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eagle

SXSWi: Hello, Austin!

AUSTIN, Texas--I just rolled off a JetBlue flight where half the passengers were typing on MacBooks and talking about last night's episode of Lost and the other half were wearing worn-out band T-shirts and combat boots. Incoming text messages from Twitter are making my cell phone buzz off the hook. I have this sudden craving for baby-back ribs and a giant margarita.

I guess it must be South by Southwest.

I'll be here through Tuesday night for South by Southwest Interactive, the digital-culture arm of the festival, and I'm pumped. Unlike my seasoned colleague Daniel Terdiman, I'… Read more

Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there

At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.

Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).

If … Read more

You are here, sort of: Fire Eagle and Urban Mapping

Where are you right now? It's a simple question for humans to ask and answer, but for Web services, location is a complex and sometimes fuzzy concept. Right now, I'm in San Francisco, and I don't care who knows it. Where in San Francisco? That's not so public. I started writing this at home, with a specific address that I don't want to print here but that I'm OK with my friends knowing. Where's my house? It's in the Noe Valley neighborhood. Although, a real estate agent might be able to get … Read more

The 'Eagle' has landed

Just for the record, turntables aren't the only types of audio equipment that occasionally resemble heavy machinery. It's just hard to resist singling them out when systems start to approach $1 million.

The latest example of industrial chic is the "Eagle Neo-Retro CD Player," whose prosaic name really doesn't do justice to its unique design. We would expect no less from the site of Art Lebedev Studio, the Russian design house that's been a darling among technophiles for such groundbreaking innovations as its "Optimus" and "Upravlator" keyboards.

The turntable is … Read more

Photos: Where ScanEagle drones dare

Unmanned aerial vehicles, "drones" or "UAVs" for short, are getting to be pretty impressive affairs. Target-tracking software allows one drone to fly by its own wits, even above 15,000 feet. Overseen by humans, these planes can chase down a moving vehicle, send reports to a human operator by cell phone, collect photo images and video, and even relay information via VoIP.

Even with the new autonomous capabilities in the ScanEagle, surveillance efforts will often dictate that a human maintain a greater degree of oversight. One major objective of these flyers is to reduce the risk … Read more