Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Privacy: Get a free disposable phone number with Numbr

from Lifehacker by Adam Pash

Web site Numbr provides free, anonymous, disposable phone numbers.

~~Similar to previously mentioned Craigsnumber~~ Numbr is Craigsnumber re-branded with a lot of cool new features. Numbr supports 23 US cities, can forward calls to up to 2 phones, blocks telemarketers, and offers a Do Not Disturb option from 9PM to 8AM. Additionally, the app can also take voicemails and email you your disposable number's call history. If you ever feel wary about handing out your real number for a short term contact (say for Craigslist), Numbr is the perfect place to go.

Numbr [via UneasySilence]

Enter Zenter, Google Office is now complete

from GigaOM by Om Malik

Google has snapped up yet another start-up - Zenter, which is building online presentations. This is yet-another-exit for YCombinator, the madrassa of the Web 2.0 crowd. In Microsoft world those are known as PowerPoints. Google had earlier bought Tonic Systems, a start-up that was working on similar technology but was more focused on backend technology. With this acquisition, Google has completed its online productivity suite - Docs, SpreadSheets, Calendar, Mail and Presentations. Now they are on equal footing with Zoho. (Check out the comparison between various online office suites over on ReadWriteWeb .)

The problem is that unless Google figures out a way to create a seamless integration between these online apps, these will all have limited utility. The other aspect of the Google Apps which the search giant needs to address is usability and interface. A lot of people like their minimalist approach to UI, but not me personally. Similarly, like many GMail users we are still unconvinced about Google's ability to provide an always-on service, and ensure the safety of data

AT&T kicks off Video Share rollout

from Engadget by Chris Ziegler

Though phones that support it have been on the streets for a few weeks now, AT&T is just now getting official with its Video Share service. Though the feature is the first to bring 3G video calling to the US, excitement is a bit tempered by the fact that the service is one-way -- callers must manually switch feed directions to see each other, despite the fact that other UMTS networks across the globe already support two-way services. What's more, we can expect to get nickeled and dimed here: Video Share runs $4.99 a month for 25 minutes of usage, $9.99 for 60 minutes, or 35 cents per minute, regardless of whether the customer is already subscribed to a data plan. AT&T claims its "research" has shown a strong demand for stuff like this, but we think we'll wait for generation two (you know, when we can actually see each other at the same time and it's included with our already-pricey unlimited data). Look for Video Share to be available first in Atlanta, Dallas, and San Antonio, with a full rollout on AT&T's 3G network come late July.

Verizon FIOS plans to add HD VOD

from Engadget by Ben Drawbaugh

Verizon FIOS

Fiber to the premises (FTTP), has the potential to deliver the most advanced HD services today, and although it isn't available in most of the country, Verizon (and others) are bleeding money digging up neighborhoods all over the US to install the magical stuff. Just because you have fiber to your home doesn't mean life is perfect though, there are still plenty of things that can get in the way of your viewing pleasure -- like franchise agreements. Verizon recently announced that they were testing HD VOD in their labs and have an internal time line for launching the service -- that they aren't ready to share. But with their competition already offering this service in some areas they can't wait forever.

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Philips intros 20-inch 3D display -- no need for gaudy glasses

from Engadget by Darren Murph

Don't count Philips as the first outfit to dream up a 3D display that allowed you to leave the eyewear at home, but it looks like the technology is coming ever closer to the mainstream -- for better or worse. The firm has reportedly developed a 20-inch LCD "designed to increase brand awareness and attention value of products at point-of-sale locations," and is showing off the (literally) eye-popping effects at this week's InfoComm. Of course, this rendition seems to be aimed at businesses rather than consumer applications, but we'd expect to see more where this came from as the WOWvx-equipped lineup expands. The newest duo consists of a frame-mountable 20-3D2W01 (pictured above) and a more decorated 20-3D2W04 if you're wanting a bezel and stand. As expected, there's no word yet on pricing or availability, but feel free to peep another shot of the third-dimension after the break.

