JLab releases style-centric Diego and Bombora headphones

As cool as these new phones look, we're hoping JLab put as much effort into their interiors as it did with their exteriors.

 The perennial kickoff for holiday madness known as Black Friday is a little more than a week out, and things are beginning to heat up. JLab has been fanning those flames of late, as yesterday, it unveiled its new Crasher Bluetooth speaker, and two new pairs of headphones. The phones, dubbed Bombora and Diego, are on-ear and in-ear respectively and inject some funk into the traditional red & green holiday palette.

• Diego – Inspired by SoCal sound and style, the Diego earbuds are powered by a with a 10mm neodymium micro driver, and are outfitted with an in-line mic/remote, pretty standard given their $20 price point. We just hope that these phones, while clearly built around the culture of music, also reflect the power of music. In other words, let’s hope substance isn’t forgone for style. The Diego’s (pictured right) also feature a Double Molded Y Connector w/ 3.5mm Jack and a variety of tips. 

             Pricing: $20.  Availability: Purple/Mint available for pre-order at JLabAudio and Amazon 

• Bombora – These cushy surf-inspired on-ear headphones sport 40 mm full-range drivers, a push button mic, a detachable flat nylon cable, and fully-isolating ear-cups. Again, they seem a bit more style-centric than audio-obsessed. Named after the Aboriginal word for large, powerful ocean waves, Bomboras (pictured above) come in a variety of colors and designs, including the limited edition skin seen above, created by the San Diego-based TEKST artist. It seems comfort was also a concern here, as the Bomboras utilize memory foam ear cushions upholstered with micro-suede; sounds like a treat for the ears. 

             Pricing: $70.  Availability:  Midnight Black/Gunmetal and TEKST edition available for pre-order at JLabAudio and Amazon 

We’ve yet to review either of these offerings, but we’re anxious to see if their designs – which ooze cool – overshadow their audio.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Facebook to take on Craigslist with classifieds plan, report claims

Facebook is set to challenge the king of online classifieds Craigslist with the launch of its own service, a report claims.

In an effort to find new revenue streams, Facebook is reportedly looking at the possibility of launching a classified ads service that may give Craigslist a run for its money.

The service would offer a mix of paid and free ads and include items for sale, apartment rentals and job vacancies, among other things.

A report by The Daily says “two sources within Facebook” claim the service will be called Marketplace, the same name given to a similar project launched by Facebook five years ago and which is now operated by Oodle.

Whereas Craigslist functions as a noticeboard that sits on the Web waiting for people to come and explore it, Facebook’s Marketplace would target members of its enormous site according to information in their profiles, posting ads in friends’ news feeds – similar to the way in which the promoted posts feature works.

For example, if you wanted to advertise a room in a particular location, you could tag friends who you think might be interested, with only those in the area receiving the ad – they could, however, share it with others if they knew someone who they thought could be interested.

While room ads are likely to be free, selling items will require a small fee – expected to be under $5 – with the ad appearing in friends’ feeds.

With job ads, a vacancy requiring a particular degree would end up in the feed only of those people with that specific qualification, while a ‘projects’ section would allow users to share tips and information on a range of subjects. “It’s possible the next generation of startups could be formed within this section,” The Daily suggests optimistically.

Whether such a service will pose any kind of threat to Craigslist remains to be seen, though with the well-established and popular classifieds site open to all, it should have little trouble in maintaining at the very least a decent chunk of its massive user base. Facebook, meanwhile, will be hoping it can use its Marketplace service to generate some much-needed revenue from its 552 million users.

While a launch date for the service appears not to have been set, The Daily’s sources claim it is being fast-tracked for launch.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Twitter silently rolled out a user directory to boost search engine efforts – but is it helping?

Twitter quietly launched a directory listing the majority of its users in an effort to boost its search engine presence. It's the latest effort by the company to establish itself as a media network driven by the hunger for ad revenue.

This week, the Internet noticed that Twitter had quietly rolled out a directory of its users, though a Twitter spokesperson tells us it was actually introduced a “few weeks ago.” While this might seem like a rather small and inconsequential feature, it’s yet another sign that Twitter is hell bent on evolving into a media company and pushing its ad revenue strategy; it’s one more way to get eyeballs on the propriety Twitter site, and instead of just competing with third party developers, this time Twitter is trying to work its way around Google. 

