The good guys are taking a hit in the ongoing online war between the thugs who profit from phishing and malware, and those who work to stop them.
For two weeks, Web sites like CastleCops.com, which offers help to those hit by malware and also actively works to shut down malicious Web sites, have been under attack. In what's known as a distributed denial of service, black hats are flooding CastleCops with a barrage of garbage data in an attempt to overwhelm the site and knock it offline.
"It's the folks who are out there in the trenches getting hit," says Paul Laudanski, who founded CastleCops five and a half years ago
Attack Spreads
When the attack on CastleCops.com began on August 29, Laudanski says, the site went down for a few hours as he scrambled to apply countermeasures. His site came back up, but the attack soon spread to other helpful sites such as 419eater.com, fraudwatchers.org, scam.com, scamfraudalert.com, and scamwarners.com. Most of these sites are currently unresponsive.
When the hosting provider for another site, aa419.org, dropped the site because the attack became too much for the provider, CastleCops gave aa419.org a home. CastleCops went down again under the combined attack, but is back up again.
The sites are all being hit by botnets, corralled networks of malware-infected computers that can be issued commands by a central controller, or botherder. Botnets are most often used to send money-making spam, but they can also launch denial-of-service attacks where each infected PC sends a steady stream of traffic at a victim site. CastleCops is shouldering the brunt of 20,000 bots as of today, and more than 1,000 additional bots join the fray each day.
Mystery Motive
Laundanski says he and others who work at these sites, many of which are not-for-profit, are still unsure about the attack's rationale. And he's likewise uncertain about whether it's one group or many behind it all. He's been able to gather some details, but doesn't want to share them while the threat continues and let his attackers know what he's been able to find out.
But Paul Sop, CTO of Prolexic, a company that defends clients against DDoS attacks, says "the prevailing street theory is that these guys are having an effect." Their advice is helping malware or phishing victims, and their investigations are helping to shut down criminal operations
"So the botnet guys are targeting them," he says.
Security sites, including CastleCops, have been targeted in the past, but attacks are on the rise, Sop says. In the past five months, he says, there has been an increased focus on attacking organizations on the front lines who try to fight back against the crooks.
Strengthened Resolve
But according to Laudanski, who has started a new online forum documenting the ongoing battles, the attacks may backfire.
"The criminals are in it for the money," he says. "It's a huge business for them. [But] we're in it for the feeling that we get being on the side of right."
So this assault shows that "these sites are definitely doing something right," he says, "because we've got the attention of these scammers. It gives us greater resolve."
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Die, Spyware, Die!
Spyware remains a continuing hassle and a potentially serious intrusion on your privacy. We tested the top antispyware programs to see which ones do the best job.
Ryan Naraine, PC World
In the beginning, antivirus software fought viruses and worms, and antispyware software fought spyware and adware. That clean distinction has largely disappeared. The decline of the macro virus and the e-mail worm sent antivirus companies looking for something else to fight, and the complexity of spyware makes it a formidable foe. (See "The Italian Job," for an example of how sneaky spyware can get.)
As we discussed in our recent antivirus roundup, "Virus Stoppers," several antivirus products are effective at fighting Trojan horses and backdoor programs--typically classified as spyware--as well as adware. So the question arises: Are specialized antispyware tools particularly effective at fighting today's threats?
The Contenders
To find out, we looked at six well-known programs. We tested five--Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5, Microsoft's Windows Defender 1.1, PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0, Safer Networking's Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4, and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5--on Windows Vista systems.
The sixth program, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 2007 Plus, wasn't available in a Vista version during our testing period, so we evaluated its performance on a Windows XP SP2 PC; for this reason, its results are not directly comparable with those for the other apps.
German research company AV-Test.org conducted the malware portion of our tests, bombarding the applications with samples of current adware and spyware. AV-Test.org gauged the products' ability to recognize about 110,000 inactive adware, spyware, and rootkit samples. An inactive sample is like an application you've downloaded and haven't yet installed. You'll want your antispyware product to recognize it--based on a match to a signature database of known threats--before the sample unpacks itself and activates in various areas of your PC.
To learn how the tools would react in such a case, AV-Test also measured each product's ability to recognize the behavior of and subsequently clean up 20 active pieces of adware and spyware. Since each threat can break down into more than 100 components, disinfection can be a tough job. We looked for the programs to clean up major file and Registry changes.
We also looked at the programs' behavior-based capabilities for detecting and blocking changes to key areas of an infected system without having to recognize anything about a specific invader. Spyware writers are continually releasing new threats, and security companies typically take some time to release signatures to catch those threats. An antispyware product's behavior-based detection protects the user during this critical window. We also tested for false positives and for speed; and we evaluated each software's design, price, and ease of use.
The Results
PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0 outperformed its Vista competitors. Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5 finished some distance behind. Neither Spybot Search & Destroy nor Windows Defender adequately protects against today's threats. And on Windows XP, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, in several performance areas, did not impress us.
For comparative results of the five Vista programs, see our chart, "Best Vista Antispyware." And for further discussion of the results we obtained, see our video, also titled "Die, Spyware, Die!"
Ryan Naraine, PC World
In the beginning, antivirus software fought viruses and worms, and antispyware software fought spyware and adware. That clean distinction has largely disappeared. The decline of the macro virus and the e-mail worm sent antivirus companies looking for something else to fight, and the complexity of spyware makes it a formidable foe. (See "The Italian Job," for an example of how sneaky spyware can get.)
As we discussed in our recent antivirus roundup, "Virus Stoppers," several antivirus products are effective at fighting Trojan horses and backdoor programs--typically classified as spyware--as well as adware. So the question arises: Are specialized antispyware tools particularly effective at fighting today's threats?
The Contenders
To find out, we looked at six well-known programs. We tested five--Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5, Microsoft's Windows Defender 1.1, PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0, Safer Networking's Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4, and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5--on Windows Vista systems.
The sixth program, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 2007 Plus, wasn't available in a Vista version during our testing period, so we evaluated its performance on a Windows XP SP2 PC; for this reason, its results are not directly comparable with those for the other apps.
German research company AV-Test.org conducted the malware portion of our tests, bombarding the applications with samples of current adware and spyware. AV-Test.org gauged the products' ability to recognize about 110,000 inactive adware, spyware, and rootkit samples. An inactive sample is like an application you've downloaded and haven't yet installed. You'll want your antispyware product to recognize it--based on a match to a signature database of known threats--before the sample unpacks itself and activates in various areas of your PC.
To learn how the tools would react in such a case, AV-Test also measured each product's ability to recognize the behavior of and subsequently clean up 20 active pieces of adware and spyware. Since each threat can break down into more than 100 components, disinfection can be a tough job. We looked for the programs to clean up major file and Registry changes.
We also looked at the programs' behavior-based capabilities for detecting and blocking changes to key areas of an infected system without having to recognize anything about a specific invader. Spyware writers are continually releasing new threats, and security companies typically take some time to release signatures to catch those threats. An antispyware product's behavior-based detection protects the user during this critical window. We also tested for false positives and for speed; and we evaluated each software's design, price, and ease of use.
The Results
PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0 outperformed its Vista competitors. Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5 finished some distance behind. Neither Spybot Search & Destroy nor Windows Defender adequately protects against today's threats. And on Windows XP, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, in several performance areas, did not impress us.
For comparative results of the five Vista programs, see our chart, "Best Vista Antispyware." And for further discussion of the results we obtained, see our video, also titled "Die, Spyware, Die!"
Boost VoIP Call Quality, Boost Profits
“Can you hear me now?” That old refrain has become a standard joke when it comes to cell phone and VoIP calling. However, it’s no laughing matter for businesses which can lose thousands of dollars as a result of poor call quality. An inability to make international calls (and especially to make local calls) without background noise decreases the professional credibility of any business, reducing their potential profits every time that the phone rings. In the past, this has been one of the most frustrating aspects of VoIP technology, especially for small businesses seeking to develop a name for themselves and a client base in their industry.
However, things are starting to look up for business professionals interested in using VoIP to make their calls. Call quality has been going up across the board from VoIP service providers who have recognized that this is a problem and worked to remedy the situation. Additionally, hardware and software manufacturers are contributing to creating solutions by crafting new technology that can be installed to improve the quality of all VoIP calls.
For example, NoiseFree VoIP has just launched a beta test version of their new software which is designed to rapidly clear up calls on many VoIP systems.
“Our software easily installs and when used at both ends of a call completely removes the challenges presented by uncontrollable environmental noise. Additionally, NoiseFree VoIP is able to reduce the packet load on a network, mitigating instances of voice distortion due to impacted network nodes. By doing so it enhances overall bandwidth availability.”(Source: SnapVoip blog)
Although it works best when used by both parties in the call, the software can assist in creating improved call quality when used by either party. The benefits of this software over other methods of VoIP noise cancellation include that it takes up very little memory or power, requires no additional hardware, and uses multiple forms of patented technology to reduce background noise and clarify voices during calls.
This can translate directly into dollars for your business. No, you’re probably not going to lose a client or an important deal because of one bad call. But if your VoIP system regularly causes bad connections, you slowly decrease your credibility in the industry. Although we all know that the flaws of technology aren’t necessarily a reflection of our business practices, we also all have a tendency to believe that these things are related. By reducing noise problems with VoIP calling, businesses give their company that polished air of professionalism that can make a difference in profits over time.
Businesses interested in trying out NoiseFree VoIP can use the beta software free through the end of the year by downloading it from the website. This software is similar to that of Solicall which is also available for download.
Is your perception of a business affected when phone calls are interrupted by background noise?
However, things are starting to look up for business professionals interested in using VoIP to make their calls. Call quality has been going up across the board from VoIP service providers who have recognized that this is a problem and worked to remedy the situation. Additionally, hardware and software manufacturers are contributing to creating solutions by crafting new technology that can be installed to improve the quality of all VoIP calls.
For example, NoiseFree VoIP has just launched a beta test version of their new software which is designed to rapidly clear up calls on many VoIP systems.
“Our software easily installs and when used at both ends of a call completely removes the challenges presented by uncontrollable environmental noise. Additionally, NoiseFree VoIP is able to reduce the packet load on a network, mitigating instances of voice distortion due to impacted network nodes. By doing so it enhances overall bandwidth availability.”(Source: SnapVoip blog)
Although it works best when used by both parties in the call, the software can assist in creating improved call quality when used by either party. The benefits of this software over other methods of VoIP noise cancellation include that it takes up very little memory or power, requires no additional hardware, and uses multiple forms of patented technology to reduce background noise and clarify voices during calls.
This can translate directly into dollars for your business. No, you’re probably not going to lose a client or an important deal because of one bad call. But if your VoIP system regularly causes bad connections, you slowly decrease your credibility in the industry. Although we all know that the flaws of technology aren’t necessarily a reflection of our business practices, we also all have a tendency to believe that these things are related. By reducing noise problems with VoIP calling, businesses give their company that polished air of professionalism that can make a difference in profits over time.
Businesses interested in trying out NoiseFree VoIP can use the beta software free through the end of the year by downloading it from the website. This software is similar to that of Solicall which is also available for download.
Is your perception of a business affected when phone calls are interrupted by background noise?
Wireless Slowly Dies After Leopard Upgrade, Users Report
Mac users are reporting a number of problems with their wireless connections after updating to Leopard, according to traffic on Apple's support forums.
Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Mac users are reporting a number of problems with their wireless connections after updating to Leopard, according to traffic on Apple Inc.'s support forums.
Users writing in a long thread -- as of 3 p.m. EDT it boasted more than 120 messages -- described one issue as a steadily degrading wireless link from their upgraded Macs.
"When you connect to your wireless network, your transmit rate will be 54 (if you're using the 54g standard)," said someone identified as nunofgs. "If you start up a download or something that occupies your bandwidth (even LAN traffic), you will notice that the transmit rate drops to 11, then to 3, then to 1 until finally your downloads will drop, your iChat connections will fail and your browser will not load pages."
Numerous confirmations of the same symptoms were posted by other users. Among them was Gregory Sims. "I am having the same problem. After installing [Mac OS X] 10.5 my Power Mac G4 is very slow on the Internet. The connection is worse than dial-up. I have never had this problem with 10.4 [Tiger]. My MacBook Pro is working fine, with a fast connection. I'm sorry to say 10.5 seems more like beta software than a $129 upgrade. I hope this problem is fixed soon, or I will have to go back to 10.4."
Users suggested a variety of solutions, including applying the post-Leopard update Apple said fixes log-in issues as well as a vaguely-stated "connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks " problem. Other ideas ranged from finding and possibly removing the "AppleAirport2.kext" file to toggling IPv6 on/off.
Commonalities between users reporting the problem were difficult to define. Some, for instance, said they had used the "Upgrade" option to move to Leopard, while others said they had picked "Archive and Install" or even wiped their drives clean before installing Leopard from scratch.
Nearly all, however, made a plea similar to this by oxys: "Apple fix please Leopard is useless."
Although Apple hosts the support forums, the traffic is user-to-user only; company technical support personnel do not reveal themselves or offer advice. As of Tuesday, the company had not posted a support document addressing the problem or provided a fix.
Computerworld
For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2007 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.
Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Mac users are reporting a number of problems with their wireless connections after updating to Leopard, according to traffic on Apple Inc.'s support forums.
Users writing in a long thread -- as of 3 p.m. EDT it boasted more than 120 messages -- described one issue as a steadily degrading wireless link from their upgraded Macs.
"When you connect to your wireless network, your transmit rate will be 54 (if you're using the 54g standard)," said someone identified as nunofgs. "If you start up a download or something that occupies your bandwidth (even LAN traffic), you will notice that the transmit rate drops to 11, then to 3, then to 1 until finally your downloads will drop, your iChat connections will fail and your browser will not load pages."
Numerous confirmations of the same symptoms were posted by other users. Among them was Gregory Sims. "I am having the same problem. After installing [Mac OS X] 10.5 my Power Mac G4 is very slow on the Internet. The connection is worse than dial-up. I have never had this problem with 10.4 [Tiger]. My MacBook Pro is working fine, with a fast connection. I'm sorry to say 10.5 seems more like beta software than a $129 upgrade. I hope this problem is fixed soon, or I will have to go back to 10.4."
Users suggested a variety of solutions, including applying the post-Leopard update Apple said fixes log-in issues as well as a vaguely-stated "connecting to some 802.11b/g wireless networks " problem. Other ideas ranged from finding and possibly removing the "AppleAirport2.kext" file to toggling IPv6 on/off.
Commonalities between users reporting the problem were difficult to define. Some, for instance, said they had used the "Upgrade" option to move to Leopard, while others said they had picked "Archive and Install" or even wiped their drives clean before installing Leopard from scratch.
Nearly all, however, made a plea similar to this by oxys: "Apple fix please Leopard is useless."
Although Apple hosts the support forums, the traffic is user-to-user only; company technical support personnel do not reveal themselves or offer advice. As of Tuesday, the company had not posted a support document addressing the problem or provided a fix.
Computerworld
For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright © 2007 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.
Google Readies Social Network Apps
After losing its Facebook bid to Microsoft, Google will on Thursday introduce OpenSocial, development tools for numerous sites.
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Belatedly recognizing the importance of social networking as an online service and advertising vehicle, Google Inc. this week will unleash its strongest response yet to the rising threat and skyrocketing popularity of MySpace and Facebook.
On Thursday, Google will announce OpenSocial, an initiative with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) at its core that is designed "to spread social applications across the Web," the company said.
These common APIs have been designed to let developers create social networking applications that will run on multiple Web sites, simplifying the making and distribution of these programs.
Partners supporting OpenSocial include various well-known software developers and social networking sites: Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo. Neither Facebook nor MySpace is on the list of partners at press time.
The move is also no doubt intended to dilute the massive success Facebook has had in attracting external developers since it opened up its Web site platform to third-party applications in May.
About 7,000 such applications have been built for Facebook so far, helping to make the social networking site more attractive to people and thus boosting its usage. MySpace recently announced it would follow Facebook's example.
By allowing developers to write an application once and have it work in multiple social networking sites, the OpenSocial initiative could, in theory, water down the appeal of Facebook's ballooning applications catalogue.
Once considered a fad of interest mostly to teens and young adults, social networks have significantly broadened their demographic appeal, attracting many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.
Along the way, social networking sites have been created for other purposes beyond entertainment and staying in touch with friends. For example, there are social networks tailored for specific occupations, such as doctors, and interests, such as sports.
Google has had a social networking site named Orkut for several years, but it doesn't seem to have merited much attention from the company until recently, and only after the popularity and potential of this type of site became evident.
Google was reportedly locked in a battle with Microsoft over which one would be chosen by Facebook to buy a stake in the social networking company and earn a deal to provide advertising to it.
Microsoft eventually won, buying a 1.6 percent stake that values Facebook at an eye-popping US$15 billion, although the social networking company reportedly will have revenue of just $150 million this year.
With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said. About 250,000 new users register every day at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.
In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, ranking first among social networking sites, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million [m], according to comScore. Hi5 ranked third with 28.2 million, while Friendster was fourth with 24.7 million. Orkut rounded out the top 5 with 24.1 million.
More information about OpenSocial and resources for developers will be available in this Web site later this week. There will also be a developer sandbox.
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Belatedly recognizing the importance of social networking as an online service and advertising vehicle, Google Inc. this week will unleash its strongest response yet to the rising threat and skyrocketing popularity of MySpace and Facebook.
On Thursday, Google will announce OpenSocial, an initiative with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) at its core that is designed "to spread social applications across the Web," the company said.
These common APIs have been designed to let developers create social networking applications that will run on multiple Web sites, simplifying the making and distribution of these programs.
Partners supporting OpenSocial include various well-known software developers and social networking sites: Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster and Plaxo. Neither Facebook nor MySpace is on the list of partners at press time.
The move is also no doubt intended to dilute the massive success Facebook has had in attracting external developers since it opened up its Web site platform to third-party applications in May.
About 7,000 such applications have been built for Facebook so far, helping to make the social networking site more attractive to people and thus boosting its usage. MySpace recently announced it would follow Facebook's example.
By allowing developers to write an application once and have it work in multiple social networking sites, the OpenSocial initiative could, in theory, water down the appeal of Facebook's ballooning applications catalogue.
Once considered a fad of interest mostly to teens and young adults, social networks have significantly broadened their demographic appeal, attracting many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.
Along the way, social networking sites have been created for other purposes beyond entertainment and staying in touch with friends. For example, there are social networks tailored for specific occupations, such as doctors, and interests, such as sports.
Google has had a social networking site named Orkut for several years, but it doesn't seem to have merited much attention from the company until recently, and only after the popularity and potential of this type of site became evident.
Google was reportedly locked in a battle with Microsoft over which one would be chosen by Facebook to buy a stake in the social networking company and earn a deal to provide advertising to it.
Microsoft eventually won, buying a 1.6 percent stake that values Facebook at an eye-popping US$15 billion, although the social networking company reportedly will have revenue of just $150 million this year.
With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said. About 250,000 new users register every day at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.
In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, ranking first among social networking sites, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million [m], according to comScore. Hi5 ranked third with 28.2 million, while Friendster was fourth with 24.7 million. Orkut rounded out the top 5 with 24.1 million.
More information about OpenSocial and resources for developers will be available in this Web site later this week. There will also be a developer sandbox.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Teaching plasma to follow LCD's lead
Once considered the future of television, plasma TVs have lost their shine.
In the last several years, the display known for excellent picture quality has given ground to the exploding popularity of LCD (liquid crystal display) in the high-definition TV market. Though plasma TVs were first to reach consumers a decade ago, LCD TV manufacturers were able to bring the costs below their plasma counterparts with an efficient panel manufacturing process.
Now researchers are looking at ways to improve plasma's brightness levels, power consumption and cost, and developers hope that will help plasma regain some of the ground it's lost. Of course, LCD technology will also improve, but the closer pricing appears between the two, the more viable an alternative plasma becomes.
"Performance will be going up in both (plasma and LCD), but costs will be coming down faster in plasma," according to Ross Young, president of market research firm DisplaySearch.
That's good news for consumers. One of the biggest challenges in getting people to switch to high-definition TVs is the price. Predictably, as prices have fallen in the last year, more consumers are willing to buy into the idea of the HD experience. About 1 million plasma and 5.2 million LCD TV sets were sold in the U.S. last year, compared to about 750,000 plasma and 2.6 million LCD the year before that, according to retail tracking data collected by The NPD Group.
LCD is so far the undisputed champion of the HDTV popularity contest, and much of it has to do with price and manufacturers' ability to scale the technology to increasingly larger screen sizes. But plasma manufacturers have gradually found ways to produce their displays for less too. The average price of an LCD dropped from $989 last year to $932 this year, while plasma's average price fell from $2,480 to $1,664.
Besides lower price, one of the traditional benefits of LCD over plasma is the brightness of the picture in a well-lighted environment. And though all TVs can be energy hogs, plasma sets are notorious for their high power consumption.
Many believe the key to solving all three issues for plasma is something called luminous efficiency, or the ratio of the light output compared with the power input. Currently, the best plasma TVs are capable of 2 to 2.5 lumens per watt. For comparison's sake, the average fluorescent light bulb can output 80 lumens per watt.
Efficiency can be increased in several ways, including changing the concentration of the gas mixture within the plasma panel, altering the structure of the plasma cells, and using different phosphors. Companies like Panasonic, Hitachi and Pioneer have banded together to create a display capable of 5 lumens per watt, double what's currently available on the market. Simply doubling the current luminous efficiency results in twice the brightness at the existing power levels, or half the power necessary to produce the existing brightness levels.
One of plasma's most loyal proponents, plasma researcher and pioneer Larry Weber, says that if a fluorescent lamp can do 80 lumens per watt, there is "no reason a plasma display can't get anywhere close to that." Weber is currently tinkering with plasma display panels for this exact reason, although he cautions that 80 or even 40 lumens per watt could be far off. "If you ask someone today (how to double or triple the luminous efficiency) they'll say, 'I don't know how to do it right now,' but as time goes on, these things will become more likely."
Huge payoffs likely
Plasma manufacturers are trying to avoid being edged out of the HDTV market by LCD, so putting any money into research in this area will likely bring a huge payoff for them. For one, better luminous efficiency will mean fewer parts needed to put the TV together. The power supply in a 42-inch 720p plasma TV accounts for 9 percent of the manufacturing cost, for example. It's only 3 percent of the cost of a comparable LCD TV. By increasing a plasma's efficiency to 5 lumens per watt, the cost of producing the TV could become equivalent to LCD, Young argues, which will allow plasma manufacturers to simply focus on improving the panel technology. And every dollar counts in the TV market, where margins are razor thin.
The improvements are not just internal. Customers will likely notice the enhancements in picture quality as well. Right now, plasma TVs look better in dark, home-theater-like environments because of their great contrast ratio and ability to light individual pixels, but that doesn't necessarily translate well to the show floor of a big-box electronics store. Increasing the brightness will erase that difference between plasma and LCD, according to DisplaySearch's Young.
"Plasma panels will perform better in all environments, and at the same time, they'll get cheaper--that's a pretty nice advance for plasma," Young said. "Currently, people position LCD versus plasma (sales) based on where it's going to be: in a bright room with a lot of windows or a darker room or if you just watch TV at night. In the future, they both become great for all applications."
In the last several years, the display known for excellent picture quality has given ground to the exploding popularity of LCD (liquid crystal display) in the high-definition TV market. Though plasma TVs were first to reach consumers a decade ago, LCD TV manufacturers were able to bring the costs below their plasma counterparts with an efficient panel manufacturing process.
Now researchers are looking at ways to improve plasma's brightness levels, power consumption and cost, and developers hope that will help plasma regain some of the ground it's lost. Of course, LCD technology will also improve, but the closer pricing appears between the two, the more viable an alternative plasma becomes.
"Performance will be going up in both (plasma and LCD), but costs will be coming down faster in plasma," according to Ross Young, president of market research firm DisplaySearch.
That's good news for consumers. One of the biggest challenges in getting people to switch to high-definition TVs is the price. Predictably, as prices have fallen in the last year, more consumers are willing to buy into the idea of the HD experience. About 1 million plasma and 5.2 million LCD TV sets were sold in the U.S. last year, compared to about 750,000 plasma and 2.6 million LCD the year before that, according to retail tracking data collected by The NPD Group.
LCD is so far the undisputed champion of the HDTV popularity contest, and much of it has to do with price and manufacturers' ability to scale the technology to increasingly larger screen sizes. But plasma manufacturers have gradually found ways to produce their displays for less too. The average price of an LCD dropped from $989 last year to $932 this year, while plasma's average price fell from $2,480 to $1,664.
Besides lower price, one of the traditional benefits of LCD over plasma is the brightness of the picture in a well-lighted environment. And though all TVs can be energy hogs, plasma sets are notorious for their high power consumption.
Many believe the key to solving all three issues for plasma is something called luminous efficiency, or the ratio of the light output compared with the power input. Currently, the best plasma TVs are capable of 2 to 2.5 lumens per watt. For comparison's sake, the average fluorescent light bulb can output 80 lumens per watt.
Efficiency can be increased in several ways, including changing the concentration of the gas mixture within the plasma panel, altering the structure of the plasma cells, and using different phosphors. Companies like Panasonic, Hitachi and Pioneer have banded together to create a display capable of 5 lumens per watt, double what's currently available on the market. Simply doubling the current luminous efficiency results in twice the brightness at the existing power levels, or half the power necessary to produce the existing brightness levels.
One of plasma's most loyal proponents, plasma researcher and pioneer Larry Weber, says that if a fluorescent lamp can do 80 lumens per watt, there is "no reason a plasma display can't get anywhere close to that." Weber is currently tinkering with plasma display panels for this exact reason, although he cautions that 80 or even 40 lumens per watt could be far off. "If you ask someone today (how to double or triple the luminous efficiency) they'll say, 'I don't know how to do it right now,' but as time goes on, these things will become more likely."
Huge payoffs likely
Plasma manufacturers are trying to avoid being edged out of the HDTV market by LCD, so putting any money into research in this area will likely bring a huge payoff for them. For one, better luminous efficiency will mean fewer parts needed to put the TV together. The power supply in a 42-inch 720p plasma TV accounts for 9 percent of the manufacturing cost, for example. It's only 3 percent of the cost of a comparable LCD TV. By increasing a plasma's efficiency to 5 lumens per watt, the cost of producing the TV could become equivalent to LCD, Young argues, which will allow plasma manufacturers to simply focus on improving the panel technology. And every dollar counts in the TV market, where margins are razor thin.
The improvements are not just internal. Customers will likely notice the enhancements in picture quality as well. Right now, plasma TVs look better in dark, home-theater-like environments because of their great contrast ratio and ability to light individual pixels, but that doesn't necessarily translate well to the show floor of a big-box electronics store. Increasing the brightness will erase that difference between plasma and LCD, according to DisplaySearch's Young.
"Plasma panels will perform better in all environments, and at the same time, they'll get cheaper--that's a pretty nice advance for plasma," Young said. "Currently, people position LCD versus plasma (sales) based on where it's going to be: in a bright room with a lot of windows or a darker room or if you just watch TV at night. In the future, they both become great for all applications."
Skype co-founder says forecasts overshot
Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Internet telecommunications group Skype, said on Tuesday that the business, bought by eBay, had not performed as well as anticipated in the short term.
"We had to chart the trajectory of growth and how fast that would run, (but) we found out that was a bit front-loaded," Zennström said during the annual European Technology Roundtable Exhibition (ETRE) conference in Hungary.
"We overshot, in terms of monetization," he said.
eBay said last week that it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling service Skype two years ago.
The write-down on the value of the deal came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, and it marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.
eBay said it had paid $530 million to Skype shareholders, including Zennström.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
"We had to chart the trajectory of growth and how fast that would run, (but) we found out that was a bit front-loaded," Zennström said during the annual European Technology Roundtable Exhibition (ETRE) conference in Hungary.
"We overshot, in terms of monetization," he said.
eBay said last week that it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling service Skype two years ago.
The write-down on the value of the deal came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, and it marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.
eBay said it had paid $530 million to Skype shareholders, including Zennström.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Cisco denies wrongdoing in Brazil tax fraud case
U.S.-based technology and network company Cisco Systems, reacting to the arrest of company executives on tax fraud charges in Brazil, denied acting inappropriately.
"Analyzing the facts to which we have access, we do not believe that Cisco acted in an inappropriate manner," Cisco said in statement published on Friday in several Brazilian newspapers.
Authorities said Cisco's Brazilian unit had imported $500 million worth equipment over the last five years without paying import duties and is estimated to owe $826.4 million (1.5 billion reais) in taxes, fines, and interest.
The company said four of the 44 people arrested on Tuesday were Cisco employees. Police said they included Cisco executives.
"Our efforts are focused on these four detained employees and on support for their families as well as the well-being of the hundreds of Cisco professionals in Brazil and the many others that provide support to our clients," Cisco said.
Cisco did not import products directly into Brazil but through middlemen, it said.
Brazilian authorities also asked U.S. police to issue arrest warrants for five more suspects in the United States.
The investigation, which has been going on for two years, alleges that Cisco's Brazilian unit used companies based in tax havens like Panama, the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying import taxes in Brazil.
Authorities said Cisco, which has played a key role in the construction of the Internet in Brazil, also systematically understated the value of merchandise it imported to pay less in taxes and frequently issued falsified receipts and other documents.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
"Analyzing the facts to which we have access, we do not believe that Cisco acted in an inappropriate manner," Cisco said in statement published on Friday in several Brazilian newspapers.
Authorities said Cisco's Brazilian unit had imported $500 million worth equipment over the last five years without paying import duties and is estimated to owe $826.4 million (1.5 billion reais) in taxes, fines, and interest.
The company said four of the 44 people arrested on Tuesday were Cisco employees. Police said they included Cisco executives.
"Our efforts are focused on these four detained employees and on support for their families as well as the well-being of the hundreds of Cisco professionals in Brazil and the many others that provide support to our clients," Cisco said.
Cisco did not import products directly into Brazil but through middlemen, it said.
Brazilian authorities also asked U.S. police to issue arrest warrants for five more suspects in the United States.
The investigation, which has been going on for two years, alleges that Cisco's Brazilian unit used companies based in tax havens like Panama, the Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands to avoid paying import taxes in Brazil.
Authorities said Cisco, which has played a key role in the construction of the Internet in Brazil, also systematically understated the value of merchandise it imported to pay less in taxes and frequently issued falsified receipts and other documents.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Schwartz: Sun to focus on storage business
Sun Microsystems plans to increase its focus on storage through a major internal reorganization, the company's chief executive has announced.
Writing on his blog on Monday, Jonathan Schwartz revealed the planned merger of Sun's server and storage teams into a converged systems team. The move, he wrote, would take advantage of Sun's existing "talent and assets" in its push into the ever-expanding storage market--a market set to be increasingly indistinguishable from the server world thanks to virtualization.
"The systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems," Schwartz wrote. "Talk to any data-center administrator, and that's what they want to hear--they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking--and just wait until they're virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes--across blades, racks, disk and tape."
Schwartz also reiterated Sun's enthusiasm for tape as a long-term storage medium: "In our view, the market for permanent data will only grow. Today, only tape can maintain the integrity of that data without electricity. And, for the data centers we serve, many are seeing the cost of electricity threatening to eclipse their hardware budgets (yes, I'm serious). For disk storage, over a decade, that's easy to see--just look at the power bill to run a SAN."
"Tape, with effective indexing and retrieval, represents the most economically responsible (that is, eco-responsible) archive platform for long-term storage. Broadly speaking, tape (and, in the future, other forms of removable media) are a core part of Sun's archive plans," Schwartz wrote.
Sun announced in August that it would lay off some of its workforce during the second half of this year. But it remains unclear how many job losses have already occurred and how many affect its server and storage teams.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
Writing on his blog on Monday, Jonathan Schwartz revealed the planned merger of Sun's server and storage teams into a converged systems team. The move, he wrote, would take advantage of Sun's existing "talent and assets" in its push into the ever-expanding storage market--a market set to be increasingly indistinguishable from the server world thanks to virtualization.
"The systems team will focus on the evolution and convergence of computing, storage and networking systems," Schwartz wrote. "Talk to any data-center administrator, and that's what they want to hear--they live in a world managing the (often idiosyncratic) interactions of that trinity (computing, storage and networking--and just wait until they're virtualized). We want to be in a position to innovate on their behalf, at the system level, beyond the boxes--across blades, racks, disk and tape."
Schwartz also reiterated Sun's enthusiasm for tape as a long-term storage medium: "In our view, the market for permanent data will only grow. Today, only tape can maintain the integrity of that data without electricity. And, for the data centers we serve, many are seeing the cost of electricity threatening to eclipse their hardware budgets (yes, I'm serious). For disk storage, over a decade, that's easy to see--just look at the power bill to run a SAN."
"Tape, with effective indexing and retrieval, represents the most economically responsible (that is, eco-responsible) archive platform for long-term storage. Broadly speaking, tape (and, in the future, other forms of removable media) are a core part of Sun's archive plans," Schwartz wrote.
Sun announced in August that it would lay off some of its workforce during the second half of this year. But it remains unclear how many job losses have already occurred and how many affect its server and storage teams.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
Gates still finding his voice
newsmaker SAN FRANCISCO--Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers.
He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go.
Following the launch of Microsoft's new corporate telephony software, Gates discussed how come the business phone remained the same for so long and how much it can change once it is made part of the same network as the PC. Gates also talked about the possibilities of touch-screen computing, noting how popular the idea of multitouch has been, both on Microsoft's tabletop computer, Surface, and on the iPhone.
Although he plans to shift to part-time work at Microsoft next year, Gates has said he will keep a few key projects under his purview and suggested the natural language interface push is one he'll probably keep working on. Search and the future of Office are also on the short list.
Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities?
Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.
The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.
Microsoft early on took it that, hey, the magic of software would come to bear on both--not just data networks, but also voice networks and video networks, and we got very involved in that. The real surprise to us, frankly, was that because that world was essentially satisfactory, people were so unwilling to take a risk to move, particularly (moving) business phone calls over onto a new platform.
These PBXs (the private branch exchange systems businesses use to manage phone calls) that are really--they're just computers--have existed alongside the normal infrastructure. Their wiring has stayed there, their directory, their server piece. And so we've been patiently sort of investing in this. In fact, in 1999 we got our first large-scale voice, PBX-type work under way.
And so I assume at that point you thought it was going to happen sooner?
Gates: As we take the magic of software to new things, it's OK to be too early. We don't want to be in too late. And so we saw that the pieces were starting to come together. And so it made sense for us to invest. We wanted to be there, particularly as Exchange and Outlook and Office had gotten so strong, you know, people used us to do everything but the telephony piece. The idea that, OK, now we should encompass telephony and do that kind of sat there as a clear, big opportunity for us.
The thing that's happened over the last eight years is this willingness that we now have enough customers who have had very good experiences using Internet transport, bringing the PC into the picture.
With speech recognition, one of the ideas is that there are some applications where it can pay off, even if it is not getting 100 percent recognition. Is finding some of those areas one of the keys to speech recognition being mainstream?
Gates: That's right. Remember, the stuff we're doing with unified communications, speech recognition is not actually a very key element of what goes on. There are some aspects of it. For example, when you're doing audio conferencing in our world, we can tell you who's speaking. And that's very frustrating today in traditional audio conferencing that you don't know who's come and gone, and somebody can speak up and you don't know who that is.
Or with RoundTable (Microsoft's 360-degree video conferencing camera), we use video and audio clues to tell who's speaking and bringing the focus on that. And you always have the full room view at the bottom, but you have that zoomed-in view as well. And so, you know, if it gets it slightly wrong, you can look at the full-room view and see exactly what's going on. And just like if the cameraman was focusing on something different you were interested in, well, the wide view takes care of that.
When you want to search something (in a meeting) if a word sounds like one of three things, for the search case, you can just index all three. And the fact that you might get some false positives, that is, when you do a search, you might get some part of the speech where a similar sounding word was being used, it's not that big a deal. You'll just look at it, skip past it. And so not being perfect is not a huge problem.
And I imagine that's going to be a huge change in video search, for example. Today when we have video searches, you are basically searching keywords of the Internet page that surrounds the video, the description, that sort of thing. When we start using voice recognition to search within the videos, we'll have a much more powerful experience, right?
Gates: Yeah, that will help a lot. Microsoft Research has some amazing demos around that. In terms of broadcast videos, of course, there's the requirement that there be the text annotation. So if you have that, you actually have the speech-to-text that has been done for the deaf listener, anybody who wants the captioning-type capability. So there's a lot of video out there where if you ingest it in the right way, that's available. For the bottoms-up video, or just a meeting you have in the business, then you're relying on the speech recognition software to make it easy to navigate.
What are some of the areas where you see voice going that people aren't necessarily thinking about today?
Gates: To me, voice is in the broad realm of natural interface. And natural interface is (the notion of) screens everywhere--screen in your desk, screen in your tables, screen on your walls, no more white boards, touching, which is like Surface, where you can manipulate things. It's a pen so you can have ink wherever you want. You know, pull up an article, write a little note on it and get it sent off to a friend.
The speech recognition comes into it--all these things about natural interface are coming to the fore, and they are probably the thing that's most underestimated right now about the digital revolution. People kind of gasp when they see how touch works on Surface, when they touch their iPhone then, "Ooooh, wow," you know, that's just such a natural thing.
When voice recognition is used in the right way--let's say you're in the car and you want to pick somebody to call--that's improved very dramatically, or speech output, text to speech, these things have gotten very good.
You talked about different natural language interfaces. You know, with multitouch, it seems to have really captured people's imaginations, both with what you guys have shown with Surface, certainly with the iPhone. Voice seems to be a little slower in terms of speech recognition as a mainstream computer interface.
Gates: Well, that's fair. Voice recognition is a harder thing. There are certainly tons of people, and I mean millions, who for some reason, the keyboard's not attractive to them. Either they have repetitive stress injury, or they're in a work environment where they're doing something else with their hands, where they've taken the time to learn the software and adapt to the software and gone through the training process there. And they love it. They can't believe other people don't use it.
When you sell a product to hundreds of millions of users, there are features that millions of users love that you can call an obscure feature because, percentage wise, it's not very many.
For the rest of us, the keyboard has worked so well that we are even getting the keyboard into phones. I think voice search on the phone is one of those applications that would really drive it forward. I mean, why should I have to try and type something in? I've got a phone, I've got a talk button; so that's one of the areas we're betting on.
You guys built a pretty significant voice recognition engine into Vista. It hardly gets talked about. Are you surprised that some of the things you did in Vista aren't getting more attention?
Gates: Well, when you sell a product to hundreds of millions of users, there are features that millions of users love that you can call an obscure feature because, percentage wise, it's not very many. You know, Butler Lampson, one of our great researchers who has done great work going all the way back to his days at Xerox, was just sending me mail about how fantastic the improvements in the speech stuff are in Vista and, you know, we're hard at work on the next version of Windows. We're going to take this speech stuff even further.
What about in the developing world? I imagine natural language input, you know, particularly for people who've never used a computer, has some really interesting applications.
Gates: I wouldn't go too far on that because they're not used to what the dialogue should be like, and in most of those places, the cost of labor is low enough that, you (can) have another person on the other end of the connection or talking to them directly. But, yeah, it should work for different languages. It's particularly interesting for Japanese and Chinese where the keyboard is not as natural as it is for languages with modest-sized alphabets. And so we do see ink and voice catching on there.
There was a demo recently where there was a challenge about typists compared with voice recognition, and the voice recognition won out by quite a bit. And so there's a lot that can be done pioneering off of the demand that will come out of those markets.
You've talked a fair amount about taking on just a few projects when you step away from full-time work. Is natural language input and voice one of those areas you think you'll be spending time on?
Gates: Yeah. I'd say, broadly, the whole natural interface thing. Big screens, touch, ink, speech, that's something that I think, along with cloud computing, is the next big change in how we think about software and how it becomes more basic. And, you know, Ray Ozzie is driving our cloud computing stuff and--way ahead of me, very hands-on all that stuff. Some of the natural interface stuff, I think he and Steve will ask me to sort of keep the energy and vision alive there in a strong way. Some of that will be reading off the screen or the tablet, but the whole natural interface area probably will be one that they'll pick.
Any others that you think you will take on?
Gates: Well, it's hard to say. Search is such a fun area right now. They might pick that. There are some ideas about where the Office software should go--I'm really quite enthused about some things. So I'd say those are the three most likely. And it's only going to be three or four, so--they'll have to decide.
He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go.
Following the launch of Microsoft's new corporate telephony software, Gates discussed how come the business phone remained the same for so long and how much it can change once it is made part of the same network as the PC. Gates also talked about the possibilities of touch-screen computing, noting how popular the idea of multitouch has been, both on Microsoft's tabletop computer, Surface, and on the iPhone.
Although he plans to shift to part-time work at Microsoft next year, Gates has said he will keep a few key projects under his purview and suggested the natural language interface push is one he'll probably keep working on. Search and the future of Office are also on the short list.
Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities?
Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.
The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.
Microsoft early on took it that, hey, the magic of software would come to bear on both--not just data networks, but also voice networks and video networks, and we got very involved in that. The real surprise to us, frankly, was that because that world was essentially satisfactory, people were so unwilling to take a risk to move, particularly (moving) business phone calls over onto a new platform.
These PBXs (the private branch exchange systems businesses use to manage phone calls) that are really--they're just computers--have existed alongside the normal infrastructure. Their wiring has stayed there, their directory, their server piece. And so we've been patiently sort of investing in this. In fact, in 1999 we got our first large-scale voice, PBX-type work under way.
And so I assume at that point you thought it was going to happen sooner?
Gates: As we take the magic of software to new things, it's OK to be too early. We don't want to be in too late. And so we saw that the pieces were starting to come together. And so it made sense for us to invest. We wanted to be there, particularly as Exchange and Outlook and Office had gotten so strong, you know, people used us to do everything but the telephony piece. The idea that, OK, now we should encompass telephony and do that kind of sat there as a clear, big opportunity for us.
The thing that's happened over the last eight years is this willingness that we now have enough customers who have had very good experiences using Internet transport, bringing the PC into the picture.
With speech recognition, one of the ideas is that there are some applications where it can pay off, even if it is not getting 100 percent recognition. Is finding some of those areas one of the keys to speech recognition being mainstream?
Gates: That's right. Remember, the stuff we're doing with unified communications, speech recognition is not actually a very key element of what goes on. There are some aspects of it. For example, when you're doing audio conferencing in our world, we can tell you who's speaking. And that's very frustrating today in traditional audio conferencing that you don't know who's come and gone, and somebody can speak up and you don't know who that is.
Or with RoundTable (Microsoft's 360-degree video conferencing camera), we use video and audio clues to tell who's speaking and bringing the focus on that. And you always have the full room view at the bottom, but you have that zoomed-in view as well. And so, you know, if it gets it slightly wrong, you can look at the full-room view and see exactly what's going on. And just like if the cameraman was focusing on something different you were interested in, well, the wide view takes care of that.
When you want to search something (in a meeting) if a word sounds like one of three things, for the search case, you can just index all three. And the fact that you might get some false positives, that is, when you do a search, you might get some part of the speech where a similar sounding word was being used, it's not that big a deal. You'll just look at it, skip past it. And so not being perfect is not a huge problem.
And I imagine that's going to be a huge change in video search, for example. Today when we have video searches, you are basically searching keywords of the Internet page that surrounds the video, the description, that sort of thing. When we start using voice recognition to search within the videos, we'll have a much more powerful experience, right?
Gates: Yeah, that will help a lot. Microsoft Research has some amazing demos around that. In terms of broadcast videos, of course, there's the requirement that there be the text annotation. So if you have that, you actually have the speech-to-text that has been done for the deaf listener, anybody who wants the captioning-type capability. So there's a lot of video out there where if you ingest it in the right way, that's available. For the bottoms-up video, or just a meeting you have in the business, then you're relying on the speech recognition software to make it easy to navigate.
What are some of the areas where you see voice going that people aren't necessarily thinking about today?
Gates: To me, voice is in the broad realm of natural interface. And natural interface is (the notion of) screens everywhere--screen in your desk, screen in your tables, screen on your walls, no more white boards, touching, which is like Surface, where you can manipulate things. It's a pen so you can have ink wherever you want. You know, pull up an article, write a little note on it and get it sent off to a friend.
The speech recognition comes into it--all these things about natural interface are coming to the fore, and they are probably the thing that's most underestimated right now about the digital revolution. People kind of gasp when they see how touch works on Surface, when they touch their iPhone then, "Ooooh, wow," you know, that's just such a natural thing.
When voice recognition is used in the right way--let's say you're in the car and you want to pick somebody to call--that's improved very dramatically, or speech output, text to speech, these things have gotten very good.
You talked about different natural language interfaces. You know, with multitouch, it seems to have really captured people's imaginations, both with what you guys have shown with Surface, certainly with the iPhone. Voice seems to be a little slower in terms of speech recognition as a mainstream computer interface.
Gates: Well, that's fair. Voice recognition is a harder thing. There are certainly tons of people, and I mean millions, who for some reason, the keyboard's not attractive to them. Either they have repetitive stress injury, or they're in a work environment where they're doing something else with their hands, where they've taken the time to learn the software and adapt to the software and gone through the training process there. And they love it. They can't believe other people don't use it.
When you sell a product to hundreds of millions of users, there are features that millions of users love that you can call an obscure feature because, percentage wise, it's not very many.
For the rest of us, the keyboard has worked so well that we are even getting the keyboard into phones. I think voice search on the phone is one of those applications that would really drive it forward. I mean, why should I have to try and type something in? I've got a phone, I've got a talk button; so that's one of the areas we're betting on.
You guys built a pretty significant voice recognition engine into Vista. It hardly gets talked about. Are you surprised that some of the things you did in Vista aren't getting more attention?
Gates: Well, when you sell a product to hundreds of millions of users, there are features that millions of users love that you can call an obscure feature because, percentage wise, it's not very many. You know, Butler Lampson, one of our great researchers who has done great work going all the way back to his days at Xerox, was just sending me mail about how fantastic the improvements in the speech stuff are in Vista and, you know, we're hard at work on the next version of Windows. We're going to take this speech stuff even further.
What about in the developing world? I imagine natural language input, you know, particularly for people who've never used a computer, has some really interesting applications.
Gates: I wouldn't go too far on that because they're not used to what the dialogue should be like, and in most of those places, the cost of labor is low enough that, you (can) have another person on the other end of the connection or talking to them directly. But, yeah, it should work for different languages. It's particularly interesting for Japanese and Chinese where the keyboard is not as natural as it is for languages with modest-sized alphabets. And so we do see ink and voice catching on there.
There was a demo recently where there was a challenge about typists compared with voice recognition, and the voice recognition won out by quite a bit. And so there's a lot that can be done pioneering off of the demand that will come out of those markets.
You've talked a fair amount about taking on just a few projects when you step away from full-time work. Is natural language input and voice one of those areas you think you'll be spending time on?
Gates: Yeah. I'd say, broadly, the whole natural interface thing. Big screens, touch, ink, speech, that's something that I think, along with cloud computing, is the next big change in how we think about software and how it becomes more basic. And, you know, Ray Ozzie is driving our cloud computing stuff and--way ahead of me, very hands-on all that stuff. Some of the natural interface stuff, I think he and Steve will ask me to sort of keep the energy and vision alive there in a strong way. Some of that will be reading off the screen or the tablet, but the whole natural interface area probably will be one that they'll pick.
Any others that you think you will take on?
Gates: Well, it's hard to say. Search is such a fun area right now. They might pick that. There are some ideas about where the Office software should go--I'm really quite enthused about some things. So I'd say those are the three most likely. And it's only going to be three or four, so--they'll have to decide.
Monday, October 08, 2007
London Internet whiz was vital militant link: FBI
A London student known online as "Irhabi 007" served as a vital communications link in three militant plots that had once appeared unrelated, FBI Director Robert Mueller said on Friday.
Mueller disclosed details of the student's role as a way, he said, of illustrating the importance of the Internet as a communications channel in modern terrorism and the challenges authorities face in tracking down militants.
"The threat exists not only in the mountains of Pakistan, but also in the shadows of the Internet," Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations in a speech.
The Moroccan-born student's real name was Younes Tsouli and his nickname translates as "Terrorist 007." He was 22 years old when he was arrested in London in October 2005.
Said by prosecutors to have close ties to al Qaeda, Tsouli pleaded guilty in July to inciting terrorism on the Internet and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Tsouli's computer revealed he communicated extensively with two students from Atlanta accused of supporting terrorism by filming potential targets such as the U.S. Capitol and participating in "terrorist training" or "terrorism-related activities" in South Asia, Mueller said.
Tsouli also was in "steady communication" with accused plotters in a case involving a Swedish national and Danish man arrested in Bosnia on suspicion of preparing to bomb targets in Europe, Mueller said.
In addition, he said, Tsouli communicated with members of a suspected militant cell in Canada known as the "Toronto 17" who are accused of planning to attack targets in Canada.
"These individuals seemed to be unrelated, but as we came to find out, they were not," Mueller said.
He said Tsouli was at the "center of this web," facilitating communications and posting thousands of files including manuals for attacks and videotaped beheadings.
"He used his computer skills to build a global virtual network for terrorists and their supporters," Mueller said. Mueller's speech comes as the Bush administration is seeking to permanently expand legal authority to eavesdrop on the communications of foreign terrorism suspects. Many Democrats are seeking restrictions on the authority to protect the rights of innocent Americans.
Mueller said the Tsouli case showed the importance of adapting legislation to match technological change.
"Our capacity, both by way of the expense of keeping up with that curve, as well as the transformation of our laws, just has not kept pace," Mueller said.
"Growth in technology requires us to have a very swift debate and take measures that are necessary to ensure that we can continue to have the kind of investigative capability...that enables us to continue to gather information."
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Mueller disclosed details of the student's role as a way, he said, of illustrating the importance of the Internet as a communications channel in modern terrorism and the challenges authorities face in tracking down militants.
"The threat exists not only in the mountains of Pakistan, but also in the shadows of the Internet," Mueller told the Council on Foreign Relations in a speech.
The Moroccan-born student's real name was Younes Tsouli and his nickname translates as "Terrorist 007." He was 22 years old when he was arrested in London in October 2005.
Said by prosecutors to have close ties to al Qaeda, Tsouli pleaded guilty in July to inciting terrorism on the Internet and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Tsouli's computer revealed he communicated extensively with two students from Atlanta accused of supporting terrorism by filming potential targets such as the U.S. Capitol and participating in "terrorist training" or "terrorism-related activities" in South Asia, Mueller said.
Tsouli also was in "steady communication" with accused plotters in a case involving a Swedish national and Danish man arrested in Bosnia on suspicion of preparing to bomb targets in Europe, Mueller said.
In addition, he said, Tsouli communicated with members of a suspected militant cell in Canada known as the "Toronto 17" who are accused of planning to attack targets in Canada.
"These individuals seemed to be unrelated, but as we came to find out, they were not," Mueller said.
He said Tsouli was at the "center of this web," facilitating communications and posting thousands of files including manuals for attacks and videotaped beheadings.
"He used his computer skills to build a global virtual network for terrorists and their supporters," Mueller said. Mueller's speech comes as the Bush administration is seeking to permanently expand legal authority to eavesdrop on the communications of foreign terrorism suspects. Many Democrats are seeking restrictions on the authority to protect the rights of innocent Americans.
Mueller said the Tsouli case showed the importance of adapting legislation to match technological change.
"Our capacity, both by way of the expense of keeping up with that curve, as well as the transformation of our laws, just has not kept pace," Mueller said.
"Growth in technology requires us to have a very swift debate and take measures that are necessary to ensure that we can continue to have the kind of investigative capability...that enables us to continue to gather information."
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
F-Secure sees smaller botnets on the rise
Cybercriminals are downsizing their botnets to make it harder for software security companies to track and contain botnet operations, researchers say.
Computers infected with a virus unknowingly become "zombies" in a botnet--which is a network used to send out spam and to mount further attacks on other machines. The zombie army can be controlled remotely, with the botnet creators usually trying to build the largest possible botnet of compromised computers to rent out to gangs for as little as $100 for a couple of hours.
But researchers at antivirus company F-Secure have reported seeing these large networks being broken down into smaller groups of compromised computers because the creation of large botnets is not creating as much revenue for such cybercriminals.
Mika Stahlberg, program manager of the security response team at F-Secure, said the company is still seeing very big botnets around the world but coders are no longer trying to build as big a botnet as they can because that does not make any more money than a collection of smaller botnets.
The botnet bandits are also erring on the side of caution by steering away from larger botnets, because if the central server controlling such a network goes down, then the entire botnet is lost, according to F-Secure."These people don't want to put all their eggs in one basket and are, therefore, running smaller botnets," Stahlberg added.
Malicious-software writers are also getting lazy, according to F-Secure, and are no longer attempting to trick companies by using increasingly complex viruses.
Sean Sullivan, technical expert at F-Secure, said virus writers can no longer beat security companies with complex codes and are therefore trying to do it by creating "malware factories" that swamp the security companies.
"It used to be a big event when a virus came along," Sullivan said, "but now we get 10,000 (malicious-software samples) a day, most of which are variations on the same code."
F-Secure employs a 16-person response team at its Finnish headquarters to monitor and detect malicious-software activity using tools such as a Google Earth mashup and a mobile-phone bunker to test viruses.
Gemma Simpson of Silicon.com reported from London.
Computers infected with a virus unknowingly become "zombies" in a botnet--which is a network used to send out spam and to mount further attacks on other machines. The zombie army can be controlled remotely, with the botnet creators usually trying to build the largest possible botnet of compromised computers to rent out to gangs for as little as $100 for a couple of hours.
But researchers at antivirus company F-Secure have reported seeing these large networks being broken down into smaller groups of compromised computers because the creation of large botnets is not creating as much revenue for such cybercriminals.
Mika Stahlberg, program manager of the security response team at F-Secure, said the company is still seeing very big botnets around the world but coders are no longer trying to build as big a botnet as they can because that does not make any more money than a collection of smaller botnets.
The botnet bandits are also erring on the side of caution by steering away from larger botnets, because if the central server controlling such a network goes down, then the entire botnet is lost, according to F-Secure."These people don't want to put all their eggs in one basket and are, therefore, running smaller botnets," Stahlberg added.
Malicious-software writers are also getting lazy, according to F-Secure, and are no longer attempting to trick companies by using increasingly complex viruses.
Sean Sullivan, technical expert at F-Secure, said virus writers can no longer beat security companies with complex codes and are therefore trying to do it by creating "malware factories" that swamp the security companies.
"It used to be a big event when a virus came along," Sullivan said, "but now we get 10,000 (malicious-software samples) a day, most of which are variations on the same code."
F-Secure employs a 16-person response team at its Finnish headquarters to monitor and detect malicious-software activity using tools such as a Google Earth mashup and a mobile-phone bunker to test viruses.
Gemma Simpson of Silicon.com reported from London.
Spam-scam crackdown nets $2 billion in fake checks
An international crackdown on Internet financial scams this year has yielded more than $2.1 billion in seized fake checks and 77 arrests in the Netherlands, Nigeria and Canada, U.S. and other authorities said on Wednesday.
The scammers, often West African organized crime groups, use ploys such as "spam" e-mail offering to pay recipients "processing fees" for depositing checks, which later turn out to be phony, and sending the ostensible proceeds to the scammer, authorities said.
The ruses are aided by U.S. financial practices that quickly credit a bank customer for deposits even though it can take far longer to discover a fake check and reclaim the money from the customer. The victims find themselves out the money they forward when the checks prove to be fake.
"Most Americans don't realize they are financially liable when they fall for these scams," Susan Grant, vice president of the National Consumers League, said at a news conference to publicize the arrests and promote awareness of the frauds.
The crackdown netted 16 arrests in Nigeria, 60 in the Netherlands and one in Canada, said Greg Campbell, U.S. Postal Inspection Service inspector in charge of global security.
"We shut down Internet cafes, we arrested scammers, and significantly disrupted the flow of fake checks into the United States," Campbell said.
Law enforcement in England also took part. Nigeria is a recognized hotbed for the financial frauds and the other countries have significant West African populations that include fraud operators, authorities said.
Three suspects from the Netherlands and Nigeria were extradited to New York and are awaiting trial, said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Alice Fischer. The United States is seeking to extradite five others.
The United States is a major draw for the scammers. But other English-speaking countries are also targeted, in part because of the widespread use of English on the Internet and because of Nigeria's large English-speaking population, Campbell said.
Nigeria has brought to court 290 cases of suspected fraud, and the prosecutions have been successful in 115 of the cases so far, said Ibrahim Lamorde, head of that country's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
He said Nigeria is doing its best to stamp out the fake check operations. It has seized counterfeiting equipment and convened meetings of anti-fraud officials from across Africa. But he acknowledged Nigeria has an image problem. "The first country that comes to mind is Nigeria," Lamorde said.
Two-thirds of Americans said they received at least one potential scam contact per week, and 18 percent said they or a family member had fallen for one, in a survey conducted for an alliance of banks, consumer groups and the U.S. Postal Service.
Grant said complaints to her group about fake checks have risen 60 percent this year, and the average victim loses about $3,000 to $4,000.
Some U.S. banks have changed their practices, for example, by training tellers to better inform depositors about risks, Grant said. She called for regulations mandating that bank customers be given clearer information.
Offers can also come in direct mail. Fisher showed hand-written envelopes directed to her at a Justice Department address.
Inside were $850 checks with a Wal-Mart logo, with letters offering her a 10 percent cut if she would cash the checks and send the money back. "After you laugh and think how silly it is...this shows (the problem) is just completely rampant," she said.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
The scammers, often West African organized crime groups, use ploys such as "spam" e-mail offering to pay recipients "processing fees" for depositing checks, which later turn out to be phony, and sending the ostensible proceeds to the scammer, authorities said.
The ruses are aided by U.S. financial practices that quickly credit a bank customer for deposits even though it can take far longer to discover a fake check and reclaim the money from the customer. The victims find themselves out the money they forward when the checks prove to be fake.
"Most Americans don't realize they are financially liable when they fall for these scams," Susan Grant, vice president of the National Consumers League, said at a news conference to publicize the arrests and promote awareness of the frauds.
The crackdown netted 16 arrests in Nigeria, 60 in the Netherlands and one in Canada, said Greg Campbell, U.S. Postal Inspection Service inspector in charge of global security.
"We shut down Internet cafes, we arrested scammers, and significantly disrupted the flow of fake checks into the United States," Campbell said.
Law enforcement in England also took part. Nigeria is a recognized hotbed for the financial frauds and the other countries have significant West African populations that include fraud operators, authorities said.
Three suspects from the Netherlands and Nigeria were extradited to New York and are awaiting trial, said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Alice Fischer. The United States is seeking to extradite five others.
The United States is a major draw for the scammers. But other English-speaking countries are also targeted, in part because of the widespread use of English on the Internet and because of Nigeria's large English-speaking population, Campbell said.
Nigeria has brought to court 290 cases of suspected fraud, and the prosecutions have been successful in 115 of the cases so far, said Ibrahim Lamorde, head of that country's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
He said Nigeria is doing its best to stamp out the fake check operations. It has seized counterfeiting equipment and convened meetings of anti-fraud officials from across Africa. But he acknowledged Nigeria has an image problem. "The first country that comes to mind is Nigeria," Lamorde said.
Two-thirds of Americans said they received at least one potential scam contact per week, and 18 percent said they or a family member had fallen for one, in a survey conducted for an alliance of banks, consumer groups and the U.S. Postal Service.
Grant said complaints to her group about fake checks have risen 60 percent this year, and the average victim loses about $3,000 to $4,000.
Some U.S. banks have changed their practices, for example, by training tellers to better inform depositors about risks, Grant said. She called for regulations mandating that bank customers be given clearer information.
Offers can also come in direct mail. Fisher showed hand-written envelopes directed to her at a Justice Department address.
Inside were $850 checks with a Wal-Mart logo, with letters offering her a 10 percent cut if she would cash the checks and send the money back. "After you laugh and think how silly it is...this shows (the problem) is just completely rampant," she said.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Microsoft plans medical-record service
Microsoft is aiming to get consumers to store all of their health records online. It's a laudable goal, but one fraught with challenges.
On Thursday the company is outlining its vision, dubbed HealthVault, in which a person can view, from one place, their complete health records. Consumers will be able to view information from medical devices, myriad health care providers and insurance companies as well as share that information with health care providers of their choosing or search for information related to their health issues.
In conjunction with the health record effort, Microsoft is also launching HealthVault Search, a secure version of its health care search engine, drawn from its acquisition of Medstory.
It's a bold vision, but one that is probably years from reality. First of all, most consumers don't have electronic access to their health records today. As part of the new HealthVault service Microsoft is announcing, hospitals, insurance companies and others will be able to make such records available to consumers, though no major providers are committing to do so as part of HealthVault's initial launch.
"It's a long journey," said Peter Neupert, the former Drugstore.com chief who is now head of Microsoft's health care efforts. "We think it's an important stake to put in the ground."
As with any sort of health care records, there are all kinds of privacy and security questions, though Microsoft is hoping to assuage most concerns by putting the consumer in charge of who sees what, when it comes to their records.
"A lot of what I want to do with my vault is share with a care provider or interact with a care provider," Neupert said. "I don't think it's appropriate to try to get in between that relationship. I want to enable it."
Six years ago Microsoft launched an ill-fated effort, code-named Hailstorm, to manage consumers' information online. Concerns over data security and privacy, coupled with difficulty in striking partnership deals, eventually sank that project.
Similar concerns may apply to the company's health information efforts. Because the new service is free to consumers and partners, such as health care providers and medical-device makers, it's unclear how Microsoft will procure revenue from HealthVault.Neupert said the company's business model centers on advertising, particularly search-related advertising.
"When I am doing a health search I typically have a need," Neupert said. "The ad is a valuable piece of content.
Microsoft's consumer effort in health care parallels a push the company is making on the clinical side of things, following its July 2006 purchase of Azyxxi.
Microsoft is not expecting consumers to just rush out and sign up for HealthVault en masse. "I don't expect a million users to sign up in the next six months," Neupert said.
Even signing up partners is likely to be a long battle. The initial supporters are organizations like the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the American Diabetes Association--not the kind of insurance companies and hospital chains that Microsoft needs to make HealthVault match its vision.
On Thursday the company is outlining its vision, dubbed HealthVault, in which a person can view, from one place, their complete health records. Consumers will be able to view information from medical devices, myriad health care providers and insurance companies as well as share that information with health care providers of their choosing or search for information related to their health issues.
In conjunction with the health record effort, Microsoft is also launching HealthVault Search, a secure version of its health care search engine, drawn from its acquisition of Medstory.
It's a bold vision, but one that is probably years from reality. First of all, most consumers don't have electronic access to their health records today. As part of the new HealthVault service Microsoft is announcing, hospitals, insurance companies and others will be able to make such records available to consumers, though no major providers are committing to do so as part of HealthVault's initial launch.
"It's a long journey," said Peter Neupert, the former Drugstore.com chief who is now head of Microsoft's health care efforts. "We think it's an important stake to put in the ground."
As with any sort of health care records, there are all kinds of privacy and security questions, though Microsoft is hoping to assuage most concerns by putting the consumer in charge of who sees what, when it comes to their records.
"A lot of what I want to do with my vault is share with a care provider or interact with a care provider," Neupert said. "I don't think it's appropriate to try to get in between that relationship. I want to enable it."
Six years ago Microsoft launched an ill-fated effort, code-named Hailstorm, to manage consumers' information online. Concerns over data security and privacy, coupled with difficulty in striking partnership deals, eventually sank that project.
Similar concerns may apply to the company's health information efforts. Because the new service is free to consumers and partners, such as health care providers and medical-device makers, it's unclear how Microsoft will procure revenue from HealthVault.Neupert said the company's business model centers on advertising, particularly search-related advertising.
"When I am doing a health search I typically have a need," Neupert said. "The ad is a valuable piece of content.
Microsoft's consumer effort in health care parallels a push the company is making on the clinical side of things, following its July 2006 purchase of Azyxxi.
Microsoft is not expecting consumers to just rush out and sign up for HealthVault en masse. "I don't expect a million users to sign up in the next six months," Neupert said.
Even signing up partners is likely to be a long battle. The initial supporters are organizations like the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the American Diabetes Association--not the kind of insurance companies and hospital chains that Microsoft needs to make HealthVault match its vision.
Social networking helps drive server sales
Social networking is pushing up server sales despite the increasing adoption of server-efficient virtualization technology, according to Sun Microsystems.
Virtualization squeezes more computing muscle out of fewer physical servers, so as its use becomes more widespread, it should help slow server sales.
But Richard Green, executive vice president of software at Sun, said there is no shortage of demand for hardware because of data-heavy applications such as social-networking Web sites demanding more storage space, resulting in server counts "going through the roof."
Sun has been bringing virtualization into its business for the past few years to help it build revenue, after struggling in the post-dot-com crash period. But the marrying of virtual and physical tools is causing "real havoc" in data centers with ad hoc, internally developed management tools not doing the job effectively, according to Green.
"The whole idea of any innovation (such as virtualization) is to give you the tools to throw at a set of problems," he said. "But with that comes increasing complexity."
Sun said it will launch an open-source virtualization management tool this December, which will be able to run on any operating system.
Earlier this month Sun's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, announced the company would be merging its server and storage teams into a converged system team, with the aim of putting a stronger focus on virtualization.
Gemma Simpson of Silicon.com reported from London.
Virtualization squeezes more computing muscle out of fewer physical servers, so as its use becomes more widespread, it should help slow server sales.
But Richard Green, executive vice president of software at Sun, said there is no shortage of demand for hardware because of data-heavy applications such as social-networking Web sites demanding more storage space, resulting in server counts "going through the roof."
Sun has been bringing virtualization into its business for the past few years to help it build revenue, after struggling in the post-dot-com crash period. But the marrying of virtual and physical tools is causing "real havoc" in data centers with ad hoc, internally developed management tools not doing the job effectively, according to Green.
"The whole idea of any innovation (such as virtualization) is to give you the tools to throw at a set of problems," he said. "But with that comes increasing complexity."
Sun said it will launch an open-source virtualization management tool this December, which will be able to run on any operating system.
Earlier this month Sun's chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, announced the company would be merging its server and storage teams into a converged system team, with the aim of putting a stronger focus on virtualization.
Gemma Simpson of Silicon.com reported from London.
Laptop with a mission widens its audience
In November, you'll be able to buy a new laptop that's spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It's fanless, it's silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, gamepad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.
And this laptop will cost $200.
The computer, if you hadn't already guessed, is the fabled "$100 laptop" that's been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It's an effort by One Laptop Per Child to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.
The concept: if a machine is designed smartly enough, without the bloat of standard laptops, and sold in large enough quantities, the price can be brought way, way down. Maybe not down to $100, as OLPC originally hoped, but low enough for developing countries to afford millions of them--one per child.
The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.
OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world--for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called "Get 1, Give 1," and it works like this. You pay $400. One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.
The group does worry that people might compare the XO with $1,000 Windows or Mac laptops. They might blog about their disappointment, thereby imperiling OLPC's continuing talks with third world governments.
