To celebrate Slacker’s updated Blackberry software, which brings support to the Verizon Storm, we’re giving away one year of Slacker Radio Plus. Like Pandora, Slacker offers free Internet music streaming to both desktop browser and mobile clients. However, a Radio Plus subscription ($3.99/mo) does away with all graphical and audio ads, plus it enables unlimited skipping and song requests. I’m a Slacker believer – their iPhone app replaced Pandora in my car once I discovered the uncensored comedy channel, in addition to all that music.

Entering this contest is as easy as it gets, simply leave a comment. (US residents only, please.) The Radio Plus service is good for any and all Slacker platforms. We’ll choose the winner at random in a few days.

While I’m not quite ready to speculate on Sling Media’s future retail presence and hardware initiatives, in light of recent defections, we do have a few clues as to their current mobile strategy.

SlingPlayer Mobile (SPM), which enables you to watch your home television programming on the go currently supports numerous devices, including many running Windows Mobile, PalmOS, and Symbian, for a $30 one time fee. Their Blackberry client is currently available as a public beta. Unfortunately, for some, only GSM handsets are supported at the moment. But I believe Sling will also get software running acceptably on the Storm. We also know Sling hopes to submit the frequently-requested iPhone app (above) to Apple for approval early this year (Q1). Of course, there’s no guarantee Apple will permit 3G streaming – they’ve been inconsistent in how they’ve handled other video apps – and we don’t yet know Sling’s pricing strategy given Apple’s hefty 30% cut.

So, what’s next for SlingPlayer Mobile? Megazone, who heads up some of Sling’s beta programs, recently provided a few clues on the Sling Community forum:

As has been pointed out, the actual development information hasn’t been released yet so it is premature to be talking about development. From what we have seen it looks like webOS is an all-new environment, so it would need an all-new SPM which would not be a small task. At this time we’re taking a wait and see approach to webOS. When it ships we’ll watch the adoption rate and decide if it warrants developing SPM for webOS or not. Keep in mind it has currently been announced for one device (the Pre) on one carrier (#3 and currently falling) so it remains to be seen if and when it appears on additional devices and carriers for the worldwide market and achieves a significant market share.

In the past Sling Media and Palm have worked closely. In fact, back in my Sling days I attended a few events with Palm and SPM was featured on their website. I understand the business case MZ is making, but it’s also critical to look ahead and predict a successful platform… and region. (ie: The dev cycles spent producing UIQ support probably hasn’t paid off.) While there’s no guarantee Palm will succeed with WebOS, they’ve got a ton of buzz, a ton of investment, and a positive track record in this space. If I were Sling, I’d be banging down Palm’s doors for an opportunity to collaborate. (more…)

TiVo programmer Ryan Rose has hacked his washing machine to send text message notifications over Twitter when his clothes are done. He did this for a practical reason, to prevent forgetting about his laundry which might sit in the damp washer and mildew. You can follow the washing machine’s activity on Twitter (412 people, including myself, already do) to be instantly informed when Mr. Rose’s laundry is done. Why would you want to? More on that later… Here’s video of “PiMPY” in action:

I’m a big fan of Activity Streams such as Twitter and FriendFeed. Once current user contributions across all the social web sites are freely distributed, with an emphasis on privacy, a new web era will arrive. My vision originates from Professor David Gelernter’s “Life Streams” as defined in his 1993 book Mirror Worlds: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox – How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.

