Gadgets and Technology to Crave.

A few days ago we got a hands on with the Durable XpanD X102 Series active glasses. We had been trying out different 3D glasses for the last few months now – from the simple paper ones too humongous black ones. So it was nice to try on a pair of 3D glasses that weren’t all that hideous or huge, and that didn’t leave me a headache from wearing them for too long.

My overall first impression of the Xpand X102 is that they are certainly durable. These glasses are being marketed to a crowd of early adopters, as well as fans of the whole Avatar experience. I got to play two 3D based video games and watch a few short 3D movies while wearing the glasses. Unfortunately, I wasn’t all that impressed with the 3D based games – one being Avatar. In fact I was left with a yearning for some Dramamine. However I was, very impressed with the way the glasses interacted with the 3D specific movies. The experience was rich and deep. While some of the movies displayed 3D in the traditional sense of popping off the screen and in your face, many of the short movies allowed you to experience the depth and perception in a new and unique way that really immerses you in to the film.

 

The Xpand X102 glasses themselves are rugged and are meant to work with any 3D enabled TV through an IR transmitter built into the glasses, as if it were a remote control. The XpanD X102 do not fold, but they are bendable and sit comfortable on your face for a decent amount of time. However, they do give the impression that you are wearing a modern version of the classic red view-master as glasses.

Not widely available yet for purchase, the XpanD X102 is just one of many 3D pairs of glasses that will be available soon, and it will be bundled to work with technology from leading companies such as Samsung who will be launching 3D televisions in the near future.

Personally the dust is finally settling over the whole analog to DTV transition, so I think many will be hard pressed to want to throw out their new TV’s in place of a 3D enabled one just for a few thrills here and there. But like any technology it takes time to adapt, so lets see if the 3D emergence is truly successful this time around and whether or not it doesn’t end up like Beta-Max.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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The upcoming Office 2010 software will be available as a free upgrade to all users who have purchased a copy of Office 2007 on or after March 5, 2010.

However, if you are feeling a bit unlucky because you got yourself a copy of Office 2007 just days before the upgrade offer was announced and are therefore ineligible for the free upgrade, here’s something that you should try.

The Microsoft web store has a refund policy of 30 calendar days for all downloadable software. If you have bought the software in a box, it is also eligible for return within 30 days of the purchase date as long as you have the original packaging, including installer media and the product key.

So here’s the deal. Return the copy of Microsoft Office 2007 to the store and buy it again from the same store. This time however you’ll automatically become eligible for a free upgrade to Office 2010 when it comes out in June.

All software retailers have different return policies but ff you have bought Office 2007 from Amazon in the last few days, you are covered too as they also have a 30 day return policy for software – the condition is that you should return the box “in its original condition.”

This should work not just for Office 2007 but all the other Office programs including Visio, Microsoft Project, etc.

Related: How to Buy Software Online for Less

Get your Office 2010 Upgrade Even if you are Late

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Oops! This link appears to be broken in Google Chrome

You are trying to open a web page in Chrome and all it gives you is this error message – “DNS Error – cannot find server.”

You hit F5 to refresh a page but the error persists. You then open an alternate browser, like Firefox or IE, and the website loads up without any problem. So its a Chrome specific issue and has nothing to do with DNS Servers or your Internet connection.

The support page on the Chrome website suggests that you clear your browser cache, delete the cookies and scan your computer for malicious software to fix the issue.

Well, that may not fix your problem because the issue is not “malware” but a built-in Chrome setting that’s possibly preventing certain websites from opening up in Chrome.

When you visit a webpage (like a search results page), Google Chrome will pre-fetch the IP addresses of all websites that are listed on that page. Since the browser has the IP addresses of all the links in advance, DNS pre-fetching ensures that any links that may you click on that webpage will load faster. However, when pre-fetching fails, something that’s not very uncommon, you may get the “link broken” error.

You are more likely to see such an error when you are trying to open a website that you have never visited before.

The fix is simple –  go to Tools > Options (or Preferences on a Mac) > Under the Hood and uncheck the setting that says “Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance.” This might increase the loading time of certain pages by a few microseconds but you won’t at least see that misleading error message.

