As a certified—and possibly certifiable—movie trailer aficionado, I’ve been a devoted visitor of Apple’s trailers page for years. But if you want to go a step beyond finding out what’s coming down the pike to knowing what’s playing near you right now, Apple’s taking a shot at solving that problem with its new showtimes feature.

(Image Caption: Apple’s new showtimes feature. Click to enlarge.)

Now, of course, there are any number of services that help you find movie showtimes—even Google will do it—but none arguably have the elegant appeal of Apple’s approach. When you visit the page, your Web browser will ask to use your current location, after which it will display a small Google Map highlighting nearby theaters (you can also enter your own ZIP code or city and state).

Clicking on any of the theaters in the map (or on their entry in the list below the map) will show you a thumbnail grid of the posters for all the films playing at that location. You can even flip through multiple pages of theaters if the one you’re looking for didn’t show up in the top five. Hovering your cursor over any of the posters tells you when the next showing at that theater is.

If you’re taking a more film-centric approach, then all you have to do is click on any movie poster and you’ll get a full list of theaters currently playing that movie, along with a set of timelines displaying the showtimes (they’re even color coded, with green dots representing bargain ticket prices). Want to buy tickets? Just click on one of the showtimes and you’ll be taken to the appropriate site.

Best of all, because it’s all made in HTML5—no Flash here, folks—it’ll work on your iPhone or iPad (albeit, in my quick test, a little less smoothly).

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Interest in IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol, is exploding among U.S. CIOs, as news of the rapid depletion of IP addresses using the current standard – known as IPv4 – reaches corporate IT departments.

Reasons for supporting IPv6 continue to pile up

Verizon Business says its largest corporate customers are flooding the carrier with questions about IPv6 and how it will impact their networks.

“We are receiving close to five or six times more questions and queries from our customers about IPv6 today vs. a year ago,” says William Schmidlapp, senior consultant for product marketing at Verizon Business. “The majority of questions we are getting are from North American companies…Our inquiries have been across all verticals.”

Verizon says small and midsized business also are asking about IPv6 because Microsoft’s Windows 7 offers built-in IPv6 support.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices: 2 to the 128th power.

Around 94.5% of IPv4 address space has been allocated as of Sept. 3, 2010, according to the American Registry for Internet Numbers, which delegates blocks of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to service providers and other network operators in North America. Experts say the remaining IPv4 addresses could be depleted as early as December.

CIOs are asking Verizon Business about how to maintain end-to-end connectivity across the Internet as some users upgrade to IPv6 and others remain on IPv4. They also are concerned about the latest mobile devices – such as Verizon’s own LTE handsets – which must support IPv6. And they’re asking how to ensure that their primary applications – whether commercial or home-grown – will support IPv6 traffic.

“The increased press…about IPv4 exhaustion is now hitting CIOs’ desks, and CIOs are asking their IT departments and their infrastructure partners about how this will affect the business,” Schmidlapp says. “This has really garnered a lot of conversations from our customers.”

In response to all the queries, Verizon Business this week issued tips for government and industry CIOs about how to transition to IPv6.

“We are telling our customers that the timeframe to get ready for IPv6 is now,” Schmidlapp says. “With the uncertainty of when IPv4 depletion is going to occur…customers need to be ready for IPv6 sooner rather than later.”

Verizon says it is trying to get the word out to U.S. corporations and government agencies that IPv6 is not as expensive or as daunting a technical challenge as some CIOs fear. Google, for example, has said that it took a small team of engineers about 18 months to IPv6 enable most of its network services.

“It’s a matter of educating CIOs and getting them past the worry that they have to do a multi-million dollar upgrade to forklift their infrastructure to IPv6,” Schmidlapp says. “We’re trying to give them a common sense approach on what they need to do from an IPv6 perspective…They need to have a migration path ready so when their CEO or C-level executive wants to use the latest and greatest cell phone, they will still get connectivity to all of their applications.”

Read more about lans & wans in Network World’s LANs & WANs section.

All contents copyright 1995-2010 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

Network giant Cisco has announced its intention to acquire IP wireless smart grid pioneer Arch Rock Corporation.

Buying the San Francisco-based firm would "position Cisco as a strategic partner to utilities working to better manage power supply and demand," said Cisco’s smart grid business unit general manager Laura Ipsen.

"Arch Rock’s wireless mesh technology enhances Cisco’s IP-based, end-to-end smart-grid offerings," added Ipsen.

Arch Rock’s IP wireless mesh technology is designed to allow utilities to connect smart meters over a scalable, multi-path network.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Cisco expects the
transaction to close by the end of 2010.

The deal complements a strategic alliance with smart grid solution provider
Itron announced earlier this week by Cisco.

Cisco said its partnership with Itron will result in a standards-based, secure technology for a full IPv6 implementation of field area communications to support smart metering,
intelligent distribution automation and interfaces to the customer premise.

Itron provides electricity, gas, water and heat meters, network communication
technology, and collection systems for the utilities industry.

Industrial market research firm SBI estimates that the global smart grid technologies market will grow 150 per cent between 2009 and 2014 to hit $171bn (£110bn).

Apple this week laid out its plans for the next two upgrades of iOS, the mobile operating system that powers its iPhone and iPad, slating the first for release in a few days.

iOS 4.1 will ship sometime next week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said during an hour-plus introduction of a refreshed iPod lineup and a slimmer and less-expensive Apple TV. The upgrade will be available for iPhones and iPod Touches, but not for the company’s iPad.

