Google gunning to jump in the EU case against Microsoft

Section: Web, Web Apps, Web Browsers, Websites, Google

And the boys continue to fight over who’s is bigger.  I wonder if they all drive red cars?  This latest round in the Google/Microsoft bru-haha features Google wanting to hop in bed with those battling Microsoft in an effort to prove antitrust charges having to do with the software giant’s ruling of the Web browser market.

Google’s VP of product management gave the following reason for jumping into the proceedings on their company blog:

Google believes that the browser market is still largely uncompetitive, which holds back innovation for users. This is because Internet Explorer is tied to Microsoft’s dominant computer operating system, giving it an unfair advantage over other browsers. Compare this to the mobile market, where Microsoft cannot tie Internet Explorer to a dominant operating system, and its browser therefore has a much lower usage. The value of competition for users (even in the limited form we see today) is clear: tabbed browsing, faster downloads, private browsing features, and more.

I’m sure Google also likes that as party to the case going-ons, they are entitled to access to confidential documents in the case, and have the right to voice objections. 

Much of this started after the EU’s recent decision to grant third-party access to Mozilla.  Mitchell Baker, the chair of Mozilla, had raised concerns similar to Google’s and Microsoft tying IE right to the Windows OS, saying it harms competition and blocks consumer choice.

Microsoft was formally put on notice in the middle of January, after the Commission (the executive arm of the EU) did object to the bundling.  They were given two months to respond, and the case was opened up to third party involvement.  As many know, IE’s share in the browser market has been steadily sinking.  Much of that is due to the growth of popularity of Firefox, although Apple’s Safari and even Google’s Chrome are making their mark.

But this whole thing also raises the issue of the fact that this isn’t the first time Google and Microsoft have butted heads and it’s not going be the last.  Also, a computer needs some kind of default operating system.  (Even to go and get those other ones).  Now tell me when Google comes out with their Android OS they aren’t going to plunk Chrome on for the default browser.  Yeah, right.  Or, why isn’t Google going against Apple for sticking Safari on the Macs?  Yes, it’s competition.  Heck, I don’t even use IE.  But, it certainly isn’t though Google is a stranger to either anti-trust cases themselves, or doing whatever it takes to move ahead in the business.  Which is just what they are doing now.  Maybe they shouldn’t yell so loud when Microsoft does they same thing. 

I’m sure not a flag-waving fan of all things Microsoft, as anyone that has read any of my stuff on here knows.  But Google?  You aren’t always the shiny little icon of above-board business either and shouting otherwise makes you look like the pouting child.

via: CNET

Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Bunnie Huang on China's "Shanzai" Mash-Up Design Shops

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Home and work with comic-store clerks

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
My two favorites are Superman and Spider-Man. Superman is the ideal. He was the first superhero and shows you the best of what humanity could be but it's reflected through the eyes of an outsider, someone who is not human. Then I like Spider-Man because he discovers his powers and, in a very human way, uses them to get the girl and get some money and not be a geek anymore. Then he learns a lesson about responsibility and decides to use his powers for the good of all.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
That can vary on a month-to-month basis. The Ultimates is the least recognizable when compared to the run before it. Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira are great writers but it's such a tonal shift from what Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did that it's just too much of a shock.

How the Safari 4 interface can be improved

FROM APPLETELL - On Tuesday, I released a list of the 8 principal things wrong with the Safari 4 interface from a usability standpoint.  Today, I’m going to outline six fixes that would make me love Safari 4, and that I feel solve all the issues. What you see above is an “Unfail… MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Customizable shipping container for the Caribbean

"Our goal for the initial start up phase of the project is to come up with a design that, like the ISO container, can navigate the many different scenarios -- Haiti, Dominica, Jamaica etc. -- in the Caribbean, and at the same time be "open" enough to take root and adapt so that families can take ownership of the dwelling to meet their needs but within their means," says Hecker.

Wil Wheaton vs. Authors' Guild vs. Kindle

I totally agreed with Cory's take on the whole Author's Guild vs. Reality (and text 2 speech) kerfuffle, and I saw that other authors like John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman were pretty much on the same, uh, page.

But then I wondered: What if we're all wrong? As an author, performer, and consumer of audiobooks, what does this mean for me? Are we really threatened by this?

To find out, I picked a short passage from my book Sunken Treasure and read it. Then, I took the identical passage, and let my computer read it. I recorded the whole thing and put together something I call "Wil Wheaton versus Text 2 Speech" so you can hear for yourself.

Ted Chiang's story Exhalation -- free podcast

Exhalation, MP3 link (Thanks, Avi!)

Australia's Great Firewall collapses under political pressure!

The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online.

Despite this, he is pushing ahead with trials of the scheme using six ISPs - Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1.

But even the trials have been heavily discredited, with experts saying the lack of involvement from the three largest ISPs, Telstra, Optus and iiNet, means the trials will not provide much useful data on the effects of internet filtering in the real-world.

Senator Conroy originally pitched the filters as a way to block child porn but - as ISPs, technical experts and many web users feared - the targets have been broadened significantly since then.

ACMA's secret blacklist, which will form the basis of the mandatory censorship regime, contains 1370 sites, only 674 of which relate to depictions of children under 18. A significant portion - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal.

iriver releases some more details regarding the P7

Section: Audio, Home Audio, Portable Audio, Video, Portable Video

At CES 2009, iriver had on display a new PMP called the P7.  While Apple certainly has the upper hand with MP3 players in the United States, iriver does pretty well in Korea, so the P7 will most likely be released there first.  You may have heard of the P7 already due to its hype, so let’s see what all the fuss is about. 

The P7 comes with a large touch screen, measuring in at 4.3-inches.  The thing about a big screen PMP is the fact that the portability factor decreases, but viewing pleasure increases.  It comes in a few different models with varying hard drive sizes (4GB, 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB).  It has a 35 hour battery life when playing audio and a 7 hour battery life when playing video.  The amount of formats a PMP can handle is important if you are an audio junkie.  The P7 is sure to please you as it supports MP3, WAV, OGG, WMA, FLAC, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, Xvid, WMV, RMVB, and H.264. 

An interesting feature is that the packaging the P7 comes in can double up as a storage container, business card holder, or a picture frame.  I can’t imagine someone buying the P7 just because the packaging is multi-functional, but these features are certainly nice to have.  Now, the optional cradle not only would stand up the device and charge it, but also comes with a integrated speaker.

Hopefully it is released sometime soon in Korea, so we can get an idea on the price and how much longer it would be until it is released in the States. 

Read [iriver] Via [DAP Review]

Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

Filming the Unfilmable: Behind the Scenes of the Watchmen Movie

Some of the most important scenes in the seminal comic book Watchmen take place in the secret basement headquarters of a washed-up ex-superhero called Nite Owl. It's a damp, vaulted space packed with avian-themed costumes and machine tools, a boys'-own-adventure clubhouse. At its center is the Owlship—a UFO-looking aircraft with two round windows that look like big shiny eyes.

And here, on a Vancouver soundstage, Nite Owl's legendary lair has been brought to real life. The Owlship is the size of an Escalade, and I'm standing inside. I'll admit it: I'm surprised. I expected a set that was all facades, no guts. Instead, I'm fiddling with the flame-thrower button on the control panel, admiring the built-in coffeemaker, and checking out a picture of "vintage" superheroes taped onto the bulkhead. It's a comic book come to life, and it's perfect.

And Zack Snyder knows it. The director has been working away on his long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Watchmen for several months, and now, on a winter afternoon with just a few more days left of principal photography, he revels in the results. "That's not cool? That's cool," he says, beaming at the Owlship like a teenager with his first car. "I might not have done anything else cool on the movie, but this is cool."

Photo: Daniel Salo

Snyder then points out two massive chain guns mounted in the floor. "When they fire, these parts here," he says, indicating two little trapdoors, "open up to catch the shells. Krak-krak-krak-krak!"

Wait a minute. Not to go all Comic Book Guy here, but ... chain guns? The Owlship doesn't have chain guns.

Or rather: When legendary comics writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons created Watchmen in 1986, the Owlship didn't have chain guns. Which means Snyder's version, while inarguably cool, is also very risky. Adapting a cult comic into a Hollywood blockbuster is fraught with danger, especially when it's the only superhero comic book ever to win a Hugo Award or land on Time's list of the top 100 novels. Even slight changes to Watchmen, changes that will enhance its appeal to the masses, seem certain to alienate the very people who loved it in the first place.

That's no knock on Snyder. Geeks trust him. Before Watchmen, the 42-year-old filmed the runaway hit 300 in just 61 days, with a $60 million budget, a giant greenscreen, and a knack for hyperkinetic action scenes. His keen treatment of Frank Miller's sepia-tinged, ultraviolent graphic novel about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae won over the nerd fan base and did big numbers at the box office, solidifying the newbie director's reputation as a guy who could make a splashy, mainstream hit while remaining true to the source material.

So you'd think Watchmen would be a snap: shoot, rinse, repeat, right? Wrong. To its many devotees, Watchmen is untouchable, unimprovable, sacrosanct. "The literati were less hard on the Coen brothers for changes they made to No Country for Old Men than the geeks will be on me for changes I make to Watchmen," Snyder says. "There are no more fierce fans than geekdom." In other words, when the movie hits theaters March 6, even a couple of cannons tucked into the Owlship will be noted and potentially deemed unwelcome.

A friend lent me the Watchmen comic in college, a couple of issues at a time, each in its own Mylar slipcover backed with acid-free cardboard. I was already a fan of Alan Moore, and this was his magnum opus. After a lifelong diet of stories about garishly clad people with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, reading Watchmen changed the way I thought about comics. It was like a bar mitzvah—all my childhood stories acquired new significance and texture. It has been 20 years, and I've never read comics the same way since. None of us have.

Snyder's take on Nite Owl still has the owlship—and the flock of neuroses.
Art: Dave Gibbons; courtesy of DC Comics; photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures

For the uninitiated, here's a primer: It's the mid-1980s, and superheroes are real but have been outlawed since 1977. One of the last costumed adventurers, Rorschach, investigates the murder of another, the Comedian. The killing turns out to be part of an elaborate conspiracy that spans more than 50 years of alternate history originally told over 12 issues. Visual themes—primarily a doomsday clock face ticking closer and closer to midnight—recur in unlikely places (a blood-spattered happy face, a radar screen, the surface of Mars). The characters are all perfect archetypes of superheroes, icons that resonate with longtime comic book readers, and the story refracts the conventions and history of the entire genre.

Also, it's really, really dark. Dogs eat children, a pregnant woman gets shot, and good guys get creamed. As source material for a big Hollywood blockbuster, Watchmen is non-obvious.

Even Moore warned filmmakers against trying to adapt it. (Previous attempts to make movies out of his work, such as V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, have been commercial and critical failures.) "With a movie, you are being dragged through the scenario at a relentless 24 frames per second. With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages," says Moore, who along with artist Dave Gibbons packed Watchmen's panels with visual puns, puzzles, and a ferocious command of fiction. "Even the best director could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie." Much of what makes Watchmen so powerful is that the material is so perfectly matched with the comic book form.

To further complicate matters, Watchmen also features a universe of far-flung locales—from New York City to Saigon to Norad to Mars. The sprawling narrative is dense with references, backstories, and flashbacks. (There's even a comic within the comic—about pirates.) And one of the main characters, the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, is bald, naked, and bright blue. (His quantum-mechanical powers let him see all of time and space as frozen instants that he can inhabit in any order. You know—the way you read a comic book.)

No wonder, then, that the basic task of adaptation was troubled from the start. "You can make a movie with the plot of Watchmen, but it won't be Watchmen," says comics critic Douglas Wolk. "You can kind of imitate it, in the same way you can kind of imitate the way Frank Miller drew the comic book 300. But Watchmen wants to be a comic."

Hollywood begs to differ. After a decade of tentpole superhero movies, studios now take it for granted that comic books can deliver at the box office. Even The Dark Knight, a largely kid-proof, two-and-a-half-hour noir epic, grossed half a billion dollars in the US.

But The Dark Knight isn't Watchmen. "Batman is this character, and you can pull elements from one story or another," Gibbons says. "Watchmen is self-contained." In theory, there ought to be a way to adapt Watchmen, but as a work, it just feels finished. Many of us whose neural maps were redrawn when we first read the comic can be excused for thinking that any attempt to make it into a movie would be doomed. Doomed!

And indeed, Watchmen has spent 20 years in Hollywood development hell. Legions of A-list filmmakers have failed to make it work. Let's start with Sam Hamm, who cowrote the script for Tim Burton's Batman. He took a crack in the late '80s and rendered the plot unrecognizable. Around the same time, Brazil director Terry Gilliam considered the project; Moore told him not to do it. Producer Joel Silver, who had made a lot of rock-'em, sock-'em 1980s action pics and later the Matrix trilogy, also toyed with the idea, even envisioning a blue-tinted Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Manhattan.

In 1994, producer Lawrence Gordon broke ties with 20th Century Fox and took the rights to Watchmen with him (or so he thought; more on that later). The project stalled until 2000, when screenwriter David Hayter—fresh from penning the first X-Men movie—pitched his own adaptation, hoping to make it his directorial debut. "Then began a five-year process of each successive studio we went to taking the deal, because they knew it was valuable, and then trying to change the movie," he recalls. Paramount finally came on board, and Hayter stepped aside as director. Darren Aronofsky was attached, then passed to make The Fountain. In 2004, fresh off the success of The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass signed up and spent six months and $7 million in development before Paramount execs decided they didn't understand the script and killed the project again.

The godlike Dr. Manhattan is just one of the dynamic characters Zack Snyder brought to the big screen.
Art: Dave Gibbons, courtesy of DC Comics; Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures

In early 2006, Warner Bros. approached Snyder, who had just wrapped 300 after directing a well-received remake of George Romero's zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. Snyder loved Watchmen, but his first impulse was to say no. Then he had a frightening thought: If he didn't make it and someone else did and messed it up, it would be his fault. He said yes.

Snyder, a onetime director of commercials, is something of a geek-jock hybrid. He's an avid videogamer and occasional anime fan, but he also threw himself into an intensive weight-training regimen on the Watchmen set. He can conduct entire conversations in lines from Star Wars while name-dropping sports icons. ("May the Favre be with you" got laughs from the crew.)

Snyder turned out to be the right guy for the job. Hayter's original draft had moved the story to the present day; Snyder's allegiance to the source material led him and writer Alex Tse to shift it back to the Cold War 1980s, making it a period piece and likely adding $20 million to the eventual $130 million budget. Snyder's deftness with the virtual environments of 300 let him turn a Vancouver back lot into a plausible world of skyscrapers and long sight lines, with greenscreens and CGI building out the rest of Watchmen's wide world.

As for the look of Dr. Manhattan, Snyder's f/x designers came up with something completely new. Snyder and his production team knew the blue, shape-shifting Dr. Manhattan would have to be CG—but how to achieve the neutron-enhanced glow? Snyder had actor Billy Crudup perform the part wearing a suit of LEDs to cast light while reference cameras captured the movements of his face for later transfer to the virtual character. But the glow from his suit wasn't enough: Nearly every scene featuring Dr. Manhattan had to be enhanced with an LED-covered pillar and a reflective sphere to get the light effects just right. The final result is a digital amalgamation of all three.

To handle the way Moore and Gibbons loaded every frame with information, Snyder used Easter eggs—hidden surprises for alert viewers that the camera will pass by fleetingly. (Don't miss the mission-specific Nite Owl costumes in the hero's secret basement and the super-dense, 6-minute opening credits sequence that retells the alternate history of the US.) "We tried to layer far more deeply than film would usually allow you to," production designer Alex McDowell says. "Zack was always saying, drill down as far as you can." That's one way you adapt the unadaptable: You find the details that the geeks are going to look for, squirrel them away in the movie's cubbyholes, and then let the fans know they're there. (The pirate story, for instance, is slated to be an animated short on the Watchmen DVD.)

All that reverence seems to have given Snyder the nerve to make one massive alteration to the original plot: He changed the ending. In the comic book, a Godzilla-sized, genetically engineered squidlike creature makes an absurd yet devastating appearance. Not anymore. "We don't have the monster," Snyder says. "We still end the film in a really gruesome way." But for geeks, changing the ending of Watchmen goes way beyond a director's creative license. It's bordering on blasphemy.

It's a humid day in July, and all Snyder wants to do is collapse in his hotel room. But between him and it are four lanes of traffic, two trolley tracks, a railroad, and 60,000 attendees of the 39th San Diego Comic-Con. A significant percentage of them are wearing cakey Heath Ledger Joker makeup or heavy Mandalorian battle armor.

