Originally brought to attention by Gizmodo, I thought the video was worth a post.  Don’t try this at home kids.

Steven Spielberg is jumping on the social network bandwagon by creating a niche social network.  A social network catering to the paranormalities of Ghosts and UFO sitings.  It has been dubbed with a name called “Rising” or “The Rising”, both domain names have been registered while they figure out which to call it.  They’re probably sifting through trademarks and corporate catch phrases to make sure they don’t get sued first.  This social site will be a feeding ground for paranormal activities with users having the ability to share stories as well as upload photo’s and movies of such events.  The site is dubbed to be launched at the end of the summer.

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

So someone found another use for Twitter besides looking at some one’s everyday boring life.  This guy was able to to setup an INSTEON light switch hooked into his computer to turn his room lights on and off by text messaging “lights off” from his cell phone.  A useless setup for most(and i mean most by 99.9%) of all users because unless you have a dedicated machine(home server?) setup for this by the light switch, this just isn’t going to catch on.  Now if INSTEON or some other Home Automation maker happens to integrate this type of technology into their switches(802.11b/g integration maybe?) then I can definitely see this becoming popular.

The boys over at Engadget have spy shots of the upcoming Palm Treo 850.  Not a bad looking unit although when brisking through the comments some say it resembles Research In Motion’s Blackberry units.  But what do you expect?  Most cars on the road have the same usable features in roughly the same spots too.  In any case, the Treo 850 will be sporting a 400MHz CPU and 100MB of RAM as another contender in the Windows Mobile arena.  Now if only you can install Linux on it.

Google is holding a presentation party, or Factory Tour of Search, today at its Mountain View headquarters location.  They have invited the press as well as representatives from Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Medical School, MedCo, Quest, Walgreens, CVS, Longs, RxAmerica, and others.  Could today mark the day in history where GoogleNet(See Skynet) becomes self aware of its users medical records?  Maybe or maybe not since Google has been trying to release this project since 2006.  See more details about the event including what will be discussed, who was invited, and those that will be presenting over at Tech Crunch.

Although there’s currently no benchmarks or reviews to test the statement, Greenhouse has announced a new SSD drive that is currently the fastest SSD in the industry.  The DH-SSDGS series are supposed to read up to 130MB/s and write up to 67MB/s.  The capacities range between 16GB to 128GB at 2.5 inches.  The SATA flavors are supposed to be available late May in Japan.  No word on release dates in the US or pricing.

In another moveto keep their heads above water, AMD fires two executives, EVP of Computing Solutions Mario Rivas and Chief Talent Officer Michel Cadieux in addition to 1600 workers laid off worldwide.  The new engineering group will oversee the development and execution of AMD’s product roadmaps throughout their business units.  AMD seems to be focusing more on their business unit now as the Opteron series will be the bread and butter until the consumer sector picks up.  Hopefully the next iteration of processors due out later this year will pickup where the Phenom’s have been lacking to compete against Intel.

Electronic Data Systems (EDS) has been in talks with Hewlett Packard (HP) to be acquired for $12-13 billion.  EDS was founded on June 27th, 1962 in Plano, Texas.  Their revenue for the 2006 year was $21.3 billion and have 136,000 employee’s.  EDS has a wide range of services broken up into three service portfolio’s which are Infrastructure, Applications, and Business Process Outsourcing.  This acquisition will better place HP to go head-to-head with IBM.  If the acquisition is to go through, it will be HP’s largest acquisition since the $19 billion buy-out for Compaq Computer in May 2002.  EDS shares surged as much as 28% while HP’s shares fell 5.7% when the buyout was first reported minutes ago.  Marketwatch.com reports.

As the Web 2.0 era rages on, Microsoft is late in the game with its Messenger TV service.  Take what You Tube currently offers but transform it into a real time chat and viewing of videos with your friends.  You will be able to watch the same video in sync with users on your messenger list and comment about the video in real time chat.  Pretty cool concept except it has been launched in 20 countries except the United States.  Although the guys over at Arstechnica fixed that by changing the language option in IE to en-CA(Canada language preset) and were able to use the service.  Imagine watching your favorite TV show, in real time, with friends, family, and co-workers.  Surely a distraction for everyone to turn the service off!  Just kidding.  I’m sure porn buff’s will love this service though.

The Asus Eee PC 900 has hit the online e-tailers today for purchase.  Engadget reports that Buy.com and ZipZoomfly have the units readily available on their sites for purchase.  ZipZoomfly has the XP version for $600 while Buy.com has the Linux version for $566.  As of this writing, Newegg.com has yet to put them on their site for sale.  If they sell like hot cakes and the demand outstrips supply, be prepared for price hikes in the short term.

There have been complaints in Austrailia that the XP version is selling for $50 cheaper than the Linux version according to Technewsworld.com.  Not sure what exactly this is about but I’m sure the details will surface soon.

Google will be launching its very own data portability service called Friend Connect.  This service allows website owners to easily integrate social services by entering a snibbit of code anywhere on the site and they can offer the Friend Connect features to their visitors.  Visitors will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or with the API’s to connect with existing friends on Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.  Essentially turning any website into a social networking site.  Welcome to Web 2.5 Beta 1.

The press release from Google further explains how site owners can drive traffic to their site from visitors looking at friends bookmarks and have the option to publish the content to their own social network or blogs.  Google’s Friend Connect is currently a preview release, meaning it’s beta and is not officially a full blown Google service to the public.  They’re testing the waters to check the adoption rate and of course to smooth out any bugs.

Check it out at http://www.google.com/friendconnect (UPDATE: This link won’t work until after Campfire One  tonight)

If anyone remembers the original USB 1.0 spec released back in 1995 it was a mess.  Intel released the spec and it was completely proprietary under their guidelines.  Then the USB 1.0 spec was thrown out and USB 1.1 fixed all the compatibility issues by starting over from scratch by the end of 1998-beginning of 1999.  USB 1.1 was a globally recognized standard along with 2.0.  USB 2.0 was released as a standard from the beginning separate from Intel and it was a smashing hit with peripherals.  Now, Intel is at it again, releasing a new and improved USB 3.0 but is pulling the same B.S. they did with USB 1.0.  Any company that qualifies as a competitor to Intel, this includes any motherboard, chipset, or CPU manufacturer(including mobile devices), will have to wait 6 months until after Intel comes out with the spec.  Any company that will make an actual USB 3.0 device, memory sticks, camera’s, printers, sex toys, whatever, will be able to get them now.  Of course any company that does not have access to the specs cannot make any devices for it.  We would of thought we could expect better from Intel nowadays but I guess history repeats itself.

The MSI Wind, which is an ultra portable notebook spanning a screen of 10″ has gotten a price tag of $610.  The specs include a 1.6GHz processor which is supposed to be an Intel Atom.   1GB of ram, 80GB Hard Drive, and Windows XP.  The price of $610 really isn’t that impressive considering its competition in this market.  HP, Dell, and Acer all have compact notebooks in this price range and will continue to fuel their ultra portable arsenal in the near future.

Let’s face it, the WiMax technology has been no picnic for any company large or small.  After repeated failed attempts around the world from multiple companies WiMax may finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.  The WiMax joint venture, which is expected to be announced today is official.  Sprint’s WiMax division is merging with Clearwire to form a single WiMax company called… Clearwire!  But Spring will own most of it.  Google, Intel, Time Warner, and Comcast will also be contributing in ways to help out the project.  Besides chipping in a cumulative $3.2 billion they will contributing in a bunch of other ways which are explained more in the press announcement.  You can check out the press announcement here.

Microsoft has finally released Windows XP SP3 on the Microsoft Windows Update and Download Center sites.  The Service Pack was delayed due to compatibility issues with Microsoft’s Dynamics RMS retail management package.  Apparently they haven’t fixed the issue yet and only implemented a work around that detects whether the machine has Microsoft Dynamics RMS installed.  If it finds RMS on the machine it will not show the update on the website, at least not for now.

OFFICIAL DOWNLOAD LINK: Microsoft Download Center