http://www.compuc.com Technology News Videos And Resources Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:14:28 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I’m a sucker. It’s true. As much you guys think we rail against Apple, we’re like abused puppies, slinking back to our master’s hard ankles, shivering and awaiting praise. Why did I pre-order the iPad? Well, first I’m a gadget blogger. Second there is no certainty that mother Apple will ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/confession-i-pre-ordered-my-ipad-and-breguet-made-me-do-it/ And the intellectual property rollercoaster continues. The BBC is reporting that Microsoft's second appeal against a judgment granting $240 million in damages due to content in Word that infringed on patents held by i4i was today rejected, leaving the Redmond giant with a huge fine to pay atop its undoubtedly ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/microsoft-loses-second-word-patent-appeal-on-the-hook-for-240/ Back in November, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service, and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades. First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/hot-potato-tosses-a-new-site-api-and-iphone-app-with-foursquare/ We already got a look at Microsoft's little XNA show-and-tell as relates to Windows Phone 7 Series, but our colleague Andrew Yoon over at Joystiq had a chance for longer sit-down with Xbox Live general manager Ron Pessner and XNA Game Studio manager Michael Klucher at GDC today, and he's ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/talkin-windows-phone-7-series-gaming-with-microsoft-at-gdc/ Sony's calling the PlayStation Move the "next generation" of motion gaming and planning to market it as heavily as an entirely new console, so it's sort of a big deal -- and that means our main dudes at Joystiq are all over it. We've already covered the main details, but ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/want-more-on-the-playstation-move-head-over-to-joystiq/ Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/whrrl-3-wants-to-kill-farmville-not-foursquare-not-gowalla/ Who says you have to pick between a netbook and the coming onslaught of standalone tablet devices? Okay maybe some (eh hem Apple), but Lenovo's trying to have it both ways with the IdeaPad U1 and the S10-3t. In clamshell mode the S10-3t looks like any old 10-inch netbook, but ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/lenovo-ideapad-s10-3t-review/ Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook. Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/the-facebook-imperative-cannot-be-stopped/ More bad news for an already bullet-riddled MySpace: three key employees have left the company to join Gravity, a cross-town startup founded by former MySpace COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto. We covered Gravity’s launch in December 2009. The three MySpacer’s are Chief Software Architect Chris Bissell (we ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/more-talent-walks-out-the-door-at-myspace-three-key-employees-go-to/ Platogo, the social games platform, has released its Platogo Wrapper that enables casual games developers to easily integrate their games with Facebook by inserting a few lines of code. Essentially, it lets any casual game take advantages of the basic social features offered through Facebook, such as the ability for a ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/platogo-lets-developers-make-their-casual-games-facebook-ready/ We have some news on the app store that Meizu announced for the M8 a while back. The official name is apparently MStore, and it is indeed open for business with its first paid app, Mr. Jelly, going for about 29 cents (we believe it's a productivity tool for managing ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/meizu-mstore-open-for-business-mr-jelly-on-sale-now-for-29-cents/ Today in Tales from ASUS we bring you the story of the 10.1-inch Eee PC 1005PR. While we didn't catch this one hiding out in the overflowing CeBIT booth, it appears big A has gone and swapped out the screen on the 1005PE for one with a 1366 x 768-resolution ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/asus-eee-pc-1005pr-packs-broadcom-crystal-hd-and-high-res-screen/ comScore has just released its US online video rankings for January 2010, and the results aren’t positive. Overall views dropped by around 2.5%, with  32.4 billion in January vs. 33.2 billion in December. And Hulu, which celebrated crossing the 1 billion view milestone for the first time in ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/comscore-online-video-views-down-across-the-board-in-january/ Brazil is sort of a strange country to throw into the “emerging market” category. It’s not a particularly young country like India or Israel, nor is it a country like China or Russia that embraced capitalism fairly recently. Brazil is as old as the US and has had a decently ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/brazil-the-new-home-of-financial-innovation/ 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 ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/cascaad-personalizes-your-news-stream-in-real-time-raises-funding/ 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 ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/msis-wind-u160-netbook-up-for-grabs-in-the-us/ 