October, 2006 — Tech News and Analysis

Archive for October 2006

Skyhook AIMs at Location Market

WiFi location startup Skyhook Wireless, which has the marketing-friendly browser plug-in Loki, has been making some pretty good progress since we last spoke to them in June. The Boston-based startup, which has raised $8.5 million from Bain Capital Ventures … Read More »

Is there an IPTV boom in the making?

After many delays, Swiss phone incumbent, Swisscom finally launched a rudimentary form of their Microsoft-based IPTV system. Bluewin TV, as it is called is promises 100-plus TV channels, 70 radio channels, and a whole slew of services. Of course if you are using … Read More »

 
 

B2Beta Live Now

(Disclosure: I still write a column for Business 2.0 magazine.) My former colleagues from Business 2.0 are blogging. Hey guys, welcome to the world of instant analysis, instant reporting. It is fun, and addictive. Erick knows it all too well. They will all bring new, interesting … Read More »

Private: For Comcast, GUBA house of horrors

Comcast launched Fearnet, a broadband only on-demand movie channel dedicated to scary movies. GUBA is handling the movie download service for the channel, which is going to be one of the many Comcast has planned. Sony and Lionsgate are partners for this venture. Users … Read More »

Crossbow for Smartphone to support Office Mobile apps?

If the pics from GPSPassions are legit, then I’d answer my own question with a resounding yes! Looks like these screenshots tell the story and could bring a big change to Windows Mobile devices running the Smartphone platform. Remember, devices running the Pocket PC Phone … Read More »

Finally, Competition for Alexa

Compete.com, a six-year-old analytics firm, is formally debuting its public data tool tonight. Searchers can input any site on the web to get numbers and trend graphs for total U.S. visitors (absolute, not relative), rank among all sites, pages viewed per visit, and average length … Read More »

Match.com launched VoIP calling with Jangl

Jangl hooked up with Match.com, it seems. The dating site announced that it has launched an anonymous voice chat service called matchTalk. Valleywag had posted about this possible pairing a little while ago. Read More »

Applications Celebrate Halloween Too

Google is famous for updating its logo to celebrate certain events and I was pleasantly surprised to see that they are not the only ones. TextMate, a famous text and source code editor for Mac OS X, celebrates Halloween in a rather pleasant way. First, … Read More »

FCC approval for the Delphi SkyFi3 XM handheld

Hey, remember that Delphi SkyFi3 handheld for XM’s satellite radio service we mentioned last month? Pre-orders started around $199 roughly six weeks ago, but it appears the commercial-free play-n-record XM radio should be appearing soon thanks to the latest FCC approvals. Actual price … Read More »

GoFish Goes Public

Who says video-sharing sites can’t go public? GoFish (which has reshaped itself as destination instead of a search engine these days) said today it had taken sold $12 million worth of stock as part of a reverse takeover by the publicly traded Unibio. Look … Read More »

Autocompletion in OSX

John Gruber is a genius. The OSX-savvy writer and producer of the well-known Daring Fireball pointed out today that autocompletion is available in all OSX Cocoa-based applications. Straight from the horses mouth: The Cocoa text system has a built-in auto-complete feature that is tied to the … Read More »

Hands down, this is one of the most insightful head to head comparisons between push e-mail offerings from Microsoft and RIM. The author breaks it down feature by feature and then determines (with color coding) which service is superior, inferior and competitive … Read More »

More Must Reads

The well-funded MVNO Amp’d Mobile says it will make some mobile entertainment content available to Japanese carrier KDDI’s subscribers. Japanese cell phone users like mobile data and Amp’d needs customers — last time we checked it had 50,000 subscribers but expects 100,000 by … Read More »

Pluck’s RSS reader has died, but NEooWS, which promises community discussion around feeds, is the latest to go after this commoditized market. Let us know if you check it out. Read More »

There seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for Vonage investors. The company reported its third quarter 2006 earnings, and things don’t look pretty. Here is a laundry list of bad news: 1. Net new subscribers were 205,000, down from 256,000 in … Read More »

Hamish MacDonald is a writer who does all of his writing on a Windows Mobile device and he has published an article describing his gear as a guest geek on GirlsGoneMobile.  Actually, … Read More »

We told you via our new reporters’ log this morning as soon as we found out Conde Nast had bought Reddit. Now we’ve had a chance to talk to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to get a few more details. He’s not spilling the price, … Read More »

This great RSS Pumpkin picture over at Hil’s OPML blog (thanks Dave Winer!) reminded me two things: first, have a safe and Happy Halloween if you celebrate. Second, you can subscribe to jkOTR in your favorite RSS aggregator with this link. … Read More »

Venture firms and investors seem to be pouring more and more money into startups that create or enable mobile content. In September over $150 million in venture funding was invested in companies in the mobile content industry. October and November will likely have … Read More »

