internet

#CES09: miRoamer and Blaupunkt team up to make Internet Car Radio

Audio/Video, Home Theater, CES, Networking & Internet / By /

miRoamer is an online portal where you can access a diverse selection of Internet radio content. Blaupunkt makes cool audio devices particularly for automobiles. Put them together and you get a car radio/receiver with Internet Radio functionality.

All you need is a 3G connection (i.e. via your phone) and you tether the radio to your phone (via Bluetooth) to get Internet access. You can add your own stations if you don’t like the ones that it comes with by default.

They were only showing off some prototypes, as availability Stateside will be in the 2nd half of ’09 with tentative prices starting somewhere around 300 Euros. Ouch. Hopefully that changes by then.

Neuros LINK – View online Internet video on your TV

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet / By /

Neuros has a new box hitting the general market soon – the Neuros LINK, which lets you get all of that video content that’s sitting on the Internet onto your TV. That means content from sites like YouTube, hulu, NBC, CNN and much more can be streamed over to your TV in HD.

The LINK comes with a ‘keymote’ (looks a bit like the old WebTV keyboards) that you can use to search for content. It even plays music, downloaded movies and displays photos. It is WiFi enabled so you can situate it near your TV without having your network and/or computer near by, but comes with Gigabit Ethernet if you’ve got that accessible, as well as 6 USB ports, S/PDIF audio output, and HDMI out.

LINK will tie in with Neuros’ upcoming Neuros.TV site which will allow you to better organize all of the content you’re interested in from the various sites. LINK is currently available directly from Neuros for $299.

Truphone – softphone for cell phones

Gizmo of the Day, Phones / By /

Truphone is a free software app for your mobile phone that routes your calls over the Internet. These calls are made using VoIP using your phone’s WiFi connection and even Nokia and Blackberrys can make calls via Truphone’s network without a WiFi conn.

In case you’re wondering what’s in it for Truphone, their business model is to charge lower rates than your mobile provider, particularly for international calls or calls made when you’re roaming abroad.

List of supported devices.

More info from the manufacturer

Price: Free for software. Call Rates start at $0.06/min.
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)

Microsoft’s Ballmer says new ‘cloud’ Windows OS coming

Miscellaneous / By /

Why do I get the impression that this is just going to be Windows with some ‘cloud computing’ window dressing (pardon the pun)? Steve Ballmer says they’ll show it off at their developer conference this month.

Yup, it sounds like an attempt to cash in on the buzzword du jour. I’m not slighting ‘the cloud’. After all, we all already do so much completely online (ex: e-mail, address books, social networking, to do lists). I’m just wondering what an OS brings to the table, when all you really need is a good Web browser. Who cares about OSes any more?!

Amazon Video on Demand

Audio/Video, Home Theater, Books, Music and Movies, Gizmo of the Day, Networking & Internet / By /

Amazon has updated their Amazon Unbox program. It’s now called Amazon Video on Demand and offers for a fee on-demand streaming of 40,000 TV shows and movies over the Net. You don’t need to purchase a subscription, but can view what you’d like ad-free, whenever you’d like for a small fee. Also, if you have a Sony Bravia TV with Internet Link, you can also use Amazon VoD.

The Amzn VoD service works on Macs and Windows boxes in your usual Web browser suspects. No HD yet, but it’s in the cards. The coolest part of this service – start watching on one machine and pick it up later on a different machine!

Rentals typically last 24 hours, and cost around $4 for a movie, $2 for a tv show. Purchases are somewhere between $10 and $15 each.

Gimme!

Comcast to cap broadband users’ bandwidth

Miscellaneous / By /

Ok, so 250 gigabytes of traffic is a pretty high limit, especially compared to some other providers, but why such a cap if they say that the average usage is 2 to 3 GB? Well, it’s their call, but if you’re going to have a limit, you better make sure you give users a way to check their usage.

I can hear it now… somewhere around the end of the month “Sorry honey – I didn’t get your e-mail or pay the bills as we’re over our bandwidth limit for the month.”

iSpring Free converts PowerPoint presentations into Flash

1 Comment / Gizmo of the Day, Miscellaneous, Networking & Internet, Software / By /

For the geek that has to do presentations, iSpring Free is a neat little tool that converts your PowerPoint presentations into Adobe Flash slideshows. So no more sticking this slides up on the Web, and needing your visitors to download then open up on their computer (and they need to have Powerpoint Viewer at a minimum too).

iSpring runs on Windows supports PowerPoint 2000/XP/2003/2007.

Delta to offer WiFi on all US domestic flights

Miscellaneous / By /

Delta will join the airline club that will offer wireless access on its flights. So far, it’ll be on all US domestic flights, and you can expect to see it starting later this year, with the rest of the fleet getting the WiFi treatment by next summer. Fees will be $9.95 on flights of three hours or less; $12.95 on longer flights.

Continental also announced the same thing earlier this year, although surprisingly American isn’t going to try competing and will only offer WiFi on very few planes.

Ok, you can bet I’ll be trying to get flights on Delta and Continental from now on.

Cuil wants to be a Google-killer

1 Comment / Miscellaneous / By /

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is a brand new search engine that claims to have indexed over 121 billion Web pages, and also claims that that’s 3 times as much as any other search engine including Google. Interestingly, just a few days ago, Google laid claim to crawling (although not necessarily indexing) 1 trillion Web pages.

So will Cuil succeed in beating Google at their own game? Well, for starters their executive/technical staff are a bunch of Google expats, so it’s quite possible, but on the other hand, Google has quite an impressive foothold now in the search arena, including mindshare with the public. After all, “google” is now a commonly-used verb. I can’t recall other search engines ever having that claim to fame, even within the geek community. Read on for a mini review.

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