ScanSnap Scanner Giveaway Continues

We’re giving away two ScanSnap scanners (courtesy of Fujitsu). You can still get a shot at winning one of them–here’s how.

Hulu Plus Arrives on TiVo Premiere

Hulu announced its Hulu Plus premium service almost ten months ago, but it’s been taking its own sweet time arriving on devices. It’s only now available on TiVo Premiere–and Engadget’s Ben Drawbaugh wishes that it was better-integrated with other TiVo services.

3D is Messing Up 2D, Too

The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr reports on an apparent ugly side effect of the generally ugly trend that is “3D”: movie theaters leaving 3D lenses on projectors even when they’re showing 2D movies, thereby robbing the films of sufficient light and leaving them dim and lifeless. Yet another reason to hope that 3D is a fad and that it goes away…

Adobe Beefs Up Acrobat.com’s SendNow

Adobe’s Acrobat.com services don’t have a very high profile–and many don’t have much to do with Acrobat or PDF–but they include some good stuff. There’s Adobe Connect, a Web-conferencing service a la WebEx or GoToMeeting which is among the most painless products of its type, and available in a basic version that’s free. There’s Buzzword, a simple but extremely good-looking browser-based word processor. And there’s a bunch of other features, including SendNow , a system for sending large files that competes with YouSendIt and its many rivals. (It too has a free basic version–which lets you transfer files up to 100MB in size–and paid tiers which offer more capacity and additional features.)

SendNow's upcoming branding feature.

Last week, the company announced some new SendNow features. The service, which has been focused on graphics and business-document file formats, now supports major audio and video formats as well. In June, it’ll give companies the ability to apply their own branding to the SendNow service, so their logo appears on the pages that people see when they download files. And it says that in the third quarter of this year–ie, sometime in July, August, or September–it’ll use Adobe Air to provide a SendNow app that lets you use the service from your desktop rather than a browser.

Do you use a big-file transfer services If so, which one, and do you recommend it?

Jeez, Sony, Get it Together

The Playstation Network may be back online, but the hacking of Sony’s websites never ends.

Intel Will Bet Big on Ultra-Low Voltage Laptops

Laptops don’t make for the most exciting news these days, but I’m pleased to hear that Intel’s PC plans call for a big bet on ultra-low voltage processors, as Ars Technica reports.

Ultra-low voltage, or ULV, refers to a range of processors that are more powerful than Intel’s netbook-centric Atom while retaining excellent battery life and allowing for slim figures. (I’m typing on an ULV laptop now, an Asus UL80vt.)

These thin-and-light ULV laptops were pricey when Intel introduced them a couple years ago, and they quickly earned niche status instead of mainstream success. Still, they offer what a lot of people are looking for in a computer — moderate performance and strong battery life in a lightweight frame — and pricing has come down. The company has already launched low-voltage versions of its Core i3, i5 and i7 processors

So it makes sense for Intel to give ULV a bigger role in its lineup. Whereas the the power draw for Intel’s chips previously centered around 35 watts, the company plans to set the center point around 10 or 15 watts, with the goal of making 10-hour battery life a reality for most machines.

On a recent trip to Best Buy, I was surprised by how chunky most laptops look, even compared to my 18-month-old machine. If Intel and PC makers can deliver lots of ultra-thin ULV laptops in the coveted $600 price range, the dreary old laptop could start to look exciting once again.

Verizon: “iPhone 5″ Will Compete with AT&T for Global Coverage

I noticed this story late last night, basically another ‘iPhone 5′ tease that’s even bigger news from where I sit than whatever newfangled whatsits Apple’s tucked under the hood: global Verizon iPhone support.

The tipster: my wife. She wants a phone she can take on business trips abroad (like the U.K., or more recently, the Middle East). But the phone has to be all things. It has to work across the pond, but also in her tiny northwest Iowa hometown. Actually out of town a couple miles to where her parents’ farmhouse sits, nestled behind a tower-blocking hill, flush with trees, cows, and a compost pit. Lest you think we’re asking the moon for cheese, Verizon’s had bumper voice and data coverage across the area for years, while—nothing against them otherwise—AT&T offers neither.

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The Brave New World of Mobile Phone Privacy

When Apple sneezes, the world takes interest in ear-nose-throat medicine. So upon learning that their iPhones have been building a bloated file of location data, consumers started wondering if mobile service also means mobile surveillance.

Add the unrelated but scary hacking of Sony’s PlayStation and Online Entertainment networks, and suddenly people are thinking about the data they are shedding and who’s picking it up.

Location is the bonanza of 2011. Companies are chasing hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue by trying to learn where consumers are, where they’ve been and even where they may be going.

“Through mobile we are getting data which as marketers we haven’t had access to before,” said Michael Collins, CEO of mobile marketing firm Joule at a recent conference. “We’re beginning to see the full life patterns of the consumer.”

