Greener Gadgets: SunNight eyes powering radios with flashlights
Even a universal power supply couldn't support other devices for very long in the wilds of Africa, where there's a total absence of electrical wiring for charging up. But SunNight's flashlights, which combine solar power with nickel hydride batteries, are already powerful enough to entirely light a good-sized room, said SunNight CEO Mark Bent, speaking on Friday at Greener Gadgets Expo in New York City.
Texas-based SunNight sold about $1 million in ultra long-life flashlights in 2007. About 30% of the lights are now sold directly in Africa, while another 30 percent are distributed through humanitarian groups. The remaining flashlights go to other destinations, ranging from police forces around the world to US retail chains like Target.
Marine One docs fly to Tehran, but not from Lockheed
A Maryland company appears to have made it possible for sensitive information on Marine One -- President Obama's helicopter -- to turn up at an IP address in Tehran, according to Tiversa, a third-party monitor of peer-to-peer networks. Blueprints, avionics information and cost breakdowns were found on the Iranian computer.
A number of Bethesda-area firms are contractors or subcontractors to the Department of Defense, including Lockheed Martin, which is building the next iteration of Marine One and recently came under fire for spectacular cost overruns on the project. (The current fleet was designed by Connecticut-based Sikorsky.) But a continuing investigation by Rick Earle at Pittsburgh's WPXI says that according to Tiversa, Lockheed is not the source of the leak, which was apparently caused by a contractor who loaded a peer-to-peer client on her or his machine.
IndiEclectic musicians do end-run around distribution
Like music? Want to hear some more music like the stuff you like? IndiEclectic, which launches this week after a lengthy beta period, taps a powerful fount of musical knowledge: Actual working musicians. The site features independent artists who are recommended by, and in turn recommend, artists who have something in common with what they do.
Visitors can preview tracks; in our quick visit, all the tracks we previewed played full-length songs, not 30-second samples. For $20/year, members can download everything they find on the site, which is driven by the Artists Recommending Artists search engine. It's also sorted into categories, and the database is searchable by artist (including many who are on the site specifically to make recommendations, not sales).
English teachers embrace 21st century composition skills
The National Council of Teachers of English isn't merely acquiescing to texting, blogging, video journalism, and all that newfangled tech stuff. In a fiery policy paper on "Writing in the 21st Century," past NCTE president Kathleen Blake Yancey makes a positive case for teachers to rethink how they teach "composing" skills in the classroom.
Composing, in other words, means effective communication by any means available -- not only pen and paper. The paper (PDF available here) gives the example of a 16-year-old girl who combined e-mail and photos to alert authorities and the media to an imminent disaster in her hometown. Texting, video, e-mail, and blogging all have authorship, and all deserve to be considered, states the paper, as the culture moves away from more traditional ideas of who writes and why.
Is Forrester advocating for blogger payola?
A report released this week by Forrester raises the creepy echo of pay-for-play scandals of yore, recommending that companies exchange goods, gift cards or the like for blog coverage as part of "sponsored conversations."
The report detailing how companies can "Add Sponsored Conversations To Your Toolbox" drew the attention of Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, who started his blog post by stating that he "respectfully disagree[s]" with the analyst firm's findings, but has words such as "dangerous" and "unsavory" in play by the end of the next sentence.
TiVo tiptoes to its first full year of profitability
Revenue may be down 20% with more pain in store for next quarter, but give TiVo this: The company has at last reported its first consecutive four quarters of profitability.
The DVR pioneer lost $3.6 million, or 4 cents per share, compared to a loss of $6.4 million, or 6 cents, year-over-year. TiVo's net income for FY09, just ended, was $104 million compared to a year-over-year loss of $32 million. Subscriptions are down by about 125,000, which may or may not reflect similar drops at cable providers as the recession wears on.
Done deal: Good is now Visto's
In a move that some are saying may spare workers from further layoffs, Visto has already closed its acquisition deal for Good Technology, purchased from Motorola in a deal announced last week.
Visto's statement this morning gives the distinct impression that it plans to market Good Technology services as competitive against Research in Motion's BlackBerry. But analysts today were speculating on the likelihood that Visto would instead add Good to its bustling portfolio of intellectual property, and may use it instead to go on the warpath against RIM by expanding the scope of its current lawsuits.
Intel's Atom finds new homes in embedded devices, Taiwanese factories
Today, small device manufacturers that don't have their own foundries rely on components makers to provide for them a kind of mix-and-match set of technologies upon which they can base their designs. One of the largest of these components companies is Taiwan's TSMC, which licenses its own intellectual property so that unique device manufacturers can leverage that IP to build their own designs. Up until today, the question of whether Intel could break into that market, making portable handset builders rely on its Atom processor the way motherboard producers rely on Core 2 and Xeon, has been up in the air.
