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Gyroscopic Golf Club: Slicer's Savior or Swinger's Snakeoil?
I'm not a golfer, so this post is framed as more of a question to our Pringle-wearing readers: Would this gyroscopic golf club work? Here are the details: The Gyro Swing has a gyroscope inside, which from the picture looks fairly hefty. The disk spins at 20,000 rpm and is supposed to ingrain the "feel" of a proper shot into the arms of the player. It is also claimed that the club resists extraneous movement, keeping – we presume – the face of the club at the correct angle. A gyroscope certainly provides resistance to movement. That's the whole point of them, in fact, and something I discovered at an early age with bike wheels. Spin a wheel (one which has been removed from the bike) and you can hold it up from one side, balancing the axle on one finger. Further, grab the other side of the axle and try to twist the wheel. It's hard, right? So, if any golfers have tried the Gyro Swing, or if any reader has some great gyroscopic knowledge, let us know whether this $200 club is a tool or a toy. Product page [SKLZ via DVICE] 
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:19 pm Impoverished NKorea gets new mobile network (AP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:18 pm Virgin Media rolls out superfast broadband (Reuters)Reuters - Cable operator Virgin Media became the first Internet provider to roll out a mass-market super-fast broadband service in Britain on Monday, launching a 50 megabits per second offering.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:11 pm Network Neutrality Defenders Quietly Backing Off?SteveOHT writes "Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. The story claims that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have quietly withdrawn from a coalition of companies and groups backing network neutrality (the coalition is not named), though Amazon's name is reportedly once again listed on the coalition's Web site. Google has already responded, calling the WSJ story "confused" and explaining that they're only talking about edge caching, and remain as committed as ever to network neutrality. The blogosphere is alight with the debate.Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:02 pm Marantz Wireless iPod Dock Requires Many Wires
The advantages: The receiver has almost every conceivable output, audio and video, and even ethernet. It will also accept music from any other A2DP-capable device. Disadvantages: These are legion. First, what is the point? Seriously -- if you're going to put a receiver on top of the stereo, why not just put the wired iPod dock there, instead? Also, the Marantz dock still needs a cable for power, so it isn't really wireless. Third, it's ugly, unless you are hankering for that 1980's bachelor pad look (think Charlie Sheen's apartment in the movie Wall Street). Fourth, it will cost ¥26,250, or around $290. Fifth, doesn't it just seem odd to have a remote control for a tiny iPod? It becomes even more recursive when you remember that the iPod (the Touch, at least) can itself be used as a remote control for iTunes. My head is spinning. Still, there are currently no plans to bring this Stateside, so we can be spared all the extra trailing wires that this wireless solution entails. Press release [Marantz via iLounge]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:01 pm Standing Still is Not the Best Option [Voices]By Nitrozac and Snaggy
Source: All Things Digital | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:00 pm Fujitsu Biblo Loox R announced
If you ever wanted a small and powerful (and expensive) laptop that is not a Mac, here is your chance to get one. The Biblo Loox R has a 12.1″ screen, Intel Core 2 Duo processor with low energy consumption, 128GB SSD, 2GB RAM, Bluetooth, Ethernet, Wi-Fi and an optical drive. Oh and I almost forgot: 12 hours of battery life. The little power horse costs 3000$ and can only be purchased in Japan at the moment. But hey it is almost small and light (1.27kg) as a netbook. [Via HWSW [HU]] Source: CrunchGear | 15 Dec 2008 | 12:00 pm YouTube Wants To Bring You To The World Economic Forum In Davos
Attendees and everyone else were asked to create a video and answer the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?” Here’s Bono giving his answer. Henry Kissinger and Shimon Peres were among the others to do so. This year they’re back with a new format called The Davos Debates. And the best part of it is, whoever creates the best video gets a free all expense paid trip, including a press pass, to the event. This is no small prize. Davos is arguably the most exclusive and interesting conference in the world, and you will have the chance to interact directly, one-on-one, with world leaders. YouTube users are asked to answer one of four questions:
The winner will be chosen by a panel of experts based on the following criteria: overall originality and creativity, offering tangible solutions and popularity of the video based on views and ratings (so you’ll want to get everyone you can to watch your video). We will of course be playing favorites with our readers, so if you create a video leave a link in the comments below. We’ll embed the best ones in a post in the coming weeks. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 Source: TechCrunch | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:55 am YouTube Wants To Bring You To The World Economic Forum In DavosLast year YouTube scored big at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They had the best space at the conference, with world leaders and celebrities wandering through on the way to the press area...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:55 am Mark Cuban Weighs in on Yahoo (aka, a Jerry Yang Nightmare) [BoomTown]
BoomTown, who never met a Yahoo story I didn’t like to write up, is handing over the stage today to hyperactive entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who just weighed in on what Yahoo should do. Literally, his post yesterday on his Blog Maverick site is titled “What Yahoo Should Do” and he lays waste to a lot of the conventional wisdom about the Internet portal’s fate. Cuban and Yahoo have a rocky history. Yahoo bought his company, Broadcast.com, in the Web 1.0 boom in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock, which Cuban promptly sold at the peak. Since then, he’s used the billions he garnered to conduct the longest-running I-told-you-so in the digital industry, including being on the alternate board when Carl Icahn was waging a proxy fight against Yahoo (YHOO) earlier this year. (Full disclosure: Cuban has recently also gotten into a tussle with the SEC recently.) Let’s just say, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang is not a fan. Ironically, in the piece, Cuban seems to be a big fan of Yahoo, or–more precisely–of its potential. First, Cuban discounts any purchase of Yahoo’s search business by Microsoft (MSFT)–sorry, Carl. And not because Yahoo does not want to sell, but because he thinks the software giant will not waste its cash horde, as it gears up to fight Google (GOOG). “Why anyone thinks that Microsoft is stupid enough to give up what amounts to most, if not all of their liquidity is beyond me. Particularly when their net current assets have now fallen a little below Google’s. Between liquid assets and borrowing capacity, both have about the same amount of ‘powder’ in place in the event ‘the next big thing’ appears on the radar. I doubt either wants to be at a disadvantage to the other when it comes to potential opportunities.”
Next, calling Yahoo’s directors and large shareholders the “Huggy Bear contingent,” after that classic cliche of a character on the “Starsky & Hutch” television show, he advises against “trying to dress up Yahoo in order to pimp it out to any bidder it can find.” Instead, in a very clear strategic explanation, Cuban advises that Yahoo become an aggressive buyer of traffic, services, content and monetization. Given so much is on sale at a huge discount, Cuban posits that Yahoo should make 20 or more acquisitions in the next 18 months: “Yahoo should be on the warpath, vetting each and every media (yes, media) and technology company it can sit down with looking for bargains. It should be taking Yahoo stock and finding every and any accretive investment in the Internet and media space that it possibly can. Some may argue that Yahoo stock is too cheap to use for acquisitions. I beg to differ. The speculation around a potential Microsoft acquisition, along with a very strong balance sheet has propped up its stock. Compared to private and public would be targets, Yahoo stock is amazingly strong currency.” I like Cuban’s moxie–I always do–especially given he seems to be able to articulate a clear vision in his piece of what Yahoo could be, much better than its leadership. “Yahoo has the opportunity to be the ultimate next generation media company,” write Cuban, quite correctly. “It just has to stop being afraid of its own shadow.” Amen to that. Source: All Things Digital | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:50 am Freezing rain, snow to return to region - Zanesville Times Recorder
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:40 am 10-Cell Netbook Battery Almost as Big as Computer Itself
There's an old joke which you may have heard already. I'll tell you again, although with some mercy: This won't be the full-length shaggy-dog story that is the original. Also, as you will see from the tech involved, it is rather an old joke, but still relevant to our purposes.
Now, take a look at the picture again. This is a 10 cell, 13000mAh battery designed for the Eee PC 1000H. It also fits an Eee 901, which is what you see here. It gives an amazing 10 to 14 hours of use, but at what cost? Meet the ugliest battery ever: 10 cell 13000mAh for Eee PC 901 [JKK Mobile via BBG] See Also:
Source: Gizmodo | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:17 am Morning Reading: Madoff, GM, Shipping, SWFs, Snow, etc.A few links to items worth reading: The 17th Floor, Where Wealth Went to Vanish (NYTimes) Is a GM Bankruptcy Inevitable? (NC) How a GM bankruptcy might play out (TheDeal) Some Chinese shipping...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:12 am HD Spycam Truly Crushes Employee Morale
The PR company's email begins thus: "You've never seen a camera like this." And it's true. The Digital Window from Scallop Imaging is a rather neat mix of hack and paranoia, a device cobbled together from five cellphone camera lenses, an Ethernet powered box and software which stitches the whole lot together for a seven megapixel, 15 frames per second, 180º view. That, for the number-hungry, is a whopping 100 megapixels per second over 10/100 ethernet, enough to fill a terabyte hard drive in, well, pretty fast. To further increase employee paranoia, you'll never know when the camera is looking at you. Because of the 180º view and high-definition, a digital zoom combined with digital pan mean the the cameras never move when looking around. We can't blame Scallop Imaging for filling an obvious market need (a market which consists of paranoid middle managers and the camera-happy British Government, itself little more than a team of paranoid middle managers), but this new kit makes us a little uncomfortable. Anybody who has read Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives will be aware of the problem. In his excellent book, the famously ubiquitous surveillance cameras of the British Isles are in fact a network of basilisk guns, and when switched on can turn anybody in sight into stone. That Scallop's Digital Window operates at such high resolution and at a 180º angle will just make doomsday that much easier. Product page [Scallop Imaging. Thanks, Larry!]