Is this creepy (they know all about you), or great (marketers offer you stuff you actually want, rather than things you couldn’t care less about)? It depends on what you value, what you understand, and how much control you end up having.

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Alas, Google News Archive, We Hardly Knew Ye

The Boston Phoenix is reporting that Google has decided to quit further work on Google News Archive, its plan to scan and index 250 years’ worth of microfilm copies of newspapers and turn them into a searchable database. The Phoenix says that Google wants to concentrate on projects of more immediate benefit to newspaper companies, and speculates that the News Archive may have been tougher to implement and less popular than Google expected.

It’s sad news. No other Web company except Google would have had the ambition and good intentions to try and do this in the first place; it’s possible that very concept of a grand unified index of the world’s newspapers just died. But  while the project was a success in terms of sheer bulk–according to the Phoenix, Google scanned 60 million pages–it had crippling usability issues. I suspect that many folks who’d find it immensely useful have no clue that it exists–and even if they do, they may find it weirdly difficult to navigate.

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Is Traditional Search Passé?

Microsoft Bing chief Stefan Weitz made a pretty significant pronouncement in an interview with The Huffington Post on Wednesday: search as we know it is dead. That’s quite the statement.

In simplest terms, the old fashioned way of search results being nothing much more than a list of returned links just isn’t cutting it — a business model that’s made Google a ton of money.

Lets be fair, though: Bing isn’t that much better. In both cases the two search engines have focused their efforts on “the social,” hoping that is the answer. Google’s social search solution is +1, which gives greater weight to returned results that people in a user’s social circle may have liked. Microsoft is doing something similar, but in that case their using content culled from a friend’s Facebook stream.

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Android Global Share Quadruples, Passes Symbian

The standard meme when it came to smartphones was that while Android and iOS powered the lion’s share of devices sold here in the US, Nokia’s Symbian was the worldwide king. That logic is now outdated according to data from research firm Gartner.

For the first time, Android has surpassed Symbian in terms of units sold in the first quarter of 2010, making up 36 percent of the market. That is a four-fold increase from the same quarter last year, when it only made up nine percent of all devices sold. Much of Android’s gain came at the expense of Symbian, which fell from 44.2 percent a year ago to 27.4 percent.

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Early Chrome Build Lets You Kill the URL Bar

Google may take minimalism to the extreme with future versions of the Chrome browser.

As ConceivablyTech points out, the latest Chrome Canary build — an early-stage version that precedes developer and beta versions — includes the ability to hide the URL bar. To turn on this feature, enter “about:flags” in the URL bar, enable “Compact Navigation,” relaunch the browser, right-click any tab and click “Hide the toolbar.” (Don’t be shy; you can install Canary side-by-side with other Chrome versions.)

Once you do this, the URL bar will disappear, providing an extra 30 pixels of room to browse. The forward button, back button and tools icon nest within the same strip of space as open tabs. Clicking an open tab creates a drop-down URL and search bar that’s much shorter than screen width.

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Buy a PC, Get an Xbox 360

Apple has long offered students a tempting back-to-school deal: a free iPod when you buy a Mac. Now Microsoft is offering something similar. Nope, not a free Zune–a free Xbox 460 360 (a $200 value) when you buy a PC that sells for $699 or above at a variety of brick-and-mortar and online merchants.

Verizon Wireless May Offer Family Plans for Data

The bad news–at least for some people–is that Verizon Wireless plans to follow AT&T’s lead and eliminate all-you-can-eat data plans this summer. The good news is that it’s talking (albeit vaguely) about family-plan data pricing that would let you spread one bucket of megabytes among multiple gadgets.

Kindle Books Outsell Dead-Tree Books

First, Amazon.com started selling more Kindle books than hardcovers. Then Kindle tombs overtook paperbacks. And now Amazon is trumpeting a new milestone: it’s selling more Kindle books than hardcovers and paperbacks combined.

Amazon quotes founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in its press release:

Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books.  We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years.

I’m startled, too–as interesting as the Kindle obviously was when it shipped in November of 2007, I would have guessed that books for it would become a healthy minority of Amazon’s business within a few years, not the majority in terms of unit sales. (Then again, Amazon has marketed the Kindle far more aggressively than I would have predicted, more or less turning over its home page to Kindle promotion.)

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Your Chance at a ScanSnap Scanner

Weren’t we supposed to live in a paperless world by now? I seem to have at least as much stuff printed on dead trees in my life as ever—business documents, photos, greeting cards, and a whole lot more. So do you, I’ll bet. And if you’d like to cut clutter by bringing them into the digital world, here’s a way to get a shot at a scanner that can do the job.

Courtesy of Fujitsu, we’re giving away two of its snazzy ScanSnap scanners in a random drawing: the super-portable S1100 (a $199 value, shown on the left above) and the double-sided S1300 ($295, on the right). Both are compact desktop models that can scan to PDF, Office, e-mail, and more, and are compatible with Windows PCs and Macs.

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