Technology Archives

LaLa.com started out as a trading site, enabling its users to trade their used CDs for a fee - and its done fairly well, creating a pretty nice community of music listeners along the way. Last week, the company launched its "Upload your iPod" feature: a free service that scans all our digital music and makes it available to you online, available anywhere. The service will scan not just those MP3s you've ripped from CDs, but all those AAC files you've purchased from iTunes, too. Apparently, you're even able to download MP3s of the same music back down to your iPod when you're on the road.

How does it work? Well, LaLa only uploads from you what it doesn't already have stored on its servers. Naturally, for most people, their library has overlap with other folks so they're able to build up the common stuff pretty quickly including the stuff notoriously difficult to find online. Bless their pea picking hearts, the good folks at LaLa are counting on the Fair Use doctrine here: the assumption being that if you own it, you have the right to it. Its an application of fair-use that appears rock solid to me: LaLa doesn't allow you to distribute music but merely access what you already own. I'm sure the RIAA will do their best to make LaLa's life a living hell, and they're probably expecting that. So, kudos to LaLa!

And, this is capitalism at work kiddies, not some cause at the behest of the likes of the EFF. Its smart business for LaLa. They build very detailed profiles of their customers' music preferences and usage patterns. THAT is enormously valuable marekting data and will enable quite a good retail business for LaLa. I can't wait to see what they do with it.

The RIAA - the group that is so reviled by owners and consumers of intellectual property alike, is accused in court of extortion, conspiracy, computer fraud, trespass, and basic evil.

The accusations are being made as a counterclaim in a suit initiated by the RIAA in Tampa, Florida. Check it:

In the case of UMG v. Del Cid, the defendant has filed the following five (5) counterclaims against the RIAA, under Florida, federal, and California law:
    1. Trespass
    2. Computer Fraud and Abuse (18 USC 1030)
    3. Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices (Fla. Stat. 501.201)
    4. Civil Extortion (CA Penal Code 519 & 523)
    5. Civil Conspiracy involving (a) use of private investigators without license in violation of Fla. Stat. Chapter 493; (b) unauthorized access to a protected computer system, in interstate commerce, for the purpose of obtaining information in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (a)(2)(C);
(c) extortion in violation of Ca. Penal Code §§ 519 and 523; and (d) knowingly collecting an unlawful consumer debt, and using abus[ive] means to do so, in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act
, 15 U.S.C. § 1692a et seq. and Fla. Stat. § 559.72 et seq.

Sounds about right. Reap what you sow, and all that.

Canon has announced the development of 50 mega pixel sensor. With a physical footprint similar to the sensors currently found in today's digital SLRs, Canon also managed to pack in 50% greater light sensitivity, too. Rumor is that Canon also wants to introduce a new file format as well.... ugh. But, still great news.

I wish, however, that the focus would switch from how much data a sensor can capture to the light sensitivity and quality of image produced. That's the frontier in digital photography right now.

Well, the iPhone's much hyped and eagerly anticipated launch was today. And there's so much out there on the web about it, I'm not even going to attempt to touch all that. I can't. Its cool....its a breakthrough and, whatever you think of how Apple handles hype and product introductions (enjoyably over the top, IMHO), the iPhone is a transformational product. Me? I'll probably wait for a second generation device that supports 3G (I already use AT&T's EDGE network and find it...lacking) and handles the whole battery thing better - still, its a fantastic product.

I'm entertained by the press Joz is getting and delighted that his product is so well received. Xeni over at BoingBoing has got a great post on the experience of standing in line at The Grove in Los Angeles for an iPod today. A couple of pics of Joz here and here.

You've got to check out The Last Supper by clarkbar6. Its hysterically funny....and the link to the Flickr page has text rollovers to identify the characters you might not know....funny.

Information Architects has updated their Web Trendmap 1.0 with a new version that is worth checking out! The map is IA's assessment of the most popular/successful websites worldwide - arranged by category, and popularity.

