Is this the answer to the question we posed back in mid-June? Maybe. While we’re still unsure if Hewlett-Packard has a webOS-based tablet in its pipeline, those on-again / off-again Windows 7 rumors may finally be nearing an end. On the homepage of this year’s Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference — which kicks off in earnest today in Washington, D.C. — there’s a pane of Windows 7 slates that are on deck for this year. Er, a pane with vendors promising Win7 slates this year. Sure enough, HP’s logo is front and center, right alongside the likes of Sony, Dell, ASUS, Panasonic, Onkyo, Toshiba, MSI, Samsung, Lenovo and Fujitsu. We’ll be keeping an ear to the ground for more, but for now, feel free to let your imaginations run wild. It’s Monday, after all.

Update: During the event’s opening keynote, which was headed by none other than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the bigwig confirmed some of what’s pictured above: Windows 7 slates will be arriving this year. Interestingly, he never mentioned HP by name (despite teasing us gently at CES with an apparent mystery device), but he did note that devices would be available at various price points and in a variety of form factors — “with keyboards, touch only, dockable, able to handle digital ink, etc.” We already knew as much from being overwhelmed by prototypes at Computex, but it’s good to get the word straight from Ballmer himself. Now, to see if anyone’s actually interested in buying a desktop OS on a mobile form factor…

Update 2: Seems Ballmer’s drinking his own Kool-Aid in a serious way, and not just on the tablet front. He noted that Microsoft will be giving consumers “a set of Windows-based devices that people will be proud to carry at home and will fit the kinds of scenarios enterprise IT’s trying to make happen with the phone form factor,” and that Microsoft would be “working vigorously” to “drive enterprise IT and consumers.” Furthermore, Steve affirmed that the tablet sector is “terribly important” for his company, and that it’s “hardcore about this.” He didn’t shy away from calling the range of Windows 7-based tablets coming out “over the next several months” ones that would be “quite impressive,” but honestly — what else would you expect him to say?

from here

internet video collaboration, instant web meetings, atul abraham

Powered by ScribeFire.

Here is the original:

Apture Packs a Lot of Media Into a Little Pop-up – ReadWriteWeb

The most obvious feature of Apture is that it is a pop-up technology. Apture is a Javascript plug-in for publishers that adds contextual information to links – via pop-ups which display when users hover over or click on them. However, because of its association with pop-ups, Apture thinks it’s gotten a bad rap. Many people dislike other pop-up products such as CoolPreviews, Snap and a new Microsoft product we covered recently called Gaze. Why? Because pop-ups can disrupt a user’s browsing experience and are sometimes even regarded as a nuisance. We spoke to Apture co-founder and CEO Tristan Harris, to find out what makes Apture different.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’ve been skeptical of how pop-up technology has been used over the years. But we’re also optimistic about the potential for pop-ups to present rich contextual information to readers, as long as it’s done in an unobtrusive way.

Apture is a similar service to Panels.net, which pops up useful contextual data about companies and people. Probably what differentiates Apture is that it makes great use of rich media, such as video and audio. The product was created by 4 Stanford computer science graduates and it is very much targeted at media publishers, from small bloggers to big media companies. One of the customers using Apture is WashingtonPost.com, which we will take a look at in this post.
Examples: Washington Post & Brand South Africa Blog

Apture enables publishers to offer extra third-party content on their website, without the user having to leave the host site. For example in the screenshot below Washington Post has a link to Senator Amy Klobuchar – when the reader hovers over it, up pops up a new window with not only biographical information about Klobuchar, but details on what she’s voted on and financial disclosures. Many of the links in the pop-up lead to more information presented inside that same window (the only links which open a new browser window are the blue official website links). It’s rather impressive how much extra information is offered in just one little pop-up.

What stood out most to us about Apture though is its ability to present – and manipulate – multimedia. Not only can publishers add links to videos inside an Apture pop-up, but they can select which point in the video to jump to. For example if there’s a quote from a Barack Obama video that is relevant to readers, and it starts 5 minutes and 10 seconds into the video, you can link to and start the video at that 5:10 mark. Below is an example from a government blog in South Africa. You can also see that it opens a separate Apture window for the video – you can have multiple Apture windows on the same page.