Related: When you cannot open a specific website

Are Web Pages Not Opening in Google Chrome?

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Google’s growth animated and digital teddy bears storming Worthing seafront in this week’s roundup

“Meet Google. The noun that became a verb.” That’s how this little film starts, going on to list all the vast projects that the company is involved at the moment using lovely animation. Made in the style of the viral “Did you know?” videos, it gives you a pretty good impression why people call Google a “frenemy”. So is Google Darth Vader? Or just a business?

Remember Charlie Brooker’s parody of TV news reporting recently? Here’s the American equivalent. Enjoy the Onion ripping apart up-to-the-minute coverage of some irrelevant story that has no ramifications whatsoever. Excellent – but not to be watched if you dislike strong language or dead fish.

Finally, we have teddy bears invading Worthing seafront. They hop above the streets, play with some cars, and kill some pigeons – all the stuff that you do when you are an animated teddy bear in a viral video fantasy from a rather talented young man.

1 The Beast File- Google (HUNGRY BEAST)
If you want to know why they call Google a “frenemy,” watch this info-animation from Hungry Beast for Australian TV channel ABC.

2 BMW S1000 RR. Dinner for RR
You know that conjuring trick where you pull out the tablecloth so quickly and smoohtly that dinner remains undisturbed? Well, BMW has tried it with a food bank and one of their motorbikes, and …

3 The Handsome Men’s Club
A post-Oscars Jimmy Kimmel gets Robert Downey Jr, Sting, Patrick Dempsey, Tad Dampsey, Ethan Hawke, Ben Affleck, Matt Demon and others to make fun of Handsome Men – that is, themselves. Really kicks of with when Lenny starts to sing. So who is most handsome?

4 Turning into Michael Jackson
Amazing transformation: Why beauty operations? Séverine takes you on a tour using make up and scotch tape to look like Michael Jackson!

5 Teddys storm Worthing sea front
Cutie of the week! Watch an endless row of teddy bears taking over the seafront of Worthing. Internet creativity as its best.

6 Iron Man 2 Trailer 2
Marvel Comics meet blockbuster featuring machines, special effects, Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson and Mickey Rourke to perform a film fest coming in May. But the trailer has already made it into the charts.

7 TRON: LEGACY – Official Trailer
Another movie in which technology plays the main role, and this time its a father and son tale that puts us back into 1980s cyberspace. Oh, but in 3D. Is that enough?

8 NEW E*TRADE Baby – Girlfriend
Animated human baby boy and baby girl have a serious relationship talk. What happened last night? And was that milkoholic Lindsay there as well? Very well made ad, deserves to go viral.

9 PS22 Chorus “LISZTOMANIA” Phoenix
You think Glee is TV fiction? Than watch this! Here is the pop video of the week featuring the elementary school chorus from Public School 22 in Graniteville, Staten Island, who cover Lisztomania by Phoenix.

10 Captain Kirk deals with a strange alien culture
Looking at the screen, Spock and Kirk can’t really believe their eyes. Or ears.

Source: Mostly taken by Unruly Media, but heavily inspired by Mag.ma. Compiled from data gathered at 18:00 on 11 March 2010.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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Micro-blogging service Twitter’s user growth has almost levelled off since September 2009, according to a study

Twitter’s growth seems to have lost its momentum, according to a new study.

Growth in the micro-blogging service’s number of users peaked at nearly 20% last April, but had dropped down to 0.15% in December 2009, says a study by Barracuda Networks.

Recent web analytics had already suggested that Twitter had reached its peak, as Twitter.com recorded a traffic high in July 2009 and has never reached that level since. According to Compete, Twitter reached 23.5 million users in August 2009 and stayed put. However, as Twitter client applications have grown and have become a bigger percentage of Twitter’s user base, the numbers didn’t necessarily reflect the actual situation of the micro-blogging service. By using the growth in Twitter users, instead of the site’s traffic, the Barracuda study now puts things into perspective.

