Web Traffic At Once

Ah, gadget violence: if you want to create a viral video, it cannot fail. That’s what Sony Australia was thinking when they created a video in which a PS3 Slim gets smashed into a Sony Bravia LCD TV at 50 mph (22 meters per second).

We give Sony points for not trying to hide the fact that they’re behind the video: it’s part of a promotion during which Sony Australia is giving away 25,000 PS3 slims for buyers of selected Bravia LCD TV models.

A couple of blogs were invited for the event, which included a specially-constructed sled that hurled the 3.2 kg heavy PS3 Slim into the Sony Bravia KDL46X 3100 Full HD LCD TV which was standing some 60m away. You can read the gory details over here, or simply check out the beauty of sheer destruction (in slow motion) in the video below.

Tags: Bravia, PS3, sony, viral video

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The marketing campaign for the upcoming Motorola Droid is in full swing, with the new phone looking to be both the definitive Android handset and a genuine challenger to the iPhone.

Following a fairly vicious attack on the iPhone through the launch of the “DroidDoes” ad campaign, which essentially calls out all of the iPhone’s shortcomings, an associated mail marketing campaign has also been launched for the device.

The message? Droid is omnipotent, scary and has night vision, at least according to this messaging: “It hears, It knows / Fast. Scary fast / It sees in the dark.” The promotional mails, obtained by BoyGeniusReport, form part of a campaign that’s actually building some palpable excitement within the geek community: the kind of excitement usually reserved for products built in Cupertino.

Is Judgment Day fast approaching for the iPhone? We’ll know at the end of this month.

Tags: droiddoes, motorola droid, verizon droid

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Internet geeks would love to believe that their online behaviors actually stimulate the brain for the better. It turns out this notion may be a reality, at least according to a FOXNews story that recently surfaced.

Yesterday, findings from a UCLA study on internet behavior and brain activity were presented at the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.

The study, which involved fMRI scans on 24 neurologically normal volunteers ages 55 – 78, showed that the portion of the group that had very little internet experience were able to change their brain activity patterns and increase function after just 7 days of one hour sessions searching the web.

Participants consisted of two test groups, those who used the Internet daily, and those that did not. Both groups under went initial brain scans while searching the web to track “brain activity by measuring the level of blood flow in the brain during cognitive tasks.”

Ultimately, those in the less internet savvy group demonstrated that the regular web searches activated brain patterns similar to those in the savvier internet user group. The original author of the study, Teena D. Moody, concluded, “The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults.”

From the report:

“The first scan of participants with little Internet experience showed brain activity in the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities. The second brain scan of these participants, conducted after the home practice searches, demonstrated activation of these same regions, but there was also activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus – areas of the brain known to be important in working memory and decision-making.

Thus, after Internet training at home, participants with minimal online experience displayed brain activation patterns very similar to those seen in the group of savvy Internet users.”

While the findings are only applicable to older adults, follow up studies on young adults are expected to determine if the same correlation holds true. The eventual goal is to “identify aspects of online searching that generate the greatest levels of brain activation.”

Tags: brain, internet, study, ucla

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We’ve been covering this story as it unfolded, from the first admission of a color screen to the leaked dual-screen details and the leaked price of $259.

Now at long last, Barnes & Noble’s eReader the Nook is official, and it’s worth bringing you an update on all the details.

On board will be 2 GB of storage — enough to hold about 1,500 eBooks — with an SD slot for expanded storage. With wireless turned off, the battery will last a reported 10 days on a single charge — pretty good news in the battery life department.

In a significant win for Google’s remarkably flexible mobile OS, the Nook is running Android. It will feature a nicety whose lack is often disparaged about eReaders — the ability to loan a book to a friend. Said friend won’t even also have to have a Nook — the LendMe feature can be used to loan a book to any device that will run the B&N eReader software, including Macs, PCs, BlackBerries and iPhones. The lending is limited to 2 weeks at a time, but nevertheless it marks an attention to user-friendliness than one-ups Amazon’s Kindle in this regard.

It also supports the open ePub standard, again chipping away at Amazon’s primarily proprietary content store. Unfortunately in terms of selection, Barnes & Noble can’t quite hold a candle to Amazon. So if you’re primarily in the market for obscure titles, you might want to check your usual suspects in the Barnes & Noble store to make sure the content market behind this device lives up to your expectations.

Unfortunately, at launch the Wi-Fi capability will be limited only to within Barnes & Noble stores, which is a bit of a bummer. On the flip side, when in a store you’ll be able to connect via Wi-Fi and browse complete titles for free, just as if you were perusing a hard copy of a title in the store.

Pre-orders for the device are going on now (a few more photos for your viewing pleasure are below), with an expected ship date in November. Does the Nook pique your interest? Or one of the other squintillion eReaders that seem to be on deck? Let us know in the comments.

Tags: amazon, barnes & noble, e-ink, ereader, Kindle, nook

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According to WordPress, there are more than 60 million page views that come from mobile phones per month for WordPress.com blogs. With that kind of traffic, how your site renders on mobile devices could be a big boon to increasing engagement.

That’s why we’re excited to learn that WordPress has just launched two new mobile themes for WordPress.com blogs that will be automatically displayed when a compatible mobile phone attempts to access your site.

For smartphones with top notch mobile browsers, like the iPhone or Android devices, the theme will be a tweaked version of WPtouch, while other devices will sport a variation of the WordPress Mobile Edition.

From the sound of it, WPtouch is pretty spiffy and even includes custom header image scaling. WordPress also shares that, “visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading.” As for phones running less sophisticated browsers, the mobile theme will help your site load faster and display as much relevant information about your blog as possible.

Given that the new mobile themes are default, you don’t have to do anything to see the new changes made to your WordPress.com blog. However, if you’d like to disable the mobile themes, you can do so from your Dashboard under Appearance -> Extras.

While we think the news is great for hosted WordPress blog owners, we’re slightly disappointed that the mobile themes aren’t available for those of us who have self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Tags: blogging, Mobile 2.0, mobile theme, Wordpress, wptouch

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For as long as we can remember the term “Google Phone” has referred to Google’s Android operating system as opposed to an actual Google device.

But this morning TheStreet.com is reporting that there is an offical Google-branded phone on the way, and it will be the product of a partnership between Google and an unnamed smartphone manufacturer.

Even more remarkable is that the rumors have this Google Phone poised to be released before the end of the year and available through retailers instead of carriers. Essentially, the phone would be something you could purchase regardless of your wireless service provider, and the antithesis to the iPhone and its exclusivity with AT&T.

At the center of the rumor is Ashok Kumar, a Northeast Securities analyst, who claims to have spoken with Google’s design partners about the phone and it’s product release strategy. The article speculates, “If talk of the Google phone plan is true, the entrance of a unlocked, low-cost, Web-friendly touchscreen device will probably undercut other Android phone efforts by players like Motorola, Samsung and Dell.”

We’re quite anxious to see how this rumor develops and if there’s any merit to it. We think it would be a smart and logical move for Google, with the potential to steal customers away from Apple and their wildly successful iPhone, which remains exclusive to AT&T in the US.

Tags: Google, google phone

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We noticed a short while ago that social photography site Flickr was down. We were hoping that it would just be a minor hiccup, but it looks like that Flickr has been going online and offline for some time.

There are several new updates on the Flickr Blog over the issues. The first update was at 8:51 AM PT and the last one was at 10:50 AM PT. Here is the full text from Flickr:

“10:50 AM PDT: Hey, we wanted to make sure you all knew, if you embedded photos from a photopage on Flickr, we are still serving them. So, if they are posted to your blog, your photos will still be showing there. What we are doing now is working on getting all our WWW servers back on for everyone; this includes bringing the API back up, which has been affected as well. Sorry for the downtime to everyone, we hate it as much as you!

10:05 AM PDT: We’re still here working on getting things up and serving to you, shouldn’t be too much longer!

9:18 AM, PDT: Hello! All hands are on deck over here and we’re still working on getting things back up for everyone. Apologies for the disruption!

8:51 AM, PDT: Ahoy everyone! Flickr is experiencing problems at the present time, and our engineers are all in the main engine room, working on resolving the issue. Please hang tight, and we’ll have things back for you as soon as possible. If we need to, we’ll post an update for you here.”

