November 2004 Archives

At the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, neurobiologist Kenji Doya is using "cyber rodents" to probe how rewarding individuals when they achieve simple goals can give rise to intelligent group behaviors. Two of the critters circle each other in a mating dance. Others forage for fresh batteries on the floor. Another one just sits there. "That one is lazy," says the scientist. "It doesn’t expend energy to get a reward."

Doya's work could help designers build machines that collaborate to carry out complex tasks, paving the way for self-sufficient swarms of robots that explore hostile environments, gather surveillance data, and repair equipment remotely.

The key is teaching the robots to do the right thing. Each rodent is equipped with a processor chip, a camera, sensors, wheels, and infrared data ports that allow it to communicate with others. If a robot approaches a battery pack or orients itself to mate, it receives a digital "reward"—a snippet of software code that reinforces that behaviour in the future. Over time, the robots compete for power and may even develop territories and alliances.

Via Technology Review.

Larry Abramson of All Things Considered weighs in with a report on Philly Wi-Fi: The governor hasn't signed the bill yet, and NPR adds their somewhat objective two cents. It's so objective that they give Verizon a little too much of a bully pulpit. Verizon complains that the municipal government has enormous cost advantages, but that's a blind: Verizon will have a 2015 requirement for 100-percent access in Pennsylvania, which gives them plenty of time to push back on that requirement in years to come. Philadelphia wants to offer 100-percent access by 2006. There's no way that Verizon could build out such a service profitably in that time at any rate that would make sense to residents. I've said it several times during this discussion, but Verizon would love to avoid building infrastructure. They'd love to sell logical service on a single bill--that is, the Internet dial tone not the Internet copper and wireless. It's incredibly cheap for Verizon to add, say, 50,000 customers on infrastructure they don't have to finance, build, and maintain. In fact, the Verizon rep said as much: cities can raise money more cheaply and aren't subject to taxation. Thus Verizon would benefit from cities building Internet infrastructure resold to Verizon on a cost-plus basis, as well as to all comers....

While there's been a ton of coverage concerning the bill in Pennsylvania to stop municipal broadband offerings, and how that could derail Philadelphia's WiFi plans, there's a more interesting case over in Barcelona. There, the city had already set up a free WiFi system, though it was quite limited. It was designed so users could just view 60 websites related to information and services for the city. However, even though the system was already built, and only offered in this limited way, the Spanish Telecommunications Market Commission has forced the city to turn off the network, claiming it violates competition rules (found via Broadband Reports). It's hard to see how a WiFi network that only lets you visit 60 specific websites is competing with anything, but apparently those are finer points that the Commission didn't want to bother explaining. It's also difficult to see how the added competition of another network can go against competition rules. Isn't more competition a good thing?

Following on from DaveN's threat of unleashing the "how to hijack" guide if Google dont sort themselves out Lots0 give us some more to think about:

The Nigitrude Ultramarine SEO contest that SearchGuild promoted, proved in public, beyond any doubt, that anyone can harm your site in google, if they know how. In fact there are several ways (not just one) to accomplish this.

A few twists and turns and even Marcia wants to see some action:

I was sitting on the edge of my chair in anticipation with my fists and teeth tightly clenched. It was getting as exciting as waiting to watch a rocket get launched!

Lets see what happens :)

Some of the key concepts of the Cell advanced microprocessor for next-generation computing applications and digital consumer electronics have been revealed by partners IBM, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment and Toshiba.



Optimized for compute-intensive workloads and broadband rich media applications, including computer entertainment, movies and other forms of digital content, Cell is a multicore chip comprising a 64-bit Power processor core and multiple synergistic processor cores capable of massive floating point processing, the companies confirm in a joint statement.



The microprocessor adopts a flexible parallel and distributed computing architecture consisting of independent floating point processors for rich media processing, say the partners.



It supports multiple operating systems, including PC/WS operating systems, as well as real-time CE/Game operating systems. "In addition, the Cell processor is scalable and can be utilized in a variety of applications - from small digital CE systems within the home to entertainment applications for rendering movies, to scientific applications, such as supercomputers," they state.



The design work is taking place at a joint development lab the three companies have established in Austin, Texas, after the project was announced in 2001.

Three examples of informative listening about Bit Torrent:

• Engadget’s Podcast number 17
• NPR’s Joel Rose
  comments on the future of Bit Torrent
• CBC on why Bit Torrent makes Bid Media sad (this
  link is the MP3 file)

We have already written about the Korean news website Ohmynews a few times on the Editors' weblog, but until now we didn't know the precise figures concerning this website. "According to Min, director of international development, OhmyNews is generating almost US$500,000 a month in advertising revenue."We broke even last year and since then kept generating a monthly profit of about $27,000," The website is ranked in the top 15 in South Korea. According to a website message from the founder, Oh Yeon-ho, after three years OhmyNews was breaking even, with 2004 anticipated to yield a modest profit. According to OhmyNews sources, only 20% of the site's copy each day is written by staff journalists. The balance is totally dependent on outside contributors, including professors, police officers, students, housewives, business people - everyone. "OhmyNews citizen-reporters are paid from US$20 to as little as $5, depending on the place [each article] is assigned by our editors," Min said. The site was recently recognized at the fifth World Forum on E-Democracy hosted by PoliticsOnline, in a ceremony in France, as one of the global players instrumental in changing the world of the Internet and politics.

Martin Geddes has a hot nut about VoIP issues. He sees what many others miss. Today he cooks Vonage's holiday goose and points out how VoIP will basically bea bundled service with no implied cost.

It's funny. Yetserday I was interviewed about VoIP by Fast Company's Associate Editor Jena McGregor and said basically the same thing when it came to ultimate pricing strategy for telephony service but from a different perspective. Voice is being marginalized down in cost. Those who remember 13 cent per minutes in the 90's that dropped to 6 cents and lower with discounts know that the RBOC's can make costs as low as they want to. VoIP costs are minimal when they stay on net and even when they go off-net how expensive are the really?

Xeni Jardin:
Burger King locations around the United States are reporting thefts of inflatable Spongebob Squarepants rooftop icons. The gigantic blow-up-Bobs commemorate the fast food chain's promo effort with a new animated film.

Similar SpongeBobs have disappeared from Burger Kings in at least two other states, including Minnesota, where a "kidnapper" asked for ransom - 10 Crabby Patties, fries and milkshakes. The note was signed by SpongeBob's cartoon nemesis, Plankton.

vs. Fios fiber. "SBC in 2010 will be offering slower speeds than France and Japan in 2005," notes industry analyst Dave Burstein, who chimes in on "Project Lightspeed", the company's effort to offer ADSL2+ to residential users. Wall Street is apparently more impres..

What benefits does "competition" in the digital video recorder (DVR) market bring consumers in the post-ReplayTV litigation world? If the details in this USA Today piece on DirecTV's DVR-in-planning are any indication, not many.

We knew we couldn't expect to see a major breakthrough in functionality; after all, the copyright cartel has stuck a fork in the DVR, and it wouldn't take very kindly to anyone daring to innovate "outside the TiVo." Here's what we get instead:

• identical functionality (surprise!);
  
• except not really, because you won't be able to jump over commercials entirely using the 30-second hack;
  
• video-on-demand included as part of the service; and
  
• it'll be cheaper to get video-on-demand + "TiVo" -- nice if you're already purchasing both separately.
  

For comparison's sake, check out the list of features you could have if you decided to make your own DVR from scratch -- including the "feature" companies like HBO take away in order to sell back to you: the ability to make fair use of recorded programs and movies.

Matt Blumberg explains how VCs acutally make their money.

The CNet article Striking up digital video search has stirred up quite a discussion today.

What struck me about the article is not the fact that Stefanie points at plans from each of the of the Big Three (Google, MSN, Yahoo). Yes, AOL is mentioned, but they don't seem to be in the search technology business. AOL strikes me as a company fumbling their way through this brave new world and attempting to stay relevant as the world moves to broadband.

Anyway, what really surprised me was the living room connection. Her article leads with:

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are quietly developing new search tools for digital video, foreshadowing a high-stakes technology arms race in the battle for control of consumers' living rooms.

Hmm. She goes on to talk about how we're all going to "bring TV to the web." And when you combine this with the idea of a "Netflix over broadband" service, an interesting picture starts to emerge.

It's funny. We've been hearing about brining this stuff to our couches and living rooms in various ways for years now:

• Interactive TV (remember back in the pre-netscape Jim Clark/SGI days?)
• Tivo and Internet-connected PVRs
• Media Center PCs

But who'd have thought that we might arrive there with search technology pushing things along?

Not me.

Many of the right pieces seem to be close at hand. Some are technology and some are ideas that we're all buying into:

• Interactive TV (remember back in the pre-netscape Jim Clark/SGI days?)
• Tivo and Internet-connected PVRs
• Media Center PCs
• BitTorrent
• Search as a commodity

It's going to be an interesting story to watch unfold.

Who is going to build the iTunes Music Store of the video world?

: Internet ad spending jumped 25.8 percent to $5.5 billion for the first nine months of 2004 compared to $4.4 billion for the same period in 2003, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR. That's nearly one-third of the $17.7 billion brought in by local newspapers and half of the amount being spent on cable tv. It's also the largest increase of all segments; nearly half of the segments showed double-digit increases.

USA Today ran a story yesterday about DirecTV's new combo DVR/VOD unit that will eventually replace TiVo.

"DirecTV is preparing to offer a digital video recorder (DVR) service in mid-2005 that could duplicate virtually every feature now available from current partner TiVo, plus provide video on demand similar to what's offered on cable, say executives of the company preparing the software."

This is bad news for TiVo, since they usually count the million or so DirecTiVo customers as their own, and share subscription and ad profits. This news came to light this past summer and I speculated on it last year, but I think it'll still be bad news for people like me that are quite happy with their dual tuner, native quality recording TiVo boxes. I'm not much of a fan of Video On Demand, so I don't think I'm losing much by not having it. The other big difference between an NDS box and a DirecTiVo will be the interface and basic functionality. Competitors haven't really come close to the wishlist, season pass, or basic reliability a TiVo box provides. My guess is that now DirecTV has announced they're working on this, don't expect to see any major updates to the DirecTiVo OS. I doubt we'll see the Home Media Option. I doubt we'll see Multi Room Viewing, and I seriously doubt we'd ever see TiVo To Go on the DirecTV units.

