Cascaad, which is billed both as an ‘awareness engine’ and a ’smart social media browser’ by the Italian startup behind the service, aims to make the realtime streams you tap into more about you.

Essentially, the tool is designed to filter the never-ending incoming message stream from your friends and millions of others by continuously distilling which part of the chatter is about stories, things and places that match your specific interests, context and social affinities.

Here’s how the service, currently only available as a beta iPhone app (iTunes link), gets pitched in their own words:

The goal is to potentiate your extended awareness of what is happening right now of personal relevance in your world. It is basically a very sophisticated realtime networked search, discovery and filter engine that distills automatically what both your friends and millions of other people are paying attention to on Twitter and other social platforms into the attention-grabbing stories, things and places that match personal interests and social affinities.

Cascaad will soon be releasing a full-fledged Web-based experience, and the company is also working on integrating new data sources and capabilities, including location awareness, as well as extending the platform’s reach. Last week, Cascaad released its first beta of what it calls the SuperTweet API, which it says will allow third-party Twitter applications to “add smart contextual information and monetization [...], including semantic entity markup, nonintrusive in-text affiliate commerce links, related content [and] social relevance scores”.

The startup was founded in 2008 by Erik Lumer (PhD Stanford, formerly at Xerox Parc and founder and ex-CEO of Internet TV startup Babelgum). The company’s R&D unit is based in Milan, employs 8 people and will be opening an office in Silicon Valley some time this quarter.

Cascaad has raised close to $2 million in financing over two rounds (one in November 2009, and one last month) from Italian VC firm Innogest Capital.

Another venture-backed startup doing similar things is Israel-based my6sense.

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Got a hankering for Pine Trail? We attest to a certain weakness ourselves, and now MSI's Wind U160 netbook is on sale for $380 to fulfill your Atom N450 snacking needs. We were intrigued by the little laptop when we played with it back at CES, particularly if its standard 6-cell battery hump can really produce the quoted 14 hours of life. For whatever reason Newegg and Buy.com are showing now-shipping right now, while Amazon's lagging with pre-orders only at this point, but we're sure you'll make the right retail choice, whatever happens.

MSI's Wind U160 netbook up for grabs in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 05:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember that guy who made the DuckPhone iPhone app? And how his app was rejected due to "Minimum User Functionality?" Well, Apple just approved his app after he added some news streams and a twitter feed from the stars of Jersey Shore. It just goes to show that one man's dumb garbage app is another man's acceptable piece of useful software.

Justice, friends, has been served.

Turns out Steve Ballmer's talk up at the University of Washington delivered even more saucy info than we were initially led to believe. In a transcript of the subsequent Q&A session, Steve is shown to have delivered the following statement on the topic of large-screen televisions and Microsoft's related hardware strategy:

For that big screen device ... there's no diversity. You get exactly the Xboxes that we build for you. We may have more form factors in the future that are designed for various price points and options, but we think it's going to [be] important.

It's safe to assume new form factors point to a smaller rather than larger 360 chassis, though the price points and further options he mentions are wide open for speculation. It wouldn't be unreasonable to forecast Microsoft pushing out its own slimmed-down console to match up with Sony's PS3 Slim, but we also shouldn't discount the idea of an Xbox 360 with Project Natal hardware integrated into its shell. In other words, we really don't know what Steve has going on under that shiny dome of his, we just hope it's as exciting as he makes it sound.

Steve Ballmer teases new Xbox 360 form factors, price points and options originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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