TiVo and Amazon.com have announced a new service that will allow TiVo Subscribers to watch Movies and TV Shows downloaded from Amazon Unbox on Their TVs.

With “Amazon Unbox on TiVo”, subscribers will have the ability to rent and purchase movies and television shows. Television shows will cost $1.99 per episode and most movies will range between $9.99 and $14.99 for purchase with movie rentals starting at $1.99. The current list of supported major studios includes CBS, Fox Entertainment Group, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Bros.

Once live, subscribers will be able to activate the service on Amazon.com to establish a link between their TiVo Series2 or Series3 box. Once the service has been activated, eligible movies and television shows can be downloaded directly to the TiVo box. Downloaded content will automatically appear in the “Now Playing” list …

New York State Senator Carl Kruger is looking at banning the use of electronic devices such as mobile phones and digital audio players like the iPod, when crossing streets in New York.

Citing that a number of fatalities in the city have been attributed to people not paying attention to crossing traffic due to personal phones or audio players, the Senator hopes to ban the use of these types of gadgets in city crosswalks in an effort to “look out for the people”.

“While people are tuning into their iPods and cell phones, they’re tuning out the world around them,” said Kruger. “Tuned out to the world around them. They’re walking into speeding cars. They’re walking into buses. They’re walking into one another and it’s creating a number of fatalities that have been documented right here …

Google is welcoming Princeton University as the latest library partner in its Book Search Library Project.

Princeton University will be opening approximately one million public domain works from their library system in an effort to make them available online in a searchable format. The Princeton University library system consists of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library and thirteen special libraries located around the campus.

The books being considered for the project are out-of-copyright works and therefore part of the public domain. Once digitized, the books will be fully searchable by researchers and readers alike. With Google Book Search, users can view the texts online, download them, or print them for later reference.

The project is expected to be completed over a six year period.

Palm announced today that the Treo 750 smartphone will be made generally available to customers across Europe through the Palm online store starting February 6th, 2007. The Treo 750 was previously only available on Vodafone’s network in the UK since last September, but this announcement opens the device up to all mobile phone networks.

The Palm Treo 750 runs on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5.0 OS and will feature Pocket MSN along with view and editing capabilities for Word and Excel, and allowing viewing of PowerPoint and PDF files all through a touchscreen interface.

The smartphone device is compatible with 3G UMTS/HSDPA networks and takes advantage of Microsoft’s Direct Push technology to give quick and wireless email and contact updates to the handheld gadget.

“The Treo 750 smartphone – made available first with Vodafone in Europe and recently announced …

After announcing they would distribute the game to Europe and Asia, Atari along with CD Projekt announced today that they will market and distribute ‘The Witcher’, an RPG game that will be released on Games for Windows this fall in North America.

“The Witcher is a tremendous game that has been on everyone’s radar since CD Projekt began development,” said Jeremiah Cohn, Product Manager, Atari, Inc. “With this publishing deal, Atari continues its quest to bring highly impressive titles to North America and we have our sights set on making The Witcher one of the most anticipated RPGs of the year.”

The Witcher, based on a world created by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, will add a new twist to traditional role playing games in that decisions made by the player can make significant changes in the game outcome. …

Southwest Airlines finds a number of ways to cut costs and provide discount airfare to its customers, and they know how to reward their most frequent customers. The airline has partnered with Nintendo to give some Rapid Rewards members a free Nintendo DS Lite game system along with a copy of Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day.

“We are helping our Members welcome the New Year with low fares, frequent flights and, of course, exercise … exercise for their mind while they travel,” said Blair McGrain, Director of Marketing Planning and Customer Loyalty in a press release. “We are thrilled to partner with Nintendo to give our Members some FUN in the New Year.”

Southwest has already mailed the free Nintendo DS and Brain Age game to 50 of the most long term and high mile …

NecSoft, a Japanese software company, has released some new authentication software that uses facial recognition as a different type of biometric security in order to gain access to a Windows PC.

In order to authenticate, a web cam views the face in front of it and matches it to an existing photo tied to the user account. The system also has a network management component in the works to allow a network administration of the facial recognition authentication for individual client PC’s.

As an added security feature, all of the images taken when trying to authenticate with the web cam are saved by the system. This, unlike trying multiple passwords, identifies the individual attempting to gain access to the system through the BiodeLogon facial recognition application.

We had reported last October about a Japanese mobile phone from NTT DoCoMo that also utilized …

An novel security hole presented itself last week with the new version of Windows Vista released by Microsoft to customers around the world.

George Ou, and online blogger, reported on Tuesday through ZD Net that he was able to access the Start Menu on Vista and could potentially run programs through voice command audio files played through the system speakers. This type of functionality could allow a hacker to run programs, delete files and any number of other harmful processes accessible through the voice command functionality of Windows Vista.

Microsoft has attempted to downplay the issue slightly, and has addressed the Speech Recognition Issue on their Security Response Center blog. “While we are taking the reports seriously and investigating them accordingly I am confident in saying that there is little if any need to worry about the effects of this issue on your …

Apple has recently updated information on its website about iTunes compatibility with Windows Vista from Microsoft, urging iTunes users to wait for an new iTunes version before upgrading to the new OS.

iTunes software is the key to syncing up music from Apple iTunes to the iPod portable media players, and although it has worked well with the current XP and 2000 operating systems from Microsoft Apple has noted some issues with the new Vista OS and has a new iTunes release on the way to address them. Apple states that iTunes 7.0.2 may work well with Vista on many PC’s, but due to some known compatibility issues iTunes users should wait until the next release of the iTunes software is out in a few weeks.

Some of the known issues Apple has noted range from serious …

Google has announced an improved version of its Google Mini search appliance. The new Mini offers document and user-level security, access to other business applications through Google Onebox for Enterprise, and integration with Google Analytics.

The Google Mini is a combined hardware and software solution that can search from 50,000 up to 300,000 documents and 220 different file types. Mini was introduced two years ago as a small, simple and affordable appliance to aid small business in finding and sharing information.

Secure Search
The new Google Mini now offers document and user-level security across all business content. Google’s entitlement management capabilities will integrate with existing security systems to ensure that employees can access only authorized information.

OneBox for Enterprise
The Mini’s new OneBox for Enterprise feature enables users to view search results from various business applications through a single Google interface. …

In case you miss any of Sunday’s Super Bowl action you can rest assured knowing that the video highlights of the game will be available for download from Apple’s iTunes Store.

The announcement came on Tuesday from the NFL, saying that highlights from Sunday’s game can be purchased online starting Monday. The download will cost $1.99 and will be viewable on computers or iPods. A special 90-minute video of the NFL’s coverage of the Super Bowl will also be available for $1.99.

This marks the first time that football fans will be able to download video highlights of the Super Bowl. Video highlights from the regular-season and playoff games have been available from the iTunes Store since September. The iTunes library contained highlights of each NFL regular season game in addition to a “Follow Your Team” Season Pass. …

One of the oldest controversies in online gaming is the re-selling of in game merchandise. Ever since the days of EverQuest to the present World of Warcraft phenomena, selling your hard earned, in-game items has been a somewhat dubious profession. EBay is putting the brakes on such practices however.

The practice known as RMT (Real Money Transfer), is usually discouraged by game publishers because it involves selling intellectual property which may in fact belong to game publishers and not the players themselves.

A spokesman for eBay, Hani Durzy, recently told SlashDot that eBay has made the decision for “the overall health of the marketplace.” Mr. Durzy also said that the selling of virtual items involved “legal complexities.” Mr. Durzy also cited eBay’s existing digital goods policy, which states that a seller …

A recent entry on the Google Book Search Blog highlights a new feature that integrates Google Maps with Google Book Search. With Google Book Search you can now see a visual representation of the places mentioned in a book through an interactive Google Map.

When you click the “About this Book” link next to a search result from Google Book Search you will be sent to a detailed page for that book. If the book contains a good share of quality locations it will also include an interactive Google Map highlighting those places mentioned in the book. The map points will contain snippets of text from the book and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned.

I did a search for “The Great Gatsby” and saw the following results:

This is an interesting …

A recent report by Unstrung Insider shows that 3G home base stations “Femto cells” could pose a market challenge for WiFi VoIP phones in homes and businesses. According to the report, “Ultra-low-cost home base stations that allow wireless users to communicate across any IP access network using a standard mobile handset will challenge WiFi VOIP for dominance in the consumer fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) market. ”

What this report is referring to is a challenge between phones such as the WiFiFone from Samsung, or one of the iPhone’s from Linksys (not Apple) and mobile phones that utilize a more traditional 3G technology which has a much broader coverage area.

The Femto cells are basically home base stations, much like a WiFi base station, which are connected to a broadband internet service. Instead of being hotspots for WiFi connections, Femto cells …

Google has taken action to limit the impact of so called Googlebombs also known as link bombs. According to Wikipedia, A Googlebomb is an “attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions.” The bomb works by relating key works to a link. For instance if you link to site with the words really great technology site, Google will associated those words with the site to which you linked. Now consider if 1000 or 10000 sites do the same thing. If enough sites link to the same site with similar terminology then the target site will become strongly associated with those terms in a Google Search.

Some of the famous Googlebombs involved slights against George W. Bush and Microsoft. The …