It won’t be shocking to most in the electronics industry, but the rest of the world probably doesn’t realize that many products use components from other manufacturers and even direct competitors. So much like most hard drives are made by one of only a few companies, there are only about four LCD panel manufacturers. But just because it’s Samsung inside doesn’t make it the same, and in that vein Samsung took pause with the Australian value-minded brand, Kogan, when its commercial very plainly exposed just who makes the panels in its TVs . The cease and desist notice didn’t sit well with Ruslan Kogan, who claims his company never agreed to obscure that fact and that he wouldn’t “conceal the truth from the public.” While we usually wish everyone could just get along, we can totally see where Samsung is coming from on this one, as there is far more involved in making a quality TV, beyond sourcing a great panel.

Continue reading Kogan advertises Samsung LCDs in its HDTVs, Samsung would rather not take credit

Kogan advertises Samsung LCDs in its HDTVs, Samsung would rather not take credit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As if it weren’t hard enough keeping your house safe from debt collectors these days, now you have something else to worry about: a falling German satellite called ROSAT. The German Aerospace Center has estimated that the hunk of decommissioned, extra-orbital metal will enter the atmosphere sometime between 7:30pm ET tonight and 1:30am ET tomorrow. It’s unknown whether any of the thing will survive re-entry, but the 1.7 ton telescope mirror onboard very well may, striking the surface at a hasty 17,398MPH. The agency doesn’t know where it will fall, but did reassuringly say that it won’t hit Europe — German scientists basically telling the rest of the world to spend all night worrying while they doze away, peacefully. At least it won’t be taking any of its orbital brethren with it…

Achtung: German satellite to crash down tonight, won’t land in Germany originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When blowing up land mines for military training is accompanied by a goat sacrifice, the cultural divide between the U.S. and the rest of the world looms large. Yet, more and more the job of U.S. troops abroad is to bridge that gap in the service of peacekeeping by training local armies. Wired.com was on the scene in Mozambique to view one of these training events firsthand.

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We are the connected generation. Thanks to our ever-present mobile devices we are always ‘on’ and connected. This allows us to capture a record of all the great things we do, and share our experiences, our recommendations and our memorable moments with friends, colleagues and the world at large, through the medium of popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. We broadcast these moments out to the rest of the world. We let others share in our passions and see the details of our daily lives. We have become the lifeblood of information for our friends and followers, and they have taken on the role of gatekeepers as we filter and pump information from network to network.

As the opportunities to share information have become more ubiquitous, there has been an increasingly hyped-up debate and concern around the topic of privacy. But is privacy really the issue? As Jeff Jarvis rightly points out, the reason for using social services is for sharing, not hiding. Twitter and Instagram are prime examples of this, where the user is forced to choose between sharing everything or limiting their sharing to a personally selected group who apply for the privilege. Nonetheless, the fact is that although many of us want to share, we want to be able to fine-tune our audience. This challenges services like Facebook where you determine sharing settings in advance of your broadcast.

Has the notion of a ‘friend’ become too diluted by the many different definitions of ‘contact’ across social media networks? Path is trying to redefine this by limiting the number of friends you can add to 50, encouraging you to only share with your “real friends.” But then the question is whether this really solves the issue? Do we only want to share with our close social circle, or do we (as I would argue) have things we want to share with other groups of contacts we would not classify as “friends”?

The problem is that there is currently no universal standard for privacy settings. Each social network has implemented their own interpretation as it applies to types of content shared on their platform. As social networks open up their APIs, allowing users to give third parties access to their content, their social media content can become spread across multiple services. Every network defines their privacy and sharing settings differently, so there is significant ambiguity around how these settings translate when transferring content among services. If you try to inherit privacy settings from multiple services the level of complexity that results is enormously challenging both from a development and a user perspective.

No one has solved this problem yet, and it is a highly relevant and important issue that needs to be addressed. We need a platform where you can manage and arrange all your connections into one simple structure, allowing you to easily define the privacy layers for how, and with whom, you share your content online. And this platform needs to integrate all the social networks.

Facebook Connect was a good first attempt at this, but sadly they quickly closed down their API that allowed you to invite your Facebook Friends to join third-party services. Now you can only view and add friends who are already signed up to that service. The continuation of Facebook Connect in its original form would have made Facebook the major organ of social media sharing, pumping content between networks and controlling the flow to new arteries of social circulation. For users, this would have allowed them greater control and continuity of how their content was shared beyond the confines of Facebook’s network.

Until we create a unified theory of sharing across social networks, there will continue to be great concern around the conflicting definitions of individual privacy. Regulators, in their efforts to protect internet users, are already discussing how to create barriers to protect the individual and simultaneously stifle social sharing. What we need is not greater personal protection through legal limitations, but consistency and standards that are recognized across social networks.

This past week the Google+ platform was revealed, ushering in a promising new chapter in the movement towards a universal standard of privacy. Google+’s ‘circles’ interface allows users to easily organize their network of contacts into spheres of association. Their organizational model for privacy takes what Facebook has developed one step further by allowing the user to easily visualize their different spheres of contacts, and determine which group they want to share updates with as the final step in broadcasting content. Wouldn’t it be great if I could link that structure to all of my other social networks? Let’s hope that Google+ hurdles past the point where Facebook Connect retreated from and becomes the new heart of social network sharing.

Eric Lagier is the cofounder and CEO of Memolane, a service that creates social media timelines for individuals and companies. Lagier formerly was the director of hardware and mobile business development at Skype.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Josh Hallett

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

• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Post-IPO strategies for LinkedIn
• Defining the next era of social music

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We don’t want to slight these three new Blu-ray players from Mitsubishi — they’ve got all the latest features that the kids are clamoring for, like 3D Blu-ray, BDXL, AVCREC, and VOD support. However, sometimes accessories are the most fascinating part of a product, as seems the case with this dual-faced remote — not entirely unlike the ones we’ve seen from Samsung and Boxee. One side controls the TV and the other does the DVR, while a built-in sensor lets the system know which side you’re using. The DVR-BZ450, DVR-BZ350, and DVR-BZ250 are pretty much identical, save for internal storage, which ranges from 500GB to 2TB. All are due out in Japan on May 31st — no word on when the rest of the world will be able to get our hands on the latest technology for losing two remotes at the same time.

Mitsubishi Blu-ray players have BDXL, 3D support, and a two-faced remote originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Apr 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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