Does it really matter that the LCD TV has a contrast ratio of 40,000:1 or that the digital camera has a 12-megapixel resolution?
David Colker gets to the bottom of these befuddling questions ahead of the holiday shopping season. He offers an in-depth gadget guide that doesn't make suggestions about what to buy but about how to buy.
--Peter Pae
One way to score a big hit in technology is to come up with not just a new gadget, but a new category. Of course, that is also a recipe for failure, because there's a risk that consumers don't think they need what you're selling.
That's the risk for Cloud Engines, a San Francisco company that makes something called the Pogoplug. They're calling it a "multimedia sharing device," in the hopes that people are looking for an easier way to share all the videos, photos and music that are now defining their digital lives.
The Pogoplug sells for $129. You plug it into your router, and then you plug a storage device -- like an external hard drive or a flash drive -- into it. You have then created what company Chief Executive Daniel Putterman calls "your personal cloud." Given the way the "cloud computing" buzzword reached the stratosphere this year, he may be onto something.
The sharing part comes in letting you give anyone access to your stuff without your ever having to upload it or e-mail it.
Engadget liked an earlier version of the product but wished it had Wi-Fi and ports for extra devices. Today the company announces the extra ports, but still no Wi-Fi.
And I can report that photos and material shared with me from a Pogoplug device worked seamlessly, like looking at any website.
-- Dan Fost
Google Inc. has shown which way it believes the winds are blowing by forking over $750 million for mobile advertising firm AdMob, one of the Web giant's largest acquisitions to date.
As AdMob itself has described, the volume and effectiveness of mobile advertising has been skyrocketing over the last several years as more advanced smartphones have caught on, making it easier to deliver more kinds of graphical and text-based advertising to phone-toting consumers.
In a recent report, AdMob said that the number of mobile ads it served had increased nearly 540% from September 2007, to 10.2 billion per month from 1.6 billion.
As mobile phones morph further into pocket Internet devices, and consumers grow accustomed to performing online functions like search, gaming and instant messaging on their handsets, opportunities for advertising companies like Google will grow rapidly, analysts expect.
Google says the number of searches performed by smartphone users has increased by a factor of five over the last two years, led primarily by iPhone users and owners of Google Android phones. At least a dozen new Google-powered phones, such as last week's launch of Verizon's Droid, are expected to be released in the coming year.
Google also says that marketer spending on mobile advertising is growing at 30% annually.
AdMob was founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui, a Web entrepreneur looking to generate traffic for his mobile-based website. The company has taken funding from venture firms such as Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Northgate, and the company's clients have included Ford, Coca-Cola, Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures.
Google, which already owns a major stake in mobile advertising with its DoubleClick Mobile unit, said it expects regulatory scrutiny of the AdMob deal but hopes the pact will be approved within a matter a months.
-- David Sarno
Columbia University's Teachers College announced today that it received a $150,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, through the foundation's Health Games Research national program to develop a smart phone app that emulates the physiological responses smokers get from smoking.
The first apps are likely to be for Apple Inc.'s iPhone or iPod Touch. The user would control the game by blowing into the device's microphone in response to different color and sound stimuli coming from the handset. Researchers hope that it will be able to elicit the same brain patterns, heart rate levels and relaxation responses that smokers get from smoking. The game, Lit: A Game Intervention for Nicotine Smokers, is expected to be released in about two years.
Breath therapy has been used to help smokers quit smoking for a while, but it's hoped that the game will disseminate this technique to the masses. "You don't have to learn anything; the game will cause you to breathe the right way," said Charles Kinzer, professor of education in the Communication, Computing and Technology Program and the Game Research Lab at Teachers College.
Technology is being used in another way to help smokers quit smoking. Researchers at the GRAP Occupational Psychology Clinic and the University of Quebec in Gatineau recently found that smokers who crushed virtual cigarettes experienced a significant reduction in nicotine addiction.
Tobacco use is still the leading cause of death in the United States, according to a statement from Kinzer and the Lit project team. It added that 70% of adult smokers say they want to quit, and more than 40% try to quit each year.
Kinzer said, "If we can capitalize on the motivational aspect of games and the availability of mobile devices, there is tremendous potential to positively affect heath and wellness for smokers who want to quit, and this would have implications for healthcare costs as well."
--Melissa Rohlin
Sophisticated pets, with deep-pocketed owners, can now use garage-like doggie doors that open and close electronically when a pet wearing a collar with a radio-frequency-identification chip approaches. The doors only open for the pet with the RFID chip, keeping out unwanted visitors.
The chips are widely used at automated toll booths and for tracking airline baggage.
Plexidor Electronic Pet Doors cost $129 to $800 depending on the size and model. To see a picture, check out our L.A. Unleashed blog.
"It allows the pets to go outside when they have to, not when you're able to let them out," said Plexidor President Joe Ambrose. He added: "For the pet owner, it is very helpful in preventing pet messes in the house from the pet having to hold it too long."
-- Melissa Rohlin
The unusual case of the missing Sidekick data may be nearing its conclusion.
Microsoft Corp. announced this morning that most or all users of its Sidekick mobile device might indeed see their lost data again. The announcement came after a week of worry that users' contacts, notes, photos and other virtual property may have been lost for good when company servers failed.
"We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible," wrote Roz Ho, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Premium Mobile Experiences, adding that the company now believed the outage affected a minority of Sidekick users.
"We have determined that the outage was caused by a system failure that created data loss in the core database and the backup," Ho explained in a statement. "We rebuilt the system component by component, recovering data along the way. This careful process has taken a significant amount of time, but was necessary to preserve the integrity of the data."
Ho said Microsoft would offer another update on the data restoration by Saturday.
If indeed the data are restored, Microsoft may dull the negative echoes of the episode, which initially looked to be one of the worst incidents of online data loss in memory, with many of the device's reported 1 million users suffering a complete wipe of many months of irreplaceable information. At least two lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft and Sidekick carrier T-Mobile.
In an e-mail Wednesday evening, Microsoft sought to show that the problem was isolated to servers run by its Danger Inc. subsidiary, which it said was not part of its main "cloud" infrastructure. "Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform," the company said.
-- David Sarno
Microsoft Corp. is now putting space between itself and Danger Inc. -- the now-ironically named subsidiary that created the Sidekick and was responsible a computer network that failed, causing many of the device's loyal users to lose substantial amounts of personal data.
Microsoft is now emphasizing that the data loss, and the problems that led to it, were limited to a segment of the company's network that is separate from its core cloud infrastructure.
“The Danger Service platform, which experienced the outage, is a standalone service operating on non-Microsoft technologies, and is not related to Microsoft’s cloud services platform or Windows Live," Microsoft spokesperson Tonya Klause wrote in an e-mail. “Other and future Microsoft mobile products and services are entirely based on Microsoft technologies and Microsoft’s cloud service platform and software."
The Sidekick outage was severe enough that users were warned that their data might not be recovered, an unusual outcome in a technology environment where users are increasingly entrusting their data to large Web firms -- who in turn invest heavily in keeping the data backed up in case of problems.
This was apparently not the case with the Danger Service platform.
Microsoft drew a further distinction between Danger and its other data assets, saying that "it’s important to note that for native Microsoft services such as Windows Live, Hotmail, Azure, etc., we write multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices so that the data is available in a situation where a single or multiple physical nodes may fail," Klause wrote.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a question about why Danger would have been subject to different standards for data integrity and redundancy, unlike other parts of the company's worldwide network of servers.
The Sidekick appears to have been taken off the market by Microsoft and its carrier, T-Mobile, on whose site the device is marked "temporarily out of stock."
-- David Sarno
Over the last year, the technology sector has become enamored with the possibilities of the "cloud."
That's the computing paradigm that allows consumers to forget about storing their software and data on local hard drives -- where it can be vulnerable to electrical surges and soft-drink spillage -- and let companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft worry about keeping it safe.
But last week, a hole was poked in the cloud's massive hype bubble. Microsoft Corp. and T-Mobile Inc., the respective maker and carrier of the Sidekick mobile device, acknowledged a "service disruption" that cut off most users of the device from large amounts of personal data -- contacts, calendars, personal notes and more -- that were stored in Microsoft's cloud.
Initially pessimistic about their data recovery efforts, the companies on Monday released a more sanguine forecast, saying that "the prospects of recovering some lost content may now be possible." (For close readers, note the number of conditional nouns and verbs in that sentence -- not very confidence-inspiring.)
But the larger questions may be how this incident will affect attitudes about the dependability of cloud computing, or if it should affect them at all.
In places where the cloud is now on trial -- in Los Angeles City Hall, for one -- decision makers may have one more reason to be suspicious of its many promises. Google Inc., a major proponent of cloud software, is quick to offer a laundry list of advantages -- lower cost, ubiquitous access, no hassle. But the company spends less time warning of its potential pitfalls.
Though absent in Google's promotional literature, those pitfalls are enumerated at length in the company's regulatory filings, where it must legally disclose risks and liabilities to its shareholders. In a letter last week to City Councilman Bernard C. Parks, John Simpson of advocacy group Consumer Watchdog noted the stark language Google uses to describe the many things that could go wrong with its cloud-based systems:
Of course, if a company is compelled to enumerate every possible risk to its bottom line, it may read like the above parade of nightmares -- when in reality each individual disaster may be exceedingly unlikely. So far, Google is not known for weak security.
Still, with the Sidekick situation, Microsoft has proved that data disasters do -- and will -- happen. (Notably, the Redmond, Wash., software maker is vying with Google for the Los Angeles computing contract). What's less clear is how frequent this type of incident will occur and whether cloud users ought to be actively worried. As with plane crashes, disease outbreaks and shark attacks, a handful of sensational instances may not reflect the risk to the population at large. Moreover, some businesses can learn from errors and reduce the likelihood of a repeat occurrence.
People are willing to tolerate a certain amount of risk -- otherwise they wouldn't be flying, driving, eating spinach or surfing in Malibu.
But the cloud is new and fragile, kept levitating largely by the trust of its users. To date, serious problems have been relatively rare. But if consumers begin to believe their data is not safe in the hands of certain companies, they'll just pull it out -- and poof!
-- David Sarno
Pleasing vacation readers everywhere, South Korea's LG Display Co. on Tuesday announced a new e-book reader that comes complete with a 10" solar cell, so that you never again need run out of batteries while reading on the beach in Hawaii.
Unless, that is, you're in Hilo. That's the gorgeous coastal town on the Big Island that, counterintuitively, is one of the cloudiest cities in the United States. It joins Juneau, Alaska, and Quillayute, Wash., on NOAA's short list of places where the sun shines as little as 30% of the year.
When you consider cities like Yuma, Ariz., (90% sunlight), Redding, Calif., (88%) and even Los Angeles (73%), it's only fair to wonder if linking the availability of sunlight to literacy might be unfair to those relegated to less sunny climes.
A cool four to five hours of direct sunlight would improve the device's run-time by about a day, meaning you could go a whole week without plugging it in if all you did on your tropical vacation was sit outside and read.
Sadly, the solar e-book won't be available until at least 2012. That's because LG considers the 9.6% solar energy conversion rate inadequate and is holding out for something higher, like 14%.
As seen in the photo above, the cell is actually a completely separate panel from the screen -- a configuration that leaves the reader to stare at a rather unexciting black square at all times. But the point here is the potential: E-books consume so little energy in the first place that a well-placed, efficient solar cell could make a reading device completely self-powered.
You're on notice, print books: Soon the only people that will read you will live in Alaska, Hawaii and outside of Seattle.
-- David Sarno
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