Author: Serkadis

The EFF points us to a story claiming that the Blu-ray edition of the movie Avatar is being released earlier than the studio would like due to France’s three strikes law. The article claims that, while most folks have concentrated on the three strikes part, the law also requires limited release windows, such that studios need to release films on DVD within a certain time period after theatrical release. I certainly had not heard this, and some challenged the claim in the comments, but the original blogger points to the specific language in the statute. While some others point out that the window for release is pretty large (longer than pretty much every other movie ever uses), it makes you wonder why France is legislating this at all. I’m all for shorter movie release windows — and think studios should get rid of the windows for the most part — but I can’t fathom how it could make sense to mandate a specific time for release windows in the law.

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I have a confession to make. I’ve never been able to solve a Rubik’s cube. I had a solved one in my office for years, but its one I bought at the store, removed from the package, and put on the shelf. Everything was fine until my son got hold of it, and jumbled it up for me.

I’ve never peeled the stickers, but I did take my cube apart when I was younger and “solved” it that way. Apparently I’m not the only one who has had issues with one of the best selling puzzles of all time, because there is now an official website with step by step instructions on how to solve your cursed cube. The Rubik’s team has also started their own Facebook group and YouTube channel as well. Sounds like it’s time for me to dig up my cube and see if the videos will actually help you solve it (without taking the cube apart this time).

Click here for the full press release.

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Everybody likes Helvetica, and even if you’re a little sick of it being used everywhere, all the time, I’m sure you won’t turn down a delicious cookie based on it. To be honest, Impact would probably be more practical for cookie-making, but that really won’t do if you’re hosting a typography party (I can haz frosting?).

These instruments of tasteful typecutting are designed by Beverly Hsu, who has updated the design page to say that yes, they will be sold at some point in the future, but not for a little while. Oh well — that’s why they invented bookmarks.

[via BoingBoing]

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As we’ve covered in the past, the cost of engaging and keeping great employees can be high. You can pay an intelligent employee to stay late, or placate them with a posh office environment, but one way to keep an innovator in their chair is to challenge their problem solving skills. Instead of hiring sub-par developers or trusting code to rogue contractors, below are two case studies that may make you consider creating competition to meet aggressive goals.

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The Case for Prizes

As shown on Stanford University’s ECorner, chairman of the X Prize Foundation, Peter H. Diamandis first got the idea for the $10 million dollar prize while reading The Spirit of St. Louis. Although Diamandis knew that the author Charles Lindbergh was the first man to cross the Atlantic in a single engine plane, he did not realize that the pilot (and many others who attempted the flight) had done so to win a prize.

Exclaims Diamandis, “I’m adding it up and [realize that] $400,000 was spent to win this $25,000 prize. How insanely leveraged is that? It was 16 times the prize money. And this [investor] didn’t spend a penny to back any of the guys most likely to win… Prizes are an efficient way to get 10 or 50 times your money and you only pay the winner.” When the Ansari X was awarded in 2004, it was estimated that $100 million dollars were invested in new technologies in pursuit of the prize.

Netflix saw similar results when it awarded $1 million dollars to a team of developers for improving on the company’s Cinematch predictive technology. Similar to Diamandis’ outcomes, the technology discovered during the contest is estimated to be worth considerably more than the initial prize money. The contest was so successful that Netflix is planning a second contest for additional product features.

Creating Your Own Prize

If you’re a startup founder and you’re hoping to leverage the power of third-party developers to build your business, here are some points to consider in launching your own prize:

1. Creating a challenge: Make sure that what you are proposing is actually a challenge worth solving. Few third-party developers or designers will spend their weekends and evenings building a technology that is uninteresting. While your challenge should represent your business interests, it should be something that requires a great deal of intelligence and creativity to solve.

2. A higher purpose: A great challenge doesn’t just contribute to your company’s core technology, it represents a feat of intelligence that will contribute value to the greater programming, scientific or business community. Your contest is meant to inspire a legacy of advancement in education and industry-wide learning. If your challenge is likely to give rise to a truly groundbreaking piece of technology, you may find other companies willing to add to your prize incentive.

3. Recognition: Although it helps to offer a large cash incentive, one of the most important parts of a challenge is recognition amongst peers and in the media. The fact that an untrained amateur can potentially beat esteemed scientists and researchers is a particularly compelling narrative. Meanwhile, those within the academic community may see the prize as a good way to elevate their career prospects.

