Founder, Publisher and Editorial Director of the 9to5/Electrek/DroneDJ sites.
Seth Weintraub is an award-winning journalist and blogger who won back to back Neal Awards during his three plus years covering Apple and Google at IDG’s Computerworld from 2007–2010. Weintraub next covered all things Google for Fortune Magazine from 2010-2011 amassing a thick rolodex of Google contacts and love for Silicon Valley tech culture.
It turns out that his hobby 9to5Mac.com blog was always his favorite and in 2011 he went full time adding his Fortune Google followers to 9to5Google.com and adding the style and commerce component 9to5Toys.com gear and deals site. In 2013, Weintraub bought one of the Tesla’s first Model S EVs off the assembly line and so began his love affair with the Electric Vehicle and green energy which in 2014 turned into electrek.co.
In 2018, DroneDJ was born to cover the burgeoning world of drones and UAV’s led by China’s DJI.
From 1997-2007, Weintraub was a Global IT director and Web Developer for a number of companies with stints at multimedia and branding agencies in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Madrid and London before becoming a publisher/blogger.
Seth received a bachelors degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in Multimedia and Creative Technology in 1997. In 2004, he received a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s ITP program.
Hobbies: Weintraub is a licensed single engine private pilot, certified open water scuba diver and spent over a year traveling to 60 cities in 23 countries. Whatever free time exists is now guaranteed to his lovely wife and two amazing sons.
More at About.me. BI 2014 profile.
Tips: seth@9to5mac.com, or llsethj on Wickr/Skype or link at top of page.
PocketNow has what seems to be pretty convincing photographs of what they claim is the ASUS padfone devices. To put it simply, it is to tablets what Motorola’s Atrix is to laptops, though it appears to be in a much cleaner package.
The whole thing seems to make the device a little thicker than we’d appreciate but it may be something for those who want the not best of both worlds.
Another show of the two seperate devices below:
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Before it got pulled, TechHog showed off a picture of what they said was a Nexus 3 device that was to be made by HTC. HTC obviously was the maker of the original Nexus One and has a pretty strong relationship with Google, even if it pays Microsoft patent fees for every Android device it ships.
Interestingly, the device above doesn’t have any permanent front facing buttons, much like the Honeycomb tablets that are being produced right now.
It stands to reason that software-only buttons will make their way down to phones in the next version of Android, called Ice Cream Sandwich, which will combine the Honeycomb tablet versions of the Tablet OS and the Gingerbread phone versions. Ice Cream sandwich is due later this year and Andy Rubin claimed that a Ice Cream Sandwich reference device was in the works before Christmas.
Is this it?
Techhog says the images were pulled at the request of an outside petitioner, though it isn’t clear who it is. Google and HTC are obvious suspects.
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ThisIsMyNext posts some interesting news out of the Samsung camp. After Apple requested to see some of Samsung’s unreleased products (most of which were released before the judge granted the motion), now Samsung is requesting to see some of Apple’s unreleased products. Namely the iPad 3 and the next iPhone whether it be the 4S or the iPhone 5.
Samsung claims that it needs to see Apple’s future products because devices like the Droid Charge and Galaxy Tab 10.1 will presumably be in the market at the same time as the iPhone 5 and iPad 3, and Samsung’s lawyers want to evaluate any possible similarities so they can prepare for further potential legal action from Apple. It’s ballsy, but it’s not totally out of the blue:
In the unlikely event that Samsung gets access to Apple’s products, it will only be Samsung’s legal team that gets to see the devices. Samsung’s manufacturing team probably already has some pretty good knowledge of the new products since they are bidding on/building some of the most important parts.
Nilay Patel, a former copyright attorney himself, thinks that this is a move to reignite negotiations between the companies. If that is true, Apple seems content to let the disagreements go to court and let a judge/jury decide.
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I did a big writeup over at Fortune/CNN Money on what Google Offers/Wallet means this morning. Here are the major takaways:
While it isn’t officially official, HTC’s CEO Peter Chou has come out and said it would unlock all of its phone’s bootloaders.
