This morning came with a bunch of surprises on the Apple Store (store.apple.com).
Those visiting will notice the new colorful iPod Shuffle and the availability of the 802.11n updater for Apple products.
The $1.99 comes free along with the Airport Extreme Base Station and is suitable for the Macs that have the 802.11n hardware built-in:
MacBook Pro with Intel Core 2 Duo
MacBook with Intel Core 2 Duo
Mac Pro with AirPort Extreme option
iMac with Intel Core 2 Duo (except the 17-inch, 1.83GHz iMac)
To install the AirPort Extreme 802.11n Enabler:
Order AirPort Extreme 802.11n Enabler from Apple.
Click the download link provided by the system, then locate the disk image (.dmg) file on your computer and double-click it.
Double-click the AirPort Extreme 802.11n Enabler file and follow the onscreen steps to update your Mac.
Our live coverage of DEMO and Whisher Exclusive continues! For a more convenient display we have moved the article to a new, stand alone section available through the sidebar badge or this link! Continue refreshing for more Whisher news!
There are a couple of initiatives out there called Blogger Desk and Computers Behind Blogs we gladly salute and adhere to. They are set to find out what/who is behind those blogs we read and link to every day; what computers, platforms or wallpapers. I think that’s great! There’s so much more to this game than the recent “5 secrets tagging”.
So here’s the setup from which WiF:)) comes alive in all its magic. Hopefully, should not too shy, our loving contributors will post their own.
Whisher came alive sooner than we anticipated. They already posted a beta program on their website.
Frankly, we don’t know much about it and… don’t even know what it’s all about! Our registration for the beta login was never answered.
Ferran, Mike? Wtf?!
Update: Mike Puchol (whisher) got in touch and told me they had to freeze the beta due to corporate espionage and some other cool 007 stuff. I mean there’s a lot of buzz around this enigmatic Whisher – “we share” :) – and it appears they have something of great interest for all WiFikind. Fact that they denied all pre-launch beta accounts and got a rigid stand proves they have a duck laying golden eggs in the backyard. And the bad guys want it…bad!
I’d take the duck for the paté though..
But here’s what Mike told us in quote: “We have been keeping this project under wraps, as it caused some controversy a few weeks ago, and so we wanted to be very careful about how much and to whom we let information go. We even had a case of attempted corporate espionage against us, so you must understand our position. Whisher is launching next week at DEMO (http://www.demo.com), so from the 31st the project will go live and public.”
About a month ago Skype quietly announced a new pricing policy to be effective starting Jan18th. Nobody really knew anything about it and being a beta tester didn’t help either. The little I could learn was that Skype was planning to introduce a per-connection fee general plan.
Straight from the official Skype blog:
“The connection fee is a straightforward set-up charge per call.[..]
The connection fee is 0.039 Euro, excl VAT or the equivalent in local currency.“
Also, “Skype’s new pricing strategy will roll out worldwide during 2007. When launched in full, the pricing strategy consists of a premium subscription package (Skype Pro), one feature of which removes per-minute charges for SkypeOut calls to domestic landlines and includes a small connection fee.“
Now, of course they advertise some lower rates on a few destinations too and say that their new disruptive pricing is revolutionary and cool. We always thought Skype was just too good to be true. Great sound, great client application, cross-platform compatibility, great image and friendly marketing, cheap worldwide calls.
It was just a matter of time till they decided they’re just not getting enough. It’s hard to start as a conventional telco killer then to realize you have to eat too and hey, why were you stupid to start your business with rates so low??
There’s a rule by which, once you’ve lowered prices, you can’t rise them back. Skype lowered some tarrifs but pumped up a whole new wallet killer: the connection fee.
And since Skype is famous at dropping calls frequently, f**k this! The game’s over. Everyone used to close their eyes and said “it’s okay” when calls dropped because the whole thing was cheap.
But who’s willing to spend about 2 minutes ($/euro 0.039) of global rate calls on every call drop?
