LTE mobile communications, added Achronix.The Speedster22i will also be the first commercial FPGA family that can be made in the U.S., setting it up for military and aerospace customers, which require that such chips be made domestically for security reasons.&quot;Intel has the best process technology in the world and we are privileged to have formed this strategic relationship, which enables simultaneous improvements in speed, power, density, and cost,&quot; Achronix CEO John Holt said in a statement. &quot;The combination of the advanced 22nm process from Intel and the advanced FPGA technology from Achronix enables Speedster22i to eclipse other FPGA solutions expected to hit the market in the next few years.&quot;Though Intel has downplayed the new deal as a sign of things to come, some analysts see it as an indication that the company is jumping into the contract manufacturing business, according to The New York Times.&quot;I think this is only the beginning of Intel manufacturing for others,&quot; said Gus Richard, a microprocessor industry analyst with Piper Jaffray, as quoted by the Times.The deal will get off the ground sometime next year, according to the Times, when Intel will begin making the chips for Achronix.First demoed by CEO Paul Otellini at the Intel Developers Forum a little more than a year ago, the 22-nanometer microprocessors are the latest chips being pushed to the market. Squeezing 2.9 billion individual transistors in an area the size of a fingernail, the 22-nanometer chip has challenged traditional manufacturing processes, which use conventional photolithography, a method by which circuits are printed onto semiconductor chips.Intel recently announced that it would spend between $6 billion and $8 billion to build a new chip manufacturing plant and upgrade its existing fabrication plants in Arizona and Oregon. The new and existing plants will be put to work making the 22-nanometer processors, which are being designed to provide higher performance and longer battery life at a cheaper cost.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[You&'ve Got&nbsp'FMail]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=yoursquove-gotnbspfmail</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=yoursquove-gotnbspfmail</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Torrie</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=yoursquove-gotnbspfmail</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The news on Monday appears to be that Facebook will reinvent email. TechCrunch says ita4a4s the long awaited Gmail killer. Others say ita4a4s Gmail inventor Paul Buchheita4a4s project since he came to Facebook in the FriendFeed acquisition. Paul says he hasna4a4t been working on that, but rather the Big Freaking Zip File app where we can download all our Facebook bits. And anyway, hea4a4s gone a4&quot; off to Y Combinator to continue his angel investing. And Ia4a4m gone a4&quot; from email. Have been for a while now.I still use email all the time. Or rather, it uses me. I watch colleagues at work (Salesforce.com) bounce back and forth from Outlook and Gmail, selecting, reading, skimming, and oh yes, deleting, deleting, deleting. You have to do that in Outlook, to stay ahead of the Mailbox is Full message. Gmail, not really, but ita4a4s hard to break the old habit. And recently I had to start paying for that privilege, when Google stopped raising the limit and converted me to a cloud customer.But thata4a4s basically a methadone program, maintenance without getting high. I work for the Man a4&quot; email. It doesna4a4t work for me. Search has replaced email as the quickest path to information on demand, and increasingly the most valuable repository is the stream. Search plus stream is Track, and email notification is the delivery mechanism du jour. Email has been taken over by notifications of events from the stream. Facebook comments, FourSquare and PlanCast follows, YouTube subscriptions, Twitter direct messages, so much stuff ita4a4s turned spam into some odd historical horse and buggy data type.What happens now is that these stream objects are lit up with transactional properties. Code gets run based on incoming events, pulling it out of the teeming inbox before we see it and converted into actions predetermined by our inference engines and workflow rules. a4AIf Retweet equals Member of Strategy Group, add to midmorning direct message queue.a4 a4AIf Silverlight press conference transcript feed contains question from Mary Jo Foley, route to broker queue with Unload flag.a4 And so on.This is not AI or smart computing' ita4a4s harvesting social signals in the context of realtime economics. This is how the television networks have been making their money for years, pushed out to access by every business and business person. Watch how Conan harnesses the social wave to shoot to the top of the ratings, by redefining the ratings around the highly desirable data type of the transactional micromessage stream addict. (This happened on Monday.) On TBS, no less. Ted Turnera4a4s old flagship, built with CBS reruns and an