We have been hearing rumors of an upcoming smartphone from Dell over the past several months, however this latest bit of information is probably not what Dell would be hoping to hear. It seems that the carriers just do not want it.
According to Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu the smartphone from Dell has gone “back to the drawing board” after the cellular carriers have shown “a lack of interest.“ As of now Dell has not responded to the comments, of course Dell has not officially acknowledged they were working on a smartphone either.
Finally, and perhaps this last comment was made in an effort to make Dell feel a little better, but Wu also stated that the excitement surrounding the “Palm Pre has not helped.“
FROM APPLETELL - This week’s biggest announcement was obviously Apple’s preview of iPhone OS 3.0, but I had quite the experience with my new iPod shuffle, Kirk has another Mac game to dust off, and we’re giving away another Podium. MORE »
Samsung has stealthily issued a follow-up to its NC10 netbook and has sensibly changed very little (so little, in fact, that our own Brian X Chen should be able to get OS X running on there again). Laptop Mag was handed a unit before anybody even knew it existed and reviewer Joanna Stern presumably lost her weekend testing it out.
The N110 improves on the few problems with the original. The new model has a proper touchpad this time, bigger at 2.5 x 1.3 inches (the old one measured 2.3 x 1.1 inches) and a higher, more clickable button. This isn’t much, but Stern says it makes a big difference to usability.
The N110 also gains a shinier casing and a rather hideous burgundy stripe (burgundy was a featured color of my grammar school uniform, though, so I might be biased) and more importantly a bigger six cell battery, weighing in at 5900 mAH and giving a rather splendid seven hours of life. The old NC10 was no slouch in this regard, though, giving almost seven hours in normal use and eight hours if everything superflous was switched off.
Best of all, though, is that Samsung hasn’t dicked around with the keyboard. IT’s the same big (93% full-size), easy to use keyboard from the previous model, complete with the proper right-shift key in the proper place.
Otherwise, the specs are the netbook standards: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 160GB hard drive, USB ports and a card reader. The price is a netbook-steep $470, but Stern says that it is “near-perfect."
While its seen only slightly less pre-announcement leaking than Gordon Gekkos bid for Anacot Steel, Tim Geithner toxic assets plan does have overseas markets all a-twitter tonight. As I call it a night,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:56 am
A dangerous nerve toxin emitted by algae off California’s coast seems to be distressing creatures in the deep ocean. U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:55 am
Toshiba is the world’s first company that mass-produces fuel cells. Starting next month, a factory in Yokohama will turn out fuell cells that are based on methanol and can be used to charge cell phones or notebooks.
The fuel cells will cost between $100 and a whopping $500 at first, but Toshiba expects these prices to drop significantly after ramping up output. Toshiba mobile phones and notebooks with built-in fuel cells are now announced for the next fiscal year, which ends March 2010.
By fiscal 2015, the company expects to rake in $1 billion in sales of fuel cell-based products.
Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
March 23 (Reuters) - Medical device maker Endologix Inc raised its 2009 revenue view and forecast first-quarter revenue above market estimates on better-than-expected adoption of its recently approved... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:47 am
BEIJING, March 23 (Reuters) - IBM expects its China business consulting unit to almost double in size within a year to cater for increasing demands from local firms despite the economic slowdown, a senior... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:41 am
Engadget is first to get one of Dell's ultra-thin Adamo laptops, and takes it for a preliminary spin.
In hand, the laptop is thinner and lighter than most of this size, though it isn't quite as svelte as the Air. Its real competitor, however, appears to be the X301. We'll be doing a full review in the near future.../blockquote>
This curious object allows one to use a Logitech Harmony-series remote with Sony's Playstation 3, without using up a USB port.
We can’t give you all the details just yet, but we can say that this adapter will, when used with any Harmony remote, give you complete control of your movie-watching experience on PS3. It will also turn the PS3 on and off – and allow you to set up your Harmony activities to include the PS3 just as you would any other device. You also won’t need to dedicate any of your valuable USB ports to get that control.
NEW YORK, March 23 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators have expanded the approval of Eli Lilly and Co's Symbyax, which combines the active ingredients of its Zyprexa antipsychotic and Prozac antidepressant, for... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:34 am
As a commented points out at Dan's Data, if you combined this 3D scanner, made from Lego by Philippe "Philo" Hubain, with a 3D printer, also made from Lego, you could create infinte Lego given enough energy and print mix. Next: von Neumann Lego.
Part of my neighbourhood in London was evacuated yesterday after someone mistook a replica of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (cf. Monty Python and the Holy Grail) for a bomb:
Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.
The road was cordoned off and a nearby pub was evacuated amid fears that the "grenade" could explode.
But after nearly an hour of analysis bomb experts realised that the cause of the scare was in fact a copy of the "Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch" used by Eric Idle to slaughter a killer rabbit in the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
Interesting new paper out showing a possible relationship between ticker search frequency for Russell 3000 stocks and subsequent stock performance: In Search of Attention Zhi Da, Joseph Engelberg,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:25 am
Destiny sez, "The U.S. Attorney's office submitted e-mails they'd received from Bernie Madoff's victims to the judge handling Madoff's sentencing.
And one of the emails that somehow ended up in the pile was the classic text of the 'Nigerian scam' email.
The U.S. Attorneys office mistook it for a real email from one of Madoff's victims -- and submitted it to his sentencing judge!"
My Name is Mr. [redacted] but my origin is from Republic of Congo. I have an inherited fund I want to invest in a business in your country with a help of a local. I don't know about what business but I found it wise to invest the funds in your country with your collaboration with me....
The danger of storing your data in the cloud, part n. VC-backed online backup and storage provider Carbonite has lost data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe, The Boston Globe unveiled over the weekend.
The newspaper gets the information from a lawsuit that was filed by the Boston company last week, alleging that two of its service providers sold it over $3 million worth of defective hardware, linking this to the loss of their customer’s data and as a result, bringing “substantial damage” to its business and reputation.
Carbonite is seeking unspecified damages against Promise Technology, which it is suing for unfair and deceptive business practices, fraud and breach of contract, as well as system integrator and IT consultancy firm Interactive Digital Systems (for breach of warranty). The latter company advised and implemented Promise Technology solutions, which were supposed to monitor multiple computer hard drives in order to assure that they were functioning properly.
I think it would be too easy to point to Carbonite for the loss of data if in fact there were serious errors with the software that were unable to be fixed by Promise engineers - something an executive at Promise Technology categorically denies - but the real victims of course are the customers, who will most likely think twice before trusting a cloud-based storage and backup provider with their files from this point forward. I also think it’s worth pointing out Carbonite has been caught red-handed earlier this year astroturfing Amazon reviews, as reported by David Pogue of The New York Times.
The danger of storing your data in the cloud, part n. VC-backed online backup and storage provider Carbonite has lost data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe, The... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:14 am
Im away for a good chunk of Monday, so posting will likely be light. The upside, of course, is that I have a great excuse for paying zero live attention to the launch of Toxic Asset Bailout 3.0. ... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 11:13 am
Ian sez, "The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has this morning published our comprehensive new report on the UK's Database State, finding that 25% of major public sector databases are illegal under human rights and data protection law. Only 15% of databases are proportionate and necessary. Calls for databases such as National Identity Register and DNA database to be scrapped."
* A quarter of all major public sector databases are fundamentally flawed and almost certainly illegal. These should be scrapped or redesigned immediately;
* The database state is victimising minority groups and vulnerable people, from single mothers to young black men and schoolchildren;
* Children are amongst the ‘most at risk’ from Britain’s Database State, with three of the largest databases set up to support and protect children failing to achieve their aims;
* Data sharing is a barrier to socially responsible activities. It is deterring teenagers from accessing health advice and undermining goodwill towards law enforcement;
* Only 15% of major public sector databases are effective, proportionate and necessary;
* We spend £16 billion a year on public sector IT and a further £105bn spending is planned for the next five years – but only 30% of public-sector IT projects succeed.
There’s a reason we haven’t heard more about Dell’s planned smartphone — it’s too boring, even for the mobile carriers. According to Marketwatch, Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu said “it appears that it ultimately came down to lack of carrier interest."
This is the trouble any smartphone will be up against. The Palm Pre might do well, despite the fact that it no longer has any advantage over the iPhone 3.0 (well, one — the keyboard). And the iPhone is the all conquering iPhone. To compete, manufacturers need to come up with something sexy to justify the higher prices and tariffs of inherent to smartphones, and it looks like Dell is too dull to do it.
According to Wu, Dell has “gone back to the drawing board" to design something a little more “distinct". It’d better hurry up. Acer’s lineup of smartphones starts to trickle out this year and the cheap PC maker could tie up the commodity end of the market that Dell loves so much.
Rumors that Dell disabled the snooze feature on both the Android and WinMo versions of prototypes due to feature duplication are unfounded.
(TrendHunter.com) Motoi Yamamotos incredible art uses salt, a compound that is essential to life. Its no wonder that Yamamoto picked salt as his medium of choice; in Japanese culture, salt is not only... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:39 am
By Andrew Liszewski Pedal-powered flight is not for the faint of heart, and that’s probably why the Airbike is designed to work in conjunction with a hang glider. On its own, the Airbike’s... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:24 am
(TrendHunter.com) This sleek Lenovo Poison concept blends the aesthetic of a traditional brick-shaped cell phone with a transparent glass display. Its designed by Ryan Ma of Shanghai, whos designed a... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:19 am
Anyone who makes money — or who is trying to make money — publishing on the Web is obsessed with getting more out of Google and its firehose of traffic.
Here’s a novel approach from a coterie of big media brands, including the New York Times (NYT) and Disney’s ESPN (DIS): Complain loudly that the search engine isn’t treating you fairly.
Ad Age’s Nat Ives reports that digital publishing executives including John Kosner, who runs digital media for ESPN, and Martin Nisenholtz, who oversees digital at the Times, have been grousing that their stuff doesn’t show up high enough in Google’s (GOOG) search results.
That’s the same complaint that just about every Web site in the world has, because everyone knows the value of Google juice.
But Ives quotes publishers — all of whom are anonymous except for the two I’ve mentioned – who feel that their stuff deserves special treatment because their content is inherently more valuable, and because so much of the Web riffs off/rips off their work. In fact they’d probably point to this very post as an example of a derivative work that should show up lower on Google’s results than the original story.
But it’s unclear what the big guys think Google can actually do about this.
Publishers said they’re not asking for a leg up over amateurs and link-happy bloggers. “This would in no way mean that only professional content publishers would get an advantage,” one said. “It really just says that the original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results.”
Google says it’s trying but can’t just flip a switch to deliver pro publishers’ dreams. “There’s absolutely value to original content,” a spokesman said. “There’s value to derivative content, too. We look at this in many ways from the point of view of the user. But the truth is there are so many shades of gray even within, quote, original content.”
I’d also warn publishers to be careful of getting what they wish for. If Google was somehow able to train its bots and spiders to suss out material that was truly original, it’s entirely possible that many of the big guys wouldn’t be happy with those results, either.
InfoWorld - The rise of the Mac in the enterprise is increasing because users are finding ever more ingenious ways to work with Apple's accommodating platform. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:00 am
PC World - Imagine playing what looks like an Xbox 360 game -- on a $100 cell phone. That, according to Remi Pedersen, graphics product manager at ARM, is exactly what could be possible as soon as winter 2009 with its new higher-end Mali-200 and Mali-400 processors. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Mar 2009 | 10:00 am
(TrendHunter.com) Akiane (pronounced ah-kee-ah-nah) is a child prodigy artist and poet who claims her inspiration comes from God, and that shes in constant communication with Him. Even though Akiane... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:59 am
Pressplane, they very stealth Seattle startup we covered when they raised $1.7 million from Second Avenue Partners along with a slew of hot-shot individual angel investors exactly 6 months ago, is turning... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:56 am
Pressplane, they very stealth Seattle startup we covered when they raised $1.7 million from Second Avenue Partners along with a slew of hot-shot individual angel investors exactly 6 months ago, is turning the lights on today with a different brand name and a seemingly strong offering for businesses. The new name is Inkd, and the service will be officially announced this morning (the kick-off blog post was published last Friday).
So we already knew Curious Office, the incubator behind Pressplane / Inkd, was working on a service geared towards businesses yet centered around a user-generated community, which is no surprise given their previous success applying that same strategy building Imagekind, an online marketplace for art (acquired by Cafepress for $15-$20 million in cash and stock in July 2008) and seeding Shelfari, a community for book lovers (acquired by Amazon in August 2008). We also found out early that Curious Office was betting on something to do with dead trees, and both have checked out.
Inkd is essentially a buy and sell marketplace for printed materials (think brochures, business cards, flyers, envelopes, etc.) where business owners can cherry pick original templates made by professional designers. Each creative is unique and gets screened by the Inkd team before ending up in the marketplace. If a business owner or marketer doesn’t find what they’re looking for, they can put out a request to Inkd (not directly to designers) and the startup will take it from there. Creatives who submit material to the design collection are paid a 20% percent royalty fee on the total retail sale for each transaction that ensues, but in the future Inkd plans to debut an ‘exclusive’ membership with higher commission fees.
Inkd print templates (of which 800 are already present) are made available for immediate download in a wide variety of file formats and include page layout files, along with photos and artwork. The files are fully editable and can be customized to suit any project. You can get some free samples from the Inkd website (hover over the ‘Learn’ tab) to see how they come out.
What Curious Office has done is apply a well thought-out business model that has already proven its value in other fields (iStockphoto for stock images and Logoworks for logos spring to mind) to an industry that’s dying for some innovation and execute it extremely well. The advantages for business in terms of cost and time saving are clear, the lay-out and copy of the Inkd website are great, pricing seems reasonable and there are some very smart and accomplished people involved with this company. I’m having trouble finding competitors with an equally strong offering too, although BrandDoozie may come closest.
That said, Inkd’s biggest challenges will be attracting enough professional designers to keep the flow going (and keep them coming back for more), and marketing its services to the plethora of business owners who could benefit from the marketplace but may not realize services like this exist at all or are stuck to the traditional model of working with communication agencies and freelance graphic designers.
Yet somehow, I think we’ve got a winner on our hands, and it’s great to see the Seattle startup and investment ecoystem at work.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
By Andrew Liszewski Wow! I am totally impressed by this LEGO NXT 3D scanner created by Philippe Hurbain, but what would you expect from one of the co-authors of Extreme NXT? The scanner was built to get... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:43 am
Xbm360 writes "According to data collected by Joystiq as well as Google Trends, there's been a steady rise in reports and discussion of the so-called E74 error on Xbox 360 consoles since August of last year. The E74 error is related to video problems caused by either a faulty AV connector or, more often, a loosened ANA/HANA scaling chip. This is not the first time the Xbox 360 has experienced technical issues; in recent years many people have complained about scratched discs and over-heating consoles — the 'red ring of death.'"
MIRAMAR, Fla., March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- AgentBizzUp.com, a leading provider of technology and marketing web solutions to the real estate industry, today released an affordable new IDX/MLS search solution for real estate agents - Advanced IDX Solution. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:00 am
AFP - New Zealand Monday withdrew a controversial law which could have forced firms to disconnect Internet users accused of illegal use of material such as music or films.
PARIS, March 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Valeo's Board of Directors,
which met on 20 March 2009, announces the departure of Thierry Morin who is
leaving his post as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:54 am
Facebook’s Lexicon counts “occurences of words and phrases” on its Walls over time.
Facebook, which had tried to buy Twitter late last year, has recently done a redesign that some critics are saying is too much of a panicked reaction to the hype around the microblogging service, although Twitter’s audience is just a tiny sliver of Facebook’s.
Still, Twitter’s becoming the digital trend of the moment, especially in the what’s-hot-today media, has to have last year’s golden child, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg more than a just little irked.
It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google’s (GOOG) visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.
In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”
He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or the hair bang length of a brand manager.
Well, he didn’t mention that last one, but I am prepared to believe it might be possible.
I know that there are some engineers out there who will delight in yet another triumph for alleged data over some subjective, sniffy, superior artist. I also know that there will be many, many artists and other sentient human beings who wish that they would just take a run and jump.
For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal (NWS), and Time (TWX). Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun, a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times’ paperback best-seller list. Lolcats are now even showing up on hipster soda bottles. Is there anyone left in America who hasn’t had enough of these cat photos appended with ironic, allusive, peculiarly spelled captions?
Yes—lots of people. More than two years after its launch, I Can Has Cheezburger is still having cheeseburgers. Not only hasn’t it faded, the site is bigger than ever: People keep sending in new pictures, new people keep discovering the phenomenon, and every day traffic grows a bit more. In the last year, according to the traffic-monitoring firm Compete, visits to the site more than doubled.
A week before James Hetfield and Co. are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the metal icons’ Guitar Hero: Metallica video game hits stores, on March 29th. The new addition to the GH franchise boasts 28 controller-shredding songs taken from Metallica’s voluminous catalog as well as band-approved acts including Motorhead, Slayer and Mastodon (check out our sneak preview here!). Rolling Stone sat down with frontman James Hetfield at SXSW a few hours before Metallica’s epic “surprise” show to find out how he likes his pixellated persona, whether he thinks Death Magnetic sounds better on video game or record and if he believes encouraging kids to pick up plastic instruments is hurting their chances of learning real ones.
Which member of Metallica is the best at playing Guitar Hero?
Oh, I don’t know. I think we’re all equally bad.
As a guitarist, how are you at using the guitar controller?
The initial thought was, “This is gonna be so easy.” And then I picked it up and tried doing it. And it was like [makes plunking sound]. “Are you kidding me? You guys suck! You’re supposed to follow me!”
There was a fair bit of chatter in the blogosphere yesterday about an analysis by Ross Sandler at RBC showing the remarkable growth of Facebook and the traffic the site “drives” to Google (GOOG).
The punch line that a bunch of folks took away from the analysis was that Facebook drives 19 percent of Google’s sessions. Henry Blodget made this conclusion as did a lot of others.
But I think this stat is completely misleading, and significantly overstates the importance of Facebook to Google. Let’s look at the key numbers that Ross discusses:
Vysr has launched a new version of its browser extension application, RoamAbout 2.0. The downloadable browser application, which is available for Firefox, Linux and Internet Explorer, allows you to integrate your favorite apps like Gmail, and social networks like Twitter and Facebook within the browser and then interact with the apps contextually while on any web site. We are offering 1000 private beta downloads here.
Launched last year, Vysr strengthened the browser plugin more recently by adding OpenSocial applications to the platform, letting third party developers deploy their applications on the browser extension. Once downloaded, the plug-in’s OpenBar sits at the bottom of your browser. RoamAbout 2.0 is a useful extension to your browser because it lets you see a constant stream of real-time information from social networks, email applications, RSS feeds, the latest and greatest YouTube videos and Google news.
On the bar at the bottom of your screen, you can get custom tailored updates from friends in your Facebook network, tweets from people you follow on Twitter, RSS feeds from your favorite blogs and news sites, and notifications when you get an email in your Gmail inbox. And you can get these non-intrusive updates while browsing on any webpage. RoamAbout basically eliminates the need to constantly switch to different tabs to check email, updates, and tweets. The notifier on RoamAbout OpenBar alerts you to events of interest from your apps such as new emails in your Gmail account, direct messages on Twitter, or status updates in Facebook.
RoamAbout also provides an easily personalized side application platform, called a “tray,” which can easily be collapsed, where you can access a snapshot any of your favorite applications or be led to the main page in another tab. RoamAbout currently has a choice of 46 applications that you can integrate with the plug-in, including Facebook status updates, Twitter, ESPN, Gmail notifications, GoogleMaps and more.
The RoamAbout application tray also enables applications to bring you content in the context of your web interest. Similar to the new “Accelerators” in IE8, applications can be launched in the context of the website you are on, or in the context of a word highlighted on the web page. The tray feature lets you do some pretty cool things. For example, if you highlight “Bill Gates” in a TechCrunch news post and then click on the YouTube app, related YouTube videos will be displayed right on the page. Or you can select location information on a web page, click on the Google maps app in the tray, and then share location information with friends on Facebook or Gmail contacts. You can also highlight any location on any webpage (i.e., San Francisco), click on the RoamAbout application “Fetch,” and then the app will return all Facebook friends who live in that location.
RoamAbout seems to be similar in a lot of ways to Flock, a social browser that also integrates email and social apps like Facebook and Twitter, except that RoamAbout isn’t a stand alone browser and is easily integrated into Firefox or IE. Founded by Guda Venkatesh, Vysr has several big-name investors and advisers in Silicon Valley, including investor Ron Conway and Rajeev Motwani, Stanford computer science professor and a member of the founding Google Research Team.
Here’s a screenshot of what RoamAbout 2.0 looks like on a Firefox browser:
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Looking at a regular graph of traffic data from Digg and Facebook, it would be easy to assume that Digg is lagging far behind Facebook’s staggering growth. However, Compete just produced a very different graph that compares traffic at Digg and Facebook since their respective launches, and according to this data, Digg is actually doing better than Facebook. Facebook is obviously older than Digg, so while it has more traffic now, Digg’s growth since its inception has actually been faster than Facebook’s.
As you can see from the graphs, Digg and Facebook had very similar growth curves for the first four years of their existence, and according to Compete’s historical data, Digg’s traffic was actually greater than Facebook’s for 33 out of 51 months.
It needs to be said, though, that Facebook’s user base has exploded over the last year, while Digg’s traffic ‘only’ grew by about 50 percent, according to Compete. During its fifth year, Facebook’s traffic more than doubled from about 28 million visitors to over 73 million.
Epson DC-06 Document Camera Offers Plug 'n Play USB Connection
for Easy Projector or PC Connectivity
LONG BEACH, Calif., March 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Epson America today introduced the Epson DC-06 document camera, designed to deliver flexibility, ease-of-use and affordability to today's K-12 classroom. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:01 am
--FleetBroadband speeds fish finding, thereby reducing fuel consumption--
BETHESDA, MD, March 23 /PRNewswire/ - Stratos Global Corporation, the leading global provider of advanced mobile and fixed-site remote communications solutions, today announced it has successfully completed an Inmarsat FleetBroadband field trial with Spain's Albacora Group.
The three-month field trial was conducted onboard the Albacora tuna fishing vessel Albatun Dos in the Indian Ocean. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:00 am
PARIS, March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- The MERIDIIST, the first luxury phone created by watchmaker TAG Heuer, enters a completely new dimension with the worldwide launch of its official website: www.tagheuer.com/meridiist. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:00 am
Virtual Appliance: IdentityIQ is installed as a pre-built software solution in the customer's data center on the virtualization platform of their choice. The appliance is packaged for rapid deployment in a client's existing virtual infrastructure and reduces deployment time and expenses by using a pre-configured software stack.Managed Hosting: IdentityIQ is deployed at a SailPoint hosting facility, including all required software, services and support. It helps ensure that costs are more predictable by eliminating the need to procure hardware or additional internal IT support.Managed Services Packages: Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 7:00 am
Reuters - EBay unit Skype on Monday plans to announce a version of its Internet calling software that connects to corporate phone systems, the Wall Street Journal said. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Mar 2009 | 6:52 am
taucross writes "ISP iiNet today confirmed its exit from the Australian government's Internet filtering trials. iiNet had originally taken part in the plan in order to prove the filter was flawed. Citing a number of concerns, their withdrawal leaves only five Australian ISPs continuing to test the filter."
COPENHAGEN, March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Milestone Systems, the open platform
company within IP video management software, sets up subsidiaries in
Australia and Spain to support continued long-term business growth in these
regions.
Milestone Systems is a demonstrated international leader in the security
industry, with a decade of development behind their robust and proven IP
video management software. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 6:00 am
JOENSUU, Finland, March 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Blancco Ltd., the global
leader in data erasure and end-of-lifecycle solutions, has launched a
tailored data erasure solution for SPARC servers and workstations. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:55 am
Attention-grabbing rumors of a Dell smartphone began to surface this past January, and then again in February. Now, more than 2 months since the web-wide guessing game first began, there is fresh speculation regarding Dell’s secret handset.
Unfortunately, it’s probably not the kind of hype or publicity that Dell is hoping for. According to Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, Dell’s recent attempts to develop a competitive smartphone have been rejected by potential carriers due to an overall “lack of interest.”
Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>
Exploding term sheets are nasty. If you don’t know what they are, it’s a fairly literal definition. Someone gives you a term sheet to invest in or acquire your company (or some other transaction), but they put an expiration date into the term sheet and if you don’t accept by that date, the offer explodes. Investor Y Combinator (recently in the news for taking an investment from Sequoia Capital) posted an advisory tonight that their competitors are using exploding term sheets, and suggesting companies ignore them.
Companies use exploding for a variety of reasons. But the goal is to put additional pressure on the company to accept the terms and quickly, without much further negotiation. In particular, they don’t want to see a deal “shopped,” which is when you take their term sheet and go to other buyers/investors looking for a better deal (which is exactly what you should be doing as soon as you get a term sheet from anyone).
But they are bad news for startups, who can’t take their time to find the best deal possible when presented with one. I’ve received a couple of these in the past and have always ignored the clauses. Generally speaking, the day after the explosion they’re still very happy to do business with you. If they’re not, they weren’t good partners anyway. (there are exceptions, such as when certain financial milestones or other important dates are coming up, but those situations are fairly obvious).
The Y Combinator letter is fairly straightforward in its advice. In particular, competitors (which are mainly TechStars and DreamIT, although they aren’t mentioned) are giving exploding term sheets that expire prior to Y Combinator getting a look at the companies. Lawsuits have also been threatened:
Advice to Summer Applicants
March 2009
If you’re also applying to one of the other YC-like organizations, you may find yourself in an awkward situation. Last summer several of them gave startups offers timed to expire before YC interviews.
At least one made groups who got offers sign something promising not to tell anyone. Another actually threatened to sue a startup if they didn’t show up for their program.
Using so-called “exploding termsheets” to pre-empt other offers is not uncommon in the VC world, though even there it’s considered a slightly dubious tactic. But VC funding happens asynchronously. Using this tactic in a stage where funding happens synchronously is not very ethical. It would be like colleges doing it.
(YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)
What can you do if you find yourself being pressured to decide before you’re ready? We advise approaching the situation with confidence. If your startup is going to succeed, you’re going to have to learn how to push back against people who try to take advantage of you. So try negotiating. The better you are, the more willing they’ll be to wait for your decision, no matter what they say about their deadlines or the number of “spots” they have.
If you really get into a pinch, let us know and maybe we’ll be able to figure out some way to interview you early.
Sorry about this. We started YC to make it less stressful to start a startup, not more. We never anticipated this sort of situation would arise.
There’s just one problem with the advisory, though. Y Combinator themselves ask companies to make a decision on the day they get their offer. So it’s somewhat hypocritical to complain about the same actions by their competitors. As they say, though, they are the last to interview new startups in each summer and winter class. So startups know who has accepted them by then, and the Y Combinator deal terms and even the contracts they’ll sign are on the website for review.
I’ve emailed both TechStars and DreamIT for a comment. TechStars Executive Director David Cohen writes:
No, TechStars does not ask the founders that it makes offers to not to disclose the offer. We do ask them to accept it quickly (usually in 24-48 hours) or we move on.
TechStars issues a letter of intent when it makes an offer. Once our offer is accepted and signed by both parties, it includes non-disclosure (but not before).
The reason for this is two-fold. First, we are by definition still making offers and we may have to move down the list if some are not accepted. We don’t make all offers at once - it happens over a period of about a week, usually in personal meetings. So we don’t want other applicants that we’re planning to make offers to thinking they won’t get one, etc. Second, we generally advise our startups not to make a bunch of noise on the way in to the program as this is typically too much publicity too early. So, if they enter into the letter of intent, we ask them for confidentiality until such time that we can coach them on working with the media. Then they decide what they want to do. Again, this only happens upon acceptance, and not before.
TechStars has never once threatened to sue a startup or applicant for any reason. I have heard this rumor about another program (not ours), but I have no idea if it’s true or not.
will also tell you that regardless of lots of random innuendo, we have never once set our application or offer deadlines based upon those of any other program. Our program historically sits in the exact dates of the University of Colorado summer break, in order to maximize the likelihood of available temporary housing. We set our dates completely around this, and not based on anything else. In Boston this year, we simply added a two week offset for logistical reasons.
What would be best is if founders didn’t have to make decisions on any of these small incubators/investors until they’d pitched all of them. That’s unlikely to happen, since Y Combinator carries most of the brand weight and would likely get most of the best startups (like Stanford gets all the best students). My guess is we’ll be seeing more of this, not less, over time.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Attention-grabbing rumors of a Dell smartphone began to surface this past January, and then again in February. Now, more than 2 months since the web-wide guessing game first began, there is fresh speculation regarding Dell’s secret handset.
Unfortunately, it’s probably not the kind of hype or publicity that Dell is hoping for. According to Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu, Dell’s recent attempts to develop a competitive smartphone have been rejected by potential carriers due to an overall “lack of interest.”
Wu goes on to explain that Dell’s current prototypes (which include both WinMo and Android-powered devices) failed to offer any distinguishing features from the ever-growing field of smartphone competitors. He also noted that due to limited carrier subsidies, there would be very little room for Dell to sustain reasonable profit margins from the rumored handset(s).
On the bright side, Dell has apparently “gone back to the drawing board” in an effort to craft a more “distinct” smartphone. In light of Dell’s new found interest in design (see: Adamo), part of me wants to believe that Dell may just be able to pull off a decent if not attractive smartphone. On the other hand, it is Dell.
What do you think? Can Dell actually produce a worthwhile smartphone (the dPhone, perhaps?) that can seriously compete with Palm’s upcoming Pre, Apple’s pending iPhone 3.0, or any of the slew of feature-packed HTC handsets expected to drop later this year?
Surgeons at North Carolina's Duke University Medical Center say they have performed surgery on a fetus to repair a heart defect.
The heart was critically malformed and lacked proper channels for blood flow, The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer reported Sunday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:01 am
PC World - Once upon a time, all you needed to tap into the wide world of TV was a TV--though a good set of rabbit ears didn't hurt. Internet video is way more complicated. Few networking tasks are more demanding than pumping video fast enough to avoid pauses, hiccups, and other glitches. So keep the following technical issues in mind before you cut up your Blockbuster card. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 23 Mar 2009 | 5:00 am
Meebo, a popular web-based chat service, has announced that it is going to extend its successful advertising platform to include the growing number of partners that are deploying its Community IM product, which launched last year.
Last summer Meebo launched interactive social ads on its main chat portal at meebo.com, presenting users with small icons at the bottom of their chat windows that would display a popup when clicked (users can also share the ads they especially like with their friends). A number of major corporations have run campaigns using the unique advertising platform, and so far Meebo is posting impressive results: the company says that it has seen an average 1% CTR with 10% of chat users sharing ads with their online buddies.
Now Meebo is ready to extend its successful ad platform to its partners that are using Community IM, Meebo’s chat product that allows web publishers to implement persistent browser-based chat clients on their websites (it’s akin to Facebook Chat). Ads will be displayed in the chat bar at the bottom of the browser (see the screenshot below) and will expand when the user clicks on the small icon shown. Community IM sites participate in a rev share agreement with Meebo, and will be able to use ads from Meebo’s inventory or from their own.
Alongside the announcement, Meebo has also revealed a handful of new partner sites that will be deploying Community IM, including CafeMom, StarPulse, IGN, Current TV, CrispyGamer, DailyStrength.org, GGL Global Gaming, and Internet Brands (over 40 partners have now announced plans to integrate the product into their sites, though some are taking their time).
One of the concerns often brought up about Meebo, especially after its $25 million funding round last year, is how the site plans to generate revenue. The initial results of the new ad platform on meebo.com have been encouraging, and if partner sites continue to see similarly impressive results, Community IM could well turn into a very lucrative product for the company.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
1989: Two electrochemists announce they've produced energy with a fusion reaction in a benchtop apparatus at room temperature. The world reacts with surprise, skepticism and, ultimately, derision.
Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and his mentor, Martin Fleischmann of Britain's University of Southampton, made the startling revelation in a news conference 20 years ago today in Salt Lake City. They claimed they had fused the atomic nuclei of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) using routine electrochemical techniques. Each deuterium nucleus with one proton and one neutron would couple with another nucleus to create a helium nucleus with two protons and two neutrons, plus extra energy that could be harvested for human use.
Pons and Fleischmann's glass percolator used two electrodes and heavy water (with deuterium rather than ordinary hydrogen), and they said the simple apparatus put out up to 100 percent more energy than was required to run it.
Until that time, only hot fusion reactions had produced energy in more than minuscule amounts for more than fleeting periods of time. And we mean hot, like a million degrees or so. Think about the sun and other stars on the one hand, or the uncontrolled chain reaction of a hydrogen bomb on the other. Not exactly benchtop stuff.
If the experiment could be replicated, and then scaled up to industrial production, it promised a nearly limitless supply of cheap, clean energy. If ...
Questions quickly arose. Pons and Fleischmann were not experts in quantitative isotope analysis. A few labs rushed into experiments that seemed to confirm the findings, but the researchers were often outside their areas of expertise as well. When they belatedly added sufficient controls to their experiments, the allegedly confirmatory results vanished, and many labs had to issue embarrassing retractions.
An MIT team soon found big problems with Pons and Fleischmann's gamma-ray spectra. There were no signs of nuclear processes, specifically of any neutron activity. When the U.S. Department of Energy concluded in October that cold fusion was not demonstrated, cold-fusion advocates complained they were being politically victimized by the hot-fusion and particle-physics establishment.
After it couldn't replicate the earlier results, the University of Utah discontinued cold-fusion research in 1991 and allowed its cold-fusion patents to lapse in 1998. Pons and Fleischmann left for for the south of France in 1992 to continue research for a Toyota subsidiary. But even Japan's government stopped funding cold-fusion research in 1997.
Nonetheless, a network of dedicated cold-fusionists still toils away in a vineyard that looks pretty barren to almost everyone else.
If Florida transportation officials have their way, the state will soon lease a 78-mile toll road across the Everglades to a private firm for 50 years, in a deal that could make hundreds of millions of dollars for both sides. Advocates hail it as a windfall that the state can invest in other projects, but critics say no good will come from a shortsighted a plan to make a quick buck.
"You’re talking about taking public assets, paid for with public dollars, and selling them off," says Gina Downs, director of the Citizen's Transportation Coalition. The group opposes the plan to lease the stretch of Interstate 75 known as Alligator Alley. "If governments start leasing assets to plug up budget deficits, pretty soon they'll be selling off anything and everything they can get their hands on. It's a slippery slope."
Such debates will grow more common as states increasingly turn public works projects over to the corporate sector, because they can't afford to do the work. President Barack Obama promises to spend more than $100 billion overhauling the nation's dilapidated roads, bridges and other vital infrastructure, but that gigantic sum is only a fraction of what's needed to do the job.
The real cost of modernizing the country's infrastructure, says the American Society of Civil Engineers, exceeds $2.2 trillion — an overwhelming figure. Cities and states increasingly are inviting private firms to manage assets these governments can no longer afford and build projects they can't finance. More than half of the states are considering public-private partnerships to get things done, following an example set by European countries that have turned over airports, highways, waterworks and other critical infrastructure to the corporate sector.
Proponents say such partnerships allow the government to generate cash and free itself from the burden of improving and maintaining expensive and crumbling public assets. Critics argue the trend places profits ahead of safety, service and accountability.
Several high-profile public-private partnerships have been forged in the past year. Chicago privatized the regional Midway Airport. A corporate consortium joined Virginia to design, build and operate $1.9 billion of high-occupancy lanes on a 14-mile stretch of the Capital Beltway. Smaller deals have helped many cities and towns build schools, parking lots and other projects.
The global financial meltdown has slowed things down, some experts say, but such partnerships will almost certainly grow more common. There are too many projects and too few dollars for it to be any other way.
"The needs are enormous, way beyond the ability of federal, state and local governments to cover them," says Richard Norment, executive director of the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships. "PPPs are a way for the government to amplify the impact of the money it plans to spend."
Americans have traditionally been leery of entrusting corporations to do work historically reserved for the government, which is why the United States lags behind the rest of the world in turning to public-private partnerships. London's Heathrow Airport, for example, is privately run, as is Canada’s air-traffic-control system. The corporate sector has built 3,400 miles of highway in France alone.
It’s a growing trend around the world, and institutions like the Carlyle Group, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and other firms reportedly have amassed some $250 billion to invest in infrastructure projects in the United States and elsewhere. If they spent every cent of it here, it still wouldn't be enough.
America's infrastructure shortcomings are simply too staggering. One in every four bridges in the country is deficient or "functionally obsolete," according to the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials. A study by Deloitte suggests poorly maintained roads contribute to more than one-third of the nation’s auto fatalities. The nation's water-treatment plants leak as much as 10 billion gallons of raw sewage annually, the Environmental Protection Agency reports. The list goes on.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's critical networks a D on its most recent Report Card for American Infrastructure. The group's estimate that we need $2.2 trillion over the next five years to bring everything up to snuff is up from its $1.6 trillion estimate in 2005.
It's impossible to say what our crumbling infrastructure costs the economy, but lousy roads cost motorists $67 billion a year in repairs and operating costs. The National Education Association estimates the nation's schools need $322 billion in repairs and upgrades.
"Failing infrastructure cannot support a healthy economy," says D. Wayne Klotz, the society's president. "We have under-invested for decades, and we're getting hit with the hard reality that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. The longer we wait to close the investment gap, the more expensive it will become."
Public-private partnerships attempt to close the gap. Proponents call them mutually beneficial deals that allow the government to get things built with minimal capital or risk. The companies recoup their investments through tolls, fees or leasing the infrastructure back to the government. Such partnerships typically take one of two forms.
Green-field projects bring the public and private sectors together for new projects. A private group that included Carnival Cruises and Royal Caribbean Cruise lines chipped in to build a cruise-ship terminal in Galveston, Texas. The city of Tampa, Florida, paid American Water-Pridesa $29 million in 2004 to finish construction on a monumentally over-budget $158 million desalination plant, with the private partner assuming financial responsibility for the project.
Such deals have lead to projects like a 47-mile toll road in Denver, the Hiawatha Light Rail Transit system in Minneapolis and the Narrows Bridge in Tacoma, Washington. The city of Fredricksburg, Virginia, recently wrapped up $85 million worth of new green-field projects that include two schools and a parking lot. Assistant city manager Bevery Cameron said the deals allowed the projects to be finished in less time, and with fewer hassles, than if the city had gone it alone.
Brown-field projects are more controversial, because they involve turning over existing public assets, such as Alligator Alley, to the private sector. The faltering economy has slowed Florida's plan, but the state transportation department has set a May 8 deadline for bids. It remains to be seen how much the state might get, but similar deals in other states have proven lucrative.
An international consortium led by the Spanish firm Cintra and the Australian company Macquarie Infrastructure Group paid $1.8 billion four years ago to run the Chicago Skyway for 99 years. They struck a $3.8 billion deal in 2006 to lease the Indiana Tollway for 75 years, one year after Macquarie picked up a controlling interest in the company running the Dulles Greenway in Virginia for $533 million. The Macquarie group reportedly has netted $74.7 million in advisory and debt-arrangement fees on the three roads.
Consortium spokesman Matt Pierce says the two firms have widened toll plazas and improved traffic flow on the Indiana and Chicago tollways and says they will spend $4.5 billion on maintenance and upgrades over the course of the leases. Because the lease agreements contain specific limits on toll increases, the private group shoulders the financial burden if traffic fails to meet projections — something that’s entirely likely, given that traffic on the tollways has slumped along with the economy. Macquarie's funding reportedly has dried up, the U.S. roads it purchased are having trouble repaying their debts, and last month the company's stock hit its lowest level since 1999.
Other big brown-field partnerships include a 20-year, $1.5 billion deal between Indianapolis and Veolia Water to run the city’s water system, and Chevron-Texaco's leasing land at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to build a power plant. The city of Tampa pays American Water a monthly fee to operate the desalination plant it helped build, but the company refuses to disclose details of the deal. But they can be very lucrative.
Proponents say such projects bring free-market efficiency and innovation to public works. They provide governments with much needed cash while letting them off the hook for building, maintaining, and improving expensive infrastructure. Freed from such obligations, the argument goes, the government can focus on tasks like national security.
But critics argue that although these projects can bring cities and states a quick jolt of cash, they may do more harm than good in the long run. Nathan Newman, director of policy at the Progressive States Network, says that without a crystal ball, it's impossible for the governments to know the real worth of the assets they are selling off.
"Unless you know what kind of revenue stream an asset will generate in the future, it is tough to know what you're giving up when you turn it over to a private firm for 99 years," he says. He adds that private firms lack accountability when it comes to relations with labor unions and employees.
Mike Joyce, director of legislative affairs for the Owner Operator Drivers Association, a trade group representing truck drivers, is concerned that private firms will place profits above safety.
"What are these private companies doing to ensure they make a profit?" Joyce says. "Are they cutting corners to make sure the numbers work?"
No, says Norment, head of the National Council for Public-Private Partnerships. Private firms have a vested interest in maintaining — and improving — the infrastructure they manage, he says, because "companies competing in a market environment must innovate to survive."
He points to the Chicago Skyway as an example, noting that the consortium drags what is essentially a giant magnet across the road each morning to remove metal debris, reducing the incidence of flat tires and increasing safety. "The public sector never would have come up with this," says Norment. "They’re just not in the business of innovating."
There is still fierce opposition to some PPPs. Florida's proposal has met with resistance among the public and in the state capital, and last year Pennsylvania lawmakers rejected a proposal to privatize a major highway. But with more than half of the states considering such deals, they almost inevitably will gain broader acceptance among policymakers and the public.
"The message is getting out," says Norment. "As misconceptions about these programs are addressed, they'll continue expanding in the U.S."
When The Maw was released at the end of January, critics raved. The game had everything: cute, Pixar-like graphics, charming lead characters and a kooky game mechanic — you control a bloblike sidekick that devours enemies, getting gradually bigger (and weirder) with each chew. What's not to like?
One thing: the length.
The Maw is a very short game; downloadable from the Xbox Live arcade, you can get through the entire storyline in about three hours. And this was the one thing that annoyed the otherwise-thrilled critics. I read a couple of dozen write-ups of the game, all of which were highly positive — but which complained that The Maw was "too short." (See ME Gamers, A.V. Club, Gameplanet, GamePro Arcade, Game Focus, AtomicGamer or Games Radar.)
Granted, The Maw is indeed a wafer-thin repast compared to most games these days. I'm slow, so it took me four hours, but that's still only one-tenth the traditional "40 hours of play time" that has become the atomic standard in the game industry. Since most new games cost about $60, and The Maw is $10 — about 16.7 percent of that price — you could argue that by math alone The Maw ought to be a few hours longer. (40 hours x 16.7 percent = 6.68 hours, if you want pinwheel-beanie precision.)
Still, the uniform kvetching about The Maw's short span made me wonder: Why exactly is 40 hours considered the natural length of a videogame? Is The Maw really too short?
Or is it more possible that other games are simply too long?
Forty hours might sound like a reasonable amount of play. But the truth is that very few games offer an experience that truly requires — and rewards — 40 hours of play. After all, one of the chief joys of gameplay (which nongamers tend to misunderstand) isn't in having mastered it. It's in the process of mastering it. You start off stumbling around, not really knowing what your goals are, how your enemies and obstacles behave, or the complexities of your weapons and abilities.
Then, largely through a process of head-slapping trial and error, you begin to sense how the system works. If the game is incredibly complicated — like chess — you've got years and years of play ahead of you; you may never really apprehend all its nuances.
But most videogames aren't anywhere near the complexity of chess. Nor need they be: They're intended as a more-immediate and user-friendly sort of entertainment. Another central pleasure of being a videogame devotee is in constantly sampling new types of play mechanics — like the gravity-bending of Prey, the dimension-flipping of Super Paper Mario or the space-tripping of Portal. It's like dim sum for the brain: We love being handed a slightly newish (but not completely foreign) treat to puzzle over and test-drive.
But the truth is that most game mechanics simply do not need 40 hours to reach their limits. For example, I loved Fallout 3's fight mechanics and moody design, and played it for several evenings in a row. But then battles and environments began to feel too similar, and my attention started wandering. Sure, I know there's another 120 hours of stories and environments to explore. But I don't care: 10 or 15 hours is more than enough.
In contrast, The Maw felt like the perfect length — because the game ends precisely at the moment that your learning curve flattens out. After three hours, I felt like I'd figured out every permutation of weird trick I could pull with my ever-expanding Maw — so when the ending arrived, my brain felt perfectly exercised.
