Raoul Roverato, France Telecom's executive vice-president for new growth businesses has called for Google to be investigated over the "scary" amount of information it collects about its customers. .... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 14 Mar 2010 | 3:05 am
gollum123 writes "Think we'd all be better off if HTML5 could somehow instantly replace Flash overnight? Not necessarily, according to a set of comparisons from Jan Ozer of the Streaming Learning Center website, which found that while HTML5 did come out ahead in many respects, it wasn't exactly a clear winner. They did find that HTML5 clearly performed better than Flash 10 or 10.1 in Safari on a Mac, although the differences were less clear cut in Google Chrome or Firefox. On the other hand, Flash more than held its own on Windows, and Flash Player 10.1 was actually 58% more efficient than HTML5 in Google Chrome on the Windows system tested. As you may have deduced, one of the big factors accounting for that discrepancy is that Flash is able to take advantage of GPU hardware acceleration in Windows, while Adobe is effectively cut out of the loop on Mac."
gollum123 also links to additional tests indicating that Flash "does not perform consistently worse on Mac than on Windows."
CAIRO, March 14 (Reuters) - Egyptian private equity firm Citadel Capital has invested 1 billion Egyptian pounds ($183 million) in three Nile river ports and wants to invest in two more in the country,... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 14 Mar 2010 | 3:02 am
Tonight at 2am, remember to set your clock an hour forward. Look forward to both more sunlight at the end of the day and unfortunately, an earlier rise to work. Wikipedia explains why: More »
Last time I was in India I wrote about the amazing business model innovation that had allowed telecom operators to make money on a paltry $6 a month per average user. That compares to a desired average monthly payment of $50 or more in the U.S.
The results have been phenomenal—550 million people in India have phones, and it has transformed the poorer service economy by giving them an affordable way to be reached and arrange jobs. Just last month, nearly 20 million new mobile accounts were opened. That’s more than double the people than have high speed Internet in the entire country. Even in slums where people live on less than $2 a day, everyone has a phone. If “Slumdog Millionaire” was more accurate, Jamal wouldn’t have had to go on TV to find Latika. He could have just called her, or worst case, called a few friends until he found her number.
It’s unequivocally India’s most successful infrastructure achievement —despite some mounting concerns about the effects of all those towers dotting nearly any urban rooftop that can hold one. And a host of exciting applications are being built on top of this invisible thread that connects a disparate country with a vast terrain and even bigger gulfs in language, literacy, income, religion, language and living standards
But amazingly, when Rajiv Mehrotra (pictured below) looked at the existing telecom penetration in India, he saw failure. What about the people who can’t afford $6 a month or live too far to get service? Don’t they deserve to be connected as well? The result was VNL, a company that’s already gotten a good deal of press and acclaim for its dead-cheap, low-maintenance, Ikea-like easy-to-assemble, solar-powered base stations that extend existing mobile footprints into rural villages for a fraction of the price, allowing the remotest, poorest villages to have mobile phones in every household at drop-dead low prices. “We are the bottom of the bottom,” boasts Mehrotra, practically daring competitors to try to play his low-cost, super-durability game.
The World Economic Forum named it one of 26 Technology Pioneers, and just last month VNL won the Mobile World Congress’s Green Mobile Award. Time called it a “Tech Pioneer that Will Change your Life” and Fast Company named it one of the world’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world.
I met with Mehrotra at the company’s headquarters in Gurgoan during my November trip to India. This time I wanted to see its technology live in villages and hear first hand what the impact had been. I traveled to a village that had now had phones for about seven months to see how the technology had changed their lives. Of the 500 families spread across this area, almost all of them had a phone—and most for the first time.
The majority of the people I spoke with said the first calls they made were to family members, and that the biggest impact was the ability to stay in touch with family, to know when there was an emergency and be able to respond quickly.
But there have been business effects too. One man (pictured here) has a business operating several trucks traveling between this village and Delhi and before he’d have to ride on a bike between back-and-forth to coordinate them. Now he can sit at home and just call the drivers. He installed one of VNL’s small base stations on his roof, and he said it had increased his standing among his peers—he is frequently the one called on to settle disputes. And now they can just call him. Similarly wives will call husbands out in the fields when its time to come in and eat, rather than trudging out to get them, allowing them to focus on kids and the housework.
Another woman (pictured below) I spoke with was a widow with six kids and 21 grandchildren. (So many, she actually had to ask someone else how many she had.) As grandkids clambered in and out of her lap, she explained that she gets pension checks from the government, but the delivery used to be spotty. Before her phone she had no recourse but to travel to Delhi to inquire about it. Not exactly something she relishes, having lived her whole life in this village and only been to the big city twice. Now she can call the office and gives them an earful. Not surprisingly, the checks have started to come more regularly.
Another man (pictured to the right) told me he felt more connected to the rest of India as a result of having a phone. This village is surrounded by mountains, and he said that he felt “imprisoned” and cut off, despite being just a few hours drive from Delhi. Now he has a renewed interest in politics and what’s happening in other villages and the country at large. This man had only had his phone for six months, but he expected it would change his life in ways he couldn’t articulate or imagine. “Since the day I got this, my life has already changed,” he said through an interpreter.
Indeed, Mehrotra says it’s already having a ripple affect on the politics of Rajisthan—the state between Pakistan and India where VNL did its first installations. Politicians come through and make promises and villagers demand their cell phone numbers and call to check up on whether those promises are kept. “They have to be accountable,” Mehrotra says. “They can’t wriggle out.”
These phones are not just a nice-to-have, they’ve quickly become a must have for these villages, deeply tied to the way they make money, participate in their government and retain closely important family relationships. And these ripple effects are only now beginning. Think of what the impact will be when there are better programs for marketing crops, saving money and even learning and game playing rolled out on these very basic phones. Life will always be different in a village or a city, but India can at least gain some basic common denominators between the two.
Mehrotra is a big believer in the Ghandian mantra: Change the villages and you change India. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has already built businesses rolling out satellite TV and landlines to rural areas, but he thinks this company will have a bigger impact than anything else he’s done and is the one with the real potential to go global. It bears noting that he’s invested all of his own money in the project—and it’s taken far more than he expected.
This is not a cheap venture—Mehrotra has invested more than $100 million in the last five years and is still investing more. But I’m not sure it could be built any other way. I don’t think there’s the venture capital appetite or risk profile in India to fund something like this and most of the mobile equipment companies Mehrotra talked to back when he started thinking about this insisted it couldn’t be done. Once he built it he’d take equipment and operator executives out to see it and they still couldn’t believe it. They were making calls to test the quality from different areas of the village trying to find pockets without a signal. “They were climbing on the antenna and shaking it like monkeys trying to break it and they couldn’t,” Mehrotra says.
From a business point of view, the operators love VNL because it cheaply expands their existing footprint. The equipment operators aren’t so sure. In theory, VNL isn’t competing with them because they’re not going into the cities. Now that VNL has proved this model works, could a larger established vendor steal the market? The best chance of that would likely come from a Chinese powerhouse like Huawei. That said, any vendor that builds such a low cost solution that’s too good will risk eroding his higher priced systems designed for urban areas. “They’ll say ‘Give it to me in the city too.’ ” Mehrotra says.
All these awards aside, this is the year for VNL to prove it’s really a viable business. And Mehrotra says there are some surprises in store. In terms of market, VNL is already rolling the technology out in other countries and in terms of product they’re not done with just simple mobile access. The countries are likely in Africa and perhaps Latin America, and my guess is the new functionality will entail turning on some kind of Internet access through the existing base stations. Expect much more on this newly minted international do-gooding darling in 2010.
this_boat_is_real writes "Somewhere off the coast of Chile a pioneering underwater robot named Abe lies in a watery grave today. The Autonomous Benthic Explorer was one of the first truly independent research submersibles, being both unmanned and un-tethered to its launching ship. While on its 222nd research dive on Friday all contact with the craft was lost, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has announced."
