Last week, someone who had been at MySpace for a while was telling me about what it was like working inside the social networking company, which had gone from supernova to also-ran in the course of a few years.
Reflecting on the downward spiral that its owner News Corp. (NWS) had been trying to slow over the last year and how hard it was to do a turnaround of any kind, the exec also could not shake the idea that it could still be revived.
“MySpace is kind of a hot mess,” said the exec, referring to its still-large audience and well-known brand. “It’s both impossible to save and hard to give up on.”
While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as infighting among top execs finally came to a head today.
Escalating tensions over strategy going forward had grown untenable between Miller and Van Natta, as well as among and between Van Natta and his top two execs, COO Michael Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.
(Pictured from left to right above are Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn.)
Sources said relations had gotten so bad that Hirschhorn had told Van Natta recently that he was planning on resigning by June.
It was a threat that moved well beyond well-known gripes the former media exec had aired to many outside the company over the last year about how much worse shape MySpace was in than he thought and also weariness from his weekly commute between this home in New York to the company’s Los Angeles HQ.
And, after a recent blog post that claimed Hirschhorn was the one leaving, relations became even more frosty, sources said.
The relationship between Miller and Van Natta had also become badly frayed, several sources noted, mostly over the pace of change and the level of control Van Natta had over MySpace.
“There were serious disagreements and something had to give,” said one person close to the situation.
After firing Van Natta in an afternoon meeting yesterday, in what several people described as a “termination without cause,” Miller (pictured here with Van Natta behind him) appointed Jones and Hirschhorn co-presidents of MySpace.
It was a dramatic shift from only nine months ago.
With the backing of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, Miller hired Van Natta last April, after jettisoning Co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe.
But, despite his CEO title, the former Facebook and Amazon (AMZN) exec didn’t get to select the two top executives beneath him.
Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller directly–also with Murdoch’s involvement and approval.
The idea at the time of assembling this troika was that three heads were better than one, especially in dealing with the technological, administrative and business hairball that MySpace had become over the years.
As it turned out, three heads came with three brains and three different ideas of what MySpace needed to do to fix itself.
While working on cleaning up the company, making cuts and also attracting new talent proceeded, it seems as if not enough progress was made on the what-next part of the equation, as a variety of strategies were considered.
That led to an increasing number of clashes, as pressure began to mount to do something, even as rival Facebook’s growth skyrocketed.
While Van Natta and the others distilled it into the idea of making MySpace the place where consumers and artists stored and kept track of their entertainment content online, using a series of “super tools” to move them all over the Web, the lack of concrete changes even began to irk Murdoch.
In News Corp.’s earnings call last week, in fact, Murdoch said about MySpace, despite recent encouraging signs of stabilization: “It’s not yet where we want it.”
Uh-oh, that might have been a clue to watch for big changes!
In addition, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted, News Corp. disclosed that MySpace and the rest of its digital portfolio were coming up short on its end of a $900 million, three-year search deal with Google (GOOG), and that would mean that News Corp. would receive around $100 million less than originally anticipated.
That was due to changes made to the site’s design, which cut down on some page views that the old site created to show higher traffic.
And, said sources, any new search deal with Google or, perhaps, Microsoft (MSFT) is not expected to be stellar.
“MySpace will get paid what it is worth,” said the source about search fees. “But the days of big payouts are over.”
The real problem, of course, is that MySpace’s audience has been going elsewhere, particularly Facebook, and will continue to do so until a bold new direction is set.
Many in the industry do not think that is even possible and that News Corp. shouldn’t even own MySpace anymore.
There is also a good argument that it should have, and could have, sold the asset several years ago, either to Yahoo (YHOO) during its takeover fight with Microsoft or to another bidder when the company was riding high.
Now, News Corp.–which is dealing with many other vexing digital issues, including a pitched battle over paid content–is stuck trying to fix a distressed asset that became that way by allowing the old regime to run it in a less than rigorous manner.
And, despite all the bandaids applied so far, reviving MySpace will take a lot of more arduous work from Jones and Hirschhorn, neither of whom has helmed as big an organization, despite recent layoffs.
In addition, the co-presidents must also get along well, and power-sharing arrangements are always tricky to pull off.
So, until Miller, Jones and Hirschhorn figure it out–or not!–and, in honor of MySpace’s music meme, here is Cobra Starship’s “Hot Mess” video:
I am an extremely happy Android NexusOne phone-owner (fast! open!) but even I have to admit that Randall "XKCD" Munroe's Android bug-reports raise some real concerns about the platform:
* Sometimes, when arranging home screen icons, you feel sad and you're not sure why...
* If you stop for gas, sometimes navigation suspends, but doesn't resume when you start driving again (or just disappears without notifying you), so you miss the upcoming turn and think you're already on I-95, and by the time you discover your mistake and turn around you've lost enough time that you totally get to the conference too late to catch Richard Stallman doing his acapella Bad Romance cover which is the whole reason you paid the entry fee in the first place.
It didn’t take long. Square, the iPhone credit card transaction startup co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, already has a European competitor.
Like Square, Berlin and London-based iCharge wants to democratise the ability to accept credit card payments in person through an add-on device for smartphones and the startup’s accompanying application and service that taps into established payment gateways. The result is that any sized retailer – from someone self-employed, an independent shop owner or small trader – can take payment by credit card using just an iPhone or handset running Google’s Android.
SSDs haven’t found their way into the mass market yet, but a team of Japanese researchers is already trying to make them more worthwhile. The team claims it has developed a technology that helps to shrink the size of SSDs by no less than 90%, makes them cheaper and boosts energy efficiency by 70%.
The research group is comprised of people from a handful of different institutions, i. e. Toshiba or Keio University in Tokyo (where Professor Tadahiro Kuroda is the main person responsible).
The new technology makes it possible to produce 1TB SSDs that are as small as a postage stamp. The current prototype (pictured) is sized just like that and made of 128 NAND flash memory chips and one controller chip. It boasts a data transfer speed of 2Gbps and is based on radio communication, which (according to the researchers) leads to lower production costs.
A practical version is expected to be ready by 2012.
Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
Google is seemingly bent on making a clean sweep of the Pacific Rim in its new anti-censorship campaign: first it refused to go on censoring its services at the behest of the Chinese government; now it... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 2:59 am
Google is seemingly bent on making a clean sweep of the Pacific Rim in its new anti-censorship campaign: first it refused to go on censoring its services at the behest of the Chinese government; now it has refused the Australian government's (batshit crazy) request to censor YouTube videos that Canberra's censor board put into its "refused classification" bucket.
The minister who made the request, Stephen Conroy, apparently missed the memo on Google and China, as he cited Google's erstwhile willingness to censor on behalf of Beijing as reason enough for the company to help him censor videos about safe drug use and painting graffiti, or those that advocate euthanasia. These subjects are all prohibited by Australia's government of the day, which apparently believes Aussies to be such soft-headed sheep that they can't possibly be exposed to ideas it doesn't like, lest they be tempted into wickedness.
"Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."
Google Australia's head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy's comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not "helpful or relevant".
Google has recently threatened to pull out of China, partly due to continuing requests for it to censor material.
"YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography, and we enforce these, but we can't give any assurances that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification content from YouTube," Flynn said.
schliz writes "The Australian Government Information Management Office says that the cost of a platform change could cost more than it saves. It was pushed to investigate open source software to reduce its AUD$500m budget at a Senate meeting yesterday. From the article: 'Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they apply a software,' spokesperson Graham Fry said. 'If the cost of assessing it [open source] was greater than the cost of the software, you would have to think twice.'"
Britain's justice minister says Facebook has deleted the pages of 30 UK prisoners after they used the Internet to taunt their victims. The move follows several incidents in which British Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 2:35 am
On 12 January 2010, Yahoo applied for a trademark on Y.COM, a filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office reveals.
And this isn’t exactly the first time they’ve tried to secure that particular character mark: the company actually filed an initial application for Y.COM to the USPTO back in August 2005.
The only difference between both applications that I can tell is that the most recent one is a bit more limited in scope, as the ‘Goods & Services’ description in the application is for one specific category only, whereas in the 2005 application there were three.
In the new filing, Yahoo seems to focus more on its search business (or what’s left of it):
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Creating indexes of information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks for others; searching and retrieving information, sites, and other resources available on computer networks for others; computer services, namely, providing search engines for obtaining data on a global computer network; design, creation, hosting, and maintenance of websites for others; providing temporary use of online non-downloadable software for use in designing, creating, hosting, maintaining, and operating personal web pages; hosting computer software applications of others; providing customized online web pages featuring user-defined information, which includes search engines and online web links to other websites; domain name registration services for identification of users on a global computer network; online computer mapping services; mapping services, namely, providing a website and website links to geographic information, map images, and trip routing; computer services, namely, providing spam filtering, firewall, and parental control online filtering services; providing temporary use of online non-downloadable software in the field of employment information.
The irony is that even when Yahoo succeeds at securing the trademark, the domain name y.com does not belong to the company and conceivably never will. The reason for that is that virtually all single-letter and single-digit .com domain names have been reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) ever since the early nineties.
The only single-letter .com domains that are in use today were registered prior to the 1st of December 1993, when IANA moved to make them unavailable for registration. They are: q.com (Qwest Communications), x.com (PayPal) and z.com (Nissan).
Back in 2005, when Yahoo first filed an application for the Y.COM trademark, an announcement was made that the reserved single-letter domain names might be put up for sale by ICANN after all, which is probably the reasoning behind the initial application in the first place. But as far as I can tell, there’s no indication that ICANN intends to move ahead with the auctioning of reserved single-letter domain names this year, so the question remains why Yahoo is going after the Y.COM trademark for the second time.
Note that the above doesn’t necessarily mean it makes zero sense for Yahoo to register Y.COM as a trademark. The company could simply be covering its bases in the event that the domain name y.com should ever be available for registration in the future and someone else secures it before they can (or wins the auction). It’s also perfectly plausible that Yahoo has plans to use Y.COM as part of its branding campaigns without necessarily owning or using the domain name.
More background about the ’single-letter trademark claim game’ can be found here.
Kirkus Review, one of the major sources of book-reviews for libraries and the publishing trade, has been rescued from bankruptcy by an unlikely white knight: it is now property of Indiana Pacers owner... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:40 am
Kirkus Review, one of the major sources of book-reviews for libraries and the publishing trade, has been rescued from bankruptcy by an unlikely white knight: it is now property of Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon. (via Resource Shelf)
HONG KONG, Feb 11 (Reuters) - The Hong Kong IPO of American International Group's Asian life insurance division is targeting a listing committee meeting for the end of March, people close to the matter... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:31 am
Design Out for Crime, a project by The Home Offices Design and Technology Alliance Against Crime and the Design Council was launched last April to develop new ways of securing mobile phones against thieves... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:21 am
TEL AVIV, Feb 11 (Reuters) - 012 Smile.Communications said on Thursday it has signed a 3.9 billion shekel Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:13 am
By Chris Scott Barr If you’ll recall, last August Logitech released a wireless keyboard/mouse combo that promised incredible battery life. Specifically, you could go three years on your keyboard... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:04 am
By Eliot Van Buskirk, Contributor, Epicenter, Wired.com
Predictions about the appeal of cloud computing were on the money. We increasingly share, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves with software and media on remote servers rather than on our own computers. But a big catch prevents more of us from investing much time or money in ephemeral digital media or constantly-changing online services: It can be difficult, if not impossible, to grab your stuff and split.
When it comes to creating sketch comedy and spoofs for web video, the guys at Landline TV are relative newbies, having only been working together since August 2008. But since that time they’ve become a dominant force in creating incredibly topical yet notably creative viral video with high production value — including recent million-view baby Little Jersey Shore and most recently, a parody of Google’s first Super Bowl ad.
I spoke to co-creator Jared Neumark over IM about the differences between working with partners Babelgum and Revision3, the realities of low-budget production for the web and the secret to creating the classic viral video.
Botnets, or networks of zombie computers that mount attacks with malicious software against other computers, continue to be a moving target for network protection services. A recent report from Prolexic Technologies describes some of the new strategies that botnets are using to take down their targets in attacks that are increasingly of a political bent.
The Prolexic report focuses on the increase of DDoS attacks, where multiple computers overload the available bandwidth of a system through methods such as IP spoofing or DNS request floods.
Google today announced an audacious plan to build what a cutting-edge broadband network. It is an experimental network, much like Google's Wi-Fi network in the city of Mountain View, Calif. Google's planned... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 1:00 am
According to Business Insider, the New York Times iPhone app hit 3 million downloads in December. The app, available for free, launched in July 2008. In December alone, we had 75 million pageviews from... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 12:46 am
Well, iSuppli is at it again, and this time they are deconstructing the iPad. Admittedly they aren’t 100% sure about what exactly is inside the new device, they are taking their best shot at it and the numbers are pretty impressive. It doesn’t surprise me when an company makes money (in fact I’m more surprised when they don’t), Apple stands to make quite a bit with each tablet sold.
Interestingly enough, the most expensive part of the iPad is the screen; iSuppli estimates that each screen costs Apple around $80. The $499 iPad (with 16GB of memory) costs Apple approximately $219.35, and $10 to manufacture. The $699 64GB version will cost Apple about $335, and the mid-range version will cost $287. Any way you look at it, the iPad is pretty much going to print money for Apple once it’s available for purchase. Analysts are predicting that Apple will sell between 2 to 5 million units in the first year. Looks like the estimate that we told you about a few weeks ago was right.
