Heeeeeeere’s some fun news for you! YouTube’s Official Blog  announced yesterday the official    Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson  channel. For those of you who may be to young, or have lived under a rock all your life, Johnny Carson was considered the king of late night TV. For 30 years his show dominated late night TV. His show was the platform that launched the careers of many of today’s  stars. Most any late night host today will tell you of Johnny’s influence on their personal style.

Courtesy of YouTube

The new YouTube channel plans to add new Carson clips each week. They are also taking requests from subscribers to their channel. When you go to the channel, make sure you take a look at Howie Mandell’s picks. He has hand picked some of his favorite videos to share with the community. He also shares some of his own personal memories of the show.

The timing of this announcement by YouTube is interesting, because Fox News also reported yesterday, in an article entitled “YouTube Joins Wal-Mart in Streaming Video“, that YouTube is in the final planning stages to offer a paid movie streaming service. According to the article, YouTube hopes to capitalize on the Android market’s success and offer it’s streaming video service hopefully before the end of the year. This seem like a natural transition for them and they certainly have the brand recognition to pull it off. Now one can only hope that this doesn’t negatively affect the YouTube service that so many of us already enjoy.

I love to have access to online video on as many devices as I can. I use the Netflix and Hulu apps on my iPad on a regular basis. So, when I heard that my favorite media center company was working on an iPad app, I got really excited. Now, Boxee has made that app a reality.

Boxee, the company behind the Boxee Box and very popular Boxee Software, has released their official iPad app. The app includes all of the great social features of Boxee, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr integration. It also comes with the ability to watch bookmarked videos on your iPad.

The new two features are what makes this app worth picking up. The first is the ability to stream media from your PC or Mac to your iPad. That means media that is saved on your hard drive, not media that is on the internet. You will need to be on the same Wi-FI network as the machine with the media.

The final feature that should get Boxee Box owners excited is the ability to Air Play to your Boxee Box. That’s right, Boxee has taken the ability to share content from your iPad to another device and given it to their own little media powerhouse.

Overall, this is a nice little update to the Boxee ecosystem. I do wish that it came equipped with the great suite of Boxee Apps, however. I don’t know if it was a licensing thing that kept those away, or if it was simply Boxee’s unwillingness to canibalize on their other offerings. Maybe apps will come in a future update. We will have to wait and see.

Apple on thursday updated the developer portal, uploading about 110 session videos, which were taken during its annual developer conference, WWDC 2011. Apple unveiled Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5 during the event which are set to be released in this July and Fall respectively. Apple also introduced iCloud, its cloud based online data synchronization service along with other stuff during the event.

Apple has broken down sessions into these six categories:

• Apple Platforms Kickoff
• App Frameworks
• Core OS
• Developer Tools
• Graphics, Media, and Games
• Internet and Web

The videos are available in both HD and SD formats for the Mac, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone or Apple TV. They can be downloaded from here. You will need a registered developer account and you will be able to download it(for free) in iTunes after logging in with your developer account. These videos would be really helpful to those developers who were not able to make it to the conference or those who missed some important sessions due to scheduling conflicts. Given the conference was sold out in 10 hours, there would be many developers who were waiting for this.

Apple reminds developers that all the material in the sessions remains under Apple’s confidential information NDA.

Reminder: The content presented within the session videos and slides is Apple Confidential Information and is subject to the Registered Apple Developer Agreement.

I have always advocated the use of royalty free codecs (first Ogg-Theora and then WebM) for the HTML5 <video> tag. The WebM movement has been slowly but surely gaining momentum since its inception. We have already seen almost all the the major desktop browser vendors (Google, Opera Software, Mozilla and Microsoft^*) adopt Google’s open source and royalty free media format. Desktop media players like Winamp are beginning to embrace WebM. And, perhaps most crucially, chip makers like Intel are working to add WebM support at the hardware level.

One of the biggest challenges for WebM is the intellectual properties issue. It’s no secret that the patent system is seriously messed up. Some of the patents granted to the members of MPEG LA, the consortium that owns the patent pool for H.264, are so broad and ambiguous that it’s almost impossible to develop a media codec without violating them. Nevertheless, Google has maintained that WebM doesn’t infringe any existing patents, and is a clean and reliable royalty free alternative to H.264. A couple of months back, MPEG LA, the entity that stands to loose the most from the success of WebM, called upon its members to submit patents essential to the VP8 video codec specification, presumably in preparation of a patent infringement lawsuit..

With the threat of legal action looming, all the companies involved and interested in the growth of WebM have formed a cross-license initiative. It’s essentially a consortium that will freely share all patents related to WebM on a royalty free basis. Google was already working closely with Xiph (maintainers of the Ogg audio format) and Matroska (maintainers of the Matroska video container). Additionally, CCL includes the likes of AMD, LG, Mozilla, Opera Software, Samsung, and Texas instruments. The hope is that with the backing of these corporations, WebM will be able to tackle any legal challenge that it might have to face in the future.

*Internet Explorer 9 can play WebM videos provided that the required codecs have already been installed.

The Blackberry PlayBook; a 7 inch tablet from RIM will be out soon. The tablet was featured at the CTIA 2011 and I got a good chance to play around with the tablet.

