Software Blog » Videos

The Sweet Smell of Social Media Success – and the Funk of Failure

admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0000

How’s this for tying together Old Spice’s winning social media strategy and Apple’s current iPhone problems: While the cologne and deodorant company is ending the week smelling like a rose, Steve Jobs’ tech colossus is in danger of stinking up the joint. Follow along with me as I attempt to marry the two top tech stories of the past few days. Both involve the Internet, media relations/marketing strategies, and consumers drunk with the newfound power that social media/Web video imparts upon them.

Microsoft Vies for Dev Attention With WinPho7 Toolset

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:21:33 +0000

Microsoft on Monday announced the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools beta; this was followed on Tuesday with the announcement of WinPho7 integration with the Windows Live and Zune services. The moves come as Microsoft works to consolidate its mobile efforts around the Windows Phone 7 platform and remain a player in the mobile phone market. The beta release is the near-final version of the tools needed for building applications and games for the WinPho 7 platform, Microsoft said.

Fiber Optics and Rural Medicine: Healthcare at the Speed of Light

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:00:00 +0000

As healthcare professionals rely more on electronic medical records, tests, images, videos and other multimedia files, high-speed broadband networks have increasingly become a necessary way to transfer and move this data. Unfortunately, however, rural hospitals and clinics have had a difficult time keeping pace with the need for new networks and fiber optic technologies. To fill this gap and to make sure that rural hospitals stay up to speed, in 2007 the FCC established the Rural Health Care Pilot Program.

Google May Steer Devs Web-Ward With Mobile YouTube Refresh

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:31:59 +0000

YouTube’s decision to make its mobile Web site compatible with HTML5 may one day be viewed as a turning point in what is shaping up as an epic battle for control of the mobile device landscape. In unveiling the new site on Wednesday, YouTube said its goal is to give mobile device users the same video viewing experience they get on desktop computers. Part of that experience is being able to access the site and play videos directly through a Web browser rather than relying on a dedicated application that must be loaded on the device.

Google May Steer Devs Web-Ward With Mobile YouTube Refresh

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:31:59 +0000

Hackers Target YouTube With XXX XSS Attacks

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:18:31 +0000

Hackers hit YouTube over the weekend, injecting pop-ups, disabling comments and redirecting viewers to porn sites when they tried to access videos. Google clamped down on the problem swiftly and is attempting to figure out who was behind the attack. The hack followed the online publication of a YouTube HTML code injection exploit. The hackers used a cross-site scripting attack on YouTube. This is a technique that injects code into a user’s browser instance.

YouTube Says HTML5 Not Ready for Prime Time

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:37:37 +0000

Despite predictions to the contrary, Adobe Flash won’t be supplanted any time soon as a major video distribution vehicle on the World Wide Web, according to a software engineer at the Net’s largest video sharing site, YouTube. “[W]hile the ‘video’ tag is a big step forward for open standards, the Adobe Flash Platform will continue to play a critical role in video distribution,” John Harding wrote in the YouTube API Blog this week. He was referring to prognostications that a new version of the language to create pages on the Web, HTML5, will “kill” Flash.

Leaked Slides Provide Sneak Peek at Windows 8

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:40:52 +0000

A set of PowerPoint slides that appear to contain details about the next version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system surfaced Monday. The slides indicate that Microsoft plans to tackle the long-running problem of Windows’ slow start-up time, in addition to placing cutting-edge technology such as facial recognition in the new operating system. Questions remain, however, about the authenticity of the material. The slides, dated April 2010, first surfaced on the Italian Web site Windosette.

iPhones Sell Like iPhones Despite Hardware Kink Stink

admin — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Launch day for the iPhone 4 arrived Thursday, complete with requisite traffic jams in Apple Store parking lots and lines around blocks. Few gadgets are blessed with the kind of hype surrounding an Apple product, and the company seems to carry its magic cache with it wherever it ventures. Since the advent of the industry-defining iPod, Apple seems able to turn even public relations debacles into good publicity opportunities. The iPhone fourth version, though, appeared to be having more than its share of technical kinks and hiccups on its birthday.

Verizon’s Droid X Joins Android A-List

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:06:32 +0000

Verizon Wireless unveiled the much-anticipated Motorola Droid X on Wednesday. The device, which Motorola variously describes as a touch tablet and a pocket-sized home theater, runs Android version 2.1. It will be updated over the air to run on Android 2.2 later in the year. When that happens, the Droid X will double as a business user’s device. The Droid X will be available at Verizon Wireless stores and on the carrier’s website from July 15 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate.

App Gives iPhone Losers a New Hope

admin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:50:57 +0000

Apple has made finding a lost mobile iGadget easier, unveiling the Find My iPhone iOS application on the iTunes app store. Downloading the app is free; however, users will need to sign on for membership to MobileMe, Apple’s cloud service, at $99 a year if they want to use the app. Apple has also added new features to MobileMe. The new Find My iPhone app works on any iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 3.1.3 or higher. Naturally, it must be used in conjunction with another iOS device — a friend’s or relative’s iPad, for instance — in order to be of any use.

