Techtonic Shifts

SugarCRM Launches Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Salesforce.com

2009-11-19T15:02:01Z

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Marc Benioff is the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, a $1 billion (revenues) software company that sells software that helps salespeople manage their accounts. He's also an incredible egomaniac and self-promoter, perhaps the most outrageous one in all of Silicon Valley—and that's saying something. Benioff recently penned an autohagiography called Behind the Cloud, in which he talks about making a spiritual quest to India and swimming with dolphins in Hawaii and then coming back and starting Salesforce.com with the Zen-like and noble goal of changing the world into a better, more enlightened place where salespeople could become even more effective at squeezing money out of prospects. Ahem.

Benioff's claim to fame is that he pioneered the idea of "software as a service," meaning you don't need to buy a copy of his software and install it on your computer. Instead, the software sits on servers at Salesforce.com and you just pay to use it. Back in 1999, when Benioff, a former Oracle executive, launched Salesforce.com, software as a service (aka SaaS) was a pretty big change. Today it's common, only now it's called "cloud computing," which is why Benioff's book is called Behind the Cloud.

One thing about Benioff is he doesn't miss a trend. Before "cloud computing" was the buzzword du jour, the same notion was called "on-demand computing," and for a while "utility computing"—and Salesforce.com was those, too. Even the company's name speaks to its trend-chasing nature, because, if you'll recall, in 1999 all the cool kids were appending the ".com" suffix to the names of their companies. Didn't matter what you did or what you made. You were a dotcom, baby. You were hip. You were new. Now, of course, having .com on the end of your name is about as hip as wearing Hammer pants. In a way it's almost embarrassing, like some weird vestigial appendage from that wacky dotcom craze.

Anyway, the thing is, Benioff is ripe for parody, and now someone has done it—and it just happens to be one of his competitors. SugarCRM, a tiny company that makes the same kind of software that Salesforce.com makes but charges less, decided to have some fun at Benioff's expense and maybe to drum up a little business at the same time. So they created a knock-off of Benioff's book and called it Behind the Smoke Screen: the untold story of how Salesforce.com still manages to sell 1999 technology 10 years later. Where the real book has a glowing blurb from Michael Dell, the parody features one from Kim Jong Il. Inside are six tiny chapters that poke fun of Salesforce.com for using proprietary code (SugarCRM is open source) and relying on stodgy, old Oracle database software (SugarCRM runs on MySQL, a newer database program).

SugarCRM printed up 1,000 copies and gave them out to people arriving at Salesforce.com's big annual conference in San Francisco this week—an event modestly called "Dreamforce 09: The Cloud Computing Event of the Year." SugarCRM also gave out flyers urging Salesforce.com customers to check out a special page on the SugarCRM Web site and consider switching to SugarCRM. "By 10 a.m. we had 1,500 hits on our Web site, and by noon we had four qualified sales opportunities," says Chris Harrick, vice president of marketing at SugarCRM. "If we close even one deal, our ROI on this guerrilla marketing campaign will be two- or three-fold."

reCAPTCHA (a.k.a. Those Infernal Squiggly Words) Almost Done Digitizing the New York Times Archive

2009-11-13T12:01:00Z

A typical reCAPTCHA

You've done it so many times, at so many sites across the Internet, that chances are you don't even think about it anymore: deciphering and typing in a "CAPTCHA," those squiggly, mucked-up words presented each time you buy tickets online, write a blog comment, or join a social network. Their purpose is clear: they tell Web sites that you are a person and not a computer, theoretically cutting down on spam. More perceptive Web users may have noticed that sometimes the garbled strings appear in pairs, with one looking more like it's been scanned out of a library book or old newspaper, perhaps with some sloppy underlining or stray pen marks. The latter is a variant known as "reCAPTCHA," and for two years it has been performing double duty, both authenticating you and helping to digitize old printed material at the same time. Far from just wasting your time, it has now helped digitize almost all of the New York Times archives.

Both CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) and reCAPTCHA are the invention of Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. "A couple hundred million CAPTCHAs are typed daily around the world," von Ahn tells NEWSWEEK. "The first time I did the calculations, I felt quite proud. And then I felt bad because people really find these annoying." They're also wasteful. It takes about 10 seconds to type a CAPTCHA─more, obviously, if you err and have to start over─meaning a total of some 500,000 human hours per day are spent typing them in. As a point of comparison, according to von Ahn, the Empire State Building took 7 million human hours to build. "Life is only like 700,000 hours," he says. "It's almost the equivalent of a life. We thought, is there any way we can use this human effort in a way that's good for humanity?"

Turns out, there is. Recognizing distorted words is one of the (dwindling number of) things that the human brain can still do better than computers. In order to make old books, newspaper, and other texts searchable, pages are scanned and fed into optical character-recognition software. Because ink and paper degrade over time, some words remain inscrutable. The reCAPTCHA system presents Web users with two words: one word that computers can't read, and one that they can. So long as you type the known word in correctly, and a few other people agree with you on the unknown word, you have helped digitize an archival page. And, von Ahn says, typing in two words instead of one doesn't cost you a significant amount of extra time.

