Ruckus

Stats don't support hype: Digital music is ailing

commentary If you want to get a sense of both the wishful thinking and the likeliness of dashed dreams for people investing in the digital-music business, click over to your Netflix queue and rent a copy of the 1962 musical "The Music Man."

Humor me here: "The Music Man," first a Broadway play, tells the story of a traveling huckster who convinces people in small towns that he can teach their tin-eared kids to play a musical instrument--all he needs is money to buy their trumpets and whatnot. And what happens once they give him his … Read more

Ruckus intros affordable enterprise access points

For the majority of homes and apartments, a home router such as the D-Link DIR-855 or Linksys WRT320N would make a viable wireless network. However, if you want to share the Internet with a few neighbors or cover a warehouse with a wireless signal, you'd need an enterprise-class access point. The problem is this type of access point is generally expensive.

Ruckus Wireless wants to change this fact and announced Monday its new line of enterprise-class access points, the ZoneFlex 7300 series, which includes two products, the ZoneFlex 7343 and ZoneFlex 7363. The former is a single-band (2.4GHz) Wireless-N access point that offers speeds up to 300Mbps and costs $499. According to Ruckus, this is the only sub-$500 enterprise Wireless-N access point on the market.

The ZoneFlex 7363, on the other hand, has support for the dual-band standard (2.4GHz and 5GHz) and offers the maximum bandwidth of up to 600Mbps. For this reason it costs $100 more than the ZoneFlex 7343.

According to Ruckus, the ZoneFlex 7300 series models are the first access points in their class to integrate Ruckus patented smart antenna array and dynamic beam-forming technology, called BeamFlex, designed to deliver high throughput speeds at long range.… Read more

Sources: Apple wants technology from struggling Lala

Update 6:21 p.m. PST: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are reporting that Apple and Lala have struck a deal.

Apple acquired Lala on Friday, unlikely offering much for the streaming-music service.

Sources with knowledge of the discussion told me Apple is interested in bringing some of Lala's engineers onboard. According to the sources, Apple is impressed by Lala's technology. The 4-year-old Lala scans users' hard drives and creates a duplicate music library that they can access from Web-enabled devices. The company also sells songs for a dime each.

I posted a story on … Read more

Is the next iTunes challenger iLike?

Facebook most's popular music application comes from iLike, and soon the company will try to turn that social-networking cachet into song sales.

Seattle-based iLike, a social music service, is expected to launch a music download store in coming days, perhaps as soon as Thursday, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. Last month, CNET News reported that iLike was in talks with the top four recording companies about securing licenses for downloads.

The new store will debut as a beta version and will feature songs from at least three of the four top major recording companies, according … Read more

Ruckus brings Wireless-N outdoor the smart way

Wireless-N has gone outdoor for a while now with Meraki and Tropos having taken turns to release their their products.

However, Ruckus Wireless on Monday announced new outdoor wireless products it claims to be "world's first and only outdoor dual-band 802.11n with dynamic beam forming." The new product, the ZoneFlex 7762 access point, is supposedly designed to solve problems that have hindered outdoor Wi-Fi deployments, including interference, physical obstructions, as well as network management complexity and cost.

The ZoneFlex 7762 is the company's first centrally managed, concurrent dual-band 802.11n (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz) outdoor … Read more

Total Music: 'Free' can't compete with free

Universal Music first floated the idea of Total Music in 2007 as a way to give customers an alternative to free MP3s available on file-trading networks and anonymous Internet sites.

At that time, the business model called for hardware manufacturers to pay some extra amount--perhaps $5 per month--and optionally pass this cost along to consumers. In return, consumers would get the right to download as much music as they wanted, for free, during a certain time period.

Nokia eventually launched a similar plan, Comes With Music, but Total Music (which became a joint venture between Universal and Sony Music) ran … Read more

'Re-Mission' is a video game with a vital purpose

At first glance, Re-Mission comes across as a stylishly produced, anime-influenced video game. But the targets in question are cancer cells, which the character Roxxi the nanobot blasts with the Chemoblaster, the Radiation Gun, and the Antibiotic Rocket.

Re-Mission is specifically designed as a health improvement intervention for teens and young adults who have cancer. Game producers at HopeLab start with a desired health outcome, and then reverse engineer a game that encourages positive behaviors, adding motivation and fun into something as scary as a kid's battle against cancer.

HopeLab Vice President Ellen LaPointe spoke at the Sandbox Summit … Read more