Archive for May, 2005
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
10:18 AM PT |
Believe it or not, Bluetooth is not dead. Instead it is thriving, despite all the negative karma around the short-range wireless technology. According to Bluetooth SIG, 5 million products with built-in Bluetooth are shipping every week. Nice PR touch: At this pace, if you were to combine the range (30 feet) of these Bluetooth units, one week’s worth would take you around the earth and one year’s worth to the moon SIX times. A stack of 5M Bluetooth chips (1mm each) would be higher than the tallest 12 buildings in the world combined. Bluetooth headsets, mobile phones, cars and mice are in the category of devices that are shipping in volume. Wonder that would happen when BT headsets hit the market?
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
7:10 AM PT |
I have often used Kinoma Producer 3 for converting video for playback on a Palm device, but now I am told that they have started to support Sony PSP. In other words, you can take your Alias shows and put them on your PlayStation Portable, in an easy manner. Even though there are other programs that do the same, but I don’t think there are any which work on both platforms, Windows and OS-X. It can convert AVI, DV, MPEG-4, 3GPP, QuickTime, and MPEG files, in addition to most other QuickTime compatible files.
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
7:04 AM PT |
Houston Chronicle: For SBC, offering naked DSL goes against the grain of its triple play “bundling” strategy, which is to sell packages of voice, video and data services at discounted prices. But competitive pressures from Qwest, the first to announce naked DSL service, and Verizon, which announced recently it would eventually provide it, are forcing SBC to grudgingly test the waters. The company says not many of its customers are interested in naked DSL, but will still conduct trials. I see subtle pressure from FCC at work here.
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
4:00 AM PT |
Cox Communications is all set to launch its VoIP service in the Las Vegas area, according to local daily, The Las Vegas Review & Journal. The service will be offered in a yet-to-be selected area of northwestern Las Vegas in October, Cox Vice President Steve Schorr told the daily, and will expand the services to other parts of Nevada soon. Cox is trying to steal business from local incumbent, Sprint, which itself is merging with Nextel. The post merger Sprint is going to spin-off the local operations into a separate company.
Cox rolled out its VoIP service in central Florida. “Unlike regular voice-over IP calls, Cox’s calls won’t travel on the public Internet; they instead will go over Cox’s own national fiber-optic network, and if necessary, onto existing telephone networks.
Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities in the country, and that’s got nothing to do with two hit television series based around the Sin City. Many of Bay Area high rollers have quit technology business and have started building condo complexes in Nevada. Which explains why Nevada is a hotly contested market. Nevada Utilities, for instance has been test marketing its own voice-over-IP service for a year and has 400 voice-over-IP customers. via
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
3:45 AM PT |
Roadcasting, he cool software that lets you create ad-hoc networks while in a car has caught the attention of blogsphere yesterday. Think of it as pirate radio-meets-smart mobs at 60 miles per hour. The software can easily be used to create hyper local networks, and with enough support from open source community, and peripheral makers could turn every man, woman and child into a walking broadcast network.
How about a tiny piece of software that installs on your wifi enabled Siemens SX 66 Windows Moble phone and starts broadcasting on the go? Or what if a peripheral makers like iBoom come up with a wi-fi gizmo that can broadcast tunes right from an iPod. Broadcom and TI, both have certainly made embedded WiFi chipsets with lowpower requirments common place. All you need is some imagination … and programing skills. A million Howard Sterns?
(Can you hear the collective groans from Washington, Hollywood and New York?) Long tail amplified! I caught up with Jordan Kanarek and Whitney Hess and did an iChat interview with the two-fifth of the five person team behind Roadcasting project. Here are excerpts from that little late night chat…
Continue »
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
3:30 AM PT |
In response to my piece yesterday about End of VoIP as we know it, Aswath sent me an email and pointed out that there is more than what meets the eye. He is withholding judgement, up until a full ruling, not a press release is released by FCC. On his weblog this morning, he writes
I am a bit confused about the specific definition of the term. The press release says that interconnected VoIP providers “are similar to traditional telephone providers in that they enable customers to receive calls from and terminate calls to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).” It goes on to say that “it does not place obligations on other IP-based service providers, such as those that provide instant messaging or Internet Gaming Services, because although these services may contain a voice component, customers of these Services cannot receive calls from and place calls to the PSTN.”
In other words services like Free World Dial-Up and Yahoo and AIM are free from FCC’s decree. But then Yahoo and AIM can make outbound calls using Net2Phone service for example. This clearly is a very murky situation. What if someone decides to come-up with a service that can terminate PSTN calls to say Yahoo and AIM. Then what? Will AIM and Yahoo suddenly become interconnected providers. But as the man said lets wait and see what FCC really have to say about this in its ruling documents. via
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
2:00 AM PT |
The Pondering Primate believes that 4INFO is better than Google SMS when it comes to getting information via SMS. I concur. Have been using them for a few days now, and they simply rock. Better results, and more depth. 4INFO is here . via
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
1:00 AM PT |
Like a man in love, I just cannot get enough of Bit Torrent. So I have been finding all these great articles about the file sharing software and the open media revolution it has unleashed. For instance here is this piece by Clarence Ladson, a college student who thinks BT just might be unstoppable. We will see new and innovative things take form within the Bittorrent community and its technology as the need for change becomes more apparent each and every day from the anti-piracy firms and its user base. (via)
Om Malik
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Tuesday, May 24, 2005 |
12:01 AM PT |
Wachovia analyst Jim Boyle came out with a research report that says that terrestrial HD radio and satellite radio will both have 39 million listeners by 2012. Harry Helms thinks “this analysis is badly flawed in multiple ways,” because Boyle is taking the digital cable TV/satellite TV model and applying it to radio.
Boyle seems to have forgotten that digital cable and DBS were delivering essentially the same programming while IBOC/HD and satellite radio offer almost completely different content. Digital cable vs. DBS was a battle of competing delivery mechanisms, while IBOC/HD vs. Satellite is a battle of competing content and programming.
Mr. Helms, I tip my hat to you! Spot on!
Om Malik
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Monday, May 23, 2005 |
9:04 PM PT |
McLeodUSA pleads with its lenders, please don’t break my knees, I will pay you back by July 21st. They had an agreement with lenders to waive payment on about $18 million dollars until today. Bankruptcy #2 is only a matter of time. via