The Zune HD is on its way to challenge the iPod Touch and based on the video review below by CNET, Microsoft will be giving Apple a run for its money. The Zune HD has similar features as the original Zune such as the menu itself, but two of the main differences are that it utilizes a touchscreen and it has an OLED screen. There is also built in HD radio.
The initial rumor was that the Zune HD was going to ship this fall, but there was no ballpark date for when it will hit the shelves. However, there is now a rumor circulating around the blogosphere that the ship date will be September 5. Paul Thurrott of WinSuperSite.com was supposedly told this date and since then it has been spreading across the forums.
Over the weekend, a few pictures have been leaked at what is believed to be the features of a new iPhone. Next week, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference will be taking place in San Francisco, California. Above are the screenshots that Gizmodo found on a Hong Kong blog.
The photos are pretty blurry, but you will notice that a lot of the features look like it would be expected coming from Apple. There is a full 360 compass pictured on the top left, a recording microphone in the middle top, a landscape touchscreen QWERTY keyboard in the top right, MMS menu in the bottom left, advanced camera features in the middle bottom, and some sort of image focus recognition in the bottom right.
Joanna Shields was an EVP and the President of People Networks at AOL. She came to the company through AOL’s acquisition of Bebo. Shields plans to move back to London and pursue other entrepreneurial interests. Shields was President of Bebo at the time of the acquisition.
This announcement comes at a time where AOL is preparing to spin off from Time Warner as an independent, public company. When Bebo was acquired for $850 million, they were a much smaller social network than MySpace and Facebook. MySpace was acquired for $580 million back in July 2005 and Facebook is planning for an IPO several years down the road.
Below is the memo that Joanna left to her team at AOL: (more…)
Conservative media personality Tucker Carlson is very well known for being called out by Jon Stewart on former CNN show Crossfire. Carlson is now planning to launch a news website that competes directly to The Huffington Post. Carlson plans to launch a website called TheDailyCaller.com, but more from a conservative news angle.
Carlson claims that his website will focus on “telling the truth and be accurate.” The journalists on TheDailyCaller.com will share in the profits. The motto of TheDailyCaller is “every seven minutes” because Carlson claims that breaking news will happen a lot faster than The Huffington Post and The Drudge Report.
Personally I’m not much of a fan of Tucker Carlson because of the attitude he had during the program below. I’m a big fan of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. I believe that maintaining humor in the serious world of politics is a great mix to have. Questioning Comedy Central’s credibility as a defensive strategy did not seem to give Carlson much merit. And in terms of being able to compete with The Drudge Report, I think that may be a joke because Drudge is already very established and has a massive audience.
Psystar is a company that is best known for building Hackintosh machines. A Hackintosh is considered an unauthorized Mac clone machine. Psystar did it in a massive production, resulting in a lawsuit headed their way. Long story short, Apple sued Psystar for making Mac clones and Psystar sued them back for anticompetitive practices.
Making matters more complicated, Psystar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this week in Florida. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy indicates that Psystar’s investors may have given up in the legal battle against Apple. A hearing will take place on June 5 and Psystar’s equity creditors will be revealed on that day. Apple claimed Psystar was violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act based on the way they installed the Mac OS on the PC.
Despite the bankruptcy filing, Psystar continues to sell Hackintosh PCs on their website: psystar.com. Given the case at hand, it will be an uphill battle for Psystar. Hopefully Apple and Psystar will be able to resolve their differences somehow.
Amit Chowdhry | May 30, 2009 | 282 views | Comments Categorized under Facebook
I’ve heard of several cases where an employer has fired people because of Facebook photos, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone getting fired for writing a funny status message on the social network.
A employee in Johannesburg was fired and two other were suspended for writing Facebook updates that their respective employers found were inappropriate. The employee that was fired is a 23 year old admin clerk at a clothing factory located in Southern Durban. He called his boss a “serial masturbator” and was reported by a co-worker. Talk about a snitch, eh?
Another employee was suspended for “punting a competitor’s product” on the social network on her profile homepage. Lastly, another 25 year old employee in Pretoria was suspended for discussing the laziness of her employer. Supposedly writing negative remarks about work situations and environments can be considered online defamation and can lead to the loss of a job in certain areas of Africa.
Unfortunately the case of these three individuals, it cost them their jobs and reputations. If you want to complain about your job, I suggest you write about it in your notebook diary that no one will ever read at home. Don’t discuss it on the Internet. And for those of you that enjoy eating lizards on an island, don’t post pics of it on Facebook either.
