Live Blogging the iPad Product Announcement

By BRAD STONE

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times Accessories for the iPad include a keyboard dock.

Mr. Jobs’ Conclusion: It’s ‘Magical’

Update | 2:32 p.m. After a promotional video, Mr. Jobs is ready to sum things up.

“Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of products?” he says. “The bar is pretty high. It has to be far better at doing some key things. We think we have the goods.”

More than 75 million people already know how to use the iPad, Mr. Jobs says — these are the owners of iPhones and iPod Touches. And there are more than 125 million customer accounts with credit cards, all enabled for one-click shopping on iTunes, the App Store and the new iBook store. “We are at scale, and we are ready for the iPad,” Mr. Jobs says.

Mr. Jobs’ summation: “Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.” Leave no hyperbole behind, apparently.

We are off to play with this thing in the demo room next door. Stay tuned.

Accessories

Update | 2:25 p.m. Mr. Jobs is talking about accessories.

There’s a dock, of course, to let you turn the iPad into a nice picture frame or video viewer.

There’s also a physical keyboard dock — it charges the iPad and also makes it more functional for typing. “Just keep one of these in your den, and when you have to write ‘War and Peace,’ just plug your iPad into it,” Mr. Jobs says.

Available in 60 Days

Update | 2:25 p.m.
bstone6 (2:20:08 PM): The first iPads will ship in 60 days, with 3G models taking another month.

Price Ranges From $499 to $829

Update | 2:20 p.m. And now: price.

“When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had specific technical goals and user interface goals, but an aggressive price goal, because we want to put this in the hands of a lot of people,” Mr. Jobs says.

Mr. Jobs says Apple has met its cost goals: The iPad’s pricing starts at $499. (Which means, at the very least, there is little reason to buy the much more limited Amazon Kindle DX.)

For $499, you get you 16 GB of storage, with WiFi built-in. For $599, you get 32 GB of storage. For $699, you get 64 GB of storage.

The 3G models cost an extra $130 each.

So all told, there are six models of the new iPad. The most eexpensive 64 GB model, with 3G, costs $829 plus the monthly charge.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

3G Connectivity for a Price

Update | 2:16 p.m. There will be models with 3G wireless connectivity.

There will be two 3G plans for iPad owners. The first one, for up to 250 MB of data a month, will cost $14.99 per month. For unlimited data, its $29.99 a month.

“We have a breakthrough deal with AT&T, who is providing the service,” Mr. Jobs says. No Verizon Wireless, it appears.

He says iPad owners will also get free access to AT&T hotspots. Let’s all hope that AT&T solves its network issues before this thing hits it.

No contract — you can cancel the plan anytime you want.

International wireless deals will be coming by June. All the iPad 3G models are unlocked, and use the new GSM micro-SIMs, so it will be easy to put iPads on those networks.

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times Phil Schiller demonstrates Keynote, a PowerPoint-like app that will run on the iPad.

The iWork suite

Update | 2:14 p.m. Now Mr. Jobs is talking about iWork on the iPad, and Phil Schiller, Apple’s chief marketing executive, is on stage to talk about it.

There’s a new version of Keynote, Apple’s presentation software, and Pages, its word processor, and Numbers, its spreadsheet creator, all tailored to a gesture-based input device. All of Apple’s productivity software looks workable on the iPad — I’m just not sure why people would want to do this kind of work on a keyboard-less device.

The iBooks App

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times The iBooks bookstore

Update | 2:02 p.m. Mr. Jobs has put an Amazon.com Kindle on the stage and says Amazon has done a great job of pioneering that. “But we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit farther.”

He’s showing a new app, called iBooks.

This is significant for the publishing industry: Apple is going to try to control the e-book experience itself. A new iBooks store is integrated with the iBooks app, allowing people to discover and purchase

Five of the largest publishers — Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette — are supporting the app. No mention of Random House, yet. But that’s probably just a matter of time.

The iBooks store looks neat — plenty of colors, vivid book covers. Mr. Jobs is showing “True Compass” by Edward Kennedy, a book that was not available in the Kindle store for weeks after its release.

Changing pages, zooming to the table of contents, color, video, is very easy, Mr. Jobs says.

Needless to say, Apple and Amazon are on a collision course. Media (books, music, video) constitute half of Amazon’s revenues, and it won’t go down without a fight.

Apple uses the ePub format, the most popular open book format in the world. It’s unclear what digital rights management they are using and whether these books will be transferable to other devices that support ePub, like the Barnes & Noble and Sony e-readers.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Apple chief executive, Steve Jobs, unveils the iPad.

A Few Observations from David Carr

Update | 1:58 p.m. This update is from my colleague David Carr:

You get the feeling that the iPad is creating and killing categories at the same time. It is a remarkably ambitious project in terms of all the things — photos, games, video and e-mail — that it is attempting to grab market share in.

One of the weird things about the presentation is how it is really all about the software. The gadget itself is transparent, a window into software. There is really only a single mechanical button on the device, the “on” button. The rest is all fingers interacting directly with software.

The scaling of the landscape has significant implications. Seems like it is living up to the hype, or at least coming close.

“Isn’t this awesome?” Jobs says. It is, but everything looks good on stage. Nothing ages faster than the future when you get it in your hands.

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times A demo of the tablet version of the Brushes app.

Brushes App for Artists

Update | 1:57 p.m.
Brushes allows people to tinker with photos and illustrations, zoom in to images, change colors, add to images and make their own.

“Imagine an artist with a canvas this large,” says Mr. Forstall, retaking the stage and introducing game giant Electronic Arts.

The New York Times on the iPad

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times

Update | 1:50 p.m. Next up: us, The New York Times. We’ll try not to be too self referential here.

Our colleague Martin Nisenholtz is taking the stage now. Three weeks ago, The Times came to Cupertino, Calif., to develop an application for the iPad, Mr. Nisenholtz says. “We want to create the best of print and best of digital, all rolled up into one,” he says.

“We think we captured the essence of reading a newspaper,” says Jennifer Brook, another Times colleague.

The app allows people to save stories to the device, resize text and change the number of columns, skim photos and play video. It appears to look quite a bit like the Times Reader application. “It’s everything you love about the paper, everything you love about the Web and everything you expect from The Times,” Ms. Brook says.

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times

Third-Party Apps

Update | 1:41 p.m. To talk about third party software, Mr. Jobs introduces senior vice president Scott Forstall. The iPad will run “virtually every one” of the apps for the iPhone “virtually unmodified,” he says.

The iPhone apps can run in a black box in the middle of the screen or, by doubling the pixels — and I presume losing some resolution — fill the screen.

Games are “incredibly smooth,” Mr. Forstall says, demonstrating that Mr. Jobs’ capacity for hyperbole is one of Apple’s cultural traits.

He also notes developers can modify their apps to take advantage of the large touch-screen display, just as Apple did with its calendar, iTunes, e-mail and YouTube apps. The iPhone SDK, a set of programming tools for developers, will be enhanced to support development of the iPad, and the new SDK will be released today.

“We think its going to be a whole other gold rush for developers as they build apps for the iPad,” Mr. Forstall says.

Mark Hickey from Gameloft, a game developer, is now demonstrating Nova, their shoot-em-up, on the iPad.

10-Hour Battery Life

Update | 1:38 p.m. “We been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life” Mr. Jobs says. “I can take a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole way.”

He says the iPad also has more than a month of standby battery capacity. You can leave it alone, and find it still with some charge when you come back in a few weeks.

My colleague Mr. Carr notes that there’s a long history of power hyperbole in all categories of gadgets.

Kimberly White/Reuters

The Specifications

Update | 1:33 p.m.
And now we’re going to dive into the specifications. Half an inch thin. Weighs 1.5 pounds. 9.7-inch IPS display — super high quality, great angle of views, Mr. Jobs says.

Full capacitive multi-touch screen, same as the iPhone — “super responsive, super precise,” he says.

The iPad is powered by Apple’s own custom silicon, he says — a 1 GHz A4 chip,, 16 GB of memory, 32 or 64 Gigabytes of storage.

There’s Wi-Fi, 802.11n, and the latest Bluetooth. (Apparently no 3G wireless, notes my colleague John Markoff.) Accelerometer, compass, speaker, microphone.

Video on the iPad

Update | 1:29 p.m. Mr. Jobs is demonstrating the movie “Star Trek” on the tablet.

I wonder, will people really want to hold this device, other than on an airplane, while they watch TV and movies? However, the tablet might be the perfect breakfast table companion. You can control it with one hand and don’t have to fiddle with a keyboard.

“Watching is nothing like getting one in your hands,” Mr. Jobs said.

My colleague David Carr notes that Mr. Jobs is doing little bit of cross-promotion, showing off Pixar’s “Up” movie.

