On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
Yesterday the New York Times (NYT) won five Pulitzer Prizes, and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears.
But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near-term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company lost $74.5 million, or 34 cents a share once you factor out one time charges, on revenues of $609 million. That’s worse than Wall Street’s low expectations of a 5-cent loss on revenues of $630.8 million.
The reason, of course, is that the ad market is miserable in general, and even more so for newspapers. The company’s ad revenues were down 27%, a marked increase from the awful 17.6% decline the Times recorded in the last quarter of 2008.
And as in the last quarter, former bright spots like the Internet business have now gone dark as well: Internet revenues were down 5.6,%, Internet ad sales declined 6.1%, and revenues at the Times’ About.com unit dropped 4.7%.
Expect more of the same for the second quarter of this year, warns CEO Janet Robinson: “At this time, and it is early in the quarter, we believe the rate of decline in ad revenues in the second quarter will be similar to that of the first.”
Barence writes "BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay, as part of a "self-regulation" scheme with the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). BT Mobile Broadband users who attempt to access the notorious BitTorrent tracker site are met with a "content blocked" message. The warning page states the page has been blocked in "compliance with a new UK voluntary code". "This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have 'over 18' status," the warning states. It goes on to list a series of categories that are blocked, including adult/sexually explicit content, "criminal skills" and hacking. It's not stated which category The Pirate Bay breaches, although the site does host links to porn movies."
The micro-industry forming around micro-transactions is now going through some micro-consolidation. PlaySpan, which is quickly racking up micro-payments across hundreds of video games and virtual worlds, is acquiring Spare Change Payments, a startup which focuses on micro-transactions for social networking apps. The value of the cash-and-stock deal was not disclosed.
PlaySpan raised $16.8 million in a series B funding just last February from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, and STIC. The startup was famously founded by a 12-year-old, Arjun Mehta, but it is really run by his father, CEO and co-founder Karl Mehta.
The company has processed more than $50 million worth of micro-transactions through its PayByCash and Ultimate Game Card products. While its focus so far has been games and virtual worlds, it recently began making its own forays into social networks with a deal to power some micropayments on hi5. But Spare Change already has more momentum on social networks. It powers micropayments across 700 social networking apps on Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, and is on its way to processing $30 million worth of transactions this year. As the social networks and online games collide, and developers seek new ways to make money other than advertising, micropayments will continue to grow.
Like any payments business, even micro-transactions are all about scale. The bigger PlaySpan can get before the giants finally wake up and enter the market seriously, the better chance it has to becoming the PayPal of micropayments. Of course, PayPal, Facebook and MySpace all have their own plans to become the PayPal of micropayments. And plenty of other startups, from Zuora to Zong, are vying for the title as well.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
The micro-industry forming around micro-transactions is now going through some micro-consolidation. PlaySpan, which is quickly racking up micro-payments across hundreds of video games and virtual worlds,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:45 pm
- A German economic sentiment poll by the ZEW think tank hits positive territory for the first time since July 2007 Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:45 pm
MoFuse, a service that will take your website and instantly create a mobile version of it, is launching a premium version of its mobile website development service for the enterprise space. MoFuse’s existing platform, which spares websites the development costs of formatting the site by hand, creates customized iPhone versions of sites in addition to the standard versions for basic mobile browsers. MoFuse is offering TechCrunch readers 50% off any premium plan for Website owners who use the promotional code “TechCrunch” when signing up before May 1.
MoFuse Premium for Business is a completely separate platform from the site’s original service, which will remain intact and will be known as MoFuse for Blogs. The premium service creates higher quality mobile sites for businesses with more features, including the ability to nest topics in the site with drag and drop technology, search functionality, Google Maps integration, color customization, a local weather app, and more. The pricing for the premium site development starts with the “Basic” plan, which is $39 per month with a 50,000 page view limit for one site; “Small Business,” which is $89 per month, creates 3 sites with a limit of 125,000 page views per site; and “Ultimate,” which is $199 per month, creates up to 10 sites with a limit of 1 million page views per site.
Founded in 2007, MoFuse has become popular with publishers—the service has helped nearly 25,000 organizations create mobile websites. Several of our colleague publications in tech news use MoFuse for their mobile sites including GigaOm and ReadWriteWeb. In addition to converting a web site for mobile consumption, Mofuse also allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites via revenue shares with Google AdSense and AdMob. Jag.ag also provides a simple service to help less tech-savvy consumers create their own mobile presence in a few minutes but doesn’t offer some of the same premium features yet. Zinadoo and Wirenode also provide similar services.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Someone in Sharp’s R&D department must have been paying attention when the Internet started mumbling about the MacBook Pro’s potential LCD trackpad. The new Mebius PC-NJ70A netbook comes packing with just that, along with standard, underwhelming netbook-type specs: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, 160GB HDD, WiFi, & a multicard reader. The screen however, bumps this otherwise boring computer into the sweet-ass range not normally occupied by netbooks.
Said screen embeds a 854 x 4850 resolution LCD display right into the palm rest and acts as a secondary display. Only time will tell if developers will actually program for this tiny screen, but at least Sharp loaded some interesting demos onto the launch rigs. Thankfully, we have a video of the display in action, which easily shows off how cool LCD displays are as trackpads and further cements our desire for them in every notebook. After the jump.
Jay from the free sf zine Heliotrope sez, "Neil Gaiman, Lou Anders, Bryan Talbot, Hal Duncan, Catherynne M. Valente, Chris Roberson, Paul S. Kemp and Rhys Hughes contributed fiction and articles that were part of an issue of Heliotrope that was an appreciation to the legendary writer, Michael Moorcock. This issue went live online today (and is obviously free)."
NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - Chipmaker Broadcom Corp said on Tuesday it made an unsolicited bid for storage-equipment maker Emulex Corp with an equity value of $764 million. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:30 pm
Co-CEO Wenda Millard is out at at Martha Stewart Living OmniMedia (MSO). The company will not replace her but will divvy up her responsibilities among its current execs, including Martha Stewart herself.
No word on what Millard, who is best known as the longtime leader of Yahoo’s (YHOO) sales force, plans to do next. Even while she has been running Stewart’s multimedia empire along with co-CEO Robin Marino, she’s remained highly visible in the online ad world, popping up frequently to decry the rise of advertising networks.
No details on what happened so far, but Millard’s departure from the company isn’t a shock, because she has long been rumored to be unhappy at Martha Stewart. She and Marino took over the company last summer when Susan Lyne left the CEO post; Lyne later landed at e-commerce startup Gilt Group. Last fall, Millard was reportedly feuding with Stewart and was supposedly heading to sell ads for Microsoft (MSFT), a story she denied when I asked her about it. Here’s the release:
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc. today announced a reorganization of its Media business. The Company also announced that Wenda Harris Millard is stepping down from her post as President of Media and Co-CEO. The company has no plans to replace Ms. Millard or name a new co-CEO.
Martha Stewart, MSLO’s Founder, will oversee all editorial and creative functions. MSLO Chairman Charles Koppelman, who in addition to serving as the Company’s Principal Executive Officer, will now oversee MSLO’s Media businesses. Robin Marino will continue to oversee Merchandising, serving as the segment’s President and CEO, and to report to Mr. Koppelman. Ms. Marino is expected to be recommended to join MSLO’s Board of Directors.
Mr. Koppelman stated: “We are grateful to Wenda for all of her work on behalf of MSLO. Wenda has been a champion of Martha’s groundbreaking Omnimedia vision on which this company was built. She has been an effective leader of a very talented team as we’ve expanded our franchises and grown our cross-platform programs.”
“Robin will continue to work with me to identify new opportunities and create synergies across our Media and Merchandising businesses,” Mr. Koppelman added.
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
By Andrew Liszewski Oh look! Another pocket-friendly device for hunting down wi-fi networks. From my experience these things never work as well as you’d hope, but at least this one doubles as a ballpoint... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:17 pm
Reuters - Cisco Systems Inc on Tuesday introduced new network security products to help protect companies' Web-based software and services from attacks on their networks. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:13 pm
By Chris Scott Barr I’m still not really on the whole digital picture frame bandwagon. Honestly, I guess I just don’t have a need to cycle a few hundred pictures on my wall or something. If... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:07 pm
Sal sez, "Three years after Cory's novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town,' somebody actually made a router that does what the fictional mesh-network routers from the book could do.
The Fonera 2.0 made by FON, (the Spanish WiFi sharing people) is released today (barring the occasional retail glitch) for 45 euros. It comes complete with OLPC's mesh-networking system.
You can plug it into Ethernet or a 3G dongle. Share your bandwidth with any other router in range that implements OLPC's mesh-networking standard. The Open WRT software is designed to run on just about any hardware so you do not actually have to buy a Fonera to join the fun.
The software is based on Open WRT, which in turn is based on the Linksys WRTG54G firmware which the community forced Cisco to open-source (since it made use of Busybox + Linux Kernel).
As a result of this we now have a router far more featured than the most expensive access point you can get in the shops, costing a fraction of the price and based on entirely free firmware.
With a few of these we could all build community networks like the one from Cory's book."
WARSAW, April 21 (Reuters) - Polish regulator URE wants gas monopoly PGNiG to cut prices by more than the 9 percent the company has proposed, URE deputy head Marek Woszczyk said on Tuesday. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:03 pm
Google (GOOG), which been pruning some early-stage products amid slower growth and the downturn, introduced two experiments Monday: a service that displays news search results in a chronological timeline and a way to find more relevant images.
The first of the two, called Google News Timeline , presents the globs of content already in Google News — including articles, blogs, photos, scanned newspapers, magazine covers and more — in a draggable timeline. Users who search for a topic like the Iraq War will see a history of articles, photos and videos arranged by date, week or month and can scroll through them quickly with their mouse. Users can refine their search to specific sorts of news, like newspapers or blogs, and search some non-news sources like Wikipedia or movies.
Read the rest of this post at the original site
By Andrew Liszewski Details are a little vague right now, but Akihabara News is reporting that the Cube 100HD portable media player not only supports 720P video content, but will actually pump out a 1080i... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm
(TrendHunter.com) When I first heard of deep fried Mars bars, I thought it might have been the result of some high school or college experiment truth or dare game. Of course I was proven wrong, when... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:59 am
Sometimes the craziest coincidences happen. These last few days I have been wondering at the amount of badly-designed soap bottles littering the shower and kitchen, and whether I could find a simple, tough old bottle and just re-use that. “Of course you can”, is the answer, but where do I get the soap?
The solution is to be found at New Soap, a company which takes old plastic and glass bottles, cleans and sanitizes them and loads them up with soap. And not just any old soap — this is the good stuff, bought in bulk from the very suppliers who push the crap that helps us keep the landfills topped-up.
You can order anything from Windex to 409 to Palmolive Ultra, or opt for no-name products instead. You’ll find the liquids in old Heineken beer bottles, 2-liter soda bottles and Sprite bottles with spray-gun caps, and prices run from just over $2 and up.
We love the idea. Not only is it green, but these bottles look way cooler than the “real” thing, especially with the minimalist labeling, Of course, the best answer would be a local store that will refill your bottles for you, much as my local bodega will fill my empty water bottles with wine (they gave me a strange look when I asked them to turn a loaf into a fish, though). If you like the scheme, you can join the petition to get these bottles stocked in your local supermarket.
NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - Employment services company Manpower Inc posted a quarterly profit on Tuesday, defying expectations for a quarterly loss, citing recent stability in its U.S. and French... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:49 am
April 21 (Reuters) - Optical and electronic instruments maker II-VI Inc posted a 63 percent drop in net quarterly profit, hurt by a steep drop in demand at its infrared optics segment. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:48 am
High-Capacity Seidio 3500mAh Extended Battery For Treo Pro More Than Doubles Talk Time To Nearly 12 Hours Talk Time Thanks to the new Seidio Innocell 3500mAh Extended Battery for Treo Pro (includes extended... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:47 am
When I used to drive a car, I had no use for any gadget that plugged into my cigarette lighter socket. It was in constant use — as a cigarette lighter. Now that I don’t smoke, I’m pretty intrigued by Belkin’s new widgets which slip into the 12v socket and turn it into a USB port, enabling it to charge pretty much every gadget ever. This comes too late for me (my bike has no cigarette lighter) but for all you drivers, I suspect it will be very useful.
The Micro Auto Charger only has one port, but it’s tiny and sits flush with the dash. It even has a glowing blue blinkenlight, which is probably acceptable in a car as you a) don’t sleep while driving and b) don’t want to dig around trying to find the hole in the dark while you’re driving. The price is a mere $15, available “soon”.
April 21 (Reuters) - Kinetic Concepts Inc reported a drop in first-quarter profit on lower sales volumes due to capital constraints on acute care facilities and unfavorable foreign currency exchange rates... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:46 am
April 21 (Reuters) - Biotechnology company Medarex Inc signed a licensing agreement with Merck & Co Inc and Massachusetts Biologic Laboratories (MBL), to develop a treatment for patients suffering... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:43 am
NEW YORK, April 21 (Reuters) - Fertilizer maker Terra Industries Inc reported a steep decline in first-quarter profit, hurt by weak demand for nitrogen and ammonia, but said it expects the second quarter... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:43 am
(TrendHunter.com) It's not cheaper than fossil fuel, but it's cleaner and cooler - literally and figuratively. Sunengy's Liquid Solar Array system is designed to float on the surface of the ocean. A... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:39 am
AP - The Mayo Clinic has combined its medical expertise with Microsoft Corp.'s technology in a free Web site launching Tuesday that will let people store personal health and medical information. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:38 am
prostoalex writes to tell us The Daily Mail has an interesting look at current research in the field of running and injuries related to running. Most of the evidence pointed at a lack of any need for running shoes. Some of the more interesting points: the more expensive the running shoes, the greater the probability of getting an injury; some of the planet's best and most intense runners run barefoot; Stanford running team, having access to the top-notch modern shoes sent in for free by manufacturers, after a few rounds of trial and error still chose to train with no shoes at all."
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
A new deal will put a little Adobe Flash software in several of the chips that go inside TVs and set-top boxes.The technology will enable developers and content providers to create applications to deliver web-based content like news, weather, and share prices to TV screens.Chips made by Broadcom, Intel, NXP, and STMicroelectronics will include Flash, but the deal does not extend to TVs made by Sony and Samsung.The first TV sets to include applications using Flash are expected to hit shelves early in 2010.Sony and Samsung are already using similar technology with Yahoo's rich media platform of widgets instead of Flash.In the next three years more than 420 million TVs, set-top boxes, and media players are expected to ship around the world.Adobe hopes it can get Flash inside many of those devices to create a new generation of connected entertainment services. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:30 am
By Andrew Liszewski I don’t know what I find more surprising here, the fact that someone thought they could make a playable version of Donkey Kong on the Meggy Jr’s 8×8 RGB LED display,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:27 am
Anonymous, having driven the Church of Scientology into bankruptcy, has now declared war on the entertainment industry -- apparently, they're upset that the record companies aren't suing enough P2P sites:... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:25 am
We have been watching you. We are focusing all our eyes on your multiple organizations. As you are watching this video we are currently planning our next attack. You have already angered us greatly and now, all you can do is pray that we will show mercy. We will strike from every possible direction. You will not know who we are or what our next move will be. We have no central leader, no government, nobody to tell us what to do. We operate on the principles of free speech and anonymity. The very principles which the verdict against the pirate bay dot org is threatening to destroy. And this is why we attack. Because deep down we know that together, as a unit, we can ban together and defeat you, the great oppressor, who has been present since the dawn of man.
It is true that by using file sharing networks we may be committing a crime. But there is no crime greater than favoring one company over another in the corrupt eyes of the law. The founders of thepiratebay.org are awaiting their jail sentence and the founders of isohunt.com and btjunkie.org are living free with no worries from the law. We strike because we know that it is not about legality, it is not about lawlessness, it is not about going against your principles, as you obviously have none. It is about Justice, true justice that only a member of our organization can see. And believe me, we are many. And we will all carry out Justice that the rest of the world will not.
(TrendHunter.com) Whether its for work or play, slim and sexy denim is the fashionable favorite for todays top divas. 200 years after the creation of denim, jeans always seem to resurface at the forefront... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 21 Apr 2009 | 11:20 am
Verizon has recently opened up their mobile DVR control page that will allow FiOS users to control and manage their DVR from any web connection. I should point out that this was previously available, however only through a few Verizon phones, the good news is that now it is open for everyone.
Current FiOS users can simply point their mobile phone browser to http://m.verizon.com/tv then login and begin to take control. Once logged in you will be able to review, change or add recordings and delete recordings. You can also browse and search TV listings and video-on-demand listings as well as set parental controls and more.
Now if they could just integrate a Slingbox-like service into their service and let me enjoy that on my mobile phone I think I could be that much closer to truly feeling satisfied.
Content on the web is constantly changing and while you can track changes in information manually, it’s often a time-consuming process to monitor the things you care about. Trackle, a personalized web and RSS feed tracker we wrote about earlier this year, is launching a “Trackle It” button that can be added to any site to help users track information instantly while surfing the web.
Trackle.com’s free web service provides real-time personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and more. Now with the introduction of the Trackle button, the tracking service wants to let sites provide instant tracking options directly to consumers and hopes to allow users to “Trackle” an item or feed from anywhere on the web.
The button allows users to automatically sign up to receive notifications about personalized information, such as price drops, new content, messages about products, etc. via email or SMS directly from the site (instead of tracking the item from Trackle’s website, with the Trackle button, the consumer doesn’t have to be signed up to be a user on Trackle’s site). Trackle’s co-founder Pavan Nigam says that the Trackle button, which is sold to sites on a pay-per-action basis, can be incorporated into a site within an hour, using Trackle’s self serve API. He says that the button helps online marketers reach their audience with customized alerts that give users of a site a reason to return. The Trackle feature can be used to generate statistics about what’s most interesting to users. Currently, Trackle has several sites which are testing the beta version of this feature, including EveryTrail.com, Eurekaspot.com and KLDSoccer.com.
Trackle is also offering sites the option of using a Trackle widget, instead of the integration of a Trackle button. The Trackle widget is similar to the button feature and allows users to track any updated information, changes or fluctuations of any item on a site in a widget form. Site owners can choose from over 100 of Trackle’s tracking widgets, ranging from “Local Crime” and “Health” to “Weather.” For example, a ski-website might offer the “Trackle weather” widget to allow its readers to track local snow conditions. Widgets are continually updated and are ad-free.
Trackle is also trying to integrate social media into its tracking service by launching a Trackle Facebook app. The app, which currently can only track sports scores and events, allows you to create a “tracklet” for a team or type of event to be tracked, and then sends you feeds alerts to you within the application. The alerts also go into your News Feed and your friends can see and comment on your Trackle updates. Trackle says it also plans to develop a MySpace app.
As we noted in our original review of Trackle, the breadth and specificity of Trackle’s information is what differentiates the site from other RSS and product tracking applications like Google Alerts, Yotify and Notify.me (which also allows sites to embed a “notify” widget to track items). The introduction of the “Trackle” button is a useful idea, but in order for it to be widely adopted by a variety of users, it needs to be more viral. The “Trackle” button needs to be an option on eBay, or Kayak or Craigslist for it to become truly useful, which is an ambitious task. The integration with Facebook is definitely key and Trackle says that the site will also integrate with Twitter and other social media sites in the future.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
If you live in a city apartment, large or small, a balcony is essential to stop you going stir-crazy. But despite this, I’m having trouble seeing the point of the Bloomframe, unless it is so easy to fit that you can do it yourself.
The Bloomframe is an aftermarket balcony from Dutch architect Hoffman du Jardin. Like a convertible car, when the sun shines you can open it up to the air. What looks like a simple window folds out and down to make a platform and a glass balustrade.
But, we wonder, why? Would a real balcony not be better? The Dornob blog has a valiant stab at justification:
This delightful mechanical design allows a condo owner or apartment renter the flexibility of adding extra space at the push of a button without the requirement for outdoor furniture and continuous cleaning that normally come with a balcony.
But why not have outdoor space all the time? After all, its outdoors, right? It’s not like it takes up any space in even the tiniest apartment. The furniture argument fails — if you want to sit on a chair, you need a chair. At least with a real balcony you can leave the stuff out there instead of storing it indoors. And cleaning — what would you rather do — sweep the floor, or clean and polish glass until it is smear free?
Still, if you don’t have any outdoor space, and this is indeed a simple swap-in unit for an existing window, the great. If you’re building a house from scratch, though, use the real thing. Price on application — this is an architect after all.
PC World - A video game released by Sony Computer Entertainment has come in for criticism from Rajan Zed, a Hindu leader in the U.S., who has urged Sony to withdraw the game. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 10:40 am
PC World - Sharp will soon put on sale in Japan a first-of-its-kind laptop that replaces the traditional trackpad with an LCD panel with an embedded optical sensor. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 10:30 am
Appalling graphics aside, the combo touchpad/mini LCD screen combo on Sharp’s new Mebius NJ70A looks fantastic. The tiny extra screen brings a real differentiator to this otherwise standard netbook (10” screen, 1.6GHz Atom chip, 1GB RAM, you know the rest), replacing the usually terrible trackpad found on other netbooks with an extra, tiny touch-screen monitor.
The pad works just like you’d expect. Just like a iPhone, in fact, supporting pinch and rotate gestures to zoom and, well, rotate. The Mebius (yes, that spelling is annoying me, too) ships with special software to configure the screen for multiple functions, seemingly including the bowling game seen in the video from Akihabara news.
Under the panel, though, the tech is a little different, working more like Microsoft’s Surface (the Big Ass Table). The screen actually has sensors underneath which optically detect the stylus or finger. It looks like it works fine in the video, although it had better be perfect — a trackpad can make or break a notebook.
May is the launch date, and although Sharp’s teaser page doesn’t list a price, the number doing the rounds is around ¥80,000, or a steep $820.
Here's an hilarious video in which Seth Godin enumerates the essential broken-ness of many contemporary things, and takes a stab at explaining why all this broken junk continues to exist.
I-wood — useless stump of a gadget or subtle commentary on the social misuses of technology? The sell:
With our exclusive 3B* technology, fast connection speeds, support for those of us who live in reality, and our all new applications, i-wood is the all-in-one solution you have been looking for. It will help you redefine your relationships with people by showing them how truly irritating they, and their portable devices, have become. [*3 Bamboo]
The design is oddly derivative of a certain other i-product, but the environmental impact is a lot lower (mostly because there are only a few in existence, not, like, a zillion) — hell, even the ink is green.
The maker, Jesse Willmon, describes it thusly:
I just wanted to show all of you a new fancy schmancy portable device that me and my wife created called the i-wood. I thought i might be something you guys at wired might like (or really hate who knows) anyway take a look at www.iwood3b.com and let me know what you think.
Jesse, we love it. I will certainly be using it to “remind [my] friends how fun it used to be to actually know things instead of constantly referring to an electronic device.” (if I can remember), and checking out the other apps — Fantasy World (imagine it! In your head!), Meeting Ignore (give the finger to the boss) and Beat Down (“Give anyone a proper Beat Down just like the one they gave to Joe Pesci at the end of Casino.”)
The biggest surprise is that these are for sale. $10, no contract. Take that AT&T!
Reuters - LG Electronics Inc posted a smaller-than-expected 25 percent fall in first-quarter operating profit on Tuesday and said it expected improving sales of mobile phones and air conditioners to drive a recovery in the quarters ahead. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 9:51 am
On Monday Bethesda announced a new title in the popular Fallout series called New Vegas, set for release sometime in 2010. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. They said it wasn't a sequel to the highly-acclaimed Fallout 3, but rather a brand new game set in the same universe, though they confirmed that it will be similar in style to Fallout 3. The new game will be developed by Obsidian Entertainment, a studio containing members of the original Fallout team, which Bethesda's Pete Hines discussed in an interview with Shacknews. The Fallout series also made headlines earlier this week when Bethesda trademarked the name for TV and film.
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
IRLConnect (as in, ‘in real life connect’) is one of those new social-networks-meets-maps startups, but what sets them apart is some pretty cool integration, a focus on live video and a tantalizing business model based on owning the virtual equivalent of real estate. Today they launch into a public beta after being invite-only since September last year.
The site is bringing together mobile devices and multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, into a very visual platform. As well as integrating YouTube video onto their Google map, they’re pulling in partners including pictures from Mobypicture and live video from Bambuser. It will also pull in geotagged content from YouTube and news alerts from media such as CNN and Reuters.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Audio and Video Codec Suite Selected for Next Generation Handheld Mobile Devices
PALO ALTO, Calif., April 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Aricent(TM), a global innovation, technology and services company focused exclusively on communications, today announced that Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications (Sony Ericsson), a top global industry player with sales of over 97 million phones in 2008, has selected its multimedia encoders and decoders (codecs) for inclusion in its next generation, Symbian(R) operating system-based mobile phones. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am
HELSINKI, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ --
- Bahamas Operator Extends Deployment of Comptel's Convergent Mediation,
Provisioning and Activation Solutions
Comptel Corporation (OMX Helsinki: CTL1V), the leading vendor of dynamic
Operations Support System (OSS) software, today announced that Bahamas
Telecommunications Company (BTC) has selected Comptel Dynamic OSS to bridge
its new IP-based platform with its billing support system. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 9:00 am
Online retail juggernaut Amazon isn’t too pleased with the name Swiss startup Amazee picked for its social collaboration service, and is now trying to persuade the young company to change it to something else. This has apparently been going on for a couple of months, but now Amazee is stepping up and throwing some good old fighting words out there, claiming ‘peaceful and cooperative efforts to reach an amicable solution’ have led to nothing.
Amazon claims consumers could be confused by the similarity of the two names and wrongfully assume there’s some sort of affiliation. Amazee, on the other hand, claims the name is derived from the word ‘amazing’ (sounds plausible) and alleges that there’s no chance for confusion.
The startup launched a new project on its own service, and this is an excerpt of the description:
Their IP department says:
“… the mark AMAZEE is not a natural derivative of “amazing”. Amazee is a coined term where the dominant portion of the mark brings to mind Amazon, not “amazing”.”
Hm. The brand name Amazon is better known than the english word amazing? Well, at least they show great enthusiasm for their company.
At this point, it looks like Amazon attorneys representing their Luxembourg subsidiary are demanding the deletion of Amazee in the Swiss trademark register (after waiting for the opposition period to expire) while their US attorneys have filed an appeal against the registration of Amazee in the US.
Amazee, which we likened to a ‘Facebook meets Basecamp for activists’ when it launched, is now calling its users and fans to speak up in favor of the service on the project, and they’re trying to get some publicity out of it in a humorous way: if you join to support the submitted project, you have a shot at winning a 100$ Amazon gift certificate.
Personally, I’m pleased to see the young company takes a stance against Amazon, even if they’re clearly now trying to turn the situation into a promotional vehicle. Having taken a good look at Amazee’s size and scope, its logo, the believable explanation of how they came up with the name and particularly its current activities and future plans, I think Amazon is looking ridiculous going after them.
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
Dial-in Information
OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. and ZURICH, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VASCO Data Security International, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 8:01 am
The NAB SHOW(TM), LAS VEGAS, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Autonomy
Corporation plc (LSE: AU.)(LSE: AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure
software for the enterprise, today announced that its Virage VS Archive
solution is now integrated with industry-leading editing and production
solutions, including Avid's Media Composer, through Autonomy Virage's
strategic partnerships with X-ART and Marquis Broadcast.
Autonomy Virage's VS Archive is a rich media management solution that
efficiently stores, categorizes, manages, retrieves, and distributes video,
audio, and other rich media content within the enterprise. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 8:00 am
KentuckyFC writes to tell us that scientists from the UK and Germany are proposing a third kind of quantum tunneling. They propose that a quantum particle is capable of changing into a pair of "virtual particles" capable of passing through a potential barrier before changing back. The supposition also provides some interesting methods of possibly testing string theory. So many interesting and useful possibilities, I guess that just means it will be debunked faster than other scientific theories.
JERSEY CITY, N.J. and LONDON, April 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Knight Capital Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: NITE) today announced the introduction of agency algorithmic trading and smart order execution strategies developed specifically for the European equity marketplace.
Knight's EdgeTrade Algorithmic Suite for European equities is powered by FAN(TM), a smart order execution algorithm which sources liquidity from multiple exchange and MTF destinations simultaneously while adapting to market conditions in real time and re-circulating orders to where executions are occurring. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 21 Apr 2009 | 7:30 am
PC World - Hackers broke into U.S. Department of Defense computers and downloaded terabytes of data containing design information about the Joint Strike Fighter, a US$300 billion stealth fighter currently under development, according to The Wall Street Journal. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 7:10 am
A month ago Dennis Woodside was running Google’s (GOOG) U.K., Ireland and Benelux business out of London, thinking that’s where he and his family would be for at least a few more years. But that was before Tim Armstrong, Google’s president-Americas Operations, decamped for AOL (TWX) and Mr. Woodside was tapped as his replacement, to run Google’s business in the Americas region. Since then, he’s spent a week in New York, then California and then back in New York. Next week you’ll find him in London. And after that he’ll start the cycle all over again–a schedule he’ll pretty much live by until his family moves to the U.S. in July.
Read the rest of this post at the original site
University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to the Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.
Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.
The strategies of companies ranging from Google (GOOG) to Microsoft (MSFT) and from Apple (AAPL) to Yahoo (YHOO) suggest they believe the future of the internet lies in mobile phones - but many in the industry believe the mobile web is still a long way from realising its potential.
EBay’s (EBAY) senior director of platforms and mobile Max Mancini told the BBC: “The first hype cycle on mobile failed because people wanted to recreate the desktop on the phone.
Countless many were enraptured last week by the sneaky vocals of Susan Boyle. Her talents, unveiled on “Britain’s Got Talent,” were unexpected by those who prejudged her for her appearance. Wait — that was everyone. The doubters evidently were most of those present, both panel and audience.
However, watching the video that ignited the Internet and conversation everywhere, it was those who had the opportunity to see the astonishment moment by moment and either identify with or dissect this social study, whose reaction is most interesting.
A south Korean blogger was acquitted Monday of spreading false information in a widely-watched case about Internet free speech that could have sent him to prison for 18 months.
Reuters reported from Seoul that the court threw out charges Park Dae-sung had intentionally depressed market sentiment by posting false information on his blog. “Even if there was recognition that it was false information, he cannot be seen as having acted on purpose to harm public interest considering the situation at the time including the special nature of the foreign exchange market,” the court told Reuters by telephone.
Read the rest of this post at the original site
Let’s talk about why this isn’t a real next-generation Zune. I can think of seven reasons right off the top of my head, having used one for about a year now and knowing a little about the way things work. Can you spot all of them?
Okay, now check your answers against the list I’ve put together.
The Zune team is too aware of interface problems like the controls taking up a tiny portion of the bottom of the device. The thing would fall out of your hand again and again as you tried to grip the feeble sliver that makes up the Zune pad and buttons.
On that note, they wouldn’t do touch buttons because you grip the Zune across said buttons when you’re using the touchpad.
Zune moved to a non-chromed touchpad with the last generation of Zunes. Would they go back on that so quickly?
The art style is way off; the Zune art team likes white backgrounds, directed chaos, and a completely different palette.
The reflection. Zune doesn’t really do those kind of fade-out reflections. That’s something that every other hardware maker likes to do, especially Apple, whose stark presentation style lends itself to reflections.
This would be super-easy to Photoshop: lengthen a regular Zune, retouch the diagonal highlight (that’s the hard part), and make the buttons look like touch buttons. Boom.
It’s GOD damn ugly.
Seriously. If they come out with this dog? I’ll listen to an Insane Clown Posse album start to finish. Yeah, don’t think I’m joking.
We’ve been hearing for a while about this and that company thinking about making an MID or netbook (or desktop) with Android as the OS. Well! Someone’s gone and done it! And they even shot video, the dears.
The guys at NetbookNews put it on an i-Buddie, and recorded it for posterity. Unfortunately, it’s extremely short, there’s not a lot done, and error messages pop up frequently. This looks more like a curious hacker trying something out than a serious attempt at implementing the mobile OS as a PC one.
Here you’ll find the live video stream from Geek’n Rolla, a day-long conference created by TechCrunch Europe for European early stage tech startups old and new to share real, hard-core knowledge about their experiences. Here is our agenda and speaker line-up.
Geek’n Rolla is sponsored by Viadeo one of the largest professional social networks in the world, and supported by UK Trade and Investment, as well as NESTA, the National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts. Not only will we be having a great day of content for startups, we are planning the mother of all evening networking parties at one of London’s premier venues, Cafe de Paris, kindly sponsored by Winston & Strawn’s Bootlaw. Doug Richard’s School for Startups is our Strategic Event Partner. Speaker gifts and competition prizes are donated by Park Lane Champagne.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's found this smashing ad for Honeywell electronic mail from the dawn of time. I think that around the time this ad ran, I was still riding my bicycle around the Honeywell parking garage around the corner from our house in suburban Toronto. I remember thinking at the time that Honeywell must make something to do with beekeeping.
Researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management conducted a study that concluded that downloading infringing copies of music strongly correlates buying above-average amounts of music. The music industry says that this doesn't prove that downloading from P2P entices people to buy music, and you know what? I think they're kind of right.
The Norwegian study closely matches the findings from a Canadian study a few years ago. Both studies show that people who download a lot buy a lot of music -- and other research and interviews I've conducted suggest that downloading a lot of music is also correlated with doing other music-related stuff, like attending concerts, making mixes for friends, playing music, recording music, and so on.
There's a simple explanation for this: if you really love music, you do lots of music-related things. If you're in the 20 percent of fans that buys 80 percent of records, you're probably in the 20 percent of downloaders that download 80 percent of music, the 20 percent of concertgoers that buy 80 percent of the tickets, and so on. The moral is that music superfans love music and structure their lives around it.
Which means that when the music industry targets "the worst offenders" in its legal campaigns against downloaders, the people they're attacking are the ones who are spending the most on music.
Now, does this mean that downloads end up interfering with sales of music, or not? My guess is that it's a little of both. As Tim O'Reilly wrote, Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Obscure acts probably get more sales than they lose. Modestly well-known acts probably lose and gain about the same. Very famous performers probably lose a little. This has been the conclusion in the quantitative studies in music and books to date, and it makes sense to me.
Unsurprisingly, BI found that those between 15 and 20 are more likely to buy music via paid download than on a physical CD, though most still purchased at least one CD in the last six months. However, when it comes to P2P, it seems that those who wave the pirate flag are the most click-happy on services like the iTunes Store and Amazon MP3. BI said that those who said they download illegal music for "free" bought ten times as much legal music as those who never download music illegally. "The most surprising is that the proportion of paid download is so high," the Google-translated Audun Molde from the Norwegian School of Management told Aftenposten.
eldavojohn writes "The sweet sweet melodies of Queen and the late Freddie Mercury are reproduced by hardware almost as old as the song is. 'There are millions of computers sitting idle at home consuming fantom electricity. Let's see where all that power is going. This is dedicated to all fans of Queen and hey let's not forget about Mike Myers and Dana Carvey of Wayne's World. Please note no effects or sampling was used. What you see is what you hear (does that even make sense?) Atari 800XL was used for the lead piano/organ sound, Texas Instruments TI-99/4a as lead guitar, 8 Inch Floppy Disk as Bass, 3.5 inch Hard drive as the gong, HP ScanJet 3C was used for all vocals. Please note I had to record the HP scanner 4 separate times for each voice. I tried to buy 4 HP scanners but for some reason sellers on E-Bay expect you to pay $80-$100, I got mine for $30.'"
Last week I sat down with Digg founder Kevin Rose to get the Digg “State of the Union.” The company, now more than four years old, has continued to grow incredibly since launching in late 2004 and regularly innovates with new products. They are rumored to be approaching profitability after making headcount cuts earlier this year. But much of the hype around Digg is now in the past. From 2006 onwards there were regular rumors of Digg being acquired. So many, in fact, that we called on CEO Jay Adelson to “Just sell Digg already” in late 2007.
And Jay certainly tried to. They were very (so very) close to closing a deal with Google in mid 2008, but the deal fell apart at the 11th hour. Digg was quite literally left standing at the altar. And we believe that the company made the decision at that point to stop looking for buyers and to focus quietly on the core business for a long while. They raised more money late last year.
I talk to Kevin about the history of Digg for about half of the 30 minute interview. There’s a lot of good content about the early attempts to buy Digg, since it’s far enough in the past that he feels comfortable talking about it. But the forward looking stuff is easily the most interesting.
