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A Blink in the Race

by Andrew McCaskey
Google Netbook and ARM

Rumors of the emergence of a Google Netbook – introduced some time about the same time as the ChromeOS next summer – have just emerged. And, as Michael Arrington of Techcrunch proclaimed that there is a very good chance that there is no Intel Inside. The ARM processor that has proven its worth in the iPhone 3GS could have just enough power for the combination of ChromeOS and limited netbook functionality, that the phrase “only the paranoid survive” made famous by Intel Founder Andy Grove could well come true.

Just like a fatal lapse of attention in the final turn of a race that has gone on for hours, a driver in first place might provide an opening for the car on his tail to make his move.

Add in the actions last week by the Federal Trade Commission investigation into Intel market practices and market share anti-competitive posture, and the stock car race image takes hold. Google (and ARM) might have an opening that could upset the balance of power along more than a few dimensions.

Maybe Intel has reason to be paranoid. You are not paranoid if it’s true that powerful forces are out to get you.

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Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

Mag+ : Possible Future for Magazines

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Slow WiFi and the WiMax-LTE Saga

by Andrew McCaskey
“For a technology that’s all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard
Until September 2009, it wasn’t, officially, even a standard. But that didn’t stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand – it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years.

major reason it took so long for 802.11n to be finalized was “the amount of money at stake and the number of vendors in the marketplace whose lives can be made easier or harder depending on the outcome.

Wimax versus LTE – standards take time, adoption takes even longer. and with the amount of money in play here, it might take as long as another five years for the drama to play thorugh.

Or like HD-DVD and Blu Ray they might just keep beating each other up until technology awards a hollow victory to one or the other and nobody makes a lot of money.

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DIY Book Scanner Introduction and Motivation from Daniel Reetz on Vimeo.

DIY Book Scanner

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Production Schedule Change

by Andrew McCaskey
Some changes in the production schedule for SDRNews are going to take the program to three days a week for the next few weeks, as well as some holiday scheduling. Part of the plan is preparation for the coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, and part of the plan is a change in the business model.

I’ll be sharing parts of the upgrades and information on the Facebook Fan page for SDRNews, and looking forward to your comments there.

On CES, we have some really exciting news : The TPN field team has been invited to produce a portion of our CES coverage live from the NBC-Universal booth on two days during the CES Show. As more details become available, we will be certain to share. Also, the Geek News Central 24 hour podcast is coming up this weekend December 12, and we’ll have some more CES related announcements at that time as well.

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Twoddler: Twittering Toddlers from Bart Swennen on Vimeo.

Twoddler

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Location, Location

by Andrew McCaskey
Location, Location

The latest prediction from Mashable is that the real buzz in 2010 is going to surround Foursquare – the Next Big Thing. A combination of location reporting, tweeting and an online leaderboard game, Foursquare has all of the ingredients of a winner.

I think it’s going to be big – and as the saying goes, the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Fifty cities are now in the system, and presumably as more are added it will gain increased notoriety and utility.

There are a lot of things lining up. First, Twitter has set the stage for social user generated content among a wide set of mobile users. And, for the first time they have smartphone platforms that are ready to go, and a familiar use model. Very different from the pre-iPhone days of just two years ago. Secondly, they have a strong local component that can, for very little money in the form of specials, discounts, free drinks for the “mayor” of the venue a small business, restaurant or bar can attract a group of highly aware, social and loquacious customers.

It’s all about word of mouth advertising and personal recommendations, and this has it in spades. As true in the social media space as it is in Real Estate. More importantly, it’s the function of location and time. And moving people into your business. {sharethis}

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Automatic Captions in YouTube

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Google and the Golden Goose

by Andrew McCaskey
Why Threaten the Golden Goose ?

Why would Google threaten the Golden Goose of search based targeted advertising by picking a fight with handset and netbook manufacturers ?

Because they must. In ten glorious years Google has established and dominated the search category, but as the demographic baton gets passed to Baidu – the Chinese search engine – and with Bing gathering close to 10% market share a few months after launch, competition has arrived in full force.

Gigantic companies have to make really big moves in order to move the needle at all. A succession of Google initiatives that have failed to gain traction have at least failed fast. A small few, such as the location based Latitude fit well within a mobile focused universe, and when combined with search could leap to the next level.

The recent acquisition of Gizmo5 puts Google at last in a firm connect to the public switched network. A data only Google-phone, marketed in parallel with a carrier but not as a phone-offering (much like Amazon does with the Kindle and the Sprint 3G network) might keep carriers happy. The handset and netbook manufacturers will be bent out of shape for a short time – then figure out what their odds of success might be trying to develop a worthy competitor to Android and the iPhone.

Netbook manufacturers will stretch XP for another year or two – but that long in the tooth strategy is going to run out of steam fast, and by that time, Chrome OS will have traction.

Google’s not killing the Golden Goose. Just moving to a greener pasture. {sharethis}

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YouTube Direct

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Mutually Assured Destruction in Search

by Andrew McCaskey
Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1,000 sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft. But could such a plan ever work, and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?”

Anti-trust considerations aside, it might not be a good idea.

First of all even though Microsoft could find $45Bn in an offer for Yahoo, stockholders might be cautious about a billion or two. But,

it might be that Google wouldn’t stand still while its closest competitor tried to force the market away from its search engine. Maybe Google would up the stakes. After all, they have money too. Maybe the top sites could get Google into a bidding war with Microsoft, but would this be healthy for anyone except the companies that were the recipients of this largess?

