Bad news Technologizer fans — Harry has just pinged me and said that we’ll not be able to bring you liveblog coverage.
We’re working on some semi-live reporting so don’t go anywhere, see below. Still ask your questions in the comments!
Sorry for the incovenience!
UPDATE: Were Live(ish) – http://www.technologizer.co/iphone3
With the sudden news that the country is about to lose another high-circulation paper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it is becoming increasingly clear that in an attempt to stay relevant, these companies are betting on the web for their salvation.
The P-I will move to a online only source a la the Huffington Post, but it will come at a high cost: the 165-person newsroom would likely shrink to less than 20. In addition, its likely that much of the reporting would be outsourced.
What’s worse, the closure of the P-I, and the earlier shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News, could threaten other papers. Both operated what are called “joint operating agreements,” where competing papers sign agreements to pool operating costs. The Seattle Times and The Denver Post were the other halves of each respective agreement.
Neither were doing well beforehand, and now are faced to pony up for their expenses on their own.
Besides the P-I, other papers are going online. The Christian Science Monitor, which has published in print for 100 years, will go online only in the spring. But some are still trying to stick it out.
Let’s think of it as a graduation of sorts for cloud services: you haven’t made it until you’ve experienced at least one major crash. Microsoft’s time was this weekend, apparently. For 22 hours from 10:30pm Pacific on Friday to about 8:30pm PDT Saturday, Windows Azure was unavailable. It is not immediately clear exactly what caused it to go down.
We’ll likely not know until after Mix 09, happening this week in Las Vegas. That’s because Azure has a large presence at the event, and Redmond probably doesn’t want to deal with outage questions while they’re trying to talk it up. But you gotta think journos and bloggers are going to be peppering representatives with questions on what exactly happened…
([UPDATE:] This post was written with the information Technologizer had at the time. Since then, we’ve learned a bit more. Please reference this new post from Harry.)
The “Apple tax” has been somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek joke in the tech world for a long time: where the consumer pays a higher price for a product simply because it bears the Apple logo.
Well, that concept may be coming to Shuffle headphones as well. Amid giving the Shuffle its first-ever “no” recommendation for an iPod/iPhone product, Apple enthusiast site iLounge also dropped a bombshell: Shuffle headphones are essentially DRM protected.
iLounge claims that the headphones add some type of “authentication chip,” which means that standard headphones will not work with the device. Obviously they wouldn’t, since all the navigation is done via the iPhone-like pushbutton device on the right earbud wire.
But if third-party headphones add playback controls but don’t have this chip, they won’t work either. That means no volume, no voiceover, and no navigation. Nada. You’re S.O.L. To make them work, iLounge says a $20-30 to-be-manufactured adapter is needed, or approved headphones, which so far are no cheaper than $49.
Seeing on my end how easily those headphones short circuit at the pushhbutton unit causing them to malfuction on my iPhone, this should be something Apple users should be concerned with. If they bring this technology to other devices, God knows owning an iPod will become more expensive.
I’ve played with the Shuffle. And frankly, my experience was nothing like Harry’s, and more like iLounge’s. I struggled to get the thing to move from track to track–instead i was nearly blowing out my eardrums cause the volume was getting louder. Count me in as one of those who prefer their controls on the device.
I was watching others in the Apple store with me. Quite a few were having trouble with it. I really do see this Shuffle as the iPod line’s version of the Cube–kinda cool idea, but just not necessary.
The number of mobile device users accessing the Internet in the US at least once a month has risen 71 percent in the last year, with a total audience of nearly 63.2 million, comScore reports. Weekly and daily usage is also up 87 and 107 percent to 19.3 and 22.4 million respectively.
No doubt, the rise of the iPhone which in turn spurred competitors to better their own mobile Internet offerings has helped accelerate mobile Internet usage. The mobile web today is ten times better — and more usable — that what has been offered in the past.
What are people looking at? Increasingly its their social networking site or blog, as that showed a 427 percent year over year increase to 9.3 million daily unique users. General news and information was checked by 22.3 million daily, and entertainment news was also popular, seen by 5.5 million daily.
So let’s do a mini-survey of Technologizer users. How often are you using the mobile web? What are the three most common types of things you’re looking at?
