Author Archive | Ed Oswald

Circuit City To Close Down March 8th

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 6, 2009 at 8:39 am

The Tragic Last Days of Circuit CityAll remaining Circuit City stores still open will shut down on March 8, the company said on Friday. While a few stores blew through inventory rather quickly, some still have a decent amount remaining (including mine, which had a lot of TVs and computers left). Liquidators originally planned to shut everything down by the end of this month or so, but the company has blown through the $1.7 billion in inventory rather quickly.

Thanks bad economy. Seems the only way people will buy anything these days is if it is discounted so much that nobody’s making any money.

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Hulu Returns To Boxee (Kind of)

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 6, 2009 at 8:29 am

BoxeeTalks have so far proven unsuccessful between Hulu and Boxee after the online TV giant asked the media-center software startup to remove its service from its application for Macs, Apple TV, and Windows.  (I’m guessing Hulu’s owners’ pet project is playing a part here), but the set-top box company has come up with a temporary workaround. Boxee’s calling it “bleeding edge.” Translation: its’s not even beta, so don’t expect it to work 100% — but it at least brings back some of the content from Hulu to the service.

Essentially, developers have opened up the service to accept RSS feeds with video. Hulu offers some of these feeds, which make it possible to stream the video included in these fees. It is not limited to Hulu: services that use RSS such as Google Video, Yahoo!, and YouTube are also compatible, as well as many other Web sites.

Also new is an “App Store” of sorts, which is being released with this update, as well as an automatic updating feature. Users would now be prompted to download software updates when they are released.

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ZillionTV Shows NBC, Fox's Hand

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 4, 2009 at 9:08 am

zilliontv_logo_cropped_200-thumbNow it makes all the sense in the world while suddenly Boxee is no longer good enough for these two networks. Both NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox Television are equity stakeholders in ZillionTV, yet another set top box offering.

Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, and Disney also own a stake in the company. About 40 other providers have agreed to provide content, with discussions ongoing with Viacom and CBS.

The service is provided through something called a ZBar and is free of charge. It’s not completely free though: users will have to fork over a $100 activation fee and sit through advertisements.

In an attempt to get you to actually watch the commercial, points will be awarded for each one viewed. Its not immediately clear exactly what these points would be redeemable for.

Visa is also a stakeholder in Zillion, and would run the payment processing backend. The service would allow users to purchase content to skip ads, although it would not be stored locally. Content with Zillion would be stored in a “locker,” and streamed to the user when requested.

I feel really bad for the boxee folks. They had a good product going, but apparently partners like NBCU and News Corp. were working behind the scenes to undermine their work. I doubt with ZillionTV on the horizon that boxee ever gets Hulu back now: why would these two companies cut into the business of their own product?

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Eye-Fi Adds Video Support to Its Cards

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 3, 2009 at 9:21 am

Eye-Fi CardThese little memory cards are the sole reason why when I upgrade my digital camera, I’m going to made sure its SD compatible (My current one’s a Fuji, so it takes XD cards). Eye-Fi has now added video support to these cards, as well as upgrading them to SDHC technology.

Two new cards would join the lineup, the $79 Share Video and the $99 Explore Video. The Share model would upload videos to any of 20 sites automatically, while the Explore version adds geotagging, much like the original two models did.

Eye-Fi will keep its 2GB Eye-Fi Home and Share cars , which would drop to $49 and $59 respectively. These are only capable of transferring pictures, with the Home only to your home computer and not any sharing sites. The Explore version would be discontinued.

I think this is a great move for a company that has a unique product. With online video now becoming so popular, having a way to automatically upload your videos just makes good sense.

All the new cards are available today, and can be purchased from Eye-Fi’s website.

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AMD to Split Itself in Two

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 2, 2009 at 9:34 am

amdsplitThe chipmaker is hoping splitting itself up is what it needs to compete with Intel. While the original announcement of the breakup happened in October, the actual breakup occurred today. The larger of the two would still be AMD, which would retain about 14,000 employees, and would be charged with design and marketing.

Manufacturing of the chips would be the responsibity of the temporarily named Foundry Co. 3,000 of AMD’s employees would transition there. AMD would have a 50 percent stake in the new company. Most importantly, the company would no longer have any debt.

That has been assumed by the Abu Dhabi government in return for a large stake in Foundry. Intel should be a bit worried: now debtless, AMD will have a much easier time in taking the chipmaker head-on.

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White House No Longer Using YouTube

Posted by Ed Oswald on March 2, 2009 at 8:56 am

It appears as if the Obama Administration has decided to stop using YouTube as a method to embed its videos into websites for the Government. Starting with this weeks address, videos are now served in Flash through technology provided by Akamai.

While most seem to be labeling it as a way to answer privacy concerns, I always thought it kind of weird for a government entity to be using a branded solution for streaming media.

