Month: March 2006

Laptop with private info of thousands of HP workers stolen From the San Francisco Chronicle: “A laptop with the personal information of about 196,0000 Hewlett-Packard current and former employees has been stolen from mutual fund company Fidelity Investments, which manages the tech giant’s pension and retirement plans.

The theft, which happened last week, prompted HP and Fidelity to alert the affected employees about the security breach. “HP is working closely with Fidelity to minimize the impact of this information breach,” said HP Spokeswoman Brigida Bergkamp. “

Answer me this. Why would any company ever allow 196,000 records to be put on a company laptop for any reason whatsoever?

Since I’ve been computing I have had three laptops stolen. One was stolen from a bedroom when I loaned it to a friend. One was taken from a hotel room when I was on vacation and one was literally taken from my office when someone walked into the office building off the street and took it from the desk. Just a few months ago a good friend of mine had his laptop stolen when his car window was smashed and it was taken. I’ve, coincidently *never* had a desktop computer stolen.

Still, I do not keep, nor would I ever keep, sensitive personal information on a laptop’s hard drive. There is no reason possible to justify this. Any sensitive personal information can be accessed via secure connections through web based servers these days.

This is not the first high profile laptop theft that we’ve heard of compromising your personal information. This is just terrible and the government should do more to make these companies pay when they do something as idiotic as put all of your personal information on some employee’s laptop. 196,000 names!

“Crowley said Fidelity does not typically carry around sensitive information in laptops. But she noted company representatives sometimes store information in laptops in important meetings with clients.” Why? Why would they ever need this information on a laptop for an “important meeting with clients?” Is Fidelity so backwards that they can’t figure out how to demo their technology by going through secure web connections. I’m glad Fidelity doesn’t manage my retirement plan and if they did I’d hope they’d be fired for “sometimes storing information in laptops for important meetings with clients.”

Since when are their “important meetings” more important than 196,000 people’s personal financial data?

Why Google Finance Makes Me Sad (by Jeremy Zawodny): Personally I’m not a big fan of the finance sites at either Google or Yahoo!. Not because they are not cool technology but because I’m much more interested in the actual technology itself than the financial aspects of profiting from the stocks associated with the underlying technology. This said, I do think it is very cool that Yahoo’s! Jeremy Zawodny feels that he has the freedom to blog and put a post out that is openly critical of his employer Yahoo!.

From Zawodny: “It makes me sad because I end up thinking about how Yahoo! Finance has stagnated for a long time. It never really recovered from the pain of the dotcom crash. So many of my old Finance coworkers have either left the company or moved on to other groups (several moved into Search last year). Heck, I encouraged many of them to get out!

There was a lack of leadership and, even more importantly, a serious LACK OF VISION. It really disappointed me.”

The fact that Zawodny can feel free to blog the truth, even when it is not in the interest of his employer, tells me that Yahoo! is indeed a very cool place to work. Although as a big time blogger Zawodny probably is somewhat insulated from a corporate reaction (it would not look good to see a Yahoo! fires blogger headline) it is positive that he feels comfortable enough having this discussion in a public space out from behind the closed doors of Yahoo!

Thanks Jeremy and good for you.

Yesterday afternoon I spent some time chatting and catching up with Kristopher Tate. Tate is the 17 year old wunderkind developer responsible for Zooomr, the latest entry into the online photo sharing space. Earlier this month Web 2.0 high priest Michael Arrington blessed Zooomr with the headline “Flickr Has Some Catching Up to Do,” and dubbed the new photo sharing service “Flickr on steroids.”

While I wouldn’t exactly characterize Zooomr as “Flickr on steroids,” I will say that I am very impressed by the technology and even more impressed by where Tate is headed with his project. Especially interesting is the fact that Tate announced informaly last night at the SF Web Innovators Network monthly meeting that Zooomr now supports the Flickr API. According to Tate, conversion for developers is as simple as changing flickr.com to zooomr.com.

Using Flickr’s open protocol and the documentation on their site, Tate has reconstructed Flickr’s API to be used with Zooomr. (What in the world did Tate’s parents feed that kid for breakfast — I need to make sure my four young ones get on that diet). Tate told me that because Zooomr is written in Python, building extensions for it by outside developers is relatively easy. Tate’s official announcement regarding the API will be made on Monday.

Thus far Zooomr has been entirely self funded by Tate, a self taught computer prodigy. Although Tate started playing with computers at age four, he didn’t really start programming until age five. He admitted to me that he was mostly interested in hardware up until about age 10 when he started screwing around with software. “I just like this stuff,” he said.

So what is Zooomr all about? First the basics. Similar to Flickr, although slightly cheaper than Flickr at $20 per year, the site offers two versions — an advertising supported free version with limited bandwidth and a paid service.