over-80 demo, now sucking up the CoCo crowd. You kids, get off my lawn.If Facebook reinvents email by submerging it in the stream, theya4a4ll have something to announce. Meanwhile, Google continues to eat away at its notion of inevitability a4&quot; panic bonuses and multi-million dollar retention offers mixed with data withholding gambits. It never occurred to anyone that the data we give Google was valuable until they started hoarding it. Wea4a4ve known all along that Facebook was locking it up until they had so much momentum it didna4a4t matter, and now Google is blaring the news that ita4a4s too late to stop them.Google really gets in trouble when the widgets take over. I love my Gmail screen, with its GTalk/AIM IM presence lights going green and chat streams orange as Twitter tracks and FriendFeed conversations stream in. But the Chatter, Skype, and Facebook toaster popups and push notifications on my iPhone and iPad are slowly but surely relegating email further and further back in the pack. RockMelt is creeping in from the Edges, and Gmail is getting eaten alive by so many carpenter ants.Gmail is Googlea4a4s Achilles Heel, it suddenly seems. It heralded the beginning of the Cloud Era, by dismantling Microsofta4a4s aura of invincibility. You cana4a4t do that, cried the Sinofskyites, and then they did it. On demand email, you know, Office 365. But Google made the classic mistake of not checking their rear view mirror while blowing past the Borg. Wave, Buzz, Me, whatever. Forget Bing, forget the 10% raises, forget downloading the social graph and cloning it. If Google Classic is undermined, then it doesna4a4t matter what else is coming. If Facebook blows past email, Gmail looks like Google Reader all of a sudden.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[HP posts solid earnings despite turmoil around Mark Hurd&'s departure]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hp-posts-solid-earnings-despite-turmoil-around-mark-hurdrsquos-departure</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hp-posts-solid-earnings-despite-turmoil-around-mark-hurdrsquos-departure</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Catherine</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=hp-posts-solid-earnings-despite-turmoil-around-mark-hurdrsquos-departure</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Although it didn&amp;'t have a permanent chief executive for all of its fourth fiscal quarter ended Oct. 31, Hewlett-Packard still turned out solid results during the period and has raised its outlook for the coming year.The company reported solid results despite the fact that the board fired chief executive Mark Hurd in August.In a conference call, newly appointed HP CEO Leo Apotheker said the company would reinstitute salary increases in 2011. That&amp;'s in keeping with the talent war in tech, as evidenced by Google&amp;'s recent decision to give all employees a 10 percent raise. It&amp;'s a big deal for HP, since the company has more than 300,000 employees.The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company reported net income of $2.5 billion, up 5 percent from $2.4 billion a year earlier. Earnings per share were $1.10, up from 99 cents a year earlier. Quarterly revenue was $33.3 billion, up 8 percent from a year earlier. The company said it saw broad-based growth in its commercial sales business, particularly in commercial PCs and printers.&amp;''HP proved once again that it is able to execute given its market strengths and technology leadership,&amp;'' said Apotheker.The solid performance shows that HP is a big battleship and the change in one single executive position, even if it is the CEO, won&amp;'t necessarily affect the company&amp;'s performance. HP&amp;'s stock price fell after Hurd&amp;'s firing &amp;8212' related to a scandal about Hurd&amp;'s relationship with a former HP marketing contractor &amp;8212' since Hurd had led HP&amp;'s recovery for five years.The non-GAAP earnings were $1.33 a share, up 17 percent from $1.14 a share a year earlier. For the fiscal year, HP reported revenues of $126 billion, up 10 percent from a year earlier. Net earnings were $8.8 billion, up 14 percent from $7.7 billion a year earlier. Earnings per share for the year were $3.69, up 18 percent from $3.14 a year earlier.HP also said that it saw 50 percent sales growth in its HP Networking division, with 3Com revenue ahead of plan. Fourth fiscal quarter revenue growth was strongest in Europe, up 11 percent, and the Americas, up 10 percent. Overall, revenue from outside the U.S. was 64 percent of revenue. Cathie Lesjak, chief financial officer, said the growth was across all regions and product groups.HP services revenue grew 0.4 percent to $9 billion in the quarter. Enterprise Storage and Servers grew revenue 25 percent to $5.3 billion' HP software grew 1 percent to $974 million. Personal systems group revenue grew 4 percent to $10.3 billion. Notebook revenue was down 3 percent in the quarter, but desktop revenue was up 13 percent. The printer division saw revenue rise 8 percent to $7 billion.For the first fiscal