AMIMON, Motorola, Sony, et al. join hands on wireless HD standard

From Engadget -
WHDI creator AMIMON has joined forces with Motorola, Samsung, Sony and Sharp in order to form "a special interest group to develop a comprehensive new industry standard for multi-room audio, video and control connectivity" utilizing the aforementioned Wireless Home Digital Interface technology.

Reportedly, the group will have a standard completed before 2009 with the overriding goal to "enhance the current WHDI technology to enable wireless streaming of uncompressed HD video and audio between CE devices such as LCD and plasma HDTVs, multimedia projectors, AV receivers, DVD and BD players, set-top-boxes, game consoles and PCs."



Source article here.

The BIC Phone - Is the mobile phone really a commodity now?

From The Red Ferret Journal -

France's Orange have just launched the BIC Phone which comes with an hour’s worth of calls pre-loaded, a charged up battery and the SIM in place. All you’ve got to do is tear off the packaging and start calling and texting. Oh and it’s got an FM radio in it too. The handset will be available on 7 August 2008, at a suggested retail price of €49 including tax. The BIC phone will be sold in Metropolitan France only.

Source article here.

Android Installer for Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

From pocketables -

The newly developed Android Installer (released July 1) has resolved practically all the difficulties associated with installation using the original method. The new version makes installing a very functional Android onto Diablo-running N810s as quick and easy as installing an application.

Now the the first thing you need to do is download and save the android.img.bz2 image file on the N810 (internal memory or miniSD card; 110MB free space required).

Source article here.

First Look: OpenMoko's Linux-based open smartphone platform

Ars Technica provides an early look at the OpenMoko's FreeRunner smartphone, a Linux-based handset that's completely open in both hardware and software, and is designed to encourage third-party modification and customization.

Complete Article here.

GoDaddy allows executives to bid against own customers in auctions?

As posted by member fyodor on the NoDaddy forum -

"When a GoDaddy customer forgets or otherwise fails to renew a domain, GoDaddy sells it off to the highest bidder through their TDNAM subsidiary. Some registrars--even Network Solutions--give the domain owner a percentage of the proceeds of such auctions. But GoDaddy keeps all the spoils to themselves. Anyway, it was recently discovered that the Vice President of TDNAM has been bidding on (and sometimes winning) TDNAM's own auctions. This drives up the prices for normal customers and also leads to conflict of interest issues since normal bidders need to trust TDNAM to keep various information secret, such as their proxy bids, bidding history, the domains on their watch list. Also, GoDaddy doesn't tell you when your bid price was inflated due to TDNAM executives bidding against you. They are one of the few auction services which don't even give you the nicknames of competing bidders.

DomainNameWire contacted other domain auction services, and none allow unrestricted employee bidding on their own auctions like GoDaddy does. Enom (a patner in NameJet) notes that "We definitely do NOT let employees compete in auctions. Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it." Yet GoDaddy seems to think it is fine for executives to inflate their auction prices by bidding against customers. They responded to DomainNameWire that they allow this. There is a big risk that these employees have access to private information of the normal bidders, that they get special discounts, or that they may sometimes shill bid to increase prices without trying to actually win."

The story has since been picked up by Digg and Slashdot.