News for Monday, 12 January 2009

Rambus, the company that has made a speciality of haunting the courts to put forward claims for millions of dollars for patent infringements has just had a big disappointment. They had their lawsuit dismissed against Micron. The judge having noted that Rambus destroyed important documents which could have used to their discredit. More seriously, the judge considered that the patents of the company are quite simply not applicable in this context.
If Rambus hopes to appeal this decision, they are already on a back foot. Their stock has already been ravaged by the crisis, like all the others has fallen 40%, the investors preferring to flee a company whose ground is beginning to break down.
Already in the past, the American authorities were aware of the practices of Rambus considering even that the company voluntarily hid from JEDEC (organization of certification of the patents) some of its patents so that they could attack those who, in all bona fide, would start to manufacture products before these certifications became public.

We already talked about the new cheap Intel ATOM CPU, as its price can make it the dedicated processor for many notebooks and devices in current economic slow-down. It turns out that Intel is acting in order to define the market for each of its CPU offers, to prevent more expensive CPU to be banned by PC manufacturers and OEM.
So, Intel does not want to see Dual core ATOM to end up in netbook as it requires a fan, so if your need more power you need a Dual Core Core 2 Duo. Officially, Intel does not want dual Core ATOM to be associated with low performance notebook (or netbook), so the founder is adding some restriction for the use of its products to preserve market segmentations and its margins for its CPU offers.
This new restriction comes after the first one that limits the display of an ATOM-power notebook to 10.2" or 1 GB of RAM. However, Dell already obtained a grant for an exception, and HP is currently trying to get a similar one too. On a market where AMD does not offer competitive CPUs to Intel's solutions, and other CPU manufacturers have problems to bring products able to compete, Intel is trying to define CPU usage. (not sure that this is fully legal, one should maybe ask the EC to have a look at it...)

In order to prevent any issues or complains from potential customers, Apple already released a TechNote related to the famous non replaceable battery powering the new MacBook Pro 17". As we already announced it after the keynote, the battery can be changed in any APR for 179 Euro, and a one-year warranty will be granted too (depending on the local laws). One will have to wait for couple of months to evaluate if the battery lifetime really evolves according to Apple’s claims.

Friday, Microsoft launched beta public of Windows 7, the successor of Vista, allowing the first 2.500.000 people (update: this limit has since been made infinite) who would be interested to download it. However life took a turn for the worse. Faced with this load, the servers quickly fell making any remote loading impossible. Microsoft preferred to closed down everything and endeavoured to place at the disposal more infrastructure in order to answer the demand.
It should be said that this beta weighs 2,4 GB, multiplied by 2,5 million, one arrives at 6 PetaOctets and this is simply colossal.
After the mitigated success of Vista, this breakdown (which should have been foreseeable!!) restates the form of success of the company, that has suffered from image problems lately.
[Update]Things have since restarted. More amusing, well - at least for some, is that it appears that the activation keys that take so long to recover from the servers of Microsoft and that are meant to be different for each user are, in fact, picked at random from a short list that has since been made public elsewhere.

equinux is a German company, with offices in San Francisco, that developed several products for the Mac, most of them being media-oriented: such as "Media Central", a media center for the Mac, TV with TheTube, TV tuner with TubeStick, music with CoverScout and the brand new SongGenie.
We met Christian Rüb to discuss about new and future products from Equinux.

TheTube offers basic functionalities expected by most users with a single mono-window, most likely to look different than the competing applications eyeTV from elgato. The tuner is available in European version (digital terrestrial TV, DVB-T/DTT) and in US version ("TubeStick hybrid", analog and digital).
Unlike eyeTV offering a double tuner, TubeStick only offers a single tuner. According to Christian Rüb, this is a strategic choice: Equinux is a small company and can currently not deal with too many hardware diversity, so they concentrate on large key market with high potential.
The new Equinux products for early 2009 are 2 iPhone applications which should be released soon: TubeToGo (currently reviewed by Apple) and Live TV. Both are free. TubeToGo is an application allowing users to watch their recorded video via internet. IT looks similar to the video streaming option for iPhone offered by elgato, however equinux version is not limited to local network.

How does it work? It is relatively simple: you can setup TheTube to automatically upload some programs to a dedicated online storage space, via MobileMe or via FTP on an ISP or your own server. Once the recording completed, TheTube upload it to the server and updates the library file describing the different programs available. It is then easy to use TubeToGo from your iPhone to browse the library. The quality of encoding is rather, but the streaming to the iPhone will strongly depends on your bandwidth (you will need 3G network). You can also program the recording of a show from your iPhone, and it will be automatically uploaded to the server once completed. In addition, you can get access to the TubeToGo interface via your favorite web browser, so you can watch your videos from any computer. The preferences allow you to define if you can share a video with others, or if it is private contents.
LiveTV as intended by its name, gives you the possibility to watch TV on your iPhone, by streaming from your local network (requiring TheTube). If idea and the associated functions are interesting, the video quality is currently rather poor. According to equinux, this is a compromise between performance, quality and battery lifetime of the iPhone, better video quality would drain power too quickly.

Those two application initially developed independently will most likely be merged in the future.
Concerning MediaCentral, the equinux media-center solution, the application did not really evolved over the last 2 years, and while equinux is currently thinking of a new version, especially the interface, there is currently no defined date for a new release.
If you are a music addict and control freak, and particularly hate to get iTunes albums without the dedicated cover, you probably tried CoverScout:

With the version 3, the interface has completely been revised, and is now displaying an iApps design. However, changes made by Apple in the code, prevent you to add metadata to the music track as it used to be possible with version 2.0 of CoverScout. Equinux is working on this problem, expecting that apple will give them green light to fix it.
The other new product from Equinux has just been announced prior the MacWorld: SongGenie. It allows you to add information on all those music tracks floating around in your iTunes library, and usually tagged as "Track 1 - Untitled Album - Unknown Artist".

SongGenie works similarly to Shazam: it scans the music track, then compares the music signature with a music database provided by MusicIP. According to Equinux, the system is reliable in 80-85% of the search, and as with Shazam, you might have problem to tag your old recordings ripped from vinyl disc. Once the file identified, you simply need to give SongGenie the right to add all information to the selected tracks, then you can recover the missing cover with CoverScout, or index them with Genius.

Apple categorically announced that they will not take part in 2010 Macworld at San Francisco whose dates are fixed to be January 4-8.
There are now various rumours that imply that Apple will benefit from this abandonment to make an appearance at CES, the largest data-processing expo in the world, which will be held January 7 -10, although nothing is yet confirmed. However, it is known now that the organizers of this expo want to benefit with the defection of Apple to attract the industrialists of the Mac sector to within its walls.
They announced that the 2010 edition of CES will see for the first time a zone dedicated to the Mac world. This opportunist decision represents for them a gift from heaven since all the computing industry during this economic downturn will make broad cuts in its budgets of communication, with the very expensive expos being first in the firing line.
This is on the other hand very a bad news for IDG who manage Macworld and whose exhibitors will have a second reason not to take part in their expo already hard hit by the absence of Apple.
Of course, one is unaware of if Apple will go back on its decision to give up all expos to make a presence at CES, but it does remains possible. However there is a carefully drawn line concerning the new policy of the company which seeks to reconcile two incompatible things; to convince the public that the Mac is a PC like the others, thus one can move over to it without difficulty while keeping a elitism that the Mac is better than a PC and that its operating system is superior to Windows.

So,
the 2009 edition of MacWorld Expo San Francisco is over. What's left of it, apart from a lingering pain in my feet?
In spite of a keynote that many have qualified as "dull", the Expo itself didn't seem that different from the previous 2 years, in terms of visitors (although we'll have to wait for the "official" numbers) and atmosphere. You can say that there was a lack of a certain excitment in the air, like you have after every keynote given by Steve Jobs and his famous "one more thing".
Regarding the content, it's interesting to note that, after the recent years of iPod/iPhone mania, the situation is normalising itself: MWSF09 was resolutely oriented towards the Mac, on the Apple booth as well as on the 3rd party booths. Indeed, if last year's edition was still stuffed with iThings, including luxury cars "made for iPod" complete with short-skirted bimbos, this year the iPod accessories are still there but not dominant anymore.
Welcome (back) to Macintosh.
The question remains if, despite this rather good edition (in my opinion), MacWorld Expo will survive Apple's pulling out.
We'll have to wait a few month to know...
See you there next year!