The Boss – For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents – NYTimes.com

I GREW up on a farm in Nebraska, where we grew mostly corn and soybeans. During the summers I was responsible for making sure the crops were irrigated.
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After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working. I moved to Florida, where I did some freelance copywriting. After that I moved to Texas and stayed with my older sister while I figured out what to do next. In 1994, I returned to Nebraska and started my first company with my dad.

We didn’t know anything about the Internet, but I thought it was going to be a big deal. We produced CD-ROMs and a video on how to use the Internet, and we did some Web hosting. I recruited some friends and we tossed around some ideas, but none of us knew how to write software and we didn’t have much money. We watched what entrepreneurs in California were doing and tried to play along.

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn’t want to work on other people’s projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn’t worked at a real company. I didn’t know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I’d start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn’t keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn’t paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

In 1997, I moved to California and worked at what is now O’Reilly Media. By 1998, I had acquired enough technical skills to do freelance Web development. In 1999, I started Pyra Labs with a friend, Meg Hourihan, to develop project management programs. Then we started a side project called Blogger, a Web publishing tool. In 2003, we sold that company to Google. I worked for Google for two years.

Several years ago I started Odeo, a podcasting company, with Noah Glass, another friend. I ran that company for 18 months. We started Twitter as a side project within Odeo during that time.

I didn’t like the direction Odeo was going. For one thing, Apple made a lot of what we worked on obsolete when it introduced podcasts into iTunes. I bought Odeo back from the investors and moved the assets to another company of mine, Obvious, a Web product development lab now on hiatus. In 2007, I sold Odeo and spun off Twitter into a separate company.

I appointed Jack Dorsey, who was engineer at Odeo, as C.E.O. of Twitter. In October 2008 it became apparent that Twitter required a day-to-day approach from a single leader. I took over as C.E.O., and Jack became chairman and assumed a more strategic position. He had worked in the courier and dispatch field, which is where he got the idea for Twitter — a social network for sending short messages to friends over cellphones and the Internet.

When people ask me when Twitter will make money, I tell them, “In due time.” They forget that we’re only 30 employees who have just gotten started. Right now, anything we would do to make money would take our time away from acquiring more users. We have patient investors.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I’ve always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism. I was broke for more than 10 years. I remember staying up all night one night at my first company and looking in couch cushions the next morning for some change to buy coffee. I’ve been able to pay my father back, which is nice, and my mother doesn’t worry about me as much since I got married a year and a half ago.

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We’re building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge — that’s why she’s in charge.

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The Boss – For Twitter C.E.O., Well-Orchestrated Accidents

LONG BEACH, California (AFP) — US university researchers have created a portable “sixth sense” device powered by commercial products that can seamlessly channel Internet information into daily routines.

A woman looks at a multi-touch screen in Los Angeles, California

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The device created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists can turn any surface into a touch-screen for computing, controlled by simple hand gestures.

The gadget can even take photographs if a user frames a scene with his or her hands, or project a watch face with the proper time on a wrist if the user makes a circle there with a finger.

The MIT wizards cobbled a Web camera, a battery-powered projector and a mobile telephone into a gizmo that can be worn like jewelry. Signals from the camera and projector are relayed to smart phones with Internet connections.

“Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’ it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you,” said MIT researcher Patty Maes.

Maes used a Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference stage in Southern California on Wednesday to unveil the futuristic gadget made from store-bought components costing about 300 dollars (US).

The device can recognize items on store shelves, retrieving and projecting information about products or even providing quick signals to let users know which choices suit their tastes.

The gadget can look at an airplane ticket and let the user know whether the flight is on time, or recognize books in a book store and then project reviews or author information from the Internet onto blank pages.

The gizmo can recognize articles in newspapers, retrieve the latest related stories or video from the Internet and play them on pages.

“You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data,” Maes said.

“It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant.”

