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Clearwire today added unlimited pay-as-you-go plans under the Rover brand to its national WiMAX service, which currently covers a population of 56 million in 49 markets. The move was expected, but the pricing and plans are a big deal that could drive the adoption of mobile broadband beyond the corporate and geeky set. Plans are priced at $5 per day, $20 a week or $50 for a month of unlimited 4G mobile broadband without a contract.

The new Rover plans are due in part to increased competition as rival 4G networks are expected to launch before year end, and also to give potential customers a low-risk opportunity to try out the Clear network. By offering a prepaid solution, the mobile broadband provider may be able to overcome a slow start for consumer adoption and offset the several billion dollars it cost to build out the network — earlier this month, Clearwire announced that is has 1.7 million subscribers and expects 3 million by the end of this year.

On a conference call this morning, Seth Cummings, the general manager of Rover, introduced the new new brand, targeted at the 18 – 24 year old mobile market in urban areas. The flagship hardware product is a $149 Rover Puck — essentially a Mi-Fi-like device that shares a 4G connection with up to eight devices over Wi-Fi. Clearwire is also offering the $99 Rover Stick, a USB WiMAX dongle for customers to use with a single device, such as a netbook or notebook. Clearwire Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert said that users can expect download speeds of 3 – 6 Mbps using either device. Both devices can be reloaded online or through a Rover Re-Up card available in $20 and $50 denominations, and are usable in any Clearwire market with service.

The new Rover service will be sold through various partner channels, such as cable companies and retailers like Best Buy. Sievert used this morning’s call to highlight these relationships and touted the network’s speed. My own testing of Clearwire’s 4G service has shown high speeds and low network latency, but network coverage issues have kept me on a 3G plan so I don’t have to worry about having consistent mobile broadband service. This could be a big issue for those interested in Rover, as the new products don’t fall back to 3G network in areas with weak or no 4G signals. Cummings said that the company is looking at future Rover products that could be dual-mode, but Sievert says the majority of Clearwire devices are single-mode, 4G-only. My gut says that Rover is geared towards the “urban mobile lifestyle” because Clearwire’s coverage is often better in cities than in rural areas.

The new Rover brand and plans illustrate that Clearwire’s “early to market” advantage is disappearing even though Sievert said today, “it doesn’t matter what our competitors are doing.” MetroPCS is reportedly preparing its LTE network to go live within the next few weeks while Verizon Wireless is targeting 25 – 30 markets for its own LTE service before year end – a 5 – 12 Mbps network that should be completely rolled out by 2014. Factor in AT&T’s HSPA+ upgrade to 7.2 Mbps currently in progress, and T-Mobile’s completion of a 21 Mbps network by the end of this year and it’s easy to see why Clearwire needs to add new plans and target new mobile broadband audiences.

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Google is a big proponent of HTML5, especially for video and rich graphics in the browser. To show off what HTML5 can do, Google Chrome teamed up with the Arcade Fire and director Chris Milk to create a custom interactive video for their song, “We Used To Wait.” The experience is called The Wilderness Downtown and is best viewed in Chrome or other HTML5-compliant browser.

You start by typing in the address of the house you grew up in, then it loads a video of a guy in a hoodie running through the streets. Different windows pop open on your screen, some with graphics, some with videos. Google Maps and Street View images of your old neighborhood are incorporated into the video. All the video is in HTML5, different windows open up triggered by the music, and you even see a fly-over of your neighborhood based on Google Maps’ routing API.

The graphics are pretty impressive too. Shadows of birds are superimposed over the Google Maps birds-eye view of your neighborhood, and animated trees are plopped into the street using the Street View image and some boundary detection software. You can also write a note to your former self in a beautiful tree-root font or draw a picture, all using HTML5 font and drawing tools. These notes and drawing will be used in future Arcade Fire concerts.

The video is almost as cool as playing Quake in your browser. Except that it is very processor-intensive, and it suggests that you close all other tabs and quit other programs before starting. But that’s why it’s called an experiment.

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Google is partnering with U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation (USBCDC), a division of U.S. Bank; to create an $86 million Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) fund. According to a release issued today, the funding will be used towards the construction and operation of 480 affordable rental housing units for low income families and senior citizens in seven communities throughout the West and Midwest.

It’s unusual for a technology company to get involved with these types of loans; banks and insurance companies usually help fund these credits. While the money doesn’t cover the total cost of these developments, these tax credits help them complete a project.

Of course, Google has plenty of cash on hand and the affordable housing aspect is in line with Google’s social initiatives. As an added bonus, the company will be able to offset its federal tax liabilities over several years with these credits.

