Two Net access deals
Written by Admin on Sunday, September 7th, 2008
WORLD REVIEW
Two Net access deals
When accredited reporters got to Beijing, the Chinese Olympic organisers charged them the equivalent of 57,217 baht for partly censored 2Mbps Internet access; when accredited bloggers got to Denver and Minneapolis for the two US political party conventions, Google charged them 3,400 baht for admittance to the Big Tent; that is 745 square metres of high-speed Internet, workspace, crashing-couches, podcast areas, Fat Tire (sic) beer, buffet, drinks and massage chairs - plus a kiosk to upload videos to YouTube, a web site that didn’t even exist for the last US presidential election.
Yahoo! announced new steps to develop its own Internet-age news agency - investing in its own reporters as well as cutting content deals with legacy-era news agencies and “traditional” dead-tree oriented distributors; director of editorial programming Jessica Barron: “We have been doing a lot of original reporting and we are going to be doing a lot more”; recent and exclusive big-name interviews with South Korean Lee Myung-bak (reunification in his lifetime), US President George W. Bush (hamming it up as Dr Evil) and Condoleezza “I have a crush on Denzel Washington” Rice have put Yahoo! in the news forefront.
Intel showed off a revolutionary wireless electric power system, which sends electricity to anywhere, without zapping anything (or anyone) in between; the system, which is at an early stage of development but could end transformers and wall sockets forever, uses magnetic fields rather than electrical ones.
Ames Laboratory of American announced it could turn rubbish into ethanol using nanotechnology, i.e. genetic manipulation. Amazon.com bragged it is still selling Windows XP, at http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html.
Another reason you need a bigger-screen set is that Yahoo! and Intel announced they will soon introduce Widget Channel TV - actually a hardware framework to incorporate the little PC applications into TV viewing, and controllable with the remote; the widgets can monitor and give the news, update weather info or let you know when a new Bangkok Post blog entry appears; it is an open platform, available to third-party developers.
Dipping into its petty cash bucket, Microsoft is to fund a new $300 million advertising campaign that will mimic and satirise the “Get a Mac” version; comedian Jerry Seinfeld will play the cool guy for $10 million or so, and Microsoft found the perfect guy to play the geek: Bill Gates, who works even cheaper.
American Airlines opened a Gogo stage inside their Boeing 767 jetliner flying from New York to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami; no, not that go-go, and the only dancing was by a few people thrilled to pay $12.95 for full broadband Internet service (minus all telephony) while flying - 440 baht in real money for the duration of each three- to five-hour flight; Delta Airlines and Virgin America plan to add Gogo service soon.
Watching the Sun sink, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu were rubbing their hands over an acquisition; or will it be another tech giant to take over pioneering Sun Microsystems as its share prices and gloomy forecasts continue to drop.
Apple granted gracious permission to Mobile TeleSystems of Russia to use the iPhone - for a certain amount of gelt, of course.
Apple has suffered multiple problems lately - a self-inflicted launch glitch when too many people bought the new iPhone to turn them all on, the inability of the iPhone to get 3G reliably and the ups and (mostly) downs of MobileMe; but Apple is able to tap a deep reservoir of goodwill; the American Customer Satisfaction Index said Apple actually boosted its No. 1 rating by seven per cent year-on-year, with only Google doing better; the current satisfaction score: Google 86, Apple 85, with no one in third place in technology divisions; scores are available at tinyurl.com/55fzpz.
IBM, which effectively invented cloud computing before the advent of the personal computer, announced it will sink $300 in construction of a lucky 13 “cloud computer centres”; translation: IBM will built data centres in the US, China, Japan, Turkey, Poland and France where, for an agreed sum of money, it will let you back up your data for retrieval when your own computer or (more likely) big-business network goes down.
