: Will counter-marketing offesive be able to counter iTunes? I doubt it...Anyway, Sony next week will launch a marketing blitz in Europe for its new Connect music download store, and new advertisements for four Walkman products, including the recently launched NW-HD1 hard disc player.
Also, Sony said its second wave of European expansion is still on track for later this year as the battle for Europe's Web-savvy music fans intensifies.
Microsoft search researcher Eric Brill suggests that as search gets better, it will be less a money-maker: Microsoft Researcher Questions Search Engine Business Model from CRN, a nice catch from Search Engine Guide. Brill's comments were made yesterday at a...
I wonder what Google, Yahoo and others will have to say about a new version Super AdBlocker that removes paid listings from about 20 search engines? Older versions of the product blocked pop-ups, pop-unders, rich media, Flash, and some spyware...
Another early search history lesson from one of Excite's founders, Joe Kraus, about when Microsoft considered buying his company. "I remember Nathan Myhrvold nearly yelling that search was not a business; that users would find their favorite site, bookmark them...
LostCluster writes "CNET is reporting results from a Gartner Group report that claims 40% of desktop machines sold with Linux on them are being used to run pirate copies of Windows! The report goes on to say that this stat reaches as high in 80% in 'emerging markets', the same places that the stripped down lite version of Windows is being aimed at. Gartner's making a bold prediction that the number of machines sold as Linux desktops may eclipse the number of machines actually running Linux."
engywook writes "National Public Radio and The Daily Press of Ashland, Wisconsin (among others, I'm sure) are reporting that the US Navy plans to scrap the Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) system for communication with its fleet of nuclear submarines, both in Wisconsin and Michigan. The report states that the Navy no longer feels that ELF is necessary, and that they will now rely on 12 VLF systems. The system has been in operation since October 1989. The system has been protested nearly the whole time, both as a part of a Weapon of Mass Destruction and as a potential health hazard."
These days, when it seems like the patent office will approve just about any ridiculous patent, it's almost surprising to hear that they've tuned one down. However, it appears that Microsoft has had their patent application on the FAT file system rejected, meaning that many storage device makers can go about their merry ways without having to pay a Microsoft tax to make their devices work with Windows machines. Of course, as the article notes, Microsoft was so sure of the patentability of this, that they had already started hitting up manufacturers, some of whom may have already paid the licensing fees.
Natasha Netschay Davies had an interesting article about Wiki software about a week ago in The Globe and Mail. In case you do not know what a wiki is, then nothing like checking out the definition on wikipedia, one of the most popular wikis in the web. Wikis represent the latest innovation in the collaboration space - think of them as sandboxes where multiple users can jointly develop web content, without the need of programming skills.
Wikis can really cut down a lot of time on the development of product specifications, market requirement documents, and other projects that normally end up getting bogged down by multiple revisions by various people across an enterprise. Moreover, wikis create a good environment for "group think" and instills a sense of community: the willingness to contribute to a collaborative effort increases substantially.
The article also talks about Socialtext, a Palo Alto (CA) start-up that successfully commercialized the wiki concept. Hopefully we will see a lot more - this technology is one to watch in the upcoming years and will dramatically impact the collaboration space.
Comcast is a driving force for changing TV as we know it. Just read this interview with CEO Brian Roberts and COO Stephen Burke. Says Roberts:
Today, we have about 2,000 hours of [video-on-demand] programming, and most of that is no additional cost.... The goal is that five years from now it's virtually unlimited, using the great progress of Moore's law, where the servers get cheaper and capacity gets greater. You'll have 30,000 to 40,000 hours someday.... You just say, "John Wayne movies," and we have a demo of this where up comes every John Wayne movie that's on now or in the future.
Digital disruption is happening all around us. Music, Movies, Telephone, … it all is being digitized, chopped, assembled and reassembled by us.
Between Tivo/PVR functionality (now integrated into one chip), P2P file sharing platforms, Hi-Def. TV, BitTorrent, broadband Internet, falling HDD costs, rising CPU power, we're seeing a confluence where entertainment should continue to be interesting and challenging for both the content providers as well as us the customers. [PVR Blog]I had a chance to chat with Bob Bailey, chief executive of chip maker, PMC Sierra, and we got talking about the disruptions being caused in the technology food chain. Bailey gave me his five digital disruptions that are going on presently in the world, and how they are creating opportunities and at the same time destroying some old industries.
When I asked the question, what Microsoft does with its $7 billion R&D budget, I got a lot of flack. However, this morning, I did realize one thing they did not spend any money on - digital image libraries. For that, it turned to Beon Media, a 21-month-old start-up founded by Scott Lipsky, formerly of Amazon.com and Avenue A.
Beon Media had "created a novel way to display famous artwork and photographs on flat-screen televisions. Earlier this year, Lipsky radically changed the focus of the startup when Microsoft chose the company's digital-image gallery to be prominently featured in next month's release of the Windows XP Media Center. Before the deal with Microsoft, Beon Media was selling a device to businesses that allowed them to display high-resolution images on plasma television screens. The King County Library installed the system, as did the law firm of Black Lowe & Graham, creating a revolving digital gallery of famous photographs and paintings from artists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Ansel Adams.(Seattle PI)Actually if you look at Beon Media, you realize that we are so early in the convergence game that small start-ups can create strong positions in niches, and position themselves for future acquisitions by giants. (The New Road to Riches, Business 2.0)
The BBC News website has introduced links to other news sites' articles that relate to the stories they cover.
Google News is based around a similar premise, but as far as I know the BBC is the first major news organization to link to articles not written by themselves.
A good example of this in action is the current headline article about today's bombings in Iraq (look in the right sidebar).
Only the top stories seem to have this feature activated, but hopefully (to me at least) it will spread through the site with time.