Shepeleff Stephen designed a new set of headphones that are not only Bluetooth-ready, but are also powered with solar panels. The headphones are called the Q-SOUND. Currently the Q-SOUND is only a concept. The headband part of the headphones are filled with solar cells and is made out of flexible plastic. This makes it easier to wrap around the head. In terms of power, only one hour of sun is exposure is needed to power about 2.67 hours worth of active use. Within the headband, two NiMH recharable batteries can be used with a capacity of 800mAh and an operating voltage of 1.2V. The batteries keep the headphones charged for up to 40 hours. Not bad, considering that the headphones are wireless. Hopefully Stephen will be able to see his concept hit the market one day.
Amit Chowdhry | May 30, 2009 | 389 views | Comments Categorized under
Qualcomm and Freescale Semiconductor are working on a new device called smartbooks. Smartbooks are going to be cheapter to make and weigh less than netbooks. Both Qualcomm and Freescale have agreed to both refer to the device as “smartbooks.”
Smartbooks will use an ARM design and the Linux operating system to power the device. Netbooks generally depend on Intel Atom processors and the Windows XP operating system. All smartbooks will even come with a built-in 3G connection.
ARM chips are usually more power-efficient than Intel Atom processors and their overhead is usually cheap. The battery life of smartbooks will be about 8 hours. Interestingly Qualcomm’s website has an “Easter egg” that pokes fun at Mark Cuban.
Easter Egg details: Below is Qualcomm’s website discussing the smartbook. You will notice in the middle of Image A, it says “Always Connected” there is a chat session going on using “Flitter.” Using the name Flitter for the software is clearly a play on Twitter.
I noticed that Mark Cuban’s name is being used during the chat session so I zoomed in (Image B). Under Cuban’s name, I believe it says “I hate NBA fines!!” For anyone that follows Mark Cuban, you may be aware that he was recently fined $25,000 by the NBA for calling out the referee of a game on Twitter. While that was bad news for Cuban, you sometimes cannot help but laugh. Good one, Qualcomm.
Theodore Karantsalis (pictured above) decided to sue Facebook for $70.50 last week. He claimed that Facebook failed to protect users from viruses. He based the dollar amount figure based on having to re-add friends.
Karantsalis wanted to sue Facebook for having to re-add 250 friends that were removed at a value of $0.30 each. Karantsalis is a librarian that lives in Florida.
“I spoke with FB’s law department and the case has been resolved,” stated Karantsalis in an e-mail. “I will file the attached Notice of Dismissal tomorrow. We agreed to add each other as ‘friends’ and ‘poke’ each other periodically. Also, FB is going to send me a T-shirt and I’m going to wear it in my profile photo.”
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt was a bit baffled by the whole situation:
“We’re very interested to hear how he came up with the figure of $70.50,” wrote Schnitt before the issue was resolved. “He’s not going to get it but we promise to refund all the money he paid to use Facebook. Seriously, we’re glad to know how important Facebook is to Mr. Karantsalis but his account was not disabled, is currently active, and he is using it, so I’m not sure what the problem is.”
Karantsalis said that his account was renamed to John Doe and a spam message containing malware was sent out to his friends with a link that had a URL domain name “.im.” Karantsalis said that he did not fall for a phishing scam on the social network so he did not know how this could have happened. At the Miami Dade College, Karantsalis teaches courses on safe computing practices.
The lawsuit was filed to get their attention because Facebook did not answer any e-mails or phone calls.
In the video above, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg ask newly appointed MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and newly appointed News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller some tough questions.
What makes this interview interesting is when Van Natta was asked what makes MySpace’s strengths and weaknesses are. Van Natta said that MySpace’s strength was that it is a lot more open and people on the network are a lot more interested in sharing information. But the reason why some people may be leaving MySpace for alternatives is because of an innovation issue.
Earlier this week, I read an interesting piece from GigaOM about my favorite homepage Netvibes.com. I depend heavily on Netvibes so I personally hope that this company succeeds.
The company has about $16 million in funding from Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Neil Rimer, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Chappaz, and Martin Varsavsky.
Last week Netvibes unleashed a new feature that allows users to build their own custom start pages. Netvibes is able to make money by offering white-label and corporate versions of their service.
“We are on our way to being breakeven this year,” stated Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini. “We are focused on profitability this year.” That’s not bad, considering he is up against Google’s iGoogle platform.” Netvibes receives about 3 million active visitors per month.
