I hardly remember the original Robocop movie other than I thought he looked freaking cool. The upcoming remake of Robocop may have die-hard fans worried but I'm always for any sort of movie that marries futuristic weapons with robots and humans.
This sizzle reel shows some concept art for Robocop along with director Jose Padilha's thoughts of the whole thing. Joel Kinnaman, who's going to be Robocop, also pops up to discuss his take on remaking the movie. Are you guys excited for this movie or do you worry that it's going to ruin everything? More here.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is being said to have earned an Earth-shattering $500 million on the first day alone. All across the board, retailers are claiming the biggest selling game launch of all time. Gamestop sold one million copies through midnight launches alone. Amazon has never seen anything like it before.
And of course, CEOs are out to compare their earnings next to movies rather than the competition within their own markets. Activion’s Bobby Kotick seems more concerned with Star Wars and Harry Potter than Halo or Battlefield:
“With first day sales of over half a billion dollars worldwide, we believe Call of Duty is the biggest entertainment launch of the year for the fourth year in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise have exceeded worldwide theatrical box office receipts for ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Star Wars,’ the two most successful movie franchises of all time. Given the challenged macro-economic environment, we remain cautious about the balance of 2012 and 2013.”
More than 1 million applications have been submitted to Apple’s iTunes App Store since it opened its doors in 2008. The milestone was noted by Appsfire, which tracks the iTunes App Store.
493,289 of all of the applications submitted were paid apps and the company estimates that there are currently 736,247 applications in the app store, 45 percent of which require a payment to own. Since that’s far below the 1 million figure, one has to assume that thousands of apps have either vanished or were rejected entirely by Apple. A report at the end of October revealed that Google’s Play Store now has more than 700,000 applications, too, which suggests it’s quickly catching up to Apple’s ecosystem offering. More here.
Are Facebook and Yahoo getting ready to go in on a search venture together? According to a report from The Sunday Telegraph sourced by anonymous insiders, yes. Rumor has it that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have been chatting about working together to maybe get a search engine going.
Ever since Mayer took the helm at Yahoo, the company has been taking a bit of a turn towards search, and by teaming up with Facebook, it may be able to get itself back into the game full time. A partnership with Facebook could get Yahoo the kind of traffic it needs to work on its algorithm, and Facebook has been expressing interesting in getting into search for a while now.
At the moment, Yahoo relies on Bing, and signed up to do so for a whole ten years, only three of which are up. A search agreement with Facebook would likely put some stress on that deal, quite possibly bringing it to a breaking point. Of course these rumors of an alliance are only that, rumors. And there's no way of telling how far along any actual negotations may be. More here.
I hope you're not a huge fan of skeumorphic virtual page turning. If you are, I hope you have an iOS device. Why? Because Apple just got a patent for that. Yup, Apple has a patent on turning fake pages.
The patent is—as valuable patents tend to be—both simple and extremely broad. The design patent merely covers the sequential animation of the frames show in the three figures, but makes no mention of what this animation applies to. So this patent is actually broader than just an eBook thing, although that's probably it's only use. On the other hand though, it should only apply to that specific animation, not others like it.
This is just a design patent, so it's not like Apple's ownership of this patent will keep other eReaders from providing functionality; it'll just keep them from looking like books while doing it. Or force them to simulate page turning from the top corner instead of the bottom. Granted, this isn't world shattering stuff, but it all seems pretty stupid. Is this really stuff that we need to be patenting? More here.
Microblogging site Sina Weibo, China's answer to Twitter, reported a pretty dazzling statistic in its third quarter results: it now boasts over 400 million registered users. It can't be sure how many are active, of course, but it's still a vast number considering appeal is localized to the People's Republic. It also means is winning the popularity contest with social media competitor Tencent, although it humbly acknowledges their services are somewhat different. The company's platform is still evolving, and it's only recently seen mobile usage exceed computers, so is shifting product focus accordingly. More here.
Not happy with building mysterious gigantic structures in the desert, the Chinese are now building inter-dimensional portals in the middle of their cities. What the hell is this 515-foot (157 meters) high metal structure in the the city of Fushun, in northeast China's Liaoning province?
Oh wait, I know, it's just another example of the China's building craze, the one that has got them to build entire ghost cities made of thousands of pre-fab buildings.