I asked Kevin if he felt that any of the numerous competitors (AOL Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, Mixx, Reddit, Hacker News) were a true threat to Digg. He shook his head no before I even finished the question (skip to the 29 minute mark), and said something surprising: “I just feel that we’re heading in a different direction than them.” When pressed for more details, he says that they’re launching a product to address the real-time threat that Twitter, Facebook and others are focused on, and that the new Digg search was the first hint of what they’re thinking of. More details soon, I’m sure.
The full transcript is below:
Michael Arrington: I’m here with Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose.
Kevin Rose: Hey.
Arrington: Thanks for inviting me to your office.
Rose: Yeah, thanks for coming out to the office.
Arrington: Yeah. I wanted to get a sort of state of the union of Digg, because the company has been around now for…
Rose: Four plus years.
Arrington: Four plus years, November 2004. So, obviously it’s grown a lot, changed a lot, and it’s clear that there’s a big focus on new products and some things that you’re doing.
Rose: Excellent.
Arrington: I want to talk about the last couple of years, what happened to the company, the good and the bad.
Rose: Sure.
Arrington: And how it’s affected your thoughts on product and things like that.
Rose: Sure.
Arrington: So, could we take a step back and I think the history of Digg is well known. You launched in November 2004, it’s a way for people to add bookmarks that they found interesting, other people Digg those bookmarks, then the best stuff goes to the top.
Rose: Right.
Arrington: That’s well known. When did the idea explode and you realized definitely it’s taken hold, it’s gone viral and the people love this? Network effect kicked in, middle of ‘05?
Rose: Yeah, middle of ‘05.
Arrington: That’s when you launched Digg 2?
Rose: Yeah, Digg two was kind of the catalyst, I think, for a lot of that stuff.
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: I think that Digg one was just my own design and it was still a very, kind of crappy digging process. We weren’t using AJAX yet for the digging. So, you would actually Digg a story, it would take you to another page that said, “Thanks for your Digg.” And then you would have to go back to the last page you were at.
So, AJAX wasn’t big back then. I remember when we were calling it “Asynchronous JavaScript” and everyone was like… When the word AJAX came out, we were all like, “Oh, that’s different.” And then all of the sudden, everyone was using that to speed things up and to make things easier.
So, we launched that, the new design, the new big yellow buttons, kind of bring the voting aspect to the site front and center.
Arrington: And that was when, June ‘05? Or was it earlier?
Rose: Something like that. Right, that was just before Jay came on, because Jay joined the team a month or two after launching 2.0.
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: Because I was showing… Jason Calacanis was interested in buying Digg, even at 1.0, and that’s when…
Arrington: Did he make an offer, or he was sort of floating around a million dollars?
Rose: Yeah, he made an email offer. There were never any lawyers involved or anything like that.
Arrington: On behalf of AOL, right?
Rose: No, no this is…
Arrington: Oh, he hadn’t sold to AOL yet.
Rose: Right, so he’s working with Cuban and Weblogs.com.
Arrington: Weblogs.com.
Rose: And we met for sushi in Los Angeles, and he really liked the concept. I showed him version two before we launched and he took a look at the new designs and was like, “Done.” And then a day later, I got an email from him stating that he like to fold it into the mix of sites that he was already working on and thought it was really cool.
Arrington: And was it the price that was the problem, or just him?
Rose: No, I like Jason. I think it was that the terms were really funky. He’s a smart, shrewd businessman. He was like, “Here’s a kid that doesn’t know anything” - at that time I’d never dealt with the VC community, with investors of any shape or form. He basically threw out some pretty aggressive terms.
I was kind of blown away. I was like, “Wow, I could actually make a million dollars here,” on something that I’d spent four months building.
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: Shared that stuff with Jay, at the time, who was just kind of an advisor. And he looked at it and said, “These are crap terms, don’t do it. If this is something you’re really serious about, let’s turn it into a real business.” There already was a business, I’d created a corporation for Digg before we launched.
But, it was one of those $250 kits that you go and do online.
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: But, yeah. Version two was only really starting to take off.
Arrington: But, you didn’t actually raise any capital until… in October of ‘05, right? Or, at least that’s when it was announced?
Rose: Well, I was basically funding the entire project out of my own bank account. I had run out of cash. We needed some more servers, and by more I mean like, server number three or something like that. I was really in a sad state of affairs as far as my savings, so it was only a few thousand dollars and I was out of money.
And at that point in time, I talked to a friend of mine, Chris, who started a company called TextAmerica. You probably don’t remember them, but they were a really big photo… You could take a photo with your cell phone, email it, and then post it online kind of a photo blog type service.
He threw in $50K, so he was our first Angel. And then, as that was happening, they gave us a little bit of breathing room, at least another month of breathing room to where we could actually sit down with some real Angels. We were in the process of moving back up to the Bay area.
And that’s when we sat down with the Angels and VC’s at the same time, to try and figure out who we wanted to work with.
Arrington: And you worked with a bunch of them, Greylock, Amidiar, Mark Hendry, Smith-Hoffman, Ron Conway - Mike Maples somehow squeezed in there. He just started a new business, right?
Rose: Mike Maples is awesome. Well, he was actually introduced to us by… He was working with Conway at the time.
Arrington: OK.
Rose: Kind of vetting deals. Conway is, of course, amazing, and Maples has turned out to be just an awesome… You know Maples, he’s just an awesome guy. I’d be honored to have him involved in anything I ever do in the future.
Arrington: So, what was the valuation that round?
Rose: That round?
Arrington: Yeah, $2.8 million you raised.
Rose: Did I raise $2.8? I don’t know. I think we had a post of like, maybe $8?
Arrington: OK.
Rose: Something like that.
Arrington: Yeah, and that was in ‘05, so it was before things started exploding.
Rose: Right.
Arrington: So, Delicious hadn’t been bought yet…
Rose: We had good grab, everyone was looking at Alexa at that time, right? And then, the grass grew up and to the right; that was something that VC’s were very into. I think one of the problems, though, I wouldn’t have gone and shopped as many venture capital’s as we did.
We went all up and down Sand Hill Road and we had term sheets from just a whole slew of different companies. Took up a lot of time. This is time when servers were falling over, things were crashing. We should have just met with two or three and just gone from there.
Arrington: And Jay was on board at that point, a CEO?
Rose: Right, so the second I actually needed some real cash, I had no idea what I was doing. Jay had done it before. I said, “Jay, you come on, run the business side of the house, and I’m fine with giving you the CEO role,” because at the time, that’s what I was doing, as long as I have final say on whatever product we decide to…
Arrington: Has that caused any stress in the relationship? With you having final say on the product?
Rose: No, not really. We battle, we have healthy battles back and forth about certain things, but at the end of the day, it all works out.
Arrington: So, ‘06, we’re only up to ‘06 now, but I think we’ll go a little faster, ‘06 was when all the acquisition rumors started. I remember, I forgot which blog, a small blog said, “It’s guaranteed, I know that Yahoo bought Digg.” Was it $20 million is what the rumor was?
Rose: Twenty, twenty five, something like that, yeah.
Arrington: Was there any truth to that? Were there discussions going on or was that just completely fabricated? Already you were getting interested…
Rose: We were talking to… That was at the point where all of the sudden, Digg had enough media attention to where a lot of companies started knocking on the door. And a lot of the times it was, “We don’t understand who you are or what you do, but we hear that you’re the future of news, we want to talk to you.”
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: Especially the second one rumor appears, then you get calls from five other companies saying, “Is this true? Is this true? If so, let’s talk, let’s talk.”
Arrington: Yeah.
Rose: So, Yahoo had purchased Delicious, and I’m friends with Joshua Shackner and he called me up and said “are you talking to here at Yahoo? If not you should be.” Like he had been talking to some folks there, made some introductions, and there were some conversation going back and forth but it never got really crazy serious. We never got to a term sheet or anything like that.
But, those were the days of “you were a distraction” it was a major distraction for us, and looking back on things I probably would have just pushed that all aside and stayed focused on the product. Because I’m getting phone calls from Rupert Murdoch, I fly down to L.A., sit down, have lunch with him, he invites us out for drinks. He wants to know how this might work out. Fly out and be with Barry Diller.
I mean this is an honor and a crazy exciting time. I’m sitting here thinking “Wow, I could never, ever hope to have an audience with these guys and now I’m sitting here hanging out with them.” It was nuts.
Arrington: So, that was a three year period through ‘08 where… I mean barley a month would go by without a huge rumor that you guys were getting bought.
Rose: Right.
Arrington: And you look at massive growth, lots of attention, everything was going great. Although you had some side projects which you still do. But, obviously very focused on Digg, and it’s well documented that offers were made and two parties never really came together. You raised another round of funding in the middle of that, at the end of ‘06, another eight a half million. Is that right? Something like that?
Rose: That sounds about right.
Arrington: That’s all water under the bridge at that point. Last year, it seems like things sort of peaked. Early in the year it seemed like there was interest from Microsoft, or Google, maybe some others. Google seemed to be pretty interested, at least from my sources and they came pretty close to buying you guys. I suspect that you’re not going to talk too much about this since it is recent history, still. But, there seemed to be an almost acquisition in the middle of the year, didn’t have, and you guys made, it seems to me, a conscious decision to regroup and really focus on the core business and the long haul. Is that correct, or…?
Rose: I think that there were some pretty intense conversations with a couple parties; and at the end of the day, I don’t think we’ve achieved our grand vision of having… I always talked to the staff about a world where Digg will have a 20, 30, 50 thousand votes on stories and articles, and really democratizing media. I just feel as though we have a long way to go.
The question is… often times when these deals come to the table is it going to be a situation where…
Arrington: Of course you…
Rose: Two plus two equals ten, well not necessarily.
Arrington: Oh, no, I’m sorry. I thought you were going to it’s a situation where they buy us and then we go into deep freeze, which is what happens to most acquisitions.
Rose: Right, right, yeah, exactly. Which really bothers me because you see this happen time and time again, you see these little great ideas, start ups, and all of a sudden it turns into more process and overhead and it’s not a win. It’s really kind of “Oh, well that was fun” and then it just goes to fizzle out, and that’s the end of your baby.
Arrington: Normally, I’d call bullshit on that. I’d just say “Yeah, that’s great but $100 million in your pocket might get you over your concerns for your baby.” The one thing I heard is that in the last round, so you did another round late last year, it was a bigger round. You raised $29 million, $28.7 million, something like that. You and Jay maybe some others took a little bit of money off the table.
What I heard is that you actually could have taken a lot of money off the table, and you elected to take very, very little. There was more money that wanted to come in than you guys took. What was the thinking behind that? You could have taken $10 million of the table at the point if you really wanted to, right?
Rose: I think that it’s a pretty common thing in the valley with all founders of companies that get to a certain size to have in later rounds venture capitalists approach you and say “we understand you can sell, we know that you could take this offer at $20 million, or $50 million, or whatever it maybe. But, we believe five years from now, you’re a $5 billion company and we’d like to see that upside. So, as part of this next round we will buy some of your stock.”
Arrington: Yeah, but you’d want to sell that much, is that right?
Rose: Well I’d want to talk about what I have or have not sold.
Arrington: All your investors are willing to talk about it. The rumor I’ve heard is you took a million dollars off the table. I don’t want to get into your personal finances, but it seems to me that it’s pretty clear you could’ve taken a lot more than you did, whatever that number is. Is that because… is there some reason because you really want to see this through, and you really think this is a billion dollar business someday?
Rose: I’m just speaking in general terms here, but in speaking with a lot of my friends that are in similar situations and are founders of other companies.
Arrington: Like who?
Rose: I don’t want to… I’m not going to name names. You’re very good at this. But, one of the things that-
Arrington: Yeah, we’ll turn the camera off for a second.
Rose: Yeah, right. I’ve seen you do that before and the camera’s still rolling. One of the things that is pretty common is… one of the things that you want to weigh when you’re trying to figure this out is “OK, if this were to blow up tomorrow I don’t want to make sure that this is a waste of my time.” At the same time, you want to have enough equity still left in the company that you could see that upside down the road.
So, I think that if you believe in your company, you’re not going to sell all your shares, you’re going to want to hold onto that and continue to charge ahead. So, I am still that single largest shareholder at Digg, and I believe in what we’re trying to build and I know our product road map is as solid as it’s ever been, and I’m excited to keep plugging along.
Arrington: So, let’s shift topics a little bit and talk about plugging along. You guys have always been pretty innovative on the product side, while keeping the core idea. Obviously, you’re not going to mess with that where people vote for stories, and then people see the stories. You’ve done a lot of things over the years to combat - not spam, but sort of fake voting - there’s so much traffic at stake, and creating algorithms to try to figure that out, and group people together who are voting as blocks.
Rose: You’re just making some of this shit up now.
Arrington: No, I mean you talked about how that’s an ongoing battle, right?
Rose: Right, yeah, yeah.
Arrington: What I want to understand, I don’t think that’s actually that interesting. I agree it’s probably an ongoing battle which you’ll either win or lose. But, what’s more interesting to me are some of the things you’ve done more recently. I’d like to understand what you’re plans are for the future broadly - around the Digg Bar, which you’ve just recently launched, and around the new search, which really seems to be two years too late. But, you’ve finally got around to fixing search, and it’s excellent. So, you’re starting to do some really interesting things with parts of the project.
So could you talk a little bit about search, and Digg Bar, and what you think is going to happen in the future.
Rose: Sure, which one do you want to cover first? Digg Bar?
Arrington: Let’s go backwards, so let’s talk about Digg Bar first.
Rose: So, the idea behind Digg bar, we have these things internally called Digg ideas meetings where any employee can come and pitch an idea to the company and they’ll be often times prototypes of different ideas using our staging servers so that we can play around with real data and see what stuff’s inside before we actually push them on it.
The Digg Bar came up actually a few years ago. It was something that we had about two-and-a-half years ago. We had an actual mockup of it. We didn’t actually have it working until one of the employees picked up where someone had left off.
But, the idea is that we’ve known for a long time that it’s a really clunky process for someone to go click out, read an article, come back, Digg, and with our amateur things that we use to track behavior on the site. It’s oftentimes the click out really enjoys something clicked on, forget to click the story or click out, have to come back and then it’s just back and forth.
So, the idea was can we create a tool that adds value to the user when they go and visit this third party site. Will they find value and be able to Digg the story directly on the site if there’s now a Digg button in there? Will they find value in looking at related stories and more stories from that source? Is there value in showing the number of times the page had been viewed, not just the Diggs but the overall global use? Also, you want to make it so that it would be easy for you to be able to share that person’s, that publisher’s story into other social graphs.
So one click out to Facebook, one click out to Twitter, all integrated into a single bar that also happens to do short URLs at the same time.
Arrington: Which is great for Twitter and yeah…
Rose: Right, which is great for Twitter. So, it’s like it was this big, massive collection of a bunch of different ideas all coming together and it was something I’m really excited about because I think from a registered user’s perspective, the data is clear. Our Diggs - 43 percent of Diggs now occur on the Digg Bar itself, and it’s huge. That’s huge for us. People are clicking on…
Arrington: Which really means people really do want to check out the story before they hit that Digg button.
Rose: Right. Absolutely.
Arrington: Before they either dug it really without reading it, just based on the title of the summary, or they clicked out and then came back.
Rose: Right.
Arrington: Yeah. So, you’re probably seeing…
Rose: Well, we’re seeing Diggs up as well. So, what once was click out, I read it, oh, I’m moved on to something else; it’s click out, I read, oh, I really enjoyed it and I Digg it, which is great for helping surface other stories to the front page. It’s also great having users interact and view other similar stories or more from that source to drive people deeper within that one site.
But, we figured let’s go out of the gate and turn it on for everyone and see if there’s a value across the board and see if the non-users think that the features such as views of related stories, related by source and comments like top most controversial and recent are enough where they would look at that and say, “OK, I’m not a Digger. I don’t have an account. I can’t participate and click Digg. But, these other value adds are something I enjoy.”
That feedback from the anonymous crowd was mixed, even in some of the registered users as well. The vocal registered users, I should say, can oftentimes swing one way versus when you take a look at the whole entire picture and how many people are actually digging in the five million users that we have register an account on Digg.
Arrington: You have five million registered users on Digg?
Rose: About 4.8 million or something like that, 4.9 million or something like that. I don’t know exactly.
Arrington: But like 35 million uniques, right?
Rose: Right, 35 million unique among them. So, long story short, we sat back and just collected the data. We were taking a look at what people are doing with the bar. Were they closing it out? Were they closing and not blocking it, and we looked at all the different segments.
So, someone that comes in from the search engine, that’s called a search and wander. When they click out, what do they do with the bar versus someone that comes in from the Digg home page and clicks out that’s not registered versus someone that has a registered, and kind of looked at the data and then also took in the feedback from the SEO community, talking about how if a search engine comes in and has a anonymous user effectively and they try and crawl on these short URLs, Digg short URLs, I’ll post it on another site, will that impact their Google Juice?
So, there was a bunch of different cards on the table and it was kind of one of those things where we said, “OK. We’re not going to need your reaction here in day two and it’d be like, hey, there were a bit of changes.” So, we sat back, collected a week plus worth of data, including a ton of our survey feedback forms that we had right into the bar which people would click at into the survey on what they thought of the bar. At the end of the day, it just made sense to simplify things and keep it a registered only user experience.
So essentially, if anyone - search engine, user, a non-user of Digg, receives one of these short Digg URLs through Twitter or wherever else in the universe and they click on it and they’re not logged in, it’s just going to do a straight out, 301 redirect to the destination site.
Arrington: Yeah. So, you announced a couple of days ago those changes. What about just the effect of the Digg Bar there? Are you seeing a huge increase in the Digg visitors from people using it on Twitter?
Rose: Yeah.
Arrington: Yeah. I mean, like how many?
Rose: I mean, not huge, but it’s… I’d have to get you numbers from our staff.
Arrington: Regarding the material, a 10 percent to 20 percent increase?
Rose: Do you know what the numbers are? I don’t either. It’s not a 20 percent increase in uniques. I’m thinking it’s around the five percent to 10 percent range, or somewhere around there. But, that’s…
Arrington: Which is great.
Rose: Which is great because it’s allowing us to bring in more users to put on our stories that could just be on the site.
Arrington: What about search and let’s start to think - like you said a few minutes ago that your grand vision is you’d have stories with up to 50,000 Diggs on it. Now, what’s some of the bigger stories out of 5000 Diggs like?
