flash

Zuda launches with comics contest, strong reactions

Despite a few hiccups on the big launch day, DC Comics' webcomics initiative Zuda Comics went live before the end of business Tuesday on the Left Coast. The first webcomics push by a corporate comic book publisher, Zuda is attracting a lot of attention as the webcomic-o-sphere tries to figure out what it all means.

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Ego trip: Raytel debuts new lineup at SEMA

One of the newcomers to this year's SEMA show is Raytel, a subsidiary of German company Funkwerk, which is using the event to launch five new products: The Ego Drive, Ego Talk, Ego Flash Ego Look, and Ego Cup.

Ego Drive, the flagship product in the lineup, is a combined portable and dockable GPS navigation and multimedia device with a wireless rotary remote control. The device features a 4.3-inch color touch screen with 3D map view, and it comes with text-to-speech functionality to read out road names during turn-by-turn route guidance. For multimedia, the Ego Drive supports MP3 … Read more

iPhone App: Videos 4 iPhone

Videos 4 iPhone provides a solution for the iPhone's incompatibility with flash video. This app converts flash videos, helps you organize your favorite videos for easy access, and lets you submit videos to the developer's site. You can also choose to play videos over the Edge network or using local Wi-Fi.

iPhone Link: http://videos4iphone.com/

Web site link http://videos4iphone.com/about.php

SanDisk sues a score of flash storage vendors

SanDisk is suing 25 companies for infringing on its patents on removable flash storage devices.

The flash memory maker filed a suit with a U.S. District Court in Wisconsin and another with the U.S. International Trade Commission Wednesday evening, seeking damages, a permanent injunction and an order from the ITC banning the importation of the products.

The roll call of the companies is a long one, but here goes: ACP-EP Memory, A-Data, Apacer, Behavior Computer, Buffalo, Chipsbank, Corsair Memory, Dane-Elec, Edge, Imation/Memorex, Interactive Media, Kaser, Kingston, LG Electronics, Phison Electronics, PNY, PQI, Silicon Motion, Skymedi, Transcend, TSR, … Read more

New meets old: CompactFlash RAID card

In the old days, you'd buy a RAID adapter card to let your computer attach to multiple hard drives that provided data capacity and protection. Nowadays, with flash memory, the storage fits right on the card.

Addonics Technologies announced a $50 PCI card Tuesday that's got four CompactFlash card slots. The cards can be configured as four individual drives, a single large volume, or set up with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) 0, 1 or 10 to stripe data across multiple cards or mirror data from one onto another.

Note that there's no support for RAID … Read more

The undead take Manhattan at Zombiecon '07

What is a zombie, anyway?

Is it a childhood nightmare, a modernized niche of folklore, a box-office-tested horror film staple, an ironic riff on American consumerism, or simply an undead corpse hungry for fresh human brains?

Maybe it's all of the above. On Saturday at noon, somewhere around 200 zombies assembled at a bar in midtown Manhattan and proceeded to terrorize the city well into the night. This was Zombiecon 2007, the third annual edition of the pre-Halloween flash mob, and these reanimated corpses took the day very seriously. Among the crowd were undead clowns, airline pilots, ballerinas, doctors, chefs, Roman generals, prom couples, and tennis players. There were also zombified versions of Santa Claus, Pirates of the Caribbean protagonist Captain Jack Sparrow, singer Amy Winehouse, and author Hunter S. Thompson.

(Others, like yours truly, just spruced up jeans and a T-shirt with theatrical blood and white face paint.)

Also spotted: Lindsay Campbell, host of video blog Wallstrip, in a full-on goth-zombie ensemble as she interviewed fellow members of the undead for the cameras.… Read more

Jobo portable photo-backer-upper: Faster, bigger

Jobo on Monday announced the Giga One Ultra device, a portable hard drive for backing up photos in the field. That's a notch more spacious than the 120GB of the Giga One predecessor or the Spectator device, which unlike the Giga One devices have a color screen.

The drives have slots for a variety of flash memory modules, including CompactFlash, SD and SDHC, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro. Photographers can back up their data while on the road, an idea that's especially useful if you're running out of flash card space.

The new models can download … Read more

Mochi Media puts ads, analytics in Flash games

Mochi Media today is publicly launching a toolkit that serves ads in Flash games and also collects analytics. Since Flash games can spread across the Web rapidly and without the blessing of their designers, having some way to make the games phone home to developers, and send money back while they're at it, is a great idea and killer business model.

The big part of today's public release of the product is the ad network, MochiAds. Mochi Media sells image ads--splashy brand-building ads, not buy-me-now clickthrough drivers--to its own ad base at a $5.00 CPM (cost per … Read more

FlashMate turns hard drives into hybrids

A hybrid hard drive can help a laptop boot faster, operate more effectively and quietly, and run longer on a single battery charge. Flash memory maker SST and firmware/BIOS company Insyde Software announced earlier this week a technology they're calling FlashMate that gives standard hard drives hybridlike functionality. Actually, it does more. Whereas hybrid hard drives use flash memory as a data cache when a system is running, FlashMate will let you access the full contents of your hard drive without needing to power on your laptop. Using a combination of hardware, software, and firmware, FlashMate creates an … Read more