Your Apps Are Watching You

A Journal investigation finds that iPhone and Android apps are breaching the privacy of smartphone users.

Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off.

These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found.
An examination of 101 popular smartphone "apps"—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders.

The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them.
Among the apps tested, the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds among the hundreds of thousands of apps available.

Apps sharing the most information included TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them.
Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone's ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.
"In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity," says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is "always with us. It's always on."
iPhone maker Apple Inc. says it reviews each app before offering it to users. Both Apple and Google say they protect users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as location.


"We have created strong privacy protections for our customers, especially regarding location-based data," says Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr. "Privacy and trust are vitally important."
The Journal found that these rules can be skirted. One iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violated its rules.
Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking. With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. On computers it is also possible to block or delete "cookies," which are tiny tracking files. These techniques generally don't work on cellphone apps.
The makers of TextPlus 4, Pandora and Grindr say the data they pass on to outside firms isn't linked to an individual's name. Personal details such as age and gender are volunteered by users, they say. The maker of Pumpkin Maker says he didn't know Apple required apps to seek user approval before transmitting location. The maker of Paper Toss didn't respond to requests for comment.
Many apps don't offer even a basic form of consumer protection: written privacy policies. Forty-five of the 101 apps didn't provide privacy policies on their websites or inside the apps at the time of testing. Neither Apple nor Google requires app privacy policies.
To expose the information being shared by smartphone apps, the Journal designed a system to intercept and record the data they transmit, then decoded the data stream. The research covered 50 iPhone apps and 50 on phones using Google's Android operating system.
The Journal also tested its own iPhone app; it didn't send information to outsiders. The Journal doesn't have an Android phone app.
Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a "supercookie," says Vishal Gurbuxani, co-founder of Mobclix Inc., an exchange for mobile advertisers.
On iPhones, this number is the "UDID," or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can't be blocked or deleted.
"The great thing about mobile is you can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie," says Meghan O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. "That's how we track everything."
Ms. O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone users whenever it can. "We watch what apps you download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the app you go," she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual.
The main companies setting ground rules for app data-gathering have big stakes in the ad business. The two most popular platforms for new U.S. smartphones are Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Google and Apple also run the two biggest services, by revenue, for putting ads on mobile phones.


Apple and Google ad networks let advertisers target groups of users. Both companies say they don't track individuals based on the way they use apps.

Apple limits what can be installed on an iPhone by requiring iPhone apps to be offered exclusively through its App Store. Apple reviews those apps for function, offensiveness and other criteria.

Apple says iPhone apps "cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used." Many apps tested by the Journal appeared to violate that rule, by sending a user's location to ad networks, without informing users. Apple declines to discuss how it interprets or enforces the policy.

Phones running Google's Android operating system are made by companies including Motorola Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Google doesn't review the apps, which can be downloaded from many vendors. Google says app makers "bear the responsibility for how they handle user information."
Google requires Android apps to notify users, before they download the app, of the data sources the app intends to access. Possible sources include the phone's camera, memory, contact list, and more than 100 others. If users don't like what a particular app wants to access, they can choose not to install the app, Google says.

"Our focus is making sure that users have control over what apps they install, and notice of what information the app accesses," a Google spokesman says.

Neither Apple nor Google requires apps to ask permission to access some forms of the device ID, or to send it to outsiders. When smartphone users let an app see their location, apps generally don't disclose if they will pass the location to ad companies.

Lack of standard practices means different companies treat the same information differently. For example, Apple says that, internally, it treats the iPhone's UDID as "personally identifiable information." That's because, Apple says, it can be combined with other personal details about people—such as names or email addresses—that Apple has via the App Store or its iTunes music services. By contrast, Google and most app makers don't consider device IDs to be identifying information.
A growing industry is assembling this data into profiles of cellphone users. Mobclix, the ad exchange, matches more than 25 ad networks with some 15,000 apps seeking advertisers. The Palo Alto, Calif., company collects phone IDs, encodes them (to obscure the number), and assigns them to interest categories based on what apps people download and how much time they spend using an app, among other factors.
By tracking a phone's location, Mobclix also makes a "best guess" of where a person lives, says Mr. Gurbuxani, the Mobclix executive. Mobclix then matches that location with spending and demographic data from Nielsen Co.
In roughly a quarter-second, Mobclix can place a user in one of 150 "segments" it offers to advertisers, from "green enthusiasts" to "soccer moms." For example, "die hard gamers" are 15-to-25-year-old males with more than 20 apps on their phones who use an app for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Mobclix says its system is powerful, but that its categories are broad enough to not identify individuals. "It's about how you track people better," Mr. Gurbuxani says.
Some app makers have made changes in response to the findings. At least four app makers posted privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal, including Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company behind the popular game Angry Birds (in which birds battle egg-snatching pigs). A spokesman says Rovio had been working on the policy, and the Journal inquiry made it a good time to unveil it.
Free and paid versions of Angry Birds were tested on an iPhone. The apps sent the phone's UDID and location to the Chillingo unit of Electronic Arts Inc., which markets the games. Chillingo says it doesn't use the information for advertising and doesn't share it with outsiders.

Apps have been around for years, but burst into prominence when Apple opened its App Store in July 2008. Today, the App Store boasts more than 300,000 programs.
Other phone makers, including BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. and Nokia Corp., quickly built their own app stores. Google's Android Market, which opened later in 2008, has more than 100,000 apps. Market researcher Gartner Inc. estimates that world-wide app sales this year will total $6.7 billion.
Many developers offer apps for free, hoping to profit by selling ads inside the app. Noah Elkin of market researcher eMarketer says some people "are willing to tolerate advertising in apps to get something for free." Of the 101 apps tested, the paid apps generally sent less data to outsiders.
Ad sales on phones account for less than 5% of the $23 billion in annual Internet advertising. But spending on mobile ads is growing faster than the market overall.
Central to this growth: the ad networks whose business is connecting advertisers with apps. Many ad networks offer software "kits" that automatically insert ads into an app. The kits also track where users spend time inside the app.
Some developers feel pressure to release more data about people. Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope Android app, says ad-network executives encouraged him to transmit users' locations.
Mr. Binshtok says he declined because of privacy concerns. But ads targeted by location bring in two to five times as much money as untargeted ads, Mr. Binshtok says. "We are losing a lot of revenue."
Other apps transmitted more data. The Android app for social-network site MySpace sent age and gender, along with a device ID, to Millennial Media, a big ad network.
In its software-kit instructions, Millennial Media lists 11 types of information about people that developers may transmit to "help Millennial provide more relevant ads." They include age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views. In a re-test with a more complete profile, MySpace also sent a user's income, ethnicity and parental status.
A spokesman says MySpace discloses in its privacy policy that it will share details from user profiles to help advertisers provide "more relevant ads." My Space is a unit of News Corp., which publishes the Journal. Millennial did not respond to requests for comment on its software kit.
App makers transmitting data say it is anonymous to the outside firms that receive it. "There is no real-life I.D. here," says Joel Simkhai, CEO of Nearby Buddy Finder LLC, the maker of the Grindr app for gay men. "Because we are not tying [the information] to a name, I don't see an area of concern."
Scott Lahman, CEO of TextPlus 4 developer Gogii Inc., says his company "is dedicated to the privacy of our users. We do not share personally identifiable information or message content." A Pandora spokeswoman says, "We use listener data in accordance with our privacy policy," which discusses the app's data use, to deliver relevant advertising. When a user registers for the first time, the app asks for email address, gender, birth year and ZIP code.

Google was the biggest data recipient in the tests. Its AdMob, AdSense, Analytics and DoubleClick units collectively heard from 38 of the 101 apps. Google, whose ad units operate on both iPhones and Android phones, says it doesn't mix data received by these units.
Google's main mobile-ad network is AdMob, which it bought this year for $750 million. AdMob lets advertisers target phone users by location, type of device and "demographic data," including gender or age group.
A Google spokesman says AdMob targets ads based on what it knows about the types of people who use an app, phone location, and profile information a user has submitted to the app. "No profile of the user, their device, where they've been or what apps they've downloaded, is created or stored," he says.
Apple operates its iAd network only on the iPhone. Eighteen of the 51 iPhone apps sent information to Apple.
Apple targets ads to phone users based largely on what it knows about them through its App Store and iTunes music service. The targeting criteria can include the types of songs, videos and apps a person downloads, according to an Apple ad presentation reviewed by the Journal. The presentation named 103 targeting categories, including: karaoke, Christian/gospel music, anime, business news, health apps, games and horror movies.
People familiar with iAd say Apple doesn't track what users do inside apps and offers advertisers broad categories of people, not specific individuals.
Apple has signaled that it has ideas for targeting people more closely. In a patent application filed this past May, Apple outlined a system for placing and pricing ads based on a person's "web history or search history" and "the contents of a media library." For example, home-improvement advertisers might pay more to reach a person who downloaded do-it-yourself TV shows, the document says.
The patent application also lists another possible way to target people with ads: the contents of a friend's media library.
How would Apple learn who a cellphone user's friends are, and what kinds of media they prefer? The patent says Apple could tap "known connections on one or more social-networking websites" or "publicly available information or private databases describing purchasing decisions, brand preferences," and other data. In September, Apple introduced a social-networking service within iTunes, called Ping, that lets users share music preferences with friends. Apple declined to comment.
Tech companies file patents on blue-sky concepts all the time, and it isn't clear whether Apple will follow through on these ideas. If it did, it would be an evolution for Chief Executive Steve Jobs, who has spoken out against intrusive tracking. At a tech conference in June, he complained about apps "that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up."
By WSJ

Acer jumping into Android tablet market with three models

 Acer has decided to join the masses in rolling out a tablet for any and every demographic the company can possibly think of with a line of new 4.8", 7", and 10.1" tablets. The company introduced the products during the Acer global press conference Tuesday, all of which will eventually run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) when they are released in 2011.

Acer started out its presentation by saying that everyone uses technology differently, and that the future showed a "variety of form factors and devices." Indeed, Acer seems to want to get into all of those markets at once with its new family of tablets, all of which will have dual-core Tegra CPUs and come with Acer's own UI. None of the products have a name yet, nor is their OS ready yet, but the company hopes to have them available to the public in the spring of next year.

The baby of the family will have a 4.8" screen with a resolution of 1024x480 which Acer described as "100 percent smartphone, 100 percent tablet." Those specs make it slightly larger than the already-large HTC Evo with its 4.3" screen, but quite a bit smaller than the 7" tablets out there. But don't worry, Acer has one of those too: the 7" Acer tablet will have a resolution of 1280x800 (just like its 10.1" counterpart). The 10.1" and 4.8" versions have front- and rear-facing cameras, though it was unclear from Acer's presentation whether the 7" version does or not.
According to Engadget's "hands-on" time with the devices, only one of the three would power on (apparently due to the lack of OS), and the one that did turn on was described as "very sluggish" aside from a blazing HD video.

With its new yet-to-be-named tablets, Acer will engage Samsung, RIM, Apple, and a slew of bottom feeders on the latest front of tablet wars. Research firm Strategy Analytics recently said that Apple currently owns 95 percent of the tablet market, but that number is sure to drop once the Android tablets start flooding store shelves.

Arstechnica.com

NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. The feature spans 50,000 light-years and may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

"What we see are two gamma-ray-emitting bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic center," said Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who first recognized the feature. "We don't fully understand their nature or origin."

The structure spans more than half of the visible sky, from the constellation Virgo to the constellation Grus, and it may be millions of years old. A paper about the findings has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Finkbeiner and his team discovered the bubbles by processing publicly available data from Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT). The LAT is the most sensitive and highest-resolution gamma-ray detector ever launched. Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light.

Other astronomers studying gamma rays hadn't detected the bubbles partly because of a fog of gamma rays that appears throughout the sky. The fog happens when particles moving near the speed of light interact with light and interstellar gas in the Milky Way. The LAT team constantly refines models to uncover new gamma-ray sources obscured by this so-called diffuse emission. By using various estimates of the fog, Finkbeiner and his colleagues were able to isolate it from the LAT data and unveil the giant bubbles.

Scientists now are conducting more analyses to better understand how the never-before-seen structure was formed. The bubble emissions are much more energetic than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in the Milky Way. The bubbles also appear to have well-defined edges. The structure's shape and emissions suggest it was formed as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery.

One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.
"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."
Hints of the bubbles appear in earlier spacecraft data. X-ray observations from the German-led Roentgen Satellite suggested subtle evidence for bubble edges close to the galactic center, or in the same orientation as the Milky Way. NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe detected an excess of radio signals at the position of the gamma-ray bubbles.
The Fermi LAT team also revealed Tuesday the instrument's best picture of the gamma-ray sky, the result of two years of data collection.
"Fermi scans the entire sky every three hours, and as the mission continues and our exposure deepens, we see the extreme universe in progressively greater detail," said Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
NASA's Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.
"Since its launch in June 2008, Fermi repeatedly has proven itself to be a frontier facility, giving us new insights ranging from the nature of space-time to the first observations of a gamma-ray nova," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These latest discoveries continue to demonstrate Fermi's outstanding performance.”

NASA

10 Awesome & Inspiring Blogs for Entrepreneurs and Business Owners

Are you an entrepreneur, solo business owner or freelancer? Are you keen to get regular business advice but don’t have the time to work out which blogs to subscribe to? Well, we’ve done the research for you.

Here’s a collection of business blogs aimed at entrepreneurs and small businesses. These have been chosen for their insights, advice, presentation and overall appeal to business people. Hopefully you’ll find these blogs cover all the business management advice and business trends analysis for your needs.

1. Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review is a staple in any entrepreneur blog collection. The blog delivers timely business analysis and professional management advice.

2. Young Entrepreneur

When you’re just starting our with your business venture, things can be a little tough. Young Entrepreneur focuses on the things you’ll need to know – financing, bootstrapping, identifying opportunities and making sales.

3. 64 Notes

64 Notes gets straight to the nuggets of gold by bypassing straightforward management tips and filling each post with those eye-opening things that change your business from alright to amazing. They also write a lot about how to avoid being the start-up that failed.

4. The Personal MBA

The Personal MBA is a blog dedicated to teaching all the tips and tricks you would have learned if you had done a degree in business. It recommends books, summarises books and draws on advice given freely by great minds in business. If you follow this blog you will learn a great deal about managing your business.

5. Instigator Blog

Instigator Blog is a very insightful blog, mainly discussing thoughts relevant to small business and entrepreneurs, written by an entrepreneur as he works on his business.

6. Fast Company

Fast Company is a major business blog, covering business news and trends. It’s vital information if you want to know where business is heading.

7. Entrepreneur Blog

Entrepreneur Blog is a site dedicated to providing business insights to entrepreneurs. It will analyse business failures, successes and trends, while offering sensible advice for any business owner.

8. The Entrepreneurial Mind

The Entrepreneurial Mind is a business blog written by a Belmont University professor of Entrepreneurship. His academic insight into the world of the entrepreneur is a great balance to the news and trends offered by other blogs.

9. Creative Web Biz

Creative Web Biz is a great blog for all the artistic entrepreneurs out there. This is a place for those people who are entrepreneurs, but don’t much care for all the business management advice and trends. This blog is entirely focused on how to get that art out there and sold. Highly recommended for musicians, artists, and makers of other crafts.

10. Work Happy

Work Happy is a blog offering advice for anyone in business for themselves. It’s useful for freelancers, small business owners and entrepreneurs alike. It features a lot of video presentations from entrepreneurs to keep things interesting.

Bonus: Entrepreneurship Interviews
Entrepreneurship Interviews added itself on to the list by being a wealth of information in the form of interviews with entrepreneurs. It’s not much to look at, but there is a lot to be gained by listening to what other entrepreneurs say candidly about their own business ventures

Makeuseof.com

PlayStation Phone: This Could Be a Thing

PlayStation Phone speculation intensified Wednesday as blog Engadget showed off what appears to be an actual Sony Ericsson phone with PlayStation buttons.
Sony declined to comment on the rumor (same as last time this rumor surfaced), but Engadget reports that it's heading to market "soon" -- like 2011 soon. The prototype unit shown in the blog's photos has a long multitouch enabled touchpad in the center, support for microSD cards, 512MB of RAM, 1GB of ROM, and the screen is 3.7 to 4.1 inches.
Given Sony's push for a fully integrated PlayStation Network across all its devices, a PlayStation Phone doesn't seem outlandish. Getting it to market right after the Windows Phone 7, however, seems risky.

PCWorld.

Facebook Clickjacking Attack Spreading Through Share Button

Facebook users came under attack from a new clickjacking scam that could result in lost money as well as aggravation, spread by the social networking site's Share button.

The scam culminates with a list of surveys, similar to those used in a 'Dislike' button clickware scam discovered earlier this week and a Like button scam uncovered in June, according to anti-virus developer Sophos, which uncovered the con.

Those behind this latest Share button scam want Facebook users to answer a few questions within a simple survey; one blank is the request for a cell phone number. By providing their cell phone number without reading the fine print, users are subscribing to a paid-phone, automatically renewing service that charges $5 per week via the cell phone bill.

"Unfortunately, most people won't read the fine print and will willingly hand over the information and likely won't notice the charges until the end of the month," said Onur Komili, researcher at SophosLabs, Canada, in a company blog.
Some consumers remain wary to conduct mobile transactions but perception, reality aren't in sync
The State of Mobile Security

Facebook has removed fan pages associated with the scam, he said.

In this latest scam, Facebook account-holders see a fan page and are offered the chance to see the "Top 10 Funny T-Shirt Fails ROFL," according to anti-virus developer Sophos, which came across the clickjacking scheme today. Once unwitting Facebook users load the page, the tab grasps the malicious script from an external domain that forces users to automatically share the page on their profile, said Komili.

Those using Firefox plug-in NoScript receive a warning, cautioning them that NoScript "intercepted a mouse or keyboard interaction with a partially hidden element." At this point, users have the option to keep the element locked, which is recommended, or disregarding NoScript's recommendation and opening up the link.

However, those Facebook account-holders not running NoScript or not paying attention will find their profile pages sharing content that links them to a malicious domain, said Komili.

"Clicking the link sends you to one of many fan pages all serving the exact same content. It seems a fan page is chosen at random," he said.

Anyone victimized by this scam should select "Remove" to clear the content from their profile and help prevent the further spreading of the social networking disease, said Komili.

Sophos was in the process of publishing detection of this so-called Sharejacking threat as a Troj/FBJack-A and its software is blocking the domain that hosts the malicious code, he said.

Informationweek.com

Chrome OS tablet from HTC reported to ship in November

 An HTC tablet running Google's Chrome operating system will be sold by Verizon Wireless in late November, according to an unnamed source cited by the blog Downloadsquad.
The blog's source specifically said that the tablet will appear on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the traditional start of the holiday shopping season. The blog said the tablet would probably be heavily subsidized by Verizon to compete against the Apple iPad.
HTC and Verizon could not be reached for comment.
The blog also speculated that the HTC tablet would have plenty of popular features, in keeping with HTC's Nexus One smartphone tradition. Those include a 1280-by-720 multitouch display for the tablet, 2GB of RAM, and a minimum of 32GB of storage, the blog said.
But the big interest value would be Chrome OS, since Google has mostly made a splash with Android for smartphones, and a number of Android tablets are expected in the coming months from Samsung and others. Samsung is reported to be showing a new Android 2.2 tablet at a consumer electronics show in Berlin early in September.

FierceWireless reported in July that an HTC spokesman had noted widespread interest in tablets and said HTC would participate if it could find a way to offer "clear value and differentiate ourselves."

Chrome was introduced as an operating system to power netbooks, not tablets, although some analysts have noted that Chrome could work in both.

Computerworld

What can WiMAX bring to smart grid program?

GE exec Mark Hura looks at ambitions for smart grid program.
 GE last week announced that it has launched a pilot program to implement smart grid technology that uses Clearwire's WiMAX network to deliver data to both customers and utility companies.
What makes a carrier green?
 GE says that it will work with utility company Consumers Energy to deliver WiMAX-based grid sensors and energy meters to more than 6 million customers in Michigan. Smart grid technology is typically defined as any information technology that helps power companies more efficiently monitor power demand and allocate capacity. GE says that this particular smart grid pilot project is intended "to demonstrate how real-time wireless communications between meters in the home and the utility's network management and control systems can improve efficiency and reliability for all."
 In Network World's interview with Mark Hura, GE Energy's smart grid commercial leader, we discuss GE's broader ambitions for its smart grid program, its timeline for deployment and its reasons for choosing WiMAX over LTE.

 What do you hope to achieve with this pilot program?


Our WiMAX smart grid deployment is an opportunity to showcase the advantages of leveraging 4G communications for smart grids for both utility companies and consumers. It allows utilities to have a standard communications technology that includes the proper security protocols. WiMAX technology is based off of standards that are already being used in the industry.
 This is a communications standard that has the appropriate amount of bandwidth and latency, and that allows utilities to use their networks for more than automated metering and communicating with metered devices. It also allows for enabling renewable energy sources on the grid. It has more capabilities than the infrastructures that exist today and they allow for new applications on the networks such as alternative energy sources and storage technologies on a community level.

 Can you give a timeline of what we can expect to see implemented and when?
Our timeline is going to be based on utility decisions of how quickly they are going to implement their own road maps for deploying this technology on the grid. The important thing to remember when we look at WiMAX technology is that it will be widely deployed by end of 2010, covering all major markets across the U.S. So based on that I think you'll start to see deployments picking up in late 2010 and then accelerate over the next two to three years.
Why should consumers and businesses care about WiMAX-enabled smart grid technology?
Consumers and businesses will have the opportunity to understand how they use their energy and to understand how to manage their energy consumption more effectively. Having a communications platform based on 4G technology can provide real-time information back to consumers. It can tell you what your usage is at a particular moment and that can help project what your usage may be into the same day or the next day. So for instance it can tell you how you can use different energy sources for different times of the day. It can tell you how to best program devices that perform energy-intensive tasks to work only at off-peak hours to save money.

Why did you decide to go with WiMAX instead of waiting for LTE?

We took a look at the two real 4G paths that carriers are deploying, WiMAX and LTE. LTE has not been released commercially yet, whereas WiMAX is based on an IEEE standard and is commercially deployable right now. It also has a huge ecosystem all around the world. Eventually we see a future ability for appliances to leverage both WiMAX and LTE but for right now we think this is a good opportunity to leverage an existing network technology to benefit both consumers and businesses today.

Networkworld.com

Scientists find turbulence in Saturn's rings

The ringed planet Saturn, brilliant jewel of the night sky, has revealed new insights into the behavior of its rings for scientists studying signals from the Cassini spacecraft still flying through the Saturnian neighborhood after six years in orbit.

"We now have the clearest view of the rings' beautiful crystalline structure pasted onto the real night sky," said Jeffrey Cuzzi of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, leader of the Cassini-Huygens mission. "Gazillions of icy particles are constantly colliding with each other up there as they orbit the planet ... moving as waves under the influence of moonlets we've discovered orbiting inside gaps between the rings."

The tumultuous nature of the particles in Saturn's seven main rings and the gaps between the planet's rings, where those tiny moonlets cause ring edges to wave like ripples on the shorelines of space, are being described today in the journal Science.
Saturn's rings, through even the best of telescopes, look like series of thin flat discs grooved like an old phonograph record. But that's far from the truth: From Cassini's images and data, researchers have determined that each ring is a turbulent collection of orbiting particles - 95 percent water ice glistening in sunlight and the rest some strange kind of rubble tinged in red-brown here and there.
"That color may be some kind of organic materials," said Cuzzi, "but to me it looks like just plain rust - iron oxide. How it got there we don't yet know."
The ice chunks range in size from a few inches to tens of yards. As they orbit the planet, gravity turns some into huge clumps and pulls others apart, and they batter each other chaotically.
Beyond Saturn's major rings, Cassini scientists report they have detected several other faint rings that seem to be composed of minute amounts rubble and "microscopic dust."
The physics involved in their evolution suggests they are similar to the "protoplanetary discs" of rubble that on a much larger scale mark the earliest stages in the formation of the planets in the solar system.
But just how long ago the rings of Saturn formed and where their material came from originally remains a mystery, the scientists say.
The rings and the icy matter they contain are far from stable in their orbits around the planet. Instead, they appear to be changing constantly.
"Saturn's rings show dramatic variability (over) decades, years, even weeks," said the scientists.
Cassini's instruments have also revealed that strange objects occasionally shoot through the rings from far beyond the planet - comets, or asteroids, perhaps, but know one knows, Cuzzi said.
Each of Saturn's rings is labeled by a letter according date when it was discovered. Between Saturn's A and F rings lies a space 200 miles wide called the Encke gap. The gap holds several "ringlets" and gravity from a strange object named Pan, only 12 miles in diameter, disrupts the rings and causes waves along their edges.
Another gap exists between the thin ringlets of the Encke gap. It is called the Keeler gap, and here Cassini has discovered a lumpy little moonlet only 5 miles across that is also creating waves on the edges of Saturn's rings.
Amid all of Saturn's rings and ringlets lie 13 significant gaps, where Cassini mission scientists have been hunting for evidence of other moonlets. The absence of moonlets inside Saturn's C ring remains "baffling," the scientists say.
For now, the origin of the rings and much of their turbulent behavior will remain unknown, the scientists say, "until we have understood the powerful dynamical processes that have formed, and continue to shape, these elegant structures on time scales reaching from yesterday to billions of years" ago.

From http://www.sfgate.com/

Cisco Quits WiMax Radio Business

The decision to cease making WiMax base stations gives a boost to Cisco's Long-Term Evolution portfolio.

 WiMax is taking another hit as another major supplier -- Cisco -- confirmed that it is quitting the WiMax radio access network business and will cease making WiMax base stations. However, the networking company said it will continue supplying IP core and WiMax edge products like Wi-Fi and femtocells to WiMax customers.


The decision gives a boost to Cisco's Long-Term Evolution portfolio, which was strengthened in recent months by Cisco's acquisition of Starent Networks. Clearwire, which is majority owned by Sprint Nextel, has been the major deployer of WiMax in the United States.
Cisco got into the WiMax business through its acquisition of Navini Networks for $330 million in October 2007, but most carriers have since snubbed WiMax for the more efficient LTE. WiMax has been more popular in non-U.S. markets and its users, including Clearwire, have noted that it is relatively easy to shift network infrastructure -- and subscribers -- from WiMax to LTE.

Navini had a head start in WiMax and had supplied equipment to several startups scattered around the world. Its largest U.S. customer, Xanadoo, in Texas, said it had signed up more than 14,000 subscribers two years ago. Navini's use of MIMO antennas and Smart Beamforming technologies received high marks from many carriers. Navini's networks also were selling in countries with emerging business technologies.
When Cisco acquired Starent for $2.9 billion a few months ago, the acquisition also appeared to seal the doom of WiMax as a Cisco base station supplier. Starent was already gaining major contracts from LTE carriers like Verizon Wireless, which is scheduled to roll out the first U.S. LTE network later this year.

InformationWeek

Google Maps satellite photos of US government's reserve fleet

The United States government’s three reserve ship sites can be seen via satellite photos taken by Google Maps.

The National Defense Reserve Fleet is a group of ships that are used for “national defence and national emergency” crises.

The 'Boneyard': £22bn 'military aircraft cemetery' on Google Maps.

More than 170 vessels, managed by the Department of Transportations Maritime Administration, are located at James River, Virginia, Beaumont, Texas and Suisun Bay, California.

Its ships are classified as either ready “reserve force ships” (RRF), which can be put back into service between 10 and 120 days or “non-retention vessels”, which are past their serviceable life and have been nominated for disposal.
It is another example of how the US government’s disposal of military machinery.
On Monday, a spectacular series of new high-resolution Google Earth satellite images were released of the world’s most expensive military cemetery, a £22.6 billion centre dubbed “The Boneyard”.
The 2,600 acre facility, officially known Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, is home to thousands of outdated aeroplanes and helicopters mothballed by the United States Air Force and other allied forces.
Established under Section 11 of the Merchant Ship Sales Act of 1946, NDRF vessels have supported emergency shipping requirements in seven wars and crises, according to is official website.
They were used by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina.

Officials say that of the 93 non-retention vessels in the fleet, 70 are in the disposal process, or are ready for disposal while a further 23 are being prepared for disposal.
Last month the US government announced that a cleanup operation of Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet had been expanded.
A MARAD spokesman said that when a ship becomes obsolete, the department arranged for their disposal in an “environmentally sensitive manner”.
“When a ship is recycled, the recycler often salvages and sells metal and other materials, and disposes of other materials in accordance with state and federal law," he added.

By Telegraph.co.uk

Skype on Verizon: A Big Deal or Not?

Verizon Wireless and Skype say they’re teaming to bring Skype to nine BlackBerry and Android phones on the Verizon network.

I'm not sure if this is just an intriguing partnership or a major moment in phone history. But at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Verizon Wireless and Skype announced that they're working together to bring Skype to nine BlackBerry and Android phones on the Verizon network. A version of Skype Mobile will be available next month, permitting free Skype-to-Skype calls, chatting, and Skype Out calls to any phone number, including cheap international rates. And it'll all be done using flat-rate data plans rather than phone minutes.
There's nothing inherently historic about Skype being available on phones -- it's on the iPhone (albeit over Wi-Fi only right now) and I first used the service on a Windows Mobile handset years ago. (Only briefly, though -- it taxed the phone to the breaking point, and voice quality was pretty miserable.)

But a major carrier such as Verizon not only grudgingly permitting Skype but buddying up with it as a selling point for its phones is an interesting twist. I look forward to trying Skype Mobile on my Droid when it's available. And I have a few questions in the meantime...
Is there any integration with the phones' standard phone features? Say, access to the phone address book from within Skype? Or-dare I wish for it-the ability to route all calls through Skype, as Google's Google Voice app permits on BlackBerry and Android handsets? (Yes, I know that Google Voice isn't comparable to Skype-it uses phone minutes, and Skype doesn't)
How well does it work for incoming calls? Skype Mobile can run in the background, and I presume that you can use a Skypein phone number to permit people to dial a standard phone number and reach you in Skype. But does all this work smoothly enough that you could comfortably use Skype to take calls rather than the phone's standard phone features?
How's the quality? As good as a standard cell call? Better?
Are there any gotchas? On paper, this whole deal sounds...suspiciously enticing. The better Skype Mobile works, the more likely it is that lots of Verizon customers will do most (or all?) of their calling using it. Even if Skype cut Verizon in on any revenue it made, that couldn't be good for Verizon's bottom line.

More thoughts once the app's available.
For more smart takes on technology, visit Technologizer.com. Story copyright © 2010, Technologizer. All rights reserved.

Nexus One Multitouch Arrives Officially

The update also adds the Google Goggles app;

Ever since the Google Nexus One was announced (and then released) last month, talks were on about its forthcoming multitouch support. We all knew that the phone was more than capable to integrate multitouch gestures. Google, however, for some reason, chose not to include it in the initial firmware that the Nexus Ones came. There was a small fix that enabled multitouch in the browser. But that was from unofficial channels.
That was then. Yesterday, Google issued a small OTA (Over The Air) update for the Nexus One that brings in multitouch support to it - apart from numerous other improvements. Multitouch has been enabled in the gallery, browser and Google Maps where now you can pinch and zoom - just like on the iPhone. Google Maps has also been updated to version 3.4 and brings with it items synchronization, search suggestions from users' personal maps history, and a very interesting "night mode" in Maps Navigation. The update also adds the Google Goggles application that was first seen in December 2009.
Under the skin, there seems to be not much of a change. We can expect another update in the near future that will help Google fix the 3G connectivity issues that many users faced initially. As for the update to arrive for on your phone, you would have to be at the mercy of your operator to have it issued for you. Of course, there is another way out where you can update manually to get this same OTA version. More on that here.
As always, if you plan to update, do take a backup of all your data. Just in case, you know.

Techtree.com

Nokia Phones Offering Free GPS for 74 Countries

Nokia on Thursday introduced free driving and walking directions for 74 countries on a range of their mobile phones, in a direct challenge to Google and the entire GPS navigation industry.
The new version of Ovi Maps, available today on 10 phones with more existing models to be added in the next several weeks, will offer voice-guided driving and walking directions featuring text-to-speech, lane assistance, live traffic and road works information, and detailed content from partners including Lonely Planet and Time Out, all for free. Maps will cover 180 countries; navigation will be available in 74, including the U.S. and Canada. By March, all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the software.
"I expect that this will be globally available, including in the United States," said Nokia executive vice president for services Tero Ojanpera.
Not surprisingly, shares of GPS makers Tomtom and Garmin fell sharply on the news.
Google received plenty of press when it recently introduced free voice-guided navigation with the Motorola Droid. But the Droid and its GSM doppelganger, the Milestone, are available in relatively few countries, while Nokia's smartphones are best-sellers across a huge swathe of the world. The 5800, for instance, which is almost unknown in the U.S., sold more than 3 million units in its first six months on the market in Europe and Asia, according to Nokia.
Nokia has offered Ovi Maps navigation for a while, and bundled the service with a Nokia 5800 phone and a car kit to create a "navigation edition" which we reviewed recently. But for almost all of their phones up until now, voice-guided navigation carried a monthly fee and content such as Lonely Planet guides added an additional fee. All of those fees are now gone.
Ojanpera wouldn't explain how partners such as Lonely Planet, Michelin Guides, WCities and Time Out are making money now that Nokia is offering their formerly-for-pay products for free; he also wouldn't confirm or deny that including free navigation would cause smartphone prices to rise. Rather, improved location-based services will enable better mobile advertising and location-based applications, he said.
"It's not about increased prices; it's about having something consumers want," he said.
Nokia's new navigation move comes naturally from their 2008 acquisition of map provider NAVTEQ, which was part of a larger strategy to put location-based services at the forefront, Ojanpera said.
"This is a worldwide map database second to none, which actually enables us to do things that nobody else can do," he said.
Nokia's mapping technology offers several advantages over Google's, Ojanpera said. Ovi Maps can live on your phone's memory card rather than being continually downloaded to your phone, greatly reducing data traffic and letting navigation work even when the phone has no signal. (The maps for the U.S. and Canada take up about 1.6 gigabytes, he said.) The maps also use vector graphics rather than bitmaps, which means they use much less bandwidth when they're streaming to your phone over the network – one-tenth the data traffic of Google maps, Ojanpera said. The low data traffic will appeal to wireless operators, he said.

Nokia's product also has unusually good pedestrian directions, Ojanpera said, including footpaths, one-way streets and other pedestrian-only routes that don't appear on automotive maps. The software includes weather forecasts, 3D renderings of some landmarks, and the ability to post your location to Facebook updates.
Nokia's announcement could have a huge effect on the dedicated GPS navigation industry, especially in countries such as India where Nokia dominates the smartphone market. According to a Nokia press release, there are already about as many Nokia smartphone owners capable of using Ovi Maps as there are dedicated GPS owners in the world.
Ovi Maps is available today for the Nokia N97 Mini, 5800, E52, E55, E72, 5230, 6710, 6730 and X6 phones. Not a single one of those phones is currently available from a U.S. carrier, though some of them are sold unlocked here in the US. We're hoping the software will be available on U.S. carrier-supported phones such as the Nokia E71x soon.

• 

Microsoft to patch hole in Internet Explorer

Microsoft will patch a hole in its Internet Explorer browser that may have allowed Chinese hackers access to human rights activists' e-mail accounts.
The firm normally issues patches at a set time each month but said that the attention the problem had received forced it to move more quickly.
It follows the French and German governments decision to advise citizens to use other browsers.
The bad publicity has allowed rivals such as Firefox to gain market share.
According to web analytics company StatCounter Firefox is now a close second to Internet Explorer (IE) in Europe, with 40% of the market compared to Microsoft's 45% share.
In some markets, including Germany and Austria, Firefox has overtaken IE, the firm said.
Microsoft said it had now decided to act on the security hole.
"Given the significant level of attention this issue has generated, confusion about what customers can do to protect themselves and the escalating threat environment Microsoft will release a security update out-of-band for this vulnerability," said Microsoft's general manager of Microsoft's trustworthy computing security group George Stathakopoulos.
"We take the decision to go out-of-band very seriously given the impact to customers, but we believe releasing an update is the right decision at this time," he said.
He said that the only successful attacks "to date" were against IE 6.
"We continue to recommend customers update to Internet Explorer 8 to benefit from the improved security protection it offers," he said in a security advisory.
Following the high profile attacks on Google, Microsoft admitted that IE was a "weak link" in the attacks.
It said that the vulnerability could allow hackers to remotely run programs on infected machines.
The recent spate of attacks were alleged to have hit more than 30 companies including Google and Adobe.
Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the attacks.

BBC News

10 cool new toys from CES

By John D. Sutter and Brandon Griggs, CNN
Las Vegas, Nevada (CNN) -- Three-dimensional televisions, Internet-enabled TVs, touch-screen "tablet" computers, e-book readers and other fun new gadgets were scattered all over the enormous Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.
CES, which ended on Sunday, is regarded as one of the best trade shows for spotting new technologies before they take off. DVDs, CD players and Blu-ray all were introduced at previous shows. It is the largest event of its kind in the world.
As we hunted through thousands of tech displays at the show this year, these 10 products particularly grabbed our attention. It's hard to say which, if any, of the new technologies shown at CES this year will become a hit with consumers.
But these 10 new toys proved to be useful, unique or just plain strange.
So, here they are, in no particular order. Please let us know what you think.

Toshiba CELL TV with gesture technology

Toshiba unveiled a prototype of a television that doesn't require a remote control -- TV watchers simply wave their hands in the air to control the menu, fast-forward movies and turn the volume up or down. Many TV makers are working on "gesture" technology for TVs, and it hasn't been perfected, but Toshiba is among the first to show it off publicly.
In a demo at CES, a woman put her palm out in a "halt" position to select items from a 3-D, spherical menu on the TV screen. She looked like she was swimming the breaststroke when she commanded the TV to zoom in on an image. The TV uses infrared technology to sense a viewer's movements in a particular zone of the room, which a demonstrator referred to as the "couch-potato zone."
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 or 2012

What's cool: The idea of technology that reads human gestures has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with computers and TVs.

TCL 3-D TV, sans glasses
One of the big problems with 3-D TV is that most systems, when they debut later this year, will require viewers to wear 3-D glasses. They're goofy, expensive and, some testers complain, cause headaches and nausea.
But TCL Corporation, the Chinese company that's a parent of RCA, showed off 3-D TV technology that doesn't require glasses. A company representative said the technology, which adds a layer of rippled lenses to the front of the TV screen to produce the three-dimensional effect, could be used in the home as well as on billboards.
"Basically, we put the glasses that you'd be wearing on the TV," a TCL spokeswoman said.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2011 for commercial clients
What's cool: No irritating glasses.
Blio e-reader

Amid a crowd of promising new electronic readers at CES, this one stood out. This software application, built in part by futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil, turns almost any laptop, netbook or smartphone into an image-rich, full-color electronic reader. Blio uses publishers' original PDF files to preserve the exact format of books and magazines while supporting interactive multimedia, including video and Web links. It will launch with an online store featuring more than 1.2 million titles. Best of all: It's free.
Price: Did we mention it's free?
Available: Late February

Why it's cool: Blio also has a read-aloud feature and will translate to or from English. It looked impressive in a demo at CES. Tivit mobile TV add-on for phones
The Tivit, a cute, credit-card-sized device, catches live television signals -- like local weather and news -- and brings them to smartphones such as the iPhone, Blackberry and Droid.
The gadget is an intermediary step for people waiting for mobile-TV-enabled phones, and for those who don't want to purchase a new phone just to get TV on it. Tivit, from a company called Valups, uses an antennae to pick up mobile free digital TV signals from local television stations, and transmits them to phones via Wi-Fi, which it also creates, meaning you don't have to find someone else's Internet hot-spot to get a connection.
Price: About $100
Available: Spring 2010
Why it's cool: Upgrade to mobile TV without getting a new phone. Plus it's sleek.
Samsung TV remote with a TV screen on it

How meta. Samsung unveiled at CES a television remote with its own television screen. The "All-in-One-Premium" remote, which also plays its own audio, can be tuned to different TV channels than the TV it controls. It will come with Samsung's upcoming C9000 high-definition TV, and will be sold separately, said spokesman Jermain Anderson.

So, why would a person want such a thing? A Samsung spokesman said the TV-playing remote has as few functions. Say you're watching a sitcom while your roommate wants to watch a basketball game. One of you can watch on the remote, he said. The remote-watcher can put headphones on so you can both hear the audio.
Chalk this one up to another big trend at CES: Digital screens are ending up everywhere.
Price: Unannounced
Available: 2010
Why it's cool: It's so over-the-top unnecessary that it's a little bit interesting.

Lenovo IdeaPad U1 tablet-laptop

Tablet computers created quite a stir at CES. These mid-sized devices fall somewhere between mobile phones and laptops in the computer continuum.
Among the standout tablets at CES was Lenovo's U1 hybrid. It looks like a laptop, but its touch-sensitive screen pops off to become its own tablet. Independent from the keyboard, the screen looks like a big iPhone, and is said to be ideal for reading digital books, sorting through and resizing photos and surfing the Web.
The tablet is not without issues, though. One short-circuited in a demo for CNN.
Price: Less than $1,000
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's got the best of both worlds -- a take-with-you tablet for consuming media, and a keyboard for content creation.
Intel Infoscape

It's not a consumer product yet that we know of, but this multitouch-screen display at Intel's CES booth fascinated us and just about everyone else who saw it. Two seven-by-seven-foot HD screens showed an ever-shifting array of 576 cubes, each representing a photo, video or other piece of Internet content pulled from 20,000 sources and more than 20 live feeds. Touch a cube, and it expanded the content in real time.
Available: Now?
Price: Unknown
Why it's cool: Can you imagine your digital life arrayed like this in your home or office? Plus it just looked neat.
Palm Pre Plus

This newly announced smartphone, along with its thinner cousin the Pixi Plus, wouldn't be a huge upgrade over the current Pre except for one novel feature: The capability to create a 3G mobile hotspot for up to five laptops or other devices. The function comes in a downloadable app that lets Pre users create a personal Wi-Fi cloud on Verizon's 3G network.
Price: Unannounced
Available: January 25
Why it's cool: Wi-Fi everywhere you go, without paying Starbucks fees or buying a wireless card, sounds pretty sweet.
Intel Reader

OK, so it's an expensive niche product. And we've already given some love to Intel in this article. But this handheld device that scans printed text, converts it to voice and reads it aloud seems too groundbreaking to ignore. Hold the it over a page of a book, snap a high-res image of the text and the thing will read it aloud to you almost immediately. It also can play documents you transfer from a computer.
Price: About $1,500
Available: Now

Why it's cool: Yes, it's pricey, but this gadget could be a life-changing tool for the dyslexic or vision-impaired.

Parrot AR.Drone


It's a remote-controlled helicopter. And a gaming device. And yet another use for your iPhone. This flying toy is about the size of a pizza and can hover almost motionlessly, propelled by four rotors and an on-board computer. Users steer the Drones with iPhones, which act as remote controllers. A camera mounted on the AR.Drone sends a live video feed to the iPhone, meaning that you see what the Drone sees. Parrot is creating augmented-reality video games for the open-source device.
Price: less than $500
Available: Summer 2010
Why it's cool: It's fun, it's different and it can hang suspended in the air like the spaceship in "District 9."

CNN

Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension

It was more than half a century ago, in a 1955 episode of “The Honeymooners,” that Kramden, the parsimonious bus driver played by Jackie Gleason, told his wife, Alice, that he had not yet bought a new television because “I’m waiting for 3-D.”
The wait will soon be over. A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them.
Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. Beginning at around $2,000, the 3-D sets will, at first, cost more than even the current crop of high-end flat-screens, and buyers will need special glasses — techie goggles, really — to watch in 3-D.
But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension. In part, it could be the “Avatar” effect: with 3-D films gaining traction at the box office — James Cameron’s “Avatar” surpassed the staggering $1 billion mark last weekend — companies are now determined to bring an equivalent experience to the living room.
Anticipating this coming wave, ESPN said Tuesday that it would show World Cup soccer matches and N.B.A. games in 3-D on a new network starting in June, and Discovery, Imax and Sony said they would jointly create a 3-D entertainment channel next year. The satellite service DirecTV is expected to announce its own 3-D channels at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where every major television manufacturer is planning to announce 3-D televisions and compatible Blu-ray DVD players on Wednesday.
“The stars are aligning to make 2010 the launch year of 3-D,” said John Taylor, a vice president for LG Electronics USA. “It’s still just in its infancy, but when there is a sufficient amount of content available — and lots of people are working on this — there will be a true tipping point for consumers.”
At that point, the question becomes whether consumers — many of whom have only recently upgraded to costly new high-definition sets — will want to watch in three dimensions enough to pay for the privilege. “I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch the Super Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.
But will the experience translate to other entertainment? Ms. Patel said, “You don’t necessarily want the ladies of ‘The View’ sitting around you when you watch them.”
For most consumers, 3-D is still far in the distance. With the announcement this week, the media companies are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as they did for HDTV a decade ago.
 It took high-definition television about a decade to catch on — to the point where it has become part of the entertainment mainstream, with an adequate stock of HD programming and the sets now cheap enough to entice middle-class buyers. Analysts expect 3-D television to go through the same curve, initially attracting first adopters for whom price is little or no object and gradually moving out to other affluent and then middle-class homes as sets become cheaper and programmers create enough 3-D fare.
Or, of course, the technology could be a total flop.
For decades 3-D was a gimmick for B-movies and occasionally on television (in bad quality with flimsy paper glasses), but newer technology has largely erased those memories. Peter M. Fannon, a vice president at Panasonic, called the new sets “totally different than what one had seen over the last 20 to 30 years.”
In 3-D, television makers see an opportunity to persuade households that have already bought HDTVs to return to the electronics store. Though television sales jumped 17 percent in 2009, the industry needs new innovations to keep the cash register ringing.
“Three-D is an effort by the industry to come up with something that will motivate consumers to trade up,” said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Research.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Dreamworks Animation, said producers were preparing “an enormous surge in 3-D content, with images that are truly beautiful on these new monitors.”
Leading the charge to television, the pioneering sports network ESPN said it would show at least 85 live events on a 3-D channel starting in June. “The sports genre is probably the best suited to exploit this technology,” said Sean Bratches, an executive vice president at ESPN. The company has held preliminary talks with Comcast and other operators about gaining distribution; the 3-D channel could come at an added cost to subscribers. It will go dark when not showing live events.
The joint venture among Discovery Communications, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Imax Corporation will be a full-time channel featuring natural history, movies, sports, music and other programming.
New 3-D televisions, like the 3-D screens in theaters, work by dividing picture images into two sets, one for each eye. A viewer must wear special glasses, so each eye captures a different image, creating the illusion of depth. Filming entails two connected cameras, one for the left-eye image and the other for the right.
Manufacturers have developed two technologies for 3-D glasses in the home. In so-called polarized glasses, which can cost under a dollar, each lens blocks a set of images transmitted in certain types of light. “Active” glasses, which are better suited for LCD screens in particular, have battery-powered shutters that open and close rapidly, so each eye sees different views of each frame. These glasses can cost up to $100, but television makers are expected to package at least two pairs with each monitor.
On the horizon is technology that allows people to watch 3-D without glasses, but that has severe limitations, like forcing viewers to sit at a certain distance.
Mike Vorhaus, the managing director of new media for Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm, said 3-D was many years away from widespread adoption. For now, he said, it is “one more appetizer” for consumers who “already have a lot to digest.”
Indeed, a number of hurdles remain, including a lack of production equipment and dueling 3-D transmission standards. But backers like David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, say 3-D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks “closest to real life.”

By BRIAN STELTER and BRAD STONE
The original article -->NYTimes

NASA telescope detects 5 sizzling exoplanets

NASA's new space telescope Kepler has discovered five odd fiery-hot planets in its epochal search for life-sustaining planets in the depths of the Milky Way, scientists reported Monday.

"One of the planets is amazingly light - like Styrofoam," said William J. Borucki, the astronomer from NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View who conceived the Kepler mission 25 years ago and now leads it.

Picture- National Geographic

"And all five simply glow," he said, "they're like looking into a blast furnace - but that's simply no place to look for life."
The five exoplanets, as they are known, are the first that scientists have detected from Kepler's signals, and they are evidence of the strange solar systems that may exist far beyond our own, the scientists say.

The newfound planets are far larger than Earth. The smallest is the size of Neptune, four times Earth's size, and the three biggest are much larger than Jupiter, which is 10 times the size of Earth.
Hot, hot planets

Two planets are hotter than molten lava at about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and the largest one, at nearly 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, is hotter than molten iron.
NASA scientists described Kepler's findings Monday during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington and briefed reporters by telephone. A detailed report on the findings will be published Thursday in the journal Science.
A network of nine major ground-based telescopes, from Hawaii to the Canary Islands, and including the Lick Observatory above San Jose, confirmed Kepler's discoveries.
Geoffrey Marcy of UC Berkeley, a member of the Kepler team, noted in an e-mail that the five new planets Borucki announced have all been measured with "exquisite detail about their sizes, masses and orbits."
He said he's enthusiastic about what scientists will learn by the time the Kepler mission is over.
"We are measuring the brightnesses of 100,000 stars with a precision of 20 parts per million, and this unprecedented accuracy will allow us to detect the dimming of any Earth-sized planet crossing in front of any of those 100,000 stars," Marcy wrote. "It's a rare moment in science when an historic discovery looms so tantalizingly close to our outstretched fingertips."
In its search for planets, Kepler is examining 150,000 stars, most of which are inactive and quiet. Natalie Batalha, a San Jose State University astronomer who studies the fierce energy variations among stars, predicted that Kepler's data "will revolutionize stellar seismology."
Early excitement

At Kepler's mission control center at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, planetary astronomer Jack Lissauer was also excited about the mission's early results.
"We're achieving the kind of precision we really need to detect true Earth analogues," Lissauer said in an interview. "And seeing that so many of those suns out there are so quiet will enable us to learn much more about the interior of the stars themselves."
Among the surprising Kepler findings since it was launched in March, he said, was the detection of areas in the far-distant sky where small stars - not planets - fly swiftly in orbit around much larger stars. The Kepler specialists have discovered that at least one of those small orbiting stars is far hotter than the larger star it orbits - an entirely unknown phenomenon.
"We've never seen such things before," Lissauer said.
The Kepler mission is scheduled to continue at least for the next three years, hunting for signs of Earth-size rocky planets in so-called habitable zones where life itself is possible.

 David Perlman ,Chronicle Science Editor

Four Bright Ideas at the 2010 CES

LAS VEGAS (TheStreet) -- Every January, the annual migration that defines the gadget biz begins in the high Las Vegas desert: There Microsoft(MSFT Quote), Sony(SNE Quote), Google(GOOG Quote), Dell(DELL Quote) -- every electronic somebody except Apple(AAPL Quote) -- flocks to the Consumer Electronics Show to get a glimpse of what's hot for the coming year.

That begins an 11-1/2 month cycle of sniping, clobbering, discounting and otherwise trying to sell as much of this gear as possible by Dec. 24. Don't let all the Femtocells, Wi-Fi, 3-D screens fool you. This business is exactly that simple

Once again, it's January -- how did that happen? -- so here's what's hot for this year's CES and for 2010. The CES, the largest consumer-technology trade show, with 2,700 vendors, runs from Jan. 7 to 10.

1. The Google Nexus One (probably about $550): In case you haven't heard, Google's got a phone. Though Google spokeswoman Carolyn Penner flatly told me the company has not shared one single public detail of this unit, that has not stopped the collective tech press from reporting literally hundreds of stories on a $500-ish Android 2.1, touch-enabled Google phone to be released in the first week in January at an event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Though I expect this unit to be of limited actual use (the Google everything-should-be-free thing has magically disappeared here -- $550 for a phone!), the unit will almost certainly dominate CES coverage.

2. 3-D displays. (Price varies.): Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo and other mega-display makers are facing a make-or-break year. Cheap upstarts like Vizio are killing them in most TV categories. So the industry is going all-in on pricey displays that create the illusion of depth. Expect a mind-boggling array of 3-D-imaging devices for games, TV and point-of-sale. Two to look for: Technicolor's demo of a low-end 3-D system that could jumpstart deployment for cheaper TVs. And a Tokyo-based research project called Aerial 3-D Display Project. In other words, a display that looks something like R2D2 projecting Princess Leia saying, "Help me, Obi-Wan." That boils down to a TV without the actual TV. Not bad.

3. The desktop photo studio -- Ortery Technologies Photosimile 5000. (Price TBA.): Small-business owners listen up: Irvine, Calif.-based Ortery Technologies has a cool idea: a desktop product-imaging device called the Photosimile 5000. Basically, it's a white background about the size of a large microwave married to a high-quality digital camera. Simply stick any item (up to a size of a decent handbag), click a few buttons on a PC and the unit coughs up a high-quality 2- and 3-D image. Have some stinky old merchandise you can't move? This gadget gets it up on eBay(EBAY Quote) fast.

4. The connected car: Here is this year's big idea: the car as gadget. None other than Ford Chief Executive Officer Alan Mulally will be in Vegas hyping his new riff on a smart-car technology dubbed Sync. The 2010 model year will offer what amounts to a mobile hotspot that allows for easier cell and data integration as you drive. And though Ford, GM(MTLQQ Quote) and Toyota(TM Quote) deserve credit for raising auto IQ, with tools like this, the smarter car is going to be a tough slog. Remember, all cars run on the dumbest thing ever invented: rubber tires. There is not much a little Wi-Fi and data connectivity can do for that.