Snyder is sporting his own standard uniform: white polo shirt and comfy sweatpants (today they're blue). He has spent the last few hours signing autographs and giving tours of the Owlship, shipped here on a barge five months after filming wrapped in Vancouver. And now he's in the thick of it. Fan after fan approaches, asking for handshakes and hugs with an awe typically reserved for the likes of Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. One kid gives his digital camera to a buddy, puts his arm around Snyder, and shouts, "I love Watchmen!"

Art: Dave Gibbons, courtesy of DC Comics

Art: Dave Gibbons, courtesy of DC Comics

The nerd world has been clamoring for an extended glimpse of the still-unfinished movie, and Snyder is here to show them three minutes then introduce his cast. Movie studios have long used Comic-Con to turn committed fans into evangelists while generating mainstream media buzz; this is where Snyder has to show that he can bring the geeks on board.

The next day, nearly 7,000 people pack into a massive auditorium at the Convention Center for Snyder's noontime presentation. It's a full house except for several roped-off rows in front—spots reserved for the Warner Bros. brass flying down to gauge the response of their target demo. Snyder has already screened a rough cut for the execs, and while their reaction was favorable, they had one major concern: At more than three hours, the movie is way too long.

But what to cut? Early on, as Snyder tells it, the studio told him he should lose two scenes: the Comedian's funeral, which establishes tone and introduces key characters, and Dr. Manhattan's reverie on Mars, where he narrates his origin story and muses on the nature of time. Snyder pushed back, hard. "I said, 'Here's the problem: If you take those things out, I'm really not interested in making the movie.'" He got his way, and the scenes are still in. But he's going to have to cut something, and it's going to hurt.

At last the execs arrive and the lights dim. The huge screens at the front of the room (and a bunch of auxiliary screens mounted throughout the house) display the footage, a stylish, goose-bumpy montage without dialog, set to the melancholy tones of Philip Glass: Rorschach's ever-changing black-and-white mask shifts restlessly as he finds the secret stash of weapons that belonged to the dead Comedian. Hapless atomic physicist Jon Osterman gets blown up during an experiment and is reborn as Dr. Manhattan. A drop of the Comedian's bright red blood falls onto his trademark yellow happy-face pin. Dr. Manhattan's clockwork palace floats above the sands of Mars. Nite Owl and a scantily clad Silk Spectre kiss as a mushroom cloud blooms behind them. Moore's characters, Gibbons' imagery, but with the now-signature slo-mo/speed-up style Snyder deployed in 300. I begin to see how Gibbons' rigid panels could be turned into 24 frames a second at a 2.40-to-1 aspect ratio. But without dialog, it's impossible to tell whether Snyder has nailed it—or just captured the pretty pictures.

The Comic-Con attendees aren't worried about such niceties at the moment. They're just elated to see Watchmen come to life on the screen. When the clip ends and the lights come up, they peg the applause-o-meter deep into the red. Snyder's previous movies got him into the club; now he's the president.

Five months later, Snyder is finishing postproduction, his responsibilities now largely confined to color correction.

His film's legal troubles, however, drag on. Remember those rights that producer Lawrence Gordon took with him in 1994? Fox argued it was never rightfully compensated for its stake in the project. The studio sued Warner Bros. shortly before Snyder wrapped shooting, and for several months both sides traded court filings. A judge seemed to be leaning in Fox's direction; fans worried the movie's release date would be delayed. (The case was settled in mid-January: Warner Bros. forked over as much as $10 million in cash, according to reports, as well as a potentially lucrative chunk of box-office receipts.)

Meanwhile, Snyder has whittled down the movie to two and a half hours. Watching his film over and over in the editing bay, he finally accepted the truth: There was never going to be a three-hour theatrical version of Watchmen. Snyder would have to capture the book's tone, essence, and ideas but judiciously cut the story line. This picture had to be Zack Snyder's Watchmen instead of Alan Moore's. "Look, I have a fan-fetishistic relationship with it, too, but you have to get space from that," Snyder says. "You get a movie that has some of the experiences of the graphic novel but doesn't attempt to replace it. It is a separate artistic experience from the book."

Which is for the best, really. The movie is in the can; Snyder is already working on his next two projects: He's directing a cartoon based on a young-adult series of fantasy novels called Guardians of Ga'Hoole, as well as Sucker Punch, a low-budget psychological thriller. "I wanted to make an action movie that's just, like, crazy and sexy and dark and just cool," he says. "I don't want any rules, and I don't want any pedigree. I just want to go crazy and shoot some shots that make me remember why movies are badass."

Because you know what's not badass? Meeting the demands of a studio, a mass audience, and cultish fans. Even if Watchmen is well received, the burden of playing the dutiful director adapting the work of his heroes—Romero, Miller, and Moore—has become too much. "I ended up with these guys, but it wasn't by design," he says. "The thing is, you can get crucified on the same cross that you worship." It's finally time to climb down from the Owlship.

— Senior editor Adam Rogers (adam_rogers@wired.com) interviewed Battlestar Galactica producer Ron Moore in issue 16.06.

Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone

Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

Mary Lou Jepsen didn't set out to invent the netbook and turn the computer industry upside down. She was just trying to create a supercheap laptop. In 2005, Jepsen, a pioneering LCD screen designer, was tapped to lead the development of the machine that would become known as One Laptop per Child. Nicholas Negroponte, the longtime MIT Media Lab visionary, launched the project hoping to create an inexpensive computer for children in developing countries. It would have Wi-Fi, a color screen, and a full keyboard—and sell for about $100. At that price, third-world governments could buy millions and hand them out freely in rural villages. Plus, it had to be small, incredibly rugged, and able to run on minimal power. "Half of the world's children have no regular access to electricity," Jepsen points out.

The miserly constraints spurred her to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.

To build the laptop, dubbed the XO-1, One Laptop per Child hired the Taiwanese firm Quanta. It's hardly a household name, but Quanta is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world. Odds are that parts of the machine on your desk, whether it's from Apple, Dell, or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta—possibly even designed by Quanta. Like most Taiwanese computermakers, it employs some of the sharpest engineers on the planet. They solved many of Jepsen's most daunting engineering challenges, and by 2007, the OLPC was shaping up. The poor kids of the world would have their notebook—if not quite for $100, for not a whole lot more.

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.

All of which is, when you think about it, incredibly weird. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.

But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.

Spec Shot: Laptop vs. Netbook

By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent.

"We started inventing technology for the bottom of the pyramid," Jepsen says, "but the top of the pyramid wants it too." This bit of trickle-up innovation, this netbook, might well reshape the computer industry—if it doesn't kill it first.

I wrote this story on a netbook, and if you had peeked over my shoulder, you would have seen precisely two icons on my desktop: the Firefox browser and a trash can. Nothing else.

It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser. I use it for updating Twitter and Facebook and for blogging. Meebo.com lets me log into several instant-messaging accounts simultaneously. Last.fm gives me tunes, and webmail does the email. I use Google Docs for word processing, and if I need to record video, I can do it directly from webcam to YouTube. Come to think of it, because none of my documents reside on the netbook, I'm not sure I even need the trash can.

Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.

But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty. "Regular computers are so fast, you really can't tell the difference between 1.6 giga and 2 giga," says Andy Tung, vice president of US sales for MSI, the Taiwanese maker of the Wind netbook. "We can tell the difference between one second and two seconds, but not between 0.0001 and 0.0002 second." For most of today's computing tasks, the biggest performance drags aren't inside the machine. They're outside. Is your Wi-Fi signal strong? Is Twitter down again?

Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for.Which is to say, a pretty small list of things that are conducted almost entirely online. This was Asustek's epiphany. It got laptop prices under $300 by crafting a device that makes absolutely no sense when it's not online. Consider: The Eee's original flash drive was only 4 gigs. That's so small you need to host all your pictures, videos, and files online—and install minimal native software—because there's simply no room inside your machine.

Netbooks prove that the "cloud" is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outsource the difficult work somewhere else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.

Most consumers have never heard of Taiwan's quiet, unheralded PC firms, but they've been behind some of the most important hardware of the past three decades. Quanta first gained notice in the '80s for cleverly cramming new components into notebooks. Then, in 2001, Apple contracted with the company to design its G4 notebook from top to bottom. The product was a spectacular success, and Quanta was soon doing engineering for every other major PC maker. Asustek and MSI, the two other giants of the Taiwanese laptop world, also branched out from motherboards into everything from LCD TVs to mobile phones. These companies are enormous: Quanta had sales of $25 billion last year, more than marquee firms like Amazon.com, Texas Instruments, and Electronic Arts.

Even though the Taiwanese manufacturers remained subservient to the well-known PC brands, they soaked up tons of knowledge over the years. For instance, when Intel created its x486 chip in 1988, Asustek built a compatible motherboard before Intel could make its own board work. Later, Asustek was producing components for Apple laptops. "Nine times out of 10," recalls John Jacobs, a former Apple manager who now covers the LCD market as an analyst for DisplaySearch, "when we said 'Jump,' they said 'How high?' That's how Asustek learned a lot."

But for all their success, companies like Asustek and MSI were outsiders. And when Asustek released the Eee netbook, big firms like Dell, HP, and Apple did nothing for months. "All the other brands were thinking, 'Oh, this is crap,'" recalls Lillian Lin, Asustek's global marketing director.

Dell and HP weren't going to pioneer a $400 laptop, because they were already selling laptops for $1,000. Why mess with a good thing? MSI had no laptop business at all, and Asustek had only a small business selling full-price machines under its own brand, mostly in Asia and Europe. Since the Taiwanese weren't addicted to selling SUV-class computers, they could swoop in like Honda with smaller, more efficient models. They also knew how to design on the cheap after years of producing motherboards with excruciatingly tiny margins.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. "Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry," says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta's work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek's development of the netbook.

The Taiwanese firms, Shih argues, now have enormous clout in the PC industry. In the US, we regard branding and marketing—convincing people what to buy—as core business functions. What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base. As far as laptop manufacturing goes, Taiwan essentially now owns the market; the devices aren't produced in significant volumes anywhere else.

If you had asked Taiwanese hardware CEOs a few years ago about their relationship with Dell, HP, and Apple, they'd have told you that the American companies did the branding and sales while outsourcing their design and production to Taiwan. Today the view from Asia is increasingly the reverse. "When I talk to them now," Shih laughs, "they say, 'We outsource our branding and sales to them.'"

"But what about Photoshop?" It's the standard retort from those who dismiss netbooks as children's toys. Sure, a dinky 1.6-GHz chip and Linux are fine for email and silly things like YouTube. But what about when you need to do some real computing, like sophisticated photo editing? The cloud won't help you there, kid.

In the narrowest sense, this is true: A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn't find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it—until a week later, when I was blogging and needed to tweak a photo. Frustrated, I went online and discovered FotoFlexer, one of several free Web-based editing tools. I uploaded my picture, and in about one minute I'd cropped it, deepened the color saturation, and sharpened it.

I haven't used Photoshop since.

Keep in mind that I like Photoshop. I'm not doing this to make any geeky ideological point about how bleeding-edge I am or how much I hate paying for boxed software. It's simply that the hassle of finding my Photoshop disc now exceeds the ease of using FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser-based app is a mere 900 KB, and "to the average user, that comes down really fast," as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, which created it, points out to me.

My Photoshop experience is just one example of how the software industry is changing. It used to be that coders were forced to produce bloatware with endless features because they had to guess what customers might want to do. But if you design a piece of software that lives in the cloud, you know what your customers are doing—you can watch them in real time. Shirazi's firm discovered that FotoFlexer users rarely do fancy editing; the most frequently used features are tools for drawing text and scribbles on pictures. Or consider the Writely app, which eventually became the word processor part of Google Docs: When Sam Shillace first put it online, he found to his surprise that what users wanted most was a way to let several people edit a document together.

"It used to be, 'I'm buying a paint program, and I'll get the one with 5,000 features. I don't know what 2,000 of those features are, but I'll get it just in case,'" Shillace says. "Today it's just, 'Which one is most easily available? Which one is ready online?' So applications are competing on merit; they're not competing on bulk."

Netbooks are so cheap, they're reshaping the fundamental economics of the PC business. Last October, British mobile-phone carrier Vodafone offered its customers a new deal: If they signed a two-year contract for high-speed wireless data, Vodafone would give them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. That isn't quite the same as getting a free computer; after all, Vodafone bills users $1,800 on that two-year contract, so it can afford to throw in the netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered a similar deal: a $99 Acer Aspire netbook for anyone who signed up for two years of AT&T's 3G service.)

What these deals signal is that computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It's difficult to charge for. What's really valuable—what people will pay through the nose for—is the ability to communicate.

So netbooks have sent a sort of hot-cold shudder through the computer industry. Sure, it's great to have an exploding new product category. But this is a category in which it's incredibly hard to make a dime: At $300, a netbook sells for barely more than the sum of its parts—and sometimes less. "The profit margins on these things are nonexistent," chuckles Paul Goldenberg, managing director of Digital Gadgets, which created a line of netbooks under the Sylvania brand. "Everyone is saying 'We're losing money now, but we'll make it up on volume, right?'"

Nearly every company in the PC industry has had its game plan uprooted by netbooks. Microsoft had intended to stop selling Windows XP this summer, driving customers to its more lucrative Vista operating system. But when Linux roared out of the gate on netbooks, Microsoft quickly backpedaled, extending XP for another two years—specifically for netbooks. Most experts guess that Redmond can charge barely $15 for XP on a netbook, less than a quarter of what it previously sold for. (Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks assures me the company is earning "good money" on the devices and plans to make sure its next OS, Windows 7, can run on netbooks—Vista performs poorly on them.) For its part, Intel is selling millions of its low-power Atom chips to netbook manufacturers. "We see this as our next billion-dollar market," says Anil Nanduri, Intel's technical marketing manager—except that the company makes only a fraction of the money on an Atom chip as on a more powerful Celeron or Pentium in a full-size laptop.

The great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy"—the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it's also possible that the next time you're replacing an aging laptop, you'll walk into the store and wonder, "Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?" And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US—where netbooks are only just taking off—it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they're already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, "I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, 'This is where my next billion customers comes from.' And he was not referring to the US." He meant the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make—Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps?—will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.

Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled boxes with screens the size of your living room—at $2,000 a pop. For everyone else—lawyers looking for something to do on the train, women desperate for something that fits in their handbag—netbooks will dominate. It's the rise of the very small machines.

Contributing editor Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about open source hardware in issue 16.11.

Feb. 27, 1932: Neutron Discovered; A-Bomb on the Way

1932: English physicist James Chadwick publishes a letter on the existence of the neutron. His discovery helps clear the way for splitting the nuclei of even the heaviest atomic elements, making possible the development of the atomic bomb.

Unlike the proton, the other large subatomic particle that helps form the nucleus of an atom, the neutron contains no electric charge. This enables it to pass through the electric barrier of heavy atoms to penetrate and split their nuclei, the basis of the nuclear chain reaction.

Chadwick studied various problems related to radioactivity under Nobel laureate (and proton-discoverer) Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester before going to Germany to work with Hans Geiger at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichanstalt (Imperial Physical-Technical Institution) in Berlin. He was in the German capital when World War I began.

As an enemy alien, Chadwick was interned by the Germans, but allowed to set up a laboratory in the stables of his civilian internee camp outside Berlin. He remained there throughout the war, doing his research, before returning to Britain in 1919.

Working again with Rutherford, who had by this time moved to Cambridge University, Chadwick helped his mentor achieve the first artificial nuclear transformation. They also achieved the transmutation of other light elements by bombarding them with alpha particles, while pressing ahead with research into the basic structures of the atomic nucleus.

Chadwick's discovery of the neutron — posited by Rutherford 12 years earlier — was made while he was still at Cambridge. It led to the fission of uranium 235, the key element used in the development of the atomic bomb. Regarding his achievement, Chadwick remarked with some ambivalence that he now realized that the development of an atomic weapon was not only likely, but inevitable.

During World War II, Chadwick came to the United States as part of the British delegation working on the Manhattan Project.

For his discovery of the neutron, Chadwick was first awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society in 1932 and, three years later, the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Source: Nobelprize.org

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

Mary Lou Jepsen didn't set out to invent the netbook and turn the computer industry upside down. She was just trying to create a supercheap laptop. In 2005, Jepsen, a pioneering LCD screen designer, was tapped to lead the development of the machine that would become known as One Laptop per Child. Nicholas Negroponte, the longtime MIT Media Lab visionary, launched the project hoping to create an inexpensive computer for children in developing countries. It would have Wi-Fi, a color screen, and a full keyboard—and sell for about $100. At that price, third-world governments could buy millions and hand them out freely in rural villages. Plus, it had to be small, incredibly rugged, and able to run on minimal power. "Half of the world's children have no regular access to electricity," Jepsen points out.

