Wireless carrier Vodafone Spain has recently announced the launch of a new device for its users, namely the SHOWWX pico projector. The carrier also added that the new innovative portable projector comes from Microvision Inc., a leading ultra-miniature projection display and image capture products provider all around the world.

The new SHOWWX pico projector has been designed to make use of revolutionary laser-based display technology, which enables it to deliver large, colorful and vivid images. Moreover, the device can project images that are in focus at all times, no matter the projection distance, the company announced. “We are proud that Vodafone Spain sells the SHOWWX for its customers. We believe that SHOWWX will provide a truly enhanced visual experience to Vodafone’s customers and greatly enhance functionality of their mobile devices,” Alexander Tokman, president and CEO of Microvision said.

The new device is a plug-n-play pico projector that offers users on the go the possibility to easily view and share various content, including mobile TV, movies, photos or presentations. The pocket-sized projector can be carried anywhere, plugged into portable media players, mobile phones or notebooks, or to any other mobile device that sports TV-Out or VGA functionality. The projected images can range from 12” to 150”, depending on the ambient light.

“The introduction of the Microvision SHOWWX laser pico projector in Spain presents a great opportunity for Vodafone to offer our customers new and exciting display capabilities to enhance the experience with their mobile devices,” explained Ignacio Roman, head of Terminals Spain and Portugal at Vodafone.

The new SHOWWX pico projector is available for Vodafone's customers from €289 (without vat). Moreover, users will be able to get it through the Points Program, which means that it will be cheaper. At the same time, the wireless carrier also noted that it will market the new device along with the Nokia N97 mini handset

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There are a lot of metrics for website traffic, unique visitors, user numbers, and the likes. Measuring a website's “influence” is a harder proposition though, it's not exactly something you can count. Some people beg to differ though and ://URLFAN aims to do just this, measure a website's influence by counting the number of mentions it gets on blogs. It's not the most objective metric out there, but it's probably as good as it gets and it's an interesting perspective.

The ReadWriteWeb blog put together a list of the top sites on the service and their standings a year ago. At this moment, despite the growing number of people predicting its demise, Wikipedia sits at the top as the most influential site on the planet. It's not much of a surprise this one, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia holds huge amounts of content and information which comes in handy when you're trying to put something in perspective or provide more background information.

Wikipedia is followed by YouTube and then Flickr, which have switched places since last year. Their presence is entirely expected, one being the most popular video site on the planet and the other being the most popular photo sharing site among bloggers, even if it's not the biggest in its category. Things only get interesting on fourth place where Twitter now resides up five places from last year. With the huge surge in popularity and users the microblogging site has seen this year, the rise is actually rather unspectacular, but the service was obviously a lot more popular with bloggers in 2008 than it was with the rest of the Internet population.

The other hyped up social media service of the moment, Facebook has also shot up quite a few places entering the top 10 at the seventh place. With 325 million users and a warmer attitude towards making content public, the social networking mammoth will probably only get more influential and it should be interesting to see how it will compete with Twitter in 2010. There certainly other ways of measuring online influence but ://URLFAN's is interesting as it puts more weight on people's opinions rather than just cold numbers.

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It appears that the recent reports on the Internet have been correct and that the Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices has now detailed its latest Radeon graphics card, the much-anticipated HD 5970, a dual-GPU monster designed to be the fastest graphics card in the world. Featuring full support for Microsoft's DirectX 11 and the company's recently introduced Eyefinity multi-display technology, this card is expected to deliver a noticeable performance boost over any other card that is currently available on the market.

“With the arrival of the ATI Radeon HD 5970, the fastest graphics card in the world, we’ve cemented AMD as the unquestioned graphics leader,” said Matt Skynner, vice president and general manager, AMD Graphics Group. “With the holiday shopping season right around the corner, the new card, coupled with the awesome power of ATI Eyefinity technology, is the ultimate setup for serious gamers.”

Getting right down to the technical specifications of the new card, it looks like previous reports have been right on target, as it comes with a GPU clock speed of 725MHz and a processing power, for single precision, of 4.64 TeraFLOPS. The new Radeon card comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory that was clocked at 1GHz (with 4GHz data date), and 2 x 2.15 Billion transistors. There are 3200 Stream Processors, 160 Texture units and 64 ROPs, while the card's TDP has been specified at a maximum of 294W. Interestingly enough, according to AMD, it reaches 42W in idle mode, something that has been enabled by a unique feature that will disable one of the GPUs, when the PC is in Idle.

