China Mobile firing up TD-SCDMA trials this April

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless

We’ve been hearing that China Mobile would have its act together and get TD-SCDMA ready well in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympics since last November, and with merely months to spare, it seems things just may work out. Reportedly, the carrier is all set to begin commercial trials of the home cooked 3G standard on April 1st, where it will be tested in Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen, Qinhuangdao and of course, Beijing. Initially, China Mobile Group will provide 20,000 lucky souls with free TD-SCDMA phones and subsidies of 800 yuan per month, while folks outside of that group can also walk into retail outlets and pick up discounted handsets on a whim. Maybe it’s just us, but we’d probably hold off until those guinea pigs gave everyone else a heads-up of the network quality before we went dropping our own change on it.

[Via mocoNews]

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Serial Kisser Emraan Hashmi turns a year older
Smooch king of Bollywood and a hot favorite among the fairer sex turned 29 years old on March 24. Emraan Hashmi who made his foray into Bollywood through the Bhatt camp, as a side hero in the movie Footpath and went on to carve a niche for himself in the industry. He is the […]

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The daily recession angst: AAPL, BSC, C, F, GOOG, JPM, MER, MSFT, YHOO, oil, gold & war

Filed under: International markets, Other issues, Rumors, Rants and raves, Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo! (YHOO), Apple Inc (AAPL), Ford Motor (F), India, Private equity, Scandals, Citigroup Inc. (C), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Merrill Lynch (MER), Oil, Headline news, Bear Stearns Cos (BSC), Federal Reserve, Recession

Every day another story about our recession and the related fallout pops up. Are we in a recession or not? Or will we just teeter on the edge? The debate continues between those anal retentive types that must see all the actual facts, and those that see the signs all around and proclaim that “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then by golly…”

The Federal Reserve Board has acted as if we are in a recession. They sit on one side of the teeter totter lowering interest rates to counter balance the weak economy and moderate the impact of potential negative growth. Clearly they are throwing ballast off a sinking ship.

There has been much debate recently about the Fed’s dramatic bailout of The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. (NYSE: BSC) with the cooperation and maybe hand rubbing of JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM). Some feel Bear Stearns should have been allowed to collapse and others feel that the Fed had no choice in the matter and was not protecting BSC, but the overall confidence in world financial markets.

Continue reading The daily recession angst: AAPL, BSC, C, F, GOOG, JPM, MER, MSFT, YHOO, oil, gold & war

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Lionsgate Puzzles Over ‘The Last Equation’

Filed under: Action, Thrillers, Deals, Scripts

Proof may have failed to wow audiences, but it looks like math is coming back to the big screen, mixed with science, adventure, and intrigue. No, I’m not talking about 21, but rather a new adaptation that’s on the way. The Hollywood Reporter has posted that Lionsgate films have picked up the film rights to Stuart Gibbs’ debut novel, The Last Equation.

It’s all based on “the mystery surrounding Pandora, Albert Einstein’s last equation. It had the potential to solve the world’s energy problems, but it so drastically simplified the process of harnessing atomic energy that it essentially made it possible for anyone to create atomic weaponry. Because of the risks, Einstein either hid or destroyed the equation before his death.” Zoom forward to the present day. The government gets the help of a fugitive criminal (Snake Plissken!) and a math genius (John Nash!) to find the equation … dum, dum, dum … before it falls in the wrong hands. What is it about bad guys that makes them the only savior when potentially terrible things happen?

Lionsgate’s Mike Paseornek says: “Stuart Gibbs has written a novel that has everything you need for a first-rate action-thriller, starting with an ingenious premise about a mathematical formula that could either save the world or destroy it.” It could be good, it could be bad. All I know is that I’d like at least a little camp to it. The world needs a new, great good bad guy.

