Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

It would seem that just after Microsoft  launched their newest internet browser, IE7, they've gone on to release their latest media player, the Windows Media Player 11 to beat Apple in the face. 

As iTunes is to the iPod, Windows Media Player 11 should be the one for your Zune. The only difference is that WM11 works with other MP3 players as well, such as the Creative Zen. Bundled together with a music service store to help you increase the amount of songs that you would have in your collection is URGE. So, what does URGE do anyway ?

Ah yes. Poems make the world turn lovely doey and now you can even download them off the Net instead of just hearing your better half recite them.

Poetry promotion agency 57 Productions has launched a new website Tuesday which allows users to download and listen to poetry on their MP3 players and iPods. They host new recordings by poets including Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as popular back catalogue material. At a London theatre, artists, promoters and guests planned to celebrate the launch Tuesday evening, sipping champagne and listening to poets perform. 95 cents for audio poems and US$1.80 for video poems ; an annual subscription is $18 a year. The company offers a free one-month trial membership.

57 Productions launches IPoems for poetry downloads source

Its not every day a football club in the Uk launches their own internet video service. West Ham United has launched WHUTV - a dedicated broadband subscription streaming service delivering all the action from Upton Park 24/7.

WHUTV will offer live and archive match coverage plus highlights and exclusive behind the scenes coverage and is available to subscribers on a monthly basis for £4.99 or annually for £49.99 - 12 months of viewing for the price of just 10.

Existing subscribers to our previous Hammers Vision service will have their accounts automatically transferred, with all log-in details remaining the same, meaning they can take advantage of WHUTV immediately.

WHUTV launches with an exclusive welcome message from manager Alan Pardew, plus interviews with Robert Green, Tony Carr and Niall Clark, highlights of the first-team squad training and Pards's pre-match press conference ahead of the Premiership curtain-raiser against Charlton Athletic.

 
Microsoft's Zune portable music player will let people share and sample tracks via wi-fi and owners will be able to buy tracks that are downloaded direct to the device. The first Zune player will appear in late 2006.
 
Zune is the term for the hardware player, the software on it and the download service it will be tied into. Music tracks, movies and other content will be available via this service. The Zune project is aimed at toppling Apple which has a 50% share of the global portable music player market with its iPod and a 70% share of the music download market via iTunes.

Microsoft changes tune with Zune source

If you ever get bored of sitting in the office while waiting for the traffic snarl to cool down, then have a look at this cool Online TV Player - TVU Player 1.5.12. It a software that enables you to watch various TV channels without needing a TV Tuner card. Its kinda cool as wathing CNN is much better than watching your boss ramble on.

Why go to through the TVU Player ?

- Its FREE
- No TV Tuner card is required
- Once player installed, you are able to watch online television via website or using player
- Its fast. The video streams don't stop much for buffering
- Limited television channels. (CBN, Fashion, ESPN Asia, CCTV-5, Tianjin5, Cartoon Network, Univision, ABC, CBS, ESPN, DongNan TC, HunanTV, College Sports TV, Kuweit TV3, Aminie 2, Aminie 1, Opera, RTL (Luxemberg), Class News (Italy), DW TV (German), Bloomberg, NASA TV, Test, CNN1, CNN2, CNN3, CNN4, CNN, Phoenix Info, star TV, Phoenix CN, MBC, HBO, Hollywood)

YouTube maybe be a great way to uploade videos and share them but they will have a lot of headache controlling the materials on it.

A Los Angeles video news service sued YouTube Inc. last Friday in federal court for allowing its users to upload copyrighted video footage onto the popular Web site, including the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots.

Los Angeles News Service and its owner and operator, Robert Tur, assert in the lawsuit that in one week's time, one version of the Denny beating uploaded by a YouTube user was viewed and downloaded 1,000 times via the site.

'The scope of the infringements is akin to a murky moving target, in that videos uploaded are not identified by copyright owner or registration number but rather by the uploader's idiosyncratic choice of descriptive terms to describe the content of the video - tags - making it extremely impractical to identify plaintiff's copyrighted works,' said Robert Tur, the agency's owner. Tur is seeking $150,000 for each work infringed upon and a court order enjoining YouTube from allowing his work to be posted on the Web site.

The Los Angeles News Service Sues YouTube source

Have I told you almost all the Microsoft software are buggy ? Yes. A million times already. Here's more proof to that effect. When will they learn that having a few thousand programmers is just not enough to kill bugs on the long term.

A weakness in how Office applications handle Macromedia Flash files exposes Microsoft customers to cyberattacks, experts have warned. Flash files embedded in Office documents could run and execute code without any warning, Symantec said in an alert sent to customers on Thursday. The security issue is the third problem reported within a week that affects Microsoft Office users.

