RealPlayer launches SP, letting users copy YouTube vids
Let's face it: RealPlayer hasn't been a viable media player for almost ten years. As Technologizer's David Worthington wrote for Betanews in 2000, "A once useful media player's standard installation was transformed into a bloated menagerie of components and add-ons with the release of RealPlayer 7. These needlessly suck away system resources and add useless functionality..."
Today, RealNetworks finds itself competing not so much against Windows Media Player as with the likes of DownloadHelper. Real is now working to generate interest among free media consuming types with the launch of RealPlayer SP, which lets users download unprotected Flash videos to keep.
Glass: Android for office phones
Earlier this year, we took a look at a desktop phone running Android built by California startup Touch Revolution. While that device provided a look into the potential application of the OS in fixed telephony, the devices we saw were running a version of Android almost indistinguishable from the publicly available build.
Today, Cloud Telecomputers has debuted a completely unique build of Android as a part of its Glass "telecomputer" platform. The company's reference design has the Android environment running on a TI OMAP processor, and all telephony (VoIP and DSP, SIP Stack and Voice Codecs) being handled by a separate Audiocodes processor.
New Windows Live Movie Maker debuts, says good-bye to XP for good
The Windows Live team announced this afternoon that Windows Live Movie Maker, the free video editing software component of Windows Live Essentials has come out of beta and is available for download.
Windows Live Movie Maker opened in beta last year, and has been designed to provide a quick and easy method of cutting video clips rather than a full editing suite.
MySpace to acquire music discovery service iLike
It was no secret that social network MySpace was looking to acquire music discovery service iLike, thanks to reports earlier this week. Today, however, it was made official.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but rumors this week valued iLike at around $20 million after subtracting the cost MySpace will incur from maintaining the entire iLike staff, which includes CEO Ali Partovi, President Hadi Partovi, CTO Nat Brown, and all 26 employees.
NPD: 'Dumbphones' still rule, average phone buyer spends $87
Smartphones may be growing in popularity, but the market is still completely owned by feature phones, market research company NPD Group said today. According to the company's Mobile Phone Track service 72% of all new handsets sold in the second quarter were so-called "dumbphones."
This does represent a 5% decline for the quarter, when smartphones managed to increase their share by more than 47% (they now represent 28% of overall consumer phone sales). But there's still a long way to go before smartphones can lay claim to even half of the mobile phone market.
Two dual-mode satellite/cell phones in the pipeline for SkyTerra
As we saw earlier in the summer, Hybrid Satellite/Cell phones are almost here, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is playing a major role in their advancement.
SkyTerra Safety Access, a subdivision of SkyTerra Communications (formerly Mobile Satellite Ventures), has applied for $37 million in funds from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) under the Act. The plan is for these funds to be used to develop and deploy two dual-mode Cell/Sat phones for the public safety sector.
DC Metro begins wireless signal improvement in underground stations
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority announced yesterday that the project to improve cellular service in Washington DC's Metro stations and tunnels began construction over the weekend, and will be completed on October 16.
The bill to expand wireless coverage in Washington DC's underground Metrorail stations was passed in October 2008, and broke the exclusive contract Verizon Wireless had with the DC Metro Transit Authority through its acquisition of Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems. Bell Atlantic Mobile signed the exclusivity contract with Metro in 1993.
Android grows too large for G1
Even though T-Mobile continues to deny it, the Android community has resigned to the fact that the T-Mobile G1 (also known as the HTC Dream) will not receive any significant upgrades beyond "Cupcake," the Android software update from last April.
The simple fact is that there is not enough memory on the G1 to support a much bigger OS, and even equipping the device with Cupcake was reportedly problematic. "We knew that internal flash space was going to be very tight on the G1 and we kept the system partition tight on purpose," Jean-Baptiste Queru, a software engineer at Google said on Twitter last week.
