Source: Gizmodo | 26 May 2009 | 10:30 am

Luxury Phantom Masks - Kylie Minogue's Glittery Half-Face Covering in Cannes (VIDEO)

(TrendHunter.com) Worn at a charity bash at the Cannes, this awesome mask has caused some controversy. Critics claim shes trying to look like Madonna. I think she looks fierce, and furthermore, masks...
Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 26 May 2009 | 10:29 am

President Obama Chooses New NASA Leader - DailyTech

BBC News

President Obama Chooses New NASA Leader DailyTech After weeks of rumor and speculation over who President Barack Obama would choose to lead NASA, he has selected former Marine Corps Maj. Video: Obama Taps Former Astronaut As NASA Chief The Associated Press Space Foundation Reacts to Obama's Choice for NASA's Administrator SatNews Publishers The Associated Press - AHN - CNET News - USA Today all 1,042 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 10:21 am

Nokia’s Ovi Store Opens For Business: 10 Must-Downloads To Kick Off

Nokia’s very own centralized application marketplace, dubbed Ovi Store, today officially made its way to the public arena as we expected. It will have to stand up and fight against other notable mobile content stores such as Apple’s App Store, Windows Mobile Marketplace and BlackBerry’s Application Center. Nokia is rolling out the app and content store globally (with credit card support), but currently reserves operator billing for customers in Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and the UK. Additional countries and languages will be added throughout the year, with AT&T planning to make Ovi Store available to its customers in the U.S. later this year.

Nokia claims more than 50 of its mobile devices are compatible with the service as of today, with more slated to roll out over time, and estimates that around 50 million people with Nokia devices will be able to license content and download applications from the Ovi Store right now. The news is now completely out there and people are testing the service like crazy, which means it can be a little slow or downright unresponsive at times.

Update: actually, the launch is a complete fail.

We’ve browsed the online store extensively and hand-picked 10 applications we think you should download and install first. Note that the available content you can download depends on which device you’re using, we’ve selected the option ‘any phone’ to increase the chances of these being available for you as well:

* Qik (Photo & video, free) - Ovi Store listing: a powerful way to share live video from your mobile phone with friends everywhere you go. MobileCrunch knew it was going to be one of the featured apps in the store back in March.

* FlyScreen (News & Info, free)- Ovi Store listing: an application that lets you add your favorite web services (in widget form) to your phone’s sleep screen, enabling zero-click access to the content you use most.

* Photobucket (Photo & video) - Ovi Store listing: lets you log in to your Photobucket account, upload photos from your phone to your album and search its public repository of photos.

* Flight Info (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing: key in any airline code and flight number and track terminal, departing and arrival information.

* Assassin’s Creed (Games) - Ovi Store listing: end the Third Crusade from your mobile phone. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: Wolverine (€5).

* Twittix (Social Networks, €1) - Ovi Store listing: Yup, it’s a mobile client for Twitter.

* MobiSystems OfficeSuite 5 (Business, €20) - Ovi Store listing: OfficeSuite is a complete mobile office solution, allowing you to create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files away from your office. Support MS Office 2007 files.

* RISK (Games, €5) - Ovi Store listing: Enjoy the classic board game playing against up to five cunning computer opponents, each with distinctive tactics and unique levels of aggression.

* AP News (News & Info, free) - Ovi Store listing: Yes, we know, it’s AP, but this app does give you a good overview of breaking news and photo galleries to boot.

* World Traveler (Utilities) - Ovi Store listing: allows travelers to plan and manage journey activities and provides instant access to relevant information and services. Update: seems to have disappeared from the store somehow. Alternative: WorldMate 2009 (free).

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

Source: TechCrunch | 26 May 2009 | 10:18 am

Twitter May Not “Transform Television,” But Its Jump Is Interesting

When news broke earlier that Twitter was working with some Hollywood types to develop a television series, the web nearly imploded on itself. Some assumed that the show would be about the people behind the scenes at Twitter, some thought they may have a chance to be on television because they use Twitter, some were outraged that Twitter would make a TV show rather than improving their own service, some thought it was Twitter openly endorsing the stalking of celebrities, most thought it was odd, to say the least. So Twitter co-founder Biz Stone weighed in to clarify a bit.

It’s simple really: Twitter has signed an agreement with a production company to allow them to develop a show based around the service. Stone was vague when it comes to specifics, but it reads like Twitter will have little if anything to do with the show, and really will just lend its name and likeness (perhaps even in the title). It’s similar to what the company has done in the past with Current (for Hack the Debate) and CNN (for its various shows that heavily use the service). And it’s similar to other projects that are in the works with a few other networks. But it’s still quite interesting for a few reasons.

First, from what Stone wrote, it sounds like Twitter hopes this will be the first of many shows built around the service. That’s interesting because it’s an extension of Twitter’s goal to be a powerful new platform. It already is one on the web, but that’s now expanding into different mediums, like television. And that’s notable because you don’t see many other startups — or even big web companies — make that jump.

While the service has seen extreme growth in recentl months, Twitter is still nowhere near the size of something like Facebook in terms of users (200+ million versus maybe 30 some million). But services such as that, or even Google, aren’t dictating the content of shows the way Twitter is now doing. Sure, these other services pop up on television shows from time to time to make cameos — and yes, there is a movie about Facebook in the works — but Twitter is a springboard which shows are being built around. That’s a notable difference.

Second, one would assume that Twitter stands to benefit financially from such television deals. While it won’t be Twitter’s ultimate business-model, if a network were to pick up any Twitter show, the revenue split with Twitter would undoubtedly be more substantial than say, a partnership with a third-party website built on top of Twitter.

Third, this movement of Twitter into the entertainment sphere, does raise some interesting questions about Twitter versus TWiT (This Week In Tech), Leo Laporte’s popular video and podcasting network. This has been an issue in the past, but died down because ultimately TWiT and Twitter were in two different games. But if Twitter enters Laporte’s world, he may be moved to respond with his trademarks, as he noted yesterday.

“Twitter’s open approach might have the power to transform television—the dominant communications receiver worldwide,” Stone said of the news. That reads a bit arrogant, or at the very least presumptuous, and while it would be easy to immediately dismiss such a comment, it does speak to Twitter’s potential power as a platform. Because the service hasn’t yet bloated itself with the bells and whistles that other services have, and has stayed mostly true to its quick, mobile usage roots, it could be the one startup that is able to break out of the web service stigma. Yes, plenty of services have “mainstream” usage now, but those are still considered web properties that regular people just happen to use.

We may not like to admit it, but it’s still just not considered very cool to use any of these services rather than say, actually meeting up with a group of friends in person. But we’re moving to a world where not only will using these services move beyond seeming like something that geeks do, but where you don’t even think about the notion of a “web service” or being “offline.” An ascension of Twitter into entertainment could hasten that. I’m not saying that it will — hell, the Twitter show could absolutely suck — but I am saying that no one is developing television shows entirely around Facebook.

It brings me back to perhaps my favorite scene from the television show Mad Men. While setting up his presentation for Kodak’s new Carousel slide projector, Don Draper says, “Technology is a glittering lure. But there’s the rare occassion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product.” For an increasing number of us, Twitter is starting to fall into that category. Whether the larger public can be engaged in the same way, remains to be seen. For now, it remains a glittering lure.

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

Source: TechCrunch | 26 May 2009 | 10:08 am

Microsoft and the great netbook price-fixing scam of 2009 - InfoWorld

TrustedReviews

Microsoft and the great netbook price-fixing scam of 2009 InfoWorld It's the question vexing hardware vendors everywhere: How do they seize on the fervor and froth of the netbook craze without cannibalizing sales of their higher-priced, higher-margin notebooks? Microsoft, Intel put squeeze on Via TG Daily First look: Intel's Moblin 2.0 Linux desktop for netbooks ZDNet Inquirer - PC Pro - CNET News - bMighty.com all 78 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 10:04 am

Five-Disk Floppy RAID: 4MB of Blistering Fast Storage

A “Floppy RAID” might sound like the title of a frustrating niche adult movie, but it isn’t. Instead, it is a homebrew project by Daniel Blade Olson* which cobbles together five 3.5” floppy drives into a redundant disk array.

RAID means either extra speed or extra data security, but Olson’s version offers neither. The setup gives a mere 3.9MB of usable space and runs at a speed that makes dialup look quick. Daniel says “I was able to transfer “DEVO Uncontrolable Urge.mp3″ which is 3.6 MB in 32 seconds. Which is pretty good I think.”

The project was ridiculously simple. Or at least, it was simple on a 500MHz Bondi Blue iMac. Attempting the same thing on a modern-day Dell machine running Windows XP was impossible. Olson grabbed a bunch of returned but functioning USB floppy drives from his place of work and simply hooked them up to the iMac: four into a USB hub and one directly to a USB port. OS X’s Disk Utility was used to make the RAID in about six minutes, and Daniel was good to go.

Why not bigger? “I would have connected more units together, but I ran out of USB ports” says Olson. And he’s still going. Already built are a 2X speed floppy RAID (” It was able to transfer the same awesome DEVO song in just 16 seconds! KICK ASS!!!”) and a Sony Memory Stick RAID.

Next up: A RAID made from 127 floppy drives.

USB Floppy Disk Striped RAID Under OS X [Ohlssonvox via Every Joe and Oh Gizmo!]

Photos: Daniel Olson

*Porn-star name: Daniel “Blade” Olson

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 May 2009 | 10:01 am

Deathmatch: BlackBerry versus iPhone (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld - Look at any major analyst firm report since the Apple iPhone was released, and you'll see the earnest intoning to stick with the buttoned-down and pinstriped BlackBerry -- widely admired in executive corridors for its safety and security -- and beware that odd, colorful, possibly dangerous Apple device that consumers may love but professionals should avoid. If the iPhone were meant for work, it wouldn't be so much fun to use, would it?
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2009 | 10:00 am

USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg To Be Sunk For a Reef

caffiend666 writes "On Wednesday the USNS Hoyt S. Vandenberg is to be sunk in 140 feet of water off of Key West to become the world's second largest artificial reef. (The largest was created by sinking the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany off of Pensacola, Florida, in 2006.) The Vandenberg was built in 1943 (chronology) and commissioned the USS Gen. Harry Taylor. In 1963 the Air Force took it over and recommissioned it, naming it after the Air Force general. For decades the ship served as a missile tracker and space relay. It was used in NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo projects and the Shuttle program. The Vandenberg was the set for some of the scenes in the '90s movie Virus as the Russian MIR relay station. Soon it will become one of the world's most awesome diving spots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2009 | 9:48 am

Leaks All But Confirm 32GB iPhone

A surprise it isn’t, but it’s nice to know that at the very least the iPhone is about to get a storage boost, doubling its internal flash memory to 32GB. Up until the euthanization of the 160GB iPod Classic, Apple could always be relied upon to increase drive size in iPods.

The rumors/leaks come from two independent sources, and both are the results of either incompetent slip-ups or a genius-level marketing strategy. First, T-Mobile Austria posted a placeholder on its site listing a “iPhone 32GB” starting at €0 (that’s $0, for the mathematically challenged), and the blog Area Mobile was sharp enough to grab a screen shot.

Next up, Rogers. The much “loved” Canadian carrier has posted a list of upcoming handsets according to the Boy “Genius” Report. Here’s the relevant line: “# iPhone — ETA: unknown (July/August), outright: not allowed, 3-year: TBD.” That’s right folk: three years. This doesn’t point to a 32GB model, but it at least offers some confirmation of an early Summer launch.

Finally, Vodafone Australia has issued an end-of-life notice for the 32GB iPhone. This could, of course, just means that the 16GB iPhone 3G is about to be replaced by a newer 16GB iPhone, but we agree with MacTalk.au that it looks like there will be a bigger model along soon.

And you know what else this means? The iPod Touch has always had double the capacity of the largest iPhone, which probably means a ridiculously large 64GB model is on the way.

Existence confirmed: 32 GB iPhone on T-Mobile will be available shortly [Area Mobile]

Rumour: 16GB iPhone Declared “End of Life” By Vodafone & Brightpoint [MacTalk]

More good news for Rogers customers: upcoming handset release details [Boy Genius Report]

Source: Wired: Gadget Lab | 26 May 2009 | 9:38 am

Another video showing new 2009 iPhone designs - Product Reviews

Pocket-lint.com

Another video showing new 2009 iPhone designs Product Reviews There have been a number of concept designs going around the net over the past few months since the new iPhone has been announced but i guess we will just have to wait till it is launched to find out which one they went with. New iPhone 2009 Highlight could be OLED Screen I4U Direct movie downloads headed to iPhone? Afterdawn.com Cnet Asia - PC World Magazine - Phones Review - the iPhone Blog all 63 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 9:29 am

Lenovo announces Ion netbook - Inquirer

CNET News

Lenovo announces Ion netbook Inquirer By Sylvie Barak NVIDIA BREATHED a sigh of relief yesterday as Lenovo announced it would be releasing the first Ion netbook, the Lenovo IdeaPad S12, combining Nvidia's chipset with Intel's 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor. Hands On with Lenovo's IdeaPad S12 PC Magazine Lenovo IdeaPad S12 has Nvidia Ion Inside Techtree.com DailyTech - eWeek - Slippery Brick - VentureBeat all 103 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 9:24 am

Where to Eat? for iPhone (Macworld.com)

Macworld.com - It’s nearing lunchtime as I write this review, and boy, am I ever hungry. Ordinarily, I would simply stand up, walk 10 steps to the fridge and make a sandwich or something. But in the service of this review, I’m going to use Networking 2.0’s $3 Where to Eat? to answer the question, what to eat?
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2009 | 9:20 am

Leading Companies Increase Their Customer Experience Investment in Tough Economic Times According to Surprising New Study; Strativity Group Reveals Results of Their 2009 Customer Experience Benchmark Study Online

NEW YORK, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Strativity Group (www.Strativity.com) announced it will be unveiling the unexpected results of their 5th annual Customer Experience Management Study online today.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 9:15 am

Cimatron Reports Financial Results for the First Quarter of 2009

GIVAT SHMUEL, Israel, May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Cimatron Limited (NASDAQ: CIMT), a leading provider of integrated CAD/CAM solutions for the toolmaking and manufacturing industries, today announced financial results for the first quarter of 2009. The following provides details on Cimatron's GAAP and non-GAAP figures in the first quarter of 2009: There is no difference between GAAP and non-GAAP revenues in 2009. Revenues on a non-GAAP basis in 2008 excluded the effect of business combination accounting rules on the acquired deferred maintenance revenue balance of Gibbs System Inc.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 9:12 am

Smashwords Launches Flexible Ebook Affiliate Program

Smashwords, an online Ebook store for independent authors and their publishers, is launching a new affiliate program that will allow external sites to generate revenue by linking to Ebooks that are being sold on the Smashwords store.