Lanxon writes "British criminals should soon prepare to be shot at from unmanned airborne police robots. Last month it was revealed that modified military aircraft drones will carry out surveillance on everyone from British protesters and antisocial motorists to fly-tippers. But these drones could be armed with tasers, non-lethal projectiles and ultra-powerful disorienting strobe lighting apparatus, reports Wired. The flying robot fleet will range from miniature tactical craft such as the miniature AirRobot being tested by one police force, to BAE System's new 12m-wide armed HERTI drone as flown in Afghanistan."
John Park says: "Some woman had an old Nintendo and a few random games for sale. Turns out one of them was a super rare collectors dream game, so it went for around $13,000!"
Up for auction is an original Nintendo NES gaming system with 1 hand control. There are 5 games with it. They are, Family & Fitness Stadium Events in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Major League Baseball in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 the arcade game in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box, Super Mario 3 in the original box with the dust jacket inside of the box and the original game, Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt. I have had this stored in the closet for years for my kids to play but the way that electronics come & go and change from one year to the next they wanted all of the new hot items of their own now and now it's time to get rid of things that are no longer being used or wanted. This system worked perfect when i stored it but somehow over the years, we have managed to misplace the AC cord & the television hook up. I am listing this and selling without hook up but it I find them, i'll send them along with the rest at no additional charges to you. Please keep in mind though that any ac cord will work with this and the hook up from a VCR would hook it up just as well as the original cords!
John Park says: "Some woman had an old Nintendo and a few random games for sale. Turns out one of them was a super rare collectors dream game, so it went for around $13,000!" Up for auction is an original... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 12:19 am
Reuters - Sweden took the number one spot from the United States to top the annual rankings on the usage of telecommunications technologies such as networks, cellphones and computers, a report released on Thursday shows.
Earlier today, we had a runaway hit of a post that went viral within a few hours, getting unbelievable pageviews and hundreds of retweets and comments. The trouble was, it wasn't because of the post's... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 11 Feb 2010 | 12:09 am
The University of Georgia has fired Dorin Lucian Dehelean, a security analyst who was responsible for passing on RIAA copyright infringement notices to the student body, alleging that he demanded bribes from students to make the record of their supposed infractions go away.
According to UGA campus police chief Jimmy Williamson, Dehelean "offered to make the situation go away in exchange for money." He promised not to inform Judicial Programs, so the student in question would be free from any kind of disciplinary measures the University usually takes in similar cases.
The student in question didn't have any money and alerted a University employee who called in the police. The police decided to look into the case and sent over an undercover officer who went over to Dehelean, impersonating the student.
After Dehelean accepted the payment he was fired immediately and taken into custody for extortion practices. According to the campus police, Dehelean may have tried the same trick with other students, and they believe that at least one other student paid up.
The University of Georgia has fired Dorin Lucian Dehelean, a security analyst who was responsible for passing on RIAA copyright infringement notices to the student body, alleging that he demanded bribes... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Feb 2010 | 11:48 pm
Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Neil Clarke, editor of the Hugo nominated Clarkesworld Magazine, was slain on his front lawn by a snow dalek, while his young son watched. We are deeply saddened by his loss and suggest that people living in the path of the coming Snowpocalypse beware that it is merely a cover for a Dalek invasion."
Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Neil Clarke, editor of the Hugo nominated Clarkesworld Magazine, was slain on his front lawn by a snow dalek, while his young son watched. We are deeply saddened by his loss... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 10 Feb 2010 | 11:46 pm
Nicholas George, a senior in Middle-Eastern Studies at Pomona College, was detained, handcuffed, and intensively questioned by the TSA while trying to catch a flight back to school from Philadelphia. The TSA guards found English-Arabic flashcards in his luggage and said that because Osama bin Laden spoke Arabic, "these cards are suspicious." The FBI was called in, and an agent called him a "fucking idiot" when he asked why he was being held. After being asked if he was a communist or a Muslim, he was released. He was not read his rights at any time.
The ACLU has taken on his case, and they're suing.
TSA supervisor: "You know who did 9/11?"
George: "Osama bin Laden."
TSA supervisor: "Do you know what language he spoke?"
George: "Arabic."
TSA supervisor: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"
The Conference Board of Canada is a respected think-tank -- or it was, until it was discovered that it had cooked its research in a report on Canadian copyright that had been funded by copyright industry bodies (they discarded the empirical research that suggested there was no problem and instead plagiarised a lobbying document produced by its sponsors and presented it as "research").
Now, the Conference Board has finally officially withdrawn its fraudulent initial report and published a new one, reversing many of its earlier recommendations. From Michael Geist:
The new report, which weighs in at 113 pages, was completed by Ruth Corbin, a Toronto-based IP expert. Corbin started from scratch, reading a broad range of materials, conducting interviews, and leading a private roundtable on the issue (I participated in the roundtable and met separately with her). While there is much to digest, the lead takeaway is to marvel at the difference between a report cribbed from lobby speaking points and one that attempts to dig into the issues in a more balanced fashion. Three examples:
First, the report puts intellectual property policy into perspective as just one portion of the innovation agenda, noting that over-protection can be lead to diminishing returns:
Furthermore, protection rights are not the only policy option for the big-picture goal of improving Canada's innovation track record. Indeed, statistical evidence demonstrates a non-linear relationship between strength of intellectual property rights and a country's record of innovation. There are diminishing returns to rights after a certain point of "strengthening" ("the more the better" loses validity at some point), and countries have other policy means of encouraging innovation. Intellectual property rights should thus not become the whipping boy of debate. They are a necessary component, but not the sole guarantor of Canada's innovation ranking and economic competitiveness. That conclusion should allow other considerations to enter the debate, such as compatibility with foreign policy, attraction of investment capital, consistency with privacy laws, business soundness, and common sense.
According to this Korean news site, shilly Koreans have figured out how to use their iPhones and other electrostatic touchscreen devices without removing their gloves: instead, they use miniature sausages, which are close enough to a human finger in composition to trick the screen into responding.
Here's my round up of highlights from the first day of the TED presentations.
One of my favorite presentations of the day was by Dr. William Li, a cancer researcher from the Angiogenesis Foundation. Angiogenesis means the growth of blood vessels. Your body usually knows how to regulate the growth of blood vessels, but sometimes there are defects in blood growing and pruning. Too little angiogenesis can lead to things like wounds that won't heal, heart attack, and other diseases. Too much angiogenesis leads to other bad things such as blindness, arthritis. It's is a common denominator of many diseases. It's also the "hallmark of every type of cancer."
In autopsies of people who died in car accidents, doctors have found microscopic cancers in 40% of woman (breast) and 40% of men (prostate). Something like 70% of older people have microcancers in their thyroid. But the cancer is harmless -- "cancer without disease." If you block angiogenesis the cancer can't grow. "It's a tipping point between harmless cancer and deadly one."
Li showed a photo of a poor dog with gnarly tumor hanging off its side. The vet gave the dog three months to live. They started antiangiogenesis drugs. In a few weeks, the tumor shrank away completely. They also cured a dolphin of mouth cancer and saw a complete remission of a deadly lip cancer on a horse.
Today there 12 different antiangiogenesis drugs available for people and dogs. They are quite effective for many cancers, but not much for liver, lung, and breast cancers. The problem with these cancers is that by the time they are detected they have progressed too far for antiangiogenesis drugs to do their work.
The good news, Li says, is that "we eat to starve cancer." Lots of foods contain naturally occuring inhibitors of angiogenesis, and many are even better than drugs for blocking angiogenesis (see image above).
Angiogenesis also plays a huge role in obesity. "Adipose tissue is highly angiogenesis-dependent." You can cycle the weight of mice by inhibiting and promoting angiogenesis. "We can't create supermodel mice -- it takes them to normal weight."
Daniel Kahneman at TED2010, Session 1, "Mindshift," Wednesday, February 10, 2010, in Long Beach, California. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson
Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioral-economics talked about the differences between "experience happiness" and "memory happiness." His presentation brought to mind the 1966 Philip K. Dick novelette, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (which was the basis for the not-so-good movie, Total Recall).
Kahneman started off by listing a number of baked-in "cognitive traps" people have that make it hard to think straight about happiness. Happiness is complex and confusing. People tend to think that having happy experiences in your life and being happy about your life are one and the same, but they are actually different. When your doctor asks you, "Does it hurt when I touch you here" she is asking your "experiencing self." When she asks, "How have you been feeling lately?" your "remembering self" answers.
Your remembering self is a "story teller. What we keep from our experiences is a story." To illustrate, Kahneman showed pain-over-time charts of two colonoscopy patients who reported the intensity of the pain they were experiencing each minute during a colonoscopy. One patient experienced severe pain for 10 minutes. The other experienced the same level of pain for 10 minutes, followed by gradually decreasing pain for an addition 10 minutes. When each patient was later asked to recall the experience, the first patient said his experience was more painful, even though he experienced less pain than the second patient. "The way that stories end matter." The first patient's pain was at its peak at the very end, so it made for a worse story.
Another example: you have great experience listening to music at a live performance. A loud screetch at the end ruins the memory of the experience.
A thought experiment: say you are about to take a vacation, but before you leave, you are told that all memory of the vacation will be wiped out as soon as you get home. Would you take the same vacation or take a different one? If you think you'd take a different one, your "experiencing self" and "remembering self" are not aligned.
Research concludes that "happiness is mainly being satisfied with being with people that we like."
Jake Shimabukuro at TED2010, Session 1, "Mindshift," Wednesday, February 10, 2010, in Long Beach, California. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson
Ukulele Virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro got a standing ovation for his performance this morning, which included a masterful instrumental arrangement of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody."
Quotes: "The ukulele is underdog of all instruments." "If everyone played ukulele, the world would be a better place." "What the world needs now is more ukulele." "Ukulele is the instrument of peace."
I interviewed Jake (and will post the interview soon) and he is extremely nice. If the uke made him that way we have an answer to all the world's problems.
Michael Shermer at TED2010, Session 1, "Mindshift," Wednesday, February 10, 2010, in Long Beach, California. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson
Michael Shermer showed a gadget a called the ADE651. It's a black box with an antenna. The manufacturer claims it can detect both bombs and drugs up to 1000 meters away. It sells for $40,000. The Iraqi government bought 800 of them. Shermer's friend James Randi says:
the ADE651 is a useless, quack, device which cannot perform any other function than separating naïve persons from their money. It's a fake, a scam, a swindle, and a blatant fraud. The manufacturers, distributors, vendors, advertisers, and retailers of the ADE651 device are criminals, liars, and thieves who will ignore this challenge because they know the device, the theory, the described principles of operation, and the technical descriptions given, are nonsense, lies, and fraudulent.
(Does that mean he doesn't like it?.)
Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and columnist for Scientific American. He talked about patternicity -- the evolved tendency for people to find patterns, even in meaningless noise, and agenticity -- the belief in souls, spirits, gods, ghosts, government conspirators, and aliens who more advanced than us, and are either coming to save us or enslave us. Even idea that the government can rescue us is a form of agenticity.
9/11 is a conspiracy (people planned the attack in secret), but truthers think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. "But we know that can't be true because it worked."
A big aspiration for astronomers is to identify life on planets orbiting other stars. Thanks to NASA's Kepler mission we will know about the statistical abundance of Earthlike worlds in our galaxy in just a few years. But confirming that ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 11:13 pm
Some hardware is just so dear to a geeks heart that they can’t let it just die. Take for example the original NES system. Some enthusiasts take modding them to a whole new level. I mean, I like to play Mario Bros. as much as the next guy, but this is getting extreme.
One particular modder has set up an entire webpage dedicating to fixing up his NES. He’s got a laundry list of modifications, along with detailed instructions on the best way to install them. This guy can tell you how to install a remote reset button, build your own controller, replace the power supply, install a blue power LED – the list goes on and on. And while you have to respect his enthusiasm, I can’t help but question the wisdom of doing this. Of course, if I could find Tetris for the original NES, I might be tempted..
PC World - Intel will show off several applications designed for netbooks and mobile devices at the upcoming Mobile World Congress, where the chip maker plans to push a software development program designed to populate its AppUp Center application store with applications. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Feb 2010 | 10:50 pm
One Block Off the Grid, a company that helps residents get competitive group pricing for solar panel installation, has raised a $5 million series A round of venture capital from New Enterprise Associates. The company has gotten pretty far without formal venture cash—facilitating more than 600 installations in 2009, most of that in the fourth quarter. 1BOG, as it’s called, hopes to install five-to-ten times that amount this year, so that NEA cash will help the company hire and grow.
Think of 1BOG like another NEA investment, Groupon, but focused on solar panels. The site groups together customers in large metro areas interested in having panels installed and helps get them the best price. Only one could argue there’s a much bigger need for IBOG than Groupon. Most people don’t know where to start if they want to install solar panels and have no idea how to compare bids between contractors. On average, 1BOG saves customers 15%. And, of course, there’s the whole getting-us-off-foreign-oil/saving-the-planet benefit to 1BOG.
The UI is impressive. You enter your address and it pulls up an aerial view of Google maps. You pick your roof, outline where you want the panels and get a few detailed options including cost, leasing options, local rebates, added value to the house and how much time the panels will take to pay for themselves. Prices and the benefits of solar can vary wildly depending on where you live, local subsidies, what you pay for electricity now, and how much sun you get. “There are some areas where the economics for solar are mindblowing, but no one knows it,” says Dave Llorens, 1BOG’s CEO.
This is less a company saving the world, and more of a company that helps people who talk a good game about saving the world actually go through with it. And that’s the key. While solar investments are down more than 60% in the last year, lean companies that can help bring on the tipping point in adoption have a much better shot at getting some cash.
Speaking of big talk about changing the world, the company is a spin out from Virgance, which we’ve written about before here. In previous articles, Virgance’s founder Steve Newcomb described the company as a startup that would release “Activism 2.0 campaigns” much like EA releases blockbuster games. That model seems to have evolved. Now, he talks about the company in terms of an incubator that helps create and spin-out low-cost companies that will help make the world a better place.
This isn’t a non-profit. The focus is just on greed-based, high-growth companies that will also “do good.” So far, Virgance has four in its stable, and Newcomb is trying to figure out whether there’s a way to scale that up to 40. He doesn’t yet know if that’s feasible, but if it is, expect him to raise a big venture round too.
PC World - Hacker Chris Paget figured out how to enable USB host mode on the Motorola Droid, a smartphone running the Google Android operating system. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Feb 2010 | 9:59 pm
ancientribe writes "The targeted attacks out of China that hit Google, Adobe, and other U.S. organizations are still ongoing and have affected many more companies than the original 20 to 30 reported. Security experts now say they are getting closer to identifying the author or authors of the malware used to breach Google and other organizations."
There’s been a lot of criticism of Microsoft’s alleged lack of innovation lately, but they’ve got an excuse: the lethargy of the mega-corporation. Apple’s no nimble startup, but they’ve made a point of doing just a few things well, and innovation and refinement have been their strong points. The iPad seems to be merely refined, and that’s a relief to Bill Gates. I actually am not familiar to Gates’ reaction to the iPhone, but he sums it up here well enough as well. Here’s his take:
You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard – in other words a netbook – will be the mainstream on that,” he said. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’
That pretty much sums it up, right? I think he’s right on the money. It’s going to be a great device, but it’s very limited when you compare it to the aspirations of other tablet makers, and people at Google who want to put an lightweight and complete OS on a tablet. Microsoft can actually breathe easier now that the iPad is a known quantity — they feel they can do better, unlike (as Bill seems to imply) with the iPhone, which totally rattled them.
The author of the piece (who quotes Bill from conversation) seems to think Apple has invented a new class of devices. Well, no, that class has been around for a while, they just haven’t really worked. Apple’s works, but it’s not really in the class. Think of laptops as “formal” and smartphones as “casual” — what we want is semi-formal or business casual, but instead we have the iPad: a tuxedo t-shirt.
(NASA chief Charlie Bolden, in the control room during shuttle Endeavour's launch. Credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA.) Will the next generation of astronauts be sporting corporate logos on their spacesuits? Anything’s possible, as the Obama administration seeks to recast NASA’s manned space ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 9:29 pm
AP - A bill that would force online retailers to pay the same Virginia sales taxes as traditional stores advanced Wednesday from a Senate committee. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Feb 2010 | 9:18 pm
SEATTLE, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Tableau Software today launched a new product that brings public data to life on the web. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Feb 2010 | 9:01 pm
Fair warning to anyone trying to do evil in Odessa, Ukraine – they have a giant robot guarding the port. While he doesn’t seem to move much, I don’t think he has to. This silent sentry warns anyone coming in to Odessa to be good, or he will smite you with his mighty steel rod.
The giant steel robot doesn’t actually move, because he can’t. He’s built from scrap cars and whatever other material the people who put him together could find. I haven’t found any other information about this amazing creation, but if you live in the Ukraine and know his story, please put it in the comments.
Reuters - News Corp has replaced the CEO of the social networking site MySpace less than a year after hiring him, and said a discussion of his priorities led both sides to agree to a parting.
I’m prepared to forgive some hyperbole from someone who is very excited about a project he’s working on, but still, it’s probably a good sign that these guys are calling Windows 8 “mind-blowing” and not, say, “evolutionary.” Between the breathless praise of 7 and Microsoft’s quarterly results, you can actually sense people who are actually pumped about something. There’s not a lot of substance, but it’s kind of nice to have some positive noise around the project.
These days, thanks to its growing ubiquity in the media, nearly everyone knows what Twitter is. But back in 2006, when it was known as Twttr, a side project of the podcasting service Odeo, no one knew what it was. So co-founder Biz Stone made a video.
As you can watch below in “Twttr 101,” dug up by Say OMG, Stone dresses up as some sort of crazy scientist with Harry Potter glasses and sports an even crazier accent. Also worth noting is that at the time, Twitter was described as a “social texting service based on the contents of you mind.” Most users today don’t realize it, but in the early days, Twitter was almost entirely based around SMS.
For those wanting to know more about Twitter’s past, you should also check out Stone’s blog post from July 2006, announcing the launch of Twttr. In it, he writes, “Jack Dorsey is one of Odeo’s brightest stars so when he told us about this idea that has been haunting him for six years we had to listen. It’s not even remotely related to audio but it’s an awesome idea so we told him to go for it.” This foresight in switching from audio idea of Odeo and going with Twitter proved to be a very smart move.
Pretend you’re Gordon Freeman. Who am I kidding, you’ve been doing that for years — so this should be easy. The lab is self-destructing around you, a resonance cascade has just torn open a hole in the universe, and there are soldiers everywhere with orders to kill you on sight. You need a tablet, but what with the rocket launcher and seven other weapons, your HEV suit can only fit one. Before you are an iPad and a Toughbook H1 Field. What do you do?
Man, are you kidding me, you get the damn H1! What, are you going to show the headcrabs your neatly organized iPhoto galleries? Hell no! You need this thing to pwing bullets off of, and to calculate dimensional radiance points and stuff! iPad go home!
So this new Toughbook tablet looks pretty great — Atom Z240 clocked to 1.86GHz, 2GB of RAM, 64GB SSD, GPS, WWAN, camera, and everything else a guerrilla scientist might need while gallivanting across a secret government facility.
And here I was proud of building a six-foot tall snow beast when I was ten. [Baltimore Sun]
The long-running telenovela that has been MySpace over the years took yet another dramatic turn late today when News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, whom he had hired only nine months ago to turn around the troubled social networking site, according to several sources.
(The pair are pictured above in happier times, with Van Natta on the left, during an interview Walt Mossberg and I did with them at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in May. You can see the full interview below.)
While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as problems among top execs finally came to a head today.
Among the issues were tensions between Miller and Van Natta, as well as growing tensions with his top two execs, COO Michael Jones and Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn.
Miller hired Van Natta, but the CEO didn’t bring in the two executives directly beneath him: Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller, along with News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch, who signed off on both men.
Sources also noted that Van Natta had begun to bridle at not being able to select his own execs, as well as increasing meddling in the MySpace turnaround by Miller.
“There were three senior thinkers put in place to fix MySpace and it became clear that not all those voices were needed anymore,” said one person close to the situation. “So, Owen was the odd man out.”
And out he went in a flash, with Miller flying to Los Angeles on early in the week to deal with rumors that it was Hirschhorn who was on his way out.
In fact, the well-known media exec had been vocally complaining about the harder-than-expected struggle to right MySpace’s business for months and had told many he was contemplating leaving within the next few months.
Today, several sources said, he conducted an all-day review at the plans Van Natta, Jones and Hirschhorn had been working on to revive MySpace.
After it was over, multiple sources said, Miller met with Van Natta and told him his tenure at CEO was over.
The move came as a shock to the staff at MySpace, as it was not expected, although it was clear that top execs at News Corp. were aware of the decision made by Miller.
“Simply put, it was a power struggle and Jon won,” said one source.
Miller has not returned my emails or phone calls about the situation, and a News Corp. spokeswoman declined to comment.
Ironically, after fixing a range of technical and product issues over the last several months, MySpace was beginning to see a stabilization in the bleeding of users.
Comparatively, rival Facebook has seen explosively growth, reaching 400 million global users this week.
rabiddeity writes "An undergraduate at the University of Arizona has built a six legged robot from scratch. The robot, which is equipped with sensors on each foot, teaches itself to walk and orients itself via an onboard camera. A similar design might be used to explore unstable environments such as collapsed buildings or rocky landscapes."
No matter how you feel about the Spider-Man franchise going a new direction without Toby Maguire, you have to admit that a 3D Spider-Man movie has at least potential to be awesome. If soaring through the word of Avatar made you sick, just think what web-slinging through the streets of NYC will feel like. Yeah, you’re going to love it — or hate it.
But hopefully the 3D effects doesn’t compensate for a lackluster story line. After all the fact that the film is set to follow Peter Parker through his high-school years leaves already leaves a queasy feeling in a lot nerd’s stomach. I mean, outside of seeing all the films, watching the cartons and reading some random Spider-Man comics, I’m not a Spider-Man expert, but doesn’t that timeline place the film before he’s bit by the radioactive spider while attending NYU?
With a few smart tweaks, this retro WiiWare title successfully upgrades '80s tank game Blaster Master. If only the graphics fared better in the remake.
As of now the device is only slated for plug and play use with Windows, and it won't be available until sometime in Spring. The price hasn't yet been announced, but when the time comes it will be available directly through carriers. [Electronista]
BGR explains that "according to Matt, forums manager over at Motorola, the information was prematurely released" and that "the DROID update page on Motorola's website has been pulled and all links to the update page have been deleted from the forums." [BGR]
It'll be called the "PUMA PHONE"
As the PUMA brand implies, it'll be aimed at sporty folks with a feature-set to match.
It has a solar cell built-in, presumably for charging the phone
GPS
Video Chat
Bike/Run tracking applications
Pedometer (Step counter)
Built-in stopwatch
A "Music Turntable"
Sports news app, IM app, and various other PUMA-branded apps which "give you access to the PUMA world"
One of the advantages of the Apple Macintosh is that it’s the only computer consumers can buy that is able to run both Apple’s own Mac operating system and Microsoft Windows on the same machine. That means that, if you prefer the Mac environment, but need to run a program only available in Windows, you can do so on the same Mac, and even at the same time.
For instance, while I am writing this column on a Mac laptop in the Mac OS, using the Mac version of Microsoft Word, I am also simultaneously running the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook—which aren’t available for the Mac—in Windows, on the same machine. I can switch back and forth among these programs with ease.
[ See post to watch video ]
Now, the two most popular software products for accomplishing this feat, Parallels and VMware Fusion, have been updated to run faster, and to support the latest versions of the two operating systems, Apple’s (AAPL) Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 7. Each costs $80 and requires a Mac running an Intel processor.
I’ve been comparing these latest versions, called Parallels Desktop 5 and VMware Fusion 3, using each to run Windows 7 on the same Mac laptop powered by Snow Leopard. My verdict is that, after falling behind Fusion for awhile, Parallels is now the best choice again. In my tests, it proved to be both faster, and more capable of handling the heavy-duty visual effects in Windows 7.
Both programs work by creating a so-called virtual machine—a software version of a physical computer—on the Mac. Inside these faux PCs, you can install any of dozens of operating systems and the applications that run on them. That includes numerous versions of Windows, including Windows XP and Vista, and, now, Windows 7. In order to do this, you will have to buy separately a new, full (not an upgrade) version of Windows, which costs about $200.
VMware Fusion’s Aero feature with Flip 3D effect
Both programs can run either the full Windows desktop, or individual Windows programs with the desktop hidden. Parallels now comes with a new mode, called Crystal, which integrates the Windows system even more, by placing the Windows Start menu and system tray icons in the Mac’s own top menu bar.
These virtual-machine programs shouldn’t be confused with Apple’s own built-in solution for running Windows on a Mac, called Boot Camp, which also has recently been updated to handle Windows 7. Boot Camp can’t run the two operating systems simultaneously; you must reboot the computer to switch between them. That gives Windows sole control of the hardware when it’s running, but many people find Boot Camp inconvenient. I didn’t test Boot Camp for this review.
Fusion 3, from Silicon Valley company VMware (VMW), is a relatively minor revision. The latest version is mainly designed to add speed, simplify the interface, make it compatible with Snow Leopard and Windows 7, and to improve graphics performance. It achieves most of these goals, but I still found it ran more slowly with Windows 7 than it did with Windows XP. It also was significantly pokier than Parallels 5.
In addition, I found that Fusion had occasional trouble with the transparency effects in Windows 7, such as its ability to turn transparent Windows that are open so you can see your desktop. It also occasionally switched off Windows’ new Aero feature, which offers live previews of task-bar icons. It sometimes turned all my Windows desktop icons white momentarily.
The bigger story is the comeback of Parallels, which is made by a Swiss-based firm of the same name. It was the first virtual-machine program for Intel-based Macs, but got eclipsed by Fusion. Now, the fifth version of Parallels is much faster and much better at the sophisticated graphics upon which Windows 7 relies.
In my tests, on a 2008-vintage MacBook Pro with 4 gigabytes of memory, Parallels 5 started up and had Windows 7 ready to roll nearly two minutes faster than Fusion 3. Windows 7 Home Premium launched from a cold start within Parallels about a minute faster than it did inside Fusion. And, when I restarted Windows 7 with several common programs running, it took two minutes and 23 seconds in Parallels 5, versus over four minutes in Fusion 3.