Getting hard numbers on Google is always, well, hard. Andy has a few in this post, summarizing a Google manager's presentation at a recent conference:
28% of Google searches are for a "product name", 9% are for a "brand name" and 5% are searches for a "company name".
rying to address a problem most people weren’t even aware existed, Adobe has created a new file format for digital photos called Digital Negative (DNG) that tries to unify all the different raw formats (images before any in-camera processing) that digital cameras produce. Shooting raw images means you avoid dealing with the compression and loss of image quality involved with shooting JPEGs, but you also have to deal with the fact that each manufacturer basically uses a proprietary format that is specific to their cameras and might not be compatible with Photoshop or other editing software (which is where DNG comes in). They’re hoping that DNG’ll get adopted as the standard for capturing raw images, and they’re definitely going about it the right way and letting anyone who wants to to use the format in their cameras, printers, and software applications for free without any limitations.
A small sign that Sony might be starting to get it? It was already pretty much an open secret that Sony was planning to add movies and video game downloads to their Connect online music store sometime next year, but the Inq reports that they’re thinking of making it possible to properly buy (and own) the movies you download rather than subject you to frustrating rental periods where the movies self-destruct after a certain period of time (which is how MovieLink and CinemaNow do things). No doubt there’ll be plenty of DRM involved (because Sony ain’t gonna stop being Sony), but at least you’ll be able to create a video collection that you can transfer to other machines without worrying about expiration dates. There’s even a mention that the download service will work with the PlayStation Portable, and we’d be surprised if the PlayStation 3 didn’t also figure into the mix somehow.
You might be heading to Manhattan’s Spectropolis festival this weekend for the Mary-Poppins (well, if she were a
Valley programmer) meets Lite-Brite fun that will be
UMBRELLA.net, but Urballoon, a floating balloon equipped
with WiFi and projector, stands to be just as dinner-theater showy through its user-submitted content which gets
projected and lights up the ground space below the balloon at the entrance of City Hall Park. The balloon is tethered
to the ground, floating three stories high, so you can be sure that the plug you’re going to make for your blog (or
whatever) will be nice and big for everyone to see. We’re not sure if they’ll be censoring the content (probably not),
but if you have kid make sure to have your shield-hand ready for the array of explicit and hardcore content they’re
sure to receive within mere moments of the Urballoon going live. Gotta love the Internet.
[Via textually.org]
Two pieces for those of you following how the Geneva proposal for a smarter and more humane WIPO is being received:
As much as you might enjoy watching the industry-gobbling-empire that is Electronic Arts crumble to the ground, we’s got news for you, it ain’t happening any time soon. Yes, within the first ten days of the Sims 2’s release more than 1 million copies were sold (more than 50% in Europe). This of course, set a record high for a PC launch, and has elevated EA to a new level in its brief 22 year history. What makes the game so potent is its appeal to ‘non-gamers’ (if there is such a thing), earning the Sims (every capitalist’s dream) cultural phenomenon status.
I have started this new trend of inviting experts and gurus to share their thoughts and publish their essays over here on GigaOM. Earlier this month, Dan sent us The VoIP Insurrection. This week pitching please welcome Aswath Rao, who has 20 years of experience in the telecommunications field, makes his second appearance on the blog, with our open letter to Steve Jobs and Apple, telling them how to really bring VoIP into the Apple fold. Rao had earlier contributed Why Skype is No Different? Rao is telecom industry veteran and for past 5 years he has been working on VoIP related issues. Long before intelligence at the end became acceptable, he advocated "functional terminals" in ISDN. His proposal for Inter Connect Function has been incorporated in the TIPHON architecture and currently it is known as Session Border Controller. He has developed ways to offer PSTN subscribers many of the features available to VoIP subscribers. In a classic engineer's vernacular he suggests to Steve Jobs, "please build a device that facilitates users to communicate with their peers without the need for any other third parties and at the same time provides a rich man machine interface through which users can easily invoke features."
Dear Mr. Jobs
Recently you have been publicly advised on why you should heed the call of VoIP: some like Salkever suggest that you should build on iChat and follow Skype’s model, while others like Wallingford say that iChat’s lack of interconnection to PSTN is a fatal flaw and so you should acquire a company like Packet 8 or BroadVoice. While agreeing on some of the points raised by these two authors, my recommendation is radically different and goes against the common view in the industry. The purpose of this letter is to elaborate on my line of thinking. As you read this please keep in mind the famous ad taken out by your company during the 1984 Super Bowl, which established the idea of “empowerment”.
: Loudeye's Overpeer service expands in Europe...Overpeer's technology enables copyright holders to seed file-trading networks such as Kazaa with bogus computer files that resemble actual movie clips, songs and software.
: Bloglines will essentially act as an RSS cache service...It has signed up three desktop applications: FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and blogbot. The news readers plan to connect to Bloglines through a set of open APIs and Web services...
A busy day in the RSS world. First, the removal of the beta moniker to the RSS/ATOM section on My Yahoo along with a searchable directory of feeds. Second, news that Bloglines has released new tools (open API, Web Services)...
Fred von Lohmann has yet another cogent, compelling post on the misguided Induce Act, this time explaining why the ACU (PDF) and the National Taxpayer's Union are not fans:
[Let's] call [the Induce Act] what it is: a tax on innovation. Technology companies would find themselves under constant pressure from entertainment industry lawyers waving their newly-minted "inducement" law. This means many great products would be hobbled, and many others would never be built. Less flexible, less useful products means fewer sales, lower revenues. That's a tax on our nation's technology companies, a damper on earnings, a drag on competitiveness.And all for nothing - this tax won't magically solve the file-sharing dilemma, nor will it put a nickel into the pockets of artists.
That's why the Amercian Conservative Union and National Taxpayer's Union have both joined the long list of public interest and technology industry groups opposing the Induce Act.
I'm a copyright lawyer. I believe in copyright. But copyright has never given an oligopoly of media companies a veto over new technologies.
Later: Also via Fred, a few numbers to put the RIAA's push for the Induce Act in perspective:
IBM 2002 operating revenues (from annual report) = $81b
Verizon 2002 operating revenues (from annual report) = $67bTotal 2002 annual revenues of motion picture and video industries
(from CBO Report) = $62b
Total 2002 annual revenues of music industry (from CBO Report) = $13bSo IBM's annual revenues are larger than the entire music and motion picture industry ***combined***.
