December 05, 2005, 2:01 PM PST
Cingular launches push-to-talk service
Posted by: Kent German

Cingular today formally announced its new push-to-talk (PTT) service, the first such network for a major GSM carrier. The nationwide service will offer such features as group calling for up to 20 contacts, voice messaging, call waiting, and special Call Me alerts that tell contacts you urgently need to chat. Users will also be able to convert a PTT call to a regular call without disconnecting.

Cingular's first two phones to support PTT are the LG F7200 and the Samsung SGH-D357. The F7200 ($69.99 with service) offers a slider design with text and multimedia messaging, a speakerphone, voice dialing, polyphonic ring tones, instant messaging, a wireless Web browser, and support for Java (J2ME). The SGH-D357 ($99.99 with service) comes with a more varied feature set, including Bluetooth, voice commands and dialing, MP3 ring tones, and POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail support. Neither phone has a camera, which means Cingular will be pushing these phones to a business audience. Business and individual customers can use the new PTT service for an extra $9.99 a month per phone line, while family-plan subscribers will need to shell out an extra $19.99 a month for unlimited PTT use for up to five people. In the future, Cingular says it will add more PTT phones and take its new service international.

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December 05, 2005, 1:57 PM PST
New Orleans's citywide Wi-Fi makes BellSouth crazy evil
Posted by: Molly Wood

New Orleans will deploy a free municipal Wi-Fi network to help jump-start economic recovery post-Katrina. But that interferes with BellSouth's plan to profit from said recovery, so the ISP has huffily withdrawn plans to donate a building to the city police department. Insert dropped jaw here.

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December 05, 2005, 1:53 PM PST
The Razr's edge
Posted by: Kent German

Well, the Verizon Wireless Razr is finally here. After months of speculation, countless false starts, and repeated denials by Verizon that the company even had it (as if), the much-anticipated Motorola Razr V3c is now on sale. As the first Razr for a CDMA network, it offers some significant feature improvements upon the original Razr V3 for Cingular, including support for Verizon's 3G network, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and an MP3 player. We'll have to wait and see, however, just what you can do with the Bluetooth. According to Verizon, you can purchase the phone on Verizon's Web site starting Dec. 6, but if you want to pick it up from a Verizon store, you'll have to wait until December 12. The initial price is $199 after a $100 rebate and a two-year contract. And don't worry, Sprint customers, you can get your own Razr-like phone with the Samsung MM-A900.

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December 05, 2005, 11:48 AM PST
Totally tubular speakers, dude!
Posted by: James Kim

ThinkOutside, creators of the Stowaway portable keyboard, will be launching a set of portable speakers on December 15. The $200 BoomTube is a spiffy-looking set of speakers made of aluminum and shaped like a tube. Two satellite speakers unscrew from either side of the tube, which contains the subwoofer and the inputs and outputs. Designed to be used with MP3 players, laptops, and gaming devices, the BoomTube backs up style with substance: an impressive 40 watts of clean and bright sound, though the bass is lacking true thump. Though we are disappointed with the rechargeable battery's life of just four hours, the BoomTube is a nice choice for daytrippers who want to combine nice sound from a pretty package. If the BoomTube sounds or looks familiar, it's based on a design from the now-defunct Virgin Electronics. Supposedly, the current BoomTube has been improved in a redesign.

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December 05, 2005, 10:10 AM PST
Do you know what's being said about you?
Posted by: Dorian Benkoil

I've come across a number of small businesses asking how to find out what's being said about their businesses and how to track any mentions of them in the press or elsewhere. I'd like to take it a step further to consider another possibility for using Web technologies to enhance one's business.

First, the easy stuff. Previously, we mentioned some ways to track whether someone is blogging about you by using tools such as Technorati, PubSub, IceRocket, and Feedster. We also mentioned e-mail alerts from Google and Yahoo.

Now, I've come across term extraction in the Yahoo developers' area. It's a little bit geeky, and you or your Webmaster/CTO have to know what you're doing with Web code, but used well, it can help you find out what's up about your business, your community, your competitors, and whatever topic areas you can think of.

The hardest part, other than the coding, is deciding what terms to extract and what phrases to put in. Term extraction basically allows you to specify a specific word or phrase and put that in a specific format you can read; it gives you the link and even, as is noted in this post, matches it to other feeds or information.

You can do this for yourself or share it with users/customers. If you're, for example, a health food restaurant, wouldn't it be great to know the latest developments in organic foods and have people come to your Web site to get them? (And while they're there, you can perhaps sell them a meal or whatever else you sell.) What if you're a dealer in specialized antiques? The possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping you'll log on to the comments area of this blog and give us some of your best techniques for finding out what's being said about you and yours and how to accomplish what once required a clipping service or a publicist.

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December 05, 2005, 10:06 AM PST
RSS comes to Yahoo! Mail beta
Posted by: Allen Fear

The growing popularity of RSS seems to know no bounds. Not long ago if you wanted to get RSS feeds onto your desktop, you had to install a separate program or plug-in, otherwise known as a news aggregator, such as Pluck or FeedDemon. Today RSS is being built directly into browsers such as Firefox and Safari, and signs now indicate that RSS will soon be a standard feature of Web-based e-mail offerings. Last week Yahoo! announced that it was building RSS into its new AJAX based Yahoo! Mail beta. The new service lets you work with syndicated news stories just like you would a standard e-mail message. The feeds arrive in a separate folder from your Inbox, but you can open and forward the individual news items as if they were standard e-mail messages.

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December 05, 2005, 9:30 AM PST
Dear Sony, you are not cool
Posted by: Molly Wood

Sony: "Hip marketing ideas. Oh, I saw on TV once that graffiti is cool! Let's spray-paint the sides of buildings to promote the cutting-edge awesomeness of the PSP! Perfect! Those urban MTV kids will love it!" Wow. Were they even surprised when that stuff got painted over?

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December 05, 2005, 9:16 AM PST
TiVo To Go for Macs by 2006
Posted by: Molly Wood

You know how TiVo To Go now lets you transfer your saved television shows to your iPod? Yeah, that's pretty much the only Apple device it's compatible with. However, per Engadget today, Mac integration is coming by mid-2006. But will it beat Apple's own DVR to market? Ah, rumor mill.

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