Human Editing Trumps Algorithms

Another interesting aspect about Apture is that it relies on publishers to make the ultimate decisions about which media items to add to a webpage. In other words, algorithms don’t do all of the work – although they do select the sources for the editors to select from. This is a point of difference from products such as Snap and Adaptive Blue’s SmartLinks, which are both fully automated. How Apture works from the publisher’s perspective is that editors (at e.g. Washingtonpost.com) select related content, as suggested by Apture’s algorithms. The editing work is currently done post-publishing, because Apture hasn’t yet found a way to easily integrate into multiple CMSs – although it is working on solving that issue. Right now though, Apture works as a javascript plug-in on the host site, and editors can add pop-ups via their Apture account.

According to Apture CEO media Tristan Harris, Apture has “lowered the cost of inserting a [multimedia] link”. He said that the majority of journalists are not technical, in terms of HTML and related web technologies, but that Apture is simple ‘point and click’ and so it makes it very easy for them to add multimedia. We asked Harris if there is much Semantic technology happening in the back-end. He replied that they do some “semantic guiding” – e.g. when on a book page, Apture pushes up book content in the results presented to editors. But overall, Harris likes to think of Apture as a “hyper-relevant web” technology, rather than semantic web.
Conclusion: Useful and Visually Appealing

We came away impressed by Apture, because of the amount of multimedia that can be packed into such a little pop-up. Also the end-user experience is sophisticated – readers on washingtonpost.com and other Apture sites can see rich, relevant, contextual content from the likes of Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr without leaving the host site. Apture is positioning itself as “more than a pop-up site”. Actually we still think it’s a pop-up technology, but we have to say that it’s a sophisticated and useful application of it!

Apture is free for bloggers and works via one line of javascript at the bottom of your site. Although Apture’s business model was initially advertising, now the company has turned its attention to premium offerings for big media companies. It is looking for monthly subscription fees from large media companies, in exchange for premium services.

SOURCE

Powered by ScribeFire.

More:
Apture Packs a Lot of Media Into a Little Pop-up

There’s no script for running a company in this historic downturn. So what the heck do you do? Here are ten ways to weather the storm.

(Fortune Magazine) — Exciting as it is to be living through historic economic drama, you can’t just stand by and watch. You have to act – yet you have no script.

So much of today’s turmoil is unprecedented that we can’t find much guidance by looking to the past. For managers across the global economy, as well as for Team Obama on its way to Washington, today’s great question is, What do we do now?

Managing in any recession is difficult; managing through this one is especially hard because it’s different from previous ones in multiple ways. Most immediately significant, employment is plunging more steeply than in a long time – by more than two million jobs last year, more than during the previous two recessions, and this one is far from over.

At the same time, U.S. consumer spending is falling sharply. In the third quarter it sank at a 3.1% annual rate, the steepest decline since 1980 – meaning that managers who have made it through the past four recessions have never confronted anything like it. Best Buy (BBY, Fortune 500) president Brian Dunn said recently, “In 42 years of retailing, we’ve never seen such difficult times for the consumer.”

The drop is worrisome because consumer spending is more than 70% of America’s economy, and while it may rise quickly or slowly, it almost always rises. During the whole of the last recession (2001), consumer spending never declined at all; its growth only slowed.

Compounding the problem, consumers are more deeply in debt than ever, an immediate concern for companies that lend to consumers; American Express (AXP, Fortune 500) CEO Ken Chenault calls this “one of the most challenging economic environments we’ve seen in many decades.”

Longer term, consumers’ balance sheets are so ugly that many executives believe this recession may linger as people slowly rebuild their finances. Dunkin’ Brands chairman Jon Luther says, “This downturn will not have a typical V-shape, where it bounces right back. It could be a couple of years before consumer spending goes up again.”

Consumers aren’t the only ones deleveraging. Companies are too, and on a more massive scale than ever seen before. That means business-to-business firms are also suffering. Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500) CEO John Chambers predicts that his company’s sales will decline for the first time in five years.