Verizon's revenues alone beat the movie biz.
In addition, Intel's annual revenues are ~$30b (more than 2x the entire music industry).
PalmSource has unveiled its latest operating system, Cobalt 6.1, designed with a specific focus on wireless functionality. What does that mean to you, consumer? Not much at the moment, but baseline wireless feature sets mean that it will be a lot easier for handset manufacturers to offer powerful multi-network phones and PDAs without jumping through a lot of individual development hoops. Down the road, that means most Palm-powered devices should run the full spectrum of wireless networking choices: GSM/GPRS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth should pretty much be considered standard fitting for most Palm devices in the future.
Read Paul Graham on What the Bubble Got Right.
The fact is, despite all the nonsense we heard during the Bubble about the "new economy," there was a core of truth. You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
Now the pendulum has swung the other way. Now anything that became fashionable during the Bubble is ipso facto unfashionable. But that's a mistake-- an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. Over the long term, what the Bubble got right will be more important than what it got wrong.
Direct and Related Links for 'Microsoft Cools Hotmail Features'
“Love reaching your Hotmail account from your Outlook inbox? Soon you’ll have to pay for the privilege of doing it. In a bid to rein in spammers, software giant Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) is planning to turn off a feature that allows users of Outlook and Outlook Express to read messages from their free accounts on MSN Hotmail, the world’s most popular Web mail service. The decision will also affect Microsoft’s…Direct and Related Links for 'Motorola to cut 1,000 jobs worldwide'
Man, when are the IT layoffs going to stop? Not for sometime I don’t believe. And on that note, Motorola had to cut 1,000 jobs across the board according to InfoWorld. News like this really drives home the fact that is a world-wide issue that is going to grow horns and have some real repercussions if things do not improve here soon….Listening to FCC go on and on about broadband over powerlines would make you believe it is only a matter of months when we would get our high speed internet over the same cables that power our stereos and cooking ranges. Bill Pechey over at PC World UK breaks down why the technology doesn't work. For starters, transmission of data is damn difficult because of high levels of interfernce. Some have managed to overcome this problem, but the performance is spotty. Many are simply pumping data at much higher speeds at around 30 MHz frequencies to carry the signals. However, power cables were not designed for this ind of abuse and are not well balanced at higher frequencies. Thus you have leaking signals. The signals escape the cables as radio transmissions and cause interference with a whole slew of radio signals. No wonder those HAM operators are bitching about the technology. There are speed limitations to the BoPL and with ADSL2 and VDSL around the corner, the big question is do we really need to muck around with yet another transport/access network. (More details on BPL and what are the problems, check out this report from NTIA)
Garabito writes "Cnet reports that Microsoft plans to distribute in Russia the low-cost, stripped-down version of Windows XP, called 'Starter Edition.' This release of Windows is aimed at markets in developing nations, and is known for not allowing more than three aplications to run at the same time and not being networking capable. This product will not be avaiable on retail, but will be distributed by OEM vendors in new PCs, at an aproximate price of US$36. On a side note, the article also states that the MS tax payed by vendors to Microsoft for Windows XP licenses is $70 or more."
Need a specific example of how the video game industry now nets more then the film industry? Look no further than the release of the new X-box game, Fable which netted $18.7 million in its first week, surpassing this week's top grossing film, Sky Captain. 1up via waxy.
(I'm not sure I buy it --pun.forgive-- @ $50 a pop, Fable sold 375,000 units while Sky Captain brought in $16mil @ roughly $10 each, for an audience of 1.6 million viewers. You can argue that each copy of Fable will be exposed to so many users, blah blah, but either way, it doesn't seem so watershed. I believe we're on our way -- as we talked about on the Weekly Show -- but we're not there yet. -kc.)
Xeni Jardin:
Noah Shachtman writes:
U.S. bases of the future are supposed to be self-sustaining. But, right now, they produce too much junk -- more than 7 pounds per day, per soldier. And a whole heap of "personnel, fuel, and critical transport equipment are needed to support the removal and disposal" of that waste, the Pentagon notes. So Darpa, the Defense Department's far-out research arm, has just given a Menlo Park, California "gene synthesis" company a grant to give the junk a second life, by turning the plastic waste into fuel.
"Plastic packaging waste has energy content that can approach that of diesel fuel, Darpa notes. "Diesel fuel has lower heating value of 43.9MJ/kg and hydrogen content of 12.5 weight percent. Plastic heating values can range from 26-43MJ/kg with a hydrogen content of 5-14 percent. If energy content of the waste is optimized for secondary use as a fuel source, at today's level of packaging being discarded, a military unit could achieve well over 100 percent self-sufficiency for their generator fuel needs."
Professor Richard Gross, at Polytechnic University, New York, thinks he has a polymer that can get the job done. It'll have "properties similar to polyethylene and will be prepared from renewable resources with a cost comparable to current commercially manufactured plastics," he claims. DNA 2.0, Inc., out of Menlo Park, will produce the enzymes needed to make the designer material for Darpa's MISER (Mobile Integrated Sustainable Energy Recovery) project.
Link to Defensetech blog
Cory Doctorow:
If you're a P2P developer looking to understand the law, the best paper on the subject has been my cow-orker Fred von Lohmann's "IAAL*: What Peer-to-Peer Developers Need to Know about Copyright Law." It's been out of date for a couple months, though, ever since Fred won the Grokster case, legalizing an entire class of P2P networks at a stroke. Now, Fred has revised the paper to reflect these new freedoms -- have at it!
