NVIDIA provided a small surprise today as it launched a companion app for home theater PCs. 3DTV Play gives any PC with a modern, 3D Vision-capable GeForce card the ability to output a true 3D image to any TV with both 3D and HDMI 1.4 inputs, including new Panasonic VIERA plasmas as well as LCDs from Samsung, Sony and others. The system works with any set’s existing active shutter glasses and doesn’t need a format change for games or movies….

Apple is rapidly widening the gap between its app platform and Facebook, new data from Flurry found today. Although the gap was relatively small about five months into the app portals’ respective lifespans, by the 1.5 year mark Apple now has more than twice as many apps. The iPhone App Store’s 140,000 confirmed apps easily outweigh the 60,000 web-based apps of Facebook’s social network….

Cisco Systems is debuting a communications server at VoiceCon that it says will extend unified communications features outside enterprise boundaries.The Intercompany Media Engine (IME), which Cisco announced late last year and is making ready for its unveiling later this month, is designed to connect the UC systems in individual enterprise …

Solution providers looking for a virtualization manager that does more than desktops may have their answer in Citrix XenApp 6, the latest version of server software that enables applications to run in a data center and be delivered as an on-demand service to both physical and virtual desktops.XenApp 6 is …

HTC has already started shipping the Nexus One to Verizon, Taiwan’s Economic Daily News paper wrote on Monday. The deliveries of the CDMA version would be timed for Google and Verizon to start selling the Android “superphone” either later this month or in early April. The timing would line up with rumors of a March 23rd release at this year’s spring CTIA….

The rate of iPad pre-orders has cooled but could still lead to major sales even before the tablet ships, an estimate from the AAPL Sanity board suggests. Following an earlier calculation of 120,000 on day one, the board now believes that Apple landed 152,000 pre-orders over the weekend and is settling down to rates of 30,000 pre-orders on a typical weekday and 15,000 each day on weekends. Without a significant change, the rate while lower would still have Apple ship 510,000 iPads just for these customers….

Nintendo’s DS sequel will have a pair of key developments that make it more competitive against the iPhone and iPod touch, based on investigations on the GDC show floor. The handheld is expected to still use dual screens but considerably larger, higher-resolution models that form a near-seamless design. The simple change could lead to games that can join both screens together for a single experience in addition to those that use each for separate purposes….

Telx Links With Global Telecom & Technology for Gigabit Ethernet Dedicated …
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"We are excited to provide services to Telx in eight of their carrier-rich colocation facilities," said Richard D. Calder, Jr., GTT's President and CEO. …

and more »

XO Communications Launches International Customer Referral Program to Provide …
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Through the customer referral program, international carrier customers will gain easier access to XO's high-speed, high-capacity IP-based transport and …

and more »

XML co-creator Tim Bray on Monday said he has joined Google as a Developer Advocate, primarily for Android. The former Sun worker made the pick both because Android embraces an open-source, web-heavy philosophy but also as a direct opposition to Apple’s iPhone policies. Bray praised Apple’s hardware but couldn’t abide by the at times arbitrary filtering of the App Store, which he likened to censorship….

AT&T this morning led into CTIA by launching its now annual update of messaging phones. At the top of the range, the Samsung Starburst (shown above) is one of the company’s least expensive touchscreen-only phones and also includes GPS for navigation. Some details aren’t known, but the phone will use Samsung’s TouchWiz interface and should ship on March 21st for just $40 on a two-year contract after a $50 rebate….

I’m not sure the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has any chance of practical bids for their RFP: A long-awaited RFP is out for providing Wi-Fi service on all Metro-North and Long Island Railroad (LIRR) trains and most stations. Those rail lines accommodate nearly 600,000 passenger trips each week. (The PDF of the RFP has disappeared from the MTA site, but Google has a text cache.)

The MTA wants a service provider who would operate a network to bear all the expense of installation and operation (including railroad labor costs for same), provide 24×7 customer support, and uninterrupted service.

But the proposal is pretty muddled. While digital advertising (changeable signs on board trains and at stations) should be part of a bidder’s thinking to minimize the cost in installing such systems, there’s no spec for those systems. A bidder can build a bid partly around offering such services. The MTA also likes bids in which the authority shares in revenue.

I don’t see how this could fly. No sensible firm would propose taking on all this expense without any assurance of revenue beyond the public Wi-Fi side of the system. Despite the large number of passengers, many of those most likely to pay already have 3G service on smartphones or through laptop cards. There’s no operational services component, and that should be the baseline for any new rail RFP of the last five years.