No word on what will become of the HD-DirecTiVo, but I assume unless the NDS boxes support HDTV, they'll likely keep supporting that box over the normal DirecTiVo boxes. At least that's my hope, since I'd like to finally get a HDTV monitor and HD-TiVo this coming year. [thanks, Brian]

Inside the glass jar of Chrissy Caviar®, of the Human, Caucasian variety, there is, instead of fish roe, one of Chrissy Conant's eggs. Combined with human tubal fluid, each egg is anaerobically sealed inside the same sort of biology specimen research and transport tube that scientists use for mouse and human eggs and/or embryos. Each filled tube is suspended in a clear, viscous silicone-based liquid, inside each jar, and sealed.

The artist's hope is that her eggs, as a concept, will surpass Beluga caviar as the current ultimate in luxury, consumable items. In the context of fine art, using my genes as a commodity, I am making art with my body, by collaborating with technology. And I am trying to manifest, and be productive with, my highly emotional desires to find Mr. Right, and create a family together.

Via the Apartment.

Mark Frauenfelder:
Matt Vine sez: Since yesterday, the rest of the world has been buzzing with news of the World Health Organization's warnings of a impending flu pandemic that could kill up to 100 million. These warnings are suspiciously missing from American news sites - we get things like "Godzilla honored with 'Walk of Fame' star" from CNN's front page." Link

Once the preserve of science fiction, biometric facial recognition has now become a reality, according to the BBC.

"Despite its association with the controversy of identity cards, it is predicted to become part of everyday life.

A few corporations are already scanning pictures of staff for access control or to tackle swipe card fraud. And six police forces have so far recognised its use in identifying CCTV pictures of suspects - one claims it to be the biggest forensic breakthrough since DNA.

As companies become more security conscious, the process of having our faces scanned is set to become more commonplace. And new technology which can produce this in a more accurate 3D form could accelerate this trend.

A firm which has developed the 3D software, Aurora, claims it is sophisticated enough to distinguish between identical twins.

David Churbuck, veteran tech and business writer, says municipal broadband wireless is one case for free market avoidance: Churbuck writes that municipal wireless is more like ensuring POTS (plain old telephone service) for all residents as opposed to a competitive force that's stealing from free market efficiency. Succinctly, he notes, While I rather see the private marketplace do its economic magic, the cozy relationship between the Telcos and public utility commissions insures we’ll never see true free market capitalism at work....

View From Silicon Valley: Overlooking the down years immediately after the bubble, where are all the new jobs today? With a VC funding rate +14.5% above the 1998 rate, Silicon Valley still down -94,100 jobs?!? We have nearly 100,000 fewer jobs than before the boom?? Ouch!

Google's desktop search software is so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about.

Last month, Google released a beta version of its desktop search software: Google Desktop Search. Install it on your Windows machine, and it creates a searchable index of your data files, including word processing files, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail messages, cached Web pages and chat sessions. It's a great idea. Windows' searching capability has always been mediocre, and Google fixes the problem nicely.

There are some security issues, though. The problem is that GDS indexes and finds documents that you may prefer not be found. For example, GDS searches your browser's cache. This allows it to find old Web pages you've visited, including online banking summaries, personal messages sent from Web e-mail programs and password-protected personal Web pages.

GDS can also retrieve encrypted files. No, it doesn't break the encryption or save a copy of the key. However, it searches the Windows cache, which can bypass some encryption programs entirely. And if you install the program on a computer with multiple users, you can search documents and Web pages for all users.

GDS isn't doing anything wrong; it's indexing and searching documents just as it's supposed to. The vulnerabilities are due to the design of Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, PGP and other programs.

First, Web browsers should not store SSL-encrypted pages or pages with personal e-mail. If they do store them, they should at least ask the user first.

Second, an encryption program that leaves copies of decrypted files in the cache is poorly designed. Those files are there whether or not GDS searches for them.

Third, GDS' ability to search files and Web pages of multiple users on a computer received a lot of press when it was first discovered. This is a complete nonissue. You have to be an administrator on the machine to do this, which gives you access to everyone's files anyway.

Some people blame Google for these problems and suggest, wrongly, that Google fix them. What if Google were to bow to public pressure and modify GDS to avoid showing confidential information? The underlying problems would remain: The private Web pages would still be in the browser's cache; the encryption program would still be leaving copies of the plain-text files in the operating system's cache; and the administrator could still eavesdrop on anyone's computer to which he or she has access. The only thing that would have changed is that these vulnerabilities once again would be hidden from the average computer user.

In the end, this can only harm security.

GDS is very good at searching. It's so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about. And now that you know about them, pressure your software vendors to fix them. Don't shoot the messenger.

This article originally appeared in eWeek.

Stefanie Olsen takes a look at rumored video search projects from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in the article: Striking up digital video search. She goes into some depth on what Google might be (-: up to, "Google has demonstrated new...

freitasm writes "The Intelsat-7 was reported lost today. The satellite covered the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, Central America, and parts of South America. It was used to provide digital programming in the Cable Zone, direct-to-user programming, and Internet and data applications to North/Central/South America. The company is already working on the launch of Intelsat-8, scheduled for 17 December."

Don't just stand there, go check it out! Feedster rich media finder - im off to play with it....

Right now, the only way to watch videoblogs is to go to each individual blog and watch each individual video.
As of November 2004, there is no way to see videos all in one place.
It's as if when I want to hear a story, I got to run around town to each person's apartment to hear the story.
I want a stage where we can all come together and tell stories to each other.

via marcs voice

WSJ writes about China's efforts to build its semiconductor industry ground-up:

Semiconductor design has potentially huge benefits for China. Chip-design companies can create valuable intellectual property and help determine global technology standards. Qualcomm Inc., for example, the world's largest independent chip designer, earns most of its revenue, which totaled $4.9 billion in its latest fiscal year, from chip designs using its CDMA wireless technology. And whereas profit margins at the companies that assemble computers and other gadgets are often around 5%, margins at successful design companies are frequently well into double digits.

China is still years behind more advanced economies like the U.S. and Taiwan in chip design. But its rapid takeoff is attracting attention from some established heavyweights. Companies such as Germany's Infineon Technologies AG and Philips Electronics NV of the Netherlands have set up chip-design operations in China. Morris Chang, chairman of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's biggest contract manufacturer of chips, compares China's design industry to an object with "zero speed but infinite acceleration." His company this year opened a nearly $1 billion plant in Shanghai, its first in China, in part to cater to local design companies.

"If you look at the large number of small design companies created here, you are seeing the foundation of an industry created," Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive, said in an interview during a trip to China this month.

China's main attraction for chip-design entrepreneurs is the country's vast domestic demand for semiconductors, most of which are now imported. Operating in China also puts them in proximity to the electronics manufacturers who buy chips for their products, and who are increasingly concentrated in China.

We wrote about Fab Labs a few months ago -- the combination of 3D scanners, Linux computers, laser cutters, 3D milling equipment, etc., assembled by the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT for use in the developing world. It's one of the coolest and potentially one the most revolutionary projects going, as it could be the jumping-off point for the biggest developing world leapfrog ever. Now Bruce Sterling (a name mentioned on WorldChanging once or twice) writes about Fab Labs for the latest issue of Wired, doing what he does best: seeing the possibilities.

Now imagine a vast, rising tide of bastardized things, shoddier than the cheapest postwar products of Japan, coming from Congo, Myanmar, Fallujah - a global outbreak of Napster-fabbed mayhem. Fabbing would be the ultimate industry for the perennially unindustrialized; the consumer cornucopia for the antideveloping world; a mushroom patch of recycled decay that pops up whenever the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, or US Patent and Trademark Office turns its back.

(Posted by Jamais Cascio in QuickChanges at 01:05 PM)

It is easy to forget in the overwhelming PR-athon around the release of the first three seasons of Seinfeld on DVD that there once was a fresh and interesting show called Seinfeld. Well, there was, and it had some classic...

This weekend's Barron's tries to summarize the merry ways that analysts attempt to justify Google's current $50-billion valuation:...

Google News in China has had a speckled past; recall that Google agreed back in the summertime to block sources from the index which the Chinese government had specified. I and many others had issues with this. Now comes word that Google's English version of News is being blocked in China.

Shanghai. (Interfax-China) - The English version of Google's news service has been inaccessible in China for more than a week. Zhang Junwei, a Google Media official stationed in Beijing, acknowledged that the company's English News channel was inaccessible when contacted by Interfax, but could not provide further comment.

I've emailed Xiao for more info, if anyone can get to the bottom of this, it'll be him.

Thanks, SEW.

Direct and Related Links for 'Eudora’s new approach to phish scams'

Sunday Herald asks the all important question, Why bother with 3G when wi-fi can do it at less cost? “Receiving video on a limited range of handsets might be fine and dandy, the argument goes, but why bother when the wireless alternative is ready, reliable and already available on a raft of devices ranging from PDAs (personal digital assistants) and laptops to existing mobile phones? (aka WiFi)” writes the Aussie daily.

Xeni Jardin:

A teen blogger in Alaska has been arrested for her mother's murder.

Rachelle Waterman had posted to an online journal dating back to February. In the journals, which she titled "My crappy life, the inside look of an insane person." She says she lives in Hell, Alaska, details conflicts with her mother and writes about a desire to commit violent acts against herself and others...

Link to copy of one of her final entries, posted Nov. 14 -- hours after law enforcement learned of the mom's reported death. In the entry, Waterman writes about a trip to Anchorage, and buying a new pair of boots. Link to Waterman's blog. Link to related post on glassdog. Link to news coverage. (Thanks, pollenatrix)

[via Anish Sankhalia] David Kirkpatrick of Fortune writes: "The technology business is in a state of turmoil that was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Industry icons are under threat, market leaders are at risk, and the whole pantheon of tech greats seems to be under renovation...Microsoft and Sun face open source, Intel seems weakened, outsourcing threatens services players—these are just a few of the recent shifts in the firmament."

