NoiseTube, a free Java application for GPS- enabled cell phones, turns your cell phone into a noise sensor and lets you measure your exposure to noise pollution in your environment. Sounds are picked up by your phone’s built-in mic and used in collective noise mapping through tagging it with your perceived annoyance level , sending geolocalized data automatically to the NoiseTube server over internet. The server then tags your noise sample is with the street name and the city name it was recorded at and converts it into a Google Earth compatible format.Read more

Barnes and Noble's Nook e-book reader has closed up shop for holiday delivery.

"The hottest holiday gift is out of stock," says the Nook page at B&N "Order the Nook today to be first in line for the new year." You can still order one of the $259 devices, but you won't get it until at least Jan. 4, 2010, the bookseller said. Demand has outstripped supply of the Nook, but production is being ramped up, and should be going full bore by next year.

The news doesn't seem to have dampened sales, though. "Nook continues to be the fastest-selling product at Barnes & Noble, and pre-orders have continued to exceed our expectations," the company said.Read more

The QPACE supercomputer at the Research Center Jülich and the University of Wuppertal tops the latest version of the Green500 list, which ranks the energy efficiency of supercomputers around the world. The QPACEs Intel PowerXCell processors are an enhancement of the Cell/B.E. processor, originally developed by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for the Sony PlayStation 3.Read more

Smartphones will soon be a major payment method via SMS, if predictions made today by Gartner come true. The market research company has bypassed end of the world doomsters and come up with a list of the top 10 consumer mobile applications of 2012, and money transfer tops the list.

Applications were ranked for their impact on consumers and industry, taking into account revenues, loyalty, business model, consumer value and estimated market penetration. The list pretty much makes sense when you consider that Gartner expects that smartphones will make up 45.5 percent of all mobile phone sales in 2013, compared to about 9 percent in 2008.Read more

Yahoo Go, Yahoo’s mobile application service, will be shuttered on January 12, 2010. The service has been in operation since 2006. The portal enabled users to access Yahoo services like e-mail, search, contacts, calendar and photos, from mobile devices, as well as web enabled TVs and PCs. Version 2.0 of Yahoo Go was launched in 2007 in a move with HTC to offer the service on Windows Mobile devices.

Yahoo has recently begun to re-focus it’s mobile offerings into creating Yahoo apps, like Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Fantasy Football, for the iPhone and other mobile devices, and the Yahoo for Mobile browser also is getting more attention from the company. Yahoo will advise Go users to point their browsers at m.yahoo.com instead.Read more

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), due to be launched December 9 at 9:09 a.m. EST, is ready for it’s roll-out to the launch pad. The satellite is designed for polar orbit around the Earth, to search the sky for 9 months for hidden cosmic objects, such as very cool stars known as "brown dwarfs", dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.

"The eyes of WISE are a vast improvement over those of past infrared surveys," Edward Wright, mission principal investigator, said. "We will find millions of objects that have never been seen before."Read more