April, 2008 — Tech News and Analysis

Archive for April 2008

Nanosolar Promises "Fabulous" Residential Solar

In a recent post on the company blog, Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen hinted at “near-term” plans for residential solar from the thin-film startup (hat tip to CNET): To all those of you who are disappointed that our first product is not for residential homeowners, … Read More »

Free Online Content Management and Web Dev Tours

Most of us web workers are familiar with the many free trials for various software applications and services that are available. However, these often require downloads, installation and action to be taken if you choose not to buy a given product. If you’re interested on trying … Read More »

 
 

T-Mobile to launch first Android phone this year

The long awaited announcement by T-Mobile came today.  No, not the one that details the 3G launch, the one that they will indeed release an Android phone in Q4 of this year.  T-Mobile is the first major US carrier who is a member of the Open … Read More »

TAB Weekly: April 24, 2008

It’s the third TAB Weekly Podcast! We’re covering previous TAB articles as well as Apple Q1 results, Salesforce.com Mac switch, Motorola market share, and more! As usual, I’m joined by Brian Warren. You can listen to the podcast here in the player below or subscribe to … Read More »

Retro-tech: cassette shell plays MP3s from SD card

My recent twenty-year high school reunion brought back some great memories: cutting class at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, late night arcade runs with pockets full of quarters, and a classmate’s … Read More »

Is some die-hard DivX fan trying to resurrect the shuttered Stage 6 video sharing service? Ghacks was tipped by a commenter to Stage6 clone DiVxit.net. The site is live with the messages “DivX Stage6 returns here on April 29th 2008,” and “Stage6 Alternative / … Read More »

NextWave Plays Flip That Spectrum

NextWave Wireless has hired Deutsche Bank and UBS Investment Bank to help it sell spectrum in three different frequency bands, ranging from 154 AWS licenses in the 1.7/2.1 GHz band to 39 licenses and spectrum leases in the 2.5 GHz band that others are using … Read More »

It’s been awhile since I’ve provided an update on our upcoming conference, Structure 08, which will be held at San Francisco’s Mission Bay Center on June 25. We’ve been busily adding speakers and further finessing the agenda to address some of today’s biggest technology … Read More »

OpenID Marches On

We’ve written about OpenID, the growing standard for universal login across web sites, several times. If you’ve gone to OpenID, two new developments are worth a quick look. First, JanRain (who run the myOpenID provider service) have come out … Read More »

Mmmm, Delicious Library 2 Looks About Ready

I – along with much of the rest of the Mac-using world – have been waiting for Delicious Library 2 for quite a while. Seems like we’ve been hearing about how awesomer the second incarnation of the media tracking application will be, for years. … Read More »

Happy birthday, Chocolate Rain, only two days late. You and I are both Tauruses! Which is a big reason to be skeptical of astrology and what it says about one’s personality. After all, Chocolate Rain, you are a heavily synthesized song about racism … Read More »

Skype intros beta Java client for mobiles

I’ve been waiting to see this for a while now and here it is. Skype is making a push onto standard feature phones with a new mini-version of Skype that’s … Read More »

More Must Reads

Ever since Forbes.com reported that fabless chip company P.A. Semi was being acquired by Apple for $278 million, there has been a lot of debate as to why. I thought it was all about the iPhone, but not everyone agreed. And as we … Read More »

While many users of Mozilla’s Firefox open source browser and Thunderbird open source e-mail engine are hip to useful Firefox extensions and efficiency tips, there are a lot of really useful add-ons for Thunderbird too. These can help you search through your e-mail more … Read More »

Are you a double-SIM card owner that’s frustrated by swapping SIM cards in-and-out of the same phone repeatedly? How does $28 and less than three-minutes of effort sound … Read More »

Grou.ps, aims to be a catch-all for teams seeking collaboration.  This Swiss army tool of a collaborative site includes ‘Modules’ that enable various degrees of functionality, based on your teams’ needs.  Grou.ps currently offers: chat blogs wikis mailing lists + forums photo albums links (centralized bookmarks) maps subgroups personal profiles calendaring Grou.ps has smartly … Read More »

Unmanned war machines are out in force in the war on terror. Last year there were 5,000 military robots deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, up from 162 in 2004. And these semi-autonomous robo-warriors aren’t just your terrestrial terminators — they’re taking flight with the help … Read More »

Now this is a viral ad campaign done well. To promote its N-Gage gaming handset, Nokia staged a human version of its popular Snake mobile-phone game in Lisbon and shot a stop-motion film of it. While they do cheat a bit (the section where they jump … Read More »

Presenters using Tablet PCs, take note: you’ll want to download the free PenAttention application before unveiling your next Power Point. PenAttention was written by Kenrick Mock, an associate Computer Science … Read More »

Intel has joined the ranks of those companies allowing users to revise (or to use the trendy term, “mash up”) the web with the release of a beta version of Intel Mash Maker. Their site proclaims this as “Mashups for … Read More »

NewTeeVee: Apple and Amazon keep mum on movies. Earth2Tech: Pedal-powered telephony WebWorkerDaily: Make your iPhone work for you WebWorkerDaily: Why 802.11n is good for you OStatic: Will Hadoop cause EMC problems? Read More »

