One Gigabit Internet Coming To Chattanooga

When you’re thinking of ultra-high speed Internet and its expected rollout across the country, I’m sure the last place you’d probably name is Chattanooga, Tennessee. However if all goes right, the mid-sized southern city will likely be the first in the country to break the one gigabit speed barrier here in the US.

City-owned power utility EPB said Monday that it would be able to deliver the ultra-fast speeds by the end of the year. The company had originally announced in June that it would deliver speeds of 150 megabits per second over its 100% fiber-optic network, but apparently the company’s decided to go all out.

Ready to sign up? Better have a big pocketbook. The gigabit service will set you back $350 per month — making it prohibitively expensive to all but mid and large sized businesses and the wealthy. But even its own executives have admitted they really don’t know how to price the offering — so I don’t think it would be all that unreasonable to expect the price to come down fairly soon.

It will also have a little more guidance later this year after Google makes its expected announcement on where it would build its own ultra-high speed network offering similar speeds. The company pledged to cover 500,000 people in the US with fiber-optic Internet earlier in the year. 1,100 communities applied as a result.

So you may ask, “why are they doing it if it’s so darn expensive?” From EPB CEO Harold DePriest comes the best answer I’ve heard from a executive in quite awhile: “Because we can.”

Massive Dual-Touch Screen Acer Laptop is All Kinds of Wrong

Over the weekend, TechReviewSource scored some photos of what is allegedly an Acer laptop with dual touch screens.

I’m not familiar with the website, which doesn’t name its single source that provided the photos, so take these details with a grain of salt, but the 15-inch laptop reportedly packs a 2.67 GHz Intel Core i5 processor and Windows 7. The goal is to release the laptop in fall 2011 — it’s still slow and buggy right now, says the source.

A lot can change in a year — my gut says this is a prototype that will never see the light of day — but for now I’m wondering if any PC makers really think the dual-touch screen Windows laptop is a great idea to begin with.

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Twitter Holds an Event–I’ll Be There. Join Me!

A buch of tech journalists–including me–have been invited to an event at Twitter headquarters tomorrow afternoon. (We’ve been asked to show up by 3:45pm.) I don’t know what the topic is (guesses welcome!) but this is the first such event at Twitter that I can remember.

I’ll liveblog the news as it happens at Technologizer.com/twitter_event, and I hope you’ll drop by to see what’s up…

Latest Motorola Android Phone to Debut.. On Oprah??

Color me slightly confused on this one: Motorola is set Monday to debut its Defy phone on Oprah as part of the show’s season premiere — which is also its last. I guess it may be a good marketing decision considering the ratings for the show would probably be quite high, but then again are soccer moms a good target audience?

The Defy launches on T-Mobile later this year, and sports a 3.7-inch scratch-resistant touchscreen, Android 2.1, Motorola’s BLUR interface, five-megapixel camera, and a “rugged” exterior shell. This extra rigidity keeps out dust and water better than other smartphones, Motorola claims.

Motorola also will include noise-canceling technology on the device as well as Adobe’s Flash Lite, a feature that seems to have become ever more popular on recently released Android phones as of late. T-Mobile’s product management chief Paul Cole is calling it “a connection hub wrapped in a layer of protection.”

Another interest feature is built-in DLNA support. DLNA allows electronics to share content between devices supporting the technology. A cool feature, but it obviously requires other DLNA-equipped devices in order to truly be useful.

Pricing has not been announced — that will be part of the Oprah debut. So I guess you have to tune in and find out if you’re interested in the Defy. Now I guess it *might* make a little sense?

When Will They Ever Learn (to Back Up)?

Someone stole John Boldt’s laptop out of the trunk of his car. Nothing really newsworthy about that. But according to a CTV Calgary article, that laptop contained the University of Calgary grad student’s nearly-completed master’s thesis, as well as his research and notes.

“It’s so many years of my life just thrown away,” Boldt told CTV. “The computer can be replaced. It’s what’s on it that can’t.” Unless an honest thief returns the precious files, Boldt figures that he can’t return to the University. His academic life and future career, judging from the article, are pretty much over.

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Live Matrix is…Live!

Live Matrix, the intriguing schedule for live Web events which I wrote about a few months ago, has opened up to the public.

The Boxee Box: Nearly Here, Still a Contender

What a difference a year makes. When Boxee and D-Link unveiled the Boxee Box  in late 2009, things were pretty quiet on the Internet-TV-in-the-living-room front. Now, after a bit of a delay, the companies are getting ready to ship the Box in November. And it’ll compete against the all-new Apple TV, set-top boxes and TVs based on Google TV, the first devices that support Hulu Plus, and a bevy of other methods of getting video off the Internet and onto an HDTV. Little Boxee, in other words, will face daunting competition from some pretty formidable rivals.

