Sansa TakeTV: Taking digital video content to your TV

Being the good geeks you are, you should all know Sandisk, a corporation that has been manufacturing diverse flash memory products and MP3 players for years now.

But like all companies, Sandisk has to take steps to innovate if they want to keep consumers looking their way. Monday, the company released the Sansa TakeTV, a flash-based USB device that will let you transfer video content directly from your PC to your television, eliminating the need for large set-top boxes. The Sansa TakeTV is both small and compatible with all current television models on the market.

The way the device works is insanely simple:

  1. Plug the Sansa TakeTV into your PC and copy your video content onto it (MPEG-3 or 4, DivX and xVid).
  2. Plug the device in your TV (supported AV outputs: Composite, Analog and S-Video)
  3. Hit play on the TakeTV remote.

The Sandisk TakeTV is compatible with Windows Vista, Windowx XP, Linux and Mac. The 4GB version, which offers approximately five hours of video playback, goes for $100, and the 8GB version, which offers twice as much, goes for $150.

Sansa TakeTV

Seesmic: A video Twitter on steroids

Even if I am a French Canadian guy, I rarely browse the French blogosphere. There’s something about “la langue de molière” that is so anti-tech that the hairs on my arms stand up whenever I hear some of the bogus expressions French people come up with to designate technical concepts.

However, there is one exception to this, and it is Loïc Le Meur’s blog (which, incidentally, also has an English version). Here is a small excerpt from his English “about” page:

Loïc is a well-known serial French entrepreneur who created and sold 4 Internet startups, also blogger and vlogger. Loic’s blog is #1 in France, read by more than 250 000 unique visitors per month, he made hundreds of video podcasts including the only podcast with President Nicolas Sarkozy).

A few weeks ago, Loïc launched a new online service, Seesmic, which could be described as some kind of video Twitter on steroids.

Seesmic

When it launches, his new concept will probably revolutionize the world of online video content as we know it. But don’t take my word for it, watch the following videos and make your own impression.

And here’s another interesting video that shows how discussions are handled between people in Seesmic:

These clips are a part of a series of videos that Loic films to document the launch of his new startup. The whole series can be seen on Seesmic’s front page. This should be particularly interesting for those of you who desire to learn a thing or two on how a new business evolves in the first few days of its existence.


Facebook News Trifecta

FacebookBy David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I have three stories about Facebook today, one focusing on its ads, one on its apps, and one on its popularity.

The first comes to us from TechCrunch and talks about how Facebook Flyers can allow you to target your advertising on the site to certain demographics. Here is a bit from the post:

Flyers let you target by country, city, gender, age range, political views, relationship status, education level, workplace affiliation, or any keyword in a person’s stated interests. It’s that last option that could be really powerful. For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into traveling. Such targeting could theoretically allow advertisers to reach exactly the people they want, instead of the scatter-shot approach favored today.

This is something that many websites with a diverse membership have been trying to effectively do, and while some have succeeded, I think that this might become the most detailed version of targeted advertising.

The second story comes from a new service site called APPMRKT, which allows people to buy and sell Facebook applications. Currently, there are only five advertisements for applications on their sales page, with features ranging from a 924 user GTalk application that would allow a web based Google instant messenger client in your Facebook page, to a 52,000 user Friends Quiz application. Prices also range from a buy it now of $1200 to $20,000 depending on the popularity of the application and its included features.

The third, and final story comes from TechCrunch once again, this time focusing on its popularity, and growth. It seems that while MySpace is still the most popular social networking site, Facebook is coming up fast in rankings.

From the article:

New figures released by HitWise show that in Australia at least, MySpace is now losing market share as the Facebook juggernaut continues. Traffic to MySpace in Australia has dropped 5% as Facebook has tripled its traffic in the 10 weeks to October 13, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Anyone want to take a guess at how long it will be before Facebook overtakes Fox’s MySpace?

Audi R8: The slowest car we’ve ever built (Video)

I’ve always loved the design of Audi cars. They’re good looking, classy, and the R8 is no exception to this.

In an unprecedented move, Audi UK is investing more than 6 million pounds (roughly $12 million dollars) to support its new R8 high-performance car with one of the most ironic claims in the history of advertising: “the slowest car we’ve ever built”.

The R8 is, of course, anything but slow. It is the fastest production car Audi has ever produced, but because each one is constructed with painstaking precision, largely by hand, it actually has the by far the slowest build process of all Audi models. Only 450 cars will be delivered in the UK this year, and 750 in 2008, with prices starting at £77,000 ($155k).

TVLinks Shut Down, Owner Arrested

By David Peralty
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

There are many ways to get your favorite shows, you can watch them at their scheduled time on television, record them with your PVR or VCR (does anyone use a VCR anymore?) or watch them on the broadcast companies website. If none of these choices work well for you, sometimes you can catch them on sites like TVLinks (tv-links.co.uk), where they link to illegally uploaded videos on various video hosting websites, which allows you to view them at your convenience.

I don’t want to focus on the legality of this whole thing, but for the many people that use such sites, a sad thing has happened: TVLinks has been shut down.

Not only has the site been taken down, but the owner, a 26-year-old man from Cheltenham, UK, has been arrested. Though he doesn’t host the content himself, only providing links to the material on major video hosting sites, he has apparently been charged with the “facilitation” of copyright infringement.

Personally, while I agree that the service wasn’t entirely legal, I think it provided a remarkable video on demand service for shows both on and off the air, and should continue to prove to studios, production companies, and cable providers that the audience demands to have their media at their disposal. I hope that the charges are dropped.

Also, as they have started to realize with both video and audio, consumers will get what they want, any way they can and companies can adjust, or try to bully people using the legal system. Unfortunately, bullying won’t get them very far. Proof of this is the number of such video linking websites, torrent websites, and private content sharing networks still out there today.

Now is your chance to chime in on the discussion. Was it right for the site to be taken down and the owner arrested? Will the removal of TVLinks stop you from watching television shows and movies online, or will you find another source?

Do you believe that the future of both video and audio is a complete multimedia on demand service? If so, how much would you pay every month to access any and every movie and song available in a massive library?

Please do not link to any video sharing, torrent or any other illegal or grey area websites as such comments will be moderated. Geeks are Sexy does not condone piracy, but we do believe that certain, currently illegal, models are proof that the handling of media is rapidly evolving and changing to a very consumer focused model.

MP3 Spam starts appearing in inboxes

Can you believe it? After using YouTube, PDFs, and pictures, spammers have now turned themselves to audio files in order to send you their crap and bypass your spam filters.

Spammers involved in pump-and-dump scams touting penny stocks now are using MP3 music files to lure investors, a switch security experts say is the latest tactic designed to sneak the messages past spam filters.

According to e-mail security provider MessageLabs, the spam run began late on Oct. 17, with roughly 10,000 messages blasted out per hour. The e-mails include semi-random subject lines that matched the title of the attached MP3 file, which plays a short 20-60 second message touting microcap shares of a company called Exit Only Inc.

So the next time an email that contains an attachement named “getbiggernow.mp3” lands in your inbox, please don’t open it, unless you’re really looking to… Nah, forget it! :)

Stock Spammers Pump It Up With MP3 Files