After a while in private beta, Yahoo’s Brickhouse development group has set loose public beta of Fire Eagle, a new service that aims to be a centralized hub for users to tap into location-aware Internet applications. The idea is that users update their location info via Fire Eagle—ideally via a mobile phone, but using the Web works too—and a myriad of location aware services will all be able to pick up that information and work their location-specific magic for that users—like alerting you to nearby friends, a great restaurant nearby, updating traffic information, getting directions…and, no doubt one day, being subjected to location-specific ads.
Tag Archive: Fire
Fire At The Planet Affects 9,000 Servers
They call the data center in Texas The Planet, a place full of servers. But a large fire has taken 9,000 of the servers at The Planet offline, bringing down thousands of web pages around the world.
An electrical short reportedly caused the blaze that destroyed three walls around the data center’s electrical equipment room.
In a blog post, The Planet team wrote:
"We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our back-up generator plan based on instructions from the fire department."
PSP Catches Fire
There have been several incidents of lithium-iron batteries catching fire, but they’ve mostly affected laptops. On Wednesday, however, 12-year-old Henry Clay from Detroit found that hisSony PSP burst into flames in his pants pocket, Vnunet reports. On Click OnDetroit, the boy’s mother, Sheila Clay, explained, "He said it wasn’t a gradual heat. It really started heating up. He’s always been taught burn – fire – smoke, you drop and youroll. So, he dropped and rolled." The handheld wasn’t on, as it was nine a.m. and the boy was in class. A teacher was able to remove the PSP from his pocket, and as a result Claywas treated for second-degree burns to his leg. In a slightly ironic touch, the Burn Out game was in the handheld at the time. Sony has had battery fire problems with its notebooks before, butnot a PSP. If this turns out to be the tip of the iceberg, it could seriously hurt its position against other devices like the Nintendo DS.
Samsung Brings Music Events To HDTV
Samsung is the exclusive sponsor of a unique and exciting schedule of music programming on the INHD Channel through 2005. This remarkable music series will debut in October and present suchartists as The Who, Peter Gabriel, Earth, Wind & Fire and Chicago. The two companies promise details concerning the series debut andadditional high profile announcements in the coming months.
As part of this effort, Samsung will use its Internet marketing muscle to promote the exclusive music programming to consumers through its network of 380 key Internet sites reaching 1.6 billion users. Rob Jacobson, President & CEO of INHD parent company iN DEMAND Networks said, “Samsung, the leader in high definition TV systems is the perfect partner for INHD’s exclusive music programming. Together we can bring an unparalleled music experience into the homes of our trend-setting cable TV subscribers.”


