December, 2008 — Tech News and Analysis

Archive for December 2008

Wishing you all a very happy new year!  May 2009 be a safe and happy year for everyone!  We thank you for your continued support, you make what we do special.  Best of times are yet to come! Read More »

2008 should have been a good year for P2P startups. The FCC ruled that ISPs can’t block BitTorrent and other distributed protocols, the growing importance of HD was increasingly making P2P look like a viable solution, and the P4P folks even came up with … Read More »

 
 

With 2008, Let's Say Good-bye to Mediocrity

As 2008 takes its final breaths, I am sitting in my apartment, which is enveloped in a thick fog that’s hiding both the ugly high-rises and the beauty that is the San Francisco Bay. The fog is also muting the sounds of the city — … Read More »

As 2008 comes to a close, Liz Shannon Miller and Jill Weinberger look forward to improving themselves and the Internet in the New Year. Find out their New Year’s resolutions and their recommendations for others in online video in today’s Station Conversation! Liz: Happy … Read More »

Oh boy, it’s that time of year when we put ourselves out on the front line and boldly make our predictions for what we’ll see in the world of mobile tech in 2009.  I say “we” but that’s only to put Kevin’s butt on the line … Read More »

WWDC 2008 Winners: Where Are They Now? — Squirrel

When French student Axel Peju wanted to use his Mac to track his finances and manage a budget, he couldn’t find an application to meet his needs, so he created his own. He developed Squirrel, a personal finance program for the Mac (and soon, … Read More »

In addition to the production version of its plug-in hybrid sedan, the Fisker Karma, Fisker Automotive plans to show a concept car called the Fisker Karma S (for “Sunset”) at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month. What’s unusual about the Sunset … Read More »

Quite the conundrum over possible restrictions using Intel’s Atom CPU if Digitimes has the facts straight. Today they’re reporting that HP is negotiating with Intel so that they can use the Atom chipset in notebooks with display sizes larger than 10.2-inches. Allegedly, HP wants … Read More »

Shout'Em: Roll your Own Microblogging Community

Twitter is now rumored to have between four and five million users, varying from the inactive and curious, to hardcore life-streamers, though it still lacks some useful features like groups. The company appears to be pursuing growth over immediate revenue streams, such as the Read More »

Macworld Town Hall Meeting

Today, IDG World Expo (the folks behind Macworld), announced that they will be holding a Town Hall Meeting at next week’s show. The meeting will be held on Wednesday, January 7 at 5PM PST in Moscone’s Gateway Ballroom, room 102. All Macworld attendees are free to and encouraged … Read More »

Year-end prognosticators have their work cut out for them. Most predictions made a year ago were undone by events few actually foresaw. Now things are as uncertain as ever. 2009 could bring a healthy recovery, or another financial crisis could set us back even further. So … Read More »

I brought my Inbox to zero over the weekend, but the barrage of CES pitches has me buried again. Rob Bushway is doing better than I am at managing the endless e-mails because he’s actually reading some. He notes that the Digital … Read More »

More Must Reads

Brits Develop Carbon-Eating Cement: A new kind of cement based on magnesium silicates requires much less heating than the conventional stuff (which accounts for 5 percent of global carbon emissions) and absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens. — The Guardian Gimme a $2-a-Gallon Gas … Read More »

Producteev is the new kid on the block in the collaborative task management arena, but this app puts the emphasis on the social and makes multi-tasking, our 21st-century way of life, a lot easier. Just to be clear, this is not another Basecamp-type application. It is … Read More »

http://www.youtube.com/v/WmEOQD8AS-o&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01 We haven’t done one of our “geek session” videos in a while, so we’re ending the year with one. Good timing too as we have the Kodak Zi6 camera to talk about. I purchased this little device online while I was traveling this … Read More »

I’m planning to have a good 2009 – and this is going to be the year that I actually plan that. I’ve managed to muddle through the past couple of years of web working without any major plans, but like many of you, the economy has … Read More »

Over the past few years, the amount of time I’ve had to plop in front of the TV and channel-surf has decreased (there is a LOT of online video to watch, y’all). Even with my TiVo at the ready, I still only watch about two or … Read More »

As you may or may not be aware, TechCrunch reported yesterday that a larger format, 7 to 9-inch iPod touch was in the works at Apple and would arrive by next fall. They claim to have received the information from three seperate, independent sources, … Read More »

The screams of anguish you might have heard today are the natural reaction of owners of 30 GB Zunes.  They started bricking world-wide last night at midnight and nothing can bring them back.  No word from Microsoft or anyone else what caused the 30 GB Zunes … Read More »

With Time Warner Cable poised to take Viacom channels off the air in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities Jan. 1 due to a dispute over raising fees, that’s an awful lot of people who will be missing ”The Daily Show,” ”Best Week … Read More »

With Time Warner Cable poised to take Viacom channels off the air in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities Jan. 1 due to a dispute over raising fees, that’s an awful lot of people who will be missing The Daily Show, Best … Read More »