One thing you should keep in mind is that, this is a monster of a card, by all definitions. It's design might lead to some modifications of your ATX chassis, as this card is 13.3-inches long, which could raise some problems, even for owners of full-tower cases.

With those specs and the fact that NVIDIA currently has nothing on the market that could beat the Radeon HD 5970, expect prices to be high. In fact, according to the world's second largest chip maker, these cards will be available for a MSRP of US$599. The prices are likely to go down when NVIDIA launches its Fermi-based cards, or by the time the 40nm yields at TSMC would improve.

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Telecom service provider Deutsche Telekom is reportedly looking out for partners for its U.S. Subsidiary, T-Mobile USA, and might consider teaming up with AT&T, Clearwire or MetroPCS, recent reports suggest. Moreover, it seems that there might also be the perspective of unnamed financial investors from outside the wireless industry, at leas this is what the German newspaper Handelsblatt states, cited by fiercewireless.

“The report, citing unnamed sources from the German telecom giant, said that the company is looking for a partner to help finance T-Mobile's network expansion. If Deutsche Telekom were to partner with a financial firm, the paper reported, that company might take a minority stake in T-Mobile. The carrier, the nation's fourth largest, is in the midst of building out its 3G network, and plans to upgrade its network to HSPA+ beginning next year to capitalize on the growing demand for mobile data,” the news site notes.

Deutsche Telekom has been said a few times before to plan including its US subsidiary in a joint-venture, and a Bloomberg report from September suggested that Clearwire and MetroPCS were possible partners for T-Mobile. According to the report, the aim was gaining access to the spectrum holdings of the partner companies.

Some other rumors that emerged earlier into the wild suggested that Deutsche Telekom would be interested in the purchase of Sprint Nextel, yet it seems that the deal is off now. The talks with the aforementioned partners appears to be only in their early stages, yet AT&T, Clearwire and Deutsche Telekom declined to comment on the deal.

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Microsoft will make available the next update to the service it has built around its Xbox console, come next week. Larry Hryb, the director of programming for the Microsoft gaming network Xbox Live, revealed that the Redmond company would offer all members of the Xbox LIVE community the latest refresh to the service starting with November 17, 2009. At the time of this article, the Xbox LIVE update has been already offered to a select pool of testers. However, it appears that Microsoft’s Preview Program for the upcoming Xbox LIVE Update will soon be shut down, as the company will start delivering the fully-fledged refresh.

“I know some of you are already enjoying many of these features through the Preview Program, but I am happy to announce that the next update that contains Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm and Zune video will be available to all Xbox LIVE members launch Nov. 17,” Hryb noted.

When it comes to the Windows LIVE update there are a few things that Xbox console users need to be aware of. First off, the refresh is designed to kill unauthorized memory units. The Redmond company made it clear in October, when it debuted the Preview Program, that it would tackle the usage of unauthorized memory units with Xbox 360 consoles.

In addition, not all users will be free to enjoy the new enhanced social networking capabilities of Xbox LIVE. Testers that have been running the public preview and that were younger than 18 were cut off from accessing Twitter, Facebook, or Last.fm. This situation will not change after Microsoft will release the fully-fledged update.

“We made this decision because as it stands now, parents aren’t able to use Family Settings to customize which of these applications their children can access. In order to offer an age-appropriate environment for everyone, we decided to turn off these applications for those Gold members under the age of 18. As expected, this has been a hot topic with the preview users. We want to make sure everyone was aware, however, that the development team is working on an update that gives parents the choice of which social applications their children can access. This means that Xbox LIVE members between the ages of 13 and 17 will be able to use Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm as long as their parents approve,” Hryb added.

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Microsoft’s Simon Aldous has been talking through his hat, the Windows maker claims, when the company's partner group manager stated that Microsoft tried to “create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics” for Windows 7. As reports circulating on the Internet say, Aldous appeared to admit that Microsoft had looked at Mac OS X for inspiration. Microsoft vehemently denies this.

