Innovation - How many times does a band have to take the music video world by storm before its record label gets that its members might know a little something about music videos? We may never find out, because OK Go, the band in quion, has just ditched EMI, the record label in quion, largely due to that very problem.OK Go rocketed up through the indie rock world in large measure due to the band's brilliant, lo-fi music videos, which have spread like wildfire on YouTube. But EMI, in a misguided attempt to wring every penny out of the band's success, decided to block embedding on the YouTube videos--meaning the videos were unable to disseminate out through music and pop culture blogs, news sites, and personal blogs the way they did before the rriction. And that's not a minor detail: the band saw a 90% drop in views when that rriction went into effect. As in, 100,000 views one day, 10,000 views the next. OK Go isn't a band with huge hit radio singles; they're a journeyman power pop act that puts out reliably excellent, not blockbuster, albums. Music videos are the band's way of making themselves buzzworthy, and it works: their homemade videos have achieved a level of popularity nobody could have predicted. So when the label makes their videos less popular, it means, in no
Innovation - A new layer on Google Maps will let cyclists access maps of 150 cities around the US. It's a bike geek's dream come true.
Innovation - The Google Apps Marketplace will make it easier for companies to download and manage third-party applications, Google says.
Innovation - Photovoltaic solar power may be the bees knees in green power cleverness, but you still have to work out how to mount the panels on your building. That's going to be much easier now a Dutch company has combined them with windows.
PV panels aren't exactly the most attractive of household additions, in their typical "we just bolted these suckers onto your shingles" installation (though they are much more visually attractive than the solar heating units the come with the ugly cylindrical water tanks on the top.) There are fresh re-inventions that are tackling this problem, like the neat PV solar roof tiles, but they're not universally suitable.
Whereas every home has windows. And this fact has led Dutch company Peer+ to create Smart Energy Glass panels that generate current from the sun while also acting as like those old-fashioned devices that lets you see right through a wall. But that's not all. Similar to the other up-and-coming LCD glass treatments that let you blank a window at the flick of a switch (removing the need for curtains, blinds or shutters,) these smart windows also have selectable darkness. Dark is the high privacy mode, and thanks to a trick of the optics concerned, also leads to the most efficient power generation from solar input. And you
Innovation - What does a climate change "tipping point" look like? We may be about to find out first hand.Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees. Discussions about global warming focus on CO2 for a couple of key reasons: the first is that human activities have demonstrably increased carbon dioxide; the second is that the other gases tend to cycle out of the atmosphere pretty quickly. For the most part, unless there's a sudden, massive increase in the amount of the other greenhouse gases, we can safely focus on CO2.
Well, guess what?
Scientists from Alaska's International Arctic Research Center, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Stockholm University have published an article insciencemagazine indicating the discovery of a startlingly large amount of methane coming from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf--methane that was thought to be frozen, in the form of methane clathrates. How much methane? An amount equivalent to the total of methane coming from the r of the world's oceans. The key paragraph, from the National Science Foundation press release:
They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and more than 50 percent of surface water had methane levels
Innovation - Redbeacon, a site that matches users up with service providers (like plumbers, painters, personal trainers, and housekeepers), announced a few new options, most notably Facebook, that'll encourage a more social use of the site--and hopefully gain some users in the process.
Redbeacon, which won the TechCrunch50 award last year, is less a reviews site than a straight utility. You type in your location and service needed, and Redbeacon finds a local provider that'll b address the job. It does snatch reviews from Yelp and Google to help you make your decision, but it's more specific than a search engine.
Even better, it retrieves an actual quote from the business it recommends: not an imated quote, or a base quote, but an actual quote from the business, directly responding to your inquiry. Redbeacon says that in the few months since their October launch, they've been able to secure a 100% response rate for quotes, usually within hours. The service then lets you book an appointment right from the site, like OpenTable, and it's all free to the consumer (Redbeacon takes 10% off the top from the service provider).
Redbeacon's announcing a bunch of changes today. Users can now upload photos and more detailed descriptions of the service they need, which should help
Innovation - As sales of 'Guitar Hero' and 'Rock Band' continue to slip, Seven45 studios introduces 'Power Gig: Rise of the Sixstring," which ships with a real electric guitar.
Innovation - Sony, Samsung, and Panasonic are among the companies expected to release 3D TVs in 2010. But how many consumers will welcome the 3D revolution into their own living room?
Innovation - The promise of a major Cisco announcement fell flat. Why? Because Apple ruined it for everyone else.
Innovation - According to the New York Times, Facebook is set to introduce location sharing into their arsenal of social networking tricks this April at the F8 conference. I predict that 98% of my Facebook updates will read "My bedroom."This is unconfirmed, but according to trusted sources, Facebook has been developing this location-based feature in-house for awhile now, tinkering until it's completely ready for release. There are to be two main aspects to the update. First is what you'd expect, a simple update from Facebook that lets you share your location. The second is actually an API, a set of developer tools that allow third-party developers to take advantage of this new feature. That could mean other developers, like Foursquare, would be able to input user information into Facebook.It's impossible to predict exactly how this location-based update will look. The easy prediction is something similar to Twitter's location awareness, in which status updates are accompanied (if desired) by the location of the user. But the New York Times also says, with surprising confidence, that Facebook isn't going after Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt, but actually Google's dominance insmall businessadvertising. What would that look like? We'll have to wait until F8 to find
Innovation - With popularity comes trouble. Ask any Windows user, or the Notorious BIG. As Twitter's popularity has skyrocketed, it's become the target for various scams, and the Twitter team is now taking action to stop the abuse.The fight against spam is a consistent one for the Twitter team, but recently, phishing scams have started gaining in popularity. Spread mostly through direct messages (or email notifications about those messages), these scams offer a malignant link that, when clicked, can result in a whole mess of headaches for the user. From viruses to stolen passwords and remote access, these scams are a serious problem for novice Twitterers.So in response, Twitter has set up a separate service that routes all links submitted to Twitter through a separate service, which detects bad links and wipes them clean. Quoth Twitter:By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we
can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all
of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email
notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user
safe.Links will often be shortened to Twitter's own twt.tl domain, but the r of the machinations of the new service will be undetectable. We'll see more from this
