Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

New Yorker on ultra-expensive wine counterfeits

from Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Mark Hurst's Good Experience newsletter alerted me to this New Yorker article about the crazy world of very expensive wine and how it is being counterfeited and sold to rich people who don't know the difference.

[Michael Broadbent, the head of Christie's wine department] is a Master of Wine, a professional certification for wine writers, dealers, and sommeliers, which connotes extensive experience with fine wine, and discriminating judgment. He pronounced a 1784 Th.J. Yquem "perfect in every sense: colour, bouquet, taste."
At two-thirty that December afternoon, Broadbent opened the bidding, at ten thousand pounds. Less than two minutes later, his gavel fell. The winning bidder was Christopher Forbes, the son of Malcolm Forbes and a vice-president of the magazine Forbes. The final price was a hundred and five thousand pounds -- about a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars. "It's more fun than the opera glasses Lincoln was holding when he was shot," Forbes declared, adding, "And we have those, too."

Link

All I want for Christmas is my HDTV... and an Apple

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Displays, Gaming, GPS, HDTV, Laptops

A national survey of 1,200 consumers conducted by Solutions Research Group found that 3 out of 4 surveyed Americans wanted a new gadget this holiday season. The rankings went a little something like this:

HDTV (35%)
Windows-based notebook (20%)
Digital camera (17%)
Windows-based desktop computer
GPS car navigation
Cellphone
Digital video camera
Nintendo Wii
Sony PS3
HD DVD or Blu-ray player

So where's Apple, the big bad daddy of consumer electronics? Well, their best showing was the MacBook with an 11 ranking followed by the iPhone at number 15. Pretty good when you consider the level of brand awareness this represents in a field of otherwise unspecified laptops and cellphones. In fact, 1-in-6 consumers are hoping for some type of Apple gear under the Chanukazaa tree this season.

IBM And Linden Lab Team For Virtual World Interoperability

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

IBM and Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) will announce a new partnership at the Virtual Worlds Conference in San Jose today that will focus on virtual world interoperability.

The initial focus of the joint effort will be the ability to allow users to use a single virtual persona (or Avatar) across multiple virtual platforms, with seamless interworld transactions to be considered later.

Discussions and efforts surrounding standards and interoperability are in vogue this year, as the marketplace for virtual worlds has matured. Chinese Second Life clone HiPiHi announced its intention to lead a push towards standards based virtual worlds in August, and TechCrunch 40 presenting company Metaplace offers interoperability between user generated worlds on its DIY virtual world platform.

IBM has been highly active in the virtual worlds space, both as a user of platforms such as Second Life as a conference and business communications tool, and as a creator with its Active Worlds chat platform. IBM's Italian employee's went on strike within Second Life in late September.

Consumer Feedback Impact - AT&T Changes its ‘Terms of Service’

from GigaOM by Om Malik

Remember the brouhaha about AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) and the awkward language in their user agreements that prevented people from among other things criticize them. (As Bill Maher says, I kid the phone companies.) AT&T, seems to have taken the feedback from blogs and is changing the language of its terms of service. An AT&T spokesperson emailed us with the following statement.

We are revising the terms of service to clarify our intent. The language in question will be revised to reflect AT&T's respect for our customers' right to express opinions and concerns over any matter they wish. And we will make clear that we do not terminate service because a customer expresses their opinion about AT&T.

THIRTY virtual worlds in San Jose

from GigaOM by Wagner James Au

First the good news: virtual worlds are experiencing their own dot com boom. Now the bad news: virtual worlds are experiencing their own dot com boom. Tomorrow and Thursday, the second Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo launches in San Jose; the first one went off last March in New York, when just nine worlds/MMOs were showcased. Six months later, thirty of them will be on hand, many you've probably never heard of, and if past history is any guide, just as many you'll probably not hear much about, afterward. Seven slated for the show are kid-oriented, including Zwinktopia, Gaia Online, and Habbo Hotel, all of which have been featured on GigaOM; with the continued growth of MMOs for minors, this isn't surprising. But then, four of them are virtual worlds designed for enterprise solutions, including Forterra, Unisfair, Project Darkstar from Sun Microsystems, and something called VT&T, a stealth project from a team of developers formerly of AT&T.

Like the original dot com boom, the Expo is an awkward convergence of traditional media corporations like Disney (new owner of Club Penguin), MTV/Nickelodeon (announcing eight virtual worlds), and Turner (which recently ~~bought~~ partnered with Kaneva), scrappy start-ups like Metaplace and Ogoglio, and lumbering into the proceedings like they always have, Microsoft with Virtual Earth and an unknown MMO set to be announced there.