Affiliate programs for bookstores are nothing new. Typically online publishers will link to a book and will get a cut of the proceeds if the store linked to makes a sale within a certain timeframe. But the emergence of Ebooks is changing the landscape. Amazon, which has built up its affiliate program for traditional books over the last decade, does not give affiliate publishers any portion of the purchase price if a visitor winds up buying an electronic book. Smashwords is looking to capitalize on this omission by offering web publishers an alternative.

The Smashwords affiliate program is offering commissions of 11% of the net selling price (the sale price less any PayPal fees) for all of its online books (authors can optionally opt out if they’d like). And the store is giving authors and publishers the ability to control how much of a commission they’d like to offer above that 11% - so an author could bump it up to 50% or 80% if they were willing to exchange revenue for increased exposure. You can find the full details of the program here.

Smashwords launched a year ago, and has grown to offer 1,300 Ebooks primarily from independent authors, though some small publishers are beginning to sign on as well. All of the content sold is DRM-free (you can read it on your computer, or devices like the Kindle) and authors receive 85% of the net proceeds of any Ebooks that they sell. Other players in this space include Fictionwise and Scribd, which just launched its online store, though neither of these offer an affiliate program.

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

Source: TechCrunch | 26 May 2009 | 9:08 am

Intel Projected to Release Core i5 Microprocessors in September. - X-bit Labs

Intel Projected to Release Core i5 Microprocessors in September. X-bit Labs by Anton Shilov Intel Corp. plans to release its next-generation performance-mainstream microprocessors code-named Lynnfield in September this year, which is considerably later compared to the original schedule. Intel delays debut of Core i5 platform until early September DigiTimes Intel Core i5 Details emerge I4U Computer Business Review - Neoseeker - PC Advisor all 16 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 9:05 am

NeuStar Delivers Mobile Instant Messaging Service to Telefonica O2 Germany Customers

LONDON, May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- NeuStar (NYSE: NSR) today announced that mobile operator Telefonica O2 Germany has selected NeuStar's Next Generation Messaging (NGM) services to power its mobile Instant Messaging (IM) service in Germany.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 9:00 am

Underground coal mine expands ActiveMine(TM) installation

- Active Control receives order for new wireless network equipment from existing customer - Now at 57 nodes, customer's MSHA-approved wireless Wi-Fi mesh network is largest in US TSX-V: ACT

Source: Gizmodo | 26 May 2009 | 8:56 am

Customer Satisfaction for VoucherSeeker Running At 95%!

LEEDS, England, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- When leading vouchers and offers site VoucherSeeker wanted to find ways to improve their site, they decided to ask their users directly. Sending out a survey both via email and the VoucherSeeker blog, site users were more than willing to share their views about the site. An impressive 95% of VoucherSeeker users are happy with the site, whilst a further 84% found the site easy to use.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 8:35 am

WWYD (What Will Yahoo Do?): Deal, Sell, Stand Pat or What? [BoomTown]

If BoomTown were to hazard a guess, I would assume Yahoo would, if it could–in the end–sell itself off to Microsoft.

That’s just my opinion, of course, but–after all that has gone on and all the time that has passed–it would still be the best-case scenario for the company, over either a more limited commercial advertising and search partnership with the software giant it has been discussing.

Or, of course, going it alone.

That’s because partnerships of two strong companies are always fraught with struggle that hinders true achievement. I would imagine that would go double for Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT).

And, in standing pat, Yahoo faces a future that is uncertain, especially given the need to keep up with the massive changes in the digital arena and the long struggle it has had over the last several years in trying to redefine itself in the Web 2.0 era.

After all, in 2009, it is still hard to answer the simple question: What is Yahoo?

That’s the one that stumped former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang onstage at our sixth D: All Things Digital conference last year.

And, it will still be the key query that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will need to answer when she takes the stage Wednesday morning at D7.

I have been noodling all weekend about what to ask the forthright executive, who does not seem to mince words or suffer fools.

That’s good, since it will take that kind of gumption to clearly lay out for the influential crowds of attendees and assembled tech press exactly what she is going to do, now that she has started to make the basic structural changes at Yahoo.

Cost-cutting and focusing management, of course, are the low-hanging fruit at Yahoo and now it will be up to Bartz (pictured here) to begin to tell a story about the future of the company she helms and where it is going.

Is it a media/content company or a search company or a communications company for example? And, if it is parts of all three, how does that stack up against competitors?

There are a lot of questions like this that one can ask about Yahoo, from how it innovates to how it holds onto talent to how it will recharge its growth.

Because, even though it is one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web and one of Silicon Valley’s icons, it is still much too easy for many to count Yahoo out.

So, perhaps most of all, what I look forward to hearing from from Bartz is how we can all begin to count it in again.

Until then, here’s two parts of video highlights from Walt Mossberg’s interview with Yang and also former President Sue Decker last year at D6:

Highlights, Part 1

Highlights, Part 2

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 8:17 am

Why the New York Times Took Carlos Slim Over David Geffen [MediaMemo]

The New York Times (NYT) turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter, and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead.

So says the New Yorker, which has an extensive profile of Slim in this issue. Writer Lawrence Wright says that when Geffen learned that the Times was working on a deal to borrow $250 million from Slim, he offered to make the loan at the same terms, but was rebuffed by  Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

The Times chairman, Wright says, told Geffen’s people he preferred to work with Slim, because the telco billionaire already owned Times shares, and “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.”

Where would Sulzberger have gotten that idea? From Geffen, of course.

Wright also reports that Geffen offered to buy the publisher outright last September; he says Geffen made the offer via Steve Rattner, the media banker turned Obama advisor who is one of Sulzberger’s closest confidants.

The pitch: Sulzberger would oversee the Times’ editorial operations, Geffen would handle the business side, and eventually the entire business would be handed over to a non-profit foundation. Obviously, Sulzberger turned that one down.

Wright’s piece–which is behind a pay wall, so it will be interesting to see how much of the story gets circulated via the Web–is first and foremost a profile of Slim, and secondarily about the Times. So, it doesn’t spend much more time on Geffen or the notion of other white knights for the paper, a la Google (GOOG).

But, in just a few paragraphs, it does seem to sketch out Geffen’s desire to associate himself with the Times, in whatever way he can: Buying it outright, lending it much-needed money or buying some of its stock (via Harbinger Capital).

For now, the Times is controlled by Sulzberger and his extended family, who have repeatedly insisted that they’re not interested in parting with it. Then again, that’s what the Bancroft family always said about the Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. And those properties are now a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS)–as is this Web site.

Source: Gizmodo | 26 May 2009 | 7:53 am

DoD Sharing Threat Data With Critical Industries

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that for the past two years, the Defense Department has been collaborating with critical industries to stem the loss of important defense industry data — by some estimates at least $100 billion worth over that time. The Pentagon is considering ways to share its threat data with other industries including telecommunications and Internet service providers, led by the DoD's Cyber Crime Center, the clearinghouse for threat data from the NSA, military agencies, the DHS, and industry. The Pentagon's trial program with industry illuminates the promise and the pitfalls of such partnerships: a reluctance of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to release threat data they consider classified, and the companies' fear of losing control over personal or proprietary information. 'This isn't just about national security,' says Barbara Fast, vice president of Boeing Cyber Solutions. 'It's about the economic well-being of the United States.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2009 | 7:29 am

D-Day: In the Seventh Year, We Didn’t Rest (Mostly Because of Meetings) [BoomTown]

We launch the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, Calif. today, after a long weekend of preparations and way too many meetings, as you can see in the video below.

(Including packing the swag bags for attendees, upon which one of my kids sits in this photo.)

The conference kicks off with an evening interview tonight with Twitter Co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

Walt Mossberg and I will be asking the pair about everything from their business plans for the hot microblogging service to the huge hype around their start-up to the state of innovation in Silicon Valley to what they plan to do next.

BoomTown will update after the interview, but you can follow the proceedings–in live blogs and video–as it happens on our All Things Digital D7 site here, so check early and often, starting at about 6:30 pm PST.

Here’s the final prep video, including several meetings Walt and I attended today, a view of the ballroom being outfitted and another movie review–we took the staff to see “Terminator Salvation” last night to get pumped–by my annoying geek brother:

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:07 am

Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive [Voices]

Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scotswoman who became a worldwide singing sensation last month, may wind up as the winner this week of “Britain’s Got Talent,” the hit ITV show.

After a six-week absence, she returned on Sunday night to sing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” wowing the crowd and advancing to Saturday’s finale.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:05 am

Survey: Airport Wi-Fi More Important Than Food [Voices]

For the business traveler (and the traveler in general, really), Wi-Fi is important — crucial, even. But more important than sustenance? That’s exactly what was found in a recent survey by American Airlines and HP, where some 47% of business travelers responded that Wi-Fi was the “most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travels needs such as food by nearly 30 percentage points.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:04 am

They’re Fast, They’re Cheap, and I’m Out of Control [Voices]

Last month, I became an obsessive air-traffic controller. The culprit: a terrific game for the iPhone called Flight Control. The premise is simple: You’re faced with a crush of planes, and it’s your job to guide each one to its respective runway. The gameplay, though, is irresistibly difficult. A few minutes in, the planes start to show up at an alarming rate, and you scramble to keep them from crashing into one another.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:03 am

Star Trek, Star Wars, Transformers Warp Into New Merchandise [Voices]

Now you can kick off your Star Trek shows, climb into Star Wars bed and read the fan fiction you stored on your Transformers flash drive — all thanks to the summer’s more creative movie-marketing merchandise.

The flashy, limited edition Star Trek shoes from Airwalk scream to the world: “Yup. I’m a meganerd. Deal with it.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:02 am

Endpaper - Fiction reaches a new level [Voices]

T S Eliot wrote of Dante that “there seems really nothing to do but point to him and be silent”. How very wrong T S Eliot was. In perhaps the most bizarre literary cameo since Geoffrey Chaucer was shown singing along to Queen tunes in the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, Florence’s most famous son will soon be crashing into your living room as the growling, cross-wielding hero of his very own video game.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Source: All Things Digital | 26 May 2009 | 7:01 am

MACH Warns Lack of Roaming Fraud Protection Could Equal Losses of $5 Billion Globally

LUXEMBOURG, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- MACH, the leading provider of solutions to simplify and accelerate the creation and operation of the mobility supply chain, warned today that it expects roaming fraud to cost mobile operators $5 billion globally in 2009 as many operators around the world have yet to comply with NRTRDE recommendations.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 7:00 am

VASCO Integrates Strong Host Authentication into DIGIPASS 250, 260 and 270

Strong host authentication: VASCO patent pending technology offering one of the strongest One-Time Password solutions on the market OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill. and ZURICH, May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VASCO Data Security International, Inc.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 7:00 am

Virgin Media Selects Motorola's Ultra-Broadband Solution to Accelerate Delivery of Personalized Media Experiences

Motorola's DOCSIS(R) 3.0 I-CMTS solution enables Virgin Media to deliver ultra fast broadband services COLOGNE, Germany, May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ANGA Cable 2009 -- Motorola, Inc.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 7:00 am

Nevada wacky-race with $500 cars

Murilee sez, "It was hot as hell in the Nevada desert for the 24 Hours Of LeMons Goin' For Broken race (in which all cars must be built for $500 or less and twisted themes are strongly encouraged), but that didn't stop these crazy bastards on the ZZ Uber Das team (which ran a pair of matching VW GTIs, one black and one white) from rockin' these great Spy Versus Spy costumes all weekend. Everywhere you turned, one of these guys would be popping his snout around the corner and brandishing a highway-flare 'dynamite bomb' at you. There was also a Ford Capri-based team called 'Dungeons And Dragsters,' which featured fuzzy 20-sided dice hanging from the rearview."

Cheaters Busted, Awesome Themes Admired: Tomorrow, We Race! (Thanks, Murilee!)


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 6:08 am

Small sf press rallies despite recession

Brett from the independent sf publisher ChiZine sez,

While many other publishers, big and small, have been firing people and putting acquisition freezes on their lists, we at ChiZine Publications have been trying to push our business to the wall and make a real go of it. To that end, we're launching four books at WorldCon in August:

Daniel Rabuzzi's 'The Choir Boats'
Claude Lalumiere's 'Objects of Worship' (with a foreword by James Morrow)
David Nickle's 'Monstrous Affections' (with a foreword by Michael Rowe)
Robert J. Wiersema's 'The World More Full of Weeping'

However, until then--and to partly finance this big-ass launch--I need to try to sell as many pre-order copies of our third title, 'The Tel Aviv Dossier' by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv, through the CZP website as I can, so I was hoping you could help spread the word. We're offering 15% off until June 30th.

A potent mixture of biblical allusions, Lovecraftian echoes, and contemporary culture, The Tel Aviv Dossier is part supernatural thriller, part meditation on the nature of belief--an original and involving novel painted on a vast canvas in which, beneath the despair, humour is never absent. Experience the last days of Tel Aviv...

The Tel Aviv Dossier TPB pre-order info! (Thanks, Brett!)


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:18 am

Documenting a Network?

Philip writes "Three years ago I was appointed as a network manager to a barely functioning MS-based network. Since then I've managed to get it up and running — even thriving — but have been guilty of being too busy with the doing of it to document the changes and systems that were put in place. Now as I look back, I'm worried that I am the only one who will ever know how this network works. If I get hit by a bus or throw in the towel for any reason, I'd be leaving behind a network that requires some significant expertise to run. Ultimately, this won't be a good reference for me if they are trying to work out technical details for years to come. It looks like I'm going to have to document the network with all sorts of details that outside consultants could understand too (no, I don't want to be the outside consultant), especially since it's likely that my replacement will have less technical expertise (read 'cheaper'). Are there any good templates out there for documenting networks? Is anyone who has done it before willing to share some experiences? What did you wish your predecessor had written down about a network that you inherited?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2009 | 5:15 am

Steel ball + Arduino + hacks = amazing Katamari Damacy controller

Why this hasn’t been done before is a mystery to me. This little hack project by Kellbot of NYCResistor takes a rolling ball, an optical mouse, a gutted PS2 controller, and some Arduino hacking and makes it into a working (and awesome) virtual Katamari. Why didn’t they have special controllers like this that came with the game? It makes so much sense!

The idea is surprisingly simple if you know how the PS2’s analog controller is wired and have some circuit-building know-how — requirements which leave me out. But if you’re crafty, and have access to a giant steel ball and three smaller ones, you might be able to rig this up since the design is open source. It’s essentially just a giant trackball, but it’s not like you can just whip one of those up anyhow.

