Posts by EricMack

Many new iPad addicts out there have certainly had the idea: It would be so great if there were an easy way to mount that thin tablet on your car's dash to use all those apps on the go.

Now, one California start-up has announced it's making the dream come true. T3 Motion 's main business is in "green security" - creating electric and hybrid vehicles and Segway-like personal transporters for law enforcement and security personnel. But they're also planning a plug-in hybrid consumer car called the GT3, with an interior that will be centered around an iPad where you might normally expect to find the stereo or control panel.

"In today's advanced mobile communication environment, people on the go demand clear and consistent connections as well as in-car access to information and the Internet," said T3 Motion CEO Ki Nam. "As a next-generation consumer vehicle, the GT3 will incorporate technologies that address both these design requirements."

The iPad provides the GUI for that set of technologies, while CelLynx' 5BARz cellular network extending technology provides the wireless service up to 3G speeds within the vehicle. CelLynx CEO Daniel Ash claims the service will work with nearly any phone and will be integrated with the vehicle iPad.

"5BARz delivers clearer calls so GT3 drivers are always on, always connected for business or managing their personal lives," says Ash.

In another statement released last week, the company explained that the two-passenger, …

Earlier this week, information and telecommunications giants Google and Verizon were nice enough to work out a deal on Net Neutrality, outlined in a "joint policy proposal" for Congress. As we reported , one of the most controversial parts of the proposal is the suggestion that service providers should be permitted to engage in "reasonable network management."

In the past, providers like Comcast have gotten in trouble for slowing or prioritizing certain types of traffic. Open Internet advocates say such network management will lead to an Internet with multiple tiers of service that can be abused and would be a major blow to freedom of information. Verizon and Google say such measures are needed to deal with network congestion, ensuring network security, addressing traffic that is unwanted or harmful to users and ensuring service quality to subscribers.

For an expert take on the Google/Verizon proposal, we spoke to Susan Crawford , former special assistant to the President for science, technology, and innovation policy (2009). She now teaches at the Cardozo Law School and is a visiting researcher at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy.

DaniWeb: What was your first reaction to news of the Google Verizon Deal?

Crawford: The key takeaway from this deal is that it's going to serve as a catalyst for the Federal Communications Commission to get involved. We can't have large companies regulating themselves in such a crucial area for the American economy.

DaniWeb: …

The DARPA geeks are at it again . On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced it is developing what it calls an "ExtremeScale" SuperComputing system . The project is part of what DARPA refers to as its Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program -- that's Pentagon speak for "badass," which the agency itself says has the modest goal of simply "re-inventing computing."

It (the UHPC program) plans to develop radically new computer architectures and programming models that are 100 to 1,000 times more energy efficient, with higher performance, and that are easier to program than current systems.

And DARPA says the trickle-down effect of having ultra quick, efficient and powerful computers that don't melt under the heat generated by their own awesomeness will amount to......at least 50-times greater energy, computing and productivity efficiency, which will slash the time needed to design and develop complex computing applications.

Specifically though, here's the specs DARPA is looking for, courtesy of the UK's Channelregister :

...DARPA wants a petaflops supercomputer, including networking, storage, and compute elements as well as cooling, to be crammed in a space a little larger than a standard server rack - 24 inches wide by 78 inches high and 40 inches deep - and consume only 57 kilowatts to power and cool the device.

The machine has to deliver a peak petaflops of performance and 50 gigaflops per watt sustained power efficiency while running the Linpack …

Lately there's been lots of buzz over how to keep the flood of online content coming and allow the people and companies that create it to eat, too. This led the Center for the Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School to rehash an old meme in its annual report released on July 23rd - should Twitter become a pay service? The findings seem statistically impossible and sent film critic Roger Ebert flying into action.

The USC report found "0.00 percent" were willing to pay for using Twitter . But that didn't sit well with Ebert, so he did his own impromptu survey over the past week, via Twitter , of course.

The results of the film critic's non-scientific survey would seem to indicate that something may have been amiss in the Annenberg report, which polled around 1,900 people. Ebert has nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, of which, almost 4,000 took his SurveyMonkey poll and 20 percent said they would consider paying to tweet.

As Ebert notes, "they're no great figures for Twitter." But the company probably isn't too concerned, since it has no plans to begin charging for use of the service anyhow. And as Ebert and his followers point out, that's likely a very good thing:

"Those opposed (to the notion of paying for Twitter) made two good arguments (1) Twitter's strength depends on it being universal and free, so that countless witnesses can tweet …

No more shortcuts for hackers - that's the word from Microsoft, which plans to release a patch today that the company says will fix a security loophole. The issue is tied to the way the Windows OS handles shortcuts, or .lnk files, or as Microsoft explains it in the official security advisory : "The vulnerability exists because Windows incorrectly parses shortcuts in such a way that malicious code may be executed when the icon of a specially crafted shortcut is displayed. This vulnerability can be exploited locally through a malicious USB drive, or remotely via network shares and WebDAV. An exploit can also be included in specific document types that support embedded shortcuts."

In other words, all it takes is viewing the contents of a USB drive to embed a malicious shortcut in your system.

