Panasonic all set to market its 3D TV with Best Buy offer!

With Panasonic all set to promote its new 3-D televisions this week, the company is teaming up with Best Buy to let customers try out the technology at special displays in hundreds of stores, before deciding on whether to buy the product or not. Now, the customers will be able to see it before having to believe its magical presentation and quality and they can also own it at a much reduced price.
Panasonic is also planning to discount the 3-D models by upto to 50 percent. A 50-inch model will now be available only for $2,500, according to the wsj reports.

McDonald's to offer free wireless Internet access at its U.S. restaurants!

As McDonald's continues to deliver fast and friendly food service at more than 30,000 convenient locations around the world, you can now enjoy the possibility of staying connected with friends, family and co-workers. Just find a Wi-Fi ready restaurant and you can check e-mail, browse net or chat with your friends while enjoying the delicious taste at the dining table.
All without no extra cost…yeah…according to reports, McDonald's will lift a $2.95 fee that it had charged customers for two hours of wireless Internet access, available at about 11,000 of its 14,000 domestic locations, starting from Jan 2010, McDonald's USA Chief Information Officer David Grooms said in an interview.
The free access comes under a partnership with AT&T Inc., which provides McDonald's stores with wireless Internet.
The service providers provide high-quality Wi-Fi service through several convenient connection options: on-line credit card payment, subscriptions, prepaid cards, or promotional coupons.
So get ready to enjoy surfing and working in your local McDonald's at no extra cost!

Telecom IT Providers to Merge in China...

Beijing-based AsiaInfo Holdings will acquire telecommunications-software competitor Linkage Technologies International Holdings in a cash-and-stock deal worth US$733 million, as reported by Wall Street Journal. AsiaInfo President Steve Zhang said that the acquisition is intended to help the firm sell more products into China Telecom, the country's second-largest telecom provider. AsiaInfo was originally focused on selling to China Mobile, while Linkage concentrated on China Telecom. The new enterprise will provide software and services like billing systems and customer relationship management tools to China's telecommunications giants. According to Goldman Sachs, AsiaInfo held 12% of the Chinese market for telecom IT services, while Linkage held 11%. Competitor Huawei Technologies had 14%.
We have very complementary customer bases. AsiaInfo's traditional strength is with China Mobile, and Linkage's traditional strength is with China Telecom," Steve Zhang said.

Digital Whiteboard for the Kindle!

Luidia, the maker of an interactive whiteboard technology called eBeam, is entering into another screen: Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.
They are starting-up by launching a system that automatically zaps a copy of notes and scribbles left on whiteboards into people’s Kindle or Kindle DX. It works by turning the notes (captured digitally by the eBeam system) into an image file, and then emailing that file to a Kindle.
Kindles have long had a unique email address to which people can email Adobe PDFs, RTFs, Word documents, pictures and other files. Amazon charges the Kindle owner 15 cents per megabyte. (The Kindle user has to first add the sender’s email address to an approved list.)
The notes capability could help improve the ways students use the Kindle in classrooms, says Luidia. Nearly 90% of Luidia’s customers are K-12 schools, some of which have been experimenting with using Kindles and e-reading technology to lighten the load of students. In theory, a teacher could present a whole lesson and then zap the notes to students or parents.
“We saw the potential not just to read a novel and textbooks, but also have other kinds of content created live in the classroom by students and teachers themselves,” says Jody Forehand, Luidia’s vice president of product planning.
For now, the feature only works with the Kindle, but Luidia says it plans to add the capability to other e-readers.
“Down the road, we would like to have a much better updating mechanism,” says Rafi Holtzman, Luidia’s chief executive. He says the company was exploring options, but he wouldn’t say whether it was working on a dedicated app for the Kindle that lets people access their notes.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Luidia’s technology or on the future of Kindle apps. But apps that extend or go beyond reading are one of the most anticipated additions to e-book readers in the coming year. Kindle competitor Irex has said it would release a software development kit so that programmers can make their own apps for its e-reading device.
The Kindle does, however, have limitations that multipurpose devices like Apple’s iPhone don’t, including a black-and-white screen that updates relatively slowly, and a wireless Internet connection that is “free” to users, except for times (like emailing over a file) where Amazon charges a fee.
But Amazon already sells a Sudoku game that lets you play the mind-benders on your Kindle, and includes the ability to get hints and check answers! -WSJ

iPhone Tries to Crack Korea...

