Oh, hello there, crazy drool-worthy and inexpensive ultra high-speed Internet from Google! Yeah, that’s right, Google is looking to launch an experimental, ultra high-speed broadband network in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We are talking about Gigiabit fiber to the home speeds here. The only thing that currently comes close is Verizon FiOS, and their current download speed tops out at 50 megabits per second. Gigabit would be 1000 megabits (or, 128 MB) per second, which is just insultingly fast. Even better? They want to launch it at inexpensive prices in the launch/test cities. So, why would they do this, and what would be the benefit?

First, competition. Google wants to bring the price down while bringing the service level up, and they are putting their money where their mouth is and challenging other ISPs right on their home turf. If you had a choice between crazy-fast Google Internet and sucky Comcast, you’d likely end up going with Google in a heartbeat, since it’s like 200x faster, and less expensive. Second, Google is getting into the web apps business hard. It would be ideal for them for web applications and native desktop applications to have no difference in speed, and you can bet that they’d be deploying these tests to optimize the hell out of their web app products. Make no mistake, they want Google Docs to run just as fast in your browser as Microsoft Word runs when you launch it on your local machine.

We love this, and despite having a 50/20 FiOS connection, we want it badly. Google, bring this to Seattle, k?

Read More | Google Fiber for Communities

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When Apple introduced the world to the original iPhone, YouTube wasn’t part of the equation, but in the weeks leading up to launch, Steve Jobs revealed that YouTube would in fact have a dedicated app built right in to the iPhone and that the company had started the task of re-encoding their videos to H.264 format, which plays nice with the device. Fast-forward to today, and we are hearing similar rumblings as it pertains to Hulu and the iPad.

The biggest complaint we are hearing about the iPad is that it lacks Flash support, which means that a device that seems to be perfect for watching videos on Hulu, has no way to actually accomplish that task. However, it seems that Hulu is already hard at work on an iPad-compatable version of the site. Now, we don’t know if this is actually going to be a Hulu app, similar to what YouTube has on the iPhone, or if Hulu is simply switching up it’s Flash player and adding support for HTML5. The nice thing here is that Hulu has been using H.264 compression in their videos since the beginning, so the only real change that needs to be made to be iPad-compatable is to allow videos to be played outside of the Flash player, and HTML5 solves that perfectly.

At this point, we wouldn’t be surprised if a week or two prior to the launch of the iPad, Apple let’s us know that USA-based iPads will ship with Hulu supported from day one.

Read More | TechCrunch

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RealNetworks has just announced that it will be spinning off its Rhapsody music service into a separate, independently-operated company that will be based in downtown Seattle. This move follows the departure of founder Rob Glaser as CEO of the company, and about 150 RealNetworks employees will make the transition over to the new Rhapsody. Rhapsody, a joint venture between RealNetworks and Viacom MTV Networks, will no longer see it’s majority stake held by Real, which currently has a 51 percent share. RealNetworks says this is a move that is focused on streamlining company operations. Interesting, to say the least, since as far as we’re concerned, Rhapsody is the most interesting and mainstream product that RealNetworks has to offer.

Read More | RealNetworks

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Google just announced their latest product, called Google Buzz. Buzz will be integrated into Gmail, similar to the way video and chat had been integrated into Gmail. Buzz is akin to Twitter, but uses the Gmail UI. They’ve incorporated auto-following of those in your contacts list, a rich UI, and options for public and private sharing. Alongside Google Buzz, the company has also introduced a new mobile homepage, a mobile Buzz web application, and a new version of Google Maps for Symbian, Android, and Windows Mobile (with other platforms to be updated soon, apparently) to incorporate Buzz features.

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If you haven’t heard of Mass Effect 2, then you’re probably just waking up from cryogenic sleep. The sequel to one of the best selling Action RPGs hit the shelves this week and, for the most part, is bouncing right back off the shelves and into gamer’s 360’s and PCs.

We’re always keeping our eyes open for free stuff. Especially free video games. It looks like the brand new gaming site L33tsauce.com is celebrating their open beta by giving away a copy of Mass Effect 2 (any platform) to the person who makes the best page about the game on their site.

For the full contest rules, check out the contest Dojo. And don’t miss the “bonus” offer at the bottom of the page. Submissions will be judged by yours truly, and iJustine.

Read More | L33tsauce

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YouTube has just launched a new experimental HTML5 video player, which would replace their Flash player for supported videos. Flash has long been seen (with good reason) as a resource hog, so switching to the HTML5 browser should show a dramatic performance increase. One user reported a resource drop of over 50% when using the HTML5 player when compared to the Flash version. You can get in on the action, as long as you are using either Google Chrome or Safari 4.0 or above (although we’ve heard that it also works with recent versions of Firefox.) The only catch here is that videos with ads, annotations, and captions will still play in the older Flash player, and you won’t get fullscreen support. Of course you can try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can just turn it off.

Read More | YouTube HTML5 Video Player

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The Short Version: If you donate to Haiti relief by SMS by texting “HAITI” to the number 90999, or by texting “YELE” to 501501, we will match your donation multiple times. Just leave a comment telling us how much you donated, and we will take care of the rest. We are currently matching donations 14 times.

