AP - Sprint Nextel Corp., the nation's third-largest wireless service provider, on Monday reported a larger first-quarter loss on declining revenue and a charge for job cuts announced in January. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 May 2009 | 12:08 pm
Hugh Pickens writes "MSNBC reports that in 1969 Walter T. Davey, an aeronautical engineer at North American Rockwell discovered he was being overpaid by roughly 2 cents an hour, or one-third of 1 percent of his pay. Davey submitted the discovery to his superiors and suggested a simple fix. 'It was so simple to correct,' said Davey, a 79-year-old retired Air Force colonel, 'just change a few digits in the coding software.' The Project on Government Oversight, which reviewed Davey's findings last year, estimated the change could save taxpayers $270 million a year. Multiply by 40 years — the length of time since Davey made his discovery — and the figure grows to an astounding $10.8 billion. Legislators ignored Davey's letters, federal auditors deferred to Congress, and lobbyists 'descended on it and tore it into a piece of Swiss cheese' but legislators aren't eager to challenge the powerful defense lobby about a figure that's a relative pittance in the overall defense budget — even if it exceeds $100 million annually. 'A lot of people have taken advantage of the system to reap as much in taxpayer dollars as possible,' says Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight. 'But when you're going up against the contractor lobby — whether you're an individual across the country or a public interest group or a government employee — it's a tough road.'"
Semiconductor luminaries honored at a black-tie ceremony in Silicon Valley Saturday night didn’t get a lot of time on stage. Most posed a few seconds for a photo with their award, said a few words about how honored they were, and left the stage. Andy Grove couldn’t resist doing a little more, including comparing commerce in patents to the actions that brought down Wall Street.
Intel’s (INTC) former chief executive and chairman was given a lifetime achievement award by the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame. The group helped celebrate the 50-year history of the semiconductor by inducting 15 chip innovators Saturday, along with a description of their seminal patent and its number.
InfoWorld - SpringSource, developer of the open source Spring Framework for Java application development, has acquired Hyperic, an open source Web application and infrastructure management vendor. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 May 2009 | 12:01 pm
Oregon-based Dark Horse Comics has finally made its way onto a mobile platform with the its first iPhone App today. With the upcoming release of Terminator Salvation, Dark Horse has pulled out a classic from the archives for its first foray with The Terminator. It was originally published in 1998 and the entire four-part series of The Terminator: Death Valley is available now for $0.99 each. Other Dark Horse titles will be released in the future so be sure to check out the Dark Horse Mobile page often.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
By Andrew Liszewski According to the Telegraph, many believe that the image above, which was snapped by one of the panoramic cameras on the Spirit Rover, shows a Martian skull, complete with eye sockets... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 11:47 am
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Sprint Nextel Corp., the nation's third largest wireless service provider, says it had a larger first-quarter loss on declining revenue, continuing customer losses and... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 May 2009 | 11:45 am
I think Silicon Valley has been toppled from its pedestal. I think information technology is much less important in the global picture today than it was even 10-20 years ago.
This is the “Cyclone”, a chainless penny-farthing-alike which proves that odd bike designs are far from a modern phenomenon.
Or rather, it’s a serving tray with an old Cyclone ad on it, which itself proves that there is no corner of Catalonia I can enter without finding a Gadget Lab-worthy object. This one was found in a village in the depths of Penedés (and yes, we know that this poster is in French).
The Cyclone solves one of the main problems with the penny farthing design — a very high “gear” ratio — with an extra cog. Imagine a single turn of your pedals equalling a single turn of the wheels and you’ll immediately see the problem, a problem which gets bigger with such huge wheels. The intervening cog, which should step down the geas somewhat, doesn’t appear to be large enough to be very useful, but it’s better than nothing.
This picture also, we think, has something to do with the origin of the term ”moustache handlebars”. Take a look at the similarity between facial hair and steering device.
May 4 (Reuters) - The Pepsi Bottling Group Inc said on Monday its board has rejected a proposal by PepsiCo ,citing the offer as "grossly inadequate." Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 May 2009 | 11:20 am
STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - The body in charge of assigning Internet addresses such as .com and .net should be shorn of its U.S. government links from October and made fully independent, Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 May 2009 | 11:18 am
SHANGHAI, May 4 (Reuters) - A Chinese investor group said on Monday it may sweeten its offer to acquire ringtone provider Hurray Holding Co Ltd if there is a rival bidder, but urged the U.S.-listed firm... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 4 May 2009 | 11:07 am
The name of Ani Niow's SteamVibe suggests. Catching sight of the thing itself sends an eyebrow heaven-ward. Finally, the name of the Flickr set sweeps away any remaining ambiguity: steampunk vibrator.
You're probably asking, does it really work? the answer is you betcha. its been proven to work (and vibrate) off of compressed air, I'm seeking a more powerful boiler than my pressure cooker so I can actually run it off of steam so please let me know if you know of one.
More photos, and details of its construction, are at The Lady Cartoonist: "[It's] machined out of a solid hunk of stainless steel (no easy task), and fitted with the world's itty-bittiest Tesla Turbine."
A steampunk robot penis machined in similar fashion to current-gen MacBooks? I think someone divided the Internet by zero.
It looks like we are getting a little closer to seeing the launch of the highly anticipated Palm Pre. According to a recent posting over on the Sprint Gurus user forums training is scheduled to begin very soon. In fact, it is just a few days away now on May 6. It looks like the classes are also going to be highly guarded, and the students employees will be required to hand over all phones, cameras, iPods, etc. before entering.
“As I’m sure you are already aware, the details of the Pre phone have been a closely guarded secret, and we’re proud of that. We’re excited to have reached a point where we can now share with you the details you need to know to support the product. However, this does not mean that our level of security has changed. In fact, we’re asking you to join the ranks of people who will keep the secret.”
“Before we end this training course, please remember that you signed a non-disclosure agreement at the beginning of class today. It is important to not share what you have learned here today with anyone until the Pre phone launches and we begin supporting customers. If customers or friends ask about the phone, direct them to www.sprint.com/palmpre or the Palm Website (www.palm.com) for the latest information.”
They will also, as noted in the above quote, be required to sign a NDA. Another item to note from these training classes is that each session will include one Palm pre setup and only five students, which should be good for their hands on time, which will hopefully mean that these employees will be able to effectively talk about, suggest and in-turn sell the Palm pre once it is available.
So, what does this mean for all of us who are simply waiting for a release to get some hands on time? Nothing really because a release date still has not been made official. It does however suggest that we are getting closer to finding out that information. Now, let’s just hope that a release date follows soon, and if nothing else that some employees feel the need to leak some goodies from their classes. Of course, if any Sprint employee is reading this, feel free to send anything my way.
Reuters - The body in charge of assigning Internet addresses such as .com and .net should be shorn of its U.S. government links from October and made fully independent, the European Union's information society chief said on Monday. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 May 2009 | 10:57 am
You want to get nuts? Come on! Let's get nuts! -- Michael Keaton, in Batman (1989) Typically amusing new Malcolm Gladwell piece in the current New Yorker on how "David... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:52 am
By Andrew Liszewski A company called Leviathan Energy has come up with a clever way to improve the efficiency of wind turbines, without making any modifications to the turbines or propellers themselves... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:51 am
The Sap Cap's crown conceals a "unique impact material," which makes it a powerful and discrete weapon in the hands of a master.
This standard baseball cap can be used as a blackjack or sap. Just use the bill as the handle and the cap as an impact weapon. The secret of the Sap Cap is the pocket of a unique impact material that is 110% the density of lead and will not rust. Velcro adjustment.
Good, one supposes, for self-defense in those places where the customary equipment is not legal. And it's cheap, too: it's $30. One reviewer, however, offers an explanation why:
It's a standard 6 panel Velcro closure hat but the panels were uneven making the entire hat lopsided. What good is a self defense hat if you'd never wear it? ... It does what it says, it just looks terrible and fits uncomfortably while doing it
Just because a few people keep asking, a screenshot of every Firefox add-in currently running at iGreed HQ. Check 'em all, after the break: Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:43 am
Amazon is on the cusp of busting out a new, large format Kindle. The new e-ink device could be here this week and be big enough to read magazine and newspaper layouts without too much dickering with their designs.
This is the claim made in yesterday’s New York Times, citing “people briefed on the online retailer’s plans.”
Unfortunately, the story then goes off into a kind of newspaper fantasy land, full of unicorns, marshmallows and time-reversals. The big hope for the Big Kindle is that it will somehow reverse the fortunes of the the spluttering print news industry, allowing publishers to charge subscription fees and load their pages with advertising, even though everyone with an internet connection can get the same content free.
The move by newspapers and magazines to make their material freely available on the Web is now viewed by many as a critical blunder that encouraged readers to stop paying for the print versions.
And:
Publishers could possibly use these new mobile reading devices to hit the reset button and return in some form to their original business model: selling subscriptions, and supporting their articles with ads.
This is, apparently, serious. The trouble with this business “model” is that it forgets that there is an internet, while at the same time using that same internet as a convenient distribution system an order of magnitude cheaper than pulping trees, running them through a building-sized press and then moving them around the country in trucks. As others have written, news won’t go away if newspapers go away. The format of a print newspaper is dictated not by the content (the news) but by the technological limits of its production and distribution.
The NYT piece mentions, in passing, the real market for a large-format e-book: Text books. Not only would a big Kindle be easier to carry than a back-breaking rucksack full of college books, it would probably be cheaper. Cheaper, that is, if only the publishers would relent and stop overcharging for downloaded material.
For they, too, profit from scarcity, just like the newspapers, and scarcity no longer exists in a digital world. Charging $100 for a ones-and-zeros version of a $100 book is obviously nonsense, as the record labels found out when they lost their own industry to piracy. And the market here is college students, apparently the most voracious pirates of all. Catch them quick, textbook makers. Subsidize this new Kindle, make the books way cheaper than they are in print and allow students to re-sell them when they’re done, like they can now. Otherwise those students won’t be paying for your books at all.
Finally, while a large-screen Kindle would be very welcome, Amazon should perhaps start selling the regular Kindle outside the US. Just saying, is all.
Update: It looks like the story is true. Amazon has started sending out invites for a press even this Wednesday.
The last time Amazon (AMZN) held a press conference in New York City was in February, when it introduced the Kindle 2.0. Now it is scheduling one for Wednesday morning at Pace University in lower Manhattan.
Expect a new, large format device that’s optimized for reading newspapers and magazines.
Here’s the full text of the invitation that just showed up in my inbox:”We’d like to invite you to an Amazon.com press conference scheduled for Wednesday, May 6 at 10:30 am ET. The press conference is scheduled to take place at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, located at 3 Spruce Street, New York City. Doors will open for registration at 9:30 am ET.”
Say this for whoever’s organizing Amazon’s product announcements — they’ve got a nice sense of whimsy. Amazon showed off Kindle 2.0 at the Morgan Library. And Pace University, located just next to the Brooklyn Bridge, sits on the site of the New York Times (NYT)’s 19th century headquarters. The Times, according to the Times, is partnering with Amazon on the new gadget.
Amazon currently sells a monthly subscription to the Times for $14 a month. That version has less features than the paper’s free Website — no video, no color photography, and it’s updated just once a day — but some of the early adopting Kindle users seem to like it. In February, the paper said Kindle subscriptions were a “modest” business.
Amazon is one of several players with plans for a new, large-format device that’s supposedly optimized for newspapers and magazines. News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site, has said it’s interested, and fellow publisher Hearst is already working on its own. And here’s a list of entrants you haven’t heard of.
Can a new Kindle — or any other device — reverse the fortunes of print publishing industry? Nope: It doesn’t matter how you deliver the information, if you can’t afford to generate it in the first place. And the industry’s more sober executives understand that.
But if Kindle-like devices really do take off, they will be a natural platform for whatever version of the publishing industry survives. The question facing publishers: Do you try to create your own platform from scratch, so you can control your own distribution? Or hop aboard the industry leader, and accept that you may end up in the position the music business is in, where one outlet — Apple’s iTunes (AAPL) store — dominates the business?
Pocket God, a popular iPhone game that depicts the torture and murder of "primitive islanders" has been labelled disgusting and degrading by Pacific people, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. Indigenous... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:21 am
IPhone application developers say a problem with Apple's online application store means they are feeling the pinch. stuff reports. Layton Duncan, director of Christchurch application developer Polar... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:08 am
(TrendHunter.com) British biannual publication .Cent Magazine leaves the poor model hanging high and dry in this intense editorial from their Spring/Summer 2009 issue. Photographer Manuel Vason captured... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 4 May 2009 | 10:00 am
The product name of the week award goes to Nobis for its adjustable hat tech, called Caps_Lock. The widget, which looks a lot like the brain-holes into which long sensors are shoved in the Matrix, is a simple twisting knob which adjusts the length of an internal strap.
The Caps_Lock means that one-size-fits-all is actually a true statement rather than a tricksy marketing lie, and Nobis is proud of the money-saving fact that it only has to make one size of each cap. Further, you can crank the hat tighter on windy days, or when speeding along the beach-side boardwalk on your bike, and loosen it for those sweat-inducing poker games.
