Items tagged with Ello
Ello was able to gain some attention recently when it announced that it would be a social media network that wouldn’t sell user data or have advertisements. The invite-only network, which is currently in beta, appears to be an appealing prospect for many who have become tired with ads on social networks such as Facebook, which also collects and sells user data. But despite the fact that it will not have ads or sell data, it has received $5.5 million in funding from several corporations. The company received funding from The Foundry Group, Bullet Time Ventures, and FreshTracks Capital on the same day it made its ad-free stance official by filing in Delaware to be a Public Benefit Corporation....
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Last weekend, we wrote about Ello, a proposed "Facebook-killer". Despite its myriad of lacking features and minimalistic interface, the service has grown incredibly in the past couple of weeks, all thanks to a bad move made by Facebook: Forcing people best-known under an alias to use their real names. The drag community has been integral in making Facebook take note that forcing a real name is not a great idea. Outside of that community, there are many legitimate reasons why someone might want, or need, to use an alias. Nonetheless, changes are coming, and I'm sure that's something many will be glad to hear - especially those in the drag community. Chris Cox, Facebook's Chief Product Officer,...
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Many people have finally become truly fed-up with the likes of Facebook. All the ads, all the tracking, all the rules. Last month, the world's most popular social network found itself in hot water after it forced some drag performers to use their real names, and while it's not hard to understand Facebook's reasoning, it's a no-brainer that some people simply can't use their real names, either in the name of safety, or because they're better-known under an alias. It's for reasons like this, and especially privacy, that the popularity surrounding up-and-comer social network Ello has exploded. As of a couple of weeks ago, the invite-only network was in very early testing, with a modest number of...
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NVIDIA Announces 2009-2010 Fellowship Program SANTA CLARA, CA - NOVEMBER 3, 2008 - NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the world leader in visual computing technologies, announced it is accepting applications for the NVIDIA Fellowship Program for the 2009-2010 academic year.Dr. David Kirk, Chief Scientist at NVIDIA, stated: "The NVIDIA Fellowship Program is designed to stimulate and support excellence in visual and parallel computing research in universities worldwide, and to promote communication between NVIDIA's R&D team and outstanding students and professors. Since its inception in 2002, the Program has awarded over $1.6 million in funding to assist 65 Ph.D. students with their research."The...
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Upon first glance, today's press release from AMD, "AMD and Havok to Optimize Physics for Gaming," caused us to do a double take. Considering the long-time feud between AMD and Intel, it seemed surprising that any sort of amicable partnership could develop between AMD and an Intel-owned company, such as Havok: "AMD (NYSE: AMD) and Havok today announced plans to jointly investigate the optimization of physics effects utilizing AMD's full line of products. With over 100 developers and 300 leading titles already using Havok’s physics engine -- Havok Physics -- the company has clearly defined its position as the leading developer of game physics. By working together, both companies are demonstrating...
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There are plenty of hybrid cars on the road, but hybrid boats? They haven't been seen. Until now.The super-fast, super-sleek 25-foot speedboat uses a combination of electric and diesel engines to produce a low-emission vessel that should warm the hearts of the greenest motorboat sailor. "Everybody knows about hybrid cars, but hybrid boats are different," said Michael Frauscher, managing director of the company that built the boat. Most air pollution from motor boats comes in the harbor, when the boat is idling or running at low speed, said Michael Chrisman, California's secretary of resources, who went for a demonstration ride on the bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge. The hybrid...
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Newegg certainly raised the bar when it came to computer component e-tailing, and it seems that they might be planning on challenging eBay and Amazon.com with their newest service: NeweggMall. “Consumers can buy from the NeweggMall site, and products are drop-shipped from the reseller. Newegg takes a portion of the revenue from the sale, which it justifies by handling the portal and logistics. Depending on category, that portion can range from 6 to 15 percent, nearly identical to the revenue share structure at Amazon.com.” The site’s main layout page seems to be very similar to that of eBay which prompts one to wonder if the NeweggMall will eventually try to challenge the online...