Deleveraging is typical in a recession, but because boom-time leverage had reached unprecedented levels, the reverse process may become particularly violent. Deere (DE, Fortune 500) CEO Bob Lane cites current deleveraging as a main difference between this recession and previous ones: “The U.S. economy has never been through anything like this, and we don’t know what the effects will be.”

Yet another important difference – the credit crunch – affects even those companies that are reducing debt, but especially those that aren’t. Virtually all firms depend on a constant flow of credit to carry them smoothly through the ups and downs of business fluctuations. While it’s entirely typical for lenders to get more cautious in a downturn, the near freezing of credit is something else again. Even companies able to pay higher interest rates may find that credit isn’t available from the usual sources at any price.

Making this recession unique above all is its sheer interconnected complexity. Consider this sequence: The U.S. housing bubble bursts, pushing U.S. consumer spending down, leading to less demand for imports from China, causing slower growth of the Chinese economy, thus decreasing demand for copper, pushing copper prices down to their lowest levels in almost three years, causing big problems for you and your warehouse full of copper. You can conduct pretty fancy scenario planning and still not be ready for that – and it’s safe to say we’ve barely begun to see the rippling effects of a recession in an information-based, truly international economy.

Yet that’s the environment in which you must manage. How? Insights and practices from global executives, consultants, and others suggest several steps you can take now.

As usual in these situations, much will depend on how quickly you move. It’s human nature to avoid confronting bad news and to imagine that today’s troubles will pass more quickly and easily than they really will. Virtually everyone Fortune spoke to recommends the opposite: Assume conditions will be worse than you actually expect.

“You identify areas where you think you can be more efficient by assuming the worst-case scenario,” says Intuit (INTU) CEO Brad Smith. “Then you end up saying, Why don’t we just do that anyhow?” Facing the coming reality before your competitors do can make a big difference in which of you stays healthy or even who survives.

It must be said that some of the most effective moves you can make for prospering through a recession are ones you established a long time ago. In times like these the strong get stronger and the weak get eaten. In the tumultuous third quarter, while Washington Mutual and IndyMac Bank were failing, Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500) – which got out of subprime mortgages in 2001 – attracted $21 billion of new consumer deposits as consumers ran to safety. When the Wickes furniture retailing chain filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, more than 100 truckloads of furniture were on their way to its stores; a Milwaukee retailer that had remained financially solid, Steinhafels, bought the contents of several at bargain prices.

Remember that for next time. For now, what’s done is done. No matter what shape your business is in, it will benefit from following these ten recommendations.

• Reset priorities to face the new reality.
• Keep investing in the core.
• Communicate like crazy, balancing realism and optimism.
• Your customers face new problems, so give them new solutions.
• Don’t rush to cut prices.
• Focus on capital – how you’re getting it and where you’re using it.
• Reevaluate people – and steal some good ones.
• Reexamine compensation – what is it offering incentives for?
• Think twice about offshoring.
• Be smart about mergers and acquisitions.

It’s hard to be upbeat in a recession, but it truly is an opportunity. Marathoners and Tour de France racers will tell you that a race’s hardest parts, the uphill stages, are where the lead changes hands. That’s where we are. When this recession ends, when the road levels off and the world seems full of promise once more, your position in the competitive pack will depend on how skillfully you manage right now.

Reporter associates Steven Gray, Christopher Tkaczyk and Yi-Wyn Yen contributed to this article.

SOURCE

See more here:
How to manage your business in a recession

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.

Getty Images

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.

SOURCE

View original post here:
?Atlas Shrugged?: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

Excerpt from:
Dreamtheater : Constant Motion

Andy Greenberg, 09.18.08, 6:04 PM ET

.headirexreader { background-color: #336699; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; padding:2px;}.borderirexreader{ border:1px solid #003366;}.bordercolorirexreader { background-color: #336699;}.rowirexreader { background-color: #ffffff;}.row1irexreader { background-color: #ffffff;}.row2irexreader{ background-color: #efefef;}.ruleirexreader { background-color: #cccccc;}.spaceirexreader { background-color: #ffffff;} iRex Reader 1000 .headplasticlogic { background-color: #336699; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; padding:2px;}.borderplasticlogic{ border:1px solid #003366;}.bordercolorplasticlogic { background-color: #336699;}.rowplasticlogic { background-color: #ffffff;}.row1plasticlogic { background-color: #ffffff;}.row2plasticlogic{ background-color: #efefef;}.ruleplasticlogic { background-color: #cccccc;}.spaceplasticlogic { background-color: #ffffff;} Plastic Logic Reader .head1203ebooks { background-color: #336699; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; padding:2px;}.border1203ebooks{ border:1px solid #003366;}.bordercolor1203ebooks { background-color: #336699;}.row1203ebooks { background-color: #ffffff;}.row11203ebooks { background-color: #ffffff;}.row21203ebooks{ background-color: #efefef;}.rule1203ebooks { background-color: #cccccc;}.space1203ebooks { background-color: #ffffff;} In Pictures: The Future Of E-Books var fdcAuthorQuery = “?famname=Greenberg&givname=Andy&url=2008/09/18/ereader-kindle-irex-tech-egang08-cx_ag_0918irex”; .headpopvideos { background-color: #336699; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; padding:2px;}.borderpopvideos{ border:1px solid #336699;}.bordercolorpopvideos { background-color: #336699;}.rowpopvideos { background-color: #ffffff;}.row1popvideos { background-color: #ffffff;}.row2popvideos{ background-color: #efefef;}.rulepopvideos { background-color: #ffffff;}.spacepopvideos { background-color: #ffffff;} Popular Videos Ironman COO Salad Days Of Gates And Zuckerberg Short-Term Skeptic, Long-Term Optimist Telework Wherever Collecting Currency In Crisis .headpopstories { background-color: #003399; color: #ffffff; font-weight: bold; padding:2px;}.borderpopstories{ border:1px solid #003399;}.bordercolorpopstories { background-color: #003399;}.rowpopstories { background-color: #ffffff;}.row1popstories { background-color: #ffffff;}.row2popstories{ background-color: #efefef;}.rulepopstories { background-color: #cccccc;}.spacepopstories { background-color: #ffffff;} Most Popular Stories Video Piracy–Without The Piracy Spore’s Piracy Problem Filtering Viruses Through The Cloud Five Ways To Cut Energy Bills Young Workers, Virtual Problems

Amazon’s Kindle was fun. Now it’s time for electronic readers to get to work.

On Monday, Netherlands-based iRex Technologies is slated to unveil the iRex Reader 1000, the first in a wave of e-reader devices that promise bigger screens and improved interfaces and functionality. And unlike Kindle or Sony’s Reader, this second generation of e-readers aims to bring innovative E-ink display technology to the more demanding, and possibly more lucrative, world of business.

The iRex Reader 1000 offers a 10.2-inch diagonal E-Inkscreen, far larger than Kindle’s 6-inch screen or even iRex’s own 8.1-inch diagonal iLiad, its last e-book model. That stretched display is designed to work with any file format, be it an e-book, a full-sized PDF, a Word document or HTML. Like earlier iRex devices, it sports a stylus and touch screen for taking notes and marking documents.
[See "The Future Of E-Books."]

The new reader shares the Kindle’s passive E-ink display technology, which uses real pigment rather than a filtered liquid crystal display to produce black and white tones that make it easily visible in bright sunlight. It also significantly reduces eyestrain even after hours of reading. The E-ink technology also uses just a fraction of the energy typically needed for comparably sized screens, extending the device’s battery life to between 60 and 80 hours.

At the mid-September gadget conference, DEMO, Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up Plastic Logic announced its own business e-reader prototype–an 8.5-by-11-inch E-ink touchscreen that weighs just ounces. The device is no thicker than a legal pad and can run for up to two weeks without a charge.

Although Plastic Logic has yet to name its new reader, which won’t go on sale until the second quarter of 2009, the company’s chief marketing officer, Joe Eschbach, touts it as a small and sturdy replacement for an entire briefcase.

