Samsung announces world's fastest memory: GDDR5
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Toshiba and Samsung to cross-license NAND rights: more flash for all!
While Toshiba (and SanDisk) and Samsung might be battling it out in the press for the world's fastest and highest-density NAND, they're actually good buddies behind closed doors. In fact, they've been partners in the Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology Corporation for years. Today they announced a deal to cross-license the rights to respectively produce, market, and sell Samsung's OneNAND and Toshiba's LBA-NAND memory chips. Each plans to release products next year based on the newly licensed technology of the other. The move should broaden the choice of suppliers to OEMs in a day where multi-sourcing reigns supreme. Yes, that's a good thing for us consumers.[Via DigiTimes]
Wal-Mart, Amazon ratchet up anti-DRM pressure
Both Wal-Mart and Amazon have already made their positions on DRM pretty well known, but it looks like each are now taking some further steps to ratchet up the pressure on the remaining hold-out record labels. For its part, Wal-Mart has reportedly told the record labels point blank that they must offer DRM-free MP3 versions of all their music, a matter that Sony BMG is apparently still the biggest hold out on. Amazon, on the other hand, is looking to give its download service (and, in turn, DRM-free downloads) a boost by giving away up to a billion free downloads in a promotion with Pepsi that's its set to launch during the Super Bowl in February. You'll need to guzzle quite a bit a Pepsi if you want to get your quota of those MP3s, however, as you'll apparently need to collect five bottle caps for each download. According to Billboard, Amazon has approached all the major record labels about participating in the promotion, but some are apparently balking at the 40 cents per track Amazon is willing to give 'em, which is a sizable cut from the 65 to 70 cents they currently receive.[Via Gadget Lab]
JetBlue introduces free in-flight email and IM
Bandwidth for these services is provided by LiveTV, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the carrier that provides the entire fleet with select DirecTV and XM radio channels, and which also happens to possess a valuable 1MHz slice of ground-to-air spectrum that it's deploying for this very purpose (with the help of some 100 existing cell towers around the country). If all goes well in what is admittedly a beta test, more aircraft will receive the WiFi makeover, and more features -- such as access to terabytes of locally-stored multimedia content -- will be rolled out, along with additional service providers besides Yahoo. Just don't expect an open pipe any time soon: that sweet little slice of spectrum is not nearly robust enough to handle the heavy Slinging, VoIPing, and Torrenting you all would obviously be doing.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
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