The Powerline AV+ comes in a kit that includes one three-port adapter and one single-port adapter with a estimated price tag of $180.

Belkin's Powerline AV+ offers three network ports instead of one.

This story has been updated. Other vendors, such as Netgear or Slingmedia also, offer multiple-port PowerLine adapters.

I remember Belkin was the first vendor who sent us a Pre-N router, the Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router way back in 2004. Ever since, it hasn’t been the most prolific vendor in wireless networking in comparison with D-Link, Linksys, or Netgear.

On the other hand, it’s very clear that Belkin’s new line of powerline networking adapters offers some interesting features. The Powerline AV+ has three network ports (instead of one like most others I’ve seen) enabling you to use up to three devices with it at a time without having to get a switch. Belkin claims that the new adapter is capable of delivering throughput speed up to 200Mbps (twice that of a regular wired connection), which is more than you need to stream HD media contents.

According to Belkin’s Web site, the new router will have network storage capability, similar to that of the Linksys WRT610n, where you can attach a USB external hard drive to the router and make the storage available to every computer in the network. It also has other standard features for high-end routers including: Wi-Fi Protected Setup, Draft N 2.0 compliance, Gigabite Ethernet, and so on. It’s unclear whether or not the product will support dual-band, working in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies spontaneously. The new router is slated to cost $120.

However, I’ve learned recently that in October Belkin is releasing a few new networking products, including the all new Belkin N+ Wireless Router and the Powerline AV+.

Poetic Kinetics’ Wi-Fi flowers

Brightly colored by day and lit up with LEDs at night, the flowers have been on tour around the country for several weeks. According to John Lisko, the executive communications director for Saatchi & Saatchi, Toyota’s ad agency on the project, the flowers have gone through Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and will shortly be departing for Los Angeles.

Inspired, at least in part, by a set of giant, mobile flowers Shearn built for Burning Man in 2005 and 2006, Toyota commissioned the project to reflect the theme of the new Prius: Harmony between man, nature, and machine.

SAN FRANCISCO–A pair of Los Angeles artists have teamed up with Toyota on an unusually functional art project: a set of large, colorful flowers that have been providing free Wi-Fi and power outlets in public places around the country.

Designed for Burning Man 2005 and 2006, these two art cars, a flower and a venus fly trap, were among the most popular pieces at Burning Man.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Currently on display in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens, the flowers–the creation of a company called Poetic Kinetics and its principals, Patrick Shearn and Cynthia Washburn–are part of a campaign for Toyota’s newest generation Prius.

(Credit:
Poetic Kinetics)

The Wi-Fi flowers are lit up at night.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

For now, the project is no more than temporary art. But Lisko said that Toyota is “thinking through” the possibility of providing permanent versions, particularly because, he said, the public feedback has been so strongly positive.

Kodachrome makes up less than 1 percent of Kodak’s total sales for still film, according to the company. Digital cameras are obviously the main culprit contributing to Kodachrome’s demise, but photographers are also using newer kinds of color film that are easier to process. Only one photofinishing lab in the world still processes Kodachrome–Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kan.

Photos: Saying goodbye to Kodachrome

Kodak is donating its last rolls of Kodachrome to the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. One of these last rolls will be shot by McCurry, with the photos donated to the museum. Dwayne’s Photo said it will continue to process any leftover Kodachrome until 2010.

First we said good-bye to Polaroid, now it’s Kodachrome. What’s a film sentimentalist to do? After 74 years of making the color film used by many of photography’s greats, Kodak announced Monday that it’s ending Kodachrome’s production.

Even though Kodachrome is largely known as still film, it has also been made for movie formats, including 16mm. In the past three years, Kodak has come out with several new professional still films and motion picture films.

Photographers like Kodachrome for its warm colors and fine grain, which are perfect for shooting portraits. The famous portrait of the Afghan refugee girl with the bright green eyes that graced the cover of National Geographic in 1985 was taken with Kodachrome film by Steve McCurry. But even McCurry has moved onto digital and other still film.

It is for former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble. A couple weeks back he said on his blog that a new Microsoft technology made him cry. He didn’t give many details, citing a confidentiality agreement, but he provided enough there for folks to connect the dots.

My new boss, Dan Farber, correctly predicted that it was an updated version of the WorldWide Telescope program, a fact later confirmed by TechCrunch.

Microsoft researcher Curtis Wong showed an early version of the telescope software at last year’s TechFest, Microsoft’s internal science fair. Sources tell me that Microsoft’s desktop software is far more immersive than what was shown at last year’s TechFest or than the sky feature in Google Earth. In particular, the software will let you get extremely close to celestial objects, enough so that the software might be useful not just to armchair astronauts, but also to serious researchers.

