Mobile company Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) has bought IPTV and mobile video company Digital Fountain (DF). Digital Fountain is located in Fremont, Calif. DF stated by providing technology to national defense companies and then moved to mobile devices. One of DF’s most popular products is the DF Raptor. The Raptor allows mobile devices to send digital media over CDNs.
DF’s customers include Cisco, Sirius XM, Sony, Nokia, Adobe, etc. Qualcomm will keep seven key engineers on board from the company to maintain support for DF’s customers. The team will be moved to Qualcom’s Santa Clara, Calif. officers. Mike Luby, a DF founder and the former CTO, will report to Qualcomm’s CTO Roberto Padovani.
An Apple PowerBook G4 17″ with 2GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive just sold on eBay for $800. However, this is no ordinary laptop. It used to be owned by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
“In January of 2006, Snaggy and I travelled to Macworld to appear on David Pogue’s keynote show. We arrived in California a few days early, and spent that time at our friend Steve Wozniak’s house. Steve had just bought a new Powerbook, and was selling his old one, so we jumped at the chance to buy it from him, knowing that one, it would be awesome machine in great shape, and two, that it would have that little bit of history tied to it, in that it was once owned by the inventor of the Apple computer!” wrote the seller of the computer.
The computer even put a dent in the thing himself. Nice job devaluing the product being sold by a company you cofounded, Woz!
Amit Chowdhry | February 28, 2009 | 352 views | Comments Categorized under Ilshat Garipov
Ilshat Garipov has put together this Bluetooth headset that looks more like an earring or an ornament. Ilshat took inspiration for this device from a water droplet. This Bluetooth device has one button for turning it on and off.
Scientists at the University of Tsukuba has designed a way to enhance the virtual reality experience by creating a robotic floor motion detector. Check out the video above.
Yeah, that’s right. Best Buy will start selling a $12,000 electric motorcycle. Brammo HQ, the manufacturing company of the Enertia motorcycle received an investment from Best Buy last year. The $11,995 bike will be available at 5 Best Buy stores on the west coast in May.
Amit Chowdhry | February 28, 2009 | 249 views | Comments Categorized under Nokia, Nokia 1600
Andrew Cheatle was on a boat and his phone fell out into the sea. It turns out that a 25 lb. cod fish ate the phone. One week later, Cheatle’s girlfriend received a phone call from a fisherman saying that he found the phone in the fish. The phone was still functional even after that journey.
“I was messing about with my dog and my phone must have fallen out and been swept out in the swell. I kept calling it but I gave up hope after a couple of days,” stated Cheatle in an interview with The Sun UK.
Cheatle and his girlfriend were shopping for a new cellphone when the phone rang.
“I thought he was winding me up but he assured me he had caught a cod that morning and was gutting it for his fish stall and that my Nokia was inside it — a bit worse for wear,” stated Cheatle. “I didn’t believe him but went to meet him and found it was my phone — a bit smelly and battered — but incredibly it still worked after I let it dry out.”
For $6.99 you can make a speaker at a meeting feel awkward after telling a bad joke by using this cricket sound generator. This also works well for a comedian that isn’t doing to well on stage. Sure it is mean, but people in the audience will love it. Its available now on CoolStuffExpress.com.
Last year Yahoo! paid about $79 million to outside financial advisors when they needed help with the Microsoft deal. The advisors were also paid for “other strategic alternatives, including the Google agreement.” As all of you know the Microsoft and Google deal both did not work in Yahoo!’s favor whatsoever.
Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers were the advisers at the time. Lehman’s investment arm is now a part of Barclays capital Plc. This was revealed in a report with the SEC. About 5 separate lawsuits were made against Yahoo! last year that were related to Microsoft’s bid offer.
Amit Chowdhry | February 28, 2009 | 235 views | Comments Categorized under LG, LG Spyder 830
The LG Spyder 830 cell phone was recently recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The phone was pretty much seen as a hazard because it doesn’t hold a good connection when calling 911 emergency services. The recall was made when a trapped motorist tried to call 911 from the phone from a disabled car. The call was constantly being dropped, but fortunately that person was uninjured. About 30,000 phones were removed across 9 states.
The LG 830 has a dual slider keypad and a touch screen. The phone has GPS and EV-DO built-in. The problem is caued by the software in the versions T83LGV03 and T83LGV04. The recall does not pertain to the models on US Cellular and Alltel.
Several weeks ago, LG’s Canadian division recalled 250,000 LG 150 phones.
Earlier this week, the Amazon.com Kindle 2 started shipping. The Kindle 2 has more space to hold more books than the original and even contains a feature called text-to-speech. A robotic computer voice even reads the book for you if you like.
The Authors Guild, a group that represents 9,000 book authors apparently criticized Amazon for having this feature. Amazon wrote a press release saying that the feature is legal, but decided to give the copyright owners the option to choose whether to allow the ebook to have Text-to-speech built-in. Amazon pretty much did this as a concession, but they didn’t have to do it.
The Union Bank of Switzerland made a pretty massive error. The Swiss bank company made a $31 billion order ($3 trillion yen) in convertible bonds in the Japanese game company. This deal would have been the biggest on the Tokyo stock exchange, but it turns out the order was made on accident. The amount was wrong due to a computer error.
In actuality the investment amount was supposed to be 31 million yen ($314,000). On the official Capcom blog, the company revealed that they were ready to do a happy dance when they first heard amount the investment.
“The official Capcom happy-dance began when we heard that financial titan UBS AG placed an order for 3 TRILLION yen (that’s 31 billion bucks!) in Capcom stock yesterday. We were unfortunately forced to reveal that there, um, isn’t ¥3 trillion worth of Capcom stock for sale, so they revised their order to a measly ¥31 million.”
Regardless of the error, at least Capcom will have a great year with the release of Street Fighter IV and it sounds like The Legend of Chun Li movie is doing okay. Capcom is also about to launch Resident Evil 5 on March 13. UBS apologized for their error.
John Battelle of Federated Media recently interviewed Jason Kilar, CEO of Hulu. Hulu is a joint venture between NBC and FOX. Jason Kilar is an Amazon.com veteran. Battelle asked Jason how effective the ad on the Super Bowl advertisement for Hulu was. It turns out that it was very much worth it.
Although Jason did not answer directly, Battelle was able to obtain a number from a different source. It turns out that Hulu’s traffic jumped by 50%. Considering that about 100 million people tune into the Super Bowl in the U.S., it is no surprise that Hulu’s traffic would see a sudden jump.