Back in January 2012, Google came under fire for favoring Google+ results in its social search feature and cutting out data from Twitter and Facebook. The effort that users had put into surfacing their Twitter and Facebook accounts — inarguably the most important social profiles there are — was immediately buried when Google flipped the switch. 

Right away, Twitter voiced its disapproval. “For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet… We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Regardless of the history between Google and Twitter, it’s in Google’s best interest to its users as “a search engine’s ultimate goal is to give people what they want,” says Dan Eng, Senior SEO Strategist for Red Bricks Media. 

Now, since it appears the Google isn’t doing Twitter any favors, Twitter is doing what it can to get its content better Page Rank. For instance, Twitter recently changed its robots.txt file to enable search engines to crawl content within tweets and hashtags. Eng offered us his two cents about how Twitter was positioning its directory for search engines to index. “It’s mostly likely taking users from top to bottom in authority. Logic will say that the most popular and active users should get preference in content creation for indexation while inactive or spammy profiles hold less weight.”

What this means is that you can now search for general topics like “fashion” or “presidential debate” in a search engine, and you may find tweets from relevant and preferential Twitter users showing up in the search results. Or if news breaks, Twitter hopes that search results will offer relevant tweets. 

And in addition, of course, is the full user directory Twitter has published that should help index many Twitter accounts with all search engines.

“If successful, Twitter would have expanded their reach by presenting their well-received content through a new source for their existing audience as well as providing a new channel for first time users and users that have dropped off over time,” Eng pointed out. “If Twitter’s audience responds well to this information, search engines will have no choice but to recognize it as valuable content that is helpful and in demand from their searchers.”

Twitter confirmed as much when we asked about the new directory. A spokesperson told us it was released, “to help people find the accounts they’re looking for with various search engines. Public and protected accounts are included.” The spokesperson emphasized that protected tweets will remain private to the user and accepted followers.

If you’re logged out of Twitter, you can access its directory from the bottom of its homepage, to the left of Twitter’s copyright mark. Opening up the page will present to you an index of Twitter accounts listed in Latin and non-Latin character names listed by the name that you’ve signed up on Twitter with (not your Twitter handle).

Interestingly enough we’ve found that the directory limits the number of pages you can visit (or calls you can make) within a restrictive time frame. When we opened up more than five pages within the directory in a span of a few seconds (not links to individual Twitter accounts), we were greeted with a blank page on the sixth page. The rest of the site work was working as intended.

From the directory, I was able to find my own Twitter account, @francisybea under “Francis Bea,” as well as my colleague Molly McHugh, @iammollymchugh. We’re skeptical that every single Twitter account appears in the directory, but it could be close to listing the full 500 million users. We’ve estimated that under “A,” there are 18 million user names alone.

Twitter’s spokesperson cryptically hinted that not every account may appear in the directory. “Similar to search results, we have methods to filter for quality accounts.” The spokesperson then directed me to Twitter’s Help Center to read the requirements for a user to show up in Twitter’s search results. Basically, it says the directory will only list what Twitter deems “quality accounts”  – a determination that’s reminiscent of how Twitter hands over Verified Account badges. Accounts that don’t meet Twitter’s expectations per “Twitter’s Search Rules and Restrictions” could be penalized by being excluded from the directory.

 

While how Twitter decides who gets to be in the directory is interesting, what really matters here is how effective its efforts at getting indexed by search engines are. When we conducted a Google search to find out how many accounts were indexed from Twitter’s directory using the query site:twitter.com/i/directory/profiles, as SearchEngineLand (which noticed the directory roll out) had done, we found that just a mere 618,000 Twitter accounts had been indexed (fewer than SearchEngineLand found earlier this week). At last check, this number had risen to 644,000 results, which indicates Google is continuing to index them. 

Bing on the other hand has yet to index Twitter’s directory and returns just one result. DuckDuckGo offers just two results.