Continue reading Philips intros 20-inch 3D display -- no need for gaudy glasses

Levi's intros shiny new cellphones

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

Levi's made its cellphone intentions pretty well known late last year, but it's just now following through with them, trotting out its new line of self-branded phones made with more than a little help from ModeLabs. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot in the way of technical details at the moment, but Levi's is more than willing to talk up the phone's various style advantages, including its riveted steel casing and detachable chain. From the looks of it, you'll also be able to get the phone in your choice of five color schemes, including metallic silver, black, brown copper, "shiny silver," and "shiny sand" -- the latter two of which also come with "mirror" screens. More details should be trickling out as we near the phone's September launch date, which appears to be confined to Europe for the time being.

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Apple TV with YouTube: v1.1 update hands-on

from Engadget by Ryan Block

As we heard earlier this morning, the Apple TV v1.1 update with YouTube finally went out, so naturally we had to kick the tires. It works exactly as advertised (and shown by Jobs at D), but there are a few things we discovered.

The update isn't available through iTunes, as you might expect -- it's either pushed out automatically directly to the ATV (it checks for updates weekly, and prompts if you want to install), or through manual update in the ATV's settings.
The update process took about 9 minutes to download and install. Not nearly as bad as a TiVo update, but we still wish it would have been a bit faster.
YouTube appears in the main dash, as expected. Users must log in with their YouTube account to rate videos, save to favorites, etc., but users who aren't logged in still get a video history.
Using a keyboard on the Apple TV's USB port sure would be nice for logging in, searching videos, etc. -- we tried, it's still disabled.
Video quality looks pretty decent, all things considered. YouTube regulars will be more than satiated.
It was clear not everything has converted for Apple TV yet -- Engadget's smattering of YouTube videos were nowhere to be found. For shame!
Unfortunately, you still can't fast forward further than the buffer has streamed, like you can with Google video.
Apple also added an iTunes Store menu in the settings. Apple claims it's to set your country of origin so the top music previews aren't just assumed to be for US users.
Other updates: parental controls setting for disabling YouTube, as well as slideshow option for screen saver.

All in all we're pretty stoked. How much of a friggin pain is it to watch YouTube videos with your friends on your TV? (Don't act like you've never tried.) If you're an Apple TV owner you'll no doubt be using this more than you'd probably like to admit.

Gallery: Apple TV with YouTube: v1.1 update hands-on

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NVIDIA launches Tesla: GPUs are the new CPUs

from Engadget by Nilay Patel

We've seen a couple cautious attempts at leveraging the raw floating-point capabilities of modern high-powered graphics cards, but NVIDIA is taking the gloves off with the launch of Tesla, its new general-purpose computing platform built on the 8-series graphics cards we all know and love. According to NVIDIA, the only way to skirt the inevitable collapse of Moore's Law is to join the GPU and CPU together, so two of the three Tesla configs are in the form of workstation upgrades -- a $1,499 single GPU PCI Express card and a $7,500 dual-GPU "deskside supercomputer" that plugs into a custom PCI controller. The truly crazy can pony up a full $12,000 for NVIDIA's first rack units, the four-GPU Tesla S870, which has a peak performance of 2 Teraflops. We're hearing the card and deskside unit will be available in August and that the servers will start shipping in November or December -- perfect for the Engadget Folding@Home holiday rush.

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JVC designs tiny 4k D-ILA chip

from Engadget by Erik Hanson

JVC 1.27-inch 4K2K D-ILA chip

JVC announced at InfoComm 2007 a 1.27-inch 4K2K D-ILA chip for use in projectors that offer up more than four times high-definition resolution. Intended initially for medical, modeling, and simulation use, the chip can produce a ten-megapixel 4096x2400 pixel image with a 20,000:1 contrast ratio. While DLP-based 4K projectors are currently in use in some digital cinemas, the JVC chip will be used in D-ILA, a variant of LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon), and has a higher pixel density. Much like professional racing technologies trickle down to the average sedan on the street, the research that goes into 4K projectors can also make their way to HDTVs in the home, bringing smaller, higher-definition sets to a living room near you. We say bring on the quad-split-screen HD!

Lessig switches from copyright to corruption

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: Last week, at the International Creative Commons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Lawrence Lessig made a stunning announcement: he is going to retire from copyfighting and take up a new career, fighting for a new issue. He's going to stay involved with Creative Commons as its CEO, but from now on, he's working to fry a bigger fish: the corruption that leads countries to make bad copyright laws and other regulations, even when they know that the laws are bad for their society.

Larry has posted an expanded piece about this to his blog, explaining his decision to move on after ten years. He suggests that the open Internet and a culture of sharing and remix will make it easier to fight the bigger problem of corruption.

Lessig inspired me -- his writing and work changed my life forever, and I'm not the only one. It's amazing to see him moving on to tackle this new issue. I'm looking forward to following where he leads.

From a public policy perspective, the question of extending existing copyright terms is, as Milton Friedman put it, a "no brainer." As the Gowers Commission concluded in Britain, a government should never extend an existing copyright term. No public regarding justification could justify the extraordinary deadweight loss that such extensions impose.
Yet governments continue to push ahead with this idiot idea -- both Britain and Japan for example are considering extending existing terms. Why?
The answer is a kind of corruption of the political process. Or better, a "corruption" of the political process. I don't mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean "corruption" in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can't even get an issue as simple and clear as term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.
The point of course is not new. Indeed, the fear of factions is as old as the Republic. There are thousands who are doing amazing work to make clear just how corrupt this system has become. There have been scores of solutions proposed. This is not a field lacking in good work, or in people who can do this work well.

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Gold farming in China makes the NYT

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: Julian Dibbell, author of the stellar Play Money (a book about making real money in virtual worlds), has a great NYT feature up about the life of Chinese gold farmers (a subject I tackle in my story Anda's Game). This story keeps on getting weirder and more interesting.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night's haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20. The small commercial space Li and his colleagues work in — two rooms, one for the workers and another for the supervisor — along with a rudimentary workers' dorm, a half-hour's bus ride away, are the entire physical plant of this modest $80,000-a-year business. It is estimated that there are thousands of businesses like it all over China, neither owned nor operated by the game companies from which they make their money. Collectively they employ an estimated 100,000 workers, who produce the bulk of all the goods in what has become a $1.8 billion worldwide trade in virtual items. The polite name for these operations is youxi gongzuoshi, or gaming workshops, but to gamers throughout the world, they are better known as gold farms. While the Internet has produced some strange new job descriptions over the years, it is hard to think of any more surreal than that of the Chinese gold farmer.

Link

See also: Avatars, and the carbon-based meatbags behind them (that's us)

Samsung and Seagate finally match Hitachi with 1TB SATA disks

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Months after Hitachi announced their big 3.5-inch, 1TB drive, Samsung and Seagate have finally matched that capacity by sheepishly launching their own 3Gbps SATA disks. Sammy does it all with efficiency boy, by spinning 3x 334GB platters to Hitachi's 5x 200GB platters (10 heads) or Seagate's 4 platters (8 heads) of 250GB each. That little trick should keep the weight, decibels, and power draw of their SpinPoint F1 (pictured) to a minimum. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 still packs that impressive 32MB buffer which Samsung and Seagate can only aspire to with their 16MBs of respective cache. Expect both of the newcomers to be priced around $400. Cheap, but we'll be holding our wad for the inevitable head-to-head (to-head) shootout we're sure somebody is cooking up. Read -- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 Read -- Samsung SpinPoint F1

Track Every Click with Crazy Egg’s “Confetti”

from TechCrunch by Nick Gonzalez

Optimizing your website can be tough business since you can’t “see” your customers online. Analytics packages like Google analytics do a good job letting you see how many visitors are coming and going on your site by tracking every page request. However, another breed of analytics focuses on optimizing how they’re using it, by tracking where visitors click. Crazy Egg, one of these optimization services, now has a new feature “Confetti” that lets you easily see where every visitor clicked on your site and what brought them there. We’ve covered their previous overlay and heatmap features here.

