With the coming of fall just around the corner, sports fans will once again login to Fantasy Football leagues to manage their virtual teams in their fictional leagues. Whether you are in a work league or a league amongst friends, you’ll be spending your time building your teams, fielding your players, and watching their performances online. Facebook users who want to make their team management and competition more of social venture, will have the opportunity to do so this upcoming season. Sports Illustrated has jumped on this Facebook-Fantasy Football bandwagon by teaming up with Citizens Sports in launching their Fantasy Football 2008 application. With their integration into Facebook, where millions of people spend millions of hours, they hope to give Yahoo’s and ESPN’s fantasy football leagues a run for their money this upcoming season.

Read

Recent Internet Explorer 8 rumors being tossed around the Web loosely outlined what bloggers referred to as “porn mode”. Basically this new functionality would allow users to easily enable and disable a strict privacy policy, disallowing all cookies and disabling browsing history, search history, and form data / password memory. Microsoft has finally confirmed that the upcoming much needed update to their Web browser will indeed include a secretive browsing mode, though it seems to have opted to not go with the “porn mode” moniker despite its relevance. Andy Zeigler, Microsoft Program Manager, recently detailed what has been dubbed the “InPrivate” feature line within Microsoft’s upcoming eighth Internet Explorer version. Three new services combine to make up the InPrivate package; InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking and InPrivate Subscriptions. When enabled, these three components (along with an automatic history deletion feature) combine to ensure that you can go anywhere you want on the Web and no one will ever find out what a sick, twisted deviant you really are.

[Via The Register]

Read

The internationally popular social network Hi5 launched a mobile version (m.hi5.com) of its website this week. The mobile website will allow Hi5 users to send and receive messages, add / request new friends, view friend’s profiles and make comments and also view the real-time status of other members online. With support for 26 languages, Hi5’s mobile website targets the growing number of international users, who unlike their American counterparts, are more likely to use a mobile device to access the internet than a PC. Creating this “culturally relevant” social network and providing it to the world has been Hi5’s strategy and it has worked.  According to ComScore, hi5 grew 79% in the first half of 2008 with the number of unique visitors increasing from 31.4 million in December 2007 to 56.4 million in June 2008. That is more than twice the growth rate of any of the other top 10 social networks! Keep those rates up and they will be poised on the cusp of world domination.

Read

If there are two things that Adobe knows like the back of its collective hand, they are photos and mobile software. We don’t know anyone young or old who doesn’t automatically say “Photoshop” when someone mentions photo editing. As for mobile software, Flash Lite currently resides on over 500 million handsets and that figure will only grow. So when Abode told us that today it would be unveiling the first beta version of its photo-centric mobile software, we can’t say we were surprised. After a demo however, we were also pretty excited. In a nutshell, the initial offering of Photoshop.com Mobile will be the third leg in a trifecta of account syncing - allowing you to capture and automatically (or manually) upload images from your mobile phone and have them sync between your mobile, Photoshop Express (online) and Photoshop Elements 7. In other words, your photos are automatically synced across mobile, cloud and desktop / laptop even as you edit and save them. Awesome! If you think that’s not a big deal, go ask Apple how it’s doing with MobileMe. From Francisco Kattan, director, Product Marketing and Developer Relations, Mobile and Device Solutions at Adobe:

With the rising popularity of camera phones and rich Flash based mobile applications, Adobe is giving consumers the ability to share their mobile photos at any time. With Photoshop.com Mobile Adobe is taking the first step to deliver on the promise of rich multi-screen experiences that seamlessly work on the desktop, in the browser and on mobile devices.

