Beta Test Windows Home Server
After first unveiling the product at CES in January, Microsoft on Monday released Beta 2 of Windows Home Sever, and is opening up the beta program to a broader group of external testers. Previous releases were tested by over 1,000 Microsoft employees and the Redmond company's partners.
Windows Home Server, known by the code-name Quattro, is designed to enable families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers so they can easily store and access their digital media and documents. HP has announced the first Windows Home Server-based product, dubbing it: MediaSmart Server. Those interested in joining the beta test can apply on Microsoft Connect. A new Windows Home Server blog has also been created to supply more information.
Web Video Goes Mobile with Flash Lite
Adobe announced Monday that Adobe Flash Lite 3, scheduled for release in the first half of 2007, will include the capability to watch videos, bringing all the main features of Adobe Flash Player to mobile devices equipped with the software.
Flash Lite runs on numerous platforms: Symbian S60 v2/v3, Qualcomm BREW 2.x/3.x and Microsoft Windows Mobile 5, and a variety of OEMs. There have been more than 200 million Flash-enabled devices shipped worldwide, and with a community of over one million designers and developers, expect a variety of new applications specifically tailored to the mobile user this year
Bolt Nears Settlement with Universal
Representatives for social video site Bolt.com said Monday that it had agreed to pay a multi-million dollar settlement to Universal Music Group to settle charges of copyright infringement, and agreed to pay royalities on any future UMG-owned content uploaded.
UMG sued Bolt and Grouper in October of last year, accusing the two sites of hosting pirated versions of its videos. At the time, it sought $150,000 per occurrence, which was expected to total in the thousands.
Toshiba, HP, HTC Unveil WM6 Phones
With the release of Windows Mobile 6 at 3GSM, several companies have unveiled new phones based on the platform. Among them are a high end PDA phone from Toshiba, and smartphone devices from HP and HTC.
Toshiba's new G900 is aimed at the premium market segment for smartphones, and will feature tri-band HSDPA support. In addition to high-speed data, the G900 boasts an impressive list of features.
Intel to Show Off 1 TFlop, 80-core CPU
At a meeting of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in Santa Clara later this afternoon (early this evening East coast time), engineers from Intel are slated to demonstrate a working version of a conceptual CPU, using designs the company may integrate into future product lines. As promised during the last Intel Developers' Forum, this concept CPU will incorporate 80 cores using an experimental "network-on-a-chip" architecture, which enables the cores to share data without depositing it in memory first.
Last month, in an about-face in its strategy toward waging the "dual-core duel," AMD CEO Hector Ruiz pronounced, "It's not about the cores," in an attempt to deflect attention toward those parts of CPU architecture where AMD may still hold a slight advantage. Today's ISSCC conference is evidently where Intel responds, "The heck it's not!"
Final Version of GPLv3 Likely Delayed
Under the Free Software Foundation's previous roadmap, a so-called "last call" draft of the third GPL revision was due by now, with final release set for March. However, recent comments in the tech press indicate that is no longer the case.
Executive Director Peter Brown has indicated that the FSF is still working on release of the final draft of the specification, and would no longer hold itself to the March deadline. However, the organization's Web site has not been updated to indicate a new date.
MP3tunes Storage Service Now Free
MP3tunes, the company started in 2005 by MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, is dropping the yearly fee for its Oboe digital music locker service that offers unlimited storage and high-quality streaming over the Web.
The service is designed to rid users of having to carry around their music around wherever they go. "It makes more sense to safely store your music online and sync it or stream it to all the places you listen to music, which is exactly what Oboe makes possible," Robertson said when Oboe launched in November 2005.
Qualcomm's UBM Means TV on the Go
Qualcomm announced today a dual entry into the mobile entertainment, or "TV on your phone" market: its Universal Broadcast Modem (or UBM) chip, and MediaFLO platform for streaming content to mobile devices.