n other words, a copyright owner has to show that you had knowledge of infringement when you could have done something about it. StreamCast and Grokster (like vendors of photocopiers and VCRs) never had knowledge of a specific infringement at a time when they could have prevented it. The critical factor was the decentralized architecture of the Grokster and Morpheus software. The software gave the defendants no ability block access to the network, or to control what end-users searched for, shared, or downloaded. Accordingly, by the time the defendants were notified of infringing activity, they were unable to do anything about it (just as Xerox is not able to stop infringing activities after a photocopier has been sold). In the words of the court: "even if the Software Distributors closed their doors and deactivated all computers within their control, users of their products could continue sharing files with little or no interruption
The BBC provides an overview of the recent Loebner chatbot competition, which ALICE won for the third time. The ALICE chatbot was developed by Richard Wallace. A few years ago ALICE was internally proposed for an interactive way to gather consumer comments. A technical tidbit: This form of AI uses Zipf's law as part of the basis for its interaction. Wallace and his team have developed something called the Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) which is worth a look. We experimented with web based chatbots using the Extempo system. Neither of our efforts went very far, but the results are worth examining. For purposes of scale, having a system that interacts like a person, using a knowledge base of information, can be very useful. The knowledge simply needs to be uploaded rather than learned. It turns out that people interact with AI systems in remarkably trusting ways, I refer again to Stanford's Byron Reeves work on media interaction, where we were inspired by his seminal book with Clifford Nass: The Media Equation. Tricky issues of privacy also emerge, should we demand to know if we are talking to an AI versus a human? What is the implication of giving data to an AI that represents itself as a human? I consider the Loebner Prize more of a slight-of-hand trick that takes advantage of our trusting nature, rather than a creating true AI, but it is a step that suggests how we may eventually solve the problem....
Wired News points out a growing issue troubling political polling groups like Zogby and Gallup: they don't call people on cell phones. That might sound like a positive thing at first, but consider the number of people who use only mobile phones and don't have a land line (about 3% of Americans at the moment). That means an entire segment of the population - early adopters - aren't being represented in these polls.
By 2009 as many as 15 percent of Americans are predicted to have tossed their land line phone, meaning 1 in 7 adults wouldn't be included in these polls.
Survey Says: Cell Phones Left Out [Wired]
A Mexican limo company has converted a Boein 727 airliner into an 18-meter, 50-person limousine powered by a 6-cylinder turbocharged diesel engine. They've thrown out the cramped quarters to include a bar, a dancefloor, a lounge, and even a "romantic space" in the back (romance is near the engines, it seems).
For just $1,500, the coverted 737 can be yours for about 3 hours.
A Wingless 727 Limo? [Mavromatic]
Airliner turns white liner on Mexican roads [ABC.AU]
Symantec report says Internet attacks for financial gain on the rise. [PCWorld.com - Latest News Stories]
'-- The people behind these types of attacks, says Symantec Africa regional manager Patrick Evans, are well-funded, organized crime groups that use networks of bots to obtain financial information for their own gain. "It is not just script kiddies anymore," he says, "although they are still there." Bots, Evans explains, are installed on vulnerable PCs and can be remotely controlled. A further implication of such control is that code can be updated on the fly, rendering antivirus software useless in a matter of seconds. "Bot networks are the favored mechanism of organized crime syndicates to gather financial data," Evans says. The latest report notes that there has been an enormous increase in the number of IP addresses associated with bot networks--from an average of 2000 per day from June through December last year, to an average of 34,000 per day in June of this year, with a peak of 75,000 per day in March 2004. --'
...John
: Yahoo.com's new look, expected to debut Tuesday, isn't a radical makeover, although company officials say it represents the most significant cosmetic change for the site in two years.
The retooling also affects "MyYahoo"...interesting to see if they will make it easier to add RSS feeds, and somehow integrate Oddpost, after its acquisition (I doubt they'll do it this soon)....
Update: The new MyYahoo beta will go live 9 PM PST tonight here..it will have new RSS features, as mentioned in this page...the company has also put together an FAQ page for publishers here...
Shawn writes "This could possibly be the worst viruses yet! Earlier this month Microsoft announced a problem in their GDI driver that processes the way JPEG images are displayed. Someone has finally posted an exploit to Usenet. Easynews, a premium Usenet provider, found the virus Sunday afternoon. Up-to-date information about how we found it and what it does is located at www.easynews.com/ virus.txt. When this picture is viewed it installs remote management software (winvnc and radmin) and will connect to irc."
Whaddaya know (reg. req.):
A U.S. law criminalizing the sale of bootleg recordings of live performances is illegal because it doesn't limit the life of a copyright, a judge ruled in the case of a Manhattan man indicted for selling concert tapes.U.S. District Judge Harold Baer struck down the law, which carries a five-year prison term. He didn't address a related civil statute. U.S. copyright law limits protection of a work to the life of the author plus 70 years, Baer said. The criminal anti-bootlegging act runs afoul of that legal standard because it "grants seemingly perpetual protection to live musical performances," the judge said.
[...]
The case is U.S. v. Jean Martignon, 03cr1287, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
Joe Gratz has more on the context, promising still more once the opinion is posted: "In the last notable criminal bootlegging case, United States v. Moghadam (11th Cir. 1999), the court went through some pretty deep constitutional analysis, holding that the statute was enacted under the commerce clause and rejecting Moghadam's appeal that the statute is invalid because it is inconsistent with the Copyright Clause's fixation requirement. Moghadam failed to raise the 'limited times' issue, so the court could not invalidate the law on these grounds, though it seemed inclined to do so."
Direct and Related Links for 'AV products mixed on detecting new malicious .jpg files'
“An automated kit to aid in generating exploits for Microsoft’s recently announced .jpg vulnerability is now widely available and will make it simple for even unskilled attackers to compromise dozens of unpatched applications, say experts. They fear an automated worm is the next step. “JPGDown.A is a simple tool that makes it trivial for even unskilled attackers to author MS04-028 hostile .jpg files [and] significantly increases the likelihood of widespread attacks,” said Ken Dunham, director…Moment of truth for the Baby Bells?The Wall Street Journal reports that credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's is contemplating cutting the credit rating of the baby bells within a week or so. Such a move would be the first time the ratings firm has acted against these three companies at once, WSJ says. If its one step downgrade, then things will be all right, but if the cut is steeper than that, the bonds would tumble, and stocks would follow. And even the healthy dividends might go out of the window. I see this as proof of the continuing telecom death spiral.