Apparently I am not alone in my opinion that Activity Streams are the next big thing. Some of the most influential people in social media (MySpace, Google, Plaxo, Comcast, Nokia just to name a few) recently attended a DiSo meeting to discuss the future of how their user’s activity will be published. (Ian Kennedy, formerly of Yahoo and now head of Nokia’s Ovi service, kindly recorded the DiSo meeting using his phone.) One of the points discussed during the event was that activity streams are not just generated by people but that machines, like PiMPY, can also broadcast what they’re doing. Mr. Rose’s place of employment is noteworthy, and it got me thinking about the possibilities of machines with their own activity streams – particularly TiVo. (more…)

Leaving comments across the blogosphere…

Which HD video Web service is the best?
Still shots seem kind of irrelevant when talking video. But another good measure might be to test different source HD formats and see how these sites do reencoding them. Upload limits are also an important consideration. But possibly most important, to me anyway, when choosing a video site is trying to figure out who’s still going to be around in a year or 5 years. Cloud storage and sharing is great, as long as the company doesn’t shut their doors and take our content with them. Or pull some silly crap like Yahoo killing their original photo sharing site. Lastly, YouTube has become a pawn – takedown notices come in, your video is removed (or the audio track, or ads are embedded), and copyright@youtube.com won’t provide contact details of the claimant so you can determine what exactly infringes.

Build Your Own Amazon Kindle 2
Given the amount of books (or newspapers) I read, $350 or $400 is a bit much. However, including a better web browser or RSS reader would definitely get my attention. But I’m not sure they’d want to without also implementing a monthly data fee. I’d rather see an iPhone Kindle app, despite the small and bright screen, because it’s a device I already own and Amazon is offering great rates on digital editions of their books.

AT&T’s CV Leaves Me Feeling Lost
Is this AT&T licensing MobiTV or is this a separate initiative? The best mobile video is still serving yourself via a Slingbox or Hava placeshifter. Requires more tech skills to set up and may or may not be cheaper in the long run (if you already have a data plan, it probably is), but you get everything you already pay for (and hopefully record) at home. Regarding your quality concerns, MediaFLO service is probably the best subscription service. But it’s limited live channels and limited regions are a drawback.

Yahoo Mail Chases Gmail with IM and SMS Features
Another user of Yahoo Plus for $20 or $25/yr. NO ads in the interface or signature and BETTER spam filtering than the free account. Well worth it in my opinion, been paying for years. The only thing I really envy Gmail users for is IMAP. I dislike Gmail’s organization paradigm and prefer good, ole fashioned folders. And the UI doesn’t appeal to me. Although their new themes open possibilities. I’ve been using Yahoo Mail since like 1999, and that’s the biggest reason I probably wouldn’t change. But man do I need IMAP, Yahoo!

Opera Mini 4.2 for Android goes gold
The video thing is significant… since I thought the Android G1 shipped without a player! Wonder what files/codecs/enclosures it’s capable of handling. Hm.

4,000 Plugins
All the more reason for a tighter framework that somehow limits rogue or poorly coded plugins from impacting WordPress, the db, or the server. An early build of Disqus 2.0 duplicated 10,000+ comments in my database, for example. And that was unintentional. I’ve had other scripts that churn and churn, spawning processes that aren’t cleaned up, etc. Wonder what someone with an agenda could accomplish. Which is why I want things like Super Cache in the code, so I know it’s been tested and retested by lots of folks. Oh yeah, I love and depend on WordPress. So don’t take this the wrong way. Shoot, I’d happily pay for it if you charged.

For those of you still not satisfied with the current crop of movie recommendation services, you’ll soon have another option available to you. Jinni’s new interactive movie rating website is trying to do for movies, what Pandora has done for music. Although the site doesn’t stream any of the films that they recommend, but provides convenient links to places where you can find the films online (Netflix, Blockbuster, Hulu, etc.) Apparently, the company has been live for a few months now, but I just discovered them after catching a review of the service on Read Write Web. Last week, I signed up for the private Jinni beta and have been pretty impressed so far.