My forcast: one more year!
Sorry Skype, you blew it this time!
The ‘n’ news is out! After a long four years struggle the board of IEEE voted in favor of the draft 2.0, thus validating it. It may have been a vote based on further delay avoidance, but what do we know? Most hardware manufacturers already shiped ‘n’ compatible routers and cards. It was well about time.
Consedering the hickups of the draft and its competition in form of interim MIMO/SRX, the ‘n’ is not much of a deal. As a matter of fact it’s hardly a big improvement at all.
But we salute the industry seeking to push the 802.11 forward.
If the hotspot industry deals just fine even with ‘b’ compatible gear, the new multimedia era with IPTV as a flag ship demands more bandwidth than ever.
Sortof related, Apple’s take on the ‘n’ was a vivid example of how the industry sometimes plays pranks. ZDNet says they couldn’t have avoided the premim for the software enabler, but the good news is the price has been confirmed to a trivial $1.99.
It’s one of those gloomy all-round months. I said it was going to be cool when it started but with an eye on Wall Street and the other on the weather news and all that global warming warning my first girlfriend got married a year ago bleah, I kindof lost the appetite.
With storms raging in Europe with winds in excess of 100mph, energy shortages because of Russia’s protective measure to shut down oil pipes on account of the weather, the Old Lady’s getting brownish. They hung the bad Iraki dictator just like they shot the bad Romanian dictator back in ‘89.
The US still burns an incredible 25% of global energy every day. And going up.
We’re all still burning oil like if there’s no tomorrow. There’s no safety regulations in civil construction building like all car manufacturers have (airbags, shock absorbant frames…) and no one raised the bar in energy conservation.
Apple Inc. (AAPL :94.95, -2.15, -2.2% ) posted a profit of $1 billion, for the period ended Dec. 30, up from $565 million, a year ago. Revenue rose 24.5% to $7.1 billion from $5.75 billion.
Sales of the iPod accounted for $3.43 billion of the company’s revenue, or nearly half the total, says marketwatch.com.
Holy-moly!!!
That’s a billion. With a B! That’s 1000 million dollars! That’s 1000000000 dollars they go home with! Jeeeesus!
These guys at Apple Inc. need another planet. They’re done selling iPods here on Earth, done selling MacBooks and already sold out the darn phone even before it was released. We’re maxed out! Go away!
We learn via martinvarsavsky.com that FON (for those of you who still don’t know these guys, it’s a WiFi sharing startup) is working hard to develop a Symbian WiFi sniffer. Which is great news for all Nokia addicts! But some friends who make a sweet living on building Symbian software say it’s not really doable. Hmm..but still. Benefit of the doubt on us. Maybe they’ll make it…just in time for the iPhone launch! Which brings us to the next question: who’s going to build iPhone’s WiFi sniffer? Verizon…anyone..?
Last year in March (2006), the Wi-Fi Alliance imposed a special security requirements for all Wi-Fi devices. All the Wi-Fi
devices were supposed to include the WiFi Protected Access and WPA-2 (802.11i). This was an 8 step process which proved to be too complex for many home users and small business without a proper IT department.
Seeing that this did not kick off, the same Wi-Fi Alliance established Protected Setup, a program that standardized security setup into four steps — a process simple enough that home and small-business users will be able to enable the top levels of security available in current Wi-Fi devices.
You can find a list of the first products that support the Wi-Fi Protected Setup here.
“The first release of the program supports use of a push-button technique or entry of a PIN (personal identification number) to network Wi-Fi devices. Support for methods using Near-Field Communication, in which a user simply touches a token or card to a device, as well as USBA high-speed bidirectional serial connection between a PC and Flash drives, is planned for later in the first half of 2007.” says dailywireless.org
This is in my opinion a thing that will make Wi-Fi NOT fun…
Has Apple iWon in Europe? Is the “iPhone” theirs? Has Apple won the trade mark, playing the cards right? The real question is: Do they actually care about the outcome of this?
