Posts for 'Greetings' Category

The current economy has forced many families to cut back on holiday spending this year, but they still want to treat their loved ones to a special gift. W, the women’s show has found a perfect solution that the whole family will enjoy: a complete entertainment system for playing video games, watching high-definition Blu-ray movies and more.

To tell viewers about the hottest gift for the holidays, W, the women’s show invited Kim Nguyen from Sony Computer Entertainment America to be a special guest on an upcoming episode. The show airs nationally in November and December on the BRAVO and Oxygen networks.

The PLAYSTATION® 3 system is ideal for children who love to play video games, as well as for parents who will enjoy the ability to upload photos and music, watch movies and browse the internet,” says Nguyen.

Read the complete story

Here's a new twist on Internet calling: T-Mobile plans to offer a supercheap version, essentially a loss leader to get and keep wireless customers. For $10 a month, T-Mobile customers will be able to make all the calls they want from traditional handsets at home across the Internet. The offer will be available in July.

If the quality is good enough to attract customers, the move is sure to put pressure on AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which already offer Internet phone service. Their service starts at around $30 a month, which is also what cable companies have been charging for their unlimited Internet calls. Even independent competitors like Vonage charge about $25 for comparable service.

T-Mobile at Home will include all the typical bells and whistles unlimited domestic long distance, voice mail, three-way calling, call waiting, and caller ID. Customers can move their existing phone number to the new line.

The wireless carrier has tested the service in Dallas and Seattle. T-Mobile says that 97 percent of customers dropped their land lines in favor of the cheaper calling.

Unlike other dirt-cheap calling services, including Skype and magicJack, T-Mobile's won't require a PC to make calls. Customers would buy a T-Mobile router to plug into their broadband connection. The router will cost $50 with, in a nod to T-Mobile's wireless pedigree, a two-year contract.

Google is expected to unveil a tool Tuesday that measures Internet use to help advertisers identify the best places to buy ads that will reach its target audience, according to a report Monday on the Wall Street Journal Web site.

The measurement tools, which will be offered to advertisers and their agencies for free, will compete with services offered by established leaders Nielsen and ComScore. While those services base their estimations on selective surveys or customer panels, Google's results would be based on data collected from Web servers, providing a deeper and broader picture of Internet behavior, the newspaper reported. By giving away the new tool, Google could attract more advertising business.

The news follows Google's announcement last week that Google Trends had unveiled a new service that lets users type in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site using nothing more than organic user searches. Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session.

After news of the planned service hit the Web, ComScore shares fell $1.69, or 6.1 percent, to $26 after-hours trading. Nielsen is a privately owned company.

In its newest report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project has revealed that nearly 30 percent American adults used the Internet to read or watch "uncensored" campaign material, whether it be footage of debates or announcements or transcripts of speeches and so on.

The report found YouTube and other video Web sites having soared in popularity with 35 percent American adults having watched a political video online during the primary season. It found 10 percent of adults as having used social networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace for political activities. It found video- and social- networking to have increased since the last presidential election.
An interesting revelation: Pew found online fund-raising to have gone up to six percent as compared to just two percent in 2004. Democrat Barack Obama was found to be particularly good at raising funds online; Obama supporters were found twice as likely as those of Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican John McCain to have made an online contribution to the campaign.

To top it all, the Pew report found that though so many Americans were obviously using the Internet to get a bird's eye view of the campaign, as many as 60 percent did not trust the Internet fearing widespread misinformation and propaganda.

Japan's top advertising firm Dentsu Inc. said Monday that it was entering Internet advertising in India, predicting potential for major growth.

Dentsu said it was starting a joint venture, tentatively to be called Clickstreamers India Pvt. Ltd., in a joint venture with Mumbai-based Connecturf India Pvt. Ltd.

The venture, which will open offices in New Delhi and Bangalore, aims at tapping into the "fast-growing Indian Internet advertising market," a Dentsu statement said.

Some 46 million Indians were using the Internet as of September last year, a jump of nearly 43 percent from one year earlier, Dentsu said.

Revenue from Internet advertising in India is expected to rise by more than three and a half times from current levels to be worth more than 200 million dollars in 2012, it said.

Dentsu has set a strategy of expanding digital and overseas operations to make up for a lacklustre market for traditional advertising in Japan.

GridNetworks said Monday it has formed a collaborative relationship with Comcast Corp. and received an undisclosed investment from Comcast Interactive Capital.

GridNetworks is a Seattle company that has developed technology, called GridCasting, that allows media companies to make full-screen, high-definition video available over the Internet.

Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA,CMCSK) is a Philadelphia-based cable-television, Internet, phone and media company based in Philadelphia. Comcast Interactive Capital is its venture-capital arm.

Stephen Colbert, whose U.S. presidential campaign was cut short, came out a winner on Tuesday when he walked away with a Webby award as the Internet's "Person of the Year."

Other special achievement winners in the 12th annual Webby awards, known as the "Oscars of the Internet," included Black Eyed Peas' frontman and songwriters will.i.am, recognized as "Artist of the Year," and French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who took home honors as "Video Person of the Year."

The Webby awards, which honor excellence on the Internet, are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-person judging academy. Winners will be honored at ceremonies on June 9th and 10th in New York, and, as always, will be limited to just a five-word acceptance speech.

Colbert won the highest honor for "the innovative way he has used the Internet to interact with fans of The Colbert Report."

Among other Web achievements, a campaign by Colbert's fans made his show's official website the top Google search result under "Greatest Living American" and his "One Million Strong for Stephen T. Colbert" Facebook group attracted more than 78 members per minute in its first week.

Last year Colbert, who plays a pugnacious, egomaniacal talk show host on Comedy Central, cut short a playful run for the presidency after his requests to be on the South Carolina Democratic and Republic primary ballots was rejected.

NASA is badass. Let's admit it. Who else would be so forward thinking as to team with m2mi to build small satellites to make internet bandwidth available in space? This way, the Venusian social networking site we've all wanted to hook up with will be ready to receive us before too long.

Also, if you end up going to space, and you need to buy that collector's Star Wars Darth Vader action figure replica helmet from eBay, you don't have to ask the astronauts to land the space shuttle special for you. You can just buy it from space. Now, the shipping, we're not sure how that will work, but NASA can't solve all your problems, you know.

When I was a boy, I wanted a shortwave radio. I was fascinated by the idea of listening to radio programs from around the world. I didn't get one until I was an adult, by which time the reason I had wanted one was diminished: In recent years, most of the national radio services around the world have stopped or cut back on their shortwave broadcasting, opting instead to broadcast via the Web. Britain's BBC is a prime example. Some years ago its World Service stopped broadcasting directly into North America via shortwave.

Meanwhile, although radio broadcasters have embraced modern times, with some 10,000 around the world now streaming their programs online, radio makers haven't caught the hint. Why don't more radios feature an Internet connection? The appeal is obvious, if only because tuning in to a broadcast on a computer isn't as easy as flipping on a radio on the nightstand or in your kitchen.

This is why I was excited to try the Aluratek Internet Radio Alarm Clock. Priced at $199, the Aluratek is a basic clock radio that can pick up both traditional FM signals as well as Internet broadcasts via an Ethernet cable or your Wi-Fi wireless router.

Balky on Passwords
When I connected the radio to my router via Ethernet, the setup was easy. I didn't have to configure anything on my computer. But setup via Wi-Fi could have been better. My router is an Apple (AAPL) Airport Extreme, and I use both WPA2 passwords and MAC-address filtering to prevent others from hijacking my network. Try as I might, I couldn't get the router and the radio to work with a password required. I'd type it in with the remote control, and still it wouldn't connect. Finally I turned off the password requirement on my router, and the radio connected. I had this same problem once when I tried another model of Internet radio, the Roku Soundbridge Radio. Wi-Fi radios don't seem to like passwords very much.

Read the complete story

LOL, BRB, and OMG are just some of the things teens say in their conversations to their friends on the Internet, in their blogs or in text messages. And a new study released from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that 64% of teens are starting to use this electronic language in their writing assignments at school. "It has become more pervasive. More and more kids write at school like they right at home," said Stacy Fabrega, an English teacher at Leon High School.

Students say the Internet lingo has become like a second language. "I've done it before a couple, a lot of times. I'll be writing a paper and you use the letter "u" or something instead of the word. Or you know b/c for because or you know w/o for without just shortening it because you get lazy and don't want to type the whole thing," said Patrick Dix, a Junior at Leon High School. "If it, it helps a lot because it's real quick and easy so I tend to use it like OMG or like some other ones LOL for laughing out loud," said Philippe Schmitt, a Sophomore at Leon High School.

 
The study says 85% of teens use some type of electronic communication on occasion. This includes text messaging,
e-mails, instant messaging, and social network sites like myspace. As more and more young people are exposed to the abbreviated language, some think this issue will only get worse. And some teachers say when students mix this writing with formal writing it can become a real problem. "I don't know if they are spelling it incorrectly because they don't know or because it's just their style of writing. So we do address that," said Fabrega.

The study was based on 700 teens in the U.S. ages 12 to 17.