Quote from HTC CEO Peter Chou: “There has been overwhelmingly customer feedback that people want access to open bootloaders on HTC phones. I want you to know that we’ve listened. Today, I’m confirming we will no longer be locking the bootloaders on our devices. Thanks for your passion, support and patience.”
It will be interesting to see how the carriers react to this. The Sprints and T-Mobiles likely will be ok with this (they carry the Nexus S afterall) but Verizon and AT&T? That’s another story. GDGT is awaiting clarity on those and other issues. Expect a Press release from HTC soon.
As per usual, the best place to get the newest Verizon Gaming phone is Amazon who have the Xperia Play for half price at launch with a two year contract.
The Play runs Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread is the first Android phone with a Playstation gaming controller built in. It has a 854×480 4″ touchscreen LCD, 5-megapixel camera, Bluetooth connectivity, microSD card slot (8GB pre-installed), USB connectivity, and more.
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This is My Next just grabbed a screenshot from the Container Store internal documents which seems to indicate that they will be part fo Google’s new Wallet initiative. The rollout seems to be around September 1 and it appears that at least a few other companies will be signing up as well.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch seems to think VivoTech and Citibank are in on the deal.
We’ll be on hand tomorrow at noon Eastern with all of the details. Stop back, won’t you?
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We just got the event invite and we’re pretty excited to see what Motorola and Sprint have in store. Until now, Sprint has been pretty light on Motorola products outside of their Nextel iDen cra…stuff.
So what’s coming? We know there is a WiMAX XOOM in the works but that isn’t going to get the two CEOs, Dan Hesse and Sanjay Jha to meet up.
More likely, there will be a number of devices. I think Motorola trots out a 4.3 and 4.0 inch qHD set of Droid-like devices that run on WiMAX.
Also remember the Sprint Google event tomorrow (we’ll be on hand live) – perhaps Motorola has some NFC goodness in their phones.
YouTube celebrated its 6th birthday this week with a deluge of new stats. The most significant is that people we watching 3 billion videos per day and a rate of a Trillion a year. That’s a huge number.
The other great birthday present? Your views. We’re amazed that over this last weekend, you drove YouTube past the 3 billion views a day mark, a 50% increase over last year. That’s the equivalent of nearly half the world’s population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day.
Just as a dollars experiment, imagine Google makes a very low-ball guess of $1 CPM. That’s $1B/year. And Google probably makes a multiple of that.
Also, users are uploading 2 days worth of video every minute. The numbers are staggering.
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From 9to5toys.com
Today only, Woot offers the refurbished Samsung Galaxy Tab 3G 7″ Tablet with Google Android 2.2 for Sprint, model no. SPH-P100, for $259.99 plus $5 for shipping
(It’s a current price low by $54.) This media tablet features a 7″ 1024×600 touchscreen LCD, 2GB internal memory, microSD card slot (16GB card preinstalled), 3G capability via Sprint (separate wireless account / plan required), 802.11n wireless, 1.3-megapixel front camera, 3.0MP rear camera, Android 2.2 OS (Froyo), and more. A 90-day Woot warranty applies.
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The author of the book In the Plex does some on sight Q&A with Googlers. Search Engine guru Matt Cuts does the moderation.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RYmSWRRbUI&w=670&h=400]
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.1s all around it seems. This is actually great news for Samsung. I’ve been playing with the amazing Galaxy Tab 10.1 hardware since Google IO and absolutely love it. Unfortunately, the Android 3.0 software is buggy as …and pretty much ruins the experience.
Word comes today that Samsung will ship with 3.1.
This is pretty amazing news for Samsung as 3.1 is so much better in the brief time I’ve had to play with it. It is more stable and it has more features like USB host that make the tablet more versatile.
So Samsung will have the lightest Android Tablet hardware with the newest OS? I smell a winner.
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I’ve often wondered why data centers don’t all move as far north (or south-toward the poles) as possible, especially as cooling becomes the most expensive part of running a data center.
Finland qualifies as pretty far north and water from the North Sea certainly is a great cooling agent. That’s what Google’s move there seems so smart.’
According to the video – available here – Google runs sea water to the facility through a tunnel that was built for the Summa paper mill as far back as the 1950s. The water, says Google senior director of data center construction Joe Kava, is run through a heat exchanger, where it is used to dissipate heat from the facility’s servers.
Data Center Knowledge reports that the sea water goes through four separate straining systems before it reaches the heat exchanger, and that it cools a separate water stream that’s then used to cool the data center.
The water is then moved to a “tempering building”, where it’s mixed with a separate stream of water from from the sea, so that it’s cooled before returning to the gulf. “We return it a temperature that is much more similar to the inlet temperature, so we minimize any environmental impact in that area,
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ&w=670&h=400]
Google also just invested $55 million into Mojave Desert Windfarms.
Mobilized is reporting that virtualization specialists BlueStacks is building an emulator that will allow PC users to run Android apps on their PCs. The emulator has been known about for months. But it will get its first public demos at Citrix Synergy conference on Wednesday.
Now, they are ready to share their idea publicly. BlueStacks plans to show off its technology at the Citrix Synergy conference on Wednesday, as well as detail its ambitions plan to convince PC makers to load their software on new computers, ideally enabling tens of millions of Windows computers to run Android apps over the next couple of years.
Sure you can already do this already – heck, you can probably install a working version of Android over Windows, on another partitian or in a VMWare instance. Android does run on Wintel hardware after all. But BlueStack looks like it makes the job simple and more importantly, they are working with OEMs to get their software pre-installed
Interestingly, it will likely also be able to run on Windows 7/8 tablets – which means that Windows tablets could run Android Apps – thats both good for developers and possibly Windows 7 tablet users but might not be so great for Google.
So Android Apps will run on Android, QNX tablets and now Windows 7. That means developing for Android means that you have access to most of the world’s computing users.
Funny thing happened while the courts were deciding to give Apple access to Samsung’s unreleased Android products which Apple claims infringe on its IP.
Samsung released all but one of them.
So it turns out that Apple could have gone to Amazon instead of the court to get access to these products. In fact, we have three of those products (Tab 10.1, Charge and Infuse 4G) in our labs, below:
Additionally, The Galaxy S2 is on sale in the UK and available globally through resellers. The only product that you can’t yourself get your hands on is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 – which we’re expecting to see shortly –probably about the same time Apple lawyers get their hands on theirs.
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Barnes and Noble announced their new Touch Nook today and it seems pretty impressive at first blush.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzH6gWcpmc8&w=670&h=390]
Some fun facts:
The question in my mind is: How many people would rather have a color iPod touch or Samsung Galaxy player for less than $100 more and get full Apps, Web Browser, maps, GPS, Cameras, Video conference, etc etc on only a bit smaller screen?
Interestingly, the Nook Touch also looks really small unless the guy below is a giant:
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Amazon just announced the pre-order of the Samsung Galaxy 4 PMP (smartphone without the phone), thus becoming the first real challenger to Apple’s dominant iPod touch.
What do you get spec-wise beyond the iPod’s? The rear camera is a respectable 3.2Megapixels with a LED flash and the it comes with a bigger 4-inch display. While it has the same base 8GB of internal memory, the Galaxy Player 4 also has a micro-SD card slot for up to 32GB of additional storage per card.
It also has a front-mounted camera but unfortunately runs Android 2.2 which doesn’t have native Google Talk Video conferencing capabilities.
The Galaxy Player 5 with a huge five-inch display which was announced earlier should also be in the wings.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVbXrubQpa0]
After her little visit to Mountain View, it appears that Lady Gaga is coocoo for Google, staring in the above commercial for Chrome with a bunch of her little web monsters. Amazon also has her new album”Born This Way on sale for $.99 today.
Overstock.com offers the factory-refurbished Barnes & Noble NOOKcolor eBook Reader for $224.99. Coupon code “206777” cuts it to $179.99. With $2.95 for shipping, that’s $66 under the lowest total price we could find for a new one.
The (popular with the women) NOOKcolor features a 7″ 1024×600 LED-backlit color touchscreen LCD display with extra-wide viewing angles for reading books, magazines, and newspapers in color. This popular with the hackers device was just updated to Froyo and Gingerbread/Honeycomb builds have been ported as well. Other features of this Google Android-based eBook reader / tablet include 802.11n wireless (with free access in Barnes & Noble stores), 8GB internal memory, microSD card slot, eBook lending, MP3 audio and MP4 video playback, Pandora, and more. A 1-year Barnes & Noble warranty applies.Barnes and Noble is rumored to be releasing another Nook product in the coming month.
In other Android deals, Best Buy has the Samsung Epic 4G smartphone (below) for free with a two year agreement with Sprint.
As the mobile patent wars heat up, Google is arming itself with just about anything it can find, borrow or buy. The latest case for the latter is the $4.9 million pick up of the assets of Israeli mobile device maker Modu. From the release, it isn’t certain which patents Google gets but the thinking is spending $5 million now will save more than $5M later in patent damages.
Google had originally bid $2M for the patents.
One thing that keeps people on Excel is the ability to use Pivot tables. Google today eliminated one more barrier to migrating to apps by implementing pivot tables today in Google Spreadsheets.
In essence, a pivot table does just that — it allows you to “pivot” or rotate data, thus looking at it from different angles and seeing a variety of patterns which may not be immediately obvious. Let’s take a very simple example of a list of students. This list includes a number of students and some information about them, including gender, class level, and major.
Updates to Spreadsheets are rolling out now.
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Today, Verizon announced the Sony Xperia Play will be coming to its network online at verizonwireless.com beginning May 19, and in stores on May 26 for $199.99 with a new two-year customer agreement. Customers will need to subscribe to a Verizon Wireless Nationwide Talk plan and a smartphone data package. Nationwide Talk plans begin at $39.99 for monthly access and an unlimited smartphone data plan is $29.99 for monthly access.
The Play is the Playstation Android phone that was announced earlier this year. We got our hands on a GSM version at Google I/O last week and should have a review shortly. To sum it up in a few words: If you own a PSP and an Android phone, you’ll definitely want to combine your purchases here soon.
Full Press release follows:
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http://www.c-spanvideo.org/videoLibrary/assets/swf/CSPANPlayer.swf?pid=299421-2
CNET reports that Apple and Google have been called back to the Senate to continue to testify on privacy concerns which surfaced when it was revealed that Apple had been storing location information on iPhones and backing that up on PCs/Macs. This time Facebook was invited to speak as well.
On the docket to testify as part of a witness panel is Bret Taylor, the chief technology officer for Facebook; Catherine Novelli, Apple’s VP of worldwide government affairs; and Alan Davidson, Google’s director of public policy for the Americas. Joining them is Morgan Reed, the executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology, and Amy Guggenheim Shenkan, the president and COO of Common Sense Media. Ahead of that panel is David Vladeck, the director of the bureau of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission.
Notably missing is the U.S. Department of Justice, which made up part of the opening act in last week’s hearing, as well as a representative from Microsoft, which also collects location information from Windows Mobile 7 devices with a unique ID. During last week’s hearing, the Justice Department discussed forward-looking policy initiatives to require mobile providers to collect and store information about their customers, which is likely to be a topic at Thursday’s hearing.
The Senate will hold the hearing on May 19 at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
Although Senate hearings can be boring (see above), we did get some interesting information about Apple’s upcoming plans for crowdsourcing traffic data from this whole mess. (Cross-posted from 9to5Mac.com)
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There are some new features coming down the pike in Google News, the search company said today. The update, released today, is supposed to give greater story diversity with less clutter.
The updates should be rolling out immediately. Think the “greater story diversity” update has anything to do with Eli Pariser’s new book Filter Bubble?