Nike teamed up with Apple to offer new products and services combined with the iPod nano. The new partnership will include electronics, clothing, and online services for people who like to listen to music while working out. Apple claims 50% of iPod owners use their music players during a workout. The new campaign is called Nike+ and features community and social networking components. The first product is the Nike+iPod Sport Kit, a $29 accessory connecting your shoe and your iPod. Runners can place a small sensor under their shoe insole and connect a receiver to their iPod nano to…
Category Archives: Gadgets
iPod, the rejected startup
Tony Fadell helped develop handheld devices for General Magic and Philips. Tony had a vision of a portable MP3 player complemented by an online music store. His startup, Fuse, couldn’t get VC financing to build the product. He shopped the idea around to big companies such as Real Networks and only one company decided to experiment with his idea, hiring Tony as a contractor to build a prototype in two months. The first review on Slashdot in October 2001 called the product “lame” and “not very exciting” for lacking wireless and a bigger hard drive. The product idea became the…
PodSession: wireless broadband
I want high speed Internet everywhere. Forget the WiFi hotspot locator attached to your keychain or the questionable reliability of a local cafe, I want a reliable and fast connection everywhere I go, even if it’s on a train or car moving 60 mph. Thankfully the cellular phone industry is up to the task and rolling out wireless data connections with up to 3 Mb/s in the San Francisco Bay area and other large metropolitan areas throughout the U.S. These new mobile technologies are known as EV-DO or HSDPA depending on the carrier and are delivering high enough speed…
Cablevision tests remote storage DVR
Cablevision plans to give its more than 2 million digital cable customers access to 80 GB of remote storage for less than $10 a month. Digital cable boxes would receive a software upgrade allowing a subscriber to select favorite programs for recording on Cablevision’s servers. You can record two programs simultaneously while watching a previously recorded show. These types of services are only the beginning of what broadband providers are able to offer their customers on-demand over a high speed network. In the future there may be a channel produced by the cable company on a specialty subject such as…
Disney buys Pixar for $7.4 billion
Disney just announced the acquisition of Pixar for about $7.4 billion. 2.3 Disney shares will be exchanged for every Pixar share, including the shares of Pixar’s largest shareholder, Steve Jobs, who owns 50.6% of all outstanding shares. Jobs joins the Disney board of directors as part of the deal which is expected to close this summer. Tags: disneypixarstevejobs…
Photocasts are not valid RSS
I just bought a copy of Apple iLife 06 and created my first photocast of foodporn. The feed invents its own date format and places a guid at the channel level. Apple is also doing some odd user agent restricting access to browsers such as Firefox and tools such as Feed Validator. <pubDate>2006-01-11 18:55:03 -0800</pubDate> Perhaps Apple can publish an update to make all dates RFC 822. Apple also declared a new “wallpaper” DTD that is undefined, just like their podcast DTD. Tags: ilife, photocast, ilife06, puppy…
Gadgets in the living room
The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available for your listening pleasure. This week Om and I talk about the latest consumer electronics announcements from CES over the last week and some of the emerging trends for new gadgets in the living room. I liked the Intel Core Duo announcement and its energy-efficient design. New laptops utilizing the technology have over 11 hours of battery life! I was also impressed by XM Radio’s new XM Passport hardware, a tiny 1.5″ square satellite radio tuner that can be inserted into multiple devices similar to a SIM card. Om…
Pacific Digital WiFi picture frame with Windows Vista features
Pacific Digital is also showing off a WiFi picture frame at CES in Las Vegas. The new MemoryFrame products will connect to Windows Vista PCs using Windows Media Connect, Windows Connect Now, and Vista’s integrated RSS features. The picture frame can connect to other PCs on a home network using WiFi and display shared content. I could not find any pricing information but current 10.4″ wireless picture frames from Pacific Digital cost about $400. Tags: photos, windowsvista, windows…
eStarling WiFi picture frame
eStarling just released a picture frame with built-in WiFi that can receive photographs from any RSS feed or POP e-mail account. You configure the device once using a USB connection and it will automatically update itself over a 802.11b wireless network (even with WEP encryption). Pictures formatted in JPEG or bitmap format are displayed on a 5.6″ LCD. You could subscribe to a specific tag on Flickr or send e-mails from your cell phone to a special e-mail address such as a free Gmail account. I would love to give one of these to my mom and have it…
Emerging video trends podcast
Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video. I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge…