Samsung's HSDPA-enabled SPH-W2400 does DMB TV
Earthlink unveils WiFi phone beta in Anaheim, CA
Earthlink's finally ready to publicly discuss the WiFi phone beta they've been running in Anaheim California -- well, kind of. They didn't exactly have much to say about the service because it's in beta, but we know that officially exists, and that should be enough, right? We'd love a closer look at the Accton phone they're using for this thing, but we know the type, and something tells us it's not exactly going to have an ancillary HSDPA for 3G SIP or anything.MASSIVE AIRBUS A380 ARRIVES IN LOS ANGELES
LOS ANGELES – 03/19/07 – The world’s largest passenger aircraft – the four-engine Airbus A380 – made its maiden arrival at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) yesterday morning.
The plane’s statistics are staggering. The double-decker airplane is 239 feet in length, boasts a wingspan equal to the length of a football field, with a tail that rises some 80 feet off the ground.
The 525-ton A380 can seat as many as 550 passengers, hold 81,890 gallons of fuel, cruise at 560 mph and fly some 8,000 nautical miles.
EADS Airbus – the European Union-based consortium that designed and built the aircraft – hopes the A380, which is designed to carry more people farther than any plane in history, will dominate air travel for the next two decades.
For Airbus, which has been beset by management and financial problems including a two-year delay to the A380 that wiped out more than $6.61 billion in profit forecasts, the flight is a chance to prove that the plane will be ready when the first deliveries are made in October to Singapore Airlines.
Airbus has 166 orders from 15 airlines for the new plane, which already has made tests flights in Europe and to Asia.
The Los Angeles airport, the fifth-busiest worldwide, is expected to be the first US destination for the A380 when it enters commercial service.
The inaugural Los Angeles flight was devoid of passengers and crew, save for those in the cockpit.
EADS Airbus said the plane will undergo tests at LAX, including airfield maneuvers, docking at the terminal gate, and ground and gate handling exercises.
Los Angeles World Airports, which administers operations at LAX, ultimately plans to spend about $121 million to prepare for the A380, and already has reportedly earmarked more than $50 million to improve runway and taxiway intersections to accommodate
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GoogleTalk Gadget Added to Personal PagesPosted: 14 Mar 2007 07:45 PM CDT
Google IG is still only 1/7th or so the size of Yahoo’s competing product according to worldwide Comscore numbers. But Google’s integration with it’s own widget platform puts it ahead of the personal page giant Yahoo, which hasn’t integrated with it’s own konfabulator widget platform. Yahoo widgets have also been tough for others to wrangle. Netvibes’ Universal Widget API won’t include the platform in its first iteration. The widget isn’t just a copy of the Gmail version, it also has some of its own cool new features. Compared to popup message windows in the Gmail version, the widget’s conversations open up tabs instead. The new widget will also will also intelligently parse Picassa and YouTube links, displaying the content embedded right in the conversation. Here’s Google’s run-through of the new functionality.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
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Microsoft Acquires TellmePosted: 14 Mar 2007 03:17 PM CDT
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. |
MyStrands Mobile Adds Community To Streaming AudioPosted: 14 Mar 2007 12:44 PM CDT
The service accesses a collection of six million songs, so hopefully there’s something out there for you, and connects directly to your MyStrands page. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 |
| Business 2.0: | |
| The Next Net 25 | |
25 startups to watch
Business 2.0 Magazine's guide to the hottest Web 2.0 companies - and the powerful trends driving them - in this make-or-break year.
(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Twelve months have passed since we introduced the first Next Net 25 - our picks for the Web 2.0 wannabes most likely to break out of the pack. The moment seemed propitious: Hardware was cheap, broadband was ubiquitous, software was open-source, and venture capitalists were once again flooding Silicon Valley with ready cash.
Many of our choices were prescient: Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot, Writely. (The last two were snapped up by Google (Charts).) But one of the 25 succeeded even beyond our most bubble-icious expectations: YouTube, purchased in October by Google for a game-changing $1.65 billion. Web 2.0, for better or worse, had gone mainstream.
