5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Thom Allen

1. Hauppauge Digital Broadway Box Streams Live TV To Your Mobile Devices
Hauppauge have this week launched their new Digital Broadway Box which has been designed to provide an easy way to watch live TV on your mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets whilst on your home network or while travelling. All you need is access to a Wifi connection.

2. Yahoo Is About To Spin Off A Billion Dollar Business
Yahoo is going to spin off its Hadoop unit this week, a Giga Om report says.

Hadoop is an open source software framework pioneered by Yahoo that’s useful to handle tons of data in the cloud, which is exactly the type of thing that is really hot these days. We wrote previously about Yahoo’s impending Hadoop spinoff; it’s a potential billion-dollar business that’s not in Yahoo’s core, and so would be best spun off with Yahoo retaining a stake.

3. How NextDrop Is Using Cell Phones, Crowdsourcing To Get Water To The Thirsty
In cities where the water coming from pipes is anything but reliable, a new service alerts people so they don’t have to sit at home all day waiting for the tap to turn on.

4. All-You-Can-Watch MoviePass Brings Netflix Model to Theaters
MoviePass, a new $50-per-month service for film fans, will let subscribers watch unlimited movies in theaters using their smartphones as tickets.

Using an HTML5 application (native smartphone apps coming soon), MoviePass will let users search for a film, find a local show time, check in to the theater and go straight to the ticket-taker.

5. Top 10 Reasons Geeks Should Love the Tour de France This Saturday, the 98th edition of the Tour de France starts in Province of Liège, kicking off three weeks of bicycle racing. Twenty-one teams of nine riders each will have to endure 3,400 kilometers of racing and 23 mountain passes to reach the finish line on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. It’s an event full of incredible human achievement and endurance. But it’s also full of geeky goodness. I decided to update my article from 2009 encouraging you to enjoy the race.

BONUS

6. Apple “steps up its game”, new iOS 5 firmware to block downgrades
Apple has started to introduce new security checks in its new iOS 5 software that could possibly restrict owners of an iPhone, iPad or iPod from downgrading the firmware on their devices, the iPhone Dev-Team has revealed.

7. Companies Are Erecting In-House Social Networks
What would Facebook look like without photos of drunken nights out and tales of misbehaving cats? It might look a lot like the internal social network at the offices of Nikon Instruments.

8. Take that Netflix, HBO Go app sees big growth
If you don’t believe cord cutting exists and that there isn’t any competition between Netflix and cable programmers, then you needn’t read on. If on the other hand, you at least see the potential for Netflix to some day snatch customers away from the cable guys, then take note: this weekend HBO expects to see the 3 millionth download of the HBO Go app, which debuted on May 2, a company spokesman told CNET. There are 28 million HBO subscribers in the United States so the 3 million downloads would indicate that roughly 10 percent of the company’s audience has tried out the app.

5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Thom Allen

1. Steve Jobs Confirms Discontinuation of iWeb in iCloud Transition
Since last week’s unveiling of Apple’s new iCloud service and the transitioning of the company’s existing MobileMe service into iCloud, many users have been wondering about the fate of some of the MobileMe services that were not mentioned in the transition discussion. In particular, users have been concerned about iWeb, Apple’s website creation software included with iLife that can be integrated with site hosting via MobileMe.

2. DIY U: The Future Of Learning [Video]
The future of learning is open–and it’s in your hands. This video series, based in part on my book DIY U, explains that while the higher education bubble may be overblown, there is an explosion happening in the edu-world, with technology and openness transforming content, social learning, and accreditation all at once. Part One explains what’s happening and why the old models no longer apply.

3. Bunchball raises $6.5M, doubles down on gamification
Bunchball, the social gaming software company, has raised $6.5 million in a new round of venture capital. The San Jose, Calif.-based startup plans to put the funds toward growth initiatives such as hiring, new product development, and international growth, CEO Jim Scullion told me in an interview last week.

4. Sony Knows Cross Game Chat is a Huge Thing
No, Sony is not talking about PlayStation LifeStyle’s podcast, “Cross Game Chat.” Andrew House of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe is talking about cross game chat for the PS3.