Here's a good reason to stay in Austin on Monday night.
In 2001, Jon Lebkowsky and Cory threw the first annual Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) party during SXSW Interactive, hosted by EFF-Austin. This party became annual tradition, and morphed over the last four years into Plutopia, a multifaceted extravaganza of music, performances, art, and talks, this year based on "The Science of Music." The event is Monday night, March 15, at the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin.
Plutopia 2010 is an amazing convergence of technology, DIY, music, art, and academics. In addition to standard party fare, performance and the arts will play a major role alongside exhibits and talks in presenting the ideas in a way that will make this yet another memorable, stimulating, and fun SXSW after event.
Way beyond the run-of-the-mill "booze and schmooze" after-party mixer, Plutopia is an ever-evolving multimedia experiment of Austin-tatious proportions dedicated to a playful, yet masterful cross-pollination across verticals to bring you an immersive interactive experience event.
This year's Plutopian theme explores the role of technology, sound and digital media in changing the landscape and narrative of music in the information age.
The science refers to everything from immersive listening and the expanding of audio boundaries and experimentation, to new forms of instrumentation, sampling and remixing and emerging creative processes; and from integrated multisensory systems and interfaces with intelligent networks, to the transformations of aesthetics and the changing rhythm of nature.
Monday, March 15, 2010
7pm - midnight
Mexican American Cultural Center
600 River St. Austin, TX
FREE to SXSW Interactive and Platinum Badge Holders; $15 General Public
FEATURED ARTISTS:
Bruce Sterling
Xiao He
DJ Spooky
Black Pig Liberation Front
White
Dr. Strangevibe
and also featuring the Edible Austin Foodie Fest and Tipsy Texan Cocktail Bar!
Unique to this and only this event, Edible Austin magazine is bringing the heart and soul of Austin's local foodie scene and cutting edge mixology to Plutopia and will be hosting out-of-town guests from Eat Well Guide. Full list of food and drink participants here.
Here's a good reason to stay in Austin on Monday night. In 2001, Jon Lebkowsky and Cory threw the first annual Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) party during SXSW Interactive, hosted by EFF-Austin... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 10:11 pm
Marc de Vinck says: "I was watching SpongeBob with the kids. During the snail races I noticed the announcer's mug. OK, so it most likely stands for Bikini Bottom (where SpongeBob lives), but maybe, just... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 10:10 pm
Marc de Vinck says: "I was watching SpongeBob with the kids. During the snail races I noticed the announcer's mug. OK, so it most likely stands for Bikini Bottom (where SpongeBob lives), but maybe, just maybe, it stands for something else?!"
AP - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called for regulation of the Internet on Saturday while demanding authorities crack down on a critical news Web site that he accused of spreading false information.
I am the 90-year-old producer of the 1956 family home movie, Disneyland Dream, which you first BoingBoinged nearly two years ago, on April 11, 2008.
I thought you might be interested in knowing that a 1956 "Disneyland Dream" DVD is now available for purchase for $15 plus shipping from Amazon.com, with an added Special Feature on "The Making of Disneyland Dream." It has taken me a long time to get this set up, but the attachment to this email is a flyer I have worked out to let people know about this new DVD availability. "Disneyland Dream" can still be downloaded anytime free from the internet at Archive.org, but from now on the 2009 "Making of D.D." will only be available as part of this for-sale DVD.
This is my first venture into commercial marketing (after 75 years of amateur film making), so I don't know how it will go. But I appreciate your earlier interest.
This is the most delightful historical Disneyland movie I've seen -- including the old TV shows where Walt tours the park. Young Master Barstow was a great film-maker (there's a reason that the Library of Congress added this to the National Film Registry), and the subject is wonderful, My mom and her family had a trip to Disneyland in '56, and my grandfather talked about it to his dying day -- the stuff of legend.
Home movie hero Robbins Barstow writes, I am the 90-year-old producer of the 1956 family home movie, Disneyland Dream, which you first BoingBoinged nearly two years ago, on April 11, 2008. I thought... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 9:53 pm
Palm has recently rolled out their Developer Purchase Program, which will allow developers to purchase either the Pre, Pre Plus, Pixi or Pixi Plus. Sadly though these handsets are not coming as unlocked, but instead need to be purchased for the carrier that you plan to use it with. In other words those hoping to grab a Pre or Pre Plus and enjoy it on AT&T here in the US are going to be disappointed. In terms of the carriers, the Pre is available with Sprint, Telcel and O2, the Pixi is available with Sprint and the the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus are available with Verizon Wireless. Otherwise, and as a nice plus the handsets do come at a slight discount as compared to regular retail.
Pre - $439.99
Pre Pus - $479.99
Pixi - $319.99
Pixi Plus - $319.99
Oh, and all handsets come with free two day shipping.
this_boat_is_real writes "There's growing concern over how pharmaceutical companies use social media and the Internet to market their products. Last November, the US Food and Drug Administration held a hearing on the topic, and many were worried over how marketing mediums such as Twitter — which has a 140-character limit on text — can sufficiently disclose drug risks." Here's the FDA's announcement about last year's hearings, which includes links to an archive of presentations as well as a video record of the meeting.
Social media researcher and general internet guru Danah Boyd gave the keynote address at SXSWi earlier today, focusing on matters of privacy. On paper, Google Buzz was a perfect social network. So why did it freak everyone out so much? More »
While a lot of the smaller startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting much of the buzz at SXSW, Twitter isn’t sitting idly on the location sidelines. Sure, they launched location integration on their site a few days ago, but they’ve also apparently set up a sub-site totally around location for SXSW. But here’s the weird thing: It’s only for stalking their employees.
As co-founder Evan Williams tweeted out earlier, sxsw.twitter.com shows you a Google map of Austin, Texas (where SXSW is held) with tiny Twitter logos overlaid on it, showing Twitter employees at the conference tweeting.
The site, which is clearly tailored for mobile usage (it looks great on the iPhone, for example), has two areas: “Twitter People” and “To Meet.” The Twitter People area is the one that shows the map and the tweets overlaid on it. The To Meet area is interesting because it asks, “Which of these sound like awesome things to work on?” and gives you a few different options to click on.
For example, if you click on, “Making fast and sexy applications” it takes you to a list of various Twitter employees at SXSW that you should meet. If you click on “Partnering with Twitter,” you get a different list. Clearly, Twitter is using this site for both new employee recruitment, platform expansion, and partnership opportunities.
Twitter, while now fairly commonplace in the mainstream (especially the media), first rose to fame among early tech adopters during SXSW three years ago.
We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you're exhausted, but it's not from the booze, the... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:14 pm
(TrendHunter.com) For the day of March 13th, these are the Top 20 trends, which include Terrifying Cannibalistic Art, 'Lord of Rings' Dwellings and Living Paintings. The rankings are based on hundreds... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:10 pm
badger.foo writes "The OpenBSD 4.7 pre-orders are up. That means the release is done, sent off to CD production, and snapshots will turn -current again. Order now and you more likely than not will have your CD set, T-shirt or other cool stuff before the official release date. You get the chance to support the most important free software project on the planet, and get your hands on some cool playables and wearables early. The release page is still being filled in, but the changelog has detailed information about the goodies in this release."
How to deal with user privacy on social networks as they grow, mature and become more sophisticated has been a frequent topic of conversation at this year's SXSW. But is privacy just a technical problem? Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:00 pm
I could go on all weekend about Son House, one of the top and longest-lasting country bluesman, but I'll be kind to you and get to the music quickly. His original recordings are messages from a foreign... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:57 pm
I could go on all weekend about Son House, one of the top and longest-lasting country bluesman, but I'll be kind to you and get to the music quickly. His original recordings are messages from a foreign land, his sessions and concerts after rediscovery rival Skip James' (hear an interview with John Fahey and the future Dr. Demento from that period), and both his lyrical and guitar styles are slashing and unforgettable. "Death Letter" is as deep as country blues gets. National resonator guitar!