The company has made about a couple of million dollars in revenue this year. The company plans on tripling sales by signing up several large customers. The reason I found GigaOM’s post so interesting is because I did not know much about Netvibes’ revenue until now. Based on these figures, if you depend on Netvibes as much as I do, you can remain confident that this service will be here in the long run.
Red Hat has filed a lawsuit against the Swiss government over a desktop software and services contract that was awarded to Microsoft. The Swiss government did not make a call for competitive bids before awarding the contract.
The contract revolves around standardizing desktop software licenses and applications for services, maintenance, and third-level support. The deal is worth about 42 million Swiss francs over three years. In U.S. dollars, that is about $39 million.
However The Swiss Federal Bureau for Building and Logistics awarded the contract to Microsoft for technical reasons because no other bidding party would be able to meet the requirements, or so they claimed. The Swiss law allows companies to award contracts to companies without the requirement of seeking competitive bids if that is the circumstance.
Red Hat claims that the Swiss Federal Agency for Computer Sciences and Telecommunications and the Swiss Federal Institute for Intellectual Property (IGE) is using them already. Red Hat sells enterprise Linux software that competes directly with Microsoft’s offerings.
German firm Open-Xchange is also pushing the Swiss government to give them a chance to make a bid on the contract too. About sixteen alternative companies all want to make a bid according to Red Hat.
Over Memorial Day weekend, Systemax revived the Circuit City brand name and website by buying the rights for $14 million. Since then the Circuit City website has seen a fair number of deals and products reappear.
Systemax bought out the CompUSA brand and website for a discounted price when that retail store went under too. Systemax is the same company behind TigerDirect.com. The problem with the CircuitCity.com website is that the deals are very similar to what is available on the TigerDirect and CompUSA websites.
Many of the products on the CircuitCity website are selling for lower prices than the Best Buy website and is comparable to NewEgg or Amazon.com according to CNET. But when it comes down to it, the new CircuitCity is a TigerDirect and CompUSA’s triplet. Save your time and look at one of the three websites when shopping online.
Chas Edwards was the Chief Revenue Officer at Federated Media up until now. He has quit to become the Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at social bookmarking website Digg.com. Digg hired Thomas Shin from Yahoo! recently and he will be reporting directly to Edwards.
Mike Maser, the current Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer at Digg will become the Chief Strategy Officer. He will control the marketing, community management, and business development at Digg.
Federated Media founder John Battelle plans to start looking for Edwards’ replacement. This past January, Federated Media cut their staff and decided to start focusing on conversational marketing. Federated Media and Microsoft also recently started a project together called ExecTweets which I thought was a terrible idea.
Two of Federated Media’s biggest publisher partners GigaOM and TechCrunch recently cancelled their agreements. GigaOM decided to sign with a different ad partner and TechCrunch decided to sell ads directly themselves. Digg themselves left in 2007 after a partnership with Microsoft.
Edwards joins Digg at a time where the company has decided to find additional revenue streams. Digg is also focusing on directly sales and is pushing for profitability. Digg made about $8.5 million in revenue in 2008 and they will probably need to make double that amount in order to become profitable.
T-Mobile has began to sell the Samsung SGH-t349. This is not the most exciting looking phone since it does not feature a full QWERTY keypad, but sometimes that suits the fancy of certain people. Personally non-QWERT phones are not my cup o’ tea.
As usual, here is the list of features for this device:
* – T-Mobile myFaves® enabled
* – Messaging services
* o Text messaging (XT9 Predictive Text Technology)
* o Instant Messaging (AIM®, Windows LiveTM Messenger, Yahoo!® Messenger)
* o Picture Messaging
* – Support for web2goSM
* – 1.3-megapixel Camera
* o 1280×1024 resolution
* o 4x digital zoom
* – MP3 Player: supports MP3, AAC, AAC+
* – Stereo Bluetooth® Wireless Technology
* – MicroSD Card Slot – up to 4GB
* – Speakerphone
* – Personal organizer (alarm, calendar, calculator, notes, world time, converter, timer, stopwatch)
* – EDGE & GPRS Class: 10; 850/1800/1900 MHz
* – Dimensions: 4.49? x 1.97? x 0.53?; 3.2 ounces
* – Display: 2.2?, 176 x 220 Pixels, 262K TFT Color
* – Standard Lithium Ion Battery: up to 7 hours talk time; up to 300 hours standby time*
