It’s full speed ahead for modems

Mon., May 14, 2007

From Staff and Wire Reports The Spokesman-Review

The CEO of Comcast Corp. says the next generation of cable modems will make current broadband speeds seem anemic by comparison.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, during a trade show last week in Las Vegas, said wideband modems will allow users to download content at speeds of 100 megabits or more per second.

That’s about 20 times faster than current modem speeds.

Roberts did not specify when those new modems will become available.

Second Life getting too crowded

The managers of popular virtual world Second Life are trying to address problems raised by disgruntled users of the 3-D software game who say the system has become unusually buggy.

The users’ main complaint: Second Life is growing so fast that it’s straining Linden Lab’s resources to the limit. The result, they’ve complained, is a failure to introduce timely fixes for technical glitches and failure to introduce upgrades to the complex technology.

In a town hall meeting inside Second Life last week, company managers asked users to be patient and wait for the improvements.

“We are working to fix bugs and enable incremental improvement,” said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab, the venture-funded San Francisco startup that launched Second Life in 2003.

The company estimates 25,000 computer owners are joining the game every day. Linden Lab said it is adding 120 servers per week to address the problem of heavy use.

Mpire turns to bloggers, widgets

Looking to capitalize on its shopping analytics, Seattle’s popular shopping site Mpire is rolling out about 80 new e-commerce “widgets.”

The free widgets — small software tools that plug into Web sites — will allow bloggers and online publishers to post shopping-related content to their sites and make money by passing leads on to Amazon.com and eBay.

A Seattle Post-Intelligencer story reported people who download the widgets will keep 100 percent of the revenue, with Mpire hoping to make money by selling custom widgets to large search engines, online marketplaces or other players. It also hopes that the widgets — if added to hundreds or thousands of Web sites — will boost Mpire’s rankings in search engine results.

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It’s full speed ahead for modems

Second Life getting too crowded

Mpire turns to bloggers, widgets

Jesse Tinsley

Jim Meehan

Molly Quinn

Rob Curley

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