Archive for October 21st, 2008
In search of Technology Innovation in Las Vegas:
Usually when Im looking to be inspired and find innovative new technologies I find myself in Tel Aviv meeting with early-stage startups. Yesterday I was in Las Vegas on a similar mission. Except rather than looking for a company to invest in, myself together with Kevin Kelly and Ryan Block were the judges at the first ever i-stage event and our goal was to determine the winner of the first i-stage competition. During the course of the day we had the opportunity to see presentations from a...
Wii Fit on Track to Outsell GTA IV This Year
The market for video games is changing profoundly, and a comparison of two prominent titles’ recent sales figures shows just how much: Wii Fit, a game largely marketed to women, is outpacing the latest installment of one of the industry’s biggest franchises, Grand Theft Auto. With some 8.7 million units sold worldwide, Nintendo’s Wii Fit has already grossed far more money than Take-Two’s Grand Theft Auto IV. (Roughly 10.6 million copies of GTA IV have been sold for th...
Get Your Lala Out for 10 Cent Music
The major record labels plan to start selling digital songs for a dime apiece. The catch: You can’t carry them with you on an iPod. Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of digital business and U.S. sales, came up with the new pricing approach for the “Web song” while in discussions with Lala Media, a digital music retail store and service. The Web song is stored online and can be listened to only through a computer’s Web browser. Sony, the three other major record l...
Wii Takes It to the Music
Nintendo has launched Wii Music, letting up to four players mimic the real-life motions of playing instruments with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck controllers. Players will be able to mimic the motions of more than 60 real-life instruments using the motion-sensitive Wii Remote and Nunchuck controllers to learn to play along with more than 50 songs — and the game encourages players to improvise, making their own music, mixes and arrangements. Unlike games like Guitar Hero and Rock Ban...
What businesses prosper in harsh times?
Who prospered in the great depression? There were three strategies: Businesses that helped you survive tough times. Five and Dimes, buy/sell stores (pawn shops, used clothing, thrift shops) and other local retail. Repair shops (shoes, tailors/seamstresses, furniture) extending the life of what you own. When shoe repair shops get busy, you know the economy is in pain. Vegetable seed catalogs and others who helped you garden your own food. Disintermediate farmers and middlemen by using your...
Mac Mini Going Bye-Bye?
The Mac Mini may be pronounced dead as soon as today’s Apple earnings conference call, as two major retailers in Europe have confirmed that they can’t order any more of the little doodad. While this could signal an updated model coming in, the impression is that — once again — the Mac Mini may be dead dead DEAD for real, even while you can still order it at the Apple Store. It would be weird to see it go in this time of crisis, but being their worst-selling computer, it&...
Will Technology Cure Health Care — Or Kill It?
Obama says technology will save health care, and it’s true that IT is quickly becoming a medical resource: Google, which recently launched an online medical records service, claims that online search is where consumers turn first for health information. Computerization can eliminate much of the 30 percent of medical costs that are due to inefficiency, according to Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute. And advanced diagnostics will encourage prev...
Is Nuvox Buying One?
Nuvox is out kicking tires to see who they can buy. Rumor has it that Greenville-based Nuvox is looking to buy One Communications in the Northeast to expand their footprint, especially their MPLS reach. (I didn’t know Nuvox sold MPLS. I thought they were just a cheap Integrated T1 supplier). Rumor also has it that One Comm. is having problems. Provisioning being one of them, which usually leads to sales declining. Customers don’t like install issues and neither do agents, since it c...
When Your Company SHOULD Spend
Cash is king. VCs like Fred Wilson are advising their portfolio companies to be in cash-preservation mode for the very good reason that more cash will be hard to come by and, if obtainable at all, may come with serious dilution as its price. But, if your company has cash, this can also be a wonderful time to spend. In the end you will succeed because of what you DO spend your money on. Suppose you have much more cash than your main pesky competitor. Assuming that advertising or paid marketing o...
Akamai Joins The Targeted Advertising Rush
Today content delivery network Akamai said it would purchase behavioral advertising startup aCerno for $95 million and launched an advertising product called Advertising Decision Solutions. Get ready for another wave of Internet privacy debates — although I bet users and politicians will find this far less frightening than having an ISP know where they surf. The Akamai product cedes the last mile back to consumers on the privacy front, but pushes behavioral ad targeting much deeper into t...
Indian Telco Offers Free Netbook With a Wireless Contract
The concept of offering free portable computers bundled with wireless Internet connections has been kicked around for a while, but no company has gone ahead and done it. Till now. Reliance Communications, a large telecom carrier in India says that it will be giving away free netbooks for those who sign up for their 2-year wireless Internet service. It has teamed up with Intel, Acer, Asus, HCL and Lenovo in order to make this happen. Netbooks are highly portable versions of laptops that are typi...
Are Blogs As We Know Them Dead?
