This morning, Cisco announced that it is acquiring Pure Digital Technologies, better known as the company responsible for Flip Video cameras, the pocket-sized digital camcorders.

Today's announcement confirms earlier speculation that the company was interested in acquiring Pure Digital. Cisco's plans for the next five years revolve around developing three major areas: the connected home, the media-enabled home, and visual networking. Pure Digital's products fit into the second of these three categories, and will flesh out the company's growing catalog of consumer products.

Continue reading →

Sony today announced that its eBook store now carries over 500,000 free public domain titles, thanks to a partnership with Google.

The company's eBook Library desktop software is designed like a stripped down version of iTunes, organizing the user's content library, and serving as a portal to the eBook Store from Sony. Today, the software features a link called Unearth a Classic which goes to Google's Book Search database of public domain content optimized for the Sony Reader.

Continue reading →

When Nokia announced last month that it will be opening The Ovi Store for mobile apps, the company noted that the content in the store would be of the same nature as the content previously available on Download, WidSets, and MOSH.

Previously is the operative word in that statement, according to a report from Reuters today. According to the report, MOSH will be closing down.

Continue reading →

After a photo leaked that appeared to show an unspecified Lenovo netbook last week, Lenovo gladly came forward to discuss just what the photograph depicted.

Johnson Li, director of Lenovo's Beijing Innovation Center, said the leather-bound, dual-folding netbook was an experiment that is now "finished." It is a 2007 concept that Lenovo created, called the "Pocket Yoga" notebook. The device's shape is based around a 360 degree hinge conceived by one of the company's New Zealand-based designers.

Continue reading →

Developers are getting a lot of love this week. Access to iPhone 3.0 has come to iPhone devs, and Nvidia PhysX has come to PlayStation 3 game makers. Now, Microsoft has unveiled developer beta 3 of its Silverlight runtime.

Offering a host of audio and video improvements, Silverlight now supports 720p full screen HD playback and MPEG 4-based H.264/AAC audio. 3D graphics rendering and animation has been improved, and more than 60 controls with source code have been added.

Continue reading →

Boston Power debuted its Sonata battery technology in 2007, as a safer, more efficient alternative to standard lithium ion batteries. Boston Power promises Sonata batteries can charge 80% in 30 minutes, and have an average lifespan of three years.

Hewlett Packard took an early interest in the startup, and late last year officially announced that it had adopted Boston Power's technology for its own line of notebook batteries.

Continue reading →

Nvidia yesterday announced that it will be offering its PhysX SDK for free to registered PS3 developers. The technology generates real-time physics in games by calculating the trajectory of objects, their angles of collision, and their impact force. By using it, developers can make sure that in-game object interactions are unique every time, instead of re-using a standard animation each time.

The technology has been used in more than 150 games on PC/Mac, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii, including the Gears of War series, Mirror's Edge, and Unreal Tournament 3.

Continue reading →

Salisbury, Maryland is not small-town rural America in the traditional sense. The college town stands in the middle of the Delmarva peninsula, halfway between an urban sprawl of Atlantic beachside resorts and miles of farmland, acting as a waypoint for travelers bound for Ocean City, Rehoboth, and Dewey Beach.

It is also, according to the city's mayor, a "city under siege" by bloggers.

Continue reading →

Discovery Communications, best known for its Discovery Channel cable network and related retail stores, is also the holder of a rather comprehensive e-book patent filed nearly ten years ago. The company has taken legal action against Amazon.com for infringing upon that patent with its popular Kindle e-reading device.

The patent (#7,298,851) was granted in November 2007 to Discovery founder John S. Hendricks, and includes everything from the content delivery method (both through the Internet and through a connection to Cox cable box for video) all the way down to the operating system of the reading device (Menus include virtual shelves labeled "books in your library," and "books you can order.") Page 26 of the patent also includes a method of printing books on demand.

Continue reading →

Download Google Chrome 2.0.169.1 for Windows from Fileforum now.

Today, Google has made the latest beta of Chrome available for download, promising a 25%-35% speed boost over the latest stable version, and speeds nearly double that of the original Chrome beta, according to two Google benchmarks.

Continue reading →

The iPhone's operating system has secured the fourth-largest share of the global smarphone OS market, and has been increasing fourfold annually. While it has won the hearts of many, it has done so despite a prominent lack of certain built-in functions. The "Top 8" of these absent features are: MMS support, Adobe Flash support, video recording, Bluetooth modem tethering, push notifications, SMS forwarding, background applications, and -- an old favorite among the Mac faithful -- cut-and-paste.

While cut-and-paste functionality, and roughly four of the top eight needed functions were indeed added, they were piled under no less than a dozen other new abilities intended to advance videogaming on iPhone.

Continue reading →

View images of the Dell Adamo up close

Dell's fashion-first Adamo notebooks are now available for pre-order on the company's site. The super thin notebooks may offer reduced computing power, but they are the current apogee of Dell design.

Continue reading →

Nintendo prevailed in yet another patent infringement lawsuit about its controllers for the Wii and GameCube. A 2007 suit from Fenner Investments Ltd. sued Nintendo and Microsoft for the joystick ports on their consoles.

The patent held by Fenner (#6,297,751) is for a low-power interface with standard 5 volt peripherals that "includes a bi-directional buffer circuit and a pulse generator which, together, generate a digital pulse signal, representing a joystick coordinate position, based on an input analog measurement signal."

Continue reading →

Late last month, Nokia announced that it would be scaling back its operations, and instated a voluntary resignation program for 1,000 of its employees.

Today, Nokia announced further workforce reductions will take place, affecting devices and markets, corporate development, and global support divisions that would be overlapping after the company completes its acquisition of Symbian.

Continue reading →

Steven "Tag" Loomis, who wrote the server software for Internet radio service SHOUTcast (with Nullsoft founders Tom Pepper and Justin Frankel) will be leaving AOL. With Loomis' departure, and the large-scale structural changes taking place at Time Warner's AOL, the future of SHOUTcast becomes uncertain.

Sources at Nullsoft suggest that SHOUTcast will simply go into maintenance mode as daily responsibilities are turned over to Shoutcast developers Faisal Sultan and Neil Radisch.

Continue reading →