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:05 am Microsoft signs up for Iphone App Store - Inquirer
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:03 am Car keys become mobile phone jammers - Inquirer
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:00 am Gmail Enables SMS Messages from Chat for US Phones. No, Really.If you're a big SMS user, you've no doubt encountered this situation: you're sitting at your desk in front of your computer, you get an SMS message, you pick up your phone and respond. The conversation...Source: Infocious RSS raw feed - channel BNBlogTech | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:00 am Test Center preview: Windows Azure Services Platform gives wings to .Net (InfoWorld)InfoWorld - Microsoft intends its new Windows Azure Services Platform to be a serious cloud computing platform for a broad range of developers and scenarios, from lone developers starting up a new Web-based company on a shoestring to large teams of enterprise developers looking for high-performance, highly available, and scalable Web sites, computing, and storage.Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 15 Dec 2008 | 11:00 am Prince of Persia PC is DRM-free - bit-tech.net
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 15 Dec 2008 | 10:56 am Wii outsells Xbox three to one - Inquirer
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 15 Dec 2008 | 10:51 am Time Warner raises stake in Eidos
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 NewsOXY | Blu or Not: Death Race, Burn After Reading, Polar Express 3D /FILM - I’m the type of guy who owns 3000 DVDs, so when the two High Definition formats were announced, I used the HD wars as an excuse not to take the leap into a new format. quickguide NEW ON DVD: Hitting stores tomorrow Amazon Blu-ray Sale Gets Under Way |
Palm's much-delayed linux-based mobile operating system will be re-announced next month at CES alongside new hardware. Wired's Priya Ganapati says its the firm'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."
When analysts talk like this ("actually close to a certainty"), it's fun to imagine the consequences should the proposed scenario not happen. Would that be news?
Take, for example, the eternal predictions of an Apple tablet PC. If Apple doesn't announce one when an analyst intimates that it might, there are no consequences. Nothing is really at stake.
But what if Palm did nothing at CES? The idea of it is absurd: the story of Palm's coming "hail mary" moment is most interesting because it's already been written, and all it has to do is turn up.
Previously:
• Palm Death Watch: Revenue falls 41% short of projections
Spotted at Italian Eee fansite EeePC.it, news of a Celeron-equipped desktop adds yet another Eee PC to the dozens already in existence.
Otherwise similar to current Atom-powered models, the Celeron Eee Box will offer similar performance from its older, cheaper, more power-hungry chip. Why the switch? Because Intel can't make Atom CPUs fast enough to keep up with demand where they're needed, in notebooks.
Source (Italian) [Eeepc.it via Lilliputing]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Engadet takes a close look at United Keys' OLED keypad. Much of the review is dedicated to describing the state of terminal scorn induced by it.
We're naturally utterly un-blown-away by the product -- you get what you pay for -- but it's still a relatively unique and interesting product, and wears the mantle of "the poor man's Optimus" quite well.
Talk about back-handed compliments!
United Keys OLED Display Keyboard and Keypad hands-on [Engadget]
 New York Times Blogs | BMW Z4 - two cars in one Motoring - BMW's Z4 has been reborn as two cars in one with the first retractable hard-top on a BMW two-seater - and replaces both the Z4 Roadster and Coupé. New BMW Z4 revealed 2009 BMW Z4: Hairdressers Rejoice! |
That Samsung's Pixon has an 8 megapixel sensor hardly reassures: the problems of lag and general aggravation associated with cellphone cameras can't be resolved by adding resolution. On the other hand, the reviews are good, suggesting that it at least takes great shots, even if it is just another touchscreen handset in other respects.
Already available unlocked as a gray import, it's likely to be subsidized in the U.S. by AT&T, according to Cellphone Signal:
Today, FCC gave is the information about a new version of ths Samsung Pixon coming to USA market. This is the Samsung M8800L. This specific version of the Samsung Pixon wil come now with 1900 and 850 3.5G, only compatible with AT&T bands
Oddly, the Pixon has GPS and geo-tagging, but no Wi-Fi. If only HSDPA were widespread enough to make that a reasonable proposition.
Report [FCC via Cellphone Signal]
In October, Mahalo.com founder Jason Calacanis laid off staff at his human-powered search engine. Then he announced he was hiring engineers, for a mysterious new “Project A.”
Today he’s unveiling it: An “answers” service designed to compete with one of Yahoo’s most successful sites.
Like Yahoo Answers (YHOO), Mahalo’s new product relies on users to answer other users’ questions. Unlike Yahoo’s site, Calacanis promises to give his most prolific answer-givers a chance to make money, via a virtual currency they can earn by answering questions.
The proposition: Users can ask questions for free. But they can also buy “Mahalo Dollars”, using real money, and reward people who answer their queries. Users can eventually cash out the Mahalo currency they earn for real dollars, with Calacanis taking a 25 percent cut.
This aligns him with a growing number of Internet execs who think they can make money via virtual goods and currencies. That’s worked well for Asian companies and a handful of Western video games, like Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (ATVI). But the market for virtual stuff has yet to appear at most U.S.-based Web sites.
Still, Calacanis thinks he’s got a better shot of making it work next year than his original plan for 2009: Selling ads on his site besides the ones he runs from Google’s AdSense (GOOG). “I think it’s going to be very hard to make money selling ads,” he said. “The market needs this more than it needs us out there trying to sell inventory.”
All of this supposes that people are actually willing to pay for advice they get over the Internet. I’m dubious, but then again I had no idea Yahoo Answers was as successful as it was until Calacanis walked me through the user stats in his demo*: 24 million unique users in the U.S., according to Quantcast.
I did try it out myself, and found that Calacanis’ beta users (who are presumably incented to answer as many questions as they can) did a decent job of answering my query about moving my Palm data to my BlackBerry via my MacBook–and much better than the people at Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, who didn’t even try.
But it’s still not good enough. Looks like if I want to get this done I’m going to have to pay someone real cash.
*A note for anyone who ever has to demo a product: Find some way to watch Calacanis go through his paces live if you can. You can get a sense of the experience by reading his tutorial, or by watching video of him in action.
But it’s another thing to get it in real time, and watch him simultaneously hype and soft-sell. Really effective stuff.
[Image Credit: Joi Ito]
The New York Times' eighth annual Year in Ideas sketches out 2008's intellectual map, from A to Z. Here's just one example—The Biomechanical Enery Harvester—of something wonderful that you might have missed:
Max Donelan, a professor of kinesiology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and director of the S.F.U. Locomotion Lab, described “biomechanical energy harvesting” in a story published in February in the journal Science. He sees plenty of uses for the compact device, which stores the energy it harvests in a small lithium-ion battery. Aid workers in disaster zones or soldiers trying to reduce theweight of their battery packs will benefit. (The first large-scale client is the Canadian military.) “There are people whose lives depend on portable power,” Donelan says.Five years ago, Larry Rome, a biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, invented a backpack that made its own electricity from the subtle bouncing motion as its wearer walked — like a scaled-up version of the self-winding watch. It was a cool demonstration of the principle but not really practical for civilians; to generate significant power, Rome’s backpack weighed up to 80 pounds. By contrast, the in-development version of Donelan’s device — with its aluminum frame, transmission system and generator — will weigh less than 2.5 pounds and easily fit underneath a pair of pants.
Stillsuits and Weirding Modules by Christmas 2010.
The 8th Annual Year in Ideas [NYT]
In the wake of the changes at Microsoft’s online division, a senior advertising sales exec, Bill Shaughnessy (pictured here), is set to leave his post, the company confirmed.
The departure was first reported in Ad Age, which said Shaughnessy’s future plans were undetermined and, in fact, noted it was unclear why the longtime Microsoft (MSFT) staffer of 15 years was leaving.
