An exclusive gaming industry community targeted
to, and designed for Professionals, Businesses
and Students in the sectors and industries
of Gaming, New Media and the Web, all closely
related with it's Business and Industry.
A Rich content driven service including articles,
contributed discussion, news, reviews, networking, downloads,
and debate.
We strive to cater for cultural influencers,
technology decision makers, early adopters and business leaders in the gaming industry.
A medium to share your or contribute your ideas,
experiences, questions and point of view or network
with other colleagues here at iVirtua Community.
Updated Venturer's anticipated cut-price SHD7001 HD DVD player went on sale this morning on the QVC home shopping channel for less than was expected. At £162.62 (or two easy payments of £84.96), it's the cheapest standalone HD DVD player on the market....
Microsoft's Patent Prevents You From Skipping Ads With DRM [Software]Gizmodo Fantastic. Not only are people trying to stop you from skipping ads on your DVR, Microsoft's patent will stop you from skipping ads on video you watch on your computer. The technique uses DRM to prevent any sort of playback until you watched the appropriate number of ads, and would essentially allow content providers like NBC or other networks to place their shows online and make sure they get their ad time's worth. Although we're in favor of any method that would get more people to put shows online, the fact of the matter is we're used to skipping over commercials via our DVRs anyway. To BitTorrent we go. [Patent via Electronista - Image courtesy Geekpedia]
Microsoft goes for VMware's throat, throws Dell under the bus [Virtualization]Valleywag Microsoft is releasing an early version of Hyper-V, its virtualization software, ahead of schedule. Microsoft is competing head-on with high-flyer VMware, which went public in a much-hyped IPO earlier this year. The company, which is majority owned by EMC, is off 20 percent from its all-time high last month. For the 99 percent of you whose business card doesn't say "IT Peon," here's what this means.
Virtualization allows one computer to run multiple "virtual machines," with different operating systems. If one crashes, it won't bring the others down, and also allows for better security and more efficient allocation of resources. At the end of the day, this billion-dollar-spat between Microsoft and VMware means one thing to non-sysadmins: You can get away with cutting your hardware budget next year. Sorry, Dell.
As if it wasn't enough that we had to blame ads for the UK's growing obesity crisis, now adland has received fresh claims that they also cause anorexia and alcohol abuse.
Author: Melinda Varley
As if it wasn't enough that we had to blame ads for the UK's growing obesity crisis, now adland has received fresh claims that they also cause anorexia and alcohol abuse.
Children's minister Ed Balls last week announced he was launching an inquiry in Parliament that will aim to tighten regulations on ads that children might see.
He estimated that kids see 10,000 ads a year and are greatly influenced by them when it comes to their social habits.
The Advertising Association hit back saying 'we can't blame ads for today's social problems' and blamed the parents who gave into their kids' poor lifestyle choices.
Last year Ofcom introduced a ban on ads for products that were high in fat, salt and sugar, which aimed to help reduce the amount of obese children in the UK. However, the regulations have been in full force for well over 8 months now and have proved to be no silver bullet to the issue of obesity - yet.
Are we really so ignorant and reluctant to confront the real issue that we must blame ads for any major problem we have? Surely it's also peer pressure, magazines and celebrities being considered as role models (for example Victoria Beckham) that are more responsible for a growing trend in anorexia?
And as for alcohol abuse, retailers can't sell it to kids under 18 so how else are they getting their hands on it? I know many parents who freely buy their kids alcohol for their Saturday night teeny bopper parties thinking its better they know what they're up to.
I hope this is still true, but when I was growing up my parents had complete control over me, what they bought for me to consume and how I lived my life until I was 18. Has old fashioned parenting gone out the window and now we're blaming advertising? That seems to be the real issue here, not adland.
To read the news story related to this blog, go to mad.co.uk
LinkedIn API and New Homepage Drawing NearTechCrunch LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is trying to establish itself as a better destination with a stronger presence on the web. As a better destination, LinkedIn would experience higher levels of user engagement and more page views, which in turn would translate into greater advertising revenue. With a stronger presence, the site would grab [...]
Author: Mark Hendrickson
LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is trying to establish itself as a better destination with a stronger presence on the web.
As a better destination, LinkedIn would experience higher levels of user engagement and more page views, which in turn would translate into greater advertising revenue. With a stronger presence, the site would grab mind share away from rising competitor Facebook, which has already become a household name for many.
A new homepage, with a focus on providing users with reasons to return more often, is under development and meant to turn LinkedIn into a better destination. A "beta" version of this homepage will go live for a subset of LinkedIn users this Monday. The three homepage components meant to entice users back to the site include on-site messaging, news articles from around the web, and "network updates" (i.e. a news feed). On-site messaging is not new but will now enjoy prime real estate on the homepage, with the inbox sitting on the top of everything else. The news feed, which will be given third greatest prominence, will display the network activity of people in your network.