Von Ahn is tough to pin down on a number of details─he won't say how much the New York Times pays for reCAPTCHA's services, nor the precise amount of progress it has made in digitizing its 150 years of pages. But he hinted in his recent talk at the 2009 PopTech conference that the project was on track to finish by the end of 2009 or slightly later.

reCAPTCHA, which is free for Web sites to implement, is being used by Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and more than 100,000 other sites. In September, it was acquired by Google, which has massive human proofreading needs in its Google Books and Google News Archive projects. At some 40 million deciphered words a day, and approximately 100,000 words per book, that means the reCAPTCHA army could in theory chew through hundreds of thousands of books per year.

It's been said that we shouldn't ask what's next in terms of what the Internet and technology will be able to do but instead try to understand what we've already got and figure out how to put it to good use. Von Ahn's efforts surely prove that point. They also show that in some ways, we can help computers as much as they help us.

Microsoft Vista Still a Thorn in PC Makers' Side

2009-11-12T21:45:02Z

Has Windows Vista reached out from the grave to foul things up one last time? Judging by lower-than-expected PC sales off the back of the Oct. 22 Windows 7 launch, it would appear so.

Usually, when Microsoft ships a new operating system, a flood of new PC purchases follows. But despite glowing reviews and brisk sales of its own (pre-orders beat Harry Potter's record in the U.K., according to Amazon), Windows 7 boosted PC sales only 49 percent in its first week. That's not shabby for any industry in a recession. But it's well below the 68 percent spike that attended Vista's debut in 2006. PC makers and retailers were counting on a huge bump to kick off the holiday buying season early.

What caused the discrepancy? Windows 7 has gotten great word of mouth, but that word is that it fixes what was wrong with Vista, not that it's a revolutionary product that needs new hardware to work best. Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal gave the simpler, more intuitive OS a rave--and also wrote that nearly any Vista PC would run Windows 7 just fine. Even Microsoft calls Windows 7 "a whole lotta less" in one ad. For recession-conscious consumers, that's a strong incentive to try it out on the machines they already own--the machines they bought for Vista.

PC makers needn't worry too much, though. A more prosaic explanation for the smaller coattail might be that Vista debuted in January, generally a hotter sales month than October. There's also the idea that before buying a PC, consumers need to see new models built for Windows 7 in person. To that end, Microsoft is launching its own line of retail stores, the first of which opened last month in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, shoppers can see Windows 7 powering sleek PCs with a snappy interface and wireless links to HDTVs and Xbox consoles. "It creates the halo that something cool is happening here," says Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group. Cool enough to let Vista and its hassles rest in peace.

Can Apple Avoid The Mistakes It Made Throughout The 1990s?

2009-11-11T18:36:08Z

One of the great things about covering technology is that if you hang around long enough, you get to write the same stories all over again. In 1987, when I first started on the tech beat, desktop PCs were a big deal. Today the excitement has moved to mobile devices, also known as smartphones. Watching this new market unfold is a bit like seeing one of those movies where they've taken an old classic and remade it with new stars but the same script.

Now, as then, a smaller device is displacing a bigger one. Now, as then, the platform remains somewhat primitive but is evolving rapidly. Hardware makers are trying to figure out which user interface works best. Software makers are dreaming up new ways to use machines that even their creators could not have imagined. Now, as then, a new ecosystem is arising, with disruptive technology creating new powerhouses and threatening the survival of market leaders.

The most striking Groundhog Day moment for me involves Apple. Back in 1984, Apple leapt way ahead in the PC market when it released the original Macintosh, the first popular computer to employ a graphical user interface. It took Microsoft six years to come up with something that could compare to the Mac, in the form of Windows 3.0. Six years! For all that time, Apple had the market to itself. Nevertheless, Windows took over the world and now holds more than 90 percent market share, while Apple squeaks by with less than 5 percent worldwide.

Cut to the mobile phone market, today. In June 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a device that was so far beyond everything else in the market that even now, two and a half years later, nothing can beat it. To be sure, Nokia and Research in Motion still hold a greater share of the smartphone market than Apple does, but their aging software platforms look obsolete next to Apple's.

The question is, will Apple do with the iPhone what it did with the Mac?

For the full story, click here.

Is Facebook a Paradise for Scammers?

2009-11-06T17:02:35Z

Every day tens of millions of people log on to Facebook, the popular social-network site, and spend time playing goofy online games. But watch out. Some people playing these games are getting fleeced by scammers, tricked into signing up for products and services they didn’t want.

Worse yet, this isn’t happening by accident. The companies that develop games for Facebook make big money by selling ad space—some of it to scammers.

This week, Silicon Valley blogger Michael Arrington caused a ruckus by suggesting that Facebook itself has been turning a blind eye to the scams because it is sharing in the spoils. Arrington, who runs the influential TechCrunch blog, is on a crusade to pressure Facebook to clean up its act.

“Ultimately this is Facebook’s fault,” Arrington says. He says the social-networking site isn’t enforcing its own rules against scam ads. “It’s like with Major League Baseball and steroids. If the rules aren’t enforced, which is what’s happening on Facebook, then people are going to break the rules. Facebook needs to stop this.”

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Seven Lies We Tell Ourselves About Facebook

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Why I Love It ...

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Etiquette: Is It OK to Poke You?

Facebook denies Arrington’s charge. In an exchange via e-mail, David Swain, a company spokesman, tells NEWSWEEK that Facebook works hard to stamp out scammer ads and has already disabled two ad networks that were breaking the rules.