Blockbuster OnDemand to hit Motorola handsets
As Blockbuster gets slowly buried by rivals Netflix and Redbox, it has pulled out a number of noteworthy streaming partnerships: TiVo in March, Samsung in July, and according to the most recent reports, Motorola. But Blockbuster OnDemand is reportedly not coming to Motorola set-top boxes, just phones.
Kevin Lewis, Senior Vice President of Digital Entertainment for Blockbuster today said, "People are increasingly relying on their mobile phones to stay connected to the things they love the most -- including their favorite movies and TV shows. The integration of our Blockbuster OnDemand service into Motorola's mobile phones will provide access to thousands of movies from the moment someone initiates their service."
European Commission pumps €18 million into LTE research
Today, the European Commission announced it will invest a total of €18 million into researching the deployment of LTE and LTE Advanced.
The EC says it will begin laying down the details of its LTE projects next month, and intends to begin in January 2010. The projects are expected to cost more than €700 million by the time they're completed in 2012.
US broadband adoption plummets as national plan goes forward
Yesterday, Leichtman Research Group (LRG) released its quarterly study of the nation's cable and telephone providers and found that net broadband additions last quarter were the lowest they have been in eight years, dropping by almost 30% from last year.
"The second quarter has proven to be traditionally weak for broadband growth, but with the market becoming more mature, broadband adds further waned in 2Q 2009," said Leichtman Research Group's President and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman.
PS3 Slim: A virtual repeat of the PSP Go?
At Sony's big press conference scheduled today in Germany for Gamescom, the long-rumored PS3 Slim, a much cheaper, much smaller PlayStation 3 with a 120 GB HDD and requisite Blu-ray player, was finally unveiled. However, it wasn't too much of a surprise for eager potential buyers, as several online retailers prematurely posted product pages for the device.
It is similar to the situation with the PSP Go! at E3 this year. Just days before the new, smaller PlayStation Portable was slated to make its big debut, Sony's own Qore magazine leaked a picture of it.
Sony Computer Entertainment's President and CEO Kaz Hirai called it the "Worst-kept secret of E3."
Former Secret Service informant named in 'largest credit card data breach ever'
Today, the US Department of Justice announced that a 28-year-old hacker and former Secret Service informant named Albert Gonzales is being indicted for the third and, by far, the largest crime of his short career: participation in the theft of more than 130 million credit and debit card mag-strip data dumps, in attacks between 2006 and 2008.
Gonzales was already in federal custody for several major data breaches. He faces trial in New York next month for the first, which involved hacking restaurant Dave and Busters' payment system. Then the second case will be heard in Boston in 2010 for Gonzales' involvement in the theft of data off of more than 40 million credit card mag-strips from OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, BJ's Wholesale Club, and many more.
HTC confirms 'Sense' Android UI upgrade for China
HTC's 'Sense' UI is a large part of what makes the HTC Hero such a desirable handset for Android fans. The interface, centered mostly around home screen widgets, was debuted earlier in the summer and was expected to arrive on other "non-Google" HTC Android handsets.
Since there are only three HTC Android handsets, and all of them are Google-branded in the US so far, this meant at the time that the UI was not coming to the States.
Back up the Pirate Bay!
With the future of the Pirate Bay still up in the air, an anonymous user has created an archive of the torrent indexing site just in case things don't go well with its acquisition and transition into a "legitimate" service.
The user has made a mostly complete archive of The Pirate bay and all of its 873,671 hosted torrents available as a 21.3 GB download. The Pirate Bay's tracker claims to track over 2 million torrents, but most of these were not hosted by the Pirate Bay.
Tim's Bio
Tim Conneally was born into dumpster tech. His father was an ARPANET research pioneer and equipped his kids with discarded tech gear, second-hand musical instruments, and government issue foreign language instruction tapes. After years of building Frankenstein computers from rubbish and playing raucous music in clubs across the country (and briefly on MTV) Tim grew into an adult with deep, twisted roots and an eye on the future. He most passionately covers mobile technology, user interfaces and applications, the science and policy of the wireless world, and watching different technologies shrink and converge.
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