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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Promising New Technology for Wi-Fi Enabled Secure Digital Memory Cards

from Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection by Thomas Hawk

Wi-Fi memory cards coming to cameras | CNET News.com CNET News.com is out with an article on Eye-Fi, a company that is set to release new camera memory cards this Fall which will allow you to transfer your photos wirelessly to your PC or to online photo-sharing websites. This is exciting technology indeed. It looks like the cards will hold 2GB and sell for about $100. Even more exciting to me than Wi-Fi image transfer is the possibility to use Wi-Fi hotspots to auto geotag images prior to transfer. If by using hotspot geolocational data, Wi-Fi enabled chips could accurately geotag images, this would represent a great step forward for geotagging. It will be interesting to watch this technology unfold.

Nothing Me.dium about its Funding

from GigaOM by Liz Gannes

Me.dium, a company making a browser add-on that relates the webpages you are browsing to those being viewed by other people concurrently using the tool, today announced it had raised $15 million in a second round of funding, bringing its total amount of capital to $20 million from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Brad Feld, and Elon Musk.

Really? $15 million? I didn’t realize it had taken off to a level to attract that kind of bet. Me.dium is something I tried out for an early review and ended up uninstalling a week or so later during a plug-in purge.

I called Me.dium co-founder David Mandell this morning to ask how many users the company has. He said it had just opened up its private beta a week ago, and has 20,000 registered users total. How many were active users, he couldn’t say (though he said he would try to follow up). The users tend to be pretty geeky, he said, because the plug-in is only available for Firefox (IE is coming “in the next couple weeks”) and the sign-up process was until recently not very accessible.

The funding, Mandell said, is to be put toward infrastructure costs — “managing and making recommendations based on the real-time activity of everyone online actually uses a lot of hardware and engineering” — and also consumer marketing in the fall.

I have to say, $15 million is a pretty big bet for a company that has not proved many people will use its tools. In this latest round of post-bubble-burst web funding, I thought it was users first, money later, but here that doesn’t seem to be the case.

China kicks Three Gorges Dam turbine generator into motion

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

The AP reports that China has flipped the switch on the first of 12 turbine generators on the right side of the ginormous Three Gorges Dam, with it apparently already pumping electricity to the national power grid after a 72-hour test run. The dam itself, as you're no doubt aware, is the world's biggest hydropower project evar, totaling up to some $22.5 billion. In addition to giving it something to brag about, China is hoping that the dam will let it cut its dependence on coal, as well as control flooding on the Yangtze river. This latest development follows the activation of 14 turbines on the left bank of the dam, which began operating in September of 2005.

Virgin Charter Launches: Private Aviation Marketplace

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Virgin’s most recent new business, Los Angeles based Virgin Charter, launched this evening. The company was founded by CEO Scott Duffy with the hope of modernizing the booking systems for charter aircraft. Virgin’s Richard Branson got wind of the startup, gave the company three times the funding they were looking for and took a controlling interest. The company was renamed Virgin Charter.

Today, the Internet doesn’t play much of a role in chartering private aircraft. Well to do clients have their organizations contact small operators who generally control 3-5 jets. Schedules are compared and prices negotiated. The entire process takes up to five hours on average. And inefficiencies in the marketplace result in very high prices - the average U.S. flight is $18,000 round trip, and a cross continent, Los Angeles to New York flight is generally $35,000 - $65,000. Much of the price is due to “empty legs” - flights that have to come back early instead of waiting for clients, resulting in four legs flown for a round trip. The most well known Internet site for operators to list their planes is CharterX, but it leaves much to be desired.

Virgin Charter aims to change all that by putting small operators of charter aircraft together with potential buyers. In a process that is much like booking a trip on expedia, buyers can look through available aircraft, view ratings on the companies and actual planes, and choose to big on flights. Sellers respond, and flights are booked. Payment is completed via the site using a credit card, wire transfer or EFT, and Virgin Charter keeps a percentage as their fee. Following the flights, both the buyer and seller are requested to leave feedback on the other party. And Virgin Charter will work hard to fill those empty legs, which increase marginal revenue substantially for operators.

The U.S. is most of the worldwide market for private aviation, Duffy says, with about 75% of operators based here. The company is starting out only in the U.S. for now.The company has been in private beta for a few months, with 60 operators (out of 2,500 in the U.S.) By September, when they go live, they plan on having the largest 500 operators under contract.

