Author Archives: Kim

About Kim

Kim has been writing online since 2003, covering topics from TV to photography with a peppering of books and food to break of the monotony. She was hired by 451Press.com in 2006 when it was a blog network. Kim managed technical aspects of the site as well as some of the business tasks related to recruiting and hiring writers. When 451Press.com shut down, Kim simply focused on her personal blogging hobbies of writing her extremely rowdy family while taking obnoxious amounts of photos and re-reading all of the Harry Potter series for the millionth time.

When the owners of 451Press.com decided to try to relaunch the site in 2011 with a different model, they asked Kim to come help. She obliged and will be managing and creating all of the content until it becomes too much for her to do alone. She is still writing about her rowdy family during her free time on her personal site, but she'll bring her interest in all things gadget, entertainment and photography related here to 451Press.com.

Kim is also a sucker for flashmob videos. She makes no apologies for this, but does feel like a warning is in order as she takes over the content here.

8 GB NOOK Tablet for $199

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Barnes & Noble has launched a table version of their NOOK and are selling it at the matching price to the Kindle Fire: $199. This shows that B&N is seizing the opportunity to take some of the Affordable Tablet market that Amazon has been hogging since the launch of the Kindle Fire. The two still seem to offer enough differences in both hardware and services that neither seems to be the obvious choice for consumers. If someone is already an Amazon Prime user, taking advantages of eBooks and unboxed videos, they’ll probably side with the Kindle Fire. However, if they’re not, they may be lured to the Barnes & Noble device with the hardware options of more storage and better screen display.

We won’t know for sure until we watch it play out in the market, but there’s definitely not an obvious victor at this stage.

Google Glasses Expected This Year

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It appears that Google is planning on launching their real-time visual data display by the end of 2012. These glasses are expected to be run on an Android platform. There is expected to be a screen that sits close to the eye and will give date displays based on visual and audio data as well as geographical data gathered from a GPS.

The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.

Source.

Possible uses discussed are navigation systems that learn from the user as well as a front-facing camera. Of course, Google is not the only company hoping to market wearable devices, as Apple is rumored to be developing similar devices. Although the 2012 sale date from Google does indicate that they’ll be the first to hit the market with such a tool.

Introducing Mac OS X Mountain Lion

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Apple released Mountain Lion to developers today in an effort to “fully connecting the experience you have on the Mac with the world of the iPad and the iPhone” by making steps like removing iChat to focus on Twitter.

Instead, here’s iMessage, which will still let you IM your contacts (if you must). But what it really wants you to do is use Apple’s seamless texting replacement of the same name. Admittedly, the thought of being able to immediately text anyone with an iPhone for free from your desktop is so unbelievably cool, it can bring on an attack of the vapors.

Basically, it seems like Mountain Lion will be creating an iPad-like experience, doing things like dumping the bouncing icons for the notifications. There’s also fun partnerships (Airplay) and variations on things like the Notes app. No prices or released dates announced yet, but it definitely is a turn worth monitoring.
Source.

Instagram Update

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Instagram users were treated to an update this weekend that will make the popular photo app even more fun for it’s 15 million users. The best part of the update was “LUX” which can lighten up a too-dark photo with one click. And it’s smart enough to not lighten the entire photo, just the areas it interprets as being too dark. The Instagram notifications also will now take you directly to the photo or comment mentioned, as opposed to taking you simply to the app itself. Finally, there’s another filter included in the update: Sierra.

Nothing revolutionary, but enough to excite avid users who may be itching for some new tools tweak their photos.

iPad 3 Announced In March?

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While rumors about releases and announcement of any new Apple products are ubiquitous, certain outlets seem to refrain from announcing them until they seem legitimate. This seems to be the case with the Announcement from All Things D this week.

Sources say the company has chosen the first week in March to debut the successor to the iPad 2, and will do so at one of its trademark special events. The event will be held in San Francisco, presumably at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple’s preferred location for big announcements like these. No word yet on a street date for the iPad 3 (assuming that’s what it’s called), though my guess is retail availability will follow roughly the same schedule as that of the iPad 2: Available for purchase a week or so after the event.

