Here it is, folks! Its been a few long months for Sprint fans toting Touch Pro2’s, given that the same device on all of the other carriers saw upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5 months ago while their own Pro2s stayed back at WinMo 6.1. We knew the update was coming sometime in March, and then we pinned the date down to some more specific: today.

Sure enough, the update went live. So go, go young Pro2 carrier, and let the warm rays of Windows Mobile 6.5 breath new life into your Touch Pro2. (Download link here) Better yet, hack Android onto it.

Read the original article at Mobile Crunch:
Ready for Windows Mobile 6.5 on your Sprint Touch Pro2? The upgrade is now available

In Greek tragedy, the flaw of hubris was the decisive plot point that brought down many great men. Palm, then, is the Oedipus of a modern tragedy, their efforts to rebuild hampered by a failure to see past their own greatness and a refusal to enter the market on the market’s terms.

To be honest, I was a Palm fan, then I wasn’t a Palm fan, and now am part of the chorus of voices bemoaning the lowly state to which the company has been thrust. Palm recently reported $349 million in revenue with a third quarter loss of $102.8 million. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein said:

“If we could have launched at Verizon prior to the Droid, I think we would have gotten the attention the Droid got. And since I believe we have a better product, I think we could have even done better.”

That’s right: when the going gets rough, blame outside forces. Palm had a huge build-up at CES when the Palm Pre was first announced and now they’re taking a page from Apple’s playbook and boosting the Pre and Pixi Plus devices with some memory and processing power. Sadly, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander, especially when the gander is losing profits. Palm shipped 960,000 units last quarter and, as Giz points out, sold 400,000 of them. Someone is buying Palm handsets, but 400,000 isn’t a big number.

Palm needs to sell itself. Their IP is strong and their brand is strong and well-known. Someone like HTC could take Palm and run with it, bringing Palm’s social-media connected OS to a whole new set of consumers. But things need to change and quickly.

Read the original article at Mobile Crunch:
Palm: We coulda been a contender

The Zune HD’s price keeps dropping and dropping. No matter. It’s a killer media device and well worth your money if you don’t mind forgoing the App Store that’s available on the competing iPod touch. Dell Home currently has it up for $240, which is the lowest price we’ve seen from a reputable retailer yet. Who knows how long it will be that low, though, so you better direct your web browser over to the site and snatch up the deal while it’s still available. [Dell Home via DealCatcher]

Read the original article at Crunch Gear:
32GB Zune HD is down to $240 at Dell

Uh oh. Looks like someone at the Telegraph got loose and ran around their house with an infrared camera. If you want to see more unidentifiable photos like the one above, then just walk right this way.

Read the original article at Crunch Gear:
Gallery: Thermal imaging of household objects

Last year, OneRiot ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. The search engine also launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has since been integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time.

The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot’s “Trending Ads” were available only via OneRiot’s API. This meant that developers had to integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads.

In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content from OneRiot’s network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates.

Currently OneRiot’s trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization tool for developers.

The startup, which just raised $7 million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.

Read the original article at Tech Crunch:
OneRiot Rolls Out Realtime Ad Unit That Refreshes To Match Trending Topics

Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is extremely fast, and the upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier.

It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter.

Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another search instead.

No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and SPDY, and sharing its best practices and speed-monitoring tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH protocol into Google Reader and other apps. In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source project). The list goes on and on.

It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors.

Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia Almelda

Read the original article at Tech Crunch:
Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More

The increasingly popular location-based mobile game Foursquare recently announced a new addition to its service. A history function now shows who you were with in addition to where you were at a particular time. You will have a record of all the friends you were with at the Grizzly Bear concert two months ago–and the friends you didn’t invite can see that, too. The function could prove to be more than just a tool for jealous spouses, though.

At first glance the feature doesn’t seem to be much of an addition, since you obviously know who you went out with last Wednesday. The bigger trend is adding context to your past location and Foursquare (with similar other services) is seeking to find new ways to do that.

“We want to let you see how your social graph changes over time. You can look at who you were hanging out with five years ago. You’ll see the people you were spending the most time with and what you used to do with them. You can do all types of contextualizing with this kind of information, and getting the history out there is the first step,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley said in a phone interview.

The contextualizing Crowley is discussing can involve prioritizing your contacts. Of all the people who share similar interests with you, who is good for going out for drinks or a game of racquetball? Maybe this information can help Foursquare provide users with fine-tuned recommendations about places to go and people to see. Also, Foursquare plans to enable gazing into the distant past, back to 2003 (a lifetime in Internet years). Before Foursquare, Crowley was trying to break into the location-based service scene with Dodgeball, acquired by Google and then discontinued. However, Dodgeball users can build a full history all the way back to 2003 if they imported their data to the system before it shut down.