Last month, I risked life and limb to tell you about Celsius X-VI-II, a shadowy French company who was building a $300,000 mechanical cellphone. The first pictures of the phone have surfaced, though they don't exactly answer our questions. More »
This is not the first we have seen in terms of leaked images of the BlackBerry Slider, but if nothing else this latest batch of images does offer a few more angles. Anyway, included here is a shot of the back, a shot of the back with the batter cover removed and a few side shots.
Interestingly enough, the Storm 3 name seems to have gone away in favor of this being a Bold. Or more specifically, a Bold 9700a. Of course, in the end both name suggestions are nothing more than rumor and speculation. Personally I would like to see it called a Bold, if for no other reason than the Bold seems nicer than the Storm.
Additionally, there is also some question about the camera. Is is the Blackberry standard of 3.2-megapixel or has that been upgraded to a 5-megapixel. Sadly these images do not confirm that because the megapixel description that is typically printed near the lens is not shown.
With virtually every twittery, techie media fanboy and girl swarming all over the greater Austin area this week, it feels a little empty in the Bay Area. The sun is shining, but Dolores park is just a little emptier. There are fewer fixed-gear bikes darting between cars in the Mission District, and convenience store shelves are overflowing with unpurchased Pabst Blue Ribbon. Weekend Update feels a little left out, sitting here staring longingly at all the #sxsw twitter tags. But we know why we stayed behind this year. It was to bring you all the updates from a wild week of tech. Neither rain, nor snow, nor a hipster-packed BBQ joint can keep AllThingsD from our appointed post, though.
Earlier this week, Google (GOOG) launched its App store, er, marketplace. Before the announcement, Kara shot a video with Manymoon, a start-up funded my Harrison Metal that is doing work in the social-productivity space. Its online tools are among the more popular on Google’s fledgling app aggregator, but it remains to be seen how the venture will fare. In a case of foreshadowing, or not, Kara covered the bump between Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim and Bill Gates this week. Slim, a major creditor of the New York Times (NYT), bumped Bill Gates from the top spot of the Forbes billionaire list by a mere half-billion, or as Weekend Update likes to call it, about 200 times most American’s lifetime earning potential. Kara rounded out the busy week with a post about wireless music player maker Sonos landing $25 million from Index Ventures. Kara even managed to get a lunch date with Mike Volpi of Index, who now also sits on the Sonos board.
John was out this week, but left us all with a provocative entry about the coming siege of HTC by the Apple (AAPL) horde. An analysis by Deutsche Bank says HTC may not have much support for its arguments in the freshly pressed patent suit. John will be back on Monday. We can’t wait to see how this shakes out.
Peter was posting like a madman this week and was on his A game for sure. He caught some news from Twitter that might have easily been swept under the mat. According to the Twitter blog, the company has come up with a plan to battle some of the phishing that’s been plaguing the twitterverse. The compay has decided to reshorten suspected attack links so that it can track them to their origin and decide if they need to be deleted. Creepy? Maybe. Effective? We’ll see. It was a tough week for record company EMI, and MediaMemo was on the case. The giant music label lost viral video mavens OK Go. Peter reminded us that OK Go hasn’t been as viral when it comes to album sales, but the band’s departure is certainly a hit to beleaguered EMI. Peter finished up this week by spending some valuable time on Chatroulette, though not in the way you’re thinking. He covered a conversation that the New York Times had with the Web video chat service creator, Andrey Ternovskiy. Seems that while the 17-year-old isn’t looking to sell Chatroulette right now, he would like Google to pay him the ad money so far denied him on account of his age.
Personal Technology was a little countercyclical this week as Walt reviewed an e-reader device much nearer to the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle than to the iPad. While Walt had some complimentary things to say in regard to the IREX DR800SG e-reader’s design and readability, he’s not a fan overall. The device’s software feels clumsy and it lacks a robust way to download new materials. While the bigger size and sleeker design may be the shape of things to come, Walt put this device squarely behind the Kindle in the purchase line. The Mossblog had a new post for the second week in a row, this time with a video of Walt on WSJ.com’s “Digits” talking about what to consider when purchasing an e-reader. Readability, battery life and ease of purchasing books are what it’s all about, but thanks to the magic of the Mossblog, you can check it out for yourself. Mossberg’s Mailbox featured a few important clarifications this week. Walt fielded queries on AppleTV, securely wiping hard drives and one more magicJack question. Katie got her hot little hands on Motorola’s (MOT) Backflip this week and said the new smartphone, which strangely runs an outdated version of the Android OS, gets high marks for innovative thinking, even if the execution has some bugs. The device offers users a way to use the touchscreen without actually touching it, in this case by placing a touch-sensitive area on the back of the device. The Backflip also features a full keyboard, though all of those features working together in a physical way was cumbersome at times, Katie said. She gave it 6 of 10, but looks forward to more innovation in the space.
That’s all from Weekend Update. We’re staying on the job here in Silicon Valley to keep you up to date with all the tech news, even if you are busy eating ribs, watching bloggers give presentations and listening to indie rock music under the Texas sky. You keep Austin weird. AllThingsD will keep you up to date.
KYEV, March 13 (Reuters) - Ukraine is not on the verge of default despite severe budget holes, newly appointed Finance Minister Fedir Yaroshenko said on Saturday. Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:04 pm
At least in the parts of the internet I frequent, pet pictures have been enjoying an unusual popularity as of late. FujiFilm's Finepix Z700 has technology that snaps a photo when your furry friend smiles. Talk about capturing the zeitgeist. More »
Mirk writes "Back in 1985 it was possible to understand the whole computer, from the hardware up through device drivers and the kernel through to the high-level language that came burned into the ROMs (even if it was only Microsoft BASIC). The Reinvigorated Programmer revisits R. C. West's classic and exhaustive book Programming the Commodore 64 and laments the decline of that sort of comprehensive Deep Knowing."
In my household, we have an almost unhealthy obsession with all things Patagonia. The environmentally conscious surf-and-climb brand from California has just released its lightest fabric ever via the new... Source: RSS feed - channel BNBlogTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 4:04 pm
In my household, we have an almost unhealthy obsession with all things Patagonia. The environmentally conscious surf-and-climb brand from California has just released its lightest fabric ever via the new M10 jacket — it has three layers of waterproof material, air vents for your armpits, a giant hoodie, and weighs only 10 ounces.
According to the rumor mill, the clamshell styled Viliv N5 is going to be available for purchase as of this May. According to the details, which come courtesy of Pocketables, “the plan right now is to release the Viliv N5 in May.” In other words, nothing official has been announced as of yet.
In terms of the Viliv N5 and what it has to offer. Well, feature wise it has a 4.8-inch WSVGA touchscreen display, a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z520 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 32GB SSD and is running Windows 7. Additionally, due to the clamshell design, the N5 also comes sporting a QWERTY keyboard, albeit a small QWERTY keyboard.
Honestly I am not sure about these style of devices, I was able to mess around with the N5 during CES for a few minutes and for me the small keyboard is a device killer. I am in the mind set that if the keyboard is not large enough to touch-type is is not as useful. Personally on a device with a 4.8-inch display I would feel better served by a virtual keyboard, or the ability to pair it with a full-sized Bluetooth keyboard for the occasional typing. That said, my personal feelings regarding the keyboard aside, the Viliv N5 appeared to be a very nice device when I was able to check it out.
krou writes "Talking to the BBC at a private function held at the Royal Society in London, former astronauts Jim Lovell and Eugene Cernan both spoke out about Obama's decision to postpone further moon missions. Lovell claimed that 'it will have catastrophic consequences in our ability to explore space and the spin-offs we get from space technology,' while Cernan noted he was 'disappointed' to have been the last person to land on the moon. Said Cernan: 'I think America has a responsibility to maintain its leadership in technology and its moral leadership ... to seek knowledge. Curiosity's the essence of human existence.' Neil Armstrong, who was also at the event, avoided commenting on the subject."
Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.
Boyd says that privacy is not dead, but that a big part of our notion of privacy relates to maintaining control over our content, and that when we don’t have control, we feel that our privacy has been violated. This has happened a few times recently.
How The Buzz Launch Failed
As a first example Boyd brought up Google Buzz. She says that nothing with the launch was technologically wrong — you could opt out of Buzz, elect to hide your friend list, and so on. But the service resulted in a PR disaster because Google made non-technical mistakes, doing things that didn’t meet user expectations:
Google integrated a public facing system in one of the most private systems you can imagine. Lots of people thought Google was exposing their email to the world.
Google assumed people would opt out if users didn’t want to participate. “I can’t help but notice that more technology companies think it’s ok to expose people tremendously and then back pedal when people flip out”, she says.
You want to help users understand the proposition. You need to ease them in, invite them to contribute their content.
Boyd says that years ago, researchers noticed people in a chat room would often ask “A/S/L” (age, sex, location). So some services, looking to streamlines things a bit, started building user profiles that had this information. What they failed to understand is that this “A/S/L” was a sort of chatroom icebreaker. Users lost that, and putting that information in a profile — even if they would have shared it to answer that chat message — could creep them out.
With Buzz, Google found the social equivalent to the famous “uncanny valley” (where things seem almost natural, but aren’t quite close enough, so they’re creepy). They collapsed articulated networks (email) and assumed it was a personal network.
Boyd then transitioned to talk a bit about the fuzzy lines between what is public and private. She says that just because people put material in public places doesn’t mean it was meant to be aggregated. And just because something is publically accessible doesn’t mean people want it to be publicized.
The Facebook Privacy Fail
Boyd’s second case study was Facebook’s privacy changes in December, when Facebook changed ‘everyone’ to the default. We’ve written extensively on this fiasco, which may take years to really reveal the extent of the damage it has done.
Facebook said 35% of users had read the new privacy documentation and changed something in the privacy settings. Facebook thinks this is a good thing, but it means 65% of population made their content public. Boyd has asked non-techie users to tell her what they thought their settings were. She has yet to find a single person whose actual privacy settings matched what they thought they were.
Boyd recounted a story of a young woman who had moved far away from an abusive father. The young woman talked with her mother (who had moved with her) about possibly joining Facebook. They sat down to make the content as private as possible, which worked well. But in December, the young woman clicked through Facebook’s privacy dialog (as most people did) and had no idea her content was public. She only found out when someone who should not have seen the content told her.
Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.
As an example, Boyd talked about a teenage girl who often put risqué, sometimes illegal content online. When Boyd asked why she’d want to do something, the girl replied, “I want to get a modeling contract just like Tila Tequilla”. Her calculation wasn’t about what she could potentially lose, but rather what she stood to gain.
Boyd says that most techies think about Personally Identifiable Information, but that the vast majority of people are thinking about personally embarrassing information. People often share private information with their friends in part because it allows them to bond, it makes them somewhat vulnerable and establishes trust. But when it’s through technology (e.g. Facebook’s public by default setting) it’s a huge technology fail.
Boyd also called out the presence of racism in social media. On the night of the BET awards last year, all of the trending topics were dominated by terms relating to the event and the black community. In response, some Twitter users made very racist comments — clearly even these open communication platforms are still prone to hate.
To conclude the talk, Boyd pointed out some of the challenges we will continue to face with regard to privacy online. She asks whether or not teachers can be expected to maintain a professional, pristine presence online — something that is very difficult to do while leading a normal life.
Ultimately, she says, “neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both.” We’ve been looking at privacy and publicity as a black-or-white attribute for content, when really it’s defined by context and the implications of what we’ve chosen to share.
Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well.
Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page.
Sort of like a Ping.fm for media, Pixelpipe automatically distributes any new audio files, images, or videos to your profiles on social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed. You can choose to group these services by tags, so you can be more selective about where you’d like to to post the content. Pixelpipe’s CEO Brett Butterfield tells me that Brightkite and possible Gowalla integration will be rolled out in the future.
As the geolocation wars heat up, it seems like web applications and mobile apps, both new and old, are getting into the location game. Hot Potato,SimpleGeo and new startups StickyBits and Social Great have hooked up their applications with Foursquare. And Foursquare competitor Gowalla upped the ante with a new release.
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission is using GPS data collected in every cab to review millions of trips in New York City over the past 26 months and has discovered a huge number in which out-of-city rates, twice the rate charged for rides in the five boroughs, were improperly charged. The drivers' scheme, the commission says, involved 1.8 million rides and cost passengers an average of $4 to $5 extra per trip when drivers flipped switches on their meters that kicked in the higher rates, costing New York City riders a total of $8.3 million. Cab drivers are supposed to charge the higher rate only when they cross the border between New York City and Nassau or Westchester. 'We have not seen anything quite this pervasive,' said Matthew W. Daus, the taxi and limousine commissioner. 'It's very disturbing.' The taxi industry vigorously challenged the city's findings, saying it was unimaginable that such a pervasive problem could be the result of deliberate fraud. The commission says that 75% out of the city's 48,000 drivers had applied the higher rate at least once. Officials hope to roll out a short-term fix in two or three weeks in which an alert will appear on the backseat monitor when a cabbie activates the out-of-town rate."
The North American premiere of American: The Bill Hicks Story delivers a biting dose of the late, great stand-up's routines. But that's just the tip of the iceberg: Fans who've memorized every word will dig the documentary's inventive animation sequences.
There’s something reassuring about the way Asimov speaks on this topic (surely one of his favorites) — even though this clip has got to be 35 or 40 years old, it rings true now and we would do well to take his advice. And how about that transcription? Like human beens indeed. It’s an interesting topic for post-brunch rumination: what would a world built around robots be like? Probably like that nightmare Korean theme park if we’re not careful.
The Battery Replacement Service FAQ on Apple's site outlines their policy for handling iPads with diminished battery capacity, and its surprisingly generous: for a $99 service fee, they'll send you a replacement iPad. More »
When you use a site like Gmail, you have to decide: Do I want to use the service's website, or do I want to use it through an app, like Outlook? Here's how to get the best of both worlds. More »
According to The Financial Times, "Google has drawn up detailed plans for the closure of its Chinese search engine and is now '99.9 per cent' certain to go ahead [with the closure] as talks over censorship with the Chinese authorities have reached an apparent impasse, according to a person familiar with the company’s thinking. In a hardening of positions on both sides, the Chinese government also on Friday threw down a direct public challenge to the US search company, with a warning that it was not prepared to compromise on internet censorship to stop Google leaving." "99.9 per cent" or not, both sides say they'd actually like Google to remain in China, but neither is willing to bend publicly on the question of censorship. If Google closes google.cn, as now seems likely, it could still maintain its R&D office in Beijing and its sales force, who sell ads on google.com targeted into China.
I'm delighted to report that the UK Liberal Democrats' Spring Convention have accepted the emergency motion on internet freedom, and will be debating it tomorrow morning.
The LibDems were plunged into controversy last week when two of the LibDem Lords introduced a pro-web-censorship amendment to the Digital Economy Bill (this amendment was later shown to have been written by record industry lobby group BPI). Outraged party members (including dozens of prospective parliamentary candidates) rallied to fight this shift in party direction toward curtailment of freedom on behalf of corporate lobbyists.
