Visa is now readying two sets of credit card payment services on separate continents for users of Android and Nokia smartphones. And there may be more convergence to come around mobile payments in various sectors of the globe.
On a brighter note than most of the other financial news in the world this week, Visa is planning new services for Android and Nokia smartphones that might ultimately make it possible to use your smartphone much like a credit card.
Evri, a Seattle-based semantic-Web project backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital, has thrown open the doors on its beta site and on Evri's Garden, a sandbox for researchers and interested bystanders.
Formerly known as Hypertext Solutions, Evri's first widget offering in the Garden is a pop-up that examines the words it finds significant (generally nouns) on a page and returns various related articles, images, and video, and (if sufficient connections are available) a circle-and spoke chart, showing terms with which a given word has a close connection. An automatically generated chart might link, for example, "Barack Obama" with "Joe Biden," or "Beverly Hills" with "Ed McMahon," or "Mariners" with "failure." (I may have made that last one up. You can check for yourself on Evri's site or download the widget for your own uses.)
Download Safari for Windows version 3.1.2 from FileForum now
BetaNews has verified through its own testing that the latest build of the open source WebKit rendering engine, version r36882, makes Apple's Safari for Windows pass the Acid3 rendering test from the Web Standards project: 100%.
Alabama telephony company Digium announced its flagship product Asterisk, open source PBX (Private Branch Exchange) system, has released a beta version of Skype for Asterisk.
Since Asterisk is designed for commodity PC hardware, inclusion of one of the world's most popular consumer VoIP clients seems a natural fit. The add-on channel driver module integrates Skype VoIP calls into the Asterisk structure. Skype calls can be made, received, transferred, routed to voice mail or automated menus, and conferenced without the need for any additional hardware.
A recent essay by Google's chief Internet evangelist has BetaNews' Scott Fulton thinking about the meaning behind all this content, and whether the evolution of the Internet has made its creators forget the need for meaning.
One of my favorite movies of any genre made in this decade has been Pixar's Wall-E, and one of the reasons is that it depicts skillfully, though gently, the exact nature of a world that has become chock full of content. The title character's world became overrun with stuff, but devoid of people. In fact, the people got so sick of it, they left.
Download Adeona for Windows 0.2.1a Beta from FileForum now.
A software project from U. of Washington and U. C.-San Diego researchers will make its way to ToorCon next week, and if your laptop should happen to go to that conference without you, you could use this software to see that it makes it there.
While it isn't even October yet, the CES 2009 time bracket is fast approaching, with new gadgets on including the latest rechargeable "e-bicycle," and a family of Wi-Fi-, Web-, RSS-, and photo-enabled "wireless Internet frames."
NEW YORK, NY (BetaNews) - Although vendors at a ShowStoppers press event this week focused mainly on demoing electronically oriented gifts for the 2008 holiday season, a few also gave sneak peeks of new products targeted for release at the start of next year.
The problem that Palm has been perennially facing is that it now has a very popular phone, the Centro, whose price point is so low that the company can't sustain its margins. Yesterday, we learned that RIM is no longer immune.
Until recently, analysts have been divided on the impact the ongoing financial services upheaval will have on Research in Motion and its BlackBerry line of smartphones. Yesterday, RIM announced it doesn't think the future looks quite as wonderful as it once did, and lowered its outlook for the next quarter. Stock value subsequently plummeted.
Microsoft on Thursday was released from a payout to Alcatel-Lucent that at one time was as high as $1.5 billion, when a federal appeals court tossed the original jury's verdict in a long-running patent case.
The original case concerned Windows Media Player and Microsoft's MP3 license for that software. Microsoft licensed its MP3 codecs for $16 million from Fraunhofer Labs, the German research institute that, with Bell Labs and French electronics giant Thomson, invented the MP3 audio-compression standard.
1:55 pm EST September 26, 2008 - T-Mobile told BetaNews today it has now removed a 1 GB monthly data cap on the Android-based G1 from its policy statement, confirming our earlier report that the wireless carrier is dropping plans to impose a cap. A T-Mobile spokesperson also said that revamped 3G data plans will be "shared broadly with all customers" as soon as those plans are finalized.
The full text of the T-Mobile spokesperson's statement to BetaNews this morning follows:
The challenge continues for Microsoft to produce documentation about Windows' communications protocols that others outside the company can understand. Two weeks ago, the Justice Dept.'s team started making its own suggestions.
According to the US Dept. of Justice's regular Joint Status Report on the ongoing effort by Microsoft to meet the commitments of its settlement with the government, the Technical Committee (TC) overseeing the project for documenting communications protocols has not been entirely pleased with the quality of Microsoft's work thus far. It's not that Microsoft hasn't produced papers -- it has, and perhaps now that the count has reached the five-digit mark, parties may have stopped counting. It's that the work has been hard to understand, and now the TC is trying to help Microsoft by suggesting a new set of documentation templates based on what it considers to be approved industry standards.
Just how capable is your Netflix STB? An enterprising customer discovered there's an unpublished way to make the box stream much faster than any ordinary user can select.
A feature turned on by default in Roku's Netflix set-top box is intelligent streaming, where the bitrate is chosen according to the user's connection speed, thereby assuring the smoothest stream as possible. A user on Roku Forums posted a heretofore undocumented way to override the automatic selection and always stream at a chosen bitrate.
A new service from iCopyright allows publishers and content creators to find out who's reusing some or all of their words and pictures. But don't just think of it as a tool to beat up on "little guys" online, says the owner of the company.
In fact, CEO Mike O'Donnell says that searching out plagiarists and other abusers of copyright is "a distant third" on the list of things his firm's new Discovery service can do.
Richard Donaldson, COO of co-location provider UnitedLayer, knows that his new client InterCage is unpopular. It's just that he's not sure that hosting botnets, malware, and spam services deserves a lifetime of incarceration.
Because that is, Donaldson says, effectively what it means to cut off InterCage (a.k.a., Atriva) from the net community in this day and age.
Following Tuesday's rollout of T-Mobile's Android-based G1 phone, Larry Page went to Washington on Wednesday, urging the FCC to hurry up with its decision about opening up "white spaces" of the spectrum for free use by Google and others.
The day after helping to launch the first Android phone on T-Mobile's commercial wireless network, Google co-founder Larry Page landed on Wednesday in Washington, DC, where he lobbied the FCC to provide the "white spaces" wireless spectrum free of charge to companies like Google -- along with end users -- for future wireless devices.