The housing complexes being built with the fund include a range of one to four-bedroom apartments, and offer a shared laundry facility and community gathering area; effectively creating 500 new units of affordable housing. The release says that Google has also recently invested in two other low-income housing projects for senior citizens, one in the San Francisco Bay community of Sunnyvale, and the other in the Los Angeles County community of Inglewood.

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It has been rumored for months that Intel, the largest chipmaker in the world was close to buying German semiconductor company, Infineon’s wireless chip business. Well, it has finally happened. Intel today announced that it was spending $1.4 billion in cash to buy Infineon’s wireless business solutions group (WLS). Given that WLS’s annual revenues are close to $1.16 billion, it doesn’t seem as if Intel overpaid. However, Infineon might be facing tough times as Apple, a major customer, starts to look for alternatives for the radios inside its iPhone, especially for the rumored CDMA-version of the gadget. Infineon says it will now focus on the automotive, industrial and security industries now that it has jettisoned wireless.

The big question, is will this buy be enough for Intel to make a strong showing in the hyper-competitive wireless chip market? My views on this are pretty black and white. After all, I wrote a post almost four months ago, arguing that Intel was going to always be a wireless loser. My views haven’t changed in three months, mostly because Intel has a very checkered record when it comes to acquisitions. In addition, Intel has become accustomed to the fat margins of its PC business, and as a result would have a tough time trying to get off that habit.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini in a press release, lays out the rationale for this deal.

“The global demand for wireless solutions continues to grow at an extraordinary rate. The acquisition of Infineon’s WLS business strengthens the second pillar of our computing strategy — Internet connectivity — and enables us to offer a portfolio of products that covers the full range of wireless options from Wi-Fi and 3G to WiMAX and LTE. As more devices compute and connect to the Internet, we are committed to positioning Intel to take advantage of the growth potential in every computing segment, from laptops to handhelds and beyond.

Intel’s goal is to expand its mobile and embedded product offerings to support additional customers and market segments, including smartphones, tablets, netbooks, notebooks and embedded computing devices. Through this effort, Intel will pair WLS’ best-in-class cellular technology with its core strengths to enable the delivery of low-power, Intel-based platforms that combine its applications processor with an expanded portfolio of wireless options — bringing together Intel’s leadership in Wi-Fi and WiMAX with WLS’ leadership in 2G and 3G, and a combined path to accelerate 4G LTE.”

Otellini’s comments also reflect the ultimate truism of our times: computing without connectivity doesn’t matter and perhaps that is why his company badly needed a radio to be married to its processors. It is something Qualcomm had figured out earlier and has been using it to its advantage.

In addition, it seems Otellini (and Intel) like many of the early backers of WiMAX might be shifting loyalties in favor of LTE, which clearly has more momentum with the handset makers. Intel, like other WiMAX backers, has had some setbacks in recent months. Infineon has made some good progress on LTE. The German company had been working closely with Nokia on LTE, and given that Nokia and Intel are partners on Meego, a Linux-based operating system targeting the smartphones and tablets, one could reasonably guess that Intel’s new wireless chips might find its way into Nokia handsets and connected devices with new chips.

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Media and communications fund Syncom Venture Partners annonuced a series A investment of $3 million in ShowUHow, a San Diego based business that could make the traditional instruction manual obsolete.

ShowUHow provides official online video instruction guides, web-based sales and customer support tools. ShowUHow’s clients make and sell products that are advertised as “some assembly required,” or that general consumers may find complex, initially.

According to the company’s website ShowUHow clients include brands sold at BestBuy, CostCo and ToysRUs within the categories of consumer electronics, toys, outdoor recreation and furniture.

Other providers of online instruction manuals, like NeedInstructions.com, offer user-contributed, and editorially crafted “how to” content.

ShowUHow claims its online videos, software and services can help manufacturers reduce customer support costs, and avoid product returns.

Giles Bateman, a co-founder of Price Club/Costco, and formerly a chairman of CompUSA, has joined the ShowUHow board of directors.

The venture-backed company is not, apparently, related to T-Pain the hip hop artist who performs the song “Show U How.”

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Looks like “>RIM has dodged a bullet in India, at least for the time being. The “>BlackBerry maker has provided the Indian government with “proposals for local security agencies to monitor BlackBerry service” so that, when necessary, the Indian government can tap into BlackBerry users’ email. And while that may not sound too positive a development, it was either that or risk an outright ban.

Polar Rose, a Swedish-based facial recognition startup launched in summer 2007, is shutting down its consumer-facing service which allowed users to tag people in photos anywhere on the Web. Last spring, the innovative company introduced facial recognition to popular photo-sharing site Flickr by way of a third-party browser plugin. With the plugin installed, Polar Rose users could tag their Flickr photos with the names of their Facebook contacts and then alert those friends on Facebook that they had been tagged. It also organized Flickr photos into pages by person and could recognize people automatically in later uploads.

