Google Developing A Rival To Facebook

Though Google hasn’t directly admitted that they are developing their own social network site to rival Facebook, the pieces are starting to fall into place that serve as evidence. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Google is currently in discussion with several online game makers. The goal of these talks would be to develop a social networking site with broader capabailities than Facebook. The expected site would have a much larger variety of abilities than their already existing Google Buzz. Learn more by reading the article here.

Facebook and Amazon Join Forces

Facebook and Amazon officially teamed up this week as the one-stop online mega shop will start using Facebook Connect to send users reccommendations for their online shopping. The service would be available on both the Amazon’s US and Canadian sites. The deal comes as Facebook also annouced that it would allow publishers to contact users who click the Like button a particular story.

Facebook Launches Questions

On Wednesday, Facebook offically annouced the release of their new service Facebook Questions. The service will let you ask questions to the community, and the answers could come from both your immediate friends and the public. Though the product is only being released to small beta group, more news about its release will be revealed based on how the service performs in the tests.

Facebook Launches User Safety Page

With the social networking site now surpassing a 500 million user milestone, the question of privacy becomes an even bigger concern. Facebook announced this week that they will be releasing a safety page to compliment their security page. The page will allow users to receive updates on the best ways to protect their safety and privacy on Facebook.

Facebook Launches New Media Page

Another new Facebook annoucement this week was the opening of the Facebook Media page. The site serves to help media organizations by offering tips and reaching out in the interest of better utilizing their Facebook ages. The page also offers great separate reference tabs for journalists and developers.

Facebook Launches Public Relations Page

Another Facebook page that launched this week was PR for Facebook. The page will serve as a great networking tool within the profession and also offer helpful tips and resources for professional in the field. Seeing as Facebook is a focal point on any PR campaign, it is a logical step for the site.

Facebook won a lawsuit in Delaware this week against Leader Technologies. The lawsuit was intially filed in 2008 when Leader claimed Facebook had infringed one of its patents. After a six-day hearing the jury ruled in favor of the social networking site.

Spanish Facebook Hacked

Those who have used the Translation application and put their Facebook page into spanish may have noticed some offensive terms where their daily birthdays were supposed to be. It appears that this was caused by tricking the application. If enough people vote on an incorrect translation, it has the ability to replace the correct phrase.

Don’t Wait For Facebook To Go Public Anytime Soon

A recent story published by Bloomsberg revealed details about Facebook’s 2010 revenue and IPO. Mark Zuckerberg and company continue to delay the public offering, and see no need for it in the immediate future. Don’t expect Facebook to go public before 2012, and that is still no more than an estimate.

LiveWorld Launches Fan Engagement Platform

LiveWorld, one of the numerous Facebook Page service providers, released LiveConnect this week. LiveConnect is a new product which aims to help Page administrators more effectively engage with fans.

The Contract Lawsuit

Over the past few weeks much dispute has come out over whether Mark Zuckerberg signed a contract giving Paul Ceglia 85% of Facebook’s rights. Facebook and its lawyers are claiming the contract is a forgery. Now news of Ceglia being busted for shrooms and defrauding customers is showing up.

Last month, I got a chance to review IK Multimedia’s recently released iRig and AmpliTube combo for the iPhone. Not only did it sound great, the AmpliTube software looked awesome, providing access to numerous authentic effects boxes and amp combos that emulate their real-world counterparts. Now IK Multimedia is back with a version of AmpliTube for the iPad that is even more impressive.

Spacious is how I would use to describe my initial impression with Amplitube for the iPad. When considering just how perfect this version is, it’s useful to consider the iPhone alternative. Comparing with the above screen shot, the iPhone version display is really only as big as just one of the stomp boxes. Accessing the various options include hitting buttons and popup menus in an interface that while extremely functional, feels fairly cramped. With the iPad app, all of effects, amps, and control knobs are displayed on one screen, with the same attention to detail that I loved about the iPhone version.

Fortunately, nothing was lost in the app’s performance during translation to the iPad. All of the effects and amps sound just as great as the iPhone app, and this version offers a welcome fourth simultaneous effects pedal. The increased screen size does allow for a more logical layout with less button pushing to get to the sound you want. And accessing all of the knobs on the amp simultaneously is a welcome improvement when dialing in a great tone.

So how do the two stack up head to head? If you’re both an iPad and iPhone owner, its tough at this point to recommend the iPhone over the iPad version except for its extreme portability. While the iPhone app seems more suited for practicing music on the couch, I’d say that the iPad edition approaches stage readiness. If you’re a touring musician, busker with a battery powered amp, or want to lighten your load when heading to your friend’s house to jam, it’s easy to imagine using AmpliTube for the iPad live. If IK Multimedia were to develop a foot switch and a more rugged input/output interface that connects to the dock connector, I could see a wide adoption by musicians. The app just sounds that good.

Want a more in-depth review and hear how AmpliTube for the iPhone and iPad performs? Check out my previous review which includes an audio tour.

Wired: Same great sounding effects as the iPhone version. Logical layout that increases usability through the iPad’s large screen. Fourth effect pedal a welcome addition.

Tired: Should be a universal app so iPhone and iPad users wouldn’t have to buy twice.