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The latest rumor doing the rounds is that AMD's Athlon X2 may replaced by a dual-core K10 by the end of the first quarter of 2008. This is just a rumor, but we've been expecting AMD to transition their dual-core offerings from the now 'old' K8 designs to the newer K10 for some time. “AMD will launch a new series of dual-core products based on its next-generation architecture, Athlon 6000, in the later half of second quarter next year. First to launch will be the Athlon 6250 and 6050, the sources revealed. Although the core frequencies of the two CPUs have not been set yet, they will adopt 1MB L2 cache and 2MB shared L3 cache, the sources added.”By 1 MB L2 cache, we're fairly sure...
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I'm a big fan of Wikipedia. It's easy to find foolish or inaccurate things on it of course, but on the whole it's a fantastic and useful utility. If you do a lot of websearches on Google, you'll notice that Wikipedia has become a sort of default top of the page result for a lot of queries. That might be set for a big change, now that Google itself appears to be gearing up to have a Wikipedia of their own. Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development...
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An SUV named "Boss" won the $2 million challenge in the DARPA robot race on Saturday.The Tartan Racing Team, based at Carnegie Mellon University, walked away with a $2 million prize on Sunday for coming in first in this year's Pentagon-sponsored robot race, held at a former Air Force base.The team's robotic vehicle, "Boss," turned in the top performance as it navigated itself through the 60-mile (100-kilometer) Urban Challenge course at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville this weekend.The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency took over the deserted base for the past week to offer an obstacle course tailor-made for city traffic. Boss, a modified Chevy Tahoe, competed...
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While GDDR4 is still working on becoming the standard for high-end graphics cards, it looks like GDDR5 is already being sampled. So what is new with GDDR5, well all we have are rumors but a key one is cyclic redundancy checks or CRC. Perhaps this will turn out to be a sort of 'automatic' throttle for self-overclocking cards.One of the most interesting pieces of speculation is who is getting their hands on early samples:“GPGPU freaks will be spooging over this one - as, apparently, will Intel engineers. Rumour has it that the first chaps to get their hands on samples with be the Chipzilla bods working on Larrabee “If this turns out to be accurate, Larrabee could be quite interesting....
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Two Chinese parents decided to attempt to name their new child “@”, but there has yet to be any official word on whether or not the name will be considered acceptable.If the couple ever has another child, we're thinking that the name could either be QQ (a popular IM program in Asia) or perhaps simply .com. “The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words."The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.While "@" is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they...
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Hello Everyone! We'd like you all to feast your eyes on the newest - and definitely the cutest - member of the HotHardware family, Eric Weirick. Our resident news man Chad and his wife were just blessed by a bouncing baby boy this past Monday, July 16th at around 9:10 AM. Eric showed up about 3 weeks earlier than expected and weighed in at about 5.4 lbs. When I was born, I arrived almost 2 months early and weighed a little less than Eric, and now I have to shop for clothes in the big man aisle and can't fit into compact cars. You gotta watch out for those preemies Chad! Congratulations!...
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Bill Gates and Co. have been doing their best to promote Windows Vista since its release, but it seems they just cant get a break from Apple's latest "Get a Mac" ad campaign. The ads, which poke and prod at PCs as well as Windows Vista, have as of late focused on security. In a recent press conference, Bill Gates claimed that Macs are far less secure then PCs running Windows. Gates told reporters that security experts uncover exploits for Macs daily, some of which can result in a complete takeover of the system from the user, and then challenged the public to be able to do that once a month on a Windows based machine. It's been several weeks since Microsoft...
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eHomeUpgrade has posted an interesting story this morning outlining a proposed new display interface that would replace DVI in all PC's. Apparently, a number of leading PC hardware vendors such as Intel, Apple, NVIDIA, and more are working together to develop this new specification. Who knows what features we can expect with this new technology, though you can be sure there will be plenty of HDCP hoops to jump through.UDI is targeted to become the new display interface for desktop PCs, workstations, notebook PCs and PC monitors, replacing the aging VGA analog standard and providing guidelines to ensure compatibility with today's DVI standard. Further, as planned, the UDI specification will be...
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