PhotoCop is a private, non-commercial web site providing research, management, and technical information about the photographic enforcement of traffic laws. From the site, on 'Who delivers this technology?'
Most photo-enforcement equipment in use around the world is manufactured by American Traffic Systems (ATS), Driver Safety Systems, Ltd. (DSS), Econolite, Gatsometer, Multinova, Peek, TraffiPax, or Truvelo. Usually, however, jurisdictions buy from distributors such as Electronic Data Systems (EDS) who resell the equipment and provide processing services as well, and SAIC-Syntonic also distribute photo-enforcement systems. Only Redflex provides complete manufacture, distribution, and processing services in the United States... Only a few manufacturers like American Traffic Systems (ATS), Redflex, and Poltech seem committed to rapidly improving the technology. Many European manufactures are slower to change since the time and expense to get a new system certified in the EC is great.
The funny thing is that the same technology for surveillance will end up in IT-based camcorders and be used by personal media management services to help us easily search and retrieve what we want from our videos. From facial recognition to pattern recognition, the emerging generation of media producing citizens will expect this kind of functionality from their media service providers.
Today, Vidient raised $6 million in an initial round of funding. From their site: Today there are over seven (7) million CCTV cameras in the United States, but who is actually watching all these cameras? Busy security guards are often too distracted to keep careful track of every action on every camera. And many cameras are not monitored at all. The SmartCatch software offers an accurate and effective solution to monitor, identify and track objects for security policy violations via your existing CCTV infrastructure...
(Our) algorithms are capable of performing complex behavioral analysis, tracking numerous objects and simultaneously identifying security threats in even the most complex environments, inside or outside, regardless of weather conditions.
: Cable industry is betting on gaming as a broadband boost...Armed with high-speed pipes and a gaming-friendly PacketCable Multimedia (PCMM) architecture looming on the horizon, it's fair to say that cable definitely has gaming on the agenda.
In U.S., Comcast, Cablevision Systems, RCN and others, most of them going for an ASP approach. And a small Israeli online games ASP Exent is reaping all the rewards...
And then other issues like adaptive bandwidth...read the story...
JD Lasica takes a look political coverage at Google News and Yahoo News in Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories from the Online Journalism Review. From the article, "Google News uses computer algorithms to identify top stories...
vincecate writes "The largest Itanium system maker, HP, has terminated its Itanium workstations. It seems their workstation customers have spoken in favor of x64. In related news, Intel expects to ship over 100,000 Itaniums in all of 2004 while AMD is estimating 1.5 to 2 million AMD64 chips in Q4."
CNet has a story up about the growing trend within corporations to use GPS-enabled phones to monitor and track employee whereabouts which features this lovely quote from Sanjay Shirole, CEO of one of the firms that makes the tracking software:
"There's no electro shock--yet," Xora CEO Sanjay Shirole said.
Ha ha, nice one, Sanjay! The only thing classier than creating a technology that will eventually be used to tie workers into virtual corrals - I'm not joking, it's in the article; called "geofences" - is to make a joke about using the system to abuse workers. Hilarious! Now that you've cracked wise about it, Sanjay, we can certainly rule out any possibility of it ever happening in the future.
Big boss is watching [CNet]
The new code is more dangerous than the exploit that appeared earlier this week, since it allows malicious hackers to run their own code on vulnerable machines, according to the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center. [Computerworld News]
'-- Despite releasing the exploits, Florio said he does not intend them to be used in a malicious way. The exploits are not suited for use immediately by low-skilled computer hackers, commonly known as script kiddies, and would need to be modified by a knowledgeable programmer before they could be used in widespread attacks, he said. --'
Script kiddies will throw a tantrum.
...John
Nextel CEO Tim Donahue has started make polite noises about the spectrum swap. He pointed out that Nextel had some minor quibbles with FCC's decision and those can be "fine-tuned" through an erratum. Fine tuned means that FCC doesn't have to go for lengthy public hearings and can keep pesky rivals such as Verizon Wireless from creating too much trouble. Donahue says Nextel is also looking for additional credit on the spectrum it is relinquishing and for the cost of adding base stations to maintain its network capacity during the swap process. The company believes that the spectrum it is giving up is worth an additional $450M, given what it perceives to be its more precise POP measurements.
“Applying the FCC’s valuation formula using Nextel’s current more granular spectrum totals and accurate population coverage yields an 800 MHz spectrum value credit of $2.059 billion—an increase of $452 million over the $1.607 billion credit set forth in the FCC’s rules,” according to a Nextel filing.Well FCC has to agree with that in the end. With the spectrum swap and its ultra wide band wireless plans coming along nicely, Nextel looks like one of the better wireless plays despite the threat of litigation from the likes of VZ. Meanwhile the company is getting some serious heat from the likes of firefighters. "company's foot dragging proves that "the so-called 'consensus plan' (pushed by Nextel) was never about helping first responders," the First Response Coalition is urging fire chiefs across the U.S. to demand action now by Congress on the interoperability communications crisis," said in a press release.
: So the economists find out that online message boards on companies presage market activity. The authors found that the characteristics of messages helped predict volume and volatility. Perhaps more surprisingly, they also found that the number of messages on one day helped predict stock returns the next day.
Interesting this: It appeared from their analysis that high message volume helps predict articles in The Wall Street Journal published two or three days later, though again the causality was unclear.
The latest version of the paper is here (paid)...and a complimetary 2002 version of the paper is here (PDF)...
David Pescovitz:
Scientists report that dogs can smell disease in the urine of bladder cancer patients. In the study, published in this week's British Medical Journal, the canines successfully identified a cancer patient's urine sample placed among six control samples 41 percent of the time, far better than the 14 percent expected by chance. From an Associated Press article on the research:
"Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer. Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumor in the right kidney."
Cory Doctorow:
A manufacturer of rubber presidential fright masks says that their sales figures during election-year Hallowe'ens successfully predict the winner of the upcoming presidential election. Unfortunately, at the moment more people are signing up to buy Shrub funnymasks than Kerry, but it's still early times.