There is plenty of time for buzz on this subject until the “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” the “revolutionary mobile phone,” and the “breakthrough Internet communications device” will be on sale this summer. And hey, it can only do them good. All this buzz assures you keep reading about it and even those uninterested won’t stand the curiosity to see what this is all about. In the end, everyone will know about the iPhone and many will want one. Some because it’s cutting edge technology, some for the design, others just because they gotta have one, too. The iPod was nothing compared to this.
And think about all the web appearances! Everywhere… for free!
Many bother with targeted advertising after enormous planning of marketing campaigns. What targeted advertising? The target of this campaign is: everyone, anywhere.
Many important lessons could be learned from this: Free Publicity, Event Planning, How to use the opportunity a public launch can offer. I doubt that another company could get this right the way Apple did with their “iPhone”. Just look at the shock wave. You’ll still be sensing that for a while.
And to get back to what we’re apparently debating, BE SURE this makes up for much more than an hypothetical loss in court, if somehow that will happen.
Apparently, Cisco no longer owns the iPhone trade mark in Europe. Looks like in Europe a person can lodge a revocation application against a trade mark registration if the trade mark has not been used for the past five years. And it’s just what happened on December 18, 2006 when a german law firm lodged a revocation. Ironically, that’s the launch day of Linksys’ iPhone series. Here’s more on this.
If you think that loading your router with a new firmware or making your own firmware is cool, some guys didn’t agree. That just wasn’t enough!
So they decided they want to add music streaming capabilities, speaker output, an SD card reader, connect an LCD screen and a VGA screen. And they wanted to share that. In case some of you are bored sometime… Here is the tutorial. Wicked, eh?
I believe you remember the news from Apple Inc. where they said that every Core 2 Duo Mac available on the market, sold or still on the shelf has the 802.11n standard capabilities, but in a locked status. Well, if you want to enable that, you will have to pay a small fee to Apple Inc. in order to download the patch, says AppleInsider.com. The fee is something around $4.99, and it’s supposedly bound by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Because of the Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognizes revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn’t finished delivering the product at that point.
Of course, you can always get on the waiting list for an Apple Airport Extreme, and wait for it to ship to your location, since it appears that the enabling patch is included with its software. That’s just $179.
Hey, do you remember that (in)famous Firefox extension – GSpace?
Yeah, the plugin that lets you upload stuff to GMail and store it in a convenient online folder for free. Well that’s been bought some time ago by FON we keep on blurbing about. These guys will soon release a Wi-Fi router that will be capable of downloading content and later store it at wish on GMail. That’s a neat approach.
But they can’t get hold of the gspace dot com domain, Martin Varsavsky (Fon founder) says on his blog. It’s been kidnapped by a bunch of pr0nographers! Baaad, baaad fellas!
Speaking of which, should it have not been for these guys, HDDVD would have never kicked Sony’s Blue Ray out of the scene! 2-0 for the bad guys!
But more intriguing I found the storing of a podcast on GMail. Should it ever be big, let Google tackle the bandwidth! Schrewd, huh? Now I wish somebody explained me how to do it myself! Comments please!
Hi there wireless people! It’s Monday and there’s plenty of news to share! Or, maybe not…
Even if they begin their week with Sundays in the US stragely enough nothing happens…Sundays!
Today’s story is rather old news. But since it’s unfolding, we might keep it in the headlines a little longer. Remember we talked about those little FON routers called La Fonera? Well, the master of all wireless devices, Brainslayer, finally broke down in front of all tearful prayers and has taken the time to make a distro of DD-WRT which replaces the locked-down low-feature firmware that router comes with it!
Why people want to hack it for is unclear, but FON keeps hitting it in the head with a brick. Backdoor by backdooor they shut daily to keep the darn thing locked-up!
Heh, I’d be doing the same if it were my insane amount of money being re-routed for another purpose. Just immagine somebody bought a million cars to have them serve as taxis. But a bunch of smart guys would claim them as theirs to drive chicks to the disco for free!
