At the 1964 New York World's Fair, people stood in line for hours to check out "Futurama." Forty years later, we're still waiting for congestion-free highways, jet packs and the paperless office. What's holding up our "Star Trek"-like gadgets?
President Obama announced today he is creating the post of cyber security coordinator to oversee "a new comprehensive approach to securing America's digital infrastructure."
Advances in the study of coral in the last few years has led a group of scientists to conclude that corals almost rival humans in their genetic complexity and their relationship to algae is key to their survival.
He's a helicopter test pilot who spent 18 years in the British Army. He just beat more than 8,400 others to become one of Europe's newest astronauts, destined for the International Space Station.
The first comprehensive report into the human cost of climate change warns the world is in the throes of a "silent crisis" that is killing 300,000 people each year.
On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback. Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal. We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well. One interesting insight from the conversation: I ask Reback if he thinks we’d be in a better world if Microsoft had in fact been broken up into two or more companies as was originally ordered. His response - “no.” The investigation and lawsuits themselves, he said, did enough to force Microsoft’s hand and allow browsers like Firefox, Chrome and others to blossom. We’re giving away 15 autographed copies of Reback’s book. We’ll determine the winners in the same way we did with Sarah Lacy’s book - retweet this post using the green button below. We’ll select the winners randomly from retweets that occur by midnight California time on July 3rd. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million. More on that later. Now that Linden Lab has been around for nearly 10 years, and with its product Second Life celebrating its sixth birthday since launching publicly in June 2003, we thought it would be a good idea to take a close look at the report and see how the company’s doing according to the analysts. First of all, you may be wondering if anyone is still using Second Life at all. The answer is yes, and users are very active on there. During the past 30 days, one million users logged in, according to Second Life’s own statistics. In average time spent per user per week, Second Life in fact trounces all other MMORPGs, including World of Warcraft and Civilization IV. In another testament to the service’s apparent stickiness, the number of hours users spend on Second Life has been increasing steadily and is currently at historic highs, totaling approximately 124 million hours in the first quarter of this year. More importantly, Next Up says in-world transactions have recovered after a significant drop in September 2007 - when gambling was banned in the virtual world - and has been steadily increasing ever since December 2007. Which brings us to the valuation, or at least the estimated value Next Up claims Linden Lab is worth after running a couple of calculations. Using publicly-traded online gaming companies as a proxy, Next Up pegs the median enterprise value (EV)/ Revenue multiple for that group at 7.2x off of 2009 revenues. Subsequently applying this self-proclaimed “conservative” multiple of 7x to the estimated revenue of Linden Lab ($100 million for this year), the current target valuation amounts up to $700 million. That seems like a stretch. In November 2007, the last time we asked ourselves how much Second Life is worth, we came out somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. The current estimated enterprise value calculated by Next Up falls pretty much right into the middle of that range. Next Up defends the 7x multiple variable by referring to a two-year-old M&A deal. When Disney acquired Club Penguin for $350 million in cash back in August 2007, it paid out at least a comparable multiple based on Vlub PEnguin’s projected revenue for the year (between $50 and $65 million), despite the fact that it reaches a narrower demographic profile. But things have changed since then: stocks have tanked, valuations have dropped, the IPO market has pretty much dried up and VC-backed liquidity is at a record low. So that implies a major discount, with a valuation between $300 million to $500 million, which is decent but not spectacular, assuming Next Up’s revenue projection is accurate. Here’s what else Next Up says could have a negative impact on Second Life’s valuation: - the aging population of its main target markets (U.S. and Europe) and less of a presence in developing nations where its main target audience (people from 13 to 45) is quickly gaining in size. - limited amount of premium subscriptions (about 1% or 170,000 users) - possible taxation on virtual monetary transactions in a variety of countries - cost and complexity of running the technical infrastructure behind the virtual world If you’re interested in the virtual worlds or Linden Lab in particular, there’s a ton of information and speculation about the market to be found in the report, even if we focus mostly on the financial side of things. To conclude, here are two charts from the report, one on the estimated valuations based off of different calendar years and one on the post-money valuations after the various funding rounds raised by the company. CrunchBase Information Linden Lab Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
It’s been a nice two weeks in San Francisco, but in about 10 hours I’m headed to SFO’s international terminal again. This time, I’m going to London. I’m traveling as part of a group of bloggers, authors and videographers called “The Traveling Geeks,” whose mission is simply to go to various cities around the world and try to learn as much about its tech scene as we can. Our first trip was to Israel last year; now we’re headed to London. It’s a rag-tag group that includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Meghan Asha of Nonsociety, Robert Scoble of everywhere, videographer JD Lasica and many other fine geeks you can read all about at the link above. As a Sarah-Lacy-bonus-feature I’m sticking around London an extra week, mostly to do some interviews for my book. But I’ll also be meeting with companies, handing out an award at the TechCrunch Europas Awardsfor European startups, hosted by our network site TechCrunch Europe, and—yes, Arrington—writing some posts as well on what I find. We’re kicking the whole trip off with a Tweet-Up this Sunday night. I think we’ve got about 50 slots left if you act quickly! Yes, there’s a fee to get in, but it comes with free drinks, food and all the Scobleizer you can handle. And, if that’s not enough for you Euro-techies, Intel is giving away a few laptops. (Intel is a sponsor for the trip. For more on sponsors and our ethics statement go here.) Discount code and other details are here. Hope to see you all there or at the Europas! Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
According to The Hollywood Reporter, movie studio Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game “Asteroids”. Initially released as an arcade game back in 1979, Asteroids featured a triangular space ship that needed to be navigated through an asteroid field. The object was to shoot and destroy masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both, so we suspect it will not turn out to be romantic comedy. Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer of both Transformers movies as well as the 2005 adaptation of the Doom game. Also wondering how you could possibly build a script around the simple game? Universal is just going to try and see if it sticks: “As opposed to today’s games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch.” (Hat tip to The Register, which offers some advice for a story line and potential cast) Asteroids made by Neave Games Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks. Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week month. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every month week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week. More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
This is really unfortunate. eMusic used to be a great example of how treating customers right and with respect and trust could win over more customers -- but in the last month or so, it seems like the company is throwing all that out the window and pissing off customers left and right. Beyond the big price increase at the same time as signing its first major record label (bad PR to announce both together), the company has censored critics and removed the feature that let you redownload songs you'd purchased before, at your convenience. However, now we're hearing that there were a bunch of other features that were removed as well. An anonymous reader notes: "July 1 was the first day in the Sony era over at eMusic. Despite published interviews with eMusic executives, FAQs on the eMusic web site and messages from eMusic employees on the eMusic forums attempting to clarify the new pricing structure, there were quite a few surprises. Some of the changes I've noticed (or read about in the forums) include: Certain tracks can only be downloaded with "paid" credits, not the free credits eMusic hands out for trial memberships. Individual track downloads disabled for tracks longer than 10 minutes - you must download the entire album Certain (popular) sub-10-minute tracks disabled for individual download No downloading individual discs in multi-disc sets Most new albums use 12-credit album pricing (very few reports of 6 or 9 credit album pricing) Many (a significant portion in the classical section at least) albums with fewer than 12 tracks cost 12 credits Many albums previously available on eMusic have been re-priced (in some cases, tracks available for 1 credit on June 30 now require 12 credits) IMO, the fact that eMusic did such a poor job communicating these important changes suggests that they deliberately withheld (or downplayed) this information, possibly to keep from fueling the outrage generated from last month's Sony/pricing announcement." This seems like an increasing disaster. Hopefully some of these changes are mistakes, rather than permanent. But the way this whole situation has been handled is going to make a terrific case study in how not to do PR. eMusic has turned from a company that customers really loved into one that many seem to hate... and it's happened in an incredibly short time frame. That's really unfortunate.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
It's been shown repeatedly that redlight cameras don't appear to make intersections any safer, but they do act as a nice revenue generator for cities. In fact, at times it's such a tempting revenue generator that city officials cannot resist the urge to tamper with the timing of the lights to get more people running "red" lights that really should have been yellow. The latest such case, as pointed out by Jeff Nolan, happened in Arizona. According to regulations, the yellow light at a certain intersection was required to last 4.3 seconds: 4 seconds for the road being 40 mph and another 0.3 seconds due to the way the road curves. Yet, over 1,000 motorists were ticketed, in part because the traffic light had been adjusted so that the yellow light only lasted 3 seconds, 70% of the required length. Thanks to some enterprising motorists who timed the light and complained, those who were caught are getting back their money and having the citations removed from their record.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
We've pointed out time and time again how silly it is for politicians to run around trying to ban each and every driver distraction, rather than just focusing on beefing up laws for reckless driving. There have been laws or proposals against driving while talking on a phone, texting, viewing a video screen, faxing, eating, shaving, playing video games and even having sex. And now, Comboman alerts us to a proposal in New Jersey to ban drivers from using GPS devices that require manual programming. Instead, drivers could only use those with voice control features. Next up? Who's going to ban adjusting the radio dial or the air conditioning?Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
A bunch of folks have been sending in variations on the news that Blizzard has killed off LAN support for StarCraft II. The Buzz Saw points out that Blizzard seems to be taking the same old tactic of claiming that this removal of a feature is for the benefit of users, noting that this is "the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience." However, the company also does admit that it was a "difficult decision" and that a larger part of the reason may have been to "safeguard against piracy." Either way, this seems like a move that's designed to backfire badly. It's all about taking away value, rather than adding value (or a reason to buy). LAN parties using StarCraft were a huge part of the appeal of the game -- and even though there were many pirated versions out there, it's part of what drove more people to buy the legitimate version. One thing that we've seen over and over again is that any business that focuses on "safeguarding against piracy" isn't focusing enough on providing unique value to customers. It's amazing that it still needs to be explained in this day and age, but you succeed in business by providing more positive value to customers, not in taking it away just because it doesn't fit with your business model.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
It's interesting to see the logical pretzels that certain business execs will twist themselves into to defend a poor business model against one that customers enjoy much more. Take for example, the claim from cable firm Rainbow Media's CEO, Josh Sapan, that free video online somehow "insults" people who pay for cable: "I do think it's important to be technologically progressive and responsive to what consumers want. But that's a different thing, in my mind, from creating bad habits," Sapan said in an interview. "To offer these shows for free ... It's almost insulting to the consumer who's paying money for it, because it says to that consumer, 'What are you doing?'" Of course you could make the identical argument for any obsolete product. The telephone apparently "insulted" telegraphy purchasers. The airplane apparently "insulted" those who traveled by boat across the ocean. The printing press? Man, did that ever insult those monks who wrote out bibles by hand. Honestly, it's yet another sign of the entitlement culture, where some seem to assume they're entitled to keep their business model, and it's somehow "insulting" to show their customers that there are better/cheaper/more efficient ways to get what they need.Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