I must say that I was pretty impressed with the tablet and definitely look forward to it’s release next week. The interface is fluid and smooth. I addition to that, the tablet is a multi-tasking powerhouse with live widgets that will continue to play in the back while you launch other applications.

For example, if you are playing a video and switch to another app, you can still view a live feed of it in the apps panel. The same goes for games, emails, and practically every app.

To know more about the feature take a look at the Blackberry PlayBook hands-on video I shot at CTIA 2011. Click here or here if you can’t watch the videos.

By now all you people might already have heard about the announcement of the new iPad 2, but if you missed watching the event online you probably want to see it for two reasons.

1. The iPad 2
2. Steve Jobs

So go ahead and see how Steve Jobs talked about the iPad 2 while bringing down PC creators and the competition. You will also see what the new iPad 2 has to offer and what the pricing is, new features are and more.

So without ado, click the play button on the video below. You will require the QuickTIme plugin from Apple for browsers to be able to watch the video embedded at Apple. Unfortunately we couldn’t embed it into the post.

In the past few months, with the series of Android devices launched at CES 2011 and MWC 2011, it seems that everyone has almost forgotten about the Blackberry.

RIM is planning to launch a couple of new Blackberry smartphones in 2011, and details of quite a few such devices including the Blackberry Storm 3 have already leaked out.

Today, we have come across a video of the Blackberry Storm 3 (codenamed Monaco). The Blackberry Monaco comes with Blackberry OS 6.1 and comes with a nice design. The OS seems very fast and responsive, with an improved UI. It is very slim, at just 11.5 mm.

The Blackberry Monaco comes with a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm processor and has 768 MB RAM. It has 4 GB internal storage and supports up to 32 GB microSD cards.

It is a dual band CDMA phone with EVDO Rev. A connectivity. It comes with a 3.7 inch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. It also offers Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS. It also has NFC connectivity and supports Mobile Hotspot.

It will also have a 5 MP camera with autofocus and flash with support for 720p HD video recording. It is much better than the Blackberry Storm, but doesn’t offer anything that the new generation of Android smartphones, or the iPhone 5 won’t.

via Crackberry

…or at least, tries to. These Japanese people, I tell you they’re absolutely bonkers. There’s an endless list of good things that the Japanese do from electronics to anime. There’s also an endless-er list of crazy things that they do. In this case, it’s a man who deep fries a battered Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) covered in batter (see what I did there?) and then tries to eat it. All this while, his friend films the entire cooking experience.

You might ask why the two make an entirely pointless (I cannot possibly think of a point here, except internet infamy) ten minute video of the ordeal. In these ten minutes, the man is seen introducing his PSP which incidentally has a Monster Hunter game running (how typical) and laughing maniacally as he coats it in batter in the kitchen, near a pan of boiling oil. Then he drops it in the oil, puts on cool shades and starts laughing. Three and a half minutes in, the two of them start coughing from the fried fumes of electronics and plastic.

Eventually he’s seen taking the melted, battered PSP out and dipping it in some sort of sauce. Apparently, they wanted to make a tempura dish with a PSP. Then the guy actually bites a piece off the device and tries to eat it. Needless to say, that does not turn out very nicely.

Some Japanese people, I tell you. Bonkers.

Portal 2 is going to be the best First Person Shooter (FPS) to come out this year. Or so I hope, for I really really suck at judging a game genre in which a hundred games are released every year. However, I am pretty sure Portal 2 will be the funniest FPS to come out this year, mostly because it takes itself too seriously (on purpose) and is ridiculously silly at times.

Take, for example, this advertisement for Portal 2‘s preorder that is going to hit the developer’s (Valve) digital distribution store Steam very soon. Released on Valentine’s Day, the ad mocks the concept of gifting ideas for the female species.

Okay, that’s about as far as I’m allowed to say without spoiling the entire advert for you. The thing is that it’s done very well (and probably within Valve’s Source engine, judging by the way things moved when… erm… other things exploded). Watch the video here!

However, contrary to what the video says, Portal 2 is not available for preorder. At least not from my country (and not from my random Tor IP either). Is this another one of those Valve Time debacles? Is this a sick joke from Valve’s side, as we poor mortals refresh the Portal 2 page, hoping for a preorder? Is this the end of the world??

No, it’s probably just a mistake by the Portal 2 PR team. It’s alright everybody; we don’t need to do a flash protest here. Move along.

Bioware’s new epic, Dragon Age II has just gone gold. This means that the game has [hopefully] removed [almost] all its bugs, the final polishing is done and it is ready to be released. This is the same Dragon Age II that was hinted at quite some time ago, but it only seems like it was yesterday. PC Gamer’s DA2 preview certainly makes it seem like a lip-smacking delight of an RPG which takes the best things from Mass Effect and its predecessor Dragon Age: Origins to make good its promise of an epic and entirely long story.

The developers have released a stupendous fifty-five minute long live-chat session while playing the game. The game was played as the onlookers sat, without any rehearsal or script at hand. The game looks breathtakingly good, and the story (however little of it that can be gleaned from this and the reviews) is far more solid than its predecessor (which, let’s face it, was a very generic story with tiny bits and pieces of enjoyment). There is no arbitrary morality meter, so you can immerse yourself in this game without going through shades of black and white. The game will probably refine the Role Playing genre to such an extent that games after it would probably have to pale in comparison, or so we hope, again.

You can watch the full video here.