Developers are uniting this weekend and putting a number of awesome Android titles on sale this weekend and if you’re a mobile gamer, you should be excited. They have a number of my own personal favorites including World of Goo, Canabalt HD, Anomaly Warzone Earth HD, Great Little War Game, Fieldrunners and more. There is some seriously awesome content mixed in here and the deal begins today, May 24th and runs through June … [read full article]
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While athletics fever may be in the air, fashion fans descending on the UK capital for the Olympic Games July 27 – August 12 haven’t been forgotten about. Find out about how designers including Paul Smith and Matthew Williamson are getting involved here.
The last time TechCrunch heard from the internet-for-everyone proponents at FreedomPop, they revealed to us that they were working on an iPhone 4/4S case with a built-in WiMax radio that would give their users monthly access to free mobile broadband.
Now, according to my high-level source, the company is very close to bringing these things into the real world. Ahead of their beta launch slated for the summer, the company has just quietly begun to take pre-orders for the nifty iPhone accessory, though some of their plans for the product have changed over the past few months.
For one, they’re not running with the deposit model my source previously alluded to. Instead, they’re just going to sell the case itself for $99, and users can contact the company to return the unit and get their refund at any time. It’s functionally the same experience for the user, except without the accounting headaches that come with managing scores of deposits.
Perhaps the most notable tweak is that they’ve changed how much free bandwidth each user gets right out of the gate. The original plan was to offer 1GB of WiMax data access for free to users each month, but they’ve since dropped that “guaranteed monthly minimum” to 500MB. Sort of a bummer, I agree, but I’m told that they’re trying to err on the side of caution for now.
Glass-half-full types can take solace in the fact that the company will not neuter their free plan to below 500MB per month, and that the initial level of bandwidth allocation could actually grow over time.
If you’re concerned that 500MB/month isn’t that great, I’m also told users will be able to earn more bandwidth thanks to a social layer that FreedomPop is developing as part of the service. FreedomPop users will be able to connect with each other, and doing so nets them both of them an additional (sadly unspecified) amount of usage — especially popular (or smart) users can raise their monthly data allotment as high as 1GB.
Beyond that, users will also have the ability to share their location with their so-called FreedomFriends, but perhaps more importantly, users will be able to treat the amount of bandwidth they have at their disposal as a transferable commodity. If a friend of yours is bumping up against that 500MB limit and really doesn’t want to pay that $.01/MB overage fee, you’ll be able to transfer him or her a portion of your own monthly bandwidth allotment.
That, in short, is awesome. Larger wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T sell access to their data networks in pre-configured chunks, which often leaves their subscribers paying for more data than they actually need in a given month. The real frustration comes from the fact that the users who have paid for X amount of data access per month can’t do anything with it — the counter just resets at the end of the month at that’s that. Giving users more control over what they pay for (or don’t pay for, as the case may be) is a smart approach to working with a dumb pipe, and could help give FreedomPop users a reason to stick around.
A brief video demo of the case in action (seen above) was also passed along, and it offers up our first real look at what the darn thing looks like. Given that the case was a WiMax radio and a separate battery jammed into it, it’s understandably thick, but it doesn’t look much more offensive than some of the other hefty iPhone cases floating around out there. It doesn’t look like it would do a great job actually protecting the iPhone nestled inside it, but hey — you can’t always get what you want.
A warning: You can only spam Twitter so much before it brings in the law. As Twitter grows — the company now claims to have 140 million active users — naturally, it’s become an attractive target for spammers, which have collectively made their drek a familiar part of the social network’s user experience. Now Twitter is officially putting its foot down and enlisting the help of the federal courts, filing a suit in San Francisco today against its five most aggressive spammers. In pursuing legal action, Twitter said in a statement on its blog, it believes it’s going “straight to the source”.
By shutting down tool providers, we will prevent other spammers from having these services at their disposal. Further, we hope the suit acts as a deterrent to other spammers, demonstrating the strength of our commitment to keep them off Twitter … While this is an important step, our efforts to combat spam don’t stop here. Our engineering team continues to implement robust technical solutions that help us proactively reduce spam.
So, not only is Twitter pursuing legal action, it’s using other tools at its disposal to silence the peanut gallery, launching anti-spam measures that, among other things, specifically target @mention spam. Twitter also said that it has been using its link shortener, a.k.a. “t.co” to analyze data on spammy content and its origins, and give it the kabosh.
Obviously, spam has become a real problem on Twitter, and its taking legal action definitely functions as a clear signal that the company is taking the problem seriously. Nothing like “federal courts” to drive home the point. As Twitter users know, spammy followers are a routine occurrence, like those one-link spam tweets that end up in your “mentions” tab, for example. Twitter does implement sweeps to reduce the overall reach and tally of these spam accounts — one of the reasons we see our follower numbers periodically drop.
Of course, this is not a problem they can fight alone. The company is also asking users to help police its network, and users can find out how to report and block spammers here.
We’re a bit peeved at companies that refuse to follow standards. Sony for example, with their refusal to use SD for storage, instead opting for their much more expensive MemorySticks. Or Apple and their refusal to go with USB 3.0, instead decking their hardware with Thunderbolt. Do you know of many Thunderbolt enabled devices? Didn’t think so. But at least now you can add Elgato’s Thunderbolt SSD drives. Coming in 120GB and 240GB capacities, they feature 270MB/s data read speeds. This is fast, especially when compared to USB 2.0′s typical 35MB/s speeds. And it is indeed theoretically about twice as fast as USB 3.0 could be, but it’s also super expensive. The 120GB model retails for $430 while the larger 240GB unit goes for $700. People who work with large files, like HD video or RAW photos would definitely enjoy the extra storage room, especially if they’re working off a MacBook Air, with their limited 128GB/256GB drives. And of course, like any SSD, the drives are whisper quiet. However they feature only one port, which means that they’d have to be at the end of any daisy chain you might have created.