The focus on business users, argues Eschbach, could mean a far larger market than the 380,000 or so Kindles that Citigroup estimates Amazon will sell this year. “The opportunity on the business side is much larger than on the leisure reading side,” Eschbach says. “The average person only reads two or three books a year. But the same person probably reads several thousand pages of Word, Excel and Powerpoint files at work.”

Business-targeted readers also come with business-sized price tags. Though Plastic Logic won’t yet reveal the price for its device, iRex says its basic reader will start at $650. (By contrast, Kindle sells for $360.) Adding a writable screen to the iRex reader will cost another $100, and equipping it with wi-fi, Bluetooth and a 3G cell connection for downloading documents will raise the price to $850.

But nonbusiness consumers, take heart: Cheaper, book-focused e-readers are also likely to be revamped soon. Sony has all but confirmed that it will announce a new version of its Reader in early October, though it won’t share any details. Amazon is rumored to be working on a next-generation Kindle, though the company says it won’t be released before the end of the year.

Even with its outsized price, the new iRex reader won’t offer two features also missing from other electronic books: color and video capability. In fact, the 16 graytone screen takes about eight-tenths of a second to refresh when loading a new page. Plastic Logic’s device has similar limitations. E-Ink enthusiasts will likely have to wait until 2009 for color E-ink and as late as 2012 for video, says Russ Wilcox, the chief executive of Cambridge, Mass.-based E-Ink, which developed the black and white pigment now used in every paper-like reader. [See "The Future Of E-Books."]

But Plastic Logic’s and iRex’s devices push e-paper development beyond simply reading letter-sized PDFs, says Wilcox. He argues that the two readers signal E-ink’s transition to larger-format digital media that include magazines and newspapers.

“First we had a wave of e-books. Now we have a wave of something closer to e-newspapers,” Wilcox says. “E-ink is the only way to create that size of display that’s thin, rugged and has a long battery life. As the capabilities and features go up and up and up, the applications will keep growing.”

SOURCE

More:
Next-Gen E-Readers Arrive

Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who’s Doing It?

Here is the original:
Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who?s Doing It?

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Skip to next paragraph

The makers of the Cuil search engine say it should provide better results and show them in a more attractive manner.

Now, along with her husband, Tom Costello, and a few other Google alumni, she is trying to upstage her former employer.

On Monday, their company, Cuil, is unveiling a search engine that they promise will be more comprehensive than Google’s and that they hope will give its users more relevant results.

“I think it will be better,” Mr. Costello said in an interview. “But there is no question that the public has to decide.”

Cuil, pronounced “cool,” is only the latest in a long string of start-up companies that have been founded and financed with the goal of competing with Google, as well as Yahoo and Microsoft. (In June, Google accounted for 61.5 percent of search queries in the United States, while Yahoo held 20.9 percent and Microsoft had 9.2 percent, according to comScore.) Some of the most prominent include Powerset, which Microsoft recently bought, and Wikia, which was founded by Jimmy Wales, one of the creators of Wikipedia. So far, none have managed to make a dent in the search market.

But some analysts say Cuil has potential, in part because of the pedigree of its founders.

“This is the most promising thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Danny Sullivan, who has followed the online search business for more than a decade and is the editor of Search Engine Land. “Whether they are going to threaten Microsoft, much less Google, that’s another story.”

Mr. Costello, a former researcher at Stanford, said that with 120 billion Web pages, Cuil’s search index is larger than any other. The company uses a form of data mining to group Web pages by content, which makes the search engine more efficient, he said. Instead of showing results as short snippets of text and images with links, it displays longer entries and uses more pictures. It also provides tools to help users further refine their queries.

Google would not comment on Cuil and would not disclose the size of its own index. But in an e-mail statement, Google said that it maintained “the largest collection of documents searchable on the Web” and welcomed competition.

Mr. Sullivan said he was unimpressed by Cuil’s claim that its index includes more Web pages, noting that that could mean users are “overwhelmed by a whole bunch of junk.” But he said that Cuil’s new approach to ranking pages and presenting results could prove to be a hit with some users.