Beyond that, I found Parallels 5 handled the graphical previews and transparent effects in Windows 7 more quickly and smoothly than Fusion did. The Aero previews of running programs in the task bar appeared more quickly.
Also, I found Parallels 5 played high-definition video in Windows more smoothly than Fusion did. It also seemed to slow down the Mac side of the computer less.
Parallels isn’t perfect. In particular, it displays a black screen for a bit during start-up, something the company says it hopes to fix. And, while it shares the Mac’s printer, it confusingly mislabels it.
Neither of these programs is the answer for Mac owners who want to run the latest heavy-duty games or other graphics-intensive programs in Windows 7. For them, I recommend either Boot Camp or a separate Windows PC.
But, if you’re looking to run typical, everyday Windows programs on a Mac without rebooting, Parallels 5 is now the best solution.
Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free of charge, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.
A trademark filing by Square-Enix in Europe has revealed the title of the next game in the Deus Ex series. Sure, that’s not big news in and of itself, but now that they’ve settled on a name (Deus Ex: Human Revolution), you can bet they’ll get some title art and a cinematic trailer out quick as a flash. GDC maybe? Or E3?
I think we can all agree that Deus Ex: Invisible War was a bit of a letdown. Hopefully the next one will open things up a little more. It always seems a little silly to me when people remove what made a game sell in the first place and expect people to buy it anyway. With Sonic it was the speed, with Final Fantasy it was the sprawl, and with Deus Ex it’s the complexity. Bring it back, people!
Even after Congress ripped into the Big Three CEOs for jetting to DC on private jets to seek help, Elon Musk has been doing the same thing. Repeatedly.
PC World - With only a few more days until the Mobile World Congress begins in Barcelona, Spain, rumors are flying about which new phones, apps, and operating systems will be making an appearance. Will we finally see a Zune phone? Will HTC release another powerful Android phone? And what about Samsung's new Bada OS? Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 10 Feb 2010 | 7:00 pm
Does the new Apple iPad have a removable battery? I haven’t seen any mention of this issue in all the stories about it.
A: No. Like Apple’s (AAPL) other current portable devices, the iPad has a sealed-in battery that isn’t user-replaceable. The company claims the battery gets about 10 hours of running time between charges.
When I use the zoom control in the Firefox Web browser, the whole page zooms, but I can’t seem to get text to enlarge very much. Can you help?
A: I have found that zooming in Firefox increases text size considerably. But there’s a feature that might help you. In the View menu, under Zoom, you can check on “Zoom Text Only.” This focuses the zooming function solely on the text and, in my quick tests, seemed to make the text get larger more rapidly. I was able to make the text really huge, in both the Windows and Mac versions of the browser.
I upgraded to Windows 7 and discovered that the calendar is no longer in my Live Mail. Why did Microsoft (MSFT) eliminate the calendar?
A: There is indeed a calendar in the latest version of Windows Live Mail. It can be called up from the menu in the lower left corner–it’s the second item, just beneath “Mail.” If you aren’t seeing it, you may have an older version, and you may want to download a fresh copy of the latest edition. You can get it at: download.live.com/wlmail.
It’s almost my birthday and my husband says he wants to get me a Kindle or a Nook. I read your review of Nook but was wondering what your thoughts are now that Nook has been updated and some glitches repaired.
A: I haven’t tested the Nook with the latest fixes. But, when I tested it in December, I found it not only to be slower than the Kindle, but to have a clumsier user interface, and a catalog of e-books that was mostly made up of pre-1923 books that are out of copyright.
So, unless Barnes & Noble (BKS) managed to overhaul the whole thing in a couple of months, I would still recommend for the moment going with the Kindle.
The other option would be to wait for Apple’s iPad, which will work as an e-reader and have a better screen and elegant software. But that product hasn’t even been released, so I can’t yet say how it would measure up.
You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and all of my other columns, online, free of charge, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com.
News Corp. (NWS), which owns the social network, has replaced its old CEO with his former lieutenants, Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who have been named co-presidents.
It’s Van Natta’s second consecutive short-tenured job. Prior to MySpace, he was ran the music startup Project Playlist, where he stayed for less than six months. Van Natta built his reputation at Facebook and Amazon (AMZN).
For starters, it’s clear that attempts to turn around the social network are taking much longer than expected, as News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch acknowledged last week during the company’s earnings call.
That may be in part because of changes MySpace’s new leadership made to the site’s design, which cut down on some page views that the old site created. But it was primarily because MySpace’s audience has been migrating to other sites, particularly Facebook, for some time.
MySpace executives have been overhauling the site, primarily under the hood, and have been rolling out a series of incremental changes in recent weeks. Those changes aren’t supposed to win back Facebook users–the company has declared that it’s no longer trying to compete with that site as a social network anymore–but are designed to let it hang on to existing users, and establish itself as some sort of entertainment hub.
A tough task under any circumstance. But it wasn’t made any easier given the tensions in the corporate suite. Miller hired Van Natta, but the CEO didn’t bring in the two executives directly beneath him: Both Jones and Hirschhorn were hired by Miller (along with Murdoch, who signed off on both men).
People who’ve talked to Van Natta say that he’s been relatively public about his frustrations at the job in recent weeks. Describing Jones and Hirschhorn as happy campers would be a stretch, too.
But whatever finally prompted the move seems to have come relatively quickly: The MySpace and News Corp. insiders I’ve talked to so far seem taken aback by Van Natta’s departure.
Owen Van Natta Steps Down as MySpace CEO; Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn Elevated to Co-Presidents
Los Angeles, CA, February 10, 2010–News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.
“Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s Chairman and CEO of Digital Media. “However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts.”
Mr. Miller continued, “Mike and Jason have demonstrated true leadership in their operational and product guidance, respectively, and I have the utmost confidence in both of them to lead MySpace into its next chapter.”
In a joint statement, Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn noted:
“We joined MySpace last April with very a specific set of goals in mind, and are anxious to continue working together to make those goals a reality. This business is now pointed in the right direction, and we have a great team of employees that will continue to push MySpace closer to its potential as the place where people go to be discovered and to discover great content.”
Mr. Van Natta commented:
“MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we’ve made real gains in terms of product focus and user experience. I’m proud of the work we’ve all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth.”
Prior to his role as MySpace COO, Mr. Jones founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. He also was founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.
Remember, this is supposed to be really real:
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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sorry who r u?
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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32/f
how did u get my msn??
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
i have no idea, you added me....
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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i dont know how you got my msn
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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how did u get my msn?
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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ha ha
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
whats a bot?
Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
what is the capital of saudi arabia.....
ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
What color Panties do you think i should wear? i might have you favorite color here somewhere...
Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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Mary says:
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ernestineholom553@hotmail.com says:
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I mean really. How can this bot not even know the capital of Saudi Arabia? And doesn't it know all 21-year-old females who like to party are named Chastity? [PC Tools]
There’s an interesting and thought provoking essay at BetaNews by Joe Wilcox entitled “Why former employees say Microsoft can’t innovate“. It’s a rather myopic examination of the middle-management woes and culture of job protectionism that is harming Microsoft’s ability to truly create. Microsoft has grown a lot in the last couple years, and they’re up to almost 100,000 employees now. Any company that size is going to face specific challenges, and they simply can’t be as nimble as a three man startup in someone’s garage. Also, the software they create is used and relied upon every day by some very important clients, so there’s a natural amount of aversion to risk that should be prevalent in their culture. But has it gone too far?
The article concludes with
[N]o company’s organizational structure is perfect, because too many people put their personal ambitions before the company they work for. But companies can encourage mismanagement by the organizational structure, corporate culture and review and compensation processes. Based on my communications with dozens of former and current Microsoft employees over the last couple months, Microsoft needs to streamline its management processes, empower small groups to act like startups, reward risk-taking innovation and sharply reduce the number of middle managers.
I’m not a Microsoft apologist, but I think it would have been interesting had Wilcox talked to some folks who think that the current Microsoft culture is working well. Maybe he tried, and simply couldn’t find any?
I shared the link with a former Microsoft employee, who observed that much of the problem lies with unintended redundancy: as the company continues to grow, it’s harder and harder to keep track of who’s doing — or already done — what, so efforts are duplicated. “There is a lot of redundancy across product groups”, says my contact. “It is a big problem that frustrates the employees when they have a cool idea and are crippled to move into a particular space because it would potentially compete with another team.” The end result? Mediocrity.
According to my contact:
In addition to the inefficiency, there were some cases where teams ended up competing internally for ownership. At that size, for some teams, it could also be challenging to fully own their space in efforts to avoid cannibalizing another business within the company.
As I said, an organization as large as Microsoft must take some care to avoid unnecessary disruption to its customers. But given the incredible number of markets in which Microsoft participates, a one-size-fits-all culture to development and innovation simply can’t work for the long term. The kind of risks that the operating system and SQL server groups face are different from those on the entertainment or mobile groups. Maybe the problem lies deeper, in how Microsoft chooses to align its product groups? Business, Entertainment & Devices, Online Services, Server & Tools and Windows & Windows Live … entertainment includes the XBox, clearly, but does all the Windows Mobile stuff fall under “devices”? Does it make sense to lump all of entertainment together with all of “devices”? I’m not sure.
What do you think? Does Microsoft’s culture provide them the stability they need to maintain their existence for the next ten years, or is it hampering their ability to effectively compete?
Hugh Pickens writes "The Raw Story reports that terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina's Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison. The 'Subversive Activities Registration Act' passed last year in South Carolina and now officially on the books states that 'every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States ... shall register with the Secretary of State.'"
MySpace has just announced that CEO Owen Van Natta has left the company. Taking his place will be co-Presidents Mike Jones And Jason Hirschhorn, who had been serving as the company’s Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively. The news comes less than two weeks after we interviewed Van Natta about his first eight months running MySpace, when he gave no indication that he was intending to leave the company. Van Natta joined MySpace last April alongside Jones and Hirschhorn as part of a major executive shakeup.
We’d previously reported that Chief Product Officer Hirschhorn would soon be leaving the company. Obviously that isn’t the case. Our sources tell us that there has been a long standing conflict between News Corp digital chief Jon Miller and Van Natta, and that part of Van Natta’s decision to leave was his inability to terminate Hirschhorn.
Before MySpace, Van Natta had a short-lived stint as CEO of Project Playlist, where he stayed for around five months.
We’ve included the release below:
News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.
“Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s Chairman and CEO of Digital Media. “However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts.”
Mr. Miller continued, “Mike and Jason have demonstrated true leadership in their operational and product guidance, respectively, and I have the utmost confidence in both of them to lead MySpace into its next chapter.”
In a joint statement, Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn noted:
“We joined MySpace last April with very a specific set of goals in mind, and are anxious to continue working together to make those goals a reality. This business is now pointed in the right direction, and we have a great team of employees that will continue to push MySpace closer to its potential as the place where people go to be discovered and to discover great content.”
Mr. Van Natta commented:
“MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we’ve made real gains in terms of product focus and user experience. I’m proud of the work we’ve all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth.”
Prior to his role as MySpace COO, Mr. Jones founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. He also was founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.
Since joining MySpace, Mr. Hirschhorn oversaw all aspects of product development, and previously has led both start-up and established online businesses. He was president of Sling Media, Inc’s Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device, and was chief digital officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company’s digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry.
On Super Bowl Sunday, about 116 million viewers watched commercials touting Budweiser, Doritos and Coke — as well as spots promoting Flo TV, a service that promises to let you watch TV wherever you are.
It was a high-profile promotion for mobile TV, which despite years of innovation has failed to catch on outside of a few niches.
A mobile TV service from Qualcomm, Flo offers channels such as ESPN, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central for a monthly fee. You can watch Flo on your cellphone, in your car or on a dedicated device known as a personal television.
“Flo is a prepackaged entertainment experience,” says Alice Kim, senior vice president of strategy & corporate development for Flo TV. “It’s about portability, it [is] about live video and it is complementary to your home experience.”
Mobile TV, which bring television news and shows to handheld devices, could be the next big thing for consumers who want to watch a game while on the subway, or catch up on their favorite TV show while waiting at the DMV. For instance, with Flo TV, you can get Jon Stewart on The Daily Show or live NBA games with a few clicks. The 3-inch screen is small, but it’s more convenient than a netbook.
But it’s a difficult sell. U.S. consumers so far have failed to jump on the mobile TV idea, even though it’s been around for years. Just about 1 percent of mobile users in the U.S. watch mobile TV. And even there, Flo faces some stiff competition. Rivals MobiTV and Sling Media also offer TV content to go. Last month, AT&T allowed iPhone users to access live and streaming TV on the Sling player over 3G. Meanwhile, a coalition of local broadcasters has formed a group called theOpen Mobile Video Coalition that attempts to bring free TV content to mobile devices.
“The idea is to be an alternative to the DVR,” says Ross Rubin, an analyst with research firm The NPD Group. “Prime time can be when you say it is or you can always tune in to live programming.”
Flo TV is alluring to some — especially when you have restless kids on your hands. Just ask Tyren Patterson, a Michigan-based Flo TV user who has been paying $25 a month for the service since 2006 on his LG Voyager. “When we go out and run errands or shopping and the kids get to start to antsy it’s good to be able to turn on Nickelodeon,” he says.
