Yahoo! Buys Meedio

yahootv.jpgThis past Tuesday, Yahoo! announced their purchase of technology from Meedio who make software for Entertainment Center PC’s. I’ve been eyeing Meedio for a while now and was planning on using their flagship “Meedio Essentials” application for an HTPC that I’m planning on building this summer. You may also remember some older posts about Jon’s HTPC. This is the software he uses to power his beast of a entertainment center pc (I’m hoping he’ll speak up in the comments).

This purchase could go a few different ways depending on what Yahoo! does with it. They didn’t flat out buy the company, they only bought the technology. Does this mean they’re going to integrate it into something they’re already working on? Yahoo Go has had a “Personalize Your TV” demo site up for a little while now. I can only assume that this is built with the technology they acquired from Meedio. There are still quite a few unanswered questions though. The great thing about Meedio is that is was very customizable. Hopefully Yahoo, trying to keep users inside the Yahoo network, doesn’t cripple that customization which has made Meedio a great piece of software. When Yahoo purchased Konfabulator several months ago they pretty much left it as it was and just made it available for free. With Konfabulator though, it’s more along the lines of Yahoo’s primary business – the web. Meedio doesn’t really fit into that category.

Yahoo has been moving more towards TV in the past year though. They announced a partnership with Tivo back in November allowing you to record shows on your Tivo from Yahoo TV. I wonder how this new Meedio relationship will fit into that. I think Yahoo definitely wants to get into the TV video market, I just wonder how they’re going to mesh all this stuff together, or if they’ve even thought that far ahead.

I think the best case scenario with this is Yahoo not changing much with Meedio as it stands now (maybe just throw the little “Y!” icon on there somewhere) and giving it away for free a la Konfabulator, or Google’s Picasa purchase. That way when I get to building an entertainment PC this summer there’s one piece that I won’t be paying for.

New Look for Techory.com

I’ve been playing around with a new design for a little while now, and am finally to the point where it’s ready to go live. I don’t think it’s quite done yet (probably won’t ever be satisfied). I’ll still be tweaking things for a while, but I thought I would at least get it out there. Let me know what you think, and if you run into any weirdness when trying to do anything.

Mentos + Free iTunes

Mentos Sours iTunesIt’s not like I need another reason to buy Mentos, but it looks like I just got one. Looks like Mentos has started offering free song downloads from Apple’s iTunes Music Store with codes located on boxes of Mentos Sours. I haven’t seen any of these free music Mentos Sours boxes in the wild yet, but you’d better believe when I do, I’ll be slapping down some cold hard cash to get me a few boxes. When Pepsi does their yearly iTunes promotion, I usually end up buying more 20 oz. bottles. It’s scary to think how many boxes this promotion will make me buy when it’s a food item I’m already obsessed with. Too bad they don’t sell Mentos Sours at the same number of places that Pepsi is sold… or maybe for the sake of my health, that’s a good thing. Naw! Anything that promotes the candy of the gods is definitely a good thing!

A Pig Just Flew By With an Apple in its Mouth

Apple LogoWell, the rumors came true. Apple announced a program called Boot Camp this morning that will let you boot windows (officially) on a new Intel Macintosh. It was Apple’s birthday last Saturday and they turned 30 years old. I’d be willing to bet that if they’d released this on their birthday (April 1st) nobody would have believed it.

I think this is a good move for Apple. They continue to claim they’re a hardware company. I think giving the customer more options (another OS) is definitely a good way to go. If you’re even the slightest bit interested in what Apple has to offer, you no longer have to worry if you’ll still be able to run your existing Windows apps. If Apple is looking for switchers this is a great way to get people to taste OS X when they normally wouldn’t have done so. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple furthers this feature in their upcoming OS 10.5.

Check out the first BSOD on a Mac

cFree Wireless Officially Launches

cFree Wireless Network

It was a bit of a chilly day to be sitting outside surfing the internet on a laptop Tuesday, but that was the day of the official launch to the cFree Wireless Network. cFree has been a project I’ve been working with for a little under two years now. The initial idea for the project was to bring free wireless internet to public spaces in Iowa City, and was based on similar projects in Austin and New York. Well, since then, the project has grown significantly to include not only Iowa City, but Coralville and Cedar Rapids as well. One year ago from our launch, the name Corridor Free Wireless Network (cFree) was announced. The name refers to the Iowa Technology Corridor witch includes the space between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. Currently the cFree Wireless Network has hotspots in several cities throughout the corridor.

  • Iowa City – Downtown Pedestrian Mall
  • Coralville – City Campus & North Ridge Park
  • Cedar Rapids – Downtown Areas

For a map of the cFree coverage areas, and information about the network, check out the cFree website: http://www.cfreewireless.org. And if you’re in any of these hotspots, pull out your wireless device and jump on the network… it’s free!

Newsvine

Newsvine LogoOn March first a great little website called Newsvine opened their doors to the public. I was fortunate enough to get a beta invite to the site and have been playing with it for quite a while now. It has quickly become my news outlet of choice on the web. Now you’re probably asking yourselves, “why the heck do we need yet another news site when there are already a-million-and-one already out there?!?” That was exactly my thought when I first heard of the site too. Well, I’ve come to learn that Newsvine is a little more than just a news indexing site. The best way to put it would probably be to say that Newsvine is like the lovechild of Google News, Digg, del.icio.us and Wikinews (that is, if multiple websites could produce offspring). I’ve had access to Newsvine for a little over a month now and have slowly been using Google news less and less.

So what’s so great about Newsvine? It’s more than just a site that throws up the newest stories and breaks them into categories. It does do that though. Newsvine provides stories from The Associated Press and ESPN. I think one of my favorite parts of Newsvine is the social aspects that are tied into the standard news stories. What that means is that any visitor to the site can bump stories that interest them to the top. So the most popular (more important?) news show up on top.

Not only does Newsvine list stories from the AP and other professional sources, but it also lets visitors point to other stories on the internet. So if you find a piece of interesting news on Jo Scmho’s blog, you can write up a blurb about the blog post and add a link all within Newsvine system, so it’s categorized and fits in with the rest of the news. They’ve even got a handy bookmark that’ll do everything for your automatically.

Newsvine also lets you write stories. With a free account, you can set up your own news column and write the news to your heart’s content. Your articles will be promoted through the site and you can earn money from them. That’s right, you can earn money from writing news stories on Newsvine. They share the ad revenue with you! You get 90% of the ad revenue from the stories that you write.

Newsvine has become my news site of choice. In an internet full of news index sites Newsvine has a nice collection of bells and whistles that make it stand above all the others.

ONTV & Democracy Video Players

Over the past few months I’ve run across a few of these video player/aggregator applications. A couple of the better ones I’ve found have been ONTV and Democracy. Both these players are more than just video players. They both present themselves as internet television and provide a nice directory of videos all viewable right inside the application.

My favorite of the two is the Democracy player. It has the best integration of directory downlo and video. It provides 300 channels of internet video to chose from. You can set it to download the top videos in several different categories to watch whenever you get to them. It also will subscribe to RSS feeds to download your favorite video podcasts. And to save bandwidth, it integrates with BitTorrent. I like to usually have it set to download a collection of videos so I’ve got several things to watch whenever I’ve got some down time with the laptop.

Sketch Swap

Make a drawing… get a drawing. This quaint little site will give you a blank canvas to leave your mark. You’ll then receive a drawing from someone else doing the same.

If making a drawing isn’t you thing, give file swap a try (from the same folks as sketch swap). It’s works the same way, only you don’t need to draw, just drop in a file (image/sound/video/document/whatever) and you’ll get one back.

Drive a Racecar Through New York

Race CarThe new Windows Live Local Virtual Earth will let you take a spin through the streets of New York City (and any other city they cover) in a racecar, sports car, or on foot. This is kind of a novel way of showing the street-level photos they’ve had up for a while now as part of Live Local. You can see where you are on the city map (as a car icon) and your cockpit view shows what you’d see out the windows of your car. As you turn, the view turns. It’s a neat way to virtually take a spin through the city without all the rude drivers and pedestrians.

Licorice Mentos

licorice mentosI was looking around Walgreen’s today, checking out the Mentos selection (which I do at just about every store that I go into) when I ran across something interesting… Black Licorice Mentos! I’ve had these before, but it’s be quite a while since I’ve seen them… and never in the U.S. The last roll I found was probably around 1997 or 2000. They’re normally sold (from what I can tell) in Denmark. Those Dutch like their black licorice. I’m not a huge black licorice fan. I’ll eat it if it’s around, but probably wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. So, these Mentos are probably at the bottom of the Mentos ladder for me. But, even being on the Mentos ladder puts them head and tails above all other candy. Well, what do these taste like? They taste very much like black licorice. I believe that the candy shell is still mint so they have a slight hint of minty flavor, but the centers are definitely black licorice… so if you’re a fan of licorice, these Mentos are definitely for you.