[via Reddit]

Source: CrunchGear | 26 May 2009 | 5:14 am

Fourth Street Fantasy Con, intimate, literate convention in Minneapolis

Elise Matthesen, conference chair for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, writes,

From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep, intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the fantastic. Its return in 2008 was so much fun that we couldn't resist bringing it back again in 2009

Fourth Street is a small convention for people who are serious about good fantasy and good books- serious about reading them, serious about writing them, serious about appreciating them in all their various forms. It's also for people who are serious about having a good time. It's a weekend of high-quality, high-intensity, mind-stretching fun, focused on books- there's a single track of programming that is at the heart of it all. When everyone sees the same panels, it leads to fascinating conversations in the consuite, hotel bar, and corridors.

Come and hang out with Catherynne Valente, Jo Walton, Pamela Dean, Steven Brust, Sharyn November, Beth Meacham, Jon Singer, and many other interesting folks. If you show up on Thursday evening, bring a copy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, because we'll be having playreading that night at the hotel, in between folding programs and prepping for the convention.

On-line registration will be open through tomorrow, Tuesday May 26.

Come and be part of the conversation. It will be better if you're there -- you know it will.

Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (Thanks, Elise!)


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:13 am

God comics: God asserts his copyright in the universe

Elan sez, "I'm an Eisner Nominee for Best Digital Comic, and I just wanted to share with you my newest project: 'God' (the abridged title): Some day the intellectual property of God will be owned by a media, entertainment, and theme park corporation that rhymes with 'Malt Crispy'. The Apocalypse is looming and its up to Reverend Joeb Kim, an ordained minister in the Sacred Order of Accounting, to stop it."

God (Thanks, Elan)


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:10 am

Why it's hard not to stare at facial deformities

On Wired Science, DeAnne Musolf writes about the neurological basis for staring at facial deformities or irregularities:

When someone unfamiliar approaches you in the aisle of a grocery store, a glance at his face and its expression helps your brain to sort that person into one of two broad categories: safe or potentially unsafe. The amygdala (the brain area associated with judgment) depends upon the emotion conveyed by the person's facial features to make that crucial call. Is he happy? Angry? Irritated?

To decide, your eyes sweep over the person's face, retrieving only parts, mainly just his nose and eyes. Your brain will then try to assemble those pieces into a configuration that you know something about.

When the pieces you supply match nothing in the gallery of known facial expressions, when you encounter a person whose nose, mouth or eyes are distorted in a way you have never encountered before, you instinctively lock on. Your gaze remains riveted, and your brain stays tuned for further information.

Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:08 am

Plagiarising Canadian think tank who used tax dollars to shill for Big Content refuses to back down

The Conference Board of Canada, who were caught plagiarising in a report on the Digital Economy, produced the at Ontario tax-payers' expense, have responded. They claim it's not plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty that led them to copy-and-paste from an American entertainment lobby group's materials, it's just that the corporate mouthpieces of the record, film and software industries happened to have published the best, most balanced account of copyright in the digital age. As Michael Geist points out, their definition of plagiarism wouldn't pass muster at any university, and the report they copied is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Leaving aside the fact that all the most relevant arguments just happen to come from a U.S. lobby group with direct links to the funders of the Digital Economy report, the Conference Board of Canada has failed to understand the rules associated with plagiarism as a sprinkling of citations is simply not good enough. As the University of Ottawa's plagiarism guidelines (which are mirrored in academic institutions around the world) note "if you use someone else's words, data, etc., use quotation marks and give a complete reference." The Digital Economy report repeatedly used the same or very similar wording to the IIPA document and does not use quotations. Moreover, my posting cited to factual errors contained within the report and the press release. For example, the Conference Board claimed that the OECD concluded that Canada is the world's file sharing capital on a per capita basis. This is simply false as anyone who reads the OECD report will find that it did not reach that conclusion. Nevertheless, the Conference Board has chosen not to respond to this issue.

Admitting an error is never easy, but I would submit that the Conference Board of Canada has compounded its mistake by standing by its report. In doing so, it has done little more than further undermine its credibility. Particularly given that public dollars helped fund this report, Minister of Research and Innovation John Wilkinson should provide his views on whether his government regards this as appropriate use of taxpayer money.

Conference Board of Canada Responds, Stands By Its Report


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:06 am

Cellcom Israel Announces First Quarter 2009 Results

NETANYA, Israel, May 26 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- - EBITDA(1) Up by 3.0%; Record EBITDA Margin of Over 39% - Cellcom Israel Declares a First Quarter Dividend of NIS 3.36 per Share (Totals Approx.
Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 26 May 2009 | 5:02 am

Pirate theater automata built from Legos*

This astounding mechanical Lego pirate theater, controlled by Mindstorm/Nextstorm robot Lego, marries the Victorian dramatic clockwork automaton with 21st century cheap computation and precision brick-making. And it's got pirates! Seriously, this one had me scraping my jaw off the keyboard as wave after wave of awesomeness emanated from my browser.

The Pirates and the NXTfied Theater (via Geekdad)

* Oh, I do love calling them "Legos." Legos, Legos, Legos!


Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 5:00 am

Gain the secret knowledge, become a DTV transition guru - Ars Technica

Ars Technica

Gain the secret knowledge, become a DTV transition guru Ars Technica You might think you know everything there is to know about the digital TV transition here in the US, but Ars gets gnostic on the topic and digs into the "secret knowledge" about the switch. What you need to know about digital TV Houston Chronicle Viewers prepare for analog-to-digital move June 12 Las Vegas Review - Journal Chicago Tribune all 16 news articles

Source: Google News - Sci/Tech | 26 May 2009 | 4:49 am

Beyond Detroit: On the Road to Recovery, Let the Little Guys Drive

The offices of Transonic Combustion are not going to win any design prizes. Located in Camarillo, California, the company occupies a line of anonymous rooms and padlocked garage workshops at the edge of town, where land is cheap and prying eyes are scarce. Alloy-frame bicycles lean against the walls of the computer-stuffed workspaces; wastebaskets overflow with empty Mountain Dew cans. So many nondisclosure agreements have spewed from the printers on the tables that they must be capable of producing them without human intervention.

It looks, in other words, like any other high tech startup trying to make its mark in software, electronics, biotech, or energy. But Transonic isn't working in any of those fields. Instead, it is part of a surprising wavelet of innovation in an industry largely dismissed by venture capital: automobiles. The company makes a special breed of fuel injectors, which use advanced technology to force precisely timed, high-pressure bursts of gas-air mixture into engines to increase their power and efficiency. Tests are not complete yet, but Transonic believes that its products could help drivers get as much as 100 miles per gallon out of otherwise standard internal combustion engines. "If you double gas mileage, that ultimately cuts consumption by about half," Transonic president Brian Ahlborn says. "We're in business to make money, but we're aware of what that kind of dramatic drop could imply." He hopes that in the next few years Transonic fuel injectors will be in millions of vehicles, saving millions of gallons of gas a year.

Not long ago, Ahlborn's dream would have seemed quixotic. Detroit's Big Three automakers have for decades been notoriously hostile to outside innovation; Flash of Genius and Tucker, films that decry the industry's insularity, are both based on true stories. No small US company has grown into a big carmaker in the past 50 years—one of the reasons that the automobile itself hasn't changed more fundamentally during that time. "It's as if the computer industry were still dominated by Wang and Data General and DEC, and they were still selling minicomputers," says Henry Chesbrough, executive director at UC Berkeley's Center for Open Innovation.

Nonetheless, the automotive startup world is sputtering to life. Venture capitalists invested roughly $300 million in young car-related companies last year, up from $8 million in 2003. Dozens of startups are dipping a toe in the water, many in the high tech corridors near Boston and in Southern California (see this story's "Next Year's Module" sidebar). Some, like Transonic, focus on nitty-gritty hacks of machines that exist today. Others are assembling fanciful all-electric sports cars that may cost as much as a small house. But all of them are trying to jump-start the industry with new ideas, vigor, and technology.

Detroit desperately needs them. US automakers' share of the domestic market has plummeted nearly 30 percentage points since the early 1980s. The federal government has unceremoniously ousted the head of General Motors. By the time you read this, two of the Big Three may be in bankruptcy, a bleak capstone to years of collapsing stock prices, shrinking margins, and cascading layoffs. Some analysts believe not one of the major US carmakers will exist a decade from now. And while there are plenty of historical explanations for Detroit's sorry state—vicious labor relations, uncontrolled health care costs, neglected quality control—the most fundamental problem is also the hardest to overcome: The most innovative cars are no longer made in America.

If a domestic auto industry is to survive, it will have to incorporate and encourage breakthroughs from outsiders like Transonic. Automakers will need to transition from a vertical, proprietary, hierarchical model to an open, modular, collaborative one, becoming central nodes in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. In other words, the industry will need to undergo much the same wrenching transformation that the US computer business did some three decades ago, when the minicomputer gave way to the personal computer. Whereas minicomputers were restricted to using mainly software and hardware from their makers, PCs used interchangeable elements that could be designed, manufactured, and installed by third parties. Opening the gates to outsiders unleashed a flood of innovation that gave rise to firms like Microsoft, Dell, and Oracle. It destroyed many of the old computer giants—but guaranteed a generation of American leadership in a critical sector of the world economy. It is late in the day, but the same could still happen in the car industry; it just has to harness our national entrepreneurial spirit to develop the next wave of auto breakthroughs.

Transforming US auto manufacturing would be an enormous task. It would require the cooperation of the federal government to help create the conditions under which innovators can thrive—primarily by removing the energy and health care obstacles that now stand in their way. But now is the time to do it. The specter of global economic collapse has forced politicians, labor, and industry to abandon some of their most entrenched and dysfunctional ideas. Eventually, a reconfigured car industry could leapfrog Europe and Japan the way Toyota began to outpace Detroit 30 years ago. Indeed, such a radical reconfiguration may be the only way this vital industry can survive on these shores. "They're going to have to swing for the fences," says Steven Klepper, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies industry innovation. "The only way I can see for them to win the game is to change it entirely."

I should declare a personal interest here. My father worked as a Big Three executive for much of my childhood, most of that time at Ford. He left to run his own marina, but he always remained loyal to Detroit. He never bought a foreign car. I didn't buy one until after his death, and even then I felt like I was thumbing my nose at his memory. I would like to return to a US product. More than that, I would like millions of Americans—people who don't share my sentimental ties—to come back to vehicles from US companies.

Illustration: Bryan Christie Design

My father spent his days at the "Rouge," in Dearborn, outside Detroit. Once the biggest factory complex in the world, it had its own electricity plant, its own steel mill, even its own docks on the River Rouge that were big enough to handle deep-water vessels. Raw materials were unloaded on those docks, shuttled around the plant on 100 miles of internal railroad, and turned into finished vehicles, entirely inside the high factory walls. The Rouge made every major component for every model it produced except the tires—the company even tried to make the tires for a while, buying an Amazonian rubber plantation twice the size of Delaware in the 1920s.

The Rouge was an embodiment of the vertical integration that has defined the US car industry since the days of Henry Ford. Initially, the complex was Ford's attempt to solve a manufacturing problem; in the days before networked communication, coordinating precisely with small suppliers was impossible, which meant he couldn't ensure that all the parts for his cars would be ready at the right time and in the proper condition. Ford's answer: total control. By trusting as little as possible to outside entities, he was able to guarantee that his factories got what they needed when they needed it.

But by the 1970s, this system's deficiencies—bureaucracy, groupthink, and inflexibility—were obvious. Toyota-style production, with its dramatically smaller parts inventories and workers who functioned in teams, was much more efficient. Japanese companies also enjoyed better relationships with labor, more-dedicated employees, and centralized purchasing that allowed them to take advantage of economies of scale. It took a long time—far too long—for the Big Three to adapt, but they finally did. Detroit began adopting lean production methods in the late 1980s, and by 2007 it had repaired its labor relations enough to win important benefit concessions. General Motors also centralized its fragmented organization to benefit from massive economies of scale. (The rest of Detroit is still several years behind GM in this regard, according to David Cole, chair of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor.)

The costs of these shifts were huge and painful—the once-proud Rouge was nearly shut down altogether—but almost everyone inside and outside of Detroit believes they were worth the hurt. When the transition is complete, lean production, labor concessions, and globalization will have shaved nearly $5,000 off the cost of every new vehicle from Detroit. Many consumers may still regard US carmakers as high-cost, low-quality manufacturers, but in truth they have largely caught up with—and in some cases surpassed—their Japanese competitors.

But even this extraordinary effort may well not be enough. Consider the 2010 Fusion hybrid, Ford's next-generation gas-electric, launched in March. Driven by a nickel-metal hydride battery that is smaller, lighter, and more powerful than the one in the previous model, the car has a novel electronic dashboard that uses visual cues to train drivers to maximize mileage. The Environmental Protection Agency rates the car at 41 mpg for city driving, though many reviewers report getting 50 mpg or more. Ford did focus far too long on its highly profitable pickup trucks and SUVs, and it was blindsided by the public interest in hybrids, which soared with the US arrival of the Toyota Prius in 2000. But now it has crashed through a top-of-the-line, technologically advanced product in record time. Sleekly styled and innovative, the Fusion "proves what I've been writing and saying for years," proclaimed Washington Post auto writer Warren Brown. "Detroit makes good cars."

Alas, so does the competition. One month after the Fusion came on the market, Honda launched a new version of the Insight, a five-passenger hybrid with almost the same fuel efficiency as a Fusion—and a base price of $19,800, about a quarter less than the Ford's $27,270 price tag. One month after that, Toyota introduced its third-generation Prius, rated by the EPA at 50 mpg—now the most fuel-efficient vehicle in the US market. A similar fate may well await GM's forthcoming plug-in electric car, the truly innovative Chevrolet Volt, which unlike typical hybrids uses its gas engine only to charge and extend the range of its heavy-duty battery, drastically cutting fuel consumption. The problem is that "the rest of the Volt is just an ordinary family sedan, for which they are charging more than $40,000," says Michael Cusumano, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "If they sell more than a few thousand, I'll be surprised." Meanwhile, according to current timetables, by the time the Volt goes on sale in late 2010, Toyota will have already released its own plug-in version of the fashionable Prius.

By seeking to match the likes of Toyota, Detroit has been trying to come from behind in a game where its adversaries set the rules. To Klepper, the Carnegie Mellon economist, the Big Three today resemble the American television-receiver industry in the 1970s and 1980s, pioneered by US corporations that, after decades of domination, were suddenly confronted by foreign innovation. Companies like RCA and Zenith were slow to incorporate new technologies until it was too late; all exited or sold out to foreign firms. "Every time American companies catch up to the competition," Klepper says, "the competition already has moved on and instituted new things. In that situation, it's extremely difficult to get ahead."

