Orb Audio is roundly seen as being a company that produces decent to excellent mini speakers at a price that is, at the very least, acceptable to a wide strata of the speaker-buying public. We reviewed a set of Orb home theater speakers and our reviewer found them excellent for cinema playback. The company, seeing a niche, has just released the Orb Audio Booster kit, a $356 package with two basic speakers and a little amp, for computer use.
Installation is dead simple: you plug in the speaker wires into a port on the back and then connect the speakers using simple, push-type mounts. You can then add up to four inputs – two RCA and two mini-jacks – and an optional $299 Super Eight subwoofer. Orb, to their credit, screws the speaker wire to the small green connector cage out of the box. → Read More
Orb, a small company in New York, makes odd-looking speakers with some great sound. They just announced a small speaker/amp combo for $299 which includes two speakers and an optional subwoofer. The handmade speakers come in multiple finishes (I have the copper here at the house, which I personally don’t think go with my rug) but the dark ones look nice. The super eight subwoofer, a real monster, costs $299, while their larger model costs $598. I’ll have my review of these up soon – I’m having some set-up issues – but for the size they’re excellent. → Read More
Apparently you simply drop an SD card into this bugger, press a button, and take pictures. It’s designed to fit almost anywhere — they recommend the eyeball of a mannequin — and records up to six hours of video on a 2GB card. Sadly it lasts only 3 hours on battery but that’s enough to roll it through the bus station for some hot upskirt action. Wait… hot upskirt action at the bus station? $299.95 gets you this ball delivered. Extra points for watching the entire video without turning down the sound. → Read More
The original boxless Slingbox, Orb might just be unveiling an iPhone/iPod Touch version of its excellent-and-free interface in the next couple of days. Orb has apparently found a way around Apple’s RTSP port cockblockery by streaming your goodies as MP4 files. You’ll also be able to use Orb features with Winamp to "turn your home media player into a very limited kind of on-demand radio station for friends," according to The Register. If this works well enough, the limitation of the storage space on your iPhone or iPod Touch could turn into less of an issue, since you’d be able to access all of your music and videos from wherever you can get a signal. Orb opens up iPhone [The Register] → Read More
http://images.soapbox.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swfVideo: LiveStation Demo Microsoft LiveStation is kind of a Joost-meets-Orb except that it’s live TV (unlike Joost) only and it requires broadcasters to participate (unlike Orb). The guy in the video refers to LiveStation as “Slingbox without the box.” Sort of, but Slingbox doesn’t require broadcaster participation. He’s dead on about the box, though. Slingbox does have a box, LiveStation does not. LiveStation’s got a real purtty mouth — programmed using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology and looking to replicate the real-life experience of flipping through your TV channels. I think that this could be a great service, in theory, if they can talk all the major broadcasters into signing on. → Read More
Downloadable television, first made popular by Tivo and its competitors, is compelling stuff. As consumers become accustomed to watching a show whenever they choose, pausing at will and fast tracking through commercials, tuning in to a station at a scheduled broadcast time seems quaint at best. Today, 7% of U.S. households have a digital video recorder, or DVR and most cable companies offer a DVR as an option. File trading networks, such as bittorent, are also extremely popular (if sometimes illegal) choices for consumers wanting access to time-shifted television content. While DVRs are great, content producers and distributors are less than thrilled by the loss in revenue from all those skipped commercials. Also, DVR’d shows cannot be easily transferred to mobile devices or otherwise viewed away from their home television. Some consumers want more flexibility and options. Enter downloadable television, spearheaded by iTunes. On October 12 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0 which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. iTunes initially offered a selection of several thousand music videos and five TV shows, including most notably ABC’s Lost and Desperate Housewives, as well as the collection from past seasons. New shows are available 24 hours after the initial broadcast. Since that time, the collection has expanded with NBC Universal, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel shows, and Viacom, in addition to further Disney-owned networks’ shows. iTunes also gives the ability to view Apple’s large collection of movie trailers. Format for purchased Videos is 128 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4 video. By January 2006, iTunes offered over 40 television shows for download, including, most recently, additions from Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and MTV with episodes of such shows as the Daily Show, Spongebob Squarepants, South Park, and Punk’d. Showtime added some content in February. The networks, though, are hoping that iTunes will not be the only way people watch TV on their computers. CBS, Fox and ABC are all experimenting with their own direct downloads or streaming. ABC ABC is offering streaming versions of a number of its hit shows to viewers within the U.S. for no charge: Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief. The shows are viewable in 400×700 Flash format. On the plus side, ABC’s offering is browser and platform agnostic, and are free. On the minus side, and these are big ones, you must be online to view the show. You can’t take these → Read More
Oliver at MobileCrunch has a great writeup on Orb, the free alternative to the $250 Slingbox from Sling Media. Orb allows you to stream live tv, video, audio and pictures from a base computer to any web connected device. Oliver put Orb through a very high stress test – by streaming the movie Underworld Revolution from his home PC at 36,000 feet using Conexion by Boeing on his way back from a recent trip to Korea. Everything went very well, he said. Personally I’d just like to have 100 GB of storage on my phone, but given that is currently a non existent product, streaming via Orb may be a good and free way to go. → Read More
Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here. Zvents My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff. KnowNow Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week. Orb Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though. Wink Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”. Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow. Allpeers Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently. Flock Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again. But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week. PubSub Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here. → Read More
