This blog has moved:
Okay, it hasn't really moved -- it's still here. But it has been superseded by a new and improved version of Geekwatch, which lives in a new location at http://www.globeandmail.com/blogs/geekwatch. It has a whole lot more blog-type features, including the ability to comment on each individual post (rather than having comments all in a big lump at the end of the entire blog) and "perma-links" or individual URLs for each post to make it easier for other bloggers and readers to link to. There's also an RSS feed, which you can import into one of a number of feed-readers -- either Web-based like Bloglines or downloadable like NewsGator -- so you can get your Geekwatch fix whenever there's a new item posted (there's more about our RSS feeds at http://www.globeandmail.com/rss). If you want to let me know what you think of the new Geekwatch, just post a comment.
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Turn those fans up to 11:
If you're a computer nerd -- or even just interested in the guts of what Google does and how it does it -- a story in the New York Times has some fascinating details on the new server farms the search engine company is constructing on the shores of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon. Two are built already and a third has received a permit. They are as big as two football fields, and each one has giant cooling towers four stories high attached to the end, in order to keep the massive racks of servers from overheating.
Microsoft and Yahoo are apparently building their own giant server farms upstream in Wenatchee and Quincy, Wash., which means that the Oregon-Washington region will likely need a few extra nuclear plants or dams or something pretty soon. Entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky of FON says that when he asked Google founder Larry Page what the main factor limiting the company's growth was, the billionaire said electricity.
Just how big is the Googleplex? The Times says the number of servers the company is currently operating at its 25 locations around the world is in the 450,000 range. That figure has more than quadrupled since 2004, when Google's server operation was already estimated to be one of the world's most powerful distributed supercomputers - rivalling anything that NASA or the NSA have. Based on estimates of the power that half a million servers would consume, that means Google's electricity bill is likely somewhere between $50-million and $100-million every year -- and growing.
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And a big sticky mess:
By now, you've probably seen one of the "viral" videos that seem to regularly make their way around the Internet faster than the speed of light, most of them courtesy of video-sharing websites such as YouTube.com or Google Video or Revver.com. There's the teenager playing Pachelbel's Canon on the electric guitar (note for note) and the older gentleman known as Bus Uncle yelling at a younger man who criticized his cellphone manners -- and more recently, the visual sculpture created by two men wearing white lab coats, brandishing 101 litres of Diet Coke and about 500 Mentos mints.
Using a variety of equipment, the two men drop Mentos into the bottles of Coke, some of which are set swinging on ropes, at which point geysers of pop go spraying into the air up to 20 feet high. According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, the two men from Maine -- a professional juggler named Fritz Grobe and a lawyer named Stephen Voltz -- said the exercise had no real purpose other than to have some fun with the properties of Mentos mints and Diet Coke. They posted it to their comedy website called Eepybird.com, and it has reportedly been viewed almost a million times.
What's interesting is that, according to the WSJ story, the company that makes Mentos -- a subsidiary of an Italian concern called Perfetti van Melle -- has embraced the video as "viral" marketing for its candies, and has said it may try to work out a deal with the two men to create further Mentos-related video artwork. According to a company spokesman, the word of mouth spread by the video is likely worth about half the company's U.S. ad budget, or about $10-million. Some other corporations have taken a dim view of people using their products in ways they weren't intended to be used, including FedEx. The shipping company sent a "cease and desist" letter to a man who had set up a website showing how he made furniture from FedEx boxes.
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Download at will:
Sweden's justice minister said recently that he would consider ripping up that country's recent law banning the downloading of copyrighted music and video over the Internet, and replacing it with a mandatory charge on all broadband Internet users. Those revenues would then be used to compensate artists for the unlicensed use of their work -- much as the Canadian copying levy, which gets tacked on to every blank CD and DVD sold in the country, is designed to help compensate artists whose music or video is shared over the Internet (it only covers private copying, however, and only applies to music).
Justice Minister Thomas Bodstrom told a Swedish newspaper that while he favoured the current legislation, he was willing to reopen the issue if the country's opposition parties wanted to look at a different method of handling illegal downloads. The Left Party has said that it wants to get rid of the current law because it hasn't done anything to stop illegal file-sharing, while the Moderate Party says the issue needs to be looked at again so that Sweden's copyright laws can be adapted to recent technological developments.
In other file-sharing related news, Sweden's crackdown on The Pirate Bay -- a popular website for movie and software downloaders that the government raided recently -- seems to have had little effect. Although the country's police force took most of the service's computers and closed its doors, the site was back up within three days using servers based in the Netherlands. In fact, according to another Swedish news report, The Pirate Bay's traffic has actually increased as a result of the publicity surrounding the raid.
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Google wants us to turn it up:
The co-founders of Google, gazillionaires Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have often said that their intention is to organize all of the world's information -- not just the stuff that is online, but everywhere. That includes TV, of course, and there have been hints that the search giant wants to become the new TV Guide of the digital information age, indexing and searching TV shows just like it does websites. Now a couple of Google Labs researchers have developed a system that would allow the company to bring up relevant information based on what show you're watching -- just by listening to the ambient audio coming from your television set.
The two researchers presented a paper at the Euro Interactive TV conference in Athens recently (and won best paper at the event), in which they described how their system could "sample the ambient sound emitted from a TV and automatically determine what is being watched... all with complete privacy and minuscule effort." According to the two, the system could easily keep up with users while they channel-surfed, "presenting them with a real-time forum about a live political debate one minute and an ad-hoc chat room for a sporting event in the next."
All of this could be done, they said "without users ever having to type or to even know the name of the program or channel being viewed." The paper they submitted (PDF document here) describes how interactive chat sessions could be brought up based on who else was watching the same content, or even maps and other information relating to a movie or documentary. The system would not be able to decipher conversations or record audio, they said -- all it would do is decipher enough audio to figure out what the program was. It would also have a "mute" button, they said, for users who didn't want the TV listening to them.
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Get your red-hot evil:
Google has been getting a lot of flak from the blogosphere -- and even the non-blogosphere -- for breaching its famous "Don't be evil" corporate mantra, by doing such things as acceding to the Chinese government's demands to censor its search results (although one of the company's co-founders seems to be rethinking that move). But at least one observer thinks the search behemoth needs to get more evil rather than less. Why? Because, says Lore Sjoberg, "the worldwide market for evil is stratospheric, and Google is uniquely positioned to take advantage of it."
Sjoberg, writing for Wired News, says that "economists -- many of whom are themselves evil -- estimate that if Google abandoned its inefficient policy completely, it could capture 38 percent of the evil market." That's more than Microsoft and Lindsay Lohan combined, notes the former writer for the Brunching Shuttlecocks satirical group.