BoomTown found the answer looking at the very bottom of the press release announcing the hiring of former Yahoo (YHOO) tech exec Qi Lu as head of its online services group:
“As part of today’s announcement, several teams will move to further align resources. The field sales organizations in the Online Services Group will move to Microsoft’s centralized Sales, Marketing and Services Group led by chief operating officer Kevin Turner. This group, called Consumer & Online, will be led by Corporate Vice President Darren Huston and will include the Global Advertising Sales and Services organization, led by vice president Bill Shaughnessy.”
The move to centralize, according to sources, has been controversial within the company, since that means all sales are being lumped into one mega-group.
Shaughnessy has worked on a range of MSN properties, as well as for the Windows group.
In his most recent job, he worked closely with Brian McAndrews, the top online ad sales exec at Microsoft, who announced he was leaving the company on the same day Lu was hired.
McAndrews had been a contender for the digital head job.
According to a Microsoft profile of him, Shaughnessy was global VP of sales, marketing and services, “responsible for the business leadership and management of its international business operations outside of the United States, including the Greater Asia region. His responsibilities include sales, marketing, business development, programming and regional and country management.”
Screw netbooks. I want a gold-painted Vaio TT with a Swarovski crystal portrait of Kim Jong Il and an integrated snuff dispenser.
Source (Chinese) [Sina.com via Sony Insider and PCPOP.com]
Sir Clive Sinclair's C5 was a tiny electric vehicle, released in the mid-1980s to a skeptical British public that did not buy many of them. It looks surprisingly attractive now, two decades later, but that sleek pearly-white design conceals serious design flaws: pedals to make up for the dreadful battery and a highway safety profile analogous to riding a motorcycle, in the nude, down a ski ramp.
From Wikipedia:
Powered operation was possible making it unnecessary for the driver to pedal. It had a top speed of 15 miles per hour (24 km/h), chosen because vehicles unable to travel faster could be driven without a driving licence in the UK. Despite being relatively cheap to purchase (it sold for £399 + £29 for delivery), the C5 quickly became an object of popular ridicule, and was a commercial disaster with only around 12,000 being sold.
Here is a jet-powered one:
Natural media peripherals have an obvious appeal: the latest technology married to the real world's own bounty, as beautiful and simple as it often is. A walnut PC enclosure, perhaps, or a mouse made of stone.
But a leather keyboard? Kinky. And $540.
Product Page [M-Yokanaru via Hackaday and Gizmodo]
Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).
Like Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer any question. But Mahalo Answers throws in a twist. If someone really wants to encourage the best answers, they can offer a tip in “Mahalo Dollars,” which can be funded through PayPal and are convertible into real dollars once a member has earned at least 40 of them. For those of you who remember Google Answers, it paired questioners with vetted researchers who found answers for a fee. This is slightly different in that questions are not assigned to a specific researcher. As many people can answer it as they want and all compete for the tip. Furthermore, the tip can be rescinded by the questioner if he or she is not satisfied with any of the answers.
To keep people honest, there is a reputation system. If a tip is withheld, you have to explain why. Reneg on too many tips, and nobody will want to answer any of your questions.
There is also a point system. Calacanis says he was inspired by many of the gaming startups at TechCrunch50, and how they were designed to keep players engaged by getting them to constantly level up. On Mahalo Answers, you get points for asking questions, answering them, providing the “best” answers, as well as adding links and gaining friends. (And guess who is the member with the most points accumulated during the closed beta? Calacanis).
As you get more points, you progress through different belt levels (white, yellow, green, etc.). It’s like a game. The higher belt you have, the more of an “expert” you are. One of the features of the site is that people can ask members direct questions. The more points you have, the more you can charge for your answers. Mahalo takes a 25 percent cut when Mahalo Dollars are converted back into regular currency Calacanis says:
If you can make knowledge into a game and help people make living, it is very powerful.
He considers Mahalo Answers to be the third plank of his company’s strategy, with human-powered search and abbreviated wiki guides being the first two. When someone answers a question, they are encouraged to add links, photos, and videos as part of their answer. Mahalo harvests all of those links, and the best answers become part of its topic guides. “The question and answer service becomes a way to make our guide better,” says Calacanis. That is, if enough people use it.
Mahalo is essentially paying for traffic here, or rather getting its users to pay for traffic. The prospect of making tips from other users will be the main draw for many visitors. The question is: Will that be enough to jumpstart more organic growth by improving upon the Q&A format and seeding the site with some really good answers? Or does Yahoo Answers with its 154 million monthly unique visitors worldwide (comScore) have too much momentum to ever be challenged?
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
That a vibrating alarm clock pillow should emerge from Japan comes as no surprise. Forgive the cultural stereotyping, but where else do such ingeniously banal ideas flower into real products?
Except for Brookstones, I mean.
Vibrating pillows get us up, shut us up [Trends in Japan via Impress]
Should your petty crimes come to bore you, try executing them with Glow Graffiti, a paint that glows in the dark. The can even has a bright LED next to the nozzle, acting as a kind of primitive meatspace "preview" function,
Glow in the Dark Graffiti Spray [via Random Good Stuff]
As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew if could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service.The made-up dramas of the Wall Street Journal
By Ashlee Vance, Reporter, The New York Times
Intel (INTC) came up with a novel way to show how important the Internet and computing have become in the lives of Americans. In conjunction with Harris Interactive, the company conducted a survey of adults in the United States under the prosaic-enough banner “Internet Reliance in Today’s Economy.”
But the first “key finding” from the study is a little more attention-grabbing. According to the study, 46 percent of women and 30 percent of men would opt to forgo sex for two weeks instead of giving up access to their precious Internet for the same period.
More broadly, those surveyed said access to the Internet ranked highest among the discretionary spending items they could not live without.
By Stephen Fry, Author and Blogger, StephenFry.com
So here I am. In a hotel room in New York. The writing desk and its view of xth Avenue are all but obscured by:
7 x Mini USB cables: 2 of them are the new Micro type that Blackberry has switched to for the Storm only, the rest are standard.
1 x Ethernet cable: into wall-socket of hotel room. 8 bucks a day. But using Ethernet rather than the hotel’s Wi-Fi allows me to share via a wireless network that I create on my laptop. That way all my other toys can be online without separate logging on and billing. Hotels make so much money from “high-speed” Internet these days. Well, they’ve lost their once-juicy phone income I suppose. I remember back in the early nineties, before the world wide Web was so much a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye and the net was all VERONICA, JANET, WAIS, Gopher and FTP, I ran up a Princeton hotel phone bill of three and half thousand dollars in one calendar week. Ach, die schöne Zeit …
By Oliver Marks, Blogger, ZDnet, Collaboration 2.0
Tokyo is currently the largest city of origin of Twitter messages in the world, more than twice that of second placed San Francisco and New York in the USA as of this summer.
(Incidentally, while the Japanese Kanji language Twitter service, which only launched in April of this year, contains advertising, the rest of the planet’s Twitter service currently does not).
International usage of Twitter is pretty extensive, with multiple languages and character sets available. The recent attacks in Mumbai India had a pretty substantial online communications element to them, with the tag #mumbai widely used to track events in multiple languages, and with the attackers using Blackberrys and mobile phones to collaborate and to monitor the media.
By Tam Vo, Blogger, VentureBeat
Public event listings on Facebook have been used to influence politics and organize protests. But now events organized through Facebook–and their chaotic aftermath–may just lead to…a modeling contract?
Two weeks ago, British teen Georgina Hobday posted a Facebook event to announce her birthday party, one worthy of MTV’s reality series My Super Sweet Sixteen (where spoiled rich teens throw lavish, themed tantrums to celebrate their coming-of-age, often with ponies and Range Rovers). She invited 100 guests online, but kept the event public. I would have immediately regretted that decision.
What ensued was over 400 gatecrashers stampeding Hobday’s family mansion in Brighton, U.K. A gang dubbing itself the “Facebook Republican Army,” which scours the internet and Facebook for parties to crash, trampled the lawn, burnt carpets and smashed anything breakable in sight.
Read the rest of this post
By Cory Doctorow, Co-Editor, BoingBoing.net
The McCain-Palin campaign fire-sale dumped a bunch of orphaned Blackberries, including at least one loaded with confidential personal numbers of important people, and a ton of internal campaign email. These were the people who were planning on running an entire country.
“Blackberry phones at $20 a piece. There were only 10 left. All of the batteries had died. There were no chargers for sale. But people were snatching them up. So, we bought a couple.
And ended up with a lot more than we bargained for.
When we charged them up in the newsroom, we found one of the $20 Blackberry phones contained more than 50 phone numbers for people connected with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as hundreds of emails from early September until a few days after election night.”