Kodak's new Zooms: the 12 megapixel Z1275 and ZD710 with 10x zoom

from Engadget by Thomas Ricker

Egads, Kodak just busted out two new members of their Zoom series: the 12 megapixel Z1275 and 7 megapixel ZD710. That's right, 12 freakin' megapixels packed into a tiny 1/1.72-inch CCD -- thanks a lot Sharp. The Z1275 brings a 5x Schneider-Kreuznach Variogon optical zoom lens and 2.5-inch LCD powered by 2x AA batteries. As for that "HD" on the front? Well, that's due its ability to record 1280 x 720 video in MPEG-4 format. Meanwhile, the ZD710 cranks the zoom up to 10X while dialing the LCD back to 2-inches. Both shooters lack any kind of optical or mechanical image stabilization which, amongst other shortcomings keeps the price down to $249 when they ship starting August 2007. [Via Photography Blog]

Monday, June 11, 2007

Peonies from the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens

In Blogger/Blogspot, BE SURE to go into Settings -> Formatting and make sure "Convert Line Breaks" is set to NO. Otherwise it will add < br / >'s to every line and break the javascript.

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Ztail, online listings made easy

from GigaOM by Om Malik

It has been a weekend of relative quiet and peace – where most of the time was spent cleaning up the apartment, and discovering that I had more digital device clutter than any sane person should have. In other words, time to head on over to eBay and list some old stuff to make room for the new gee-gaws. Apparently I am not alone: a recent survey released by eBay shows that the average US household has approximately $3,000 of unused things in their home

Call is serendipity, but right after watching Roger Clemens right the New York Yankees' ship, I met with Bill Hudak, cofounder and CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Ztail, that has come up with web service that allows you to easily create "classifieds" and then publish them to not only eBay, but to other sites such as Edgeio, Facebook, MySpace, TypePad and WordPress blogs, and of course the Ztail listings site.

The company launched earlier this week has been bootstrapped by Hudak and Dave Keefer, and the duo have lot of online commerce experience, having worked at companies such as Google, Shopping.com and Epinions.

Ztail is a dead simple and easy to use. Once you go to their site, Ztail starts you off by asking you the question, what do you want to sell today? You type in, say, Nokia E61 – and Ztail gives you all options, including photos and technical specifications that you might have to otherwise type out. You personalize this information, describe the condition of the item; add your eBay ID (or Facebook ID or your blog credentials) and hit publish. That's it! You are done.

Being someone who is flummoxed by the eBay listings process, I found Ztail a time saving utility. Of course there is the added bonus of listing my stuff in many different places and thus increasing the chances of selling makes Ztail worth giving a whirl. Okay, time for me to go make listings, create a special blog for listing the items, and then have a massive virtual garage sale!

Vietnamese fishermen mistakenly swipe miles of fiber-optic wire

from Engadget by Darren Murph

While this mishap may not look as if it would cost Vietnam nearly as much as the Alaskan vaporization, losing 27-miles of critical fiber-optic cabling connecting the underdeveloped nation to Thailand and Hong Kong is fairly serious (and pricey). As it turns out, hordes of Vietnamese fishermen were given permission to salvage war-era undersea copper lines to fetch whatever price they could on local markets, but things got out of hand when vital telecommunication pipelines began getting swiped instead of antiquated cabling. The country has since disallowed the removal of any underwater wire until things pan out, but it looks like Vietnam will be relying on a single cable to the outside world until it can pony up the $5.8 million in replacement costs.

Publisher steals laptops, misundertands copyright

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Richard Charkin, the ~~CEO of Macmillan USA~~ Chief Executive of Macmillan and owner of Nature Publishing Group -- a division of Holtzbrinck, the same company that owns my publisher, Tor -- disgraced himself this week at BookExpo America in NYC. He walked up to Google's booth and stole two of their laptops, then later returned them, saying that he'd done it because there wasn't any sign telling him not to steal them.

This was intended as trenchant commentary on Google's book-scanning project, a generally laudable effort to scan and index all the books ever published, including huge dark-matter of books that are out-of-print with no clear rightsholders.

Pat Schroeder and the American Association of Publishers have sued Google over this, saying that Google shouldn't be allowed to index these out-of-print books (the majority of books published) unless they take on the Sisyphean task of figuring out who controls the copyright to all of them and then get permission to make an index.

Google makes indexes of every page on the Internet without ascertaining who their copyright belongs to, without asking permission. If your page is on the public Internet, Google will index it. The publishers argue that books shouldn't be indexable without explicit permission.

Larry Lessig has posted a great rebuttal to the idea that stealing laptops is the moral equivalent of indexing books -- a must-read if you want to understand exactly why Charkin's stunt was so mind-numbingly wrong-headed.