Mutually Assured Destruction strategies just keep everyone’s nerves on edge. And once it went through all the legal appeals suits and countersuits it is likely to tie up such an approach in court for so many years that it wouldn’t matter to most of us for a long, long time.

Even Microsoft stockholders probably don’t like paying lawyers.

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Little Dog Robot- Boston Dynamics

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Murdoch -v- Google

by Andrew McCaskey
Master of the Universe

We all got a good laugh last week when Rupert Murdoch announced that he was going to pull his NewsCorp content from Google.

It may not be that simple.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who used to work for Murdoch’s Digital Chief Jonathan Miller when the two were at AOL, posted a simple suggestion: Not only should Murdoch de-index from Google, but he should get Bing to pay him for the exclusive right to index it. If other media companies joined Murdoch Google could actually find itself in a very difficult position, where Bing had content that Google didn’t. If you knew that Wall Street Journal and, say, New York TImes content was only in Bing search results, mainstream search users would suddenly have a big reason to go to Bing.

This would shift the balance of power away from search engines and to the content sites – if they could pull it off. Bidding wars over rights to index content would conceivably break out between Google and Microsoft.

In spite of what we see in the movies, the title Master of the Universe does not get thrown around lightly.

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Cloud Computing Explained

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NetFlix Explains ISP Economics

by Andrew McCaskey
And a Lot More

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings shed a little light on the actual costs of streaming at the NewTeeVee Live conference today in San Francisco and had some words on the idea that ISPs are suffering from higher costs to deliver video to end users. He pointed out that the cost of bandwidth and capacity is falling rapidly due to Moore’s Law. He pointed out that Amazon charges about 5 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth — or about a nickel a movie — as proof of the low costs. and that few users are able to use enough bandwidth to pick up the $60-80 a month they are paying for a 20Mb/sec connection.

Hastings also pointed out that Netflix may compete with cable and IPTV video providers on the video side, but that services like his streaming video offering are driving demand for cable’s high-speed Internet products. Calling it a halo effect, and comparing it to Apple’s ability to sell more Macs after folks snapped up iPods, Hastings said the primary reason for anyone to subscribe to 20Mbps service is to watch video, not send emails faster.

Fair enough. I have to wonder where the middle ground lies, between the claims of Verizon and Comcast that the few bandwidth hogs are making their investor’s lives miserable, and the Netflix perspective. I pay around $80 a month (being forced to buy a basic Cable TV subscription that is not even connected) but get , on a good day, 20Mb/sec down and 5Mb/sec up. I have it mostly for the convenience, and for those times when I need to run simultaneous video, Skype, Voip sessions – maybe once every six weeks.

I know that Comcast is making some serious money off of me – since I am buying the peak speeds, not the heavy throughput. If I had kids in the house watching movies, it might be a different story.

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Boxee Quick Overview

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Road Train Concepts

by Andrew McCaskey
The EU is planning a study on Road Trains

It’s basically a big semi trailer with a “professional driver” , and a series of automobiles drafting danger close behind in a line. Wireless sensors and radar link these autos maintaining precise distances and synchronized speeds while Presumably those drivers are taking a nap or catching up on work online.

It’s sort of a guidance “tractor beam” that, once you join allows the group of vehicles to travel on down the road all controlled by the lead driver. Because the vehicles are so closely spaced in the airflow, fuel savings of 20% are anticipated.
The drivers can relax until they wish to leave the road train, at which point they signal their intention to the driver at the front, and they are free to accelerate out of the trainline to an adjacent lane, and the tractor beam signals the car behind you to take up the slack.

The EU’s study will be entirely focused on the system working with wireless sensors and up to eight vehicles ranging from your everyday family cars to buses and trains. In theory, these vehicles could be mixed and matched in a ‘road train’

Either way, test trials are set to begin in the UK, Spain and Sweden on tracks with public road trials beginning in Spain.

Bet there are an entire generation of lawyers in school right now on this one.. a business opportunity for lawyers.

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SARTRE Road Train Concept in EU

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• Internet Phone Systems Riding High
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• Connectify.me for Windows 7

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Connectify.me Now with Windows 7

by Andrew McCaskey
Road Warrior Cloud

Connectify.me is a new service that is going to turn into a game changer. And it offers real value and is going to sell more Windows 7 laptops to business users than any ad campaign. If you are a mobile worker, you really can’t live without connectivity. My trusty Sprint EVDO Cradlepoint, the new Verizon MiFi a Boingo Wi-Fi account, a 3G data plan with Verizon Wireless or Internet tethering on your Blackberry – we all have our ways.

The main difference between tethering and a Cradlepoint or Mifi is that the MiFi creates an Internet connection for 3-5 users using cellular networks, and tethering allows only one. Connectify allows multiple users to piggyback off a single connection. Oh, and the MiFi and similar devices cost a bit – or a lot – to buy and maintain, but Connectify is free to install and run.

It’s a free download, and makes any Windows 7 computer into a WiFi hotspot. Windows 7 users have got to try this app. You never know when you’ll get to save the day by letting other users share your Internet connection.
On a decent Win7 Laptop, you might be the hit of the next meeting on the road.

Now if they could do the same with AC power.

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Enhanced Video with Still Images

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