The only escape from this conundrum is to pursue what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has called disruptive innovation—the kind of change that alters the trajectory of an industry. As Christensen argued in his 1997 book, The Innovator's Dilemma, successful companies in mature industries rarely embrace disruptive innovation because, by definition, it threatens their business models. Loath to revamp factories at high cost to make products that will compete with their own goods, companies drag their feet; perversely, financial markets often reward them for their shortsightedness. Good as they are, the European and Japanese automakers are established companies. At this point, they are as unlikely to pursue disruptive innovation as Detroit has been. That gives the US auto industry an opening. To take that opportunity, it will have to behave differently—it will have to step far outside the walls of the Rouge.

Illustration: Bryan Christie Design

Most modern automobiles have a long, serpentine belt that winds intricately through the engine compartment. Driven by the engine, it powers the accessory system: the alternator, water pump, AC compressor, and a handful of other components. During city driving, the engine turns slowly, which spins the belt slowly, which in turn pumps the compressor slowly. Running at low efficiency, the air conditioner must be enormously powerful to keep the car cool—so powerful that car and truck air conditioners account for about 5 percent of annual US motor fuel consumption. Similar problems plague alternators, which provide little charge to the battery during the start and stop of most driving.

Fallbrook Technologies, a San Diego startup, has raised $50 million to solve this problem. It hopes to squeeze more power from the serpentine belt by building simple, cheap transmission components that will power the accessory system more efficiently. Unlike standard transmissions, which move from gear to gear in distinct steps, transmissions using Fallbrook's technology move along a smooth continuum, allowing it to function more effectively at low speeds and to drive accessories at a constant velocity, no matter how fast the engine is turning. Typically, automobile transmission systems have hundreds of parts, many of which must be manufactured to high precision. Fallbrook's has fewer than 50, of which the most critical is a set of stainless-steel ball bearings—"the cheapest precision-machined product in the world," says Fallbrook CEO William Klehm, a former Ford executive. Preliminary tests on military vehicles show that Fallbrook's tech can make alternators produce 75 percent more power at idling speed. Although the transmissions would have the most impact on tomorrow's electric cars, Klehm says they can be used almost immediately to benefit gas engines, too.

When Klehm was working for Ford, a small outfit like Fallbrook would have had little chance of engaging the industry. "There was a big NIH problem," he says. "If something was 'not invented here,' we didn't want it." Detroit has long worked with outside suppliers, but the relationship has typically been one-way and often hostile; car companies specify exactly what services they need and how much they'll pay for them. Since the 1990s, the Big Three have forced suppliers' prices down so much that many are edging toward bankruptcy. At the same time, the industry has tried to loosen up, outsourcing production to independent firms. However, these efforts have done little to change the underlying dynamic, in which the automakers exert an enormous amount of control over a handful of giant suppliers. None of the big manufacturers have regularly allowed Silicon Valley-style innovators like Transonic and Fallbrook into the core of their products.

Even inside the companies themselves, the industry draws on a narrow well of innovation. Detroit does work with the University of Michigan, an excellent school. But the Big Three pull in few employees from other top colleges. "Our students have basically not been joining GM, Ford, or Chrysler for 20 years," MIT's Cusumano says. "They go to companies like Intel, Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard." One consequence, he says, is that when young engineers and designers launch their own firms, the last sector they think of is the auto industry. "It's seen as a place that isn't interested in new ways of doing things."

In its insularity, the auto industry is increasingly an outlier. A growing number of firms have adopted what UC Berkeley's Chesbrough dubbed "open innovation"—accelerating change by letting ideas flow much more freely in and out of companies. Rather than depending primarily on their own engineers, he says, auto companies should leverage the insights of others, outsourcing much or most R&D to an ecosystem of small, agile entities outside the factory walls. Unsurprisingly, open innovation is seen most clearly in firms like IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, but Chesbrough argues that it has been picked up with success by companies in fields ranging from chemicals and packaged goods to lubricants and home-improvement gadgets. "The auto industry is different," he says. "It hasn't learned that no one company or industry has a monopoly on useful ideas."

Nobody can say which companies will come up with the inventions that revive the auto industry—Transonic, Fallbrook, any of the other startups, or some company yet to be created. A few years ago, a 1978 photo of Microsoft's founders—a disheveled bunch of geeks—made the email rounds under the subject line "Would you have invested?" No single company could have foreseen or designed the modern computer industry, just as the Big Three cannot predict the eventual shape of the US auto industry. But they can build the ecosystem that allows it to develop.

How does a traditionally top-down manufacturer become an open-ended promoter of innovation? Clues can be found in "Managing in an Age of Modularity," a classic 1997 Harvard Business Review paper by economists Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark. They studied how personal-computer manufacturers divided their products into subsystems, establishing standards that allow parts to be readily swapped out and replaced. By giving outside innovators the freedom to tinker with individual modules—hardware, operating systems, software, peripherals—PC makers spurred the development of far more sophisticated devices and allowed customers to individualize and customize their purchases. In other words, modularity encouraged multiple innovations from multiple sources and made them easy to incorporate.

The analogy between cars and computers can't be taken too far. Because automobile design and manufacturing flaws can kill people, the industry is properly governed by strict regulations—and subject to continual product-liability litigation. As a result, automakers will never be able to release a set of standards, then snap together a working automobile out of whatever components entrepreneurs happen to come up with. But they can use this model to rethink how they approach innovation and manufacturing.

Indeed, a precursor already exists. In 2000, GM inaugurated a new complex in southern Brazil. Rather than following the still-dominant Rouge model, the Gravataí factory consisted of 17 separate plants, 16 of which were occupied by suppliers, including Delphi, Goodyear, and Lear. Unlike elsewhere in the auto world, the Gravataí suppliers didn't just carry out GM's blueprints but took an active role in designing their subunits: fuel lines, rear axle, exhaust and cooling systems. Suppliers delivered preassembled modules to GM workers, who plugged in the pieces to make cars much more quickly than plants in the rest of the world.

Despite its achievements, the Gravataí model has largely been ignored. It should have been extended. Instead of limiting the number of suppliers, companies could encourage startups to join the supplier network, working to meet industry specifications while bringing their own ideas and innovations to the table. As in Gravataí, the car company would act largely as a coordinator and assembler, piecing together interchangeable units to create a complete vehicle.

The growing dependence of cars on computers will accelerate this process. The typical 2009 car includes about 200 electronic sensors and some 40 networks, monitoring everything from temperature to tire pressure. Outside firms are already largely responsible for the electronic equipment that reduces emissions by controlling the mixture of fuel and air combusted by the engine; they also largely developed electronic stability control, the network of actuators and controllers in the suspension that helps prevent skids. One can readily imagine garage entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley—or platoons of data-crunchers at Google—building software-driven devices that make cars run more cleanly, efficiently, and safely. Scott McCormick, president of the Connected Vehicle Trade Association, foresees a future in which networked cars constantly communicate with one another and the road, helping drivers avoid traffic jams and accidents. Plenty of tech companies would be happy to take part in accomplishing that vision.

By outsourcing most R&D, car companies would be able to reap the rewards of innovation for a fraction of the cost and risk. The growing sophistication of design and simulation software makes it easier for startups to create prototypes and test new products virtually, before undergoing those expensive processes in the real world. Not every idea will succeed, but the costs of failure will be reduced and borne by smaller firms that can collapse with less impact on the larger economy. Ultimately, modular construction will lead to cars that can be custom-built to the specifications of their future owners, somewhat as Dell allows purchasers to click on hyperlinks to add or subtract computer features. Custom-rebuilt, too—it will be easy to install upgraded modules, in much the way that computer owners replace old video cards.

Of course, there are dangers for the automakers. When US computer giants adopted more-open, modular designs in the 1980s, they set off an explosion of technological advances. But they also reduced their own relevance. Famously, IBM was overwhelmed by the entrepreneurs and developers it had enabled; to save itself from bankruptcy, the company successfully shifted its focus from physical products to software and services. Wang and DEC no longer exist as stand-alone companies. More globally, the balance of power in the industry has moved away from manufacturers and toward the module designers—the chipmakers and software jockeys whose innovations move the industry forward.

American carmakers could follow a similar course. By shifting away from vertical integration, they will inherently play a smaller role in the overall industry. As system architects, they would lay down the framework in which independent developers work, communicating and enforcing those standards with would-be suppliers. They would also be the marketers and sales force—nobody knows how to advertise like Detroit.

This will not come easy. But in seeking a model for outsourcing in a heavily regulated industry, automakers might look to pharmaceutical companies, which also operate under severe regulatory, legal, and safety constraints. Manufacturing is simpler for drug companies, but the process of testing new products with clinical trials is nightmarishly complex and costly. Yet this has not prevented drug firms from relying on outsiders; they routinely buy startups and test out their technology. Many or most of the acquisitions prove unusable, but the successes pay for failures. Managing and using outside innovation is difficult, but it has helped keep the US drug industry alive in a climate of unforgiving competition.

It is an open question whether the Big Three will be able to participate in the new auto industry. But they can't expect to maintain their positions as gatekeepers. They are too weak, and there is simply too much activity, too much interest, and too much money in play. Although that may be bad news for the companies, it may not be bad for their customers and—in the long run—their employees and the nation itself, which will eventually benefit from a revitalized industry. What is good for the country may no longer be good for General Motors.

The biggest obstacle faced by Transonic Combustion is just down the street from its offices: a gas station. When I pulled in for a fill-up, the average price per gallon was about $1.90—so low that Americans were again buying gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. It is difficult to imagine the typical US driver paying more for Transonic's hyperefficient fuel injectors when a fill-up costs less than a pizza. Nor will there be much enthusiasm for cleaner, safer vehicles in a nation that has few penalties for carbon emissions and where performance standards have remained effectively unchanged for decades.

In other words, the US automotive industry will not introduce innovative cars unless there is a market to support them. And sustaining that market is next to impossible when oil prices can double or drop by half within six months, argues Bernard Swiecki, an analyst at the Center for Automotive Research. That's why he and other economists argue that higher gas taxes are necessary. As the events of last summer prove, the best way to get Americans to buy more-efficient vehicles is to sell gas at $4 a gallon. A tax that sets a floor for fuel prices would be politically unpopular, but its bitter taste could be offset by cuts in the payroll tax—and by making it part of the broader energy package.

Even with all of these initiatives, a good outcome for the US auto industry is far from guaranteed. Detroit is in an extraordinarily difficult position. But a long shot is better than none at all. Asked if he could think of any industry that had recovered from the position in which Detroit now finds itself, David Cole, chair of the Center for Automotive Research, answered—unhappily, to my ear—with a simple "no." Then he said, "That doesn't mean it can't happen, though. There's room for bold action. I just hope they're allowed to take it."

Contributing editor Charles C. Mann (charlesmann.org) wrote about spam blogs in issue 14.09.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2009 | 4:00 am

The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity

As the Internet was taking shape in the late 1980s, an MIT professor named Tom Malone started thinking about how it could change the structure of industries. In a series of papers, he predicted that the big top-down companies of the 20th century would soon "decentralize and externalize" into industry ecosystems.

"Imagine an AT&T that breaks up into not two or three different companies but two or three hundred thousand different companies," Malone told Wired in a July 1998 interview. "This sort of voluntary, radical disaggregation is an attractive alternative for some large organizations."

It simply stood to reason: Huge vertically integrated conglomerates were created to minimize what economist Ronald Coase called transaction costs between teams and up and down the supply chain. Now distributed-information networks would do the same outside the walls of a single company. The Web would be globalization taken to the extreme. Projects would be open to the best of breed anywhere, creating virtual flash firms of suppliers and workers that would come together for one product and then re-form for another. "Small pieces, loosely joined" was the mantra.

But out in the reality of the world's great industries, the opposite seemed to happen. Corporations just kept getting bigger. On Wall Street, Goldman Sachs was pulling in almost $90 billion a year, tripling annual revenue in less than a decade. The pharmaceutical industry consolidated through hundreds of mergers and acquisitions. The Fortune 10, which today includes Wal-Mart and General Electric, more than tripled in size since 1990. And AT&T, far from breaking up into 300,000 different companies, became even bigger than before and, once again—at least for iPhone users—a monopoly.

And then last September it all came toppling down. Those big financial firms turned out to have been inflated by debt at levels never before seen (and hopefully never repeated). The big car companies crashed head-on into skyrocketing oil prices and plummeting consumer demand. Big Pharma ran out of blockbusters. Wal-Mart kept closing stores, while GE tried to sell off divisions. (OK, AT&T is still an iPhone monopoly, but give it time!)

So now, in the graveyard of giants, it's worth asking: Was Malone right? Was his age of nimble mammals simply delayed by the final march of corporate dinosaurs into the tar pits?

This crisis is not just the trough of a cycle but the end of an era. We will come out not just wiser but different.

What we have discovered over the past nine months are growing diseconomies of scale. Bigger firms are harder to run on cash flow alone, so they need more debt (oops!). Bigger companies have to place bigger bets but have less and less control over distribution and competition in an increasingly diverse marketplace. Those bets get riskier and the payoffs lower. And as Wall Street firms are learning, bigger companies are going to get more regulated, limiting their flexibility. The stars of finance are fleeing for smaller firms; it's the only place they can imagine getting anything interesting done.

As venture capitalist Paul Graham put it, "It turns out the rule 'large and disciplined organizations win' needs to have a qualification appended: 'at games that change slowly.' No one knew till change reached a sufficient speed."

The result is that the next new economy, the one rising from the ashes of this latest meltdown, will favor the small.

Take Detroit. The only way for the Big Three to survive, Charles C. Mann writes in "Beyond Detroit", is to harness the innovation of the myriad startups working on automotive technology.

Or take Google. As Steven Levy explores in "The Secrets of Googlenomics", the company deploys a bottom-up model for ad sales, dictated not by firm handshakes but by hard math.

Or even society at large. A century ago, mass collective action could be organized only by the state. Now we have the Web. Kevin Kelly resurrects socialism—without the state—in "The New Socialism".

To all the usual reasons why small companies have an advantage, from nimbleness to risk-taking, add these new ones: The rise of cloud computing means that young firms no longer have to buy their own IT equipment, which helps them avoid having to raise money or take on debt. Likewise, the webification of the supply chain in many industries, from electronics to apparel, means that even the tiniest companies can now order globally, just like the giants. In the same way a musician with just a laptop and some gumption can accomplish most of what a record label does, an ambitious engineer can invent and produce a gadget with little more than that same laptop.

"Involuntary entrepreneurship" is now creating tens of thousands of small businesses and a huge market of contract and freelance labor. Many will take full-time jobs again once they become available, but many others will choose not to. The crisis may have turned our economy into small pieces, loosely joined, but it will be the collective action of millions of workers hungry for change that keeps it that way.

Chris Anderson (canderson@wired.com) is Wired's editor in chief.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2009 | 4:00 am

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or barter economy where there is no property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money. But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements. Groups of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step, the amount of coordination increases. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.

I. SHARING

The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it's a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the 6 billion videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.

Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.

