Filed under: Audio/Video, Cell Phones

Motorola’s RAZR redefined how thin a cell phone could be when it launched in 2004, but in the years that followed, the iconic slim phone was so mass produced that it turned from trendy to tired.

Now, with the competition regularly releasing phones that are as thin or thinner, Motorola is finally updating the RAZR with the RAZR2. The phone was announced back in May to much fanfare, and has since been released in South Korea and reviewed in detail. All nice, but it doesn’t compare to actually buying the phone, which Motorola says you should be able to do any day now.

The company has announced that the the RAZR2 will be available at nearly all domestic mobile carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Alltel are mentioned) very shortly. Of those AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have announced pricing. The first two will be charging $299, while Sprint will come in slightly cheaper at $249. Sprint will also be selling the phone first, available starting August 22, while AT&T and Verizon subscribers will have to wait until sometime in September.

We expect sales to be brisk, given the RAZR2’s new, sleeker design, larger screen, and two-gigabytes of internal memory for music and video playback.

You can get the full specs from our earlier coverage of the phone’s announcement.

It’s great that this phone will be available to all phone-carrying Americans, but we’re wondering just how long it’ll be before this next-gen iconic device will lose its new-gadget cool — probably not too long….

Related Links:

• $99 Samsung Blast Mobile Phone 4 TXTers
• 2007’s Other Highly Anticipated Phones
• Moto Launches RAZR2, Not iPhone-Killer

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), eBay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN)

As several sources wrote last week, Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) will start its own online payment system that will put it into competition with eBay’s (NASDAQ: EBAY) PayPal and Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) CheckOut service. Although CheckOut is not a large business for Google, PayPal is a very large revenue source for eBay.

The new product will be called Amazon Flexible Payments Service, according to MarketWatch.

The investors in eBay have reason to watch the development closely. PayPal revenue rose 34% last quarter to $454 million. The unit had almost 36 million active accounts at the end of the June 30 period.

While Google’s major business is not as likely to funnel customers to become users of an online payment system, Amazon’s retail customers might well use its systems if it become part of the standard e-commerce operations at the company’s websites.

That could give eBay fits.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 247wallst.com.

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Wil Clouser is a Web Developer with the Mozilla Corporation, and blogs at Micropipes::Blog. Mike Morgan is Manager of Web Development at Mozilla Corporation, and has a blog at morgamic.com.

This talk described the process of internationalizing Web properties at Mozilla, specifically mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org, site which together receive almost 200 million hits a day. The localization process for the Web sites is still behind the Firefox client, which ships with over 40 different locales.

They started by discussing a few of the pitfalls of localization, such as pluralization and noun-gender, and then went on to talk about the system they settled on for localizing the Mozilla Web properties, which are a combination of static text in templates and dynamic content pulled from a database.

For static text, they ended up using GNU’s GetText, as it’s a stable, well-proven solution already in wide use. It has good documentation, pluralization support, and a wide variety of tools that translators may already be familiar with.

For the dynamic content, they used a simple database-driven solution of lookups based on string ID and locale key. (They initially looked at PEAR::Translation2, but it turned out not to be flexible enough for their purposes.) The advantages of this system are its simplicity, and the fact that it’s easy to apply to dynamic content lookup anywhere in the database. Drawbacks are the large table sizes and complicated joins required to get data out in a way that allows language fallback.

They also touched on some of the improved localization tools that are in develoopment, such as Canonical’s Launchpad, and various ways of getting the community involved and empowered to help out with localization.

Slides for their presentation are available online here.

Wil also has a follow-up blog post called Ten Tips for Website Localization.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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Filed under: Books, Lists, America

I’m heading into my last semester of grad school and preparing to write my thesis. It’s a collection of essays about cooking, kitchen tools and family. One of the things my adviser requires is a plan, including a reading list of books that are in the subject area and will help guide me through the work. I’ve been pulling the list together both physically and on paper. Friday morning I wandered through my apartment, creating a stack of food books that I already owned that could join the list. (I realize that Laurie Colwin is totally absent from the line up, but I say in my defense that my mom currently is in possession of my copies of “Home Cooking” and “More Home Cooking”).

I also queried some friends for book recommendations and was referred to a great segment that aired on NPR’s Morning Edition back in June. In it Steve Inskeep spoke with Ruth Reichl about her favorite food memoirs. In the segment she spoke about several books, but then also furnished NPR with a more complete list of gastronomical memoirs for posting on the website.

Okay Slashfoodies, what are your favorite food memoirs?

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One of my online buddies must have known I needed a pick me up, because she basically told me to use an old DOS command shell and do this:

Geeky parents out there who grew up with DOS (like myself), might actually be sleep deprived and demented enough to think this was funny. I even did it twice and sang along.

To the vast majority of readers who are probably scratching their heads wondering why they just wasted 15 seconds reading this, all i can say is: syntax error, please insert disk in drive A:.

Want to try it yourself? I used the FreeDos Emulator - Thanks Gabrielle for the idea!

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Filed under: Action & Adventure, Paramount, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Movie Marketing, Remakes and Sequels

Other than ComicCon stuff, it has been awhile since we got a new video from LucasFilm at IndianaJones.com. The last one, right before the Con was a really disappointing look at the international buzz for Indiana Jones IV. Then, of course, we got the confirmation that Karen Allen would be returning as Marion Ravenwood. In her introduction at ComicCon, there was mention of the family being reunited — I took this to mean it was official that Indiana (Harrison Ford), Marion and Indy Jr. (Shia LaBeouf) were a family in the sequel. So, I saw the title of LucasFilm’s latest video, “Reuniting the Family,” and figured it would give further proof that the Joneses would be a happy unit. That was obviously stupid of me. How could I believe they’d give any story info away that easily?

The video is actually a montage of scenes from Raiders, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, inter-cut with interviews about the reunion of the family behind the camera. Featured is Ford, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy. And as if to really annoy me, the video features too much Kate Capshaw and Alison Doody and not enough Allen. It even starts off with a tease of Marion saying, “Indiana Jones. Always knew someday you’d come walking back through my door.” Then Spielberg comes on and says, “I’m excited about making Indy 4, if for no other reason than to get a reunion with our original family.” Another thing that made me sad: all the footage of John Rhys-Davies (nothing against Ray Winstone, but I’m really going to miss Sallah).

Maybe one day — before Memorial Day, 2008, perhaps? — we will find out the whole deal behind Marion’s return to the franchise. By then we will hopefully also have a real title and maybe some confirmation that this movie is indeed a full-circle-back to the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in the meantime, let’s keep watching these hype-making videos that give us nothing new. It’s better than twiddling our thumbs for the next nine and a half months, I guess.

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