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MIT researchers make ?sixth sense? gadget

American Idol, one of the only television franchises that’s truly interactive with its audience, is getting a brand extension through of a deal with the teen social network service Habbo. The match makes a lot of sense if you look at the demographics of the two products: teens love American Idol, and Habbo is built for them. When I talked with FreemantleMedia Entreprises (which owns the American Idol franchise) SVP David Luner, it became clear that the demographic overlap was the driving factor in this deal.

“We were looking for a virtual world,” for American Idol, Luner told me. None of the full-motion, fluid worlds, like Second Life, were right for the franchise. Luner cited safety as the primary reason. Habbo has controls designed to make it a safe environment for teens. It’s also a “two-and-a-half-D” world, meaning the graphics and blocky, and the perspective never moves off the isometric. It certainly works as a framework for a social site, but it’s hard to ape dance moves in the system.

American Idol in Habbo also lacks snarky judges and singing, two of the franchise’s biggest features. It does, however, let users engage in some “mini contests,” as well as chat about the show. Users will also be able to buy virtual branded items that have appeared in the show, and they’ll be exposed to crossover advertising from the series.

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American Idol branding lands in Habbo

Cisco Intensifies Wooing of Entertainment Firms

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Cisco Intensifies Wooing of Entertainment Firms

Apple working on 3D OS X UI

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Apple working 3D OS X UI

Josh Phillips(PM), Niklas Gustafsson(Architect), and Artur Laksberg(Developer) of the Parallel Computing Platform Team spend some time with me to discuss a managed (.NET-based) DSL (Domain Specific Language) for concurrent programming, Maestro. Maestro incorporates well-entrenched language patterns (imperative, OO, C style syntax, etc) and language constructs (channels, agents, domains) in a compelling way to make concurrent composition more accessible and familiar to the legions of sequential code composers.

Here we dig into the architecture and design of the Maestro language and compiler as well as discuss the philosophy behind this incubation project (at this point in time there are no plans to release Maestro as a product – it’s a research project, an incubation…). Why create another language to help solve the Concurrency Problem? What’s the advantage over implementing a library (this is .NET after all -> CLR + BCL = most of the power of the platform)? There’s obviously good reasons for implementig Maestro as a language, but you’ll need to watch and listen to find out.

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Maestro: A Managed Domain Specific Language For Concurrent Programming

Some years ago when I worked at the libertarian Cato Institute, we used to label any new hire who had not yet read “Atlas Shrugged” a “virgin.” Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok was practically a job requirement. If only “Atlas” were required reading for every member of Congress and political appointee in the Obama administration. I’m confident that we’d get out of the current financial mess a lot faster.

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The art for a 1999 postage stamp.

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.

Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism, was already a celebrity. The left, naturally, hated her. But as recently as 1991, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club found that readers rated “Atlas” as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008. We already have been served up the $700 billion “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act” and the “Auto Industry Financing and Restructuring Act.” Now that Barack Obama is in town, he will soon sign into law with great urgency the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.” This latest Hail Mary pass will increase the federal budget (which has already expanded by $1.5 trillion in eight years under George Bush) by an additional $1 trillion — in roughly his first 100 days in office.

The current economic strategy is right out of “Atlas Shrugged”: The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That’s the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies — while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to “calm the markets,” another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as “Atlas” grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate “windfalls.”

When Rand was writing in the 1950s, one of the pillars of American industrial might was the railroads. In her novel the railroad owner, Dagny Taggart, an enterprising industrialist, has a FedEx-like vision for expansion and first-rate service by rail. But she is continuously badgered, cajoled, taxed, ruled and regulated — always in the public interest — into bankruptcy. Sound far-fetched? On the day I sat down to write this ode to “Atlas,” a Wall Street Journal headline blared: “Rail Shippers Ask Congress to Regulate Freight Prices.”

In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal — stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in “the public good.” The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything.

The scene is eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in “the public interest.”

Ultimately, “Atlas Shrugged” is a celebration of the entrepreneur, the risk taker and the cultivator of wealth through human intellect. Critics dismissed the novel as simple-minded, and even some of Rand’s political admirers complained that she lacked compassion. Yet one pertinent warning resounds throughout the book: When profits and wealth and creativity are denigrated in society, they start to disappear — leaving everyone the poorer.