“If it turns out that they have good relevancy, I could see that the word of mouth” would bring Cuil some popularity, he said.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

Continued here:
Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine

There are simple reasons why the new iPhone 3G is better than the last.

Apple has eliminated so many annoying little hang-ups that you might run into when using the old one. The GPS pinpoints to meters instead of blocks. The 3G connection slashes web loading times by minutes to seconds. The more rounded case feels great in the hand. And most importantly the new software polishes the OS and opens the phone up to nearly unlimited capabilities through the countless programs that are already being written by the brilliant legions of faithful developers. It’s kind of cool.

If you want to cut to the chase, the software is what we’re most excited about—so much that we ran the first half of this review earlier extolling the iPhone 2.0 virtues in detail, including the fact that it’s a free upgrade for the people who snapped up the first iPhone, perhaps before it was ready.

On the software side, the iPhone has the most advanced touchscreen OS out there today. Scrolling, dialing, panning, zooming, touching and pinching are all actions you can do to get around your photos, your maps, your movies, your music and of course, your phone calls. The iPhone 2.0 update improves on the already great communication features such as desktop-class email and web browsing by adding MobileMe and Exchange support—both of which push emails to your phone as soon as they’re received, just like on the BlackBerry. These two new additions also allow your phone to always sync contacts and calendar events with your computer or your office’s system directly over the air, without ever needing to dock, or take any action. There’s also the App Store, which gives you access to a gigantic library of third-party applications to add features such as controlling your iTunes, instant messaging, 3D gaming and To Do lists. One drawback is that Apple may not support the cool (illegal) apps like the NES emulators and video recording programs that don’t work through the SDK. Lots of unofficial third party apps may never make it to the store. One, Instinctiv, a super iPhone music shuffle app, was recently denied store sales because it is against the terms of agreement to enhance the iPod or iPhone music playback in any way. Huh?! Apps also take a long time (minutes) to install and uninstall, and backups now take awhile longer than before. Annoying, but still worth the wait.

The fact that the free software’s advantages are available on the original iPhone means that the reduced subsidized price $199 for the 8GB and $299 for the 16GB are good, but maybe not good enough to justify a trade-in. (The $10 extra a month for 3G access is a wash, frankly.) Quite a conundrum for those of you tempted.

Onto the hardware. Let’s start with the husk: Once, I sat down on a twisted key, putting a giant scar across the aluminum back of my iPhone. With that one exception aside, my iPhone’s abused-to-hell case still looks strong and shiny.

The new case is made of smudge-able plastic, and last time I checked geek material lust hierarchy, plastic was a distant ranking of 452342 places behind aluminum. The effect is that the case, feels lighter, warmer and thicker but also cheaper than before. And in your hand, picking up a slightly warm iPhone, it feels almost more organic. Between that and the the rounded shape, which fits far better in the hand, it’s like you’re cupping a warm baby bird. The old phone by comparison feels like its a better quality device, with the spiritual heft of a German machine. The new case is lighter but actually thicker; still, it feels less significant and durable. The case did survive being put in a bag full of keys and rubbed vigorously. Only some of the silver Apple logo on the back got visibly scratched. The case is also a lot easier to send radio waves through than the previous case—useful as this phone has many more radios—although reception improvement was not noticeable. [UPDATE: Actually, it is much better, in both EDGE and 3G mode] Also, if you place the new model on a table, it rocks when you tap the screen, so you can’t use it as a table top computer anymore. And the case is very easy to smudge. The black color is available in both sizes, but the white only comes in pricier 16GB, much to the chagrin of boyfriends who promised to buy their significant others one in the pale tint.

The screen is slightly warmer in color temperature (more yellow than blue), slightly brighter (even when considering decay over time) and the daylight viewing is better, but it’s the same 3.5-inch, 480×320 resolution screen. And it’s still gorgeous.

Oh, the headphone jack isn’t recessed anymore, so you can use whatever headphones or adapters you want. And the lock and volume buttons are recessed slightly more and are metal. The speakers and earpiece have a metal grill behind them. All this, to great effect.

