IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (TweakTown) 14/03/2011

YouTube to hire 30% more staff
Google have had a great time with YouTube and have said that 2010 has been a great year for YouTube. The results of this success are leading YouTube to hiring more staff to allow YouTube to grow. The plan is to expand its staff by 30-percent which makes it the largest hiring year in the history of YouTube.

Right now, YouTube has between 600 and 700 staff, a 30-percent increase would create 200 new jobs. YouTube launched on February 14, 2005 and has enjoyed rocketing success since. YouTube sees 35 hours of video uploaded for every minute that passes and well in excess of 2 billion views per day!
"It's been amazing to watch an idea become a platform that turned into a stage for hundreds of millions of people to express themselves," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "We now have aspiring filmmakers and musicians building their careers on YouTube, activists opening our eyes to global issues and individuals telling their stories in ways that only video can capture. And because we believe that technology and platforms like YouTube are giving rise to the most diverse set of faces and voices ever seen or heard in human history, us YouTubers really enjoy and feel proud to work here."

iPad 2 installed in a Ford F150, FaceTime in your car - Xzibit nods in appreciation
SoundMan Car Audio have another in-dash iPad installation and this time they've used the just-launched Apple iPad 2. The iPad 2 was installed onto the dash of a 2010 Ford F150 truck and looks absolutely amazing.

I have no idea why this isn't done more but the results are great. Full GPS, FaceTime if needed, Internet/E-Mail access from your dash is such a great idea. For those who can't multi-task (and I know quite a few) this would be absolutely disastrous but that doesn't stop it from looking cool.

RumorTT: Google Me to launch in two months
Rumor has it that Google plan to launch their Facebook competition at the next Google I/O which is on May 10 - 11, 2011. There is not much else to know right now apart from it 'may be happening'.

Back in September of 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggested that a "social layer" was coming to all Google products. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has always been weary of such things saying that a social layer does not cut it, a service needs to be built from the ground up with social in mind.
But, less than two months from now we'll know if Google is indeed releasing it's own social networking competition to Facebook.

Apple iPad 2 specs probed, powered by a 900MHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 chip
AnandTech have probed the iPad 2 and found what makes her tick. That tick comes in the form of a dual-core ARM chip that is clocked at around 900MHz with the graphics side of the iPad 2 being powered by a dual-core PowerVR SGX543MP3 GPU on the die.

With those powers combined,
I am Captain Planet
, I mean, much more powerful than the original iPad. This performance increase is not just a little it's actually quite significant. When using GLBenchmark, the iPad 2 pushes 57.6 frames per second, the higher-res Tegra 2-powered Motorola Xoom can process at 26.7 fps while the original iPad can only pull 17.6 fps.
Not quite the "9X faster graphics", but you get the picture.

Nintendo Pods in Major Cities, Including Mine
From a March 10th press release, Nintendo announced that they would be mounting a cross-country major city Nintendo 3DS promotional campaign in which "Pods" would be showcased in metropolitan areas around the United States (and Canada). Living in one of those major cities, I moseyed over to San Francisco's Pier 39 to check out what was going on.

The Pod has 8 play-testing spots with different games at each one. The games at the SF location included AR Games, Face Raiders, Street Fighter IV, Madden, Pilotwings, Steel Diver, and the much anticipated Nintendogs + cats. The latter is a Tamigotchi-style virtual pet raising game, in which you can pet your pets with a cursor, feed them, take pictures of them, post them to various social netoworks and even hold in the palm of your hand (thanks to an AR Card). Nintendo is also providing a Mii-maker kiosk adjoining the Pod, where you can make a Mii based on a couple default settings and an intuitive process that adds features based on a self-photograph. As you could post this to Facebook or send this to up to 3 email addresses, many people were enjoying this feature, including Mii. I mean, me.

Most popular game to demo was a three-way tie between Face Raiders, AR Games and Nintendogs + Cats. All of these games have AR elements or are entirely AR based, so this bodes very well for Portable AR experiences in the near future.
Make sure to check out the gallery for more photos, or if you're in any of the following major cities, make the trek and check it out yourself:
New York City: Grand Central Terminal (Vanderbilt Hall, West Side)
o Running March 11-30
o Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m.
o Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.
Chicago: Citigroup Center (entrance to Ogilvie Transportation Center)
o Running March 11-April 3
o Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m.
o Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-8 p.m.
San Francisco: Pier 39 (Main Entrance Plaza)
o Running March 11-April 3
o Monday through Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Los Angeles: Third Street Promenade (1300 block)
o Running March 11-April 3
o Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.
o Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m.
o Sunday, 11 a.m.-7 p.m.

