FiReaNGeL writes “An international team has obtained the closest views ever of what is believed to be a super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers used radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California to create a virtual telescope more than 2,800 miles across that is capable of seeing details more than 1,000 times finer than the Hubble Space Telescope. The target of the observations was the source known as Sagittarius A* (”A-star”), long thought to mark the position of a black hole whose mass is 4 million times greater than the sun. Though Sagittarius A* was discovered 30 years ago, the new observations for the first time have an angular resolution, or ability to observe small details, that is matched to the size of the event horizon.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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As presented in the previous posts, yet in the early 1990s, Moen Corporation, located in North Olmsted, Ohio, found itself in a challenging situation. The company was losing market share and not positioned well for the changes that were beginning to take place in the market. To transform the company in order for it to grow, newly installed CEO, Bruce Carbonari, implemented a range of reforming strategies which brought fruitful successes. However, the company did not have a reliable process for the identification of new products. They needed a way to determine a corporate strategy and accompanying product plan that would help them to meet the higher growth rate they desired. Two teams (i) Project Periscope Team and (ii) the Extended Periscope team have been formed in order to move a plumbing fixtures company to a new level of excitement and innovation in the industry. Besides, some more strategies are also utilized. (This post is excerpted from The power of strategy innovation : a new way of linking creativity and strategic planning to discover great business opportunities by Robert E. Johnston, Jr., and J. Douglas Bate.)

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Google is promoting their new browser Chrome on quite a lot of national homepages, from China to France to the US. In Germany, they temporarily advertised Chrome in the wrong place. Instead of a link below the search box mentioning the new browser, the red “New!” message was placed in the footer, the link text which led to Chrome reading “Advertising with Google”. I bet this made quite a few Germans scratch their head earlier today… (by now, it’s fixed). [Hat tip to Yinxue!]

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Boston-Power, Inc.’s (DEMO 07) first battery of its proprietary lithium-ion technology platform, Sonata ® , is now for sale and available for evaluation testing by computer makers and other electronics manaufacturers.

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With the upcoming $1.5 billion to $2 billion IPO of Yandex, certainly the biggest tech IPO we would have seen in a while, the Russian search giant got a fair amount of attention lately. The Times published an (somewhat boring) interview with the founder, the blogosphere commented en masse on this story. Some bloggers wondered […]

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Hit the rack at 9 last night, too delirious to hold my eyes open, but drugged myself with a Restoril for extra insurance. Then Junior burst in with news of an unwanted phone call: “Loser!” he said. “It’s not even 9 and you’re in bed!” I pleaded that my circadian rhythms, whatever they are, were […]

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September is suddenly here, and I, for one, have been looking forward in my diary to see what key events are taking place that I should attend - and The Future of Web Apps Expo, in London, October 8-10, certainly looks like a must.The line-up of speakers includes Jason Calcanis, Kevin Rose, Kathy Sierra, Tim […]

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This latest post is some sketching for a longer riff I’m eager to dig into. I love the fact that I can do sketch out loud thanks to American Express. Here’s the first few grafs: Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation,…

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Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunctMuxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Filed under: Google, Browsers

Yesterday might have been a US holiday, but the Twittering and blogging masses were awakened (by quacking claxons, I’m sure) to the inadvertent leak of Google Chrome, the oft-rumored browser from the search giant. Naturally, everyone wants a piece of the action. Here are a few of the stories we’re digesting:

TechCrunch has some juicy first pics of the browser. They snagged a few blurry YouTube screenshots before the demo video was pulled as well. Is “blurry” and YouTube in the same sentence redundant?

Not everyone is enamored with Chrome. Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine provides tonic to those who think this is a real game-changer. He makes some great points.

At the moment, the Google Chrome comic book page on Blogoscoped is down because the “server is a bit stressed right now.” I need 90cc’s of Google juice, stat!

If you think Quikboy has something to say about Chrome, you haven’t read the thread over on Slashdot. Go ahead, we can wait.

Yes, there’s already a Wikipedia page!

Don’t forget Mashable’s take, our old buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick runs down the top features and Ina Fried (Webware) points out what everyone has been repeating: Redmond, volley off the port bow.

Google News has a little over 1,000 stories on Chrome, all within 24 hours. So who’s not interested in this thing?

The read link on this post takes you to our Google Chrome page, and we’ll be liveblogging around 2pm to cover the press conference via those who are there. Will September 2 be a watershed day online, or is Google’s browser destined to be an also-ran? Leave your thoughts in the comments, as always.

UPDATES:
Chris Messina chimes in, explaining why this is important to Mozilla and the open web at large.
Forgot to include Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, who references her awesome interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly.
VC extraordinaire Fred Wilson pulls up a three-legged stool to explain what this means.
Switched has a post about Chrome as well.
Matt Cutts has a liveblog going of the announcement (thanks Ryan!)
Jack Flack deciphers the Googlespeak.
Ryan at CybernetNews asks if Chrome will eat all other browsers for lunch.
OStatic’s Mike Gunderloy has a terrific browser scorecard with his predictions on how other browsers will fare after the Chrome hits the fan.

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Google will release a browser tomorrow in what seems like a full frontal assault on Microsoft. Maybe! But it can also help Google realize its mobile ambitions. Plus my interview with Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who isn’t too worried about Google browser for now, but is happy to compete. Continue Reading the story. The browser will be available for download at this site at 12 Noon PST.

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You regularly see people in the newspaper business, as well as some professional media critics, complaining about the terrible consequences of falling advertising revenues in the mainstream media. There seems to be a worry that as the Internet makes the news business more competitive, traditional media organizations won’t be able to afford to do “real” reporting any more. It’s not a crazy argument, but more often, the opposite seems to be true. Take the recently-completed Democratic Party convention. Ezra Klein points out that there were a ton of reporters who had to justify their presence at the convention, and so rather than focusing on what was happening on the stage (which they could have just as easily done by watching it on TV) they wandered around looking for trumped-up controversy to cover, giving undue attention (in Ezra’s view) to a few disgruntled Clinton supporters. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias points out that CNN appears to have flown its stars to Denver, put them up in hotels, and constructed an elaborate new set for them, all so they could “cover” the convention in precisely the same way they would have covered it if those same stars had stayed at home in Atlanta or DC. Far from having inadequate resources, on the most high-profile news stories, the mainstream media seems to squander vast sums of money on things that only marginally improve the quality of their coverage. There are a variety of factors that may be undermining the quality of mainstream media coverage, but at the moment, a lack of resources doesn’t seem to be among them.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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I just posted a long essay and video of Judy Estrin, former CTO of Cisco, on how the quick-buck, pump and dump mentality in the US is destroying innovation and resulting in lousy service (not to mention long term market share decline).Go to Muniwireless to read my post.

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Got a great idea for a new web site domain name but you’re not at a computer? Send a text message to Domain by Text with a message like IDEANAME lifehacker at 41411 and get an SMS back with the availability of that domain. [via]

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Lightning Parrot

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