We know you’ve got questions, and if you’re brave enough to ask the world for answers, here’s the outlet to do so. This week’s Ask Engadget question is coming to us from Anthony, who is looking for an external battery pack to keep his laptop humming through those 21-hour T / TH marathon days. If you’re looking to send in an inquiry of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com.

“I’m going off to college soon. I have a new HP TM2. Obviously the 9 hour battery life isn’t realistic, and I would like the fabled “full day computing” experience. I do have a second battery, but it’s awkward to charge both batteries, the shape doesn’t fit into my bag well, and I have to hibernate to switch (which introduces some wonkiness to some programs). I’m looking into external batteries which provide power to the DC input of my laptop (18.5V, but 19V will work too). It would preferably be approximately 9- to 13-inches diagonally to fit into my bookbag and / or laptop bag, and not ridiculously thick. USB charging would be a definite plus too, but not required.”

For Mac owners asking a similar question, we can personally attest to the greatness of the HyperMac, but we’ll be looking to the collective brain of our dear readers to help on Anthony. Go on and toss your suggestion down in comments — you wouldn’t want poor Anthony running out of juice during his first Biology lab, now would you?

Ask Engadget: best external laptop battery? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Apr 2010 01:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lala – where music will stop playing …

In a brief message that was just posted on the Lala.com website, Apple has announced that the service will be shut down on May 31st, 2010. Apple will not be accepting new users, and existing users will be able to log in only until the end of next month.

Does this mean we can start raising our hopes for iTunes in the cloud?

At the bottom of a Wall Street Journal piece published back in January 2010, the paper suggested that Apple was gearing up to launch iTunes.com as soon as this June, citing sources familiar with the matter.

For an extensive view on how far-reaching that could prove to be, check out this guest post by Michael Robertson, the former CEO of MP3.com, who laid out Apple’s cloud-based media strategy going forward.

An iTunes-in-the-cloud offering – which is basically what Lala’s value proposition boils down to – is the central part of such an endeavor. Late last year, we wrote about how a move to the cloud was inevitable for iTunes. With the imminent shutdown of Lala, it’s safe to assume something is brewing at Cupertino.

Will Apple be the first company to turn online music subscription services into a sizable business?

Perhaps Apple, which acquired Lala late last year, will be making an announcement at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which will be held June 7 in San Francisco.

(Thanks for the tip, Josh)

Innovations in communications software and websites can be quite exciting. After the dust dies down, however, it’s really not clear how much more information has been made available, how much more people can communicate, how much more thinking has been enabled.

London-based Mendeley’s offering up an Open API and making a vast catalog of academic publications searchable, well, that might make the cut.

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Mendeley is a popular academic and scientific research cross-platform management tool, usable both desktop and online. The tool automatically extracts bibliographic data from a user’s document library and stores that information, and the papers and studies it helps builds, on their computer or on the cloud. It is that information that is now available with its API and on its search.

Prior to making the API catch-as-catch-can, Mendeley is asking researchers and developers to send in proposals by May 14 and will announce who among them will have immediate access on May 21.

The quantities of data in aggregate (the API also offers you your own data) and the varieties in type of research, from cancer studies to the influence of the Iroquois Confederacy on early American democracy, beggars the imagination. On a more practical level, Jason Hoyt, the company’s Research Director, writing on the Mendeley blog, pointed out the number of features that company gets requests for are too many to handle. Perhaps developers, both general and niche, will invent some interesting tools.

The catalog has basic search starting today, but Hoyt said the company already has an advanced search function ready that will be implemented in two weeks.

Hoyt promises the relational elements of Mendeley will be expressed in its search results.

“An algorithm called ‘ReaderRank’…will adjust results based on the level of readership for an article. This doesn’t mean the most read articles will always appear at the top, only that it is an additional measure in ranking your results. We have also taken care to prevent artificial enhancement of the results, i.e. gaming the readership. Over time, we hope to refine this algorithm by taking into account other measures of quality such as the reputation of who you trust and follow on Mendeley.”

Although the combination of Open API and search should in itself be a powerful source of information, inside academe and out, it might also inspire academic publishers, who are notorious stingy with information, to loosen their stranglehold on knowledge.

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Dell’s Android-loving Thunder already boomed about its future “integrated web video Hulu app,” but now we’re also getting confirmation, albeit an unintentional one, from Hulu itself that an Android app for the streaming service is in the works. A reader spotted the incriminating info above when searching for more info about just such a program — as you can see, “Hulu App for Android devices” is specifically named in the blurb below the link to Hulu Labs. The actual Labs page has no new info, and our suspicion is it will stay that way until Android 2.2 brings integrated Flash support to the platform. We’re also seeing a reference to an iPhone OS application, but since that bit of text trails off, it’s a more equivocal implication — though not an illogical one at all. Either way, this is the most concrete indication we’ve had yet that Hulu is going mobile, in what seems to be a pretty big way.

[Thanks, Zach S.]

Hulu app for Android revealed by Google search originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 02:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When it comes to media management for your portable electronics, there’s the iTunes/iPod goliath, and then there’s everyone else. In the last six months or so we’ve seen the competition in the second category heat up quite a bit, with applications like doubleTwist and Songbird offering strong alternatives to Apple’s dominant media app. Dazzboard is another of these iTunes alternatives that’s taking a different approach: it’s entirely browser-based (though you need to install a small plugin). It’s been available for Windows since last summer, and today it’s launching for Mac.

