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Wi-Fi Gets A Speed Boost

Not yet officially but coming soon… they are talking about at least 4x speed on top of 802.11G…. nice!

MIMO (pronounced MY-moh) stands for multiple input/multiple output and uses multiple antennas to break a single fast signal into several slower signals at the same time. The slower signals are sent using a different antenna using the same frequency channel. The receiver then reassembles the signals using complex mathematical algorithms to sort out the jumbled radio waves so that they can be read easily. The result: clear, unbroken wireless Internet access over a large area, and fast as all get-out.

From the 16th-floor, penthouse suite of Manhattan’s Royalton Hotel, a Belkin company representative streamed the “Spiderman 2” trailer using a Dell (nasdaq: DELL – news – people ) laptop to the bustling, sun-drenched, ground-floor plaza outside the hotel. The signal was transmitted hundreds of feet through the window to the router in the dining area, then to a flat-screen Panasonic LED television, without a break in the action.

In another demonstration, the Belkin router and network card were put to the test directly against Netgear’s (nasdaq: NTGR – news – people ) 802.11g products. When the laptop was moved into the mirrored, chrome-filled bathroom, two rooms away from the access point, the stream from the Netgear network card broke easily, while the Belkin Wi-Fi system kept playing. [Forbes.com]

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G-Metrics

You might be interested in the popularity of keywords in Google for a variety of reasons — you might be doing research on a technology, or you might be trying to optimize your page and get a sense of how many other people are using the word you want to use. G-Metrics ( http://g-metrics.com/ ) is a service allowing you to track the number of results for a keyword over time. [ResearchBuzz]

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Snapple takes it to the Mobile

It’s just a press release for now… but coming soon to a Brew and J2ME phone in your pocket… I had not seen much in the mobile advergaming space, but apparently Airborne has been doing it for a while… I could not tell you if Snapple drinkers really want this extenstion beyond the lunchtime 3 second entertainment, but I guess we’ll see soon enough.

Airborne Entertainment — one of the world’s leading mobile entertainment publishers — has entered into a wide-ranging partnership with Snapple, part of Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages. Airborne will leverage Snapple’s Real Facts under the cap trivia campaign, its quirky personality, and iconic packaging to create “the best mobile phone stuff on earth.”

Snapple lovers can look forward to downloading games, applications, wallpapers and animated ringers directly on their phones. Each product promises to capture Snapple’s irreverent, refreshingly full-flavored attitude. [Airborne Entertainment]

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Blockbuster Goes for NetFlix

I guess they just could not take it anymore… Nice to see they are lowering the price in the market for this as well as using their physical presence to their advantage.

Blockbuster Inc. launched an online service allowing customers to rent up to three DVDs at a time that will be sent through the mail, in a move to expand from its slowing in-store movie-rentals business in the wake of competition from Internet-based rivals.

Like online DVD-rental pioneer Netflix Inc., the Blockbuster service will have no return dates or extended viewing fees for DVDs. Blockbuster said in a news release Wednesday that subscribers will also receive two free in-store movie-rental coupons each month.

The Blockbuster Online service will charge a monthly fee of $19.99, below the $21.99 fee currently charged by Netflix. [WSJ.com]

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Growl… you’ve got alerts

This is theory at the moment, but could be a very nice standard way to show downloads, itunes status and new mail among others…

For users, this means that all your apps, if Growl enabled, will display pretty notifications in the same, uniform way. You can also use growl to work with any scripts you write in perl, python, and other things. You can also decide what applications may, or may not, send you a notification, and then the types of notifications it can send you. [Growl!]

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Sony’s New Interactive Television

I’d been wondering what Sony planned to do with the PS2 chip in a TV, but image manipulation was not on my radar…

TOKYO — Fighting to show that it still has its innovative edge, Sony Corp. unveiled technology that lets television viewers play with the images broadcast to their screens, letting them zoom into and pan around the picture as well as sharpen the resolution.

Some of the features will be included in a new line of television sets Sony plans to unveil next week, as it hails what it hopes will be its latest additions to its decades-old string of hits, including the Walkman and the Trinitron TV set.

