Archive for August 7th, 2008
Bringing 3D TV to the Home
Forget HD. In its perpetual quest to provide bigger and better entertainment (and to sell new gear), the consumer electronics industry is pushing 3D televisions. But first it needs to figure how to deliver the 3D tech and what types of standards need to be set so the experience is the same as that of 3D movies. The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California said it has formed a 3D working group to solve some of these issues, and plans to make an announcement regard...
Service Provider Views - Savatar Q&A, Part 2
My Part 2 Q&A with John Macario of Savatar is running now on TMCnet. I was hoping to get this posted before going on vacation last week, but it wasn’t published until after we’d gone away. This article is for the bi-monthly column I’m writing for them - it’s called Service Provider Views, and it covers the broad spectrum of topics that I find topical for this space. The previous column was Part 1, where John and I talked about some of the bigger trends around the ado...
What’s There to TokBox?
Will Tokbox Make It? Probably not Yes, I think so I need a new toy Bain Capital must be psychic. Apparently they’ve looked into the future and seen that TokBox, a San Francisco-based startup, will either grow into a large company or find a buyer for what is essentially a Flash-based, in-browser video chat service that’s gotten marginal traction. Sure, the company has a new desktop client that allows you to video chat with anyone, but then so does m...
Skype Unlimited Calling Adds Two More Countries
Having spent three days with Nokia personnel based in Finland, my need to make calls to Finland on my Skype Unlimited World subscription has just increased. And with all the technology development going on in Israel (for instance, iSkoot’s and Fring’s developers are based in Israel), Israel becomes another high demand country for inclusion in Skype’s various Unlimited subscriptions. Today Skype announced the addition of Finland and Israel to their Unlimited subscription o...
Wireless Results Scorecard
The four major mobile carriers have presented their 2008 second quarter financial results, and it’s really a tough time to be Sprint. We compiled a quick scorecard after T-Mobile USA reported its numbers this morning, so for an at-a-glance view of which added the most new subscribers (Verizon) or which makes the most money off of each subscriber (Sprint), see below. AT&T reported Q2 earnings on July 23: Wireless revenue: $12 billion Wireless operating income: $3.1 billion Churn (post...
JAJAH Babel and JAJAH Concierge Launch
JAJAH today launched two brand new JAJAH services called JAJAH Babel and JAJAH Concierge. JAJAH Babel is a speech-to-speech translation service. Currently, it only translates English-to-Chinese (Mandarin) and Chinese-to-English. Perfect timing for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Summer Games, but I wish JAJAH also launched with English-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-English. My wife and I hire the Maids Home Services on occasion to help clean up our house and inevitably my wife or I ask them to clean a sp...
Skype updated to support Windows Mobile 6.1
Download the latest Skype 2.2 for Windows Mobile Premium (Pocket PC). No new features or bug fixes in this release. tags: skype, pocket pc, pocketpc, windows, mobile, 2.2, windows mobile, 6.1 Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype. ...
It???s Time for Electricity to Come Out of the Closet and Go Into Storage
Way back in 1991 during a previous housing slump we had moved to Vancouver and had to sell our house in Vermont. “Replace the heating system or no one’ll look at the house,” the realtor said. The offending system was fairly new; it was in good shape; it was comparable in operating cost to what other people had; it was extremely low maintenance; but it was politically incorrect. It used electric (shudder) storage heat! In the 1970s when electricity from nuclear plants was going...
Google Apps, Mail Go Offline for Some
Quite a few people are experiencing an extended downtime on their Google Apps accounts, according to sporadic reports that have landed in my inbox. Some folks are not able to get their email, while others have not been able to get hold of their documents. It’s not clear how many people have been impacted, or the magnitude of the outage. I will call Google later today and find out what is going on with the service. We have personally not suffered this outage so I can’t get too worked...
3CX Phone System gets Windows IT Pro award
Dan Blunk talking about 3CX Phone System for Windows 3CX Phone System recently got an Editors award from Windows IT PRO magazine - pretty cool stuff because Windows IT Pro is a long established and respected magazine. Great news for the 3CX team! ...
Does Anyone Use Trackbacks Anymore?
Yesterday, I wrote a post about why Macs are more expensive than Windows machines. In citing a couple of other blogs, I ran into a rarely-seen creature: the trackback. You know, that tool that lets bloggers know when someone else has mentioned/acknowledged their blog. At one time, the trackback was fairly de rigeur within the blogging world but it’s a tool that has been shuffled to the background. Much of the trackback’s demise likely has to do with spam. It got to the point where th...
Become the Captain of YOUR Life
Are YOU the Captain of YOUR Life? Or are you just a passenger going along for the ride? Living can be an ACTIVE not PASSIVE activity. Yet, how often do we let ourselves go with the flow and let others set our own direction without even realizing it? How often do YOU end up giving in against your own best wishes and let others drive your next move? How often do you regret this decision but dont feel comfortable speaking up and expressing your own feelings? This is something that can happen in b...
Watch The Police LIVE Today: 10:45 PM EDT
Im looking forward to watching the three last songs of The Police in their final performance’s encore from their show at Madison Square Garden tonight (August 7th) broadcast worldwide over at: http://www.bestbuy.com/thepolice. The broadcast starts at: 10:45 PM EDT. Tags: The Police, Best Buy, MSG, Jeff Pulver ...
FreeWorldDialup Moves to Paid Model
Free World Dialup is implementing a $30 USD annual membership fee during the month of August after 12 years as a free service. Read More… ...
International Lypp conference call services now in 20+ countries including the United Kingdom
Just a quick post… We quietly launched our International service for Lypp teleconferencing this evening. Users from Australia, UK, Germany and many more countries, can now sign-up and start using Lypp teleconferencing. Existing and new users in North America can also now include participants from 20+ countries. We only charge you for minutes you use and there are NO additional long distance costs if you use the outbound calling feature. Since Lypp calls you and your attendees there is lit...
Congressional Scrutiny Hurting NebuAd
Sometimes if you combine consumer outrage and an election year strange things happen. That seems to be the case when it comes to NebuAd, which is using controversial technology to inject ads into webpages by tapping into people’s click streams. The company today announced that it has laid off a “significant number” of employees, according to The Register. The story suggests that NebuAd is considering a different way to use its deep packet inspection technology for advertising...
Open Thread: How to Fix BitTorrent, the Startup?
There are rumors that pink slips have been handed to some of the employees of San Francisco-based BitTorrent. The problems stem from their ill-fated consumer distribution effort, which competed with richer, more deep-pocketed rivals. They were trying to hawk the division to Best Buy for about $15 million, but the deal didn’t work out. So far it’s all hearsay, but NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes is trying to get to the facts of the story. If true, then it would be yet another tumultuou...
Take Home a Concert on Your Wrist
Now we finally have a really useful application for USB drives — besides just for backing up or taking yhour files with you on your rambles. The Aderra Audio System allows a single technician to record an event and duplicate up to 1,000 USB flash drives within 15 minutes after the event has ended. They record live events, duplicate them on the spot and sell them to attendees as they are leaving the venue, usually on a wristband that has the USB flashdrive em...
Mobile Subscribers Forecast to Top 5 Billion-Mark by 2011
A few days ago, I pointed out that India was finally getting its 3G act together by coming up with a liberal licensing policy that will boost mobile broadband in that country. A similar scenario is playing out across China, Brazil and Russia, which together with India account for a major chunk of the global mobile footprint. That is one of the main reasons why Infonetics Research is expecting that by year 2011 there will be one mobile broadband connection for every four wired broadband subscrib...
Free Those Trapped Cell Phone Photos!
Getting your great candid pictures off your camera phone is no easy matter — it should be so simple! CNET gives us a couple of ways to do it. One of them has got to work! The least labor-intensive way to rescue your pictures from being trapped on your phone is to send them to an e-mail address in a multimedia message. But as you know, this costs money, so you’ll be pleased to hear there are alternatives. If your phone accepts a memory card, you can save your pictures to the car...
Context-Sensitive Search Via Blogs
By now most of us are familiar with Google’s PageRank algorithm, or at least the principle behind it, whereby a web page is ranked based on who else is linking to it. One key aspect of blogs is that, while a few cover just about everything under the sun, most blogs have specific areas of focus, be it art, news, politics or what have you. Such information is potentially valuable in the context of search because a blog can announce its areas of focus — keywords, in effect — that...
Dell Offers HPC Systems in Europe
Dell has launched a pilot program to provide high-performance computing systems to European universities and other organizations. The market for high-performance computing servers grew 15.5 percent in 2007 to reach a record $11.6 billion, according to IDC. It’s not a completely random venture for Dell, which has 25 computers on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but it is an example of the computer giant chasing growing markets. We’ll see if this pilot mak...
Why Pay Twice as Much for a Mac?
Is Windows really that bad, you may ask? Well, Apple Watch asked that very same question and came up with some very interesting statistics. Last weekend, they got to wondering about Mac versus Windows PC pricing after seeing two HP notebooks on sale at the local Target. One of them, a 14-inch model, the HP DV2946NR (pictured at left), sold for $699.99 and packed 4GB of memory and a 320GB hard drive. Capacity for both features is twice that of the $1,299 MacBook – and shared graphics i...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.