Jinni includes reviews, photos and even trailers for each film in their database, but their movie filtering software is the real bread and butter. Most of the content you’ll find on their movie description pages is pretty much available on any of the other movie sites, but their “movie genome” information is exclusive. Through a process of human and computer intervention, they’ve categorized every film in their library using information from the movie’s plot, mood, genre, time period, critic reviews, story type, and attitudes. Viewers are then able to filter their search results by using these definitions. (more…)

An interesting bit of news from the doom9 forums. As anyone who is testing the Windows 7 beta has discovered, and as the above screengrab shows, Microsoft is breaking with tradition and including more codec support in the upcoming Windows bundle. Previous Windows versions did not even include MPEG-2 decoding, which proved to be quite mystifying to many users trying to watch a DVD in their computers for the first time. And, needless to say, Microsoft stayed far away from any of the more esoteric codecs, including the key MPEG-4 ASP implementations such as DivX and Xvid. However, the beta of Windows 7 includes the ability to play back DivX, and Xvid, and even the next generation MPEG-4 AVC, better known as h.264. More intriguing is news that Microsoft may be working on an implementation of the Matroska container (MKV) for Windows7. Why is all of this important? Read the rest of this entry »

Leaving comments across the blogosphere…

Senate OKs DTV Delay, Still Needs Money for Coupons
While I don’t favor a delay and have said repeatedly the entire transition has been a cluster on multiple levels, local affiliates being permitted to flip the switch prior to to June 12th might make things even more chaotic. I’m sure maintaining simulcasts incurs expenses of one form or another. And some stations will drop NTSC broadcasts. But others won’t. So the folks who have no clue what’s coming will now be even more confused when some stations come in and others don’t.

Back to the proposals, I think it’s likely we’ll see a movement to recycle vouchers quicker than the current 90 days – the program really isn’t out of money, but rather the funds are spoken for with cards that may never be redeemed. Heck, I was sent two cards. One went to Best Buy (to get a converter for my mom’s kitchen television), and the other went into the trash. And this latest proposal allows folks to reapply for coupons if theirs have expired.

Pandora adds ads, while Slacker gets a facelift
For more parity, it’s worth mentioning that the free tier of Slacker radio on the iPhone serves periodic audio ads as well. I believe after every fifth song. But I love my Slacker, and recently discovered they even stream uncensored comedy. If they could get a CNN Headline News and/or ESPN Radio stream going, they’d pretty much kill satellite radio for good.

Palm Responds to Apple iPhone Patent Warnings
Wow, that Palm III pencil drawing is nice – very artistic and detailed. I mean look at the ridges on the stylus. The current crop of patent filers must employ lazier artists or maybe the engineers are responsible.

Back to the Pre, prior to Palm’s big reveal I was not-so-secretly hoping they’d reintroduce the Palm V form factor. Man, I loved that device. I used it on business travel with a dialup modem accessory to read email and access a server. So slim and sexy (when the modem wasn’t attached), and the OS was always quite sprightly.

Tallying the Numbers: Web Video Rivaled TV for Inauguration Views
I think you may be on to something with web video page reloads during stalled streaming. Also, the same people could be visiting multiple sites. In fact, I checked out ABC, Hulu (Fox), and CBS for a few minutes each… Yet had the television on CNN HD for hours. (CNN.com keeps wanting me to upgrade my Flash player to the buggy v10. Ain’t going to happen. In fact, most of my online news is now coming from MSNBC.com.)

Road warrior’s delight- Adapt MPJ-101 pico projector
I’ve seen the 3M and Optoma pico projectors in person, and the licensed WowWee one as well. They pretty much universally suck. It makes a great proof of concept and is a neat trick, but until the projected image is larger and the lumens are much higher there’s very little practical use for these things.

SugarSync Adds Shared Folders to Cloud Service
Wonder how much of this is available on the Mac. Seems like the SugarSync OS X client software has trailed the Windows version. Since migrating to the 13″ MacBook a month or so ago, I haven’t reinstalled the software (I have an annual subscription). Maybe it’s time for another look. One of the things that irked me was if I make changes in iPhoto, like merging events, they aren’t reflected within my online albums. I was kinda hoping SugarSync would replace MobileMe galleries… in addition to Mozy and Dropbox.