The outcome of that outrage is the emergency motion on internet freedom, called the "Save the Net" memo. It calls for net neutrality, proportionality and due process in copyright enforcement, an absolute rejection of web-blocking and disconnection to solve copyright problems, and other good, principled stands that I'm proud to see my party get behind.
Organisers worked around the clock all week to get the emergency motion accepted for debate. Tomorrow morning, party delegates at the Spring Convention will debate the Save the Net motion from 0915 to 0945. If you are attending the Birmingham convention (or know someone who is!), please help support this motion and get it passed -- let's send a signal to corporate schemers that British law isn't for sale.
If you're not attending the convention, you can still help by joining the Facebook fan page for the motion. If thousands -- tens of thousands! -- of people from around the country and the world show their support for this motion, it will help conference delegates understand how important and far-reaching Internet freedom is.
Laws about copyright and the Internet don't just affect how we get and use cultural works: they affect everything we do with the Internet, whether it's earning a living or staying in touch with family or reporting the news or organising your neighbours around important political issues.
In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.
Mollet's memo, entitled "Digital Economy Bill weekly update 11 March 2010," appears to be a weekly status report on the DEB's progress. On the CC list are executives from major record labels, staff at IFPI (the international record industry lobby), PR agents from The Open Road, and others I don't recognise (if you can identify others on the CC list, please post to the comments).
In the memo, Mollet identifies Britain's top spies as being a stumbling block to the bill's passage -- worried, apparently, that creating a Great Firewall of Britain will make it harder for spies to spy on naughty sites (someone should tell MI5 about Ipredator, the excellent proxy service from the Pirate Bay; after all, that's the same proxy that everyone else in Britain is likely to use to get at the blocked sites if the BPI gets its way).
Mollet also implies that Britain's spy agencies might have paid for a Talk Talk survey in which 71% of 18-34 year olds said that they would simply evade the DEB and go on infringing.
Mollet claims that Britain's ISPs have already caved into their duties to spy on and censor network connections, claiming that there is a sense of "settled will" in the "ISP community."
On the other hand, he identifies Members of Parliament as being "resigned" to the fact that they will not be allowed to debate the bill or give it "detailed scrutiny" (heck of a job, MPs!). He cites an expert on legislation as saying that the bill will likely die if MPs insist on their right and responsibility to examine this legislation in detail before voting on it.
Bueno Aires's Librería El Ateneo Grand Splendid used to be a beautiful movie palace. Saved from the wrecker's ball, it is now one of the most majestic bookstores I've ever clapped eyes upon, a veritable temple to books.
Marilyn sez, "El Ateneo Grand Splendid in downtown Buenos Aires is a spectacular bookstore that retains all the glamour of its former life as a 1920s movie palace, with a original balconies, painted ceiling, ornate carvings and crimson stage curtains.
Photo by Bob Krist for National Geographic Traveler.
The Guardian named El Ateneo as one of the top ten bookshops in the world (along with Secret Headquarters):'Where else can you sit in a theater box and leisurely read a volume of Neruda, or sip a cortado where Carlos Gardel once performed?'"
Here we have yet another ebook reader and yet another rumored launch date. This time the rumor is in regards to the Alex ebook reader from Spring Design and suggests that it will soon be available. Well maybe soon is an understatement here, according to the rumor it will be available as of March 16 which is just a few days away now. Of course, rumor aside the official Spring Design website is still referring to a “first week of March” time frame. And as we can tell from the calendar, that has already passed.
There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.
Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).
As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.
SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.
One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.
Yesterday, Netflix announced that they're pulling the plug on the sequel to their supercool Netflix Prize in which teams competed to improve the company's recommendation algorithm for a million dollar reward. Privacy: can't live with it, can't live without it. More »
sglines writes "Over the last couple of years I've been slowly getting deaf. Too much loud rock and roll I suppose. After flubbing a couple of job interviews because I couldn't understand my inquisitors, I had a hearing test which confirmed what I already knew: I'm deaf. So I tried on a set of behind-the-ear hearing aids. Wow, my keyboard makes clacks as I type and my wife doesn't mumble to herself. Then I asked how much: $3,700 for the pair. Hey, I'm unemployed. The cheapest digital hearing aids they had were $1,200 each. If you look at the specs they are not very impressive. A digital hearing aid has a low-power A-to-D converter. Output consists of D-to-A conversion with volume passing through an equalizer that inversely matches your hearing loss. Most hearing loss, mine included, is frequency dependent, so an equalizer does wonders. The 'cheap' hearing aids had only four channels while the high-end one had twelve. My 1970 amplifier had more than that. I suppose they have some kind of noise reduction circuitry, too, but that's pretty much it. So my question is this: when I can get a very good netbook computer for under $400 why do I need to pay $1,200 per ear for a hearing aid? Alternatives would be welcome."
Two former astronauts say they are disappointed with the U.S. government's decision to cancel NASA's moon landing program. Eugene Cernan, part of the 1972 Apollo 17 mission, said he's... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 12:14 pm
Everyone was shocked when Google took a stand against China’s censorship laws in early January for various reasons spanning from cyber attacks to stricter censorship laws. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has gone on record saying that Google will conclude talks with China soon over the search issue.
If a compromise can not be made, Google will stop filtering search results to Google.cn, something Li Yizhong, China’s minister of Industry and Information Technology, does not approve of.
Yizhong was quoted saying, “I hope Google can respect Chinese rules and regulations. If you insist on taking this action that violates Chinese laws, I repeat: You are unfriendly and irresponsible, and you yourself will have to bear the consequences.”
Whatever these consequences might be, the end result will most likely end up with Google moving search out of the country and losing the largest market of internet users in the world.
As luck would have it, I’ll be in the market for a brand-new phone in the coming weeks. Terribly exciting, yes. But there’s a bit of a problem: the two “biggest” phones out there, the iPhone and all those Android-based ones, rub me the wrong way. Longtime readers will know that I’m fairly neurotic, sorta like George Costanza from Seinfeld. Does the phrase Jerkstore mean anything to you? That’s 100 percent me. (Yes, the irony in linking to Google-owned YouTube is not lost on me.) So what’s a person to do when, for reasons I’ll describe, he wants nothing to do with Apple or Google phones?
I’ve had an iPod touch since last autumn, and there’s no way I could envision using that as a phone. It’s just so cumbersome, I think. I feel like I’m holding a brick in my hand whenever I use it to check WoW.com before going to bed. Plus, I’ve soured on Apple’s attitude in recent years. Again, George Costanza says hi.
On to Google. There’s another company I’ve grown tired of in recent years, the most recent offense thinking it can bully China—China!—into bending to its will under the guise of the free flow of information. Does Google think it’s the East India Company, making demands left, right, and center?
I simply don’t like the companies enough to support them in this fashion.
What are my options?
People love the iPhone, but again: it’s not for me, and that’s based on using the iPod touch for several months. The Droid got high marks, and the Nexus One should be hitting Verizon Wireless (the only wireless provider that has reliable service in my area) in the next few days, but do I really want to spend money supporting Big, Bad Google? Note that I already support Big, Bad Google with my use of Gmail, and don’t think I haven’t thought of weening myself off that!
Or maybe I should take a ridiculous stand and just go without a phone from here on out?
Promising a mix of revenue and flexibility, the startup will offer independent filmmakers a direct route to movie fans.
We're no strangers to the work of Lego master Nathan Sawaya, but his latest creation achieved the impossible: making a Blackberry exciting. It incorporates a working flat screen TV for comfortably displaying video. Clearly he took some artistic liberties. More »
suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins:
"Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. 'Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,' said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. ... Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: 'Together with Mozilla, we're excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,' said program manager Adrian Bateman."