With Facebook increasingly more popular these days, and more and more social networking users ditching their MySpace profiles for the service, its no surprise that Facebook is beginning to borrow some of its competitors conveniences. One of them is the vanity URL.
Simply put, it’s so much easier to give someone your MySpace URL. I jumped on that bandwagon real early, so mine is nice and short: http://www.myspace.com/edoz. However, on Facebook, there’s no way I’d remember this doozy: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1014145619.
Up until recently, you had to be a band or group in order to get one of those nifty vanity URLs on Facebook. Well, that policy appears ready to change. A few folks, including Demi Moore, Aston Kutcher, and now Digg’s Kevin Rose have their own vanity URLs on Facebook.
When will this happen? It’s not quite clear just yet. But with it beginning for those social media elites already, its only a matter of time before us commonfolk get the same opportunity.
While President Obama has made much of his efforts to bring broadband in the US up to par with other countries — his Administration is spending $7.2 billion on it — it appears the initiative is not off to as fast a start as some of Obama’s other programs.
The government held a informational meeting at the Commerce Department on Tuesday which was well attended according to BusinessWeek. However, important questions — such as the government’s definition of “unserved,” the recipients of the lion’s share of the money — were not answered.
Officials with the the National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA) deflected those questions, saying it was still looking for guidance from industry leaders and the public. Every other question about allocation was answered in the same way, BW reports.
So what was the point of this meeting? No one seems to know. What it does seem like is a collosal waste of time if the government wasn’t ready to announce anything substatiative. For an Adminstration that’s hanging its hat on eliminating government waste, meaningless events like this could be a good place to start.
There are more public meetings scheduled. These will take place in Washington, Las Vegas, and Flagstaff, Arizona, and be open to industry leaders and other interested parties. One hopes by this time they will know what they’re doing.
The drumbeat in the media claiming Apple is developing some type of netbook or tablet PC for later this year is growing louder. Reuters says souces in Taiwan report that the Cupertino company has placed an order for 10-inch touchscreens with supplier Wintek.
That firm has received orders for these screens, and Apple is a client of the company. However, it would not comment on the report, and Reuters’ source declined to offer any more information.
Either way, delivery of these devices is expected in the third-quarter. Reuters’ story also marks the third news outlet to report something about these touchscreen devices from Apple.
A Chinese business daily reported the original news earlier this week, and a Taiwanese government listed Apple and Sony as customers of Quanta, a contract laptop manufacturer, in 2009 (this was last year).
So despite a lot of analyst predictions that Cupertino would slow down as a result of the slowdown, it now appears the company is still going full steam ahead.
GigaOM is reporting that Sprint has reportedly begun testing LTE equipment, a move that may suggest it may not be completely confident that WiMax may be its eventual route for 4G.
Sprint owns 51 percent of Clearwire, a company commited to bringing near-nationwide WiMax access by 2010. However, its competitors have all decided that LTE is the way to go for next-generation data, leaving the company as the odd man out, so to speak.
The company is not denying that it is testing out LTE, explaning it as a method “to monitor and assess the competitive landscape and any potential impacts to Sprint’s plans.” But you have to think, being that its the only provider comitted to WiMax that maybe it may be having some second thoughts.
Add this to the fact that Clear’s WiMax equipment was built to be converted later to LTE, and one has to wonder.
With its auction business struggling, eBay is turning to its Paypal arm for salvation. According to an BusinessWeek article, the company plans to use its annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday to focus on its plans for its payment arm.
New eBay CEO John Donohoe has already said that he believes PayPal will overtake its auction revenues in the not-too-distant future. That wouldn’t be hard to believe either: even with PayPal’s popularity as an online payment medium, here in the US where it used the most, only 12 percent of all online payments are processed through the service.
Obviously PayPal has a lot of room to grow. So how is eBay going to do it? By going after those companies and organizations that use online payments everyday. Charities and organizations rely on a lot of online donations, and some government services allow for online payments of taxes, bills, and fines. Both could easily integrate PayPal into their offerings.
In addition, the service plans to offer an SDK of sorts to encourage developers of e-commerce apps to fully integrate paypal into their offerings, such as Apple has within iTunes. This could also increase the company’s share of online payments.
With people moving away from credit cards with the recession, using services like PayPal may make sense. Like the BusinessWeek article infers, people only want to spend the money they have. Expanding at a time like this could pay dividends later as people get used to using the service regularly.