One memorable moment in “Atlas” occurs near the very end, when the economy has been rendered comatose by all the great economic minds in Washington. Finally, and out of desperation, the politicians come to the heroic businessman John Galt (who has resisted their assault on capitalism) and beg him to help them get the economy back on track. The discussion sounds much like what would happen today:

Galt: “You want me to be Economic Dictator?”

Mr. Thompson: “Yes!”

“And you’ll obey any order I give?”

“Implicitly!”

“Then start by abolishing all income taxes.”

“Oh no!” screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. “We couldn’t do that . . . How would we pay government employees?”

“Fire your government employees.”

“Oh, no!”

Abolishing the income tax. Now that really would be a genuine economic stimulus. But Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Washington want to do the opposite: to raise the income tax “for purposes of fairness” as Barack Obama puts it.

David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand’s ideas, explains that “the older the book gets, the more timely its message.” He tells me that there are plans to make “Atlas Shrugged” into a major motion picture — it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. “We don’t need to make a movie out of the book,” Mr. Kelley jokes. “We are living it right now.”

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

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?Atlas Shrugged?: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

We are starting 2009 off in a particularly inauspicious economic climate, though as we’ll see, important opportunities also exist. 2008 was a very tough year for many businesses and industries and it’s almost as hard to see how things could get worse as it is to understand how things can get better. To survive and thrive, organizations will be looking to make the most of what they already have while gearing up to weather an unknown landscape of challenges this year. These concerns frame up the majority of my Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions for this year, though not all.

I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes.Before we review what’s likely to happen this year, let’s take a quick look at 2008’s predictions:

I led off my list last year with the pronouncement that SOA was becoming lighter weight and more Web-oriented, which was largely borne out. Last summer’s numerous online debates about things like Web-Oriented Architecture and the future of SOA eventually culminated in some bold conclusions by industry leaders such as Anne Thomas Manes who went as far as to declare SOA dead as of a few days ago, being eclipsed by “mashups, BPM, SaaS, Cloud Computing, and all other architectural approaches that depend on ’services’“. It’s clear that SOA isn’t really dead however, but evolving markedly in response to years of experience as well major business and technological changes in the industry.

My predictions for little progress on enterprise search and for growing security concerns around Enterprise Web 2.0 also seemed to do well with many IT leaders expressing frustration in both fronts in my discussions with them throughout the year. The rise of social networking in the enterprise, the adoption of Enterprise 2.0, and the use of mobile applications in business also scored well with numerous surveys and research showing impressive uptake.

Other predictions didn’t fare as well or their outcome is unclear or hard to determine. These include significant early adoption of tools to take the unstructured information in blogs and wikis and mine them, the rise of Microsoft Silverlight in the enterprise (though Adobe AIR seemed to do fairly well), significant early adoption of collective intelligence applications/decision support, and a push by IT for governance budget for Enterprise Web 2.0 systems and applications. I also missed out on predicting the advent of cloud computing, one of the year’s biggest news stories.

Finally, two of last year’s predictions in particular are going to be much bigger in 2009 than in 2008. These are the shake out of Enterprise Web 2.0 vendors and the uptake of enterprise mashups, more on those below.

As for 2009, I predict a rebuilding year for most organizations, with a few that will use innovative new ideas to break out with major successes. With the large network effects that have been built online over the last few years by the major internet players, we will have fewer fast growth businesses in the major categories, but there is still plenty of room for major new products in industry sectors and classes of data that haven’t seen wide penetration online yet. This will also include, as we’ll see, areas that have only partially thrived online traditionally, like real estate and investment banking, that now must be completely transformed and remade, as the downfall of these industries leaves a large vacuum that must be filled by something.

8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions. This seems like an obvious prediction but how it plays out will be very interesting. This could end up actually helping the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others. But in reality, once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, SaaS enterprise apps, and so on, they may find the one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers more than they can resist. Make no mistake, however, IT shops and businesses alike will be looking to cut costs and I expect a lot of IT and business downsizing to happen in a surge of “Economics 2.0?.

