Jan 17, 2012 | News
So there have been reports that websites will be going dark in protest to the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy ACT) . The cofounder of Wikipedia, has gone and done such a thing. Jimmy Wales is actually defending his decision to blackout the website across the world tomorrow. Unfortunately other companies are still not cool on the idea. The blackout will be for 24 hours, and it is going global. Even though this is an American battle within the government, many are worried that people will not be so happy around the globe as they would fear that a passing of such bill would make other countries think about their online piracy and make a move to make a similar act, in which case would make censorship global. However there was some debate on the Wikipedia side on if should of been just US vs. worldwide. It went to a vote and the globe won. Wikipedia is the sixth most visited site in the world, and as far as the English speaking people the shutdown will affect 100 million users as only the English version of the site will be down across the globe. It does look like the protests could be working as there are reports that the White has stated that it will not approve many key parts of the act. What this will do would just send it back to for another crack at making the act stick. So keep up the protests and maybe we can keep free speech on the internet.
Jan 16, 2012 | News
With all the talks of these technology companies getting into the TV game it is no surprise that Google would be finding a suitor for its TV. The word on the street is that Google is in talks with LG to have access to the newest version of Google TV. LG did show off a TV at CES in Las Vegas that is 55 inches, extremely thin and used OLED which stands for organic light emitting diode technology and oh wait they also added motion sensing software. You would have to think with Apple moving hard and trying to really get into the game of TV, Google will need to move fast in locking up partnerships and being first to the market with a quality TV. Because once Apple gets their hands on it they usually start to move fast and leave everyone in the dust.
Jan 15, 2012 | News
In 2011 Microsoft dominated the video game landscape. Accounting for an amazing 40% of video game sales. The total number is around 6.7 billion dollars. The sales breakdown fairly simply into these two categories: Consoles which accounted for 2.1 billion and 4.6 billion on games. The numbers are staggering and the overall numbers in 2011 reached 17.02 billion which sounds like a lot but is actually down from 2010 by around 8 percent. These numbers only account for physical retail sales and don’t factor in any digital content that would be purchased through the Live network, PSN or Nintendo. The question becomes, will the dominance continue thru 2012? This year it has been announced that Microsoft and Sony will be introducing their new consoles at E3 and who knows if those will be available in the same year, which is commonly not the case. Last year Nintendo introduced their newest console and that is still in development and will most likely have a locked arrival date around E3 or else what will Nintendo announce? Another DS?
Jan 14, 2012 | News
It being reported that The Pirate Bay will be stopping the downloads of .torrent files. What it will be doing instead will be giving links to visitors that they will be calling magnets. So it started the change over and have made the magnets the default download instead of the torrents. They are saying they going magnetic will have its advantages such as very little bandwidth will be need to host proxies. The end of an era is truly upon as the Pirate Bay has been a staple of torrent downloading for years. It is no doubt that the Pirate Bay is putting in ways to protect themselves from the SOPA by doing this magnetic linking. Now we will see if this actually works or if there will still be problems for the pirates.
Jan 13, 2012 | News
It has been reported by the Electronic Times Internet News that Samsung and LG have won the rights to put LCD panels into the much anticipated Apple iPad 3 which from all reports will be unveiled in Q1 of this year. The reason this is any sort of a deal is that Sharp was suppose to be the original developers of the display panels but it actually failed the quality control process Apple has for approval of mass production. Apple has a plan to obtain at least 65 million LCD’s for the iPad 3 in this year alone. The LCD panels are estimated at around 5 million to meet the demands of the launch of the iPad 3. So I am not sure how Sharp dropped the ball on this one. I have typically been very fond of the Sharp TV’s and products and to see them loose on something like this is very surprising. I wouldn’t of guessed that LG or Samsung would have won over Sharp to develop these displays. Just goes to show that even the best companies can lose out if they are not careful.
