Monday, April 20, 2009
Oprah Twitter Effect; Adobe Flash TV; and the Stella

You've probably seen the commercials comparing the Subaru Stella to the BMW Mini. The commercials are lame if you ask me, I don't see any comparisons to begin with so of course they can dish out tons of incomparable features.

Fuji Heavy Industries, parent company and maker of Subaru automobiles, has just announced its plans to begin testing prototypes of its Subaru plug-in Stella electric vehicle, which will be introduced in Japan this summer. Furthermore, the company has managed to boost power output from 40kW in the previous iteration to 47kW, and it also stripped away some unnecessary weight and fine-tuned the output management system. There's no mention of a price or expected launch date in North America.

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Adobe is working to bring its Flash web animation and video viewer to the living room via a new run-time system for HD TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other connected living room devices.

This is all part of bringing Internet content into the TV viewing experience.

Adobe has signed up a host of partners to support the technology, called the Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home. The new platform is available now to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), and the first devices and processors that will support it should be available in the second half of the year, Adobe said.

Partners that have signed on to support the new version of Flash are Atlantic Records, Broadcom, Comcast, Disney Interactive Media Group, Intel, Netflix, STMicroelectronics, The New York Times Company, NXP Semiconductors and Sigma Designs.

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Oracle will acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The deals comes after IBM withdrew its offer to buy Sun earlier this month.

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison in a statement. "Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up."

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Today sees the public launch of Tweetie for Mac, the desktop-based big brother of what many consider to be the iPhone's best Twitter client. People have been playing around with a beta version of the app for the last few days since the initial preview last Thursday.

In other Twitter news...

Late last night, former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block tweeted out that he had done some research to attempt to quantify the "Oprah Effect" - that is, the number of users who signed up for Twitter after Oprah featured the service on her show on Friday. The number he came to was about 1.2 million new users.

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  • Written by: Christy"
    • | 8:27 AM | 0 comment(s)! |

    Friday, February 20, 2009
    Toys without batteries! Phone Sick Note.

    For those who are looking for the latest and greatest construction toy, like Lego or K'nex, then you have found what you are looking for with the Topodo.

    Topodo is designed by people at the MIT Media lab, and allows the user to create projects that can walk and do other actions of motion. That may sound like Lego's Mindstorms NXT, but in this case, the Topodo user does not need a computer, or even batteries.

    That's right, no batteries are required to make these toys move, as the Topodo comes with a special set of kinetic memory motors. They work by having the user moving the limbs or body parts, and these special parts will reproduce the action, enabling creations to walk across the floor without power.

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    Applied Nanodetectors Ltd. (AND) from the UK is currently parading a prototype cell phone at the International Nanotechnology Exhibition & Conference that is able to detect various diseases simply by analyzing the user's breath. The phone itself is made by Nokia, featuring AND's chip inside that features integrated sensors which are able to detect minute traces of different gases including CO2, NOx and ammonia (NH3). Once detected, the chip will get to work by analyzing the composition of the user's breath while tabulating the density of each gas. The results will be compared against characteristics of various diseases in order to detect whether one is possibly suffering from a certain type of disease or not. Sounds cool, but the phone is still a long way off from being commercially available.

    So tell your boss that your phone told you to stay home sick. See how that one works for ya.

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    A report in The Wall Street Journal is indicating that cable giants Time Warner Cable and Comcast are in talks with some of the companies that operate pay-cable channels, for a plan to make some of the networks' content available online to subscribers. It'd probably be on a streaming, ad-supported basis, and probably available for free to existing subscribers.

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  • Written by: Christy"
    • | 2:43 PM | 0 comment(s)! |