Patterson, a Verizon Wireless customer, has been a subscriber to Verizon’s V Cast service, which is powered by Flo TV.
“I use it everyday,” he says. “When you turn it on and start flipping the channels and see basketball games there’s the wow factor. The cost doesn’t matter then.”
Customers like Patterson may be few today (Qualcomm won’t disclose how many Flo TV users there are currently) but there are 200 million cellphone users who could become potential users, says the company. Flo rival MobiTV claims to have more than 7 million subscribers.
Where Flo TV says it hopes to distinguish itself is by offering the kind of shows and channels that most consumers would really want to watch, by offering high-quality video, and by time-shifting so you can watch shows when it’s convenient to you.
Flo — which stands for Forward Link Only — takes standard video signals and re-formats them for the mobile platform. Flo’s network operations center transcodes and compresses broadcast content into a single package that is sent to transmitters using satellite, microwave or optical fiber. The transmitters then send it to receiving devices over the 700-MHz spectrum.
“Flo TV’s network is explicitly designed for this and does a very good job of it,” says Rubin.
And because it’s a push technology with one-way data transmission, from the tower to the device, it doesn’t overload the network. Video through Flo TV is smooth and doesn’t stutter, says Kim. But to run Flo TV, devices need to have a special chip made by Qualcomm.
To popularize Flo TV, Qualcomm hopes to bring down the price of the service and offer it on a variety of devices. A personal TV that runs Flo costs $200 today, down from $250 just months before, Kim says. Meanwhile, AT&T has reduced subscription fees for the device to $10 a month from $15 earlier.
And on the road map are new devices such as a personal DVD player from Audiovox that will come with Flo TV, and a shot at the iPhone and iPod Touch market through a collaboration with battery and accessories maker Mophie.
“We are not trying to make a choice for the consumer, we are trying to give them choices,” says Kim.
A mobile TV service from Qualcomm called Flo TV made a high-profile splash with three ads on Super Bowl Sunday. But can it catch on among consumers who have stayed away from mobile TV so far?
A mobile TV service from Qualcomm called Flo TV made a high-profile splash with three ads on Super Bowl Sunday. But can it catch on among consumers who have stayed away from mobile TV so far?
Reuters - Apple Inc's forthcoming iPad tablet computer will cost as little as $229.35 for the company to produce, according to an estimate on Wednesday from research house iSuppli.
Love it or hate it, everyone is talking about Google Buzz right now. And, judging from my account, a ton of people are actually using it too. The main use envisioned for Buzz was sharing, but the problem is that for content, you still need to copy a URL and then head over to Buzz to share it. Not anymore.
We’re all used to tweet buttons (like the one built by Tweetmeme), Facebook buttons, Digg buttons, and even Yahoo Buzz buttons on many posts around the web. These make it easy to share without having to leave the content. So we made a Google Buzz button.
When I say “we,” I actually mean one of our developers, Andy Brett, who hacked this together with amazing speed. He could do that because it’s actually a simple piece of code derived from a button you would use to share an item on Google Reader. And that’s an important thing to note: for this to work, your Google Reader shared account has to be hooked up to your Google Buzz account. The good news is that assuming you use Google Reader, Google did this link-up automatically for you.
Apple's radically re-imagined Magic Mouse may be the best mouse ever, but with everyone using laptops or gesturing air-guitar style to communicate with their machines, it may be the last, best mouse ever.
Take a photographic tour of our favorite Saturn moon, Enceladus. Not only is the little moon mysterious and beautiful, it's also one of the best bets to find extraterrestrial life in the solar system.
Apple's radically re-imagined Magic Mouse may be the best mouse ever, but with everyone using laptops or gesturing air-guitar style to communicate with their machines, it may be the last, best mouse ever.
Yahoo calls reporters to its Sunnyvale HQ to emphasize that's it's still a player in the tech world, and that its search engine isn't going away -- regardless of its deal with Microsoft. The pitch sounds good, but will Yahoo continue to matter?
“The PC took computing out of the back office and into everyone’s office. The Tablet takes cutting-edge PC technology and makes it available wherever you want it, which is why I’m already using a Tablet as my everyday computer. It’s a PC that is virtually without limits–and within five years I predict it will be the most popular form of PC sold in America.”
Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates has long been an evangelist for tablet PCs, but he’s not impressed by Apple’s (AAPL) new variation on the device, the iPad. In an interview with BNET, Gates–who evidently finds the iPad neither magical nor revolutionary–diplomatically dismissed it.
“You know, I’m a big believer in touch and digital reading, but I still think that some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard–in other words a netbook–will be the mainstream on that,” Gates said. “So, it’s not like I sit there and feel the same way I did with iPhone where I say, ‘Oh my God, Microsoft didn’t aim high enough.’ It’s a nice reader, but there’s nothing on the iPad I look at and say, ‘Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.’”
Not yet, you don’t. Keep in mind that Gates said essentially the same thing about the iPod in 2004, only to launch the Zune two years later.
But the FT doesn't stop there: They also claim that Apple is still actively pursuing a $30 "best of TV" subscription service, which would roll selected content into a bundle, for which users would pay a monthly fee, and that Apple is being careful to avoid linking the Apple TV to discussions about either proposal, because the prospect of people watching downloaded TV on their actual televisions is apparently terrifying to content providers, for some reason. Ha, could Apple care any less about that poor box?
So, how would this actually go down? I'd wager that a limited first wave of $1 shows will serve as a sort of pilot program. Once, or if, these shows make up their price decrease with larger download volume, it'll be much easier to convince the rest of the content providers to go along with the new scheme. Got a better theory? Throw it in the comments. [Financial Times]
Are you bored of having virtual road trips around the world on Google Street View? Don’t fret, as you can now have virtual ski trips instead. The Google Street View snowmobile will record ski slopes around the Whistler Blackcomb Mountains in Vancouver. Building on the idea of the Street View car and the Street View “tricycle”, Google had their inspiration of making a snowmobile from the upcoming Winter Olympics 2010. The Google Street View Snowmobile has that Google’s trademark camera attached to it, which records the physical world around the ski slopes. You should probably check out the video below:
I just returned from the Microsoft campus, where some students from Carnegie Mellon University are showing off their awesome project, a version of D&D that runs on the Surface. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, just recognize that this isn’t just a holy grail for tabletop gaming nerds. I mean, it’s that too, but really it’s a proof of concept that shows how fun and intuitive something like this can be, and how accessible a team can make it. I honestly think that if they had these things scattered around like Golden Tee cabinets, they’d get a huge following.
The build we played with was last semester’s (it’s a student project, not a professional development), and since then there’s been a lot of bug-squashing and feature-adding, but the newest build isn’t playable. So they’ve got a short little scenario where we went from a zoomable map screen to a town where we… spotted some orcs! Roll for initiative!
Whatever the details, we want to hear about how gadgets, technology, or social networking interfered with your love life. So send your stories to me with the subject of "Bad Valentine Tales" and we can share the horror.
Leading up to its January event, rumors were swirling that Apple was talking to the TV networks about offering possible subscriptions to their shows through iTunes. Of course, that never happened. While reports had CBS and ABC interested in such a deal, the other networks apparently were less enthusiastic about it — perhaps out of fear of repercussions from the cable companies. But that doesn’t mean that Apple is giving up.
A new report today in the Financial Times indicates that Apple will begin testing the sale of $1 U.S. TV shows this year. Specifically, the new pricing could launch around the time that the iPad does, which will be March/April, FT notes citing people familiar with the discussions. Apple currently sells its shows for $1.99 (standard definition) or $2.99 (high definition) through iTunes. These $1 would be the standard definition variety, apparently, as they will play on the iPad.
Obviously, by cutting the prices of the shows in half, Apple and the networks in the test are trying to see if it spurs sales. It undoubtedly will, but this remains a temporary solution. Apple still wants to do some sort of subscription service for the shows it offers through iTunes. And I would be all about that because it would strike a blow to the major cable operators that control the industry with an iron fist and make us all pay insane rates so they can pad their profits.
Also, a subscription version of television shows would mean you wouldn’t have to store all of them, all the time. It’s simply not practical to buy all the shows you want through iTunes right now. Even if you could afford it, the amount of space they take up would quickly overwhelm your hard drive. This is exactly why iTunes is inevitably going to move to the cloud.
Apple has been testing discounts on its TV shows even before this announcement. For example, if you bought the latest season of ABC’s show Lost early, you could get the season pass for $39.99 instead of the regular $49.99. It’s not clear how the new $1 pricing would change season passes, but presumably, they would be much cheaper as well.
destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings...can be done by computers for pennies an hour," adding that AI "is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity...and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
The online prankster group Anonymous unleashes a major distributed denial-of-service attack against Australian government websites to protest internet censorship in the land down under. Several of the sites were slowly recovering from the barrage by the same group that earlier had taken down Scientology websites.
Ever wish your dog could tweet? I sure haven’t. But there’s going to be an app for that this summer anyway, and it’s called BowLingual.
Based on a Japanese gadget of the same name, BowLingual analyzes a dog’s bark and narrows it down into one of six emotions: sad, frustrated, needy, happy, self-expressive and on guard. From there on it attempts to translate the bark into a set phrase to go along with the emotion. The iPhone app includes Twitter integration for dog owners to tweet the transcriptions to their friends.
The original standalone BowLingual device cost $100 when it was released in Japan in 2002, according to Time, who honored the translator as one of the best inventions of 2002. Japanese company Takara Toys designed the BowLingual gadget. Index Corp, a Japanese mobile software company, developed the BowLingual iPhone app.
The BowLingual app is due out for Japanese users this summer, and an English version will follow. It’ll cost $5, IndexCorp told PC World.
A United Nations panel has informed the government of Japan that its treatment of two Greenpeace activists is in contravention of several articles of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The panel's opinion, which was communicated to Japanese authorities ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 4:08 pm
Rebuilding Haiti must include all the different voices within the nation to provide the basics of life to all. And any plan should put into action the notion of a single class of citizens.
When it came to Facebook and Twitter, it took brands a while to figure out how to take advantage of the social networks. With Foursquare, they have been much faster. But now with Google Buzz, they’re beating plenty of early adopters to it.
Samsung has already set up a Google Buzz account this morning and is already cranking out buzzes. Not only that, but they’re apparently trying to start their own trends on the service, as they have today tagged a bunch of their “favorite buzzers” and tagged the buzz with “#BUZZwednesday.” Of course, the problem here is that Google Buzz doesn’t support the “#” symbol the same way Twitter does (at least not yet). Still, you can search Buzz (right from within Gmail) for the term “#BUZZwednesday” and Samsung’s buzz will appear.
Of course, what’s annoying about the Buzz tagging mechanism is that it automatically sends these message to your Gmail inbox if you’re mentioned in one.
Hope everyone is ready for an onslaught of brands on the service! Need I remind you that Google Buzz just launched yesterday?
Update: And Samsung responds:
For the record, I think it’s smart for brands to hop on these services early — it’s just Samsung doing it’s job. But I think we can all see how this will get annoying quickly.
Update 2: And Samsung adds: “We agree that messages going to Inbox is not ideal. We need an @reply and DM section. Maybe even a comments, likes, and favorite sections.” A good idea, I think.
angry tapir writes "Sony has announced a new 3D Blu-ray Disc player and upgrades to existing players so that they will be able to show high-definition 3D movies too. The company introduced the BDP-S470 Blu-ray Disc model and upgraded existing home theater systems, which will be able to play Blu-ray movies when related firmware for the devices is released later this year. Movies based on the Blu-ray 3D specification, which was finalized by the Blu-ray Association in December, can be shown on the players."
FROM GAMERTELL - Final Fantasy XIII Xbox 360 bundle pictures and information have been discovered, hinting that North America could be receiving a $399 bundle, with the game, console, controllers, 250gb hard drive and headset when the game launches in March, 2010. MORE »
Google’s Nexus One won’t be the only smartphone to run Android 2.1, the latest version of the Android operating system, for too long. Motorola is planning to upgrade the Droid’s firmware this week to include features such as full multi-touch.
The upgrade to Android 2.1 will bring the pinch-to-zoom gesture for web surfing and major applications such as maps to Droid. Motorola will also enhance the Droid’s virtual keyboard, the device’s music app and offer a better news and weather application.
For instance, the Droid’s virtual keyboard will be slightly larger so typing on it can become easier and will include auto-complete and auto-correct, says Electronista. Motorola is also likely to offer a new widget called 3-D Gallery that lets users flip through photos and videos in a flip-through stack.
An improvement to the Droid’s battery life is also reportedly a part of the upgrade.
In October, Motorola introduced the Droid on Verizon Wireless. At the launch, Motorola hailed the phone as one running the most advanced version of Android, the Linux-based free open source mobile operating system created by Google. But in January, Google debuted the HTC-designed Nexus One with Android 2.1 has eclipsed the Droid.
The latest update should help level the playing field for the Droid.
Online advertising revenues among the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) ramped up 10.2 percent in the fourth quarter to $9 billion. This marks the second quarter of positive growth following last year’s advertising recession, and growth accelerated from 1.2 percent in the third quarter.