Endgadget Editor-in-Chief, Others, Peace Out
Endgadget's editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky is no longer a part of the AOL-owned Tech Blog. Though the story broke on Kara Swisher's All Things D around 3:00 PM PST, Topolsky followed up with his own (and maybe last?) Endadget post (with the following photo as well):

"It's hard to believe that I'm currently writing the words I seem to be writing, though a casual stock-taking of my senses dictates that it must be true. Here I am, at my computer, typing letters one by one into a plain text document, rolling along through one of the strangest posts I've ever penned for this site. Okay, probably the strangest ever.
After nearly four years at Engadget, it's time to make my exit. There are things I'm after and challenges I want to take on that just don't fit with my day-to-day schedule here, so off I go.
I didn't make this decision lightly. The time I've spent here has been -- without question -- the most amazing, rewarding, and just insanely fun period of my life. And I like to think I've had some pretty good times. The Engadget staff is easily the greatest collection of human beings I've ever encountered, and they've made waking up and freaking out over tech news for 12 to 18 hours a day into basically a party. I've never worked so hard or had so much fun doing it. I don't use religious terms very often, but if there's such a thing as being blessed, I would say the opportunity I had to work with these people certainly made me feel that way.
And it's not just the core team at Engadget; all the groups at Weblogs (and its director Brad Hill), have been tremendous friends, partners, and peers.
Then there's you guys -- the readers. The hive mind. The Engadget fan-boys and -girls. It's hard to sum up my experiences with the readership of Engadget in one paragraph. It would probably be hard in a hundred. But I can say that you're simply the most informed, passionate, and excited group of people anywhere on the planet. Sure, you can get a little crazy sometimes -- but what an astounding group of super-geniuses you are as well. Writing and working for the throngs of people who visit this site every day has been a huge challenge, a learning experience, and just kind of awe-inspiring.
But as I said, it's time for me to step away. I'm not leaving the industry or the news game -- in fact, I've got a few fantasy projects in mind that hopefully you'll be hearing about soon.
Don't worry though, Engadget is going to keep doing what it does best: being awesome. We have an amazing staff of senior editors and writers that will keep the machine chugging along (and growing!) for years to come. My friend and our editorial director Josh Fruhlinger will be taking on a bigger role in our day-to-day during the transition, and I won't be completely disappearing from the site -- I'll stay on as editor-at-large, to advise and direct when necessary. I'll also be sticking around to host more episodes of the Engadget Show, so you can continue to get your fix (if you're into nerdy video shows about gadgets and technology, that is).
And with that, I'm shuffling over towards the door, just underneath that dim exit sign that keeps blinking on and off, its fluorescent bulbs cracking with some syncopated rhythm all their own. It's just started to rain a little bit outside, but I've got my coat and umbrella. I'll be fine, and so will you.
Till we meet again..."
According to Swisher, the move had nothing to do with the recent AOL acquisition of either TechCrunch or The Huffington Post (apparently Arianna Huffington even urged Topolsky not to leave), but Engadget's editors have been dropping like flies ever since the acquisition by the former Internet-Portal-turned-News-Site: two other senior editors, Paul Miller and Ross Miller (Miller's a common name, people) recently left, and Swisher's sources claim that now-Managing-Editor Nilay Patel is also on the way out.
I'm going to go ahead and call shenanigans on Topolsky's departure "having nothing to do" with working under AOL- with a revolving door of editors as well as having a giant corporate editorial structure, it couldn't have been easy.
Not that anyone could really believe that Topolsky was leaving the Tech-News gig after running a site that has 14 million unique views a year, but according to him he's got some other projects in the works.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX590 sucks its beer gut in, shows off a possible single-slot cooler? Even The Situation is jealous.
UPDATE: The source looked at the picture wrong, I apologise if I got some people excited! The GTX590 will be a dual-slot card, at 297mm in length which is close to the GTX295's length.
The launch of the soon-to-be amazing GeForce GTX 590 dual-Fermi based GPU is about to go live and the closer we get to the release, the more that leaks out about it. NVIDIA has obviously put a lot of green sweat into this puppy and the latest shots show a 21.5mm-thick cooler which would imply that it's a single-slot based cooler.

This would be an amazing achievement if true, but could also come at the cost of your ears. If it is indeed true, NVIDIA have pulled a rabbit from the hat and should get some fairly good press based on the cooler design alone.
Below is a shot of Sparkles upcoming single-slot GeForce GTX570 which was shown off at CeBit, looks quite sexy as a slimmed card.

NZXT Cryo LX Aluminum Notebook Cooler Review

Introduction
With more and more laptop coolers passing through our doors, I have seen enough to get a basic feel for the market. Some coolers look like space ships with bulky plastic and rubber pieces and get surrounded by LEDs; some with and some without lighting control. If I was a teenager again, these things would all appeal to me, and at that point I know noise wasn't as much of an issue for me back then, but with lots of other things going on in the world around a PC, I like to see performance without making my ears bleed in the process.
While I was receiving coolers from Antec and Cooler Master, I asked NZXT for the Cryo LX to see what they have in store for the notebook cooling market. I mean we have just seen their LED kits, the Bunker, and those very nice looking wiring adapters, I figured they had to take some of that creativity into other products they produce, and NZXT seems more than happy to oblige me with my desire to want to see it.
Today we will be taking a close look at the Cryo LX, the "largest full aluminum notebook cooler". Not only does this notebook cooler offer an extruded aluminum construction, it also offers plenty of air flow. Even at first glance on the site or looking at the coolers packaging, it isn't hard to tell that NZXT is offering a classy looking addition to your desktop as well. I say we get to the specifics and key features of the Cryo LX, disassemble it a bit, and get to the testing to see if the "largest" cooler means the "best" notebook cooler.
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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

IT News HeadLines (TweakTown) 14/03/2011

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