iPhone Our friends at luxury blog Luxist have discovered an app that’s perfect for my lack of fashion sense. Given some basic information about how you look (eye/hair color, height, and body shape), it will give tips for men’s fashion. It doesn’t just tell you what colors to wear, though; it tells you what patterns in your wardrobe match and what shades complement each other. I have an extreme blind spot when it comes to looking good, so outsourcing this kind of decision-making is perfect for me
Bobby Kotick / image credit: dfarber During a quarterly earnings call this afternoon, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick took the opportunity to address (what else?) the ongoing Infinity Ward situation his company is currently embroiled in. “The decision to terminate the two Infinity Ward executives, was not done lightly,” Kotick admitted. “And it was not done to deprive them of their bonuses, nor was it done without a great deal of deliberation about the consequences.” Those consequences have varied from lawsuits , countersuits , studio departures (“approximately 35 others have resigned and it is likely that a few more people will leave as well,” Kotick said), the formation of Respawn Entertainment, to another ongoing lawsuit from the Infinity Ward Employee Group . After calling Infinity Ward founders West and Zampella “friends,” Kotick said, “Once we began to understand what had occurred, there was no gray area
iPhone , iPod touch , App Review We’ve covered quite a few board and card games in this ongoing series of iPhone / iPad app reviews , but I haven’t been as excited about any of them as I was when I saw that there was not just one but two Skat apps available for the iDevices. Considering that Skat is my absolute favorite card game of all time (in second place: SWCCG , an entirely different beast), I knew I’d need to download them both (at US$4.99 each, sadly) and see if either one offered an experience that is in any way similar to playing against real humans. The answer: as much as a touch-screen interface can replace your friends, they do. The first of the two apps is called Skat and its icon looks like this .
Software I have to admit it: I like location-based social networking apps. Probably my favorite to date has been FourSquare , which I love because I’m the “Mayor” of a couple dozen locations. But this type of app isn’t for everyone. My wife, for example, says that she thinks they’re a bit too much like stalking (to which I replied, ” there’s an app for that “), so she won’t use them.
Filed under: Etc. , Videos , Police/Emergency , Humor Winston tears the bumper off a police cruiser – Click above to watch video after the jump Take one Chattanooga, Tennessee police cruiser, add a dog named Winston, and subtract one bumper. That’s the math caught on video when Winston decided for reasons only he knows to completely tear off the bumper of the moving police car. Kudos go to the officer driving the patrol car, who showed marvelous restraint in not simply making a Winston pancake.
If you’ve ever gone down to the seashore and tried to pull mussels off rocks (and hey, who hasn’t?), then you’ll know how tenacious their holdfasts can be – although they can be tugged back and forth, it’s almost impossible to actually remove them. Recently, scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces analyzed how the delicious mollusks are able to to achieve such a feat of natural engineering. What they discovered could find its way into human technology… Tags: amino acid , Engineering , Polymer Related Articles: Safer surgery using mussels and inket printers means no needle and thread A hard rain’s gonna fall on exoplanet COROT-7b Have your drink on the rocks – literally Our naked planet – the OneGeology project Nature can still surprise us: more than 350 new species found in Himalayas Nullarbor fireball cameras lead scientists to location of rare meteorite
Things seem to be going well for US-based electric motorcycle company Zero Motorcycles which has debuted its 2010 lineup consisting of four new bikes at Daytona Bike Week. The new Zero S, DS, X and MX are equipped with performance enhancements that allow for higher top speeds and greater acceleration than earlier models and feature enhanced power pack technology… Tags: Electric Motorcycle , Motorcycle , Motorcycles , Zero Motorcycles Related Articles: Roehr set to unveil 96 bhp electric sports motorcycle Zero releases dual purpose electric motorcyle 2010 Comoto blurs the boundaries between electric motorcycle and MTB The GEM 6-passenger neighbourhood electric vehicle Yamaha’s radical adjustable electric motorcycle KTM reveals production plans for electric enduro motorcycle
Is ‘checking in’ at places using location-based mobile apps like Foursquare and Brightkite resulting in us enjoying life a little less ? Is there such a thing as too much data for a fun activity such as running? We address these and other questions in the final installment of our interview with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing . Modern web applications are packed with features that ostensibly connect us more to the real world and our activities in it. Foursquare uses location data to connect us with places and people.