“We have, and will continue to, move aggressively to stop any activities that threaten or damage our users’ experience,” Swain says. “Any assertion to the contrary is false.”

Arrington responds that Facebook isn't doing a good-enough job, because when he checked out FarmVille, a popular Facebook game, "it took me about 10 seconds to find really scammy ads."

Facebook is the hottest site on the Internet, and it's growing like mad. The site has more than 300 million users, adding 50 million in the third quarter alone. Earlier this year Facebook board member Marc Andreessen said Facebook would rake in more than $500 million in revenue this year.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in September that it had become “cash-flow positive” well ahead of schedule. It had expected to hit that milestone in 2010.

Facebook is booming because it’s a wonderful and useful Web site. But it also represents a ripe target for scammers. Here’s how they operate.

Let’s say you’ve signed up to play FarmVille, a game produced by Zynga, a company in San Francisco. Each month some 63 million people play the game, in which you plant seeds and harvest crops.

If you want to buy things in FarmVille, like seeds or land, you can either earn points or you can buy points. To buy points, you send Zynga some money from your credit card. Yes, people really do spend money buying seeds for an online game. I have no idea why.

There’s also another way to earn Zynga money: you can click on ads that promise to give you FarmVille currency if you perform some task, like filling out a survey.

You might take an “IQ quiz,” for which you answer a few questions, and then, to get your score, you must enter your cell-phone number. The scammers send a PIN number to your cell phone, and tell you to enter that PIN on a Web site.

In the fine print, there’s a message saying that by entering your PIN you are signing up to get a daily horoscope for $9.99 per month. Next time you get your phone bill, you’ve been stung.

When first contacted by NEWSWEEK, an exec from one company that distributes these ads claimed they’re totally legitimate. “There is no way a user can inadvertently sign up for anything,” said Matt McAllister, marketing director at Offerpal Media, an ad network in Fremont, Calif. “They have to opt in for it.” McAllister points out that this is nothing new. “These ads have been around for years.”

Two days after that conversation, however, Offerpal announced that its CEO and founder, Anu Shukla, would be stepping down. McAllister said her resignation had nothing to do with the charges about scammy ads. But then her replacement, George Garrick, posted a public statement admitting that "regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity." Garrick vowed that the practice would stop.

It’s true that scam ads have been around for years. But one thing that is different about Facebook is that users share a lot of personal data with the site. This means scammers can create especially insidious ads, using software programs that dynamically insert your personal information—your name, the name of one of your friends—into the ads that you see. So a naive user might think the ads are just messages from Facebook, especially since scammers sometimes use the same typefaces and colors as Facebook does.

Better yet, scammers don’t need victims to hand over a credit-card number. All they need is a mobile-phone number. Guess who’s on Facebook? Millions of naive teenagers who may not have credit cards, but do have mobile phones. Cha-ching.

What gets Arrington’s goat is the fact that legitimate companies are profiting from this stuff.

See, Zynga gets paid to run ads with its games. And Zynga is making a fortune. The company is privately held and won’t say what its revenues are. But at least one analyst says it earns about $200 million, while published reports have placed Zynga’s revenues as high as $250 million this year.

That’s pretty amazing, considering the company was founded only two years ago, in July 2007.

To be sure, most of Zynga’s revenue comes from legitimate business, not from scammers. Zynga executives declined to give interviews. Instead they had an outside PR agency send five written statements via e-mail with instructions that these statements could be attributed to Zynga, the company, but not to any individual.

In the statements Zynga said it has a team dedicated to stamping out scammers and has already shut down some advertisers for breaking rules. Zynga’s statement list also points out that most of its revenue comes from people “directly paying for virtual goods” rather than clicking on ads and special offers.

After Arrington launched his crusade, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus posted a blog item on which he said, “We have worked hard to police and remove bad offers,” but also acknowledged that “we need to be more aggressive.”

Arrington fired back by digging up and posting a video clip in which Pincus earlier this year told an audience of developers that "I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues." Arrington's take: "Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model."

But Arrington says the ultimate responsibility lies with Facebook because (a) this all takes place on their platform; and (b) if you follow the money, a lot of it ends up at Facebook.

While Zynga makes money by selling ads that run with its games, it also spends a lot of money buying advertising space from Facebook to promote its games.

In fact, Arrington reckons Zynga is Facebook’s largest single source of revenue. He says Zynga will spend $100 million with Facebook this year. The research firm eMarketer doesn’t have an estimate for how much Zynga spends with Facebook, but says Zynga ranks as the eighth-largest advertiser on all social networks and is one of Facebook’s largest advertisers.

“Facebook is getting indirect cash payoffs from the advertising, and the amount is clearly massive,” Arrington says. “This is what helped them get to profitability this year.”

For this reason, Arrington surmises, Facebook has an incentive to ignore scammy ads, even when some of those ads violate its rules.

Facebook says that’s simply not so. Swain, the Facebook spokesman, insists the company aggressively enforces its rules, with Zynga as well as everyone else.

But consider this. Right after Arrington broke the story, Zynga announced it was taking down all of the ads that let people pay for stuff via a mobile phone.

This wasn’t exactly an admission of wrongdoing. But if those “mobile ads” were legitimate, why did Zynga take them down?