The Maw's designers understood that a campaign-style game isn't merely about keeping players going by offering them more story or more environment. It's about keeping them going by offering new wrinkles in the play. If designers run out of play before they run out of story, the game dies.
The truth is, tons of very good, very enjoyable narrative games have only about four or five hours of really serious play in them. They probably shouldn't drag on for 36 more hours. There's even a practical benefit to being shorter: A four-hour game appeals to a much larger pool of gamers — including the many adults out there who want to experience the delicious sense of closure you get from completing a narrative game, but who simply haven't got the time (as I argued in my previous piece on "The Mythical 40-Hour Gamer").
Now, there are some obvious practical pressures on game designers to keep things long and drawn-out. Really complex modern games cost a lot of money to make, so you probably need to sell them for $60 — gamers likely won't pay that much for a few hours of play. The market pushes designers into the temporal equivalent of bloatware. (Bloat-time?) It would be wonderful, of course, if every game hit a golden mean — with play mechanics that simultaneously reward a couple of hours of play, yet also deepen and enrich after literally months of play. (Many argue this is precisely how a good online game functions, be it World of Warcraft or Halo, or a super-addictive casual game like the new — and derangedly awesome! — Drop7.)
But for my money, I'd love to see more designers aim for The Maw's mix of brevity and innovation.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
Federal regulators plan to draw up blueprints for the country's broadband future and want input on what to do. Get started with your suggestions at Wired's interactive broadband widget.
Cloud computing and social networks are two of the more powerful movements in the web 2.0 space. So the potential of social media and the cloud integrating is compelling to say the least. Salesforce.comrecently rolled out the Service Cloud, a customer service application that tries to capture the crowdsourced pools of knowledge floating across the internet from sites like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and then uses this information to better equip commercial customer service operations with useful knowledge. Salesforce has now connected Twitter to the Service Cloud, allowing customer service reps using the SaaS to access tweets from more than 8 million Twitter users.
Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
What the Palm Pre does not want to see from Apple today “One has to believe everyone in the Palm building in Sunnyvale, California will be holding their breath today as Apple discusses iPhone 3.0 software. The Pre was unveiled in January and looks to be the company’s great hope, if not…“ MORE »
Death and the Internet addict “If you actively use the Internet to socialize on social networking sites, participate in forums, blog, or play games, then you know that communication is key. In any sort of online game, death is the worst possible outcome. It could meaning losing all of…“ MORE »
Best Buy playing dirty tricks on customers? “ If you have ever shopped at Best Buy or looked at their advertisements, you probably know that they will match the price of a local competitor, as long as you show them valid proof. This…“ MORE »
Recession-O-Rama: 160GB PS3 for $399, 20%+ off laptops, and more “ We’ve partnered up with LogicBuy.com to bring you today’s Recession-O-Rama deals. What do we have for you today? You can grab a HP G60t laptop for $150 off, get $100 off a 160GB PS3 bundle (which includes Uncharted Drakes), 20%an…“ MORE »
Is the Pre now vulnerable to iPhone comeback? “Wow, Apple let loose a barrage of improvements today at their iPhone 3.0 preview. With these improvements on the celebrated iPhone, is the Pre still looking like the champ it was back in January? If you MORE »
Sprint unveils Palm Pre plans “Sprint has announced the pricing plans for the highly anticipated Palm Pre. Sprint users will be able to buy the phone with one of Sprint’s Simply Everything plans, which include unlimited data and texting along with a bucket of minutes starting at 450 for…“ MORE »
Vista is the word for future versions of Windows “Sorry XP fans, Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 7 and all future versions of Windows will be little more than minor revisions of Vista, the OS everyone either loves or hates, with little middle ground in between. They claim this will help insure that…“ MORE »
Celebrate St. Paddy’s Day with these 5 Green Gadgets! “ Who says it’s not easy being green? With these five fun gadgets…being green has never been quite so red hot! 1. Solar Cell Strap This one might be handy to have around for those…“ MORE »
Palm Treo Pro officially available with Sprint “Despite the numerous false starts and delays, the Palm Treo Pro is now available for purchase. Of course, I am not sure if this will mean good news or bad news…“ MORE »
thefickler writes "A new study by the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) has found a strong link between air quality and life expectancy. The researchers looked at air pollution, deaths and census data for 51 metropolitan areas between 1978 and 2001, and what they found was a direct correlation between improving air quality and extending life expectancy. People lived about 2.72 years longer over that time span and at least 15 percent of that increased life expectancy was from a decrease in air pollution."
The rooms offer two single beds as well as an attached sitting room and bathroom. These rooms have been pretty popular with tourists in the sleepy village of Stavoren. If you get tired of the in-room television and radio, you can rent a bicycle and travel along one of the many popular bike paths to see the old growth forests and beach. There is even a famous statue of “Lady van Stavoren” to keep an eye on the harbour as well as an eccentric local story to go along with it.
The wine casks are a great reuse as hotel rooms because of their ability to seal tightly. Visitors have stayed in the hotels four special recycled rooms from all over the world. Prices for the rooms range from approximately $150 USD a night to about $40 USD a night depending on the length of your stay and the season you go in. How can you afford not to?
The number of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch is nearing the 30,000 mark but hardly any application takes advantage of the network effects that lie within the Apple ecosystem. Most developers simply ignore the fact that all iPhones and iPod Touches are interconnected globally and roll out stand-alone applications. This is one of the major reasons why the vast majority of fun apps lack stickiness and are easily forgotten after a few quick bursts.
But a Tokyo-based start-up called Genkii is building a unique app that has the potential to not only let a few iPhone users connect with each other, but thousands of them - at the same time or asynchronously. Sparkle is poised to become the first virtual world for the iPhone. What's more, it's being developed completely from scratch, exclusively as an MMO for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
Former Yahoo COO and current Quadrangle Group partner Dan Rosensweig (pictured here) will take over as CEO and President of Activision Blizzard’s powerful Guitar Hero franchise, according to sources close to the situation.
Rosensweig will run the hot gaming company’s division, which is located in Silicon Valley, the result of its purchase of Red Octane in 2006, source said.
He is well known to Activision (ATVI) Chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick, who served on the Yahoo board for many years when Rosensweig was a key exec there. Both Rosensweig and Kotick have since left Yahoo.
It’s an interesting move for Rosensweig, who has been working in private equity since his departure from Yahoo (YHOO) in late 2006.
His name has been bandied about for several high-profile Web positions of late, and many thought he might also take a political job too, given he was one of many digital execs involved in helping elect President Barack Obama.
But the weak market for investments and also Rosensweig’s longtime experience and interest in eventually returning to operations–along with his well-known passion for music–are the likeliest motivators for the move to Guitar Hero.
Sources said Rosensweig will start his new job at Guitar Hero–which Activision could announce as early as tomorrow–in several weeks.
It wasn’t so long ago that we saw just how bulletproof the Sonim XP1 phone was. Of course, Sonim was inviting it, while I doubt Seagate and Western Digital make any claims as to the slug-stopping power of their data storage devices. Not that stops people from shooting them.
HardOCP has always done thorough reviews, but this is ridiculous. What use could it possibly be to test the durability of the… wait, did you say incendiary round?
The crew aboard the International Space Station maneuvered the station and the shuttle Discovery Sunday to avoid space debris, the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 23 Mar 2009 | 1:23 am
Slatterz writes "A decade ago people were talking about the death of distance, and how the internet would make physical geography irrelevant. This has not come to pass; there are still places around the world that are hubs of technology just as there are for air travel, product manufacturing or natural resource exploitation. This list of the ten best IT centres of excellence includes some interesting trivia about Station X during the Second World War, why Romania is teeming with software developers, Silicon Valley, Fort Meade Maryland, and Zhongguancun in China, where Microsoft is building its Chinese headquarters."
The current sound formats have been around for quite a while. It seems we’ve been dealing in MP3 and AAC forever. Neither are perfect when it comes to representing the original sound recording, though most consumers tend not to worry too much about that. A new generation is here, though, bringing in the next generation of the MP3.
Thomson, one of the companies responsible for the MP3 file format has released the next generation, the MP3HD. The format is lossless, so it will retain much more of the original sound than the original MP3. It’s the same thing that makes FLAC and Apple Lossless so popular among audiophiles. It is also backwards compatible, so there’s no worrying about playing it back. The MP3HD files also contain the old MP3 files within them for playback if MP3HD isn’t supported. Why anyone would prefer the original MP3 over MP3HD is beyond me, however. MP3HD is capable of bitrates between 500Kbps and 900Kbps, much higher than that of MP3. Sure, it produces much larger files than MP3, but to some people that might be worth it.
I’m hopeful that this takes off eventually as the format of choice among the general populace, even if it means less songs per music device. 128 Kbps, which is standard for most people to rip songs, can be painful at times. The sound just doesn’t come out well at all. It doesn’t bother a majority of people, so it might take a while, though. Or, Amazon and other music stores that deal in MP3s could jump on it and offer songs in the new format as well. After all, the average consumer might not notice the difference at first, but its bound to happen that some of them will.
In-home Tests Show Femtocell Advantage over Macro Network in Data Rates and Consistency
TOKYO, March 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Femtocells Asia 2009 -- Airvana, Inc. (Nasdaq: AIRV), the company transforming the mobile experience, today announced results of performance tests of the company's HubBub(TM) CDMA femtocell that demonstrated dramatic improvements for indoor 3G coverage and performance when compared with using the existing macro-cellular network alone. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 22 Mar 2009 | 11:00 pm
cayenne8 writes "I want to experiment at home with setting up multiple VMs and installing sofware such as Oracle's RAC. While I'm most interested at this time with trying things with Linux and Xen, I'd also like to experiment with things such as VMWare and other applications (Yes, even maybe a windows 'box' in a VM). My main question is, what to try to get for hardware? While I have some money to spend, I don't want to, or need to, be laying out serious bread on server room class hardware. Are there some used boxes, say on eBay to look for? Are there any good solutions for new consumer level hardware that would be strong enough from someone like Dell? I'd be interested in maybe getting some bare bones boxes from NewEgg or TigerDirect even. What kind of box(es) would I need? Would a quad core type processor in one box be enough? Are there cheap blade servers out there I could get and wire up? Is there a relatively cheap shared disk setup I could buy or put together? I'd like to have something big and strong enough to do at least a 3 node Oracle RAC for an example, running ASM, and OCFS."
The pitch for this little video has the elegant and demented simplicity that is the hallmark of all great ideas: "Open the last saved jpeg image. Save it as a new jpeg image with slightly more compression. Repeat 600 times"
theodp writes "While the universal remote has served humanity with distinction, its days are numbered, and your smartphone is to blame. Whether you want to control your music, your television or your PowerPoint presentation, there's probably a solution using your phone. Try as it might, the universal remote simply can't navigate the digital world the way the smartphone can — it's a lot easier to put the remote's abilities in the smartphone than vice versa."
A promotion arrived in my email, offering 40 percent off on products from a company I'd done business with in the past. I was interested in a website construction tool that's gotten good reviews, and clicked the Buy button:
Without my asking, the company had added "Extended Download Service" for an extra few dollars. I dislike this kind of thing -- unrequested add-ons that have little utility in any case-- and I know I'm not alone in feeling this way.
