If only John Mayer’s dad lived in Australia and owned a Dell. Then all of John Mayer’s dad’s tech support questions could have been easily answered by the good folks at Gizmo.
You see, today Dell and Gizmo announced that they were going to get intimate, with Gizmo services like setting up your Dell PC or setting up a wireless network available as an optional extra when purchasing a new Dell machine.
While it’s highly unlikely that anybody reading this would need tech support to set up their own computer, this could be the kind of thing that you purchase for your own mum or dad when buying them a PC, so you can save yourself the 1,742 phone calls about how to get the computer working or, in John Mayer’s case, finding an application.
Pricing is a bit on the expensive side, but look at it this way: they have to put up with all of those inane questions from old people so you don’t have to. Isn’t that worth something?
Pricing is below:
All you city-dwellers out there – spare a thought for your poor, unfortunate rural brethren. For while you dine on the feast of High Definition delights afforded to you from Foxtel HD and the free-to-air TV channels, they have to rely on Austar, which has decided to take the “slow and steady and maybe not at all” approach to HD.
According to Australian IT today, Austar CEO John Porter has stated that launching HD channels on Austar probably won’t happen any time soon, as they are struggling to find a financial model that will actually make them money from new subscribers.
Although – just to confuse us all – he then stated that they will probably still release a HD-capable PVR in the 3rd quarter of 2009, although they may not accompany the hardware with any HD programming.
Just a little over a week since the ABC launched their iView service for video on demand, executives from Hulu, the NBC/News Corp video streaming service from the US, have flown into Australia to meet with all the Australian networks to try and launch Hulu down under.
According to the SMH, all three free-to-air networks have met with Hulu, and seem to be fairly optimistic about the proposition, although whether or not we see an Australian version could come down to what kind of business deals are offered to the local networks.
But most interesting is the fact that network executives are also considering using the ABC’s iView to do the same thing – act as a central content hub for programming from all the Australian networks.
The guys from ZDnet went on a photographic excursion yesterday to the site of Google’s new offices down in Pyrmont, Sydney.
The building reportedly cost $50 million to build, and will be shared between Google and global IT services company Accenture. It will also be the first building in NSW to be awarded a six-star environmental rating.
Although the building still appears far from complete, apparently Google are planning on moving in at some point in October this year. Of course, only time will tell what kinds of awesome furniture and fun design the Sydney office will feature. Hopefully we’ll be able to get an inside look when the team moves in later this year.
For a full gallery of the construction, head on over to ZDnet.
[ZDnet - Thanks Renai (Photo credit to ZDnet as well)]
newVideoPlayer("/ibird.flv", 506, 304,""); The iBird Flight Simulator was easily the most creative demo at Microsoft’s Research Summit yesterday. Also developed in conjunction with NYU (like the UnMouse Pad), it uses a USB controller with dual retractable, pulley-style cords, the iBird tracks your movement in 3D space.. The iBird then relays that information back to the computer and offers visual feedback in the form of a projected 3D world where you become a bird that flaps, leans and speeds up.
One of the only few things going for getting an iPhone on Telstra, especially in light of their terrible data packages, was the inclusion of free Wi-Fi at their hotspots around the country. But now that hotspot network looks to be a few locations fewer with the announcement that Starbucks is closing 61 of their 84 stores.
Because not every store had Wi-Fi before the closures, this probably won’t effect too many people. Unless you live in Canberra that is, where it’s likely that all three Wi-Fi enabled Starbucks stores will close.
The guys over at ZDnet got into the nitty gritty of the situation, and although there are a lot of unknown factors still involved around exactly which Starbucks stores will be closing, the loss of any free Wi-Fi hotspot is a sad day for Gizmodians around the country. Hopefully Telstra will be looking to expand their 1000+ network of hotspots in light of the Starbucks move. And hopefully they’ll make them free to everyone. Not holding our breath, though…
[ZDnet via Lifehacker AU]
No word on what it does besides “improve stability and performance”. Keep in mind that this comes a few days after iPhone app DRM was cracked, so if you’re dabbling in the black arts of app swapping, you probably want to wait til someone else reports on whether this affects that or not before upgrading.
The biggest thing holding satnavs back in this country has been a lack of real-time traffic information. Even though Intelematics launched the SUNA traffic channel in Melbourne last year, the other capital cities haven’t had the same luxury.
It looks like all that’s about to change, however. I received an invite to the official launch of Sydney and Brisbane’s first real-time traffic information service. It’s an extension of the Melbourne SUNA offering, which is currently supported by most of the major satnav providers (albeit via an optional extra antenna, in most cases).
They’re also promising to announce some new local partnerships at the launch event, which happens on August 13. We’ll be there, so stay tuned for updates then.
The Gadget: EOS Wireless iPod Dock/Wireless Speaker system, which has one base unit that can take either an iPod or anything that can feed into its 3.5mm aux input (wire included). With this one base unit you can feed up to four satellite wireless units up to 45 metres away (or less through walls and floors).
AiLive, the company that collaborated with Nintendo on the MotionPlus controller add-on, has released a video demonstrating the full capabilities of the new hardware with a set of 3D tools called LiveMove2. An obvious but effective rendering of the controller shows that the touted 1:1 tracking is, in fact, 1:1 and that the response time is almost instant. They’ve also had some fun with the software, mapping a light saber to the WiiMote to fight off physics-enabled Seeker Drones (which caused our own Adrian Covert to “make a mess in his pants”). To top it all off, the “Snap-to-fit” technology can map incredibly complex motions to more specific commands, recognising everything from throwing a lasso to specific sword slashes.