We’ll update this post when Flickr is back online.

Tags: flickr

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We’ve recently covered Barnes & Noble’s e-reader which aims to take some wind out of Amazon Kindle’s sails.

Today is the official launch date, and some additional details about the device have surfaced. The Nook, as it’s called, will have a 6-inch monochrome E-Ink panel as the main display, a multitouch color LCD panel right below it, and a price tag of $259 – exactly the same as Amazon’s Kindle.

Besides the tech improvements that Nook will supposedly bring over the Kindle, Barnes & Noble has another trick up its sleeve: its physical stores, where customers will probably be able to try out the Nook before purchasing. Its partnership with Google, who’s also launching an electronic book store, combined with all the above might make Barnes & Noble a worthy adversary to the current king of digital book sales – Amazon.

The official Nook event starts today at 4 PM ET; we’ll bring you the rest of the details then. In the meantime, here’s an interview we did with Barnes & Noble about the then-yet-to-be-named Nook earlier this month:

Tags: barnes & noble, e-reader, nook

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When asked about increased competition to the iPhone, like the new Android offerings, Apple COO Tim Cook was characteristically confident: “We think people are trying to catch up with the first iPhone released two years ago,” he said.

Cook continued to point out that the 85,000 apps in the App Store far exceed the offerings of any of the other smartphone platforms.

Whether Android 2.0 is iPhone 1.0 or not (and we think not), it’s clear Apple still feels they have the lead on innovation and new technologies that consumers want to use.

In a sense, of course, this is true. One could argue that every smartphone released to the market since June 2007 has been a response to the iPhone. This isn’t to suggest that everything in the original iPhone was revolutionary (it wasn’t), but the combination of full web-browsing plus multi-touch screens and ease-of-use — not to mention the platform-specific application store — is something that virtually every other smartphone has tried to emulate in the last two and a half years.

What has really driven the iPhone as a product and as a brand hasn’t been the technical features of the phone, but the apps. When you compare what is available elsewhere with what is available for the iPhone, both in quality and quantity — it’s not as stark as pre-App Store to post-App Store, but it isn’t on the same playing field.

The iPhone 3GS is selling like hotcakes too. Although sales were up a “mere” 7% year-over-year (and keep in mind that it was Q4 last year that the iPhone came to many international markets for the first time), the sell-through rate was 38% higher than last year and Apple had a very difficult time keeping its channel inventories stocked. Even now, Apple remarked it wished it had more stock in the channel, especially with the impending iPhone China launch.

Still, something tells me that Apple won’t be content to sit on its laurels and to underestimate the competition. Apple knows it has to continue to innovate if it wants to retain its lead on the competition.

What do you think of Cook’s statement? Are other smartphones still playing catch-up to the original iPhone? Let us know!

Tags: android, apple, iphone, peter cook

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Geolocation is one of the big current trends in social networks and mobile applications. And why not? Being able to find out what’s going on around you and what your friends are doing nearby is pretty awesome. It’s one of the reason apps and services like Foursquare are gaining traction.

Today, Loopt, one of the early players in connecting users to their friends based on location, is launching a new app that helps you meet new people, called Loopt Mix.

Loopt Mix (iTunes link) is a free app for the iPhone that lets you connect with people nearby that you don’t already know, but might want to meet. With it, you create a profile (your e-mail address is never shown and you can choose to hide or show your age) and you can search for people nearby.

Your exact location is never shown and you can choose to hide your profile from public view at any time (so if you’re on a date and you don’t want to be bothered by potential new friends, or if you’re trying to get stuff done — you can turn off your public profile). See someone interesting nearby? You can send them a free message and see if they want any company or want to meet somewhere close-by.

You can post status updates showing what you’re doing – so if you are playing basketball and looking for someone to join in, you can include that information so that would-be ballers can know to message you to join in on the fun. Meeting new people can be hard and the social web is supposed to make it easier. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Loopt Mix is aiming to fix that.

What do you think about using the social web to meet new people while on the go? How do you meet new people when you are in a new city or looking to expand your social circle? Let us know!

Tags: geolocation, iphone, loopt, loopt mix

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