Wednesday, February 23, 2011

“Come see what’s new for the Mac on October 20


The iPad 2 nears! An iPad 3 is on the horizon! iPhone 5 is coming! Maybe an iPhone nano! New MacBook Pros! New iMacs! Maybe even an Apple television! Of all the Apple rumors out there right now, there’s a odd lack of talk about something we know is coming — and soon: OS X Lion.


Back in October of last year, Apple gave an official sneak peek of Lion and stated that it would launch in “summer 2011″. The first official day of summer is exactly 4 months away. And yet, Apple has been largely silent about the new OS since that preview four months ago. We now have the Mac App Store which we know will be a key ingredient, and likely points to some other things about the OS as well. But there has been no official update out of Apple about Lion. So where does it stand?

Well, first of all, from what we’re hearing, Apple is now using it internally. That they’re testing it shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s apparently being widely used internally. Recent statistics seem to confirm this. Looking over the TechCrunch logs, it seems that OS X 10.7 (Lion) has been seeing a surge of usage in recent weeks. After peaking in late August/early September, stats fell off a bit. But now they’re soaring again, indicating that full-scale internal testing is underway.

And while we already know some of the new features thanks to Apple’s preview, there are still a few surprises, apparently. One of these is a much-anticipated UI overhaul. But that means that developers are going to need to be ready when it rolls out. And along those lines, we’re hearing that a developer beta should begin soon. There’s no firm timetable for this yet, but again, we’re only 4 months away from the summer.
Apple has also been busy prepping the lastest version of OS X Snow Leopard, 10.6.7. And developers have been receiving builds of it for weeks now. But that development cycle will remain separate from the OS X 10.7 track.

Meanwhile, new MacBook Pro updates are slated for this Thursday, and that may include hardware slightly modified to run the new OS X better. These are likely to be the last hardware updates before OS X Lion hits. Bigger trackpads for better multi-touch support? A dedicated SSD element for the OS? We’ll see.
All we know for sure is that the sleeping Lion is stirring, and about to get a lot louder so it can roar this summer.

Most of the revenue came from Europe with 116.2% growth



Remember Archos? With all this talk of Droids v. iStuff, Archos’ stable and handsome PMP/Tablet line has been cast by the wayside, relegated to a distant third place where it commiserates daily with Creative and the Zune. However in many markets Archos is still a leader and now they have the financials to prove it.
According to a recent release, Archos hit 83 million Euro in revenue compared to 59 in 2009. Most of the revenue came from Europe with 116.2% growth and, surprisingly, an over two-fold increase in revenue in America.
Read more…

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Eqentia is a powerful enterprise platform for aggregating, curating, consuming, analyzing and re-publishing web news content.


When it comes to realtime news, the prevailing wisdom these days is to let your friends tell you what to read through Twitter or Facebook. Instead of editors, people are using these social stream sto filter their news, and a whole bunch of apps (like Flipboard) are tapping into that to present your social news feed in more appealing ways. But a Toronto startup called Eqentia is approaching the problem from a different angle. It indexes 100,000 articles a day across blogs and news sites, puts them through a semantic engine to categorize them into every topic imaginable, and only then does it look at how much social attention each article is getting. Social comes last, not first.

What you get is a personal news page organized by topics and sub-topics that you want to follow (business, technology, iPad news, mobile web, cloud computing). Headlines can be sorted by time, social attention, or preferred sources. Eqentia is designed to create a competitive intelligence dashboard were you can create essentially an alerts page for specialized news about any micro-topic, but these also roll up into broader topics. Each topic page shows recent tweets about that topic in a sidebar widget. The news search is also pretty powerful because of all the implicit categorization and content mining that Eqentia does.

Eqentia has been around a couple of years, but it recently cleaned up its design and launched a few new features, including a personal news stream that syncs with your Twitter favorites and Google Reader shared items. Any Tweet with a link that you favorite on Twitter will appear in your personal stream, along with starred and shared items in Google Reader. Eqentia also offers a browser bookmarklet that lets you start tracking news about topics simply by highlighting them in your browser page. If you make your personal stream public, others can follow it, opening up the service to social curation of the news.

Some of the topic streams can be delivered to other news readers such as Flipboard if you don’t like its user interface. The site could still use some streamlining in terms of making it easy for people to jump in and start using it, but there are some powerful technologies under the hood.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Akhirnya! SONOS Untuk Release App Controller Android Pada bulan Mac


Ah, Sonos. Once you’ve tried it you never go back. The trouble was that it used to cost thousands of dollars to get your home set up to stream music from any wifi connected hard drive to the Sonos speakers. Here’s my Sonos review from way back in 2006.


Then things started to happen. Most notably they released the Sonos ZonePlayer S5, a lower cost Sonos device that could be controlled via an iPhone or iPod Touch. And, last year, they finally had an iPad controller app.

But nothing for Android. Always promised in the near future, but we had to wait. And wait.
And now the wait is over. Sonos says the Android app will be released in March. Details here.
There are some nifty feature that the iOS folks don’t get. Deeper hardware integration allows you to control the volume on Sonos devices via the physical volume buttons on your Android phone, for example.

“We think we make the best wireless music system for the iPhone. Now we make the best wireless music system for the Android, too,” says Sonos marketing director Thomas Meyer.

TigerText Melancarkan Versi Enterprise Dari Perkhidmatan Texting Swasta


TigerText, a company that develops a private SMS app, is launching an enterprise version of its product today. Called TigerTextPRO, the service allows companies to deploy their own private and secure mobile network in hours.


As we reported last year, TigerText’s mobile apps allows users to send text messages or photos that can then be deleted off both the sender’s and receiver’s phone after a selected period of time. Once a sender selects the message lifespan (from 1 minute up to 30 days), expired messages are not only deleted from both phones, but are not stored on any server and they cannot be retrieved once expired. Users can also select a “Delete on Read” option, which will delete the text 60 seconds after the recipient opens the message.

TigerTextPro allows organizations to deploy a private, secure mobile network to allow employees can privately communicate on their existing mobile devices within a company.

With the enterprise version of the app, users download the app on their company smartphones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows 7) and perform a one-time login to get authenticated. Administrators can then use a web-based tool to control archiving policies, create groups and perform simple user management. The PRO version provides companies, health care institutions and government agencies with administrative and policy-level controls reduces liability and risks of data leakage while enhancing employee communication and productivity.

Already a number of companies in the healthcare and financial sectors are using the Pro version so employees can communicate via SMS without the risk of privacy issues. The startup, which faces competition from Kik Messenger, has raised $1.9 million in angel funding from Herb Madan and the co-founder of Akamai, Randall Kaplan.