Welcome to the latest edition of “Top Funding Stories,” a weekly series where we summarize the big startup funding and investment stories of…

Hiring the wrong person for key company positions can cost a business thousands — or tens of thousands — of dollars and man hours.…

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your st…

This Morse Code Signal Lamp may not sway the course of a battle, or signal distant allies, but it will give your room the right kind of nautical ambience and blend in with the portholes, ancient mariner tea cups and the signed copy of Moby Dick on the capstan coffee table. Unfortunately it only supports a ...

Lenovo originally stated mid-last year that a brand new game console, then known as the “eBox” would be hitting the Chinese market in November 2010 followed by other markets in 2011. As Lenovo missed their launch window, it has now been revealed that the console has been renamed to “iSec”...

You can toss it on a plane. You can toss it on a train. You can toss it in a car. You can toss it near and far.

Kiloo's new Frisbee(R) app for iOS gives geeks a safe environment to toss the disc (so no more broken windows or dents in the lawn). We managed to keep that little blue saucer parallel to the ground for several seconds during our hands-on. It even flew through one or two of those enormous black and white hoops (enormous relative to the finger-nail-size frisbee). Many of the interface elements feel like they were borrowed from Angry Birds, from buttons and other graphics, to the way you progress through levels. This brought a certain familiarity to the game, though gently sliding a Frisbee(R) across the screen is arguably much less addictive than catapulting feathered fowl to their explosive deaths. We tossed (or flicked) the disc on an iPhone, but if you're ready to step up to the big leagues, the free app is available for iPad (and iPod touch) as well. Jump up and catch it at the source link.

Frisbee Forever app hits your iPhone screen, doesn't crack it originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 02:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whoops. If you'll recall, Sony held what can only be described as an emergency press event in Japan a week ago in order to issue a number of assurances about the resumption of service as it relates to the PlayStation Network and Qriocity. Seven days later, things are still as dead as they were pre-Cinco de Mayo. This evening, the company's Senior Director of Corporate Communications Patrick Seybold punched out a quick update to let the world know that they could actually leave the house and find something else to entertain 'em -- like it or not, PSN isn't coming back online today. The reason? On May 1st, Sony was apparently "unaware of the extent of the attack on Sony Online Entertainment servers," and now, it's spinning its wheels in order to restore security on the network and "ensure" that user data is safe. Mr. Seybold seems to understand that you're overly anxious about getting back into the swing of things, and he's even going so far as to ask your trust that Sony's doing "everything [it] can" to get the lights blinking once more. Oh, and if you were planning on visiting that source link just to find the new ETA... don't. Sony's planning to update you "as soon as it can."

[Thanks, Alex]

Sony misses promised PlayStation Network and Qriocity restoration date, begs for more patience originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 07 May 2011 03:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Karen Butler maintains that after being heavily sedated she awoke speaking with a thick British accent. Can it be true?

He showed a clip from a local news station that equated the portrayal of homosexuality on 'Glee' to product placement. "You throw a soda in a movie and within a few seconds everybody in the theater is thirsty for that particular brand," the woman in the clip said.

London is unprepared for a terrorist attack on the 2012 Olympics because of a chronic shortage of air ambulance crews and other fast response teams, Lady Justice Hallett warned in her report into the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks.

Joystick Division looks at gamers' reactions to the PSN hack and outage.

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New data from comScore for this past March has pointed to Apple nearly passing RIM in smartphone market share for the US. Shipping 18.65 million iPhones helped Apple gain half a point since December to hit 25.5 percent share in its home country.

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The Long Island Serial Killer may one day take his place alongside the Gacys and the Bundys. Or he may be all but forgotten like these poor lunatics.

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'The industry estimates are wrong. They're low. You can write that down.'

GRPN is a RPN calculator for the X Window system built using the GIMP Toolkit (GTK). GRPN works with real numbers, complex numbers, matrices, and complex matrices. Numbers can be displayed in 4 different radix modes, and complex numbers can be displayed in either Cartesian or polar form, in decimal or engineering notation.

Changes: Clipboard support was added, with Ctrl-C. The comma is no longer a separator in complex numbers. It has been replaced by ";" and ">", since it is used as a decimal separator in some locales. Debian sources and binaries are available.

