Stage Two's blog

In June, Ardica announced its global “Power To The People” contest designed to have creative designers from around the world come up with a brilliant new application using their miniaturized, portable power system called the Moshi Power Pack. From over 120 entries, the judges narrowed it down to eight finalists that will present to the judges at the Ardica offices on Saturday, December 5.

Judges from technology websites Gizmodo and Wired, IDEO, Mountain Hardwear and Stanford will examine each entry carefully and ultimately award the winners cash prizes for their innovative ideas for integrating the Moshi power pack into their design. But what exactly is a Moshi? It’s a battery pack that is both lightweight and unobtrusive and can charge most electronic devices quite frequently. The Moshi power pack can even be used as a heater so when you’re in a cold environment, it’ll keep you snug and warm.

As part of the Ardica design contest, they have also decided to award one of the eight finalists the “People’s Choice Award” whereby that winner will receive an extra cash prize of $1,000. In order to be the winner of this prize, Ardica is asking for people to cast their votes by clicking here, looking at each of the eight finalists and casting their vote. As an added incentive, three random voters will be given a Moshi power pack!

Voting goes now through noon on December 4. To cast your vote, simply click here.

VUDU today unveils yet another great new feature to their interface, the integration of Wikipedia into VUDU.  When you land on a movie page, you can view all the information Wikipedia has to offer about that film – links to actors, directors (and anything else) are all active, so you can explore to your geeky content.  And film links actually can take you back into VUDU!

Their blog post says it all, so we won’t repeat it here.  But this is yet another reason why their implementation of a “streaming user interface” is so darn smart.  They can update VUDU with great new features like Wikipedia, Rotten Tomatoes, theatrical trailers and more, quickly and easily.  It doesn’t require a user download or a firmware upgrade – it’s very much like updating a web page.

A number of outlets have covered the news.  The list of coverage is below.

• LA Times
• Ubergizmo
• Gearlog
• Engadget HD
• Big Picture Big Sound
• Zatz Not Funny
• Engadget
• eHomeUpgrade
• Geek Tonic
• HDTV Review

The New Pogoplug!

At a great late night event held in their SF headquarters, Cloud Engines – creators of the ubercool award-winning Pogoplug “multimedia sharing device” unveiled the next step in their Pogoplug product evolution (see picture).

A very select group of techgeeks got a very special sneak peek and hands-on with the new Pogoplug, which boasts 4 USB ports (a big crowd pleaser), very cool new design, and a bunch of new features:

• Automatic sync with your music, movies, photos…really any folder you want
• Bulk uploading
• Improved data display for media – cover art, albums, genre, artists for music, timeline for photos
• Super easy and cool looking drag and drop slideshows
• Streaming video from my.pogoplug.com in just about any format – even stream to your iPhone
• Improved address book functions, incorporating Myspace and Facebook friends for easier sharing
• Global search across all Pogoplugs and drives – never forget which drive that file is sitting on. Just hit the search button

The Pogoplug has had an incredible year after just launching at CES in January, earning huge accolades and a very dedicated community of followers (check out www.pogoplugged.com). We’re thrilled that the second generation already seems to have captured the imaginations of many in the tech world just a few hours after its release. Check out some of the great client coverage below:

• Slashgear
• LA Times
• Engadget
• CrunchGear
• VentureBeat
• Gizmodo
• CNet
• Electronista
• MacWorld
• Ubergizmo
• PCWorld
• Cult of Mac
• OhGizmo
• GeekTonic
• Inquisitr
• Geek.com
• eHomeUpgrade
• Gadgetell
• GottaBeMobile

(more to be added as they come in)

BOKU has a big announcement today, which includes 12 major partnerships with some of the biggest names in free-to-play and social / casual gaming.  BOKU offers a direct mobile payments system for virtual goods.  Want some digital alfalfa for your virtual horses in Barn Buddy on Facebook?  BOKU lets you pay for it with your mobile phone.

The new partnerships account for more than 200 million (yup, million) new customers with access to BOKU to pay by mobile for their virtual goods.  BOKU is a global outfit with offices in the US, South America, the UK and Singapore. Their release went out on the wire at 9AM PST today – the full list of new partnerships are available there.

BOKU also announced the 3rd generation of their user experience today, which includes some great features to simplify and streamline customer checkout – the ability to instantly differentiate between a landline and mobile number is one example.  Innovations like this make life simpler for the end consumer, and nncrease conversion for their customers, and making life better and more profitable is what being in business is all about – well done BOKU!

Several outlets picked up the news this morning, the list of publications covering the news is below.  We’ll update the list as we see articles appear.

• CNET
• VentureBeat
• Virtual Goods News
• ReadWriteWeb

Great news for Clicker today – they’re launching out of Beta, making the service available to anyone in the world.  Clicker has also increased their content index dramatically, partly through collaboration with Netflix and Amazon to index all of their video-on-demand content – this brings Clickers content index up to:

• 400,000+ episodes, from over 7,000 shows
• 30,000+ films
• 50,000+ music videos

And, they have some great new feature enhancements thanks to all the Beta feedback they received.  This includes features like use of  Facebook Connect (to create an account using your FB credentials) and improvement to their amazing playlist function (sort of like a DVR for Internet television to create season passes, and get alerts when new episodes are available, etc.)

We issued a press release via Business Wire this morning.  A little later today, founder and CEO Jim Lanzone will be publicly unveiling the site at the NewTeeVee Live 09 event in San Francisco (in our fair city!)

A number of outlets have covered the news this morning.  We will update the list of coverage below as we see it come in throughout the day.

• NYT
• LA Times
• CNET
• USA Today
• VentureBeat
• Reuters
• ABC
• TechCrunch
• Variety
• Mashable
• ReadWriteWeb
• Forbes