With Apple’s announcement and details of the SDK yesterday at its Cupertino headquarters, many are now on the speculation path. The power of the SDK gives a slew of possibilities from voice activation, to video recording, to video streaming. No one seems to do the latter better then Slingbox and with its experience of the SlingPlayer on Windows Mobile devices as an example, its hard not to say the iPhone is next in line for a SlingPlayer.

For those unfamiliar with Slingbox, the technology is one that connects a box to your DVR (TiVo, ReplayTV, DISH, DIRECTV etc.), satellite receiver (DIRECTV, DISH, etc.), cable set-top box (Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Cablevision, etc.), DVD player or VCR. Once connected, you have full access to any of these devices content from either your PC, Mac, or mobile device such as a Pocket PC, Nokia, or Palm. You can watch live TV, change channels, view recored content from your VCR or TiVo or play a DVD, all remotely from the actual video device. Adding the iPhone to the line up will only bring more customers to Sling Media’s door.

Sling Media’s Brian Jaquet, Director of Public Relations, has told SvenOnTech that Sling Media is indeed excited about the new SDK. Sling Media announced Blackberry support at CES and told SvenOnTech, “Before the BlackBerry announcement, the most requested two platforms were BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod Touch.” Jaquet went on to say, “We think the iPhone platform has a lot to offer and is ideally suited for mobile TV via its WiFi capabilities and to a lesser extent (today) its EDGE cellular capabilities.”

Sling Media already has a fully functioning Mac OS X client of SlingPlayer which would take little effort to add the CocoTouch interface to the SlingPlayers OS X client. Sling could either use streaming via Wi-Fi or EDGE or add the content right onto the iPhone itself using it’s newly announced SlingSync feature.

With the Slingbox ability to connect to a TiVo or even an AppleTV, millions of iPhone users could watch a movie, sporting event, or the latest news anywhere an Internet connection exists. With SlingSync, one could then watch prerecorded programming anywhere at any time.

While Sling Media cannot comment further on a SlingPlayer for the iPhone, SvenOnTech was told that its engineers have already downloaded the SDK and, “Are already taking a look at it.”

John Gildred, President of SyncTV (read SvenOnTech post SyncTV Embraces Multi-platform IPTV Scheme to Draw Larger Crowd), is just as keen to the possibilities of what the iPhone SDK could mean for mobile media. Gildred elaborated in his blog saying, “It means that consumers could get ad-funded, subscription and premium downloads from SyncTV in the not-too-distant future.”

And now for our really bad pun: Stay tuned media fans, you may just be Slinging the Summer Olympics on your iPhone from Beijing if all goes well.

Crumpler has to be the one of the most unique companies I have ever encountered. Just a visit to its web site will leave you wondering what you’ve just gotten yourself into. Clicking any of the links may make many blush and rush to turn down the volume in their cubicles at work. I won’t even mention the chain on the main page and what happens when you pull it. (Okay, I will. It flushes a toilet!) The company is obviously one that prides itself in having fun while making some killer bags. My press swag prize was some itty bitty matches. Ya, matches!

I was privileged enough to be able to talk a bit to Bianca Dillion, Crumpler’s brave face for media relations, at this years Macworld Expo. She showed me the many different bags Crumpler has to offer (you can see them on a “normal” web site at its store) and the variety of tasks each bag can hold (forgive the pun.) Unlike other companies with boring names like “Road-warrior” or “Trail King”, Crumpler names its product line with gusto such as “Tony Blair”, “Albert Stash” and the “Harry Board” bag. If that’s just too odd for you, then you’ll want to look at the Squirrel line, mate.

If you noticed an English theme here, one of the founders, Dave, comes from Great Briton and has brought a bit of home back to the Aussie based company. Started 12 years ago in Melvin, Australia, by Steward Crumpler, Crumpler desired to make a tough bag that just looked different. He did not want to produce just another bag that screamed, “Look! I’m carrying a laptop!” and after a few minutes in the Crumpler booth, I can tell you he has succeeded.

At one point of my interview with Bianca, someone walked in and asked her if the straps of Crumpler bags would rip with “really heavy stuff in the bag”. Without asking what this guy was carrying — or why anyone would carry such weight — she told him without even a single bead of sweat falling from her brow that Crumpler bags have a lifetime warranty and it would replace any damaged bag if it happened. When I questioned her about her confidence in the bag, she told me that one method of testing the bags is to put it, “On the back of a 4 x 4 and drag it” all over the place in the dry dessert heat of Down Under. Bianca again reiterated that Crumpler desire is to sale tough high quality bags. Period. Well, and with style.
You can tell that every bag Crumpler makes is well thought out. No bag is just another bag at Crumpler. From the crazy naming scheme to the bright colors, Crumpler bags stand out as something different. I don’t think Crumpler doesn’t have a bag in its mix that wouldn’t fit somebody’s need. From a basic bag for your laptop to one that could carry your entire office nicely, I just couldn’t stop being impressed by what I saw. Without doubt, Crumpler bags are just plain sweet!

With the degree of quality and style Crumpler is putting in its product line, it won’t be long before US cities become just like Melvin, Australia. Everyone will have a Crumpler on their back or shoulder.

Looks like Apple may have a surprise for us all on March 6th, a week later than Apple’s originally announced February release of its iPhone SDK. In its invite, Apple specifies that, “Some exciting new enterprise features,” will on the agenda at the Town Hall in Building 4 on Apple’s Cupertino campus on March 6th. Could this be the Exchange Direct-Push SvenOnTech first reported on last January that Apple is working on?

