Total Pageviews

Dead Phone Battery? Just Burn Something

After Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in the Northeast, a New York start-up came up with a good publicity stunt: Light a fire so people could charge their dead cellphones.

BioLite, a 15-person company based in Brooklyn, sells a $130 camp stove that doubles as a power source. You light a fire inside a metal fuel chamber, where a thermoelectric generator converts the heat into electricity to run a fan. The fan blows air into the fire to oxygenate it and create a clean burn. The generator also powers a USB port for charging phones and other electronics.

Erica Rosen, director of marketing at BioLite, said company employees set up a table with the stoves in spots like Washington Square Park in Lower Manhattan, where m any people were still without power. They offered hot drinks to people as they gathered around the stoves to charge their dead phones. The stoves got plenty of attention from passers-by, including the police, who ordered BioLite to stop.

“It was going really well until the cops showed up, and we packed up and made our way back,” Ms. Rosen said. “I can sympathize with them - we're in a disaster emergency, and here come a group of people with literally a table that's on fire.”

Founded by two designers, Jonathan Cedar and Alec Drummond, BioLite received $1.8 million in financing in December from the foundation led by Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator's Dilemma.” It sells the stoves in 70 countries with the goal of popularizing a cheaper, cleaner approach for the three billion people around the world who cook on open fires. The company declined to say how many stoves it had sold, but said sales were in the tens of thousands.

It's a bit of an unusual start-up in a time when many entrepreneurs are trying to strike it rich with the next great app for smartphones. “Software is great at making life efficient, but many of life's most basic needs are still served by physical objects,” Mr. Cedar said.



Election Monitoring in the Age of Social Media

A judge in Philadelphia ordered poll workers to cover up a mural depicting President Obama at a school in Philadelphia on Tuesday, after a photograph posted on Twitter, showing voting machines set up in front of the president's image, spread rapidly across the social network.

Valerie Caras, the communications director for the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, drew attention to the image, taken by one of the party's volunteer election monitors at the polling place for Philadelphia's 5th Ward, 18th Division, inside the Benjamin Franklin Elementary School.

Just an hour later, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Tim Miller, posted an image on his Twitter feed, showing the order to ha ve the mural covered up, which was issued by John Milton Younge, a Democrat.

The mural on the wall of the elementary school appeared to pay tribute to President Obama's 2008 campaign, featuring the words “hope” and “change,” on either side of his image, and a quote from a speech he gave during the Democratic primary campaign that year, on Feb. 5, 2008, in which he said: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”



Campaigns Turn to Stars to Get Out the Vote

In the final days of a close race, as the candidates made their final pitches at rallies in swing states, both campaigns tried to harness the star power of their most celebrated supporters.

At a late-night rally in New Hampshire on Monday, Mitt Romney's opening act was Kid Rock. Before his final song, “Born Free,” the Michigan-born performer channeled the Romney campaign's one-word slogan, “Believe,” asking the crowd: “I want to know, do you believe? I want to know if you believe that you still live in the greatest country in the world!”

Video of Kid Rock performing at a rally in support of Mitt Romney on Monday night in New Hampshire.

Earlier on Monday, President Obama appeared on stage with Jay-Z and Bruce Springs teen at a rally in Ohio. As The Ohio Capital Blog reported, Mr. Springsteen, channeling Woody Guthrie, played a ditty inspired by the Obama campaign slogan, “Forward.”

Video from The Ohio Capital Blog of Bruce Springsteen performing at an Obama rally on Monday.

The same blog also captured video of Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, dancing during Jay-Z's performance.

Video from the Ohio Capital Blog of Senator Sherrod Brown enjoying a Jay-Z performance on Monday.

Hoping to bolster the enthusiasm of small-town voters in Ohio, the Romney campaign dispatched a local hero, Jack Nicklaus, to rally the troops on Monday at a breakfast meeting in Port Clinton. The golfer, recently described by Mr. Romney as “the greatest athlete of the 20th century,” argued that the former Massachusetts governor would govern in a bipartisan fashion in his address at the Republican party headquarters in the town of 6,000.

Jack Nicklaus, speaking on behalf of Mitt Romney, on Monday in Port Clinton, Ohio.

Over the weekend, the Obama campaign unveiled a YouTube endorsement from the comedian Will Ferrell, who offered “to do anything to get you to vote on Nov. 6.”

