When Shania Twain accepted a lifetime achievement award at the Juno Awards Sunday night, there was an unwelcome celebrant in the audience.

Twain’s alleged stalker, Dr. Giovanni Palumbo, attended the award show at the Air Canada Centre despite a court order to stay 500 meters away from the singer.

“He said he just wanted to meet her,” Det. Michael Jander told the Toronto Sun.

After learning her obsessed fan was in the audience, police approached him shortly before 10pm and promptly escorted him out of the arena.

The not-so-good doctor was arrested and charged with “three counts of failed to comply recognizance,” according to Toronto Police Department media relations spokesperson Constable Wendy Drummond. “He was also charged with criminal harassment.”

Dr. Palumbo was so determined to meet the sexy songstress, he even tried to convince a Canadian reporter to set up a meeting—not such a good idea. “Him being there within 20 meters of the victim was in breach. Therefore he was charged,” Drummond told Radar Online. “He went to court the next day.”

When Dr. Palumbo appeared in court, Justice of the Peace John Jackson ordered him to “make no contact” with Twain. The Toronto Sun reported that the doctor looked bewildered and laughed, “You are all doing a wonderful job, your honor. I am in jail. How can I contact anybody? I am in jail.”

Twain, who lives in Switzerland, failed to show up to a March 7th hearing in Canada to press charges against Dr. Palumbo for a laundry list of creepy behavior, including sending her love letters and bouquets of flowers, visiting her cottage in Muskota, Canada, and—yikes—attending her grandmother’s funeral.

On a previous arrest, Dr. Palumbo was wearing a Shania T-shirt and was carrying her autobiography.

Clearly, that didn’t impress Twain much.

View full post on Entertainment

If there was one thing that bothered us most about the Xperia Play, it was the dearth of original PlayStation games we could, you know, play on it. That’s getting a shot in the arm tonight with the introduction of five PS One titles to the Android Market: Syphon Filter, MediEvil, Cool Boarders 2, Destruction Derby, and Jumping Flash. Each is priced at £3.99 in the UK, with the first two games on the list also being available in five languages. That pricing translates to $6.38 when the games are accessed from the US, but we imagine the final pricing may differ once the Xperia Play lands Stateside. And yes, the Xperia Play will be your only way to access these for now (R800i is its codename), leaving the rest of us Android PS One lovers with a bunch of games to envy and one less emulator to enjoy. The Android giveth, and the Android taketh away.

PlayStation One games appear in Android Market, predictably restricted to Xperia Play originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 16:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Droid Gamers, BGR  |  Android Market  | Email this | Comments

View full post on Engadget

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted Thursday that the company is losing the QuickBar it introduced in a recent update to the iPhone application. The Quick Bar originally sat on top of your tweet stream within the app, and scrolled as you did, unshakeably resting at the top of the screen. A later update eventually changed the Quick Bar’s behavior, making it just stick at the top of your stream without scrolling, but even that apparently wasn’t enough to appease disgruntled users.

The update that removes the Quick Bar from the iPhone app is live right now in the App Store. In an official blog post on the matter, Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman noted that the plan for future use of the Quick Bar included in-app notifications of new mentions, direct messages and other activity, but that after determining that the feature “doesn’t improve the user experience,” the decision was made to remove it rather than to continue tweaking it as it currently exists.

CEO Costolo originally seemed to be very much behind the idea of the Quick Bar, according to his tweets around the time of the feature’s launch, but recently Business Insider reports that in fact, he wasn’t a fan of the idea at all, and that it was actually a product of internal organizational structure confusion. Following the announcement of the Quick Bar’s removal, he seemed still to support the basic idea behind the feature, noting that “[T]he engagement data is through the roof but we ultimately agree trends are “too far away” and out of context in that position.”

Ultimately, this seems to come down to a question of user experience vs. a tentative early step towards profitability. It goes to show that even when you’re already a firmly established player, messing around with risky UX decisions can potentially carry brand-damaging ramifications.

