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That’s right, there are strong rumors floating around from very reliable sources that the iPhone 5 will be available to Sprint in mid-October. For those people with a Sprint contract due to work or location, this is great news! I think it’s about time that Apple is reaching to more carriers. When they started out with strictly AT&T only, I thought it was a bad decision because they were reaching a smaller market compared to if they were to go with all carriers. But I am starting to wonder if adding one market at a time is a good strategy for building up anticipation and making the phone more elite. I for one have a Sprint contract and can’t wait to get an iPhone!

It’s new, it’s beta, and it’s already popular! A few days ago I was invited to join Google +, and already the majority of my friends are starting their “official” transition from Facebook to this new social platform. So, why make the switch? What does Google + offer that Facebook doesn’t?

At first glance, the layout of Google + is extremely similar to Facebook. There’s the main page with a news stream, status updates, photo and video albums, and chat. You can customize your profile and security settings to be in control of who sees what. The feature that I like best about Google + is our first topic for discussion:

Circles

This is your opportunity to divide the people you know into their rightful groups without them even knowing it. All my family members are in my Family circle, all my good friends are in my Friends circle, and all the people that I don’t care to know what they had for breakfast are in my Acquaintances circle. You can choose which circles see your status updates and look at each circle’s stream individually. This way you know for sure when you click on “Friends” that you will actually be seeing news from the people that matter the most to you, chosen by you. And it’s so easy to manage your circles with the drag and drop feature.

Hangout

I love this feature almost just as much as Circles. On Google + you can declare that you are “hanging out,” and then anyone from the circle you have specified will be able to join your hangout. What is a hangout? It’s a popup window with up to 10 video chat participants! Only one person can hog the big screen at a time, and you can choose who that lucky bugger is by clicking on their smaller video next to everyone else at the bottom of the window.

Sparks

This is a pretty cool feature if you just feel like browsing. You can decide which topics spark your interest and Google will do what it does best and bring you different websites and articles that are related to your Spark topics. The results it provides are a constant feed so that you see different things every day!

Overall, I am excited for this new social platform and I have found myself clicking my Google + bookmark before Facebook as of late. Could this be Facebook’s downfall?

By now I am sure you are making use of LinkedIn, an ever growing social networking site for professionals. If not, now is the time to take advantage of the benefits this site has to offer!

According to Jason Seiden, “LinkedIn began publicly trading Thursday, and immediately the stock spiked, rocketing from $45 to $122.70 before retreating to $94.25 at the end of the trading day.”

Take advantage of LinkedIn. As a student, I have had this pounded into my head. As an entrepreneur, friend, and coworker, I have experienced the benefits firsthand. Not only is LinkedIn a great place to keep in touch and connect with acquaintances; but it also has the potential to get you a job!

Check out the new InMaps. In this post you see an image of my own LinkedIn InMap. If you click on the picture it will take you to the interactive version. These InMaps are a way to see your own connections and assess your network of people. Why would it be important to assess your network, you might ask? If you have too many connections that are not relative to your interests, then your network does not benefit you. Make sure that you are easily able to label and recognize the various groups and individuals that you know. Here are a few tips to keep in mind when using LinkedIn:

1. Keep in touch and connect with people that you have worked with and that could recommend you to someone.
2. Do not connect with people that you are not familiar with, as it does not benefit you in any way.
3. Make sure your profile is a complete and correct representation of you.

It’s not as big as Facebook, but I’m excited to see how LinkedIn grows from here on out!

Taken from a cute play on words of the iconic phrase from Star Wars, “may the force be with you,” today’s unofficial holiday brings a little burst of joy to the nerd community. Lucasfilm has taken advantage of the hype to announce more details on the long awaited release of the complete saga on Blu-Ray.

I’ve been checking on the official May the 4th website all day, viewing all the picture previews. I can’t wait to get the new set and see all the films in full, high definition glory. Imagine all the bonus content!

Just as I was posting my last blog on Tuesday, Sony announced an “unauthorized person” was able to obtain user’s personal data, including login information and passwords, and possibly credit card information.  Users have been warned to be cautious of fradulant activity in their accounts, and to be on the lookout for scammers contacting them via email, telephone, or snail mail.

