Wireless USB 1.1 aims for 1 GB per sec

The wireless USB initiative announced that they are aiming Certified Wireless USB 1.1 to achieve transfer speed upto 1 GBps for the distance upto 3 meters which is stratosphere away from the first generation Wireless USB which offer just 40 MBps !

Certified wireless USB developed by the Wireless USB Promoter Group (Agere Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, NEC Corporation, Philips and Samsung) was seen as the annihilator of Blue Tooth but guess what Blue tooth is alive and kicking.

It also will adopt the techniques of near field communications (NFC) which enables the communication between devices over a short distance for letting two devices identify themselves to each other with a simple contact.

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YouTube now to show ads on the videos

The good days of commercial free Video streaming is bygone ! Youtube now to show ads on the videos. After google spent 1.67 big ones to purchase it, it was expected they would monetize youtube more to justify its price tag. According to Wikipedia page on youtube it makes an annual turnover of about 10 Millions while word on the blogosphere put it around 15 which means google has to wait 100 years just to break even !

Now these ads will be an eyesore without a doubt but atleast these ads will be "animated overlays" as they put it and not pre-roll. According to youtube

These are animated overlays that appear on the bottom 20 percent of a video. If you're interested by what you see there, clicking on the overlay launches a deeper interactive video ad that we think is relevant and entertaining. (The video you were watching is temporarily paused.) If you choose not to click on the overlay, it will simply disappear, so that you're in full control of your YouTube experience.

Already this is creating controversy with the video owners. youtube user irabnut posted a comment on the Youtube blog "That really sucks! i don't want my artistic masterpiece to be filled up with cheesy unrelated ads. The site will become less attractive."

Youtube is already compromising on the video quality to save on bandwidth it is to be seen if this additional income through ads will make it less bandwidth stingy and improve the quality of video.

Will this eyesore make people move to other video sharing sites such as Metacafe (which is offering rewards for video makers) Vimeo , and newly launched Blip.tv ? Only time will tell !

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Blue Ray Vs HD DVD - The Format War

The format wars are on and this time between Sony's Blu Ray Disk (BD ) and Toshiba and Nec's HD DVD. Sony is betting big on its blu Ray Format, so much so that it is willing to make a Loss of $241.35 on every PlayStation 3 console it sells at $599, and $306.85 on every PS3 console it sells with a smaller hard drive at $499.

Sony isn't in the mood of corporate generosity, it is willing to bear the loss for the sake of putting a Blu Ray Disk player in most homes to give an advantage on the Format wars

The battle lines are drawn with major media corporation choosing the sides. Blu-ray Disc is exclusively supported by Columbia Pictures and MGM ( owned by Sony), as well as Disney, 20th Century Fox and Lionsgate. While paramount, Universal Studios Dreamworks and even microsoft have pledged support to HD DVD.

Wasn't long ago when were using 1.44 Mb of 3½-inch Floppy disk here comes Blu Ray disk with 50 GB of Optical memory ! A dual layer of HD DVD have about 30 GB of space. The reason they can store so much data as compared to a standard DVD is due to the fact they use Blue/violet Rays to read and store data which are shorter in wave length hence the name Blue Ray.

With this format war on full onslaught where does this leave you ? Well history is testament one will loose like the case of VHS and Betamax where VHS won the war even though sony's Betamax was superior technology doe a Marketing coop by VHS.

So you are better off waiting till the Universal Players (which plays both format) gets cheaper and better. Both LG and Samsung have launched these players.

One thing about format wars is that, the case of VHS has shown that not always the best technology wins.

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