As if users did not have enough worries about viruses hitting their PCs (whether at home or at work), the latest Trojan hit mobile handsets running Symbian-based OS.  The latest piece of malicious code has been dubbed "Skulls" by the anti-virus experts, and comes disguised as a theme manager for Nokia phones in the Symbian Installation Format, such as the 7610.   The virus kills off system applications and then replaces their icons with skull images.

But Skulls is not alone in Trojans creating havoc for cell phone users.  A program called Delf, was used in Russia to infect PCs so that spam could be sent to mobile users across Russia.  Similar viruses have been written to attempt to infect devices such as PDAs running on Windows CE.  Hackers will be increasingly focusing on creating viruses that can infect mobile handsets.   

: According to a U.S. Dept. of Commerce report "A Nation Online: Entering the Broadband Age" (prepared in September but held until after the election), the use of fast Internet connections doubled from 2001 to 2003 but did not meet expectations. As of Oct. '03, about 20 percent of U.S, households were on the fast track. That means the majority of U.S. households either didn't have the ability to get high-speed access or chose not to pay for it. Either way, that leaves a big gap of households not using broadband content or services and it leaves the U.S. lagging behind other countries. Especially troubling: the low numbers in certain demographic segments -- 1 in 7 blacks, fewer than 1 in 8 Hispanics, 24.7 percent of rural users. That compares to 40.4 percent of urban households and 1 in 4 whites.

Engadget ran a great how-to on how exactly you can download tv shows automatically. It's a bit tricky, since the software uses regular expressions, but they provide a bunch of examples to make that easier.

I've often heard this can replace a PVR completely, but if anyone's ever looked around for missed shows online, you can probably agree the quality usually isn't too high and you'll likely have trouble finding what you need unless it's somewhat popular. Still, it's an interesting direction and a few years from now the home recording fans of TV may just fill out the remainder of the TV lineup (and in HDTV no less). I know the networks and movie studios are freaking out over this, so it'll be interesting to see what they do in response to kill this technology.

An anonymous reader writes "ZAP's Smart Car has officially been approved by the EPA for sale in the United States. From the article: 'It was the last major regulatory hurdle the company faced.' Finally a 60 mpg car that can go 90 mph and look cool at the same time!!"

Dave sez: Downhill Battle has released Blog Torrent to the masses! Blog Torrent is software that makes it much easier to share and download files using the bittorrent protocol on your PHP-enabled web site.


Why does Blog Torrent matter?

Making it easy to blog large video files means that people can share their home movies the same way they share their photos or writings. It lets people create vast networks of truly peer-to-peer video content-- video that was made by individuals and shared with individuals, no bandwidth budget or distribution deal needed. Does this mean that we can do for television what blogs have done for news? Let's find out...

Why use Blog Torrent on your blog or website?

1. It lets you post video or other large files as easily as you post text.

2. Installing Blog Torrent is as easy as uploading a photo to your website or blog.

3. Blog Torrent is the one bittorrent tracker that won't confuse your users.

4. It publishes an RSS feed of all your torrents.

Thanks to reader Brendan Wilson for pointing this out: The Palo Alto Medical Foundation is warning against the use of Google Desktop (and presumably, any similar search tool). The foundation even published a FAQ about GDS. From that document:

How does this affect me? If this tool has been installed on a PC that you are using, it is possible for your private health information viewed through PAMFOnline to be cached on the computer's hard drive and retrieved later by someone else.
What can I do about it? If you uncheck the "Include Secure Pages (HTTPS)" option, the tool will no longer be able to retrieve secure PAMFOnline pages.

This is one example of what I am sure will be a long, slow awakening to the power and potential of having search history in our lives.

The New York Times: Packet8 phones also do not use the new H.264 video encoding and decoding scheme, which provides high-quality, 30-frames-a-second images with half the bandwidth requirements. In some ways, the new codec may mean to video what the MP3 compression format has meant to audio.

There’s an old joke that says just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Sadly, that sentiment is probably a pretty accurate summary of the mood at PalmSource these days. After first losing Sony as a major licensee, now PalmSource could be facing the departure of its single-biggest licensee, PalmOne.

Nothing is certain yet, but the rumors of PalmOne’s decision to make a Treo running Windows Mobile won’t die. The latest rumors have Dell pressing PalmOne to make a Treo with a Microsoft engine so that Dell can turn around and sell it to their enterprise users. With wireless PDA’s like Dell’s Axim largely a stagnant-or disappearing-market, Dell would like nothing more than to offer its customers the best smartphone on the market, without having to hassle with the FCC or waste time developing one on their own. It makes sense for PalmOne as well, a company that needs to start actively courting the enterprise market-or risk losing even more ground to RIM. Dell would be a great partner for PalmOne to use to get into the enterprise space.

Most importantly, says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney, is that this is what the market really wants: A device that looks and acts a lot like a Blackberry, but that runs the PocketPC/Windows Mobile engine. “Everybody sees the success that RIM is having,” says Dulaney, “but it’s a closed, proprietary system and folks want a viable alternative.” The Treo-arguably the best smartphone out there-is that alternative, so for once I think these rumors may actually carry some water. I fully expect to see a Palm-Microsoft device-it’s weird to even write that-sometime in the next few months. (Ed Note: We think Dell is trying to push Good as a RIM alternative and needs the Microsoft engine to make a compelling sell to its customers!)

Where that leaves PalmSource no one knows yet, but it’s probably no place good. They can talk about all the tiny Taiwanese new licensees they like, but until they start lining up some A-list licensees, the perception will rightly remain that the buzzards are circling.

(Guest post by Matt Maier, Business 2.0’s fearless wireless & gizmo correspondent and my fellow traveler into the wireless wonderland. Matt uses six phones at a time, talks on none, takes video clips on two and when he is slowing down he double fists fizzy and fancy caffeine drinks. )

Quarterly sales of servers running the Linux operating system topped $1 billion for the first time during the third quarter of 2004, analyst company IDC reported Wednesday. With year-over-year revenue from Linux server sales up 42.6 percent, Linux accounted for more than 9 percent of the $11.5 billion in servers sold worldwide during the quarter, which ended Sept. 30, the research firm said.

Nice. Anyone that knows anything about server software wouldnt touch an M$ setup unless their life hung on it, and bearing in mind that your biz might indeed hang on a robust, server setup....

Link courtesy of IT Garage

Xeni Jardin:
From The Hollywood Reporter:

Buried inside the massive $388 billion spending bill Congress approved during the weekend is a program that creates a federal copyright enforcement czar. Under the program, the president can appoint a copyright law enforcement officer whose job is to coordinate law enforcement efforts aimed at stopping international copyright infringement and to oversee a federal umbrella agency responsible for administering intellectual property law.

Intellectual property law enforcement is divided among a range of agencies including the Library of Congress, the Justice and State departments and the U.S. Trade Representative. It is hoped that designating a single overseer to coordinate copyright law enforcement will put some cohesion into the federal effort, said one Senate Appropriations Committee aide.

The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities

Which search engines are adequately disclosing their paid placement and paid inclusion practices? Which ones are failing to do so? A new report offers some surprising insights.

An anonymous reader writes "Just this month, Microsoft paid almost $20 million to the Computer and Communications Industry Association to make an anti-trust lawsuit go away. FT.com has just revealed that *half* of that payment was pocketed by Ed Black, the president of CCIA and one of MS's fiercest opponents over antitrust issues. His payment was approved by the CCIA board, which includes Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and Oracle. And here's a quote from this article at Groklaw: Could this be why Nokia quit the CCIA right after the settlement was announced, saying matters were not handled "in the proper way"?"

dereklam writes "The popularity of the iPod could be boosting Macs' popularity as well. News.com reports that 6 percent of iPod users have made the switch from PCs to Macs. An additional 7 percent said they are planning to dump their old PC for an Apple machine, according to the survey." I wish the linked story had more details; it's not clear from the results mentioned whether there's a strong causal relationship here.

Because it isn't already easy enough to get a virus on your computer with IE, it appears that an ad serving company with a number of big name clients had its machines compromised for a time over the weekend. Rather than just seeing an ad, certain visitors using Internet Explorer on an unpatched Windows machine would have a virus downloaded while they were visiting websites from The Register, NBC Universal, AtomSchockwave, The Golf Channel and a variety of other sites. While anyone who was using a different OS or browser (or adequately patched) wouldn't have a problem, this does still show how much more risky it's getting to do anything on the internet without making sure everything is locked up tight. It used to be that people trying to push out web-born malware would try to trick people into visiting a site. However, with things like this, it shows how much more aggressive some are getting -- trying to make legitimate sites serve up destructive files without people realizing it.

alleging direct, contributory and vicarious liabilty for copyright and trademark infringement filed November 19 in the Central District of California by Perfect 10 magazine against Google, for providing, via its Image Search, links to 'Stolen Content Websites' displaying unauthorized photos.

Interesting assertion from complaint: "It would be virtually impossible for consumers to locate most Stolen Content Websites if they were not directed to them by Defendant" (para 23). Plaintiff also notes that most of the Stolen Content Websites are judgement-proof.

Complaint via The Berkman Center.

Eyebeam R&D has teamed up with the UI wizards at Stamen Design to release reBlog 1.0. Check it out at www.reblog.org. It more fun and easier to install and use than ever.

Most notable is the new super-sexy online RSS/Atom Aggregator/Reader called reFeed (demo reFeed here).

We've also improved the Movable Type plugin to import del.icio.us-style categories from reFeed, and added a plugin for WordPress. And if you're a reBlog beta user, we tried as hard as we could to smooth the upgrade paths, and we think you'll appreciate the effort.

If you're into blogs, feeds, personal publishing, and/or syndication, we think it's worth your time to check out www.reblog.org and reFeed, and maybe even install and try using the software.

The number of Dutch broadband connections (cable and ADSL) increased from 2.53 million on 30 June 2004 to 2.85 million on 30 September 2004. This brings the number of Dutch households with broadband access to 40.4 percent, and seems to indicate a tipping point for the TV business online.

