Current news items regarding technology, tech companies, the Internet, the government, etc.
You gotta love competition. In response to the Verizon/Motorola ads dismissing the iPhone for the things it can’t do, Apple has responded with some ads of its own. Here is one of them, and below is one of the Droid commercials.
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We first reported on Opera Unite when version 10 of the Opera web browser was released in September.
At the time, Unite was not yet built into the browser, but is now with this latest release.
According to Opera:
Opera Unite is a new technology platform allowing you to share content directly with friends without having to upload anything to a Web site. You can stream music, show photo galleries, share files and folders or even host your own Web pages directly from your browser.
It will be interesting to see if the other major browser makers start to employ similar ideas into their products.
No, not a release of the much blogged about Chrome OS, but a webcast given by a VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai. He starts off by talking about Chrome, the browser, then gets into Chrome OS itself.
Perhaps the biggest news of all is that the Chrome OS has been open sourced. Kudos again Google. Just one little detail, the open source version is called Chromium OS.
If you don’t know what Chrome OS is, then take a look at this entertaining video which explains what it is, and more importantly why.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that a Google Phone is imminent, possibly in early 2010. However, it may be a data-only VoIP ‘phone’ but what would be cool is if Google issues Google Voice phone numbers to those phones.
About the only bad piece of news here is that it may end up initially only on AT&T with other GSM carriers being maybes.
The hardware would in all likelihood be produced by some other hardware vendor but only have Google branding.
Back in the mid-90s, I really thought that AOL (America Online) couldn’t keep competing against the tidalwave of new ISPs that were offering Internet connectivity for much less, not to mention without the horrible bandwidth-sucking AOL application in an age of dial-up modems. I was quite wrong. Relatively few knew about those ‘other’ ISPs and AOL thrived.
In what may retrospectively be seen as hubris, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner and the company was even know for a few years as AOL Time Warner.
The merger was a mess. The 2 companies never really merged and benefited from any potential symbiotic relationships. AOL later became a subsidiary, and now they’re being thrown off altogether.
Will AOL survive by itself? I don’t see it. I imagine they’ll need to get absorbed by another ISP or tech company in order to carry on.
I’ve spent my own share of time criticizing Microsoft for their buggy software and unethical business practices, but I’ve got to give them kudos for this move. They are exchanging free (1-time use) WiFi service for just a single search on Bing, their new search engine. Pretty smart.
The goal is to get more people familiar with Bing and hopefully get them using it. The Bing team is working with JiWire which works with 60-70% of the WiFi market for airlines and hotels.
This is probably going to cost MS some dough, but they have it and it can potentially reap significant rewards. However, they’ll need to keep running creative ad programs like this if they want to really dent Google’s market share in search.
It seems like an incongruous pairing, but Radio Shack (aka The Shack) is set to carry the iPhone 3G and 3GS in Dallas and New York City by Thanksgiving, and then nationwide in 2010.
Of course, if you can’t wait, you can still get an iPhone at Wal-Mart or Best Buy OR you could get yourself an Android handset instead.
Sony is getting smart about this e-book publishing and how to tie it into their eReaders and online eBook stores. They have teamed up with independent self-publishing outfits to allow authors to get their books published on the Sony eBook Store.
In particular, they’ve teamed up with Smashwords and Author Solutions, 2 online companies that let independent authors (and small publishers) self-publish books without the need for a larger vetting publisher.
Expect Amazon to follow up quickly with a similar offering.
According to 1 market research outfit, Windows 7 has outsold Windows Vista by 234% in their first few days of sales. Not surprising is it? The question is whether or not this is sustained and makes significant inroads into the business market where Microsoft makes a great deal of its income from operating system and productivity software.
Recent research over the past few years have shown that light can be converted at least partially into motion, or more specifically vibration. While this seems innocuous, it could open up new ways of performing actions in optical microcircuits.
Physicists at Caltech and Duke University have shown that light could be made to make glass vibrate. They were even able to store a pulse of light traveling down a fiber as a vibration and then release it nanoseconds later.
One application would be to have optical microchips where vibrations or microwaves control high-frequency optical signals or the reverse. Of course, science has a strange way of spawning applications that were not envisioned at the time of discovery.
