Social Networking hosting/Platform (more)

Always Innovating has an interesting Smart Book Tablet/NetBook concept. (more)

FaceBook is revamping their Facebook Groups offering. (Group Forming) (more)

Fred Wilson points to a Mark Suster piece about the future of TV/Media Center stuff. (more)

Zed Shaw creates the Oxymoron CSS FrameWork to get the simplicity of table-like grids in a CSS-compliant way without playing with float and clear. In order to establish the new world order, all the front-end weenies came up with this totally table-less design, and with a Jazz hands level of hand-wavy bullshit declared it "semantic". Right, semantic, because "clear" and "float" makes so much fucking sense to everyone. Ohhhh they mean, "lots of divs replace lots of table/tr/td". Not semantic, since that doesn't mean anything close to what they think it means.

Aug En will supposedly have a $150 7-in Android Tablet in K Mart stores this week. I hope this pans out.... (more)

EBay CEO 1998-2008 (more)

While Tivo isn't obviously an Information Appliance, I'm including it because: (more)

investor that's a mix of Venture Capital and Angel Capital (more)

very messed up member of the Creative Industries (more)

The Reputation Management site previously known as Un Varnished has rebranded/launched as Honest Ly. It's using FaceBook accounts as a way to enforce a sticky-though-anonymous Digital Identity. Brand-new Facebook accounts are viewed skeptically by the site. Someone who only reviews negatively will also come to Honestly's attention. Someone who reviews wantonly but is never reviewed herself will also draw suspicion. Users can vote others' comments up or town. Reviewers begin as "novices," and eventually gain "trusted" status on the site. That sounds like a smart Company Fuckers design. (more)

Mike Arrington thinks there's collusion going on amongst the Super Angel-s. It is absolutely unlawful for competitors to act together to keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group is doing. (more)

China is the source of 95% of the world's Rare Earth elements. The use of rare earth elements in modern technology has increased dramatically over the past years. Rare earth elements are now incorporated into many technological devices, including Super Conductor-s, samarium-cobalt and neodymium-iron-boron high-flux Rare EarthMagnet-s, electronic polishers, refining catalysts and Hybrid Car components (primarily batteries and magnets).[6] Rare earth ions are used as the active ions in luminescent materials used in optoelectronics applications, most notably the Nd:YAG laser. Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers are significant devices in optical-fiber communication systems. Phosphors with rare earth dopants are also widely used in cathode ray tube technology such as television sets. The earliest color television CRTs had a poor-quality red; europium as a phosphor dopant made good red phosphors possible. Yttrium iron garnet (YIG) spheres have been useful as tunable microwave resonators. Rare earth oxides are mixed with tungsten to improve its high temperature properties for welding, replacing thorium, which was mildly hazardous to work with. (more)

Emily Steel and Geoffrey Fowler report that many of the most popular applications, or "apps," on the social-networking site FaceBook Inc. have been transmitting identifying information—in effect, providing access to people's names and, in some cases, their friends' names—to dozens of advertising and Internet tracking companies, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. The issue affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook's strictest Privacy settings. The practice breaks Facebook's rules, and renews questions about its ability to keep identifiable information about its users' activities secure... Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person's name, using a standard Web browser, even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private... The apps reviewed by the Journal were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities. (more)

Ray Ozzie is leaving Microsoft. According to one person familiar with the situation, Mr. Ozzie decided to quit Microsoft because "he has accomplished what he wanted to accomplish" at the company. His major contribution to Microsoft was in helping it shift the company to focus on cloud computing, in which more computing chores move into data centers rather than being executed on PCs operated by users. (more)

better than ReCycling (more)

Chris Dent thinks Tiddly Space could be a good federated/P2P platform for Social Networking.

Michael Mace thinks that RIM/Blackberry needs to invest in creating some compelling and well-integrated features to keep their core user segment, or they will slide into a Platform Death Spiral. To sum up, RIM is at risk because its natural market is saturating and many of its customers are considering a switch to other platforms. The company may be able to bumble along in this situation for years before the problem comes to a head, but once a migration away from Blackberry starts it would be almost impossible to stop. So if the company wants to ensure its survival, it needs to act now.

John Robb on the importance of methods to replicate Small Fab success. We need an online system that standardizes and simplifies the description of the processes used to make the hardware.

John Robb on the use of KickStarter to cover the capital investment for producing the Glif. Essentially, it's a small piece of plastic that allows you to mount your iPhone 4 on a tripod. It solves a niche problem quite nicely... The team ( Thomas Gerhardt and Dan Provost) did their research and product development on their own (a labor of love). They also printed a 3D plastic prototype. To raise money for low cost per unit (and likely higher quality at this juncture) injection molding ($10 k fixed cost set-up), they turned to Kickstarter for funding. (Small Fab)