The strap is internal, so the cap appears to change in size, an improvement over the usual strap at the back which merely cinches the circumference. Available now, with equally great product names such as Al Koholic and Angus Beef. Prices vary wildly like all clothing, but expect to pay over $40.
Classic interactive flipbook Myst is now avaialble for just $6 on the AppStore -- as a colossal 730 megabyte download that requires 1.5GB of empty space to install! Scenes are newly rendered for the iPhone and iPod, you can swipe to move, and all the movies and other features of the original are present. [AppStore via 9to5Mac]
CrunchGear's Peter Ha reviews Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FX37, with an eye to finding a good high-quality concealed carry model. Smaller and cheaper than its supreme point 'n' shoot, the LX, this is from the range that gets rebadged as Leica's C-Lux. On the spec sheet are a wide angle f/2.8 lens, 4x optical zoom, 720p video, face tracking, "Intelligent ISO" and many specialty screen modes. But what are the pictures like?
Image Quality - The big fat MINUS for this camera, not a very strong point at all.
And yet he recommends it: "I absolutely love this Panny." Why? Read on.
Hail Mary - noun: A long forward pass in football, esp. as a last-ditch attempt at the end of a game, where completion is considered unlikely.
New reports have several companies on the verge of releasing large screen electronic readers designed specifically for reading newspaper content. The first such product may be unveiled as soon as this week -- a large screen version of Amazon's Kindle. This is setting up a lot like the newspaper industry's Hail Mary. And it's a pass they won't catch.
The industry has been hit worse than anyone else by the ad spending slow down in our current recession. Almost all of the major newspaper companies are bleeding, and this week The New York Times Company may have to close the Boston Globe -- a huge metropolitan newspaper. It's sad. Some of the best journalistic work throughout this country's history has been done through newspapers. But if these companies really are putting their faith in a large screen Kindle to save them, it may be time to start mourning them for real.
Hail Mary - noun: A long forward pass in football, esp. as a last-ditch attempt at the end of a game, where completion is considered unlikely.
New reports have several companies on the verge of releasing large screen electronic readers designed specifically for reading newspaper content. The first such product may be unveiled as soon as this week — a large screen version of Amazon’s Kindle, which we first reported on last year. This is setting up a lot like the newspaper industry’s Hail Mary. And it’s a pass they won’t catch.
The industry has been hit worse than anyone else by the ad spending slow down in our current recession. Almost all of the major newspaper companies are bleeding, and this week The New York Times Company may have to close the Boston Globe — a huge metropolitan newspaper. It’s sad. Some of the best journalistic work throughout this country’s history has been done through newspapers. But if these companies really are putting their faith in a large screen Kindle to save them, it may be time to start mourning them for real.
The idea that a large screen Kindle (or any similar device) could save newspapers is a joke — and one that perhaps shows these newspapers do not even know their own killer. It’s not the “paper” part of newspaper that’s the problem, it’s the “news.” As in, newspapers are way too slow at delivering it in the age of the Internet. People are unsubscribing from newspapers because what’s the point of reading something in print a day after you’ve read it online? Sure, there are certain takes by certain authors worth reading later, but even most of those are now online first. And of course there is something to be said for good journalism, but that is being done online as well — and can be viewed for free. For the most part, the newspaper industry as it stands today is the very definition of “a day late and a dollar short.”
Would the newspapers save a lot of money by literally stopping the presses, and distributing their content digitally to these readers? Of course, but they would save just as much money — if not more — by entirely switching to the online format. Some have already done that, but many don’t want to because it’s proven hard to make people pay for content on the web. But the idea that people are going to run out in droves to get these new giant Kindles just to have the privilege of paying for newspaper content is absurd.
Yes, some people are paying for the content on regular Kindles right now, but that’s only because that device has a gateway drug: Books. Books have proven to be popular in electronic format (beyond Kindle, just look at the iPhone eBook sales to prove it). But books are fundamentally different from newspapers. There isn’t a free online equivalent to books, like the newspapers have to contend with in blogs. People do not buy Kindles just to get the newspaper or magazine content, and they’re not about to start now.
In fact, I’d argue that it’s the much less sexy textbook business that could be the real key to this big Kindle. Textbooks are an absolute rip-off in print form, with many costing over $100 a book. If Amazon was able to offer textbooks on this large Kindle at a discount the same way it offers a discount on regular books on the regular Kindle, that would be worth the price of admission for just about every college student in the country right there. And a Kindle textbook reader makes sense because it would make bookmarking, taking notes and syncing all of those things up to the cloud, a snap.
But the number one problem with the Kindle is its price. At $360 it’s way too expensive for the average consumer to go out and buy. So how much would a Kindle with a larger screen cost? You’d have to imagine it would be more, if not significantly more. So let’s assume that it’s $500. And if it’s $500, for a device meant to read newspapers and magazines (in grayscale no less), it might as well be $10,000. Again, the only reason the Kindle is selling pretty well at its ridiculous price is because of books. Newspaper and magazine content will not mobilize users in the same way.
Speaking of mobilizing, one reason people still do enjoy newspapers is because they are very mobile. But who on Earth is going to want to take a large screen Kindle on the go? Sure, if it is also a tablet computer that has many functions, it makes sense to carry around — but again, just a device for reading newspaper content? No. And such a device, like the Kindle itself, is just a holdover until all of these devices start to merge. And that’s going to happen sooner rather than later.
So I implore newspapers not to put too much stock in these big screen Kindles. I know the options are awfully thin as to what can save you, and the Kindle is a potentially sexy savior; but it is not the answer. I’m really worried when I read articles like the one in the NYT that quotes high ranking print media industry folks as getting all excited about the possibilities with these large screen readers. This is a false hope, people — a Hail Mary.
People love to share photos on Twitter, so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see many independent application developers focused on facilitating just that through tools using the micro-sharing service’s API. Many of them have been submitted to us, and we wrote about a few in the past, from stand-alone services like TwitPic, Twitxr, Pixim to add-on services from photo sharing startups, like ImageShack’s YFrog and PhotoBucket’s TwitGoo.
Now a new contender, TweetPhoto, has launched its service and plans to go head-to-head with TwitPic, which seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack with over 1 million users and traffic going through the roof (sometimes bringing along the same scalability problems that plagued Twitter for years).
In a way, TweetPhoto is more like Posterous, which allows users to micro-blog by e-mail and also doubles as a photo sharing service with Twitter integration (at least the way I use it). The service lets you upload photos by e-mail, mobile phone or the web, and automatically posts links to the images on Twitter and Facebook. Conveniently, TweetPhoto automatically geo-tags photos and offers decent search functionality and trending topics, features that are currently lacking on TwitPic.
TweetPhoto also added a social layer which allows you to tag, favorite and comment on photos but also see who favorited and commented on your own photos. It also offers a way for users to embed custom widgets on their blogs and of course even boasts its own URL shortening service, dubbed Pic.gd.
Of course, there’s no guarantee more features means TweetPhoto will stand a chance against TwitPic and other services that have been around for years. People seem to be comfortable with using TwitPic despite its lack of features (which is being worked on, by the way), and I doubt more features will make them switch any time soon. That said, if you were on the look-out for a Twitter photo sharing app that offers that extra bit of functionality, I’d suggest you give TweetPhoto a spin.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
TEL AVIV, Israel, May 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Ceragon Networks Ltd.
(NASDAQ and TASE: CRNT), a leading provider of high-capacity, LTE-Ready
wireless backhaul solutions, today announced that its advanced FibeAir(R) IP
solutions are deployed by Stelera Wireless, a pure-play (data only) wireless
broadband services provider headquartered in Oklahoma City. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 9:00 am
TAOYUAN, Taiwan, May 4 /PRNewswire-Asia-FirstCall/ -- HTC Corporation
(TAIEX: 2498) today announced its total revenues for March 2009 were NT$
12,376 million, up 12.03 % YoY. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 8:58 am
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails; csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository; Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2; Sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list." Adds another anonymous reader, "You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors or via BitTorrent. There is also a quick review of the new features and upgrade instructions."
As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer's plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.
And who are these people briefed on the online retailer's plans? Why, his own colleagues at the Times:
An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company's relationship with Amazon.
I love how this hamfisted, parsing disclaimer comes across as Stone screaming at the top of his lungs: "HINT, HINT!"
There are two money shots in Brad Stone's report on a new Kindle coming this week with a larger screen designed specifically for reading newspapers and magazines. Here they are:
But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.
An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company’s relationship with Amazon.
First, we already knew that a larger Kindle was coming, so this news simply buttresses our original information with a modicum of rumor. Then Stone notes that he talked to his own employer - the NYT - and they didn't comment. As Joel at BBG writes, "HINT HINT!"
Palm's Pre, the first post-iPhone phone to excite The Media, will be out on June 7. This according to BGR's anonymous source:
Best Buy will be getting its hands on a limited inventory of Pre handsets for a trial launch on June 7th. Sprint will be direct-shipping the lot to arrive on the 6th and in total, about 4,500 units will be spread throughout Best Buy Mobile locations across the country.
The best part is the rumored no-contract price: $1,000. That would be a preposterous marketing stunt, as the Pre possibly costs less than $200 to manufacture.
Sprint 'n' Best Buy. Couldn't have picked a better pair.
If you live in the EU, you have 48 hours to contact your MEP and urge her or him to vote for the "Citizens' Rights Amendments" to the Telecoms Package. These amendments will keep the Internet neutral, restrict censorship and spying."
Jeremie Zimmerman sez,
Threats to citizens' basic rights and freedoms
and to the neutrality of Internet could be voted without any safeguard
in the EU legislation regarding electronic communication networks
(Telecoms Package). EU citizens have two days to call all Members of the
European Parliament (MEPs) to ask them to vote for the "Citizens' Rights
Amendments", in the second reading of the Telecoms Package. These
amendments include all the safeguards that were removed in the
"compromise amendments", as well as provisions protecting against "net
discrimination" practices and filtering of content...
There are two money shots in Brad Stone’s report on a new Kindle coming this week with a larger screen designed specifically for reading newspapers and magazines. Here they are:
But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.
An Amazon spokesman would not comment, but some news organizations, including The New York Times, are expected to be involved in the introduction of the device, according to people briefed on the plans. A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said she could not comment on the company’s relationship with Amazon.
First, we already knew that a larger Kindle was coming, so this news simply buttresses our original information with a modicum of fact. Then Stone notes that he talked to his own employer - the NYT - and they didn’t comment. As Joel at BBG writes, “HINT HINT!”
So we know it’s coming, but what does it mean? Using the Kindle for newspaper and magazine reading is an exciting proposition. Circulation numbers are down and the most expensive fixed cost of making a magazine is pretty much all the paper you have to buy. Writers come and go, but you still have to run the presses daily. Cut that out and you have a fascinating industry.
However, will people pay for the Kindle version of the NYT? In my limited experience with Kindle distribution - I know that CG and TC are available on the Kindle, for example - it seems that smaller publishers won’t find a savior here. However, the NYT and magazines like Wired and the New Yorker, stalwarts aimed at techies and people who read, if not both at once, will win.
This is a brave new world, friends, that has such ebooks in’t. We’re coming up to a revolution - all they need to do is convince a quorum of dead tree readers to switch.
Trent Reznor, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails is pretty upset that Apple has rejected the latest version of his iPhone app. And rightfully so, the reason for the rejection once again points to Apple's inconsistencies when it comes to the App Store approval process. While we pointed that out yesterday, Reznor pulls no punches in pointing it out today, in the NIN's forums.
Here's what Reznor had to say (warning, it gets pretty graphic):
Now, "The Downward Spiral" the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song "The Downward Spiral" I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.
Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem - as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?
CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Africa is the only continent that still has a severe lack of telecommunications connectivity. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 8:00 am
Sumana sez, "Keith Allison visited Centralia, Pennsylvania, a mostly-evacuated town whose coal mine caught on fire in 1962. He took pictures and tells the tale."
There was no mining to be done after that, though there was plenty of fire fighting going on. The mines were flushed with water. Chunks of flaming coal were excavated. Shafts were backfilled and redrilled, but the fire refused to be tamed. In 1983, as the fire continued to spread, an engineering study was released that stated the fire could very well be burning for another hundred years or more and consume an underground area of roughly 3,700 acres. This spelled pretty dire news for the town of Centralia. Living on top of a raging mine fire was generally considered to be bad for the locals. Smoke, steam, and toxic fumes crept up through the soil. Water became contaminated. Trees died in droves and sat in barren patches of blackened, smoking soil that made the whole town look like it ought to be criss-crossed with trenches full of German and British troops locked in a Western Front stalemate. And then the sinkholes and fissures began opening. One nearly swallowed a young boy
whole, and people started thinking that maybe Centralia was a lost cause.