Review: Samsung CLP-315 color laser printer
New MIMOBOT drives
Photty = cool key holder + mini photo frame from Japan
Thanko sells USB-powered and teddy bear-shaped gloves
Compulsory Savings: Tetris and Breakout piggy banks
Nintendo just found a boatload of money and it’s called Dragon Quest X
 Canada.com | Free Wireless Broadband on Hold, for Now PC Magazine - by Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The US Federal Communications Commission said on Saturday it was canceling a December 18 meeting in response to a request by Democratic lawmakers that it pay more attention to a smooth transition to digital television ... THE MINE SHAFT GAP: Wi-fi should be free and uncensored FCC Cancels Free Internet Vote |
It's 6AM here in London and I'm sitting in the living room with the baby, listening to the washing-machine hum away in the kitchen. The washing machine, a Hotpoint combo washer-dryer (jack of all trades, master of none, I'm afraid) started blowing the breaker every time we ran it about a month ago. On Saturday, we had a technician in from the manufacturer. After prodding at it with a multimeter for a while, he shrugged, pulled out a laptop and an EPROM burner, burned a new EPROM, took the old one out, and installed it. And now my washing machine is fine and doesn't trip the breaker. Turns out that all it needed was a more up-to-date version of the OS.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The barley used in the new beer is a third-generation offshoot of the original plant stored for five months in a Russian laboratory in the station. The company has made only 100 liters of the new brew, named Sapporo Space Barley, which is not for sale. Sapporo says the beer is safe because it has tested microbes in it and did tests with lab animals and Sapporo employees, too. It also says that the space beer tastes just like regular beer.Sapporo to offer tasting of space beer (Thanks, Marilyn!)
On the heels (gettit?) of the now-notorious incident in which an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at some guy named George Bush, the world press has rushed to tell us that throwing shoes is a really bad thing in the Arab world. Not like here in the west, where it's a gesture of affection.
“In Arab cultures, throwing shoes is a grave show of disrespect.” —Bloomberg.comThose Mysterious Easterners, So Different From You and Me“The act is an Arab symbol of contempt.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Throwing shoes at somebody is a supreme insult in the Middle East.” —Reuters
“In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt.” —Associated Press
Other notorious examples of the Cupertino effect include an article in the Denver Post that turned the Harry Potter villain Voldemort into Voltmeter, one in the New York Times that gave the first name of American footballer DeMeco Ryans as Demerol, and a Reuters story which changed the name of the Muttahida Quami movement of Pakistan into the Muttonhead Quail movement.Questions & Answers: Cupertino (via Joho the Blog)It could be worse. Leave out one of the os from the beginning of co-operation as well as the hyphen and you might be offered not Cupertino but copulation. Now that would be an error to write home about. Or perhaps not.
Delta to offer in-flight Internet on East Coast shuttle flights USA Today - By Roger Yu, USA TODAY Delta Air Lines will be the latest domestic airline to offer in-flight Internet for passengers, launching paid Wi-Fi service on Tuesday on its East Coast shuttle flights. Delta to roll out Wi-Fi on some flights Delta to Introduce WiFi on Some Shuttle Flights |
Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.
Last post about politics and media, this one less about 2008 than 2012. My final assignment to my ITP class on amateur media and the election (i.e. created by political amateurs, not necessarily media amateurs) was to ask them write a memo with advice on the subject that would be relevant to the 2012 Presidential election The responses ranged in style from a memo to Schwarzenegger to a letter from a young Democrat to Republican friends.
One that became clear from reading those memos were the critical uncertainties -- issues that will matter enormously, but whose outcome we don't yet know, something I can describe best using an example the students brought up in class in the early weeks of the semester:
In August of 2008, a video called Sing for Change went up. Made by a Venice, CA music instructor, it featured a couple dozen kids, ages 5 to 12, singing a song their teacher had written about Obama. The video itself was fairly straightforward -- it was just the kids standing on stage, wearing "Hope" t-shirts made for the occasion, and singing a song about how wonderful Obama is.
As you might imagine from that brief description, the video is a horror. My class skews liberal, and we all watched it slack-jawed, animated by a single question: "What were they thinking?" When it launched, the Republican blogosphere went nuts, while the Democratic reaction was mostly a muted "Well, I guess she was trying to help..." The public feedback was so intensely negative that the makers quickly took it down, but the warranty ran out on that strategy long ago, and copies were instantly re-posted, many with explicit references to Hitler Youth or North Korea in the title.
The videomaker may have thought she was advancing the cause, but she was actually preaching to (and with) the choir; there was a "Look at me!" quality to the work that destroyed any intended political utility. It's clear that not one person involved said "Let's see...kids too young to vote, in identical costumes, singing words we've literally put in their mouths? Maybe we should re-think this..." before the video was uploaded. It takes a truly jaded mind to understand that people who disagree with you have to be engaged, not just emoted at.
So here are two key uncertainties for 2012 (Congressional as well as Presidential), extrapolating from Sing for Change and my students' work:
1) What happens to the motivational landscape? Amateurs differ from professionals in part because of motivation -- Barely Political's Obama Girl video was designed to get attention for...Barely Political; name recognition for Obama himself was a side-effect. In 2012, will the motivations driving amateur political media be more political and strategic, or will they stay largely personal and attention-getting?
2) Will the average quality of politically amateur media rise or fall? Average quality of amateur digital production rises over the long haul, but there are also periods where the in-rush of amateurs floods the zone with dreck (desktop publishing ca. 1990, web design ca 1995) before communities of practice can form.
Two uncertainties produce four possible futures. Consider the future where the motivation of amateurs turns political and average quality rises; we could label this "The New Agora", where online video becomes a key arena of political argument. The opposite of that world would be most amateurs making video for personal motivation, and falling average quality. In this world -- call it "Lost in the Noise" -- in-jokes and me-tooism would make amateur political video a sideshow, compared to 2008.
One can also imagine a world of mainly personal motivation by the creators, but rising average quality. You could call this "Obama Girl Nation" -- there's lots of great political material people tune into, but its effect on the campaign will be secondary to the pursuit of boffo laffs. The opposite would be more political engagement but falling quality. In this future, call it "A Few Gems", most of the work wouldn't be worth the time of day, but there could be a couple of game-changing works by amateurs. (You could also call this future "Status Quo Plus", since it's closest to the election we just had.)
That, of course, is just one set of uncertainties played off on each other (and of course different futures can come true for different groups of people.) There are several other open questions: How much more active will the campaigns be in trying to shape amateur production? (Too much and they risk buzz kill, the FEC, and being damned for work they didn't produce.) How much coordination will we see, away from media mostly produced by individuals and small groups, towards media produced and spread by large organized collectives? How much will mobile devices change the landscape? How much will new archives allow crowdsourced opposition research? And so on.
Some of my students have agreed to let me release their memos; they make good reading for politics junkies trying to think through what's next. As Don Derosby of GBN says "There's no data on the future. That's what makes it interesting."
Zipped file of 2012 Amateur Political memoranda. (The students whose memos are linked here are Alexander Reeder, Amanda Bernsohn, Amit Snyderman, Andrea Dulko, Cheryl Furjanic, Corey Menscher, Dave Spector, John Dimatos, John Randall, Kristen Smart, Matt Parker, Steven Lehrburger, Thomas Robertson.)
: Intrepid tourists travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of dollars just to experience historic marvels with their own eyes. The irony is that much of what they're seeing is the work of ongoing upkeep, the replication of what it probably used to look like.
To mark the 2001 reopening of the Leaning Tower of Pisa after a fix that kept it from falling over, we take a look at the preservation efforts of other epic monuments.
Left:
Egypt's Sphinx has seen many phases of conservation, from its uncovering by Thutmosis IV in 1400 B.C. when only its head was visible, to a multiphase restoration project that began in 1989 and continues today. Weather and modern wear on the ancient statue require nearly constant upkeep.
Image: ptrosss/flickr
: Photo: Library of Congress/George P. Hall & Son, N.Y.C. Even Lady Liberty in New York Harbor needs a little love sometimes. Closed to the public and covered in scaffolding from 1984 to 1986, much of Statue of Liberty's iron framework was replaced with stainless steel, and holes in the copper skin were patched and repaired. The job required $230 million in private funding.
: Photo: Library of Congress/Detroit Publishing CompanyEngland's Stonehenge is actually the result of three phases of building and restoration.
The first stage occurred around 3100 B.C., which included the construction of a circle of timbers and digging of a perimeter ditch using animal bones.
The site was then rebuilt around 2300 B.C. using bluestones from the Prescelli Mountains in Pembroke, South Wales. The monument we see now was the result of another update that happened around 2100 B.C. The bluestones were dug up and replaced by larger sandstone pieces from Marlborough Downs 20 miles from the site. Today, less than half the original monument is standing.