Apple Inc.'s iPhone on Saturday(28th Nov 2009) will finally go on sale in South Korea, a country that prides itself on creating and consuming cutting-edge technology.
Since the announcement of its availability last week, about 40,000 people placed pre-orders for it, causing the Samsung Electronics Co., to slash the price of its most advanced and expensive phone, a touch-screen model like the iPhone called Omnia2.
The iPhone's arrival will also end the control that South Korea's cellphone makers and carriers, including KT, have had on the software that runs on phones. Applications for iPhone will be available through Apple's online service or directly from software makers.
Even so, the iPhone hasn't gotten that popularity in South Korea that it has in other countries and Apple faces a huge market bias for domestic-made phones, mainly by Samsung and LG Electronics Co., which contributes to about 90% of the cellphones.
In Japan, Apple experienced a slow ramp-up of sales after the iPhone became available two years ago. And in China, where Apple last month began selling the phone, sales have been slow due to modifications the company made at the government's request and the existence of a massive gray market.
South Koreans pay the highest prices in the world for cellphones and among the highest for wireless service. The average selling price for Samsung and LG phones is nearly twice as much in South Korea as it is outside the country.
The iPhone is already changing the pricing dynamic. KT will offer three iPhone models under monthly usage plans with charges ranging from 45,000 won to 95,000 won, or about $40 to $80. Depending on which plan is chosen, the iPhone's price ranges from $342 to free.
Samsung responded this week by making its Omnia2 phone free for people who buy an $80 monthly plan on SK Telecom Co., one of KT's rivals. It cut the $900 price on other plans to around $300.
"The most appealing part of iPhone is the variety of applications," In the case of the domestic phones, we ca use only those programs that are pre-installed on them.
A spokesman for KT Corp., the carrier offering iPhone, says it expects the iPhone to sell more quickly than in other countries because Koreans consider cellphones a way to express status and trendiness!

~Palm Takes on Giants in Smartphones ...

Palm, a new entry in the big list of mobile phone manufacturer came up with the all new, first of its kind of a Web-surfing pocket-computer phone 2002.
The team introduced a new generation of smartphones in June with the $199 Palm Pre on Sprint’s network. The second phone in the line, the $99 Pixi, went on sale Sunday.
While both the products got good reviews as per the expectation for being easy to use and great for Web browsing. But in recent weeks, the rival Google’s Android operating system for smartphones took not more than a week to grab the public attention.
Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive and the former Apple engineer (the first head of its iPod division), said in an interview that Palm does not need to be as big as its rivals to thrive. “One of the key things we need to do as a company is to get to scale,” he said. “We need to bring on more carriers and more regions.”
Right now, it sells phones in six countries and is steadily expanding to others in Europe and North America. Investors trying to read the mood of the consumer are unsure whether Palm will prevail. The volatility in Palm’s stock is a sign of the uncertainty over its ability to challenge the iPhone and BlackBerry. (Palm’s shares bounced up to $12.40 on Friday on speculation it would be acquired by Nokia, a prospect many analysts find unlikely.)
Palm looks particularly small if smartphone applications are compared. Apple’s App Store now has more than 100,000 apps. No other phone operating system comes close, though there are about 10,000 apps for Android. Palm has about 300.
Mr. Rubinstein said Palm would never need as many applications as the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said. He expects developers will write program code for Palm devices, in part because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites. Android, by contrast, is based on Sun’s Java language, and Apple uses a variation of the C computer programming language.
While Android is getting a lot of attention because it has attracted so many phone makers, those companies, Mr. Rubinstein, argues “have to depend on the kindness of strangers” — meaning Google — for their software.
“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience — the hardware, the software and the services — and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,”
“We did what we said we were going to do,” “We have done a really good job of laying a foundation for the company moving forward. Now we need to move quickly,” said Mr. Rubinstein.

Twitter ~ Create something that you want to see in the world!

Evan Williams, chief executive of the popular microblogging service, said he's focusing on making the service more useful, not on earning revenue
Mr. Williams founded several companies before Twitter, including the Blogger service that he eventually sold to Google. One lesson he has taken from them all: “Create something that you want to see in the world,” not what some M.B.A. brandishing a business plan suggests.
“I am motivated by the world telling me I am going to fail,” Mr. Williams told journalists gathered in San Francisco.

Even after snagging $100 million in new funding from investors, Mr. Williams seems to feel no pressure to come up with a revenue model for his popular service.
According to him, the company is focusing more on building value using different approach, such as through the new Twitter Lists, which will allow anyone to create a custom list of Twitter accounts that can be shared publicly or privately.
While lists are one step towards taming the chaos of Twitter, a robust search tool is even more important.
In an interview after his keynote presentation, Mr. Williams acknowledged that the current Twitter search engine is too basic and the company has a “significant search team” working on improving it. The next goal is to eliminate the duplicates and other “noise” that come up in most search queries.
Mr. Williams said recently, the company is also releasing a tool for developers Friday that will allow geographic locations to be embedded in tweets.
So there is a lot to look forward in future!