Trends Hut

Facebook will integrate with Skype to let users of the world's largest social network leverage the VOIP giant's PC-to-PC calling capabilities, rivaling Google's VOIP tools.

Facebook and Skype are reportedly discussing an integration that would allow users of the world's largest social network leverage the VOIP giant's PC-to-PC calling capabilities with their Facebook account information.

Facebook and Skype are working to allow Facebook users to send SMS messages and make voice and video calls to friends and contacts via Skype, according to AllThingsDigital.

The wait is finally over.
FOX announced on Wednesday the new judges' panel for season 10 of "American Idol."
Hollywood's worst kept secret was officially revealed in a press conference Wednesday before a crowd of several thousand in Los Angeles, kicking off the final judges' round of auditions for season 10 of the hit show.

After months of speculation and rumors, Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler and pop superstar Jennifer Lopez were both confirmed to be replacing original judge Simon Cowell as well as season nine judges Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi.



Lopez and Tyler will join the series' only remaining original judge Randy Jackson at the judges' table this January.

When the original "Star Wars" hit theaters in 1977, moviegoers were blown away by then-pioneering, eye-popping special effects that transported them to another fully formed universe. Now the mastermind of the series, director George Lucas, has a plan to refresh the movies on the 35th anniversary of their debut.

According to the Los Angeles Times movie blog Hero Complex, after observing the huge success of "Avatar" and "Alice in Wonderland," Lucas has decided to re-release the Jedi epic in 3-D. The current plan is to kick off the 3-D makeover in 2012 with the retrofitted first prequel in the space opera series, 1999's "Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace," and then follow with the five other movies, in numerical order, in consecutive years, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
 
Lucas' famed Industrial Light & Magic special-effects shop will oversee the 3-D conversion. Considering the flack some filmmakers have received for converting to 3-D after the fact to ill effect, Lucas promised in a press release that the greatest care will be taken not to tarnish the "Star Wars" legend.

"Getting good results on a stereo conversion is a matter of taking the time and getting it right," said ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll. "It takes a critical and artistic eye along with an incredible attention to detail to be successful. It is not something that you can rush if you want to expect good results. For 'Star Wars' we will take our time, applying everything we know both aesthetically and technically to bring audiences a fantastic new 'Star Wars' experience."

The Times noted that Lucas, never a big proponent of 3-D, has said recently that the technological advances made in James Cameron's "Avatar" convinced him to take a second look at the process. Lucas told "Access Hollywood" earlier this year that he was considering a 3-D makeover for his beloved space saga.

"Haven't been a big fan of 3-D, but that movie definitely improves in [the field of] 3-D ... We've been looking for years and years and years of trying to take 'Star Wars' and put it in 3-D," Lucas said. "But [the] technology hasn't been there. We've been struggling with it, but I think this will be a new impetus to make that happen."

In addition to awaiting new, better 3-D technology, the director was also reportedly biding his time until there were more theaters equipped with 3-D screening capability in order to do the widest release possible of the retooled movies.

Given the criticism Lucas has received in the past for tinkering with the original trilogy by adding new effects and scenes, longtime fans should take heart that, according to Variety, Knoll said there are no plans to add or fix visual effects in the movies for the 3-D conversion.


Are you excited to see the "Star Wars" saga in 3-D?

rocked some dead-on Britney Spears recreations, but it wasn’t the slam-dunk I had hoped it would be. Part of me didn’t buy New Directions’ devotion to Spears — aren’t they a liiiitle young for her? “Baby One More Time” would have come out when they were in first grade or so — but mostly, the numbers just didn’t advance, explore, or heighten the storylines.



