Linux-powered VoIP uber-phone does WiFi video conferencing

from Engadget by Darren Murph

We're not sayin' we'd put one of these bad boys in our living room or anything, but adorning the board room table with a four-line VoIP phone that sports a built-in 3.5-inch LCD, webcam, and Zach Morris-style handset wouldn't be a half bad use of resources. The SysMaster Tornado M20 uber-phone does a lot more than hold down IP calls, as it also manages to handle video conferencing, IPTV, video- / audio-on-demand, internet radio, voicemail, email / chat / news, and local weather information. This conglomerate even touts a dual-core processor, 32MB of RAM, and 32MB of flash memory, and the integrated Ethernet jack, WiFi, RCA audio outs, and Linux-powered UI are all welcome additions. Of course, we've no idea if you can rig up Tetris on this thing and use the 4, 8, and 6 keys to control your pieces, but it'll only cost you $260 and a tick of your time to find out.

 

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System X: Ross Lovegrove’s modular fluorescent lighting

from Engadget by Joshua Topolsky

It’s been a long time coming, but someone has finally developed a fluorescent lighting array that isn’t completely hideous — just somewhat hideous. Shakespearian actor (see photo) Ross Lovegrove’s diabolically named System X (designed for Japanese manufacturer Yamagiwa) allows for all sorts of interesting and “artistic” combinations of the X-shaped bulbs, permitting large, linked arrangements, or simple, singular set ups… or circles. Truly a minor development in the de-uglifying of offices everywhere.

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Perry Ellis gives away cheapo USB flash drive

from Engadget by Joshua Topolsky

You would think that Perry Ellis, a “respectable” department store clothing maker, could afford something half-way decent to hand out to its customers — but you would be wrong. Like many designer products, after you get through the ornate packaging and custom plastic box, it’s just cheap junk from China. In this case, that cheap junk happens to be a 64MB (that’s right, megabyte) USB flash drive. Of course, you’ll be thanking Perry when you’ve got a place to store one big Photoshop file.

[Thanks, kristofer]

Xcavator.net: Visual Stock Photo Search

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Xcavator.net is a stock photo search portal based on visual search technology.

Xcavator.net provides natural and intuitive interactive search for stock photography providing buyers with a browsing experience based on both visual content and keywords. The key to the visual search capabilities is the portal’s color and image search engines, powered by CogniSign Intelligent Image Recognition Technology.

In laymen’s terms, Xcavator.net offers three types of interrelated search options. Tradition search delivers photos based on tagged keywords and is much the same as others in the stock photography market. Where Xcavator.net gets interesting is in color and image search. Xcavator.net allows color search matching, for example if a stock photograph was needed that matched a brochure or web site in terms of colors, users are able to refine the photo search to those colors by utilizing a color chart or by inserting the exact hexadecimal color into a box. Image search provides similar photos based on a user uploaded image or via a drag and drop of images found in an initial search.

Xcavator.net competes with other visual search sites including Riya, Pixsy and PicSearch. Xcavator isn’t necessarily better than any of their competitors, but different. The color and related search capabilities don’t have the same level of user enjoyment as Riya’s search features do, yet Xcavator.net’s features feel more practical and are definitely more finely targeted at niche stock photo search.

Xcavator.net recently signed a deal with iStockphoto that delivers 1.8 Million images from 38,000 contributors into the Xcavator.net search database. The site comes out of Beta on July 2.

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iChat display sharing removed from Leopard?

from ZDNet Blogs by Jason D. O’Grady

The first Leopard iChat demo video from Macworld Expo in January Apple shows a feature called “display sharing:” Narrator: Screen Sharing lets you remotely observe and control your buddy’s display from the other room or another time zone. Initiate a screen sharing session and iChat immediately kicks off an audio chat so that you can talk through simultaneous control of a single Mac desktop. Create Web sites together, make travel plans or review that big presentation. iChat with display sharing opens a whole new world of collaboration possibilities. Curiously display sharing is not mentioned in the Leopard demo video (Apple, YouTube) of iChat from WWDC 2007. The new demo mentions “iChat Theater” but not a peep about “iChat display sharing.”…

"I have 250,000 users, now what?"

from Techmeme

“I have 250,000 users, now what?” — Craig Ulliott is a web developer in Philadelphia, PA, USA. 3 weeks ago, he built the Where I’ve Been Facebook application, which lets you create a map for your profile page showing visitors where you’ve traveled. Cool experiment, right?

Source: Inside Facebook
Author: Justin Smith
Link: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2007/06/21/i-have…

killer video search engine (ClipBlast)

from Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger by Robert Scoble

I’ve been looking for a great video search engine that includes all the videos that I’ve done. I’ve been to Dabble, Blinkx, YouTube, MeeVee, Truveo, and others. None have all my videos with the latest videos represented. Dabble is pretty close, actually, but Clipblast really blew them all away. Visit Clipblast and search on my last name, or on a topic you know I’ve covered like “Google Reader” to find the videos I’ve done of the Google Reader team. It’s really great.

I just learned about it from Gary Baker, Founder/CEO who is sitting next to me (I put a short video of him up on my Kyte channel, although that was a bit choppy because the Wifi sucks here).

Anyway, here’s the highlights.

1. Their engine has been spidering the video world for 3.5 years.
2. Three million professionally-done video clips with five million additional of user generated clips.
3. The current interface on Clipblast went live in April.

They also crawl engines like YouTube and MySpace and Daily Motion. Blip, Veoh, Brightcove, etc. are all crawled for their latest video.

Stuff they are strong on, according to Gary:

1. News video from local, national, international sources.
2. Video podcasting and video blogging
3. Newspapers that are putting video out, like New York Times and Los Angeles Times.
4. Commercials.

“Our ultimate goal is to get viewers and more views to the video.”

I’ll try it out more, but on a few minutes first look it really is great. What do you think?

Personally this is one I was happy to see before Mike Arrington and the TechCrunch crew. I have a feeling Mike will write about this pretty soon.