2. Online community and 2.0 technologies become a priority for most organizations. The early data from our IT and Business Outlook Survey for 2009 shows these two areas as a top priority this year for respondents. CRM and customer service are becoming deeply connected with online communities of users as many organizations wake up to meaningful customer interaction online. For budgetary reasons as well as competitive advantage, all things 2.0 are finally becoming mainstream as the the applications themselves become truly enterprise class. The seemingly late arrival of 2.0 to business is also partially due to the lag time that most businesses have when adopting new technologies and approaches.

3. Cloud computing will remain one of the biggest new Internet developments. The cloud computing story, as compelling as it is today for many situations, will only get larger in 2009. While the some of the bloom may be lost off the rose as some of the complexities and risks surface in early pilot projects, the cloud computing industry as a whole will grow in leaps and bounds as organizations seek to cut costs, manage growth/shrinkage, and shorten time to market. Expect major new products from the big existing players such as Amazon and Force.com as well as new entries from big firms and startups alike.

4. Internal use of 2.0 will continue growth in large enterprises while the struggle continues with market-facing 2.0 products. We saw widespread internal penetration of social networking and Enterprise 2.0 in organizations globally in 2008, but the weak story continues to be the successful creation of online 2.0 products for the broader marketplace. Virtually all of the major online success stories have come from Internet startups; very few if any traditional organizations have been able to create fast growth, widely used Web 2.0 products like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That’s not to say that there aren’t many compelling attempts, but none of them have reached the same engagement level with the marketplace. This will almost certainly continue in 2009 as organizations continue to find ways to grapple with the best methods for leveraging the world’s largest single marketplace in their businesses.

5. The economic climate will at long last drive major advances towards aligning IT with business. With little room for error this year, many organizations will finally close ranks over the IT/business divide to reorganize, respond to new business conditions, create new revenue streams, and solve long-standing business challenges. IT leaders that don’t do this, can’t bring new solutions to the table, or resist may find themselves out on the street as organizations have more and more options for how they use technology to solve business problems. Using strategic partners via outsourcing will continue to be an important alternative IT avenue while using customers over the network (aka crowdsourcing and open business) will also become an important new method for a small but significant set of forward thinking organizations looking to innovate and leapfrog the competition.

6. Mobile platforms and devices will become highly strategic in 2009. The spread of Android beyond phones to computing appliances, major advances in the iPhone platform, the prevalence of the Blackberry and its new open application strategy, the growth of the netbook will drive business applications that continue to untether the workforce, enable virtual organization while connecting workers together using new collaboration and communication technologies, many of which will be using 2.0 approaches. If the desktop didn’t completely die in 2008, it will become almost completely outmoded in 2009 as the average smartphone becomes capable of helping users with a larger percentage of their daily computing and communication tasks. The biggest holdup will not be technology, it will be in the ability of businesses and their workers to adopt mobile technologies and understand how to leverage them in their business. Fortunately, mobile-enabled business applications are starting to arrive in waves to help with this, see Oracle’s and Salesforce’s iPhone apps for a sense of this. However, 2009 will be the year that mobile devices of all varieties become a central plank in IT strategy.

7. SOA goes on a diet, picks up some new tricks, and survives. I’ve long been bullish on the ideas of SOA, but very concerned that the focus is on complicated technology, hard to master skills, and too much the purview of technologists and not business people. To be fair, some of the fault squarely lies with workers that don’t take the time to master the basics of modern technology’s application to business in today’s global, highly competitive environment. They don’t have the knowledge to design a modern, working business. The other half belongs to the IT departments that aren’t deeply entrenched in their lines of business and focus too much on technology or the status quo. Given current events in technology and business, SOA will not survive in its present form and 2009 will be a deeply transformative year for it. Expect mashup technologies to be front and center with this transformation as well as the closely related Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) as Web 2.0/SOA convergence continues unabated.

8. The massive changes in the business landscape create new 2.0 business opportunities. While the financial sector has been hit hard, many aspects of it were already online, if in a very 1.0 way. Trading applications were certainly one of the first major online success stories and so were online mortgage applications. Real estate, however, never had a large presence online for a number of reasons related to control of the industry by brokers and other organizations. It is likely that these industries and others will finally be put online in a fully 2.0 fashion by a new generation of players. These companies that will use the latest new technologies and business models to move into the massive gaps left over by the implosion of the finance and mortgage industries. What could this actually mean? It likely means things like user-generated mutual funds, online investment vehicles with 100% transparency, as well as real estate markets going fully online with self-service listings. The end of a business cycle such as we’ve seen leaves the landscape open for innovative new players with good ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have a runway to succeed. I believe we can expect a number of them online in 2009 since the Web remains the quickest and easiest way to create and grow a new business.

What else in 2009?

I left a lot of technology out of this year’s prediction list since there were few major new technologies that reach the level importance of what we’re seeing in the broader business outlook at the moment. Cloud computing, mashups, and SOA are the exceptions of course, but they are also strategic business enablers as well as technologies. No, the big focus this year is going to be partnering with the marketplace over the network (customer communities, cloud sourcing, and crowdsourcing), looking for major new opportunities for low cost growth, and just doing more with less.

What do you see coming in 2009? Please leave your commentsbelow.

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8 Predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2009

Skype Lite Coming to Android & Java-Enabled Phones

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Skype Lite Coming to Android & Java-Enabled Phones

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

If you’re like most interactive marketers, you probably don’t think much about search optimizing your online video content. Less than 20% of marketers tell us they insert keywords into the filenames of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.

But if you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start. “Blended search,” the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.

Recently, we conducted a little experiment to learn more about how search engines respond to common queries. We created a list of 40 of the most-searched keywords — pulled from the search engines’ own lists of popular and fast-growing search terms, like Google Trends — and ran those searches on Google in the US and the UK, as well as on MSN UK and Yahoo UK.

MSN and Yahoo (both of which we studied only in the UK) still present only standard results for most of their searches. But Google blended non-standard search results into a large majority of the keywords we studied: nearly three-quarters of the searches we ran on Google in the UK, and well over half the searches we ran on Google in the US, returned blended results. In both the US and the UK, Google was more likely to blend videos into its results than any other type of media. (Images, in case you’re wondering, are only rarely blended into any of the engines’ search results.)

Not only are video results increasingly common in Google’s search results, but your videos stand a much better chance than your text pages of being shown on the first results page. On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results — giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results — giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. Now that’s a lot of math, but here’s what it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. Those are some attractive odds.

Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.

So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I’ve talked to offer a number of different tips:

• Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
• Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).

I’m also curious to hear about your experiences. Do you optimize your video content? If so, which tactics do you use — and which have worked best for you?

SOURCE

The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google

Online Applications for Social Security

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Online Applications for Social Security

Optimizing Adobe Flash Technology on Intel® Media Processor CE 3100 Will Enable Rich and Seamless Web Content on TV More >>

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Intel and Adobe to Extend Flash Platform to TVs

Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold

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Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold

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New Vuzix VR Glasses To Be Unveiled at CES

Lots of neat and ground-breaking laptops will be on display this coming week at CES, and Voodoo may just lead the pack.

The world has never seen the HP branded Voodoo Firefly prototype, dubbed the  “HP Firefly with Voodoo DNA,” a laptop that features a uniquely positioned multi-touch touchpad, dual displays, and enough gaming muscle to tear through Far Cry 2 without a flinch. But here at LAPTOP we had a chance to play around with the behemoth of a notebook before it goes before the public eye in Las Vegas.

It’s one of the most innovative gaming notebooks we’ve ever fragged on. Voodoo provided us with an exclusive look at what is only a concept notebook. However, that doesn’t mean some of this machine’s innovations won’t wind up in other HP or Voodoo PCs.