Unfortunately for me, I had previously used my primary debit card to purchase games via the PSN.  Admittedly, I have not canceled the account, but keep a very close eye on the activity daily.  I’m not sure if that is the best plan of action at the moment or not, but for now, I sense the hacker’s intention was to cause a disruption, rather than personally profit from this stunt.

On a positive note, I will be getting a 1 week credit on my Hulu Plus bill for the month.  $2 each back in the pockets of the good guys.  Tiny Victory.

Crisis in the gaming community continues.  Last Thursday, the PlayStation Network, the backbone of they PlayStation 3s online features, mysteriously went down, and has yet to return. Sony has been reluctant to admit that its network was hacked.  Saturday, Sony announced that during this extended outage, they have been “rebuilding our system to further strengthen our network infrastructure.”

The PSN outage has hit my home particularly hard.  My fiancé is an avid Unreal Tournament 3 player, and I myself depend on Hulu Plus through the PS3 for television content.  Thankfully it was a holiday weekend, so we had many other activities to fill our time.  However, as this disruption persists, I fear that we may actually need to become productive in our free time.

While the PSN outage is mostly a personal inconvenience, another network failure hit this week, causing ripples in the business community. AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing service, experienced a 4 day disruption, also starting Thursday.  Some web based business, such as Reddit, Quora, and Foursquare, had their operations crippled by this outage. 

Both of these high-profile events are a reminder to us all to proceed with caution as our lives become more and more dependant on network-based technologies.  Remember, we are depending on others to keep everything up and running, and it’s humbling to see how little control we all really have.

It’s a growing battle: Discs vs. Downloads.

According to NPD entertainment research, discs are still ahead of the game when it comes to home media viewing — but it won’t stay that way forever. The days of physical media are limited. Stephen McGill from Microsoft even went so far as to say that “Blu-Ray is going to be passed by as a format. People have moved through from DVDs to digital downloads and digital streaming…. So, who needs Blu-ray?”

Kaz Hirai from Sony says, “To think everything will be downloaded in two years, three years or even ten years from now is taking it a little bit to the extreme.” There are two sides to this argument.

1. Physical media will be around as long as the generation that used it is still alive (case in point: my great grandmother prefers VHS).
2. The mainstream style of home media viewing could lean in the favor of digital downloads quicker than people think. Just look at how much computers have developed. In 1977 Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corp. said “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” At the exact same time, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were working on a project that would impact the future immensely with Apple, Inc.

No one can deny that digital media downloads are becoming more and more popular. But there are still some reasons for sticking with disc. Some people argue that quality is better, you can bring it anywhere and borrow them from friends, and what about the special features? These are all concepts that digital downloads will have to address sooner or later.

Click after the break for the top sources of digital media download and streaming.

Read more…

It’s getting hot in here, and I’m not talking about the weather! Mozilla released the newest version of the Firefox web browser on March 22nd. Here are four of the most popular features that Mozilla brings to the desk. After introducing the features, we’ll take a look at Firefox’s competition.

1. Interface

The app tab and panorama are newly added to Firefox 4′s interface. Right click on any open tab and choose to pin it to the browser. This gives that tab a compact, permanent home in your browser to easily access at any time. I would recommend only having 1 or 2 of these app tabs because otherwise it will slow the start-up time of the browser, and that gets really annoying.

Panorama is a way to group tabs and organize your web life. Some people have complained that previous versions of Firefox can look untidy and be painful for your eyes. Now here’s an easy solution for the mess.

2. Customization

Add-ons are famously known to be in relation with Firefox. This is a great concept for the post-modern generation. YOU choose what you want YOUR browser to do for you. It really makes it your own and identifiably matching who you are. And everyone is different! Add persona skins to your browser, and now you can have pink flowers and kitty cats bordering your webmail, news, and social networking sites. Whatever floats your sailboat — with this web browser you’ll have smooth sailing into the sunset.

