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[engadget] The Commodore name licensed again for a line of keyboard PCs

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:29:00 -0700

We've always had a soft spot for Commodore computers. Compact, economical, and robust for their day, they were ubiquitous throughout the 1980s. Unfortunately, the machine's glory days are long behind it, with little more than some gaming rigs and the tireless work of Ben Heck to keep the flag flying. But all that could change if Barry Altman has his way. As President and CEO of the newly minted Commodore USA, he's spent the better part of a year crawling through the arcane red tape necessary to get the rights to the Commodore name. And now? With any luck, later this year the company's monumental advertising campaign will have had its effect ("something like you've never seen in your life," as Altman described it to us on the phone this afternoon) and you'll be able to have your very own keyboard computer with the Commodore logo slapped on for good measure. Presumably based on the Cybernet ZPC-GX31, the exact configurations and pricing will all be spelled out soon enough. In the meantime, hit the source link to see for yourself. And please, guys -- make us a beige one, will ya?

The Commodore name licensed again for a line of keyboard PCs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[betanews] Internet Explorer 9, the HTML 5 browser: Better than half-way there

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:54:26 -0700

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview via Fileforum now.

[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]

It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to care.

Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."

"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right -- our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a particular set of features. Done right, HTML5 applications will feel more like real apps than Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."

Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+ libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries that IE should be using now natively.

Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features, not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it instead.

But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.

For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple (apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:

"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms difference."

When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard. But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today, Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of one language, the fog would be lifted:

"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers. That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8. Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."

As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same markup.

The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on 7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.

"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers across the board.

Meanwhile, the IE9 preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3 standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox, by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?

"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."

Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU... Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right, was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.

"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there. And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a slower interpreter."

Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse, and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code -- 100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions (for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under 30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.

Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background process:

"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."

HTML 5 in large print, SVG in small print

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch playing catch-up with Chrome.

Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first time, directly and openly supporting SVG.

It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9 browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.

HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG. Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.

Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance, the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.

Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its special site devoted to the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.

The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is building a Web applications platform. Finally.

[gizmodo] TokyoFlash's E-Ink E-Clock

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:44:35 -0700

TokyoFlash didn't invent the epaper/eink watch, but they are the first to present something truly different with the tech.More »

[engadget] Windows Phone 7 Series won't have copy and paste

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:37:00 -0700

Ready for another long, drawn-out copy and paste controversy to overtake your every waking moment for a year or two? Good: Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won't be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series... so that's that. Kind of ironic considering that the WinMo of old has been enjoying the functionality since time immemorial, isn't it? Of course, anything is possible going forward -- they've said on several occasions in different talks and sessions this week that they're already looking at a number of enhancements that were scoped out of the initial release of the platform -- but for the phones you buy this holiday season, don't expect to be copying anything between apps.

Windows Phone 7 Series won't have copy and paste originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Switched On: Halting Total Customization

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:30:00 -0700

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Throughout the histories of Windows Mobile and Android, many handset developers have talked the talk of supporting these mobile operating systems, dribbling out a couple of handsets per year as they focused on other priorities. But not HTC. The company has created more Windows Mobile and Android handsets than companies many times its size, and in fact developed the very first Android handset. Microsoft cited HTC at Mobile World Congress 2009 for being an exceptional partner, while Google's Nexus One is an HTC-built handset sold exclusively by the search giant.

HTC has done more than simply create a lot of phones for these operating systems. It has attracted attention for its designs that include some of the largest displays and best QWERTY keyboards, as well as clever touches like the Touch Pro2's speakerphone, which activates simply by placing the handset face down on a table during a call. But most distinctively, HTC has invested heavily in developing engaging user interfaces on top of both mobile OS foundations, with development teams focused on delivering skins like TouchFLO and Sense to both Windows Mobile and Android. But now that Microsoft is radically changing Windows Phone 7 Series, HTC will have to change course, and in the process lose the distinction of having its custom user experiences live across both Windows Mobile and Android.

Continue reading Switched On: Halting Total Customization

Switched On: Halting Total Customization originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[gizmodo] TokyoFlash's E-Ink E-Clock [Watches]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:20:00 -0700

TokyoFlash didn't invent the epaper/eink watch, but they are the first to present something truly different with the tech. More »

[NewTeeVee] Rovi Acquires Media Recommendation Firm MediaUnbound

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:16:33 -0700

Rovi is looking to expand its ability to help clients create more personalized recommendation systems, and to do so it quietly acquired media recommendation firm MediaUnbound for an undisclosed amount. The purchase, which closed Friday March 12, could bolster Rovi’s data business by providing recommendation information as a value-add, while also delivering better recommendations to end users that access content through its own electronic programming guide.

MediaUnbound has helped to build static and dynamic personalization and recommendation engines for a number of clients, including Napster, eMusic and MTV Networks. The company has focused primarily on the music industry, but Corey Ferengul, Rovi’s executive vice president of product management and marketing, said in a phone interview that the same software can be used to provide recommendations for other media types that Rovi has in its database, including movies, TV, games, and even books. In fact, he says that many of MediaUnbound’s customers use its recommendation system along with Rovi’s data products.

The first step for Rovi will be packaging MediaUnbound’s recommendation technology to customers that buy its media data. But the company could also integrate the technology into its TotalGuide digital programming guide, which could enable it to extend more personalized movie and TV show recommendations to end users.

Rovi evaluated a few different recommendation services before acquiring MediaUnbound, and according to Ferengul, it was just as interested in acquiring the company’s talent as its technology. “Recommendation is a hot space right now, but there isn’t a single answer — there will be continual answers that need to be developed over time, and we needed a good team to keep us looking forward,” he said.

Cambridge, Mass-based MediaUnbound was founded by three Harvard University students in 2000. Privately held, the company has been profitable since 2003.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

The Paradox of Thinking Outside the (Set-Top) Box (subscription required)

[engadget] Leaked slide points to March 17th launch, $99 price for Motorola CLIQ XT

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:03:00 -0700

Motorola already said that its new CLIQ XT Android phone would be available sometime this month when it let us get our hands on the phone last week, but it unfortunately didn't get very specific about an actual date or a price. If this seemingly authentic slide obtained by TmoToday is any indication, however, it looks like the Blur-skinned handset will hit retail on March 17th (tomorrow), and run $99 on a two-year contract (or $199 for a year). That places it right in line with the current pricing of the original CLIQ, which would seem to be prime for a price drop if it's sticking around.

Leaked slide points to March 17th launch, $99 price for Motorola CLIQ XT originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[readwriteweb] Spotify Founder Leaves Us Looking to MOG, Napster & Others

Mike Melanson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:54:00 -0700

Everybody piled into the ballroom today at the Austin Convention Center to hear Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give the final keynote interview of SXSWI of 2010 fully expecting to be blown away with the release of the peer-to-peer music player.

Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday's announcement of MOG's move to mobile, with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels.

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At the same time, while we're all awaiting the U.S. launch, it looks like many of the tech savvy already have gotten their hands on the Europe-only application. Interviewer Eliot Van Buskirk started out the session by asking who in the audience had used Spotify and more than most of the crowd raised a hand in the air. Ek said that he was very surprised by the number of people that had used the software.

Ek said that he thinks that the day that we allow music to be seamlessly transported between platforms and carried around on mobile devices would be when we saved the music industry.

"Music that I really love, I tend to want to buy and own still," said Ek. "I don't necessarily want to own it in the format it used to be, like in a dumb plastic disk, but I'm more than happy to pay $100 to get a box set with a t-shirt and notes."

He explained that, while many seem to criticize Spotify for giving music away for free and adding to the problem, "it's not free" and that "with all those listings on the Spotify platform, the artists get paid every time" their music is played.

Ek argued that he thought that the music industry would be "radically bigger" today if users could legally have music on any device, using the metaphor of music as flowing water.

We did, however, get to see a quick demonstration of Spotify for Android, but it was a bit quick to glean much in the way of usability. It did, indeed, play music.

In the end, though, we have to wonder why we're all holding our breath for Spotify to land on U.S. shores. By the show of hands, it certainly doesn't seem that hard to acquire and we have some valid alternatives, like MOG and the soon-to-be Napster platform, as well as their web counterparts.

If you're that worried about getting Spotify, our suggestion would be to go get a proxy service set up and get to it already.

Discuss

[engadget] FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:45:00 -0700

Yesterday, the FCC submitted its National Broadband Plan to Congress, essentially requesting that six goals be met over the next decade, including sizzlers like access for "every American" to "robust broadband services,"which apparently equals a minimum of 100 million US homes with "affordable" access to at least 100MBps down / 50Mbps up speeds. Pretty heady stuff, we know. We thought we'd contact a few of your friendly ISPs for comment, and we've got Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon going on record here -- all in all, they're rather predictable 'rah rahs' for the plan, especially considering that whole "affordable" bit. We also threw in part of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's response. The statements are after the break, and hit the source links for the fuller, long-winded versions.

Continue reading FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond

FCC National Broadband Plan: some of your favorite ISPs respond originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[readwriteweb] Chatroulette: Everyone Talks About It, Few Actually Visit

Marshall Kirkpatrick — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:39:41 -0700

Chatroulette has been talked about a lot over the past 30 days but for all the media mentions - ComScore reports that the site is still seeing less than 1 million unique US visitors per month. Site visitors are disproportionately young, male and also interested in gay and lesbian websites, the company says. Comscore believes that 960,000 people in the US visited the site in February, the month it blew up.

As social network analyst danah boyd puts it, Chatroulette is "a hugely controversial site, one that is prompting yet-another moral panic about youth engagement online." Given all the controversy - wouldn't you think that more than 1 million people in the US would have visited the site last month?

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Boyd again on the up side of the site:

ChatRoulette reminds me a lot of the quirkiness of the Internet that I grew up with. Like when I was a teen trolling through chatrooms, ChatRoulette is filled with all sorts of weird people. And most users ignore most other users until they find someone they find interesting or compelling...I can't tell you how formative it was for me to grow up talking to all sorts of random people online. So I feel pretty depressed every time I watch people flip out about the dangers of talking to strangers. Strangers helped me become who I was. Strangers taught me about a different world than what I knew in my small town. Strangers allowed me to see from a different perspective. Strangers introduced me to academia, gender theory, Ivy League colleges, the politics of war, etc. So I hate how we vilify all strangers as inherently bad. Did I meet some sketchballs on the Internet when I was a teen? DEFINITELY. They were weird; I moved on...I simultaneously am amused by ChatRoulette and depressed because I realize that so many folks would prefer to keep themselves and their teens/college-aged-kids sheltered rather than giving them a way of thinking about systems like this and teaching them to walk away when things get weird.

Given all that, the fact that less than a million people in the US visited the site last month seems like a real shame. Heck, if it's naked men you're concerned with - I just spent 30 minutes on the site and only saw 2 of them. Maybe that's changing.

Google Trends says Chatroulette is most popular in Tunisia, followed by Norway, France, Chilli and Finland. Belgium, Turkey and Sweden send more traffic to the site than the US too. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, then. People in the US media find the site interesting, they talk about it all the time, but for some reason not a lot of people in the US are checking it out. ReadWriteWeb was bigger than Chatroulette last month, in fact. We're not waiting by the phone for Jon Stewart to call, though.

Discuss

[yahoo] Microsoft embraces HTML5 specification in IE9 (InfoWorld)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:33:12 -0700

InfoWorld - Potentially toughening the competitive landscape for its own Silverlight rich Internet application platform, Microsoft will expand support for the HTML5 specification in its Internet Explorer 9 browser, under a plan revealed Tuesday.

[engadget] Researchers teach liquid to flow uphill, hope to cool future CPUs (video)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:24:00 -0700

Another day, another experimental CPU cooling method that may or may not come to pass. We've seen "thermal paste" from IBM and polyethylene from MIT, and now researchers at the University of Rochester have developed a method for coaxing water along nanometer-scale grooves carved into silicon. So hydrophilic are the patterns that water will even flow against gravity (and we've got the video to prove it). Not only are the structures so precise and nondestructive that the surface feels smooth to the touch, but they also trap photons, according to The New York Times, "so the grooved silicon appears pitch-black." And who knows? Maybe your next PC will be cooled by streams of water flowing freely inside the case. It's a nice image, anyways. Peep the video after the break to see it in action for yourself.