Gowalla, another location-based mobile service built on the idea of check-ins (when you go to a venue like a bar, you check yourself in with your mobile phone; the people with most check-ins at a venue get special titles or points), is thinking hard about bringing context to location. At Gowalla’s website, users have been able to read through their history since the service launched in beta a year ago, but the company is revamping the functionality along with the rest of its site. “Gowalla likes to think of the check-in as a ‘bucket’,” says CEO Josh Williams. “You can add various of things to that ‘bucket’ to provide context.”

“This might be the type of place you were at, the date, was it a special event, and so on. Two things we’ve added recently to the bucket are conversations and photos. Now, when you check in, a friend can comment on that check in and start a dialog. This makes it super-easy to say, ‘Stay there, I’ll be over in 20 minutes’, or, ‘Try the BBQ, it’s the best in Austin.’ Photos are great, too, and certainly add depth to the concept of checking in,” Williams wrote in an e-mail, adding that more features are coming to the check-in function soon.

Williams thinks contextualizing location in different ways will make a big difference to users and developers. “In the end, it [adding data to location] will make it fun for users to review the highlight reel of their lives and potentially fun for developers to mash up this information in aggregate, in the form of ‘visualizers,’ or who knows what. Lots of fun to be had here.”

Visualization is on Crowley’s mind, too. Foursquare’s website already provides lots of statistics about users, such as average check-ins when out, percentage of check-ins at new places, distribution of check-ins by day of week, and so on. Foursquare refers to the excellent and meticulously (or downright obsessively) compiled Feltron Annual Reports of Nicholas Felton, and Crowley says this type of information lends itself perfectly to some cool visualizations.

“What’s interesting about the Feltron Reports is that the data Felton has compiled lets you see how he has grown personally, and this is something we would like to enable in some form for other people,” Crowley said.

Crowley also said these features will be a part of Foursquare’s API, or application programming interface. Developers can take that functionality and use it in ways that Foursquare hasn’t invented yet; in other words, they’ll throw it out there and see what third-party developers can turn it into.

Getting a cool graph with bells and whistles about your social life can be interesting to you, but not to you only. The functionality opens the door to an obvious privacy concern: Not everyone wants to let people know who they were with even when they’re willing to share their location. The connections could spark conflicts (jealousy or maybe suspicions of leaking sensitive information come to mind) and raise questions about why these people are, or seem to be, connected. In any case this may be the type of information some people would not be comfortable seeing out in public.

Foursquare says it is wary of the privacy issues and backlash new features might incite (think Google Buzz) and this is why the functionality is restricted, at least for now, to users’ approved Foursquare friends only. Users can also delete history they don’t want to make public, and Dennis Crowley says that tools to hide or even delete friends from users’ history are easy to provide.

So, while the idea of building a personal highlight reel will appeal to many, Foursquare, Gowalla, Burbn (a newcomer that wants to bring rich media to people’s whereabouts) and all the other services based on people’s willingness to share their location will have to tread carefully.

[This story is part of a weekly series on location-based services, written by VentureBeat's JP Manninen. If you have an idea for a story you would like to see in this series, drop a line at jp@venturebeat.com]

Tags: Foursquare, Gowalla, location

Read the original article at Venture Beat:
Location history now shows who was with you

Yoichi Wada is kind of greedy. His company, Square Enix, has shipped more than 96 million copies of its Final Fantasy games since 1987. But he wants people to buy more, more, more. On March 8, the Japanese company began selling Final Fantasy XIII, the latest edition in the long-running role-playing game. This title has a lot more action in it and loads of movie-like animations in between the fighting sequences. But it remains true to its role-playing roots as well. Wada, chief executive of Square Enix, is pinning a lot of hopes on this games. Square Enix knows that its core market in Japan isn’t enough to fuel its growth. The company has to succeed on a global scale to keep growing. We caught up with Wada at the launch part for Final Fantasy XIII. Check out our interview.

VB: What is the significance of this game for you?

YW: This is the first version that will go on both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. So this has a very big significance for us. A customer or a user would have a critical view. They want to know just how fun and how expressive this game and its characters will be on these new platforms. We have our expectations and the customer has expectations, and we have our own uneasiness about whether or not we can meet those expectations. In Japan, we launched it in Japan in December and it was very successful. My hope is to have the same success in the U.S. market as well.

VB: What’s the best way to describe the audience for this kind of game?

YW: Final Fantasy has rich storylines and beautiful visuals. For those who love those things, those are our gamers. In addition to that, the battle system is speedy. It is a lot faster than it used to be. There is a lot more action. There is a tightness and tension. Even though it is a role-playing game, the users feel like they’re in the middle of an action game.

