AppScout

Blue Star Military Families Get Google Voice Invites

2009-11-10T22:23:45Z

Google is extending Google Voice invites to Blue Star Families, a group of military spouses who work to educate civilian communities about the hardships faced by military families.

"Military families encounter unique challenges and frequent separations, so staying in touch is vitally important," Google wrote in a blog post. "With one Google Voice number, families won't have to worry about missing calls from service members abroad."

In August, Google extended Voice invites to any serviceman or women with a .mil e-mail address. Google said it would prioritize their requests so they receive invites within 24 hours.

Twitter 'Dad' Feeds Gets TV Deal with CBS

2009-11-10T20:43:16Z

Twitter executives may have shot down the idea of a Twitter TV show, but that doesn't mean its members aren't ready for prime-time.

CBS has reportedly snapped up the rights to "Shit My Dad Says," a Twitter feed that catalogs the commentary of Justin Halpern's 73-year-old father. Halpern, 29, moved back in with his father earlier this year and started posting his amusing outbursts to the micro-blogging site in August.

The feed soon amassed 700,000 followers, and Halpern landed a book deal with Harper Collins. Now, "Will & Grace" creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick will serve as executive producers of a new family comedy based on the Tweets, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Halpern will serve as a writer on the show.

Some outtakes from Halpern's dad after the jump.

"The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain't like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain't spitting it out."

"You're being fucking dramatic. You own a TV and an air mattress. That's not exactly what I'd call "a lot to lose."

"You touched that god damned biscuit. Bullshit, I saw you touch it....I don't give a shit about your evidence, this isn't a court of law."

"Your brother brought his baby over this morning. He told me it could stand. It couldn't stand for shit. Just sat there. Big let down."

Bing Updates Maps

2009-11-10T18:15:30Z

One area where Microsoft's Bing search site lagged the competition a bit was in maps: It didn't let you drag driving-direction routes around to taste, didn't allow you to embed maps on your own site, and took longer than the others to load. Today, the Bing Maps blog announced updates to the service addressing all of these shortcomings. For starters, the maps home page has been trimmed down for a faster load time. Also contributing to speed are new data centers at seven locations around the world.

A stylish new toolbar now graces the bottom of the left-hand sidebar where you see directions or searches. This offers buttons for directions, favorite place bookmarks, sharing a map via email or embed, printing, and traffic. Another improvement is the zoom bar, which catches up to Yahoo and Google maps with the ability to jump to specific zoom levels.The search bar is also more intelligent: You can now enter the name of a tourist site or the name of a city followed by "traffic" for expected results.

But the most welcome new feature for me is the draggable trip routes, so important if you need to pick up Aunt Tilly in Elmira on the way to Buffalo. Finally, the new maps include World Wrap, which lets you navigate back and forth past the International Date Line.

Hawaii Becomes 50th State Added to Google's Street View

2009-11-10T18:11:36Z

Don't have enough cash for that vacation this year? Not to worry. Google on Monday added Street View imagery from Hawaii, so you can peruse those white-sand beaches from the comfort of your cubical. Yay?

The addition of Hawaii, however, means that all 50 states are now included in Street View. Users can look through imagery from Oahu and Maui.

"In 1959 Hawaii became the 50th state admitted to the union. Today, 50 years later, we're including Hawaii as the 50th state in Street View on Google Maps," Google wrote in a blog post.

With all states now included, Google has also added tours of the 50 state capitol buildings to the Street View gallery.

Meanwhile, Google has narrowed down the 25,000 submissions it received for locations that users want the Street View trike to visit. Categories include university campuses, theme parks, and landmarks. Go to www.google.com/trike to vote before the deadline at 11:59pm Pacific time on Monday, November 30.

Test Drive: Amazon Kindle for PC Beta

2009-11-10T18:00:00Z

Tablets may be the most exciting product category that doesn't exist, but the concept is already on display in small handheld devices, multi-touch PCs, and via applications that meld the best of the burgeoning e-Reader world with the power and flexibility of a traditional convertible tablet PC. Amazon's Kindle for PC Beta 1 is just such a product.

Amazon rolled out Beta 1 of the new Amazon Kindle for PC this morning. I own a Kindle 2 and had a touch-screen laptop on hand, -- the Lenovo ThinkPad X200 -- so I decided to take it for a spin. Downloading took seconds. Next I entered my Amazon account information -- username and password -- and then the app launched. The simple home screen offers just a handful of buttons, including "Home" and "Archived Items".

More after the jump.

My Home screen launched with all the Kindle books I already owned on display. A message told me to select any one of them to download it to the PC, but before doing so, I pulled my Kindle out of my backpack and turned on the wireless radio -- I usually keep it off to conserve battery power. This let my Kindle connect with Amazon's 3G service, Whispernet, and synchronize my books and bookmarks.

I waited a minute to make sure that the Kindle had time to upload my information. Then, I downloaded the book I'm currently reading to the PC. As expected, it opened right on the page where I left off on the Kindle.