The Secretary of State for Media, Medy van der Laan, has issued a recommendation that the three channels of the Dutch public broadcaster should be distributed live over the Internet, and other plans include those of ISP Wanadoo: like its mother company France Telecom through its MaLigneTV service, (...)

Entry continued...

Kazaa has added Skype to version 3.0.

Now users can tell each other where to find the free song tracks they want and avoid the bad files...

I wonder how long it takes before someone hacks Skype into Kazaa Lite.

Here's the original press release from Skype.

Scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) are to unveil the new KHR-3, in December.

"The robot can walk like a human longer than an hour powered by embedded batteries. We plan to release the self-contained robot's specifications next month," said KAIST professor Oh Jun-ho.

(KHR-2, the predecessor of number 3)

The 1.2-meter-tall KHR-3 is similar in size with Honda's Asimo and weighs 55 kilograms.

KHR-3 can walk by using 41 built-in motors and numerous joints and can also shake hands or lift objects with its five-fingered hands.

With KHR-3, Korea will be able to narrow the gap with Japan in the competition to make two-legged robots.
Considering the decades-long research experience of Japanese robotics engineers and Korea's relatively short development history, Korea has a shot at emerging soon as a major player. Mechanically, Korea lags behind Japan 2-3 years, but is almost on par with the country in intelligence.

Via Nanoblog < Korea Times.
See also: Robots to serve people in Korea's post offices.

Portland International Airport launches largest free airport Wi-Fi network--in the world? PDX breaks with the usual habit of charging fees, sometimes higher than those in hotels, for airport Wi-Fi. The service covers about 70 percent of the airport, and will be free for at least the first year. The project has a single T-1 on the back end through XO Communications at present. I'm unaware of any other airport of this scale offering free service in the U.S.--or anywhere in the world. The airport sees over a million passengers (counting in and out) per month....

Provisional House Bill 30 (HB30) could put a snag in Phiadephia’s plan to offer city-wide WiFi starting in June 2005.  The bill makes it unlawful for local government to offer the service for a fee unless it goes through private partners.  In this case, it look like politician-friendly Verizon could be the winner of this legislative battle.  The incumbent regional telecommunications carrier in Philadelphia, not only could they get the contract to provide the service, but would also end up having their new network susidized by the city.  Nice one, big V.

National media asleep at the wheel as bloggers, Esme Vos and Harold Feld track the real wireless broadband scandal unfolding in the Penn State. Verizon drafter legislation is putting the Philly Wi-Fi project at risk.

The news that Thomson will take a one-third share of Bethesda, Md.-based ContentGuard has raised the age-old question of Microsoft’s potential domination of standards. Microsoft and Time Warner had previously taken 50 percent stakes in ContentGuard, which owns a patent...

Plenty of press attention (and an SEW Blog post) last weekend about Brin, Page, Schmidt, and others selling some shares. We just learned (via EDGAR) that Google's VP of Business Operations, Shona Brown, also sold a bunch of stock last...

serbach writes "Steve Gibson posted this link to a superb test of about two dozen top Anti-Spyware programs: Eric L. Howes conducted the test over a two-week period in October. The results surprised me: only 3 ASW programs had a 'batting average' of better than .500 when it came to eradicating the broad range of spyware in the test. Freeware star Spybot Search & Destroy came in a distant 7th with an average of only .376. The top three? Giant Anti-Spyware, Spy Sweeper, and Ad-Aware. These test results are well worth your time."

Good news out of the WIPO meetings we've been following: "Member states of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) have sidelined a US government proposal to extend copyright protection for television and radio productions to cover webcasting, a WIPO official said on Monday."

Said Cory, before presenting an open letter from 20 technology companies opposing the inclusion of webcasters' rights, "This coalition shatters the illusion that there is a technology consensus on this issue."

Reads the letter, "One proposal within the Treaty would extend these pseudo-copyrights to the Internet, by means of a controversial 'Webcasting Provision.' While there has been very little support from the national delegations for this proposal, the insistent voice of self-styled representatives of the technology industry has been loud enough to see to it that this proposal has persisted through draft after draft of the Treaty."

Admitted WIPO Deputy Director General Rita Hayes after the proposal failed, "There was no support for it."

I love it when a negotiation process like this actually works, 100 per cent against the odds.

VHS Format Dies Quiet DeathJeremy C. Wright | London | November 23IT Observer - One of Britain's largest retailers, Dixons, is officially retiring VHS players.

Anime Popeye Quicktime.

Canon Inc. will overhaul its domestic production system by introducing unmanned manufacturing lines, officials of the electrical machinery maker said Monday.

Absolutely fantastic news: the aspects of the copyright mashup bill that had so many of us worried were dropped before it passed in the Senate this weekend. The omnibus is now a minibus -- S 3021 [PDF].

Kudos to Public Knowledge, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, the Consumer Electronics Association, NetCoalition, and many others for their hard work in this fight.

Says Gigi Sohn in the PK press release:

Consumers won a major victory when the Senate passed legislation removing the most egregious elements of the omnibus copyright bill that had previously been under consideration. We strongly support the version of the Family Movie Act included in the bill, which gives families more control over how they watch movies and television, preserving the right to skip over commercials. The bill will benefit consumers, both in their entertainment choices now, and from the innovation in technology that will result in coming years.

We are also pleased that HR 4077 was dropped from the bill that passed. That legislation would have lowered the standard for copyright infringement. The Senate also wisely removed the PIRATE Act, which would have made the government the entertainment industry’s private law firm at taxpayer expense.

The Senate should also be commended for including in the bill legislation helping to preserve orphan works and reauthorizing the National Film Preservation Board. These features of the bill are important steps in preserving our nation’s culture. We look forward to working with Congress in coming sessions to make further progress in advancing consumer interests and preserving copyright balance.

Later: Derek Slater: "Take note again of how much better the public interest is being represented today than just a few years ago. Still playing a lot of defense, but at least it's relatively successful defense."

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Bob Wyman of PubSub adds:

Mary Hodder points out on her blog that the PubSub matching engine doesn't "collect the data and store it" like search engines do. This is, of course, because we focus on prospective search ("Searching the Future") rather than the retrospective search that search engines provide. Since we're searching the future, it doesn't make sense to build up a collection of data that we've seen in the past. The only thing we care about is what's new. We're not just "yet-another-search-engine"... We're working on the "other half of the search problem" that hasn't gotten much attention in the past.

Since we don't store data, we can't let you know what has been said about any particular subject in the past. We can only promise to let you know if what you're interested in is mentioned in the future. Thus, a prospective search service only handles half of your search needs. The other half must be provided by using a retrospective search engine like Google, Feedster or Snap. Prospective Search compliments Retrospective Search rather than replaces it. The two are best used together.

This distinction between prospective and retrospective search maps exactly to the different phases of "research" that people typically pass through when seeking information. For instance, imagine the you just came across a reference to PubSub.com and you decided that you wanted to find out more about us. First, you would probably do a retrospective search. You would use Google or Snap to find out "What is known?" about us -- what has been written in the past. Then, if you decided we were interesting, you might think to yourself: "Let me know whenever there is something new about PubSub." That second question would be a "prospective search" and it is what we do at PubSub.com.

JohnScott over at V7N is talking about an interesting clause in the PayPal agreement which essentially covers chargebacks, there are some particularly intriguing arguments in the thread but what it boils down to is you get charged $10 if someone lies to paypal - sounds a might iffy to me and John certainly thinks so:

How does PayPal suppose that we are to avoid it? PayPal is the one who knows the credit card number, the address associated with the credit card, the three digits on the back of the credit card, etc. By being a payment processor, I'd think they were be in the ideal position to assess the legitimacy of a credit card purchase.

They always come through as "un-authorized", so it's not a matter of the customer asking for a refund. It's a matter of the customer lying to PayPal and saying he didn't use his account to submit.

Buyer Complaint Process Requirements

In order for a transaction to be eligible for Buyer Complaint Process review:

* You must have used PayPal to pay for your purchase.
* You must not have received the item that you purchased.
* You must file a claim within 30 days of payment.
* Your purchase must be a tangible item. Services and intangible items, such as emailed recipes and e-books, are not covered.

According to that, a person who submits to BlueFind isn't even eligible to complain to PayPal about it. It isn't a tangible item.

And, if a dork wanted a refund they could just ask me to refund them and remove the listing. I've refunded payments on many occasions when the submitter wanted to be listed in a category that wasn't suitable for the site.

Apparently this is from his directory submissions where one charming individual keeps deciding that he didnt really make those submissions..

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are set to sell 7.2 million shares each in the next 18 months in a move that could net them $US1.2 billion apiece. Google CEO Eric Schmidt also says he plans to sell 2.2 million shares, which should net him more than $US370 million..."

Cory Doctorow:
Great Newsweek editorial defines the young adults of today as the "tech-support generation" who go home at Thanksgiving and patch their parents' operating systems and de-install their spyware. The related Slashdot thread catalogs the must-install apps, plugins and patches that you should bring home to the old folks to get them online.

Forget the generational tags you’ve already heard, like Gen X and Gen Y. We are the Tech-Support Generation. Our job is to troubleshoot the complex but imperfect technology that befuddle mom and dad, veterans of the rotary phone, the record player and the black-and-white cabinet television set. Next week, on our annual pilgrimage home, we’ll turn our Web-trained minds and joystick-conditioned fingers to the task of rescuing our parents from bleeding-edge technology on the blink.

Link

(via Slashdot)

Most users are still waiting........ Many users want to go DSL (and VoIP or Cell) only, but their telco won't provide DSL without local service. Rumblings out of the FCC indicate Powell doesn't want to force "naked DSL" any time soon, despite the fact customers have found their DSL lin..

Barron's writes:

SAP, with annual sales of nearly $10 billion, now accounts for a stunning 54% of the worldwide revenues of the top five players in business software -- and that figure looks headed to 70%. SAP has been grabbing market share hand over fist for the past year as two of its key rivals, Oracle and PeopleSoft, prolong their bitter takeover battle. And in dramatic defiance of critics, the company has positioned itself to thrive in a new era of Web-based computing, where corporate workers can exchange data across departmental, physical and geographical barriers.