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| TWO'S NOT ENOUGH: Niklas Zennstrom (above) and Janus Friis have disrupted the Internet playing field before: first with Kazaa, then with Skype. Now the twosome are betting that Joost is the future of online television. |
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That made choosing this year's Next Net 25 particularly dicey.
Wave that kind of scratch around and you don't know who's going to show up at your door. This year's field is chockablock with "me too" companies, and the bar for startups has been set even higher, in terms of both what customers expect and the kind of return on their investments the angels and venture capitalists want to see.
This means that, for many, 2007 is going to be a make-or-break year. "There has been enough time now to determine if there is something there," says David Hornik, a partner with August Capital and an Internet startup specialist. "For a lot of companies, the answer will be no." (Hence the rise of F---edCompany 2.0 sites like TechCrunch's DeadPool and Valleywag's Deathwatch.)
While the VC spigot is still open, funding will be harder to come by as investors focus on the bets they've already made. "I will probably be making fewer investments in 2007," says Jeff Clavier, a Palo Alto-based angel investor. "It's too frothy already."
The blessings of Web 2.0 - the low cost and relative ease with which you can start a company - turn out also to be a curse. If you can launch a startup in your bedroom, so can the genius in the apartment down the hall.
Here's a reality check: There are already more than 200 video sites trolling the Web for viewers. Most will not even come close to billion-dollar buyouts; more likely they'll end up as feature buttons in someone else's service - if they're lucky. "Your barrier to launching is low, but your barrier to success is high," says Bill Nguyen, CEO of music site Lala. "People are really going to feel that this year."
The losers are likely to be those companies that try to make money by pouring old-media wine into the new Web bottles. The winners will be the players that invent new ways to tap into what the Web brings to the party: instant feedback, instant analysis, and the collective wisdom of a billion users.
So who looks best positioned to succeed in the class of 2007?
Click here to meet the pick of the litter in five categories that embody the spirit of the Next Net: social media, video, mobile, online advertising, and enterprise applications. We scoured the field, talking to investors and entrepreneurs about companies whose business plans best illuminate where the Web is headed and where the most lucrative opportunities lie. ![]()
Web and mobile release
We've been busy developing some major enhancements and new features, so there hasn't been a release since the beginning of April 2007. This is alarming, our last release was last year! :-) But let's take a look at what's new on the web side, on the client side, and somewhere in between.
On the Web
The most visible change is the main page on Central Vibe, where we have put lots of efforts on making using it simple, as well as into making it easy for the first time users to get started. We will improve this a lot in the upcoming releases, but I think this is a great start. You can now choose widgets on the web and explore what it will look like on your mobile. You can even preview "the real stuff" on the mobile phone simulator. And when you've played around with it for some time and think you're ready, you can download what you selected to your mobile.
As you might remember, we introduced the alpha version of something called recommendations in the last release, back in December last year. We have now improved that and hopefully it will provide you with much better suggestions for cool widgets, making it much easier for you to find interesting widgets in the 1000+ widget library.
On the mobile
Related to the first-time user we've also improved the registration process. The easiest way is still to go to www.centralvibe.com with you laptop browser and register there. But the mobile registration has now been streamlined a lot, so the sharing feature we introduced back in October last year can now be utilized to its full extent. Next time you're in a bar with some friends and (hopefully :-) showing them WidSets, share a widget with them and get them on board, imediately!
On the mobile the biggest change is in the default widget (system), where we have introduced a lot of new views to the CentralMash Sets Library. You can new find widgets using the familiar views from the web i.e., the most popular widgets, the latest ones, the slick picks, based on categories, and of course using general search. It is now much easier to start using great widgets directly from your mobile.
Developers
For widgets developers we have expanded the "Published widgets" view on the web with lots of statistics. For all of you who have created a widget, you will now get statistics about how often it has been seen in the Library (impressions), opened, picked (over time), and of course how many people are using it.
Other
We've also (finally) updated the supported phones page, and we have provided more help and statistics for people to check how popular their particular mobile phone model and brand is on CentralVibe.
And you'll of course find all kinds of new cool widgets in the Library, but I'll get back to that, later.
