Geek News and Musings

Wide desks are often hard to come by but exceptionally useful when you require it (like with audio workstations), you want a desk ready for coworking, or you just want the room to create little sections to work. Whatever the case may be, today’s featured workspace provides a wide desk that’s attached to the wall to offer up a wide area without occupying the entire room. More »

You may know Vudu as the startup bringing high definition movie rentals and rent-to-own services to set-top boxes like PlayStation 3 and the Boxee Box. And most TVs and Blu-ray players. Vudu recently became the second streaming service to receive its own dedicated button on Vizio’s remote controls, following Netflix.

You may also know Peter Gabriel, the British rocker who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a part of Genesis. Also the man responsible for Sledgehammer. What you may not know is that Gabriel is the front man and lead investor in a rapidly proliferating recommendation service called The Filter. Or that today The Filter is officially announcing that it has been tapped by Vudu to power its recommendation engine.

The Filter is already providing its recommendation technology to an impressive list of clients, including Sony Music, Nokia, Comcast, Warner Brothers, NBC — and now it’s added Vudu’s huge library of HD movies to the list. As my colleague Mike Butcher wrote last year, The Filter’s main business model involves becoming a white label personalization engine for mass audiences. As such, it needs partnerships like these to prove that its technology is able to scale into the billion-request level. Today’s announcement is further indication that the UK-based business is well on its way, considering it currently reaches more than 200 million unique users across multiple devices.

Through the new partnership, The Filter will offer Vudu subscribers a personalized video-on-demand experience based on customers’ previous viewing habits. The service is a little bit Amazon, a little bit Last.fm, and a little bit Netflix, serving its users with recommendations that are based on purchase data, consumption data, combining a wide array of statistical and rule-based analysis with artificial intelligence techniques that both learn and forget — all in an effort to provide smarter recommendations while protecting user privacy.

In the case of Vudu, The Filter’s recommendation engine will generate targeted and timely video recommendations from Vudu’s selection of streaming movies and TV shows. And seeing as the competitors in this space, Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube included, collectively reach a massive audience and are trying to differentiate their services in an effort to provide the best streaming movie (and movie recommendation) option, The Filter is becoming a big part of the conversation.

Vudu was acquired by Walmart last year (for an estimated $100 million-plus), as a play into the Internet-ready TV sales market, so The Filter may now count Walmart as a channel through which to reach new users. And Walmart is, well, a larger-than-average corporation, that may one day sell its products (beyond movies and TV shows) through a service like Vudu, using The Filter to recommend everything from movies to a new pair of pants. Or a new rifle. Look out!

Three of our favorite Gmail Labs features have graduated and moved on to out-of-the-box Gmail. Superstars lets you assign different levels of stars to an email, making a killer to-do list based on priority; nested labels creates labels within labels, so you can organize your mail by sub-categories; and if you use a desktop mail client, you can now adjust which labels show up in your client and which don’t. The Google Search Box lab has been removed altogether, since there’s already a “Search the Web” button in Gmail. All features are available from Gmails’ Settings page. Hit the link to read more. [Official Gmail Blog] More »

If you were among the first wave of people to buy an iPad last spring, there’s a good chance you spent a lot of time playing one game in particular: Plants vs Zombies. PopCap’s smash hit was one of the first games on the iPad and it did extremely well, and it’s also seen a lot of success on the smaller iPhone/iPod Touch form factor. Now, some 16 months after its release, the game still ranks #27 on the App Store’s list of top paid apps. It’s not Angry Birds, but it’s easily one of iOS’s most popular games ever.

And today, finally, Android fans are getting a chance to smack down some cartoonish undead. The application just launched on Amazon’s Android Appstore, and you can download it right here (it’s free today, and will be $2.99 starting tomorrow). Oh, and you won’t find it on the official Android Market for another two weeks. Unfortunately it isn’t currently optimized for tablets, but it should still work fine.

The launch is a big deal for two reasons. First, Android gets another AAA game title, giving users one less reason to look longingly at their iOS counterparts. And it’s also another big marketing push for Amazon’s Appstore, which is a direct rival of Google’s official Android Market.

Amazon’s Appstore launched in March, offering users a slightly different experience from Google’s official Market. Apps on Amazon’s store are all tested to ensure a baseline level of quality, and Amazon also provides recommendations and steep discounts on some apps. These are great features and it’s nice that Google has some competition when it comes to app distribution, but Amazon has its work cut out for it.

