Author: Toby Leftly

This week will see a bunch of changes to Facebook’s privacy controls, addressing the ongoing concerns that Facebook is unconcerned with user privacy, offers only convoluted and confusing controls to handle it and has flat out lied about selling data to ad networks. At this point it’s ludicrous to assume Facebook has even good intentions for it’s users, but anything which simplifies the process of moderating privacy is a welcome change. The changes should begin appearing tomorrow, May 26th. Facebook’s vice president of product Chris Cox said it has been a humbling time for Facebook. It will…

Yahoo’s new CEO Carol Bartz was interviewed by infamous blogger Michael Arrington last week at TechCrunch Disrupt and was less than pleased by his aggressive questioning. Well known for her x-rated language, Bartz showed her teeth when Arrington implied that Yahoo wasn’t working quickly enough to build it’s profile after last year’s disastrous crash. The short video above shows Bartz snapping, clearly frustrated with the expectation that she should have already turned Yahoo’s profits around. “I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company. It probably…

With personal devices becoming more widespread, and nanotechnology evolving in leaps and bounds, the way we interact with our devices is becoming more personal and more intuitive. This seems like a big step forward in this area. Designer David Boyce’s innovation is a set of speakers that you can hold, squeeze and shake. Essentially flOw Wireless Interactive Speakers is an iPod speaker dock, but the cool part is that you use tactile feedback to control volume and playlists. Squeeze the speaker to pump up the volume. Turn the speaker upside down to ‘pour’ away the volume. Shake the speaker to jump…

Like most newspapers and magazines, Sports Illustrated has been wondering how to handle the move to digital and internet distribution. Some publications are leaning towards iPhone and iPad apps, but the most promising technology in terms of widespread distribution is still the web. As the video shows, HTML5 has more than enough capability to create a compelling experience for magazine readers. The iPad is a success because people can envision themselves sitting on the train reading a book or magazine. But as devices like ebook readers and tablets become smaller, lighter and sturdier, and…

Apple is finally releasing the iPad App Store to the international market. Until now, opening the App Store using an account anywhere outside the US resulted in a message stating that the App Store is not available in your region yet. Still missing from the store are Apple iWork apps Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Users were easily able to circumvent the problem by creating a US account, but no word yet on how easy it is or if it is even possible to transfer apps purchased with a US account to your own native country account. Apple is about to begin shipping iPads to nine additional countries on May 28, including…

Canada is one of the top five countries responsible for piracy around the world, along with China, Mexico, Russia and Spain, according to the Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus. The five countries have failed to make progress during the last year, and US intellectual property holders are suffering. Senator Orinn Hatch from Utah went as far as declaring that the “five countries have been robbing Americans”. The caucus went so far as to release the list of most notorious offender sites. The list includes IsoHunt (Canada), Baidu (China), The Pirate bay (Sweden), Rapidshare (Germany)…

If you’re a web designer, web user or a human being who’s touched a computer in the last year, you probably know that HTML5 is kind of a big deal. Well, nobody told Adobe that. Having just shipped Adobe Creative Suite 5 you’d expect the world’s leading creativity software maker to be up on all these new fangled web technologies. Actually, Dreamweaver, the Creative Suite’s HTML authoring tool has very little in the way of support, but Adobe has realized this and has released the Adobe HTML5 Pack as an extension. The extension contains several useful tools for web designers, including code hinting…

Google has had a fantastic week for it’s I/O Conference. Google Wave went live, WebM open source video was announced and Google Online Storage was released to the world, amongst many other exciting updates. The latest news from I/O is that Android 3.0 is in the works for the fourth quarter of 2010. Codenamed “Gingerbread”, the next big update to Google’s mobile OS is expected to include support for WebM and VP8, Google’s latest video codecs. Updates to the mobile OS have followed an alphabetical theme, inspired by delicious treats; Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo and now Gingerbread. Right now…

Gist, a social networking tool that works through email, today announced a Google Apps Gadget for Gmail. Email, the very first form of internet communication is ironically the last bastion of privacy in a time when everything you send out into the world wide web suddenly belongs to someone else, but Gist has been working hard to change that. Gist works through an add-on for Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes or through an iPhone app. Gist hopes to reach a much wider audience by adding Gmail support. As the video shows, you can click on people’s names in the ‘To’ or ‘Cc’ field in an email and using Gist’s…

Nike is finally announcing an addition to the Nike+ fitness add-on for iPods, a heart rate monitor. The news appears in a Nike+ forum thread. The launch date is June 1st, with a Canadian release later in June and international release set for the summer. No details on price or compatibility yet, but this is promising news for hardware that has been in discussion since last September. The Nike+ accessories work by placing a sensor in a slot under the sole of your Nike shoes and a receiver plugged into your iPod or iPhone. As you run, your iPod shows information about your workout, or selects songs based…