activity

Philips has announced plans to release a line of Swarovski crystal earbuds, available just in time for Valentine's Day. Priced at $99, the Philips Active Crystals earbuds feature a stainless steel body, fabric cable, silicon in-ear caps, and single neodymium drivers with a 16 ohm impedance.

The Active Crystal earbuds are part of Philips' larger launch of women-focused products, including crystal-studded USB drives and home electronics that feature a softer, more elegant design aesthetic.

Do the halls of malls give you a case of the jingle hells? You could kick back for a 20-minute break from rampant consumerism to learn more about the toxic mess it makes of the planet.

Fun, right? Actually, it is with The Story of Stuff. It's a short, friendly movie covering the ABCs of consumer culture. The sky may be falling, but we can prop it up, the film suggests.

The Story of Stuff was produced by Free Range Studios, makers of the Meatrix. That entertaining, animated diatribe against factory farming has attracted more than 15 million viewers. … Read more

I've waited for this one for a long time. Centeris had always been an interesting company, given that it makes it possible to manage Mac, Linux, and Windows machines through Microsoft's Active Directory. Instead of allowing Microsoft to lock in its users to its own ecosystem, exclusively, Centeris enables enterprises to choose the desktop clients that work best for them, while still benefiting from Active Directory.

Now Centeris has changed its name to Likewise, the name of its flagship product, and has open sourced some of its code as Likewise Open. Red Hat and Canonical (Ubuntu) are set to include the code in upcoming releases of their Linux products. (Novell has been using Likewise for some time.) The potential is exciting, as Java Developers Journal suggests:… Read more

Magna will be making a "Sport Activity Vehicle," or SAV, for BMW's Mini line of cars, both companies announced this week.

Magna , a company that designs, develops, and manufactures automotive systems, worked with BMW before on its BMW X3 (shown left).

"By outsourcing production of the Mini SAV, BMW Group is able to increase flexibility within its own production network," BMW said in a statement.

BMW's Mini lineup now includes the Mini, Mini Convertible, and Mini Clubman.

Facebook's "Beacon" advertising program nearly ran aground this week.

First, the liberal activist group MoveOn.org tore into the strategy, which shares members' activity from third-party sites on their Facebook "news feeds," as an invasion of privacy. Then MoveOn upped the ante earlier this week over the program's lack of an opt-out control. Then, on Thursday, reports began to surface that the program was close to being heavily altered or even cut altogether. The advertising program continues to be scrutinized by legal experts, and several advocacy groups have already filed complaints to the Federal … Read more

This post has been updated to clarify the names of companies participating in the Beacon program.

Facebook has altered its controversial "Beacon" advertising program, following complaints by users and protests from activist groups like MoveOn.org. The Beacon ads, which project Facebook users' activity on third-party partner sites--retailers like Blockbuster and eBay, for example--to their friends' "news feeds," are a key part of Facebook's much-hyped new social-advertising program, but they hadn't received the friendliest of reception.

It's a situation reminiscent of the one last year when the initial launch of Facebook's News … Read more

More good news for those of us who have been forced to divide our attention between the road and what seems like an ever-increasing number of gadgets and other in-car distractions: automotive voice-activation technology is becoming more widespread.

On Thursday, U.S.-based company Nuance announced that it will be putting its text-to-speech technology in select new Ford models in Europe. The system powers Ford's "Human Machine Interface" (HMI), which allows drivers to make calls, enter destinations into the navigation system, control the audio system, and change the inside temperature using simple voice commands.

For example, a … Read more

Greenpeace might want to save the whales, but it's not above giving them silly names.

The legendary environmental organization, as part of its Great Whale Trail Expedition campaign, is tracking humpback whales in the South Pacific via satellite tags and hoping to gather data that will help protect them from hunting. To humanize the massive cetaceans a bit, Greenpeace International is also holding a whale-naming competition in the form of an online poll. It appears, looking at the site, that a number of "winning" names will go to the array of whales being tracked.

Among the 30 … Read more

This story was updated at 2:36 PT to provide comment from Facebook and at 3:59 PT to provide further comment from MoveOn.

Is there more to the controversy surrounding Facebook's "Beacon" ads? MoveOn.org thinks so.

Last week, a feud began to brew between leftist activist group MoveOn.org and social-networking site Facebook concerning its "Beacon" advertisements, which broadcast information about users' activity on third-party partner sites to their friends' Facebook newsfeeds. According to MoveOn, it's a violation of user privacy because there's no way to universally opt out of Beacon … Read more