Here are a few films I recommend based on my personal tastes. This is by no means exhaustive, inclusive, etc. Feel free to make further suggestions in the comments. Disclosure: Asterisks (*) mark films to which I have a connection.
Best of the best:
Ma vie en rose (A family struggles with a gender-variant child. The best scripted film to date, in my opinion)
Boys Don't Cry (True story of a trans man murdered in rural Nebraska. The second-best scripted film, in my opinion)
The Crying Game (An IRA soldier takes a British soldier hostage and later meets his girlfriend. Explores gender, race, nationality, misogyny)
Paris is Burning (Chronicles 90s New York ball culture. One of the best documentaries.)
Other great choices:
Different for Girls (Uptight greeting card employee meets former schoolmate in quirky romance)
Soldier's Girl* (True-life story about a trans showgirl and her US soldier boyfriend, who is murdered)
Transamerica* (Road movie about a trans woman and her long-lost son)
Prodigal Sons (Doc on trans woman who returns to her hometown and tries to reconcile with her troubled brother. Theatrical release in March)
Red Without Blue (doc on identical twins: one transitions, one doesn't)
Other documentaries worth a look:
Beautiful Boxer (documentary)
The Cockettes (documentary)
Middle Sexes: Redefining He and She* (documentary)
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (documentary)
It seems the car industry doesn’t have any problems left that need to be solved. Or what else can explain Nissan’s shot at designing a car that can “show emotions”? The so-called Smiling Vehicle was jointly developed by the Hara Design Institute Nippon Design Center and the automaker. And yes, the mini vehicle, based on the Nissan Cube, does look friendly.
The concept car is covered with a substance called ROICA, a a polyurethane elastomer fiber from major chemical company Asahi Kasei. ROICA has the ability to deform by up to 900% and is normally used for producing shoes, clothes or car seats. Combine the material with Animatronics, and you get a car grill that can actually “smile”.
The idea behind the Smiling Vehicle sounds rather esoteric. Apparently, Nissan sees this technology as an extension of the driver’s character, meaning it can be used to express your current feeling when you sit in the car. This involves being able to share your feeling with other drivers thereby communicating with other people while on the go.
This video (courtesy of Diginfonews in Tokyo) shows the Smiling Vehicle in action:
By Chris Scott Barr These days buying music and putting it on your MP3 player of choice is a pretty simple task. Unfortunately for some of the older generation, even that can seem like a daunting task... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 3:03 am
An anonymous reader sends in this link from Technology Review about a startup company testing drugs that may help those with autism-spectrum disorders — even adults. "Seaside Therapeutics, a startup based in Cambridge, MA, is testing two compounds for the treatment of fragile X syndrome, a rare, inherited form of intellectual disability linked to autism. The treatments have emerged from molecular studies of animal models that mirror the genetic mutations seen in humans. Researchers hope that the drugs, which are designed to correct abnormalities at the connections between neurons, will ultimately prove effective in other forms of autism spectrum disorders. ... The company is funded almost entirely by an undisclosed family investment of $60 million, with $6 million from the National Institutes of Health. [A spokesman] says that Seaside has enough funding to take its compounds through clinical testing and approval."
Running out of time, so I am just going to post a few resources for those interested in biologists who research sexual variance in nature, and how non-procreative sex can be beneficial to a species, including humanity. This research challenges a number of assumptions about sexual selection that have been in place since Darwin wrote about them.
Cory blogged previously about my friend Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford. Her book Evolution's Rainbow is an accessible overview.
I also recommend Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, an extensive catalog of diverse sexual development and behavior. Their work challenges those who claim that non-procreative sexual behaviors are "maladaptive evolution" because they don't allow the individual to leave more offspring, but it's clear from many of our closest genetic relatives (especially bonobos) that sex is not just about reproduction. It is often about strengthening social bonds within groups, and that same-sex activity is an important part of that.
Joan has also been critical of Richard Dawkins' concept of the "The Selfish Gene." Her book The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness examines the assumptions behind this conept.
Running out of time, so I am just going to post a few resources for those interested in biologists who research sexual variance in nature, and how non-procreative sex can be beneficial to a species, including... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:44 am
By Chris Scott Barr iPhone cases were everywhere at CES this year. You couldn’t go past more than a few booths without someone showing off their latest designs. Most cases were similar to others... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:37 am
Although BoomTown completely enjoyed having dinner with entertainment agency overlord Ari Emanuel last week–hey, it was a Hollywood party at the Consumer Electronics Show, so name-dropping is required–I have little interest in the money and scheduling machinations that broke out last week over NBC Universal’s late-night television talk shows.
But I do love the roundelay of online videos this Tinseltown mess has created.
It all has to do with Jay Leno stinking up the joint in his newish 10 pm time slot, which has caused NBC affiliates to revolt, which–in turn–has sent broadcast network execs into a decided chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic.
Thus, their big and cloddish idea to reschedule Leno back to late night, while trying to hipcheck Conan O’Brien from his 11:35 pm perch, all without incurring a big contract penalty fee. Jimmy Fallon, who comes on after O’Brien, also is part of the shovefest, as is after-Fallon host Carson Daly.
And, of course, all of them got to comment on it all on–yes–their late-night comedy routines that open the shows.
Here are Leno and O’Brien riffing on the silly crisis–as well as ABC’s late-night host Jimmy Kimmel weighing in with Daly’s help–at the GE (GE) unit that just got bought by Comcast (CMCSK).
And below is an interview I did with NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference last May, talking about a range of topics, including what a brilliant idea it was going to be to move Leno to an earlier, five-night-a-week slot.
By Chris Scott Barr If you have an iPhone, it probably goes with you everywhere. But how many places do you take a cable to charge it? Since the iPhone is notorious for having less than spectacular battery... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:20 am
I've read plenty of London guidebooks since I moved here in 2003, but none have inspired me to go out and see my new hometown more than Secret London - an Unusual Guide, written by Rachel Howard and Bill... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:13 am
I've read plenty of London guidebooks since I moved here in 2003, but none have inspired me to go out and see my new hometown more than Secret London - an Unusual Guide, written by Rachel Howard and Bill Nash. This handsomely illustrated book has peeled back the covers on London for me, showing off this city's many oddments and wonders, curiosities that had been literally lurking right there on my daily walk to work, all unsuspected.
Some examples:
The cellars beneath the Viaduct Tavern in Newgate Street contain the last remaining cells from the notorious Newgate Prison, now used as beer-cellars (the staff will let you in if you ask nicely);
Somerset House's "Dead House," in the Strand is a grim and ancient tomb, practically next door to the post-office box where I've been getting my mail for seven years;
A rare surviving "sewer venting lamp" outside Charing Cross station, which lit up the streets of London with "firedamp" rising from the foetid Victorian cloaca;
Dennis Severs House, in Brick Lane (around the corner from our regular Sunday breakfast), a huge, mouldering row house formerly owned by a Canadian artist who filled it with junk antiques and curiosities, now open to the public;
The Mummy of Jimmy Garlick, in St James Garlickhythe Church in Garlick Hill -- a body that lay in state during the Great Fire was mummified by a trick of the great heat, which rested for centuries behind the church organ (exhibited to curiousity seekers for a few pennies), then moved to the hymnal cupboard, and finally located in dusty bell-tower, where he can be seen by appointment only;
A hidden pet cemetery in Hyde Park, where "hundreds of mildewed miniature headstones" mark the final resting places of dogs, cats, birds and a monkey;
The Crossbones Graveyard, a plague pit filled with 15,000 dead (including the local whores, who were called "punchable nuns" in the parlance of the day) that is now used as a bus-parking yard by Transport for London to the outrage of some Londoners, who stage a monthly memorial at the site at 7PM on the 23d of each month.
There are literally hundreds of incredible sights to see enumerated in Secret London, and my New Year's resolution is to get to as many of them as I can!
I picked up Secret London by the register at Clerkenwell Tales in London's Exmouth Market, near my office, where they have done an absolutely brilliant job of curating a display of quirky, interesting and beautiful books.
Israeli archaeologists have found remains of an 8,000-year-old building as well as hippopotamus bones and pottery shards in the Tel Aviv area, the Israel Antiquities Authority said on... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 2:00 am
By Marisa Taylor, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
There’s not much that’s subtle about Ed Hardy, the clothing line splashed with rhinestones and vintage tattoo designs that’s favored by the likes of Jon Gosselin.
But at CES, Ed Hardy entered the world of mobile accessories with handset designs called Icing, intended for “the distinguishing mobile user who wants to show off the Ed Hardy brand with subtlety,” according to the company.
They’re made by Crystal Icing, which makes handsets adorned with Swarovski crystals. Users can choose between 10 new designs with names like “Beautiful Ghost,” “Love Kills Slowly” and “Koi Fish” for mobile faceplates ($30), iPod faceplates ($20 to $30) or special rhinestone faceplates ($50).
AMSTERDAM, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Dutch biotech company Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics has submitted a marketing application for its lead product Glybera to European drugs authorities, it said on Monday... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 1:43 am
Here is 2009's company-reported user growth of several top virtual worlds and MMOs I've been tracking: Second Life, of course, the largest user-created 3D social world; World of Warcraft, the largest Western... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 1:30 am
Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).
Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer, which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase).
We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us the following statement:
“We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola Droids shortly.”
Android isn’t the first smartphone OS to fall prey to security bugs like this. In August 2008 a similar flaw with the iPhone allowed people to easily bypass the phone’s lock screen.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoardbecause it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone's screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 1:18 am
Haven’t really gotten on a rant in awhile… guess i’ve been doing a lot of travel lately, but now that I’m back in California for awhile, there’s something i’ve been meaning to bring up that bothers me. It’s kind of a dirty little secret of the startup industry, but there are very few good product, design, and marketing people in tech. And hardly any of them that are good seem to make it into the venture capital profession.