II. COOPERATION

When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don't have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites employ the same social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, the technology aids users directly, letting them tag, bookmark, rank, and archive for their own use. Second, other users benefit from an individual's tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, tagged snapshots of the same scene from different angles can be assembled into a stunning 3-D rendering of the location. (Check out Microsoft's Photosynth.) In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.

Community aggregators can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Digg and Reddit, which let users vote on the Web links they display most prominently, can steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks. (Full disclosure: Reddit is owned by Wired's parent company, Condé Nast.) Serious contributors to these sites put in far more energy than they could ever get in return, but they keep contributing in part because of the cultural power these instruments wield. A contributor's influence extends way beyond a lone vote, and the community's collective influence can be far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions—the sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism aimed to ramp up this dynamic via the state. Now, decoupled from government and hooked into the global digital matrix, this elusive force operates at a larger scale than ever before.

III. COLLABORATION

Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.

Adding to the economic dissonance, we've become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees."

Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

IV. COLLECTIVISM

While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held responsible if the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale collectivist groups have tried this operating system. The results have not been encouraging, even setting aside Jim Jones and the Manson family.

Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia, Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source code factory, observed, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.

In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database, is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale.

Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies allow some private property.

Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.

The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution, independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise software or reference books.

The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How large? Ohloh, a company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free, even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't paid yet continued to produce automobiles!

So far, the biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale of a decentralized town or village.

Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far greater. YouTube claims some 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million registered users have contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are designated active. More than 35 million folks have posted and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on every possible subject. Google has 3.9 million.

These numbers still fall short of a nation. They may not even cross the threshold of mainstream (although if YouTube isn't mainstream, what is?). But clearly the population that lives with socialized media is significant. The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized socialism has reached millions and counting. Revolutions have grown out of much smaller numbers.

On the face of it, one might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don't think of themselves as revolutionaries. No new political party is being organized in conference rooms—at least, not in the US. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party formed on a platform of file-sharing. It won a paltry 0.63 percent of votes in the 2006 national election.)

Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software. Basically, overt politics is not practical enough.

But the rest of us may not be politically immune to the rising tide of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden.

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day, someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by unleashing market forces on social problems.

Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into elections.

Senior maverick Kevin Kelly (kk@kk.org) wrote about correspondences between the Internet and the human brain in issue 16.07.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2009 | 4:00 am

May 26, 1981: Programmer-Attorney Wins First U.S. Software Patent

After a seven-year struggle, Satya Pal Asija patents the Swift-Answer program he wrote 12 years earlier.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2009 | 4:00 am

Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability

In the midst of financial apocalypse, the gadflies and gurus of the global marketplace are gathered at the San Francisco Hilton for the annual meeting of the American Economics Association. The mood is similar to a seismologist convention in the wake of the Big One. Yet surprisingly, one of the most popular sessions has nothing to do with toxic assets, derivatives, or unemployment curves.

"I'm going to talk about online auctions," says Hal Varian, the session's first speaker. Varian is a lanky 62-year-old professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and School of Information, but these days he's best known as Google's chief economist. This morning's crowd hasn't come for predictions about the credit market; they want to hear about Google's secret sauce.

Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google's unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 "sponsored links" on every results page. It's the world's biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo's boisterous Tsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, "every time you search." He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year.

His talk quickly becomes technical. There's the difference between the Generalized Second Price auction model and the Vickrey-Clark-Groves alternative. Game theory takes a turn; so does the Nash Equilibrium. Terms involving the c-word—as in clicks—get tossed around like beach balls at a summer rock festival. Clickthrough rate. Cost per click. Supply curve of clicks. The audience is enthralled.

During the question-and-answer period, a man wearing a camel-colored corduroy blazer raises his hand. "Let me understand this," he begins, half skeptical, half unsure. "You say that an auction happens every time a search takes place? That would mean millions of times a day!"

Varian smiles. "Millions," he says, "is actually quite an understatement."

Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system.

Google depends on economic principles to hone what has become the search engine of choice for more than 60 percent of all Internet surfers, and the company uses auction theory to grease the skids of its own operations. All these calculations require an army of math geeks, algorithms of Ramanujanian complexity, and a sales force more comfortable with whiteboard markers than fairway irons.

Varian, an upbeat, avuncular presence at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, serves as the Adam Smith of the new discipline of Googlenomics. His job is to provide a theoretical framework for Google's business practices while leading a team of quants to enforce bottom-line discipline, reining in the more propellerhead propensities of the company's dominant engineering culture.

Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company's seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google.

The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online.

When the American Economics Association meets next year, the financial crisis may still be topic A. But one of the keynote speakers has already been chosen: Googlenomist Hal Varian.

Ironically, economics was a distant focus in the first days of Google. After Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998, they channeled their energy into its free search product and left much of the business planning to a 22-year-old Stanford graduate named Salar Kamangar, Google's ninth employee. The early assumption was that although ads would be an important source of revenue, licensing search technology and selling servers would be just as lucrative. Page and Brin also believed that ads should be useful and welcome—not annoying intrusions. Kamangar and another early Googler, Eric Veach, set out to implement that ideal. Neither had a background in business or economics. Kamangar had been a biology major, and Veach's field of study was computer science.

Google's ads were always plain blocks of text relevant to the search query. But at first, there were two kinds. Ads at the top of the page were sold the old-fashioned way, by a crew of human beings headquartered largely in New York City. Salespeople wooed big customers over dinner, explaining what keywords meant and what the prices were. Advertisers were then billed by the number of user views, or impressions, regardless of whether anyone clicked on the ad. Down the right side were other ads that smaller businesses could buy directly online. The first of these, for live mail-order lobsters, was sold in 2000, just minutes after Google deployed a link reading see your ad here.

But as the business grew, Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, was renamed AdWords Premium.

One key innovation was that all the sidebar slots on the results page were sold off in a single auction. (Compare that to an early pioneer of auction-driven search ads, Overture, which held a separate auction for each slot.) The problem with an all-at-once auction, however, was that advertisers might be inclined to lowball their bids to avoid the sucker's trap of paying a huge amount more than the guy just below them on the page. So the Googlers decided that the winner of each auction would pay the amount (plus a penny) of the bid from the advertiser with the next-highest offer. (If Joe bids $10, Alice bids $9, and Sue bids $6, Joe gets the top slot and pays $9.01. Alice gets the next slot for $6.01, and so on.) Since competitors didn't have to worry about costly overbidding errors, the paradoxical result was that it encouraged higher bids.

"Eric Veach did the math independently," Kamangar says. "We found out along the way that second-price auctions had existed in other forms in the past and were used at one time in Treasury auctions." (Another crucial innovation had to do with ad quality, but more on that later.)

Google's homemade solution to its ad problem impressed even Paul Milgrom, the Stanford economist who is to auction theory what Letitia Baldridge is to etiquette. "I've begun to realize that Google somehow stumbled on a level of simplification in ad auctions that was not included before," he says. And applying a variation on second-price auctions wasn't just a theoretical advance. "Google immediately started getting higher prices for advertising than Overture was getting."

Google hired Varian in May 2002, a few months after implementing the auction- based version of AdWords. The offer came about when Google's then-new CEO, Eric Schmidt, ran into Varian at the Aspen Institute and they struck up a conversation about Internet issues. Schmidt was with Larry Page, who was pushing his own notions about how some of the big problems in business and science could be solved by using computation and analysis on an unprecedented scale. Varian remembers thinking, "Why did Eric bring his high-school nephew?"

Schmidt, whose father was an economist, invited Varian to spend a day or two a week at Google. On his first visit, Varian asked Schmidt what he should do. "Why don't you take a look at the ad auction?" Schmidt said.

Google had already developed the basics of AdWords, but there was still plenty of tweaking to do, and Varian was uniquely qualified to "take a look." As head of the information school at UC Berkeley and coauthor (with Carl Shapiro) of a popular book called Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, he was already the go-to economist on ecommerce.

At the time, most online companies were still selling advertising the way it was done in the days of Mad Men. But Varian saw immediately that Google's ad business was less like buying traditional spots and more like computer dating. "The theory was Google as yenta—matchmaker," he says. He also realized there was another old idea underlying the new approach: A 1983 paper by Harvard economist Herman Leonard described using marketplace mechanisms to assign job candidates to slots in a corporation, or students to dorm rooms. It was called a two-sided matching market. "The mathematical structure of the Google auction," Varian says, "is the same as those two-sided matching markets."

Varian tried to understand the process better by applying game theory. "I think I was the first person to do that," he says. After just a few weeks at Google, he went back to Schmidt. "It's amazing!" Varian said. "You've managed to design an auction perfectly."

To Schmidt, who had been at Google barely a year, this was an incredible relief. "Remember, this was when the company had 200 employees and no cash," he says. "All of a sudden we realized we were in the auction business."

It wasn't long before the success of AdWords Select began to dwarf that of its sister system, the more traditional AdWords Premium. Inevitably, Veach and Kamangar argued that all the ad slots should be auctioned off. In search, Google had already used scale, power, and clever algorithms to change the way people accessed information. By turning over its sales process entirely to an auction-based system, the company could similarly upend the world of advertising, removing human guesswork from the equation.

The move was risky. Going ahead with the phaseout—nicknamed Premium Sunset—meant giving up campaigns that were selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, for the unproven possibility that the auction process would generate even bigger sums. "We were going to erase a huge part of the company's revenue," says Tim Armstrong, then head of direct sales in the US. (This March, Armstrong left Google to become AOL's new chair and CEO.) "Ninety-nine percent of companies would have said, 'Hold on, don't make that change.' But we had Larry, Sergey, and Eric saying, 'Let's go for it.'"

News of the switch jacked up the Maalox consumption among Google's salespeople. Instead of selling to corporate giants, their job would now be to get them to place bids in an auction? "We thought it was a little half-cocked," says Jeff Levick, an early leader of the Google sales team. The young company wasn't getting rid of its sales force (though the system certainly helped Google run with far fewer salespeople than a traditional media company) but was asking them to get geekier, helping big customers shape online strategies as opposed to simply selling ad space.

Levick tells a story of visiting three big customers to inform them of the new system: "The guy in California almost threw us out of his office and told us to fuck ourselves. The guy in Chicago said, 'This is going to be the worst business move you ever made.' But the guy in Massachusetts said, 'I trust you.'"

That client knew math, says Levick, whose secret weapon was the numbers. When the data was crunched—and Google worked hard to give clients the tools needed to run the numbers themselves—advertisers saw that the new system paid off for them, too.

AdWords was such a hit that Google went auction-crazy. The company used auctions to place ads on other Web sites (that program was dubbed AdSense). "But the really gutsy move," Varian says, "was using it in the IPO." In 2004, Google used a variation of a Dutch auction for its IPO; Brin and Page loved that the process leveled the playing field between small investors and powerful brokerage houses. And in 2008, the company couldn't resist participating in the FCC's auction to reallocate portions of the radio spectrum.

Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its various business units. Since moving a product's storage and computation to a new data center is disruptive, engineers often put it off. "I suggested we run an auction similar to what the airlines do when they oversell a flight. They keep offering bigger vouchers until enough customers give up their seats," Varian says. "In our case, we offer more machines in exchange for moving to new servers. One group might do it for 50 new ones, another for 100, and another won't move unless we give them 300. So we give them to the lowest bidder—they get their extra capacity, and we get computation shifted to the new data center."

The transition to an all-auction sales model was a milestone for Google, ensuring that its entire revenue engine would run with the same computer-science fervor as its search operation. Now, when Google recruits alpha geeks, it is just as likely to have them focus on AdWords as on search or apps.

The across-the-board emphasis on engineering, mathematical formulas, and data-mining has made Google a new kind of company. But to fully understand why, you have to go back and look under AdWords' hood.

Most people think of the Google ad auction as a straightforward affair. In fact, there's a key component that few users know about and even sophisticated advertisers don't fully understand. The bids themselves are only a part of what ultimately determines the auction winners. The other major determinant is something called the quality score. This metric strives to ensure that the ads Google shows on its results page are true, high-caliber matches for what users are querying. If they aren't, the whole system suffers and Google makes less money.

Google determines quality scores by calculating multiple factors, including the relevance of the ad to the specific keyword or keywords, the quality of the landing page the ad is linked to, and, above all, the percentage of times users actually click on a given ad when it appears on a results page. (Other factors, Google won't even discuss.) There's also a penalty invoked when the ad quality is too low—in such cases, the company slaps a minimum bid on the advertiser. Google explains that this practice—reviled by many companies affected by it—protects users from being exposed to irrelevant or annoying ads that would sour people on sponsored links in general. Several lawsuits have been filed by would-be advertisers who claim that they are victims of an arbitrary process by a quasi monopoly.

You can argue about fairness, but arbitrary it ain't. To figure out the quality score, Google needs to estimate in advance how many users will click on an ad. That's very tricky, especially since we're talking about billions of auctions. But since the ad model depends on predicting clickthroughs as perfectly as possible, the company must quantify and analyze every twist and turn of the data. Susan Wojcicki, who oversees Google's advertising, refers to it as "the physics of clicks."

During Varian's second summer in Mountain View, when he was still coming in only a day or two a week, he asked a recently hired computer scientist from Stanford named Diane Tang to create the Google equivalent of the Consumer Price Index, called the Keyword Pricing Index. "Instead of a basket of goods like diapers and beer and doughnuts, we have keywords," says Tang, who is known internally as the Queen of Clicks.

The Keyword Pricing Index is a reality check. It alerts Google to any anomalous price bubbles, a sure sign that an auction isn't working properly. Categories are ranked by the cost per click that advertisers generally have to pay, weighted by distribution, and then separated into three bundles: high cap, mid cap, and low cap. "The high caps are very competitive keywords, like 'flowers' and 'hotels,'" Tang says. In the mid-cap realm you have keywords that may vary seasonally—the price to place ads alongside results for "snowboarding" skyrockets during the winter. Low caps like "Massachusetts buggy whips" are the stuff of long tails.

Tang's index is just one example of a much broader effort. As the amount of data at the company's disposal grows, the opportunities to exploit it multiply, which ends up further extending the range and scope of the Google economy. So it's utterly essential to calculate correctly the quality scores that prop up AdWords.

"The people working for me are generally econometricians—sort of a cross between statisticians and economists," says Varian, who moved to Google full-time in 2007 (he's on leave from Berkeley) and leads two teams, one of them focused on analysis.

"Google needs mathematical types that have a rich tool set for looking for signals in noise," says statistician Daryl Pregibon, who joined Google in 2003 after 23 years as a top scientist at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs. "The rough rule of thumb is one statistician for every 100 computer scientists."

Keywords and click rates are their bread and butter. "We are trying to understand the mechanisms behind the metrics," says Qing Wu, one of Varian's minions. His specialty is forecasting, so now he predicts patterns of queries based on the season, the climate, international holidays, even the time of day. "We have temperature data, weather data, and queries data, so we can do correlation and statistical modeling," Wu says. The results all feed into Google's backend system, helping advertisers devise more-efficient campaigns.

