DEVICE DOCTOR (FREEWARE)

Device Doctor is a freeware Windows application that scans your computer hardware and checks to see if there are new driver updates available for your devices. It also locates drivers for "unidentified devices" in the Windows Device Manager.
NOTE: This tool was designed to be very simple and easy to use.
Just click on 'Begin Scan' to detect your hardware; Device Doctor queries our manufacturer driver database and immediately fetches the correct driver files for your computer.
Device Doctor version 1.0 is now available, download the free driver updater.

New! We have just published Device Doctor Portable, a special version of Device Doctor that can be used on multiple computers from removable drives without installation. Check out our portable updater...

Source:www.devicedoctor.com

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Snake Camouflage: Japan Gets Exclusive Metal Gear Solid 3DS System

Resident Evil isn’t the only big video game series that made the news in Nippon today: Konami announced [JP] the so-called METAL GEAR SOLID SNAKE EATER 3D PREMIUM PACKAGE for the Japanese market. The set includes a special 3DS system, a copy of Metal Gear Solid Snake Eater 3D, and two clear files in MGS design.

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Advertising Report: Facebook Now Earns 23% More Per Impression Than In Q1 2011

     Facebook is making significantly more money per ad now, charging 23% more per 1000 impressions than at the start of 2011. There are still cheap ad clicks to be had on Facebook — you just have to keep traffic bouncing around within the social network. Facebook appears to be incentivizing advertisers to grow their Facebook applications and Pages, with cost per click campaigns that point internally costing 29% less than those linking offsite. These figures from a new study by ad agency giant TBG Digital show strong monetization performance and potential for Facebook as it prepares for an IPO this summer.

The Q4 2011 Facebook Advertising Report form TBG Digital looked at 326 billion ad impressions ran by 266 of its clients across 205 countries. The findings are statistically sound, having been vetted by the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre.

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Ticketmaster’s New Facebook App Recommends Concerts From Your Listening Activity

Of all the new Open Graph apps launched tonight, Ticketmaster’s new Facebook experience is the most impressive. Sure it can share that you’ve “bought” tickets, but lots of apps have similar publishing functionality. What makes Ticketmaster’s app cool is that it pulls your Facebook profile’s music app activity from services such as Spotify or Rdio, and recommends nearby concerts of artists you actually listen to, not just those you say you Like.

Ticketmaster has come a long way in the two years since Nathan Hubbard became CEO following its merger with LiveNation. It now shows you its service fees up front rather than tacking them on as you checkout. This pissed off artists and venues who thought it would scare away sales, but Ticketmaster did it in the name of transparency.

Executive VP of ecommerce Kip Levin tells me that for a long time the company was scapegoat for all of the live event industry’s problems. Now it’s pushing back and putting the customers first — something people might not expect just because it charges those pesky service fees.

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Facebook’s New Timeline Apps Introduce New Actions Like “Bought,” “Want” And “Love”

          Facebook has partnered up with sixty different startups to add their “stories” to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel.

Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories — which go beyond what we’re used to on Facebook.

“When we say anything we really mean anything,” Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen said as he took the stage and announced that verbs like “knitting,” “shared” are now a part of Timeline story options.

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Facebook In Brazil: A Big Ending To 2011 Finally Pushes It Past Orkut

      First there were the stories about Facebook taking over your college campus, then it was your high school or workplace, then your country… now the stories are starting to be about how Facebook has used up all the new users and only has engagement left to gain. But that’s in older markets like the US. The company is still growing worldwide every month on its way to a billion users, and it’s because of places like Brazil.

In 2011, according to a new study out from leading web measurement firm comScore, Facebook added nearly 24 million new users in the country passing incumbent Orkut in December to reach 36.1 million monthly uniques. The Google-owned social network isn’t seeing any drop-off, though, in contrast to US incumbent MySpace’s fate – and in contrast to India, Orkut’s other big market that was lost to Facebook years ago. Instead, Orkut just grew slowly from 32.7 million to 34.4 million in Brazil during the year.

