Entries Tagged 'tech' ↓

One company that I’ve been tracking for the last little while is D-BOX Technologies. They’ve designed a system, in which your can watch a movie, and your seat will move along with it, giving a more realistic element to the movie. I assume that this would be similar to something like you would experience at a theme park, without Spongebob jumping out of the screen are you.

The D-BOX™ Integrated Motion System (IMS) is the next dimension of your cinematic experience. Taking you into the movie, you actually feel the rush of flight, the bumps in the road, the pulse of ocean swells on the shore – all of the on-screen action is brought to you as never before.

By the sounds of this, it is looking like it is going to be a very promising technology in the future. Several hundred movies are already set up to use this system. The technology itself is very adaptable because the cues are programmed directly on to the DVD itself.

Their stock has also been doing very well.

Although it is a very speculative stock right now, it is looking very promising. It all depends on the management’s ability to sell this technology and if they will be able to make the right deals with the right people.

Not likely. However, there have been rumours lately that Microsoft is going to release a portable media player. In my opinion, they do not have the marketing abilities to sqaush the iPod.

As Leo Laporte mentioned on his KFI Podcast, no company stays on top forever. This may be true for Apple, but I don’t think that Microsoft is going to lead to their demise. Microsoft has never made anything trendy. It has never been “cool” to own Windows. Apple has managed to successfully market a product to 95% of the market. This isn’t going to happen for Microsoft.

The question is, who is going to be the demise of Apple?

Vlogging, or video-blogging has been growing recently. With these new trends, come a few “vlogs” that are quite popular. One of the most popular vlogs is a show called Rocketboom. Rocketboom is a daily news show that used to feature Amanda Congdon.

Amanda Congdon was recently fired as the anchor for Rocketboom as she announced she was planning on moving to L.A. Rocketboom’s producer, Andrew Baron, was not very supportive of Amanda’s decision to pursue other things. She had planned on doing Rocketboom from L.A.Andrew Baron has often been portrayed in the tech-world as someone who isn’t easy to get along with. Amanda Congdon expresses her frustration with Andrew on her personal blog at http://amandaunboomed.blogspot.com

With the recent news of Amanda no longer being on Rocketboom, many rumours have been floating around about who is going to replace Amanda. Rumour has it that Joanne Colan is going to be replacing Amanda Congdon as of Monday, July 10, 2006.

I used to watch Rocketboom on and off a couple of months ago. It made it very enjoyable to watch, having such an interesting personality as the anchor. It will be interesting to see how the new anchor turns out.

Net neutrality has recently been a hot topic in the tech world, not so much in Canada, but very prominently in the United States. For a working definition of what Net Neutrality actually is, you may want to check out the Wikipedia entry.

Recently a bill to promote Net Neutrality was put forth into Congress in the United States. However, this bill was turned down. You may get a good idea of how and why it was turned down by listening to the mp3 file linked below. It was probably because of the wonderful working definition of Net Neutrality given by Senator Ted Stevens.

Click here to listen to Ted Stevens explaining Net Neutrality

I personally have not had any problems in Canada. Regardless of what Leo Laporte says, I have not heard of any issues in Canada with regards to VoIP and ISP competition. I am currently using Rogers High-Speed Extreme internet. This gives me 6mbps down and 800kbps up. There have been rumours that Rogers throttles BitTorrent traffic. I was not able to get a confirmation of this over the phone, considering all of the PR representatives at Rogers though that BitTorrent was used for ringtones. However, due to regulations in Canada, Rogers does not throttle bandwidth on port 1720 because this is the port commonly used by VoIP providers. I now use BitTorrent on port 1720. I am told I get 6mbps down, and I usually get about 5800kbps. This is very acceptable.

I am slightly worried that in the future Rogers may start throttling ports that VoIP providers use. This may come shortly after Rogers introduces their own VoIP service. As someone that is seriously considering purchasing a service such as Vonage VoIP in the future, this concerns me greatly. I am going to be watching this issue dilligenty. I know a couple of people that have Vonge with Rogers High-Speed Extreme and they have noticed some discrepencies with the quality. It is not all of the time, but it happens quite frequently. Considering the bandwidth Vonage requires compared with the bandwidth readily available from Rogers, this should not be an issue.

This issue is becoming more and more prominent every day.

Yesterday I was listening to Leo Laporte the Tech Guy on KFI and he recommended a music recommendation engine called Pandora to a caller. Over the past year or so I have heard different things about this website, but I had never actually tried it.

In the spirit of trying something new, I signed up for an account from Pandora. I was absoloutely blown away by the quality of this service. A few things draw me to it:

• It’s absoloutely free
• The music is of a very high quality
• It recommends very good music

This engine is very sophisticated. The idea is similar to Yahoo Music’s LaunchCast, but it is much more complex. Initially, you tell it a couple of songs you like, and it recommends songs from there. It takes into account things such as vocals, instruments, major and minor keys, melodies, harmonies, etc.

I told Pandora a couple of songs I like, and out of the next 10 songs it chose, I really liked 9 of them. Most of these were songs that I had never heard of. If you like a song, it also gives you the option to purchase the song on iTunes or Amazon. I think this is a brilliant way to market music online.

I really suggest that you try this service. It can be found at http://www.pandora.com