Filed under: Cellphones

Rumor no longer, Motorola is taking a hard look at its Mobile Devices unit and might very well give those slackers the ol' Freescale treatment and spin off the division as a separate company. This sort of love 'em and leave 'em tactic is oddly a bit of a habit with Motorola when times are bad, and times certainly have been better -- Motorola's phone unit lost $388 million this quarter, compared to $341 million in earnings a year ago. Motorola may sell the unit or spin it into its own company, which would leave Motorola with precious few intersections with the RAZR-saturated consumer, and as more of a government and enterprise business. Says Greg Brown, current president and CEO: "We are exploring ways in which our Mobile Devices Business can accelerate its recovery and retain and attract talent while enabling our shareholders to realize the value of this great franchise." It's a pretty odd statement for any company to make, and considerations may be further along than they sound, but either way we'll be keeping an eye out for any developments.

[Thanks Stasys; via Unwired View]

 

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MashMeet NYC REMIX tickets are on sale! MashMeet NYC REMIX is a whole new spin on the massively popular MashMeet NYC meetups: in addition to the usual drinking and networking, there will be presentations in front of a 300+ crowd and streaming live on the web. There will be food, liquor and beer! There will be a famous NYC DJ, Chuck Dogg, The Triple Threat of Power 105.1!

Join Pete Cashmore, Adam Ostrow, Adam Hirsch and hundreds of top technology powerbrokers for the biggest, best and most exclusive Mashable event so far!

Full details for the event:

Name: MashMeet NYC REMIX
Date: Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Time: 7:00 pm till 10:30 pm EST
Place: For Your Imagination’s Studios, 22 West 27th Street, NYC.
RSVP?: There will be an initial 200 tickets on sale for $20 each. These will go really fast. We have alloted 30 additional tickets for members of the media (if you are a member of the press or a blogger, please e-mail me for details).
Schedule: Presentations will begin at 7:15 promptly. There will be 6 five minute presentations, each with a short question and answer period following. The presentations will be streaming live via the internet on Mashable and CenterNetworks, a MashMeetNYC REMIX affiliate.

Sponsor Opportunities

Want to get your branded schwag into the hands of hundreds of tech influencers? How about branded banners, signage, or a custom-mixed cocktail (named after your company!) at the bar? If so, e-mail us about sponsorship opportunities.

Get Your Ticket!

To get a ticket, use the form embedded below or go direct to the purchase page.

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About our Presenters and Partners

Liquor comes courtesy of Kubler Absinthe, and the smoothest gin I’ve ever tasted, Right Gin!

For Your Imagination develops and markets high-quality original Internet TV and web video series, turning concept into reality for brands and content creators. The company works with creative individuals to develop their show, offering them the opportunity to reach a targeted advertiser-friendly audience effectively and monetizing quickly.

Utterz lets you mobile post voice, video, picture and text mashups to any blog, social network or other website right from your cell phone. Setting up an Utterz connections to your pages takes less than a minute, and youre ready to post anytime, anywhere to all your sites at once, or each individually. Utterz is a free service, works with all cell phones and requires no special software for your phone. Post from events, parties, while traveling, or anytime you are away from your computer. Set up your Utterz connection and report from NYC MashMeet Remix while you’re there!

CafeMom is the largest and fastest growing community site for women. Since its launch in November 2006, the company has been introducing and popularizing innovative offerings including: photo sharing, micro-blogging, widgets and more.

FaceySpacey.com is a leading Social Media Marketing & Development Company, specializing in Facebook Apps, flash widgets, social networking sites, YouTube-style video sites, Rich Internet Applications and viral marketing. Responsible for startups including OrganicIncentive.com, ReelProperties.tv and many others, Facey Spacey is your One Stop Social Media Shop!

coComment is the leading provider of comment and blog access, aggregation and tracking technology. The company enables better conversations on the web by providing users the ability to centralize, track and share comments anywhere online. Through integration with major platforms, coComment increases the visibility and exposure of comments to a greater user base of active commenters and bloggers – creating more interesting user experiences, driving users to the commenting sites and linking conversations with a community.

ooVoo provides a high-quality video communication service that delivers a more meaningful way for people to call and connect over the Internet. ooVoo’s superior quality video and audio is available to anyone with a computer, broadband connection and a web camera, for real-time video calls with up to six people simultaneously. You can learn more and download free ooVoo software at ooVoo.com.

KickApps’ on-demand social media applications enable web publishers and marketers to quickly and easily grow, engage and monetize online audiences. Its SaaS platform features a broad array of applications, including social networking, user-generated content, online video players and viral widgets. For more information, please visit KickApps and KickDeveloper.

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Terry Semel has resigned from Yahoo’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. Semel had been serving as “non-executive Chairman” since he resigned from the CEO position in June, at which point co-founder Jerry Yang assumed the company’s top slot.