Confetti overlays your site, showing each visitor’s click as a colored dot. The colors stand for the categories you sort the clicks by: operating system, browser, window size, time before clicking, and what search term brought them to the page. It even shows you clicks that weren’t on links, so you know if your users are expecting a link where there isn’t one. You can see the results in aggregate as a bar chart or click on individual dots to find out more information about a particular user. For instance, you can use Confetti to see how users from different referrals behave, and settle the debate over exactly how many of those Digg users click on your ads.

Crazy Egg has been implemented on over 250,000 sites and is free if you just want to track up to 5,000 clicks on 4 pages at a time each month. But if you upgrade to a paid account, you can track more clicks over more pages with real time data. The limited number of clicks tracked may seem restrictive, but analytics from Crazy Egg are meant to run for a short period of time on a specific url to grab a sample of how your users react to design changes.

There are a couple other optimization services out there: Map Surface, ClickTale, and Click Density. Click Density was one of the first services to show each unique click on your site, but Crazy Egg has added a simpler point-and-click interface for drilling into your data.

Crazy Egg is based in Orange County California and has reportedly been in acquisition talks.

Monday, June 18, 2007

The Long Tail Is Getting Fatter

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Three separate news stories involving numbers this week caught my eye. iLike announced it has now has 6 million registered users and is now adding 300,000 new users a day. Apple’s Safari browser for Windows has now had 1 million downloads. Finally SpaceTime, a 3D browser we reviewed June 5 passed the 100,000 download mark.

All three may not seem obviously related, but there is something they all share: large user numbers.

It wasn’t that long ago that 100,000 users was considered huge for a Web 2.0 related business. Today a small startup such as SpaceTime can gain those numbers in two weeks. 6 million users three years ago would have seemed an impossible dream, and yet iLike joins a long and growing list of Web 2.0 sites with 1 million or more users. Web 2.0 offerings are improving their appeal to a broader audience which in turn is driving growth in the overall market: the Long Tail is getter fatter.

Although this fattening of the Web 2.0 marketplace makes it more difficult to stand out from the crowd, the marginal cost and ROI potential has now improved. Consider the SpaceTime browser. Immediately many would question the need for an alternative browser, yet this isn’t an all or nothing proposition. Every single user of SpaceTime presents a ROI for the company due to search deals. An average SpaceTime user might return $5 per month to the company by clicking on Google ads or surfing eBay; $500,000 per month @ 100,000 users. The figure could be lower or higher, but it’s still a return. Safari will be operating on a similar model for Apple. The need to find appeal has actually decreased as a percentage of the overall market. Conversely the bar to creating a sustainable business hasn’t risen in line with the number of potential users, today startups can achieve with a smaller percentage of the overall market.

From a developers or startups view, the fattening long tail should be seen for what it is: a marketplace that has improved opportunities for smart startups. A bigger marketplace makes today and tomorrow an even better time to build a Web 2.0 business than yesterday. A fatter long tail means that as a whole there will be an increasing number of success stories and sustainable startups, a win-win all round.

The Rise Of The Prosumer

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Mark this word in your mental diaries: Prosumer.

The word is a combination of producer and consumer that perfectly describe the millions of participants in the Web 2.0 revolution.

It’s not a new word, but it’s a word that will become the norm in the coming years. It’s already being used by companies such as Sony to describe users of video cameras.

Earlier in the week, Read/Write Web featured a video from Davide Casaleggio where Prosumer is featured strongly. Video as below, other highlights include world domination by Google in 2050 and Lawrence Lessig becoming US Secretary of Justice in 2020 and declaring copyright illegal. I’ve not been able to get Prosumer out of my head since watching this video so expect it to be dropped regularly in future posts.

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