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Facebook buys photo service Divvyshot

Calling it "an offer we can't refuse," the founders of a photo-sharing service called Divvyshot announced Friday that the start-up has been acquired by Facebook. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it's clear that as with Facebook's acquisition of Parakey--and even the far bigger FriendFeed buy--this is an acquisition designed to get the engineering team on board.

Divvyshot, which launched with backing from the Y Combinator incubator, allows for group photo sharing: multiple users can edit albums, which are grouped around various events and places. As part of the acquisition, the … Read more

WarioWare D.I.Y.: The trouble with doing it yourself

One of our all-time favorite games is WarioWare, especially the first installment for the Game Boy Advance. The clever idea of remixing Nintendo's old properties into an irreverent hyperspeed assortment of challenges was revolutionary at the time, and had great replay value.

The series has evolved and with it, we're now introduced to arguably the most ambitious effort yet: the ability to create WarioWare minigames. However, in WarioWare D.I.Y. it almost feels like the franchise is regressing rather than progressing. The beauty of the randomness of WarioWare was in guessing which buttons or inputs needed to be used and in what manner in order to pass the challenge. In D.I.Y., inputs are limited to screen tapping, which is itself a reduction compared with the touching/writing motions in WarioWare Touched (the last DS game in the series). As far as a collection of games, WarioWare D.I.Y. is the weakest assortment yet.

The new addition this time, however, is a robust editor for creating new minigames from scratch. Art, animation, AI routines, and even music composition create a toolkit that's amazingly deep for a handheld game. We were instantly transported back to the days of Mario Paint using its onboard game and music composers, which served as some positive familiarity with the creation process. … Read more

The 404 Podcast 528: Where we leap back into...Y2K...10?

Ten years after Y2K, the folks over at Sony still can't seem to remember to set their clocks right. The major firmware bug that shut down (almost) everyone's PlayStation 3s over the weekend turned out to a glitch in the "clock functionality incorporated in the system," according to Patrick Seybold, Sony's senior director of corporate communications and social media.

Despite the company's claims that the glitch has been fixed, we're still harboring some serious doubts that Sony did anything to fix it and probably just waited until March 1 in hopes that the bug would fix itself, which thankfully it did. So go ahead and stop caressing your consoles and return the drums of apple sauce you bought to survive the Armageddon, and...turns out the Mayan calendar ended two years earlier, and much less severely than predicted.

In less serious news, a new iPhone app called TigerText will hopefully help you succeed where Tiger failed. The application acts as a third-party call center for your text messages and erases your texts after a given period of time that you specify. Your options for lifespan go from 30 days all the way down to just one minute, depending on the NSFW-ness of your texts.

Both parties must pay for the service ($2.49 per month), and the app is only available for the iPhone for now (BlackBerry and Android support coming soon), but that's a small price to pay for the freedom to send those "Hey...you awake?" texts at 3 a.m. on a Saturday night.

Finally, we're happy to report that despite accusations of child labor abuse, Wilson G. Tang is still happily riding the Apple train, except that this time we're actually right there with him.

Apple recently released a report that exposed three facilities in China that employed underage workers to build its products. Apple subsequently terminated all of its contracts with that factory, but certain outlets continues to blow the story out of proportion, when in fact Apple independently investigated a situation that they had no legal responsibility to address, which deserves commendation in our book. You win this round, Tang...

All this plus a face-melting psychoanalysis Calls From the Public segment you won't want to miss on today's episode of CNET's The 404 Podcast!

EPISODE 528 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Sony jumps into the 13-inch ULV laptop crowd with the Vaio Y series

Hardly a day goes by that we don't recommend a 13-inch laptop to someone for their specific computing needs. After all, it's the only size that we find big enough for all-day use, but small enough to carry around several times a week (but every day would be pushing it).

While Apple's MacBook may be the archetype 13-inch laptop, almost every other PC maker has one or more models, and many of the current ones use Intel's latest ULV processors (non-ULV options are also available) to keep the systems thin, light, and energy efficient (even if … Read more

Lenovo releases Core i7 laptop, lots of ultraportables

Windows 7 may have launched last week, but the Windows 7 party is just starting for companies like Lenovo. Their webcast today announced a variety of new desktops and laptops--most notably, high-end Core i7 consumer laptop as well as an expansion of their ultraportable U line of thin-and-light notebooks.

Are $1,000-plus consumer notebooks a smart move in this economy? Lenovo will find out, as the company releases its first Core i7 consumer laptop, the IdeaPad Y550P. A high-end multimedia/gaming laptop set to compete at the high end of the laptop market, it will have a 15.6-inch 16x9 … Read more

New perspectives on the work/(life) conundrum

My mom always told me “Make your passion your profession, and you’ll be a happy man.” She was right, and I am glad I followed her advice. Yet I appear to be part of a minority. In an article about growing disenchantment at work (“Hating What You Do”), this week’s Economist cites a survey conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, an American consultancy. It found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of workers who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%, and the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% … Read more

Novel software

yWriter 5 is an unusual but interesting bit of freeware that takes a coder's approach to writing a novel. Simon Haynes, a bestselling novelist and programmer, developed it to help the aspiring author by automating many of the tasks common to fiction writing. It's basically a specialized word processor that breaks down the elements of a writing project into discrete pieces that can be refined individually and then strung together, much the way a coder approaches a large programming job. Chapters, scenes, characters, and plot elements can be defined, developed, edited, and automatically integrated into the project. You … Read more

Why Gen Y buys into HP's 'Declare Yourself'

Hewlett-Packard's new back-to-school campaign, dubbed Declare Yourself with HP, isn't your typical laptop sales promotion. It probably could be used instead as a case study of how members of Generation Y tend to gravitate toward products that inflate their egos.

The online campaign, which rolled out this week in partnership with Viacom's MTV Networks, enables users to "declare" their goals with one-line summaries. HP is "hoping that this promotion will help (students) set obtainable goals that will help further personal growth."

Obtainable goals, eh? Let's check out some of the goals my … Read more