Tivo’s been selling data about people’s viewing habits—what shows and commercials they watch (or skip), when they pause, fast-forward, rewind and so on—to advertisers for around a year. Now they’re adding personal info to the Chex Mix of ratings data they sell: age, income, marital status and ethnicity.
The sample size will be 20,000 homes, which for now is comprised of volunteers enticed into letting loose their persona details by a raffle offering the chance to win a free Tivo. The group is six times larger than Nielsen’s sample of 3,000. It’s also one-upping Nielsen in that it “will offer marketers the opportunity to survey some of its users via an online poll to ask deeper questions about their viewing habits and their feelings about both the ads and the marketers.”
Though the info brigade is all-volunteer for now, Tivo’s considering allowing advertisers to compare their customer database’s with Tivo’s, “which […]

Original post by Matt Buchanan

Filed under: Digital Cameras, HDTV

We’ve come to expect flaws in gizmos these days, particularly in first generation products, but judging by CamcorderInfo’s review of Hitachi’s “world’s first Blu-ray camcorder,” this thing should be sent straight back to R&D. Truth be told, it’s not that often that we see a review this harsh, but we understand the need to be particularly critical when pondering a $1,600 purchase. Nevertheless, the DZ-BD7HA was essentially thrashed from top to bottom save for its stylish design and satisfactory outdoor shooting performance.. Testing revealed abysmal results when it was used in even the brightest of low-light situations, and the lackluster manual controls, omitted optical image stabilization (it opts for electronic IS) and a dreadful auto response system pretty much eliminated any shot at redemption. Honestly, repeatedly hearing about its “terrible image quality” throughout the review would be enough to scare away most, but if you just […]

Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: Gaming, HDTV, Home Entertainment

Sony’s full-version firmware bump to 2.00 is now out and available for your downloading fix. So go ahead and get to downloading and feel that underwhelming surge of decorative features overwhelm your console. As to the remote start feature, once you turn it on, prepare to have the PS3’s cooling fan spinning 24 x 7 in preparation for remote access. Fortunately, it’s nearly silent so no worries — just as long you’re not concerned with the wails of the baby Gore. That, according to Engadget Japan’s translation and confirmed by their testing. Wha?
[Via Engadget Japan]
Read — Firmware 2.0Read — Remote Wake
 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Thomas Ricker

The sort-of awaited 2.00 firmware update for the PS3, featuring remote start, customizable themes and other fancy newness is now live. If you’d like a video demo (for whatever reason) before clicking update, click here. Or you could just go ahead and download it. [Destructoid]

Original post by Matt Buchanan

Filed under: Desktops

The true computing geeks in the house are about to need adult diapers: AMD’s launching a dedicated stream processor, the FireStream 9170, and an accompanying SDK today, which will be available in Q108. Granted, this 55nm “world’s first Stream GPU with double-precision floating point technology” will run you two grand, but you’ll be getting 500 GFLOPS at under 150 watts power draw, but you’ll get all the insane math-crunching benefits of stream processing that your current number-crunching rig isn’t seeing, despite the eight 8800s you’ve got jury-rigged into the thing. Press release after the break. Read more about stream processing here (because we’re reall in no position to lecture on its benefits).
Continue reading AMD announces FireStream 9170, first dedicated stream processor
 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Ryan Block

Hewlett-Packard’s shifting the focus of its digital photo business from cameras to home printing and online photo services. Future cameras will still bear the HP branding, but they’ll be designed and manufactured by a licensed third party. The HP-but-not camera deal should be set with the ghost producer halfway into 2008—HP will keep selling their own through the end of this year. [NYT, HP Press Release]

Original post by Matt Buchanan

Filed under: Robots

We’re no strangers to the use and abuse of insects in the name of science, but we’ve gotta say that this robo-moth mech is the best example yet. Built by a few mad scientists over at the University of Arizona, robo-moth intercepts signals sent by the moth’s eyes to its teensy brain and turns them into movement. The bot can detect where the moth is looking, and turns in that direction. Since moths have quite the fancy pair of preceptors and built-in reflexes, it’s going to allow for some pretty complicated actions once scientists figure out how to control more motion than left and right. Researchers are looking down the road to where a moth could act as a disposable bomb-sniffing robot, or where paralyzed humans could more accurately control wheelchairs with their thoughts, but that’s all still a ways out.
 
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Original post by Paul Miller

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless
We’ve already seen a number of ultra-high speed alternatives to LTE trialed and drooled over, so it’s about time that Long Term Evolution had its 15 minutes, too. The LTE / SAE Trial Initiative, founded by a gaggle of companies including Nokia, has recently revealed that initial testing “confirmed that the technology will deliver high levels of data throughput both for stationary and mobile devices.” More specifically, it was suggested that peak 100Mbps downlink / 50Mbps uplink rates could indeed be met, and we’re told that confirmation was “achieved using an agreed set of common transmission profiles, test procedures, and analysis methods.” Beyond the hip, hip, hooray, there’s not a lot of details to share, but those interested in basking in the glory of one darn fine trial can hit the read link and have at it.
[Via Physorg, image courtesy of LetsGoMobile]
 
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Original post by Darren Murph

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment
Regardless of what those oh-so-knowledgeable analysts had to say, we all knew this day was coming. Yep, that highly-touted, totally “impenetrable” copy protection technology known as BD+ has officially been brought to its knees, and it’s not at all surprising to hear that we have SlySoft to thank. The AnyDVD 6.1.9.6 beta has quite a comical change log too, and aside from noting that users now have the ability to backup their BD+ movies and watch titles sans the need for HDCP-compliant equipment, it also includes a candid note to Twentieth Century Fox informing the studio that its prior assumptions about BD+’s effectiveness were apparently incorrect. You know the drill, hit the read link below to try ‘er out.
[Thanks, Aaron]
 
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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Original post by Darren Murph

The Netrunner is a device that allows you to affix your laptop to a treadmill — and I don’t think I need to tell you why this idea falls short of genius (although I will anyway). I’ll admit, they had me with the ability to play DVDs. I can see how that could be useful in certain situations. But if you can surf the web using this thing, you are not working hard enough my friend. Plus, if you are interested in this, you might as well go all out with the treadmill desk from Steelcase. Available for $99. [Product Page via BookofJoe]

Original post by Sean Fallon