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A news item is circulating the internet reportedly from German business weekly Wirtschaftswoche claiming Amazon is facing a major hurdle in trying to bring its Kindle to Deutschlan. The problem at hand? The two big wireless providers in the country, Vodafone and T-Mobile, are both saying "nein" to providing Whispernet service, and apparently the issue has to do with how much money Amazon was willing to give -- unsurprising, if true. Another, very likely reason for T-Mobile's unwillingness is that parent company Deutsche Telekom is rumored to be working on its own e-book reader, and we gotta believe those company picnics would be mighty awkward if a large subsidiary was given the competition a major boost. We can't imagine this stopping Amazon for long, and we'd be very surprised if the Kindle didn't find some way to sneak itself into the region sooner or later.

Filed under: Handhelds, Wireless

Kindle's German launch stalled by T-Mobile and Vodafone? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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StudioGPU replaces computer animation render farms with $5,000 PC — I’ve seen the demo with my own unbelieving eyes. A single graphics accelerator card on a standard Intel-powered PC can now render in seconds what used to take a roomful of servers all day. Hollywood-based StudioGPU, a privately-funded startup, has released MachStudio Pro, a software tool that lets computer animators design and render scenes nearly in real-time. StudioGPU’s demo setup fits on a restaurant table and leaves room for dessert, yet a StudioGPU employee showed me how he could modify the lighting and other parameters on the same demo video found on the company’s homepage, with no visibile delay between tweaking the knob and, say, watching the room brighten enough to see one character’s face in the complicated lighting shown here.

CNN “source” in Tehran turns out to be some guy on Twitter – An editor at Gawker found that quotes attributed to a “source,” which was made to read like some reporter’s traditional personal contact on the ground in Tehran, were actually pulled off Twitter. A CNN spokesman called it a regrettable mistake.

Michael Jackson traffic charts continue to amaze — Hitwise has plotted traffic to TMZ and news sites on last week’s saddest day for pop culture. Jacko, as music journalists noted over the years, always hoped for a hit even bigger than Thriller. Last Thursday, he got it.

 

Facebook modeling competition saves young women from moving to Los Angeles only to be tragically disappointed – Sonnet Models is a newly-launched British startup whose announced plan is to create a Facebook-based modeling agency. “For example,” Sonnet’s launch announcement says, “a scout from an LA-based agency may be looking for new face to meet a client’s request - a female who is at least 5′11″, aged 16-18, living in California and considered beautiful and elegant by men aged 25-35, living in New York, who are interested in technology and fashion. This may seem like an impossible task.” Actually, it sounds like a great idea for a dating service. The company is kicking off by hosting a modeling contest that promises an introduction to the upper end of the industry for a few winners. 

Joost, the failed YouTube rival, replaces CEO – Mike Volpi (pictured) is out, and former SVP of engineering Matt Zelesko has taken his place. AllThingsD reports that Joost has abandoned its plans to become a YouTube-like video portal, and will instead focus on selling a white label video hosting service. For many employees, this will be a job for which they didn’t sign up. The video shakeout is here.

Palm Pre sales fall short of iPhone-Killer status – Barrons reports that Palm sold an estimated 300,000 Pres in June. Does that sound like a lot? Apple sold a million iPhone 3G S superphones in one weekend.

 

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Lawyer Raymond Niro, for whom the term "patent troll" was apparently first coined, has been known to use the fact that he represents a company called Global Patent Holdings (GPH) to his advantage. GPH owns patent 5,253,341, but looking at it there won't do much good. You see, Niro and others claimed that the patent covered pretty much anyone running a web server, leading to quite a few legal battles, including one against a guy, Greg Aharonian, who called it a "bad patent." For claiming that, he got sued for patent infringement. In fighting the patent, it was re-examined, and all 16 of its claims were rejected... but a 17th claim was added and allowed to stand.