It didn’t hit like the Madonna episode, which brilliantly wove the songs into the narrative; the “Like a Virgin” number alone would put that episode at the top of my “most awesome” list. “Theatricality,” aka the Lady Gaga episode (even though it included some KISS songs,

If someone was to tell you that Pamela Anderson was blacklisted on Google instant search, would you believe him? After all haven't we all searched the voluptuous beauty online and found her successfully in her various avatars! But the fact is that Pamela Anderson is a blacklisted word on Google instant.
Whenever you start typing a word in Google search, the browser automatically completes what you're typing in order to reduce search time. But if you were to search Pamela Anderson, Google will not complete the word for you, neither will it give you an option of searching the buxom babe in its drop down. Try it!

Electronic Arts' European boss Jens Uwe Intat has spoken a little more about the publisher's growing relationship with Sony, saying that he believes the PlayStation maker could catch up to the Microsoft and its Xbox 360 in the West.

"We could certainly see Sony come back – in the UK it’s still a head-to-head competition between PlayStation and Xbox, but on the continent Sony is traditionally stronger than Microsoft," Intat told MCV in a recent interview. He suggested that this renewed console competition has allowed EA to support the PlayStation 3 more heavily...

Actress Lindsay Lohan has decided to check herself into a substance abuse rehab program in the next few days, a source close to the actress said Sunday.


Lohan's decision came two days after a Los Angeles judge ordered her to jail without bail in the wake of a failed drug test. Another judge allowed her to post a bond Friday evening.

It was not immediately clear which rehab program Lohan would enter, said the source, who asked not to be identified because the source was not authorized by the actress to release the information.

Lohan spent 23 days in a court-ordered rehab program at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center last month, following 13 days in a Los Angeles County jail...

Microsoft is holding a press conference in Europe on October 11, where several Web sites are expecting the company to finally announce the first Windows Phone 7 devices.
The October 11 announcement coincides with a Microsoft "open house" in New York that day, although the invitation to Microsoft's New York event specifically excluded any mention of Windows Phone 7.

According to Engadget, the October 11 press conference will be held at 2pm in London and is expected to offer "hands-on opportunities with WP7 devices." We've heard from other sources in Europe invited to the same event.

Microsoft spokespeople in the U.S. didn't respond immediately to a request for comment, but they're on the West Coast and it's pretty early in the morning there right now.
There's been a lot of confusion over the launch date for Windows Phone 7, with Neowin insisting that there will be launch events on October 21 but not giving any hints of the October 11 event to which Engadget was invited.
Further complicating things, Microsoft observer Paul Thurrott is claiming that Windows Phones will launch in the U.S. on November 8...

Well over three million of the new iPhone 4 devices have already been sold, and Cris Clapp Logan, director of communications and congressional relations for Enough is Enough, tells OneNewsNow several pornography companies have already created services for it.
"Because of this feature, you have a backward-facing video and a forward-facing video, so the recipient can see your face. And if they have an iPhone, you can see theirs as well," Logan explains. "So individuals can actually talk through their phone in a video conferencing-like way -- and the pornographers are really trying to capitalize on this new feature."...

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt on Friday said that Microsoft's Bing search engine was the company's main threat, not Facebook or Apple.

"While it's true Web search is not the only game in town, searching information is what it is all about," Schmidt said in Wall Street Journal interview video posted online.

He described Apple as a well-respected competitor and Facebook as a "company of consequence doing an excellent job in social networking," but said that Microsoft's latest-generation search engine was Google's main competition.

We consider neither to be a competitive threat," Schmidt said, referring to Facebook and Apple. "Absolutely, our competitor is Bing. Bing is a well-run, highly competitive search engine."
Microsoft's Bing and other Internet search services overtook Yahoo! for the first time to become the number two search engine in the United States in August, according to The Nielsen Co....

Emma Watson has accepted her first film role after the Potter franchise.


The 20-year-old actress has signed on to star in an upcoming movie about Marilyn Monroe.

'My Week With Marilyn' will also see Michelle Williams playing the blonde bombshell, the Daily Star reported.

The film is a story of Colin Clark, who worked as Laurence Olivier's assistant on 1957 picture 'The Prince And The Showgirl', which he filmed with Monroe.

