Category: News

This morning, after many months of rampant speculation over the enigmatic Tablet, Apple officially invited scores of press to a special media event to be held January 27. The debut of the Tablet seems all but a given according to most reports, but there are some secondary announcements that also stand to be huge — especially the rumors that we may also see the launch of iPhone 4.0. This afternoon, Fox News “confirmed” that we’d being seeing the latest iteration of Apple’s hugely popular mobile OS for the first time. Should that be the case, there’s also a good chance we’ll see launch of a very important new feature: background applications.

First things first. While the title of the Fox News article is “Apple Tablet, iPhone 4 Launch Confirmed for January 27″, the body of the article later says that it’s “likely” that Apple will unveil those two products (along with an updated iLife suite), and also notes that Apple is known for suddenly removing features or products from their announcements at the last second — none of which makes the news sound totally concrete. That said, there are plenty of reasons why iPhone 4.0 could be making an appearance alongside the Tablet, and why it will bring background apps with it.

We’ve discussed the probable connection between the Tablet and the iPhone OS since as early as last May. With iPhone OS, Apple took Mac OS X and stripped it down to the basics to turn it into a compact and powerful mobile operating system. The tablet will almost certainly have more horsepower than the iPhone, but it would still stand to gain from the power and space saving attributes of the mobile OS (albeit a modified version). Our suspicions got further support less than a week ago, when we saw reports that the newest releases of the iPhone OS was actually being held back because some of its code alluded to the unannounced tablet device. Given these ties, it would be logical for the iPhone 4.0 OS to make its debut alongside the tablet.

But the Tablet OS will need to bring some new features with it. For one, it will probably need to allow users to run multiple apps at the same time. Most people don’t particularly care (yet) that they can’t do this with their iPhones, because the screen real estate is so limited and they don’t view the device as a handheld computer (even though it is one). But that won’t be true with the tablet — in light of its larger screen, users will expect more functionality, and the inability to run multiple apps would grow frustrating quickly. With that in mind, if Apple has already established a paradigm for running background apps on the tablet, it would make sense to finally bring it over to the iPhone too.

The iPhone’s current lack of background applications is one of its most glaring weaknesses compared to other mobile operating systems, most notably Android and Palm’s WebOS. Apple’s reasons for withholding the functionality before now were obvious: running multiple applications can drain the device’s already-strained battery more quickly, and forcing users to manage which apps are open adds an extra layer of complexity. It was the right choice then, but it’s time for things to change.

Plenty of developers have already had their applications hampered by their inability to run in the background. Messaging clients have to rely on the iPhone’s Push notifications, which can only display a single alert at a time. Music players (other than the built-in iPod app) close down as soon as you try to do anything else on the phone. And location based apps have to rely almost exclusively on the “check-in” model popularized by Foursquare, because they have no way to passively monitor your location. Consumers may not be frustrated by these restrictions yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they look enviously at their Android-toting friends streaming Pandora and running Skype or Meebo in the background.

And Apple knows it. As far back as last May we were hearing that Apple was having serious discussions about how to implement background applications.  As it did with copy and paste (which iPhone users had to wait years for), Apple is clearly taking its time to get it right the first time.  Now, with the imminent release of the tablet, Apple may have finally settled on a solution.  If the Fox News report is correct, that could be revealed as soon as next week. But even if iPhone 4.0 isn’t announced for a few more months, it seems highly likely that background apps will come with it.

Image via Gizmodo. And no, it isn’t real.

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Vanilla Forums, an open source community forum software technology, has raised a $500,000 (CAD) Series A funding. Vanilla Forums was a Techstars summer 2009 company.

The round was led by Montreal Startup, with participation by eonBusiness, Norseman Capital and Klein Venture Partners. Vanilla Forums, a Montreal-based startup, will use the funds to expand its marketing, development, and sales efforts.

Vanilla has also released its forum hosting platform and additional premium features. According to Vanilla Forums, their hosting platform enables customers to quickly and easily deploy a community forum solution without having to write a single line of code.

Vanilla also released two new premium features, custom domains and ad-removal, with plans to release additional premium features including custom CSS, single sign-on, and forum analytics in the future.

The company already has over 300,000 users, including companies like O’Reilly Media, Rackspace, Mozilla, and more.

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The inventor of the world’s first video and imaging system for seats, CruiseCam International, today inaugurated a new distribution center in North America, as the first round of inventory for back orders of 1,000 multi-patented camera mounts produced in China arrived at the new facility yesterday.

The facility soon will include a showroom for the first CruiseCam store. The center technicians and a service coordinator will conduct beta testing of the company’s latest product, a DVR (digital v… (read more)

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson signed an executive order Tuesday, pushing his state to “become the center of the North American solar industry.” Richardson’s extensive order calls for state agencies to work aggressively to develop renewable …

From the Citroen DS3 anti-retro, we’re back to the 60’s with this Opel Corsa “Color Race” version from General Motors. The model is based on the Kadett B Rallye 1900 which was produced from 1969. The modifications are purely aesthetic, and include the very bright colours of Sunny Melon yellow, Casablanca white and Magma red.