The Amazon store takes advantage of the fact that Android is an open OS — through a process called sideloading, you can install any application you want without requiring Google’s approval. To access the Amazon store, users visit amazon.com/appstore from their phones, then download and install the store client from there. Unfortunately the process is a bit cumbersome — you have to dig through your Android settings and tap a checkbox that allows for installation from “Unknown sources”, complete with a warning that you are potentially exposing your phone to more malicious applications. Most users aren’t going to bother with this unless they have an incentive to.

Which is why Amazon is working with developers to offer exclusives like Plants vs Zombies and Angry Birds Rio — and they’re also giving away one application free every day. This is a good tactic for building early traction, though in the longer term Amazon will need to work out partnerships so that its Appstore comes pre-installed on devices (it will obviously come pre-installed on whatever Android devices Amazon builds itself). Because no matter how many neat games Amazon offers exclusively, that “Unknown sources” check box is a big hurdle.

This isn’t the first grade-A title that made waves on the iPhone and was later ported to Android: Doodle Jump has been available since March 2010, Angry Birds arrived last fall, and Flight Control came out in April of this year.

No matter how clean you try to keep your keyboard, the dust and oil your fingers pick up over the day are bound to get it a little dirty. Thankfully, all you need is a few household items to give it a really deep cleaning. More »

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer took the stage for an interview with our own Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from Google’s mobile growth to Mayer’s investment strategy. A few minutes after the interview, I had the chance to ask her a few more questions about Google’s approach to mobile and local. It’s only been a few weeks since I interviewed Mayer about Google’s two pillar approach to local, but I still had plenty of questions.

The first thing I asked: what happens if and when Apple decides to swap out the Google Maps application that ships with every iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad in favor of something that it built in-house (Apple has confirmed that it’s working on an improved traffic database, and has also quietly acquired some mapping-related startups).

Unsurprisingly, Mayer mostly skirted the question — instead she pointed out how huge Google Maps’s audience is, with some 200 million active users on its Mobile products alone. She also mentioned some of the innovations that Google has made recently with Maps, including the new vector-based tiles that require 1/100th the data (the iOS version of Maps doesn’t take advantage of this feature).

Next, I asked if there were any technologies coming up that would help phones more accurately determine your location. Because while the Wifi/GPS combo works pretty well in most places, reliability takes a nose-dive whenever you’re in a dense city like NYC.

Mayer says that the Wifi hotspot database that Google has been building out will help with this, because it will improve over time. This is one reason why Google is going to be pushing users to explicitly check-in using Latitude — in addition to providing a new channel to engage with consumers, these check-ins also help Google improve its database. The system may not know your exact GPS coordinates, but if if someone with the similar signals previously checked in at In-N-Out Burger, there’s a good chance that’s where you are. Mayer likens the system to the powerful spell checker that often pops up in Google search.

Finally, I asked about serendipitous suggestions on mobile phones, which Mayer has previously said she’s excited about. Mayer says that she thinks we’ll see these “inside of a two year horizon”. The UI for what these suggestions will look like is still TBD, but it sounds like initially they’re be pronounced rather than subtle.

@LulzSec just posted what it claims were the methods used to hack PBS.org.

“PBS.org was not owned by SQL,” they write, “PBS.org was owned via a 0day we discovered in mt4 aka MoveableType 4.”

Kevin Mitnick, who knows a little about this stuff, responds: “Yeah, they claim it’s a bug in mt4… but I doubt they would reveal the vector until much later.”

I’d imagine this will become clear soon, after the holiday passes. Background on the incident in this BB post; the mess continued throughout the day today and appears to be ongoing at the time of this blog post.

Sometimes people are late for various reasons, and that’s understandable. Some people are late all the time, and that’s just disrespectful. If you have a chronically late friend you’d like to fix, here’s a clever method to make them show up on time. More »

So you’ve become the Memorial Day grill master, but you pull your grill out of the garage only to find that it’s a sea of dirt and grime. Luckily, it’s pretty simple to give your grill a proper cleaning before setting it up for the summer. More »

Android: If the default Android dialer feels a bit too bare for you, dialer replacement Dialer One should make you happy, easing phone calls with speed dial features, a smart T9 search feature, and call log filtering. More »

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