Microsoft Office has Macromedia Flash bug source

I'm using Winamp v5.13 right now and its cool to listen to mp3s while sprucing up Excels and sending long winded emails to angry customers. Alas ! There's a new critical security vulnerability in the Winamps from versions 2.90 through 5.23 and its recommended you upgrade your Winamp to V5.24 just in case some hackers might use it to steal your secret files in the hard disk.

Two earlier 2006 Winamp updates - including one labeled "extremely critical" by Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia in January - have been deployed to rid the player of security problems.

We have released Winamp 5.24 (21 June 2006)in order to fix a security vulnerability that has been uncovered in older clients. - Fixed crash bug & potential security vulnerability in in_midi.

Critical Update to Winamp 5.24 source

There's big money in sports technology and one of the biggest events running now is the World Cup 2006. It will be good business sense to invest in it to get better gains and that's what LENOVO Group Limited is doing. They've completed the first-ever sponsorship of the Olympic Games earlier this year and now they've bagged Ronaldinho as their Lenovo Worldwide Brand Ambassador.

If you don't know who Ronaldinho is , then you must be living under a shell. He made the headlines back in the World Cup 2002, is a Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Player of the Year for two years running, currently plays for Barcelona and the Brazilian national team.


Ronaldinho is a Lenovo Worldwide Brand Ambassador source

Here's some news that I just found out. Robert Scoble, the TOP Microsoft Blogger is leaving Microsoft and will join PodTech.net, the podcasting network. He will be moving from Seattle to Silicon Valley. Its no big deal he says, since MS has some other 3000 bloggers still sticking around. Read the his thoughts here. Good luck to Robert as the Podcast Universe really needs your spunkiness and energy.

I also learned some great stuff when I read Robert Scoble's interview with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, on 9 June 2006. The interesting points are :

1. Sun Microsystems is about to layoff thousands of people but its going to encourage all the laid off workers to continue to blog on Sun's pocket. It'll make it possible for new employers to get in touch with laid off workers. There's a lot of companies that are hungry for workers right now.

2. Sun's engineers have found a way to dramatically lower the power consumption of their servers.  Now that's enviable with soaring oil prices and electricity rates hitting us consumers.

ContentNext.com is having a Social Networking Gathering at the W Hotel, Los Angeles Westwood, on the June 14, 2006. Do drop by if you are free or in the neighborhood. It doesn't hurt to meet more people if you are in the IT/internet business. Who knows what deals can be made. Sign up here.

We invite you to our second LA mixer (of paidContent.org and Moconews.net readers) on June 14, 2006, at the W Hotel in Westwood. As the name suggests, the concept is simple: you come, you meet people, you talk. You do deals, too, of course (and then you tell us about them). We will have a good mix of people from entertainment, media, mobile, newspaper, radio and television companies, so be prepared for some lateral thinking while networking.

Sphere is a new blog search engine that is fairly free of spam blogs or Splogs. You can search for any topic on Sphere and then choose the Featured Blogs link on the right sidebar. Sphere shows a list of the best blogs associated with that topic and related media. Pretty nifty results from this new Blog Search Engine as it manages to find my name Colbert Low in the right places. Lets hope Technorati does not kill them.

Can’t get some videos to play on your PC ? Got an important videocast that won’t play on your laptop. Here’s a piece of Windows software to solve your blues. The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools for video playback. Codecs are required to encode and/or decode (play) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files online or offline. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play 99% of all the movies that you download from the internet.

The K-Lite Codec Pack has a couple of major advantages compared to other codec packs:
- It it always up-to-date with the latest versions of the codecs.
- It is very user-friendly and the installation is fully customizable, meaning that you can install only those components that you really want.
- It has been very well tested, so that the package doesn't contain any conflicting codecs.
- It is a very complete package, containing everything you need to play your movies.

A new site, ChannelChooser.com, is going up the Alexa rankings and briefly broke into the Top 1000 sites. ChannelChooser a simple website where you just click on a channel, and start watching TV.

But it isn't perfect. First, who wants to watch TV on their computer? I suppose if the quality eventually gets good enough we could use channelchooser as a sort of virtual Tivo and start recording shows, and then playing them on our TV... but that seems to be a distant dream. Then, there is the selection. At first blush, it looks pretty good, with 70 channels to choose from. But look further. Where is MTV, HBO Movies ? I can't find it.

Channel Chooser is interesting, but at present limited to a relatively small audience. Get more channels, get high quality video and get plugins to work with Tivo, save shows and then we have something.