The Color Race Corsa also has 17-inch alloy wheels in bronze effect, panoramic roof and leather steering wheel. The engine range is the same with the 1.4-litre petrol with 80 or 100 hp, and the 1.7 CDTI with 130 hp and a fuel consumption of just 4.5 litres per 100 km. The Opel Corsa Color Race will be available only in Germany at a cost of about 15,560 euros. The Corsa Color Race video is after the jump.

Opel Corsa Color Race version

Stanford School of Medicine recently received a $3 million grant to eliminate corporate influence on continuing medical education (CME). The grant, however, came from an unexpected source: pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc.

Since 2008, Stanford has had a strict policy against commercial support for specific CME programming. However, this grant is an exception due to its open-ended scope. The three-year grant will go toward a new metric-based approach to the overall Stanford CME program and will be distributed at Stanford’s discretion, without any input from Pfizer.

“The grant comes to us as a gift, and Pfizer will not be involved in how it is spent,” wrote Medical School Dean Philip Pizzo in an e-mail to The Daily.

CME consists of seminars and classes for practicing physicians to update them on advances in medicine. Doctors must attend CME at regular intervals to keep their medical license.

The new CME program Stanford seeks to implement bases its curriculum off of data on how doctors perform. Using a wealth of data sets on the subject, the CME team at Stanford have found specific subject areas where doctors at Stanford need improvement. These subjects include smoking cessation, preventing surgical infection and reducing readmission for heart failure.

Pfizer will be giving Stanford $1 million each year from 2010 through 2012.

According to Robert Jackler, the associate dean for CME, there have long been problems with commercial influence on CME programs. “CME has been corrupted by the commercial system,” he said. “Many programs that are taught are biased…toward a commercial project.”

As Jackler explained, many classes are taught at tourist destinations and financed by corporate giants with huge commercial interests in the subjects being taught. These influences have affected the curricula both overtly and indirectly.

After Stanford adopted a strict policy of eliminating commercial interests, the University has been running programs without any of the lucrative corporate funding received by other schools.

“Since the time we adopted [our policy] in 2008, the companies never gave us anything, and we never even asked,” Jackler said.

Now, with the Pfizer money, Stanford seeks to create a new evidence-based curriculum for CME that redefines the programs free from industry influence. The major question, however, is why Pfizer would now offer Stanford such a large grant toward a curriculum that does not serve any of its corporate interests.

A Pfizer representative characterized the move as an act of patient service. “The grant to Stanford provides the opportunity for credible, publicly-transparent collaboration around areas of mutual patient-centric interest where it is understood we are here to serve rather than be served,” said Pfizer Media Director Kristen Neese.

However, Jackler put Pfizer’s decision into a larger context.

“Pfizer has been a bad actor. They just filed a 2.3 billion-dollar settlement with the Department of Justice…there’s no question Pfizer has been a sinner,” he said. “[Pfizer was] seeking to do it a different way, and I think they were seeking a partner who had a reputation for doing something with the highest ethics.”

Pfizer’s September settlement with the Department of Justice centered on fraudulent advertising charges for the drug Bextra, along with other products. The charges involved kickbacks to health care providers in an effort to encourage doctors to prescribe them, along with extensive off-label marketing.

The grant to Stanford may not offer Pfizer commercial marketing opportunities, but as Pizzo explained, it could help the company improve its public image.

“Virtually every pharmaceutical industry has served the public poorly with their CME programs,” Pizzo said. “And I would further add that physicians and institutions have been complicit as well. I have no doubts that both need improvement in their reputation, and I am sure that has figured into the Pfizer decision.”

Jackler concurred that image could be behind the grant, but he also hoped that Pfizer truly took an interest in better medical education.

“It would not surprise me, but my firmest hope…is that it’s not to polish their image,” he said.

Jackler said he believed that if CME is done the right way, it can help doctors keep up to date with scientific breakthroughs and to learn about the latest advances in the medical field. He said this could, in the end, benefit the industry as well as patients.

“If your company has really good products that meet those criteria, then it will work out for you in the end,” he said.

Jackler also cited the potential positive impact of the grant for the University. “Three million dollars in education is a huge grant. We can do some really good things at Stanford here with this,” he said. “We’re seeking to be a paradigm shift.”

Pizzo is optimistic about the program, but noted that it will be monitored closely. “I view this as an experiment,” he said. “We will have to see if this can be accomplished–and will be monitoring it very carefully.”

