Author: Angela West

Apple recently announced that they hit the one million mark on sales of the iPad without the device even being out for a month. By comparison, Amazon sold one million Kindles throughout all of 2009. The new iPad 3G sold over 300,000 units over its first weekend of sale. Trefis, a community of MIT engineers and Wall Street analysts, forecast sales for the iPad at 4 Million for 2010. Now, they are forecasting that sales will likely exceed 4 million for the iPad WiFi and 3G models combined. Some of the reasons for the bump include factoring in for the holiday season and the fact that Apple will be making a…

The speed tests in the above video were filmed at actual browser rendering times. Here is a list of the equipment used, courtesy of the Youtube page that the video is hosted on: – Computer: MacBook Pro laptop with Windows installed – Monitor – 24″ Asus: We had to replace the standard fluorescent backlight with very large tungsten fixtures to funnel in more light to capture the screen. In addition, we flipped the monitor 180 degrees to eliminate a shadow from the driver board and set the system preferences on the computer to rotate 180 degrees. No special software was used in this process. – 15Mbps Internet…

While a specific date has not yet been given, the popular UK-based music streaming service Spotify is threatening a US launch before the end of 2010. No doubt the new Spotify features we reported on last week were partially in preparation for the big reveal. Spotify is a music streaming service that offers over 8 million tracks for free, and its move may scoop Apple’s plans to introduce a similar service within iTunes with its recent acquisition of streaming music service Lala. Currently, UK Spotify users can access the service ad-free for a small subscription charge of $15.00 per month. Users…

A couple of people from Apple displayed the new platform in person at the Hill Holliday agency in Boston, and Ilya Vedrashko blogged the experience. Just some of the interesting things they stated over and above Job’s presentation last week: Branding “Each banner published on the network will carry an iAd logo to differentiate it from the ads that do click into the browser”,  stated Ilya. In addition, there will be only one iAd banner per screen on each app, making the iAd real estate both less intrusive and more exclusive. iAd SDK on the Horizon To start with, the iAds will be built in-house by Apple…

If you are not in the US and you were looking forward to the delivery of your shiny new iPad, you’ll have to turn to eBay or employ a forwarding service in the US to actually get an iPad if your gadget lust can’t wait for another month to be satiated. Apple has formally announced that the iPad demand in the US has forced a delay of one month to international shipments and will be shipping them at the end of May. “Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing…

This formal US Postal Service Jeep has been transformed into a contraption that the most hardened fighter jock could climb into after a night of gambling and hard drinking of ambrosia in the pilot’s mess. Yes, Dean Shorey, the master ride mechanic for Seabreeze Amusement Park in Rochester, NY has created a vehicle that may actually make a hardened geek cry more than a silver Delorian. And it’s street legal. STREET LEGAL. You can drive this baby on the motherfracking highway. It uses a Chevy engine block and features a cassette deck, appropriate low-tech for the “no networked computers on MY SHIP”…

Hewlett Packard recently concluded a study that used Twitter to very accurately predict box office numbers for movies before they were released. The system studied over 3 million messages and accurately predicted box office takes for a number of movies, including the hit film “Avatar”. Bernardo Huberman, head of the social computing lab at HP, noted that their predictions “were incredibly close.” The HP system predicted that The Crazies would take in $16.8 million; it took it $16.06 million. Other movies were similarly close; if you want to check out the research for yourself, you can do so…

Within 24 hours of Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 4.0 OS beta, a hacker from the iPhone Dev Team who goes by the handle of MuscleNerd announced that he had jailbroken the OS. The process of “jailbreaking” allows users to run apps not authorized by Apple on their phone. Musclenerd advised that people should avoid installing the pre-release betas on their primary phones, as they are very buggy and can pose security concerns. Since this is a beta, Apple will likely plug up these holes before the official release of the iPhone 4.0 OS. Source: Apple Insider…

Lee Brimelow is a Flash evangelist and developer at Adobe, and the author of the Flash Blog. Needless to say, Brimelow is less than pleased at Apple’s decision to “slap developers in the face” by removing Flash support on the iPhone OS 4 update. While the blog was obviously changed at his employer’s request after the fact, before the redaction Brimelow had typed “What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5.” What has remained on the blog is the resounding conclusion of “Go screw yourself Apple” and the fact that Brimelow refuses to purchase any Apple products under there…

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine has come up with a new technique of skin grafting that works like a printer to improve the treatment of anyone who is unfortunate enough to lose skin. Dr. Anthony Atala calls the new technique “bioprinting” and has already set up machines to do it in the laboratory doing initial scans on mice. A laser first scans the wound to feed information to the machine, and the “printer” then sprays two layers of cells onto the wound. The cells take care of the rest. This technique allows skin to heal within two weeks as opposed to five if left untreated. The next…