Rose: In any given week, there’s a story from like 13,000. So, our big stories are the 13,000 to 15,000 Diggs. If it’s insane, like a president gets elected, mostly we’re talking like the 20,000 to 30,000 world.
Arrington: Let me ask you where all the top stories are in the tens of thousands of Diggs. How do you get there? How do you bridge from here to there and how long is that road?
Rose: That road is a lot shorter than you would think.
Arrington: OK.
Rose: I mean, I’m not going to go into details but…
Arrington: Sure.
Rose: Product details, but I will say we’ve been talking about - I think that we kind of just could give a really good overview of the four years and leading up into this point, and I think that there was only one time in Digg’s history where really… Well, two times, I think, that we really kind of did more than just add-ons. Like, Digg has always been launched - we’d launch the site and then adding feature, feature, feature revision and feature revision, right?
The big kind of product changes for us were 2.0, which went from a nasty, ugly design with no AJAX and still more interactive experience, expanding it to all categories, so getting out just the tech. What we’re working on now is what I would consider to be the biggest overhaul to how everything works behind the scenes, and that’s no joke. Like we…
Arrington: Are we talking rewrite tech stuff?
Rose: Completely new directions for us that you will look at and I guarantee you would be like that’s a ballsy move. Like it’s really, we’re evolving and we’ve got some really exciting things that we believe are going to take us to that turn.
Arrington: Is that this year?
Rose: I mean, I’m not going to give out hard dates, but it’s some time in the next six months.
Arrington: What might that look like? Like, what are we talking about?
Rose: Well, we’re talking about a revamp of the site.
Arrington: Like a logo change?
Rose: Yeah, a logo change is going to get us there. We’re talking about some lens flares on the logo…
Arrington: Well, what are you going to do so that somebody’s going to, like, “Hey, here’s the stories.” And they’re saying, “Digg it!” I mean that’s kind of it. Right? It’s like a one trick pony with bells and whistles attached. I mean, I agree that most of your changes are bells and whistles. So, what is it that you’re going to do that doest kill your core idea that’s a whole new thing?
Rose: I can’t go into that stuff right now.
Arrington: Can we see a screen-shot?
Rose: Sure.
Arrington: Do you need to raise any more money this year?
Rose: No. We’ve put a lot of time and effort in focusing on revenue in the last six months. As we should. We essentially have started to build out our ad sales team. We’ve got another year and a half with Microsoft. And our ad sales team now is starting to focus on more custom integrations with bigger ad campaigns. So, it’s exciting.
Arrington: Does Microsoft… How much revenue is Microsoft? It’s like 100 million over the three years of the contract. Something like that?
Rose: We don’t disclose that stuff.
Arrington: I’m pretty sure that one night you told me that. We were having beers. I’m pretty sure you said 100 million dollars.
Rose: Really?
Arrington: It’s a three year deal, it’s up next year. And now you’re going, “Direct sales is the future.” But the new product stuff isn’t around revenue. Right?
Rose: No, it is. There’s a piece of that as well. Absolutely. There’s a big component around revenue, which is nice because for the first time… I feel as though it’s always kind of been this awkward built-on to Digg. It’s always like, “Oh, we have these plans. Oh, we can do a custom thing with Digg dialog.” Or something like that, right?
Arrington: Oh it’s the new ad product that we talked about. Remember? You told me this last year. Well, you never told me this, but I was thinking about it last year, which is - You have ads that basically people vote on. And the better the ad, the cheaper it is, and the higher it gets ranked.
Rose: Is an ad product really going to get us to the world of 30 to 50 thousand Diggs? No.
Arrington: No, but I love that product. I do like that product idea. You know what I’m saying, right?
Rose: I know what you’re saying.
Arrington: This is where it’s writing the story, and people vote on it based on it based on how good the ad is. I think there’s something there. I don’t know quite what it is, but the idea is like, the higher it is, and maybe even the cheaper it is, the more people vote on it. And that really encourages really good ads. Whatever those ads are. I think that’s interesting, so…
Rose: You always wonder why… You asked me one time why… What was that question with the off-handed comment that you made about, “What is your staff working on?” Because we had so many developers.
Arrington: You had 70 engineers, or 50 engineers out of 70 employees at one point. Right?
Rose: I don’t think it’s 50 engineers. It’s probably about 40 or so.
Arrington: Yeah and it’s Digg, what do you need? Like one guy? And then, you know, some office guys to keep the surplus revenue up.
Rose: How many office guys do you have?
Arrington: Oh, we have like one tech guy.
Rose: How many servers?
Arrington: Three, I think.
Rose: Well, that’s the problem. Not to say your site is not huge, because I know you do a good job with the cash. I mean, I think you work with Chris, right?
Arrington: Yeah. Media Temple does all of our hosting.
Rose: Yeah, Chris is amazing.
Arrington: He’s absolutely amazing.
Rose: He can tweak anything to run off, like, a couple of servers.
Arrington: Yeah, but what the hell did you need with 50 engineers when…
Rose: Hundreds and hundreds of servers my friend. And new projects are in the staging environments. Just, it requires…
Arrington: It wasn’t my argument that you guys weren’t stupid, it wasn’t that they were doing nothing. It was that you were working on some big things.
Rose: Big new things are coming.
Arrington: But then you laid them off. Right?
Rose: No, absolutely not. We still have a team of 40 or so engineers.
Arrington: OK. Total employees? 50?
Rose: 72 or 70.
Arrington: Oh I thought it was 70 before the layoffs.
Woman: We still hire.
Arrington: OK. Well again, I don’t want you to talk about… And you’re not going to talk about the new product. And actually I didn’t even know…
Rose: I will say this. I don’t want to get into specific details about the product, but I believe that it’s time for Digg to get a little bit more real-time in nature. And we need to be a living and breathing site. And you know, that’s an exciting direction for us. I think that’s part of the reason why we rolled out a pretty awesome search. It was kind of us experimenting with some of that.
Arrington: OK, well that’s a teaser. That’s great. One thing that concerns me is that massive more participation on the site probably means… Which is a good thing but it probably means, on the downside, more trolling.
Any community, the bigger it gets… And Digg long ago hit that point where you get a lot of negativity from users. And you guys have done as well as anyone in fighting that and keeping the community as positive as possible and as interesting as possible. But, how do you fight that in the future? If you get orders of magnitude bigger, what do you do?
Rose: Well, I think that it’s clear that you can’t throw 35 million people in the same sandbox and expect them to always get along. There’s no doubt about that. It has to do with fostering positive communication among friends and peers, and then also the way that you slice the data. And giving people a place to hang out and call home that might not necessarily be just the Digg front page.
Arrington: Just a couple more questions if I can.
Rose: Sure.
Arrington: So you guys have had, obviously, a lot of competitors over time. You had Reddit, which eventually Conde Nast bought. It’s now part of Wired I guess. Mixx is out there. There’s Hacker News, which is a great site run by Paul Graham. You’ve seen that I’m sure, right? It’s sort of a Digg site just for tech news.
Rose: Yeah.
Arrington: There’s Netscape which became Propeller, which really seems to be on its last legs. I think TechCrunch is actually quite a bit bigger than Propeller, and obviously we’re a blog
Rose: You can remember now.
Arrington: No, I don’t see that happening. I mean it’s very small. Oh and there’s also Yahoo! Buzz. So, I mean Yahoo!… Big guys, Yahoo! And AOL gun for you. And then there’s the small sites. I think Mixx in particular considers itself to be a competitor. Do those guys really have a chance to… Do you feel like you’re so big now that…
Rose: [Shakes his head no]. I don’t feel that we’re so big now, I just feel that we’re heading in a different direction than them.
Arrington: Well, see that gets back to the… You’ve got to remember the golden goose, or what’s that saying? Like you have this thing that kind of works.
Woman: The golden egg.
Arrington: Yeah, the golden egg.
Woman: The golden goose that won’t lay the gold egg.
Arrington: Maybe we could edit that to make it sound a little more intelligent but…
[laughter]
Arrington: Then you have the golden egg or the goose, and you can’t screw that up. Right? So how do you… I guess what I need is more details on what you’re… You know, the new real-time stuff.
Rose: Yeah. Well, I’m happy to, when the time comes where I can sit down with you and… I don’t think you do embargos anymore so I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Are you still on that train or not?
Arrington: I do embargos with PR groups that I respect and that have not screwed up in the past. And your communications people are pretty nice.
Your New Years resolutions include, you wanted to go on a date with Jennifer Aniston. And I assume that you were at least partially serious. Is that…
Rose: Partially serious?
Arrington: Well, I don’t know if it was completely a joke or if you really meant it. I mean, do you have a plan for that? Has it happened?
Rose: I was more joking than anything else. But, then again, if she wants to go on a date…
Arrington: Does she have a publicist or an agent that reached out to you? I mean it seems like…
Rose: She didn’t said anything about this.
Woman: Look at all surfers that won’t Twitter.
Rose: Oh yeah that’s right, she hates people that Twitter so I’m kind of out.
Arrington: She has strong feelings about Twitter?
Rose: She broke up with John Mayer because he was tweeting too much.
Arrington: Oh. I’ve got to read more blogs about celebrity stuff.
Woman: That’s not going to work out for Kevin.
Rose: Yeah, it’s game over.
Arrington: OK. Well, thanks very much for your time. I really look forward to the new stuff, and good luck with it all.
Rose: Thanks.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunchMobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
Julia from HarperStudio sez, "We're publishing a book of previously unpublished pieces by Mark Twain called WHO IS MARK TWAIN? (UK, US) and Flash Rosenberg illustrated a section read by John Lithgow."
Tonight MySpace is preparing to launch a new addition to its application platform that allows developers to distribute notifications from their apps to their users. It may not sound particularly exciting at first, but the feature is one that developers have been clamoring for, as the notifications are essential to drive asyncronous applications (like a long-term chess games), and can be used to keep users engaged with a variety of other apps. The program is only in Beta for now (developers can only send notifications to other developers or themselves) with plans to release it more widely in the near future.
Given how basic the feature is, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen it sooner. So what took so long? MySpace says that it’s doing its best to prevent abuse from spammy applications - a problem that Facebook suffered from for a few months when it first got started (it has since employed a variety of measures to curb spam, but it isn’t perfect). Notices will be shown in their own channel on MySpace, similar to the way invites are in the site’s message center, so even if some spam does get through it shouldn’t be too annoying.
For more details, check out the MySpace blog post here.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
On the frozen plains of the Siberian tundra, a reindeer herder chances upon a 40,000 year old baby mammoth – the most perfectly preserved mammoth ever found. On Sunday, witness the mammoth’s unveiling to the world, as scientists reveal her incredible story. Click to meet the Baby Mammoth now >> natgeotv.com/mammoth
The May issue of Wired is oozing with oodles of brainteasers, which were compiled by Mike Selinker, the founder of puzzle-game studio Lone Shark Games, and Teeuwynn Woodruff, the company's creative director. Lone Shark enlisted the help of some of the biggest names in the puzzle world, such as New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and the legendary Martin Gardner, who boggled the minds of several generations of geeks with his puzzle column that ran in Scientific American from the 1950s to the 1980s. Below are all of the puzzles from the magazine, plus another crop exclusive to wired.com. Sharpen your virtual pencils!
For those of you following a link listed in the May issue — here are the titles and page numbers of each of the puzzles that appear in the magazine.
Digidoku (p. 14), Thanks for the Memories (p. 34), Pick Nine (p. 40), Mixed Signals (p. 48), Split Screen (p. 60), Game Changers (p. 70), Shades of Grey (p. 81), Secret Codons (p. 110), Color Scheme (p. 126)
This interactive sudoku features the numbers 1 through 6 in LED form. Only a few bars of the LED are shown; you can fill in the rest by clicking on each of the individual bars to form numbers. Click the RESET PUZZLE button to start over. Each row, column, and 3 x 2 box must contain one each of the numbers 1 through 6.
Thomas "Dr. Sudoku" Snyder, a postdoctoral researcher in bioengineering at Stanford University, was the winner of the US (2007) and World (2007, 2008) Sudoku Championships as well as the US Puzzle Championship (2006-2008). His first book of puzzles, Battleship Sudoku, was published in 2008.
This essay ends with cheating. Specifically, my friend Greg and I, after playing a particular videogame for 11 hours straight, are stuck. We call a fellow gamer to learn what moves we need to make to get to the next level. With the new information in hand, we finally complete the game.
OK, there ya go. No need to read the rest of this piece—seriously, there's an annoying rant up ahead anyway. Skip to the next article. You certainly could—you could skip the whole magazine. Of course, I hope you don't. Some painstaking work went into this incredibly cool issue. (There are things occurring within these pages that are not apparent at first or second glance. That's the only hint I will give you.) I urge you to dig. Give in to the unknown for a while and ponder the mystery. It's worth it. Which, I suppose, is the topic of this very essay. The one that I've already suggested you skip.
J.J. Abrams, creative director Scott Dadich, deputy editor Thomas Goetz, and senior editor Chris Baker discuss the evolution of Wired's May issue.
Mystery, obviously, is everywhere. Is there a God? Mystery. What about life after death? Mystery. Excuse me, what material is the ShamWow made of? Mystery. Stonehenge? Big Foot? Loch Ness? Mystery mystery mystery. McDonald's Special Sauce? I don't care how many bottles of Thousand Island Dressing you show me, it's Special Sauce. Mystery.
And yet: For all that mystery, why does it feel like the world has been ripped open, all parts exposed? Why does so much seem absolutely and thoroughly demystified? These days we can leap, all of us, from a casual curiosity about anything to a sense of satisfying understanding. Instantly. Want to fold origami? There are more than 200,000 Google results on that subject available to you, now. Need to know the capital of Mauritania? A recipe for sticky buns? How to pick a bicycle lock? You could answer all these questions in less time than it will take you to finish reading this article (which, for a second time, I suggest you skip. Remember: You know how it ends, so why are you still here?).
What I'm getting at is hardly news to anyone: We're smack dab in the middle of the Age of Immediacy.
True understanding (or skill or effort) has become bothersome—an unnecessary headache that impedes our ability to get on with our lives (and most likely skip to something else). Earning the endgame seems so yesterday, especially when we can know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it.
People often ask me how Lost is going to end. I usually tell them to ask Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who run that series. But I always wonder, do they really want to know? And what if I did tell them? They might have an aha moment, but without context. Especially since the final episode is a year away. That is to say, the experience—the setup for a joke's punch line, the buildup to a magic trick's big flourish—is as much of a thrill as the result. There's discovery to be made and wonder to be had on the journey that not only enrich the ending but in many ways define it.
Think back, for example, to how we used to buy music. You would have to leave your apartment or house and actually move your ass to another location. You'd get to the store, where music would be playing on the stereo. Music you may not have heard before. Perhaps you'd ask the clerk what it was and she'd send you to a bin—those wooden containers holding actual albums or CDs—and you'd look through it, seeing other album covers that might catch your eye. You'd have a chance to discover something.
But wait, you say, iTunes gives you the chance to browse! To that I nod, concede the point, and say, "Bullshit." Those little icons you scroll past mean almost nothing to most of us. Why? Because we didn't get on the train, brave the weather, bump into strangers, and hear music we didn't choose. In other words, we didn't earn the right to casually scan those wooden bins. Lately I go to Amoeba Music in Hollywood just to watch people flip through albums. It's a lost art.
J.J., MAN OF MYSTERY
An Abrams production doesn't just mean a good story—it also means puzzles and Easter eggs. Here, we tap into our fave J.J. mysteries.
Meghan's Box in Felicity
In Abrams' college drama, there was one unanswered question that sustained throughout: What's in Meghan's wooden box?
The Number 47 in Alias
CIA agent Sydney Bristow's search for the elusive Milo Rambaldi's works frequently featured clues involving the number 47. They drove us mad.
The Rabbit's Foot in Mission: Impossible III
The plot focused on the struggle for the "rabbit's foot," but in the end even Ethan Hunt didn't find out what was really in that canister.
The "Observer" in Fringe This enigmatic character writes in an unknown language, lacks eyebrows, and manages to be always around the corner. Stay tuned ...
Sure, in the days before recorded music, you'd need a live performance to hear music at all. So isn't technology actually enriching our lives? Well, of course. This is not meant to be an antitechnology diatribe—some clichè9d Luddite treatise (in an issue of Wired, no less). On the contrary, I'm a massive fan of most everything electronic. I use, appreciate, and drool over far too many high tech innovations. I'm an embarrassed whore for the stuff. But tech has made us thankless. Back in the day, it would've been unthinkable to go to the music store, actually purchase a record, and then get home and not listen to it. But today? How many of us have downloaded albums or songs that are still sitting, months or years later, unplayed in our iTunes library? My hand just slowly went up, too.
In my profession, this mentality is illustrated by the spoiler: that piece of information meant to be kept secret, like the end of a movie or TV show or novel. Spoilers give fans the answers they want, the resolution they crave. As an avid fan of movies and TV myself, I completely understand the desire to find out behind-the-scenes details in a nanosecond. Which, given technology, is often how long it takes—to the frustration of the storytellers. Efforts to gather this intel and the attempts to plug leaks create an ongoing battle between filmmakers and the very fans they are dying to entertain and impress. But the real damage isn't so much that the secret gets out. It's that the experience is destroyed. The illusion is diminished. Which may not matter to some. But then what's the point of actually seeing that movie or episode? How does knowing the twist before you walk into the theater—or what that island is really about before you watch the finale—make for a richer viewing experience? It's telling that the very term itself—spoiler—has become synonymous with "cool info you can get before the other guy." What no one remembers is that it literally means "to damage irreparably; to ruin." Spoilers make no bones about destroying the intended experience—and somehow that has become, for many, the preferred choice.
In some cases, spoilers don't just prevent the intended experience of something, they prevent the very existence of it. Case in point: I had spent close to two years working on a version of a Superman script for Warner Bros. Then an early draft was leaked, reviewed, and spectacularly decimated on a Web site that I still adore and read daily. It wasn't just that the review was bad. Which it was. I mean, like, kraptastically bad. And probably deserved (I'm the idiot who made Lex Luthor a Kryptonian). What was so depressing wasn't just that the thing being reviewed was an old version of a work in progress. What killed me was that the reviewer—and then readers of that reviewer—weren't just judging my writing. They were judging the movie. A movie that was barely in preproduction and many drafts away from final. A film that ultimately never got made—in small part because that review, and subsequent posts, made studio decisionmakers nervous. The fact is, that Superman film might have been awful. Or it could have been something else. We'll never know.