PC World - The Apple iPad has been available for pre-order for more than 24 hours now. Initial demand seems promising, although not everyone has embraced the concept of dedicating $500 or more to be an early adopter of a device that nobody really has all the details on just yet. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 13 Mar 2010 | 11:14 am
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has arrested 30 people suspected of belonging to a U.S.-linked cyber network gathering information on Iranian nuclear scientists and sending people abroad for... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 11:13 am
I am a firm believing in backing up your data, and for the most part I am diligent about doing do. Up until now I have used a mix of services that probably was not the best method of attack, but at the same time it was far from the worst either. If nothing else I can say that I had been much better than most computer users, but now I am looking to be fail proof. In the past I always did a mix of complete backups along with misc file backups, which was good. The bad part here is that I was breaking a golden rule in terms of the complete backups—I was only backing them up locally. You see, I had become dependent on Time Machine and that taught me a lesson yesterday—the external hard drive that I was backing up to died. It just shut off and never came back on. Luckily I had a spare drive in the closet and was able to set that backup again. Of course, that just served as a little wake up call.
Moving forward I have decided to do an on-site and an off-site backup of everything. For that I have chosen to stick with TimeMachine and also add in MozyUnlimited. The Time Machine is a no brainer for a Mac user (plus I already had it set up) and the MozyUnlimited seems to be a good option. Plus MozyUnlimited is only $5 a month.
As for those partial file backups, those are typically my documents and other misc files. They consist of a few folders and range in the ballpark of 5-10GB of space. Nothing major in terms of size. Anyway, for those files I am also going to use a mix of on-site and off-site backups. Except with these I want to be able to access them on the go, just in case. So I guess I am looking for a mix of backup and cloud access here. Luckily there are two good services for that, both of which I had been using already. For these backups I am going to be using Pogoplug and SugarSync. The Pogoplug will be my local copy with SugarSync my off-site copy. And as a bonus both of these services have apps for the iPhone and iPod touch as well as Android.
Anyway, take this drive failure of mine and rethink your backup plan. Remember its best to have backups that are both on-site and also off-site. Unfortunately even with drive failure aside there are things that can ruin a local backup such as a house fire, a burglar or in my case bad weather such as a hurricane.
And for those that are looking for an alternative to the services that I have mentioned, you can always back files up locally and manually to an external USB drive. Of course the best system is one that you do not have to remember to do. I would suggest automating your backup schedule whenever possible. Also, as an alternative to MozyUnlimited you can check out Carbonite, and as an alternative to SugarSync you can also check out Dropbox.
Finally, in terms of costs. Obviously there are some involved here, after all external hard drives and services are not free. Luckily storage has gotten pretty cheap these days and if you ask me, having my data safe seems well worth the price. After all, I have years and years worth of family photos at this point and plenty of documents that I have saved/archived over the years. Not to mention a 101.44GB iTunes folder that I would hate to lose.
In short, backup and then backup your backups. Now with Saturday just beginning I have to go and start my Mozy backup process, which with roughly 250GB of data is going to take some serious time.
In addition to the orientation-lock button, yesterday's pre-order commencement delivered another surprise nugget: the iPad will read all EPUB books out loud. If you remember the shitstorm that surrounded Kindle's text-to-voice feature, you'll know that this is a bold move. More »
Intermolecular polarity is a fancy way of saying "oil and water don't mix". Here, Science Bob explains why, and shows off a fun trick you can do over and over with oil, water, food coloring and alka-seltzer.
Short Version: We now have so much storage in our homes that we could probably, each of us, start our own Rapidshare service. But how do we get all that data to the other machines on our network or, better yet, out onto the Internet?
Devices like the Iomega iConnect allow us to place storage space on our internal networks and expose that data to the world, as needed. However, the iConnect also creates a local iTunes share, adds a Time Machine back-up location, and performs a few other tricks all for $99. While it’s not perfect, it’s pretty cool.
Features:
Four USB ports
iTunes/Time Machine support
Printer support
Wireless
Pros:
Shares data locally and with the world
Compact
Built-in Ethernet port
Cons:
iTunes sharing not selective
Set-up a bit wonky
Doesn’t work with Drobo
The Iomega iConnect Wireless is, in short, a NAS without drives. You can stuck up to four devices onto this thing and even print wireless over your network. When you need to grab a file from one of your drives – and if you’re like me, you have plenty – you just connect to that drive. When you take the drive out of the network it disappears. Add it again and it reappears. The system also offers a remote access service with your own private URL mapped to the iConnect.
The device is fairly easy to set up. You connect to a network, run the enclosed software, and add a disk. As soon as a disk is plugged in it appears as a share on your network. A click and you’re in.
Setup is very straightforward. The desktop UI is barebones and the web UI isn’t much more complex. It isn’t for the average user but you could set it up for Grandma and tell her how to watch her soaps. Besides, it has a Torrent client built right in so she can DL her things on the DL.
For $99 you get a lot of features. Is it better than something like the Netgear Stora? That depends on how many loose drives you have in your collection. If you need to get your data online in a hurry, however, this is a good solution.
In the comments for our quick look one reader, Bryan, found that the device doesn’t support the Drobo, which is a problem. It also seems to only support FAT, FAT32, and NTFS, which could be a problem for larger files. However – and I haven’t tested this – most devices like this will handle large files thanks to the sharing properties and protocols used. The disk format seems to be invisible to OS X.
A couple weeks ago, we noted the city of Topeka, Kansas’ humorous attempt to get Google’s attention: by rebranding their city “Google, Kansas.” Why would they do such a thing? Because they want in on Google’s fiber action — the search giant’s proposed plan to sell 1 gigabit-per-second broadband to consumers. Now Baltimore, Maryland is getting in on the fun as well.
The city has appointed a “Google Czar” — yes, that’s the actual title — to lobby the company to put Baltimore on the list of cities in the initial trial. Tom Loveland, CEO of a local tech company, Mind Over Machines, has been appointed by Baltimore’s mayor to take this exalted, but volunteer position.
The Baltimore movement has also launched a website, BmoreFiber, which states in huge, bold letters, “Ask Google to Invest Billions in Baltimore’s Future.“
These attempts by cities to catch Google’s attention, while humorous, show a massive desire for better broadband in this country. It’s kind of sad that it takes an outsider, Google, to spur faster broadband development. Meanwhile, companies that offer broadband as a core business, like Comcast, drag their feet with service that is an order of magnitude slower at huge prices.
What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp.
Here are all seven pairings: Artist / Technologist
Cao Fei / Jeff Hammerbacher
Evan Roth / Joshua Schachter
Aaron Koblin / Matt Mullenweg
Monica Narula / Andrew Kortina
Ryan Trecartin / Hilary Mason
Tauba Auerbach / Ayah Bdeir
Marc Andre Robinson / David Karp
Schachter, for instance, is being paired with artist Evan Roth, who has created open-source software to analyze graffiti tags and has even created a Graffiti Markup Language (GML). Schachter, of course, pioneered the use of data free-form tags to categorize Delicious bookmarks years ago. Mulennweg is being paired with Aaron Koblin a digital artist who creates art based on the input of thousands of individuals. He is also the artist who created Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video using no cameras (embedded below)
The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here).
The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate which is put the program together.
Here’s a clever yet simple DIY project for you, just in time for the weekend. You could probably even through this thing together before the next camping trip, even if you are heading out tonight. It’s that simple.
Take an inexpensive cooler, chop a couple of holes in the side. Add speakers, wiring, a stereo, and a car battery, and you’re rocking loud enough to disturb the neighbors. Admittedly it’s a little more complicated then that (for example, the author had problems mounting the speakers), but overall it seems like an easy project. The author added a few extra features as well, including a built in charger, a couple of 12v outlets (for charging other devices), and an amplifier with a sub-woofer as well. From looking at his build log for the thing, it’s obvious that this is an ongoing project and I look forward to seeing what other refinements he can come up with.