Current restoration efforts include the Stonehenge Project, which (or maybe, witch) seeks to move roads away from the site and build a visitor center nearby.
: Photo: Library of Congress/Keystone View Co.Erected by some of the greatest sculptors, architects and artists of fifth-century-B.C. Greece, the Acropolis reflects the power and wealth of Athens at its peak. Since then, the structure has suffered extensive damage, and its preservation is ongoing.
Restorers are now using a combination of traditional techniques and lasers in their efforts. The marble technicians use tools similar to those used by the original architects, while lasers clean intricate details like the battle-scene carvings.
: Photo: CorbisThe Great Wall of China consists of architecture from several eras and has been battered over the years by both natural and human elements.
Inner Mongolia contains the largest section of any province, and has launched a three-year restoration project at an estimated cost of $14.3 million.
: Photo: Library of CongressThe Taj Mahal attracts 3 million visitors a year while sitting on the banks of the most-polluted river in India, the Yamuna. The Archaeological Survey of India recently enacted a restoration project to clean the marble facade using clay mudpacks to remove the yellow tinge of air pollutants, much as women in India use mudpacks to help their complexion. This famous facial is estimated to cost $200,000.
: An estimated 500,000 people lost their lives in gladiator battles and hunting simulations in the Roman Colosseum. Medieval builders also ripped off its stones to use for their own constructions, and it suffered extensive damage from an earthquake in 1349. Since then it's been under almost constant restoration and planning.
A survey conducted in 1997 using lasers and infrared light provided a very precise map of the building, revealing useful information on structural deformation. Half the Colosseum's floor was rebuilt with wood to protect the underground rooms and passages in 2000, and the effects are being monitored before the second half follows suit.
Image: ptrosss/flickr
: Photo: Dean Conger/CorbisA visual icon of Russia, St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square was built on uneven ground and has formed cracks as it's settled. At one point, a government report warned that it was slowly sinking into the ground.
Restoration work has kept the building intact and saved much of the artwork, but the cathedral will likely need ongoing attention for as long as it stands. Plans to develop a luxury-hotel complex and underground garage next to it have raised further concern over the structure's integrity.
To play World of Warcraft now, you've got to be a torturer.
In the recent expansion pack Wrath of the Lich King, there's a quest called "The Art of Persuasion" that requires you to extract information from a tied-up sorcerer. You do this by stinging him repeatedly with a creepy instrument called the "Neural Needler," a device that "inflicts incredible pain to target, but does no lasting damage." After a few minutes, the sorcerer coughs up the info.
As you'd imagine, this little slice of Abu Ghraib set the gameosphere alight with blistering, ideologically freighted debate. Some gamers were straightforwardly creeped out. Others were blasé; games already contain bucketsful of senseless slaughter, they figured, so is torture really worse?
Pioneering game designer Richard Bartle argued that the quest violated in-game canon, since the quest is forced upon people playing with narratively "good" Alliance characters (as opposed to WoW's evil Horde characters). In the end, the Art of Persuasion quest poses a big cultural, aesthetic and political question: Should games include torture?
To which the answer is simple: Sure they should.
In fact, I'll go further. I think we need more torture in videogames.
And better torture.
I should probably unpack these statements a bit. Let me begin by putting my cards on the table: In the real world, I'm unconditionally opposed to torture. This is in part because history has proven it produces unreliable intelligence. Even John McCain signed a bogus confession when tortured by the Viet Cong.
Torture advocates constantly evoke ticking-bomb situations to argue that drastic measures are OK in rare cases, but these scenarios exist only in the fever dreams of Hollywood; they are basically nonexistent in actual, recorded history. And hey, I live in Manhattan, the Top Terrorist Target in the United States. I want good antiterror intel! But you don't get it from torture.
More importantly, torture has devastating repercussions. It permanently erodes the character of the torturer and, worse, of the public that condones the torture. What's more, torture destroys a nation's moral high ground — which is why military commanders consistently oppose it — and incites further acts of terrorism. Torture has consequences.
From my perspective, Americans aren't thinking very seriously about those consequences. The torture at Guantanamo Bay, in overseas CIA prisons and at Abu Ghraib has all gone by with relatively little public outcry.
Why? Partly because U.S. officials refuse to describe or admit clearly what they're doing. But equally important, I think, is that our mass culture is filled with wildly misleading ideas about how torture works.
Consider the popular television series 24. The sheer metric tonnage of torture rose to an almost self-parodic level in the last few seasons of the show; barely an episode went by without someone being shocked, injected, waterboarded or just plain ol' beaten senseless. Yet 24 has never seriously shown any repercussions of that torture.
For example, a CTU agent in a Season 3 episode is mistakenly accused of being a traitor, then tortured with a stun gun. When the mistake is cleared up, what happens? She stands up, straightens her clothes, goes back to her desk ... and demands a raise to ensure her silence. Brassy!
And a total, cynical fantasy. Psychologists know that torture causes, among other horrid things, lasting mental-health problems. But 24's frantically violent fairy tales are typical of what passes for mass-cultural debate about torture. We're not encouraged to think about what happens next, so we don't. It is a massive failure of the public imagination.
Which is why we need more torture in videogames.
Games are excellent vehicles for helping people inhabit complex, difficult situations. They're also extremely good at illustrating consequences: If you do X, then Z and L will happen; if you do Y instead, then C and Q result.
What's more, gamers love this stuff. Several of the biggest recent games were praised precisely because the moral acts inside them had long-term consequences. In BioShock, you could either save or exploit the Little Sisters, and your actions produced very different endings to the game. In Fable, decisions made in the first 15 minutes of play (will you side with lawkeepers or cause mischief for personal gain?) change the moral tenor of your home town 15 years later. In Sid Meier's Civlization: Revolution, as with most world-conquering strategy games, failing to make an alliance upfront can screw you down the line.
So this, really, is the problem with World of Warcraft's torture sequence. It does not model any consequences. You torture the sorcerer, but nothing particularly comes of it. You just move on to the next quest.
This would be lame in a TV show, but is arguably even lamer in a videogame, because it's not too hard to imagine all sorts of repercussions that would have been dramatically fascinating while actually enhancing the gameplay.
For example, Lich King maker Blizzard Entertainment could have made the Art of Persuasion quest optional — but endowed it with some unusually lucrative loot or experience. That would have made it a genuine moral quandary: Should you do a superbad thing for a really desirable result?
Or how about this: What if you got blowback from torturing the sorcerer? What if other non-player characters got more aggro, attacking you more often because of your reputation as a torturer? And maybe some Alliance NPCs would simply refuse to give you further quests.
On the other hand, what if becoming a torturer made the game easier to play? What if it burnished your rep as a dangerous character, making future quest opponents so scared of you that some battles became simpler? After all, that's one of the neoconservative arguments about torture: You show the world who's boss. Blizzard could have programmed not only the consequences that would be predicted by a bleeding-heart liberal, but those posited by a neocon.
What we need, if this isn't too weird a phrase, is better torture design. I'll issue several caveats here. One is that I haven't played Lich King myself, because I don't have a high enough WoW character. I'm relying on reports from Lich King players, so I could be entirely wrong about the Art of Persuasion, though I doubt it.
Here's a more nuanced caveat: Some players I talked to think Blizzard has been quite thoughtful about how torture plays into the world of Lich King. The dialogue accompanying the Art of Persuasion has several coy references to modern geopolitics: The quest-giver tells you he personally isn't allowed to engage in torture, but because you're a foreigner, you can — a seeming reference to extraordinary rendition. And other quests in Lich King — I won't give out any spoilers here — require you to mount some other fairly sadistic attacks. It's quite possible Blizzard has a much larger, slow-moving point to make about torture.
If true, that's great. Because personally, I'd like to see games that had more torture — and better torture — in them. In this alarming chapter of American history, they might wind up fueling the best public debate yet.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
2001: Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa reopens its doors to tourists after a $27 million effort to keep it from tilting so much it might fall over.
Construction began on the tower in 1173. It's the freestanding bell tower, or campanile, of the cathedral next door. The structures, along with a separate baptistery, make a sublime three-part architectural composition that would have become world-famous even if the tower had not developed its well-known tilt.
But tilt it did, as the clay soil subsided beneath one side of the foundation. Construction was halted in 1185, but resumed a half century later.
Further delays caused by war and civic upheavals probably kept the tower from collapsing before it was finished. The interruptions allowed the underlying soil — with the "consistency of jelly or foam rubber" — to compact a little. As the work continued sporadically, masons corrected a little for the tilt, resulting in a tower that not only leans, but is actually curved.
The tower was completed around 1370, and there it stood, without further problems for nearly half a millennium. (In the 17th century, Galileo may or may not have dropped a musket ball and a cannonball from the tower to refute Aristotle's theory that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. That account is found nowhere in Galileo's extensive writings, appearing first in a gushing, posthumous biography.)
