Look here. This is one of the nicest things about news blogging that others don’t seem to mind at all – you get to learn new things, concepts, softwares and all those stuff as you struggle to find news items relevant enough to occupy a space in this blog. Like XBMC Software Media Player and Entertainment Hub. I’ve never heard of this stuff before and wouldn’t have known about if I’m not blogging for 901am.

So, what’s XBMC anyway?  It’s a free, open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for all your digital media. It runs on Linux, OSX and Windows and even the original Xbox console. And its also a perfect companion for your HTPC. In short, it’s a perfect solution for your home theater needs.

XBMC lets you play almost all audio and video formats and was designed for network playback, allowing you to stream multimedia from anywhere in your house. Or even directly from the internet using any network protocols. It also lets you play CDs and DVDs either from a disk or image file. In short, if you’ve installed XBMC, your computer is probably a fully functional multimedia jukebox by now. If not, well you can start doing so by downloading XBMC’s latest version update – XBMC 9.11 codenamed – “Camelot.”

New on XBMC version 9.11 include -

• revamped user interface through a new skin called “Confluence”, which by the way looks stunning,
• DirectX support for Windows,
• completely reorganized settings menu,
• automatic video information extraction,
• smoother video playback
• support for new remotes out of the box
• updated codecs

Alright folks, you may download the new version of XBMC from here.

Via

Amazon should be thankful for the Holiday season as it can rest easy on the stress brought about by Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Sony PRS e-Readers.  It looks like there are more Kindle owners right now than before as it is now the most gifted item on Amazon. And if this is not enough, on Christmas Day, Amazon achieved quite a record-breaking sale on Kindle books than the printed ones.

And no one could be more pleased than Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos as he claims:

“We are grateful to our customers for making Kindle the most gifted item ever in our history. On behalf of Amazon.com employees around the world, we wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading.”

I could just imagine Dan Brown grinning from ear to ear right now, since his new book “The Lost Symbol” is among the top-selling Kindle books on Amazon. And so did Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and Kathryn Stockett’s “The Help.”

Going back to Amazon’s Holiday shopping report. It was noted the Amazon’s sales peak was on Dec. 14, when consumers flock to the site and ordered 7 million units of various Amazon products. Amazon shipped to over 178 countries on this day.

Aside from the Kindle, the 8GB iPod Touch, Garmin nuvi 260W 4.3-inch GPS unit are also among the hottest-selling Amazon Electronics products.

So, did you get any of these items as a Christmas gift?

Read the full Amazon PR here.

HBO joins the madding iPhone apps crowd with its own HBO Mobile iPhone app. And since they are rather a little late in this genre with other cable networks like Discovery, AMC and other already into it, HBO made sure that its iPhone app is peppered with great features to make it stand out from the rest of the crowd.

So, you got program guides, schedules as well as social sharing features and a heap of interactive features  including show descriptions and other details, cast and character profiles, episode guides, video clips and photos of  various HBO programs. For movies, the app even provides you with trailers, yup, right on your iPhone.

To boost its on-demand programs, the HBO Mobile iPhone lets you surf through its VOD service catalog.  And for those who always miss HBO shows and movies, you can set up an alerting service that will send you SMS messages whenever a show you’ve been wanting to watch will be on HBO.

For its social networking features, HBO Mobile lets you share shows, movies and HBO programs that you are planning to watch with your Twitter or Facebook contacts. You can also share this via the embedded email app.

HBO Mobile is a free app. If you spend more hours at your home watching HBO features, this app is definitely for you. You’d love the nice interface and easy navigation features of this iPhone app.

Via

Aside from having tested its features and services already, new music sharing and playing in the cloud service, tunesBag finally goes out of public beta after being in close-by-invitation only mode for quite some time now. Earlier, tunesBag has released a web client, Adobe-AIR desktop client,  iPhone and Facebook apps.

Offering both a free ad-supported version as well as a paid premium subscription, tunesBag lets you upload your music collection to its cloud storage and then play them anytime, anywhere. tunesBag also lets you easily share your playlists and invididuals via email and social networking updates. You can also rate and recommend songs and playlists to anyone. In other words, tunesBag is your standard online music sharing service.

And to avoid copyright issues, tunesBag only allows music sharing in countries where it is legally covered by licensing agreements. tunesBag will determine this through your IP addresse. Likewise, tunesBag may also refer users with restricted access to licensed music to other online sources where they can listen or find information about those music tracks.

Want to take tunesBag for a spin?  Sign up here.

I remember using  the free music app Songbird a long time ago but didn’t quite fully maximized its features.  In fact, I thought the app was no longer existing until now that I learned about its latest software update, Songbird version 1.4.2.

In case you never heard of Songbird before, it’s an open-source music app that you can use if you’re tired of using iTunes and Winamp as it provides simple interface with powerful features to let you manage and listen to your music files.

For its latest version, Songbird is introducing new features such as Mass Storage Class Support, CD Rip support, and Purple Rain Feather.

MSC Device Support lets you sync tracks from MSC devices to phones and MP3 players including the iPod  through MSC mode.  Music tracks which are in incompatible formats are transcoded on the fly to be supported by Songbird.

Songbird also now lets you rip CDs into FLAC/OGG or WMA for Windows users.

