There were over 1000 people at this grand opening, including some high profile Microsoft execs like the COO Kevin Turner who came out to cut the ribbon.

They say the store looks more like an Apple Store (imitating again?) so that means I have to go to an Apple Store and see with my eyes how it really looks (luckily, there are several around Phoenix area). Maybe the look of the store is because MS worked with a former Apple store designer?

The people were enthusiast about the opening but let’s see how they’ll appreciate Microsoft’s products, especially the newcomer Windows 7 (soon I will buy a machine which runs that so I am eager as well).

Enjoy the video!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz4ptRHjkZ4[/youtube]

They say the imitation is the highest sign of flattery and in this case, as in other cases, Microsoft imitates a lot. It was not enough to follow Apple in the operating systems graphical UI, not enough to follow Apple in the music players field, not enough to follow Apple in music market field…they had to do it in the physical retail stores field too.

Tomorrow is the start of a new competition with Apple – retail – and it does so by opening the first world’s Microsoft specific store in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The store will be opening tomorrow, Thursday Oct 22, at 10 AM (Arizona – Mountain Time) in Scottsdale Fashion Square, a high end shopping mall.

Scottsdale is part of Phoenix Metro area and because I am living in Phoenix I will try to be present at the event and send news from there (or right after it).

Scottsdale is an upscale neighborhood and it’s considered the “rich people’s town” around here which could explain why it was chosen by Microsoft (good demographics).

In this store Microsoft will sell the company’s products such as  software, games, Zune, Xbox as well as some other companies products which are Microsoft’s partners (computers and mobile phones running Microsoft software).

In the same mall Sony has a retail store and Apple has retail stores around Phoenix area too.

This launch coincides with Windows 7 launch and for this Microsoft didn’t spare anything. They’ll give free gifts to the first 1,000 people including free tickets for the concert of the singer/actress Ashley Tisdale (set for 5 PM Arizona time).

Come back tomorrow for more news (and maybe video) about this event!

A Romanian team just experimented with sending automated tweets using an iPhone and a Helium balloon during the Romanian Webstock conference.

The idea was pretty simple: get a regular balloon Helium filled, attach an iPhone using a custom application and set it free. Well, not really free because it was flying in the conference room only.
The iPhone took a picture at one minute interval and posted it automatically to Twitter. To see all the pics go to the project page.

They are also offering the source-code of the custom iPhone application (Objective-C), free of charge (MIT license). Just ask them.

This reminded me of these students from MIT who did the same (Project Icarus) but at a higher scale and using a photo camera instead of an iPhone.
They managed to send a simple Helium filled balloon into the stratosphere (18 miles high) equipped with a point and shoot photo camera which got some amazing pictures of the earth’s curvature. All for a mere $150 budget.

See some of the results below…

Apple however has just approved an application called “Cannabis” (iTunes link) which lets you find the nearest medical cannabis/marijuana medicine, doctors, attorneys (lawyers who specialize in marijuana cases), organizations in the states where medical marijuana legislation has been passed.

Where legislation hasn’t been passed, users can locate the nearest cannabis organization to get involved and take action towards reform.

Ajnag.com is the creator of the application will soon add News, Videos, Menus and Reviews too.

This application is for those who are legally entitled to use medical marijuana so if you are not one of those people, save up your money for a trip to Amsterdam.

Via PCWorld

Yes, it’s still a rumour but according to a Wired Magazine source, factories in China are already manufacturing the new iPod Touch with both features and expected to go on sale 2-3 months from now.

The source also reportedly said:

These new features would enable the iPod Touch to “understand voice commands, capture video and images, and work with a wider variety of programs in the App Store“.

How many blows can landline phone carriers take before they go bust? (image courtesy of Wired)

uberVU

ContextVoice is actually a packing of the uberVU API which was has been in use for quite sometime. Because people have increasingly begun to use the API for areas the developers hadn’t initially imagined, uberVU decided to spin it off as a separate service (“conversations as a service“, as they call it).

By tracking this whole conversation in one place using ContextVoice in close to real-time (Twitter is one source which is tracked) you get more engaging content around stories, access to a larger community than that present on your site and important data and metadata around your content that you can use to develop better or new offerings for your customers. Some of the services tracked by default include Digg, Twitter (obviously), Delicious, Friendfeed, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Picasa, Blogger, WordPress, NY Times but you can add your own URL to be tracked if you want.

In the image below you can see the workflow of the entire tracking process used by ContextVoice.

ContextVoice service has different pricing plans (yes, they have to make money nowadays):
- Free: for a limit of maximum 5,000 API call per day (you need to get a developer key)
- Pro:  $2000/month for a limit of maximum of 200,000 API calls per day
- Platinum: $….. for a 1,000,000 API calls per day (you have to email them to get a quote)

The Platinum version offers also a white label use, commercial use, XMPP push, call implementation support, existing software integration support.
Tweetvisor (Twitter client / Feed reader), Disqus (the blog plugin), gReactions (a Firefox plugin), Mashable (social media blog) and, of course, uberVU is using ContextVoice for now.

uberVU is an award-winning Romanian-UK company (a Seedcamp London winner) established in 2008 in UK, after winning Seedcamp. It is run by three young Romanian entrepreneurs: Vladimir Oane (CEO), Dan Ciotu (CTO) and Dragos Ilinca (CMO). uberVU is backed by Eden Ventures UK (an early stage European venture capital group) and by the money they earned by winning the Seedcamp startups contest.

How does it do it?
After signing up with them you are given a piece of Javascript code to insert between the <body> tag of your website (if you have a blog then you can paste it in the “footer.php” page and it will appear on all of your blog’s pages).