The celebrated "open source documentary" RIP: A Remix Manifesto has found a progressive, forward-thinking distributor that is making the film available as a download on a pay-what-you-want basis (alas, the offer is US only, due to the insanity of the film industry):
It's been a peculiar road to get to the point where we could release the film as a download, because obviously this is something we wanted to do right from the get go. But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn't undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away. So we waited a while before launching the various online permutations. The National Film Board [of Canada] put up a chaptered version during our U.S. premiere at South by Southwest in March, and we embedded calls to action into each chapter.
Around SXSW, we partnered with two American partners -- Disinformation for our DVD release, and BSide for the theatrical side of things. And at the first meeting I had with them, it became clear that we needed to go down this road. We knew the film would appear on file-sharing networks immediately and we knew the audience for the film wanted and expected it to be online. So knowing that, we wanted there to be a method for those who wanted to pay to do so.
Over on the Sire Records web site, they have a big page full of music videos from all their artists... Except that if you actually click on any of them to play, they've *all* been taken down for copyright infringment... by Warner Music Group, Sire's parent company.
Their long arm of the law has stretched all the way around the internet to spank themselves in the ass.
Hilarious!
Coincidentally(?), if you go to Warner Music Group's YouTube channel, the first many pages of comments are just angry users lashing out about deleted videos.
You'd think Warner'd be more receptive to people sharing and spreading advertisements for their artists. But they're in such a panic about infringment they've gone so far as to ban even the official videos. Amazing.
David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has discovered pedophiles don't want to waste their time just flipping through MySpace pages or Facebook pages. It's as futile as trying to call up random numbers from the phonebook and trying to get a date. It's just a waste of time.
They would rather go for the low-hanging fruit: young people hanging out in sexually suggestive chat rooms presenting themselves in a sexual way -- "Oh, I wonder what that's like" or, "If only somebody would buy me an iPod and a lollipop, I would be a very happy girl or boy."
If your kid is just texting his friends, or posting pictures on Facebook or AIM'ing, it's no more dangerous than them talking to each other as they walk down the sidewalk, or at the mall.
We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe John Paczkowski has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”
Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off on doing it for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.
It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.
Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.
We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.
But, like the digital industry and innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether is comes from Silicon Valley or not.
That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might either turn out to be a rocket ship or a shooting star.
They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.
And, as we always do, we will also be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.
In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-ups products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.
While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site, via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.
Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:
Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)
Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.
As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page.
FREMONT, Calif. and ISMANING, Germany, May 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SCM Microsystems, Inc. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 7:06 am
The other day my colleague Kee Malesky turned me on to an incredibly interesting article from the New Scientist website about the granting of patent 7508978. What’s so important about Patent 7508978 you ask? It’s the patent that explains how Google’s proprietary book scanning technology works.
In theory, the RSS reader is a great idea. Many years ago, as blogs became an ever-larger part of my news diet, I got addicted to Bloglines, one of the first popular RSS programs. I used to read a dozen different news sites every day, going to each site every so often to check whether something fresh had been posted.
LONG BEACH, Calif., May 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Printing on an Epson printer from an Apple(R) iPhone or iPod Touch(TM) is now possible using the new EuroSmartz, Ltd. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 7:01 am
At a time when large timeshare companies are feeling the pinch of the spiraling hospitality sector, Timeshare Rescue hopes to take advantage of displaced talent through aggressive recruiting.
DENVER, May 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Timeshare Rescue has defied hospitality industry expectations with its rapid expansion, revealing TimeshareRescue.BIZ, a site posting positions to recruit new employees. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 7:01 am
BEIJING, May 4 /PRNewswire-Asia/ -- Changyou.com Limited ("Changyou" or
the "Company") (Nasdaq: CYOU), a leading online game developer and operator in
China, today announced its unaudited financial results for the first quarter
ended March 31, 2009.
(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090402/CNTH020 )
First Quarter 2009 Highlights
-- Total revenues reached a record of US$61.6 million, an increase of 6%
quarter-over-quarter and 50% year-over-year.
-- GAAP net income reached a record of US$33.5 million, an increase of 15%
quarter-over-quarter and 120% year-over-year.
-- Non-GAAP(1) net income (i.e., net income excluding share-based
compensation expense) reached a record of US$34.4 million, an increase
of 13% quarter-over-quarter and 100% year-over-year.
-- Non-GAAP fully diluted earnings per American depositary share ("ADS")
(one ADS represents two Class A ordinary shares) were US$0.72,
compared to US$0.64 in the fourth quarter of 2008 and US$0.36 in the
first quarter of 2008.
-- Aggregate peak concurrent users ("PCU") for both MMORPGs(2) grew 16%
quarter-over-quarter and 47% year-over-year to 970,000.
-- Active paying accounts ("APA") for both MMORPGs grew 14% quarter-over-
quarter and 50% year-over-year to 2.27 million.
(1) Explanation of the Company's non-GAAP financial measures and related
reconciliations to GAAP financial measures are included in the
accompanying "Non-GAAP Disclosure" and the "Reconciliation to
Unaudited Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations."
(2) MMORPGs include Tian Long Ba Bu and Blade Online.
"I'm pleased to have delivered another quarter of record results as we
report for the first time as a standalone public company," said Mr. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 6:30 am
SugarStacks.com has photos of different kinds of food (both processed and natural) showing how much sugar is in the the food by displaying a stack of 4 gram sugar cubes next to the item. (Via Presurfer)
All are welcome to submit their favorite version of this spicy pickled delicacy and taste the competition. The people’s choice will win $100, second wins $75, and third will get $50. Bring 1 quart of your best Kimchi to CRITTER on Saturday May 9th at 1 PM. Tasting opens at 2PM.
All varieties accepted!
There will be ongoing demonstration of how Kimchi is made, and plenty of palette-cleansing white rice available. So even if you don’t have a favorite recipe for Kim Chee, or you’ve never tried it before—here’s a chance to try the best Kimchi at CRITTER.
An anonymous reader writes "A team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara have hijacked the infamous Torpig botnet for 10 days. They have released a report (PDF) that describes how that was done and the data they collected. They observed more than 180K infected machines (this is the number of actual bots, not just IP addresses), collected 70GB of data stolen by the Torpig trojan, extracted almost 10K bank accounts and credit card numbers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in the underground market, and examined the privacy threats that this trojan poses to its victims. Considering that Torpig has been around at least since 2006, isn't it time to finally get rid of it?"
PETACH TIKVA, Israel, May 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 012
Smile.Communications (Nasdaq: SMLC) today announced that it will release its
first quarter results on Tuesday, May 19 2009, before the market is opened.
On the same day, Management will host an interactive teleconference to
discuss the results at 09:00 a.m. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 5:32 am
PC World - How long does Microsoft plan to keep selling copies of its Windows Vista operating system after the upcoming launch of Windows 7? The company isn't saying. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 4 May 2009 | 5:20 am
Trent Reznor, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails is pretty upset that Apple has rejected the latest version of his iPhone app. And rightfully so, the reason for the rejection once again points to Apple’s inconsistencies when it comes to the App Store approval process. While we pointed that out yesterday, Reznor pulls no punches in pointing it out today, in the NIN’s forums.
Here’s what Reznor had to say (warning, it gets pretty graphic):
Now, “The Downward Spiral” the album is not available anywhere in the iPhone app. The song “The Downward Spiral” I believe is in a podcast that can be streamed to the app.
Thanks Apple for the clear description of the problem - as in, what do you want us to change to get past your stupid fucking standards?
And while we’re at it, I’ll voice the same issue I had with Wal-Mart years ago, which is a matter of consistency and hypocrisy. Wal-Mart went on a rampage years ago insisting all music they carry be censored of all profanity and “clean” versions be made for them to carry. Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart’s standards of decency - because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you’ll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any “indecent” material for sale - but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film “Scarface” completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?
You can buy The Downward Fucking Spiral on iTunes, but you can’t allow an iPhone app that may have a song with a bad word somewhere in it. Geez, what if someone in the forum in our app says FUCK or CUNT? I suppose that also falls into indecent material. Hey Apple, I just got some SPAM about fucking hot asian teens THROUGH YOUR MAIL PROGRAM. I just saw two guys having explicit anal sex right there in Safari! On my iPhone!
Come on Apple, think your policies through and for fuck’s sake get your app approval scenario together.
Below, find the rejection letter that Apple sent NIN’s developer:
Follow-up: XXXXXXXXXX
Dear Craig,
Thank you for submitting nin: access to the App Store. We’ve reviewed nin: access and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store at this time because it contains objectionable content which is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:
“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”
The objectionable content referenced in this email is “The Downward Spiral”. Since the app is live on the App store, please make the necessary changes to the application as soon as possible, and resubmit your binary to iTunes Connect. Thank you
Regards,
iPhone Developer Program
Here’s an update from the actual developer as well:
v1.0 is live. v1.0.3 got rejected due to content yet the app has no content in it. this was mainly a stability release to fix the bug that crashes the app for international users. the bug was fixed 24 hours after 1.0 went live and we have been waiting for apple to approve it ever since. meanwhile the app continues to get a growing number of 1 star ratings from international users understandably frustrated by the bug. but looks like our hands are tied.
apple is not allowing us to make the current app more stable because there is “objectionable” content online (yes on the internet). so we are essentially not allowed to fixed bugs unrelated to the issue.
we removed the song “The Downward Spiral” from the server, hoping to appease apple and get this bug fix through. however i have yet to receive a reply.
So NIN went as far as removing the supposedly offending content from its servers to appease Apple. Pretty crazy if you ask me.
Free Seminar May 7 Demonstrates How to Leverage BI and Visualization Best Practices
SEATTLE, May 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com), the global leader in rapid fire business intelligence software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/business-intelligence-software) and data visualization software, today announced that StrategicOne implemented Tableau to provide client-facing business dashboards and customer relationship management (CRM) analytics. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 4 May 2009 | 4:01 am
He may be dead, but this fall Vladimir Nabokov is back with a new novel, The Original of Laura—or at least the beta version. Before he died in 1977, the author of Lolita and Pale Fire asked his family to burn this last, unfinished work. But after three decades of soul-searching, his son, Dmitri, has decided to finally publish the unusual manuscript, written on 138 numbered index cards now yellowed with age. Nabokov routinely composed on such cards, shuffling and reshuffling the deck as he wrote. It was like constructing a puzzle.
As a boy in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov devised chess problems, played with codes and ciphers, and later wrote his own crosswords—devices that would find their way into his later fiction. The novels and stories are generously seasoned with acrostics, anagrams, number games, and whodunits, not to mention parodies, puns, and multiple layers of hidden allusions.
Codes and concealed meanings were central to Nabokov's worldview, says Brian Boyd, an authority on the writer's life and work. "Nabokov felt that the thrill of discovery was one of the highest things life had to offer," Boyd says. "But he also felt that ultimately the whole of reality seemed to be constructed as if by some great cosmic prankster."
Nabokov, the authorial prankster, buried Easter eggs of every sort for careful readers to unearth. Along with an enciphered line from Shakespeare ("5.13 24.11 13.16 9.13.5 5.13 24.11"*), there's a multilayered chess problem embedded in his memoir, Speak, Memory. And in his short story "The Vane Sisters," an acrostic reveals an unexpected twist. (Take the first letter of each word in the last paragraph and string them together to find the secret message.) Pale Fire, his involuted, nesting-doll of a novel, has enough riddles and trapdoors to fill another entire book.
Boyd is one of the few people who have read The Original of Laura, to be published in November. "There's pleasure in it, but at the same time there's frustration, because you know that this may be—what?—two-thirds of the puzzle, or seven-eighths? You get some of the satisfaction but also some of the frustration of incompleteness."
The finished book will include facsimiles of every card, on perforated paper, so that readers can reshuffle them. It's a perfectly Nabokovian concoction, a tantalizing puzzler from the beyond.
A few weeks ago, the Obama administration released controversial memos from the Justice Department describing torturous techniques used by CIA agents while interrogating terror suspects. Since then, media and news outlets have been saturated in moral discussions: Should the CIA have tortured the detainees? Should Obama have released the memos?
But few have questioned the media's self-censorship in reporting on these techniques while they were in use.
Flickr user Legofesto (who prefers to remain anonymous) was fed up with news outlets refusing to publish images depicting torture due to their graphic nature. So he recreated the images and first-hand accounts using Legos to protest what he saw as irresponsible censorship.
The use of children's toys is at once sanitizing and horrifying and many of the images have received thousands of views. We post selections from Legofesto's series here as a gallery, accompanied by remarks from the artist.
Legofesto: "During the initial invasion of Iraq, it became apparent how censored much of the images and reporting was. Stories were reported of human rights abuses in the name of "freedom and democracy," such as events during the first siege in Fallujah and torture at black sites, but the lie of a fast, clean, honorable war had the footage and images to go with the story.
"Until Abu Ghraib, barbarity on our freedom-loving side could be plausibly denied; afterwards, the truth that people like Dahr Jamail, Steve Vincent and Riverbend spoke of could no longer be dismissed as wing-nuttery or hyperbole."
Legofesto: "Playing with my boy one morning, putting Lego prisoners into the cells of a pirate island, I renamed it Guantanamo Bay, and the idea was sparked. Soon after, the images of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib were published. Yet perversely, some of the media balked at publishing such horrific images, saying they were too graphic to show. "
Legofesto: "I decided to try to show the horror, the blood, the fear, the murder, the loss of humanity in the faces of minifigs [Lego figurines], the 'everyman' of toys; thus [Lego] Abu Ghraib was recreated using the actual images or from the first-hand testimony."
Legofesto: "I only ever use actual Lego pieces (not other brands), a whole array of which are available: differing faces, bodies, utensils, weapons, accessories, printed tiles."
Legofesto: It all started in the run-up to the Iraq war. Here in the U.K. the sexing up of intelligence by the Blair government and the dodgy dossier leading us to war were massively contentious. Then, during "Shock and Awe," staring in horror at the TV screen, watching the bombardment unfold live on the rolling news. "
Legofesto: "As with 9/11, the immediacy of the images, the response of the people there, the horror in their eyes, was both riveting and appalling at the same time, and yet again, I couldn't turn away. I knew I wanted to make an artistic response to the War on Terror, but wasn't sure what."
Legofesto: "Sometimes I get ideas whilst searching through the bricks for other pieces. A facial expression on a minifig is reminiscent of somebody, or I stumble across a new part, and the idea spirals from there. I should state clearly and loudly that Lego in no way endorses what I do."
Legofesto: "All pictures taken with a Pentax K10D using mostly a Pentax A50mm f1.7, or an ancient Vivitar 135mmCF f2.8 lens. Lit by window light with a few ad hoc reflectors."
Legofesto continues to make Lego recreations of current affairs, which can be found on his Flickr page, and the actual sculptures have been exhibited in Great Britain.
The most celebrated inscription at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, used to be the biblical phrase chiseled into marble in the main lobby: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." But in recent years, another text has been the subject of intense scrutiny inside the Company and out: 865 characters of seeming gibberish, punched out of half-inch-thick copper in a courtyard.
It's part of a sculpture called Kryptos, created by DC artist James Sanborn. He got the commission in 1988, when the CIA was constructing a new building behind its original headquarters. The agency wanted an outdoor installation for the area between the two buildings, so a solicitation went out for a piece of public art that the general public would never see. Sanborn named his proposal after the Greek word for hidden. The work is a meditation on the nature of secrecy and the elusiveness of truth, its message written entirely in code.
Almost 20 years after its dedication, the text has yet to be fully deciphered. A bleary-eyed global community of self-styled cryptanalysts—along with some of the agency's own staffers—has seen three of its four sections solved, revealing evocative prose that only makes the puzzle more confusing. Still uncracked are the 97 characters of the fourth part (known as K4 in Kryptos-speak). And the longer the deadlock continues, the crazier people get.
Whether or not our top spooks intended it, the persistent opaqueness of Kryptos subversively embodies the nature of the CIA itself—and serves as a reminder of why secrecy and subterfuge so fascinate us. "The whole thing is about the power of secrecy," Sanborn tells me when I visit his studio, a barnlike structure on Jimmy Island in Chesapeake Bay (population: 2). He is 6'7", bearded, and looks a bit younger than his 63 years. Looming behind him is his latest work in progress, a 28-foot-high re-creation of the world's first particle accelerator, surrounded by some of the original hardware from the Manhattan Project. The atomic gear fits nicely with the thrust of Sanborn's oeuvre, which centers on what he calls invisible forces.
With Kryptos, Sanborn has made his strongest statement about what we don't see and can't know. "He designed a piece that would resonate with this workforce in particular," says Toni Hiley, who curates the employees-only CIA museum. Sanborn's ambitious work includes the 9-foot 11-inch-high main sculpture—an S-shaped wave of copper with cut-out letters, anchored by an 11-foot column of petrified wood—and huge pieces of granite abutting a low fountain. And although most of the installation resides in a space near the CIA cafeteria, where analysts and spies can enjoy it when they eat outside, Kryptos extends beyond the courtyard to the other side of the new building. There, copper plates near the entrance bear snippets of Morse code, and a naturally magnetized lodestone sits by a compass rose etched in granite.
"People call me an agent of Satan," says artist Sanborn, "because I won't tell my secret."
Photo: Adrian Gaut
The heart of the piece, though, is the encrypted text, scrambled, Sanborn says, by "a coding system that would unravel itself slowly over a period of time."
When he began the work, Sanborn knew very little about cryptography, so he reluctantly accepted the CIA's offer to work with Ed Scheidt, who had just retired as head of Langley's Cryptographic Center. Scheidt himself was serving two masters. "I was reminded of my need to preserve the agency's secrets," Scheidt says. "You know, don't tell him the current way of doing business. And don't create something that you cannot break—but at the same time, make it something that will last a while."
Scheidt schooled Sanborn in cryptographic techniques employed from the late 19th century until World War II, when field agents had to use pencil and paper to encode and decode their messages. (These days, of course, cryptography is all about rugged computer algorithms using long mathematical keys.) After experimenting with a range of techniques, including poly-alphabetic substitution, shifting matrices, and transposition, the two arrived at a form of old-school, artisanal cryptography that they felt would hold off code breakers long enough to generate some suspense. The solutions, however, were Sanborn's alone, and he did not share them with Scheidt. "I assumed the first three sections would be deciphered in a matter of weeks, perhaps months," Sanborn says. Scheidt figured the whole puzzle would be solved in less than seven years.
During the two years of construction, there were moments of intrigue and paranoia, in keeping with the subject matter and the client. "We had to play a little on the clandestine side," says Scheidt, who talks of unnamed observers outside armed with long-range cameras and high-intensity microphones. "We had people with ladders climbing up the walls of my studio trying to photograph inside," Sanborn says. He came to believe that factions within the CIA wanted to kill the project. There were unexplained obstacles. For instance, he says, "one day a big truckload of stone for the courtyard disappeared. Never found. I saw it in the evening, went back in the morning, and it had vanished. Nobody would tell me what happened to it."
Sanborn finished the sculpture in time for a November 1990 dedication. The agency released the enciphered text, and a frenzy erupted in the crypto world as some of the best—and wackiest—cryptanalytic talent set to work. But it took them more than seven years, not the few months Sanborn had expected, to crack sections K1, K2, and K3. The first code breaker, a CIA employee named David Stein, spent 400 hours working by hand on his own time. Stein, who described the emergence of the first passage as a religious experience, revealed his partial solution to a packed auditorium at Langley in February 1998. But not a word was leaked to the press. Sixteen months later, Jim Gillogly, an LA-area cryptanalyst used a Pentium II computer and some custom software to crack the same three sections. When news of Gillogly's success broke, the CIA publicized Stein's earlier crack.
James Sanborn buried his sculpture's message so deeply that a CIA staffer took seven years to solve just the first three sections. Here's what we know.
The first section, K1, uses a modified Vigenère cipher. It's encrypted through substitution—each letter corresponds to another—and can be solved only with the alphabetic rows of letters on the right. The keywords, which help determine the substitutions, are KRYPTOS and PALIMPSEST. A misspelling—in this case IQLUSION—may be a clue to cracking K4.
K2, like the first section, was also encrypted using the alphabets on the right. One new trick Sanborn used, though, was to insert an X between some sentences, making it harder to crack the code by tabulating letter frequency. The keywords here are KRYPTOS and ABSCISSA. And there's another intriguing misspelling: UNDERGRUUND.
A different cryptographic technique was used for K3: transposition. All the letters are jumbled and can be deciphered only by uncovering the complex matrices and mathematics that determined their misplacement. Of course, there is a misspelling (DESPARATLY), and the last sentence (CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING?) is strangely bracketed by an X and a Q.
Sanborn intentionally made K4 much harder to crack, hinting that the plaintext itself is not standard English and would require a second level of cryptanalysis. Misspellings and other anomalies in previous sections may help. Some suspect that clues are present in other parts of the installation: the Morse code, the compass rose, or perhaps the adjacent fountain.
But if anyone expected that solving the first three sections would lead to a quick resolution of the whole puzzle, their hopes were soon dashed. The partial solutions only deepened the confusion.
K1 is a passage written by Sanborn. "I tried to make it sound good and be inscrutable enough to be interesting," he says. Judge for yourself how well he did: "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion." Yes, iqlusion—one of several misspellings that Sanborn says are intentional. The second section reads like a telegraph transmission. There's a reference to a magnetic field and information transmitted to a specific latitude and longitude—geo-coordinates for a location a couple of hundred feet south of the sculpture itself (a spot where nothing of apparent interest lies).
K3 paraphrases a diary entry of anthropologist Howard Carter from his 1922 discovery of King Tut's tomb, ending with a question: "Can you see anything?" When Gillogly turned up that passage, he says, he had "the same excitement and exultation that Carter described. In a way, it seems that the plaintext is a metaphor for the work of the code breaker, or perhaps of the CIA itself."
The 97 characters of K4 remain impenetrable. They have become, as one would-be cracker calls it, the Everest of codes. Both Scheidt and Sanborn confirm that they intended the final segment to be the biggest challenge. There are endless theories about how to solve it. Is access to the sculpture required? Is the Morse code a clue? Every aspect of the project has come under electron-microscopic scrutiny, as thousands of people—hardcore cryptographers and amateur code breakers alike—have taken a whack at it. Some have gone off the deep end: A Michigan man abandoned his computer-software business to do construction so he'd have more time to work on it. Thirteen hundred members of a fanatical Yahoo group try to move the ball forward with everything from complex math to astrology. One typical Kryptos maniac is Randy Thompson, a 43-year-old physicist who has devoted three years to the problem. "I think I'm onto the solution," he says. "It could happen tomorrow, or it could take the rest of my life." Meanwhile, some of the seekers are getting tired. "I just want to see it solved," says Elonka Dunin, a 50-year-old St. Louis game developer who runs a clearinghouse site for Kryptos information and gossip. "I want it off my plate."
Making the effort more complicated is the fact that the puzzle maker is alive and, in theory at least, a potential resource. For years, there has been a delicate pas de deux between the artist and the rabid Kryptos community. Every word Sanborn utters is eagerly examined for hints. But they also have to wonder whether he's trying to help them or throw them off track. Scheidt says that this process parallels the work of the CIA: "The intelligence picture includes mirrors and obfuscation."
Photo: Adrian Gaut
"It's not my intent to put out disinformation," Sanborn says. "I'm a benevolent cryptographer." Some think otherwise, and Sanborn occasionally receives messages from people enraged that he knows the secret and they don't. "It's the fact that I have some sort of power," he says. "You get stalkers. I don't know how they get my cell numbers and everything off the Internet, but they do. People have called me and said pretty terrible things. There are some who say I'm an agent of Satan because I have a secret I won't tell."
Though Sanborn's usual practice is to stay in the background, every so often he feels obliged to comment. In 2005, he refuted author Dan Brown's claim that the "WW" in the plaintext of K3 could be inverted to "MM," implying Mary Magdalene. (Brown included pieces of Kryptos on the book jacket of The Da Vinci Code and has hinted that his next novel will draw on the CIA sculpture, a prospect that deeply annoys Sanborn.)
Intentional or not, Sanborn's comments (or lack thereof) seem to generate an added layer of confusion. Even a straightforward question, like who besides him knows the solution, opens up new wormholes. The official story is that Sanborn shared the answer with only one person, the CIA director at the time, William Webster. Indeed, the decoded K3 text reads in part, "Who knows the exact location only ww." Sanborn has confirmed that these letters refer to Webster (not Mary Magdalene). And in 1999, Webster himself told The New York Times that the solution was "philosophical and obscure."
But Sanborn also claims that the envelope he gave Webster didn't contain the complete answer. "Nobody has it all," he says. "I tricked them."
So, Webster really doesn't know?
"No," says Sanborn, who has taken measures to ensure that someone will be able to confirm a successful solution even after he dies. He adds that even he doesn't know the exact solution anymore. "If somebody tried to torture me, I couldn't tell them," he says. "I haven't looked at the plaintext of K4 in a long time, and I don't have a very good memory, so I don't really know what it says." What does the CIA make of all this? "When it comes to the solution," says spokesperson Marie Harf, "those who need to know, know."
If anyone manages to solve the last cipher, that won't end the hunt for the ultimate truth about Kryptos. "There may be more to the puzzle than what you see," Scheidt says. "Just because you broke it doesn't mean you have the answer." All of this leads one to ask: Is there a solution? Sanborn insists there is—but he would be just as happy if no one ever discovered it. "In some ways, I'd rather die knowing it wasn't cracked," he says. "Once an artwork loses its mystery, it's lost a lot."
The day I visited Kryptos, a rare snowstorm in Virginia had blanketed the courtyard in white. I circled the sculpture carefully, marveling at the way the colors and texture of the surrounding landscape affected the panels, as some character strings became highlighted in white and other phrases shimmered, reflecting the dull light bouncing off the windows. I examined all the pieces, brushing aside the snow to uncover the Morse code and the compass rose. It was like unearthing hieroglyphs in some ancient ruin. Agents and bureaucrats shuffled past, deep in thought, clutching cups of coffee from the onsite Starbucks. In their midst, Jim Sanborn's statement in copper, wood, and granite remains, proof that even in the house of spies, some truths may never be found.
Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) wrote about the 20th anniversary of the Mac in issue 17.01.
This fable requires you to pass judgment in the manner of a certain blonde-haired porridge junkie.
Goldilocks, as part of her punishment for pirating the Bear family's cable, was moving boxes around the basement. As she picked up a 16-pound box, she exclaimed..."Wow, this box is as heavy as a..." only to be interrupted by a trio of bear voices.
One said, "...my Blickensderfer Model 6 Featherweight typewriter, introduced in 1906?"
Another said, "...my Ericsson Mobile Telephone System A, introduced in 1956?"
Still another said, "....my Macintosh Portable computer, introduced in 1989?"
Given that the item Papa Bear was describing weighed more than 16 pounds, the item Mama Bear was describing weighed less than 16 pounds, and the item Baby Bear was describing was just right, which bear was describing which device?
Papa Bear described the Ericsson Mobile Telephone System A, which weighed in at a whopping 90 pounds, over 300 times heavier than the original iPhone. Mama Bear described the Blick typewriter, which weighed a mere 5 pounds, truly a featherweight; a later model would be the first electric typewriter commercially available, almost 50 years before IBM. Baby Bear described the Macintosh Portable, which was just right, although not to anyone who actually tried to use it.
A Florentine merchant drops a couple of "at" signs into a letter, becoming the first person outside a monastery known to use the symbol that will become a ubiquitous presence at the turn of the 21st century.
As promised, I went to go visit the Google goats today — you know, the goats that were brought in to replace lawnmowers in Google’s ever-expanding quest to go more green. I was told the goats would be in the big field at the corner Rengstorff & Amphitheater (on Google’s campus in Mountain View), and sure enough, I found a few hundred of them there. Apparently, the area was previously covered in 4-foot tall brush, but within a few days, the goats had eaten it down to basically nothing (as you can see in the videos and images below).
These goats, which were being picked up today and transported to their next gig (at Morgan Hill), will do this field-clearing once a year for Google, the herder on site told me. He was a bit concerned for the goats because a few of them got sick due to people feeding them flowers (which, apparently, are poisonous to them), he told me. PETA, would no doubt be concerned about the lack of shelter for when it was raining, and the electric fence that encircled the goats.
But all in all, it looks like the goats did the job they were brought in for, and were very efficient in doing so. Now, the question of if it cost Google more in both money and fuel to have the goats shipped over to the site versus what it would have been to pay some people to mow the lawn, is a different question. But hey, nevermind that, cute friendly goats!
Check out some pictures below and two videos below that. The Qik video has some more substance, but is much longer and is pretty hard to hear at points due to the wind.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Gamasutra has an interview with members of Off Topic Productions, the team behind the recent completion of The Nameless Mod, a Deus Ex modification that was in development for seven years. They talk about how they stayed interested in such a lengthy, unpaid project, and also how their vision for the mod shifted over the years as a result of experience and feedback. "We estimate that we recreated everything we did during the first 2 or so years because we got better. The plot went through 4 revisions in the first year and was continually tweaked, expanded, and revised. Most of it also simply came about as we experimented with the game and the engine and grew familiar with what we could do — originally we were planning something even more open and free-form than we ended up with, but when we realized how fundamentally the game was built for a completely different type of structure, we reigned ourselves in and adjusted our design. ... Also, I don't know if you ever go back and read what you wrote 6-7 years ago, but in my experience that's a great way to embarrass yourself — I spent a lot of time rewriting old dialogue to be less embarrassing."
Maggie Koerth-Baker was a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.
Today is my last day guest blogging, and I just wanted to drop a quick note to say thank you and let you all know how much fun I've had over the past couple of weeks. Y'all have been a great, thought-provoking crowd to share my book and my random ramblings with--almost like having coworkers again!
Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and may your Monday be less than hellish. Until the nude animal revolution comes, I leave you with these adorable photos of a hairless rat, and a hairless cat.
P.S., a couple people have asked how to keep up with me post Boing Boing. Best way is via Twitter, where I will point you toward various writing projects occasionally and try to be entertaining and informative (within a limited word count) in the in-between time. Thank you again. I hope to return to Boing Boing in the future.
The BBC reports that Norway is experimenting with a system that would let secondary school students take their school exams on laptop computers. According to the article, using computers for exams isn't new there, but it's been on fixed machines rather than personal computers that the students can take with them and use for other purposes throughout the school day. Having suffered through three years of exams taken on the awful SoftTest (inflexible, single-platform, ugly, buggy), I hope they do a better job — this is something that is all too easy to get wrong.
As a four-year-old, Brian Backus became captivated by the children stories told by Dr. Seuss, a neighbor of Backus’s aunt. According to Backus, Dr.Seuss’s tales inspired him to join the world of cartoon storytelling years later as a producer at Disney Interactive. Now, Backus is launching Kidlandia, web destination where parents and kids can create personalized cartoon fantasyland maps named for the people and places that tell a child’s personal story.
Kidlandia lets parents and kids create maps of a fantasy land, where the child is King or Queen of their own eponymous fantasy kingdom such as “Leenatopia” or “Michaelland.” You can insert family members or friends names into the map, so other areas of the land incorporate family members’ names. The map also features whimsical characters from horned Uniquills and scowling Grumps to long-trunked Yuhoos on the map.
Once created online, parents can order prints of the map for the child, which range from $40 for a small sized scroll to $180 for a larger sized, high quality, framed print of the map. Parents can order the maps to be printed on scrolls, that are easy for the child to carry around, or on canvas that is stretched over a frame to be hung.
Backus says that Kidlandia is driven by what he calls the “Disney Strategy,” which focuses on getting parents and kids emotionally involved with characters and a story line and then merchandising products about the characters and stories to kids who want to integrate the tales into their everyday lives. In Kidlandia’s case, each map tells the child’s own fantasy story, a personalized family story. Backus plans to add additional merchandise to market, including stuffed animals and puzzles. Backus says that there is tremendous revenue potential in fantasy games and toys for children and is hoping to share in a market where Disney makes billions each year.
Kidlandia is a creative idea and the price points for some of the maps are fairly reasonable. But there doesn’t seem to be any integration with the web to create a virtual world for kids alongside the product, which doesn’t make the site very interactive. Webkinz and Disney’s Club Penguin create virtual worlds for children to immerse themselves in a fantasy land, and have become increasingly popular.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Slatterz writes "Acer's UK managing director has revealed the day that Windows 7 systems are expected to begin shipping. Bobby Watkins said that Acer will start offering systems sporting the new Microsoft operating system on 23 October, confirming earlier reports that Windows 7 would ship ahead of Microsoft's original target of early 2010."
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
Ant writes with this depressing story about how public schools sometimes work: "This six-page Los Angeles Times article shares its investigation to find 'the process [of firing poor teachers] so arduous that many school principals don't even try (One-page version), except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare ...'"
Clearly there’s gotta be some crossover between people who like golf and people who need to prop a door open or this $18 “Golfer’s Doorstop” would cease to exist.
Sold by Vat19.com, the product description pegs the item as “the perfect gift for the lunatic golfer,” so you may want to leave the gift on the doorstep, ring the bell, and take off before there’s any trouble.
And if you’re a golfer who’s not already a lunatic, it won’t take long to become one as the putting area is an inch and a half narrower than a traditional golf hole.
kanewm writes with a snippet from Portable-Ebook-Reader.NET: "Samsung's new, highly portable e-book reader, dubbed 'Papyrus,' will be available in Korea in June 2009 and in the UK and North America sometime later (likely within several months)." As the site notes, though, this lacks some features of the Kindle, the obvious choice for comparison in the American market.
Officials said Saturday that the first swine flu virus in pigs was found in Canada. The pigs that were infected by a farm worker that visited Mexico. Dr. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 8:14 pm
You guys! Nobody panic, but the Apple Store has that image up that makes everybody go ape shit. What could it be?! The candy-coated iPod Touch 2.5?! The new iMacbook Tablet Mini Pro Classic?! The long-awaited Apple iPager?!! I can’t take the suspense!!!
Having your super hit song mastered with some sexy and expensive analog gear is an important part of the music making process. Of course you can do the mastering yourself in your home “studio”. Trust me on this: Having your song professionally mastered is a good thing and Online-Mastering.com does it even better.
Listening to music is fun. Listening to the same song again and again is fun too but only if it keeps your ears interested. Professional mastering is the key to that. Of course you need proper mixing, etc but in the end you need someone qualified and in possession of good ears to listen to your song and do voodoo stuff with it.
Online-Mastering.com is offering professional mastering service for those in need. It’s very simple to use their service: register an account, upload your song and wait. After a while you’ll receive an email once your track can be downloaded for a preview. If you like what you hear, pay online and receive the fully mastered track immediately. It took about a day to receive the master for the song I uploaded. Mastering a single song costs $120 and you get a discount if you want more songs to be mastered. In my case the unmastered song I uploaded got twice as loud than it was before. The vocals are clearer and better and the whole song is more in place somehow: it’s good to listen to it over and over again.
You can compare the unmastered version with the mastered one below. Oh and by the way we are launching a remix contest tomorrow with great prizes to win. For instance the best mixes will be professionally mastered by Online-Mastering.com
Last year, I covered the landmark SEC decision to recognize corporate blogs and potentially other forms of Social Media as a recognized form of meeting public disclosure requirements under Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) – in some cases. It was a significant validation of a widely recognized medium for sharing information between publicly-traded companies and stakeholders. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, among many others, successfully lobbied over the years for official recognition of blogs and the SEC finally took notice.
The real question is, did other public companies and their communications and Investor Relations teams take notice?
Just under a year later, all was quiet on the social IR front until recently. But questions are swirling. While PR, marketing, advertising, branding, HR, and customer service are rapidly adopting participatory communication channels such as Twitter and Facebook, IR has (wisely) observed the landscape to ascertain the risks and opportunities present within the new SEC guidelines.
It’s time to bring this discussion into the spotlight again in order to connect IR, PR, and legal in the dialogue that will prompt new policy and regulation to better serve investors, customers, and influencers.
Recently, I hosted a discussion on this very topic at the NewComm Forum in San Francisco. I assembled an expert panel that included those active in covering and defining the world of corporate disclosure in the era of the social web, including: Richard Brewer-Hay of Ebay, Bryan Rhoads of Intel, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and ZDNet, and David Gelles of Financial Times. The experiences and lessons shared in this discussion brought to light the real world internal concerns, challenges, and possibilities for integrating blogs, Twitter, and other social networks into the portfolio of disclosure tools.
In reality, social media is reshaping disclosure and the practice of investor relations. As the social web begets a human voice and genuine transparency, it also raises the risks of meeting and maintaining legal compliance. It’s true, the SEC has recently modified its stance on blogs, but as new social tools continue to innovate and gain traction, a gap may be widening between the ability for companies as well as the SEC to keep pace with a rapidly evolving landscape of social networks and the means to meet investor demand and simply keep up with all of the emerging opportunities for engagement and communication.
Analyzing SEC Guidelines
In last year’s post, I playfully tossed out the idea of killing the press release in favor of new electronic formats and hubs that connect stakeholders, not because I believed that the press release is dead, but because I wished to challenge legal and communications teams to expand their reach to the communities that currently grip the attention of the people they wish to reach – especially when the news is favorable.
According to the SEC, “As we have developed EDGAR to facilitate and promote electronic availability of information, we also have encouraged companies to make their Commission filings and other company information available on their web sites. We believe that company disclosure should be more readily available to investors in a variety of locations and formats to facilitate investor access to that information.”
However, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, the SEC published a 47-page report that outlines the boundaries for sharing information as well as holding companies and their employees liable for the information that they post on blogs, networks, communities, and discussion forums.
If public companies are not proactively analyzing these guidelines and establishing internal policies, frameworks, and penalties, then they are exposed to the dangers that loom in the form of overly enthusiastic employees who are enamored with new and shiny social tools and objects. One wrong, irresponsible or casual post, comment, tweet, or status update can produce a domino effect of consequences that have yet to establish precedence. While a tweet, for example, may seem harmless, the activity and response sparked by an update could result in repercussions that trigger SEC investigation and shareholder retaliation. Corporate and marketing executives who normally rely on self-restraint and common sense across the organization aren’t employing common sense at all.
Investor Broadcasting vs. Investor Relations
Traditional Investor Relations serves analysts, investors, stakeholders and influencers through a combination of strategic outreach and the ongoing distribution of material information using compliant channels. With the extension of the model to now include social networks and also the experimentation of publicizing personalities in the process, companies are potentially emphasizing the “relations” in IR. This opens up a particular area of focus as maintaining relations with analysts for example, is considered outside the realm of traditional disclosure. Engaging in conversations with investors in the public timeline (statusphere), on Web sites, and in the blogosphere, potentially place companies in jeopardy of backlash and legal action.
In a discussion with several corporate bloggers, social media strategists, and also IR professionals, how and when to engage in social media was a shared concern. While each were divided in their position on corporate brand versus personal brand when distributing information in social networks, they were united on two important fronts that set the tone for any organization exploring and documenting best practices for participation. The first contends with individuals, particularly those of influence, who share glaringly incorrect information that will most likely have a negative impact on trading and value. Every person I spoke with agreed that a public response in these cases is most likely necessary and that the tone of the response should introduce information poignantly and factually without added perspective or personality. In the instances when public discussions bash or question company decisions, news, or value, all were in agreement that these conversations are better left untouched.
As I mentioned in a recent article published in the Financial Times by David Gelles, “If the people doing social media for a company aren’t informed enough to do the right thing when using these tools, you’re in danger.”
Gelles explained went on to explain, “Companies are using social media to good effect in several ways. Through new dialogues with their customers, some companies are improving their public relations. With opt-in marketing, other companies are generating additional sales. . . . But when it comes to investor relations, it’s not clear how much social media can contribute. The SEC has strict guidelines about disclosures. Regulation Fair Disclosure necessitates that material information distributed through social media be consistent in timing and language with conventional press releases. Moreover, companies so far seem uninterested in using social media to foster new conversations with investors about their stock’s valuation. So while companies may be applauded for embracing new communication tools, there is little additional value that social media can bring to investor relations. Even if companies do use social media as an additional method to broadcast earnings or material information, at this point those efforts are more about public perception than investor relations.”
Integrating New Technology with What Works Today
Yes, it’s the company’s responsibility to reach people where they are actively seeking and sharing information, but the SEC also cautions communicators in doing so. Just because blogs, social networks, and micro communities such as Twitter and FriendFeed are the current flavors of our digital generation, their conversational roots and culture do not relinquish companies from their responsibility to share data in a way that complies with federal securities laws. The SEC guidelines clearly state, “While blogs or forums can be informal and conversational in nature, statements made there by the company (or by a person acting on behalf of the company) will not be treated differently from other company statements when it comes to the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws. Employees acting as representatives of the company should be aware of their responsibilities in these forums, which they cannot avoid by purporting to speak in their ‘individual’ capacities.”
Companies must not abandon or sacrifice the bridges and services that already effectively connect information to people today and also comply with SEC regulation. It’s the responsibility of any community-focused organization to use all of these tools and channels in a way that extends and supplements each other.
While press releases are among the top choice for meeting disclosure, they are not necessarily inexpensive and therefore encourage the exploration of new conduits. Companies report spending $15,000 - $50,000 or more per year on issuing press releases in order to satisfy Reg FD. Traditional and social solutions can also be considered as they are sometimes as or more effective than a traditional press release, especially in a recession where every penny counts. The sometimes-exorbitant costs of meeting disclosure have also fueled the study and technological evolution of corporate blogs, wikis, and social media releases. They represent exciting, modernized possibilities to adapt to and connect with constituencies and influencers in ways that some rely upon in order to make decisions and also process and produce content based on material company information.
This isn’t an ” either, or” discussion. The Wall Street Journal reminded us recently that corporate blogs and tweets must keep the SEC in mind. I’d also include that companies must ultimately keep investors and their communities in mind while using the SEC guidelines as the map in which to connect with them according to meeting disclosure requirements.
Playing by the Rules: Amplifying Corporate Reach and Resonance
There’s a difference between mandates and guidelines and it’s your responsibility to understand the nuances in order to comply with Reg FD, while not missing the prospects associated with new and influential online communities.
When you read the SEC guidelines, you’ll quickly realize that they do not provide specific instructions and boundaries that dictate permissible and prohibited procedures and activities. In its current form, direction is gray at best. However, analyzing the guidelines based on the framework implied by the SEC, as it correlates to the culture and interworking of any organization, provides a blueprint for constructing a compliant and most likely, more effective, communications infrastructure.
Companies will need to consider whether and when postings on their Web sites, communities, or networks are “reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public.”
While the SEC specifically mentions Web sites, forums, and blogs, it does not specifically name popular networks such as Facebook or Twitter – at least not yet. But that does not mean that they are excluded from the potential communications channels companies can use to reach stakeholders today.
The guiding principle is pervasive throughout the document and essentially advises that companies use the tools and services that reach constituents when, where, and how they rely upon receiving timely information, “In order to make information public, it must be disseminated in a manner calculated to reach the securities market place in general through recognized channels of distribution, and public investors must be afforded a reasonable waiting period to react to the information.”
Ebay is one of the widely referenced examples as it relates to disclosure and the Social Web. It also spotlights an instance when an individual employee is at the forefront of traditionally guarded and controlled information production and distribution process. In this case, Chief Blogger and Richard Brewer-Hay maintains a blog and Twitter account where his personal presence is as dominant as his affiliation with eBay.
In January, Ebay released fourth-quarter results and while listening to the earnings call, Richard Brewer-Hay posted live updates to Twitter. The legal team was alerted and after analyzing the medium, possible liabilities, and also associated potential, the team documented a series of 140-character disclosure statements. One tweet reads: “The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures.”
As its “internal reporter,” the company empowers Brewer-Hay to transparently share company activity to shape the brand and inject personality and perspective through a strategic and proactive outbound communications program.
But he’s not alone in his efforts to humanize the corporate voice in and around financial reports, disclosure and earnings obligations through blogs, Twitter, and other social presences.
Johnson and Johnson recently reported, for the first time, minutes from the company’s annual meeting via Twitter.
EMC Corp also uses Twitter to extend the reach for company news, while also tracking the opinions of employees, investors and peers.
Dell publishes Dell Shares, an investor relations blog that complements the company’s blog network dedicated to providing transparency and insight related to corporate activity, technology, and products. In David Gelles’ Financial Times articles, Dell’s Vice-President of Investor Relations Lynn A. Tyson acquiesced that she was initially reluctant to start Dell Shares, “One of the challenges on the blogosphere is disclosure. How do you comply with all the disclosure requirements in an environment that could potentially create more risk?”
In May, Intel Corp. will allow shareholders to ask questions via the Web and vote online during its annual meeting. But for now, the company isn’t yet integrating blogs and Twitter for use in investor relations until further research and analysis can provide a solid and meaningful connection between Intel and investors.
The Society of New Communications
Research tracks over eighty-one Fortune 500 companies that publish
blogs, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Chevron Corp. and General Motors Corp
with 20 linking to corporate Twitter accounts (not all are yet utilized
however). The SEC also maintains a Twitter presence via SEC Investor Ed and SEC News.
Corporate Twitter Accounts include (partial list):
Investor Relations and disclosure aside, every company needs a public presence and voice as it relates to Public Relations, customer relationships, community development, reputation and brand management, and product development.
Bryan Rhoads at Intel shared his experience and lessons so that others can overcome common challenges and hurdles within organizations seeking direction and ROI for social participation, “Start small, do the due diligence and have patience… and be fine with being a change-agent for the following year or two. At Intel, I had many serendipitous relationships and circumstances that allowed us to move forward with external social media. First, we had some pioneers in this space that served as natural allies and examples that we leveraged for a foundational framework. We also approached amiable members of our legal and management teams to build those relationships and to ensure that we had the proper strategy, risk assessments, process, etc. This air cover and due diligence allowed us to undertake a small pilot blog.”
Rhoads also observed, “We took the deliberate approach and philosophy that employees must have direct access to the audience without complicated workflows through PR/Legal. These needed to be “real” employees who had an information dense story to tell. A natural candidate for the pilot was our own IT Department, i.e. to have our own Intel IT managers talk about how they implement Intel technology and also show how we eat our own dog food through a “peer-to-peer” lens to other IT managers facing similar challenges, difficulties, questions, ROI, etc. Our IT@Intel blog pilot was a natural and authentic “in-the-trenches” story that resonated with more than just IT Managers. Its success then made it easier to expand employee blogging and social media in early 2007, where we had the process, the policies and the strategies in place to offer additional blog flavors such as Research, CSR, Technology and Geo blogs in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc. All in all, we have over 35 flavors of communities and blogs on intel.com.”
Corporate Voice vs. Individual Personality
Indeed, the SEC is recognizing company-sponsored blogs and networks, which can include CEO blogs and investor relations blogs, among other communities, as official presences in addition to company web sites, “Companies can use these for a variety of purposes, including allowing for the exchange of opinions and ideas between a company’s management or certain other employees and its various stakeholders. The open format of blogs makes them an attractive forum for ongoing communications between and among companies and their clients, customers, suppliers, shareholders and other stakeholders. Similar to blogs, electronic shareholder forums can serve as a means for investors to communicate with companies and each other and to provide investor feedback on various issues in a real-time basis, and we have adopted rules to encourage their use.”
These rules raise concerns as to the extent of transparency and humanization of the information shared, requiring a delicate balance between personality and objectivity. Remember, it’s not just what you do say and how, but also what you don’t say that can lead to speculation and movement based on interpretation and speculation.
For example, some eBay followers have noticed a change in tonality in Brewer-Hay’s tweets. But, if it doesn’t expose eBay to legal proceedings and still delivers information in a way people prefer, then so be it.
What’s important to realize is that maintaining a presence on the Social Web is not formulaic, whether it’s PR or IR. The answer lies in what matches existing company culture and also appeals to stakeholders in ways that they favor. The spirit of the Social Web seems to galvanize the presence of a person or persona, but perhaps interim corporate accounts could help ease the foray into unchartered waters for many organizations. This is all driven and steered by community feedback. By not participating or listening to communities across the web however, companies gain nothing in terms of value, advice, or feedback – no matter what stage of participation companies fall within. This is not the time to plug our ears and close our eyes in the hopes that this social fervor will subside.
Creating an Effective Communications Network
A critical theme within the SEC documentation is the stipulation that companies are more likely covered under the Fair Disclosure act if they publish information equally and accurately through a variety of traditional and digital passages. More importantly, companies should create a hub that documents all available mediums to receive information as it’s made public. For example, list all press release services you employ; provide a directory of relevant blogs with URLs and RSS Feeds; list Twitter, FriendFeed, FaceBook or other relevant social network profiles; share podcast links and presences on other audio networks such as iTunes; embed electronic documents and link back to host accounts such as DocStoc and Scribd; and also link to a traditional or social media newsroom if this isn’t already the directory where this information resides.
News and intelligence should not reside in any one place. Concurrently, new channels should not suddenly appear without proper attention and disclosure. The SEC advises the practice of writing and distributing Notice and Access press releases to alert stakeholders to upcoming material announcements and pointing them to the place of distribution. Notice and Access is the SEC’s attempt at helping companies reduce costs associated with traditional press releases, while still utilizing the tools they use today to receive information. Since these releases dramatically reduce the word count, they also minimize the typical expense per release.
The advantages associated with Notice and Access also extend well beyond the financial savings or meeting disclosure. Notice and Access provides a cost-efficient vehicle to condition investors and influencers towards any given format companies choose to prioritize, including corporate blogs and Web sites.
Wherever possible however, the operation of traditional and new media cross pollination enables companies to broadcast information to a distributed compilation of networks that deliver information instantly, serving the appetite for immediacy where people choose to consume news.
These are monumental times in which new regulation and interactive communication channels are established and shaped as marketing and legal teams reach accords based on their interpretation of Regulation FD, the migration and shift of investor consumption patterns, and the experiences associated with evolving corporate experimentation and participation.
New SEC guidelines are imminent and chances are they will cover some of what’s already been discussed in this article. The lessons shared here indicate that an ambitious program to extend corporate communications combined with a conservative, truthful, and unbiased voice may best serve the function of corporate disclosure and investor relations in the near future. In the end, while companies embrace the social web, its prevailing spirit may actually work against the desire or ability to fully engage in the very conversations that power and define it – at least from any dialogue that involves financial performance or material, undisclosed information.
Vincent West writes with this excerpt from The Register: "Spy chiefs are already spending hundreds of millions of pounds on a mass internet surveillance system, despite Jacqui Smith's announcement earlier this week that proposals for a central warehouse of communications data had been dumped on privacy grounds. The system — uncovered today by The Register and The Sunday Times — is being installed under a GCHQ project called Mastering the Internet (MTI). It will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers' networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency's Cheltenham base, 'the concrete doughnut.'"
The XLink Bluetooth Cellular Gateway is a $99 device ($119 for an upgraded model) that lets you pair up to three cellphones with your old landline handsets. Gadgetell got to test out the $99 BT model.
What’s Good:
The XLink lets you make use of the cellular plan you already pay for, thus eliminating the need for a separate landline. There is no monthly fee with the XLink, just the initial cost of purchasing the base. Setup is really easy - it took us less than 10 minutes to set up ours - and you can pair up to three cellphones.
It would be good for families and roommates who want to minimize monthly telephone bills. You can avoid dead spots in your house - just keep your cell in a spot where you get a signal and move around with your paired cordless handset. Also, if you still want to keep a landline, the BTTN model ($119) will let you integrate that alongside your cellphones.
What’s Bad:
The initial outlay of $99 or $119 may be a bit expensive for some.
What’s In-between:
There is no included phone cable with the BT model (BTTN model does come with a cable), so you will have to purchase one if you don’t have a spare lying around the house. The XLink’s instructions say that any paired cellphone must be within 10 ft of the base, which seems a bit short in range for our liking. Bluetooth items usually give you at least 30 ft. Also, the XLink doesn’t have the most stylish design.
For those of you using Skype, XLink has recently released an alpha version of XConnect software that allows you to make and receive Skype calls on any phone connected to the Xlink BT or BTTN. However, when we tried installing the new software, we got an audio driver error message. So, in theory this is a great idea, but it’s buggy. May be best to wait for the beta version.
The Crux:
If you’re looking to ditch your landline and you hate searching for your cellphone to answer calls while at home, then the XLink might be for you. Assuming it works as well for you as it did for us, we’d highly recommend it. The XLink Bluetooth Cellular Gateway BT model is available for $99 and the BTTN model is available for $119.
Well, it finally happened: someone used YouTube to help deliver a baby. Yup, a man in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Cornwall, to be exact) used the video-sharing site to help deliver his wife’s fourth child, a boy named Gabriel. (A nice, biblical name!) Yes, this is a crazy world we live in.
So the guy, one Marc Stephens, a 28-year-old Royal Navy engineer (not pictured: this is John and Kate Plus 8), began his YouTube hunt at around 10:30 pm, when his wife first started noticing that, um, something’s going on here. A few minutes go by, “how to deliver a baby” later, and bam! Newfound info.
Several hours later, young Gabriel starts his escape. Stephens, armed with his YouTube knowledge, delivers the baby, then goes off to hospital to make sure all is A-Ok.
Also, this story totally reminds me of a video we saw in 10th grade biology. I think it was called “The Miracle of Life,” and the baby just sorta… just sorta shoots out of there.
Skeptical hat: why not rush over to hospital as soon as your wife starts saying, “Honey, I think he’s making a break for it.”? (I should write dreadful sitcoms.)
Dot com meltdown survivor and restaurant reservation software company OpenTable had been a rumored IPO candidate for a while. Still, it shocked many when it finally filed its intention to debut on the Nasdaq back in January. What? Does this company just have a thing for market meltdowns?
There’s still no word on when OpenTable will actually price, but so far, the IPO is still on, signaled by the company filing its first quarter earnings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. What’s more: It had an OK first quarter. Revenues increased from $13.2 million a year ago to just under $16 million, and the quarter had a modest $366,000 profit. Last year’s first quarter came with an $87,000 loss.
Now that the markets have recovered, I’m betting on a pricing later this year. That’s good for me: I’ve been promised a sit down with the CEO once the quiet period is over. (Send me your burning questions!) And it’s certainly a much better thing for OpenTable’s very patient investors and venture capital as a whole. The National Association of Venture Capitalists is so concerned about the lack of IPOs in venture land that it recently laid out an ambitious proposal to change the rules.
But OpenTable is hardly an Internet homerun. It’s frequently described as a consumer Internet company, when really it’s a software-as-a-service company. The good news –for this moment in time—is that that means Open Table doesn’t have an ad model. It actually has paying customers in the form of restaurants using its reservation software and paying it monthly subscription fees.
But what software-as-a-service companies gain in predictability of revenues, they lose in big blowout quarters. In other words: Don’t expect this IPO to set the world on fire. Netsuite—a company with a far bigger addressable market, a better growth rate and more than three times OpenTable’s annual revenues– hasn’t fared well since its 2007 IPO, and so far Salesforce is one of the only SAAS companies to get to $1 billion in annual revenues. A business like OpenTable’s takes a lot of investment in sales and marketing to close a modest deal, and that will be harder as the company strives for more international reach.
But there is one way OpenTable could use this IPO to its advantage: Forget international expansion for now and use the IPO proceeds and new stock currency to acquire a real consumer Internet company or at least some star UI talent.
I’ve long criticized OpenTable for catering only to the restaurants, and not caring much at all for the actual diners. Just look at the so-called loyalty rewards system: You practically have to eat out every day of your life to get a $20 dining voucher, and points expire without any notice. They’d do better not to have a loyalty program at all. In short, for diners OpenTable has been a convenience but not much more. And since many restaurants call you to verify the reservation and insist you call them back, it’s not really even that convenient. Can you imagine having to call United after you’ve already bought your ticket online or call Amazon to verify you really wanted to buy that book?
But increasingly OpenTable seems to be inching in the user-friendly direction, and it turns out being the only player who knows exactly where you’ve dined, when, and what availability there is in restaurants near you at every moment can be a pretty formidable advantage.
Consider user reviews, a feature idea OpenTable only recently launched. My initial reaction was it’d be near impossible for OpenTable to compete with Yelp’s edge, community and UI savvy. But unlike Yelp, OpenTable knows where you’ve dined, when. Like NetFlix or Amazon can prompt you to review a rental or purchase as soon as the transaction has occurred, OpenTable now sends out an email asking for your thoughts. With some UI help and a one-click-from-the-email rating system, the company could get people in the habit of quick reviews and build a library of your tastes, tailoring recommendations in other cities for you, or even sell that data back to restaurants. It shouldn’t aim to get the same depth of reviews that Yelp gets. Instead, it should aim for breadth. A simple, one-click yay or nay on every place you dine that no one else can replicate, because no one else owns the reservation engine.
Here’s another edge that isn’t new, but was new to me: Because OpenTable’s software is at the host stand, diners can search for real-time reservations. Say it’s a Friday night in San Francisco and you’re wondering what restaurant you can get into in ten minutes. Before you’d have to call around blindly asking how long the wait was. On OpenTable you can search for immediate openings in a given neighborhood. Most online reservations sites have an hour cut off because the systems have to sync together. But OpenTable is the restaurant’s system. It’s the first time I’ve seen OpenTable actually do something for me as a diner that I couldn’t have done any other way, and the new location-aware iPhone app makes that functionality all the more powerful.
These are baby steps to the applications OpenTable could develop on top of its in-restaurant software edge if it hired some crack consumer Internet talent. Here’s hoping the IPO is a means to that end, and not just the final destination for a company that’s mostly spent the last decade playing it safe.
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The 26,000-person city of Ottumwa, Iowa claims to be the “Video Game Capital of the World” and is making a big push to become the location of the video game hall of fame.
The proposed venue will showcase 35 years of video game history, host world-record contests and, city leaders hope, put Ottumwa on the map.
The southeast Iowa city of 26,000 is best known as actor Tom Arnold’s hometown.
“We have produced some great folks like Tom Arnold, but the more we can do to brand our community and bring in visitors who will spend money here, the greater of a place it will be,” said Terry McNitt, who heads the Ottumwa Area Chamber of Commerce.
If you’ve seen the King of Kong documentary, you may remember Ottumwa as the site of the Twin Galaxies arcade where in 1982, Billy Mitchell set a world-record high score on Donkey Kong during the Video Game World Championship. The event received national TV coverage and put Ottumwa on the map as it pertains to video gaming.
Walter Day owned the Twin Galaxies arcade and became the official scorekeeper for video game world records. Needless to say, he’s very much in favor of the proposed hall of fame.
Ottumwa’s video game hall of fame will be like a walk through time, Day said. Visitors will get to pop quarters into old-school Pac-Man arcade machines or try out more sophisticated games, such as Deadspace, on XBox.
“You would be able to go for world records,” said Day, who owns Twin Galaxies, the official scorekeeper of video games. “This will become a very, very big vacation destination.”
A new landmark study published May 1 documents for the first time the process in which increased mercury emissions from human sources across the globe, and in particular from Asia, make their way into the North Pacific Ocean and as a result contaminate tuna and other seafood. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 5:51 pm
Drillship JOIDES Resolution completes first expedition as redesigned shipThe Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) drillship JOIDES Resolution is returning to port in Honolulu this week after a two-month voyage to chart detailed climate history in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The expedition was the first of two back-to-back voyages of a scientific project called Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT). It was the first international scientific drilling expedition after the JOIDES Resolution underwent a multi-year transformation into a 21st-century floating science laboratory.The PEAT expeditions are recovering a series of continuous historical records in sediments at a number of different geographic locations beneath the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The first research effort, called Expedition 320, took place March 5 through May 4, 2009; Expedition 321 will take place from May 5 through July 5, 2009.Co-chief scientists of Expedition 320 were Heiko Palike of the University of Southampton, U.K., and Hiroshi Nishi of Hokkaido University in Japan. On Expedition 320, scientists obtained records from the present back in time to the warmest sustained "greenhouse" period on Earth, which took place around 53 million years ago.Shipboard studies have revealed that changes in ocean acidification linked to climate change have a large and global impact on marine organisms."The sediments collected during this expedition offer an unprecedented window to the evolution of the tropical Pacific, one of the largest and most climatically important ocean regions on Earth," said Julie Morris, director of NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences."In focusing on a time period that includes some of the best analogs for abrupt climate change, extreme climate events, ocean acidification, and 'greenhouse' worlds, the results will give us insights into the potential impacts of future climate change."Environmental changes are recorded by shells of tiny microfossils that make up the deep-sea sediments."We can use the microfossils and layers of this sediment 'archive' as a yardstick for measuring geologic time," said Expedition 320 co-chief scientist Hiroshi Nishi."This will allow us to determine the rates of environmental change, such as the rapid first expansion of large ice-sheets in the Antarctic 33.8 million years ago. This polar process had a profound impact on phytoplankton even at the equator."We managed to retrieve several records of this important climate transition."Expedition 320 co-chief scientist Heiko Pälike said that "it's truly remarkable to see 53 million years of Earth's history pulled up onto the drillship's deck, then pass through our hands, and move past our eyes. We saw first-hand the effects of Earth's climate machine in action."For the upcoming Expedition 321, co-chief scientists will be Mitch Lyle of Texas A&M University in the U.S., and Isabella Raffi of the Universita "G. D'Annunzio" Campus Universitario in Italy.---Image Caption: Basaltic rock was brought up in sediments in this core taken from the bottom of the Pacific. Credit: Consortium for Ocean Leadership/IODP [ More Images ] Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 5:45 pm
Researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar (WCMC-Q) have mapped a draft version of the date palm genome, unlocking many of its genetic secrets."We have generated a draft DNA sequence and initial assembly of the date palm using the most advanced technology," says Joel Malek, director of the Genomics Laboratory at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 5:40 pm
Study outlines potential risks to native species and human healthWildlife imports into the United States are fragmented and insufficiently coordinated, failing to accurately list more than four in five species entering the country.So reports a team of scientists from the Wildlife Trust, Brown University, Pacific Lutheran University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Global Invasive Species Program.A paper on their findings is published in this week's issue of the journal Science.The poorly regulated U.S. wildlife trade can lead to devastating effects on ecosystems, native species, food supply chains and human health."As our world, in many senses, grows smaller and smaller with the ease of international travel, the network of connections has increased, facilitating the spread of diseases," said Rita Teutonico, senior advisor for integrative activities in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE).SBE co-funded this research through the agency's Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) priority area. HSD was supported by all NSF Directorates, and by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering and Office of Polar Programs."These scientists report a pattern of trade in wildlife that includes a very large number of animals, coupled with a poor understanding of what species are traded," said James Collins, NSF Assistant Director for Biological Sciences. "The findings highlight the need for further research because of the unknown effects these animals and their pathogens can have on native organisms."A global trade in wildlife generates hundreds of billions of dollars each year. The researchers report that during a six-year period from 2000 through 2006, the U.S. imported more than 1.5 billion live animals."That's more than 200 million animals a year--unexpectedly high," said scientist Peter Daszak, president of the Wildlife Trust, who co-led the research.The animals collected were from wild populations in more than 190 countries around the world, and were intended for commercial sale in the U.S.--primarily in the pet trade."This incredible number of imports is equivalent to every single person in the U.S. owning at least five pets," said biologist Katherine Smith of Brown University, co-leader of the study.More than 86 percent of shipments contained animals that were not classified to the level of species, making it impossible to assess the full diversity of animals imported, or calculate the risk of non-native species introductions or disease transmission."Shipments are coming in labeled 'live vertebrate' or 'fish,'" said Daszak. "If we don't know what animals are in there, how do we know which are going to become invasive species or carry diseases that could affect livestock, wildlife--or ourselves?"The wildlife trade has previously led to disease introductions such as the 2003 monkeypox outbreak following the import of infected African rodents for the pet trade."The threat to public health is real, as the majority of emerging diseases come from wildlife," said Smith. "Most of these imported animals originate in Southeast Asia--a hotspot for emerging diseases."The research team calls for direct measures to decrease the risk of such "pathogen pollution" and proposes guidelines to protect human, animal, and ecosystem health.Recommendations:Stricter record keeping should be required to inform risk analysis on animal imports.Third-party surveillance and testing should be established for both known and unknown pathogens at the exportation points in foreign countries.Greater public education is needed to educate individuals, importers, veterinarians and pet industry advocates about the dangers of diseases that emerge from wildlife and that can make their way to domesticated animals and humans."We need to look at all the factors that impact ecosystems--the whole picture," said Daszak. "The global wildlife trade is promoting a process that will impact our health and the health of the planet."---Image 1: The pet trade includes sales of tokay geckos, pictured here. Credit: Michael Yabsley, University of GeorgiaImage 2: Scientists swab imported tree frogs for a deadly fungus infection linked to amphibian declines. Credit: Katherine Smith, Brown University Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 5:30 pm
Researchers say sedimentary deposits from more than 20 cores in New York and New Jersey indicate that some sort of violent force, such as a huge wave, swept the Northeast coastal region some 2,300 years ago, BBC News reported.While some experts believe it could have been a large storm, other evidence is increasingly pointing to a rare Atlantic Ocean tsunami.The size and distribution of material would require a high velocity wave and strong currents to move it, according to Steven Goodbred, an Earth scientist at Vanderbilt University.He added it is unlikely that short bursts produced in a storm would suffice. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 5:05 pm
Good news, CrackBerry fans. (See what I did there?) It looks like the 8900, which is currently running wild on T-Mobile, will make its way to AT&T this June. That’s the “word on the street,” at least, which this wonderful photo illustrates.