Design
Calling this titan a Firefly is like naming a rabid pitbull “Cupcake.” After all, HP tells us it weighs 13 pounds including a massive pound power brick, and looks a lot like the laptop version of HP’s Blackbird desktop system with Voodoo DNA. With a 17-inch screen, it isn’t as large as the 20.1-inch HP HDX, but its not a system you would want to carry on your back (nor do we think you could even find a bag for it!)

The Firefly’s keyboard features customizable backlighting, much like the keyboards on the Area-51 m15x and m17x from Alienware. It also has HP’s QuickPlay controls for playing, skipping, and pausing music or video. There are toggle switches for wireless and audio mute, as well as controls for volume, treble, and bass levels. The entire notebook has the light etching and imprint design found on HP’s dv series notebooks.

Multi-touch Invasion
Pulling some features from the Voodoo Envy, the Firefly has a multi-touch trackpad. The Firefly’s pad is uniquely positioned to the right of the keyboard (sorry lefties) where gamers would normally keep their mouse. With three fingers on the pad, your left finger can be used as a left click, and your right finger as a right one. Hypothetically, this should mean that you could play a first-person-shooter quite well without a mouse. In Far Cry 2, however, we noticed that it was actually pretty hard to accurately aim. Moving around was easy, though, and much more efficient than trying to do so with a regular trackpad.

Double Vision
Underneath the large 17.1-inch 1920 x 1200 display is a second 4.3-inch LCD with 800 x 480 resolution, similar to the Fujitsu N7010’s which is found above the keyboard. This dwarf display acts as a second monitor at all times, so you can easily drag any window or application right onto it. We loved having the ability to check our Gmail during a frag match, or watch YouTube videos while working on the bigger display. The secondary screen’s resolution was a bit too high for us, though. Text looked too small and we found that we were squinting on Web sites while trying to type in new addresses.

Loaded with Gaming Muscle
Under the hood of the 17.1-inch Firefly we found a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a pair of ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3870 GPUs running in CrossFire mode, and a 7,200 rpm 250GB hard drive. The Firefly spec sheet said the machine is capable of overclocking, but we didn’t touch the BIOS.

We weren’t permitted to run any benchmarks on the Firefly, since it remains a concept machine, but we did run Far Cry 2. We cranked the graphics up to Very High with Direct X 10 enabled and then went around setting the tall grass on fire with a flamethrower. Even with all of the effects on full blast around us—trees blowing in the wind, fires raging, enemies shooting—the game ran silky smooth. The machine consumes 170W of power; that’s not bad for a desktop, but quite the power sucker for a notebook.

We did notice that the Firefly slowed down a good deal when we tried to watch a YouTube video on the small screen while we were running Far Cry 2, but gameplay was fine when we substituted another video site, Ustream.tv, for YouTube.

X-Fi in the House
The Firefly doesn’t have a set of measly speakers or a budget soundcard. It packs in Creative’s X-Fi audio technology, which features Dolby sound and support for 5.1 surround sound speaker sets. Music sounded excellent out of the two tweeters underneath the display, and blasting grenades were loud and booming.

See in the Dark
The Firefly is the first notebook we’ve ever heard of with a night vision webcam. Theoretically it should let you make video chats in complete darkness with your gaming pals, since it switches to infrared mode in low or no-light conditions. However, the software wasn’t loaded on our machine. We’d love to see HP include this kind of feature in al types of notebooks so we can test it in the real world.

Final Thoughts
Though the Firefly will not come to market, we’re glad Voodoo is attempting to push the gaming notebook envelope. Features like a backlit keyboard and the ability to overclock the system have been done before, but this is one of the first notebook with a secondary display directly beneath the primary LCD, which could be used for all sorts of applications.  Moreover, the multi-touch trackpad was a stellar idea, and its placement is ideal for gamers, assuming HP and Voodoo can figure out how to make it work better for first-person shooters. Sure, the Firefly is not the sleekest concept we’ve seen, but we’ll be excited to see how Voodoo and HP leverage and tweak its innovations going forward.

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