November 26, 2007

TechCrunch has published two articles explaining exactly the steps needed to create viral YouTube or other internet videos. Viral videos are videos that people forward to other people because they find them so entertaining or interesting. Viral videos can be an excellent and low-cost online marketing platform for the right types of companies.

November 23, 2007

A reviewer from CNET compared three different 3D projection technologies used for showing the movie Beowulf. For the first time, viewers had a choice not only of watching with the film in Imax 3D and Real D projection technology, but also in the newcomer Dolby 3D format. Based on the review, it appears that Dolby 3D technology came out significantly ahead of the other two 3D projection formats.

According to the review: "Dolby's technology gave a sharp image that showed every beard bristle, the colors were relatively rich, flicker from moving objects was nonexistent, but most significantly, the sense of depth was strong. Even the subtle differences between a character's facial features were perceptible, and group shots with a host of characters showed as true depth, not as a number of gradually more distant two-dimensional layers. I was truly impressed."

November 22, 2007

The Kindle eBook reader from Amazon.com is on sale now. It is a "sleek, thin electronic reader that connects wirelessly to the Internet at broadband speeds and allows users to download e-books, or subscribe to magazines and blogs directly from Amazon.com. Unlike the Sony e-book reader, it does not ever need to be hooked up to a PC."

November 22, 2007

According to Crave, the newest Samsung Blackjack, the BlackJack II, will be available for sale on tomorrow.

Crave.CNET.com writes:
"The newest edition of the Samsung BlackJack officially will become available on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The Samsung BlackJack II for AT&T sports a revamped design that comes in two color schemes: black or burgundy. Improvements include a larger display and more shortcut buttons while a front jog wheel replaces the side-mounted scroll wheel. On the feature front, the BlackJack II offers everything we saw on its predecessor but adds integrated GPS and support for AT&T Video Share. Only the black version will go on sale this Friday, November 23. You'll have to wait until December 6 to snag the burgundy model. Both are $149 with a two-year contract."

June 26, 2006

At 6.9mm, the Samsung X820, also called the Ultra Edition 6.9, is the thinnest cell phone on the market. Among the features are a 2 megapixel camera and an MP3 music player. The two other announced phones, the D830 and the D900 are also extremely thin. The D900 even has a 3 megapixel camera.

August 6, 2005

According to several blog postings, the unannounced Treo 670 uses Windows Mobile 5.0 instead of the PalmOS operating system. According to the specifications, the device features CDMA on Verizon's network, Bluetooth, 1.3 megapixel camera, EVDO, and Windows Mobile 5.0. Although these blog postings include a number of pictures and even some videos, it is possible that this may be a hoax.

June 13, 2005

PC World has published an article with 30 things you didn't know you could do on the Internet, containing many tips and tricks that will help you solve problems and save time. These include the Wayback Machine, GoogleX, PubSub, Streamload, Mail2Web, ManiaTV, Kayak.com, Sharpmail anonymous e-mail, Bubbler, the Tech Support Guy, the Constant Contact e-mail newsletter service, GoToMeeting, the Where's George money tracker, CafePress custom printed items, RemindMe.com, self-publishing on demand from Lulu.com, Konfabulator, and many more.

June 10, 2005

Executives from AMD today announced that they will start shipping quad-core Opteron processors early in 2007. Other planned features include per-core power management, improvements to the HyperTransport specification, secure execution, virtualization, DDR-2 and DDR-3 memory support, new multimedia-specific instructions, enhanced floating-point performance, and dedicated coprocessors.

June 6, 2005

CVS stores in the Northeastern U.S. have started selling a $29.95 one-time-use digital video camera. The device from Pure Digital Technologies records 20 minutes of video at 15 frames per second with a 640 by 480 pixel resolution. It saves the digital video to internal memory, and requires users to send the camera back for processing to DVD output. The processing charge is $12.95. Currently there is no way to transfer the video from the device to your PC, but we are sure that someone will come up with a hack to do exactly that.

June 4, 2005

Sharp Corp. has said that it will begin selling the world's largest liquid crystal display television set, containing a 65-inch LCD screen. The Aquos LC-65GE1 is full-spec high definition LCD panel with new back-lighting technology that enhances color output, and is priced around $15,000.

June 4, 2005

MacDevCenter has published a two-part article exploring all of the features of Safari RSS in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. See how you can easily manage your feeds and customize the RSS functionality in Safari to make it even more useful.

May 31, 2005

Prototypes of a Mac mini look-alike PC were on display at the Computex trade show in Taiwan this week. The machines use Intel Pentium M processors and run Microsoft Windows. The company is trying to inspire PC manufacturers to adopt the design in order to better compete with Apple's Mac mini.

May 20, 2005

ONLamp.com has published a very informative article that explains how to develop sophisticated web applications using XMLHttpRequest, the core of the Ajax development methodology. If you want to create great web based applications like Google Maps, GMail, and Flickr, then this is a great article to get you started.

May 19, 2005

Google has taken a page out of Yahoo's playbook and created their own My Yahoo-style personalized homepage service. The new service lets you arrange your GMail, Google News, Google Maps driving directions, Weather, Stock Quotes, and soon, RSS feeds, on a single personalized homepage.

May 17, 2005

GameSpot has published photos and specifications for Sony's new PlayStation 3 game console. Features include a Cell Processor running at 3.2 GHz with 8 SPE processing cores, an RSX graphics unit running at 550 MHz, full HD video output at 480i/480p/720p/1080i/1080p, Dolby 5.1 channel sound with DTS, 256 MB of XDR RAM at 3.2 GHz, 256MB of GDDR3 VRAM at 700 MHz, 2.5" HDD slot, 6 USB 2.0 ports, MemoryStick port, SD port, CompactFlash port, three Gigabit Ethernet ports, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, up to 7 wireless game controllers, full PS2 game compatibility, dual HDMI video ports, media compatibility with Blu-Ray/DVD/CD/SACD, and more. There are several video clips from the Sony press conference at E3, including clips of game demos. See the bottom of the GameSpot article for links.

May 16, 2005

An article over at Informit.com shows you how to set up a video broadcast server to transmit live television to any device on your network, including wireless laptops. All you really need is a TV tuner card and the free Windows Media Encoder software. If you want, you can even stream live television to anyone on the Internet via HTTP.

May 10, 2005

A few Japanese programmers have released a Game Boy emulator for the Sony PSP. Several videos of the program in action have also appeared on the web.

May 4, 2005

Today Google launched a beta of the Google Web Accelerator, a free plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is designed to speed up web browsing for users with broadband connections. In order to achieve this, the Google Web Accelerator uses the browser plug-in and thousands of servers run by Google in order to cache frequently accessed pages, prefetch pages on users' computers, manage TCP/IP throughput, and compress transmitted content.

April 27, 2005

Scientists at UCLA said that they have achieved nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment using a small heated crystal and electricity in a chamber of deuterium gas. The reaction gave off energy, neutrons, and an isotope of helium as proof that fusion had taken place. However, the experiment did not produce more energy than was put in. Further experiments are needed to show whether this method can be used to generate excess energy.

April 20, 2005

Today Google launched Google Maps UK and Google Local UK. The mapping service works exactly the same way as Google Maps in the US. The Google Local UK service provide listings of local businesses in the UK.