quarter ending Dec. 31, HP estimates revenue of $32.8 billion to $33 billion, with earnings per share of $1.06 to $1.08. For the full year, HP expects revenue to be $132 billion to $133.5 billion and earnings per share of $4.42 a share to $4.52 a share.In a conference call, Apotheker said he has been on the job three weeks. During that time, he said, customers are asking for full solutions from HP, with access to data instantly wherever they are. Apotheker says those customers want to do more business with HP and that the company hopes to be more agile, drive more revenue from its existing portfolio, and offer a wide variety of products to each customer.Some wags are surprised that Apotheker took the call, apparently from the company&amp;'s headquarters in Palo Alto. That&amp;'s because Apotheker, former CEO of SAP, is wanted by Oracle in a legal proceeding. Apotheker has evidently been avoiding Oracle&amp;'s subpoena, partly by traveling around the world to visit HP&amp;'s employees. Oracle is suing SAP for illegally copying Oracle&amp;'s software.&amp;''That&amp;'s a bit of an odd question,&amp;'' Apotheker said when asked by journalist James Rodgers of The Street.com where he was physically located for the call. &amp;''Why, I&amp;'m on the media call concerning our fourth quarter in Palo Alto at HP&amp;'s headquarters together with a bunch of people. Would you like a picture&amp;''Next Story: Viacom blocks Google TV, the madness continues Previous Story: Sign up for the Vator Splash NY competitionPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Companies: HPPeople: Lo Apotheker, Mark Hurd          Companies: HPPeople: Lo Apotheker, Mark HurdDean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Google Instant Brings Search As You Type To The iPhone. Cool, But Pretty Hard To&nbsp'See]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-instant-brings-search-as-you-type-to-the-iphone--cool-but-pretty-hard-tonbspsee</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-instant-brings-search-as-you-type-to-the-iphone--cool-but-pretty-hard-tonbspsee</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Ben001</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=google-instant-brings-search-as-you-type-to-the-iphone--cool-but-pretty-hard-tonbspsee</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Two months ago, when they first unveiled Google Instant, Google let everyone know that it would be coming to mobile devices this fall. Sure enough, it&amp;'s here, in beta form.While the feature hit some Android devices about a week ago, today it has arrived for the iPhone as well. I&amp;'ve just loaded up google.com on my device and sure enough, right below the search box and location indicator, there&amp;'s an &amp;''Instant (beta) is on: Turn off&amp;'' message. It&amp;'s sort of interesting that the feature is opt-out, even on mobile (Update below). Though I have to assume that if your connection is slow, they&amp;'ll revert to regular Google search just as they do in the browser itself.So how does it work Similar to it does in a regular web browser, but it&amp;'s a bit odd since the drop-down search suggestions take up a lot of screen real estate and so does the on-screen keyboard. You can still see the results being populated as you type, but barely (see below).The other mildly annoying thing about Instant on the iPhone is that it once again is google.com-only (this was my main complaint about the desktop version as well, but they&amp;'re currently rolling it out baked into Chrome&amp;'s Omnibox). For most of my searches on the device, I use the Google search box built into the browser and that doesn&amp;'t have Instant. Obviously, even if Google wants to add it there, they&amp;'re going to need Apple&amp;'s approval. I wouldn&amp;'t hold my breath for that.Update: Google has let me know that for the majority of users it is actually opt-in. They are testing it as opt-out with a small percentage of users and I was apparently in that test. I&amp;'ve updated the story as such.Regarding the &amp;''hard to see&amp;'' aspect, a Google spokesperson had this to say:On a phone, the screen size is much more constrained than on desktop so the layout of the search predictions and results are different. We did reduce the number of predictions that show on screen to create more space for results, but we find that people like being able to quickly choose between predictions. CrunchBase InformationGoogleiPhoneInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[All 17 Beatles Albums Are In The Top 100 On&nbsp'iTunes]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=all-17-beatles-albums-are-in-the-top-100-onnbspitunes</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=all-17-beatles-albums-are-in-the-top-100-onnbspitunes</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Nisha</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=all-17-beatles-albums-are-in-the-top-100-onnbspitunes</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Obviously, there is a lot of pent-up demand for the Beatles on iTunes.  