In 2000, due to the popularity of political masks, BuyCostumes.com began publishing statistics on each Presidential Candidate's mask sales. It was soon apparent that the mask sales were as good a resource as the polls being published by major national media groups. Seeing the similarities, BuyCostumes.com then looked into some data on political mask sales in election years. Not only did they ask five different mask manufacturers, they also spoke with 12 national stores about their sales history all the way back to 1980. Their findings were astounding and right every time....
So, do we have to wait until after Halloween to find out? How many days?
rmb
In a pretty amazing piece of sleuthing, Katherine Albrecht and CASPIAN have gathered photographs from a trade show of Checkpoint's item-level ...
From a Wall Street vantage point the tech sector doesn't look that good right now. Earnings season is coming up and there are unlikely to be many positive surprises from Silicon Valley's public companies. However, things are cooking in the...
Fortunato_NC writes "Microsoft has decided that future IE updates, including those related to security, will only be available to customers using Windows XP. This news.com article has the complete scoop. A choice quote: 'Microsoft may be turning the lemons of its browser's security reputation into the lemonade of a powerful upgrade selling point.' This should provide a huge boost to Mozilla and other alternative browser backers."
JamesD_UK writes "John Kennedy, President and COO of Universal Music is to succeed Jay Berman as Chairman of the IFPI, the worldwide equivalent to the RIAA. Andrew Orlowski of The Register has written an article covering John Kennedy's views on copyright infringement and the public domain. Although Kennedy's thoughts on the former are predictable, he has vowed to fight hard to extend European recording copyrights past the current fifty year term. An extension of the European term to match the US would be particularly damaging to the public domain and efforts such as the Internet Archive as well as increasing the control that the recording industry holds over performers. For those interested, I run a small blog of articles regarding copyright recordings."
Robin Ingenthron writes "As 2007 gets closer, the legislation to postpone mandatory transition from Analog TV broadcast to Digital is taking shape. Here's an idea - make the broadcasters pay to use the airwaves (they get both analog and digital spectrum for free). For that matter, why permanently auction the bandwidth to cell phone companies, why not rent it to them too? Each postponement keeps the Fed budget in the red, so consumers have a choice -- between analog (black borders on the sides of their digital TVs) and digital (black borders on the top and bottom of their analog TV)."
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "The Denver Post has written the last three days (Tue, Wed, Thu) about how computer viruses have crippled the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicle's computers since last Friday. This has prevented them from issuing new/renewed licenses, so they are providing 30-day extension stickers. The 'dozen experts' have decided that 'fresh software' is the best way to remedy it - probably means re-installing Windows, but have they considered Linux? Colorado seems to be having its share of problems - today's article mentions the Zinc Whiskers issue several months ago that knocked the the Colorado secretary of state offline for a couple of weeks. And it could only get worse as the JPEG exploit starts showing up in the wild."
According to Italian business news daily Il Sole 24 Ore, rival telecom equipment makers Alcatel (NYSE:ALA) and Cisco (Nasdaq:CSCO) are both interested in acquiring a majority stake in Italian softswitch vendor Italtel SpA. Italtel reported a 2003 net loss of €24.2 million on sales of €691.2 million.
As reported on that daily on Tuesday, US private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier and Rice, which has owned the stake (48.8 percent) for more than four years, now wants to sell it after the company put plans for an initial public offering (IPO) on hold due to market conditions. Alcatel has made an offer for the stake and Cisco, which already owns 18.4 percent of Italtel, has indicated it wants to increase its shareholding.
Italtel's main client is Telecom Italia (NYSE:IT), which accounts for 65 percent of its revenues and holds 19.37 percent of its capital. According to the article, the Italian telco has no preference between Alcatel and Cisco and only wants Italtel to be "effective and competitive".
CNN.COM reports:
The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday approved a bill that would increase jail time for identity thieves and Web users who register sites under false identities.
The bill, which passed by voice vote, would not directly outlaw the use of fraudulent registration information.
Rather, it would increase by up to seven years the prison terms of those convicted of felonies.
Full story here.
David Pescovitz:
Researchers from the University of Florida are outfitting trained rats with neural implants and a wireless radio so that the rodents can scurry through collapsed buildings searching for survivors. The electrodes are implanted in the rat's olfactory cortex, motor cortex, and reward center. When a rat--trained to seek out the smell of human--finds its target, the "aha! moment" can then be wireless transmitted back to headquarters. From a New Scientist article about the DARPA-funded work:
The researchers trained the rats to search for human odour by stimulating the reward centre when it found its target smell. Once the rats were trained, they were set to forage for the target smell, while electrodes recorded their neural activity patterns.This allowed researchers to identify the brainwave patterns associated with finding that smell. They were also able to train the rats to sniff out the explosives TNT and RDX – key after terrorist attacks that may leave buildings harbouring unexploded bombs.
Cory Doctorow:
Last weekend, I represented EFF at a meeting in Geneva of several disparate activit and non-govermental orgs, working to draft a joint doc called "Future of WIPO," (or, more formally, "Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization"). This doc is a call to arms to orgs that would see WIPO revisit its role in the world, to take into account the public interest when formulating and promulgating IP policy. The doc has been finalised and is online -- we're collecting signatories for it, and you're invited.
Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways.
* Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;
* Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;
* Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;
* Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;
* Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;
* Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;
* Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;
* Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain.
Link to declaration, Mailto link for signing on
(via Copyfight)
Verizon has announced that its EV-DO high-speed wireless network will be expanded from its current three city market on the 27th to include Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Kansas City (<3), LA, Miami, Milwaukee, New York (yay!), Philly, Tampa, and West Palm Beach. This is extremely good news... sort of.
EV-DO is super-fast - basically the best wireless high-speed option we have in the US at the moment - but Verizon currently only offers the service via a PCMCIA PC Card for laptops; not a single cell phone supports the network. That's somewhat understandable, as the best way to utilize the 300 - 500kbps download rate (more like 100 -150 in real world situations) of the EV-DO networks is to use a laptop, but what about smartphones (or people with laptops without PCMCIA)? It seems a shame that all that juicy bandwidth is out there for the subscribing to, but there isn't a practical way for many of us to use it (and if I'm going to pay $80 a month extra, then I certainly want to be able to use that bandwidth on every device I own).