Strong growth in user numbers of 21.17% in April dropped to 10.95% in July and to 0.82% in September, and has ever been under 1% since – 0.58% in October, 0.34 in November and finally 0.15 in December. The accounts deleted by month also was growing, from 3.36% in April to 12.03% in October from which they peaked off to 8.48% and 8.14% percent in November and December.

To get these figures, Barracuda analysed more than 19 million Twitter accounts for frequency and content of tweets, user-to-user interactions, and each account’s overall activity level. “We have been monitoring Twitter for more than one and a half years and keep track of the public timeline, and any new account of the public timeline,” says lead researcher Nidhi Shah.

Barracuda’s chief research officer, Paul Judge, explains the stagnation of Twitter with the end of “The Red Carpet Era”. Twitter shows “a very concentrated growth spurt during the early part of 2009 – a period that we define as the ‘Twitter Red Carpet Era’. Twitter users came online to follow their favorite celebrities. The most famous people have already joined Twitter, so I don’t think they’ll see another growth spurt like that,” says Judge. From November 2008 to April 2009, several big celebrities, including Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and John Mayer, joined Twitter.

In comparison, the number of Facebook users has been rising continously. According to Facebook, today 50% of the 400 million active users log on to Facebook in any given day, with more than 35 million users updating their status and more than 60 million status updates posted each day.

Another Twitter study published by US web analytics company RJMetrics last month seems to confirm Barracuda’s report. It says that Twitter has 75 million users, an estimation that Barracuda roughly agrees upon, with a large percentage of accounts being inactive.

According to RJMetrics’ data, about 80% of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times, about 40% of accounts have never sent a single tweet, and 25% of accounts have no followers.

RJMetrics concludes that “the past six months have shown steady decline in the number of new account registrations”, but the number of new users a month is currently at about 6.2 million. Their report doesn’t say anything on the number of deleted accounts.

Twitter, which has not yet commented on the reports, recently announced that it had hit 50 million tweets a day. According to Barracuda’s report, users are becoming more active on Twitter, with the most active users being those with about 1,000 followers.

According to internal documents leaked to TechCrunch, the company’s forecast that it would go “from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to 1 billion in 2013″.

Until now, Twitter itself has not released precise figures on its growth. Recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone posted an email newsletter saying that it had recorded 1,500% growth in the number of registered users but did not specify the timespan.

The reports certainly will prompt several questions. Has Twitter reached its peak? Is Twitter a micro-blogging service where only marketing people tweet to each other? Was it overhyped? How relevant is it anyway?

One thing is certain, the days of micro-blogging might not look as rosy as they did last spring, but they are far from over.

Google is giving tweets a visibility they never had before. After the launch of Google’s real-time search in December, Twitter’s traffic rose 9% from December 2009 to January 2010, according to ComScore.

Twitter’s number of users may not have grown, but with the Google deal it became more important than ever.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Print publishers are hopeful the iPad will hit the streets next month.

There are already several test examples out there. Some blend print and online as BERG’s version for the innovative Swedish publishing house Bonnier shows, others ues a more online approach as the video of De Telegraaf shows.

Publishers are hoping the iPad will encourage people to read digitally with users willing to pay for content. It is also hoped that the iPad will be used more in people’s leisure time so it will attract different advertisers.

A question which isn’t answered is if publishers are ready to serve another platform, in a time when workforces are not getting any bigger, who is to shoulder the extra work?

Maybe the version of De Telegraaf therefore isn’t the most thrilling, but the most realistic. As Robert Andrews of paidContent UK points out rightly about De Telegraaf’s approach: “It only renders Telegraaf.nl’s existing website on the gadget.”

Have a look at the different iPad versions, and decide which one is your favorite.

1 Wired and Adobe decided to go for a deconstructed magazine version. They favored on scrolling down instead of flipping sideways, but magazine sides are still the entry point. In addition, they show some new possibilities for advertisers.

2 The Swedish publisher Bonnier R&D asked BERG to help with the transition of the print reading experience to a digital format. BERG focused on maintaining the relaxed and curated features of printed magazines, and compared to Wired it feels more like an app, indeed. In addition they invent a couple of new ways of navigation through “heating up” to select all, cut, copy and paste, among others.

