Archive for November 7th, 2008
Top HDTVs under $1000
Want to know the top HDTVs & LCDs under $1000? Well, Amazon has a sweet round-up of the top HDTVs that won’t break the bank. My 480i/480p/1080i 65″ rear-projection TV is getting a bit old, it’s bulky, and it doesn’t support 1080p, so might be time for me to buy one of these or add it to my Christmas wish list. Read: Amazon’s Top HDTVs under $1000 Tags: 1080i, 1080p, 480i, 480p, HDTV, LCD, television, top HDTVs Related Entries Grand Cinema C3X 1080 Projector o...
Put Out an APD: The Blogosphere’s Been Killed
Blogging is dead….or, at least, Nick Carr has decided that the free-wheeling blogosphere has disappeared, and been replaced by traffic/advertising hungry writing machines. In the process, he declares that independent bloggers have been swept aside as “online magazines” such as the Huffington Post, TreeHugger and Engadget dominate the landscape (He could added TechCrunch, GigaOm, et al). You knew it was only a matter of time before Carr found something new to gripe about. It...
VoIP Plays Role in the Elections
VoIP played an important role in this year’s Presidential elections. Even notorious robocalls leveraged VoIP to blast out calls using inexpensive calling rates. Michael Dinan has an interesting article on how the Republican National Committee (RNC) leveraged Grandstream phones for pollsters across the U.S. The photo to the right is John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain using a Grandstream GXP2020 phone. Obviously, John McCain had to pinch pennies where he could to counteract Barrack...
Nortel May Cut 10% of Its Workforce
UBS Research analyst Nikos Theodosopoulos in a note to his clients today says that Nortel, the Ottawa, Ontario-based telecom equipment maker, will make steep staff cuts — “possibly amounting to 10 percent or more of its total workforce, or at least 3,000 employees.” Nortel has some liquidity concerns and needs to make cuts and sell its Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) business in order to stabilize itself. UBS estimates a “cash burn of $686M, $700M and $700M in CY08, CY0...
Sprint Loses Customers But Gets a Reprieve on Debt
Unlike the many consumers facing unsympathetic lenders, when you’re a money-losing telecommunications firm with a $9.39 billion market cap, you can still renegotiate your debt. Today, after reporting a third-quarter loss of $326 million and the defection of 1.3 million customers, Sprint said it had done just that. Under the terms of its new credit facility, the troubled telecom has less money available to it, but has the ability to take on a greater debt load relative to its earnings wit...
Future Mobile Phone Features 20 Megapixels, 100Mbps, HD Video - in other words it’ll kick ass
Ericsson is predicting the future mobile device by 2012. Ericsson predicts mobile devices with 12-to 20-megapixel cameras, support for full HD video shooting capabilities, 1Ghz processors that don’t suck your battery dry, 1024×768 XGA resolution, and high-speed Internet access using “HSPA evolution”. HSPA evolution is the successor to HSPA, and “LTE (long term evolution)” with speeds of more than 100Mbps. I still can’t over the fact that the iPhone, suppo...
Spurned Microsoft Scorns Yahoo
Looks like Yahoo’s Jerry Yang’s ham-handed handling of the Microsoft offer is coming back to bite him. At a Friday business lunch in Australia, Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, put on the airs of a spurned lover and told luncheon attendees that he wasn’t buying Yahoo, although he might consider a search engine partnership. The Associated Press quotes Ballmer as saying: “We made an offer, we made another offer, and it was clear that Yahoo didn’t want to sell the bus...
Location, Location, Location
When I joined PlanetEye in July 2007, GPS, geo-tagging and location-based services were on the high-tech landscape but getting little attention as “Web 2.0″ hogged the spotlight. Today, however, it’s a completely different story. With wireless devices such as the iPhone and the Blackberry coming with GPS; Google Maps becoming more popular, including the proliferation of thousands of mashups; and GPS becoming popular in-car tools, the world is becoming about location, location, ...
Still Thinking about the Future of TV…
Yesterday afternoon at the Rosh Pina Festival I shared some of my evolving thoughts and observations regarding the Future of TV. My basic assertion is that the Future of TV is TV. How we get there and what TV really is by the time we do get there is up for grabs. The advent of the Internet has had a profound affect on many industries. As worldwide broadband penetration continues to grow, the worldwide Television industry will be disrupted. In fact it already is. It is just a matter of ti...
Ultra-wideband Decline Proves Perils of Chip Investment
Five years ago, the promise of a new networking technology known as Ultra-wideband was a living room without wires, where DVD players, set-top boxes and video accessories could connect with TVs over the air. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a wireless personal area networking technology that can transmit large amounts of data for short distances using very little power. Over time, its promise expanded from the living room to the home office, as backers used Ultra-wideband as the basis for Wireless USB a...
iSkoot Scores a New $19MM Financing Round
This evening iSkoot, the service that provides Skype access from smartphones, announced (press release link to come when available) they had received a new $19 million venture financing round to build out and bring to market a new suite of mobile communications services. Recently iSkoot acquired Social IM, who is in the beta stage of producing a desktop Instant Messaging client linking real time communications and notifications to social networks. No further details have been released but obviou...
