While this isn’t quite bad enough to merit a “dude, your Dell is on fire” part deux, it’s a pretty frightful example of the hazard modern batteries (of any kind) represent. A Consumerist reader reports that her year-old Dell Mini 9 recently popped, “hissed and sizzled” as it filled her room with smoke and tarnished her fine wooden flooring. Judging from the fallout pictures (available after the break), we’d say the culprit for this Mini fire (oh!) was the battery pack, which again reminds us how badly we need to improve our energy storage technologies. Dell has been quick to remedy the situation with an upgraded laptop being sent over to the young lady and the melted machine packed off to the labs for inspection, though there’s no mention of compensation for the owner’s scarred floor and mind.
Continue reading Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor
The whole “man, how time flies” thing feels a little played out, but we definitely just heard the Pavilion dv2 say as much to the Wind U100. Believe it or not, those two machines were just a couple of the legions that ushered us into a netbook-crazed 2009, and now DisplaySearch has the figures that prove what we’ve all been thinking: netbooks are the bees knees. According to their research, shipments of low-cost, miniaturized laptops shot up 103 percent year-over-year; compare that to the 5 percent uptick in the conventional laptop market, and you’ll start to get a feel for the shifting trend. Potentially more amazing is the revenue analysis, which found that netbooks experienced a 72 percent rise in year-over-year revenue growth while all other mobile computers saw a loss. It’s tough to say if the momentum can be stopped, but if folks have continued to buy these things despite the limited CPU options and lackluster multimedia performance, we suspect there isn’t anything those angered CULV alternatives can do to stop the inevitable rise to stardom.
Zynga’s massively successful moneymaking machine is about to get another way to reach its millions of avid users. Today, the company is starting to test SMS notifications, allowing a small number of users to receive updates directly to their mobile phones. The first 50 TechCrunch readers to sign up here will be able to try it out for themselves, though it’s limited to Mafia Wars only for now. It’s a feature that’s going to be good news to the game’s millions of addicts and also represents a very important strategic move for the company. Because it’s one more thing that Zynga won’t have to rely on Facebook for.
Zynga’s ties with Facebook run deep. They now share some of the same investors, including Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies which has poured as much as $400 million into Facebook and just led a $180 million round in Zynga. Zynga is rumored to be Facebook’s largest advertiser. And Facebook’s viral features have played a huge role in helping Zynga rise to prominence. But despite all of this, it’s in Zynga’s best interest to keep as much control over its own games as possible.
The team behind Aol-acquired Sphere, Tony Conrad and Tim Young, are starting their next company. The company is in stealth – there no website yet and it only has a working name, PumpkinHead. But they’ve raised $800,000 in an angel round to fund development.
The angel round includes Aol Ventures, True Ventures (Conrad is a partner there), Scott Kurnit, Founders Collective, Radar Partners (Doug Mackenzie & Kevin Compton) and David Mahoney.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the pleasure to write about iPhone / iPod touch apps from Tapbots. First there was Weightbot, a beautifully designed app for tracking your weight. Next came Convertbot, a unit converter calculator that featured an innovative and extremely useful interface. Now Tapbots has introduced a third app to their stable of products; Pastebot [US$1.99, iTunes Link], which is a combination of clipboard storage and (with a companion Mac app called Pastebot Sync) inter-platform cut and paste.
Launching the app brings you directly into the Clipboard. As with all of the Tapbots apps, the user interface is not only functional, but a treat to the eyes. To add items to the clipboard, you simply use the iPhone’s copy and paste function to copy something. It can be text or a graphic, a URL or a photo. When you copy the item, then launch Pastebot, the item is automatically added to the Clipboard. The Clipboard items have a frame around them with a small circle up in the top right corner. When that circle turns blue (it looks like a blue LED), the clipboard item is selected and ready to perform some action on. Tapping again slides a small toolbar out of the bottom of the frame.
Are you finished with your Christmas shopping? Like most people, there’s probably not enough time in the day to work, hang out with the family and friends, and then actually do shopping. If you’re missing the perfect gift for someone and you’re getting down to the last few days, Apple wants to make your life easier.
Apple has had an “Express Shopping” service since 2006 at the Apple Stores. They take a limited number of Apple products and keep them in a roped-off area. If you need to purchase a MacBook Pro, for example, you wander into the area and one of the Apple Store employees helps you to make your purchase and get you out the door as quickly as possible.
Whoa. A judge for the The U.S. Court of Appeals has just upheld an earlier verdict forbidding Microsoft from selling both Office and Word after January 11th, 2010. This suit, which was filed by i4i, a creator of a XML plugin for Microsoft Office, alleged that Microsoft’s Open XML format, which uses the DOCX and XLSX extensions that have been a part of Office on the Mac since Office 2008, violated i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. The court ruled in favor of i4i back in May, and Microsoft today lost their appeal, with the judge telling them that they don’t have the right to sell the software as-is.
Microsoft now either has to attempt to appeal the ruling again, or settle with i4i (read as: “Ballmer has to write a big honking check”), and is currently considering further legal options. The company is also working to remove these features from Microsoft Office (possibly in time to release new versions of the old software on January 11th), and this ruling doesn’t affect the upcoming Office 2010 for Windows. We’ll keep you posted if anything further develops.
Whoa. A judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals has just upheld an earlier verdict forbidding Microsoft from selling both Office and Word after January 11th, 2010. This suit, which was filed by i4i, a creator of a XML plugin for Microsoft Office, alleged that Microsoft’s Open XML format, which uses the DOCX and XLSX extensions that have been a part of Office on the Mac since Office 2008, violated i4i’s patented XML handling algorithms. The court ruled in favor of i4i back in May, and Microsoft today lost their appeal, with the judge telling them that they don’t have the right to sell the software as-is.
Microsoft now either has to attempt to appeal the ruling again, or settle with i4i (read as: “Ballmer has to write a big honking check”), and is currently considering further legal options. The company is also working to remove these features from Microsoft Office (possibly in time to release new versions of the old software on January 11th), and this ruling doesn’t affect the upcoming Office 2010 for Windows. We’ll keep you posted if anything further develops.
‘Tis the season shop until your brains melt (or skip it all entirely, depending on your interpretation of the term holiday). In that spirit, for the next few weeks we’ll be rounding up a dozen daily deals courtesy our friends at DealNews.com. Each afternoon tune in to TUAW for this handy summary. Keep in mind that while our posts will live on, the deals won’t. Each is lovingly generated by the deal-bot every day, so get ‘em while they’re hot. Enjoy!
iTunes Music Store: [iPhone / iPod Apps] Wild West Pinball for iPhone / iPod touch downloads for free, more
iPhone customers using O2 in the UK are three days into connectivity issues, according to Sky News. Many have been seeing the error message, “could not activate cellular data network.” It’s bound to happen once and a while, but such widespread outages … and for so long … have users rather cranky.
Today it seems that O2 has identified the issue and is working on a fix: “We are aware of an issue currently impacting data access for some of our customers,” they told Sky News Online. “We have identified a fault with the allocation of IP addresses and are working to resolve this as quickly as possible. We apologise to any affected customers.”