And if the last boom's trajectory of hubris and greed is followed, most of these are destined for obscurity– or acquisition by their wiser superiors. While kid-oriented MMOs have the most active users and thus seem like the safest bet, for example, as FoundRead editor Carleen Hawn suggests, they're also fragile ecosystems that can fall apart with too much outside interference and commercialism.

In any case, I'll be there to appear on a panel, and looking for GigaOM stories to file from the scene. If you see me, be sure to say hi; and if you miss me at this virtual worlds conference, you can still look for me at the one in London, later this month.

Disclosure: My Second Life blog New World Notes is a "media partner" with the Expo.

30 VIRTUAL WORLDS PLATFORMS TO BE SHOWCASED

With more than 30 virtual world platform providers participating at our Fall Conference, attendees will gain unique insight into the solutions available to meet their individual needs.

For the first time ever, professionals seeking to leverage virtual world technologies will be able to review and interact with all the major providers in one location. Attendees will be able to discuss business strategy, gain a comprehensive understanding of available technology and learn best practices. The Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo provides participants an edge in using virtual worlds applications to deeply engage their customers, partners or employees.

Virtual World platform companies participating at Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo:

Company	Platform Name

Animax Entertainment	TyGirlz.com
Areae, Inc.	To Be Announced
Conduit Labs	To Be Announced
Disney Online	Club Penguin, Virtual Magic Kingdom and others
Doppelganger	vSide
Forterra Systems	OLIVE platform
GAIA Interactive Inc	Gaia Online
GoPets Ltd.	GoPets
HiPiHi Co., Ltd	HiPiHi
IAC/InterActiveCorp	Zwinktopia
Icarus Studios	Icarus Platform
Ironstar Helsinki	MoiPal mobile platform
Kaneva	Kaneva Platfrom
Linden Lab	Second Life
Makena Technologies	There.com
Microsoft	Microsoft Virtual Earth
Microsoft	Entertainment Effort To Be Announced
MindArk	Entropia Universe
MTV / Nickelodeon	more than 8 virtual worlds and growing
Multiverse Network	Multiverse platform
Numedeon Inc	Whyville.net
ProtonMedia	ProtoSphere
Qwaq	Qwag Forums
Stardoll	Stardoll Platform
Sulake Corp. Ltd.	Habbo
Sun Microsystems	Project Darkstar
Three Rings	Whirled
Transmutable	Ogoglio
Unisfair	Unisfair Virtual Event
View 22	Immersiv Platform
VT&T	To Be Announced

The conference has five primary tracks:

Entertainment and Marketing
Virtual Worlds for the Enterprise
Business Strategy and Investment
Community and Customer Service
Design and Development.

DOE to Invest in Projects to Store 1 Million Tons of CO2

from Earth2Tech by Katie Fehrenbacher

About half of the electricity Americans consume comes from coal, and China's economic boom is being fueled by the dirty-burning stuff. So while we'd prefer an end to all coal, technologies to capture and store the carbon emissions from coal plants will just have to help us out in the meantime. The DOE said today that it has awarded the first three large-scale carbon sequestration projects in the U.S., the largest single set of projects in the world to date.

The three projects — the Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction Partnership, the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, and the Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration — will test the storage of 1 million or more tons of CO2 in deep reservoirs. The basins supposedly have the capacity to store over 100 years of CO2 emissions, and the DOE will invest $197 million over ten years, subject to Congressional approval. Including partnership cost share, the total value of the projects is $318 million.

For now the technology of capturing and storing carbon emissions is unproven, expensive and still in the research stage. And clean coal technologies in general are highly controversial. Though that hasn't stopped the venture world from investing in startups like GreatPointEnergy and Secure Energy. Check out the release for details on the individual projects .

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

outside.in Raises $1.5 Million

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Outsidein outside.in, the Brooklyn-based "place blogging" site, has raised $1.5 million, which it will use to build out the site and develop a geo-targeted ad platform. The site, founded by writer-entrepreneur Steven Berlin Johnson last year, raised $900,000 this spring.

Most of the original investors re-upped for this round: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Ventures, Village Ventures, George Crowley, John Seely Brown, Esther Dyson and John Borthwick. We're confirming whether Marc Andreessen, who invested in the first round, participated in this one.

Nine Inch Nails Help Seal Record Industry’s Coffin

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Highly popular Industrial Rock Band Nine Inch Nails have announced that as of today they are free agents, and will not be using the services of a record company in the future.