Continue reading Researchers teach liquid to flow uphill, hope to cool future CPUs (video)

Researchers teach liquid to flow uphill, hope to cool future CPUs (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Samsung confirms slate PC in the works

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:02:00 -0700

Well, the details are extremely thin here folks, but it looks like Samsung's working on a tablet PC -- or 'slate' if you're into the new fangled lingo -- just like pretty much every other manufacturer on the planet. Speaking with APC (the website, not the clothier), Philip Newton, director of Samsung Australia's IT division, said that the company is working on a slate PC for the second half of 2010 that will have "PC-grade processing power and connectivity" -- two things Newton had previously cited as the main things lacking in the iPad. That's really all there is to go on -- no specs or features mentioned, though Samsung has been vaguely hinting that the tablet, when it appears, will run on Intel's Atom platform, which sounds about right. We'll have to wait and see, won't we?

Samsung confirms slate PC in the works originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[NewTeeVee] March Madness: Coming to a Laptop Near You

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:12 -0700

March Madness is kicking off with its opening round game today, and CBS is getting ready to live stream all games online starting with the first round on Thursday. The network has already made $37 million and sold all of its ad revenue for March Madness On Demand, AdAge is reporting. However, other sites could profit from the NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament, as almost half of its audience will follow games and scores online, according to a new report from Unicast.

As it turns out, March Madness is very much a two-screen experience for many viewers, with live streaming only being one of many parts to the puzzle. 83 percent of its audience will watch it on TV, 44 percent will follow the tournament online and 10 percent will use a mobile device. Sports sites like ESPN.com and Yahoo Sports should see a lot of traffic from fans trying to keep track of the scores, but the official CBS live stream at NCAA.com will see its fair share of users as well: 54 percent of the March Madness online and mobile audience actually wants to watch games in real time.

Unicast’s new 2010 NCAA Basketball Tournament Fever Report reveals that 58 percent of the March Madness online audience want to use the medium to keep track of scores while 49 percent want to watch game highlights online. Catching up on complete games after they air is something that only 19 percent are interested in. Most users said they will flock to ESPN.com (69 percent), followed by Yahoo Sports (42 percent), FoxSports.com (34 percent) and CBSSports.com (29 percent). The official CBS-powered NCAA.com site was on the mind of 26 percent of the respondents.

51 percent of the respondents don’t care about and won’t follow March Madness at all, which still leaves 49 percent ready to take work a little less seriously in the weeks to come. Out of those, 44 percent will go online. Put those pieces of pie into context, and you end up with the estimate that around 11.6 percent of U.S. adults are planing to tune into March Madness online. That’s a lot of eyeballs, even if not everyone follows through. Last year’s March Madness online coverage was seen by 7.52 million people, which generated a total of 8.6 million hours of live streaming video, according to CBS.

AdAge reported yesterday that CBS’s has sold as many ads online as on TV this year. Of course, TV ad revenue still outweighs online, which was estimated to be around $619 for last year’s March Madness. Still, online revenue is up 20 percent, which validates CBS’s strategy to stream the games in real time without any of the restrictions NBC imposed on its Olympic coverage this year.

Related content on NewTeeVee: Where to Watch March Madness Online

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Why Is the Plasma HDTV Market Dying? (subscription required)

[gizmodo] Lifechanger: My Big Fat Music Collection [Lifechanger]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:00:00 -0700

According to iTunes, I have 22,880 items in my music collection. That adds up to 70.9 days worth of music, taking up 145.26 GB of hard drive space. And thank God for it. More »

[engadget] Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:29:00 -0700

It's far from the first rock-paper-scissors-playing device we've seen, but this glove made by Steve Hoefer (of Secret Knock door lock fame) may well be the most ingenious. You see, not only will it let you play a game of rock-paper-scissors by yourself (and who hasn't wanted to do that?), but it will actually learn to identify the weaknesses in your game and eventually become an unstoppable rock-paper-scissors-playing machine (or at least as unstoppable as you can be at rock-paper-scissors). Head on past the break to check out the glove in action, and hit up the link below for the complete details for making your own.

Continue reading Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer

Rock-paper-scissors glove will learn to beat its wearer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] Spotify Consumes More Internet Capacity Than All Of Sweden

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:04:41 -0700

Today, during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a country.”

Ek made the statement when asked why Spotify chose to use a P2P model, rather than centrally store all of its music in one place and stream it from there. Ek noted that if they were to stream from one UK datacenter, they’d consume all the bandwidth. So instead, they leverage the power of the Internet to get their users to help them stream to other users.

Ek also said this was primarily the reason that Spotify is a native application, rather than a web app. P2P streaming is a bit more complicated than streaming from one source on the backend of things, obviously.

When asked why Apple (which of course, runs the largest music store in the world, iTunes) doesn’t use the P2P method, Ek said that was the “million dollar question.” He then speculated that they will move more towards Spotify in terms of being in the cloud (something we’ve written about a few times), and having a subscription model.

Ek noted that Spotify is now in six countries and has over 320,000 paid subscribers. That’s up from 260,000 the last time they mentioned it. Overall, they have some 7 million users now. And yes, that’s largely without the U.S. where the service only exists in a very limited closed beta as the company negotiates with the labels for music rights.

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[engadget] JooJoo refund issues creating some bad juju

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:01:00 -0700

Given the legally-disputed origins of the JooJoo and the current shipping delays, you'd think Fusion Garage would scrupulously maintain a squeaky-clean image with its customers as it leads up to launch, but it looks like it wasn't quite prepared to handle refunds in a sensible way -- we just confirmed that the company asked a customer for his bank account information in order to deposit a refund directly after running into some troubles with PayPal. Here's the relevant exchange:

"Support Joojoo" wrote:

Dear Rony,

We have checked this at our end and there seems to be a problem with
refunding via paypal.

To avoid any further wait time, could you send us your bank name, bank
account name, bank account number, sort or swift code and your bank address.

We will have a direct transfer done to your bank account. If you could
provide us the details today, we will ensure that the refund hits your bank
account by friday of this week.

Please advise . Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Fusion Garage tells us that this customer actually changed his mind about getting a refund several times, and that they've only had three customers with refund issues, all of which were related to problems with PayPal issuing credit long after pre-orders were placed. While it's uncommon here in the States (and obviously this buyer wasn't keen on it), bank to bank transfers are the norm in Europe and widely used for the wiring of cash across international lines. Clearly after the issues with PayPal, however, the idea of handing over bank details doesn't seem appealing in this case. We'll see how everyone feels when that promised March 25 ship date rolls around, and we'll let you know what happens with Rony and his refund when we find out more. Maybe next time just mail a check, guys.

JooJoo refund issues creating some bad juju originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[cnet] Music label seeks realism in iTunes guitar app

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:45:00 -0700

Universal becomes first major label to design its own simulated guitar-playing video game, Six String, debuting Wednesday on iTunes App Store.

[gizmodo] 25 Things You Can Remote Control With Your iPhone [Apple]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:40:00 -0700

One of the more interesting things you can do with the iPhone is use it as a remote control for other devices. Since the iPhone App Store launched almost two years ago, developers have created hundreds of remote control applications. More »

[techcrunch] Google Automates The Creation Of YouTube Overlay Ads

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:36:44 -0700

In its relentless push to turn YouTube into a profit center, Google is trying anything it can to pump more advertising into the billions of videos people watch on the site. Now it is automating the way that Flash overlay ads can be created and displayed on YouTube videos. Through the self-serve Display Ad Builder in Google AdWords, mom-and-pop businesses can now create Flash overlay ads as easily as they can create display banner ads and place them in YouTube videos.

Overlay ads have been around for a long time on YouTube and other video networks. YouTube constantly refines the types of overlay ads it shows, but many of the small businesses which typically advertise on Google AdWords don’t have the tools to create Flash overlay ads. Now Google is providing them with templates, much like it does already for banner ads.

As of last October, YouTube was showing ads on more than one billion videos a week, which was roughly one in seven videos. YouTube wants to open up all of its video inventory to advertisers large and small. Today’s release is the latest move in that direction.

At what point will there be too many ads and will consumers ever backlash? Already I find those persistent pop-ups and overlays to get in the way of the videos I am trying to watch, and I don’t find them particularly relevant. Flooding YouTube with even more of these ads may be good for its bottom line, but viewers are not going to like them.

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[engadget] Sony VAIO M netbook officially unveiled, attempts to befriend your wallet

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:36:00 -0700

It's still mildly hard to believe that the Sony VAIO M is for real, given its lack of VAIO's iconic chiclet keys plus the pretty convincing VAIO W fake that we've stumbled upon. Nevertheless, kudos to Sony for reaching out to a more affordable market with its new 3.1-pound netbook. The specs are the identical with the ones we saw yesterday and earlier this month, but hey, there's no harm in having another party to welcome this fella, right? You can grab one now -- in black or white -- for £300 ($456) in the UK.

Gallery: Sony VAIO M netbook officially unveiled, attempts to befriend your wallet

Sony VAIO M netbook officially unveiled, attempts to befriend your wallet originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[NewTeeVee] YouTube Opens Up Banner Ad Overlays to Everyone

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:34:33 -0700

Expect those yellow teeth ads to pop up on top of your YouTube videos any day now, as Google has added an option to build display ad overlays for YouTube within its Display Ad Builder, making it possible for Adwords customers to easily generate and run overlays that make use of their own imagery.

YouTube has been running ad overlays for close to three years now, and the site has called the format “one of the most effective ad formats.” However, generating those ads was previously fairly complex, and even many large advertisers have so far opted for text overlays instead of display ads. The new self-serve ad generator could lead to a huge number of display ads finding their way to YouTube, but also significantly increase monetization for the site, which could make as much as $1 billion in 2011, according to a recent Citigroup estimate.

Adwords customers can use Google’s Display Ad Builder to upload graphics sized 480*70 and then book these banners for regions, categories, or even a specific video. Display overlays can be booked either on a cost per click or CPM basis.

The move towards self-serve advertising on YouTube doesn’t come entirely as a surprise: GoRumors uncovered a patent application for such a feature in January. In that application, Google wrote:

“The conventional techniques for development of such multimedia advertisements are complex, requiring resources beyond the means of many small to medium-sized organizations.”

The new ad generator on the other hand is squarely targeted at small advertisers. YouTube’s blog post announcing the new self-serve option specifically mentions small businesses as its target audience, musing that this would be a great way for a small beauty products outlet to “create an overlay ad and then run it on popular fashion and beauty videos.”

Related content on GigaOm Pro: Why 2010 Still Won’t Be the Year of Mobile Advertising (subscription required)

[engadget] Military looking to build autonomous, bunker-busting killbot

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:14:00 -0700

We remember hearing something in the 1990s about SDI (or "Star Wars") actually being a tool to fight UFOs, and that places like Area 51 contained vast underground bases positively teeming with ETs. We didn't think much of it then, and neither do we now -- although this request for information posted over on the FBO website has given us pause. The query is officially for info regarding "robotic underground munition technology," meaning that Defense Threat Reduction Agency would really, really like to get its hands on an autonomous bunker-busting robot capable of being dropped on a target and digging into (and then blowin' up) whatever it is that lies beneath the ground. Features specified include: a survivable underground communication system, capabilities to efficiently overcome natural and man-made obstacles, viable passive and active defensive and offensive systems, vehicle control logic to avoid, traverse, neutralize or defeat natural and man-made obstacles, and more. One one hand, this does sound like a bit of "war on terror" overkill, but again we don't really expect the federal government to throw tons of money at a grandiose and over-expense project that will never come to fruition. We'll be keeping a close eye on this one.

Military looking to build autonomous, bunker-busting killbot originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] Live Blog: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Says Music Service Now Has 320,000 Paid Subscribers

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:05:46 -0700

I’m here at the last keynote of SXSW, where Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is being interviewed by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk. Ek will likely be revealing some new announcements about Spotify during this interview. I’ll be live blogging my notes below.

Van Buskirk kicked off the keynote by asking how many people in the audience had used Spotify, leading a significant portion of the audience to raise their hands. This was surprising, because Spotify is only widely available in Europe (you need a beta invite to use it in the US). Ek then took some time to walk the audience through the streaming music service if they haven’t used it before (see our extensive past coverage if you need a refresher).

Q: What drove the initial decision to make this an application as opposed to something in the browser?
A: There are a few things that applications are better for. In our case, we think that applications are better for swift music playback. What we see is that people tend to spend a lot of time on Spotify because it’s so swift. They tend to replace their media player with Spotify, because they notice no difference between playing a song locally (some have even remarked that it’s faster than playing it through iTunes).

Q: Let’s talk about the licensing realities. Spotify is available in Europe. How will the model work in America?
A:There could be slight changes. A year and a half since launch more than 7 users, only in six countries. What we’re working on is the next gen of Spotify. We’ll never be content to just have an app. There are a lot of things we want to fix in Spotify. We tend not to take the ‘release early, often’ approach. What we’ve been working on for last 6-8 months is next gen of Spotify. How to make it more connected. Easier sharing and management of music. We’ve realized people spend a lot of time on Spotify and they tend to manage their music with Spotify.

Q: Which platforms/devices are most exciting?
A: Three years ago if you wanted to develop for mobile, had to support 3-5 major mobile os’s. Long lead times. That shut out all this innovation. More recently, application devs can get the application on phones. We look a lot at bundling with devices. Mostly not for revenue possibility but more for pre-installs. With exception of the iPhone today, most of the other handset manufacturers lack a good media player. Historically hard to get music to other phones if you had in iTunes.

Q: Let’s talk about the business side of bundling. If someone is paying for cell phone bill, they can check off something to get Spotify, seems like easier decision. How has that been going in Europe?
A: We have two mobile operators working with us many more to come. If you go into any Telius store in Sweden, you can go in and pick out a smart phone that comes preinstalled with Spotify. 3-6 months included. Incredible takeup with that. One of the key things Spotify is pushing is that people listen/share to more music than ever, more diverse artists. People will still buy music they love, but vast majority of music they just want access.

Q: We’ve heard services like Spotify people say “oh no we’re not going to buy music any more”. The idea of geting people to play a monthly fee, that seems promising. Why would someone buy something?
A: I think we’re going that route. But we find that music I really love, I tend to want to buy it. Not necessarily a plastic disk, but a special edition for an artist I really like, I’m more than happy to pay $100 for a box set with a t-shirt in it, liner notes. Another person may be willing to pay for a live edition with extended tracks. Or pay for a live concert experience. The reality of the music industry today is that there isn’t one biz model. It’s about figuring out how to use downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing, all these things. I don’t think streaming music is stream.. with Spotify people label us ‘free’ music. But people pay, either with time (adverts, which are targeting), or actually paying for the service.

Q: Are you going to start filtering ads by mood (e.g. if you listen to down tempo music).
A: We want to figure out a lot of things based on how people listen to music. Can figure out mood, brand preferences. We see that from CTRs, if you listen to same music and are from the same place who tends to like a certain brand, there’s a high likihood you will too. Ad model is getting better every month. But this for me is not about free vs paid music, it’s about a model where there’s a free music element and a paid one.

A: Tech savviness at labels is increasing, now more people that love music and know the digital space are working with labels and artists.

Q: How do indy artists get music on Spotify? On ITunes you can submit paperwork. You’re different in that approach.
A: The way to get on Spotify today is we have a bunch of aggregators we work with. Main reason we’ve wanted to work with aggregators is that they tend to understand format/structure. We get quality control, picture, bio, etc.

Q: Are we done with DRM?
A: If you look at Spotify, it has DRM associated with it. We want to make it so that there isn’t really any announcement what’s DRM or not, we can protect and give users flexibility you want.

Q: Let’s talk about Spotify of the future. How do we get to point of ‘music like water’.
A: I see that’s sort of where we’re heading. The music industry needs that happen. I think music and tech are aligned for the first time. We’ve had a lot of proprietary standards, trying to figure out how to get music on a BlackBerry phone vs. getting it on iPhone vs set top box, radically different. We need to open platforms.

Q: With regard to Twitter/FB. Are you thinking of integrating sharing functionality into Spotify?
A: We’re looking at integrating some social aspects. I think genres are non-sane. What classifies rock, or neo-pop, etc. Spotify is quickly approaching 10 mil tracks. How do you manage that? Search is one solution, but isn’t optimal way of discovering new content. We won’t be another social network. We never believed in being our own social network, we’re working with existing social networks.

Q: With your playlists people have read/write access, can delete entire thing, what are you doing about that?
A: Looking from tech angle. We support version updates. One way to solve that is that you can step back in history and go back. What we don’t have is user privilege on playlists. We think Twitter/FB will figure out those privileges, and will use them.

A: I think the total rev matters more than actual conversion rate. But we do want to make sure there are a number people are paying for Spotify and that will grow. We’re making a lot of progress. We’re in six countries, now well in excess of 320,000 paid subscribers. Last time we mentioned a fig. it was 260,000. 100 million playlists. 7 million users. People spend a lot of time on playlists. 30% of all playlists are albums (albums stored in collection). People say album is dead. I don’t agree. I think there’s a lot to develop there.

Q: Let’s talk about P2P element.
A: It was a key decision, and one reason we’re a native app. Helps offload bandwidth. P2P actually helps Spotify and users, it will take tracks on your friends and coworkers on same local network and stream to them so it’s faster. “We’re consuming more capacity than Sweden has as a country”. If we had to stream all the data from our UK center, we’d consume all the bandwidth.

Q: Why isn’t Apple doing this?
A: That’s a million dollar question. I think they are. I’m just speculating on this. Apple is very interested, we’ve had iTunes store. They’re understanding this is more to subscription model. They understand it’s going more to a cloud based model. I don’t have any magical insight into Apple.

Q: Let’s look at Spotify on this phone. I wanted to show this cool device. Sony Ericson X10 mini. Out in US in next couple of months. It’s an Android phone. We’ve installed Spotify. Now demonstrating the app. Has a spotify widget.

A: Over the next couple of weeks a lot of features coming in to Spotify. I hope from them moving in a more steady direction. We are listening to what users are asking us to do.

Q: US Launch? Also China?
A: The most important thing for us when it comes to US launch is that we want to build the best possible product we can and get all ducks in a row, partnerships with next gen of Spotify. Sort out publishing which is a huge task. Here you have to strike deals with almost 5000 publishers. Big thing for us is working on next gen of Spotify and getting that out there.

Q: How many plays equals one dollar?
A: Depends on the type on contract with the publisher/record labels. We share the rev we bring in. You can’t really equate to ‘per play’ we look at all our ad rev. Creates a bucket. For instance how do you account for a purchase of a song. There is no easy answer to your question. Over time our ad revs are growing, number of downloads growing. Amount of rev we bring in is growing.

Q: How are it working to convince American label that not everyone needs to be a subscriber for it to work.
A: This is the world’s biggest music market. We have potential reach of 170 mil people in Europe. America has much more. People spend more money in America. The whole industry is looking more and more about new opportunities. At the same time CD sales have been in decline, nothing online has been able to counter balance that decline. I think people are looking at how we can support Spotify, how do we ensure that people don’t stop buying CDs.

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[engadget] Astro pleads for street cred with $150 A30 Cross-Gaming headset

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:52:00 -0700

Ah, Astro Gaming. It's been awhile, hasn't it? After going on a year-long hiatus from crafting new hardware, the company is hitting back with an all-new headset based around the same DNA found in its A40. Rather than cranking out yet another pair of mic-infused headphones that do users little good outside of the LAN party setting, the A30 Cross-Gaming actually boasts a street-style design that enables them to double as vanilla headphones. The boom mic is removable (though an in-line mic allows for communication in any situation), and you'll find interchangeable speaker tags if you're scouting a way to "be yourself." It's up for order today at $149.95, but if you're looking to pick up a Dolby-powered Astro MixAmp -- which is said to "seamlessly blend voice and game sounds" -- you'll be looking at a grand total of $229.95.

Gallery: Astro A30 Cross-Gaming headset

Astro pleads for street cred with $150 A30 Cross-Gaming headset originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[readwriteweb] The Rocky Road for LBS: Beyond Smartphones and LBS Games

Mike Melanson — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:50:00 -0700

The first thing we think of these days when someone mentions "location-based services", or LBS, are the mobile social platforms we've gotten used to "checking in" to wherever we go - Gowalla, Foursquare, Brightkite, MyTown and the like. But looking forward in the LBS market actually requires us to look back to feature phones and a GPS-less existence.

According to Jason Finkelstein, the director of product and marketing at LBS solution-provider WaveMarket, we are looking at a "truly horizontal market" that can be "applied to dozens of different types of businesses". But first, there are a number of hurdles to jump over.

Sponsor

Finkelstein spoke today at the South By South West festival in Austin, in a workshop entitled "LBS 101: Geolocation On The 'Horizon'", explaining that location started out with car-based GPS services before moving onto "personal navigation devices" and finally ending up in the smartphones that nearly 20% of the population carries around in their pockets.

LBS 101

Right off the bat, Finkelstein argued one of the largest uses of text messaging is to find out friend and family location. Fifty-five percent of SMS messages, he said, ask some variation on the simple question of "Where are you?".

"The peer-to-peer privacy model is complicated", he said, explaining that the solution is not simple.

A federal mandate in 2000 made it so that any time someone dialed 911 from a cellular phone, the cell tower used would have to be reported. In 2005, the requirements were made more stringent. It's those two things that became the background of the LBS market we see today.

"The future, which is more or less here", Finkelstein explained, referring to check-ins, Facebook widgets, notifications when friends are nearby, GPS-indexed local search, location-aware advertising and marketing, crowdsourced traffic systems, location-aware messaging applications and security prevention applications.

Market Fragmentation and the Future of LBS

"Location data is not just a dot on a map - there is a whole lot of more rich data," Finkelstein said. Part of what LBS app developers will have to deal with in moving into the future, he said, involved handling various networks with different kinds of location information, device fragmentation and application types, whether SMS, downloadable apps or Web-based applications.

"The downloadable app is not the entire universe," he said, explaining that SMS systems might be much more accessible to the 80% of the population that do not have GPS-enabled smartphones. "For most people, downloading something is a hurdle."

To get past some of these issues, Finkelstein said, and provide LBS to both smartphones and feature phones, developers can use "Assisted GPS", which is a "hybrid using GPS satellites and cell tower signals", triangulation and cell ID, with varying levels of accuracy and latency.

"If you want to address the mass market, you have to address all of this stuff," said Finkelstein. "You can't build a mass market service... really."

Between handset types, network and platform fragmentation and carrier coverage, the solution for developers is not clear. Location aggregators, such as Veriplace (a service provided by Finkelstein's company, which he admitted as "shameless self-promotion"), are one solution for developers looking to get beyond these complicating factors. But a constant theme throughout the panel was that with all of the hype over LBS, we are still in infancy stages in the LBS market.

Discuss

[gizmodo] Portable Sega Saturn Console: Virtua Cop On The Go [Gaming]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:40:28 -0700

Making something portable usually means stripping away the excess plastic and coming up with a streamlined beauty. Not in the world's first portable Sega Saturn's case though, which comes to us via the BenHeck.com forums. More »

[NewTeeVee] Akamai Takes Over Majority of Netflix’s Streaming Business

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:30:30 -0700

Netflix confirmed today that it has picked Akamai as its primary content delivery network in what looks like a move to lower its streaming costs. The decision could also help the subscription video company to expand into markets outside the U.S., something it plans to do later on this year.

According to a report on the Streaming Media blog earlier this month, Akamai was tapped by Netflix after the CDN offered a significant discount on its streaming delivery services. Netflix is reportedly paying Akamai just one and half cents per GB delivered for three to four months, before its pricing goes back to about six cents per GB delivered.

Akamai’s aggressive pricing has paid off, as it has captured the majority of Netflix’s streaming video delivery. Previously, Netflix was using a combination of Limelight and Level 3 to deliver streaming videos as part of its Watch Instantly service. But while Limelight will continue to maintain a portion of Netflix business, it appears that Level 3 will be the odd man out as Akamai becomes the primary CDN provider.

The Akamai pick comes as Netflix has rapidly grown the streaming portion of its business over the past year. Although subscribers continue to rent DVDs, Netflix reported that 48 percent of its subscribers streamed a movie or TV show in the fourth quarter 2009. That compares with 41 percent in the third quarter and 28 percent who watched streaming video in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The growth in streaming is expected to continue as the service is added to more consumer electronics devices. Since the service first showed up on Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles two years ago, it has become nearly ubiquitous, with Netflix expecting to have the service on more than 100 different CE devices in 2010.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

Connected Consumer Tuned In to TVs in Q4 (subscription required)

[engadget] Microsoft announces three new 720p LifeCams with TrueColor technology

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:29:00 -0700

Looking to upgrade that built-in or non-existent webcam in your laptop or LCD monitor? Then Microsoft hopes you'll consider one of its three new LifeCams, which each not only boast a 720p resolution, but the company's new TrueColor technology that promises to provide "superior color and brightness in even the worst lighting conditions." Apart from that feat of optical wizardry, the webcams look to provide all the basic features you'd expect, including auto focus and face tracking, along with a flexible base on the HD-5000 and HD-5001 that can be adapted for use on a desk, or attached to a laptop or desktop monitor -- the HD-6000 is designed for laptop use only. Look for the HD-5000 and Best Buy-exclusive HD-5001 to roll out first later this month for just $50 apiece, while the HD-6000 will be available in April for $60. Hit up the gallery below for a closer look at each.

Gallery: Microsoft announces three new 720p LifeCams with TrueColor technology

Microsoft announces three new 720p LifeCams with TrueColor technology originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] MOG bringing unlimited music streaming to iPhone and Android, Rhapsody taking iPhone music offline

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:08:00 -0700

While we all wait patiently for Apple to concoct its own subscription-based, unlimited music streaming service (hello, Lala acquisition!), MOG is jumping on the opportunity right away. Er, almost right away. Down in Austin this week, the company announced that an iPhone and Android app would be out "in early Q2" in order to bring unlimited music streaming to both operating systems for $10 per month. We're told that a catalog of seven million songs will be available, but there's no way to know if 6.99 million are of the "no one cares" variety. At any rate, your monthly fee will also allow unlimited streaming from the desktop, but alas, you'll be left with nothing but hollow memories should you ever stop ponying up. In related news, Rhapsody has announced (video after the break) that offline playback support is coming to the iPhone, with the updated app expected to be passed along for Apple's confirmation "shortly." Granted, the Rhapsody to Go subscription is $5 per month more than MOG's option, but with all this competition popping up, we wouldn't be shocked to see that slide lower in due time.

Continue reading MOG bringing unlimited music streaming to iPhone and Android, Rhapsody taking iPhone music offline

MOG bringing unlimited music streaming to iPhone and Android, Rhapsody taking iPhone music offline originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[betanews] In light of news that it has 'flopped,' Google's Nexus One lands on AT&T and Rogers

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:53:56 -0700

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Google's first attempt at directly selling an Android-powered mobile phone is already being called a flop thanks to reports from mobile analytics company Flurry that estimate sales to have been around 135,000 units in the first 74 days on the market (compared to 1.05 million Motorola Droids, 1 million iPhones.)

However, Google's approach to selling the device is vastly different from the more common methods employed by wireless carriers: it has been primarily sold unlocked for $529 directly from Google, or for $179 with a special T-Mobile plan. Since the device was released, there's been a "Coming soon: Spring 2010" section that shows Verizon Wireless and Vodafone as the next US and European carriers.

Today, Google expanded the device's compatibility in a different direction, and rolled out a version compatible with AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada. It is now the second Android device on AT&T behind the Motorola Backflip. Rogers currently offers a goodly amount of Android devices, including the HTC Dream and Magic (known as the G1 and MyTouch 3G in the U.S.) LG Eve, Samsung Galaxy Spica, and soon the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10.

So instead of a CDMA version as expected, today we've got a device that supports 850/1900/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands, and one that supports the 900/AWS/2100 MHz 3G/UMTS bands used by T-Mobile.

Selling the device unlocked is unlikely to greatly expand its popularity, as it still only appeals to a niche audience.

[betanews] FCC: Wireless spectrum 10x more valuable for wireless broadband than for TV

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:51:12 -0700

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The 300+ page National Broadband Plan that the Federal Communications Commission submitted to Congress today contains some logical goals, some ambitious ones, and some that are sure to cause a good deal of conflict between industries.

One of the most contentious issues also happens to be the most important aspect of the broadband plan: the re-allocation of wireless spectrum for the use of mobile broadband.

Last October, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said Americans' consumption of mobile broadband has grown so quickly that we are almost at a bottleneck, and that more wireless spectrum is needed for it immediately. The plan, therefore, says that it will increase the 255 MHz - 3.7 GHz spectrum available to "terrestrial broadband services" (a.k.a., non-satellite) by at least 300 MHz in the next five years, and 500 MHz within the next ten.

But where will all of this wireless spectrum come from?

Of the 300 MHz due in the next five years, 120 MHz will be coming from the broadcast television bands.

It's no secret that the radio and television broadcast industry is still sitting on huge chunks of unused wireless spectrum, and the recent transition to digital broadcast freed up a significant amount of spectrum in the 700 MHz band that was auctioned off to mobile network operators in 2008. By re-purposing the wireless spectrum for mobile Internet services, the FCC says it increased its value to about $1.28 per megahertz/pop. Right now, the FCC estimates that the spectrum the broadcast TV industry has is only worth about $0.11 to $0.15 per megahertz/pop.

In short, the spectrum is ten times more valuable for wireless broadband than it is for broadcast television.

This is due to a couple of factors. Firstly, it's because only 10% of the population is estimated to still rely on free over-the-air broadcasts. Secondly, it's because broadcast TV licensing has interference protection built into it, which leaves significant amounts of spectrum intentionally unused.

So to get this extremely valuable wireless spectrum, the FCC is going to try a multi-pronged approach to restructuring the broadcast TV industry:

1. Update the rules on TV service areas, distance separations, and revise the table of spectrum allotments starting at the 6 MHz channel.

2. Fix the licensing framework so two or more broadcast stations can share the 6 MHz channel. (The Commission estimates that two HD video streams or several SD streams can exist within that channel.)

3. Get government approval so broadcasters who have voluntarily consolidated their channels will be able to share the profits of the remaining spectrum that is auctioned off.

If that is not approved, then other methods of restructuring the broadcast industry must be explored, such as by transitioning to a cellular broadcast architecture (smaller, lower power transmitters that cause less interference than the big broadcast towers) or by auctioning off "overlay" licenses where licensees must negotiate directly with broadcast TV stations to clear out the bands.

Some of these alternative methods would be a little more forceful to broadcasters.

"We were pleased by initial indications from FCC members that any spectrum reallocation would be voluntary, and were therefore prepared to move forward in a constructive fashion on that basis," Dennis Wharton, Executive Vice President of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement yesterday evening. "However, we are concerned by reports today that suggest many aspects of the plan may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised. Moreover, as the nation's only communications service that is free, local and ubiquitous, we would oppose any attempt to impose onerous new spectrum fees on broadcasters."

Now that the value of the wireless spectrum has been clearly proven and outlined, television broadcasters who have faced declining ad revenue and declining viewership could be standing before a huge pile of money. The 700 MHz spectrum block alone garnered more than $19 billion from wireless network operators in 2008 for a little under 100 MHz of spectrum. License holders in the bands to be vacated are holding very strong cards indeed.

[engadget] Bandai Rilakkuma netbook gets touchscreen and CPU boost, as precious as ever

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:45:00 -0700

We've heard some folks (we're not naming names) disparagingly refer to netbooks as "toys" from time to time. Of course, when a manufacturer like Bandai cranks the cute factor up to eleven we can't say that it's an altogether bad thing. Like its predecessor, the Rilakkuma SX features 1Seg TV, webcam, Bluetooth, and WiFi. Putting the "next" in "next-gen," this baby features an Atom Z520 processor, 1GB RAM, 60GB HDD, DVD Super Multi, and an 8.9-inch (1280 x 768) convertible touchscreen. Built by Kohjinsha, this one is reportedly coming to the Bandai Namco online store in June for ¥90,000 (about $995).

Bandai Rilakkuma netbook gets touchscreen and CPU boost, as precious as ever originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[yahoo] The top 10 singles and albums on iTunes (AP)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:30:46 -0700

AP - iTunes' top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending March 15, 2010:

[NewTeeVee] Vid-Biz: C-Span, Crackle, ManiaTV

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:30:44 -0700

C-Span Puts Full Archives on the Web; C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet, including 23 years and more than 160,000 hours of TV footage. (NY Times)

Crackle Sees Video Streams Rise; according to Nielsen Online, Crackle’s audience averages between 1.5 million and 2 million unique users. (The Hollywood Reporter)

ManiaTV Resurrected, Struts ‘Celebrity Rush’ Out; after shutting its doors last spring and being bought back by original founder Drew Massey, maniaTV is producing original celebrity-driven content again. (Tubefilter)

Mondo Media Gaining Revenue from International Licensing; the company sells foreign rights for its shows and picks up rights for international Web shows and then localizes them for a U.S. audience. (Beet.TV)

Showtime Inks Deal With DreamWorks; cable network restocks its supply of movies, adding 35 DreamWorks Studios films to be theatrically released between 2010 and 2015. (Multichannel News)

Dogwoof Films Picks Cisco Eos for Web Management; independent U.K. documentary distributor will use Eos to build and manage web sites related to current and upcoming films. (press release)

Versus, DirecTV Finally Reconnect On Carriage Accord; after a more than six-month stalemate, DirecTV and Comcast have reached an agreement to return Versus to the top DBS provider’s air. (Multichannel News)

FCC Wants Broadcasters To Give Back 120 MHz As Part Of Broadband Plan; according to a copy of the plan, there is a near-term goal of freeing up 300 MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband within five years and 500 MHz within 10 years. (Multichannel News)

Yahoo’s Bradford Joins Demand Media; the content distributor has hired former Yahoo senior vice president Joanne Bradford as its chief revenue officer. (paidContent)

Justin.TV Turns To Law Professor Eric Goldman As It Battles Live Video Piracy; live streaming site retains law blogger as adviser on copyright issues. (TechCrunch)

[engadget] Nexus One hits for AT&T and Rogers 3G bands

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:24:00 -0700

That's it folks -- the heat is on. Today Google's Nexus One has hit the virtual shelves equipped for 3G action on AT&T and Rogers networks... free of any contracts or nasty carrier locks. The device can be purchased from Google's phone store right now for $529, and if your pocketbook is hurting later today -- don't say we didn't warn you. This is the moment you've been waiting for, right? Full PR after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Nexus One hits for AT&T and Rogers 3G bands

Nexus One hits for AT&T and Rogers 3G bands originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[VideoNuze] The FCC's National Broadband Plan: A First Look

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:17:15 -0700

The FCC released an executive summary of its "National Broadband Plan" yesterday (more details are expected today), which it has been developing for most of the last year at the direction of Congress. Regardless of your political beliefs, when the government decides to weigh in on key telecommunications issues, it's important to understand its positions and their potential implications. This is particularly true given how dynamic the digital, broadband and mobile landscapes are.

Based on my reading of the Executive Summary, here are my first reactions to some of the most important parts of the plan:

Spectrum reclamation/mobile use - One of the most anticipated pieces of the plan is what the FCC would propose to do with spectrum currently allocated to local broadcasters. Many believe that with the shift to digital delivery, broadcasters should give back some of their spectrum for more pressing uses - mobile being at the top of the list. On the other hand, broadcasters are seeking to keep their spectrum for HD and mobile TV services.

The FCC's proposal, to free up 500 megahertz of spectrum within 10 years, of which 300 megahertz would be used for mobile within 5 years, seems like a good starting point. It pragmatically recommends that the spectrum be freed up through "incentive auctions," with some of the proceeds going to broadcasters. This means broadcasters should be able to run business cases and economic comparisons on the pros and cons of keeping or giving back some of their spectrum, with the government tweaking the incentives to accomplish its bandwidth goals. Given the exploding interest in mobile devices and video apps (e.g. March Madness on iPhones), more bandwidth for mobile use is crucial to achieve.

Competition/transparency - While the FCC makes a host of transparency recommendations for broadband service providers, it wisely did not include "open access" mandates, where broadband ISPs' networks would be opened up for others to use. That would have upended broadband ISPs' business models, likely leading to years of litigation and little progress toward desired goals. The FCC's recommendation for things like market-by-market price and service benchmarking and service disclosures are consumer-friendly and not onerous to broadband ISPs. To the extent that consumers gain access to the information they'll help fuel competition as well.

