|
|
|
|
What happened to free apps on the App Store?FROM APPLETELL - It seems the free iPhone apps on the App Store are now mainly “Lite” versions of paid applications. Sure, it’s a smart move financially, but does it always make sense, and is it always necessary? MORE » Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 2 Mar 2009 | 6:12 pm Asus unveils the Windows Mobile based W835 smartphoneSection: Communications, Cellphones, Smartphones, Mobile
While the feature set seems to be complete, there is still more that sets the W835 apart. It offers a built-in ability to share its Internet connectivity. The W835 is able to act as a Wi-Fi access point and can share its 3G connection with up to ten other devices. This is done through a “simple” to use interface that even re-connects dropped connections automatically. Of course, with all the good news feature-wise, Asus did leave a few details out on their press release such as the price and release date. Read [Asus] Full Story » | Written by Robert Nelson for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article » Source: Gadgetell | 2 Mar 2009 | 5:02 pm Safari Beta Takeup Tops Firefox, IE and Chromenk497 writes "The release of the beta for the next version of Apple's Safari browser last week helped drive Apple's market share above ten per cent. The Safari beta has gained users at a rate of about 0.5 per cent a day since its release, topping one per cent by day four. For comparison, Microsoft's beta of IE took six months to hit one percent, Chrome needed almost a month, and Firefox 3 took a week."Read more of this story at Slashdot. Source: Slashdot | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:44 pm Universal Music: We Don’t Sound As Bad As Everyone Else [MediaMemo]
1) The big music companies continue to post crummy results. 2) Vivendi’s Universal Music Group (VIV.PA), the biggest music label in the world, continues to post results that aren’t as bad as its competitors. The newest data points come via Vivendi’s 4th quarter earnings release, which announces that Universal’s sales declined 6% in the last 3 months of 2008. Strip out currency fluctuations, and that number would have been - 7.8%. That’s bad, but not as bad as the 11% drop that Warner Music Group (WMG) reported during the same period, or the 22% decline that Sony’s Sony Music Entertainment (SNE) recorded. Universal says earnings (EBDITA, in this case), declined 3.6% for the quarter, or 6.6% if adjusted for currency fluctuations. Per usual, Vivendi doesn’t provide much more in the way of meaningful data about Universal’s performance — though it does say it sold a lot of Lil Wayne music last year. For what it’s worth, here’s what it said about UMG’s results for 2008: Revenues: Down 4.5% (-0.2% after adjusting for currency). Earnings (EBITDA): Up 9.9% (11.6% after adjusting for currency). Recorded music sales: Down 8.8%, (-4.8% after adjusting for currency). Digital sales: Up 31% (the company only provides a currency-adjusted number here). It says online sales were strong “in all large countries” — thank you, Apple (AAPL) — and that mobile sales were strong everywhere outside the U.S.. Obligatory YouTube clip: Here’s UMG star Lil Wayne having a giggle with Katie Couric about his marajuana intake. Source: All Things Digital | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:24 pm Amazon supplier loses warehouse lease, invites the public to loot its booksBookbarn, one of Amazon UK's largest warehousing and fulfilment suppliers, lost its lease on its Bristol warehouse, so they flung open the doors and invited the public to come in and take all the publishers' consigned books they had on hand, as that was cheaper than returning them to the publishers who still owned them.This reminds me of when I was working at a scholarly bookstore in Toronto and we bought the entire remaining inventory of Progress Books, the Soviet Union's English-language publisher, whose New York warehouse suffered a "mysterious" fire after the USSR fell apart. For weeks, I unboxed and sorted through smoke-reeking, charred expurgated works of Lenin, Marx and others, stacking the saleable merchandise in one corner, the briquettes in another. Books given away for free at one of Britain's biggest warehouses (Thanks, Kathryn!) Source: Boing Boing | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:21 pm How To: Five Minute DIY Desk Cable Tidy
This weekend, I decided to do something about it. There are plenty of tutorials on the web detailing intricate schemes for cable management, most of which involve drilling holes, installing wooden screens or other long-winded solutions. I’m lazy, and I’m also fussy about how things look, so I thought about the easiest (and cheapest) fix I could make. Read on to find out how, with some street scavenging and five minutes of easy work you can have a neat and tidy workspace.
I found this one almost as soon as I had decided to do this project and, double-lucky, it fit right in between the legs of the folding table. This means that it met my criterion of being easy. Check how snug it is:
Next, to decide how to fix the crate to the table. As the crate has plenty of holes, cooling won't be an issue and the whole thing can be snugly pushed against the bottom of the desktop. The problem there, though, is that those handy gaps front and back aren't quite big enough for easy access. I figured I could either get fancy and install some kind of hinge to swing it down, but that would quite obviously be too much effort. So I checked to see if there would be legroom if the casket was mounted on a permanent slant:
Here it is slotted in underneath. As you can see, swinging it down a little won't significantly restrict what little legroom this desk already has. So, having decided that I could fix it in place, it was time to choose the manner of attachment. Cable ties!
The ties weren't quite long enough to reach, so I just doubled them up:
Then, it was a matter of threading them through a nearby gap. This shows the second advantage of the plastic crate: lots of holes means lots of mounting points. And because it is lightweight, you only need a few ties to hold both crate and power strips.
Easy, and – if it weren't for taking all the photos – a ten minute job. The hard part was in finding the right sized crate and there I got lucky. The finished piece:
Now, right there it looks pretty conspicuous but, when returned to its home with the crate-side to the wall it will be a lot less visible. You obviously don't have to use a crate -- a cardboard box would do (along with some air holes if you plan to put any hard drives in there). As you can see from the picture, though, the crate is ideal: It is easily attached, it has a nice big gap at the back for throwing in new hardware and it has plenty of holes from which to run those cables to the computer above. Heck, with the ventilation I could even throw the Gadget Lab Hackintosh netbook in there, hook up a monitor and use it as a permanent desktop machine. Next up: Actually tidying the cables away -- a rather formidable task. Take a look at the mess I have to deal with after pulling the table out of the room:
Over to y'all. Anyone got a neat and tidy desk hack? Post in the comments here, or add your photos to the Gadget Lab Flickr Group. Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:14 pm TV Test Pillow
Designed by Henriette Hyldgaard, this pillow shows an old British test card and costs $40-ish. Product Page [Funktionalley via Funfurde] Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:12 pm OhGizmo Review: Clarion MiNDBy Evan Ackerman The Clarion MiND (which I will herein capitalize as normal) is supposed to be a lot of things. It’s supposed to be a GPS, an internet tablet, a media player, and more… All...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:05 pm Report: Apple to announce new desktop computers on March 24World of Apple reports rumors that Apple will host an event on March 24. Given the state of the lineup and recent rumors, such an event is likely to involve desktop computers: new Mac Minis, iMacs or Mac Pros in any combination. Source: Gizmodo | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Samsung announces NX Series hybrid digital camera
With all the pre-PMA announcements that Samsung made in the last few weeks I wondered if they had anything left in the tank. While it’s not a production ready model, the NX Series hybrid looks interesting, but it’s a still a hybrid and I don’t think they’re any better than a point and shoot. However, I won’t pass judgment until I’ve taken this one for a ride. The hype over this hybrid is the APC-S sensor that is found in DSLRs sans mirror box. Because of the exclusion of the mirro box, the NX has an electronic viewfinder that Samsung says is “ultra-precise.” The distance between the lens and sensor on the NX is approximately 60 percent closer than that of a DSLR. The first NX Series model will be out in the second half of this year. Samsung Digital Imaging’s CEO Sang-jin Park had a pretty interesting quote in the press release about hybrid market share.
I don’t see Samsung taking over the world by 2012, but the estimate about hybrids being 20% of the market is pretty astounding and maybe a little laughable. But you never know. People want small cameras to put in their back pocket or purse. That will never change and most aren’t pedantic enough to care about actual image quality so long as everything isn’t blurred, etc. Source: Gizmodo | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Navajo Nation Bridges the Digital DivideInteractive Video Conferencing and Distance Learning a Reality for Navajo Students CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Conterra Telecom Services (Conterra), a...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Atmel and IS2T Announce Java Support for AVR32 UC3 Flash MicrocontrollersIS2T to Provide Java Solutions to Increase Development Productivity for AVR32 UC3 Microcontrollers SAN JOSE, Calif., March 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Atmel(R) Corporation ...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Triangle Game Conference Announces Tracks and SpeakersConference Taps Pool of Industry Experts for "Innovate or Die" Learning Exchange RALEIGH, N.C., March 2 /PRNewswire/ -- The Triangle Game Conference (TGC),...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm CSC Selects SAS to Provide Support for New North Carolina Medicaid Management Information SystemCARY, N.C. and FALLS CHURCH, Va., March 2 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- CSC (NYSE: CSC) announced today that SAS, a leader in business analytics, has been selected to be...Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Samsung puts DSLR sensor in chunky crossover
Samsung's NX has the sensor of a conventional DSLR camera in a smaller body, which swaps a traditional viewfinder for pure electronics. According to the press release, Samsung's developed a new "ultra-precise" electronic viewfinder that allowed them to fit an APS-C sensor in a body 60 percent smaller than models similarly equipped. An APS-C sensor, being larger than the tiny equivalents in most point-and-shoot cameras, makes it easier to take fast, noise-free photos. The use of an EVF means the NX has live preview, too. It'll be out in the second half of 2009. There were no further details in the press release, but photos reveal a hot shoe but no built-in flash, standard PASM, scene and movie-recording features, and an AF light. Hell, can't even tell what sort of flash card it uses. It's hard to tell exactly how big it is, too: is this Sigma DP1-sized (yay!) or more like a fat ultrazoom? 
 Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 2 Mar 2009 | 1:00 pm Meet pyuuun, your new palm-sized sidekick robot
Tokyo-based Robo-Engine started selling a mini robot [JP] that’s supposed to become your sidekick and keep a record of your daily life. The so-called pyuuun is marketed in Japan as a “life log robot”. Contact either the Japan Trend Shop, Gizmine or Rinkya if you want to get it, too. It costs a whopping $3,100 though. pyuuun is equipped with two stepping motors, a 12V battery (battery life: 6 hours) and wireless LAN. It also comes with eight sensors: brightness, pyroelectricity, crash, sound, range, temperature, acceleration and infrared. pyuuun runs on Windows 2000/XP. On their website, Robo Engine gives two examples for the life log function. pyuuun is able to send an email to its owner when it detects the presence of a human being (”anti-crime function”) and it also produces a sound when the temperature in a room rises (”in-door thermal management”). Source: CrunchGear | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:58 pm GTA IV Expansion: Breaks Records, Gets Damned - Techtree.com
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:51 pm How Things ChangeSource: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:42 pm Will Nokia Comes With Music soon come without DRM? - Afterdawn.com
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:38 pm TAXiFlasherTaxiFlasher is a really cool app. It flashes the word TAXI in large letters (black letters on a yellow background alternating/flashing with the reverse, yellow letters on a black background, or you pick...Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:33 pm NASA delays Kepler launch for rocket checks - Register
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:24 pm Foxmarks becomes Xmarks, does site discovery - CNET News
Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:20 pm AirPhones: Wireless Audio Streaming From Mac to iPhone
It would seem, then, that you should be able to send tunes to the speakers from the iPhone or iPod Touch. You can’t. In one of its frequent but inexplicable arbitrary cripplings, Apple has ruled that thou cannot do this, despite it being technically feasible. AirPhones doesn’t quite fix this — the iPhone app effectively does the opposite, but it is a neat way to replace hardware with software (if you already have the phone, that is). The $5 application (Intel Mac only right now) sits on the iPhone. A companion app (free) is installed on your Mac and beams audio over the network to the iPhone. You can then either hook up headphones (kind of pointless) or jack it into your stereo. Instant wireless audio streaming, without having to buy Apple’s crippled box. Better yet, AirPhones also works with movies, something the Airport Express can’t do without the excellent Airfoil software from Rogue Amoeba, which costs $25. Product page [AirPhones via TUAW] See Also:
Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 2 Mar 2009 | 12:17 pm iPhones and PCs take fitness to heart
|
Desktop Linux: Ready for the mainstream InfoWorld By Galen Gruman It's been a decade since Linux proponents first argued their OS was ready for mainstream adoption. Yet for all intents and purposes, Linux remains nonexistent on "regular" people's desks. Can WinTel Survive? Office 14 Won’t Launch Until 2010 – But Will It Delay Windows 7? |
The Brits are getting shafted again. We’ve reported many times already about the drop in value of the Great British Pound against, well, against pretty much every currency, and the knock-on effect of increased gadget prices.
Now, though, Sigma has bumped a lens price by £8,000, or around $11,400 in today’s money. To be sure, this isn’t a cheap $200 that has suddenly rocketed in price — the 200-500mm f/2.8 APO EX DG HSM was already a stunning $16,000 ($22,800) at launch. Still, a 50% price hike is huge, resulting in an MSRP of £24,000 ($34,200)
We haven’t covered this rather specialist lens before so, to save you having to Google it, here are some fun facts: The lens weighs 15.7 Kg (34.6 lbs) and has so much glass inside that it needs its own internal battery pack (rechargeable) to focus it. The lens even has its own LCD display to show you the current focal length and focus distance.
LENS PRICE ROCKETS £8,000 IN ONE MONTH (UPDATE) [Amateur Photographer]
See Also:
 Washington Post | World's poor drive growth in global cell phone use The Associated Press GENEVA (AP) - Six in ten people around the world now have cell phone subscriptions, signaling that mobile phones are the communications technology of choice, particularly in poor countries, according to a UN report published Monday. ITU: S'pore has lowest ICT cost UN study finds poor countries drive growth in global cell phone use |
AP - Six in ten people around the world now have cell phone subscriptions, signaling that mobile phones are the communications technology of choice, particularly in poor countries, according to a U.N. report published Monday.
 Radio 1 | Rogue apps raise concerns over Facebook's reactive policies Ars Technica Two malicious Facebook applications were caught scraping user data and spreading virally. The apps were quickly squashed, but the incident is raising new questions about the effectiveness of Facebook's open-door developer requirements. Facebook users suffer viral surge Phishers Target Facebook |
D_skin is a protective cover for DVDs, a scratch guard for optical media. Unlike the hard to apply, sticky film protectors you are familiar with, the d_skin clips on and can therefore be replaced when you scratch it.
There is, however, a problem. The d_skin cost more than the DVDs it protects. At $12 for a five-pack, they come in at around ten times the price of DVD-R blanks. Of course, if you buy pre-recorded DVDs, in the form of movies and video games, the price ratio of this replaceable prophylactic improves. But the product site pushes this as a cover for your regular, home made media, even touting the fact that you can burn a disc with the skin in place.
The real problem is optical media in general, though. DVDs are low capacity, expensive and easy to damage. There are two reasons we still have them — DRM and poor bandwidth. The former is due to shortsighted paranoia on the part of content producers, the latter is due to greed on the part of the cable and internet providers, who insist on capping and slowing data on their networks.
So, if you haven’t already backed up your Xbox games onto a hard drive somewhere, you might want to grab some of these. OR, you know, learn to hack and just burn them to another blank DVD — it’ll be cheaper.
Product page [d-skin via Core77]
It’s a classic seller’s gambit: Increase prices by cutting supply. The online publishers’ version: Make your ads more valuable by selling fewer ads.
Here’s how SmartMoney.com did it, according to Advertising Age. In October, it stopped selling one of the three display ads it sells on each page. Since it dropped the one few people saw in the first place — the “skyscraper” unit Web users wouldn’t see unless they scrolled down to the bottom of the page — the move wouldn’t cost the publisher much.
But the online arm of the personal finance magazine says the move actually made it money, by somehow increasing the click-through rate — and thus the value — of its remaining ads: “The result: a 21% increase in aggregate click-through rates. Some advertisers that had quit buying the site have returned, including Scottrade and Options Xpress. And the site was sold out in the fourth quarter, though [publisher Bill Shaw] said that trend hasn’t continued in first quarter.”
SmartMoney’s experiment wasn’t enough to fend off lousy times for Web publishing in general and financial titles specifically: The site laid off about a dozen people in January. (Both the site and the print title are a joint venture between News Corp.’s Dow Jones (NWSA) and Hearst; Dow Jones also owns All Things Digital.)
And off course, on the Web, the concept of scarcity is a tough one to sell. Even the most optimistic Web sales guy will privately moan about the glut of online ad inventory that gets bigger every day.
And note that SmartMoney didn’t exactly turn its site into an commercial-free zone — it is still running text ads from Google (GOOG) at the bottom of its pages, and it added a second ad onto its home page.
Eventually, if online publishers are going to increase really increase value of their advertising, they’re going to have to find ways to make their ads fundamentally more compelling. But in the meantime, expect to see them keep nibbling around the problem with gambits like this. In times like these, every bite helps.
[Image credit: kennymatic]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Foxmarks, one of the most popular Firefox add-ons for social bookmarks, is re-branding itself as Xmarks and making significant additions to its functionality. Since Foxmarks has collected so many urls (600 million to be exact), the company is creating a search feature that turns up pre-qualified results. Since Foxmarks’ launch, the bookmark synchronization add-on has been downloaded over 14 million times, with most downloads originating from Firefox users, though the add-on launched Internet Explorer and Safari browser capabilities in early February.
The Xmarks feature produces search results based on what millions of users in its community are bookmarking. Users can view each result’s number of bookmarks, popularity ratings and reviews, and a user-generated description of the site. The search engine also recommends similar sites to the user. If the user downloads the Xmarks add-on, the technology will mark popular bookmarked sites (with an icon) in any Google, Yahoo or MSN Live searches. Users can hover over each icon to see a thumbnail view of the Xmarks reviews and information on the site. Users can also click an Xmarks icon in their address bar to learn more about any site they are currently visiting. Much of the information on Xmarks, such as site summaries and reviews is user-generated and the hope is that users will create a wiki for website reviews, according to CEO James Joaquin. Currently, the Xmarks add-on is only available for Firefox users but is expected to reach Internet Explorer and Safari users in the near future. They are also in talks to extend Xmarks capabilities to Google’s Chrome browser.
Founded by Mitch Kapor and Todd Agulnick, Xmarks competes with other popular social bookmarking applications like Delicious and StumbleUpon. While Delicious’s search feature is similar, Xmarks’ search result snapshot is more comprehensive and informative with summaries, reviews and similar sites included in the result. And the ability to see this comprehensive Xmarks snapshot in a Google search or in the address bar is unique.
Xmarks’ technology is undoubtedly innovative and useful, particularly to users looking to deepen the information-return of their searches. It is interesting, however, that the company has chosen to re-brand their product line after spending over two years building what could be called a Firefox-related brand around Foxmarks. Joaquin says that Firefox has created a rich environment for the company to distribute its add-on, but the company is now hoping to gain additional momentum from other browsers. Part of that effort includes a less Firefox-centric brand. And as Internet Explorer continues to lose market share and the battle of the browsers becomes more heated, it will be important for Xmarks to diversify its user base.
Here are a few screen shots of Xmarks’s web search features:
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
 Ars Technica | Review: Safari 4 Beta Takes Page From Google Playbook InformationWeek The latest version of Apple's Web browser, now in beta, copies features already available on Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera -- and looks great doing it. Analysis: Safari 4 lifts Apple above 10% browser market share Week in Apple: Safari 4-palooza, Omni sets apps free, market share ... |
That's the key Web 2.0 insight: "the web as a platform."What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09Okay, "webs" are not "platforms." I know you're used to that idea after five years, but consider taking the word "web" out, and using the newer sexy term, "cloud." "The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
Imagine that this was financial thinking -- instead of web design thinking. We take a bunch of loans, we mash them together and turn them into a security. Now securities are secure, right? They are triple-A solid! So now we can build more loans on top of those securities. Ingenious! This means the price of credit trends to zero, so the user base expands radically, so everybody can have credit! v Nobody could have tried that before, because that sounds like a magic Ponzi scheme. But luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvious who owes what to whom, we can have a fluid, formless ownership structure that's always in permanent beta. As long as we keep moving forward, adding attractive new features, the situation is booming!
Now, I wouldn't want to claim that Web 2.0 is as frail as the financial system -- the financial system that supported it and made it possible! But Web 2.0 is directly built on top of finance. Web 2.0 is supposed to be business. This isn't a public utility or a public service, like the old model of an Information Superhighway established for the public good.
The Information Superhighway is long dead -- it was killed by Web 1.0. And web 2.0 kills web 1.0.
Addendum:
The more I think about it the more apt the comparison between the web and the financial system is.The web is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. But its proven to be such a goddamn useful tool that we're using it more and more, and discarding our previous tools. We're replacing bookstores with amazon, mail with email, tv with hulu etc. because this new tool is so GOOD. But in our excitement about it, we haven't stopped to consider some of the drawbacks or limitations it might have.
Likewise, the financial system was built on new tools of statistical analysis. These tools were so GOOD and allowed so much money to be made that we didn't stop to consider the drawbacks or limitations of them. And it turns out there are some pretty severe drawbacks and limitations. They're so severe in fact, that they're currently destroying the entire financial system.
Total reliance on something without considering the drawbacks is a recipe for disaster, and its certainly possible that our use of the web is taking us down that road.