SAP's successes have lifted its stock nicely. The company's New York-traded American depositary receipts have more than doubled in the past two years, to a recent 45. They now trade at about 30 times estimated earnings for 2005, a premium of more than 25% to Oracle, Microsoft and some other competitors. But SAP may well be worth it.

The fact is, Kagermann & Co. soon could hold sway over the corporate-software market to the same degree that Cisco Systems came to rule the Internet- router business in the 1990s. Cisco, after realizing it had become the preferred supplier of the most vital picks and shovels of the Internet gold rush, unleashed a sales and marketing blitz like few others, crushing the competition and becoming the predominant provider of networking gear.

SAP's greatest opportunity lies beyond Microsoft -- in a change taking place in the buying habits of corporate technology chiefs. Many of them no longer have the patience, or lavish budgets, for the costly wares of smaller, more specialized competitors. And they want "fewer necks to choke" when technology malfunctions. A report on tech spending released last week by Goldman Sachs noted that businesses are "still in the upswing part of the trend toward fewer, larger vendors."

SAP has been able to gain market share by steadily increasing the breadth and depth of its offerings. That's attracted new customers and given existing ones reasons to order more software. Some companies have shown their allegiance by ripping out their specialized "best of breed" applications and replacing them with comparable SAP offerings.

The other big new product is NetWeaver, which is a stack of software built on an application server-plus, as Kagermann describes it. Application servers allow different applications, or software flavors, to talk to each other via the Internet. While most of SAP's products in the past were written in proprietary code, NetWeaver uses a more open code that works with software from other companies. For example, PeopleSoft human-resource applications can interact with SAP accounting software. NetWeaver also provides Internet portals for accessing information, and data-warehouse and "business-intelligence" capabilities for analyzing trends.

The stronger sales from transitions to mySAP and installments of NetWeaver should lead to greater application sales to big corporations. At the same time, SAP is making inroads into the wide-open middle tier by launching more affordable solutions for small and mid-sized companies. In all, Goldman's Sherlund expects SAP to increase its global market share among the top five enterprise vendors to 64% by the end of this year. Other than Cisco in networking, the only tech outfit with that kind of market dominance is Microsoft.

Treo 650 is already proving to be a problem for early adopters. Oops!

Microsoft strategy for expansion in the real-time collaboration market is about to become reality as in the coming months the company will be releasing a new version of their Live Communication Server and a new corporate instant messenger (code-named Istanbul)......

The math behind the detection of porn.

gollum123 writes "Reuters reports Taipei city planners are building what they say will be the world's biggest Wi-Fi network, making cheap, wireless Internet access available almost everywhere in the Taiwan capital. The project will build on the network available in Hsinyi, an up-and-coming shopping and financial district that is home to the world's tallest building, the 508-meter (1,667-foot) Taipei 101, and the city government headquarters. The city-wide network will be built by Q-Ware Corp., a unit of the Uni-President group, which also holds the 7-Eleven franchise in Taiwan. Q-Ware will deploy at least 20,000 access points throughout Taipei at a cost of US$70 million. Q-ware is aiming for a basic monthly fee of T$150-T$400 (US$4.5-US$12), far less than the T$800-T$1,000 (US$24-US$30) that fixed-line broadband providers demand in Taiwan. The network will cover 90 percent of the city by the end of 2005."

The Standford Law School for Internet & Society are reporting that a US judge has ruled that Archive.org's Way Back Machine pages are admissible as evidence.

Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys rejected Polska’s assertion of hearsay, holding that the archived copies were not themselves statements susceptible to hearsay exclusion, since they merely showed what Polska had previously posted on its site. He also noted that, since Polska was seeking to suppress evidence of its own previous statements, the snapshots would not be barred even if they were hearsay. Over Polska’s objection, Judge Keys accepted an affidavit from an Internet Archive employee as sufficient to authenticate the snapshots for admissibility.

Story via BoingBoing

News.com writes about efforts by Microsoft, AMD and Intel, and then adds:

If you want to spread low-cost access to computing, and ultimately protect intellectual property, maybe it's time to revisit Larry Ellison's concept of the network computer. You probably remember that the Oracle executive pushed the notion of small, diskless "appliances" that included a monitor, keyboard, network connection and not much else--especially no place to run pirated software.

The idea was that all of the smarts were pushed down to network computers from server computers running Oracle's database and communications software. Oracle was to make its profits by selling the server software to hosting companies, Internet service providers, governments and the like.

Ellison even founded a company, Network Computer, Inc., to manufacture and sell the devices. But after reinventing itself as a TV set-top box maker, that venture crashed and burned when it failed to get additional funding back in 2003.

Other companies--including Gateway, Sony and the former Compaq Computer--introduced cheap Net-surfing machines four to five years ago, and all ultimately exited the market as the cost, and profitability, of PC hardware plummeted.

Now, the modern version of the network computer concept comes from Sun Microsystems, which is pushing its Linux-based Java Desktop System as a low-cost way to provide computers to people in China and elsewhere. The company signed a deal last year with China Standard Software to provide JDS to millions of consumers. Sun is also aiming the program at India, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries.

Devising a low-cost PC isn't an exercise in altruism. At stake is an opportunity to gain a foothold in what could be the biggest technology market opportunity this century. Ballmer has thrown down the gauntlet. So who's going to take up the challenge?

SiliconBeat writes:

We talked the other day with Ronald Chwang, over at Acer Technology Ventures.

He's one of four partners in the Silicon Valley office (Santa Clara) of the venture firm, a spin-off from the Taiwanese computer company Acer. The firm was on the early side of the latest wave of VC firms scrambling to invest in China, making its first investment there in 2000.

True, Chwang is here in Silicon Valley, he says, because it still leads technology innovation broadly. Hands-down winner. Developments in intellectual property, new business models, or just divining things that are "very hard to do" -- it's largely happening here in the San Francisco Bay Area. So the trick so far has been to apply the innovations here to the market back in China, tweaking products so they fit in with local usage habits, cultural preferences and so on.

But then Chwang says things have been shifting lately. In some areas where China's market size so exceeds the U.S., they're poised to sneak ahead with several technology innovations. Take the mobile phone usage, where China clearly exceeds the U.S. Chinese companies, he says, are developing new ring tone, music/picture/video messaging capabilities not yet seen here. "Just because of sheer population," he says. Short Messaging Service (SMS) is taking off faster in China because of the country's censorship of official newspapers and online news sites. "SMS is China's underground news media," he notes. He predicts new innovations sprouting from that usage. Another area is in DVD media. China already has a higher DVD standard, offering higher quality and more storage capability than the going US standard. And with broadband usage taking off in China, companies are moving aggressively to offer video-on-demand -- something slow to catch on here. So just as Japan forged a lead in consumer electronics, China has potential to lead in several of these new mobile/DVD/broadband areas, Chwang concludes.

Mary Hodder has the goods....PubSub is monitoring more than 6.5 million blogs, about half of them active....

Canada is ramping up its efforts to get a piece of the outsourced/offshore software development market, which of course is booming in India. Did you know that several Canadian provinces offer very generous tax incentives to US and other companies...

CareerConfused asks: "Today I came across an ad in the NY Times, put out by Microsoft, Micron, Level 3 (among others) that claimed that the H-1B visa quota for FY2005 has already expired (it claims the quota expired the first day of FY2005, which started just about a month back). OK. On the one hand, we have stories of techies not finding jobs; and on the other, we have stories from businesses which claim that lack of H1s is killing their business, as well as public advocacy (like that ad in NYT). So, what is it? Are we in another boom, with jobs going a-begging and companies requiring more H1s to fill them? How come I haven't noticed this in the form of a fatter paycheck (or an Aeron chair, or a fooseball table in the cubicle)?" What have you experienced in your searches for technology-based jobs? Is it still hard to sell your hard-earned skills or are things looking up?

Six Apart have claimed 1 million blogs use its product, according to a statement made by company co-founder Mena Trott to CBS Marketwire. The company would not say how many active accounts it has.

Xeni Jardin:
Jason Schultz points us to the following surreal slice of news and says, "Boy, I'd love to hear the expert witness testimony in this trial!"

Hooters of America and a rival restaurant chain began arguing in federal court over who has rights to the concept of using scantily clad women to sell food and beer. Atlanta-based Hooters of America accuses Ker's WingHouse of Kissimmee of poaching the idea coined when it opened its first sports bar in Clearwater in 1983, Hooters lawyer Steve Hill said in opening statements Wednesday in Orlando.

"The evidence will show WingHouse has copied the Hooter girl almost from head to toe," Hill said. "For want of a better expression, the Hooter girl is our Ronald McDonald."

But Crawford Ker said he based his chain on Knockers, a failing restaurant with an all-female staff in Largo that he took over after retiring from the NFL, according to pretrial deposition.

Link. You can get a "taste" of the allegations made by Ker's WingHouse here: Link. Couldn't we just settle this with a round of topless onion dip wrestling and some free draft pitchers?

The Associated Press reports (Forbes.com link) that Sirius Satellite Radio has hired former Viacom President Mel Karmazin as its new CEO, replacing Joseph Clayton, who will stay on as Chairman of the company. If Howard Stern's jumping ship didn't get people to pay attention to satellite radio, this surely will.
(via BoingBoing)

For years, we've been saying that the real power of connected systems (the internet, mobile phones, etc.) are in their ability to let people connect to each other -- not to be yet another delivery channel for broadcast content. The broadcast content industry, of course, can't fathom how that's possible, and that's part of the reason why they've had so many problems with intellectual property law and finding business models that make sense. It looks like researchers are finally starting to tackle this idea. A professor from Wharton and another from the New Jersey School of Law have written a long, but quite interesting paper looking at how copyright law is out of date, because it assumes a centralized, broadcast model. All of the protections are designed to work in that model -- but connectivity and the ability to do many-to-many communications has really meant that content has moved to "amateur to amateur" communications. That is, it's decentralized -- and our copyright laws are not set up to handle that situation at all. There are, of course, many, many, many examples of this in action -- but we're stuck in our thinking about it by assuming that the only content that really matters is the content that comes as a final package in the "broadcast" model. Rethinking copyright law from the perspective of promoting amateur to amateur content is going to be a big first step in creating the next generation of applications and services that will be successful on these communications systems.