Is Twitter’s directory necessarily helping to crawl more Twitter accounts? Not yet at least; the directory doesn’t appear to make much of a dent on Google’s search algorithm when accounting for the fact that just 0.0012 percent of Twitter’s directory of 500 million accounts are being indexed by Google — although that number appears to be rising, albeit very minimally. 

Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and marketing blog Quick Sprout, agrees. “Percentage wise, I don’t think it will cause a huge lift. I would be shocked if it causes their overall traffic to jump by more than 10 or 15 percent,” he says. “When you have millions of Twitter profiles, naturally not all of them will be indexed as good portion of their user profile pages aren’t popular, contain very few tweets, and aren’t linked to from other websites,” Patel explained. Still even a five percent increase would result in millions more visitors, Patel adds, the idea being this respectively boosts Twitter’s ad revenue.

As Twitter tightens its grip on its ecosystem, motivated by its renewed focus on advertising, the directory should improve Twitter’s search visibility — even if just by fractions. The better the company’s search presence on Google, Bing, or any other search engine, the more traffic it will bring in. And of course higher traffic means more ad revenue. So even if that increase is minute, it’s existent. 

“Just like any business out there, Twitter has to keep on growing. And a good way for Twitter to do that is to leverage the number one site on the web, Google, to gain more traffic,” says Patel. “Through their directory initiative, move people will find Twitter when they Google names or use any other search engine.”

So what does this mean for everyday users of Google, Bing or other search engines? Twitter has consistently been a source for the freshest information, so “now by making this information available to search engines, Twitter provides helpful on the spot data whereas a page that needs to gain organic rankings would never be able to reach,” say Eng.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Facebook reportedly launching second social gifting attempt with Facebook Gifts

Post-Karma's acquisition, Facebook is gearing up to launch Facebook Gifts, its second attempt at a gifting app in an effort to bolster its mobile revenue.

Facebook’s first post-IPO acqusition was the social gifting app, Karma, and the social network insisted that the app was not to be picked apart as an acqui-hire of its founders and team. True to its word, TheNextWeb reports that the social gifting app’s technology will be integrated into Facebook’s own social gifting platform set to be launched soon.

Karma is an iOS and Android app that works by offering platform for users to purchase in-app gifts curated by Karma staff. The company gift wraps the ordered products and ships them to the recipient.

The indication that Facebook was making a move first appeared through a job listing that InsideFacebook had noticed for a “merchant operations analyst.” The job posting initially published to Facebook’s Careers site and LinkedIn both have been taken down. ““We are looking for an individual with strong communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills to help us launch our Facebook Gifts product,” the post stated.

It’s also expected that Facebook will be rolling the site into Facebook Gifts altogether and shutting down the main hub altogether.

According to TheNextWeb’s insider, Facebook’s social gifting platform will be launched in the U.S. within a few weeks times. The acquisition and launch is of course motivated by Facebook’s struggle to improve its mobile monetization strategy. According to our earlier report on eMarketer’s United States net mobile advertising revenues, Facebook was projected to make just $72.7 million in advertising revenue in 2012 and lags behind competitors including Pandora, Twitter, Google Apple and Millennial Media. Come 2013, Facebook’s mobile mobile revenue is projected to skyrocket and earn $387 million, following behind Google.

We reached out to Facebook, but the spokesperson declined to provide any comment on the matter. So for now, TheNextWeb’s reports are left up to speculation and educated guesses.

Facebook conceded its foray into social gifting after the company built out the unsuccessful Facebook Gift Shop, which exclusively offered virtual goods like “Happy Birthday” virtual cards purchased using Facebook credits. Facebook even at one point was testing out a feature for third-party developers to integrate their own virtual and even physical gifts that users could purchase within the Gift Shop. Then social gifting was a feature that was scrubbed and taken over by third-party developers that integrated their technology into Facebook as a Facebook App.

With this in mind, existing developers in the social gifting space like Give.it and Wrapp may have something to worry about with the launch of Facebook’s own social gifting app. And what we would like to learn is whether gifts will include physical goods, virtual items, or a combination of both. By looking at the job listing we can expect at the least that products will purchased by Facebook and be housed by the company in a manner similar to the inner workings of Karma.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Watch a 13-minute promotional short for 1982′s Blade Runner

In an effort to promote Blade Runner, the producers had this 13-minute short created for distribution at sci-fi conventions.