Among the new business ventures Sjoberg suggests Google could get into are Google Torture, which he describes this way: "Google provides access to nearly all the public information on the web, but what about data people aren't willing to share? Google could enhance its core search engine by deploying goons and/or thugs to beat information out of people -- anything from the location of their valuables to interesting sports trivia." Other new business opportunities are "Google Murder" and "Google Blackmail," which would make better use of the search company's video-uploading service to extort money from unfaithful husbands.
Larry and Sergey, are you listening?
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Just sit down and watch it:
Television used to be something you pretty much had to watch, well... on your television. In one place. All at the same time. But the VCR changed that, and more recently the arrival of devices like the Slingbox have changed it even further. With one of the sleek units from Sling Media, you can stream recorded TV to anywhere you want over the Internet -- and that has made the entire broadcast industry very, very nervous.
Another example of just how nervous the industry has become came on Wednesday, when Major-League Baseball told Sling Media that it didn't particularly like the fact that viewers were moving games around and watching them in different places.
Why would baseball care? Because the league -- like other sporting leagues -- sells broadcast rights based on geographical location,
which explains why some cities are "blacked out" during the playoffs. Slingbox threatens that whole structure, which in turn is the financial foundation for much of sport broadcasting. So MLB wants users to pay more for the right to move their programs around and watch them in different places.
As more than one person has pointed out, however, it's not like the viewers of those games are doing something illegal -- they have already paid their cable or phone company for the right to watch those shows. Why should they have to pay more just because they want to watch it on their laptop in the airport?
This conflict was reportedly the subject of much debate at the Digital Media conference in Los Angeles. George Kliavkoff of MLB said that users who moved their content around using Slingbox or Orb Networks were violating the user agreements they signed with their cable providers. Sling Media argued that they had every right to watch whatever they wanted wherever they wanted.
In many ways, the TV industry is currently fighting the same battle that the music industry is. Illegal downloading is just the tip of the iceberg -- for companies like Apple and record labels like Warner Music, the bigger issue is whether paying customers have the right to move their media to another location, or whether what they paid for was some kind of geographically-restricted (or format-restricted) use. Expect to see more battles on this one before the umpire finally rules.
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Office-like, but not Office:
So Google has a spreadsheet app (and yes, it's called Google Spreadsheets -- really creative name there, guys). Now let's start the countdown to the presentation app (called Google Presentation, no doubt): here it comes in 10, 9, 8... oh, why not just buy Thumbstacks.com and be done with it.
With the acquisition of Writely.com, the launch of Google Calendar, and now the spreadsheet, the search behemoth with the $130-billion market cap has put together many of the same pieces as the Microsoft Office suite, which more than one person has noted makes up about 25 per cent of the software company's revenue (it used to be about 40 per cent) and an even larger chunk of its profit as well.
The only question that remains unanswered is, so what? Don't get me wrong -- Writely.com is a great application. But you can't export as a Word document, which means that no one is going to be able to use it as a business application (ThinkFree Office makes more sense for that). Google Calendar is great too, and nicely integrated with Gmail, but I don't see businesses standardizing on either one of them.
So why is Google bothering -- just to show that it can muscle in on markets too, the same way Microsoft does? Or is it just jumping on its horse and riding madly off in all directions, as Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock put it? One thing is for sure, it's not a great day to be JotSpot, NumSum or iRows -- although someone pointed out that Yahoo might be looking to get into the game too. And maybe Google Spreadsheet will become something more than a kind of half-assed Web version of Excel. Let's hope so.
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Don't forget to bring the Ajax:
It was inevitable that someone would eventually take a bullet in the ongoing battle of the "portal" homepages (it's no Alamo, but we have to do the best we can on the new frontier). It turned out to be the fittingly named Fold.com which, well... folded. That leaves about a half-dozen Ajax-powered portals (Ajax being the technology that makes them fast and interactive), including Netvibes, Protopages, Pageflakes and Zoozio. Oh yes -- and there are a couple of little players named Google (with its google/ig) and Microsoft (with live.com).
Both Netvibes and Pageflakes have recently gotten venture-capital financing, so someone must see a future in the homepage frontier. Richard MacManus of Read/WriteWeb is one of those. In a recent post, he says that what now appear to be just cool interactive homepages could become the portals of the Web 2.0 future, with all kinds of widgets and tools built in. In a sense, they could become a virtual desktop -- the tool you use to gather all the bits and pieces of your online life together, all of them interacting and updating automatically.
I think Richard might be right. I'm a big fan of Netvibes.com, in part because it is fast -- a lot faster than Google's ig -- and because it is flexible, with dozens of different modules (such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Digg modules) and features including the ability to add new tabs, click once and mark all items in a feed read, and so on. Google's effort, much like its other tools such as Google Reader, verges on the lame. It seems slow and clunky, you only get three columns (Netvibes.com has four) and you can't add new tabs. Admittedly, those kinds of things aren't exactly a powerful barrier to entry.
Microsoft's entry in the portal sweepstakes has also gotten better. At first, Live.com was slow and buggy -- kind of like Windows 1.0. But it has gotten a lot faster and sleeker-looking, and is the closest to having a competitive offering compared with Netvibes. All are racing to add as many modules as they can, but so far Netvibes has the most useful ones, such as a window where you can track your Writely.com documents, and a connection to Box.net online storage. Pageflakes has added a "share this page" feature, and Netvibes now lets you add modules to the Netvibes "ecosystem."
One thing that Google has going for it is a mobile version of its portal that is fast and slick. In fact, when it comes to mobile RSS readers, it is right up there with the best. I've tried several, including one called conveyor.com for the BlackBerry, and they all leave something to be desired. This could be an important differentiator between the competitors going forward.
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Steve still has one though:
Remember the "halo effect?" That was the term some analysts came up with for the boost in Apple sales that was expected to result from the smash success of the company's iPod music and video players. The assumption was that all the love for the iPod would spill over onto the rest of Apple's business, and that people would be drawn to purchase more Macs and iBooks and so on. There were several articles and analyst reports last year that said the effect seemed to be working -- but now there are numbers from a PC-market research company that call those early reports into question.
According to the latest report from Gartner Group -- obtained (ironically) by a blog called Apple Insider -- Apple's worldwide market share actually dropped in the first quarter of this year, to 2 per cent from 2.2 per cent in the same quarter of 2005. Even in the U.S., the company's primary market, its share barely budged during the quarter, remaining more or less flat at 3.6 per cent (Gartner says the company's share rose by one-tenth of one per cent). Even if you assume that lots of people held off buying Apple laptops and desktops because they were waiting for the new models that use Intel chips, that's still not a great performance -- and certainly not much evidence of a halo.