The porn industry peddles a product as old as Adam and Eve, and it’s always found the most cutting edge ways to do it.
It’s no accident that each year as the Consumer Electronics Show winds down in Las Vegas, the Adult Entertainment Expo heats up. Bespectacled techies cross paths with corseted porn stars selling high-tech sex toys and tools of all shapes and sizes.
BANGALORE, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The following corporate finance-related stories were reported by media on Monday: Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Jan 2010 | 12:28 am
In the dog eat dog world of the CE business, margins are low and money – especially in this economy – is tight. That’s why a number of smaller vendors, including some we talked to in Vegas, took rooms in local hotels or ran “peripheral” events in other venues. The Daily Tech reports that some of those vendors have been ousted by the hotels themselves after the CEA, the organization that runs CES, convinced management to force them out.
Why? Because the CEA requires payments of $100,000 and up to exhibit at CES and their inability to pay for formal space at the show or in one of the show’s official hotel spaces is apparently an affront to the gadget gods. While the CEA puts on a nice show, it is my opinion that trade shows are dinosaurs and the extortionist tactics used by CEA to convince Las Vegas hotel to do things like this is an affront to capitalism and whatever else is good and wholesome about a massive trade show in a resort city in the middle of the desert.
In the end, CES is place where CE companies troll for customers. If the CEA wants to increase barriers to entry to their perceived value-add proposition, more power to them. Just don’t expect vendors to play nice next year in this game of cat and mouse.
If you’ve been booted, let us know. We’d love to hear your story.
Here's a shirt that's bound to infuriate your type-obsessed pals: the word Helvetica, set in Comic Sans. Helvetica (via Making Light) Previously:Campaign to ban Comic Sans typeface - Boing Boing... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jan 2010 | 11:59 pm
The Slovak aviation cops decided to test their airport security by planting explosives on travellers without their knowledge, to see if they'd be spotted by the security screeners. It gets better: the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jan 2010 | 11:55 pm
The Slovak aviation cops decided to test their airport security by planting explosives on travellers without their knowledge, to see if they'd be spotted by the security screeners.
It gets better: the screeners only caught seven out of eight explosive-plants. The remaining one was left in the luggage of an Irish tourist, who was nabbed on his return to Dublin and thrown in jail.
Three days later, the Slovak cops contacted their Irish counterparts, who let the poor bastard out of jail, cordoned off his street, and had the bomb-squad remove the Slovak explosives.
Ludmila Stanova, spokeswoman for Slovakia's ministry of the interior, says Dublin airport was warned to expect a person carrying explosive samples, and that the passenger was also alerted after his arrival.
"He was supposed to wait for the police to take the sample from him," she told the BBC World Service...
On Tuesday morning the man's flat near Dublin city centre was cordoned off while bomb disposal experts removed the explosives for further examination.
The Irish Army said passengers had not been put in danger because the explosives were stable and not connected to any essential bomb parts.
The Slovak minister for the interior has expressed his government's "profound regret" to Mr Ahern.
Ant writes "The December malware threat reports are trickling in from vendors — and they all appear to be different. Fortinet, Sunbelt Software, and Kaspersky all published their lists of the most prevalent malware strains for the last month of 2009, but they didn't match up, leading to an admission that users will inevitably be confused by the results. Not only do the various security companies use different names for the threats they identify; they don't even identify the same threats."
For most of the first decade of the new century, we all waited for the emergence of location-based services. The LBS dream, it seemed, was always being deferred. Fast-forward to today -- in 2010 we'll... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Jan 2010 | 11:28 pm
The latest installment of the excellent Tor.com science fiction story podcast is Steven Gould's "Bugs in the Arroyo," a sharp little tale about a world where alien, lethal metal-consuming bugs have rendered the American southwest uninhabitable except in the style of the pioneers. It's got heart, scientific speculation, and pulse-pounding adventure (as you'd expect from the author of the must-read Jumper).
SwingSwing's Tuper Tario Tros. is a mashup of Super Mario Bros. with Tetris: hitting spacebar toggles between a challenging Tetris game (don't let the falling blocks squash Mario!) and a Super Mario level that's composed of the Tetris blocks you've dropped in Tetris mode. It's funny, clever, and way fun to play.
In the UK, Business Secretary Peter Mandelson has tabled his "Digital Economy Bill," a terrible piece of legislation that requires ISPs to police their customers on behalf of the music industry when the latter claims that its copyrights have been violated (no evidence necessary). The UK music industry blames piracy for £200 million in annual losses, and this is Mandelson's excuse for abridging human rights and fundamental justice in his witch-hunt for pirates.
But the government's own research shows that Mandelson's plans will cost the UK ISP industry £500 million to implement, and when these costs are added to each customer's bill (as they surely will be), the rise will be enough to knock an estimated 40,000 British families off the Internet.
What's more, the government's own Digital Inclusion research has shown that poor households with Internet access enjoy a substantially higher quality of life than their offline neighbours, thanks to a variety of factors, from low-cost online shopping, to savings through online utility billing, to better research tools for school-kids, job-seekers and people with health problems.
Half a billion pounds down the drain, 40,000 of Britain's most vulnerable families knocked offline, and for all that, there's no reason to believe that Mandelson's plan will do anything to reduce piracy.
Today, according to a new report, government ministers have admitted that the costs will amount to £500m ($799.2m).
ISPs say that issuing warnings will cost every customer £1.40 ($2.24) and otherwise meddling with accounts at the behest of the music industry will add £25 ($40) total to an annual subscription.
Worryingly, ministers say that this extra cost will force 40,000 UK households offline, with BT's John Petter calling the plans "collective punishment that goes against natural justice."
Jeremy Hunt, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said that it is "grossly unfair" for the government to force all broadband customers to foot the bill, and noted that forcing tens of thousands offline will go against government targets of increasing Internet take-up among the most disadvantaged communities.
I can't say that it made me a better programmer, but this mashup of Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie's classic "The C Programming Language" with the elder horrors of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos has alerted me to the urgent problem of inadvertent dimensional rifts that may be opened through poor programming practice:
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream- flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating- sorting themselves inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. Their croaking, baying voices called out in the hideous language of the Old Ones:
void Rlyeh
(int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) {
int Ia, fhtagn;
if (wgah>=nagl) return;
swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2);
fhtagn = wgah;
for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia<=nagl; Ia++)
if (mene[Ia]
swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia);
swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn);
Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1);
Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl);
Microsoft's ad agency Traffik/@radical.media produced this trailer for a godawful thriller based on Office 2010, a kind of 24 meets Enemy of the State thing. As a short comic film, it's a real success -- I laughed aloud at least twice -- but I'm not sure about its value as an advertisement. The humor is in-jokey, aimed at people who already know pretty much everything they need to know about Microsoft and its products and who tend to have their minds made up already (I haven't used Office since switching to the excellent OpenOffice.org years ago, and haven't missed it once; most of the Office users I know upgrade when they get a new version gratis with a new PC). So I suppose that this thing is meant to alert avid Office users to the existence of Office 2010, an hypothesis that is further borne out by the absence of any product info in the ad.
Still, if someone produced a video this funny for the next Ubuntu release, and managed to work in a couple of actual compelling sales messages aimed at proprietary OS users, I'd applaud.
READING, England, January 11 /PRNewswire/ --
- Mobile Broadband Expert Christian Gabetta Joins Acision as Vice
President, Global Markets
Acision, the world's leading messaging company, is pleased to announce
the appointment of Christian Gabetta as VP, Global Markets. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Jan 2010 | 10:01 pm
Network-theory pioneer Duncan Watts set out to test the strength of self-fulfilling prophecies in pop culture. Clive Thompson reflects on the baa-d news: We're often just sheep.
Albumteam has finally done something that has taken far too long to a company to realize: make a decent digital photo album that can leave the coffee table. Album accomplishes just that, it’s a 7-inch portable digital photo frame. It also is fairly simply, possessing only three buttons for the interface. Sure, it might be even easier to use a touchscreen, but Albumteam decided to not make it touchscreen because that tends to leave smears and sometimes scratches on the screen. That’s something they wanted to avoid.
The Album as it stands now is a 7-inch digital photo album, though the next version, Album2 will add more functionality. The Album2 will add video and wi-fi to the device, which would make it much more interesting. Given that you will be able to load any video you want to the device via an SD card. The Album2 will support most major file formats, which is great. However, with an estimated 2 hours of battery life on the Album2 (3 hours on the Album), it might not be as useful or interesting as it sounds for most people.
Why in January – a month set aside for recovering from the excesses of the holiday season – thousands of people would fly to Las Vegas for a gigantic tradeshow. Why they’d even consider spending four days wandering around an aircraft hanger filled with vastly oversized television sets, or sitting through endless product launches that are being simulcast online anyway.
Why they’d subject themselves to three nights of well drinks at a succession of disappointing after-parties before passing out in overpriced, soulless hotel rooms that charge $10 a day for wifi. Frankly why they’d willingly submit themselves to any of those horrors when they could simulate the entire experience from home simply by wiring a thousand dollars to Steve Wynn, dropping a tab of acid and then heading to Best Buy with a hooker.
Still, there was a moment earlier this week when I thanked the gods that CES exists. And that was the moment when Heather Harde emailed Sarah and me, politely but firmly informing us that we were introducing this year’s Crunchies. CES clashes directly with the Crunchies, an overlap that at least meant fewer people would be in San Francisco to witness the inevitable train wreck of us standing on stage, trying to make jokes about Twitter.