Unfortunately, this and all other end user-focused services are being terminated as the company switches its focus to its series of facial recognition products. Says Polar Rose's Thijs Stalenhoef, the service was "fun while it lasted."

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Polar Rose Says Goodbye to End Users, Hello to Products

According to Stalenhoef, the response to the facial recognition products introduced during the Mobile World Congress last February has been "phenomenal." These include the company's flagship FaceCloud server platform, mobile face recognition library FaceLib and FaceCore, a core face detection and recognition module for deep integration and other use-cases.

Unfortunately, the company has not been able to focus on the service at polarrose.com due to the popularity of these back-end applications and products. The Polar Rose service hasn't seen a new release in ages and support requests on GetSatisfaction have basically been ignored. "The site, as it stands today, is not up to the standard we set for it when we launched," admits Stalenhoef.

But instead of bringing on new staff to help better manage the consumer service, the company has decided to shut it down entirely. The company will close the service on PolarRose.com on September 6th, 2010 at which point all user accounts and corresponding data, including images downloaded from Facebook and Flickr, will be deleted. The tags sent to Flickr and Facebook, however, will remain in place.

Competition for End Users Ramped Up Over the Years

It's a shame to see such a compelling and interesting service disappear, but Polar Rose has had stiff competition in the consumer space as of late. Google introduced facial recognition functionality into its Picasa photo-sharing service, a Flickr competitor. Windows Live Essentials introduced facial recognition into its latest release. Also, Face.com, a facial recognition technology company, introduced multiple Facebook apps in 2009, including Photo Finder, a facial scanning service for tagging unidentified photos of Facebook friends, and later Photo Tagger, an app which automates the tagging process. And Facebook, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed, hosts five to six times more photos than all competing photo-sharing services combined.

Meanwhile, Polar Rose may be finding its niche as the technology behind the next great facial recognition service or application. For example, last summer Polar Rose partnered with Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe to create an augmented reality concept application called Augmented ID which employed Polar Rose's facial recognition technology in an app that recognized people through a mobile phone's camera in real-time. Earlier this year, the app was re-branded as Recognizr and the company announced plans to ship the app as an Android application in a matter of months. That deadline, sadly, has since come and gone.

As for Polar Rose, it's no longer alone in the licensing game, either, when it comes to facial recognition technology. Rival Face.com launched APIs (tools that allow developers to incorporate the technology into their own applications) back in May of this year. These APIs, free during the early alpha stage of testing, have already been used to power marketing campaigns by Orbit gum and Axe deodorant. Future plans could involve charges - no word yet on that. In any event, despite losing the end user service at PolarRose.com, having multiple companies vying for dominance in the facial recognition space will ultimately be a win for consumers - at least those who aren't creeped out about the technology in the first place.

Discuss

Skype today launched Skype Connect, a VoIP service that enables enterprises to connect and use Skype for a corporate telecommunications. The company is leveraging its original consumer voice and video service to ride the wave of IP convergence in a fight for business dollars against the likes of heavyweights such as Avaya and Cisco. Previously in beta since March 2009, Skype Connect 1.0 works with private branch exchange (PBX) and Unified Communications solutions. Enterprises pay a monthly fee of $6.95 per line while outgoing calls to landlines and mobiles are charged at SkypeOut rates that start at 2.1 cents per minute. Incoming Skype calls are free.

So why the official big move into corporate telephony? For the past half-dozen years, Skype has prepared itself ahead of the world’s migration towards packet-based communications, starting with its successful consumer offerings. Consumers, however, are more apt to use Skype’s free services such as online voice calling and video chat. Out of 560 million registered users of Skype, only 8.1 million are paying customers on a monthly basis, so corporate customers will boost revenue potential. And last week’s news of making phone calls through Google’s Gmail can’t have gone unnoticed by Skype — while Gmail calls aren’t yet available for Google Apps customers, it’s only a matter of time before Google joins Skype in actively pursuing business budgets with increased corporate features.

For Skype to appeal to the business world, it has to go beyond what the original Skype Connect offered. When it first launched in beta last year, the service was looked upon by some as a simplified and lower-featured version of Skype for Asterisk and essentially just a way for Skype to offer low-cost calling minutes to corporate customers. Now Skype Connect clients can integrate “click to call” button on a corporate website for customers to tap and get connected to call center, for example. IT organizations can manage a Skype-powered PBX from any web-connected computer through a browser and the Skype Manager application. And eventually — sooner rather than later if Cisco does indeed purchase Skype as Om noted last night– video-conferencing and other value-add features could become further unified within Skype Connect.

Skype says the beta Connect service has attracted more than 2,400 global customers, and it has added real-time, dedicated customer support through Skype chat. Skype Connect is also certified to work with SIP-enabled PBX systems from Avaya, Cisco (scsco), SIPFoundry, ShoreTel, Siemens and Freetalk, to name a few, and is also supported on older PBX gateways such as those from VoSKY, AudioCodes and Grandstream.

I’ve been out of the enterprise world for a few years now, so I’m curious: who’s ready for Skype to become the corporate phone system? And is anyone else thinking of how the mobile-empowered workforce might benefit from true Skype integration on enterprise handets?

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Internet telephony and chat service provider Skype is officially launching Skype Connect 1.0 (formerly Skype for SIP), to the public (you can see the release here). The service has been in beta since last year.

Skype Connect allows a business’ employees to make domestic and international calls using regular office telephones (PBX systems) instead of using a computer and a headset for VoIP calls. Users can receive and manage inbound calls from Skype users to SIP-enabled PBX systems, enabling them to offer click-to-call functionality on websites.

Outbound calls from desktop phones to landlines and mobiles worldwide are billed at Skype’s standard per-minute calling rates and users can receive inbound calls from Skype connected users worldwide by placing Skype’s Click & Call buttons on their Web sites. Skype calls to your SIP-enabled PBX are free of charge to people using Skype.

Pricing for the use of the Skype Connect is €4.95 per channel per month with long-distance calls charged at Skype’s standard per minute call rates (with call rounding). Each channel purchased allows for either one inbound or one outbound call at any time. You can buy up to 300 channels per SIP Profile. Skype Connect can be launched and managed via Skype Manager, a web-based tool that allows IT managers to control Skype usage in a company.

Skype says that approximately 37% of Skype users reported that they use Skype for business-related activities and this particular offering could bring significant revenue from the enterprise sector.

Skype, which filed for an IPO earlier this month, is looking for revenue channels and unsurprisingly sees potential in enterprise use of the service. Of course, it should be interesting to see if the rumors pan out and Cisco ends up buying Skype.

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The CEO of the company that publishes the venerable Oxford English Dictionary said on the weekend that he doesn’t think the massive reference work will ever appear in print again, thanks to a continuing decline in demand for the hard-cover version. Although the company later said that there is still a chance a printed version will be published, that chance seems to be getting more remote by the day. Which raises the question: Does it matter whether there is a printed version of a reference work like the Oxford English Dictionary, or is online good enough?

Nigel Portwood, the Oxford University Press chief executive, told the Sunday Times that demand for the printed version of the dictionary — which had 20 volumes in its last printing in 1989, and cost $1,165 — had been dropping every year for the last decade, while demand for the online version (which costs $295 a year) continues to climb. When asked whether the next version of the legendary work would be available in print form, he said “I don’t think so” (a spokesman for the company later said that “no decision has yet been made on the format of the third edition,” and that a print version “will certainly be considered if there is sufficient demand at the time of publication”).

One of the main reasons why the OUP can’t be definitive about the eventual format of the next edition is that work on the new version of the dictionary is less than 30-percent complete, according to the company. A team of 80 lexicographers have been working on the new edition for decades already, and they are estimated to be at least another decade away from completion. The last version of the OED contained almost one-third of a million entries (the first version of the dictionary was begun in 1879 and released in sections over a 44-year period from 1884 to 1928).

The decline of the printed reference work, of course — which has also impacted companies like Encyclopedia Britannica — is just part of the broader transformation of the book, as e-book sales continue to climb and hard-cover sales fall. Simon Winchester, author of “The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary,” told the Telegraph that until recently he had been “clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever,” but that with the arrival of the Apple iPad “I am now wholly convinced otherwise.” Winchester said that “books are about to vanish [but] reading is about to expand as a pastime. These are inescapable realities.”

We seem to be growing gradually used to the idea that newspapers may move completely online, and that printed books may also become more of a novelty than a business. But should a major reference work like the OED go online only? It seems inevitable. But just because the dictionary publishes online doesn’t mean that it has to submit completely to the real-time frenzy of the web, and try to emulate Wikipedia. The OUP could continue to update the dictionary only at certain intervals, but this job would be a whole lot easier — not to mention substantially less expensive — without the need to print dozens of books for just a single copy of the finished product.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): The Price of e-Book Progress

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user thrig

The news page on Digg, and particularly the Technology category, is currently plastered with links to discussions and images posted on rival Reddit instead. That’ll bring Reddit some traffic this morning, but more importantly it’s a bit of an embarrassing situation for Digg.

