local

If you've ever wondered what people near you are tweeting about in real-time and thought that might help you find cool things going on nearby, Twitter may soon offer exactly that feature.

According to AllThingsD, Twitter may well be working on new features that would show tweets from people near you.

"Twitter is in the process of testing a new feature that lets you discover tweets from people within a certain distance of your location," AllThingsD said it had been told by multiple sources. "The idea is to surface relevant activity based on where you are … Read more

All so-called LED TVs are really just LCD TVs that use LEDs for their backlight. This backlight creates the light that allows the LCD to create an image. However, there are multiple ways these LED backlights can be arranged, and that arrangement can have a dramatic effect on picture quality.

So here's your guide to all the different versions, with some funky illustrations, too.… Read more

Google, who? Facebook, huh? Yeah, that's right. The Internet behemoths don't pose any threat to business-reviews site Yelp and its still-blossoming local advertising business. Well, that's Yelp's attitude anyhow.

"Today, we're really competing with print, radio, and television," Geoff Donaker, Yelp's chief operating officer, said Tuesday when speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom conference.

But what about Internet businesses like Google and Facebook? Donaker is sure the pair will compete with Yelp in the local advertising arena eventually -- emphasis on eventually. Yelp will let that battle "play … Read more

TuneIn Radio has an intuitive interface that makes it a snap to listen to streaming radio while you're on the move. It offers more than 50,000 stations and 120,000 shows from around the globe, plus, with the help of your iPhone's GPS, it can even serve up all of your local favorites.

Upon launch, TuneIn lets you drill down to exactly what you want to listen to. You can browse local radio, recommended stations, stations for different languages, and even podcasts. You can also choose from categories like sports or talk radio.

Like other radio-streaming apps, … Read more

Earlier this month, Google shared a fascinating statistic. The number of items in the company's Knowledge Graph -- its database of people, places, and things, and the connections between them -- had tripled in size over its first seven months in the wild, to 18 billion facts.

Up until this month, though, those facts were available only in English. It wasn't until December 4 that Google made the Knowledge Graph truly global, by introducing it in seven new languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

The project to make Knowledge Graph content available in … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- What happened when NYU students discovered they could e-mail 40,000 people at once.

- Trotify kit puts Monty Python horse coconuts on your bike.

- Why is Slate defending your right to name your kid Hashtag?

- Why people spend so many hours stitching footage into YouTube collages.

- Access Main Computer File: Exploring graphical user interfaces in movies.

- Brave Robotics offers 3D-printed 1/12 scale mecha transformer at Maker Faire.… Read more

When heading to a city like London on a budget, a service like Airbnb can be a godsend: with dozens and dozens of available apartments to choose from, a traveler can easily find a place to stay that's much less expensive than a hotel, and which offers privacy, a sense of home, and maybe most important of all, a kitchen.

Last year, I went to London on business and decided the visit was long enough to merit getting a place through Airbnb. But I hadn't been to the English capital since I was a teenager and had no … Read more

I was going through the app listings the other day and came across LocalScope, a unique local search tool that helps you find things near your current location. Obviously, many people already use Google Maps (no current version for iOS) for this purpose, and the Yelp-powered Apple Maps gets better every day, but after looking at LocalScope (reviewed below), I went on a search for other apps that tailor their results just for what is right around your area.

This week's collection of apps is all about searching for services around your location. The first gives you tons of listings and a surprising bonus feature for finding your destination. The second offers a slick radial interface and tons of categories to pick from. The third is LocalScope, and uses social data to find places, videos, and images from people around your location.… Read more

Like most operating systems, OS X supports multiple languages, with full character sets and fonts for practically every language. In addition, there is full localization for a number of these languages, so you can have the system display menus and other system features in the language of your choice.

To do this, open the Language & Text system preferences, and in the Language tab drag the language you would prefer to the top of the list. After a restart, your system and applications will use that language, if they include localization support for it. Be aware of that qualifier because … Read more