The technology features tens of millions of digital images from sources like the Hubble telescope as well as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project championed by missing Microsoft researcher Jim Gray.

Attendees of the posh TED conference will get to see the new Microsoft software next week, while the company also plans to show it at TechFest, the internal science fair that takes place the following week.

I’ll be traveling to Redmond for the event, but I’m going to take a risk and leave my hankies at home.

I’ll give you a hint. The three acronyms by which cloud fare is usually categorized all end in three letters: “aaS,” short for “as a Service”.

Service is the name of the game in cloud computing. It is at the heart of why end users can worry less knowing that their providers are doing most of the worrying for them. Treating customers right is a differentiator; in fact, it is probably the most critical differentiator in the relatively crowded Infrastructure as a Service market.

Yet, I have long observed that customer service is an afterthought in the design of cloud-related hardware, management software and even many online services. So much emphasis is put on functionality and “self-service”–in the mechanics of provisioning and elasticity–that often some basic support for customer care is left wanting.

I’m not so much talking about the “premium support” services offered by the likes of Amazon and most of the so-called “cloudcenters.” There is a reason that they cost money; if someone is going to spend time on your case, they have to be compensated, which means the vendor has the right to charge you for the service. This is not a diatribe against for-fee support services.

However, I know of no cloud platform vendors that have built customer service into their platforms. In my mind’s eye, it should be simple for the average Joe to:

collect data when a problem occurs
report the problem with a click of a button
have a “self-service” case created with fields where customers can track the progress they are making against issue resolution–and which can be “mined” by the vendor’s support organization to discover trending bugs, etc.
search documentation for workarounds or solutions without having to jump through hoops
have the option to jump to a chat session or forum where he or she might get some help
have the option to select a one-time premium support option if a case warrants it

Now, I’ve been in the enterprise software business long enough to know that making support profitable–or even sustainable–is more complicated than it sounds. But how hard would it be to give customers a clear sign that their issues are of concern to the vendor, whether or not they are a premium support customer?

I think the first cloud infrastructure vendor that puts a big effort into treating the end-user right through software will have a tremendous advantage in both enterprise and service provider settings. Integration with Remedy for that “self-service” case creation and tracking, for instance.

What do you think? Is there a need for customer service to be built into your cloud-computing platform? What features would you like to see?

(Credit:
findthelostring.com)

As I predicted Sunday night, the Web site for a new alternate-reality game that seems to be tied to the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing went live Monday.

The game, known as Find the Lost Ring, is built around a story line in which a young woman named Ariadne says she woke up on February 12 in a South African corn maze with amnesia and knows nothing about who she is or where she comes from.

The game’s conceit will be to have players help Ariadne find her identity through a complex series of online and, most likely, real-world clues and puzzles. Somehow, it will all be tied in to the Olympics. One clue on the game’s site says she offers up the “fact” that, after waking up, she spent a week in the hospital being treated for her very rare form of amnesia and that doctors there “say I’m an Olympic-caliber athlete.”

To me, it’s all very Bourne Identity-ish, except probably without a lot of gun play and CIA involvement.

For the full list of clues that launched the game, see my blog entry from Sunday night, which includes photos and the text of the initial clues.

The Open Source Initiative just announced the results of its 2008 board elections. The good news? I’m out. (I wasn’t able to give the amount of time needed by the OSI–the OSI is a lot of work.)

The better news? Some fantastic new faces are in, namely Martin Michlmayr (Linux International, Debian, HP) and Harshad Gune (GNUify Conference, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India).

I’m really happy to welcome Martin and Harshad to the OSI board, and to see the others remain (Danese, Michael, Russ, Ken, Alolita, Nnenna, Rishab, and Bruno). It’s an excellent group of people, one well qualified to uphold the ideals of open source.

According to the release, “Just over 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs. Fewer still have Chief Bloggers, and Kodak is among the first to name a female Chief Blogger.” Wow. I had thought that writing, customer service, and public relations jobs were chock full ‘o women, but now I discover that Chief Blogger was a job title heretofore out of my chromosomal reach. So much more rewarding than CTO or CFO.

Now, there are lots of corporate blogs and bloggers out there (can I officially coin the terms “clog” and “clogger”?), some of whom I even read, like Adobe’s John Nack. But really, once you’ve appointed an official blogging overlord and publicly announce it just to impress Wall Street analysts, blogs take on all the glamour and interest of CRM.