Which is not to say that we didn’t do our best to write a non-trainwrecky introduction. On the contrary, the day before the ceremony we decamped to the lobby of the W Hotel for two whole hours where – fuelled by Champagne (Sarah) and cheeseburgers (me) – we brainstormed ideas. We are after all, professionals.
“How about this? ‘Hello and welcome the Crunchies. We want to start with a couple of jokes about Spotify, mainly because if we wait until the end they’ll probably be out of business’”.
“Meh. It’s only funny ‘cos it’s true.”
“Good point. Okay, how about a Bing joke? Are there any Bing jokes?”
“No. But I just got another email from Heather. She says she’s willing to dress up in a gorilla suit if we think it’ll be funny.”
“It may yet come to that. What else is funny?”
“People slipping on banana skins are funny.”
“People slipping on banana skins are funny.”
“Shall we do that?”
“No.”
Still at least by agreeing to open the show, our night’s work would be over after four minutes and we could head out to the auditorium to watch the award presentations. Like hundreds of thousands of other people, I’d cast my votes in the awards – although I’d completely forgotten for whom – and so was eagerly anticipating the results. More specifically I was looking forward to bitching when my preferred winners inevitably failed to even scrape in as runners up. (My inability to pick winners is just one of the many reasons why I made a terrible book publisher.)
Sure enough, barely ten minutes into the main event, I found myself gripping the arms of my chair and gnashing my teeth in frustration and despair as yet another of my votes turned out to be for nought. “The Nook as best gadget?! No one even has a Nook!”
Talking to friends after the after-party, I realised I wasn’t alone: almost everyone I ran into had a complaint about at least one of the results. But, then again, that’s how it was supposed to be. The whole point of the Crunchies is that they’re voted for by the public – the readers of TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – and as such they represent the wisdom of the crowd, not some cabal of Silicon Valley insiders – soi-disant experts, out of touch with what services and apps the real Internet users use. Vox populi, vox dei.
Sure.
Okay.
That kind of democra-fetishism might make sense for consumer awards like The Webbies – which, perversely, are awarded by a cabal of insiders – but it’s completely ludicrous for an event specifically aimed at industry professionals. Don’t get me wrong, there are some seriously smart and well-informed people who read TechCrunch – you, dear reader, are one of them. But for every one of you, there is your polar opposite: the kind of knuckle-dragging jizz-wit who is – even as we speak – scrolling down to the comments to ask what, exactly, about this column is Not Safe For Work. And I have no reason to believe that the same ratio of smart to dumb isn’t true for GigaOm and Venture Beat. We wouldn’t trust these people to review a dive bar on Yelp so why on earth should we trust them to vote whether Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons are worthy Founders of the Year?
“But” – you might argue – “that’s the great thing about the masses; if you have enough people voting then the majority of intelligent people drive out the minority of idiots.”
Sure.
Okay.
Even accepting that the majority of our readers are smart and well-informed, there still remains an inevitable problem that occurs whenever huge numbers of people vote for something: the most popular nominee – as opposed to the best qualified – always wins. It could be total coincidence that Facebook has won the Overall Best Startup for three years running, but it isn’t. 2009 was, by any metric you care to use, the year of Twitter. And yet we’re supposed to believe that Facebook – a company that more than any other has been racing to mirror Twitter these past twelve months by buying Friendfeed, changing the language of its status messages and rapidly shifting from private to public – is a more worthy winner? Because of Facebook Connect? Oh please. Facebook won for one reason: it has between 15 to 20 times more users than Twitter and so is at the front of more people’s minds when they come to vote.
Worse still, public voting is such a flawed way to hand out industry awards that even sensible results are rendered all but meaningless. Consider Ron Conway: a more deserving winner of Best Angel it is impossible to imagine. Not only did Ron keep his investment head while all those around were losing theirs, but he is also a dedicated philanthropist and one of the nicest men you could wish to meet: if he hadn’t picked up the Best Angel gong, then the world would have been destroyed in a supernova of wrongness. And yet, as Heather pointed out as she handed over the award, Ron has invested in hundreds of companies – to the point where almost everyone in the theatre, and by extension, thousands of those who voted for the Crunchies had some kind of connection with him. As a result, it’s impossible to know whether Ron won on his obvious merit or simply because he has name recognition and popular appeal – and that kind of uncertainty does a worthy winner a huge disservice.
The same is true of Mark Pincus who picked up CEO of the year. There’s a powerful argument for Pincus winning the award: his response to Scamville and pledge to turn over a new leaf is, arguably, an example to us all. And yet there’s an equally powerful argument that Tony Hsieh was an even more logical winner this year, having built Zappos into one of the best respected ecommerce companies on the planet, before selling it to Amazon for $928m. But again public voting makes that debate irrelevant: thanks (ironically) to Scamville, Pincus has a ton more recent name recognition than Hsieh and so the award was his by a landslide. Hsieh didn’t even come in as runner up.
And what about Aaron Patzer as founder of the year? Mint is a cool company which enjoyed a decent enough $170 million exit. But, then again, if you want to talk about cool exists, the runners up – Stoppelman and Simmons from Yelp – just turned down half a billion from Google. The key difference between the two companies is that – thanks in large part to TechCrunch’s championing them since they won TC40 – Mint has an image as the cool newcomer, while Yelp is considered old hat. Meanwhile Elon Musk, the dude who built an electric car company for Christ’s sake, doesn’t fit into the narrative at all and so doesn’t even make the top two.
We at TechCrunch need to accept our part in all this ridiculousness. Look at all of the winners this year and you start to see a pattern. Foursquare won best mobile app – an award they should rightfully share with MG; Animoto – Arrington’s favourite – won best design; Chrome OS and Google Wave – which we’ve covered endlessly, despite no one understanding the latter – shared the top spots in Best Technological Achievement. These were awards chosen by the public and yet they almost perfectly reflect the narrative that we have been subconsciously writing all year. You can argue it either way: that TechCrunch writers are freakishly good at spotting what’s popular, or that TechCrunch writers make things popular – but either way, it’s painfully obvious that Crunchies are won and lost based on a media profile we’ve helped to created, rather than any kind of objective merit.
So what? So if I were one of the winners this year I’d be rightfully proud of my success, but I hope I’d also be confident enough in my merits to lobby for next year’s awards to be judged differently. Specifically, I’d encourage the organisers – TechCrunch, GigaOm and Venture Beat – to make a decision: are the Crunchies going to continue as a popularity contest, or are they going to become a true award for excellence? If the former, then fine – popularity is a perfectly legitimate metric, especially for an industry where fortunes are built on eyeballs and traction. But then at least the categories should be renamed. Replace “best…” with “most popular…”. Call a spade a spade.
If on the other hand, we really want the Crunchies to be our industry’s highest accolade then it’s time we took a leaf from the book of every other media industry and created a formal judging academy, made up of industry experts, succesful entrepreneurs, veteran investors and previous winners. Produce clear guidelines on how each award should be judged and publish those guidelines online for all to see. That way, even though everyone would still disagree passionately with the results, they could at least be confident that something resembling critical and expert thought had gone into the process.
Of course no system is perfect – and there’s every possibility that Mark Zuckerberg will still find himself on stage in 2011 picking up his fourth Crunchie. But at least next year he might look a bit less embarrassed when he does so.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
What you see here is a large board from Intel’s booth at CES. All those cubes are actually representative of news stories from across the Internet. The cubes could represent anything from news stories pulled from aggregators, Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook updates, or any mixture you can think of. Each time a cube it touched, a box pops up over the cube with a larger image and more details. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be a product Intel plans on shipping any time soon. Instead, it is a tech demo to show off the power of the Core i7 processors. It was meant to show how fast and how powerful the processors really are. The screens can have multiple people up there touching many different cubes, without any real hint of a slow down, which is quite impressive. What is possibly even more impressive is the fact that each individual board was run by just one (higher-end) consumer-grade laptop.
It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t like Flash. It won’t allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch despite all of Adobe’s cajoling and pleading, and despite the fact that it’s long been working in the labs. The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both consumers and developers, and is a gaping hole in the iPhone’s arsenal.
But all of that is about to change because Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.
Much of the focus in the Flash iPhone debate centers around the fact that Flash is the de facto video standard on the Web. For instance, whenever you encounter a Web page in your iPhone browser with a Flash video, instead of seeing it right there in the browser, the phone must open up a separate Quicktime player. Most video on the Web, including everything on YouTube, is displayed through a Flash player, so this gets to be tedious. Apple has always cited technical reasons for why it doesn’t support Flash. It’s a battery hog, it’s too slow for mobile phones, not capable enough, etc. Some of these issues are valid and Adobe has been addressing them to the point that Flash now works fine on Android.
But there is a more strategic reason Apple kept Flash off the iPhone. It wanted a chance to become ingrained with developers. In addition to video, Flash, of course, can be used to create Web apps—the kind of apps that might look good on a phone. Apple had to hold off Flash not so to control the video experience on the iPhone, but because it needed to establish its own Apple-controlled iPhone SDK. The last thing it needed was a competing developer platform getting in the way.
Once Adobe publicly releases CS5, Flash apps and video still won’t run on the iPhone. But those 2 million developers will be able to keep working with Adobe tools and simply turn them into iPhone apps automatically. In contrast, there are only an estimated 125,000 or so iPhone developers. This will lower the barriers to making iPhone apps even more than they are today, which may or may not be a good thing. But if you thought there were a lot of iPhone apps now, just wait until the Flash floodgates are open.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Reuters - The pace of growth of China's online gaming industry slowed in 2009, growing 30.2 percent to 27.1 billion yuan ($3.97 billion) over the previous year, according to data from research firm iResearch. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Jan 2010 | 8:43 pm
Tingalin, the makers of the world-famous Tingalin app, have outdone themselves. Their new app, based on the magic of the Jersey Shore but not directly affiliated with the MTV show in any way features a number of useful tools for the Situation-in-training.
