Hulu Launches Beta Site
Hulu, the long-awaited online video joint venture from NBC Universal and News Corp., opened in beta Monday. Along with the launch, the company announced new partnerships with Sony Pictures Television and MGM. From Sony, Hulu will stream more than 40 TV shows and from MGM, the service will make TV programming and movies available.
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Sprint Nextel to Unlock Cell Phones
More than 54 million customers of Sprint Nextel will benefit from the decision taken by the company to provide the programming code necessary to unlock their cell phones. The settlement is being extended to all customers who bought a Sprint phone between Aug. 28, 1999, and July 16, 2007.
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Debian-based router Linux achieves major update
Vyatta has achieved a major new release of its community-supported, Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at turning commodity x86 hardware into enterprise routers, firewalls, and VPN appliances. New features in Vyatta Community Edition 3 (VC3) include IPSec VPN, multilink PPP, and BGP scaling and security, the vendor says. Vyatta is a startup led by former MontaVista VP Kelly Herrell. It has gone through two funding rounds, the most recent led by Internet and cable TV provider Comcast. Although not yet profitable, the company is close, according to VP of Strategy Dave Roberts. "We may or may not need another round," he told LinuxDevices.
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Google plan sees phones by mid-2008
Web search leader Google Inc is expected to announce advanced software and services enabling handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by mid-2008, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The announcement is expected to come within the next two weeks, the newspaper reported. No one at Google could immediately be reached for comment. Google has moved rapidly over the past year to extend its reach beyond text-based, pay-per-click Web search advertising into a variety of new markets, including online video, television, radio and print advertising.
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Vampire Electronics Drain Homes of Energy
Another Kind of 'Vampire' Invades Homes This Halloween: Energy-Sucking 'Standby Mode' A force as insidious as Bram Stoker's leading man is quietly sucking a nickel of every dollar's worth of the electricity that seeps from your home's outlets. Insert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That's vampire electronics. Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as "standby mode" rather than shutting it off: That's vampire electronics. The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year.
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3 launches new Skype mobile phone
Mobile phone provider 3 has launched a new handset that will allow users to make free calls over the internet via telephony service Skype. Users will also be able to use Skype's instant messaging service, 3 said. But while people using Skype on their computers are able to make cheap global calls to any phone number, this will not be possible via the new 3 handset. The service, launching on 2 November, will be accessed by a button on the handset. As well as the UK, the 3 Skype-phone will be launched in countries including Australia, Denmark, Italy and Hong Kong. Pay as you go customers will have to top up their account with at least £10 each month to qualify for the free Skype-to-Skype calls, 3 said.
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Backhaul Requirements of Emerging 4G and WiMax Deployments
Mobile WiMax and Ethernet based 4G networks are starting to be rolled out. As these networks are being deployed, traditional T1/E1 backhaul solutions are no longer viable for the Ethernet based transport required for emerging services. T1/E1 backhaul solutions not only have capacity limitations that are exceeded by 4G networks, they do not support the Ethernet transport requirements of 4G networks.
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Gmail launches IMAP
Google just launched the IMAP support in it's free mail service. To see how do enable this just click in the source link bellow.
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China may skip 3G mobile phone generation
Chinese telecommunications companies may limit investment in third-generation services for mobile phones to prepare for the adoption of even faster wireless technologies, ABN Amro Holdings NV said. "There isn't a huge business case for 3G," Wendy Liu, ABN Amro's head of China research, told reporters in Hong Kong yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. "It makes sense for China to go directly to 4G as it may offer better returns on investments," she said.
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Facebook Teams Up With RIM
College parties met business e-mail on Wednesday as Facebook Inc. said it is adding its social-networking platform to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices. Facebook also announced a few other advances in the mobile arena, where it expects to have 4 million active users by the end of this month. There are Facebook services available on most major U.S. and Canadian carriers, and Moskovitz announced its first carrier deal outside North America, with O2 (U.K.) Ltd. Social networking has to move to mobile to reach users where they are, especially younger people, and Facebook seems to be leading larger rival MySpace in getting there, analysts said.
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Verizon's FiOS Challenges Cable's Clout
After years of promises, Verizon Communications Inc. is making significant headway with its $18 billion effort to roll out television and faster Internet service, posing a difficult new competitive threat for the cable industry. Two years after launching its FiOS service, Verizon has signed up half a million TV subscribers and, as of the second quarter, was adding 2,600 customers per business day, the company says. FiOS uses fiber optics to deliver television, faster Internet services and phone. Like similar cable packages it typically costs a little under $100 a month for all three services. Cable systems use fiber-optics in their networks as well but depend on coaxial cables to get the service into homes (last mile access).
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Microsoft introduces mobile management system for smart phones
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer outlined plans Tuesday to turn the smart phone into the next laptop for business users. Ballmer opened the wireless industry trade show and convention at San Francisco's Moscone Center by introducing a piece of server software called System Center Device Manager 2008, which allows companies to add Windows Mobile and roll out Web and phone-based applications while enabling employees to access company data behind corporate firewalls. The software, which will be available in the first half of 2008, is designed to help IT managers safely manage a fleet of smart phones as easily as they do corporate laptop computers.
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Scientists draw on new technology to improve password protection
An inventive way of improving password security for handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberry and Smartphone has been developed at Newcastle University. The software, which uses pictures instead of letters and numbers, has been initially designed for handheld devices, but could soon be expanded to other areas. In DAS, the user draws an image, which is then encoded as an ordered sequence of cells. The software recalls the strokes, along with the number of times the pen is lifted. By superimposing a background over the blank DAS grid, the Newcastle University researchers have created a system called BDAS: Background Draw a Secret. This helps users remember where they began the drawing they are using as a password and also leads to graphical passwords that are less predictable, longer and more complex.
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NBC pulls YouTube clips ahead of Hulu launch
NBC Universal has removed its video clips from YouTube and closed a promotional channel on the Google-owned online video site in advance of the expected launch next week of its own rival service, Hulu. An NBC spokesperson confirmed the move, and said it was intended to provide a boost to Hulu, which is a joint venture with News Corp's Fox division, and did not represent a new, tougher line that the company was taking against Google.
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Carbon Dioxide Levels Rising Faster Than Predicted, Study Says
Carbon dioxide is collecting in the atmosphere faster than forecast as the use of dirtier fuels increases worldwide, an Australian-led team of scientists said. The growth rate of carbon dioxide, or CO2, emissions has averaged 3.3 percent a year since 2000, compared with 1.1 percent in the 1990s, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The rate rose 35 percent more than scientists had anticipated based on economic growth, said Corinne Le Quere, one of the authors of the paper.
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