Recently my production company, Bad Robot, decided to be ultra-secretive about a movie called Cloverfield [guest ed. note: Apologies to anyone who got motion sick]. When the trailer hit the screens right before Transformers, people freaked out. Not necessarily because of the content of the trailer, but because it was a surprise—they knew nothing about it beforehand. That was the point: The intended effect was to make a teaser trailer that actually teased. It worked like gangbusters, all because we hadn't prepublicized the film on entertainment shows and in magazines. It was a small experiment that proved what most everyone knows: Having all the information isn't always better.
I guess the question is, who among us has the self-control to choose not to go for the easy answer? This time my hand stays down. In 1989, I was living with my best friend since kindergarten, Greg Grunberg. He's an actor—currently on NBC's Heroes. We had recently purchased a Nintendo videogame system and were playing Super Mario Bros. 2. Actually, playing is the wrong word. We were obsessed freaks. For us, getting to the end screen of that game was more important than anything in the history of time. And this particular game was lacking a certain feature I like to call The Ability To Fucking Save (or TATFS). This meant that playing Super Mario Bros. 2 was an all-or-nothing activity. Yeah, you could pause it, but then when you left your house the thing might catch fire and kill people. No, you had to play that damn thing in one hideous sitting.
Weeks into this pathetic example of two 23-year-old men not having a life, Greg and I decided to complete Super Mario Bros. 2. And because it lacked TATFS, this meant giving up any human activity until the job was done. So early one morning, we stockpiled some food and began playing. Around lunchtime, taking turns with the controller at every stage, we were at level 4-2. Which, for the uninitiated, is more than halfway through the game. We were feeling pretty cocky and had probably high-fived a few times.
Anyway, again for those not in the know, you start off with something like four Marios (meaning you can die three times and still play). But you can gain extra lives as you play. As it approached eight o'clock that night, the controller was in my hands, we were on level 7-1, and we had 22 Marios. That's right: 22. We were feeling pretty good about ourselves. 7-1 is so close to the end, you can almost smell having to get a life again. But to get past 7-1, you need to jump through a series of clouds—which sounds easy as hell but isn't: There was this one particular cloud I couldn't get past. Every time I tried, the little Mario would fall, spinning, to his demise. I can see it in my head now, and it still infuriates me. Our 22 Marios quickly dwindled to 15, and I was freaking out. When we were down to around a dozen Marios, I started getting pissed.
"This is bullshit!" I yelled.
"OK, OK," Greg said, picking up the phone. "I'm gonna call my cousin."
This was good news. As he dialed, I kept playing. And kept dying. Ten Marios left. I heard Greg on the phone, explaining our situation to his cousin. "Uh-huh. OK, thanks," Greg said and hung up. "Someone's gonna call us back."
"Good," I said, having paused the game to take a deep breath, only to resume and subsequently die again. "Damn it!"
A few minutes later, the phone rang. "Yeah, thanks for calling," Greg said in a grim voice, like there was a family emergency. He explained to the guy what was going on, and I heard Greg say, "Uh-huh. OK. OK, hold on." And then Greg told me, "Move to the right edge, then double-jump up and you should get to the next cloud."
"Double-jump?" I asked. Oh, good. This was information. This was new and helpful, and hope coursed through my veins. "Thanks—OK—" And I tried it. And died. "DAMN IT!!!"
Greg told the guy on the phone that it didn't work. Then he told me, "Yeah, he knows exactly where you are. Go to the edge of the cloud, then double-jump. He swears it works."
I tried it again and failed. Repeatedly. I now had five Marios left. FIVE MARIOS.
"Greg," I said, my heart sinking. "We're gonna die here."
"No," Greg insisted. "Try it again."
I did. Three more times—WE WERE DOWN TO TWO MARIOS AND I WAS GOING INSANE.
Greg reported this to the guy on the phone, then said to me, "Try it one more time."
Sweating, shaking my head, I tried again and lost my penultimate Mario, and I couldn't take it anymore, and I yelled out, "WILL YOU TELL THAT GUY HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK HE'S TALKING ABOUT?!"
Greg quickly covered the mouthpiece and said to me, quietly, admonishingly, "Dude. He's 7."
And that was when I really felt it. Cheating is humiliating. No matter what form it takes. Skipping ahead—even without the help of someone in Underoos—lessens the experience. Diminishes the joy. Makes the accomplishment that much duller.
Perhaps that's why mystery, now more than ever, has special meaning. Because it's the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It's a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.
It turns out the 7-year-old was right. His tip finally worked, and Greg and I finished the game that day. But I'd traded any true satisfaction for a cheat. I can't even remember seeing that end screen.
The point is, we should never underestimate process. The experience of the doing really is everything. The ending should be the end of that experience, not the experience itself.
So, if you're still reading, I say please:
Dig.
J.J. Abrams is the creator of Alias, cocreator of Lost and Fringe, and director of the new Star Trek movie.
1994: News breaks that astronomer Alex Wolszczan has confirmed that there are definitely planets orbiting pulsar PSR B1257+12. His research appears in Science the next day.
The confirmation kicked off an explosion in extrasolar planet hunting. As of this moment, astronomers have found 344 planets around other suns, and are adding more every day.
The groundbreaking discovery came on the heels of a disaster: Wolszczan's telescope broke. In early 1990 he was working at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (famous for its roles in films like Contact and GoldenEye), when the 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope had to be shut down for repairs. Scientists couldn't aim the telescope's receiver at particular parts of the sky for about a month. But they could still look straight up and see what was there.
Wolszczan took the opportunity to scan the sky for pulsars: the dense, spinning corpses of stars that died as supernovae. As they rotate, they sweep the sky with a beam of radio energy, so from Earth they appear to wink on and off, or "pulse." Normally the pulses are so regular, you could use them to set the most accurate atomic clock on Earth.
Not so with PSR B1257+12. This wonky cosmic clock kept unreliable time, alternately speeding up and slowing down. Wolszczan immediately suspected the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of a planet would nudge the pulsar back and forth, changing — by a few milliseconds — the time its radiation takes to reach Earth.
Finding a planet around another star was a revolutionary discovery in itself, but finding one around a pulsar was even weirder. "You couldn't imagine a worse environment to put a planet around," said astronomer Dale Frail of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in a phone interview. Pulsars are essentially rubble from the cataclysmic explosion of an old, massive star — an explosion that would have incinerated any planets the old star might have harbored.
Wolszczan now thinks the first star had a companion, and ate it. The two stars danced around their common center of mass for a few millennia, until the larger one exploded. Most supernova explosions begin inside the star, but slightly off-center, and send it careening through space in its death throes. Wolszczan's pulsar either rammed right into its neighbor, or came close enough to rip it apart gravitationally.
"It was like stealing part of the star and leaving the scene of the crime very quickly," Wolszczan said. The stolen stellar mass formed a disk around the cooling pulsar, which eventually coalesced into planets.
Cold, dark and constantly bombarded with radiation, pulsar planets are not friendly places for life. But the implications for finding planets around normal stars were huge. "If even in this hostile environment you can form rocky bodies in orbit, by golly, Earths must be pretty common," said Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, one of the first theorists to consider how extrasolar planets might form.
Of course, the pulsar's funny behavior could also have been explained by an error in measuring its position. Arecibo is great for large surveys, but it's too big to pinpoint exactly where a star is located. To be certain, Wolszczan asked Frail to use the Very Large Array, a series of 27 radio telescopes in New Mexico (itself famous as a film location for 2010 and Independence Day, among others), to calculate the pulsar's position as accurately as possible.
While they crunched the numbers, they were almost scooped. A team of astronomers led by British astronomer Andrew Lyne announced in July 1991 that they had found a planet around a pulsar. The astronomical community was agog, the media buzzed, and Wolszczan calmly continued to process his data.
"I decided, all right, he did it, I'll do my story, we'll see what happens," he said. "It was too exciting to get frustrated and throw it away."
His efforts paid off in September 1991. "I sat down in front of my computer and ran the model for the data, and got the answer that was very astonishing," he said. "Beyond any doubt there were planets."
In a dramatic turn of events, Wolszczan and Lyne were asked to give back-to-back speeches at the American Astronomical Society meeting in January 1992.
Lyne went first and shocked the thousand assembled astronomers by admitting that he'd goofed. He made exactly the sort of positioning error Wolszczan had contacted Frail to avoid. Rather than detecting the motion of an extrasolar planet, Lyne had detected the motion of the Earth.
"Everyone sucked in their breath at the same time," Frail recalled. "There was this moving gasp through the audience. And then Alex had to stand up there and give his talk."
It took another two years to confirm that the planets were really there. Ultimately, Wolszczan found three of them, one with a mass of 4.3 Earths, one of 3.9 Earths, and one just twice the size of the moon, the smallest extrasolar planet found to date. If they were in our solar system, they would all fit within the orbit of Mercury.
"Then all hell broke loose," Wolszczan said. "Now it's a blooming field." With hundreds of planet-hunting astronomers and telescopes on Earth and in space, we're closer than ever to finding worlds like ours.
“Punked” is one of those words that started out as a slang term, but was taken to a whole new level by a pop culture moment — in this case, the MTV show Punk’d. But as quickly as it heated up in 2003, it quickly burned out, lasting just 4 years. But the company behind it, Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst Media, may have found a way to revive the formula — take it live and online.
Katalyst is teaming up with Ustream, the online streaming video service, to bring “Punk’d-style experiences” to the platform. It would seem to have all the makings of a new web hit: People getting tricked and embarrassed on video, the whole thing happening live, interactivity and, perhaps most importantly to get it off the ground, star power. As we saw this past week with Kutcher’s race to a million Twitter followers, the guy knows how to leverage himself on the web.
Of course, content is still king. Kutcher and partner Jason Goldberg’s web cartoon show Blah Girls, hasn’t exactly exploded onto the scene after being unveiled at last year’s TC50. Traffic to the Blah Girl’s site does seem to be increasing nicely now, but it was in a rut for a while — and pales in comparison to say, the amount of pageviews Kutcher’s Twitter profile did just last week. And to be fair, Blah Girls is syndicated a bunch of different places, so website traffic doesn’t mean all that much for the show.
But Ustream knows a bit about huge viral shows itself. It hosts the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, which is literally just a live stream of a puffy puppies sitting there being cute. That video has attracted some 10 million viewers, according to Ustream. And Ustream also did some major streaming during President Obama’s inauguration in January.
On top of their web partnership, the two sides plan to bring their videos to the iPhone in May, with a new live streaming aggregator app, taking all of these Punk’d-style live videos mobile.
As I said, it sounds like a winning combo, but I would caution Kutcher and company of one thing: There is still backlash on the web. If you overexpose yourself too much, users can get turned off, just as viewers do in Hollywood. Stay focused on what works, but don’t try to do too much. And please follow up on your promise to punk Ted Turner.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Earlier this year Skout shifted gears, shedding its role as a traditional location-based social network in the same vein as Brightkite to become a network exclusively focused on location-based dating. It’s now primarily centered around its iPhone application, which launched in January and was one of the iPhone’s first dating apps. But until now its web presence has failed to properly reflect its shift to dating, presenting users with a clunky social network that the Skout team didn’t pay much attention to. Today, Skout is looking to fix that with a revamped and simplified homepage that makes flirting its top priority.
The site now primarily revolves around a location-based feed, which anyone in your region can post status updates and photos to. There’s also a ‘hotlist’, which allows users to ‘follow’ the actions of the users they find interesting (the site has swapped its Facebook-like friending system to a Twitteresque following model, so you can follow people you don’t know). The site now also more prominently features a chat area, and allows you to ‘wink’ at people.
And that’s about it. The simplicity makes the site easy to navigate, but I can’t help but feel that Skout might have become a little too basic - there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot going on. That may not prove to be too much of a problem though, as the site is really only meant to serve as an extension to the iPhone app. The company is reporting around 2000-3000 new users sign up per day, with 15,000 unique logins on a daily basis.
I’ve previously expressed my reservations about Skout - namely, I question if there’s really room for yet another dating site (I suspect some of the more established players will release location-based apps of their own). But it’s also doing some smart things, like bringing a new product called Skout OUT to bars and clubs, which users can interact with on digital screens (the company currently has some major deals in the works on this front). And it’s also beginning to white label its network, allowing sites to offer their own branded dating apps that are pre-populated with Skout users.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Kerrieanne writes to tell us that Australian telecommunications giant Telstra has become the first major player down under to lay down the law with respect to social media. Still recovering from the shakeup surrounding a Telstra worker using the name of the communications minister on Twitter, they have released a six-page set of guidelines on the use of Facebook, Twitter, and other similar websites for both company and personal use. "Under the guidelines, which are backed up with the threat of disciplinary action, employees using sites on official Telstra business should disclose who they are, ensure they do not give away confidential information and treat other users with respect. They are required to complete an accreditation process and undergo training to update their 'knowledge on emerging social trends and evolving best practice in social media.'"
Matti Niinimäki says, "I have always liked the voice of William S. Burroughs and I've always wanted to do something with the Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups clip. Now I have. Also includes a cut-up example by Brion Gysin." Cut-Ups(video, on Vimeo, thanks Richard Metzger)
After months of teetering on the brink, Ugobe, maker of the the green, scaly, rubbery Pleo dinosaurs has taken its last breath.
The company has fired all its employees and filed for liquidation of its assets under the bankruptcy law, according to a report in the Idaho Statesman.
The Pleo was just about two years old, having been launched in January 2007. The company has sold about 100,000 Pleos till date.
Two months ago, we reported about how Ugobe was struggling to find fresh funding to stay alive. Last year the company saw a host of top management departures, ran through
two CEOs, closed down its office in California and pared down its
marketing and PR staff.
Yet Ugobe President and COO Doug Swanson while speaking to Wired.com in February seemed hopeful that the company could raise fresh funding to stay alive. Now Ugobe has said in its bankruptcy filing that it has assets of $1.6 million and liabilities of $3.6 million.
It's a sad end for a company whose Pleo robot was recognized for its ability to realistically mimic a pet. The Pleo has a graceful motion and an uncanny ability to respond to human
interaction. The robot can respond to being
petted, makes feeding sounds, plays when engaged and can walk around the
house.
The Pleo, which cost $350 when it was introduced, now retails for $245 on Amazon. Most likely, once the current stock of Pleos are exhausted, the dinosaurs will be extinct.
danah boyd tweet-points to this "chilling story of educator in a sexting mess," and says "We should all be horrified by the prosectors' obsession with 'sexting'." Ting-Yi Oei, the Virginia high school teacher in question, is male. All charges against him have since been thrown out of court. But as in the case with Julie Amero, that final acquittal doesn't erase the personal and professional damage caused -- nor does it make up for the reckless tech-stupidity of prosecutors and school officials involved in the case.
Ting-Yi Oei's "sexting" witchhunt story begins about a year ago, when a fellow teacher told him about a rumor that some teens at the school were texting naked self-portraits around to one another.
I called a student I thought likely to have such a picture into my office. In the presence of the school's safety and security official, he quickly admitted that he did. He pulled out his phone and showed us an image of the torso of a woman wearing underpants, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her head was not in the picture. The 17-year-old student claimed not to know who the young woman was or who had sent him the photo.
I immediately took the picture to the principal, who instructed me to transfer it to my office computer in case we needed it later. Being unfamiliar with camera features on cellphones, I asked the school's technology resource teacher for help, but he didn't have an immediate solution. The student then said that he could text the picture to my cellphone. That left the problem of getting it to my computer, whereupon the boy said that I could send the picture to my school e-mail address.
In hindsight, of course, he could have sent it directly to my computer himself. But it never occurred to me that my actions could be regarded as suspect: I was conducting a legitimate school investigation with children's welfare in mind, and I did so in the presence and with the full knowledge of other school officials.
I interviewed more students with the security specialist, but we found no more pictures and were unable to identify the woman in the photo. We concluded that she probably wasn't a student at the school. I reported our findings to the principal and assumed that the matter was closed.
I left the building quickly that day -- the start of spring break -- to join my wife, Diane, at a doctor's office to discuss her upcoming surgery for a potentially malignant tumor. I told her about the sexting photo, but we had other things on our minds. When I returned to school two days after break ended, I confronted a new problem: The boy with the photo on his cell was now in trouble for having pulled a girl's pants down in class (another teen phenomenon known as "flagging"). I informed his mother that I was suspending him, and in the discussion I also told her about the earlier incident. She was outraged that I hadn't reported it to her at the time. She called me at home that night at 10 p.m. and again at 7 a.m. the next morning, agitated and demanding that the suspension be revoked and threatening to involve an attorney. I told her as calmly as I could that the suspension was for the deliberate act of pulling down the girl's pants. A couple of days later, after an appeal hearing with the principal and me, she shouted at me, "I'll see you in court!"
The story quickly takes a turn for the surreal. Soon, the teacher who claims he sought only to protect the kids he taught was himself charged with possession of child pornography. Read the rest of the saga here: My Students. My Cellphone. My Ordeal.(Washington Post)
PC World - Oracle made it clear that it was Sun Microsystem's software business that made it want to buy the company, raising significant questions around the fate of Sun's hardware business, analysts said on Monday. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 21 Apr 2009 | 2:20 am
Remember this useful little set-top box from Netgear? Well, it’s available. That’s pretty much all there is to this post. It’s a nice little net-connected box that’ll stream all the usual stuff, upconvert whatever signal suits your fancy to 1080p, and it has a couple unique features that require you to buy more than one of the things.
Personally I’d go for a more readily tweakable platform like a cracked 360, but I’m more of a tech guy than say my parents, for whom this would probably be a great option.
If you’re one of the incredibly small camp of people who use the phenomenally unpopular “I-Phone” or whatever, you might find this useful. The Micro Auto Charger fits right in your cigarette lighter’s slot and sits flush with your dash, exposing only a USB port. Good news for people with iPods who don’t want something protruding from the dash, but bad news for everyone without iPods, since they’ll have to get the much larger Dual Auto Charger, which isn’t nearly as sweet.
The big one has two USB ports and will charge pretty much anything that can charge over USB, but it also sticks out super far. I guess you can’t have everything.
China's historic Great Wall is about 1,550 miles longer than previously thought, a government survey reveals.
The wall had been thought to be around 3,975 miles long, but all its parts added together total 5,533 miles, the Mainichi Daily News reported Monday.