For a complete collection of Twitter resources, check out The Twitter Guide Book, Mashable’s hub for all things Twitter. - Most Twitter users probably follow under a thousand other people, but that’s enough to make it hard to keep track of the real-time stream. I actually started having trouble keeping up when I hit about 50 follows — and depending on how prolific the people you’re following are, you could be dealing with a hard-to-parse Twitter stream even following just a handful of people. But while people like social media fanatic Robert Scoble, who follows over 100,000 people, appear to have the superhuman ability to stay on top of things, the rest of us need help filtering the Twitter stream. Fortunately, there are a good number of methods and applications we can put to work to filter tweets from the people we’re following. Which work best for you? Let us know in the comments. (Please note that a few of the apps in this post actually do multiple types of filtering, and so could have theoretically been added to more than one category.) By Keyword One way to filter Twitter is by keyword. Filttr is a full-featured, web-based Twitter app that includes keyword-based filtering. You can both blacklist and whitelist key phrases and Filtter will block or allow those tweets. Flittr, though, has a pretty steep learning curve, and before I even added any keywords it started filtering tweets — and took a particular dislike to a few of my Twitter friends. I’m not sure what criteria it was using for those initial filters. Another full web-based client that includes keyword filtering is Mixero, which is in private beta. Philtro, which is also in private beta, learns what types of tweets you like based on your ratings. Give thumbs up and thumbs down ratings to tweets, and Philtro slowly figures out what you like and attempts only to bother you with tweets you’d be likely to want to read. By Links About 19% of all tweets contain links, but if your Twitter stream moves quickly, you may miss many of the best unless you use a filter. MicroPlaza organizes the links tweeted by out by your followers by recency or popularity. MicroPlaza personalizes the concept employed sites like Tweetmeme, Twitt(url)y, and dailyRT, which assume that the more a link is tweeted, the more worthwhile it is of your attention. MicroPlaza not only looks at which links are being tweeted and retweeted the most, but also which are being tweeted specifically by the people you’re following. The idea is that you’re most interested in things your followers are saying (otherwise, you wouldn’t be following them), so if they tweet about popular links, they’re more likely to be of interest to you. One of the coolest features of MicroPlaza, though, is that you can assume the identity of any other Twitter user — so if you follow someone very connected to a specific industry, you can see the links that their friends are sharing. By Grouping Another way to filter Twitter, is by organizing your friends into groups. By putting the people you’re following into groups, you can break up and effectively slow down your Twitter stream, making it easier to follow tweets from your friends, colleagues, and family members. There are a ton of different ways to organize you friends into groups, but one of the easiest is to use a Twitter client that supports grouping, such as desktop heavyweights Seesmic Desktop, Destroy Twitter, and TweetDeck (which has a complimentary iPhone app that also supports groups), or a web-based app like PeopleBrowsr. Another option is to use a service that helps you create channels or groups of Twitter users and monitor their tweets. Floxee is one of the most full-featured such sites. It not only lets users monitor the tweetstream of a predefined group, but also displays stats about the activity of that group (or “flock”). Other sites you could use include TwitHive, Tweetizen, Twhanel, Crowdstatus, TwittGroups.com, and TweetChannel. Disclosure: TweetDeck partnered with Mashable to create MashDeck, a branded version of the software. By Favorites Favorites aren’t the best way to filter tweets, because the reasons you favorite tweets might not be the same as other people. However, by the same token, tweets that have been favorited by multiple users are generally worth reading for some reason: they’re interesting, funny, clever, extraordinary, etc. Favrd keeps track of the most favorited tweets, but is limited to those users who have signed up with the service to have their favorites watched. (Careful: Favrd is often NSFW.) Favotter is another favorite tracking site, but again, watches a limited number of users (due to API limitations, according to the site’s about page). BONUS: TwitterForBusyPeople doesn’t really filter Twitter, but it does organize your recently active follows in a way that you can get an “at a glance” view of the activity of people you’re following. Once you get used to it, it is potentially a good way to make your Twitter stream more manageable. BONUS 2: Twalala does keyword filtering, but where it really shines is the ability to mute certain users to remove their tweets from your twitter stream temporarily. Bird illustration via Flickr user matthamm. Reviews: Flickr, Mashable, Mixero, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Tweetizen, Twitter
We’ve noted before that China’s Green Dam, web filtering program supposedly designed to block pornography, but in reality a serious threat to privacy and security, was obviously created in a haste, with many of its shortcomings being revealed as the story unwinds. Now, besides the fact that it doesn’t work on 64-bit operating systems, we have another one: it doesn’t support Macs. Thus, Apple’s computers seem to be – at least for the time being – exempt from the order that all PC makers must include Green Dam with new PCs sold in China. This is probably just another temporary setback to the controversial Green Dam initiative, as the program will undoubtedly get updated to include support for currently unsupported operating systems. IDG writes: “A service representative at a sister company to Green Dam’s main developer, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, said the company is testing the software on non-Windows platforms and will release an updated version if compatibility is added for other OSes.“ Yes, the program is a possible security threat, and yes, the entire initiative was launched before it was actually possible to implement. But judging by the fact that most PC makers have already started to comply with the demands of Chinese authorities – even with the actual initiative being postponed – proves that all those shortcomings probably won’t be enough to stop it.
Readers may have noticed that Google changed the way it displays search results this week: the Google logo is smaller, results are indented and spacing has been added above the search box. Google also removed the page size indicator, which gives you a hint of how long the page might take to load. Reader Marek Foss sent us screenshots comparing the old and the new layout (below), which he feels looks more like Google AdSense than a page of Google search results. And yet we know that such changes can have a significant effect of Google’s revenue and page load times – removal of features (eg. page size indicator) gains a fractional boost in load times, for instance. We also know that Google is meticulous in optimizing pages, and that asking the user what they want (as we do here) might not result in the correct answer, as a CNET article last year explained: For example, Mayer said, the company wanted to find out how many search results to show users–the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they’d like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise. Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters. Google’s latest layout change, then, isn’t likely to be for aesthetic purposes: it’s for speed and revenue. The question is: do you, like Mark, find it less aesthetically appealing? Are you a fan of the new Google layout?(trends) Reviews: Google
As a lot of e-commerce businesses and Twitter users are noticing, the entire Authorize.Net infrastructure crashed a few hours ago. For anyone who makes a purchase online, this is huge; Authorize.Net is the largest service for accepting credit cards and e-checks through the web. This means that millions of web-based transactions and purchases have come to a halt. Luckily, Authorize.Net understands the usefulness of social media in situations like these. They set up a new Twitter account, @AuthorizeNet, earlier today to keep users informed about the recovery of one of the web’s most important payment systems. So what took Authorize.Net down anyway? And when will it be 100% back? Twitter and the status of Authorize.Net According to AuthorizeNet, the cause of the outage was a fire at their datacenter in Seattle. This impacted not only their website and transaction platforms, but even their backup center. Couple this with the fact that today starts the 4th of July holiday weekend, and you have a recipe for disaster. Luckily, it seems that transaction processing has returned, although global processing is still down: This is the most important aspect of the outage – without the payment system, merchants couldn’t accept credit card payments, which could result in millions of dollars lost among all of its vendors. The website is still down, meaning that accounts can’t be accessed. Luckily, the company had the foresight to use Twitter to keep merchants and users informed. We will update this post with any new developments on the situation. Reviews: Twitter
I don’t play World of Warcraft anymore. The doctor ordered me not to. Suffice to say that I actually started reading about TweetCraft 10 hours ago, and then ended up watching the entire BlizzCon ‘08 PVP tournament replay. However, if I did play today, I’d definitely appreciate the ability to tweet in-game. Waiting for 25 people to come together for a raid, or standing in front of the battlegrounds gives you a lot of time to kill, and what better way to do it than to tweet your heart away? Now you can. TweetCraft, a Twitter plugin for World of Warcraft been in the works for a while, and although it’s still not the easiest thing to install (read the full instructions and some background here), it’s fully functional. Basic features, beside in-game tweeting, are the ability to queue tweets for later, upload in-game screenshots through TwitPic, autotweet certain events such as entering an instance (for the love of God, please don’t use this option), and the ability to connect with other AddOns which can also register events and set them to autotweet. If you’re worried about breaking Blizzard’s terms of service, it’s a bit of a gray area, but you’re probably safe. From the FAQ: “Is this a violation of World of Warcraft’s Terms of Use or the new AddOn policies? As far as we know, no. We do not do any internal memory reading or other hacks to the Warcraft client. You could argue that it’s possible to follow a Twitter user that would add advertising in-game which would violate the addon policy for in-game advertising, but the onus is on the user of TweetCraft to ensure the people they friend don’t write messages (Tweets) that violate Warcraft’s AddOn policy. In short, it’s up to each person to ensure they’re following Warcraft’s terms of use. “ However, since it is, in part, a third-party app, it’s always wise to wait for official word from Blizzard before you install it. There are some bad news, too: it doesn’t work on Macs, as it requires an external, Windows-based application to run while you play. Download TweetCraft here, check out an introductory video below, and remember; if you need a shaman, PVP-specced, has a job but will probably get fired after reactivating his account, I’m back at Burning Legion (EU) (;. Reviews: Twitpic, Twitter
Aetna Inc. will offer free credit monitoring for a year to about 65,000 people after some e-mails were copied from the health insurer's job application Web site. Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna said Social Security numbers of current and former employees and people who received job offers from the company were stored on the Web site, which was maintained by an outside vendor. Most of the information was from current and former employees. For people who received job offers, the site also stored phone numbers, addresses and employment histories. Aetna has no reports that this information or the Social Security numbers were copied, spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said. "We know for certain that the e-mails were accessed, we don't know whether or not anything else was accessed," she said. "But we're erring on the side of caution, we want people to know." The site held e-mail addresses for about 450,000 people who had applied for jobs or submitted resumes to the company, but Michener said they don't know how many were copied. Some people left their e-mails on the site so they could be notified if an opening came up that matched their skills. Michener said some of these e-mails were copied from the site and then used to contact applicants. She said Aetna hired an outside company to perform a "thorough forensic review" of the site, but they haven't been able to pinpoint how the breach happened. The managed care company first heard about the problem in early May, when it received complaints from applicants who received phony e-mails that told them they had a job offer or asked for personal information like addresses and telephone numbers. Aetna immediately shut down the Web site and started investigating, Michener said. It posted a warning on its main Web site, http://www.aetna.com, that the e-mails were not coming from the health insurer. The...