Unlike in the third quarter, Google didn’t account for all the growth. All four companies showed decent sequential increases, indicating that display advertising is beginning to regain its health, and not just search advertising. But search is still driving the gains. Google had another blowout quarter, for instance. And Microsoft showed some strength compared to the previous quarter, perhaps due to Bing search advertising revenues starting to kick in. On a sequential basis, Microsoft’s advertising revenues grew the fastest at 18.6 percent. But the other three weren’t exactly slouching, with growth rates between 11.5 percent and 13.7 percent each
I keep track of these numbers every quarter for these four companies, which turns out to be a good proxy for overall online advertising revenues since they represent a majority of the industry’s revenues. The numbers represent global advertising revenues, and include network revenues paid to affiliates through AdSense and Yahoo’s ad network. Google’s licensing revenues for Google Enterprise Apps have been stripped out. For Microsoft and AOL, I include only the advertising portions of their online revenues as reported in their quarterly earnings statements.
appl_iran writes "Iran's telecommunications agency announced that it would be suspending Google's email services permanently, saying it would roll out its own national email service." From the short WSJ article that is kernel of this Reuter's story: "An Iranian official said the measure was meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government." Funny way to go about that. Updated 20100211 9:54GMT by timothy: Original link swapped for a more appropriate, updated one.
This is Verizon’s 3G coverage map. See those little white spots amongst the green? More specifically, the ones in California? Those are the spots where Verizon’s 3G coverage is completely absent or mostly lacking. And, well, Verizon hates them – so much, in fact, that they’ve been spending millions of dollars every day to get rid of them.
According to Verizon themselves, the company pumped roughly $485 million into their data network in California in 2009. That works out to a bit over $1.3 million each and every day. All-in-all, the company has spent $5.7 billion in California, and $55 billion nationally since they launched in June of 2000.
So where’s that money going? New cell towers, primarily, followed by capacity improvements to towers that are already in place.
http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=66079 or by calling 1-888-645-4404 or 201-604-0169. It is recommended to dial in approximately 10 to 15 minutes prior to the scheduled start time. An audio rebroadcast of the conference call will be archived for one year online at http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=66079 Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Feb 2010 | 2:08 pm
HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ITC^DeltaCom, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: ITCD) announced today that, in light of current market conditions, it is withdrawing its previously announced private offering of senior secured notes to institutional investors. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 10 Feb 2010 | 2:01 pm
IceDiver writes "I am a teacher in a small rural school. My Grade 9 students are doing a unit on astronomy this spring. I have access to a 4" telescope, and would like to give my students a chance to use it. We will probably only be able to attempt observations on a couple of nights because of weather and time restrictions. I am as new to telescope use as my students, so I have no idea what objects would look good through a 4" lens. What observations should I attempt to have my students make? In other words, how can I make best use of my limited equipment and time to give my students the best experience possible?"
FROM APPLETELL - There are a lot of great apps in the app store, but that doesn’t meant there couldn’t be even more. What kind, you may ask? Well how about… MORE »
Sequencing the genome Professor Willerslev, 38, and his team grabbed international attention last year when they reconstructed the complete mitochondrial genomes of a woolly mammoth and an ancient human. However, the current discovery is the first time scientists have been able to reconstruct the 80% of the nuclear genome that is possible to retrieve from fossil remains. From the genomic sequences, the team has managed to construct a picture of a male individual who lived in Greenland 4,000 years ago and belonged to the first culture to settle in the New World Arctic.The discovery was made by analyzing a tuft of hair that belonged to a man from the Saqqaq culture from north-western Greenland 4,000 years ago. The scientists have named the ancient human "Inuk", which means "man" or "human" in Greenlandic. Although Inuk is more closely related to contemporary north-eastern Siberian tribes than to modern Inuits of the present day New World Arctic, the scientists wants to acknowledge that the discovery was made in Greenland.Professor Willerslev discovered the existence of the hair tuft by coincidence after several unsuccessful attempts to find early human remains in Greenland"I was speaking with the Director of the Natural History Museum in Denmark, Dr. Morten Meldgaard, when we started discussing the early peopling of the Arctic," Willerslev recalls. "Meldgaard who had participated in several excavations in Greenland told me about a large tuft of hair, which was found during an excavation in north-western Greenland in the 1980's and now stored at the National Museum in Denmark."After the Greenland National Museum and Archives granted permission, we analyzed the hair for DNA using various techniques and found it to be from a human male. For several months, we were uncertain as to whether our efforts would be fruitful. However, through the hard work of a large international team, we finally managed to sequence the first complete genome of an extinct human.", Willerslev says.Willerslev adds: "It was crucial that a private person, Fredrik Paulsen, chairman of the medical company Ferring, became interested in the project and provided the necessary funding to run some pilot tests, and that The Lundbeck Foundation of Denmark, quickly followed up providing substantial economic support to complete the project"."It shows how crucial private funding is to basic science these days. Without these private donors it would have taken us a lot longer to sequence the first ancient human genome". Blueprint of the ancient manThe reconstruction serves as blueprint that scientists can use to give a description of how the pre-historic Greenlander, Inuk, looked - including his tendency to baldness, dry earwax, brown eyes, dark skin, the blood type A+, shovel-shaped front teeth, and that he was genetically adapted to cold temperatures, and to what extend he was predisposed to certain illnesses. This is important as besides four small pieces of bone and hair, no human remains have been found of the first people that settled the New World Arctic. Willerslev's team can also reveal that Inuk's ancestors crossed into the New World from north-eastern Siberia between 4,400 and 6,400 years ago in a migration wave that was independent of those of Native Americans and Inuit ancestors. Thus, Inuk and his people left no dependence behind among contemporary indigenous people of the New World."Previous efforts to reconstruct the mammoth nuclear genome resulted in a sequence filled with gaps and errors due to DNA damage because the technology was in its infancy. The genome of Inuk is comparable in quality to that of a modern human ", Willerslev tells and continues:"Our findings can be of significant help to archaeologists and others as they seek to determine what happened to people from extinct cultures. Doing so requires organic material - bones or hair kept as museum pieces or found at archaeological sites. Previously, the DNA needed to have been frozen or buried in a layer of permafrost. But with the new methods developed here at the Centre, that is not a premise anymore".Much of the hands-on work analyzing and joining the DNA sequences and the chemical analyses of what little was left of the damaged genetic material together to form a complete profile of Inuk was done by Morten Rasmussen. The work was carried out in close collaboration with other scientists at the University of Copenhagen and in China, where they have far more sequencing machines than in Denmark."Not so long ago, reconstructing an entire modern human genome took years," Rasmussen says. But the new methods and the abundance of sequencing machines allow us to do it in just a few months - and that includes the time-consuming task of analyzing the results. The interesting thing about compiling a human genome is that we can look at the genes to see traits like why Scandinavians are blonde, why some are predisposed to certain illnesses and why others more easily become addicted to alcohol or tobacco. But the genome we've reconstructed is no Frankenstein's Monster; it's more like we've got the blueprints for a house, but we don't know how to build it."The results of the team's research will be published in the leading British scientific journal Nature. Key collaborators:Anders Krogh's bioinformatics group, University of Copenhagen, DenmarkSøren Brunak and Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten's bioinformatics groups, Technical University of DenmarkRasmus Nielsen's evolution group, University of California, Berkeley, USRichard Villem's genetic anthropology group, LatviaToomas Kivisild's genetic anthropology group, Cambridge, UKJun Wang's sequencing centre, BGI, ChinaBjarne Grønnow, National Museum of Denmark, DenmarkClaus Andreasen, Greenland National Museum and Archives, Greenland ---Image 1: Reconstruction of the prehistoric man Inuk. Drawing: Nuka GodfredtsenImage 2: Morten Rasmussen and Eske Willerslev in the lab. Photo: Jens Astrup Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 1:35 pm
The Huygens probe as it descended through Titan's atmosphere in 2004. Could a similar delivery method seed life on other worlds? (NASA) The speculative mechanism of panspermia could explain how life formed on Earth and how it might exist elsewhere ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 1:24 pm
A component analysis firm estimates Apple’s iPads are worth between $220 and $335 in parts, depending on the model.
ISuppli on Wednesday published its estimates report after breaking down iPad part costs piece by piece. The 16-GB iPad without 3G, which Apple prices at $500, is worth $220 in parts, iSuppli estimates. And the top-of-the-line 64-GB model with 3G, priced at $830, is probably worth $335 in parts, says iSuppli.
Jagdish Rebello, senior director and principal analyst for iSuppli, pointed out that the mid-range model — the 32-GB iPad with 3G — will generate the highest profit for Apple. The 32-GB versions of the iPad cost only $30 more to produce than the 16-GB versions, but their retail pricing is $100 higher, Rebello explained.
“This shows that Apple believes the highest-volume opportunity for the iPad resides in the mid-range of the product line,” Rebello said.
Initially, it may appear as though Apple is grossly overpricing its iPad, but component cost estimates do not include the costs of advertising, labor and development. Also, iSuppli did not possess an actual iPad and is rather speculating based on Apple’s public statements about the product’s features. So take this all with a grain of salt. $220 is a reasonable estimate for the $500 16GB iPad’s parts when compared with the estimated costs of the iPhone’s parts. According to a 2009 teardown by iSuppli, the 16GB iPhone 3GS, whose unsubsidized price is $600, is worth $172 in parts.
It is also inconclusive whether Apple indeed has room to slash iPad prices if initial sales are slow, like a Wall Street analyst suggested in a Monday report. The $500 starting price of the iPad fell far below many analysts’ expectations. Prior to the iPad unveiling, some analysts guessed Apple’s tablet would be priced no lower than $1,000.
The most expensive part of the iPad is its 9.7-inch touchscreen — worth $80 for all models, according to iSuppli. The iPad’s display employs In-Plane Switching (IPS) technology, which provides a wider viewing angle and better presentation of color than conventional LCDs.
Google already controls most of what I do on the Internet, so why not let them control how I get onto the web as well? Google is building an experimental fiber network that will deliver blazing fast speeds to computer in U.S. homes. The broadband networks would bring speeds that are 100 times faster than the average speed available to users in American homes, according to a post on the official Google Blog.
Internet users would experienced 1 gigabit per second speeds using Google’s fiber-to-home connections. That would mean downloading full albums in seconds, HD movies in less than five minutes, and watching live 3D streaming video of lectures. Though the 2009 stimulus package called for investment in America’s broadband networks, Google seeks to move faster than the FCC and government will.
Google plans to build networks in select markets to test deployment techniques and emerging technology. The network would reach between 50,000-500,000 people at prices competitive with what customers pay to their current ISP. It plans to make the network “open” and provide access to other service providers. Google is seeking requests for information from local governments interested in participating.
itwbennett writes "Once the largest telecom show in the United States, and arguably the world, SUPERCOMM has been shelved for financial reasons, the Telecommunications Industry Association announced yesterday. Blogger Tom Henderson speculates that the new emphasis on mobility rather than the landline infrastructure is partly to blame. (The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and CTIA Wireless are the beneficiaries of this shift.) But part of the blame also has to go to the decline of multivendor conferences and trade shows, which Henderson attributes to vendors wanting their own shows where they can 'control the message.'"
A colony of threatened penguins in South Africa have a little less too worry about after a ban has been placed on purse-seine fishing around the local region, according to marine biologists on Wednesday. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 1:06 pm
Good news, Palm fans! We knew that the Pre and Pixi would be getting the webOS 1.4 update with its much-desired video recording capabilities sometime in February – but now we’ve got an exact date.
A wonderfully loose-lipped Sprint technician over at PreCentral took this screenshot of an email outlining upcoming software update. Though it’s very possible the date is subject to change due to last minute certification issues, there it is in all of its tentative glory: “due on 2/15 as an update to webOS”, for both Pre and Pixi.
Before there was Christopher Columbus or Leif Erikson, a band of potentially balding hunters carved their path to the New World. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 12:55 pm
Take a step into the past along an ancient street that provides a fresh glimpse into commercial life during the 6th century. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 12:50 pm
Over the past few years, Sprint has definitely given itself a facelift and now has excellent pricing plans and some decent handsets. Sadly, things aren’t turning around as quickly as Sprint would like since it has been showing some tremendous losses the past few quarters. The fourth quarter, however, shows that Sprint is slowly but surely easing its way to where it wants to be.
Sprint lost a net 148,000 subscribers during the fourth quarter 2009; hefty, but a big improvement over its 545,000 losses from the previous quarter. Pre-paid numbers are still up thanks to Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile where Sprint picked up 435,000 new customers, but post-paid is where it’s at.
While it’s not the biggest chunk of progress, Sprint lost $980 million in the fourth quarter which is slightly better than $1.6 billion YoY. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse is keeping a close eye on costs and keeping things tight while looking ahead to the future. “The fourth quarter completion of the Virgin Mobile USA, Inc. and iPCS, Inc., acquisitions, as well as our additional large investment in Clearwire, are important to our future,” says Hesse.
For a company that actually has great coverage, excellent data speeds, great plans and nice handsets, I’m pulling for Sprint to do well, or at least a lot better, in 2010.
