Wow! That’s Fast! April 1, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Technology , add a commentIBM last week at the 2007 Optical Fiber Conference showed off a prototype of a tiny optical chipset capable of moving data at 160 Gbps, making it possible to download a high-def movie in one second. The optical transceiver streams data over light pulses sent through plastic tubes. It’s eight times faster than existing optical technology, where data travels over electrons through copper wire at rates of 2.5 Gbytes to 5 Gbytes per second.
As the technology matures, it could find its way into the home, although that is probably 4-5 years off. A high-definition movie arriving over cable could be processed and stored in a second, using a set-top box with the optical transceiver; it takes at least 30 minutes with the fastest connections today. The technology could pave the way for devices that almost instantly transmit a digital X-ray to a doctor’s hand-held screen, a seismic analysis to an oil engineer’s workstation or movies around home networks.
Check it out at InformationWeek
New Jib Jab Video - The News March 29, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Weblog , add a commentI love Jib Jab — they make very funny videos that parody everyone from the President to Arnold Schwartzenegger. Check out the announcement on Tech Crunch:
JibJab, the creators of the famous 2004 U.S. presidential election parody cartoon “This Land” have a new original video out called “The News. The new video premiered tonight at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner. All of their original videos can be viewed here
. JibJab is slowly expanding from pure content creation to becoming a hub for humor-related video and other media. The company was founded by brothers Gregg and Evan Spiridellis and is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. JibJab raised a Series A round of funding from Jon Flint at Polaris Ventures in June.
Watch the video here.
Free Movie Downloads This Saturday! December 1, 2006
Posted by Steve in : Weblog, Movies , add a commentTip of the Hat to Tech Crunch, who gives us a timely headsup on some free movies downloads for the Christmas season this Saturday:
AOL Video has decided to spread some holiday cheer by giving away over 30 free movie downloads for one day only on Saturday.
Several of the titles are, appropriately, Christmas movies such as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and Jack Frost, but there will be some non-spirited ones available such as Spiderman 2 as well. The free offering begins at 6:00 a.m. Eastern Time and customers are limited to one movie per person, but not one per computer.
Normally, movie downloads from AOL Video are priced from $9.99 to $19.99 per title. We reviewed AOL Video in October and found it to be lacking in selection and high in price compared to the other movie downloading services. But on Saturday, we would argue that it will be one of the better ones. After all, who can argue with free?