It's easy to see how that might happen. There's no CD/DVD drive at all, no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. The Linux operating system doesn't run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs. The membrane-sealed, spillproof keyboard is too small for touch-typing by an adult.
And then there's the look of this thing. It's made of shiny green and white plastic, like a Fisher-Price toy, complete with a handle. With its two earlike antennas raised, it could be Shrek's little robot friend.
And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. "Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop," they say.
"Breakthrough after breakthrough"
Clearly, the XO's mission has sailed over these people's heads like a 747.
The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough--some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.
In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges--versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.
The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That's one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.
Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO's color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it's almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.
The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup--even when there's no Internet connection.
With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos--color-coded to differentiate them--represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO's visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)
This feature has some astonishing utility. If only one laptop has an Internet connection, for example, the others can get online, too, thanks to the mesh network. And when OLPC releases software upgrades, one laptop can broadcast them to other nearby laptops.
Power users will snort at the specs of this machine. It has only one gigabyte of storage--all flash memory--with 20 percent of that occupied by the XO's system software. And the processor is feeble by conventional standards. Starting up takes two minutes, and switching between programs is poky.
Once in a program, though, the speed is fine; it turns out that a light processor is plenty if the software is written compactly and smartly. (OLPC points out that despite gigantic leaps in processing power, today's business laptops don't feel any faster than they did a few years ago. The operating systems and programs have added so much bloat that they absorb the speed gains.)
The built-in programs are equally clever. There's a word processor, Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games (clones of Tetris and Connect 4), three music programs, a painting application, a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents.
There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)
There's real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the computer itself. Many nations in XO's market have few natural resources, and the global need for information workers grows with every passing day.
Share and share alike
Most of the XO's programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you're word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you're doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You've never seen anything like it.
The pair of laptops I reviewed had incomplete power-management software, beta-stage software and occasional cosmetic glitches. But OLPC and its worldwide army of open-source (volunteer) programmers expect to polish things by the time the assembly line starts to roll in November. No, the biggest obstacle to the XO's success is not technology--it's already a wonder--but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers.
(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte's, response: "Nobody I know would say, 'By the way, let's hold off on education.' Education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.")
But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the obstacles and doubters, OLPC has come up with a laptop that's tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles.
It's a technological breakthrough, for sure. Now let's just hope it breaks through the human barriers.
Entire contents, Copyright © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
And this laptop will cost $200.
The computer, if you hadn't already guessed, is the fabled "$100 laptop" that's been igniting hype and controversy for three years. It's an effort by One Laptop Per Child to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries.
The concept: if a machine is designed smartly enough, without the bloat of standard laptops, and sold in large enough quantities, the price can be brought way, way down. Maybe not down to $100, as OLPC originally hoped, but low enough for developing countries to afford millions of them--one per child.
The laptop is now called the XO, because if you turn the logo 90 degrees, it looks like a child.
OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world--for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called "Get 1, Give 1," and it works like this. You pay $400. One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country.
The group does worry that people might compare the XO with $1,000 Windows or Mac laptops. They might blog about their disappointment, thereby imperiling OLPC's continuing talks with third world governments.
It's easy to see how that might happen. There's no CD/DVD drive at all, no hard drive and only a 7.5-inch screen. The Linux operating system doesn't run Microsoft Office, Photoshop or any other standard Mac or Windows programs. The membrane-sealed, spillproof keyboard is too small for touch-typing by an adult.
And then there's the look of this thing. It's made of shiny green and white plastic, like a Fisher-Price toy, complete with a handle. With its two earlike antennas raised, it could be Shrek's little robot friend.
And sure enough, the bloggers and the ignorant have already begun to spit on the XO laptop. "Dude, for $400, I can buy a real Windows laptop," they say.
"Breakthrough after breakthrough"
Clearly, the XO's mission has sailed over these people's heads like a 747.
The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough--some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.
In the places where the XO will be used, power is often scarce. So the laptop uses a new battery chemistry, called lithium ferro-phosphate. It runs at one-tenth the temperature of a standard laptop battery, costs $10 to replace, and is good for 2,000 charges--versus 500 on a regular laptop battery.
The laptop consumes an average of 2 watts, compared with 60 or more on a typical business laptop. That's one reason it gets such great battery life. A small yo-yo-like pull-cord charger is available (one minute of pulling provides 10 minutes of power); so is a $12 solar panel that, although only one foot square, provides enough power to recharge or power the machine.
Speaking of bright sunshine: the XO's color screen is bright and, at 200 dots an inch, razor sharp (1,200 by 900 pixels). But it has a secret identity: in bright sun, you can turn off the backlight altogether. The resulting display, black on light gray, is so clear and readable, it's almost like paper. Then, of course, the battery lasts even longer.
The XO offers both regular wireless Internet connections and something called mesh networking, which means that all the laptops see each other, instantly, without any setup--even when there's no Internet connection.
With one press of a button, you see a map. Individual XO logos--color-coded to differentiate them--represent other laptops in the area; you connect with one click. (You never double-click in the XO's visual, super-simple operating system. You either point with the mouse or click once.)
This feature has some astonishing utility. If only one laptop has an Internet connection, for example, the others can get online, too, thanks to the mesh network. And when OLPC releases software upgrades, one laptop can broadcast them to other nearby laptops.
Power users will snort at the specs of this machine. It has only one gigabyte of storage--all flash memory--with 20 percent of that occupied by the XO's system software. And the processor is feeble by conventional standards. Starting up takes two minutes, and switching between programs is poky.
Once in a program, though, the speed is fine; it turns out that a light processor is plenty if the software is written compactly and smartly. (OLPC points out that despite gigantic leaps in processing power, today's business laptops don't feel any faster than they did a few years ago. The operating systems and programs have added so much bloat that they absorb the speed gains.)
The built-in programs are equally clever. There's a word processor, Web browser, calculator, PDF textbook reader, some games (clones of Tetris and Connect 4), three music programs, a painting application, a chat program and so on. The camera module permits teachers, for the first time, to send messages home to illiterate parents.
There are also three programming environments of different degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students can not only study how their favorite programs have been written, but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of things, they can restore the original.)
There's real brilliance in this emphasis on understanding the computer itself. Many nations in XO's market have few natural resources, and the global need for information workers grows with every passing day.
Share and share alike
Most of the XO's programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you're word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you're doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You've never seen anything like it.
The pair of laptops I reviewed had incomplete power-management software, beta-stage software and occasional cosmetic glitches. But OLPC and its worldwide army of open-source (volunteer) programmers expect to polish things by the time the assembly line starts to roll in November. No, the biggest obstacle to the XO's success is not technology--it's already a wonder--but fear. Overseas ministers of education fear that changing the status quo might risk their jobs. Big-name computer makers fear that the XO will steal away an overlooked two-billion-person market. Critics fear that the poorest countries need food, malaria protection and clean water far more than computers.
(The founder, Nicholas Negroponte's, response: "Nobody I know would say, 'By the way, let's hold off on education.' Education happens to be a solution to all of those same problems.")
But the XO deserves to overcome those fears. Despite all the obstacles and doubters, OLPC has come up with a laptop that's tough and simple enough for hot, humid, dusty locales; cool enough to keep young minds engaged, both at school and at home; and open, flexible and collaborative enough to support a million different teaching and learning styles.
It's a technological breakthrough, for sure. Now let's just hope it breaks through the human barriers.
Entire contents, Copyright © 2007 The New York Times. All rights reserved.
SAP plans to acquire Business Objects
SAP announced Sunday afternoon it plans to acquire Business Objects in a cash deal valued at slightly more than $6.8 billion.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008, is SAP's largest acquisition ever. The deal is especially noteworthy for SAP, which has tended to favor developing its own technology, rather than acquiring it.
The acquisition of Business Objects, a leading player in business intelligence software, is designed to dovetail into SAP's previously announced strategic plans to double its addressable market by 2010, said Henning Kagermann, SAP chief executive, during a press conference Sunday afternoon.
Nearly a year ago, SAP noted the business intelligence market was growing at a rapid rate. And SAP's customers had been calling on the enterprise applications giant to add an end-to-end solution for structured and unstructured business analytics and embed them into SAP's business suite, Kagermann noted.
"This acquisition accelerates our growth potential," Kagermann said.
Forrester Research estimates that the business performance solutions market will grow by 11 percent through 2010.
Business Objects, based in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, will operate as a stand-alone business and be part of the SAP Group.
Roughly 40 percent of Business Objects' customers use SAP, said John Schwarz, Business Objects chief executive.
The companies said there is very little overlap and neither company expects significant restructuring as a result.
With the Business Objects acquisition, SAP will be further positioned to compete against its arch-rival Oracle. Last March, Oracle acquired business intelligence tool developer Hyperion Solutions in a $3.3 billion deal.
At the time of the Hyperion acquisition, Oracle touted that "thousands of SAP customers" relied on Hyperion for such things as financial analysis and reporting system of record. And that with its acquisition, SAP's customers would need to tie into Oracle's Hyperion software to view and analyze their underlying SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) data.
Business Objects' Schwarz, however, noted that his company is roughly three times the size of Hyperion.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008, is SAP's largest acquisition ever. The deal is especially noteworthy for SAP, which has tended to favor developing its own technology, rather than acquiring it.
The acquisition of Business Objects, a leading player in business intelligence software, is designed to dovetail into SAP's previously announced strategic plans to double its addressable market by 2010, said Henning Kagermann, SAP chief executive, during a press conference Sunday afternoon.
Nearly a year ago, SAP noted the business intelligence market was growing at a rapid rate. And SAP's customers had been calling on the enterprise applications giant to add an end-to-end solution for structured and unstructured business analytics and embed them into SAP's business suite, Kagermann noted.
"This acquisition accelerates our growth potential," Kagermann said.
Forrester Research estimates that the business performance solutions market will grow by 11 percent through 2010.
Business Objects, based in San Jose, Calif., and Paris, will operate as a stand-alone business and be part of the SAP Group.
Roughly 40 percent of Business Objects' customers use SAP, said John Schwarz, Business Objects chief executive.
The companies said there is very little overlap and neither company expects significant restructuring as a result.
With the Business Objects acquisition, SAP will be further positioned to compete against its arch-rival Oracle. Last March, Oracle acquired business intelligence tool developer Hyperion Solutions in a $3.3 billion deal.
At the time of the Hyperion acquisition, Oracle touted that "thousands of SAP customers" relied on Hyperion for such things as financial analysis and reporting system of record. And that with its acquisition, SAP's customers would need to tie into Oracle's Hyperion software to view and analyze their underlying SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) data.
Business Objects' Schwarz, however, noted that his company is roughly three times the size of Hyperion.
Friday, September 21, 2007
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Hybrid hard drives: Why they are failing
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Back in 2005, Samsung and Microsoft announced something that got the storage fans in the world excited: they had designed a hard drive with a bit of flash memory in it that would serve as a data cache.
The hybrid hard drive would cut down power consumption, increase battery life, and, most importantly, whack boot-up time, the companies said.
But so far, you don't see a lot of them on store shelves and the benefits are somewhat disappointing, said hard drive executives at Diskcon 2007, taking place in Santa Clara this week.
"The initial versions haven't delivered the performance consumers expected," said Dr. Richard New, director of research for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
The problem, said New, might be correctable if drive makers put in more flash. Right now, hybrid drives have about 256MB of memory. If you put in 4GB or so, the flash could hold a lot more storage, which in turn would reduce power consumption and help boot-up time. That would raise prices, though.
The small amount of flash also means that boot-up time isn't that much shorter, noted Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computing Products of America. From a cold start, boot-up time might drop from 28 seconds with a standard drive to 21 seconds with a hybrid, according to Hagberg.
"I don't see anyone paying for that," Hagberg said.
The sleep function on Vista also indirectly chips into the desirability of hybrids, added Richard Rutledge, senior vice president of marketing at Western Digital, the number two maker of drives. The company, which doesn't market a hybrid, conducted a bunch of tests comparing boot-up times of different versions of Vista from a cold start with boot-up times with computers resting in Vista's sleep state. Boot-up from a cold start with Vista PCs ranged all the way up to 70 seconds, depending on the version of Vista (Vista Home Premium is the slow one, by the way.)
Vista PCs, however, would come out of the sleep state to being operational in four seconds. Western Digital tried seven variants for Vista and it always came to around four seconds. Thus, with the sleep state working as it does, you don't need a hybrid, he said.
The hybrid hard drive would cut down power consumption, increase battery life, and, most importantly, whack boot-up time, the companies said.
But so far, you don't see a lot of them on store shelves and the benefits are somewhat disappointing, said hard drive executives at Diskcon 2007, taking place in Santa Clara this week.
"The initial versions haven't delivered the performance consumers expected," said Dr. Richard New, director of research for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.
The problem, said New, might be correctable if drive makers put in more flash. Right now, hybrid drives have about 256MB of memory. If you put in 4GB or so, the flash could hold a lot more storage, which in turn would reduce power consumption and help boot-up time. That would raise prices, though.
The small amount of flash also means that boot-up time isn't that much shorter, noted Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computing Products of America. From a cold start, boot-up time might drop from 28 seconds with a standard drive to 21 seconds with a hybrid, according to Hagberg.
"I don't see anyone paying for that," Hagberg said.
The sleep function on Vista also indirectly chips into the desirability of hybrids, added Richard Rutledge, senior vice president of marketing at Western Digital, the number two maker of drives. The company, which doesn't market a hybrid, conducted a bunch of tests comparing boot-up times of different versions of Vista from a cold start with boot-up times with computers resting in Vista's sleep state. Boot-up from a cold start with Vista PCs ranged all the way up to 70 seconds, depending on the version of Vista (Vista Home Premium is the slow one, by the way.)
Vista PCs, however, would come out of the sleep state to being operational in four seconds. Western Digital tried seven variants for Vista and it always came to around four seconds. Thus, with the sleep state working as it does, you don't need a hybrid, he said.
NASA pundits launch debate over space flight
PASADENA, Calif.--At the 50th anniversary space conference here Thursday, a fight over the future role of NASA's space program inadvertently took off.
If it were up to Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer known for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, NASA wouldn't be developing a spacecraft to put another man on the moon by 2020. That government mission has already been accomplished, and a repeat performance is "silly," Rutan said during a panel held at California Institute of Technology, CalTech, which runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
"Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by telling them) "No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology."
"I think it's absurd they're doing Orion development at all. It should be done commercially," he said, referring to the name of the lunar spacecraft. Rutan and other panelists also question the importance of space flight at a time when environmental concerns are paramount.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin responded to Rutan's vision in a speech following his panel. "Unlike Rutan, I will continue to think space programs are important," Griffin said.
Of course, Rutan has a big stake in commercial development of spacecraft. As founder and president of Scaled Composites, he develops rockets for future commercial space tourism. Rutan is among a cadre of technology entrepreneurs, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Virgin CEO Richard Branson, who are working on ventures to send people into space.
Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, the rocket that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by breaking the Earth's atmosphere twice during a set time. And his company is building SpaceShipTwo for Branson's Virgin Galactic, which aims to launch its first commercial flight in 2009. But Scaled Composites recently suffered a tragedy when two people were killed in an explosion at the company's facility in Mojave, Calif.
In his speech, Griffin talked about NASA's budget for the last 50 years, adjusted for inflation. He said that the most money NASA has ever received from the government was not the period during the Apollo missions, but over the 10 years from 1989 to 1998. "So we get more money today than (what was) given the agency during Apollo" (during the 1960s and 1970s.) NASA's budget for 2007 is $14 billion, or about 15 cents a day of a taxpayer's money, according to Griffin.
Part of Rutan's argument against NASA's development program was that after the early 1970s, when astronaut Alan Shepard golfed on the moon, there wasn't "much innovation."
Griffin didn't respond directly to whether or not there is a lack of innovation. But in response to criticism on an earlier panel that NASA's science budget has waned, he said the first decade of NASA's budget was proportionally the same as its most recent budget. During the first 10 years of the space agency, he further clarified, 58 percent of its budget was devoted to human spaceflight, 17 percent to science, 6 percent to aerospace and 10 percent to new technologies. In contrast, in 2006, 62 percent of NASA's budget was earmarked for spaceflight and 32 percent was for space science, he said. Last year, NASA didn't have a budget to develop new technologies.
"There is a mythology that science has been decimated by human spaceflight. That's not right." Griffin said.
He added that the current missions back to the moon and onto Mars by 2035 are sustainable programs, ones that wouldn't likely be stemmed by a change in administrations.
"We have here a program which is affordable, sustainable and which can be highly correlated to historical successes and developments from the past," said Griffin.
Rutan said that the goal of private space tourism is to reduce the cost of space travel and exploration. "If we go through a time period where the focus is on flying the consumer, these 'payloads' who pay to fly and can be reproduced with unskilled labor...with tools around the house," he joked, "there will be a breakthrough to enormous volume."