3. Privacy

Mozilla makes privacy a high priority for Firefox. The “Do Not Track” feature sends a message to sites that you want to opt-out of online behavioral tracking. This feature can be toggled on and off. The one issue with this for now is that it only works with sites that are compatible with the “Do Not Track” feature. We have yet to see what sites will be in league with this idea. For the time being, I like the effort that Mozilla puts out to standardize the privacy of consumer data and web users.

4. Extras for Web Developers

The JägerMonkey Javascript engine makes for faster and higher performance of page loads and web apps/games. There are also some fun things to play with involving HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and SVG.

Read more…

Back in January of 2009, I blogged about my experience “cutting the cord” and living with broadcast television only, then ultimately the decision to re-subscribe to satellite service.  Fast forward to today – the introductory rate has expired, and with a $50/month increase in cost, I find myself asking the same question I did 2 years ago, is subscription television service really worth it?

Despite all our efforts, our country is still in the middle of recession, and it still effects us all in our daily lives.  I am still drinking generic soda, cutting coupons, and looking for new ways to stretch my budget even further.  On the surface, cutting out satellite seems like an obvious way to free up those needed dollars.  However, in re-reading my last blog, I am reminded of how much I truly enjoy it.  And as summer fades away, I dread the boredom filled days of the dead of winter, not that far off.

While the economic situation remains the same, new technologies have evolved, creating a more plausible alternative to subscription television.  The majority of television programming is now available to stream over the internet.  Hulu was in its infancy during the first round of my debate, but it has quickly grown into a media powerhouse.  The vast majority of programming I watch can be streamed though this site.  If you can’t find a show there, most likely the host network has it available for streaming on their own website.

Well, it seems like a no brainer, why pay for something when you can get it for free? My first and biggest problem with this alternative is video quality.  In order to download at a reasonable speed, resolution has to be sacrificed.  This is not a sacrifice I am willing to make.  Blu-Ray technology has spoiled me and I now expect all my video to be crisp and vibrant, and right now that’s just not possible over the internet.

The other problem is that my preferred position for television viewing is sprawled out on the couch, in front of my big screen HDTV.  It is not relaxing to me to sit in an office chair, in front of a computer monitor, I do that every day.  While it is technically possible to connect the PC to my TV, this would require jumping through more hoops and spending more dollars than I am willing to at this point.  And besides, as I mentioned before, the picture quality is lost, especially if I try to blow up the image as large as my TV screen.

After a call to my provider, it turns out that although my introductory rate has expired, I am still under contract for another 6 months, and I’m not about to pay the early cancellation fee.  I did reduce my plan to the basic package (plus HD and DVR of course) – so although I no longer have GSN or Soap Net, I’m not paying any more than what I was before.  This also gives me some more time to debate the issue, so I’d love to hear what you think…

One of the major issues with the current packaged media formats is copy protection. Home media, commercial applications, parts catalogs, and corporate presentations all questioned the actual reliability of current copy protection encryption. With Blu-ray declared as the tangible media of the next generation it is important to examine the merits of its copy protection capabilities.

Blu-ray copy protection uses 3 major layers of copy protection:

1.   Advanced Access Content System (AACS). AACS is similar to CSS, which was used with DVD, and works like a secret handshake between the disc and the player. The major benefit is that the “handshakes” are renewable and transparent to the honest media user. It has been publicized that this technology has been hacked, but the renewability of this scheme makes it difficult to compromise it completely.

2.    BD+. This technology works like a virtual machine that monitors the system to detect modification or “modding”. “Modding” evolved out of the gaming industry as systems were easily modified to play pirated games. BD+ keeps a memory of the hosting environment and can detect and render a system useless until normal functioning is restored.

3.   BD ROM Mark. A licensed replicator of the media will be required to use a unique watermark on the disc. The Blu-ray player will look for that watermark before playing the disc.

These three layers of control will hopefully manage the amount of piracy in the industry and allow content providers to feel confident that their distribution is contained. Content security is important to entertainment content, but also to those looking to contain their brand and disallow manipulation and unauthorized use. The 3 layers of copy protection used by Blu-ray aim to protect those interests.