Swain says Facebook “will hold ad networks and developers accountable.” But scammers find ways to avoid detection. One trick is to “geo-block” scammy ads so that they don’t get displayed to Internet users in Northern California, where Facebook is located, so Facebook can’t spot them.

The good news is that scammers tend to hit a site for a while and then move along once people start to catch on. So eventually they’ll drift away from Facebook.

For now, though, Facebook remains a fantastic honeypot for scammers—a place with 300 million people who have been lured in with the promise of free fun and games, and who have willingly handed over all sorts of personal information about themselves. These naive, trusting souls represent such a ripe target that you almost can’t blame scammers for exploiting them.

Facebook has good reason to crack down on scammers. If it doesn’t, members may start to drift away. Also, Arrington says if the baby Einsteins who run these social-networking sites can’t police them, government regulators may step in and do it for them.

Microsoft's Finally Got Game

2009-11-05T12:00:00Z

.Project Natal: Playing with virtual controls...

After Atari popularized the joystick in 1977, videogame developers spent years cramming more buttons onto the controller. Then along came Nintendo, with a motion-sensing controller for its Wii console that was less complicated, and more fun. Since Nintendo launched the Wii in 2006, it has sold more than 50 million units worldwide--about as many as its two rivals, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, combined.

As any fan of Super Mario Bros. knows, however, invincibility only lasts so long. In the first half of 2009, Nintendo profits fell 52 percent to $772 million, dragged down by a 43

percent decline in Wii sales. "The Wii has stalled," CEO Satoru Iwata told investors, citing a gap in the pipeline of must-have games.

Iwata should be worried about more than game development. Nintendo's archrivals, Microsoft and Sony, are poised to release their own motion-sensing devices in 2010, with Microsoft having the best chance to out-Wii the Wii. Its Project Natal product, announced in June, eliminates the controller entirely--instead of a player holding a gadget, a special device mounted beneath the TV uses a video camera, an infrared sensor, and software to identify a player's motions. The gamer's actual silhouette, not a generic avatar, can then be inserted directly into games.

I played an early prototype of Natal in May, and it makes the Wii controller's capabilities, once a breakthrough, seem crude. To win at Wii tennis, you basically just need to swing your wrist back and forth. In contrast, the Natal camera detects the subtle movement of your limbs. I tried a game called Ricochet, where you punch, kick, and head-butt a ball down a corridor to break apart bricks at the far end. It sounds simple, but because the Natal camera tracks the exact movement of each limb going after the careening ball, I really needed to reach for each shot. Microsoft isn't exactly known for simple products that work seamlessly--but the Xbox has been an exception, and if the final product delivers on what the prototype promises, Natal may be Microsoft's most graceful step forward in gaming yet.

Sony has a motion controller in the works, too: a handheld, wandlike device that pairs with a camera, splitting the difference between Wii and Natal. It doesn't have a name yet--but it does have an expected release date of spring 2010, earlier than Natal. Beating Microsoft to market is Sony's best chance at bringing the PlayStation 3 out of third place in the console wars.

Sony and Microsoft desperately need big hits. Both companies cut prices on their consoles by $100 this summer to pump up sales--an acknowledgment that the videogame industry is not, after all, recession-proof. Emphasizing platforms with intuitive, motion-based controls over those with complicated controllers is crucial to helping the videogame market expand beyond its base of young men. Nintendo is already there with games like Wii Fit, which appeals to families and adults.

At $50 billion and climbing, the global gaming market can accommodate all three big console makers. Until the new products--and the games that best exploit them--are out, it's impossible to say which will be the biggest winner. The smart bet, though, is on Microsoft and Sony to take a greater share of the videogame market. That's a perilous prospect for Nintendo, which doesn't have the same diversity of products and revenue streams to fall back on. Microsoft has Windows, Sony has its movie studio (and much more), while Nintendo is just a videogame company. And if it wants to remain the biggest, it had better get moving.

The Lost Decade: Why Steve Ballmer Is No Bill Gates

2009-10-29T21:02:04Z

Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 and opened the first of a chain of new retail stores. As usual with such announcements, there's been loads of hoopla and ginned-up excitement. But mostly people are just relieved. Windows 7 replaces Vista, one of the most disastrous tech products ever. It also caps the end of a decade in which Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, stepped aside, and the company lost its edge.

Ten years ago, when Gates appointed his longtime second in command, Steve Ballmer, as his replacement as CEO, Microsoft was still the meanest, mightiest tech company in the world, a juggernaut that bullied friends and foes alike and which possessed an operating-system franchise that was practically a license to print money. Techies likened Microsoft to the Borg on Star Trek, the evil collective that insatiably assimilates everything around it, with the slogan, "Resistance is futile."

That was then. Now, instead of being scary, Microsoft has become a bit of a joke. Yes, its Windows operating system still runs on more than 90 percent of PCs, and the Office application suite rules the desktop. But those are old markets. In new areas, Microsoft has stumbled.

Read the full column >>

Cougar Hunting: Apple's Cat Options Dwindle

2009-10-29T12:30:39Z

Apple's latest operating system, known as "Snow Leopard," resolved dozens of headaches for users. But it may herald a new one for the company's marketing team: trying to come up with yet another big-cat name for the next version of the OS. After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and two types of Leopards, are there any more marquee felines left to poach? Yes, but none that Apple is likely to want.