The miserly constraints spurred her to be fiendishly resourceful. Instead of using a spinning hard drive she chose flash memory—the type in your USB thumb drive—because it draws very little juice and doesn't break when dropped. For software she picked Linux and other free, open source packages instead of paying for Microsoft's wares. She used an AMD Geode processor, which isn't very fast but requires less than a watt of power. And as the pièce de résistance, she devised an ingenious LCD panel that detects whether onscreen images are static (like when you're reading a document) and tells the main processor to shut down, saving precious electricity.

To build the laptop, dubbed the XO-1, One Laptop per Child hired the Taiwanese firm Quanta. It's hardly a household name, but Quanta is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world. Odds are that parts of the machine on your desk, whether it's from Apple, Dell, or Hewlett-Packard, were made by Quanta—possibly even designed by Quanta. Like most Taiwanese computermakers, it employs some of the sharpest engineers on the planet. They solved many of Jepsen's most daunting engineering challenges, and by 2007, the OLPC was shaping up. The poor kids of the world would have their notebook—if not quite for $100, for not a whole lot more.

Inspired (or perhaps a bit scared) by the OLPC project, Asustek—Quanta's archrival in Taiwan and the world's seventh-largest notebook maker—began crafting its own inexpensive, low-performance computer. It, too, would be built cheaply using Linux, flash memory, and a tiny 7-inch screen. It had no DVD drive and wasn't potent enough to run programs like Photoshop. Indeed, Asustek intended it mainly just for checking email and surfing the Web. Their customers, they figured, would be children, seniors, and the emerging middle class in India or China who can't afford a full $1,000 laptop.

What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.

All of which is, when you think about it, incredibly weird. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.

But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop—they wanted less.

Spec Shot: Laptop vs. Netbook

By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent.

"We started inventing technology for the bottom of the pyramid," Jepsen says, "but the top of the pyramid wants it too." This bit of trickle-up innovation, this netbook, might well reshape the computer industry—if it doesn't kill it first.

I wrote this story on a netbook, and if you had peeked over my shoulder, you would have seen precisely two icons on my desktop: the Firefox browser and a trash can. Nothing else.

It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser. I use it for updating Twitter and Facebook and for blogging. Meebo.com lets me log into several instant-messaging accounts simultaneously. Last.fm gives me tunes, and webmail does the email. I use Google Docs for word processing, and if I need to record video, I can do it directly from webcam to YouTube. Come to think of it, because none of my documents reside on the netbook, I'm not sure I even need the trash can.

Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.

But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty. "Regular computers are so fast, you really can't tell the difference between 1.6 giga and 2 giga," says Andy Tung, vice president of US sales for MSI, the Taiwanese maker of the Wind netbook. "We can tell the difference between one second and two seconds, but not between 0.0001 and 0.0002 second." For most of today's computing tasks, the biggest performance drags aren't inside the machine. They're outside. Is your Wi-Fi signal strong? Is Twitter down again?

Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for.Which is to say, a pretty small list of things that are conducted almost entirely online. This was Asustek's epiphany. It got laptop prices under $300 by crafting a device that makes absolutely no sense when it's not online. Consider: The Eee's original flash drive was only 4 gigs. That's so small you need to host all your pictures, videos, and files online—and install minimal native software—because there's simply no room inside your machine.

Netbooks prove that the "cloud" is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outsource the difficult work somewhere else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.

Most consumers have never heard of Taiwan's quiet, unheralded PC firms, but they've been behind some of the most important hardware of the past three decades. Quanta first gained notice in the '80s for cleverly cramming new components into notebooks. Then, in 2001, Apple contracted with the company to design its G4 notebook from top to bottom. The product was a spectacular success, and Quanta was soon doing engineering for every other major PC maker. Asustek and MSI, the two other giants of the Taiwanese laptop world, also branched out from motherboards into everything from LCD TVs to mobile phones. These companies are enormous: Quanta had sales of $25 billion last year, more than marquee firms like Amazon.com, Texas Instruments, and Electronic Arts.

Even though the Taiwanese manufacturers remained subservient to the well-known PC brands, they soaked up tons of knowledge over the years. For instance, when Intel created its x486 chip in 1988, Asustek built a compatible motherboard before Intel could make its own board work. Later, Asustek was producing components for Apple laptops. "Nine times out of 10," recalls John Jacobs, a former Apple manager who now covers the LCD market as an analyst for DisplaySearch, "when we said 'Jump,' they said 'How high?' That's how Asustek learned a lot."

But for all their success, companies like Asustek and MSI were outsiders. And when Asustek released the Eee netbook, big firms like Dell, HP, and Apple did nothing for months. "All the other brands were thinking, 'Oh, this is crap,'" recalls Lillian Lin, Asustek's global marketing director.

Dell and HP weren't going to pioneer a $400 laptop, because they were already selling laptops for $1,000. Why mess with a good thing? MSI had no laptop business at all, and Asustek had only a small business selling full-price machines under its own brand, mostly in Asia and Europe. Since the Taiwanese weren't addicted to selling SUV-class computers, they could swoop in like Honda with smaller, more efficient models. They also knew how to design on the cheap after years of producing motherboards with excruciatingly tiny margins.

In The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen famously argued that true breakthroughs almost always come from upstarts, since profitable firms rarely want to upend their business models. "Netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry," says Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied both Quanta's work on the One Laptop per Child project and Asustek's development of the netbook.

The Taiwanese firms, Shih argues, now have enormous clout in the PC industry. In the US, we regard branding and marketing—convincing people what to buy—as core business functions. What Asustek proved is that the companies with real leverage are the ones that actually make desirable products. The Taiwanese laptop builders possess the atom-hacking smarts that once defined America but which have atrophied here along with our industrial base. As far as laptop manufacturing goes, Taiwan essentially now owns the market; the devices aren't produced in significant volumes anywhere else.

If you had asked Taiwanese hardware CEOs a few years ago about their relationship with Dell, HP, and Apple, they'd have told you that the American companies did the branding and sales while outsourcing their design and production to Taiwan. Today the view from Asia is increasingly the reverse. "When I talk to them now," Shih laughs, "they say, 'We outsource our branding and sales to them.'"

"But what about Photoshop?" It's the standard retort from those who dismiss netbooks as children's toys. Sure, a dinky 1.6-GHz chip and Linux are fine for email and silly things like YouTube. But what about when you need to do some real computing, like sophisticated photo editing? The cloud won't help you there, kid.

In the narrowest sense, this is true: A really powerful application like Adobe Photoshop demands a much faster processor. But consider my experience: This spring, after my regular Windows XP laptop began crashing twice a day, I reformatted the hard drive. As I went about reinstalling my software, I couldn't find my Photoshop disc. I forgot about it—until a week later, when I was blogging and needed to tweak a photo. Frustrated, I went online and discovered FotoFlexer, one of several free Web-based editing tools. I uploaded my picture, and in about one minute I'd cropped it, deepened the color saturation, and sharpened it.

I haven't used Photoshop since.

Keep in mind that I like Photoshop. I'm not doing this to make any geeky ideological point about how bleeding-edge I am or how much I hate paying for boxed software. It's simply that the hassle of finding my Photoshop disc now exceeds the ease of using FotoFlexer. The code for working with the browser-based app is a mere 900 KB, and "to the average user, that comes down really fast," as Sharam Shirazi, CEO of Arbor Labs, which created it, points out to me.

My Photoshop experience is just one example of how the software industry is changing. It used to be that coders were forced to produce bloatware with endless features because they had to guess what customers might want to do. But if you design a piece of software that lives in the cloud, you know what your customers are doing—you can watch them in real time. Shirazi's firm discovered that FotoFlexer users rarely do fancy editing; the most frequently used features are tools for drawing text and scribbles on pictures. Or consider the Writely app, which eventually became the word processor part of Google Docs: When Sam Shillace first put it online, he found to his surprise that what users wanted most was a way to let several people edit a document together.

"It used to be, 'I'm buying a paint program, and I'll get the one with 5,000 features. I don't know what 2,000 of those features are, but I'll get it just in case,'" Shillace says. "Today it's just, 'Which one is most easily available? Which one is ready online?' So applications are competing on merit; they're not competing on bulk."

Netbooks are so cheap, they're reshaping the fundamental economics of the PC business. Last October, British mobile-phone carrier Vodafone offered its customers a new deal: If they signed a two-year contract for high-speed wireless data, Vodafone would give them a Dell Mini 9 netbook. That isn't quite the same as getting a free computer; after all, Vodafone bills users $1,800 on that two-year contract, so it can afford to throw in the netbook. (In December, RadioShack offered a similar deal: a $99 Acer Aspire netbook for anyone who signed up for two years of AT&T's 3G service.)

What these deals signal is that computers are developing the same economics as mobile phones. Hardware is becoming a commodity. It's difficult to charge for. What's really valuable—what people will pay through the nose for—is the ability to communicate.

So netbooks have sent a sort of hot-cold shudder through the computer industry. Sure, it's great to have an exploding new product category. But this is a category in which it's incredibly hard to make a dime: At $300, a netbook sells for barely more than the sum of its parts—and sometimes less. "The profit margins on these things are nonexistent," chuckles Paul Goldenberg, managing director of Digital Gadgets, which created a line of netbooks under the Sylvania brand. "Everyone is saying 'We're losing money now, but we'll make it up on volume, right?'"

Nearly every company in the PC industry has had its game plan uprooted by netbooks. Microsoft had intended to stop selling Windows XP this summer, driving customers to its more lucrative Vista operating system. But when Linux roared out of the gate on netbooks, Microsoft quickly backpedaled, extending XP for another two years—specifically for netbooks. Most experts guess that Redmond can charge barely $15 for XP on a netbook, less than a quarter of what it previously sold for. (Microsoft corporate vice president Brad Brooks assures me the company is earning "good money" on the devices and plans to make sure its next OS, Windows 7, can run on netbooks—Vista performs poorly on them.) For its part, Intel is selling millions of its low-power Atom chips to netbook manufacturers. "We see this as our next billion-dollar market," says Anil Nanduri, Intel's technical marketing manager—except that the company makes only a fraction of the money on an Atom chip as on a more powerful Celeron or Pentium in a full-size laptop.

The great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy"—the little mobile thingy you get after you already own a normal-size laptop. But it's also possible that the next time you're replacing an aging laptop, you'll walk into the store and wonder, "Why exactly am I paying so much for a machine that I use for nothing but email and the Web?" And Microsoft and Intel and Dell and HP and Lenovo will die a little bit inside that day.

The decision is probably out of American hands. Indeed, living in the US—where netbooks are only just taking off—it can be hard to grasp just how popular the devices have become in Europe and Asia and the degree to which they're already altering the landscape. As Shih told me, "I was talking to the chair of one of the major Taiwanese notebook manufacturers, and he said, 'This is where my next billion customers comes from.' And he was not referring to the US." He meant the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China—where billions of very price-conscious customers have yet to buy their first computer. And the decisions they make—Windows or Linux? Microsoft wares or free cloud apps?—will have enormous influence on how computing evolves in the next few years.

Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled boxes with screens the size of your living room—at $2,000 a pop. For everyone else—lawyers looking for something to do on the train, women desperate for something that fits in their handbag—netbooks will dominate. It's the rise of the very small machines.

Contributing editor Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about open source hardware in issue 16.11.

Secret Lives of Comic Store Employees

Superman has Clark Kent. Spider-Man has Peter Parker. But it's not just superheroes who have secret identities. Wired.com's new "Secret Lives" series looks at individuals you encounter every day and reveals a side of them you normally wouldn't see.

What better profession to begin with than the comic store employee? And what better time to start than now, as the WonderCon comic convention invades San Francisco this weekend?

From the sassy princess of underground comics to the pajama-wearing ex-convict, your local pulp-pushers are anything but ordinary. We've profiled nine comic crusaders, five from New York and four from the San Francisco Bay Area, photographing them in their shops and at home. We asked each employee roughly the same questions, and their responses are published alongside their photos.

Strap on your utility belts (fanny packs) and click through the gallery to remove the masks of these not-so-costumed heroes.

Use the thumbnails under the main image to navigate through the gallery or click through, page by page, using the links below.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: Ted Alexander
Store: Midtown Comics
Age: 33
Hometown: Grass Valley, California
Lives in: West Village, New York City

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Obviously Superman because he has no weaknesses except a green rock. But realistically, I'd say Spider-Man.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
X-Men has fallen because there are so many titles bearing the X-Men name that they've forgotten what it was about.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
Daredevil. He was a good character before but the way he's being written now and the character development is excellent.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I've been working here for 10 months. I worked at another store for two years at the end of the '90s but got laid off when the store closed. The comic book industry crashed then. Then everyone started jumping in during Superman #75, when he died. All the different covers and new companies started coming in and flushing the market with bad books.

I think we're actually higher now than we've ever been. With all the movies coming out, Ironman and Dark Knight, it's definitely one of the biggest industries I can think of.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best part is the people and talking comics everyday. The worst part is seeing the same comic over and over again. Or the actual shipments of comics. It's more labor than you'd think. A big store like us gets a couple thousand of each book every week and we're on the second floor without an elevator.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
I have a girlfriend and social life and a real life outside the store.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
The perfectionists. Like the clerks with the eggs, inspecting each one. The people that look for the perfect, most valuable comic hoping to keep it for 10 years, but in reality it won't be worth a lot of money because there are so many out there. They aren't as rare as they used to be.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
That we're fat, nerdy and don't have any lives. Everyday I see businessmen and women come in. It's all different types of people and that Simpsons Comic Book Store Guy doesn't really represent any of them.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
A lot of people raised on comics were also raised on computers and the internet presents new ways to keep up with the comics. Sites like Newsarama.com keep people informed on upcoming storylines and keep people connected. One promotes the other.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: Steven Norman
Store: Jim Hanley's Universe
Age: 25
Hometown: Bronx, New York City
Lives in: Bronx, New York City
Background: Graduated with a degree in Cartooning from the School of Visual Arts, aspiring comic book artist

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
My two favorites are Superman and Spider-Man. Superman is the ideal. He was the first superhero and shows you the best of what humanity could be but it's reflected through the eyes of an outsider, someone who is not human. Then I like Spider-Man because he discovers his powers and, in a very human way, uses them to get the girl and get some money and not be a geek anymore. Then he learns a lesson about responsibility and decides to use his powers for the good of all.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
That can vary on a month-to-month basis. The Ultimates is the least recognizable when compared to the run before it. Jeph Loeb and Joe Madureira are great writers but it's such a tonal shift from what Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch did that it's just too much of a shock.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
Green Lantern is on the way up. A while back they replaced the main character Hal Jordan with a new Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner. But he was never the equal of his predecessor. It was hard for fans to take. Then they had Hal turn evil. But when they restarted the title they brought Hal Jordan back but the writer Geoff Johns made a strong move and kept Kyle Rayner. It kept the new fans without upsetting the old fans. He also brought back the Green Lantern Core.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I've worked here for four years. I was recommended by a friend who had just become an assistant manager. It's a very collegial atmosphere. I've made some of my best friends and met a lot of connections to the industry. There's a lot of great talent that comes in and it's good to be a part of that creative nexus.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best part is doing a job that you enjoy. Nine times out of 10 if you work at a comic book store it's because you love comics. Learning more about comics, talking to people who love them and working with people who love them. There is little more you could ask of your 9-to-5 job.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
That's a bold question. Contrary to the popular belief regarding the average comic-book-reading male, I have a girlfriend.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
It can be bothersome when someone is going to show you a pack of cards and ask you how much it is, and you see the price tag right there on it.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
That comics are only for kids and they're infantile and immature. The thing that's on the tip of everyone's tongue right now is Alan Moore's Watchmen, which is one of the most literary works in comics. You cannot call that anything less than artwork.

The biggest misconception of the fans is that we can't hold a conversation in polite society. They think we're just people who eat, sleep and breathe comics and science fiction. But we are people who have girlfriends and go out on Friday nights and we know how to be out in a social setting.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
First of all, for the geek or nerd subculture the two things have always go together. The smart and nerdy people were ostracized in high school and they couldn't get that level of social interaction so they live vicariously through comics. That's why smarter people, tech junkies, can get into comics. Also, on another level it's interesting to see where technology can go through comics. Like Ironman who bases all his inventions on things humanity may need in 10 or 20 years. It's very much in line with what's the next technology will be. It can be inspiring.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: Raymond Salvador
Store: Forbidden Planet
Age: 23
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Lives in: Queens, New York
Background: Aspiring comic book artist

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
That's a strange question. I do like the idea of having a superpower or being a character, but I've never really wanted that to be me. I always liked the character Colossus because he's a big guy and I was a really big kid. You get ideas about him because of his size but it turns out that he's an artist, like I am as well. He's a sensitive guy. He has a strength in his heart. So maybe him.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
Wow. Half of Marvel's books. That's mean. Marvel's become very repetitive, redundant and kinda cookie-cutter. Just like gimmicky writing. They did terrible things with Spider-Man. The character was going in such a great direction when J. Michael Straczynski was writing him. Aunt May knew he was Spider-Man and he was growing exponentially and going to a different place. He wasn't just this teenager anymore. He's out of college now and 26 or 27 and some writers still treat him like a teen. They sacrifice quality over quantity and put out too many books.