Jeremy Bell of Toronto design firm Teehan+Lax shared some additional thoughts about why the Quick Bar failed from a UX standpoint. Specifically, according to Bell, the Quick Bar encountered resistance because it foregrounded one of Twitter’s weakest aspects — trending topics. While he felt that Twitter improved the situation a great deal by removing the scrolling aspect of the Quick Bar, the feature still ultimately suffered from the same flaws that affect trending topics in a much broader sense, and brought them front and center in the Twitter app user experience. Bell maintains that “trending and how it’s displayed in general is flawed, since it provides no understanding of the context of topics or why they might be important to [a user].”

It’s also worth noting that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey confirmed Monday that he has returned to a more prominent role at the company as head of product development. Dorsey spoke Tuesday at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he said he sees “Twitter as a pure utility, like electricity or water.” Dorsey’s return, his statements regarding Twitter, and the removal of a feature that many saw as detracting from usability while serving profit all seem too well timed to be simply chalked up to coincidence.

Post photo courtesy of Flickr users Rosauro Ochoa

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
• Facebook Patent Hints at Social Search Plans
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

View full post on GigaOMApple

The price of chocolate could increase if the violence and political stalemate in Ivory Coast continues. Prices of cocoa are already at an all time high and confectioners warn that the consumers could soon be paying more for chocolates if there is no resolution.

The West African country is the world’s largest producer and exporter of cocoa. The international community has slapped embargoes on the Ivorian cocoa industry, stopping exports of the crop, in a bid to cut off foreign exchange revenue to former president Laurent Gbagbo and his supporters. Gbagbo refuses to give up power after losing elections last year

The fighting has also paralyzed the country’s biggest port, which exports much of the raw produce for chocolate.

Latest reports indicate that forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara, the would-be president of the West African nation, have taken the coastal cocoa town of San Pedro. Hundreds of thousands of tons of cocoa beans are reportedly in warehouses, ready to be shipped to international markets.

As the crisis of leadership continues, ordinary Ivorians say they are paying the ultimate price for Gbagbo’s stubbornness. Cocoa farmers are forced to stockpile their crops, waiting for the impasse to end. However, the longer this goes on the longer they don’t get paid.

Beyond the economic hardships, the human impact continues to horrify observers.

“Ivory Coast has reached a boiling point,” says Human Rights Watch (HRW). It says ordinary Ivorians and West African immigrants continue to be massacred by forces loyal to Gbagbo. “We are extremely concerned about the potential for further human rights atrocities, given the killings on both sides,” says Daniel Bekele, who heads up HRW in Africa.

Now, the United Nations has eventually beefed up its response against Gbagbo’s regime, implementing tougher sanctions against him, his wife and three associates. However, the Security Council fell short of referring Gbagbo and his supporters to the International Criminal Court.

With both the economic and humanitarian situation reaching dire consequences for ordinary Ivorians, what is the solution? Will sanctions work to shift Gbagbo out of power? Will West African nations take matters into their own hands and launch their own offensive? After all, the impact of this instability is felt far beyond the borders of the Ivory Coast.

View full post on Business 360

Sasha Grey at the premiere of her film

Adult actress Sasha Grey—who took her stage name from Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”—has been described as “the thinking man’s porn star.”

So to satisfy her cerebral fans, the multiple AVN award-winner has authored a book with self-portraits and short essays, “Neü Sex.”

“It’s three and a half year’s worth of photographs,” Grey told The Daily. “There’s some pretty raw shots in there, so it wasn’t necessarily about being the prettiest or being perfect.”

“Neü Sex,” which includes citations from Nan Goldin, Sartre, and Jung, had a rather auspicious start. “I gave these photos to my literary agent around 2007 and he loved them and he loved and he suggested publishing them,” explained Grey. “When I was growing up, I felt really conflicted about my sexuality. And until I started having sex—I was a senior in high school—I was just guilt-ridden. And now this is just a continuation of my awaking sexuality.”

Grey is one of the few adult film stars to make the transition to non-porn acting, including a regular role on the HBO hit ‘Entourage’ and starring turns in Hollywood films by the likes of Academy-Award winning director Steven Soderbergh.

“Early on in my adult film career, I didn’t worry about the way people did my makeup or the way people did my hair, because it wasn’t part of my goal to be this bombshell sexpot—that just wasn’t part of my strategy,” said Grey. “Right now, I am pursuing acting outside of adult films.”

Grey hopes that “Neü Sex” will change the way people think of her. “I think the most difficult part of overcoming the stereotypes is people’s perception of me before they’ve ever met me,” she said. “I wanted to prove people wrong.”

View full post on Entertainment

This is the very reason YouTube, possibly the world, exists. Though if you can watch past the one minute mark, that may signal a shriek for psychological help.

Apparently the United States national team made a video before their trek to Italia ‘90, in which it’s proclaimed “I never lose because I’m a champion”. Which is funny, because they lost three of three in the peninsula.

More of the same truth in rap lyrics, it appears.

[Guardian]

View full post on International Football News – World Cup Blog

My expectations weren’t that high for Angry Birds Rio.  Video games with movie tie-ins are traditionally rushed affairs looking to make a quick buck — especially in the casual gaming space.
Gameplay remains faithful to the original game.  You fling wingless birds at a tower with the goal of bringing it down.  Instead of killing pigs, however, they modified it a

View full post on Latest Cell Phones, iPhone Apps, Android Apps, News & Reviews – Phone Blog

The new Logitec (not Logitech) LAN-WH450N/GR offers four Gigabit Ethernet ports, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking that maxes out at a theoretical 450Mbps, and just about the wildest router design we’ve yet seen. Yes, it’s justified by improved wireless throughput as a result of having three antennas sprouting out of the thin-bodied device, but who is Logitec trying to kid? It’s a futuristic, desktop-straddling robocopter and everyone at that company knows it. Should you or the geek in your life be interested in obtaining one, the new routers are going on sale in Japan in mid-April for ¥19,000 ($230).

Logitec’s new wireless router is crazy-looking, crazy fast originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 Mar 2011 09:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink OhGizmo!, Akihabara News  |  Logitec Japan  | Email this | Comments

View full post on Engadget

Fon was once a company on the verge of bankruptcy with an unsustainable business model, but a new era of mobile computing ushered in by Apple’s iPhone and the devices that followed have completely turned its fortunes around. How? By jump-starting the demand for Wi-Fi everywhere.

The idea behind Fon is that using the company’s Fonera routers, customers can offer up a small portion of their home internet bandwidth for use with public Wi-Fi spots maintained by the company throughout the world. In exchange for buying a Fonera router and sharing a small fraction of your bandwidth, you get access to Fon’s more than three million worldwide Wi-Fi access points for free, and, once you link your PayPal account, you also make money based on the revenue Fon makes from users buying paid Wi-Fi access via your router’s public hotspot (which the company calls a Fon Spot).

Om mentioned in his piece on the hard truths of Wi-Fi that Fon never anticipated the unique opportunities that the company would glean from the introduction of the iPhone and the connected device revolution it was instrumental in popularizing, but Fon founder Martin Varsavsky went one further, arguing that Fon would not even exist today had it not been for the iPhone, the iPod touch, the iPad, and all the other devices these provided the mold for. “Fon almost went bankrupt until the iPhone came along,” he told me over email.

According to Varsavsky, before the arrival of the iPhone, interest in the Fon model of public Wi-Fi sharing wasn’t sustainable with laptops alone:

So our strategy was failing. We had spent all our funds building our systems and giving Foneras away (through you as well) and there was just not enough interest in Fon. So Fon let go of half of its people, my partners stopped investing. Things were BAD.