Decades after their last album, they were still the third best-selling music group last year, and that was without any digital sales.  Since going live on iTunes for the first time this morning, all 17 albums are currently in the top 100 best selling albums on iTunes.  And 15 of them are in the top 50.The best selling Beatles album is Abbey Road, currently at No. 12, followed by the White Album (no. 14), Sgt. Pepper&amp;'s (No. 15), and the $149 Box set (No. 16), and moving up the charts fast.  The least popular Beatles albums  Yellow Submarine (No. 72) and Beatles Fior Sale (No. 57).In contrast, only 6 of the top 100 songs on iTunes are from the Beatles.  &amp;''Here Comes The Sun&amp;'' (No. 53), &amp;''Let It Be&amp;'' (No. 56), &amp;''Blackbird&amp;'' (No. 67), &amp;''In My Life&amp;'' (No. 69), &amp;''Come Together&amp;'' (No. 89), &amp;''and &amp;''With A Little Help From My Friends&amp;'' (No. 97).  People are definitely buying the albums instead of singles.  This kind of impulse buying is to be expected on the first day the Beatles are available, especially with all the media coverage around the sale of these albums.  But will a Beatles album take the top spot before the week is out  And how many of these will remain in the top 100 through the holidaysCrunchBase InformationiTunesInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Venture titan John Doerr: Cleantecha4a4s a4ANetscape momenta4 coming next year]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=venture-titan-john-doerr-cleantechâÂ€Â™s-âÂ€Âœnetscape-momentâÂ€Â-coming-next-year</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=venture-titan-john-doerr-cleantechâÂ€Â™s-âÂ€Âœnetscape-momentâÂ€Â-coming-next-year</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>herman01</dc:creator>
<category>Eco</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=venture-titan-john-doerr-cleantechâÂ€Â™s-âÂ€Âœnetscape-momentâÂ€Â-coming-next-year</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Cleantech investing may have fallen by 30 percent in the past few months, but legendary venture capitalist John Doerr said this morning that hea4a4s still optimistic about backing startups in this field.Doerr, whose investments include Internet giants like Google and Amazon, said that looking at the amount of money invested doesn&amp;'t indicate the quality of companies &amp;8212' after all, during periods of peak venture investment, many &amp;''inconsequential&amp;'' Web startups got funded. In cleantech, Doerr said the industry is waiting for its a4ANetscape momenta4. In other words, the industry needs a big, successful initial public offering that will a4Acapture the imaginations of investors and consumers alike.a4a4AI think wea4a4re very likely to see that next year,a4 Doerr said.(Some cleantech companies, namely Tesla and A123Systems, have already had successful IPOs, but their stock price subsequently dropped.)Doerr made the comments at VentureBeata4a4s GreenBeat conference on the Stanford campus. In the past few years, Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp;amp' Byers (where Doerr is a partner) was largely seen as refocusing on cleantech, but it has made headlines over the past few months for its mobile and social investments. Still, Kleiner is definitely a4Aopen for businessa4 in cleantech, Doerr said, and it invested in six clean-energy companies during the past year.Doerr also took the opportunity to talk about the recent election. Most Democrats are feeling pretty glum about the results (Doerr is a big Democratic donor and also served on President Barack Obamaa4a4s economic advisory board), but Doerr focused on the defeat of Proposition 23 in California, which would have halted the statea4a4s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He called the proposition a a4Aduplicitous, sinister proposala4 funded by Texas oil companies.a4ACalifornians said, a4We want a clean energy future,a4a4a4 Doerr said.[photo by Dean Takahashi]Next Story: Why won&amp;'t utility companies innovate Smart Grid leaders explain Previous Story: GM exec: Chill, Volts won&amp;'t bring down the gridPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: GreenBeat, GreenBeat 2010People: John Doerr          Tags: GreenBeat, GreenBeat 2010People: John DoerrAnthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and social networks. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. (All story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com) You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[The great white iPhone 4 hunt to end soon]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-great-white-iphone-4-hunt-to-end-soon</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-great-white-iphone-4-hunt-to-end-soon</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>hongchen</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=the-great-white-iphone-4-hunt-to-end-soon</guid>