To track and test their predictions, Wu and his colleagues use dozens of onscreen dashboards that continuously stream information, a sort of Bloomberg terminal for the Googlesphere. Wu checks obsessively to see whether reality is matching the forecasts: "With a dashboard, you can monitor the queries, the amount of money you make, how many advertisers you have, how many keywords they're bidding on, what the rate of return is for each advertiser."

Wu calls Google "the barometer of the world." Indeed, studying the clicks is like looking through a window with a panoramic view of everything. You can see the change of seasons—clicks gravitating toward skiing and heavy clothes in winter, bikinis and sunscreen in summer—and you can track who's up and down in pop culture. Most of us remember news events from television or newspapers; Googlers recall them as spikes in their graphs. "One of the big things a few years ago was the SARS epidemic," Tang says. Wu didn't even have to read the papers to know about the financial meltdown—he saw the jump in people Googling for gold. And since prediction and analysis are so crucial to AdWords, every bit of data, no matter how seemingly trivial, has potential value.

Since Google hired Varian, other companies, like Yahoo, have decided that they, too, must have a chief economist heading a division that scrutinizes auctions, dashboards, and econometric models to fine-tune their business plan. In 2007, Harvard economist Susan Athey was surprised to get a summons to Redmond to meet with Steve Ballmer. "That's a call you take," she says. Athey spent last year working in Microsoft's Cambridge, Massachusetts, office.

Can the rest of the world be far behind? Although Eric Schmidt doesn't think it will happen as quickly as some believe, he does think that Google-style auctions are applicable to all sorts of transactions. The solution to the glut in auto inventory? Put the entire supply of unsold cars up for bid. That'll clear out the lot. Housing, too: "People use auctions now in cases of distress, like auctioning a house when there are no buyers," Schmidt says. "But you can imagine a situation in which it was a normal and routine way of doing things."

Varian believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati—and it's all about harnessing supply and demand. "What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data. As a result, he believes that the kind of technical person who once would have wound up working for a hedge fund on Wall Street will now work at a firm whose business hinges on making smart, daring choices—decisions based on surprising results gleaned from algorithmic spelunking and executed with the confidence that comes from really doing the math.

It's a satisfying development for Varian, a guy whose career as an economist was inspired by a sci-fi novel he read in junior high. "In Isaac Asimov's first Foundation Trilogy, there was a character who basically constructed mathematical models of society, and I thought this was a really exciting idea. When I went to college, I looked around for that subject. It turned out to be economics." Varian is telling this story from his pied-è0-Plex, where he sometimes stays during the week to avoid driving the 40-some miles from Google headquarters to his home in the East Bay. It happens to be the ranch-style house, which Google now owns, where Brin and Page started the company.

There's a wild contrast between this sparsely furnished residence and what it has spawned—dozens of millionaire geeks, billions of auctions, and new ground rules for businesses in a data-driven society that is far weirder than the one Asimov envisioned nearly 60 years ago. What could be more baffling than a capitalist corporation that gives away its best services, doesn't set the prices for the ads that support it, and turns away customers because their ads don't measure up to its complex formulas? Varian, of course, knows that his employer's success is not the result of inspired craziness but of an early recognition that the Internet rewards fanatical focus on scale, speed, data analysis, and customer satisfaction. (A bit of auction theory doesn't hurt, either.) Today we have a name for those rules: Googlenomics. Learn them, or pay the price.

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com) wrote about the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters in issue 17.05.

Source: Wired Top Stories | 26 May 2009 | 4:00 am

Robot Warfare Going Open Source

destinyland writes "Peter Singer, author of the new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, says 'You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000.' Singer argues that 'just like software, warfare is going open source.' He warns that, ultimately, robot warfare may even expand beyond the military using more DIY and off-the-shelf systems. In addition to 43 countries now working on military robots, there are 'non-state actors ranging from Hezbollah to this militia group in Arizona to a bunch of college kids at Swarthmore... One person's hobby — such as the hobbyist who flew a homemade drone from North America to Great Britain — can be another person's terrorist strike option.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2009 | 3:21 am

Doctor Jesus (snapshot from the road in Guatemala)

iPhone snapshot of a painting that hangs in a traumatologist's waiting room in Guatemala. Story + sizes here. Hi to the home blog from the road (and I am fine, I'm not the patient, thanks).

Update: At left, BB commenter Florsie sends along this equally excellent "Baby Doctor Jesus" image in the same popular theme, also of Latin American provenance. Haz click aquí!

Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 3:07 am

RT: @Microsyntax Sets Out To Make Sense Of #twittergrammar

One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post).

New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post, he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo.

Microsyntax is not just about coming up with commonly used abbreviations. It is also the way that structure can be added to the mess that is Twitter today. Hashtags, for instance, lets you find all tweets about a particular subject or event. We probably need more microtags for different purposes.

The problem with the microsyntax approach, however, is that it appeals mostly to the command-line crowd instead of to the average user. Nevertheless, if a microconvention becomes popular enough, then Twitter itself can adopt it, as it has with the @replies (although it has messed that up by mixing in retweets that simply mention your name and aren’t truly replies, but I digress). What’s your favorite microslang and what do we need to add to the microlexicon?

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

Source: TechCrunch | 26 May 2009 | 2:21 am

Epic's Sweeney On the PC Shareware Revolution

simoniker writes "Over at Gamasutra, there's a massive new interview with Epic (Mega)Games founder Tim Sweeney, the guy who's still a key technical figure at the Unreal Engine/Gears Of War developer. He discusses his early programming days, the story behind classic shareware game/tool ZZT, the origins of Epic, the '90s shareware business, and even a bit about the future as well. Particularly neat is his revelation that you can still order ZZT via mail, with orders fulfilled by his dad: 'My father still lives at the address where Potomac Computer Systems started up, so he still gets an order every few weeks... he's retired now, so he doesn't have much to do. Every week, he'll just take a stack of a few orders, put disks in them, and mail them out.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 26 May 2009 | 1:37 am

Online news fees: financial salvation or suicide? (AP)

AP - The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is a rarity among large U.S. newspapers — it's selling more weekday copies than a decade ago. In Idaho, the Post Register's circulation has remained stable, while many other print publications have lost readers to the Internet. How can this be?
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 26 May 2009 | 1:12 am

Into The Subdimensions

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I can't put my finger on a really good link to the word "subdimension" in Golden Age SF and comics, maybe some readers can come up with it. It's basically a place-holder word, a liguistic MacGuffin, used to fill in for any type of weird science that happens to be needed. But I've always wanted to visit the subdimensions.

Experientially, I think of going into the subdimensions as being something like SCUBA diving...here's a photo of a guide, my big brother Embry and me diving near Yap Island in Micronesia.

In recent years I decided to retrofit the word "subdimensional" and use it to apply to a hypothetical cosmos that lies "inside the Planck length," in a sense that I'll explain at the end of this post. I introduced this SFictional usage three yeares ago in a story with Paul DiFilippo, "Elves of the Subdimensions," which is still online in issue #1 of my webzine Flurb.

And I used it again in my novel Postsingular. You can either buy the paperback or download a free Creative Commons PDF release from my site for Postsingular. Here's a drawing from my online working notes for the novel (these notes are also online my Postsingular site).

The beings who live in the subdimensions are called "subbies," and generally speaking, you're better off not having any dealings with them!

It's always nice have some kind of scientific justification for what I write about, and, by way of justifying the reality of the subdimensions, I found the following passage in Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds, where he discusses a 1984 theory of “string duality” ascribed to Keiji Kikkawa and Masami Yamasaki. String duality allows for interesting physics below the Planck length (which is roughly a quadrillionth of the diameter of a proton). The Planck length becomes something like an interface between two worlds. As Kaku puts it:

Let's say we take a string theory and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius R. Then we take another string and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius 1/R. By comparing these two quite different theories, we find that they are exactly the same. Now let R become extremely small, much smaller than the Planck length. This means that the physics within the Planck length is identical to the physics outside the Planck length. At the Planck length, spacetime may become lumpy and foamy, but the physics inside the Planck length and the physics at very large distances can be smooth and are in fact identical.

Source: Boing Boing | 26 May 2009 | 1:11 am

The Great Ethanol Scam

theodp writes "Over at BusinessWeek, Ed Wallace is creating quite a stir, reporting that not only is ethanol proving to be a dud as a fuel substitute, but there is increasing evidence that it is destroying engines in large numbers. Before lobbyists convince the government to increase the allowable amount of ethanol in fuel to 15%, Wallace suggests it's time to look at ethanol's effect on smog, fuel efficiency, global warming emissions, and food prices. Wallace concedes there will be some winners if the government moves the ethanol mandate to 15% — auto mechanics, for whom he says it will be the dawn of a new golden age."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2009 | 11:50 pm

Video player round up: Find the right player for you

Section: Audio, Video, Computers, Desktops, Software / Applications, Web, Downloads, Features, Originals

One important piece of software essential to any computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) is a video player.  There are many good, free, available programs out there, yet many users shy away from some that they haven’t heard of before.  Within this post, I’m going to take a look at five different programs and some key features about each.

Windows Media Player

Developed by Microsoft, Windows Media Player is available on all PCs, pocket PCs, Windows Mobile cell phones, and it was even developed for Mac, but that development has since ended.  Windows Media Player has been released in many versions ranging from 6.1 - 11.  The player has a lot of strong features, but many of which require plug-ins.  For users running Windows Vista or XP, I’d suggest using Windows Media Player as at least a starter.  If any other program below looks appealing, then go with that. 

VLC

The next media player is the open source VLC Media Player, which is available on all platforms and boasts 100 million downloads of its version 0.8.6.  It can handle pretty much any media format you throw at it, and comes many encoding and decoding databases for Windows, which reduces the amount of required plug-ins.  For more experienced users with many different file formats, you can’t really go wrong with VLC, as it handles nearly everything. 

Miro

Miro is another video software that manages a lot of online videos and incorporates other video software.  First off, it is available on all three major platforms - Windows, Mac, and Linux.  It uses a RSS Aggregator to collect the latest videos you want, features a BitTorrent client built-in, as well as a media player.  For Windows, the media player is VLC.  For Mac OS X, it is QuickTime.  And if you are running Linux, then it comes with either Xine Media Player or GStreamer.  One of the main features of Miro is its use of BitTorrent, which is definitely a plus if you Torrent a lot. 

ALShow

The next media player is Windows only.  It’s very popular yet but it does have some nifty features.  On the homepage, it lists a few features such as:

# Loads Faster & Plays Smoother
# Play FLV Files - Get the codec in the ALShow Codec Center!
# Codecs Included - Never search for codecs again
# Video / Screen / Audio Capture - Save parts as video, pictures, or audio
# Loop Video Segments - Want to watch that again a few times?
# Instantly Hide ALShow - Press the ESC key
# Caption & Subtitle Support

Based on the system requirements, ALShow does not take up a lot of system resources, which is important in a video player.  One key advantage to ALShow is that all of the codecs are built-in.  After you download ALShow, you would never have to download any additional codecs. 

GomPlayer

The last media player I have for today is GomPlayer, a media player designed for Windows, which is especially popular in South Korea.  Some core features of the player is that it can play many different types of files without codecs, and can play broken files.  The player was developed in South Korea for Gom-TV.  If you live in South Korea, you have probably already heard of this player and possibly use it, as it is more popular than Windows Media Player in South Korea.  Otherwise, it’s not very popular here in the United States. 

Well there you have it.  Each media player listed above has its own specialties and unique aspects.  However, each player is still a quality, free program that will hopefully be continued in the future. 

Check it out [Windows Media Player]
Check it out [VLC]
Check it out [Miro]
Check it out [ALShow]
Check it out [GomPlayer]

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

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Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2009 | 11:15 pm

Public Notices Going Online, Not In Newspapers

An anonymous reader tips a story up on Bnet.com about the growing trend for governments and others to eschew newspapers and post notices of public record on their own Web sites. It's under discussion at local, state, and national government levels, including in the SEC and the states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, so far. "If classified ads were a backbone of the newspaper business, then the very center of the spine was the public notice. Mandated by laws and courts, these often long recitations of detail were to give official notification, to any who were interested, of the legal intents and actions of both government entities and companies that found themselves under some appropriate regulation. But a growing number of state and local governments want to move public notices online to their own sites as a cost-cutting measure. Beyond newspaper economics, critics are concerned that the shift would allow government officials to effectively hide their activities from scrutiny."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2009 | 11:00 pm

300 Things I’d Like To See From Twitter Before A TV Show

It’s not a bad joke, Twitter is apparently somehow involved in a new TV show. Among other things, this earns it our rarely used “WTF” in sign language image.

Twitter has not yet responded to an email, but investor Fred Wilson seems to think it’s a good idea, saying “TV isn’t TV anymore. It’s just the largest screen in the house.”

So we’ll wait for more details of the show to surface before we write the inevitable blog post trashing the idea (update: details!). In the meantime, Twitter, as a heavy user there are a nearly unlimited number of things I’d so much rather you guys spend your time on than going Hollywood. Here’s a few key ones, I’m guess lots more will show up in the comments and we’ll get to at least 300 or so things Twitter could better spend its time.

Keep The Lights On. Twitter is still not a stable service.

Fix Track. This is the “Google Alerts” feature of Twitter that made a brief appearance in 2007 but was stripped out in the uptime wars of 2008. It may have made sense to remove it at the time, but we’re long past due on this much needed feature.

Fix Search. Twitter’s main value is as a search engine, and it’s pretty broken. There’s lots of work to do here.

Stop Breaking Stuff. Twitter just doesn’t seem to feel comfortable in its own skin, making changes to suit the masses that are just confusing and need to be reversed.

Fix Private Messages. Twitter’s direct messages (private messages) has occasional hiccups. Sometimes they are mis-delivered, as in they go to the wrong person. That just can’t happen.

Maybe Launch Some Features. Twitter is so concerned with uptime that they rarely (never) launch new features. Sites like FriendFeed are embarrasing them with innovation, and others like Facebook are copying the core Twitter service. I get that uptime is important, but if you have time for meetings in Hollywood, you have time to add new features. Spend that time interviewing new engineers at the very least. You need more people badly.

Ok, that’s six. Let me know what you’d like to see Twitter do before working on a television show in the comments, and we’ll add the smartest and most entertaining to the main post.

