zing

Zing your own salad dressing

Salad dressing, being the condiment that changes a bunch of lettuce and vegetables into an actual salad, has a pretty high importance in salad hierarchy. Of course, this is not surprising to anyone who has ever become lost in the condiment aisle at the supermarket. However, for all those bottles that line the shelves, all too often that massive selection does not lead to the one you want. Luckily, it is easy to make your own.

The Zing Anything Salad Zinger ($23.95) is a simple-to-use salad contraption that may end up rivaling the salad spinner for salad importance. Intuitive … Read more

Dell's music player delayed?

Dell's purported music player will apparently not be here in time for the holidays.

A report in Monday's Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources saying that a music player with software designed by Zing, a company Dell bought last year, will not be released as planned before the crucial holiday shopping period.

The report got around and Dell publicly addressed it later Monday on the company blog.

"As we said a few months ago, our strategy focuses on content offerings and delivery platforms that mix Zing software, remote access and pre-configured media bundles across all of our … Read more

New media player searches for spoken words in videos

EveryZing, a media indexing company, is launching its own media player that lets people search for spoken words within videos.

The player's secret power is that it also indexes YouTube videos, giving a publisher who embeds YouTube content more functionality than YouTube itself provides.

The new video player, called MetaPlayer, uses technology the company already has in the market in its ezSearch and ezSEO products.

EveryZing is a business-to-business technology provider; MetaPlayer is provided to its customers alongside the other back-end tools. On sites that support it (the first announced is the Dallas Cowboys' site), people will be able … Read more

Dell hints it's working on smartphone

It wasn't much more than an offhand comment this time, but Michael Dell's got the gadget-obsessed stirred up again.

In an interview with Om Malik of GigaOm, Dell was asked about the company's plans in the smartphone industry. At first he gave a vague, corporate PR-type answer: "We are certainly looking at the whole smartphone category, but I wouldn't expect anything anytime soon." But when Malik pressed him about whether his company was more interested in a Symbian or Android OS for any potential handheld device, Dell was slightly more informative.

"We're … Read more

Dell's plan for Zing

If you haven't heard of Zingspot.com yet, you soon might.

It was recently registered by none other than Dell, which also applied for a trademark on the name. (Thanks to the Trademork blog for pointing to it.)

Zingspot is likely related to Zing Systems, a company that Dell acquired in August. Zingspot.com is described in the document filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office as "an online consumer portal for digital entertainment content acquisition and distribution." Being a hardware maker, it would make more sense to expect Dell to make a device rather … Read more

Dell to add some Zing to its lineup

Dell said it would be doing some interesting things this year, and lo, it has: the company announced Monday it will purchase Zing Systems, maker of streaming audio technology.

Zing currently licenses its technology to SanDisk, for the Sansa Connect, and Sirius, for its Stiletto 100 product. Privately held Zing Systems is based in Mountain View, Calif., and all 120 of its employees are expected to be retained by Dell, said David Frink, a spokesman for Dell. Other details of the transaction were not released.

After almost 20 years of very few acquisitions, Dell's latest streak of buying three … Read more