Video game developers used to call it crunch time or the death schedule. Now theyve found another term for their 80-hour work weeks: overtime. ...

There was a time, when a small company made everyone on Madison Avenue sweat. It gave consumers powers to skip through commercials and record television shows, freeing them from the tyranny of a time-bound television experience. It was TiVo, the Che Guevara of the consumer electronics. It started a revolution, which forced companies big and small, from Comcast to Microsoft, to change their digital media plans. It inspired copy cats, and for the first time created a “user defined” technology experience.

It never made money…. infact, it lost money…. tons of it. Still, the TiVoted never stopped loving the cute TV with Antenna ears. Till today. In a desperate bid to stay alive, TiVo which was born out of scorn for commercials sold its soul for a few pieces of silver.

(sub. req.): Yahoo and SBC are expanding their access-content relationship...Customers would be able to tap into a Yahoo portal via a cellphone, PC or TV to do things such as route phone calls, check e-mail, order TV programming and set parental content controls for the Internet or TV. Yahoo would provide software for new TV set-top boxes that SBC is developing, as well as for cellphones for Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest cellular company that is 60%-owned by SBC. The first new services are supposed to hit the market Jan. 1.

For Yahoo, the agreement offers assurance that it won't be squeezed out as the Web and digital entertainment converge on Internet-connected TV sets, phones and stereos...

News.com: SBC will use Yahoo's services when it begins offering its faster broadband product Project Lightspeed. SBC will use Yahoo to provide online radio broadcasts, online photos and remote access for programming digital video recorders.

There's a great new app floating around that automatically downloads and saves your favorite programs via bittorrent. I haven't used TVtorrent before so I'm not sure how complete it is, I bet you'd have to stick to fairly popular shows if you really wanted to get every episode.

People have been building apps with bittorrent and rss before, but this is the first automated app I've heard of that combines the two to grab just the shows you want. Sounds a lot like the app wished for here.

WM Recorder sounds like a pretty cool new product that lets you capture streaming windows media to a file. Seems like they'll be on shaky legal ground as many pay-only audio and video services use the windows media format solely to get around people doing this. More details on the software in their press release today.

Last May, I wrote about how Google effectively approves of cloaking in the case of content from NPR. The new Google Scholar launch, while good for searchers, leaves the company open to even more hypocrisy over its published policy on...

X-mas is coming. No idea how to get the attention of the crowd? Dress your bra like a X-mas tree!

The illuminated clothing design of Janet Hansen features light-up underwear, costumes, and accessories emphasize the artistic integration of lights within each unique garment.

Silicon Valley doesn't have its young whiz kids anymore, those icons of youthful energy and enthusiasm that were common during the dotcom boom years. Some of those kids moved back East, some moved in with their parents I'm told. Others...

gillbates writes "Today Microsoft warned several Asian countries that using Linux could subject them to lawsuits, claiming that Linux violates '228 patents'. Apparently, Steve Ballmer believes he can enforce U.S. law in Asia." Ballmer is presumably speaking about this story. So, companies which sell insurance against lawsuits and companies which make competing products both warn of the dangers of using Linux. Maybe someone should point out that Microsoft is battling dozens of patent-infringement lawsuits itself, and any user of Microsoft software (including governments) could also be sued?

Edward Felten, who can make any complex, obscure technical topic lively and accessible, has posted a new lecture that aims to do the same for the current battles over intellectual property online. It's entitled "Rip, Mix, Burn, Sue: Technology, Politics, and the Fight to Control Digital Media," and it was delivered on October 12 at Princeton:
RealPlayer 56K; RealPlayer 350K; WinMedia 56K; WinMedia 350K

[via Shrikant] Kevin Werbach writes:

An update on Skype's P2P voice over IP service, courtesy of Jeff Clavier:

* 13M+ users registered
* 1M+ simultaneous users reached for the first time a couple of weeks ago
* 2,384,686,217 minutes served, as I type this - i.e almost 2.4 billion minutes. Just to put things in perspective: Vonage has 170,000 customers and passed the billion minutes mark sometime in 2004
* 295,000 users have signed for SkypeOut (Skype has a goal of 5% conversion from the free service to SkypeOut)

If you haven't tried Skype, you should. The sound quality is surprisingly good, even though it uses peer-to-peer connections over the public Internet. They just announced availability of the Skype API, which will let developers build new applications and functionality on top of the platform.

I was originally dismissive of Skype, because it was free, private, and software-only. But I now thing it's a bigger deal than people realize. It's an example of how VOIP is changing the game in telecom, not just allowing in new competitors.

In 1991, according to The Patent Wars by Fred Warshofsky, Bill Gates said this about software patents:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

Russell, cuts to the chase and carves up the recent conversation between Charlie Rose Bill Joy, John Doerr and a bunch of others to pieces. His analysis, different from the gushings of others, proves my point: SIlicon Valley lives in a bubble of its own creation, and indulges in a group think, and of course doesn’t have a clue about wireless. Google’s figurehead CEO Eric Schmidt talked about wireless, except his own company has gotten the wireless religion as yet.

Thomas Hawk writes "PVRblog is reporting today that TiVo will begin to place banner advertisements on your screen when you are fast forwarding. As one of the whole points for people getting a TiVo is to remove obtrusive advertising, it seems like a really bad move to force advertising on people at the exact moment that they are using your technology to avoid advertising. This act points to the desperation of TiVo and their management team and although it might help them in the short run it will most certainly backfire in the long run." This is ironic for a company whose slogan used to be "TV Your Way," but not surprising, since its CEO says he wants to move to a largely advertiser-supported revenue stream. I've bought three TiVos in the past four years, but my next PVR will run MythTV -- unless HR2391 passes and makes me a criminal for skipping commercials.

David Hornik has digged down a recent SEC filing and found an interesting list of Sequoia investors:

"Sequoia has a fairly typical mix of investors: Universities (e.g., Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc.), Foundations (e.g., Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, etc.), Fund-of-Funds (e.g., HarbourVest, Knightsbridge, etc.), and high profile individuals (e.g., Andy Bechtolsheim, Wu-Fu Chen, Ed Kozel, Ram Shriram, Jerry Yang, etc.)."

Interesting.

The VoIP tax and regulation issue far from settled on the state level. With the California local municipalities trying to charge the VoIP providers a tax the local issue may be an even hotter debate topic.

After two days, I've yet to hear back from the "consultant" Don Maynard, a Silicon Valley attorney, who is advicing the League of California Cities on how to go after the alleged tax money.

If It's not enough that TeliaSonera has blanked Sweden with Wi-Fi, more is coming: The Cloud has formed a norther subsidiary, The Cloud Nordic, that will challenge TeliaSonera's Swedish primacy by installing hotspots in 55 Swedish train stations. Eventually, all 178 train stations in Sweden will have hotspot service. (In the U.S., we have maybe a dozen so equipped.) Telia HomeRun lists nearly 500 locations in their Swedish directory. This Register article notes that The Cloud's competitor Broadreach has installed Wi-Fi both in stations and is preparing to roll service out on trains. Sweden and Britain already have Wi-Fi-equipped trains: the Gottenburg to Copenhagen run and some of Britain's GNER trains; both of those installations come from Icomera. Broadreach is using Canadian firm PointCast's equipment. PointCast has two lines in California and one in Canada up and running in production and trials....

According to Gartner, by way of CNET, Microsoft has taken the OS lead on handhelds. Here are Gartner's Q3 handheld shipment numbers: Windows CE: 1.4 million (up 33% from last year) Palm: 851,000 (down 26% from last year) RIM (Blackberry):...

Lufthansa now has 13 jets outfitted with Wi-Fi with more on the way. I'm told that usage is running at about 3% of occupied seats; this may not sound like a lot but given how new the service is and...

Good God, how much tin does it take to fill Mickey's ears? Recall how worked up I got over the Kleptones mashup of Queen's A Night at the Opera? Well, many others did too, including Waxy, which linked to various mirrors of it, as did I. In any case, Disney, which owns the rights to the original Queen recording, has now threatened to sue Waxy over the links. I know of one other organization that regularly threatens to sue when someone links to what they consider private intellectual property. They threatened me at Wired in the mid 1990s. Who were they? The Church of Scientology. Great company you keep, Mickey f*cking Mouse.

Link via Boing Boing.

Texas officials wary of plan to hunt by Internet. Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms. "We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head,"

Business 2.0: New software could transform the desktop giant into the behemoth of Internet-based communications.

Microsoft might have been late to the voice-over-Internet-protocol party, but now the company has a plan to take over the world of IP-based communications. In the coming months, Microsoft will likely release a new version of its instant-messaging server, Live Communications Server, and a corporate IM client code-named Istanbul. The LCS/Istanbul combo is a way to cash in on the trend toward IP-based communications. Continue Reading at Business 2.0 website

: Lobbyists from various factions are trying to push through HR2391, a hodgepodge of IP bills now known as the Intellectual Property Protection Act -- and chockfull of provisions that protect content at the cost of consumers. According to Wired News' Michael Grebb, the bill would punish anyone who infringes on copyright by distributing material electronically "with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement" and permit use of skipping technology for "objectionable" material but prohibit commercial skipping. That just scratches the surface. Opponents are trying to spin the process into the next session.

Summus has released the 2005 Hooters Calendar Girls for wallpaper for mobile phones. Each month will introduce photographs of a new model, including photos not available anywhere else. Each one will cost US$1.99.

Summus hopes it will have the same success as last year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit portfolio which has had 1.2 million downloads to date.

Via textually.

TheMeuge writes "The New York Times is reporting a new development in the unrelenting progress of the RFID juggernaut. The school district of Spring, Texas has adopted RFID as a way to track students' arrival and departure. Upon being scanned, the data are transmitted to both the school administrators, as well as city police. I guess cutting class is no longer an option."