Excavation work nearby in the late 1830s destabilized the tower's base, and it began to lean a little more every year. After a tower collapsed in Pavia in 1989, the Italian government decided to close the Leaning Tower to tourists and do something to prevent its collapse.
Someone proposed a scheme to drill 10,000 holes in the tower to reduce its weight. (That could have been disastrous, because centuries of standing out of kilter had already stressed some stone structural elements to the point of crumbling.) Another proposal was to build an exact replica of the tower leaning against it from the opposite direction to prop it up. (Yeah, right.)
Also considered was a plan to take the tower apart stone by stone and then rebuild it in a way that would keep it from toppling over. Photographers documented every detail of the structure, and 6,400 of those shots are now available in a remarkable photo tour and online archive.
In the end, authorities decided to try straightening the tower a bit by getting the high side of the foundation to sink a little. Construction workers placed 100 tons of lead weights on the lip of the north-side foundation, and 340-foot steel cables were installed to hold the tower from any further leaning. Then, 41 corkscrew drills angled under the north side to remove soil underneath the 800-year-old foundation.
It took three years, but it worked. The tower settled toward the high side, reducing its 6-degree tilt by half a degree, and its 13-foot overhang by about 17 inches. The temporary safety cables were removed.
Tourists now enter the tower only in guided groups of 40. The 35-minute tour costs 15 euros (about $19). The cyclically varying pitch and roll of the 284-step spiral staircase make for a dizzying experience, especially walking down.
The tower's tilt now approximates what it had three centuries ago, and engineers say it won't need another overhaul for a few hundred more years.
Source: Various
 Palm Infocenter | Palm Pins Its Hopes on Nova BusinessWeek - The smartphone maker debuts its new operating system, code-named Nova, at January's CES. Palm says its phones for it will bridge the BlackBerry-iPhone gap By Peter Burrows Jon Rubinstein got the call in mid-2007 while he was living on the Pacific Coast ... Palm to announce Nova at CES New Palm Nova OS to be unveiled at CES 2009 |
Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and technological networks.
As I hand off the magic wand of guest-posting on the last minute and second of my tenure here, there's one Boinger I want to thank in particular: Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I remember, early this decade, when bB turned comments off because the haters and random trolls were simply too much, and it is a testament to TNH and her folks that the comments are back on and as good as they are, at an audience scale several times what it was in those days.
TNH gets this medium like Gretsky, which is to say she skates to where the puck is going to be. You could see this with her invention of disemvoweling in 2002, which Time magazine flogged as a hot new (uncredited) idea in 2008. Oops. And, as has been Time's MO since Phil Elmer-Dewitt put bogus net-research on the cover with no consequences, Time won't update the story to reflect what TNH understood about the value of visible governance, half a dozen years ago. (Fck Tm mgzn, I say.) Because of all of that work on governance (not just disemvoweling), reading the comments has been a real pleasure.
So in honor of TNH, I'd like to try an experiment, making my last post here a question to you rather than a pointer elsewhere. Here's the question: what do you think you know about the future that few other people understand yet? What's going to happen in the next five years or so that will catch most of the rest of us by surprise, but not you? (And no fair faking the timestamp and predicting financial meltdown.)
Thanks to BoingBoing for letting me guestblog, and over to you in the comments...
FROM GAMERTELL - Resistance 2 and LittleBigPlanet are highlights in this latest Playstation Store Update… MORE »
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FROM GAMERTELL - Amid all the holiday scrambling to sites like Amazon, GameStop, and even eBay you may have overlooked Overstock.com. Yeah, the site’s commercials neglect to mention the fact the company also sells video games, as if it’s some dirty secret. In any case, Overstock’s dirty laundry is your gain. Overstock.com is… MORE »
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Yep, you can win this HP HP HDX18 as part of the HP Magic Giveaway. All you’ve got to do is sign up for a Dabbledoo account!
Take a look at some of its features:
- Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 GHz
- 18.4 inch 1080P display
- Two 250GB hard drives
- 4GB RAM
- Blu-ray ROM with SuperMulti DVD Dual Layer burner
- Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
Full Story » | Written by Iyaz Akhtar for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
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Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
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For months now, I have been trying to play .MKV and other video files on my living room front projector. At first I tried to connect a laptop directly to the TV. But this didn’t always work, the audio was crappy, and it was awkward to have a laptop connected to the projector.
I started using my XBOX 360 to play video files. At first I wanted to stream the files across my network. This worked every once in a while, but mostly it was an exercise in frustration. And I got miserable fast forward and rewind capability because of the network bottleneck.
Then I tried using my Neuros OSD for this. That was a non-starter as the OSD only has a composite video out port and I wanted to play high definition video.
Eventually I started copying video files to big fat thumb drives and plugging them directly into the XBOX. This worked very well for a lot of video files, but didn’t work at all for high definition files because they were mostly over 4GB in size (the XBOX 360 only recognizes FAT32 formatted drives, and FAT32 doesn’t allow for more than 4GB per file).
I then started investigating the black arts of video transcoding. I looked for tools that would allow me to convert the video formats I found on the internet into something that was XBOX 360 friendly. But most of the automated tools were a compromise. If it converted the video into something XBOX friendly, and under 4GB in size, the audio would be downgraded to 2 channels (from 5.1). And I would run my computer for hours converting video, and many times something would go wrong and the file wouldn’t play on the XBOX.
I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure this out.
One Fall afternoon, Western Digital announced the WD HD TV Media Player. It promised to play high definition video over HDMI and optical audio, up to 1080p, all for about $120 street price. I was skeptical at first that such a tiny and inexpensive device would solve all of my months of video headaches. But any skepticism disappeared once I hooked the gizmo up to my projector and in about 20 seconds I was watching glorious high definition 1080p with DTS sound.
Basically the WD HD TV Media Player (horrible name, by the way) will play just about any video format you throw at it. You put the videos on any USB mass storage device, like a thumb drive or an external hard drive, and plug it into the device. It recognizes the files on the drive and plays any video, audio, or photo files it finds. It comes with a handy remote control, and the software interface is very simple and easy-to-use. The box has 2 USB ports for you to plug in any combination of mass storage devices. Even better, it supports the NTFS file format so you are not limited to files that are under 4GB.
I loaded up an external hard drive with all manner of video files and plugged it into the Media Player. Using the remote control I navigated the on-screen menu and chose several different file formats to test. The little black box played each of the files beautiful. The playback was smooth, even in fast action sequences. The digital audio worked flawlessly and it even supports subtitles. I tested a variety of 720p and 1080p and 480p files. I couldn’t find a single one the device had trouble with.
I connected the Media Player via optical audio and HDMI. It also supports composite video with analog audio, but I did not test those ports.
I was also pleasantly surprised by the compact yet powerful remote control. I hid the tiny Media Player box behind my media cabinet in the back of the room where my projector is. And I didn’t think the remote control would be able to hit the device, but sure enough I just pointed it at the ceiling above my head and it worked very nicely, registering each key press.
I love this little black box. It singlehandedly solved my video playback problems and ended months of frustration. People will gripe about the lack of network support, but I personally have no desire to stream high definition video over my local network. Direct hard drive or thumb drive connections ensure fast and reliable playback and controls. Simple and fast, the WD HD TV Media Player is a powerhouse solution in a tiny and affordable package.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
File sharing service BitTorrent has undone its $17 million financing from earlier this year, we’ve learned from an investor in the company, and that money (or what’s left of it) has been returned to investors DCM, Accel Partners and DAG Ventures.
The company, admitting that the their business was “not gaining sufficient traction,” has closed a new $7 million round of financing from those same investors at a “substantially reduced” valuation of $28 million.
Down valuation rounds are common in tough economic times. But rescinding entire rounds of financing and returning capital to investors isn’t - it’s a sign of significant distress at a startup.
From a letter to shareholders:
In late May and June of this past summer we closed a $17 million Series C financing.
The lead investor in this financing was DAG Ventures. Given the changes in our Company’s business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated. After evaluating DAG’s claim, engaging in significant negotiations with DAG, unsuccessfully trying to raise funds from other sources, and taking into account the overall economy, the Company decided to work with DAG to significantly modify the terms of the Series C financing.
The executive team has also been cut dramatically. Most of the executives listed on this page no longer appear to work for the company (BitTorrent previously announced that Eric Klinker was promoted from CTO to CEO after the resignation of Doug Walker) :
As a result of the foregoing, the Company now employs 19 people, and our executive
officer team consists of the undersigned, Eric Klinker, as CEO, Mitch Edwards as CFO, Bram Cohen as Chief Scientist, Simon Morris as VP of Product Marketing and Ilan Shamir as VP of Engineering.
