TECH BITS: Verizon joins Sprint, AT&T with wireless e-book loads
Associated Press
NEW YORK | Verizon will be providing wireless book downloads for an electronic reading device, joining AT&T and Sprint in supporting electronic books.
IREX Technologies, a Dutch company, said last week that it will start selling an e-book reader this fall for $400. It will have a screen with an 8.1-inch diagonal, in between the size of the two models of Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle.
The Kindle was the first e-book reader on the U.S. market with a cellular Internet connection, supplied by Sprint Nextel Corp. AT&T’s network will support upcoming readers from Sony Corp. and Plastic Logic Ltd.
IREX says its reader will use Barnes & Noble Inc.’s e-book store, and the device itself will be sold in some Best Buy Inc. stores.
Life magazine’s online in Google scan project
NEW YORK | Decades of Life magazine have been scanned and posted online, giving the public the first comprehensive electronic access to the iconic publication’s archives.
Life already has made images available through the Life.com Web site and a partnership with Google Inc. The latest effort, also with Google, makes stories available as well, all searchable and viewable for free in their original magazine layout.
"Every day we receive requests from readers looking for these issues for research purposes, and to find photos and articles featuring family members, hometowns and other memories," Andrew Blau, president of Life Inc., said in a statement. "Now with these full issues available online, readers will be able to browse through history as it was being recorded."
The online archives are part of Google’s ambitious book-scanning project, which has prompted a copyright-infringement lawsuit by publishers and authors. The parties have settled, although they are renegotiating details after the U.S. Justice Department concluded that the original deal probably violates antitrust law.
The Life archives are not dependent on that settlement because the Time Warner Inc. magazine is agreeing to make its works available through Google.
The archives cover the magazine’s main run as a weekly, from 1936 to 1972 – more than 1,860 issues in all. After the weekly ceased publication in 1972, it was resurrected as a monthly in 1978 and ended again in 2000. From 2004 to 2007, Life appeared as a weekly newspaper supplement.
Intel branches out with software
SAN FRANCISCO | As Intel Corp. branches beyond its core business of microprocessors for laptop and desktop computers, the chip maker is doubling as a software company. The goal is to make sure many kinds of devices work well with Intel’s chips.
One example: Intel is backing an open-source project called Moblin, an operating software for mobile devices.
At Intel’s forum for technology developers last week, CEO Paul Otellini also showed off software that computer makers can use to build application stores like the one Apple offers on the iPhone. Intel’s project will let programmers write applications that work on multiple operating systems and different types of computers using Intel chips.
Intel says that will eliminate the "massive reprogramming" now required for applications to run on multiple devices.