Bees prefer nectar with small amounts of nicotine and caffeine over nectar that does not comprise these substances at all, a study from the University of Haifa reveals. “This could be an evolutionary development intended, as in humans, to make the bee addicted,” states Prof. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 12:19 pm
FROM APPLETELL - iPhone GPS guidance apps aren’t quite a dime a dozen, but there are more than enough choices to make you wonder which fits your needs the best. Appletell’s Jake Gaecke takes a look at Magellan’s RoadMate 2010 North America. MORE »
Image 1: This small plant will play an important role in genetic research on food and biofuel crops. Credit: Oregon State UniversityImage 2: Regeneration of Brachypodium plant in vitro. Credit: BrachyTAG program (John Innes Centre, Norwich)Image 3: Brachypodium is a small plant that can be easily grown by the thousands in a laboratory, facilitating genetic research. Credit: Oregon State University Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 12:05 pm
Are you as excited as I am about LTE and the blazing fast data speeds it promises? Sure you are. And while you’re undoubtedly holding your breath waiting for 4G service and handsets, AT&T is moving forward with field trials after announcing that Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson will be providing its equipment. What’s in store for AT&T in the near future?
One step at a time for AT&T. First, it is going to upgrade to HSPA 7.2Mbps to whet our appetites for LTE. Some time later this year, we can expect field trials of LTE before AT&T starts launching it in commercial markets next year. Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, who both provide AT&T’s current 3G equipment, will be working with the telco once again for its LTE efforts – the former saying that its current 3G equipment can be upgraded to LTE.
This is great news and all, but I’d like to see AT&T speed up on reinforcing its 3G network where needed, like New York City and San Francisco. With Verizon starting its LTE upgrades this year, it’s the least AT&T can do to make sure its customers stay happy.
Apple take note: According to a study by the NPD Group, a whopping 93% of e-reader owners are very happy with their devices and only 2% said they were totally unhappy. When asked what their favorite features were, 60% said wireless connectivity while 23% said it was the touch screen.
“Both the display technology and available content on e-Readers are optimized for those interested in books, said Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis at NPD. “Pairing these optimizations with wireless technology for transparent access and touch screens for easy navigation has resonated with the avid readers that have been early e-Reader adopters.”
Despite the high level of satisfaction, the owners surveyed had many suggestions for improvement, among them longer battery life, color screens, and more book title availability.
This study is good news for established e-reader makers Amazon and Sony but may not be for Apple, which is positioning its iPad as the ultimate e-reader. As a Kindle and iPod Touch owner, I believe the Kindle has nothing to worry about. The iPad, which is basically a giant iPod Touch, is a nice gadget, but simply doesn’t include the features users wanting a multiuse device are looking for. It doesn’t multi-task, doesn’t have Flash, and displays videos in 4:3 rather than widescreen. As far as it’s e-reader capabilities, while being able to use multiple e-reader apps is a plus, the backlit LCD means extended reading will likely result in painful eyestrain.
What do you think? If you own an e-reader are you happy with it? Do you plan to trade it in for an iPad? Why or why not?
Boom! Within minutes of uncovering details about the upcoming Puma Phone tucked away within a teaser page, one of our lovely readers has sent in a picture of it.
According to the tips-bringer, this shot was snatched from a video of the Puma Phone that was very briefly available on Youtube. This is obviously the rear half of the handset, showing off the big ol’ solar charging cell, what appears to be a camera, and the classic Puma logo.
And what does the other side look like, you ask? We’ll probably have to wait until Mobile World Congress for that, unless another short-lived video hits the Tubes.
In the wake of a series of flaws, human and otherwise, found surrounding Climate Change 2007 (aka the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report), suggestions are emerging about how to fix the beleaguered scientific conglomerate. Five such recommendations ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 11:19 am
Image Caption: This graphic shows the extent of Arctic sea ice in September 2009 (in white) compared with the median ice extent for September from 1979 to 2000 (in magenta). (U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center/map) Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 11:11 am
We’ve known since around October of last year that PUMA was working on a branded phone with Sagem (the same folks who make the Porsche-branded phones) – but outside of the fact that it was in the works, there wasn’t much else known about it.
PUMA just put up a teaser site for the phone, but it’s just that: a teaser site. Its got plenty of cute animals, but it doesn’t say much of anything about the phone – at least, not directly. Fortunately, a quick peek inside the source code unveiled a bunch of details that they likely didn’t want out just yet.
Heres the bit we pulled from the source code:
Welcome to the PUMA PHONE website. The PUMA PHONE is a connected lifestyle device with sport and lifestyle functionalities such as PUMA Icon Messaging (Puma Language), Solarmeter (Solar Cell), Photo Sharing, GPS tracker, Bike Tracker, Run Tracker, Video Chat, Pedometer, Stopwatch, Music Turntable. It is also a connected handset that embraces the PUMA Community (PUMA on Facebook, PUMA on Twitter, PUMA on YouTube, PUMA on Flickr) and gives you access to the PUMA WORLD (Football, Motorsport, golf, sailing, running latest news), to PUMA Products and to specific PUMA Applications and Games.
What we can gather from that
It’ll be called the “PUMA PHONE”
As the PUMA brand implies, it’ll be aimed at sporty folks with a feature-set to match.
It has a solar cell built-in, presumably for charging the phone
GPS
Video Chat
Bike/Run tracking applications
Pedometer (Step counter)
Built-in stopwatch
A “Music Turntable”
Sports news app, IM app, and various other PUMA-branded apps which “give you access to the PUMA world”
According to the teaser page’s countdown, the PUMA Phone should be launching in 6 days. What a coincidence, that’s right in the middle of Mobile World Congress!
The AT&T Navigator app for iPhone got an update recently, and adds an interesting new feature. From any menu screen, simply shake the iPhone to make the app route you to a predefined “home” address. No need to work through the menus: simply shake your phone. That sounds like a convenient feature. It only works from a menu screen, not when a route is already engaged, so you don’t need to worry about potholes or a bumpy road redirecting you en route.
Other updates include
Speed Limit Display & Alerts: Navigation screen includes speed limit information and provides visual alerts if the limit is exceeded
Last Trip Origin: Once a trip is completed, users can easily return to the origin of their last trip by accessing the “Recent Places” menu
Nighttime Maps: The brightness levels of map screens are adjusted for nighttime driving for easier viewing
Improved Route Avoidance Options: Drivers may now choose to avoid routes that make use of high occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes or choose to avoid routes that include toll roads
Improved Pedestrian Mode: Users will be able to clearly identify when they are navigating in pedestrian mode with the introduction of a new pedestrian icon on the map screen
And here’s a video showing some of these features in action:
Before Apple’s iPad was even confirmed to exist, several publications (including Wired) flaunted concept demos of tablet apps to show how excited they are for the future of magazines. And now Andy Warhol’s Interview is next in line, claiming it will have an iPad version of its magazine ready to launch when the tablet ships next month.
The video, which is posted on Huffington Post and not embeddable (grumble), looks swanky. The app seamlessly blends together video, audio, photos and text.
Flashy and impressive, yes, but would an app make you pay for written content? Based on what I’ve seen, I might. See more magazine tablet app demos in the links below.
In Reversal, Land Is Cleared for Global Trade and Big Cities, Says StudyThe drivers of tropical deforestation have shifted in the early 21st century to hinge on growth of cities and the globalized agricultural trade, a new large-scale study concludes. The observations starkly reverse assumptions by some scientists that fast-growing urbanization and the efficiencies of global trade might eventually slow or reverse tropical deforestation. The study, which covers most of the world’s tropical land area, appears in this week’s early edition of the journal Nature Geoscience.Deforestation has been a rising concern in recent decades, especially with the recognition that it may exacerbate climate change. Studies in the late 20th century generally matched it with growing rural populations, as new roads were built into forests and land was cleared for subsistence agriculture. Since then, rural dwellers have been flooding into cities, seeking better living standards; 2009 was recorded as the first year in history when half of human lived in urban areas. Large industrial farms have, in turn, taken over rural areas and expanded further into remaining forests, in order to supply both domestic urban populations and growing international agricultural markets, the study suggests.“The main drivers of tropical deforestation have shifted from small-scale landholders to domestic and international markets that are distant from the forests,” said lead author Ruth DeFries, a professor at the Earth Institute’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. “One line of thinking was that concentrating people in cities would leave a lot more room for nature. But those people in cities and the rest of the world need to be fed. That creates a demand for industrial-scale clearing.”DeFries and her colleagues analyzed remote-sensing images of forest cover across 41 nations in Latin America, Africa and Asia from 2000-2005, and combined these with population and economic trends. They showed that the highest forest losses were correlated with two factors: urban growth within countries; and, mainly in Asia, growth of agricultural exports to other countries. Rural population growth was not related.In recent years, tropical countries have been supplying growing amounts of palm oil, soybeans, sugar, meat and other processed products to distant markets abroad. Not all the products are used for food; palm oil and sugar in particular are also being converted into biofuels. Furthermore, said DeFries, as small farmers within tropical nations move away to become city dwellers, they may actually use more resources from the countryside, not less. This is because those living in cities have higher incomes—the reason most moved there to begin with—and thus tend to consume more processed foods and animal products. Pastures needed to produce meat, and large plantations and other facilities that turn out other products, in turn, require land. “Collectively, these results indicate a shift from state-run road building and colonization in the 1970s and 1980s to enterprise-driven deforestation,” says the study.Hot spots of industrial-scale clearing include Brazil, Indonesia and Cambodia—countries that, unlike many others, still have considerable forests left to clear. The trend has not reached some forested parts of Latin America, such as Surinam or Guyana, which also have large tracts of remaining forest. Almost 60% of remaining forests occur in areas where net agricultural trade, percent of products exported, and urban growth are all relatively low. But as demand for products grows, these areas are likely to see increased pressure, the study says. According to projections by the United Nations, nearly all population growth in the next 40 years will take place in cities, and some two-thirds of people will live there by 2050.DeFries said that some initiatives aimed at halting deforestation need to be quickly shifted. For instance, some policies that focus on getting small landowners to conserve forests—a popular mechanism among governments and nonprofits at the moment—“may not be all that productive without a focus on large-scale clearing as well,” she said. “Governments will have to look at policies that intensify yields on existing high-yield fields—not clear more land,” she said. The other authors of the study are Columbia University ecologist Maria Uriarte; ecologist Thomas Rudel of Rutgers University; and Matthew Hansen of South Dakota State University.---Image Caption: Clearing for large-scale agriculture, Mato Grosso, Brazil. (Doug Morton/Goddard Space Flight Center) Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 10:55 am
On the trunk of a gnarled, centuries-old oak tree, about 90 miles southwest of Phoenix, Ariz., are odd carvings of six-legged, lizard-like beings. The tree is located at Painted Rock, an archaeological site peppered with hundreds of ancient petroglyphs, images ... Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 10 Feb 2010 | 10:13 am
Just because you don't swallow the worm at the bottom of a bottle of mescal doesn't mean you have avoided the essential worminess of the potent Mexican liquor, according to scientists at the University of Guelph.Researchers from U of G's Biodiversity Institute of Ontario (BIO) have discovered that mescal itself contains the DNA of the agave butterfly caterpillar — the famously tasty "worm" that many avoid consuming. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 10:12 am
Finally SiriusXM! 8 months after the release of the iPhone/iPod Touch app, you finally release the BlackBerry version. Thank you! As a BlackBerry owner and longtime XM subscriber I’m thrilled.
The app gives BlackBerry users access to 120 channels of music (most of it commercial free!) news, talk and sports. Some will be disappointed that Howard Stern isn’t included but Stern says it’s because of “contractual reasons” and that he hopes to be added to the app at a later date.
The app is free but the service is not. You’ll need to be Sirius/XM subscriber ($12.95 a month) and add the $3 a month online streaming service. I’ve been a subscriber for 7 years now and it’s been worth every penny. The app is compatible with the Storm/Storm 2, Curve (8500, 8900), Bold (9000, 9700), and Tour (9600).
Mobile marketing solutions provider MADS has partnered with Netbiscuits, which offers a B2B web software platform for the creation, publication, and monetization of mobile websites.
In essence, MADS' mobile marketing platform will be integrated with Netbiscuits mobile website publishing platform, which enables the latter's publishers to monetize their sites utilizing mobile ad campaigns via the MADS network, which self-reportedly includes over 20 global ad sales agencies.
A small earthquake rattled windows, set off car alarms, and jolted people from their sleep at 4 a.m. Wednesday morning near Chicago in the western suburbs of Geneva, according to officials. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 8:05 am
With Apple’s announcement that the iPad will become an snazzy eReader, that is will have the apps to read digital books, the case is being made that Apple has already blown it. By attracting the attention of publishers with higher price sales, is Steve Jobs simply sitting on rocks while singing the sirens song of more profits?
Amazon’s recent power play with Macmillan books showed the world that the $9.99 model for all ebooks is dead. Amazon attempted to hold the line and simply remove the publishers books from their catalog but quickly gave in, giving more power to Macmillan to increase the price of their ebooks. Macmillan had already worked a deal with Apple, which is offering to sell it’s books through a version of iTunes at higher prices.
Peter Kafka, over at All things D, provides a cautionary tale based on music labels messing about with pricing. By changing pricing from $.99 to $1.29, Warner Music saw sales slow. The conclusion drawn is that raising prices above a magic number such as $.99 or $9.99, customers become disinterested. The thinking follows that iPad will fall short in growing the ebook market, instead, it has killed it.
I believe this is short-sighted. Digital music is on the backside of the boon. The market is saturated (witness flat iPod sales) and as a luxury item, music is going to trend downward in tough economic times. Ebooks, however, still have yet to see that boon. Apple hopes to bring consumers to that boon with the iPad and that is why publishers are moving to reset the price point that consumer will get attached to.