Promote rural access - The FCC correctly wants to address the issue of broadband "haves" and "have nots," brought about by the hard economic realities of wiring less dense, rural communities. Much as the government sought to subsidize prior infrastructure projects like electricity and telephone service, the FCC now seeks to shift necessary money from the Universal Service Fund to support broadband buildouts in rural America. So long as the FCC policy doesn't spread to more suburban or urban markets that already have robust broadband infrastructure, this seems like sound policy.

Expand digital literacy - A small item in the overall summary, but one which could be quite impactful is the idea of creating a "National Digital Literacy Corps" to teach digital literacy and raise broadband adoption. The practical reality is that even the fastest broadband pipes mean little if citizens on the receiving end don't know how to use a computer or a web browser. Many people today live their lives digitally, but many others still don't. Incenting some of the former group to channel their energy and knowledge to the latter group is in everyone's interest.

The FCC understands how crucial broadband is and also articulates 6 longer-term goals (e.g. 100 million homes with 100 mbps access) which set the bar high for America to keep pace with other countries. Video delivery is already one of the key areas impacted by broadband adoption and under the new FCC plan it is poised for still further change. Overall, the FCC seems to recognize that broadband fuels further innovation in our economy and that it is important to be supportive of its continuing buildout. The Plan now has to make its way through reviews and approvals.

What do you think? Post a comment now (no sign-in required).

[programmableweb] Bing Maps Get More Visual Thanks to Flickr’s API

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:11:05 -0700

Perhaps that Bing-Yahoo search deal is paying off. Even though Maps and Flickr aren’t known to be part of the deal, Microsoft has connected its Bing Maps to the Flickr API in a unique way. It overlays geotagged Creative Commons photos over its current StreetSide imagery, as shown in the video embedded below.

It was first shown at the TED conference, so you know it’s a big deal. The Bing blog explains exactly why:

Why is this cool? You’re now able to see what that club looks like at night (is it really THAT scary?), see if you’re really going to get a good sunset at that B&B you’re looking to book, or check out the crowds on a Saturday morning at Pike Place Market in Seattle or get a view of the same market from decades prior.

The feature is similar to PhotoSynth, technology also shown off at TED and also incorporated into Bing Maps (nearly 20,000 of them). SearchEngineLand has a series of example photos that gives a good feel for this new feature.

You can give it a shot yourself, starting with this Pike Place tech preview (this feature requires Silverlight).

Bing search has been gaining a bit of market share lately, and using outside APIs, as Bing has done here with Flickr, could provide more ammunition in Microsoft’s battle against Google.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Flickr API Profile, 508 mashups

[gizmodo] PogoPlug Hard Drive Sharing Gadget Now Streams to Xbox and PS3 Across the Cloud [Cloud]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:10:57 -0700

Pogoplug, the gadget that puts a hard drive's content's online just got a new feature: sharing of media with Xbox 360 and PS3 across the local network or cloud. More »

[engadget] Pogoplug now streaming to Xbox 360 and PS3, handling offsite backups

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:00:00 -0700

It's been a long and painful four months since Pogoplug introduced its second generation NAS-ifier, but those who've been holding out for additional functionality can finally buy in. In an effort to cater to these so-called "gamers," the company has enabled its device to stream multimedia content directly to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles; users will be able to access, share and stream media directly to their console from any local or remotely located Pogoplug, and if all goes well, your console should actually see the drives connected to the Pogoplug and the contents of other shared Pogoplugs automatically. In related news, the unit is also now capable of pushing out offsite backups through a new version of Active Copy (shown above), so all that's left to do is hop online and suck down that tasty firmware update that should be waiting. Enjoy!

Gallery: Pogoplug second generation NAS device

Continue reading Pogoplug now streaming to Xbox 360 and PS3, handling offsite backups

Pogoplug now streaming to Xbox 360 and PS3, handling offsite backups originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[gizmodo] iCON: Curb Your Enthusiasm Meets Fake Steve Jobs [Apple]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:55:36 -0700

Fake Steve Jobs (Newsweek's Dan Lyons) is teaming up with director Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat) to produce a "TV" show on streaming service EPIX. More »

[readwriteweb] Nexus One Flopped, but Android Didn't

Sarah Perez — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:52:28 -0700

A new report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some interesting numbers about Google's first attempt to sell its own custom branded Android device, an HTC-built phone called the Nexus One. It's a flop. After 74 days, the same amount of time it took the original iPhone to sell its first million units, the Nexus One sold only 135,000.

But before you read too much into these numbers, thinking that it has any meaning with regard to the Android ecosystem as a whole, think again. Android market share is growing fast - it more than doubled from September to December of last year, for example. Oh, and the Droid, Android's fastest-selling phone to date? It actually beat the iPhone by day 74, Flurry says. All this new data shows is that Google is no Apple when it comes to marketing their own device.

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iPhone Killer? Hardly

In January of this year, Google hosted a press event to showcase its new Nexus One phone, a HTC device sold exclusively by Google on its own website in both a carrier-specific and unlocked version. When asked if the new phone was meant to be an iPhone killer, Google Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin simply replied that "choice is a good thing."

Prior to its launch, many technology insiders suspected (or rather, hoped) that the new "Google phone" would be exactly that - a killer, the first real rival to challenge Apple's dominance in the smartphone market. With features like support for multitasking, Google's own GPS navigation application, Google Voice (the VoIP app Apple banned from iTunes), a 3D photo gallery and, of course, heavy integration of Google services, the Nexus One had a feature lineup that Apple's iPhone couldn't beat.

Why Did the N1 Flop?

So what happened? Why don't the sales numbers match up with the excitement surrounding the device? The problem likely has to do with the fact that the phone is sold online only. You can't march into a store and purchase a Nexus One and, apparently, that's how most customers want to shop. Another problem is that the U.S. carrier for the N1 is T-Mobile, a much smaller network than either AT&T (iPhone) or Verizon (Droid). Also, the N1 isn't available worldwide like the iPhone is.

However, don't count the N1 out just yet. According to Google's website, it will arrive on Vodafone in Europe by spring 2010, and, in the U.S., Verizon will get a version of the device at the same time. Given how well the Droid has done for Verizon, the Nexus One may have a shot at boosting its sales soon.

Meanwhile, Android, as a platform, is doing quite well even if the Nexus One isn't. The Droid recently became the fastest-selling Android phone to date, beating myTouch 3G sales by more than four times; the Android market share has been growing by leaps and bounds; Android's application store is now the second largest, second only to Apple's iTunes; and, finally, some companies found their Android website visitors increasing by as much as 350% over the past year.

In the end, the Nexus One may not have succeeded the way Google had hoped, but clearly, Android itself has.

Discuss

[engadget] Engadget Mobile Podcast 039: MIX Edition - 03.16.2010

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:49:00 -0700

You've read the news - it's Windows Phone 7 Time, for real real. Chris and Nilay go after the innards of the new news in a variety of dimensions. It's all in the MIX, y'all.

Hosts: Chris Ziegler, Nilay Patel
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Daestro - Light Powered (Ghostly International)

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Engadget Mobile Podcast 039: MIX Edition - 03.16.2010 originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[digg] Netflix Watch Instantly streams to Windows Phone 7 Series!

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:27:31 -0700

We just got a quick at Netflix for Windows Phone 7 Series, one of the third-party apps Microsoft's showing off here at MIX10, and it looks... well, very Netflixy -- it's red to the bone. Unlike other mobile Netflix apps, this one's got Watch Instantly support and it looks great -- a real testament to the capabilities Microsoft's slinging.

[engadget] Samsung acquires 'Android' trademark for mobile hardware sales in Korea

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:26:00 -0700

As it turns out, Korea operates two separate trademark systems for hardware and software. So while this doesn't affect Android OS and its distribution, Samsung's recent acquisition of the Android hardware trademark does forbid other manufacturers from releasing Android-branded devices -- whether they be a mobile phone, a PMP, PDA, GPS, DMB, or any other snappily titled mobile computer -- into the Korean market. This will be felt by local competitors like LG, who has an Andro-1 OEM handset in the works that would infringe Samsung's newfound rights. The trademark previously belonged to local supplier Triplex, who'd held it since before Google's OS came into being, and apparently using just four characters of "Android" will be sufficient to offend the authorities. Sammy's clearly decided to aggressively pursue being the premier supplier of Android phones in its backyard, and rubbing LG's nose in it must've been the chocolate frosting atop that eclair.

[Thanks for the translation, Didier]

Samsung acquires 'Android' trademark for mobile hardware sales in Korea originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] TC50 Movie Search Startup AnyClip Launches, Without Many Clips

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:06:36 -0700

When movie clip search startup AnyClip demoed at last year’s TechCrunch50, it was one of the crowd pleasers. The concept was to be able to search for any line or scene in a movie, and the site would take you to that exact moment and play the clip. The demo looked great, but could the startup actually get the movie studios to license their films? Sean Parker, one of the judges on the panel noted: “This is the kind of thing that absolutely should happen. But it will take you twice as long to make those deals.”

Parker turned out to be right. AnyClip continues to negotiate with the studios, but decided not to wait for those deals to open up its service. Yesterday, it launched in a public beta, without many actual video clips. There are some older and public domain movies, licensed from the Film Chest catalog, such as the classic Reefer Madness. Search for “faster, faster” and up comes the piano scene from Reefer Madness.

But AnyClip works even for movies where it cannot show the clips. Search for “I drink your milkshake” and the dialogue from the scene in There Will Be Blood comes up as a result. Or you can search for “ferris wheel” scenes, where a ferris wheel appears in the scene but is not necessarily mentioned in the dialogue.

AnyClip has indexed 2,000 movies so far. CEO Aaron Cohen estimates that “two percent of all searches appear to be for 8,000 Hollywood films and 1,000 actors.” Creating really deep meta data around movie clips and exposing those to search engines should be enough to get traffic growing simply as movie quotes database. But the ultimate appeal of AnyClip is the ability to start playing the movie clip at the exact moment you are looking for and share those clips. It’s going to happen. Rival MovieClips.com, which launched in December, has already struck licensing deals for 12,000 clips. Those are predetermined clips, however. AnyClip still wants to provide data on, literally, any clip.

At the same time, the movie studios are paying companies to index their digital archives for their own internal purposes. Cohen is hoping to do a trade: give them the metadata on their catalogs for free in return for the ability to promote their films. Maybe if AnyClip gets big enough, they will start paying attention.

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AnyClip

MOVIECLIPS

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[techcrunch] Fake Steve Jobs, Larry Charles Working On EPIX Silicon Valley Comedy Series

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:02:20 -0700

Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer, book author and creator of the Fake Steve Jobs persona, is currently writing a pilot script for a comedy series on Silicon Valley for entertainment channel and movie streaming network EPIX.

Larry Charles of Seinfeld, Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat and Brüno fame will be directing the pilot and overseeing the script development. The show is going to be called “iCON” and will be a half-hour, single-camera style satire.

EPIX, a service from Viacom, its Paramount Pictures unit Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate, is working with Media Rights Capital to develop the series, which it promises it will “pull out all stops” for and aims it to be a “riotous satire of Silicon Valley and its most powerful figures”. Notably, EPIX recently landed its fourth major cable deal by signing up Charter Communications, after sealing deals with Cox, Mediacon and Verizon FIOS.

Deadline has more on what the series will be about:

The show’s lead charcter (SIC), Tom Rhodes, is a composite of that Silicon Valley titan, and the comedy is described as a savage satire, a study of ego, power and greed.

And:

MRC will serve as the studio and financier. The company said it had several bidders for the property, but chose EPIX because Charles could be as edgy as he wanted to be. The feeling is that the show could put EPIX on the map the way series like Mad Men did for AMC, Weeds for Showtime, and Burn Notice for USA. Charles, who worked with MRC on the Baron Cohen films, will be swinging for the fences.

We. Cannot. Wait.