Now that’s wireless fun! :)
After postponing the launch of their service a few times, Whisher seems to have gotten their game right and are about to hit the market in February.
Whisher.com is a WiFi sharing product (but not limited to) which is going to be compatible with existing wireless initiatives. More information is scarce but that’s just fine because we like secrecy for the sweet adrenaline rushes.
Back at CES in the beginning of the week, ASUSTeK announced the release of the AiGuru S2, second version of their USB cordless internet phone. It’s supposed to be compatible with Skype, Windows Media Player, iTunes, and even Windows VISTA. Waiting to get my hands on one, I can only notice it has a keyboard… more specs on their news page.
If you happen to own an Internet Phone, or plan on buying the above mentioned, the nice people from Actiontec decided it was about time to release a router which will increase your Wi-Fi range to the n draft, all around your house, supports encryption standards and “all major carriers” whatever that means. Engadget wrote a full article on this here
Ed Burnett one of the editors at ZD.net says that Cisco might not have the rights on the “iPhone” trademark anymore. Even if he writes a very consistent article in his dev blog, this might be just another rumor in the blogosphere. The US Patent and Trademark office shows the iPhone trademark listed as owned by Infogear, a subsidiary of Cisco since 2000.
Looking out for your input on this, we can just sit and wait for this cloud of allegations and rumors to dissipate.
Update: according to Engadget, Cisco indeed lost their trademark rights, but was granted a six months grace period. Apparently, they have to prove that they actually used the trademarked name in the last period, and they ar now trying to get by that using a simple sticker on an old VoIP telephone they sell. More here
Glenn Lurie over at Cingular says that they and Apple are taking secret steps to make the iPhone more difficult to unlock and use on other GSM carriers in the US. Of course at a certain point someone will manage to unlock it… In order to delay that moment, Apple Inc. will not allow third party applications to run on their gadget, but will maybe allow third party widgets.
I wish them all the luck, but the above mentioned luxury, of being one of the new Cingular subscribers is something that might and will keep some of the customers away…
The Apple Inc. curse strikes back. It’s at a very early morning hour that I ran across yet another reason to voodo Steve J. I know I cursed him when they shipped iLife ‘05 along with my iBook but a week later touted iLife ‘06 for everybody else!
Then came the very unhappy Core Duo MacBook early adopters who threatned to turn their lappies in global warming devices. Then the Core 2 Duos came along with a number of invisible improvements such as… 802.11n compatible at flip of a software enabler!! Now revolt!
On the other hand it’s actually great news and a pleasant surprise. I waited for the MacBook to mature. :) I can now proceed to getting one. U’re 0wn3d!
Though a great little piece of equipment, FON’s La Fonera social router has its flaws. I recently stumbled upon a bug that was left unanswered on the boards: La Fonera prevents login to new (ex-beta) Blogger!
And Blogger is a Google service. And Google is a FON investor. At least Google’s pages should rock&roll!
Now.. il looks like La Fonera is blocking access (both on FON public and private networks) to the www2.blogger.com due to some DNS forwarding bugs. Board user js.opdebeeck throws in some DNS hosts to help alleviate, but that’s just for hardcore users. We’ll pretend we know nada and wait for a firmware upgrade. (counting started!)Luckily most Foneros have another WiFi router laying around so it should pose no problem.
WiFi is a household appliance in my home. Every member takes advantage of having wireless laptops, including general desking applications in any room, and machines are commonly found in the kitchen displaying recipes and in the living room for looking at TV listings online.With the advent of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, or internet telephony, such as Skype), the applications expand. Laptops work great for this service, but suddenly seem bulky (laugh at this, I command you! Microsoft’s Answer to the iPhone iTouch Mobile). Enter the iPhone – not Apple Computer, Inc.’s “iTouch Mobile”, but a WiFi device designed explicitly for VoIP. Read the rest of this entry »
On a surprise move on Friday, Apple, Inc. announced that it was renaming its newly released “iPhone” product as the “iTouch Mobile” after a lawsuit was filed by Cisco Systems, Inc. earlier in the week. says The Associated Press
Update: the blogosphere buzzes on the name change. some say it’s a hoax. Whatever the outcome, Apple Inc. has not changed the name on their website. And even Endgadget (link) has the same hunch Dan had during the phone’s release at Macworld.