When it launches toward the end of September, Photoshop.com Mobile will be available for the following six Windows Mobile devices: Samsung Blackjack I, Samsung Blackjack II, Motorola MOTO Q 9h, MOTO Q Music 9m, Palm Treo 700 w/wx, and Palm Treo 750. More Windows Mobile handsets will be supported by year end 2008 but don’t fret if you don’t have a Windows handset. Adobe has a couple of partnerships in the works including Photoshop Express support for ShoZu that will make certain aspects of the mobile portion of their service available to hoards of additional handsets. Of course this might not offer the same rich experience as its Flash Lite-based Photoshop.com Mobile app but it will defintiely tide us over until more versions are launched. In terms of pricing, the Photoshop.com Basic account which offers 5 GB of storage is completely free while a Photoshop.com Plus membership offers more services such as templates and interactive online albums along with 20 GB of online storage for $49.99.

Read

Google has launched its new Gears Geolocation API for mobile and desktop browsers. Websites using this API can provide targeted information based upon your current location. The API determines your location using GPS or cell phone triangulation for cell phones and the IP address for desktop browsers. If you are in the UK, you can see the Gears Geolocation API in action on supported Windows Mobile devices at the European Travel site, lastminute.com, and the social discovery tool, Rummble. Point your mobile browser to m.lastminute.com or m.rummble.com, install the Gears application, and get your location based web content served up to you. Gears currently is only available for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile devices and for Firefox and Internet Explorer on the desktop. Expansion to include other devices and operating systems such as Android is expected. It is also free for both developers and users. All in all, not bad guys, not bad.

Read

Hot out of the Microsoft labs is a new web service called Photosynth. In short, it allows users to create panoramic images using their own 2-dimensional photographs. The really neat thing is that these images won’t be your standard, boring, linear panoramic displays. Instead, the effect will be like a real 360-degree rendering of the pictures and location. Imagine yourself at a piazza in Rome twirling around like some love-drunk fool taking in the romantic sights and landmarks… We guess it’s kinda like that. Or you can take a look at the New York Times’ image of the Water Cube in Beijing.

Even though the technology isn’t new, it isn’t just for professionals or digital artists anymore. So far, the quality isn’t quite as good as professional-grade work but we have to say, this is a pretty good start. Once Microsoft refines this new software and service, Facebook and MySpace will never be the same! If this thing really takes off, it can be an exciting new piece of technology and will likely enhance business and social networking, too. Imagine being able to slap images like these on Twitter and having them geotagged, or giving a 3D tour of your office or facility without having to hire a 3D artist and Flash developer for your site. See, Microsoft doesn’t waste money frivolously…

Read

By “Jaiku is the new Twitter”, we’re hardly suggesting it is a popular new microblogging site that may overtake the reigning king. No, that ship has sailed. We mean it never works anymore. Twitter seems to have been spending cash found during its recent funding round very well. It made a few key hires, sought a bit of outside help and now downtime is a thing of the past (for now at least). On the other hand you have Jaiku, the young scrapper with a promising future cut short by a Google acquisition. Let’s take a look at what we’ve seen from Jaiku since it was snatched up by the big G:

• Registration closed, invite only
• A huge spike in traffic, followed by a huge drop-off
• Server issues
• Downtime
• Moved to Google Apps engine
• Server issues
• Downtime

It becomes quite apparent that Google isn’t all too interested in the present community aspects of Jaiku. Instead, it has been hypothesized that Google was likely more interested in Jaiku’s mobile presence applications; a live phone book of sorts where users can view the status of each of their contacts and even post messages and replies from right within the app. Sounds like something that might be a pretty interesting addition to Android, no? Whether or not this is the case, it seems to be a fair assumption that Google doesn’t have much interest in the current Jaiku users. The service has been up and down all week and now users have been informed via the screen capture above, that Jaiku will be taking a vacation all weekend. As the message on Jaiku’s homepage suggests, now is probably a good time for Jaiku users to find other ways to communicate.

Read

…is this the new mug for Vista? Our beloved, impeccable, and extremely user-friendly Windows OS? All kidding aside, it seems like Windows is still desperate as ever to push Vista into your home or office if you haven’t been forced to take it already. After a year-and-a-half on the market, Microsoft’s Vista has still been taking a backseat to Windows XP and pirated copies of XP Pro and other XP variants. Companies like Dell have even offered to install XP into their computers for free, though at one point there was a premium to pay for choosing XP over Vista. That’s not even counting how many people have “downgraded” to XP from Vista directly. With a reception like that, what is a company to do? Hire celebrities!