It’s not so much that 3G service works perfectly along the various part of the system, but it certainly works well enough. A service provider would either need to be a cell operator that can use the system to promote and sell Wi-Fi by itself and a combination of 3G and Wi-Fi (AT&T and T-Mobile notably in this position), or build on another technology that would go well together to feed service to trains and mobile devices (Clearwire’s WiMax).

The system described would likely cost many tens of millions of dollars to build to the specifications that the MTA is requiring, without any substantial potential to reclaim that as revenue.

Copyright ©2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

I’m not sure the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has any chance of practical bids for their RFP: A long-awaited RFP is out for providing Wi-Fi service on all Metro-North and Long Island Railroad (LIRR) trains and most stations. Those rail lines accommodate nearly 600,000 passenger trips each week. (The PDF of the RFP has disappeared from the MTA site, but Google has a text cache.)

The MTA wants a service provider who would operate a network to bear all the expense of installation and operation (including railroad labor costs for same), provide 24×7 customer support, and uninterrupted service.

But the proposal is pretty muddled. While digital advertising (changeable signs on board trains and at stations) should be part of a bidder’s thinking to minimize the cost in installing such systems, there’s no spec for those systems. A bidder can build a bid partly around offering such services. The MTA also likes bids in which the authority shares in revenue.

I don’t see how this could fly. No sensible firm would propose taking on all this expense without any assurance of revenue beyond the public Wi-Fi side of the system. Despite the large number of passengers, many of those most likely to pay already have 3G service on smartphones or through laptop cards. There’s no operational services component, and that should be the baseline for any new rail RFP of the last five years.

It’s not so much that 3G service works perfectly along the various part of the system, but it certainly works well enough. A service provider would either need to be a cell operator that can use the system to promote and sell Wi-Fi by itself and a combination of 3G and Wi-Fi (AT&T and T-Mobile notably in this position), or build on another technology that would go well together to feed service to trains and mobile devices (Clearwire’s WiMax).

The system described would likely cost many tens of millions of dollars to build to the specifications that the MTA is requiring, without any substantial potential to reclaim that as revenue.

Copyright ©2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.

On the Beats by Dre Solo box, Monster is keen to drum in a quote by Dr. Dre saying that “people arenít hearing all the music” — that typical headphones are giving up details, and Dre feels it his mission to get those details back. That he largely achieved that goal with the high end models is generally accepted, but how does the Beats line fare with a middle of the road offering? Are listeners really missing details in their music with other headphones? Our Beats Solo review finds out….

As promised, Sony on Saturday launched its first flagship retail store. The two-storey Sony Store Nagoya showcases most of Sony’s home lineup and is built to emulate the success Apple has had with stores like its Ginza location. Besides bright, open areas, it includes a designer (though not glass) staircase and even a Genius Bar-style service, nicknamed backStage, for getting technical support and training….

As promised, Sony on Saturday launched its first flagship retail store. The two-storey Sony Store Nagoya showcases most of Sony’s home lineup and is built to emulate the success Apple has had with stores like its Ginza location. Besides bright, open areas, it includes a designer (though not glass) staircase and even a Genius Bar-style service, nicknamed backStage, for getting technical support and training….

The competition between Apple and Google has reached “incendiary” levels that aren’t likely to cool down anytime soon, a detailed story from within the two companies has shown. While signs of the split have become increasingly public, a Bay Area investor claims that the two sides, particularly Apple, are getting “emotional” as it becomes a personal battle between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his Google equivalent, Eric Schmidt. At Apple, Jobs’ infamous attack on Google at a post-iPad town hall has been followed by repeated shots at Android in d…

RIM’s first touchscreen slider is bound at least for Sprint but may have problems on its way if a leak today proves accurate. Now called the 9900 in GSM form and 9930 for CDMA networks, the phone is reportedly being tested with Sprint branding but has had an unusually high 80 percent failure rate in early testing. BGR has heard that the only other BlackBerry to suffer similar problems early on was the Pearl Flip….

Apple may have moved nearly 120,000 iPads in just its first day of pre-orders, an estimate by private analysts at the AAPL Sanity board suggests. After excluding the 16,500 average orders on a given day, the collective has used the intervals between order numbers over 19.5 hours to estimate that about 119,987 iPads should have sold during that period. The statistic doesn’t include those who simply reserved a unit in-store and potentially puts the actual launch day tally considerably higher….

Dale Combs, president and CTO of Third Party Verification Inc. (3PV), AssureSign LLC and Marketing Systems Group Inc. (MSG) announced he has retired, effective Jan. 1, 2010. CEO David Brinkman will take on his role as president.Combs will maintain part-time involvement through mid-year while continuing his ownership interest in the …