The custom of naming new versions of its fast, virus-resistant OS after outsize cats dates to 2001, when Apple coined the internal code names "Cheetah" and "Puma" for versions 10.0 and 10.1. The first update to be publicly given big-cat status was "Jaguar," and from there the cage door swung open. But the latest name change—from Leopard to Snow Leopard—was so subtle that some people started wondering if Apple's pride was running thin. True, leopards and snow leopards are different species, and Apple's decision probably had more to do with the fact that Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade than fears of a branding crisis. But the question remains: has Apple backed itself into a corner—and can it claw its way out?

With almost 40 different species of wild cat in the "Felidae" family tree, it might seem like Apple has plenty of options left. But a closer look at the remaining big-pawed population—which is limited to lynx, cougar, bobcat, lion, and a litter box of lesser kitties—suggests it might be time to for Apple to move on to another type of beast.

A review of the options:

LION. By zoological standards, the only true big cats are the "roaring cats" of the Panthera genus, including tigers, jaguars, leopards and lions. (Yes, panthers roar, but panthers are actually just black leopards.) The lion is Apple's only truly big cat left. But while the fabled "King of Beasts" has long been co-opted as a corporate icon, it hardly fits Apple's current needs. The next OS X upgrade is 10.7. Lions should be the end of the line, the definitive edition, not just another update in an ongoing chain.
COUGAR. Synonymous with puma, catamount, and mountain screamer, cougar is not an official species—at least not scientifically speaking. But it does have a rich folk history. The Incas are believed to have built cities in the shape of a crouching cougar, while Courtney Cox recently built a sitcom around the cat's modern incarnation as an older woman prowling for younger men. Apple reportedly registered "Cougar" and "Lynx" as trademarks back in 2003, but they have since been allowed to lapse—and with good reason. Sure, cougar is just another name for the grande dame of the bar, the one who can thrill in ways that no cub could hope to match. But cougar's nine lives as a branding tool have all been spent.
LYNX. Known in mythology as "the keeper of secrets," lynx would make a great corporate brand. But much like cougar, the name is fraught. In the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the randy grooming company Axe calls itself "Lynx." It's also the national animal of Macedonia, a recently war-torn Balkan country that was part of the former Yugoslavia. But most crucially it's already the name of a competing operating system. Apple is no copycat.
BOBCAT. Part of the lynx genus, the bobcat has great name recognition. But it's mostly associated with a brand of dumpy front-end loaders. And at only twice the size of a house cat, it's about as mesmerizing as Rusty, the neighborhood stray. No surprise that Apple has stayed away.
THE REST. Fishing cat, flat-headed cat, Geoffroy's cat, rusty-spotted cat—the rest of the feline family tree is notable for its funny names more than its national brand potential. The caracal cat can snatch birds from the sky and likes to shear away its prey's fur—alive, mind you—before devouring it. But it lacks the reach of, say, the Cheshire Cat. And the realm of ligers and tigons is just silly.

If you were Steve Jobs, what yarn would you dangle in front of the Apple marketing team? Leave your suggestions in the comments, and we'll publish our favorites.

Don't Expect High-Resolution Photos on Facebook Any Time Soon

2009-10-27T15:21:44Z

One of the many mind-boggling statistics about Facebook—300 million members, half log in daily, 8 billion minutes of use per day—is that the social network also happens to be the Web's largest photo-sharing service. By a lot. Earlier this month Flickr announced that it had received its 4 billionth upload, total; Facebook is up to 2 billion a month.

Facebook's big advantage, of course, is that it lets you tag your Facebook friends in images, sending alerts rippling throughout the social network. The interface is snappy, and integration with mobile devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone is superb. Since pretty much everyone you know is on Facebook, it has become the default place to share albums of birthday parties, vacations, and the like.

But one big drawback to Facebook photos has always been that they are shown in relatively poor resolution—about 600 by 600 pixels. That's so-so for onscreen viewing, but poor for bigger displays, HDTVs, and (especially) printing. So far, as the statistics attest, that hasn't been a big liability. But Facebook will be integrated into the next version of the Xbox Live platform, bringing the social network onto gigantic HDTVs. Microsoft gave me an early look at the feature, and photos there look OK, but not spectacular.

This mediocre image quality also limits third-party book-printing services—such as Pixable, a promising startup that lets users easily make hard- and soft-cover albums out of Facebook photos. Pixable's killer feature is that you're not limited to your own photos—it will grab any image that you'd normally have permission to see on Facebook.com. The service also automatically grabs information like tagged names, captions, "likes," and comments. It's a great concept, but the biggest printed images Pixable users can get out of Facebook's 600 x 600 limit is five by seven inches.

I spoke to Facebook's Scott Marlette, an engineer who helped invent and scale Facebook photos, about the company's plans to go high-res. Bad news: there aren't any. The site is focused on encouraging users to tag and share images, not improve how good they look.

"It's funny," Marlette says. "For me, taking pictures is more about photography—I want to see the details in the photo. But the reality is, the value of the photo is who's in it, where was it taken, and your memory or experience associated with that."

As you might expect with a company of Facebook's scale, there are technical reasons to dread going high-res, too. Doubling the width and the height of an image requires four times the data. And a bigger concern than file size, Marlette says, is the sheer number of files involved—today, each uploaded image is turned into four images of varying resolution, so 2 billion photos per month means 8 billion files.