As we know, Microsoft is pouring $300 million into a huge ad campaign attempting to convince us Vista isn’t terrible - and Jerry Seinfeld’s help may just be the beginning. It’s also rumored that funny-boys Will Ferrell and Chris Rock are being considered for this face lift. With that kind of financial and celebrity backing, who knows? It just might be enough for people to overlook Vista’s shortcomings. You know what they say, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? And if it is broke, why fix it when you can push it with smart heavy advertising and famous celebrities? Expect to see them around starting September 4.

Read

It has been less than one month since Palringo added its IM application to the iPhone App Store and we already have the major revision promised when it was released on July 29. The most notable addition of course, is Push-to-Talk (PTT) support. PTT, or vocal IM as they often call it in this case, is the feature that sets Palringo apart from competitors on various other platforms and now the great functionality is available to iPhone users as well. So how does it work? Just like standard PTT services, simply select a contact from your contact list and hold a [virtual] button while speaking. Finish talking, release the button and your audio recording is quickly delivered to the recipient. Incoming PTT messages can be played automatically or manually depending on your settings and they will play right from within the app. Of course Palringo also supports messaging to a variety of other IM platforms such as GTalk, Yahoo and AIM and they aren’t left out when it comes to PTT. The catch of course is that these IM services don’t support PTT so any vocal messages, just like picture messages, will be delivered as a link to the file hosted on Palringo servers. The recipient can then easily click the link and view your image file or play the PTT message right from within any standard browser. Of course the addition of PTT support doesn’t change the fact that the app is free and since all iPhones are sold with unlimited data, you’ve now got unlimited PTT as well - to any handset running Palringo on any network! Take that, carriers.

Read

As traffic to Pandora continues to climb at an impressive rate, far more steep than that of competitor Last.fm as seen in the chart above, the popular custom internet radio provider may be a breath away from closing its doors. Why, you might ask? The answer is not very far from being obvious these days. Wherever there is an emerging revolution in the realm of music consumption, loved by many yet still on the brink of defeat; the RIAA is never far from the scene. Pandora’s current woes fit the mold precisely. Pandora usage is at all all-time high and usage increased by almost two million visits per month from June to July alone, yet elevated royalty rates are making it nearly impossible for the company to stay afloat. After last year’s decision that internet radio provider per-song royalty rates would double there has been an ongoing battle between providers and SoundExchange, an unincorporated division of the RIAA tasked with collecting royalties from digital providers such as satellite and internet radio. The decision determined that the rate would increase incrementally from .08¢ per song per listener in 2006 to .19¢ per song per listener by 2010. While tiny fractions of a penny seem insignificant, they add up quickly. Pandora projects that it will pay out about $17 million this year, or a staggering 70% of its revenue, in royalties. Long story short, it is losing money. The problem is even worse for smaller internet radio providers, where increased royalty rates are expected to amount to between 100% and 300% of annual revenues. Translation: By way of SoundExchange and lawmaker support, the RIAA would rather wipe internet radio off the map with outrageous royalty rates than find a fair way to make some money for its clients (labels and, theoretically, musicians). Why is that? There is no way for us to say but as per-song performance royalties are positioned to wipe internet radio off the map, it should be noted that terrestrial radio pays no such fees.

Tim Westergren, Founder of Pandora, had this to say to the Washington Post:

We’re funded by venture capital. They’re not going to chase a company whose business model has been broken. So if it doesn’t feel like its headed towards a solution, we’re done.

