Sony is considering building a mobile phone of the PlayStation Portable. It would be the PSP combined with a Sony Ericsson phone. A team may be put together for this project starting as early as a month from now. This type of device won’t be available for at least a year from now.
This would be an interesting way to challenge Apple considering that the iPhone company makes substantial revenue through game applications sold on iTunes. Game publishing companies Electronic Arts, SEGA, Capcom, etc. are all very active in creating games for the iPhone and Sony PSP. Aside from selling games on the PlayStation Store, Sony will be selling TV shows and movies.
As of this past February, Sony announced to have over 20 million users on the PlayStation Network and sold above 50 million PSP devices.
Yesterday Michael Jackson died from a heart attack.
AOL’s TMZ first reported the story and spent all night covering the story as it developed. As a result, TMZ’s traffic spiked and they had the capacity to keep the website online while their competition’s servers couldn’t handle it.
TMZ wasn’t the only one that had traffic spikes. On Twitter over 5,000 messages were sent out per minute shortly after the Michael Jackson news story broke. The number of tweets doubled according to Biz Stone. AOL Instant Messenger and LiveJournal’s servers also took a big hit, causing a slowdown. The Los Angeles Times website hit about 2.3 million pageviews in one hour after the news story broke. Facebook status updates tripled from the average.
SitePoint was once known to be a popular marketplace for selling online properties such as WordPress templates, e-businesses, and e-books. SitePoint gained additional attention in a New York Times article called Find An Undervalued Asset. Fix It Up. Flip It. (Now It’s Web Sites, Not Houses) [link]. Now SitePoint has renamed itself to a company called Flippa. Flippa announced 10 new features in a blog post, including a new controversial price model.
The new price of listing a website on Flippa is $19 plus a 5% success fee with a cap of $499. The original cost of listing websites on SitePoint was $10 flat. All SitePoint accounts have been migrated to Flippa as a part of the rebranding. Unsurprisingly, many people are complaining about the changes in different forums. What does SitePoint management think of all the complainers? Apparently they could care less. Below is a statement from SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle.
Thanks for all your positive feedback guys. We appreciate it. One thing to keep in mind…Our buyers aren’t going anywhere. They are savvy business people. They don’t care about the design of the site or the fact the logo sucks (the current logo is a placeholder BTW), they simply get on with the business of buying, and we’ve made it alot easier for them to do that on flippa.com.
Meanwhile while you all whine and complain about the fees, the design, etc. the smart sellers are listing their sites on flippa.com and they are attracting the majority of the buyer interest. They will also get the added benefit of the PR we’re about to roll out.
So, it’s totally up to you! If you want to come across to flippa and sell your site in the professional marketplace we’re creating for serious buyers, we welcome you with open arms. If not, please do go to digitalpoint. List your site for free and see if the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies.
One of my favorite 80′s songs is “Right Here Waiting” by Richard Marx. Now that I have that out of the way, Marx himself made a statement defending Jammie Thomas. Thomas is the Minnesota resident that was sued by the RIAA and lost in court, penalizing her $1.92 million. Below is the statement from Marx:
As a longtime professional songwriter, I have always objected to the practice of illegal downloading of music. I have also always, however, been sympathetic to the average music fan, who has been consistently financially abused by the greedy actions of major labels. These labels, until recently, were responsible for the distribution of the majority of recorded music, and instead of nurturing the industry and doing their best to provide the highest quality of music to the fans, they predominantly chose to ream the consumer and fill their pockets.
So now we have a “judgment” in a case of illegal downloading, and it seems to me, especially in these extremely volatile economic times, that holding Ms. Thomas-Rasset accountable for the continuing daily actions of hundreds of thousands of people is, at best, misguided and at worst, farcical. Her accountability itself is not in question, but this show of force posing as judicial come-uppance is clearly abusive. Ms. Thomas-Rasset, I think you got a raw deal, and I’m ashamed to have my name associated with this issue.
Although Marx’s statements won’t do much in terms of the RIAA being more lenient, it is interesting to note that one of Marx’s songs “Now and Forever” was one of the 24 tracks that Thomas was forced to pay a copyright infringement fine.
Recently a hospital in Tennessee admitted that they had performed a liver transplant on Apple CEO Steve Jobs. About 6,500 Americans are fortunate to receive such an operation every year while 16,000 others are still on a waiting list. Paying for a transplant is illegal so Jobs did not do that. The reason why he received the transplant is because the hospital said that he was the sickest patient waiting for a liver when it had become available.
The operation took place at the Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute. Jobs suffered from pancreatic cancer in 2004 which lead to the liver transplant need. Back in January Jobs claimed that his malnourished appearance was due to a hormone imbalance. According to Dr. Anthony D’Alessandro, liver transplant chief at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, anyone is able to go to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients website and find out how long the average wait times and the success rates are for every transplant program in the nation. Jobs was able to get on the shorter waiting list in Tennessee.
To get accepted into a liver transplant program, the patient must go to the facility and be evaluated by the staff. Several tests are taken to ensure that there is a medical need for a transplant. Once a patient is accepted, they must get to the facility within seven or eight hours of being noticed. People can be added to as many waiting lists as they want as long as they are able to get to the facility in time and meet other conditions.
After the transplant was complete, Methodist University transplant chief Dr. James Eason said that Jobs has an “excellent prognosis,” meaning Jobs is on the way to recovery. Eason was right because Jobs was spotted returning to work earlier this week.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former CTO Nathan Myhrvold are credited for the invention of a “temperature-stabilized storage container” used for storing and transporting “water or flavored water, dairy product or fruit juice, carbonated soda, wine, beer, or distilled spirits.” This type of container “may store a beverage such as beer, for example, at a temperature appropriate for serving depending upon the type of beer.”
Looks like Bill and Nate are putting their geekiness to good use here. The high-tech keg would also have an electronic display that shows the temperature using transmitters and sensors. If the patent is granted, then it would become intellectual property of Searete LLC. Searete is tied to Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue-based company run by Myhrvold. Gates and Myhrvold meet fairly often to come up with different ideas.
Whoever thought that Bill Gates wasn’t hip may have a different opinion of him now. Personally I’d like to see an advanced keg like this start becoming available at higher learning institutes. That way in about 20 years from now, I can look at my kids and college and tell them how our kegs were made only out of metal and a tube and that is all we needed.
You know how sometimes you want to share links and status updates on Facebook, but don’t want to show it to all of your friends. Facebook is adding the ability to make certain messages private through the use of the 5 tier networks. Either you can share a link, photo, or status message with all of your friends, everyone, friends and networks, friends of friends, or a custom network.
Below is a screenshot of what the new feature looks like. While status privacy is a nice feature, it seems like it is a minor add-on. I don’t foresee myself manually selecting who I want to share stuff with and who I don’t. However I am glad that they already had a similar privacy feature for photo albums. There are certain photo albums I have that I don’t need some people seeing.
I guarantee you that if you put this robot in a competition against Omarion or Marques Houston in the You Got Served movie, they will get out-danced. This robot can pop and lock, do the splits, and do a head-spin. The robot is called the Manoi and was designed by Kyosho
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