The guest of honor in the aquarium's Kids' Corner octopus tank had swum to the top of the enclosure and disassembled the recycling system's valve, flooding the place with some 200 gallons of seawater.Octopus floods Santa Monica Pier Aquarium (Thanks, Coop!)"It had grabbed the tube that pulls out the water and caused it to spray outside the tank," said aquarium education specialist Nick Fash. Judging by the size of the flood, Fash estimated that the water flowed for about 10 hours before the first staff member, Aaron Kind, showed up for work.
Addenda:
Note to octopus:Chris Spurgeon:I did not mean to eat your brother. I thought that sushi was squid.
Please spare my family.
Signed,
Me
That octopus is now confined to a tiny corner of his aquarium where he's passing the hours bouncing a baseball against the wall.
Addenda:
Death by Snoo Snoo!Jessemoya:
Well, of course he died. What else do you do with your life after you win a $4,000 bet by having sex with two women for 12 hours? Nothing! That's it, you're done. YOU WIN.
 CNET News | AMD divides itself in two, hoping to gang up on Intel VentureBeat After a couple of years of preparation, Advanced Micro Devices is finally going to split itself in two today in the belief that competing with Intel is easier done with two heads instead of one. AMD Plans 32nm Processors in 2010 For AMD, There's Life After Fabs |
Apple's iPhone now runs the full version of MacOS--MacOS 7, that is!
The MacOS iPhone project has successfully crunched the classic edition of Apple's Macintosh operating system, released in 1991, onto the company's popular cellphone. It took many weeks just to get it running, the developers report, but ultimately the whole system, including apps like MacPaint and MacDraw, run well enough to "sit for hours playing this this."
Photos: James Cunningham.
Project Page [MacOS iPhone project via OSNews and Electronic Pulp]
I’m (mostly) back from my month-long vacation. A month that I spent sitting on a beach in Hawaii doing absolutely nothing that involved work. I hiked, I surfed (badly), I snorkeled. I read book after book sitting in the sun with an ice cold beer next to me. All of my computers were left behind in California. All I took with me was my iPhone, to post a few pictures to Posterous and Facebook. The only news I heard was local stuff, mostly about the weather.
I stayed in Hanalei Bay on the north shore of Kauai. Hanalei is a very small town with just a single small hotel, lots of locals and a few tourists driving through to reach some good hiking trails at the end of the road. For a blogger looking to get away from it all, Hanalei is a good place to do it.
I didn’t stay in that hotel (you’d know why if you saw it). Instead, I stumbled across a listing on a vacation rental site for the Hanalei Surfboard House. They are generally booked solid months in advance, but there was a random cancellation and I jumped on it.
Little did Simon Potts know that he’d be creating the perfect haven for a down and out blogger when he opened the Surfboard House in 2003. Potts, a 56 year old retired British music executive, is one very colorful person. Surfboard House (named after the surfboards that line the fence of the property) sits one house off the beach. The rooms are immaculate, huge, and very private. It compares favorably to any five star hotel I’ve stayed in (here’s what Frommers said about Surfboard House). I spent weeks there.
Potts is a fascinating character. I quickly determined he basically felt the same way about the music business that I do. In short, he thinks he got out at exactly the right time. His quippy summary of the music business today: “It’s an unholy mess.” So we got along famously. And boy can he tell a story. In his short but profitable career in the music industry he signed artists like The English Beat, The Stray Cats, Haircut 100, Thompson Twins, The Cure, 10,000 Maniacs, MC Hammer, Blind Melon and Radiohead. He retired when he was 40. He’s got a story or two about every artist.
When my time was up to leave, I asked Potts if I could stay another week. He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed. But the days flew by, and soon it was time to go home.
In short, I’m back. I’m tanned, rested, and generally grumpy about not being in Hawaii any more, but back I am. And somehow TechCrunch did just fine without me.
More soon on my plans for the future and my thoughts about the events that led me to take a month off in the first place. Just as soon as I get a couple more days of skiing in.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
You will, along with many millions of others, likely make an emergency appointment with your psychologist this week.
After all, the words of Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln College in Oxford, England, have probably slapped their syllables against your very core. Social-networking sites, she said, like Facebook (it’s interesting how Facebook seems to have come to symbolize all social networking), are infantilizing the human mind.
The definition of infantile behavior appears to span such horrific traits as sensationalism, short attention spans, and a need to urinate in the middle of shopping malls. (Perhaps I inadvertently slipped that last one in.)
However, Lady Greenfield’s worries are clearly weighing upon her mind. She told the Daily Mail, for example: “My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children, who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span, and who live for the moment.”
The news that Google is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business!
Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. If Larry and Sergey plan to share anything more than links with the newspapers whose headlines it displays in Google News, they haven’t signaled their intentions.
Ladies and gentleman, the co-producer of NBC’s Late Night With Jimmy Fallon—debuting Monday—is a geek.
Or at least the former producer of G4’s Attack Of The Show, is geek-y. He’s not stuck in a basement somewhere uploading pictures to 4chan, but he knows what 4chan is.
The point is that Gavin and his team are bringing a new sensibility to the business of making a late night talk show. It’s one that they developed by living in an Internet-connected world. Late Night With Jimmy Fallon will be a talk show for the Twitter era.
Amazon has caved into demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the Kindle to read a book aloud. This is very bad news.
We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud. The story got famous when it was shown that one of its public domain works — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — was marked to forbid the book to be read aloud. (Here’s a piece I wrote about this in 2001).
Now the issue is back. The Authors Guild has objected because Amazon’s Kindle 2 has a function built in that enables the book to be read aloud. So when, for example, you’re commuting, you can plug your Kindle 2 into your MP3 jack and have the book read aloud.
Meet Mark, an IT guy at a small company who occasionally has to renew licenses for the software utilized by the business. Recently, he had to activate a copy of PaperPort, the scanning and document management software from Nuance. In order to free up another activation slot, he had to uninstall the old one first while being online. Like most activation licensed software, this doesn’t always work properly.
To resolve the issue Mark contacted Nuance’s support. To his surprise however, they didn’t want to help him straight away, instead asking him to take pictures of the CD in order to prove that the company owned a legitimate copy.
“I couldn’t believe my ears,” Mark told TorrentFreak. “After arguing with support for a while on how ridiculous it was, I still had to have the license within the day. To make a long story short I finally got them to unlock 2 licenses after 2 days of repeated calls and sending the picture of the CD multiple times.”
And this is how we will do it [Vanhoozer Studios]
We’re less than two weeks away from Plugg, the European startup conference organized by our writer from across the pond, Robin Wauters, and it promises to be a great event with a host of knowledgeable speakers and a startup competition that will feature some of Europe’s most promising web and mobile startups on the main stage (see below for details).
If you’d like to join the array of seasoned European entrepreneurs and investors at Plugg, which will take place on March 12 in Brussels (Belgium), you can register for the event with the following code which will knock 15% off the €450 list price: plugg09-media-techcrunch. To use the code, head to this registration page hosted by Amiando and enter the promotional code at the bottom.
Speaking at the event are some of Europe’s most prolific industry pundits, each specializing in a specific area which they’ll highlight in a keynote or panel. Among the speakers are: our own Mike Butcher (TechCrunch UK), Gerd Leonhard (Media Futurist), Bart Decrem (Tapulous), Anil Hansjee (Google), Dries Buytaert (Drupal, Acquia), Inmaculada Martinez (Stradbroke Advisors), Lisa Sounio (Dopplr), Fred Destin (Atlas Ventures), and more.
Last week Plugg announced the 20 finalists, selected out of a batch of 133 companies who registered their profiles for the event’s startup competition. Here’s the run-down of the list of startups, who will each be pitching the audience and a professional jury on stage at the conference (in alphabetical order):
ApSynth / Calcul Plus (France)
“ApSynth provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) to build Rich Internet Application available on demand in the ApSynth’s marketplace.”
BeeBole (Belgium)
“Imagine business apps built like personalized start pages. SMBs and freelancers now have their own business web portal.”
Bubok (Spain)
“We are an online on-demand publishing company. Customers can publish and sell their work for free and worldwide, both paper and e-books.”
Burt (Sweden)
“Our software help ad agencies to better understand and leverage technology to create more entertaining, clever and efficient campaigns.”
ContextIn (Israel)
“ContextIn is offering a unique semantic technologies, improving the performance of online display advertising.”
Desktop Reporting (Belgium)
“Desktop Reporting brings Google Analytics to the desktop, with a host of features that help you understand how your web site is performing.”
“CannyBill is a web based invoicing and billing solution for businesses and web designers.”
Hammerkit (Finland)
“We are the IKEA of the web, following an assemble-it-yourself model & delivering dynamic unique web services with plug & play simplicity.”
iOpus / AlertFox (Germany)
“An in-depth monitoring service for Web 2.0 & SaaS web applications (100% AJAX, Flash, Silverlight Support)”
Jinni (Israel)
“Jinni is the first semantic discovery engine for movies and TV shows, with search and recommendations from the Movie Genome in a visual UI.”
Mendeley (UK)
“Free academic software to manage & share research papers and a network to discover research trends and like-minded researchers.”
Myngle (The Netherlands)
“Myngle changes one of the most traditional industries, by bringing traditional language education to the online mass market.”
Nulaz (The Netherlands)
“See where your friends are, share locations and view local info. Nulaz tells you what’s happening!”
Plista (Germany)
“We personalize your Internet experience by helping you to find and share content that’s relevant to you and hence save you time and money.”
SenseBoard (Sweden)
“Be like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Move around objects on the screen or even type with your bare hands”
Silentale (France)
“With Silentale, store all your personal conversations in one place and access them from anywhere. Time travel through your message history.”
Snagsta (UK)
“A Recommendation site. Make lists of favourite things. Share them with friends. Discover new stuff in the lists of people similar to you.”
SofaTutor (Germany)
“People study late for exams-often too late to get help. sofatutor offers video answers to any School & College topic.”
“Tailgate transforms everything (banners, video, widget, microsites, etc) into e-commerce and distributes any website functionality anywhere”
VinoGusto (Belgium)
“Wine guide and social network. Based on user reviews, it helps to find the right wine and selling point.”
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Ella sez, "A friend of mine asked to put her camera on the conveyor belt at a local kaiten sushi restaurant. People's reactions as they discover that they're being filmed are fairly humorous."
Kaiten (conveyor) sushi time in real Japan
(Thanks, Ella!)
