The Seattle Times: Brier Dudley's blog

Redmond Nintendo-Siras exec heading up Mt. McKinley

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:33:05 PDT

While most of us are gripping beers around the barbecue this weekend, the chief executive of Nintendo subsidiary Siras will be clinging to a rope on the side of Mt. McKinley in Alaska.

Peter Junger's a hardcore mountaineer well on his way to climbing the highest mountains all 50 states and McKinley's one of the last hard ones on his list.

Redmond-based Siras offers technology that companies use to "fingerprint" merchandise to reduce fraudulent returns and verify warranty eligiblity.

The company's Web site has a link to follow Junger's progress - he's using a GPS device from Spot Adventures that displays his progress on a Google map.

Comcast channel shuffles in August, Clearwire bundles in 2010

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:01:10 PDT

Comcast is shuffling a bunch of channels in early August in King County, including a few moves related to its digital conversion.

Mostly affected are customers who already have digital cable service.

Starting around Aug. 5, Digital Starter subscribers will start getting high-definition versions of 28 channels such as MTV, Comedy Central, Travel, BET, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The full list was printed in the paper's legal notices section.

Digital Preferred customers will get four additional sports channels - NBA TV, NFL Network, NFL Network HD and NHL Network - but lose ESPN Classic to the optional "sports entertainment" tier that costs an extra $5.99 per month.

Also being added is an HD version of CBUT, at channel 619. It will be available to "Limited Basic" customers using an HDTV and a digital tuner.

Comcast spokesman Steve Kipp also provided a little information on the Clearwire 4G/WiMax mobile wireless bundles that Comcast began selling in Portland on Tuesday.

Comcast plans to offer the Clearwire bundles in the Seattle area in 2010, Kipp said.

Portland's promotional price, at least, doesn't sound too bad.

Comcast is offering a $50 per month bundle that includes 12 megabits per second home broadband plus Clearwire mobile service in the metro area, offering up to 4 Mbps. After the first year promo, the plan will cost $73 per month.

Subscribers to Comcast's triple play phone/TV/broadband plan can add Clearwire for $30 per month. It's also offering a Clearwire/Sprint combo that provides local 4G and national 3G via Sprint for an additional $20 per month.

Comcast invested in Clearwire in 2008.

USB 3.0 coming later this year: 5 gigabits per second

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:11:04 PDT

PCs with USB 3.0 connections could start appearing by the end of the year, boosting throughput 10 times over USB 2.0 - fast enough to transfer 5 gigabits of data per second..

That's according to a Nikkei Electronics Asia report (which I found via Microsoft product planner Alan Cheslow's Twitter feed and blog).

The report said NEC - the leading USB 3.0 manufacturer so far - is going to begin large-scale production of USB 3.0 host controllers in September.

NEC expects USB 3.0 to quickly become mainstream. It's anticipating 140 million PCs with USB 3.0 will ship in 2011, and 340 million in 2012.

We'll have to see if Windows 7 supports the standard when the software's released in October, though. Early word was that it may not be in the initial version; I've asked a Windows spokesman for a status report.

UPDATE: The answer from Microsoft is no, not at launch. A spokesman said via email that the USB 3.0 specification "was approved too late in the Windows 7 development lifecycle so it won't be supported at launch. However they'll consider it down the road."

Dell's Android iPod challenger: Microsoft in play?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:52:05 PDT

A crazy thought: Is Dell toying with Microsoft with its stealthy mobile device project?

That's what I wondered after reading the Wall Street Journal story about Dell developing Android-based devices, including a Web tablet slightly bigger than an iPod Touch and phones that could go on sale later this year. An excerpt:

The development effort is one of the first experiments by a big-name PC maker in a nascent category of products known as mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, which are designed to fill a perceived gap between mobile phones and laptop computers.

You could also call them ultra-mobile PCs, or even Origami devices, after a code name Microsoft used for its early stab at the category in 2006, long before the Google-backed Android operating system surfaced.

Given Dell's relationship with Microsoft and its upcoming Windows 7 push, it doesn't seem too farfetched to imagine that Dell also evaluated some version of Windows for its new devices.

Today's disclosure could put pressure on Microsoft to offer a better deal (although it's hard to beat the price of Android).

If nothing else, the story may give Steve and Michael something to chat about as they haggle over Windows 7 pricing for netbooks and other PCs coming out this fall ...

IT decline nearly 4x worse than expected, but it's just a "pause"

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:42:07 PDT

Forrester Research dramatically adjusted its forecast for IT spending in 2009, saying it now expects a 10.6 percent decline instead of the 3 percent drop it predicted at the start of the year.

That's for the globe. In the U.S., Forrester expects a 5.1 percent decline, down from the 3.1 percent it predicted at the start of the year.

But don't fret - it's only a "temporary pause," the Cambridge, Mass.-based research giant said.

Spending on technology should pick up in the fourth quarter in the U.S. - which syncs with Wall Street starting to talk about MSFT hitting $30 again - and recover in Europe and Asia in the first half of 2010, the firm said.

The press release quote from Andrew Bartels, Forrester vice president and principal analyst:

"While Q1 2009 saw a scary drop in purchases in the US tech market, ironically that is good news for the long run and we expect to see a stronger rebound sooner. The big drops are not precursors to further declines; rather, we think they are evidence of a temporary pause in US tech purchases, which we expect to start recovering in Q4 as businesses realize that they overreacted in the first quarter."

Breaking down the global decline, Forrester expects computer equipment sales to fall by 13.5 percent this year; communications equipment spending will fall 12.4 percent; software spending will fall 8.2 percent; and IT consulting and outsourcing will fall 8.6 percent.

Bungie chief on ODST, Halo 4, Natal and being ex-Microsoft

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:18:04 PDT

Here's a supplement to today's column on Bungie and "Halo 3: ODST" - edited excerpts from an interview with Bungie President Harold Ryan last week at the company's Kirkland offices.

Ryan has more to say about the Xbox "Project Natal," competition for Halo and Bungie's independence from Microsoft. He also touched on Halo 4 - a new game called "Reach" that's coming next year and already being played within Bungie.