ABC.com Streaming HDTV

ABC.com is now streaming their most popular shows in HD. Who needs a HDTV? Now all you need is a decent computer. To view the HD shows, viewers will be prompted to download a player from Move Networks. With the new player, you can watch the shows in either full-screen or mini-mode, but ad viewing is still mandatory. In other streaming TV news, BBC’s iPlayer, which allows you to watch BBC television shows for free, is getting flack for being Windows-only.

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You don’t have to be a child living in the 3rd world to get a $100 computer anymore - a company has introduced a $99 PC for everyone called "Zonbu." Designed to be a "green" PC, the small computer needs little power to run, utilizing just one-tenth the power of a typical desktop machine. In addition, the company operates in an environmentally-friendly way, offering a free take-back program and using less energy in production of the devices. By eliminating fans & hard drives, the Zonbu is completely silent; instead, flash memory is used to run the machine. Since flash memory doesn’t need to "start up" the way a hard drive does - by spinning its disks - the Zonbu starts right up away. The computer runs the Zonbu OS, which is their own flavor of Linux, and includes the open-source productivity suite Open Office, the Firefox browser, the Evolution email client, a universal IM program, Skype, a media player, a photo organizer, various other multi-media apps, and games, including puzzle games, shooter games, and a selection of classic arcade games.

With the purchase of Zonbu, you can also get the Zonbu service (and you should) which provides you with upgrades to your applications & operating system. As
new versions of OS, the applications, and the drivers become available,
the Zonbu service automatically applies the upgrades, so your system is always up-to-date. With this $12.95 per month service, your data is encrypted and stored on the company’s servers, so even if something was to happen to your Zonbu device, the data could be restored to a replacement machine. Additionally, you can log in to Zonbu’s private web space from anywhere that has an an internet connection and access your data from there. The device has six USB ports so you can hook up your printer, an iPod, a digital camera, insert a memory stick, or plug in any other number of gadgets.

Since this is a managed, diskless device, you can’t install your own programs, and there could be a lack of support for various peripherals. These limitations mean that you should not consider using this as your home’s primary computer, as you will still want something more customizable to your needs. However, as a kid’s computer, a spare to have in the kitchen or the guest room, or just an extra computer for the family so you don’t have to fight over who’s "turn" it is, this basic machine may be worth checking out.

The amazing, if processor-intensive, Particls application helps you deal with information overload by scanning your feeds for keywords while learning your interests. The end result is a filtered news reader that brings to your attention only the information that you truly want to view. Yesterday, a posting on their  blog announced a new feature: a sidebar gadget now replaces the ticker as the default output adapter. The post reads, "The new Particls Sidebar is your personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online. It’s real-time. It’s animated. It’s social. It’s always there, keeping you informed. It can also be set to "Auto-hide" so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed. It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters…Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news. Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around."

circaVie is a new site from AOL where you can build multi-media timelines of photos, videos, and text that you can then share. On the beautifully designed site, you can easily start a new timeline, adding events to it, then post it anywhere - whether your personal homepage, your blog, or even your online profile at a social networking site like MySpace. People viewing your flash-based timeline can either just view it, scroll through it, skip to a certain date in the timeline, search it, browse your tags, subscribe to its feed, or comment on it. During the beta phase, all timelines will be public, but later on, you will be able to mark them as private so as to make them viewable only to family or friends.  How cool! We were all bored with flickr anyway, weren’t we?

…even if the I.T. guy says "no!" If your company uses a Microsoft Exchange email server, then you can get your company email on your iPhone, no I.T. department required. A company called Synchronica announced their Mobile Gateway 3.0 supports over-the-air synchronization between Microsoft Exchange and the Apple iPhone. Their Mobile Gateway uses Microsoft’s secure Outlook Web Access (OWA) to retrieve email from the company’s Exchange server, a service enabled by many enterprises to provide people with access to their work email from home or while traveling. The service will even sync messages on the iPhone to your mailbox.

I kind of want this. I have absolutely no use for it, I don’t need it, but who can resist a big, squishy, purple keyboard?

Everyone was down today due to a major power outage in San Francisco. Netflix, Craigslist, TypePad, Vox, LiveJournal, Adbrite, Technorait, Yelp, RedEnvelope and more. Or was it really a drunken employee that did the damage? Leave it to Valleywag to kick someone when they’re down. Literally.

I just watched The Pirates of Silicon Valley last night right here. Made Steve Jobs look like an miserable, egotistical a**. Yelled at his employees all the time about how they were crap and their work was crap. Tried to pretend he wasn’t the baby daddy of his kid. Treated his friends terribly. How true was this movie? How come everyone idolizes him if it was true?

More:

• All your USB devices can be wireless soon. OMG! Salvation!!
• I can’t believe someone actually invented this: Cooler Scoop for people who are too wussy to put their hands into a cooler of ice.
• Big Gmail productivity list

On Friday, Mashable! reported that MySpace mysteriously started blocking the letter "i" on MySpace blogs. How bizzare. Although obviously a glitch, it wouldn’t have come about if MySpace wasn’t so into censorship. Sites like Vidlife, Stickam, Revver, and Photobucket have all felt the effects of a MySpace ban. Additionally, Pyzam.com, Glitter-graphics.com and MrDoe have all found links to their sites disabled this past week. Sure, MySpace just wanted to show these companies who’s boss, but it’s the users that suffer. You can’t permit thousands of users to post content from a site onto their profiles one day, then block that same content the next. C’mon. Top off this random censorship with busy, slow-loading, ugly, & loud personal pages, tons of spam friend requests, and unorganized lists of "friends" that really aren’t, I think it’s safe to say that MySpace has jumped the shark for most people. Although still strong in numbers for now, as more and more people get fed up with the lack of concern MySpace shows for its own users, the more people will dump MySpace for friendlier, cleaner sites like Facebook.
 

More iGoogle fun! Want to dress up your iGoogle homepage with a custom theme? Add the Custom iGoogle Skins gadget to your homepage and you can pick from one of several custom, user-generated themes. Some of the currently available themes include a "Digg" theme, "BBC," "Pink Heffalump," "Dark Skyline," "Halo," and more. With the gadget you can also create a new skin of your own, and by using another tab, you can submit your creation to share with others. 

Both the iPhone & T-Mobile’s "HotSpot @Home" service offer cellular phones that can automatically switch over to wi-fi when a wireless network is present. Now it’s time to add another phone to this list, and it’s a Blackberry (sweet!). The new BlackBerry 8820 supports 802.11 a/b/g wi-fi standards. Other features of the phone include a built-in GPS, microSD memory cards support, an enhanced media player, and EDGE/GPRS/GSM cellular and Wi-Fi® connectivity for data access and voice support through UMA (unlicensed mobile access) for fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) service offerings from various wireless carriers around the world. No official date as to when the BlackBerry 8820 will be available.

The new and popular invitation-sharing website, InviteShare, was purchased by TechCrunch today. InviteShare website matches users who have invites to the closed beta web 2.0 startups to those users that want an invite. Apparently, TechCrunch was working on a similar website, but InviteShare beat them to launch. When InviteShare went on the auction block, TechCrunch outbid the others and acquired the company. They announced that the site might be named something "crunchier" to fit in with their other websites. I hope the acquisition will bring more people on board with the service so there are more invites to share!