By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I’ve always aspired to have a video wall, until the thought of all those talking heads and ceaselessly moving images remind me to steer clear of the TV aisle for now. But thanks to video search engine Blinx, I can now have one virtually. You can customize your own video wall (6 screen or 16, you decide), or search the Blinx library. It’s not YouTube, but the video viewer is interesting. And the price is right.

Hint: Mouse over the screens for more info.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I’m a little stunned here. Jeff Hawkins is a hero of mine. He designed the Palm Pilot and made the PDA a viable product category after scores of failures. Even the Treo at one point had many corporate users under its spell. And today when we were told of a new breakthrough announcement and product demo from Jeff himself to tech heavyweights Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, it just had to be good.

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff
A lot will be written about the specs and so on, so I will just cut to the chase. Here are Five reason why Jeff and Palm have really veered into outer space with the ill-fated Foleo:

1. It’s a $499 sub-notebook that runs Linux
2003 is calling on line one. It wants its hardware back Psion on line two: it wants 1996 back.

2. It’s meant to be paired with the Treo
We want to break free of pairings. We want our smartphones smarter, not some 1990s version of hot syncing. So you drag this around to give yourself a larger screen and keyboard.

3. 5 hour battery life
My tiny Sony gets nearly 8 and runs all my office apps, has integrated wireless (cellular and WIFi) and even sports a DVD burner all at about 4 lbs. True it was not $499, but my Audrey was and I can always dust it off and get to work if I have to.

4. You have to press a button to retrieve your email
Hawkins loves one button access. Why it is that most laptoip users acan simply flip open their laptops in hibernate mode and ytsrt getting email without doing a thing. Look Jeff, no hands!

5. Doesn’t Play YouTube Videos or do PowerPoints
But it’s billed as “simple and fun.” Some fun.

We Say: Wow. Palm really blew it. Even the Sony Mylo was better. Source: Palm

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I’m not a DJ and I don’t even play one by day, but I have been known to mix up a podcast or two. Hell, does anyone need a reason to want this? It’s the Belkin TuneSudio, a completely portable mixing board for your iPod. Bottom Line: $249 is not cheap, but if you are getting serious about your mixing, this product is music to our ears. Not yet for sale.

Belkin’s TuneStudio for iPod 5th generation (video) is the first 4-channel audio mixer that lets you create high-quality digital recordings directly onto your iPod. This mixer allows the input of up to four different instruments or audio sources, and records the audio onto your iPod for instant playback.

TuneStudio is compact, portable, and tough enough to withstand life in on the road. Bands can easily attach instruments and microphones to TuneStudio and record jam sessions directly onto an iPod. Podcasters can also use this device to record their shows either in a studio or on location.

Product Page
Source: Belkin

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

We get so caught up in covering products and DRM lawsuits that it’s easy to forget how the Web also makes a great museum for those who have a little too much time on their hands. That’s so 1997 I know, but for every song you download and printer cartridge you buy, there is also the Mad Magazine cover archive and the interactive cassette tape library organized by brand, recording length and tape quality on Tapedeck.org.

Hint: When you visit the site, click on one of the thumbnails for the ultimate close up. (This is the first “high end” tape I ever bought.) Obsolete storage never looked so good.
Source: Tapedeck.org

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

This is silly yet interesting. First some facts about Google Maps: “Each marker and even the speech bubbles with further information cast a shadow on the maps and satellite images. While zooming in on the map, the pixel size of the markers on the screen always stay at the same size. But if their size is seen in relation to their environment they shrink when the user zooms in.”

Basically that knowledge got guy named Aram Bartholl all worked up, and he decided to re-create the map markers in real life. To scale. “The size of the rebuilt red Marker in reality corresponds to the size of a marker in the web interface in max zoom factor of the map.”

See Adam’s Map Project Here
Source: datenform.de
View the Video on YouTube

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

I will say this was not expected by me, but I don’t really follow the startup coverage at TechCrunch that much, I end up reading the more mainstream stuff they do, like the youtube announcement, etc. But, this does make sense as they would cover the entire lifetime of a startup, from beginning until the end.

FuckedCompany first went live in 2000, chronicling failing and troubled companies in its unique and abrasive style after the dot com bust. Within a year it had a massive audience and was getting serious mainstream press attention. As the startup economy became better in 2004, much of the attention the site received went away. But a large and loyal audience remains at the site, coming back day after day for its unique slant on the news. At its peak, FC had 4 million unique monthly visitors.

Since FC focuses on the negative news coming out of startups, and TechCrunch tends to focus on the positive, this combination may seem odd. But the sites are in fact extremely complimentary. For example, the audiences are about equal in size and have very little overlap. So from day one we will double our reach and traffic. Source: TechCrunch Has Acquired FuckedCompany.com

We Say: Lots of comments have cried April Fools, and this certainly would be a pretty good one, and lots of them happened a day early last year. Michael talks about merging both websites into one and creating a new site for the startups, which doesn’t make much sense to me, but, what do I know.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I can admit it. When I was very little, I went out to our backyard and tried to dig to China. I was a literal child and I guess, not much has changed. Here’s a handy site that shows exactly where you would end up if you dug through the earth to the other side.

Key Learnings: China is not even close to where I’d end up if I dug from San Francisco straight down. I’d be washing ashore in Madagascar or Cape Town, South Africa. But the best part about the world being round, is that the bottom of the earth is also the top and the side when you move the start location around. Makes the experience more 3D than even me with my little yellow shovel.

Try It Here
Source: ubasics.com

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Researchers from Microsoft and California University have been following the spam money trail and have uncovered the companies and some of the techniques they use to get doorway pages listed in search engines and how they use the traffic they get to make big bucks redirecting visitors to advertiser sites or using such programs as Google Adsense. The researchers also noted that 22% of their sample that were cataloged as spam were blogspot urls, and that most of it was going through two web hosting companies.

“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators. Source: Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

We Say: The important thing is they have found out how they do it and how to find out who is doing it and for what advertiser. On the Strider Search Ranger page, don’t get me started on that name, they even tell you how to do it yourself; if you have a blog that gets comment spam, using free tools like Fiddler and whois lookups, you can help follow the money trail. More here.