It’s finally gotten out of hand. We need a ping.fm style service for location-based social networks.

I recent bought some new glasses from Park Slope Eye, a local shop that’s very big into using Yelp. They have the coveted “People Love Us On Yelp” sticker in the window and have begun to offer a $25 gift certificate to one of Park Slope’s awesome local businesses if you are in the store and check in using Yelp’s latest feature. Sounds awesome, right?

My issue is that I am a regular FourSquare and PegShot user, and don’t have the Yelp app installed on my iPhone, nor do I have the MyTown app, BrightKite or Gowalla. In order to take advantage of this offer from Park Slope Eye, I have to install the Yelp app on my phone before my glasses are ready and remember to check in on Yelp after checking in on FourSquare and taking a photo and sending it to PegShot. Then there are micro location networks popping up like Shakedown (disclaimer: I contributed sound design to the app). Suddenly, letting people know where I am has turned into a chore.

If it’s a problem for the person checking in, it must be a larger pain for the businesses who want to encourage people to checkin at their location. Which to choose? Yelp offers a tie in to their amazing back catalog of reviews, but FourSquare seems to be the trend that’s breaking out of the geek circles. Each network has their own community and strengths.

Back before Twitter established itself as the leader of the market for social networking microblogs, Ping.fm helped the user frustration by creating a one-to-many system (broadcasting) for sending information to the networks. I think it might be time for someone to take the opportunity to enable users to check in to one location on multiple networks. As a user, I know that I’d use it and I know many other people who would too.

This has been in my family for a long time, and I have a stack of it. No one knows where or when it’s from, so I’m outsourcing this to the internet. Can you help?

Click the images to see a higher resolution version.

UPDATE! Many commenters and people on Twitter have positively identified the money. In 1912, the Russian Federation honored Peter the Great with a 500 Rubel mark, which was the highest that the Russian Federation had issued up until that point. Kimberly’s comment is to an image on Wikipedia that is the same money.

The media player of CES this year was Nuu Media’s Nuu Player, not the Boxee Box. Hidden in one of the back corners of the South Hall of the Consumer Electronics Show was the people at Nuu Media with their player that will retail for a bit more than the other media player boxes, but it’ll also do more than the other media player boxes.

The Nuu Player from Nuu Media does Boxee, so let’s shelve the comparisons right there. It does Boxee and has a 160 GB internal hard drive, which lets us place aside the Apple TV comparisons. On top of that, it streams media from most places that allow it, like CNN, Pandora, YouTube, Facebook video, last.fm, Netflix, MLB.TV, Comedy Central and Flickr. The press release states it plays “all available codecs in any form – video, music, or photo – from any source and in any format”, which seems to set the bar a little high, but we’ll see upon its release. Oh, and did I mention that it plays Hulu out of the box?

The box itself is a simple shiny black box about the size of an Apple TV. The right side of the box sports a USB port, audio in and out and an SD card slot and the connections in back include a network jack, DVI, HDMI, two more USB and another that looks like Firewire 400. On the inside, it’s running Intel’s Atom processor, which isn’t as powerful as the Apple TV, but more powerful than the Boxee Box.

the player also has a WebKit based browser and Nuu Media was showing off custom Facebook and Twitter interfaces for a ten foot interface. Combined with a USB webcam and Bluetooth microphone (I assume a USB cam/microphone combo would work), it also does Skype. With Skype supporting 720p, it makes sense that Skype is moving to the home theater. I would also assume that a USB or Bluetooth keyboard would also work.

The Nuu Player will sell for “around 300″ according to the folks in the booth at CES. That makes it the most expensive of all the media players on the market, but it also appears to have the most features on the market. On top of everything else listed, video search through Clicker.com and TV widgets are also included in the box.

In terms of the best media player box at CES 2010, I’d put my money on the Nuu Player from Nuu Media. It’s more than Boxee and it’s more than an Apple TV. We’ll see for certain when it’s available for sale, but based on their CES 2010 showing, the Nuu Player will sit at the top of the media player pile. Here’s a demo of the player in action:

CES wasn’t very glamorous as far as a flashy new technology or one gadget that defined the convention. While the major media is talking about #d televisions and technology, the attendees didn’t seem impressed with “the future of TV”. There was an undercurrent of devices that followed a life cycle I’ve been thinking about for a little while:

With USB 3.0 being adopted by a few computer makers, bandwidth between a computer and an external hard drive has increased dramatically.
The increase in USB speeds and constant advance in laptop processor technology are closing the gap between what’s possible on a desktop computer and what’s possible on a laptop computer. On my primary laptop (a Macbook Pro), the shortcoming is the hard drive. Realistically, I can’t edit video or edit multi-track audio on my machine because the hard drive isn’t fast enough to meet the read and write speed requirements necessary for good performance.

So what’s new? RAID drives meant for mobile computers. On the CES show floor, RAIDon was showing off some 2.5″ RAID drives (pictured) that had a smaller footprint than two dollar bills and wasn’t more than three inches tall. Seagate has a PC Express USB 3.0 kit, the BlackArmor PS110 USB 3.0 which helps solve the problem of USB 3.0 and backwards compatibility.

We’ll see more of these miniaturized RAID 2.5″ drives coming out from other companies with faster USB connections or adapter cards like the Seagate. The hard drive configurations support spinning or solid state drives, which unlock the potential for these drives to get faster and get smaller at the same time.

Polaroid had a few announcements at CES, including a digital version of their classic idea of instant gratification of having a photograph a few moments after taking it. the camera is called the POGO and it prints 2″x3″ prints.

The real story was something that wasn’t available in the digital press kits that the company was handing out. It was three cameras sitting unassumingly in a glass display, pictured to the right. Polaroid is bringing back it’s iconic Instant Camera. It’s not the new digital version, it’s the honest to goodness old-school version of the Instant Camera and the original chemicals and film. It’s a shame that they closed their plants in Massachusetts and fired the 150 who worked at them. the guys in the booth said we can expect the film to be returning in the summer time and the cameras to return in October of 2010.

Check out the shots of the “non-working prototypes” that were out for display. It was clear these were old Polaroid cameras that were re-painted, but I comment Polaroid for bringing out their Instant Cameras Click the photos to see the hi-res images. Enjoy!

Check out more coverage from CES 2010 at Tech Podcast Network CES 2010 Coverage and Geek News Central’s CES 2010 coverage.