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Even if you might think this is yet another Apple blog, this is not the case… It just happens that Apple is making more and more waves…
Not everyone is happy about the launch of Apple’s new iPhone. Cisco Systems, another big shot in Silicon Valley, had that name registered since 2000 when they acquired Infogear. Cisco’s spokesman announced that they have been talking with Apple Inc., in order for the latter to use the name, a contract was drafted, but was never finalized. After Jobs’ Keynote at Macworld the other day, Cisco decided to sue Apple for using their brand. Apple was not available for many comments, they just said it was a silly law suit.
I just received a link to the official document announcing the lawsuit. You can read it here. Thank you Calin.
And going back to Apple Inc. today, they just announced the new AirPort Extreme Base Station, in their words “a sleek, easy-to-use wireless solution”. Launching it just after Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld where they announced their new iPhone, this could go unnoticed for a while but I think their solution might appeal to the average mac user or even to switchers.
It adds the n draft to the classic a/b/g standards, with a slight delay compared to the other major wireless hardware makers, including Belkin, Netgear, and Linksys which implemented the n draft a while ago.Using MIMO (Multiple In, Multiple Out) smart antennas and the n draft, it promises to boost up it’s range and speed 5 times.So, it’s elegant and simple, 5x faster, easy as a Mac, and super-compatible. They also offer wireless printing, hard drive sharing, compatibility with Apple TV (iTV) and much more.
No more Apple today!
Romanian free hotspot operator c*free wireless that touts 27 hotspots nationwide and, interestingly one in the US says they’ve had it with the sluggish market! “We are fed up to see mobs of angry wifi-laptop-equipped clients being refused free internet access at their favorite venues. We want to put an end to this!” says Marius, company R&D big shot, pointing out the window to the yet peaceful streets. “They are going to rebel! My word!”.To prevent this massacre, we came up with a new package called ‘wifi to go‘ hotspot starter kit. It comprises of a c*free modified router (typically a Linksys), install and config, promo, 12 months of free support and.. a Café Latte?! (What’s up with the marketing dept.?)
All this, starting just €199-.I mean, does it get easier and cheaper than this? Say NO and meet the revenge of the Wi-Fi people!
Yep, this looks like the Apple special week on WiF.
C’mon Cupertino! Is that all you can do? A phone? No flash-based-hdd mac tablet with LED lit TFT and Romanian traditional ’sarmale’ stove?
Not quite. This is just as good, a device codenamed the iPhone. It’s absolutely gorgeous, does things unseen before and it’s wifi’ed too!!
We’re sure you’re gonna be reading about it a lot everywhere so I promise we won’t post more on it until I have one in my hands. Is that good? Well, how about tomorrow? Naah, we didn’t even get our geeky hands on the basic SMC Skype WiFi phone. Will do!
We’ve seen much speculation around this year’s Macworld. And for sure there’s goodies to expect. Having just listened to Bill Gates’ CES keynote on Vista, Vista, Vista and … Vista again, which I thought was boring, Jobs’ upcoming speech is highly anticipated among the WiF crew.
But it’s not complete secrecy. One with an eye for details could stop rumouring outrageos plasma laptops (or..whateva’) and note that store.apple.com no longer offers the veteran iSight. Yup, you got it right, the sexiest webcam to date is probably getting upgreaded heavily or phased-out! So there you have it crew! One definitely new product from Apple to be announced at the keynote. May it be wireless!
Feed yourself!
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After postponing the launch of their service a few times, 