If it were up to Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer known for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, NASA wouldn't be developing a spacecraft to put another man on the moon by 2020. That government mission has already been accomplished, and a repeat performance is "silly," Rutan said during a panel held at California Institute of Technology, CalTech, which runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.
"Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by telling them) "No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology."
"I think it's absurd they're doing Orion development at all. It should be done commercially," he said, referring to the name of the lunar spacecraft. Rutan and other panelists also question the importance of space flight at a time when environmental concerns are paramount.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin responded to Rutan's vision in a speech following his panel. "Unlike Rutan, I will continue to think space programs are important," Griffin said.
Of course, Rutan has a big stake in commercial development of spacecraft. As founder and president of Scaled Composites, he develops rockets for future commercial space tourism. Rutan is among a cadre of technology entrepreneurs, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Virgin CEO Richard Branson, who are working on ventures to send people into space.
Rutan designed SpaceShipOne, the rocket that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by breaking the Earth's atmosphere twice during a set time. And his company is building SpaceShipTwo for Branson's Virgin Galactic, which aims to launch its first commercial flight in 2009. But Scaled Composites recently suffered a tragedy when two people were killed in an explosion at the company's facility in Mojave, Calif.
In his speech, Griffin talked about NASA's budget for the last 50 years, adjusted for inflation. He said that the most money NASA has ever received from the government was not the period during the Apollo missions, but over the 10 years from 1989 to 1998. "So we get more money today than (what was) given the agency during Apollo" (during the 1960s and 1970s.) NASA's budget for 2007 is $14 billion, or about 15 cents a day of a taxpayer's money, according to Griffin.
Part of Rutan's argument against NASA's development program was that after the early 1970s, when astronaut Alan Shepard golfed on the moon, there wasn't "much innovation."
Griffin didn't respond directly to whether or not there is a lack of innovation. But in response to criticism on an earlier panel that NASA's science budget has waned, he said the first decade of NASA's budget was proportionally the same as its most recent budget. During the first 10 years of the space agency, he further clarified, 58 percent of its budget was devoted to human spaceflight, 17 percent to science, 6 percent to aerospace and 10 percent to new technologies. In contrast, in 2006, 62 percent of NASA's budget was earmarked for spaceflight and 32 percent was for space science, he said. Last year, NASA didn't have a budget to develop new technologies.
"There is a mythology that science has been decimated by human spaceflight. That's not right." Griffin said.
He added that the current missions back to the moon and onto Mars by 2035 are sustainable programs, ones that wouldn't likely be stemmed by a change in administrations.
"We have here a program which is affordable, sustainable and which can be highly correlated to historical successes and developments from the past," said Griffin.
Rutan said that the goal of private space tourism is to reduce the cost of space travel and exploration. "If we go through a time period where the focus is on flying the consumer, these 'payloads' who pay to fly and can be reproduced with unskilled labor...with tools around the house," he joked, "there will be a breakthrough to enormous volume."
Patent law overhaul: Bad for start-ups?
WASHINGTON--Silicon Valley start-ups and independent technologists will suffer if Congress's proposed overhaul of the U.S. patent system succeeds, the brains behind the Segway and Apple's QuickTime video argued Thursday.
The list of companies favoring the proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in a 220 to 175 vote earlier this month, seemingly includes all of today's major tech-sector players--including Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google, eBay, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com and Oracle. But opponents of the bill say a tech-oriented side of the story is getting drowned out by those powerful lobbying forces as politicians press ahead with the most significant patent system changes in decades.
Among the inventors who showed up to deliver that message at a press conference here just steps from the U.S. Capitol building were Dean Kamen, best known for conceiving the Segway, and Steve Perlman, the chief developer of Apple's QuickTime video technology in the 1980s and inventor of WebTV, one of the first TV set-top boxes offering Internet access.
They--along with other members of the Innovation Alliance, a coalition of academic institutions and patent-dependent firms from the manufacturing, biotechnology and nanotechnology world--also planned to pay visits to politicians' offices later that day.
Kamen and Perlman claimed the proposed legislation will devalue patents and discourage investment, by making it easier to challenge patents and more difficult for patent holders to receive the damage awards they believe they deserve in infringement suits. Kamen, for one, said the bill would be bad for anyone like him who holds many patents but does not actually build his own products, leaving that instead to deeper-pocketed companies through licensing arrangements.
"I had learned from all the experts that a troll, which is a bad thing, is somebody who's abusing the patent system, and someone who abuses the patent system is somebody who never actually makes their own products," said Kamen, who runs a company called DEKA Research & Development. "I would sit there thinking, 'Hmm, that sounds awful, that describes me.'"
Joking aside, Kamen said he recognizes that patent system abusers exist, but he suggested the bills in Congress are not the way to go about addressing that issue.
To be sure, the bill that passed the House and a similar version pending in the Senate propose a number of significant changes.
In an attempt to weed out questionable patents, each would set up an out-of-court process within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for challenging recently issued patents.
One of the most contentious components of each bill would also change the way courts award damages to patent holders that win infringement suits, generally basing them on the value of the patented component, not the entire market value of the product. The bills' tech-industry supporters say that's necessary because their products often contain hundreds or even thousands of patented components, creating the potential for inflated settlements or damage awards unless Congress makes those changes.
Kamen and Perlman said they recognize that the U.S. patent system isn't perfect, but they suggested the best course of action is to start by beefing up the number of patent examiners in an attempt to deal with a backlog of more than 600,000 pending applications.
Perlman was particularly animated about the bills' movement, arguing that there has been an utter failure by its sponsors to seek out the perspective of Silicon Valley start-ups. He said Capitol Hill staffers told him they had sought input from eBay, whom they considered representative of the Silicon Valley set, but he scoffed at the idea that anyone would equate the online auction giant with a start-up. (Even he alone owns more than the 25 patents eBay has to its name, he said.)
Larger technology companies backing the patent proposals would be wise to consider the negative impact he and others believe those changes will have on the ability of Silicon Valley start-ups to obtain and enforce their patents, Perlman warned. Smaller venture capital firms have voiced similar concerns to Congress--albeit before a small-business committee with no control over the direction of patent law.
'Part of an ecosystem'
"A lot of the companies that are for the bill depend on the start-up companies that feed them," Perlman said. "We are part of an ecosystem. "They have market power, we don't. If we don't have patents, we cease to exist."
Perlman, who now runs a venture called Rearden Companies that bills itself as an "incubator of art and technologies," knows something about having his inventions scooped up by bigger firms. After all, Microsoft bought his WebTV venture back in 1997.
Although Perlman admitted he was "late to the party" and only found out about the patent reform proposal after it passed the House two weeks ago, others present at the press conference claimed the bill's sponsors have been ignoring the interests of engineers and inventors more generally. (Kamen, for his part, has testified at patent law-related hearings in recent years.)
Keith Grzelak, chairman of the intellectual property committee for IEEE-USA, which represents American electronics and electrical engineers, said his organization has long been aware of the movement toward patent system changes. "We were champing at the bit to have a say," he said. "We were not asked to participate in any of these discussions."
Claims that independent inventors and other stakeholders have been left out of the process aren't accurate, said Shanna Winters, chief counsel to Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the primary sponsor of the House patent bill.
"From the beginning, Mr. Berman reached out to independent inventors to try to get their perspectives and in fact made a number of changes to the bill based on what the independent inventors asked for," she said, adding that an inventor was asked to testify at a hearing about the bill earlier this year but was unable to attend.
Passage of patent law changes this year is hardly a sure thing, although the bills have moved further along than in any previous sessions of Congress. Berman has already acknowledged that the House version isn't perfect and has pledged to continue negotiating further changes. The prospects for the Senate version, which would have to be reconciled with the House bill even if passed, are even less clear.
The list of companies favoring the proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in a 220 to 175 vote earlier this month, seemingly includes all of today's major tech-sector players--including Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Google, eBay, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com and Oracle. But opponents of the bill say a tech-oriented side of the story is getting drowned out by those powerful lobbying forces as politicians press ahead with the most significant patent system changes in decades.
Among the inventors who showed up to deliver that message at a press conference here just steps from the U.S. Capitol building were Dean Kamen, best known for conceiving the Segway, and Steve Perlman, the chief developer of Apple's QuickTime video technology in the 1980s and inventor of WebTV, one of the first TV set-top boxes offering Internet access.
They--along with other members of the Innovation Alliance, a coalition of academic institutions and patent-dependent firms from the manufacturing, biotechnology and nanotechnology world--also planned to pay visits to politicians' offices later that day.
Kamen and Perlman claimed the proposed legislation will devalue patents and discourage investment, by making it easier to challenge patents and more difficult for patent holders to receive the damage awards they believe they deserve in infringement suits. Kamen, for one, said the bill would be bad for anyone like him who holds many patents but does not actually build his own products, leaving that instead to deeper-pocketed companies through licensing arrangements.
"I had learned from all the experts that a troll, which is a bad thing, is somebody who's abusing the patent system, and someone who abuses the patent system is somebody who never actually makes their own products," said Kamen, who runs a company called DEKA Research & Development. "I would sit there thinking, 'Hmm, that sounds awful, that describes me.'"
Joking aside, Kamen said he recognizes that patent system abusers exist, but he suggested the bills in Congress are not the way to go about addressing that issue.
To be sure, the bill that passed the House and a similar version pending in the Senate propose a number of significant changes.
In an attempt to weed out questionable patents, each would set up an out-of-court process within the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for challenging recently issued patents.
One of the most contentious components of each bill would also change the way courts award damages to patent holders that win infringement suits, generally basing them on the value of the patented component, not the entire market value of the product. The bills' tech-industry supporters say that's necessary because their products often contain hundreds or even thousands of patented components, creating the potential for inflated settlements or damage awards unless Congress makes those changes.
Kamen and Perlman said they recognize that the U.S. patent system isn't perfect, but they suggested the best course of action is to start by beefing up the number of patent examiners in an attempt to deal with a backlog of more than 600,000 pending applications.
Perlman was particularly animated about the bills' movement, arguing that there has been an utter failure by its sponsors to seek out the perspective of Silicon Valley start-ups. He said Capitol Hill staffers told him they had sought input from eBay, whom they considered representative of the Silicon Valley set, but he scoffed at the idea that anyone would equate the online auction giant with a start-up. (Even he alone owns more than the 25 patents eBay has to its name, he said.)
Larger technology companies backing the patent proposals would be wise to consider the negative impact he and others believe those changes will have on the ability of Silicon Valley start-ups to obtain and enforce their patents, Perlman warned. Smaller venture capital firms have voiced similar concerns to Congress--albeit before a small-business committee with no control over the direction of patent law.
'Part of an ecosystem'
"A lot of the companies that are for the bill depend on the start-up companies that feed them," Perlman said. "We are part of an ecosystem. "They have market power, we don't. If we don't have patents, we cease to exist."
Perlman, who now runs a venture called Rearden Companies that bills itself as an "incubator of art and technologies," knows something about having his inventions scooped up by bigger firms. After all, Microsoft bought his WebTV venture back in 1997.
Although Perlman admitted he was "late to the party" and only found out about the patent reform proposal after it passed the House two weeks ago, others present at the press conference claimed the bill's sponsors have been ignoring the interests of engineers and inventors more generally. (Kamen, for his part, has testified at patent law-related hearings in recent years.)
Keith Grzelak, chairman of the intellectual property committee for IEEE-USA, which represents American electronics and electrical engineers, said his organization has long been aware of the movement toward patent system changes. "We were champing at the bit to have a say," he said. "We were not asked to participate in any of these discussions."
Claims that independent inventors and other stakeholders have been left out of the process aren't accurate, said Shanna Winters, chief counsel to Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the primary sponsor of the House patent bill.
"From the beginning, Mr. Berman reached out to independent inventors to try to get their perspectives and in fact made a number of changes to the bill based on what the independent inventors asked for," she said, adding that an inventor was asked to testify at a hearing about the bill earlier this year but was unable to attend.
Passage of patent law changes this year is hardly a sure thing, although the bills have moved further along than in any previous sessions of Congress. Berman has already acknowledged that the House version isn't perfect and has pledged to continue negotiating further changes. The prospects for the Senate version, which would have to be reconciled with the House bill even if passed, are even less clear.
Scientists ponder next 50 years of space exploration
PASADENA, Calif.--In the next 50 years of space exploration, scientists are hopeful that we will find other life in the universe.
Weeks away from the 50th anniversary of space flight, a group of aerospace engineers, space entrepreneurs and astronauts met here Thursday at the California Institute of Technology to reflect on the past and discuss the coming 50 years of space exploration.
The two-day conference, called 50 Years in Space, is marked by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, astronaut and former U.S. senator, called that event an "intellectual earthquake" for science and the first trigger of interest in space. To be sure, the United States formed NASA in November of the following year; and in 1961, President John F. Kennedy promised that Americans would land on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed the first man on the moon.
More than that milestone, early space flight paved the way for decades of technological innovation and scientific discovery and brought about a multibillion-dollar space industry. Scientists believe that new technology and knowledge about the universe will easily push us further in the years to come.
"The first 50 years have given us a new view of the physical places in the universe, new knowledge; and obviously new technology was essential," Ed Stone, director emeritus of NASA's research center, the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, said during a morning keynote speech.
"An unexpected diversity in the universe has given us a new view. That diversity promises that there is so much more to be discovered and beckons us to expand new frontiers into space."
Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist at JPL and professor at Caltech, added that considering that all of the matter on Earth comprises only 4 percent of what's in the universe, "the next 50 years may well reveal (whether) we have company."
Stone named five frontiers of space: physical, knowledge, technology (developing the capability to travel to space), human and applications. "In the last 50 years, we've made remarkable progress in exploring and pushing those frontiers," Stone said. He gave some examples of new views of the universe brought about by work in those areas. Through the Cassini mission to Saturn, for example, scientists have seen plumes erupting from the surface, posing the question, "Where is this energy coming from?" Stone asked.
In another example, the Mars rover mission, which landed in 2004, has yielded findings from crater bedrocks that indicate there was once a vast amount of water on the planet. "Here on Earth, wherever you find water you find life," he said.
Gentry Lee, chief engineer for the JPL's Planetary Flight Systems Directorate and a science fiction author, said the changes in his profession as space engineer during the past 50 years have been dramatic, especially considering there was no such profession when he was a child.
He attributed one of the biggest changes to computers. At the beginning of the space program, for example, all simulations were done through hardware. Now, 99 percent of flight simulations are done through software, he said. For the Viking robotic mission to Mars in 1976, for example, the team might have run simulations of entry and landing on Mars all night on a mainframe computer. Now it would take "10 minutes on my desktop," said Lee, who worked on the Viking project for 12 years.
"Where the computer has been a magnificent tool, there is a downside, too," Lee said. "Often the people using the computer programs didn't have a hand in building them, so we as engineers must remember that the computer and processes are tools there to guide us, and not the engineering substance itself."
The one common denominator between now and 50 years ago, he said, is the human factor. "The right processes, tools and computers are not enough, you must have the right people who can tie it all together and reduce the risks," Lee said.
Weeks away from the 50th anniversary of space flight, a group of aerospace engineers, space entrepreneurs and astronauts met here Thursday at the California Institute of Technology to reflect on the past and discuss the coming 50 years of space exploration.
The two-day conference, called 50 Years in Space, is marked by the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, astronaut and former U.S. senator, called that event an "intellectual earthquake" for science and the first trigger of interest in space. To be sure, the United States formed NASA in November of the following year; and in 1961, President John F. Kennedy promised that Americans would land on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed the first man on the moon.
More than that milestone, early space flight paved the way for decades of technological innovation and scientific discovery and brought about a multibillion-dollar space industry. Scientists believe that new technology and knowledge about the universe will easily push us further in the years to come.
"The first 50 years have given us a new view of the physical places in the universe, new knowledge; and obviously new technology was essential," Ed Stone, director emeritus of NASA's research center, the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech, said during a morning keynote speech.
"An unexpected diversity in the universe has given us a new view. That diversity promises that there is so much more to be discovered and beckons us to expand new frontiers into space."
Paul Dimotakis, chief technologist at JPL and professor at Caltech, added that considering that all of the matter on Earth comprises only 4 percent of what's in the universe, "the next 50 years may well reveal (whether) we have company."
Stone named five frontiers of space: physical, knowledge, technology (developing the capability to travel to space), human and applications. "In the last 50 years, we've made remarkable progress in exploring and pushing those frontiers," Stone said. He gave some examples of new views of the universe brought about by work in those areas. Through the Cassini mission to Saturn, for example, scientists have seen plumes erupting from the surface, posing the question, "Where is this energy coming from?" Stone asked.
In another example, the Mars rover mission, which landed in 2004, has yielded findings from crater bedrocks that indicate there was once a vast amount of water on the planet. "Here on Earth, wherever you find water you find life," he said.
Gentry Lee, chief engineer for the JPL's Planetary Flight Systems Directorate and a science fiction author, said the changes in his profession as space engineer during the past 50 years have been dramatic, especially considering there was no such profession when he was a child.