AmpliTube iRig Hardware Interface ($40)
AmpliTube for iPad (iTunes: Free, $20)

Image by Philms; used under Creative Common license

Welcome back puzzlers. After sifting through grids, emails and the occasional carrier pigeon delivered solution the winner of this weeks $50.00 Thinkgeek gift certificate is Ralph Czerepinski who correctly identified the following:

• Rene from Troop 86 worked at the Rifle Range and worked at camp for 6 years.
• Brendan from Troop 162 worked in Handicrafts and worked at camp for 4 years
• “Lollipop” (What else would you call a skinny kid with a big head”) from Troop 45 worked at Field Sportsand worked at camp for 2 years
• “Squirrel” (Don’t know why but the squirrels avoided him) from Troop 276 worked at Scout Skills and worked at camp for 1 year

From these clues:

1. Rene, who has worked at camp for 6 years, ran the Rifle Range.
2. The Scout from Troop 45 worked at camp for 2 years.
3. “Lollipop” did not work at camp as long as the scout from 162 or the scout from Troop 86.
4. The scout with the least amount of time at camp worked at Scout Skills and was not from Troop 86.
5. “Squirrel” has less time at camp then the scout at Field Sports.
6. Brendan was from Troop 162.
7. The Scout from 276 worked at Scout Skills.
8. One Scout was from Troop 45.
9. The Scout in Handicrafts has worked at camp for 4 years.

Nice work Ralph. Enjoy your gift certificate ! The rest of you should tune in next week when Dave Banks returns, hot off of his Comic Con outing, to bring you a new reason to get nothing done at work !

This is a guest post by Will Pomerantz, Senior Director of Space Prizes at the X Prize Foundation.

By way of quick introduction, I am not yet a dad, but I am most certainly a geek — earning a degree from the International Space University probably cemented my geek status for life. Also, I have the great fortune of working at a place–the X Prize Foundation, where I run the Google Lunar X Prize–that celebrates geek culture in a major way. And though we’ve been in the news this week because of the finals for our Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize and our announcement of our newest competition, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge, I’m guestblogging here at GeekDad to talk about a different project: an educational competition called MoonBots.

As previously discussed at GeekDad, MoonBots is a competition for the younger geeks of the world. Students aged 9-18 are competing to, in essence, win the Google Lunar X Prize using Lego Mindstorms kits. The competition is divided into two phases: from early April through late May, more than 200 teams from 15+ countries used CAD software like Lego Digital Designer and Google SketchUp to design a lunar rover and submitted their design, along with a brief video highlighting their main reasons to explore the Moon.

We had a very tough time selecting from the entries, but we were eventually able to whittle our way down to twenty finalists. Each of these finalists was then, thanks to the generous support of our partners (full disclosure: including Wired/GeekDad!), sent about $500 worth of Lego bricks, Mindstorms Kits, and subscriptions to Wired magazines. Those finalists are spending the summer using their designs and those components to actually build their functional MoonBots as well as a large (7′ x 7′) moonscape complete with a variety of challenging obstacles like craters and ridges.

Following these teams has been fun and inspiring — thankfully, all of them are maintaining blogs — so we thought we’d profile a few of them for the GeekDad audience. We know you’ll enjoy following along with them just as much as we have. One final caveat, which hopefully goes without saying: any discussion here does not imply anything whatsoever when it comes to selection of the overall winners of the competition. Thankfully, we’ve got a stellar panel of expert judges–including entrepreneur and private space explorer Anousheh Ansari and uber-inventor Dean Kamen — who will take care of that process for us.

First up, team Shadowed Craters hails from the San Diego area. The team consists of two boys and two girls, aged 13 – 16, all of whom are veterans of the various robotics challenges put on by FIRST Robotics. Their team captain, Richard, a father certainly worthy of the GeekDad moniker, notes that “All the kids have worked with the Mindstorms NXT for FTC and/or FLL competitions so knew how to build and program NXT robots. I have always had a strong interest in the space program and astronomy, and thought this would be a good way to teach my kids about it and possibly interest them in exploring careers related to it.” As you can imagine, that’s music the ears of those of us who put on this competition.

When we were writing the prize rules, we paid a lot of attention to FIRST. We wanted the competition to be difficult enough to challenge FIRST veterans in their off-season, but also straight-forward enough that new teams could emerge to enter the competition (and, ideally, take advantage of the fact that our three winners each receive a FIRST registration and start-up kit). We asked Richard how we did in that respect, and what his overall impressions were of MoonBots. He said:

The toughest part of the game is probably the autonomous robot mission. FLL tournament fields have a very smooth surface, so the NXT robots don’t usually deal with the uncertainty of rough terrain. (FTC tournaments often have terrain features to deal with, but mostly use the aluminum Tetrix kit for chassis and drive motors.) We think use of multiple sensors for navigational feedback will be the most important factor for a successful mission. One more tough issue that’s more logistical has been the short timeframe of the competition during a time when many families go on vacation! It’s been hard finding time when all the kids are actually in town at the same time for meetings. We’ve been having to do some Moonbots work while on vacation.

The kids (and I) have learned more about the early manned space programs, current and previous robotic probes, and of course the Google Lunar X Prize itself. We were all surprised to learn that it has been 34 years since there was a manned lunar landing! It’s also great to talk to the kids about the way current NASA programs are being revised and have them wonder why things are being changed.

In addition, we have been learning a lot about different planetary rover drive mechanisms: rocker-bogies, differentials, pendulum drives, skid-steer, etc. — and how to build them in Lego Technics.

We are definitely having a good time – both making video and text blog entries, and working on the robot!

Here are the students themselves talking about some of those technical challenges in one of their video blog entries:

We asked Richard what he thought of the team’s odds in the competition, now that’s he’s had some time to size up the other teams. He said, “We think we stand a very good chance of placing high in the competition because of our previous experience, however several other teams appear to have very similar experience levels. My youngest daughter would love to win an iPod Touch!”

Best of luck to team Shadowed Craters, and may the best team win!

O2 has recently released the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro in the UK. The phone features a QWERTY slider keypad, a 2.55-inch (240 x 320) capacitive touchscreen display, a 600MHz processor, a 5-megapixel AutoFocus camera, a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a microSD card slot (up to 16GB), 3G, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro is priced at £25/month. [UnwiredView]