Twitter made news today for announcing that it now sees an average of 50 million status messages posted each day . A sharp growth curve indicates that activity on Twitter could grow much higher in the short term future. Good old MySpace says it can’t be counted out yet, though. MySpace told me tonight that it still sees 1 billion status messages per month, divided by 30 days that’s about 33 million status messages per day. That means until just last Fall, MySpace was still bigger than Twitter.
For months, we’ve been fielding rumors (and filtering out the facts) about MySpace’s proposed redesign and rebranding. Tonight’s report on TechCrunch outlines a few minor details of the overall plan to stop the site’s hemorrhaging users and stem its financial decline. As we’ve known (and as we predicted last year), the site will shift its emphasis from pure social networking to content discovery and recommendation. The site’s tagline is expected to change to “Discover and Be Discovered.” But is that really enough to bring users back? What would it take for you to start regularly using MySpace again?
A Twitter phishing attack is spreading rapidly today, attempting to obtain Twitter logins via Direct Messages. If you receive a message reading “lol, is this you”, and linking to a site called “bzpharma”, do not click the link . Users who do click that link and enter their details are inadvertently letting spammers take over their accounts, which are then used to spam the same Direct Message to all their friends. If you’re receiving these messages, your account is not compromised, but if you find you’re sending them, make sure to change your Twitter password immediately. We’ve already notified Twitter of the issue.
There’s a fine line between what is considered a knowledge database and an invasion of privacy, and that line is likely to be determined by marketing. This week we wrote an article about Please Rob Me – a service that identifies Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins on Twitter and lets others know that a person is not home. While location-based services are often touted for their social and recommendation-based benefits, the realization that they can be used negatively have many questioning the responsibility of those groups that collect the data. Sponsor In mid January Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that the age of privacy had come to an end and we responded that evolving preferences were not a valid justification of the elimination of privacy preferences . Nevertheless, between cookie tracking and browser identifiers like those shown in the EFF’s Panopticlick and the fact that it only takes your zip code, gender and birthdate to identify you, it’s hard to ensure total privacy in the first place.
Many people think that when people set up their online social networking profiles, they may be prone to… exaggerating a bit. Given that they can control what they say about themselves, many have posited that those profiles really represent an idealized version of themselves. Yet, perhaps that’s not true. Jose Luis Campanello points us to a recent study that found that people actually tend to be pretty honest in their social networking profiles.
This officially wins the Chindōgu award of the week. Seems our friends over at Evil Mad Scientist Labs are at it yet again. Hot on the heels of those delicious Asteroids cookies , they’re back – this time with a robot that makes cocktails. Not just any old drinks, but White Russians to be specific. Created for BarBot 2010 (which we reported on yesterday), EMSL’s descriptively-named Drink Making Unit is a digitally-controlled bartender.
DICE 2010: Founder & CEO Steve Perlman puts ambitious game-streaming network through its paces, explains why game consoles and physical media are doomed by a culture of “instant gratification.” Who is the consumer of today? According to OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman, it’s Eric Cartman. To introduce his DICE Summit keynote address titled “Instant Gratification: Video Games In The ‘Now’ Era,” the executive showed the clip of the corpulent South Park character having a conniption outside a retailer while waiting for the Wii to come out . Steve Perlman “That’s the consumer of today,” said Perlman, “They want everything right now.” To prove his point, Perlman said that 26.6 percent of all Internet traffic was “real-time entertainment” in 2009–more than double the 12.6 percent share it had in 2008. This is mostly off video-streaming sites such as YouTube and Hulu.