3 The official iPad commercial of Apple shortly shows a really short glimpse of the New York Times application at second 0.6. Developed in house, it has also favorites a more curated feel than the website.

4 Sports Illustrated version for the iPad was one of the first and is a collaboration between Wonderfactory and Time.

5 The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf transferred its website to the iPad, however this might be the most realistic approach for most publishers in terms of work flow.

Which interactive iPad design is most convincing?

Popularity: 4% [?]

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The luck of the Irish will be with all of us on Wednesday the 17th in honor of St Patrick’s Day, so it was kind of odd when we received Tupperware from Geek Squad that included a bag of uncooked rice and beef jerky for the holiday. We were left scratching our heads – what is techie about this? But after we dug deeper, we realized it was a survival guide for St. Patrick’s Day. In case you get too festive that day – these seven steps will save you, when you drop your cellphone into a big glass of ale.

Step1: Turn off phone and remove battery

Step 2: Dry phone (inside and out) with a cloth

Step3: Check if you have beef Jerky or uncooked rice

If you have Beef Jerky follow the next few steps –

Step 4: Take the silica packet out of the jerky bag

Step 5: Take airtight container and place the phone and silica packet inside

Step 6: Seal the container and leave it overnight

Step 7: Eat jerky in nervous panicky way hoping cellphone isn’t dead

Step 8: Put the battery in the phone and turn it on

If you want to use uncooked rice –

Step 4: Take and airtight container and pour the uncooked rice inside

Step 5: put your phone in the rice

Follow Step 6 and Step 7 above.

Step 8: Use left over unused rice to make sushi

There you have it one nice and dry phone!

Popularity: 5% [?]

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The Joos Orange is a waterproof and Versatile “Personal Solar Appliance.” The JOOS Orange promises that it can make more power than any other personal solar charger on the market today. As a matter of fact, it claims that it can produce unto 20x more, and with their optional reflector kit – even 30 times more. It will deliver more than 2.5 hours of cell phone talk time for every hour of charging time and it has the capability of charging existing personal solar power devices. This is not the most attractive looking thing, but it certainly is very helpful when you need to charge something and don’t have access to an electrical outlet. It works with a dead battery and can be charged by USB, and it also works in low-light conditions.  The Joos Orange will retail for $99.95.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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If the Internet were a classroom and all the different social websites were students, this is how a group photo of that class might have looked like.

You can also download a landscape version of this graphic directly from Buzz. See some more infographics.

The Internet Classroom

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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It is always inspiring to read stories of people who may never have had an Internet connection but are still using the power of Internet to find clients from across the globe.

Meet Samson – he drives an auto-rickshaw in the Souther Indian city of Chennai and has a proper website where his prospective clients can read more about his services and where they find him.

Samson checks his email every week and says the best way to reach him is text:

I can usually be found outside of the Taj Comorandel Hotel, please just walk down the ramp to the street and ask for Samson! I can also be contacted by phone or text message at any time. If you would like to arrange a time for me to meet you before you travel to Chennai then why not send me a text?

Maybe a web-savvy friend is maintaining Samson’s site but now meet Devesh Mishra, a taxi driver from the North Indian city of Varanasi who gets hundreds of emails every week just because of a video that he uploaded on to YouTube.

The story of Devesh is quite interesting. He wanted to advertise his taxi service on the Internet but didn’t have the funds and know-how. One of his clients from Switzerland recorded a video of him and uploaded it on to YouTube.

The video has received more than 25k views and, because of Universal search, it also appears on the first page of Google for queries like “Indian Taxi Driver.”

There are probably more such inspirational stories. Sean Blagsvedt, who was earlier part of the Microsoft India Research group, started an online jobs portal — BabaJob.com – for drivers, maids, cooks and other low-income jobs in India.

Of the 66,000+ people who are currently registered as job-seekers at BabaJobs.com, lot of them may have never touched a computer in their life or they may not even know how to read and write but they will still find work through the Internet. Amazing!

Thanks Suhel for your tip.

Taxi Driver in India Uses YouTube to Find Customers

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Popularity: 7% [?]

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