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Over the past couple of days, while trying to carry on with “business as usual,” I’ve personally found it hard to focus on tech, gadgets, and all of the CES 2010 goodness that we have yet to bring you, as the world is focused on the disastrous aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti. We’re sure you’ve seen the imagery, but if you haven’t, or if you aren’t quite sure, I encourage you to watch this AP report:

Gear Live & Friends Will Match Your Haiti SMS Donations!
We felt it was time to do our part to help, so with the support of a bunch of Gear Live friends, we are announcing that we will match SMS donations made by Gear Live readers and viewers. As many of you know, the Red Cross has made it super-simple to donate $10 to help out by simply texting the word HAITI to 90999. In fact, this has been so successful that it’s already earned $11 million in just a few days. That is fantastic - but the damage to the country is far greater than that, and every little bit helps. So here’s what we’re gonna do:

Starting now, if you send an SMS donation to either the Red Cross (by texting the word HAITI to 90999) or to YELE (by texting the word YELE to 501501) Gear Live will match it, up to $500. In addition, we have a bunch of our friends joining in as well:

• David Geller of Eyejot and WhatCounts will match up to $2500
• Leslie Camacho, President of EllisLab (which makes the fantastic ExpressionEngine CMS) and Roger Rustad (wondering network guru) will personally match up to $600 $1200
• Nate True of Tap Tap Revenge and iPhone hacking fame will match up to $500
• Jeremy, Adam, and the team at Stage Two will match up to $500
• Dave Taylor, the man behind AskDaveTaylor.com, will match up to $250
• Don McAllister of Screencasts Online will match up to $250
• Robert Scoble, the face behind Building43, will match up to $200
• Local Gear Live fan Shauna Causey will match up to $100
• Parnassus Ventures, the folks behind 140: The Twitter Conference, will match up to $100
• Jason Neudecker, a Gear Live Twitter follower, will match up to $100
• Hadley Stern and Apple Matters will match up to $100
• Xavier Lanier and Notebooks.com will match up to $100
• Amisha Gandhi-Lanier and Served Raw will match up to $100
• Kevin Urie from Social Media Club Seattle will match up to $100
• TechieDiva.com will match up to $50
• Eric Siegfriend and DanceHop will match up to $50

In total, so far, that’s

$4500 $5400 $5650 $6550 $6700 in pledged matching donations! For each donation you make, each entity above will match it, until their limit is reached. In other words, with our current eight eleven twelve contributors, your $10 donation will actually be matched six nine eleven twelve fifteen seventeen times, resulting in a $70 $100 $120 $130 $160

$180 payment. So, what do you need to do? This is the easy part. Just scroll down and leave us a comment letting us know that you made a donation, and whether it was a $5 or $10 contribution. If you do it multiple times, let us know that too. Even better, if you want to be on our list as a person or company that will match donations, let us know!

Now, what if you don’t have any money to donate? We will make it easy. Just comment with a link to an article on from any of the following websites that you found interesting or helpful, and we will donate $10 on your behalf:

Gear Live, Notebooks.com, AskDaveTaylor.com, Gear Diary, Mobility Minded, Technologizer, WindowsPhoneThoughts, Served Raw, SlashGear, or GeekRoom.

I have to give a big thank you to my pal Xavier over at Notebooks.com. He came up with the idea and invited me to donate. I then asked a few friends, and never thought we’d get the support that we did, so we kicked off our own campaign. Together with Notebooks.com, we have

$10,500 $11,400 $11,650 $12,550

$12,700 in matching donations for your SMS contributions!

The time is now! Leave a comment after donating, tell your friends, forward this around, and share this on Facebook and Twitter using the buttons at the top of the article. Make us spend every penny of the matching funds that are available.

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If you’re an aspiring author who’s been wanting to publish a book, or if you’ve got a blog that you think would be fantastic as a printed work, pay attention. FastPencil has hooked us up with 10 giveaway packages that will let you take your work and put it into a physical, published form, for free. In case you aren’t aware, FastPencil is a super-simple way for anyone to write, organize, sell, and distribute physical books, as well as ebooks. Ten of you will win:

• A free printed book
• A free eBook
• Free shipping and handling

In order to redeem, you’d just put in your original work in the FastPencil system, or if you have a blog, it can be automatically imported. Seriously, it’s very cool, and we’re gonna hook up 10 of you with the prize package. How do you enter? Simple. Just leave a comment here on this post, or over on the Gear Live Facebook page. We will choose ten people randomly a week from today!

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Google is aiming to continue their attempt at speeding up the Internet with the introduction of Google Public DNS. What’s it do? Well, basically, they are promising faster DNS lookups than your ISP. According to Google, they aren’t going to hang on to the data, and the data doesn’t get associated with your Google account in any way. They will just keep data for two days, and use it to study how to speed up DNS across the board. If you wanna take the plunge, set the DNS on your computer or router to the following Google Public DNS IP addresses: 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

Read More | Google Blog

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Okay guys, if you are looking to do some Black Friday 2009 shopping, we think that the Amazon Black Friday deals page is a great place to start. Why? Well, so far today they’ve had full music albums for 75% off, The Dark Knight on Blu-ray for 72% off, and a Garmin nuvi GPS for 50% off. Oh, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

Sound interesting? Head on over to the Amazon Black Friday Deals page to scope out what else they’ve got going on.

Read More | Amazon Black Friday 2009 Deals

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