Update: Some of the better suggestions from comments:

Groups/Friend List — @zee and @blackrabbit

Increased/No limit for API requests — Sam Houston and Jeff

“A business model.” — @robinwauters

Spam filtering — Sean Percival

Integration with Steam — @carltonprest

30-second edit window — @Sheamus

Analytics — @MiikoMentz

iTunes Genius-like recommendations engine — Wesley Barrow

Auto-linking of hashtags — @silvaldropout

Threaded conversations — jcunwired

Some of the suggestions were a bit more amusing:

“surrendering to FF” — Johnny Schroepfer

“Limit the amount of followers a cat can have to 499,999.” — @robinwauters

“Gonorrhea - something I’d like to see before a Twitter TV show.” — Dante

“A phone number where I can short the stock of the TV network that plans to air this show.” — swag

“I’d like to see Twitter allow people to order cheesecakes by tweeting @twittercakes, before I would like them be involved with a TV show.” — @chacha102

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

Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 10:56 pm

Viralheat Measures And Analyzes Real-Time Content On Twitter, YouTube And More

As YouTube and Twitter have become essential marketing tools for brands and companies, there has been an emergence of startups that help marketers track the buzz around a certain individual or brand. Radian6, Visible Measures, Omgili, Omniture and a plethora of others offer tools to monitor blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of a company or individual’s name. Startup Viralheat is entering this space with the private beta launch of its affordable social media measurement product that scours social video sites including YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo, and Twitter to deliver real-time results of consumer generated content on these sites.

Viralheat allows you to create profiles to track an individual’s name or a company’s name across nearly 30 video sites and Twitter. The platform’s Twitter tool provides data on how many total mentions an item had on Twitter for the week and for the given day, the most active Twitter user who has Tweet about a brand, the most common language of Tweets, percentage of Tweets about a brand that are Retweets, the most active day of the week for mention of a brand and a sentiment breakdown of Tweets. For example, a profile created for “Obama” shows there were just over 7,000 tweets today including the name “Obama,” and over 32,000 total Tweets this week. The service also provides a graph of the number of Tweets over the past week and shows the most recent Tweets about the item updated in real-time, which you can Tweet out directly from Viralheat’s platform or email to others.

The video tool will filter the breakdown of a brand or individual over video sites, letting you know how many mentions were made over each video platform. The video dashboard will let you know what the most popular video was, how many videos were found with a certain brand or name in a given week, the average number of video downloads per day and how many total views the videos received in a week. Similar to the Viralheat’s twitter feed, the site pulls in a real-time feed of the videos and allows you to email or tweet links to the videos directly from the platform.

Any data from the Twitter and video dashboards can be exported directly into PDF files or Excel spreadsheets, making it easy for marketers to share this data with others. Viralheat also lets users share a snapshot their profiles of brands, trends, individuals, etc. with the public. Under a trends page, anyone can see the performance of profiles of brands or individuals broken down by subject (politics, sports, movies, television).

Viralheat’s service could be a cost-effective and user-friendly way to view social metrics data from Twitter and video sites. And the price for the tool is easy on the wallet—for $10 per month, you can track 10 profiles on the site. For $40 per month, you can track 50 profiles. There’s no doubt that tracking Twitter is useful to companies and brands, but Viralheat’s reach is currently limited. One major drawback is that the site doesn’t allow you to track other social networks where brands are commonly mentioned, such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Flickr. The startup says that it has plans to incorporate blogs, sites and social networks into its dashboard over the next few months and will not be planning to change its pricing structure when these services are added. Viralheat also plans to add an app store-like marketplace where users can add extra tracking items, such has the ability to track top keyword searches and tags for a profile.

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

Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 10:45 pm

Hostage Hallucinations: Visual Imagery Experienced by Victims of Torture, Rape... and UFOs.

Mindhacks blog points to a fascinating (though also disturbing and graphic) study conducted in the mid-1980s about hallucinations experienced by the victims of kidnappings, rape, torture -- and people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs.

The reasoning behind including two 'alien abductees' was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.

The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.

Link to Mindhacks post, which includes links to the studies, and an excerpt of one torture victim's hallucination testimony, in which he compares the visual imagery experienced to a PCP trip. As the Mindhacks writer, Vaughn, says, "Worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it's a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience." (via Maggie KB)


Source: Boing Boing | 25 May 2009 | 10:33 pm

Cocaine Test Prompts Red Bull Removal In Germany

viyh writes to mention that six German states have mandated pulling Red Bull Cola energy drinks off the shelves after testing found trace amounts of cocaine in the drink. "Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment said Monday that the cocaine level was too low to pose a health risk. It planned to produce a more detailed report Wednesday. Red Bull said its cola is 'harmless and marketable in both the US and Europe.' It said similar coca leaf extracts are used worldwide as flavoring, and a test it commissioned itself found no cocaine traces."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot | 25 May 2009 | 10:11 pm

Facebook settles trademark dispute

Section: Web, Web 2.0, Websites

Facebook announced it has settled a trademark dispute brought against it by Think Computer.  Think founder Aaron Greenspan, who went to school with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, released a web based student portal called HouseSystem back in 2003.  The portal had a section called “The Universal Face Book” but it didn’t include member profiles because they were considered a security risk.

Nonetheless, Greenspan filed the dispute.  The reason wasn’t because he wanted the “Facebook” name for himself.  He was simply angry that it caused problems for him when he tried to market his book “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era” with Google Adwords.  Greenspan was seeking to have them invalidated all together.

“Aaron and I studied together at Harvard and I’ve always admired his entrepreneurial spirit and love of building things,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “I appreciate his hard work and innovation that led to building houseSYSTEM, including the Universal Face Book feature. At school, I was even a member of houseSYSTEM. We are pleased that we’ve been able to amicably resolve our differences.”

It is believed Greenspan received a sizable financial settlement, but specifics have not been released (however an earlier suit filed against Facebook by ConnectU was settled for $65 million in cash and stock).  It’s not the first time he has tried to bite off a piece of the Facebook pie.  He previously claimed ownership of the idea behind the wildly popular social networking site, but says he’s made peace with the fact that Zuckerberg will be the one to profit from it.

Facebook is likely turning its attention to what could be its next legal battle-a tell all book due in July called “The Accidental Billonaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”  Stay tuned!

Read [CNet]

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

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Source: Gadgetell | 25 May 2009 | 9:31 pm

The App Store Hype Gets A Dose Of Reality

Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “The Incredible App Store Hype“, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had released (some of which rank on the App Store’s top apps lists), and what other developers could expect to make accordingly. His conclusion? That most of the 36,000 applications on the App Store aren’t selling at all - for many apps, most days go by without a single sale.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

As marketplaces go, the App Store has a very low barrier to entry that makes it easy for anyone to sell their wares, which means that it’s flooded with apps. There’s no way Apple could prominently present these 36,000 applications to users without overwhelming them, which means most apps fall into obscurity as soon as they’re submitted. If you can’t find a way to get the word out, nobody is going to find your app on their own.

Now, as someone who regularly likes to cover the success stories of the App Store, I thought this would have been fairly obvious to other developers and have thus failed to insert disclaimers that these cases were not typical results. But the fact that Strom’s post was written seems to indicate that perhaps we need to make this a bit clearer.

So here goes: The App Store probably will not make you rich.

To underscore the point, let’s go over some of the stats presented by Strom. His application Zen Jar ranks #34 on the Social Networking top apps list. And while most of us would probably assume it would take at least a hundred daily downloads to place there, the reality is quite surprising: Zen Jar reached the 34th position with only 30-35 downloads a day (or around $20 a day for a 99 cent app). Similarly, Sprint Board Pro, which ranked 95th in the Board Games section of the store with 6-8 daily downloads. Granted, these aren’t exactly the most popular categories, but If it takes fewer than 10 downloads a day to make the top 100 bestsellers of any category, that’s saying something.

Strom likens the App Store to a lottery, with the time and cost spent developing your application as the price of admission. And I think he’s right in this respect. The thing is, I don’t really see how this differs from many professions where the rich and elite are given heavy media coverage while everyone else toils away in obscurity. This is true for the entire entertainment business, where actors train for years just so they can vie for a limited number of spots. Most writers struggle to have their books published, let alone see them become popular. Basically any job that has the potential to make you rich is going to require a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. Those with lower barriers to entry will see huge amounts of competition. There’s a reason everyone isn’t wealthy.

Strom writes that software entrepreneurs frequently use the “huge successes” of a market to gauge its potential, rather than looking at the average outcome. I think this may be true for some of them, just as some would-be actors venture to Hollywood with the expectation of simply jumping into the spotlight only to find themselves waiting tables at a diner. But I think that most developers understand the risks involved, and how unlikely it is that their app will hit the big time. The same can be said for most of the web entrepreneurs I meet. They may invest many months or years into their work, but they know that the vast majority of new online ventures are bound to fail.

So for all of you iPhone developers who are new to these somewhat discouraging facts of life, I’m sorry if I (and the media as a whole) have failed to underscore the low probability of striking it rich on the App Store. To those of you who keep building things anyway: rock on.

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

Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 8:48 pm

The full Modern Warfare 2 trailer, finally

We’ve seen teaser after teaser, but the full trailer is finally here for Modern Warfare 2 and looks amazing. Watch it in HD, too. This game is going to rock. Hard.

Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2009 | 8:37 pm

Palm EOS coming in the second half of 2009

After we broke the story of the Palm EOS' existence back in April, the information came pouring in. Alas, one thing that no one could seem to nail was a release date.

Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2009 | 8:33 pm

The OpenTable Binge and Purge [Digital Daily]

Anyone remember Foodline.com? Judging from the performance of OpenTable’s IPO last week, it would seem few do. Like OpenTable, Foodline was an online restaurant reservation business. And it too boasted some high-profile investors–Zagat, American Express (AXP). But it never went public. It went bankrupt in 2001, leaving the online restaurant market to OpenTable, which survived the bust to try its luck on the open market a few years later.

Ancient history, I suppose. But perhaps worth thinking about in light of OpenTable’s rather astonishing IPO last week. Originally priced at between $12 and $14, shares in the company were instead listed at $20. They opened at $24.50 and then spiked to $33 before closing at $31.81. A 59 percent surge on the first day of trading. For a company whose business is built on the recession-brutalized fine-dining industry? Impressive. Must have made for quite a windfall for OpenTable’s’s larger investors. Especially those who took the opportunity to dump their stakes in the company. Charles Schwab (SCHW), Pacific Asset Partners, W Capital Partners, Venture Frogs, Zagat and a number of small private investors sold off all their OpenTable shares as part of the company’s IPO (click on chart below), according to the SEC filing.

Interesting, yeah? Seems at least some of the company’s investors had been hoping for an exit. And they fled for it in unison, pockets full, when one was offered. Perhaps they’d lost their appetite for risk after reading through the Risk Factors section of Open Tables IPO filing, which grimly noted that “a significant majority of our restaurant customers are fine-dining restaurants which have been particularly affected by economic downturns such as the one we are currently experiencing.”

Or perhaps, like Scott Sweet, a senior managing partner at I.P.O. Boutique, they remember Foodline and the last dot-com bubble and bust. “People don’t truly know the story here about this company. It’s a one-trick pony company,” Sweet told the New York Times. “Pricier restaurants in San Francisco, Tampa, New York are not that hard to get in right now. In fact, one can do it themselves if they choose, with 15 minutes notice.”

Source: All Things Digital | 25 May 2009 | 8:31 pm

Palm Eos coming in the second half of 2009

After we broke the story of the Palm Eos’ existence back in April, the information came pouring in. Alas, one thing that no one could seem to nail was a release date.

A month later, we’re still date-less - but we’ve at least got a rough idea. Engadget tore this slide fresh out of an AT&T internal document, pointing out the mentions of a release sometime in the latter 6 months of 2009. With the first half of 2009 nearly over, all this really means is that it’s not coming, you know, next month - but hey, at least we know they’re still hoping for a 2009 release, right?

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

Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 8:30 pm

AT&T to see Android in August

AT&T is playing with black magic, and some of its closest ties may get burned. AT&T will be launching the HTC “Lancaster”, powered by Google’s Android platform, making its way to retail stores in August of this year. Having AT&T’s first Android-powered device being released soon looks like this isn’t something that AT&T is setting on its back burners. This may be mildly damaging to Apple as they’re working on contracts and negotiations with AT&T for continued exclusive support for the iPhone. So is this AT&T’s way of showing Apple that it hasn’t become a one-trick pony, relying largely on the success and popularity of the iPhone?

This device’s aesthetics are a true mash up between the HTC-Magic and HTC-Pro, offering a very streamlined, sexy design. So, what does this little gem have running under its hood? Well, as reported by Engadget, it will come equipped with a 3-Megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0 support, AGPS, and will support EDGE and 850 / 1900MHz HSPA bands. I’m sad to say, however, its processor chip won’t hold its weight to the iPhone or any upcoming power-house phones and the resolution (marked at 240 X 320) is not impressive at all. This device, as drawn out on the specification-sheet, will only support video-playback, with no mention of actually recording videos that is now available for T-Mobile’s Android handsets with Google’s release of Cupcake. It’s nice to see healthy competition within a service providers selection of devices, but this phone is not shaping up to be a David to Apple’s Goliath. It’s a shame the first Android phone on AT&T is nothing more than a gutted, dulled down T-Mobile G1.

[Via Engadget]

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

Source: MobileCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 8:08 pm

BBG’s netbook compatability chart updated

Got an hankering to install OS X on your netbook? Rob over at Boing Boing Gadgets just added a few more machines to his compatability chart, which should ensure full OS X workability. The last thing you would want is to buy a new netbook, install OS X, and not have WiFi. Or video! Oh noes!

Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2009 | 7:50 pm

Microsoft has Google in its sights with latest $100M ad campaign

Section: Business News, Web, Web 2.0, Web Apps, Web Browsers, Websites, Google

I admit it.  I am not a lover of the business practices of all things Google, and yet when I need to look something up online, where do I go?  You guessed it.  The Big G.  Google managed to quite successfully win over much of the public through the years with their approach to search, and the fact that there aren’t big old ads all over the place when you try to look something up.

But now, Microsoft intends to grab a big piece of that search pie.  They are doing it with a rather large ad campaign for their search engine Bing.  Large as in $80 to $100 million being spent on the campaign.  Now, considering Google only spent $25 million total in advertising last year, that’s a rather impressive dollar-to-dollar comparison.

Apparently, they don’t plan to play the same game they did when they went after Apple in their marketing attacks.  Google, (or Yahoo), won’t be mentioned directly by name.  They are going to be all just “planting the idea” that the search engines of today don’t work as well as consumers thought by asking them whether or not search (ahem…that would be Google), really solves their problems. 

How subliminal of you Microsoft!  The software giant is hoping that by doing so, it will give consumers a reason to think about switching engines.  This switch, is what is what is probably going to be one of Bing’s biggest hurdles.

The reality is, most people are happy with their search.  But, that could simply be because they don’t know there could be something better.  “If you grab the average user off the street and ask them, ‘Does search suck?’ I think they’d say no. They don’t know what else can be done,” said Shashi Seth, a former Google executive who is now chief revenue officer at Cooliris. “They think search does a pretty good job, and if you could prove otherwise with a product that’s differentiated, people will sit up and take notice.”