(3) If the computer was not sitting at a market booth, but instead was in a trash dump (like, for example, the publishers out of print book list), or on a field, lost to everyone, then that fits the category of property that Google is dealing with. But again, Google doesn’t take possession of the property in any way that interferes with anyone else taking possession of the property. The publisher, for example, is perfectly free to decide to publish the book again. Instead, in this case, what Google does is more like posting an advertisement — “lost computer, here it is, is it yours?”
(4) Or again, imagine the computer was left after the conference. No easy way to identify who the owner was. No number to call. In that case, what would the “head honcho’s,” or anyone’s rights be? Well depending upon local law, the basic rule is finders keepers, loser weepers. There might be an obligation to advertise. There might be an obligation to turn the property over to some entity that holds it for some period of time. But after that time, the property would go to the “head honcho” — totally free of any obligation to Google. Compare copyright law: where the property can be lost for almost a century, and no one (according to the publishers at least) has any right to do anything with it. Once an orphan, the law of copyright says, you must be an orphan. No one is permitted to even help advertise your status through a technique like search engine.
(5) Or again, imagine the computer was a bank account in New York. And imagine, the bank lost track of the owner of the account. After 5 years, the money is forfeited to the state. Compare copyright: in New York state, a sound recording could be 100 years old, but no one has any freedom with respect to that sound recording unless the copyright owner can be discovered.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Asus stuns Computex with £100 laptop

Wednesday 6th June 2007

4:12AM, Wednesday 6th June 2007

Asus chairman Jonney Shih sprang a surprise during Intel's Computex keynote today with the announcement of a $189 laptop.

The notebook measures roughly 120 x 100 x 30mm (WDH) and weighs only 900g. We saw the notebook boot in 15 seconds from its solid-state hard disk. The huge auditorium then burst into applause as Shih revealed the astounding price tag. Dubbed the 3ePC, Shih claimed the notebook is the 'lowest cost and easiest PC to use'. As the crowds rushed the stage, we sneaked off to the Asus stand to take a closer look.

The notebook uses a custom-written Linux operating system, much like the OLPC, though unlike the OLPC, Asus has chosen a more conventional interface. The desktop looked fairly similar to Windows and we saw Firefox running on one 3ePC. A spokesperson from Asus told us that the notebook would come with "an office suite that's compatible with MS Office", though he refused to confirm or deny whether that meant OpenOffice.

He claimed the 3ePC would be available in all areas of the world, not only developing nations.

The low price comes from some interesting design choices, primarily the flash-based hard disk. A disk of today's standard capacity would cost more than notebook itself as we saw with the 32GB Samsung disk, but Asus uses a 2GB disk. We were not allowed to touch the 3ePC so couldn't tell how much of this is left after the bespoke OS is installed.

The CPU also remains a mystery, though Shih said the version on show did have 512MB of RAM. Another version will be available for $299, but nobody could tell us what the difference between the two models is.

Kingmax shows off 16GB SDHC card

It doesn't seem too long ago that a 16GB solid state disc was a sight to behold, but now that SSDs are creeping up to 256GB and beyond, it's about time the flashy guys caught up. While we knew Kingmax was aiming to unveil its 16GB SDHC (only to match the early moving MICRODIA) card at Computex, pictured proof is always preferred, and it looks like all you digicam owners with SDHC-capable slots can rejoice as the sizes beneath this one quietly tumble in price. Notably, it was suggested that the cards were practically "ready for mass production," and should be available worldwide fairly soon. [Via Inquirer]

Friday, June 08, 2007

Will the iPhone be undone by its keyboard?

from Engadget by Ryan Block

For those in the audience enamored with the iPhone -- especially those willing to look past the lack of 3G and requisite 2-year service agreement -- there's really only one x-factor left: the touchscreen keyboard. We've all seen it done, but no one's ever seen it done right -- and Steve seems to think it's going to be off the chain. So why is Dvorak, noted tech pundit, and goader of Mac users and iPhone fans, reporting that he's got insider information that the iPhone's keyboard is complete crap and "people are going to return the phone in droves"? Well, that might have something to do with the fact that he's Dvorak, but we did consult a trusted and well connected source who, as it turns out, has heard the very same thing from multiple iPhone users, and who further noted that an accessory keyboard to go with the device may become necessary if the touchscreen keyboard doesn't cut the mustard. Of course, we can only reserve judgment until we wrap our paws on a real production model, but we hope it all turns out well -- even if only because we're sincerely frightened of an iPhone-incited fanboy riot in the streets.

Does Digital Fingerprinting Work?: An Investigative Report

Written by Liz Gannes Posted Friday, June 8, 2007 at 12:00 AM PT

Audio and visual fingerprinting of copyrighted video is seen as the best way to combat infringement, but in NewTeeVee's testing this week across multiple sites, it did not work. We were surprised to be able to upload multiple times the exact same copyrighted file, even after we explicitly told the hosting site and the fingerprinting provider about it and they took it down.

What follows is a description of our procedure, accompanied by the vehement disclaimer that we were doing this only for educational purposes.

