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Filed under: Home Entertainment

There’s been a definite trend towards service integration at TiVo lately, with quite a string of partnerships to show for it: the company’s gotten in bed with Music Choice, Picasa / Photobucket and Nero in the past couple weeks, not to mention the finally-happening Comcast rollout, Amazon Unbox and Rhapsody offerings. On top of that, the company is also finally capitalizing on its vast stores of aggregate viewer data, having entered into a deal with NBC to provide Nielsen-esque ratings data on a second-by-second basis. Given all the wheeling and dealing, it’s not at all surprising that CEO Tom Rogers told the New York Times that TiVo has “substantially moved in the direction of becoming a media company,” but it’s definitely a big shift for the DVR company, which until recently was something of an outsider. That’s all changed now, apparently — according to Rogers, “all the networks” are in talks to land similar ratings deals, and that the company is “aggressively” trying to partner with the media industry. That sounds about right to us — we haven’t mentioned the deathwatch in a while, after all — but we’re just hoping all of this doesn’t lead to even more targeted ads.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

While certainly there’s been no shortage of Wiimote hacks, the number of genuinely useful ones has been considerably more limited. It looks like you can now add one more to that list, however, as Johnny Chung Lee (he of the Wiimote finger-tracking hack) has now upped the usefulness even further with a makeshift multi-point interactive whiteboard. There’s a bit more involved with this one than just a Wiimote, however — namely, an IR-emitting pen (or two), which the Wiimote tracks while relaying all the necessary information back to a PC. That, as the video after the break shows, allows you to turn any surface into a multi-point whiteboard with the use of a projector, or turn any LCD screen into a touchscreen, of sorts. Best of all, Johnny has kindly provided the necessary software free of charge, so hit up the read link below if you want to give it a shot.

[Via Hack a Day]

Continue reading Wiimote repurposed for multi-point interactive whiteboard

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Interviews

If you were to make a shortlist of Engadget’s most sought after executives, Peter Chou, CEO of arguably the most advanced cellphone manufacturer in the world, HTC, would be right near the top. We finally got a chance to sit down with the man who helped reshape what a cellphone could be (and in doing so put Windows Mobile on the map), and discussed HTC’s new partnership with Google on Android, whether WinMo has a stagnant platform, challenges for companies trying to break into the US wireless market, and even the 700MHz spectrum auction. Talking with Peter was definitely a high point for us, check it out.

Thank you for sitting down with us.

Thank you! You have a very successful site.

Thank you. Yeah, well, we do our best, it’s a lot of fun. So, Android is obviously huge news for you guys.

This is a significant announcement for us.

I assume that you guys have been working on this with Google for quite some time.

Yep. That’s true.

Are we talking about, say, over a year that this has been in the works?

Two years. More than two years.

Then you’ve have been playing with Android, I imagine. If not on the HTC device (or devices) that you are working on, then at least some kind of build of the software. You’ve been fooling around with it and know what its like…

Yeah.

We didn’t get too much of a sense of what this software is going to be about and what it’s really like as a core experience. Can you tell me anything that you really like that Google has done with Android? And the things that you think that Android is really going to excel in? Things that you will be able to leverage in HTC hardware?

Maybe you can get a little more information [from the SDK]. But this is trying to be a more optimized experience of Google applications, and obviously the internet experience will be more optimized. So there are some things that I still think today are being… well, I’m a veteran in this industry and we’ve been working on this stuff for ten years and really waiting to see something which can really enhance the internet experience in these mobile devices. I believe in this system and I’m excited about its ability to perform well.

Continue reading The Engadget Interview: Peter Chou, CEO of HTC

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Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Disney just finished refurbishing the iconic Spaceship Earth attraction at Disney World, and it looks like a certain board member gave a little shout-out to a friend: there’s (animatronic) Woz in the garage, diligently hacking away on what appears to be the mutant offspring of an Apple I and the Lisa. Anyone else see this yet? We’re dying to know if there’s a check made out for $350 with “Breakout” listed in the memo line.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Speculation is growing that the device Palm recently blamed for its revenue shortfall is none other than the yawn-worthy Treo 755p, a phone that launched on Sprint eons ago and, despite being rumored in Verizon trim eons ago as well, has apparently had all sorts of trouble getting through Big Red’s testing process. While it’s hard to deny that it’s a pretty unspectacular handset at this point, we can also imagine that failing to launch it on the country’s largest CDMA network would account for a significant drop in cash flow — the Palm OS / Garnet faithful are still plentiful, after all, and there’s no Centro in sight for Verizon at the moment. So, tell us: is anyone out there really drooling for this thing right now?

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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