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Meizu upgrades Music Card, spills deets on miniOne
Chinese manufacturer Meizu is nothing if not prolific, which accounts for not one but two bits of interesting news coming out of the company today. First up are some details on its Music Card digital audio player, which we now know will come in 2, 4, and 8GB varieties, each packing a 176 x 132 1.5-inch display, a built-in FM radio, and a promised 20 hours of juice from the battery, not to mention a whole range of interchangeable face plates. Apparently, these'll sell for as little as $65, $80, and $100 for the 2, 4, and 8GB models, respectively -- though not 'round these parts, obviously. On another front, Meizu has let loose some more info on its now infamous miniOne handheld, otherwise known as the M8. According to Meizu CEO J.Wong, the device will be available in two separate versions: an entry-level model without a camera and a standard model with one, each available 4GB and 8GB variations, ranging in price from $195 to $400. It's also apparently been confirmed that the device will indeed come with a 720x480 16-bit 3.32-inch display, although any word on an exact release date remains unclear.
Read - Meizu Music Card [Via Engadget Chinese]
Read - Meizu Me, miniOne details
Meizu upgrades Music Card, spills deets on miniOne
Chinese manufacturer Meizu is nothing if not prolific, which accounts for not one but two bits of interesting news coming out of the company today. First up are some details on its Music Card digital audio player, which we now know will come in 2, 4, and 8GB varieties, each packing a 176 x 132 1.5-inch display, a built-in FM radio, and a promised 20 hours of juice from the battery, not to mention a whole range of interchangeable face plates. Apparently, these'll sell for as little as $65, $80, and $100 for the 2, 4, and 8GB models, respectively -- though not 'round these parts, obviously. On another front, Meizu has let loose some more info on its now infamous miniOne handheld, otherwise known as the M8. According to Meizu CEO J.Wong, the device will be available in two separate versions: an entry-level model without a camera and a standard model with one, each available 4GB and 8GB variations, ranging in price from $195 to $400. It's also apparently been confirmed that the device will indeed come with a 720x480 16-bit 3.32-inch display, although any word on an exact release date remains unclear.Read - Meizu Music Card [Via Engadget Chinese]
Read - Meizu Me, miniOne details
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The Digital Bling 
In Noteworthy
The first time I heard anyone call widgets the “digital bling” was back in summer of 2006. Niall used it to explain widgets. Later Newsweek picked up on it and used it to explain to its main stream, non-geeky audience. And now Guy Kawasaki has started using this easy to understand description of widgets. Anyway the article about widgets on blogs takes a look at only one aspect of widgetization of the web.
I agree with DJI that blogs are not where the the widgets are not going to have big impact. There is a reason - most of the ones DJI cites - why you don’t see any widgets here on this blog.
Widgets that do work well on blogs - polling widgets, comment widgets and sometimes IM widgets, Flickr and Last.fm widgets they are all about enhancing the reader experience, not distracting from it. The real excitement of widgets in on personalized pages, mobiles and the desktops.
Valleywag has a widget rant as well, which does make some good points, and questions the MySpace specific business model.
| LG Prada |
LG Electronics and Prada today unveiled the KE850 touch screen mobile phone. LG and Prada have worked closely together on every aspect of the KE850, from handset development to marketing combining the detail and quality of Prada design with the technological innovation of LG Electronics.
The Prada Phone by LG introduces the world's first advanced touch interface which eliminates the conventional keypad making the overall usage experience a highly tactile one. An extra wide LCD screen maximizes visual impact, allowing the user to benefit from several key features of the phone, including the 2.0-megapixel camera featuring Schneider-Kreuznach lens, video player and document viewer capacity. Glowing icons on the face of the phone disappear when not in use to reveal a pure, un-adulterated black exterior. The phone is ultra thin (just 12 mm), hosting an array of additional multimedia functions including an MP3 player and a music multi-tasking function for messaging. It also boasts an external memory slot, allowing the user to increase memory capacity for images, music and film clips. The LG Prada Phone will be available with prices starting from 600 Euros in mobile dealerships as well as selected Prada stores in the UK, France, Germany and Italy as of late February, 2007, followed by countries in Asia such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore from late March, 2007. The Korean version of the phone is scheduled to launch in the second quarter of 2007. LG Prada Phone Specifications: - Capacitive Touch Screen Trackback(0)
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