While the upcoming "fake tan" system is not yet in place, the app does have a nickname generator, a fist pump challenge that acts like Guitar Hero for bros, as well as a list of useful pick-up lines for meeting and wooing drunk honeys.
A full video explanation follows.
Tingalin, the makers of the world-famous Tingalin app, have outdone themselves. Their new app, based on the magic of the Jersey Shore but not directly affiliated with the MTV show in any way features a number of useful tools for the Situation-in-training.
While the upcoming "fake tan" system is not yet in place, the app does have a nickname generator, a fist pump challenge that acts like Guitar Hero for bros, as well as a list of useful pick-up lines for meeting and wooing drunk honeys.
A full video explanation follows.
Technology Review reports from the Consumer Elecronics Show in Las Vegas that potential e-reader competitors to E-Ink are everywhere. The current market leader in e-book displays is greyscale-only, and it takes a long time to change the display ("turn the page"), so video applications are not possible. E-Ink says they will have a color display shipping by late next year, but it will be dimmer than the current greyscale and its response time will still be too slow for video. The wannabe competitors — Pixel Qi, Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Liquavista, and Kent Displays — all do color and some of them can do video (Pixel Qi, Qualcomm, Liquavista), and some of them (Pixel Qi, Kent) are shipping now.
Monster is going crazy with all the announcements this week. However, most of the announcements in terms of headphones have been earbuds, with not much said about standard headphones. That has changed, however, as Monster had added even more headphones to the Beats line-up.
The new headphones are called Beats Spin. The idea behind these new ones is that they are meant to be used by music professionals. More specifically they headphones are made for DJs, sound engineers, producers and musicians. The $350 price point definitely reflects that part. They are meant to have better sound than the current Beats Solo, and be very durable in terms of build and the drivers inside due to the expected constant use.
Of course, as these are DJ headphones the Beats Spin have the option of only listening in one ear at the time. The second cup can spin away from yours ear. Also convenient feature for most who will want these is the fact that the wire can be plugged into either cup. The other cup’s audio port can then be used to share the music. The cups can also be removed from the headset entirely for cleaning purposes. The Beats SPin will also include Monster’s Control Talk and have a shorter section (3 inches) of the wire coiled to help prevent tangling which can be a huge problem in headphones with a lot of coiling (usually upwards or 9 inches).
Tingalin, the makers of the world-famous Tingalin app, have outdone themselves. Their new app, based on the magic of the Jersey Shore but not directly affiliated with the MTV show in any way features a number of useful tools for the Situation-in-training.
While the upcoming “fake tan” system is not yet in place, the app does have a nickname generator, a fist pump challenge that acts like Guitar Hero for bros, as well as a list of useful pick-up lines for meeting and wooing drunk honeys.
As we mentioned before, MTV has nothing to do with this app, an interesting oversight that should give future reality show marketers pause before poo-pooing the appization of their creative produce. In this case, MTV is now excluded from making their own Jersey Shore app in the same way it is excluded from surf ‘n’ turf night, excluded from ravioli night, and excluded from chicken cutlet night.
Crunch Network: CrunchBasethe free database of technology companies, people, and investors
AFP - Cutting-edge technology grabbed the headlines at the premier US gadget show here but the showrooms also featured products better described as useful, useless and downright unusual.
Over the holidays, an Ohio man named Dennis Bort cut a potato in half and was surprised to find the image of a cross inside. Any other time this might not have been remarkable, but during the Christmas season ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jan 2010 | 7:55 pm
Earlier this week, research published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Pediatrics found no evidence that special diets have any influence on autistic children. This was a blow to some parents of autistic children who had hoped for a cure, but ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jan 2010 | 7:49 pm
AFP - A premier Consumer Electronics Show (CES) ended after rebounding from a global economic drubbing and wowing attendees with gadgets that merge 3-D, software, entertainment, and the Web.
Another year, another CES. The show this year wasn’t that different then previous years with some new stuff, a lot of old crap, and nerds all over Vegas. Hopefully you followed us around the show floor via our massively-successful Livestream feed. If not, stay tuned. We’re going to cut a lot of the fluff and repost the good stuff like my interview with a panda and Doug walking into a wall.
But if you still have the CES bug, let me suggest this Flickr set from the 1990 Winter CES. Yup, Winter. The show was held twice a year from 1978 to 1994 — Winter in Las Vegas and Summer in Chicago. Anyway, enjoy the set. We did. [via gamovr]
Another netbook that I spent some time messing around with this morning was the Eee PC 1005P and the Eee PC 1005PE, both of which were on display in the Asus booth here at CES. Personally I have a preference for Eee’s, mainly because I have had a few different models since the Eee PC 701 first launched and they have all been very solid in terms of expectations. That said, while I like what the Eee PC 1005P and 1005PE has to offer I am not quite sold on the exterior casing, to give it a one word description, I would have to say—shiny. Not that that will make it bad, but it seems like a fingerprint magnet.
That said, the Eee PC 1005 series netbooks feature 10.1-inch WSVGA display with a 1024 x 600 screen resolution, an Intel Atom N450 processor, 1GB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and a 92% keyboard. Additionally it can have either a 160, 250 or 320GB hard drive and is running Windows 7. Of course the 1005 models shine (no pun intended in regards to the casing) in terms of battery life with a claim of being able to offer up to 11 hours of power with the 6-cell battery and up to 5 hours with the 3-cell battery.
With that, check out some images of the 1005P and the 1005PE below…
Hugh Pickens writes "Space.com has a piece about changing theories of planet migration. The classic picture suggests that planets like Earth should have plummeted into the sun while they were still planetesimals, asteroid-sized building blocks that eventually collide to form full-fledged planets. 'Well, this contradicts basic observational evidence, like We. Are. Here,' says astronomer Moredecai-Mark Mac Low. Researchers investigating this discrepancy came up with a new model that explains how planets can migrate as they're forming and still avoid a fiery premature death. One problem with the classic view of planet formation and migration is that it assumes that the temperature of the protoplanetary disk around a star is constant across its whole span. It turns out that portions of the disk are opaque and so cannot cool quickly by radiating heat out to space. So in the new model, temperature differences in the space around the sun, 4.6 billion years ago, caused Earth to migrate outward as much as gravity was trying to pull it inward, and so the fledgling world found equilibrium in its current, habitable, orbit. 'We are trying to understand how planets interact with the gas disks from which they form as the disk evolves over its lifetime,' adds Mac Low. 'We show that the planetoids from which the Earth formed can survive their immersion in the gas disk without falling into the Sun.'"
We are used to seeing Android all over the place. First on many smartphones, then notebooks and netbooks, and in all sorts of other cool gadgets. But only at CES would we be seeing a microwave or dryer with integrated Android.
While so very cool and a little glimpse into the future, I’m not entirely sure how to respond to this. While it would be cool to have apps for cooking or some other kitchen-aide, I don’t think we can expect our next Microwave pre-installed with the latest Android firmware.
I just want to go on the record that I would so buy one if it did.
A special thanks goes out to Energizer for supplying the Gadgetell crew with Energi To Go battery packs, which allowed us to keep our gadgets charged on the run and focus more on finding good stuff at CES and not having to worry about sitting next to a power outlet. For more information on the Energi To Go battery packs you can visit EnergiToGo.com or visit them on Twitter at @energitogo.
To cap off the CES coverage, we'd like to give a shout-out to our partners and also discuss our coverage. We do this for you guys, after all, so feel free to chime in with your opinion on both the show and us. The biggest electronics show in the world is a difficult thing to report as it is with only a handful of timid bloggers, ripped from their natural habitat as it were, and placed in an unfamiliar environment. But to put them in front of a live camera and ask them to provide meaningful commentary for hours on end is to invite calamity.
Fortunately, thanks to our great Livestream team and partners like Alienware, who provided our rendering computers, I think we did passably well. Impressions and notes on the show and our coverage follow.
To cap off the CES coverage, we’d like to give a shout-out to our partners and also discuss our coverage. We do this for you guys, after all, so feel free to chime in with your opinion on both the show and us. The biggest electronics show in the world is a difficult thing to report as it is with only a handful of timid bloggers, ripped from their natural habitat as it were, and placed in an unfamiliar environment. But to put them in front of a live camera and ask them to provide meaningful commentary for hours on end is to invite calamity.
Fortunately, thanks to our great Livestream team and partners like Alienware, who provided our rendering computers, I think we did passably well. Impressions and notes on the show and our coverage follow.
The Show
We’ve already got our best of put up, and John weighed in on the tone of the show as well. I generally agree with him. The most common announcements and gadgets were either of the 3D TV variety or some sort of e-book reader. The former was tiring to us, since it was hyped ad nauseam and few were offering anything the others weren’t. But despite that, this show convinced me (and a portion of the industry) that these 3D displays were functional, unobtrusive, and will eventually be affordable. That’s important, even if there’s hardly any content available for them yet.
The big tech guys have a sort of manifest destiny thing going on, and if they say 3D is the next big thing, it is — because they’re going to make it so whether you like it or not. And the truth is, they’re actually kind of awesome — but the hype was completely out of control. I’d prefer we get AMOLEDs first.
The e-book reader thing is more like the proliferation of netbooks after the Eee PC. Many will enter, few will win. Standouts like the Skiff and Que will remain, but the majority will be left behind by the rapid advances in e-ink and miniaturization which have already made Kindles obsolete.