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times

Colors are crisp

Update | 1:23 p.m. Some early impressions from looking at the device on stage: It appears to have only one physical button, looks exceedingly light and thin, and the screen has great crisp colors. Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the device’s e-mail and photo capabilities.

Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the music capabilities of the iPad. Album artwork displays along with songs. However, you ain’t strapping this thing to your shorts as you work out.

As he demonstrates the tablet’s calendar, I’m thinking that we have yet to see any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size.

Mr. Jobs is now showing the maps app. Apple is still using Google Maps, Silicon Valley watchers. Maps includdes a nice integration with Google Earth and Street View. So you can shift from a bird’s-eye view of that sushi restaurant you are looking for to a crisp view of its front door.

Browsing the Web on the iPad!

Update | 1:16 p.m. Mr. Jobs is giving an overview: it’s very thin, with customizable background images. “You can browse the Web with it. It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”

I’m cutting out all of Mr. Jobs’s “phenomenals” and “amazings” and “incredibles,” folks. Just assume they are there.

The iPad works in both landscape and portrait mode, like the iPhone. It has a virtual keyboard, access to photo collections, direct access to iTunes’ surfeit of content.

“It’s awesome to watch TV shows and movies,” Mr. Jobs says. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen.”

He’s now displaying the New York Times site, NYTimes.com. If he shows the Bits blog, the space-time continuum may rip. Oh, jeez, he just showed the Technology page, which has Bits on it. I just saw my own name on the screen. Audience is chuckling as they see our tech headlines.

He’s now going to Time magazine, thank God. “Did you see what’s going on today?” he quips as the audience looks at Time’s tech headlines. “A whole Web site in the palm of your hands.”

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times

The New iPad Looks Like a Big iPhone

Update | 1:10 p.m. All of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle?

The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, “it has no reason for being.”

Apple’s answer: the iPad.

It looks like, well, a big iPhone, pretty much as anticipated.

Apple is a Mobile Device Company

Update | 1:05 p.m. Mr. Jobs says there are 284 retail stores. At the online App Store, there are more than 140,000 applications, which have been downloaded a total of 3 billion times.

Apple is now a $50-billion-a-year company, Mr. Jobs crows. The revenue comes from iPod, iPhone and of course Mac sales — a majority of which are laptops. All are mobile devices. “Apple is a mobile devices company. This is what we do,” he says. He calls Apple the number one mobile devices company in the world.

Now let’s get the main event, he says.

David F. Gallagher/The New York Times

Steve Jobs Appears

Update | 1:03 p.m. Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, has taken the stage. He looks disturbingly thin, much as as he did when he took the same stage in September to introduce new iPods. But there’s a sparkle in his eye and a smile on his face as he gets a big standing ovation.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary product,” he says. But first, there are some updates: a few weeks ago Apple sold its 250 millionth iPod.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Workers apply the Apple logo to the exterior of the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco.

The Event Begins

Update | 1:01 p.m. The lights are darkening here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The Wi-Fi is unstable, endangering the tweeting and blogging of hundreds of journalists.

After remaining mum during more than two years of rumors and thousands of speculative articles and blog posts, Apple is finally ready to unveil its “latest creation” on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco.

All signs point to the introduction of a tablet computer. Analysts and high-tech companies have long thought that such a device, at the right price and with the right technology and connections to content, could establish a new category of computing and change how people consume media. It could also bring further disruptive changes (some positive) to all sorts of industries. But tablets have flopped before. On Wednesday we’ll see if the Apple tablet is a game-changer.

I’ll be chronicling the morning’s events here as they happen, with contributions from John Markoff, veteran technology reporter, and David Carr, the Times’s media columnist. We’d like to hear any and all questions from readers and will try to answer them in our coverage.

Steve Jobs is expected on stage at 10 a.m. local time, 1 p.m. New York time, so watch this space for updates.

Continued..

A Big-Picture Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo

Nick Bilton/The New York Times

On Wednesday, I wrote about a battle looming between Apple and Google as discussions take place over the possibility of Apple making Microsoft’s Bing the default search engine on the iPhone.

Stepping back further than a single search engine fight, it’s evident that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Yahoo are now competing in numerous different business arenas.

The chart above illustrates many of the services these companies provide. Some of their products have been cornerstone revenue streams, and others are just at the beginning of development. But putting them up against each other really helps illustrate each company’s focus and their possible future directions of exploration.

Google
Although the company started in search and made billions of dollars in search-related advertising, it recently made the move into mobile software and hardware. Google is also moving to the desktop as hardware companies consider using Google’s Android operating system for tablet PCs and netbooks and Google continues developing its own Chrome OS. Google’s recent foray into mobile phones, with the Nexus One, signals a big shift for the company, but the lack of customer service might hinder customer adoption of its mobile products.

Microsoft
Microsoft really competes with everyone. It is on the desktop, in the cloud, on mobile devices, in your living room, answering search queries and navigating you to your favorite restaurant. So what’s next? Although the company invested in Facebook, and it offers some social features on its Xbox platform, it still needs to make a major leap into social networking. Another major gap is mobile phone hardware.

Apple
Apple’s success with Mac personal computers, the iPod, the iPhone and iTunes has allowed it to step back from the fray and avoid competing in search, news, maps and social networks. But the recent competition with Google over mobile phone software might change its attitude. Apple has close to $34 billion in cash and securities, which means that it can afford to make some big purchases in the search market — or any other market for that matter.

A side note: While looking at the comparisons of these four companies, it’s especially interesting to see that Apple is the only one of the four that charges for its online services, including calendar, contact sync and Web mail. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all provide these cloud-based products free of charge.

Yahoo
Yahoo has not really added any new products or services over the last year, but it seems to do best with content-related products. Yahoo News is still the No. 1 news site, and Flickr continues to grow and remain a highly successful photo Web site. As the race really pushes toward mobile over the next few years, it’s going to be interesting to see how Yahoo decides to play in that space.

This article from here

Continued..

For Google, a Threat to China With Little Revenue at Stake

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has said principle drove its threat to back out of China unless the government there allowed it to run its search engine without censorship.
Analysts say that inevitably, the decision was a business calculation, too.

Google’s business in China, for now, remains small. Estimates put Google’s China revenue last year at about $300 million, a tiny fraction of its more than $22 billion in global sales.

Still, Google’s investment in China includes building a staff of more than 600 people there, many of them highly paid engineers. And in October, Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, predicted that China would become a dominant market for online businesses, saying that in five years, the Internet “will be more non-English, it will be Chinese.” Clearly, Google has high hopes for its business there.

But there is also an economic value, even if it is hard to gauge, of the good will that Google’s decision has earned it. And it comes at an opportune moment.

For much of the last year, the company has been under attack for disregarding the rights of individual authors as it builds an immense digital library and bookstore. The company, which needs users of its Gmail and other services to trust it with their data, has been criticized for its privacy practices. And the federal government began multiple antitrust investigations into its business.

Lately, it has been difficult to find anyone in Silicon Valley who would utter Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto without a bit of a snicker.

But its surprising threat to pull up stakes in China has replaced the smirks with lavish praise. Much of it is coming from longtime critics.

For a company that has been in something of a defensive crouch for much of the last year, the turnaround has been swift.

“Taking the stance that they took put them on a higher plane,” said Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing consultant.

If it stays, the potential losses to its reputation, and eventually its business, are real, too. “Certainly they are aware that continuing to compromise in China would be seen as a move to the dark side,” Mr. McKenna said.

Google strongly dismissed suggestions that economics played a role in its decision. “We are not going to make a financially based decision to stay in a market that is intolerable for us,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said this week. And he denied that public relations was a factor. “This wasn’t a question of P.R.,” he said. “It was a question of trying to do the right thing.”

There is little doubt, however, that public perception of Google has shifted sharply since the company publicized online attacks on its computer systems this week, which it said were aimed in part at entering the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

In China, young people deposited flowers in front of Google’s offices, as praise for the company reverberated from Twitter to the reader forums of various newspapers.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group and frequent critic of Google, commended the company in a blog post titled “Uncensoring China — Bravo Google.” Human Rights Watch said that Google’s response to the attacks “sets a great example.” On Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats alike hailed Google’s move.

Google’s top executives, and many of its employees, are steeped in idealism and are strong supporters of free speech. The company agreed to censor its search engine in China in 2006 to enter that market, but only after an internal debate in which the founders, in particular Sergey Brin, who was born in the Soviet Union, argued strongly against it.

Still, some have argued that Google can afford to take a principled stance because the losses from leaving China are small. The company has struggled to compete with Baidu, the dominant China-based competitor, and some critics say the attacks gave Google a good excuse to pull up stakes and cut its losses.

Google rejected those suggestions. While Google’s sales in China remain small, the business is growing rapidly and Google just had its best quarter in that country, said Gabriel Stricker, a Google spokesman.

