We’re only a week away from their grand unveiling, but already we’ve got word of the specs for NVIDIA’s high end GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. Priced at $499, the 480 will offer 480 shader processors, a 384-bit interface to 1.5GB of onboard GDDR5 RAM, and clock speeds of 700MHz, 1,401MHz, and 1,848MHz for the core, shaders and memory, respectively. The 470 makes do with 446 SPs, slower clocks, and a 320-bit memory interface, but it’s also priced at a more sensible $349. The TDPs of these cards are pretty spectacular too, with 225W for the junior model and 295W for the full-fat card. Sourced by VR Zone, these numbers are still unofficial, but they do look to mesh well with what we already know of the hardware, including a purported 5-10 percent benchmarking advantage for the GTX 480 over ATI’s HD 5870. Whether the price and power premium is worth it will be up to you and the inevitable slew of reviews to decide.

[Thanks, Sean]

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 and 470 specs and pricing emerge originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 04:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Plotting their latest spread of watches this spring, Casio executives decided it was time to “go green.” Some poor schmuck in R&D took them at their word. Thankfully for mother nature, the Casio Pathfinder PRG110C-3 is more than meets the eye; the watch — suited for argonauts needing an altimeter, barometer, thermometer and digital compass — also has a miniature solar cell built into its face to automatically recharge the battery. Though Casio’s claim that this last will cut down on the three billion batteries Americans trash each year seems a little reaching — watch batteries last a lot longer than a AA — the timepiece does help the planet some merely by being packaged in recyclables. The $250 device will be available exclusively from Amazon, and yeah, the color you see here is the color you’ll get.

Casio’s solar-powered Pathfinder watch plays the green card twice originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Trada

Quick Pitch: Trada’s online marketplace boosts Google and Yahoo search ad results by crowdsourcing search expertise for small and medium businesses.

Genius Idea: Trada takes a lot of the complexity of running SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns by letting advertisers or agencies take advantage of lots of different search experts who can execute campaigns for them quickly and efficiently.

Trada is officially launching today, after being in private beta since January, 2009. The idea is pretty simple: Have advertisers or agencies lay out the parameters for a campaign, like the landing page, a budget, maximum cost per click, etc. and then have search experts work in tandem to generate keywords and ad groups that can be submitted to various ad networks like Yahoo and Google AdWords.

Once a campaign has been submitted, advertisers can monitor the keywords to see how different things are performing and to make sure that the keywords are clear and accurate. Search experts get to keep the difference in what the advertiser is willing to pay per click/conversion and what it actually cost to generate. In other words, they have a very real incentive to get as many conversions or clicks for your campaign as possible.

Trada is essentially acting as the liaison between the two groups — which means that they also offer some stability and checks and balances for both parties. Search experts have to pass an entrance exam before being accepted into the program.

Trada is free for advertisers or agencies to use — their budget and total advertising cost will vary depending on the parameters of the campaign. Search experts get to keep 75% of their profits, with 25% going to Trada.

Trada sounds like a low-cost way to try different SEM strategies and to take advantage of people that are actively working to get you conversions because it benefits them. Likewise, it might be a low-noise opportunity for search experts who don’t want to have to be tied to certain campaigns or companies and can choose what projects they work on and so-forth.

Have you ever run any search engine marketing campaigns? How did you figure out your approach? Let us know!

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Tags: advertising, ppc, SEM, SEO, trada

Sales of digital downloads have not been enough to make up for the decline of CD sales since its peak in 2000. Universal Music Group plans to soften the fall of CD sales by dropping prices across the board, to a maximum of $10.

The company plans to test lower prices beginning next month and continuing throughout 2010. Nearly all of UMG’s CDs will priced between $6 and $10. UMG is hoping that increased volume will make up for the price drop, and the company plans to create more higher-priced “deluxe” versions for more hardcore fans.

“We think [the new pricing program] will really bring new life into the physical format,” Universal Music Group Distribution president and CEO Jim Urie told Billboard.

Retailers have been clamoring for lower retails prices, with many believing that $10 is the magic number to spur sales. (I’ll admit, I rarely buy a physical CD for more than $10 these days). A recent test from Trans World Entertainment showed that a $9.99 price point doubled CD sales in over 100 of its stores.

Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan thinks labels may have to consider pushing prices as low as $5 to further slow the decline of CD sales. “The CD is a dying music product format, but it has some life left in it because downloads haven’t generated the format replacement they were expected to,” he wrote. “With all previous music formats the successor format was firmly in the ascendancy by the time its predecessor was in terminal decline.”

However, digital downloads won’t ever generate format replacement. Music on CDs is already in digital format—if you own the CD already, there’s no benefit in “replacing” it with a digital download. Furthermore, it will be hard to justify spending $10 on a compressed digital download over $6 for an actual physical disc that can be ripped into iTunes or any other media software in a matter of minutes, and can be done using lossless encoding (if so desired).

iTunes LP, thought by the record labels to help save the digital album from succumbing to single track downloads, isn’t making much of a splash with consumers, either.

Effectively, what UMG is doing—and what other labels will do if they also decide that lowering prices will prop up dying CD sales—is giving consumers the expectation that albums should cost even less than $9.99. Because once consumers become accustomed to getting a whole album in physical form for $6, you’ll have a much harder time convincing them to buy downloaded albums for more money later. Lowering prices on CDs will increase sales in the short term—good for labels because CD sales still account for about 65 percent of their revenue—but it will only slow its demise, and slow the uptake of digital as a primary format.

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You think the idea of user-generated content as a business model was invented in the Aughts? No way. Media outlets have been drawing on material created by amateurs, consumers and customers for generations and repackaging it for your entertainment.

Folksy as it may sound, our history is driven not strictly by the polished content produced by a class of citizens with a slew of degrees and many years of training – a surprisingly amount has been generated in a largely unfiltered form by the masses.

Sponsor

Lon S. Cohen is a freelance writer and social media consultant. He is @obilon on Twitter.

Necessity meant that user-generated content was packaged and presented through very structured channels. That’s not that different from today, where the stuff that we produce is presented through some slick content management system on websites like Blogger or Square Space or through podcatching software like iTunes.

Talk Radio

Click and Clack (Tom and Ray) are two brothers from the very funny and very informative nationally syndicated NPR call-in show, “Car Talk.” Since the 1980s, these guys have done nothing but take calls from real life people who are having trouble with their cars, and then attempt to give good advice and be funny at the same time. It works. While the actual talking is done by these two grease monkeys the fodder is all provided by real people who call in with real automotive woes.

Dear Abby

Think that newspapers are being killed by user-generated content? Well it’s about time we returned the favor since so many advice columnists made a name for themselves using our pitiful problems to advance their fame, dispense advice, sell a few newspapers and make some dough to boot.

One of the most famous and recognizable names in the advice column game was started in 1956 by one Pauline Phillips using the pen name Abigail van Buren or Dear Abby to dispense her “uncommon common sense“. Without the contribution of hundreds of thousands of users over the years, Dear Abby and her twin sister, Eppie Lederer (a.k.a Anne Landers), would never been able to produce such a voluminous supply of folksy advice.

America’s Funniest Home Videos

With the invention of the hand-held Super8 film camera and the video tape recorder, average people could tape themselves doing all sorts of silly, stupid, dangerous, profound or mundane things. Sometime in the late 1980s, television producers saw a goldmine in the stockpile of footage the average American had been recording for more than two decades.

In closest precursor to YouTube that anyone can probably point to, AFV consisted of the serendipitous slapstick of the average American man and beast. From sledding into the side of a house to a cake in the face, American viewers are still not tired of this shows format even though much more of the same can be found on YouTube every day.

Fanzines

Of course, the geeks rule in this very early form of user-generated content. In the 1930s, amateur magazines were produced by science fiction fans as a way to connect with other like-minded people. This became a massive network of people who produced, collected, commented and held conversations about science fiction. Some of the early fanzine publications even consisted entirely of letters sent in by subscribers – a publication with a cool sort of self-generating content paradox!

The preeminent SciFi convention, Worldcon, even instituted a best Best Fan Writer and Best Fan Artist category in the mid fifties to recognize the best of fan made content. Technological innovations like mimeograph and photocopy machines allowed for faster, quicker reproduction of fanzines to a global audience but unfortunately it wasn’t until bulletin board newsgroups and blogging technologies came about until that information could be transmitted faster than the postal system allowed.

Late-Night Television

David Letterman had some wild antics by decidedly non-professional persons and animals with the Stupid Human Tricks and Stupid Pet Tricks segments on his late night show.

Along with fellow comedy writer, Merrill Markoe, Letterman hit on success with these two segments that invited the public to showcase their talents (and the talents of their furry friends) on national television. There were others who followed the David Letterman model of plumbing regular people for content to display on big media outlets.

Discuss