Orange brings Macbook Air in Romania

Orange launched at CERF 2008 a new portable broadband solution. The thinnest laptop in the world, the Apple MacBook Air, the smallest USB modem in the world, Option ICON 225 and Internet Unlimited Start were created for the wireless world.

You can Connect to the internet wherever you are, at 3G+ speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps in over 300 localities in Romania and at EDGE speeds of up to 220 Kbps in the rest of the country.

The subscription fee starts from 10 euros. The price of the MacBook Air is 1689 euros including VAT.

IRIS, the Romanian distribuitor for Apple, will sell MacBook Air only after 2 weeks to those who pre-ordered him online.

More about this: Orange

Internet is more popular than TV

A new study from IDC shows that on average people spend 32.7 hours online a week and only 16.4 hours watching television. Newspapers and magazines get only 3.9 hours of our attention. IDC surveyed 992 Americans aged 15 years and older.

Does this actually mean that the Internet is twice as popular as television? The total weekly media consumption comes to 70.6 hours in the survey. The press release also doesn’t indicate whether there was simultaneous media consumption.

Barring simultaneous consumption, with seven hours of sleep a night and eight hours of work a day, that leaves about an hour a day for everything other than media consumption. I’d like to think that even I don’t consume that much media in my spare time. The study doesn’t specify whether these hours are only “leisure” time—and I’m gonna bet that most people can’t get away with channel surfing during work.

The study also looked at online activities:

The data also show that consumers tend to use the media they grew up with. The older the respondents, the more they consume TV, newspapers, and magazines; the younger they are, the more the Internet displaces usage of traditional media. Using search engines (84% of respondents), mapping and navigation services (83%), personal research (77%), and using email (76%) are the most frequent online activities.

The 16% that didn’t use search engines would have said yes had the question said “Google” or “Yahoo.” (I’m not entirely joking—I was explaining what I do for my grandfather once. I asked him if he used search engines. He said he didn’t. I asked him if he used Google. He said he did.)

Odd, though, since I know that the stats I gave to clients two years ago said that 88% of Internet users used search engines (NFO Research, though the discrepancy there is probably within the margin of error) and even more used email (90% to 95%). I find it hard to imagine that nearly a quarter of American Internet users aren’t using email at all.

Is the Internet more popular than television? Apparently. But it’s also more portable and more universally accessible (especially from work). Is this even a fair fight?

See more here: IDC

NTT DoCoMo joined Google in Mobile Internet Services

NTT DoCoMo, the world's largest wireless internet provider, and Google formed a partenership that includes providing search services, search-related advertisement and potential applications to i-mode users.
The two companies will also collaborate to enhance the user-friendliness of i-mode services by making various Google services easier to access through i-mode mobile phones. The default pre-loading of Google Maps application into upcoming DoCoMo i-mode handsets is one of the initial initiatives being discussed.

Through the partnership with Google, i-mode users will be served Google search results for mobile and PC web sites via the i-mode portal search-box. Launch of the expanded search services is scheduled in spring 2008. The new search-box will be placed on the top-page of the i-mode portal, increasing the immediate accessibility and convenience of searches on i-mode.

Simultaneously with the launch of the new search services in spring 2008, key-word based advertisements using Google's ad platform AdWords will also be provided on the search-result pages in conjunction with the search results.

The parties intend to make it easier for i-mode users to use Google services such as Gmail, YouTube and Picasa by giving users more seamless and immediate access over the mobile phone. Furthermore, in all upcoming DoCoMo full-browser capable handsets, Google will be set to appear as the default start-page on the full-browser.

DoCoMo and Google will also continue to study the possibility of bringing Android based handsets to the Japanese market. Android, a revolutionary platform for mobile phones, was announced by the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) last fall, in which Google was the key initiator of the Android project.