Mobile curmudgeon Mike Cane (I thought for sure he’d pick that name for his blog) has written up his final thoughts on a number of gadgets he got to play with at the recent Digital Life event in NYC.  He offers his unique perspective on … Read More »

VentureBeat has started a job board for Valley jobs paying $100,000 and up. TheLadders has had a lot of success with this demographic. Yes, everybody has a job board these days, but the newcomer has more than 100 listings already. Read More »

Facebook is infiltrating sites across the web, decorating everyone from the Washington Post to the Onion to IMDB with its new little “f” logo. The social networking site over the last week has been introducing features allowing members to collect content from all over the … Read More »

Conde Nast has bought Reddit. It is one of those days… everyone is buying everyone. Read More »

Just in time for those new MacBook Pros with Intel Core 2 Duos comes the Slingbox public beta for Mac OS X 10.4. I would have told you sooner, but those sneaky Sling folks shot me the press release at 12:10 this morning! The beta … Read More »

Online travel search company SideStep has bought hotel review site TravelPost. SideStep was one of the first of the new wave of meta-search travel sites around, though now there are many. We guess they have to stand out somehow — why not buy a … Read More »

Sounds like David DeJean at InformationWeek pulled an "E.T." this week by walking around the IW offices mumbling "D.D….phone home" with a Skype phone. Lucky for him, he wasn’t dialing up another planet on the WiFi phone from Netgear. Nope, David just used the … Read More »

I love my Ultimate Ears Super.fi Pro 5 earphones and I’ve made no secret about it.  If you’re on the fence about spending so much money on a pair of these fine earphones then maybe a review written from a two-person perspective will help you make … Read More »

Hey could this be true? Friendster has shut down its office in one of its biggest markets? Couldn’t be – maybe they relocated! Read More »

Google has bought JotSpot, the wiki company in constant transition, for an undisclosed amount of money. We had heard about this deal a few days ago, but Google PR didn’t call back, JotSpot PR agency got snippy with us when we asked; Joe Kraus, … Read More »

It has been a while since we launched the new look for GigaOM. As you might have noticed, things have been busy around here. First of all being a rookie manager, I am learning a lot of new things about business — how it is run, … Read More »

We will dig into this later, but for now, go read what JotSpotters have to say about the deal. Read More »

SF TechSessions was all abuzz with social bookmarking yesterday. And now comes the news that eSnips, an Israeli social sharing site has raised $2 million in new funding from Greylock Partners and Gemini Israel Funds. Read More »

When I first got wind late last year of a handheld Windows XP device that also ran Windows Mobile I was excited, to say the least.  I jumped at the chance to have a look at the device that promised so much as the first handheld … Read More »

This week, Intuit announced their update of their hosted application service, QuickBase. The application is designed to provide even small business with the kind of tools which used to be available only to corporations large enough to afford their own mainframes. With … Read More »

SuperDuper is fast becoming everyone’s favorite backup utility. I have been using it on a constant basis for the last few months, and it has definitely earned its place in my must-have apps list. The most impressive feature of SuperDuper is the ease-of-use that is evident … Read More »

It has been a long time coming, but Mac lovers can get on the place shifting bandwagon, and get Slingbox mojo on their Macs. Read More »

I just took a quick glance at my RSS feeds before setting in for Monday Night Football; big game tonight as I’m down by a point this week in Fantasy Football. … Read More »

French newspaper giant Le Monde has relaunched their blogging services based on WordPress. It must be the themes, that did the trick Read More »

Fidelity, the mutual fund giant has its own tech lab, and they have developed a cool personal finance search engine that uses flash-based UI. Read More »

PalmAddict is a great website that covers all things Palm and PDA and right now they are giving away an HP tc1100 Tablet PC in what might be the easiest contest you’ll ever run across.  They are only running this for another day so you’d … Read More »

While we’ve been somewhat skeptical about the market for certain location-based applications for mobile devices, the market for GPS-navigation services is actually taking off. Nokia is betting big on the GPS market, and today the company announced its first dedicated GPS auto-navigation device, the … Read More »

Big shout out to GottaBeMobile for writing about and then getting picked up for the news on a possible Dell Tablet PC entry in 2007! Folks are buzzing … Read More »

Faced with the ridiculous cost of living in urban tech hubs like San Francisco, Seattle and New York, it’s no surprise that web workers would take advantage of their mobility and move where they’ll get a better value for their dollar. But as they fan … Read More »

Am I the only one who doesn’t use or need a WiFi finder? (Probably) I can’t think of a single WiFi device I’ve owned that couldn’t find and then use (with configuration) a hot-spot. Then again, this WiFi dongle from E-Let provides WiFi via … Read More »

Do you feel alone in your web browser, separated by time and space from all the other people out there exploring the internet? A startup called Medium thinks it can help make web browsing social by telling you what pages your friends are on at … Read More »

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