Which has risen like a pheonix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
I think Justice Society of America is a wonderful book. They had a series in the late '90s and early 2000s that was really good and now what they're doing is super-relevant and superoriginal. It's these characters that no one really knows or cares about but if any one really picked up that book, I think they'd be reading it. For the first 10 or 15 issues I was like a crackhead waiting for the next issue of JSA.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I've been working at Forbidden Planet for about eight months but my other store I started back in '03 or '02. I've asked the owner since I was 8 to hire me because I always wanted to be there. And finally I started picking up some Sundays and I've been doing it ever since.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best parts are connecting people with comic books. It's just wonderful. When you recommend something for someone and they come back later and say, "That was amazing! What else you got for me?" And they keep coming back. A lot of people have preconceived notions because of movies and cartoons and don't understand how intelligent, original and inventive these books can be. Especially work by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Those guys are amazing.

The worst part would be the same as any retail job. You have a manager on your ass and people just don't like you for some reason. Some bigger stores have like eight managers.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
I'm surprisingly smooth with ladies.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
When people ask stupid questions or do stupid things. Typical rude things.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
That we're the stereotype of the geek. Though I'm a geek and I'm proud. The biggest misconception about comic books is that they're cheesy or corny or ridiculous or they're not intelligent writing. The thing with comics is that it merges great writers with great artists; it's two forms of art and storytelling combined. People just see them as 2-D, flat, with no structure. And to those people I say, read The Invisibles. Read Watchmen. And if you think these are the exceptions, get back to me and I'll give you 15 other books that are just as good.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
It's that — I hate to say it — that escapist mindset. You just like to be in other worlds and be other people. Tech junkies like their massive multiplayer RPGs and a lot of comic book geeks do too. Not all the time, but it's a factor.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: Raph Soohoo
Store: Midtown Comics
Age: 24
Hometown: New York City
Lives in: Lower East Side, New York City
Background: Aspiring comic book writer

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Hands down, Superman. I'm a big Superman fan and I'm a big Batman fan. But Batman's human and when he jumps off stuff, he gets hurt. When Superman jumps off stuff, he flies. It's what you want to be rather than what's real. I like that approach better.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
That's hard. I'd say Superman/Batman. It started off really strong with Jeph Loeb, then he left and it's just been passed around. It's the book you'd think would be really good but it just isn't. I feel horrible because those are my favorite characters. I don't pick up that book anymore.

Which has risen like a pheonix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
I'm gonna say Action Comics. They had promised Richard Donner was gonna be on it and it would be really good but then it just fell of the face of the earth. Then Geoff Johns who was writing with Richard Donner went on his own and wrote some of the best Superman stories I've ever read. Superman just turned 70 this year. Seventy years of Superman stories and these are the best ones in the past few years. He knows how to retell a character's story and make you care about it.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
Six months last week. I'd been stalking Midtown Comics since college and once I graduated I really went for it. I told them how much I loved comics and eventually they hired me. I've been so involved in comics for a long time that how could I not do it? It just makes sense.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best part is definitely just being around comics and getting to see new stuff before other people do. If you go into an office and walk from cubicle to cubicle you don't hear people talking about comics. You hear, "Oh I have to do this report." I get to talk comics at work. I get to recommend stuff to people. That's also one of the hardest parts — not getting too carried away. It's a job and I have to pay attention to the floor, make sure there are enough comics on the wall and do inventory. You can't get too involved.

The real worst part is when it gets super busy on new-release day, Wednesday. Around 5 o'clock there's a line goes from one end of the floor to the other and around the book shelves. The floor is huge. Keeping that in control is pretty crazy.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
I'm a big sports nut. I'm a huge Yankees fan. It's still nerdy because I'm a stats guy. But I'm like any jock, screaming when someone scores.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
That we are people with no hygiene and that comics are for kids and that it's stupid stuff and you can't take it seriously. There are certainly fantasy elements, but why do people take Hollywood movies seriously and give them awards? I think the last few years with Dark Knight and Ironman, they legitimize the format for us. Go into a comic shop and pick up something. Don't judge it until you try it.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
That's easy. You've got characters like Batman and Ironman who are human. But what makes them different is their training and their gadgets. What tech junkie wouldn't love to get in the Batmobile and test that GPS and all the other gadgets in there? Who wouldn't want to make their own piece of armor and fly around and shoot people? Comics have always had an element of sci-fi and have always had technology that was semi-futuristic. Techies love it. I'm also a Trekkie. I love new technology and stuff. It's all sort of related.

You also write scripts?
Yeah, I have my own storylines and universes. I developed a character called Raph and combined all my favorite books, kung-fu movies, LOTR, fantasy and adventure. I've got the guy's life mapped up from the moment he's born until he's 30. I know exactly what's going to happen.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: Olive Panter
Store: Cosmic Comics
Age: 18
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
Lives in: New York City
Background: Student at The School of Art at Cooper Union

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
I'm actually named after Olive Oyl. But seriously, I think I might shoot myself. That's really hard. Probably because there isn't a comic book character I'd want to be. I don't live vicariously through comics. I think a lot of people tend to. It's definitely escapist for me, but I don't like to pretend I'm Superman. Especially as a girl, you don't want to pretend to be the giant-breasted, platform-wearing.... It just wouldn't be fun. But if I had to pick, it probably harkens back to when I was 12 and read Ghost World for the first time. It would probably be Enid from Ghost World.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
I don't read superhero comics and that's usually a superhero thing. From what I've heard — actually, I haven't heard anything. I never listen to what the customers say. In my opinion, title-wise, potentially, Angry Youth Comix. I love Johnny Ryan and I always have. But it's getting pretty repetitive these days. Less anal rape.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
I tend to believe that the people who have a grasp on writing comics have always kind of been good. Like Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine. Dash Shaw was a student of my dad's and he has a grasp on it that I haven't seen in a long time. I really like Leah Hayes who wrote Holy Moly and Funeral for a Heart.

Who's your dad?
He's Gary Panter. He does the comic Jimbo but he's most well-known for designing the set for Pee-Wee's Playhouse and having Matt Groening rip off Bart from Jimbo, which Matt has admitted many times.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
Almost four years on and off. I started when I was 14 and quit and returned and quit and returned and quit and returned. My dad got me into it. He works at the School of Visual Arts and it's nearby and Mark, the owner, really liked his comics. I started on Sundays bagging books and now I come and don't do anything.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best part is definitely the free comics. And I've made some pretty great friends. The worst part is that comics have a bad rap for a reason, because it really does tend to attract crazy people. Surely they're not all like that, but I do get creepy stares all the time. I'm kind of used to it now. The clientele can just be a bit irritating.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
Nerdy. You have no idea. I grew up so embroiled in it that it's kind of stupid to make myself not nerdy. I'm in a band, so maybe that's not nerdy. But I even wear glasses and I go to art school and I work in a comic shop. There's nothing not nerdy about me. I have a designer jean fixation, but that's kind of retarded.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
Odors. Most people are fine, but there is one that comes wearing just a pair of jogging shorts (he's not in good shape), a wifebeater, and a towel around his neck. He's perpetually mopping his head and his neck with his towel.

We also have two customers who compete on new comic book day to get the most intact comics. But they get mad at us when one arrives before the other and gets the best comics.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
It's probably just that everyone is the stereotypical overweight, middle-aged, balding, lives-in-his-mother's basement comic geek. I'm the antithesis of everything that is but I was raised on comics. And I love them and I wouldn't trade them for anything. I'm going to read them until I die. And they're easier to read than books when you're too exhausted.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
It goes back to the escapism. If you are immersed in comics than you are trying to get away from something. Kind of like videogames. But I can't stand videogames. They scare me.

Do you have any anecdotes about working in a comic store?
On a Wednesday, a regular customer came and bought a ton of comics as per usual. Then the next day he came in he was completely scab-covered and bruised on his face. We were like, "Dude, what happened to you? Are you okay?" Turns out he started falling down on a escalator while holding his comics and rather than protecting his face he protected his comics. But they still got a little bent, so the next day he came back and re-bought them.

Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

Name: John Crowe
Store: Neon Monster
Age: 39
Hometown: Kennesaw, Georgia
Background: Masters in Studio Art at Maryland Institute College of Art

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Professor X so I could read the minds of my customers, no wheelchair though.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
I would've said the X-men, but it's back and now I'm selling out of them. DC Comics in general, Superman straight up.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
All Star Batman & Robin started out shaky and now is the greatest thing ever.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I was in the Atlanta Journal Constitution at 14 because I was such a big comic book collector, a comics junkie hard-core. Neon has only been open for a year and I'm the new kid on the block. We have the chance to be the fresh start for people. We're trying not to the be the dusty old comic store.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
Having all the comics at your disposal. Which is also the worst part because I don't feel as compelled to collect them.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
My girlfriend, probably; everything else is pretty nerdy.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
When people come in here and say 'Hey it's so great you're here,' when before they were coming in to say 'This is a bad location, you're never gonna make it.'

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
It's that they're for kids exclusively; now they're more sophisticated. And that all fans dress up in costumes and are all couch potatoes.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
Now with digital processors and color, it just really appeals to that sort of person. And the tech sciences. Tech porn in comics — everyone's using gadgets.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Name: Gary Buechler
Store: Comic Outpost (Owner)
Age: 39
Hometown: San Diego, California

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Multiple Man. If I could just copy myself a million times it'd make my life so much easier.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
Amazing Spider-Man. They did this thing to fix a continuity issue. Mary Jane and Peter Parker had been married so long it was starting to get boring and stagnate. So Marvel decided to fix it. Peter's aunt is dying and Mary Jane and Peter make a deal with Mephisto and in exchange for Peter's aunt's life, they have their memories erased and never knew they loved each other, in an Eternal Sunshine sort of twist. Seventy percent of the customers hate it.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
Now that the Uncanny X-men are in San Francisco, it's awesome.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I've worked here for 5 years. Started by being a customer and was selling auto parts for Acura and it came up in conversation that the owner was selling the store. We worked out a deal in a week.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
Best part: The hours, flexibility, working with something I love and have loved all my life and the clientele. Being my own boss.

Worst: Being my own boss, taxes, being bound to one distributor.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
Ha, I don't if I should say this but ... I'm an ex-con. It was a long time ago and I'm a good person now.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
I don't think I have one. All are welcome here.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
Comics: that they are not a literary medium because they are. And some are better than a lot of novels and I read both.

Fans: That they aren't very rounded people. There is the fringe hardcore fanboy, but I sell to lawyers, meter maids, doctors, artists ... and there's a growing female audience. We have a new generation taking over, it's not crabby old fat dudes with ponytails telling you not to touch the books. We want you to read it before you buy it. I equate comic books stores now to what record stores were in the early '80s.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
Both love the internet and their PS2's. I think that's our main competition, videogames. When a new Madden comes out we're competing for those same dollars.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Name: Palle Madsen
Store: Amazing Fantasy
Age: 38
Hometown: San Jose, California
Background: Broadcasting Degree and Certificate as a Forensic Identifier

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Spider-Man, because he's just as human as the rest of us.

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
The whole Marvel Ultimate line, started off as a great concept and has just gotten silly.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
Storm Watch started off as typical and has turned into something great.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
Seven years. I got started in it because I got laid off from my high-tech job and realized I'm not a very good corporate person so I should do something I like.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
Best part: Working with something I've loved all my life and at least something of an expert.

Worst: Any customer who comes in and we don't have what they're looking for and they take it personally.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
The fact that I help run a burlesque show.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
People who refer to comic books as graphic novels.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
Comics: The big thing is that people think they are still just for kids which is entirely not the case and that reading comics is not acceptable as literature.

Fans: That we're all like the comics store guy from The Simpsons. We're just like everyone else.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
There is a lot of history in comics and that appeals to people who are in detail-oriented jobs. There is an element of science in comic books, some of it is legitimate and some predicts future scientific developments.

Photo: Emily Lang/Wired.com

Name: Jack Eldredge
Store: Dr. Comics & Mr. Games
Age: 25
Lives in: Oakland, California

If you could be any comic book character, who would it be?
Most of my favorite characters are ones I really would not want to be — Hellboy, John Constantine, Spider-Man, Batman, Swamp Thing — I don't really envy them. So I'm gonna have to say Tom Strong. He's at the peak of human strength and physical perfection. He's a brilliant scientist and inventor with an apparently unlimited budget. His aging is decelerated, but he's not immortal (that's key). He's got a giant house/base on a tropical island with his gorgeous and wise wife and lovely daughter who both team up with him regularly for superheroics. Plus he's got a pneumatic robot and a brain-altered gorilla for comic relief. Yup, Tom Strong for sure (from the truly fantastic comic of the same name by Alan Moore).

Which title has fallen farthest from grace?
Are we talking about long-running standards that have been through decades worth of storylines and creative teams, some with multiple classic or arguably classic periods with years in between? It really has a lot to do with when you first became interested in ... The Amazing Spider-Man for example. To a lot of fans, the Lee/Romita issues of the late '60s and early '70s are it and always will be. I know a few Ditko purists who think even that's too new, though. Then in the late '80s, Venom made a huge impact on my generation, and that era became the basis for the past 20 years of a whole slew of spider-comics besides Amazing. And just recently, J. Michael Straczynski ended his years-long run as writer, most of which is widely considered excellent, so that's like new classics. So fans of every era believe (or will believe) that "it used to be so good but now it sucks."

Short opinionated answer: Ultimates 3 is a giant piece of crap. Frank Miller's goddamn Batman is goddamn awful. The X-titles are currently all garbage. The new Hulk ongoing sucks horribly, too.

Which has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of suck-itude?
DC's Booster Gold and Marvel's The Immortal Iron Fist are both characters that nobody expected to see returning in their own ongoing titles, much less that these books would be really good by all accounts. Also, the current runs of Green Lantern (by writer Geoff Johns) and Captain America (by writer Ed Brubaker) are in my opinion better than those titles have ever been in the modern age of comics.

How long have you worked in a comic store? How did you start?
I've been with Dr. Comics full time for about five years. I lived in the neighborhood and I've been into comics since I was a kid so I'd been a regular customer for a while before I mentioned to the boss that I could use another part-time job.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

What are the best and worst parts about working in a comic store?
The best part about it is the comics. They're my world, and so obviously I love just being in such a fabulously stocked comic store, let alone making my living by being there. Most of what I do in the store is all about our inventory: filing, stocking, reordering, etc., so as a result I've become familiar with just about everything in the store.

The worst part about it is having to overhear and occasionally being asked to weigh in on the who-would-win-in-a-fights. Also, the constant barrage of comic book movie talk is unbearable. I do not care what you think is going to happen in a sequel that doesn't come out for another five years and which is bound to disappoint.

What's the least nerdy thing about you?
I get one pass, right? Pass.

Biggest pet peeve about customers?
What gets to me is the speculators. The people who are still collecting comics because they're collectible, buying what they think is likely to become valuable later so they can get rich or something. This is flawed logic, and it devastated the comics industry just 10 years ago ... and yet here we are again.

The comics that are worth real money today, are valuable for two reasons, one of which is that they weren't valued when they were published. Comics from the '60s and earlier are exceedingly rare because so many copies were destroyed or discarded, and the ones that are still around are very "well read," hence the insanely high selling prices for the very few pristine copies of key issues.

Modern comics have relatively high print runs, and almost all of the copies in existence are being saved and kept in good condition. The real value of your comics is what you get out of reading them, so buy what you want to read, and keep what you want to read again sometime — which ties into the second reason that some comics are valuable: because they're good stories that people remember and still want to read.

Your comics are not worth a thousand dollars each. You bought them in 1993 and so did literally a million other people. You have all kept them in near-mint condition. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you don't understand basic economics, though, because as an adult you still think the "investment" you made as a 10-year-old was a sound one.

What's the worst misconception about comic books and their fans?
That comics are a genre of story, rather than anything less than every different genre of story. There are people who say they don't like comics, and they're wrong. This is more like saying "I don't like music" than "I don't like rock music." Sequential art is infinitely diverse, and this goes for the fans, too, because for every different type of person there is some form of sequential art that will appeal to them, whether they've been exposed to it or not. You can call it the funnies or you can call it a graphic novel, but you like comics. You do.

Why is there such a big crossover between comic book fans and tech junkies?
Well, I guess because they're adults with their own money to spend on entertainment. Comics may be a necessity for a sad sack like me, but for almost everyone else they're an indulgence, an expensive addiction. Same as new gadgets for the tech junkies. Although unlike the latest tech, your comics actually become cooler as they get older, instead of obsolete.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Verizon Business Receives Security Clearance From Government of India to Operate International Gateways

First Superman comic up for bid

"Of the 100 existing copies, 80 percent have been restored, but people want an untouched copy," (Comic Connect owner Stephen) Fishler said. The book is listed in "fine" condition, a six on the 10-point rating scale...

Co-created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the comic book first appeared on newsstands for 10 cents a copy in June 1938.

Nearly 12 years later, a young boy on the West Coast found himself in a secondhand book store, where he persuaded his dad to loan him 35 cents to buy the comic book.

Until 1966, the owner forgot about the book, which was hidden in his mother's basement. Since then, he's been holding onto it, hoping to see it increase in value, Fishler said. He has not been disappointed.

Appletell reviews the Orbit MP3 and Tweakers portable speaker systems

FROM APPLETELL - Altec Lansing and GrandMax are selling low-cost portable speakers built to follow you and your iPod, iPhone or some other thing around.  But whereas one company chose to focus mainly on design and portability, the other chose to focus on sound. MORE »

Warcraft video game compared to cocaine

Flooding sends mine waste into rivers

Microsoft's Augmented Reality, Video Photosynth

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hack an iPhone, win 10 grand at Pwn2Own

Pwn2Own, a sort of Gray Hat extravaganza, is going to be cracking browsers and phones for the third year in a row this March. It’ll go from the 18th to the 20th and thousands of dollars in prizes. Many will enter, few will pwn.

The targets are IE8, Chrome, and Firefox running on Windows 7, and Safari and Firefox on OS X. I’m guessing it’s not going to be Safari 4 since that’s probably a mess security-wise right now. For mobiles, it’s BlackBerry, Android, S60, WinMo, and an iPhone. Any browser bug/exploit wins $5000, and a mobile bug or exploit nets you the ten large — plus you get to keep the phone you cracked.

It’s up in Vancouver, BC, so although I can just drive up, doubtless many international men of hackery will be hopping a plane to take their shot in this lucrative contest.

[via Reg Hardware]

Source: Gizmodo | 27 Feb 2009 | 3:30 am

A drop in traffic congestion? Unemployed may be behind it - Seattle Post Intelligencer

Inside NoVA

A drop in traffic congestion? Unemployed may be behind it Seattle Post Intelligencer By LARRY LANGE Seattle is less congested these days, but there's only so much celebrating people may want to do. It may be because of the faltering economy as well as last year's high gas prices. Birmingham ranks 48th in traffic congestion Bizjournals.com Decongesting: DC Area Drops to 5th Most Congested City MSNBC Wall Street Journal - Forbes - Chicago Sun-Times - KIROtv.com all 93 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 27 Feb 2009 | 3:18 am

MSI’s sleek X320 and X340 to hit in April

We fawned all over it when it was revealed, corrupted it with our pawing hands at CES, and marvelled at its recently-revealed big brothers. And now the X320 and X340 have specs and release dates. We’ve known for a while that there would be an Atom version and one with a grown-up processor as well, and with the latest announcement, it looks like that is indeed the case.

The $700 X320 sports a shiny Atom Z530 and despite its tiny body has a 13.4″ screen. Doug can’t get enough of it, and he’s got the real story up there in the CES link. As for the X340, it’s got a couple configs, both using Intel’s Consumer Ultra Low Voltage CPUs. The entry level version ($750) will have a Celeron M 725 processor, but you’ll want to spring for the nicer Core 2 Solo SU3500, of which there will be a couple options that will bring the price up to just under a grand. Other than that there isn’t much info, but we’ll be getting the full story soon.

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 3:14 am

UTStarcom Expects Auditor “Going Concern” Letter [Voices]

UTStarcom (UTSI) this afternoon said that as a result of recurring losses and negative cash flow from operations, the company expects to receive a “going concern uncertainty explanatory paragraph” in its audited 2008 results.

However, UTStarcom said that if it reaches its projected 2009 sales target and contains expenses and cash used in operations to the levels contemplated in its 2009 financial plan, it should have sufficient liquidity to finance its working capital and cap ex requirements for the next 12 months.

But here’s the thing. The telecom equipment company declined to actually provide 2009 financial guidance due to the current economic climate. So that’s nice: the company is in deep trouble, and it has a plan to get out. But it isn’t interested in telling you what it is, because the economy is bad…right?

Read the rest of this post

Source: All Things Digital | 27 Feb 2009 | 3:11 am

SEC and FTC investigating data theft

Section: Computers, Security

The FTC and SEC, along with several other federal agencies, are investigating the data breach at Heartland Payment Systems.  The company processes about 100 million credit card transactions a month. Over 250,000 merchant locations were affected by the breach, which involved hackers stealing unencrypted data such as addresses, debit, and credit card numbers, and expiration dates. The company has also been hit with a class action lawsuit.

Company President and Chief Financial Officer Robert Baldwin Jr. disclosed the investigations during Heartland’s quarterly conference call with investigators Tuesday, saying that the SEC had launched an informal inquiry into the company and that there is also a related investigation by the Department of Justice. The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulates national banks and their service providers, has launched an inquiry, as has the FTC, he said.

As the company is refusing to disclose the names of the retailers it processes payments for, it would be wise to keep an eye on your accounts-and your mail. You may be affected and not realize it.  I was! I got a new debit card in the mail from HSBC today. I was rather puzzled until I found a letter explaining they were reissuing all their bank cards with new account numbers after being notified of the breach by Mastercard. Kudos to HSBC for looking out for its customers!

An important note: Don’t just be on the alert for suspiciously large charges on your account. Scrutinize any small ones too, because hackers commonly test accounts by making tiny charges of a dollar or two before making a large hit!

Read[PCWorld]

Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 27 Feb 2009 | 3:02 am

Sony Reader: Ian Fleming Edition

Although I don’t get the feeling that Ian Fleming would have been a big e-book fan (he was a paperback kind of guy), that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be awesome to have a 007-themed Sony Reader. Unfortunately the Reader itself is standard issue — but the cover for it is embossed leather, and the Reader comes with two free Bond books.

If I’m honest, it’s not much of a deal, but if you’re going to have a Reader, you may as well get the most awesome of the bunch.

[via Pocket Lint and Gearlog]

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 2:30 am

JPG Magazine Has Been Acquired, Lives Anew

JPG Magazine, the innovative photography magazine that was composed of user-submitted photographs and shut down last month, has been revived. The magazine’s assets have been acquired by a group of investors who will also continue to employ some of the magazine’s staff, we’ve confirmed with a source with knowledge of the deal.

JPG launched in late 2006 with the novel idea of cutting back on publishing costs by accepting user-submitted photos and relying partially on the community to edit the magazine. But despite reaching near-profitability, the periodical announced that it was shutting down on January 2nd when its parent company 8020 Media ran out of money. Within a few days it became clear that JPG might still have life, as a number of potential buyers including Flickr and Smugmug entered talks, but until now the future of the magazine was in limbo.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: TechCrunch | 27 Feb 2009 | 2:27 am

AirScape whole house fan is an ultra-quiet cheaper, greener alternative to A/C

As the economy worsens and our wallets slim, an AirScape whole house fan sounds like a simple way to go green and save some money. While traditional whole house fans are noisy and power-hungry, the AirScape fans are ultra-quiet and energy-efficient. The Airscape can quietly move up to 1,700 cubic feet per minute by using fans designed for computer rooms.

The main function of a whole house fan is not simply to replace hot air with cooler air - it is to cool down the entire structure by drawing off the heat. The fans are designed to run all night, steadily drawing cool fresh air in through open windows while exhausting hot stale air out through attic roof vents.  What makes the AirScape truly effective is its slower flow over a longer period with quiet operation.

As the graph pictured above shows, payback on the AirScape is much faster than solar. Also, reducing electricity use means reducing CO2 emissions, so you’re reducing your carbon footprint while saving costs. Easy enough. The fans start at $549 and can be bought on the AirScape website.

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 2:00 am

Celestica Inc. announces cash tender offer for its 7.875% Senior Subordinated Notes due 2011

(All amounts in U.S. dollars. Per share information based on diluted shares outstanding unless noted otherwise.) TORONTO, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ - Celestica Inc.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:45 am

New Adobe AIR Marketplace

From blogs.adobe.com

Adobe AIR Marketplace is a central resource that allows developers to make their applications available to millions of potential users and makes it easy for consumers to find them.

The new AIR marketplace was launched a few days ago and features a brand new look and several new features. Do check it out!

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:39 am

Ning Launches Rich, Persistent Chat Feature

Tonight Ning will introduce new chat functionality, giving Ning network administrators the oft-requested ability to integrate a rich chat environment similar to the one launched on Facebook last April. Ning’s new chat system is Flash-based, presenting users with a persistent chat bar along the bottom of their screens as they browse through a Ning network. Users have the option of chatting through an interface at the bottom of their screen, or can ‘pop-out’ their chats into their own windows. While the interface will remain consistent across each network, users won’t be able to chat with members outside of the Ning network they’re currently browsing.

Ning originally introduced a more basic chat feature last summer, but that version uses either dedicated chat pages or sidebar iFrames, which means they aren’t always visible as users navigate through a network. But even the basic version has proven to be very successful - Ning’s chat traffic has skyrocketed, as seen in the Compete graph below pitting Ning’s IM domain against Meebo’s homepage. To be fair, the graph probably doesn’t take into account Meebo’s traffic that occurs offsite (Quantcast reports that Meebo’s entire network sees more like 12 million uniques), but it’s clear that Ning Chat is rapidly gaining traction.

Aside from its growth in chat, Ning has also been posting some impressive stats recently, growing to 4.8 million uniques in January (a 368% growth year over year) despite the fact that the site recently banned porn networks, which some believed were responsible for a significant amount of Ning’s traffic.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:36 am

Digital Realty Trust to Present at Citi's Global Property CEO and Raymond James' 30th Annual Institutional Investor Conferences

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:33 am

Microsoft sues Linux-based vendor over patents (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld - Microsoft's lawsuit against Linux-based technology vendor TomTom over alleged patent violations could signal a more aggressive stance by the software giant over intellectual property issues -- or it could be just an isolated case involving a dispute with one vendor.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:10 am

The Onion asks: Are video games preparing our kids properly for the apocalypse?

Don’t pretend this hasn’t been on your minds, parents. You bought the kids Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and the like, but are you making sure they’re getting the proper lessons they need from these games? The Onion presents a few viewpoints on this subject.

On a side note, I hate it when they make it clear they haven’t played the game. What cyborgs? And grenades were useless in Fallout 3! “Customized Sniper Rifle to the dome” is the message I took home.

[via GeekSugar]

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:09 am

Android on laptops and PCs? Steve Ballmer thinks so.

Section: Computers, Desktops, Mobile Computers, Hardware, Laptops, Netbooks, Software / Applications, Wireless, Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Web Browsers, Websites, Google

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows what to pay attention to right now and right now he’s looking at Apple and Android.  Apple is creeping up in position behind Microsoft in the desktop front, and has pulled in the number four spot in operating systems this past year behind Linux.  And Ballmer sees it all.  “"We’re very focused on both Apple as a competitor and Linux as a competitor.“

And then there’s Google’s Android.  Google?  As an OS?  What piece of the pie doesn’t this company have their hands in?  Remember when you first heard of them as a search engine and thought “Google??  What kind of weird name is that??“  Then you used it.  Uh-huh.  There was no looking back.  Well, it seems you see “powered by Google” stamped all over the place these days, and the new Android phones are the ones that people are clamoring for.  An open-source operating system?  Yeah, Ballmer is concerned.  Because he sees it as a competitor not only on phones, but coming to desktops and laptops as well.

Ballmer states “I think the dynamics with Linux is changing somewhat.  I assume we’ll see Android-based, Linux-based laptops, in addition to phones, and we’ll see Google more and more as a competitor in the desktop operating system business than we ever have before.“

Well, this makes sense Steve, since pretty much what you need to run Linux is what you’d need to run Android, with some adaptations to some applications, since Android doesn’t run an X Server.  Google seems to be hard at work in secret on something.

Apparently one-third of the traffic coming out of Google’s Mountain View is coming off computers using some “clandestine operating system.“  Traffic was tracked, and none could be matched up with the tags of any known operating systems, leading many to speculate it was possibly their own Android related OS.  Keeping it in the dark seems to be something they want.  Their Android team is split up, with the core team in Boston, and others elsewhere.  Android employees and non-Android Google employees don’t have too much contact with each other.  No slipping any secrets.

So, it seems as though there is no longer such a big divider between a phone OS and a PC OS, and Ballmer says that Microsoft has revamped their investments in the client OS accordingly. 

“The truth of the matter is all the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android,“ Ballmer said.

He goes on to state that the real competition in the mobile arena is going to happen in two places.  First will be sales of mobile-related software separate from the hardware.  (Could that be why they supposedly show interest in creating a Windows Mobile online apps store??)  Second, bundle together the software, hardware and services.  Yeah, kind of like RIM’s Blackberry or the iPhone.

Will be interesting to see what they do and what they come up with.  Hell, it can’t be any worse than what they did to us with Vista.

Via: CNET

Full Story » | Written by Jodie Andrefski for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 27 Feb 2009 | 1:06 am

AOL Ad Head Greg Coleman Reorgs Too! (It’s Spreading Like the Flu at Web Firms Today) [BoomTown]

Another Web company, another management restructuring!

Yahoo (YHOO) reorg fever struck AOL today too, as its advertising head, Greg Coleman (pictured here), moved the exec chairs around his domain at AOL’s Platform-A unit.

Coleman–who actually once was Yahoo’s sales head before taking the new gig at the Time Warner (TWX) online unit earlier this month–is replacing some execs and elevating others. Also there is some sleepy ad-serving stuff about the migration to its ADTECH system.

In related news earlier today, BoomTown reported AOL international head Maneesh Dhir was leaving.

You must all know the drill by now, after endless reorg memos today, so here’s the entire skinny in the memo Coleman sent out (also, after the jump, is the 2009 goals memo sent today by AOL CEO Randy Falco that says, let’s be honest, next to nothing):

From: Coleman, Greg
Sent: Thu 2/26/2009 7:00 PM
To: Platform-A@platform-a.com
Subject: Unlocking Our Potential

Dear Platform-A colleagues,

When I met with you earlier this month, we talked about the big mission we’re embarking on and the vision I have for our future.

Over the past year, you’ve done great work integrating Platform-A and creating a powerful business from the ground up. Platform-A now provides marketers the most comprehensive and cost-efficient tools and technologies for the digital advertising space.

Just today, we took another big step forward with the migration of our ad inventory to ADTECH–an incredible challenge and a big win for us and our advertising partners. My thanks go out to the technologies and ADTECH teams who made this happen.

I’ve also been inspired by what I’ve heard from people throughout the organization, many of whom reached out to me during my first few weeks here to express their confidence in our ability to succeed.

Now, after a year of transition, key acquisitions and integration, we need to turn our attention to unlocking the full potential of this great business. And we need to move aggressively.

This will mean changes in how we’re organized, particularly in our ad sales functions. Over the next few weeks, I will be rolling out a multi-tiered plan that will address our infrastructure, make necessary role changes and bring in talent where needed. I want to tell you about some initial steps we’re taking today.

First, Don Kennedy will be stepping down as head of ad sales, a role I will assume on an interim basis. Don and I agreed that his many talents are best served in a different capacity, and I look forward to working with him in the coming weeks to define that role.

In addition, Mike Peralta will be leaving Platform-A. I want to thank Mike for his contributions to the business, and wish him well on his future endeavors. His team will report temporarily to Mark Ellis.

In addition to his day-to-day responsibilities, Mark will also be working closely with me as an advisor as we work through the changes ahead. Mark is a veteran in the Internet advertising space, and in the short time I’ve been here, I’ve quickly come to value Mark’s insights into the market and Platform-A. I’ve asked Don to lend his keen insights as an advisor during this process as well.

We will also be holding two days of meetings next Tuesday and Wednesday with regional ad sales executives to discuss the plan and get their input.

As we think about our growth and our future, please know that our mandate is clear. Even in this economy, we must ensure we have the best sales teams and the best tools across the country to serve our clients and grow our share of the market.

I came to Platform-A because I know this business has an incredibly bright future. And I know that working together, and working closely with our colleagues in MediaGlow and People Networks, we will realize that future.

Greg

(more…)

Source: All Things Digital | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:58 am

TigerLogic Announces Changes to Executive Management Team

Chairman of the TigerLogic Board of Directors, Richard W. Koe, Assumes Interim CEO Role After Carlton H. Baab Resigns IRVINE, Calif., Feb.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:56 am

Dell 4Q profit dives, recession stunts tech spend (AP)

AP - Dell Inc. said Thursday its profit dove 48 percent during the fiscal fourth quarter as the recession forced consumers and businesses to spend less on technology. The company also said it expects to make further cuts to its work force.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:33 am

Best FOSS Help Desk Software For Small Firms?

Nocts writes "I'm currently working for a moderately sized company that manages a large portion of its internal help desk questions through a Jabber-based chat room. What we're looking for instead is an open source, preferably Web-based solution that will give us the ability to have floor representatives queue questions and concerns in a similar fashion to BugTraq, directed at the help desk. Email capability would be preferred for elaboration of specific issues, but the more we can centralize everything into the queued system the better. Any recommendations and experiences? Just about any language is doable since I have the ability to configure and upgrade our servers and we're looking at about a user base of 100 people, with around 5-10 questions a minute."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:32 am

I Love TwistTogether Shelves

You remember these guys, right?! Of course you do. I wrote about their TwistTogether lamp back in ’07. Anyway, now they have a TwistTogether shelving system that consists of two lamps and three shelves. It comes in candy or chocolate and retails for $110. This would make a really cool gift. Want one so bad now.

Glide via Unplggd via SuperMarket HQ

Source: CrunchGear | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:30 am

A Map for the Kindle 2's Whispernet Coverage

The e-Ink Kindle 2's Whispernet service is one of its most important features, for without it, it's just another expensive plug-in gadget with content DRM'd up the nose.

But what if you live in an area where the service isn't covered? Amazon notes on its website that the service (using Sprint's network) doesn't cover Montana and Alaska, but it's clear from the map provided online by the telcom that many more areas suffer from poor coverage.

Over the last year, several Kindle users have reported poor Whispernet connections in the Salt Lake City airport, in Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada (except Vegas), Nebraska, and many others.

Whispernet, a cellular wireless (EVDO) connection, matters because it allows the Kindle to hook up to the web within seconds and helps you buy books and magazines over the air, all without using a computer. Since Amazon holds your account info (and more relevant, your credit card's) you don't have to waste any time 'at the register,' if you will. Many users have noted that the feature is the biggest differentiator against its main competitor, the Sony Reader, and point it as the reason they've given up the latter.

Our own Charlie Sorrel has already observed that this is a great tool to use when traveling – just take it with you and check out real-time update on useful sites like WikiTravel.   

You can also synchronize data between Kindles, and with the Whispersync system, you'll likely soon be able to push books between mobile devices, like phones and maybe even netbooks. 

But before you go over to Amazon.com to pick up a Kindle 2 on a wave of hype, we think you should really figure out whether the device picks up Whispernet service in your area (and you should also take a look at our review). Because EVDO transmits wireless data through radio signals, rural areas are more likely to suffer the poor lines. 

In the Sprint map, orange stands for its highest-speed EVDO coverage and green is the lower speed 1xrtt coverage. In the US, 1xrtt (1 times Radio Transmission Technology) has a peak of 144 kilobits per second, which is about 6 times faster than a dial-up line and is slightly slower than 3G speeds. It has been defined as a 2.5G connection. This means that you can still receive your books over the air, but much slower. We've heard of a book taking 3-5 minutes to download instead of 10 seconds.

Check out the full Kindle Sprint map right here, and you can also use Sprint's EVDO coverage for all devices map here

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:27 am

Cloud Computing Roundtable Sold Out, But It Will Be Streamed

Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can’t join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud

TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT:

Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture.

On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?

I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off:

Veodia—Video recording through the cloud.
BrowserMob—Stress testing Websites via virtual browser instances.
Diomede Storage—Cheap, green storage with power-saving technologies at one tenth the cost of Amazon S3. Or so they claim..
Appirio—Stitching together three different clouds. Can it be done?

They will be judged by:

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
George Zachary, partner, Charles River Ventures
Geoff Ralston, CEO LaLa
David Bernstein, VP/General Manager, Cisco
David Kralik, Silicon Valley office Director of Newt Gingrich

And then we will hold the roundtable. Again, our roundtable participants will be:

Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail
Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace

Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT

Thank you to Microsoft and the BizSpark team for hosting us at their Mountain View campus. And thanks to Charles River Ventures, Ribbit and FathomDB for sponsorship support of the roundtable and reception.  We looking forward to learning more about a dozen early-stage companies at the roundtable reception.

We have a few tables left for companies who would like to demo product at the event, but otherwise we are over capacity. Contact Jeannie with sponsorship inquiries (jlogo@earthlink.net)

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:10 am

Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone

Apple's iPhone has wowed most of the globe — but not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it's being offered for free.

What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.

In an effort to boost business, Japanese carrier SoftBank this week launched the "iPhone for Everybody" campaign, which gives away the 8-GB model of the iPhone 3G if customers agree to a two-year contract.

"The pricing has been completely out of whack with market reality," said Global Crown Research analyst Tero Kuittinen in regard to Apple's iPhone prices internationally. "I think they [Apple and its partners overseas] are in the process of adjusting to local conditions."

Apple's iPhone is inarguably popular elsewhere: CEO Steve Jobs announced in October that the handset drove Apple to becoming the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, after selling 10 million units in 2008. However, even before the iPhone 3G's July launch in Japan, analysts were predicting the handset would fail to crack the Japanese market. Japan has been historically hostile toward western brands — including Nokia and Motorola, whose attempts to grab Japanese customers were futile.

Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.

What else bugs the Japanese about the iPhone? The pricing plans, Kuittinen said. Japan's carrier environment is very competitive, which equates to relatively low monthly rates for handsets. The iPhone's monthly plan starts at about $60, which is too high compared to competitors, Kuittinen added.

Cellphones are also more of a fashion accessory in Japan than in the United States, according to Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. And carrying around an iPhone in Japan would make you look pretty lame, he said.

Hayashi's cellular weapon of choice? A Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV. It also features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors for Wii-style games.

"When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they're amazed," Hayashi told Wired.com. "They think there's no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that's only because I'm setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features."

Kuittinen said he's predicting Apple's next iPhone will have better photo capabilities, which could increase its odds of success in Japan. However, he said the monthly rates must be lowered as well.

Otherwise, Apple might as well say sayonara to Japan.

See Also:

• iPhone Critics Vote on Handset's Most Annoying Flaws
• Pervert Alert: Japanese iPhone Shutter Sound Cannot Be Switched ...
• 91 Percent of Japanese 'Will Not Buy IPhone'
• Japanese Magazines Piggyback on iPhone's Success
• iPhone Hobbled by High Prices in Japan, Lack of 3-G in India ...

Photo: DannyChoo/Flickr

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:07 am

One Last Yahoo Reorg Missive: Bartz Tells Employees What She Already Said. Again. [BoomTown]

Goodness gracious, make it stop!

You must know by now how much BoomTown loves internal Yahoo (YHOO) memos. But this is getting ridiculous.

It’s been like a flash flood after a long drought at Sunnyvale HQ today, as Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz turns on the fire hose of a whole lot of communicating.

A lot. A real lot.

“I know you guys have reorg fatigue,” wrote Bartz, in the latest email to employees about the management reorganization finally announced this morning.

Also memo-fatigue at All Things Digital HQ, if you can believe it.

Okay, I give Carol! Well, for now, until another juicy internal memo you aren’t handing out freely lands in my inbox, for example, such as about a search deal with Microsoft (MSFT). I’d like one of those to go, please!

But, in a gesture of a leak-free peace (can the drop-kick bounty be suspended for just today?), I am posting this last memo about the management reorganization from Carol “Chatterbox” Bartz.

(Although, I wish she would stop insulting the press, as she does below again. We are just doing our job–and very accurately, as it turned out–yet the jibes continue. Which is odd, frankly, given Bartz has had mostly glowing coverage in the media her entire career.)

But Bartz did seem to leave a little mystery in the email still, as if even more rearranging were to come.

Writes Bartz (my bolding):

“As soon as decisions were made, I wanted you to know about them–even if that means we don’t have all the details nailed down yet.

Wait, are the deets all nailed by Bartz’s productive hammer or aren’t they?

At least, thankfully, the note is capitalized properly, unlike the quaint no-caps stylings of former CEO Jerry Yang.

In any case, if you just can’t get enough, here is Bartz’s reorg blog from this morning and her new management structure memo too.

And here is her entire email on the reorg to employees:

From: Carol Bartz
Reply-To: Carol Bartz
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:02:49 -0800
To: “all-worldwide@yahoo-inc.com”
Subject: Our New Organization

Yahoos,

As I’ve gotten to know Yahoo! over the past several weeks, I’ve developed a point of view on how our organization should be structured to set us up for success.

Our goal is simple: to consistently deliver awesome consumer and advertiser experiences, everywhere in the world we do business. Delivering great customer experiences is everyone’s job at Yahoo!–and each part of our organization will have a clear role in making that happen every day.

The timing of this announcement is important. As soon as decisions were made, I wanted you to know about them–even if that means we don’t have all the details nailed down yet. Yes, there’s been a lot of speculation in the media over the past few days…that’s been a little frustrating, but I’m not willing to speak publicly about decisions before they’re final. Today, they are–so I’ll lay out our new organizational structure for you now.

I know you guys have reorg fatigue. Hang in there–our intention is to leave this structure in place for two to four years. We’ll continue to make adjustments as needed, but we expect this core structure to stay put.

The structure outlined below will enable us to make big improvements in our product quality and operational efficiency. Part of that is simplicity–I’m frankly amazed at how complicated some things are here! We’ll have much clearer decision making and accountability. Product and regional teams will share responsibility for revenue targets and expense management, but we’ll have one P&L, for which I’m accountable.

We will also be in a better position to really listen to and understand our customers–both consumers and advertisers. I think we’ve gotten into the habit of focusing internally too much and we sometimes forget who we’re here to serve. You’ll notice that our management structure puts a renewed focus on the customer, with stronger feedback loops across the company…and they all come through me.

Also, as you know, no organizational structure is a substitute for collaboration, communication and trust. We’ll all need to evolve our behavior a bit–as teams and as individuals – to make this structure work the way it’s designed.

So here’s the overview, with the roles that will report directly to me. As you’ll see, some of our leaders are still to be determined. I know you’ll
want more detail than what’s below–you can learn more on Backyard: http://backyard.yahoo.com/ourorg .

Products: We’ve combined Tech and Product groups under one roof, led by Ari Balogh as EVP Products & CTO. Ari’s charter is to deliver global products that enable extraordinary consumer and advertiser experiences. Ari’s direct reports now include one leader for each product group – we’ve taken care of the “two in a box” problem.

One important note: The Connected Life team has been integrated into various parts of the new organization. Our mobile strategy remains a key part of Yahoo!’s focus going forward and all of our product groups will own mobile innovations. After leading Connected Life for four years, Marco Boerries has resigned from the company to spend more time with his family in Europe. We thank Marco for his important contributions at Yahoo!.

Regions: There are now two: North America and International. As I’ve said before, international growth is critical for Yahoo!, which has become too reliant on its U.S. business over the years.

The regions deliver Yahoo!’s products, programming and services to consumers, partners and advertisers in local markets. They will partner
closely with the newly formed Regional Solutions & Products group in Ari’s organization to help drive a significant shift in how Yahoo! develops products for different geographies. The goal is to have global platforms on which regional product offerings are based.

The North American region–comprised of the U.S. and Canada–is led by Hilary Schneider. The leader of our International region, to be hired soon, will be responsible for a cohesive Yahoo! global strategy and seizing our international growth opportunities. Until we determine who’ll lead the International region, Rose Tsou (Asia), Rich Riley (Europe) and Keith Nilsson (Emerging Markets) will continue to report to me.

Marketing: Elisa Steele will be joining Yahoo! as our Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), effective March 23. Elisa joins us from NetApp where she was SVP, Corporate Marketing. Previous to NetApp, she held executive positions in marketing at Sun Microsystems. Elisa will oversee our global marketing strategy and provide direction for our marketing function. She’ll bring together the various Yahoo! marketing teams that have been spread across the company. Reporting into Elisa will be Brand Marketing, Audience Marketing, Corporate Communications, Insights, Policy & Privacy, Community Affairs and related central teams. I’m delighted to have Elisa joining the team.

Customer Advocacy: As I said, we can do much better in hearing the voice of the customer across Yahoo!, and incorporating what we hear into all of our work day-to-day. We have opened a search for a leader, who will oversee Customer Care and Ad Operations globally with the goal of improving how we support Yahoo!’s users and advertisers. In the interim, these teams will continue to report to Hilary.

Service Engineering & Operations: This new team is responsible for delivering common technology services at scale, including application
management and infrastructure. No matter how cool our products are, the customer’s experience won’t be great unless our applications consistently deliver. Note that we’re bringing Service Engineering together as one group because these engineers bring expertise that is best applied horizontally. Leading this organization is David Dibble, who joined Yahoo! in December. David’s team also will be accountable for delivering more effective corporate IT systems.

Corporate Functions: Blake Jorgensen will be leaving Yahoo! and I am searching for a new CFO. Blake will remain through a transition with his
successor, and I want to thank Blake for all of his great contributions to Yahoo! over the past two years. Mike Callahan will continue to lead our Legal team, and David Windley leads our Human Resources function. Joel Jones joins the team as my Chief of Staff.

So that’s the high-level view. These changes are effective immediately, but we’ve got more work to do in filling out the structure of each group. In the short term, this transition will be challenging for many of our people. My executive staff will be working with their organizations as quickly as possible to create further clarity. For example, we’ll need to recast budgets and adjust work areas so we have the right people working side-by-side.

I want to thank all of you who’ve shared your ideas and views with me since I arrived. Several leaders across Yahoo! came together to design this new structure–I’ve been very impressed with their dedication to the right outcomes, particularly how they’ve embraced the need to eliminate the silos that have been a drag on this organization for so long.

I think this organizational structure has the potential to solve many of the issues you’ve helped me better understand. Of course, new issues will emerge. But I know we’ll be aligned and nimble in tackling them together.

This is a tremendous, proud company with a powerful brand, great products and a bright future. Now’s the time to get more focused than ever on delighting our users and advertisers. Let’s show them how great Yahoo! can be.

Carol

Source: All Things Digital | 27 Feb 2009 | 12:00 am

Video: If you say your phone is bulletproof, you better mean it

Sonim’s XP1 is supposed to be virtually indestructible, and although it’s put up with quite a lot of hammer blows, Sonim felt they could confidently state that the thing could take a 22-caliber bullet. Well! What did they think was going to happen when they make a claim like that?

GadgetReview headed to the range and busted a cap in it. Sad to say, it didn’t really survive the rifle shot at all, but it did at least stay in one piece for the pistol shot. I think it’s more of a testament to its toughness that at one point the bullet bounces back and nails the host.

[via HardOCP]

Source: CrunchGear | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:57 pm

Grupo Iusacell Announces Revenue of Ps.2,982 Million and EBITDA of Ps.662 Million for 4Q08

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Grupo Iusacell, S.A.B. de C.V.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:51 pm

Video: Here’s the first trailer of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

Yes, that’s Ghostface rapping in this, the first official trailer of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. Like all good trailers, there’s minimal actual gameplay shown, but worry not! Rockstar has also launched the game’s official site today, and there’s more footage of actual, true-to-life gameplay for your to view.

So as you can see, the game doesn’t exactly have the overhead view from the original GTA games, which is what I tried to convey the other day.

While we’re on the subject of GTA, anyone play The Lost and Damned yet? My Xbox is still in for repairs so I’ve been unable to play anything, from Street Fighter IV to Everything Else. In fact, I find myself going to bed earlier now because, I mean, why bother staying up late if I can’t play my Xbox?

Remember: Chinatown Wars comes out for the Nintendo DS on March 17.

Source: CrunchGear | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:30 pm

Bike Coalition Wants to See Your Rack

San Francisco becomes the latest city to crowdsource the design of bike racks. Show us great bike-rack designs you've seen.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:28 pm

Apple, Psystar File to Protect Secrets Before Battling in Court

Apple and Mac cloner Psystar have filed a protective order to ensure trade secrets are not leaked before their November trial.

Filed Wednesday, the 18-page order requests restrictions on expert testimony as well as access to software. If honored by Judge William Alsup, the order will allow both companies to label sensitive materials as "CONFIDENTIAL" or "CONFIDENTIAL — ATTORNEY'S EYES ONLY." 