It's made of an astounding 3,000 tons of steel and it will glow at night—decorated with 12,000 LED lights. According to Fushun Municipal Government's officials, this titanic structure does absolutely nothing except serve as an elevated sighting position. They claim it is pretty "landscape architecture"—like the Eiffel Tower. It uses four elevators to take people to the top.
The Chinese media has been harsh about the building after a blogger posted these photos on Sina Weibo, which is the country's "largest microblog platform." Not surprising, since this thing costs $16 million.
The ciy's defense: "there's not enough people to build entertainment, so we just build something pretty, OK?! ARE WE COOL NOW!". Or something like that. They also claimed that they don't have enough citizens to build other more useful buildings. They have all the hospitals, recreation centers and municipal buildings they need, so they probably decided to blow their excess budget in this thing.
According to Fushun's Urban Construction Bureau, the "Ring of Life" means "a round sky and a path leading to a paradise in heaven." More here.
Apple’s stock has been tanking for the past several weeks, perhaps adjusting to market conditions. Here’s a trivial explanation for why a stock price might fall even when a company appears to be performing well: sometimes in a weaker market a firm’s stock price will decline to meet demand expectations, suggesting that perhaps it was too high before.
One might assume, in that scenario, that it will climb back up to somewhere between its current low and its previous high. Right now, it’s trading at the lowest price since May, six months ago, as noticed by 9to5Mac. The stock price is around $529 at the time of publication, and its market cap is at $499 billion. In August, the company became the most valuable company in the world when its market cap hit $621 billion on a stock price of $663. It closed just above $702 in September. More here.
If you want to take advantage of all the handy gesture shortcuts in Windows 8, but would rather skip the tablet or touchscreen display, Elecom's got a new space-saving keyboard that's right up your alley. It's a full-sized wireless keyboard complete with a dedicated number pad that does double-duty as a gesture-compatible touchpad.
When it drops in December for around $105, the Elecom TK-FDP055BK will also be able to be used like a laptop's trackpad for controlling the cursor and performing more common gestures like scrolling. But at the push of a button it will revert back to functioning like a typical number pad. Accountant-types who work with numbers all day might not appreciate the lack of physical keys, but the average PC user should find the added functionality more useful, particularly if they've already updated to the latest version of Windows. More here.
The iOS 6 version of Skype has been officially updated to support the larger 4-inch display on the iPhone 5. Prior to today, the application showed borders along the top and bottom of the screen, which was a bit frustrating since it didn’t provide an full, more immersed experience. Skype also said it fixed several bugs in the application, although it’s initially unclear what bugs were prevalent. As always, Skype is available from the iTunes App Store for free. More here.
You can pretend you're just a baseball fanatic, or prefer batting practice at night, but there's really only one reason someone is going to buy this heavy-duty machined aluminum flashlight shaped like a baseball bat. It's for protection—or more likely—for delivering physical intimidation to one's enemies under the darkness of night.
It's available in both 15-inch and 23-inch lengths for $36 and $46 respectively, but most will probably opt for the longer, heavier version. It's got a 3-watt LED bulb and various flashing modes, but again, these are features the flashlight's true target market probably cares nothing about. More here.
In a cute, little art project, this keyboard supposedly shows the most used keys on a keyboard. Think of it as an infographic IRL. Do you agree that these buttons are the most popular key? I swear I use C more than that! More here.
As if having to remember to bring along a charging cable isn't annoying enough, they seem to have a knack for becoming knotted while in your bag. But a company called Tylt has solved at least one of those problems with its Band Wall Charger that uses a ribbon design that's nigh impossible to get tangled.
The flat ribbon also wraps around the cylindrical plug for easy storage and cable management, and at just $40, available in four different colors, it looks like a nice alternative to your iPhone's included (30-pin connector) charger. Fingers crossed for a lightning version soon! More here.
There's a solar eclipse coming tomorrow, and while it may only be visible over Northern Australia and the Pacific, there are a couple of places you can watch it remotely.
The eclipse is supposed to start at 3:35pm EDT tomorrow. The Slooh Space Camera has a live feed from Cairns, Australia that will start at 2:30pm EDT. Folks at Slooh say this dispatch should be particularly stunning, since the event is supposed to begin around sunrise in the area.
