roundtable

Reporters' Roundtable: CNET experts not bullish on RIM

Research in Motion was once the company making smartphones. Business boys and girls carried BlackBerrys around as not just tools but status symbols as well. For all the device's personal appeal, RIM became successful by selling BlackBerrys and their support systems to corporations.

But the real smartphone revolution was driven by consumers. Though RIM did have some success selling smartphones to end users, consumers now buy iPhones and Android phones. Furthermore, RIM's grip on the enterprise has started to slip.

Meanwhile, its robust security architecture is actually landing it in trouble with many governments, who want backdoor access to the RIM infrastructure.

The company is trying new things. It's revising its aging BlackBerry operating system. It's releasing its own tablet, the PlayBook, with a new tablet OS. And its co-CEOs are trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to convince the world that the RIM system is both supersecure and government-friendly.

So what does the future of RIM look like? We're discussing that today with three CNET experts on the topic: tablets reviewer Donald Bell, mobile-phone editor Nicole Lee, and telecommunications reporter Maggie Reardon.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Where is navigation going?

Today we're talking about car navigation. Of course, when navigation units first came out, they were seen by users as magical. But how quickly we've become accustomed to having a device in the car that can tell us how to get where we're going. Now people want to know how to get there faster than everyone else--and that means getting traffic data into our navigation systems. We're going to talk about the state of the art in car navigation, and how traffic data is becoming a bigger part of it. In particular, we're going to dive into the interesting conceptual battle between sensor-based traffic reporting and crowd-sourced traffic.

We have two great guests today. Di-Ann Eisnor runs U.S. operations and is working on the "live mapping" function for Israeli crowd-sourced navigation and real-time traffic start-up Waze. Di-Ann is a neogeography pioneer and serial entrepreneur. Prior to Waze, she started Platial, the world's first social atlas.

Craig Chapman is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrix, a major provider of traffic information, directions and driver services. He was previously development manager for the automotive business unit at Microsoft.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Dining 2.0

Today we're talking about one my favorite topics: food. Dining out, to be precise. I wrote a story in December about how at least one San Francisco restaurant owner, Mark Pastore of Incanto, had problems with OpenTable, the restaurant reservation service. I thought it was an interesting snapshot of what the Web has done time and again: upset and upend well-established business models, sometimes with unexpected and negative side effects that go along with the numerous upsides.

There are several companies affecting the restaurant business. OpenTable radically changed the way restaurants fill their seats. Yelp changed how people get reviews of restaurants, effectively killing Zagat's lock on the mobile guidebook market. Modern Web 2.0 and mobile darlings like Groupon and Foursquare are continuing to change what people pay for dining out and how they find out about restaurants.

There are lessons to be learned here that affect all small and local businesses, and that's what we are discussing today, with two guests intimately familiar with these issues.

First up, Incanto's Mark Pastore. Mark is a well-known and unconventional restaurateur and stands out in San Francisco, where it's hard for any dining establishment to get noticed. (He also owns Boccalone.)

Also joining us: John Li, co-founder of Menuism.com, a local Web start-up for reviewing restaurants and dishes. John and his team are in the middle of "dining meets Web space" and trying to break into the big leagues, and he can tell us what that's like.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Earthquake engineering

Japan will be recovering for years from the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck there a week ago. Arguably, of all the places in the world to get hit by such a disaster, Japan was the best prepared. Yet still there was devastation. Thousands of people died. Towns were literally washed away. Several nuclear reactors were damaged beyond repair. How did this happen? What technologies and engineering were used to mitigate earthquake and tsunami risks in Japan, and how did they fail?

And could it happen here?

Today we're talking about engineering for earthquakes, and how what we know about geology affects how buildings and other structures are designed for various locations.

Our experts today are Andy Thompson, an engineer at Arup and author of the book Peace of Mind in Earthquake Country, and Tom Holzer, research geologist for the Earth Hazards Team of the USGS in Menlo Park, Calif.

Want to help the victims of the Japan earthquake? Donate your old gadgets via the CNET program at Gazelle. All proceeds will go to the Red Cross.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Can the iPad be topped?

