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>> Oracle acquires Sun Microsystems. Don Henley files a lawsuit over YouTube. And hold on to your teenyboppers, there's a new T-Mobile Sidekick. It's Monday, April 20th. I'm Natali Del Conte, and it's time to get Loaded.
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The technology of our government is now in the hands of one Aneesh Chopra, not Eric Schmidt from Google. President Barack Obama has appointed Chopra to be the Chief Technology Officer. He's responsible for technology policy across the government. Prior to this appointment, Chopra was the fourth secretary of technology in the State of Virginia. He seems perfectly qualified. You can find his bio at Technology.virginia.gov under office info. Google published a very nice blog about him this weekend, crediting him with helping to make Virginia's technology work better for citizens with actions such as requiring state government agencies to make their sites more searchable and integrating iTunes into the state's educational system.
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We don't usually cover enterprise technology here on Loaded, but here's one that bears a mention. Oracle has agreed to buy Sun Microsystems for 7.4 billion dollars. We had originally thought IBM would buy Sun, but those talks ended a few weeks ago. Sun's board of directors still has to approve this deal, but we expect that they will.
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It looks like Windows Mobile 6.5 will be coming out a little sooner than we had expected. We thought it would launch in the fourth quarter of this year, but now it looks like it will come out on May 11th at the Tech Ed 2009 Conference. That is quite the preemie. Microsoft is known for late releases, not early releases. I am looking forward to seeing it in action. I just hope they don't rush out a product that isn't quite ready.
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Just in time for Earth Day, a new solar-powered mobile phone was announced in Japan. It will come out of the Japanese carrier KDDI, in cooperation with Sharp. It will take ten minutes to power up the phone for one phone call, or 120 minutes of standby time. It will also come with a supplemental conventional battery. It will go on sale in Japan in June and hit other countries -- we don't know when.
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Google knows your family tree, or at least it's going to try a new Gmail feature called "Suggest." More recipients will suggest adding more people to an email based on the groups of people you email the most often. For instance, I regularly send emails to both Mark and Wilson, my producers here on Loaded, or sometimes I'll email all the 404 hosts. This feature would help me remember to include Justin Yu in my distribution list, which is a good thing because he's very sensitive and does not like to be left out.
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Time-Warner Cable is ditching their plans to charge for broadband ala-carte. They started testing this model last year in Texas, but apparently consumers found it too confusing. They were going to roll it out nationally, but now they say that they are shelving the idea. It isn't dead altogether, though. They're going to continue to experiment with consumer education around this idea. But for now, we can all relax and consume broadband with unabashed gluttony.
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You can put captions on your YouTube videos directly in YouTube. The site launched CaptionTube late last week. It lets you add captions to the videos from the browser using a timeline system that looks like a regular video editor. You could do this before, but you had to do it by time codes, and then upload the captions as a separate SUB file. You can now find this feature yourself at CaptionTube.appspot.com
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In other YouTube news, the site is now grounds for contention for singer Don Henley. He is upset Senate candidate Charles DeVore used two of his songs in his YouTube campaign videos without permission. The songs are "Boys of Summer" and "All She Wants to Do is Dance." Henley has filed a lawsuit against DeVore, and I am going to avoid the temptation to make a joke about telling Henley to "take it easy."
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Last week, we reported on the Twitter race between Ashton Kutcher, CNN, and BritneySpears. We said that CNN won the race to one million followers. We misspoke. Ashton Kutcher won that race. Sorry for the confusion and now back to the news you actually care about.
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T-Mobile announced the new Sidekick last week. Now, before you scream OMG, you might want to hold off. It's a great phone, but it won't ship until May 13th. But we will get a chance to look at it tomorrow at the T-Mobile Sidekick launch party. We'll be covering the event and show you footage on Wednesday. In the meantime, here are the specs. It's called the Sidekick LX, and it's 3G, of course. It's thinner, has a larger screen, corporate email support, 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, but unfortunately, no Wi-Fi. Tune in later this week to get a closer look.
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Those are all your headlines for today, but I will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. I'm Natali Del Conte with CNET TV, and you've just been Loaded.
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