An ad for the O bama campaign featuring the comedian Will Ferrell.


AT&T Prices Nokia\'s New Lumia Phone at $100 - Again

Nokia said on Tuesday that its new flagship smartphone, the Lumia 920, would cost $100 with a two-year contract on AT&T - an aggressive price for a brand-new handset with high-end features. It's a repeat of what Nokia and AT&T did with the last Lumia, which didn't sell well. Will things be different this time around?

The main difference now is that along with the phone, AT&T is throwing in a free plate that you can place the phone on to wirelessly charge the battery. And the phone, which goes on sale Friday, includes the newest version of Microsoft's mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8.

Nokia is staking its future on the success of Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system, which has also been unpopular compared with Google's Android system and Apple's iOS. But Microsoft has dragged Nokia down in the smartphone market. In the third quarter, Nokia posted a loss of $1.27 billion, and worldwide sales of Lumia smartphones fell to 2.9 million handsets in the quarter, down from 4 million in the previous quarter.

Incidentally, Microsoft's share of the phone market in the United States has shrunk to just 1 percent, down from 2.5 percent last quarter, according to Pete Cunningham, an analyst at Canalys. He said the Lumia and the Windows Phone system lost momentum after Microsoft announced that Windows Phone 8 would not be compatible with the older Lumia phones, which ran Windows Phone 7. The Lumia phones are aimed at tech-savvy consumers, so they were aware that they shouldn't buy a Lumia phone before Windows Phone 8 arrived, Mr. Cunningham said.

Whether the Lumia 920 is a winner depends on how well Microsoft and Nokia get the message out that they have a compelling alternative to Android and the iPhone, Mr. Cunningham said.

“Frankly, Nokia is running out of chances, so it has to make a success of it,” he said.



Daily Report: Tech and Media Companies Resist Proposal to Strengthen Online Privacy Protections for Children

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter have all objected to portions of a federal effort to strengthen online privacy protections for children, Natasha Singer reports in The New York Times on Tuesday.

In addition, media giants like Viacom and Disney, cable operators, marketing associations, technology groups and a trade group representing toy makers are arguing that the Federal Trade Commission's proposed rule changes seem so onerous that, rather than enhance online protections for children, they threaten to deter companies from offering children's Web sites and services altogether.

The underlying concern, for both industry and regulators, is not so much about online products for children themselves. It is about the data collection and data mining mechanisms that facilitate digital marketing on applications and Web sites for children - and a debate over whether these practices could put children at greater risk.

In 1998, Congress passed the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act in an effort to give parents control over the collection and dissemination of private information about their children online. The regulation requires Web site operators to obtain a parent's consent before collecting personal details, like home addresses or e-mail addresses, from children under 13.

Now, federal regulators are preparing to update that rule, arguing that it has not kept pace with advances like online behavioral advertising, a practice that uses data mining to tailor ads to people's online behavior. The F.T.C. wants to expand the types of data whose collection requires prior parental permission to include persistent ID systems, like unique device codes or customer code numbers stored in cookies, if those codes are used to track children online for advertising purposes. The idea is to preclude companies from compiling dossiers on the online activities - and by extension the health, socioeconomic status, race or romantic concerns - of individual children across the Web over time.

But the economic issue at stake is much bigger than just the narrow children's audience. If the F.T.C. were to include customer code numbers among the information that requires a parent's consent, industry analysts say, it might someday require companies to get similar consent for a practice that represents the backbone of digital marketing and advertising - using such code numbers to track the online activities of adults.



Anonymous Did Not Hack PayPal

A number of reported Anonymous cyberattacks on PayPal, Symantec and other sites on Monday, timed to Guy Fawkes Day, did not appear to be the work of the group after all.

For Bravo Start-Ups Show, Crash Test Dummies

There's one particular scene in the movie “The Social Network” that was slightly made up. It's about halfway through the film, when the character of Mark Zuckerberg and his clan of nerdy programmer roommates sit down to build Facebook. The challenge for the movie's directors: how do you make a not-very-sexy 20-something, sitting, wearing a hoodie at a computer while he writes code, look sexy?

The answer: You make stuff up.

“Let the hacking begin,” says the character of Mr. Zuckerberg, as he wiggles his fingers in the air like an animated .gif. Then, a fast-paced sequence of programming is interwoven with scenes of pretty girls partying and a computer screen filled with code. The entire montage lasts about 1 minute and 30 seconds.

