Welcome to News About Tech from all around the world

Reuters - U.S. cable television operator Charter Communications is suspending a program that would offer advertisers ways to target pitches at people based on what they search for on the Internet.

Reuters - The world's first advertising-funded mobile telecoms operator, Blyk, will enter the highly competitive German, Spanish and Belgian markets next year, the firm said on Wednesday.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, talks with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser about the future of video and broadband.

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, talked with Beet.tv's Andy Plesser about the future of video and broadband at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York.

Cerf expects that video will be downloaded rather than streamed over time. With gigabit for second speed, users could download an hour of video in 16 seconds. "It's like the iPod--you can download music faster than you can listen to it," he said. Cerf also said that broadcasting, rather than downloading a separate copy to every user, is a good delivery model, and that users will have more control over which ads to watch.

However, obtaining the bandwidth to download a movie in seconds is a problem. Cerf said that the U.S needs policies that will cause more broadband to be rolled out everywhere in country. "We need to have as many broadband solutions as possible to evaluate for cost and deploy in the places where they are most effective," he said.

He added that incentives are needed for investments in infrastructure, and it could entail regulation of some aspects of the Internet in order to assure that there is either competition or fair access to the underlying broadband resources. The U.S. is far behind other countries in its regulatory posture and still very hands off, Cerf said. "As a nostrum, it hasn't worked out very well," he said.

Watch the video

Google’s new service will allow media buyers to identify sites where their display advertisements might work best, judged on criteria like demographics and traffic.

To Io and beyond...

The Eclipse Foundation wants to know who is using Eclipse and how they are using it ahead of next year's planned mega release.…

The Walt Disney Company, concerned that its main Web site is too corporate and not fun enough, is moving once again to overhaul Disney.com.

Evri, a Paul Allen backed semantic search engine, is launching into a limited beta tonight. Evri was first shown publicly at the D6 conference. Evri's CEO Neil Roseman likes to talk about Evri in terms of organizing content instead of calling it a search engine. At its core, however, Evri definitely is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms.

In its early stages, Evri is only going to start out with a limited set of results and possible search terms, based on what it considers to be the most popular terms and people. This approach of starting with only the most popular terms is reminiscent of Mahalo. However, unlike Mahalo, which relies on paid editors and volunteers to create its results, Evri completely relies on its algorithms to create connections between people, products, concepts, and events.

Evri especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. In his demo at D6, Roseman described the system as being similar to "an army of 7th grade grammar students graphing the Web."

Evri is entering in direct competition with a number of recent entries to the semantic search market, especially Powerset and Hakia. Powerset, however, only indexes Wikipedia articles, while Hakia tries to index all of the web, but focuses less on the relationships between objects and more on providing highly organized results for a given term.

You can sign up for invites to Evri on their homepage. The first wave of users should be receiving invites tonight.

For a more in-depth look at the state of semantic search, see also Alex Iskold's article on the myth and reality of semantic search.

Filed under: Displays, HDTV, Home Entertainment

We got a first glimpse of Mitsubishi's brand new rear-projection-ish laser-based TV tech, LaserVue, back at CES, but now the sets are just about primed for action, and should be hitting store shelves, as previously noted, Q3 2008. LaserVue will debut in 65-inch and 73-inch, with the 65-inch version hitting the scene first. Mitsubishi is still pretty coy about what exactly makes the technology tick -- other than the "zomg, lasers" aspect -- but is quick to point out the 200 percent color gamut that LaserVue provides, more than twice that of most traditional HDTVs. The sets also run at 120Hz, and boast 500 nits of brightness. Head to head against LCD and plasma sets we had trouble finding the differences, other than the color depth (particularly in the reds, almost too much so, though we're sure you can tweak that). Have no fear: the blacks are black, the brights are bright, and the viewing angle puts DLP to shame. That said, we're hearing price points are going to be more comparable to plasma and LCD than DLP, so Mitsubishi might have its work cut out for it in convincing consumers that these new "chubby," 10-inch thick TVs are the way to go. We're not entirely convinced ourselves, though one aspect can't be disputed: LaserVue draws under 200 watts, about half that of LCD and a third of plasma.

Permalink | Email this | Comments