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BlackBerry 9000 in the wild

Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Handhelds

Today, Engadget answers the singular question on the mind of everyone out there who’s sitting at a solid oak desk in a glass office wearing a suit as they read this: what’s up with the next BlackBerry? The rumored BlackBerry 8xxx / 9000 series is getting a lot clearer today, and we’re happy to report that RIM’s cooking up a beauty to keep its legion of devotees loyal — and maybe even win a few converts along the way. Head on over to Engadget Mobile for pictures and video of the little beast in action!

[Thanks, BaggedLunch]

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For the next generation of e-baby

Do not forget me designed by Tomas Kral consists both of a brace for the cherished robotic dog Eibo, and a harness to show him the external world! This seems perfect for the next generation of e-baby, designed to provide convenience for the completely mental!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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SEO by numbers: Where is everybody?

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Transgenesis

Transgenesis

In 2000 I had the chance to meet Pavel Smetana at Avignon Numérique, in France, and interact with his Room of Desires that he created in 1995. In this project I was connected to brainwave and heart-rate sensors in an empty room, with video projections of pretty relaxing pictures and music. As soon as I would become excited with an image, the system would generate new images and sounds, based on my biofeedback. The audience could witness these changes and understand what imagery would trigger a certain kind of emotions. After a while I would be able to control the system, in a way “controlling my emotions” and also what the audience would see as a result.

Recently Pavel Smetana in collaboration with Ivor Diosi and Ivan Acher revisited this past work and created transgenesis, a set of virtual environments the audio and the visual parts of which are changing in real-time in dependence on data received form sensors capturing brain and heart activity of viewers. Each viewer enters those and only those virtual landscapes which his or her physical and mental states lead to. Landscapes vary in audiovisual styles ranging from horror-like hyper-realistic atmosphere up to geometric or organic abstractions.

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure
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Is there such a thing as a “sweet tooth”?

Filed under: Candy, Newspapers, Sugar

I always thought there was such a thing as a sweet tooth. You know, that love of the taste of sugary foods. Most of us have probably heard about that tooth from the very beginning. Some scientists are working on changing that perception, though.

They’ve been researching this topic, and they think that people aren’t really addicted to the sweet taste of sugary foods. The researchers are discovering that the brain senses the yummy calories from the sugar and in response it releases hormones that make us feel happy. The people studying this question say it has very little to do with actual taste, and they’re proving it on mice with no “sweetness” taste buds. The mice still love sweets even though they supposedly cannot taste the actual sugar.

Of course, the researchers are also working on how to use this information to “turn off” the sweet tooth. Blasphemy! Outrageous! First some scientists think they’ve found a cure for chocoholism and now they want to take away my sweet tooth! I just don’t know what the world is coming to when everyone is trying to take away my few pleasures in life. What about you? Do want to keep your sweet tooth?

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‘Never Back Down’ Director to Tackle Modern ‘MacGyver’

Filed under: Action, Deals, New Releases

I often wonder what studios look for in their hired guns. Case in point: Jeff Wadlow, director of the tolerable Cry_Wolf and the miserable Never Back Down, who, according to The Hollywood Reporter, has been tapped to direct The Tomb for Summit Entertainment. The Tomb is billed as a prison-escape movie with a MacGyver-like protagonist who uses smarts and ingenious devices to escape from a high-security prison that he himself designed. Summit hopes to make the action-packed film into a franchise cash cow.

I’ve seen both of Wadlow’s movies (the first of which, Cry_Wolf, was made with the money he won in the Chrysler Million Dollar Film Competition), and his m.o. seems clear: slick, blandly good-looking, montage-heavy genre flicks. So in some ways it makes sense for Summit to pin its franchise hopes on him: when you’re gambling on a movie, inoffensive competence behind the camera may be your safest bet. Like any cinephile, I wish studios would be a bit more adventurous (and thus cringe whenever a bold move — putting Ang Lee in charge of Hulk, for example — backfires at the box office), but as a business decision it’s perfectly rational.

Continue reading ‘Never Back Down’ Director to Tackle Modern ‘MacGyver’

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