In the Wild West that is online video, Hulu.com has proven to be a trailblazing answer to how professional content can thrive on the Web. It's this year's pick for Web site of the year. "This is period of great experimentation in regard to media, in regard to online video," said Hulu chief executive officer Jason Kilar in a recent interview. "You've seen a lot, you're probably going to see even more in terms of various business models, various interface designs. I personally love to operate in moments of time like that."

When the 11:45 a.m. bell signals lunch at Whitefish Bay High School, students burst through doors like executives out of a meeting, their phones and personal electronics shimmering into view. Sleek iPods appear and ear buds pop into place as students share songs or listen to podcasts or books over the lunch hour. With personal electronics and ever-popular iPods reaching critical mass among teenagers, some high schools have begun modifying their prohibitive policies.

Palm is planning a massive product launch for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas next month. It could be the company's last, best shot at survival. "It's quite likely, actually close to a certainty, that they will show a new OS, new user interface and probably new hardware," says Lawrence Harris, an analyst for Wall Street brokerage firm CL King & Associates. "This is Palm's last shot to prove it has what it takes to survive in a very competitive market." Palm ushered in the handheld computing revolution more than a decade ago with the Palm Pilot, and further advanced the market with its early Treo smartphones. But in the last few years the company has been struggling for survival while its devices get eclipsed by smartphones from Research in Motion, Nokia and Apple. Now Palm has industry watchers buzzing about its plans for a CES press conference. According to analysts contacted by Wired.com, the company is likely to debut its new, Linux-based operating system, dubbed Nova, and show the first of a new family of smartphones that would use the OS. Nova is scheduled for release in the first half of 2009, the company has previously said. CES, the largest consumer electronics products fair in the U.S., will clearly be a make-or-break event for Palm. The company recently posted second-quarter financial results nearly 40 percent below what some Wall Street analysts had projected. Sales of the Centro smartphone, the company's biggest seller, have been fading. Palm also faces strong headwinds from a weakening economy. Meanwhile, competition in the market has gotten more intense with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone, Research In Motion's latest BlackBerry devices and T-Mobile's G1, the first phone based on the Google-backed Android operating system. Palm currently uses its Palm OS, aka Garnet, and Windows Mobile for its handsets. However, Palm OS is restricted in its use. It lacks support for high-speed HSDPA networks, also known as 3G mobile technology. Nova could fix that and offer Palm an opportunity to create a new family of products that would go beyond the Centro and its Treo line. "The good news for Palm is that folks are still talking about them and those making the trek to CES will likely pay attention to what they're saying," Michael Gartenberg, vice president at research firm Jupitermedia, wrote on his blog. "If this event disappoints it's going to be hard for them to muster attention in the future." Palm may have gotten industry watchers buzzing but, so far, it has held its cards close to its chest. There have been almost no leaks about new hardware or features of the upcoming OS. It could be a result of the culture that the company's many recent hires from Apple may have brought with them. Over the last 18 months, Palm has hired a number for former Apple executives including Jon Rubenstein who was instrumental in the creation of the iPod, Lynn Fox, former head of Mac PR and Paul Mercer, a former Apple engineer. "It is part of the Apple culture to keep things under wraps," says Harris. "And now we are seeing greater secrecy than ever from Palm." Photo: (mhaithaca/Flickr)

Red Hat's Spacewalk project is getting into place. The project wants to feed development of the Red Hat Network Satellite product for system management. Satellite is a critical tool for Red Hat users as it provides management capabilities for multiple servers for software deployment and updates. Almost six months ago, Red Hat kicked off the Spacewalk project in an effort to create an open source version of Network Satellite that would serve as the upstream project that drives development. According to Red Hat executives, Spacewalk is still in the process of getting aligned with Network Satellite releases in terms of the development model. As well, Spacewalk is now gearing up to replace Network Satellite's proprietary Oracle database backend with an open source database. It's all part of Red Hat's larger efforts to use the open source model effectively in all parts of its business, as well as reducing the costs associated with proprietary databases.

In 1999 at a Sony Music corporate meeting, the room was filled with Sony executives and attorneys from across the globe. At one point, one of the Sony attorneys gave a presentation on two music services. One was the Sony music service and the other was a tiny, fledgling service. The Sony service required users to go through multiple layers of Web sites in order to get to the songs they wanted. Then the Sony attorney demonstrated the other service. She typed in "Hey Jude." Not only did the the Beatles version appear, but so did other versions. And -- it was free.

"Cloud computing is not magical, but it is more economical, more easily scaled and more easily managed," said Lance Walley, chief executive officer of Engine Yard, a hosting and infrastructure support company for Ruby on Rails applications. It's getting more so, too. That's because it's so practical, more applications are sure to appear every year. "It's like running your own generators or buying power from the public grid," Walley said. "What this will do is make more apps appear and prosper than would have before."

In four years, driving a car in the San Francisco Bay area may involve a variation of the "plug and play" concept. Think "plug and drive," if the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose and start-up Better Place have their way. The company, founded by former SAP executive and Wired magazine cover subject Shai Agassi, announced a private-public partnership Thursday with the three mayors and regional entities to begin building the support infrastructure for electric car use in the Bay Area.

CA has released a suite of enterprise IT management software tools that it's calling the next "killer app" for virtualization. The first phase in the nascent industry -- server consolidation -- is well underway; the next big trend, according to CA, is the comprehensive management of virtual systems. "We have been working on managing virtual machines for many of our products already," said CA executive Stephen Elliot. The new suite bundles previously released applications with new tools for support and management of both physical and virtual infrastructures.

Unveiled on Monday by the USB Implementers Forum, the USB 3.0 spec can theoretically support data-transfer speeds of up to 4.8Gbps - 10 times the speed provided by USB 2.0. The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB, is also expected to be more power-efficient than its predecessor. "SuperSpeed USB is the next advancement in ubiquitous technology," Jeff Ravencraft, the president of the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that promotes USB technology, said in a statement on Monday. "Today's consumers are using rich media and large digital files that need to be easily and quickly transferred from PCs to devices and vice versa. SuperSpeed USB meets the needs of everyone, from the tech-savvy executive to the average home user."

I just want to clarify the title of this article. I am not implying that the chair that you see here on the left costs six million dollars, but uses a bionic leg to support your weight similar to that of the Six-Million Dollar Man. The Leopard is under development by the Oki Electric Industry and the Okamura Corporation, and it is designed to rise up and meet your backside as you go and sit down. It will also rise up when you want to get up. You might ask yourself why someone would make a chair like this. Perhaps someone feels a need to create comfort that is “akin to being held in someone’s arms”. It sounds to me like the inventor of this chair may have some dependency issues, but I’m all for any device that can make you more comfortable, especially if it is an office chair. The chair can hold about 120 to 130 pounds (55 to 60 kilograms), which isn’t really much if you imagine a fat executive, particularly a CEO. Cleary, this bionic leg that supports this weight does not have the Six Million Dollar Man’s super strength. I mentioned before how this chair hopefully won’t cost six million dollars, but it looks like it will be in the “expensive” ballpark. We should see once it appears on the market in May of 2009. Source Cool Gift Idea: Digital Picture Frames, check out our reviews.[ The Leopard is the Six-Million Dollar Chair copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]