Apple Inc. recently released the iPhone 4G iOS 4.1, but there are hackers who just want to jailbreak it, and the reason is why are they jailbreaking it so early. One of the main reasons that the users want to jailbreak the latest iOS is for the Cydia applications
and that one can also use the GameCenter on their iPhone 3G with Redsn0w 0.9.6.

We guessed the latest batch of Facebook phone rumors from this morning wouldn’t be the last we’d hear about the supposed INQ mobile/Facebook collaboration, and on cue a new set of tidbits have arrived.  GigaOm have been piecing together their own sources and have fleshed things out a little: they say Bloomberg’s H1 2011 timescale is over-confident but that the first network to see the Facebook phone will be Hutchinson’s 3, likely with a Spotify bundle in tow.  While they reiterate that the vaunted AT&T deal hasn’t been finalized yet, they also say that, if Spotify manage their predicted December US launch, access could also be bundled on the AT&T version of the smartphone(s)....

Ivan Seidenberg made the comments Thursday at an investor conference, according to The Associated Press. Though he said nothing about an iPhone being built for his company's current CDMA network, he said he hopes Apple will allow Verizon to sell a smartphone for its forthcoming long-term evolution 4G network.

The CEO's comments come as rumors have steadily built for months that Apple is prepared to launch a Verizon-compatible CDMA iPhone in early 2011. This week, overseas suppliers indicated to one Wall Street analyst that Apple will begin manufacturing a CDMA iPhone in December of this year...

Justin Bieber is making his "CSI" debut on Thursday night (September 23), and while it remains to be seen whether the teen idol can pull out an Emmy-worthy performance, his appearance on the show continues the series' tradition of casting marquee names for guest spots.

Taylor Swift got to live out her dream in March 2009, when she played Haley, a girl found dead outside of a motel. While Swift didn't have very many lines, the pop singer did display some chops onscreen and got to indulge her morbid acting fantasies.

"I've always joked around with my record label and my mom and everybody — all my friends know that my dream is to die on 'CSI,' " she said last year. "I've always wanted to be one of the characters on there that they're trying to figure out what happened to." ...

ust 9 mm tall, Dot, the world's tiniest doll, is the hero of an action-packed adventure in a new stop-motion film created with a camera phone and a microscope.
The film, simply called Dot," was produced by Aardmann, the creators of Wallace and Gromit. It was commissioned as a
Image via Wikipedia "viral" for Nokia and was made using the firm's Nokia N8 smart phone.
Wallace and Gromit are the main characters in a series comprising four British animated short films and a feature-length film by Nick Park of Aardman Animations.
Dot is to enter the Guinness Book of Records as the world's smallest film.
Dot finds herself in a magnified world and hears a noise coming from off-screen to her left. Suddenly she sees that the material on which she is standing is unstitching itself at an alarming rate, reports the Daily Mail....

It comes a day after the socialite admitted possessing cocaine and obstructing a police officer during her arrest in Las Vegas last month.

BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion will have a lot to prove if it releases a much-anticipated tablet PC.

With the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and blockbuster movies, it’s easy to overlook the very real and acutely transformative effect that film and motion pictures have had on the world. Beyond just transporting viewers into new worlds and fantasies, film has the power — perhaps beyond that of any other medium — to shed light on an issue, telling a story and chronicling history.This greater power was discussed yesterday in the UN Week Digital Media Lounge in a session entitled, “Reel Impact: The Power of Film to Change Lives.”
In the session, film producer Caroline Baron, the founder and CEO of FilmAid , and filmmaker Lisa Russell, co-founder of MDGFive.com, discussed the impact and life-changing potential film can have on the developing world and vulnerable communities.

Both women were drawn into using film to help achieve social good during the war in Kosovo. Sometimes called the world’s first humanitarian war, Kosovo brought the plight of refugees and those in refugee camps to the public in a way that hadn’t happened with previous wars and conflicts.....