The surveyors followed the wall's remnants through 10 provinces, special autonomous regions and municipalities from the easternmost Ming section of the wall in Liaoning province to its westernmost extension in Gansu province, the newspaper said. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Apr 2009 | 1:13 am
644bd346996 writes "Newsweek has an article about the latest weapons in the US military's arsenal. The iPod Touch and the iPhone are being adapted as general purpose handhelds for soldiers in the field. 'Apple gadgets are proving to be surprisingly versatile. Software developers and the US Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a "ballistics calculator" called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight's Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.'"
This Wednesday night will be the first-ever Pop-Up Magazine, a live performance/reading featuring more than a dozen writers, editors, designers, photographers and filmmakers who contribute to publications like Wired, The New Yorker, NY Times Magazine, This American Life, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. Come watch features, mini-features, Q&A's, essays, lit reviews, photos, and more from folks like Michael Pollan, the Kitchen Sisters, Joshua Davis, Larry Sultan, Todd Lappin and me...
I've been given the unofficial "Gallagher/Carrot Top slot." What that means: I'll be reviewing and demoing gadgets.
Tickets are already sold out (wow!). BUT, if you register via email, you'll be the first to know about the next Pop-Up, and you'll also be put on the waiting list in case any seats do open up for Wed., April 22nd, 7:00 pm at the Brava Theater.
Microsoft and Yahoo have been busily ferreting away on their talks about the possible search and advertising partnership possibilities, in what one person close to the situation described as “hot and heavy.”
But exactly how hot and how heavy does depend on which side you are talking to, with Yahoo seeking to play it a bit cooler and Microsoft, according to many sources, aggressively interested in striking a deal.
Nonetheless, sources within Yahoo (YHOO) said that the company is also eager to make what could be a lucrative arrangement with Microsoft (MSFT), which could come sooner than some expect.
Yahoo and Microsoft spokesmen declined comment, after queried by BoomTown tonight.
But their execs are talking more, nonetheless, said numerous sources.
In fact, several sources said, Microsoft executives–including a key M&A and strategy exec, Charles Songhurst, and digital head Qi Lu–have been in Silicon Valley recently in talks with Yahoo execs.
Both Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, I reported, had even met in person in Silicon Valley.
That meeting went well, said many, and several Yahoo sources said a deal could come, especially if Microsoft and Yahoo can settle disputes over a number of issues.
That would include the size of the large revenue guarantee and payment Microsoft would make, in exchange for selling Yahoo’s search ads and perhaps more related to search.
In that deal, Yahoo might take over sales of display ads for the pair.
Whether the pair can come to an agreement is anyone’s guess, though, given all the drama between the companies over the last 18 months.
Talks between the pair have “flamed in and out,” said many people at both companies, due to a range of thorny items.
Yahoo is very interested in getting a high TAC rate–basically, a payout to Yahoo on each search query–for example, and also wants to make sure it has rights to all the data related to search.
That’s because some within Yahoo are insistent that search and display need to be closely married together and that it would be dangerous for Yahoo to split them up by outsourcing some of that business to Microsoft.
That said, Yahoo could also save enormous amounts of money it spends on search, if Microsoft took over some of the business.
But, warned the sources, the new talks are different and focus intently on keeping Yahoo independent.
In any case, that search deal offer then included:
– $1 billion for Yahoo’s search business and a five-year guarantee of $2.3 billion in search ad revenue, with an option to renew it for another five years at a $1.6 billion minimum;
– An offer by Microsoft to buy $3.9 billion of Yahoo shares, and lend the company $2.8 billion at a five percent interest rate, by taking over a part of its debt. The money would be used to give a special dividend to shareholders;
– An agreement to raise the TAC rate to 85 percent from its former offer of 70 percent, for three years, and to 75 percent after that;
That misbegotten and overly complex offer also included a time constraint, a spin-off of Yahoo’s Asian assets and Icahn getting control of Yahoo in the mix, which is ironic since he is now a Yahoo insider.
In other words, a lot of water has flowed under the Yahoo-Microsoft bridge.
It has to, as many think it important that the two are partnered closely together in search and display advertising, even though they still compete on many other fronts in the Internet space.
By joining their forces, they might create a sale that is much more attractive to advertisers and allows for better competition against search powerhouse Google (GOOG).
That is especially true, given that Yahoo is the No. 2 player in search, for example, with a much larger share than third-place Microsoft. According to recent surveys, for example, Google has a 63 percent share, while Yahoo has 20.6 percent and Microsoft eight percent.
But it is also in Yahoo’s interest to move fast, since its search traffic could be declining soon, according to some analysts.
The One Laptop Per Child project is humming along, and while the dual-screen, open-hardware OLPC 2.0 is still riding unicorns in Narnia, the OLPC 1.5 is quite real. And according to the project’s hardware guy, it’s going to be more of the same — but better. They’re upping the storage space, brightening the screens, and replacing the old AMD processor with a shiny new VIA C7-M.
Supposedly the new processor (and its much newer chipset, the VX855) will allow for smooth 1080p playback, because those kids in the third world have nothing to watch their Blu-ray movies on. But really, it’s about making the thing as capable as other netbooks, yet as low-power and adaptable as conditions require it to be.
I think it was a mutual thing with AMD; they’re more interested in pushing their mid-range Neo platform, found in the sexy but slim HP dv2. VIA’s another underdog (everyone’s an underdog compared to Intel), so I’m glad to see their tech being put into something interesting and useful. Maybe they’ll be powering the XO 2 as well?
With too many companies to list battling it out for users in the live mobile video broadcasting space, spreading the word is key. Most people just don’t realize such a thing is possible; outside of geekier circles, the entire concept is still fairly new. Stream a live video from your handset and send the link off to some friends that don’t lurk blogs and social sites all day - chances are they’ll be more amazed by the fact that you’re streaming live video from a phone than they are by the content.
Many of these services have turned to outside networks to get the word out, enabling users to automatically share their content out to their already established circle of friends. Just recently, for example, both Qik and FlixWagon added support for Nokia’s Share on Ovi service. That’s all well and good for reaching the geek crowds - but what about everyone else?
This evening, Qik is announcing that they are the first to roll out Facebook Connect support, which could potentially introduce the concept to a massive new group of people.
As they’re leveraging Facebook Connect, they’re able to post videos directly to your video collection or wall without requiring the user to install additional Facebook apps. It’s as simple as could be for the user looking to share, but not without its faults: due to a limitation of the Facebook Connect API, videos can’t be streamed live directly onto Facebook, only posted after the fact. As an alternative, however, users can opt to publish a status update which links directly to their live video whenever they’re streaming.
The update is being rolled out immediately. As it’s a user profile setting, no updates are needed to the handset software. To get things going, users just log into Qik, pop into the “Edit Networks” screen, and authorize Qik as you would any Facebook Connect service.
Over time, however, all handsets will see updates which improve upon the new functionality. Available immediately is an update for non-touch Windows Mobile smartphones which allows users to pick-and-choose which videos they want pushed to Facebook. On other handsets, for the time being, Facebook will be updated with all Qik videos set as “public”.
This is a huge move for Qik and, as I’d imagine that all of the competition is already hard at work at rolling in Facebook Connect support as well, a huge move for the concept as a whole. Facebook is amongst a small handful of social networks that have really breached the main stream. Integrate a product properly, and you’ll be pitching your wares to one of the few online audiences that isn’t almost entirely geeks.
Crunch Network: TechCrunchobsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
India successfully launched a radar imaging satellite Monday, the country's space agency said.
The Indian Space Research Organization fired the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket carrying the RISAT-2 satellite from its facility at Sriharikota, The Times of India reported.
Citing informed sources, the newspaper said the satellite's day-night capability, and its ability to look through clouds and fog, gives it defense applications. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 21 Apr 2009 | 12:42 am
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have come up with a mobile medical imager that works on Windows Mobile phones over plain ol’ USB. Its applications are still limited due to the power and space requirements of other useful imaging techniques like MRI, but it’s a promising application for the tiny computers we all have in our pockets.
Smartphones are capable of so much, yet mostly all they do is pass on audio streams and squirt a few text characters at each other. Wouldn’t you like to have a “determine baby’s gender” app? Great for settling bets.
The project was made possible by a $100k grant from Microsoft, and isn’t actually aimed at the consumer market (believe it or not). It’s meant to be used in developing countries, where stationary machines are too expensive, but cell phone coverage is expanding. Local doctors could take an ultrasound or what have you, beam it to a central location where a specialist can diagnose, and then hear back an hour later — all from the field. And you know that the military would like to get their hands on a few as well. Better in-situ medical care is good for everybody.
They’re hoping to hook up with MIT for some field trials in third-world countries.
Back in January when Microsoft announced their earnings for second quarter, things were not going well for them. As a result, they were forced to enact job layoffs over an 18 month period totaling 5,000 job cuts. At that time, this was already a lot of jobs to be lost for the suffering company. Today, an analyst, Sid Parakh, at McAdams Wright Ragen, predicted Microsoft to cut even more jobs as they are not able to gain a profit.
Even though Microsoft outlined an 18 month plan to cut jobs, Parakh predicts the job cuts would be occur sooner, rather than later. In addition, he predicts that Microsoft will be performing even worse than what most major analysts are saying right now. The Wall Street consensus is that Microsoft will be earning around $14.1 million, however due to lack of good sales and profit, Microsoft will most likely not even reach a global revenue of that figure. If this is all true, then it is likely that Microsoft will make more job cuts in efforts to shrink the payroll and increase efficiency.
At this time, Microsoft has not made a comment on this matter, so it will be interesting to see what will happen in the near future.
Quick Version: So you’re a gamer that splits his or her time between the PC and PlayStation 3, but you really want to make the switch to console full time. And at the same time, you can’t give up the mouse and keyboard combo you’ve grown accustomed to, right? Short of the PlayStation team announcing a mouse and keyboard as an official control scheme, SplitFish’s FragFX controller is probably the best option the hardcore FPS PC enthusiast.
Extended Version: The PC vs Console FPS argument will likely never go away with each camp arguing why one is better than the other until the end of time. I understand both sides, but I left PC gaming earlier in the decade and haven’t looked back since. Sure, I might not be as accurate with my headshots on an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controller, but I’ve managed to get the job done for the last decade or so.
But then came a package from SplitFish containing the updated FragFX v2 controller for the PS3. And all I can say is, I’ve missed you, mouse, I really have.
Version 2 of the FragFX controller comes bundled as a mouse and grip controller combo that connects via USB to your PlayStation 3. At six feet, the cable is long enough that you should be able to game from your couch comfortably. They even throw in a hard plastic mouse pad with a neoprene-like surface. For the money, it’s a very good setup.
Hardware
The optical mouse (right-hand only) has the four default PS buttons right where your thumb will rest and the “start” and “select” buttons under that middle finger of yours. You’ll have to tweak the controller settings in-game based on what game you’re playing to ensure you’re having a smooth experience. It’s straightforward and the build quality is acceptable despite its appearance. The mouse buttons, however, leave a bit to be desired. They require quite a bit of movement that cannot be achieved with a gentle tap.
Perhaps I’ve grown too accustomed to my Logitech Revolution MX, but the SplitFish’s doesn’t feel as comfortable. However, I arch my hand over my mice rather than laying them on like a normal human being.
The grip stick is essentially a Wiimote clone and it features a D-pad, analog joystick, Left and Right bumper buttons, sensitivity dial, and the ‘frag’ button. While using the ‘frag’ feature, the mouse slows down a tad for you to really get an accurate shot, but I’ve only been playing Killzone 2 and haven’t used it very much. SIXAXIS is supported by the grip stick in case you were wondering.
I won’t lie: it’s pretty awkward to hold. I found that using just one finger to tap the bumpers was more comfortable than trying to double tap with my index and middle finger. Honestly, all I wanted to do with the grip stick was flail around like a Wii jackass.
Performance
Now let’s get down to what’s really important. Because Killzone 2 was the latest game in my PS3 collection, I chose to review the FragFX with just this game. By tweaking the in-game settings for the controller and adjusting the sensitivity on the controller itself, I found myself navigating through K2 a bit faster than I was with the six-axis controller during certain stages.
SplitFish suggested the following settings to me for Killzone 2: 80 percent on the X- and Y-axis with sensitivity on the controller set between 3 and 4. I have to say, it worked a lot better than what I was doing.
Keep in mind that the FragFX controller requires a small learning curve and FPS enthusiasts all have varying styles of play, so my experience is obviously going to be much different than yours. The bottom line, though, is that it works.
The only issue I see arising from a PC gamers standpoint is sensitivity. Although I only played Killzone 2 for 99 percent of my review, I dabbled with a couple demos just to see what it was like. You’re going to have to constantly adjust sensitivity settings both in-game and on the FragFX to find that sweet spot. However, I’d imagine that’s something PC gamers are used to by now.
Overall: PC gamers who find themselves playing FPS games on the PS3 with the FragFX probably won’t be impressed compared to their standard PC rig, but they’ll likely find it much better than the SIXAXIS controller. At $80, the FragFX v2 controller from SplitFish is a good investment for any PS3 owner with a dedicated library of FPS titles like Resistance or Killzone.
But don’t take my word for it. Check out the #1 Call of Duty player in the world DD tell you what he likes about v2.
When we heard that the 2009 edition of the Sidekick LX would be rockin’ an oh-so-droolworthy 858×480 screen, we crossed our fingers in hopes that it could playback video at a resolution worthy of the display. Not content with waiting for tomorrow’s Sidekick shindig, we did a bit of digging - and uncovered pretty much everything there is to know about video on the 2009 Sidekick LX.
Read the rest of this entry >>
When we heard that the 2009 edition of the Sidekick LX would be rockin’ an oh-so-droolworthy 858×480 screen, we crossed our fingers in hopes that it could playback video at a resolution worthy of the display. Not content with waiting for tomorrow’s Sidekick shindig, we did a bit of digging - and uncovered pretty much everything there is to know about video on the 2009 Sidekick LX.
The original Sidekick LX got video playback support back in July of last year by way of over-the-air update. While it was a nice bonus, it wasn’t ideal. Limited to h.263 encoded 3GPP videos, it was neither high-quality nor convenient.
According to details shared with us this morning, it looks like they’ve amped things up a bit. Here’s what we’ve confirmed so far:
3GPP: Yes
h.263: Yes
h.264: Yes
Streaming (Presumably 3GP): Yes
MPEG-4: Yes
Maximum resolution: It can playback videos up to the full resolution of the screen, 858×480. There aren’t too many 858×480 videos lurking around, so as a more common metric: it can playback video at 720×480, the same resolution used by nearly all North American DVDs.
We only went digging for playback information, but turned up some details on video recording as well. Here’s what we’ve heard on the matter:
Codec: MP4 in high quality mode, h.263 in low quality mode
Recording resolution: 320×240 or 176×144, depending on settings
These are all theoretical limitations, of course. We haven’t personally seen video playing back at these resolutions, so we can’t vouch for their smoothness. We’re working on getting photo/video recording samples, but that might have to wait until tomorrow’s festivities.
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This patent for a pocket protector was issued to Himan C.1 Dexter on February 24, 1903, which predates Hurley Smith's famous and more celebrated "pocket shield" by a good 40 years.
Ownd?
Not exactly. Despite its appearance, Himan's invention wasn't exactly the full sheath pioneered by iconic nerd doodad creator Smith, which is probably why Dexter's got zero Goog juice. In fact, it was only an "Improvement in Pocket-Protectors." Turns out there are a handful of patents that attempted to further the functional design of shirt pockets. Some date back to the 1880s. And who knows what was being created before the rise of patents. This complicates how you'd go about identifying the one and only "pocket protector."
When we think of the "pocket-protector," Smith gets the bulk of the credit. Articles in Wikipedia, geek historian Benjamin Nugent's American Nerd and even IEEE's "History of the Pocket Protector" all neglect to mention or even footnote Dexter or any of the other pocket-science developers from the 19th century. It's like discussing the history of the automobile, and giving Henry Ford all the credit, no?2
Granted some pocket-protector aficionados do recognize those early contributions, but that's not evident online. So today, I'd like to salute Dexter, D.J. Scott (1887), W.V.S. Bastian (1890), Joseph W. Parmley (1892), Joseph D. Heffner (1899), and all the other tailors, seamstresses, and engineers who dared to push pocket function forward.
1Uneducated guess: the "C" stands for "Could-be-worse-at-least-my-surname's-not-Poindexter.-But-yeah,-you're-right.-Himan-is-kind-of-a-bummer."
2On the other hand, the most effective marketers always get the most credit. From the NYT (bold is my own):
Made possible by the same heat-sealing process used to make World War II flak jackets, the pocket protector was intended as an advertising giveaway, emblazoned with a company logo. But this simple polyvinyl chloride product evolved into something far more culturally symbolic: it became the ultimate emblem of nerdiness.
Had Dexter found a way to freely distribute mass quantities of his early pocket protector, perhaps we'd be calling the device the "Dexter."
A new report is revealing that most federal agencies aren’t following security protocols that could prevent phishing attacks. The report by the Online Trust Alliance, a group of security companies working to fight email and Internet fraud, found that 56% of the 25 agencies it studied did not authenticate emails or domain names, leaving themselves open to phishing attacks.
Phishing is an epidemic these days. Government agencies and financial firms are common targets. Scammers send out fake emails that look like they came from them, often with links to spoofed sites that often look disturbingly legit. Anyone who falls for the scam has their personal info (social security numbers, credit card and banking info, log ons and passwords, etc) stolen. Some scammers simply clean out the victim’s bank account and run up huge charges on their credit cards. Others sell the info to other criminals for big bucks.
14 federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury, the FBI and the White House, earned failing grades in security, while the Bureau of Veterans Affairs, the Census Bureau and the IRS were among the agencies that passed. The IRS is one of the most popular targets of phishers, who send thousands of fake emails claiming the user is owed a substantial tax refund or stimulus payment.
Anyone else find it incredible that the Department of Homeland Security was found to have little or no computer security protocols in place? That doesn’t make one feel particularly secure about their ability to protect the company, does it? Hopefully the report will lead them to put those protocols in place.
Karim Y. writes "The Vatican is going solar in a big way. The tiny state recently announced that it intends to spend 660 million dollars to create what will effectively be Europe's largest solar power plant. This massive 100 megawatt photovoltaic installation will provide enough energy to make the Vatican the first solar powered nation state in the world! 'The 100 megawatts unleashed by the station will supply about 40,000 households. That will far outstrip demand by Pope Benedict XVI and the 900 inhabitants of the 0.2 square-mile country nestled across Rome's Tiber River. The plant will cover nine times the needs of Vatican Radio, whose transmission tower is strong enough to reach 35 countries including Asia.'"
