This winter holiday season, visitors to Best Buy will be able to purchase televisions and DVD players with the ability to transmit wireless video in high definition. But before getting too excited about dumping your cords, you should know that there are currently four different ways one can watch wireless HD, and it’s unlikely all of them will be built into consumer devices.

That’s right, the variety of wireless HD technologies are sowing the seeds of a new standards war. And standards wars stink. Whether between Blu-Ray and HD DVD or the varying shades of Ultra-Wideband technologies, when the fight centers on technologies, consumers lose. This year, SiBeam, a company participating in the WirelessHD standard operating in the 60 GHz band, plans to have products on shelves, as does a UWB vendor. Products based on the third standard, known as WHDI, are expected to be on shelves this winter as well.

Device makers have yet to choose a standard, so it’s hard to say which technologies — and related startups — will win out. Continue »

This week, four teams from UC Berkeley took home prizes in the Venture Lab Clean Technology Innovation Contest. The winning team developed a small, pencil-sized steel fuel cell that can convert kerosene, a common fuel in developing nations, into electricity for indoor lighting. For a rundown of all the finalists and their technologies, check out Earth2Tech.

I’ve being doing the ’startup thing’ for close to a year and a half. That might not sound like much, but I feel that I’ve learned a ton and gained much experience. Following a recent startup-oriented weekend adventure I took a part in and some introspection, I thought I’d offer my take on Ye Olde ‘Top 10 Pitfalls’ of starting up in the web environment:

1. Lack of focus

Keep it simple, stupid. This might sound obvious, but a lack of focus is a real killer for a young start up. Define your core business and avoid temptations to branch out in other directions as opportunities come along (Jim Collins calls it the hedgehog mentality). Know what you do best, and stick with it.

2. Lack of discipline

If you don’t have the discipline to pursue your goals with single-minded determination, you will fail. This doesn’t mean that your vision has to be set in stone (far from it, your vision should be constantly adapting), but you have to know what your core ideals are and believe they will take you where you want to get. You will encounter hardships and things will get much worse before they get better, so have the resolve to follow through (or save yourself the time and go work at some software company).

3. Overuse of buzz words

If the first two points were universally true, this one plagues web startups to a much greater degree. People throw around concepts such ‘viral’, ‘SaaS’, ’semantic web’,‘web 2.0′, ’social community’ to describe how their brand spanking new start up is going to succeed. If one of those concepts happen to apply to your idea, people will understand it themselves. If you need to keep using them to convince others of your certain future success, you might be experiencing the buzz-word syndrome. Continue »

Adobe today launches its Adobe Media Player, a product we’ve been following closely. AMP channels RSS feeds for streaming and download of online video from partners such as MTV and CBS. The Adobe Air-based software has a simple UI that feels a bit like a file organization system. Full report on NewTeeVee.

Between the laptop and the mobile phone lies…something. Intel and Qualcomm may differ on what that something is, but both firms have determined to tap into growth — real or imagined — in the ultramobile PC space, following on the heels of device makers ranging from established players such as HP and BenQ to smaller ones like LimePC and ASUS Taiwan.

Along the way, the Intel Atom and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets will compete against processors from VIA Technologies and Freescale Semiconductor, both of whom make chips for ultramobile PCs already. So far, the winner looks like it will be anyone who wants a computer with a screen width ranging between four and nine inches, as new devices will flood the market. But beyond education, how large will that market be?

Continue »