Once you download a book, it moves from the archive listing to the Amazon Kindle for PC homepage. I touched my screen to open the book -- oddly, sometimes I had to double-tap -- and then used a one-finger sweeping gesture across the screen to turn the page back and forth. There's no cute animation to show that you're turning the page and, just like on the Kindle, no real page numbers to show you exactly where you are. Still, it's clear that you're turning a page.

One other complaint I have is that on this X200 screen, the page is, at least by default, a bit narrow. There are gray bars on either side of the screen, plus ample white margins on either side of the text. I was able to solve this issue by using one of the app's touch features. I simply used two fingers to pinch and zoom until the text was the right size and filling enough of the page. There's also a font-sizing button in the menu that lets you resize the text and set the number of words per line without using gestures.

A tap on the corner of a page folded down a virtual corner. This may be another way to bookmark a page, though there are no tool tips to tell you if that's so. There's a button for showing "Notes and Marks" on the far right of the screen. Click it, and a right column appears. Since the book I'm reading has no notes are marks (highlights) nothing appeared in the column.

There's also a Menu button that lets you, among other things, manually sync the app with your Kindle and send feedback to Amazon. It's one area that shows the limitations of this app. The menu items are no larger than you'd find on any typical desktop application. In other words, they're clearly were not designed with touch in mind. This is a common theme throughout. The cover shots are a bit too small, and even the page fold function takes a pretty precise finger to select.

On the other hand, this is only beta 1, which means Amazon has ample time to work out these kinks.

Kindle for the PC's archive page.

Reading a book on Kindle for PC

Kindle for PC's "Highlights and Marks" column.

New Google Caffeine Search Engine Coming Soon!

2009-11-10T17:41:59Z

Last August, Google announced a new technical underpinning for its search engine results--a pretty fundamental move for the search giant's business. The new infrastructure wouldn't affect the look of Google's home page or even results, but it would have an impact on site developers, so Google made a test, or "sandbox" version of its search site for them.

In the wee hours of this morning, our astute colleagues over at Mashable noticed that the sandbox site was no longer working like a search site, but instead bore the following message:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

The move shows that the overwhelming search leader isn't sitting still, given the welcome reception Microsoft's Bing has received. According to the original blog post, Google engineers claim that the new engine will "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."

In typical Google fashion, the company has given no advance notice about when the technology may go live.

[via Mashable]

Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0 Emerges From Beta

2009-11-10T16:37:39Z

Panda today has pulled its purely cloud-driven anti-malware service Panda Cloud Antivirus out of beta after six months of user testing. Panda Cloud Antivirus leverages its Collective Intelligence technology to gather malware information from its global community of users in the cloud to identify and classify new malware strains in minutes, according to Panda.

Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0 boasts improved bandwidth and reduced performance impact over the beta version. It also features an updated interface that Panda claims makes Cloud Antivirus even easier to use. The service works with Windows XP, Vista, and 7 and can be downloaded for free from Cloud Antivirus' Web site. Keep an eye out for PCMag's full review of the service, coming soon.

Samsung Bada Opens Up Feature Phones

2009-11-10T16:11:27Z

Samsung appeared to announce a new mobile-phone OS today, but it didn't really. The mobile-phone giant sent out a press release and opened up a Web site today announcing Bada: a "new open platform" for mobile phones.

Bada is an extension of Samsung's long-time, proprietary feature-phone OS, according to company spokesman Kim Titus. That's the OS already running on popular phones such as the Samsung Rogue and Highlight. Bada will initially appear on touch-screen Samsung phones in 2010. Titus added that Bada is "an extension of the GSM version of [Samsung's] operating system," which makes it look as though Bada may not be coming to Sprint and Verizon phones at all.

The Bada difference seems to be a native SDK for third-party developers to write applications directly for the phones. Up until now, third parties writing for feature phones have generally written for virtual machines on top of OSes, whether they're JAVA (Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile) or BREW (Verizon, MetroPCS, Cricket.) Native apps have been one of the things differentiating smartphones from feature phones.

It looks like Bada may really blur that line. Samsung is preparing a native SDK and opening an app store. But many things are still unclear here. Feature phone OSes typically don't have robust memory and process management. Carriers tend to like their protected JAVA and BREW sandboxes (and revenue sources.)

We've asked Samsung many more questions about Bada, and we hope to have more details soon.

LinkedIn Gets Twitter Integration, Compares Self to Chocolate

2009-11-10T14:48:14Z

LinkedIn and Twitter this week announced a deal that that lets users update both services by publishing a status update to either site. The new features will be rolled out on the sites over the next few days.

The question, naturally, is whether you really want potential employers to be tuned in to the manner of things you're posting on Twitter--though, unless your account is locked, that information is out there for all to see anyway, and most companies are savvy enough to perform a simple Google search.

LinkedIn announced the feature in a blog post yesterday, saying that the two companies are like peanut butter and chocolate. LinkedIn, naturally, is chocolate in this scenario. After all, when you chose the analogy, you also get to pick the flavor.

Memopal Launches Free Online Backup

2009-11-10T12:55:32Z

Memopal has unveiled a free version of its online backup service. It offers 3GB of space for anyone to store documents and photos, with no transfer limits.