Source: Boing Boing | 2 Mar 2009 | 7:18 am
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Shenzen, China, Feb 08
Source: Boing Boing | 2 Mar 2009 | 6:15 am
So I started making my bed in the morning. Now I didn't have to do it at night, and as a bonus, it looked nice all day! For a while I had mixed feelings about this, though. I'd mutter in my head, Yeah, yeah, Dad, OK, it's best to make the bed in the morning, you were right, now shut up.The Bed-Making Story (Thanks, Rihatsu!)Later I started muttering stuff like: Think you're so smart, Dad? Can you imagine if you'd just waited it out, never mentioning bed-making ever when I was young? I probably would have started making my bed in the morning long before this, with no prompting at all, and you could have come to my first apartment and seen my nicely made bed, and then you'd have seen how well I turned out and how I didn't need all the nagging to get that way. Oh, but then you'd have been unable to pat yourself on the back for having trained me that way, so I guess you wouldn't have like that so well after all.
Later still, I thought something more like, Well, regardless, your issues are your own, Dad, and I guess I can't know. I like making my bed in the morning. Guess that's all there is to it.
Eventually I guess I stopped talking to my dad in my head quite so much around bed-making time. And many years passed.
Physical Culture Magazine's Aug, 1930 issue carried this intriguing advert for a nose brassiere ("the patented Model 25 Nose Shaper") that would help you by "remolding the cartilage and fleshy parts, quickly, safely, and painlessly." Coming from a long line of beaky sorts, I find this frankly captivating!
How to Obtain A Better Looking Nose (Aug, 1930)
Source: Boing Boing | 2 Mar 2009 | 5:57 am
B3ta user "The Coast Of Yemen" responds to the news that shitty discount airline Ryanair is contemplating in-flight pay toilets with a revised seatpocket safety card that lists the coin-op tariffs for emergency masks and slides.
I’m a big fan of ruggedized items. Although PDAs (as opposed to smartphones) are relatively rare these days, there’s still a large need for them in certain scientific and professional pursuits. Ruggedized PDAs even more so, as chances are you’re not going for a two-month expedition to your grandma’s house. I’m sure there are plenty of surveyors, mappers, science guys and secret agents that would love this thing in all its multi-capable glory.
The PS535 is a sort of combination hardcore GPS unit and smartphone, and sports an altimeter and compass in addition to the positioning system. Its 533MHz Samsung 2450 processor and 128MB of RAM put it squarely in power handheld territory, and it’s got 2 gigs of onboard storage (no word on expandability). It runs Windows Mobile 6.1, which I think is a prerequisite for pros since there are lots of specialized apps that only work with WinMo. Lastly but certainly not least is a sunlight-readable 3.5″ touchscreen at 640×480. Of course, it does wi-fi and Bluetooth as well.
If I were going on a trip to the Lost World, or tracking Grizzlies in Alaska, I’d definitely be bringing one of these suckers along.
Damn, their stuff looks rock-hard. Check out this awesome tablet.
Section:
No need to scour the interwebs for hot gaming news, Gamertell‘s already done that for you! Here’s a look at this week’s top stories…
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Up until now, digital music has eroded the album cover's prominence, but recent innovations could be poised to usher in a new era of music packaging.
To celebrate the album cover's second wind, we want to see your favorite album art of all time.
Use the Reddit widget below to submit your favorite album cover and vote among the other submissions. If we like your submission, we'll include it in a gallery on Wired.com.
We don't host the images, so you'll have to provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. Using an online photo service that requires that you log in will not work. If your image doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it again, and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).
Please bookmark this page, send it to your friends and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!
Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your favorite album cover.
(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)
First of two parts.
Dr. Ed Boyden is showing off his lab's equipment with naked delight. We've whizzed past a laser table, a 3-D printer and some rattling biological shakers, and come to rest beside a water cutter.
Boyden picks up a piece of scrap metal and demonstrates how the cutter uses a powerful stream of water and fine bits of garnet (nearly as hard as diamond) to slice precisely through almost any material. It can be used to build nearly anything. He pauses, and considers. "We're probably the only lab in the world that uses a water cutter to build neural interfaces."
Boyden directs MIT's Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Lab, part of the MIT Media Lab. He explains the mission of neuroengineering this way: "If we take seriously the idea that our minds are implemented in the circuits of our brains, then it becomes a top priority to understand how to engineer brains for the better."
Here, neuroscience is not merely studied, it is applied. Which is why we're off again, to see the molecular engineer's microscope, the viral growing area, and the machine where they cut micron-thin slices of mouse brains in order to evaluate what changes they've made using the rest of the equipment.
Human beings worked out a few thousand years ago that the brain is where the action is. Since then we've been trying to get it to do what we want it to.
Like a computer, the power of the brain arises out of how the many parts constantly and quickly talk to each other. But unlike the electrical circuits in a computer, brain cells aren't physically connected to one another. Neurons communicate across tiny empty spaces, called synapses, that lie between the tendrils of neuronal cell bodies. This almost-but-not-quite touching is what gives them such flexibility as those connections form and fade throughout our lives.
Most of what we think of as our ability to learn and change comes from the pattern of those synapses. In a way, history is the story of trying to manipulate those patterns through learning, faith, love, drugs, food, exercise -- in short, anything and everything. We have spent thousands of years working out indirect ways of changing the contours of our brains to change the shape of our minds.
Neuroengineers, on the other hand, take a pragmatic and direct approach. They are trying to change brains by going in and just changing them.
Boyden, a bespectacled professor with a soft smile, speaks rapidly and expansively. He has been a polymath all his life, plunging into one discipline after another. It's hard to imagine there was ever a time when he wasn't moving.
"Early in life, I wanted to be a mathematician," he says. He walked the path of the quantitative universe, studying math, then physics, then electrical engineering, trying to understand the universe -- trying to change it in precise ways. But it was birds and serendipity that brought him to the messy human brain.
"I decided to go to Bell Labs and learn lasers," Boyden says, "but the person I wanted to work with was going home to Germany, so I ended up working with his neighbor, Michael Fee, who was analyzing how the bird brain generated birdsong. That experience was my first work in biology or neuroscience." Boyden had a new all-consuming passion.
Not long after he found himself in the Stanford University lab of Dr. Karl Deisseroth, combining his abilities as an engineer with his new calling as a neuroscientist. There, Boyden was part of a team that invented a new way of controlling brain cells. Employing molecular biology, genetic engineering, surgery, fiber optics and lasers, they created a kind of "light switch" which was then used to control a group of neurons.
How it works: The researcher modifies a harmless, non-reproducing virus to add genes to a particular type of cell, in this case a target type of neuron in a mouse.
The genes come from two sources: one from an algae, and the other from an archeon found only in the Sahara Desert. These genes respond to light either by switching the cell off or causing it to fire up.
The archeon is as far from us as life on Earth gets. Archaea are unfathomably old: Our last common ancestor probably lived around 2.7 billion years ago. They are so simple they are nothing but single cells without a nucleus, but we are still relatives. We use the same system of genetic proteins and the same cellular mechanisms to read and act upon them. So if we take a bit of an archeon's DNA that responds to yellow light and transplant it into a nerve cell in the brain of the most sophisticated biological system on Earth, it just works: When stimulated with yellow light, the archeon's gene makes the nerve go quiet.
The gene lifted from an algae, a distant but not-quite-so-distant relative, works in a similar way, except that it causes the cell to fire, which occurs when the gene receives a pulse of blue light.
Et voila, the mechanics of a light switch: blue light to turn the neuron on, yellow light to turn it off.
The next step is getting the switch into the brain. The body is good at killing viruses, so it's not simply a question of infecting someone with a brain control flu. The only way to get a virus like this into the brain is to put it there directly.
Then there's the matter of getting the right colors of light past the skull and into the precise spot to be controlled. All of this means Deisseroth's team has to open up the mouse's head surgically, apply the virus to the desired area, then feed in a fiber optic cable that will continue to protrude out of the mouse's head after the surgery has healed up. Then they attach the fiber optic cable to lasers that can pump in the precise frequencies of light needed to control the cells.
Once it's done, though, they have absolute control over the section of the brain involved. Fed into the left motor cortex, the area that controls movement, it could make someone dance to the right. Fed into the pleasure center of the brain, it could make someone happy with the press of a button.
It's hard to tell if a mouse is happy, but attaching this system to its motor cortex makes a dramatic demo. Deisseroth, who is still developing this technology at Stanford, plays the video of a mouse wandering around its container. The fiber optic cable leading into its brain is barely visible until someone turns on the blue light. Then the animal runs to the left in large, almost perfectly circular loops. "You've got to wonder what he's is thinking," Deisseroth muses. "It's 'I gotta go left, I gotta go left.'"
The list of experts needed to get this done is daunting: various biologists, an ecologist, a geneticist, a neurologist, a surgeon, a laser physicist and -- whether they're invited or not -- a bioethicist or two. Making mice run in circles is one thing, but installing mood switches into human brains raises more consequential moral issues.
"If we surgically or electrically modify someone's personality... that raises many questions about personal identity, (of) who we are at our core," says Dr. Debra Matthews of The Berman Institute of Bioethics. "We place ourselves in the mind and therefore the brain. (Mood-altering surgery) feels like fundamentally modifying who a person is."
Matthews, herself a medical doctor and geneticist, says that application of this technology will be difficult, practically as well as ethically. "It's hard enough to translate what a drug is doing in a mouse to what it's doing in a human. This could be orders of magnitude harder."
Yet this is the very task of the Deisseroth lab, located deep in a basement at Stanford, down a perfectly white hall inexplicably streaked with jagged red neon. The lab itself is a jumble of metal bookshelves, crammed with weighty psychology and physics texts, as well as a place to display some whimsically personal touches: Pinned up against the end cap of one desk is a Sigmund Freud action figure, still in its box. Down the hall is the animal experimentation area, a quiet room filled with glass tanks and partitioned with black cloths hanging from the ceiling.
While Deisseroth studies the organ of the mind, he also seeks to strengthen it to resist its pathologies and moments of inadequacy.
"How surprising (it is), clearly we did not evolve to do calculus. Nothing in our evolution involved calculus and yet we can do it. Why is that? It just shows the fundamental versatility of our brain. That it's set up to do unanticipated things gives me hope," he says.
Deisseroth started as a regular engineering undergrad at Harvard. But his path took a twist when he took a class on neural networks. He was enchanted, decided he wanted to spend his life focused on the real neural network, and became a psychiatrist. Eventually, frustrated with the paucity of tools for working directly with the brain, he started building his own.
Deisseroth still spends one day a week seeing patients. In his practice he treats depression. Talking about their hopelessness darkens his otherwise ebullient demeanor. "I see the lack of (hope) in my patients.... I want to understand the biological underpinnings of (it)," he says. His clinical time gives his research a sense of human immediacy rare in academia.
However odd or uncomfortable the idea of engineering the human brain might seem, if yours is broken enough, the philosophical arguments cease to hold any water: You just want it fixed. Nowhere is this more true than for someone suffering from depression. For the most serious sufferers the condition transforms the natural dread of death into something like their only hope for peace, undermining the basic urge to survive. It's as confusing to understand clinically as it is to experience.
"Depression ... is where the brain substrate is all there but the mind is not coming through," says Deisseroth. "The neurons are ready to go, but the mind is not driving them right."
Antidepressants are commonly used for treating depression, but they're incredibly crude tools. Instead of precision engineering, these drugs are the equivalent of trying to build a bridge by piling up a lot of rocks. They go everywhere in the body and interact with everything. In order to get past the blood-brain barrier, psychoactive drugs often must be delivered in much higher concentrations into the blood, often causing unpleasant and dangerous side effects. When a drug does get to the brain, its effects are felt in all parts of the brain, including our mental faculties, our senses, even how we move -- not just the broken bits.
These problems severely limit what drugs are ever likely to accomplish, despite the hopes of the pharmaceutical industry. Worse, recent studies have shown strong evidence that anti-depressants probably aren't even working much of the time. That our drugs seem very advanced and specialized is only in comparison to the horror stories of the thorazine shuffle and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest.
Not only that, the drugs' side effects are so strange and inconsistent that they point to our bodies being far more individual than medicine is equipped to handle, and to our minds being far more complicated.
Deisseroth is blunt. "Not only do we not have a model for how our brains do complex tasks, we can't even imagine one."
Metaphorically, the neuroengineering approach brings the study of the brain into the Age of Enlightenment. By isolating, then testing and altering individual parts of the neural system, we can, for the first time, truly understand what those components do. Ultimately, we can enhance an individual function while leaving the rest of the system untouched. It's the same transition that let us move from alchemy to atomic physics. Boyden is trying to get his optical switch precise enough to fire a single neuron, the atomic unit of the mind.
This is what makes the possibilities of neuroengineering so staggering. Its pioneers are bringing science and technology into a system basically unchanged since we climbed down from the trees.
Tomorrow: Dialing in happiness
1887: Harry Soref is born. The inventor will miniaturize the security of a bank vault into the everyday padlock.
As a young man, Soref earned his living as a traveling locksmith in the United States, Canada and Mexico. During World War I, he invented a special padlock for protecting tanks and other military equipment.
Soref established the Master Key Company to produce skeleton keys, but he had an idea to improve padlocks at no great expense. Most padlocks of the time had cheap metal casings that you could easily bust open with a hammer. Security? Hah!
Building a padlock from thicker steel would be expensive. Instead, Soref applied the design of bank vaults and battleships: Use multiple layers of thin pieces of steel in a laminated construction. In his patent filing, he said: "A great advantage which flows from my invention is that the material employed in the production of the laminations is available to the manufacturer without any cost attached thereto. Such laminations are punched from the small 'scrap' which is created in very large quantities in manufacturing establishments operating punching presses."
Soref tried to interest big hardware companies in the idea, but engineers thought the construction process was too cumbersome. So, with backing from a couple of friends, Soref established the Master Lock Company in 1921 and began building the little devils himself in a small Milwaukee shop — with five employees, a drill press, a grinder and a punch press.
The locks — patented in 1924 — were tough, and the company prospered. Corporate lore says Soref taught Harry Houdini how to hide keys under his tongue and between his fingers.
Milwaukee was famous for its beer, but Prohibition was in force. When the growing firm needed larger quarters, it moved into the shut-down Pabst brewery. Master Lock sent a famous shipment of 147,600 padlocks to federal agents in New York City in 1928, and the irony was not lost on many that speakeasies and distilleries were soon shut down and secured with locks made in a former brewery.
The American Association of Master Locksmiths in 1931 awarded Soref's many achievements with the only gold medal it has ever bestowed.
Soref died in 1957 and never saw Master Lock's famous 1974 SuperBowl commerical. It featured a high-powered rifle shooting a hole through a sturdy Master Lock without opening it.
Source: Various
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
(The picture makes sense once you read to the end). A former MeeVee employee emails in to say that he hasn’t received his 2008 tax forms from the company, and that no one will pick up the phone to say when he might receive them. We emailed Brad Greenspan, the CEO of parent company LiveUniverse (MeeVee was acquired in May 2008) for a comment. His response: “LiveUniverse is in business” (not what we asked, but good to know), and “…we haven’t had any meevee employees active in a few months as we consolidate operations of that website with a few others.”
We speculated on the health of the parent company last month after a number of high profile outages and claims by employees and business partners that they were going unpaid, but Greenspan insists LiveUniverse remains a going concern.
Always a colorful character, Greenspan (who made $48 million in the 2005 sale of MySpace to News Corp.) also sent us a few unsolicited follow up emails this evening, pointing to a presentation on a company that he invested in called Borba that sells beauty products, and saying that he’s “working on a rival to techcrunch…..so many pretty little users that can be sold at a high cpm…..yum yum….give me some.” In another email, Greenspan sent naked pictures of a woman with the message “OH AND MY CURRENT GIRL FRIEND. PLAYBOY BUNNY. RECENTPICS SHE PASSED ME THAT WERE PUBLISHED RECENTLY. SO IM SURESHE WONT MIND ME PASSING THEM TO YOU BIG GUY!!!”
Ever dutiful to our readers, we post a headshot of one of the photos Greenspan sent us above (it’s worth repeating that he sent these as a response to our question of whether MeeVee was still in business). For the rest, I guess you’ll have to go to Playboy.
Back to MeeVee, though: It looks like it’s in the DeadPool.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
The last time I saw something like this, I believe I was playing Goldeneye. This hacked-together pocket superlaser is guaranteed to start either conversations or fires — or conversations about fires. We tested out another laser the other day and found it sufficient for lighting a candle, but this one appears to be rather more powerful — and you can gank it out of a Blu-ray player.
The full instructions are here, but it’s not for the faint of heart of shaky of hand. Still, it’s totally awesome. Needless to say, in any project to do with lasers, wear eye protection. Also, don’t even try this in the first place. Are you crazy?
[via Reddit]
Section:
We may not cover Apple 24x7… but we know someone who does! Here’s a few of this week’s hottest from Appletell to get you started…
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section: Apple, Audio, Portable Audio, Video, HDTV, Portable Video, Imaging, Digital Cameras, Web, Websites, Features, Originals
The economic stimulus bill has passed, it’s a new month, and the economy is still in trouble. Let’s hope this new month can bring some new changes for the better in the economy. Today we have some deals ranging from a Sony Walkman, to a Digital Camera, to a 1st gen iPod Touch, and then a 52 inch HDTV.
Our first deal today is from Buy.com who has Sony’s 4GB NWZ-E436FPNK Flash Portable Media Player, for $83. It normally sells for $93, so you are saving $10. The MP3 player comes with a 2 inch LCD screen, 45 hour battery life when playing audio, a 8 hour battery life when playing video, and a built-in FM tuner.
Next up, we have the Olympus FE-20 Digital Camera from OfficeMax. It sells for $70, after a $60 instant savings. It comes with free shipping and this deal ends on 3/7. This camera comes with a 8MP resolution, 2.5 inch LCD screen, and 3x optical zoom.
Moving on, we have a product that rarely gets marked down unless Apple says so. The 1st Gen 32GB iPod Touch is on sale at BestBuy.com for $310 + $6 for shipping, totaling $316. It usually costs around $380, so you are saving $70. I’m sure you already know all about the iPod Touch, but it comes with a capacity of 32GB, a 3.5 inch touch screen, 22 hour battery life when playing music, and a 5 hour battery life when playing video.
6th Ave Electronics is selling the Samsung LN52A650 52 inch LCD HDTV on sale for $1900. This price is after a $100 coupon using coupon code “AFL5”. This HDTV has a resolution of 1920x1080, 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, and is energy star compliant.
Hopefully with some of these deals you can save a bit of money. Stay tuned for more weekend deals next week.
Full Story » | Written by Natesh Sood for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Section:
Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
Full Story » | Written by NEWS for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
WebMynd, a Y Combinator company that launched early last year, has released a new plugin that is looking to streamline the way you search. The plugin, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, enhances the search results on most popular search engines by inserting a handy sidebar with related search results from a variety of other sites. You can test out a web-based version of the feature here, or download the plugin on the site’s homepage.
WebMynd isn’t the first browser plugin to offer complementary results from other sites, but what it lacks in originally it makes up for with its polished execution. After installing the plugin, users simply visit one of the supported search engines (which include Google, Yahoo, and Live Search), and search for a query as usual. The plugin inserts a handful of small widgets at the right hand of the screen, each of which includes the first few matches of the same query from sites like Twitter, Amazon, or Digg. Users can choose from over 25 different search sites that they’d like to include in their results. The inserted widgets take some getting used to, but in practice they’re surprisingly useful.
The Firefox version of the new plugin also incorporates WebMynd’s historical archiving technology, which was the company’s primary focus when it launched (The IE version doesn’t offer this yet, but it is on the way). The archiving feature allows users to search through a comprehensive history of the pages they’ve visited, including the full text of each recently visited page (users can choose to turn the feature off during the plug-in’s initial setup process or at any time down the line).
CEO Amir Nathoo says that the company plans to monetize the new search enhancement by offering a white-labeled version of the plugin. Companies are able to set their search results as the default widget in the sidebar, though users are still free to customize the widget with their favorite sites after installation. A branded version of the widget can be seen at Fluther.com, and WebMynd is currently seeking other partners.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Glamorous as my job may seem at times, my feelings on gadgets and tech these days is pretty ‘meh’ and only a small child-like handful of doodads piques my interest. Lately, for some reason, I’ve become infatuated with luggage. I’d really like to give Live Luggage’s Hybrid PA a spin, but I never check my bag and $400 is a bit much.
So, when the release for the BioCase from Heys popped up I had to tell all of you about it. First, it’s carry-on and touts itself as the world’s lightest. Second, this thing has a biometric scanner of some sort that stores up to eight fingerprints for up to 90 days. They seem to be pretty tough and come in a 19- and 20-inch model. And you can charge the scanner via USB or a power adapter. No word on price, but the BioCase is coming in April.
Fantagraphics has just released an anthology of one of the wackiest comic book artists and writers ever, Boody Rogers. His feverishly surreal comics from the 1940s paved the way for the underground artists of the 1960s. When I read these stories, filled with crazy-looking beasts and absurd situations, the thing that stuck out in my mind was how much fun Rogers must have had while drawing them.
