The Story

Aardvark, a startup which runs a pretty awesome question and answer service, will be opening up its database of compiled question and answers to the public. According to Max Ventilla, CEO of Vark,

Next Wednesday, October 14, Aardvark is going to make Social Search available on the Web at www.vark.com.

The new website will be open to the public, so for the first time, anyone in the world will be able to tap into the wisdom of their social networks just by visitingwww.vark.com.

Aardvark is a service which allows users to ask questions and answers via instant message, email, and forms on the vark.com website. When a user signs up, he fills out topics about which he wants to answer questions. So if you go to the site and register yourself as someone who knows stuff about cooking, you’ll receive questions about cooking, among other things. When you in turn ask a question, Aardvark will direct it to a user who’s knowledgeable on the topic, who will then respond to your inquiry.

The Questions War Has Begun

As many people who punch questions into Google are …

The Story

AT&T announced that it has “taken the steps necessary so that Apple can enable VoIP applications on iPhone to run on AT&T’s wireless network.” This came after the release of a Vonage iPhone application, which allows users to make VoIP calls over 3G if they have a Vonage account. This means that Apple has approved an application which, unlike Apple’s previous claims, actually replaces the iPhone’s basic phone functionality (which is what Apple said was the reason behind their blocking of the Google Voice application).

Remember, this new decision doesn’t just  apply to Vonage but to every VoIP application. The Skype blog had some happy remarks as we can probably expect to be Skyping on the go in the very near future.

AT&T’s Beefed Up Network

I know a lot of people are going to say that AT&T should have done this from the start, but really they needed to do a whole lot of network maintenance first. Given the state of the company’s networks for the past few years, it would have been a huge mistake to allow users to Skype all over the place. In New York, the AT&T …

The Story

By the end of 2009, there will be 4.6 billion outstanding mobile subscriptions worldwide. To put that in perspective, that’s around two-thirds of the global population (though Reuters points out that people in industrialized countries often have multiple accounts).

The more interesting number from the report is that there will be over 600 million mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of the year. What makes this interesting is that according to the UN, there are 500 non-mobile broadband subscriptions. So despite the fact that mobile is more expensive and delivers less by way of performance, the convenience of it has attracted more customers.

And It Keeps Growing

Something that geeks make like to see noted is that right now, we don’t have real mobile broadband (or at least we don’t here in the US – Japan might be another story). 3G is sometimes fine, but people are usually more surprised when a YouTube video loads quickly on an iPhone than they are when the data network is crawling.

The birth of real mobile broadband is scheduled to begin next year, so  that 600 million broadband user statistic is probably going to increase substantially. Verizon is …

The Story

There’s evidence about that Windows 7 could be lowering the price of Windows-powered laptops. And that does mean laptops and not netbooks. Something which has me salivating is HP’s Pavillion dm3, which has it all: 13″ screen, Intel Core 2 Duo, good battery life, and it weighs under four pounds. Price? $549 starting.

According to Bob O’Donnel of IDC, part of the reasoning for lower prices is that “It’s getting harder and harder to sell anything over $800.”

A Slippery Slope, But A Good One

Right now, OEMs are going to try and keep their premium laptops alive. That means Dell is going to sell pretty good machines for $500 or so, but they’ll also sell the expensive pile of fail that is the Adamo. But given the overlap between the cheap Windows 7 laptops and their more expensive counterparts, this could soon change.

Essentially, the OEMs are running the risk of doing what Nvidia did with the 8800GT. That video card retailed for $300 or less when it came to market, and it performed almost as well or better than many of the higher end cards. A few years down …

The Story

Google and Verizon are to hold a joint press conference today, during which the companies will announce a new partnership: Android phones are coming to Verizon. According to some other information, this means at least one handset as early as the second half of this month.

Procuring Android-powered phones for sale will finally give Verizon what many in the tech community consider to be a “real” smartphone. Right now, AT&T has the iPhone, T-Mobile has a few Android phones, and Sprint has the Palm Pre, though they’re slated to get their own Android phone soon. But Verizon only has BlackBerry phones, which are not exclusive products.

Verizon is coupling its new smartphones (which we will know more about later in the day) with a heavy 3G advertising campaign. The ads are aimed at convincing consumers that Verizon has the best 3G coverage, presumably in hopes to get people out of the AT&T-iPhone camp.

