Category Archives: Xbox

The Week in Tweets: RIP Flip Camera

It’s hard to get a seasoned journalist to express shock and dismay, but on Tuesday, CNN’s Anderson Cooper got rather emotional over a certain piece of news.

“I can’t believe the Flip camera is being discontinued. I love my Flip,” he tweeted on Tuesday.

Meanwhile a more dramatic David Pogue of the New York Times tweeted, “WHAT THE HEY!?!?? Cisco is killing off the Flip camcorder! I know our phones take video, but—come on.”

 

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Product extinction happens frequently in the fast-paced world of technology, as sleeker, faster, more efficient devices cannibalize old ones. But nearly everyone was shocked on Tuesday when Cisco announced that it was ending its Flip line of cameras, a well-regarded product that Cisco acquired in 2009 for $590 million. Yesterday Pogue reported that Flip cameras represented 35 percent of the camcorder market, and was the bestselling camcorder on Amazon.

So why did Cisco kill the Flip? To focus on what it knows best: enterprise. After dabbling in the consumer electronics market with Flip, Cisco said it planned to restructure the company, refocus its home-networking business, and integrate its ūmi home telepresence product into its enterprise offerings. By the end of the year, Cisco will shed 550 Flip-related employees.

Flip founder Jonathan Kaplan told reporters he was sad Cisco decided to ditch the brand, and that he still believed people wanted a standalone, handheld camera in addition to a smartphone. On Friday, Sony and Kodak also said they weren’t worried about smartphones cannibalizing their lines of personal camcorders.

This Week in Tweets we captured all sorts of reactions to the news of Flip’s death. While many admitted to “two-timing” the Flip with their smartphone cameras and others saw it as a logical business decision, there was a widespread feeling that the Flip had died a premature death.

Meanwhile if you’re looking for a replacement, PC Mag has compiled Ten Top-Notch Flip Video Camera Alternatives.

Online Tax Prep Services

It’s that time of year again. Tax time. A few of your documents may still be straggling in, but chances are you’ve at least got your W-2s, and you’ve either got all the receipts you’re going to need for your deductions or you’re going to wing anyways. So why not get to work now? I suppose you could wait until Sunday to get started, but who needs all that last-minute pressure? It’s never been simpler to get started—you don’t even have to schlep down to the electronics store to buy a copy of the software anymore, or, worse, spend time haunting a depressing tax center waiting room. As long as you’ve got access to a browser, you can do your taxes without ever leaving home. Unless you’ve got a horribly complex return or have an issue with exposing your financials over the Internet, doing your taxes online is the simplest way to go about it. Accordingly, we’ve reviewed the best online tax packages for tax year 2010.



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All the major tax prep players have had Web-based versions for years, and all look and work like their desktop counterparts, letting you save partially finished returns and finish them in multiple sessions. It’s convenient, and the sites remember your data from year to year. Even if your local copy gets hosed, you’ve got a copy on the tax-prep site. And there’s a good chance much of your basic data will carry over from year to year, giving you a headstart on the process.

Once you’ve chosen a tax-prep package, you’ll need to decide which of the many versions of that company’s service to use—the free 1040EZ version (generally you still have to pay to e-file for your state taxes at least), or the high-end SMB version, or something in between. You’ll have to do a little research to make sure you get the right forms, for, say, your small business’ income. But don’t assume that you need the full-on ultimate premium premier version—with the exception of extra forms (and occasionally some higher-end help functionality) they’re pretty much the same as the freebies, in terms of function and interface and so on. Don’t overpay. If price is the determining factor for you, definitely check out TaxACT—even its high-end versions are dirt cheap.

I won’t tell you that any of these online tax services can make tax time enjoyable, but the best of them can at least make the process relatively quick and painless.

Note that the thumbnail descriptions below link to our full reviews of the major players in the tax-prep space. Click through to read the full reviews by tax expert Kathy Yakal.

CompleteTax OnlineCompleteTax Online

CompleteTax, a service of global financial services provider CCH, has some of the best guidance available on tax preparation sites. It also does a good job of exploring tax topics, and is offering free Premium versions to select populations for 2010.

H&R Block At Home PremiumH&R Block At Home Premium

H&R Block At Home Premium Online gives TurboTax a run for its money every year. Premium’s Best of Both option provides beginning-to-end support that no one else has ever offered, at a reasonable price.

TaxSlayer.com Premium EditionTaxSlayer.com Premium Edition

TaxSlayer.com’s parent company has been in the tax preparation business for over 40 years, and its online offering is a capable 1040-tamer. But the site could use some improvement in the areas of navigation and help.

