when you think about buying a new GPS device or searching for GPS in an inexpensive price, Garmin 50LM is definitely for you. Garmin 50LM includes large 5-inch touchscreen display and Voice Navigation and however it comes with inexpensive prices. Garmin 50LM also gives us free lifetime maps updates. It is an extremely great deal, isn’t it?

Garmin 50LM delivers you safely wherever life goes. Created to make navigation easy, merely enter an address and premium functions which includes lane assist with junction view, help you make all the correct turns!

The Garmin 50LM  is the leading of the line navigator in Garmin’s new 2012 Important series, offering a 5” wide screen and lifetime map updates. The models in this series are meant to become fundamental navigators at a budget price, lower than what we’ve previously noticed for Garmin entry-level models. Nonetheless, they do come with some functions not previously discovered on low-end nuvis, like speed limit display, lane assist and junction view.

 With a large 5-inch touchscreen, more than 5 million points of interest (POIs) and spoken turn-by-turn directions, Garmin 50LM makes driving fun once more. With Free lifetime map updates, you usually keep your roads and POIs up to date. Generally speaking, all nuvis will get you from point A to point B; whenever you spend more, you are mainly performing it to obtain bells and whistles. Nonetheless, the nuvi Essential series has some nice features. The subsequent turn icon within the top left corner highlights the proper lane to become in. You will primarily see this on freeways and on some surface streets in urban locations. Coverage is fairly extensive.

The trip log allows you to display where you’ve been (which may be a big assist navigating mega-mall parking lots, and even in everyday city driving). The trip log will be the thin blue line shown below. There are options to Show or Hide this info, but unfortunately (unlike on other nuvis) there appears to be no way to clear the trip log brief of a difficult reset! Perhaps this really is just an oversight which will be fixed in an upcoming firmware update; I’m definitely hoping Garmin hasn’t decided that privacy features should be restricted to greater priced models!

I noticed no routing irregularities whilst using the Garmin nuvi Essential series, nor did I notice excessively long waits for satellite acquisition. Except for the missing bells and whistles, it performed also as my other nuvis. I did have difficulty getting it to go into USB mass storage mode when connecting to my computer, but this was solved by ensuring that the unit was on prior to connecting it. And this problem went away entirely as soon as I updated to firmware version 2.ten. The only other item of note is that I found the mount just a little awkward to clip the nuvi into at initial, but after awhile I got used to how it attaches and seldom had issues with it.

In conclusion, it’s extremely recommended. This really is with out a doubt the very best entry level navigator Garmin has ever released. It has an ultra-wide 5” screen along with functions previously restricted to mid-range units. You can’t go wrong with this one. You can also read the GPS Reviews on my website!

The Guardian, one of the world’s most forward-thinking newspapers, has been conducting some interesting online experiments recently, including a cool little tweetbot that answers your questions by finding stories in the news, and its attempt to open up news production.

But one of the most interesting trials could be a new hyperlocal service called n0tice that the company is putting through its paces.

The site, which is currently running in invite-only beta, is an attempt to create a publishing platform based on location — and it uses the metaphor of a community noticeboard to get there. People can sign up to create their own board, customize it, leave messages, place small ads, anything they like. In a way it harks back to the days of BBS, but with all the bells and whistles you might expect from a website in 2011.

Testers, mainly in the U.K. where most of the focus is, are starting to use it for a range of different things: whether it’s existing local bloggers giving it a trial run, people selling items, listing events in their community, reporting road closures, and so on.

And there’s a business model too: while small ads are free to run, companies that want to target users pick a location and pay depending on how far they want their message to spread.

It’s certainly a departure for The Guardian, which has largely focused on content over platforms — and the end result is a hybrid with some serious potential. It’s part blogging platform, part Craigslist, part communal Twitter stream, part forum, part event listing. Work clearly needs to be done on some areas, and the emphasis is likely to shift over time, as more and more users come in and shape it — but the real question is whether it becomes more than the sum of its parts, or less.