Other than that, John was right: things are smaller and more functional, but rarely touted enormous numbers in order to attract eyeballs. Everything is still 1080p, but the focus is on getting the consumer into the 1080p world, not on moving to the next standard (3D excepted, because it coexists with 1080p). That said, there were some pretty awesome UHD and 4K displays and projectors.
Kisses go out to MiFi, without which we could not have covered the press day due to shoddy internet in the press room, and EyeFi for the loan of one of their cards. Alienware we mentioned earlier, thanks guys. Livestream, Otto, Deborah, Thomas, and Tommy: very, very well done. And thanks to all the PR and booth staff for being friendly and helpful. We’ll be following up with all of you before long. And lastly, thanks to CEA for accommodating us, and providing lots of coffee and enough donuts to sink a battleship.
Our Coverage
As you probably know, we attempted a completely different style of coverage this year, with live streaming video going for hours at a time as we demoed the newest products, interviewed famous people, and traversed the show floor. As I noted above, there was a risk of all of us being terribly unvideogenic, freezing up, and that sort of thing. I can’t speak for myself, but I thought the other guys did a pretty great job on camera and everyone brought something different to the videocast. You guys will have to sound off on that, since we probably remember ourselves as being rather funnier than we actually were.
So let us know: how’d you like it?
Of course, being in front of the camera precluded posting about whatever was there, so traditional post-based coverage was reduced. We got HD video and stills when we could, but we could have done better getting you the most interesting stuff from the stream put up where you could see it, if you missed it during broadcast. We’ll be peppering our normal content over the next couple weeks with the interviews, weird gems, and other stuff that you might not have tuned in for; it takes some time to re-render and snip the video.
We also could have scheduled the items in the stream a little better, but there are two considerations: first, wandering the show floor is half the fun, and second, nothing goes as planned either in CES or in Las Vegas generally. If you’ve been there, you know this to be true. Still, we’ll work on that. There’s only so much blogger banter our readers/viewers can handle.
We know you guys also had requests, and we neglected to get an official channel for those in place promptly. Fortunately, enough got through that you could pose questions to the creator of Gran Turismo, suggest booths to go to, and make fun of the products we’d seen.
That’s pretty much it. We’ll have reviews soon of lots of the stuff we saw, too, so keep your eyes open. This was really fun and as usual, CES was a hectic, insane pleasure to cover. ‘Til next year, CES.
For some people, the draw of a heavy bass are the satisfying vibrations it causes. But, what if you don’t want to have the bass all that loud? What if you don’t want to wake the kids, or the neighbors with your annoying bass? That’s where the ButtKicker comes in.
The ButtKicker is one of those gadgets you’d only ever see at a show like CES. What it does can almost be drawn from the name: it shakes your chair or couch in response to the bass of your media. On the show floor ButtKicker has a couch where you sit and feel the device in action. After sitting through the extended Sherlock Holmes trailer with the ButtKicker I can say it’s just as annoying as a loud bass. Sure, it gives an interesting experience at first, but by the end of the trailer the novelty wore off, and I was left yearning for a decent subwoofer that I could tune down to a less annoying level.
dumbnose writes to let us know that a fraudulent app that attempts to steal bank information has made it to the Android app store. From the alert: "NOTICE: Users of mobile devices with Android software may have noticed several applications available for download in the Android Marketplace. If you see any applications provided by the user Droid09, please do not download these applications. Android applications provided by Droid09 are fraudulent. Please remove any applications by Droid09 from your mobile device and contact your mobile provider to evaluate whether any other applications or information stored on your mobile device have been compromised." Multiple marketplaces are possible in the open Android ecosystem. Might we see the emergence of a marketplace distinguished by an iPhone-like app vetting process?
Saturday afternoon, residents of northern California were violently shaken by a magnitude 6.5 earthquake not far offshore in the Pacific Ocean. Much of the area is without power after electrical lines snapped in the quake, and in some places damage ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jan 2010 | 3:32 pm
Since GPS units started becoming popular, there has always been some sort of fear of having the devices stolen. The solution so far tends to be hide the GPS away in the car, or carry the unit with you where-ever you go. Now it seems that there’s an alternative solution.
The solution is Maplock, a lock for your GPS. The Maplock clamps around the front of your GPS unit, and the connected cable is meant to be looped around your steering wheel. That way even if somebody breaks into your car, they won’t be able to get your GPS unit out of the car. The Maplock can secure just about any GPS unit with a screen up to 5 inches and a depth up to 1 inch. So it won’t be able to secure many older models, but will likely secure any recent model.
The Nexus One may be currently be the biggest Android release ever but this Droid is the biggest. Period.
I passed Motorola on my way to Microsoft’s booth and I’m glad I did. Motorola had a couple rather large Droid’s on display promoting the Droid Does notification panel. These things were absolutely huge and if a few suited businessmen weren’t blocking my way, I would have gotten a much better look at this giant phone. This proves if there’s one thing the Droid can’t do it’s getting through airport x-ray machines.
Despite its size I still don’t know if the keyboard is any better (or worse) than the normal sized Droid.
Before CES, we asked you to give us your predictions about what you thought would be at CES. The crazier the better, and whoever had the craziest one that came true would win a sweet prize package from SteelSeries. Well! We have a winner. Here it is, and no arguing now…
Pat predicted:
I bet there is a helicopter that can be remote controlled with your phone…(hmmm, amazing!)
Lo and behold, we got all kinds of hands-on with the AR Drone, which has a robust iPhone control interface. I’d say that’s close enough. Our runners-up were both “robo-wife” predictions, but those were at the porn expo so technically not CES. Congrats to the winner, I’ll be contacting you shortly!
This guest post was written by Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net. Box.net was founded in 2005 with the goal of helping people and businesses easily access and share information from anywhere. Box.net is now used by millions of individuals, small businesses, and Fortune 500 enterprises worldwide.
Consumers have readily embraced the Cloud in the form of services like Facebook, YouTube and Gmail, but businesses are a different story. While small and medium businesses have been drawn to the cost efficiencies of web-based solutions, the Cloud has thus far hovered on the periphery of mainstream business IT, with many dismissing it as unfeasible on a large scale, or at best, a distant solution. But cloud-based services are about to tip for the enterprise, and quickly.
The coming shift echoes the disruptive transformation of IT in the ’90s, driven by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Lotus and Sun. Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado,” studied this transition and described the chain of adoption for enterprise technology: innovators are followed by early adopters, visionaries, and finally IT departments. And when enterprise technology hits this latter group, we’re officially in the Tornado.
Well the dust is beginning to swirl once more. Over the next two years, enterprise IT will follow in the footsteps of today’s early adopters and visionaries, finally embracing the Cloud and moving content, applications, and processes to the web. So what are the catalysts for this perfect storm? A combination of maturing platforms, generational and cultural shifts, and compelling economics, making cloud-based solutions the undeniable choice for nearly all future non-core technology purchases.
The platforms are ready
Today’s web-based platforms are finally maturing into real, viable solutions for businesses. They’re not just for small businesses or early adopters. Between Amazon EC2 for infrastructure-as-a-service, Force.com for platform-as-a-service, and Google Apps for software-as-a-service, companies large and small now have enough options to run their entire business in the Cloud. These complementary services can now talk to each other like never before, making it easy for IT administrators to weave connections between web platforms. And unplanned downtime is no longer a valid argument against the Cloud: like most cloud-based offerings, Google guarantees that Google Apps will be available at least 99.9% of the time, and will reimburse customers if this target isn’t met. According to a study by The Radicati Group, companies with onsite email solutions averaged 30-60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and 36-90 minutes of planned downtime per month in 2008. Even after a spat of outages in 2008, Matthew Glotzbach of Google’s Enterprise unit estimated that Google Apps downtime totaled a mere 10-15 minutes per month. Furthermore, cloud vendors front the bill to get the server back online, not your internal IT team.
Make way for new workers and a new way to work
Not only have our applications and platforms changed, so have the people using them. We’re now seeing the newest generation of the “knowledge worker” emerge in the enterprise. The formative years of this generation were spent chatting online, facebooking strangers and friends alike, and maxing out their hard drives with music and movie downloads. Accordingly, these employees are simply not capable of doing more work to find information than performing a Google search (I know, because I am one). They have no patience for convoluted IT policies, limited email storage and siloed data. Cloud-based IT services are the only solutions that can match the experience, efficiency, and access that we get in our personal lives. We’re already seeing companies like Salesforce mimic consumer tools with offerings like Salesforce Chatter. It’s only a matter of time before more vendors catch on that enterprise collaboration should be as easy as social networking, and must likewise take place in the Cloud.
The cloud is cheap
Okay, so we’re almost out of the recession. Companies who hunkered down will soon shift from survival mode to winning back marketshare. But guess whose stock is already at an all-time high? Salesforce. Despite the still-fragile economy, businesses are buying into the cloud, and there’s a lot more room to grow. At the risk of sounding completely obvious, they’re buying these services because they cost so much less to maintain and the barriers to getting started are much lower. And although the economy is showing signs of improvement, the past few years have fundamentally changed the way we think about technology purchases. Higher cost does not necessarily translate to higher quality. Products from behemoth software vendors like Microsoft are not necessarily more reliable. And in the Cloud, substantially fewer people are needed to get started: a medium-sized business five years ago required dedicated personnel, consulting, and redundant infrastructure to deliver corporate email. Today, the point of entry is a credit card transaction, with no infrastructure in sight. The time to transition to cheaper, more manageable platforms is now.
