Columbia Pictures has just released the very first teaser trailer for its upcoming film, The Social Network. Like the poster that debuted last week, the teaser is sparse in its detail, but intriguing and provocative at the same time.
The Social Network, otherwise known as “the Facebook movie,” is based in part on the book The Accidental Billionaires. It chronicles the formative days of Facebook, from its founding in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room through its early rise to success. Written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, the film stars Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg. It hits theaters this October.
Yes, the iPhone 4 Will Shatter If You Drop It… Into a Blender
Those wanton destroyers of super expensive, highly coveted technology are at it again — Blendtec took on the iPhone 4 with its storied device, and that sucker blended like one big, toxic, black, smoking smoothie.
We saw Blendtec — a company that manufactures blenders and produces a series called “Will it Blend?” — demolish the iPad a few months back, which must have gone straight to the heart of a goodly number of Apple fanboys and girls.
We saw Blendtec — a company that manufactures blenders and produces a series called “Will it Blend?” — demolish the iPad a few months back, which must have gone straight to the heart of a goodly number of Apple fanboys and girls.
Twitter Sets New Record: 3,283 Tweets Per Second
Despite massive Twitter activity due to ongoing World Cup match play, Twitter’s biggest tweets per second record to date was during last week’s NBA finals. That record was shattered yesterday as Twitter users published 3,283 tweets per second at the close of Japan’s victory over Denwark in the World Cup.
These new numbers come directly from Twitter . You may recall that the previous record of 3,085 tweets per second came at the close of the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics on June 17.
Both of these recent records are staggering given that Twitter — during normal daily activity — averages roughly 750 tweets per second. The Japan-Demark World Cup figure means that activity swelled 438% above average, which helps to put recent service issues into perspective.
Still the World Cup has yet to reach its climatic finale, so we expect this record broken in the very near future. Stay tuned.
These new numbers come directly from Twitter . You may recall that the previous record of 3,085 tweets per second came at the close of the Los Angeles Lakers’ victory over the Boston Celtics on June 17.Both of these recent records are staggering given that Twitter — during normal daily activity — averages roughly 750 tweets per second. The Japan-Demark World Cup figure means that activity swelled 438% above average, which helps to put recent service issues into perspective.
Still the World Cup has yet to reach its climatic finale, so we expect this record broken in the very near future. Stay tuned.
Gmail Gets One-Click Microsoft Word Previews
Google just announced a small but handy new feature for Gmail: one-click previews for Microsoft Word documents. This new features works for .doc and the more recent .docx format. Until now, Gmail's one-click preview feature only supported PDF files, PowerPoint documents and images in the TIFF format. The new preview feature for Word documents replaces the "view as HTML" option in Gmail. 
The new Word previews definitely look far better than the HTML preview it replaces. It handles page breaks, footnotes and other more advanced features without any issues. If you want to edit the document in Google Docs, once additional click from the previewer will open the document for editing. You can also save the document to your Google Docs account without leaving the preview mode. Of course, you can also download the document and edit it in your favorite desktop word processor.
Chipotle Wants to Turn Your Junk E-mail into Healthy School Lunches
The program –- called “No Junk” –- encourages people to forward their spam to nojunk@chipotlejunk.com. For every 100,000 messages received at that address, Chipotle plans to donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box, a non-profit organization that provides resources to schools to help them make their food programs healthier.
For Chipotle, the project aligns with the marketing messages you’ve likely seen if you’ve eaten at one of their restaurants, which emphasize the “naturally raised” animals and organically grown ingredients the company uses in its burritos.
Browser Wars : Army Reassembles
Internet Explorer 9
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may still hold dominant market share in the web browser arena, but it is quickly fading against strong competition from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The IE browser has been much maligned for its lack of support for web standards and its poor performance against the competition.
Yesterday, the company launched IE9 Platform Preview 3 at an event in San Francisco. Surprisingly Microsoft’s presentation focused almost exclusively on how IE9 beats its competitors, Chrome (
) 5 and Firefox (
) 3.6.4. They ran test after test showing off its processing capabilities. What came up the most though was hardware acceleration: IE9 utilizes DirectX 10 to make far better use of the hardware.
And trust me the results admiited were striking
Could IE9 finally be the iteration that turns Internet Explorer’s (
) woes and horrendous reputation around? I leave it up to you to decide.