Release Tags: Stable, Minor, gtk-2.0

Tags: Office/Business, Financial, Scientific/Engineering

Licenses: GPL

Jmx4Perl provides an alternate way of accessing Java JEE Server management interfaces that are based on JMX (Java Management Extensions). It is an agent-based approach where a small Web application deployed on the application server provides HTTP/JSON-based access to JMX MBeans registered within the application server. It is set up from a handful of Perl modules, which can be integrated seamlessly in your own programs. It also includes a Nagios plugin, check_jmx4perl, a jmx4perl command line tool for remote JMX queries and operations, and a readline-based JMX shell j4psh, with context sensitive command completion and syntax highlighting.

Changes: This release contains bugfixes and minor enhancements like the possibility to avoid clear text passwords in configuration files.

Release Tags: Minor, Bugfixes

Tags: Development, Libraries, Perl, Modules, Java, JMX, JEE, Nagios, Agent, JSON, REST, software, j2ee, Monitoring

Licenses: GPLv2, Commercial

KnowledgeRoot is a knowledge base system that lets you structure your content in a tree. It integrates FCKeditor to make adding content easy.

Changes: This release adds a content printout dialog. The position for contents can be set at create or edit time. Some small bugs have been fixed.

Release Tags: Minor bugfixes, Minor feature enhancements

Tags: Internet, Web, Dynamic Content, Wiki, Software Development, Documentation

QLC, the Q Light Controller, is used to control DMX and analog lighting equipment like scanners, dimmers, and other effects. The goal is to produce free software that replaces hardware lighting desks.

Changes: HTP (Highest Takes Precedence) has been implemented for all intensity channels. An unlimited amount of fixtures and functions is supported. The cue list and chaser editor now support cut, copy, and paste. All stock plugins are included in the main package. Usability has been improved in some dialogs.

Release Tags: Major feature enhancements

Tags: Artistic Software

Licenses: GPLv2

TCPDF is a PHP class for generating PDF documents without requiring external extensions. TCPDF supports all ISO page formats and custom page formats, custom margins and units of measure, UTF-8 Unicode, RTL languages, HTML, barcodes, TrueTypeUnicode, TrueType, OpenType, Type1, and CID-0 fonts, images, graphic functions, clipping, bookmarks, JavaScript, forms, page compression, digital signatures, and encryption.

Changes: A bug in barcode type 93 was fixed.

Tags: Software Development, Libraries, php classes, Text Processing

Licenses: LGPL

TCExam is Web-based assessment software for generating and managing online tests and exams. It simplifies the exam cycle, including generation, execution, evaluation, presentation, and archiving.

Changes: This version includes better result interfaces and improved export filters (CSV, XML, PDF).

Tags: education, Testing, Computer-Based Assessment, e-exam

Licenses: AGPL v3

Wiki2Beamer is a small tool to create LaTeX Beamer presentations from text files with a wiki-like syntax. Thus, it enables the user to create beamer presentations in a less time-consuming way.

Changes: An issue with the color syntax element ( _ somecolor _ sometext _ ) which might get in the way a little bit too often was fixed and improved. It now only is activated when "somecolor" is a simple name (doesn't contain the curly braces) and not a complex LaTeX command.

Release Tags: Stable

Tags: Text Processing, Markup, TeX/LaTeX, Office/Business

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Prudence is a platform for creating scalable Web applications and network services using dynamic scripting languages and proven REST principles. Your application can support thin clients (HTML) and rich clients (AJAX), with anything in between. You can also create pure REST services with no user interaction. Languages supported are Python, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, JavaScript, PHP, Succinct, Velocity, and anything else supported by the Scripturian project.

Changes: This release includes upgrades to many dependencies (notably Groovy and JRuby) and fixes a major bug with Internet Explorer.

Licenses: LGPL

WikkaWiki is a lightweight and flexible wiki engine allowing easy management of Websites, in particular collective Web-based projects: it provides an intuitive interface for modifying page content, tracking and comparing revisions made by single users, and setting user access privileges. It features W3 compliant XHTML and CSS output, several text formatting options, categories, a GUI for editing pages, support for images, tables, Flash objects, RSS feeds, FreeMind maps, advanced Access Control List management, referrers management, and text search functions. Designed for easy customizability, it aims at keeping its core as light as possible while maintaining an architecture that supports extensibility through plugin modules.

Changes: This release addresses many outstanding bugs and introduces a slew of new functionality including relaxed page naming requirements, new actions, and a more robust RSS feed generator.