Read

In the world of Web 2.0, “aggregate” is the word of the month. It seems like 50 new services pop up every day trying to make a business out of aggregating data from other services. Some are mildly successful and a handful experience big success but most just flounder and flop. Why? Because trying to start a business based on other people’s web services is a tricky game. Among the companies that have found a terrific niche to which an aggregation model can be applied, is TicketStumber. This, people, is one of our new favorite sites. TicketStumbler is a tool for finding tickets to any and every sporting event you can think of (concert and theater events will be coming within the next few months). The site has a brilliantly simple and smooth UI, and lets you search or browse events by team, date, region and more. So why is it better than StubHub? Apart from being much more logical and therefore more usable, TicketStumbler does not sell tickets nor do its users. The site pulls in ticket listings from a variety of sources such as StubHub, RazorGator, Empire Tickets and Ticket City, and lists everything on one clean page. Check out what’s available along with prices, compare listings with the on-page seating charts and then choose the tickets you want. Once you click the purchase button you will be forwarded right to the appropriate vendor page. Not hassle, no fuss. Beyond form and function, perhaps the best part about this service is the founders. This Y Combinator-funded team is very, very responsive and thrives on feedback. Case in point: v1 did not include seating charts which made for a bunch of back-and-forth as users looking to compare seat placement as opposed to just prices. They received some feedback to this extent and update the site include seating charts. How long did it take them to respond and implement the changes? Two days. No that’s customer service…

Read

As WiMAX continues to stumble and stammer, people are wondering if the once-exciting prospect of WiMAX in the US is simply a pipe dream. This wouldn’t be the first time a group of competitors rallied together and bribed convinced the FCC to impede progress. With the future of WiMAX up in the air, the struggling Sprint is realizing that it will have to look elsewhere to juice up its data offering for the time being. Finding new ways to leverage that EVDO Rev. A network of theirs is indeed going to be key and making its Phone-as-Modem (PAM) plan a bit more accessible is a fine start. While nothing has been confirmed yet, rumor has it that the new price point in the near future will be a very reasonable $15 / month, down from the current $40 / month. Of course some of us use our handsets as wireless 3G modems without paying an extra cent, but for those unaware of that possibility $15 per month isn’t half bad - especially if the $15 service addition might replace a pricey USB modem or laptop card.

Read

Kicking things off with the LG Voyager, Verizon Wireless has just gone live with its visual voicemail service. No doubt inspired by the iPhone though Apple was hardly the first to introduce such a service (just ask its legal team), Verizon’s new service allows users to listen to voicemail messages by navigating through a visual representation of their voicemail inbox. In a nutshell, it marries voicemail and a call log. So what sets Verizon’s offering apart from third-party alternatives? For one thing, it’s cheap! At $3 per month, Verizon’s service is a fraction of the price of services like PhoneTag which charge $9.99 per month or more. Of course PhoneTag also transcribes voicemails and that is the core value of its offering, whereas Verizon’s service doesn’t quite go there. For your $3 you can store up to 40 messages for a maximum of 40 days and create up to 10 caller ID-based greetings. As for the implementation, the UI won’t be winning any American Design Awards any time soon but at that price you pretty much can’t go wrong. So if you’ve got a Voyager and you’re game to check out Verizon’s offering, the first thing you have to do is check your firmware version. VX10KV09 or later are ready to roll but if you’ve got something older you’ll need to drop by your local Verizon store for an upgrade.

[Via AppleInsider]

Read

…It should start charging $1 per month for Gmail service. Twitter users probably represent one zillionth of the Gmail user base (yes, that is an exaggeration) and here is the Twitter reaction when Gmail went down for less than 30 minutes today:

Twitter reaction

Bravo Google, the world needs Gmail. I would venture a guess that at only $1 per month Google would likely retain well over 50% of its current user base. That’s a whole lot of dollars…

Well, the girl above seems to be enjoying JAJAH Concierge - a little too much perhaps. Is that a Von Dutch hat by the way?! Ahem. MOBIVOX and JAJAH have just announced a new partnership that has resulted in a pretty cool new service offering call Concierge. The MOBIVOX-powered service allows users to place a call into the Concierge beta service with a free access number. Once the call is connected, users can issue voice commands to call contacts (or any number with digital dialing), send text messages and even set up conference calls. JAJAH CEO Trevor Healy’s press blurb:

This is a great partnership between two companies at the forefront of the development of voice 2.0 services. MOBIVOX customers benefit from enhanced voice quality, while continuing to use the service they know and love. At the same time, we are delighted to offer JAJAH customers a new service developed on MOBIVOX’s voice application platform.