Also, if it's anything like it is here in Manhattan, if you already have one of the EV-DO PCMCIA cards from Verizon, you might already be able to connect to the networks.
Read - Verizon Wireless to Expand 3G Network [eWeek]
Government officials say Microsoft's move to share the source code for Office 2003 won't change anyone's mind about Microsoft or open source. [Technology News from eWEEK and Ziff Davis]
Nice try Microsoft. I think times are tuff when you can't even "give it away."
...John
So my statement that the "axis of technology has shifted to somewhere in the South China Sea" is finally coming true. Couple of days ago, Cisco Systems announced that it was setting up a $32 million R&D labs in China. Today there is news that Cisco Systems is setting up a venture capital arm in India.
Cisco is bullish on the Indian market, which it says is amongst the top three strategic markets worldwide and its fastest growing. New product launches and the recent establishment of separate vertical business groups there have buoyed hopes for Cisco in the country, whose own manufacturing and services industry has been maturing in recent years because of de-regulation and privatization. [Venture Wire News]"India has been referred to for years as 'the land of eternal promise' because its markets always seemed on the verge of really taking off," Daniel Scheinman, senior vice president of corporate development for Cisco told News@Cisco.
"Now we see that promise coming true." Scheinman says because of changing U.S. visa laws, many Indian technology managers that had been working in the United States are now returning to India to start companies. This trend, combined with India's excellent pool of engineers and burgeoning consumer and business markets make it ripe for investment. "Our new venture capital operation is a reflection of the maturity of India as a technology marketplace," Scheinman said.Taken together, Cisco is saying that entrepreneurship is in India while research in China. Or is it that it feels its money has more legal rights in India. I don't know the answers, but it is clear that the globalization of technology continues.
Recommended reading:
You can tell a lot about a company, and its future from one simple metric: sales per employee. It is also a good yardstick to measure how efficiently a company is run. Albert Lin of American Technology Research thinks that operating income per employee is a good barometer to a company's future. He scrolled through gigabytes of data to discover that Qualcomm, is among the top 1 percentile in revenue and profits per employee among technology companies and as a result "should earn a multiple premium to peers." Here are some comps: Qualcomm generates about $690,000 per employee per year in sales, up significantly from about $500,000. In comparison, Cisco employee brings in about $500,000 and so does a MicroSerf. Beating Qualcomm - Dell! What about operating profits per employee? "With its 30%+ operating margin, Qualcomm tops the charts with almost 2X MSFT's performance and more than 2X that of once-mighty Intel," says Lin. Qualcomm's operating profits per employee are also about 3X that of DELL and nearly 10X that of IBM and TXN.
: 
The 99-cent meme is going beyond music...AOL/Movielink have tried a promo for 99 cent movies before..now MLB Advanced Media, the interactive arm of MLB, is launching a 99 cents clips download store, BW reports...
Update: The MLB Minivision service is online now...
MLB's own story: "MLB.com's video crew will edit and make available a wide variety of selected highlights on a nightly basis."
The service will launch with about 200 clips from the entire season, lasting several minutes each. They can be purchased at Mlb.com and then downloaded into a PDA or a cell phone so fans can watch highlights on the move...
Another offering will be a 99-cent audio wrapup of the day's games, a clip that can be downloaded to MP3 players.
The DRM will allow fans to download the clip only once into a portable device. The file can't be swapped to another device.
Related:
-- MLB's Batting Wireless
-- MLB To Distribute Through MSFT, AOL
-- MLB.com To IPO In October?
-- Nokia Pitches Baseball To Phones
-- MLB and The Melding of Sports And Technology
-- MLB Downloads Allow Sharing And Burning
: That was the event held yesterday by ONA...
Among other things: CNET News.com is currently working on restructuring its inner story pages because they are the first point of entry for so many visits due to linking and RSS feeds. Smart...something every news site should be thinking about.
The most interesting panel was on the role of online news aggregators...a full recording of the panel is on Niall's website, here....
Direct and Related Links for 'MIT searches for solar power in spinach'
See Popeye was right all along! Why in the heck have we been using conventional technology to harness the power of the sun when we should have been using spinach all along. OK, that is sort of weird. Regardless though, MIT may truly be onto something with their advanced solar research and the old fashion can a of spinach….
Cory Doctorow:
Ed Felten's posted a fascinating rumination on the impossibility of excluding bots from online poker games, and what that means for online casinos:
By reiterating their anti-bot and anti-collusion rules, and by claiming to have mysterious enforcement mechanisms, online casinos may be able to stem the tide of cheating for a while. But eventually, bots and collusion will become the norm, and lone human players will be driven out of all but the lowest stakes games.But there is another strategy. An online casino could encourage bots, and even set up bots-only games. The game would then become not a human vs. human card game but a human vs. human battle between bot designers for geekly mastery. I'll bet there are plenty of programmers out there who would like to give it a try.
Direct and Related Links for 'Nintendo and Sony Square Off in Handheld Game Market'
Free registration required to read the article. “Japan’s Nintendo Co. Ltd. struck the first blow in what is set to be an all-out war with Sony Corp. for the lucrative handheld game console market, aggressively pricing its new dual-screen model at $149.99 and setting its U.S. launch date for Nov. 21. For its part, Sony kept mum on the price and exact launch date of its long-awaited PlayStation Portable (PSP), but also went on the…A lot of you might have read my interview with Juniper Networks chief executive Scott Kriens. Well following up, I have some juicy gossip on the company. It is about to snag a big $150 million four year contract from SBC Communications, one of the first wins the company has scored at incumbent Bells. (Don't include Qwest, because it was the old Q which snapped up Juniper products.) FBR analyst Susan Kalla says that the deal could be for B-RAS products. No not the Victoria Secret kind, but Broadband Remote Access Servers which are used for things such as selling DSL services to consumers.
