Thanks to companies like Hulu, Netflix we now have access to high quality Television and movie content without ever touching cable television. And thanks to Boxee, we have a super simple to way to  watch this content – with a remote, and from 10 feet away.

There are a slue of companies that are building 10 foot interfaces that interact with virtually every type of media available. Microsoft has Windows Media Center and  linux geeks have MythTV. Both a great – but  Boxee runs on almost every platform – Mac, Windows and Linux. Plex is a great competitor to Boxee on the Mac – that often beats Boxee head to head on features and speed (mac version only).

Learn more about Boxee and to get the free download.

Related articles

• Plex 0.8.3 brings on the Snow Leopard love fest (tuaw.com)
• Boxee Media Center Goes Into Beta December 7 (mashable.com)

Scientists at Johns Hopkins and their colleagues have developed sugar-coated polymer strands that selectively kill off cells involved in triggering aggressive allergy and asthma attacks. Their advance is a significant step toward crafting pharmaceuticals to fight these often life-endangering conditions in a new way.

Read the full story Sugar-coated polymer is new weapon against allergies and asthma.

Google just released a new “Sharable Folder” feature with Google Docs (for both normal Google accounts and  Hosted Domains). Here’s how you do it.

1. Create a New Folder
   

2. Name your new folder. Something like My Global Share will do just fine.
   

3. Click “Share this Folder”
   

4. Select “Get the link to share…”
   

5. Click the “Get a Link for anyone” Tab and then copy the Long URL.
   

6. Create a Bit.ly URL from that big ole Google URL.
   

Twitter announced that it was getting ready to roll out an ambitious new project: Geolocation. The idea was to be able to attach a location to every tweet. Today, the API has been officially turned on, but location is not a part of the main site — yet.

This means that applications that have been buit using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

Read the Full Article

Twitter Turns On Location. Not For Twitter.com Just Yet..

Have young children? You might want to check this out, particularly if they’re taking their first steps on the Web right about now.

KidZui, the web browser that’s built for kids, is today launching KidZui 5.0, featuring more functionality for parents and children to discover and share the Internet together.

With one click, children can now send KidZui-approved videos, websites, and pictures to their parents with the browser’s new built-in ‘KidConnect’ capabilities. Parents can now also easily send content directly to their children to return the favor. Essentially, KidZui aims to maximize parent and child computer screen time as an opportunity to connect and converse with each other through shared content online.

KidZui says it currently boasts over 2 million games, websites, photographs and videos, and that all of them are approved jointly by parents and teachers.

New in version 5.0 is that parents can now use Facebook to digitally hook up with other parents and to connect their kids with one another, providing an opportunity to create friendship and community online through the social network. KidZui, which is available for Windows, Mac and as a Firefox plugin, will continue to provide weekly activity e-mail reports to parents about their apparent kids’ interests.

KidZui has also recently launched a kid-appropriate video destination site dubbed ZuiTube.

The company, which is backed by approximately $10 million in funding, claims more than 1 million children and parents have registered for the service since its launch in 2008. KidZui’s audience is said to have grown 300% in the past year, mostly through word of mouth.

Still according to the company, children have spent more than 5 million hours using the KidZui browser, visited over 100 million web pages, videos and photographs, and shared over 4.4 million items with each other. Yours on it yet?

For a cool alternative, check out KIDO’Z’ kid-friendly media browser too.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.

Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.

That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees.

To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change.

The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing.

Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important.

Make no mistake, there are hurdles to location-based services gaining widespread acceptance. But the upside of it far outweighs the downside. And with that the case, these types of services are ripe to take off.

At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things.

I remember the first time I used sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster (back in the day) to find people that I went to high school with who I hadn’t talked to in years. It was a little weird, but also in some ways exciting. Imagine that transfered into the real world. Maybe you’re in a city with a person you went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to in years. It’s unlikely that the two of you were ever run into each other randomly, but maybe you can get pinged by Facebook location when they’re nearby. Maybe neither of you want to meet, and that’s fine. But maybe you do.

The word we keep hearing over and over again for such situations is “serendipity,” but really it’s not. None of this needs to be left up to chance. It’s simply an extension of social networking into the real world.