Last week was the 2010 Tokyo Game Show (also called TGS 2010) and the games on display came from some of the brightest minds in the industry. Here you’ll find 12 hottest games at the show, including The Last Guardian, Devil May Cry and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Google has just released version 3.1 of Google Earth for iOS, an update that includes native iPhone 4 support and also the ability to explore the world’s oceans.

Few filmmakers can pitch something like that to their financiers with a straight face, but Avatar was the most successful film ever, raking in nearly two billion dollars at the box office, so Cameron is among those filmmakers. He might even be the only member of that club.
Cameron is no stranger to deep sea exploration. He shot the deep sea acclaimed documentaries Ghosts of the Abyss  and Aliens of the Deep.
No one has visited Challenger Deep since explorers Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh made the journey half a century ago. The X-Prize was announced to commemorate their voyage.

Written by  Samuel Axon

Apple’s 27-inch Cinema Display, first announced about a month and a half ago, is finally on sale at the company’s online store.
It’s an IPS-based glossy monitor with a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, with LED backlighting, 1000:1 contrast ratio and a 178 degree viewing angle. It comes with built-in MagSafe charging, iSight camera, speakers, and three USB ports.
This new display replaces Apple’s old 30-inch Cinema Display. Shipping time is one to two weeks, and the price is $999.

Written by Stan Schroeder 13

The story simmered in my mind all day, though, and you know what? Facebook is great, but it’s not the nature of the Internet for things to last forever. This is a living, breathing, growing, changing world, and even though I know Facebook has rabid fans and they definitely wear the crown right now, they aren’t indestructible…or at least, they are uncrownable.*
In short, Facebook may not be king forever – and here’s why:........   click on read more below

Pew Internet has just completed a survey of nearly 2000 mobile users in the US and has come up with some not particularly startling statistics about phone and app usage. Still, it’s good to have some cold hard numbers to look at, even if the sample size seems a bit small. Here are a few highlights from the survey and writeup:

• 23% of Americans are now landline-free
  Higher than I expected. I suspect a fair amount of people with land lines these days are more or less required to have them as part of a internet or cable deal.
• 24% of mobile users are active app users
  That is, 24% use their apps regularly, as opposed to simply having apps sitting there on their phone.
• Apps rank low on non-voice activities
  Pew mentions that many apps are used for such things as text messages, picture taking, and so on, but the structure of the survey didn’t allow for this kind of flexibility.
• 13% of users have paid for an app
  Whether this is high or low is kind of a matter of perspective. Two years ago this number was probably more like 2%.
• Median number of installed apps is 10, average is 18
  You seem to be either a light or a heavy app user, not too many people in between. This stat likely owes a lot to the age gap as well. The young people have way more apps than the geezers....
  

American Idol  hopefuls have a new way to audition, and they might not even have to leave their houses to do so, because this season the show will allow aspiring singers to submit audition videos via MySpace.
Singers interested in going on the show will have to perform a song, a capella, from an approved online list. Participants can only submit one video each, and the video can’t be longer than 40 seconds (submissions are due by October 6).
These web auditions will be judged in a manner similar to the usual tryouts. Aspiring musicians with successful audition videos will be called back to the next round in Los Angeles. Viewers will be able to share the videos, and they will also be able to watch highlights on Idol’s MySpace page....

