Happy Wi-Fi Day!

Qualcomm Atheros created this art to celebrate 802.11 day, a holiday it invented.

I bet you didn’t know it, but today is 802.11 day. (I didn’t know it either until a PR person for Qualcomm Atheros–the Qualcomm division formed after Qualcomm acquired Wi-Fi chipmaker Atheros–e-mailed me.) Not because of any scientific milestone involved in creating the IEEE standard more commonly known as Wi-Fi, but because, well, it’s really 8.02.11. Get it?

The folks at Qualcomm Atheros seized upon the tech equivalent of a bad pun to update a group of journalists about what’s next for the popular connectivity technology–and although the excuse may have been lame, what they had to say was interesting. The last big upgrade, 802.11n, delivered speeds on the order of 100mbps Ethernet, so the standard now in the works is going for the next speed hurdle–1 gigabit.

Continue reading this story…

Zediva’s Streaming Video Loophole Closed By Judge

If you’ve been waiting for an invite to Zediva’s cut-rate streaming video service, it might be time to give up. A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction against Zediva on grounds of copyright infringement, which should lead to the site’s closure in about one week, CNet’s Greg Sandoval reports.

Zediva launched out of beta last March, with streaming rentals of new releases for $2 per night, or $10 for a 10-pack. It offered new movies before they became available through Netflix and Redbox, and didn’t pay a dime to movie studios. The trick was to let each individual user rent an entire DVD player, along with the disc inside, remotely over the Internet. Zediva argued that it was just like a brick-and-mortar rental store, but with a different delivery method.

Not surprisingly, movie studios disagreed. The Motion Picture Association of America sued Zediva and argued that the service’s rentals were actually performances, entitling studios to licensing fees. U.S. District Judge John Walter concurred, and has given Zediva and the MPAA a week to work out the wording of an injunction.

Continue reading this story…

The Bing Screen of Death

Here’s an amazing Stupid Search Engine Trick: typing the words “view” and “topic” in one query (or “phpbb”) into Bing will crash it.

Skype for iPad is Here (For Real This Time)

After accidentally being released a day early (and subsequently pulled), Skype’s iPad app is now available in the App Store for real. The release ends a long wait for those looking to Skype on their tablets: Skype with video on the iPhone has been available since the beginning of the year, and the iOS app itself for much longer than that.

Skype is playing up the benefits of video chatting on the big screen of the iPad, and I have to agree. While it’s nice to video chat from your phone, I’ve always thought video conferencing does better on bigger screened devices.

Continue reading this story…

Apple’s iCloud Pricing vs. the Competition

Apple has announced pricing for its upcoming iCloud service. In typical Apple fashion, the company kept things simple. 5GB of online storage is free; 10GB is $20 a year; 20GB is $40 a year; 50GB is $100 a year. (Most other cloud-storage companies price by the month rather than the year, which makes it tougher to judge what you’re really going to shell out–if you find one of these services useful, you’re going to use it indefinitely, not one month at a time.)

So is Apple’s pricing a deal? Comparing prices for these services is tough. Different ones offer different capacity points. Some have lots of features (SugarSync and Box.net, for instance) and some are far more bare-bones (Amazon Cloud Drive and Microsoft Cloud Drive). Some have their own twists (YouSendIt, for instance, has a built-in digital-signature feature) and some (Amazon Cloud Drive and iCloud) don’t include purchased music in the capacity limits. And anyhow, iCloud isn’t an exact counterpart to any existing service. It’s going to be way more Apple-centric–betcha there won’t be Android clients–and is less about syncing and more about leaving your files in the cloud, period.

Continue reading this story…

Android for Your Wrist: WIMM Unveils Wearable Computing Modules

Of all the gadget categories that have ever failed to take off, smart watches rank among the most resoundingly unsuccessful. Microsoft’s SPOT watches were remarkably crummy, and went absolutely nowhere in the market. Fossil’s Palm OS-based Wrist PDA fared no better. Dick Tracy would not be pleased.

But a startup called WIMM is trying again with the concept of creating a computing device you can strap to your wrist. And while it’s way too early to declare it a success, the demo I got from the company last week was enough to leave me intrigued.

Continue reading this story…

Iomega’s New Hard Drive is for iPad-Owning Mac Users

How can hard-drive companies jump on the iPad bandwagon? Seagate and Hitachi have created wireless drives designed to work with Apple’s tablet. Iomega is taking another approach. Its Mac Companion Hard Drive is a standard USB hard disk–and a desktop model at that–designed to charge an iPad.

As seen above, the Companion features an Apple-esque design and is sized to fit on the stand of an iMac or Apple monitor. It can connect to a Mac via FireWire 400/800 or USB 2.0, and has both a two-port USB 2.0 hub and the high-powered charging port required by the iPad.  (The USB 2.0 is a tipoff that Iomega really intends this drive for Mac users–otherwise, the company has been aggressively moving to USB 3.0, a technology which no Mac yet supports.)

The Companion is available in 1TB ($195) and 2TB ($295) versions, carries a three-year warranty, and will be available only at the Apple Store at first.

GoToMeeting Gets Videoconferencing

Built-in videoconferencing is an almost-standard feature in Web conferencing services these days–it’s even in SlideShare’s free Zipcast. It has, however, been missing from one of the biggest names in the business: Citrix’s GoToMeeting. But Citrix is announcing today that HDFaces, the video feature it revealed last October is going live after a bit of a delay. The company told me about the new feature last week in an appropriate way: it let me participate in a GoToMeeting session that used it. (That’s three folks from Citrix and me in the screenshot above.) Even though I was on so-so hotel Wi-Fi, it worked well.