Four years ago, as I was preparing to dive back into the "video over the 'net" world, I bythely predicted that terabytes worth of NAS (Network Attached Storage) would be cheap and plentiful as consumer products. Of course, as often happens, my prediction was a bit early. But Amazon's selling products from HP that appear to be evidence its happening. Sure, we've been able to buy not only home NAS kits from the likes of NewEgg for a couple of years, and folks like Buffalo, Netgear and Linksys have doing it for awhile now. But when you can buy products from HP off of Amazon, I think that moves it from the realm of Alpha Adopter (geek purchases) to the mainstream. I'm sure the the Petabytes of home storage that will blossom across the land will be filled with legal, DRM'd content and not those nasty pirated content from torrent sites. Sure they will.

They could have picked Thomas Edison and his lab in Menlo Park, NJ. They could have chosen the Wright Brother's bicycle shop in Dayton, OH. They could have chosen Philo Farnsworth and his lab on Green St. in San Francisco. But no - they chose Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in Job's parents' garage in Los Altos.

The good folks at PodBrixhave chosen to immortalize the young Woz and Jobs in a Lego playset, and I've got to say they really chose the right guys to immoralize. I mean, who do you want your kids growing up to worship? Marylin Manson or Woz? I mean, c'mon! Woz got his Prius going 104 MPH and he did not have any cocaine in his pocket! Seriously, very cool. I'm sure we'll have to get one for Uncle Peter as well as our house!

Hmm.... a very interesting patent application by Google showed up on the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday. No, I'm not that big a geek that I regularly troll the USPTO's site - I'm hopefully awaiting the award of several patents to Akimbo, so I checking it pretty regularly right now.

Anyhow, the patent application details a system through which Google offers mobile (phone) based payments a "GPay" service. Examples of payment scenarios given in the patent include paying for goods from a vending machine, as well as purchasing items directly from offline retailers. While the example used is a phone, it’s entirely feasible to apply the GPay Mobile payments system to a variety of platforms - and, probably in Google's best interest to assure that. Of course, all the rabid rumor mongers expecting a Gphone offering from Google will interpret this as a sure sign of a Gphone exclusive application, giving Google (or their carrier partners) a distinct advantage over other carriers in enabling mobile payments from a handset.

The application isn't new - you can use your cell phone to make payments for things like parking and event tickets sporadically around the U.S. today. Cell phone based payment has been utilized pretty significantly in Japan for three or four years now. But Google's payment details a better method - typical of Google in simplifying it and just doing it smartly, simply. Exciting stuff, I think.

Remember Eudora, the email client that introduced millions to SMTP based email? If you were an early internet user on the Macintosh, you probably used Eudora (anyone remember Quickmail?!). Interestingly, Qualcomm ended up the owners of the inimitable email client and quietly put it to eternal rest last May, unnoticed by nearly all of us. But Qualcomm decided to do a good thing: they open sourced the Eudora code. And the wonderful Mozilla folks have decided to give it life.

Code name Penelope (Eudora 8.0.0b1), it is now available. Penelope is essentially Thunderbird wrapped up in a Eudora skin, but for folks who invested a lot of their time and sensory memory into the Eudora UI - all the keyboard shortcuts, toolbar icons, menu structures and behavior of Eudora is captured in Penelope. Reading the notes on who is developing Penelope, it looks like the last Eudora team at Qualcomm has skipped on over to the project - very, very cool. Having worked on a much loved and widely adopted product (ok, well....ok...another one, too) that had an end of life long before users were ready to give it up, it is a delight to see this: one of the wonderful enablements of the open source movement and I (again) applaud Mozilla.

Its got a 3-inch, 922,000 pixel LCD display (with HDMI viddy output) and a 51-segment auto-focus sensor attached to a new CMOS 12.3 MP sensor on a rugged, beef body. 6fps continuous shooting, 45mx shutter lag, 13ms start-up time and the Nikon EXPEED image processor. Focus tracking by color and scene recognition join up with live view on the LCD monitor. Yummo.

So it's just an early look over at DPReview.com, but I already know I need one. Now if all my friends and family were to chip in, they could probably get it for me as a Halloween gift... I've got to have one!

Editor's Note: Apparently, the user defined data times out at some point....which means you might, at some point, see a movie but without my face! Thought I'd leave it just as is!