I met with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and D-Link Director of Consumer Marketing Brent Collins this weekend to get a sneak peek of a nearly-final Boxee Box. And you know what? Despite the avalanche of competition it’ll face, it still looks pretty cool.

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Super-Strange Mario Bros.

In the beginning, there was Mario.  Just Mario–the humble handyman who chased after Donkey Kong. But on September 13th, 1985, he appeared in a blockbuster game whose title gave him an honorific he’s proudly kept ever since: Super Mario.

Technologizer’s resident game historian, Benj Edwards, is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Nintendo megafranchise Super Mario Bros. with a look at some of the weirdest Super Mario variations, spinoffs, and tributes. May the little guy continue to inspire us all for at least another quarter century.

View Super Mario Oddities slideshow

Super Mario Oddities

Super Mario Bros.–that classic of classics–turns 25 years old today. On September 13th, 1985, Nintendo released the seminal video game for the Famicom (the Japanese equivalent to the NES), and it made its way over to the States early the next year. With the possible exception of Pac-Man, no video game franchise symbolizes the art form more completely.

Since Super Mario Bros. has touched the lives of so many people (it was the top-selling video game of all time until Wii Sports eclipsed it recently), many works of art, culture, and merchandise have been inspired by it. In the spirit of this anniversary, let’s take a look at some of the oddest ones.

Adobe Illustrator Goes HTML5

Does Adobe want Flash to have a long and healthy future? Sure, but as the dominant player in software used by people who design Web sites, it’s clear that it must embrace open-source HTML5 standards with at least as much energy as it gives its own technologies. Here’s a promising sign: The company is releasing an add-on pack for its Illustrator vector-drawing package that turns the software into an HTML5 authoring tool. The Pack lets Illustrator users gear up for the richer Web ahead by beefing up Illustrator’s existing SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) features and adding new support for HTML5 concepts such as CSS3 and Canvas Tags.

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Instant Everything

If Google Instant is a hit, Google–and its competitors–will presumably try to build similar interfaces for other services. In the meantime, there’s an unofficial site called YouTube Instant.

Galaxy Tab (Almost) Everywhere

At Samsung’s Galaxy Tab launch at IFA in Berlin last week, Samsung executives wouldn’t say when the tablet would debut in the U.S.–but they did say that it would be for sale from “most” major wireless carriers. Looks like they spoke the truth: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint will all offer the Tab.

Death to Killer Metaphors!

Can we all agree that it’s always a terrible idea for a tech company to suggest that its new product is going to kill any existing product? If so, could someone please tell Microsoft?

Google: Don’t Get Excited About Android Tablets–Yet

Can Google’s Android power tablet computers that make sense as serious iPad rivals? Sure–but it’ll take more than slapping the OS on a device with a big touchscreen. Google–or somebody–will need to seriously rework Android’s interface so it takes advantage of the extra pixels and real estate on a tablet, just as Apple did when it put the iPhone’s iOS on the iPad.

Two upcoming versions of Android, Gingerbread and Honeycomb, will apparently be built with tablets in mind. For now, the best a hardware manufacturer can do is to put Android 2.2 Froyo on a tablet and tweak it to deal with the new form factor. But Google doesn’t seem to think that’s a good idea: Techradar is quoting Google mobile honcho Hugo Barra, and his implied message seems to be to hold off on buying an Android tablet for now.

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Fast Isn’t Everything

In the wake of Google Instant’s launch, Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has some smart thoughts on improvements Google could make that have nothing to do with speed.

Facebook More Popular than Google

The need to check up with friends on Facebook is becoming so great that as a whole we’re spending more time on Facebook than any other online destination, comScore reported this week. A total of 41.1 million minutes or 9.9 percent of consumer’s online time were spent on the site in August, surpassing time spent on Google which came in with 39.8 million minutes or 9.6 percent.

It shouldn’t be all too surprising that the social networking site has come out on top. Facebook’s user experience invites the user to spend an extended period of time on the site, whether it be posting statuses, playing games, or creeping on other’s profiles.

Google doesn’t have that. All we come to do there is search and get out, really. There currently is not much there to keep us, so its more of a passthrough than a destination per se. It should be noted that Google’s other sites — including Gmail and YouTube –  were apparently included in the numbers but that still wasn’t enough.

Even more interesting than the race between Google and Facebook is Yahoo’s own fall from grace. In the same study taken last year, Yahoo had 12 percent of user’s online time, versus only five percent each for Google or Facebook. This year, that has fallen to 9.1 percent in the current survey.

I know at least in my own usage, my Facebook time far outweighs any time I spent on Google. I could also arguably say I spent more time on Twitter that Google, too. What sites are you using the most?