In any case, I clicked the trashcan to remove the extended download service (something that any user could do at no extra cost with any remotely serious kind of backup system), and got back here:
I entered the promotional code and clicked "Apply" -- and what shows up again on the next screen? You guessed it: that extended download service:
At this point I closed that tab in my browser.
I realize we're in a recession, but this kind of behavior doesn't win new customers.
UPDATE: See this comment from the company in response. Apparently the retailer in question is the US reseller for the company that makes the product. Hope they'll straighten out their reseller, which seems to be the intention based on the comments.
Dare Obasanjo writes about Facebook's news feed redesign and decides it is a big mistake. He's backed by some 94% of users responding to a Facebook application poll, and cites internal gossip that Mark Zuckerberg thinks user feedback is irrelevant. I think Dare is premature in this assessment.
First of all, Facebook is not copying Twitter; it's copying FriendFeed, who originally copied Twitter. Where Obasanjo describes two different models - phone book and micromessaging - there already are three, including personalized aggregation or what I will call the micro-portal. Facebook already had part of the last functionality, so its opening of the micromessaging stream consolidates all three legs of the tripod.
In doing so, Facebook is counting on the same relative inertia that Twitter has so carefully cultivated. The calculation is that 175 million people are less likely to move away from something than they are to wait and see what is going to happen. Twitter decided they could stonewall third parties once a critical mass was reached, parrying attempts to build competitive subservices by slowing down API access. Today's Twitter to FriendFeed delay: a reported 40 minutes.
A father whose daughter's oral vaccination resulted in him contracting paralytic polio 30 years ago should receive $22.5 million, a New York jury says.
The Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance reported Saturday that Dominick Tenuto, 61, was awarded $22.5 million in damages as a result of Lederle Laboratories being deemed entirely liable for Tenuto contracting polio and losing the use of his legs.
Tenuto's daughter, Diana, received a Lederle vaccination called Orimune in May 1979 while she was an infant.
The vaccine was found to contain a live virus that the jury deemed made the medication potentially dangerous.
Tenuto said he likely was exposed to the virus while changing his infant daughter's diaper as the vaccine may have exited her body in her stool. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 8:43 pm
Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "Some spam houses have invested in real mail servers now, meaning that they are able to get past greylisting and even content filtering. Recently Peter Hansteen found himself resorting to active greytrapping to put some spammers in their place. The article also contains a list of spam houses' snail mail addresses in case you want to tour their sites."
Internet Explorer 8 was released at noon on Thursday and users have already flooded the pages of Microsoft’s feedback pages with complaints. It hasn’t done too hot with Pwn2Own and got hacked easily. Although many problems were supposed to be resolved during the beta testing phase, it still seems that there are multiple issues affecting the web browser.
Top complaints include problems printing from websites, search function malfunctions, and misplaced images. Many users have said that their search bar doesn’t work and have appeared blank. Additionally, a bug has appeared to cause an issue with dragging photos in IE onto Facebook pages. Boot up times have also been reported as slow as well as taking up an extra 4GB of hard drive storage space.
Microsoft has contended that they have fixed the most significant issues in beta based on priority by community voting. Upgrades to IE 8 include several bars that you can use to manage the sites that you navigate on the web. A favorites bar, tab bar, and address bar have all been added with the upgrade. You can manually download IE 8 from Microsoft’s download page.
Hundreds of patients have died at Stafford Hospital in England because of inadequate treatment, an agency report maintains.
The regulatory body that oversees the National Health Service said in a report that hospital officials ignored repeated warnings that the quality of care at the hospital was substandard, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The report issued by the Health Commission last week said many patients died at Stafford Hospital because of the appalling treatment they received.
The newspaper reported that Stafford executives were warned as early as 2002 by government officials about the quality of its emergency care services and that it was not adequately staffed. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 8:27 pm
The Canadian government came under harsh criticism from environmental groups on Saturday for increasing its annual seal-hunting quota. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 8:10 pm
Karsten sez, "The Tor Project together with The Electronic Frontier Foundation have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2009! We are now looking for great students to join us in summer and work on either EFF's Switzerland project or on Tor. See the linked blog post for more information. Thanks!"
This will be our third Google Summer of Code after 2007 and 2008. In our first year we had four students working on making relays work better (and not crash) on Windows, on a library and tool to try alternative path selection algorithms, on a fuzzing library to look for parsing problems, and on scalability and privacy for hidden services. In our second year we had seven students. One of our successful students of the 2008 program wrote a nice blog post reviewing how GSoC went for him, for the other students, and for the project in general.
We have made resolutions for our third GSoC participation to make it even more successful than in the past years. We have set ourselves the limit of accepting no more than 4 students (plus up to 2 students mentored by EFF). Rather than being persuaded by all those great applications, we want to focus on the most promising projects and students. We plan to assign up to 3 mentors to each student to provide optimal support. We will try harder to encourage students to interact with the community and become a part of it. It may be challenging to discuss project ideas on a mailing list or in a chat room with dozens or hundreds of unknown people listening. But communication is an important part of the GSoC experience (if not the most important).
Mike Chapman points out this InfoWorld article, according to which you shouldn't immediately expect much in the way of performance gains from Windows 7 (or Linux) from eight-core chips that come out from Intel this year. "For systems going beyond quad-core chips, the performance may actually drop beyond quad-core chips. Why? Windows and Linux aren't designed for PCs beyond quad-core chips, and programmers are to blame for that. Developers still write programs for single-core chips and need the tools necessary to break up tasks over multiple cores. Problem? The development tools aren't available and research is only starting."
Here’s a fun hypothetical for your Sunday. Let’s say you’re Palm, and you’ve poured untold sums of money and time into developing the Pre; the early response has been positive. But when you launch the phone, hopefully still sometime before July, it completely and utterly bombs. For whatever reason—people unwilling to give up the iPhone, people unwilling to switch to Sprint—it just doesn’t do the numbers you expected it to, or needed it to. Then what do you do?
But let’s step back for a minute: is there any evidence to suggest that the Pre won’t do well? Hard to say. During CES in January, anyone even tangentially interested in gadgets and technology seemed to be mightily impressed. Dumb Peter Ha even went on G4 to say, yeah, the Palm Pre looks pretty darn good; Peter is a Charles Montgomery Burnsian cynic, it must be said. Developers seem to like its operating system, webOS. (It has a physical keyboard!) But let’s temper the enthusiasm.
First, and let’s make no mistake about this, Palm really needs the Pre to be a hit, with a Gartner analyst calling it a “bet-the-company product.” If it tanks—again, there’s no reason to assume it will tank—then Palm is in a bad way. The company just posted its seventh consecutive quarterly loss (to the tune of $94.7 million); revenue is down nearly $100 million from the previous quarter ($77.5 million vs. $171 million last quarter). Palm could use a hit right about now.
And then there’s Sprint, which has exclusive rights to the Pre through the end of the year. Sprint doesn’t have the best reputation of the big cellphone carriers here in the U.S., nor does it have a surplus of subscribers. It needs to convince people to switch from AT&T, Verzion and T-Mobile in order for the Pre to be a success. (Say what you will about Verizon’s lackluster phone selection, but I’ll be damned if you can find a better-sounding cellphone call in the northeast than with Verizon. Dream combo: the Pre on Verizon!) So we’re dealing with two wobbly companies that need each other to exceed expectations.
In the words of a famous radio host, good luck, bro.
And, for the record, lest someone accuse me of being a biased jerk, I want to see the Palm Pre succeed. My concern here is Sprint. I haven’t used a Sprint phone in ages, and I’m one of those weird people who still like their phones to make reasonably clear phone calls. If the Pre is good but Sprint stinks (which is my opinion of the iPhone/AT&T setup), then I may hold off. We’ll see.
The number of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch is nearing the 30,000 mark but hardly any application takes advantage of the network effects that lie within the Apple ecosystem. Most developers simply ignore the fact that all iPhones and iPod Touches are interconnected globally and roll out stand-alone applications. This is one of the major reasons why the vast majority of fun apps lack stickiness and are easily forgotten after a few quick bursts.
But a Tokyo-based start-up called Genkii is building a unique app that has the potential to not only let a few iPhone users connect with each other, but thousands of them - at the same time or asynchronously. Sparkle is poised to become the first virtual world for the iPhone. What's more, it's being developed completely from scratch, exclusively as an MMO for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
The number of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch is nearing the 30,000 mark but hardly any application takes advantage of the network effects that lie within the Apple ecosystem. Most developers simply ignore the fact that all iPhones and iPod Touches are interconnected globally and roll out stand-alone applications. This is one of the major reasons why the vast majority of fun apps lack stickiness and are easily forgotten after a few quick bursts.
But a Tokyo-based start-up called Genkii is building a unique app that has the potential to not only let a few iPhone users connect with each other, but thousands of them - at the same time or asynchronously. Sparkle is poised to become the first virtual world for the iPhone. What’s more, it’s being developed completely from scratch, exclusively as an MMO for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
The first iteration of Sparkle, a text communication app called Sparkle IM, actually went on sale yesterday (App Store link) and costs $4.99. Sparkle IM basically brings Second Life communication to your iPhone, connecting you to Second Life (and OpenSim) grids. Users can send and receive IMs, chat, send teleport requests etc. on the go through their Second Life and OpenSim accounts.
This video shows how Sparkle IM works:
But for the average iPhone user, Sparkle 3D will be much more interesting. Once finalized, Genkii says users will get a full-fledged virtual world in 3D (the company has a track record in virtual worlds development). Sparkle 3D will have its own economy, customizable personal spaces and avatars, social networking functions, virtual goods, games, streaming audio support, etc.
Have a look at some early Sparkle 3D screens and avatar designs below.
CEO Ken Brady says the company is looking at ways to integrate Sparkle 3D with other significant platforms such as PlayStation Home and plans to support these platforms in the near future. This means that users from fixed-web virtual worlds and MMORPGS can connect with Sparkle 3D users without having to own an iPhone or iPod Touch. The app will also be available in a number of languages right from the start.
Another obvious option to expand the virtual world is to make Sparkle 3D available for browser clients, Android phones or video game machines like Nintendo’s Wii. Brady says this would be an important step in growing Sparkle and a viable option due to the way the technology is built, but right now, the focus is on developing a virtual world for the estimated 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners out there.
The viral potential for a mobile virtual world optimized for the Apple ecosystem could be as big as the potential for continuous monetization: sales of avatar accessories, virtual apartments (utilizing iPhone 3.0’s new subscription option), sales of in-game items, music downloads, branded spaces and conventional ads come to mind.
Currently, Genkii is completely self-funded and has been bootstrapping for over a year. The company is now actively seeking angel investment to accelerate development of Sparkle 3D. We will stay tuned.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, then show it in the way that is most needed. On average, each donation catalyzes the publication of around 150 mainstream press articles, exposing human rights abuses and corrupt government around the world. These exposures result in substantial reforms and have changed national election outcomes.
