Videos

When I joined the Gmail for mobile team a year ago, the mobile client worked like a web application designed for networks that were always available. This was fine on a fast and reliable network, but when you hopped on the subway, network reliability could be a big problem.

Today, we’re happy to announce Gmail for mobile 2.0 for J2ME-supported and BlackBerry phones. For this version, we changed our fundamental assumption about the network. We re-thought every action that you might perform with the app and tried to solve for the case where there is no signal. We wanted to make the mobile client faster and more reliable and added some other new features along the way.

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Yesterday I received an HTC Touch Diamond, one of the initial batch of the phones to ship for sale in Asia. The Touch Diamond represents HTC’s second generation of finger touch based Windows Mobile Professional smartphones, and features the new TouchFLO 3D user interface extensions and home screen. While it is a bit hard to review this device since it only supports one lonely GSM band in the USA, 1900MHz GSM/EDGE, I can still give you folks an idea of what the device is like, and what its features and shortcomings are.

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If you can spot all the memes in Weezer’s pop video then you have clearly spent too much time on YouTube* when you could have been playing darts….

Source From: Guardian

This week’s video picks include an outdoor robot, those Ballmer moments and how mobiles have changed.

Does it pickup the cuttings too?

PARDON? YES, IT’S OUR BIPEDAL LAWN MOWING ROBOT! NOISY, BUT IT’S COOL! EXCEPT WHEN IT FALLS OVER! WHAT? A SHEEP WOULD DO THE JOB? MORE QUIETLY?
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Unwanted PCs are ending up in massive toxic dumps in West Africa

Hidden Flow: The rising tide of European e-waste, from Danwatch

From our “In case you missed it” department, today’s paper has a piece by Richard Wray on Breeding toxins from dead PCs. Briefly:

Thousands of discarded computers from western Europe and the US arrive in the ports of west Africa every day, ending up in massive toxic dumps where children burn and pull them apart to extract metals for cash.

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Xobni has just opened a public beta for its email helper application

Xobni (Inbox backwards) has opened a public beta of software that adds features to the Microsoft Outlook inbox (see video). These include some social networking features.

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A great look at measuring contextual success with Google Analytics (rather than monetary). I came across this video when I was researching how to better track activity within Smaller Indiana with Google Analytics.

Source From: Douglaskarr

The takeover battle is dragging on, but could soon come to a head

The deadline for Yahoo to accept Microsoft’s “friendly” takeover offer has now passed, and unless Yahoo says something soon, Steve Ballmer faces a big choice: get hostile or walk away. In this case, a good way to get hostile would be to put up candidates to be elected to Yahoo’s board, replacing the current members, if they get enough votes. The new board could then accept the offer.

The possibilities are discussed in If Microsoft goes fully hostile on Yahoo, on Marc Andreessen’s blog. The analysis is based on input from “expert corporate attorneys — Michael Sullivan and Ed Deibert at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk and Rabkin in San Francisco”.

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The May issue of Game Informer has a 10-page Grand Theft Auto 4 world exclusive preview. GTA4 has made a full summary that you can read here:

* The main character’s name is Niko Bellic (shown above) - an Eastern European immigrant who has come to Liberty City to live the “American Dream.” The game is set in Liberty City in 2007, but it is bigger than the Liberty City we saw in GTA III.

* The GTA 4 equivalent of the Statue of Liberty is called the Statue of Happiness, and DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) is known as BOABO (Beneath the Offramp of the Algonquin Bridge Overpass).

* In Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar have recreated 4 of the 5 boroughs in New York, as well as part of New Jersey. Broker is the GTA IV equivalent of Brooklyn, Manhattan is now called Algonquin, Queens is now Dukes, the Bronx is Bohan, and New Jersey is Alderney. The map is smaller than San Andreas, but considerably more detailed. No countryside or desert, we are led to believe.

* Pedestrians are far more realistic in GTAIV than in previous GTA games - they sit on benches, smoke cigarettes, read books and generally act like any real pedestrian would in the middle of a street.

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Robots are competing in Germany this week to traverse a maze that simulates the aftermath of a natural disaster (see video, right).

It is part of the largest warm-up event, the German Open, for the annual RoboCup, held in China this July. The main Robocup event has been running for 11 years and pits teams of soccer robots against each other, with the goal of having a robotic team beat the human world soccer champions at their own game by 2050.

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Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which transform the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008.

Japan Probe has covered “an
amazing new bicycle parking system that has opened at Kasai Station in Tokyo”.
The underground garage can apparently hold 9,400 bikes and, at the push of a
button, the automated system can retrieve one in less than 30 seconds.

An alternative (amateur?) video at
YouTube says a robot
station can handle 180 bikes, so it would take three hours to fill and empty one
silo, if each operation takes 30 seconds per bike. Better hope not everybody
arrives during the rush-hour…..