Follow: BetaNews CrunchGear Download Squad Electronista Engadget Gizmodo Technology Review RSS Feeds TorrentFreak + add/remove »

BetaNews — By Scott M. Fulton, III , Betanews Tuesday evening, during an event televised over YouTube called Google Campfire One, Google executives lifted the curtain on its cloud-based Apps Marketplace for PC-based applications, with the promise of opening its online store with 50 charter vendors later in the evening. The Marketplace is designed to feature applications that integrate with the company's existing Google Apps, Gmail, and other cloud-based services. Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gondotra told attendees at the company's ...More headquarters that the company plans to utilize very simple terms of service. Think of a garden, but more with clearly marked paths as opposed to walls. Extending the concept of the Android Marketplace from handsets to computing devices, the company is inviting developers to build applications using its Studio tool, then deploy those apps by way of the Marketplace. Each developer is asked to pay a $100 sign-up fee, and then give Google a 20% revenue share for sales, at whatever price the developer charges. (We have not seen yet whether there will be a price cap.) FURTHER INFORMATION FORTHCOMING Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010 ...Less

Electronista — Former Sun CEO and president Jonathan Schwartz claims to have received a lawsuit threat several years ago from Apple CEO Steve Jobs. After Schwartz unveiled the prototype Linux desktop titled Project Looking Glass in 2003, Jobs allegedly called personally to notify Sun that its graphical effects were "stepping all over Apple's IP," according to Schwartz's personal blog....

Engadget — That's the "glass is half full" attitude we like, Verizon -- always looking for a way to sign a few more of those lucrative data contracts, no matter the circumstances! Turns out Big Red is tipping off its staffers on how it can encourage customers to go with the WiFi-only version of the iPad and pair it up with a device like the MiFi rather than shelling out $130 more for integrated AT&T 3G and waiting a few extra weeks. As usual, Verizon's keen on playing up the anti-AT&T sentiment it's cultivated in its recent ...More ad campaign by openly calling its biggest competitor's 3G network "overloaded," but we see one big hangup: 5GB of data on a Verizon MiFi is going to run you $60 a month, twice as much as AT&T will be charging for its dedicated iPad plan. Then again, even AT&T's own boss thinks the WiFi-only iPad is the way to go , so who knows -- maybe Verizon's onto something here. [Thanks, Mark] Eternal optimist Verizon calls iPad launch 'an opportunity' to sell some data plans originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |   |  Email this  |  Comments ...Less

CrunchGear — A bundle of screenshots just hit the net showing off the latest Direct3D-based mobile games running on a WinPho7 device, adn they look pretty hot. We knew that the Tegra chipset in the Zune HD and likely in several upcoming WinPho handsets (Tegra 2, to be precise) is capable of some nice 3D, but these are better than anything I’ve seen yet. The game shown is The Harvest, a dungeon crawler which, if indicative of the general quality of WinPho7 games, portends good times to be had. Read the rest of this post on MobileCrunch…

Electronista — Cisco as part of a self-proclaimed "revolutionary" event today launched a new router system meant for the very highest levels of Internet and cellular carriers. The CRS-3 is roughly three times faster than the previous Cisco best and theoretically provides as much as 322 terabits per second (Tbps) when it's attached to a suitable network. With that much bandwidth, a carrier could serve 1 billion videos at the same time or serve the entire population of San Francisco with 1Gbps Internet access....

Electronista — Rogers today became the first North American carrier to pick up the Samsung Galaxy Spica. The smartphone is similar to the original Galaxy in its 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi but runs Android 1.6 and carries a faster 800MHz processor. Its only observable sacrifice is a 3.2-megapixel camera instead of 5 in the original....

Engadget — Crapware's bad enough, but having your life torn asunder simply by plugging in that shiny new (insert USB-connected device here) is an exciting new trend -- viruses find their way into the darnedest places, don't they? It seems an employee at anti-malware firm Panda Research who'd ordered a new Magic off Vodafone UK's site was greeted with no fewer than three nefarious executables upon plugging the device into her PC: a bot client, a password stealer, and a Conficker variant, and running a network sniffer quickly confirmed that ...More the virii were live and ready to do harm as soon as the autorun in the Magic's mounted mass storage was executed on her Windows machine. If this were a widespread issue, we'd certainly have heard about it in other places, so odds are good (as Panda points out) that this was simply a case of HTC or Vodafone doing an awful job of wiping a refurbished set -- but it gives you pause and kind of makes you wish you worked for an anti-malware firm, at least on days when you're plugging in a new phone for the first time. The silver lining, we suppose, is that Vodafone has recently discontinued the Magic, though that creates another problem: the only Android device it currently stocks now is the lowly Tattoo , so the X10 and Nexus One can't come soon enough. Customer greeted with malware on Vodafone-issued HTC Magic (good thing it's discontinued) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink   Daring Fireball  |  Panda Research , Android Community  |  Email this  |  Comments ...Less