Jose Castillo has a great post on how to create Video podcasts. That's one sure way to get your business really closer to customers when you integrate it on your website or blog. Seeing how people look like is much more fun than reading a bunch of text.

Podcasting allows anyone to distribute free or paid media to the content hungry masses. With a few simple technology tools and a PC or Mac, you too can create a video podcast in 3 easy steps.

The most recent reinvention involves a marked upswing in the use of video-based podcasting. Video podcasting have been used by a cross-section of traditional and non-traditional media, from major TV networks, cable, and public television stations to software companies, movie studios, and intriguing upstarts like AskaANinja.com, Happy Tree Friends, and Channel Frederator.

Creating Video Podcasts source

MTV and Microsoft are lending plenty of big bucks to make sure they can catch the iTunes market.

MTV Networks, a division of Viacom International, and US software maker Microsoft have unveiled the public beta of Urge and the Windows Media Player 11 beta.

Windows Media Player 11 beta offers enhanced search and media management capabilities, a visually driven user interface and optimised portable music player support. MTV Networks and Microsoft collaborated on the development of Urge and Windows Media Player 11.

Microsoft and MTV iTunes Killer source

I've been seeing some recent rumors that Yahoo is in talks with Digg to be bought out for a rumored $30 billion. However, the rumors were denied by Kevin Rose in a recent blog post saying: So, just to set things straight - we are not in talks with Yahoo. We are focused on creating new features and expanding digg into new areas beyond tech. The recent reports about digg and Yahoo! are just rumors, nothing more.

Rumors point out that we could be seeing an announcement by both companies as early as next week. Of course, this could be blogs just stirring up trouble again. Nevertheless, if I were Kevin Rose, I'd sell out right now. I think it's the best place to find hot news relating to computers, science, and some other interesting IT stories.

Yahoo! recently bought Upcoming.org, Whereonearth, SearchFox, and Del.icio.us. They have a lot more other companies under their belt, but these all have to do with what is called "Web 2.0", a new wave of services that use AJAX to spice things up (usually). Yahoo! is clearly trying to buy all the new and innovative Web 2.0 companies; and that's great because Yahoo! can change them to make them even better. What we are seeing is Yahoo!'s true intent: rule RSS, rule the world with Google catching up on that too.

By YC from the Technocrat Soapbox,
Guest Blogger

Unless you had no contact with the civilized world this past week, you would have known that North America's largest Consumer Electronic Show, CES 2006, was held in Las Vegas. CES 2006 opened with a BANG on January 5th and ended with a whimper yesterday afternoon.

Just as CES 2006 wound down, another show started today, the 2006 Macworld Conference & Expo started at San Francisco.

To the legions of Apple Fans, Macworld is not just another technology exhibition; it is pilgrimage season to the 'Mecca' of the 'Apple way of life.'

By YC from the Technocrat Soapbox,
Guest Blogger

CES 2006 is here, in a tornado of new gadegts, portable media deivces, CPUs, ultra-humongous Flat Panel HDTVs, multi-functional phones, and enough hot-air from IT Big Shots to fill three hot-air balloons.

And if that's not enough excitement for one, the event is held in "Sin City" Las Vegas, where whatever happens there, stays incriminatingly scandalous.

In the excitement of all, it is difficult to know what to think of the annual Consumer Electronics "Mardi Gras." Bawdy Corporate Extravagance? Geek Woodstock? Or, High-Tech Haute Couture?

Thanks to an insightful CNN report, I suddenly had an epiphany. The following is my CES 2006 "Lessons Learned":

By YC from the Technocrat Soapbox,
Guest Blogger

The landscape for TV advertising is rapidly changing. And this is not just due to TiVo, RePlayTV, and DVRs (either home-brewed or provided by Satellite/Cable Companies), although they played a huge part in stunting the growth, it is actually the ever-changing ways humans absorb information that is killing the effectiveness of TV advertising. Some might argue that it's technology that affords us the plethora of choices, but that's getting into the Chicken-and-egg debate.

These days, chasing the heels of the hugely successful iPod Video and iTunes are Media Networks (e.g. ABC and NBC), offering their programs (e.g. Lost, The Office) for download at an affordable $1.99 per episode, COMMERCIAL FREE! Telecommunication providers like Sprint and Verizon have also joined the bandwagon, offering subscribers the ability to stream live TV Programs to their cellular phones. And then there is this new device called the SlingBox (from SlingMedia) that allows a user to watch his/her local TV programs anywhere in the world.

With so many new information and entertainment medium vying for consumer attention, what is left for conventional TV? Or TV commercials for that matter?