Apple in July filed a lawsuit against Psystar alleging copyright, trademark and shrink-wrap infringement. Psystar has been selling Mac clones — non-Apple PCs hacked to run the Mac operating system — since April. Earlier this month, Psystar filed a counterclaim alleging that Apple is misusing copyright laws by attempting to prevent other companies from installing Mac OS X on their systems.

The outcome of the lawsuit could dramatically impact Apple's business. If Alsup rules in Psystar's favor, the case would effectively legitimatize Mac clones, opening doors for other Hackintosh businesses as well. Apple frequently stresses that "software is the key ingredient" to the success of its hardware, and thus surrendering OS X to other companies would be detrimental to its Mac sales.

Apple and Psystar are scheduled to go to trial Nov. 9.

Stipulated Protective Order and [Proposed] Order [pdf]

See Also:

• Psystar: Apple Is Paranoid for Alleging Conspiracy
• Psystar Tags Back Apple With Antitrust Suit
• Apple Finally Sues Mac Copycat Psystar
• Apple Demands That Psystar Recalls All Hackintoshes
• Apple Cries Corporate Conspiracy Behind Psystar
• Psystar: Blu-Ray Hackintosh for Sale; MacBook Clones on the Way ...
• Hack of the Clones: Why Apple Can't Stop the Copies

Photo: Psystar

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:24 pm

Will Windows Server Foundation Edition Raise the Bar For Affordable Servers? (PC World)

PC World - PC parts are so cheap, you could easily spend more on 10-user license for Windows Server than on the hardware on which it's installed. Steve Ballmer mentioned the disparity, noting the upcoming Foundation Edition server designed as a "low-cost, low-price, low-functionality Windows Server SKU." The skeleton server will be released in the next month or two, although Microsoft hasn't yet announced further details.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:18 pm

Creative Commons Releases "Zero" License

revealingheart writes "Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0. The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:14 pm

Scientific Games Announces Full-Year and Fourth Quarter 2008 Results

2008 Revenues Increased 7% 2008 Adjusted EBITDA Increased 8% Profitability Improvement Program Underway -Recent Developments- Production of instant lottery tickets began in China Termination of Mexican lottery contract Exploring strategic alternatives for the Racing and Venue Management businesses Expect cost savings of $30 to $40 million from profitability improvement program by 2010 NEW YORK, Feb.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:09 pm

New Skype feature allows for more discounted calling

Section: Communications, Mobile, Web

With eBay’s Skype users have the ability to communicate with others across the globe at little to no cost.  Now, Skype is providing Skype to Go with the ability to make outgoing national and international calls from both landlines and mobile phones.

To access the service, users will be given a unique number to dial from their phone line.  Once you dial in, you will listen to several prompts in order to get connected to your friends and family members.  The number provided to you is a local phone number, so you won’t be subjected to extra long distance charges from your phone company.

Extra features include speed dial which allows you to quickly dial frequent callers instead of manually entering the numbers.  Skype call rates are very low compared to other phone service providers.  Your credit card or Skype account will be charged when you use the service.  Skype to Go used to be available in a few select countries, but it is now available stateside.

Read: [CNET]

Full Story » | Written by Heather Wood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:05 pm

New Yahoo CEO ushers out CFO in executive shake-up (AP)

AP - After spending six weeks diagnosing Yahoo Inc.'s troubles, new Chief Executive Carol Bartz started to prescribe a cure Thursday with a management shake-up that will usher out the Internet company's chief financial officer.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:05 pm

Desert ants use odor trails for navigation

Germany scientists have used gas chromatography to determine desert ants use their olfactory sense to find their way without landmarks for guidance. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology discovered desert microhabitats have unique odor signatures that can be used to guide the ants back to their nest. Until now scientists thought the desert ant Cataglyphis fortis, which makes its home in the Tunisian desert, was a vision-guided insect. But the researchers -- Kathrin Steck, Bill Hansson and Markus Knaden -- trained ants in field experiments to recognize the odors pointing to a hidden nest entrance.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:00 pm

ICE System (Intelity ICE & iGoLogic iGo-ICE Panel PC) Elevates Hospitality Customer Technology

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:00 pm

Advanced Information Systems Partners with iGoLogic to Release Largest Virtual Office Reception System

Newest Video Receptionist product offers 42-inch infrared touch flat-panel display LAS VEGAS, Feb.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 11:00 pm

PowerBook Explosion Prompts Office Evacuation

A London IT manager played the role of firefighter Wednesday when a PowerBook in his office exploded in flames.

"I went to get a fire extinguisher and was just getting ready to put out the fire when all of a sudden it went 'Bang!'" he told Inquirer. "Suddenly flames flew up about six foot in the air and there were sparks flying everywhere."

The company requested to remain anonymous. "Steven," the IT manager, said he told the staff to evacuate when he saw smoke coming out of the battery. After it exploded and he saw the flames hit the ceiling, Steven set off the fire alarm. Then, a fire marshall arrived and sprayed the flaming laptop with a fire extinguisher.

Officials are investigating the battery. The PowerBook is believed to be three to four years old.

Usually when gadgets explode, faulty battery cells are the root of the problem. Sony was under major scrutiny in 2006 when some of its overheating laptop batteries resulted in a recall of 9.6 million notebook batteries worldwide.

PowerBook explodes in London office [Inquirer]

Photo: Inquirer

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:37 pm

SMS Company Sues VISA for Patent Infringement

HOLLYWOOD, Fla., Feb. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Charge Notification Services Corporation (C.N.S.C.) has filed a lawsuit against VISA, Inc. for patent infringement. C.N.S.C.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:37 pm

Digg Is Working On a Toolbar To Go After StumbleUpon, TinyURL, and All The Rest

A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.

Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.

Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. This technique works for pages that have never been Dugg as well. I could see this feature eventually showing up as part of a browser add-on so that Digg URL’s could be created with one click.

The toolbar is not an add-on to existing browsers. It is actually creating a large i-frame around the original Webpage and delivering it on the Digg.com domain. Users can click on an X to get rid of the toolbar frame and be taken to the original page, and the original page gets the hit as well. (This is a similar technique to what Ginx does with its Web-sharing Twitter client). But by running all of the recommended pages through its own domain, Digg can run all sorts of analytics on each page such as how many people viewed it, where people clicked to next, and so on.

It is amazing that Twitter has single-handedly created this need for shortened URLs and that a relatively large player like Digg now wants a piece of that market.

Click on the screenshot below for a larger image:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:33 pm

US District Ct. Says Defendant Must Provide Decrypted Data

An anonymous reader writes "If you're planning on traveling internationally with a laptop, consider the following: District Court Overturns Magistrate Judge in Fifth Amendment Encryption Case. Laptop searches at the border have been discussed many times previously. This is the case where a man entered the country allegedly carrying pornographic material in an encrypted file on his laptop. He initially cooperated with border agents during the search of the laptop then later decided not to cooperate citing the Fifth Amendment. Last year a magistrate judge ruled that compelling the man to enter his password would violate his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Now in a narrow ruling, US District Judge William K. Sessions III said the man had waived his right against self-incrimination when he initially cooperated with border agents." sohp notes that "the order is not that he produce the key — just that he provide an unencrypted copy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:31 pm

Extreme Networks Announces Financial Conference Schedule

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Extreme Networks, Inc.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:19 pm

Rumor: Battlestar Galactica coming to theaters

FROM GAMERTELL - Rumors that the original Battlestar Galactica series is heading to the big screen, while Sci-Fi channel BSG series has two new films due to premiere in 2009. MORE »

Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »

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Source: Gadgetell | 26 Feb 2009 | 10:03 pm

Army Reloads on Sticky Foam Weaponry

The military struggled to develop a sticky foam that could stop rioters in their tracks. It never panned out. But the idea resurfaces again, this time with the Army hoping to gum up hostile vehicles instead of people.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:50 pm

Folding Nanosheets To Build Components

Nakeot writes "In the continuing efforts to build faster and smaller components, a group of researchers at MIT have constructed a basic prototype device that folds materials only hundreds of microns across. Mechanical engineer and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering George Barbastathis leads the charge into 'nano-origami' machines involving, the article reads, 'a new technique that allows engineers to fold nanoscale materials into simple 3-D structures' (more details available on MIT's page). The group had worked in 2005 with MIT Associate Professor Yang Shao-Horn to build a single-fold nano-capacitor (PDF, or see Google's HTML version), and this work appears to automate their 2005 process. A comment on the posted video appears to suggests this device is not completely automated yet, however. (This should not be confused with Paul Rothemund's slightly-more-ahead DNA-origami technology.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:44 pm

Killer Cyclone Fueled By 'Pre-Existing Condition'

Image Caption: In early May 2008, Cyclone Nargis passed over Burma (Myanmar) after forming in the Bay of Bengal. NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Jesse Allen.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:40 pm

Yahoo CEO Bartz Unveils Major Reorg

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Chief Executive Carol Bartz on Thursday took the wraps off a broad reorganization plan designed to dismantle what she called the "silos" that had slowed down the Internet company.

The move came as Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen became the latest executive to leave Yahoo, which has struggled to convince Wall Street that it has a solid growth strategy after turning down a takeover bid from Microsoft last year.

Under the plan to simplify Yahoo's management structure, its various technology and product groups will be combined into one entity led by Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh, according to an email Bartz sent to employees.

Yahoo will also divide the world into just two regions -- North America and International -- from four previously.

"Today I'm rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo a lot faster on its feet," Bartz, who took the CEO reins six weeks ago, wrote on Yahoo's corporate blog. "We'll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer."

The changes follow weeks of meetings between Bartz, who replaced co-founder Jerry Yang in January, and Yahoo's various division heads as she familiarized herself with the company's many businesses.

Yang's 18-month stint as CEO was defined by his rejection of a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft, which the software maker subsequently withdrew.

Yahoo's stock price has sunk from $19.18 before Microsoft's offer to below $13 on Thursday, as revenue and profits have been pinched by an industrywide slowdown in advertising spending.

The goal of the new organization is to deliver the best possible consumer and advertiser experience, with greater speed and efficiency, according to a Q&A document distributed by Yahoo management to employees.

"It's premature to discuss our strategic options. For the time being, nothing is off the table and creating shareholder value is our first priority," it said. Yahoo added the changes were not driven by a desire to cut costs, but that the company is constantly reviewing its business and expenses.

TOP CONCERN: SEARCH BUSINESS

Pacific Crest Securities analyst Steve Weinstein said Bartz, the former CEO of software maker Autodesk Inc, has shown herself to be decisive and unafraid to take action in her short time at the company. But he noted that a reorganization alone is not enough to revive Yahoo's fortunes.

"What we really want to see is what direction does Carol want to go. That's the first step," Weinstein said. "And the second step is how well she actually executes."

Among the most pressing questions on investors' minds is the fate of Yahoo's search business, which is a distant second to Google Inc. There has been long-running speculation that the unit could be sold to Microsoft, or Yahoo could team up with another rival such as Time Warner Inc's AOL.

Yahoo tried to form a Web search partnership with Google last year as an alternative to a deal with Microsoft, but the deal collapsed under U.S. antitrust review.

On Wednesday, Jorgensen had told attendees at an investor conference that Yahoo was not opposed to a sale or partnership deal on search, leading some observers to believe that the company was moving closer to a deal with Microsoft.

Earlier this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said a potential partnership with Yahoo as a means of competing with Google, which controls 63 percent of the U.S. search market.

Yahoo shares rose as high much as 7.3 percent to $13.39 on Jorgensen's comments. They were up nearly 4 percent at $12.98 on Nasdaq late Thursday.

SEARCHING FOR CFO

Yahoo has initiated a search for a new CFO, and Jorgensen will remain through a transition period, Yahoo said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday.

Bartz also said in the memo that Marco Boerries, head of the company's Connected Life group, has resigned. The Connected Life group, which focused on bringing Yahoo products to mobile devices, will be integrated into various parts of the new organization.

And she announced that Elisa Steele, an executive at NetApp Inc, will join Yahoo as chief marketing officer.

Hilary Schneider will continue to lead North America, while an international chief has yet to be found.

"International growth is critical for Yahoo, which has become too reliant on its U.S. business over the years," Bartz said in the email to employees.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the company would not provide any official announcement on the reorganization, other than Bartz's blog post, calling it an internal matter.

In October, Yahoo announced plans to cut at least 10 percent of its workforce of roughly 15,000 employees. In the fourth quarter, Yahoo reported a $303 million net loss, while sales declined 1 percent year-over-year to $1.8 billion.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, editing by Tiffany Wu, Richard Chang)

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:27 pm

HP Upline Gets Disconnected, Heads To The Deadpool

Well, that didn’t last long. HP’s Upline, a backup service that offered unlimited storage for $59/year, is closing its doors. Since launching last April, Upline has faced issues with extended downtimes - a pretty major offense for a backup solution. But it’s likely the ultimate reason for the shutdown is that Upline was never really able to get much traction in a crowded space with very little in the way of differentiation. That said, there’s clearly money to be made in online storage, as evidenced by Hitachi’s recent acquisition of storage and backup solution Fabrik this week and EMC’s $76 million acquisition of Mozy in 2007.

Below is the letter sent to HP Upline users, who will have until March 31 to download their files. In a classy move, it looks like HP is going to refund all fees customers have previously paid for the service.

Thank you for your interest in HP Upline.

HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.

HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline.

If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx.

HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.

Thank you.

HP Upline team

HP Upline has been added to the Deadpool.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:09 pm

TomTom Sued for GPS Patent Infringement (NewsFactor)

NewsFactor - Microsoft filed a patent-infringement lawsuit Wednesday against personal navigation device (PND) maker TomTom in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The software giant is seeking compensation for each alleged infringement, together with reasonable royalty, interest and court costs.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Feb 2009 | 9:07 pm

Early Humans Walked On Modern Feet

Image 2: In the foreground, Christine Galvagna, a Rutgers undergraduate at the time, meticulously cleans a trail of hominid footprints as Professor Harris (dark blue shirt) looks on. Credit: David Braun
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 8:55 pm

Sony Blu-spec CD Format Detailed, Hits Stores

CNETNate writes "More details about Sony's new Blu-spec CD format — standard CDs authored using Blu-ray's blue diode technology — are beginning to emerge, with commercial releases beginning to hit Amazon. Blu-spec CDs are compatible with existing CD players but have been mastered with higher levels of accuracy by using the same technology used to author Blu-ray discs, with the intention of eliminating reading errors that occur as a result of being authored with traditional red laser technology. Sony has also launched an official (Japanese) site for Blu-spec CDs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 Feb 2009 | 8:52 pm

Impossible Alloy Now Possible

What has been impossible has now been shown to be possible – an alloy between two incompatible elements. The findings are being published in this week's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA.A research team led by Professor H.K.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 8:37 pm

AIM for iPhone Grows Up, Paid Version On the Way

While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).

Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.

So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location:

Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location.

Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity. As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency. Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet.

Beyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed. This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications.

Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell.

AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download, while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 8:11 pm

Microsoft slashes contract worker rates by 10 pct (AP)

AP - Microsoft Corp. is slashing overtime, hours and pay for U.S. temporary workers as part of an overall push to curb expenses during the recession.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 Feb 2009 | 8:09 pm

Australian Fires Release Millions Of Tons Of CO2

A top Australian scientist said Thursday that the nation’s bushfires, which have devastated Victoria state, have released millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The Victoria fires, many of which are still burning, have killed more than 200 people and were the worst in Australia’s history.Mark Adams of the University of Sydney said forest fires could become a growing source of carbon pollution as the Earth continues to warm, triggering a vicious cycle in which forests might no longer be CO2 sinks, further accelerating the rise of atmospheric greenhouse gases."With increasing concerns about rising CO2, rising temperatures and reduced rainfall in many of the forested areas, then we could well see much greater emissions from forest fires," said Adams, dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources, in an interview with Reuters.Firefighters were fighting seven wildfires in Victoria on Wednesday, hoping to control the flames ahead of expected higher temperatures on Friday."Scientists worldwide are worried about fires and forests.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:59 pm

Google Kills Paid Apps for Unlocked G1 Phones

Googlephone developers can no longer use their unlocked phones to load for-pay applications.

Google has put the kibosh on paid application downloads for HTC G1 phone users that are using the $400, unlocked version available to people in Google's Android developer program (which costs $25 to join). Google had offered these unlocked devices to developers in a bid to help them create apps for the phone.

G1 phones that have been unlocked through other means do not seem to be affected by the ban.

A Google employee revealed the change in policy suddenly earlier this week in response to a user question on the Android discussion forums. "If you're using an unlocked, developer phone, you'll be unable to view any copy-protected application, including Shazam and Calorie Counter. This is a change that was made recently," wrote the Google employee.