To mention the 3G is to bring up painful memories, the time I’ve lost waiting for web pages to load on the iPhone, or standing on street corners waiting for maps to load.

Our tests in AT&T’s aggressively built-out NYC area showed the 3G connection is 4.8 times faster than the old EDGE connection. When you turn off 3G and do an EDGE-to-EDGE test between older and newer models, they both perform the same. The GPRS (850, 900, 1800, 1900) and UMTS/HSDPA (850, 1900 and 2100 MHz) cellular radios have the advantage of some design improvements, including the use of the steel ring around the screen as an antenna and the electronic transparency of the now all plastic back.

Wi-Fi reception is better. In a side-by-side test with the old iPhone, we walked away from an access point, the old iPhone’s connection died at 100 feet and the newer one lasted to about 120 feet. And there’s a new Airplane mode that turns off cellular but powers up Wi-Fi for airline internet.

At the end of a day with lots of email and browser use, or media playback, my old iPhone would be begging for a serious dock charge. How does the iPhone’s 3G connection affect that?

The downside of such speedy downloads is a reduced battery life, something the original couldn’t stand to lose much of. We’re do more testing of that soon. But here’s an interesting thing: According to the data out there, the iPhone 3G has better battery life using 3G than the old iPhone does using EDGE. Let me explain. Apple’s official browsing battery life rating on Wi-Fi is 6 hours for both models. They never rated the EDGE battery life but most testers found it to be about 25% less than Wi-Fi. That’s 4.5 hours. The iPhone 3G rating is 5 hours of browsing. Apple is claiming that it’s 5 hours for both the new iPhone 3G and the EDGE on the old one. We shall investigate such claims soon. But I wish Apple would take me up on my idea for using the 3G only for active browsing, maps and certain apps that need it, dynamically switching to EDGE for IMing, email downloading and weather checking.

UPDATE: Battery life has been noted to drain very quickly, but because I find myself using the phone a lot more often thanks to the added usefulness of apps. 3D gaming is also a killer on battery, far worse than anyone has claimed so far, thanks to the constant use of CPU, GPU and LCD backlight. Here is a roundup of nine battery tests taken from the best reviews, averaging about 5 hours for 3G talk (good) and 3-5 hours for “mixed use”. Regardless of life, here are some tips on increasing iPhone 3G endurance and some gadgets that can help extend battery life.

Phone-wise, I decided to lower my minute plan. I completely have stopped using my old iPhone for voice in San Francisco’s spotty network, and even when I’m connected, everyone sounds like they have marbles in their mouth. Network problems aside, the good news is that basic voice quality issues have been fixed.

Doing side-by-side calls, the difference when using the new phone and old is like the difference between talking to someone with their hand over their mouth and with their hand taken away. While the new iPhone’s speaker and mic definitely improve sound quality, it seems packets do matter too. When the the phone is running on a 3G network (in downtown NY), calls sound especially clear compared to the old iPhone. But when both iPhones are on EDGE, the call difference is noticeable, but not night and day. Even the speakerphone’s audio is much louder and so, music played through the mono speaker is also improved. As for reception back in spotty coverage areas, I’ll have to do a side-by-side soon to let you know how that goes. UPDATE: I could make no calls before in my house. Now I can, in both EDGE and 3G mode, with good (not great clarity). This is fantastic.

The old iPhone’s location detector was accurate within a few blocks, using Skyhook’s system of logging cellular towers and Wi-Fi spot MAC addresses and pairing them with physical addreses. I thought it was fine for making sure when I searched for an ATM machine, it would only return local results. The new A-GPS system is accurate within meters, though, opening up the iPhone to more useful location-based apps, maps and geotagging of photos.

The A-GPS helps get quicker fixes in the city, compared with a typical PND. However it doesn’t refresh as quickly (every 5 to 15 steps), and won’t give you a “heading-up” view, so when you’re walking, it takes a bit longer to figure out where you’re going. This is clearly optimized for walking, though in a pinch it could help lost drivers. The greater accuracy isn’t the only reason it’s better than the older iPhone: The ability to track your path is a nice enhancement too. The time to GPS lock is between 1 and 10 seconds, using a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular as well as GPS. But don’t even think about using this for regular car nav: there is no voice prompting, nor is there automatic turn-by-turn.

