...more recent posts
I'm still waiting to jump on EV-DO and already we are seeing signs of the new new thing: HSDPA (High Speed Download Packet Access.) Here's an HSDPA handset built by LG for Cingular. According to Engadget:
The LG people were crazy tight-lipped about this one, but the phone was listed as having a maximum download speed of 1.8Mbps (384Kbps up), a built-in multimedia player that can handle all sorts of audio and video formats (H.263, H.264, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA), and support for video and music on demand. Cingular is already testing HSDPA in a few places right now, and from what we're hearing they’re probably going to commence their nationwide rollout right around the end of the year, with more and more cities to be added throughout 2006.Mmmm. 1.8 Mb/s. Now that is some serious speed. And from what I understand HSDPA can go even faster than that although, yeah, we'll see when they actually roll out the networks. I'll be surprised if anything actually happens by the end of this year. Still it's nice to know the future is happening somewhere.
Yahoo! 360 is Yahoo!'s soon to be released blogging / social network tool. Marc Canter has a little more info (since there is none at the first link.)
Presumably the rumored Flickr purchase will fit in here as well.
Google search cheat sheet. Nice. I didn't know about 'date:'. That's something I have really been wanting.
Jon Udell has been making posts in a new style he is calling a screencast. He does it with flash, which I like to bash, but this is a very nice use of the technology. Basically he just talks about something web related and you hear his voice while watching a flash movie of his screen. Here is his most recent screencast which he describes as "a whirlwind tour of del.icio.us from my own perspective as a power user."
Check it out. Screencasts are a great way to explain web related technology, and del.icio.us is an important addition to the blog world that deserves a wider understanding.
Comvu has a Windows Mobile solution for streaming video from your (Windows Mobile) video phone. Here's a slightly more technical page.
I wonder if Quicktime broadcaster will ever run on a phone? Apple seems dangerously shut out of the cellular game. Maybe something like a mobile iSight plus Quicktime broadcaster plus wifi could work, but that would be an extremely niche product compared to a cellphone.
I think streaming video from your phone will be a more compelling app than watching some prepackaged video content on your phone. But we need one of the cellular companies to knock the walls around their garden down a bit. I want to stream to *my* server.
Mr. Technorati, Dave Sifry, has posted a new State of the Blogosphere report compiled from their huge mine of blog data:
Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.Lots more interesting numbers and graphs at the link above.
Things don't appear to be letting up either....
Samsung a970 EVDO swivel 2-megapixel cameraphone. Or should it be called a camcorderphone?
Very very nice. No release date, but it is coming to the U.S.
New whitepaper from the honeynet project: "Know your Enemy: Tracking Botnets"
Honeypots are a well known technique for discovering the tools, tactics, and motives of attackers. In this paper we look at a special kind of threat: the individuals and organizations who run botnets. A botnet is a network of compromised machines that can be remotely controlled by an attacker. Due to their immense size (tens of thousands of systems can be linked together), they pose a severe threat to the community. With the help of honeynets we can observe the people who run botnets - a task that is difficult using other techniques. Due to the wealth of data logged, it is possible to reconstruct the actions of attackers, the tools they use, and study them in detail. In this paper we take a closer look at botnets, common attack techniques, and the individuals involved.
The long tail:
The most interesting statistic however, was that while the top 10 searches were thousands of times more popular than the average search, these top-10 searches represented only 3% of our total volume. 97% of our traffic came from the “long tail” – queries asked a little over once a day....
You know the real reason Excite went out of business? We couldn’t figure out how to make money from 97% of our traffic. We couldn’t figure out how to make money from the long tail - from those queries asked only once a day.
The site feels a little spammy, but this guy has been around for a while and I think he's legit. And he is now selling a dual EV-DO wireless solution that he claims will get 256 kb/s up and 3.2 mb/s down. Takes two PC card slots, and he has to saw the antenna off the bottom card. It's ridiculously expensive, but this is the bleeding edge.