The T-Mobile G1 which runs the Google developed Android OS was launched in October. But it was just two weeks ago that Google started allowing developers to offer paid applications through the Android Market or the device's online app store.

Unlocking a phone allows the device to run on any carrier's network and is not illegal. But the practice is frowned upon by handset makers and carriers.

Google says it is blocking paid apps access on unlocked developer phones to prevent piracy of apps. "The developer version of the G1 is designed to give developers complete flexibility. These phones give developers full permissions to all aspects of the device, including the ability to install a modified version of the Android Open Source Project," said Google in a statement. "We aren't distributing copy protected applications to these phones in order to minimize unauthorized copy of the applications."

Now maybe developers holding unlocked G1s won't feel all that bad about not having access to the $200 'I am Rich' app.

Also see:
Android App No Malware, Says Google
Showdown: HTC T-Mobile G1 vs. iPhone 3G
Analysts: T-Mobile's G1 Android Phone Lacks Sizzle
Annoying: Google Android-Powered G1 Leaves Out Standard Headphone Jack
Photo Gallery: G1 Android Phone Up Close and Personal

Photo: (jugglerpm/Flickr)

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:53 pm

IM Wars: AIM for iPhone grows up, gets paid version

While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).

Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.

So, what’s the big deal here? What do all the changes mean? Well, for one thing, now when you first sign in, the app will ask you if you want to share your current location:

Want to see where your friends are hanging out? You can share your location with your Buddies (or everyone) and see Buddies who are sharing their location.

Users are given three options: 1. No, don’t share location (default); 2. Share only with people on my Buddy list; or 3. Share with everyone. Once you’ve made your selection (let’s say we pick option 2 or 3), a new Group will be added - “Near Me” - showing other contacts within your vicinity.  As Ars Technica points out, “there is no control over how large one’s nearby radius is” and thus, it is not exactly clear how near or far any of your contacts may be from your current location. What you can control, is the frequency of your location updates by navigating to: My Info > Preferences > (scroll down) Frequency.  Here, you can select between 3 options: 1. On Startup; 2. Every 5 min. (default); or 3. Every 2000 feet.

Beyond location-awareness, AIM 2.0 also features SMS capabilities. Users now have the option to send an IM to a screen name, or alternatively, can send an SMS to a contact’s phone number (works on both iPhone and iPod touch). The app now includes both a buddy list and a contact list, to take advantage of these new features. Also, you can now stay logged-in for up to 24 hours, even if the AIM app has been closed.  This allows you (iPhone users only) to get notifications via SMS when you receive a new IM and offers a work-around until Apple enables real Push notifications.

Other notable new features include the ability to use photos (taken with an iPhone) as buddy icons and the option to configure/switch between multiple screen names at any time. Are these new features enough to take down competing IM apps such as IM+, Fring, Truphone, and others? Only time will tell.

AIM Free (2.0.1) is currently available for download (via iTunes), while the cleverly named (but as yet unpriced) AIM Paid is still pending approval (at the time of this writing).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:50 pm

Alaska Airlines Begins Testing Satellite-based In-flight Wi-Fi

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:45 pm

FDA orders drug 'boxed warning'

The U.S.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:42 pm

Dysentery in motion: Oregon Trail for iPhone gets a trailer

We got a big fuzzy feeling when we first saw stills of the Oregon Trail port coming to the iPhone, so seeing it in smooth, buttery action is like being hugged by the physical embodiment of pure nostalgia and happiness.

It looks like they’ve captured the original spirit of the game pretty well, building up the foundation rather than just tearing it all down and exploiting the name for all its worth. Everything we know and love makes an appearance. I want it now.

If things are still on schedule from what we’d heard before, look for it to hit the app store sometime in the next week or so.

Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:27 pm

Four Tons Of New Seeds Added To Doomsday Vault

The "doomsday seed vault" in the Arctic Circle is celebrating its first anniversary with the arrival of nearly 90,000 food crop seed samples, BBC News reported.After the four-ton shipment, more than 20 million seeds are now secure in the frozen repository.The $7 million Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built over 12 months some 426 feet inside a mountain, with the ultimate goal of protecting the world's food crop species against natural and human disasters.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:25 pm

Weak Genetic Diversity Among Europe's Bison May Threaten Existence

The future existence of bison in Europe relies on a handful of closely related captive animals, which scientists fear could leave them vulnerable to certain illnesses due to weak genetic diversity.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 26 Feb 2009 | 7:13 pm

Google blocks unlocked G1s from downloading for-pay applications, upsets developers

Looks like Google is now preventing anyone with an unlocked G1 from downloading for-pay applications from the Android Market. Google says this is to prevent piracy (but only in the most abstract sense, in my [worthless] opinion), but some developers don’t like the idea. Welcome to the Situation Room, I’m Wolf Blitzer.

Google just implemented this ban a few days ago. In the company’s world, it was done to prevent someone from using an unlocked phone from buying a for-pay application, returning it (Google allows full refund returns within 24 hours of downloading), then re-downloading it for free. This Minority Report scenario can happen because unlocked phones give the user access to all the phone’s directories, including the “special,” usually off-limits directory where for-pay applications are stored.

This is where Android developers enter the picture. Google lets the devs buy unlocked phones as part of their development kit. These developers, however, should they only own the unlocked phone, can now no longer purchase their own for-pay application from the Android Market! It’s insanity! One developer is so mad he’s starting to sound like that crazy CNBC guy from the other day, suggesting a “revolt” of some sort:

It would be the only way to show Google that this is NOT acceptable, and that devs are not second (third?) class citizens on the Market. I do not know about you, but I am beyond angry that I can not even see my own paid app on the Market with my 400 dollar dev phone!

Seems to me the easiest way to avoid upsetting the very developers who make Android Market hum is to eliminate the new rule preventing them from downloading for-pay apps. How many people are going to go through the trouble of buying an unlocked phone just so they can get free apps? And if these people exist, so be it; there can’t be that many of these “pirates” that it puts Google out of business.

/soapbox

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Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 6:16 pm

Your horses? Hold them. NAM Nokia 5800s not for sale afterall

If you packed your picnic basket, loaded the family into the car, and hauled over to the Nokia flagship store yesterday as a result of our post yesterday on the Nokia 5800 going on sale, we officially apologize. Chances are, you were turned away. As of this morning, Nokia 5800s aren’t actually on the shelves; they have them in stock, mind you - they just can’t sell them yet.

Their inventory system apparently isn’t playing too nice with the new addition and, seeing as pens, pads of paper, and calculators are banned from Nokia stores, they’re unable to sell the units until they get things patched up. If you’re on the edge of your seat, keep checking back - we’ll update you as soon as we hear they’re letting them out the door.

[Via BoyGeniusReport]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 6:06 pm

Netbook Gets a Heart Transplant, Crushes Benchmarks

The first netbook with Intel's new 1.66-GHz Atom N280 processor it kicks ass. Posting 7 percent faster benchmark scores, it's the fastest netbook we've tested.

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 26 Feb 2009 | 6:00 pm

Video: Windows CE and Android running simultaneously on a Nokia N800

What’s this? Windows CE and Android running on the same device? Is the universe collapsing into a black hole? Oh noes!

VMWare says it’s in talks with handset manufacturers to offer this sort of virtualization but somehow we doubt we will see this outside of geekland anytime soon. It seems a tad over the head of the average consumer. Still, a great proof of concept and something most of us would love to play with.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 3:50 pm

iPhone not selling well in Japan, now available for free

There are no official statistics available as how well the iPhone sells after Apple started offering it in the Japanese market. Now Softbank Mobile, one of Asia's biggest tech companies and the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan, thinks sales need a boost and decided to give away the hardware basically for free.

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 3:49 pm

Japan gets a quad-band BlackBerry Bold

Guess what fellow T-Mobile subscribers?! Japanese DoCoMo subscribers just got themselves a quad-band BlackBerry Bold. Sure, we’ve got ourselves UMA on the 8900, but who needs 3G speeds when Wi-Fi is readily available EVERYWHERE.

RIM,
Thanks, jerks.

T-Mobile,
You better have something in the pipe.

RIM Japan via BGR

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 3:49 pm

Verizon Wireless announces the versatile LG Versa

I guess Versa stands for versatility since the latest LG phone has an attachable QWERTY keyboard. So clever Verizon and LG are.

Today, VZW announced that the touchscreen LG Versa would be available on March 1. This, too, has the fancy new 3D interface, but the most exciting feature is the detachable keyboard. The 3-inch screen is nice, I guess. But is it plastic or glass? Probably plastic. It also comes with a 2-megapixel AF camera with flash, a music player, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, visual voice mail, microSD, 2.5mm jack and a slew of other whatever features.

Whoa! There’s something called Chaperone as well that allows parents to track their kids. And that costs an extra $10/month.

The Versa will be available on March 1 for $200 after a MIR and 2-year contract.

BASKING RIDGE, N.J., and SAN DIEGO – Verizon Wireless and LG Electronics MobileComm U.S.A., Inc. (LG Mobile Phones) announced today that the LG Versa™ will be available on the nation’s largest and most reliable wireless voice and data network beginning March 1. With its elegant chrome border on a bar design, animated 3-inch touch screen interface with tactile feedback and an attachable QWERTY keypad, the LG Versa will be an MVP (Most Versatile Phone) for customers.

Customers can personalize their LG Versa phones based on their messaging needs – either attach the QWERTY keypad to their phones or leave the keypad at home. The LG Versa’s home screen is transformed into a sizzling, animated 3D interface and customers can quickly customize three different home screens with their favorite shortcuts. The built-in accelerometer rotates the screen automatically from portrait to landscape, and customers can use rotation movements to steer games. The HTML Web browser includes Flash and RSS feed support, and customers can keep up to three windows open and switch from one window to the other to view pages.

Additionally, the phone comes packed with Verizon Wireless’ V CAST Music with Rhapsody and V CAST Video services. V CAST Music with Rhapsody allows customers to choose from more than 5 million songs over-the-air, download the master copy of their songs to their PCs free of digital rights management (DRM) software and sync their favorite tracks, albums and playlists from their PCs to their LG Versa phones using the included USB cable.

V CAST Video allows customers to download or stream video from the best names in news, sports, entertainment and more.

The LG Versa supports productivity tools – such as Visual Voice Mail so they can prioritize their messages – while Verizon Wireless’ VZ NavigatorSM service transforms the phone into a navigation device at a fraction of the cost of most GPS systems. In addition, the LG Versa is compatible with Mobile Broadband Connect to allow customers to use their phones as a modem by linking their laptops to their phones to establish a broadband connection anywhere within Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Broadband rate and coverage area.

Additional features and capabilities of the LG Versa include:

· Virtual QWERTY keypad

· 2.0 megapixel camera and camcorder with autofocus, flash and image editor

o SmartPic technology for improved image quality

o Camera resolutions: 1600 x 1200 (default), 1280 x 960, 800 x 400, 640 x 480, 320 x 240 pixels

o Face detection – automatically detect a face when taking a picture

o Zoom: up to 2x

o Image editor: zoom, rotate, crop, add frames and icons, and write over images

o Video resolutions: 640 x 480, 320 x 240, 176 x 144 pixels (default)

o Video recording time: 30 seconds for sending or up to one hour for saving

o Video player for WMV, MP4, 3GP, 3G2 formats

o Customizable brightness, white balance, shutter sound, color effects, photometry, and self-timer

· Music Player –

o Music player for .mp3, .wma, unprotected .aac and unprotected .aac+ formats

o Multitask while playing music – hide player to send messages, edit contacts, and browse the Web

o Create and manage playlists

o Music Library – organized by artist, genre and album

o Music Only Mode (RF off except Bluetooth®)

· microSD™ memory port with up to 16 GB support (16 GB card available in mid-March)

· USB Mass Storage – transfer files between microSD card and PC

· Bluetooth Version 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) –

o Supported profiles: headset, hands-free (car kits), dial-up networking, stereo phonebook access, basic printing, object push (for vCard and vCal), file transfer, basic imaging, and human interface device

· Animated three-dimensional interface for home screens – customize up to three home screens with favorite features and applications

· Module home screen when QWERTY keypad is attached

· VZ Navigator-capable – get visual and audible directions to thousands of destinations, locate businesses and other points of interest, get maps of a location and share directions with others

· Chaperone® Child-capable – allows the LG Versa to have its location shared with family members via the Chaperone Web site, the Chaperone® Parent application or Child Zone® SMS alerts

· Chaperone® Parent-capable – with the Chaperone Parent application, customers can view location information or be notified of the whereabouts of the Chaperone Child phone

· Visual Voice Mail – delete, reply and forward voice mail messages without having to listen to prior messages or voice instructions

· Mobile Web-capable – customizable, enhanced wireless access to the latest in news, sports, weather and more

· Mobile Email – access MSN® Hotmail®, America Online® and Yahoo!® accounts to exchange e-mail

· Media Center-capable – downloadable games, ringtones, wallpapers, location-based services and more

· Mobile IM using AIM®, MSN, Yahoo!

· Auto Screen and Key Lock – prevents unwanted key actions

· 2.5 mm headset jack

· Text, picture and video messaging

· Supports threaded messaging

· Personal organizer with calculator, EZ Tip Calculator, calendar, alarm clock, stopwatch, world clock, notepad, and drawing pad with character recognition

· Speakerphone and voice commands

· Bilingual interface – English and Spanish

· Phonebook with up to 1,000 entries with multiple contacts

· TTY/TDD-capable

· In Case of Emergency contacts

· Frequency: 1.9 GHz CDMA PCS, 800 MHz CDMA

· Data transmission: EV-DO Revision A (Rev. A)

· Dimensions: 4.16” (h) x 2.07” (w) x 0.54” (d)

· Weight: 3.81 ounces

· Hearing Aid Compatibility = M4/T4

· SAR: head 1.38 W/kg, body 0.764 W/kg

· LCD: 262K color TFT, 480 x 240 pixels, 3.0”

· Ambient light sensor controls the brightness on the LCD according to surrounding light

· Proximity sensor turns LCD off when a customer is placing a call on the LG Versa

· External LCD: monochrome OLED, 56 x 120 pixels, 0.94” (only available on the QWERTY keypad attachment)

· Standard battery: 1,100 mAh

· Usage time: up to 290 minutes or

· Standby time: up to 430 hours

Pricing

The LG Versa will be available online at www.verizonwireless.com and in Verizon Wireless Communications Stores beginning March 1 for $199.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. Customers will receive the rebate in the form of a debit card; upon receipt, customers may use the card as cash anywhere debit cards are accepted.

Customers can get the most out of their LG Versa with Verizon Wireless’ Nationwide Premium calling plan. Starting at $79.99 monthly access, the Nationwide Premium calling plan includes unlimited messaging, VZ Navigator, Mobile Email and V CAST VPak, plus unlimited megabytes for Mobile Web and Media Center. Mobile Broadband Connect can be added to their plans for $59.99 monthly access for 5 GB, and Visual Voice Mail is available for $2.99 monthly access, per line, plus airtime or megabyte charges and messaging fees, depending on a customer’s plan.

For more information about Verizon Wireless products and services, visit a Verizon Wireless Communications Store, call 1-800-2 JOIN IN or go to www.verizonwireless.com.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: MobileCrunch | 26 Feb 2009 | 3:29 pm

CEO: Nokia Considers Entering Laptop Industry

HELSINKI (Reuters) - The world's top cellphone maker Nokia is eyeing entering the laptop business, its Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in an interview to Finnish national broadcaster YLE on Wednesday.

"We are looking very actively also at this opportunity," Kallasvuo said, when asked whether Nokia plans to make laptops.

Industry has rumored about Nokia's possible plan to enter the PC industry since late last year, but Kallasvuo's comment was the first official admittance of such plans.

"We don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cellphone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging," Kallasvuo said.

"Today we have hundreds of millions of people who are having their first Internet experience on the phone. This is a good indication," he said.

Nokia's comments come a week after No 3 PC brand Acer launched a foray into the phone business with eight cellphone models, joining leader Hewlett-Packard and No. 4 Lenovo in the high-growth space.

While strong profit margins in the smartphone industry attract PC brands, the attraction of the low-margin computer industry is less obvious.

"Nokia maybe nervous about entering a market segment that is already heavily commoditized, but it would be in a position to exploit its enormous scale in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution," said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

"All leading mobile network operators and retailers are adding connected notebooks and netbooks to their portfolios alongside mobile phones. On this basis it comes as no surprise that Nokia is evaluating this segment," he said.

The global PC industry was resilient for most of last year when other technology sectors were ailing, but it too has now been caught up in the deepening economic downturn that has hit demand from consumers and corporate buyers.

(Reporting by Tarmo Virki; Editing by Brian Moss, Bernard Orr)

Source: Wired: Gadgets | 26 Feb 2009 | 1:34 pm

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