The founding team has also been diluted to the point that they own a very small percentage of the company. Common stock and stock options account for only 11.4% of the company after the new financing, and much of that is owned by the venture capitalists. Current executives, though, are clearly being topped up. 30% of the newly capitalized company is set aside for new stock options.
The full letter is below, as well as the term sheet for the new financing and the current capitalization table. We’ve emailed BitTorrent with a request for comment.
Letter To Stockholders:
CONFIDENTIAL
Dear BitTorrent Shareholder:
I am writing to inform you of a number of significant developments related to the
Company, including the renegotiation of the terms of the Company’s Series C financing, and to
request your approval of, and to offer you the opportunity to participate in, the revised financing.
Business Update
Last spring the Company was focusing its business efforts on content delivery services
(DNA), embedded software (SDK) and our direct to consumer portal (the Store). Over the
course of the summer it became clear that some of the Company’s businesses were not gaining
sufficient traction, and that the Company would significantly miss its projections. In response,
the Company substantially restructured various product offerings, closed the Store, laid off a
significant number of employees, and made significant changes to our management team.
As a result of the foregoing, the Company now employs 19 people, and our executive
officer team consists of the undersigned, Eric Klinker, as CEO, Mitch Edwards as CFO, Bram
Cohen as Chief Scientist, Simon Morris as VP of Product Marketing and Ilan Shamir as VP of
Engineering.
Series C Financing
In late May and June of this past summer we closed a $17 million Series C financing.
The lead investor in this financing was DAG Ventures. Given the changes in our Company’s
business model and projections that occurred in close proximity to the Series C financing, DAG
claimed that the Series C financing should be substantially renegotiated. After evaluating
DAG’s claim, engaging in significant negotiations with DAG, unsuccessfully trying to raise
funds from other sources, and taking into account the overall economy, the Company decided to
work with DAG to significantly modify the terms of the Series C financing. The modifications
included reducing the amount of the financing from $17 million to $7 million, substantially
reducing the pre-money valuation of the Company to $28 million, and reducing the amount of
the outstanding pre-financing liquidation preference from $38 million to $13 million.
Series C-1/Series C-2 Financing
The terms of the revised financing call for the rescission of the Series C financing and the
sale of $7 million of a new Series C-1 Preferred Stock at a price of $0.32178 per share. The
terms also require the conversion of all of the Company’s pre-financing outstanding Preferred
Stock into Common Stock, and providing shareholders whose Preferred Stock is converted into
Common Stock the opportunity to exchange approximately one-third of such Common Stock
(approximately 2.1 million shares based on a $7 million financing) for a new Series C-2
Preferred Stock at a ratio of approximately 15 shares of new Series C-2 Preferred Stock for each
share of Common Stock being exchanged, if such shareholders participate in the new Series C-1
financing. The new Series C-2 Preferred Stock has a liquidation preference of $0.4196 per share,
resulting in an aggregate liquidation preference of the Series C-2 Preferred Stock of $13 million
(assuming a $7 million financing). The purpose of this Series C-2 Preferred Stock exchange is to
incent current Preferred shareholders to participate in the Series C-1 financing, and to obtain
their agreement to the reduction of their liquidation preference, by providing for them to receive
a higher percentage of the Company than they would otherwise have. We expect that the $7
million raised in this financing will fund the Company’s operations for a minimum of 12 months.
Please note that the financing documents also provide that the Company may use up to
$750,000 of the financing proceeds to repurchase shares of Common Stock from current
Common Stock holders. The Company has not yet decided whether to pursue such possibility.
In connection with the financing John Cadeddu of DAG will be joining the Company’s
Board, and Ashwin Navin has resigned. All directors other than Mr. Navin voted in favor of and
support the financing.
Enclosed is a Summary of Terms describing the Series C-1/C-2 financing in more detail,
together with a pre-financing and post-financing capitalization table.
The Company has already received the commitment of DAG to purchase $2 million in
the Series C-1 financing, and for Accel and DCM, the Company’s other major investors, to
invest an aggregate of $5 million in the financing. The other smaller investor in the Series C
financing, Quilvest, has elected not to participate in this financing. The Company may raise up
to approximately $7.8 million in total if additional shareholders purchase their pro rata portion.
Shareholder Participation
Given the nature of this financing, the Company is providing all shareholders the
opportunity to participate in the financing, to the extent that they can consistent with applicable
securities laws. If you would like to participate in the financing, or would like additional
information on the financing or the Company’s business, please contact the undersigned at (415)
568-[redacted] or [redacted]@bittorrent.com; or Mitch Edwards at (415) 568-[redacted] or
[redacted]@bittorrent.com.
If you are interested in participating in the financing you must notify the Company in writing by January 5, 2009.
Financing Approval
Enclosed is a Shareholder Consent approving this financing, and various related matters
(including a substantial increase in the Company’s stock option plan to allow the Company to
provide appropriate incentive to its new management team). If the proposed transactions and
Consent are acceptable, please sign the Consent and return it to our Company’s law firm,
Fenwick & West, attention Diana Woods at (650) 938-5200 (fax) or dwoods@fenwick.com (by
pdf). Please provide your consent as soon as possible, as we would like to close the initial
closing of this financing in the very near future. We will be holding a second closing in the
future for any shareholders who wish to participate in the financing as described above.
The need for this revised financing is disappointing. That said, the management team
believes that the Company’s prospects are bright with a greatly reduced operational expense
profile, a focus on attaining profitability and a commitment to building value for our
shareholders.
Sincerely,
Eric Klinker
President and CEO
Term Sheet:
DOCS-1990105-v4-Summary_of_Terms_Series_C-1_BitTorrent - Free Legal Forms
Capitalization Table:
bitprepostcap - Free Legal Forms
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Good news for those of you in North Korea! (That must be, like, zero of you. I can’t imagine the North Koreans allowing our silly, subversive site to be easily readable.) You’ll have a 3G network up and running tomorrow, thanks to Egypt’s Orascom Telecom’s $400 million investment.
The network will initially cover Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, and other major cities.
The AP reminds us that North Korea has some pretty tight communication restrictions, and it’s not yet known how ordinary North Korean citizens will be able to use the 3G network.
I just find it funny that there’s going to be 3G in Pyongyang and I can’t so much as get T-Mobile EDGE here in Dutchess County, NY, which is about an hour north of NYC. Ridiculous.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How great is this: the FCC meeting that was scheduled to take place this week where they’d discuss the plans for free nationwide Wi-Fi isn’t even going to happen. The meeting, which was supposed to occur on the Dec. 18, was killed because a bunch of congressman objected to any “controversial” items emerging from the FCC during the last day’s of George W. Bush’s presidency. Better to let the new congress and Obama-influenced FCC tackle the matter.
Kevin Martin, the FCC chair, wants the nationwide Wi-Fi network to be be pornography-free (yeah, that’ll happen; the Internet is for porn), dontcha know?
In any event, it’s best to look at this latest development as merely a postponement and not an outright killing of the plan.
Next year, then.
TEAC is introducing a monolithic iPod dock that is sure to feel right at home in a chic loft. The ITB1000 packs a 2.1 speaker setup into the single tower, but sadly, the 15Wx2 power rating proves this setup is more sizzle than steak. Besides looking like a monument to power and grace, there doesn’t seem to be anything worthwhile to justify the $400 US price tag. Moving on…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Viral videos–you-gotta-see-this clips Web surfers pass along to each other without any prompting–are every marketer’s dream. Except that making them is easier said than done, for obvious reasons.
Here’s HBO’s clever attempt: Use an existing video that’s already popular on Google’s (GOOG) YouTube and try to piggyback off of that.
Time Warner’s (TWX) pay cable channel’s “Flight Of The Conchords,” its comedy series about two Kiwi slacker/musicians trying to make it in New York, is already a YouTube sensation. So no need to reinvent the wheel: To promote the new season of the show, the channel is asking the site’s users to lip-synch their own versions of one of the show’s most popular clips.
The carrot: The best versions, collected here, will get mashed into a best-of compilation clip that will air after one of the new shows next year. To get things moving, Deep Focus, the interactive ad agency running the campaign for HBO, bought ads on a handful of video Web sites that specialize in comedy clips. And those sites in turn created their own versions, using sort-of-well-known folks like Andy Dick and College Humor’s Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld.
The promotion just kicked off last week, so it’s too early to tell whether any of the new clips will take off–and more important, bring HBO more viewers and/or subscribers. But at least give the channel credit for trying to harness the audience that YouTube and others have aggregated.