<description><![CDATA[For  the dedicated (and crazy) few waiting for a white iPhone 4, relief may  be on the way. The elusive device has found its way to AT&amp;amp'Ta4a4s online  system, according to the mobile site Boy Genius Report, a sign that Apple may be gearing up to launch it within the next few months.The news coincides with a report from last week about the white iPhone 4 appearing in Best Buya4a4s employee toolkit, which revealed that it was scheduled to be in stock on February 27.Now it appears that the white iPhone 4 will likely be available in March, which would fall in line with Applea4a4s announced delay of the phone until Spring 2011. The device was delayed several times since the initial launch of the iPhone 4 in June 2010, and it was later revealed that a possible hardware flaw with the white case and the iPhonea4a4s camera was the culprit.The camera issue, along with the iPhone 4a4a4s widely publicized antenna problem and potential trouble with sliding cases and its glass back, is a sign that Apple will have to come up with a radical new redesign for the iPhone 5. Apple just recently delivered the iPhone 4 to Verizon with only minor antenna changes for its CDMA network.Next Story: How to pitch to tech journalists Previous Story: Foursquare grew 3400% in 2010PrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: iPhone, iPhone 4, smartphonesCompanies: Apple, AT&amp;amp'T, Best Buy          Tags: iPhone, iPhone 4, smartphonesCompanies: Apple, AT&amp;amp'T, Best BuyDevindra Hardawar is VentureBeat's lead mobile writer and East Coast correspondent. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for several years, and has been writing about technology since 2004. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him at devindra@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @Devindra. Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Teen virtual world Gaia Online lays off 15 to 20 staffers]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=teen-virtual-world-gaia-online-lays-off-15-to-20-staffers</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=teen-virtual-world-gaia-online-lays-off-15-to-20-staffers</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Alexlll</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=teen-virtual-world-gaia-online-lays-off-15-to-20-staffers</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Gaia Online, which has created a virtual world for millions of teens and young adults, has laid off 15 to 20 of its employees in the past few days, VentureBeat has learned.It doesn&amp;'t bode well for the virtual world category, which has had a number of high-profile failures this year.While it isn&amp;'t a large number of layoffs, it&amp;'s a sizable percentage of the company&amp;'s employee base, which was at 110 employees in June when we interviewed then-CEO Craig Sherman. In August, Mike Sego replaced Sherman, who remains on the board of the company.[Update] In a statement, chief operating officer Elaine Kitagawa said, &amp;''As with any company in a fast, emerging area, Gaia continually evaluates its business to find additional ways to create and meet market demands. In light of this, Gaia has indeed restructured its staffing this week, which resulted in open positions in some areas and reduction in others. Gaia believes this move will better enable it to pursue growth in the social gaming and virtual world communities arena. &amp;'' [end update]In June, Sherman said the company had 9 million unique visitors and han seen steady results in hanging onto its users, even in the face of the enormous popularity of social games on Facebook. Gaia targets 13- to 25-year-old youths with a casual, two-dimensional anime-cartoon-like virtual world.The world is akin to a fantasy world, offering a richer experience than a typical Facebook game. The average revenue per paying user is about $30 per month. Rivals include IMVU and Habbo.Gaia&amp;'s traffic has declined a little, but not dramatically, according to Compete.com. The company makes about 60 percent of its money from the sale of virtual goods and another 40 percent from ads. Some of those ads are pretty creative' when the film Alice in Wonderland debuted, Gaia put rabbit holes in the world for users to jump into. But since the recession hit in 2008, ads haven&amp;'t been a stellar business.Gaia was founded in 2003. That was eons ago in teen time. Now teens are flocking to social networks such as Facebook, where they can play games and communicate with a larger body of people.Virtual worlds such as There.com, Vivaty, Metaplace (bought by Playdom) and others have all shut down this year. Second Life appeared to be bucking the trend, but it has seen layoffs and a change in top management. If there is a blessing in the downturn for virtual worlds, it&amp;'s that there is less competition than there used to be.Gaia had hoped to drive more engagement with its own massively multiplayer online game, zOMG!, embedded within the Gaia Online world. That ad-based game is a full-featured game with quests and missions and has helped with monetization and retention, but it didn&amp;'t really pull in lots of new users for Gaia, Sherman said.Next Story: Acer announces its answer to iTunes: Alive Previous Story: Acer&amp;'s on a roll: Launches Android