Since then the patent has been asserted against a wide range of organizations, including some resort in Florida and the Green Bay Packers. Niro appears to claim that any site using a JPEG image violates the patent. Not only that, but in cases where the patent has been asserted, Niro has been known to go for something of a sympathy play, by noting that the inventors (or the widow of one inventor) named on the patent are "old and feeble" (yes, they called them feeble) and made almost no money in 2006 (even though the filing was in 2008 -- some noted that their 2007 income was conveniently left out).

With so many cases involving this patent underway, the USPTO agreed to re-examine the one claim (claim 17). And, with that re-exam going on, a judge on one of the cases put the case on hold until the re-exam is done. While GPH protested, claiming that the patent had already been re-examined (and that the re-exam process took too long), the judge pointed out that there's only one claim left (so it should be faster) and that this particular claim had never been re-examined, since it was added during the last re-exam.

Last summer, the USPTO gave an initial (non-final) rejection of the patent, in rather strong language. Not surprisingly, GPH/Niro have pushed back, but in early June the USPTO appears to have smacked down the patent all over again in this rather lengthy ruling, which you can see below: 90008972 The smackdown here is rather complete. On top of reaffirming the 19 reasons for rejecting the remaining claim, the examiner added more reasons to reject it for being obvious and anticipated by other inventions. Also, it appears that GPH/Niro tried to do something similar to last time, in that they also submitted some new claims to be added (claims 18 - 21), but the examiner smacked those down as well, as attempts to "broaden the scope" of the patent. On top of that, the rejects scolds GPH/Niro for mischaracterizing what the patent office has said and even using a "biased" expert witness with "flip-flopping declarations."

This is, still, a non-final rejections, but it doesn't look like GPH/Niro has been able to make up any ground at all on this particular fight, and, in fact, seems to be getting pushed further and further back with each try. This particular patent expires in March of 2011 anyway, so unless Niro is able to pull a proverbial rabbit out of the hat to convince the USPTO that this patent is vaild, it's not looking very good.

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The FDA is poised to ban the popular painkillers Vicodin and Percocet forever!

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Last week Sony killed Moneyball, the Steven Soderbergh-directed $58-million baseball film starring Brad Pitt based on Michael Lewis' book about former Oakland A's GM Billy Beane, just five days...

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Gamasutra has an interesting article about how the push toward realistic graphics and extremely lifelike characters in modern games is making the term "murder simulator" — once laughed off for referring to pixelated dying Nazis — a concept to take more seriously. The author is careful to simply explore the issue, and not come to a specific conclusion; he doesn't say that we should or shouldn't prevent it from happening, only that it's worth consideration. (One section is even titled "Forget the kids," saying that decisions for what children play fall under parental responsibility.) Quoting: "We should start rethinking these issues now before we all slide down the slope together and can't pull ourselves back up again. Or, even worse, before governments step in and dictate what can and can't be depicted or simulated in video games via legislation. ... Obviously, what makes an acceptable game play experience for each player is a personal choice that should be judged on a person-by-person basis (or on a parent to child basis), and I believe it should stay that way. As for me, I'm already drawing the line at BioShock — I can barely stomach the game as it is. Sure, I could play it more and desensitize myself, but I don't want to. And that's just me. It's up to you and a million other adult gamers to decide what's best for yourselves and to draw the line on virtual violence where you feel most comfortable."

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We've been nothing if not comprehensive in our coverage of this new Pentax shooter, and early reviews are showing why. Photography Blog praised the K-7 for its weatherproofing and for having "one of the best LCD screens" they've ever seen on a DSLR, while ePHOTOzine were impressed by the image quality and Wired found the package of features and specs exceedingly robust given the $1,300 asking price. Some shortcomings were found, such as the slightly unintuitive interface and noise levels at higher ISO settings, but impressions were overwhelmingly positive. If you've been looking for a solid alternative to Canon's 50D or Nikon's D300, check out all the thoroughly detailed analysis in the read links below.