Big news from the Evernote folks: they’ve passed over one meeeeehhlion notes with the new product. Quite amazing when you consider it’s only been around for two months. So … Read More »

Remember when we complained about the Web 2.0 Expo having no video-related panels? Well, the folks at O’Reilly listened and gave us the mad-dash opportunity to create a session about a week before their conference. Inspired by one of the comments left here on … Read More »

I now have six more invites to the Xobni closed beta so click on my cartoon head and email me a request and the first 6 will get them. UPDATE: They’re all gone don’t email for one. Read More »

Evernote (which we looked at a few weeks back) is still in closed beta, despite all the good press you’ve probably seen. But in celebration of their first million saved notes, they’ve quietly announced a special deal for … Read More »

BP is looking to go “beyond petroleum” via Brazilian ethanol, with an investment it calls the “largest made by an international oil company in the Brazilian ethanol industry.” This morning the British oil giant said it intends to pay about $60 million to take … Read More »

MobiTV Raises $5 Million More; money on top of the $125 million the white-label streaming service already raised. (VentureBeat) TubeMogul Adds Howcast; creators can now get analytics for their work on the instructional video site. (release) SAG and Studios Extend Talks; move helps alleviate fears of … Read More »

Jeff Pulver said today that he has resigned from the board of Pulvermedia, the company he founded. Pulver is a pioneer in the VoIP world and Pulvermedia — the company behind the VON conferences and magazine — has been a rallying point in the VoIP … Read More »

If you want any indication as to how the movie download business is going, you’ll have to look elsewhere than yesterday’s earnings calls from Apple and Amazon. Though both companies are jockeying to lead us into a downloadable future, they barely touched on the topic during … Read More »

I spent yesterday afternoon in an hours-long strategy session with some former Y Combinator grads. The team is in the final week of preparing their startup for its Beta launch, and they were having difficulty yesterday deciding what the ultimate hierarchy of the … Read More »

The good folks at Boingo have supplied me with a demo of their WiFi hotspot service so I can tell you what I think of it.  I only got the demo … Read More »

If you’re and OS X user who is tired of trying to manage a full-blown GTD application but who finds the event and task management capabilities of iCal to be somewhat clunky, there’s a new alternative. Second Gear’s Today application … Read More »

I think I woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, but everything in the news seems a little depressing, today from Motorola, which saw its handset sales drop by 39 percent in the first quarter and is not expecting to … Read More »

Those outside of Japan won’t get any subsidized deal on the Sharp Willcom D4 clamshell computer. Nope, you’ll have to order from an importer and add your own … Read More »

Handsets on handlebars are bringing pedal-powered mobile call shops to rural Nicaragua. By souping up an old pedal-powered ice cream cart with a car battery, an alternator, a fixed cellular unit and three pay phones, mobile communications can travel outside the Nicaraguan cities via cellular cycle. … Read More »

It’s no secret why the adoption rate of Solid State Disk drives is plodding along slower than a Commodore 64 trying to display multitudes of sprites on the … Read More »

Apple’s Address Book is a central repository for your contact information and makes your contact information available to many other Mac programs.  To enhance Address Book, take a look at an application called PostCheck, which adds some great improvements. For starters, have an incomplete … Read More »

I just heard from my friends at Laptop Magazine who have been all over the new Asus EEE PC 900.  They are giving one of the new EEE … Read More »

Man, there’s been a lot of comics related news this week. Marvel Entertainment is keeping it going with its serious push into online territory. Marvel just hired former Sony Pictures Digital EVP Ira Rubenstein to head up its new Global Digital Media … Read More »

This is the age of Celebrity 2.0. If you have more that 200 Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Yelp friends, you’re a celeb, too! After watching too many big shots ‘step in it’ again and again this week (first at Y Combinator’s Startup … Read More »

The biggest barrier to building all these solar thermal power plants in the Mojave desert is, unsurprisingly, cost. At this week’s Fortune Green conference the CEO of California utility PG&E, Peter Darbee, said he’s had discussions about using PG&E’s deep pockets to buy their own … Read More »

Ooma, a Palo Alto, Calif-based company that launched with much fanfare last year had run into a wall in recent months. It lost some key executives and failed to live upto its promise. Ooma promised free voice calls for life married to slick … Read More »

RightScale, a company acting as an easy front-end console for Amazon Web Services, has raised $4.5 million from Benchmark Capital. The Santa Barbara, Calif.-based startup was formed in September 2007 to help companies provision and monitor the web services products offered by Amazon. With this … Read More »

If you know your Devotchka from your Devendra Banhart, then you probably know Stereogum. The influential music blog recently launched Videogum, a site devoted to the more visual side of pop culture, including movies, TV and web video. BuzzNet took over Stereogum late … Read More »

Farming – The Ultimate Green Collar Job: Amid the chaos that has been the Pennsylvania primary, both candidates have been pushing “green-collar jobs” but have failed to address the greenest job out there – farming – Grist. Li-Ion Batteries Now With Less Fire: The technologies of … Read More »

loading external resource
Click to log in with: Not you?
Comment as guest:
By continuing you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Submitting comment...
results