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The Obama Administration's Department of Justice, with former RIAA lawyers occupying the 2nd and 3rd highest positions in the department, has shown its colors, intervening on behalf of the RIAA in the case against a Boston University graduate student, SONY BMG Music Entertainment v. Tenenbaum, accused of file sharing when he was 17 years old. Its oversized, 39-page brief (PDF) relies upon a United States Supreme Court decision from 1919 which upheld a statutory damages award, in a case involving overpriced railway tickets, equal to 116 times the actual damages sustained, and a 2007 Circuit Court decision which held that the 1919 decision — rather than the Supreme Court's more recent decisions involving punitive damages — was applicable to an award against a Karaoke CD distributor for 44 times the actual damages. Of course none of the cited cases dealt with the ratios sought by the RIAA: 2,100 to 425,000 times the actual damages for an MP3 file. Interestingly, the Government brief asked the Judge not to rule on the issue at this time, but to wait until after a trial. Also interestingly, although the brief sought to rebut, one by one, each argument that had been made by the defendant in his brief, it totally ignored all of the authorities and arguments that had been made by the Free Software Foundation in its brief. Commentators had been fearing that the Obama/Biden administration would be tools of the RIAA; does this filing confirm those fears?"
Wednesday was day one of the CanSecWest Pwn2Own hacking contest, and the results are in. Using fully patched copies of Safari, IE8, and Firefox, hackers broke them all. They each failed to what is called hacker “Nils.“
The Pwn2Own contest challenges experts in security to find and exploit vulnerabilities in browsers. And it apparently didn’t take them very long. They broke Safari in just seconds, and both IE8 and Firefox in a few hours. Chrome, however, remained intact.
Chrome isn’t perfect
This doesn’t mean Chrome is flawless however. Previous Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller says that he did, in fact, find a bug in Chrome, but he isn’t able to exploit it due to the browser’s system security measures and sandboxing feature working together, which poses a steep challenge.
How the contest works
The contest has different tests run, using both Windows PCs and Macs. Day One has the “hackers” attacking default installations, with no additional plugins. Day Two has a little added. Now they are looking at Java, QuickTime, and .Net to make the “attack surface” greater. Day Three sees more popular apps, like Adobe Reader, added to the mix. To succeed at these tests, there must be code execution within context of the application.
Microsoft must be pleased
I’m sure Microsoft was thrilled with this announcement, given it occurred just as they were publicly releasing IE8 on the web. IE8 is the latest browser-child of Microsoft, and it is purported to include several corporate features. These features include tools that let the user “customize and control the software via centralized policies.“ It’s also supposed to include new privacy and security settings. (Better take another look at those security settings Microsoft folks!)
The winner of the Pwn3Own contest won a cash prize as well as the Sony Vaio which was used in the contest.
Singularity Hub has a story about the development of technology that will some day allow for the constant, real-time monitoring of your medical status, and they take a look at current technological advances to that end. Quoting: "Did you ever stop to think how silly and also how dangerous it is to live our lives with absolutely no monitoring of our body's medical status? Years from now people will look back and find it unbelievable that heart attacks, strokes, hormone imbalances, sugar levels, and hundreds of other bodily vital signs and malfunctions were not being continuously anticipated and monitored by medical implants. ... The huge amounts of data that would be accumulated from hundreds of thousands of continuously monitored people would be nothing short of a revolution for medical research and analysis. This data could be harvested to understand the minute by minute changes in body chemistry that occur in response to medication, stress, infection, and so on. As an example, the daily fluctuations in hormone levels of hundreds of thousands of individuals could be tracked and charted 24/7 to determine a baseline from which abnormalities and patterns could be extracted. The possibilities are enormous."
AP - The video game industry is holding up, but the gloom of the recession will be on the minds of thousands of people at this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a key event for video game insiders looking to learn new skills, showcase innovations and if they're lucky enough, find work.
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. In it, he argues that the Internet shatters all forms of advertising. “The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed,” he writes. The views he expresses are his own, and we present them here to foster debate. (Obviously, we hope there is a place for advertising on the Internet since it pays our bills).
1. There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising:
The expected drop in internet advertising revenues this year was neither unpredictable nor unpredicted, nor was it caused solely by the general recession and the decline in retail sales. Internet advertising will rapidly lose its value and its impact, for reasons that can easily be understood. Traditional advertising simply cannot be carried over to the internet, replacing full-page ads on the back of The New York Times or 30-second spots on the Super Bowl broadcast with pop-ups, banners, click-throughs on side bars. This might be a subject where considerable disagreement is possible, if indeed, pushed ads were still working in traditional media. Mostly they have failed. One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.
Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him. The net will find monetization models and these will be different from the advertising models used by mass media, just as the models used by mass media were different from the monetization models of theater and sporting events before them. Indeed, there has to be some way to create websites that do other than provide free access to content, some of it proprietary, some of it licensed, and some of it stolen, and funded by advertising.
The idea that content has a price and net applications should find ways to earn a profit without providing free access to other people’s content gets explosive reactions; when virtual reality pioneer and tech guru Jaron Lanier suggested in a New York Times Op Ed that authors deserved to be paid for their content he actually received death threats. But other models are possible and several suggestions for alternative forms of monetization are offered below.
2. Advertising will fail:
The internet is the most liberating of all mass media developed to date. It is participatory, like swapping stories around a campfire or attending a renaissance fair. It is not meant solely to push content, in one direction, to a captive audience, the way movies or traditional network television did. It provides the greatest array of entertainment and information, on any subject, with any degree of formality, on demand. And it is the best and the most trusted source of commercial product information on cost, selection, availability, and suitability, using community content, professional reviews and peer reviews.
My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again. To analyze this statement we need a working definition of advertising, and I proposed the following, which is as general as I could make it:
Advertising is using sponsored commercial messages to build a brand and paying to locate these messages where they will be observed by potential customers performing other activities; these messages describe a product or service, its price or fundamental attributes, where it can be found, its explicit advantages, or the implicit benefits from its use.
It is frequently argued that the advertising industry will provide sufficient innovation to replace the loss of traditional ads on traditional mass media. Again, my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind. The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below. Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.
Better targeting of ads using individual interests and individual behaviors will ensure that we do not bore or annoy as many people with each ad, but cannot address the trust issue. As for paid search, it is closer to other mechanisms that allow a website to sell access to potential customers. It works effectively as a revenue source for Google, of course. But it surely is not replicable for the average content website.
3. Advertising will fail for three reasons:
There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:
Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.
Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.
And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor
Yes, both network executives and their ad agencies have noted that we are not watching traditional ads, and they attribute this to the fact that we have moved beyond newspapers, televised network news, and broadcast movies, to video games, iPods, and the internet. Porting ads to a new medium will not solve the three problems noted above. The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed.
4. Alternative models for monetization are available:
Again, my research suggests that there are three general categories for creating value that can be monetized, including selling real things, selling virtual things, and selling access. Some websites exist solely to sell real things. Many of the best-known perform aggregation of demand, so that there will be enough customers to justify stocking and selling items for which there is only limited demand. Amazon is merely the best-known example. Sites like Amazon and Zappos are especially good for long tail items … where else do you go for a copy of the Green Sea of Heaven, Elizabeth T. Gray’s magnificent translation of the Ghazals of Hafiz, or for a pair of size 20 basketball shoes? Selling real things online has been studied since the advent of interest in eCommerce and will not be discussed further here. Other websites sell virtual things. These activities fall into three categories:
Selling content and information, from digital music to news and information. Some of these sites are funded by subscriptions, like Gartner Research; some are by direct micropayments for purchases, like iTunes; and some currently attempt to fund themselves through advertising, like Business Week or The New York Times, while still searching for a more effective business model.
Selling experience and participation in a virtual community, including Second Life and World of Warcraft, Facebook and MySpace, Flickr and YouTube, or LinkedIn. Not all of these have found a way to charge for participation.
Selling accessories for virtual communities, like completed homes and stores, furnishings, clothing, and pets in Second Life or characters and accessories that would be difficult to earn in World of Warcraft, although this behavior is generally despised by serious World of Warcraft players.
Finally, some websites create and sell access to customers. Again, this can be divided into multiple categories.
Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid. Misdirection also includes misinformation, such as telling a customer that a hotel is sold out when, indeed it is still available, if the hotel has chosen not to pay a promotional fee, and then allowing the guest to choose an alternative property. Misdirection is, regrettably, still a popular business model on the net, although for reasons I explored in an earlier TechCrunch post on Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model.
Evaluation, assessment, and validation. The opposite of sending a customer someplace other than where he wants is providing the customer enough information for him to make an informed choice on his own. Recommendations on TripAdvisor.com allow potential guests to evaluate and validate recommendations provided by Hotels.com; not surprisingly, Hotels.com originally owned TripAdvisor, and benefited greatly from it. Since Hotels.com did not attempt to influence or censor TripAdvisor content the website was (and is) trusted and helped put recommendations from Hotels.com at a level of trust comparable to those from an experienced travel agent. There are at present only a few other examples of website symbiosis like this, where community content on one site adds considerable value for another; consider also the relationship between the Beeryard’s list of new beers and Ratebeer.com, where clicking on the name of a newly arrived beer at the Beeryard will allow you to examine reviews on Ratebeer.com.
Social search. Social search is a way of tailoring search based on the user’s network of friends. Rather than searching for any hotel in Chicago, or for any hotel that paid for the keywords “hotel” and “Chicago” I would like to be able to ask for the hotel where my friends stay when they are in Chicago. This invades no one’s privacy, avoids the annoyance of pushing ads at me when I am not searching for something to buy, and provides more relevant results than paid search usually can deliver. There are many problems with this, including the fact that my friends may not be on Facebook or other networks yet and those that are may not post their hotel or automobile or restaurant preferences. Most seriously, while it is clear how Microsoft might benefit from this, using its Facebook connection to undercut Google sponsored search, it is not clear how Microsoft or any other firm could monetize this directly.
Contextual mobile ads. At present contextual mobile ads delivered by SMS appear to offer much promise. Imagine a hypothetical all-knowing information-based firm that (i) knows your location because you have registered to have the information from your in-phone GPS shared with your friends and (ii) knows that you like Thai restaurants because it monitors the content of your email and your online restaurant searches and (iii) knows that you are hungry because you just said so in a text message or Twitter post you sent from your phone. What a great time for them to text you an advertisement for a nearby Thai restaurant, sent directly to your phone. But why would you trust this? I remember when Hotels.com used to refer me to the same hotel, albeit at different prices, when I asked for a two-star or three-star hotel close to my office; I was never sure which was more amusing, the 80% price increase for the same hotel when I was willing to splurge on a three-star for my visitor, or the fact that there were comparable hotels 20 blocks closer to my office. I suspect that my hypothetical all-knowing firm will similarly be providing sponsored content; perhaps I will take a couple of additional seconds in order to find the restaurant I really want. This probably does not work as a form of advertising.
Of course no one knows yet, but if I had to guess, based on my meatspace experience, I would offer the following guesses for successfully monetizing the net in the future:
Selling Virtual Things: People will pay for superior, timely, original content and for superior online experiences. Presently I willingly pay for the Financial Times, The Economist, and Foreign Affairs, I value the content, and, indeed, I feel I need it; I will continue to pay for them online. Perhaps I would not be willing to pay for archive material, which I expect that I would be able to find elsewhere, but I will cheerfully pay for the newest content online. Similarly, I willingly pay the cover change for my favorite jazz clubs in New York, and expect that I would cheerfully pay to participate in Second Life or World of Warcraft if, indeed, I had any interest in those virtual experiences. I guess, ultimately, if we compete for status through our purchases of accessories, clothes and homes in meatspace we will probably continue to purchase virtual accessories in Second Life, though I can’t say I fully understand this yet.
