Hasta La Gadget!

Netflix announced its Q4 2010 earnings today and surprised us with its huge rise in sales. In the letter it sent out to its shareholders (PDF), the company said it had surpassed 20 million total subscribers in the closing hours of the final day of 2010. The big story is that Netflix added 7.7 million of those subscribers during 2010.

Netflix’s original prediction for subscriber growth in 2010 was 3.6 million. The letter says much of this growth stems from Netflix’s streaming-only plan that it added in November. The service is only $7.99 a month, and it accounts for one-third of the 7.7 million subscribers. About 3.1 million people subscribed in the fourth quarter alone, which would explain the rise in the streaming-only plans. Netflix says that very few existing subscribers are downgrading to the pure streaming plan.

Streaming is much bigger for Netflix than physical DVDs, in hours of entertainment delivered, and it’s growing much faster than DVD rental. DVD shipment and content costs are still very material, and Netflix says it expects year-over-year shipments to decline in the coming quarters. But for those who take advantage of the DVDs rather than streaming, there’s no need to worry. Netflix says, “even though we expect DVD shipments to decline this year, we want to be clear that we intend to continue to offer great DVD-by-mail service for many years to come.”

Interestingly enough, Netflix spent about 10 percent less in marketing than it did a year ago, yet its subscription numbers grew 63 percent over the year.

A shopping mall in California resorts to license plate scanning to help forgetful drivers find their parked cars.

Originally posted at The Car Tech blog

Can’t say this is any surprise, but Sanjay Jha just confirmed on Motorola’s earnings call that he “sees good reason” to eventually release an entire family of tablets at “different multiple different display sizes and price points.” Specifically, Jha mentioned 7-inch tablets, and later said that consumer demographics like kids, teenagers, and “women” want different things from a tablet than enterprise and professional customers — which sounds suspiciously like Jha doesn’t think women want a single device for work and home, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, since he’s not always the smoothest speaker.

As for the Atrix, Jha simply said that “you will see our diversity in the retail channel as well with other carriers in the US,” which certainly sounds like it’ll hit other carriers once the AT&T exclusivity runs out. How long that exclusivity is, we don’t know — but keep in mind that the Droid Bionic is very nearly the same phone, so there’s a chance a software update will bring that sweet docking action to the red side of the market in the future. And if not, we’re sure the hacking community will have it covered.

Sanjay Jha says multiple Motorola tablet sizes coming, hints at Atrix on other carriers originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on April 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Google Talk is by far my favorite instant messenger to use, but for some reason I never quite understood why they restrict you from starting a conference call. This is a feature I’m sure a lot of people would appreciate, and being able to talk to multiple people simultaneously would be a great addition to the software.

In the meantime however, there is a hack that you can use to do conference calls. It isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world because you’re going to have several instances of Google Talk running simultaneously. Here’s how it is done:

1. Find the shortcut that you use to open Google Talk, then right-click on it and go to Properties.
   
2. At the end of the shortcut add /nomutex which is what will let you run multiple instances of the Google Talk Client.
   
3. Now you need to open one Google Talk for each person you want to chat with. That means if you want to have a voice conversation with two other people you will need to run two instances of the client:
   
4. Now just open up a conversation window for all of your friends that you want to talk with at the same time and start chatting.
   

Pretty much the only bad thing about doing this is that everyone will have to do the same thing…so if there are a total of 3 people in the conversation (including yourself) then each person will need to have two instances of Google Talk open.

This is good for more than just conference calling though, this also means that you can sign-in to multiple Google accounts simultaneously. That might be useful if you have a separate account for work and a separate personal account because you can use both simultaneously.

If conference calling is really an important feature that you think Google Talk should have available, then let them know over at the Gmail suggestions page.

Source: IPAhome

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Related Posts:

Google Starts Working On New Google Talk FeaturesYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryGMail No Longer Needed For Google TalkHow To Make Phone Calls Using FirefoxGoogle Talk And AIM Coming Together

Motorola had one of the best CES showings of any company in recent memory, and now we’ve got some rough ship dates for all that new gear: CEO Sanjay Jha just announced on the company’s earnings call that the Atrix 4G for AT&T and 3G Xoom for Verizon will arrive at “the end of February,” while the LTE-enabled Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom will arrive at “the end of the second quarter” as previously promised. That sounds good to us — and with that earlier Best Buy leak suggesting the Xoom will hit on February 17, we’re hoping that Moto’s taking a long view of when the end of February actually begins. Even better, a late February Xoom release supports those rumors that Honeycomb will be generally released in March, which is when the real Android tablet invasion will begin. It’s all happening, folks.

Update: Oh boy. Jha followed up his Xoom comments in the Q&A portion by hinting that the Xoom might slip to March, but that he’s very confident they’ll make their timeline. Fingers crossed.

Motorola Atrix 4G and Xoom tablet launching at the end of February, Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom in Q2 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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