Sony Ericsson’s Infinite Hope for a Turnaround

Bored with the buttons on your current phone and their limited functions?

Sony Ericsson says its new cellphones will features an Infinite Button that can connect you to your friends, photos, music, videos and more. Well, it will do this if it can actually deliver the phones with the buttons next year.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Sold Out for the Holidays

Update | 1:56 p.m. Added comment from a Forrester analyst on the e-reader shortage.

Update | 3:00 p.m. Added comment from Amazon.com.

It’s shaping up to a be very merry holiday season for Amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader.

Earlier this week, we reported that Sony could not guarantee that its new Daily Edition Reader would reach online buyers in time for Christmas.

Google Says It Doesn’t Want to Be a Utility

Google’s PowerMeter allows consumers to monitor their home energy use from any Web connection

Ed Lu, the former astronaut and now program manager for advanced products at Google, wants to be clear: Google is not interested in competing with utilities.

“We are not in the business of providing electric power,” Mr. Lu said in a discussion this morning at the GreenBeat 2009 conference in San Mateo, Calif.

BigDeal Puts a New Spin on ‘Entertainment Shopping’

Remember Swoopo? In August, I wrote about that German-born “entertainment shopping” site, which runs global auctions for products at huge discounts, with the important caveat that users actually must pay a few cents each time they bid.

The lucky and determined winner of these contests can usually score a product like a single-lens-reflex digital camera for a few dollars,

Palm Drops iTunes Workaround, for Now

The Palm Pre.

 

Palm’s latest update to its mobile operating system now allows owners of the Pre and Pixi to use Yahoo’s instant messaging client and watch YouTube videos in wide screen view, among other things.

But one feature not included in the update is the seamless synchronization with iTunes, Apple’s popular software for managing music and other media on a computer.

Nvidia’s Gamers Helped It Win Big Business

Nvidia critics will sometimes have fun knocking the company as being a slave to child’s play.

There’s some truth to the jab. Nvidia has long depended on gamers to move its graphics chips. As a result, the company flourished in a lucrative albeit niche part of the computing market.

But this year’s supercomputing conference in Portland points to

Former Nickelodeon Chief Has iPhone Plans

Bigby, an 8-year-old crime fighter, will appear in an iPhone app in January, but the character’s creator has “transmedia” aspirations.

Can the iPhone begin a new children’s entertainment franchise? One of Hollywood’s leading character architects is banking on it.

Albie Hecht, the former president of Nickelodeon Entertainment who helped develop such stalwarts as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” will introduce

Supercomputers Are Still Fast, but Less Super

Update | 6:06 p.m. This story was updated to correct a previous assertion that Jaguar was the first x86-based system to be the world’s fastest supercomputer. 

A decade-long trend reached its inevitable conclusion this week when a supercomputer based on chips from Advanced Micro Devices became the fastest machine on the planet.

Hulu Steps Into Music With EMI and Norah Jones

Norah Jones performs in San Francisco, Calif.

Hulu, the joint online venture between NBC, Fox and ABC that mostly offers free TV shows and movies, is about to start singing a different tune: music videos.

On Wednesday the company plans to announce a somewhat limited deal with EMI, the smallest of the four major music labels, to give a “channel” on Hulu to the

Library in a Pocket

With Amazon’s Kindle, readers can squeeze hundreds of books into a device that is smaller than most hardcovers. For some, that’s not small enough.

Many people who want to read electronic books

Luxury Firms Move to Make Web Work for Them

BERLIN — The luxury goods industry, struggling through a recession that has threatened some well-known names with extinction, is trying to cast off the kid gloves that have hampered its efforts to get a grip on technology.

At Checkout, More Ways to Avoid Cash or Plastic

For almost as long as Americans have been hearing about jetpacks and picturephones, they have been hearing that money — bills, coins and plastic cards — might cease to exist, or at least become a novelty.

Instead of leather wallets, consumers could, sooner than they think, carry virtual wallets, with their credit card and bank information stored on remote computers that are accessible everywhere and anytime. They could use them whenever they want

Glyde Aims to Simplify Online Sales of Used Media

Glyde, the brainchild of Simon Rothman, standing, tries to streamline the buying and selling of used CDs, DVDs and more.

SAN FRANCISCO — People whose old books, CDs, DVDs and video games are collecting dust on their shelves will soon have another way to resell them on the Web.

On Monday, Glyde, a start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif., plans to introduce a Web site intended to make it simple for people to buy and sell used media products.

Apple Wouldn’t Risk Its Cool Over a Gimmick, Would It?

“SOME of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description.

But the love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, televisions, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.

Dell’s Out-of-Town Tryout for Smartphones

Dell Mini 3

Dell has finally confirmed what has been bouncing around the market for some time, that it is entering the smartphone business.

It’s not saying very much about its strategy, other than that it is using Google’s Android operating system. (That, in itself, confirms what is becoming clear about Android: That it is now the Windows of cellphones, the operating system for hardware companies that don’t write their own operating systems.)

Another Web Video Face-Off: Roku vs. Boxee

Boxee draws in a wide variety of video from the Web and presents it in an interface designed for viewing on a TV screen.


Roku and Boxee are two radically different companies pursuing the same goal: to bring the wide-ranging world of Internet video to the living room TV.

In the spirit of Bits’s earlier comparison of Netflix’s Watch Instantly and Amazon Video on Demand, let’s juxtapose the two companies and ask: whose technology and recently announced innovations are more appealing?