Read - Photography Blog
Read - Wired
Read - ePHOTOzine

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Pentax K-7 review roundup originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mnemosyne's $10,000, 16GB USB drive is housed inside a puzzle that must be solved to physically get to the memory within. Apparently simple encryption is just too middle-class for anybody rich enough...

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It doesn't do 3D and it doesn't curve all around your periphery, but Alienware's OptX AW2210 does a decent number for its just barely sub-$300 price tag. The 21.5-inch widescreen LCD panel boasts 1080p resolution, two millisecond response time, 16.7 million colors, and an 80,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio. Throw in two HDMI and four USB ports -- sorry, no VGA or DVI here -- and you've got yourself a pretty nice option. The screen's on sale now via Alienware direct.

Filed under: Displays

Alienware's 1080p 21.5-inch OptX AW2210 priced for maximum street fighting originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yet another data point to suggest the predicted "death of journalism" that we keep hearing from the old school newspaper guys is a bit overblown, online news publisher Talking Points Memo has just announced that it's hiring seven new editorial staff. No, of course that doesn't replace all of the jobs lost at newspapers, but it does suggest that online news organizations are figuring out ways to make money and to grow.

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From the vaults of Brando comes this retro glowing vacuum tube that's actually a little USB sound card. It's got both audio in and out, and could actually be kind of useful in certain situations. I...

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The rumor we reported earlier today about Gannett Newspapers laying off thousands was true. According to the Wall Street Journal, Gannett plans to cut between 1000 and 2000 jobs in the coming days....

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James Kendrick / jkOnTheRun:
Skype 1.1 for iPhone Released- SMS but Don't Push  —  The Skype people are busy, as they have released version 1.1 for the iPhone in addition to the WinMo version we covered earlier.  This new version adds the ability to check Skype voice mail and to send SMS messages, but it lacks a highly desirable feature: push notification.

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	Firefox 3.5 arrives Mozilla is saying its new browser is more than two times faster than Firefox 3, but what has us more excited is the support for plugin-free "open codec" video and audio playback		Wii MotionPlus impressions: it works, but so far the games aren't worth the fuss At first glance it's a little difficult to understand the necessity of another motion-sensing add-on.
	Pirate Bay acquired by Global Gaming Factory, going legit like Napster We'll have to wait and see how this pans out but it certainly smacks of a Napster v2 like situation at first blush.	Other news of import Verizon's BlackBerry Tour coming July 12th, pre-order page now live Microsoft outs educational, inspirational Windows 7 tour videos NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a "top five" manufacturer before 2010? Sony placing PS3 slim manufacturing orders for delivery in July?
	Top ten rationales for illegally downloading HDTV shows We're not saying we've ever downloaded anything off the internet that wasn't 100% on the up and up, or that we're here to judge those who have.		Video: Palm Pre caught playing with GSM SIM in Vietnam Having the Palm Pre on Sprint might be good for Americans driving their pick 'em up trucks down the CDMA data highway, but it doesn't do Europeans (or Palm's bottom line) any good over in the Old World.
2009 British Open broadcast confirmed in standard def on TNT & ABC Oppo BDP-83 pre-orders now open for all (in North America)		Nokia N97 getting firmware 1.1 on July 1 BlackBerry Tour emerges in Alltel livery for those non-Sprint, non-Verizon types

The Daily Roundup: here's what you might've missed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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1sockchuck writes "Yahoo has come up with a data center design called the Yahoo Computing Coop, which it says will make its new data center in Lockport, NY one of the most efficient on earth. The design features 120-foot by 60-foot metal prefabricated facilities with louvers on the side to support free cooling, and a peaked roof to manage the release of waste heat from the hot aisle. Chief Yahoo David Filo said the name was adopted 'because it looks like something chickens live in.' The $150 million data center in Western New York, which was announced earlier today, will run on cheap hydro power from the Niagara River."

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