4. Supporting innovation: You can’t just issue a challenge and expect the first press conference to be your only expense. Developer challenges require a supportive environment where participants can trade findings, get help from staff and submit new documentation. The more support you provide to third-party developers now, the more likely your challenge will yield good results.

Photo Credit: Terren

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Bellwether rings in a good new year — Texas Instruments is another one of those bellwethers for the economy, as its chips are used in cell phones, TVs, and other electronic gadgets. The company beat analysts’ expectations today, reporting a profit of $655 million on sales of $3 billion in the fourth quarter. And CEO Rich Templeton predicts that growth will be up sequentially in the first quarter, not down as is typical for the season. Credit the overall tech recovery. Still, the company’s stock price fell in after-hours trading.

VMware says IT spending grows — The virtualization software company reported today that its fourth quarter earnings got a boost from a rebound in corporate information technology spending. The company projected that its revenues in 2010 will be up 21 percent from 2009.

Bill Gates goes green — The Microsoft chairman has invested some of his money in Vinod Khosla’s latest fund at Khosla Ventures. Most of Gates’ attention has focused on his philanthropic efforts aimed at solving world health problems. But he’s looking to make money in cleantech.

Big India city ditches coal — The city of Delhi has decided to get rid of coal in favor of natural gas. That’s a huge step for a city of 12 million people.

Cybercrime catches corporations flat-footed – A survey of 523 IT managers by Deloitte shows that corporations aren’t prepared to fight cybercriminals. Many corporations are neglecting simple countermeasures such as keeping track of patches for their software systems.

NFL goes mobile – The National Football League plans to make its RedZone Channel game highlights available to mobile phone users next season.

Asian LCD makers upbeat — Makers of liquid crystal display are expecting a good 2010 thanks to the launch of new touchscreen devices and eBook readers.

China fires back on Google – Chinese authorities shot another volley at the U.S., saying its fears of cyberattacks in the wake of the Google hacking incident are groundless.

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I’m just going to take it.

That’s right, Comcast. This is me, waving my white flag. I’m not going to complain to you any more. Why did I even try in the first place? It’s like trying to erode Mount Rainier with licks. So from here on out, I’m just going to take it. All the outages, all the fees, all 20 levels of customer service. Who was I kidding, anyway?

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670 horsepower and a top speed of 211 mph. Those figures may mean a lot to many people but there are few places in the world where you would be able to enjoy a combination of both – and it seems like Lamborghini finally understands that. According to AutoWeek, the company will move away from focusing on horsepower ratings and will concentrate more on using lighter materials to reduce a vehicle’s overall weight.

“It has come to the point where acceleration equals consumption,” said Stephan Winkelmann, CEO of Lamborghini. “More consumption means increased CO2 emissions.”

Winkelmann said that taking into consideration future government regulations that could restrict engine performance, Lamborghini will concentrate on taking extra weight out of its vehicle to increase acceleration.

Maurizio Reggiani, chief of Lamborghini’s R&D department, says that once a vehicle reaches 211 mph, there is a declining rate of return for each additional horsepower needed to push the car to go faster. He also said that there are few places in the world where a driver can go that fast, so Lamborghini will now focus on acceleration instead of top speed.

“The weight-to-power ratio will be the key factor,” Reggiani said. “We will use composite materials in the right place, when it also has the right cost, stiffness and mechanical characteristics.”

– By: Stephen Calogera

It’s completely anecdotal and lacking in what some might call “scientific rigor,” but we’re digging the, ahem, relevance of Phil Gyford’s little text input faceoff he performed for his blog recently. The piece pits an Apple Newton, Palm Vx, Treo 650, and Apple iPhone up against each other, with regular pen and paper and a laptop’s full QWERTY keyboard thrown in for reference. The results may or may not surprise you, but (spoiler alert) after the MacBook Pro took top honors in blazing through a 221 word passage twice, the iPhone beat out the rest of the competition, with the three pen-related inputs (pen and paper, Newton MessagePad and Palm Graffiti) all taking up dead last. The iPhone, Treo and pen and paper all were relatively close in speed, and naturally your mileage may vary. That said, where do you think you fall? Drop in your results in comments (the full text he used can be found at the source link) or hit up the poll below with your best guestimate. We’re dying to know!