Here’s the original version:
And here are some pre-seeded takes…
College Humor (note the MTV crew in the background):
Australia looks to be moving ahead with its plan to censor Internet content on a country-wide level, and will test its array of filters later this month. To refresh your memory, the Australian government wants to block access to illegal material on the Internet, be it genuinely awful material like child pornography or something more controversial like terrorist Web sites. (Who’s a terrorist?, when is a site advocating terrorism?, etc.)
The scheme is made of two filters: a giant blacklist, maintained by the government, that ISPs would have to block access to; and an optional filter that would be used to weed out unseemly content from being accessible to children. Quite the nanny state you’ve got there.
Of course, there’s plenty of people who don’t like the idea. Type in “australia censorship” on Facebook and you find dozens of groups populated with thousands of people who aren’t too keen on the idea of mandatory Internet filtering. Oh, and these filtering schemes, in tests, have slowed Internet speeds by as much as 87 percent. So there’s that.
Again, as with the Great Usenet Purge of 2008, it’s hard to defend against censorship when officials hide behind things like child pornography and terrorism. No one wants to be seen as being “soft” on such topics, and the nuance required to successfully argue against this type of censorship is often difficult to articulate in a media environment of 60-second sound bites and screaming Drudge sirens.
Some climate experts are predicting this winter will be the coldest of the decade and this Apple quilt might be a great way for MacHeads to keep warm. 20 shirts make up the quilt and they appear to range from the late nineties to around OS X Tiger’s launch. While blankets are economical way to stay warm, this ebay listing, at time of writing, is $237.50 so it essentially will not save you any money. Mac Fanboys are used to throwing away money, anyway.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Here’s a fine way to spend that $10 you still have in your pocket after last night’s Crazy Night Out: Team Fortress 2 for $9.99 on Steam for the PC.
For the uninitiated, Team Fortress 2 is still the reason I have The Orange Box handy, despite the fact that it’s the lesser Xbox 360 version. Though, as you know, my patience for shooters has pretty much run out, TF2 is well worth any price you pay for it.
via videogaming247
The video is totally SFW, but you might lose a few brain cells by watching it
PlayStation Home for the PS3 could be the absolute dumbest thing ever produced in the history of human civilization. (Penny-Arcade doesn’t like it either, and their voice carries the same weight as Walter Cronkite’s did during the Vietnam War.) But not only is it wretched—the Wii has avatars, the Wii is selling well, therefore we need avatars to sell well, too—it’s also offense to women! It’s a one-two punch of mediocrity!
The video embedded here, and there’s plenty more (though that one’s actually hilarious) where that came from, shows a so-called “female avatar” (which is more than likely just a dopey kid toying with others’ emotions), being surrounded and harassed by a pack of “male avatars.” It’s among the sorriest things you’ll find online today.
My only hope, for Sony’s sake, is that PlayStation Home didn’t cost too much money to develop, because, frankly, it’s rubbish.
A couple years back, my friends Paul and James opened a pair of chocolate shops in London, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, with one branch in the City and
the other in Islington, in Camden Passage. Paul is a self-taught chocolatier whose truffles I'd been lucky enough to sample over the years, and James is a very sharp entrepreneur, technologist and activist, so I knew that whatever they made, it would be tasty.
But I didn't count on it being this good.
In a few short years, Paul A Young chocolates have won more awards than I can count, including the Academy of Chocolate's "Best New Chocolate Shop," "Best Dark Chocolate Truffle" and "Best Filled Chocolate," and so on -- and when I dropped in this week to buy the last of my Christmas presents, I discovered that the Observer and the Financial Times had both put Paul A Young on their list of the 10 best chocolates in the world. I'm pretty well travelled, and I've enjoyed some magnificent chocolate here and there, but I'm hard pressed to find a chocolate I find myself thinking about, dreaming of, tasting the phantom of, more than Paul's.
Here are a few of my favourites from the shop. First, the drinking chocolate -- a gently heated pot of molten Valrhona chocolate guarded by several jars of fine ground spice, ranging from chilis to ginger to cardamom, cinnamon, and many others. Get a cup and season to taste, stir, drink, fall unconscious. I'm also a great fan of Paul's chewy, rich brownies, which have the texture and color of good, loamy soil and the flavour of high-cacao artisanal chocolate adulterated with such additives as stem ginger.
But my favourites have to be the truffles -- they were special treats for my wife during her pregnancy and after her delivery, they're the gifts I give to friends come from out of town, they're the treats I go for on days when nothing seems to be going right. There are the "normal" truffles (for example, the gold-medal-winning Sea Salted Caramels have a hard, glossy dark shell that shatters in your mouth, revealing a slow, decadent slurp of salty caramel, or the Kalamansi truffles, with a centre of tangy tropical citrus), and the exotics -- truffles stuffed with Marmite, stilton, and other savouries that turn out to be extremely witty and improbable taste-combinations that are inevitably delicious in a way you never expected.
What's the catch? Well, they're kind of expensive -- especially if you're used to buying an assortment of milk chocolates at the grocery store. And they're also only available in person at the shops in London -- no mail order. Paul's chocolates are made fresh daily on the premises, without any preservatives of any kind, and they just don't travel (I've successfully brought abroad them in my hand luggage, but I wouldn't try to ship them as cargo or by mail). So this is a pleasure strictly reserved for Londoners and those who visit London.
It's this last part that's kept me from mentioning them here for so long -- it seems like a cheat to tell you how goddamned fantastic this stuff is and then announce that you can't have any. But it's the end of the holiday shopping season and plenty of you live in London. If you're looking for an extraordinary gift that comes from a local small business, won't clutter up the house after it's opened, and will certainly be warmly appreciated and fondly remembered, this is my top choice.
Oh, and Paul's hiring staff -- his business is doing very well, despite the crummy economy, and I can't think of a better place to work (except for the risk to your waistline!).
Update: in the comments, James Cronin - Managing Director, Paul A Young Fine Chocolates, sez: "I'll brief the team in the morning that if anyone mentions that they read about us on Boing Boing they can have a free chocolate on me."
No Limit Texas Dreidel on Amazon, No Limit Texas Dreidel homepage (Thanks, Jennie!)No Limit Texas Dreidel combines the traditional dreidel game with Texas Hold'em poker. The objective is for each player to create the best dreidel "hand" by combining dreidel spins. You will combine dreidel "spins" in your shaker, which only you will see, with other Community Spins, which will be seen by all players. Players bet in rounds using poker betting rules. The game is best played with chocolate gelt (coins), as is the traditional wager for the Dreidel Game. No Limit Texas Dreidel is an entertaining adult party game and is family fun for everyone ages 9 to 99.
Former TechCrunch UK writer Sam Sethi’s newest venture: Twitblogs. The service is targeted towards Twitter users who want to write more than 140 characters, or want to embed images into their posts, etc.
In other words, it’s a feature-poor but usability-rich blogging service similar to Tumblr and others. Users actually don’t even create accounts. Instead they log in with their Twitter credentials. And any posts created on the site are automatically posted to Twitter as well to get extra exposure. So heavy Twitter users can use Twitter for the quick messages and Twitblogs for the longer stuff, and everything flows into Twitter automatically.
Generally I like services like this, which are created on the cheap and put out there for users to try out. Some survive to funding, most fade away. But in this case the service has serious founder baggage to deal with as well.
Sethi’s previous startup, Blognation, folded a year ago and left writers and employees unpaid for months of work. We’ve had our own unpleasant issues with Sethi as well, all documented here. Some of his former writers have accused him of fraud and other crimes.
None of this matters that much for users. Except that they must type their Twitter credentials directly into Twitblog to test the service. That’s iffy at the best of times. But when a service is run by someone who’s shown questionable ethical behavior in the past, it’s a non-starter. The service also lacks terms of use and a privacy policy, so users won’t know how their private information may be used, sold or exploited.
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Making the rounds quickly on Twitter this weekend is Tweetwasters, a site that gives you an idea of how much time you’re really ‘wasting’ posting messages and status updates to the popular micro-sharing service. Users are calculating away and tweeting about it, ironically spending even more time on Twitter (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
There’s even a WordPress plugin that lets you show off your Twitter usage stats to your blog visitors, and if you try hard you might just make the Tweetwasters Hall Of Fame.
Tweetwasters estimates that a user spends about 30 seconds on creating a Tweet on average, which I think is a bit long. They multiply that by the number of Twitter messages you have produced and they provide you with the approximate number of seconds, minutes, hours or days of your life you have spent on Twitter. Of course, I assume most people spend more time reading tweets than writing them, so it’s probably way more than Tweetwasters will ever be able to tell you.
The service was obviously built for fun (by Sugarrae and ITCN), but there’s an application called Wakoopa that actually tracks your software usage continuously and provides you with a good overview of what you use the most (both for desktop and web applications) and tells you what other software you might find useful.
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Last year YouTube scored big at the 
