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Those of you who don’t like PayPal should be pretty happy to hear this news- the Wall Street Journal reported online Friday that search engine giant Google is planning to roll out it’s own payment proccesor sometime later this year. This could be bad news to PayPal owner eBay, since the payment processor accounted for 23% of eBay’s revenue in the first quarter of this year. Google could pose a major financial threat to one of it’s biggest advertisers, but that might not be such a bad thing.
Expanding into online payments might make Google less dependent on advertising, which accounted for nearly all of its first-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion. The merchants who run auctions on eBay are major buyers of Google’s ads, which appear alongside search results.
Read More 
| USA Today
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When I was younger, I always wanted to have porch swing. I also wanted a xylophone. I got the xylophone, but my parents weren’t willing to get me the porch swing, so you can imagine my delight when I came upon the Musical Porch Swing from Musical Furnishings. At first glance, it appears to be no more than a regular cedar swing, but make no mistake, each piece of the swing is hand tuned. Each swing also come with a pair of mallets and a songbook to get you started. While this is a high quality piece of home furniture, the price is also high at $1,000 USD. The company also makes coffee tables, chests, and childrens’ furniture as well.
Prior to these offerings, a person would have to purchase two separate items at a substantially higher cost and still not achieve the space conservation, ease of access, and novelty that of our products offer. Whole sections of musical instrument classifications are waiting to be explored and incorporated into the home setting.
Read More | Musical Furnishings via I4U
Two computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that within a human generation we may have the ability to replicate any 3D object out of a material made of small synthetic “atoms”, giving us the ablity to “teleport” over the internet. Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein first came up with the idea from a process known as claymation, an animation process that uses clay figures and manipulation to produce an images of realistic movement.
Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object. ‘When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like its moving itself. That’s something like the idea we’re doing… in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the ‘clay’, as though the clay can move itself.
Read More | BBC
Latest Gear Live Videos
Google is is just about everywhere these days with their search engine and Gmail. Why not give them even more real estate using your desk? Check out the Google Icon Vase Speaker. On sale now at the Google Store for $30.75, the dark metallic blue speaker hooks up easily enough through your USB port.
Many computer speakers have a rather grim look and too many wires, so consider this sound alternative: a single 2-way surround sound speaker with innovative audio lens technology, a tweeter tuned for clarity. The speaker is powered by a single USB plug (no adapter required), and the clever on/off knob at the top emits an orange LED glow when it’s on.
Read More | Red Ferret
DittyBot Offers Tiger Users A Way To Stream Music Wirelessly From iTunes
Posted by Devin Categories: Mods / Hacks, Portable Audio / Video,
Most of us already have an iPod and iTunes so we can listen to our favorite songs on-the-go, but those of you who use OS X Tiger and have a Skype account with SkypeOut, can now hear your favorite songs on your cell phone. Using a script called DittyBot, Mac users will now be able to email a song request and have the song sent to their phone in about a minute.
You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the Internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it’s even quicker!
DittyBot is an Apple Automator Workflow and there is a pretty good amount of setup involved, so make sure you pay close attention to the directions.
Read More |Plastic Bugs
Take something as basic as clothing, add the type of community and interactivity of the internet to the design process and what do you get? Open source clothing of course.
Full story after the jump.
Click to continue reading Unique Business Watch: Open Source Clothing
Toshiba is introducing a new business grade notebook computer. If you just want a portable, no frills system, this would be a great steal. The 14-inch WXGA unit includes the Intel Centrino chipset with optional NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 video platform. The best part, it weighs right around five pounds, and will cost less than $1,000.
Read More | Network World
Seven Ways to Warm Your Prospects Using Website Audio
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Marketing,
Gone are the days when putting audio on your website consisted of subjecting your visitors to gaudy musical fanfares and various clichéd sound effects. Fortunately, audio has now become a lot more sophisticated and new techniques that allow audio to be streamed have made it possible to use your own voice as a highly effective marketing tool.
Most visitors to your website will have computers with audio capabilities. Using your own voice, you can deepen the impact of your sales message and develop a stronger connection with your visitors. Many websites using streaming audio to promote and sell services claim that audio increases their conversion by as much as 300%! Learn how to put audio to use after the jump.
Click to continue reading Seven Ways to Warm Your Prospects Using Website Audio
Now this I like. Not that it will change any of my, um, habits or anything. It is basically an interface that trys to keep you conscious of exactly how much illegal content you are downloading, with a robust statistics system. If you want to know how much money you owe based on your practices, just check CrimeWire. It will even give you an allowance of sorts if you punch in your wage, basically telling you that since you only make $5.50 an hour, you shouldn’t feel guilty about downloading a maximum of 18 songs per day, or something to that effect. CrimeWire is a skin for the LimeWire P2P client.
Read More | The CrimeWire Project
Toshiba is set to release a simple business laptop aimed at the no-nonsense businessman. It’s portable, at five pounds, with a 14-inch WXGA display. The Centrino chipset is inside, so you also get built-in 802.11 b/g, along with good performance. The best part? This one will sell for under $1,000 USD. Not bad at all.
Read More | Venturus