The San Diego company has been a leader in CDMA development, and the UBM is designed to be a companion to its CDMA2000 and WCDMA/UMTS Mobile Station modem baseband chipsets. It promises to deliver some of the premier standards in mobile video to mass-market handsets in one chip, and supports Qualcomm's own FLO, Nokia's DVB-H and ISDB-T.
Motorola Q Goes Global with GSM
Motorola's popular Q smartphone that debuted last May on Verizon's CDMA network has finally received a GSM counterpart, which will enable the device to be sold by U.S. carriers AT&T and T-Mobile, as well as in Europe.
The phone will come in two SIM card-supporting models: the MOTO Q q9 and MOTO Q gsm. The q9 can be considered a successor to the original Q, sporting a slightly thicker form factor based on Motorola's SCPL platform and running Windows Mobile 6.
Nokia Siemens Moves Ahead with Merger
The proposed merger of Nokia and Siemens' communications units appears to be back on track, as officials announced the company's portfolio, while saying the merger would close sometime this quarter.
Nokia Siemens Networks will be divided into six units, including Radio Access, Service Core and Applications, Operation Support Systems, Broadband Access, IP/Transport, and Services.
iTunes Starts Selling Lionsgate Movies
Movie studio Lionsgate has agreed to begin selling its movies on Apple's iTunes Store, joining Disney and Paramount and bringing the number of available films up to 400. "Terminator 2," "LA Story," "Total Recall," and "The Blair Witch Project" are among the 150 movies being offered by Lionsgate this month for $9.99.
Lionsgate is a top independent movie studio, and holds a library of over 10,000 films. "We're delighted to offer these incredibly popular Lionsgate films on iTunes, and look forward to adding even more films in the future," remarked Steve Beeks, president of Lionsgate. "iTunes lets users download these wonderful films to watch on their computer, TV or iPod."
RIM Debuts the BlackBerry 8800
Research in Motion unveiled the highly-anticipated BlackBerry 8800 device at 3GSM World Congress Monday, saying it would be available on AT&T in the US and Rogers in Canada.
The 8800 features a full QWERTY keyboard with trackball navigation. In addition, the phone includes built-in GPS, multimedia functionality, and expandable memory through a microSD slot.
Broadcom-based Handsets Cleared for Sale in US
In another indication that one of the most heated intellectual property disputes in the history of telecommunications could end up a near-wash for both sides, a US District Court ruled late last week that two major handset manufacturers will be allowed to export devices with Broadcom chips to the US, despite a pending patent infringement lawsuit from Qualcomm.
The two manufacturers are Samsung and Panasonic, for whom the ruling was quite timely, especially with the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona having opened just this morning. Both companies have current licenses with Qualcomm already as well, with respect to WCDMA technology; this ruling enables them to continue selling Broadcom chip-based phones by virtue of the fact that Qualcomm has already licensed its technology to them anyway.
Microsoft, Novell to Bridge Active Directory, eDirectory
In the next phase of the two companies' much-discussed collaboration, Novell and Microsoft announced they are working together to develop a method for using existing protocols for bridging network access between eDirectory and Active Directory, with complete details to come sometime during the first half of this year.
Though the two companies did not mention this explicitly, the common bond between the two identity management services for their networks is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Both are implementations of an LDAP store, although Microsoft utilizes a kind of abstraction layer that enables Windows Server-based networks to bind an LDAP application to a replica partition rather than specifically to an IP address. Differences in implementation such as this are why bridging the two identity services is not an academic process.
Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 Updated
Apparently not content to leave its products in beta like rival Google, but not yet ready to rubber stamp a final release, Yahoo on Monday released what it calls a "gamma" version of its application for mobile phones. Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 brings the ability to share searches and news articles with friends, as well as search directly from maps.
Yahoo! Go is available for Symbian and Windows Mobile based smartphones, and Yahoo says the service has been downloaded 400,000 times since its beta introduction last year. Other features of the offering include a personalized mobile homepage using RSS feeds, photo sharing through a Flickr widget, and access to Yahoo! Mail. One feature in version 2.0 that users may not be happy with is new interactive advertising.
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