favors

Play and rip DVDs for Apple devices

Favor DVD Player for Mac is a utility for playing and ripping DVDs. Supporting all DVD formats, Favor DVD Player for Mac lets you watch your DVDs on your MacBook or iMac. Even better, Favor DVD Player for Mac lets you rip DVDs to formats for your Mac or portable iDevice, as well as Apple TV.

Favor DVD Player for Mac downloads and installs easily. The interface has preset defaults for the most common settings, and a simple interface for watching DVDs. We watched a wide variety of disks, in numerous formats, and all played properly. We also ripped a … Read more

Google's approval ratings best Apple, Facebook, Twitter

If you're looking for the technology industry's most popular company, look no further than Mountain View, Calif.

ABC News and the Washington Post recently joined forces with Langer Research Associates to poll more than 1,000 Americans between March 28 and April 1 on their attitudes toward some of the tech world's most successful companies. The researchers found that a whopping 82 percent of respondents have a "favorable" opinion of Google, making it the most popular tech company. Just 9 percent of respondents expressed an "unfavorable" opinion toward the search giant, while 10 … Read more

Fetchmob resembles a crowdsourced Kozmo

"There's a third way to shop," Crisson Jno-Charles, the founder of Fetchmob tells me. Like other pickup-gig services--Zaarly, TaskRabbit, GigWalk (story)--Fetchmob is about not going to a store, nor going online to shop, but rather getting someone else to shop for you. Fetchmob lets you post quick shopping jobs that friends or acquaintances can take on.

It sounds a lot like a crowdsourced version of Kozmo, but Jno-Charles sees the service as being more intimate than that or any of the current open-call gig services. He views it as being used primarily by people in close proximity to each other: students in the same dorm, or co-workers on a floor. He thinks people will use it not to make money, but simply because it's what you do when you live with people or work closely with others.

First Montalvo patent is issued

Finally, I can call myself an inventor.

I've been inventing things for almost 20 years now, but Montalvo Systems was the first company I worked for that took intellectual property seriously. (That was no coincidence; it was also the first company I worked for where I helped develop the intellectual-property strategy.)

During my years at Montalvo, I came up with quite a few ideas and participated in brainstorming sessions that yielded more ideas. Most of these sessions were limited to Montalvo's own people, but there was one person I brought in to help us as a consultant--Don Alpert, who was the principal architect of Intel's Pentium processor and, possibly less significantly, a member of the editorial board at Microprocessor Report.

Working with three of us from Montalvo--myself and chief architects Greg Favor and Peter Song--Don took the lead in preparing a set of related patent applications describing a new way to design microprocessors.

The first patent from this set was… Read more