Today is iPad 2 day. People are once again lining up to buy Apple's latest new shiny toy. Why? What does Apple get right that other tablet vendors don't? We're going to talk about this release as well as how Google, Microsoft, HP, and RIM are faring in this new market.

As usual, we have two expert guests. First in the studio, Josh Lowensohn, our CNET News Apple reporter, freshly back from braving the line at the downtown San Francisco Apple store.

Joining us via Skype from Raleigh, N.C., Anand Shimpi, founder of the great tech analysis site AnandTech.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Michael Robertson on today's music industry

Today we're talking about the music industry and how the Internet has affected it. But mostly we're doing this particular episode since I got Michael Robertson to be a guest. He's has made a career out of attacking old, established industries, first by starting the digital music company MP3.com, which CNET actually acquired in 2003. Michael also started Lindows, a Linux operating system company clearly targeting Microsoft; Gizmo5, a VoIP company aimed at the telcos, and most recently DAR.fm, launched during the Demo conference. It's TiVo for radio.

Also on today: Greg Sandoval, CNET reporter and Media Maverick blogger. Greg covers digital media disruption.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Journalism in the age of WikiLeaks

On this special edition of Reporters' Roundtable, CNET Chief Political Correspondent Declan McCullagh hosts a panel discussion on Journalism in the age of WikiLeaks. Sponsored by the The Society of Professional Journalists of Northern California, this discussion covers how WikiLeaks is forcing editors and reporters to rethink traditional journalistic practices.

For example, The New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel were given a mere three weeks to decide how to handle more than 90,000 confidential documents on Afghanistan. Join us as we discuss the challenges journalists face given such information and as we consider the question of the role of professional news organizations when anyone can publish the kind of information that previously was the purview only of established news outlets.

We have a great panel of six journalists in this discussion, including reporters and editors from the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and Fast Company.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Debating the robobrains

Big news in AI this week: IBM's Watson project defeated "Jeopardy" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a three-night prime-time demo match. What does that win mean for computing, and more importantly, for humanity? That's the topic for this week's Reporters' Roundtable, and to discuss it we have two great guests, both with current books on the topics of computer vs. human competition.

First up is Stephen Baker, author of Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Baker reported on the development of Watson from inside IBM headquarters to write this book. He was BusinessWeek's senior technology writer before that.

And branching out a bit from the Watson news, we also have Brian Christian with us. He's the author of The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive, which will be out on March 1. He's also author of the recent Atlantic cover story Mind vs. Machine, which is a great primer for this topic. Both of these works tell the story of Brian's participation in the annual Loebner Prize, in which humans face off with computers in a Turing test competition to convince judges that they are human. Brian, it should be noted, was voted most human.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Who owns your online identity?

Today, we're talking about identity. You own your identity, right? That's why we talk about identity theft: Identity is clearly personal, and it can be stolen from us. But it can also, in some cases, be legally taken. If you work at a modern business and you create relationships with people during that employment, it can be argued that, if those relationships are work-related, your employer owns them. But if you create a rich social profile that supports your work, say on Facebook or Twitter, it can be unclear whose identity, persona, or reputation that is.

Meanwhile, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Google, are becoming de facto universal electronic identity providers. You can log in to many new Web sites with nothing but a Facebook ID. So does Facebook own our identity?

To discuss these topics, we've identified two experts:

Dick Hardt is a champion of what he calls Identity 2.0: a user-centric identity architecture. Previously he worked on OpenID and OAuth and championed identity work at Microsoft. Currently he's working on: an "Address Book 2.0" personal productivity assistant.

Peter Kazanjy is co-founder of Honestly.com. Formerly Unvarnished, Honestly.com is a professional reputation and peer review Web site, where people can rate others in both an authenticated yet anonymous way.

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Reporters' Roundtable: Kinect, multitouch, future of interfaces

Sick of your keyboard and mouse? Our touch points with technology are finally expanding beyond them. The Wii gave us motion-controlled games to one extent, and the Kinect took it to the next step: gamers are using their entire bodies for control. Apple, of course, has ushered in an era of multitouch and gesture-based user interfaces, and voice-operated technology is making great strides. What's next? We discuss with Ars Technica's Jon Stokes and Forrester's James McQuivey.

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