Shutterfly's got a new piece of bait to lure traffic to their photo processing site: custom videos. Its pretty fascinating to marry a little facial recognition technology to do face extraction with some smart sprite , provided by Personiva. But the end result is a bit dodgey, I think.

I made the one above using my own photo because the two I made with pictures from my kids were too creepy! The effects used to make the eyes blink and animate the mouth are interesting, but a little off putting. What is really creepy is that they extract the faces from the pictures you upload, and don't include the person's hair. Ok, no big deal on a grown man, but very disturbing with the children. Of course, the alpha-blending required to make transparencies through hair would require more processing power than Personiva wants to throw at this kind of application. But ultimately, it ruins the effect.

It's kind of cute and funny for about the minute it takes you to upload a picture and watch the video, but then you're done with it. I'm not sure how Personiva's hot new viral marketing technology's going to "People engage with the brand in ways that extend the lifespan and reach of the brand message" in a way that actually drives traffic and picture orders for Shutterfly.

Today's New York Times devoted the entire Science section to honoring the 50^th anniversery of Sputnik. Sputnik was a watershed event in human history - it changed everything. I wasn't alive at the time, but I can imagine the sense of awe and wonder that the little "beep beep beep" coming back from space must have made on those hearing it at the time. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik on October 4, 1957 and wasted no time trumpeting their triumph. in a stare down with the U.S. over the sites of both countries' newly crafted nuclear arsenals, the Soviets were only too glad to use this technological triumph to strike fear into the hearts of America's techological and industrial mighty.

It is Sputnik that catalyzed the creation on NASA, DARPA (and, therefore, the Internet) and the computer industry. It jump started and invigorated a technology revolution that has had enormous and mostly beneficial implications for the global economy. What the world needs now is a Sputnik for education or food production.

Visit the Times' site and view Sputnik inside and out. If you're too young to remember Sputnik, go learn why its such an important event in human history.

The brewing tension between Apple and developers who wish to write 3^rd party apps for
the iPhone (and the iPhone users who want to use those apps) continues to grow. I still marvel at Apple's ability to dissimulate innovation on their own inspired products. A group of disaffected developers decided to throw some of Apple's promotion right back at 1 Infinite Loop, co-opting Apple's "Crazy Ones" ad and making it their own to deliver their message.

It's pretty amazing that you can buy a 500 gigabyte hard disk for about a hundred bucks these days. That's half a terabyte of storage for a C note! Twenty years ago, that kind of storage was a whole room of equipment in a dedicated facility with raised flooring, expensive air-conditioning and fire suppression equipment - millions of dollars. Thank Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for the amazing economies of modern hard disk storage.

Today, the Nobel Prize in Physics was bestowed on the two gentlemen for their work in 1988 to discover and define the fundamental physics that allowed for the radical miniaturization and cost reduction in hard disk based data storage. In 1988 the Frenchman Albert Fert and the German Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. It took nine years before the GMR effect was suitably industrialized and launched, but immediately became the standard technology for commercial hard disks. This may not be as lofty a discovery as the quantum physics of Einstein or world shaking as Fermi's work, but at a practical level this is the most noble work of physics. I'm delighted to see the Nobel Prize committee reward this achievement.

Congratulations and thank you Monsieur Fert and Herr Grünberg.

Yesterday, I sang the praises of Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert - this year's Nobel Prize winners for Physics who were rewarded for their discovery of the phenomenon of giant magnetoresistance, or GMR. This is the fundamental science behind the miniaturization of hard disks. Today, I want to praise the engineer whose work manifest that scientific discovery as a life enhancing practical application.

Fert and Grünberg's discovery was published in 1988. It was the work of IBM research engineer Stuart Parkin at IBM's research labs in San Jose that begat the now ubiquitous hard disk application of GMR. The discovery of the phenomenon of GMR is a great and wonderful thing, but even Grünberg acknowledges that it was Parkin's work that opened up practical vistas that were beyond even the imagination of the physicists when Fert and Grünberg published their work. Many expected that when Fert and Grünberg received the prize (and this one was anticipated for several years) that they would likely share the prize with Parkin.

Stuart Parkin may be relegated to the background of the rich tapestry of modern invention as have so many seminal contributors (witness Doug Englebart). But I'd like to acknowledge him, for it is his contribution that is the foundation of the iPod and countless local, affordable, tiny data caches. It dropped the cost of the most critical component of computing - storage - by several orders of magnitude - and was a critical component in making practical so many of the wild-eyed dreams in computing that we now take for granted. Thank you, Mr. Parkin.

Looking for a complete new waste of your time? Perhaps a new internet addiction? Try the new Google Image Labler. As a means of generating those oh-so-valuable tags on their image file index, Google has invented a game to entice us all to provide those tags. When you log-on, you're randomly assigned a partner - another person who is playing - and you job is to match tags on pictures for two minutes and earn points. You're both simultaneously shown the same image, and you keep typing in words until you match, or both participants pass on that image. The goal is to generate as many points together as possible.

Some are easy, some are hard and the more descriptive terms are worth more. For example, matching on "man" or "actor" might yield you 50 points, where matching on "Lawrence Olivier" might garner you up to 150 points. Hooking up with a newbie or someone who just can't identify anything can be annoying, but getting a partner who is good is a real rush as you start racking up points. If you're the kind of person who easily fell prey to the black holes of time that are things like Tetris, Bejeweled or Word Sleuth, beware: for you, this will be addictive. You've been warned.

About a month ago, I commented on a potential Microsoft investment in Facebook that would give the social networking company a $15 billion dollar valuation. Today, the Wall Street Journal reported Microsoft has confirmed their $240 million investment to purchase a 1.6% stake in the young company which hopes to break even this year with revenue of about $150 million.

Why? How?

Why is fairly easy to recognize, if not rationalize. Sillycon Valley has the fever again over web sites with lots of users, as well they should: Facebook signs up an amazing four million new users every day. Even if they lose 90% of those people within a month, those are amazing numbers. How do you monetize them? Advertising, and this is the germ behind the fever. As the almighty advertising dollar is rapidly shifting from print and TV to the Web, new fortunes are being made. I reference Google, that little company with a $209 billion market cap, built on web advertising. As Microsoft and others attempt to get a piece of that monstrous pie, Facebook is the most delectable slice. So GOOG and MSFT have been fighting over Facebook all summer.

How involves more conjecture than observation. One theory is that 23 year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Harvard drop-out, now billionaire - sound familiar?) thought up the most outrageous sum he could. Hell, if Yahoo was willing to pay $1 billion for the company last year (how glad is he that he turned them down?), perhaps people would bite at $10 billion. They did! $15 billion was probably the apogee of the ridiculosity curve. Somewhere, somehow, there's some numbers jockey in Microsoft's corporate development group that can justify the evaluation and investment cost based on cash flow. I must not have taken enough Accounting courses in business school to figure out how.

The other theory about how, and these are not mutually exclusive, is that this is about face:

The exec on the losing side was probably my old 3DO colleague, Omid Kordestani. I'd assert it was rational to let this go. In fact, I'd surmise, getting Microsoft to shell out that kind of money for the right to sell Facebook's advertising (the core of the deal) was a hell of a strategy. Go Omid. Time will tell.

I have a feeling I'll be blogging more about advertising on the web, particularly as it relates to selling adds for video-on-demand. To quote the kids, its just a "sick" market (meaning, crazy wicked hot).

For those of you wondering what the inimitable Timo has been up to holed away writing code with Peter and Morgan, I can share this since its in the public domain. OK, its not like have a bunch of info I'm not sharing - they're being good boys about staying stealthy (and I'm not seeking like Tim and Peter's San Diego contingent!). I had the feeling that Bruce Leak of QuickTime, General Magic and WebTV fame, might be bankrolling their efforts. So, no new news, but cool nonetheless. Who knew Timo was such a cute spokesmodel?

My last post was showing off Timo's little moment in the sun as the poster boy developer for Android. Today, he sends me a link to the video above with the description, "I've been mocked!"