>> Natali Del Conte: NASA launches an iPhone application. Sprint kicks off its first WiMax network, and Netflix wants to charge you a whole extra dollar for Blu-ray rentals. It's Thursday, October 9. I'm Natali Del Conte and it's time to get loaded.
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>> Natali Del Conte: We have a lot of Google news today. I'll try to be brief and sum up. First off, Google has officially launched GeoEye-1 and Google Maps, which is their high resolution commercial imagery. This is really sharp satellite imagery like the images you see in spy movies. It's cool. Check it out. Google is also offering a new layer of email storage. Small businesses and individuals can get email archiving of up to 10 years for 45 dollars per user. And finally, I read something this morning about Google offering RSS feeds to search results. Apparently this was discussed last week, but I must have missed because of the barrage of financial news we're all consuming. So if I missed it, I assumed you might have too. What this means is that you'll be able to get an RSS feed for Google searches, which is like a Google alert only without having to check your email. I like this a lot because, let's face it, we all want a real-time feed to see what's happening when we Google ourselves. A judge in California has decided to uphold the restraining order for RealDVD. This is the movie copying software by RealNetworks that has been in court this week based on a lawsuit from the Motion Picture Association of America. A judge has extended the temporary restraining order while the trial goes on, but RealNetworks released a statement on Wednesday saying that they expect justice to prevail and their program to be up and running again soon. Sprint officially launched its new WiMax network in Baltimore yesterday as promised. CNET's Maggie Reardon was on the scene to check it out. Take a look.
>> Maggie Reardon: I'm here with Sriram Viswanathan of Intel and he's going to show us, driving around the city of Baltimore, how WiMax really works. He's going to show us some applications here. So what are we doing? Are we looking at some video here?
>> Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah. I'm actually on a YouTube page and I'm actually in the car, in the back seat and I'm not connected to anything and I'm actually playing the video. You know, the American Nobel prize was announced and here's the video that's actually being played in, you know, real time. And I could actually have multiple video windows because the bandwidth that I'm actually getting in the car is well in excess of, you know, 5 megabits. It's actually a downstream bandwidth of 7.7 megabits per second and upstream bandwidth of 2.2 megabits per second.
>> Maggie Reardon: Now we're in a car riding around the city. You've got a laptop here. I mean, do you really envision -- I hope people aren't going to be watching video on their laptop while they're driving, but what are some of the applications that would could, I mean could we see this embedded in cars or would people, would that be something that people would want to do?
>> Sriram Viswanathan: Yeah I think, you know, it's actually a very good point, you know. We don't envision people actually sitting in the, you know, front of the car using their laptops. But what it does is that it opens up the possibility for your car, or your mobile environment to be connected all the time.
>> Natali Del Conte: Now that there's actually a WiMax network up and running, manufacturers are racing to put WiMax capability in their devices. One of the first to do this Acer, the new Aspire 4930 and 6930 are notebooks that will both be able to run on WiMax. The 4930 is a 14 inch notebook with a 320 gig hard drive that costs 900 dollars. The 6930 is a 16 inch notebook that also 320 gigs of memory and also costs 900 dollars. The NetFlix competition is over and there were actually two winners of the coveted popcorn bowl trophy. Suresh Joachim of Canada and Claudia Wavra of Germany watched movies for 123 hours and 10 minutes marking a new Guinness world record. They win 10,000 dollars and a lifetime subscription to NetFlix. Congratulations to the king and queen of couch potatoes the world over. NetFlix is raising prices, but I would hardly take this as a sign that the economy is bad. It's only a one dollar increase. If you order Blu-ray movies over NetFlix your monthly account fee will go up by a whole dollar. Given the fact that Blu-ray movies cost up to 30% more than regular DVDs, I don't think anyone should cause a stink about this. Yahoo calendar got a makeover this week that the makes the application a lot more social. The new calendar is built on the Zimbra platform so it's compatible with iCal and interoperable with other web calendars such as Google, AOL, Mozilla and more. Users can share calendars with friends who use any other calendaring program and subscribe to any iCal-based public calendar. There's also integration with Flickr, the ability to set alerts to email, IM or SMS, drag-and-drop functionality and a to-do list. It looks much improved, and really, it was about time. The Financial Times is reporting that EMI is going to launch its own music portal this holiday season. The British music label will offer audio and video for users to download. Most of it will be for sale by track, but some of it will be free. A spokesperson for the company said that they would use this more as a learning lab than a big money-making endeavor, which is good because single-label music services are usually not big cash cows. Remember Sony's Pressplay? I rest my case. EMI says they don't necessarily want to compete with iTunes or Amazon, they just want to sort of farm their artists online before they push them out beyond the internet. Best Buy is rolling out their own line of laptops. These are Best Buy branded laptops. The retailer isn't actually building the machines. The first two Blue Label laptops include the Toshiba E105 and an HP Pavillion model. They are laptops that will only be sold at Best Buy and they're designed based on surveys from customers about what they want in their machines. Both notebooks cost 1200 dollars. There's really nothing ground-breaking about these machines other than the fact that Best Buy thinks their brand name may mean something to consumers when they're looking for a laptop. I'm not really sure that's the case, but, OK. NASA now has an iPhone application. iAPOD Viewer lets users view pictures from NASA's astronomy picture of the day website. There's a new picture delivered daily with a professional astronomer's description. I do find it odd that this isn't a free application though. It costs a dollar 99. But why would I buy this content as its own application when I can easily just navigate to Safari and see that same information on NASA's picture of the day site for free. Those are all your headlines for today, but before I sign off, I want to send out my week's birthday wishes. Happy belated birthday to Michelle whose birthday was last Saturday. Happy early birthday to Jaime and Allan and my sister Lindsay, whose birthday is on Saturday. Also congratulations on your wedding to Mark and Shannon in Australia who wrote me about their upcoming nuptials this weekend. Thanks for watching Loaded. That's it for this week. Remember if you've missed any episodes, be sure to catch up at Loaded.CNETTV.com. I'm Natali Del Conte and you've just been loaded.
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