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Pen input faces off against hardware and software QWERTY keyboards: there can be only one (maybe) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 20:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Homebrew coder ant512 is back to release a new version of Woopsi, a handy GUI library for creating homebrew user interfaces for the Nintendo DS. The latest release of the brew is another feature pack update that

Many of the drugs we use are natural compounds or their derivatives, obtained from plants, fungi, or bacteria. Unfortunately, these organisms produce them for their own needs, and don’t always make enough for us to obtain them in sufficient bulk or purity. One of the things that motivates the field of synthetic biology is the hope that we can design an organism from scratch so that it will make useful compounds like these drugs. But a paper that will be released by PNAS later this week suggests that there may be an easier way to go about things: take an existing bacteria and delete anything it doesn’t need to make the drugs.

One of the challenges of engineering bacteria to produce natural compounds is that the chemicals involved in the production process—the biosynthetic pathway, as it’s called—may come from many different parts of a cell’s metabolism. So, for example, the biosynthetic pathway may stitch together a piece of a sugar, part of a broken-down protein, and some lipid in order to make a useful drug compound. So, it’s not simply enough to identify the enzymes that catalyze the steps in a biosynthetic pathway; you have to identify the raw materials, too, and ensure that your engineered bacteria makes all of those.

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»  Windows Mobile could be folded under Microsoft’s main Windows’ operation as a result of the company’s reorg. [The Register]

»  Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) might announce the end of AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity on Wednesday. PC World]

»  Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader WebApp works well on BlackBerry even though it was designed for Android and iPhones. [CrackBerry]

»  Flight Control game hits over 2 million in sales. [TouchArcade]

World peace? Twenty minutes in a steel cage with a heavily sedated Steve Ballmer? No, His Jobsness cares not for these trifles. And after seeing what his one wish truly is, I can’t say I blame him. [Fredo&Pid’jin]

So you’re in the market for a new supercar and your budget is around $1.2 million dollars – well, you’re in luck. A dealer in the Netherlands has this light blue Bugatti Veyron (looks like the Bugatti Veyron Bleu Centenaire) up for sale with a matching Mercedes Atego car transporter for a total of €895,000 ($1,264,815 USD).

The Bugatti Veyron only has 4,802 miles on it and seems to be in mint condition.

Bugatti Veyron for sale with matching trailer:

– By: Kap Shah

Source: JamesList (via WCF)

Did Obama just seal the Democratic party’s fate in November by leaking word of a coming 3-year discretionary spending freeze?

Let’s quickly point out why this already sounds like a political blunder:

• It won’t do jack to control the budget. It only affects 17% of the budget, and that 17% isn’t the part that’s growing like crazy.
• It won’t do anything to make conservatives like him.
• It will piss off liberals — royally.

And indeed that last one is already happening.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reports that labor and other liberal special interest groups are venting fury at The White House this evening.

Liberal blog Samefacts.com announces that Obama’s “self-inflicted lobotomy” proceeds apace.

Red-hot netroots site FireDogLake — whose influence on the left really deserves its own story at some point — is predictably appalled.

Still no word from Paul Krugman, but we won’t be surprised if he chimes in with a paragraph or two somtime tonight.

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See Also:

• Obama To Announce Spending Freeze For Tiny Sliver Of The Federal Budget That Won’t Effect Anything
• Obama’s Blunder: Forgetting Politics Is All About Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, And More Jobs

With only a day remaining until the massive action game hits the store shelves across the globe, Zipper Interactive has revealed the differences between the MAG Beta 5.0 and the final version of the game.
 

To be fair, the $12,000 figure cited in the headline is pure guesswork on my part. But when the 40″ version of the TV, reviewed here at FlatPanelsHD, costs £6000 (about $10,000), it’s easy enough to do the math. These mega-lux TVs are meant to be the final word in current LCD TV technology — and will of course be worth less than a fig once AMOLED is the standard. Until then, however (probably two years), these B&O sets will remain, high-cost, high-quality, and high-fashion displays for you to watch heavily compressed cable news on.

Okay, okay, I’m being too harsh. The fact is these things look gorgeous and if they’d give me one, I’d gladly put it on my wall instead of the nothing that’s there right now. But the other fact is that they cost a huge amount of money and really, I doubt they produce $10,000 more picture quality than a mid-range Samsung (which provides B&O’s LCD panels) or another set aimed at mortals.

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In the vast pantheon of watches, the aviator is a timeless paragon of virtue and class. Traditionally given to folks who fly in planes (hence the term “aviator”), these watches were larger than standard watches and often had big crowns for easy winding. The IWC Big Pilots Watch is a classic in the form, with the clear, legible numbers and top triangular noon pip.