Microsoft says the loophole is present in Windows XP Service Pack 3 and x64 Service Pack 2, right on up through Windows 7, including Windows Server 2003 and 2008. Consumers were first notified of the problem in the middle of July, along with detailed directions for a temporary workaround . Company managers say that in the interim they've seen an increase in attempts to exploit the vulnerability, prompting today's "out of band" release of the patch (out of band is Redmond-speak for outside the regular monthly update schedule).

Microsoft's Holly Stewart says that Malware in the Sality family , especially …

The federal government and almost all these United States are broke, and so they're considering something we've all at least thought about from time to time: making money off the Internet. There's a fight brewing in Washington, D.C. over an attempt to collect sales tax from online purchases... yet again.

The idea is pretty simple - states haven't been able to collect sales tax on most Internet purchases thanks to a 1992 Supreme Court Decision holding that retailers can only charge tax in states where they have a physical presence (yes, all the folks in Kentucky have been getting screwed on their Amazon orders for many years now), so now they're turning to Congress for help getting around the ruling. The result is H.R. 5660, the Main Street Fairness Act , introduced by Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt, which would essentially do an end run around the status quo to give states the power to force Internet retailers to collect and remit sales from customers in those states, making it a whole lot easier to tax them.

Not surprisingly, everyone from Amazon to individual eBay powersellers seem to oppose the idea. The Computer and Communications Industry Association, which claims its members employ more than 600,000 workers and generate annual revenues in excess of $200 billion, had this to say:

CCIA has long opposed taxes on e-commerce, which would burden on-line vendors with the task of sorting through the policies of thousands of taxing authorities …

Foursquare is so hung up on where we are now or where we've been... Never fear, Plancast is here to fill the void in the location-based future social networking space. Actually, it's much cooler than that, and it's beginning to pick up steam. As its name infers, Plancast is all about broadcasting your plans, just to friends or to the entire world. Think of it as a sweet combination between Twitter and an events calendar.

It also has nifty mapping features, integrates well with Facebook and Twitter and comes as an app for iPhone or Android. To see one of the best examples of Plancast at work, check out Robert Scoble's (of Scobleizer fame) page .

Plancast's parent company, Worldly Developments, is made up of former TechCrunch blogger Mark Hendrickson and programmer Jay Marcyes. Since opening a public beta in late 2009, they received a lot of attention at South by Southwest in March and $800,000 in seed funding. In the ensuing months, the site has continued to grow, announcing an API earlier this summer, and receiving an ever-increasing amount of attention. This week, Ford even Plancasted its new Ford Explorer reveal in New York's Herald Square.

The obvious reaction may be "why do we need another online planning tool?" John Greene at Springwise points out the key Plancast advantage:

...most of those tend to focus on formal ones; when it's just drinks and dinner …

At a time when newspapers are having a hard time convincing people to pay for online access to their news, one site is having much better luck getting people to go online and pony up some cash to give directly to journalists who use the donations to then go out and report stories.

The site is Spot.us , it originally got going a few years ago with a Knight Foundation grant and a mission to experiment with the idea of using crowdfunding via the web to report stories that were going unreported in the San Francisco Bay Area. After successfully crowdfunding some reporting of big stories, including sending a journalist the Pacific Garbage Patch who chronicled her voyage in a story in The New York Times , the site secured more funding and expanded its local coverage to Los Angeles, Seattle and Minnesota.

Then, this week Spot.us announced that the site would begin accepting pitches to crowdfund stories of a local or regional interest from across the country. Founder David Cohn said he had initially envisioned the site continuing to expand market by market, a la Craigslist, but in a blog post this week he announced an about face and Spot.us' expansion nationwide, apparently effective immediately.

...it makes little sense for me to tell a good pitch from Illinois or Alamo Texas that they can’t put their pitch up until we find a handful of other pitches …

As goes Google, so goes the rest of the universe -- or at least that's the fear this week after the start up-turned-giant-turned-common verb reported disappointing earnings that sent the Silicon Valley stock over a digital cliff after-hours Thursday.

The company pulled in 1.84 billion dollars for the quarter or $5.71 per share, less than analysts' average projection of $6.52 per share.

Taking the blame for the disappointing figures are Europe's lackluster economic situation -- Google does a significant chunk of its business in the Euro zone -- and a recent ramp-up in hiring that bumped up total expenses.

But lurking below the surface here are worries about the Adwords Economic Indicator -- you saw the phrase coined here first, folks -- which could be telling us that retailers aren't buying as much online advertising as they should be, and, more importantly, indirectly telling us the economy is still pretty crappy.

Of course we should point out that Google, the company, its ad sales and those vital pay-per-clicks that underwrite its googol of tentacles forever invading the information universe, are all actually on the upswing.

"(Google saw) solid growth in our core business and very strong growth in our emerging businesses drove 24% revenue growth year over year," said CEO Eric Schmidt. "We saw strength in every major product area, as more and more traditional brand advertisers embraced search advertising and as large advertisers increasingly ran integrated campaigns across search, display, and mobile."

To translate …