Top 5 posts for the week:
Peak number of RSS feed subscribers: 103
Number of Facebook Fans: 62
Busiest day: September 20th, with 994 unique visitors.
Top browser: Firefox with 32.09% market share.
Top operating system: Windows with 65.34% market share.
Now this is all just a theory, not a rumor, certainly not a fact, just an idea.
That said, does any remember Lala.com? That little company that Apple bought out and then shutdown, which let you stream your music library to any computer using your web browser. Pretty sweet stuff.
Of course everyone thought iTunes 10 was going to bring Lala’s streaming framework into play, but that didn’t happen. Apple did announce AirPlay which lets you stream media from your iPhone/iPad to AirPlay compatible devices (such as the AppleTV), while cool, this isn’t quite what the masses had hoped for. At least the people that I know.
Enter AirPlay+. Here’s my theory, Apple wanted to get the media streaming down in a local area network type setting, where they don’t face the same bandwidth constraint / requirements as with internet streaming before they even touched it. Admittedly this isn’t much of an issue with music, but what if AirPlay+ let you stream videos as well?
Once they get things working well in that environment I expect us to see Apple roll out AirPlay+, probably as a $9.99 a month subscription based service that allows you to stream any media purchased through your iTunes account to any iOS device, or computer with iTunes installed. We’re talking movies and music videos, as well as your music library. At the same time we’ll see a refresh to the AppleTV software that will enable the same streaming functionality.
This would also be a prime opportunity to increase the value of MobileMe, by including AirPlay+ at no additional charge to MobileMe subscribers. And if we’re lucky, wireless syncing for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad will debut at or around the same time.
What is ThinkUp? Techinally it’s the new face of Twitalytic by Gina Trapani. ThinkUp bills itself as an “open source social media insights engine”. Rather fancy sounding.
In plain English and 140 characters or less (according to their Twitter bio)…
ThinkUp captures and organizes replies to your status updates on Twitter, Facebook and beyond.
Focus on the beyond portion of that statement, because ThinkUp does a lot more than just organize replies to your updates. Think of it as a kind of account statement for your social media.
Here’s a quick look at the features of ThinkUp.
Currently ThinkUp is available in, I believe, an alpha stage to the public. You can download the latest build from their GitHub page.
The install isn’t too complicated, you do have to be running your own server of course. First create your MySQL database, then upload the contents of the ZIP you downloaded from the GitHub page and run the install. The most complex part of the installation process is registering your ThinkUp install as an application on Twitter.com, and really, that’s pretty straight forward.
Don’t have access to your own server? You’re in luck, first two people to email aaron@hijinksinc.com will get access to their own installation of ThinkUp on our servers.
Oh hey, Peek is still producing products. Didn’t realize that.
I kid, I kid. The Peek 9 was just announced, claiming to be 9 times faster than the previous Peek Pronto, thanks to a nice software overhaul. But the bigger news in my mind is they’ve started packing more features into the OS, and the Peek 9 ships with several new apps, including Facebook, Twitter, Weather, RSS reader, and PeekMaps. It also looks like they’re launching an ad-hoc type app store called PeekTop Apps.
Rounding out the offering is the ability to view PDF and Office files attached to emails.
For those who are reading this and going, “Wait, what the heck does the Peek do?”. It’s a simple concept, Peek provides contract free unlimited texting/email for as little as $10 a month. Pricing for the 9 is $69.99 for just the handset or $99.99 for the handset +2 months of a service.
[ Get your Peek 9 ]
Granted this feature has only been rolled out on a few low end Compaq systems purchased through Best Buy, but apparently Intel has been offering consumers an “upgrade” card, with nothing more than a serial code on it for $50. What does that code do you ask? It “unlocks” threads and cache on y?our Pentium G6951processor.
Yes, you read correctly. Intel will take an extra $50 of your hard earned cash just so you can use your processor, that you’ve already paid for, to its full potential.
This is way worse then when Apple charged users $1.99 to enable the Draft-N support in their wireless card. At least that was a feature that wasn’t advertised when people originally purchased the MacBooks.
So, is the hardware equivalent of DRM the hot new revenue generation model for vendors trying to make up for discounted hardware prices? I sure hope not. Otherwise those websites claiming to “make your PC faster” will be selling fake hardware unlocks to unsuspecting people instead of just bogus software.