With e-mail push for corporate customers the number one request of the iPhone, such an “enterprise feature” would put another boast into iPhone sales for sure and finally giving Blackberry some mean competition. It’s clear Apple is aware of business men and women’s needs based just on this statement contained within the invite. It’s even possible that Apple may announce support for Blackberry BAS (push) server as well which would then cover the two most popular methods of receiving e-mail for business professionals.

Time will tell and it is our hope that Apple will impress with such an announcement next week.

Netflix has wisely been adapting to the future fairly well with adding Blu-ray and HD-DVD (yanking the last from the queue just recently, however) to the mix. Netflix has also playing around with movie downloads. Many have been excited by the latter and with only a Windows version currently available, Macintosh fans are sitting at the table with fork and knife, ready to dive in. But you may want to put down the silverware as it’s most likely you’ll never see Netflix downloads on your Mac.

According to a source at Netflix, Apple is making things very difficult for it, and every other company with digital content, to bring this new exciting technology to OS X machines. The difficulty? FairPlay. Apple has a long history of not playing fair with it’s DRM (digital Rights Management) from shunning RealNetworks’ Rhapsody to work with the iPod to ignoring Sonos‘ constant requests for access to FairPlay to allow the music player to play content from the iTunes Store. Apple simply does not want to license out its DRM scheme as Microsoft has freely done with its Windows Media format.

Hollywood is very stringent with its content and has signed onto Window Media and FairPlay after much work by Microsoft and Apple. To add another DRM to the fold may not go down very well with Tinsel Town. Further, the cost of coming up with a new protection scheme may be too extreme for many companies. Lastly, the “bullet proof” aspect of the DRM would be questioned by all the studios and that would become the deal breaker. In the end, it has to be FairPlay on the Mac.

As long as Apple plays deaf to all the outside requests for licensing of FairPlay, one will never see Netflix movie downloads on their Mac. With Apple having its own movie rental scheme now, it’s highly unlikely Netflix movie downloads will come to the Mac. Like RealNetworks, Apple doesn’t want competition on its platform. In the end, if you really have to have those movies from Netflix on your Mac, get Parallel’s Desktop.

So tonight I’m enjoying a $1.50 hot dog and soda at Costco with my three kids when I noticed a shopping cart filled with some new HD-DVDs and a Toshiba player at the next table. I kept debating in my head if I should warn the family of four men and a mother of their possible DOA purchasing choice. Finally, I just walked over after wiping away the relish from my mouth and said, “Hi, I don’t mean to be rude, but I noticed your HD-DVD player in the cart. Did you hear that Toshiba announced it was leaving the HD-DVD market, Monday?” They all looked at me with a stunned expression and said they hadn’t. I also told them that basically only one major studio was supporting the format and pretty much by the end of the year, HD-DVD would be the Beta of this millennium. One of the guys replied, “Wow, I’ve got to return this then! No wonder it was so cheap!”

I didn’t note the price of the player when we walked in, but by the customers comments, it sounds like Costco is already slashing the prices on the hardware. Smart retail move before the masses figure out that Blu-ray is the way to go now.

I had hoped HD-DVD would have made it through but truth is, on paper, Blu-ray is just a better format. The DVD Forum should have listened to Sony when it made its proposal for the next generation DVD format years ago. I guess it knew what it was talking about and with a bit more money in the bank than it had in the 80s, looks like it learned from its Beta mistake.

Macworld was a great time last week even if nothing ground breaking happened other than a very thin and a very expensive laptop was released. In my book, Apple TVs update and HD movie rentals was the big news. But what bugged me more than anything was the lack of something and that something was the missing feature of Cut-n-Paste in the iPhone. Without a doubt, this has got to be the most annoying omitted ingredient of the iPhone and yet still, Apple continues to ignore this chasm. Yes, chasm! I can’t understand why there isn’t more of an uproar about this must-have option in such a versatile device. I’m tired of typing in long web addresses from notes, address book notes, and iCal note fields that the iPhone seems to ignore and translate into hyperlinks. I’m tired of typing in redundant information into notes or iCal entries. I’m tired of hand copying text from web sites into other applications. Heck, try typing, from memory at best, long WEP keys for protected wireless networks! Tired, tired, tired! What gives?!

Well, I hunted someone down at Macworld to give me the answers and after a long search and pass off after pass off from Apple employee to Apple employee, I finally got an answer. The deal is, Apple is aware of the desire for this option and it is working on it in the labs as we speak. The trouble it is having is implementation. How to easily call up a copy or cut option and then the paste action. It’s probable that the zoom bubble (the one that brings up the edit cursor) is the issue as it has removed the obvious tap and hold position from Apple to use for a pop-up menu of some sort. Text selection is another difficulty to sort out. Certainly, the cursor could be added to the menu selection; however, Apple wants to keep this as simple as possible and that added step would not lend itself to simple.

My source would not give me any details other than to say that it has been working on the solution for some time and that there was no immediate release for it. So at best, we can hope that the interface hurdle will be leaped over very soon.

As to Exchange, a straight answer was more difficult to pull out of my Apple source. Yes, Apple knows that there are business professionals that want support for it (and Blackberry Enterprise Server) and Apple is not ignoring this demand. The source would not go as far as to say that it’s being worked on, but when I asked for clarification by questioning, “So is Apple not working on a solution?” he simply laughed and said, “Apple’s aware of the Exchange need.” So, take that at face value, business professionals.

While there is a slew of other unanswered features many have called for since day one, such as voice dialing, these two were my main concern and I was glad to at least get some kind of answer. My source suggested letting Apple know of my fire desires in encouragement that this would help push for a quicker resolve. So, folks, if you agree with my needs, head over to Apple and let them know now!