I had been under the mistaken impression that Facebook has all along been storing an original-resolution copy of each image it receives, and was just not making it available because of concerns about blowing the roof off its already sky-high bandwidth needs. That isn't the case. In fact, for most photos, Facebook's servers never even see the original image—its uploading tool first compresses each picture file on your computer, to shorten transmission time. That means that even if Facebook does eventually add high-res support, it would work only for new uploads, not the billions of images users have already added.

Last week Flickr, which does allow for high-res uploads, added support for people-tagging. That site also supports geotagging, an increasingly popular feature that maps photos to exact GPS coordinates. Flickr won't threaten Facebook's lead in the photo department any time soon. But it's a shame that online photo sharing seems to be splitting in two directions: tolerable-and-social on Facebook versus awesome-and-less-visible on Flickr and other sites.

Will the Nook Wind Up Hurting Barnes & Noble?

2009-10-26T17:01:23Z

When the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader was announced last week, I wrote about the company's strategy to beat out Amazon's Kindle by making B&N e-books available on many different devices, giving customers more places to buy and read their books. It only took a couple of days before Amazon followed suit and announced it too was making a Kindle app for PCs. Versions for Mac and BlackBerry are supposedly in the works.

Choice is good. But Marion Maneker over at The Big Money argues that while the Kindle helps Amazon's business, if the Nook turns out to be a big hit it could wind up hurting Barnes & Noble. As book prices fall due to heavy discounting, it is becoming harder for the bookseller to support its expensive stores and many employees. The Nook may make the problem worse by robbing sales from the company's physical bookstores while setting an expectation among its customers for cheaper books.

Maneker writes:

"Amazon has established the idea of $9.99 e-books, especially for best-sellers ... On the most heavily trafficked titles, BN.com will have to spend money to keep up the $9.99 price point. But Amazon has mountains of cash from its other businesses to support this; B&N does not. The physical stores don’t generate enough profit for that. Meanwhile, those stores are getting beat up by Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon, as they establish a $9 price for the biggest best-selling titles."

It will be interesting to see how B&N tries to get around this. Does it shutter many of its physical stores and move more toward becoming an online and e-book seller? Or does it find a way to use its physical bookstores to offer customers an "experience" that online stores can't?

There's a lot more in Maneker's piece--well worth reading the whole thing.

At Windows 7 Event, Microsoft Reminds Us Once More Why Vista Is Crap

2009-10-22T19:07:42Z

Found in the press room of the official Windows 7 launch event in Manhattan: a reminder of why we're all very, very glad to be rid of Vista.

...

Beyond the Ghetto: A New Polish Portal Rebuilds Shtetls With Wiki Power. And Lots and Lots of Photos.

2009-10-22T16:42:28Z

Lodz: The Great Synagogue

Mention Polish Jews and you'll likely think of death camps and ghettoes. The four-month-old Virtual Shtetl Web site tells much, much more about the 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland—a country that once offered the community religious refuge in medieval times and later became home to the world's biggest Jewish community. Like so many others in Europe, that community was almost obliterated during World War II. Virtual Shtetl creator Albert Stankowski knows it will never come back, but he hopes the site will at least resurrect some of it online. Stankowski likes to call the site a museum without walls—a multimedia precursor to the 2012 completion of Warsaw's long-anticipated Museum of the History of Polish Jews. But the shtetl site is more treasure trove than institutional preview. Its key feature: wiki technology enabling registered users to contribute memories, documents, and photos to the bilingual (English and Polish) site. The result is a portal where both Jews and non-Jews of Polish descent are collaborating to create a rich new archive of a millennium of Polish Jewry. Holocaust survivors and their descendants are contributing pictures of lives wiped out by the Nazis. Current residents, freed from Soviet revisionist history, are offering information on what formerly Jewish towns (shtetls) look like now. They're helping to relocate desecrated cemeteries damaged by the Germans and provide GPS coordinates to vanished places of interest.

So far, more than 900 shtetls are listed. Visitors who type in their names get a Google map and historical notes on the community. Information about Zgierz, for example, details how efforts to oust Jews from Christian neighborhoods in the 1820s foundered because the forced resettlement hurt the local economy. More than 3,000 pictures depict synagogues, pre-World War II street scenes, and sepia-tinted weddings. Many simply show gravestones.

Stankowski, the son of a Holocaust survivor and a Roman Catholic Pole, says the value of the project extends far beyond his home country. He is currently working on a cooperation agreement with the Jewish Culture and Information Center in Vilnius, Lithuania, and on a Hebrew version of the portal interface. He is also integrating the Virtual Shtetl with megasites like Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. Meanwhile, he continues to relish the poignant personal histories uncovered by the site. One example: his communication with American Jews of Polish origin who believed they were the second generation of lawyers in their family. The site provided enough family background for them to establish that they were part of a far longer line of legal practitioners. Stankowski says that about 2,000 to 3,000 visit Virtual Shtetl daily. He expects that number to keep growing.

Happy Days: Residents of Bobowa prepare to celebrated a wedding in 1931 (Photos: Courtesy the Virtual Shtetl)

E-Books Are Cool, But They Have Drawbacks. For One Thing, They're Exactly Like Hitler.

2009-10-21T16:18:36Z

On Monday I wrote about the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, called the Nook, and how it is part of a larger strategy by the bookseller to topple Amazon. Now the Nook is official, and hardwarewise, it certainly makes the Kindle seem even dowdier and less exciting than it already did, if that's even possible.

No doubt Amazon will hit back with an even better Kindle next time around, and then Apple will weigh in with its rumored Nook'nKindle killer tablet in a few months─and so it goes. The good news is, all this competition will mean better (and cheaper) devices and e-books for all of us. If there was ever a doubt that e-books would eventually go mainstream, that's now been settled.

Yet there are those who still have doubts about leaving paper behind. Some of the misgivings about e-books are easy to understand. The e-readers and a lot of the books themselves still cost too much; and most commercial e-books are shackled with stupid DRM restrictions that severely limit the way customers can use them, much the way MP3s were once locked up before record labels finally realized they were fighting a losing battle.

But now comes a new complaint about e-books that, I must admit, had never occurred to me before: They are the equivalent of Nazis. In the October issue of the Evergreen Review, novelist and poet Alan Kaufman writes that the promoters of e-books are plotting to kill paper books the way Hitler plotted to kill Jews. He goes on to say that─wait, you know what? I can't do justice to the sublime lunacy of this piece by paraphrasing. Excerpts:

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists [sic] tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.
... As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.

At this point one might point out that no one is arguing that paper books should be abolished. One might also note the irony of Kaufman's choice of forum, using a magazine Web site to rave against the evils of reading on a screen. But one senses Kaufman does not have much of an ear for irony.

Instead, let us return to the text for his rousing conclusion. The spread of e-books is, he writes, "... a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human."

Well, OK. But the Nook has a color touchscreen, which you have to admit is pretty slick.

Stewart Brand, an Icon of Environmentalism, Talks About Embracing Nuclear Power

2009-10-21T06:43:25Z

When it comes to icons of the environmentalist movement, Stewart Brand ranks at the top of the list. Brand, 70, founded the Whole Earth Catalog, which helped to mold the counterculture of the 1970s. Today, though, he's just released a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he makes a U-turn into much of the movement's received wisdom. Perhaps the biggest about-face concerns his embrace of nuclear power. NEWSWEEK's Andrew Bast sat down with Brand in New York to talk about the atom, the environment, and the dire ramifications of napping on a tugboat. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Is nuclear power green?
BRAND: Yes. Having been careful not to look into nuclear power for many years, when I began considering it I thought it was green primarily in the context of greenhouse gases and climate change. But frankly, now I've gotten to the point now that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, and climate change were not significant issues, I would still probably be pro-nuclear. Because coal is so awful.

Is it fair to compare the remnants of coal-fired power plans with nuclear waste?
The waste from coal means gigatons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There is also the fly ash, slurry, and all the rest of the stuff. The sheer quantities get to be overwhelming. Eighty rail cars a day of coal, each one weighing a hundred tons goes into a 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant, and that multiplies to 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide, every day. Compare that to one year of a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, which puts out 20 tons of very dense nuclear waste that goes into dry cask storage. You know exactly where it is and you monitor it, and it's not doing anything bad. That's a pretty strong contrast.

In the book, you tally up the anti-nuke environmentalists who have changed their minds. Is there a definitive line in the environmental movement to embrace nuclear power?
You can name the prominent figures on two hands and two feet. The one I like, because it is so clear, is Stephen Tydnall in Britain, who was head of Greenpeace there. Today, Britain is headed toward an environmentally permitted, if not actually encouraged, nuclear renaissance. And they've got France right across the channel selling them 2 gigawatts a year of nuclear electricity!

You were trained originally as an ecologist, so maybe it's easy for you to think about long eras like 10,000 years. But for many people, whether it's nuclear power plants, waste from coal-fired plants, or climate change, it's hard to think beyond much more than the time they've got before, well, they're part of the earth, too.
If we got most of civilization comfortable thinking in a 100-year time frame, that would be a fantastic victory. Climate change may do this. But that is jumping up from a situation where people can barely think seriously about a decade at a time. Mostly we're focusing on the next quarter, the next election, and that's fine. But one of the things we hire government and scientists to do is to step outside that time frame, bear it in mind, operate within it, but keep the century in mind.

Environmental debates are undoubtedly heated. Do you think good science ends up the victim? Good science wound up a victim in a serious way with genetically engineered food crops. The next generation, known as synthetic biology, has learned the lesson that efforts were not made to get really good public understanding and permission to go ahead with new technology.

In an ideal world, shouldn't good science─the scientific method─rise above the fray?
Ingo Potrykus, the Swiss engineer who developed golden rice, had to get money from the Swiss government to grenadeproof his greenhouse. He was developing the rice that would provide Vitamin A to save the lives and eyesight of a million children a year. He was vilified and threatened by many, especially in Europe. We would like to not keep doing that.

What's your strategy, then?
The title of my book, Whole Earth Discipline, shows that we have to engage a global climate problem, which doesn't belong to any one region. We are doing what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. That's what beavers do─they make dams, and then you get a much richer environment. Earthworms do it, too. So we need to be as productive, ecologically, as earthworms and beavers.

Is there any hope for the upcoming climate change summit in Copenhagen?
Focusing on the nuclear issue, I would trust that they will not make the Kyoto mistake of refusing to give carbon credits to nuclear power.

One last question, about you as a person. You live on a tugboat in San Francisco. First, does that lessen your impact on the environment? And second, don't you get seasick when you take a nap in the afternoon?
No.

No to the impact, or no to the seasick?
No to the seasick.

Ah, well.
The impact is pretty small, mainly because it is a pretty small space. My wife and I have lived for 25 years in 450 square feet. It's easy to cool, because we are on the water. It's easy to heat, because there's not much space. We do use biodiesel. There's a solar panel on the flybridge that brings a little juice down into the battery bank. But mainly it's living small.

Barnes & Noble Wants to Crush Amazon's Kindle. And It Just Might Work.

2009-10-19T20:44:37Z

There is a lot of buzz that Barnes & Noble will release its anticipated e-reading device tomorrow. If the usual rumor sites are to be believed, it will have an e-ink screen, like Amazon's Kindle, and it will have built-in wireless so you can buy books over the air, like the Kindle. It may do the Kindle one better with a touchscreen, and possibly Wi-Fi, and maybe some limited way of sharing books with other e-readers.

Maybe it will be better than the Kindle. Maybe it will be pretty much the same. Gizmodo posted some photos of the thing this week. It looks just fine. There is the customary hype over the device─you know, whether it's a "Kindle killer," etc.

But the truth is, as long as it isn't a complete disaster, it doesn't really matter. Barnes & Noble is clearly out to get Amazon, but it's also clearly not counting on this device alone to do it. Instead, while the Kindle, and the Kindle 2, and the Kindle DX have been getting all the attention, B&N has been quietly sneaking up to steal Amazon's lunch.

E-books have been around for years, but never caught on. Amazon deserves a lot of credit for doing something no one had been able to do before: create a format for e-books that was attractive to a mainstream audience. People who own Kindles generally love them, and buy a lot of books from Amazon to read on them.

But many people who might become avid e-readers don't own Kindles─because they're too expensive; or too clunky; or because they don't like the many user-crippling restrictions Amazon places on what customers can do with its e-books (you buy them but you don't really own them); or because they don't want to lug around yet another limited use device along with their cell phone and iPod and laptop.

And this is where Amazon may have gotten itself into trouble. It's a bookseller, not a device maker, and forcing customers to buy the company's reader in order to read its e-books means Amazon has a lot fewer customers for them. Amazon seemed to recognize this, and brought out a decent but stripped down Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod touch. But still, it's a fairly closed universe for customers who want to buy Kindle content.

Meanwhile Barnes & Noble has been doing just the opposite. Instead of trying to convince its customers to lock themselves into a proprietary device, the company has been working to make it so they can buy and read B&N's e-books on devices they may already have in their pockets, or on their desktops. As it is now, you can read them on a Mac or PC computer, iPhone or iPod Touch, or BlackBerry phone. (There have been hints at the possibility of an app for Android phones, but so far it hasn't materialized.) The reader application is free, so there's no need to plunk down hundreds on a device before you can plunk down more money to read on it.

The company has also signed a deal to provide the e-books for the long-awaited Plastic Logic Que e-reader expected early next year. Add Barnes & Noble's own branded device, and customers have a lot of choices. If you want a dedicated e-reader, they've got one. If you want to do your e-reading on a handheld device you already own, or sitting at your desk or on your notebook, you can do that too. All of a sudden, the Kindle starts to fade by comparison. Things could get really interesting if Apple's forthcoming tablet─I know, it's just a rumor─runs both Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's e-reading apps.

If B&N allows customers to swap their libraries between devices and share books they've purchased with others─and they should─they'll attract even more customers. (Don't hold your breath for DRM-free e-books in the short run, though. Publishers are still foolishly demanding punitive restrictions on how their customers can use the e-books they buy, and retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are going along with it. Give it time, though. Just like the music labels did, publishers will eventually wise up once they realize that they're losing customers and leaving a ton of money on the table by shackling their content.)

B&N's strategy reminds me of a great recent piece in Wired by Daniel Roth about Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who had big plans to manufacture a device that would stream Netflix movies into customers' television sets. But days away from launching the product, he was in fits of self doubt. Something didn't seem right. Ultimately, he pulled the plug on the set-top box and went in an entirely different direction.

Roth writes: "Instead, the company would take a more stealthy—and potentially even more ambitious—approach. Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smart phones. Netflix wouldn't be a hardware company; it would be a services firm....

"Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix's instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets. They get it through Roku's player, which was successfully launched in May 2008. (The Roku now also offers more than 45,000 movies and TV shows on demand through Amazon.com and, since August, live and archived Major League Baseball games.) They get it through their Xbox 360s—Microsoft added Netflix to its Xbox Live service last fall. They get it through LG and Samsung Blu-ray players. They get it through their TiVos and new flatscreen TVs. By the end of 2009, nearly 10 million Netflix-equipped gadgets will be hanging on walls and sitting in entertainment centers. And Hastings says this is just the beginning: `It's possible that within a few years, nearly all Internet-connected consumer electronics devices will include Netflix.' "

If that's the sort of thing Barnes & Noble has in mind, Amazon has plenty to fear, and a lot of catching up to do.