SFGate A few years ago, a team of Microsoft engineers invited some SBC executives to a small Mountain View apartment. The engineers had jury-rigged an Xbox gaming console into a set-top box to control the television set. The SBC executives were getting their first glimpse of IPTV, or Internet Protocol Television, which uses your phone [...]

CNET News.com No one to talk to when you get home from work? One Voice Technologies has a technological solution. Its One Voice software add-on for Windows XP Media Center is designed to allow users to control their TV, stereo and computer via verbal commands. The One Voice slogan is “Just say it to play [...]

SFGate One recent evening, a high-energy crowd buzzed through the Palm’s condo sales office South of Market to a pulsing bossa nova beat. A social scientist looking for a demographic group to profile would throw in the towel, pick up a neon green cocktail (it matches one of the logo colors) and simply mingle. Singles [...]

Web Wire Vizrt Ltd. announced today that two broadcasters belonging to the CME group (Central European Media Enterprises) each bought 3-camera virtual set systems totalling over USD 700,000 of Q1 revenues, thereby significantly increasing their Vizrt graphics installations. Vizrt is the world’s leading provider of HD/SD real-time 2D and true 3D broadcast graphics. The company’s [...]

Government Computer News Many think the Internet is mainstream now, but that’s only true for nonpaying use, such as surfing for free information. As of 2003, commercial operations involving monetary exchange were limited to about 23% for broadband, 10% for e-tailing, 12% for B2B, 10% for distance learning, and 5% for music. And these are [...]

CNET News.com Wireless Internet service providers would be allowed to operate freely on new chunks of unused TV spectrum, according to two new bills in the U.S. Senate. A pair of similar measures introduced Friday would give wireless device manufacturers the green light to develop products for unlicensed use on the broadband airwaves’ “white spaces”–that [...]

Wired A virtual human, Santos may save corporations big money and help the military save lives. “Human modeling technology today is so refined, we can use it to test products before they’re ever produced,” said Karim Abdel-Malek, professor of biomedical engineering and director of the Virtual Soldier Research program at Iowa. Because just about every [...]

Wired In another 10 years, Marty Cooper predicts, high-speed mobile internet connections will be so commonplace people will take them for granted. He’s convinced that a key technology behind such capability will be the wireless broadband standard known as WiMax. Cooper is not alone. Fans of mobile WiMax — which is designed to provide broadband [...]

Om Malik’s Blog At first blush there are remarkable similarities in what ace coder Jeremy Allaire’s new start-up, Bright Cove is trying to do and what others such as TiVo and Akimbo plan to achieve. They are all trying to become the platform to publish video content over the Internet, which can, and will be [...]

Scientific American A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will unleash a revolution of new possibilities. The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in [...]