Because we don’t buy steak all that often, we have trouble keeping all the different cuts straight when we do. Did we like the porterhouse for this recipe, or was it the rib eye? Food Paper has a quick and dirty guide to all the cuts, and we’ve bookmarked the page for just these moments!

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A year and a half ago, we had an interesting discussion here about whether or not the Fourth Amendment and your right to privacy extended to information you stored online via any sort of “cloud” service. The arguments basically fell into two camps, with some citing the “third party doctrine,” which basically says that once you gave up info to a third party, you no longer have any right to expect it to be kept private. This argument came from a lawsuit (Smith v. Maryland) that basically said phone numbers you dialed were not “secret” because you were supplying them to the phone company. Of course, the other side of that argument is that it’s ridiculous to extend this concept to online storage, noting that the Supreme Court had recognized in the Katz case (about wiretapping public pay phones) that the Fourth Amendment applies to “people, not places.”

It looks like this debate is kicking off again, with a discussion on News.com over whether or not the Fourth Amendment covers information stored in “the cloud.” It tackles some of the same ground that we covered a while back, but points to a recent law review paper on this topic (pdf) by David A. Couillard.

The paper does a good job separating out the thinking here, and explaining why the Fourth Amendment absolutely should apply to information you store online. As it notes, while the Smith case said that phone numbers dialed might not be private, that did not extend to the contents of the phone call itself. And that’s key. The reason that the phone company gets the phone numbers dialed is because that information is key to it delivering its service of connecting the phone call. So you can make a reasonable argument that while such information (the information needed to initiate a service) might not be subject to privacy protection, everything else communicated or stored via that service still deserves those protections.

The issue is that right now we really don’t know how the courts feel about this — and you can bet this is going to become an issue that shows up in the court system before too long. Hopefully, the courts will recognize that any “third party doctrine” when it comes to the Fourth Amendment is limited to a very narrow subset of information provided for a particular purpose, rather than all information stored on third party servers.

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The HZ35W is a rare compact camera with 15x optical zoom. The wide-angle 24mm Schneider lenses are coupled with 12mp sensors, and the HZ35W has a 3-inch AMOLED screen along with GPS for geo-tagging.

The HZ30W on the other hand has a 3.0-inch TFT LCD, so won’t offer a battery life quite as long as its bigger brother. Video recording is done at 720p and 30fps. These two go on sale in March also.

http://www.trendsnow.net/2010/01/nissan-urge-concept.html

Google has thrived as a web company and has made a killing selling ads everywhere online. Its advertising options are almost as diverse as its cloud products, but there is still one frontier where Google has struggled and where it failed to make much headway, the old media. It gave up on its radio and publishing ventures last year and its last remaining fo… (read more)

About 30 Stanford students, administrators and staff gathered in the Black Community Services Center (BCSC) on Friday for the first Caribbean Student Association (CSA) Haiti Focus Group.

The Focus Group was a brainstorming session on how to best organize relief efforts within the Stanford community and Silicon Valley area, but also to provide support for students who were personally affected by the disaster. Many of the students present were Haitian or had family living in Haiti.

“I’m from Puerto Rico, and I’ve been seeing this image and thinking, ‘This could have been my island,’” said Gabriela Spencer ’11, who led the CSA event. “This is very relevant to Stanford students because it could have been the Bay Area–it’s hard for students to see that.”

Leaders from all corners of the Stanford campus, including representatives from FACE AIDS, Sigma Gamma Rho, the HAAS Center, administrators, the Stanford News Service and Stanford Libraries, also attended the event.

“CSA doesn’t have the answers,” Spencer said. “But we’re here to get ideas.”

Attendees gathered in a large circle and soon learned that many students had very personal connections to the disaster.

“I have family who are displaced,” said Faradia Pierre ’12, a first generation Haitian American. “Some of their homes are still standing, but they’re afraid to go in because they might collapse. Right now a lot of people are living outside of their homes on the street.”

The event concentrated on developing strategies to move forward. Attendees pitched ideas for raising funds and providing aid.

Some of the ideas included putting on a benefit concert with a recommended donation, setting up collection boxes similar to those used by UNICEF in student dorms, donating meals through the Stanford meal plan and finding companies in Silicon Valley to match Stanford donations.

“People need daily necessities right now,” Pierre said. “Everything about daily life is completely destroyed. Schools are destroyed; students are not going to school.”

Other ideas included an internship or abroad program specifically targeted to reconstruction in Haiti, a campus-wide collection of clothing, goods and baby supplies, creating a Haitian exhibit in Old Union and showing a Haitian documentary at Aquarius Theater in Palo Alto to raise awareness.

One theme of the event was to think beyond the fiscal resources at Stanford.

“It’s important to think about the capital at Stanford,” said Jan Barker-Alexander, director of BCSC. “But there is something else to think about in terms of what Stanford has to offer, which is intellectual capital.”

Alexander offered Harvard and MIT as examples of educational communities that have succeeded in bringing intellectual resources to previous disaster areas, particularly the involvement of their architecture and policy programs in New Orleans.

“We are the future–future policy makers and doctors,” Pierre said. “With our successes, we are benefitting other people in the end.”

Many branches from around the Stanford campus are launching their own projects in response to the crisis.

According to Sally Dickson, associate vice provost for student affairs, students at the Stanford Law School are collaborating on a Haitian immigration project.

Stanford alums have also mobilized to address the crisis. Luke Beckman ’09 and Josh Nesbit ’09, currently stationed in Haiti, have been working in the technology and strategic planning division of Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters (InSTEDD), an international, non-profit humanitarian organization, to facilitate the organization of aid and reconstruction on the ground.

As a national response liaison, Beckman has been coordinating efforts between the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Military, the Haitian government, mapping agencies, technology companies, the United Nations and other NGOs.

“My job is to support all of these different networks by keeping everyone in the loop,” he said.

Beckman’s team is currently working on creating a texting hotline, a “shortcut” for Haitians so they can report problems and communicate with a network of thousands of volunteers.

“We had a big win yesterday,” he said. “The top five Haitian officials didn’t have phones, and President Obama wanted to talk to them…through collaboration, we got phones to them and now they’re on the phone with President Obama,” he said.

Conditions for Beckman’s team have been nothing short of difficult. The island lacks enough water, security and most imaginable resources.

“If you can imagine it, it’s probably an issue,” he said.

“Most of us on the team have had four hours of sleep in two days,” he added. “We’re running on adrenaline now.”

Beckman specifically noted the country’s lack of infrastructure as a major setback to administering aid. The airstrip in the capital of Port-au-Prince was destroyed, and most roads are not navigable, which can make it impossible to transport people and supplies.

“Seventy percent of the buildings in Port-au-Prince have been destroyed,” he said. “And thousands of people were in those buildings or under them.”

Although Beckman thinks that chaos will prevail in Haiti for the time being, he is hopeful for the gains to be made during reconstruction. Missing person databases have been created, new medical centers are being formed and sources have collaborated in sharing map imagery.

“The Haitians I know personally have suffered under a lot of things for a lot of time,” he said. “And they’re still here, and they’re still kicking. They’re a resilient culture.”

If you’re one of the ones involved in the Opel business, you surely heard about CEO Nick Reilly’s letter submitted to employees last week in which he talks about a number of topics, including the future of both Opel and Vauxhall and their relation with North America.

First of all, Reilly emphasized that Vauxhall will continue to remain a British brand while Opel will live on at a global level. However, the two will be named "Opel/Vauxhall" when referring to the European activities, … (read more)

Fernando Alonso revealed, during a chat session he had with the Ferrari fans on the team’s official website, that he has already arrived at Maranello for the pre-season seat-fitting with the Scuderia. As you all know by now, Ferrari are currently tackling their last development stage of the 2010 challenger, and the seat-fitting is crucial for Fernando Alonso before the testing season kicks off in early February.

As Felipe Massa has been racing Ferraris for years, the Spaniard is the only one … (read more)

As announced back in December 2009, Nelson Piquet Jr. completed his second NASCAR test, after taking a Red Horse Racing Camping World Truck Series machine for a spin on the New Smyrna, Florida track.

After no prospects opened up for him in Formula 1 and after refusing one offer, as he says, the Brazilian-born may make his NASCAR debut from as early as the Daytona race in February.

I could’ve been there if I wanted to. A team offered me to be there. I just thought I was sick and tired of a… (read more)

Mazda UK has announced the introduction of the Mazda3 1.6 Tamura special edition, which will be available from February 1, 2010.

The edition is based on the TS model and is enhanced by a sports styling kit, consisting of sports front grille, side skirts and sport bumpers), front fog lamps, bespoke badging and free metallic paint. The exterior color range offers a new metallic paint (Aluminum Silver Metallic) two regular Mica colors (Black Mica and Velocity Red Mica), and the unique-to-Tamura … (read more)

Martin Luther King was a prominent leader of the civil rights movement in America. He was a clergyman by profession but had the most prominent actions when it came to the rights of Africans.

BlatantNews.com

He was born in the year 1929 and became a Baptist Minister. He was killed on April 4, 1968. He was staying at Lorraine Motel and was shot while he was standing on the Balcony of the second floor. He was killed by James Earl Ray. He was captured two months after Martin Luther’s death from London Airport.

Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso admitted that his desire to compete in Formula One and win more titles for the Scuderia has not changed at all during the past few years. Although he spent the last couple of seasons in the middle of the F1 field – or even in the rear of it, as it happened through the majority of 2009 – the Spaniard is still very much excited when thinking of driving an F1 car.

Talking to the Italian tifosi during a chat meeting on Monday, the 2-time world champion assured them that … (read more)