The service protects and secures files and folders with a single click, and is intended for use as an alternative to e-mail and FTP. It works with PCs, Macs, and Linux machines; iPhones can also access Memopal files using a free app, while other mobile devices can hook in with a WAP browser.

To get a free 3GB online account, hit www.memopal.com, download the free client, and enter a valid e-mail address; no credit card is required.

Navigon GPS App Gets Crowdsourced Traffic

2009-11-10T12:50:40Z

Navigon has added the optional Traffic Live service to its MobileNavigator iPhone GPS app. Traffic Live offers users real-time traffic reports to calculate faster routes and avoid congestion.

Users see on-screen alerts for accidents, construction, and other road incidents, along with degree of severity and the speed of traffic flow. The reports leverage real-time speed data from over 1.3 million drivers including other app users who opt in to participate, plus commercial fleets and regular drivers with GPS systems.

Currently, the reports work in the U.S. but not in Canada. Navigon Traffic Live costs $19.99, and works as an in-app purchase from within MobileNavigator; no monthly fees are leveraged after the fact. After the first four weeks, Navigon intends to increase the price to $24.99. MobileNavigator itself costs $89.99.

World Series Fans Hit the Mobile Web

2009-11-10T12:35:31Z

Looks like people are actually using those newfangled smartphones. A new report from Novarra, the mobile Web browser company, found that Web traffic shot up on "game days" compared with off days during the World Series.

The highest traffic was during Game 6, when page views almost tripled off-day levels, according to the company. That was when the Yankees defeated the Phillies and MVP Matsui drove in six RBIs.

The graph (pictured) says it all. The company said that the latest data highlights how people are increasingly turning to the mobile Web for entertainment.

Novarra powers the HTML browser that comes with some recent feature phones like the LG enV Touch.

Google Acquires AdMob, Possibly Gizmo5

2009-11-09T23:10:50Z

Google on Monday announced that it has acquired mobile display advertising firm AdMob for an undisclosed amount rumored to be in the $750 million range.

"Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages," Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, and Vic Gundotra, vice president of Engineering at Google, wrote in a blog post. "We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal."

Wojcicki and Gundotra said the deal will produce better products and tools and more effective monetization for publishers of mobile Web sites and applications. It will also bring better, more relevant ads on a grander scale for advertisers focused on the mobile space, they said.

Consumers, meanwhile, will benefit from more "mobile ads that deliver useful information," they concluded.

Meanwhile, Google will reportedly also acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5 for about $30 million. The purchase could allow Google Voice users to make and receive calls to Google Voice phone numbers from a computer.

Get the rest of this story on pcmag.com.

Research in Motion Amps Up BlackBerry APIs

2009-11-09T23:02:54Z

Research in Motion ramped up its API offerings for BlackBerry Monday with the announcement of new advertising and payment services, general availability of content and alert push to apps, and three new location-based services.

RIM also announced OpenGL ES support for 3D gaming and graphics.

"Our worldview is that everything is moving towards smartphones and connect[ed] services. There's no debate about this," RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie said during Monday's annual BlackBerry developer conference. "The key, however is deep, rich application integration, not just application development."

BlackBerry Advertising Service will allow developers to integrate ads into their apps.

"You can simply insert advertisements into your application without negotiating," Balsillie said.

Developers will have access to ads from networks like Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless, and Sympatico.ca. Possible applications of this functionality include the ability to initiate a call, add a calendar entry or contact entry, or directly link to an application in BlackBerry App World - all from an advertisement.

The Advertising Service and its SDK are expected to be available in the first half of 2010, as will the BlackBerry Payment Service, which will allow developers to sell digital content like monthly or annual subscriptions, premium content, or additional levels and upgrades for games.

RIM also plans to make its Push Service, which was released to Alliance Program members earlier this year, generally available in 2010.

On the location front, RIM will add three new location-aware applications to the platform's existing GPS capability.

Get the rest of this story on pcmag.com.

Murdoch to Pull News Corp. Pubs from Google News, Eventually

2009-11-09T22:57:30Z

News Corp. will likely pull all of its newspaper content from Google News once its switches from an ad-supported to a subscription-based model, according to Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch on Friday sat down with Sky News, of which News Corp. is a partial owner, to discuss the impact of the Internet on news, among other things.

The Australian media tycoon has been critical of the Google News aggregation model, as well as similar offerings from Microsoft and Ask.com, which he says is tantamount to stealing. When asked why he has not pulled News Corp.-owned material from Google News, Murdoch said that it will likely happen down the road.

"I think we will," Murdoch said. "But that's going to be when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal."

Google has argued that its news aggregator simply points users to content online and actually helps drive traffic to news sites. Murdoch was not impressed by Internet traffic and said he was more interested in finding loyal readers.

"What's the point of having someone ... who likes a headline they see in Google, come to us?" he asked. "The fact is, there's not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all the Web sites profitable. We'd rather have fewer people coming to our Web site but paying."

Get the rest of this story on pcmag.com.