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 ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/duckshead-revisited-apple-approves-duckphone-app-after-minor-changes/ 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 ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/steve-ballmer-teases-new-xbox-360-form-factors-price-points-and/ One of the cofounders of Zynga, the company’s executive vice president of sales and business development Andrew Trader, is no longer with the company, we’ve confirmed. He has been quietly removed from the company’s management page. Remaining cofounders – Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron and Steve Schoettler, ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/zynga-cofounder-andrew-trader-out/ We've been dying to know more about Microsoft's Courier tablet / e-book device ever since we first caught wind of it last September, and while our entreaties to Mr. Ballmer went unanswered, we just learned some very interesting information from an extremely trusted source. We're told Courier will function as ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/microsofts-courier-digital-journal-exclusive-pictures-and-details/ Apple just announced that its tablet device, the iPad, will be available in the U.S. on April 3. See announcement below. When Apple unveiled the device a few months ago, we were told it would be available by March. Rumors began to swirl recently that shipment of the devices was ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/apple-ipad-available-for-pre-order-from-march-12-on-sale-from-april-3/ For whatever reason, Android's high-performance Native Development Kit introduced back in the Cupcake days never got a ton of attention despite the subtle hints that it'd give devs the low-level access they needed to create killer, graphically rich, immersive environments ready to compete with pretty much any other gaming device ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/hyperdevbox-exzeus-arcade-allays-fears-that-android-games-are-destined/ According to the site Gigatweet, we are about an hour away from the 10 billionth tweet sent since the dawn of Twitter. More incredible, this milestone comes less than 5 months after the 5 billionth tweet. The only problem? It’s not an exact science. Gigatweet isn’t counting to an exact number, but ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/the-10-billionth-tweet-or-so-will-take-flight-in-about-an-hour/ In December 2008, Microsoft surprised a lot of people by releasing an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. A month later, they ensured the move wasn’t taken as a joke or gimmick by launching another app, Tag, into Apple’s App Store. Now, they have a few, including an app for Bing. ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/microsoft-launches-its-first-android-app-yes-google%e2%80%99s-platform/ AMD has officially announced the successor to its 790GX chipset, and the kids at Hot Hardware have not only put it through its paces but have been kind enough to let us in on their results. Apparently the two 890GX they tested should at least perform "on par" with previous ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/amds-new-amd-890gx-hd-chipset-announced-reviewed-lauded/ Every year year the World Economic Forum names its Young Global Leaders, a list of up-and-comers from the worlds of business, politics, culture, and non-profits. Last year’s list included YouTube founder Chad Hurley,, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and Skype CEO Josh Silverman. Today, the World ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/evan-williams-marissa-mayer-steven-chen-named-world-economic-forum/ We all know by now that AT&T has secured the rights to furnish US iPad owners with 3G connectivity, but apparently the market desire for that service won't be quite as big as we might have expected. That comes straight from Randall Stephenson himself, AT&T CEO and eternal believer in ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/att-ceo-ipad-will-be-mostly-used-on-wifi-wont-drive-many-new/ Pretty huge news in our book: Skype has published a free mobile application for Symbian in the Ovi Store, basically enabling over 200 million Nokia handset users to easily download the program and start making free Skype-to-Skype calls from their phones. If I were a carrier, I'd probably be feeling rather ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/skype-app-hits-ovi-store-and-potentially-200-million-nokia-handsets/ Sony's PlayStation Motion Controller has gone through a few different names during its development, but "Arc" has cropped up far more than any other over the past few months, and it's now looking increasingly like a sure thing. While any official announcement will likely have to wait until GDC next ... http://www.compuc.com/gadgets/sony-files-for-playstation-arc-trademark-in-japan-all-but-a-done/ Over the weekend, Citysearch pushed out an update to its iPhone app with a much smoother user interface, better local search, and maps are now the default view. I am happy to report that it no longer looks exactly like Yelp’s iPhone app. The improvements should help it ... http://www.compuc.com/technology-news/citysearch-upgrades-its-iphone-app-with-twitter-reviews-and-%e2%80%9cshake/