Korea Tech Preview Day 2
Day 2 was every bit as good as Day 1, and on the whole I found this excursion very worthwhile. Not a whole lot of IP communications on display here, but where else are you going to come across so many intriguing technologies, innovations, gadgets, etc.? I met quite a few interesting companies and will definitely be following up with some of them. Heres a quick recap with some photo highlights, and dont be surprised to see some of these at your local electronics retailer in 2009. Lunchtime k...
Belkin GoStudio Turns iPod into Recording Studio!
Now you can turn your iPod into your own mini, hand-sized recording studio with Belkin’s GoStudio. It can record stereo audo directly to an iPod Classic, Nano or Video with its two built-in microphones, a mono speaker and four external microphone inputs. The iPod slips into a holster-like setup and a recording menu appears. Neat features include built-in gain and recording level controls as well as monitor controls so you can listen to your recording while you are doing it. ...
Wii Remote Goes Big
Tired of just moving the Wii control around when what you really need is something that really replicates the shooter or gaming action you need? Well, the Rumble Blaster magically transforms your entire Wii controller into a gun system - and adds realistic rumble action to boot! (Now we are not a big fan of shooter games, but …) It’s compatible with most Wii shooting games, such as Ghost Squad and Target. MSRP: $29.99 Availability: In stores this month. www.dreamGEAR...
Money for Nothing and Your Spectrum for Free
Google may be getting all the advantages of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to start opening up more radio spectrum without even having to bid big at an expensive spectrum auction. The FCC’s decision earlier this week to open up white space spectrum, the slivers of bandwidth between what’s being made available for the coming digital television stations, could eventually net the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant as much as $5 billion more a year. Google ...
Discount on Tickets to AdRevenue 08
According to PubMatic, 70 percent of ad inventory goes unsold. The one-day AdRevenue 08 conference on Friday, November 14 in San Francisco looks at strategies and tactics for making that figure better and increasing publishers’ profitability. The schedule includes speakers from Quantcast, Redpoint, SixApart, PubMatic, NBC Universal, RazorFish, Havas and AOL. GigaOM readers can use the code GIGAOMDSCNT to get 33 percent off registration. ...
File Under: Trends We Don’t Like
Increasingly, Internet providers across the country are placing limits on the amount of data users can download each month as a way to curb a small number of “bandwidth hogs” who use a lot of the network capacity. For example, 5% of AT&T’s subscribers take up 50% of the capacity, according to AT&T. AT&T will initially apply the limits in Reno, Nev., and see about extending the practice elsewhere. Comcast, the nation’s second-largest Internet service pr...
Ballmer Is Wrong About Android
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, should just stay away from predicting the success of consumer-focused products. He was wrong about iPod and was even more wrong about Apple’s iPhone. And now he is dismissing Google’s Android Operating System and the devices (including phones) that are likely to use that OS. “I don’t really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does,” he quipped at a meeting down in Australia. What’s there to understand, Steve? It is...
Gaboogie
Conferencing is growing and there are so many players in the field. Not much differentiation that I can see. But Gaboogie has at least one differentiator: It calls the participants! Another differentiator is Dimdim, which states that “When they wanted to share what was on their computer screens they discovered that existing web conferencing products were all either too expensive or too complicated (or both).” Dimdim is free for up to 20 attendees. I use Freeconference.com and pay for...
White Spaces Device Could Combine WiMAX and Wi-Fi
The FCC decision on Tuesday that opened up a huge chunk of spectrum for broadband services is a decided victory for its proponents, but there are still many details left to figure out, including what kind of radios will be used to “tune” into the Internet. Today, at an event, Larry Page of Google said any such chips used in these devices should cost less than $5. One way to do that is to put multiple radios on the chip, tuned to the variety of available spectrum, and let them use th...
Learn About the Future of Your Living Room at NewTeeVee Live
The television-viewing experience has undergone some major changes over the past few years. TiVo made it easy to watch TV anytime. Then along came Sling Media, which made it possible to watch TV anywhere. So what’s next? I’m going to sit down with Sling CEO and Co-Founder Blake Krikorian at our NewTeeVee Live conference on Nov. 13 in San Francisco to find out — we’re going to talk about how the living room viewing experience is expected to change. I hope you can join me;...
FierceVoIP Declares Ifbyphone As Top VoIP Company in 2008
FierceVoip has announced this year’s top VoIP companies — The 2008 FierceVoIP Fierce 15 — and Ifbyphone is on the list. FierceVoIP editors evaluated hundreds of organizations, and found us to be amongst the “fiercest,” proven by creativity and innovations in the marketplace. Past winners have included companies like Vonage, Skype, & GrandCentral. In a description of how this year’s winners were chosen, FierceVoip noted the following important characteristics of t...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.