Category: NewsFeed

Beginning Monday, Fort Worth, Texas-based RadioShack will feature Skype products in a special kiosk, including a new Motorola Inc. headset that uses short-range wireless Bluetooth technology to make calls via Skype, priced at $100. It will sell a $40 headset from Logitech and a $129 cordless phone from Cisco Systems Inc.’s Linksys unit.The RadioShack kiosk will feature Skype starter kits for $5 with a simple earpiece/microphone, software and 30 minutes of free Skype calling time to any number in the world. Sales clerks will offer training videos and software to customers.

Skype in U.S. Retail Distribution Pact

This is huge for Skype.  Retail placement in Radio Shack will put the next to cell carriers like Verizon.  RS already has some of the hardware with Skype included available here.  A geek bonus would be if this hardware could be reconfigured to work with SIP.  I’ll be looking into this.

Ideally, these bots could use RSS and anyone with a feed could create their own bots that their visitors could add and use. Would you use a MAKE bot? You could ask it “how do i solder” and it he’d return text and links to our pages on this online and in the magazine

MAKE: Blog: Make AOL Instant Message bots?

Here’s an intriguing idea: we create bots that run on popular IM platforms (Yahoo, AIM, MSN, Jabber,etc) that fetch links to lessons or search the US Code.  I could see this as part of our study group idea, or for use in the classroom.  Put all that IM speak to good use.

technorati tags: IM, IM bots, CALI Lessons

What’s perhaps most interesting about the Google Base design is that it appears to have been designed from the ground up with RSS and XML at its center. One need look no further then the detailed XML Schema and extensive RSS 2.0 specification to realize that Google intends to build the world’s largest RSS “reader” which in turn will become the world’s largest XML database.

Burnham’s Beat: RSS and Google Base: Google Feeds Off The Web

Google extends RSS through the use of a namespace, adding attributes to the <item> level.  While this will certainly consume feeds, it seems that the feed’s author will need to be fairly clear about what the feed is providing.  I wonder how long it will be before we see extensions built for commerce apps that will generate these beefed up feeds?  In many ways it should be fairly straight forward if you are operating some sort of online inventory or catalog to generate these googlified RSS feeds. 

Of course there is still the problem of getting the feeds to Google.  It is not clear if Google will ‘aggregate’ feeds or merely parse the feed and create records.  For it to be really cool, it needs to regularly read the feed.  The focus on the bulk upload pages seems to be on FTP, but RSS is certainly lurking in the background. If I can give Google Base a URL for a catalog feed and have it chekc the URL for new items, then this makes a lot of sense.  I guess we shall see.

technorati tags: google, google base, rss, xml, feeds

“In a crowded and competitive VoIP marketplace, yakForFree is distinguished by its free video capabilities and ease-of-use. By downloading the free Virtual VideoPhone, which takes less than a minute, users can make free calls over the Internet using a high-speed connection.”

Slashdot | Yak Launches Free Video and Voice Service

This has been in the making for most of the year with CounterPath (formerly XTen) providing the eyeBeam softphone that handles SIP and video.  The feature set offered in the various Yak products suggests an Asterisk backend.  There is at least one report of configuring Asterisk to use the Yak service.  I’m going to try this out, so if anyone wants to test, drop me a note.

technorati tags: yak, yakforfree, sip, voip, xten, counterpath, cooltool