Cory Doctorow:
A security expert who audited the Japanese National ID Card system and found it to be terribly designed and implemented was prevented from presenting his findings at a technology conference after the Japanese government intervened and threatened the conference organizers.

The Japanese government gave me two options.

1) Do not talk
2) Drastically change your slides to say what they want me to.

When I offered to not use slides at all and give my own opinion they told me that I would not be permitted to speak AT ALL. It is obvious to me that they did not have an issue with my slides or presentation. They were afraid that I would draw attention to problems in JUKI net. Soumushou thinks that they can hide from the issues. They think that if they keep people from speaking about the issues, it will go away. I thought I would be immune from such Japanese government pressures however I underestimated Soumushou's ability to manipulate those around me.

Link

(Thanks, Gohsuke!)

The headline of an email from the Union for the Public Domain (UPD) says it all: "Broadcasters Try to Steal More of the Public Domain this Week at WIPO."

As regular Copyfight readers may remember, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) took an extraordinary step forward in October when it adopted the Development Agenda -- a proposal that the organization throttle back its "IP Uber Alles" philosophy and tap into its considerable power to spur innovation and help humanity. Starting today, the organization will hold the 3-day Twelfth Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, and a number of non-government organizations (NGOs), including CPTech, EFF, and the UPD, will be there to urge WIPO to stick to its guns.

My EFF colleague, the indefatigable Cory Doctrow, will pursue four major initiatives on EFF's behalf:

• asking WIPO to apply public-interest considerations in revising the highly controversial Broadcasting Treaty [PDF], which proposes the creation of a new and unnecessary layer of pseudo-copyright protection for broadcasters (see EFF's statement [PDF] for details);
  
• joining other NGOs in proposing an alternative draft of the treaty -- one that targets the problem (signal theft) rather than adds new rights;
  
• advocating filling in the "negative space" at WIPO -- that is, using the organization to establish a miniumum global set of rights for the public as well as for copyright holders; and
  
• supporting 20 tech companies that will speak out against the inclusion of "webcasters" in the Broadcasting Treaty.
  

• The UPD website (front page)
  
• EFF's Deep Links
  

So .... I was looking at Google trading volumes this week in light of the much-ballyhooed 30+-million shares coming out of IPO lockup. And I discovered something interesting: Google's trading volumes went through a gestalt shift back on October 21st.Here...

David sends me this link to Stever Robbins site Venture Coach that is full of resources fro aspiring entrepreneurs. One of the best piece is Q&A for a reasonable equity distribution:

"Dividing equity among founders

Having several founders makes it hard to keep everyone adequately compensated. By the time of harvest (IPO or acquisition), the founding group can expect to own about 20-30% of the company. With one founder, that can mean riches. With several founders, that may mean splitting the pie into so many pieces that no one is happy with the value of their piece."

No rocket science on this site but pretty good introduction into the whole topic.

Go read it all.

<

If you're using Skype, it's sure time to upgrade to the latest version.

The folks at Secunia have pegged this a threat, much like the exploits that affect Internet Explorer.

Andy says--get the latest version and also, make sure your antivirus is up to snuff.

A rumour circulating from folks close to Level 3 has Comcast coming out with VoIP in a big way next year too.

Here's what I'm hearing but it may not be fully accurate so I'm hedging as a brief call with Comcast and the promise of a call back later this morning has them saying it's just a rumour:

Five Cities will be unveiled Feb 11th with another 50% of all Comcast covered in another 6 Months. The goal is to have 100% of all Comcast covered by the end of 2005. My source says that Comcast accelerated having entire country covered by a year.

I'm calling Comcast PR to see what they have to say...but the tea leaves seem to say that the MSO's know they have competition and need to move fast. They are not used to doing that but their saving grace is that the RBOC's move slower.

TatAD Inkorporated, a Vancouver based company, offers you to make some cash by tattooing your body with your favorite logo or product name.

You register and TatAD tries to match you with corporations, who can identify with each participants demographic and psychographic sectors and potential target markets.

You can then choose an area of your body that you are willing to have branded with a particular corporate brand, product name or logo.

"The business idea came up when we saw a guy from South Carolina, Auction off the back of his head on eBay for $7000 to an Internet service provider, said Mark Chadwick, President of TatAD. "Since then, the Company has reported 800 new signups directly related to their walking billboard, a cost of only $9 for each new account. That's serious business!"

Via sexblo.gs < agenda.
Related: tattoo your email address.

Yale Law School Dean : "I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud" Ian H. Solomon's belated realization : "Could we have been so naive?....by my presence, along with other Democratic lawyers, I lent an air of legitimacy to the voting process....We should have had trained observers - computer scientists, not lawyers! - verifying the integrity of polling data from machine upload through the tabulation of countywide and statewide results. Somehow we neglected the most vulnerable step....I realized that I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud....The time is now for voters from all states that used electronic voting machines to request an audit of results and a manual recount of ballots if possible."

Lucent Technologies, it seems is closed to snagging a big portion of the $4-to-$5 billion 3G upgrade likely to be undertaken by Cingular/AWE. The news could be announced before the year is over. The new Cingular which is closing its merger with AT&T Wireless today, plans to upgrade to UMTS, also known as Wideband CDMA, which is based on the European GSM standard. Friedman Billings Ramsey analyst Susan Kalla thinks that the deal is actually worth about $3 billion over three years ($1 billion per year), and sees it as a “very major win for Lucent.” Also in 2005, Cingular will focus on building out its California and Nevada networks, which it divested to T-Mobile for about $2 billion as part of the merger agreement with AWE, Kalla adds. “The Cingular win would be major for LU, since Lucent has little market share in GSM,” says Kalla. In 2005, Cingular/AWE will try to catch up with Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS. According to Kalla, the operating margins could be 25% in the first year of the contract, lower than LU’s customary 30% margins for wireless, but margins are likely to improve after the first year of the contract. The contract could start in early 2005.

All of you US residents who have been lusting for that USB-adapter, Siemens Giga handset combination that has been the buzz of the web, well I have some bad news for you: you will not get it. Not today, not today anytime soon. Why? I asked for a review unit from Siemens folks and here is what their PR person emailed me back: “Siemens doesn’t have review units for this product, since it is not going to be available in the US market. I’m sorry we aren’t able to help.” Now if I am Skype, or Skype’s investor, I better find a way to get a similar contraption out in the US , which still remains one of the hottest market for Skype-service. Not having this device means, that making money from Skype Out service is still going to be tough.

The VoIP feature madness is taking a new turn. Today AT&T announced that its CallVantage customers can get nine more local numbers in addition to their primary number, a nice way to circumvent paying any sort of long distance charges. It will cost you $5 a month per number - which is what Vonage charges you. (Ma Bell, catching up with Citrons?) This new feature set, designed primarily to give Baby Bells a migraine is called "Simple Reach Number." Cathy Martine, AT&T senior vice president for Internet Telephony warns: "We have a pipeline of exciting new enhancements coming from AT&T Labs that will give AT&T CallVantage Service customers even more capabilities, convenience and control over their communications." The company also introduced today additional service enhancements that include:

• "International Call Blocking /Shut Off," will provide the ability to block or unblock outbound international calls to those locations where a per-minute fee would be assessed
• "International Calls in Call Log," tracks all international placed and received calls to create a complete record of all usage;
• "Caller ID/International Update," now delivers Caller ID information, where available, on all international calls;
• "Caller ID Name from Phone Book," that allows even further personalization of the service by displaying the personalized or preferred name from the phone book as the Caller ID name for in-coming calls. For example, "Mom" will appear instead of "Smith, Jane."

Cisco Bigwig Joins Board at VoIP Favorite reports The Street.com.

Cisco's router chief has taken a board position at closely held VoIP upstart Skype.Mike Volpi, head of the Cisco technology unit focusing on boxes that direct Internet traffic, has joined the board of the Luxembourg Net calling company, according to a story published in BusinessWeek on Wednesday.

A few years ago, someone in Australia complained that an article in Barron's magazine portrayed him in a negative light, so he sued Barron's parent company, Dow Jones, under Australian defamation laws. Dow Jones fought back, noting that the article was intended for an American audience, and that it had been hosted on a New Jersey-based server -- meaning that they shouldn't fall under Australian jurisdiction. In 2002 the Australian Supreme Court disagreed, saying that because someone in Australia could read the story, Australian laws applied. Now comes the news that after fighting the case in Australia for the past few years, Dow Jones has settled the case, issued an apology, and paid up a small amount to the person in question. The problem, however, is that the precedent still stands. Australians can now sue under local laws for things online that simply were not intended for that audience at all. If other nations adopt this policy, then we suddenly have a least common denominator of laws when it comes to the internet. The most stringent law automatically applies around the world -- which is obviously quite problematic.

Direct and Related Links for 'Unused PC Power to Run Grid for Unraveling Disease'

Looking to broaden the use of its desktop Linux software beyond technology enthusiasts, Novell has started shipping a business-class release that's based on the same underlying code as its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating system. [Computerworld Linux News]

'-- Forrester Research Inc. analyst Simon Yates contrasted the $50 annual fee for Novell Linux Desktop 9 with the purchase prices of up to $500 that users have to pay for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP and Office software. But if users are heavily locked in to Windows systems, chances are slim that they would consider deploying many Linux desktops, he said. --'

The keywords here are "heavily locked in." Vendors just love these three little words because it means continued cash flow. Fortunately, managers now have a way out from being jerked around and ripped off by vendors, if they choose to break the bonds of dependencies.

...John

Entertainment industry mega-bill. Congress is considering a new bill that answers several entertainment industry concerns in one fell swoop, doing the work of several previously proposed (and rejected) bills. According to Wired, HR2391 would ban users from skipping commercials on th..

Indexed Forever links to a Bain Capital Ventures report on successful software companies. One of the points mentioned is that a new software company should focus on the rule of 126 - $100 million in revenue, 20% EBIT margins in 6 years.

That presumably would apply to companies with a licencing model. Indexed Forever offers a rule of 111 for "software as a service" companies: $100m, 10% EBIT, in 10 years.