Apple has announced that the latest beta of its iOS 4.2 software comes with printer support. The AirPrint feature allows users of the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to print wirelessly over Wi-Fi, without needing to install drivers or software.
Although the software is currently only available through Apple’s iOS develop program, Apple says iOS 4.2 will be ready for the masses in November. The first devices to support AirPrint will be HP’s line of ePrint enabled printers.
AirPrint is said to support a full range of print functions through iOS, including page range selection as well as single-sided and double-sided printing. It will also feature a Print Center that coordinates your print queue, so you can keep track of the progress from across the office if you’re so inclined


Written by Blake Robinson

Google will most probably launch its social network, dubbed Google Me, later this year. However, the secretive project might be more of an added social layer to Google’s existing products and services than an entirely new service.“We’re trying to take Google’s core products and add a social component,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference on Tuesday.
Rumors about Google building a Facebook competitor became slightly more convincing back in August, when Google acquired Ångströ, a service that brings intelligent search results on someone’s professional network, as well as social app company Slide.
Now, however, Google Me is shaping to be more like Buzz, in the sense that it will integrate with Google’s existing popular services such as email and Google’s most important product – search.
“If you think about it, it’s obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better,” Schmidt said.
Hearing these words coming out of Schmidt’s mouth must be a a huge confidence booster for Facebook. If social networking is so important for search, well, Facebook has already solved that part of the equation. If Google’s social networking efforts fail, Google may become desperate to partner up with Facebook.
Note that Schmidt was very careful to mention users’ permission. Google Buzz made Gmail social, but it also caused a backlash from users who simply didn’t like the fact that some of their email-related info is now shared with other users.
It’ll be interesting to see how Google plans to make its services more social without making the same mistakes again.

Written by Stan Schroeder


 

Epic Games announced at the Korea Games Conference that the developer kit for its popular Unreal graphics engine will soon “generate iOS applications.” In other words, one of the most popular and advanced 3D engines used by console and PC video games will soon be used to produce graphically impressive iPhone iPod touch and iPad games.
Epic demonstrated a tech demo game running the Unreal engine called Epic Citadel [iTunes link] at Apple’s event unveiling the new iPod touch earlier this month, then made the demo available as a free download from the App Store. The demo has since been downloaded one million times, so the unprecedented graphics must have impressed iPhone and iPod-wielding gamer geeks.
Apple has been trying to make the iPod touch and the iPhone the biggest and best portable gaming devices, and depending on how you measure success, the company might have done just that. Casual games and remastered classics have performed well on the platform, and Apple just launched an Xbox Live -like social gaming platform called Game Center.
Epic Games revealed its iOS developer kit plans because it recognizes the potential of the smartphone gaming market. It also revealed that it is running the engine on the Android platform, but it didn’t say when or if that platform would be publicly supported in the developer kit.

Mozilla’s “Tab Candy” experiment has proved so popular, the company has decided to roll it into future versions of the Firefox browser as a standard feature.
The latest nightly builds of Firefox 4 now include a new Tab Sets feature. If all goes well, the feature could be included in the final version of Firefox 4, due this autumn.
Previously referred to as Tab Candy during its development phase the last few months, Tab Sets allows you to group and quickly switch between related clusters of open tabs. Tab Sets are specifically aimed at making life easier for those of us who frequently have dozens (or more) tabs open at one time. By grouping your open tabs into sets — say a group of tabs for work and a group of tabs containing some Instapaper articles — you can keep better track of everything without needing to scroll through dozens of tabs.

People said it would happen with Foursquare, it may have already happened with Twitter, and now the trend has continued on Facebook: Burglars in Nashua, New Hampshire looked at updates from Facebook to figure out when one target wasn’t at home.
Police caught three young men who had used “social networking sites like Facebook to identify victims who posted online that they would not be home at a certain time,” according to local news station WMUR 9.
That said, don’t jump to conclusions. The burglars weren’t using the new Facebook Places location system, despite implications by The Huffington Post and other web publications. Facebook released the following statement published by NECN:

We’ve been in contact with the Nashua police, and they confirmed that they while they have an ongoing investigation and have already made a number of arrests, the only Facebook link was that one of those arrested had a Facebook friend who posted about leaving town in the near future (which is why they believe that home was targeted) and it had nothing to do with Facebook Places. The police confirmed that the other burglaries had nothing to do with Facebook altogether.

