Rafe's Radar

Let's kill the OS upgrade disc

I love upgrades. But I hate upgrade discs and upgrade pricing. Let's find a way to do away with both, or at least make the upgrade transaction a bit cleaner.

Operating system upgrades
The reason I'm writing this column won't be a surprise to anyone one who follows technology: Windows 7. I bought the upgrade disc (on the pre-order special price). When it arrived, I started the upgrade process for my Vista desktop. Knowing that the disc was licensed only to upgrade an existing Windows installation, I pressed the big button for a "Custom" installation and the more

Stalqer mobile social app finds friends in new ways

The developers of the iPhone app GasBag, which helps iPhone users find the cheapest gas for their cars, are working on a new mobile friend locator service, Stalqer. This clever and aptly named service has two technologies that are unique, as far as I know, to help it get around two of the big problems found in other friend locators like Foursquare, Loopt, and Google's Latitude.

Problem 1: On the mobile platform that matters, the iPhone, there's no way to do real-time location reporting without running an app all the time, and the iPhone doesn't allow background processes. And even if it did, it would draw down the battery. The Stalqer solution is to create a dummy e-mail account that pings the Stalqer servers whenever the phone polls for mail, which is, by default, every 15 minutes.

When the phone hits the Stalqer e-mail servers, it sends along Internet gateway data, which can be used to locate the phone. It only works when the phone is connected via Wi-Fi, not GSM. It also doesn't get data from the phone's GPS sensor, but it's a clever hack on the way to the creation of more robust location reporting features.

Competing mobile social apps require the app (Foursquare, Loopt) or site (Latitude) to be open for the user's location to be reported. Or they require a phone that supports background processing, like an Android device.

CEO Mick Johnson told me there is another company that has this idea, but nobody has yet released a product based on it.

AARP aims to increase ranks through online app

The American Association of Retired Persons, or AARP, an organization with the stated mission of helping "people 50 and over improve the quality of their lives as they age," has launched a Web site for whippersnappers, people not old enough to be members, called LifeTuner. The consumer pitch is noble: It helps people set good financial habits early, while there's still time. The site and the advice and tools on it are free. AARP membership, of course, is not free. Hence the obvious business case for the service: It can help people retire so they can afford the dues. more

Reporters' Roundtable Podcast: Cloud 'dangers'

This week we are covering the dangers of cloud computing. Get it? With the major loss of consumer data for the Sidekick smartphone users--the Sidekick is made by Danger, a Microsoft company--the whole idea of "cloud" safety has been brought front and center for consumers.

Businesses, likewise, are wondering if they are exposed to similar risks when they put their apps and data in the cloud.

Can we trust the cloud?

Our guests to discuss this topic are CNET senior writer Stephen Shankland and Christofer Hoff, author of the Rational Survivability blog, which is about this very topic. Hoff is director of cloud and emerging solutions at Cisco System and thus has a vested interest in keeping the cloud safe and profitable.

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Reporters' Roundtable #7: The dangers of the cloud more

Tech advice from Tim Berners-Lee

SAN FRANCISCO--When Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, entered the room for the final interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, the audience stood up for him.

Appropriately so, since most of those present here Thursday owe their livelihoods to his invention. In an on-stage interview with Tim O'Reilly, the audience was listening to Berners-Lee not just for his perspective but his guidance. While not explicitly called out in the discussion, there was good advice in what he had to say. Here's what I heard:

Don't build your laws into the Web. "Technology shouldn't more

iCurrent: A news aggregator that works

There have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies that have tried to create useful Web browser start pages and content aggregation sites. Popular themes include RSS readers, widget collection pages, and user-filtered news hubs. I've seen and tried a lot of them but rarely use them after a quick look. A new project, iCurrent, has potential to break out of that swamp for me and other users.

iCurrent contains no magical thinking or head-slappy reconceptualizations of news. It's just an aggregation service done well, with useful and clear features for users, and a straightforward sharing mechanism.

You tell more

Hands-on with Twitterized Bing

Microsoft is getting into the real-time search business, as we reported earlier Wednesday from the Web 2.0 Summit. It's good to see a mainstream product dive into this stream, as one of the big issues with searching Twitter is that timeliness can swamp relevancy.

Bing has the opportunity to leverage its well-developed search engine chops to address this--not only will public tweets will show up in search results, Bing can rank results based on relevance of the post, the popularity of the writer, and other, more complex factors.

Uncharacteristically for Microsoft, the new search feature went live shortly more

HP can't save print industry, but big props for trying

Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.

BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.

Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products more

GE shows off pocket-size ultrasound scanner

SAN FRANCISCO--In a wide-ranging interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, announced a low-cost and very portable ultrasound scanner called the Vscan.

"It's about the same size as a BlackBerry," Immelt said, holding up a white device that appeared to fold in the middle like a flip-phone. The top of the device showed an ultrasound image (of a patient's liver, we were told), while the bottom showed control keys.

"This is Moore's law," he said, saying that the device had the same power as a console ultrasound from two to three more

Wolfram Alpha iPhone app is cool but overpriced

The iPhone app for Wolfram Alpha (iTunes store link) got approved by Apple surprisingly quickly, I was told in a breathless e-mail from Wolfram PR on Sunday. But the real surprise was the price: The app is $49.99.

The rationale is twisted.

"It's less than half the price of a graphing calculator, but it does more," the rep told me. By the way, "price of a graphing calculator" is a calculation that Wolfram Alpha can't compute.

For much, much less than the price of a graphing calculator, or $0.00, you can point your iPhone's Safari more