Tuesday Tech Talk #70

Hey everybody and welcome to another installment of Tuesday Tech Talk.

Big Brother looking at disabling your cellphone in a vehicle

This is somewhat tech and a lot political, but it was enough to fire up the libertarian in me (note the small “L”). Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was quoted as stating the following:

“There’s a lot of technology out there now that can disable phones and we’re looking at that,” said LaHood on MSNBC. LaHood said the cellphone scramblers were one way, and also stressed the importance of “personal responsibility.”

Now here is the problem I have with this statement, scramblers would scramble any cellphone in the vehicle so even if you are a passenger in the vehicle, your cellphone would be scrambled too. Of course if you are driving you should not text and drive that is just personal responsibility which he states at the end. Never the less, with the whole controversy of TSA naked X-Ray machines and pat downs, the last thing the American people want to hear is how someone else in the government wants to take away more of our freedoms. Go shove it Mr. LaHood!

Hulu Plus leaves Preview and drops its price

Hulu Plus is now for everybody and at a $7.99 price and, is available on Roku boxes. No word yet on an AppleTV deal, but with it being available on the iPad and iPhone, it can only be a matter of time before it is available for AppleTV.

Zuckerberg talks Messaging, Data Portability, and Mistakes

Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the future of messaging and how email will be used in more formal communications, but more casual messaging is growing more and more through IM, SMS Texting, and Facebook messaging. He also touches on data portability and mistakes made.

Twitter CEO takes issue with China over labor sentencing over a retweet

Dick Costolo sent out a tweet last week critical of the Chinese government sentencing a woman for one year to a labor camp for “reeducation”. Here is a snap shot of the Tweet:



News Corp and Apple building iPad only Newspaper

According to Women’s Wear Daily, Apple and News Corp are collaborating on an iPad specific digital newspaper called The Daily, that would sell for 99 cents per week. There is even speculation that Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs will make a co-announcement sharing the stage together. I have thought the iPad is perfect for reading a digital newspaper, in-fact I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal newspaper on my iPad and if The Daily is anything like the WSJ, then we are in store for something special at a cheaper price than the WSJ.

Apple working on CDMA-GSM iPad?

According to All Things Digital, Apple may be working on a “World iPad” in that it would contain both a CDMA and GSM chipset to work with multiple carriers. If so this would be huge and is going to sell units in just about every wireless providers store. Take that Samsung Galaxy and Blackberry PlayBook!

GoogleTV gets double negative reviews from New York Times and Wall Street Journal

Basically calling it complex and not as straight forward as the AppleTV. The New York Times and WSJ said that GoogleTV is a step in the wrong direction and missing the mark, respectively. Quite frankly, I would agree, I played around with both the Logitech Revue and Sony-based systems and found it to be a cross between watching WebTV while viewing TV content. Look, if people want to browse the web while watching TV, their going to do it from their laptop, smartphone, or tablet device and not their TV. It may be ahead of its time possibly, but for right now it is a pure geek device and not something you would get your parents or grandparents. By contrast, the AppleTV is straight forward, you have a basic remote for browsing a basic onscreen menu to jump between the different services that all do one thing, provide video and audio content for your TV. Once again, Apple gets it, try again Google!

Well, that is going to do it for this edition of Tuesday Tech Talk, I still love you guys at Google, but with Thanksgiving this week, there will be no Googling Friday this coming Friday. You don’t need to spend your time reading my blog that day, instead spent it with your family. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tuesday Tech Talk #32

Hello folks and welcome to another edition of Triple T. Now that I have what I wanted to say about the iPad out of my system for a while, lets see what else is happening.

New Google social product announcement

I will have some follow up on the announcement by Google at 10am tomorrow (no it doesn’t say which time zone 10am refers to so I will assume it is ET).

New MacBook Pro’s coming soon?

Per a photo of a Best Buy internal ordering system. Showing current MBP status as deleted meaning no new orders can be submitted for that particular model. Using MacTracker January-February are generally the time a refresh line is announced so stay tuned for new faster MacBook Pro’s and hopefully a new MacBook as well.

1080p and 5.1 surround sound coming to Netflix Watch Instantly

Interesting tidbit here from Engadget about Netflix adding 1080p and 5.1 to their watch instantly service later this year. No date as of yet so stay tuned.

HDMI 1.4’s 3D spec publicly released

We might be a step closer to sitting around our TV’s wearing 3D shades in our living rooms and it looks like no format war either since it’s an open standard.

This Week’s iPhone/iPod touch apps

This week I thought I would focus on news specific apps.

The Wall Street Journal - Those who like to follow the latest in business news will like this handy app. It’s free and it will give you access to the free content on their site and if your an online subscriber you can enter your login info on the app to access paid content as well.

Drudge Report Classic - This free app gives you mobile access to the latest news on the Drudge Report.

ABC 7 - If your an Angelino or a former one like I am but still like to see the latest news in SoCal, then KABC 7 has their own app with the latest local news, weather, and traffic conditions. It also has video of news reports. If your not a ABC 7 fan then KCBS and KCAL also have their own app with similar features.

Well that will do it for this weeks edition of Triple T. See you all next week!