Yet, he also suggested that Google could shut down its search engine in China with little financial impact, saying that the majority of its business in the country comes from ads that Chinese companies place on Google’s American-based Web site.

The reaction on Wall Street suggests few worried that Google would suffer financially. While its shares dropped nearly 3 percent on Wednesday, the day after Google’s announcement, they have regained most of their value.

Analysts say that Google’s economic pain may one day be great but is not likely to be felt for years. But they also say that staying in China, especially after the attacks, was a risky proposition. Google’s change of heart in China may not have been solely about freedom of speech, but also about something that strikes at the core of its business: the security of information stored on Google’s servers.

“The moment that some activist goes to jail because his Gmail account was compromised, Google will be accused of giving them up,” said Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. “That would do incredible damage,” not only among human rights advocates, but also for anyone who uses a Gmail account, he said.

Some who praised Google’s move have said that they hope other companies will follow suit. While the calculus on whether to abandon China is no doubt different for every company, following in Google’s footsteps could have all the downside risk and may produce only marginal payoff — at least on the publicity front.

“To the extent that there is any realized gain from this kind of move, the first company to do it gets all the headlines,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “The second company to do it will be seen as a follower who didn’t have the courage to act according to its convictions in the first place.” this information from here

Continued..

Google Voice and How Anyone Can Be a Phone Company

Google is “just scratching the surface” with Google Voice, Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management, said today on eWeek.com, and will move aggressively next year to further blur the line between telephony and the Internet. And as the search giant turns voice into an application and dives deeper into carriers’ domain, network operators will have to find ways to leverage their networks and provide competing apps and services or be relegated to simply pushing other companies’ offerings through their pipes.

Google is gearing up to do battle with Cisco and Microsoft in the unified communications market. The company recently acquired Gizmo5, a SIP-based service provider, as part of its effort to build an enterprise-quality VoIP offering. And Gizmo5’s expertise in soft clients can help Google extend its mobile reach, potentially allowing the company to offer Google Voice across a host of devices.

As the recent acquisitions of Ribbit by BT and Jajah by O2/Telefonica demonstrate, voice is increasingly being turned into an application from service providers. Those acquisitions are aimed in part at helping users communicate from their phones in a variety of ways, from traditional telephony to Internet-based services like e-mail, instant messaging, VoIP and social networks.

But while savvy carriers are beginning to acquire startups to better compete in the brave new world of web-based communication, behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Cisco are coming at the market from an application point of view. Divorcing voice from the network is liberating for consumers who could enjoy a host of ways to communicate seamlessly and efficiently, but it also opens the field to non-operators. Operators that can leverage both the Internet and their own networks to deliver optimized, personalized services will be able to compete with the players moving into telecom. Those that don’t will quickly find themselves doing nothing but shipping data over their networks. this information from here

Continued..

New Printing Technology in Printing World

Welcome to the new phase of the world of printing. Digital print has single handedly been responsible for changing the very face of the printing industry, especially in Toronto. Toronto printing companies have an edge over there competitors in this particular way of printing. Digital print is the imitation of digital images on a material. It is usually made to use for small print runs, and for the adaptation of print media. The procedure of digital print is completely different from lithography, gravure, and letterpress printing in many techniques. As there is a smaller amount of primary setup, it is helpful for quick prototyping, and less costly for small print runs.

Digital Printing is used for personalized printing or variable data printing (VDP or VI), for example personalized children's books, which are customized with the specific child's name and images. Digital Printing is also used in Print on Demand (POD) systems, for small books of varying number of pages, and binding methods. There is another type of digital printing which is known as Variable-data printing (VDP) in which things like content, graphics and pictures can be altered from one printed part to another. For this, there is no need to stop or slow down the printing procedure.

Toronto being an expert in the data printing industry handles the clients efficiently and also puts in an economical tag on the services it offers which is an amazing thing considering that the machines used in this process are extremely expensive and can really up the ante on the overall cost of the finished product. The method is a straight result of digital printing, which connects PC data and digital print device and highly efficient software to produce top-quality, complete colored docs, with a great appearance as compared to usual offset printing.

Earlier, the terminology VDP has been directly linked with digital printing machinery. Though, in the last three years the function of this technology has extended to internet, emailing, and mobile messages. This makes the digital printing a force to reckon with, and Toronto offers its client ale the best of this technology at an affordable price. So go, get your life digital!

