If the rumors are true, Hulu may soon be liquefying your brain on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Hulu, the popular video streaming service, is working on an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Although the report states that the application should work over 3G or Wi-Fi, we find the 3G claim highly suspect as other video apps such as CBS’ TV.com (iTunes Link) have to work over Wi-Fi due to the bandwidth demands of streaming video content over a cellular network.
While the app has not yet been officially confirmed, it isn’t too difficult to imagine that this is indeed being worked on. With their ad-supported revenue model, it only makes sense for as many eyeballs as possible to be watching their content. And as for the end user, this will give you an enermous library of television shows and movies you can watch for free right at your finger tips. The only possible downside to this whole scenario, and possibly the aspect that makes it untrue, is how this will effect iTunes store sales of their downloadable videos.
Only time will tell if this proves to be true, but I for one am hoping it is.
Proving once again that the iPhone and iPod Touch are capable of just about anything, Chrysler is going to let you start a car with them.
Chrysler is launching a new electric car next year called the Peapod. While the car is pretty standard for the electric market (30 miles at 25 mph off of an 8 hour charge), its integration with the iPhone and iPod Touch are fairly different. You place your device in the dashboard dock, and from the custom app you will be able to monitor information about your car, see how efficently you are using it, play music and so on.
Where it gets really odd is that the brochure for the car makes mention that you can use your favorite gadget as a key to start the car. It doesn’t go into great detail on how this will work, just that it exists. It does also mention that you can use your traditional key if you choose to, and we say “thank goodness for that!” Imagine trying to call your spouse and explain, “Honey, I can’t come home yet, my iPhone ran out of power and I can’t start the car without it.” Somehow we don’t imagine that would fly too well as an excuse.
It’s difficult to believe, but StarterTech.com is already one-year-old!
In the midst of all out other blogging this week, we totally missed our own birthday! StarterTech launched on April 12th, 2008, and what a quick year it was! In celebration of this we thought we’d do a little variation on our usual “Top 5 Posts Of The Month” posts, and take a look at what the five most read posts of the past 12 months were.
What Is Remote Backup – So glad to see this post as #1 because everyone should back up their systems in some way, and remote backups are our favorite method! This is also the type of post we created this blog for as we feel everyone should be able to understand the ever changing world of technology.
What Is Google Desktop -This is another one of those pieces of software out there that you hear people talk about, but you aren’t quite sure what it is, or what it does. There is no shame in that, and that’s what we’re here for.
Twitter Privacy Breach Found -It is never comforting to think that your private communications are out there for the world to see, and it happened on Twitter not all that long ago. Luckily they fixed the problem fairly quickly, but it was still pretty unsettling to think about.
Here is looking forward to many more years to come, and, as always, if you have something you would like to see us cover here, make sure to drop us a note!
Though the news came out yesterday, today was Oprah’s first official day on Twitter, and, yes, she has posted some Tweets already. Also, as expected, her follower count is growing at an insane pace. When we posted yesterday, she was already at 48,000, and now she is sitting at over 171,000.
As Oprah introduced her audience to the concept of the service, she also had Ashton Kutcher on the show to talk about his being the first user to pass the 1 million followers mark. The videos are embedded below, but it seems to be more about rambling than actual information. They are interesting to watch though if you;re a fan of the service because it feels like it really has arrived now.
It may be the biggest announcement in the history of Twitter… Oprah is coming.
While Twitter has been raising its profile in the mainstream media for quite some time, an endoresement by Oprah Winfrey may be what pushes it over the edge into complete acceptance. Ms. Winfrey has taken control of the @Oprah account on Twitter, and apparently she will be sending the first Tweet, user slang for the messages, while on the show. She will also have Ashton Kutcher, the first Twitter user to be in striking distance of 1 million followers, to talk about his love affair with the service.
Twitter has been growing by insane leaps and bounds, but now that Oprah is on board, a woman who can merely mention a book’s title and see it sell hundreds of thousands of copies, what will become of the service? We could possible be seeing a huge onslaught of the “Fail Whale”? For those not in the know, you can check out this cartoon for an idea of what the Fail Whale is about, but it is essentially a cartoon looking whale the site shows anytime it is having technical difficulties. This used to be a fairly common occurence during times of high traffic, but it has luckily disappeared over time. Is Twitter ready for an onslaught by Oprah’s loyal fans?
If there is any doubt about Oprah’s power, as I write this, without one word appearing on her account yet, she is already at almost 48,000 followers. This is with no formal announcement, no TV episode yet, nothing, just her mere presence on the account has brought in that many followers. How many new accounts will appear tomorrow? Personally, I am not a fan of Oprah, or to be more blunt, I really dislike her (as is made fairly clear in this Oprah podcast I did a few months back with my best friend), but there is no denying that when she speaks, people listen. This will be a huge boost for Twitter, but hopefully the early adopters of the service will be understanding as the service tries to adjust to the onslaught of the Oprah faithful.
I am thrilled I joined Twitter when I did (@seanpaune), and I am willing to stick out a few rough days, and I have a feeling all of the old faithful users are going to be experience as the Oprah leions descend upon us… someone pass out the canned food and we’ll head to the fallout shelters.
Normally the release of an iPhone application isn’t newsworthy, but when it comes from the Wall Street Journal, and it’s free, you tend to notice.