FROM APPLETELL - iPhone apps that simulate beaches? That turn your phone into a masseuse? Get some work done, people! There are mazes to navigate, languages to learn and commodities to track. MORE »
The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. "The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually," says Williams. "And what your brain does is, if you're looking at the 'R' on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the 'R' flashes, your brain says, 'Hey, wait a minute. Something's different about what I was just paying attention to.' And you see a momentary change in brain activity."
Wilson, who used the interface to post the Twitter update, likens it to texting on a cell phone. "You have to press a button four times to get the character you want," he says of texting. "So this is kind of a slow process at first."
However, as with texting, users improve as they practice using the interface. "I've seen people do up to eight characters per minute," says Wilson.
Macworld.com - Belkin announced on Monday the $15 Micro Auto Charger, a power accessory that plugs into an auto's accessory outlet (a.k.a., "cigarette-lighter jack") and provides a powered USB port; you use your iPod or iPhone's USB dock-connector cable to charge the player. Unlike most auto chargers, which protrude from your vehicle's accessory outlet, the Micro Auto Charger sits nearly flush with the jack's opening. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 20 Apr 2009 | 10:53 pm
Researchers have learned to measure the telltale light signatures of primitive bacteria. Applied to light reflected from planets outside the solar system, it could provide a new tool for finding alien life.
I don’t want any of you to think that tomorrow’s NYC T-Mobile event has anything to do with anything other than the new 3G Sidekick LX. So, here are two variations of the event invite, which coincidentally were not sent to me by T-Mobile.
MONTEREY, California – The sunny climes of California might seem an unlikely place to see an Alaskan snow bike, but the annual Sea Otter show draws bikers of all stripes. Bikers from Alaska rub shoulders (or wheels) with Montana downhillers and urban hipsters on fixies from Seattle. The Sea Otter, one of the bike industry's biggest shows, is a race-meets-expo. Here's what caught the eyes of two cycle enthusiasts, Wired.com's news editor and photo chief.
Left: Alaskan biker Greg Matyas' Fatback snow bike has huge fat tires and a unique banana-shaped top tube that bows in the middle. The tires are designed for snow, and so is the top tube: The bow stops you from whacking your privates when you step off the pedals and sink into the snow. "It's saved me many times," said Matyas, laughing. He custom-builds Fatback bikes for customers in Anchorage, with prices starting at about $3,000.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
If Fizik's high-end saddles, the Arione and the Aliente, had a baby, this would be the result. Fizik's new Antares saddle is long and thin like its dad, the Arionne, but has a wider rear section like mom, the Aliente. It will be available next week for about $200. "It's race meets comfort," said a Fizik staffer manning the company's booth at the show.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
This $5,500 dual-suspension mountain bike from custom frame builder Ventana Mountain Bikes is called El Bastardo. Why? "It's the bastard wheel size," explains Ventana owner Sherwood Gibson. "Twenty-seven-and-a-half inch." Sitting between the regular 26-inch mountain bike wheel and the popular new 29-inch size, 27.5-inch wheels offer the benefits of the larger wheels (easy rolling over rough terrain and easier climbing) to shorter riders.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
This carbon-fiber dog bowl is made by bike designer Sky Yaeger, one of the bike industry's celebrated designers. A former vice president at the famous Italian bike maker Bianchi, Yaeger is credited with kicking off the fixie bike movement after designing Bianchi's Pista. In 2006, she joined Swobo and launched a line of distinctive and well-received city bikes. After decades of designing bikes using exotic materials, Yaeger fell in love with carbon fiber – hence this $65 Splash-N-Go dog bowl. You can order one by calling Swobo at (831) 459-0542.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
This new Pronghorn mountain bike comes from the unlikeliest of places: Denmark, one of the flattest countries in the world. "It's probably the last place you'd find a mountain bike," says Marcus Crider, owner of Twowheelogic, which is distributing the bike in the United States. "It's as flat as can be." Thanks to its unusual design that puts the rear shock above the top tube, the bike rides high and the suspension doesn't sag. "It rides like a hardtail," says Crider. "It stresses up like a hardtail. It's excellent for climbing. It's almost like having Positraction." An aluminum Pronghorn frame and fork cost $1,900; a carbon-fiber mainframe and fork go for $2,800.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Tailor Nan Eastep is one of several clothing makers catering to bikers. A few years ago, Eastep started making more clothes for people who rode bicycles, as she does herself. "I've always been a tailor, but the more I rode, the more I made bike clothes. And that's all I make now," said Eastep, seen here modeling her $400 wax cotton raincoat for women.
Eastep's label, B. Spoke Tailor, is based in Oakland, California, and is one of several tailors making clothes for bikers. In London, Saville Row tailor Timothy Everest teamed up with Rapha to offer a $3,500 suit for biking, and Dashing Tweeds makes a special fabric interwoven with reflective yarn for biking clothes it calls Lumatwill.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
If you have to ask how much this slick Speedvagen track bike costs, well, you know what they say. Custom made by Sacha White, the frame builder behind Portland, Oregon's Vanilla Bicycles, the Speedvagen has no brakes, no gears and none of the bells and whistles often found on a high-end ride. It's just a flawlessly made steel frame, a pair of fancy wheels and a seat that'll likely hurt your rear. Yet it probably costs about the same as a second-hand car. "He’s an artisan. His frames are just jewelry; they're gorgeous," said Kevin Nelson, a design engineer for Edge Composites, which supplies some of the bike's components and wheels.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
The German component maker Sram is the self-proclaimed underdog of the bike groupset world, chasing Shimano, the Japanese giant. That's why the third iteration of its well-received Force groupset, unveiled at the Sea Otter bike show last weekend, has a lot of trickle-down from its professional line, Red. The Force update is thinner, lighter and sexier – and carries a slightly less-shocking price tag. (Figure $1,400 for the Force gruppo, versus $2,000 for the Red). There are also some cosmetic changes: The revamped gruppo is a better platform for Sram’s legendary marketing savvy. The company's logos are splashed big and bold all over the new groupset.
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Pedros, the lube and tool company, was green before green was in. In the early days, Pedros used to sell tire levers made from recycled milk cartons, and saddlebags made from old inner tubes. These days, the New England company has a full range of environmentally friendly lubes and degreasers, including Ice Wax 2, an update to its popular Ice Wax chain lube. The $5 Ice Wax 2 is now made with a natural, biodegradable wax base, which Pedros claims is “the cleanest lube on the market.”
Karen Hertzberg writes "Since the earliest days of MMO gaming, beta testing has played a pivotal role in the success or failure of our persistent worlds. We've come a long way since the initial tests of Ultima Online and The Realm, but what role do our current beta tests play in the potential outcomes of unreleased titles? To answer this question, Ten Ton Hammer turned to current and former beta decision makers at Cryptic Studios, NetDevil, Sony Online Entertainment, Funcom, and Mythic Entertainment. Some of their answers — and the information they reveal — may surprise you."
Time Warner Cable gives up on its plan to charge subscribers by the byte, but the idea probably isn't dead yet. Unless big ISPs embrace transparency, consumers should remain very wary of giving up unlimited data plans.
Smivs writes to tell us that one of the world's most powerful telescope arrays has been switched on with great success. Seven radio telescopes in the UK have been linked with optical fiber, replacing the older microwave tech that connected them previously. One researcher compared the move to a broadband upgrade from dial-up. Research teams will now be able to do in one day what previously took them three years.
Having a yard has been sweet surprise, like picking mushy cornbread out of my molars with my tongue. I mean, I've always liked gardening. I even like to mow the lawn. But I spent the last six years in Brooklyn, with planter boxes on concrete and gardens with more brick and glass than rocks in the soil; Saturdays the smell of grills interleaved with the winds of hot trash.
Sometimes I'd walk out into the park and pluck hookers right off the tree.
Okay, not really. Grilling and such in New York is quite a lot of fun. But I spent Saturday and the better part of Sunday at my house here in Eugene, poking around in Movable Type with Rob while tending to a pork loin that I was smoking in my new Charbroil American Gourmet Smoker, sipping a ridiculously wonderful lambic, watching Porter run around in the yard sniffing ferns, and being rejuvenated by one of the first legendarily awesome Oregon rainless spring days.
It's the first time in my adult life that I've had a yard, and I've lucked out with this one, with its blackberry bushes, bamboo stands, and flower-happy landscaping. It even had a garden pre-cut in the yard with a sprinkler outlet underneath, although I'll be damned if I can figure out how to actually turn the sprinkler on.
I'm just renting this place—I only plan on being in Eugene for a couple of years, and I don't think I could afford to buy it, besides—but even after just a few weeks I think I may be spoiled already. There's just something incredibly civilized about it all, lounging in your couple hundred square feet of nature, enjoying the grounds.
(For the record, I have no idea why the yard has a sprinkler system—in Oregon of all places—and I don't plan on running it anyway. If I wasted all that water on the yard, what would I use to wash my car in the hot tub every day?)
In Brooklyn I used an indoor stovetop smoker for years, which wasn't perfect for actual barbecue, but can produce surprisingly great meat, provided you can get the meat inside. They don't even stink up the house as much as you'd think. Within a couple of hours after using the stovetop smoker, the smell would usually have dissipated, although we didn't have carpets. I'd often smoke some pork ribs for a couple of hours on the stove, then rub them outside to grill for a few minutes and slap on some sauce. (Unlike some, I think tomato-based barbecue sauces taste best when slightly caramelized by the heat of a grill, although one should avoid any actual burning if possible.)
I lost the stovetop smoker in the break-up, though, along with the beer brewing gear*, so I needed a new grill. So on a lark we went to Jerry's, a honkin' home improvement store out by the airport, staffed by some really nice people and a few confused starlings.
What I saw there was a shock. Three aisles of "barbecue grills", most of which were gas-powered, and many of which cost over a thousand dollars. As Justin said at the last Baker Boulevard Geographic Society meeting, "Grills like that are a lifestyle choice."
Besides, gas is meant for the kitchen, not the grill. I understand it's more convenient, but it's just not the same for me, in flavor or experience. I don't even like using pressed charcoal briquettes, preferring chunk charcoal or even just wood chunks.
But really, grilling over gas or over charcoal is mostly affectation in the first place: heat is heat is heat. And none of it is actually barbecue.
Which is why I ended up buying the embarrassingly named American Gourmet, a little offset smoker than also works fine as a grill. The best thing about it: It was $100, very nearly the cheapest grill in the store. I was amazed that the grill closest to my ideal was so inexpensive, but it wasn't made of burnished metal and didn't have any infrared warming trays, either.
It's mostly just two simple black metal tubes bolted together. (And the owner does the bolting, which took me about a can of Dale's Pale Ale to get through.) The grill height can be adjusted in the smoker box simply by turning it ninety degrees—the bottom is curved, so the rectangular grill sits higher. Nothing fancy about it at all.
It does have a thermometer that sits on the top of the main chamber, just a few inches from the stovepipe. That's handy, because when you're smoking, keeping a constant temperature for a long time is important. You might only bring the smoke up to 250° (or less!), but need the internal temperature of your meat to reach, say, 180&dwg; for several hours to make sure it's properly cooked.
It works, but it's entry-level equipment. The smoker box is pretty small, making it difficult to get a constant smoke going without periodic noodling, which further affects the temperature in the main chamber. And because there's just a couple-inch lip separating the smoking chamber from the main chamber, it's easy to get ash and soot in there if you blow too hard on the coals to try to get them to hot up—which you wouldn't have to do if not for the small smoke chamber.
The metal of the smoker walls is also very thin. So thin, in fact, that when I put coals in the main chamber to grill some steaks, the metal had warped itself enough that I couldn't fully insert the cooking grills. Cooking on a slope is a pain, although the steaks still came out fine—it's hard to beat the searing heat of real hardwood briquettes. (Although lest you think I'm too far up my own ass, I think almost the best way to cook a steak is to skip the fire entirely and cook it in a cast-iron skillet.)
Worse, the thin metal means that smoke tends to leak at every loose seam, from the door to the place where the smoke chamber attaches to the main chamber. Not the end of the world, but it does make it more difficult to maintain a constant level of smoke and heat, especially since the smoke chamber is relatively small to begin with, so any wisp of smoke that isn't going over the meat feels like a waste.
That said, I'm pleased. As a grill it allows all the finesse of a public park grill, but that's fine—grilling isn't a precision art. It's a middling grill with a middling smoker attached, but until I someday muster the gumption to actually build a smoker of my own out of something sturdier, I suspect it'll do.
* Which is another story. Ask me about my shattered carboy!
A study by Verizon Business revealed that organized crime was behind more than 90% of all data breaches. The company investigated 90 data breaches that exposed over 280 million records.
Matthijs van der Wel, manager principal forensics EMEA, at Verizon Business Security Solutions, outlined the typical scenario for data losses. “The end user makes a mistake. The attacker takes advantage of some mistake committed by the victim company, hacks into the network, perhaps using an SQL injection attack, and installs malware on a system to collect data.”
The study also revealed that even hackers are feeling the sting of economic woes. The going rate for credit card numbers on the black market has dropped sharply from around $16 per record in 2007 to less than 50 cents today, in part due to market saturation and the over all credit crisis.
In response, hackers are turning to PIN (personal identification number) theft, and PIN fraud is exploding. PINs are used to secure both credit and bank accounts. 93% of compromised data comes from financial firms.
Hackers are not going away anytime soon. They will continue to roll with the punches and find new ways to steal and profit from personal data.
I don’t want any of you to think that tomorrow’s NYC T-Mobile event has anything to do with anything other than the new 3G Sidekick LX. So, here are two variations of the event invite, which coincidentally were not sent to me by T-Mobile.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Indigenous people from 80 nations are meeting in Alaska for a United Nations-affiliated conference to discuss mitigation and adaption to climate change.
Hosted by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change is also designed to develop recommendations to present in December to the U.N. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 8:55 pm
Mites not only inhabit the dust bunnies under the bed, they also occupy the nests of tropical sweat bees where they keep fungi in check. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 8:47 pm
Last month MSI, a Taiwanese manufacturer better known for its netbooks, announced a new 18.5-inch
touchscreen desktop PC. Now the company has disclosed a recession-friendly price tag of $530 for the machine.
All-in-one desktop computers also called 'kitchen PCs' have become important to PC makers who are betting consumers want a sleek, touchscreen desktop in their home for web surfing,
leaving notes and checking internet videos.
Four major PC makers including Dell, HP, Asus and MSI now offer all-in-one systems with
touchscreens instead of keyboards.
The new MSI Wind desktop is available with an Atom processor, 2GB of
RAM, a 160 GB hard drive, 1.3 megapixel webcam and WiFi capability.
At $530, the machine is the cheapest in the market. The Asus Eee Top costs $600, while Dell's all-in-one machine, yet to launch in the U.S., has been priced at $800 for a touchscreen model.
Aw, come on T-Mobile. If you’re going to spoil the fun of bloggers everywhere by unboxing your own new toys before they’re even on the shelves, do it well. Or, at least, actually unbox it. This 2-minute long video, which just went up on T-Mobile’s Youtube channel, is about 10% unboxing and 90% some girls face.
Plus - if you can’t top the Samsung Omnia’s parade-in-a-box, what’s the point?
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
German scientists say they have determined the reason transplanted liver cells don't proliferate as well in older recipients as they do in younger ones.
Researchers at Germany's Martin Luther University said they determined that while the age of the donor makes no difference, the age of the recipient is significantly important -- and many humans requiring liver transplantation are older.
The German study conducted in rats found that older rats had a repopulation rate of only 2 percent, 10 times less than that seen in younger ones. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 8:25 pm
I can’t deny the fact that Mophie knows how to make stylish accessories for the iPhone, but after a lackluster experience with the original Juice Pack for the iPhone 3G I’m wondering if the air will fair any better.
Quick Version: The Juice Pack air has an added bonus of being not only a reserve battery pack, but also a hard cover for your iPhone 3G. It doesn’t add too much extra girth to the svelte device and comes with an on/off switch (located at the base for the reserve battery.
The European Space Agency says it has again postponed the joint launch of its Herschel and Planck spacecraft.
The space agency said the latest delay was caused by an anomaly discovered during tests on a subassembly identical to the one on the Ariane 5 launcher. Officials said Arianespace Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 8:12 pm
Two legal experts dispute the Obama administration's position that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to cell-site records. Cell-site data maintained by phone companies tracks the whereabouts of mobile-phone users.
A Vermont company wants to give big and tall riders a boost with a line of
electric-assist bikes. The iZize from Super Size Cycles is the first
electric bike capable of carrying riders who weigh as much as 425 lbs.
Heavier folks who want to start riding often face some obstacles, not the
least of which is finding a bike that'll carry more than 225 pounds. And
then there's the fact cycling can be tough if you're carrying a lot of
weight yourself. Chrome-moly alloy frames and beefy components mean Super
Size's non-motorized bikes
and trikes can handle riders weighing as much as 550 lbs, while the iZize
packs a battery and a 450-watt motor.
The electric bike is hardly a case of a company capitulating to
ever-growing American waistlines. In fact, Super Size Cycles founder and
president Joan Denizot says the bikes are aimed at people who want to slim
down and get fit, but just don't yet have the strength to carry their weight
up a hill without a little help. She should know -- she's a self-described "super-sized person who decided to get exercising
again."
Heavens to Betsy, Casual Profanity's liquid sculpture is captivating. And oh my goodness, I bet you could weave this into someone's hair. (The excellent video and music work helps, too.) [via Waxy]
Update: The music is Ratatat's "Imperials" from LP3 -- Steven
Not long ago, buying a 15-inch notebook also meant dropping two grand. That's just not the case anymore. The newest crop of multimedia laptops contain beaucoup processing power with price tags well south of a thousand dollars, and a few even have the option to "upgrade" to Windows XP.
Polymer Vision's Readius is set to be the first pocket e-book reader with a roll-up display bigger than the device itself. There's just one catch: The device isn't out yet and the company, which has blown past its predicted launch date, is looking to refinance itself and raise new funding.
Polymer Vision, a a spin-off of electronics giant Phillips, needs a cash infusion to keep going, says CEO Karl McGoldrick.
"Our whole supply chain is in place but the device is not in
market because, like many other companies, we have had financial difficulties," he says. "The last nine months have been very difficult for young companies."