5. Apple iCloud Not Supporting Windows XP
We strongly suspect all the support Apple has shown the venerable Microsoft OS with iTunes and Mobile Me has mostly been a way of keeping people from buying shiny new copies of Windows 7, but that’s all coming to an end with Apple’s music-streaming iCloud, which won’t be featuring Windows XP support and will need either a Vista or Windows 7 PC to run.

BONUS

6. Use Binder Clips to Replace Broken Keyboard Feet [MacGyver Tip]
They make great cable organizers and phone stands, but the humble binder clip can also fix things that are actually broken, too. In this case, it’s those little flip-out “feet” on the bottom of most keyboards. Just take the metal wings off two clips, and replace the feet by squeezing the those wings into their place. If nothing else, it’s a lot cheaper than replacing the keyboard.

7. iOS 5 Allows For 1080p Video Exports, Confirms iPhone 5 8 Megapixel Camera
The iPhone 4 features a 5 megapixel camera, and it is capable of recording video in HD at a resolution of 720p, we have been hearing rumors that the iPhone 5 will feature an 8 megapixel camera, possibly a Sony CMOS sensor, which would mean it would be capable of Full HD Video in 1080p.

5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Thom Allen

1. Juniper: NFC Payments To Reach $50 Billion Worldwide By 2014
We know Google has made a big bet on near field communications (NFC) as a payments system with the launch of Google Wallet, but does the technology have the potential to be the future of how money is transacted? Juniper Research seems to think so. The company is releasing a new report that forecasts that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions will reach nearly $50 billion worldwide by 2014.

2. Salesforce Invests In Video Messaging Startup (And Skype Rival) VSee
VSee, a video collaboration service provider, has received a capital injection from Salesforce, TechCrunch has learned. The amount was not disclosed, but we’ve been informed that the investment amounted to ‘multiple millions of dollars’.

3. Apple tries to tighten its grip on media with Newsstand
Slowly but surely, Apple is trying to convince more media companies to play in its sandbox, and the latest move is an iBooks-style digital news stand for iPhone and iPad. As part of the raft of new features and services it announced at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, Apple launched the Newsstand — a single interface for all of a user’s subscriptions to newspapers and magazines. Whether the new offering will convince more publishers to sign up and hand over 30 percent of their subscription revenues to the company remains to be seen.

4. Movie & TV streams still missing from Apple’s iCloud
Here’s one feature you won’t find in Apple’s new iCloud service: video syncing. The cloud-based media storage service introduced at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco on Monday offers the ability to sync your personal music library with the cloud without uploading any of the actual files, making it possible to access thousands of songs on any of your devices in a matter of minutes. Apple calls this feature Music Match, and charges users $24.99 per year to instantly access their personal music library online.

5. Apple Didn’t Tell Mobile Carriers About iMessage
When Apple announced iOS 5 yesterday, one of the new apps that was unveiled it called iMessage, it is basically a messaging app that will let you send and receive messages to other iOS devices similar to BlackBerry Messaging.

BONUS

6. RIM acquires Scoreloop to take social gaming to a whole new level
RIM has just announced that it has acquired Scoreloop, one of the pioneers in mobile social gaming.

7. Sorting Through Apple’s Many Announcements
Yesterday, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Steve Jobs took the stage to reveal what the company’s been up to. Turns out the answer is: a lot.

Pulse Ups The Ante On Mobile News Consumption

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Thom Allen

Pulse, an iPhone app that presents news and blog feeds in a grid fashion has upped the ante with their latest release.

So far I think Pulse is the best iPhone app on the market. And now you can access the app on any web enabled device using their new website, pulse.me. This is huge. Another feature that rocks this app is the ability to save an article for future reading. In the past I’ve had to email the link to myself so I could read it when I had time.

And Pulse now allows you to send article links to Instapaper and Evernote. Again, this is huge on many levels. The ability to send content to Evernote is great for me because I use It throughout my day.

Take some time to check out Pulse, you’ll be glad you did.

Thom Allen Weblog

I Read / Write / Code. I talk about Software Craftsmanship, Cloud Computing, Open Source Software and Mobile Development.

Tag Archives: Apple

5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

5 Tech Stories Worth Reading

Pulse Ups The Ante On Mobile News Consumption