Finally, the new Songbird now sports a new Purple Rain Feather for a sleek-looking and cool interface. It now has dedicated toggle buttons for frequently used Media Views and simplified display pane management.

Did the title confuse you?  Wait till you’ve watched the cool video of demo showing Orange UK’s 3D Augmented Reality app. But that’s  assuming  of course that your head is still intact and did not explode after watching the video.

I really don’t know for what purpose this iPhone app is really.  Probably just a bragging tool to show how powerful the iPhone is for handling 3D graphics and augmented reality manifestation.

The augmented reality iPhone app was developed by Ogmento, which judging by the way they have produced this video, is an expert on augmented reality app.

The video shows an iPhone inside another iPhone displaying how you can manipulate the 3D graphics rendering of an another iPhone. It allows you to zoom in your virtual iPhone.  Coolest part is that you can fire up and run iPhone apps.

Now that is totally wicked, right? Enjoy the videos, folks!

Via

Despite AT&T’s network problem and what other people say about the iPhone, Americans don’t seem to mind them at all and continues to buy and use the iPhone. Proof?  The latest Nielsen report say so.

Apple’s lone mobile phone product snags 4% of the mobile phone market in 2009. Followed by its closest rival perhaps, RIM which is actually at the number 2 spot not because of  it mobile phones that directly competes with the iPhone but because of its old and yet reliable phone series – the 8300 including the BlackBerrry Curve.

Interestingly two other RIM phone series managed to get in to the list – BlackBerry Storm and the 8100 series.  So if you’re going to add up the market share of  BlackBery, RIM could easily beat up Apple in the mobile phone space in terms of usage.

In addition to the Top 10 Mobile Phones in the U.S. Nielsen also released the Top 10 Websites Accessed Over Mobile Phones, Top 10 Brands Accessed Over Mobile Phones and Top 10 Mobile Video Channels.

Google search, Yahoo Mail and Gmail are the top three websites accessed on mobile phones. Yahoo beats Google and Bing/Windows Live/MSN in the top brands accessed via mobile phones while YouTube, Fox Interactive and Weather Channel top the list of Video Channel visited via mobile devices.

Nokia has just rolled out a somewhat familiar service on its Nokia Beta Labs – Image Space. Basically, Image Space gives you a new way of viewing photos you shared to from your Nokia supported handsets to your Flickr account.  Image Space will stitch together your photos as well as other people’s photos in a common 3D environment.

That’s all there is to it actually. Just a pretty simple mobile to web applications utilizing various technologies such GPS, photo meta tagging by Flickr, fetching photos from Flickr to Nokia Beta Labs, and the photo stitching technology employed by Image Space.

Image Space works with any Nokia handset with a-GPS navigation feature such as the N97 mini, Nokia 6210 Navigator, Nokia 6710 Navigator, Nokia 6720 Classic. The GPS feature is used for location tagging the photos you take and upload to Flickr.

Nokia Image Space is a pretty good service, simple and yet fun. But  the pre-requisite here is that you have a Flickr account and Nokia is relying the success of a new service to another service which is not actually their own.  Granting that Flickr is the most popular  photo sharing service online, it is quite uncertain whether users of Nokia handsets that support Image Space actually have their Flickr account.

It would have been better if Image Space could support other photo sharing site as well or perhaps even photos uploaded to Facebook. Now, that would be awesome.

Via IntoMobile

If you’re a Dailymotion user, you’d be glad to know that you can now have access to your favorite Dailymotion videos even while on the move. The Dailymotion iPhone app just made it to  the Apps Store, waiting for you to download it. You may get the ad-supported free app or shell out $5.99 to get the ad-free version. Of course if your a daily viewer of Dailymotion videos, the paid version is still the best option.

So, what’s so exciting about the Dailymotion iPhone app? Take a gander at these cool features:

• easily search and find videos
• discover new featured videos every day
• check out the latest viral hits
• surf DM’s 15 themed channels
• access your DailyMotion account
• shoot and upload videos directly (iPhone 3GS users)

Cool, eh?  The DailyMotion iPhone is even available in 9 different languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Polish and Greek) It support both iPhone and iPod Touch as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Go make this app’s developer $6 richer by getting the Dailymotion Premium app. And enjoy watching those videos anywhere you go. Here’s the iTunes Link.

Hopefully by now most of you already have your Google Wave account. If not,  send me your Gmail account because I’ve got dozens of invites to give out. Anyway, this news is not about how to obtain a Google Wave invite but just a demonstration of how Google Wave can be used to expressed ideas in the form of video.

The guys at Whirlwind Interactive, who have been playing around with various Google Wave created videos unveiled their latest creation entitled “Waving Goodbye to 2009.”  The title alone is enough to make you want to watch this video from start to finish. In case you didn’t know, these guys are also responsible for the Samuel Jackson Google Wave demo video.

It’s a great way of looking back at the year that was in Tech. And also a great way of exploiting one of the many uses of Google Wave. Of course this is not the only way that you can use Google Wave. There are other features of Google Wave that you might want to explore or have probably explored if you have a Google Wave account already. After all Google Wave is an online collaboration tool, so online videos is not what it is only good at.

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