Yearly Archives: 2005

Props to Sprint for a few news items: yesterday they became the first U.S. company to offer music downloads over a cellular network, besting the Apple/Motorola ROKR’s circuitous “iTunes-to-pc-to-phone” route. Puh-leeze. The dilly: at launch, subscribers have access to some 250k songs from the stables of EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner and Vivendi’s Universal; for $2.50 you get two copies of the song (read: a tinny phone version and one for your PC). Downloads are available to those with EV-DO phones (i.e. those with wireless broadband), which at the moment are only Samsung’s MM-A940 and Sanyo’s MM-9000 phones. With the record labels continually fighting with Steve Jobs over iTunes’ $.99 song price, I’m sure some execs are smiling about Sprint charging $2.50 for a single song (get real – the phone version doesn’t count). With a very small user base and a pricing structure 2.5x greater than the market leader, this has some hurdles to overcome, but Sprint is the first one out there. Check this review of the Sprint Music Store (Laptop Magazine) for more. Their rating? 3/5 stars.

Second morsel: speaking of EV-DO, Sprint’s getting serious about competing with Verizon, offering several data plans that, I must admit, are very tempting. Where’s my PPC-6700, you ask? Puh-leeze. Mere details! Plans are as follows:

• $15/month gets you the basic Power Vision Access Pack, including an unlimited supply of tasty EV-DO and streaming news and music.
• $20/month for the Power Vision Plus Pack, which includes unlimited messaging and Sprint TV (content from ABC, Fox News/Sports, etc.).
• $25/month for the Power Vision Ultimate Pack includes everything above plus more channels.

I’m waiting for the Power Vision Super Duper Better Than Anything Else Pack! Damn marketing jargon. Yeesh.

The Internet is more than just a place to blog your own personal rants. It has also become the place for hard facts and information when you know how to find it. Problem is, there is just so much out there that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sift through the mud. The post on Wikipedia just a few days ago gets right to the point (although I have a personal hard-on for Wikipedia, the point is well taken).

But there is another field where people go online (almost exclusively) to get information. If you aren’t logging in to get an encyclopedic definition, you are probably getting directions to the airport, party restaurant etc.

But just like online encyclopedias you can’t just take the first site that comes up as the holy grail of online maps. There are tons of mapping services from Google to Mapquest and Yahoo. So what works best? Cartography, a blog dedicated to maps has just finished a 9 part series analyzing which mapping systems work the best under different circumstances. Enjoy and happy traveling.

Day Two:

More of the same stuff happened today. They repeated most of the same things they showed yesterday, so I did the things that everyone did yesterday, but with shorterlines. I played World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (more below). I attended some of the panels, which gave awesome information. I got to play more StarCraft: Ghost. In the afternoon, I attended the comic panel with the guys from Penny Arcade, GUComics, and PvP. Those guys are way funny. Also, the finals of the BlizzCon invitational tournaments were today. I got to see the best StarCraft and WarCraft III players from around the globe compete. It was awesome.
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I’m still having a little trouble swallowing this one. When Apple announced the Video iPod I was a little skeptical. After all, most “iPodders” use their units while exercising, or in the car. Neither needs video, and are definitely more suitable to an audio experience. Most users didn’t really use the photo features of the last generation. And who really wants to watch a 2 inch screen for longer than a few minutes? Finally, Jobs had said in the past that the iPod was really not suited for video in the end.

Well, there are a million reasons why the Video iPod is succeeding. Apparently, there have already been 1 million videos downloaded from the iTunes site! I’m still trying to figure out how many of the players that Apple could have sold in less than a month to have that many videos downloaded, but this sounds like a very hot product, and THE Christmas toy for this year. This also proves that you can’t always guess what’s going to catch on.

You can read the original press release here.

There’s an old saying “two heads are better than one”. This is true when you’re taking a math test, or trying to solve a riddle, but it goes only so far. The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, takes this old staying way further than it should have. If you’re not familiar with Wikipedia, it’s an encyclopedia where the content is created by everyone instead of a few ‘boys in the back room’.

The saying says “two heads”, not 6.5 billion heads, are better than one. Wikipedia is just finding this out now. The content quality is below par, “An encyclopedia can’t just have a small percentage of good entries and be considered a success.”

And I fully agree. My father used to tell me that encyclopedias are like chains, only as strong as the weakest link. Wikipedia has tons of links, and a lot of them seem to be rather weak. The concept is great, but I’m not encouraging my nephew to reference Wikipedia on his 3rd grade report on African Elephants, he just may be misled.