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EPIX

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[engadget] Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z review

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:02:00 -0700

The hallowed Think branding finally spread out to the land of AIOs earlier this year and we just had to wrap our paws around some of that signature matte black plastic to see what's what. The ThinkCentre A70z represents Lenovo's most direct assault on the eco-conscious office manager's checkbook, coming as it does with minimal packaging, built out of recycled and recyclable materials, and significant energy savings relative to orthodox desktops. In our time with it, we found the A70z to be a well built and capable little rig, but the question you most probably want answered is whether the premium branding we associate with the tank-like ThinkPads can be trusted to deliver a similar superiority in hardware and construction in the all-in-one arena. Click past the break for the answer.

Gallery: ThinkCentre A70z review

Continue reading Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z review

Lenovo ThinkCentre A70z review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[NewTeeVee] Thriller Tyranny Proves the Possibility of Low-Budget Sci-Fi

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:00:32 -0700

Before we understand where we’re going, we have to know where we’ve been — and why we know what’s going to happen. That seems to be the premise, anyway, behind the so-far intriguing sci-fi thriller Tyranny, which premiered last week on Koldcast.

Tyranny is slow to start thanks to an extended prologue/credits sequence, but after a minute or so we get down to business. Opening in Prague in the year 2011, we meet Daniel McCarthy (John Beck Hofman), whose use of technology to get a glimpse of the future has made him an outcast, the leader of a rebellion and a prisoner of Dr. Malik (Enrico Piazza).

Trying to sort out the credits on Tyranny might give you a bit of a headache, as the official site makes a big deal about how the series is the unfinished work of McCarthy, who “disappeared” in 2009, but had left behind enough raw footage for his friend Max to assemble. (In truth, Hofman, who is uncredited as the series star, is also its creator.)

This sort of deceit is admirable for trying to play with the concept of narrative online, not to mention introducing a potential ARG element. Unfortunately, that “backstory” doesn’t correspond at all with the actual series, which is conventionally filmed like fiction — did Daniel use a three-camera set-up to capture video of Dr. Malik’s interrogation? The approach would make sense were the show a lonelygirl15-style vlog drama, but doesn’t match with the series as it stands. Daniel’s journals, which track a filmmaker’s career and his excitement about Tyranny as an upcoming feature film, only add to the confusion.

However, the genius of setting your show in the extremely not-too-distant future is that it’s usually not too hard to pull off the look, visually — production design doesn’t require too much alteration from a modern look in order to be believable. And Tyranny is one of those shows that looks great despite clearly not being a massive production, with many locations feeling found rather than constructed and minimal yet effective touches of world-building. The effect is similar to other relatively low-budget thrillers with sci-fi twists, such as the complex indie favorite Primer — proof that you don’t need a lot of money to tell a story in this genre.

Tyranny is taking the web series to feature film approach, pinning its hopes for distribution on how the series performs. And for a project that has a lot of feature film DNA, it’s pretty well-structured episodically. However, it’s very hard to get a sense of how Daniel’s claims that he’s the leader of an underground resistance movement connect with the actual narrative so far, which is taking its sweet time to unfurl.

In the three episodes provided for review, the focus is on Daniel’s experiments with the human brain – how the world began crumbling, and whether Daniel could have done anything to stop it, are the show’s big unanswered questions. Audiences eagerly needing answers may find their patience tried.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): By The Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series

[gizmodo] ZumoDrive Apps Stream Media and Access Documents on Your Android, Palm Pre, or iPhone [Apps]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:00:00 -0700

Whether you're carrying an iPhone, Android or Palm Pre device, there's an app available to access ZumoDrive's cloud service. This means that you can stream nearly all your media and view most documents over Wi-Fi, 3G, and Edge. More »

[techcrunch] ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android And Palm Devices

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:57:19 -0700

File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive is expanding its mobile offerings today with free applications for Android and Palm phones. While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service includes a slightly different twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

The startup launched an iPhone app last year, which let users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. The Android and Palm apps include much of the same functionality. The apps allows users to sync their entire iTunes library on their phones even though the songs are not locally saved. Plus, ZumoDrive allows you to import your files. photos albums and videos onto your Android and Palm phones.

Additional features include video streaming from ZumoDrive directly to devices in MP4, H.264 format, music organized by artist, albums, and even playlists created on other devices, the ability to stream music in the background and listen to music over both 3G or EDGE networks.
Additionally you can access and view Microsoft Office documents and PDF files.

ZumoDrive has been gaining traction over the past year. Fresh off of a $1.5 million funding round, the startup scored a deal with HP in January to to power the backend of the technology giant’s CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks.

Last year, ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service was also upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.

Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.

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ZumoDrive

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[gizmodo] iPod Shuffle Owner Files Lawsuit Against Apple For Not Being Sweat-Resistant [Apple]

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:50:50 -0700

Imagine being so angry at your $59 iPod Shuffle conking out, that you'd file a lawsuit against Apple. He must have a serious lack of shame too, as his reason for the Shuffle breaking? It wasn't immune to his sweat. More »

[engadget] Rumor mill says Nintendo DS2 might be headed for E3 unveiling

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:41:00 -0700

Hot on the heels of the recent DSi XL appearance, rumors are swirling that Nintendo is preparing to announce a second version of the DS -- the DS2, if you will -- at E3 in June. Over on RPad they're spilling the beans about the supposed device, including the fact that it'll boast two larger, higher resolutions screens, an accelerometer, and it will also supposedly run on an NVIDIA Tegra chip. Finally, RPad is also reporting that they spoke with developers who say their games will be finished by the end of the year... leading us all to speculate the the unannounced successor could, possibly, be announced at E3, then available by the end of the year. Of course, this info's all 100 percent unofficial, so take everything with a grain of salt, relax, and we'll let you know as soon as we hear something more solid.

Rumor mill says Nintendo DS2 might be headed for E3 unveiling originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[readwriteweb] NPR and WSJ Building iPad-Only Websites

Sarah Perez — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:32:51 -0700

The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio (NPR) will be launching custom-built iPad-only websites next month when the new Apple slate computer known as the iPad is made available for sale. Both sites will automatically detect when web surfers arrive via an iPad device and will then show those visitors a special version of the site, customized exclusively for the iPad. How exactly will these sites compare to the web pages regular site visitors see? There's just one difference: they won't feature any Adobe Flash technology.

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NPR's New iPad Site: Entirely Flash Free

According to reports from MediaMemo, NPR is removing all traces of Adobe Flash, which powers its website's media and graphics, from its iPad-only version. Although many news organizations use Flash to display multimedia presentations and audio and video content, NPR in particular was going to be heavily affected by Apple's refusal to support Flash on the new iPad devices. That's because a key feature on NPR's website is its Flash-based audio player, something that's featured on nearly every webpage site-wide.

Kinsey Wilson, senior vice president and general manager of NPR Digital Media, recently told Poynter that their developers decided to work around the problem by implementing an HTML5-based player instead. Wilson also noted that the company has a "launch sponsor" for the iPad-only site, since it won't be able to support web ads, which are often coded in Flash.

WSJ: A Flash-Free Front Page

The Wall Street Journal, a News Corp. property, is also building an iPad-only version of their site - well, actually just an iPad-only front page. Unlike NPR's iPad site, which will be 100% Flash-free, WSJ visitors who follow links deeper into the website will soon discover that not all its page have been converted. Here, they'll run into the soon-to-be-infamous "blue box," the lego-like symbol that appears where a Flash content should have been.

There aren't any demos or mockups of these new websites available, so it's unknown at this time if they're being changed in other ways to accommodate iPad visitors. That is to say, it's unknown if they will be exact replicas of the non-iPad versions but just with the Flash content removed, or if they will perhaps sport an entirely new design.

Start of a New Trend?

With these two leading media companies making this sort of change, it's reasonable to imagine that others will soon follow. And while iPad owners will certainly appreciate the adjustments - that blue lego is such an eyesore, after all - the need for so many custom versions of the same site may become a burden on businesses who need to reach a wide audience.

Today, companies are already tasked with creating a traditional website, a mobile website and sometimes a customized mobile website designed just for iPhone visitors. Now there's the iPad-only website to code for and soon there may be another one, too. Recent news reports state that Amazon is working on a new web browser just for their Kindle e-Reader. Will that be yet another website needing its own custom version?

So Many Versions of the Same Site!

It's bad enough that the mobile application ecosystem itself is so fragmented - developers have several platforms to code for from the iPhone to Android, plus Palm, Windows Mobile - including the new Windows Phone 7 Series, Symbian and Blackberry, to name a few. Now it seems they'll have a number of unique mobile devices to support as well?

The web was supposed to be the one unifying "platform" that works anywhere, on any device, no matter what hardware is used to access it. But thanks to varying screen sizes and differing feature sets (most notably Apple's refusal to allow Flash on their mobile devices), those who want to provide compelling content to all their site visitors will be forced to re-code their site multiple times. Publishers without the resources to do so will have to make a tough choice - remove the unsupported content and the media that makes it slow to load on mobile devices entirely? Or leave it be and risk losing their mobile audience instead? That's a "Sophie's Choice" no one wants to make. Unfortunately, in a down economy where money is tight, that may be just what happens.

Discuss

[engadget] AirStash brings the WiFi, neglects the storage, for a cent under $100

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:19:00 -0700

When we last saw the AirStash, it was keeping its mystique about it and refusing to disclose any salient details beyond the fact that it'll function as a wireless SD/SDHC card reader. Today, the fog of war is lifted with the news that the AirStash is now officially on sale for $99.99, and will come with a battery good for five hours of continuous data streaming. Marketed primarily at iPhone OS devices, it creates a wireless network that allows any WiFi and browser-equipped computer to access the storage cards within it. The UI is built around HTML5 and recharging is done via a USB connection, which also turns the AirStash into a simple SDHC card adapter when plugged in. Check out our hands-on with it from CES over here and look for a full review coming up shortly. We do care so very deeply our portable storage.

AirStash brings the WiFi, neglects the storage, for a cent under $100 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[yahoo] Twitter Will Stream Tweets Across Popular Web Sites (NewsFactor)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:14:52 -0700

NewsFactor - In a move to broaden its reach across the Internet, Twitter on Monday announced a new feature that lets users send and receive 140-character messages while surfing the web. Dubbed @anywhere, Twitter's latest service gives sites like Amazon.com, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC, The New York Times, Yahoo and YouTube the ability to stream the millions of daily tweets Twitter users send every day.

[NewTeeVee] The Masters Will Be Shown in 3-D, on TV and Online

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:32 -0700

The 2010 Masters Tournament, which kicks off with broadcasts from CBS and ESPN beginning on April 7, will be made available in 3-D, a first for the tournament and for the 3-D TV industry in general. The event will be aired live in 3-D by Comcast and also viewable at the Masters web site, making it the first live 3-D broadcast of a major sporting event, as well as the first live simulcast of an event in 3-D online.

Comcast subscribers with new 3D-TVs will be able to watch the Masters through a dedicated channel that will show about two hours of live broadcasts per day. The channel, which is made possible through a partnership with the Augusta National Golf Club, will have different camera angles than the broadcast coverage in order to accentuate the 3-D experience.

To get the 3-D video into consumer living rooms, Comcast is using its fiber network to carry a 3-D production feed to its own media center, where the cable company will edit and package the feed for distribution both to its subscribers as well as to the Masters web site. Sony and IBM are also participating in helping to make the 3-D feed available to viewers.

While the 3-D feed in TV will only be available to Comcast subscribers — and furthermore only viewable by those who also have 3D-TVs — the Masters will also be available in 3-D online. Using a 3-D media player, monitor and glasses, viewers will also be able to watch the feed at www.masters.com.

3D-TVs were all the rage at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but despite the range of new products that will (SONN? OR ALREADY?) be appearing on the market, there’s still a question as to whether consumers will buy them given there’s still not a whole lot of content available to be viewed in 3-D. But live sporting events like the Masters becoming available in 3-D could help change that.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

Are We Putting the 3-D Cart Before the Horse? (subscription required)

[techcrunch] Shorthand Mobile Launches TextApps To Bring Web Content To Basic Mobile Phones

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:30 -0700

TechCrunch50 2008 DemoPit company Shorthand Mobile (formerly Smart Touch) aims to help consumers who don’t use mobile data plans to access SMS and web content. Upon launch in 2008, the startup had developed a suite of basic widgets for mobile phones that visualize SMS services, allowing users to navigate through an intuitive menu. Today, Shorthand Mobile is launching TextApps, a new category of apps that deliver content from websites via SMS in a rich, interactive interface, aiming to expand the capabilities of non-smartphones and provide access to web content for mobile users without data plans.

