FocuSoft Tech Blog

FocuSoft Tech Blog

Bose SoundDock 10 weighs in with $599 of iPod amplification

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 12:20 PM PDT

fcf7e07addk 10 1.jpg Bose SoundDock 10 weighs in with $599 of iPod amplification
So Bose is back to the iPod dock scene a big way — and we do mean big. The new SoundDock 10 weighs in at 19 pounds and measure 10-inches deep, leaving room for a good-sized woofer, 52-inches of winding, integrated waveguide channels and a pair of Bose “Twiddlers” up top. The Twiddlers are apparently a patented combination of highs and mids, and the new waveguide is an effort to shrink existing Bose tech down to size. The results are positively Bose-ey: not a precise or flat reproduction of music, but usually pretty pleasing to our untrained ears, with enough volume to fill a big room. The SoundDock 10 sounds “large” in some ways for its size, but at the same time you can still hear the limitations of the boxed-in form factor. Just as interesting is Bose’s interchangeable dock: the standard iPhone / iPod dock can be switched out for a $149 A2DP Bluetooth receiver — and docks supporting other audio players could be forthcoming based on market demand. The unit hits the streets on September 21 with a Bose-esque $599 pricetag. Check out a virtual teardown of the dock after the break.

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Bose SoundDock 10 weighs in with $599 of iPod amplification originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TC50: LearnVest Is A Personal Financial Guide For Women

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:44 AM PDT

1bc854ad3150x250.jpg TC50: LearnVest Is A Personal Financial Guide For Women

Now more than ever, personal finance education and help is crucial to anyone’s financial health. Mint.com, a former TechCrunch 40 company who won the top prize at the conference, has grown incredibly since its launch and was recently acquired by Intuit for $170 million. TechCrunch50 startup LearnVest is serving a different purpose when it comes to online finances; the startup focuses on helping users, particularly women, organize their finances and learn how to become financially savvy. It’s kind of like the online version of financial planner Suze Orman.

When you first log in to LearnVest, the site will ask you a series of questions about your financial health (i.e. how much credit card debt do you have), you life stages (i.e. do you rent, are you planning a family soon, do you own a house) and your financial education level (i.e. have you checked your credit score lately). LearnVest will use all this information to diagnose your financial health and education level and will then give you a snapshot of what you need to learn and improve.

LearnVest will then give you a customized plan of things you need to do to do and read via a checklist. Sort of like a cheat sheet, the checklist will help you navigate a range of issues such as getting out of credit card debt, budgeting for a wedding, buying a house and much more. As you complete the tasks on the list, you check off each box and earn points for your improvements. Points will give you status in LearnVest’s community and you can eventually trade in points for rewards.

As you keep logging on to LearnVest, the site will be completely customized for your financial profile, providing you with news articles that relate to your specific financial goals. LearnVest also aims to be a social community of sorts, where users can ask questions on discussion forums to other users and to experts as well, although I’m not sure how many women will want to share their financial woes with others.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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TC50: LearnVest Is A Personal Financial Guide For Women

NEC, Casio and Hitachi make cell phone op merger official, announce international plans

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:42 AM PDT

c4049bb3b7itachi.jpg NEC, Casio and Hitachi make cell phone op merger official, announce international plans

The first rumors started spreading about two weeks ago, and it was officially announced yesterday: Major Japanese cell phone makers Hitachi, NEC and Casio are merging their mobile phone operations to become Japan’s No. 2 maker (following Sharp). The name of the new venture will be “NEC Casio Mobile Communications”.

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NEC, Casio and Hitachi make cell phone op merger official, announce international plans

TC50: Cocodot Is The Stylish, Prettier, More Social Evite

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:31 AM PDT

5f2e976fca50x250.jpg TC50: Cocodot Is The Stylish, Prettier, More Social Evite

Online event planning and invitation platform Evite was on the forefront of innovation—ten years ago. TechCrunch50 startup Cocodot is hoping to be the Evite of this generation of web technology, serving a style-conscious, eco-friendly event platform that people and brands can use to create an online presence for celebrations.

Cocodot’s platform, which is targeted towards women, is a one-stop-shop for event planning and invitations. You can create a high resolution, chic, stylish invitation (that can be printed as well), a vertical event pages, guest management tools, seating charts, and a directory for event planning vendors. When you create event, you can build an event homepage that aims to be a social conversation hub. Once you create an invitation, you can import your contact lists from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and other contact managers and email services. Cocodot also lets you send links to the event homepage and invitation to Facebook, directly from the platform.

Cocodot is also getting into the online greeting space, letting user create a simple “happy birthday” or “Thank you” online card. The graphics and styles are actually pretty impressive. Users can adjust color and text, move the graphics and text and even offers a “copy concierge” to help people think of thoughtful sayings.

Unsurprisingly, Cocodot is going after the wedding industry by providing high-end printable online invitations and a event management platform. Cocodot also lets you embed custom event widgets on other sites and features a variety of design-friendly templates. Cocodot plans to make money from subscriptions and per use fees and will sell virtual goods. The startup is also positioning itself to be eco-friendly, by saving paper from sending out invitations. Cocodot will make money via ad revenue, premium features, virtual gifts and through product lines and licensing designs.

Cocodot was launched by former MySpace CMO Shawn Gold and raised just under $1 million of seed funding earlier this summer from investors like Anthem Venture Partners and William Morris’ Mail Room Fund.

Cocodot is similar to Pinng, which we wrote about here.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Lior Zorea, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

BH: I don’t want to like this but I think the world needs this. The exisiting invitation tools are not sufficient and this could take off.

TO: You think about a company like Hallmark, its a huge business opportunity, and I think you are thinking like a business, will probably be successful.

SD: I think you should try to differentiate yourself a little more. What happens after the event is booked?

LZ: I like what you guys are doing. How do you get consumer mind share out ther for the product, particularly in teh case of weddings.

A: Every invitation is virally marketed because its branded with Cocodut. We are going to do partnernships with other sites like DailyCandy and pursue a revenue share. We are going after PR agencies and companies that don’t like Evite and are using PDF’s, not taking advantage of he efficiencies in the digital medium.

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Information provided by CrunchBase

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TC50: Cocodot Is The Stylish, Prettier, More Social Evite

Direct2Drive offering $5 game downloads

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:30 AM PDT

Archos 5 Internet Tablet makes an honest PMP out of Android

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:30 AM PDT

fd3fe06669nds 02.jpg Archos 5 Internet Tablet makes an honest PMP out of Android

Android has become many things to many people, but high-powered media devices haven’t latched on to the OS just yet. Much of it has to do with the Android’s immaturity: from what we hear, it doesn’t even support hardware graphics acceleration, much less embrace multimedia and games. Archos has punched through that barrier by porting over its existing media-happy application layer from Linux to make good use of the 800MHz OMAP3440 processor they’ve stuffed inside the brand new (much leaked) Archos 5 Internet Tablet. The tablet runs a 4.8-inch 800 x 480 screen, and can pump out 720p video (including WMV and H.264) over HDMI. Because it’s Archos’ own special sauce, the device also supports protected WMV and protected WMA (hooray PlaysForSure), a rarity for Linux. With the optional DVR Station the device can do VGA TV recording, though you’ll probably want to spring for one of the beefy HDD models, which offer capacity up to 500GB, but double the girth of the basic 0.4-inch thick flash player. There’s also 802.11n WiFi, a bit of a rarity in portable devices like this, and quite a treat for 2.4GHz-addled city dwellers.