tablets, 4.8-inch smartphone, crazy dual-screen laptopPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: anime, Second Life, virtual worldsCompanies: Gaia Online, Linden Lab, Metaplace, There.com, VivatyPeople: Craig Sherman, Mike Sego          Tags: anime, Second Life, virtual worldsCompanies: Gaia Online, Linden Lab, Metaplace, There.com, VivatyPeople: Craig Sherman, Mike SegoDean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Angry Birds On Android Projected To Generate $1 Million Per Month In&nbsp'Advertising]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=angry-birds-on-android-projected-to-generate-1-million-per-month-innbspadvertising</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=angry-birds-on-android-projected-to-generate-1-million-per-month-innbspadvertising</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>medicabc</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=angry-birds-on-android-projected-to-generate-1-million-per-month-innbspadvertising</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ One of the most successful mobile games right now is Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times across different mobile platforms, with 12 million of those being paid downloads on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.  But on Android, the game is free, and is supported by advertising.  Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 5 million times on Android since that version launched in October.  &amp;''By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds,&amp;'' says Peter Vesterbacka, the &amp;''Mighty Eagle&amp;'' behind the game at Rovio Mobile.He appears in the video above taken by Google&amp;'s AdMob team, which kicks off a mobile developer series.  In the video, he doesn&amp;'t mention the $1 million a month figure, but he does reveals some other stats, such as the fact that the apps have an 80 percent retention rate, measured by the number of people who download updates.  And on the iPhone alone, people spend a collective 65 million minutes a day playing the game. He also talks about different ways to make money from mobile gamesa4&quot;whether that is paid downloads, advertising, or toys.  (Expect to see ads for the Angry Birds plush toys in the game itself).CrunchBase InformationAngry BirdsRovio MobileInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Samsung sells 2M Galaxy Tabs, 80M phones, in record-breaking quarter]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-sells-2m-galaxy-tabs-80m-phones-in-record-breaking-quarter</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-sells-2m-galaxy-tabs-80m-phones-in-record-breaking-quarter</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>enochkeonc</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=samsung-sells-2m-galaxy-tabs-80m-phones-in-record-breaking-quarter</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Life is good for the reigning Android hardware king Samsung.  The company released its record-breaking earnings report (PDF link) for the fourth  quarter of 2010 yesterday, revealing that it sold 2 million Galaxy Tab  tablets and 80 million phones.Samsung announced in early December that it sold 1 million Galaxy Tabs in its first two months on the market. The 2 million number tells us that sales for the tablet  just about doubled in December. The company says its phone sales were  driven in large part by its successful high-end Galaxy S line, which sold 10 million units last year.  Phone sales in the quarter were up 17 percent from a year ago, and they  reached a total of 280 million units sold for 2010, a 23 percent  increase.The  strong fourth quarter helped Samsung to surpass many of its previous  fiscal records. For 2010, the company saw total revenue of $139 billion,  $14 billion in net income $15.5 billion in operating profit ($2.7  billion of which came from the last quarter).Samsung also shipped 12.72 million flat panel TVs in the fourth quarter, a 10 percent increase from the previous quarter.The  company came out of nowhere last year with its slick Galaxy S phones,  which were released in the US across all major cellphone carriers. Now  Samsung has to fight to keep its position as the top Android phone  manufacturer as we begin to see an onslaught of 4G devices from competitors with powerful  dual-core CPUs. Other Android device makers like Motorola and HTC have  already unveiled their plans for next-generation smartphones, and  Samsung reminded investors that it has a dual-core successor to the  Galaxy S on the way in a few months.We suspect many new devices to appear at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona in a few weeks.Via Engadget, ElectronistaThis post was sponsored by WatchMouse, a service which monitors websites, Web applications, and web API&amp;'s for availability and performance from an external perspective. WatchMouse delivers a self-service monitoring solution utilizing an infrastructure of over 50 monitoring stations in 30 countries. Multi-step monitoring, Real Browser Monitoring and Public Status Pages are included in all plans. Learn more here. As always, VentureBeat maintains strict adherence to its principles of editorial integrity and WatchMouse had no input into the content of this post.Next Story: Canada&amp;'s Real Ventures announces lean startup program for games Previous Story: For $200,000, George Whitesides will send you into space (video)PrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: Android, earnings, Galaxy S, Galaxy Tab, smartphones, tabletsCompanies: Samsung          Tags: Android, earnings, Galaxy S, Galaxy Tab, smartphones, tabletsCompanies: SamsungDevindra Hardawar is VentureBeat's lead mobile writer and East Coast correspondent. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for several years, and has been writing about technology since 2004. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him at devindra@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @Devindra. Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Salesforce picks up Ruby on Rails web-app provider Heroku for $212M]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=salesforce-picks-up-ruby-on-rails-web-app-provider-heroku-for-212m</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=salesforce-picks-up-ruby-on-rails-web-app-provider-heroku-for-212m</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Peplyclere</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=salesforce-picks-up-ruby-on-rails-web-app-provider-heroku-for-212m</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Salesforce announced today that it has acquired Heroku, which develops and deploys web-based applications that rely on the programming language Ruby on Rails, for $212 million as part of its Cloud 2 suite of cloud applications. The company made the announcement at the Dreamforce 2010 conference in San Francisco.Heroku helps developers streamline their Ruby on Rails web-based applications. Once a developer builds their app, they can launch it on Heroku, which then adjusts things like computing capacity and storage as needed. The community has more than 1 million developers and around 105,000 applications.Last fall, it started integrating with other services. For example, a company could launch their application on Heroku and then monitor it using services from another Rails startup, New Relic.The company also recently raised a round of funding worth $10 million in Mayand has raised $15 million total after it was incubated by Y Combinator. The round was led by Ignition Partners, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.It&amp;'s a pretty sizable exit for a company that was founded in 2007, and another testament to how important cloud computing has become for a public company like Salesforce to pay out more than $200 million. It&amp;'s also another indication of a shift in Salesforce&amp;'s strategy to focus more on developers, as Heroku specializes in removing headaches for developers working with Ruby on Rails.Salesforce already works with VMforce, which similarly helps Java developers run their applications natively on Salesforce&amp;'s cloud application environment Force.com.Next Story: WeGame launches digital game distribution with a social twist Previous Story: Technology 500: Tech industry is on an upward swingPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: acquisition, cloud computing, ruby on railsCompanies: Heroku, salesforce          Tags: acquisition, cloud computing, ruby on railsCompanies: Heroku, salesforceMatthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francsico, Calif. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Microsoft jams JavaScript from partners in its Hotmail messages]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-jams-javascript-from-partners-in-its-hotmail-messages</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-jams-javascript-from-partners-in-its-hotmail-messages</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>minpnoresajk</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=microsoft-jams-javascript-from-partners-in-its-hotmail-messages</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Microsoft, looking for a way to differentiate itself from other Web email services, has allowed a select group of companies to include JavaScript code in email messages that will introduce new functions, potentially opening up a fertile new canvas for marketers.That can involve bringing in Orbitz flight and hotel search functions directly into the email message, or Monster&amp;'s job search engine. Microsoft also plans to partner up with Netflix and LinkedIn, giving Hotmail users ways to access their queues or LinkedIn profiles directly from the email message.The idea is to shave off a few seconds necessary to travel to other sites and keep the content of email messages up to date. But it also has the potential of introducing what are essentially ads from Microsoft partners directly into emails &amp;8212' the kind of integrated experience advertisers have long sought.The Hotmail team said Microsoft is trying a number of things to differentiate itself from Gmail and make it more competitive, like removing limits on attachment sizes and offering a deeper level of connectivity with its Web-based Office applications. There are a number of security concerns with allowing JavaScript inside email messages, because it would be easier to insert malicious code. Microsoft says its Active Views service should eliminate that risk by isolating the email message from your computer.Research firmComScore shows that Hotmail is still on top of the email hill with 361.7 million users. Google&amp;'s Gmail currently has around 193.3 million users, but it has had a bit of an easier time picking up Internet-savvy evangelists than Microsoft has had. Microsoft is also a bit late to the game with some of its new functions a4&quot; file-sharing is really a non-issue at this point with the emergence of services like Dropbox, and Google has also been in the Web-based office game for some time now.Microsoft recently tried to break that cycle by firing off a social media campaign that involved sending the Hotmail development team to news aggregation site Reddit.com. The results weren&amp;'t quite so spectacular, as many users didn&amp;'t pull their punches and literally asked why they should switch from competing services like Google&amp;'s Gmail.Microsoft only listed those four companies as partners that can use the Active Views service for now. It hasn&amp;'t said whether anyone will be able to introduce JavaScript code into Hotmail messages. It&amp;'s an interesting idea, but it&amp;'s still unproven. Only time will tell if this is as safe and useful as the company suggests.[Photo: gaobo]Next Story: Vimeo turns its video site into a film school Previous Story: On the GreenBeat: Court delays Tessera solar plant, Chinese solar panel maker to grab 10% of global marketPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: Active Views, email, Hotmail, javascript, Microsoft Active Views, Microsoft HotmailCompanies: Google, Microsoft          Tags: Active Views, email, Hotmail, javascript, Microsoft Active Views, Microsoft HotmailCompanies: Google, MicrosoftMatthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francsico, Calif. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.Name (required)Mail (will not be published) (required)WebsiteVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[BrightSource raises $89M out of planned $100M for solar thermal]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=brightsource-raises-89m-out-of-planned-100m-for-solar-thermal</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=brightsource-raises-89m-out-of-planned-100m-for-solar-thermal</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>vupgealu</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=brightsource-raises-89m-out-of-planned-100m-for-solar-thermal</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Solar thermal company BrightSource Energy has raised $89.5 million out of a planned $100 million round, according to an SEC filing.Last summer, the company set out to raise $215 million and closed on $176 million of it as of June of last year. It also announced in May it had raised $150 million in equity financing from investors that included Alstrom, Draper Fisher Jurveston, Morgan Stanley and VantagePoint. The company is perennially bandied around as an IPO candidate, with a couple of folks betting that this will be the year.BrightSource has been flying high on a few successes, last year landing a $1.37 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for its Ivanpah project, a 392-megawatt solar project that could generate enough energy to power up to 140,000 homes. The project is currently underway and uses BrightSource&amp;'s solar thermal technology, which involves using a field of mirrors in the Mojave Desert to reflect sunlight onto a point on &amp;''power towers&amp;'' that contain liquid that can be heated to generate the steam that turns electrical turbines (pictured).Power plant company NRG Energy has pledged to invest $300 million over the next three years in the Ivanpah project. And PG&amp;amp'E and Southern California Edison have all signed 20 to 25-year power purchase agreements to buy electricity generated at the site.BrightSource also has a deal with Chevron to build a 29-megawatt solar thermal plant at the site of one of Chevron&amp;'s oil fields in California.Next Story: Google asks users to help fight content farms Previous Story: Nokia and Microsoft: Can two weaklings make a musclemanPrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: Solar, solar thermalCompanies: BrightSource Energy          Tags: Solar, solar thermalCompanies: BrightSource EnergyIris Kuo is the VentureBeat's lead GreenBeat writer. She has reported for The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, Houston Chronicle, the McClatchy Washington Bureau and Dallas public radio. Iris attended the University of Texas at Dallas and lives in Houston. Follow Iris on Twitter @thestatuskuo (and yes, that's how you  pronounce her last name). Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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