“Up to now, TV has been passive,” said Tetsujiro Kondo, chief developer of the technology, which Sony has dubbed Digital Reality Creation. “We’re introducing an active element — like binoculars.”

In addition to sets featuring the technology unveiled today, the TVs to be shown next week also will include a model that has the look and feel of a videogame machine and runs on the super-fast microprocessor that powers Sony’s PlayStation 2 game console, people familiar with Sony’s plans said. This new model will follow Sony’s PSX — a videogame-playing DVD recorder available only in Japan — in marrying game technology with consumer electronics. It will feature the PSX’s fast response time and distinctive cross-bar menu, the people said. [WSJ.com]

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Presenting mOlympics.com

This is a slick new app/site for catching Olympic fever while on the go…

Presenting mOlympics.com

Matt found me a bunch of Olympics-based feeds and now the aggregator is up and running online. You should be able to hit the site from your phone’s minibrowser (XHTML-MP/WAP 2.0) without problems and from the web. I’ve made a basic search page and included the latest 30 stories on the front page. That should keep anyone interested in the Olympics more than informed while reading on their mobile. [Russell Beattie Notebook]

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Online Advertising Is on the Reboom!

According to eMarketer’s just released report, Ad Spending in the US, after the precipitous 15.8% drop in 2002 for US online ad spending, the path back has been more like Lance Armstrong cycling the Alps in the Tour de France %u2014 steep and rapidly upwards. With a 20%-plus growth rate last year, and the same expected this year and next, eMarketer sees Internet ad spending surpassing $11 billion by the end of 2005. [eMarketer]

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YouSendIt

YouSendIt is a very cool way to share files that are normally considered too large for email. The service is essentially a web based drop box. You select a person’s email, choose a file on your desktop and then hit send. Your browser uploads the file and they send an email to your friend or work buddy to pick it up. It’s simple and works well even up to files that are 1GB in size.

I used it a few times today, first as a test with myself and then a few zips to a buddy of mine. Works like a champ – highly recommended if you or they don’t have easy ftp access. It’s free for now… files expire after 7 days.

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Personalized Stamps

I’ve never used Stamps.com, but now I might just do that when I’ve got a special family mailer to do…

Breaking with tradition, the U.S. Postal Service has approved stamps bearing the likeness of a living person: you.

A set of 20 custom postage stamps sells for $16.99.

Stamps.com today announces a service that allows people to design their own postage — from kids to cats to corporate logos — on their computers.

“It makes mailing a little more exciting,” says Stamps.com CEO Ken McBride.

The company, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif., received exclusive permission from USPS to test their product, dubbed PhotoStamps. [USATODAY.com]

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Windows WiFi

This was actually driving me crazy to the point where I had to plug a cable in here at my desk… WiFi is definitely finicky regardless of position relative to my Airport when my Macs have no issue at any time.

Here are the symptoms of the problem: A Wi-Fi-enabled computer running Windows XP is working fine one minute, pulling up Web pages and processing e-mail. Then, for no reason, the connection drops, websites fail to come up and the e-mail flow stops. The small wireless connection icon in the taskbar says the signal from the access point is strong, so the problem isn’t that the user wandered out of radio range. The icon even shows that the computer’s Wi-Fi hardware is sending information to the access point — it’s just not getting anything back. And manual attempts to re-establish the connection through XP’s built-in wireless configuration tool won’t do the trick. Even more bizarre, the connection sometimes comes back on its own. [Wired News]

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Download the Windows XP Service Pack 2

Don’t feel like waiting for the CD to arrive or Windows Update to have magically downloaded … here’s your chance to get the XP SP2 update now.

