A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.
This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference. Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.
As cheap, powerful automatic cameras and camera phones proliferate, the music industry–and its sports counterpart–have had to realize they can’t control fans’ ability to take pictures.
Two Australian girls, lost in a storm drain, recently used their cellphones to update Facebook to alert people about their predicament rather than calling emergency services.
by Daniel Terdiman, Editor, Geek Gestalt, CNET News.com
This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Imagine getting to introduce to the Internet a couple of otherwise-normal 60-somethings who, having lived off the grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of national forest, have missed more than 30 years of media innovations.
by Matt Zimmerman, Senior Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation
On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay.
There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.
My iPhone needs charging every night. Even then, it dies on me by the end of the day, cutting off important conversations. Coming upon solar- and wind-powered portable chargers, I wondered if I found the perfect solution to keeping it going while helping the environment.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
So, uh, wasn’t Dell supposed to be working on a cellphone?
Well, that was the scuttlebutt. But Dell has failed to show at recent mobile trade shows. Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros., asserts in a research note today that the company’s first attempt was basically rejected by the carriers as too, well, Dell-like.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
So, did you buy a PC this week? How about a cellphone? A printer? A switch?
Probably not. And that could be a problem.
The higher the current rally takes the semiconductor stocks–the SMH, the Semiconductor HOLDRS, is up 18.5 percent over the last seven sessions–the more you can expect the Street to dig into the question of whether there has been any real change in demand beyond inventory restocking.
by John Markoff, Technology Writer, The New York Times
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. That metaphor is the map.
Microsoft executives have long spun visions of a world where computer users can seamlessly share information between a PC, the Web, and a cellphone. But the company has made little progress in making that vision a reality–at least until now.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu believes that Apple’s market share is still small enough relative to the overall PC and cellphone markets that there’s room for significant growth in both the Mac and iPhone businesses. He expects the company to earn $5.05 a share in FY 2009 on revenues of $35.5 billion.
The Semiconductor Industry Association today cut its forecast for 2008 worldwide chip sales growth to 4.3% from 7.7%, citing ongoing weakness in memory chip pricing. Sales ex-memory products are expected to grow 7.4%.
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