Launching in beta today on select Motorola and Nokia handsets on AT&T and on Windows Mobile phones, Shorthand TextApps use SMS to expand access to top brands and mobile content including social networks, local search, sports scores, weather forecasts, movie times, news and entertainment. TextApps is an app you download which then creates a more intuitive UI for text-based apps.

Once you download Shorthand, it uses your SMS text messaging plan to connect you to the web content you want. Apps in the TextApps library include CitySearch, Netflix, Facebook Mobile, Twitter, The New York Times and Yelp. Of course, Facebook, Twitter and others have independently integrate with SMS for their sites but Shorthand claims to add more functionality by almost recreating a basic smartphone app. Shorthand is also now available in India on all major carriers and will launch in Brazil this spring. The starup will offer localized TextApps for these countries. Shorthand is free to download, but you will be charged for SMS messages via your SMS plan with your carrier.

As we wrote in our initial review, year, the technology behind is very basic so users shouldn’t expect to see a iPhone like Facebook-app on their phone with TextApps. That being said, the fact that Shorthand has struck deals with Nokia and Motorola to include its offering on their phones and could become a useful way to incorporate extra functionality into basic mobile phones.

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[slashdot] Blazing Fast Password Recovery With New ATI Cards

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:55:00 -0700

An anonymous reader writes "ElcomSoft accelerates the recovery of Wi-Fi passwords and password-protected iPhone and iPod backups by using ATI video cards. The support of ATI Radeon 5000 series video accelerators allows ElcomSoft to perform password recovery up to 20 times faster compared to Intel top of the line quad-core CPUs, and up to two times faster compared to enterprise-level NVIDIA Tesla solutions. Benchmarks performed by ElcomSoft demonstrate that ATI Radeon HD5970 accelerated password recovery works up to 20 times faster than Core i7-960, Intel's current top of the line CPU unit."

[engadget] World's first portable Sega Saturn has a face only a gamer could love

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:54:00 -0700

We'll start by saying that this perhaps the most aesthetically challenged portable console we've ever seen, and while it is a bit more slim than that "portable" GameCube we spied a few years back, it too is hardly pocketable. So why cover it? Because it's the first and only legitimate way to get your Fighters Megamix fix while on the go. (No, the Game.com version does not count). It was created by a modder who goes by the handle Evil Nod over at the benheck.com forums and contains what looks to be a full-sized console re-skinned and surrounded by a one of the system's optional analog controllers split in two. There's a 7-inch screen front and center and a nine volt battery 'round he back. The result ain't pretty, but we'd let it spin our Panzer Dragoon collection anytime.

[Thanks, ttsgeb]

World's first portable Sega Saturn has a face only a gamer could love originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] This Is Not My Beautiful 3D Television: How Gaming Will Change The 3D Equation

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:40:08 -0700

I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit in the past few weeks and Adam Frucci wrote something that caught my attention, concentrating my thoughts the way a seed crystal builds boules of material in the Czochralski process.

Gaming will make or break 3D. I don’t care if James Cameron sends miniature 3D cameras into Leonardo DiCaprio’s urethra during his “king of the world” scene in the new 3D version of Titanic: there will be no compelling reason to upgrade your entire TV set-up to watch 3D movies. Why will you buy a 3D set-up? For gaming and you’ll probably buy a 3D-capable PC before you buy a 3D-capable TV.

[engadget] Sanyo surrounds Tokyo with Eneloop charging stations and bikes to match

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:33:00 -0700

Renting a bike in most urban areas of the US is a difficult proposition. In Japan not only can you easily rent a bike, you can now rent an electric bike -- a solar powered electric bike to boot. Sanyo has dropped Eneloop stations on three locations around the Setagaya ward of Tokyo, each having 100 of the company's electric rides on offer for passers by to borrow (for a sadly undisclosed fee). When the bikes aren't being pedaled around town they'll sit in the station, being recharged by 46 square meters of solar panels that not only juice up batteries but also provide LED lighting for the station itself. While Sanyo does offer some solar stations for Eneloop owners, these look to be for renters only, meaning those who've bought their own will have to take themselves and their little baskets somewhere else.

Sanyo surrounds Tokyo with Eneloop charging stations and bikes to match originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Mac virtualization face-off: VMware Fusion 3 vs. Parallels Desktop 5 (video)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:11:00 -0700

With Steam officially hitting Mac in just a few weeks many Apple gamers have suddenly lost their need to emulate. But, for those who are hoping to get busy in a little Command & Conquer 4 under Snow Leopard this week -- or any of the other myriad of PC-only gaming options -- virtualization is the only way to go -- short of rebooting into Boot Camp, of course. Parallels is the most commonly used solution, but how does VMware's Fusion 3 stack up for gaming? Not too well, as it turns out. MacTech sat the two down together on matching Mac hardware and ran them through a number of benchmarks, including 3DMark. The results of that test fall heavily in the favor of Parallels, offering better framerates and far more consistent visuals, which you can see for yourself in a video below. Most of the many, many other tests run favor that option as well, but we won't spoil all eight pages worth of results just waiting for you on the other end of that source link.

Continue reading Mac virtualization face-off: VMware Fusion 3 vs. Parallels Desktop 5 (video)

Mac virtualization face-off: VMware Fusion 3 vs. Parallels Desktop 5 (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Cowon J3 PMP looks cool in its brushed metal case

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:44:00 -0700

Hot on the heels of giving our opinion on Cowon's (relatively) big-screened V5 media player we have some news on the next player in line from the company. It's called the J3 and, while Cowon has officially acknowledged its existence, its specifications have only been unveiled thanks to what looks to be an internationally coordinated effort on behalf of gadget lovers everywhere. The J3 is said to have a 3.3-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a resolution of 480 x 272, pulling content from 4, 8, or 16GB of internal storage -- content that can also be routed to a TV. There'll be Bluetooth to pump tunes wirelessly and a new metal case that's said to improve the quality feel of the player. That, of course, we won't know about until we can feel one of the things, and according to the company some folks will be able to do just that before the month is through.

Cowon J3 PMP looks cool in its brushed metal case originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Cynergy's magazine kiosk concept serves up digital content a la carte (video)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:21:00 -0700

Not that we've never seen Surface-like touch tables interacting with mobile devices before, but now that the whole thing is being repackaged as "the magazine stand of the future" and those trendy tablets are involved, we might as well have a look. Cynergy is demonstrating a seamless method for purchasing digital content from one of these kiosks using your e-reader or tablet pc. It's just a matter of plopping your device -- which already knows your identity and available credit -- atop the display table and then flicking the particular magazine or newspaper you want onto your storage. It looks effortless and all, but it also requires that you have the "custom designed and built" software from Cynergy, which you'll have to pump funds into in order to get the seamlessness going. We don't know how we feel about yet another proprietary ecosystem floating about, but you can make your own mind up after watching the video after the break.

Continue reading Cynergy's magazine kiosk concept serves up digital content a la carte (video)

Cynergy's magazine kiosk concept serves up digital content a la carte (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] Facebook Kicks Off Implementation Of QR Codes

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:02:12 -0700

I can’t see this on my own Facebook profile yet, but we’ve gotten a number of tips in our inbox in the past 10 minutes so it’s safe to assume it’s not a hoax or anything: Facebook appears to have started enabling users to generate custom two-dimensional QR codes.

From the looks of the screenshot embedded above, there are two types of QR codes: a personal barcode or a “status QR barcode”. This also seems to appear on Facebook Fan Pages.

Judging from the tweets about this, the QR codes don’t seem to actually function yet, and the links on pages appear to come and go.

We’re trying to get more information and will update accordingly.

Update – Facebook gave us the boilerplate response:

“We’re always testing various features on the site, but we have nothing more to share at this time.”

In case you’re not familiar with QR codes: QR is short for Quick Response (because they can be read quickly by a mobile phone through its camera). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more.

QR codes are generally more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store much more data. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a scanner to ‘read’ them, most modern mobile phones can convert them and there are applications out there for smartphone that don’t support native QR code scanning.

Imagine wearing the link to your Facebook profile on your t-shirt – this is what that would look like when converted to a QR code:

(Thanks to Marco Schierhorn for the tip and screenshot – bottom image via Webometric Thoughts)

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[engadget] Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:00:00 -0700

Well it's about time, Spring Design! After missing its February ship date, the company is finally ready for you to whip out the plastic and pre-order its Alex -- that dual-screen, Android-based ereader we liked so much at CES. While you can shell out the $399 today, you'll still have to wait until mid-April for the mailman to drop off the package. We'd like to say the wait stops there, but we've also learned that early buyers won't have access to the promised Borders eBook store until June. When we chatted with Spring Design CEO Priscilla Lu last week she confirmed that Borders will officially launch its store in the "June time frame," which will be around the very same time that the 3G version of the Alex will be ready to hit the market -- at least there's access to Google Books and an micro-SD card slot for sideloading in the meantime. With so much coming down the pike it may be worth waiting a bit more time for this one, but our own Alex arrived just last night so no matter what it'd behoove you to wait a few days for our review before you hit the source link to pre-order.

Update: Well, this is odd. Even though this news hit the wires today, the shop page on Spring Design's website is definitely non-functional right now. Instead, you'll see a message to check back soon. We'll keep doing just that until we see signs of life... or hear otherwise.

Update 2: And we're back...the pre-order page is finally up!

Gallery: Spring Design Alex unboxing

Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Cabestan's Nostromo watch is geared for success

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:42:00 -0700

You might think, given our recent bout of attentiveness toward wristwear, that we're starting to develop an Enwatchet subsection, but that's not entirely accurate. It's just that when we come across such wild and quirky designs, there's nothing to be done but share them with the world. Case in point: the Cabestan Nostromo watch, inspired by the ship from the Alien movie. In the words of its own designers, the Nostromo combines traditional watchmaking with "retro-futuristic audacity," and when we gaze upon its exposed vertical mechanics, we can't exactly argue otherwise. With a titanium case, Superluminova phosphorescent coating for dusky situations, and side windows (see them after the break), this is as appealing a watch as any geek can dare to imagine. Sure, you could probably buy a sports car for less than the 150,000 Swiss Francs ($141,400 in American currency) asking price, but it's not like you can strap a Porsche to your wrist, now is it?

Continue reading Cabestan's Nostromo watch is geared for success

Cabestan's Nostromo watch is geared for success originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Nokia: MeeGo "door is not closed" on N900

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:19:00 -0700

Now that we have clarity with regard to a Windows Phone 7 update on the HD2 (sorry, folks), let's move on to the next contentious platform: Nokia's N900 and MeeGo. As Nokia's only Cortex-A8 handset, there's plenty of hope that Nokia sees fit to upgrade the N900 to MeeGo once the unified Maemo and Moblin OS is ready for consumers. Hope all but crushed yesterday after CNET reported the following from an unnamed, but apparently official Nokia source:

"Maemo on Nokia N900 is not upgradeable to MeeGo."

We ran this past Ray Haddow, Senior Manager within Nokia Communications who took the quote back to the project team in Finland. According to Ray, the "the door is not closed" with regard to MeeGo on the N900 -- a final decision has not been made. This also echos the words of Valtteri Halla when he announced the MeeGo repository in early March. In response to questions at the time, this one-bodied half of the MeeGo Technical Steering Group had this to day:

"N900 is a natural tool for Nokia to drive MeeGo support for our designs and for the ARM CPU architecture in general. We want to have baseline HW that is powerful, easily available for anyone and form-factor stuff so that one HW works for most platform and application development needs.

That said, please do not take this yet as a commitment to fully productise MeeGo on N900. I am quite confident that we will end up having a really good developer distro for N900 already but committing to stabilise a consumer-grade MeeGo 1.0 (first half this year) for N900 is another story. That is a product business decision beyond my scope. Also, we do not yet know about MeeGo 1 release content. I am not yet sure if I would be personally ready to let my Maemo5 go for the first MeeGo release in my daily N900 use. Let's see."

So, looks like another long game of wait and see, eh?

Nokia: MeeGo "door is not closed" on N900 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[NewTeeVee] DivX Targets Sneakernet With New Release

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:00:52 -0700

DivX Inc. is releasing a new version of its media player today that tries to bring web video downloads to legacy devices without Internet connectivity. The new DivX player, which is part of a free software suite called DivX Plus, can convert downloaded videos and transfer them to USB drives or burn CDs or DVDs to play on DVD or Blu-ray players, DivX-compatible TV sets or Sony’s PlayStation 3.