Tablet owners will have to wait until November, when Jobs said Apple will ship iOS 4.2.

Jobs promised that iOS 4.1 would fix some of the bugs that have been extensively reported and discussed on Apple’s support forum since the launch two months ago of iOS 4.

“First of all, a lot of bugs have been fixed,” said Jobs on Wednesday. “Proximity sensor bugs, Bluetooth bugs, iPhone 3G performance bugs. All the bugs that we’ve been nailed on. We think we’ve nailed a lot of them.”

What Jobs didn’t say was whether iOS 4.1 would address all the flaws customers have complained about, an omission that some noticed. On one iPhone support forum thread, someone identified as “mistabell” claimed to have the 4.1 Gold Master (GM) in hand — GM is the term used to describe the last test release to developers before calling the update good to go — and said that not all of the proximity sensor bugs have been fixed.

“I don’t think the GM that went out today with the announcement fixes the problem all the way,” said mistabell yesterday. “At least not for everyone under every condition.”

According to a thread started two days after the June 21 launch of iOS 4 , customers have reported that the iPhone’s proximity sensor wasn’t properly deactivating the touchscreen when the smartphone was held up to their faces, causing dropped calls, muted calls and “face-dialed” numbers.

Users have also flooded the support forum with gripes about getting and keeping Bluetooth devices, such as in-ear headsets, connected with the iPhone, and even more prominently, complained about a dramatic performance hit on older iPhones, especially 2008′s iPhone 3G, after upgrading to iOS 4.

“Users who have diligently updated their OS as per Apple’s request are now screwed, as you cannot go back without a jail break,” said Computerworld reader Richard Ruda in an e-mail last month. “So there are thousands of people out there with phones that are very slow, do not load apps at times, and have to be reset daily.”

Jobs also spelled out the new features in iOS 4.1 that will let users upload high-definition (HD) video over Wi-Fi, rent TV programs and begin using Apple’s Game Center multi-player online network.

But most of his time was spent showing off a new feature he called HDR, for “high dynamic range,” that processes three exposures of each snapped photo — one taken with the normal automatic exposure, two others taken simultaneously as under- and over-exposed — to produce more detail in over- and under-exposed areas of a photograph.

“For some photos, it’s pretty great,” Jobs said.

Another feature in iOS 4.1 adds the Ping social network to the iPhone and iPod Touch versions of iTunes, allowing users to connect with friends and artists to discuss music, track upcoming concerts and recommend tunes.

Although iOS 4.1 will be available for the iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4, as well as for the 2008, 2009 and 2010 iPod Touches, Apple hasn’t defined which features may not work on older hardware. (iOS 4, for example, doesn’t offer multitasking on the two-year-old iPhone 3G.) The upgrade will be a free download via iTunes.

Two months from now, Apple will follow with iOS 4.2, which Jobs said was “all about the iPad.”

The iPad has been stuck on iOS 3.2 since its April launch — it was bypassed in June’s iOS 4 upgrade — and Apple had promised to deliver an update to the tablet’s OS at some point this fall.

iOS 4.2 will add wireless printing to Apple’s mobile devices, as well as AirPlay, a new name for the AirTunes Wi-Fi streaming technology.

AirPlay will let iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads stream content — pages from an iPad’s browser, for example — to the Apple TV, and thus to the TV screen. Apple also licenses the technology to a small number of speaker and audio receiver makers, including Denon, Bowers & Wilkins, Marantz and JBL, to give customers a way to push content to external audio hardware via Wi-Fi.

The November update will be available for some iPhone and iPod Touch models, as well as for all iPads. The latter will then also receive all the new features that iPhone and iPod Touch owners get next week.

In a continuing trend, more businesses are shifting loyalties from Blackberry to iPhones and Android devices as the relative newcomers make inroads into the corporate world. Three-quarters of the 200 businesses surveyed in the United States and the U.K in the study reported that their employees are choosing other than Blackberry, Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. reported to Bloomberg. The number was 83 percent for U.S. companies.

The biggest drop comes as bankers, lawyers and government workers – Blackberry’s once-loyal clientele – abandon the phones for other brands on the market.

Several studies on smartphones have predicted the trend, including Nielsen Co. which said that new subscribers for Blackberry dropped and more than half of Blackberry users planned to switch to an iPhone or Android phone. Last month a study by the NPD Group also reported that in 2010′s second quarter, Android phones rose to 33 percent of the market and Research in Motion’s Blackberry dropped to 28 percent. The Apple iPhone was 22 percent of the smartphone market.

One of the latest products, the Blackberry Torch 9800, was deemed adequate but hardly competitive with recent Android devices and the iPhone. With a sluggish browser, a small and low-resolution touchscreen and a cramped keyboard, the phone may only appeal to previous Blackberry users and loyalists. Some are calling RIM’s latest smartphones consolation prizes for executives who wish they could have an iPhone. Others are comparing RIM to IBM because it cornered the market for several years but seemed to stop reinventing itself or innovating.

The business world has spoken loudly and clearly, they want more from RIM and if it expects to stay relevant the company needs to comply. The next few years will tell us if RIM is still able to compete and innovate in the quicksilver mobile arena.

Contact or follow Barbara E. Hernandez on Twitter @bhern.