These particular burglars performed more than 50 burglaries but they didn’t use Facebook Places, and they may have only targeted one person by looking at his Facebook page. But it goes to show that you should be careful even if you’re using Facebook’s privacy settings to make your updates viewable only to friends.
We’ve heard speculation that burglars would use Facebook status updates to target people in the past, but this time it looks like it’s not just talk. So let this be a warning: Be careful what you include in your social media updates.
 Trends Hut
This Article is written by Samuel Axon

Trends Hut 
This Article is written by Christina Warren
Name: SeeVolution
http://www.seevolution.com/
Quick Pitch: A real-time analytics, heatmap and alert system that overlays all the data on the user’s website — so they never have to log in to another site.

Add caption

Genius Idea: SeeVolution makes it easy to visualize how visitors are using and interacting with your website. SeeVolution also offers real-time traffic and analytics information that you can view as an overlay on your live website.
SeeVolution has just entered beta and the service is free for up to five different domains. After signing up for the service, you enter in the URL of a site you want to monitor and SeeVolution provides you with a few lines of JavaScript to put on any pages you want to monitor. If you want to track your entire site, just insert the code into the footer section of your website or template.....

 Trends hut
This Article is written bySamuel Axon
 
Facebook just launched a new web app not-so-memorably dubbed “Discover Facebook’s Popular Pages.” It’s a visual interface intended to help you find more pages to “Like” based on your past selections, what’s popular and what your friends like.
The app divides pages into nine categories: Musicians, Sports, Celebrities, Movies, TV Shows, Media, Politicians, Brands and Games. You can view images representing different pages in each category, or you can view pages from all categories, which include other things like local businesses or photographer friends’ pages, for example.
On the right, Facebook has included a list of the friends who have the most pages in common with you. Clicking on any of the names will pop up a list of your mutual likes, and you can click on the “All Likes” tab to see the other things they like.
You can also look at the most popular pages by country with the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the site.
Facebook provides a ton of ways for you to discover new pages to like as it is. You’ll of course see pages in your friends’ news feed updates and profiles, you’re asked to search for pages to like when you create a new profile, and the site regularly displays boxes with suggestions.
It might all seem like a bit much, but Facebook wants to be a portal that connects consumers and brands because it can provide services or advertise to both, so we’re not surprised that Facebook is adding new ways to build those connections.

 Trends Hut


Would you believe that Justin Bieber  and his legion of fans use up 3% of Twitter’s server infrastructure at any given time — such a large amount of activity that “racks of servers” are dedicated to Bieber mania?
So said a Twitter employee, according to web designer and blogger Dustin Curtis. Yesterday he sent out the following tweet:

“At any moment, Justin Bieber uses 3% of our infrastructure. Racks of servers are dedicated to him. – A guy who works at Twitter”

When we asked Curtis who the Twitter employee is, he said his source is someone “who would know such things. I obviously can’t give you his name. But I trust that the information is absolutely correct.” So maybe you’d better believe it. Bieber consistently appears on the top Twitter trends chart we publish each weekend, and he topped a “Twitter’s most listed” chart too.
We shot an e-mail Twitter’s way to confirm, and while the Twitter rep we contacted didn’t confirm the figure, she didn’t discourage us from believing it, either. “While we don’t break out metrics like this, everything around and about Justin Bieber is consistently popular on Twitter,” she said.
Curtis also tweeted that “most of the popular users on Twitter have dedicated servers for their accounts.” He believed the Twitter employee and tweeted what he said in part because he thinks the numbers make perfect sense:

“Every time Bieber tweets, his messages have to be delivered to more than five million people who then endlessly retweet it. Apparently, his account receives more than 60 @-replies per second for a while after he tweets, which is something Twitter wasn’t originally designed to handle.”

He’s certainly no Justin Bieber, but Curtis isn’t totally unknown on Twitter himself. He appeared in our “10 Web Design Bloggers You Should Follow” list a couple of months ago.