Ahmed Kaludi – Page 9

Free Group Chat App Convore Launches To Challenge Campfire

Convore comes from the minds of developers Leah Culver and Eric Florenzano, as well as designer Eric Maguire. The latter two were recently working at online gaming powerhouse Mochi Media. Meanwhile, Culver and Florenzano met while coordinating some Django meetups in San Francisco, and the collaboration took off from there. The team has been working on Convore full time for approximately the past two weeks, out of an office in SOMA.Convore is a Y Combinator startup that’s out to challenge the likes of Campfire and IRC with a free group-chat web app.

Users can create groups, either public or private, with multiple topics in each group, all free of charge. Private groups require would-be members to get moderators’ permission to join. Users can pick public and private group participants from your Facebook or Twitter friends, or they can invite members via e-mail.

Because it has options to connect one’s profile with one’s social networks, its onboarding process is fraught with opportunities to start chatting right away with people who already happen to be one’s friends.

The instant messaging is quick and incredibly simple to set up. It features a clean interface, and it’s usable in a way that very few new web apps are.

We also like the Mentions feature, which allows users to see who has sent them a message or replied to their message from within a group chat — an especially good feature for when chats get fast-paced or “noisy” or for when a person goes offline.

And while the uses for individuals and friends are undoubtedly there, what really excites us is what the app means for users in businesses, from tech startups to distributed SMBs to the enterprise.

Syria Lifts Ban on Facebook and YouTube

Mideast Syria Interne_Norm — Feb. 8: A Syrian man connects on his Facebook account at an internet cafe, in Damascus, Syria. A media watchdog said Tuesday that Syria appears to be lifting a three-year-old ban on YouTube and Facebook, a decision that could be seen as a gesture to stave off unrest following popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia. (AP)

Syrians may be able to start accessing Facebook and YouTube for the first time since a ban was instated in 2007.

As the Associated Press reports, on Tuesday, Internet users in Syria said they were able to access Facebook and YouTube — without the aid of proxy servers —for the first time in years. The reported ban lift comes just two weeks after Syria banned programs that allow access to Facebook chat. Many news outlets are speculating that the government’s change of heart stems from fears that protests similar to those in Egypt might erupt in Syria.

Opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had planned a protest, scheduled to start last Friday, in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Like the organizers of both the protest in Egypt and an uprising in Tunisia that forced the ruling party from power last month, they used Facebook to plan the event. One Facebook Page got about 17,000 likes, but the “Day of Rage” failed to materialize.

While Egypt took down Twitter, Facebook, and then the entire Internet in reaction to protests in that country, Assad may be ready to make some changes in favor of open communication in order to preemptively quell future uprisings.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Assad distinguished Syria from what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia, but said that Syria would consider reforms aimed at solving shared problems of countries in the region.

“As for the internal, it is about doing something that is changing; to change the society, and we have to keep up with this change, as a state and as institutions,” Assad said. “You have to upgrade yourself with the upgrading of the society.”

Lifting the block on Facebook and YouTube isn’t a huge concession. Most people in Syria access the social platforms through international proxy servers (they did, after all, organize the failed protest over Facebook). But at least one U.S. government official applauded the change as a first step in opening communication, though one useless without other freedoms.

“Welcome positive move on Facebook & YouTube in #Syria but concerned that freedom puts users at risk absent freedom of expression & association,” tweeted Alec Ross, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation.

A Basic Sketch of the Next iPad

Apple is a cyclical creature, like bears, unicorns and ladyfolk. iPods in September; iPhones in June; and likely, iPads in April. April is not so far away! So, unsurprisingly, we’re starting to hear what the next iPad looks like.

The brains – While one generation of devices does not a trend make—three’s a trend, in journo-land—Apple is less mystical and more economical than most internet denizens would suspect. The A4 chip that first showed up in the iPad also made its way into the iPhone 4, iPod touch and re-designed Apple TV. It too, is not all that mysteriousical: It’s a custom system-on-a-chip built around ARM’s Cortex A8 processor that’s clocked at 1GHz with a PowerVR SGX 535 graphics chip (also found in the iPhone 3GS). It’s not crazy that the next generation of Apple’s system on a chip, which Engadget has pegged as the A5, will follow the same pattern, as their sources indicate: It’ll show up in the next iPad, followed by the iPhone 5 (and its iPod touch equivalent, though this goes without saying), and a new Apple TV.

Full size – What’s in this next-gen Apple chip? Well, quite logically (and according to sources), the heart of the A5 (or whatever it’s called) is the next-generation ARM chip. The multi-core ARM Cortex A9 (PDF), already seen in dual-core configurations up to 1.5GHz. A 1GHz dual-core A9 is also the heart of Nvidia’s Tegra 2, which is powering like a bajillion Android 3.0 tablets and steroidal smartphones (Motorola’s Xoom, Atrix 4G and Droid Bionic), and the TI OMAP 4430, powering the BlackBerry PlayBook. Oh, and Samsung’s next CPUs—codenamed Orion—which we can expect to be heart of the next wave of Galaxy phones, tablets and toasters. (Image: Apple’s A4, from Chipworks/iFixit)

The BlackBerry PlayBook is not a bad place to start thinking about the kind of performance we’ll see in the next iPad. It can simultaneously play back 1080p video and run Quake III. Without choking. The TI OMAP 4430 inside not only uses a dual-core 1GHz A9 processor, but a PowerVR SGX540 graphics core. According to AppleInsider’s sources, and driver bundles found in iOS 4.3, the A5 will include a PowerVR SGX543 graphics chip—quite possibly a dual-core version, resulting in 4x the graphics power of the current iPad and iPhone 4’s chips. If the PlayBook can do what it does, imagine what a more powerful, dual-core graphics chip can do. 1080p video is just a start.