Incidentally, one of the reasons why it's ironic that the Gartner report shows up on a blog called Apple Insider is that the blog was one of several that were sued by the computer company for leaking inside information about Apple products -- a lawsuit that Apple just recently lost. Could Apple Insider be feeling just a little bit of what the Germans call schadenfreude?
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How not to win friends:
The much-anticipated -- and much delayed, and much criticized -- Vonage IPO just keeps setting new records for how screwed up a public share offering can get. In what no doubt seemed like a Web 2.0-type gesture for a tech issue, the company offered its customers stock as part of the IPO, and that has turned into a gigantic boomerang that just clocked Vonage in the back of the skull. Since the stock tanked after it started trading, many of those eager investors are now saying they won't pay.
Former tech analyst Paul Kedrosky says the investors who grabbed those shares should have known what they were getting into, since skeptics on the Vonage IPO weren't exactly difficult to find. But the company is still caught between a rock and a hard place, or maybe two rocks and a hard place. It has now said it will reimburse the brokerage firms for any stock that disgruntled Vonage customers (see the Vonage forum here) don't pay for, but all that's going to do is irritate the ones who actually paid money for it.
So then you have a company that is already losing money at a prodigious rate of speed -- more last year than it made in revenue, which is no mean feat -- spending more money to soothe the egos of the customers it convinced to buy shares. The only other option is to sue those customers, and what kind of marketing would that be? It's a lose-lose-lose proposition, a rare money-losing hat-trick in hockey terms. So at least that's something to be proud of.
Update: Vonage now says that it will pursue legal action against those who don't pay for their stock, but as I pointed out above, that is just one of the three losing options available to the company (the third being to do nothing).
A report in the Wall Street Journal says that due to some procedural errors during the weeks leading up to its IPO (including sending out an email without a link to the prospectus), disgruntled Vonage investors may have some recourse to avoid paying for the stock. And Paul Kedrosky says that while retail investors may have gotten hammered by Vonage, venture capital investors did pretty well.
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Better pay attention:
Cellphone companies are all desperately trying to find ways of "monetizing" the eyeballs that look at their handsets every day, and charging for text-messaging and cam-phone pictures clearly isn't bringing in enough dosh. So Virgin Mobile USA -- a "mobile virtual network operator" or MVNO, which resells phone service from Sprint -- has come up with a novel way of charging users: under a new plan, it will give you free cellphone minutes if you agree to watch a video ad or receive a text-message ad on your phone.
The plan, called "SugarMama," is expected to launch in June and include ad campaigns from Microsoft (for the Xbox 360) and Pepsi, among others. Virgin has about four million mostly young customers, which many advertisers are eager to reach. The company says it will offer users as many as 75 minutes of talk time per month if they agree to watch a 30-second video ad or get a text message. But there's a catch: in order to get the time, the user has to answer a question based on the content of the ad, to ensure that they have been paying attention.
Virgin is clearly aiming to make some money from its "pre-paid" customers, who buy minutes up front and are seen as somewhat less valuable than dedicated monthly-plan holders. But will the plan work? The New York Times story has a great quote from Roger Entner of Ovum Research which might make one skeptical: "If you're too cheap to buy a minute of air time, how are you going to afford an Xbox?" he asked. Another analyst pointed out that the average cost of a cellphone minute is as low as 3.5 cents, which means that for watching Virgin's ads you are being paid up to $2.60. Does that sound like a good deal?
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Volunteer to be watched:
Having someone track your driving behaviour — how fast you go, how hard you jump on the brakes, and so on -- sounds like a Big Brother-type nightmare (unless you're the parent of a teenage driver, of course). But what if you monitored yourself and then sent the information to someone voluntarily? And what if it could save you money on your insurance rates? Easyway Insurance Brokers of Ontario, a large independent brokerage, has launched something it calls "Save As You Drive." All you do is install a device that tracks your driving behaviour, and then send the info it generates to Easyway.
"Good driving habits should be rewarded with lower car insurance rates," says John Belyea, the president of Easyway Insurance. "Unfortunately, the technology hasn't existed to allow drivers to prove their abilities - until now." The Easyway "smart meter" allows drivers to track their speed, the time of day, total mileage and whether they aggressively accelerate or brake. Drivers can review the data on their PC before submitting it and be eligible for a discount of up to 30% on their rates, and regardless of their driving, their rates won't go up.
Smart idea, right? Just think of how you could extend that to other things. How about health insurance that decreases if you agree to install cameras that record how long you sit on the couch eating chips and drinking beer? Or a chip in your fridge that records how many vegetables you eat -- or better yet, an implantable chip that monitors your blood pressure and immune system, and raises or lowers your insurance rates based on whether you eat a lot of fat or not? The possibilities are endless.
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The enemy of my enemy...:
There have been all kinds of rumblings about power shifts and prospective deals among the major Internet players over the past six months or so, with talk of takeovers and partnerships and other permutations and combinations -- including a recent 52-page report from J.P. Morgan about the most likely pairings among Yahoo, eBay, Microsoft and Google. The most likely coupling, according to the brokerage firm, was Yahoo and eBay. Whoever wrote that report must be feeling pretty pleased with themselves, because the two Internet giants announced a far-reaching and long-term partnership on Thursday that involves a whole series of offerings from both companies.
Among other things, including a shared browser-toolbar offering, Yahoo has agreed to use PayPal -- eBay's online payment system -- for all of its Yahoo services, and eBay has agreed to make Yahoo its exclusive provider of ads on its auction pages, and also for sponsored search throughout the eBay service. The two companies have also agreed to explore a partnership for so-called "click to call" ads that would use software from voice-over-Internet company Skype, which eBay acquired for $2.4-billion (U.S.) last fall.
As more than one analyst has pointed out, this type of deal falls into the category of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Both eBay and Yahoo are up against not just search leader Google -- which is edging into the auction arena with Google Base, and also becoming more of a portal the way Yahoo is -- but also fighting Microsoft's attempts to move in on their turf. By teaming up, J.P. Morgan and others say, the two get to combine their strengths and present a kind of united front in the search, auction and online portal wars.