In February 2009, TV broadcasters will vacate wireless spectrum used to broadcast analog TV signals. Instead, broadcasters will transmit digital TV signals, which use spectrum more efficiently and provide better picture quality. The transition to digital means that some older TVs, and TVs with analog-only tuners, will have to be retrofitted to tune into digital signals.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) report issued Tuesday said about 91 percent of the 1,122 full-power TV stations that answered their survey said they were already broadcasting a digital TV signal.

“Broadcast stations have made substantial progress in transitioning to DTV, with the vast majority already transmitting a digital signal,” the GAO concluded.

But the Web site Ars Technica points out that the agency got answers from only about 66.7 percent of the 1,747 full-power TV license holders in the Federal Communications Commission’s database. The article notes that “while the report’s conclusions are still encouraging, the phrase ‘vast majority’ may be a tad overoptimistic.”

The agency’s study also said some stations still had technical and logistical issues to work out before the February 17, 2009, deadline for making the big switch from analog to digital broadcast.

“Some of these stations still need to order equipment, such as antennas, to build their final digital facilities. Furthermore, stations may have coordination issues to address, to complete their final digital facilities,” the agency said. “Stations also need to coordinate with cable providers and satellite companies to ensure that cable and satellite facilities receive digital signals when the analog signals are turned off.”

While it looks like the TV broadcasters are on track to meet the deadline, some lawmakers worry that there is still confusion about what the digital transition means to consumers.

“Far too many Americans are unaware of, or unprepared for, February 17, 2009,” Senate Commerce Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) said in a statement after the GAO’s report was released. “It is imperative that all stakeholders in the DTV transition, both public and private, work together to ensure that local communities are fully informed and prepared for the transition, and that no consumer is left in the dark.”

It’s estimated that there are 70 million or so analog TV sets that rely on over-the-air signals. And because many of these TVs belong to minorities, senior citizens, low-income individuals, and people who live in rural areas, the fear is that these individuals will not be ready for when broadcasters stop transmitting analog TV signals in February 2009.

While TVs made after March 2007 will have digital tuners built-in, TVs made before then won’t. This means that some folks will have to either buy a new TV or get a digital-tuner box, which will be subsidized by the government. The government is already offering vouchers to help people buy these boxes.

The National Association of Broadcasters, which has already spent millions of dollars in efforts to educate the public, has said awareness is increasing. According to a new survey by the trade organization, almost 80 percent of households with a TV have at least some knowledge of the digital transition, up from 38 percent a year ago.

Under pressure from the FCC and lawmakers, broadcasters earlier this year agreed to run at least four advertisements a week during prime-time hours, along with a 30-minute show about the transition before the February 17 deadline next year, to educate the public about the transition.

That was in February though, and since then a group of half a dozen developers has put together their own solution, called Vreel. Originally planned to launch back in March, it opened up its doors this morning.

Like its predecessor, one of the service’s strong suits is that it uses DivX, a codec that’s not as popular as Adobe’s Flash for Web video, but beat it to market for delivering high-resolution videos and is largely the format of choice for videos found on sites like The Pirate Bay. Since then, Flash has caught up technologically, but high-resolution videos have not quite reached the mainstream, only popping up on sites like Dailymotion, Vimeo, and in a gallery on Hulu. The user-uploaded videos already filling up Vreel’s servers are beautiful (albeit mostly illegal).

The service is allowing users to upload gargantuan video files by most standards. The current cap is 1GB, which is what many free Web storage services offer as their entire limit. I’m told users will be able to upload even larger sizes in the future. The best thing is that there’s no time limit, so as long as your video is under the size cap, it can be as long as you want. Considering the news about YouTube extending its video length, this is a necessary move.

The short clip I uploaded earlier today came from my digital camera and was converted from AVI to DivX with no noticeable loss in quality. The one caveat there is that, to see it, users have to install the DivX Web player in their browser, the same thing you have to do with Flash and YouTube. DivX’s player, however, has a few tricks up its sleeve. For one, you can pop out any video to its original quality, which on some widescreen videos looks just great. It’s also got a much more complex options menu for every clip that lets you do fast forward and rewind, and even save the clip if you have a premium version of the player–the same kind of things you get with Apple’s QuickTime.

Unfortunately, the one thing missing is a way to embed the clip on other sites, so if you want to see how it looks beyond the screenshot below, you’ll have to go here

Update: Oops, looks like we helped take the site down. Removing links for the time being–will put them back up when the site returns.

Update 2: Vreel is getting more servers and should be officially “re-launching” soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Update 3: Everything is back to normal. Links are back.

High-quality videos on Vreel shine. You can even view them in close to native resolution with a pop-out player.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)