| HTC Bliss: An Android Phone Designed for Women, by Clueless Men Is HTC working on an Android-based device designed just for women? That's the scoop the ex-Engadget team has over on their temporary new home, This is My Next. According to their source, the upcoming HTC Bliss, a cross between the HTC Desire S and Desire Z, is being built with the needs of the female demographic in mind, from its "calming" sea green tones to its dangling charms. It even has diet and shopping apps. Oh no.
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Showyou, the Flipboard-Like Video App, Adds YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr Integration As a tech journalist who travels a lot, I often find myself sitting next to someone at the airport or on an airplane who wants my advice on whether they should buy an iPad or which apps they should download. (Note to self: start carrying print books again in lieu of gadgets to avoid these sorts of conversations.) Lately, when it comes to showcasing the iPad's wow-factor, I've shown people Showyou. The video-browsing app launched last month to great praise, much of it comparing Showyou's reinvention of consuming videos on the iPad to Flipboard's reinvention of consuming blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds. The enthusiasm for the app doesn't just come from the tech press. Since its launch, Showyou says it's already fetched over 10 million videos from its users' Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the startup says that users watch, on average, more than 4 videos every time they open the app.
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Ai Weiwei Zodiac Heads Unveiled With Help of Social Media It's now over a month since influential Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by China's government. In what New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg called a "bittersweet honor," Ai Weiwei's latest art exhibition opened today in NYC. The 12-piece outdoor public sculpture, entitled Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, is supplemented by a special Tumblr blog, Twitter account, Facebook Page and official website. Nobody has heard from Ai Weiwei since his detention on April 3rd, also the date of his most recent tweet (Weiwei is a prolific Twitter user). We hope this brave artist is safe and will be released as soon as possible.
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Twitter Begins Sending @ Replies to Users - Not All of Which Are SFW Twitter has created a new official account called @TwitterSuggests and is using it to send public replies to other Twitter users. What does Twitter want to say to its users? How to use the service, of course, and more specifically whom they should follow. Unfortunately the recommendations are unsolicited and some of them are kind of dirty. Other people are going to complain about this a lot - but I say hacking is cool, let's get more of it going on in-house at Twitter with official support! It's also pretty funny, in a disturbing way. Twitter has offered links to recommended users for months in its sidebar but this new method accomplishes a number of things: it sends new users what might be their first @reply so they can see how the system works and it is another attempt to get people to act on follow suggestions. Retention of new users is Twitter's #1 problem and this little experiment could help solve the biggest challenges new people face: boredom and pointlessness. In theory, at least. It's sure to be interesting, though!
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Learn Just the Foreign Language Phrases You Need With TripLingo A lot of foreign language instruction is geared toward the travelling experience. But what that typically means is a few vocabulary lessons on shopping and a few key phrases on how to order from a menu. If you aren't really interested in local dining or boutiques, then you'll probably find that even mastering all the vocabulary or phrases in a language guide will do little to help you on your particular journey. A set of new apps hits the iTunes App Store today that offers a much better way to help you customize what you want and need to know about a particular language - whether you're travelling for business or for pleasure. TripLingo launches its first 4 apps with Mexican Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portugese versions.
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Tim O'Reilly On What OpenCourseWare Can Learn From the Open Source Movement This week the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of opencourseware. The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the course materials from all 2000 of the university's courses on the Web. With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described today as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: "the traditional of the global intellectual commons."
The opening keynote at today's OCW Consortium meeting was Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, who spoke on "Perspectives on Open" and on what opencourseware and open education can learn from the open source movement.
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XYDO Feels Like It's Taking The Pageviews Out of Publishers' Mouths Yesterday XYDO, the service that curates users' Twitter and Facebook streams and adds a layer of social bookmarking a la Reddit or Digg, opened up to the public. After trying it out for a little while today, I realized that something felt wrong, and then it came to me - when I click on a title, I don't get taken to the website hosting that content, I get taken to a page within XYDO that hosts the content. It's like XYDO has taken my friends' recommendations, let people vote on them and then, right when I go to click on it, stepped in and said "Here, take this instead." But what exactly is wrong with this?
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Google Analytics Now Tracks Page Load Speeds to Help You Optimize Your Site Google announced this afternoon the creation of a new tool in Google Analytics, the Site Speed report. The report, which Google Analytics users must opt-into and edit their embedded javascript in order to activate, displays load times for various pages and site assets under different circumstances like location of visitor, media placement, technology used to access the page and more. The feature has been a long time coming, with variations of it bubbling up over recent months and years through Google Webmaster Tools and Labs. Google, it's long been said, has an economic interest in making the web better because more time spent online means more ads clicked. The company reminded Analytics users today that they too have an interest in speed, saying that page load speed impacts not just their own site conversion rates but also their AdSense offerings and standing in Google search results. It's not just browbeating, though: the new tool will allow site owners to try out different methods of optimization and track the resulting consequences in terms of load time.
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New Apps for Your iPhone and Android, April 2011 Edition In this continuing series, we round up some of our favorite new applications for smartphones each month, specifically for iPhone and Android devices. This spring edition is one of the longest lists yet - there have been a number of incredible new launches to highlight this past month. (And yes, we know it's May already, these things take time). As a bonus just for this month, we've added a section for new iPad and Honeycomb apps, too. As always, feel free to share your favorite apps in the comments!
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Injecting Poetry into Bacteria to Produce More Poetry Canadian Poet Christian Bök has translated his purpose-written short poem into DNA and is injecting it into a bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans. New Scientist has published an interview with Bök about the project. Called The Xenotext, the project is being presented at the Text Festival and documented on its website. Bök said he had read about texts being translated and injected but "But in every case where scientists or artists have already implanted messages into DNA, it has just been a case of republication." His is a a new, unpublished poem.
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