Anything different about AT&T’s 8900? Nope, doesn’t look that way. It’s more or less a carbon copy of T-Mobile’s 8900, which isn’t so bad at all.
Now you have to decide: do you go with the slightly bigger Bold, or this newer, slightly thinner (and lighter) 8900? Decisions, decisions!
Bad news: nothing to tell you about the price or exact release date. But considering RIM is going to host some sort of show in a couple days, this should sort itself out in a couple of days.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
FROM GAMERTELL - Florida women buys a Nintendo DS for her son but instead of a kick-ass system gets a box full of rocks and paper. (but no scissors)... MORE »
Looking for another decent option when it comes to a portable media player? Well Amazon has just listed the latest, or should I say largest Cowon S9 PMP. We have had the 16GB model available for a few months now, however, just recently, Cowon introduced the 32GB model in the South Korean market and it seems they are not going to make us here in the US wait all that long.
The Amazon listing is showing a selling price of $299.99, which sounds pretty nice considering the features. Just to begin with, the Cowon S9 has a 3.3-inch 16:9 widescreen AMOLED touchscreen display with a resolution of 480 x 272. Additionally, the 32GB S9 offers up to 11 hours of video playback and up to 5 hours of audio playback. Other features include support for MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG, WAV and APE files as well as a voice recorder with internal microphone, FM Radio, Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP, a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and TV-out connections.
For sure, Twitter Trends give visitors a great general overview of what the app’s user base of millions are talking about the most at any given time, giving some insight in what’s happening around the world.
It’s an awesome way for people to discover what’s going on, and more users will see the benefits of keeping track of trending topics now that the company has decided to integrate the top 10 trends in the right sidebar of the web version for everyone.
At times the keywords for the trending topics, often determined by many users using the same hashtag for something can be quite self-explanatory, e.g. today’s ‘Swine Flu’ and ‘#swineflu’. More often that not, however, you have no idea why a certain keyword is currently a trend, and figuring out what all the fuzz is about can be quite a pain. Enter What The Trend, which attempts to offer short blurbs about trending topics with a short explanation on why it’s in the top 10 list.
For example, I had no clue why ‘Jonas’ was in the top trends list, until I clicked through to this user-editable explanation blurb and learned that it’s a new show in Disney Channel. In addition, What The Trend shows me the latest tweets about the topic, and also attempts to fetch related pictures from Flickr as well as news through Google News.
You can directly tweet that there’s a trend explanation to your own Twitter account, with bonus points for another service boasting its very own URL shortening service (wttrend.com). The service has its own Twitter account which it regularly updates with new trends + explanations and also offers RSS feeds and its own API. I’m left wondering which desktop application provider will be the first to integrate the What The Trend explanations, and how quickly people will start abusing the wiki-approach the service is taking: my guess is we won’t have to wait long for either one to happen.
I can actually see myself going this website once and a while to get a feel of what’s trending on Twitter, although I wish I wouldn’t need to and Twitter would incorporate this into the web version itself. Until that happens, and I doubt it ever will, What The Trend provides the perfect alternative.
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Haven’t caught all of the Gadgetell news this week? Here’s your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles!
What would a Verizon iPhone look like? “Today, USA Today broke the story that Verizon and Apple are “discussing the possible development of an iPhone for Verizon.” USA Today cites unnamed sources at Apple who are not authorized to make…” MORE »
Windows 7 RC1 upcoming, XP Mode coming later ” Windows 7 is certainly getting a lot of attention recently as Windows users try to forget about the mistakes of Vista and focus on the next OS. It seems every major release of the OS has appeared MORE »
Why MLB.TV is the service to beat in terms of online sports streaming ” Any self respecting baseball fan knows each game out of a 162 game season is very important. Every die-hard fan tries their utmost to catch as much of the game as possible. Now unfortunately, people move away from their town where…” MORE »
Get 100 DVDs on one GE disc ” Ok, ok…so you can’t go to Newegg and buy it just yet. But GE announced just today that they’ve made some huge steps forward in the whole process, and now just have to figure out how to make their lab success work…” MORE »
Mint.com wants you to get financially fit, introduces “Financial Fitness” “Mint.com, the free online personal financial manager, is releasing a new feature today called Financial Fitness. Mint designed the new feature as a way to help users actively improve their financial well-being. I have been using Mint.com for a few months now, so I was eager to play with the…” MORE »
Dropbox lets you sync for free ” There’s a fairly new file syncing program in town, and it is getting lots of positive feedback from its users. Dropbox is an online sync and storage service that is able to be used over Windows, Linux or Mac. It relies…” MORE »
Flip Ultra HD now available in the retail market “In what seems to have been a pretty quite announcement, we now have another option to choose from in the Flip handheld video camera lineup. Unfortunately, this latest addition comes with very little information in…” MORE »
Google Maps puts Swine Flu in perspective “View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map With each passing day, many of us are checking ourselves for any flu-like symptoms as the media tells us about a potential pandemic: Swine Flu. A common sneeze now merits a steady…” MORE »
Best Buy launches vinyl record pilot program in 100 stores “Vinyl records have begun to make a slight resurgence, or at least enough of one to warrant a little shelf space in Best Buy. It turns out that while CD sales have dropped about 20-percent in the last few years, vinyl sales have only increased. According to…” MORE »
Image Caption: Purdue doctoral student Jonathan White holds a cross section of a wind turbine blade like the one used in research to improve the efficiency of turbines and prevent damage to blades from high winds. The researchers, from Purdue and Sandia National Laboratories, have developed a technique that uses sensors and computational software to constantly monitor forces exerted on wind turbine blades. Such sensors could be instrumental in future turbine blades that have control surfaces and flaps like those on an airplane's wings to change the aerodynamic characteristics of the blades for better control. (Purdue University photo/Andrew Hancock) Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 2:10 pm
Endemic diatoms at the base of the lake's food chain depend on disappearing iceSiberia's Lake Baikal, the world's largest and most biologically diverse lake, faces the prospect of severe ecological disruption as a result of climate change, according to an analysis by a joint US-Russian team in the May issue of BioScience. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 3 May 2009 | 1:22 pm
Even though I’d like to think of myself as an open-minded individual, I have never really experimented with Linux. At school, I take a computer class, and one of our recent projects was installing Xubutu (a form of Linux) on a Windows XP Professional edition computer. For those of you on the fence about installing Linux on your computer, hopefully my experience can make that decision a little easier. You can use my experience as a guide to installing Linux so you can dual boot the OS with Windows.
The Computer Specs
First off, it is important to note what type of a computer I installed Xubuntu on, and one problem that had arisen from it. It has a 20GB hard drive, and I’m not sure on how much RAM it has, but it’s either 256MB or 512MB. The computer is an old one, so our class is allowed to tinker with the older systems. Due to the low specs, installing Xubuntu was pretty much the only option. It is specifically meant for low performing computers as it has a much more efficient desktop environment.
The Installation Process
The purpose of the project was not just to install Xubuntu, but also to keep Windows XP on the hard drive. To do this, the hard drive must be partitioned. In case you are not familiar with hard drive partitioning, it is basically splitting up the hard drive into two separate sections, which is great for running multiple OSes on one hard drive.
Partitioning the Hard Drive
There are numerous amounts of software that can partition a hard drive, but I used PartedMagic 3.0. However, PartedMagic 3.0 did not work because the system did not meet the minimum requirements. Unfortunately, I did not realize that at the time, so after PartedMagic 3.0 didn’t work, I had to search on some support forums and diagnose the problem. It was a stupid, amateur error on my part.
To resolve this, I opted in using a lower version of PartedMagic, PartedMagic 2.0 - which worked like a charm. As I previously mentioned, the hard drive was only 20GB, so I partitioned it to 10GB and 10GB. One of them would solely be for Windows XP, while the other would be for Xubuntu. After this process was complete, I quickly checked the hard drive space on Windows XP to make sure it was, indeed, 10GB. At this time, I also prepared an install CD of Xubuntu.
Installing Xubuntu
Shortly after, the install CD of Xubuntu was created and I was ready to install the OS with the Penguin logo. After I popped in the CD upon booting the computer, I had to select which hard drive to install the OS on. After selecting some install options (such as username, password, and all that fun stuff), I had finally successfully installed Linux on my computer. The computer restarted and I chose boot to Xubuntu and was met with the Xubuntu loading bar.
Post Installation Thoughts
While the installation of Linux at the time seemed pretty easy, it was actually pretty tough. As I write this article, I realize that my instructor had to help me time-to-time on what to do next. Also, a few of my classmates had accidentally deleted the Windows XP install, because when they tried to boot to Windows, they were met with the blue screen of death. In other words, I would not recommend someone setting up a dual boot Linux/Windows machine if they are not good with computers. At the very least, know thy enemy. Google and Wikipedia are your friends. Don’t be afraid to search for Linux installation tips because that will help make your installation much easier.
I haven’t had a whole lot of experience working with Xubuntu yet, so I can’t really say whether it is much better than XP. However, it does come with word processing programs, GIMP (a free alternative to PhotoShop), some simple, yet fun games, and Instant Messaging programs. Since Linux is completely open-source, there are a whole lot of applications available for download, absolutely free.
If you are still not sure whether you want to install Linux on your system, be sure to check our Shawn Ingram’sTop 5 Linux Myths, to clear up anything you have heard about Linux that may be false.
As promised, I went to go visit the Google goats today — you know, the goats that were brought in to replace lawnmowers in Google’s ever-expanding quest to go more green. I was told the goats would be in the big field at the corner Rengstorff & Amphitheater (on Google’s campus in Mountain View), and sure enough, I found a few hundred of them there. Apparently, the area was previously covered in 4-foot tall brush, but within a few days, the goats had eaten it down to basically nothing (as you can see in the videos and images below).
Clearly there’s gotta be some crossover between people who like golf and people who need to prop a door open or this $18 “Golfer’s Doorstop” would cease to exist.
Having your super hit song mastered with some sexy and expensive analog gear is an important part of the music making process. Of course you can do the mastering yourself in your home “studio”. Trust me on this: Having your song professionally mastered is a good thing and Online-Mastering.com does it even better.
Dot com meltdown survivor and restaurant reservation software company OpenTable had been a rumored IPO candidate for a while. Still, it shocked many when it finally filed its intention to debut on the Nasdaq back in January. What? Does this company just have a thing for market meltdowns?
For sure, Twitter Trends give visitors a great general overview of what the app’s user base of millions are talking about the most at any given time, giving some insight in what’s happening around the world. 
It looks like we are getting a little closer to seeing the launch of the highly anticipated Palm Pre. According to a recent posting over on the Sprint Gurus user forums training is scheduled to begin very soon. In fact, it is just a few days away now on May 6. It looks like the classes are also going to be highly guarded, and the 
Hail Mary - 
Hail Mary - 
In fact, I’d argue that it’s the much less sexy textbook business that could be the real key to this big Kindle. Textbooks are an absolute rip-off in print form, with many costing over $100 a book. If Amazon was able to offer textbooks on this large Kindle at a discount the same way it offers a discount on regular books on the regular Kindle, that would be worth the price of admission for just about every college student in the country right there. And a Kindle textbook reader makes sense because it would make bookmarking, taking notes and syncing all of those things up to the cloud, a snap.
People love to share photos on 
There are two money shots in 
Palm's Pre, the first post-iPhone phone to excite The Media, will be out on June 7. This according to BGR's anonymous source:
There are two money shots in 
Trent Reznor, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails is pretty upset that Apple has rejected the latest version of his iPhone app. And rightfully so, the reason for the rejection once again points to Apple's inconsistencies when it comes to the App Store approval process. While 
David Finkelhor, the head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, has discovered pedophiles don't want to waste their time just flipping through MySpace pages or Facebook pages. It's as futile as trying to call up random numbers from the phonebook and trying to get a date. It's just a waste of time.
Trent Reznor, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails is pretty upset that Apple has rejected the latest version of his iPhone app. And rightfully so, the reason for the rejection once again points to Apple’s inconsistencies when it comes to the App Store approval process. While 
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