Momentum in the IT department
Managing infrastructure and technology that is not competitively-additive has become competitively-expensive. As we approach the Tornado, IT experts are redefining their roles and priorities from directly maintaining all the “contextual” applications around their business (CRM, email, file servers, search) to honing in on technologies that are core to their company’s performance and competitive advantage. This opens up the IT department to a new world of meaning and purpose. IT will move from a pure systems and process management function to a business success through technology service.
How do we know this is happening? IT decision-makers are starting to knock on the doors of Google, Amazon, Salesforce and Box.net. Box’s 10 largest sales in 2009 were made with IT managers at organizations you’d recognize. The common thread linking these IT buyers? In our case, they want to move toward Cloud Content Management, in lieu of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on traditional ECM. This comes from awareness that their role is not about being bogged down in server administration, storage limitations and downtime, but rather about finding best-of-breed technology to solve their company’s issues and enhance their business, quickly. Imagine a world where IT is defined as a means to increase margin through people and process productivity gains, rather than an expense to the organization.
Ok, so what’s holding us back?
There is no question that Security concerns and a fear of relinquishing control of data and applications are still holding back adoption of cloud technologies in the enterprise. The interconnectedness of our web identities, and especially our reliance on email as a primary authentication provider, limits the level of security possible for web-based software today. We saw an example of this with Twitter’s leaks from Google Docs. But traditional IT has never been fully secure either, and Cloud IT providers have a number of mechanisms at their disposal to improve lock-down procedures on all fronts – plus, their business survival hinges on reliability and security. Between two-factor authentication, centralized network and hardware security, and other standards now being implemented by cloud providers, I think we’ll see the Cloud as being more secure in aggregate than traditional IT.
Vendors of cloud-based services are aggressively tackling security concerns as a final hurdle, and thanks to maturing platforms, a new generation of knowledge workers and compelling pricing, the Tornado is already gathering momentum. Many concede that the Cloud is indeed coming to business, but see it as a distant solution, perhaps five or ten years off. But the Tornado-like transformation of Enterprise IT will soon be upon us. And once adopted, the Cloud is inherently scalable. Internal infrastructure can take months to set up, but cloud solutions can be online within hours. Traditional platforms require ongoing maintenance and tedious administration and training, but web-based platforms can (and should!) be as end-user friendly as their consumer-focused counterparts. And because cloud-based platforms can be woven together, it’s no longer about forcing your business to fit a one-sized-fits-all solution, but rather designing a solution to fit your business.
Most businesses have spent the past few years in survival mode, trying to minimize losses and weather the recession. The coming Tornado will be game-changing for those who dive in early, and devastating for companies that continue to resist. Once the Cloud tips for enterprise IT, the whirlwind of adoption will be impressive. We should see major surges of implementation in 2010, with the Tornado in full force in 2011. And unlike the storm Geoffrey Moore detailed in the 1990s, the drivers of this fast-approaching disruption won’t be the behemoths Oracle, Microsoft, Lotus and Sun. They’re too bogged down by rigid ecosystems and product upgrade commitments. Rather, it’s a new generation of cutting-edge, nimble software companies that are disrupting the current order and leading the charge into the storm. A storm that is bringing unprecedented change to IT and competitive advantage to early adopters, ultimately redefining the role of Enterprise IT itself.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
blee37 sends along a writeup from the School of Medicine at Stanford University on their pneumatic tube delivery system, used for sending atoms not bits. Such systems are in use in hospitals nationwide; the 19th-century technology is enhancd by recent refinements in pneumatic braking. "Every day, 7,000 times a day, Stanford Hospital staff turn to pneumatic tubes, cutting-edge technology in the 19th century, for a transport network that the Internet and all the latest Silicon Valley wizardry can't match: A tubular system to transport a lab sample across the medical center in the blink of an eye."
Most multitouch displays you’ll find right now are built right into computers, whether they be all-in-ones or laptops. There’s little for those who prefer to buy tower PCs, or even (gasp) build their own. To help those consumers and professionals who might want or need multitouch, 3M is releasing its a multitouch monitor.
The monitor in question is the 3M Display M2256PW, and is a 22-inch multitouch monitor with a maximum resolution of 1680x1050. What sets the 3M monitor apart from most other multitouch displays is the fact that it supports up to 10 points of interaction at the same time. That was you can have every finger on both hands moving independently and have to PC recognize each one of them. The demo on the CES floor included at display with four movie trailers going at one time. Each trailer could be moved, rotated and zoomed at the same time, assuming you have the manual dexterity or enough people to help you.
The 3M Display M2256PW is scheduled to be released in March.
A special thanks goes out to Energizer for supplying the Gadgetell crew with Energi To Go battery packs, which allowed us to keep our gadgets charged on the run and focus more on finding good stuff at CES and not having to worry about sitting next to a power outlet. For more information on the Energi To Go battery packs you can visit EnergiToGo.com or visit them on Twitter at @energitogo.
At CES, among other things, Otterbox showed off the first of their new co-injected plastic Tandem cases. The case is made with two different types of plastic - a hard shell for protection and a softer plastic that feels more like a non-slip grip. The first Tandem case is for the Palm Pre.
For the moment, it doesn’t look like the case allows Touchstone charging, which makes it a non started for many users. The Touchstone inductive charging system for the Palm Pre gets high marks from us and never attaching the device via cable is a big plus to many of the users. Having a case that doesn’t allow for inductive charging is a bit of a let down. We’ve got a call into Otterbox about this and if there will be a Touchstone friendly version. We’ll pass that along when we get a response.
Touchstone compatibility questions aside, the case felt very nice in hand. The soft-touch plastic made it much easier for me to open the device. The Tandem didn’t add a lot of bulk and looked to add some decent protection. Kudos to Otterbox for launching the series with the Pre, that’s a bold move in itself.
The Tandem is coming later this year at an undetermined price.
You remember a few months ago there was a video going around of this thing, and I called it out for being derivative of the Redneck Techie’s Game Gun? Well, that criticism still stands, but after testing this controller out, I have to say that whether it’s the only game gun on the market or not, this thing is awesome.
Basically what you’ve got is a gun-shaped controller with a lightweight, laser-based projector (a modified version of their SHOWWX) mounted on top, which uses a mirror vibrating harmonically and a few lasers to create an 848×480 image that’s always in focus. That’s key: there’s no focus at all, no matter what. The unit itself is about iPhone-sized:
The gun is equipped with motion detectors that let you go as far as you want left, right, up, or down. Another version has tilt as well, which I found would be very handy in FPSes with lean controls. There’s a d-pad in the front of the gun and a few buttons, one of which locks the viewpoint so you can move the gun without moving the camera in-game. This is for when you reach the edge of your room or screen and need to look further: you hit the button, drag back to the middle of the screen, and again you have space to move around.
Basically, it’s all in the video, though of course you can’t see what I’m doing because it was pitch dark and the camera wouldn’t pick up the image in the light. Brightness wasn’t a problem; the image was good, but you will want to be in a dark or semi-dark area to use it.
The main thing that impressed me was that there was absolutely no lag between my movements and the display. To be clear: not “very little lag” as even the next-generation motion controllers have, but no lag at all. It really helped with the immersive feel to not feel that the game was “catching up” to my movements. Microvision told me that part of this was the projector, part of it was the way they’d set it up, but at any rate there was another benefit of the laser projection: quick movements won’t blur or separate the colors, since each frame is rendered almost instantaneously. Add that to the always-in-focus aspect and you’ve got a pretty killer setup.
Of course, this was all pre-production equipment and so on, so we can actually expect things to be a little better (the wireless version, for instance, still had lag, which they assured me will be mostly eliminated). Oh, and the wireless version uses “clips” as batteries. How cool is that? Ammo!
Man, I’ve gone on a bit here. But really, this thing was extremely cool. Having to actually look up with the gun, for instance, and have things above you actually be above you, was awesome. My reservations, of course, remain: not many people have a room well-suited to this kind of controller, but many people do have small rooms that will probably do well enough. I got a great experience on a hastily-erected sheet hung in the corner of a meeting room.
But my skepticism has been conquered. This type of controller is going to be a lot of fun to use, and I hope Microvision gets their due, since they seem to have it pretty well together ahead of the others.
You can find out more at Microvision’s site. The SHOWWX is the actual projector used, and it’s for real, but the gun and all that are still in prototype form.
An anonymous reader writes "At a symposium at the Dutch Spinoza-instituut on 8 December, 2009, string theorist Erik Verlinde introduced a theory that derives Newton's classical mechanics. In his theory, gravity exists because of a difference in concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings. He does not consider gravity as fundamental, but as an emergent phenomenon that arises from a deeper microscropic reality. A relativistic extension of his argument leads directly to Einstein's equations." Here are two blog entries discussing Verlinde's proposal in somewhat more accessible terms.
Each day 11 people die of asthma in the U.S., and it accounts for one-quarter of all emergency room visits. Since 1980 the asthma death rate overall has increased by 50%.
A new iPhone app called AsthmaMD, which was created by am Pejham (a doctor and researcher) and Salim Madjd, aims to help some of those sufferers. The application let’s them keep a diary of attacks, helping them keep records of the severity of attacks, medications used, etc.
But what’s really interesting about AsthmaMD: users can opt in to share this data anonymously with the service. The data is aggregated and will be shared with researchers. The company says that will help doctors and researchers better understand the disease, and may help people know when an attack is more likely.
In an email, Madjd says:
Just imagine what might be possible now with the data we gather from this app. For example, since we have precise location of patient and the time of their asthma activity we can correlate that against local pollutant count, adverse weather changes, and different type of pollutants. Or imagine if one area in a city shows higher per capita asthma severity than the rest, we can clearly show that in a map and alert the parent of a potential pollutant by a nearby business. Or imagine this data mashed up against a real estate site. For parents or to-be parents they can also look at the asthma activity in any specific area and make more informed decisions about where they want to move.