But that’s all pretty regular Archos-ey stuff. The newness for Archos comes in the form of Android, which has been fairly seamlessly melded with the Archos layer — which hovers over the vanilla Android install when needed. The OS scales up pretty nicely to 800 x 480, which is a relief because the touchscreen keyboard is a bit of a chore with the 5’s resistive touchscreen. Since it’s not a Google-blessed device, you’ll have to score a copy of Gmail on your own time, but the regular Market is available if you want to risk going around the 5-optimized AppsLib store. Several third party apps are included out of the gate, including ThinkFree Mobile, which should be updated to allow for document editing in the near future. When plugged into a dock and paired with an optional mini-QWERTY keypad (or any regular Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) the 5 becomes a rather nice way to surf the internet on your TV. It’s missing in-browser Flash, but there should be an update to rectify that soon. Out of the house the tablet offers a high-end GPS experience, including hugemongous birds eye photo maps of major cities, and can tether with a 3G phone over Bluetooth for a bit of data. So, Archos 5 might not be Android’s killer device, mainly because it isn’t a phone and doesn’t make for pleasurable mobile data entry or consumption. Still, it’s doing stuff with media that the relatively sluggish crop of Android handsets have failed at so far, and hopefully will spur the community to greater heights. The player is available as of today, with prices ranging from $250 to $440, not to mention accessories galore. Check out videos of the tablet in action after the break.

Gallery: Archo 5 hands-on

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Archos 5 Internet Tablet makes an honest PMP out of Android originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wacom Bamboo multitouch pen tablet spotted by Mr. Blurrycam

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:10 AM PDT

8dbc905427uch 01.jpg Wacom Bamboo multitouch pen tablet spotted by Mr. Blurrycam
It’s been awhile since we’ve seen a new tablet from Wacom. In the meantime, the company has given us a digital DJ interface, but not what we really crave — a new Bamboo tablet with multi-touch support. So what do we have here? A brave tipster (who wishes to remain anonymous) has turned us onto some blurrycam photos suggesting that such a tablet is indeed coming out. Might the above pictured Bamboo Touch see the light of day with the impending release of Windows 7? Stranger things have happened! More photographic evidence is yours to behold after the break.

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Wacom Bamboo multitouch pen tablet spotted by Mr. Blurrycam originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CTL reveals new 10.1-inch 2go Classmate PC E10 netbook

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:04 AM PDT

It’s ironic to me that such a small netbook has such a long name. The long name aside, the new 10.1-inch 2go Classmate PC E10 netbook has been revealed and will replace the previous netbooks from the manufacturer. The device has a 10.1-inch LCD and 160GB of storage.

classmatee10 540x430

The older Classmate that is being replaced had a smaller 8.9-inch screen and 30GB of storage. The new machine is aimed at schoolchildren in K-8 grade and is available with Windows XP or Ubuntu Linux and will be offered with Windows 7 once it launched next month.

The machine has a keyboard that is 90% of full size and offers advanced wireless connectivity. Above the LCD is an integrated 1.3MP webcam and the system is ruggedized and water resistant. Power for the machine is from a 6-cell battery promising 5.5 hours of run time per charge. The system can be upgraded to 2GB of RAM and 1GB is standard. The processor is an Intel Atom 1.6GHz unit and the system starts at $449.

Relevant Entries on SlashGear

CTL reveals new 10.1 inch 2go Classmate PC E10 netbook

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CTL reveals new 10.1-inch 2go Classmate PC E10 netbook

Activision mulling plug-and-play Guitar Hero TV games in the future

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT

f9f4d03954gh.jpg Activision mulling plug and play Guitar Hero TV games in the future

If you really think about it, it makes sense that future installments of Guitar Hero and other games like that could basically come packaged like those Jakks Pacific plug-and-play TV games. It'd eliminate the need for a console altogether. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick realizes this, and says that his company is considering the possibilities.

Kotick said the following at a recent technology conference:

“I think what the untethered Guitar Hero does is it maybe equals the playing field a little bit more and gives you leverage with first parties on downloadable content and the business model… [Y]ou should expect to see many of our products to be playable on the television independent of a console.”

Kotick also noted, however, that there's plenty left to do with actual consoles, "saying they still provide enhanced online experiences and better production value," according to IGN.

But you can imagine, for instance, an early Guitar Hero game stripped down a bit and loaded onto memory inside the actual guitar, a guitar which would have a simple AV output cord to your TV. Something like that isn't probably too far off.

Expect Console-less Guitar Hero from Activision [IGN]

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Activision mulling plug-and-play Guitar Hero TV games in the future

42 Shocking Discoveries the Newly-Upgraded Hubble Didn’t Make [Photoshop Contest]

Posted: 15 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT

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