Microsoft recently took its Soapbox user-contributed video site out of the public eye until it could implement filtering technology from Audible Magic. Last Friday, it relaunched, supposedly armed and ready to fend off copyrighted content. So we asked our intrepid reporter Craig Rubens to test how the system worked by uploading a Daily Show clip.

Surprise, surprise, the clip went up like a charm (screenshot). We called Microsoft to ask what was going on. You should talk to Audible Magic, they said; our system is only as good as their index. We called Audible Magic, who essentially blamed Microsoft, for only implementing the audio version of its software. The reps then set off to nail down statements from their companies, a process that took most of the week.

Only sometime last night did the clip finally get taken off Soapbox, replaced with a copyright violation notice. To see if the system had been corrected we uploaded it again today, and again it appeared about 40 minutes later. At this point, if all went as it was supposed to, the video should have been automatically added to the index of banned clips, and then rejected when we uploaded a duplicate. But again, we had no problem.

Concerns about whether digital fingerprinting is ready for action have persisted, and market leader YouTube has hesitated to deploy its "Claim Your Content" system while it is being perfected. However, confidence in fingerprinting has moved past the optimism stage. "This technology works," says MPAA Vice-President Dean Garfield, as reported by BusinessWeek.

Audible Magic has bagged most every high profile deal in video filtering: MySpace, Dailymotion, Break.com, and GoFish/Bolt.

The Audible Magic representative insinuated the company's technology was deployed in fuller form on MySpace — which recently launched its "Take Down Stay Down " and filtering system using AM's system — so we also tried uploading the clip there. Interestingly, that also posed no problem. See it in action here.

Below is Craig's description of the procedure he used to upload his clip to Soapbox. He says after about 50 minutes of "processing" the video went live and was playable. The MySpace experiment was even quicker, taking about five minutes.

Search for "Daily Show" on YouTube
Select first clip of actual Daily Show with Jon Stewart content and download it via KeepVid.com (selected video )
Convert the video to a Soapbox approved format (shockingly, Microsoft doesn't like .flv)
Upload Daily Show clip to Soapbox
Allow time for Soapbox to process, convert, and (supposedly) scan for copyrighted material.

Here are the official statements Microsoft and Audible Magic sent yesterday after days of deliberation and phone calls about the issue.

"We are continuing to work with Audible Magic to fine tune our implementation of their proactive automatic filtering services to best meet the needs of our content partners. The fact that a clip of any unauthorized copyright material slipped through is unfortunate, but that's why we also provide rich notice and takedown tools to content owners to automate and expedite the process of identifying and removing unauthorized content. We are committed to working in partnership with the industry to continue to evolve our technologies and solutions for customers and partners." — Rob Bennett, general manager for Entertainment and Video Services at MSN

"Audible Magic's technology has the ability to identify content such as 'The Daily Show' clip in question. We are working closely with Microsoft to customize our solution in order to meet the business needs of their Soapbox service." — Vance Ikezoye, founder and CEO of Audible Magic

Though all these systems, as advertised, depend largely on identifying content once in order to block it future times, we made no bones about identifying our uploads as Daily Show clips. We also had no problem uploading the exact same file after we had informed the proper people about it and they had taken it down.

Of all the videos on the web, Comedy Central clips are a huge bone of contention, figuring into Viacom's pending $1 billion-plus lawsuit against YouTube and its parent Google. Funnily enough, the original Daily Show video is still live on YouTube.

Eurocom intros all-in-one LV190 / LV220 ViiVA systems

from Engadget by Donald Melanson

They may not boast a name like the "F-Bomb," but Eurocom's new all-in-one LV190 and LV220 ViiVA systems look like they should be able to garner a fair bit of attention on their own. Boasting 19- and 22-inch widescreen displays, respectively, the systems can be configured with your choice of Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme processors, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 graphics, a max 4GB of RAM, up to two 500GB hard drives, and an internal TV tuner, among other options. Knocking things down a notch, however, is the somewhat lackluster 1680 x 1050 resolution on the 22-inch display, and an even lower 1440 x 900 on the 19-incher. If that's not a deal breaker for ya', you can get your order in now, with systems starting around $1,500 and going up considerably as you pack on the upgrades.

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Thursday, June 07, 2007

MIT's wireless electricity demoed, dubbed WiTricity

from Engadget by Ryan Block

We always knew Tesla was right: MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic and his team of researchers behind the latest wireless electricity scheme have reportedly demoed their magnetically coupled resonator technology on a 60-watt lightbulb that wasn't plugged in. Of course, no technology should be without a name, and so they've dubbed it WiTricity. Apparently Soljacic thinks it's possible to commercialize WiTricity within the next few years, which would be totally amazing if it was powered by Steorn's humanity-saving infinite energy device. [Warning: subscription req'd for link]

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