February 17, 2006, 4:04 PM PST
NBC just now notices videos on YouTube
Posted by: Tom Merritt

What?! The unbridled popularity of the absolutely hilarious "Lazy Sunday" clip from Saturday Night Live can be traced to illegal versions of the video on the site YouTube? Good thing NBC waited two months for the buzz to die down before it asked YouTube to yank it. Kindly, NBC still offers a streaming version for free at its Web site, which is fine if you don't use a Mac or a Linux machine. The network will also sell it to you for $1.99 in the iTunes Music Store, although it was free in December. Way to almost recognize the power of Internet buzz, NBC! You just couldn't stop yourself in the end, though, could you?

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February 17, 2006, 3:51 PM PST
Should Beatles album become public domain?
Posted by: Tom Merritt

The BBC has a thought-provoking article about copyright expiration, centering around the expiration of the copyright on the Beatles' first album, as well as recordings by Elvis Presley, in 2013. Record companies want copyright extended because they make so much money from the sales of big-name 1960s recordings even today. They're also terrified of losing even a penny to digital piracy. Which brings me to point out a sad state of affairs: Not one recording company or pundit has mentioned the great benefits of the Singing Nun's albums becoming public domain. Sad.

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February 17, 2006, 3:46 PM PST
Mash-up of Wikipedia and spreadsheets
Posted by: Tom Merritt

The first time you think about it, the idea of doing online collaborative spreadsheets in the style of a wiki may sound stupid--especially if you don't like jargon. Then ask yourself if you've ever had issues sharing an Excel document. If you answered yes, as 90 percent of you will, then WikiCalc is not so stupid after all. It was created by Dan Bricklin, the man who brought us VisiCalc long before the days of Excel. You can still get VisiCalc as a 28K download. That's smaller than the page you're looking at right now.

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February 17, 2006, 3:29 PM PST
iRidiculousness
Posted by: Jasmine France

Am I the only one sick of seeing iThis and PodThat? I understand the desire to capitalize on the iPod's success, but I think these companies could be slightly more creative in their naming schemes. Ranting aside, I had to give a shout out to Corgi's iCar, namely because if any male member of my family over 40 owned an iPod or any other MP3 player, he'd be drooling over these speakers. Of course, he'd also assert that Corgi ought to offer more options than the Cadillac Escalade and the Nissan 240SX models. The fancy speakers work with any audio device that has a standard headphone jack, but they also come preloaded with their own tunes. Of course, the real draw of the iCar is the hydraulic action. The car, which is actually mounted atop the speaker unit, bounces up and down and rocks in all directions to the music. Naturally, each car also includes a full light kit, with LEDs flashing in the undercarriage, the engine, the wheel wells, and the trunk area. And, oh yes, the rims spin. But try not to be too hypnotized by all this action--at $34.99, you can't expect killer sound from the speakers themselves.

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February 17, 2006, 11:19 AM PST
Volkswagen's cutting-edge research
Posted by: Wayne Cunningham

Volkswagen takes advantage of the San Francisco Bay Area's high-tech expertise by situating its Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) in Palo Alto. This is the group that helped the Stanford team build Stanley, the winner of last year's DARPA Grand Challenge. I got to visit ERL this week and look at some of the technologies Volkswagen is developing.

Gypsy
ERL keeps a Passat in its garage for use as a project car. The Passat has a 9-inch touch-screen LCD in the center stack, and its software interface is named Gypsy. The interface starts off with six menu items displayed as big, easy-to-tap buttons. Hit one, such as Entertainment, and the other buttons fly off the screen, their place being taken by more buttons for choosing audio, video, or whatever other entertainment source might be available. The interface looked very easy to use and fluid to me. It essentially involves drilling down through menus and submenus, yet the button size and placement make it very accessible. But Gypsy is more than just an interface, as it includes the idea of being updatable, with new applications referred to as widgets. A widget could be a new game for the kids in the backseat or something more useful, such as a gas price monitor. Volkswagen's researchers figure a driver could pull into a local VW dealer or other outlet and purchase more widgets whenever something compelling became available. The widgets would be loaded onto the system through a wireless connection.

Google Earth navigation
To make GPS navigation more usable, VW worked with Google to incorporate Google Earth. Instead of looking at a flat, 2D map, the driver sees a 3D representation of the world with a photorealistic overlay. At the ERL demo I watched, an engineer entered a destination, and the point of view--which uses the entire globe as its default--suddenly started to fly in, getting closer and closer to the surface until streets and terrain were visible. In one part of the demo, I was shown the Grand Canyon, which has a complete photo overlay. The demo also included a destination in Manhattan, which showed how useful this system could be; having individual buildings represented on the map makes it easier for the driver to get oriented. ERL also worked an Nvidia graphical chipset into the system to make the maps look really good. On the business side, Google could use the system to sell sponsored positions in a point-of-interest search. For example, if a driver searched for hotels nearby, the system could highlight or offer more information for hotels that paid for position. The engineers at ERL anticipate that other Internet companies with mapping services would probably want to partner with other car companies.

Car-to-car communication
In the final demo I saw at ERL, we drove around in two cars that were sharing data. The car I was in displayed speed, braking, and steering angle for a second car following us. A lot of research into this type of data sharing is being pushed by the Department of Transportation, the idea being that it could be used to prevent accidents and convey traffic information. For example, if traffic is stopped on the other side of a blind curve, approaching cars would be warned and prevented from slamming into the stopped cars. General traffic congestion information could also be communicated to central servers so that drivers could check their routes and determine if they should take detours. The FCC has reserved a wireless band for car-to-car communication called Dedicated Short Range Communications. It's a fairly simple idea and easily implemented with modern technology, but its impact could be revolutionary.

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February 17, 2006, 10:41 AM PST
Second Mac OS X pest found
Posted by: Robert Vamosi

Antivirus vendor F-Secure this morning reported a second Mac OS X pest, Inqtana, which spreads primarily using Bluetooth. Yesterday, antivirus researchers reported the first Mac OS X virus, Mac OS X Leap, which uses Apple's iChat to attempt to download an infected image file. Of the two, Mac OS X users should consider Leap to be the greater risk. Leap can cause some Mac applications not to run and, in some instances, crash the infected machine.

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February 17, 2006, 8:31 AM PST
Shoulder Panasonic's new prosumer camcorder
Posted by: Lori Grunin

Slipping not quite so neatly into Panasonic's prosumer three-CCD camcorder models, the Proline AG-DVC20 offers a trio of larger 1/3-inch, 460,000-pixel CCDs compared to the 1/4-inch, 410,000-pixel versions in the more expensive AG-DVC30 and AG-DVC60. One might be tempted to think of it as a shoulder-mounted version of the DVC30, but other aspects of its feature set don't match that model's, such as a 10X zoom compared to the DCV30's 16X and the use of electronic image stabilization vs. the optical image stabilization incorporated into most of the company's other cameras and camcorders.

Still, when it ships in June for a relatively modest price of $1,850, I'm betting it will be just as good a value as the rest of Panasonic's three-CCD models.

Plus, the press release contains a lovely bit of spin: "Weighing just 4.4 pounds in full operating condition, the camcorder is lightweight but a size that is not easily misplaced or hidden." My Panasonic Toughbook weighs only 2.8 pounds, but I've never lost it because it was too small. And this is the same company that provides tiny, where-the-hell-did-I-put-them SD cards!

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