Tech News Today 153

Tech News Today Episode 153

Tech News Today 153: Glance Glance Revolution

iPhone Verizon finally gets a date, Facebook's getting an IPO, control video games with your eyes, and more.

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Becky Worley (@bworley)
  • BeckyWorley.com
• Sarah Lane (@sarahlane)
  • sarahlane.com
• Jason Hiner
  • techrepublic.com

Top Stories

• Verizon Event Set for Tuesday–iPhone Time
  • Evidence points to Apple launching Verizon iPhone Feb. 3 - rumor

• Ford unveils Focus Electric with MyFord Mobile smartphone integration
  • CES: Ford introduces smartphone app for electric Focus
  • Ford partners with Leviton and Best Buy for $1,499 Focus Electric charging station

• Not so moronic: DECE DRM finally coming midyear
  • @ CES: Studios Host Pep Rally For UltraViolet

• Facebook Will Go Public or Disclose Financials by April 2012
  • In short, Facebook will have to open up the books
  • Facebook's Revenues Leaked

Discussion Stories

• CES: Sony's tablet not aiming to be an iPad killer
  • Hands-on: Sony's 3D Vaio almost cool enough to justify wearing dorky glasses outside

• Intel Insider DRM Risks Monopoly Investigations
  • The ‘Lost’ Paradox: Why Some Free Shows On The Web Are So Heavily Pirated

• Samsung Teams Up With Comcast, Time Warner, Hulu to Bring TV to Multiple Screens
  • Samsung to Offer Blu-Ray Players Equipped With Google Software

CES Las Fuseas

• Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo said the company has started the process of establishing broad 3-D health and safety guidelines for electronics manufacturers, content makers and broadcasters. While there is no medical evidence to link 3-D with health-related side effects, Nintendo and Toshiba have issued health warnings.

• General Motors showed off the EN-V ("Electric Networked Vehicle") prototype here at CES. Leo got to take a spin in one and immediately was ready to buy it! Only 150cm long, it manages about 25 MPH, but GM has no plans to bring it into production soon. Sorry Leo.

• Lady Gaga teamed up with Polaroid for three fashionable announcements. The GL10, an instant printer with Zero-ink or ZINK technology for printing photos ont he go, a revival of the Polaroid Instant camera, called the GL30 which is really just an instant printer with a camera built-in, and the Gaga-est of all the GL20 camera glasses that take pictures and then display them instantly on LCD screens built in to the lenses.

• Verizon Wireless and Hewlett-Packard introduced the first notebook PCs for Verizons 4G LTE mobile network late Thursday. The HP Pavilion dm1-3010nr and the Compaq CQ10-688nr are expected to provide fast online experiences, and downloads and uploads within seconds.

• Hulu Plus has finally been confirmed for the Android platform. Samsung is helping Google and Hulu work out their differences, and Hulu CEO Jason Kilar demoed the code-complete app running on a Galaxy S smartphone. No word on a release date though.

• Move over Kinect, next up is motion control. Hunter Smith and Christopher Culver from Waterloo Labs, a research group within National Instruments are demonstrating an interesting prototype that uses the motion of your eyeballs to control things on a screen. When you look left it creates a certain voltage, and when you looks right, up, or down, also different voltages, he added. They created a dance dance revoltion type game that only requires you to move your eyes instead of your feet.

News Fuse

• Apple's new Mac App store delivered 1 millon downloads int he first day, and all that in spite of new and creative ways to pirate. Seems someone found you can copy three files from a free app store app and place them in a copiued paid app, and circumvent the DRM. At the same time, a group known as Hackulous says it has developed a program called Kickback which can break the protection on any piece of App Store software.

• Android has finally taken the crown for top dog in the US. According to ComScore's, Android had 26 percent of all US smartphone subscribers in the quarter ending November 2010, bettering Apple's iPhone for the first time. The major victim of Android's ascendancy has actually been RIM's BlackBerry, whose lead at the top contracted by 4.1

• Google says it will fix a mobile phone bug that mistakenly sends text messages to the wrong people. The glitch, which has hit a small portion of the company's Android mobile phones, first emerged last year. Those affected say some of their texts have ended up in the hands of random recipients.

• Skype 5.1 for Windows just launched and the video calling feature is no longer free. A day pass costs $4.99 for impromptu sessions while a monthly subscription can be had for $8.99 with a 33 percent discount available to anyone signing up for 3 or 12 month subscriptions over the next 30 days. Two-way video calling is still free.

• Microsoft really thinks they've finally fixed the bug that left Hotmail users without email in the first part fot he year. Mike Schackwitz of the Hotmail team says the problem stemmed from an error with an automated script that Microsoft uses to test the service for errors in every day usage. Part of the script's function is to clean its tracks once it's done creating test accounts, but this time around the testing jumped the test group and went to real user accounts. Oops.

• RapidShare has won a court ruling against Atari in the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf, Germany, over whether RapidShare was responsible for piarted versions of Alone in The Dark. ""The Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf acknowledged RapidShare’s efforts against the distribution of material that is protected by copyright and deemed the additional measures required by Atari to be unreasonable or pointless,"" according to RapidShare.

Calendar

• Samsung will announce dual-core smartphones, new tablets at MWC 2011 on February 13th
• AT&T Windows Phones on Amazon get 1-cent sale

Email

"Dear Tom, Darren, and the rest of the Monday lineup;

It was recently announced that a phone was coming out with a ""Super AMOLED Plus"" screen. I wonder how that will compare to Apple's next Iphone which, according to rumor, will have a doubleplusgood screen as well as a fix for its predecessor's ungood antenna.

Love the show, Your unnamed troll *cough* *cough* I mean source"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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