By Cynthia Herbert :: 11:47 AM
Book retailer Barnes & Noble is offering a special deal this week on its Nook HD+ tablet, the larger of its two tablet offerings.
The company had been including a credit of $50 toward Nook content, but has now sweetened the deal by including a free Nook Simple Touch E Ink e-reader, which usually retails for $79.
The Nook HD+ offer starts at $269 for the 16GB tablet model, and runs from March 24th through the 30th.
This deal is not surprising for the company. It had a lackluster set of sales numbers from the holidays, and obviously is eager to get some inventory moving. Also, the e-reader is due for a refresh soon, and this is a good way to get the warehouse shelves cleared out before new technology arrives.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 10:38 PM
By Paul Thomson :: 3:11 PM
Joining the ranks of Apple and Samsung, it looks like Google has now thrown its hat into the ring for the development of a smart watch product.
According to reports published by the Financial Times, the search giant is developing a wearable watch-like device out of their Android development unit. Unlike the breakthrough product of the moment, Google Glass, this watch is not being developed in Google’s X Laboratory, but likely in conjunction with a hardware partner on the operating system side of the house, possibly Motorola.
The quote from the Financial Times article:
“While Glass is being created in its X Lab, home to experimental “moonshot†projects such as the self-driving car, Google’s smart watch is being developed by its Android unit, according to a person briefed on the project, to act as an extension to the smartphones using that operating system. The project is separate from Samsung’s efforts, the source said, although there is no indication of when it might launch.â€
Now of course, all of these watch products, Apple’s, Samsung’s, and Google’s, are all rumors at this point. But, back in early October, Google did have a patent for a smart watch approved by the U.S. Patent Office.
The patent describes Google’s proposed smartwatch as having a camera and a clear cover that displays augmented reality information. The patent also outlines wireless network connectivity for the device, as well as a touch-screen interface.
As with all of the other futuristic timepiece rumors floating around, we’ll just have to hold tight and wait this out to see how real it is.
By Gilbert Falso :: 7:17 AM
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is spicing up its search results page for people searches with the help of social media data.
If you search for a person on Bing now, the search engine will also scour LinkedIn for their profile, and bring it up along the right-hand side of the search results if it finds a match. If there is no corresponding social profile for a person, Bing tries to bring up a Wikipedia entry, if one exists. In addition to the social profile, there are also shortcut links to that person’s various social media accounts.
In addition to people, the box on the right, referred to by Bing as the “Snapshot Box” will also work for geographic place searches.
Microsoft’s Richard Qian, lead developer on the Bing search team, released this statement on a blog post:
“Since its introduction in June, we have expanded Satori to include a significantly larger number of entities from more domains with a deeper level of understanding about them. They include people, places, and things which are among the most common searches on Bing. So, whether you’re searching for answers about a celebrity, co-worker, animal, geographic location, or man-made structure, Bing helps you understand the world around you by providing at-a-glance answers about the people, places, and things you care about.”
This is not Bing’s first foray into expanding search results with social media data. The search engine has also entered into a partnership with Facebook to provide the search results on all of the social network’s people searches, and has pulled Facebook profiles into Bing search results.
Screenshot below shows how Bing results include LinkedIn data – in this case, the search was for Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley. Yellow shading is added to show location of Snapshot Box, but does not normally appear on Bing’s search results.
By Cynthia Herbert :: 1:13 PM
E-mail delivery company SendGrid today announced that it has fired its developer evangelist, Adria Richards, after a flap involving her and two developers from another company erupted over the past several days.
Richards, who was attending a Python language conference, PyCon, had objected to the jokes being traded by two male developers seated immediately behind her. They involved words like “dongles,” “forking,” and other innuendo, and were, according to most reports, fairly childish in nature. Richards took a picture of the developers, Tweeted it out with a complaint, which led to the two developers being asked to leave the conference. One of the developers was later fired from his job at mobile game developer Play Haven for his actions.
The firing of the Play Haven employee set the developer world (mostly young and male) off in a firestorm yesterday on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, Reddit, and Twitter. The reaction about Richards’ Tweet and the Play Haven employee’s subsequent firing resonated with this community, and many quickly sought to have Richards terminated from SendGrid as well.
Today, SendGrid has been fighting off a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on its website and email servers. In addition, public threats have been made against the company and against Richards across many social media outlets.
About an hour ago, SendGrid posted the following message on its Facebook page:
“Effective immediately, SendGrid has terminated the employment of Adria Richards. While we generally are sensitive and confidential with respect to employee matters, the situation has taken on a public nature. We have taken action that we believe is in the overall best interests of SendGrid, its employees, and our customers. As we continue to process the vast amount of information, we will post something more comprehensive.”