ComScore notes a few more specific aspects of Facebook’s gains: Southeast Brazil started to grow first but now traffic is coming from all over the country; women are spending more time on the site than men, and younger demographics are more likely to be on than older ones.

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Hulu To Debut Its First Original Scripted Show “Battleground” Next Month

      Hulu is launching its first-ever original scripted series with its 13-episode order of Battleground, a political comedy following the campaign trail of a third-place candidate in Wisconsin angling for a seat in the Senate.

The show is kicking off Hulu’s foray into scripted programming, and will be followed by two other original shows: a second season of documentarian Morgan Spurlock’s A Day in the Life series, and Up to Speed, a travel show from Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater.

Battleground will debut on February 14th, Hulu says, and will be available to all users of Hulu’s free service and its paying customers on the premium version. The company also told Bloomberg that it’s planning to raise money to fund further expansion into original shows. According to Andy Forssell, Hulu’s Chief Content Officer, the company has a “very healthy business.”

“When you have a healthy business, capital is not a problem. There are plenty of people who want to help,” he said.

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Some Key Social Media Trends To Look For In 2012

    Editor’s note: Guest contributor Joseph Puopolo is an entrepreneur and start-up enthusiast, who blogs on a variety of topics including green initiatives, technology and marketing.

In 2011, social media had its share of growing pains. Large brands and corporations took to social media in force to try to find footing in this expanding medium. Some brands found success, while others found peril and new PR nightmares. One person who has helped brands navigate the proverbial social media minefield isAmy Jo Martin. She is the founder of Digital Royalty, a social media firm that has set itself apart by helping A-listers find their social media voice.

Amy works with people like Dana White of the UFC, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson of acting/WWE fame and brands like Nike and Fox Sports (and now Joel Stein). Her specialty is working with organizations or individuals and making them look good online. Since the online world is in perpetual flux, I wanted to get Amy’s take on the social media landscape for 2012.

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Apple - Siri

Your Wish is its command.    

     Siri on iPhone 4S lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back. Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it.

It understands what you say.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late.” “Remind me to call the vet.” “Any good burger joints around here?” Siri does what you say, finds the information you need, then answers you. It’s like you’re having a conversation with your iPhone.

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Liveblogging Platform CoverItLive Hacked

CoverItLive, the Demand Media-owned liveblogging platform used by many outlets to cover major events in real time, has just alerted their users of a potential data compromise.

According to the alert e-mail sent to CoverItLive customers, the company noticed that “certain proprietary data files were accessed without authorization” beginning last Saturday. While they say they’re currently unsure as to what exactly was accessed (though they claim that payment details were definitely not), they urge their users to change their passwords be it they use the same (possibly exposed) password anywhere else. While they say that all user passwords are encrypted, they do not say what sort of encryption (and thus what level of security) was used.

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Satellites help track pirate loot in Somalia

Spot the pirate (Image: GeoEye)

    X doesn't mark the spot where pirates stash their loot, but the night-time glow of artificial lighting is a dead giveaway.

A satellite study has shown for the first time where Somali pirates are putting the proceeds of crime – and suggests where strategies against their banditry might and might not work.

Warships from 30 nations patrol the waters off Somalia but still piracy continues, costing $12 billion a year. The naval threat just makes pirates squeeze more out of every ship they manage to capture: top ransoms trebled from $3 million to $9 million between 2008 and 2010.

One solution could be to give Somalis something better to do on shore. To target that assistance, though, we have to know who profits from piracy and who does not. With no effective government and no government statistics in Somalia, that's hard to find out.

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Not At Any Price: Twitter Denied Data To Google And Bet On Itself

    If Twitter continued to sell its firehose to Google, fewer searches would occur on Twitter’s internal search engine where the microblog platform can serve its own ads. That’s why sources familiar with the negotiations tell me Twitter wouldn’t renew the data access deal at any price, or at least set a ludicrously high price to sink the deal. Cash and increased visibility on Google Search was more valuable to Twitter in 2009 when it was still trying to gain serious traction. But by July 2011 Twitter was more established and ready to try monetizing without Google. A firehose deal would have impeded this, so it’s understandable why Twitter walked away.