The company also revamped all of its other products as part of the DivX Plus launch. Most notable are some additions to the DivX codec pack that make it possible to play 1080p H.264 videos on some netbook models through DXVA hardware acceleration, as well as a free MKV converter that should make the HD container format even more popular.

For a while the company has been touting the more than 250 million DivX-certified devices in the market place. However, most of these devices are legacy DVD players and similar hardware that’s capable of playing back DivX files. Many consumers probably don’t even know that their devices are DivX-certified, or they wouldn’t know how to convert a movie they recently downloaded to play on their DVD player.

DivX’s new Plus player wants to take care of these issues by simplifying file conversion with DivX devices in mind, and it actually seems to work pretty well, judging from a few tests I was able to do in recent days.

Users simply have to click on the device type of their choice, select whether they’d like to burn a disk or transfer media via USB drive, find a file they’d want to transfer — and have a little bit of patience, depending on the power of their machine. I successfully burned a couple of CDs and DVDs with converted files and was able to play them on an older DVD player without any hiccups.

Of course, DivX isn’t the first company to enable the sneakernet through media conversion tools. BitTorrent client maker Vuze has been offering its users the ability to convert files for playback on iPods, TiVo DVRs and Apple TVs, amongst other things, and doubleTwist has put a lot of energy into a client that syncs with PSPs and iPods as well as Blackberry and Android mobile phones. Company representatives told me that the DivX Plus player will soon also support conversion for and syncing with DivX-certified cell phones, but the goal for this version was to bridge the gap to many devices that are already in people’s living rooms.

That’s a smart move for the company. DivX recently made headlines with its new TV platform, and it has been trying to get more Hollywood content through partnerships with VOD vendors like CinemaNow. However, VOD isn’t bringing in big bucks for anyone yet, and DivX might have a hard time competing with heavyweights like Vudu in the connected TV platform game. The company’s bread and butter is still its codec and video player, and making those more useful by leveraging the huge legacy hardware base already out there might just be what DivX needs to stay relevant.

Related content on GigaOm Pro: For Wal-mart, There’s More to Vudu Than VOD (subscription required)

[engadget] Chinese manufacturer sticks IP webcam on robot vacuum, calls it a day

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:59:00 -0700

WiFi-controlled sentry robots have been our playthings for a few years now, but sure as Sunday morning, they don't help us get much work done. Why would you, when you can discreetly spy on your house, kids and neighbors from the convenience of a web browser? That's what we thought. But now, there's a robot to assuade your guilty conscience: the G182, a complete VoIP webcam system built on top of a pseudo-Roomba. Sure, a Roomba-cam isn't really anything new, but while you wait for the real deal to shake off its economic funk (if it ever does), this yellow disc is the next best thing. For the low, low price of $500, you can once again feel like you're accomplishing something -- vacuuming floors and yelling at the kids to do chores -- while dodging the daily grind. Full specs and loads more pics at the source link.

Chinese manufacturer sticks IP webcam on robot vacuum, calls it a day originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[techcrunch] Questetra Helps Managing Business Processes Via The Web, Supports Google Apps

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:32:02 -0700

Which employee does what, when, how and with which tools? That’s a critical question for many companies, which usually rely on business process management (BPM) solutions to visualize, streamline, and implement predefined workflows. Just last month, enterprise SaaS behemoth Salesforce.com rolled out a new BPM tool, Visual Process Manager – only to be now challenged by a small startup called Questetra, which thinks its eponymous solution can stack up.

The way Questetra’s BPM suite (and similar products) work is that users chart business workflows to identify redundancies, “bottle necks” or conflicts in future company processes. Once the design is ready, the designer can authorize other users to revise the system themselves, meaning these designs are then put to actual use in a work environment.

The applicant in the reimbursement process visualized below, for instance, submits a request through the Flash application, which then notifies his supervisor who can then approve and send the request to the accounting division for a final check (there’s actually a whole bunch of different task execution functions built into the application). All actions can be managed via a user-specific dashboard, and just like with Salesforce.com’s solution, for example, Questetra users don’t need to deal with any code.

Apart from relatively low pricing and ease of use, Questetra says the “killer feature” of their suite is that it’s 100% web-based, meaning separate software isn’t required to design a process or perform a task. Another key selling point is the seamless integration with Google Apps (in the SaaS version, users can log in with their existing Google accounts and easily export data to Google Docs).

Questetra, which says their suite is especially interesting for companies with 20 to 200 employees, offers a self-hosted (downloadable) edition and an SaaS solution for $10 per user per month (there’s also a trial version and a number of free sample workflows). It’s also one of the first applications distributed through the Google Apps Marketplace that launched just last week.

Questetra, which is based in Kyoto/Japan, is currently working on mobile-friendly features and an API to be rolled out in the near future. Apart from Salesforce.com’s Visual Process Manager, the Questetra BPM suite competes with SAP’s Visual Composer, Appian, and Intalio, amongst others.

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[engadget] Apple vs. Google gets personal: 'Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt' (video)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:21:00 -0700

Image Credit: Daniel Adel, New York Times

Nothing sells papers (or ads) like turning a little corporate competition into something personal. Case in point, a New York Times piece from the weekend titled "Apple's Spat With Google Is Getting Personal," that opened with this rather ominous, one-sentence paragraph:

"It looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

Cue the orchestra. The lengthy piece chronicling the relationship between the Silicon Valley titans was formed by two dozen interviews with industry watchers, investors, and current and former employees. It covers a timeline spread that began with Google and Apple working in harmony to prevent Microsoft's domination of online services and mobile devices, and ends with Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC that reeks of a proxy battle against Android and Google. According to the NYT then, the heart of the dispute is betrayal, or Jobs' belief that Schmidt (a former Apple board member) "picked his pocket" by developing cellphones that "physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone." Here's how one especially feisty encounter is described:

"At one particularly heated meeting in 2008 on Google's campus, Mr. Jobs angrily told Google executives that if they deployed a version of multitouch - the popular iPhone feature that allows users to control their devices with flicks of their fingers - he would sue. Two people briefed on the meeting described it as "fierce" and "heated.""

And that's just the beginning. Read the rest after the break.

Continue reading Apple vs. Google gets personal: 'Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt' (video)

Apple vs. Google gets personal: 'Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt' (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 06:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[readwriteweb] POLL: What's the Best Way to Support Startups, Services or Cash?

Jolie O'Dell — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:03:12 -0700

After wrapping up a panel with a gamut of pro- and anti-VC types at SXSW, I'm left wondering why there aren't more services-oriented startup firms.

Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they're still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup?

Sponsor

The fact is, almost every startup needs a little help. Maybe you get that help from the bank of Mom and Dad; maybe you get that help from your good friends at Mastercard. Often, you get that help from folks who want equity; you end up trading part of your assumed long-term success for resources you need in the short term.

We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we're also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship.

But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke's SproutBox or Marcus Whitney's Remarkable Wit. These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it.

So, we're interested to know from our friends in startups who aren't taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We'll be following up soon based on the results.

Discuss

[engadget] Kingston's 2,400MHz HyperX memory kit offers the world's fastest Intel-certified RAM

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:54:00 -0700

For those among us finding it hard to decide what blisteringly fast DDR3 sticks to pair with their Core i7, Intel has decided to do its own compatibility certification list (see link below). And since the happiest memory maker is usually the one atop the pile, we have to imagine Kingston is feeling pretty sunny right now, as its 2.4GHz HyperX memory kit has scooped the top spot away from Corsair's 2.33GHz offering. Running at 1.65 volts and offering 9-11-9-27-2 timings, this is now officially the RAM to own if you're after headline-grabbing stock speeds. We also love the fact Kingston acknowledges "benchmarkers" as a distinct group alongside gamers and enthusiasts -- finally some appreciation for those misunderstood souls. Whatever you describe yourself as, you'll be able to get on the latest speed bandwagon in the second quarter of this year. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Kingston's 2,400MHz HyperX memory kit offers the world's fastest Intel-certified RAM

Kingston's 2,400MHz HyperX memory kit offers the world's fastest Intel-certified RAM originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] AUO's 65-inch 3D HDTV panel headed for the conveyer belt in 2H 2010, boasts polarized specs

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:16:00 -0700

While it might have been a pipe dream back in '09, Taiwanese display manufacturer AU Optronics is firmly committed to blasting our eyeballs in 2010, with a monstrous 65-inch HD LCD panel ready for all the 3D and pseudo-3D content (we're looking at you, G-Force) you have on offer. AUO isn't hedging its bets on this one, either; at FPD China 2010, the company announced that they're using a polarized solution with cheap, $2 to 3 glasses to generate the 3D effect. Sure, polarized is the preferred method for most theatres, but it's often more expensive than active shutter tech for an in-home user -- and can come with some serious visual tradeoffs like permanent ghosting or halved vertical resolution. We won't know for sure until we get hands-on, but either way, expect to see AUO's panels in a branded 3D HDTV near you early next year, or just a few months before HDI drops a 103-inch monster of its own.

AUO's 65-inch 3D HDTV panel headed for the conveyer belt in 2H 2010, boasts polarized specs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Sky TV buys 15,000 3DTVs from LG for live sports broadcasts in public venues

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:24:00 -0700

LG is today proudly boasting that it has sealed the biggest sale of 3D television sets so far, thanks to its partnership with UK broadcaster BSkyB. Following a surprisingly successful trial run of broadcasting the Arsenal versus Man United match in 3D this January, Sky clearly sees its future through polarizing glasses and has ordered up the big batch of tubes so that it can provide weekly 3D broadcasts of Premier League games. The plan is for a rapid rollout this spring -- which is right about now -- meaning that your local pub should be getting all glitzed up just in time for the end of season excitement. It remains to be seen whether Brits will swarm to the new tech or lose interest once the novelty wears off, but judging from the size of this investment, it would seem the bigwigs in charge of our entertainment are already convinced that 3D will be a win.

Sky TV buys 15,000 3DTVs from LG for live sports broadcasts in public venues originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Droid Eris rooted to 2.1, but look before you leap

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:28:00 -0700

Tired of waiting for Verizon and dissatisfied with a series of recent buggy leaks, the fine folks at XDA Developers were determined to trade their Cupcake-laden Droid Eris for a more toothsome Eclair on their own terms. Yesterday evening, it seems they finally achieved their goal, though not without a caveat or three. If you're still running the stock Android 1.5, it's a simple matter of dropping a ZIP file onto your SD card and restarting your phone; if not, you're completely out of luck. Rooters warn that the hack won't work on phones that have already been flashed to that aforementioned Eris 2.1 leak, and that they haven't yet figured out a way to restore any non-1.5 phones back to factory default. If hacking isn't your daily bread, proceed with caution -- Sense UI may be fancy and all, but chaining your phone forevermore to an unsupported OS just ain't worth it. See what an Eris Eclair looks like after the break.

Continue reading Droid Eris rooted to 2.1, but look before you leap

Droid Eris rooted to 2.1, but look before you leap originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[engadget] Homegrown Wacom Cintiq LCD tablet comes to life through prefab DIY enclosure

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:32:00 -0700

Dropped a stack of change on a premium Wacom drawing tablet, only to find yourself with Cintiq envy? Got an old laptop handy? If so, odds are good that you've occasionally (or persistently, for that matter) thought about hacking together an LCD tablet of your very own. Problem is, the mods we've seen require some serious shop time -- building a custom enclosure isn't for the lighthearted, you know? But if you're in possession of a sizable Wacom Intuos and roughly $220 of post-tax cheddar, TabletMod.com has a purpose-built, laser-cut acrylic enclosure with your name on it. You'll still need an LCD controller kit and CCFL extenders, and there's still a chance you'll be paying more for the whole kit and caboodle than if you just got a low-end $1,000 Cintiq 12WX to begin with -- but if you've already got half the parts lying around (or you're just dying to scratch another DIY itch), this project might be worth your while. Cheapskates like us, however, will continue to wait for the Bamboo variety, though you can certainly dabble in the source link if you're scouting some instructional videos.

Homegrown Wacom Cintiq LCD tablet comes to life through prefab DIY enclosure originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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