Reviewing a drive isn’t very exciting. What can you say? “It contains a storage medium, is small, and surprisingly light.” Thankfully, the Buffalo MiniStation Thunderbolt can add one important point to that litany of mundanity – a Thunderbolt port and cable that jacks the read and write speed up to amazing levels – thereby turning a ho-hum review into a real barn-burner.
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Trolls, feel free to skip to the bottom of this column and post your comments immediately without reading a word. Actually, who are we kidding — you didn’t make it this far.
Everyone else, brace yourselves. You may want small children to leave the room. I’m about to do something I don’t do often — something I always said I’d do if the product deserved it. Something some people seem to think I’m incapable of: praise a Google product — an Android-based Google product, no less.
Is that enough build up for you? Okay. → Read More
At the end of August, mobile TV and video platform MobiTV filed its S-1 and announced its plans for a $75 million initial public offering. Founded in 1999, the company had been one of the early movers in the movement to bring live and on-demand TV to mobile devices, which led to partnerships with NBC, ESPN, Disney, CBS, and a bunch of other sizable media companies. The company closed over $100 million in outside investment in their time, had partnered with the big four carriers, and revenue was on the rise, so it seemed like a company on the road to a successful IPO, right?
Wrong. → Read More
It was nearly two years ago that I said goodbye to my MacBook Pro. I loved the device, but the new MacBook Air was that good. My Pro — which was only six months old at the time! — seemed like total overkill for my computing needs. The Air was finally fast enough to use on a daily basis, and it was (obviously) significantly thinner and lighter. It was a no-brainer in my mind: Air all the way.
And in these past 20 months, the Air has been my go-to machine. But last week, a new challenger was unveiled: that old familiar friend, the MacBook Pro. Armed with both a slimmer body and a killer new screen, the device is stunning. And at least in my mind, it has brought back that old debate as to which is the best MacBook.
Following Apple’s WWDC keynote, I got to play around with the Retina MacBook Pro for a bit, and was given a demo unit to take home. I quickly posted some initial thoughts as to how it could fit into my computing life — long story short: I wasn’t sure. A week later, I have a bit more understanding as to how the new MacBook Pro fits in. → Read More
NAS drives are getting smarter and smarter, and the Iomega ix2 is no exception. Priced at $400 for 1TB, this compact drive is actually more of a mini-computer and features “apps” that allow it to become more than just a storage dump.
I installed the drive on my home network and found it obviously quite easy to install and run. The version I test, a disk-less case that costs about $185, had space for two SATA drives. I dumped them in and powered the thing up. It immediately appeared on my network and was accessible by visiting myiomega.com. Because it depends on port-forwarding, however, accessing the drive remotely was a bit more complex. A few tweaks and I was ready to go.
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First of all, let me say that the Dry Case Waterproof Backpack is designed for use in outdoor environments with the main goal of keeping things in the inner compartment dry. Clearly, all the marketing pictures at DryCase.com, show people using the bag in wet, outdoorsy places (on a canoe, on a boat, etc), and with that in mind the biggest question is “does it actually work?” I put it through the ringer. Here are the results: → Read More
The Evo 4G LTE is a fine phone. There certainly aren’t any glaring issues: Sense has been considerably streamlined, and it’s really good at what it was made to do, which is entertain. The design language is a little loud, though maybe that’s what it takes to shake things up in the land of Android. (LAndroid.) But unlike the Evos that have come before it, this latest iteration doesn’t really bring any truly special features to the table.
I mean, consider the name. It’s the Evo 4G LTE, yet Sprint’s 4G LTE network isn’t set to go live for another month, at the very earliest. And even if that weren’t the case, LTE is no longer a wow factor. It’s a soon-to-be norm, which means that the Evo needs something more than fast data to be a big deal.
Does it have what it takes? Let’s find out together, yes? → Read More
Content companies have struggled to monetize on the Web, and there has been plenty of debate over the effectiveness of paywalls. What’s more, tech startups really can’t seem to rush fast enough into the hands of angel investors or venture capitalists. That’s why, as a digital content company that has been around for years and has yet to take a penny of outside investment, Lynda.com has such relevance in today’s landscape.
While it didn’t happen over night, Lynda.com has been able to build a paying customer base of over 1 million, outshining every major newspaper, and its traffic is on the rise. Using a passion for education, industry experience, knowledge of what is important to its customers, and focus on product-before-profit, co-founders and married couple Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin have turned $20K of their own investment into a platform that produced $70 million in revenue in 2011.
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Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you’ll want to click. Yet despite all of this information, advertising still pretty much sucks. It doesn’t have to be this way.
While marketers and advertising agencies strive to command your decisions in the “attention economy”, long-time open source advocate Doc Searls puts forward a better idea in his new book, The Intention Economy. Rather than continue to allow vendors to blindly guess as to what we want, we should all be moving toward a new market equilibrium in which we consciously and directly signal our intentions to the market. Companies that respond to our intentions will reap larger profit, waste less money on dubious advertising initiatives, and enjoy real customer loyalty. → Read More
ComScore today released its analysis of this month’s top properties on ye olde Webernets in the U.S. There are a number of points of interest, but among them, it seems that lotto sites were the top beneficiary of U.S. internet traffic. This was largely a result of the unprecedented Mega Millions jackpot, which became the largest jackpot in U.S. and world history, reaching $656 million in March. Lotto sites drew nearly 29 million visitors (with MegaMillions.com grabbing the top spot), up 25 percent from February, making it the biggest mover in March.
