Common Paradox Tech Blog

Boxcar just let us know Boxcar 2.2 [Free/in-app purchases - iTunes link] has been served up piping hot to the iPhone (and iPod touch) App Store. Here are some highlights:

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This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Boxcar 2.2 Push Notifications for iPhone Hits App Store

Bit.ly, as the world’s largest URL shortener and default for Twitter messages, has thousands of links passing through its doors every day. Because of that, it has a great deal of data on what’s hot and what’s popular on the web.

Now the company is finally beginning to harness that knowledge in meaningful and useful ways. The company has launched Bitly.tv today, a new experimental website that utilizes Bit.ly data to find what videos are going viral on the web.

When you load the Bitly.tv interface, it presents you with screens of what videos it has determined are hot right now. There are also options currently for figuring out what is hot for today and for the last two days (we’d like to see bitly.tv go farther into time, though). It gets even more interesting when you click on a video. Not only will a description and an embed of the video appear, but it also displays recent tweets sharing the video with Bit.ly and buttons so that you can tweet and share the video on Facebook.

Bitly.tv makes sense, but we think this is only the first step. If Bit.ly can perfect the algorithms for videos, it certainly can do it for blogs and news articles. And because it utilizes link sharing over Diggs or upvotes, it may in fact be a more accurate tool for figuring out what’s hot on the web. We think this is just the beginning.

Tags: bit.ly, Bitly.tv

Like Alton Brown, I think all devices should be multitaskers, if at all possible. I think he’d appreciate the D-Link DIR-685 Xtreme N Storage Router as much as I do.

Here’s one for the hypochondriac on the go – a collapsible keyboard that, in addition to folding up into a compact stick for easy carrying, it also purports to keep the germs away.

Designers Yoonsang Kim and Eunsung Park made sure to include a "None Bacterial Project" label front and center, which lets potential buyers know that their portable plank is first and foremost designed to reduce the spread of infection. But the real draw here is in how neatly and compact the plank folds up

It’s a concept keyboard so you can’t actually order one right now, but until the design comes to fruition, you can ogle at a handful of pics of what the plank might look like, should someone actually build it, at YankoDesign.com.

Want to have some fun with the germaphobes? Post a link to a pic of the filthiest keyboard you own, Hot Pocket shrapnel and all, in the comments section below.

Image Credit: YankoDesign

While French President Sarkozy didn’t namecheck Google directly, he more than alluded to them, claiming that their aim of scanning out of copyright books and putting them online will damage France’s own book digitization plan.

Speaking at an event yesterday about France’s plans to place the nation’s books online, he said:

“We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is”

It’s not the first time Google’s been attacked over its Books scheme, with the controversy coming to a head in October when Sergey Brin was forced to defend Google in a column in the New York Times.

Writing for the New York Times, Brin said:

“This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers”

With controversy surrounding the Google Books plan for over a year now, I have a feeling this isn’t the last of it, especially now that the hot-headed French President has weighed in. [Reuters]

Image credit: Downing Street

The dual-booting Aspire One AOD250 was the first Android netbook available, and even though it hasn’t been a hot seller, Acer wants to be first again with Google’s Chrome OS next year.

Acer has been developing a Chrome-based netbook since mid-2009, and its Chairman, JT Wang, has told DigiTimes, he wants it to be the first netbook out there when Chrome OS is released in the second half of 2010. [DigiTimes]

The HP Mini 311 is our favorite netbook of the year. Featuring Nvidia’s ION LE graphics chip, this system does what other mini-notebooks can only dream of: power games and full HD video (with Flash 10.1, anyway).

The holiday party circuit is definitely more fun when you can whip out your iPod and wow everyone with your carefully constructed seasonal playlist. But when your plans go terribly awry when you disco…

Amazon killed their brick and mortar competition when it came to Black Friday Twitter buzz, and when all was said and done they were also the most visited website on Black Friday as well.

The deals, however, are just getting started as today kicks off Amazon’s Cyber Monday discount extravaganza. So, while you can poke around their website and find deeply discounted products, we think you’ll be best served by paying extra close attention to their @AmazonDeals Twitter account.

Savvy Twitter users have noticed that as of early this morning AmazonDeals, which is officially managed by the online retailer, started posting Cyber Monday Deal Alerts in addition to their ongoing Lightning Deals. So far deals include Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for $29.99, an Archos Tablet for $199.99, and The Office: Season Four for $19.49. Definitely keep your eyes on this hot Twitter account today.

Thanks to Steve Eisenberg [@northlight] for the heads up. If you have any tips on Twitter accounts to follow today, we’d love for you to share them in the comments.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: amazon, cyber monday

As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map.

4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins.