Xbox gets a new dashboard

In 24 hours, the happy owners of the Xbox 360 will have a big surprise. Very early, the new Dashboard device is scheduled to go on air on Tuesday, December 6. And Microsoft has some interesting promises for those who have the current generation console.


First, the Xbox 360 holds hands with Windows Phone. The company led by Steve Ballmer chose to play the Tiles interface (the squares of the WP) on the console. It is not look like a giant smartphone, however, and I think the result was very positive against the previous interface device. This is the biggest change in the look of the Xbox five years, according to some specialist vehicles.


Some categories of resources were reorganized. "Social" appears to give vent to the contemporary need to share what we are thinking, doing and eating in networks Twitter and Facebook. The user can view the timeline and update their profile from the game.

With the update tomorrow, Microsoft intends to take another step towards the 21st century intelligent television. Not coincidentally, the applications are worth mentioning: it has Netflix, YouTube, Rango, Epix, Last.fm and many others. Depending on the service-TV signs the gamer, the Xbox 360 still give you access to live channels and functionality that provides pay TV provider. In the U.S., customers Comcast has 10 000 films and made available to Verizon FiOS customers can watch some special content.

Specifically in Brazil, Microsoft confirms the availability of Mexican broadcaster Televisa's telenovelas next year. We also have MLB.tv content related to baseball. And only.


Xbox 360: Content
The Bing brand presence in the new Dashboard. The Microsoft search engine does not take the user directly to web searches. Instead, it appears as an option for those who want to search for content stored on the console itself. Movies, applications, etc products available through Marketplace.

It also has better integration with Kinect. Who has the accessories connected to the console can use gestures or voice commands to access applications and do some research (using Bing, of course) on Xbox 360. According to the Guardian, the search for movies "Harry Potter" depends to speak "Xbox, Bing, Harry Potter."

Xbox Live Gold Subscribers gain the ability to save games in the cloud, as well as movies that are watching. Thus, simply put the gamertag on another console to pull the saved games and movies to be viewed directly from the Microsoft cloud.

The dashboard update does not cost anything and it should automatically come on Xbox 360.

Google and Mozilla Are Negotiating Firefox Search Deal

The Google search that everybody sees in their Firefox is not there for nothing. A few years ago, Mozilla has made a deal with the world's largest search engine to implement the search in the browser. This agreement was renewed in November 2008 and would end date the last day of the month. Some days have passed, but so far the Mozilla did not say whether the agreement was renewed or not, which calls into question the future of the company.


Meanwhile, at the headquarters of Mozilla.

Since its inception, has always brought the deal profitable fruit for Mozilla. In 2010, customized searches through the Firefox bar that generated revenues accounted for 98% of its revenue, although the company does not reveal exactly what the Google in total - similar agreements with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo are also included . So it's a little unusual that no announcement has been made around that yet.

For its part, Google said the BusinessInsider that still has a deal with Mozilla, but does not elaborate on what he is. And as the Google search has not been removed with an update of Firefox, we can deduce that he still will extend at least until the end of the year, giving time for the Mozilla can adapt to a change.

But what happens next? We will see a Firefox with Yahoo or Bing as default search engine? Or Mozilla will be sold to another to pay more, since the company has become extremely dependent on these agreements to have a good financial return? Remember that Firefox already has a version with Bing, but she is not the standard version.

The fact is that Google has its own browser that already has enough traction to overcome the Firefox, so it is natural that Google reconsider the contract it has with Mozilla. The question is whether, first, Mozilla will even let the goose that lays the golden eggs escape, secondly, how users will react to a possible change.

I have no problem in having the Bing or Yahoo as default search engine in Firefox, since I can change. And you?

Cuba creates virtually identical to the social network Facebook

The Cuban government seems to start thinking about new ways to narrow down the information that travels across the country. Recently Mairata Sandro, who writes on issues related to Latin America to Tumblr channel Univision, published some screenshots of the project called 'Red Social ".


The website is obviously equal to Facebook, where even the same sequence of buttons, layout and visual identity can be easily recognized. The logo sort of tangled up with the old version of MySpace icons.

The project is supposed to be headed by Minister of Education, although it is always difficult to confirm this information when it comes to any action of the country. Set in the air almost noiselessly, Red Social has raised questions about its true purpose.

On the website homepage replaces the image of world map commonly used by Facebook for that of the island of Cuba, signed by the phrase "A virtual meeting place for Cuban Universities."

The blogger Carlos Alberto Benitez La Chiringa * of Cuba said in one of your posts that the project serves as a kind of intranet, online, with access restricted to just local internet connections, making it impossible to access it elsewhere.

Many sources have confirmed it can not access the domain http://facebook.ismm.edu.cu in dif countries. Here in Brazil, apparently, is equally impossible.

Curiously the base url inicilmente include the word "facebook" as a subdomain, which has already ventured implications of brand misuse and possible problems associated with patents. For most it is restricted and controlled the flow of information because of the political regime of the country, it is hard to believe that a carbon copy of so literal largest social network in the world could be so naively developed without any just retribution.

I personally believe that the rapid entry-exit strategy, and has the typical Cuban touch, where the controversy seems to always attract the necessary attention. If this is not where the project should have been thrown away from the radar of the interwebs, then someone made enough mistakes amateurs in the early stages of the network.

Immediately after the publication of Benitez on the above address, apparently concerned about the type of response that Facebook, the engineers behind the project created a new domain for the network http://neko.uclv.edu.cu/index. php / equally inaccessible, but only from the island itself.

However, the likely problems linked to all the visual and functional network can still persist. For now Facebook has not expressed any opinion on the matter.

A year ago, Cuba had already undertaken the construction of EcuRed, which gives his version - both in form and in content - the online encyclopedia Wikipedia on .. all.

Hotmail, the best web application of year 2011?

I put it as a question, but colleagues of the magazine "PC Magazine" have already decided: Hotmail received a gold medal as the best web-based service this year which ends in a couple more days. The journalists put Google Docs in second place, with grade 4 (of 5), while Microsoft appears webmail with a grade 4.5 (5 also, of course).


They wrote the following to defend the arrival of Hotmail as a number of web services:

"The folks at Microsoft have taken seriously the updates of your webmail service leader-participation-in-world, adding unique tools for organizing and cleaning up inboxes and view active content. [...] The new Hotmail beats Gmail messages prior to the offer, a better implementation of the Conversation view, better tools to maintain order in your inbox and remove "messages" gray, or messages that are not spam but are not priority. "

In fact, Microsoft has brought Hotmail to a new level. He went from being old-fashioned thing of the past to become a mail service option among geeks. Still, I think that Gmail is still a perfect tool with powerful spam filter. It seems like the journalists of "PC Magazine" forgot the Priority box, which classifies the non-spam messages as a priority or not. It was introduced last year, but until now has been improved. And the recent redesign has made viewing Gmail messages in a conversational manner more efficient.

Now they are right about one thing: the display of active content in Hotmail is very good. The message can be handled with some forms of interaction that does not allow conventional mail. But that depends on partnership with the MS web companies in order to do something truly integrated.


Every email service has its pros and its cons. Instead of defending one or the other, I leave the question for you: Hotmail is a web application for 2011 in your opinion?

Gingerbread Crosses Android Froyo In Popularity

Nearly 1 million activations per day (October estimates) make the scenery in the world of Androids change remarkably over short periods of time. The channel's developer platform serves well to show this change. The latest data, released earlier this month, accusing the Gingerbread (2.3) finally passed Froyo (2.2) and most widely used version of Android.

Gingerbread is a majority. For the time being.

The Gingerbread reached 50.51% while the popularity of Froyo version, which last month held the crown of most popular incarnation of the system, saw its share fall from 45.3% to 35.3%. She is ahead of the 2.1 Eclair (9.6%), 1.6 Donut (1.3%), 3.2 and 3.1 Honeycomb, with respectively 1.2% and 1.1%. The less-used versions of Android is 3.0, with 0.1% and 1.5 Cupcake with 0.8%. Only the two latest versions of the platform, Gingerbread and Honeycomb (developed for tablets), gained share in the period.

Although the Gingerbread has won more than half the territory in Android smartphones, the deed does not chill the discussions of the fragmentation of the platform. With five releases in the street, the platform gets a new leader of use shortly after the presentation of a new version that will incorporate statistics. Besides, soon, to further increase the distance between the latest version of the program and apparatus frozen in their updates.

TIM announces broadband optical fiber in Rio and Sao Paulo

At an event for press and shareholders, TIM revealed its next investment. Through a new company called Fiber TIM, the Italian operator will offer fixed broadband services in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo from July next year.


Initially, the operator will sell two speeds: 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps. All this speed will arrive in customers' homes through a fiber optic network that will reach the pole or building. Since then, come together to network covers pre-existing residence through a VDSL converter. The discerning will opt for higher speeds the fiber directly into their homes.


Luca Luciani, CEO of TIM and Rogerio Takayanagi, CEO of TIM Fiber
The fiber optic network Fiber TIM covers practically the entire city of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as well as some nearby towns. This is because the purchase of AES Atimus by TIM in July of that year, which added to the grid operator of a 5500 km optical fiber in the two capitals.

The focus of TIM is to win customers in the utilities operators (Hi and Telefonica) which, due to the distance between home and central, are prevented from owning more than bandwidth of 2 Mbps. The investment for each customer is approximately $ 500. This value encompasses the entire installation process, from labor to the boxes that must be affixed to the pole.

The ambition is large: the operator plans to own 20% of the broadband market in four years of operation in the capital. It does this by working with two market segments: "I pay, but I have no technical availability" and "but I can not get." Along with fixed broadband, the operator will also create a network of hotspots, a la Vex.



However, prices and plans were not disclosed. Rogerio Takayanagi, TIM Fiber CEO, said the deal will be similar to the competition, except in the form of collection: it is not necessary to have a landline to get broadband. The operator did not bet on convergence in the two services, because it has a prepaid plan with rates cheaper than a landline.

In the presentation, there was a model of the connected home. A computer connected to the service was available for testing, and get 45 Mbps download and 30 Mbps upload. Takayanagi I could talk to, and he assured me that the upload should stay in between 10 and 15 Mbps.

HSPA +
TIM also used the event to advertise their projects on HSPA +. The carrier will operate the technology in three carriers and three sectors for each site, allowing a total of up to 378 Mbps theoretical for each antenna. This link will be provided through the TIM Fiber networks and Intelig important to remove the bottleneck previously known: just for the sake of comparison, each antenna had only 8 Mbps.

Unlike the Live, no specific plans for Internet access via this technology. Customers can browse the HSPA + network without the need to exchange their data packets.

Takayanagi was keen to highlight that the implementation of infrastructure and TIM Intelig Fiber is essential for the expansion of mobile network: the sites are getting the upgrades will be able to LTE, with speeds up to 300 Mbps to each customer. "Now, TIM has that capability," he said.

YouTube Gets New Design

With just an addition of the code in browser JavaScript console could already see: YouTube was preparing to relaunch its home page with new layout. Last night Google released once the revamped interface, which is available to users immediately (at least here already opened on the first try).


Note that the homepage has undergone many changes. The design team chose to YouTube add a menu on the left side, from which the user has access to several channels that he signs. And integration with the Facebook brand presence, so that the video site pulls own social network what friends are sharing and places it in a way more interesting for those who just want to watch the audiovisual content.

Of course it also has integration with Google +. It works similar to the social network integration with Mark Zuckerberg.

On the cover there are still entries, with the videos recently published in the subscribed channels. Beside, YouTube uses algorithms to define recommendations videos you would like to attend, considering your user profile. Each click on "like" each play and each site interaction enhances the way that YouTube builds its consumption profile (content, in this case).

Following the previous layout, YouTube remains a large area below your top bar in which advertisers can place interactive video and other types of advertising. After all, Google still has the intention of making money from the biggest video site in the world.


Page YouTube Channel
The channel page has also changed. You can choose a video highlight, and other customizations depending on the interest of each user. For me, I found it interesting to put the video Lumia 800 highlighted, with immediate playback as soon as one opens the page and no ads. See the result here.

I was with the new YouTube layout enabled a few days ago. The feeling is that the design team put its house in order. It was easier to find functions, and the page channel is certainly more elegant.

And what did you think?

iPhone 4S: TIM starts sales from December 16

I just confirm. The iPhone 4S will be sold by Tim on December 16. So a contact within the operator told me, the launch will be in some stores 0n scheduled for Thursday to Friday. Then, the TIM began selling the product in all its stores.


As you know, TIM bet on unlocked smartphones. The trend is that the same happens with the iPhone 4S, but no information about this feature of the sale was passed on to me. If there were subsidies for customers who adhere to a contract, I think more people would be interested in the product. Still, the company's strategy - to my knowledge - is.

TIM does not talk about prices or availability of the iPhone 4S models, which comes in black and white and 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB of storage.

Interested in buying the iPhone 4S must register on the site operator. However, it warned that leave the register does not create a bond of purchase. It works more like a direct channel for information about the machine.

I saw site saying that the operators will start selling the new iPhone on December 9. At least in the TIM, the correct date is December 16. This contact has hinted that the date can only change if Apple so authorizes Brazil. Something very unlikely when we are talking about the giant run by billionaire Tim Cook.