Tags: Information Management, Internet, Web, Dynamic Content, Wiki, Site Management, Software Development, Documentation, Communications, Issue Tracking

Licenses: GPL

The deployment and configuration management of software over servers, or simply of the instantiation of various configurations in a test environment, is a complex and error-prone operational task. KwateeSDCM automates the deployment and manages a central repository of distributed configuration parameters, thereby reducing complex update operations from days/hours to a single click. kwateeSDCM is easily adaptable for existing software packages and provides the following features: central repository for software and configurations, software and configuration versioning, single click rollout, auditing of configuration changes and multiple configuration sets (i.e. test, production, etc.). It supports deployments on various operating systems. All that is required on target servers is ssh access and a lightweight agent.

Changes: Many bugfixes and minor enhancements.

Tags: sdcm, software deployment, release management, application deployment automation, software configuration, installation tool

Licenses: Freeware

Learn how to use the Ubuntu font for your website or webpage. Use the Ubuntu font on your website in all browsers with Google Web Fonts.

The iPhone Dev. Team has updated their applications - redsn0w and Pwnage Tool - so as to allow it to jailbreak iOS 4.3.3 running iDevices.

LimeWire has lost most of its operations after the court ruling and from this recent event, it seems like everyone wants to have a piece of profit from this ruling. It is not a secret anymore that P2P software is indeed used for illegal file sharing but there has to be a clear line on how far this suing business can extend in the matter.

Apple continues to grow their business on the smartphone department. In a recent study conducted by IDC which was released this week; it revealed that Apple, currently the second worldwide seller of smartphones is now getting close to overtaking the current number one seller, Nokia. The figures states that Apple shipped a total of 18.7M [...]

The discovery by physicists, including NIST scientists, has potential applications in broadband technology and spacecraft navigation.

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Freelancer.com's quarterly jobs report finds less demand for cheap articles and more projects for iOS and Android developers.

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In a letter to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, Sony's Kazuo Hirai defended the company's response time in letting users know about the recent PlayStation Network and Qriocity data breach.

Joe Hewitt, the man behind Facebook's iPhone app, has left the company after nearly four years to become an independent programmer.

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A security flaw in Skype for Mac that could enable a user to gain remote control of a Mac computer running the software has been fixed, says Skype, but users should make sure they have the latest version to ensure total protection.

Joe Hewitt helped build Firefox, he built the wildly popular developers' tool Firebug and then he single-handedly created one of the world's most widely used iPhone apps: the Facebook app. Today he announced on his blog that he's leaving Facebook and going independent.

What's he going to do? Build tools. "[T]ools for writers, designers, programmers, whatever," he writes. "Wherever people are using computers to turn their ideas into reality, I want to help." That sounds awesome.

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Hewitt continues:

"I've spent the last four years of my career working on a very different kind of software. At Facebook, I've gotten to build communications tools that reach hundreds of millions of people. I've had the honor of seeing people, even my own parents, using my apps while walking down the street, in restaurants, on trains, in planes and everywhere I go. Still, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Firebug.

"Technologies have a way of growing faster than the ecosystem of tools needed to support them. Over the last four years, we've seen the rise of mobile apps, the cloud, and now HTML5. Most developers building on these new platforms are using the previous generations of tools along with a mix of ad-hoc scripts and Web apps to get things done. It works, but it is far from ideal. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the Ajax climate back in 2006 when I decided to make Firebug.

"And so, I'm independent now, and I'm going to pour myself into understanding the needs of modern developers and designers, and creating software to fill those needs. There are so many opportunities that I can't even predict what I will end up building, but I am pretty sure I know where I am going to start. I can't wait."

Other blogs will focus on Hewitt's incredible success building Facebook's mobile offerings, but imagine the wisdom from that experience turned to face outward. Leading developer and former director of developer tools at Mozilla Dion Almaer writes tonight, "I have never been as excited about someone leaving a company as hearing that Joe Hewitt has moved on for Facebook to become an independent developer."

Hewitt's plan to build tools for other developers (much less writers and designers!) points towards a future where the Web is a platform for democratized creation again. A generative force, not a new walled garden silo for passive consumption of media on a mass scale.

Facebook is many things; on the positive side it's been an incredible introduction to a writeable, personalized, feed-driven, mobile, social, place-aware Web for hundreds of millions of people. Just like AOL was too often mistaken for the entirety of the Web in the old days, though, there's a risk that many people will treat Facebook like the entirety (or at least the center) of the Web today and in the future.

There's nothing hotter right now than mobile design and applications and there are few things online more conflicted with potential and confusion at the same time as HTML5. Some tools-driven leadership could come in very handy in both departments.

Joe Hewitt creating for creators, on the open Web, sounds like very good news for the Web and its future.

Discuss