On BP's "Response in pictures" site, one photo, purported to be taken on July 16, 2010, sat for days, unquestioned. The photo shows BP's Houston Command Center, a desk with some massive monitors, lots of complicated things happening on them, and employees monitoring the situation in the Gulf. But all is not as it seems.
Two partners, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) and the Huffington Post, announced the release of Foursquare location layers today. It's a new feature from Foursquare that could turn out very cool and useful, or ravaged by disingenuous ads.
We've all heard the stories of Google's extraordinary treatment of its employees--amazing food, tons of time off, great child care--and now you can add one more to the list: equalizing a tax break denied to same-sex couples.
Traditional removable batteries of the AA and AAA variety might be going the way of the dodo: Modern gadgetry that used to rely on them now use internal, rechargeable batteries. But there are still a good few items out there that need those defiantly old-school juice cylinders, like keyboards, mice, and remote controls.
Word came down today, first in a post from Gizmodo and later in an official statement from Microsoft, that the brand-new Kin line of phones is now discontinued. Kin, you might remember, was a series of two phones aimed at the young teenage set. They had some very interesting elements, including an innovative cloud-based backup service, but fell victim to confusing branding and an uncertain place in the phone hierarchy.
Online retailer Woot has built up a huge and passionate fanbase like few other retailers ever could. The site started out by selling one item per day at a steep discount, often some sort of electronic gadget. (Today's Woot item is a current-gen 8GB iPod Nano, the one with the video camera, for $100.) The company later expanded to a few other sites, including Shirt.Woot (which sells $10 American Apparel shirts with user-submitted designs), Wine.Woot (which sells fancypants wine), Kids.Woot (kids' stuff), and Sellout.Woot (sort of a forum of many different deals on other sites).
Google is pretty secretive about all this--understandably, as it's the company's bread and butter and there are viable alternatives out there, like Microsoft Bing and Yahoo--so this infographic is based on the little information and clues Google has given. Even for someone who deals with SEO (search engine optimization) all day (alternate headline for this post: "Google Apple Babies Steve Jobs Boobs iPhone Obama Scandal!"), there's some stuff in here I didn't know.
For the tech-obsessed (and, increasingly, normal people), bedside tables, desks, and coffee tables are a hazardous jungle of electronic detritus. Smartphones, media players, game controllers, remote controls, portable gaming consoles, digital cameras, e-book readers, and more, plus cables, result in giant power strips and unattractive clutter.
Live Labs, led by Gary Flake (check out our interview with Gary here), is one of the more interesting teams at Microsoft. They're also responsible for PhotoSynth, a sort of Google Street View taken to the next level--it stitches together user-generated photos seamlessly to create a 3D tour of an area.
As the first major tablet to be officially announced after the iPad's launch, Cisco's Cius is bound to be compared to Apple's pioneer. But really, they're two very different devices, aimed at two very different markets. You could almost think of the Cius as the BlackBerry to the iPad's iPhone: It has a specific set of tools for a specific segment of buyer, and those buyers could well find it as indispensable as the BlackBerry. After all, BlackBerry is still kicking the iPhone's ass in sales--the business market is powerful and huge.