Wal-Mart has been in the DVD retailing business for quite some time now. And while this has been doing good for them, the company lacks one service which has been the the more popular way of bringing digitial movies to U.S. consumers – video-on-demand service.
But Wal-Mart may be preparing up to enter this arena soon, as New York Times is reporting that the video company is eyeing Vudu, an online movie service provider. Although the deal has not been confirmed yet by both companies,reports had it they have began informing Hollywood studios about the deal.
If the deal is indeed true, Wal-Mart maybe facing up stiff challenge against the likes of iTunes, Netflix and other online video-on-demand services. While Vudu for its part has been pretty much making some noise especially during the recent CES Event wherein the company managed to struck some deals with LCD TV manufacturers in putting Vudu services in their products.
Previously, Vudu has been advocating the use of a separate device that would connect to home TVs but could not manage to get some leverage. Since then, the company concentrated on delivering online movie service instead.
We’ll see whether this deal would make some headway in the coming days. It will be exciting to watch how Wal-Mart would put up a challenge against iTunes, Amazon, and other big names in the video-on-demand service. And whether which one will emerge as the households’ choice of VOD provider.
Comcast has just launched it new Secure Backup and Share service with the aim of helping you reduce the risk of losing important files that are saved on your computers. In short, it’s a cloud storage service with a facility for sharing some of the files you store easily.
While there maybe free services of this kind available online, Comcast however will offer the service for a fee. If you’re an existing Comcast subscriber you automatically gets 2GB of file storage for free, or should I say as an incentive for subscribing to its Internet service.
But of course, 2GB of storage won’t be enough for you, so you can always upgrade to a paid account. A 50GB storage plan will cost you $4.99 monthly or $49.99 annually. While a 200GB storage plan will set you back for $9.99 monthly or $99.99 annually. Those two options give you enough storage for all your photos, videos, files and other digital documents.
And since you are paying for the service, Comcast assures that all your files are in good hands. They’ve got a secure and reliable protection system plus a file restoration facility in case disaster strikes and your files are destroyed.
For file sharing and access to files, Comcast gives you a site which you can share with your family and friends. You and your friends and family can access the said site from any Internet connection as well as on your mobile phone.
So, if you’d rather store and back up your files on a highly secured server, you might want to give Comcast Secure Backup and Share service a try.
Google Voice is one of the most important products that Google put a lot of stake on. Hence, we really couldn’t blame them for going out of the way to make this endeavor a success. But apparently, Google Voice doesn’t s seem to be getting the mileage, or perhaps usage that it wants to have.
What could be the reason for this? Google thinks that their service is overwhelming for its many users. So, to remedy this and perhaps to spike up interest towards it, Google has prepared a series of videos explaining, demonstrating and exploring the said communication service.
In case you’re like me who have never experienced using Google Voice and is wondering what it does and how it can make your communication life better, I suggest you check out all the videos. But if you’re don’t have the time and just want to know what Google Voice is – it’s actually a communication service provided by Google with various features ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email. What’s good about Google Voice is that it allows you to use one number for all your communication transactions.
The series of videos explaining the service include the following:
And while you’re at it, you might want to subscribe to the Google Voice YouTube channel to be notified of new videos about Google Voice in the coming days.
Here we have Adobe’s contribution to the ongoing Mobile World Congress. And what contribution it is as Adobe demoes something that might possibly give the Android platform an edge over Apple’s iPhone OS – Adobe AIR running on Droid. Since the demo looks quite well, it follows that other Android devices including Google Nexus One will be to run Adobe AIR apps as well. Likewise, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available for Android devices as well as iPhone.
With Adobe AIR, developers will have access to a feature-rich environment when developing their rich applications outside the mobile browser of Android devices and on multiple operating systems via individual marketplaces and applications stores. Adobe AIR will bring about mobile apps that are optimized for high performance on mobile screens and takes advantage of the capabilities of native devices.
Adobe AIR will also allow developers to include multi-touch, accelerometer, geolocation, and other functionality offered by existing mobile OS into their own mobile AIR apps. It also let developers to create contextual apps with different display screens, device-speficif interaction techniques, mobile platform specific functionality and network access and bandwidth differences.
In addition, Adobe also announced that Flash 10.1 will soon be available on Android devices such as DROID and Nexus One as well as other mobile platforms including the BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile. Interestingly, while the iPhone was not mentioned as part of those mobile platforms that will support, Windows Mobile was included in the list despite the fact that Microsoft may not be supporting it on Windows Mobile 7.
As part of Google’s ongoing effort to make the web faster, YouTube has just introduced its Video Speed Dashboard. This tool was created to give you an insight into what your YouTube speed looks like compared to the YouTube speed of users in other regions with different ISPs. In short the YouTube dashboard could either tell you that your YouTube video speed is either too fast or too slow, like mine.
In measuring the speed by which you stream YouTube video, the Video Speed Dashboard takes into account various factors including speed of your Internet connection, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) you are using and your distance to the YouTube video servers.
Aside from telling you information about your own video speed, the Dashboard can also list down the YouTube speeds of users in your neighborhood who have different ISPs as the one you are using. That way you can decided whether you should ditch your current ISP in favor of your neighbors’ ISPs. No, I’m just kidding. Or perhaps I may be true.
Incidentally, the YouTube Video Speed Dashboard measures video speed based on the speed at which YouTube video is received by the browser. The Dashboard then averages this over the previous 30 days you’ve used the same browser during the same period.
So, how fast is your YouTube Video Speed? You may check it out from YouTube Video Speed Dashboard. Hope it’s not as pathetic as my ISP’s 256kbps speed.
Today’s news headlines is definitely going to Nokia’s big surprise to date. How about this? - turn-by-turn navigation on all its smartphones via the new Ovi Maps available worldwide and free forever. Well not really forever I supposed. Maybe for as long as your Nokia smartphones are working and functional and for as long as Nokia keeps on creating new smartphones that you’d eventually end up buying.
So according to the news, starting March 2010, all new GPS-enabled Nokia smartphones will come installed with the new version of Ovi Maps. This means that those smartphones will be able to provide you with free global sat-nav feature, or turn-by-turn walk and drive navigational maps.
As for the current crop of Nokia smartphones, the new Nokia Ovi Maps can be immediately installed. So, if you own any of these Nokia smartphones right now, you might as well get the new Nokia Ovi Maps up and running on them. These smartphones include Nokia N97 mini, 5800 XpressMusic, 5800 Navigation Edition, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710 Navigator, 6730 classic and X6. And Nokia promises to add more handsets into the list. More →
We all know that Apple is set to announce something big on January 27 since a couple of weeks ago. But it is only now that Apple has started to send out official invitations to press people about their gig happening next week.
According to the official invitation, Apple is inviting selected people to “come and see our latest creation.” So obviously, Apple is about to announce a new product. And we don’t have to think hard enough to know what this product is going to be since rumors of Apple launching an Apple Tablet, or what others call it – iSlate has been going around.
But just as Apple sent out the invites, new speculations started to come out. And that pertains to Apple not just launching the iSlate but perhaps another product, something that will serve as its answer to the Google Nexus One phone. Yes, dear readers Apple might also announced the iPhone 4.0, but not the device yet. It might probably be the latest iPhone OS.
Foxnews is actually running a story about this, citing sources at Apple saying that the Jan 27 event would likely focus on three projects – tablet device, iPhone 4.0 and a new round of iLife2010.
Interestingly, Apple’s invitation is pretty creative, possibly hinting of what it will be launching on January 27. The invitation features colorful spray-painted blobs in vibrant colors. Foxnews is also suggesting that it could be pointing to “a device that captures” creative activities. And we couldn’t agree more.
Besides, the Apple Tablet is a long overdue announcement. Despite Google not very successful with the launch of its Google Nexus One phone, Apple still needs to retaliate. And indeed it is about to fight back – with the iSlate, Apple Tablet or whatever you may want to call it.
After several months, social media center Boxee is finally available in beta. Boxee lets you play media from your computer and other devices in your home network as well as stream or download moviews, tv shows, music and photos from Internet sources to your TV. If you don’t want to buy the Boxee Box which was launched recently, the Boxee software will allow you to do all the things you can do with the Boxee Box using your computer.
To kickstart the release of Boxee Beta, which you can download right now here, Boxee has also snagged partnerships with several content providers including TV.com, Blip.tv, and IGN. TV. com has several great shows including Family Guy, Heroes and more. Blip.tv is a great source for independently produced content and IGN is of course for gaming content. In addition, Boxee is also bringing in an app for the upcoming awesome movie Wolfman.
Boxee Beta is available for Windows, Linux and of course Mac OS X. For more details on what Boxee can do, check out an earlier post from the Boxee blog.
To get started using Boxee, you need to sign-up at this site, grab the software, connect your PC to your TV or get wait for the D-Link Boxee Box to be released, grab a popcorn and then sit back, relax and enjoy watching media content on your 32-inch HDTV.
Alright, let me just set aside my Apple fanboy persona and let’s an take an objective look at what Steve Ballmer just presented during his keynote speech at CES 2010. True to the rumors that has been going on the past few days, Microsoft and HP has collaborated on a Tablet PC. It’s a Microsoft tablet PC that is called the HP Slate. Now, that’s confusing, isn’t it?
Anyway, as soon as Mr. Ballmer showed the HP Slate, some resourceful geeks just spotted the official video demo and an official photo of the Tablet PC branded as HP.
Ok, for the purpose of this report, let’s call it the HP Slate. What does it brings to the “not-yet-so-carved” new generation tablet PC niche? What else but Windows 7, to make its screen fully touch-enabled.
Mr. Ballmer describes the Windows 7-powered HP Slate as “ more powerful than a phone and almost as powerful as a PC. Perfect for reading, surfing the web and taking entertainment on the go.”
In other words, Microsoft and HP are hitting several birds with one stone, or slate for this matter – the rumored Apple and Google tablets, e-book readers and perhaps netbooks as well.
The HP Slate is a multi-functional device. It’s a netbook minus the bezel.
So, are you excited? I am. Not because I’m buying this HP Slate but because I’m pretty excited on what lies ahead. Just imagine – Apple Tablet vs. Microsoft HP Slate vs. Google Tablet/Slate? Ain’t that exciting enough?
RIM has just launched it latest smartphone accessory, the BlackBerry Presenter - a small and light device that you can easily plug into a projector or monitor to display a Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation. You then control the presentation using your BlackBerry phone. Sounds cool? It certainly is, handy and useful as well.
Utilizing Bluetooth connectivity, the BlackBerry Presenter connects with your BlackBerry smartphone. As such, it allows you to move freely when doing your presentation, that is within the 30 feet range. This allows you to easily control your presentation – navigate through the slides, view speaker notes, loop presentation slided and reference information on one slide while displaying another.
The BlackBerry Presenter has the following specs – supports NTSC and PAL video formats, S-Video and VGA video cable, micro USB connection, and support for various display resolution – VGA, SVGA and XGA. It doesn’t need any additional file processing as you can do your presentations directly without tweaking your presentation on your PC.
No details on availability yet, but if you’re keen on getting the BlackBerry Presenter, it will set you back for $199. It works with most BlackBerry models except BlackBerry Curve series and BlackBerry Pearl Flip series.