Talks with China over censorship have reached an apparent impasse and Google, the world's largest search engine, is now "99.9 percent" certain to shut its Chinese search engine, the Financial Times reports.
AP - Factory worker Chen Qinghai frowned as he looked at a tall bulletin board full of help-wanted notices from companies making everything from photocopiers and DVD drives to mobile phones and car parts. Source: Yahoo! News: Technology News | 13 Mar 2010 | 9:11 am
The alleged "world's strongest chicken" is appearing at a Green Bay rodeo where he will pull trainer and rodeo clown Rory Meeks in a specially designed chicken chariot. Source: Discovery News - Top Stories | 13 Mar 2010 | 8:57 am
Those planning to purchase an Asus notebook or netbook in the future can expect to see a few less items included in the box. That items that will be missing—a printed user manual and a recovery DVD.
“ASUS is devoted to creating environment-friendly products/packaging to safeguard consumers’ health while minimizing the impact on the environment. In order to reduce the use of substances harmful to the environment, the EeePC and notebook product package does not come with the notebook support DVD. For system recovery, use the F9 recovery function instead.”
This seems to make sense, especially in the case of the Eee PC’s that do not even have a built-in optical drive. I would imagine that not having a recovery DVD will anger, upset or confuse some but at the same time it always puzzled me a little to include one with an Eee. Either way, moving forward, Asus owners will be able to view the complete user manuals online and should use the F9 key to aid in any recovery efforts.
While standing in line for an hour to get my badge and materials at this year’s SXSW Interactive Conference, I had time to ponder my first trip to Austin for the event. Initially, my plans for attending centered around hunting down and harassing SEO spammers but a little extra time to reflect reminded me of the insensitivity and meaninglessness of such actions. Besides, that time could be much better spent hunting down beer and merch.
All kidding aside, Friday got off to a slow start, panel-wise, but that seemed to suit the nice, laid back nature of this town. At least the AT&T network seemed stable. We’ll see how that goes in the following days. If you have something specific to bitch CrunchGear at SXSW, twoot me at getdonovan.
Check back for details as I sort the good from the bad and pass the info on.
Here is what’s on deck:
The “Location Wars”. I will be speaking with several people intimately involved with providing you the latest location based goodness to help keep your “Check-In” habit interesting.
Botryococcus braunii algae contributed to existing petroleum depositsUsing green algae to produce hydrocarbon oil for biofuel production is nothing new; nature has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years, according a Texas AgriLife Research scientist.“Oils from the green algae Botryococcus braunii can be readily detected in petroleum deposits and coal deposits suggesting that B. braunii has been a contributor to developing these deposits and may be the major contributor,” said Dr. Timothy Devarenne, AgriLife Research scientist with the Texas A&M University department of biochemistry and biophysics. “This means that we are already using these oils to produce gasoline from petroleum.”It’s not just a gee-whiz science trivia, Devarenne said. B. braunii is a prime candidate for biofuel production because some races of the green algae typically "accumulate hydrocarbons from to 30 percent to 40 percent of their dry weight, and are capable of obtaining hydrocarbon contents up to 86 percent of their dry weight."As a group, algae may be the only photosynthetic organism capable of producing enough biofuel to meet transportation fuel demands."Devarenne is part of a team comprised of other scientists with AgriLife Research, the University of Kentucky and the University of Tokyo trying to understand more about B. braunii, including its genetic sequence and its family history.“Without understanding how the cellular machinery of a given algae works on the molecular level, it won't be possible to improve characteristics such as oil production, faster growth rates or increased photosynthesis,” Devarenne said.Like most green algae, B. braunii is capable of producing great amounts of hydrocarbon oils in a very small land area.B. braunii algae show particular promise not just because of their high production of oil but also because of the type of oil they produce, Devarenne said. While many high-oil-producing algae create vegetable-type oils, the oil from B. braunii, known as botryococcenes, are similar to petroleum.“The fuels derived from B. braunii hydrocarbons are chemically identical to gasoline, diesel and kerosene,” Devarenne said. “Thus, we do not call them biodiesel or bio-gasoline; they are simply diesel and gasoline. To produce these fuels from B. braunii, the hydrocarbons are processed exactly the same as petroleum is processed and thus generates the exact same fuels. Remember, these B. braunii hydrocarbons are a main constituent of petroleum. So there is no difference other than the millions of years petroleum spent underground.”But, a shortcoming of B. braunii is its relatively slow growth rate. While the algae that produce 'vegetable-type' oils may double their growth every six to 12 hours, B. braunii’s doubling rate is about four days, he said.“Thus, getting large amounts of oil from B. braunii is more time consuming and thus more costly,” Devarenne said. “So, by knowing the genome sequence we can possibly identify genes involved in cell division and manipulate them to reduce the doubling rate.”Despite these characteristics and economic potential of algae, only six species of algae have had their genomes fully sequenced and annotated, Devarenne said. And B. braunii is not one of the six.Devarenne and his colleagues have done some of the groundwork in better understanding B. braunii and sequencing its genome.They are working the Berkeley strain of the B race of B. braunii, so named because it was first isolated at the University of California at Berkeley. The team has determined the genome size and an estimate of the B race's guanine-cytosine content, both of which are essential to mapping the full genome, he said. There are also races A and L of B. braunii, but they were not looked at by the team.Guanine-cytosine bonds are one of base pairs composing DNA structure. Adenine-thymine is the other possible base pair."Genomes with high guanine-cytosine content can be difficult to sequence and knowing the guanine-cytosine content can help to assess the amount of resources needed for genome sequencing," Devarenne said.The team determined B. braunii’s genome size to be 166.2 ± 2.2 million base pairs, Devarenne said. The size of the human genome is about 3.1 billion base pairs. That of the house mouse is also about 3 billion base pairs. But the B. braunii genome size is larger than any of the other six previously sequenced green algae genomes.The team also looked at the phylogenetic placement of B. braunii – where it belongs in the family tree of similar algae species. Though they knew from the work of other scientists that the B race of B. braunii was distinct from other races of B. braunii, there was some question that the genetic samples of the B race used in a previous study by other scientists might be contaminated by another algal species.To check this, they used a process called reverse transcription to isolate genes from a pure culture of the B race of B. braunii, and then mapped those genes to confirm the relationship of the B race to other races of B. braunii.“Our results support the original Berkeley DNA sequence used for phylogenetic placement was from a contaminating algae,” Devarenne said. “And our study places the B race of B. braunii in the correct location on the ‘algal family tree’.”The actual genome sequencing and mapping will be performed by DOE’s Joint Genome Institute.“We’ve submitted genomic DNA from B. braunii for JGI to use in sequencing, but that hasn’t begun yet,” he said.Devarenne’s research partners include: graduate student Taylor L. Weiss, Texas A&M department of biochemistry and biophysics; Dr. J. Spencer Johnston, Texas A&M department of entomology; Joe Chappell, University of Kentucky department of plant and soil sciences; and Shigeru Okada, the University of Tokyo graduate school of agricultural and life sciences.The results and methods of their study will be published online in the Journal of Phycology, an international journal of algae research, this summer.By Robert Burns, Texas AgriLife Research---Image Caption: The green algae Botryococcus braunii lives as a colony of individual cells held together by an extracellular matrix, according to Dr. Tim Devarenne, Texas AgriLife Research genticist. In this microscopic image, hydrocarbon oils are being released as large droplets from the matrix. Many more smaller oil droplets can be seen as tiny spheres inside each cell. (Texas AgriLife Research photo) Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:38 am
Matt: “I see we just got the latest computer monitors. Take that, South Korea.”
Devin: “Zerg him, comrade”
John: “Our glorious gold farming initiative is the pride of the world.”
Dave: “What?? Doug left CrunchGear?”
Greg: “Our screens may not be bigger, but they are deeper. Take that, South Korea!”