Rafi Michael is an owner of Toronto Printing, At Toronto Printing, Toronto printing company offer a variety of postcards, brochures, banners, Digital printing Toronto, flyers and much more.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rafi_Michael

Continued..

Debt for a brighter future

Do you think you have a debt that scary? If you answered yes then you are in a difficult person to succeed. This is due to our debt could raise venture capital, buy the need for more advanced. If we raise money first and the result will be different, because it takes time. Examples for our children / students who need education costs + equipment costs (laptop) if we have enough money it does not matter, if less? we can debt and pay in advance for that.

Debt makes entrepreneurs enjoy more benefits and making bank also profited. Debt consolidation properly so as not to increase cost but reduce labor and increase profits. With the guidance of how to manage the debt will automatically make a good performance or a private company becomes more efficient and find out what the next step.

If you want to get a loan quickly put on a bill consolidation program, then you will get the loan faster. and there are also products debt consolidation credit card that can help us more quickly to get something you want within your budget household

Continued..

For 2010, IDC Predicts an Apple iPad and Battles in the Cloud

Apple brings out an iPad digital tablet. Netbooks move upscale. And I.B.M. buys Juniper Networks.

Those predictions for next year, and others, are being presented on Thursday by the technology research firm IDC.

IDC’s entry in the year-end forecasting sweepstakes doesn’t lack for detail. There will be 300,000 iPhone applications by the end of next year, nearly triple the current number, according to IDC. There will be 50,000 to 75,000 Google Android applications, up from about 10,000. Interested in digital electric meters, the home devices crucial for energy-saving smart electric grids? Twenty million will be deployed in United States households in 2010, and more than 60 million worldwide, IDC says. Spurred by federal stimulus dollars, 77 million Americans, or 25 percent of the population, will have electronic health records, compared with about 14 percent now, the firm predicts.

Often, it is the thinking behind the data points that is most illuminating. I discussed the predictions on Wednesday with Frank Gens, IDC’s chief analyst.

Take all those applications iPhones and Android phones, for example. Mr. Gens notes that there are roughly 10,000 Windows PC applications listed on Microsoft’s Windows 7 compatibility Web site.

“The market follows the applications,” Mr. Gens said. “That’s a message for the software industry, particularly for the PC industry.”

The competition to supply the tools and digital workbench — a “platform,” in techspeak — for cloud computing will intensify, Mr. Gens says. The early cloud platforms come from Salesforce.com’s Force.com, Microsoft’s Azure, and Google’s App Engine. In 2010, I.B.M. and Cisco Systems will enter the field with their cloud platforms, IDC predicts.

“This is going to be the strategic battleground of the next 20 years in computing,” Mr. Gens says.

The long-rumored Apple touchscreen tablet computer, or iPad, will arrive in 2010, IDC predicts. It will be more of an oversized iPod Touch, with an 8-inch or 10-inch screen, than a downsized Macintosh. With its larger screen, IDC says, the Apple tablet will be ideal for watching movies, surfing the Web, playing online games, and reading books, magazines and newspapers. It will be general-purpose, unlike Amazon.com’s single-purpose Kindle reader. The Apple offering, Mr. Gens says, “could deliver a real kick in Kindle’s butt.”

Netbook PCs, IDC predicts, will move beyond stripped-down Web-surfing, e-mail and note-taking machines, costing $200 to $400. More powerful models, Mr. Gens says, may cost $700 or more, though will still be extremely light and small.

IDC also sees I.B.M. getting back into the computer network business by acquiring Juniper. Networking, Mr. Gens says, is increasingly part of the package of capabilities the largest technology companies must offer corporate clients. He points to Hewlett-Packard’s recent purchase of 3Com and Cisco’s partnership with EMC as evidence of the trend.

“If you are going to be in the hardware systems business,” Mr. Gens says, “you need network competence.” This information from here

Continued..

So You Want to Borrow an E-Book …

Borrowing a library book is now possible without ever visiting a physical branch.

According to OverDrive, the largest supplier of e-books to public libraries, about 9,000 libraries offer digital audio books and about 5,400 of them offer e-books as well. E-book selection is still small compared to print collections, but they are growing. Other companies that distribute books to libraries include Ebrary and NetLibrary.

Generally speaking, patrons with a library card download library e-books for a two or three-week period onto a desktop computer, laptop, notebook computer or mobile device. If you have a Sony e-reader, you download the digital book to a personal computer or Apple Mac computer, and then, in turn, transfer it to the Sony Reader. (Sony makes a big push on its own Web site) Popular formats include ePub, Adobe PDFs and Mobipocket software for mobile devices.