You've met Fletcher HanksBoody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers. Now meet Boody Rogers! Fans of Boody Rogers' Golden age comic-book stories span generations of cartoonists, from Robert Williams to Art Spiegelman to Johnny Ryan. Spiegelman printed Rogers' work in RAW magazine and recently it also appeared in the anthology book Art Out of Time: Unknown Comic Visionaries (Abrams). Here at last is a single book - Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers - devoted to this cult comics hero, collecting Roger's best Sparky Watts , Babe and Dudley stories, as well as much more. This beautifully designed tome also has tons of vintage photos and unpublished art (including art from the first modern newsstand comic book that Rogers did in 1935). It all begins with a career spanning fun and fascinating interview with the late Rogers, by editor Craig Yoe (Arf).
Section: Gadgets / Other, GPS/Navigation
If living off of coconuts and fish for a year or two doesn’t sound like your idea of an extreme vacation, check out this new personal locator beacon called Fast Find. Today, adventurers have many options in locator beacons and they seem to keep getting smaller and smaller. This time, they get smarter and smarter.
This little gizmo, the size of a cell phone, upon activation, simultaneously sends two signals out alerting search and rescue to your location. The top of the line model (still under the $200 mark) sends the alert via the standard subscription-free 406 MHz gets beamed by satellites to ground stations and 121.5MHz to be used by fly-over planes and vessels to home-in on your location. The high end unit also features a 50-channel GPS receiver and transmits your GPS coordinates as part of the emergency message as well as your personal contact data that gets registered with the company.
A couple of clever features are aboard this unit. One is the fold-up antenna that allows the unit to stow small, but extended when ready for use. One potential downside to anyone floating in an inflatable raft it is the antenna strip looks sharp. The other smart feature is the 50 seconds, “are you sure you really want to alert the world to your location?“ time the unit pauses before transmitting the call for help. This is intended to help that that accidentally activate the unit. Search and Rescue operations are quite costly and there is even talk of charging for their services, prank or not.
The offering comes in two models, a 200 series unit that lacks the GPS and the 210 that gains it. The difference is in the pinpoint accuracy of your location. The non GPS model puts your location inside a 28 sq mile circle while the GPS equipped model puts you in a much smaller 0.03 sq mile radius. If seconds may count in your survival, give the GPS equipped model a good hard stare.
Last year at CES 2008, I found the SPOT GPS messenger that offered messaging and tracking as well as an option to contact 911 type emergency response systems.
The Find Fast units were just approved by the FCC and are available now.
Product site: [Fast Find]
Full Story » | Written by JG Mason for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
It’s understood that come the end of June, Microsoft will be financing Vista buyers’ upgrades to Windows 7. But that date is too far off to drive sales now, obviously, so PC sellers Pacific Systems in the Seattle area (Auburn) are going to start offering free Windows 7 replacements starting next week.
They’re not going to be installing illicit beta copies or anything like that, it’s just a matter of timing for them. They need the sales and although they’ll be incurring a cost of about $200 per machine they sell, it’s a good way of keeping customers coming and making sure they stick around until 7 comes out.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Some very bored Japanese guys decided to change the rules of Mario 64: activate a 1-up mushroom, then try to collect all 8 red coins before the unstoppable green-and-white monster catches up to you. It moves at about normal Mario speed, but can fly and apparently go through walls and floors. The narrators scream bloody murder whenever the sinister fungus appears, and for some reason I can’t stop laughing.
I missed these on Friday at Kotaku, but had to put them up because they’re solid retro gaming comedy gold. There are a ton of videos because they’re largely unedited and the guys die or get caught a lot. I love the bit at just after 5:50 on this level; their panic recalls my own when a T-Rex snuck up on us in Tomb Raider 2 and Dusty dove behind the couch, screaming.
Section: Gadgets / Other, Lifestyle, Miscellaneous
Hearst Corporation, the publisher of popular magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Popular Mechanics, has announced it has plans to roll out its own e-reader by the end of the year. Like the popular Kindle, it will be an e-ink device, but with a larger screen more suited to displaying newspapers and magazines, will be black and white (but will be upgraded to color later) and may be flexible and even foldable. Content will be delivered wirelessly.
What Hearst and its partners plan to do is sell the e-readers to publishers and to take a cut of the revenue derived from selling magazines and newspapers on these devices. The company will, however, leave it to the publishers to develop their own branding and payment models. “That’s something you will never see Amazon do,“ someone familiar with the Hearst project said. “They aren’t going to give up control of the devices.“
The question now is, will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?
Seems to me they already are. Newspaper and magazine readership is in a decline. Hallmark magazine recently announced it is folding and many newspapers are struggling to stay afloat amid steadily dropping ad revenue. One of Hearst’s own papers, the San Francisco Chronicle, is among them. Some papers, such as Newsday, are looking toward the net to make up for their lost revenues by beginning to charge for their online content.
Hearst is being tightlipped about any further details regarding its reader, including price, so we’ll have to see if it will give the Kindle a run for its money, or flop.
Read [Fortune]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The world of home movie creation is an increasingly exciting one. Digital files are easier to store and make sense of, and our computers are becoming powerful enough that editing and sharing all that footage is no longer difficult. iMovie is the poster child for this change: it has made directors out of many who would otherwise have left their movies raw or sitting in the camera media.
Now, in this increasingly HD world, there are a couple numbers that rule our lives. One of those numbers is 720. 720 lines of vertical resolution is the lowest bar for “true” high definition, and it is increasingly the standard in consumer video cameras, point and shoots, and even webcams. But it appears that the latest iteration of iMovie, included in iLife ‘09, kicks 720p to the curb. This is troubling.
There are a huge amount of devices, from the Zi6 I use for reviews to HDV camcorders and even DSLRs, that shoot to 720p. An HDTV must support 720p or better. 720p is, however arbitrarily chosen, the standard. Why, then, does iMovie push the even more arbitrarily chosen 540 vertical pixels as its standard? The lack of resolution information in the program as a whole is alarming in the first place, but even the freshest shooter would recognize that none of the output options match what their source, which they probably bought because it advertised 720p on the box. The little “Share” buttons are designed to fit Apple’s little ecosystem, and the program seems willfully ignorant of any other standards that may already be in place.
Well, you say, you can just use the “Export using Quicktime” option, right? Sure, if you know what multi-pass encoding and bitrate throttling are. I do, so I did try. You see, it fails there too. “Dimensions: 960×540(Current).” I’m sorry, but no. The original, and the one in the iMovie folder, are both 720p. Project settings reveals nothing. Okay, okay, so I guess I have to manually set it to output 720p in the size panel. Not a big fuss.
What the hell, 1248×702? Brother, that ain’t right. Oh, and you can’t change it. I guess there is literally no way for me to export 720p video from iMovie ;09, even though that is the most widely recognized HD standard in the goddamn world. It’s not that I’m going to really miss those 18 vertical pixels, but changing the video output size means loss of detail, and nonstandard video sizes are trouble in general. Sure, you can letterbox, but what’s happening to that extra information? Is the video window squeezed? Are they throwing it away just for kicks? It’s not really clear.
The real loser here, though, is the guy who doesn’t know better. He buys a nice $1000 1080p or 720p video camera, shoots some stuff, puts it through the iMovie grinder, and just assumes that what comes out the other side is as good as it gets.
Maybe it seems a bit nitpicky, but it’s bothersome that such a basic thing should be impossible. What is a guy to do if he doesn’t want his wedding footage to be shrunk, cropped, or needlessly re-encoded? I’ll tell you: get a PC. Because that’s where I’m doing all my editing from now on after this debacle. iMovie and its picky formatting, its weirdo interface, and its crappy transitions can go straight back to Cupertino.
A Wisconsin woman opened a bag of Clancy’s Ripple Potato Chips and found a super old Nokia cell phone inside. Ewww! Who uses a Nokia that old?! I mean, ewww, a cell phone in a bag of chips! The phone apparently wouldn’t turn on but it had a T-Mobile SIM inside “and a discolored circle on the back, as if it was once connected to a belt clip.”
Read the rest of this entry >>
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
A Wisconsin woman opened a bag of Clancy’s Ripple Potato Chips and found a super old Nokia cell phone inside. Ewww! Who uses a Nokia that old?! I mean, ewww, a cell phone in a bag of chips! The phone apparently wouldn’t turn on but it had a T-Mobile SIM inside “and a discolored circle on the back, as if it was once connected to a belt clip.”
The chips were purchased from an Aldi store and, according to the Janesville Gazette, the woman was told that “the store would pull all the chips with the same brand and expiration date as hers.” She was also offered a new bag of chips but she refused, saying “You kind of don’t want chips for a while.” An investigation is currently underway by the FDA.
Local woman finds unpleasant surprise in her potato chips [Gazettextra.com via Consumerist]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This guest post is written by Jack Arrington, who contributed 50% of the genetic material required to produce TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Jack was around at the very beginning of what we today call the Information Technology business. In 1950 pure business necessity drove Bank of America, then the largest bank in the world, to look for ways to automate the labor intensive job of handling checks. From that necessity ERMA was born, one of the first large scale data processing machines for business. Jack joined Bank of America in 1963 as a Computer Operator Trainee. He retired in 2002 as Head of Data Processing Operations.
2009 is the half-century milestone in the use of information technology for business applications, and it’s an opportunity to look back and give a nod of appreciation to those early IT entrepreneurs.
In the mid-20th century, the majority of people did not have checking accounts and none of them had bank-issued credit cards. Those in the lower and middle economic classes mostly relied upon cash to buy goods and pay bills. If funds needed to be sent long distances, Western Union provided facilities for the purchase of money orders that were communicated via telegraph and could be retrieved by the payee in another town or country. But the process of consumer banking was tailored for the needs of people who lived most if not all of their lives in the same town. Banking activities were mostly limited to home and car loans and the average customer was well known by the banking staff.
Throughout most of the country, historic bank processes continued to serve well because most banks were single-office businesses, catering to the needs of a stable and known customer base.
California, though, had unique scaling problems. The state faced an exploding population following World War II, when many of the people who had served in the US military decided to settle there instead of going back to the eastern & mid-western hamlets and family farms of their origin. Jobs in California were plentiful, land was cheap and so was construction material. Homes were thrown up throughout the length and width of the Golden State.
California-based Bank of America, then the largest bank in the world, had earlier pioneered the concept of deploying branch offices of the parent bank in many locations. So BofA followed its potential customers into each new neighborhood, providing home loans and other banking services. But if your account was domiciled in Palo Alto, cashing a check in Modesto was difficult because of an inability to share data between two bank offices, even though they were both Bank Of America branches. Identification of account holders attempting a transaction was primarily accomplished by visual comparison of a transaction signature to the one on a signature card on file at the domiciling bank office. In order to retain its leadership position in commercial and consumer banking, BofA desperately needed a banking solution that would accommodate mobility and the financial flexibility of people and businesses.
The system worked, but just barely. BofA was hard pressed to keep up with the demands on its services. Backrooms of the branch offices were crammed night and day with people tapping away on huge adding machines while manually updating paper ledgers for each account-holder. An experienced bookkeeper could post about 245 accounts per hour, but errors were common and required another person to proof the work of the first. Adding more people to fix the problem simply became impossible, and branches began closing earlier and earlier in the day to deal with the mountain of paperwork that piled up.
By 1950, BofA decided it was time to think about replacing all those people with a computer. At the time, computers were used primarily for scientific and military calculations. But there was no reason they couldn’t be built to handle the mundane but important task of processing checking accounts, too.
Displaying focused insight that should be the envy of many in the current crop of Silicon-Valley entrepreneurs, Bank of America teamed with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and General Electric to invent and then build the first system of automation for commercial banking. They dubbed it ERMA.
The goal was simple – to create a computer that could keep up with the processing demands of the bank’s customers. Transistors had been developed by Bell Labs in 1947 but functionality had not matured sufficiently to enable the processing required of ERMA in the early 1950s, so SRI first settled on vacuum tube technology to meet the requirements set by BofA. A modified octal binary system served the program assembler and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR, or E13B,) font was developed to allow checks & deposit slips to serve as machine-readable input. Other methods of input included punch-paper tape, which allowed insertion of alphanumeric data such as names and addresses. Reels of magnetic tape (distributed by dedicated air and road couriers,) allowed current account-balance information to be shared between, eventually, each of 14 ERMA Centers located from San Diego to San Francisco.
These were, by today’s standards, monstrously large machines. ERMA weighed about 25 tons and was spread out through four rooms. It contained more than a million feet of wiring, 8,000 vacuum tubes, 34,000 diodes, 5 input consoles with electronic reading devices, (optionally) two magnetic memory drums, a check sorter, a high-speed printer, a power control panel, a maintenance board, 24 racks holding 1,500 electrical packages and 500 relay packages, up to 12 magnetic tape drives for 2,400-foot tape reels, and a refrigeration system. ERMA used more than 80 kW of power and required cooling by an air conditioning system.
Her primary processing unit (which contained memory and I/O interface units) was about the size of a Humvee. Her complement of 8-12 tape drives were each the size of a refrigerator and her printer was a little bit bigger than a fully-loaded Mini-Cooper. The primary peripheral device that ERMA was designed to serve was the Check Reader/Sorter, which could read MICR encoded checks at a rate of 600 per minute, capturing the data on magnetic tape for subsequent posting, while routing them to one of 12 pockets. The contents of each pocket would subsequently be fine-sorted and packaged for return to the domiciling branch-office with the morning’s journals and status reports. ERMA controlled two of the Check Reader/Sorters, each approximating the size of a Ford Explorer. A complete ERMA system required about 3000 square feet of space, to house her components and serve her auxiliary input and output needs. During the busiest hours, ERMA required 5 operators working in harmony to achieve peak processing capacity. By today’s standards, you might consider her a bit chunky…but in our time, we thought she was lean and efficient.
Programs under execution resided on magnetic tape. When needed, commands and calculations were downloaded into the 4000 bytes of memory (donut-shaped iron core components with each bit approximately the diameter of a dime and twice as thick.) This was long before the deployment of wireless or even wired connectivity to user devices, so output was limited to updated magnetic tape files and printed reports produced on a huge noisy device, which (when not broken), could turn out journals and status reports at a speed of 600 lines per minute.
Nearly a decade elapsed in the design, testing and manufacture of the system before the product was put into service in September of 1959. A total of 32 ERMA systems were purchased by BofA and installed in cities throughout California. Each machine processed up to 33,000 accounts per hour (the output of about 135 experienced bookkeepers), providing daily posting of all customer checking and savings accounts. Best of all, the machines never slept, going 24/7 except for (frequent) maintenance - a GE engineer was on site every day to deal with issues. A single ERMA machine, working a week straight, was able to do the work of more than 500 people.
The decision to deploy ERMA wasn’t about simply replacing high-cost jobs with a relatively low-cost computer. While there were undoubtedly significant operating efficiencies, ERMA quite simply allowed the bank to continue to keep pace with the rapid population growth of California. Without computerized data processing, that would have been impossible.
Other banks soon jumped in line to follow the direction taken by BofA and the technology became standard for most banks in the U.S. Although 50 years have passed, E13B (the magnetic ink font at the bottom of checks) remains the most common machine-readable input standard for financial institutions.) A nice thing about E13B is that with a bit of training and focus, people can read it too, although few today are able to determine which district of the Federal Reserve is encoded in the MICR line on their checks.
ERMA served the BofA well until 1967, when her vacuum tubes grew cold and dim and her limited brainpower could no longer cope. She was replaced by an IBM monstrosity (the 360 and its trail of descendants). Two ERMAs were preserved; one is at the Smithsonian in Washington DC and the other at Bank of America’s Technology Center in Concord, CA.
My time with ERMA lasted only two years but the hands-on experience remains a vivid memory, even with a half-century of progress clamoring to dull my senses.
For more information on ERMA, see SRI, GE and Ed Thelen (lots of pictures).
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Travelers to Sweden’s Stockholm Arlanda Airport don’t have to venture too far to find a place to sleep. A converted Boeing 747-200 airplane now known as Jumbo Hostel has 25 rooms, 85 beds, and is a quick ten-minute walk from inside the airport.
Beds start at just under $40 per night in four-bed male or female dorm-style rooms or you can opt for a private room with twin bunk beds for around $135 per night, a private room with a double and a single bed for around $150 per night, or splurge for the Cockpit Suite at around $365, which includes two beds in the plane’s cockpit and a private bathroom with shower.
The hostel opened on January 15th and boasts flat panel TVs and free wireless internet access in all the rooms. I’d think it’d be pretty loud since it’s right by the airport, so if you’re a light sleeper this might not be the place for you. Oh, and if you don’t want to share a room with three strangers and a bathroom with who-knows-how-many other people.
Other than that, though, it might make for a fun place to stay in a pinch.
Jumbo Hostel [via Likecool]
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Section: Communications, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Websites, Features, Originals
It seems as though everybody blogs or is on some kind of social networking site these days. You have a ton of social networking sites to choose from to meet people, stay in touch with those you know, instant message, share photos, play games, fill out useless surveys and waste time at work. A name that has risen in popularity since its inception is the ever growing website Facebook.
According to Facebook, they have over 175 million active users, and among those users the fastest growing demographic is among users over 30 years old. Okay, so we can gather it doesn’t target the same crowd as MySpace then.
It seems that those users are apparently busy on the site. In a month, they upload more than 850 million photos and over 5 million videos. While this sounds like a lot, can it really compete with all the other social networking sites out there?
Are they really as wonderful as they want to project themselves to be? They’ve certainly had some “uh-oh’s” as of late. One such “uh-oh” was a rather biggie. That little thing called “Terms of Service”? Well, apparently Facebook up and decided to change them, then after a bit of an uproar from users; they decide to go back to the original ToS until such time that they can get the new ones all mapped out. Users don’t tend to like things like that being changed in a big way after the fact. Uh-Oh.
So what makes Facebook stand out from any other social networking site you can sign up for? Why should I log in there every day and waste my precious work hours on their site rather than some other networking site? Granted, they have a ton of applications on their site, supposedly over 52,000 on their platform with 140 new ones being added every day. If you want to throw ketchup packets and pillows at someone, Facebook is the place to go to.
But, to be honest, for the most part, their apps seem kind of goofy to me. There are a ton of things to hand out from smiles to flowers to candy. Ummmm…ok. The one app I’d like to see working well isn’t even really fully developed yet. Their music application, that allows you to put music you like on your page (aptly named iLike), has a vast majority of the songs that only play 30 second clips. I don’t know about you, but iLike to hear the entire song.
What is giving them a huge push in overtaking some other sites like MySpace, is the fact that it does (as they claim) seem to have an “older” user base. You don’t have people bombarding you with friend requests who seem to be looking to hook up for the evening. Or bands. Or people trying to sell products. It is much more of a networking site and a site for friends that may have lost touch through the years to find each other again and simply do a touch base stay reacquainted thing. In other words, it seems to be MySpace minus the teen drama, which for many is a huge draw.
Now, Facebook wants to continue to make it even easier for its users to use their service. Facebook already has deals with RIM for their Blackberry smartphones and, of course, Apple’s iPhone. Next on their to-do list is to snag Nokia, Motorola, as well as Palm, who they are reportedly already in talks with regarding the Palm Pre.
All the mobile Facebook is cool and all, but while they are busy all of doing that, can’t they do something about the login process? I don’t know if it is just me, but I can’t believe after all this time, Facebook hasn’t adopted some sort of Identity 2.0 or begun using Open ID. Call me lazy, but having to enter an entire email address and password each time I go to log in just seems barbaric to me. I mean…not even simply a username. The entire email. It seems that an Open ID would be a logical step forward.
It’s clear they are focused more on keeping things out of reach and private than even MySpace is, where users can pretty easily get at page code and mess with the html. It is not near as easy to do anything like that on Facebook. They took that lesson and learned something from it. Another big thing that sets them apart from MySpace, is the fact that FaceBook developers actually seem to get the concept that users are there to catch up on what is going on with their friends, and don’t really want to have to click on 50+ pages to get that information by going to each friend’s site. So, get this….they don’t make you!
You can actually get friend updates right on your own home page. Imagine that. Now granted, each user has privacy settings. So your stuff only appears to who you want to see it. But if Jake uploads some photos on his page from last week’s party showing us all acting goofy? I can see it right on my homepage. (Ummm…if he lets me that is). So, while it may cost Facebook a few clicks in page views now, it is definitely something their users appreciate, and will only help them over time.
So where is Facebook going? Is it going to be “the” social networking site, leaving others in the dust? I think it is definitely here to stay, especially if they continue to make some forward movements and continue to work on developing their platform. They have to not get lazy, or just sit back and become the cash cows that MySpace morphed into. If they play their cards right, they could very well hold strong and steady. Or, if not, they could be the site that our kids grow up saying “Face what???“
Everybody stay calm. Sit down if you’re standing up. If you’re already sitting, stand up and then sit back down either in the same chair or find a different, more comfortable chair. Okay, ready?
AT&T might implement a handset trade-up program.
Read the rest of this entry >>
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The views he expresses are his own, and we present them here to foster debate.
The mainstream press, such as The New York Times, has noticed that even Google itself is starting to worry about the possibility that the Department of Justice may seek regulation, possibly even the break-up of Google. How can this be? How can a firm seen as a triumph of creative capitalism and a virtuous contributor to the economy (“Don’t be evil!”) possibly be suspected of anything? Is this regulatory oversight gone mad? Not exactly.
Below I summarize what I do know about Google’s behavior and what I believe the Department of Justice is likely to perceive and likely to need to demonstrate if it seeks to act against Google. In a later post I will expand, including what I believe but cannot yet demonstrate. It’s important to remember that I am not an attorney, just a computer science faculty member at a major business school, with some litigation experience, and that I have had no conversations with Google or with the Department of Justice about these issues, but I believe that what follows provides some insight into thinking at the Department of Justice.
Monopoly power in electronic distribution channels is often difficult to assess since the relationship between market share and market power may be deceptive, even counter-intuitive. Two historical examples that were subjects of my earlier research provide the best way to begin the analysis, because their economic implications are now very clear.
In the mid 1980s American Airlines’ Sabre and United Airlines’ Apollo computerized reservations systems (CRSs) dominated the market for travel agency reservations systems, with 43% and 27% market share respectively. Other systems existed, and other airlines appeared to be free to enter with their own CRS offerings, but agencies were satisfied with the systems they were using, the largest agencies were actually given their systems free or even paid for their usage, and the position of these two CRS vendors appeared stable. At the time 80% of air travel bookings were made through travel agencies. Thus, while neither Sabre nor Apollo accounted for a majority of any airline’s bookings, even the smaller of the two controlled access to approximately 20% of each and every airline’s potential customers and therefore approximately 20% of every airline’s sales. Airlines initially chose to participate early, when participation in the CRSs was free. Only later, when agencies had come to depend upon CRSs, and thus when airlines had become dependent upon CRSs as well, did Sabre and Apollo institute high fees for reservations, ticketing, and other services they provided to the airlines.
Can we demonstrate that these CRSs had market power at the time? The historical record makes this quite clear. When Apollo dropped Frontier from its reservations systems, Frontier was forced to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11; it reemerged, regained listings in Apollo, and continues to fly. When Sabre, which was larger than Apollo, dropped Braniff, Braniff ended up in liquidation and no longer operates. Clearly market power was present and clearly this power became evident to all airlines even if it was not perceived by passengers or even by agencies. Ultimately, both American and United were earning more from booking flights on other airlines than from their own operations, and at one point American was earning more from booking passengers on Delta’s flights than Delta was earning by operating them.
Neither Sabre nor Apollo had a monopoly of the market for reservations services, but together each had a parallel monopoly on the share of the market that they served through their agency customers. This should be clear from the figure below.
At approximately the same time Philadelphia National Bank (PNB) acquired Cash Stream, signed Provident as a customer bank, and consolidated the position of MAC as the sole ATM service provider for the Philadelphia region. Interestingly, even with 100% of the market for inter-bank ATM switching services, PNB lacked monopoly power, was unable to charge excessive fees to its member banks, and never represented a competitive threat to the other banks in Philadelphia. How can we possibly explain this? Again, a picture is very helpful.
From these pictures we can plainly see that the geometry of the two networks — CRS services and ATM services — is quite different. The CRSs are positioned between the airlines and their passengers. If one CRS drops an airline then all agencies that use the CRS and all of that agency’s customers are denied access to one (and only one) airline. The agency may not care, and the customers may not even know. Moreover, bypass of the CRS at the time, before the presence of search engines and online booking, meant that the lost business was likely to be impossible to recapture as long as participation in the CRS was denied. Despite the high fees, no airline voluntarily removed itself from any CRS.
In contrast, each bank is positioned between its customers and the ATM network service provider MAC. If a bank is denied access to the network, at least its own cards will work on its own machines. Moreover, each bank used an identical interface in its communications with MAC. Therefore the banks were able to forge an alliance — if PNB attempted to compete unfairly against any one of them, they would simply implement bilateral switching among themselves and cut MAC out entirely.
Again, even with 100% market share, there were no complaints of abuse lodged against MAC. In contrast, there were significant complaints lodged against the operators of the CRSs and, ultimately, regulation from the Department of Justice severely limited the power of the CRS operators.
What can we learn from the geometry of the current network for search?
Clearly, Google’s market share for sponsored search and for search generally is larger than Sabre or Apollo ever enjoyed, and clearly Google comes between the shopper and the ultimate service provider (hotel, airline, retailer, or manufacturer), just as we saw in the case of the airline CRSs. The conditions are right for Google to enjoy enormous market power over service providers, who feel they must bid for positions in Google’s sponsored search keyword auctions.
Offsetting the fact that Google’s market share advantage in search is greater than that of Sabre or Apollo at their largest, is the fact that alternative routes to airlines, hotels, and retailers exist. For instance, in the case of hotels, customers can call the hotel directly or can call the hotel chain’s central reservations systems, or can enter the URL for the hotel’s own website for reservations or can enter the URL for the hotel chain’s central reservations websites. The concept of relevant market share, which was a critical part of the Microsoft antitrust litigation, is likely to be a crucial factor here as well in assessing how important Google search is to companies’ access to their customers.
What else will the Department of Justice need to show? It will want to show what the economist William Baumol has called contestability is absent, which is usually taken to be an indication that market power can be obtained, and it will want to show the abuse of that market power. (Interestingly, Baumol developed the theory of contestability when he was consulting for AT&T, and he developed the theory to argue that there were cases when even 100% market share did not constitute monopoly power. In contrast, we argue here that even without monopoly market share, market power may exist). His test for the presence or absence of contestability is the ability to earn enough in one industry to subsidize others. The test for abuse of market power is both prices that are too high and the use of these subsidies to deter entry by competitors. In the Microsoft trial these two were established simultaneously, and the same can be done here:
What else would the Department of Justice want to demonstrate?
Notice that the argument that Google has monopoly power and that it abuses it does not require demonstrating that Google’s search is superior or inferior. It does not require establishing that Google could do a better job with organic search, or even that it deliberately does not do a better job with organic search. It does not require showing that consumers are harmed directly by lower quality organic search, if indeed lower quality organic search exists. It surely does not require establishing that Google got its market share illegally. It merely requires establishing that Google has monopoly power in a market that is not contestable, and that it is abusing that power to overcharge corporations and deter market entry in other businesses. Likewise, it does not require demonstrating the Google paid search is the only excessive charge suffered by the travel industry and passed on the consumers; at its most abusive, hotels.com was charging a 30% commission while claiming to be a low cost.
I believe the Department of Justice will be able to establish monopoly power and the abuse of that power. Ultimately, the Department of Justice will seek to demonstrate consumer harm, direct or indirect, caused by the high fees charged for sponsored search, and, ultimately, I believe that the DoJ will succeed in establishing this, but these are not essential to establishing the presence of and abuse of market power.
Again, I am not approaching this as an attorney would, nor have I discussed this with lawyers for any of the concerned parties, but I expect that attorneys both at the DoJ and at Google headquarters are already addressing these issues.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Do the names Joanne Bradford, Mike Walrath, Wenda Millard and Greg Coleman mean anything to you? Do you know what pork bellies have to do with online advertising?
Then you may get a chuckle, or at least a modest smile, out of this video, prepared by Yahoo (YHOO) and shown at last week’s Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting in Orlando.
But the rest of you don’t have to go away with nothing to show for your click. I’ve added a miniglossary below the Yahoo video, so you can catch up if you care to.
And if that doesn’t do anything for you, there’s a bonus clip after that–Jimmy Fallon and Jack McBrayer, from “30 Rock,” responding to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to President Barack Obama’s speech last week.
Joanne Bradford: Former Microsoft (MSFT) ad exec now heading up sales for Yahoo after a brief stint at ad start-up SpotRunner.
Mike Walrath: Former CEO of Right Media, an online ad exchange snapped up by Yahoo for $720 million in 2007, when ad exchanges suddenly became must-have assets for online publishers. Now an SVP at Yahoo.
Wenda Harris Millard: Former high-profile ad exec at Yahoo, now CEO at Martha Stewart Living (MSO).
Greg Coleman: Millard’s former boss at Yahoo, now running ad sales at Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL.
Pork bellies: Shorthand for an online ad business debate, kicked off by Millard last year: She thinks that the industry’s increasing use of automated ad exchanges and networks has commodified and devalued Web marketing.
Still don’t care? OK. Here’s the Jimmy Fallon clip; his NBC show kicks off Monday night.
On Friday, during our cloud computing event, Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?, Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary noted, “The cloud is the new dotcom.” He was one of the judges for the demo startups, and for good or for bad, he might be right. Cloud computing as a term is broad enough to encompass most internet startups and already is in danger of being latched onto as the next catch-all category. Yet there is also obviously something there. Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook all want to become the cloud platform of choice for startups and developers to build their Web apps on.
And we are already seeing some impressive cloud-based apps that would have been much more difficult to build without these platforms. During the demos, for instance, Veodia showed an app for recording video in the cloud straight from a laptop’s camera—no uploading required. FathomDB is putting a relational database in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2), and Diomede Storage is offering its own cloud service with a twist: online storage where you can monitor the power consumption of each file and act accordingly.
Below are four video highlights from the roundtable that followed the demos. In the first video, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argues that “we are on the threshold of fundamentally a new paradigm of computing.” He defines cloud computing both as as software-as-a-service and as platform-as-a-service (and judging by how many cloud platforms were represented at the event, it seems like everyone wants to be the latter).
In the second video, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains why Amazon is in the cloud computing business in the first place, and says that overall for cloud computing in general: “This is still Day One.” We talked a lot about how enterprise apps are starting to look more and more like consumer Web apps, partly because they are both being built on similar back-end cloud architectures. But in the third video, Google’s Vic Gundotra takes exception to the idea that enterprise apps mimicking consumer apps is anything new.
And in the final video, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini talks about the importance of video in the cloud and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit talks about how consumers don’t care where all the data and applications are stored, but that applications on different cloud platforms nevertheless have to be able to seamlessly interact with each other. (As a side note, the reason I am on a video screen in some of these clips is because I joined the event remotely).
To watch the video highlights, just click through the playlist below. For those interested in watching more, you can watch the entire three hours of the event here.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
| World : News Archives | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Technology | Science | Marketplace Audio |
| India : News | Business | Entertainment | Sports | Telugu | |
| Blogs : Humor pages | Norkay's Blog | Kids Stories | Indian Recipes | Database Tech Blog |
| Sundries : World Video Clips | Songs Clips | Indian Video Clips | |
Asus has recently unveiled their latest smartphone—the W835 and based on the specs it sounds like it may be worthy of a purchase. As for the specs, it features a 3.5-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of 800 x 480 and is running Windows Mobile 6.1 with the Glide UI. Of course the features do not not stop there, the W835 also includes Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, a 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus, a microSD card slot and 4GB of internal storage. Additionally, the W835 also has a trackball (similar to the BlackBerry Pearl) for navigation along with an onscreen virtual keyboard.
Two constants in the music business right now:
