YouTube rolling out movie rentals from Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks

Jordan Kahn

We reported a couple weeks back that Disney and Google were partnering to bring Disney content to YouTube, and today the first of that content is beginning to roll out with movies from Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks available for rent at youtube.com/movies (U.S. and Canada).

Adding to the thousands of Hollywood titles already available for rent through YouTube, the company will roll out hundreds of Disney titles in the weeks to come, with a handful of titles available today including Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh, Cars 2, and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. As always you’ll have 48 hours to view the rentals which range from $1.99 for older titles to $4.99 for newer releases.

While YouTube has already signed up Warner Brothers, Sony, and Universal to provide content, the addition of Disney films sees Google buddying up with one of Apple’s closest allies. Apple has a close relationship with Disney, to say the least. Other than iTunes previously being one of the biggest online portals to Disney content, the company was also the first to back movies on iTunes and became even closer connected with Apple as the acquisition of Pixar saw Steve Jobs become the largest individual shareholder at Disney.  More recently, Disney CEO Bob Iger joined Apple’s board after restructuring named former board member Arthur D. Levinson Chairman. This major push of Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks content to YouTube could prove to be one less reason to pick iTunes over Google’s content services. Read more

Researcher who exposed Carrier IQ tracking software gets legal threats

Jordan Kahn

Some pretty alarming news coming from the Android hacking community today. If you haven’t yet heard of Carrier IQ, it’s essentially tracking software that has been found loaded into the source code of several devices being shipped by Samsung, HTC, and other Android vendors. The software is said to track and log user activities. Now, this has been known for sometime and wouldn’t normally be newsworthy at this point, but the company behind Carrier IQ is now actively threatening XDA-Developers member Trevor Eckhart, a.k.a TrevE, the same dev who first discovered the software.

As part of Eckhart’s research to expose the software, he posted training material that the company had already made available publicly online. Following his analysis and criticism of the software, Carrier IQ  removed the training material from their own website and issued a cease-and-desist letter to Eckhart demanding that he remove the documents and replace his report with a statement written by Carrier IQ renouncing his research. They also want him to issue that statement as a press release.

Eckhart didn’t back down, fortunately. On his behalf, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a response to Carrier IQ’s cease-and-desist letter. Here’s an excerpt:
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HTC lowers Q4 forecast in face of competition from Apple and Samsung

Jordan Kahn

When we reported HTC’s last earnings call for the third-quarter, the company doubled profits and revenues year over year and had an all around solid quarter. While Q4 revenue will be on par with the same quarter last year, approximately NT$104 billion ($3.4 billion), the Taiwan-based company is lowering revenue estimates by 23% in the face of competitive product lines from Samsung and Apple. Bloomberg reports:

“Due to global macroeconomic downturn and market competition, the assumptions of 2011 Q4 financial forecast provided earlier are no longer applicable,” HTC said. Growth will return in the first half of next year, it said.

Previously the company had estimated  between NT$125 billion and NT$135 billion in sales for Q4, and while HTC’s quarter-on-quarter sales have grown since Q1 2010, this marks the first quarter in nearly two years sales have slowed. HTC shares also hit  NT$565 (a 5.8% drop) before today’s announcement, which accounts for the lowest share value since September 2010.  Inline with HTC’s original estimates, analysts estimates seem to be much higher than the NT$104 billion announced today. Bloomberg grabbed the average of 23 predictions from analysts, which resulted in an a estimate of NT$136.7 billion for Q4.
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Google abandons green tech initiative, axes Knol, Wave, Friend Connect and other services

9to5 Staff


Google Wave is no more.

Google already shut down Android developer forums, closed Labs, phased out Google Desktop, killed off questions and answer site Advark and gave up on a whole lot of other services. With that in mind, the latest batch of Google services heading to the technology graveyard will surprise hardly anyone.

The streamlining of the company continues as the search Goliath announced in a blog post yesterday that Knol, Wave, Bookmarks Lists, Friend Connect, Gears and Search Timeline are goners, too. They are also shutting down the RE<C project which aimed to lower the cost of renewable energy (RE<C is an acronym for “renewable energy” [RE] is cheaper than coal [C]“). This comes after Google’s green arm had poured over $850 million into various renewable energy projects.

Google’s CEO and co-founder Larry Page said his company would kill off  a number of smaller products in order to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. The Jobs-ification of Google is supposed to allow the company to become more agile as it sets its sights on moon shots, ambitious projects which could metamorphose into the pillars of Google’s future growth.

Page took the reigns at Google on April 4, taking over from Eric Schmidt who was promoted  the company’s chairman. Head down past the break for the full list of discontinued products and their respective end-of-life dates, per Google’s post.

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First Android device with Qualcomm’s Mirasol display has weeks of battery life

Jordan Kahn

Qualcomm has announced the world’s first device to use their new Mirasol display technology in partnership with South Korea’s largest book seller, Kyobo. While at first glance the vividness of the display might not impress, the fact that it provides the new Kyobo color E-reader with weeks of battery life under normal usage is enough to get us interested.

Kyobo’s new Android 2.3-powered e-reader is the first device to utilize the mirasol technology and sports a 5.7” 1024×768 display, 1GHz Snapdragon S2 class processor, and “battery life measured in weeks”. Now, before we get too excited about the incredible battery life provided by the mirasol technology, Kyobo warns battery life estimates are based on 30 minutes of daily reading time, with WiFi off, and the display set to 25% brightness. With those settings, depending on just how many weeks the device actually lasts, many of the e-readers currently on the market, such as the Kindle Touch, are comparable. The new Kyobo e-reader is available now in South Korea for $310 USD.

If you’re unfamiliar with Qualcomm’s mirasol technology, the displays essentially utilize a micro-electro-mechanical system “composed of two conductive plates” which are used to create color from ambient light. The end result is extremely decreased power consumption in comparison to traditional displays, while still providing a bright, always-visible color screen that can handle video and animations. Qualcomm describes it as having “the benefits of the e-reader, coupled with the benefits of the handset, and the disadvantages of neither”. Thankfully, Qualcomm is hard at work on the second generation mirasol technology that might make its way into smartphones sometime in 2012. The video below walks us through exactly how the technology works.
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LG ‘exclusive launch event’ slated for December 1st, hints at “LG Nitro”

Jordan Kahn

Motorola, Samsung and just about every Android vendor has held a recent event announcing their new product lineups, especially in anticipation of the holiday shopping season. Not to be left out, LG has sent out invites (via Engadget) announcing an ‘exclusive launch event’ for December 1st. While we don’t learn anything from looking at the invite, Engadget claims the image file is titled “LG Nitro”. There have been rumors of a “Nitro HD”, which is thought to be the Optimus LTE variant for AT&T. We’ll of course be bringing you updates as the announcements unfold next Thursday.
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