Released just today (the United States tax day seems appropriate day to release an app about financial news), the Wall Street Journal app (iTunes link) is a bit of a surprise in that it is free. This is only surprising because the paper was one of the first on the Internet to charge for its content years ago, and they still do to this day.
So the question is why would they allow owners of iPhones and iPod Touches access their content for free while people who visit them on the Web are still paying? The new application is ad supported, and you have to wonder if this is possibly a test for the future of their Web access, something you still have to pay $103 a year to subscribe to, or are they possibly just thinking that there won’t be that much access from the Apple devices?
Whatever the case may be, it is a welcome addition to the devices. Users will get to enjoy full stories, exlcusive video and podcasts, the ability to share stories, tracking the stock exchange and more. Possibly they will want to charge for the application down the road, but that never seems to go over well with users, so it’s probably safe to assume that this will remain a free application for however long they plan to support it.
Our suggestion is to go ahead and grab it, and then decide if you really need it on your phone, but so long as it is free, why not?
Effective today, Windows XP is no longer supported by “Mainstream Support”, and will only be covered by “Extended Support”. All of this was announced in an email that came out on Monday.
On April 14, Windows XP will transition from the mainstream support phase to the extended support phase, as planned and previously announced.
Normally Mainstream Support only lasts for 5 years, but Windows XP was extended to 7 & 1/2 years due to the delay in release of Windows Vista. Extended Support means that everyone will have to pay for support from here on out unless they bought an extended service plan. This also means that Microsoft will only release security patches from here on out, and those will also come to an end on April 8, 2014.
In an odd move, the Windows XP “Downgrade” program which allows users to install XP if they have bought a copy of Vista, will last now until April 30th, 2010. If Windows 7 releases in the fall like everyone suspects, that means XP will still be ciculating even after it has released.
At this point it is almost becomng funny how this operating system will just not fade away.
People everywhere are concerned about the Conficker virus that is running rampant across the Internet, butas it sits dormant for so long, it can be difficult to tell if you have it or not. Luckily the Conficker Working Group has come up with an amazingly easy way to tell if you have it by just taking a look at the chart below.
Conficker Eye Chart
How to interpret:
If you see this above:
It probably means this:
= Normal/Not Infected by Conficker (or using proxy)
= Possibly Infected by Conficker (C variant or greater)
= Possibly Infected by Conficker A/B variant
= Image loading turned off in browser?
Any other combination
= Poor Internet connection?
If you’re curious as to how this works, the first row of images are served up by the actual websites for those anti-virus programs. As Conficker prohibits you from going to those sites to download tools, you would not be able to see them if you were infected. The second row is there merely as a control sample so you know if your browser is working properly. If you are showing signs of infection you can go here to check out some tools to help you get rid of it.
Popular VoIP service Skype may be changing hands again, but this time it may be back to a familiar team.
In 2005 Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, sold the service to eBay for a final price of $3.1 billion. Since then that purchase decision has come into question many times, to the point that eBay had to write off some debt that knocked the price of the comany down to $1.7 billion.
According to Rumors reported by the New York Times, the founders are gathering funds from private equity firms, along with using their considerable fortunes, to attempt to buy the company back from eBay. Experts are saying that the auction company is looking to sell as they have never found a successful way to ingetrate the service with their core ecommerece aspects.
The reason this is a natural sale is also that Zennstrom and Friis own Joltid,the peer-to-peer architecture that is the heart of Skype. Recently they pulled the license from eBay for undisclosed reasons, but that means that anyone who bought Skype could also find it horribly crippled if they started enforcing this lack of a license.
Considering that Skype now has 405 million registered users compared to the 53 million at the time of the original sale, and that it is also the makers of one of the most popular iPhone apps, and has one coming out for the BlackBerry in May, if the sale price really goes for $2 billion, it seems the original owners would be getting quite the bargain. As for what they might do with it, you could easily imagine further development of the service, and possible integration with their video service, Joost, which might allow people to watch videos together as they talk.
It is easy to imagine that the potential uses for this service are far from tapped out, and back in the right hands of people who know what to do with it, it could become an even bigger service.
Bluetooth is looking to get updated soon, and the announcement of what we can expect is coming April 21st.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group will be announcing all of the new specifications for Bluetooth 3.0 on April 21st, and from what is being rumored, it seems everyone’s favorite wireless communications standard will be getting even better. The biggest increase will come in the form of speed focused at the consumer electronics market which will allow you to move files between home devices quickly and efficently. Until now the home market has not had much Bluetooth connectivity, but this is something they are looking to change with this new release.
For those of you who use Bluetooth headsets with your phones, you’ll be happy to know they are promising a new feature called “Enhanced Power Control”. While there is no clue as to how this works, but the result of this will supposedly be less disconnects between your paired devices as you move them around such as putting them in a pocket or purse. This has always been one of my personal biggest complaints about the technology, so hopefully this really will improve things.
If the rumors are true, Hulu may soon be liquefying your brain on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Proving once again that the iPhone and iPod Touch are capable of just about anything, Chrysler is going to let you start a car with them.
It’s difficult to believe, but StarterTech.com is already one-year-old!
As promised, the 
It may be the biggest announcement in the history of 
Windows XP’s death is drawing ever closer.
Popular VoIP service 