Scott:”I always get sniped on de_dust, too. Don’t let it get you down, brother.”
The person who sends in the best caption, as judged by all of us, gets something from John’s box-o-stuff. We’ll close the contest on Monday at noon New York Time.
via The Big Picture where there are 30 more just as funny pictures.
WWF and TRAFFIC welcome a World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS) statement urging its members not to use tiger bone or any other parts from endangered wildlife.The statement was made at a symposium Friday in Beijing and notes that some of the claimed medicinal benefits of tiger bone have no basis. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:32 am
NEIKER-Tecnalia has studied the influence of soil management and irrigation on yield, vigor and quality in a vineyard in the Denominación de Origen Calificada Rioja Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 13 Mar 2010 | 6:27 am
We’re big fans of Animoto, a website that lets you easily create photo and video slideshows matched to music. The site is constantly innovating its nifty product, most recently adding an iPhone app and the ability to incorporate video. For those not familiar with Animoto, the startup basically allows you to take your images, video and your music and mash them together to create cool videos. What makes the videos cool is the company’s technology that renders the pictures so they’re in-step with the music you’ve chosen, adding nice transition effects. This morning, Animoto is opening up its API, allowing partners to now incorporate Animoto’s compelling technologies into independent sites
The first API that being rolled out for the Animoto Partner Platform is Animoto Quickstart. The API essentially allows any website to tap into Animoto’s video creation flow. The aim is to make Animoto one click away from any website that has photos, videos or music. Quickstart allows websites to connect their own content, including photos, video clips and music to Animoto as the first step in creating an Animoto video. So partners can integrate Animoto’s video slideshow creation tool into their sites. And the startup promises that Quickstart takes only hours to a partner to set up on a site.
For example, SmugMug, a photo sharing site that caters to professional photographers, uses Quickstart so users can ‘pass’ their photo albums into Animoto’s video creation flow. So the user now has the option of making a slideshow from their hosted photos and simply needs to pick a song to complete their Animoto video. Once a user clicks to make the slideshow, he or she will be taken to Animoto’s site, where their video and photos will automatically be placed into Animoto’s site.
Another use case is a promotion Animoto is launching with iconic musician John Bon Jovi where fans of Bon Jovi can go to Bonjovi’s site to create an Animoto music video with Bon Jovi’s latest single and footage from his music video. Pepsi also used the Quickstart API to help users create video slideshows in a contest involving its ShareTheJoy campaign.
With the launch of this API at SXSW, Animoto is partnering with music publication SPIN magazine to allow fans to promote their favorite South by Southwest bands for a chance to win prizes.
From now until March 31, 2010, fans can create and submit Animoto videos featuring songs from top South by Southwest bands for a chance to win $1000 and a spot on Spin.com, and other prizes.
Currently Animoto has 1.4 million users and makes money off of its paid subscriptions. On its site its free to create 30 second videos, but you need to pay $3 per video to make an lengthier slideshow. The site sells a year long subscription to users for $30. A large part of Animoto’s subscription business is composed of professional videographers and photographers who pay $250 per year to create their own branded videos that they can download, and burn to a CD (and the slideshow doesn’t bear the “Animoto” logo). Animoto’s CEO Brad Jefferson tells me that 10 percent of users, so 140,000 people, are have paid for at least one product on the site.The company is already cash-flow positive, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s less than three years old.
In terms of monetizing the API, Animoto isn’t charging any of its partners. In fact, it’s actually paying its partners in terms of affiliate fees. So if any partners lead new users to the site who end up buying a subscription, Animoto will give the partner a 40 percent cut of the first year’s consumer subscription fee or $50 of the first years pro subscription fee.
The Quickstart API seems to be the first of a few sets of APIs that will extend Animoto’s technology onto the other sites. It’s a smart move. While many photo sharing sites have the ability to make slideshows, the technology is not nearly as fun and easy to use as Animoto’s. And Animoto is undoubtedly a compelling tool for an brand marketer to use for a campaign. Frankly, the possibilities are endless because Animoto is such an easy tool to use.
Handset leader Nokia and iPhone creator Apple will seek a U.S. court hearing in a key patent battle in two years, raising the specter of a prolonged legal struggle. Nokia sued Apple last October, saying the company used its patented technologies without paying them. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:49 am
The Atlantic bluefin tuna and other marine life in the world's overfished oceans are the focus of a United Nations conference in the Gulf state of Qatar. The 175-nation Convention on... Source: RSS feed - channel BNewsTech | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:43 am
On Friday, a global Internet oversight agency deferred a decision until June on whether to create an "xxx" Internet suffix for porn Web sites, according to the Associated Press (AP). Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:40 am
Scientists said Friday that dozens of decapitated skeletons have been found in southern England, and they are believed to be those of 1,000-year-old Vikings. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:35 am
A federal court ruled on Friday that cable companies will still have to make sports programming and other channels they own available to satellite companies and other TV providers. The U.S. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 13 Mar 2010 | 5:20 am
The Justice Department said on Thursday that a California sushi chef and the restaurant that he worked for have both been charged with illegally serving meat from an endangered Sei whale. Source: RedOrbit News - Science | 13 Mar 2010 | 4:55 am
Online scams and other types of cybercrime cost computer users more than $559 million in losses in 2009, said an FBI-led task force on Friday. Source: RedOrbit News - Technology | 13 Mar 2010 | 4:45 am
AP - Motion controls and social gaming were the hot topics at this week's Game Developers Conference, the annual convention of game designers, programmers and executives.
I am the 90-year-old producer of the 1956 family home movie, Disneyland Dream, which you first BoingBoinged nearly two years ago, on April 11, 2008.
With virtually every twittery, techie media fanboy and girl swarming all over the greater Austin area this week, it feels a little empty in the Bay Area. The sun is shining, but Dolores park is just a little emptier. There are fewer fixed-gear bikes darting between cars in the Mission District, and convenience store shelves are overflowing with unpurchased Pabst Blue Ribbon. Weekend Update feels a little left out, sitting here staring longingly at all the #sxsw twitter tags. But we know why we stayed behind this year. It was to bring you all the updates from a wild week of tech. Neither rain, nor snow, nor a hipster-packed BBQ joint can keep AllThingsD from our appointed post, though. 
According to the rumor mill, the clamshell styled Viliv N5 is going to be available for purchase as of this May. According to the details, which come courtesy of Pocketables, “the plan right now is to release the Viliv N5 in May.” In other words, nothing official has been announced as of yet.
Today at SXSWi, keynote speaker Danah Boyd took the stage to talk about privacy and publicity, and how they intertwine online. Boyd is a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and has studied this space extensively for years. It was a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private. To help underscore her points, she recalled and discussed a number of major privacy blunders from Facebook and Google. You can find my notes from the presentation below.
I'm delighted to report that the UK Liberal Democrats' Spring Convention have accepted the emergency motion on internet freedom, and will be debating it tomorrow morning.
In this leaked, six-page email, Richard Mollet, the Director of Public Affairs for the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's record-industry lobbyists), sets out the BPI's strategy for ramming through the Digital Economy Bill, a sweeping, backwards reform to UK copyright law that will further sacrifice privacy and due process in the name of preserving copyright, without actually preserving copyright.
Here we have yet another ebook reader and yet another rumored launch date. This time the rumor is in regards to the Alex ebook reader from Spring Design and suggests that it will soon be available. Well maybe soon is an understatement here, according to the rumor it will be available as of March 16 which is just a few days away now. Of course, rumor aside the official Spring Design website is still referring to a “first week of March” time frame. And as we can tell from the calendar, that has already passed.
There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. 
A couple weeks ago, 
Here’s a clever yet simple DIY project for you, just in time for the weekend. You could probably even through this thing together before the next camping trip, even if you are heading out tonight. It’s that simple.
While standing in line for an hour to get my badge and materials at this year’s 