Can the internet public know more about you than you would like?  According to an article at New Scientist, there’s a company that uses software to analyze blogs and forum posts to find out a blogger’s age, gender, and … Read More »

Car buyers in California could be getting a different kind of sticker shock in the new year. Starting Jan. 1, every 2009 model year and newer car sold in California will be required to carry a label that ranks, in addition … Read More »

Over the holidays, I ended up reading an awful lot using my iPhone/iPod touch. I started with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, just to determine whether or not I wanted to cough up ten bucks to go see the Brad Pitt movie, and then, … Read More »

Last week I wrote an article about Liferay, an open source portal app. Today, I’ll be looking at another option, Cyn.in, from Cynapse, an enterprise software solution provider. Cyn.in is an open source collaboration app, and as such only offers a portion of … Read More »

The race to produce the favorite dedicated eBook reader is going strong with word of the release of the BeBook Reader.  This reader has the standard fare with some corner cutting to keep the price down.  It is going up against a gaggle of readers, … Read More »

Startups associated with social gaming were all the funding rage in 2008. (Think SGN’s $15 million last May, for example, or the $17 million that went to Playfish in October.) And though executives with casual game startups recently told me they’re Read More »

What would happen to New York if The Daily Show went off the air? Where would hipsters get their daily Moment of Zen? No Spongebob Squarepants either – which means the Upper East side mommies would actually have to talk to their kids. A dispute between … Read More »

China’s Qaidam Basin could become the equivalent of the Mojave Desert in terms of solar power projects, if new plans to build a 1-gigawatt solar power photovoltaic farm in China come to fruition. While utilities and startups have sited the Southern California desert for some of … Read More »

With every tick of the clock, 2008 is taking its final steps toward 2009, when the year starts afresh. From a broadband perspective it has been an eventful year –- one that was good, bad and ugly. Here is a rundown of 10 stories that defined … Read More »

Think of 2008 as Act I when it comes to set-top boxes, the prelude of what’s to come. Next year will bring the conflict in Act II, and 2010? Hopefully Act III and a resolution. In 2008, all manner of brand-name and upstart players began vying to … Read More »

Spain’s Acciona has plugged its Portugal solar project into the grid, announcing this week that the new 46-megawatt plant can produce enough electricity to power over 30 million Portuguese homes. One of Spain’s largest construction contractors, Acciona invested €261 … Read More »

Updated: Back in October, when I broke the news that uber venture fund Sequoia Capital had organized a secret meeting in which it warned its portfolio companies to prepare for the pending financial apocalypse, the revelation was met with some skepticism. Some thought Sequoia was using … Read More »

As seems to be the trend with Smule’s iPhone applications, their point may not be immediately clear. With many App Store offerings, “enjoyable time waster” could be the point, but that’s not always enough for some people. There were those who didn’t see the point … Read More »

A while back, a friend of mine and I had an idea for a new e-commerce web site we were thinking of launching. We eventually shelved the idea after digging up a couple of sites that were too close in spirit to the same idea, but … Read More »

PC Magazine just named NewTeeVee to its 2008 list of 100 favorite blogs! We are thrilled to receive the kudos and the click-throughs. And happily, our sister sites OStatic and Web Worker Daily also made the list. Here’s what they said about us: … Read More »

We last briefly looked at Invotrak in the Summer of 2007. The service is similar to Freshbooks, in that users can create and track invoices and timesheets for client projects and employees as well as some funky analysis of payment history. Feature-for-feature, Invotrak and … Read More »

Clean technology in Hawaii is ending the year with a bang. The Aloha State kicked off December with an agreement for Better Place to build an electric vehicle-charging network on the islands, then Khosla Ventures teamed up with utility Hawaiian Electric … Read More »

As 2008 comes to a close, my dream of building a quality blog network that was more than just GigaOM has become a reality. While I have always believed in the quality of our editorial product, today we got a third-party affirmation of our efforts. PC … Read More »

After a dip in October, the number of overall unique online video viewers rose again in November, according to Nielsen’s VideoCensus. The number of unique viewers during the month grew to 124 million from 120 million in October, putting November back on par with September. … Read More »

As I think it goes with most geeks, our better half (yes as a matter of fact, some of us have girlfriends and wives!) usually isn’t the most technical of people. My lovely wife can use a computer just fine, but she’s not the type of person … Read More »

You may be interested and motivated to become a freelance writer, but it’s hard to know where to start. First, you should write, but that goes without saying. How do you turn your passion into paid work? It’s not a simple process, and it involves a … Read More »

Earlier this month I took up another one of my wacky challenges. I took one for the team and decided to try and keep my iPhone off the grid. I wanted to see if I could run it strictly off solar power for 30 … Read More »

With a new $6 billion bailout from the Treasury approved late yesterday, General Motors has lowered its requirements for auto loans. The bailout includes a $5 billion stake in the company’s financing arm, GMAC, plus a $1 billion loan that GM can use to reorganize … Read More »

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