Travel sites were the next biggest beneficiary of traffic, according to comScore, as Americans looked to book last-minute spring break trips and summer travel. This made travel info sites one of the top-gainers, up 10 percent to 69.7 million visitors in March. → Read More
It’s a bit hard to officially review the Nook Simple Touch With GlowLight as it’s almost exactly the same as the previous version but with one important improvement: it glows.
Arguably, the Nook and the Kindle are equal contenders in the race to the e-reader throne and although I do prefer the Kindle Fire over the Nook Tablet, I feel the Nook Simple Touch is still an excellent choice and one of the best e-readers on the market. Luckily, it just got better. → Read More
We’ve covered quite a bit of the Epson line and usually found the printers to be solid, respectable, and inexpensive. This latest addition to the WorkForce family, the WP-4540 is arguably all of those with a few caveats.
This is a workhorse printer, designed solely to pump out as much paper as possible in an office setting. It’s quite large and heavy, and adding on the extra paper drawer makes it nearly a foot high. It weighs in at 36 lbs, making it cousin to some more compact laser printers. It can hold 580 sheets and prints duplex, which is at once a potential cost and time savings as your employees use less paper and have to fill the thing up less frequently.
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Developers don’t have to wait for a fully baked version of Apple TV to come out to get a feel for how their apps will play on the big screen.
Although an eco-system for Apple TV apps does not yet exist, there are dozens of quality iOS applications that are best consumed on an HDTV via AirPlay Mirroring. Creating apps specific to the leaned-back setting of the living room requires more than just supersizing titles originally conceived for smartphones or tablets. Successful Apple TV apps need to source and showcase entertainment, news and social activity in ways not currently possible via cable, satellite or video streaming providers.
Inside are the 10 best iOS apps available on Apple TV today. → Read More
As our lives increasingly move to the digital realm – whether it’s what we read, what we watch, photos that once sat in frames now uploaded to a server farm somewhere in the rural United States, or even the 140-character thoughts we share with the world – comes the very reconstitution of our identities online. A German artist named Tobias Leingruber recently took this concept to its logical extreme when he produced physical identification cards based on Facebook profiles (this attempt at satire was executed so well that Facebook sent Leingruber a cease-and-desist letter three days later).
Between the lines of Leingruber’s satire, though, is a very real, emerging concept. What Leingruber hit on is something I refer to as social currency. Social currency essentially refers to the idea that every person has an online identity formed through participation in social networks, websites, digital communities, and online transactions. Our everyday activities — web searches, status updates, ‘likes’, tweets, and comments — they all leave a trail of data behind which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway. → Read More
In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo. Facebook claims that Yahoo’s Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”.
This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for “generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity” and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo’s filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn’t always pay. → Read More
To publish a “review” of the Lytro as it is today is, in a way, very premature. But it’s also only fair. The product is shipping and, to an extent, complete. But given the number of features and planned improvements in the pipes, a review today will be obsolete in a few months. Nevertheless, an initial judgment on the device must be made.
So here is what can be said of the Lytro in a form that can only really be called a public beta.
We also recently got to talk with Lytro founder Ren Ng and their director of photography, Eric Cheng, at an event in San Francisco. I cornered them for a few minutes to talk about the product and their plans for the future. Watch the video inside. → Read More
Not to miss an opportunity to make an impression upon hipsters, Mobli is going to squeeze all the juice it can get out of SXSW with a major app revamp, and a party in Austin to boot.
Mobli, which counts Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its investors ($4M funding to date), is dubbing the new version, ‘Mobli 2.0′. Personally I feel they should have gone with ‘The New Mobli’ — zing!
Besides a Pinterest-inspired interface, the new version packs a major upgrade to the camera, along with a set of features to edit, touch-up and enhance photos, all bundled under a new section in the app called, ‘Darkroom’.
Rebuilt from the ground up, the new camera now includes real-time tilt-shift and even real-time video filters. Focus can now be locked and white balance set. This is on top of the 18 brand-new photo filters, superimposed gridlines and a self-timer.
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If Windows Vista was Microsoft’s folly – a mish-mash of ideas not fully baked and aimed at multiple constituencies – Windows 8 is Microsoft’s rebirth. To get ecstatic about it isn’t quite the direction I’d like to take this mini-review, but let’s just say that Microsoft is on the cusp of getting things right.
As we said before, Windows 8 will ruffle a lot of feathers. The first and most obvious comparison is with the new Windows Phone interface. The “Start” menu is gone, replaced by what amounts to the entire Metro UI. This UI – the one with the multiple, animated squares, is the one that matters. → Read More
Like a line of hard-marching Lemmings (or a swarm of Patapons), Sony’s countless, niggling enemies would like nothing better than to distract and steal the company’s hard-won fan base. The Playstation has long been the gold standard in console gaming, despite the Xbox’s recent challenges to the throne. And Sony does a good job. Graphics are better, gameplay is or can be more immersive, and in the battle for RPG dominance the PS3′s library is peerless.
But now Sony is fighting against lots of great ways to waste your time. Stuck in a long line? Whip out the iPhone, RAZR, or Blackberry. Want to play something bigger and bolder? Pull out a tablet and rock a few hours of Civilization Revolution or Need For Speed. Want to watch a movie? Bring up Netflix on any device in the house save your kitchen blender. There’s not as much space for a dedicated gaming device out there as there used to be, and both Nintendo and Sony know it. → Read More
more, More, MORE. STOP! Rather than cram more features into Bump 3.0, the team behind the 75 million-installs mobile app combed the data and brushed off all the features no one used. Now, instead of letting you wirelessly share apps, music, and calendar events with nearby devices, it only allows contacts and photo sharing. That’s a better user experience, and examples other developers should follow.
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