Yang issued the following statement in a press release this evening:

“Terry Semel has been a great partner and true friend, and has played a key role in helping to grow Yahoo!’s business - and industry-leading audience - over the past seven years. He also has been a tremendously valuable resource in recent months, as our new management team developed and began to execute our strategic growth plans. On behalf of the entire Board, I want to thank Terry for his many contributions to Yahoo! over the years - and for helping to lay a firm foundation for future success and improved financial performance.”

Roy Bostock, who has been on Yahoo’s board since 2003, will be taking Semel’s spot. As to be expected, the release is praise-worthy of Semel, citing his accomplishments of “growing revenue nearly nine-fold as well as creating $30 billion in shareholder value.” Personally, I think one of Semel’s most overlooked achievements is making some fairly savvy acquisitions early in the Web 2.0 boom, such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, and more recently MyBlogLog.

That said, the company hasn’t done much to integrate those buys into the rest of the company, and Yahoo hit a big slide in the last couple years of Semel’s tenure, with the plans to lay off 1,000 employees earlier this week putting an exclamation point on the weakness.

No need to feel bad for Semel though - he made more than $500 million in compensation and options in his tenure at Yahoo.

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Lookery is getting ready to start a new guaranteed payment publisher program for its ad network that reaches across multiple social networks’ open platforms. At a rate of $0.125 per CPM across 100% of Facebook or Bebo application traffic, Lookery is going to guarantee this rate for a three-month period. It’s an exclusive for application traffic, and is an effort for Lookery to get some publishers on board as it ramps up its volume across apps.

So far, this deal is focusing its rates based on its goal of reaching 1 billion pages per month, and then taking it to 3 or 4 billion as quickly as possible. Taking this Google-fied approach to contracting a payout price over a specified period of time looks to remove a major variable from the quintessential problem of the chicken and the egg. In getting more publishers on board, Lookery can seek out more advertisers in order to spur the growth process along.

Based on Scott Rafer’s blog post about this new program, it appears that Lookery is also hoping to regain some momentum after the peak for ad payouts over the holiday season. Once this ball gets rolling, Lookery will be able to achieve its other goal for the new guaranteed payment program, which is to allow app publishers to focus on their apps, and not stop their workflow because they have to worry about monetizing their products. What do you think–can this work effortlessly, on a scalable level?

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Filed under: Digital Cameras, GPS

The highlight of an otherwise lackluster PMA 2008 came not from Nikon, Canon, or any of the other big name companies, but rather General Imaging: GE's new camera division announced that it will release one of the world's first point-and-shoots with embedded GPS. Well, to say that the E1050 has true GPS would not be totally accurate -- but the very features it lacks are what make it possible to incorporate geotagging capabilities in the first place. You see, this model only contains a GPS radio courtesy of New Zealand-based Rakon, but no baseband chip to process the data in order to create a "fix"; rather, an NXP Semiconductor spinoff called Geotate provides server-connected software that does the heavy-duty calculations once photos have been transferred over. This results in almost no hit to battery life or endless waits for a solid fix.

It works like this: every time the shutter is triggered, the camera's memory card briefly captures the raw data from the GPS radio, associating it with each photo. Then, once the pictures have been imported into Geotate's proprietary client, auxiliary location data is downloaded from a central server, which is then synthesized with the camera data using local resources to establish actual coordinates. What's more, the Geotate software hooks in to Wikipedia as well as the popular mapping and photo-sharing services, giving you real-world information about your shots while also allowing you to map them out and upload to Flickr, Picasa, and friends.

Geotate tells us that besides the E1010, we can also expect to see the platform incorporated into future cams designed by Taiwanese OEM Altek, with such a reference design pictured in the gallery below, along with one for a geotagging peripheral that snaps into a DSLR hotshoe. In the longer term, Geotate hopes to embed its low-cost solution (all that's needed is a small radio and some flash memory) in all sorts of products, from PCs to sneakers to soda bottles. And that's where the name of the company comes from: Geotate stands for "GEOgraphic noTATion," with the ultimate goal being the creation of an ecosystem in which we search not by "what," but by "where."

 

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It’s been a while since my last Orientation, but we’ve all been traveling around for various events and such over the last month so it’s been a little hectic. To get things back on track, we’re going to talk about High-Definition Multimedia Interface, better known as HDMI. The Super Bowl is coming up as well as March Madness and some of you just got a brand new HDTV for the holidays so let’s try and get the best out of the whole deal. Sound good?