B-RAS are multiservice platforms, installed at the edge of the network upstream of the DSLAM, and used for such functions as termination of PPP sessions and to provide a central collection point for data that can be used to bill customers for their network and service usage. They are highly intelligent edge routers.Cisco is said to be in running for the business, but Kalla thinks that most of the business is going to Juniper. The edge of the network represented more than half of Juniper's 2Q04 revenues of $307 million, or around $160 million.On the flipside, Kalla thinks things are getting tough for Cisco and the culprit might be Linksys.
In checking monthly revenues from Taiwanese D-Link, which competes with Linksys, we found that D-Link’s August 2004 revenues not only slowed but declined on a sequential basis compared with the previous quarter’s run-rate.She cut her revenue numbers for Cisco by $150 million to $5.97 billion from $6.04 billion for the Q1 2005. She slashed her Q2 estimates by $100 million to $6.3 billion.
In recent years, lots of efforts have been made to give robots the ability to hear and see. But what about the sense of touch? Unlike us, robots don't have sensitive skin. But this is about to change. By using organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created an artificial skin which will give robots the sense of touch. The prototype has a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter, far from the 1,500 of our fingertips. When this density increases and when the problem of the reliability of this kind of transistors is solved, the researchers say this artificial skin will also be used for car seats or gym carpets. Expect to see them in four or five years. Read more...
Today's SearchDay, Google Ad Policies To Be Expanded Publicly, is an article by me looking at how Google is finally going to explain what ads it will -- and will not -- accept. Google has come under a ton of...
presmike writes "ok, it looks like Diebold has more to worry about now that it is possible to change votes with a 5 line VB script. 'The vulnerabilities involve the Global Election Management System, or GEMS, software that runs on a county's server and tallies votes after they come in from Diebold touch-screen and optical-scan machines in polling places.'"
Opponents of genetically engineered crops have used the tendency of genes to spread from the engineered plants to their wild cousins as a major argument ...
This whole switchover from analog to digital television hasn’t been going exactly as planned (we won’t even go there), but Congress is mulling over the most perfectly American solution we’ve heard yet to get things rolling: buy everyone off. Senator John McCain just introduced a bill called the Spectrum Availability Emergency-Response and Law-Enforcement to Improve Vital Emergency Services Act which sets a deadline of January 1st, 2009 for broadcasters to stop analog broadcasts and completely make the shift to digital. But rather than leave millions of people with a completely useless box in their living room, it would also provide a billion dollars to buy anyone who is still actually watching broadcast TV (nearly 90% of households have cable or satellite) a brand new digital TV tuner (also note: all new TVs sold after 2007 will have to have digital tuners built-in, so it might not be that many people who end up qualifying for the handout). $1 billion sounds like a big giveaway just so people can watch TV, but it’s good deal for the government since they’ll be able to make tens of billions of dollars by auctioning off the soon-to-be freed up analog TV spectrum to wireless companies (and oh yeah, emergency services should get their own share of that spectrum, too, hence the name ”... to Improve Vital Emergency Services Act”).
INTERNET ATTACKS JUMP SIGNIFICANTLY THIS YEAR
The semiannual Internet Security Threat Report, which is based on monitoring by computer security firm Symantec, indicates that in the first six months of 2004 there were at least 1,237 newly discovered software vulnerabilities and almost 5,000 new Windows viruses and worms capable of compromising computer security.
The numbers represent a dramatic increase
over the same period in 2003. Even more troubling was the sharp rise in the number of "bot," or robot, networks, which comprise a large number of infected PCs that can then be used to distribute viruses, worms, spyware and spam to other computers.
The survey notes that in the first half of 2004, the number of monitored botnets rose from fewer than 2,000 to more
than 30,000.
The botnets, which range in size from 2,000 to 400,000
"zombie" machines, are often "rented out" to commercial spammers who use them to distribute junk e-mail while concealing their identities.
E-commerce was the industry most frequently targeted for attacks,
accounting for 16% of the total, and report authors note that phishing scams are responsible for pushing up the numbers in that category.
"We're seeing a professional hand in development that was pretty startling in terms of malicious code," says Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering for security response at Symantec. The report's findings mirror those of recent government-supported research. (New York Times 20 Sep 2004)
Direct and Related Links for 'Genes From Engineered Grass Spread for Miles'
Free registration required to read the story. “A new study shows that genes from genetically engineered grass can spread much farther than previously known, a finding that raises questions about the straying of other plants altered through biotechnology and that could hurt the efforts of two companies to win approval for the first bioengineered grass. The two companies, Monsanto and Scotts, have developed a strain of creeping bentgrass for use on golf courses that is…Direct and Related Links for 'Mobile Athlon 64 challenges Centrino'
“AMD has fleshed out its mobile chip catalogue this week by shipping the Mobile AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor. It joins a range of mobile models, from 2800+ to 3400+, but is the first to be built using 90nm technology. Aimed at ‘thin and light’ notebooks, the first commercial use of the chip will be in new models of Acer’s Ferrari range of laptops due in Europe later this month and worldwide in October. The…Direct and Related Links for 'Windows XP Security Guide v2.0'
“The Windows® XP Security Guide v2.0 describes the features and recommended settings for Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2). The Guide includes thoroughly tested templates for security settings for Windows Firewall, which replaces Internet Connection Firewall (ICF). Information is provided about closing ports, Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communications, memory protection, e-mail handling, Web download controls, spyware controls, and much more. Any IT environment is only as secure as its weakest link. Unfortunately, client operating…...a slight downgrade. I popped into the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) the other week at the Moscone center. The twice-yearly IDF is a good place to catch up with my Intel contacts and also rub shoulders with analysts and other...
: NYT Company's Internet ad revenues increased 31.4% for August 2004 compared with August 2003, "due to strong growth in display advertising and in all classified advertising categories".
(reg. req.): BBC's ambitious online archiving project, "Creative Archives", will launch next month, and Guardian does a fawning review and says that Larry Lessig made it happen...The Creative Archive will show the commercial world what happens when these [open-domain copyright etc] ideas a