June 05, 2006, 4:13 PM PDT
The Windows answer to GarageBand
Posted by: Jasmine France

Today, M-Audio introduced Session, a software program aimed at aspiring musicians with little experience in digital-music creation. Session takes a page from GarageBand's book by offering a simple loop-based tool with a straightforward user interface, but now, any Windows user can quickly turn a PC into an easy-to-use home recording studio. Unfortunately, the software is currently available only as a giveaway with M-Audio's Fast Track USB ($129.95), so if you already have a similar device (or just don't want one), you're stuck buying a piece of hardware you don't need--or just not getting the software. The good news is that M-Audio intends offer Session by itself in the second half of this year.

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June 05, 2006, 3:47 PM PDT
Farecast and Mpire: Smart sites that will save you money
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

The Web is a fantastic platform for comparing current prices on items. But what about prices tomorrow? Will the price on the thing you want drop? And what about historical data? If you're buying or selling an item on eBay, you could probably use a price history before you kick off a transaction.

Fortunately, pricing analytics are coming to consumers. First up: a travel site, Farecast, that tells you if you should buy those airplane tickets you're interested in now or if you should wait for the price to drop. Farecast uses historical airfare data to predict prices. For a given trip, it will advise you to buy now or wait, depending on its predicted price curve.

Since the airlines are secretive about how they price tickets, the modeling behind Farecast can't be 100 percent reliable, but the system gives a confidence level on its recommendations, and it can make you a lot smarter about spending your money. Farecast goes live later this month.

Also coming soon: Mpire, a system that currently brings pricing analytics to eBay sellers. For any given item, it will tell you how much the item has sold for in the past (which is also useful to buyers). It also recommends the best day and time to end your auction, the type of listing that is most successful, and other information that can help you maximize your selling price. The founders of the site hinted at the release this month of buyer-focused tools, not just for eBay but other commerce sites, too (like Craigslist). I'll report more on this when the news comes out.

It's about time buyers got better pricing transparency and analytics. As I write this, neither Farecast nor Mpire are live with their buyers' services. If you want to experience first-hand what access to pricing data does for the buying experience right now, check out the house-buying site, Zillow.com.

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June 05, 2006, 3:10 PM PDT
Samsung SCH-A930 now with Verizon
Posted by: Kent German

Samsung's newest multimedia phone is now available with Verizon Wireless. Armed with EV-DO compatibility, the SCH-A930 will offer full V Cast video support (videos and music) and come with Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera with rotating lens, stereo speakers, external music controls, and a Micro SD card slot.

The pure-black design was attractive when we saw the A930 at CTIA earlier this year, but we'll have to wait to get our hands on the phone before we can make a full assessment. The A930 is $99 with service.

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June 05, 2006, 2:58 PM PDT
New Moto phone for T-Mobile
Posted by: Kent German

T-Mobile is now offering the Motorola V195. Inside its plain but compact shell, the flip phone offers Bluetooth, a speakerphone, voice-activated dialing, text and instant messaging, and quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) world phone support. There's no camera, but we don't mind that omission at all. You can get the V195 for $39 with a two-year contract.

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June 05, 2006, 2:57 PM PDT
New political tactic: YouTube?
Posted by: Molly Wood

California gubernatorial candidate Steve Westly is, perhaps wisely, perhaps mercenarily, trying to ride the YouTube wave to victory in tomorrow's primary elections (and beyond!). He's recorded an about-three-minute video talking about his vision for California, and it's clear that the campaign has used its vast resources to, well, dumb down the video. It's grainy, vaguely out of focus, and full of choppy cuts--hilarious, considering that it's also so obviously scripted to the gills and blatantly attempting to reach out and grab the "youth vote." Oh, Steve Westly. Good try, dude, really. But here's the thing: you can make as many videos as you want, but unless you can tack on a dog biting its own leg, crazy pop-locking, a sweet guitar solo, or somebody getting kicked in the hoo-hoos, I'm still voting for the Numa Numa guy.

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June 05, 2006, 2:50 PM PDT
Two new Samsungs for Cingular
Posted by: Kent German

Two more cell phones that made their debut at CTIA in April are now part of Cingular's lineup. The Samsung SGH-D807 first caught our eye in Las Vegas, due to its attractive slider design and slim profile (0.6 inch thick). The insides were also promising, with Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player, a speakerphone, a Micro SD card slot, and 18MB of internal memory, among the promised features.

The Samsung SGH-D407 comes in a more basic flip design, but its feature set is still plentiful. Included are Bluetooth, push-to-talk support, a VGA camera, and a speakerphone. The Samsung SGH-D807 is $129 with service, while the Samsung SGH-D407 will run you $69 with service.

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June 05, 2006, 10:46 AM PDT
Dorkfest 2006
Posted by: Wayne Cunningham

On Sunday, June 4, more than 50 BMW Z3 and M Coupes gathered for Dorkfest 2006 in California. I was there with my own Sapphire Black 1999 BMW Z3 Coupe. We met up in Woodside, a little town south of San Francisco, drove a windy mountain road down to Highway 1, then to Half Moon Bay. After arranging the cars for photos in a large parking lot, we Coupe owners milled about, talking about our cars. I got some good tips on installing an iPod adapter, which, in the BMW, is relatively easy through the stereo's prewired CD-changer plug.

As a bonus, a 2007 BMW M Coupe, based on the Z4 Roadster, made an appearance. This car was driven up from Southern California for the event and was generally admired by all attendees. The original Coupe, produced from 1999 to 2002, was based on the Z3 Roadster and loved by few. It varied in engine size, from the original 2.8-liter in-line six-cylinder in the 1999 Z3 Coupe to a powerful 3.2-liter in-line six in the 2001-2002 M Coupe. The 2007 M Coupe uses the same 3.2-liter engine as the current BMW M3. Although the displacement is the same between the older and newer engines, BMW has wrung another 18 horsepower out of the newer model.