Nine Inch Nail's Trent Reznor wrote on the NIN site that the writing is on the wall for the traditional music distribution model, saying that the music business has radically mutated from one thing to something inherently very different today and that "it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as i see fit and appropriate."

It's expected that Nine Inch Nails next album will follow on from Radiohead's Rainbows and be released directly to the public.

I think Gizmodo hits it right on the head when they write:

If two of the biggest acts in the industry can see the digital writing on the wall and totally embrace it—that the old way of doing business is broken—why can't the labels? What Radiohead and NIN are showing is that the business model "of the future" feared by entrenched interests isn't arriving some time in the horizon. It's touching down now.

See also Michael's take on the music industry here.

Search Engine Marketing Firm ReachLocal Takes $55.2 Million

from TechCrunch by Duncan Riley

Woodland Hills based search marketing firm ReachLocal has taken an additional $55.2 million in funding, brining total funding to $67.9 million on a valuation of $305 million.

The round was led by Rho Ventures, with original investors Galleon Crossover Fund VantagePoint Venture Partners also participating.

ReachLocal offers a local-focused search marketing product that targets SMBs. ReachLocal offers campaign management for online advertising on major services including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, and also provides campaign specific site building and click tracking to customers.

For what is basically a SEM firm, the valuation is staggering; however despite the direct to buyer model of advertising options such as Google Adwords there is a growing market for middle-man services such as ReachLocal. There will be many people in the SEM business who will be re-evaluating their company valuations following ReachLocal's new round of funding, and I'd suggest that many of them may be sitting on a lot more value than they had previously thought.

(in part via LA Times)

What The Kids Are Stealing These Days -- And What They'll Be Buying Soon

from Silicon Alley Insider by Peter Kafka

Zoe The same record labels that complain about the epidemic of file-sharing/song-stealing also pay close attention to what songs file-sharers are swapping. Why? Because song-stealers tend to have the same tastes as song-buyers, but they tend to move faster. So if you track the what songs are moving quickly on P2P file-sharing systems, you can get a good sense of what's will be selling in a few weeks' time.

Online measurement firm BigChampagne has generated a "biggest movers" chart for us, which tracks which songs have had the biggest week-to-week increases on file-sharing networks. We've published it after the jump. Note that it doesn't correlate at all to CD sales, because people who buy CDs aren't buying them because there's one good song on them. But if there's more than one good song on them, they tend to do very well. That's why we're confident that Gorilla Zoe, who we'd never heard of prior to today, will be selling a lot of copies of his album Welcome To The Zoo in the coming weeks. The album, released by Warner Music Group (WMG), has two fast-moving songs on the BigChampagne chart.

Bcchart

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe mobo boots in five seconds with embedded Linux

from Engadget by Joshua Topolsky

If you're an impatient individual, you're probably going to like what you hear about ASUS's newest motherboard, the P5E3 Deluxe. Sound fancy? Well, it is -- featuring Intel's X38 chipset (with an FSB running at 1600MHz), Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme CPU support, plus the company's Energy Processing Unit, 8-phase power, and WiFi-AP. Of course, that won't help with your MTV-generation attention span and lack of patience, but the embedded micro-Linux variant, Express Gate, just might. You see, when you boot the system, you're given an option to immediately enter into a small Linux OS -- within five seconds, they say -- called SplashTop (developed by DeviceVM). The OS is coupled with a stripped-down version of Firefox and Skype, allowing you to update your Facebook profile almost instantly. The whole shebang is available right now for three-hundred and sixty of your precious dollars.

[Via Phoronix]

Ontario's privacy commissioner to geeks: design for privacy!

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Here's a one-hour video of a magnificent lecture from ~~Canada's~~ Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr Ann Cavoukian, to the University of Waterloo's Computer Science Club. The talk is called "Privacy by Design," and it charges technologists to build tools that minimize the collection and retention of personally identifying information, and to consider a complete, end-to-end, comprehensive framework for protecting user privacy. As Mitch Kapor said when he founded EFF, "architecture is politics" -- when you design tools that have wiretappable elements, you invite wiretapping. When you design tools that retain user data, you invite identity thieves and overreaching subpoenas.

Cavoukian argues that privacy and security are not zero-sum, that privacy is just as important in the "post-9/11 world" as it was before, and that you don't need to give up one to get the other. She addresses specific privacy-protection computer science techniques, and cites Kim Cameron's wonderful Seven Laws of Identity (I wish Kim would approach trusted computing with the same skepticism that he brought to identity issues, but that doesn't take away from his excellent work there).

There's something incredibly refreshing about hearing a high-ranking government official say things like, "Privacy is integral to freedom. You cannot have a free and democratic society without privacy. When a state morphs from a democracy into a totalitarian regime, the first thread to unravel is privacy." Link (via /.)

Monday, October 08, 2007

Mint Rakes It In

from TechCrunch by Erick Schonfeld

Since launching and winning the top spot at our TechCrunch40 conference three weeks ago, personal-finance startup Mint has been on a roll. On Friday, Mint was named Best of Show at the 2007 Financial Innovations conference (along with peer-to-peer lender Prosper and mortgage-finder Mortgagebot).

CEO Aaron Patzer reports to us that, in just the past three weeks, Mint has already helped organize more than $2 billion worth of people's personal financial accounts, and identified more than $40 million in potential savings for those members. (Mint helps you find better interest rates on bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial products). Interest in the site spiked right after TC40. At one point, Mint was signing up a new member every five seconds. Not bad for a service from a previously-unknown startup that asks for access to all of your private financial data, including your bank and credit-card accounts.

Apparently, getting consumers to give up that level of privacy, has not been an issue so far. (The old axiom is true: people really will do anything to save a buck). Now comes the hard part. Getting all those people to keep coming back past the initial stage of curiosity.

Update: I asked Mint CEO Patzer for some more details on how many people are using Mint, and he responded with the following data. Keep in mind, this is only 18 days worth of data and thus should be treated as extremely preliminary (these are early adopters, so they may be more likely to embrace such a service and use it more often than a mainstream user):

—That $2 billion is spread across 50,000 registered users.
—About 70 percent (or 35,000) have come back more than once.
—Those who have been in the system at least a week (including beta testers), visit Mint.com 2-3 times a week.
—About 10 percent (or 5,000) come to the site every day.
—And 10 percent have signed up for mobile alerts.

(See also his comments below about the lengths Mint goes to secure customer data).

Adult Alternative: Facebook and iTunes Teaming Up?

from Gizmodo by Mark Wilson

To fight off the evil empire that is MySpace, tiny entities Facebook and iTunes may be teaming up to bring a musical component to Facebook's offerings (while offering Apple another venue to sell their music).

According to the unconfirmed rumblings, Facebook is working on expanding their interface. Musical artists will now have special pages with integrated widgets for promoting band events. The upcoming iTunes widget will allow users to sample and even eventually buy music through Facebook (in support beyond the current iLike software). iPod owners who use Facebook will surely take glee in this new integration, but honestly, many of us avoid MySpace like the plague because it's full of a bunch of losers with crappy bands. Now all those losers with crappy bands are going to set up pages on Facebook, find their way into our networks and infiltrate our clean social networking. Not that we're paranoid or anything. [paidContent via macworld]

Sunday, October 07, 2007

MIT students' Biocell creates electricity from biomass on the cheap

from Engadget by Conrad Quilty-Harper

Five MIT students under the team name BioVolt have created a $2 gadget that uses biomass to generate electricity. The output of the device isn't particularly significant -- six months to charge your cell means you shouldn't throw away that charger just yet -- but the low cost of the components, the availability of "biomass," and the capability for chaining multiple devices together means this is the perfect solution for isolated areas or poor communities. It's good news for the researchers too, who happened to win $5,000 in a design competition for their efforts. Good show lads.

Read

Dr. Augustine Fou's Online Scrapbook

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

New Yorker on ultra-expensive wine counterfeits

All I want for Christmas is my HDTV... and an Apple

IBM And Linden Lab Team For Virtual World Interoperability

Consumer Feedback Impact - AT&T Changes its ‘Terms of Service’

THIRTY virtual worlds in San Jose

DOE to Invest in Projects to Store 1 Million Tons of CO2

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

outside.in Raises $1.5 Million

Nine Inch Nails Help Seal Record Industry’s Coffin

Search Engine Marketing Firm ReachLocal Takes $55.2 Million

What The Kids Are Stealing These Days -- And What They'll Be Buying Soon

ASUS P5E3 Deluxe mobo boots in five seconds with embedded Linux

Ontario's privacy commissioner to geeks: design for privacy!

Monday, October 08, 2007

Mint Rakes It In

Adult Alternative: Facebook and iTunes Teaming Up?

Sunday, October 07, 2007

MIT students' Biocell creates electricity from biomass on the cheap

Recent Articles

Favorite Blogs

Blog Archive

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Monday, October 08, 2007

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Subscribe To

Recent Articles

Favorite Blogs

Blog Archive