Another social network, Twitter, is already in hot pursuit of such functionality. Any day now, the service will turn on its geolocation service which will both allow you to send tweets with your location tacked on, and allow you to pass in location information from other services, like Foursquare. As a service with tens of millions of users, Twitter will be the first massive test of location as an extension of social networking.

It may be a while before users start truly taking advantage of it since it is an opt-in feature. But eventually, I believe we’ll see more and more users opt-in to be able to use third-party clients like Birdfeed which let them choose which tweets to attach their location to and let people know where they are.

And beyond individual user data, this location data will be very interesting as an aggregate. Undoubtedly people will use things like Twitter’s geolocation APIs to make services that can show where people are flocking to in realtime. This is the next step for what services like SocialGreat are doing with location data, showing hot spots in towns. And we already know that Twitter is planning to use the data to tailor its trending topics to show the hot things being tweeted about in specific places.

Social networking up until this point has been great. But it’s also really a bit odd. The core concept is still to gather your friends in a virtual construct, while the companies behind these constructs convince you to hang out in them as much as possible. Instead, they should be using the interesting social data they have to help you connect in other places as well. That’s what makes Facebook Connect is so powerful. But that doesn’t extend to the real world yet. But with location, it could. And that’s exciting.

We’ll be discussing this and other topics at our Realtime CrunchUp this Friday in San Francisco.

[images: MGM and Warner Brothers]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

circletimessquare writes “Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft, is self-publishing a cook book with scientific underpinnings. The man who presided over the original iterations of Windows has built a laboratory kitchen, hired 5 chefs, and plays with misplaced lab equipment: using an autoclave as a pressure cooker, using a 100-ton hydraulic press to make beef jerky, and using an ultrasonic welder for… he’s not sure yet. The article includes a video on how to cryosear and cryorender duck. ‘It’s basically like a software project,’ Dr. Myhrvold said. ‘It’s very much like a review we would do at Microsoft.’ Is it possible to BSoD food?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.

The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.

But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.

Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:

One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung. Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google. So rumors like this one may be much more important than they first appear. But either way, the best information we have right now points directly at Korea as the birthplace of the Google Phone.

We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January.

That’s all we have for now. We don’t yet know what the device will look like, how big it will be, or even if it has a physical keyboard. But we do know that Google is getting into the phone building business directly, and doesn’t seem too concerned about competing with all the other device manufacturers building Android phones.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

About two weeks after debuting the latest beta build of Opera Mobile for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 smartphones, Norwegian software maker Opera is bringing the latest beta version of its custom mobile browser application to Windows Mobile-powered devices.

Microsoft’s operating system for mobiles is taking quite a hit lately, having lost one third of its smartphone market share since 2008 according to research firm Gartner.

But Microsoft still holds about 8% market share in the segment and it is currently prepping the 2010 release of Windows Mobile 7, so all is not unequivocally lost for Redmond in this space – whether you want to believe it or not.

Anyway, Opera Mobile 10 Beta is now available for Windows Mobile phones, and that means users can benefit from a more enjoyable browsing experience from their handsets than is usually the case with built-in and other third-party web browsing tools.

The Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows Mobile looks and feels similar to the Opera 10 desktop browser and Opera Mini 5 beta and has all the features that were already available for Nokia and other Symbian/S60 phones: Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, a password manager and its super, server-side compressor, Opera Turbo.

It’s supposed to be way faster, too. Anyone still own a Windows Mobile smartphone want to take Opera Mobile 10 Beta for a spin and let us know how much of an improvement it is?

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Career related sites like Monster and others are meant for people who are looking for a specific type of job or area. But what if you don’t know what career or job opportunity you want to pursue? Daily Endeavor is a site that’s designed to help students and job seekers learn about job opportunities and then decide which career suits their skills and interests.

Daily Endeavor’s founder Matthew Mahoney says the sites is focusing on content in the social change areas such as education, microfinance and human rights. Ultimately, the site’s goal is to profile 100,000 types of jobs over the next 3 years. The site is hinged on getting people to write detailed descriptions, reviews and guides about their jobs and experiences

By design, Daily Endeavor is not a job listings site but hopes to partner with these platforms in the future. And Mahoney says there are opportunities to market the platform at universities. The site also has an existing companion business, EdeavorPrep, that advises students and job seekers with career advice.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0