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June 05, 2006, 10:29 AM PDT
MerchantCircle: World's easiest small business Web sites
Posted by: Rafe Needleman

Thanks to location-specific services (like Google Maps and Yahoo Maps), the World Wide Web is becoming a great resource for local business. In fact, I believe all small and local businesses should have their own Web sites. But many don't.

MerchantCircle, officially launching today, is a site-publishing tool aimed squarely at these very small businesses. The site has two things going for it. First, 14 million small businesses are already programmed onto the site, waiting for their owners to "claim" them and grow them into more robust microsites. If a business owner wants to get his or her shop online and the site's bare-bones page is already set up, there may be no quicker way to establish an online presence.

Second, the service is designed to make sure that search engines and mapping services find the pages on it. While potential customers of the businesses represented on the site can go to MerchantCircle.com directly, the system's CEO, Ben Smith, realizes that most people find businesses on Google, so he's built his system to create pages that Google (and other search engines) will find and rank highly. In this regard, MerchantCircle is a lot like Citysearch, whose local business listings frequently show up at the top of Google search results. MerchantCircle, however, is targeted at smaller communities where online expertise is not common--in other words, the team won't be marketing to the Bay Area, Seattle, or New York.

At its free service level, MerchantCircle is absolutely worth a try for any small business. But the free product is just a tease. For $29.95 a month, MerchantCircle will put one paid ad per month on engines like Google and Yahoo. This advertisement management is the real value of MerchantCircle--unless you are good at managing a paid online advertising program yourself, in which case you might be able to get more traffic for your money. For $99.95 per month, you get more ads placed and a personal consultant. Again, this is not a bad value for the business owner who values time over money and doesn't want to worry about the Web.

MerchantCircle's paid programs look like easy and relatively inexpensive ways for small businesses to get online in local markets. Businesses serious about expanding on to the Web will probably outgrow the service in short order--but they might get some good value from MerchantCircle before that.

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June 05, 2006, 10:03 AM PDT
Sony dSLR Alpha A-100 info: Web 1, Sony 0.
Posted by: Lori Grunin

We had signed a nondisclosure agreement that bound us to wait until midnight tonight to publish info about the Sony Alpha A-100. But thanks to a river of highly accurate leaks that started with Digital Photography Blog in Australia and culminated in the premature launching of the order page on Sonystyle.com (which has since been removed), we're blowing up our raft and jumping into the white water with the rest of the Net. Plus, Sony finally realized the futility of trying to control the blogosphere.

The first question everyone asks: "Isn't it just a rebranded Konica Minolta?" Nope. The body design is a variant of the Maxxum 5D, and aside from the A-mount compatibility (rebranded as the Alpha mount, naturally), among the few tricks it inherits from KM is the Eye Start autofocus, which initiates focus when you put your eye to the viewfinder, not to mention the company's flash system. The sensor is a new APS-size 10-megapixel Super HAD CCD, the kit lens is a Zeiss, and Sony uses its own Super SteadyShot CCD-shift technology rather than Konica Minolta's for image stabilization. In conjunction with CCD vibration to eliminate dust on the sensor, the chip has an antistatic coating to repel contaminants.

Sony also incorporates a new imaging pipeline processor, dubbed Bionz, which the company claims improves sharpness and maintains low noise--the camera supports as high as ISO 3,200--and uses hardware to perform all its D-Range Optimizer image enhancements. The processor--plus a big memory buffer--enables the camera's 3fps unlimited JPEG shooting. Its LCD is the same 2.5-inch version that's used by the Cyber Shot DSC-T9.

The kit version of the Alpha A-100, called the A-100K, comes with a f/3.5-to-f/4.5 18mm-to-70mm lens (or 27mm to 105mm, as a 35mm equivalent). When it ships in July, the kit model will be $999, while a body-only version will cost $899.

The rest of the lens lineup will look like this at launch:

• 100mm f/2.8 macro lens: $679.95
• DT 18mm-to-200mm f/3.5-to-f/6.3: $499.95
• 50mm f/2.8 macro lens: $479.95
• 50mm f/1.4 standard lens: $349.95
• 75mm-to-300mm f/4.5-to-f/5.6 compact supertelephoto zoom: $229.95

All in all, it specs out pretty well. I'll reserve judgment on the CCD, though; most of the digital SLRs on the market use CMOS rather than CCD sensors, and the two have different noise characteristics. We haven't been impressed with most of Sony's noise-suppression algorithms, but the company has likely come up with something new for this camera. We'll see.

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June 05, 2006, 9:28 AM PDT
BlackBerry + Apple = AppleBerry?
Posted by: Bonnie Cha

AppleBerry--no, we're not talking about the latest flavor of Snapple here, but the latest prediction from Peter Misek, an analyst with Canaccord Capital, who correctly forecasted a partnership between Research in Motion and Intel last year. Misek is now saying that a joint effort between RIM and Apple could be possible, since each company lacks what the other provides. By creating a BlackBerry embedded with Apple's iTunes software, RIM would be able to reach more consumers, while Apple would finally have a presence in the wireless-communication sector. Another idea that was thrown around was an iPod with integrated RIM wireless technology. Jean-Louis Gassee, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who once oversaw Apple's global products division and research and development, said the partnership would "technically" work but was more concerned with whether the "strong personalities" at both companies would be able to work together. "I want to see the two CEOs of RIM and Jobs working together," he said. "The thought of this ménage à trois is absolutely hilarious." What do you guys think? Would you like to see these two companies pair up? Talk back to me below.

Sources: Slashdot, The Globe and Mail

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