conversion

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of fanfare about an application called DoubleTwist that is at its core a free music jukebox that offers content syncing to a variety of portable devices, including the BlackBerry, the PSP, and the iPod, as well as pretty much anything that can mount in Universal Mass Storage mode. One of the main draws of the program is that it can take your iTunes library and sync it to a variety of non-iPod players, an important feature for anyone who has ditched the ubiquitous device in favor of a music phone or other MP3 player. And soon, the Windows version of the jukebox will offer built-in support for Amazon MP3 store purchases as well (note: the Mac version already supports Amazon MP3 purchases), a move in line with the company's goal to offer consumers choice when it comes to digital music management.

Certainly, DoubleTwist is a useful solution for a lot of people, especially since it incorporates automatic video transcoding for a lot of the supported devices, which is the feature that drew me to the software. However, the program is not without its pitfalls, and some of them are sure to cause no small amount of frustration. For example, the video transcoding--done during the syncing process--takes forever. Conversion speed was roughly two times normal speed, so a 90-minute movie took 50 minutes or so to encode and transfer. Still, considering DoubleTwist offers this feature for free and integrates it so simply, I'm willing to forgive the sluggishness.

Much more annoying is how slow the video library loads in thumbnail mode, and while it is loading, you can't actually browse the selections.… Read more

Turbo Browser is an intuitive photo-editing and file management tool. It combines two features we don't usually see together--a basic image editor along with a file browser and organizer--which sets it apart from other similar programs.

Turbo Browser's interface is basic and looks a lot like Windows Explorer. There are panes to display folders, the names of files within the folders, and previews of the files of themselves. We loved being able to preview not only images, but also Word documents, PDFs, and other files without opening their respective programs; this is a really valuable tool to have … Read more

Converber provides an incredible amount of options as a unit converter. With a simple layout and an impressive collection of units, this program will be helpful for school and everyday life.

We dove right into the program's intuitive and simply laid out interface, with two main menus of conversions front and center. We would have liked a more robust Help file, perhaps with definitions of the more obscure conversions, but were able to fully utilize the program nonetheless. At first we didn't believe the program description boasting over 1,200 conversion units, but we quickly learned it was … Read more

MConvert quickly calculates complex mathematic formulas. By performing this difficult task users can ensure accuracy and save time.

We instantly started converting our facts and figures thanks to the program's intuitive layout and its well-marked command buttons. We imagined all the practical home and school possibilities while choosing between dozens of everyday and scientific conversions ranging from temperature conversion, distance, volume, mass, time, currency, area, and more. We were relieved to find all the guesswork taken out of conversion, since the program lists all possible alternatives (for example, the currency converter lists dozens of monetary units, while temperature lists … Read more

It was just a matter of time: "With brands turning into curators of conversations about them and brand value increasingly determined by the value of aggregated content, third parties might be inspired to hijack these very brands by offering curated conversations on their behalf," I wrote in early July.

And now Seth Godin and BzzAgent have done exactly this. The marketing guru and the marketing agency have launched a portal that aggregates conversations about brands and presents them in a unified public-facing dashboard that gives brands the chance to lead the discussion. Brands in Public translates the Get Satisfaction … Read more

Jeff has the day off today, so you know what that means: TOTAL CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION! Well, not exactly...Wilson has a little trouble getting the show started, but eventually we get off the ground and welcome our guest on today's show, Mr. Tim Geisenheimer. However, we only get to chat with Tim 1-on-1 for a second before Natali Del Conte pops in to help us out too, making it an all-star lineup!

So after a quick Seinfeld moment about the woes of moving Ikea furniture, we break into a story about a real life "Gaydar" developed by two MIT students which uses social networking data to determine the sexuality of a user. Our major issue with this "study" is that the computer program takes statistical analysis way too seriously. It assumes that if you have a high volume of gay friends, then you must also be gay yourself...interesting jump there. Subscribing to a "birds of a feather, flock together" adage, the two students trained their "Gaydar" to be "very accurate" on men, but not so great on bisexuals or women.

Speaking of women, apparently a group of 3,000 female participants voted the SHOWER RADIO the worst gadget ever invented. It's unclear whether or not they forced the women to choose overtly female-target gadgets (which tend to be cheesy anyway), but Natali has a few things to say about the other gadgets on the "worst ever" list, which include electric fluff removers at #8, egg slicers at #10, and the electric can opener at #18. Although I think we're all starting to doubt Natali's sanity after she tells us all the infomercial junk she's bought over the years...can you say...SLAP CHOP?

Have you heard about CNET TV's newest show called CNET Conversations? To kick off the first episode, CNET's Molly Wood and Ina Fried will sit down with Steve Balmer at the Microsoft offices in Redmond, Washington, and they're bringing questions from viewers. If you have a question for Balmer, head over to the CNET Conversations blog and ask it in a comment!

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With a sleek new form factor and internal memory instead of an optical UMD drive, Sony's new PSP Go handheld gaming console is a very different animal than the original PlayStation Portable. Naturally, dedicated mobile gamers have been asking what, if anything, could they do with their collections of UMD game and movie discs if they upgrade to the PSP Go.

After initially hinting that current UMD games could be either converted for use on the SSD/Memory Stick-only PSP Go, or physically traded in for a digital download version of the same game, Sony now says that's not in the cards. … Read more

While the rest of the developed world looks at the controversy over healthcare reform in the US with a mix of embarrassment and disbelief, Americans have experienced a raging debate this summer that was to a large part driven by word-of-mouth online.

MotiveQuest, a research firm, has evaluated the healthcare chatter bouncing around the Internet. It pulled data from more than 100 health and political forums and blogs, representing more than 2,000,000 posts and 110,000 people in the average month. Categorizing the debate’s language into thematic groups (treatments, payment methods, doctors/patients, and the uninsured), it … Read more

Able2Doc PDF to Word Converter basically does one thing very well--it converts PDF files into Word or Open Office Writer documents so that you can use and manage them in Microsoft Word, the OpenOffice.org open-source program, or a compatible word processor. It also saves files in both DOC and RTF formats.

The program has advantages beyond doing away with a PDF reader and standardizing your documents and files, such as preserving the look and feel of PDF files in your Word documents. It offers several conversion options, including the ability to convert .PDFs into fillable Word forms, to place … Read more