Status : Launching Date Awaited
Mozilla 3.6.4
After some delays, Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.4, the newest version of the popular web browser. It comes with one big addition: protection against crashing due to third-party plugins, most notably Adobe Flash.
The updated browser comes with dozens of bug fixes and stability upgrades. What the average user will care about most though is Firefox () crash protection, something that is a prominent feature of Google Chrome ().
Crash protection utilizes out-of-process plugins technology to run third-party plugins (specifically Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight) in a separate process. In the past, a plugin crash would take down your entire Firefox browser. With crash protection however, “the browser will stay running while the portions of websites controlled by the plugin will be disabled.” It only takes a refresh to restart the plugin.
There is a catch, though: only Windows () and Linux () users have access to crash protection. According to Mozilla, making crash protection available to Mac OS X users would require major changes to Firefox’s infrastructure. However, the non-profit promises that it will become available for Mac users in Firefox 4, which should ship by the end of the year.
Status : Download from here
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer may still hold dominant market share in the web browser arena, but it is quickly fading against strong competition from Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The IE browser has been much maligned for its lack of support for web standards and its poor performance against the competition.
Yesterday, the company launched IE9 Platform Preview 3 at an event in San Francisco. Surprisingly Microsoft’s presentation focused almost exclusively on how IE9 beats its competitors, Chrome () 5 and Firefox () 3.6.4. They ran test after test showing off its processing capabilities. What came up the most though was hardware acceleration: IE9 utilizes DirectX 10 to make far better use of the hardware.And trust me the results admiited were striking
Could IE9 finally be the iteration that turns Internet Explorer’s (
) woes and horrendous reputation around? I leave it up to you to decide.Status : Launching Date Awaited
Mozilla 3.6.4
After some delays, Mozilla has released Firefox 3.6.4, the newest version of the popular web browser. It comes with one big addition: protection against crashing due to third-party plugins, most notably Adobe Flash.
The updated browser comes with dozens of bug fixes and stability upgrades. What the average user will care about most though is Firefox (
) crash protection, something that is a prominent feature of Google Chrome ().
Crash protection utilizes out-of-process plugins technology to run third-party plugins (specifically Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight) in a separate process. In the past, a plugin crash would take down your entire Firefox browser. With crash protection however, “the browser will stay running while the portions of websites controlled by the plugin will be disabled.” It only takes a refresh to restart the plugin.There is a catch, though: only Windows (
) and Linux () users have access to crash protection. According to Mozilla, making crash protection available to Mac OS X users would require major changes to Firefox’s infrastructure. However, the non-profit promises that it will become available for Mac users in Firefox 4, which should ship by the end of the year.Status : Download from here
iPhone 4: 1.5 Million Sold on First Day
We know that 600,000 units have been pre-ordered. Reiner estimates that 100,000 additional, non-reserved units were sold at Apple stores and that 50,000 were sold at Best Buy. He multiplied the final number by two to include international sales.
Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has a more conservative calculation: He thinks that Apple will sell between 1 million and 1.5 million iPhones in the first three days, including pre-orders.
Both Munster and Reiner arrived at these numbers by surveying hundreds of iPhone 4 buyers on Thursday, but make no mistake: these are very rough estimates. Apple’s sales numbers — especially on launch day — have a habit of surprising even the biggest optimists, so it’s probably a good idea to wait for the official numbers before jumping to conclusions.
Porn Sites Set to Get .XXX Domain Name Option
ICANN, the organization that oversees domain names and registrations for the Internet, plans to approve the .xxx top-level domain (TLD) for adult websites.
According to multiple reports, ICANN officials told people at a public meeting in Brussels that it intends to allow adult businesses to register .xxx domains, which have been the subject of controversy for several years. An ICANN attorney said that due diligence and contract negotiations must still be carried out; if those are successful, Internet porn could have its own distinct TLD.
The .xxx domain has been criticized by everyone from pornographers — some of whom see the TLD as a form of digital segregation — to conservative American activists, who would probably prefer a porn-free Internet altogether.
This development has been spearheaded by the ICM Registry, who could end up selling .xxx domains as soon as this year if ICANN negotiations go smoothly. ICM states on its website that the idea of the .xxx domain is that responsible pornographers will be able to self-identify and web users will more easily be able to identify adult content online.
