Dell Moving Out Of China?
Dell has recently started its operations at its new India plant. On the sidelines of it, Indian Prime Minister hinted at Dell’s statements that implied that the popular hardware manufacturer could be pulling out of China owing to legal and political uncertainties.
Mr. Singh is quoted as saying,
“This morning I met the chairman of Dell Corporation. He informed me that they are buying equipment and parts worth $25 billion from China. They would like to shift to safer environment with climate conducive to enterprise with security of legal system.”
While a statement from the Indian Prime Minister cannot be taken at face value to gauge Dell’s business strategies, the move however could be interesting considering that Google and now GoDaddy have decided to cease their China operations.
[via Engadget]
AOL To Make Videos Search Engine Friendly
Online videos have been a challenge on so many fronts – Not only do they consume more bandwidth (and cost more to maintain), they do not monetize well and are not search engine friendly. While there have been reports of companies such as Google working on scanning online videos to understand the context (and thus be able to rank them more appropriately), AOL seems to have an interesting alternate solution.
In a recently filed patent application, AOL describes a way to “study” the instant messages shared by people viewing a video and scanning this text for keywords that may be added as a metadata. This includes splitting the video itself into frames and assigning particular frame IDs. The algorithm will then study the instances of instant messages shared within a particular time since a frame of the video is displayed.
For instance, if several users watching a baseball game video type in praising a “homerun” 25 seconds into the video, the system immediately recognizes that an event associated with a keyword “homerun” has occured at a frame near the 25 second mark and associates this keyword to the video – thus helping in future searches as well as helping it index its videos better on search engines.
Sounds cool?
T-Mobile USA Joint Venture With Clearwire
T-Mobile, the fourth largest carrier in the US may be contemplating a joint venture partnership with Kirkland based Clearwire, a leading provider of wireless broadband and ISP solutions.
The rumors itself is not new. However this time, the speculations have been fueled by statements from T-Mobile USA CEO, Robert Dotson. In an interview, Dotson had said,
“We continue to look at JV opportunities for additional spectrum… there are a number of different options we look at, (we) have been talking with cable companies, with Clearwire.”
Ever since T-Mobile garnered high profile smartphone partnerships including the likes of Nexus One, the company’s demand for wireless spectrum has been on the increase and in this regard, a partnership with Clearwire can come handy.
Shares of Clearwire however suffered a 2% drop since the news broke out
Twitter Advertising Model To Be Rolled Out Next Month
There was a lot of anticipation over Evan Williams’ keynote at the South BySouthwest Interactive conference yesterday. However, while there were interesting revelations regarding Twitter’s new @Everywhere announcement, nothing was revealed about the thing everyone wants to know – How Twitter finally plans to make money?
Now, it appears that Twitter’s ad monetization model could be unveiled in mid-April during Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference scheduled for a month from now.
If the timing of the announcement is indeed set for Chirp, we wonder if that could mean that there could be some sort of revenue sharing feature with the developers. Could we be seeing another Adwords/Adsense ecosystem in the making with Twitter?
[via All Things D]
50 ARM Tablets Launching This Year
Close to 50 ARM based tablet devices could be launched through 2010. This was stated by Roy Chen, ARM’s ODM manager for worldwide mobile computing who says that enquiries over ARM technology for tablet devices from PC manufacturers is so intense that the company has had to rent additional floor space to show off the devices at CeBIT.
One caveat here: Not all enquiries translate into actual products. But truth is that PC and mobile manufacturers have realized the mistake in letting the iPhone have an early mover advantage in the smartphone segment and regardless of whether they see justice in serving a segment like tablet, companies are likely to launch few devices to gauge customer interest in the same.
What do you think?
[via Engadget]
FoxConn Wants To Improve Your Dice-Gaming Experience
One might have assumed that FoxConn wants to claim proprietary rights to devices that can change apps, play music,etc. on shaking the device (which is prior art by the way). But no. Taiwan based Hon Hai Precision, which is better known as FoxConn outside wants to patent a shake responsive handheld that will improve the experience while playing dice-games.
The patent application reads
“In general, such dice games are played by rolling the dice for the user automatically or based upon a simple button press, which differs significantly from the experience of physically rolling dice. In the real world, there is a causal relationship between physically tossing dice and observing the outcome that has made dice games so popular over the centuries. Therefore, there is a need to provide a handheld device that can be shaken to simulate dice rolling in the real world.”
Wouldn’t you love shaking your phone instead of a dice?
High Speed Wireless Broadband On T-Mobile Launching March 14?
T-Mobile has announced that the company shall be making certain changes to its coverage map to more accurately depict the data and voice coverage across the country. This is expected to launch come March 14.
However, one of the internal documents posted points to a new category of wireless broadband titled : ”Very fast mobile web : Home broadband like speeds on the go“. It is not clear if this is the 21 Mbps connection that T-Mobile is working on. Nobody’s confirmed it, but we definitely hope that is the case.
LG Panther Is First Windows Phone 7 Handset?
Ever since Microsoft unveiled their new generation mobile OS, there have been a lot of rumors about the Windows Phone 7 based handsets launching in the markets. Though a majority of them are not expected to launch until the holiday shopping season, the earliest to launch is likely to be in September.
It is now rumored that LG, the company expected to come out with the first Windows Phone 7 based handset is likely to name the device Panther. Pretty uninnovative and un-cutesy for a brand that is expected to take on the likes of iPhone and Droid.
How do you like the name? Will you be buying one Tell us in the comments.
[Best Mobile Contracts via Gizmodo]
Price Of Motorola CLIQ XT, Nokia Nuron, HTC HD2 Revealed?
Sources close to TmoNews have revealed the prices of the T-Mobile based handsets which get launched later this year. According to the source, Motorola CLIQ XT will launch at a price of $129.99 with a 2 year contract. Without the T-Mobile contract, you can get hold of the device for $329.99.
Nokia Nuron will retail at $69.99 with contract and $179.99 without one. Similarly, HTC HD2 will come at a subsidized price of $199.99 with the 2 year contract and at $449.99 without one.
We guess the phones have been priced at a pretty attractive level. What do you think? Which one are you going for?
[via TmoNews]
In-Car Music Purchasing Application
Airbiquity, a company working on wireless communications solutions is working on an application that will make downloading music while you travel easy. The application, the developers say will help you download that cool song that you just heard on the radio.
In a patent application filed recently under the title, “IN-VEHICLE MOBILE MUSIC PURCHASE”, the inventors describe a way to download your favorite music rightaway to your car digital stereo, mobile phone or even your home computer.
According to the invention, a dedicated button shall be provided with the in-car stereo or can be externally provided via a software configuration. Once installed, whenever a user listening to a song on the radio wants to purchase it, they need to press this button. Doing so will pull the metadata of the song (title, singer,etc.) and purchase and download the music from the pre-configured third party retailer such as iTunes. It is better explained via the image below