It’s been about five years since blogs emerged on the media landscape. There are more than 175 million blogs - many of them well written, insightful and/or interesting but you have to wonder if blogs as we know them have had their day. By that, I mean the “traditional” blog that features a lot of text, some links and perhaps a graphic or two to spice things up. It’s bread-and-butter blog not unlike newspaper articles or columns. The barriers to entry are low, which explai...
TOM-Skype Breach: Answers to Phil’s Questions from 2006 SJ Post
This is the third of four posts resulting from an interview with Nart Villeneuve, principle investigator of the Citizen Lab report “Breaching Trust”. Two weeks ago Phil republished an April 2006 Skype Journal post with about sixteen questions related to the TOM-Skype security breach discovered by Nart. My interview provided answers to several of these questions but I ran them by Nart for more completeness, where an answer or response was feasible. 1. Is TOM only filtering chats where...
garbled skies
"Report from 40,000 ft on AA’s new WiFi service: It’s very fast (YouTube works great) but Skype is blocked (calls are garbled)." - Philip Kaplan ...
Where Will Android Go Next?
When it comes to its new mobile operating system, Android, Google’s dreams go beyond just mobile phones. Indeed, the company is hoping that the open-source version of the software will eventually find its way into a panoply of devices. Google today announced that the open-source version of its mobile OS is now available for anyone to download and use for their devices — even to improve upon Android itself. Its availability comes a day ahead of the launch of T-Mobile’s G-1 handset. (Re...
Sprint Announces End of Wired Intenet
A rapidly growing phenomenon in the telecommunications world is the growth of “cord cutters,” people who give up their hardwired landline phones and use only cell phones. Now one of the leading proponents of that shift, Sprint Nextel, hopes to do for the Internet what it’s doing for telephones. At a recent ceremony in Baltimore, officials from Sprint Nextel celebrated the official launch of the company’s XOHM WiMAX service by literally cutting a cord — they sliced ...
Sony PSP Extends Download Capabilities
The latest firmware update to Sony’s PSP console has ignited more game development, giving PSP users the ability to download more types of content and offering application writers more options. The net net: It gives publishers and developers much more scope in relation to the types of games they can release. What’s to come: a wider range of releases in 2009 and more opportunities in terms of the types of games that can be released on PSP, even in terms of more female-oriented games,...
Palmtop PCs on Their Way Back
In the what’s old is new again category … IMOVIO has launched a smaller alternative to a subnotebook – much smaller. The new iKIT is about the size of a PDA from 10 years ago, but has a QWERTY keyboard and connects to the Internet at 3G speeds via your cell phone or Wi-Fi. (Ah the Newton … Anybody still using that little gadget goodie from Apple?) The $175 Linux-based system has a built-in Webcam as well as a range of applications, such as Web browsing, e-mail and...
MySpace Yes But No Facebook on Google Phone
Since Google pays News Corp millions of dollars to be its friend, it is no surprise that MySpace, the elder social networking service would be one of the first companies to release an Android-version of MySpace Mobile just ahead of the commercial release of the Google Phone tomorrow. It looks remarkably like the iPhone-version on Facebook. (Check out my review in case you are interested in buying the phone.) MySpace Mobile for Android will join its Sidekick and iPhone brethren and a Blackberry ...
Skype crosses over 14 million simultaneous users!
I didn’t notice the number of simultaneous users in my Skype client today, but the folks over at Skype Journal did notice and Skype Numerologist Jean Mercier captured the occasion with a screen shot. Mercier writes: “We needed only 35 days to go from 13 million concurrent users online to 14 million.” It is indeed an impressive statistic. (Confirmed by Skype’s own blog.) Congrats to the folks at Skype! Technorati Tags: skype, voip ...
Five Reasons There Is No Adwords for P2P Yet
Brand Asset Digital launched its P2P advertising platform P2Pwords today, promising to bring pay-per-click advertising to file-sharing networks like Limewire, Gnutella and Emule. The NY-based company received a largely positive review from John Healey over at The LA Times Bitplayer blog, who thinks that “the opportunity presented by P2Pwords is so large, it may be hard for advertisers to resist.” The combination of file sharing and advertising is definitely an interesting one. File...
Blue Box Podcasts #83 and #84 now online - VoIP, SIP, Skype security…
Over on Blue Box, I’ve now uploaded two recent episodes: Blue Box #83: SIP and Asterisk vulnerabilities, voice biometrics, P2PSIP, Aircell blocking Skype, VoIP security news and more… Blue Box #84: New Cisco, Avaya, Nortel VoIP security vulnerabilities from VoIPShield, Skype in China, UCSniff and other new tools, news and more With that I am almost caught up with our main shows… and I still have a bunch of Special Editions to finish producing and post. I’m hoping to finish ...
TI to Sell Part of Its Wireless Chip Biz
Texas Instruments said today on its third-quarter earnings call that it plans to sell its merchant baseband processor business, the division that makes off-the-shelf wireless chips for handsets. The company plans to keeps its OMAP applications processor business (the brains inside mobile phones), and will continue to make custom radios for certain clients. To be sure, making radio chips for wireless handsets is becoming more of a commodity business, and one where scale is increasingly important...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.