Also like Flickr, Zooomr relies on a lot of the ajaxy type eye candy that makes it super sexy. I really enjoyed their “lightbox” method of viewing photographs. With the lightbox view the photo is essentially highlighted in the middle of the screen while the background on your PC is darkened out. It feels very elegant and reminds me of being in a virtual art gallery or museum. You can see the screenshot below to see what I mean. Transitions are a little slow between photos when using lightbox but I like it a lot more than Flickr’s similar slideshow view that they offer.

Also like Flickr (and I mean really like Flickr), you can view your photos in square, thumbnail, small, medium and large views. Zooomr also generates html code to allow you to paste the Zooomer photo into your blog and share it with the rest of the world (the photos in this article are all blogged from Zooomr).

Tate plans to focus much of his attention in the coming months on developing rich and powerful new ways to share metadata associated with photographs. Already he has in place an interesting mashup with his service and Google maps that is capturing geotags where available and mapping photos on the site on a Google map. You can then click through on a user’s pin on the map and find other photos geotagged close to the same site. This would seem like interesting technology if you were going to take a trip somewhere and wanted to check out the sites ahead of time or if you were on vacation and were looking for interesting sites to go see and photograph yourself.

Zooomr also, in addition to letting you tag your photos, has kind of an interesting angle on allowing you to use a function called “add people” where you can identify people that appear in photos. There is then a section of Zooomr that actually ranks popularity and can show you all of the photos that you are in. This seems like smart technology and would seem to appeal to the MySpace crowd where kids are rapidly snapping shots of them and their friends and uploading them. Adding people specifically vs. free form tagging people’s names seems like an easier way for many to understand and group this type of metadata.

The most interesting aspect of metadata of all though Zooomr though is the ability to attach audio .mp3 and .wav files to your photos — what Tate calls Zoomrtations. While photos are easy for anyone to take and upload, video by contrast is generally difficult to take, edit and upload. By offering the ability to add recorded audio to photos, Zooomr is potentially signficantly enhancing the photo sharing experience.

One of the things you have seen emerge on Flickr is a certain type of Flickr female superstar often focusing much of their work on self portraiture. While some have criticized these photos as self indulgent they are undeniably a strong draw for the viewers of Flickr. _Rebekka, a sexy Icelandic single mother of two, may be the singlemost popular photographer on Flickr. I can imagine that many might find the _Rebekka viewing experience to be enhanced by hearing her annote her photos in her own voice. It’s an interesting wrinkle that would be sure to effect popularity.

Two other zooomrtations worth checking out are from Zooomr user thaumata. Here and here.

More than just popularity though, using audio annotation for online photosharing makes great sense on a much larger level. How cool would it be for my mother to be able to hear my son Jackson describe a photo he took in his own voice. And how cool would it be for Jackson to hear grandma in her own voice describe the photos from her current vacation. This is slick technology.

Unlike Flickr, Zooomr is not focusing as much of their resources at present on the various aspect of building a social community. Rather Zooomr at present is choosing instead to focus more on enriching the metadata experience. Not that Zooomr will not incorporate more social and community building in the future though. When I asked Tate about adding groups to Zooomr he said that although he has thought about it and that there is a strong liklihood of forums coming to Zooomr that he is hesitant at the moment because he doesn’t have the time to monitor them and that according to him there are “many new innovations that are on the table that I would rather get out then spend the time on forums at present.”

What are some of these new innovations that will be coming out from Zooomr shortly? According to Tate we should expect to see new mobile technologies for photo sharing, better sets as well as an online ranking system where users can rank photos on a scale of 1-5 where 5’s become your favorites and the other data is contributed towards an algorithm similar to Flickr’s “interestingness” that Tate instead calls “Awesomeness/Wickedness.” Expect to see “Awesoneness/Wickedness” in the next Zooomr release.

At present you can upload photos directly to the site or you can use bulk uploading tools developed for both the Mac and PC that you can download here.

You can use 5 different existing methods to sign on to Zooomr: Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google, and Meetro. If you don’t already have an account with one of those services Zooomr prompts you to create an ID and use OpenID. The logon on process with OpenID is still a bit clunky and there are still some very basic things that need to be fixed (and I’m sure will in the next release — like being able to upload your photo icon for your personal profile), but all in all Zooomr is pretty darn impressive. Although I could never imagine ditching Flickr for Zooomr,
I suspect that I may use both for a while and follow their respective advances. They are two very different places with each having their own set of postives and negatives.

Although Tate is aware that visitors from Yahoo Corporate have been visiting his site quite recently he is quick to point out that his site is focused on different things than Flickr: “I like Yahoo! and Flickr, I think they are great people” said Tate. “What Zooomr tries to accomplish is not organizing like Flickr does so well, but actually getting at the metadata that a photo represents.” Adding, “Photos mean a lot to me — I hope that no matter which technology is at the forefront, photos get represented in the light that they deserve.”

Indeed.

By Davis Freeberg

I remember the first time that I went shopping for a television. As a poor college student, I knew that my funds were limited, yet I still wanted the biggest TV that I could find. At the time 19″ sets were priced at $200 and it seemed like the prices went up by about $10 an inch, until you hit the 32″ threshold. After the 32″ sets, the prices seemed to jump by about $150. Being a bargain minded shopper I seized upon the 32″ set as being the best value for my money, but also offering the largest screen size.

Two years ago when I was finally ready to make the upgrade to a big screen TV, I used the same philosphy in my approach. At the time prices on the 42″ plasmas were very tempting, but then I noticed that I could get a 60″ rear projector for about $3,500 and I starting to look into it more seriously. It was tough choosing between the slim plasma design or the larger screen size, but ultimately the screen size won me over and I purchased a 60″ Sony Wega rear projector TV.

Sony did a really good job with the design. Despite being a rear projector set, the depth of the TV is only about 22 inches deep. While this isn’t plasma impressive, it’s depth was still less then my previous 32″ Panasonic even though the screen size is significantly larger.

The picture quality on the big screen varies depending upon whether you are watching HDTV or standard definition. HDTV definetely looks great. It may just be my imagination, but sporting events seem to look the best on this set. It could just be the larger screen size, but sports always seem to look especially crisp. It’s hard for me to get a true sense of how good the picture quality really is because the KF-60WE610 model that I bought only supports 720p resolution. For most of the public I think that this is clear enough, but in retropsect, I do wish that I would have purchased the more expensive 1080p KDS-R60XBR1 model instead. In reality, I probably couldn’t tell the difference between the two, but psychologically I’m sure that I would think it looked better.

I might not be able to tell the difference between 720p or 1080p, but the difference between standard definition and high definition is pretty dramatic on the 60″ set. Standard definition TV looks terrible. The large screen degrades the quality pretty significantly. The quality looks about the same as when you try and watch a .mpeg in full screen mode with an aspect of 320×240. It doesn’t make it impossible to watch, but it’s a huge step down compared to the HD programming.

Compared to SD programming, DVDs look great on the set, but you can tell that the HDTV is just a little bit better. The only real drawback to the video presentation is that the screen that they used seems to be especially reflective with light. If you watch TV mostly in the dark, you’ll never notice it, but if you’re trying to catch up on your daytime soaps, then you’ll definetely need a good set of blinds.

I’ve experiemented a little bit with the audio quality and while it’s on par with any standard definition set on the market, it didn’t blow me away compared to my home theater system. With 30 watts of output, you should be able to get more then enough volume out of it, but despite the audio quality being clear it doesn’t have the same depth that you can achieve with a complete home theater setup. For some this won’t be as important, but believe me hearing Michael Myers breathing behind my neck made Halloween about 20 times more scary.

Over the last year and a half I’ve probably used at least 2,000 hours of lamp light and have yet to run into any major problems. I have noticed that on a half a dozen occasions, I’ve had to completely cutoff power to the unit in order to get the lamp to light, but it’s always turned back on after I’ve recycled it’s power. I know that models produced prior to January 2004 have had issues with this but my set was made after that. I’m not sure how many hours of lamp light my set is designed to take, but I know that the estimated life of the more expensive KDS-R60XBR1 model is supposed to be around 6,000 – 8,000 hours. I figure that this should give me at least 3 – 4 more years of years of heavy use before I need to worry about upgrading to a better set.

The TV also has some additional functionality that I haven’t tested out, but it supports cable card and it has the ability to hook up your computer directly to the TV. I’m a little disappointed that we don’t see any ethernet support, but you can play mp3s and photos off of a memory card. Somehow limiting my music collection to a memory card fails to excite me, but someone at Sony must have liked the idea.

In total the set features seven different input channels and supports every video input out there, unfortunately only two of it’s channels are dedicated to HDTV. Because my home theater system only supports an HDMI connection, I’m forced to juggle between Cable, DVDs and the Xbox 360. I could go out and get a splitter box, but I swore those off after I got rid of my Nintendo & both of my playstations.

Overall I’ve had a great experience with my TV and would recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have their heart already set on a flat screen. The TV may end up taking up a bit more space, but the extra screen space is well worth it. While I don’t believe that Sony is still producing my model, their 1080p model currently sells for $3,500 – $4,500 depending on the merchant.

TV Here, There, Everywhere – New York Times The New York Times is out with a basic overview piece on TV placeshifting and focuses a lot on Slingbox. Slingbox has been getting a ton of attention lately and most recently has announced support for a SlingPlayer Mobile for Pocket PC beta.