Our government (in theory at least) is supposed to not show any favoritism towards any one company. Seeing that big ol’ YouTube logo everytime I watched the President’s address always seemed slightly odd.

If it did have to do with privacy concerns, YouTube had actually made some effort to strengthen its privacy policy for those watching videos on government websites. Apparently the Administration didn’t get the message there.

Videos would still be pushed to YouTube as they have been before. However it now appears that Akamai’s technology will serve them on the actual government site.

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The Diggbar is Just Not a Good Idea

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 27, 2009 at 11:00 am

digg-logoA Flickr photo has set off a firestorm of speculation across the web as to the social news sites future plans, which apparently involve the launch of a application-free browser toolbar. It would appear that the toolbar would work much like application StumbleUpon debuted last year.

SU originally started as a browser add-on, however it ditched that model to use HTML frames instead in September. Users start their experience from the SU homepage, and their browsing afterward appears in the framed user interface.

A user would be able to digg stories without actually going to the site, as well as submit content. Like SU’s app, they would also be able to randomly surf to another digged site from the toolbar itself.

It would also allow for the easy sharing of digged sites through Facebook messages, e-mail, Digg “shouts,” or through Twitter.

Now this sounds all well and good, and interesting, so how is it a bad thing for Digg? Simply put, its going to add a significant amount of noise to the site. Digg’s submission process acts somewhat as a filter of sorts, discouraging people from digging everything and anything.

Using a toolbar would simplify this process dramatically. It would also probably have the effect of muddying the site with a lot of submissions that are of little value. This would also cheapen Digg’s brand in my opinion.

While yes I understand the sites desire to increase traffic, I am not so sure going to a toolbar may be a good idea.

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Apple Enthusiasts' Urge To Flame: What Gives?

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 26, 2009 at 1:00 pm

I have spent much of my professional technology writing life covering Apple, from my days at BetaNews right through my current gig here at Technologizer. My original “beat” wasn’t always Apple, though: I also covered Microsoft for a time.

Having covered both sides of the spectrum, I’ve dealt with the hyper-enthusiasts — the “fanboys” if you will — of both sides. What I’ve found is a completely different reaction to unfavorable press from either group.

Bad news is inevitable, after all.

Continue Reading →

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Office 14 To Be a No-Show in 2009

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 24, 2009 at 10:15 am

Microsoft OfficeSteve Ballmer has finally put the kibosh on any hopes of seeing the next version of Office this year, essentially telling Wall Street analysts any rumors or leaks indicating such are not true, according to Mary Jo Foley.

Executives have let slip apparently that there was some possiblity of a late 2009 release, and enterprise sales representatives were echoing that to their customers. However, for whatever reason it now appears that date has slipped.

Could it be a casualty of the poor economy? Possibly. Pushing it into 2010 could mean a better adoption rate as many economists expect some type of recovery to begin at that time. A lot of companies right now are slowing down their product releases as a result of the poor retail environment, which does make good business sense.

Office 14’s delay doesn’t seem to be affecting Windows 7, however. MJ’s sources still place the release of that operating system later this year. I think it isn’t a problem: an operating system release is more important that a productivity suite in my eyes.

After all, I know a few folks who have still yet to upgrade from Office XP yet.

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Safari 4: Rapid! Revolutionary! And Mostly Unnecessary

Posted by Ed Oswald on February 24, 2009 at 9:03 am

safariiconApple Tuesday release Safari 4 on Tuesday, promising the “world’s fastest web browser” and exciting new features. Yes, this browser is fast Nitro makes this browser quite fast, and it works well — I’m using it right now to type out this post. While I have not tested it on Windows, a Microsoftie reported into me not too long ago that Safari 4 is indeed faster than IE8 on the platform.

Really this release of Apple’s browser appears to be more of a window dressing than an actual honest-to-god upgrade of the platform. Safari now borrows cover flow technology from iTunes, which allows you to see current previews of your “top sites” when opening a new tab, or searching through your bookmarks (here, the pages look as you last visited them).

Search has been modified to actually remember information within the pages in your history. This would allow you to search through the information contained within the pages, which is probably one of the most useful “new” features in this release.

Overall however, Safari 4 when you take out the Cover Flow really is more of a point release than a dramatic retooling of the software. However, with so much done already in the browser space, these days it’s pretty tough to be original…

Update: Found my first showstopping bug with S4 (at least for me). The browser does not work correctly with WordPress’ Dashboard on the Mac version, which obviously throws a wrench in allowing me to put it to regular use.

And before I hit save, on the subject of my calling the update “unnecessary,” which some have taken issue with: my point is that the new visual features do not really add all that much value. I did say the browser is fast, I’ve updated that to make it clearer that this is Nitro.

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