Beyond the cool-factor, the service is pretty useful in a time where disobeying hands-free mobile phone laws has become a very expensive endeavor. Pricing details are not yet available but for the time being it looks like the service is in closed beta and will open up in the coming months. MOBIVOX’s standard offering should tide you over in the meantime.

[Via MOBIVOX]

Read

This, people, is a smart service. Schmap, provider of interactive online maps with guide and tourism info, has just pushed an innovative iPhone-friendly solution into public beta. The service allows users to quickly and easily publish iPhone-friendly contact details with a map on their websites. When we say “Quickly and easily” we mean it. First of all, no registration is required and the service is completely free. Secondly, the setup from beginning to end takes about two minutes. The user need only enter the contact details in a few form fields on the Schmap site, copy the resulting code and paste it onto their homepage. Done. The results will be completely invisible to most browsers but visit the site on an iPhone and bar will appear across the top of the screen. Tap it and you will be brought to a page with contact details; rotate the iPhone and a map will be displayed pointing you to the exact location of the business. Schmap also has plans to make the service S60, Android and BlackBerry-friendly in the near future, meaning that the same piece of code will yield properly-formatted results for each of the aforementioned platforms. No changes to the code currently in place will be required when the update comes around. The key challenge for Schmap of course will be getting exposure with less-web savvy retail business owners, restaurants, bars, etc so that they know the service exists. We wonder what other cool services could be added to websites in a similar no-registration, two minute-implementation way? For a sample of Schmap’s service in action, hit www.purefoodandwine.com from an iPhone.

[Via The Outsidr]

Read

Readers who own an S60 handset from Nokia may or may not have heard of an application that Nokia has has done a fairly good job of keeping relatively hush. One of the biggest complaints S60 users have in general is the lackluster email client and less-than-reliable performance that comes along with it. There are plenty of third-party options out there of course, but none that is truly optimal and geared specifically for personal use. Nokia Email is Nokia’s first attempt at just that; a premium email client geared toward personal use as opposed to enterprise. We just got off a conference call the Nokia Email Product Manager and we have to say that the future is looking pretty bright for this app / service combo. Here are some highlights from the call:

• Nokia Email goes live on Nokia Beta Labs tomorrow
• Nokia Email will be a pay service once it exits beta; cost will be integrated into carrier data plans
• Users not on a carrier with whom Nokia has an agreement will still have access to the client, pricing info not yet available
• Future features:
  • Focus on value added services - plenty coming that is not in the current beta
  • Multiple email accounts will be supported - current beta client supports only one account
  • Software update notifications will be automatic - install overlay will not remove settings
  • Folder support is one of their top priorities - archiving, etc

The service itself has a long way to go but it’ll get there if you’re patient. Nokia also seems to be paying particular attention to feedback surrounding this app so don’t be shy in telling them what you want. Feel free to mention HTML support, though we know it’s already on Nokia’s radar…

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour.  There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.  We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love.  One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe.  Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve

We have to wonder: Do you think Steve currently uses MobileMe himself? How about the rest of the Apple higher ups?