The HDMI interface was designed in ‘02 and produced in ‘03 by the HDMI Founders that include big shots like Hitachi, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, RCA, Silicon Image, and Panasonic. It didn’t really start to pick up a full head of steam until ‘06 when CE products started to integrate the interface. This year’s CES made it pretty clear how big this interface is going to be in the coming months. Most of the CES show floor was based around HDTVs, or, at least, that’s the impression I got. Prices on HDTVs are going to go down this year simply because they’re getting easier and cheaper to manufacture. I think there will be quite a bit of competition from Chinese OEMs who are bringing cheaper HD sets to the market, which seem to be fairly decent. We also haven’t gotten to the point where things are going to be 100 percent wireless yet, but having HDMI-equipped gear is a step in the right direction. If anything it clears out most of the clutter.

So what exactly is HDMI? In a nutshell, it’s a single interface that transfers both digital audio and video that’s uncompressed from, let’s say, your set top box to your HDTV or game console to HDTV. To get simpler, it’s 19 separate cables wrapped into one with a bandwidth of 10.2Gbps. What that translates to is crisp and clear audio and video on a HDTV. Component cables suck and just make everything dirty because so much data is lost when going from analog to digital. Of course, HDMI supports video that’s not HD. It also supports up to eight digital audio channels, which certainly clears up the tangle of wires for you burgeoning theater buffs.

The current spec is 1.3 and what that entails is full, uncompressed 1080p content flowing through without a hitch. Spec 1.3 supports 10-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit color depths, which just means you’ll see more colors the way they’re meant to be seen. The connector is also smaller than previous versions. The Samsung HMX10 I’ve been toting around the last month has an HDMI slot so I can hook it right up to the TV in my living room and watch all that 720p content I’ve been shooting over the last month. On the audio side of it, 1.3 supports lossless compressed digital audio formats like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio as well as Dolby Digital and DTS.

The only problem with HDMI at the moment falls on the shoulder of the manufacturers. A lot of CE products out on the market right now come with one HDMI port and that’s obviously not enough. So you’ll want to pick up a switcher of some sort like XtremeMac’s XtremeHD switcher. If you’re stuck with DVI then you can pick up a converter for that, too.

I think most everyone is aware of the capabilities of HDMI, but, like many, you’re probably more concerned with the price. Luckily for me, my Elite came with an HDMI cable saving me a 100 bucks. But here’s the thing, if you’ve already thrown down the dough for an HDTV and home audio system, why wouldn’t you spend another couple hundred bucks on an HDMI cable? You’re not going to get anything else right now that’s going to give you the best visual/audio experience. You could wait a few months to see if prices go down, but you’ll only be torturing yourself. The easiest way to see a difference is to stop by your local Best Buy or electronics shop and ask for a demo. You’ll instantly see the difference and you won’t want to go back to your setup that’s using component cables. The Super Bowl is this weekend and chances are you have an HD set top box and, at the very least, a 720p TV. Don’t you want to see the Giants go down with crystal clear picture and audio?

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It should come as no surprise that the ad inventory on social networks like Facebook are not worth much. A new offer by Lookery, a startup that places ads on social appss inside Facebook and Bebo, is offering a guaranteed ad rate of 12.5 cents for every thousand impressions (CPM). The promotion, which runs through April is probably close to what Lookery can get for ads it places on Facebook. Add in 2 cents per thousand impressions for serving the ads and you get to about a 15 cent CPM. That is probably a good average for the bulk of inventory on Facebook, which makes up the vast majority of Lookery’s business.

This is a market-share play for Lookery. By offering a guaranteed rate, it hopes to attract enough application publishers to get to a billion impressions a month, up from 170 million in December. Lookery is smaller than the other major social-app ad networks, like Slide, RockYou, and Social Media. On social networks, more so even than on the Web in general, advertising is obviously a volume game. And Lookery is trying to catch up to the larger app ad networks, which may very well have higher average CPM rates, by taking all the low-hanging penny inventory that is out there.

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Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

You've got to give the Pentagon credit for imagining every possible threat scenario in its latest wargame, dubbed "Cyber Storm," but the plotline this time around is pretty wild. Starting with an electronic attack on the Port Authority of New Jersey, major new networks and bloggers spread "believable but misleading" information without revealing their sources -- all while hundreds of people on the "no-fly" list stream into airports, DC's Metro trains shut down, air traffic control towers in Philly and Chicago are disrupted, and mysterious liquids are found on the tube in London. That's quite an afternoon, but we're taking offense to the Pentagon's classification of the press and bloggers as "threats" -- come on guys, we're here to help. We wouldn't spread rumors -- there's nothing at all in the hollowed-out left leg of the front pew at St. Micheal's Church in Fort Walton, Kansas.

 

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While the MPAA continues to insist there's really no legitimate use for file sharing apps, it appears that one film festival has decided that it's a great distribution mechanism for finding new films. The Cinequest film festival is asking filmmakers to submit their movies to a file sharing platform where people can view the films and vote for their favorites. The fan favorites for feature-length and short films will be added to the actual festival. The organizer has a few quotes that suggests he understands that piracy isn't the problem the MPAA makes it out to be: "No artists have ever starved because too many people knew about them."

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