Via Neowin, the full quote from the respective interview has been reproduced below.One of the things that people say an awful lot about the Apple Mac is that the OS is fantastic, that it's very graphical and easy to use. What we've tried to do with Windows 7 – whether it's traditional format or in a touch format – is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We've significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it's built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance.

As the same report reveals, the people in Redmond immediately issued a counter-statement revealing that Aldous' comments were not only “inaccurate,” but downright “uninformed.” In a post on the Windows Team blog, Microsoft blogger Brandon LeBlanc stated the following:

An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed.

While Microsoft cannot possibly admit Windows 7 mimics Mac OS X, the Redmond giant can’t hide the obvious – a great deal of people (and vocal ones, may we add) have given their verdict: Windows 7 does look like Mac OS X from quite a few perspectives. However, as this editor has stressed over and over again, there is a thin line between copying a product and using universally intuitive solutions for graphics, functionality, etc. There’s a limit to how much things can be changed just to be different from each other, yet still work for the customer. Do share your own opinion in the comments.

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Google's most hotly anticipated project, the brand-new, web-based operating system Chrome OS, is about to become a reality if rumors about its impending launch as soon as next week turn out to be true. When it first announced the project, Google said that the first public release should come this fall so this wouldn't be too much of a surprise. There's not much info aside from the fact that it will be launched and any type of details about Chrome OS have been scarce so far, so there's plenty of anticipation in the tech crowd to see just what Google cooked up.

The rumor comes from the TechCrunch blog which has been on somewhat of a roll lately with rumors about Google. Adding the fact that we already knew that Chrome OS would hit at around this date, the info seems solid enough. But don't get your hopes up yet, just because Google is launching the OS doesn't exactly mean that you'll be able to pop it into any computer or laptop and run it. It's likely that it's at a pretty unpolished state and Google previously said that Chrome OS wouldn't be ready for the market at least until the second half of 2010.

Hardware support is one of the biggest issues at this point. Chrome OS is based on the Linux kernel so, in theory, at the low level, it should have some very good driver support. It's unclear though what kind of changes Google has made and how far along the other components of the OS are to take advantage of the hardware capabilities. Google is building Chrome OS with netbooks in mind, so chances are that some of the more popular machines like Asus' Eee PC will probably work right off the bat.

But even if you can install it and run it, it doesn't mean that there will bemuch to look at, from a user's view point, Chrome OS will most likely be very lacking at this point. This release is meant to get developers familiar with the platform and give hardware manufacturers enough time to get used to it, before presumably starting to ship machines with Chrome OS. Anyway, even so there's plenty to be excited about, we'll finally get a look at the mysterious GUI Google has been working on and see how the company has adapted the more system-oriented tasks to an OS designed for the cloud. There have been some clues already, but the speculation should end soon enough.

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The chatter is once again picking up around FriendFeed, the real-time social aggregator Facebook acquired a couple of months ago. At the time of the deal many were left wondering about the fate of the service which, despite not becoming as successful as hoped, managed to secure a core of loyal users and to stay ahead in the innovation department. Not much has been said since, and despite claims that the service won't be shut down, users have mostly abandoned it.

Now FriendFeed cofounder Paul Bucheit has decided to come out with some clarifications though the future of the service is as vague as ever. “There was a lot of chatter about the future of FriendFeed this weekend. The short answer is that the team is working on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. Transformation is not the end. Consider this the chrysalis stage — if all goes well, a beautiful butterfly will emerge,” Bucheit wrote in a FriendFeed post.

The message tries to be reassuring but ends up confirming the rather bleak future that awaits FriendFeed in its current form. A couple of preeminent bloggers, both great supporters of FriendFeed, raised concerns about the future of the service and the fact that the activity on the site died down after the news of the acquisition. Everything is still there, in terms of features and functionality, but nobody wants to invest in a dead service.


At the time of the acquisition, many argued that Facebook bought FriendFeed for its talent, as the service was backed by a small but all-star team of engineers. The four cofounders are all ex-googlers and were behind products like Gmail and Google Maps. Facebook is no doubt at work integrating some of FriendFeed's best features but it may be a while until the social network can be seen as a proper replacement if ever. The project may very well be open-sourced – an underlying component has already been released as an open-source project – but this won't help save FriendFeed either. Something may still pop up but as time passes the service is losing even more users.

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