He attributed one of the biggest changes to computers. At the beginning of the space program, for example, all simulations were done through hardware. Now, 99 percent of flight simulations are done through software, he said. For the Viking robotic mission to Mars in 1976, for example, the team might have run simulations of entry and landing on Mars all night on a mainframe computer. Now it would take "10 minutes on my desktop," said Lee, who worked on the Viking project for 12 years.
"Where the computer has been a magnificent tool, there is a downside, too," Lee said. "Often the people using the computer programs didn't have a hand in building them, so we as engineers must remember that the computer and processes are tools there to guide us, and not the engineering substance itself."
The one common denominator between now and 50 years ago, he said, is the human factor. "The right processes, tools and computers are not enough, you must have the right people who can tie it all together and reduce the risks," Lee said.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Virtual game world hires real economist
Like many central bankers, Eyjolfur Gudmundsson spends his days fretting about inflation, making sure monetary growth is reasonable and trying to collect data about the economy.
The difference is that the economy Guodmundsson oversees exists only in the virtual world of Eve Online, a science fiction computer game run out of Iceland.
Guodmundsson is the newly appointed chief economist for CCP Games, which hired him in June to quantify the wheelings and dealings of Eve Online's denizens, which number about 200,000 players.
CCP hopes that will grow 50 percent by the end of 2008 to be about the same size as Iceland's population.
"There's a lot of discussion in the game about inflation and that is my job, to find out if inflation is going on," said Guodmundsson, who has a doctorate in environment and resource economics from the University of Rhode Island.
Players want standardized data about Eve's economy to help them track prices and make investment decisions as they battle to control interstellar space on behalf of mega-corporations whose size and power would make any real multinational blush.
"This makes the consumers behave in a more natural way because they are competing against each other on multiple levels, not only on a tactical level in combat but for logistics and resources. That builds consumer behavior and patterns that you see in the real world," Guodmundsson said.
It's a darkly literal twist on the creative destruction beloved by classical economists--players create things, like heavily armed starships and alliances, to destroy rivals.
Eve's economy is rooted in activities such as mining raw materials. Players deal in interstellar kredits, or ISKs, a play on the trading symbol for Iceland's currency, the krona.
Just like for a Wall Street stock investor, a Singaporean commodities trader or a London foreign exchange dealer, information is key. In this regard, Guodmundsson is the envy of every policymaker who has wrestled with incomplete data--all deals and prices are instantly captured by CCP's computers.
"As a real economist I had to spend months trying to find data to test an economic theory but if I was wrong, I wasn't sure if the theory was wrong or the data was wrong. At least here I know the data is right," Guodmundsson said.
As new players join, CCP adds new planets and asteroids that can be exploited, one of several "faucets" that serve to inject funds into the universe and keep the economy ticking.
"After we opened up an area where there was more zydrine (an in-game mineral), we saw that price dropped. We did not announce that there was more explicitly, but in a matter of days the price had adjusted," Guodmundsson said.
He is tasked with figuring out whether the game has enough "sinks" that can soak up excess money if it looks like an inflationary bubble is emerging.
CCP pricked such a bubble when it overhauled the system for producing player-created items. The 425mm railgun- a powerful gun for the large ships that are a stalwart of any serious battle fleet--dropped to a fifth of its previous price.
"We think Milton Friedman would definitely like this," CCP Chief Executive Hilmar Petursson said, referring to the American economist best known for his theory that money supply ultimately drives the boom and bust of the business cycle.
Guodmundsson is also looking into whether lessons learned in running a virtual economy can apply to real-world ones. It's a rich field that is drawing interest since experiments that would be impossible in real life can be arranged with a few software tweaks.
"We watch price bubbles happen in Eve Online. We are thus able to watch in rapid fashion, a mathematical simulation of those price bubbles. We then are in a position to extrapolate price bubbles in the real world and trade on that, in futures or whatnot," Petursson said.
When pressed on whether he thought his work would really eventually give CCP an edge in real-world financial markets, Guodmundsson declined to answer, but said: "I strongly believe that in future we will look to virtual worlds to see how things have evolved in that world and apply that to a real-world situation."
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
The difference is that the economy Guodmundsson oversees exists only in the virtual world of Eve Online, a science fiction computer game run out of Iceland.
Guodmundsson is the newly appointed chief economist for CCP Games, which hired him in June to quantify the wheelings and dealings of Eve Online's denizens, which number about 200,000 players.
CCP hopes that will grow 50 percent by the end of 2008 to be about the same size as Iceland's population.
"There's a lot of discussion in the game about inflation and that is my job, to find out if inflation is going on," said Guodmundsson, who has a doctorate in environment and resource economics from the University of Rhode Island.
Players want standardized data about Eve's economy to help them track prices and make investment decisions as they battle to control interstellar space on behalf of mega-corporations whose size and power would make any real multinational blush.
"This makes the consumers behave in a more natural way because they are competing against each other on multiple levels, not only on a tactical level in combat but for logistics and resources. That builds consumer behavior and patterns that you see in the real world," Guodmundsson said.
It's a darkly literal twist on the creative destruction beloved by classical economists--players create things, like heavily armed starships and alliances, to destroy rivals.
Eve's economy is rooted in activities such as mining raw materials. Players deal in interstellar kredits, or ISKs, a play on the trading symbol for Iceland's currency, the krona.
Just like for a Wall Street stock investor, a Singaporean commodities trader or a London foreign exchange dealer, information is key. In this regard, Guodmundsson is the envy of every policymaker who has wrestled with incomplete data--all deals and prices are instantly captured by CCP's computers.
"As a real economist I had to spend months trying to find data to test an economic theory but if I was wrong, I wasn't sure if the theory was wrong or the data was wrong. At least here I know the data is right," Guodmundsson said.
As new players join, CCP adds new planets and asteroids that can be exploited, one of several "faucets" that serve to inject funds into the universe and keep the economy ticking.
"After we opened up an area where there was more zydrine (an in-game mineral), we saw that price dropped. We did not announce that there was more explicitly, but in a matter of days the price had adjusted," Guodmundsson said.
He is tasked with figuring out whether the game has enough "sinks" that can soak up excess money if it looks like an inflationary bubble is emerging.
CCP pricked such a bubble when it overhauled the system for producing player-created items. The 425mm railgun- a powerful gun for the large ships that are a stalwart of any serious battle fleet--dropped to a fifth of its previous price.
"We think Milton Friedman would definitely like this," CCP Chief Executive Hilmar Petursson said, referring to the American economist best known for his theory that money supply ultimately drives the boom and bust of the business cycle.
Guodmundsson is also looking into whether lessons learned in running a virtual economy can apply to real-world ones. It's a rich field that is drawing interest since experiments that would be impossible in real life can be arranged with a few software tweaks.
"We watch price bubbles happen in Eve Online. We are thus able to watch in rapid fashion, a mathematical simulation of those price bubbles. We then are in a position to extrapolate price bubbles in the real world and trade on that, in futures or whatnot," Petursson said.
When pressed on whether he thought his work would really eventually give CCP an edge in real-world financial markets, Guodmundsson declined to answer, but said: "I strongly believe that in future we will look to virtual worlds to see how things have evolved in that world and apply that to a real-world situation."
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Newsmaker: The secrets of a teen's Internet success
newsmaker Internet start-ups have a legacy of twenty-something founders. Just look at Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.
But that esteemed age limit is lowering.
Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old co-founder of MyYearbook.com, hatched the idea for her now-thriving online yearbook site when she was a sophomore in high school. Now, in little less than two years, the site is making millions in annual revenue from advertising, Cook said, and attracts more than 3 million monthly visitors, according to research firm ComScore. (In 2006, it raised $4.1 million in venture funding from U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital.)
It's also in a sweet spot for online marketing. Its audience is primarily between the ages of 13 and 22, and nearly all are from the United States.
By next year, Cook hopes to turn MyYearbook into the largest teen media company online, buoyed by a new user-generated magazine and tools that let high schoolers challenge each other to voting duels on topics like best-looking senior. While she's plotting online domination, she will also be studying international business and marketing at Georgetown University this fall.
CNET News.com talked to Cook about skipping school, raising venture capital and the future of online publishing.
Q: So how did you get the idea for MyYearbook?
Cook: Basically, Dave (my brother) and I were pretty new in our school. We had just moved to Montgomery the year before, so none of us really knew that many people in our grades, and we turned to the (yearbook) as a way to get to know other people in our classes better at the time. David was showing me a picture of some girl...and we thought it would be much cooler if you could make your own, maybe post a picture online and have a profile. This was even before we had even heard of Facebook. So we started brainstorming this idea, and a few days later we approached Geoff at dinner.
This was your other, older brother?
Cook: Yes, my oldest brother, Geoff, and he invested $250,000. He has the money from a Web site he started in college. And from there, we started working on all of our templates, which were actually made in India because our programming team is there. My brother had worked with programmers in India before so it just seemed like a good option for us, too.
So the whole site was developed in India?
Cook: Yeah, the original. It kind of came around in phases. The first phase was just launched in our high school, so it was like a testing one. The original site we launched didn't have any of our most popular features. All the core features of the site all came from my friends' ideas--they were telling me during lunch, all the break-the-ice features and secret admirer stuff.
That's interesting. All of the popular features were your friends' ideas?
Cook: Actually, the most popular feature right now, Battles, which has like made our page views go up by 500 percent since this February, was someone on the site's idea. That person said that he wanted a new way of doing superlatives, so I came up with Battles--a one-on-one image contest, instead of just being against everyone in your class. Best-looking is the most popular category. We launched video battles about a month ago, and now best music video is also very popular.
How do you think your site compares to MySpace.com and Facebook?
Cook: We're actually really different than those sites. Comparatively in page views, MyYearbook is third in the United States after MySpace and Facebook, but we're bigger than Bebo, Hi5, Tagged.
But compared to MySpace and Facebook, MyYearbook is a lot younger, so 80 percent of our users are between 13 and 22, whereas MySpace reports they only have 12 percent of teen users and Facebook is now going mass-market. So we definitely stay to our niche.
Another big difference is unlike MySpace and Facebook, on those sites what you really do is to click on profiles and go into the groups, but on MyYearbook only 10 percent of the page views come from clicking around profiles. The other clicks are for our other features like Battles, MyMag and quizzes. That's where almost all of the traffic comes from.
That's something that is very unique about MyYearbook. There are a lot of sites that let you make a profile, but we are the only one that really has very competitive Battles, online magazines that users make themselves, and I think we have more than 100,000 quizzes.
You came up with My Mag--a user-written teen magazine. Why do you think it's resonating with your visitors?
Cook: My Mag is really for people who want to be on the site but who aren't necessarily into Battles or feel the need to challenge people. I think it's so popular because all of the new articles are things that our users write. We do have professional editors--otherwise the articles wouldn't be as good as they are.
But about 2 percent of the articles (submitted) get posted to the site, and they're all very relevant to teens, not just about celebrities--things like managing popularity in high school.
There seems to be an absence of that kind of material.
Cook: All the teen magazines like Teen People and Elle Girl, for instance, even stopped doing their print publications because there was no longer a market. Their online publications aren't really going through because very established print media companies aren't used to doing it in online, and so we are actually ahead of those. Personally, I find a lot of the teen magazines only focus on celebrities, which kind of bothers me because I don't care what Angelina Jolie is doing this week. That doesn't affect me in any way.
The (most popular) articles that are on My Mag get about 3,000 comments a day. The other ones average around 1,000.
So from that perspective, what do you think the future of media is?
Cook: I think that people will realize that user-generated content doesn't have to be like, bad. A lot of older companies and print publications hear "user-generated content" and they're kind of like scared because they don't trust what people will come up with. But I think that's the only way you can really stay in tune with what your members want, with what your readers want. So I think other media companies will realize that that's kind of the key to staying relevant. You have to post what your members want by actually seeing what they write.
Does that mean you plan to start publishing original content alongside your user-generated content?
Cook: Yeah, like once in a while, I'll write a feature article.
What was the last one you wrote?
Cook: It was about why popularity doesn't matter in terms of high school, knowing that I've not been very popular in high school myself.
What about MyYearbook? That had to boost your image.
Cook: I was very well-known, but I wasn't necessarily in the popular group. I was the class entrepreneur, so I was mentioned in the class president speech, valedictorian speech and all the class advisory speeches so everyone knows who I am, but I'm not that popular. I have a few close friends, but I don't have much time for parties and stuff because I'm always working.
How much time do you spend working on MyYearbook?
Cook: Forty hours a week or more sometimes. In the summer, I work about 60 hours a week. During the school year, it ranges between 25 to 40 hours depending on the week. In college, I plan to still be working pretty much as I had been in high school because I think I actually can miss a lot more college classes than I could high school classes.
Aren't you tempted to skip college?
Cook: I could, because I do have a very solid job. But the thing is, I don't want to quit something before I even see what it's like.
Is MyYearbook the first of many companies you want to start?
Cook: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't necessarily know it would be an Internet company, but I definitely don't think that MyYearbook is the last thing I'll start. Say in 10 years, I don't think I'll able to settle down and work a normal job. I've gotten rather used to being the boss. It's very fun running your own company.
I saw you speak at the Mashup 2007 conference with several other teen Internet entrepreneurs on stage and I was wondering how you thought you were different from your peers?
Cook: Well, obviously we're all driven. But I noticed one of the questions, I remember I made everyone laugh, they asked me how I balanced school and working. I said I spent a lot less time on school, and I noticed other kids on the panel would (sacrifice their work for school). I always put MyYearbook first, no matter what. I didn't study for any of finals this year or midterms, Also MyYearbook is bigger, so I have 30 employees working in the office.
So did your grades suffer at all?
Cook: I think they turned out pretty well. I had a 4.0 when I graduated. Junior-senior year my grades dropped, but not by that much. I never found school that difficult, and I would just find ways to multitask so I didn't have to do certain things. For instance, all senior year, I never asked for or picked up my government policy books. Instead I just downloaded the chapters, because they had them on podcast, onto my iPod and listened to them in the car on the way to the office.
What was it like when you first raised money for MyYearbook? Did you go to those meetings?
Cook: Geoff, because he is the CEO, he went to those meetings. Even though I thought of the company I still had to graduate high school. We had a PowerPoint I put together with the business plan. It's almost a blur because it was so stressful and time-consuming. Seriously, I seldom got three hours of sleep per night, but when we finally presented, it was a relief.
How many days did you miss from school, and did your parents support you with writing notes?
Cook: My mom did yell at me every time I got a note from the school saying that if I miss one more class I would lose credit. So I kept having to go into my vice principal's office and argue that it should be an excused absence, every time I was absent. So that was kind of annoying because I did almost lose credit. But my mom was very supportive. All she really cared about was that I graduated high school.
So I wrote this story that teens aren't using e-mail anymore, and you were the lone person in the story who still used e-mail. Do you think e-mail will die out in favor of text messaging and other modes of communication?
Cook: Personally, I don't think so. One of the reasons e-mail could never fully die out is just because it is a lot easier when you're crunched for time to write e-mail rather than to make a phone call, or even sending text messages can get really expensive and e-mail is free. I send so many e-mails to my friends and all of them send e-mails back, so I know I'm not crazy.
The only thing that's definitely dying is snail mail. When I was doing my college admissions, I couldn't even remember how to address an envelope. I had to look it up. I couldn't remember where the ZIP code went.
But weren't your college applications online?
Cook: I did all my applications online except for Georgetown, which didn't offer it to be done online. But I always had to mail my high school transcripts and SAT scores.
Apart from MyYearbook, what other sites do you visit? And what do you do for fun?
Cook: I really like Gamehouse.com. I like the little gaming sites that are all over. Other than that I do have a Facebook (page) because I like to check what all the Georgetown people are doing. And I'm into blogs. I read Mashable, TechCrunch and GigaOm.
Also I love the Scooby-Doo PSP games, and I'm pretty good at ultimate Frisbee, soccer, gymnastics. I like to basically do any sport.
So here's the classic college admission question: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Cook: I don't know. I can actually see myself working in a different country, so that's why (I'm majoring in) international business. I don't think in my freshman year I could've ever seen myself owning such a giant company by my senior year, so it's really hard to say.
But that esteemed age limit is lowering.
Catherine Cook, the 17-year-old co-founder of MyYearbook.com, hatched the idea for her now-thriving online yearbook site when she was a sophomore in high school. Now, in little less than two years, the site is making millions in annual revenue from advertising, Cook said, and attracts more than 3 million monthly visitors, according to research firm ComScore. (In 2006, it raised $4.1 million in venture funding from U.S. Venture Partners and First Round Capital.)
It's also in a sweet spot for online marketing. Its audience is primarily between the ages of 13 and 22, and nearly all are from the United States.
By next year, Cook hopes to turn MyYearbook into the largest teen media company online, buoyed by a new user-generated magazine and tools that let high schoolers challenge each other to voting duels on topics like best-looking senior. While she's plotting online domination, she will also be studying international business and marketing at Georgetown University this fall.
CNET News.com talked to Cook about skipping school, raising venture capital and the future of online publishing.