Most notable is a new feature, discovered by Erick last week, that will display headlines from around the web which may be of professional interest to you. Unlike the early version of this system that Erick stumbled upon, the most recent iteration of LinkedIn's news aggregator - the one featured on this beta homepage - will not require any manual training. It will rely on its own algorithms to automatically determine what you may be interested in reading, in part using the history of what other people in your network have read to make its selection (LinkedIn is not disclosing what service it actually uses to aggregate all the headlines in the first place). News articles will be filterable by topics such as: most read, company, competitors, and industry.
More interesting to me is LinkedIn's attempt to build a stronger presence on the web by providing an API, previously disclosed but until now without any real details available. There's still not a lot of information, but the company has disclosed that it is actively working with select group of partners to develop applications with the new API. BusinessWeek, the only known partner, will implement a few features using LinkedIn's API, as shown in the screenshot to the right. The API will basically allow BusinessWeek to draw from the information in users' profiles and associate it with the content in its articles. One way to do this will be to display, via a popup, how many people in a company are directly connected to a user or in the extended network or geographical region of a user.
LinkedIn hasn't disclosed exactly when the API will be readily available but the company does say that the API will eventually be accessible to any and all developers sometime in the next year. The API will provide access to information in profiles, connections, search, network updates, and the "company insider" (its news article service).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it's time for you to find a new Job2.0
NYTimes Surges, CNet SlumpsTechCrunch Ever since the NYTimes.com swept away the last remaining boulders of its subscription pay wall (aka Times Select) in mid-September, its traffic has been going through the roof. According to comScore, it gained 7.5 million readers worldwide from the end of August through the end of October (November numbers are not out yet). [...]
Author: Erick Schonfeld
Ever since the NYTimes.com swept away the last remaining boulders of its subscription pay wall (aka Times Select) in mid-September, its traffic has been going through the roof. According to comScore, it gained 7.5 million readers worldwide from the end of August through the end of October (November numbers are not out yet). That is a 64 percent jump (to a total of 19.4 million). Similarly worldwide monthly pageviews surged 52 percent in that time period to 181 million. Other major news outlets like BusinessWeek.com (4.4 million readers in October), the WSJ.com (3.6 million, with a subscriber wall), and Wired.com (3.2 million) saw gains as well during the Fall, but nothing as dramatic as the NYTimes.com.
To put this in perspective, in the month of October alone, the New York Times added 4.9 million readers on the Web. That is more than double the total readership of CNet's News.com of 2 million, which sadly seems to be one of the few media sites declining in visitors (from 2.5 million in August). News.com's pageviews have also been flat, at 6 million per month since August. For comparison's sake, comScore shows TechCrunch (including our sister site CrunchGear) at 8 million monthly pageviews worldwide in October (we surpassed News.com in September), and it shows us catching up in online readers with 1.7 million worldwide in October. Here are the actual worldwide figures from comScore for a variety of news sites:
And just for fun, here is a chart showing pageviews over the past year for Wired.com, News.com, Economist.com, TechCrunch (with CrunchGear), and ZDNet Blogs. TechCrunch is the green line.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Friends of the UK forces seeking to send a bit of festive cheer to troops fighting on the front line have almost been thwarted by bureaucracy. Volunteers were forced to defuse 650 Christmas crackers before the British Forces Post Office would accept them, on "safety" grounds....
In most of the medical community, house calls disappeared years ago, scheduling can be a nightmare and fees are mysterious things that typically get revealed only after a service has been performed. Not so with Dr. Jay Parkinson, a Williamsburg, Brooklyn doctor who aims to turn traditional doctoring on its ear.
Dr. Parkinson only just hung up his virtual shingle in September, but he's already received press coverage nationwide (sadly, we're admittedly late to the game on this one). And with good reason: he has no office; many consultations are by e-mail, video chat or IM; and he only treats residents between 18 and 39, preferably in Williamsburg. For all face-to-face visits, 31-year-old Parkinson goes to a patient's work or home ("no more wasted time surrounded by coughing people in waiting rooms"). He also treats patients with an eye toward finding the most reasonable health care prices. Patients pay an annual fee of USD 500, which includes an initial consultation plus two additional face-to-face visits as needed. For each extra service, Parkinson's rates are clearly spelled out ahead of time for those with and without health insurance.
Much like the mobile warriors we've written about, an office-less lifestyle affords Parkinson a certain level of freedom, and saves him money on rent and staff. His doctor bag contains his iPhone, MacBook, stethoscope, blood pressure monitor, otoscope, opthalmoscope, thermometer and blood drawing supplies, which is enough equipment to perform a sound diagnosis in most cases. (Other symptoms of a thoroughly modern MD: Parkinson built his own website, blogs about health care issues and is a popular photographer on Flickr.)
Why did he choose to set up his practice this way? Parkinson explains: "First, I feel an easily accessible physician is the best way to optimize your health. Second, healthcare and traditional health insurance is too expensive in NYC. I'm doing my part to make it more affordable for you. Third, I feel that the healthcare industry profits largely by keeping cost information from you. I think this is extremely unethical. The industry takes advantage of people when they are in need and willing to pay anything to get back on their feet. I will absolutely not let this happen to you when you are my patient." Combining the benefits of an old-fashioned, small-town doctor with the convenience of web technology-sounds good to us! Doctors in the rest of the world: How about you....?
Fark Wants To Trademark Not Safe For WorkTechCrunch I'd think this was a joke, except for the USPTO entry. Fark has lodged a trademark application for the term "Not Safe For Work." According to this USPTO entry, Fark wants sole rights over NSFW in the following areas: Entertainment Services namely providing a website featuring photographic, audio, video and prose presentations featuring comedic captions regarding current [...]
Author: Duncan Riley
I'd think this was a joke, except for the USPTO entry. Fark has lodged a trademark application for the term "Not Safe For Work."
According to this USPTO entry, Fark wants sole rights over NSFW in the following areas:
Quote:
Entertainment Services namely providing a website featuring photographic, audio, video and prose presentations featuring comedic captions regarding current events and online discussions and/or reviews of web materials of an adult nature; Entertainment services, namely, providing a web site featuring musical performances, musical videos, related film clips, photographs, and other multimedia materials; Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line reviews of photogrpahs and /or web postings of an adult nature
As Trademork points out, it might be a little difficult to protect and enforce this mark given its already widespread usage, including a range of other websites the use the term (and the NSFW abbreviation) in their title. NSFW has also become a common term used widely to the point that it even has its own Dictionary entry.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Attack Your Online ClutterWeb Worker Daily Last week, we talked about ways of eliminating the file clutter in your life. Now let's take care of the mess online: 1. Read It Later. A very cool Firefox extension from the Idea Shower, Read It Later sits in Firefox's toolbar with two simple icons: one to save your current page to a reading list, [...]
1. Read It Later. A very cool Firefox extension from the Idea Shower, Read It Later sits in Firefox's toolbar with two simple icons: one to save your current page to a reading list, and another to serve you with a page from your reading list. You can also right-click on links that you want to read later, which is useful on social bookmarking sites such as delicious or Digg, or on your favorite blog (such as Web Worker Daily).
So how does this reduce clutter? Well, if you use a bookmarking service or just use your browser's bookmarks, you probably have a large number of items that you've bookmarked that you want to read later. Read It Later simplifies all of this by keeping everything in one list, and serving things up as you want to read them. Check them off when you're done reading, and they're removed from the list. It's hard to get any simpler than that.
2. Morning Coffee. We've mentioned this before, but the Morning Coffee extension for Firefox is a useful way to open all your daily sites in tabs with one click of the Morning Coffee icon. Sure, you could do the same thing by creating folders for your Firefox bookmarks and opening them all in tabs ... but Morning Coffee puts it all in one click, and that one click can open different tabs for different days of the week or combination of days. It simplifies your bookmark folders in this way by putting everything in one button, one click.
3. Google Docs. For me, Google Docs has been a godsend when it comes to organizing my online files and keeping the clutter to a minimum. Why? Because now I do all my word processing and spreadsheet work online, all my documents are in one place, and I can access my documents from anywhere. Because now I don't have to worry about filing documents ... I just save them, and then do a quick search when I need them. Simple and easy.
4. RSS. Sure, you already use RSS to read your favorite blogs. But do you make the most of RSS's power? If there are other sites you check regularly, using an RSS reader can greatly simplify your life ... just subscribe to the RSS feed on a page, and you can get updates whenever you like.
I recommend using Google Reader, because it keeps things extremely simple, it's fast, and easy to use. Within a few minutes, I can read all my feeds in Google Reader using super fast keyboard shortcuts.
5. Gmail. The best way to stop junk mail is at the source. Gmail has the best spam filter I've seen (the last time I got junk mail in my inbox was months ago), which is one reason I recommend it for getting rid of clutter. And if you set up Gmail filters to unclutter your inbox, and archive and search rather than file, email clutter is a thing of the past.
What are your favorite tools for reducing online clutter? Let us know in the comments.
Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it's time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version. Firefox
Firebug [...]
Author: Edit Staff
By Chris Poteet
Everyone, especially computer people, love lists of resources. I do as well, and I decided it's time to share many of the resources that have helped me in my career. All of these resources (except for the print books) are either freeware, open source, or the application offers a free version.
Firefox
-Firebug - Essential tool for CSS/JavaScript debugging.
-YSlow - Firebug add-on to help determine performance bottlenecks.