Read

It looks like an internal email from El Jobso to Apple employees it quite telling with regards to the current MobileMe situation. What is the MobileMe situation? It’s not good. We’re sure you’ve ready about the many, many problems that many, many people are having with the service. You’ve also likely read that people are dropping their MobileMe accounts left and right. Apparently Apple has noticed a bit of an issue as well and Jobs took it upon himself to circulate a “my bad” to his troops. In the note, Jobs acknowledges that Apple went about it all wrong. As opposed to dropping the unproven service in its entirety to coincide with the launch of the iPhone 3G, Apple might have considered a gradual piecemeal release starting with iPhone sync and then slowly adding additional services. From El Capitán:

It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

Well, you know what they say about hindsight. Apple has hardly given up on the service of course and it is reportedly working very hard to remedy the situation by year’s end. The MobileMe team has gone through a bit of a reorganization and all internet services including iTunes, the App Store and MobileMe will now be headed up by Eddy Cue, formerly the VP of iTunes. It would be hard to argue that Cue hasn’t done a bang up job with iTunes and we expect he will fair just fine in his new role. Jobs closes the email by saying:

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services and learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Fair enough.

Read

Typically when a rumor starts off with “I’ve been informed by a strange but totally plausible source”, it’s a safe bet that you shouldn’t get too excited. There are always exceptions to the rule though and since we may have heard a bit of rumbling around the bush ourselves, we’ll run with this one. Apparently in the next few months, despite the fact that the Nokia Music Store has only been launched in a few regions (and has not been greeted with much fanfare), Nokia will reportedly be launching its own movie store. Details are a bit scarce but the concept is actually quite interesting. Basically the service will allow you to pay a monthly fee and stream unlimited 320 x 240 H.264 videos (with AAC stereo 96 kbps audio) directly to your handset. Movies can be watched on the handset of course, or even on a television via the TV-Out on some Nseries handsets. Perhaps the most interesting and unique part of the service is that you will supposedly be able to easily initiate a movie purchase at any time during playback with a single button click. The movie will then be dispatched over night to your address on file from a Nokia-partnered DVD retailer. No, it’s not as tech-forward as a set top box solution but it is a pretty cool way to integrate mobiles into Nokia’s offering.

Read

Now this is a service we can get behind! Fonolo serves one purpose and one purpose alone: Kill phone trees. If you’re not familiar with the term “phone tree” you’ll certainly be familiar with the concept. When something you own isn’t working properly despite your best efforts, you get angry. You pride yourself in being a skilled gadgeteer so the fact that you can’t fix the problem yourself is a bit enraging. Now you have to swallow your pride, cowboy up and call the dreaded “customer care line”. After dialing, are you greeted with a knowledgeable human? Of course not. A digitized female voice simply makes matters worse by asking you all kinds of questions and requiring you to push various buttons for a few minutes before you have the pleasure of sitting on hold for half an hour. Ugh. There is hope though, and that hope is fonolo.com. Fonolo provides you with flow charts for each company in its data base. The flow charts represent each and every option that you would have if you called the customer service line yourself. Simply select a point on the chart (likely “speak with a customer service rep” down near the bottom) and Fonolo will call the company for you. It will automatically navigate the menus and then ring your phone once it has reached the point you specified. Best of all, it’s free! There are also some other cool options such as the ability to record calls and publish them online to give others a taste of what they can expect should they need to call the same company. The catch? It’s currently in private beta. You can enter your email on the homepage to be notified as soon as they’re ready for you and we highly recommend doing so. This is the kind of service worth waiting for.

[Thanks Robby]

Read

Google is definitely putting some solid work into its Mobile mapping application these days. We have a feeling it will eventually come to a point where Google makes paid navigation services obsolete (especially subscription services such as Nokia Maps) and it will likely be sooner rather than later. We can’t imagine a better native navigation candidate for Android, can you? In the meantime, new features continue to roll out at a surprising pace and the application seemingly becomes more comprehensive each day. Our last post covered Google’s voice search pilot available on certain BlackBerry devices and now Google has introduced mass transit directions on its S60 and Windows Mobile versions of Google Maps. Released yesterday, version 2.2 can be downloaded and installed by pointing your mobile browser to google.com/gmm. The version provides access to transit directions in over 50 cities around the world and surely more will follow. The usefulness of this new functionality is fairly obvious, especially for those who travel often. Mass transit had already been incorporated into the BlackBerry and Java versions of Google Maps so now we get to sit back, relax and wait to see what the mobile Maps team comes up with next.

Read

If you have an S60, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry smartphone then you should already know about Palringo. They call it “rich messaging” and we call it a good IM application with support for AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, Gadu Gadu, ICQ, Jabber, Windows Live Messenger and Palringo’s own IM platform. For a quick recap on what sets Palringo apart, here are the three core functions:

• Text IM: Standard, run-of-the-mill instant messaging.
• Vocal IM: More commonly known as Push to Talk (PTT), users can instantly exchange voice messages in near real-time. Think of it as a free walkie talkie on your mobile. Palringo -> Palringo voice messages will play automatically on the recipient’s device, just like PTT. Palringo -> ‘Other’ messages will be delivered as links that the recipient can click on to play the audio file hosted on Palringo’s servers.
• Image IM: Exactly what it sounds like. Click the picture button and Palringo will activate the handset’s camera. Snap a picture, hit send and the image will display right in the Palringo client on the recipient’s handset. Users can also send images to third-party IM services (GTalk, AIM, etc). Just like voice IM, your contact will receive a link that will allow him / her to view and save the image hosted on Palringo’s servers.

Now, iPhone owners have access to what is likely one of the most versatile mobile IM apps on the market. For the time being, functionality is limited to text and image messaging but Palringo promises vocal IM in the second release version. In the meantime, iPhone owners can now enjoy free text and image IM on whichever IM platform they like. Just hit the App Store and you’re good to go.

Read

According to cuil.com’s homepage at the time this article was written, the Cuil search engine indexes an astounding 121,617,892,992 web pages. The question is how they are indexed. Backed by big brains and bigger bucks, Cuil (pronounced “cool”) launched last night and was hardly welcomed with the parades and fanfare it was surely hoping for. In fact, we can’t recall the last time a product received this much bad press within 24 hours of its launch. Most would be overjoyed by not one, not two, but three consecutive articles on Techcrunch, not to mention the hundreds of other articles on blogs across the internet. Unfortunately it seems as though not many people had anything good to say. Search is a tricky space since Google swallowed it years ago and bloggers would typically root for the underdog as opposed to writing a young scrapper off immediately, but it might just be too hard to root for Cuil. Traffic to cuil.com may end up being the biggest bell curve we’ve ever seen. It has a great look and some interesting features but downtime, skepticism and perhaps worst of all, consistently bad search results have dug a hole that Cuil may never be able to climb out of. Come on guys; when we search “Cuil” we don’t get a single result about the site! Just about every search we ran yielded pretty terrible results, even our search for “Boy Genius Report” as seen in the image above. Well, maybe we’ll be the 121,617,892,993rd page indexed…

Read

It seems like a lifetime ago that Sirius and XM first announced the intentions to merge and form a single satellite radio powerhouse. Subscribers were generally overjoyed by the possibilities; twice the content, a la carte options, the promise that current subscription rates would not increase, etc. It sounded like everyone would be a winner. There was just one problem though… Terrestrial radio and its “relationship” with the FCC. We won’t go into this mockery of government yet again, but suffice it to say that there were some pretty big hurdles that had to be ovecome. Here we are almost 18 months later however, and the merger has finally been approved! Of course there are some conditions to the $3.3 billion deal, first and foremost is the fact that the companies will have to cough up $20 million in fines to the FCC right out of the gate. These fines are a result of FCC claims that several radio models and signal-boosting towers violate FCC regulations. Ok fine, moving on. The other notable stipulation is one that we can’t say we disapprove of:

The companies must cap prices for three years after joining and allow consumers to choose the channels they want and pay less for packages of channels.