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Use VOIP to call your broker:
And so we return to our story, to find our hero -- the plucky little (or not so little) voice-over-Internet-protocol or VOIP company called Vonage -- finally going public, after much back-and-forthing over the past year about when to issue stock and for how much, or whether to try and convince someone to take the company over. And what happens? The stock tanks, dropping by as much as 15 per cent at one point on Wednesday. Needless to say, that's not what most IPOs are supposed to do, especially since underwriters of initial offerings usually try hard to underprice the issue so that they get a little "pop" on opening day.
Well, Vonage definitely got a pop, but it was more like the sound a balloon makes before it deflates. Why? Because while the term VOIP may be hot, industry watchers have been warning for some time that Vonage is caught between a rock and a hard place -- it has the name-brand value (courtesy of a very expensive marketing campaign) but it is being squeezed by free VOIP provider Skype on one hand and by cable providers on the other. While Vonage has features that set it apart from either one, including the ability to take a VOIP system on the road and still use the same phone number, that may not be enough to base a business on.
It's true that by selling shares at $17 (U.S.) each, Vonage managed to raise a little over $500-million, giving the entire company a combined market value of over $2.5-billion. So we shouldn't be holding any charity drives for CEO Jeffrey Citron, whose stake is likely worth about $1-billion or so. But at the same time, Vonage needs all that money to try and plug the gigantic hole in its balance sheet, which continues to drain money at a furious pace. Last year, the company lost $261-million, which was almost as much as it had in revenue. Not a great sign.
The worst part is that Vonage's costs are likely to remain roughly the same, or even increase, as the market gets more competitive -- and yet its chances of becoming profitable are likely to fall, as Skype and the cable companies both put pressure on prices. Sound like a good recipe for an investment to you? Then Vonage would like to hear from you.
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Share photos, no uploading:
One of the interesting things about the recent Web 2.0 conference in Toronto known as mesh (full disclosure: I was one of the organizers of the conference) was the chance to chat with some of the small Web-based startups across Canada, including two that recently announced that they had received financing from venture-capital groups. Pixpo, based in British Columbia, was one of those companies -- founder Colin How told the conference that his company had just gotten $6.5-million from a group of VCs.
Also involved in the financing round were Madrona Partners, a VC based in the Pacific Northwest that specializes in early-stage companies, a Canadian VC group called GrowthWorks, a Canadian fund called Yaletown Venture Partners that focuses on Western Canada, and a Calgary-based early-stage fund called Springbank TechVentures (started by one of the early investors in MetroNet, which was sold to AT&T in 1999 for $7-billion).
Pixpo's software -- a modified version of the kind of "peer-to-peer" network used by companies such as Kazaa for file-sharing -- allows computer users to share their photos, music, video and other media without having to upload it all to some external site such as YouTube or the photo-sharing site Flickr. Instead, the user just leaves the photos or music or videos where they are, and gives outside Web surfers access to those files on the PC, while keeping that access secure enough that the user doesn't have to worry about hackers messing around with other files or the operating system.
Hosting all the files on your home PC can pose its own problems, however, including the strain that gets put on both the PC and your home Internet connection if your video clip of your cat falling into the bathtub happens to get linked on BoingBoing and millions of people try to access it at the same time. Mr. How says that Pixpo uses a combination of a modified P2P network and a hosted-server network so that if certain files become particularly popular, they can be cached or hosted on Pixpo's own servers. He also said that in contrast to other streaming-media software such as Orb Networks, Pixpo is more flexible, faster and provides a better quality video feed.
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And in this corner...:
The bare-knuckle bout for VoIP supremacy is still in the opening round, but Skype has thrown what could be a haymaker punch. The voice-over-Internet pioneer that eBay acquired from founder Niklas Zennstrom last year for a mind-boggling $2.4-billion (U.S.) - and up to $4.1-billion if Skype meets certain performance targets - is now allowing users to make VoIP calls from their computers to any landline number for free.
The freebie for what the company calls "SkypeOut" calls is only a short-term offer, however. It expires at the end of the year, and is clearly designed to suck new users into the Skype vortex. But is it a smart move by eBay to build a customer base and take on Vonage, or a desperate move to justify that multibillion-dollar cheque it cut?
Skype said in its release that "completely free calling in the U.S. and Canada will expand Skype's increasing penetration in North America and solidify Skype's position as the Internet's voice communication tool of choice." And there are those who believe it will make the service - which is based on P2P or "peer-to-peer" technology originally developed for the Kazaa file-sharing network - a lot more appealing to non-geeks, since the previous free VoIP service only included PC-to-PC calls.
Phil Wolff of SkypeJournal.com wrote after the announcement was released that "in one stroke [it] simplifies the choice to try Skype. No need to whip out a credit card or think about minutes. Just download and call. No trying to understand SkypeOut rates." The move will "starve small competitors," he added, as well as forcing Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Google to match the free outbound call offer or fall behind.
The VoIP player it really puts pressure on, however, is Vonage. The company is currently the leader in what some call the "hardware-based" VOIP market, since it sells users a box (and/or a handset) that plugs into their Internet connection, rather than just software that runs on a computer. But selling those products and marketing its service as a replacement for traditional phone service costs a lot of money - much more than Vonage makes by charging for its VoIP service - and so it is currently hemorrhaging cash, even as its costs continue to grow. The company's marketing costs alone totalled more than $88-million (U.S.) in the first quarter of this year, contributing to a loss of more than $85-million on revenue of $118.9-million.
Skype's announcement couldn't come at a worse time for Vonage, since the company is trying to market a public share offering despite its money-losing ways. And yet more than one analyst has noted that the VoIP provider is being squeezed by Skype on the low end with its free services, and the cable companies on the higher end with their all-in-one VoIP services.
Andy Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager who now writes about technology and investing, said that the free SkypeOut announcement was a "classic, high-stakes, Wall Street sucker punch" to Vonage. He described the impetus behind the offer as a case of "why not play with the mouse before you kill it," and added that eBay must have been thinking: "What better way to do away with the Vonage IPO and raise their cost of capital then/ scare investors even more." (Telcos are likely feeling just as glum as Vonage, of course, since Skype continues to push the cost of phone calls down closer and closer to zero).
Over the past year, while Vonage's customer base has grown, the cable companies have grown faster in terms of VoIP adoption, to the point where some are wondering whether Vonage is likely to become the TiVo of VoIP - a pioneer that winds up struggling to turn itself into a lasting business. As of February, surveys from both UBS and TeleGeography showed that cable providers had taken more than 52 per cent of the voice-over-Internet market, while independents including Vonage only had about 37 per cent. Vonage was still the largest single provider, with 1.2 million customers, but Time Warner was close behind.
eBay, meanwhile, is obviously trying to boost market penetration for Skype to the point where it becomes the de facto standard for free or low-cost VoIP. The company has been adding services to keep its product the leader as AOL and Google add voice-calling features to their instant messenger offerings. It has also been doing deals with hardware companies to sell Skype-branded handsets such as the Netgear-Skype Wi-Fi phone, a cellphone-like device that allows users to make Skype calls from any wireless hotspot or Wi-Fi network.
Skype's news may be bad for Vonage, but it has its own battle to fight against Microsoft, AOL and Google, not to mention the cable companies, all of whom have very deep pockets. Call this the first punch in what could be a long slugfest over the VoIP market. The good part for consumers, of course, is that it means using the telephone continues to get cheaper.
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A toy for math geeks?:
At its recent Google Press Day event, the search giant's executives -- CEO Eric Schmidt and boy-wonder founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- took questions and launched a few new toys, including Google Trends and something called Google Co-op (the actual address is "coop" because hyphens don't work that well in Internet URLs). While the service may turn out to be a promising addition to the Googleplex, I would warn you not to delve into Google Co-op without either an advanced programming degree or a large supply of Excedrin.
Co-op makes the incredibly complicated and mind-bogglingly obtuse Google Base look like a Hallmark greeting card. I know that Google is all about algorithms -- not just because it's obvious, but because that's what Eric Schmidt said during the press conference. But Google Co-op is enough to make a non-math geek hold his head in his hands and weep. It seems simple enough. Google wants you to "Help other users find information more easily by creating "subscribed links" for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best." How hard could that be?
As it turns out, pretty hard. If you go looking for more detail, here's what Google tells you: "In order to use the API you need to define one or more ResultSpecs. A ResultSpec contains a Query and a Response. The Query gives a general trigger pattern of queries for which you want to trigger your result. The Response provides a template for the output you want to display when the trigger pattern is matched. The id attribute of the ResultSpec tag uniquely identifies the ResultSpec."
And that's just the introduction. It gets worse. You have to learn about structured queries and data objects and output methods, and that's just to put together a list that you then have to submit and get others to subscribe to. Obviously, this is for people who like programming in the same way kids like ice cream. And I know that like Google Base, it is meant for companies and services to set up their own databases and then feed them into the Googleplex.
But still. Couldn't it be just a little more user friendly for us non-programmer types? Cynthia Brumfield over at IP Democracy said that Google needs to remember the KISS rule. But how can you keep it simple when you're hiring 300 math geeks a month?
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Let us thank the Great Google:
The state of California usually takes in about $7.3-billion (U.S.) or so in tax revenue in April, or at least it did last year. And this year? The tax grab... er, haul... er, income worked out to $11.3-billion, which is almost 50 per cent higher than in 2005. So what changed? Among other things, a whole pile of insider selling by Google executives and employees, as the San Francisco Chronicle reports. To be specific, Google execs sold about $4.4-billion in stock last year, after the restrictions on the IPO expired -- and that would have accounted for almost $500-million in capital gains tax.
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in case you were wondering, each sold about $1.3-billion in stock -- and still have several billion dollars worth of stock left. And the $4.4-billion in sales is just the 14 insiders who have to report their sales by law. Plenty of non-insider Googlers no doubt took the opportunity to buy a new yacht or whatever with their shares as well over the past year. To put all those sales in perspective, a site with a name that we're not allowed to print in a family newspaper notes that Google's insider sales account for more than half of all the insider stock sales at the top 200 companies in Silicon Valley.
That means all the insider sales at all the other 199 top companies in California --including such little-known names as eBay, Yahoo, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Oracle -- put together would still be less than the stock sold by Google executives. If you live in the Valley, better get a yacht while you can, because they're probably going fast.
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Geek translator needed in Aisle 2:
No one would deny that the Perimeter Institute for Advanced Physics in Waterloo, which Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis helped finance, is full of a whole bunch of really smart people. So smart that they've probably forgotten more about advanced physics than the rest of us will ever know. But do they really need to rub it in? A recent press release from the institute has to rank right up there with the most incomprehensible ever issued -- and that's presumably after someone tried to "dumb it down" for us non-physicists.
According to the release, theorists at the Institute for Quantum Computing and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics "have presented an operational control method in quantum information processing extending up to 12 qubits." Don't feel shy about admitting that you don't know what a "qubit" is, or if you got it confused with the measurement that Noah used when building the ark (that was the "cubit" which is the distance from the tip of your finger to your elbow). Whatever a qubit is, the IQC and PI guys managed to get up to twelve of them.
The release goes on to say that "despite decoherence, the researchers reached a 12-coherence state and decoded it using liquid state nuclear magnetic resonance quantum information processors." Sounds like fun, doesn't it? In case you're keeping score at home, that's no less than seven modifiers (liquid, nuclear, resonance, etc.) before you get to the actual noun in that sentence, which is the word "processors." Now all they need is a steady supply of dilithium crystals.
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Just ignore the nasty DRM:
Last fall, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen and the Motion Picture Association of America announced an odd agreement. Mr. Cohen said that he had reached an understanding with the movie studios, and would remove any links to copyrighted content from his website at bittorrent.com. The odd thing about this announcement, of course, was that hardly anyone goes to Mr. Cohen's website to find links to material they can download using BitTorrent -- they go to dozens of other websites such as thepiratebay.org and click on a link, and the BitTorrent app opens and starts simultaneously downloading and sharing the file at the same time (creating the "peer-to-peer" structure that is the key to BitTorrent's success as a distribution platform for large files).
So why bother agreeing to remove links that no one uses anyway, when the vast majority of BitTorrent downloads occur somewhere else? The thinking at the time was that Mr. Cohen was working with the major Hollywood movie studios on a deal for movie downloads via BitTorrent, and the announcement was part of a quid pro quo before they could get down to business. And now we have what appears to be the first fruits of that arrangement, with the news that Warner Brothers -- a unit of Time Warner -- will be offering some of its movies for download using Mr. Cohen's P2P technology, although it's not clear what they will cost or whether there will be DRM (digital rights management) incorporated so that they can only be used in certain ways, or for a certain period of time.
According to a comment on the blog BoingBoing.net, Warner already has a similar system in place in Germany, offering movies for download using a different P2P technology. The comment says the files are in Windows Media format and have DRM restrictions, are of inferior quality to a DVD but cost about the same, and yet have no additional features such as bonus scenes or commentary. Users get credits for sharing the movies once they download them, such that sharing a movie 40 times gets you enough credits for a new movie.
Doesn't that sound appealing, kids? Pay the same as a DVD (which you can rip and burn to your heart's content) for something of inferior quality that is all locked up with DRM. Nice try, WB.
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Steve Jobs, benign dictator: It's funny how our view of what is right changes depending on whether we like the person who is making the rules. Take Apple and iTunes for example. After months of negotiations -- and months before that filled with sniping back and forth -- the four major record labels have signed contracts with Apple that allow the company to continue offering songs at 99 cents apiece. This news has been greeted by cheering in most quarters, since it means that Uncle Steve managed to beat the record labels at their own game, and has kept songs cheap for music lovers everywhere.
But has he? Or has he kept some songs cheap and made others more expensive? And would we feel the same about a company with 80 per cent of the market for downloadable music controlling the price for music if it were Microsoft instead of Apple? It's true that if the record labels had won their fight for "variable pricing," they would have been able to raise prices for newer hits -- but they would also have been able to charge less for older songs that only a small group of people might want to download (although some industry critics have said that we would likely see a lot more of the former than the latter). Depending on whom you believe, keeping prices locked at 99 cents might actually benefit Apple more than it does music downloaders.
Obviously, it's difficult to get much sympathy up for the major record labels, which have not only spent the better part of the last three years suing as many of their customers as they can get their hands on, but have also been charged in the past with their own brand of price-fixing, for which they had to pay a rather large settlement. But still -- should we applaud price-fixing just because it's Apple doing it and not Microsoft or EMI?
Update:
Mike Masnick, who runs a tech-commentary blog called TechDirt, took issue with my comments in a recent post, saying price-fixing is something the labels would do (and have been accused of doing), not something a retailer such as Apple does. All it is doing, Mike says, is setting a price. As I mentioned in a comment on the post at TechDirt, it's true that retailers aren't normally the ones who engage in price-fixing -- so perhaps it's better (as one reader suggested) to call it monopoly pricing power.
Whatever you want to call it, however, Apple has it -- and my point is that it may or may not be good for consumers at the end of the day. TechDirt is right, however, to point out that the labels are largely to blame for the mess they find themselves in, since they were the ones who required Apple to use restrictive DRM or digital rights management -- which has locked users in -- and they were also the ones who spent all their time suing customers instead of developing their own viable alternatives to iTunes. The bed has been made, and now they have to lie in it.
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How about virtual interest?:
The line between virtual worlds and the real world just got a little blurrier: Project Entropia, a "massively multiplayer online role-playing game" or MMORPG, is offering game players a bank-machine ATM card that they can use to convert money from the game -- Project Entropia dollars, or PEDs -- into real dollars. Project Entropia players use money within the game to buy tools and supplies, and these tools eventually expire and have to be replaced. In the game world, players are colonizing a planet called Calypso and have to avoid volcanoes, mutants and other dangers.
The game was designed from the start to have what the founders call a "Real World Economy," based on in-game currency. Users convert their real-world money into PEDs at the rate of 10 PEDs to the U.S. dollar. But as the blog Techdirt notes in a post on the topic, in the real world many countries (including Canada) have what is called a "floating" currency, in which the dollar fluctuates in value based on the perceived strengths of the economy, and it will be interesting to see how long Entropia can maintain its fixed currency rate.
As a comment on Techdirt mentions, it will also be interesting to see how long it takes before some "script kiddie" can hack a script that will generate billions in game dollars out of thin air. And what about other elements of the "real-world economy?" It might not take too long before a Project Entropia version of the mafia forms, or trade unions, or maybe even billionaire currency speculators.
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Share photos and screen calls:
It's been a busy couple of days for small Canadian tech companies: a photo and video-sharing service called Pixpo, which is based in Victoria and has been around for a while now, and Ottawa-based telecom startup Iotum. Pixpo has released a new version of its media-sharing software -- which has a couple of key differences compared with other similar services -- while Iotum has announced a partnership with PhoneGnome, a company that sells a voice-over-Internet appliance for consumers.
Pixpo, which was founded by Colin How, allows users to share their photos, music and video without having to upload it to an external website or server, as most services such as YouTube.com and Flickr.com do. Pixpo's software allows users to connect directly to the content on your PC, and provides a nice-looking interface so they can browse through thumbnails of your photos or watch video clips with the built-in media player. Mr. How said in an email that the service uses a modified "peer-to-peer" network with a series of servers that can cache or store popular content.
Iotum, meanwhile, has announced a deal to bundle its Relevance Engine software with VOIP devices sold by PhoneGnome. Iotum's product uses smart filtering to determine which phone calls should be put through to a user based on the time of the call and who it is coming from, and can also determine where to send the call based on previous behaviour patterns or rules set by the user. PhoneGnome -- which was started by one of the founders of Earthlink, an early Internet service provider in the U.S. -- sells a box that users can simply plug a regular phone into that provides VOIP calling, but allows them to keep their regular phone number.
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Upload photos while you wait:
The best part about having a digital camera is that you can take a gazillion photos and then edit out the bad ones later (assuming there are any bad ones, of course). But you have to carry around your camera's USB cable in order to upload them, or a card reader that your camera's data card can fit into. Now a company called Eye-Fi thinks it has an answer: an SD Secure Digital) data card that also has a built-in Wi-Fi wireless transmitter.
Memory card getting full? Eye-Fi says you will be able to upload your photos automatically wherever there is wireless access -- and the company (which hasn't officially launched yet) has said that it plans to have built-in support for photo-sharing sites such as Flickr, so that you can upload your shots to the service automatically right from the camera. There are cameras that have Wi-Fi built into them hitting the market now, including one of Kodak's EasyShare models and one from Nikon -- but they only allow photos to be uploaded to their proprietary storage services.
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Nice sales, shame about the growth:
It's tough being Microsoft, isn't it? Rack up sales of almost $11-billion (U.S.) in your latest quarter, up 13 per cent over the same period a year ago, and what does the market do? Drops your stock like a vial full of anthrax -- pushing it down by more than 10 per cent at last count, on about five times the normal trading volume. At one point, the shares fell by 13 per cent, the largest drop in six years. Why? The biggest reason was that the company's sales came in at the low end of its own previous estimates -- and not just the low end, but pretty much the bottom -- and its profit flat-out missed. Not only that, but the next quarter doesn't look so hot either.
That's not to say the quarter didn't have some bright spots. Helping to push revenue higher was sharply higher sales of Xbox 360 consoles -- Microsoft's home entertainment division saw its revenue jump by 80 per cent. Unfortunately for the software behemoth, it doesn't make any money on Xbox 360s, because it is still spending heavily to push as many of the little gizmos into people's homes as it possibly can. The MSN division also saw its sales drop, in part because dial-up users cancelled their accounts (which is known in some circles as "AOL disease").