Selling Access. Misdirection will fail totally and completely. I use a Mac, but I have abandoned Safari for Firefox. I have an iPhone and an iPod but I have never used the little white earbuds, preferring instead to purchase a pair of Shure E500 phones that I think sound vastly superior. Similarly, I would be equally happy to purchase a search service that worked for me, rather than accept a free one that works both against me and against the firms I patronize. In contrast, while people will continue to value community content and social search, these will be difficult to monetize. Finally, contextual mobile ads will, likewise be difficult to monetize. With information easily available, I will make my own restaurant choices, irrespective of those pushed at me via SMS, especially when I know that those pushed at me have been pushed for a fee, rather than based on an impartial assessment of my preferences. Yes, I can imagine SMS ads initially succeeding if they provide discounts, but ultimately this leads to little more than a bidding war for traffic and benefits no one other than the firm that provides the text messaging services. I can think of a few commercial SMS services that will benefit everyone, such as letting the most loyal guests of a restaurant know when it is still possible to get a reservation if they act immediately, eliminating the inefficiency of empty tables, but the restaurant will do this itself, using its email or cell phone contact lists. I don’t see this as advertising, or as being monetized by any intermediary. Of course, in an age before texting and email restaurants would have welcomed the all-knowing intermediary as the only mechanism available for communicating quickly with its most loyal customers. Now, restaurants have lists of their most loyal customers and can send out real time messages of interest. If the Blue Note were to text me on some night that I am in New York that it is still possible to get a table for two for Clark Terry, or Tria were to text me on a day when I was in Philadelphia that, surprisingly, there was no wait for an outdoor table right now, I’m sure I would respond to both. Of course there is no intermediary for this interaction, and this is more like direct communication than paid advertising.
The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads. We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.
Insects such as honeybees and bumble bees are predictable in the way they move among flowers, typically moving directly from one flower to an adjacent cluster of flowers in the same row of plants. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm
Some Sunday morning rumor mongering for y’all. While we’ve known that Amazon has been planning to sell HD versions of TV shows for a few weeks now, we knew nothing about price… until now! Yup, it looks like Amazon wants $2.99 per HD episode, as this screengrab shows, which is the same prices that Apple charges on iTunes. (That works out to around $53 per season, which, knowing the quality of TV these days, is an insane proposition.) But, good news for Apple haters, then.
Now, when exactly these HD downloads will debut, who knows. Dave Zatz found hints of the HD TV shows in the TiVo interface a few days ago. Presumably you’d be able to get these HD shows on things like he Roku box, too.
Also, I’d like to take a moment to laugh at Manchester United. [Moment.] Thank you.
The most abundant material on Earth exhibits some unusual chemical properties when placed under extreme conditions.Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have shown that water, in hot dense environments, plays an unexpected role in catalyzing complex explosive reactions. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 3:47 pm
"We are done with metals," says Cemal BasaranIn the quest to pack ever-smaller electronic devices more densely with integrated circuits, nanotechnology researchers keep running up against some unpleasant truths: higher current density induces electromigration and thermomigration, phenomena that damage metal conductors and produce heat, which leads to premature failure of devices.But University at Buffalo researchers who study electronics packaging recently made a pleasant discovery: that's not the case with Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNTs)."Years ago, everyone thought that the problem of cooling for electronics could be solved," said Cemal Basaran, Ph.D., professor in the UB Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering and director of the Electronics Packaging Lab in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "Now we know that's not true. Electronics based on metals have hit a wall. We are done with metals."Single Walled Carbon Nanotubes are extremely thin, hollow cylinders, measuring no thicker than a single atom. Thousands of times stronger than metals, they are expected to one day replace metals in millions of electronic applications.Basaran and his doctoral student Tarek Ragab have spent the past four years performing quantum mechanics calculations, which prove that in carbon nanotubes, higher current density does not lead to electromigration and thermomigration; it also produces just one percent of the heat produced by traditional metals, such as copper.Basaran will present the findings in November when he delivers a keynote lecture at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in Orlando.The findings demonstrate yet another tantalizing property of CNTs, he said."It has been assumed that for carbon nanotubes, the electrical heating process would be governed by Joules law, where resistance in a circuit converts electric energy into heat," said Basaran. "We are the first to show mathematically, from a quantum mechanics point of view, that carbon nanotubes do not follow Joules law."According to Basaran, this essential difference between metals and carbon nanotubes lies in the way they conduct electricity."Even though carbon nanotubes are conductive, they do not have metallic bonds," he said. "As a result, they do not conduct electricity the way that traditional metals do."In conventional metals, he explained, conduction causes a scattering of electrons within the lattice of the material so that, when electrons move during conduction, they bump into atoms. This creates friction and generates heat, the same way a household iron works."On the other hand, in carbon nanotubes, electric conduction happens in a very different, one-dimensional 'ballistic' way," he said. "The electrons are fired straight through the material, so that the electrons have very little interference with the atoms."He drew an analogy, using the difference between a conventional railroad train and a magnetically levitated train."In the conventional train, you have friction between the wheels and the track," said Basaran. "Through the generation of heat, that friction causes a loss of energy. But with a magnetically levitated train, the wheels and track are not in direct contact. Without that friction, they can travel much faster."The minimal amount of friction gives carbon nanotubes a tremendous advantage over conventional metals, said Basaran. The unique properties of carbon nanotubes will allow engineers to realize a host of smaller, faster and more powerful new devices that right now cannot exist because of the limitations of conventional metals."When an electric car finally is manufactured, its batteries probably will be based on carbon nanotubes," said Basaran. "You can't use traditional metals in the engines because they run so hot."Much of Basaran's $1 million-plus funding at UB comes from sources like the U.S. Navy, which is interested in sophisticated electronics systems that could operate under very demanding conditions, such as the electric ship the Navy is building.Basaran's unique perspective comes from decades of research, which has fundamentally changed what is known about the high current density performance properties of metals and their limitations.He also sounded a cautionary note, pointing out that current research and development expenditures on carbon nanotubes in the U.S. electronics industry are very small when compared to those of our Asian competitors."If the industry continues this way, when carbon nanotube-based electronics become a reality, U.S. electronics manufacturers may be in a position similar to U.S. car manufacturers today, because they have failed to keep up with advances in engineering," he said.Basaran and his colleagues in the Electronics Packaging Lab actively participate in the UB 2020 strategic strength in Integrated Nanostructured Systems, which brings together physicists and engineers to further enhance and understand nanotechnologies like carbon nanotubes.---Image Caption: Research conducted by Cemal Basaran may make metal an obsolete component of electronics. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 22 Mar 2009 | 3:40 pm
Google Co-founder Larry Page is planning to build a 6,000-square-foot eco-friendly house on a more than 0.75-acre lot, according to a Palo Alto Weekly report quoting Page's spokesman.The new home will be constructed on the lot adjacent to the historic property where Page currently resides. The house will include solar panels, materials that do not emit toxic chemicals, and paving that allows the rain to seep through, a big advantage in a state where water planners are seeking to fill up aquifers. The home's exterior will include zinc cladding and lots of windows, including a wall of sliding-glass doors in the back. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 22 Mar 2009 | 12:35 pm
This is a guest post written by Bo Wang from iPhone app developer house Team iBokan, part of Bokan Technologies, about the lessons learned while conducting a pricing experiment on brick game Galaxy Impact, the company’s first iPhone application. For a different take on paid versus ad-supported iPhone apps, read our previous post on the subject.
Galaxy Impact, a classic brick-break game and the first iPhone app created by Team iBokan, went on sale in iTunes App Store on Oct 27, 2008, free of charge. It had about 220,000 downloads in its first two weeks and was ranked as No 10 in “Top Free Apps” in the Game category and No 20 in “Top Free Apps” overall, before we started charging a $.99 fee for purchases on Nov 9th 2008.
Here are the details:
Galaxy Impact downloads before start charging $.99
The downloads for Galaxy Impact in its first two weeks, broken down:
So the free downloads vs for-fee downloads is about 400:1. That means for 220,000 downloads, our revenue amounted to $550. It’s obvious that there was no way we could make money out of this with a $.99 list price.
Another lesson learned: before the price change (from free to $.99), average downloads per day was above 10,000 but after price changed back to free, the average rebounced to about 1,000 per day, which continued for a long time. If we had not experimented with charging for the app, the total number of downloads would have been much higher.
Next, we decided to try advertising and updated Galaxy Impact with ads from Admob along with other new features. There was a huge spike of update downloads with a 30,647 peak of November 22, two days after the update release.
Galaxy Impact Downloads after Update
As you can see, the huge traffic for the update does not increase the number of new downloads, even if the app remains free of charge. To this day (Mar 18th), there are about 500,000 downloads in total and about 160,000 updates (one third of new downloads). Note, only updates have ads.
So how was Galaxy Impact doing with advertising powered by Admob? Let’s take a peek at the first month of the year.
Ad revenue from Admob for Galaxy Impact (Jan 2009)
The highest daily ad revenue was $16.37 (on 17 January) and right now it’s about $2.50 per day.
Here’s our monthly ad revenue, broken down:
* Nov 2008: $70.81 (11/20 - 11/30)
* Dec 2008: $236
* Jan 2009: $175
* Feb 2009: $142
* Mar 2009: $67 (03/01 - 18)
With no update or marketing, the current rate of free downloads for Galaxy Impact is about 120 per day. If we apply for-fee ratio, this transfers to about 0.3 daily downloads at a $.99 price, which leads to revenue of $.21 for us, or about 8.4% of what we are making right now on a daily basis ($2.50).
Conclusion
In the case of Galaxy Impact, we have done absolutely no marketing and did 2 updates with new features.
1. Free downloads vs for fee downloads ($.99) is 400:1
2. New downloads vs updates is about 3:1
3. If you decide to go with ad support, do it from the very beginning.
4. Updating does not help much
5. Ad revenue in the long run is higher than sales revenue
6. It’s hardly a sustainable business for most common app developers (with average apps).
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Engadget is first to get one of Dell's ultra-thin Adamo laptops, and takes it for a preliminary spin.
We have been hearing 
Water company engineers spotted the object when they lifted up a fire hydrant cover during work on a street in Shoreditch, east London.
The danger of storing your data in the cloud, part n. 
Anyone who makes money — or who is trying to make money — publishing on the Web is obsessed with getting more out of Google and its firehose of traffic.
Cloud computing and social networks are two of the more powerful movements in the web 2.0 space. So the potential of social media and the cloud integrating is compelling to say the least. 
The rooms offer two single beds as well as an attached sitting room and bathroom. These rooms have been pretty popular with tourists in the sleepy village of Stavoren. If you get tired of the in-room television and radio, you can rent a bicycle and travel along one of the many popular bike paths to see the old growth forests and beach. There is even a famous statue of “Lady van Stavoren” to keep an eye on the harbour as well as an eccentric local story to go along with it.
Mr Robert Dutu: Am Robert Dutu. I have very important business proposition for your consideration. Can we chat on it?
The number of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch is 
The current sound formats have been around for quite a while. It seems we’ve been dealing in MP3 and AAC forever. Neither are perfect when it comes to representing the original sound recording, though most consumers tend not to worry too much about that. A new generation is here, though, bringing in the next generation of the MP3.
The number of apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch is 