Apple didn’t write a dedicated turn-by-turn navigator for driving, with voice, but now we hear that companies are making them, so we look forward to revisiting this once real navi apps are out.

The old iPhone’s software can take a photo and email it or send it to a MobileMe gallery, but the camera itself is relatively weak. It won’t capture video, and I’ve lost countless YouTube hits by not having a video device at the ready. This situation has not been improved much.

UPDATE: One nice thing we’ve finally confirmed is that the dreaded buzz you got with speakers and tape adapters too close to the iPhone with the GSM connection running during calls or data disappears when you’re running 3G.

The new camera has the same 2MP shooter which returns 1600 x 1200 pixels. There still isn’t video capture. Image processing seems to be slightly less grainy but it’s not something you would notice. The MP count would be fine, but the low-light quality is still terrible. Nokia and Motorola have built thin phones with better imaging, why not Apple? And Apple’s forte is software, so why can’t they beef up the software tools, by adding image stabilizers and noise reducers, not to mention Photo Booth-type frames and effects?

Inside the box: A new smaller USB charger the size of an ice cube, headphones, a sync cable and a SIM eject tool. There is no longer a dock included to use with the cable.

This is really not a revolutionary phone. It’s more like the iPhone we wished Apple made last year. But basics, like cut, copy and paste are still missing. (As is MMS, thanks for the reminder, commenters.) As well are the ability to use the phone like a hard drive. Other than that, we’re hoping for some more revolutionary changes to come by software update. And let’s take a moment to remember how many developers are making killer iPhone programs right this second. There’s the revolution.

So the hardware is interesting in the iPhone 3G, but the real story here is the new iPhone OS 2.0 firmware, which we’ve written about in depth here. You manage to install that, old iPhone users, you’ve got about 80% of this new iPhone’s mojo. But if you’re not making your calls on an iPhone yet, well, what are you waiting for?
[Our iPhone App Review Marathon, iPhone 2.0 Firmware Review: Forget 3G It's the Code That Counts]

Here is the original post:
iPhone 3G Review

Americans Viewed 12 Billion Videos Online in May 2008

Read more from the original source:
Americans Viewed 12 Billion Videos Online in May 2008

Windows Live Photo Gallery will Soon Recognize Faces in Pictures

The rest is here:
Windows Live Photo Gallery will Soon Recognize Faces in Pictures

NY Times …

Read more from the original source:
As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual

Sony’s latest plans: more networked devices, video download service for PS3, maybe a phone

Here is the original:
Sony’s latest plans: more networked devices, video download service for PS3, maybe a phone

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. Confounded by trying to track down fancy-looking WordPress themes? Check out this Web-based theme editor that lets you tweak every nook and cranny of a theme then spit it back to your server to go live. You can add columns, change fonts and backgrounds, even throw in a customizable tag cloud–all with no coding experience required. All you need is a little creativity and some working knowledge of drop-down menus.

While some WordPress themes have excellent built-in support for doing this right from the WordPress dashboard, many more don’t, and trying to figure out all the little things like text color is made far easier with a WYSIWYG editor than with WordPress’ built-in editing tools.

Advanced users can throw in graphics or design elements they’ve hosted elsewhere on their server (as long as it’s got a URL to link up to), and when all is said and done each bit of the theme can be grabbed as an individual file to whatever theme you’re currently using. This is an easy way to try out new fonts and colors without making a mess out of your existing style.css file
Dreamweaver users should consider ThemeDreamer. It unlocks Dw’s potential so that you can open WordPress theme files in Design View and leverage most all of Dw’s ability to manipulate HTML (like drag n drop, CSS, etc). Bonuses are code hints and context sensitive documentation to WordPress’s online reference manual. Before/After shots of of what a WordPress theme file looks like without it speaks for itself!

http://www.themedreamer.com/demos

SOURCE

Here is the original:
Something useful: A WYSIWYG WordPress theme editor

Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools

The rest is here:
Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools