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More kids are getting mobile phones: Last year, more than 35% of U.S. children ages 10-11 had cellphones, almost double the amount in 2005, according to Mediamark data, via eMarketer. And more than 5% of 6-7-year-olds had cellphones last year.

Takeaway: The audience for kids-focused mobile content, apps, and advertising is growing rapidly.

Canadian folk singer Kate McGarrigle, mother of musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright, died on Monday. She was at 63.

McGarriagle enjoyed a long, successful musical partnership with her sister Anna and the duo recorded more than 10 albums together in the ’60s and ’70s, Spinner.com reports. Kate had been suffering from clear cell sarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

“Sadly our sweet Kate had to leave us last night. She departed in a haze of song and love surrounded by family and good friends. She is irreplaceable and we are broken-hearted. Till we meet again dear sister,” Anna McGarrigle wrote on the sisters’ website www.mcgarrigles.com Tuesday.

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 Today we sit down with Senator David Koehler to get his priorities and overview of the coming legislative session.

Meaningful? Or meaningless? You make the call: The Federal Trade Commission has told the group that filed a greivance about Facebook’s recent privacy changes that it its “complaint raises issues of particular interest at this time.”

And that means…. hard to say.

In a letter (pdf) to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, David Vladeck, the FTC’s director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, says his agency would be happy to talk to EPIC about its concerns. But that’s about all he’s promising for now.

Just as important, Vladeck points out that he won’t and can’t say whether the FTC is formally investigating EPIC’s complaint, and that he’s not going to: “Please be advised, however, that any Commission investigation is non-public until the Commission decides to issue a formal complaint or investigation. As a result, we can neither confirm nor deny that we are conducting an investigation of the issues raised by your complaint.”

So there you go. Either the Feds are taking this very seriously, or they’re not.

As I’ve said before, Facebook may face some regulatory blowback for its privacy overhaul — otherwise known as the “please share as much of yourself as you can” campaign — in the US, and more likely in Europe. But unless it starts hearing from  advertisers, I’m not sure how much farther this goes.

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Investors hoping IBM’s latest financials would keep the tech rally alive seem to have gotten their wish. Reporting fourth-quarter earnings after after the close of trading Tuesday, Big Blue posted a profit of $4.8 billion, or $3.59 a share, on $27.23 billion in revenue.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected IBM (IBM) to earn $3.47 a share on $26.96 billion in revenue.

“We concluded a strong year with a solid performance in the fourth quarter in which we again delivered growth in margins, profit and earnings,” IBM Sam Palmisano said in a release. “IBM continued to benefit from our strategic transformation, offerings that our clients value in this economy, and our commitment to developing countries around the world.”

Looking ahead, IBM said it now expects profit of at least $11 a share in 2010 compared with a previous target of $10 to $11 per share.

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Filed under: Coupe, Truck, Etc., Volkswagen, Specialty

Still bummed that Volkswagen isn’t planning to bring the new Amarok pickup to the States? Perhaps there’s another way to get your hands on a VW made for hauling: a New Beetle pickup conversion. Proving the old adage, “When there’s a will, there’s a way,” Japanese body shop Hayashi has grafted the rear half of a pickup with the front half of a New Beetle. The results, um… speak for themselves, no?

We know that the new version of the ol’ Bug is sometimes seen as a feminine vehicle, but we’re not so sure converting one into a pickup truck is the right way to rectify that situation. At least there’s plenty of room for more than just the lonely single flower in the dash-mounted plastic holder. See for yourself in the gallery below.

[Source: Carscoop]

New Beetle pickup conversion can haul more flowers originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Truck, Etc., Chevrolet, Ford, GM, GMC, Diesel

Pickuptrucks.com sat down with Tom Stephens, General Motors‘ vice chairman of global product operations at the Detroit Auto Show, and during the course of the conversation, Stephens began espousing the virtues of the General’s new Duramax diesel, due to be fitted to the 2011 Chevrolet and GMC Heavy Duty pickups.

Obviously, it’s not rare for an exec to speak highly of a new engine, but in a rare moment of brand fervor, Stephens issued a challenge:

“You know what I want to do to prove it? I want to take our truck and Ford’s [new Super Duty] and chain them together back-to-back. Then I want to have them pull against each other. I know our truck will beat theirs.”

After making sure Stephens was serious, the site’s intrepid editor, Mike Levine, contacted Ford to see if it was interested in the challenge. He hasn’t gotten an official response yet, but he’s ready to play referee and set up an event in Texas to pit the two H-D haulers against each other. Consider the gauntlet thrown. Ford? We anxiously await your response…

[Source: Pickuptrucks.com]

GM challenges Ford to heavy-duty pickup tug of war originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Etc., Technology, Videos, Toyota

It’s called “local adaptive spatiotemporal smoothing,” and birds moths do it, bees do it, even educated fleas dung beetles do it. What it means is that when a dung beetle looks at something, it can selectively enhance multiple areas for details or for motion detection simultaneously. What that apparently means for you is, eventually, full-color night vision in your car.

According to New Scientist, Toyota has teamed up with researchers who have been studying insect optics in order to create better driving aids. Mercedes-Benz and BMW use infrared for their night-vision system, but this new system gathers information gathered in the visible spectrum and processes it differently.

It involves a three-part algorithmic, two of which video cameras use right now. When capturing a scene at night, the camera brightens the dark pixels while leaving bright pixels unaltered. The second step is to sharpens the edges within the picture, which it does by changing pixel values where it detects boundaries between light and dark areas. It increases details at the same time as it increases noise. The new and final step that is owed to dung beetles is when the camera compares values of nearby pixels to smooth out the image. The result is reduced noise and enhanced detail.

Now that the scientists have created a camera that can do all this processing on-the-go and at driving speed, Toyota will begin the work of integration. Follow the jump to check out a video on the research. Who would have thought a bug needed such awesome vision to find poop. Hat tip to Ric J!

[Source: New Scientist | Image: Paul Garland – C.C. License 2.0]

Continue reading Dung beetles in cow pies helping Toyota create night vision systems? [w/video]

Dung beetles in cow pies helping Toyota create night vision systems? [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s acquisition of Lala won’t form the basis of any iTunes subscription service, but instead may help Apple quickly build a cloud-storage component into the next version of iTunes. Apple will supposedly leverage Lala’s current music uploading technology to give users “anywhere access” to their music library.

Michael Robertson, guest writing at TechCrunch, cites a number of insider sources who say definitively that Apple will not offer a subscription option to the iTunes Store. Instead, it will complement the current model with cloud storage, giving iTunes users the ability to “to navigate and play their music, videos and playlists from their personal URL using a browser based iTunes experience.” Robertson, formerly the CEO of MP3.com, is currently the head of MP3tunes, which offers a cloud-storage service for music files similar to what he describes as the future of iTunes.

Such a strategy is one we speculated Apple would pursue, and one that sources for the Wall Street Journal also claimed would be wrapped into iTunes in a future update. Obviously, Lala’s technology and engineering expertise, combined with a giant data center, could power such a feature. Robertson suggests that doing so could make an end-run around having to negotiate additional streaming licenses from record labels, since each library would be linked to a specific customer.

“Apple will link the tens of millions of previously sold iPods, Touches, AppleTV and iTablets to mobile iTunes giving users seamless playback of their media from a wide range of Apple branded devices,” Robertson said. “iTunes shoppers will be able to continue to buy music and movies as they can now, with purchases still being downloaded, but once downloaded they will be automatically loaded to their mobile iTunes area for anywhere access.”

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It looks like Germany may be a new front in clueless attacks on Google. With newspapers and magazines admitting that they’re too clueless to know what to do with traffic Google sends them, officials in Germany are opening an antitrust investigation into Google based on some of the most ridiculous logic we’ve heard to date:

Hans-Joachim Fuhrmann, a spokesman for the German Newspaper Publishers Association, said the Web sites of all German newspapers and magazines together made 100 million euros, or $143 million, in ad revenue, while Google generated 1.2 billion euros from search advertising in Germany.

“Google says it brings us traffic, but the problem is that Google earns billions, and we earn nothing,” Mr. Fuhrmann said.

Okay. Let’s pick apart this apples and oranges comparison. First off, Google earns 1.2 billion euros from search advertising which has almost nothing to do with news. It comes from people searching for cameras or cribs or cars. Google News had no advertising at all for most of its existence and only introduced ads in the US less than a year ago. In other words, no, Google is not making more than newspapers and magazines when it comes to its News site in Germany.

And, even if Google was making more money (which, again, there’s no evidence that this is true), that still doesn’t excuse Fuhrmann’s claims — which basically amount to him admitting that Google figured out how to make money and the companies he represents did not. Yet the publishers he represents had all of the advantages in the world. They were local. Google was not. They had been around for many more years than Google. They had brand recognition and loyalty that Google did not. Furhmann is basically admitting what a colossal failure the companies he represents have been. They failed to capitalize on a huge opportunity. And now, when Google sends them traffic, they are still failing to use that traffic wisely. And then they blame Google for it? Wow.

The publishers also complained about what they saw as a lack of transparency in the way Google presents search results and news snippets in its Google News service, saying the company was manipulating the results to help maintain its strong position….

“We often feel like Web sites are elevated in Google’s search results if they have a strong business relationship with Google, and we think we can prove it,” Mr. Fuhrmann said.

So go ahead and prove it. First of all, Google is a private company and can rank sites however it wants. It’s an opinion of what Google feels is most relevant. If Google was not doing a good job, then people would go away. So basically, at this point, Fuhrmann hasn’t just admitted that the publishers he represents have failed miserably to set up even the most basic business models for adapting to the internet, he’s now suggesting that Google is purposely handicapping its own site by not presenting the absolute best results!

It’s difficult to see how this makes any sense at all. The publishers are claiming that Google is purposely degrading its results (and they can prove it!) and at the same time complaining that they can’t compete against those degraded results. Wow.

On top of all that, the article reminds us, as we discussed last year, that these publishers have convinced German Chancellor Angela Merkel to support a new copyright law that would force aggregators to pay up just to link to stories. It’s as if Germany doesn’t want the internet at all.

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“The internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes,” former Republican Senator Ted Stevens explained back in 2006.

And now, thanks to that series of tubes, you can watch a bear give birth. We don’t know what Stevens would make of this, but here comes the bear-cam.

The BBC reports that for the very first time, a webcam has been placed inside the den belonging to a pregnant wild black bear named Lily, and the “bear-cam” will stream live images to the web as she gives birth.

The bear biologist tracking Lily hopes this live birth will help people overcome their fears and misconceptions about bears. The biologist, Lynn Rogers of the Wildlife Research Institute in northern Minnesota, told the BBC:

“We’re putting it [the bear-cam] there because there is so much that we don’t know about what bears do in dens and what behavior they have leading up to giving birth. And how they take care of the cubs.”

Lily is three years old, and viewers who see the live birth may see the arrival of three cubs–that’s the size of a regular bear litter. This may all seem like quite an invasion of privacy, however Lily is no stranger to the Internet. She’s already a bit of a star on Facebook. Her “Lily The Black Bear” fan page has garnered more than 30,000 fans. She also has her own Twitter account.

So go forth, dear reader, and “friend” the bear. And don’t forget to tune in to the live birth–when the cubs will greet their momma and the entire world all at once.

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80beats: Facebook CEO: People Don’t Really Want Privacy Nowadays, Anyway

Image Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Music superstars Jay-Z and Bono are collaborating on a song to help raise funds for Haitian earthquake relief.

The pair are said to be teaming up with hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz — romantically-linked to songbird Alicia Keys to work on the collaboration.

“Me, Bono, Hova (Jay-Z) have something to say about Haiti,” Swizz Tweeted this week. “Stay tuned. I told you I was working on something amazing for Haiti They need us!!!!!!”

Meanwhile, The Edge, Bono’s U2 bandmate, seemed to confirm the collabo in a Tweet posted Monday.

“Last night we wrote a song. Bono got a call from a producer, Swizz. He and Jay-Z wanted to do something for Haiti,” he wrote. “So, Bono came up with the phrase on the phone, and last night we were here, we wrote a song – finished, recorded and sent back to them. So, that might be the next thing you hear from us!”

AT&T just wants you to know, their service will be ready to cover Dolphin Stadium for Super Bowl XLIV. Which makes you wonder, why wouldn’t AT&T’s service be prepped to handle the stress of a packed stadium?

A skeptic might see AT&T’s distribution of a press release to promise adequate bandwidth during a professional sporting event as implication that, normally, AT&T isn’t so reliable at sporting events!

But how big of a deal are sports, really? If you combine regular season games of the NBA, NHL, NFL, and MLB, you’ll realize there are 5,146 instances yearly in which, apparently, AT&T sees some reason to doubt their own coverage. And we’re not even talking about preseason or playoffs.

That’s 100 massive groups of people every week, sitting in one spot for several hours, all whom are on contract with a self-implied questionable service.

Congrats AT&T! A 0.02% success rate is really something to brag about!

AT&T Preps South Florida Wireless Network for Pro Bowl and Super Bowl

MIAMI, Jan 19, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Football players and fans aren’t the only ones gearing up for the Jan. 31 Pro Bowl and Feb. 7 Super Bowl XLIV in Miami. AT&T is gearing up its South Florida network to help ensure those in town for the games have a winning wireless experience. AT&T announced today it is expanding capacity and coverage in and around Dolphin Stadium and other key areas in anticipation of increased voice and data traffic on its wireless network.

Network preparations for the big games include:

Three mobile cell sites on wheels, or COW, in the stadium parking lot;

A new distributed antenna system, or DAS, inside the stadium;

Fourth additional layer of capacity added to AT&T cell site inside the stadium: 2G (GSM/Global System for Mobile Communications) voice and data capacity increased by 100 percent and high-speed 3G (UMTS/Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) voice and data capacity increased by 280 percent;

Capacity added to cell sites in the vicinity of the stadium;

Capacity added to cell sites serving hotels and resorts in Fort Lauderdale and South Beach where Super Bowl activities will be hosted;

A COW set up to serve Fort Lauderdale hotels where teams will be staying;

Capacity added to cell sites surrounding the facilities where the teams will be practicing; and

The addition of backhaul connectivity to cell sites surrounding the stadium to increase voice and data capacity between the sites and the routing switch.

“These are two of the biggest games of the year, and fans attending them want to be able to share the experience, as it’s happening, with those back home, whether its through a voice call, text message, e-mail or picture and video messaging,” said Rich Guidotti, vice president and general manager, AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets for South Florida. “Our network team has been working for months to deliver the best possible wireless experience for the games and their related activities.”

AT&T network personnel will be on site for the games to monitor the network. Traffic on the stadium cell sites will be balanced as needed during the games in order to maximize the ability for customers to make calls and use data services.

In addition to the network upgrades for the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl, AT&T substantially increased capacity on its 3G network throughout South Florida in 2009 with the addition of a third layer of capacity, or “third carrier” to several hundred cell sites from Key West to Vero Beach. AT&T also activated 20 new cell sites, added 3G technology to dozens of existing cell sites, upgraded its UMTS/3G switching center, added 7 new Radio Network Controllers to significantly increase capacity and added more than 2,500 backhaul connections in 2009.

From 2007 through third quarter 2009, AT&T invested more than $134 million in its wireless network in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties alone.

“We’ll continue to invest and innovate to strengthen our wireless network performance so that our customers can have the best experience with their AT&T devices,” said Marshall Criser, lll, AT&T president, Florida. “Our network investments and upgrades have made it possible for us to continue to deliver the nation’s fastest 3G network and national voice call retainability scores that are near best-in-class.”

AT&T’s 3G network is now available in more than 350 U.S. cities, including all major metropolitan areas.

AT&T recently completed a software upgrade at 3G cell sites nationwide that prepares the nation’s fastest 3G network for even faster speeds. The deployment of High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) 7.2 technology is the first of multiple initiatives in AT&T’s network enhancement strategy designed to provide customers with the best possible mobile broadband experience, both today and well into the future. Faster 3G speeds will become available as AT&T combines the new technology with our second initiative during 2010 and 2011 to dramatically increase the number of high-speed backhaul connections to cell sites, primarily with fiber-optic connections, adding capacity from cell sites to the AT&T backbone network.

For more information about AT&T’s coverage in South Florida or anywhere in the United States, consumers can visit http://www.wireless.att.com/coverageviewer/. The online tool can measure the quality of coverage based on a street address, intersection, ZIP code or even a landmark.

For updates on the AT&T wireless network, please visit www.att.com/networknews.

*AT&T products and services are provided or offered by subsidiaries and affiliates of AT&T Inc. under the AT&T brand and not by AT&T Inc.

[Silicon Alley Insider and Research by David Chaid]