Hyperlocal has long been something media companies have talked about as a way to save themselves, yet in reality it has struggled to really make its mark. On a micro scale, a number of local media properties have done this very well over the years — sites like McKinney, Texas’s Townsquarebuzz or Howard Owens’s The Batavian, say — but in order to be sustainable for a large media organization, hyperlocal needs to scale. That’s part of what convinced MSNBC to buy and relaunch EveryBlock, a data aggregation service that promised to make important local news available to you.

But where EveryBlock was all about data, n0tice is about people.

“I love Everyblock, it’s a real inspiration, actually,” explains Matt McAlister, who is running n0tice from his lofty perch as director of digital strategy for The Guardian‘s parent company, Guardian Media Group. “But I wanted to go as far in the opposite direction as I could in terms of aggregation, at least at the start. We may be wrong about that choice, but I’d like to think that people will be interested in participating on n0tice in part because it’s their space to make.”

He adds that it’s also different from other services that it shares similarities to, such as AOL’s often-derided Patch.

“It’s different from Patch in lots of ways, but one significant difference is that anyone can own a noticeboard, kind of like WordPress. It’s totally open that way. It’s different Craigslist in that it feels like a more holistic view of what’s happening the local area, not just things that people are trading.”

Still, with The Guardian behind it, a lot of people are going to be watching n0tice to see what happens. There are a few things that are worth thinking about that should be taken into account, though.

First, the UK classifieds market is far more disjointed than, say, America. Craigslist — so often invoked as the scourge of the U.S. news industry — is not just weak, it’s more or less non-existent. Sites such as the eBay-owned Gumtree are more powerful but not entirely embedded.

Second, the idea that newspapers have failed to compete with Craigslist — as posited in this piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab — also carries less weight in the U.K. Britain’s Daily Mail, for example, has been active in the small ads online for years with the likes of loot.com and has a growing property website empire.

Third, the real competition for a service like n0tice may ultimately be from social networks like Facebook or Twitter, where communities of interest already coalesce. McAlister’s argument here is that n0tice doesn’t have to beat social networks, it just has to be open enough.

“We haven’t really viewed what we’re doing in a competitive landscape, but rather approaching a common real world problem that doesn’t seem to have been solved yet. Given the open nature of the platform we’re building, I imagine we’ll be able to do a lot with WordPress and Twitter and Foursquare and any other open platform.”

Some seeds of where this thinking might go can be traced through his own work. Before being catapulted to run group-wide digital strategy, McAlister helped architect the Guardian Open Platform system — which attempts to turn the news into an API. Prior to that he was director of the Yahoo Developer Network and at the intersection of publishing and the web with The Industry Standard and Infoworld.

He confirms that combining with other services will be important as n0tice grows. A read API is about to be launched and they’re working on a write API too. Meanwhile, it will be important to connect to existing social networks and sources of activity. “We have done some lightweight hooks so far, but clearly there will be some fun things we can do with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook et cetera,” he says.

Staying power needed

Still, even if n0tice gains traction, the longer term issue may be whether it has support. After all, The Guardian‘s approach to the local market and small ads has lurched one way and then another over the last few years — it sold off its regional news operation for £44m, sold half of its sizeable classifieds business Trader Media, and launched and then closed a series of local blogs.

It’s not the only one: large news organizations including the New York Times and Washington Post have launched attempts at hyperlocal platforms or services, only to shut them down soon afterwards. Even with support from the top, does the company really have the willpower to get stuck into hyperlocal and stay there?

“My hope is that the advertising model we’re working on will support the investment people make in n0tice,” says McAlister. “If that’s the case then it will at least be sustainable, if not actually a generative platform — something that gets stronger the more people use it.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• Flash analysis: Collaborative consumption – a first look at the new web-sharing economy
• Flash analysis: the future of Yahoo

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM

Rumors have been flying around the industry for some time that Amazon is working on next generation versions of its Kindle that can do things like run video. Perhaps it will be a color version of the existing Kindle, with some extra bells and whistles. Perhaps it will be a tablet, produced in conjunction with Samsung. Perhaps it will be both.

However, until the release date of such a magical device is actually announced, the whole idea is little more than pie in the sky. So what do you do in the meantime if you want to kick back and watch some video on your Kindle?