VB: Final Fantasy has been uniquely successful with nearly 100 million units sold. How do you make each game sell more?  Do you make it more accessible to larger audiences?

YW: The strategy differs with each game. This version of the game is the first one for this new generation of consoles. Our audience includes people who are just getting this new console now. We are targeting right in the middle of those gamers, which includes people who bought the consoles early and those who are just getting one now. Final Fantasy XIII is purposely going as mainstream as we can.

VB: The realism of the animation is far better than in the past. How much resource did you pour into this game? How many people did it take to build it?

YW: We had an enormous number of people working on this. I can’t say exactly. Of all the games we have made, we put the most human resources into this one. We did learn some things with this game that we could use in different games or in a later Final Fantasy.

VB: Are the faces of the characters in the game realistic enough for you?

YW: We have made a huge effort in facial animation and we have made the faces real enough. From a technology view, we have done well. Our competitors have also done well. Now the question is how do we make the character more expressive? How do we make them act real? Those are the more important points.

VB: Has the Xbox 360 met your expectations?

YW: I am satisfied. In terms of quality, both the Xbox 360 and the PS 3 versions aren’t that different.

VB: Facebook has become extremely popular during the time you have been making this game. How does Final Fantasy fit into this era of gaming where Facebook is becoming so important?

YW: In terms of using social networking, we can use them to promote our games. The more important question is how to use the social networks as the core of our games. We have done this in Japan, but we have not done it in the U.S. This is one of our challenges going forward. We’re not sure if Final Fantasy is fit as material for that or not. It’s very difficult to ascertain.

VB: How can you succeed in the American market?

YW: You mentioned Facebook. My belief that the networked culture is not global. It is very local, or regional. The question is how well our products will be accepted in different regions. This is something that is very important to us as we grow in different markets. We want our games to have a universal appeal. We are expanding in the U.S. market. It is something we want to understand. We are focused on it.

As an addendum, please check out our video interview with Amy Blair, vice president of marketing for Square Enix in the U.S. market. We also caught up with her last week at the Square Enix party, where she noted that one of the stars of the game is a strong female co-lead character.

Companies: Square Enix

People: Amy Blair, Yoichi Wada

Read the original article at Venture Beat:
Yoichi Wada’s Final Fantasy: 96 million and counting

Filed under: iPhone

Bharti Airtel has announced that it has reached an agreement to sell the iPhone 3GS in India. Bharti Airtel is the largest cellular service provider in India, with more than 124 million subscribers. In a statement, Bharti Airtel said the agreement would allow Bharti to bring the latest iPhone to India "in the coming months" without setting an exact release date.

The iPhone 3G has been sold in India by both Bharti Airtel and Vodafone since August 22, 2008, but the iPhone 3GS has yet to go on sale. Most Indian service providers struggle to ensure decent call quality and while the rest of the world is preparing to adopt 4G, India is gearing up to welcome 3G. The announcement came a day after Bharti submitted its bid in a bandwidth auction for 3G mobile telephony services in India. The successful bidders will be allowed to offer 3G services on a commercial basis from September 1st. At present, no deal has been announced for the iPhone 3GS at Vodafone.

TUAWBharti Airtel will sell iPhone 3GS in India originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Bharti Airtel will sell iPhone 3GS in India

Filed under: OS

After only two days since the last build was seeded, Apple has pushed another 10.6.3 version out to developers. The newest build is numbered 10D572 and focuses on Graphics Drivers, Quicktime, Images & Photos, Mail, and Security Certificates. In addition, the build also includes:

• Compatibility issues with OpenGL-based applications
• Performance improvements for 64-bit Logic
• Changes to QuickTime X that increase reliability and improve compatibility and security
• Printing reliability and compatibility with third party printers
• Issues resolved that prevented files from copying to Windows shares
• Issues resolved with recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server
• Issues resolved that prevented files with the "#" or "&" symbols in their names from opening in Rosetta
• Issues addressed that caused background message colors to display incorrectly in Mail when scrolling
• Issue resolved that caused machines using BTMM and the Bonjour Sleep Proxy to wake unexpectedly

Like the previous build, there is a single known issue: Safari 4.0.5 will be re-offered by Software Update after upgrading to 10D572 from a previous seed.

As a general rule, the closer build release dates come to one another, the sooner the build will be released to the general public. 10.6.3 seems like it could very well be the biggest update to Snow Leopard since its launch last August. If the improvements are significant, it's very likely that Apple will soon press 10.6.3 discs to be sold in retail stores, much like they did with Mac OS X 10.5.3.

TUAWMac OS X 10.6.3 imminent? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mac OS X 10.6.3 imminent?