Verizon Needs This More Than You Think

Verizon may be the biggest carrier in the United States right now, but that could change very quickly if the company does not provide consumers with a good reason to keep with …

Courtesy: DoomDaily.com

The Story

The Republican Party has strongly come out against the FCC’s recent plans to make net neutrality a de-facto regulation in the United States. Congressman Cliff Stearns, the highest ranking republican of the House Communications, Technology, and Internet Subcommittee wrote a letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, stating that the FCC should conduct a thorough market analysis on the needs for net neutrality regulations before any policy is put into place. According to Mr. Stearns,

If after this analysis you conclude that intervention is necessary, the intervention should be tailored to your analysis and should be the minimum required to prevent the practices you have identified as appropriate targets of regulation.

And it’s not just one Republican who’s throwing down the gauntlet, but the entirety of the GOP. John Boehner, who is currently the House Minority Leader and one of the highest ranking members of the party, wrote a letter to President Obama. In the letter, Mr. Boehner questions the FCC’s motives for implementing standards for net neutrality:

We believe that network neutrality regulations would actually thwart further broadband investment and availability, and that …

The Story

As reported earlier today, every phone but the iPhone will be getting full Flash 10.1 in the not too distant future. What the iPhone is getting soon, however, is the ability to process Flash within specific applications.

Adobe announced that they’re currently operating a closed beta which allows developers to build iPhone applications directly from the Flash Creative Suite. Yes, there will be an “export as iPhone application” feature. Apple is claiming that this test version will go public by the end of the year.

So Many Controls

You might be wondering why in the face of everyone else’s handset’s getting Flash, Apple is choosing to just have applications. And the answer to that is simple: Apple wants controls to be in place.

Forcing Flash to only be accessible in application form means that Apple can lock down the apps in the app store to only work over WiFi. As a good portion of Apple’s livelihood now depends on its relation with various wireless provider’s world-wide, Apple decided to include controls so that carriers could force the applications in question to not work over cellular data networks such as 3G and EDGE. And …

The Story

Starting December 1st, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “will require bloggersto clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.” So when a gadget maker sends around the latest hot handset, any site which does a review will have to say “Yes, I got this for free as a review unit.” The FTC commissioners voted 4-0 in support of this new regulation, and fines for non-compliance can result in fines of up to $11,000 per violation.

Blah

Disclosure is incredibly important to the review process because reviews are a tool which a large base of consumers (large meaning more people than who took part in writing the review) use to evaluate whether or not they should make a purchase. The fundamental problem with reviews is that they will always have some bias in them. If Apple were to send the TechGeist office a Macbook Pro to review, we’d do what we can, but we’d also tell you that none of us regularly use Macs.

The problem is bigger than that, and can often boil down to very specific tastes. To me, lower weight is worth a higher price in a …

The Story

At its annual developer conference, Adobe announced that it would be working to make Flash available on more or less every major smartphone as early as next year with the release of Flash 10.1. This includes Windows Mobile, Palm’s WebOS, Google’s Android operating system, and Symbian. The BlackBerry browser is expected to get Flash a little later on.

Some types of handsets have already been running Flash Lite, which has its share of problems. Adobe representatives said that as phones have been built with better processors, the need for Flash Lite has been obsoleted in many cases because the phone can provide the resources necessary to properly run full Flash.

The iPhone wasn’t mentioned in Adobe’s announcement. Apparently Adobe had said it would work with Apple to make a version of Flash for the iPhone, but so far we have no ETA on when that will actually become available to consumers.

Tipping The Scales

Whenever Flash 10.1 hits phones in 2010, it’s going to give people yet another reason to not get an iPhone. The iPhone right now is the best media smartphone on the market, but it won’t be able …

Like the majority of the internet, Hulu is experimenting with its advertising model without getting too obtrusive. The latest experiment is one of making the existing video ad model more heavy on the content without making the ads take up more of the users’ time. The picture above is from one such advertisement. The whole thing lasted around 30 seconds, with the video taking 20. After that, the screen stayed idle on what you see above: a whole lot of things for the user to click on without intruding on the show. There’s stuff to mouse over to see more about the car being advertise (for those who are interested), plus they even drop in a link to download the corresponding application from the iPhone App Store.

I’m taking the time to write about this because it shows one of the ways in which online advertising is such a valuable tool. When one makes the Hulu vs. television comparison, the first thing that springs to mind is that no one gets up and makes a sandwich during a a 30 second advertisement online, which means that the user watches the …