YouTube Builds a Cutting Room in the Cloud

admin — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:07:28 +0000

Google has unveiled the YouTube Video Editor, which lets people edit their videos in the cloud. The application lets users merge clips into a longer video or edit down a video, among other things. Google said it will add new features based on user feedback. The video editor is available on TestTube, which is a laboratory of sorts for YouTube. The video editor lets users combine multiple short clips they have uploaded to create a longer video. It also lets them trim the beginning and ending of their videos.

Apple Lets Mini Be All That It Can Be

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:14:33 +0000

Apple has updated its Mac mini with a redesign and under-the-hood computing overhaul. The most significant enhancements include an HDMI output — used to connect the Mac mini to an HDTV — and an SD card slot that allows transfer of photos and videos from a digital camera. Apple has also upgraded the mini’s graphics and computing firepower with an Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics processor, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 320-GB hard and 2 GB of RAM. The device is now encased in an aluminum enclosure that is slightly smaller than the earlier version.

EVO Hits the Ground Running With One Shoe Untied

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:35:22 +0000

Sprint on Friday launched the HTC Evo 4G smartphone to a chorus of mixed reviews. Some hailed it as the best Android smartphone yet; others pointed out some flaws, both with the device and with Sprint’s 4G network. HTC has said it will fix some of the problems with the Evo by issuing an over-the-air update; the claimed problems with Sprint’s 4G network, however, may be somewhat more difficult to resolve. The HTC Evo offers simultaneous voice and data capability on 4G or WiFi networks.

Ode to Summer, Fixer-Uppers and $10 for Courage

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Well, Memorial Day has come and gone in the U.S., and that means summer is upon us once again, if just unofficially. What is summer for, besides sunburns, mosquitoes and sweating? That’s right, it’s time for tinkering in the great, air-conditioned indoors! It wasn’t too surprising, then, to see Linux bloggers’ thoughts in recent weeks turning to all the projects large and small they hope to spend time on in the coming months.

The Kins: Academically Average, Socially Gifted

admin — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

You might think that someone at Microsoft is a big fan of Dr. Seuss; naming the new Windows Phones the “Kin One” and “Kin Two” certainly conjures up images of critters that would assist the Cat in the Hat in wreaking havoc on Sally and her brother’s house. But it’s really Kin as in kinship; people joined by common ancestry, or in a more tech-savvy sense, younger users joined by the common desire to share every bit of information they come in contact with via their smartphones. Certainly the two Kin phones bear no kinship to previous Windows Mobile handsets.

Gxine Media Player: Just Press Play

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

It’s difficult to talk about the Gxine multimedia player as a separate app from Xine. Both do pretty much the same tasks — let you watch videos and listen to audio files. Both of these apps hale from the same Linux library of codecs and other gutsy stuff, Xine-lib. The key difference between these almost identical twins is the family lineage each one serves. Gxine is a media player based on the GTK style GUI with a Mozilla plugin. It plays CDs, DVDs and VCDs in most of the popular media file formats.

Google Brings an Open Source Gun to the Video Codec Battle

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 19:01:49 +0000

Google on Thursday announced WebM, a royalty-free media file format for online video. With WebM, Google has thrown the gauntlet to H.264, the codec backed by rivals Apple and Microsoft, among others. Buried within the new format’s FAQ was news about another Google project: Android. The next iteration of the mobile operating system, dubbed “Gingerbread,” will be released in the fourth quarter of this year. WebM is an open, royalty-free media file format designed for the Web.

Linux Distros and the Codec Conundrum

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Codecs have been the topic of much heated conversation on the Linux blogs of late, thanks largely to all the recent controversy surrounding H.264. Video compression, that is, and the technology that currently enables it in applications like Blu-ray Disc, YouTube videos and the iTunes Store. Cupertino loves the patent-encumbered
H.264, not surprisingly; Microsoft does too. The open source community? Not so much. What’s gotten the goat of many FOSS fans is that Canonical has gone ahead and licensed H.264 for Ubuntu, rather than using an open alternative like Theora.

European Racket Over Street View Privacy Spawns Probes

admin — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:06:59 +0000

European privacy advocates are scaling up their scrutiny on Google regarding its Street View cars’ collection of data from unencrypted WiFi networks. German prosecutors and the Czech data protection agency have launched separate investigations into the issue; Italy’s privacy regulator is looking into whether Google treated the data correctly; and the European Union’s Justice Commissioner has waded into the fray. Meanwhile, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reportedly said the company plays hardball with governments on privacy issues.

Software Blog » Videos

The Sweet Smell of Social Media Success – and the Funk of Failure

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Hackers Target YouTube With XXX XSS Attacks

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