Q: So how did you get the idea for MyYearbook?
Cook: Basically, Dave (my brother) and I were pretty new in our school. We had just moved to Montgomery the year before, so none of us really knew that many people in our grades, and we turned to the (yearbook) as a way to get to know other people in our classes better at the time. David was showing me a picture of some girl...and we thought it would be much cooler if you could make your own, maybe post a picture online and have a profile. This was even before we had even heard of Facebook. So we started brainstorming this idea, and a few days later we approached Geoff at dinner.
This was your other, older brother?
Cook: Yes, my oldest brother, Geoff, and he invested $250,000. He has the money from a Web site he started in college. And from there, we started working on all of our templates, which were actually made in India because our programming team is there. My brother had worked with programmers in India before so it just seemed like a good option for us, too.
So the whole site was developed in India?
Cook: Yeah, the original. It kind of came around in phases. The first phase was just launched in our high school, so it was like a testing one. The original site we launched didn't have any of our most popular features. All the core features of the site all came from my friends' ideas--they were telling me during lunch, all the break-the-ice features and secret admirer stuff.
That's interesting. All of the popular features were your friends' ideas?
Cook: Actually, the most popular feature right now, Battles, which has like made our page views go up by 500 percent since this February, was someone on the site's idea. That person said that he wanted a new way of doing superlatives, so I came up with Battles--a one-on-one image contest, instead of just being against everyone in your class. Best-looking is the most popular category. We launched video battles about a month ago, and now best music video is also very popular.
How do you think your site compares to MySpace.com and Facebook?
Cook: We're actually really different than those sites. Comparatively in page views, MyYearbook is third in the United States after MySpace and Facebook, but we're bigger than Bebo, Hi5, Tagged.
But compared to MySpace and Facebook, MyYearbook is a lot younger, so 80 percent of our users are between 13 and 22, whereas MySpace reports they only have 12 percent of teen users and Facebook is now going mass-market. So we definitely stay to our niche.
Another big difference is unlike MySpace and Facebook, on those sites what you really do is to click on profiles and go into the groups, but on MyYearbook only 10 percent of the page views come from clicking around profiles. The other clicks are for our other features like Battles, MyMag and quizzes. That's where almost all of the traffic comes from.
That's something that is very unique about MyYearbook. There are a lot of sites that let you make a profile, but we are the only one that really has very competitive Battles, online magazines that users make themselves, and I think we have more than 100,000 quizzes.
You came up with My Mag--a user-written teen magazine. Why do you think it's resonating with your visitors?
Cook: My Mag is really for people who want to be on the site but who aren't necessarily into Battles or feel the need to challenge people. I think it's so popular because all of the new articles are things that our users write. We do have professional editors--otherwise the articles wouldn't be as good as they are.
But about 2 percent of the articles (submitted) get posted to the site, and they're all very relevant to teens, not just about celebrities--things like managing popularity in high school.
There seems to be an absence of that kind of material.
Cook: All the teen magazines like Teen People and Elle Girl, for instance, even stopped doing their print publications because there was no longer a market. Their online publications aren't really going through because very established print media companies aren't used to doing it in online, and so we are actually ahead of those. Personally, I find a lot of the teen magazines only focus on celebrities, which kind of bothers me because I don't care what Angelina Jolie is doing this week. That doesn't affect me in any way.
The (most popular) articles that are on My Mag get about 3,000 comments a day. The other ones average around 1,000.
So from that perspective, what do you think the future of media is?
Cook: I think that people will realize that user-generated content doesn't have to be like, bad. A lot of older companies and print publications hear "user-generated content" and they're kind of like scared because they don't trust what people will come up with. But I think that's the only way you can really stay in tune with what your members want, with what your readers want. So I think other media companies will realize that that's kind of the key to staying relevant. You have to post what your members want by actually seeing what they write.
Does that mean you plan to start publishing original content alongside your user-generated content?
Cook: Yeah, like once in a while, I'll write a feature article.
What was the last one you wrote?
Cook: It was about why popularity doesn't matter in terms of high school, knowing that I've not been very popular in high school myself.
What about MyYearbook? That had to boost your image.
Cook: I was very well-known, but I wasn't necessarily in the popular group. I was the class entrepreneur, so I was mentioned in the class president speech, valedictorian speech and all the class advisory speeches so everyone knows who I am, but I'm not that popular. I have a few close friends, but I don't have much time for parties and stuff because I'm always working.
How much time do you spend working on MyYearbook?
Cook: Forty hours a week or more sometimes. In the summer, I work about 60 hours a week. During the school year, it ranges between 25 to 40 hours depending on the week. In college, I plan to still be working pretty much as I had been in high school because I think I actually can miss a lot more college classes than I could high school classes.
Aren't you tempted to skip college?
Cook: I could, because I do have a very solid job. But the thing is, I don't want to quit something before I even see what it's like.
Is MyYearbook the first of many companies you want to start?
Cook: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't necessarily know it would be an Internet company, but I definitely don't think that MyYearbook is the last thing I'll start. Say in 10 years, I don't think I'll able to settle down and work a normal job. I've gotten rather used to being the boss. It's very fun running your own company.
I saw you speak at the Mashup 2007 conference with several other teen Internet entrepreneurs on stage and I was wondering how you thought you were different from your peers?
Cook: Well, obviously we're all driven. But I noticed one of the questions, I remember I made everyone laugh, they asked me how I balanced school and working. I said I spent a lot less time on school, and I noticed other kids on the panel would (sacrifice their work for school). I always put MyYearbook first, no matter what. I didn't study for any of finals this year or midterms, Also MyYearbook is bigger, so I have 30 employees working in the office.
So did your grades suffer at all?
Cook: I think they turned out pretty well. I had a 4.0 when I graduated. Junior-senior year my grades dropped, but not by that much. I never found school that difficult, and I would just find ways to multitask so I didn't have to do certain things. For instance, all senior year, I never asked for or picked up my government policy books. Instead I just downloaded the chapters, because they had them on podcast, onto my iPod and listened to them in the car on the way to the office.
What was it like when you first raised money for MyYearbook? Did you go to those meetings?
Cook: Geoff, because he is the CEO, he went to those meetings. Even though I thought of the company I still had to graduate high school. We had a PowerPoint I put together with the business plan. It's almost a blur because it was so stressful and time-consuming. Seriously, I seldom got three hours of sleep per night, but when we finally presented, it was a relief.
How many days did you miss from school, and did your parents support you with writing notes?
Cook: My mom did yell at me every time I got a note from the school saying that if I miss one more class I would lose credit. So I kept having to go into my vice principal's office and argue that it should be an excused absence, every time I was absent. So that was kind of annoying because I did almost lose credit. But my mom was very supportive. All she really cared about was that I graduated high school.
So I wrote this story that teens aren't using e-mail anymore, and you were the lone person in the story who still used e-mail. Do you think e-mail will die out in favor of text messaging and other modes of communication?
Cook: Personally, I don't think so. One of the reasons e-mail could never fully die out is just because it is a lot easier when you're crunched for time to write e-mail rather than to make a phone call, or even sending text messages can get really expensive and e-mail is free. I send so many e-mails to my friends and all of them send e-mails back, so I know I'm not crazy.
The only thing that's definitely dying is snail mail. When I was doing my college admissions, I couldn't even remember how to address an envelope. I had to look it up. I couldn't remember where the ZIP code went.
But weren't your college applications online?
Cook: I did all my applications online except for Georgetown, which didn't offer it to be done online. But I always had to mail my high school transcripts and SAT scores.
Apart from MyYearbook, what other sites do you visit? And what do you do for fun?
Cook: I really like Gamehouse.com. I like the little gaming sites that are all over. Other than that I do have a Facebook (page) because I like to check what all the Georgetown people are doing. And I'm into blogs. I read Mashable, TechCrunch and GigaOm.
Also I love the Scooby-Doo PSP games, and I'm pretty good at ultimate Frisbee, soccer, gymnastics. I like to basically do any sport.
So here's the classic college admission question: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
Cook: I don't know. I can actually see myself working in a different country, so that's why (I'm majoring in) international business. I don't think in my freshman year I could've ever seen myself owning such a giant company by my senior year, so it's really hard to say.
Adobe: No threat from PDF spam
PDF spam--junk e-mail with its message attached as a PDF file to get past spam filters--poses no security risk, says Adobe Systems.
Asked if PDF spam can embed malicious software, Erick Lee, a security engineer at Adobe, wrote in an e-mail on Wednesday that "PDF is no more able to embed malware on an unsuspecting user's system than any other typical e-mail attachment."
Over the last two months, security vendors have seen a spike in spam embedded within PDF documents. Last week, it was used in a large-scale "pump and dump" scam that reportedly caused a huge spike in spam levels and in the share price of the company highlighted in the PDF spam campaign.
According to the PDF-creation software maker, there is no hard evidence that such spam exposes users to any security risk.
"Although a nuisance, we have not verified an incident where PDF spam became a security issue," Lee said. "Users can be assured that PDF is still the de facto standard for more secure and dependable electronic information exchange."
Nonetheless, Lee added, the onus is on users to protect themselves. "(We) recommend that users exercise skepticism and caution when receiving unsolicited e-mail communications requesting user action, such as opening attachments or clicking Web links," he said.
In Symantec's latest report, released on Monday, the security vendor noted that PDF image spam, which started to emerge in June this year and is on the rise, accounted for between 2 percent and 8 percent of all spam in July.
Ascertaining authenticity
One way a valid PDF sender can ensure that the recipient knows the file is authentic is to use a certified-document digital signature, said Lee.
he security engineer noted that the digital signature, when combined with Adobe Acrobat and Reader, will "provide additional validation of the author and content."
Lee said that, to ensure the security of the PDF document, the company has a Dynamic Link Library file called PDF IFilter, which "enables the creation of software that analyzes PDF files."
The PDF IFilter is used by security vendors, as well as search-engine companies, to scan the contents of PDF files. "For example, when a user searches for a PDF file on Google, they can click a found link to see the PDF file's contents in a HTML page," Lee explained.
Adobe said it is working with spam-filter companies to help prevent PDF spam from "getting through to inboxes" by implementing the PDF IFilter.
Details on potential vulnerabilities and their solutions are available on Adobe's Web site, and all documented security vulnerabilities and their solutions are distributed through the Adobe security-notification service.
Lynn Tan of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.
Asked if PDF spam can embed malicious software, Erick Lee, a security engineer at Adobe, wrote in an e-mail on Wednesday that "PDF is no more able to embed malware on an unsuspecting user's system than any other typical e-mail attachment."
Over the last two months, security vendors have seen a spike in spam embedded within PDF documents. Last week, it was used in a large-scale "pump and dump" scam that reportedly caused a huge spike in spam levels and in the share price of the company highlighted in the PDF spam campaign.
According to the PDF-creation software maker, there is no hard evidence that such spam exposes users to any security risk.
"Although a nuisance, we have not verified an incident where PDF spam became a security issue," Lee said. "Users can be assured that PDF is still the de facto standard for more secure and dependable electronic information exchange."
Nonetheless, Lee added, the onus is on users to protect themselves. "(We) recommend that users exercise skepticism and caution when receiving unsolicited e-mail communications requesting user action, such as opening attachments or clicking Web links," he said.
In Symantec's latest report, released on Monday, the security vendor noted that PDF image spam, which started to emerge in June this year and is on the rise, accounted for between 2 percent and 8 percent of all spam in July.
Ascertaining authenticity
One way a valid PDF sender can ensure that the recipient knows the file is authentic is to use a certified-document digital signature, said Lee.
he security engineer noted that the digital signature, when combined with Adobe Acrobat and Reader, will "provide additional validation of the author and content."
Lee said that, to ensure the security of the PDF document, the company has a Dynamic Link Library file called PDF IFilter, which "enables the creation of software that analyzes PDF files."
The PDF IFilter is used by security vendors, as well as search-engine companies, to scan the contents of PDF files. "For example, when a user searches for a PDF file on Google, they can click a found link to see the PDF file's contents in a HTML page," Lee explained.
Adobe said it is working with spam-filter companies to help prevent PDF spam from "getting through to inboxes" by implementing the PDF IFilter.
Details on potential vulnerabilities and their solutions are available on Adobe's Web site, and all documented security vulnerabilities and their solutions are distributed through the Adobe security-notification service.
Lynn Tan of ZDNet Asia reported from Singapore.
Sprint earmarks $5 billion for WiMax network
Sprint Nextel said on Thursday it could spend as much as $5 billion by the end of 2010 on a new network based on the emerging high-speed wireless technology known as WiMax.
The No. 3 U.S. wireless service said it expects spending on the network through the end of 2008 to be at the low end of its previously announced estimates because of its agreement to connect its network with Clearwire, a small wireless service provider.
WiMax is a wireless technology that Sprint wants to use to blanket entire cities, enabling wireless Internet access on everything from cell phones and laptops to video game players and cameras.
The technology is expected to support Internet access at speeds up to five times faster than typical wireless networks, though it is still slower than wired broadband such as DSL.
Some investors are concerned that Sprint is betting on a largely unproven technology. But Sprint Chief Executive Gary Forsee said the company would benefit by having an advanced network ahead of its rivals.
"We in fact will have a mobile broadband network at least two years ahead of other providers that will be out there," Forsee said at a company conference in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where Sprint is showcasing the technology.
Sprint's shares fell 43 cents, about 2 percent, to close at $18.20 on Thursday. Shares of Clearwire lost 97 cents, about 4 percent, to close at $22.55.
Sprint said it expects to spend $2.5 billion on the network through the end of 2008 compared with its earlier estimate of $2.5 billion to $3 billion.
Sprint expects to reach a potential 100 million customers in that time, with the company providing coverage to 70 million people and Clearwire covering 30 million people.
Sprint, which will market the new service under the Xohm brand (pronounced "zoam"), said it expects coverage to expand to 125 million people by 2010 at an additional cost of $2.5 billion, bringing total network spending to $5 billion.
But that expansion will depend on the success of the service, Sprint said.
Sprint expects its WiMax network to generate positive free cash flow beginning in 2011. Free cash flow refers to operating income excluding depreciation and amortization, but including capital expenses, working capital and other cash requirements.
It also expects between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in revenue from WiMax in fiscal year 2010.
Last month, Sprint said it would cut the initial costs for building the network through its partnership with Clearwire. The two companies plan to connect their services and allow customers to move between their networks.
Sprint also has an agreement to feature Google's Web search services via a portal tailored to WiMax devices.
Barry West, president of Sprint's high-speed wireless unit, said in a presentation that the company has commitments from device makers to embed 50 million units in the United States with WiMax connections over the next three years.
Sprint has previously announced the top three mobile phone makers as technology partners for its plan to start offering services based on WiMax next year. They are Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Motorola.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
The No. 3 U.S. wireless service said it expects spending on the network through the end of 2008 to be at the low end of its previously announced estimates because of its agreement to connect its network with Clearwire, a small wireless service provider.
WiMax is a wireless technology that Sprint wants to use to blanket entire cities, enabling wireless Internet access on everything from cell phones and laptops to video game players and cameras.
The technology is expected to support Internet access at speeds up to five times faster than typical wireless networks, though it is still slower than wired broadband such as DSL.
Some investors are concerned that Sprint is betting on a largely unproven technology. But Sprint Chief Executive Gary Forsee said the company would benefit by having an advanced network ahead of its rivals.
"We in fact will have a mobile broadband network at least two years ahead of other providers that will be out there," Forsee said at a company conference in Tysons Corner, Virginia, where Sprint is showcasing the technology.
Sprint's shares fell 43 cents, about 2 percent, to close at $18.20 on Thursday. Shares of Clearwire lost 97 cents, about 4 percent, to close at $22.55.
Sprint said it expects to spend $2.5 billion on the network through the end of 2008 compared with its earlier estimate of $2.5 billion to $3 billion.
Sprint expects to reach a potential 100 million customers in that time, with the company providing coverage to 70 million people and Clearwire covering 30 million people.
Sprint, which will market the new service under the Xohm brand (pronounced "zoam"), said it expects coverage to expand to 125 million people by 2010 at an additional cost of $2.5 billion, bringing total network spending to $5 billion.
But that expansion will depend on the success of the service, Sprint said.
Sprint expects its WiMax network to generate positive free cash flow beginning in 2011. Free cash flow refers to operating income excluding depreciation and amortization, but including capital expenses, working capital and other cash requirements.
It also expects between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in revenue from WiMax in fiscal year 2010.
Last month, Sprint said it would cut the initial costs for building the network through its partnership with Clearwire. The two companies plan to connect their services and allow customers to move between their networks.
Sprint also has an agreement to feature Google's Web search services via a portal tailored to WiMax devices.
Barry West, president of Sprint's high-speed wireless unit, said in a presentation that the company has commitments from device makers to embed 50 million units in the United States with WiMax connections over the next three years.
Sprint has previously announced the top three mobile phone makers as technology partners for its plan to start offering services based on WiMax next year. They are Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Motorola.
Story Copyright © 2007 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
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