So when Bravo sat down to make “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” a new show, you can be sure the network had to make up a lot of stuff to fill several hours of television.

Anyone who has spent time in Silicon Valley and visited just a handful of start-ups knows that these companies are pretty boring. Predominantly male (to a fault) programmers and designers sit at their desks, monotonously moving their fingers up and down on a keyboard. Their jokes, well, are esoteric and frankly a bit sad. “You should Instagram that Instagram!” would be followed by abstruse laughter.

This is, after all, the same place where people refer to girls who are programmers as “unicorns,” because they are so far and few between.

Even the parties, which I have written about, aren't that exciting. Mostly, they involve those same programmers and designers sitting around talking about the code they have written that day. “So, I wrote this mean Python script earlier!”

Silicon Valley is really quite a boring place. The story of start-ups should be a documentary on PBS, not a weekly reality show on Bravo. The creators of “Start-Ups” managed to manufacture something that doesn't r eally exist here: drama.

It might seem like watching the new show will be like gawking as a car crash happens in slow motion. But in reality - not the reality that Bravo is trying mass-produce - “Start-Ups” will be more akin to watching car crash tests at an automotive testing facility. You will know exactly when and how the car is going to crash. No one will get hurt.

Will we in Silicon Valley watch? Of course we will. Who doesn't like to see metal crunch into itself as it slams against a wall at 60 miles an hour. And, who doesn't want to watch a group of young wannabe entrepreneurs try to sneak to the front of the I Want to Be Rich and Famous line by prancing around a reality show and saying things like, “People have been intimidated, because this package generally doesn't come with a brain.”

Yes. We'll all watch the car thump the wall with the show's six crash test dummies sitting inside. And then, we'll all go back to our desks and sit, monot onously moving our fingers up and down on our keyboards.



Review Roundup: The Silicon Valley Reality Show

Poor Randi Zuckerberg. The reality show that the sister of Mark Zuckerberg is executive-producing, “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley” on Bravo, was overwhelmingly panned by critics. Wow, was it panned. Here are a few examples.

David Wiegand of The San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

If you didn't know much about Silicon Valley and watched the first episode, you'd come away with the following impressions: 1. Silicon Valley is whiter than “Children of the Corn.” 2. Everyone in Silicon Valley lives in San Francisco, except for those who can afford to live in the East Palo Alto Four Seasons. 3. Young guys wear shirts only when they absolutely have to. 4. There is probably an answer to the question “How do you solve negative cycles in a graph” but first, will someone please explain the question?

“Start-Ups” isn't very good, or very original, neither of which should come as a huge surprise. But what's really too bad is that the show misses a great opportunity to capture the singular mix of ambition and creativity that makes Silicon Valley so special. When word spread that the show was in the pipeline, valley types were reportedly worried that their community would be “Hollywoodized.” On the basis of the premiere episode at least, those worries seem to be confirmed.

Sam Grobart of Bloomberg Businessweek really didn't like it:

If you're going to distort the truth, manufacture conflict and present people shallower than a dinner plate from the Kate Hudson Kitchen Kollection, at least be entertaining about it. At least populate it with grotesque exaggerations of almost-humans that I can laugh at and feel superior to. Right?

It's not just that these people are terrible - terrible can be watchable. Villainy can be delightful. But this crew is like a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer: It's lousy and doesn't even get you drun k.

Zuckerberg said her role was to “[help] make sure that Bravo could capture the real, authentic Silicon Valley.” Based on the evidence, it would appear that Zuckerberg uses words like “real” and “authentic” about Silicon Valley the same way Taco Bell (YUM) might toss them in when describing a Meximelt.

Hugh Hart at Wired.com wrote:

In surreal new “reality” show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley, the individuals presented as Northern California's best and brightest look like supermodels, behave like fools and drink like fish. The Bravo series, which debuts Monday, reveals nothing new about the inner workings of Silicon Valley culture, but it does share plenty of information about six recent arrivals who've come to the Bay Area seeking fame and fortune.

He asks:

Does actual human innovation really need to play second fiddle to wacky antics in order to keep aud iences entertained? Not at all. Sundance Channel's 2011 series “Quirky” made a strong showing by following detail-obsessed inventors through their trial-and-error creative process. And 2010 Oscar-winner “The Social Network” extracted genuine human drama from the business of innovation.

What's your take on the series?



Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)