Jan 12, 2012 | News
It has been announced that in late 2012 we will be seeing the first Dell tablet out on the market. Now you may ask yourself the question, why did it take Dell so long to get into the tablet game? Well the answer is clear, they wanted to sit back and watch how the market has evolved and didn’t want to be too hasty into the market. Companies like HP and RIM have both jumped into the market of tablets with less than stellar results. HP had a fire sale of all of their touchpad’s and well RIM hasn’t done well with the Playbook. None the less Dell has finally decided to strike in the tablet market which no one has a firm date on as of yet but late this year has been speculated. With as much time and research that Dell has put into the development of this tablet, one has to wonder could this be the one that stands toe to toe with the iPad in all its glory? As per usual only time will tell on this one.
Jan 11, 2012 | News, Uncategorized
So for all of you Android owners out there that have been looking to see what businesses are behind SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, well there is now a way. There is an app on the Android Market that is apptly named Boycott SOPA. It works just like a regular bar code scanner app. You just take a product that has a bar code on it and scan it. Within seconds it will scan a database that will tell you if the product you are holding is made by a company behind the SOPA. It isn’t perfect though, it is said that the app itself is reliant on a user-curated list of supporters and is not publicly visible, although the app creators say the list is updated regularly. With the recent stance that Godaddy took on SOPA it is no doubt that any company that has even considered publicly lobbying for this act might want to take a step back on this one. I point to a blog I posted a week or two ago in which I talked about the comedian Louis C.K. and the awesome job he did with putting a comedy special online for 5 bucks. Cracking over a million dollars on that deal. Now the thing that draws me to this as my point is that CK asked that none steal his video and post it, he felt that the cost to view his special was reasonable. Well it seems the people listened! No it won’t stop piracy but I am sure most bought the special because it was affordable and they supported his ideal and what he wanted to do with no corporate BS. So the point of it is maybe you should just ask nicely for people not steal it and maybe you will turn a profit still. So if I was a corporation, I wouldn’t take a stance on SOPA in fear that my company will take a big hit, just ask Godaddy.
Jan 10, 2012 | News
At the 2012 CES keynote Microsoft did not have a lot to say but they did shine the light on some new things that will be coming to the Xbox in the near future. As we all know by now the Verizon Fios package has been brought to the Xbox 360 and there was talk that Comcast was going to come aboard with Xfinity. Well it looks like it is confirmed, Xfinity will also be coming to Xbox. However there was one more piece of news to come out, Xbox has also made a deal with News Corp. With this partnership Xbox will be able to deliver the Wall Street Journal, Fox news, and IGN to this wonderful console. With all this great news for Xbox 360 owners the only lacking part would be no launch dates for these great new addons for Xbox 360 Live Gold members. Will be sure to keep an eye on the updates of Microsofts exploits.
Jan 9, 2012 | News
At this year’s CES it seems Lenovo is getting into the TV business. They have announced they are making a TV that will run on Android 4.0! For those who don’t know, that is the Ice Cream Sandwich OS of Android. The Lenovo K91 Smart TV is said to be only available in China for the moment but could be looking to expand to other countries as soon as later in the year. With this exciting news one could only imagine what Apple is working on and for them not to get into the game early could potentially hurt their stock in the TV game as they were the true front runners in smartphones and then in tablets. The TV is said to have some pretty nice specs as well. Including the K91 Qualcomm 8060 Snapdragon processor @ 1.5 Ghz, 1GB of RAM with 8 GB of storage and 2GB GB SD card as well. The TV’s will come in a 42 in and a 50 in 3D LED. They even stepped it up with a 5 MP webcam that you can use for facial recognition for parental controls! Finally there will be a 3-axis gyro touchpad which from all accounts will have a integrated microphone and voice recognition.
Jan 8, 2012 | News, Uncategorized
From sources that I have read it seems that new assistant for Apple, known as Siri is making owners use twice as much data then when they had an iPhone with no Siri. This obviously will put more of a pressure situation on Verizon Wireless which is the largest US carrier sold around 4.2 million 4th quarter phones. The interesting part is that if it is doubling your data, it would be interesting see how much money Verizon will make seeing that there is no more unlimited data packages. So it will be interesting see what data overages people will be seeing due to these types of data usage.
