atmaspheric | endeavors

While the game was surprisingly solid this year, I found the commercials to be pretty poor. Usually there are more than a couple that stand out, but it’s as if the writer’s strike impacted the ad business as well.

If you’d like to see them, Ad Age is hosting them all for your [...]

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WHOA! Guess this is Microsoft’s new strategy for Google…

“Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Corp on Friday said it had offered to acquire Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) Inc in a proposed cash and stock deal valued at $44.6 billion.
Microsoft said it had offered to buy Yahoo for $31 per share, which it said represented a 62 percent premium above [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider drew my attention to a new project at Google designed to embed 2D Barcodes into print ads. On the surface this seems like an interesting idea and I like the 2D/QR/Semacodes. They are pretty easy to deal with as a geek and in theory can provide shortcuts for text entry [...]

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Trojan Horse activated …

‘We believe one of the iPod [touch's] future directions is to become the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform, running all kinds of mobile applications,’ company executives said.

The iPod touch led a significant amount of Apple’s iPod shipment growth during the first quarter, particularly in Japan. Though US iPod sales came in [...]

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I’ve been reading a fair bit as I am sure many of you have on the desire for dataportability, (it’s my info!) the social graph and of course the BS with Scoble and Facebook …
Today the news is that the DataPortability Org has signed on new members from Plaxo, Google and Facebook which is [...]

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ATT starts the morning with what seems like a fantastic announcement:
Starting immediately, AT&T (T) customers can ditch their AT&T phones and use any wireless phone, device and software application from any maker — think smartphones, e-mail and music downloading. And they don’t have to sign a contract.
“You can use any handset on our network you [...]

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I think I will have to see this in action before passing final judgment, but I don’t like the way this sounds at all. Feels like we are moving backwards.
Now, publishers will be able to show ads alongside their PDFs without selling and inserting the ads themselves, by uploading the PDF content [...]

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In general this email is fine but with two glaring errors in my view that kill any chance for the recipient to appreciate what’s here.

As you can see from my callouts, the blue text in the paragraph highlighting the “what’s new” feature is NOT a link. Why? Why make it different [...]

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Just caught this interesting snippet on the VZ…
Verizon “will provide customers the option to use, on its nationwide wireless network, wireless devices, software and applications not offered by the company.” This could be seen as a reaction to upcoming Android phones but probably won’t be accessible to the average hobbyist, as devices will need [...]

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I had a great conversation this week with SightSpeed CEO, Peter Csarty on the launch of their business conferencing product.

Sightspeed is taking a very unique and aggresive stance in realtime business communications with this update. If you’ve worked in a larger company you may have seen a Polycom (or similar) video conference [...]

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Very cool… Apple has decided to offer Nick Haley, an 18yr old kid from the UK, an amazing deal. They are upgrading the production of his home-brew iPod Touch commerical into one that will air on TV during Football and primetime starting this weekend. Pretty sweet to see that Apple is paying [...]

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Walt Mossberg has a great piece (Free My Phone!) up on All Things D, which is a must read for anyone even remotely interested in the mobile industry.

While he’s not saying anything that we (you gentle reader) have not heard or discussed, to hear it from someone with as much consumer clout as Walt Mossberg [...]

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Not sure they are even bothering with this …

AT&T, which already lets Napster subscribers transfer music from their personal computer to their cell phone via a cable or a storage card, said it would sell Napster music directly on its phones for $7.49 for a bundle of five songs, or $1.99 for a la [...]

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This sounds very cool…

In an exclusive interview with Develop, Nokia’s games boss Mark Ollila has revealed that the company is hard at work on multiple cross-platform games for its revamped N-Gage platform.

Earlier this year it emerged the company was developing a new game in association with studio RedLynx which could be played on both [...]

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I am sitting on a plane en route to the Web 2.0 Summit writing this on my N800, enjoying my time to write some things wihout distraction… aside from the guy in 11B reading this over my shoulder!

About two weeks ago, Tommi at the S60 Applications blog asked for feedback on the Nokia Beta [...]

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This has nothing to do with the Applications issue…
The iPhone is a completely locked device. Both the device itself as well as the SIM card from AT&T are locked. Of course, hackers have broken these things, but if you don’t want to have to break it to “fix it” you are pretty [...]

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Yesterday, Jaiku announced that they are being acquired by Google! This is fantastic news - Congratulations to Jyri, Petteri and the hard working Jaiku team!!

I don’t think I’ve been shy about my usage of Jaiku on this blog (or elsewhere) and I was stoked to learn that Google sees the value inherent in [...]

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The iPhone and Nokia N95 are constantly compared these days as they represent the über device from both Nokia and Apple. Aside from this detail they really target very different audiences. The iPhone is a more mass oriented unit while the N95 goes for the higher end prosumer mobilista. The gadget lust [...]

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This sounds like a complete non-event…

Microsoft’s next release of Office for Mac, due in January, will include business features that PC users have taken for granted for years.

That will include the ability to set up out-of-office messages, according to a preview in Microsoft’s Office for Mac team blog.

‘With Entourage 2008, you now have the [...]

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Techcrunch reports on an interesting adwords response by Nokia to the latest iPhone news and pricing. Of all the things Nokia could have offered, MOSH seems an odd choice. Their pitch is that you can salvage your lost $200 with the free content offered by the MOSH social sharing network. Sorry to [...]

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