The Next Web speculates that Reddit is ‘gaming’ Digg, but there seems to be something else at play here, namely Digg users actively displaying their discontent with the recently launched new version of the site by using it to promote links to its competitor.

Update: also check out the slightly revised Reddit logo.

We’re digging (wink wink, nudge nudge) into what’s going on here.

Here’s a link to the relevant discussion on Reddit and here’s a link to their Digg publisher profile (those diggs are sure piling up quickly).

Update 2: as pointed out by many, the Reddit publisher account on Digg linked above auto-submits the RSS feed for Reddit content, so every dedicated discussion or image link URL automatically gets pushed onto the new Digg. Ironically, the new version of the site happens to make it very easy for publishers to get links to their content on the front page of the site. This is one of the main complaints Digg users / fans have with the updated version of the service.

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Between online video, DVRs, and on-demand cable the amount of time people spend watching live TV (you know, with all of those commercials that advertisers spend $70 billion a year on) is shrinking fast. Only 52 percent of American’s viewing time is spent on live TV compared to online and time-shifting alternatives, according to a new survey of 1,000 American consumers by market research firm Morpace. And that percentage decreases the younger the audience, with the key 18-to-34-year-old demographic watching live TV only 41 percent of the time, versus 64 percent of the time for those 55 and older.

The alternatives to live TV are growing and basic cable is under assault, but no one single competing technology is taking over. People watch DVDs 14 percent of the time, online (including streaming video from services like Netflix) 13 percent of the time, saved programs on their DVRs 12 percent, and on-demand cable 6 percent. The survey breaks down online viewing into video from online sources like YouTube (9 percent) and streaming video from services like Netflix and Hulu (4 percent). For 18-to-34-year-olds, online video makes up 16 percent of their viewing time, and streaming video makes up another 7 percent.

Those numbers are the share of all viewing time devoted to different channels. The share of audience who views ate least some online video is much larger. Half of all people surveyed (51 percent) watch at least some online video, and 23 percent watch at least some Netflix-like streaming video from the Internet.

One of the major reasons viewing habits are changing is because people are watching video on a lot of different devices. While 96 percent of respondents watch TVs, 59 percent use at least one other media-viewing device. These include laptops (40 percent), desktop computers (36 percent), mobile phones (9 percent), dedicated media players (8 percent), netbooks (4 percent), and tablet computers (2 percent).

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Cubic Telecom, the TechCrunch40 company behind the traveler-friendly SIM card MAXroam, has partnered with popular European airline Ryanair to slash roaming costs for travelers. Cubic Telecom’s MAXroam allows users to use their unlocked cell phones in over 180 countries, saving around 60-80% on roaming charges.

Starting today, Ryanair will slash mobile phone roaming charges by up to 70% via a 3 year exclusive partnership with MAXroam. Passengers need to purchase a MAXroam SIM card, which will provides one fixed roaming rate across 43 European countries.

Ryanair passengers can also buy a ‘roaming bundle’ which includes a phone, SIM card and €10 call credit for just €29 on Ryanair.com. Similar to the partnership the startup made with Dopplr (which was eventually acquired by Nokia), this deal is a win for MAXroam, whose service is based upon connecting with travelers who don’t want to pay expensive roaming charges issued by carriers.

Cubic Telecom also recently unveiled an iPad 3G SIM card, and launched a partnership with Qik last year.

Apple has an event on the books for this coming Wednesday and it’s widely expected that Steve-O will announce new iDevices, specifically an iOS-version of the Apple TV and new iPods. Most of the pre-iTV news is purely speculative as we really don’t know much about it, although it should hit at a lower price point and a new cloud-based iTunes should debut alongside the device. Forget about the cable TV assault for a quick minute though. Let’s talk about these new iPods. If things go down as the leaks seem to say, you might actually want a dedicated PMP device again. The iPod is set to have a second coming.

You know Infineon, right? They make those tiny baseband chips inside smartphones (like the iPhone 3G). You know, the chips responsible for communicating with the cell towers on your network. Yes? I'm glad we're on the same page. Well, today, Intel bought Infineon's Wireless Solutions Business -- WLS -- for $1.4 billion of your American dollars. Why'd they do it? Well, Intel have been trying to get into the phone CPU market, but are having trouble competing with the likes of Qualcomm and ARM, who are able to offer all the communication options -- that is, WiFi, Bluetooth, GSM, 3G, 4G -- as well as the CPU/GPU, on a single chip. This makes the chips not only smaller (and therefore easier to fit on a logic board), but also more energy efficient.