HP Announces Glass-Backed Envy 14 Spectre

HP has upped the ultrabook ante with a glass-backed HP laptop that looks a bit like a MacBook and a lot like the future of HP trade dress. The HD screen displays 1600×900 pixels and includes HDMI out, Ethernet, USB 3.0, and mini Displayport ports. The glass on the back of the laptop is Gorilla Glass, which means it probably won’t break if you drop it. It includes a fat 128GB SSD drive for $1,400 and an optional 256GB upgrade. It runs a Core i5 or i7 processor and ships in February. HP has been using this design quite a bit lately, which...

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Sony Keeps Concepts Alive At CES 2012

Today at Sony’s CES 2012 press conference, the company unveiled several PC concepts that are, well, just concepts. Kazuo Hirai took to the massive Sony stage deep within the Las Vegas Convention center and talked about the convergence of TV and computers. But no one cares about that marketing nonsense. It was the concepts they flashed on the screen that got everyone excited. But don’t expect these products to hit the market. Companies are not supposed to sell concepts. They’re concepts, not products. Up until the last decade, Sony was the...

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Sony Shares Holiday Sales Numbers For The PlayStation

Sony Computer Entertainment reported some solid sales numbers for its various PlayStation systems for the past holiday season today. Sony says that they moved a total of 6.5 million PlayStation 2/3/PSP/Vita units worldwide (Sony defines “holiday season” as between November 21 and January 5 in Asia, November 21 through December 31 in America, and November 18 through December 31 in Europe). To be more specific, the company sold: 500,000 units of the PlayStation Vita (which launched in Japan on December 7 and in Hong Kong and Taiwan on December...

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Sony’s Music Unlimited Service To Land On iOS This Quarter

Apple users probably have more than enough media on their iDevices to keep them entertained on the go, but Sony Network Entertainment President Tim Schaaff thinks there’s room for another media service on iOS. According to VentureBeat, the company’s Music Unlimited streaming service will be hitting Apple’s mobile platform some time in Q1 2012. In addition to simply streaming music from the Music Unlimited catalog, users will be able save cache their playlists for offline streaming at a later time. The service is already available on Android...

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Facebook Comments Box Now On Mobile, And Over 400,000 Web Sites

Over 400,000 sites currently use Facebook’s Comments Box social plugin the company tells me, and as of today they all support an optimized mobile commenting experience. Now you can criticize your least favorite bloggers — I mean participate in intelligent discussion while on the go. Just 10 months after the launch of the revamped plugin, Facebook is starting to creep up on commenting solutions like Disqus which appears on 1.1 million sites. Comments Box has been a big win for Facebook, giving it exposure, driving use of its Subscribe...

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When Ranking Facebook Adoption As Percentage Of Population, Cyprus Is #1

Which countries really, really love Facebook? If you guessed the U.S., you would be somewhat right – this country ranks #7 on Pingdom’s new list of countries comparing the number of Facebook users as percentages of the population. To be clear, we’re not talking about raw number of Facebook users. The U.S. is still #1 there. This is ranking countries by what percentage of the population (online and total) is on Facebook. Or, more simply put, it’s looking at how popular Facebook is in that country. (The red bars show the number of Facebook...

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Comment 21 inShare156 A Christmas Miracle! Facebook Chat (Kind Of) Supports Extended Rage Faces

First, if you want to get right down to it, here are the codes you type into Facebook chat to get various faces: Poker face [[129627277060203]] Forever Alone [[227644903931785]] OK guy [[100002752520227]] Me Gusta [[164413893600463]] Lol guy [[189637151067601]] Fuck Yeah [[105387672833401]] Problem? [[171108522930776]] [[218595638164996]] [[100002727365206]]Huzzah! We are truly living in an age of wonder! Second, why does this work? There are various ways to bring Facebook content into chats. For example, you use Facebook Pages like a little TC...

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Facebook Opens Mobile News Feed As Viral Channel For Games

Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions...

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Facebook Launches Suggested Events Feature Based On Checkins

We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of...

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Facebook Snubs Zynga’s CityVille As Most Popular Game Despite 5X Users Of #1 Gardens Of Time

Playdom’s Gardens of Time took the #1 spot of Facebook’s Most Popular Games of 2011 list. But wait, Zynga’s CityVille was ranked #3 despite peaking at over 100 million monthly active users and 21 million daily active users — far more than Gardens of Time’s peaks of 17 million MAU and 4 million DAU, or its current stats according to AppData. That’s because Facebook’s list was mostly based on vaguely described “recommendations”, and hardly on active users. It’s almost as if Facebook used its cloudy methodology to keep Zynga from completely dominating...

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45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law

In 2012, Facebook will be making 45 privacy-related changes to comply with the recommendations of an audit by Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) released today. Below I’ve compiled a roadmap of all the changes Facebook will implement based on the the 149 pages of DPC recommendations and how the social network says it will address them. First, read my analysis of the audit’s findings from this morning. It explains why these changes won’t seriously interfere...

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