You can see and analyze the source of the Javascript code here : http://tcr.tynt.com/javascripts/Tracer.js (don’t worry, you don’t have to paste that big Javascript into your webpage! You will get another code which is a lot less).

See it in action on MyTestBox.com.
Highlight some text there (or text and image) and, when you release the mouse button, look at the status bar…you will see how the script intercepts the event and connects to the Tracer website right away. That means your action was recorded. The same happens when you right-click on the highlighted text and copy it into the computer’s memory. Paste it into a text editor or email. You will see the backlink the script adds to that copied text. When you click that link you’ll be redirected to the original webpage with the section that was copied highlighted for easy reference.

You can login to your account and, on the dashboard, you can see what’s copied (text or/and images), the total number of monitored pageviews, the number of the words copied, and the total number of how many times a user selected or copied from you page.

I see the usefulness of the service but there are certain things than can certainly be improved.
1. The user copies the text and paste it into an email (or a webpage). However the backlink to the original post can easily be removed by the user. How will Tracer prevent that from happening?
2. On the reporting side if would be useful if snippets of the copied text could be added as a reference so you can look on Google or Copyscape to see who used that snippet on his webpage (at least).

Anyway, the service is still in beta so it’s likely to still see improvement.
To see a demo of the service click on this link http://tracer.tynt.com/tracer-demonstration .

It seems the service has been online since last March but only recently has it seen traffic skyrock(according to Compete).

Because it’s all about Twitter these days I’m presenting you another application using Twitter API: CheapTweet.

What this application does is to scour the Twitter conversations and find the best sales, discounts and coupons people are talking about on Twitter and collects them so visitors can search for, vote on and save these deals.  CheapTweet currently has more than 150,000 deals from thousands of stores, from the very large to the very small.

The companies have now another medium to promote their products (hopefully, not spamming) and users have yet another way to find more info about the products they want (without too much noise).

Hope it will help you too. If yes, let us know your experience in the comments.

This service is the brainchild of Appozite, a company based in Austin, Texas (USA) founded by Hayes Davis and Jenn Deering Davis. They build tools integrating ecommerce and social software.

The Pirate Bay is the most known torrent (BitTorrent) tracker out there (over one million of them and 22 million users). As we all know, many of these torrents are illegal because it allows to download free software/music/games for which you would otherwise have to pay.

The Pirate Bay doesn’t host any of these free media but it indexes (like Google does) the torrents which tracks to these media. It indexes also legally downloadable  media (again, like Google does).

The lawsuit is led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and they are claiming 100 million dollars in damage. The founders of The Pirate Bay – Fredik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi – could face two years in prison. But that’s not all. The dotcom millionaire Carl Lundström, one of the donors of The Pirate Bay, is also charged.

The Swedish police and the US government wanted repeteadly to shut down the service but without much success.

Could this trial be the end on The Pirate Bay, at last?

UPDATE

According to TorrentFreak 50% of the charges against The Pirate Bay were dropped in the second day of the trial. Fredrik Neij, one of the founders,  said that the prosecution misunderstood the technology, and told the court that the evidence doesn’t show that the Pirate Bay’s trackers are used.

So, the prosecutor had o drop all charges relating to “assisting copyright infringement”, so the remaining charges are simply ‘assisting making available’. “Everything related to reproduction will be removed from the claim,” he said.

Let’s see what the next day will bring up…

Following YCombinator of San Francisco-California, Techstars of Boulder-Colorado now Austin-Texas has a startup incubator called Capital Factory (from today).

The program is 10 week summer long and was founded by the local entrepreneurs like Joshua Baer, Sam Decker, Bryan Menell, Brian Beard, Jason Cohen, Pat Condon, Chris Sherman. These will select 10 finalists from a pool of applicants and from these will, eventually, pick three winners (this will be announced on April 13th).

What those three winning companies will get?
It seems they’ll get a slightly better deal than either YCombinator or Techstars offers (at least financially): $20,000 in cash (in exchange of 5% of the company) and weekly mentoring sessions with a select group of proven, successful technology entrepreneurs (other perks are included)

The program runs from May 22nd to August 7th with August 14 being the Demo Day where the chosen companies will showcase their products.

YCombinator’s success in funding early stage startups prompted others to replicate it around USA, Boulder-Colorado being one and now Austin, Texas.

Austin is a great place for technology startups having almost all what it needs for a startup to thrive: infrastructure (startups will use Tech Ranch Austin), talent (University of Texas is there), venture capitalists (Austin Ventures is one of them), small town feeling (although it has 1,6 million inhabitants) and nice weather (no winter).

What it doesn’t have is the close proximity to the ocean (like Silicon Valley-San Francisco has) or to the mountains (like Boulder has). The ocean is like 2-3 hours away (driving) and that shouldn’t stop people who want to enjoy the water. But the closest mountains are like 12 hours away (driving) and that could be a problem if you crave that (which rules out spending weekends skiing – unless taking the plane comes to the rescue).

Austin was known before as a technology hub among other “celebrities” like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York being a central location for companies like Dell, 3M, HP, AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, National Instruments, Samsung, Sun. This gained the city the nickname of “Silicon Hills”. There are also pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
It is also known as the live music capital of the world and that’s not a small thing. Almost everybody likes music but not everybody gets to see artists perfoming live on the city streets.

I visited Austin last spring and I liked it (I have stayed only one day though).
The city feels more european than many other american cities and, for an european like me, that’s a plus (I’m not forgetting my roots).

I hope to hear about companies who originated from Capital Factory’s incubator and have done good things.