But, like great paintings, watches often stray from form, and often with positive results. If the Big Pilots Watch is “Whistler’s Mother” then the Praesto Modern Fliegeruhr is Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans. At once this watch is an homage, a little work of art, and a sly dig at the stuffy establishment.

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Driving the enterprise this year is a quest for efficiency and flexibility. To determine the actual direction, one needs quantifiable information that proves certain trends have merit.

The want ads are a great resource for seeing what types of investments are being made by companies. This year, people with virtualization skills are in big demand, followed by -you guessed it – cloud computing.

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Forrester Research is predicting that IT spending will jump about 8% but hiring will lag.

According to a post on CIO.com, Wedbush Securities, a Wall Street analyst firm, sees projects involving virtualization, Windows 7 and enterprise software as high on the corporate priority list.

In 2008, Dice.com ran an average of 85,000 job listings. Then Lehman Bros. collapsed and the job market fizzled. Jobs posted took a drop in 2009, falling to a low of 47,000. Today, the count is up to 50,000 and is expected to increase over the span of the year.

The fastest growing skills are for virtualization, which is at about 2,000 ads, up 21% compared to last year. Cloud computing is showing popularity, too. Last year there were zero jobs posted.This year there are more than 300.

Large companies from a number of industries are hiring virtualization pros, showing the demand is not just from technology companies.

IT managers realize that virtualization pros can manage more servers than their counterparts. For example, CIO.com cites a study that found one administrator manages 65 physical servers. The average for virtual servers is 77.

That’s not a huge increase but it can help save IT dollars that can be used to prove whether other growing trends deserve attention.

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The days of SEO as the primary traffic driver to your website are over. Don’t get us wrong, organic search engine optimization isn’t about to disappear as a key traffic driver. And thankfully, Google AdWords is still going strong. However, recent technology trends enable a brave new world of marketing. Ignore them at your peril.

Take real time, for instance. The next generation of search, aggregation, notification and findability services are being developed using real-time technologies that enable users and machines to receive real-time updates. In a recent post, Robert Scoble said he would be better off curating news than actually attending the Apple launch! What? If you aren’t thinking about how real time, along with social networks, mobile and location-based services fits in your marketing plan, you’re missing an opportunity.

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Google’s Great, But Facebook Rocks

In a recent post, ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick asked “Why is Google afraid of Facebook?” The answer is because social networking sites have become a key link in the search and information sharing value chain. You would have to be hiding out in a dark hole not to understand social media and the effect it has had on marketing the past couple of years – but surpass search? Oh, right, now I get it: These sites are an important information source for everyone. Importantly, friends’ recommendations are key.

Mobile is Better

Google’s VP of product development recently stated that, “with all the capabilities these phones that are coming out have – like GPS, cameras – we think there is the potential to actually make this mobile Web better than the PC Web.” That is a profound statement for marketing managers. A mobile phone experience better than the web? If you haven’t bought yourself a smart phone like iPhone or Android, we suggest you go out and grab one. Mobile applications are proliferating like rabbits. What would be better than to be first to market and offer your customers an exceptional product experience while on the go.

Perfect product placement

Location-based services mean the ability to market right outside your front door is happening now. ReadWriteWeb’s Frederic Lardinois reported in June 2009 that 1 in 3 smart phone owners use location based services. Take this simple example. You’re in Vail, you just finished 8 hours on the mountain and now you’re looking for the perfect apres ski location. You’re walking down the Mall, you take your iPhone out of your pocket and ta-da! Buy one-get-one-free margaritas at Las Margaritas. You’re standing right outside. Perfect product placement. And now you can talk about the restaurant and broadcast it immediately to all your friends.

If you aren’t listening to the conversation, you better start. There are numerous listening applications available to get you started in your pursuit to join the conversation and get a handle on positive as well as negative feedback on your product or brand. A simple saved search in Twitter can go along way.

All these trends have a profound impact on how we market to our website guests at ReadWriteWeb. Not only do we have to understand search engine optimization, but the opportunities offered by social media marketing, the new capabilities and possibilities offered by mobile, geolocation, augmented reality and real-time notification and information sharing. One seems to becoming just as important as the next.

If you don’t understand these technology trends as a marketer, you better get out while the getting is good. Enabled by technology, 2010 is already a watershed year for new ways to reach your customers.

Want to know more about the real-time Web? Read ReadWriteWeb’s report, The Real-Time Web and its Future.

Photo by Clix.

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