Varsavsky believed in the core concept behind Fon so deeply that he wound up funding the company with a personal loan in 2008, determined to stick it out until the company could find its way to profitability. And profitability did come, on the backs of the BT/Fon partnership in the U.K., but more importantly, because the pool of devices that most benefit from available mobile broadband experienced a massive boom. The introduction of iPhones and iPod touches, and later iPads and Android devices, meant that, in Varsavsky’s own words, “Fon became USEFUL.”

The company’s revenues grew from around $5 million in the previous year to about $40 million in 2010, and instead of losing $4 million a year as it did during the worst years, the company started seeing profits of around $4 million in 2010. Varsavsky was able to pay back his loan, and the company looks very strong in 2011, especially now that much of its business comes from selling its routers to mobile network operators in order to help those companies offload 3G traffic. Offloading mobile broadband demand now accounts for much more of Fon’s business than does the consumer side, and cable and fixed operators see Fon as a cheap way to reduce subscriber churn, increase their average revenue per unit and decrease customer acquisition costs, according to Varsavsky. The company’s next move is to gain a major foothold in the U.S. market, something it hopes to achieve thanks to a recent $14 million funding round led by investment fund Atomico.

The impact of the iPhone and devices that followed its example on the Wi-Fi and broadband ecosystem is often explained with charts, figures and graphs, but Fon provides a good look at how it actually affects companies on the ground. The iPhone may not be solely responsible for the sea change when it comes to mobile data usage, but it clearly lead the way and helped galvanize the realization that the future of computing is in the palm of your hand, and companies like Fon couldn’t exist without that realization.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Mobile Broadband: Pricing for Profits
• The Future of Workplaces
• How Mobile Is Changing the Video Game Market — and What It Means

View full post on GigaOMApple

The iPad 2 is still hard to get a hold of, both in the U.S. and in other countries where it has launched internationally. Luckily for would-be buyers, Apple is taking steps to reinforce and supplement its existing supply chain in order to be able to move more iPads more quickly.

New Supplier

In order to boost iPad supply, Apple is taking on a new supplier of displays for the tablet. AU Optronics Corp, which is the world’s 4th largest LCD maker by volume, has been contracted by Apple to provide flat panel screens for the iPad 2. This marks the first time Apple has use AUO for iPad supplies, according to the Taiwan Economic News. The report also says that the rate Apple will pay for the displays is roughly three or four times the average rate paid by others for displays of the same size. It’s possible AUO was able to negotiate a very favorable rate in order to guarantee a significant percentage of AUO’s total output capability.

The original iPad was also supply constrained largely due to an inability to source enough displays. LG Display, one of the iPad’s primary screen suppliers, even went on record as saying that it couldn’t keep up with demand from Apple as a result of the tablet’s strong sales. Adding another supplier for the iPad 2 should greatly increase Apple’s ability to get products into people’s hands.

Absorbing Higher Costs

We reported earlier that Apple was mulling a decision to increase what it pays for components in order to secure the supply stock it needed following the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. DigiTimes reports Thursday that indeed, Apple has agreed to such a deal. The company will absorb additional costs on its Japanese-made upstream components in exchange for smooth shipments. Many of Apple’s upstream component suppliers source their parts from Japan, where a power-brownout policy is seriously affecting the operations of electronics manufacturers.

As a result of the agreement, other companies producing tablets may feel the heat as Japanese suppliers prioritize Apple to receive a dwindling pool of supplies. The big question will be which companies decide, like Apple, that it can absorb additional costs in exchange for undisrupted short-term supply.

With ship times through the online store still listed at three to four weeks in the U.S. and internationally, and with lines still forming at Apple Stores worldwide, it’s clear that demand still far outpaces supply. Hopefully these additional measures taken by Apple help make sure more customers get what they’re after in a timely fashion.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Hot Topic: Tablets
• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• How Microsoft Can Win Back the Tablet Market

View full post on GigaOMApple