Noodles are serious business in Japan, but that doesn’t mean that the whole family can’t enjoy Bandai’s new somen-making toy that is basically a waterslide for “nagashi somen,” thin somen noodles that are served in a stream of water. The noodles come out of a little house at the top of the slide and end up in a strainer at the bottom.

Bandai Noodle Slide

(Credit: Bandai)

Electronic gadgets may be high-tech, but kitchen gadgets make things delicious.

(Credit:
Six Apart)

However, Alden said, if someone has their own antispam engine, they could plug it into the open-source framework.

TypePad AntiSpam is the same antispam technology that’s currently built into TypePad, but the company is making it available to all who want it, with no charge and no usage restrictions. The service is in semi-beta: “The code is not beta but the (open source framework around it) is,” Six Apart CEO Chris Alden also said.

TypePad AntiSpam plugs into TypePad as well as Wordpress.

There will be TypePad AntiSpam plug-ins available for Six Apart’s blog platforms, TypePad and Movable Type, as well as for Wordpress blogs.

The TypePad AntiSpam framework is open source. Anyone can muck around in the code that integrates the engine, repackage it, and so on. The heurestics and rules in the engine itself, however, run on Six Apart’s servers and are not open. Opening them would give spammers everything they need to break through the system, Alden told me. The standard antispam engine for Wordpress, Akismet, is also closed.

Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch has been testing this antispam service, Alden said.

iReport’s site has a lot in common with YouTube, showing off a grouping editor-selected videos (and photos) on the top of the page alongside a queue of the latest news content that’s been uploaded by users. Each iReport user gets their own page with a listing of their uploaded photos and videos. Similar to Current, content is marked to show if it’s been featured on CNN’s televised or Web news reporting. adding incentive for others to click on it.

News reports sent in by iReport.com users can be sorted in all sorts of ways, including 'newsiest' which uses an algorithm to figure out how hot the story is.

iReport users get their own listing. Other users can choose to 'follow' one another to keep up to date on when they share or upload new content.

More screenshots after the break.

In addition to hosting any news story videos uploaded by users, iReport dishes out assignments to fledgling videographers and photo journalists. On top of the list is the 2008 Presidential elections, alongside weather reports, the ever popular “offbeat images”, as well as “stories from Second Life,” Linden Lab’s MMORPG. Users can upload up to 10 videos and videos at a time, with each one taking up to 100MB in size.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

CNN's iReport site features playable Web videos and pictures submitted by users. Media that has been chosen to show up on CNN.com or CNN TV programming gets its own 'On CNN' badge seen in the top left of the player.

As we wrote on Monday, CNN’s citizen journalism pet project iReport was due to get a site of its own. Today the service finally went live as iReport.com, and is already filling up with user content both old and new.

In the future the service plans to increase the ties between stories, as well as where users are reporting from by integrating world maps. Already there is a “more on this story” feature that groups together content by assignment. The service also employs tags and a “newsiest” feature which “combines freshness, popularity, activity, and ratings” in an algorithm not unlike the ones found on social news sites like Digg and Reddit.

Interestingly enough, the videos on iReport.com cannot be embedded on third party sites, although there are links to share it on five major social bookmarking and news services. Users also have the option of making the file downloadable, letting others grab it to play on their PCs or portable media devices. Syndication (albeit direct) is the name of the game.

That doesn’t mean Larrabee will be a slam dunk. Intel has a checkered past in the discrete graphics chip market and this 10-year-old CNET article about Intel’s 740 graphics processor reads eerily like some of the chatter about Intel’s Larrabee today.

But Intel is older and presumably wiser now. (Though of course that remains to be seen.) Here’s a quick look at how Intel depicts the future Larrabee architecture graphically.

Intel slide shows Larrabee with up to 48 cores

(Credit:
Intel)

Larrabee packs separate scalar and vector processing units

(Credit:
Intel)

Each Larrabee core has 256KB of level-2 cache

(Credit:
Intel)

Workload in games

(Credit:
Intel)

The company said it will offer two levels of support–gold and silver–for a fixed annual fee or a percentage of customers’ total usage of its services. The support plans are available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). For more details on the terms, click here.

Right now, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its hosted services. Customers pay for how much they use the service. To get support for technical problems, they need to go to free forums.

The paid support is a sign that Amazon’s hosted computing is ramping up to take on a broader swath of clients, including large businesses.

Initially, Amazon aimed the hosted service at Web start-ups, but it’s signing on business customers too. BusinessWeek reported earlier this week that The New York Times and Nasdaq are now customers.

The support service also casts Amazon more in the mold of traditional IT providers such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems, which all offer a variation on hosted computing.

“Guaranteed support will also allow us to develop even more substantial applications using Amazon Web Services, knowing that Amazon is there to support us,” Paul Horvath, chief technology officer of health care form-processing company TC3 Health, said in a statement.

Update on Friday: Link added to Amazon Web Services support terms and costs.

An
iPod nano for under $100?! Sign me up. Buy.com has the 4GB silver model for $99 shipped. No rebates, either! So what’s the catch? These are reconditioned units with a 60-day warranty. If that doesn’t square with you, the Apple store currently has the same refurb nano for $129 with a 1-year warranty.

Of course, nanos have few mechanical parts, so there’s little opportunity for something to break. I do wish you could choose from colors other than silver, but that’s a minor quibble. The 3rd-gen nano is a wafer-thin thing of beauty, and an outright steal at $99.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

The service has all the flash and fervor of some other Adobe Flex-based apps we’ve seen like BuzzWord, Scrapblog, and Picnik. The transitions and stock slide templates are enough to distract you from how potentially boring your presenter is and thought has been put into making things look good from the get-go, no matter your design prowess. In many ways, the final results are indistinguishable from Apple’s well-known presentation software Keynote, which has been a part of the company’s iWork suite for Macs for the last three years.

Let’s start by talking about what makes SlideRocket different from presentation software you might be used to. For one thing it’s very Web-friendly. As I mentioned last week in our coverage of the company’s demo at the Under the Radar conference (coverage), it’s been designed to integrate media and information services you’re already using. Big names on the list include Yahoo maps, Flickr, and Google Docs; I foresee others being added in the future–as long as the service has a data API.

Need an image for that presentation? Grab one that has the right CC license right off of Flickr (click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Linking up to each of these services is handled with some grace, although I found performance to take a hit when adding several Flickr photos to a single slide since the service will check in with Flickr each time you load up the slide. It can be set to do the same thing for Google Documents, but this is actually a good thing in case the source data changes. I’ve been told local copies of the files will be able to be stored on SlideRocket’s servers in the future to speed things up.

Speaking of local storage, SlideRocket has the beginnings of a very smart way to handle shared media. Similar to Keynote, all your files are put together in one place and can be sorted via keywords simply by name. The more time you spend categorizing it, the faster you’ll be able to parse it, but the built-in search is instantaneous–which is very helpful. Users get up to 3GB of storage to share photos, music, and videos. These asset libraries are shared in the business editions.

So, how does it stack up against other Web-based presentation tools? If you’ve ever used Empressr, the player user interface is nearly identical. Where SlideRocket shows its prowess is the creation tool, which is much easier to use and has a wider array of transitions, fonts, and build options that let you automate the presentation.

Where Empressr, Google, Zoho Show, and Vyew have SlideRocket beat is the social side, but it’s an almost unfair comparison since SlideRocket has more of a business angle than the rest. You can set up private viewings of slide shows with attendees (minus live chat or telephony), and track viewings to potential customers or clients via the Salesforce.com app. There’s even a way to see if someone finished watching the presentation or if they gave up halfway through.

SlideRocket's editing interface is full of things to tweak and is friendly with Web media. Seen here is a Flickr photo and a Google map alongside standard text. (click to enlarge)

So, to come back to my original question of whether or not SlideRocket is a worthy replacement of PowerPoint or Keynote depends on your intended use. If you’re a casual presenter, Keynote and PowerPoint are both pretty inexpensive (we’re assuming you picked up PowerPoint as part of Office, not the $200-plus standalone copy) and come packed with a huge list of features, a big support community, and teams of people working to make them better year over year. On the other hand, even SlideRocket’s free version likely does everything you need, with a very high level of finesse, and has the promise of new features that get rolled out all the time. It’s also got a higher convenience factor of letting you create and share presentations online, which is hugely helpful if you’re out on the road or something goes wrong with your computer.

My advice is to give it a spin and try out the things you’re used to doing in either of those two programs. In my case, even the free version of SlideRocket was more than capable of letting me build a good-looking presentation with a minimal amount of effort.

The service is launching a public preview in a few weeks with a launch in July. We’ve got 500 invites set aside for Webware readers to give it a go, so just click here. Keep in mind the offline functionality isn’t available to free members, only to the personal, team, and business plans that run anywhere from $12 to $49 a month and can be seen here.

Presentation management is taken care of on one large screen. You can see thumbnail previews of each presentation you're working on, as well as the option to quickly play them if need be (click to enlarge).

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Ling said that Facebook has 200,000 developers and 16,000 applications so far. Of the 66 million current Facebook users, 98 percent have used at least one third-party application, and a significant number use six or seven applications, he said.

Ben Ling, director of product marketing for the Facebook platform

Ling spent part of his talk explaining the basics of Facebook, such as how the social graph relates people and provides alerts, and that applications need to leverage the social graph. The Facebook troops, from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on down, have mastered the art of the structured presentation, staying on message and not giving away too much. Ling has had some previous practice in making corporate presentation–prior to Facebook he was general manager of eCommerce at Google, where he founded Google Checkout and managed Google Product Search.

Ling noted that sports, music, religion and productivity are seed verticals that Facebook will be supporting via its investment fund.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

On the subject of data portability, the capability to take use the social graph outside of the Facebook, Ling said the Facebook is committed to enable users on Facebook to use the social graph in a variety of other contexts. Allowing to users to move add Facebook contact information to their cell phones is one example of data portability a reasonable scenario, but allowing a friend to suck up all your data related to your friends is an unacceptable use case, Ling noted.

He also noted the user-driven internationalization efforts, resulting in Facebook translated into languages such as Spanish and German.

He went over some of the frictionless initiatives aimed at developers, such as using Joyent, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Popfly to deliver applications, and the Facebook Platform MarketPlace. Facebook is planning to provide developers native support for accepting credit cards to help them monetize their applications. The feature will be available later this year, Ling said.

Ben Ling, director of product marketing for the Facebook platform, gave a brief peek of the upcoming profile page update and outlined Facebook’s vision at Graphing Social Patterns conference. The new profile page will combine the Wall and Minifeed, and additional tabs have been added to showcase users’ favorite apps.

(Credit:
Facebook)

“We at Facebook are thinking significantly on how to make that happen,” he said.

Ling described Facebook’s vision as making its platform more frictionless for developers and users, as well as for Facebook itself.

Willie Brent, who is the vice president of Weber Shandwick’s clean-tech practices, queried some of his clients in the field on this subject. The blog posting is worth a read.

Please alert me if you’ve seen other thoughtful pieces on the subject. With so much venture money going into the field and energy front-page news, 2008 will be a dynamic year.

The conclusion: “Cleantech, like nearly every other sector, would take a hit, particularly the companies still in need of funding, but it would also find distinct opportunities–in particular efficiency plays.”

Discussion of a “clean-tech bubble” has been going on for about two years and as fears of a recession set in, people in the field are starting to ask: how bad will clean-tech companies be hit, if at all, by a slowing economy?

