Not much later we are now seeing another carrier who took the initiative in carrying the BlackBerry Tour. Also added to the plate are the Snap and Pro2. This time, the new member is Canada’s TELUS.

At the recent Real-Time CrunchUp 2009, Khris Loux, CEO of one of the web’s largest commenting services, announced the “death of the comment”. This declaration was extremely significant as Loux’s JS-Kit is currently installed on over 600,000 sites. He blames the death on social media sites like Twitter and Flickr and the rise of “parallel channels away from [the] product”. In essence, dialogue has moved from a singular destination to a series of parallel but separate social networking channels. Sponsor Loux took the opportunity to introduce Echo – his new product that allows publishers to embed a simple JavaScript widget and aggregate social media and blog dialogue from across the web. This means that all of the related posts from Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, WordPress and Blogger end up below your post for the world to see.

The Lenovo IdeaPad S12 just started shipping last week, and it looks like units have begun to arrive — the folks at GottaBeMobile just posted up some quick impressions of their review unit. Sadly, it’s sporting Intel GMA 950 graphics instead of the NVIDIA Ion chipset that’s available for $50 extra, so it runs pretty much like every other 1.6GHz Atom machine with 1GB of RAM in the world. Hopefully those Ion units will arrive soon — in the meantime, hit the read link to see how the S12 stacks up against the S10. (Hint: it’s way bigger.) Filed under: Laptops Lenovo IdeaPad S12 not-a-netbook sized up originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 02:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

TeachStreet, a Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), is launching a marketplace feature for teachers to be able to coordinate payments from students. TeachStreet, which serves seven metropolitan areas in the U.S. including New York City, Silicon Valley/San Francisco and Seattle, allows instructors to upload information about classes. Users can look for available classes, and read and write reviews on the course and the instructor. Currently, the site includes a selection of more than 135,000 classes and teachers, across more than 700 subjects and categories. TeachStreet payments enables credit card payments for a portion of teachers/classes, letting teachers who are unfamiliar with e-commerce be able to elicit sales leads from the web.

We can’t verify the authenticity of the video, but it seems a little far-fetched to believe that even LG diehards out there would’ve been able to toil away making a very legit-looking promo piece for the company’s recently-teased new Chocolate in such a short period of time — so we’re tentatively going to say we think we’re looking at the real thing here. That said, what we’ve got is nothing short of drool-worthy: the rumored 21:9 800 x 345 display appears real (which is said in the video to be 4 inches diagonal), plus there’s a gorgeous Flash-based 3D UI, multitouch, AGPS, WiFi, 7.2Mbps HSDPA, and a glass screen surface that’s said to be scratch-proof, all packed into an impossibly thin case. Yes, we know everyone’s been trying to sound the dumbphone death knell for years now — but frankly, you’d have to have a grossly miscalibrated monitor to not have a special place in your heart what you’re seeing here. Follow the break for the quite-possibly-authentic video in full. [Thanks, Edward] Continue reading LG’s next-gen Chocolate BL40 teased on video, looks good enough to eat Filed under: Cellphones LG’s next-gen Chocolate BL40 teased on video, looks good enough to eat originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 01:05:00 EST

There’s a common wisdom that personal blogging has slowly given way to microblogging: online sharing through Twitter and Facebook. Popular blogger Steve Rubel is a prime example: he recently declared that he would switch from blogging to life-streaming on Twitter , FriendFeed and Facebook . But while personal blogging may have waned, professional blogs (like this one) have thrived. There are new, lightweight blogging communities springing up, too – Tumblr and Posterous being the most prominent examples (see Posterous vs. Tumblr: A Head to Head ). These platforms are much less about long-form writing and more about instantly sharing snapshots of life: photos, videos, quotes and audio clips

Microsoft’s Silverlight 3 and Expression 3 were released on July 9th to favorable reviews. The original Silverlight shipped in Fall 2007 as Microsoft’s first programmable web browser plug-in. It’s a 4MB Flash/Flex competitor that runs on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices. While Flash definitely holds the market share for machine installs, according to Microsoft , “In less than nine months since its release, more than 1 in 3 Internet devices now have Silverlight 2 installed.” Sponsor While this market penetration may seem high to some, the fact that Silverlight does not have widespread name recognition is perhaps a testament to the seamlessness of the service. In it’s third iteration, Silverlight 3 offers some interesting new features including the following improvements: 1. Streaming Support: Silverlight changes and adapts the video quality of a media file based on available bandwidth and CPU conditions in order to deliver an optimized viewing experience. This provides support for live and on-demand true HD (720p+) streaming. Video giant Netflix first employed the platform in 2007 to power its instant viewing service

