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Intel eyes TV sets for CPUs
Intel’s chips already go into many laptops, but it is now making a play for television sets and cable boxes.
The chip maker has announced details of an integrated chip package code-named Sodaville, designed to run Web and video applications on television sets.
The chip package includes a processor based on the Atom processor used in devices like netbooks. Sodaville chips will have the processing power and audio-video components necessary to run rich media applications such as 3D graphics and or decoding two full 1080p high-definition video streams, Intel said.
The company is working with Adobe to port Flash Player to the media processor, something that will help bring playback of Internet video from sites like YouTube directly to set-top boxes or television sets.
IBM offers fixed price BlackBerry management
IBM wants to manage BlackBerry devices for enterprises and will now do so for a fixed cost. It has been offering BlackBerry management services for businesses, but there was no standard cost model. Now, an enterprise can pay a fixed fee per user per month and IBM will manage the BlackBerry service, including secondary end-user support, integration with corporate back-end systems and monitoring services. Depending on the services delivered, enterprises will pay 15 to 18 dollars per user per month.
Google vs. authors case prolonged
The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google will get more time to modify their proposed agreement to settle lawsuits the two organizations filed against the search company over its book search service. The judge has granted a request made earlier this week by the Authors Guild and the AAP to postpone the “final fairness” hearing on their proposed settlement agreement with Google. The proposed agreement has generated a lot of controversy from critics who say it gives Google too much power to set book prices.
BlackBerry sales up, profits down
Research In Motion’s sales rose but profits fell for the second-quarter, but the BlackBerry maker said its efforts to move beyond enterprise users and sell more devices to consumers have been going well. More than 80 percent of the new subscribers to its BlackBerry service were non-enterprise customers. The company shipped 8.3 million devices and added 3.8 million subscribers during the quarter. RIM is slightly different from most other handset vendors in that it sells phones but also operates a service network for delivering e-mail to end-users.