HDFaces lets up to six people partake in a video conversation, with each person appearing in a window up to 640-by-480 in resolution. (The “HD” presumably refers to the maximum combined resolution of all the streaming video if six people are online at once–1920 by 960.) The technology adjusts for the bandwidth available: during the demo I got, the picture and audio stayed in sync and the session was about 98 percent free of choppiness or other obvious defects. As you’d expect, the video windows are integrated with GoToMeeting’s existing desktop sharing, text chat, and other features.

Starting today, HDFaces will be included at no extra charge as part of a standard GoToMeeting account, which costs $49 a month or $468 a year for unlimited meetings. (That’s for the host–it doesn’t cost anything to attend.) Archrival Webex already has videoconferencing in both its browser-based version and its iPad application: Citrix says it intends to bring the video feature to its mobile apps in the future.

Diablo III Will Make Gold Farming Legit

With Diablo III, Blizzard will attempt to legitimize a black market tradition of gold farming by letting players auction off virtual items and gold for real-world currency.

The feature, called Auction House, aims to wipe out sites like D2Items.com and D2Legit.com, along with scam artists and spammers. Blizzard says it won’t be selling any items on its own. Instead, the market will be determined entirely by the players, with Blizzard collecting a listing fee, plus a transaction fee if the item or currency is sold. Money from sold items will appear as credit in players’ Battle.net accounts, and players can convert that credit to cash using an unnamed third-party payment service. (Paypal’s my guess.)

A separate version of Auction House will use in-game currency for transactions, so players won’t have to spend real money on virtual goods.

Continue reading this story…

For Adobe, Edge Represents Opportunity, Not Surrender

“Adobe Quietly Surrenders to Steve Jobs, Builds Flash Alternative.” That’s the headline on Adam Clark Estes’s article over at the Atlantic on Edge, Adobe’s new HTML5 authoring tool. It captures the tone of a lot of coverage I’ve seen. Edge supposedly represents a capitulation on Adobe’s part. And it’s supposedly a product that Adobe might never have come up with if Steve Jobs hadn’t kept Flash off of the iPhone and iPad and been bluntly public about his reasoning.

Well, maybe. It’s true that the inability of Flash to run natively on iOS gives Adobe a powerful incentive to get on the HTML5 bandwagon. I tend to think, however, that this take gives Apple too much credit, and Adobe too little. Edge isn’t about Adobe bowing to Steve Jobs; it’s about it acknowledging reality. And Adobe shouldn’t be building this product in a grudging, grumbly fashion. If Edge is a great HTML5 tool, there’s no reason why it can’t be an enormously popular and profitable component of the company’s portfolio. It would be nuts for Adobe not to do it.

Continue reading this story…

All Things D: It’s Going to Be an iPhone October

Curious about when the next iPhone will come out? You can pretty much pick your month and find someone who says it’ll come out then–there’s probably somebody somewhere confidently reporting that a reliable source is saying the phone will come out in March, 2037. But All Things D’s John Paczkowski isn’t a guy who trades in rumors that are flimsy or just plain flim-flams. So when he says that the iPhone 5 will come out in October, I pay attention, at least.

Best Buy’s New Insignia TVs: TiVo Goes Beyond the DVR

For more than a decade, TiVo has been one thing: a DVR. And while it’s been a really good one, an awful lot has changed about the way we find and watch TV since the first TiVo box debuted in 1999. And now the company is involved in its first non-DVR project. It’s designed the on-screen interface for two new Internet-connected LCD TVs from Insignia, one of Best Buy’s four “exclusive brands” (along with Dynex, Init, and Rocketfish).

Insignia’s TVs don’t have any DVR features, and doesn’t offer an on-screen programming guide for over-the-air or cable programming. So they’re missing the aspects of the TiVo interface most closely identified with, will, TiVo. But when Best Buy demoed one of the sets for me last week, the interface did look like it has some of TiVo’s approachable DNA. That’s a major plus: TV companies don’t tend to be very good at at coming up with user interfaces when left to their own devices.

The sets come with CinemaNow and Napster–two services owned by Best Buy–as well as Netflix, YouTube, and Pandora. They use Chumby widgets to provide access to more than 1500 applets with information on subjects such as weather. And they’re the first TVs with built-in support for Rocketboost, a Best Buy technology for sending audio to speaker systems wirelessly.

They don’t, however, include DLNA compatibility, which would let you stream content off PCs and hard drives on your network: Best Buy says that its goal with these TVs was to keep things simple, and DLNA still isn’t straightforward enough.

The 32″ TV is $499; the 42″ one is $699. Best Buy says they’re available now, and that it plans both to upgrade their software with new features over time and to introduce new connected TVs and other devices based on the software in these TVs.

The Best Buy-TiVo partnership was announced more than two years ago; I was excited at the time, then so much time passed that I’d forgotten about it. Now I’m curious what other Internet-centric products TiVo might be working on. A Roku-style TiVo box could be nifty. And TiVo might be able to do a better job than Google TV has done so far at imposing a decent interface on over-the-air and cable TV. I hope that the company is furiously working on some of this stuff, and just hasn’t announced it yet…

With Edge, Adobe Preps Itself for the HTML5 Future

Adobe may be in no hurry to wind down its huge, aging, sometimes frustrating business built around Flash, but it isn’t dumb. It’s obvious that the future of rich Web sites–especially on phones and tablets–is about HTML5. And therefore it’s practically mandatory that Adobe release an application that lets creative types build such sites–a program that can join Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other Adobe products as a standard part of the world’s design toolbox.

Continue reading this story…