In this digital, password-protected world, just how many passwords do you have to remember at any given time? While it's not a good idea to use the same password for all your accounts or to leave a list of your passwords posted on your computer terminal (yes, it happens all the time), here are a few guidelines from Nick Forcier, CEO of Large Software (www.largesoftware.com), to keep passwords, as well as the data they are designed to protect, safe. * Make it impersonal. Don't use personal information, such as the names of your pets, relatives, or birthdays, to create a username, login, or password. Identity thieves are experts at sifting though data on the web to find such details. While selecting (and remembering) new passwords may be more difficult to do, it's far easier than trying to fix a stolen identity. * One size doesn't fit all. In a nutshell, diversify. Don't use the same login and password across several sites, cards, and accounts. Forcier says once a thief gains access to such a golden password, access to data will be like a house of cards, allowing thieves to access your entire financial portfolio one by one. * Longer is better. Studies have shown that it's easy to guess many user-chosen passwords automatically. Short passwords are also more susceptible to commercial tools that can recover passwords. Such software is capable of testing 200,000 passwords per second, says Forcier. To improve the strength of your password, go longer: Select a minimum of eight characters with uppercase and lowercase letters and include a mix of letters, numerals, and symbols. Be creative: Don't use words found in the English dictionary. * Make it tough. Don't use a simple password such as "12345678," "222222," or "abcdefg." Avoid sequential passwords or using passwords that use adjacent letters on a...
Google Inc. is hatching a new species of e-mail and instant messaging, but the Internet search leader first wants the hybrid service to evolve even more with the help of independent computer programmers. The free tool, called "Google Wave," runs in a Web browser and combines elements of e-mail, instant messaging, wikis and photo sharing in an effort to make online communication more dynamic. Google hopes Wave simplifies the way people collaborate on projects or exchange opinions about specific topics. Google offered the first glimpse of its latest offering Thursday during the Mountain View, Calif.-based company's annual conference for software developers who build programs on top of its services. The rest of the Web-surfing public won't be able to hop on Google Wave until later in the year. (Go to http://wave.google.com for a preview.) By the time Wave rolls out for everyone, Google hopes independent programmers will have found new ways to use the service. Among other things, Google is counting on outsiders to figure out how to weave Wave into the popular Internet communications service Twitter, social networks like Facebook and existing Web-based e-mail services, said Lars Rasmussen, a Google engineering manager. Rasmussen and his brother, Jens, helped build Google's online mapping service, which sprouted a variety of unforeseen uses after its 2005 debut because of the ingenuity of external programmers. Having learned their lesson from the mapping experience, the Rasmussens wanted to give developers ample time to tinker with their newest creation before unleashing it on the rest of the world. The Rasmussens broke away from Google's mapping service in 2006 to concentrate on building a service that would enable e-mail and instant messaging to embrace the Web's increasingly social nature. They contend e-mail hasn't changed that much since its invention during the 1960s. "We started out by saying to ourselves, `What might e-mail look like...
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer put days of speculation to rest Thursday by announcing the software giant's new search engine, named Bing as expected. The engine will replace Windows Live Search as it begins rolling out in the next few days, with full deployment by June 3. Ballmer made the announcement at the D: All Things Digital conference. When it fully launches, users will be able to go to www.bing.com, type in a search word and use tools to narrow the focus in four areas -- purchase decisions, trip planning, researching a health condition, or finding a local business. "Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don't do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find," Ballmer said. "When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web." He added that Bing is the first step in a long-term effort to help people find information more quickly and use that information. How It Works To emphasize problems with current search engines, Microsoft pointed to a report by Ipsos Mendelsohn that found 66 percent of Internet visitors use searches to make complex choices. Another report by comScore showed 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. These problems led Microsoft to focus on a "decision engine." Bing uses features such as Best Match to find the best answer for a search, Deep Links to give searchers information on what a Web site offers, and Quick Preview, an additional window that expands over a search caption to give users more information about the site's relevancy. The search engine also incorporates Instant Answers, a feature designed to provide information within the body of the search-results page. Internet search...
May 28, 2009 Endeca Technologies, a search applications company, announced today the availability of the Endeca Manufacturing Suite, providing manufacturers with visibility that reduces risk and cost, and increases product quality by enhancing decision-making across the supply chain. Endeca also announced the availability of Design for Supply 2.0, one of the search applications in the Manufacturing Suite. Design for Supply 2.0 helps global engineering and sourcing departments to better collaborate when choosing optimal parts for a new design to improve upstream part selection decisions to cut downstream costs. Endeca's Manufacturing Suite also includes two additional search applications - Spend Analysis and Warranty Analysis - built on a single platform. Endeca manufacturing customers, including Boeing, Ford Motor Company, Harris Corporation, John Deere, Raytheon, and Weatherford, rely on Endeca for information visibility across the value chain. Endeca manufacturing customers have saved tens to hundreds of millions of dollars by enabling global engineering, sourcing, quality and warranty departments to better collaborate across the value chain. The Endeca Manufacturing Suite provides visibility across previously siloed systems for key decision points in the value chain, such as selecting the best parts for a new product design, selecting the lowest risk supplier, and identifying the true source of product failures. Each search application in the Suite helps engineering, sourcing, quality, and warranty departments to easily interact with large volumes of diverse and changing information, improving millions of daily decisions. The suite makes the entire value chain more flexible and adaptable, raising quality while cutting costs. The Endeca Manufacturing Suite is built on the McKinley release of the Endeca Information Access Platform, announced in March. The new platform boasts a redesigned engine that takes advantage of multi-core processors from chipmakers such as Intel to deliver faster performance on greater volumes of data on fewer servers. For developers, advances announced...
The final act of the year's biggest pop culture sensation will not be seen on TVs, beamed out to multiplexes or heard much on the airwaves. Well, at least not in America. The phenomenon of Susan Boyle, seen by millions of Britons on ITV's "Britain's Got Talent," has been a worldwide digital storm played out in sporadic installments on the Internet. Videos of her first performance in April -- "I Dreamed a Dream" from the musical "Les Miserables" -- have been watched more than 220 million times, according to Internet video research firm Visible Measures.
The same developers who gave you Google Maps now think they've come up with the single best way for users to navigate all the communication and collaboration tools they currently use on a computer. Judging from some early tech press/blogger reaction, as well as an early thumbs-up from the development community, Google Wave may indeed have the ability to take on not only the most popular office applications, but also the hottest social networks. Google Wave washed over the crowd Thursday at Google's I/O developer conference in San Francisco.
President Barack Obama held a press conference on Friday to announce the creation of a new White House office of cybersecurity, helmed by a chief who will report to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. That person has not yet been named, but speculation is rampant that it will be Melissa Hathaway, who led a recent two-month review on cybersecurity issues. The new cybersecurity czar will integrate and coordinate all cybersecurity policies for the government.
There are lots of interesting tidbits floating around the Apple-focused blogosphere lately -- Apple quietly updated its low-end white MacBook, upstart Mac cloner Psystar filed for bankruptcy, and Steve Wozniak reportedly spoke to Steve Jobs on the phone, who apparently sounded "energetic." Not surprisingly, though, some of the most interesting news revolves around mobile action: AT&T is seen to be deploying a decent upgrade to its networks ahead of the next iPhone launch; the Palm Pre reportedly syncs with iTunes; and Microsoft's not-yet-released Zune HD brings with it a sweet touchscreen.
A prestigious Japanese university is giving away hundreds of iPhones, in part to use the device's global positioning system to nab students that skip class. Truants in Japan often fake attendance by getting friends to answer roll call or hand in signed attendance cards. That's verging on cheating since attendance is a key requirement for graduation in Japan. Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo is giving Apple's iPhone 3G to 550 students in its School of Social Informatics, which studies the use of Internet and computer technology in society.
In an effort to "provide the best video viewing experience possible" on our "lappity-toppity boxes," Hulu has launched a desktop app that eliminates the need for a browser when watching vids.They thought of all their fans, and created a PC and a Mac version. It gives you a full-screen view that you can control with your mouse and keyboard or six-button PC or Mac remotes.Hulu Desktop is the first project to come out of Hulu Labs, which was opened this week on the site. The Labs, kind of like Google Labs, will
Other World Computing's Mercury line has been around for what feels like years now, and as far back as we can remember, the crew has looked like this. Taking a note from LaCie on "if ain't broke, don't fix it," the company is instead choosing to simply upgrade the capacity and features while keeping the look the same. The latest on-the-go storage solution is said to be able to hold up to 250 DVDs, half a billion photos or more MP3 than you'll ever have time to listen to in this life.Officially called the
Wow -- Sprint cannot be fond of this. Yesterday, Verizon Wireless' CEO proudly stated that his company would be carrying the Palm Pre...just a week before it launches "exclusively" on Sprint. At CES, Palm announced that Sprint would be its one and only US launch partner for the Pre, and at the time, it seemed like a huge boon for Sprint. Apple has its iPhone, T-Mobile has its G1, Verizon has loads of options and Sprint was all set to finally pull itself up to par with the Pre. Now, things aren't so clear cut.Needless
Here lately, it's been Nintendo bragging about massive sales numbers. This week, however, it's all about Microsoft. First comes the launch date of Bing, and now we're told that the firm's Xbox 360 is selling like hotcakes. In fact, sales of the unit have surpassed 30 million worldwide, which ain't too shabby for a company that just leaped in the game console realm a few years back.Potentially more amazing is this statistic: there are over 20 million active Xbox LIVE members. With the keyword being active. In
As part of its Christmas line-up of products, Sony Ericsson introduced a new phone that will allow consumers to connect to their PS3 gaming consoles remotely. The new phone, known as Aino, will let users access media content such as music, videos, and photos from the PS3 while on the go. Sadly, Aino will not allow users to play games or access high-definition video from the phone. Aino can also synchronize with media files on your PC using Sony Ericsson’s Media Go multimedia manager. As for the phone itself,
Research In Motion bought Dash Navigation in May for an undisclosed price, but yesterday an investment adviser did the math and stated on his blog that the BlackBerry maker paid $8.3 million for the navigation company. Davis Freeberg combed through Research In Motion’s SEC filings and its first-quarter fiscal 2010 conference call in June, and laid out his assumption that Dash was purchased for far less than the $42 71 million it raised from venture investors. Does the Dash failure mean doom for all specialty hardware companies hoping to build devices for the web? Are Slacker radios or the Kindle destined to flop? Dash started out making a web-based navigation device that offered directions as well as user recommendations and real-time traffic information based on data gleaned from other Dash devices on the road. User adoption was slow, likely because the device carried a $600 price tag (later reduced to $399), but the service won praise from many reviewers, including Om. The navigation device was designed with true mobile web access and interactivity in mind, but sales were sluggish. In November, the company cut 50 jobs and said it would stop making hardware and would focus instead on licensing its software. When it acquired Dash in May, RIM kept the details under wraps – even its 6-K filing with the SEC doesn’t mention Dash by name — but news of the deal broke on June 4. RIM did not return calls for comment on this story. However, if Dash earned its investors so little, that may indicate that connectivity is the key rather than a special-purpose device for a given task. The Kindle has an iPhone app, while Slacker, which also makes a web-connected radio, has several radio apps for a variety of mobile phones. For these companies pushing a special hardware platform, the issue becomes whether the experience on the specialized device is worth the cost of buying and then toting another hardware platform. In Dash Navigation’s case, it was not, which is why RIM got such a bargain. Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more
Eight-two percent of home buyers who have had broadband service over fiber all the way to the house rank it as the leading real estate amenity, the Fiber-to-the-Home Council said today. A national study of U.S. broadband consumers by RVA LLC Market Research and Consulting shows that fiber-to-the-home ranks higher than green spaces, a neighborhood patrol and a community pool when consumers are evaluating planned communities. Even among broadband customers who cannot get fiber, nearly 70 percent want “very high-speed Internet from a direct fiber-optic line” at the next home they buy, the study showed. Although I’m a huge proponent of broadband access, and assume that it would be a critical factor in my choice of home, choosing broadband over a community pool or green spaces shows broadband to be more like an upper-middle class luxury rather than a deciding factor in choosing a home. Readers, tell us your thoughts. View This Pollpoll Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more
This year’s MobileBeat conference, held July 16 at the Parc 55 hotel in San Francisco, will focus on apps: the people who use them, the people who make them, and the people who fund them. Join the most influential investors, mobile industry executives, entrepreneurs, press and analysts for one day of in-depth discussion, debate and power networking. MobileBeat will also have a Top Startup competition and is soliciting submissions from startups younger than three years old and in two categories. These companies will get to pitch in front of a high-level audience: some 400 top mobile executives from startups and larger companies, venture capitalists, publishers, media, device makers and more. Startups can apply here. Deadline for submission is July 1. GigaOM readers can use the code “mb09gigaom” or click here to receive $145 off the ticket price. Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more
Mushroom's PortaBella device Good things come in threes, and any triptych of services is the basis for a journalist to declare a trend, so when I met three different companies last week that offered a way to bundle a variety of mobile broadband connections into one fat pipe, I was compelled to pull together an article about them. The idea is not new — Mushroom Networks has been bundling wired broadband services into a fatter pipe for over a year, as has Sharedband, but providing fatter and more resilient mobile broadband by bundling together service from WiMAX, Wi-Fi and 3G providers could gain in prominence as more folks take their computers on the go. However, so far, these services are for corporations or those with fat wallets. Mushroom Networks: Today 5-year-old Mushroom is announcing a portable, PortaBella product which is basically a box that weighs a little more than 1 pound and has USB slots for four wireless modems on one side and an Ethernet port on the other. A user plugs in as many 3G data cards as she can and then connects her laptop with an Ethernet cord. The payoff for such a clunky setup is an aggregated bundle of bandwidth. Wi-Fi and WiMAX bundling will come later. Mushroom CEO Cahit Akin says there’s little drop in bandwidth from the four connections, and the device can be tweaked to provide optimized bandwidth for special services such as uploading video. It costs $45 a month to lease the device, plus the cost of all those data subscriptions. Brand Communications: This 9-year-old company delivers a server and a software client a user downloads that will detect and aggregate any kind of wired or wireless network in range, be it cellular, Wi-Fi or WiMAX. The aggregation is limited by the number of USB ports in your computer and the number of radios available for detecting a signal. During President Obama’s inauguration, the Secret Service used this platform to add redundancy to their existing wireless broadband options, so if one cell network became overloaded, another was already bundled in. Sharedband: Like Mushroom, 6-year-old Sharedband loves hardware. It loads its software onto a Linux-based router that aggregates mobile and wired broadband signals. Right now it requires a lot of boxes to aggregate mobile signals, but the company plans to release its software on a 3G router that will enable folks to bond wireless signals using one box. Theoretically, the software allows bonding of any type of signal, limited only by the type of ports and options provided on the router the firmware is placed on. A standard router that can bond up to 12 Mbps is $75, and a kit to build a router that can bond up to 100 Mbps is $175. Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more
Updated with more service related details : Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company and one of the country’s biggest broadband service providers, says it has started to sell a new wireless broadband service called High-Speed 2go across cities in its cable footprint. Here are some facts: Comcast will offer its own wireless laptop cards and the service will not have any voice component. The card is free with a 1 year contract or it can be purchased for $99 and customers can go month to month. If you switch from a phone company, Comcast will waive off the $99 it charges for the card. It’s a combination of Clearwire’s WiMAX-based wireless broadband and Sprint’s 3G EVDO data. The nationwide laptop device automatically switches between available 4G and 3G networks. On the 3G service (provided by Sprint) there is a 5 GB amount of data usage included in the plan. The 4G service will follow Clearwire’s terms of service. Comcast High-Speed 2go Metro service will use a 4G-only data card giving customers the 4G service in their metro coverage area. The service is available today only in Portland, but will be available in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and more cities by end of 2009. Consumers can pay $69.99 a month for a “fast pack” national offering that buys them unlimited wireless data and a 12 Mbps home broadband offering. A metro-only service will cost $49.99 a month. High-Speed 2go will also be sold to small-to-mid-sized businesses through the Comcast Business Services sales teams. I think telephone companies will now start to respond more aggressively with their own 3G offerings, possibly lowering prices, which is not such a bad thing from a consumer perspective. I have many other questions — I am waiting, for example, for Comcast to tell me if there are any bandwidth caps as part of this new deal. I like that Comcast, which had previously invested in Clearwire, is launching this service but its chances are going to be determined by how aggressively it’s available nationwide. I wish it was being launched in more than a one token city. I think that by the time Comcast and Clearwire get their national act together, we can most certainly expect the likes of Verizon to launch its own 4G wireless broadband services. Market research you can use: Keep informed about Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure. Learn more
Two new Battlestations: Pacific DLC inboundPaparazzi beware! Flash purse stalks the stalkersThe Pirate Bay, well on its way to irrelevance at record speedWhat will you do if piracy as we know it goes away? (I’ll just )Video: Heinz Beanzawave in actionComing soon to a theater near you: Asteroids, for God’s sake
Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn’t work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world. Here’s how to do it. 1. Find a Windows PC. 2. Install iTunes. 3. Download purplera1n. 4. Run purplera1n. 5. Wait. 6. Run Freeze. 7. Reboot. Now you’re jailbroken. To run OpenSSH simply install the OpenSSH package in Cydia and ssh to your iPhone with root/alpine login/pass combination.
George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who originally unlocked the iPhone, has released a jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS codenamed "purplera1n." It's currently Windows-only (Windows 7 not supported), and requires the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with the 3.0 firmware. Hotz mentions in a blog post that the jailbreak for Mac is "coming soon." The iPhone Dev Team did release a unlock for 3.0 which did not work on the iPhone 3GS, but Hotz's version does (although it doesn't free you from your current carrier).
If you’ve ever come to Japan, and especially to Tokyo, you will have noticed this country’s love for digital signage systems. They’re practically everywhere and some of them are quite cool. Now Tokyo-based Dai Nippon Printing (DNP) has announced plans to set up a digital signage system [JP] that consists of a total of twelve 42-inch LCDs. In 2 weeks, the aptly named “Tall Vision” will be set up in Sendai in Northern Japan and tested for efficiency until June, 2010. It will show mainly ads, but passengers will also be able to view timetables and other information on the display. The whole thing is a whopping 3.6m wide and about 2m tall. DNP uses full HD LCD screens made by JVC for it, but the company is ready to install monitors made by other makers upon request. The main point of this system is its price tag. DNP says the $85,000 buyers have to pay for the Tall Vision is relatively low when compared to digital signage systems of similar size. And just like the Yahoo system I blogged about back in April, the DNP version also comes with NEC’s facial recognition technology to identify passersbys.
There was a bit of chatter going around yesterday that a fourth Resident Evil film was in the works. Well, it appears that it’s all true and that the fourth installment in the Resident Evil franchise will begin shooting by the end of the year with a scheduled September 17, 2010 release. Want to know what’s funny about this whole thing? Jovovich spilled the beans back in April when no one seemed to care or notice. Oh well. Shocktillyoudrop via Kotaku
Metaswitch now has the number one position in softswitch licenses. Read about it on TMC. NextGenTel has purchased the broadband service and VoIP service from Tele2 Norway. Read the press release here. FierceVoIP reports that Telesphere has raised $15 million.
Network-1 Security Solutions, Inc. has agreed to settle its court battle with NETGEAR. NETGEAR was accused of infringing on Network-1’s Remote Power Patent. Under the settlement, NETGEAR will have a non-elusive license to the technology that runs through March 2020, paying quarterly royalties based on the sales of its Power over Ethernet products. Additionally, there will [...]
A new report from Pyramid Research shows that El Salvador’s fixed and mobile data markets will double by 2014 thanks to growing use of mobile data services, fixed broadband and pay-TV. “Mobile services and broadband have been the engine for growth with penetration of the population closing at 100 percent and 2 percent, respectively, in 2008. [...]
Weren’t we just talking about how VoWiFi could be the next big thing? Well. Maybe. Redpine Signals and Ascom Wireless Solutions are collaborating to create next-gen VoWiFi phones that have 802.11n wireless connectivity. The designs will draw upon Ascom’s experience creating handsets, wireless voice and message transmission systems, customised alarm and positioning applications and more. “Redpine’s expertise [...]
Skype has a new partnership with Yuuguu. Read about it on VoIP News of the UK. Check out Doug on IP Comm for coverage of the HD Communications Summit. VoIP Watch says that Wi-Fi voice is a burgeoning sector.
Favorable chemistry and episodes with thin films of liquid water during ongoing, long-term climate cycles may sometimes make the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed last year a favorable environment for microbes.
After several days of preparing a sloped area of soft, fine soil to simulate Spirit's current sandtrap on Mars, the rover team drove a test rover into the material.
A live videocast and chat from JPL offers a unique opportunity for viewers to ask questions of scientists with NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office about how NASA discovers and tracks asteroids.
Ulysses, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission, officially ceased operations today, after receiving commands from ground controllers to do so.
NASA's wind-watching QuikScat satellite is 10 years old this month. Take a spin down memory lane and see some of the mission's greatest achievements to date.
