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CIngular an official Treo 600 Carrier, but….

Just received an email from Handspring which announced that Cingular service available in my area. Checking the site I saw that for some foolish reason they are not offering an unlimited data plan. You can only pay more (24.99) to get get 10 MB/month. On the same page, you can see that Sprint is clearly charging $15 for unlimited data and about $5 more for the same level of voice minutes.

There are other differences in service, like Cingular’s rollover minutes and Sprints desire to charge $.50/min when you roam off their network…

Hopefully AT&T or T-Mobile will have a good deal on this by the time Portability hits.

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NY Marathon

Today as I am sure you know is the NYC Marathon and my sister is running for the first time! So far she is kicking some serious ass – maintaining an average Pace Per Mile of 8:25 and looking at an estimated finish of 3:40:42.

You can look up any runner you know is going for it today courtesy of the Marathon Tracker, which is a very cool use of the runner radio tags everyone has on their shoes. For fun, we checked and can see that so far Leslie is kicking P Diddy’s ass as well.

OK – Final info is in… Leslie ran an amazing 3:47:39 in her first marathon! Diddy is still running…final time – 3:58:22. This beats his goal of 4 hours and should be what he needed to complete the mission of raising money for NYC Schools. He actually raised $2 Million, a Million over his goal!

Now that the Marathon is over, you can check how people did in a head to head simulation…

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iTunes Catalog

iTunes Catalog is a new app that will create a visual catalog of your iTunes library in HTML, PDF or XML. It has the ability to download artwork for albums automatically and apply them to your files. Looks promising… I am playing with the demo now… the full version costs $9.95.

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MIT Network Shut Down

Two MIT students who thought they’d found a way to give their fellow students access to a huge music library without running afoul of copyright law hit a snag Friday when the school shut down the service in the midst of a licensing dispute.

The “LAMP,” or “Library Access to Music” system officially went live Monday, pumping music into dorm rooms over the school’s cable television network. By sending the music over cable, rather than swapping files over the Internet, the system avoided making an exact copy of the music and was expected to face lower copyright law hurdles.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, said they had negotiated for the Harry Fox Agency, the mechanical licensing arm of the National Music Publishers Association, to grant a license to a Seattle-based company called Loudeye to sell the school thousands of MP3s for the system.

But even last week as the system prepared to go live, there was confusion. The Harry Fox Agency said no such license was complete, while Loudeye insisted it was. [AP NewsWire]

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Get ready to go faster….

In an unprecedented rush to speed, at least four more large U.S. cable multi-system operators (MSOs) –Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, Adelphia Communications and RCN Corp. — are making their broadband Internet-access services even faster this fall. [Cable Datacom News]

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Business Week through Zinio

My first subscription arrived last night for Zinio and I have to say I continue to be impressed by how this works. I was able to sign up for a year of electronic delivery by filling out a quick marketing survey… usually the kind reserved for controlled circulation publications. The best part of the electronic delivery is that my issue actually arrived early. I really like Business Week and enjoy reading through it each week, but hate that it does not always arrive on Friday as I expect. In fact often times it does not come until Monday well after content is posted on the web site.

I still have yet to pay for an issue, but so far Zinio continues to be a cool way to read. Hopefully their model will continue to support my free loading.

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Feature request for Safari

While I really like the manner in which bookmarks are handled, I’d like to see the search box have the ability to search your bookmarks and history file – or possibly the addition of a search box just for bookmarks. Firebird has this within the sidebar, another bit I would not mind see coming over to Safari either…

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The New Road to the White House

When they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog. Whether or not it elects the next president, the blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention. [Wired News]

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Berners-Lee comes out fighting to save Web

While many media applications run in external viewers these days – think the separate RealOne player – Mr Berners-Lee is concerned that by making all inline content apps subject to patent, it would effectively wipeout millions, billions of webpages that form the history of the Web.

How? Because the people that own the patent, Eolas Technologies Inc, decided they would use their patent to sue Microsoft, claiming infringement in Internet Explorer. In August, a judge agreed and awarded Eolas $521 million. Microsoft is currently appealing the decision but it has already made clear it plans to redesign Explorer to bypass the patent.

Berners-Lee is no friend of Microsoft, particularly since Explorer regularly steamrollers over the W3C efforts to build international standard consensus by including its own proprietary features. However in this case, he is infuriated by companies attempting to claim ownership of parts of the system he helped build just to sue other companies and build a fat bank balance. If Explorer does change, it will not be backwards compatible – another nasty precedent that W3C is desperate to avoid.

[The Register]

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BellSouth offers VoIP for businesses

The regional phone provider will sell Internet-based telephone services to small and medium-size businesses. [CNET News.com]

Let the games begin… I’m sure they won’t be the last ISP/RBOC to initiate IP telephony for business. Interesting to note that residential service is still in testing modes most places.