According to multiple reports, ICANN officials told people at a public meeting in Brussels that it intends to allow adult businesses to register .xxx domains, which have been the subject of controversy for several years. An ICANN attorney said that due diligence and contract negotiations must still be carried out; if those are successful, Internet porn could have its own distinct TLD.
The .xxx domain has been criticized by everyone from pornographers — some of whom see the TLD as a form of digital segregation — to conservative American activists, who would probably prefer a porn-free Internet altogether.
This development has been spearheaded by the ICM Registry, who could end up selling .xxx domains as soon as this year if ICANN negotiations go smoothly. ICM states on its website that the idea of the .xxx domain is that responsible pornographers will be able to self-identify and web users will more easily be able to identify adult content online.
Before : www.abc.com
After : www.abc.xxx
After : www.abc.xxx
Nokia N8 Will Be the Last N-Series Smartphone Based on Symbian
Nokia has plans to switch from Symbian to Linux on its flagship smartphones, and now it’s official: Nokia N8 will be the last N-series phone based on the Symbian OS.From now on, Nokia’s N-series smartphones will be based on MeeGo, a mobile platform which is the love child of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin, both based on Linux. Symbian won’t go away completely; it will power some of Nokia’s mid and low-range smartphones, but for its most powerful smartphones, it’s all MeeGo from now on.
Although this shows Nokia’s determination to catch up with the iPhone and Android operating systems – Nokia’s Symbian is still the most popular smartphone platform in the world, but it’s losing ground fast – one has to wonder how much time will pass before Nokia’s new line of smartphones reach maturity.
MeeGo is still a very new platform (it was announced at the Mobile World Congress 2010), and it currently works on a handful of devices, mostly netbooks. iOS4 and Android 2.2 are very mature platforms, devised for touchscreen devices from the very beginning. By the time MeeGo gets to where these platforms are now (if it ever does), Nokia’s smartphone business may be a shadow of its former self.
Unfortunately, this is also bad news for Nokia N8: it’s not very appealing to invest your money in a device that sports a dying OS.
Although this shows Nokia’s determination to catch up with the iPhone and Android operating systems – Nokia’s Symbian is still the most popular smartphone platform in the world, but it’s losing ground fast – one has to wonder how much time will pass before Nokia’s new line of smartphones reach maturity.
Unfortunately, this is also bad news for Nokia N8: it’s not very appealing to invest your money in a device that sports a dying OS.
Apple - iPhone 4 (iOS4)
Specifications :
Dimensions
- Height : 4.5 inches (115.2 mm)
- Width : 2.31 inches (58.6 mm)
- Depth : 0.37 inch (9.3 mm)
- Weight : 4.8 ounces (137 grams)
Capacity
- 16GB or 32GB flash drive
Color
- White or black
Display
- Retina display
- 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen Multi-Touch display
- 960-by-640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
- 800:1 contrast ratio (typical)
- 500 cd/m2 max brightness (typical)
- Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating on front and back
- Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously
Cellular and wireless
- UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz)
- GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
- 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz only)
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR wireless technology
- Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery
- Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter
- Talk time : Up to 7 hours on 3G
- Up to 14 hours on 2G
- Standby time: Up to 300 hours
- Internet use : Up to 6 hours on 3G
- Up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi
- Video playback: Up to 10 hours
- Audio playback: Up to 40 hours
Tracking
- Assisted GPS
- Digital compass
- Wi-Fi
- Cellular
Audio playback
- Frequency response: 20Hz to 20,000Hz
- Audio formats supported: AAC (8 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), HE-AAC, MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3, 4, Audible Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+), Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV
- User-configurable maximum volume limit
TV and video
- Video formats supported: H.264 video up to 720p, 30 frames per second, Main Profile level 3.1 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps per channel, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format
- Support for 1024 by 768 pixels with Dock Connector to VGA Adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Component AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Composite AV Cable (cables sold separately)
Camera, photos, and video
- Video recording, HD (720p) up to 30 frames per second with audio
- 5-megapixel still camera
- VGA-quality photos and video at up to 30 frames per second with the front camera
- Tap to focus video or still images
- LED flash
- Photo and video geotagging