In case you haven’t noticed, we at Downhill Battle big fans of BitTorrent– a filesharing technology that decentralizes the distribution of large files from websites. Last week we launched p2pcongress.org to distribute video from Congress’s hearing on the INDUCE Act. And today, we’re announcing:

http://www.sp2torrent.com

It’s a site that links to BitTorrent files of the Windows XP Service Pack that Microsoft has announced. Microsoft is limiting their release of this update due to bandwidth concerns, and we’re taking this chance to show that p2p technology can get the file out to anyone who wants it, without massive server requirements. We’re not doing this to help Microsoft (believe me), but rather as a demonstration of why p2p is valuable. [Download the Windows XP Service Pack 2]

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Drive Failure (not!)

I just resolved what I thought was going to be a serious drive issue here at atmaspheric HQ. Yesterday, one of my external FireWire drives shut down killing my chain and delivering a blow to my backup system — not to mention my entire digital music library.

As I disconnected everything today to check it out, I discovered the drive would not start-up at all when connected to my powerbook by itself… That’s when I realized I should check the plug in the cable chaos below the desk… It’s all good. Turns out one of our cats must have nestled a bit too close to the plugs and disconnected it at the mid-section where the brick connects to the extension.

Seems the simplest answer was the reason for the failure. Power is after all a critical element in getting electronics to work.

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What’s mMode?

Doc Searls got a new ATT phone and is stumped by mMode even though it has been so heavily marketed to us all on TV… He’s hardly a novice computer user… imagine how the rest of the customers must feel.

It also has mMode, which I never understood when I saw it advertised on TV, and still don’t understand now that I have it on a phone. I guess it’s the Web interface. Or one of them. Among other things, it seems like a way to sell me crap I don’t want, which annoys me.

Is mMode what I enter when I push the little joystick upwards? This brings up a “Java Powered” screen that forces me to endure 16 seconds of nothing while it boots up a choice of three IM clients (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo). [The Doc Searls Weblog]

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Photopeer is very slick

I had previously mentioned Photopeer but only recently (yesterday) got a feel for how it works…

After installing, you get an iPhoto Plugin and a Menu Bar item which lets you control prefs, invitations and albums you’ve been sent as well as invitations you might be sending yourself. I had actually installed it and gotten distracted until I received a nice email from Photopeer (assume it was from Marketing) with an album to share and help me understand how it all works. Actually the email came while working on the work PC so it was not until I was back on the Mac that I really saw it in action…

The Menu bar item highlighted and a translucent window opened to notify me of the shared album invitation. I accepted the invite and over some time and in the background the images downloaded to my computer. As they did I got a preview thumbnail as they lit up in the floating translucent window. I navigated to the menu item this morning and saw that my images were ready to view and that’s when it hit me… this is a very easy way to move large image files between friends and family!

BTW – The coolest part is that this all works within iPhoto. Shared albums show up as though you are on a local network together and can easily be imported, printed etc right from within the app.

I guess I was not clear on how it all worked, as no one else I know has the app installed, and I guess that was the purpose of the email. Mission Accomplished Photopeer… very cool indeed! A windows version is coming soon.

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Skype Me!

I used Skype for the first time today and thought it was pretty cool… I’d used Voice Chat apps before (iChat, AIM etc…) but was wondering what the big deal with Skype really was until just now when I read a post from Dan Gilmore who was commenting on the FCC’s declaration and vote to tap VOIP lines like my Vonage line as they can with landlines…

This is a stunningly bad decision, and it is going to take us down a road we’ve already traveled.

It ignores reality. Consider Skype, which encrypts calls from end to end. It runs on peer-to-peer networks. In other words, law enforcement can’t eavesdrop — because VOIP is, for all practical purposes, a software application.

Unless we have new laws banning the private use of strong encryption, the FCC/FBI alliance here just means the bad guys will move their communications — if they haven’t already — to services that can’t be tapped. Then, only average folks will be monitored. [Dan Gillmor’s eJournal]

So obviously I don’t like the FCC decision (perhaps not so obvious to you new visitor), but the capability to encrypt my discussion through a P2P network is pretty slick and though I had read that when I first learned of Skype it was lost in time as I waited for a Mac version…. still waiting on the Mac version, but the PC version is here now and works quite well. Makes me think that it might make a better choice now than a softphone from anyone else especially given the encryption angle.