Biotech & Health Mona Lisa frown: Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to life Machine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person’s face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also paintings. It’s not perfect, but when it works, it is — like much AI work these days — eerie and fascinating. The

Yahoo Trying To Unload Del.icio.us, Not Shut It Down Yesterday, a leaked internal Yahoo slide brought us the news that Yahoo will soon be shuttering Del.icio.us, the bookmarking service it bought a few years back. Today, Yahoo has released a statement on the group’s blog. We’ve embedded the the entirety of the blog post below. Yahoo says that while Delicious doesn’t have a “strategic fit” at the c

New iPhone App "Friends" Gives Social Contact Aggregation A Warm Embrace The other day, a reader emailed me asking what I use as a contact manager probably thinking I had one killer solution. But I told them that sadly I have to use a combination of Gmail, MobileMe, LinkedIn, and a few other services to get include all the people I may want to contact. And that’s especially a pain on my iPhone as

Android Map App Will Get 3D Buildings, Compass Orientation, And Offline Capabilities The Google Map App on Android phones will soon get a major upgrade which will allow it to render map images a lot faster, incorporate 3D buildings, offer offline caching, and use the compass to orient the map. In a talk this evening at the D Mobile conference, Android chief Andy Rubin gave a sneak peak of the new

Our brother-from-another-mother, Engadget, is currently showing off some super-secret spy-shots of what his tipster says is an upcoming Tegra 2 powered Motorola Olympus “iPhone killer”. Clichéd sentiments aside, what it does look like is a modified Motorola Defy, but — as Engadget point out — with an elongated speaker, different volume controls, and what could very well be a front-facing camera. A

You hit a site; it’s down. You immediately reload; it’s still down. You start to freak out. “How the hell are they down again!? Is anyone in charge over there?! WTF?!” But quite often, it’s just you. And you look like an ass for your rant that you just spewed on Twitter (or on Facebook when it’s Twitter that is down). Thankfully, it looks like Chrome can now potentially save you from that embarras

Media & Entertainment iPhone OS 4 Developer Preview brings multitasking, folders and more to the iPhone It’s been 10 long months since Apple released iPhone OS 3, which brought Copy/Paste, MMS, Tether, and Spotlight to the iPhone. Today Apple is announcing the Developer Preview, which will open up all sorts of new avenues for the iPhone with seven main features with multitasking being the crowd pl

The Yahoo Cycling Team Is Going To Love This New Google Maps Feature Yahoo is backing a cycling team. I don’t know why — but they’re doing it. And today their passion got a little boost: from Google. Google is announcing tomorrow at the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC that Google Maps will now include biking directions in the U.S. Apparently, this was the most-requested feature for the serv

What if the desktop on your computer was just like your actual desktop? That’s the core idea behind BumpTop, a really nice looking graphical overlay for Windows-based operating systems. But as cool as BumpTop looked, you still had to use your mouse and keyboard to manipulate it. As I made clear yesterday, I want those to die. So good news for me today: BumpTop is adding multi-touch support. And th

Japan's Rakuten: Can The Biggest E-Commerce Site You Never Heard Of Become a Threat for Amazon Globally? The term “e-commerce” still lacks a universally valid definition, but even if you just bundle B2B and B2C transactions under it, it’s a multi-trillion dollar business globally. Last year, Nielsen found [PDF] 86% of the global web population made an online purchase already (North America: 92%).

Media & Entertainment iPhone 3.0 wrap-up: Cut and paste, MMS, Push, and more We’ve just finished liveblogging the event, and the iPhone 3.0 press conference has definitely yielded some delicious morsels of functionality. Here is pretty much everything you need to know, though as things get more clear throughout the day, we’ll update this post. You guys will probably be seeing these features someti

Until today, one of the biggest drawbacks of Gmail is that you could not go through your emails when you were offline. Today, that changes. Gmail is finally going offline. Google is rolling out a Google Gears version of Gmail that will be available to users starting today in Gmail Labs. (If you don’t see it, keep checking, the rollout to all users should be complete by the end of the week). After

With 2008 on the way out and right around 10,000 applications behind them, Apple has released a series of lists outlining which applications scored the most downloads since the App Store’s launch back in July. The lists are separated by whether the the application is paid or free – first as an overall look, and then by each major category (games, entertainment, utilities, social networking, and mu

Pandora made a bold political statement today, saying they’d likely shut down rather than continue to pay exorbitant fees to play music to listeners of its massively popular service. Radio stations pay different rates depending on how they broadcast music. Terrestrial stations (normal FM/AM stations) pay nothing, a tribute to their powerful corporate parents with limitless lobbying budgets. Satell

We just got confirmation from Joshua Schachter, the founder of delicious, that he has decided to resign from Yahoo!. Mike Arrington just spoke to him and he said that the recent news coming out of Yahoo! pressed his decision to leave now. Joshua also said that the decision was made today, and that he has no future plans but will instead join the “gloriously unemployed.” The development of the new