For the most part, library e-books are not yet compatible on Amazon’s Kindles. Amazon could shift course and embrace ePub, but an Amazon spokesman said the company would not comment on future moves in that direction.

Although there are some collections that are available in subscriptions that permit unlimited access to books by multiple users, most e-books are treated like printed ones: only one user can access it at a time. That means there can be waits for digital books just like there are for print books. On the other hand, since so few people know about the library e-book collections or want to use them, the waits for e-books are often much shorter than for printed editions.

Since borrowing an e-book does not require a trip to a physical library, readers can download at any time of day or night.

Depending on the library or the title, there are limitations on copying or printing text, although some titles can be printed out in their entirety.

Below are some links to the digital e-book and audio book collections of various libraries around the country. readmore

Continued..

Some TVs Go Directly Online for Streaming Movies

For more than a decade, tech and media companies have wrestled with how to deliver digitized movies directly over the Internet to consumers: how do you get the copy-protected files from the computer to the big screen in the living room?

Photo Illustration by The New York Times

The early answers didn’t inspire many couch potatoes to get off the sofa. You could either plug a laptop computer into your TV set (assuming the computer and the television had the right connections) or buy a box, called a media extender, for your home theater that received streaming files from your computer. Media extenders proved obstreperous and confusing: some files wouldn’t play on some extenders, the boxes were awkward to set up and movie downloads were painfully slow.

Since then, faster broadband speeds have become more common and companies have figured how to stream videos that start in seconds, inspiring consumer electronics companies to put Internet connections into TVs, Blu-ray disc players and other devices to tap into online-movie services from the likes of Netflix and Blockbuster. It’s an end run around the limited video-on-demand offerings from cable companies and eliminates the need for a separate black box.

“This is huge,” says Dan Schinasi, a marketing manager at Samsung Electronics America. “This is what we have been waiting for.” Samsung is doubtless enthusiastic, introducing Internet connectivity on 23 different TVs, starting at $1,600 for a 40-inch LCD model and three Blu-ray players priced from $200 to $350. Indeed, the trend is that such Internet connections will rapidly become standard. According to research analysts at NPD, 12 percent of flat-panel sets sold in September in the United States had networking capabilities, up from less than 1 percent a year ago. There are now Internet-ready models from LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, Sony and Vizio.

The Samsung TVs, for example, access online movie services like Amazon Video On Demand or Blockbuster On Demand using Yahoo’s widgets, small icons that appear on the bottom of the screen and which also include popular Web services like Flickr, eBay and YouTube.

Blockbuster’s service offers movie rentals from $2.99 to $3.99, with purchases costing $7.99 to $19.99. At the moment, Blockbuster’s titles can appear in wide screen, but only in standard definition, rather than high definition. It took about 25 seconds to start up the Blockbuster service, which offered new titles like the Jack Black movie “Year One” for purchase at $19.99 and “Unmistaken Child” to rent at $3.99. When you choose a movie, the software does a quick check of your set’s connection speed and then starts playing your selection in under 10 seconds (easily beating cable video-on-demand from Time Warner in my tests). And while the cineaste in me wanted to shun anything less than HD, the standard-definition version of “Watchmen” was just fine, with instant gratification easily trumping any qualms I had about less-than-perfect image details.

Amazon Video On Demand was comparable, although it appeared to have a larger library of choices. The company claims to have more than 50,000 titles, with at least 2,000 of those in high definition. “Away We Go” was available to rent in HD for $4.99 (a standard-definition rental was $3.99). HD rentals were sharper and crisper to my eye, although a free stream of an episode of “30 Rock” in HD looked softer than the original live HD broadcast.

Other sets also offer Yahoo widgets and streaming movies from the Web. Sony offers the Yahoo feature on some sets and plans to offer Netflix streaming movies by the end of the year. LG Electronics has models that include Yahoo widgets and already include the online-movie services Vudu and Netflix. The former has the largest offering of HD movies to rent or own online and comes the closest in terms of picture quality and sound to true HD (1080p for the techie crowd). Rentals in Vudu’s HDX format have sharper picture details and better sound than other offerings, although I still find the downloads and streaming versions a little darker (and thus less crisp) than HD broadcasts.