Thanks again to all of you who came out to our Real Time Stream CrunchUp and August Capital Summer Party. We broke 600 attendees to the Real Time Stream CrunchUp, double our initial expectations, and we hosted lots more of you at the August Capital outing. We had an amazing group of CrunchUp speakers to talk about new trends, boundaries and your passions. And we fit in 22 new product highlights from start-ups and big internet companies alike. It was a blast, and we’ve got the photos to prove it. Photos by Marc Salsberry Click through on any thumbnail to view a photo at full size Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

We’ve been pretty into Carnegie Mellon’s modular snake robots for a while now , and seeing as it’s a relatively sleepy Sunday we thought we’d share this latest video of snakebots just basically crawling all over the place and getting crazy. Bots like these have been getting some serious military attention lately, so watching these guys wriggle into any damn spot they please is at once awesome and terrifying. Or maybe it’s just the music. Video after the break.

Did you know that in just 8 days, it will be the 40th anniversary of one of mankind’s greatest achievements? It was on July 20th, 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on a celestial body beyond the earth. And while astronauts now make regular trips to space (although not today, due to mother nature ), the Apollo 11 mission and the famous Armstrong line still live on as turning points in human history. Now a new project aims to recreate the entire Apollo 11 mission, from the time of launch until the Americans set foot on the lunar surface. This website, We Choose the Moon , is using history, Flash, and social media to let us all relive the key moments of that great mission

In the early hours of the morning, Commander Mark Polansky sat watching the Tour de France when he got the call that they’d be fueling NASA Endeavour’s external tank. Nearly 30,000 of his Twitter followers woke up and rejoiced at the news. Today we’re going to see lift off. The NASA Endeavour was set to launch to the International Space Station today at 7:13PM EDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida after a 24 hour lightning-induced delay. The mission was delayed several times and while Commander Mark Polansky’s Twitter account and NASA’s official account announced that the launch was likely to happen, online viewers watched via NASA TV as the mission was scrubbed with only minutes to spare. The launch has been rescheduled for 6:51PM EDT tomorrow. Sponsor Polansky, Pilot Doug Hurley, Mission Specialists Dave Wolf, Christopher Cassidy, Tom Marshburn, Tim Kopra and Canadian astronaut Julie Payette are set to replace Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Kibo laboratory. The 16-day effort will complete construction of the laboratory and astronauts will attempt 5 space walks to create an exposed experiment platform

One of the great things about the emergence of live video is the accessibility of major world events. We clearly saw the power of live video with Obama’s inauguration and Michael Jackson’s memorial . Its even being used to raise money for charity this weekend through the Mario Marathon . And thus we get to SpaceVidCast , which, in partnership with Ustream , has the one of the few HD feeds of tonight’s launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour . And since I am a huge space enthusiast (I was at one time a Physics and Astronomy major, after all), this type of live streaming implementation excites me. NASA has been embracing social media for a while now – just look at how Astronaut Mike Massimino has used Twitter and live video and the tweets of the Mars Phoenix Lander . Now we just need to have the astronauts use Ustream… in space!!! In the meantime, get your space exploration fix by watching the shuttle launch with us

The “Favorite” is kind of like the unwanted step child feature of Twitter. Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use. One would assume you’re supposed to use it to start your favorite tweets, but I don’t use it like that, because what’s the point? Instead, I mostly use it to bookmark tweets that I want to find later. But a new service Favstar.fm hopes to take the Favorite functionality back to its roots, and make it useful

With reading about concept designs, you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes they’re fairly reasonable and then there are others that are just far fetched and ridiculous. Then there are those you just hope the technology is out there to make it possible, because it would make things far more simple. Which is where this design would fall into. It is a dock for your iPod, but it allows for other things to be stacked along with it, besides just ordinary speakers. You could choose how many speakers you wanted, along with adding a couple of things you might not expect.

Thinking about plugging your laptop into one of those coveted airplane terminal power outlets while you wait for your flight to arrive? Be careful, because a hacker could be using those energy-giving wires against you. The technique is a form of keylogging, which is nothing new, but in an interesting twist hackers have figured out a non-traditional way to replicate the process using nothing but the electric signals created with each keystroke. Oh, and even if you aren’t plugged into a socket, they they can still log keystrokes remotely using a laser.