Let’s say you’ve been tasked with marketing a movie. It’s an ambitious film, one that simultaneously hopes to live up to the lofty standards of one of Philip K. Dick’s most beloved novels while also creating a vast, dystopian world that is equal parts unimaginably different from our own and a logical extension of current and near-future technology. In 2012 that wouldn’t be too difficult — just capture a few seconds of bombastic CGI, hire a deep-voiced narrator and cut a TV commercial that may or may not accurately reflect the film (but who cares as long as it puts people in the seats?) — but way back in 1982 it was a whole lot more difficult to entice notoriously picky sci-fi fans into the theater.

Thus, when faced by a similar situation for Ridley Scott’s phenomenal Blade Runner, the crew at M.K. Productions opted to put together a short, promotional movie to be distributed at various conventions around the country. According to Open Culture the short was a hit, and was widely circulated among sci-fi, horror and fantasy fan groups prior to Blade Runner’s theatrical debut. Whether or not it directly contributed to the movie’s success and current status as one of the all-time greatest sci-fi films Hollywood has ever created is debatable, but the vignette does serve as an undeniably cool look back at the creation of the film, and that’s a solid enough reason for us to embed the clip at the bottom of this post.

Along with the expected images and footage from Blade Runner, the short includes interviews with director Ridley Scott, special effects artist Douglas Trumbull and “futurist designer” Syd Mead. Normally we wouldn’t be this excited about what we now call a “behind the scenes featurette,” but in this case we’re utterly stoked to hear what these people have to say. If you’ve seen Blade Runner you know how masterfully crafted its futuristic world is, and there’s a very good reason why so many sci-fi movies, novels and video games created since 1982 have blatantly lifted ideas from Ridley Scott’s film.

More impressively, Blade Runner was created in an era where computer generated graphics weren’t really something Hollywood studios could use. They existed, certainly, but any CGI work was exorbitantly expensive, and few people had any idea how to effectively use the technology for making films. Thus, when you’re watching Blade Runner and being drawn in by the hyper-detailed detritus of that cyberpunk universe, everything you’re seeing was created by old-school practical visual effects work, making the film that much more stunning a feat.

Before you hit play on the embed below, we will give you a heads up that the footage is not exactly crystal-clear, 1080p HD quality. It is, after all, a 16mm movie from three decades ago, that was never really intended for public consumption. Thus, just be happy that this thing still exists, and that we can all use it to avoid dirtying our hands with any actual work on a lazy Tuesday afternoon.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Update on the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note Jelly Bean release schedule

It’s no secret Samsung has been investing quite a lot of effort in the the Galaxy S III Jelly Bean update development recently. Numerous ROMs have already leaked online with the latest being having a build number of XXLH8.

So, what’s really happening inside Samsung’s labs and when we can expect to see the Galaxy S III Jelly Bean update going live?

Each new Jelly Bean test ROM shows significant improvement in performance, some minor UI changes and tons of bug fixes. Even though the latest LH8 seems pretty good at first, it still has a few bugs inside and needs some polishing.

Samsung is holding a pre-IFA press conference tomorrow and it will reveal when the Galaxy S III (both US and international) Jelly Bean will come out. The Samsung Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note updates are also already in development and are scheduled to come in Q4 (which starts in October, so here’s hoping).

We’ll probably know more once the Samsung’s pre-IFA event finishes tomorrow eventing. We will be there to cover it live for you, so stick around.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

The Oatmeal raises $1 million, surpasses goal to build a Nikola Tesla museum

The Oatmeal has raised over $1 million on IndieGoGo in an effort to secure Wardenclyffe, the site of Tesla's final laboratory, to build a museum dedicated to Tesla.

Matthew Inman, the lone man behind the comics of The Oatmeal, is at it again on the crowdfunding platform IndieGoGo. This time Inman is asking for contributions that will go into securing the site of Nikola Tesla’s final laboratory in Shoreham, New York, for the future development of a Tesla museum. As of today, Inman has more surpassed his $850,000 goal and cracked the $1 million mark.