Is there a magic price for eBooks? Are folks used to paying $30 for newly printed hardcovers going to scoff at $15? If they do will Apple grab the market by the throat and drive prices back down to Amazon’s level? I can’t wait to find out.
Gene variation is the reason that some great tit populations are more curious than othersIn 2007, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology found a gene related to individual variation in exploratory behavior in great tits. Birds with a certain variant of this so-called "dopamine receptor D4 gene" (DRD4 gene) showed stronger novelty seeking and exploration behavior than individuals with other variants. This association was originally tested and found in a lab-raised group of birds.Now, a large international group of researchers around Bart Kempenaers, director at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany, repeated the test in adult wild birds captured in the field. Research groups from the Centre for Terrestrial Ecology in Heteren (NL), the Universities of Antwerp (Belgium) and Groningen (NL), and the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology in Oxford (UK) all measured exploratory behavior of large numbers of great tits in a similar way. And they brought their data together to test the generality of the association between the different gene variants and exploration behavior. "To our knowledge, this is the most extensive study of gene variants underlying personality-related behavioral variation in a free-living animal to date, and the first to compare different wild populations", says Peter Korsten, first author and a former member of Kempenaers' department.Similar results in great tits and humans Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 7:40 am
Completing the study of desertificationThe new research shows that using the LCA in combination with GIS makes it easier to adapt the LCA to study the impacts of land use, not only in the case of desertification, but also in terms of loss of biodiversity, erosion, or even water consumption.This new methodology will provide the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with an environmental impact category that will make it possible to measure "the desertification potential caused by any human activity", adds Núñez.The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a scientific methodology that objectively analyses the environmental impacts of an activity or process, taking in the full cycle, from extraction of raw materials right through to management of the waste generated at the end of this material's useful life.Núñez, Montserrat; Civit, Bárbara; Muñoz, Pere; Arena, Alejandro Pablo; Rieradevall, Joan; Anton, Assumpció. "Assessing potential desertification environmental impact in life cycle assessment" International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 15(1): 67-78, enero de 2010. ---Image Caption: This is the Guadalquivir River as it passes through Seville, one of the areas most at risk of desertification in Spain. Credit: Nesta Vázquez Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 10 Feb 2010 | 7:37 am
Corky is a self-charging mouse, turning your clicks and flicks into electricity. It is also made of cork.
Cork has many properties: It can warm the floor of a 1970s bathroom, or turn a wine of any vintage into a musty, tainted bottle of drain-filler. In this case it offers a welcoming, waterproof shell for a wireless scrolling mouse. The buttons and the scroll-wheel all contain piezoelectric elements which, in this concept design, generate juice with every click. And moving the mouse itself will also make electricity, via “elements within”.
Corky was designed by Adele Peters, and we’d love to see it for sale, with or without its oaky overcoat. After all, charging a mouse, however rarely we have to do it, is a real pain, the power fading just when we need the mouse the most. We just have one question. Would piezo-power be enough to keep a mouse running?
Now that tablets are the flavor of the season, Panasonic is launching a tablet computer. But unlike the sleek, sophisticated Apple iPad, Panasonic’s tablet is a rugged machine built for some tough love.
The Panasonic Toughbook H1 Field is a tablet targeted at maintenance workers, law enforcement and field sales personnel.
“Customers love the ruggedness and the swappable battery concept in our tablet,” says Kyp Walls, director of product management for Panasonic Computer.
The Toughbook H1 has a sunlight readable 10.4-inch resistive touchscreen and runs a 1.8 GHz Intel Atom processor. It offers about six hours of battery life and comes with an integrated RFID and barcode scanner, camera, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. The Toughbook H1 weighs about 3.4 lbs and includes a 64 GB shock-mounted solid state drive. It can run Windows 7 though there is an option to choose Windows Vista or XP.
The Toughbook H1 will be the first real rugged tablet that Panasonic has created, says Walls. In the past, the company has launched about five notebook convertibles or slates as they were called and it has a popular line of rugged notebooks.
The H1 has a magnesium alloy chassis and is rain, spill, dust and vibration resistant. It can operate in temperatures ranging from 4 degrees Fahrenheit to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
The device also support’s Qualcomm’s Gobi broadband technology that lets users connect and switch easily between any cellphone service provider. The Toughbook H1 starts at $3,379.
A strange thing has happened. After years of using a notebook as my only computer, I’m considering going back to a desktop machine. Why? The iPad.
It’s too early to tell for sure, but the iPad looks like it will do almost everything my MacBook does away from the desk: reading, browsing, watching movies in bed. It’ll even take care of the one thing that makes me schlep a notebook with me on vacation: importing and backing up photos. In fact, for many things it’ll be better than a MacBook, as it will be as grab-able as an iPhone for quickly getting something done, and I can jiggle it around without killing the hard drive.
This leaves a few very specific tasks for my “real” computer. Work, for one. Writing Gadget Lab posts involves a lot of applications open at once, and it requires a proper keyboard. The second is photo-editing, which needs the horsepower of a full operating system (right now, at least). Both of these require a big screen to avoid flipping between open windows, and to let me see the pictures properly.
When I am using my MacBook like this, it is desk-bound, hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, Wacom tablet, a slew of external drives, a card reader, speakers, and so on. With, say, an iMac, I wouldn’t need half these things, and I would never need to unplug the extras that are hooked up.
Desktop sales have declined as notebook sales have climbed over the last few years. Prices of laptops have dropped and modern notebooks are capable of running all but the highest-end software. Better still, we can carry everything with us. But if the iPad is enough computer for most things, the desktop starts to look pretty good.
I’ll compare Macs here, both because I use them and because the well-defined range makes comparison easy. The same rules would apply to PCs. The basic MacBook Pro and the basic iMac both cost the same: $1,200. The MBP is a good machine, but the iMac is way better in terms of performance and specs. It has a 3.06GHz processor versus 2.26GHz and a 21-inch screen instead of a 13-inch. The hard drive is three times bigger, it has double the memory and double the USB ports. Sure, one is a marvel of miniaturization, but if you never need to pick it up, the MacBook Pro is a pretty poor desktop computer.
Will the iPad mean a boost to sales of desktop machines? Probably not. Most people who need a “real” computer will likely still buy notebooks. But will the iPad cut into notebook sales in general as more and more buyers realize that it is plenty powerful enough for their needs? Almost certainly.
According to some emails turned over by Microsoft during an investigation into antitrust action, Microsoft was in awe of the deals Apple’s Steve Jobs worked to create iTunes. Emails from the big man himself, Bill Gates, to his team revealed his amazement and his teams response, “we got smoked.”
Clarke’s law says, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Apple uses this idea again and again in introducing new products. The idea that they have ventured so far into the land of innovation and have brought back something that will make all our lives better is consistently rolled out for big things like the iPhone and iPad. Apple did this in 2003 with iTunes and Microsoft knew it the minute they heard it.
Gates saw some of this magic when he wrote, “This time somehow he (Steve Jobs) has applied his talents in getting a better Licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music.This is very strange to me.” Gates goes on to point out how everyone else, including Microsoft, emusic, Real and others bet on the wrong horse. Jobs was able to walk away with the best deal and got his team to get the UI “right and market things as revolutionary are amazing things.”
You’ve got to give Microsoft some credit for recognizing the juggernaut that is iTunes out of the gate. Despite being “flat-footed”, as Gates put it, the team was charged with finding a competitive match and fast: “we need to move fast to get something where the UI and Rights are as good.”
These emails come to light on the backside of a New York Times Op Ed piece on how Microsoft is no longer an innovator. Microsoft could have never introduced something as innovative as the iPhone or iPad. The piece posits why has Microsoft stop bringing us things from the future? These Microsoft email show the company doesn’t lack business savvy folks that can’t see the forest through the trees, they just don’t seem to have a compass to navigate.
Fido Fashion’s dog leash turns your pooch’s energy into electrical energy, a far more useful form of power. The retracting restraint works like a crank-powered flashlight, and the constant winding and unwinding of the leash’s reel generates power.
This power is promptly wasted, sent out to LEDs to light your path of illuminate car and house keyholes (three lights point down, and one up). Dog walkers in the city have street-lights, and dog walkers in the dark depths of the countryside have already got powerful beams to guide them. What this leash needs is a USB port.
Think about it: you are out listening to some music to drown out the slobbering panting of your four-legged friend when the iPod’s battery dies. Or perhaps the heat of the day could be relieved by a USB-powered fan? Even better, you send one of the kids out with the dog and just jack in your iPhone when they both return: green and efficient.
The leash is still six months away from stores, and Fido Fashion is looking for investors. Perhaps in the intervening time the R&D boffins can add a single USB port, turning this novelty item into a genuinely great device.
Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was released in Japan last year? The basic concept behind the $250 device (which people living outside Japan can get here) will soon be used for an iPhone app that translates what a dog “says” into human language and emoticons in real-time.
Matteo Cibic’s Hi-Fido is a ceramic speaker in the shape of a dog. It is also strangely reminiscent of Nipper, the gramophone-curious mascot of the RCA and HMV record companies, and - best of all - it looks like a real dog that has been forced to wear a plastic cone on its head to stop it scratching its ears (pro-tip to cone-wearing dogs: don’t look up when it’s raining).
The Hi-Fido is internally shaped to use a bass-reflex system, and will bark out 150 Watts of noise. The speaker measures 40×30x25cm, and the input is via cable. We can’t see the jack socket on either of the pictures, but we can guess where it is.
Matteo is making just 50 speakers, and they’ll be on sale from April 2010 for a not-yet-decided price. And look at that — I managed to write the whole post without making a “woofer” joke!
Android updates appear to be getting thrown left and right recently, so it doesn’t surprise me that the Motorola CLIQ may be due for a tune-up. According to Boy Genius Report, the CLIQ will be getting Android 2.1 OS sometime in March. Perhaps it’s not soon enough for those CLIQ owners who are turning a little green watching as DROID and Nexus One owners enjoy the latest and greatest. But before you know it, March will be here and the additional features that Android 2.1 brings will make your phone feel like new again. Almost.
* Sometimes, when arranging home screen icons, you feel sad and you're not sure why...
It didn’t take long. 
"Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government."
On 12 January 2010, 
Well, 
According to UGA campus police chief Jimmy Williamson, Dehelean "offered to make the situation go away in exchange for money." He promised not to inform Judicial Programs, so the student in question would be free from any kind of disciplinary measures the University usually takes in similar cases.
TSA supervisor: "You know who did 9/11?"
The new report, which weighs in at 113 pages, was completed by Ruth Corbin, a Toronto-based IP expert. Corbin started from scratch, reading a broad range of materials, conducting interviews, and leading a private roundtable on the issue (I participated in the roundtable and met separately with her). While there is much to digest, the lead takeaway is to marvel at the difference between a report cribbed from lobby speaking points and one that attempts to dig into the issues in a more balanced fashion. Three examples:
According to this Korean news site, shilly Koreans have figured out how to use their iPhones and other electrostatic touchscreen devices without removing their gloves: instead, they use miniature sausages, which are close enough to a human finger in composition to trick the screen into responding.
Some hardware is just so dear to a geeks heart that they can’t let it just die. Take for example the original NES system. Some enthusiasts take modding them to a whole new level. I mean, I like to play Mario Bros. as much as the next guy, but this is getting extreme.
Fair warning to anyone trying to do evil in Odessa, Ukraine – they have a giant robot guarding the port. While he doesn’t seem to move much, I don’t think he has to. This silent sentry warns anyone coming in to Odessa to be good, or he will smite you with his mighty steel rod.
These days, thanks to its growing ubiquity in the media, nearly everyone knows what Twitter is. But back in 2006, when it 
MySpace has just announced that CEO 
Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates has long been an evangelist for tablet PCs, but he’s not impressed by Apple’s (AAPL) new variation on the device, the iPad. In an interview with BNET, Gates–who evidently finds the iPad neither magical nor revolutionary–diplomatically dismissed it. 
Leading up to its January event, rumors were swirling that Apple was talking to the TV networks about offering possible subscriptions to their shows through iTunes. Of course, that never happened. While reports had CBS and ABC interested in such a deal, the other networks apparently were less enthusiastic about it — perhaps out of fear of repercussions from the cable companies. But that doesn’t mean that Apple is giving up.
Google already controls most of what I do on the Internet, so why not let them control how I get onto the web as well? Google is building an experimental fiber network that will deliver blazing fast speeds to computer in U.S. homes. The broadband networks would bring speeds that are 100 times faster than the average speed available to users in American homes, according to a post on the official Google Blog.
Apple take note: According to a study by the NPD Group, a whopping 93% of e-reader owners are very happy with their devices and only 2% said they were totally unhappy. When asked what their favorite features were, 60% said wireless connectivity while 23% said it was the touch screen.
Finally SiriusXM! 8 months after the release of the iPhone/iPod Touch app, you finally release the BlackBerry version. Thank you! As a BlackBerry owner and longtime XM subscriber I’m thrilled.
Mobile marketing solutions provider 
According to some emails turned over by Microsoft during an investigation into antitrust action, Microsoft was in awe of the deals Apple’s Steve Jobs worked to create iTunes. Emails from the big man himself, Bill Gates, to his team revealed his amazement and his teams response, “we got smoked.”
Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was 
Android updates appear to be getting thrown 