There is also ability to better understand the effect of different medications, on age groups, gender, on managing asthma caused by different type of triggers from pollutant to exercise, etc.
We can even alert users of higher asthma chances in real time if we detect users of similar asthma history reporting asthma issues. Ultimately we could even send tweeter streams with zipcode or geocode of areas with asthma flare ups on real time. This app has the potential to make an impact on people lives unlike anything we’ve seen before and on personal level is one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on.
We will see a lot more apps like this in the future. Crowdsourcing is great for fixing pot holes. But it may also give doctors the information they need to better understand a variety of diseases, too.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Everything is always better in surround sound. Most 5.1 or 7.1 headphones are a convoluted mess of speaker drivers, usually resulting in massive ear cups. But these headphones from Psyko Audio Labs have a rather innovative way to trick you into thinking sounds are coming from all directions.
First, the science. The primary method your brain places sounds is based on the time discrepancy of the sound arriving to your ears. If you hear a sound off to your right, the sound waves from that source will hit your right ear milliseconds before your left one. Based on the length of time it takes for your brain to register the sound in the “far” ear, you can place where the sound is coming from.
The 5 drivers are located on the headband, aimed upwards. They feed the sound into hollow channels, which lead to the ear cups. There are two such sound channels, one for the front and one for the back. It truly is a brilliant, innovative system. A sound that is supposed to be coming from your left, will be emitted from the driver closer to your left ear. It has a shorter path to travel, meaning the sound will reach your left ear first, creating the directional illusion. Since there are no speakers around your ears, the acrylic shield on the cup can fold open, letting your ears breathe. Even though you already have other organs for that.
The unit proved its worth in our hands-on demo. A quick run through Crysis showed the technology really does work. These headphones seamlessly deliver surround sound, and with much less hassle / setup of a traditional 5.1 speaker system. Since its completely physics based, there’s no digital processing to slow the signal down. I give these a thumbs-up, and if you have $300 to spend, I highly recommend it.
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade, comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks. 'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less. 'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen." Read below for another intra-generational wrinkle.
AP - A New Jersey company says it has developed "the world's first sex robot," a life-size rubber doll that's designed to engage the owner with conversation rather than lifelike movement.
Last week, we covered Googlle opening a school in India. Googlle, not to be confused with Google. Obviously, this was a site and service set up to trick people, as they were even ripping-off Google’s logo. Well guess what? After the publicity, they decided to switch up some things.
Most notably, you’ll see that the Googlle Institute has a brand new, beautiful logo, as Fake Steve noticed today. Gone is the Google font and colors. It has been replaced by “Googlle” written in red. I’m not sure what the font is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Googlle wasn’t supposed to be using it.
You’ll also notice a new “declaration” at the bottom of the site:
We are no way related to Google Search Engine, Neither We want to copy the name or take advantage of that name & Pronounciation of same is different as “Google”.
Poor English aside, I’m going to assume Google India may not have been too happy about the site, and this is Googlle trying to cover itself.
They also apparently took the time to fix all the broken links (simply by removing many of them). They’ve also switched up the curriculum, now offering a 1-year program for a “googlle intern.” Hurry, they’re accepting applications now!
[thanks Brinke]
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Groundbreaking approach could impact fields from cryptography to materials scienceIn an important first for a promising new technology, scientists have used a quantum computer to calculate the precise energy of molecular hydrogen. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Jan 2010 | 12:10 pm
Charbax writes "This is an extensive video interview with Freescale's manager of software development about their integration of the Chromium OS onto their ARM Cortex A8 i.MX51-based $199 Tablet reference design. It seems to run smoothly and fast with multiple tabs. There's no touch screen support yet, so input is done through a USB keyboard and mouse for now, but the WiFi drivers are fine. Freescale is also demonstrating Android and Ubuntu versions. Those have a 3G SIM card reader built-in, an HDMI output and 720p video playback. The question is: will they be able to support Chrome browsing at full speed on the most JavaScript- and Flash-intensive websites and support a large amount of opened tabs?" The demonstration of the Chromium tablet begins at about 11:20 into the video. The Android and Ubuntu versions are displayed earlier.
CES is over for CrunchGear (we'll still be posting some stragglers today and tomorrow) but we'd like to reflect on the best gear we saw at the show. These few days flew by and even with the glut of 3D TVs and ereaders we were actually impressed by a few small, good things that caught our eye on the show floor. Here are the winners of CrunchGear's Best of CES 2010 informal editor poll.
CES is over for CrunchGear and we’d like to reflect on the best gear we saw at the show. These few days flew by and even with the glut of 3D TVs and ereaders we were actually impressed by a few small, good things that caught our eye on the show floor. Here are the winners of CrunchGear’s Best of CES 2010 informal editor poll.
Nyko’s new Wand+ controller has MotionPlus built into the controller, thereby preventing the dreaded “MotionPlus Elephantism” associated with the official Nintendo add-on. [Product]
This new controller uses completely different technology from the other motion controllers out there from the big 3 gaming companies. It’s magnetic, and unlike those other ones, it’s true 1:1 movement with low latency and high precision. I’d much rather be playing Red Steel 2 with something like this than with a Wiimote. It’s still a ways from production though.
Sprint Overdrive
4G speed in a package the size of a drink coaster? And it actually works in Vegas during CES? Yes, please. A great new WiMax product and literally the first of its kind. [Release]
Plastic Logic Que
The first e-book reader I genuinely want. I’d probably only use it to read newspapers and such, not books, but it’s thin, beautiful, and the touchscreen is definitely key. Too bad it costs over $600.
Palm Pre Plus
It may not have been much of a surprise by the time Palm announced the Pre Plus for Verizon, but we’re still glad it’s here. While the doubled capacity of 16GB is a nice touch, the real deal sealer is the new keyboard; it may look just about identical, but it feels a heck of a lot better than the one found on the Plus-less Pre. [Product]
Memorex HD Touch Screen camera
I’m glad to see that the pocket camera market is still going strong. I was really impressed by the Memorex Pocket cam. Not just for the touch screen, but for the fact that it supports external microphones as well. [Product]
Samsung Moment with Mobile DTV
The Samsung Moment is on here not because it’s an amazing phone but because it marks the beginning of free TV transmission to cellphones. If there’s one thing visitors to Asia are amazed by its the proliferation of live TV – in cars, in phones, almost everywhere. Samsung is finally bringing this technology to our shores and will be piggy-backing premium content over the standard, local streams we all know and love.
A study by the University of Exeter provides the first evidence that coral reefs can recover from the devastating effects of climate change. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Jan 2010 | 11:08 am
People who study the behavior of Earth's climate have been pondering a mystery of the last ice age. Why did the size of the Northern ice sheets fluctuate so dramatically, pushing global sea level up and down? Many suspected a ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jan 2010 | 11:00 am
gbjbaanb writes "I love stories about new smartphones; it shows the IT market is doing something different than the usual same-old desktop apps. Maybe one day we'll all be using super smartphones as our primary computing platforms. And so, here's Intel's offering: the LG GW990. Running a Moorestown CPU, which gives 'considerably' better energy efficiency than the Atom, it runs Intel's Linux distro — Moblin. Quoting: 'In some respects, the GW990 — which has an impressive high-resolution 4.8-inch touchscreen display — seems more like a MID than a smartphone. It's possible that we won't see x86 phones with truly competitive all-day battery life until the emergence of Medfield, the Moorestown successor that is said to be coming in 2011. It is clear, however, that Intel aims to eventually compete squarely with ARM in the high-end smartphone market."