BetaNews — By Jacqueline Emigh , Betanews After showing a prototype of its first electronic reader at CES in January, Samsung on Tuesday officially rolled out the new device, spilling all the details about the final feature set while also unveiling a new partnership with Barnes & Noble. Unlike other gadgets in the increasingly crowded field, the Samsung eReader lets people make notes in the margins of e-book pages, pointed out Vickie Cullen, a Samsung spokesperson, at a press event in New York City where the company launched a number ...More of CE products including this device, 3D TVs , and a 3D Blu-ray player. Users of Samsung's eReader can modify the electronic pages by underlining words, for example, and they can use built-in voice recording functionality to produce audio memos and annotations. It's also able to read text aloud, but only with electronic books that support text-to-speech (TTS) technology. A reader can make notes in the margins through the use of a special electromagnetic resonance (EMR) stylus pen. In a demo at the event, we saw how you can easily make the brushstrokes wider or narrower or even turn the pen into an "eraser" by touching the tip of the pen to icons at the bottom of the screen. The eReader comes in a slider form factor with a six-inch E-ink screen displaying at 600x800 resolution in eight shades of grey. Cullen said that you can import drawings and photos in JPEG and BMP formats as well as other files downloaded from the Internet to a PC, using the eReader's mini-USB port. Other supported file formats include e-pub, PDF/a, and TXT. Slated to ship this spring for $299. Samsung's new device offers 26 GB of internal memory, plus an external Micro SD slot capable of increasing storage by another 16 GB. The product also comes with built-in speakers and Bluetooth technology for playing back music or TTS translation, she said. Readers can use the gadget's built-in Wi-Fi, together with Samsung's proprietary EmoLink technology, for sharing content -- includ... ...Less

CrunchGear — Exciting news about Apple’s iTunes LP : apparently it’s a bit of a bust! The fine folks at GigaOM had the foresight to talk to people in the music industry to ask them, six months on, how’s iTunes LP doing? Not so great, is the answer . What went wrong? The first shocking revelation: iTunes LP wasn’t really Apple’s idea in the first place. Makes sense: why would Apple, which all but created the idea of a legal, digital music store, based on selling individual songs (read: not albums) all of a sudden ...More be all, “Hey, albums are cool again. Buy them, and at a huge premium, too. Rather, iTunes LP was pushed by the same record labels that complained enough to get Apple to change from an all-99 cents pricing policy to a flexible pricing policy in exchange for DRM-free music. What happened? A couple things, maybe. One, maybe, after years of getting used to cherry picking what songs they wanted to buy, people are just done with the concept of the album. Not everyone who buys music from iTunes is so into music that they’ll make 1,000-word blog posts defending the album—they just want the latest Lady Gaga song. These people have no interest in full-length albums anymore. Another reason: iTunes LP albums are expensive, both to buy and to create. One source told GigaOM that an iTunes LP album cost something like $50,000-$60,000 to create, and $20ish to buy. And what are you getting, a couple of photos and videos that you may well have found on the band’s Web site? And then there’s not too many iTunes LP albums to begin with! Apple’s probably not too concerned. Again, this whole iTunes LP adventure wasn’t its idea to begin with, so Steve Jobs is probably like, “Whatever, dude, it’s all about the iPad. Don’t talk to me, jerk.” There’s a larger issue, and that’s if the album is dead or not. There was a digital music thing here in New York a few weeks ago, but I was busy playing soccer with the guy from Univision . Questions like “Is the album dead?” were probably debated there. C... ...Less

CrunchGear — The original complaint about music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that they convinced kids that playing the guitar was actually easy. A few taps, a few strums and you sounded like Jack White or Ozzy, right? Well Powergig wants to change that perception by offering a real six-string guitar that you can really play and, with the flip of a switch, you can dampen the strings and strum along to your favorite tunes on the XBox 360 or PS3. The company, Seven45, is also making a guitar game with its own downloadable content ...More that will be something like Brutal Legend , and the guitars are made by their parent company, First Act makers of “entry level” AKA toy guitars and instruments. Nice synergy, eh? Anyway, more on this from GDC when we have it but until then, feel free to thank me for sticking Summer of ‘69 in your head. via CNET ...Less