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December 4, 2007 by dinofond.
SAN RAFAEL, Calif.–There’s no denying it. The Robot Guitar from Gibson, which went on sale Monday morning, is pretty cool.
To tune the instrument, the player pulls out one of the knobs on the body of the guitar and strums the strings. The tuner pegs begin to twist left and right on their own, and in about 15 seconds the guitar has been tuned to a different key–or even a customized combination of notes that emulates the preferred tunings of, say, Albert Collins or Jimi Hendrix. The pegs make a low mechanical whirring noise.
The guitar part is a standard Gibson Les Paul and there is no degradation in sound, according to guitarist and actor Martin Luther McCoy, who played a few songs on it during a release event at Bananas at Large, a music store here. (McCoy also played JoJo in the recent film Across the Universe.)
Gibson Robot Guitar
McCoy, who doesn’t own one of the robotic guitars but said he’s intrigued, said the benefit of such an instrument for a professional musician is time. To switch keys quickly now, you have to swap guitars. Robotic tuning allows you to retune relatively quickly and accurately on one guitar.
But how does it work? After a guitarist selects a key, a computer embedded in the back of the guitar sends commands to the tailpiece and the bridge–the two pieces of steel toward the base of a guitar which, respectively, hold the strings in place and elevate them so they can be played. A guitarist then strums. The tailpiece and bridge monitor the vibrations and tension on the strings and send the information to a processor embedded in the peghead in neck of the guitar.
The neck CPU then turns the motorized tuning pegs accordingly. When the desired tension and vibration are achieved, it’s tuned.
The strings, thus, serve as part of the network. If you want to disable robotic tuning, you can. Tronical, a German company, developed the robot and works with Gibson to install it in the company’s guitars.
The architecture means that robot tuning can be added to a guitar fairly easily, said Glenn Franzen, a product specialist with Gibson. The robot is accurate to within 2 cents, a measure of pitch. There are 1,200 cents in an octave.
Another company, called TransPerformance, sells a competing robot-tuning system that the company installs itself into a Les Paul, or a Fender Telecaster or Stratocaster guitar.
Gibson’s Robot Guitar will retail for around $2,300, Franzen said (the actual list price is a bit higher). An equivalent Les Paul without the robot would go for around $1,400.
Gibson will release 4,000 of the guitars worldwide, and to celebrate, it held events in New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, and other cities.
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December 4, 2007 by dinofond.
By Paul McDougall InformationWeek
The hosted blogging service, which has 14 million users worldwide, was purchased from San Francisco’s Six Apart.
ne-year-old Russian online media company SUP on Monday announced that it has acquired LiveJournal — a hosted blogging service that counts millions of users in the U.S. and around the world.
SUP bought the service from Six Apart, a San Francisco-based startup that began offering LiveJournal in 2005 after acquiring its developer, Danga Interactive.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
SUP’s acquisition of LiveJournal stems from an existing partnership between the company and Six Apart. In October 2006, SUP struck a licensing agreement with Six Apart to offer LiveJournal in Russia. Since then, use of LiveJournal in the country has flourished. Russian bloggers account for 28% of the software’s 14 million users, according to Six Apart.
As part of the transaction, SUP plans to establish a new operating unit called LiveJournal. It said it would announce a management team in the coming weeks. SUP will also install a LiveJournal advisory board that will include Danga Interactive founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who now works forGoogle (NSDQ: GOOG).
Two seats on the advisory board will be reserved for members of the “LiveJournal community,” according to SUP. The seats will be awarded on the basis of open, online elections and will rotate, the company said.
SUP was founded in 2006 by American investor Andrew Paulson and Aleksandr Mamut, widely seen as one of Russia’s so-called “new oligarchs” and a Kremlin insider. SUP “set itself the goal of building a portfolio of high-traffic-generating projects based in Moscow from which to expand worldwide,” a company statement said.
Beyond LiveJournal, SUP operates Championat.ru, one of the top three sports and entertainment sites on Russia’s Internet, online advertising service provider SOL, and Victory SA — another online ad agency.
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December 4, 2007 by dinofond.
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