TaxACT Online Ultimate BundleTaxACT Online Ultimate Bundle

TaxACT is the best buy available for the 2010 tax filing year. It supports all e-filable IRS forms, walks the user easily and quickly through the 1040, and offers unlimited professional help for only $7.95 extra.

TurboTax logoTurboTax Premier Online Edition
Editors
TurboTax remains king of the hill. Though it has stiff competition, its combination of financial topics, guidance, navigational tools, and interface excellence make it the best choice for 2010 taxes.

Microsoft: Windows 7 Touch Pack for All [Multi-Touch]

Microsoft has released Touch Pack for Windows 7 for anyone with Windows Touch capable devices to download.

The Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 was first introduced last May as a series of 6 applications that were designed to showcase Windows Touch in Windows 7 and to help people learn touch gestures. The features were limited to OEMs with devices having multitouch. But now the Touch pack allows users to use it with any 3rd party touchscreens.

 



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The Touch Pack is a set of six multi-touch consists of 3 casual games, and 3 Microsoft Surface applications that have been created for Windows 7.

Download: Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7

What’s Inside Touch Pack

1. Microsoft Surface Globe uses the Virtual Earth 3D engine to display a 3D  Earth. Using multi-touch, you can navigate to different regions, get local information, and “pin” your favorite locations. You can even “fly” around 3D models of buildings in some cities.
Microsoft Surface Globe

2. Microsoft Surface Collage: A photo collage app that arranges photos in the way you want.

Microsoft Surface Collage

3. Microsoft Surface LagoonMicrosoft Blackboard is a screensaver that you can interact with using multi-touch.

4. Microsoft Blackboard, A puzzle game of physics that uses nifty machine on a virtual blackboard. Use gestures to rotate and resize gears, fans, seesaws and more to move balloons and balls toward the light bulbs – and victory.

Other Games:

5. Microsoft Rebound

6. Microsoft Garden Pond

Microsoft ReboundMicrosoft Garden Pond

The apps gives you basic multitotuch experience on Windows 7 but clearly shows how immature this platform is as far as Multitouch is concerned when compared to a native device like iPad. This is the reason why HP’s Slate is a bad idea.

But would multitouch apps appear on Windows 7 Marketplace? We’ll have to wait to see it.

Windows 7 SP1 Leaked [Download]

Windows 7 is a sure hit for Microsoft, within months of the release, the Operating system managed to get 10% of the market OS share. And Today, the first Service Pack leaks to Torrents.

Windows 7 SP1 brings two big features– Dynamic Memory support and a more robust Remote Desktop client which uses RemoteFX. and the other part is the large number of Bug fixes.

 

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It’s been leaked and is freely available to anyone willing to download and install the update from a torrent site.

Though the update is legit, its hard to say what else is included in the update.
However, what’s good is that this build is very recent, with a compile date of March 27th.  The full build string is as follows:  6.1.7601.16537.amd64fre.win7.100327-0053

After the update, the main build number has been incremented by one, so you now have Build 7601. (This is exactly like Vista SP1)

windows 7 sp1

The system was stable for the period I tested after the update. however, you can try it at your own risk.

Control Windows 7 with Kinect

Xbox Kinect is the ultimate hack machine, and that’s it the most popular gadget of the year 2010. Kinect has often been hacked to work with a large number of hobby electronics to attain Gesture based control for systems. It has been hacked to control Widnows  7 PC a number of times, but it was never done and sold like a regular software bundle.

 

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Win&I is the first fully useful commercial software that let’s you control your windows 7 PC with a Kinect controller using gestures alone.

You can control Windows 7 and thousands of applications with this natural user interface. WIN&I software replaces the computer mouse by tracking simple gestures from users up to several meters from the screen using the power of the Kinect depth-sensor.

You just have to Connect your Kinect with your PC and run the WIN&I control session to control windows 7, And leave the rest for Kinect to manipulate.

Checkout the Video demo below:

Tutorial: Using Kinect with Windows 7:

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Evolve Maestro Tablet triple-boots Android, MeeGo, Windows 7, Gives upto 16h of Battery backup

Can’t decide which tablet you should go for? Get the one that boots all 3 popular Tablet OSes.

Evolve III Maestro has built world’s first tablet that Triple boots Android, Windows 7 and MeeGo. The tablet has a 1.83GHz Atom N475 DualCore CPU based on OakTrail processor.

 

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With Windows 7, you would be able to attain 8 hours of battery & 16hours of battery with Android, not bad for a Tablet that weighs less than 2 pounds.

The tablet features a large 10.1-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, up to 32GB of solid state storage, 3G and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and 2 USB ports.

What Evolve Three hopes will make this device stand out is the fact that it’ll ship with Android, MeeGo and Windows 7 out of the box. Although a custom layer for Windows was in the works – imagine a mash-up of Windows Phone 7 and Android – it was MeeGo that had the developers really excited. A virtualised version was running on the device, and while the combo of pre-release software and hardware were still a little rough around the edges, it certainly seemed like it would make for a finger friendly consumption focussed interface.

The device is set for launch in Q2 2011 and at a price of $500, it could be a steal.

Unfortunately, there’ll be no quick way to switch between the different operating environments.

Stay tuned for more  on Windows Phone, Android, iPhone, Programming and Tech news via @taranfx on Twitter or:

Prevent, Fix Windows Explorer Crashes

Windows 7 has sold more than 30 Million copies, as per Microsoft. Its evident that it had been a big success bringing great improvements over windows XP.

Glitches would never go away till it’s a software. And they can be annoying at times, but there are ways you can minimize the annoyances and prevent havocs. One such problem is with Windows Explorer who like to act weird with its “Windows Explorer has stopped responding” “Windows explorer has misbehaved and needs to be closed”, blah blah.

 

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You can always force close it but The Explorer process runs a lot of important things in Windows, and when it crashes, it can really slow you down.

But there is a solution to minimize the damage by sandboxing its process, so that when next time one crashes, others don’t in the fission.

The Solution to windows Explorer crashes

Windows Folder options actually let you create a separate process for the taskbar and desktop from the other open Explorer windows in two different explorer.exe processes (that you see in task manager). This comes handy when one of them crashes.

HowTo: Go to any Windows Explorer (say my computer), Alt+T  > Tools > Folder Options > View > “Launch Folder Windows in a Separate Process”.

windows-7-explorer-crash

If you look more closely, its something that powers Google Chrome browser, new process for every Tab. Instead, there are just two processes. Of course it would be slightly more CPU intensive, but that’s definitely worth it.

Control Windows 7 with Kinect

Xbox Kinect is the ultimate hack machine, and that’s it the most popular gadget of the year 2010. Kinect has often been hacked to work with a large number of hobby electronics to attain Gesture based control for systems. It has been hacked to control Widnows  7 PC a number of times, but it was never done and sold like a regular software bundle.

 

Microsoft MCTS Certification, MCITP Certification and over 2000+ Exams at Actualkey.com


Win&I is the first fully useful commercial software that let’s you control your windows 7 PC with a Kinect controller using gestures alone.

You can control Windows 7 and thousands of applications with this natural user interface. WIN&I software replaces the computer mouse by tracking simple gestures from users up to several meters from the screen using the power of the Kinect depth-sensor.

You just have to Connect your Kinect with your PC and run the WIN&I control session to control windows 7, And leave the rest for Kinect to manipulate.

Android tablet on the cheap: Acer Iconia A500 is the XOOM “Light”

Acer’s Iconia A500 tablet features the same exact hardware specifications as Motorola’s XOOM, but with half the flash storage and $150 cheaper.

Back in early March, I proposed that Motorola create a new SKU for their XOOM tablet with a slightly reduced feature set, which I tentatively called the “XOOM Light”.

 

 



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If you don’t remember the piece, here’s the crux of the argument:

If iSuppli’s BOM is to be believed to be within striking range of actual component costs, then Motorola can shave anywhere between 50 and 60 dollars off their manufacturing cost on the XOOM by slicing the flash storage in half to 16GB and going with less expensive camera parts, putting it closer on par with Apple’s iPad 2. This would allow the XOOM to retail for about $50-$80 less than the entry-level iPad 2, depending on how close the company wants to cut their margins.

The only way XOOM is going to be a repeat hit for Motorola Mobility in the same way the Droid was for their handset business is to undercut the iPad 2 on price. With a lower price and a similar feature set to the iPad 2, a large segment of consumers might be willing to overlook some of the shortcomings on Android 3’s current tablet app gap.

While this plea seems to be falling on deaf ears at Motorola, apparently this idea resonated with one of its competitors, the Taiwanese-based PC giant Acer, Inc.

Today the company along with channel partner Best Buy announced pre-orders for its Android 3-based iPad competitor, the Iconia A500, which has nearly identical specifications to the Wi-Fi only version of the Motorola XOOM.

See: Motorola XOOM Specifications

See: Acer Iconia A500 Specifications

The only significant difference? 16GB of flash memory instead of 32GB which lines up with the entry-level Wi-Fi iPad quite nicely. At $450.00, the 10.1″ tablet device costs $50 less than the entry-level iPad 2, and is $140-$150 less than the XOOM.

It seems that Acer didn’t even need to sacrifice the camera capabilities to make up for component costs on the BOM in order to compete with the iPad 2. It also has identically-specced 2MP front-facing and 5MP, LED flash rear-facing cameras as the XOOM.

In addition to identical SoC and PoP, memory, RAM, GPU, screen, cameras and ports, the device is also the same thickness of the XOOM, at 12.9mm, roughly half an inch.

Note to all Android and other would-be tablet manufacturers: The bar for 10.1″ full size, 16GB devices that are not carrier locked has now been lowered to $450.00. That means anything in the tablet market that is not Apple needs to cost this much or less, with similar specifications.

Oh and HP, regarding your WebOS 3 TouchPad, I’m also talking to you.

Today I pre-ordered one of the Iconia A500 devices, sight unseen. If it’s anywhere near as good a device as the XOOM as far as build quality is concerned, I’m willing to put up with some of the current shortcomings in Android 3 in order to keep a test Honeycomb device in house.

I’m not advocating that most consumers look at this device in lieu of the superior application ecosystem on the iPad 2, but this price point was enough for me to take action to meet my immediate requirements. For the same reason, Android developers will probably jump at the opportunity to buy one of these devices as well.

The question now remains of how Android 3 devices can actually differentiate at the $450.00 price point, and if it’s even possible to lower that price bar any further. I think the price bar can be lowered, but there’s only one company who I believe can accomplish this: Amazon.

As I mentioned in my November 2010 piece “Kindle’s Secret Sibling: Amazon’s Android Tablet” it is my belief that the online retailer and bookseller has a definitive plan to release such a device.

What the exact specs for this device are is left to the imagination and may be pure speculation, but certainly if you eliminate the need for Google licensing of the Android OS and the Android Market along with Google’s apps, replacing them with Amazon monetizing equivalents, the price of a similarly-specced tablet could easily be reduced another $50-$80.

An Amazon Android tablet using the Open Source, unlicensed version of Honeycomb, combined with Amazon Appstore for Android,  Kindle for Android, the Amazon MP3 service as well as Amazon Video and Amazon Cloud Player makes for a near-complete tablet OS and application stack, which would allow the company to monetize their properties on the device and take the “Give away the razor but sell the blades” approach.

All of this is dependent, of course, on Google actually releasing the source code to Honeycomb outside of their approved vendors list, a delay which currently has the Open Source community absolutely livid.

The only thing that would actually be missing from such a theoretical device is a native Android mail client to talk to GMail, Hotmail and other services including corporate Exchange email, along with the appropriate calendar sync services, mapping and integrated search engine apps.

Presumably the missing pieces could be coded in-house by Amazon, or purchased/licensed from a 3rd-party. I could certainly see Amazon partnering with someone like Microsoft to provide Bing search and mapping in lieu of Google, as well as a full license of Activesync and native Exchange client.

Whatever the outcome, it’s clear that Acer has just brought prices for iPad 2 competitors down to much more realistic and acceptable levels. Whether it will plunge any further in the immediate future remains to be seen.

Has Acer re-defined the pricing for the full-sized Android tablet space? Talk Back and Let Me Know.

Once upon a time there was Ustream. Then came YouTube Live

YouTube has broadcast several live events in the past, but, as they noted on the official YouTube blog, they’ve all been “one-offs”. Internet users interested in streaming live video relied on Ustream and other similar services, while larger broadcasters streamed video independently. YouTube, as one of the most popular sites on the Internet, was essentially an asynchronous tool for Lady Gaga and cute cat owners.

 

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Today, however, Google announced that YouTube would become a live broadcasting platform:

Today we’re announcing the initial roll out of YouTube Live, which will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time. This begins with a new YouTube Live browse page (www.youtube.com/live), where you can always find the most compelling live events happening on YouTube and add events to your calendar.

Their initial live-streamed event will begin in a few hours with a YouTube-sponsored concert series, featuring the most-viewed independent artists from the video sharing site. More interestingly, though, is the fact that this may finally become the social tool that Google has failed to create in its years trying to compete with Facebook.

Although YouTube has featured comments on videos for some time, being able to comment and interact during a live stream takes this to a new level. Right now, aside from the so-called Digitour, the selection of live shows is relatively limited. As Google notes, they are “gradually rolling out [their] live streaming beta platform, which will allow certain YouTube partners with accounts in good standing to stream live content on YouTube.”

As this becomes more widespread, YouTube Live stands to not only change the face of broadcast (can you say Google TV?), but also stands to change the face of social. It’s one thing to interact over static media. It’s quite another to interact (and ultimately, expect to interact) with live video.

Given YouTube’s existing extraordinary reach, this stands to be a big deal. Like a really bit deal. We’ll see what happens when partners beyond the Indian Premier League cricket matches begin to go live. Because while some of the partners will be major media outlets, this has the potential to enable a new level of success for the pre-Justin Bieber’s of YouTube-land.