[Via Joystiq]

Read - Tony Hawk Ride dated and priced
Read - Limited Edition listing

Filed under: Gaming

Tony Hawk Ride Limited Edition skateboard outed as UK version gets priced and dated originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 21:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Since the early days of the Facebook Platform, Causes has been one of the most popular apps. It’s also big on MySpace, and the company behind it recently announced that they had raised some $10,000,000 for various causes in two years. It makes sense; it’s using the social aspect of these platforms to spread the word on good initiatives. A new startup, TwitCause, wants to extend that idea to Twitter.

And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.

The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.

Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.

As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.

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Laptop Magazine's once again done us all a really good turn by running a pretty exhaustive -- yet totally reasonable -- test of the tech support for ten popular companies that produce laptops. Essentially, they placed two call to each outfit's support -- one during peak, one during off-peak hours, and asked them some really basic questions such as "How can I make changes to my notebook's power settings?" Then, they tried to find answers to the same questions via the company's various web-based resources. So, what's the skinny? Well, only Apple got an "A," while Acer, Dell and HP hold the bottom spots with a "C-" score, while everybody else falls somewhere in the middle. The report, is, however, a really fascinating read with far more information than mere letter grades, so please -- click the read link to read the entire, epic tome.

Filed under: Laptops

Laptop Mag's tech support showdown strikes once again originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.

Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.

OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.

As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user’s profile page and to see friends’ ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.

Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.

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