From Engadget: “The SlingPlayer software — which lets broadband-enabled WinMo devices stream live and recorded TV from a remote SlingBox — works as a 30-day trial, after which time it can be purchased for $30 (although it’s free with any new ‘Box prior to April 26th).”

I brought a Slingbox home to hook it up and test it out and was pretty much unimpressed. I never did actually get it to work because it required a seperate ethernet connection in and where I have my satellite receiver I was already using the ethernet in for my Media Center PC.

I have used Orb on the other hand which works great, is free, and doesn’t require a seperate ethernet connection beyond what is already going into my PC. Of course Orb requires a PC with a TV tuner whereas Slingbox can work with a TiVo (although with plugins, etc. you can still access Orb with Tivo), but my question is why in the world would anyone who does have a Media Center PC ever use Slingbox?

Engadget seems to like Slingbox more saying, “Before scoffing at what you think is the same service Orb charges $0 for, consider that the Sling service costs nothing as well, so all you’re paying for is the client (well, and the box, if you don’t already have one), which trumps Orb in features, convenience, and interface.”

I guess I just don’t get it. I can get Orb for, well free, no fee to use, no hardware to buy, etc. etc. Or I can pay for a Slingbox box, have one more thing cluttering up my living room, be required to put a new ethernet jack or switch in for something that supposedly “trumps Orb in features, convenience, and interface.”

Perhaps there is more that I’m not getting here but you basically use this device to watch all of your TV (and in the case of Orb also access your music, digital photos, etc.). I’ve used Orb now and it is super easy and does a great job recording and playing back your TV (albeit in crappy low res quality). Other than watching TV (which both can do) what features make Slingbox worth spending the extra money on?

I’m not sure why Engadget says Slingbox is more “convenient” than Orb. JupiterMedia Analyst Michael Gartenberg in his post on the two technologies said, “Orb by contrast doesn’t require you to do anything to your router, it just works which is much more user friendly.” Gartenberg seemed to feel that the chief advantage of Slingbox over Orb was that Orb required a PC. But if you’ve already got a PC with a tuner card it would seem that Orb would be the way to go.

Again, Gartenberg: “If you do have one or are interested in your music, pictures and other video content from your Windows XP PC, Orb is a better choice (It’s not clear to me if the Slingbox will support an MCE remotely. When I spoke with their CEO he assured me it would but I don’t know if it made it into the final release yet.) Orb also support a lot more mobile platforms at the moment so if you’re on the road with a Windows Smartphone, PocketPC, Macintosh or any device with a web browser and either Windows Media or REAL, you can connect.”

Personally the interface of Orb works just fine for me. My sister has also been able to use my Orb from Egypt just fine (the only way to get American TV over there).

One thing that is for sure though is that this technology is certainly getting a lot of attention. Personally I think Microsoft should just buy Orb and build their place shifting technology into Media Center, but then again perhaps the jury still isn’t out on the legality of place shifting and Microsoft is not ready for potential liability over the technology that we could see in the future. And besides Orb works just fine with Media Center as it is today without having to buy them.

Chris Lanier’s Blog : Sony VGP-XL1B2 Standalone DVD Changer! Chris Lanier blogs about the availability of the new Sony VAIO VGP-XL1B2 200 disc standalone CD DVD changer for Media Center. This looks like very slick technology. I’ve emailed Sony and their PR firm asking about getting a demo to review.

TiVo Marketing Manager Bob Pony posts over in the TiVo Community Forum that TiVo is extending their lifetime service (originally to be phased out on March 15th) to April 15th. If you want lifetime service on a Series 2 TiVo you’ve got a second chance to get it.

When TiVo made their announcement to drop lifetime service in their most recent conference call they received a lot of heat after the fact at places like Slashdot with folks swearing they would never buy a TiVo again with lifetime service etc.

I’d previously suggested that TiVo use a limited availibility of the return of the lifetime service when launching Series 3 later this year and that they consider using it as a tool to pump up sales from time to time if they lag by opening the lifetime service window.

Personally I’m not sure why anyone would actually buy a Series 2 TiVo right now with Series 3s due out later this year (although the Series 3 of course will most likely cost *a lot* more money), but if you wanted one and plan on using it for a long time lifetime service is definitely the best value play.

From TiVo Community Forum:

“We appreciate the feedback and apologize if some of our agents are providing inaccurate information.

We know that there have been retail advertisements which refer to product lifetime, and there have been requests here for a longer opportunity to purchase lifetime before it’s discontinued. As a result, we have decided to offer product lifetime as a subscription option through 4/15/06, even for those that have purchased since 3/15 (you do have to call to activate lifetime service though, and lifetime is not applicable for systems purchased via a bundle plan).

Our customer service team is being updated today, so please wait until later today or tomorrow and call back once the message has been delivered to all the agents.

Cheers,
Pony

__________________
TiVo Product Marketing”