Rob Day, a clean-tech venture capital at @Ventures, appears to have been first out the gate with a blog analyzing the potential impact of a recession, which has already helped take the wind from the sails of public solar companies.

My own contribution to the discussion ran on CNET News.com’s front door this morning. The article looks at the funding gap that faces many new companies in the energy field as they try to go from lab to market. It argues that new funding models are emerging with strategic partnerships with large corporations (see GreatPoint Energy or Coskata) emerging as a trend.

His conclusion is that most likely start-ups in the field will feel the pinch of the economic environment, particularly those that were counting on going public to execute their plans. But they will enjoy a counter-cyclical phenomenon driven by high energy prices and supportive government policies around energy and natural resources.

When you search for a destination on TravelPost, the site delivers a list of hotels. Once you read the hotel reviews and decide where you want to stay, TravelPost gives you the option to check rates for specified dates. It uses the Kayak.com rate search tool to find the prices on those hotels. It searches through Hotels.com, Priceline, and individual hotel sites to find you the best deal. Once you pick the deal you want, you’ll be brought to Kayak.com’s hotel information page to give you one last chance to decide if you really want to stay at that hotel. If you do, you can click the link redirecting you to the site offering the best price.

Hotelicopter might not be as convenient as services where you can find and book hotels without leaving the site, but in this economy, saving every last dime counts. And based on my experience with the service, Hotelicopter will help you find you a great deal. It’s a fine alternative to more popular travel search sites.

You might be using Expedia or Orbitz to plan your vacation (if you’re taking one) this year, but there are some lesser-known travel search sites that could help you plan a better and less expensive trip. These sites will still help you plan your vacation, but they do it in a slightly different way that should help you save some cash.

Unlike Expedia, Orbitz, Cheaptickets, and countless other popular travel search sites, Fly.com doesn’t require you to buy airline tickets on its pages. Once you input where you’re leaving from and where you’re going, the site finds flights from the airlines themselves. After you pick your flight, Fly.com redirects you to the airline’s site where the fares might be a little cheaper. You can buy the flight directly from the airline.

Hotelicopter
Hotelicopter searches and aggregates results from sites like Hotels.com and Priceline to find you the best deals on both domestic and international hotels.

TravelPost
TravelPost, which is owned by Kayak.com, searches through hundreds of travel search sites to find you the best deals on domestic and international hotels. It also features user reviews, so you can gain insight from those who have already stayed at a respective hotel.

Hotelicopter should save you some money, since it finds results from over 30 different travel planning sites across the Web. Once you input a destination city, the site returns a list of hotels in that area. You can get information about the hotels and pick which place is best for you. Like Fly.com, Hotelicopter doesn’t handle the booking itself, so it will redirect you to the site with the best deal.

UpTake is still in beta, so you might find the site a bit slow. When I was using it, it took quite a while to find hotels. But once I was brought to the results page, I was able to perform research more effectively than on other services. More importantly, it found good deals.

Using TravelPost was a bit more trying than the other sites in this roundup. You’re redirected to too many pages and it takes too long to book your stay. That said, I found that its cost savings were the best of any site in this roundup.

Fly.com
Fly.com was recently acquired by travel media firm, TravelZoo. Since then, the site has become a great place to find cheap flights across the U.S.

When you first get to UpTake.com, you’ll notice that it doesn’t feature a simple destination search field like the others. UpTake asks what you’re looking to do in the first search box and where you want to go in the second search field. For example, if you want to enjoy a romantic getaway with your significant other in Aspen, you can input “romantic” in the first search box and “Aspen, CO” in the second search box. UpTake will then search 5,000 sites from across the Web to find romantic hotels in Aspen. Each listing has recommendations based on traveler opinions UpTake gathers from those sites. You can also search for the best rates on sites like Priceline and Kayak.com.

UpTake
UpTake doesn’t just let you search for individual hotels in the U.S. Instead, UpTake lets you search for the type of hotel you’re looking for using semantic search technology.