Posted 11/12/2009 at 08:00:07pm

Amy Banse, president of Comcast Interactive Media, sat down with NewTeeVee Live for some interesting announcements and details about some of their future offerings. In particular, the fairly long interview, circled around Comcast’s “On Demand Online,” which will be released this December.

She talked about this new service in a way that we heard people talking about DMCA rights to purchased media. Banse explained that they wanted to offer subscribers a chance at accessing their content from anywhere while not undermining the subscriber business model.

As a Comcast subscriber, you can register three independent devices on your Comcast account through either Fancast or Comcast.net. Once the devices are registered to your subscription account, you’ll need to download a Move Networks powered player that will play all available content.

The content offerings appear to be very plentiful mostly due to Comcast’s business model of being able to maintain subscribers over the internet. Banse felt that having the On Demand Online service tied to the subscriber account there remained a level continuity for programmers and advertisers. Thus, many networks have opted into the new service.

The interview is long-winded but interesting at points. You can check it out after the jump.

Posted 11/12/2009 at 06:37:15pm

Google announced today, on the official Google blog, a few enhancements to the specialized movie search feature. They have pushed improvements adding detailed movie pages, genre filters, and theatre map views.

If you search for any movie title (where the wild things are) you’ll see brief bits of information about the movie, and movie times for a couple of your nearest theaters. If you click “More theaters,” or go to google.com/movies, you will be taken to an enhanced details page.

The page lists additional show times that which can be filtered by date, movie or theater. It also aggregates movie reviews from across the web. For some movies, there is an embedded YouTube player featuring the trailer and additional photos from the movie.

It’s a pretty nifty update. They just need a way to buy tickets using Google Checkout and they would have the whole package.

Posted 11/10/2009 at 08:22:27pm

Amazon announced today the release of “Kindle for PC,” a free application for Windows computers that allows customers to view more than 360,000 books on their home computer.

Customers do not need to own a Kindle to use the software, now they can purchase and download books on their PC. If you do own a Kindle and have set up Whispersync, you can access your entire Kindle library as well as your notes and marks. The software supports touchscreen gestures on Windows 7 so you can “finger-swipe flip” through pages and “pinch and zoom” content.

They have initially released a Windows only version, but a Mac version is on its way. They hope the new PC and Mac based software will help widen adoption of the Kindle library, in turn getting more publishers onboard.

Posted 11/10/2009 at 05:50:32pm

Samsung announced today that it would throw its hat into the mobile OS ring with “Bada.” Samsung’s new OS's name is based on the Korean word for “ocean” and will support fully open standards.

Samsung was skimpy on the details, but it sounds very similar to the iPhone and Android operating systems. It will feature a central application store and provide developers with a framework to build applications for the device. In stark contrast to the iPhone, Samsung claims that every aspect of the OS will be customizable, including dialer, contacts and other built in utilities.

Samsung anticipates the first “Bada” powered device to be released in the first half of 2010 along with the application store. Adding another OS into the mix might make gaining market share difficult against Google and Apple. However, this likely means Samsung won’t be sporting a new Windows Mobile OS.

Posted 11/05/2009 at 07:43:08pm

With some of the first USB 3.0 and SATA 6 devices already released, the first capable motherboards are now available for purchase. Asus and Gigabyte were both known to be working on new boards earlier this summer and both companies are now shipping their latest models.

Asus is shipping two boards, one with a P55 chipset, and the other with an X58. Due to the single lane bandwidth bottleneck of the P55 chipset, Asus uses a bridge chip (PLX8613) and four PCIe lanes so the board can run in SLI and Crossfire modes. Gigabyte is shipping seven different boards in the P55A series. Gigabyte opted to avoid the bridge chip so dual-card modes will not be enabled in the board.

These motherboards are shipping despite delayed chipset releases from Intel supporting the latest interfaces. Manufacturers do not expect to have new Intel chipsets with USB 3.0 support until 2011.

Asus P7P55D-E-Premium

Posted 11/05/2009 at 07:05:29pm

Google announced on the official Gmail blog a handy new upgrade to the Offline Gmail labs app. Before the update, you could enable Offline Gmail and it would use specialized heuristics to download messages for offline use.

With the new update, once you enable Offline Gmail, you can find some customizable options under the “Offline” tab in Settings. You can now select specifically which labels to download and how deep into your mailbox you would like the downloading to begin. Once the settings are saved, the app will immediately start downloading any emails weren't already synced to your computer.  Of course, less downloads means faster Offline Gmail so you should be careful with the settings.

It's a substantial upgrade to a very handy lab application for commuters or travelers.