Turns out it’s not impossible.

One developer at the BBC, Mark Longstaff-Tyrrell, came up with an ingenious solution to this pressing dilemma. By combining the broadcaster’s popular iPlayer video streaming service, a few bits of software and the magic of closed captioning, he has built what he calls (with tongue in cheek) “iPlayer for Kindle”.

Here’s how it works. The program plays with closed captions running. Each time there is a line of dialogue, a snapshot of the screen is taken. Over the course of an on-screen conversation or a series of scenes, these snapshots are compiled. Once that’s done, they can be put together to form a fairly accurate representation of the program — sort of like a stop-motion version of TV.

In addition, Longstaff-Tyrrell came up with a workaround for the moments when this closed caption system isn’t helpful — for example, when a dramatic moment happens on screen, but there is no subtitling because nobody is talking. At those moments the system takes a series of grabs at regular points through a scene.

Once all these pieces are in place, those captioned scenes and silent scenes are compiled into a file which you could save and flick through on your e-reader — looking something like a comic book that you can flip through to see the action. Here’s an example.

Obviously, this doesn’t turn your Kindle into a video player. It’s basically a long and carefully constructed joke. Longstaff-Tyrrell says, for example, that you can always print out your episodes onto paper, a format which “also allows distribution via the postal service” and that since a typical episode will be “weighing in at only 20MB and with offline viewing, this format has a clear advantage over existing mobile iPlayer services”. Still, who knows how it could be useful — it’s certainly a different way to catch up with your favorite programs.

So, yeah, it’s a rough and ready hack — but, like all the best ones, it has a sort of crazy elegance about it. Count me as a fan.

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

• Report: NoSQL Databases – Providing Extreme Scale and Flexibility
• How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use
• Flash analysis: prospects for Google+

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

The fight for Hadoop dominance is officially on. The unveiling of Yahoo’s Hadoop spinoff Hortonworks will undoubtedly be the talk of today’s Hadoop Summit, but its not the only game in town. In fact, while Hortonworks is busy answering questions about its product strategy, Cloudera and MapR will demonstrate new versions of their distributions overflowing with bells and whistles.

I wrote yesterday about the importance of new tools designed to improve the Hadoop experience at a level above the distribution layer, but the distribution — the underlying code base that defines Hadoop’s core architecture and capabilities — is still king. Apache Hadoop is a set of open source tools designed to enable the storage and processing of large amounts of unstructured data across a cluster of servers. Chief among those tools are Hadoop MapReduce and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), but there are numerous related ones, including Hive, Pig, HBase and ZooKeeper.

Most vendors try to distinguish their Hadoop distributions with MapReduce and HDFS. Some will try to tweak the core Apache features and architectures, while others will replace one component — generally HDFS — altogether.

EMC and IDC released their Digital Universe study this week, estimating that we’ll create 1.8 zettabytes of data this year and that data growth is outpacing Moore’s Law. Now that we’ve realized there’s value in all that information, we’re anxious to capture, analyze and use it, and that requires more and better big data technology. As this diagram from Karmasphere illustrates, Hadoop is a very large part of the big data stack, which means we’re just getting started.

So many distributions, so little time

Cloudera: Cloudera, whose CDH was the first commercial Hadoop distribution, takes the approach of taking the full complement of available open source components and integrating them into an enterprise-grade product. Its value isn’t so much in “improving” Hadoop as it is in making everything from Hadoop MapReduce to its own Sqoop (SQL to Hadoop) tool work well together out of the box.

Cloudera actually released CDH version 3.5 recently, but today it released a bunch of new features for its Cloudera Enterprise product, a suite of management tools designed to make it easier to operate CDH clusters. The coolest has to be something called SCM Express, which makes getting started with Hadoop easier. Cloudera’s Charles Zedlewski explained that SCM Express is a free tool that lets users provision and launch up to a 50-node Hadoop cluster “in about six clicks.”

