Tomorrow at the S60 Summit in Barcelona, Monsoon Multimedia will be announcing and demonstrating an application that’ll grant S60 users to connect to HAVA units back home to view and control their home Televisions from their mobile handsets.

Like the perhaps more commonly known Slingbox, a HAVA grants you to “place-shift” your TV. By connecting to your unit back home, you can watch all of your favorite channels wherever the road may take you (as long as wherever the road takes you happens to have world wide web access) via PC, Windows Mobile handsets, or Nokia N810 (player currently in beta). Depending on what features you’re looking for, HAVA boxes will set you back between 90 and 180 bucks.

The S60 Mobile player will be going into beta in June, with the final product scheduled to launch as a free download a few months thereafter. If you’ve got a HAVA at home and an S60 in your pocket, shoot an e-mail over to hava-s60@monsoonmultimedia.com for access to the beta.

Via Mobilecrunch

Share This

Share This

Remember Akimbo? It’s gone now. The company launched an internet-connected hardware box for your TV a few years ago and charged about $10 a month for a handful of channels, some mainstream. After a while, Akimbo abandoned the hardware aspect and made itself into a software service that you could use with, say, Windows […]

Remember Akimbo? It’s gone now. The company launched an internet-connected hardware box for your TV a few years ago and charged about $10 a month for a handful of channels, some mainstream. After a while, Akimbo abandoned the hardware aspect and made itself into a software service that you could use with, say, Windows Media Center. I tried it for a very brief period of time and found the content to be similar to what you’d find on Joost nowadays, except back then you had to pay for it.

There are probably a myriad of reasons why Akimbo had to close its doors, but when it comes to IPTV, video-on demand, and other non-mainstream entertainment delivery systems, you’re only as good as your content.

I also found this comment by TechCrunch reader Shane Robinson to be a bit telling;

Our daily world wide web video show, Beach Walks with Rox (http://www.beachwalks.tv) was 1 of 5 videoblogs that were invited by Akimbo to be distributed to their set top boxes. We were with them for less than a year and never saw any traffic from their service.

Their system was shut, we’d to create special .WMV files, and except for one engineer that left a while ago (who was a fan of our show and constantly helped us even though it wasn’t his job and with whom we remain great friends) their customer support staff was unhelpful and not at all knowledgeable. Their set top boxes were constantly on the fritz.

We predicted they’d shutter over a year ago. I believe that’s when they did die. They just didn’t know it because they had all that funding.

Akimbo apparently raised millions upon millions of dollars worth of funding, which would have been enough to keep the company afloat for quite some time.

Did anyone own the Akimbo set-top box or use the service? Your thoughts?

via TechCrunch

Via [crunchgear]

Share This

Share This

Portal is a cool stragy game in which you have to use portals to make your way throug different kinds of levels

Share This

Share This

Good on this tiny EVOLTA-powered robot for climbing a 1,500-ft. Grand Canyon cliff on Saturday. The 4.5-ounce, 6.7-inch robo climber was scaling the cliff as a publicity stunt/demonstration for the Panasonic EVOLTA battery, which according to the Guinness Book of World Records is longest-lasting of its kind. The robot was powered by a pair of EVOLTA batteries, and used a tiny rope to ascend the cliff face. From the sounds of things this robot needed each ounce of power its batteries could provide: after 6 hours and 45 minutes the robot climber finally reached the top. [Pink Tentacle]

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This

In what appears to be a test to see how well the set-top movie rental box can sell in a mainstream retail store, Ideal Buy is now selling Vudu in 24 of its California locations, according to Video Business. The goal is to raise mainstream interest for Vudu, say sources, which is currently at a […]

In what appears to be a test to see how well the set-top movie rental box can sell in a mainstream retail store, Best Purchase is now selling Vudu in 24 of its California locations, according to Video Business.

The goal is to raise mainstream interest for Vudu, state sources, which is currently at a disadvantage to bigger-branded rival Apple TV…

…At some of the Best Buy locations, the two products appear to be merchandised distinctly from one another. Vudu boxes are being merchandised in four different locations: within Ideal Buy’s Television sections, in its high-end Magnolia theater rooms, in DVR/new technology displays and near DVD racks. In contrast, Apple TV can be generally found once, near Apple media products.

At $295, Vudu is more expensive than the starting price of $229 for Apple Television and Vudu only handles movies, not music or photos. However, Vudu does 1080p versus Apple TV’s 720p and has a 250GB hard drive versus Apple TV’s 40GB or 160GB drives. Playback time on a purchased or rented motion picture using Vudu is instant, too. It’s very fast.

I’ve been testing a Vudu box for the past month or so and it’s a great device with a dead-simple interface. It’s great for people who love movies and aren’t necessarily all that technically inclined. It faces stiff competition from Apple TV and, to a certain extent, On-Demand cable programming, but I think that if it’s marketed as a higher end product for a segment of consumers that just wants to watch movies using a box that works right out of the gate, it could have a bright future.

via Gadgetell

Via [crunchgear]

Share This

Share This

We make a lot of noise about things like the “blogosphere”, the ultra-intra-connected network of blogs around the globe that this blog is part of. And as blogging culture creates its own universe, somewhere between news, humor, and commentary, it becomes more and more intangible. That doesn’t mean that some enterprising young dataminers can’t make […]

We make a lot of noise about things like the “blogosphere”, the ultra-intra-connected network of blogs around the globe that this blog is part of. And as blogging culture creates its own universe, somewhere between news, humor, and commentary, it becomes more and more intangible. That doesn’t mean that some enterprising young dataminers can’t make sense of it.

Indeed, over at the datamining Typepad site, I found these astounding illustrations of the blogosphere using different data sets. The image above is from one of my faves. If you’re into blogging, take a look and feel small.

Via [crunchgear]

Share This

Share This

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This

Via [Gizmodo]

Share This

Share This