Dazzboard allows users to sync media and playlists to mass storage devices, like most non-Apple MP3 players and Android phones. Along with the standard music, photo, and video syncing you’d expect from an iTunes alternative, the application also lets you to sync content with web services including YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. You can also transfer files between multiple devices. To get it working on a Mac you’ll need to be running Safari and Snow Leopard 10.6.2 or newer.

Unfortunately I had issues getting the application working properly (I keep getting errors about the backend server, which are probably related to the launch), but the functionality appears to be nearly identical to what’s available on the Windows version, which we’ve previously covered.

Dazzboard is based in Finland and recently raised $1.5 million.

Prior to SXSW, we polled you on what location-based mobile app you would use during the festival. Brightkite and Foursquare were the most popular picks, with Gowalla third. We also polled you a year ago about this class of app and at that time Brightkite was a clear favorite.

As an attendee at SXSW, it seemed like Foursquare and Gowalla were the most used. Brightkite seemed to drop off the radar of SXSW attendees, but perhaps that was because Foursquare and Gowalla had the most press attention at that time. Whatever the case, it was an inconclusive result at SXSW and there was a sense that none of the 3 leading location-based mobile apps ‘won’ that battle. It’s now a month later, so we thought we’d poll you again to see which – if any – of these apps you use regularly now.

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Please add your vote to the poll below. You can also tweet your answer to @rww.

Which location-based mobile app do you use THE MOST?online survey

See also:

• Two-Thirds of iPhone Users Now Use Location-Based Services at Least Once a Week
• Top 10 Mobile Trends of 2010, Part 2: Apps, Apps, Apps

Join us at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7, in Mountain View, CA, to discuss location-based apps and other hot topics in Mobile. If you’re in town for the Web 2.0 Expo that week, our Mobile Summit is the day after. We’d love to see you there! Register here.

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Portable devices that turn any surface into a speaker are hardly anything new, but the folks behind the WOWee One portable speaker (not WowWee) seem to be making some slightly bigger claims than most, and are even throwing out the increasingly popular “perfect companion for the iPad” phrase for good measure. As with other similar devices, the WOWee One conducts sound through any surface you rest it on (even a wall with an optional attachment), but it also has the benefit of patented “Gel Audio” technology, which promises to produce bass frequencies about three octaves below any other comparable device. You’ll also apparently get about 20 hours of use from the built-in rechargeable battery, and your choice of three different colors — all for the not so low price of $79.99. Head on past the break for a quick video.

Continue reading WOWee One portable speaker latches onto surfaces, iPad’s coattails

WOWee One portable speaker latches onto surfaces, iPad’s coattails originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With a recent public launch under its belt, OpenSky is adding $6 million in new capital. Existing investors Highland Capital and Canaan Partners invested in the series B financing. A year ago, the company raised $5 million.

OpenSky is a social marketing/e-commerce startup which connects manufacturers and distributors directly with influential bloggers who recommend their products and get a cut from resulting sales. It is much more than an affiliate networks. As I described OpenSky when it launched:

While OpenSky sounds at first like an affiliate network, it isn’t. Instead of sending customers off to other online stores, they send them to their own stores where they can track sales and follow up with personalized messages. OpenSky hand picks the publishers who are allowed to set up shops and sell in its network. It then strikes deals directly with manufacturers and distributors who agree to drop-ship any sold items to readers who click to buy through an OpenSky shop. Instead of the blogger getting a 3 to 10 percent affiliate fee, they split the net profits 50/50 with OpenSky. The economics work best obviously with high-margin products.

OpenSky CEO John Caplan was previously the CEO of Ford Models, and before that the president of About.com. He tells me that “seller conversion rates grow and repeat shoppers buy more frequently” since the launch (before that, OpenSky was in private beta with 250 bloggers). His plans going forward include hiring more people, releasing a distributed cart (for onsite shopping without sending readers off to a store), opening up OpenSky’s APIs, improve the relevance matching between product manufacturers and bloggers/influencers, and better direct marketing support for sellers.

2011 will be the year the floppy disc goes extinct. Sony, which sold 47 million of the 3.5-inch discs a year at its height, is phasing them out in Japan, one of the last markets. According to the Examiner, sales fell to only 8.5 million in 2009.

Sony’s sales of floppies worldwide ended in March of this year. Sales in Japan will end next year exactly a year later. Most worldwide manufacturers of floppies already put the kibosh on the little devils.

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Other more popular, and capacious, media for information storage and transmission, including USB drives, DVDs and CDs and online, the demand for the discs has severely declined. Added to that the fact that few computer makers are even including disc drives, there’s just no compelling reason to keep investing in them.

I wonder what we’ll do, a decade hence, when we unearth a mysteriously-labeled floppy and find no way to read it? Maybe some things are better left as mysteries.

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TiVo loyalists have waited a long, long time for this. The Premiere is marketed as the DVR to end all DVRs, and unlike those plain-jane boxes served up at your local pay-TV provider, there’s actually a decent amount of ingenuity within TiVo’s freshest set-top box. Unfortunately, those good intentions didn’t really lead to a beautiful implementation, and we found quite a few bones to pick during our time with it. Make no mistake — TiVo’s still charging a small fortune for the privilege of using its user interface and hearing its bloops and beeps, and frankly, we expected more for the premium. Are you in the same boat? Couldn’t disagree more? We’re anxious to see how you’d retool the Premiere if given the opportunity, and what you’d do differently now that you’ve been relying on it for the past couple of months. Go on, comments are waiting for you.

How would you change the TiVo Premiere? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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