Saying the nation has for too long failed to adequately protect the security of its computer networks, Obama lays out a cybersecurity strategy and announces he will name a new czar to take on the job of implementing it. E-Mail This Add to Del.icio.us
Military and intelligence leaders say protecting the nation's computer networks from hackers, spies and terrorists is one of the top national security problems. President Obama is set to release a review that is expected to lay out a plan for coordinating the government's cybersecurity efforts. E-Mail This Add to Del.icio.us
Around the world, mobile phones help rural farmers gather information about crop prices and bargain shoppers download coupons on the fly. If you live outside the U.S., in what innovative ways to you use your cellular phone? E-Mail This Add to Del.icio.us
Executives at major news companies are arriving at the consensus that they will simply have to find a way to charge people who read their articles online. But, as several newspapers have learned, it's not such a simple sell. E-Mail This Add to Del.icio.us
Have you ever had that frustration of walking into a bookstore, looking for a specific book, and being told it's out of print or not in stock? A New York company wants to put an end to that. On Demand Books has installed a trial machine in a London bookstore that prints out books on request. E-Mail This Add to Del.icio.us
HTC Hero, the latest mobile phone the Taiwanese company HTC Corporation launched into the wild with Google's Android operating system, seems ready to go stateside, as it has just been spotted in FCC's courtyard, where it has received the approval for use in the country. Moreover, it looks like the most probable operator to carry the handset will be AT&T, as the pie... ( )
According to the latest news on the Web, Santa Clara-based graphics chips maker Nvidia will release the second iteration of its ION platform with two times more shaders than the number featured on the current version. As many of you might already know, ION 2 should land on the market sometime in the fourth quarter of the ongoing year. )
Nokia's XpressMusic series adds another device to its portfolio, which targets young music lovers with not-so-high budgets. The new Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is one of the latest mass-market mobile phones and it offers a complete music solution to those who are fans of the series. Before going into more details, I have to point out the fact that we will be seeing this... ( )
SEGA, as the publisher, and Obsidian Entertainment, as the developer, have announced that Alpha Protocol, the role playing espionage videogame, is set to be released for the Xbox 360 from Microsoft, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and th... ( )
Dragon Ball Z: Infinite World is a video game developed by Dimps and published by Namco Bandai. It was launched exclusively for the PlayStation 2 home gaming console from Sony. It was released in November 2008 in North America and in December in Europe and in Japan. The game is classed as an action and fighting title played from a third person perspective ... ( )
By Tim Conneally, Betanews What will happen to the video game rental trade and companies like GameFly and Blockbuster when the market changes, and when the more direct channel -- downloads over the net -- takes over? Sony looks to be thinking ahead to that point, as evidenced by its own recent survey. The handheld market it going to be the first to drop hard copy and go fully downloadable. With the iPhone unexpectedly proving itself a viable outlet for small-footprint, small-price tag games, Nintendo dropping its customary cartridge slot upgrade on its DSi, and rumors of a new disc-less PSP, the changeover is imminent. In light of this impending change, Sony has been gauging consumer interest in a direct-to-PSP game rental service. The survey says: "The service will enable you to download a fixed number of games during your subscription period (the subscription period might renew weekly, monthly, or some other time period), you will be able to change the games you have chosen for the download once your subscription term renews. At launch, there will be an extensive catalogue of games to choose from, with more titles being added to the catalogue each month." It then asks the survey participant to choose which options would most attract them to the service. In April, Sony began to test the consumer predilection for downloads be releasing the sequel to its popular title Patapon only as a PSP download. Sony issued the statement: ""We're considering a digital only format for the Patapon 2 release as a one-time test case as we continue to explore consumer preferences for digital content." According to an unnamed source speaking to Develop Magazine today, Sony privately informed game studios at the recent Game Developers Conference in March that it planned to open a subscription rental service. This type of service has been tried a number of times in the past for home video game consoles, going all the way back to the 1980s with the Atari 2600 Gameline and Intellivision's PlayCable. The concept was revisited in the '90s in the United States with Sega Channel on Sega Genesis, and the XBAND for both Sega and Nintendo's 16-bit consoles. These services all charged a monthly fee and gave the user unlimited access to a catalog of game titles, which would rotate in and out of circulation. This, however, will be the first service of its kind for a handheld. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews Up until today, Google had been distinguishing between development tracks 1 and 2 of its Chrome Web browser. Track 1 (last known build version 1.0.154.65) was the company's production edition, though a link on the same page where you could download 1.0 could take you to the "test" version instead, version 2.0.177.1. Google's always had interesting variations on the "beta" theme. Anyway, today the company stated on its blog that it's "updating to a faster version" of Chrome, quoting an internal benchmark score giving its JavaScript processing 32.1% better speed in the new version over the old version. Well, that new version -- as Betanews verified today -- is actually 2.0.177.1, which is the same "new version" it's been for a few weeks now. Users of version 2 -- which other services had been distributing as the "most recent release" -- will notice no difference in performance. The difference that some users will see is that there's no test version choice anymore; Google's download page takes the user straight to 2.0.177.1 for the first time. Gone are the links to the 1.0 editions, and users with 1.0 builds may (or may not) notice their browsers are being updated as we speak. In fact, in Betanews tests Thursday afternoon, Google's server download speed was nothing anyone would want to shout from the rooftops about. "Making the Web faster continues to be our main area of focus," reads a post on the Chrome blog by Chrome engineer Darin Fisher this afternoon. "Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We've also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of Web applications and then running your favorite benchmark." As for anyone who's been confused by the version numbers, Fisher added, "We're referring to this as Chrome 2, but that's mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don't give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible." Betanews tests (which do not use Google's own V8 benchmark algorithm, preferring to use independently developed or derived tests instead) show the latest build of Google Chrome 2 to be about 16.3% faster than Chrome 1 on an identically configured test virtual system. Prompted by reader requests, Betanews is building a new physical test platform that will enable us to gauge performance under different versions of Windows on the same hardware. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
By Tim Conneally, Betanews In 2007, RealNetworks began to develop a set-top DVD archiver/player similar to Kaleidescape under the project name "Facet." It was this idea that spawned the creation of RealDVD, a piece of software that allows copy-protected DVDs to be copied, compressed, and saved on a user's hard drive. However, that software was temporarily pulled off the market thanks to a copyright infringement suit from the DVD Copy Control Association and six major Hollywood studios (Disney, Paramount/Viacom, Sony, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.). The suit began last October and has involved relentless mudslinging between the parties. In the beginning, the studios claimed the product should have been called "StealDVD," and that it "clearly violate[s] the law." Most recently, RealNetworks called the six Hollywood studios "an illegal cartel," and charged them with antitrust violations. RealNetworks did acknowledge the DVD Copy Control Association's initial concern, and has said that its products could be exploited by those who "rent, rip, and return" movies; that is, those who rent DVDs and copy the rental for their own collections. In the company's written testimony, it said, "RealNetworks discourages such conduct and warns consumers that the product is not to be used to copy DVDs that the user does not own." The company suggested that it should be the studios' responsibility to mark discs sold to the rental channel, and without studio cooperation, there is no way a piece of software can tell if existing discs have been purchased or simply rented, and that CSS is so broken that there are literally hundreds of different programs that circumvent it to facilitate copying. The company maintains, though, that there's really no reason why a DVD owner should not be able to copy their movies for their own use, and that in the company's set-top box, those copies are locked and safe from illegal trade. Yesterday, at the most recent hearing for the case, the MPAA argued a single copy, no matter what the purpose, is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The only backup copy Congress imagined, MPAA attorney Bart Williams said, is a pure archival backup copy that goes unplayed until the first copy is defunct. Williams also pointed out that Real will be violating the same DMCA rules that helped it win its 1999 suit against Streambox, a set of devices which allowed users to bypass the copy protection on Real's streaming RealAudio files. Upon closure of that case, RealNetworks' then-Vice President Alex Alban said "[The Court] upheld the basic principle that it is illegal to circumvent copy protection mechanisms in order to record streams against the wishes of copyright holders." For now, the case between RealNetworks and the six Hollywood studios is adjourned. It is now up to District Court Judge Marylin Patel to decide who is right. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews During the era of Office 2000's dominance in the desktop applications market, Microsoft was frequently criticized for forcing businesses into supporting a document format that was, by design, a moving target. Whenever the company added features to its Office components, support for those features had to be retrofitted onto the document format. That often made archives of thousands of older documents difficult for companies to manage. It was a situation which many thought would enable Microsoft to self-perpetuate, creating dependencies from which businesses couldn't escape, forcing them to invest in whatever new versions that came along just to maintain their efficiency. Whether it was attained by accident or design, it was such a prime market position for the company that when it announced in 2005 that it would sacrifice its own Office document formats for an entirely new, publicly viewable, XML-based scheme originally entitled Office Open XML, even Betanews asked the question, "Is It Truly Open?" To this day, even now that Microsoft's efforts led to the publication of an international standard based on OOXML, now called ISO 29500, people are wondering -- often aloud -- where's the string that's attached to this rug that Microsoft will eventually pull? In the meantime, a company which was issued a patent in 1998 for the idea of maintaining a document's format in a separate file, has been awarded $200 million to a Toronto-based collaborative software firm, whose engineers claim they had the idea first. The case made by i4i Limited Partnership in its March 2007 suit essentially boiled down to the allegation that the entire move toward XML by Microsoft was a willfully executed strategy against i4i. In 1994, just as HTML was first being investigated elsewhere as a vehicle for networked hypertext, i4i Ltd. applied for its US patent. For the time, its concept was novel as any notion of XML would be years away, and the applications for which XML would be used had yet to be envisioned. "Electronic documents retain the key idea of binding the structure of the material with its content through the use of formatting information," reads the 1994 patent's background. "The formatting information in this case is in the form of codes inserted into the text stream. This invention addresses the ideas of structure and content in a new light to provide more flexible and efficient document storage and manipulation." The engineers mention SGML, the markup language which formed the foundation for HTML. But SGML created problems with regard to formatting, as they went on to write: "While embedding structural information in the content stream is accepted standard practice, it is inefficient and inflexible in a digital age. For manual production of documents the intermingling of the markup codes with the content is still the best way of communicating structure. For electronic storage and manipulation it suffers from a number of shortcomings. Current practice suffers from inflexibility. Documents combining structure and content are inflexible because they tie together structure and content into a single unit which must be modified together. The content is locked into one structure embodied by the embedded codes. Changes to either the structure or the content of the document require a complete new copy of the document." This is a problem which the flexible formatting of XML (which is called "eXtensible Markup Language" for good reason) went on to solve. For its part, i4i had much of the same idea, essentially for creating a way to use extensible tags to mean whatever they need to mean in the context of an electronic document. As an example cited by the 1994 patent application, the tag pair and could be used to denote a chapter number in the electronic manuscript of a book, and and may offset the book's title. The meanings of those tags with respect to the document at hand could be defined by a separate document, or by many separate documents pertaining to different classes of typesetting machines or displays. Did i4i create XML? Not specifically, though it did receive a patent for one of its principal ideas, years before the W3C began to come to the same conclusions. However, despite being what many observers at the time considered late to the game in adopting XML, it is Microsoft that ended up the loser in what some analysts are saying could be among the top five willful patent infringement awards in US history. The company has made clear it will appeal the jury's verdict. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
By Tim Conneally, Betanews The pocketable Internet has created an insatiable need for bandwidth. 18% of total Internet traffic in 2008 came from mobile devices, and it's only increasing. In fact, a national tier one mobile network operator (MNO) (that preferred to remain nameless) participated in Yankee Group research that recently projected its data consumption would grow by a factor of six in the next three years. Here is what that means: In 1995, there were about 9,000 cell sites in the United States. Today, there are more than 228,000, or an average of 80 thousand new sites every five years. Each one of these sites serves about a thousand users, and the backhaul is provided mostly T1 and E1 lease lines, with an average of 3 T1's per site and an average bandwidth capacity of 4.62 megabits per second. The maximum speed is generally around 10 Mbps, and Yankee Group research showed that it cost MNOs about $6.1 billion to provide that much bandwidth in 2008. But because Internet traffic is increasingly coming from mobile devices, and a larger base of users demands higher performance, the anonymous MNO expects that sites will have to provide more than 50 Mbps each going into 2011. If the current backhaul methods were to continue, in 2012, the total cost of mobile Internet backhaul could grow to more than $82 billion dollars. "Linear growth is not an option." Said Yankee Group's Vice President of Enabling Technologies, Jennifer Pigg. "God Forbid you want 100 Mbps, you're talking about an equivalent of five thousand dollars per month per mile. GigE? Forget it, it'll cost you almost twenty times that much." So as this demand is only increasing, mobile network operators are scrambling to implement a variety of strategies on the radio side to handle this flood of data. They need to increase their cell site density, and as we enter the 4G era, the traditional T1 infrastructure is just not going to be able to fulfill our demands. "Backhaul is extremely problematic in the overall network, not RAN (radio access network), not radios, not the core network...it's the backhaul," said Pigg. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Did you want to buy or sell a media or tech company in the last six months? Chances are you didn’t: New data from banker The Jordan, Edmiston Group say the M&A market for the first half of 2009 was nearly nonexistent, at least compared to the post-MySpace Web 2.0 heyday. But you knew that (click chart to enlarge): The one exception to the drought: Companies that have something, anything, to do with mobile. The Jordan, Edmiston Group says deal volume increased 45 percent over the last year, and the value of those deals leapt by 38 percent. Granted, we’re talking about fairly small numbers to begin with–the bank counted 16 mobile deals in the first half of this year, compared to 11 a year ago–but it still seems telling, and right. We’ve been hearing about the inevitable rise of mobile as an advertising, content and commerce platform for years, but in the last year or so, this now seems plausible, due in large part to the adoption of smartphones from the likes of Research in Motion (RIMM), Apple (APPL), and, perhaps, even Palm (PALM).
You can’t overtake a market in a month, particularly one dominated by Google. But you can certainly chip away a small foothold. Which is what Microsoft managed to do with its new search engine, Bing, last month. According to StatCounter, Microsoft’s share of the market grew to 8.23 percent in June, up from the 7.8 percent share it held prior to Bing’s launch. Now, a one percent increase in market share isn’t a spectacular achievement, but it is meaningful growth. More so since Google posted a slight decline in share in June, its third in as many months. Google still rules search in the U.S., but Bing appears to be making some modest headway. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date,” said Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter. Which is fine. Particularly when you’re coming from as far behind as Microsoft (MSFT). Of course, as I’ve said before, early successes like these are driven as much by marketing as by technological prowess and positive user experience. And right now, Bing’s got between $80 million and $100 million dollars behind it. But those dollars will only last so long. And as Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt likes to point out, you really can’t expect to buy your way into the search market. “You don’t just buy it with ads,” Schmidt told Fox Business earlier this week. “You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search by search, answer by answer.” Perhaps that’s exactly what Microsoft is doing here with Bing.
Are you one of those Facebook users who worries that your boss will see photos of what you did over the weekend? Then you’ll like Facebook’s new privacy policy. It’s designed to make it easier for you to sort and filter who sees what on the site. But if you’re part of the large group of people who think that nothing is really private on the Web and that everyone should see everything you do online, then you’re really going to like Facebook’s new privacy policy. It’s designed to get Facebook users to share as much as they can with as many people as they can–including people who aren’t on Facebook. Facebook tries to explain the policy changes in a lengthy blog post here, and you can find a slideshow that accompanied a press conference the company just held here. But that will make your eyes glaze over. Here’s the short version: Facebook is simplifying the privacy setting controls it offers users. So if you want your pals to see your keg stand from Saturday night, but don’t want your parents to be privy, you should be able to do that more effectively. The company is experimenting with different ways to present the controls. Facebook also wants to encourage people to use the “everyone” setting, which right now just means “every Facebook user.” But the company is going to eventually change that setting to mean “everyone on the Web”–meaning that Google (GOOG) users, marketers, whoever, will be able to find that stuff, too. Facebook wants to expand the amount of data its users share with the world because the company thinks that the more exposure data get, the more valuable the data become. But it is doing its best to tamp down complaints from users who accidentally end up exposing kid photos or bachelor party snapshots or whatever. Hence the new, improved privacy controls, which are being rolled out before “everyone” really means “everyone.” I know, I know. That short version wasn’t that short. But you’re going to hear plenty more about this in the coming weeks. Consider this a first chapter.
Want access to the Washington D.C. elite? The city’s hometown paper is happy to arrange that for you, provided you’re willing to pay between $25,000 to $250,000. The caveat: That fee won’t include access to the Washington Post’s (WPO) editorial staff. That distinction popped up this morning after Politico detailed an “astonishing offer” that the paper’s business staff was offering lobbyists — a chance to underwrite “salons” with D.C. bigshots, hosted at the home of CEO Katharine Weymouth. A promotional flier Politico got its hands on also promised that the Post’s editorial staff would be part of the events, including one scheduled for July 21st. But that part isn’t true, a Post spokeswoman told me via email this morning: The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers. As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this. We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that The Post should be leading these conversations in Washington, big or small, while maintaining journalistic integrity. The newsroom will participate where appropriate. OK, so that’s cleared up. But let me play devil’s advocate: What exactly would be so wrong about getting the paper’s reporters or editors to to participate in one of these? This certainly wouldn’t be the first time that the Post has been at the nexus of power, money and influence — in fact, Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was famous for hosting gatherings much like these at her house. And publications of all stripes — including this one, as well as Dow Jones, which owns this site — frequently charge fees to attend networking events where their editorial staff participates. And you’re likely to see more of this stuff, not less, as publishers search for revenue streams besides advertising to stay afloat. Any tempest you see about this today is going to look quaint in a couple of years.
Microsoft just announced in a blog post that it was “integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres.” Microsoft (MSFT) said it is not indexing all of Twitter in its new Bing search service–not yet, that is–nor has it made any kind of exclusive deal with Twitter to add this real-time feed. Recent tweets will be prominently displayed near the top of the search page, but could also be spread throughout the results. The feature is now rolling out, so might not be able to be accessed immediately. It will be updated every minute, said Microsoft. Microsoft is the first major search service to do this on a regular basis, using public programming interfaces, or API’s, available to anyone from Twitter–and it is an aggressive move, which seems to be part of its major push by Bing (which is, in fact, seeing some share gain in yet another report released today). But, all are moving in that direction. While neither Google (GOOG) nor Yahoo (YHOO) is regularly indexing any part of the microblogging service’s real-time data stream yet, both have been testing the idea internally. All three, though, do index static Twitter profiles in some way in their search results. They also can show older tweets that have specific keywords in them. The Microsoft effort is different, and, um–and I had absolutely no idea that the company was doing this–appears to include BoomTown tweets, as well as those from other tech bloggers like Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan and a “few thousand people to start.” Still, in a mission-accomplished effort to creep me out, Microsoft’s Sean Suchter, general manager of its Silicon Valley Search Technology Center, noted in the blog, “starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.” He then used my name and Twitter profile as an example, displaying some of my duller tweets of stories I had posted on All Things Digital. (My testy roundelay with TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld about the veracity of its Twitter-about-to-sell-to-Google post a while back would have been much more interesting, and pertinent too!) In an interview with me this afternoon, Suchter described the addition of the specific tweets as a “first step” in adding a lot more real-time data to Bing. “Given Twitter is the big gorilla here and it is a really interesting frontier for search, we thought it was important to get something out there,” he said. “It is also about us learning how users interact with it that will also be really interesting.” Suchter said Twitter is aware of the move, but that Microsoft did not need any extra help from the San Francisco start-up to launch it. Suchter said it would begin with a limited number of tweets for now and will not include search results of tweets about a person–although that is possible. And Microsoft, he said, was not able to index all of Twitter at the present time. “We would like to grow this, because this area is so exciting, so we wanted to get the plumbing working to show we could do it,” said Suchter. “And since there is a lot of useful content in Twitter and in this real-time corpus, it has to be a big part of the search experience in the future.” This is obviously a first shot in what will be a long war over real-time search among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–each of which has also been talking to Twitter about a variety of partnership deals that have yet to be struck. Here is Suchter’s blog on the Twitter real-time data addition: Bringing a Bit of Twitter to Bing There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. Starting today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results. For example, if you type “Kara Swisher Twitter” or “Kara Swisher Tweets” or even “@karaswisher” as your search query, you’ll see something like this: The answer will include that person’s latest Tweets, along with an easy link to “See more tweets” from that individual. We’re not indexing all of Twitter at this time… just a small set of prominent and prolific Twitterers to start. We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search. We’d love to hear your feedback as we think through future possibilities in real time search. And while we may not be famous, we are prolific, so don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for all the latest news from Bing! Sean Suchter, General Manager, Search Technology Center, Silicon Valley Speaking of creepy stalking, please enjoy this nail-biting trailer for “Play Misty for Me”:
DENVER (Billboard) - All the TV ads that came out in support of Green Day's new album, "21st Century Breakdown," featured the lead single "Know Your Enemy." But only one advertiser got exclusive footage of the band -- online music service Rhapsody.
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Friday it would not limit the number of applications available at one time on the Starter edition of its upcoming Windows 7 operating system, reversing its earlier strategy of limiting its capabilities and urging users to upgrade.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said he will name a White House-level czar to coordinate government efforts to fight an epidemic of cybercrime, which even touched his presidential campaign.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Time Warner Inc Chief Executive Jeffrey Bewkes said on Friday that his company is still leaning toward spinning off AOL to shareholders as the preferred method for divesting the struggling Internet unit.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The interactive video game industry's biggest convention meets next week in Los Angeles promising a return to its glitzy past, but on the heels of weak sales and the slumping economy, the future of this fun and games business is no laughing matter.
SourceForge has been on a roll lately, improving services and now acquiring Ohloh, which promises to make the company more relevant to software developers their employers.
Yoelle Maarek, who led the team that developed Google Suggest inside a Google lab in Israel, has joined Yahoo in a similar leadership role inside Yahoo's labs in the city of Haifa.
CNET News chief political correspondent Declan McCullagh talks about a review just out on the nation's cybersecurity and how the search for a U.S. cyberczar.
President Obama has announced a new cybersecurity strategy. Can you tell which excerpts came from a current White House document, and which came from Bush in 2003.
Investigators believe hackers used an SQL injection attack to break into U.S. Army servers and redirect visitors to other sites, according to InformationWeek.
Users of the social networking site Facebook notice it now lists numerous Welsh towns and cities as being in England instead of Wales on their profiles.
A US Air Force officer has told the BBC that his country should create an offensive botnet to target any forces that launch a cyber-attack against it.
Ever wondered what your future home might look like? Well if you fancy a bed that gives you a full night's sleep in thirty minutes, you might be in luck.
While the sub-£399 laptops on page 18 offer a cheaper entry into laptop ownership, it's at the £799 price point that you can start to choose all the features and components to suit your needs. The laptops gathered here all feature the latest dual-core processors, powerful graphics cards and include features such as Blu-ray drives, high-speed 802.11n Wi-Fi and screen sizes ranging from 14 to 18.4 inches. Along with machines for gamers and home users, corporate users will also find laptops to suit with great battery lives and portable designs. Whatever you're looking for, we have it all for you in this group test.Tested today: Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T A staggering battery life and great portability help to hide this machine's flaws Acer's Aspire Timeline series comprises quality and highly portable machines aimed at corporate users. The Aspire Timeline 4810T (£749 inc. VAT) is the first model we've seen from the range and features a 14-inch widescreen display Read: full Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T review Asus N50VC An impressive all-rounder with strong performance and very few faults An excellent 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo processor, achingly capacious 320GB hard drive and whopping 4GB of memory, this is a notebook for those who want to create as well as consume. Mind you, consumers are equally well catered for. Blu-ray is finally seeping down through the notebook market, and Asus has included a combo drive here. Read: full Asus N50VC review Dell Studio 15 An evolution of one of our favourite laptops, offering great usability and quality The 15.4-inch screen is superb, with LED backlighting used to offer the most accurate colour reproduction currently possible. The resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels is among the sharpest we have seen, and creates the crispest image quality. Reflections show up in brighter conditions however, as with other Super-TFT panel. Read: full Dell Studio 15 review HI-GRADE Notino D8000 Comfortable and well-specified, but fails to come together as a complete package Hi-Grade is a UK manufacturer, making good value machines in a range of specifications. The chassis features a 16:10 screen, despite 16:9 screens becoming more popular. Measuring 15.4-inches, it's not a giant, but there's plenty of space onscreen for multiple windows. Read: full Hi-Grade Notino D8000 review Medion Akoya P8610 High-powered desktop replacement with ample features and great graphics Medion is known for its budget laptops, but it also makes machines for multimedia use. The Akoya P8610 is the largest and one of the most feature-packed laptops here. The 18.4-inch screen is huge and great for watching fi lms on, and the integrated Blu-ray drive lets you really get the most out of it. Read: full Medion Akoya P8610 review Samsung R522 A comfortable and stylish laptop, but it's limited when it comes to media use Samsung's R-series offers good quality and features at affordable prices. The R522 is a mid-range system that features impressive quality, good usability and a true widescreen display. The screen measures 15.6 inches and features a 16:9 aspect ratio. As such, films play back without intrusive black bars at the top and bottom. Read: full Samsung R522 review Our colleagues on What Laptop magazine test every machine that comes into our testing labs for both performance and battery life. Here are the results of this rigorous testing process for this group test: Although these aren't the cheapest laptops you can buy, offer a great choice of features and different specifications suit all types of user, without the need to spend the earth. features ranging from Blu-ray optical drives and high-powered graphics cards to the latest processors, whatever you're we're certain there's a laptop here for you. However, in test, two laptops proved to be better than the rest.Winner: Dell Studio 15 The Dell Studio 15 is a simply fantastic all-round package, with comfort, quality, performance and style on its side. The keyboard is one of the most comfortable we've seen at any price point and the great mix of power and portability make it a laptop suited to home, business and even travel use.Runner up: Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T The distinctive keyboard won't suit all users, but the Aspire 4810T is great for both commuters and business users. The 14-inch screen strikes a balance between portability and usability, and the eight-hour battery life is astounding. Quality is also good and the thin chassis lets you work on the move.
There's been lots of news about China's Green Dam web-filtering campaign this week, with reports that it hasn't been scrapped but merely delayed. If the web-filtering rollout happens, then PC manufacturers will have to ship computers to China with filtration software to stop pornography, piracy and the like. One way to get round this looks likely to go for a non-Windows based computer system like Macs or Linux. Mac and Linux exempt According to Lenovo, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is only asking for filtration software to come with computers using Windows. Lenovo has also said that it will not be shipping the software with its Linux portfolio. If this is the case, then it probably won't be long before this loophole is sewn up – but it does show that there are currently options for users of the internet in China who do not want their web consumption automatically filtered.
The BBC's Erik Huggers has presented the tech world with a glimpse of how Project Canvas may be advertised to the general public, and TechRadar can bring you the transcript of the early advert for the IPTV service. Huggers, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC and the man responsible for the Project Canvas – which has yet to be ratified by the BBC Trust – introduced the short film at the Intellect Consumer Electronics conference. Canvas is the BBC's attempt to create a set of standards and a rallying point for IPTV, in an attempt to get the industry to steer clear of proprietary platforms and make it simpler for consumer and easier for broadcasters – although there remains some major reservations from key players like Sony in the manufacturing world. Huggers introduced the video to the likes of Sony UK CEO Steve Dowdle, Sky's Director of Strategic Product Development Gerry O'Sullivan and Panasonic Sales Director Robert Scholes, explaining: "There's been a lot of discussion around canvas and we have a film – it's about 2-3 minutes that explains canvas much better than I could." TechRadar was there for the film – which perhaps explains better than anything the BBC vision for Project Canvas – and what follows is the transcript. Project Canvas film "Once upon a time if you wanted digital TV you had three choices: you could have a large unattractive satellite dish on your roof, some men in overalls could dig up your road and lay a big cable and pipe it into your house or you could simply buy a handy little box from the shops and plug it into your TV aerial. "If only life was still that simple. These days there's hundreds of companies offering you 'digital this', 'on-demand that' 'catch up the other'. You can watch stuff on your TV, your computer or even the palm of your hand. It's enough to put you in a right spin. "Wouldn't it be nice if someone could simplify all this? If someone could combine the plug and go simplicity of Freeview with the choice and convenience of iPlayer all packaged in one simple easy to use service?" Whole new digital world The promo continues: "Well Canvas will do just that; just plug it into your telly and into your broadband and away you go. You're ready to discover a whole new world of digital TV packed with new features, new content and new ways to watch – it's a TV revolution. "All we've taken out is the hassle. For a one off payment and no monthly subscription you'll get the Freeview TV and radio channels you know and love. "There's catch-up TV from BBC iPlayer, 4OD and ITV.com so you won't miss your favourite program again and on top of that there's a whole wealth of on-demand and archive programming to tap into. "So whether you're after another glimpse of the dashing Mr D'Arcy, or you fancy jumping through time with Dr Who we've got it all. "And if that wasn't enough, canvas also opens you up to a whole universe of web content – from the latest clips on YouTube to using your favourite social network to share video with friends and family – the digital world is your oyster. "And the best thing is that you'll be seeing it all on your TV from the comfort of your favourite armchair. "Not only that, but Canvas also lets you organise all this new digital content in a way that makes sense to you; giving you a totally personalised TV experience and changing the way you watch TV for ever. "Canvas – liberate your TV." Analysis It's interesting to note that the BBC is pushing the 'Freeview' aspect of Project Canvas in the promo – which could have been assembled to illustrate to the BBC Trust how the concept would be pushed to the public. This would obviously appeal to the huge base of Freeview transcriptions, but could alienate Freesat – who have been desperate to be linked to the project from its inception. Plus, the confusion over whether the BBC is assembling a platform, rather than merely a set of standards has not yet been diminished. "It sounds really appealing to users, but quite restrictive to the industry," said What Satellite's editor Alex Lane, "I think both sides need to decide what it is and what they want to get out of it."
Another day, another category of stunning gadgetry to flaunt before your very eyes. We hope that by now you've had your say in the T3 Gadget Awards 2009, and are waiting to be told if you've won from our selection of spot prizes. If not, what are you waiting for? If you've not yet voted, we still implore you to. Head over to the Awards site, tick your favourite boxes, and you'll be in with a chance of winning a host of amazing tech. Remember: This is your chance to tell the tech industry what you really think of their products. As well as waiting patiently for your all important votes, we'll spend the next few weeks filling you in on the categories and the nominees. Today it's the Drop Dead Gorgeous Gadget of the Year. Via T3.com
Google has announces it has added a number of new features to its Google Blog Search service, which it hopes makes the content of blogs on the internet easier to access. Google launched a new-and-improved Blog Search feature back in January 2008 and since then it has kept the service pretty much as it is. The new updates, however, will open up access to blogs with the addition of an RSS feed option and Atom feed option. Essentially this means you can subscribe to a blog like you would any website and add its content to feed aggregators like Google Reader. Hot Queries Another new feature is Hot Queries. This lists searches that are popular in blogs at the moment, a bit like the Trending Topics section of Twitter. "There's a lot of great, fresh content being published in blogs every day. We hope these new features help you discover more of it, faster," explains Akshay Patil, Software Engineer, & Dylan Casey, Product Manager in the blog. One final other thing that has been tweaked in the Blog Search is that you can now embed this service into your iGoogle page.
Many a parent has ordered something off the kids' menu just to see their picky eater barely touch it. Why make dining out any pricier it already is? Go where the kids eat free! Photo by BL1961. It...
Windows only: After we wrote about the All-Glass Firefox theme, reader bc//G_A wrote in with an even more impressive customization that enables the Aero Glass effect across almost every UI element....
Windows only: The latest update for Growl for Windows adds a slew of new features—including support for Thunderbird, Snarl, system monitoring, and even a Gmail notifier. Once you install Growl...
Got a good hour and an abiding interest in the newly announced Google Wave? (You know, the app that "is what email would look like if it were invented today.") This video demo from the Google I/O...
We've previously explained why you should ditch your extensions for bookmarklets when you can to save on browser bloat. Whether or not you've taken your bookmarklets that far, the Bookmarklet...
NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander, which spent the summer in Mars' northern polar regions performing a variety of science experiments, caused quite a stir when rumors circulated that it had discovered signs of life on the Red Planet. NASA eventually held a press conference to dispel the rumors, promising that more details would eventually be revealed when scientists got around to publishing papers that would describe the experiments in detail. That day has finally arrived; today's issue of Science contains four papers that describe various findings from the mission. There's no sign of alien life, but the studies do reveal an active water cycle on Mars—including night-time snowfall. The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. Click here to read the rest of this article
There's no denying that gaming publisher Midway has had a rough time in the past year. After an insane saga of strange twists, turns, accusations, and increasingly dire news, most of us weren't entirely certain that the beleaguered publisher would actually survive to see 2010. Despite our doubts, it turns out that Midway is living to see another day, having just been acquired by Time Warner for $33 million. For those of you new to the situation: after the company's much-hyped Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe earned lukewarm reviews and reasonable (though not amazing) sales numbers, Sumner Redstone sold his controlling interest in Midway for $100,000, and the publisher wound up laying off roughly 25 percent of its workforce and killed many games that were currently in development. It was then revealed that, even though employees weren't getting paid what was owed to them and the publisher was filing for bankruptcy, executives were still raking in a great deal of cash during all this. Click here to read the rest of this article
One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition—as noticed by Kristan Kenney—, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that mentions a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording. Here's the whole clause: Click here to read the rest of this article
"MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a website's terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all. Horrible things aren't always crimes The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today. But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a website without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns. Click here to read the rest of this article
Social networks like MySpace still cannot be held responsible for assaults that happen offline, according to California's Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles. The court was asked to review the case of four underage girls (referred to as Julie Does) who, along with their parents, had sued MySpace for gross negligence and strict product liability after they were all sexually assaulted by older men whom they met on the service. Despite the scary circumstances in which these events took place, the judge said that MySpace was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and could not be held liable. Click here to read the rest of this article
The latest installment of Public Policy & Aging Report evaluates current models of creating sustainable lifelong communities for people of all ages. The issue's four articles also explore some of the controversies associated with options presently available.
NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center physician-scientists are presenting exciting new research at the 2009 American Transplant Congress in Boston from May 30 to June 3.
Dozens of researchers at Indiana University participated in the American College of Sports Medicine conference. Studies in this tip sheet discuss findings involving exercise-induced asthma, high altitude training and high speed accelerometers.
Today, acute heart failure represents the most common reason for hospitalization in the over-65 population. Although hospital care improves symptoms in the first 24 hours after admission in around 50 percent of these patients, acute heart failure events still remain associated with a more than 50 percent mortality and rehospitalization rate at 6-12 months.
Although heart failure is a chronic condition, acute exacerbations are frequent and occur with serious complications; patients with heart failure and their families can help improve prognosis in acute events if they are taught to recognize the tell-tale signs of worsening condition and seek immediate medical help.
The Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering was ranked No. 4 nationwide for the fifth consecutive year in the U.S. News and World Report’s annual list of the best American graduate school programs.
A new study, in the journal Science, suggests that the form of El Niño may be changing potentially causing not only a greater number of hurricanes than in average years, but also a greater chance of hurricanes making landfall.
Three years after breaking ground, Georgia Tech is set to dedicate the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, one of the most ambitious and expensive projects in the Institute’s history. The ceremony will be held on Friday, April 24, at 3 p.m. The 190,000-square-foot complex poises Georgia Tech to be a global hub for nanotechnology research and development while igniting an environment that could potentially transform both local and state economies.
For several weeks last fall, different artistic interpretations of Buzz were present around campus. An auction in May will give people the opportunity to own them.
Ivan Allen College assistant professor Carl DiSalvo and doctoral candidate Jonathan Lukens show their piece, "Smog is Democratic" in the CDC's art show "Consequential Matters" through September 11, 2009.
Each of the major space station partners is represented on board, with two astronauts from Russia and one each from the U.S., Japan, Canada and Belgium. The International Space Station just had a population boom.
The long-awaited revision of the 1990 recommendations puts a cap on the amount an obese mother should gain and places more emphasis on exercise. Some doctors wanted to see a lot more. More than 60% of U.S. women of childbearing age are overweight or obese -- a significant increase from 20 years ago. And recent studies strongly suggest that either too much or too little nutrition in utero can increase a fetus' chance of becoming an overweight child and overweight adult.
The organisms that inhabit the skin may not be the bad guys. They probably enable the body to function properly, researchers say in the journal Science. Here's a finding that'll make your skin crawl: A healthy human epidermis is colonized by roughly 1,000 species of bacteria.
Researchers hail the development of primates whose genes can be passed to their offspring, but animal rights advocates object. Scientists have created the first genetically modified monkeys that can pass their new genetic attributes to their offspring, a development designed to give researchers new tools for studying human disease, but one that raises a host of thorny ethical questions.
State and county health officials say the outbreak appears to have peaked, but it will be another month before they can be certain. As New York City announced two more swine flu deaths Tuesday, bringing the state's death toll to four, health officials in Los Angeles County and California said the worst of the outbreak -- at least locally -- appears to be over.
Packard Bell recently overhauled its logo in an effort to keep up with the times, but are its offerings up to the same task? The new imedia lineup immediately recalls the recently announced M-series desktops from Acer, and that's no accident. The innards are remarkably similar too, with the top models sporting Core 2 Quad or AMD Phenom II X4 processors, a 1.5GB GeForce GT230, HDMI out, Blu-Ray combo drive and a maximum of 8GB DDR3 memory and 1TB of storage. While none of the specs are on the blistering edge of innovation, there's plenty of power there and keen pricing could make them an attractive proposition. The entry-level Celeron-based units start at 299 ($490) in the UK. Filed under: Desktops Packard Bell imedia lineup gets an Acer-inspired refresh originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read|
Now, we've never been to this "Hall of Presidents" at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida (our parents instead taking us to real, disused dungeons and battlefields for family entertainment), but we're thinking about heading down there today -- not because the newest animatronic addition -- President Barack Obama -- has just been unveiled, but because his likeness is so... unlike him, so incredibly, terrifyingly creepy (and yet still impressive all the same). Yes, we'll pop all of our closest friends' children into the van and take a fantastic voyage down to the southern tip of our great nation just to see their reactions to this horrifying robotic educational presentation. What better way to celebrate our nation's independence? Come to think of it... maybe our parents weren't so bad after all. Videos of Obamatron and of the President himself recording audio for it after the break. Continue reading Walt Disney World unveils incredibly scary, robotic version of President Obama Filed under: Robots Walt Disney World unveils incredibly scary, robotic version of President Obama originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Electronics packaging has been growing steadily smaller and less annoying over recent times, but here comes Apple adding complexity where we didn't know it was needed. The bright sparks at Cupertino envision powered, data-transmitting boxes that will ensure the device within is fully juiced, packing the latest firmware, and capable of pumping out video demos so that the packaging needn't get in the way of wooing customers. Sure, up-to-date firmware and a full battery sound nice, but we can't help but wonder about the price premium we'd have to swallow to be able to see our new toy dancing before we've even set it free from its box.[Via Phone Arena] Filed under: Misc. Gadgets Apple's 'active packaging' patent application tries to reinvent the box originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read|
It's your holiday weekend America -- how are you going to spend it? We'll tell you how: by listening to Engadget Podcast 153 over, and over, and over. What better way to utilize your extra day off and barbecue-packed good times than by putting Josh, Paul, and Nilay on repeat for you (and your friends') enjoyment? Check out the 'cast this week as the boys explore the ups and downs of the Olympus E-P1, Dell's MID plans, and field a handful of questions from our handsome, intelligent, and just basically awesome listeners. You won't be disappointed.Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel, Paul MillerProducer: Trent WolbeSong: Virt - Katamari on the RockHear the podcast 00:02:10 - Olympus E-P1 hands-on, test shots, and mini-review00:10:26 - Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 gets officially detailed, priced for US market00:14:22 - Wii MotionPlus impressions: it works, but so far the games aren't worth the fuss00:24:45 - Dell working on iPod touch-esque Android MID, says WSJ00:32:08 - Android 1.5 gets official SDK for native development00:38:10 - Video: Mobinnova an sporting a custom Tegra UI00:47:30 - Video: NVIDIA Tegra's GPU gets busy with HD video and full-screen Flash -- Intel 945GSE shrugs, kicks dirt00:47:30 - Verizon BlackBerry Tour unboxing00:50:17 - BlackBerry Tour hands-on, wild sibling confrontation with Curve and Bold00:53:00 - RIM CEO: "SurePress is here to stay"00:57:00 - 13-year-old trades iPod for Walkman, reports on mysterious ancient artifact01:04:55 - iPhone 3GS review01:07:15 - Palm Pre reviewSubscribe to the podcast [iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes (enhanced AAC). [RSS MP3] Add the Engadget Podcast feed (in MP3) to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically. [RSS AAC] Add the Engadget Podcast feed (in enhanced AAC) to your RSS aggregator. [Zune] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in the Zune MarketplaceDownload the podcastLISTEN (MP3)LISTEN (AAC)LISTEN (OGG)Contact the podcast 1-888-ENGADGET or podcast (at) engadget (dot) com.Twitter: @joshuatopolsky @futurepaul @reckless @engadget Filed under: Podcasts Engadget Podcast 153 - 07.03.2009: Independence Day edition originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Any big city bicyclist knows that being small and silent on the street is a deadly combination. Drivers of 2-ton cages are simply immune to anything but the sights and sounds of combustion engines riding four on the floor. This issue affects silent-running hybrids and compact electrics too, something Japan's government is taking seriously in a new government review that could result in a mandate for the inclusion of "a sound making function" in their future eco-rides. Safety aside, we presume Japanese manufacturers would choose a sound that's as tasteful and unassuming as their locally brewed hybrids. Imagine if GM was to make a similar decision... oh, right. Filed under: Transportation Japan considers adding noise pollution to hybrids originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Read|
At the D: All Things Digital conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveils Microsoft's revamped search engine and gives it a name - Bing. CNET News' Ina Fried reports live.
Far from the world of data centers and silicon, an agriculture project at the University of Melbourne is an unlikely place to find the forefront of cloud computing and Web applications.
Google says Chrome 2 is not a major release but it does include some new features - such as the ability to remove embarrassing most-visited sites - and a boost in speed.
The FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service were forced to shut down parts of their computer networks after a mystery virus struck the law-enforcement agencies Thursday.
Israel-based Waze shows you traffic flows on highways, and unlike other traffic services, it also shows it on side streets - and creates routing advice based on that data.
Wikipedia has blocked the Church of Scientology from editing entries at the communally-crafted online encyclopedia due to an unrelenting battle over the group's image.
Soon after her second son was born in September 2006, Carolina Alfaro noticed he had trouble nursing. In the following months, Diego was unable to roll over or lift his head when he was laid on a blanket.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Embedded in our genes is a "clock" that regulates when we sleep, when we are awake and when we eat. This human clock manages what are known as circadian rhythms, 24-hour biological cycles that adapt our bodies to the light-dark pattern of day and night.
Catalysts do function, despite the fact that not all the chemical reactions (and partial reactions) which occur are fully understood, including those which take place during the treatment of automobile exhaust. If scientists understood these processes better not only would they be able to optimize exhaust gas catalysts but also other phenomena which are observed on surfaces, for instance when molecules orient themselves in either right or left handed fashion (i.e. as an image or mirror image). Knowing this would, not least, open new avenues of development in pharmacology for the manufacturers of medicines.
Publishers, booksellers and authors are holding a major annual convention in New York this week as the industry reels from a global recession and readers migrate to digital formats.