MapR: However,Cloudera has lots of company, including the brand new MapR. That startup just released its first two products today — a free Hadoop distribution called M3 and a paid distribution called M5. MapR takes the Cloudera approach of integrating the entire spectrum of Hadoop tools into its distribution and including management functionality, but it also has made a number of significant changes to the MapReduce and HDFS components to improve performance.

MapR’s Jack Norris says the result is “probably the most comprehensive distribution,” which performs two to five times faster than the standard Apache Hadoop. A majority of MapR’s changes are to the storage layer, which it has reworked to be faster, easier, more reliable and more scalable than HDFS.

You can’t talk about MapR without talking about EMC, which announced last month that the Enterprise Edition of its Greenplum HD Hadoop distribution will be “powered by MapR.” Norris explained to me that the product, available later this year, will utilize MapR’s M5 version, which includes advanced storage capabilities around high availability and data protection. However, EMC’s line of Greenplum HD distributions, which also includes a free Community Edition, is actually centered around the specialized Hadoop code developed by and running within Facebook.

Of course, Hortonworks isn’t to be discounted, nor are DataStax with its Cassandra-based Brisk distribution or IBM, which has been promising its own Big-Blue-style Hadoop distribution for some time. But the most interesting thing about all this Hadoop activity might be the pace of it: as of mid-March, Cloudera stood alone as a commercial Hadoop provider. Now it has four competitors with more likely to come.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Joi.

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

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Putting Big Data to Work: Opportunities for Enterprises
• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011

alt=''
border='0'
/>

GigaOM — Tech News, Analysis and Trends

The LG Cookie Style T310 Games Pop and also the LG GM205 cellular phones are both priced for consumers an audience on a finances, but exactly where the Pop is actually a entirely functional touch cellphone, equipped with a three inch touch screen, the GM205, relies on aged fashioned buttons for it use, which tends to make the latter the mobile phone of selection for those searching for a straightforward telephone, which will deliver and acquire calls and text without having all the bells and whistles.

Each, the LG C105 Games Pop and the LG GM205 come equipped with a inbuilt FM stereo radio, assist Bluetooth and also have a inbuilt camera, but in which the GM205 includes a 2 megapixel camera, the Pop, comes with a digital camera which has a 3 Megapixel resolution. The LG GD510 Pop comes with a 3″display, although the LG GM205 includes a a lot smaller display using a dimension of just two.0″. Each designs help 2G, and of equally phones the inner memory/storage could be expanded, however the Pop might be expanded up to 16 GB, whilst the GM205 only supports SD cards approximately 2GB.

The LG Octane Games comes equipped with a Li-Po 1100 mAh battery, supplying approximately 450 hours of standby time, and up to eight hours of discuss time, while the LG GD510 Pop comes with a Li-Ion 900 mAh battery, offering approximately 360 hrs of standby time and approximately three hours of chat time.

Whilst overall the LG GM205 comes with much more decent hardware in location, it is impressive that LG has picked for your design of your standard mobile cellphone, over the much smoother design and style from the LG GD510 Pop in comparison to models from other makers inside the same price tag variety. However, the two phones offer almost exactly the same in performance, and choosing on which 1 to decide on, will come down to be strictly a make a difference of style.

Evolve Three’s goal of creating the world’s most versatile touchscreen tablets seems to be going swimmingly so far — first the boutique Australian outfit introduced the triple-booting Maestro, and now it’s got an Oak Trail slate on the way with some most intriguing hardware. You see, not only does this Maestro C have a 1.5GHz Intel Atom Z670 inside, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and most all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a netbook PC, it’s also got a bezel that physically rotates — turning into a chunky kickstand and exposing ports at the same time — and a removable wireless keyboard that doubles as a hard-shell protector for the entire 10.1-inch capacitive touchscreen. There’s also a 32GB “high performance” SSD, optional 3G connectivity, a pair of stereo speakers and once again, three operating systems to choose from at startup. The only things keeping us from purchasing our customary two units is lingering worry that the other shoe has yet to drop… not to mention a starting price of 9, sans optional keyboard.

Evolve Three’s Maestro C tablet has a swiveling bezel stand and a screen-protecting keyboard (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 14:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  NetbookNews  | Email this | Comments
Engadget