Day One:

We arrived at the aneheim convention center at about 9:00am. The Con didn’t open until 10:00am, but there were a couple members of our party that didn’t have tickets yet, so we went early to see if we could get tickets for them (partially through press connections I have). When we got there, there were already two long lines (about 1/4 mile each). One was the line to pick up tickets (good thing we got ours yesterday). The convention was awesome! They had StarCraft Ghost playable. They had World of WarCraft: The Burning Crusade (The just now announced expansion to World of WarCraft) playable. They gathered the best StarCraft and WarCraft III players from around the globe to compete here. They had an art gallery, Blackrock Spire to climb, a sponsor area complete with Gabe and Tycho from Penny Arcade, and a huge store, with an always long line. Not to mention the panels and FMVs they were showing the entire time.

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Spam is one of my favorite foods, although mother doesn’t approve. I eat Spam and eggs, with rice, in sandwiches, and with green eggs and ham, Spam I am. I also hate spam. The email kind of spam give me nausea and diarrhea of the inbox. Spam emails that is.

Where did they get my email address? No, I don’t want cheap software, pharmaceuticals, a larger male member, or a cheap wristwatch as a novelty. I just want the emails that are from people I know to occupy my inbox.

It looks like Spam (food) started in US, and now spam (those darned emails) are coming from Asia. Americans are trying to correlate some sort of anti-spam effort, but it seems tough to get rid of. And let’s mention that spam is more than the above mentioned marketing emails. Spam is heavily related to phishing and hacking.

The spam thing is getting out of hand if you ask me. A good name is being dragged through the dirt, stepped on, spit, chopped, chewed and spit out. Find out more of what’s going on with this Asian-spam at businessweek.com.

I guess I’m on a mobile kick lately. Writing about Mr. Jain’s commuting vlog (below) made me remember this piece of news I meant to get up yesterday. The peeps at Make:Blog posted a nice do-it-yourself (DIY) guide to turning your PowerBook into a WiFi access point, in this case using Verizon’s EVDO wireless access card (What’s EVDO, you ask? It’s a new type of wireless broadband that uses cellular telephone networks, letting you get online without keeping you tethered to a wireless hotspot). Since Verizon recently released Mac-compatible drivers for their EVDO cards, no real hacking is involved, making this little project even easier.

No World of Warcraft in the car, people (Hands at 10 and 2! C’mon!), but Skype seems like a viable alternative, doesn’t it? I still can’t get around the inherent irony associated with using a cellular phone network to connect to the internet and make VOIP calls, but hey, whatever does it for you.

This is awesome – Ravi Jain set a camera up in his car and records his 30-minute drive to and from work each day; from that footage and has decided to turn the video into a show to be posted every Friday, dubbed DriveTime. Jain lives in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain and commutes to nearby Allston (those familiar with Boston can check his route map here). This got my brain immediately thinking: I live nearby…I think Mr. Jain needs a weekly tech segment! Maybe I’ll send him an e-mail to see if we can work something out. Any thoughts, dear readers?

Gather round, MMORPG-ers…I want to send out a welcome to McKay, a new writer here at LIVEdigitally. He’s even starting out in the field! Writing from BlizzCon, Blizzard Entertainment’s convention this Friday and Saturday celebrating Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo, McKay’s going to give all of us a taste of what Blizzard’s cooked up for its fans, from shots and highlights to any other interesting tidbits that cross his path.

Mmmmmm. Gaming. Now if only I could find a way to get some of those freebies!

Government breaks up corporate behemoth, smaller companies fight during their mad-dash for market share, companies start buying one another and soon the founding member is no more…or is it? Gather round, my children, for another story from “American Capitalism: TelCo Edition.”

SBC Communications (currently awaiting federal approval on its January announcement that it would snatch up telecommunications pioneer AT&T) announced today that it realized the name SBC Communications is incredibly boring will take AT&T’s name once the merger goes through.

Yeah yeah, so it’s just a stupid name, right? Not really. AT&T is a serious brand, born as a subsidiary of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s Bell Telephone Company. Ma Bell’s innovations include the first transcontinental phone call (1915), the first demonstration of television in the U.S. (1927) and the invention of cellular telephony and the solid state amplifier (both 1947). Perhaps it’s stupid to develop some childish level of comfort with a brand, but there’s no need to argue about the value of a such a thing. Companies spend scads of cash every year promoting their identities, and SBC is getting an American brand recognized by millions, giving them an advantage right out of the gate, in addition to the company’s business partnerships, markets, technologies, etc. etc.

[From The New York Times]