There are a lot of conflicting reports on exactly how negotiations went down, stirred up by the launch of Google Search plus Your World (Search+) which favors Google+ results. Regardless of the exact details, the underlying fact is that it the inclusion of tweets in Google Search wasn’t the best thing for Twitter.

[Update: As Liz Gannes points out, Twitter did do a firehose deal with Bing. However, Twitter may have seen Microsoft and Bing as less of a threat, and viewed exposure to Bing's early adopters as more advantageous than exposure to Google searchers.]

Actually, I think backing out of the Google firehose deal was a courageous move for Twitter. It showed the company was willing to bet on continued growth and making Promoted Tweets, Accounts, and Trends work as a major revenue stream. Since these sponsored content types are artificially injected into Twitter Search results and the home page, they wouldn’t have appeared in Google Search.

Unfortunately for the end-user, no deal means Search+ isn’t quite as useful as it could be, as Steven Levy describes. Google has the ability to point to relevant Twitter accounts in its People and Pages Box since they’re not strapped with rel=nofollow, but doesn’t currently. Maybe Google will change that soon in the name of offering the most relevant results. Maybe it will change that years down the road due to pressure from the FTC or Justice Department. By then Google may have weathered the monopoly paradox and accomplished its goal of using its natural dominance in search to grow Google+. We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, Twitter Search still needs a lot of improvement, particularly around surfacing relevant older tweets. Hopefully with time it will come to encompass functionality Google Search could have provided.

As John Battelle says, the politics surrounding data access make it very complicated for anyone to offer comprehensive personalized search. So for now, real-time search remains fragmented and less effective than it could be, but Twitter has a chance to stand on its own two little bird talons.

Source: techcrunch.com

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Cupidtino, The Dating Site For Apple Fans, Releases iPhone App

  It was with a strange mix of amusement and horror that I learned about the existence of an online dating service specifically for Apple fanboys and girls almost two years ago.

But, Cupidtino is still around, and last night they quietly debuted an iPhone application to complement their dating website. You have to wonder what took them so long, but at least they’re in time for next Valentine’s Day.

The application, which you can download here, is free and pitched as a “Mac-inspired dating app designed exclusively for fans of Apple products”. It lets users search and browse profiles, send ‘heartbeats’ to members that intrigue them, and more.

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Google And The Monopoly Paradox

      With the deep inclusion of Google+ into Search, Google is tempting fate. We’ve been over this. A lot. And this story is going to continue for some time to come. It sure looks like Google is almost asking for an inquiry into potentially anti-competitive practices (and it’s coming). Which is insane. So the next logical question is why? Why is Google risking so much to do this?

My colleague Eric had a very interesting theory earlier. Maybe Google’s real motive is to get the government to also look into Facebook’s often-unfair practices with regard to their network ahead of their IPO. If social and not search is indeed the future, call this pre-subversion. And if there’s any shred of truth to this theory, more power to Google — it’s rather genius (though still extremely risky).

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Study: 80% Say Social Networks Had No Influence On Holiday Shopping Decisions

    Social networks could one day revolutionize how we get shopping recommendations, but not yet. Instead, tablets are causing the biggest shakeup in ecommerce. 80.2% of 1000 holiday shoppers said no, personal connections on Facebook or other social networks did not influence their shopping decisions. Other findings of Baynote‘s study include that 48.6% of tablet owners made a purchase through that mobile device, and that email had the most useful promotions.

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Urban Airship

Yesterday, we wrote about Urban Airship, the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, and how the company has been on a tear of late. They recently hired Skype’s former strategy czar and yesterday hit 10 billion notifications pushed. Not bad for a two-year-old.

On top of that, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo at the end of October for approximately $3.5 million. Considering that the two startups had some months before struck a strategic partnership, and both provide location-based services for mobile developers, the acquisition made sense, even if the price was lower than many had hoped. (And SimpleGeo Co-founder Joe Stump left the company post-acquisition, following Co-founder Matt Galligan.)

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The Art of 3-D Printing

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing.

What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.

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