You can also watch a stream from Tourism Tropical North Queensland, which will also broadcast from Cairns starting at 2pm EST. And since it's an important reminder to all our friends in Australia catching the moon blotting out the sun in person—don't stare at it directly or you'll go blind. More here.
Following a very lengthy wait, Research in Motion is finally going to launch BlackBerry 10. The Canadian company has today announced that it will hold simultaneous launch events around the world on January 30, 2013, during which “details of the smartphones and their availability” will be announced.
“Our team has been working tirelessly to bring our customers innovative features combined with a best in class browser, a rich application ecosystem, and cutting-edge multimedia capabilities,” said RIM President and CEO Thorsten Heins on Monday.
“Thanks to our strong partnerships with global carriers and a growing ecosystem of developers, we believe our customers will have the best experience possible with BlackBerry 10. We are looking forward to getting BlackBerry 10 in the hands of our customers around the world.”
RIM has promised that it will unveil two new devices in January, which are expected to be the previously leaked L-Series and N-Series devices. The former is a touchscreen device without a physical keyboard, while the latter takes the traditional BlackBerry form. More here.
Is the love affair with Apple over for investors? Some seem to think so, even despite the iPad Mini hype. Since September, when Apple shares peaked, the prices have fallen 20 percent — from $700 to $547 per share.
Apple just recently fired several executive staffers, and add the fact that Google’s Android is just killing it, in terms of marketshare — which surged from 57.5 percent to 75 percent — and these don’t spell confidence for Wall Street. And some wonder if maybe the company doesn’t have much more room to expand, meaning that its customerbase could be maxed out.
“It has just been wave after wave of bad news,” says Gene Munster, renowned analyst at Piper Jaffray. Cupertino, however, denies any problem, saying the company’s still growing perfectly fine, thankyaverymuch. And its stock is up 38 percent on the year, which is still positive growth. Even so, it’s hard to ignore the decline in share prices. We’ll have to wait and see if this is just a drip in the pan or the drumbeat of doom for a falling enterprise. More here.
Microsoft's been holding Surface for Windows RT sales figures close to its chest so far, but CEO Steve Ballmer has allowed in an interview with Le Parisien that the much ballyhooed tablet is off to a "modest" start. The bombastic exec gave that appraisal while touting the imminent arrival of the tab's higher-powered sibling, Surface for Windows 8 Pro, though he didn't elaborate further. After all the cake it's no doubt lavished marketing the slate, we'll have to see if the software giant finds the hardware game tough to swallow. More here.
The faster the Internet gets, the less patience we all have with even the most insignificant of waits. A new study shows that a mere two second delay is enough for many people to give up and move on.
According to the recent study, based on 2.3 million views by 6.7 million unique users, users will start abandoning "short" videos after two seconds, and that 20 percent have moved on after five seconds. As far as the study is concerned, "short" equals "less than 30 minutes," so you can probably imagine the migration happens even faster when you're talking about a one or two minute clip.
This mass buffering exodus isn't the same across the board however. A user's patience also depends on the type of network they're using. Fiber, Cable, and DSL users are all pretty similarly impatient, but mobile users are far more likely to wait around staring at the buffering animation like a chump, which isn't all too surprising.
Where do you stand on the Internet video waiting game? Does two seconds sound like an instant, or more like an eternity? More here.
The VMultra combines a USB hub, an SD card slot, a DVD±RW drive and 500GB of storage into a surprisingly slim package that connects to any computer via USB 3.0. If you like, you can even fit your own 2.5-inch hard drive in the SATA III bay.
You'll have to take out the included 500GB HDD first of course. The company intends this to be a "perfect all-in-one peripheral," especially for notebook travelers looking to lighten their luggage; perhaps to make room for things like "clothes." Each VMultra will cost you $199.99 and will ship starting November 12th. More here.
For the longest time Just Born, the maker of Peeps, has been on the forefront of novelty seasonal marshmallow technology. But the company's monopoly ends now, here, with a mug-friendly Frosty marshmallow.
What would you rather have dissolving away in your hot cocoa? A gooey yellow baby chicken covered in sugar, or these adorable snowmen marshmallows sold in packs of five for $5? More here.