Seth compared the Bing marketing challenge to what the Apple iPhone was faced with when it was first being introduced.  Before the iPhone, people didn’t realize they were missing a mulit-touch screen, or a phone with all those apps.  But Apple successfully used ads to show the totally different user experience, and it has now for many become the standard for smartphones.

Another hill Microsoft is going to have to climb is that obviously their product is going to have to do something the current ones aren’t doing.  However, the Google brand name is so ingrained is so many minds as THE search engine it is going to be an amazingly hard sell to cross that mindset.  This is shown by the fact that Google has conducted some internal tests, where the company put its logo and treatment on the results of another search engine.  Users still picked those results…even though they were not true Google results.  They were picking the Google brand  “I don’t think they can win this game with a better mousetrap,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of Landor Associates, New York. “They have to compete with Google on a brand front—there’s no other way to skin this but go head on against the Google brand.”

Microsoft did it with Apple.  Brazenly.  And it is showing in the numbers of respondents of 18-34 year olds, who they were targeting.  But again, they can advertise all they want and they need something solid to back it.  Folks who have see Bing say it doesn’t really have a different looking interface (except for some of the multimedia results), although it has some cool filtering tools, and that it is rather useful. 

It doesn’t take a whole lot to get people to type in a new URL to at least try it one or two times.  But if they want people coming back and making a permanent switch from that other search engine they better have something really unique that will keep them.

via: [adage]

Source: Gizmodo | 25 May 2009 | 7:15 pm

Nintendo DSi to become ghost hunter

Swedish developer A Different Game announced today that the DSi will soon aid ghost hunters on their quest to vanquish and/or send back the ethereal to the underworld. Ghostwire will utilize the DSi’s camera and mic to help you hunt down the ghosts haunting us all and determine why they’re still creeping around our plane of existence.

“The Nintendo DSi platform is perfect for this game” says Anders Bergman, lead game designer of Ghostwire. “This allows us to enhance the integrated real-world experience with the combination of camera, microphone and touch screen.”

via Kotaku

Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2009 | 7:06 pm

LogLogic Raises $8.8 Million for IT Security Management Service

LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data and manage their IT systems, has raised $8.8 million in an extended series D round of funding, led by Focus Ventures with Sequoia Capital, Telesoft Partners, Worldview Technology Partners, INVESCO Private Capital, SAP Ventures, CM-CIC Private Equity, Crédit Agricole Private Equity and ELAIA Partners participating. This brings LogLogic’s total funding to $58 million.

LogLogic plans to use the financing to fuel growth into new markets, including database activity monitoring. LogLogic recently acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount.

LogLogic offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, threats, and other operational data. Competitors in the secerity management space include RSA, IBM and ArcSight.

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

Source: TechCrunch | 25 May 2009 | 7:00 pm

Google increasingly battles Facebook in search (AP)

AP - Google has long been the king of search, dominating rivals including Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. But it increasingly sees social networks such as Facebook as challengers to its search engine, a company official said Monday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2009 | 6:42 pm

Lenovo busts out new Atom-powered nettop

The world of nettops is a strange one, my friends. What are they for? Where do they go? Where do they come from? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but the fact is there are computers out there that are just as at home in the kitchen as in the office. And now one of them is from Lenovo. Obviously they’re loving that Intel sauce, because this IdeaCentre C300 is filled with Atom-y goodness — and so is the S12 12-inch laptop, which sports an Ion setup inside.

Here’s what you get for the low, low price of $450:

• 20″ 16:9 display
• Atom 230 processor
• Intel 945GC chipset
• Integrated graphics (boo)
• 1-2 GB DDR2 667
• 1 2.5″ HDD slot
• “Tray in RAMBO (1 slot)” - not sure what to make of that
• 1.3 megapixel webcam
• Memory card reader
• Built-in speakers

Not a bad deal for five bills. It’s even pretty nice-looking. Although for a kitchen PC, a touchscreen might be nice. Or of course, you could put together your own barebones PC for under $150…

Source: CrunchGear | 25 May 2009 | 6:24 pm

Animal Diseases Are Increasing With Climate Change

The world's top agency for animal health said on Monday that climate change is widening viral disease among farm animals, expanding the spread of some microbes that are also a known risk to humans, AFP reported.A survey of 126 member-states found 71 percent were "extremely concerned" about the expected impact of climate change on animal disease, according to The World Animal Health Organization—known as OIE, an acronym of its name in French.Among those surveyed, 58 percent said they had already identified at least one disease that was new to their territory or had returned to their territory, and that they associated with climate change.Bluetongue, which is spread among sheep by biting midges; Rift Valley fever, a livestock disease that can also be picked up by people handling infected meat; and West Nile virus, which is transmitted by mosquito from infected birds to both animals and humans were the three most mentioned diseases.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2009 | 6:23 pm

Gallery: 23 photos of soldiers looking completely badass

Best Warrior

"A Soldier competing in the "Best Warrior" competition participates in a night-fire exercise at Fort Lee, Va., Oct. 2. Twenty-four of the Army's finest warriors representing 12 commands from across the Army gathered at Fort Lee, Va., from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3, 2008, to compete in the competition which named the Army's soldier and noncommissioned officer of the year."

Field Artillery

"Field artillerymen of Battery A, 2-218th Field Artillery, 41st Infantry Brigade Combat Team, Oregon Army National Guard, fire a 105mm shell from a Howitzer at Yakima Training Grounds, Wash., during the units annual training Aug. 9. Photo by Sgt. Chad Layton of Battery A, 2-218th Field Artillery, Oregon Army National Guard"

Working at Night

"A transport worker walks ahead of a heavy generator trailer as it crosses a bridge, Aug. 22, 2008. U.S. Soldiers of Charlie Troop, 3-89th Cavalry Regiment, 5th Squadron, 25th Field Artillery, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (not shown) provided security for four heavy power generators as part of Operation Silver Mammoth II. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Brian D. Lehnhardt/Released)"

Canal Fire

"U.S. Army Sgt. William Reese watches flames rise into the night sky after setting canal vegetation ablaze in Tahwilla, Iraq, July 30, 2008. Extremists have been using the canal's thick vegetation to plant bombs under the cover of darkness. The soldiers are assigned to Company B, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry Regiment.U.S. Army photo by Spc. David J. Marshall"

Loading the Globemaster

"1st Sgt. Jon A. Martin, Company D, 3rd Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment (Assault), stands atop a UH-60 Black Hawk before it's pulled into the belly of an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III. The Black Hawk was the very last of the 3-158 aircraft to be loaded before the unit's redeployment to Germany."

Jumping Dutch

"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - Paratroopers assigned to 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) conduct airborne operations from a Colorado Army National Guard CH-47D Chinook assigned to 2nd Battalion, 135th Aviation Regiment, into the snow-covered terrain of Fort Carson, Colo., Dec. 10, 2008. The airborne operation conducted under the command of Dutch Special Forces with the assistances of a 10th SFG (A) jumpmaster, helped familiarize the American paratroopers with Dutch commands. Operations like this help sustain and foster a good working relationship with the Dutch, said a 10th SFG (A) operations officer. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Liesl Marelli, Colorado National Guard)"

Thriller

"Cpl. Amber Jones (right) of Fort Bragg, N.C., portrays Michael Jackson, sneaking up on Pfc. Casey Long of the Tennessee Army National Guard during the 2008 U.S. Army Soldier Show's salute to the 25th anniversary of Jackson's Thriller album and video."

Jump Door

"U.S. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division conduct pre-jump mock door training during a joint forcible entry exercise on Pope Air Force Base, N.C., Oct. 21, 2008. JFEX provides U.S. Soldiers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division with training on real-world contingency operations. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. William Greer/Released)"

Flamethrower

"Sgt. Joshua Robbins, native of Dickson, Tenn., serving with the 66th Engineers Company, "Sappers," 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, "Warrior," 25th Infantry Division, Multi-National Division-Baghdad, torches an area with a flame thrower in an effort to deny terrorists concealment, and give coalition forces at Joint Security Station Mushada East a clear line of sight along a road, which lies between Mushada and Tarmiyah in the Tarmiyah Qada."

Weight Training

"A Soldier uses a tank as an anchor to exercise with a TRX Suspension Trainer Force Training Kit. Photo by Courtesy photo"

Starry Night

"U.S. Army Spc. Stephen Highberger, left, and Pvt. Charles Joiner from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army Europe, sit in a patrol base on an overnight mission near Forward Operation Base Lane, Zabul Province, Afghanistan, March 13, 2009. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini/Released)"

Scrap Yard

"Sgt. Robert Solesbee, a native of Corona, Calif., assigned to 710th Explosive Ordnance Disposal Company, 3rd Ordnance Battalion, 71st Ordnance Group, glances around at his surroundings, looking for potentially dangerous ordnance among the scrap metal at the Sheik Khalid scrap yard March 18. Photo by Spc. Laura Johnson"

Palm Grove

"U.S Soldiers detonate firebombs in an Iraqi palm grove to destroy hidden booby traps, explosives and weapons, Dec. 22, 2008. Photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Walter Pels, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq."

Another Globemaster

"The sun sets behind a C-17 Globemaster III as Soldiers wait in line to board the aircraft taking them back to the United States Nov. 17 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. C-17s can carry payloads up to 169,000 pounds and can land on small airfields. The C-17 is deployed from the 437th Airlift Wing at Charleston Air Force Base, S.C. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Erik Gudmundson)"

Lighterage

"CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (July 17, 2008)- A Bulldozer pushes Army Lighterage back out to sea to make another practice run during Joint Logistics Over-The-Shore (JLOTS) 2008. JLOTS 2008 will establish command and control of Army and Navy units, construct a Life Support Area (LSA), conduct force protection operations, execute an in-stream offload of shipping from a sea echelon area, employ OPDS, retrograde and safely redeploy allocated forces. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Brian P. Caracci."

Fallen Angel

"A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter provides aerial security for Soldiers in Company F, 3rd Helicopter Assault Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, as they move wounded Soldiers during a downed aircraft training exercise Jan. 15 on Fort Hood, Texas."

Flying Tractor

"National Guardsmen help guide a rancher as he loads bundles of hay aboard a CH-47 Chinook helicopter to deliver to stranded livestock who have been trapped by the flooded salt-waters without food or fresh water since Hurricane Ike struck the Southwest coast of Louisiana."

Flying Boat

"U.S. Navy Special Warfare Combatant-craft Crewmen (SWCC) on board a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) observe an Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter assigned to the 159th Aviation Regiment as it lifts another RHIB during a maritime external air transportation system (MEATS) training exercise in the Virginia Capes near Fort Eustis, Va., July 16, 2008 MEATS trains members of SWCC on extending their operational reach by attaching special operations crafts to helicopters for transport to remote locations for further training. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robyn Gerstenslager)"

Flying Pinto

"U.S. Air Force explosive ordnance disposalmen from the 447th Air Expeditionary Group detonate explosives attached to the wings of a C-130 Hercules aircraft at Sather Air Base in Iraq July 7, 2008. The aircraft was disabled after it made an emergency landing last month, and the Airmen are using a series of controlled detonations to divide the aircraft into smaller pieces so it can be moved. DoD photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force."

Night Jump

"Paratroopers from 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, jump into the frigid night sky during the brigade-wide Joint Force Entry Exercise on Jan. 29. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. Frank Smith, 982nd Combat Camera)"

General Lee

"General Lee lies on its side aftrer surviving a buried IED blast in 2007. The Stryker was recovered and protected its Soldiers on more missions until another bomb finally put it out of action. Photo by courtesy of C-52 of 3/2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team"

Engaging Local Puppies

"U.S. Army Spc. David Cartwright from Martinsburg, W. Va., of the 1st Platoon, 230th Military Police Company, 793rd Military Police Battalion, 18th Military Police Brigade, improves community relations by engaging with local Iraqi puppies at the Iraqi Police District Headquarters in Mahawil, Iraq, on Dec. 21."

Joint Patrol

"Airmen and Soldiers prepare for Operation Lewis and Clark Sept. 11 at Joint Base Balad, Iraq. Operation Lewis and Clark was a joint patrol in which Air Force security forces Airmen were introduced to Balad's outer perimeter, an area in which they will assume responsibility for from 5th Battalion 82nd Field Artillery Soldiers. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon/Image has been cleared for public release)"

Previously: Gallery: The Gear of War

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 25 May 2009 | 5:55 pm

India's Bharti, SAfrica's MTN in fresh merger talks (AFP)

AFP - Indian mobile company Bharti said Monday it had renewed merger talks with South Africa's MTN to create "an emerging market telecom powerhouse" that would have more than 200 million subscribers.

Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 25 May 2009 | 5:35 pm

Protected Wolf Packs Create Problems For China’s Sheepherders

Sheepherders in northern China are dealing with once endangered wolf packs looking to feast on their flocks, and since the wolves are protected, there’s currently very little they can do about it, AFP reported.Delger, a 44 year-old sheep herder in northern China's Inner Mongolia region, has lost six of his 40 sheep in the past two years to stealthy attacks by the wolves that roam the area.
Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 25 May 2009 | 5:32 pm

"Map the Fallen" honors military deaths in Google Earth

Noah Shachtman:

Google Earth developer Kevin Welch has put together something truly remarkable for this Memorial Day. It's called "Map the Fallen," and it "uses Google Earth to honor the more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 25 May 2009 | 5:23 pm

Lenovo S12 the first Nvidia Ion-powered netbook...probably

John Hermann:

Pricing starts at $449, and the S12 goes on sale in July. Ion, however, won't make its way to production units until an unspecified "late summer" date, and it'll cost a $50 premium over the standard, Intel-based solution.

Source: Boing Boing Gadgets | 25 May 2009 | 5:14 pm

Pirate Bay searching for justice, finds a bunch of biased judges instead

Section: Business News, Web, Websites, Online Music/Video

Soon after the Pirate Bay founders were sentenced to over a year in jail and slapped with hefty fines, accusations began to fly that the judge sitting on the case was biased and the verdict should be overturned.  Now the person appointed to investigate the claims has been found to have a conflict of interest as well. 

Judge Thomas Norstrom, the original judge was found to be a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, which members include lawyers that represented the plaintiffs in the case.  Conflict of interest reports and appeals have been filed by all defendants in the copyright suit.  Judge Anders Eka was appointed to investigate these accusations and now it turns out that he’s a member of the Stockholm Center of Commercial Law.  Lawyers for the plaintiffs are also involved with this organization.  With this latest turn of events, it postpones the news of an overturned judgment as well. 

Pirate Bay is still operating despite attempts by record agencies to have it taken down.  The site is also still allowing downloads of copyrighted material.

Read: [CNET]