No more. As the result of something called a memorandum of understanding between the two companies, Intel is permitting its Atom CPU core's IP to be ported to the TSMC Technology Platform -- the portfolio of IP that TSMC licenses to smaller firms. Now, these firms can build devices using Intel's Atom as their CPU, without having to also deal with Intel. It also makes TSMC effectively a co-opted foundry for Intel's hottest product line in this lousy economy.
Spansion's Chapter 11 signals the erosion of the flash memory market
The company that was at one time the world's principal provider of NOR flash memory -- the more non-volatile variety -- had its own plans to go "asset light," to use a now familiar phrase, and to concentrate on licensing its intellectual property to companies with the muscle to do the heavy lifting. It sounds like a plan AMD just executed last month. As it turns out, Spansion had also been planning to license others to produce its designs.
Whether that remains the plan after a few months' time is now completely unknown. This morning, the company's Sunnyvale-based American arm announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, a month after its Japanese division applied for similar protection there.
So who's at DEMO this year?
The "class of '09" at DEMO, underway today in Palm Desert, numbers just 39 -- down from 70 last year. But it's an exciting group, with some familiar names debuting new ideas and some fresh names very much hoping to make an impression.
Hey, it's... You know Citrix, Qualcomm, and Symantec well, and you met Evri right here at Betanews. Citrix is debuting GoView, which the company describes as a simple way to create and distribute screencasts for training, presentations and the like. Qualcomm's MEMS subsidiary is demonstrating their ultra-low-power mirasol display tech, glimpsed in the form of G-CORE at CES in January.
SAP to name a 'chief sustainability officer' for green computing
Like more and more companies these days, SAP now claims to be moving in a more "sustainable" direction, although interpretations of that term can vary a lot.
A little more specifically, in SAP's case, the "sustainability" initiative unveiled today includes plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to year-2000 levels, as well as to form a new cross-functional "sustainability organization" to lead efforts going forward.
Poor nations soar in cell phone use while Web access lags
While the vast majority -- or two-thirds -- of the globe's cell phone subscriptions are now in less developed nations, the Internet is still much less available there than in more advanced countries in North America, western Europe, and the Asia-Pacific, says a new study by a United Nations agency.
In Africa, for example, 28% of the population today has a mobile phone subscription, up substantially from merely 2 percent in the year 2000, according to the report by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). On the other hand, only 5% of the African population now uses the Internet, in comparison to a worldwide rate of 23%. Fixed Internet access in developing nations still tends to be limited, and often slow and expensive, too, the ITU explains.
Microsoft launches free trials of cloud business suite
At the CeBIT computer fair in Hannover, Germany, Microsoft unveiled its first commercial version of its Business Productivity Online Suite, which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. For its part, the Deskless Worker Suite incorporates Exchange Online Deskless Worker and SharePoint Online Deskless Worker.
These two suites are part of Microsoft Online Services, a managed service Microsoft is offering in a standard edition for businesses of all sizes, plus a "dedicated" edition providing customizability for organizations with 5,000 users or more.
The plan for Sirius XM may wait another two weeks
Sirius XM shareholders may already have reached a boiling point in their efforts to learn how it is working through a mountain of financing debt, the first stage of which came due at the end of last month. Now they will have to wait at least another two weeks, as the satellite radio broadcaster let the US government know this morning that its annual report for last year will be delayed until then, at least.
Sirius XM spokesperson indicated to Betanews this morning that the sole reason for the filing delay is to give the company more time to examine its refinancing plan. "The Company noted that senior management has been focused on the recent refinancing transactions and needs additional time to complete its Form 10-K," reads a corporate statement this morning. Sirius XM has filed the necessary 12b-25 forms for both the company and its XM Satellite Radio divisions, it says, so it's following the rules.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic hits a brick wall coming out of the gate
Though Nokia has yet to issue a formal confirmation, a representative of the New York City flagship store where Nokia phones are sold confirmed to Betanews this morning that Nokia corporate officials have ordered the store to cease sales of its 5800 XpressMusic phone, which only premiered in the US last Friday.
The sales halt comes after apparent customer complaints about 3G connectivity issues, the store representative told us, though no details about those specific issues were given. This would be a separate issue from the defective construction complaints also mounting about the device. The mobile device news source Mobile-review.com on Friday reported that, of ten shipping units its reviewers had tested, all ten had serious defects in which the casing loosens over a short period of time, causing the earpiece connection -- essentially the whole point of having a music phone -- to give way.
Most Commented Stories
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.