Speaking of Boxee...

Boxee's blog announced that their remote control app is finally through Apple approval and available in the app store. Price = free. Duh.

http://www.boxee.tv/

Boxee Gives My DVR Abandonment Issues

Boxee has generated a great deal of interest lately, as its public battle with online TV provider Hulu has provided more than one "three snaps in zig-zag formation" type reaction over the past month. Hulu, a joint online venture between Fox and NBC provides free streaming access to shows on those networks as well as their affiliates and associated partners. The content comes with short commercial breaks, hence the free nature. The service has become extraordinarily popular as it provides a fairly high quality viewing experience, on demand, FOR FREE.

Enter Boxee. Boxee for those unfamiliar, is a free media center software package that currently runs on Mac and Linux builds and is essentially an aggregator of all the free video and audio content available on the web. Its slick interface, social networking tilt, and ease of use has made it popular with many streaming media lovers. What's more, Boxee created a straightforward process to load its software onto Apple TV devices, providing a great source of media to those users as well. With Hulu being an Internet media streamer and Boxee being a streaming media aggregator...it seemed like a tiny thing for Hulu content to reside in the Boxee interface for all to enjoy. After all...you still watch the show with all the provider's intended commercials, what could go wrong? Well, in a word...everything. Hulu (read: Fox and NBC) have waged a technical war of hack and defend upon Boxee to block their software from providing content to their users. Boxee has retorted by working around the hindrance only to be blocked again. Only time will tell if NBC will come to its senses and realize that Boxee is driving more users to its content (and ads) than before.

Regardless..with or without Hulu, Boxee is an amazing piece of software. The ability to utilize the Apple remote to control, pause, and rewind content is a welcome addition. The ability to link Boxee to Twitter and FriendFeed while keeping your Boxee friends abreast of your recommended shows is a nice feature as well. For me, this is the future of media distribution. I'm willing to watch a commercial here and there (breaks are usually a single commercial) for the flexibility both Hulu and Boxee provide. The ability to provide on-demand content from major media sources at any time, on any network enabled device is extraordinarily powerful. In fact, as a self described TV junky...I'm feeling more attached to Boxee and my laptop than I am to my DVR.

Ping.fm & Pingle: All Your Status Updates are Belong to Us

There are a lot of social networking sites out there. Like, WAY too many. Unfortunately, this means that you likely don't keep up with every one of your friends through the same site, necessitating many different accounts. Each service has the ability to integrate with others (for example, twitter can simultaneously update Facebook) but you'd need a 350 million dollar Visio diagram to remember how it all fits together. If you're like me, this means you update Facebook by default and tend to neglect MySpace, Twitter, etc. Do not fear, Ping.fm is here to help. A web based aggregator designed to stitch together every imaginable IM, blog, and social networking site, ping.fm allows you to update each and every one in a single step. Ping.fm has a staggering list of supported sites, but major players are Facebook, FriendFeed, MySpace, flickr, linkedin, blogger, twitter...you get the idea. The service allows you to update via SMS, email, and IM in addition to the web portal, but you can also utilize a mobile application created by Curious Squid called Pingle. Pingle is one of the better Ping.fm implementations around, providing a quick way to update your services by category, (blogs, social networks, microblogs, etc.) or by single service. The app also shows you history and allows you to integrate photos and location into your updates or "pings". For instance, you can take a photo and add it to your facebook, myspace, twitter, and flickr pages all in one step. I'm not sure that demand can sustain the myriad sites that exist in these spaces, but in the interim aggregator sites like Ping.fm and FriendFeed can quickly make you a more efficient social butterfly.

Virtualization: What's Old is New Again, Kind Of

Back in the day, the computer sitting on your desk wasn't a computer at all. Mainframe terminals of the day ran very simple client software designed to simply connect, receive and send information, all in glorious shades of, well...just green. In fact, little of the horsepower was local, but resided inside a data center far away...sort of, like...I don't know...a cloud? Sound familiar?

These days, "cloud computing" and virtualization are the focus of many IT shops around the country as companies search desperately to cut costs and reduce IT assets. Both technologies lend themselves towards a model in which processing occurs in a central location, typically a data center, but often "cloud computing" refers to the utilization of a specific application, while virtualization refers to the execution of the entire operating system. Make no mistake however, while these technologies are suddenly popular in the age of Kanye West...the ideas themselves are straight up Doug E. Fresh. However, virtualization has come a long way, vendors such as VMWare, RngCube, and MokaFive have turned old school virtualizaion on its head, allowing central management of operating system images, while the processing itself occurs on the client's end point machine. The genius here is that you don't have to be connected to the local network (or any network) to get data to and from the VM, hence the ability to run VMs anywhere, anytime.

Recently VMWare announced that they've taken it a step further with their Mobile Virtual Platform, which obviously has the awesome acronym "MVP". When initially announced, the platform was a touch vaporware, as we saw no working prototypes to speak of. That all changed this week at VMWorld in Europe, as details surfaced on the platform itself, including video of a phone running both Android and Windows Mobile via the MVP client software. With current phone specs heading toward the stratosphere of performance, VMWare has timed this introduction well. A platform of this type could allow developers to reach an extraordinarily larger audience, and may allow consumers to focus more on the hardware when choosing a phone rather than the operating system. In addition, it brings carriers and companies who support these devices one step closer to a device agnostic mind set, one in which we the consumers have a much greater level of flexibility in our purchasing choices. And to think, it all started with a mainframe terminal...luckily we have more colors this time around.

I'm testing an application called "Pingle" for the iPhone. It allows you to utilize the ping.fm service to update a huge number of social sites and blogs...

iPhone App Review: Wunder Radio

I've only just recently started paying for apps on my iPhone. I had always previously trended towards the free sections of the App Store and for the most part always found something that suited my needs. In that vein, I've tried a number of free radio applications on the iPhone, and still love the streaming music of Pandora (who wouldn't?), but the features of Weather Underground's Wunder Radio application actually make this app worth the $5.99 price tag. You might wonder why a weather website has released a radio application, it seems as though they initially wanted an application that provided streaming weather to as many areas of the country as possible. What they ended up with was a portal to 60,000 radio stations and other content feeds. The app is available now in the App Store and has an efficient and well organized interface. You can find radio stations by way of category, region, or even stations close to you. The application offers you "station like this" in the "now playing" screen, and also often allows you a choice of stream type and bit rates along with their respective reliability. This comes in handy if you find your stream dropping in a certain location, there may be a lower quality one available that is more reliable. One of my favorite features is the police, fire, and emergency scanners available inside the application. You can listen to basically any metro police scanner in the country, including my hometown of Davenport. The Chicago scanner is riveting, and provides a lot of entertainment. You can also plug-in to Dallas' air traffic control stream which is also quite interesting. The bottom line is that this is a really great radio application with features warranting the $6 price tag...Oh yeah, it also gives you the weather.

The President Reads This Blog

NOT Photo-shopped.


The proof is undeniable...after my post yesterday providing my thoughts on the broadband pieces of the economic stimulus package. Reuters today released this statement from the White House:

Stimulus 1st Step in Obama's Broadband Goals


Thanks for stopping by, Mr. President.