Case study: Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System detected 98 percent of tagged fishA new acoustic telemetry system tracks the migration of juvenile salmon using one-tenth as many fish as comparable methods, suggests a paper published in the January edition of the American Fisheries Society journal Fisheries. The paper also explains how the system is best suited for deep, fast-moving rivers and can detect fish movement in more places than other tracking methods.The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System (JSATS) estimated the survival of young, ocean-bound salmon more precisely than the widely used Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tags during a 2008 study on the Columbia and Snake rivers, according to the results of a case study discussed in the paper. The paper also concludes that fish behavior is affected least by light-weight JSATS tags compared to larger acoustic tags."Fisheries managers and researchers have many technologies to choose from when they study fish migration and survival," said lead author Geoff McMichael of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory."JSATS was specifically designed to understand juvenile salmon passage and survival through the swift currents and noisy hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River," McMichael continued. "But other systems might work better in different circumstances. This paper demonstrates JSATS' strengths and helps researchers weigh the pros and cons of the different fish tracking methods available today."Scientists at PNNL and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Portland District co-authored the paper. PNNL and NOAA Fisheries began developing JSATS for the Corps in 2001.JSATS is an acoustic telemetry system that includes the smallest available acoustic transmitting tag, which weighs 0.43 grams. Its battery-powered tags are surgically implanted into juvenile salmon and send a uniquely coded signal every few seconds. Receivers are strategically placed in waterways to record the signal and track when and where tagged fish travel. A computer system also calculates the precise 3-D position of tagged fish using data gathered by the receivers. PIT tags are also implanted into juvenile salmon for migration and survival studies, but don't use batteries to actively transmit signals. Instead, PIT tags send signals when they become energized while passing by PIT transceiver antennas.For the paper's case study, researchers implanted 4,140 juvenile Chinook salmon with both JSATS and PIT tags. They also placed just PIT tags inside another 48,433 juveniles. All of the case study's tagged fish were released downstream of Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River in April and May 2008.A significantly greater percentage of JSATS tags were detected than PIT tags, the case study demonstrated. For example, about 98 percent of JSATS-tagged fish were detected at Ice Harbor Dam on the Snake River. About 13 percent of PIT-tagged fish were detected in the same stretch of river. As a result, studies using JSATS require using roughly one-tenth as many fish as those employing PIT tags, which helps further conserve the salmon population.Survival estimates were similar between JSATS and PIT tags. Forty-eight percent of the JSATS-tagged fish were estimated to have survived migration between Lower Granite Dam and Bonneville Dam, which is the last dam on the Columbia before the Pacific Ocean. For PIT-tagged fish, 43 percent were estimated to have reached the same area.Having flexibility in where receivers can be placed is advantageous, the authors reported. JSATS receivers can be located in both rivers and dams, while PIT antennas usually can only go inside fish bypasses at dams. Researchers can estimate fish survival for an entire river system when receivers are placed in more locations, the paper explains.The team also compared JSATS' technical features with those of another acoustic telemetry system, the VEMCO system being used for the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) project along North America's West Coast. The VEMCO system is best suited for use in the slow-moving, open ocean when observing small numbers of large fish, the authors wrote. In contrast, JSATS was developed to study the migration of larger quantities of small juvenile fish in fast-moving rivers.A key difference between the JSATS and VEMCO systems is dry tag weight. JSATS tags weigh 0.43 grams and are the smallest acoustic tags available. VEMCO tags that have been used in Columbia River juvenile salmon weighed 3.1 grams. Previous research shows fish can bear a tag that weighs up to 6.7 percent of their body weight without significant adverse survival effects. That means JSATS tags can be implanted into fish as light as 6.5 grams, while VEMCO tags should be used in fish that weigh no less than 46.3 grams.Another advantage of JSATS is that it is non-proprietary and available for anyone to manufacture or use. Because several companies have been able to competitively bid for the opportunity to produce the system's components, its cost has dropped in recent years. JSATS tags, for example, have gone from $300 per tag in 2005 to $215 in 2008. And JSATS tags cost $40 to $135 less than other commercially available acoustic tags in 2008. Proprietary interests have hindered the development of acoustic telemetry equipment in certain areas, the team wrote."JSATS has helped us get a clearer, more complete picture of how salmon migrate and survive through the Columbia and Snake rivers to the Pacific Ocean," McMichael said. "But we're continuing to develop JSATS and hope others will find it useful in studies of other aquatic animals. There's an opportunity for all aquatic telemetry technologies to be improved."REFERENCE: G.A. McMichael, M.B. Eppard, T.J. Carlson, J.A. Carter, B.D. Ebberts, R.S. Brown, M. Weiland, G.R. Ploskey, R.A. Harnish and Z.D. Deng. "The Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System: A New Tool." Fisheries, Vol. 35, No. 1, January 2010. ---Image 1: DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers helped develop the Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System to study the migration of juvenile salmon through fast-moving rivers. Credit: Pacific Northwest National LaboratoryImage 2: Two tags from the Juvenile Salmon Acoustic Telemetry System sit above a tag from the widely used Passive Integrated Transponder fish tracking system. Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Jan 2010 | 8:15 am
The inviting expanse of shimmering snow contrasts with the benign blue sky above. The ski instructor briefly goes over the planned run, his first charge glides off into the distance...and sets off a slab avalanche. The group all look on helplessly as their friend is buried under a wall of snow. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Jan 2010 | 7:30 am
Less is more; let the music show you how. We've witnessed the progression: albums to compact discs to digital files a la iTunes, where each step takes less material and less effort to get the music to the listener. Now, ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Jan 2010 | 7:04 am
Thousands Without PowerA strong, magnitude 6.5 earthquake off the coast of Northern California left thousands without power and was felt as far away as Oregon and central California, according to the Associated Press and USGS.The quake, which struck at 4:27 p.m. PST Jan. 9 about 22 miles northwest of Ferndale, CA, sent people running into the streets while buildings shook and power lines snapped, cutting power to several coastal communities.Eight aftershocks followed in the three hours after the temblor, the strongest of which occurred in the same general area at 6:21 p.m. PST with a magnitude of 4.5, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.The quake hit at a depth of nearly 10 miles about 27 miles offshore from the coastal city of Eureka, CA, the USGS said. Eureka, which has a population of about 26,000, is located roughly 270 miles north of San Francisco.There were no reports of the quake causing a tsunami, the USGS said.“Strike-slip earthquakes are less likely to produce large tsunamis because they cause relatively little vertical ground displacement,” the agency wrote in a summary posted on its Web site.“Shaking was strongest near the coast line between Petrolia and Eureka, CA, although felt reports for this event extend from as far south and north as Capitola, CA and Eugene, OR, respectively, and as far east as Reno, NV,” it said.The quake triggered the evacuation of at least one apartment building, the Associated Press reported. No major injuries were reported, but several people received minor cuts and scrapes from broken glass at the Bayshore Mall in Eureka, fire spokesman Gary Bird told the Associated Press.Although authorities were still assessing damages, some power lines were confirmed down and a number of gas leaks had been reported, Bird said. "There are some frayed nerves, but I think we've come through this pretty well for the magnitude of earthquake we've had," he said.J.D. Guidi, a spokesman with Pacific Gas & Electric Co., said there were widespread power outages throughout Humboldt County, affecting some 25,000 customers, the AP reported.Several traffic lights fell and numerous residents reported water, gas and sewer leaks, said Humboldt County Office of Emergency Services spokeswoman Jo Wattle."People have chimneys down, and we're hearing about minor property damage and lots of glassware broken," Wattle told the AP. "People are really shaken up. It was shaking pretty good, then it had a big jolt to it at the end."According to police in Ferndale, the quake caused stucco to fall off City Hall and shattered shop windows, leaving the historic downtown streets covered with shards of glass."I thought a tire had blown off my truck because it was so hard to keep control of the vehicle," Officer Lindsey Frank said. "Power lines were swaying, and I could see people in the fields trying to keep their balance."The Los Angeles Times reported items falling from store shelves in Eureka.Sandra Hall, owner of Antiques and Goodies, said the quake was the most dramatic she had seen in the 30 years her store has been open.Furniture fell over and nearly all her lamps broke, giving customers a scare, she said."We'll be having a sale on broken china for those who like to do mosaics," she told the Associated Press.Others in the area reported similar experiences."The whole town is kind of freaked out right now," said Judd Starks, the kitchen manager at The Alibi restaurant."All the power is out, people are out walking around,” Starks told the Associated Press.The quake was felt as far south as central California and as far north as central Oregon, according to USGS geophysicist Richard Buckmaster.The Northern California coastal area is known for its periodic earthquakes. In the only tsunami to take lives in the continental United States, 11 people were killed in a Crescent City tsunami in 1964.However, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said there was no threat of Saturday’s quake triggering a tsunami.However, further aftershocks remain a possibility.“The probability of a strong and possibly damaging aftershock (magnitude 5 or greater) in the 7 days following the earthquake is approximately 78%,” the USGS said.“Most likely, the mainshock will be the largest in the sequence. However, there is a small chance (~5-10%) of an earthquake equal to or larger than this mainshock in the next 7 days.” “In addition, numerous M3-5 aftershocks are expected to occur in the same 7-day period, but most are unlikely to be felt due to the distance from land.”The USGS said the figures are based on statistical observations of past California quakes and are not predictions.---Image Caption: Aerial view: Eureka on Humboldt Bay. Courtesy Robert Campbell/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Jan 2010 | 5:20 am
." Her book The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness examines the assumptions behind this conept.
(Joan Roughgarden) 
(Joan Roughgarden)
(Bruce Bagemihl)
Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).
In the dog eat dog world of the CE business, margins are low and money – especially in this economy – is tight. That’s why a number of smaller vendors, including some we talked to in Vegas, took rooms in local hotels or ran “peripheral” events in other venues. 
Here's a shirt that's bound to infuriate your type-obsessed pals: the word Helvetica, set in Comic Sans.
Ludmila Stanova, spokeswoman for Slovakia's ministry of the interior, says Dublin airport was warned to expect a person carrying explosive samples, and that the passenger was also alerted after his arrival.
The latest installment of the excellent Tor.com science fiction story podcast is Steven Gould's "Bugs in the Arroyo," a sharp little tale about a world where alien, lethal metal-consuming bugs have rendered the American southwest uninhabitable except in the style of the pioneers. It's got heart, scientific speculation, and pulse-pounding adventure (as you'd expect from the author of the must-read 
Today, according to a new report, government ministers have admitted that the costs will amount to £500m ($799.2m).
Another year, another CES. The show this year wasn’t that different then previous years with some new stuff, a lot of old crap, and nerds all over Vegas. Hopefully you followed us around the show floor via our massively-successful 
To cap off the CES coverage, we'd like to give a shout-out to our partners and also discuss our coverage. We do this for you guys, after all, so feel free to chime in with your opinion on both the show and us. The biggest electronics show in the world is a difficult thing to report as it is with only a handful of timid bloggers, ripped from their natural habitat as it were, and placed in an unfamiliar environment. But to put them in front of a live camera and ask them to provide meaningful commentary for hours on end is to invite calamity.
Fortunately, thanks to our great 
Since GPS units started becoming popular, there has always been some sort of fear of having the devices stolen. The solution so far tends to be hide the GPS away in the car, or carry the unit with you where-ever you go. Now it seems that there’s an alternative solution.
This guest post was written by 
Each day 11 people die of 
CES is over for CrunchGear and we’d like to reflect on the best gear we saw at the show. These few days flew by and even with the glut of 3D TVs and ereaders we were actually impressed by a few small, good things that caught our eye on the show floor. Here are the winners of CrunchGear’s Best of CES 2010 informal editor poll.
