The BBC invites 13 year old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

(via Daring Fireball)

-posted by Paul

We look at the good, the bad, the ugly... and the naked? That's right.  Apple just allowed its first iPhone application that focus on pornography into the App Store.  The application, called Hottest Girls, costs $2 and includes “2200+ images of topless, sexy babes and nude models," according to Wired.

What's really hilarious here is Wired's analysis of the application. Maybe someone should check old Charlie's hard drive at work -- the dude seems to know a lot about how porn should be presented!

According to Wired's Charlie Sorrel: "The application itself is terrible. Four photos are shown on screen at once and tapping one will pull a full sized version from the server. From here you can look at it or save it to your photo-roll. There is no slideshow to display a progressive striptease of the same model, so you are limited to one picture at a time before you have to navigate back to the main screen, which shows a lack of understanding as to how a porn app should work. You could of course just use the application for downloading and view the pictures later in the Photos application."

Read the entire short article here.





-posted by Justin

Twitterature, coming soon from Penguin Books. According to Mashable, Twitterature, the brain child of some University of Chicago freshmen, takes the classics and cuts them down into twenty Twitter-length tweets. So the great works of Shakespeare, for example, would be reduced to twenty tweets, 140 characters or less of course.

According to the creators, these "hipster's Cliff Notes" are the "birthday, Christmas, Hanukah and 4th of July for ever hip young person between the ages of 18 and 35 in this country"... quite a bold statement I'd say. Another example of Twitter infiltrating everything from television shows to classic literature!

-posted by Stephanie

Last week, Craig Lee at Ortiva Wireless participated in the "Multimedia on Mobile Devices" panel at the CONNECTIONS conference in Santa Clara, CA. Craig also chatted with Parks Associates about Ortiva's latest developments and mobile video market trends.  Check out the video interview here.

-posted by Lindsay

Seattle 2.0 has compiled a list of the top tech startup twitter accounts in Seattle. Here's the top five:

1. @seattle20 (Seattle 2.0)
2. @johncook
3. @calbucci (Marcelo Calbucci)
4. @daveschappell
5. @npost (Nathan Kaiser)

In the #114 spot is VOXUS (@voxuspr.com). Follow us!

-posted by Lindsay

Ever want to take a BusinessWire alternative for a test drive?  When a $9.99 service from Mr. Press Release came across my desk, I could no longer resist.  A colleague had recently explored the ins and outs of no cost wire services (get the free white paper here) and I wondered how a cheap service could compete. Using one of our own corporate releases, we took the plunge.  Here's a run down of the positives and the inconvenient:

The Positives:
- The form was simple and easy to use.
- You can add a logo or other image easily and at no additional cost.
- Visually, the release looked good, nice font and layout at the OfficialWire site (check it out here).
- Your news is indexed in Google News (the holy grail!).
- You can easily delete or edit a filed release. Although, once "payment is received" it gets posted immediately.
- We received two postings and a tweet (Mr. Press Release tweets all of their press releases on Twitter).

The Inconvenient:
- word count limit is 750
- You have to have a gmail account and use Google Checkout.
- The "channels" for distribution are a bit unclear -- we selected "America" (does that mean U.S. or North America?).
- You must have a subtitle. 
- You cannot designate a day or time for your posting (your release gets posted as soon as the payment is received).
- You must plan for a lag that happens from when you submit payment and when the payment is officially received by Mr. Press Release.

IMHO, this service is comparable to some of the free posting sites I've used. The Google News indexing is probably the key differentiator, and for many companies, worth the $9.99 all by itself. Mr. Press Release also offers unlimited press release distribution for $59 a month. This monthly service is a nice option for companies that can't afford traditional wiring fees but that want to keep a relatively active Web presence during the recession.  However, you must be willing to sacrifice the benefits that come with a big name wire service like BusinessWire. Just this month, BusinessWire helped VOXUS get more than 30 release postings and three articles – a stark contrast to the two postings and a tweet we got with Mr. Press Release.

-posted by Lindsay

Social Media is really this complex. This image, courtesy of Brian Solis, does a good job of showing just how insane this universe is. Now spend the next year figuring out what this means!  Good luck.



-posted by Justin

According to an article in the Guardian:

Nokia is developing a phone that recharges itself without mains electricity. A new prototype charging system from the company is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves – the weak TV, radio and mobile phone signals that permanently surround us. The power harvested is small but it is almost enough to power a mobile in standby mode indefinitely without ever needing to plug it into the mains, according to Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, UK.

-posted by Justin

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a report, "The Mobile Difference," which places American adults into 10 different Internet user types, depending on how they feel about information technology, what kind of information technology they have in their lives and how they use it in their lives.

CNN has published an interview with the project's associate director of research, in which they explore some of the details of the user types quiz and results. Below is a sampling of some of the 10 user types and the percentage of respondents that identified with each type.

-Digital Collaborators - use information gadgets to collaborate with others and share their creativity with the world - 8%

-Ambivalent Networkers - heavily use mobile devices to connect with others and entertain themselves, but don't always like it when the cell phone rings - 7%

-Desktop Veterans - dedicated to wireline access to digital information and like how it opens up the pipeline to information - 13%

-The Tech Indifferent - unenthusiastic about the Internet and cell phones - 10%

-Off the Network - neither cell phone nor Internet users - 14%

Take the quiz here and see what type of user you are, Digital Collaborator? Ambivalent Networker?

-posted by Stephanie

Granted, I do live five minutes from downtown Seattle, but it's a rarity that I see any of the bright lights from the big city. Well, that changed this week when I saw a stream of light going right over my rooftop deck. And guess what? It wasn't Batman sending his bat signal into the night's sky, it was Seattle area super hero Microsoft trying to market its newly-launched Internet search engine Bing. Following are some pictures TechFlash took of the spectacle.





Although I can't see a direct correlation to a light show and Bing, I do have to admit that it had people talking and most people I know are already aware of Bing. Which... could mean mission accomplished in the buzz department. As for having any substance once all of the marketing hype dies down, that remains to be seen. But for now, Kudos to Microsoft's marketing team for a launch that sure made me and a lot of other people "see the light." Now is there steak with that sizzle?

-posted by Andrew

Just got a peek at the latest mobile video report from Nielsen. After surveying 3,000 mobile video subscribers, they found out that comedy reigns supreme on mobiles. Next is weather, sports, music and news/finance. Does "weather" stick out to anyone else? People are really dialing up video to get a weather report? Hmmm.

Last month, Nielsen reported that U.S. mobile video viewers grew to 13.4 million in Q1. And Pyramid Research projected it to be a whopping $16 billion market by 2014.

It's quite clear that this crappy economy is no match for subscriber demand for mobile video.

-posted by Lindsay