Polymer Vision announced Readius in July, 2008 to positive buzz. The company had planned to launch the Readius in some markets in Europe last year and in the United States early this year.
Demos of the device showed a product small enough to fit into the back pocket of your Diesel jeans. Press a button and a 5-inch electronic ink display rolls out, making it easy to read without sacrificing portability.
If it ships, the Readius will be the first e-book reader to feature a truly rollable display. But despite its innovative idea, Polymer Vision has seen the marketplace for e-book readers get crowded. Two e-book readers, Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader, lead the the electronic book-reader market. A number of other companies including Samsung, Fujitsu and Foxit offer similar products. (See Wired.com's e-book reader roundup.)
McGoldrick says Readius stands out from the pack because it offers a unique value with its expanding display.
"There are many people making e-book readers but just one or two
dominate the market," says McGoldrick. "So anyone moving into the space will have a lot
of difficulty and we understand that."
Readius' black-and-white display is sourced from E Ink, the
Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that currently supplies the displays for
almost all e-book readers.
E-book enthusiasts should be interested in features like built-in 3.5-G wireless data connectivity and a microSD card slot to accommodate additional memory.
Though McGoldrick says he's talking to major e-book retailers, Readius won't have a bookstore of its own when it is released. That's different from the Kindle and the Sony Reader, both of which have a dedicated online e-book store for customers to buy.
But with the economic slowdown, Readius' plans have been put on hold. "This product should have been out in the market last year," says McGoldrick. "It is really frustrating."
McGoldrick says he's talking to a few investors to refinance his venture and get new funding. And he's confident of closing a deal in the next few weeks.
"We are ready to go into production but all depends on exactly when the funding comes through," he says. "Our display is perfect and the device is solid."
Polymer Vision even has a second-generation product for Readius in development -- a combination e-book reader and mobile phone, blended into a single device.
"Our concept is phenomenal," says McGoldrick. "People look at rollable displays as something in the future but it's here and we have it."
Five inches long, two inches deep and an inch and a half wide, Belkin's Mini Surge is a useful and versatile portable power strip. It's just a smidgin too big and heavy for the manbag, however, making it better in the hotel room than the coffee shop.
Readers asked us to check it out after we gave Monster Cable's Power To Go a positive writeup: it's actually a very different kettle of electrons. Whereas Monster's item is a sturdy, tiny but otherwise standard power strip, Belkin's box contains a surge protector and adds two USB power ports. It has three grounded outlets, and can swivel around the prongs to fit in tight spaces, locking at each 90 degree interval.
Sturdy and relatively easy on the eye, the Belkin Mini is $20-ish.
Mysterious changes in ice agesThe ice ages have come and gone the last 20 million years and for the last few million years we know with reasonable accuracy how often they come. In the period before about 1 million years ago the ice ages occurred around every 40.000 years, then it happened suddenly that the period changed so that it became circa 100.000 years between ice ages. It is a mystery because nothing changed in the behavior of the Earth's orbit 1 million years ago. It is therefore due to a change that comes from the climate itself.The conventional wisdom around the 100.000 year cycle of the last 10 ice ages is that the 100.000 years variation in the Earth's orbital eccentricity (the measure for how elliptical the orbit is and the half-yearly variation in the Earth's distance from the sun). This variation is still weaker than the variation that occurs with the 40.000 year cycle, so that in itself is a mystery.Warm, half cold, ice coldWith completely new research results geophysicist Peter Ditlevsen, Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, has found part of the explanation for the mystery of the sudden change of the ice ages. He has made model calculations of the climate of the past and compared it to the concrete data from seabed cores, which tell us about the climatic fluctuations of the past.From the results he has been able to construct a diagram over the possible climatic conditions resulting from the variation in solar radiation. It appears that the ice ages and interglacial periods are not a gradual fluctuation between cold and warm climates.What happened 1 million years ago was that the climate system went from a situation where it fluctuated between two states (cold and warm) with a 40.000 year cycle, corresponding to the dominant change in the Sun's radiation. After this period the dynamic changed so that the climate jumped between 3 states, that is to say between a warm interglacial climate like our present climate, a colder climate and a very cold ice age climate. It is still the 40.000 year variation in solar radiation which controls our current fluctuations, but it results in changing climate periods of 80.000 and 120.000 years.Chaotic dynamic climateThe climate does not become gradually colder or warmer - it jumps from the one state to the other. That which gets the climate to jump is that when the solar radiation changes and reaches a certain threshold - a 'tipping point', the existing climate state, e.g. an ice age, is no longer viable and so the climate jumps over into another state, e.g. a warm interglacial period. In chaos dynamics this phenomenon is called a bifurcation or a 'catastrophe'.In addition to the change in solar radiation there can be random changes in the Earth's weather variations, that contribute to triggering the bifurcation or the 'catastrophe'. Such variations are called 'noise', and a theory is, that the atmosphere's CO2 level can be an important noise-factor. This means that there is the possibility that the 'noise' is a decisive factor for very large climate changes, which can therefore be unpredictable.There is still no explanation for the change in the climate system 1 million years ago, but one theory is that the atmosphere's CO2-level fell to the lowest level ever. If so, the manmade increase in CO2 may result in a return to 40.000 year ice age cycles."The new results are an important piece of the puzzle for understanding the ice ages and their climate dynamics. In the manmade climate changes, that we are possibly in the middle of now, one worries a lot about the possible so-called 'tipping points'. The bifurcations that are now identified in the natural climate fluctuations are tipping points, so this is of course an important step in our understanding of climate changes", explains Peter Ditlevsen.---Image Caption: The Earth during the last Ice Age Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 7:25 pm
Porter 9-Volt is a San Francisco-based dog that sings and plays a Casio keyboard. He wrote this song, performed exclusively for YouTube, on the fly. [via Neatorama]
U.S. researchers say they have determined treatment with biphosphonates could prevent radiation-induced leukemia.
Alexandra Miller, a senior scientist at the U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 7:23 pm
The fossil record usually shows what adult animals looked like. But the appearance and lifestyle of juvenile animals often differ dramatically from those of the adults. A classic example is provided by frogs and salamanders. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 7:10 pm
An international team of more than 70 researchers says it has found nine new genes on the X chromosome that, when knocked-out, lead to learning disabilities.
The scientists said they studied nearly all X chromosome genes in 208 families with learning disabilities. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 20 Apr 2009 | 7:08 pm
Photographs from the Conover, N.C., Police Department
Mmmmm…mmmmmmm good. Now wait, that’s Campbells Soup. And you really probably wouldn’t be saying anything like that if you had been one of the “lucky” ones that caught the now infamous Domino’s kitchen video prank before it was pulled off of the ever popular YouTube site.
Seems like two (now) former employees of Domino’s thought it would just be ever so much fun to record themselves making their own little version of sandwiches. So, away they go, preparing sandwiches, which they made it appear were for delivery. Some cheese up the one worker’s nose, then on the sandwich was a highlight. The other employee was kind enough to narrate it all.
Well, obviously this was violating health code standards in a rather big way. And as a result, the pair find themselves facing felony charges while the company faces a major public relations problem.
Viewers saw it and were obviously disgusted. If you ran a Google search for “Domino,” you will be welcomed with plenty of hits about this video. Twitter is all a buzz with talks about it. And I realize lots of times you hear how any word of mouth is good for a company. I can’t say I am positive it is true in this case. If you are a restaurant, is that really what you want to be known for?
According to YouGov, a research firm which holds online surveys of around 1,000 consumers each day, the perception of its (Domino’s) quality went from positive to negative since last week. “It’s graphic enough in the video, and it’s created enough of a stir, that it gives people a little bit of pause,” said Ted Marzilli, global managing director for YouGov’s BrandIndex.
Paul Gallagher, managing director and head of the US crisis practice at the PR firm Burson-Marsteller says that what Domino’s is dealing with “is a nightmare. It’s the toughest situation for a company to face in terms of a digital crisis.”
It was a blogger that alerted owner Mr. McIntyre to the videos on YouTube. The woman, who identified herself as Kristy, films her co-worker Michael making the sandwiches. She proudly exclaims in the video “In about five minutes it’ll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating these, yes, eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami,” Kristy said. “Now that’s how we roll at Domino’s.”
Commentors from the site Consumerist.com used “clues” in the video to figure out the franchise location in Conover, NC, and contact the owner. The next day, the franchise owner fired both employees, identified as Kristy Hammonds, 31 and Michael Seltzer, 32. The franchise brought in the health department, who had him throw out all open food containers. McIntyre said that alone cost hundreds of dollars.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, people have to realize that what they put out there is actually viewable….it’s the internet people. Be careful what you say, or do, because you just never know who is watching. And for pete’s sake, don’t go shoving things up your nose past the age of two. I mean…what the hell were you thinking?
Readius, which claims to be the first pocket e-book reader, has a display that rolls out to enlarge the screen. It's ready to go into production, but CEO Karl McGoldrick says the company needs additional funding.
After making an unintended early debut on the LG Germany’s blog last week, the LG Viewty II - which, by the way, has been redubbed the LG Viewty Smart - is officially official.
Not much about a cell phone can change in a week’s time, so everything’s dot-for-dot with what we saw leak out last week. It’s still got an 8 megapixel camera, WiFi, 7.2mbps HSDPA, aGPS, and the “S-Class” interface LG debuted with the Arena and has used on every phone since.
While we don’t have carrier or availability info yet (outside of “Europe starting this May and then launch in other markets around the world”), we do have a video with extreme zooming and quick spinning camera transitions. Check it out after the jump.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
In a recent research report, Scientists have stated that Twitter and other social networking sites can actually be detrimental to your mental health. Scientists have stated that streams of information can affect a person’s morality and make them less adept at responding to news of human suffering.
The study was conducted by the University of California and the findings indicate that with these rapid fire news updates, it does not give the brain enough time to fully develop your emotions regarding the story. The study indicates that Twitter and similar sites do not give you enough time to reflect on the previous report before moving on to the next. This can adversely affect a person’s moral compass.
These Internet news feeds along with constant exposure to violence on television can allow a person to feel gradually indifferent about the suffering of others. The conclusion of the study was that there needs to be a slower delivery of the news in order to adequately digest the report. However, with the ever growing popularity of Twitter and similar sites, I doubt that will happen anytime soon.
Adobe announced that it will be bringing its popular multimedia platform, Flash, to televisions, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players and other home entertainment devices.
What this means is that internet TV providers will soon be able to deliver interactive content directly to your living room TV, without you having to attach a computer to that TV. The upshot? Hulu in your living room -- we hope.
Adobe says that the first devices with the new Adobe Flash Platform for the Digital Home will be available in the second half of 2009. The company has already lined up an impressive array of content and cable company partners, including Comcast, Disney, Netflix and The New York Times Company. Adobe also announced partnerships with chipmakers, including Intel, STMicroelectronics, NXP Semiconductors and Sigma Designs.
The company did not announce specific partnerships with TV or set-top box manufacturers, but those are sure to follow once the chips provided by the likes of Intel, STMicro and Sigma Designs reach the manufacturers of consumer electronics.
If you’re one of the few hundred people that attempt to climb Mt. Everest each year: don’t sweat it, you’ll still be able to text your peeps from the top.
Nepal Telecoms, a telecoms company which has a lock on some 60% of the Nepalese cell phone market, has announced that they’ll be taking signal all the way to the top by way of satellite antennas.
Climbers have always been able to phone home with satellite phone, but those things aren’t exactly compact, nor are they cheap. This will allow climbers to user the GSM/CDMA handsets they’ve already got. Certain select areas of the mountain have had coverage for a few years now (don’t go try and be the first to make a cell phone call from the summit - it was done in 2007) - but considering that the face of Everest is a relatively easy place to die, the more coverage the better.
Know who doesn’t have a Palm Pre? Me. Or you, most likely. Know who does? Angelina Jolie.
Presumably one of many celebrities currently touting Palm’s not-so-secret weapon, Jolie was recently spotted on the set of an upcoming flick with a Pre in tow. When the LA Examiner asked her about it, she “went on about it for about two minutes.” The goods? She likes the software (”better than the iPhone”), and the keyboard. The bad? The screen scratches easily.
This is the second pre-release report we’ve heard indicating that the Pre’s screen might be a bit scratch-prone. Come on, Palm: iPhone users post videos of themselves pitting their glass screens against razor blades and keys for fun. Can we get a screen protector in the box, at least?
(Oh, and if you’re wondering about the image to the right: Angelina Jolie is not tiny, and the Palm Pre is not huge. We’re just horrible with Photoshop.)
Economy bumming you out? Would you like a dual slider cell phone for absolutely free? Well folks, it’s time for another Gadgetell Giveaway! Enter now, because this contest closes on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009.
The Pantech Matrix Pro
Check out the Pantech Matrix Pro and its list of features:
Dual sliding keyboards
Audio and video player
2.4-inch display
2MP camera (also does video)
Bluetooth 2.0
Windows Mobile 6.1
What you could win
The Matrix Pro handset and a $100 (US) in the form of an AT&T gift card. You can use that card at any AT&T store (online or at a brick and mortar store).
How to enter
Landing this phone from Gadgetell is really really easy.*
Step 1: Register an account with Gadgetell and set up a profile.
Step 2: Leave a comment to this post saying why you would like this phone.
Step 3: Wait until we announce a winner.
*You must be eligible to win this contest. To be eligible you must not have won this contest on any other site and you must be a U.S. resident.
If there’s one web video platform that’s nearly impossible to escape from, it has to be Adobe’s Flash. YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, and nearly every other video hosting website uses Flash as a means of showing video. According to Adobe, Flash is currently installed on 98 percent of all computers. Apparently that number isn’t good enough for Adobe, they want us to use Flash everywhere.
How can Adobe expand the penetration of Flash if its already on 98 percent of computers? By putting Flash on other devices like TVs and set-top boxes. The move will be announced today at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, and Flash equipped TVs could come around by the end of the year. Flash could easily bring Internet services such as YouTube and Hulu to our TVs, or any other number of web services. It would allow for any number of applications that could make a TV screen useful for more than just watching whatever show is on, or what DVD/Blu-Ray/DVR content you’re watching.
The biggest complaint anybody has about Flash tends to be the fact that it’s so taxing on the system. Running Flash takes a lot of processing power, and a lot of battery power in notebooks and cell phones, which is why Steve Jobs never wanted it on the iPhone. How this will affect the TVs is unknown at the moment, but it wouldn’t be all that surprising if some issues of sluggishness pop up when using Flash. But, with Flash being the most dominant video format on the web, its doubtful if many will care, as long as they can use it to watch YouTube and Hulu in grainy-vision on new HDTVs.
Google has reported first quarter net earnings at $1.42 billion, up 6 percent from last year despite the recession. Not including traffic costs, it came to be about $4.49 a share. However, revenue did drop since last quarter, which makes Google’s top execs uncertain how to navigate its components in the upcoming months. To bring this point home, Google has stated that several key search terms, like bankruptcy, foreclosure and unemployment are at an all time high.
To remain competitive despite the recession, Google is looking to restructure some of its features to appeal to more advertisers. Representatives have stated that they may change many of the AdWords tools and look for ways to improve the number of ad clicks received. This is imperative since AdSense makes up about 30 percent of the company’s sales.
Android is performing well for the company as well and Google plans to continue to invest in Android related technologies. Predictions are that Android will make money for the company and be a part of their long term survival.
HTC’s second Android device Magic was due for a launch in the UK last week, but was delayed till an unknown date to make a few modifications under the hood. Earlier today, the Vodafone Website was updated and it looks like May 5 is the tentative launch date for the Magic in the UK and not May 1. (I wonder if Cupcake will rollout by then.) I won’t begin to dissect the pricing plans that ye folk have to deal with across the pond, but the Magic is free.
I don’t see the point of purchasing any new phone on Sprint with the launch of the Palm Pre looming, but if you’re itching to get something new because your old phone was dropped in the toilet after a drunken night out this weekend then I’ll have you know that the mini Instinct is now available.
For $130 ($100MIR) you can get this little monstrosity of a touch-screen device that’s essentially a baby Instinct but now supports 32GB microSDHC cards. Because, you know, those are really affordable right now and everyone has them.
Yesterday the New York Times (NYT) won five Pulitzer Prizes, and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears.
Co-CEO Wenda Millard is out at at Martha Stewart Living OmniMedia (MSO). The company will not replace her but will divvy up her responsibilities among its current execs, including Martha Stewart herself.
Sal sez, "Three years after Cory's novel 
Verizon has recently opened up their mobile DVR control page that will allow FiOS users to control and manage their DVR from any web connection. I should point out that this was previously available, however only through a few Verizon phones, the good news is that now it is open for everyone. 
Online retail juggernaut 
Here you’ll find the live video stream from Geek’n Rolla, a day-long conference created by 
“Punked” is one of those words that started out as a slang term, but was taken to a whole new level by a pop culture moment — in this case, the MTV show Punk’d. But as quickly as it heated up in 2003, it quickly burned out, lasting just 4 years. But the company behind it, Ashton Kutcher’s 
The One Laptop Per Child project is humming along, and while the 
With too many companies to list battling it out for users in the live mobile video broadcasting space, spreading the word is key. Most people just don’t realize such a thing is possible; outside of geekier circles, the entire concept is still fairly new. Stream a live video from your handset and send the link off to some friends that don’t lurk blogs and social sites all day - chances are they’ll be more amazed by the fact that you’re streaming live video from a phone than they are by the content.
Smartphones are capable of so much, yet mostly all they do is pass on audio streams and squirt a few text characters at each other. Wouldn’t you like to have a “determine baby’s gender” app? Great for settling bets.
Back in January when 
A new report is revealing that most federal agencies aren’t following security protocols that could prevent phishing attacks. The report by the Online Trust Alliance, a group of security companies working to fight email and Internet fraud, found that 56% of the 25 agencies it studied did not authenticate emails or domain names, leaving themselves open to phishing attacks. 
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
: Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
A study by Verizon Business revealed that organized crime was behind more than 90% of all data breaches. The company investigated 90 data breaches that exposed over 280 million records. 
I can’t deny the fact that Mophie knows how to make stylish accessories for the iPhone, but after a lackluster experience with the original Juice Pack for the iPhone 3G I’m wondering if the air will fair any better.
Quick Version: The 
Economy bumming you out? Would you like a dual slider cell phone for absolutely free? Well folks, it’s time for another Gadgetell Giveaway! Enter now, because this contest closes on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009. 