Nikola Tesla was many things. He was an inventor, an engineer, physicist, and most notably a futurist, who paved the way for modern technologies that we take for granted, including wireless communication and radio, and alternating current systems. We also Tesla to thank for other nifty inventions like the Tesla coil, which sends visible high-voltage sparks shooting into the air. Today he’s a cultural icon.

In the early 1900s, that Tesla attempted to construct a tower adjoining his laboratory, which would in theory generate electricity and wirelessly transmit it to the world. The tower ultimately failed despite its construction due to two factors. First, Tesla’s initial attempts at transmitting electricity failed due to insufficient experimentation. Second, the Panic of 1910 froze investment in his projects from J. Pierpont Morgan (founder of investment bank, J.P. Morgan). Tesla’s project was indefinitely halted and the site was sold off to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldof-Astoria, for $20,000 ($400,000 in today’s value) to pay off his overdue rent. The site’s new owners destroyed the tower in 1917 for scrap.

The Long Island science organization has long sought to transform the property into a Tesla museum, while other interested buyers plan to raze the structures and redevelop it. Its current owner, Agfa Corporation, wants $1.6 million for the property. At the site, only the laboratory remains.

Inman’s original goal of $850,000 would buy just half of the cost of the property, but the state of New York has agreed to match contributions, bringing total funds up to $1.7 million. Raising the capital to build a museum from the property will be another cost, but from the looks of it, with 36 days left and having already surpassed the $1 million mark, there should be funds to spare.

You can check out a video of the inside of Wardenclyffe below. Note that the footage taken was the result of individual trespassing and breaking into the laboratory, but it will give you good idea of what the building looks like.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Nintendo makes little effort to police use of “conflict minerals” in Nintendo 3DS, Wii U

Advocacy group the Enough Project has given Nintendo a 0 score for making no effort to police the use of "conflict minerals" in its devices.

Shocker: All the parts in your iPhone and your Nintendo 3DS come from somewhere. They are not, no matter what Apple’s shiny commercials tell you, magic. People dig metals, minerals and other goods out of the ground, refine them, and they are used in the production of electronic products. Many of those minerals like tin and tungsten are cultivated in the war ravaged Democratic Republic of Congo and the ceaseless conflicts in that nation are over control of those resources.

The Enough Project, an advocacy group backed by the Center for American Progress, released its 2012 Conflict Minerals Company Rankings this week, giving a score to electronics companies based on how well they work to not use minerals seized through violence. Intel and HP lead the pack, but coming in dead last is Nintendo.

“Nintendo is, I believe, the only company that has basically refused to acknowledge the issue or demonstrate they are making any sort of effort on it,” Enough Project senior policy analyst Sasha Lezhnev told CNN on Thursday, “And this is despite a good two years of trying to get in contact with them.”

Nintendo released a blanket statement to CNN placing the responsibility of sourcing materials on Nintendo’s manufacturing partners, not the company itself. When Digital Trends reached out to Nintendo for comment, we received the same statement. “Nintendo outsources the manufacture and assembly of Nintendo products to our production partners and therefore is not directly involved in the sourcing of raw materials that are ultimately used in our products. We nonetheless take out social responsibilities as a global company very seriously and expect our production partners to do the same.”

Like many companies, Nintendo established a set of guidelines its production partners need to agree to called the Nintendo CSR Procurement Guidelines. Nintendo did not however go into any detail on how it ensures that these guidelines are followed. The “Honor System” isn’t exactly foolproof.

This isn’t the first time in recent years Nintendo’s been accused of socially irresponsible corporate policy. In 2010, Greenpeace named Nintendo the least green electronics manufacturer in the world. Plus, that was an improvement from reports in 2008 and 2009.

For every effort that Nintendo makes to appear as family friendly as possible—from restricting the western release of games like Mother 3 it deems potentially offensive to insisting on byzantine online friend networks through Friend Codes—it’s shocking how willful the company is in its disregard for socially conscious business.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com