But one of the biggest issues for investors was that Microsoft said its costs are likely going to rise by more than it expected, and therefore profits may be slimmer. Paul Kedrosky, a former investment analyst who writes a financial blog called Infectious Greed, says there are not many details about what Microsoft plans to spend all that money in the future, but he suspects it is aimed at competing with Google. Eugene Munster of Piper Jaffray thinks so too. "It looks like Microsoft is going to war with Google, and trying to get their product development back in track," he told the New York Times.
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One to beam up, Scotty:
We all know that the blog-o-sphere is renowned for misinformation, and that all manner of unsavoury rumours get tossed around willy-nilly (or higgledy-piggledy, depending on your preference). I don't want to contribute to that kind of scurrilous behaviour any more than I absolutely have to -- but I can't help but pass on the fact that certain sources are reporting that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a Star Trek fan. The rumours come from a blog run by Rondi Adamson, a freelance writer who has written for the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Star and the Christian Science Monitor and who writes regularly on conservative topics.
And the PM is reportedly not just a fan, but someone who actually competed in a Trek convention costume contest. That is hard-core, my friends. The blog-o-verse is now afire with speculation about who he dressed up as: Was it the usual choice of leaders, Captain James Tiberius Kirk? Was it the choice of thinkers, Lieutenant Spock? Or did he go for the engineer's favourite, Mr. Scott? A picture has already emerged of the PM in a Star Trek: The Next Generation uniform, pretending to be Commander Data the android, but alas, it is a Photoshop creation.
Obviously, this isn't exactly earth-shattering news. It isn't as though the PM was suddenly revealed as a fan of Desperate Housewives or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something salacious like that. Still, it's hard to imagine George Bush as a fan of Star Trek -- too cerebral. Oh, and one more thing: Mr. Harper is also reportedly a cat fancier, and a mean impressionist. Who knew.
Update:
Another source writes to say that the "Trek influence extends deeper into the PMO than just Prime Minister Harper." Someone who went to the University of Calgary with Mr. Harper's chief of staff Ian Brodie says that the "political and philosophical underpinnings" of the series were the subject of much discussion over beers after class. This reportedly culminated in Mr. Brodie presenting a paper on Captain Jean-Luc Picard before the Learned Societies, a prestigious conference of Canadian academics. Two to beam up!
Update 2:
Another reader writes in to point out that Prime Minister Harper isn't the only leader with a fondness for Star Trek -- Diane Duane notes that King Abdullah II of Jordan is also known to be a big fan, and even appeared in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager when he was still just a prince.
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Meedio becomes Yahoo Go for TV:
Well, that didn't take long. A little over a week after Yahoo bought a company called Meedio -- whose software turns any PC with a TV tuner card into a digital video recorder and competes with Microsoft's Windows Media Center -- the Internet portal is offering a software download similar to Meedio's called Yahoo Go for TV. And best of all, it's free.
Some of the early reviews from home media-centre fan sites aren't all that enthusiastic, however -- in fact, some are a lot closer to a thumbs down. The user interface is said to be clunky, especially when compared with Windows Media Center or Apple's new Front Row (Yahoo's software is Windows only so far), and Yahoo focuses more on its own online content such as the photo-sharing service Flickr rather than giving users easy access to their own stored content. There are some more screenshots here.
For anyone thinking about building their own DVR or media centre using a PC with a TV tuner card, a free download is definitely going to be attractive -- but as more than one observer has pointed out, there are plenty of free open-source downloads out there that are better, including MythTV and SageTV. Not only that, but PCs with Windows Media Center on them are fairly cheap already, and even Microsoft-bashers say the WMC interface is pretty well done. Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg says he doesn't understand why Yahoo is even bothering. But hey -- it's free!
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Wireless "cloud" not so cloudy:
It's a great idea -- cover an entire city with free Wi-Fi wireless Internet, so that residents can check their email or play online Sudoku until the cows come home. San Francisco is doing it, thanks to Earthlink and Google, and so is Philadelphia, as well as several other cities. But is it all that it's cracked up to be? Not if you live in St. Cloud, Florida apparently. According to a recent story from Associated Press, some residents aren't happy with the lack of reception in the free municipal Wi-Fi network, which is supposed to cover a 15-mile radius. "Some can see receivers from their homes and still can't sign on - even on the porch," the story says. "Others have tried to connect countless times."
St. Cloud started the project in 2004 and has been rolling it out since, with Hewlett-Packard building the network and providing customer support. About 3,500 people have registered to use the service and logged about 176,000 hours of use. HP says that there have been some problems with access, but that they are being worked on. Residents are also advised to buy a signal booster if they want to ensure a good connection -- it costs $170 from City Hall. Joe Lusardi says that he has given up, even though he can see a Wi-Fi receiver from his front porch. "It's just total frustration," he said. "I'm going to stay with the DSL and just forget it, because I don't think it's going to work."
Glenn Fleishman of the website Wi-Fi Networking News says that it's understandable there might be teething problems with a new wireless network, especially one that is trying to cover such a large area for free. He notes that the network has only really been operating for a little over a month, and that HP has reported only 842 support phone calls out of the first 50,000 user sessions in a 45-day period. Still, maybe it's just as well that Toronto's wireless network is going to be built by the electricity company, and that users will have to pay (after a six-month free trial period). As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.
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I'll take an Apple to go:
More details have been leaking out about Apple's much-rumoured entry into the portable computer business. Back in February, there were patents filed that appeared to be describing a Tablet PC type of device with a touch screen. Now, the company has filed a new patent application that describes a virtual-keyboard type of interface for such a portable device, with drawings of a large PDA with a horizontal screen layout and an iPod-like scroll wheel.
Microsoft has dipped its toe into these waters already with a device code-named Origami, which is being marketed by several vendors as the UMPC or Universal Mobile PC -- a larger version of a PDA, with a horizontal screen and enough power to run a mobile version of Windows. The device hasn't been getting rave reviews, however, in part because it is big and heavy and kind of clunky. Hopefully if Apple decides to come up with one, it will involve a little of the Apple flair, and a little less of the "looks like a brick, weighs as much as a brick" school of product design.
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This is your Google Travel agent:
For Google, being a search-engine company doesn't just mean helping people find websites. The little company Larry Page and Sergey Brin created in their spare time -- now a $130-billion (U.S.) colossus -- wants to help people find just about any kind of information, anywhere. Looking for books? Google Library is scanning them for you (amid a little controversy over copyright, mind you). Looking for real estate? Google wants to help you there too, using its Google Base indexing service. Google Music is also reportedly in the works -- and now comes word that the Googleplex might be getting into the travel business. Russell Shaw of ZDNet noticed a classified ad Google placed looking for an experienced travel executive.
