Move Over Plasma and LCD
If you’ve got $2,500 to spare, then you might be interested in taking home the world’s first organic light-emitting diode (OLED) TV. Sony’s 11-inch XEL-1 OLED TV is only 3mm thick and incorporates Sony’s “Organic Panel.” The TV produces very deep blacks with a contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1. The TV also offers pure and vivid colors in both dark and bright images, and smoothly reproduces fast moving images. Sony designed the XEL-1 with an aluminum arm holding the OLED panel from behind, to create the illusion of a floating image. The XEL-1’s back panel has a coaxial cable input, two HDMI cables, a headphone/digital-audio output jack and a Memory Stick slot.
Speeding Up File Transfer Times
FastSoft (www.fastsoft.com) has released the results of the company’s global tests, which show major improvements in file transfer times. Based on world record-setting FastTCP technology, the FastSoft E Series of Internet acceleration appliances reside only in the data center and do not require any hardware or software on the receiving end. The FastSoft E Series achieves performance improvements by bypassing the limitations of TCP protocol. FastSoft accelerates video up to 15x for long-distance production collaboration, digital delivery to customers and superior broadband viewing in the home. Large files — including CAD, imaging, business information, and software — can see an improvement of up to 30x faster. In the testing, a 4.7GB DVD file was sent from Los Angeles to London through a 100Mbps line in nine minutes, compared to 128 minutes without a FastSoft appliance.
Community-Based Singing Experience
The social network MySpace has launched the beta version of MySpace Karaoke (http://ksolo.myspace.com). MySpace Karaoke is a user-generated music service that enables members to sing, record and share personalized renditions of 10 songs with the MySpace community for free.
With just a microphone and an Internet connection, MySpace Karaoke offers users access to a broad selection of licensed tracks. The web-based application delivers sing-along lyrics and recording capabilities, and also makes available vocal and instrumental versions of fan favorites. With MySpace Karaoke, members can browse songs, recordings and performers in a variety of categories including new releases, top artists, most popular, musical genre and more. Members can listen to and rate their friends’ karaoke recordings, make comments and even become fans of a singer. The service has been launched in the US and will roll out to MySpace’s international territories in coming months.
Try Safari on a PC
Apple Safari 3.1 is out of beta for Windows and can be downloaded free from www.apple.com/safari. Apple claims that Safari is the world’s fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs. Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers, and is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts, giving designers more choices of fonts to use in website creation. Safari features an intuitive browsing experience with drag-and-drop bookmarks, easy-to-organize tabs, an integrated Find that shows the number of matches in a page and a built-in RSS reader to quickly scan the latest news and information.