Work on a la carte-friendly radios is already underway although it sounds like despite claims made by several on-air personalities, current radio models may not be capable of receiving both Sirius and XM streams. As much of a shame as that would be, we’ll have to wait for some formal announcements before it can be confirmed or denied. Whatever the case may be, last night’s announcement was a big step forward and only time will tell how it plays out.

Read

Come on Blockbuster, all the cool kids are doing it. Almost a year since announcing the acquisition of video download service Movielink, it looks like Blockbuster is finally getting ready to round out its portfolio with a download service of its own. No there still isn’t anything new with regards to the Blockbuster set top box many have been eagerly awaiting, but we’ll get there. In the meantime word on the street is that Blockbuster downloads should go live some time next month. A handful of Total Access members are currently beta testing the new service and so far it looks like everything is in order. Blockbuster will offer movie and TV show downloads for both rental and for purchase, though the number of available titles at the time of launch is still unknown. Whether or not the rental portion of the service will come with added fees attached is also still up in the air but we have to wage a guess that at least the upper-tier subscribers will have access at no charge. In light of the fact that Netflix and Microsoft’s partnership to stream content to Xbox 360 will be available soon enough, Blockbuster is going to have to do everything it can to make its new digital offering appealing.

Read

Barring the relatively annoying Sarah Austin / Flixwagon “controversy” of the past few days, no mobile streaming video service gets as much coverage as Qik. It seems like the Qik client fell into all the right hands early in its release as celwebrities all over the blogosphere fell in love. Despite the fact that Qik was in private beta, it seems like everyone managed to get their hands on it. Qik didn’t have the most features and it didn’t have the prettiest UI, but it had buzz and buzz is everything. Fast forward to today and Qik has continued to maintain much of its early momentum as it shows off a restyled website, new handset compatibility and the announcement that Qik is now available to the world as a public beta. No, the iPhone version isn’t quite ready for the public yet, but a handful of Windows Mobile handsets are now supported along with a variety of newer S60 handsets including the E66, E71, N78 and N96. So if you’ve been wanting to check out Qik but couldn’t find a version compatible with your phone, or you’re one of 12 people around the world who couldn’t find their way into the closed beta, hit the read link and you’ll be streaming in no time.

[Via AAS]

Read

Really? No, wait. Ok now? Maybe. Ok how about now? Yeah, now. In a completely unexpected turn of events, AT&T has just announced that it has begun offering free WiFi connectivity to iPhone users at more than 17,000 hotspots around the country. And yes, by “unexpected” we mean completely expected and overdue. Since AT&T’s launch/pull/launch/pull stunt earlier this year, the future was a bit unclear for AT&T’s free WiFi offering for iPhones. Included in the 17,000 hotspot sum by the way, is each and every AT&T hotspot-equipped Starbucks location in the US. A week after the launch of the iPhone 3G and amidst accusations that AT&T and Apple are intentionally manufacturing handset shortages, now might be the perfect time to have announced the old new offering. The one oddity in all this, at least as to the timing of the announcement, is that AT&T and Apple just went to great lengths in pushing AT&T’s 3G network. Hell, the iPhone is even named “3G”. So if this new faster iPhone on AT&T’s high speed is so fantastic, why do we need free WiFi?

[Thanks Ron]

Read

Read

Tivo owners will be happy to learn that starting today and continuing over the next few weeks, TiVo will be rolling out a new version of their software. And as the post title and video above would suggest, version 9.4 of TiVo’s software brings with it a healthy dose of YouTube love. That’s right people, YouTube on your TiVo. No, YouTube videos aren’t going to look overly spectacular on your 60″ plasma screen, but at least you don’t have to get off the couch anymore every time you want to rewatch that Wii hula-hoop girl video. You’ll need a newer Series3 model to enjoy YouTube however, as the YouTube integration marks the first time that TiVo is using a codec other than MPEG-2 (they’re indeed using H.264) and older models don’t support additional codecs. As for other new goodies in the latest software version, at the end of the video above you can get a quick look at the new SDV Tuning Adapter support as well as the presence of TCP Remote support.

Read