Known primarily for its by-mail movie subscription business, Netflix has become a digital movie juggernaut by streaming movies to subscribers free of charge. The same $8.99 a month you pay for a by-mail subscription entitles you to watch as many of the company’s 17,000 digitized titles as you want, as often as you want, whenever you want. Its HD offerings lack the visual clarity of Vudu’s, but Netflix is a better value and is available on many different devices in the living room — the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 consoles, a stand-alone box from Roku, and TiVo machines. So if the Netflix option appeals to you, you don’t have to buy a new TV or Blu-ray player to get it.

But choice also means confusion: not all services are available on all devices. On some of its flat panels, Panasonic offers its own Internet services, which includes Amazon Video On Demand, but not Netflix or Blockbuster or Vudu. Samsung offers Blockbuster on its sets, but not Netflix. LG offers Netflix on its sets, but not Blockbuster. And even when they do offer the same branded service, not all the devices necessarily give you the same features.

Netflix subscribers who use the streaming option on the XBox 360, for example, will find they can add movies to their queue from the TV screen (and they have to pay $50 a year for Microsoft’s Xbox Live Gold membership to do so). But if you want to change your streaming movie lineup on the LG or Sony sets, you’ll have to go back to your computer.

Buyers will also find that some sets, like those from Panasonic, Samsung and Sony, require a wired Ethernet connection for Web access. (Vizio’s Internet-ready sets, due out this month, will have built-in Wi-Fi.) Samsung dealers offer an optional Wi-Fi adapter (802.11n) for just $80, and there are high-speed adapters that just plug into an electrical outlet. I connected a set using Belkin’s 200 Mbps $100 Powerline AV Starter Kit without entering any codes or doing anything other than plugging the adapters in.

But we’re still a long way from being able to order any movie we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. Film studios are loath to release what they perceive will be blockbuster DVDs for digital distribution, for example, until months after release, and there are many more held back by copyright issues and concerns about piracy. And even the movies you can rent digitally from Blockbuster or Amazon are often subject to the dreaded 24-hour window, which means if you don’t finish watching on the same day you started viewing it, you’ll have to pay an additional charge.

Still, the option of streaming a movie from anywhere — Netflix, Amazon or whoever — is a major leap forward. It frees viewers from the yoke of the one-store-only approach taken by cable companies and products like Apple TV. Ultimately, it’s a liberating experience — if you think of never having to get off the couch again to pick a movie as liberating.

this article from new york times

Continued..

Google Now Scanning RSS, Atom Feeds, May Experiment With Real-Time Protocols in Future

According to a post on Google's Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly "real-time," using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future - the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.


The blog post doesn't say whether or not RSS and Atom discovery is displacing traditional web crawling for sites that are feed-enabled, but it's likely that, if given the choice, Google will opt for the faster method if available. As Vanessa Fox notes on the SearchEngineLand blog, since it's unknown at this time whether Google is using the feeds in place of traditional web crawling, it may make sense to use full feeds rather than partial ones in order to get your content indexed faster by Google's search engine.

Real-Time Web Crawling in the Future?

Although only briefly mentioned in the post, Google hinted that they may be begin looking into other mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub, an open protocol that provides near-instant notifications of change updates. No further details were provided beyond the one sentence, but the announcement clearly shows that Google has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the real-time web is the future. This is one trend the company isn't planning to ignore.

The real-time web, heavily influenced by the speed of Twitter and other other rapid-fire social networking updates, has created a desire among internet users for faster access to information. This desire has, in turn, led to the creation of new real-time protocols such as the above mentioned PubSubHubbub and its counterpart RSSCloud. If Google began to use these technologies for scanning the web, their search results wouldn't just be updated faster - they would be updated in real-time. That means information would become available in the search results listings as soon as it was published to the web.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine - most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google's search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat. However, Google is already doing this to some extent now. Over time, the PageRank algorithm has evolved and can now reward sites with fresher, more fitting content and rank them higher than sites with more links on some occasions. And if anyone can figure out the proper algorithm for mixing in real-time content and ranking it appropriately along with static pages, it's got to be Google. In fact, we'll probably soon see exactly how they plan on addressing this issue, when they incorporate Twitter search results into their index, as announced last week.

...But Until Then, Google Delivering Faster, Fresher Results Instead

Although the PubSubHubbub mention may have been the most exiting part of the announcement, real-time search results aren't here just yet. In the meantime, we have to just be content with sped up results instead. The post advises website owners who are blocking Google's search bot software known as Googlebot from crawling their RSS/Atom feeds to unblock it via their robots.txt file. If unsure, webmasters can test their feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools, as the post recommends.

this information from here

Continued..