Surprising? Not really, according to one former travel industry insider. He says the ad isn't really all that special -- Google advertises for such advertising types all the time -- but he also thinks it's only a matter of time before Google gets into the travel game. It is, he says, a classic example of a business in which timely information is the key to getting a good deal -- and one in which the travel agents and airlines used to control the information flow. Expedia and Travelocity helped "disintermediate" the industry, and in a sense the entry of Google would just extend that process even further. "A lot of the value that a reseller adds is shopping around for the best deal, which is to a large extent search -- and Google can search the pants off just about anybody," said this former travel exec.
Distribution through resellers is also a big expense for suppliers (i.e., airlines) and so they would love to cut out the middleman wherever possible -- the middleman being Expedia, etc. But Google has likely avoided the industry until now because it makes so much money from ads placed by Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. Judging by the search giant's recent moves with Google Finance and Google's real estate features, it is only a matter of time before travel joins the list.
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Hands off the Internet, boys:
Call it an occupational hazard: being a regulator, the CRTC (the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission", in case you've forgotten) tends to like to... well, regulate things. Satellite TV and satellite radio are good examples. Why do you have to buy a Canadian XM satellite radio box when the U.S. one receives all the U.S. and Canadian channels? Because of the CRTC. As the office in charge of making sure you listen to enough Bryan Adams and watch enough episodes of Corner Gas, that's kind of its job.
With that in mind, it was refreshing to see the CRTC deciding not to regulate something, particularly something TV related like television on cellphones. Charles Dalfen, the chairman of the broadcast regulator, said in an interview that "It's too early stage to want to clamp a regulatory regime on it." He went on to suggest that since much of the content that Telus, Rogers and Bell Mobility are streaming to their phones is short clips, "At this stage, it's not even clear what a mobile program is."
Has someone been sneaking in to the CRTC offices and giving them reality lessons? First they decided not to try and regulate the Internet (another smart move) and now we can all watch clips of Paris Hilton's new video or whatever on our phones, safe in the knowledge that we won't have to watch a certain number of Avril Lavigne video clips at some point to compensate. Life is good.
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The new digital theatre:
If online delivery of video - including streaming and downloadable TV content - is the current version of the great Internet gold rush (which many seem to feel it is), then Disney/ABC has just jumped into the lead by staking a major claim. The news about its free, ad-supported streaming TV show plans, which was broken by the Wall Street Journal, is a substantial move forward from a major network -- exploding the TV, as media consultant Jeff Jarvis calls it -- and has instantly become the standard by which all the other networks will be measured.
According to the WSJ report, ABC plans to unveil a revamped website on April 30 that will include a "theater" where people with broadband connections can watch free episodes of "Desperate Housewives," "Lost" and other hit shows. Episodes will be available the day after they are on television and will be archived so people can watch past episodes. A Disney Channel version is expected to launch in June, and an ABC Family version is also in the works. The Soapnet cable channel -- devoted to soap operas -- will also start offering programs free on its website on April 17.
Notice that it's not downloadable episodes, but streaming content that you have to watch in the online "theatre" on Disney/ABC's website (later in the article, someone from the network says that they are contemplating offering downloads at some point, for $1.99 without ads, or 99 cents with ads). The main reason ABC wants to keep you on the site is because the episodes have been specially formatted with three minute-long ads each, all from a single advertiser such as Ford or Proctor & Gamble. And while you can fast-forward the content, you can't fast-forward through the ads.
That's a smart move, and obviously crucial to the success this effort (which at the moment is a two-month trial) ultimately has with advertisers. But lots of questions remain, not the least of which is how many people will watch these streaming shows. And how will ABC's local affiliates react? They make a lot of money by being the exclusive providers of those hit shows in their regional markets. Retailers such as Wal-Mart make a fair bit of coin selling DVD versions of those episodes -- how are they going to react to what could be an incursion into that part of their business model?
While many have been applauding the move by Disney/ABC -- venture capitalist Fred "Microchunk your media" Wilson says it is "big, big, big" -- not everyone thinks the network has gotten it right. Media consultant Umair "Edge Strategies" Haque says he thinks that Disney/ABC has done it exactly wrong, by trying to tie viewers to content on its website when the real boom in online video is "viral" content like that found at Google Video and YouTube.
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Is that drone following us?
The U.S. Army regularly uses robot (or unmanned) planes to patrol sensitive areas in military zones like Afghanistan, but you don't see them a lot in civilian centres -- like, say, downtown Los Angeles. That could change now that the L.A. Sheriff's Department is looking at using small remote-controlled drones to track what it calls "persons of interest" after crimes have occurred (or are about to occur?).
Xeni Jardin, who does reporting for Wired magazine and National Public Radio and blogs at boingboing.net, got a look at some of the technology the Sheriff's Department is working with, which involves a flying device with about a six-foot wingspan called a SkySeer (made by Chang Industries), which can be fitted with video cameras that send a stream of video wirelessly to a remote location such as a control truck. The unit also has a GPS transmitter.
According to the report, the drones cost about $30,000 (U.S.) per unit, and therefore are much cheaper than helicopters, which can cost about 10 times that amount (not including operating costs for things such as fuel). And the SkySeer is much easier to get close to a hazardous area than a helicopter with people on board. And once they can figure out how to drop smoke bombs or tear gas (not to mention tiny Gatling guns on the wings), evil-doers had better watch out.
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Pretend you didn't find this page:
A blogger named Marah Marie has been playing a fun game with the powers that be over at America Online for awhile now -- a game called "Hide the 'cancel my account' page." Here's how it works, courtesy of Marah's webpage at Livejournal: After deciding to quit her AOL account, Marah decides to cancel it, but can't find the 'Cancel my account' page on the AOL website, or any way to determine what phone number to call or what to do. So she writes a post about it, and links to the page (once she finds it). And poof! The page disappears.
So Marah does some digging and finds the new page, and changes the link to that new 'Cancel my account' page. Before you know it, poof! The page disappears again. At one point, according to Marah -- who has filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau -- the page disappeared within hours of her posting a new link to it, implying that there is a small team of people at AOL devoting their time to finding such links and defeating them. The service (part of Time Warner) also removed the word "cancel" from the list of keywords that AOL users can type in to get help with something.
Gee, do you think AOL wants to make it hard for you to cancel your account? Other reports describe having to answer a variety of questions -- once you find the "secret" pho