Luckily this rumor gives a relatively concrete date in the near future so we’ll be able to validate this in a few weeks. We’ll see where it leads us.

Nikon’s New 26.3 Megapixel Camera – The D800

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Nikon has officially announced the previously rumored 36.3 megapixel D800. The D800 will run about $3000 sans lens and will be available later next month. Nikon is also making the D800E which will evidently capture “finer detail” and will be available in April for $3300.

From the press release:

Today, imaging leader Nikon Inc. announced the highly anticipated D800 HD-SLR, engineered to provide extreme resolution, astounding image quality and valuable video features optimized for professional still and multimedia photographers and videographers. A camera with an unmatched balance of accuracy, functionality and image quality, the Nikon D800 realizes innovations such as a high resolution 36.3-megapixel FX-format CMOS sensor, a 91,000-pixel RGB Matrix Metering System, Advanced Scene Recognition System and many other intuitive features designed to create the preeminent device for the most demanding photo and video applications.

Engadget did a quick analysis of the D800 here and related it to some of the similar models Nikon has available now, like the D4 and the D700. “As you might expect, the D800 adopts many new features from the D4, while maintaining a smaller D700-like footprint.” They detail the comparisons in the write-up.

Pinterest Escalating In Referrals

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Pinterest is now on the top half of the Top 10 lead referrals across the web, according to the Shareaholic traffic report for January 2012. This now puts Pinterest above Reddit and YouTube for referrals on the list The rate of growth is quite impressive too.

Pinterest grew from 2.5% of referral traffic in December to 3.6% of the referrals in January. That’s impressive growth from just owning .17% of the traffic back in July.

The report goes on to discuss the fact that YouTube did actually grow for the month as well, and it addressed that MySpace even still holds a good size of the market of referrals.

Full report here.

Will 2012 Be The Year Of The Facebook IPO?

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The expert analysts in the industry think that 2012 will bring us the Facebook IPO. Possibly even between April and July, according to some although nothing official has come from Facebook itself about the initial public offering. The speculation whirls though as analysts believe we will see a $100 Billion IPO when the day comes.

The company itself is preparing to raise $10 billion this year, according to reports, to push the company’s public value to $100 billion. More than Disney ($61 billion), Amazon ($88.3 billion) and McDonald’s ($95.6 billion).

Source

The source also includes an infographic that breaks down comparable IPOs both in cost and in industry to show how momentous this will be. It also breaks down owners by percentage in terms of who will gain what when the time comes.

Google’s Privacy Policy Changes

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After Google changed their privacy policies, many people expressed concern. There was enough (possibly unnecessary) concern that members of Congress issued questions to Google about the changes. In order to clarify some of the issues and alleviate some of the concerns, Google re-addressed the issue with further explanation and basically simplifying their motives by explaining there are just trying to…simplify their policies.

By folding more than 60 product-specific privacy policies into our main Google one, we’re explaining our privacy commitments to users of those products in 85% fewer words.

They continue on to point out the important things that are NOT changing. You still won’t have to be signed into any Google accounts in order to use them. You can search whatever you want on any of their services without ever logging in so that the searches will never be attached to your account. They still will never sell the data they collect when you are logged in.

These changes will still go into effect on March 1st. Feel free to read more about this at the Google Public Policy Blog.

Kindle Fire Sales Hitting A Possible 6 Million For This Quarter

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It looks like things are coming up roses for the Kindle Fire. According to All Things Digital, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan has raised his estimate of 5 million sales this quarter to 6 million.

“Kindle Fire has staked out an important market position due to its loyal Amazon customer base and attractive (low) device pricing,” Rohan said in a note to clients. “We believe the lower hardware price will correlate with high e-book and video content attach rates.”

Since Amazon was taking the gamble of selling the device low, hoping to make the money back in eBook and other digital sales, these reports are great news for the business. Amazon knows that whatever loss they may incur from selling the Kindle Fire at such a low price, they can make up continually with digital sales. It’s hard to even quantify a gain that has no solid end-date. People will keep buying eBooks and movies for use on the Kindle Fire, long after they make money back from any possible loss from the initial device purchase.