All Wall St. eyes are on GOOG today as more than 39 million shares are released from lockup. Bloomberg story.

The possible increase of shares in circulation may ease a shortage of stock that helped fuel a rally since the company's initial public offering in August. Shares of Google, the most- used Internet search engine, closed yesterday at $184.87, more than twice the IPO price of $85.

Before today, 27.2 million of Google's 273.4 million shares were free for trading. The number of shares available will rise tenfold by mid-February with the expiration of more so-called lockup periods that restrict insider sales after an initial public offering.

Update: Here's Google's 10-Q, thanks to SEWBlog.

So, we already knew that robots are cockroaches' best friends (cf. The Roachbot and the wireless cockroach.)

Now, a European project called Leurre is working on a possible solution to solve the cockroach problem: a robotic Judas roach able to seek, locate and betray its insect counterparts. The Belgian, French and Swiss team says that the invention is "a breakthrough in mankind’s struggle to control the animal kingdom".

A three year study of cockroach behaviour resulted in a computer programme allowing a cyberroach to mimic its victims' social habits.

Next on the agenda was to construct the InsBot and arm it with lasers, infra-red sensors and roach scent to allow it to move in complete darkness and properly interact with the cockroach community. Tests are under way to show that while cockroaches naturally gravitate to a dark shelter, if the intruder leads them to a lit shelter they follow - presumably to their destruction. One of the researchers notes: "It is plausible and realistic to imagine that, in five or ten years’ time, people with a cockroach infestation will be buying robots to get rid of them."

The Insbot is only a proof-of-concept device, the ultimate goal is to develop robots capable of integrating and communicating with animals: stopping sheeps jumping off cliffs, preventing outbreaks of panic among guinea fowl and to encouraging chickens to take exercise.

Via Nanoblog < The Register < The Times.

The Tampa International Airport apparently thinks the FCC rule that landlords can't control unlicensed spectrum doesn't apply to them: The airport is retaining legal counsel to deal with the issue, which was settled definitively by the FCC earlier this year. We wrote about this decision in June. I don't see much leeway in the FCC stating it has exclusive authority to resolving matters, and that rules prohibit landlords from placing restrictions. The article quotes the airport's executive director's position. "There's been talk that airports do not have the authority to regulate telecommunications services within the airport," said Louis E. Miller, executive director of Tampa International Airport. "We think that's ridiculous." Fascinating that an FCC ruling would be dismissed as "talk." If this makes it to federal court, it's certainly possible that a court could rule the FCC doesn't have this authority, but it's seems doubtful, as the FCC has such a broad mandate covering this issue. There were numerous lawsuits about condos and satellite TV antennas, and the FCC appears to have definitively resolved that in their own favor. Here's a great equivocation from a trade association that seems to side with the airport: While the FCC does have the authority for frequency regulation, it does not stop an airport from "managing" the usage of spectrum, said Bill Belt, director of technical regulatory affairs for The Telecommunications Industry Association. The Web site for this group shows it advocates market-based regulation of spectrum. The board of directors doesn't seem to represent any particular landlord/airport bias, either: Lucent, Cisco, IBM, and Intel are all on the board....

It seems Starbucks was so lucky to invent a whole market segment as most recent numbers suggest:

"Net income rose to $103 million, or 25 cents a share, in the 14 weeks ended Oct. 3, compared with the $70 million, or 17 cents a share, it earned in a 13-week period a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter increased to $1.5 billion from $1.1 billion.

In a conference call yesterday with analysts, Howard D. Schultz, the company's chairman, and Orin C. Smith, who will be succeeded by Jim Donald in 2005, painted an optimistic picture for next year. Mr. Schultz said Starbucks planned to open 1,500 stores and expected growth of 20 percent in earnings per share for both revenue and earnings. "

Wow!

"The RSS syndication format has spread like wildfire through the Internet, permeating most news sites and virtually all blogs. Now there's a new aspect of RSS ready to enjoy the same popularity. Called RSS enclosures, they're the next step in the RSS revolution and hold great potential."

"TiVo boxes are in many ways a perfect target for gadget hobbyists, providing both the means and motive to create some high-powered enhancements. The devices use mostly off-the-shelf computer components and run the open-source Linux operating system, making it easy for curious tinkerers to try out their skills. In addition, TiVo has intentionally left many tantalizing features out of its boxes due to concerns over potential copyright violations. That combination has fueled a high-stakes game of underground innovation for TiVo, which must tread carefully as it seeks to create new features to stay ahead of rivals without angering Hollywood and broadcasters such as partner DirecTV."

Looking to get into listening to podcasting but aren't so much interested in spoken word works? Well, then IndieFeed is for you. Set yourself up with iPodder and iTunes if you haven't already, grab some feeds, and knock yourself out. Your feeds will regularly download with mp3s of independent artists from a variety of genres, with more on the way. The best part is that you can "suggest" additional independent artists that would benefit from the promotion on IndieFeed.


(Continued at The Media Drop)

I think it's only a matter of time for VoWiFI to really take hold and feel that the biggest sellers of VoWiFI will be one of two types of companies--the cable operators or the mobile operators.

Here's why. Access to the customers.

The mobile operators have storefronts, agents and already mail to their customers or email bills. That gives them real estate, mindshare and distribution. That means they have lots of repeat access and the ability to bundle both traditional wireless services like cellular and data (wow, I'm calling them traditional) with VoIP and VoIP over WiFi in one complete bundle, thus disintermediating the traditional telco.

That's what makes BT's pending move into the market in the UK so interesting. Basically BT has been going forward with win at all cost strategy when it comes to WiFi, first building out hot spots, then forming roaming alliances. Back in 2001 they unloaded their mobile phone service by unbundling the wireless division and lauching 02 as a standalone or spun out company.

Now with their apparent decision to go into the WiFi VoIP business the are going right after some of the same customers they sold off and using the old call box locations and new hotspot locations for WiFi. Add in that BT is also pushing a competitive VoIP product for landline replacement, and has a deal with Yahoo as part of integrating in with Yahoo's IM client, Messenger and you start to see the idea of always on, always connected, with only the mobile piece missing.

Now look at their roaming partner, T-Mobile and the missing piece seems to fall into place. BT doesn't need to be in the mobile phone business, they just need to resell in one direction or the other. Between their own hotspot footprint, that of T-Mobile and their other large hotspot partner, "The Cloud" you have the makings of a very connected universe for people who are either nomadic during the day or at home working or just talking. This all spells good news for a company like Bridgeport-Networks, who I have written about before because their technology plays such a pivotal role in making the one device work on all the networks regardless of platform (i.e 3G, GPRS, WiFi, WiMax, WiWhatever)

Now let's look at the cable companies. They are in a perfect position if they ever figure it out to be in the WiFi business too. All they have to do is turn on cable in retail locations and offices in a big way by installing WiFi in every cable box and combining a broadband modem. Can we get to One Box Please !!!! But their bigger play may come from WiMax. The cable operators have all those green boxes that are their hubs on streets. If each of those was WiMax enabled you would have the ability to make phone calls too using VoIP.

But the handoff technology isn't quite there yet, but when it finally arrives the combination of WiFi, WiMax, 3G and VoIP all in one device, via one carrier will make this all a very connected world. In the near term, I think the mobile carriers are the ones who are in position to grab market share from the traditional telcos, which also explains why AT&T is going into the mobile phone market here in the USA.

VoIP + Mobile means bye bye RBOC for many, and by being friendly with the cable MSOs as AT&T already is, they have a strong alliance partner.

Direct and Related Links for 'Attacking the alternative'

Venture Development Corporation, a research firm says Microsoft is the leader in the embedded real time operating systems followed by Wind River, Palm Source, Symbian and Green Hills Software.

Wall Street Journal reports that PortalPlayer, whose chip powered the hit IPod is going public sometime this week, selling 6.25 million shares at $11 to $13 a share. Citigroup Inc. and Credit Suisse Group’s Credit Suisse First Boston are leading the IPO. “It’s on everybody’s radar screen now,” Sal Morreale, who tracks IPOs for Cantor Fitzgerald LP in Los Angeles told Wall Street Journal. “People want a piece of the iPod, and they haven’t had too many chances.”

Feedster now has an interface at http://blogs.feedster.com/ that restricts your search to just Weblogs. Otherwise it's just the same. So that's: blogs.feedster.com -- Weblogs politics.feedster.com -- Politics (though the entries...

Blinkx, the web application that helps you find releated material based on the context of what you're currently viewing in your browser window (they call it implicit query), has a new verision (Blinkx 2.0) available. I'm going to download the...

John Battelle reports on a rumor out of a WebmasterWorld.com thread that Google might ban affiliates from purchasing ads linked to trademarked terms. But that's not the same thing as banning ALL ads linked to trademarks, as the headline of...

With innovations like this and the boyfriend's arm pillow, Japan has only itself to beat in the creepy body-part cushion market.

Sivar writes "Ace's Hardware and news.com.com.com report Solaris that 10 has been released. Improvements include a performance-enhanced TCP-IP stack to shed the "Slowaris" moniker and their much-vaunted ZFS (Z File System). Solaris will initially be "free" (as in beer with an annual subscription fee for bug fixes and support), and will reportedly be released under an open-source license later." As well, KingSkippus writes "MSNBC reports, "After investing roughly $500 million and spending years of development time on its next-generation operating system, Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday will announce an aggressive price for the software — free. Sun also has promised make the underlying code of Solaris available under an open-source license, though the details have not been released." An article at Computerworld also has the story from Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief operating officer."

In "Crazy Like a Firefox", Rebecca Lieb dissects Firefox' Open Source marketing and the grassroots efforts behind it.

My thoughts are simpler, but along her lines. Firefox got huge boosts in popularity following each release and the subsequent weblog / media outlash. Commercial efforts will have a hard time, or no chance at all, to command and harness such a support, which makes studying Firefox' success story an intersting thing, but not very useful for commercial enterprises. The use of grassroots marketing tools, such as the Drupal powered "spread Firefox" effort, the banners, referrer rewards, and more, made this one of the biggest success stories in modern OSS communications. Here we go.

Related entries: