Need To Pump Up Your iPhone Voice Recordings? The Pint-Sized iRig MIC Cast Is Now Shipping

Need To Pump Up Your iPhone Voice Recordings? The Pint-Sized iRig MIC Cast Is Now Shipping

The microphone in the iPhone 4S is pretty good â€" I have found it to capture excellent quality on all my consumer-ish recordings and videos. Of course, that is not to say it could not be improved.

When the iRig MIC Cast was announced at CES this year, I was pretty excited. I have gotten a lot of use out of the original iRig MIC and this miniaturized version seemed poised to make my travel recordings an even more portable affair.

Thankfully, it did not disappoint. The mic’s dual gain setting really extended the abilities of my iPhone for my consumer Video/Audio recordings, which is especially impressive considering the microphone is about the size of a half dollar. The new iRig also comes with a desktop stand to prop my phone while I’m recording, and I while didn’t use it too often, it could definitely come in handy for sit-down interviews and the like. Oh, and in case you felt some weird urge to do so, it works just fine when taking phone calls too.

While I am not sure what other non-iOS devices are actually supported, I was able to get it to work with things like the Korg Kaossilator 2 â€" a nifty bonus for sure.

What can I say, I am a fan of this little gadget in all of it’s portable glory. It’s shipping today and costs $ 39.99/€29.99. More info at www.irigmiccast.com

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Three Questions for PayPal’s New Boss

Three Questions for PayPal’s New Boss

Payment president: David Marcus of PayPal.
PayPal

Three Questions for PayPal’s New Boss

David Marcus aims to push the service into physical stores.

• Wednesday, May 30, 2012
• By Rachel Metz

PayPal has built up its mobile offerings in the past several years, so it was no surprise when it named David Marcus, formerly its vice president of mobile, as president in March.

Marcus joined PayPal in August 2011, when eBay paid $ 240 million for his startup, Zong, which lets someone using the service use his phone number to shop on his phone and get billed through his wireless carrier.

Last week, PayPal announced that 15 new retailersâ€"including Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, and JCPenneyâ€"will soon accept PayPal in their brick-and-mortar locations. The Home Depot already accepts PayPal in most of its 2,000 U.S. stores.

1. Soon I’ll be able to use PayPal at a variety of retailers, just by providing my cell-phone number and PIN. Are we on the verge of getting rid of cash and credit cards?

Ultimately the consumers will decide how they want to pay. But the payment experience, to me, is going to move out of the way. My favorite [example] is location-based payments, where the merchant knows you’re in the store, and the transaction happens with no friction, flawlessly, without you doing anything.

2. What’s the advantage of that?

That becomes a tool for the merchant to treat you well and to welcome you. If you go to Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco but now you want to go to Peet’s Coffee in Palo Alto, you’re greeted by your name despite the fact that it’s your first time in that store. They know what your favorite drink is, and they’ll prepare it for you. We remove the friction from the payment experienceâ€"nobody likes to pay, everybody likes to shopâ€"but we also, by doing that, enable you to have the best possible shopping experience.

3. There are a lot of companies that have come up with innovative ideas in mobile payments, including Zong, the company you ran before it was bought by eBay, PayPal’s parent company. What’s PayPal’s advantage?

Innovation at scale in payments is really hard. It’s really easy to get some initial buzz when you launch a product. To this day, no one has succeeded signing up consumers at a meaningful scale for a digital wallet serviceâ€"no one except us. We need to continue innovating, [but] as long as we continue doing that, because we have the scale advantage, we’ll be fine.

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Timing Is Everything: Indie Movie Discovery Platform Prescreen To Close Its Doors

Timing Is Everything: Indie Movie Discovery Platform Prescreen To Close Its Doors

It was just last September that we covered the launch of Prescreen, the startup founded by former Groupon and Zoosk execs that aimed to help independent films find the publicity they nearly always lack. To do so, they built a curated, on-demand video platform that would give filmmakers and distributors an alternative to traditional ad and distribution channels, while giving users an easy way to discover low-budget films they wouldn’t otherwise.

In February, Prescreen redesigned and relaunched with Facebook Open Graph integration, and in March added Netflix founding exec Mitch Lowe to its advisory board. Things were looking good.

But, as it goes in Startup Land, sometimes even veteran advisors, seed capital, and a good idea aren’t enough to keep a business afloat. Yesterday, Prescreen notified its users that it will be suspending its beta until further notice. While this doesn’t exactly mean that the startup has hit the deadpool, for all intents and purposes for its users, Prescreen is no longer operational.

Prescreen co-founder Shawn Bercuson tells us that, while the site will be officially closing its doors tomorrow, it’s reimbursing its users who had paid for movies â€" as well as its filmmakers â€" and is making an effort to put users who want to continue finding indie movies in touch with their creators. The startup will officially remain in a kind of holding pattern while the founders and advisors consider their options, as Bercuson says that it’s had interest from other companies in terms of both acquisition and merger.

That being said, much of the team has found â€" or is beginning to find â€" work elsewhere. And with $ 1.4 million raised from from the likes of Former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, Ed Cluss, Auren Hoffman of Rapleaf, Saad Khan of CMEA Capital, and having featured 168 films, rented more than 10K movies and having attracted over 115K subscribers (10 percent of whom became paying customers), it’s a disappointing end for the team.

“We’re obviously disappointed,” said Bercuson, who was also a founding ThePoint/Groupon employee, “but we’re going back to the drawing board proud of what we’ve accomplished … we see this is a part of the game we chose to play and are excited to apply what we’ve learned to our next endeavors.”

The decision to move on is also likely a result of something many founders and entrepreneurs are familiar with: Timing. As Marc Andreessen says, for startups, “timing is everything, but it’s also the hardest thing to control … being too early is a bigger problem for entrepreneurs than not being correct. It’s very hard to sit and just wait for things to arrive. It almost never works. You burn through your capital…”

While Prescreen saw interest both from users and filmmakers (and the co-founder added that some of its investors were willing to re-up), timing is crucial. The space is hot, and Bercuson believes that it’s inevitable that a platform like Prescreen will be successful, but the startup just couldn’t continue to bet on third-parties â€" or play the waiting game.

In the startup ecosystem, one company doing well often leads to success for many, but in Hollywood, the CEO says, it’s an individual endeavor. At this point, studios and executives see online, on-demand platforms like Prescreen as competition, and the whole digital realm as a “zero sum game,” he says.

I would argue that this is a frustration cord-cutters and everyone who consumes movies and TV shows online is familiar with â€" don’t want to pay for a subscription to HBO, but you want to watch the new Game Of Thrones episode without breakin’ da law? Good luck.

Content should live anywhere that people want to consume it, and eventually that will be the case. But change has been slow, as those who control rights, networks, and the distribution of content continue to fight it, Aereo being a good example. That may be the case with Prescreen, or it could be a number of other factors. We’ll update as wel learn more.

But, startups are on a different timeline, the Prescreen CEO admitted, and at this point it just wasn’t worth it for them to wait it out. Without mind-melting traction and with many obstacles still ahead, the costs were too high.

For now, the founders are considering whether to sell off the technology and move on or opt for a merger, perhaps working within a bigger entity that has more developed inroads in the industry. They haven’t ruled out the idea of eventually re-launching the website as is, with a new approach, but for now, that’s up in the air.

For more on Prescreen, you can find it here before the doors close on Friday. The startup’s notice to users is below:

Notice below:

Prescreen Notice of Change of Service

Please be advised that on Thursday, May 31, 2012, Prescreen will be suspending our initial beta test until further notice. We very much appreciate your interest in our service and hope that you enjoyed your experience with Prescreen.

In early 2011, we started Prescreen because we believed the future of film discovery and distribution is digital. Last September, we launched the beta version of our site to test this premise. In just 8 months, we proved that this is likely to be the case. In total, Prescreen featured 168 films, rented more than 10,000 movies, and saw more than 115,000 subscribers opt in to receive Prescreen movies. That said, we’re perfectionists and we still don’t believe we’ve seized the opportunity. For now, we’re going back to the drawing board. When we come out on the other side, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Team Prescreen thanks you for your support from the bottom of our digital hearts

Best,
Team Prescreen

Ryan Lawler contributed to this story

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Google Applies for .Google, .Docs, .YouTube and .LOL Top-Level Domains

Google Applies for .Google, .Docs, .YouTube and .LOL Top-Level Domains

Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google’s chief Internet evangelist and “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks ” have interesting and creative potential,” including .lol.

Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) like these will soon become a reality on the Internet and will work side-by-side with today’s 28 TLDs like .com, .org, .net and more obscure ones like .jobs and .aero. This new program will likely create somewhere between 300 and 1000 new gTLDs per year. Applicants have to pay a $ 185,000 evaluation fee, as well as additional fees once their applications have been accepted.

Here are some of the domains Google applied for (and the company’s reasoning behind applying for them):

• Our trademarks, like .google
• Domains related to our core business, like .docs
• Domains that will improve user experience, such as .youtube, which can increase the ease with which YouTube channels and genres can be identified
• Domains we think have interesting and creative potential, such as .lol

Chances are, this is just a small glimpse into all of the gTLDs Google applied for. As Cerf notes, Google is “just beginning to explore this potential source of innovation on the web, and we are curious to see how these proposed new TLDs will fare in the existing TLD environment. By opening up more choices for Internet domain names, we hope people will find options for more diverseâ€"and perhaps shorterâ€"signposts in cyberspace.”

Besides Google, a number of other companies today announced the gTLDs they applies for as well. Web.com, for example, said that it applied for .web.

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First Impressions On Fluent, The Startup Promising “The Future Of Email”

First Impressions On Fluent, The Startup Promising “The Future Of Email”

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham recently begged entrepreneurs to consider “frightening ambitious startup ideas,” like building a better search engine or replacing universities. “Any one of them could make you a billionaire,” said Graham. “That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet when I describe these ideas you may notice you find yourself shrinking away from them,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s not a sign of weakness. Arguably it’s a sign of sanity. The biggest startup ideas are terrifying.”

Among those terrifying ideas was rethinking the inbox, and in particular, the Gmail inbox. Although there has been much complaining about the sorry state of email, very few companies are addressing the situation. It’s just too hard. But there is an interesting startup to watch in this space, which happens to be thinking about the bigger picture. The somewhat stealthy Fluent is not shy about its vision either, offering a tagline that boldly proclaims it’s offering “the future of email.” But can it deliver?

For starters, if anyone can ever disrupt email, why not three ex-Googlers who spent years working on Google Wave, among other things? Jochen Bekmann, Cameron Adams and Dhanji R. Prasanna have the technical expertise (seriously, check the bios), and unlike the shuttered Wave experiment, Fluent is an entirely more functional and more attractive product. While many scoffed at Wave’s confusing, engineer-driven design, Fluent is the opposite. It’s simple, streamlined, and easy to use.

Currently, if you had to compare Fluent to something, then “the future of email” looks a lot like a web-based version of Sparrow, an email client which has been achieved some popularity among the Mac/iOS crowd. But Fluent brings a lot of new ideas to the table. Plus, it’s dreaming a bit larger, too. By starting with a web app, the team is building a front-end email client which could address users on any platform, desktop or mobile. Mac, PC or Linux. Phone or tablet. Or refrigerator…or so jokes(?) the company via blog post.

“Email hasn’t been innovated in 20 years,” explains Adams. “But in the last decade, there’s been a lot of change in how people communicate.” Communication is now more informal, more social. But while social messaging â€" like Facebook messages or Twitter direct messages â€" is good for quick one-on-one conversations, when you want to talk about multiple things, it’s easy for streams to get cluttered. Gmail helped with this by introducing threaded messages, but as you read, write and reply to email, there’s still a lot of context switching involved.

Fluent operates differently. Composing, replying, reading, archiving, deleting, searching, starring and “to-do”ing email can all be done within the one stream-like interface, no switched needed.

The Mobile Experience

While not there yet in terms of implementation, the company has a decidedly mobile-first mindset when it comes to using Fluent on smaller screens, like smartphones and iPads. The concept video (below), makes using Fluent on mobile seem more akin to navigating through a fun Twitter app than parsing an inbox. Swipes, gestures and touches let you perform tasks quickly, with optimizations for the screen size in question.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with all the drooling.

It Is Not An Alternative To Gmail, Just A Better Front-end

Today, Fluent is not an alternative to Gmail â€" it’s a cloud-based email client. The platform supports Gmail and Google Apps, and more email services will be added in the future. The company doesn’t plan to hand out their own email addresses (which could be truly disruptive to Gmail), preferring to operate as a new front-end to whichever inbox you use. Eventually, it will support IMAP and Exchange, too.  There are no plans to innovate in terms of email protocols, however, as Graham suggested, despite the team’s Google Wave backgrounds.

That being said, Fluent still has major potential. Fluent’s interface is elegant, presenting conversations as threads which you can step through with clicks or the familiar Google shortcuts (j, k to move forward and backward, e.g.).

But unlike most email systems, which require you to click to open a message, type, then hit “reply,” you can reply from the main inbox view in Fluent. That makes reading through your emails in Fluent more like scrolling through your Facebook News Feed and leaving comments. Want to reply? Just type in the “reply” box beneath the email thread, then hit send. As with Gmail, you can also star items from the main inbox view.

What’s New: To-Do’s, Attachment View, Instant Search & More 

Also unlike Gmail, it only takes one click to turn an email into a to-do item. (In Gmail, you check the email, click “More,” then “Add to Tasks.” In Fluent, you click the checkmark.) Starred emails, to-dos and your Gmail labels are all available from the left side of the screen (or at the bottom in the current mobile view) for easy access.

There’s also an attachment view which lets you visually search through emailed files, filtering for documents, images, zip files, audio, or video. These concepts are not new (remember Xoopit?), but they’re implemented in a way that makes you thump your head, wondering “why hasn’t someone done this before?” (For what it’s worth, Sparrow is also rethinking attachments in other ways that make sense.) Adams says that the attachment view, as it exists now, is only “a taste” of what’s to come.

“People use email as a defacto backup system, but accessing those files is quite hard,” he says. “We want to make it more like a file system.” In the future, Fluent will let you cluster files by version, organize them with labels, make them easily searchable and let you filter them by time, person and filetype.

Even more impressive than all the above is Fluent’s instant search. This is potentially the service’s “killer” feature. When you start typing in Sparrow or Gmail’s search box, you’re given auto-complete suggestions in a drop-down beneath the search box. Although Sparrow’s are pretty smart, in Fluent you’ll see actual emails matching your keywords appear instantly. The drop-down box’s suggestions show matching contacts, allowing you to find either a contact or email from one search interface. Fluent’s search feature doesn’t wait until you’ve completed a word, it’s truly instantaneous. Fortunate enough to test the service myself, I can confirm that despite its early, wobbly, private beta: Fluent’s instant search is crazy, crazy fast. It’s like Google Instant for your inbox. Which, of course, then begs the question: why isn’t Google doing this? (Apparently, Google+ Circles integration was the priority there.)

Other features in the works include a better contacts management experience, showing a timeline, history, and pattern of your communications, an email summarization feature which will aggregate and summarize things like social media updates or mailing list threads, plus other more common additions, like support for email signatures. Eventually, an open API will be available, too.

Can Power Users Switch?

Could a Gmail power user switch to Fluent today, assuming stability? Of that, I’m not sure. Here’s why:

• At present, it lacks a true “priority inbox” functionality which many power users have come to rely on, instead favoring the stream-like view.
• There isn’t an easy way to see important mail (i.e., “important” as determined by Gmail’s filter) or just important + unread, for example, which are often critical tools for getting through a large number of messages. Right now, “priority” mail is tucked away under a label, for example.
• It’s psychologically challenging to adjust from an inbox segmented into sections (important, unread, starred, etc.) to one where emails are simply listed chronologically, starred and non-starred all mixed together in one view. (Obviously, these concerns apply more to some Gmail users than others. It depends on how you prefer to view your inbox.) But the company plans to integrate priority mail deeper into the system, while also being more transparent about why things were marked priority, too. And a follower-like model for contacts will allow you to manage who gets flagged as “priority” in the future.
• More critically, though, I’m concerned that the “compact” view in Gmail still achieves a better at-a-glance view of the inbox than Fluent’s does, which is not nearly as compact and loads more emails dynamically as you scroll down. This seems to be thought of as a feature, but I’m not convinced. I’d like to see some 40 or 50 emails in one view before worrying about it “loading” more.

In other words, despite its good looks, Fluent is still walking a fine line between favoring pretty over powerful. Your mileage, as they say, may vary. And all this is subject to change.

That said, the overall workflow, the ease of to-do’s, and the clever attachment view are all powerful enough features that Fluent could easily grab early adopters in search of alternative solutions. As the startup shakes out the kinks (and there are kinks â€" scaling, stability, syncing), it’s a given that it will at least attract a Sparrow-sized audience, if not larger.

WHEN CAN YOU HAVE IT?!!

The saddest thing about Fluent, the so-called “future of email?” It’s not ready for you to use yet! When asked when it would be available to a wider launch, co-founder Jochen Bekmann told me, “we hope to be able to open wider in a few months, mostly depending on whether we have funding to pay for servers and refined some of our features.”

Wait, “depending on whether we have funding to pay for servers?”Hurry up with that funding, investors. (Fluent says seed round talks are “pretty far along,” thank goodness, and should have some news this summer). A staged rollout will soon follow.

Since I can’t show off my *actual* inbox, here are some sanitized screenshots. My iTunes folder:

Some attachments:

Compose screen (it pops up over current window, in this case, my empty to-do’s section):

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Here Come the Arctic Drones

Here Come the Arctic Drones

As it becomes increasingly clear that climate change and the race for new sources of oil and gas are going to turn Earth’s poles into hotbeds of military contention, Northrup Grumman is responding by offering Canada a drone that can fly under even the harshest of conditions.

The RQ-4 Global Hawk has been used by the US military for surveillance since its introduction in 1998. And now it’s going to get a second life protecting Canada from the Reds, or whoever else wants to dispute their claims on their own resource-rich northern wastes. 

Fightglobal reports:

Dubbed the Polar Hawk, the aircraft is a modified version of the basic Block 30 airframe. […] To meet Canada’s specific requirements, the aircraft’s satellite communications system has been modified to cope with the spotty coverage found in the arctic. The aircraft would also have wing deicing and engine anti-icing capability

The Polar Hawk can survey 40,000 square miles of territory a day, which means it would take only three of them to monitor all of Canada’s northern reaches. Which is good, because one Hawk plus all its support infrastructure is $ 215 million.

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Is This the Key to Vastly Better Batteries?

Is This the Key to Vastly Better Batteries?

Power maker: This component is part of a new, cheaper process to make ionic liquids (upper left) that could greatly boost the storage capacity of batteries.
Boulder Ionics

Is This the Key to Vastly Better Batteries?

One company thinks it’s solved a key problem that’s been holding back new energy technology.

• Thursday, May 31, 2012
• By Kevin Bullis

Researchers are experimenting with a handful of ideas that could make batteries vastly better than they are today, which could lead to more affordable electric cars and cheaper ways to store solar power to use at night. But many of these approaches have one thing in common: they aren’t practical because of the shortcomings of existing battery electrolytes.

Jerry Martin, CEO and cofounder of a small startup in Colorado, says his companyâ€"Boulder Ionicsâ€"is developing a type of electrolyte that would enable high-performance batteries. The electrolyte, made from ionic liquidsâ€"salts that are molten below 100 ?Câ€"can operate at high voltages and temperatures, isn’t flammable, and doesn’t evaporate. Ionic liquids are normally expensive to produce, but Boulder Ionics is developing a cheaper manufacturing process.

Replacing conventional electrolytes with ionic liquids could double the energy storage capacity of ultracapacitors by allowing them to be charged to higher voltages. That could make it possible to replace a starter battery in a car with a battery the size of a flashlight, Martin says.

The electrolytes could also help improve the storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries, the kind used in electric vehicles and mobile phones; and they could help make rechargeable metal-air batteries practical. In theory, such batteries could store 10 times as much energy as conventional lithium-ion batteries.

Boulder Ionics, which is a year-and-a-half old, has built and demonstrated the key pieces of equipment needed for its process and used them to make evaluation samples for battery manufacturers. Earlier this year, it raised $ 4.3 million in venture capital.

Martin says his company’s process could actually make ionic liquids that are cheaper than conventional electrolytes per watt-hour of energy storage in the batteries they enable.

The company is reducing the cost of making them in two main ways. First, it’s switching from a batch process to a continuous one. This is far fasterâ€"it takes six minutes to make ionic liquid electrolyte, compared to three days for a conventional processâ€"and allows the company to produce more material with a given-size piece of equipment, which reduces capital costs. Instead of building a large chemical plant, it would be possible to make enough ionic liquid for 100,000 electric cars in a space the size of a living room, Martin says.

The continuous process also gives Boulder Ionics more precise control over the chemical reactions involved, which reduces impurities. Martin says this makes costly purification steps unnecessary. Scaling up continuous production could prove a challenge, however.

For use in ultracapacitors, the new ionic liquid electrolyte can simply replace a conventional one. “It’s a nearly drop-in replacement, compatible with existing production lines,” Martin says. But battery makers will need to switch to new electrode materials that operate at higher voltages to take advantage of the high-voltage resistance of ionic liquids in lithium-ion batteries.

Ionic liquids are suitable for rechargeable metal-air batteries because the electrolyte in such a battery is exposed to the air, and ionic liquids do not evaporate. At least one company, Fluidic Energy, is hoping to make metal-air batteries practical by using ionic liquids.

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Why we need to blow the article up in order to save it (Mathew Ingram/GigaOM)

Why we need to blow the article up in order to save it (Mathew Ingram/GigaOM)

Many media outlets â€" and not just traditional players like newspapers or magazines, but even some newer and more digital-savvy ones â€" still think of the article or the story as the bedrock foundation of news and journalism. But with so many different sources of content, and so many different ways of distributing it and displaying it, is that really still the case? Author and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has been writing about this question for some time, and makes the argument that the article should sometimes be separated into its component parts in order to be more useful, advice that new-media startups like Circa seem to be taking to heart.

In a recent post, Jarvis writes about how it makes more sense to think of the various elements of a typical news article as “assets” of various kinds â€" so the nugget of news that triggered the story might be a single asset, and then the background about that event would be another, related photos or video would be a third, and so on. Do all of these things have to appear in every article? Not really. That’s just the way that things were done when you only got one chance to print something every day. So why does that form still dominate? And should it?

The future of news: Small pieces, loosely joined

During a recent Twitter discussion about Facebook’s IPO, journalism professor Jay Rosen sparked a debate about those questions when he said a Reuters story was so dense with financial terminology that it was almost impossible for a non-financial reader to understand (Anthony De Rosa at Reuters collected some of the conversation in a Storify module, which is embedded below). What the story needed, Jarvis said, was some background â€" but when those kinds of elements are included in stories they rarely serve readers well:

If you know nothing about an ongoing story, it gives you too little history. If you know a story well, it merely wastes the paper’s space and your time. It is a compromise demanded by the one-size-fits-all constraints of news’ means of production and distribution.

What would be ideal, Jarvis said, is if there was a way to connect that piece to a source of background material that is constantly updated â€" and of course there is: it’s called linking to Wikipedia, an extension of Jarvis’s “do what you do best and link to the rest” mantra. But not everyone does that; some outlets such as the New York Times prefer to link to their own database of “topic pages” instead, perhaps in part because those backgrounders are engineered to do well in search, and in general seem to prefer to link internally if at all.

If the disaggregation of the traditional story format was taken to its logical conclusion, Jarvis argues that we could end up with “news organizations that specialize not just in beats and topics but in kinds of assets,” with one being just the news nugget (like a wire service), another the explainer (like The Economist), another the data related to the story, etc. Then links between those component parts would help the reader follow as much of the story as they wish, and in whatever order they want. Sean Blanda of the consulting firm Technically Media has also written about how the article needs to evolve, and how the “atomic unit of journalism is the fact.”

A news ecosystem is already evolving

You can see the kind of news ecosystem Jarvis envisions developing already in a way, with Twitter and blogs or aggregators becoming the place where the news breaks, followed by more information on blogs or newspaper sites â€" along with photos and mashups and related ephemera on sites like BuzzFeed or Reddit (which has also taken on much of the Q&A function, and some of the fact-checking one as well). This is an illustration of what Jarvis and others have called “news as a process,” and also an example of author and Harvard researcher David Weinberger’s description of the web as “small pieces, loosely joined.”

Some of these connections are already created with plain old hyperlinks, of course, although not everyone uses them (or even likes them, if you listen to critics like Nick Carr). Is there a way to make those kinds of connections easier? Blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer thinks there is â€" in a recent post, he described a way to connect different types of documents such as comments together, a kind of peer-to-peer protocol for a document-based web.

It’s an interesting idea: instead of just a story with some scattered links in it, you could have a bundle of assets that could be packaged or linked to in any number of different ways using APIs to sources of different types of content. Judging by a blog post it published on the topic, this is also the kind of area that Circa â€" the media startup from Cheezburger founder Ben Huh and David Cohn of Spot.us â€" is focused on. As the nature of information changes thanks to the web and social media, shouldn’t the way we are delivering it change as well?

Producing news articles and putting them behind a paywall is a great idea if what people want is content. But what if they just want information? If that’s the case it will be much harder to ask folks to pay and even doubly hard to meet their desires with an outdated form (the article).

As De Rosa commented during the debate about the Reuters story, accomplishing that kind of thing in practice would require altering the entire way that traditional media content is created â€" and also the way that reporters and journalists think about what they are supposed to be doing. But if they are competing with more and more sources of information, many of which don’t even look like traditional journalism, they should probably start thinking more creatively soon.

[View the story "Reinventing the article" on Storify]

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users The Official CTBTO Photostream and Yan Arief Purwanto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Verizon to Offer 300Mbps FIOS Internet Plan

Verizon to Offer 300Mbps FIOS Internet Plan

Internet users in the US who demand the fastest speeds will be happy to know that Verizon will soon offer 300Mbps / 65Mbps FIOS internet plan. To put the speeds into perspective, a “two-hour HD video can be downloaded in 2.2 minutes instead of 4.4 minutes. A batch of 10 songs can be downloaded in 1.4 seconds instead of 2.7 seconds.” Continue reading for more information and to see the slower, yet still blazing fast 150 Mbps / 35 Mbps FIOS connection in-action.

It remains to be known if pricing will be affected. Verizon currently sells 150Mbps for $ 200 a month. Verizon could charge more for the higher speeds, or keep its pricing in-line with current plans. Either way, if you’ve got the need for speed, FIOS is your roadster. You’ll be riding high, while the rest of the country waits on all the “buffering.”

[Source]

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The Chromebook’s New Ambitions

The Chromebook’s New Ambitions

Google, together with hardware partner Samsung, just announced the next iterations of Chromebook. Samsung’s putting out a new Chromebook laptop, as well as a “Chromebox”–essentially a desktop device.

You could be forgiven for forgetting what exactly a Chromebook is. Though they launched last year with much hype, Chromebooks did not become wildly popular, in a year dominated by the rise of the tablet computer. But to refresh your memory, the Chromebook is Google’s new vision of the personal computer–one that realizes that much of our actual computing is done in the cloud, and that our devices therefore might as well just be terminals feeding into that cloud.

Chromebooks don’t have hard drives, in the traditional sense. Rather, they have flash memory and USB ports that can connect to an external hard drive, if you’re one of those old-fashioned folks who insists on having storage offline. It’s no coincidence that Chromebooks share part of their name with Google’s popular web browser, Chrome; the idea is that the browser itself is, in a sense, your hard drive.

Google put out a new video touting the next step for Chromebooks.

Some headliner specs on the new devices: The revamped Chromebook, called the “Series 5 550,” is said to run over twice as fast as the original Chromebooks; it also features HD video, offline docs editing, and a new focus on the Chrome Web store, which has 50,000 apps. It runs $ 449 for a Wi-Fi only model, $ 549 for a 3G-enabled one. (This is more or less on par with the pricing of the original Chromebooks.) The Series 5 550 has a 12.1” display, weighs 3.3 pounds, and runs on an Intel Core processor. Its battery life is 6 hours.

As for the Chromebox, it has certain similar specs (though naturally issues like battery life and screen size are no longer relevant), and starts at $ 329.

Google has clearly been affected by the tablet revolution in designing this new version of the Chromebook experience. Google’s blog post announcing the Chromebooks touts an “app-centric interface.” And any PR that spotlights an ability to play Angry Birds clearly has an eye on mobile market share.

The products are available online-only for now, but interestingly, Google plans a brick-and-mortar push shortly (stay tuned to learn just which Best Buy locations will be selling Chromebooks and the Chromebox). As the AP’s Michael Liedtke rightly puts it: “The expansion beyond Internet-only sales signals Google’s determination to attract a mass audience to its Chromebooks, just as it’s done with smartphones running on its Android software. More than 300 million mobile devices have been activated on Android since the software’s 2008 release.”

If Chromebooks are going to take a real run at tablet computing–the iPad, specifically (versions of which still are priced lower than the Chromebook)– then now indeed is the time to go after that mass audience. It’s interesting to compare the most recent Chromebook video with the one Google put out when the first devices launched last year. There was a quirkiness to original ads that I personally find more endearing, but that may have been more suitable for a niche, rather than mass, market.

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Reeling ACTA treaty rejected by three European Parliament committees (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)

Reeling ACTA treaty rejected by three European Parliament committees (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)

Momentum against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement continued to build on Thursday as three different committees of the European Parliament voted not to recommend adoption of the treaty. A final vote by the full European Parliament is scheduled for July.

The EU-wide votes followed on the heels of a Wednesday vote in the Dutch parliament. The Dutch government had placed the controversial copyright treaty on the back burner while it waited for the results of Europe-wide debate over the treaty. But the vote in the Dutch parliament will place pressure on the government to actively oppose the treaty.

The ACTA treaty is nominally an anti-counterfeiting treaty, but its provisions would have broader implications for copyright policy. While the treaty is not as bad as its strongest critics claim, it would be a vehicle for ratcheting up already excessive copyright protections by one more notch.

It was signed by President Obama last year, and was expected to be approved easily in Europe. But every EU nation must sign on for it to take effect, and the treaty has been losing momentum for months. The Netherlands joins Poland, the Czech Republic, and Germany in expressing reservations.

On Thursday, three committees of the European Parliamentâ€"the industry committee, the civil liberties committee, and the legal affairs committeeâ€"all registered their disapproval of the treaty. But their decisions are not final. The trade committee must still weigh in, and then the matter will be taken up by the full European parliament later this summer.

In a blog post, Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge said the fight was not yet over. “What happened today was the first step in a long chain that ends with the final vote in all of the European Parliament, which is the vote where ACTA ultimately lives or dies,” he wrote. “If it is defeated on the floor of the European Parliament, then it’s a permakill. Boom, headshot.“

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Real Animals as Pokemon

Real Animals as Pokemon

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Pokemon may not exist in the real world, but thanks to Photoshop and a few dedicated fans, we get a look at what they would look like. First up, we have a miniature Pikachu along with Blastoise, complete with cannons. Continue reading to see more.

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Why Parents Should Think Twice Before Password-Protecting a Computer

Why Parents Should Think Twice Before Password-Protecting a Computer

If you’ve got a child who’s addicted to the internet, banning them from the computer entirely might be the best idea, as just putting a password on it might have dire consequences. Click here to view the first image in today’s viral picture gallery. Continue reading to see what happens when goal celebrations meets special FX.

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iPhone 5 Might be Announced on June 11 at WWDC

iPhone 5 Might be Announced on June 11 at WWDC

Rumors point to a June 11 announcement for Apple’s iPhone 5 at WWDC. The biggest upgrade, its display, will reportedly be “3.999inches, with a resolution of 1136×640, giving the screen the ‘Retina’-like feel of the new iPad.” Continue reading for more pictures and information.

Other hints given away by the photo – and more are available at 9to5Mac – are that Apple has redesigned the dock connector to be smaller. This may end up making older accessories – from charger cables to speaker docks – incompatible, but there will likely be adapters released to ensure older accessories still work.

[Sources 1 | 2]

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Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on the Moon in 1976

Soviet Moon Lander Discovered Water on the Moon in 1976

The possibility of water on the moon has excited scientists and science fiction fans for decades. If we ever decide to maintain a human presence on the moon, clear evidence of water will be an important factor in the decision. 

In recent years, that evidence has begun to mount. The data comes from several sources. First there was the pioneering Clementine mission in 1994, America’s first return to the moon in twenty years. 

Clementine looked for water by bouncing radio waves off the surface–the returns giving a strong indication that water ice must lie beneath the surface. 

Then there was the Lunar Prospector which found a signature for water by measuring the amount of neutrons emitted from the surface  and which water ought to absorb).   

Then there was Galileo’s flyby of the moon on its way to Jupiter, which also found evidence and more recently, the Indian spacecraft Chandrayaan-I in 2009 which used an infrared camera to spot evidence of water in lunar rocks.   

All this has dramatically overturned the previous view that the moon was dry as a bone. 

But an interesting question is how this view came to be. After all, there is no shortage of moon rocks on Earth–the Apollo missions brought back some 300 kilograms of the stuff, so much that NASA has lost track of much of it.

Today, Arlin Crotts at Columbia University in New York city throws some fascinating light on this question in a series of three articles about water on the moon and how it got there. 

He points out that scientists believed that the Apollo samples were contaminated after their return to Earth.Apparently, the containers used to carry them could not be tightly closed because lunar dust clogged their seals. So any water found in these rocks was thought to have originated here.

What’s more, the Apollo missions confirmed beyond doubt that the river-like channels that earlier spacecraft had seen on the lunar surface were made by flowing lava rather than water. So the prevailing view was that there was that the moon was dry. 

However, the Soviets had other ideas. Crotts has unearthed evidence that the Soviets found good evidence of water in moon rocks in the 1970s. 

One of the least known missions is the Soviet  Luna-24 sample-return mission which landed on the lunar surface in August 1976. This drilled some 2 metres into the lunar surface, extracted 300 grammes of rock and then returned to Earth. An impressive feat by any standards but one that has been largely forgotten in the west.

A Soviet team analysed the sample and found unambiguous signs of water in the rock–they reported that water made up 0.1 per cent of the sample’s mass. In 1978, they published the result in the Russian journal Geokhimiia. This journal also has an in English language version but it was not widely read in the West. 

Crott says that today the work has been almost entirely forgotten. “No other author has ever cited the Luna 24 work,” he says.

Curiously, various scientists including the Nobel prize winning chemist Harold Urey, had predicted since the 1950s that water ice and other volatiles ought to be found in craters at the lunar poles, which are permanently in shadow. 

Crott goes on to detail a number of other fascinating efforts to find water on the moon, including the famous impact experiment in which NASA slammed an empty rocket stage into one of these shadowy craters to see what the ejecta plume would look like. Sure enough, it contained plenty of water but lots of other stuff too including almost as much carbon monoxide as water.  

Today, the idea of a dry moon has been completely overturned. “As recently as 2006 the settled value for the lunar bulk water content was below 1 part per billion. Most values now discussed well exceed 1 part per million,” says Crotts

That’s a remarkable turnaround but one that might have come a little sooner had the Soviet result been taken a little more seriously.

Ref:
Water on The Moon, I. Historical Overview

Water on The Moon, II. Origins & Resources

Water on The Moon, III. Volatiles & Activity

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Pill Could Reverse Effects of a Stroke Long After It Hits

Pill Could Reverse Effects of a Stroke Long After It Hits

Pill Could Reverse Effects of a Stroke Long After It Hits

One pharmaceutical company aims to lengthen a stroke’s drug-treatable period from hours to months.

• Wednesday, May 30, 2012
• By Susan Young

Brain attack: Strokes occur when blood stops flowing to a part of the brain, often because a blood clot gets lodged in an artery supplying blood to the organ.
istockphoto/Eraxion

For the 800,000 people in the United States who suffer a stroke each year, the window for drug therapy closes in the first few hours after the attack. That leaves some seven million stroke survivors in this country alone with no medical alternative beyond physical therapy. A small pharmaceutical company in New York hopes to change that with a drug that may help patients regain some of their lost mobility six months or more after a stroke.

Strokes happen when blood stops flowing to part of the brain, often due to a blood clot. Without blood to bring new oxygen, cells in the affected region start to die. If the symptoms of stroke are recognized quickly enough and the victim is brought to a hospital within a few hours, doctors can administer a clot-dissolving drug to minimize the damage. But only a small fraction of stroke patients seek medical attention soon enough for this intervention.

“If they miss this therapeutic window, the consequences are heavier, so it’s important to be able to do something for those patients who miss that window,” says Francesca Bosetti, a stroke expert with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

In the future, stroke patients who miss this window and are affected by reduced mobility long after their stroke may be able to turn to a drug that helps damaged nerves transmit electrical signals in the brain.

Earlier this year, Acorda Therapeutics reported that the compound dalfampridine improved motor function in both the forelimbs and hind limbs of rats that had suffered a stroke. This month, the company began recruiting patients for a clinical trial to test the effects of the compound in human stroke patients. Acorda plans to enroll about 70 people who have had a stroke at least six months prior. “That’s the time that deficits seem to stabilize, so we can eliminate naturally occurring improvements in patients,” says Jeff MacDonald, an Acorda spokesman.

Acorda is focusing on neurological disorders at a time when many pharmaceutical companies seem to be turning away from such maladies. The company was founded in 1995 to treat spinal-cord injuries and has since taken on other neurological conditions, including multiple sclerosis and stroke. The company originally licensed dalfampridine from drugmaker Elan in the hope of using it to treat spinal-cord injuries, but instead it found more success in treating multiple sclerosis patients. “We followed it to where it was leading,” says Andrew Blight, chief scientific officer for Acorda.

Spinal-cord injuries still garner a lot of focus from the company, which hopes to begin testing a compound licensed from Medtronic that protects neurons from the wave of cell death that follows the initial injury. Medtronic had already shown the compound to be safe in healthy patients, and later this year, Acorda plans to test its efficacy in patients in the first hours after a spinal-cord injury.  

Patients with injured spinal cords are not nearly as numerous as stroke patients, “but if you are talking about costs to society, spinal-cord injuries are extremely expensive,” says Naomi Kleitman, a spinal-cord injury expert with NINDS. “They tend to happen in fairly young people who need a lot of medical and assistive help if they have severe injuries.”

The company is also looking to treat longer-standing spinal-cord injuries with a drug that would help break down the scar tissue that forms around a spinal-cord injury. The scar tissue is thought to prevent nerves from establishing the new connections that may help patients recover some functionality. The product is still in early development, and one challenge will be devising a method to deliver the large scar-busting molecule to its target site.

Despite the pressing need, the small market for spinal-cord injury drugs may be one reason the condition doesn’t get a lot of attention from pharmaceutical giants. “No one else wants to develop compounds to treat spinal-cord injury as seriously as Acorda,” says Edward Hall, a neurologist and spinal-cord and brain-injury specialist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “These aren’t going to be billion-dollar-a-year products.”

Numbers will not be an issue for long-term stroke patients. Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability, and the number of people living with its effects is growing. “We are getting better at preventing stroke death, but the incidence is going up because the population is aging, and age is the greatest risk factor,” says S. Thomas Carmichael, a neurologist and neurorepair researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Relatively few groups are working on treating the effects of a stroke more than six months after it occurred, says Carmichael, in part because the disorder is tricky to model in lab animals.

“It’s great for the field that [Acorda] is there,” he says. “Right now, there are no pharmaceutical options.”

However, Carmichael cautions that even six months or more after a stroke, patients can respond to focused rehabilitative intervention, which suggests that movement is an important part of recovery. “You have to pay attention to physical activity.” A patient’s own activity level can confound a trial if it’s not well monitored, but it could also lead to the greatest outcomes, he says, if made a part of it.

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Google Product Search To Become Google Shopping, Use Pay-To-Play Model (Danny Sullivan/Search Engine Land)

Google Product Search To Become Google Shopping, Use Pay-To-Play Model (Danny Sullivan/Search Engine Land)

Google Product Search is getting a new name, Google Shopping, and a new business model where only merchants that pay will be listed. It’s the first time Google will decommission a search product that previously listed companies for free. The company says the change will improve the searcher experience, but it will also likely raise new worries that Google may further cut free listings elsewhere.

“This is about delivering the best answers for people searching for products and helping connect merchants with the right customers,” said Sameer Samat, vice president of product management for Google Shopping, when explaining that by moving to an all-paid model, Google believes it will have better and more trustworthy data that will improve the shopping search experience for its users.

Perhaps this will be so; perhaps not. We’ll only have a better idea when the transformation is complete. The process begins now with experiments, launches more fully in the summer and will take through the fall to finish in the United States, when the service should be formally renamed from Google Product Search to Google Shopping.

Next year, the change to paid inclusion will happen outside the US, Google says. In some countries, Google Product Search has already been called Google Shopping but without the paid listings model.

Starting Now: Experiments

Beginning today, Google will run a variety of experiments on Google.com, for a small percentage of searchers at first, that merge listings from Google Product Listing Ads and Google Product Search together. To understand better, consider this “before” example:

You can see that Google has its traditional AdWords text ads above and to the right of the main results. Also above are Product Listing Ads, which were launched at the end of 2010 and allow advertisers to show small images next to their ads, as well as purchase on a CPA (cost per action/sale) basis, rather than the more common CPC (cost per click) basis. Product Listing Ads sometimes appear to the right of the main results, as well.

The screenshot also shows the “free” listings that Google provides, those that come from Google crawling the web, as well as those from Google Product Search. The listings from Google Product Search come from Google’s web crawl as well as from data feeds that merchants send to Google.

In contrast, below is an example of how one of the new experiments may look:

Rather than the Product Listing Ads and Google Product Search results being separate, both will be combined into a single Google Shopping box. Here’s another example, with a close-up on the Google Shopping box:

The example below shows how, at times, only one product might appear and to the side of the main results:

Again, here’s a different example, with a close-up on the box:

Goodbye Google Product Search & Free Listings

As said earlier, Google Product Search currently gets its listings from Google crawling the web or by retailers submitting product data and feeds through the Google Merchant Center. There has been no charge for either. Indeed, Google has never charged for being in its shopping search engine since it began back in December 2002 and was called Froogle.

That’s ending. There’s no firm date on exactly when the free ride will be over, other than it should happen by the fall of this year.

Merchants may continue to be listed within Google’s free web search results. That’s not changing. But those wanting to appear in a dedicated shopping search engine â€" and in the Google Shopping boxes that will appear as part of Google’s regular results â€" will need to pay.

Hello Google Shopping & Paid Inclusion

The forthcoming Google Shopping will operate on what’s been known in the search industry as a paid inclusion model. That’s where companies pay to be listed but payment doesn’t guarantee that they’ll rank well for any particular terms.

In particular, Google says advertisers will provide data feeds or create product listings through Google AdWords, in campaigns that are set to run on Google Shopping. It will work very similar to how Product Listing Ads work now. Merchants won’t bid on particular keywords but rather bid how much they’re willing to pay, if their listings appear and get clicks or produce sales. Getting a top ranking will depend on a combination of perceived relevance and bid price.

As part of the changes, Google Shopping will incorporate Google Trusted Stores badges into the listings, for those merchants who participate in the program. Google has already been testing the use of these within AdWords.

Google also says the new Google Shopping listings will be able to show if merchants have any special deals or offers, though presumably only those offered through Google’s own Google Offers service.

Product Listing Ads as a product will be phased out when Google Shopping takes over, but Google says using the PLA system now is the best way for merchants to prepare for the Google Shopping change. That’s why Google is offering two incentives to get merchants going with them now, if they’re not already:

• All merchants that create Product Listings Ads by August 15 will receive 10% credit for their total PLA spend through the end of the year
• Existing Google Product Search merchants will get a $ 100 AdWords credit if they fill out a form before August 15

Google provides more details about this and the forthcoming transition here. We’ll also be following-up with more transition advice and details as they become known.

Didn’t Google Hate Paid Inclusion?

The paid inclusion model will be familiar to many merchants, who know it’s commonly used with other shopping search engines. But it’s new to Google. In fact, it’s a model that Google once fought against, even to the degree of characterizing it as evil. Those days are over. Google Shopping will becomes the fourth “vertical” or topically-focused search engine from Google to use paid inclusion.

Once Deemed Evil, Google Now Embraces “Paid Inclusion” is my column from yesterday at our sister site Marketing Land. It explains the history of Google’s past opposition to paid inclusion and its reversal over the past year. Of that history, I’ll highlight this part of Google’s 2004 IPO filing, which specifically talked about paid inclusion being bad in terms of shopping search:

Froogle [what's now called Google Product Search and will be called Google Shopping] enables people to easily find products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of our search technology to a very specific taskâ€"locating stores that sell the items users seek and pointing them directly to the web sites where they can shop. Froogle users can sort results by price, specify a desired price range and view product photos.

Froogle accepts data feeds directly from merchants to ensure that product information is up-to-date and accurate. Most online merchants are also automatically included in Froogle’s index of shopping sites. Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle, our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.

I bolded the key part. Eight years ago, Google viewed paid inclusion in general as some type of evil the company should avoid and in particular something that could cause shopping search to have poor relevancy or be biased.

What happened to cause such a change?

Reversing Its Stance

For one, Google’s official line seems to be that it hasn’t changed its mind about anything. That’s because it’s changing the definition of what paid inclusion is, to effectively claim that it’s not doing it. This is the statement I was sent after my column appeared yesterday:

Paid inclusion has historically been used to describe results that the website owner paid to place, but which were not labelled differently from organic search results.  We are making it very clear to users that there is a difference between these results for which Google may be compensated by the providers, and our organic search results.

As I did yesterday, I’ll disagree again. Paid inclusion has been historically used to describe when people pay to appear in a search engine’s results but without any guarantee of prominent placement. What’s happening with Google Shopping is classic, textbook paid inclusion. It matches up precisely with the US Federal Trade Commission’s own definition of paid inclusion:

Paid inclusion can take many forms. Examples of paid inclusion include programs where the only sites listed are those that have paid; where paid sites are intermingled among non-paid sites; and where companies pay to have their Web sites or URLs reviewed more quickly, or for more frequent spidering of their Web sites or URLs, or for the review or inclusion of deeper levels of their Web sites, than is the case with non-paid sites.

Again, I’ve bolded the key part, a part that defines exactly what’s going to happen with Google Shopping.

The fact Google considered paid inclusion evil in the past is an embarrassment that some will have a good chuckle about. But companies do change stances. The bigger issue in all this is whether the shift is good for searchers and publishers.

Paid Relationships Can Be Good

When it comes to searchers, Google’s view is that by having a paid relationship, it can better ensure the quality of what it lists in Google Shopping.

“We believe a commercial relationship with partners is critical to ensuring we receive high quality product data, and with better data we can build better products,” Samat told me.

Today’s blog post from Google reflects the same view:

We believe that having a commercial relationship with merchants will encourage them to keep their product information fresh and up to date. Higher quality dataâ€"whether it’s accurate prices, the latest offers or product availabilityâ€"should mean better shopping results for users, which in turn should create higher quality traffic for merchants.

A good example of the potential here is something we covered last November. Google had warned merchants in Google Product Search to include tax and shipping costs in their feeds. But well past Google’s deadline, merchants were still flaunting those rules.

Potentially, those merchants risked being kicked out of Google Product Search. But being a free service, it possible the merchants might come back in another way. There was a low barrier to entry. That low barrier also means much more has to be policed.

When payment is involved, it’s harder to be abusive. Merchants risk losing their accounts, along with any trust built up to those accounts. In addition, when they’re paying by the click or by the sale, there’s more incentive to ensure listings are relevant.

But There Was No Other Way?

Still, this is an unprecedented move by Google. The company has never eliminated a search product that had free listings and shifted to an all-paid model.

I couldn’t think of any examples of this in the past, and Google confirmed this was a first. At best, it offered that Boutiques.com â€" purchased in 2010 and integrated into Google Product Search in 2011 â€" had a similar pay-to-play model. But Boutiques.com wasn’t an existing service that was shifted from free to fee.

For a company with such a long history of trying to be inclusive, it’s shocking. It’s more so when Bing Shopping accepts free listings. Google couldn’t find a way to do what Microsoft does?

“We’ve looked at a number of different aspects to approach this, but we have to evolve our experience. We believe consumers have a higher expectation of shopping online,” Samat said.

Will It Stay Comprehensive?

One thing I’ve generally loved about Google Product Search is that if I couldn’t find some odd product on Amazon (which tends to be a pseudo-shopping search engine for me), Google seemed able to ferret it out. But with the change to a paid inclusion model, will the ability to get into the nooks and crannies of the retail web be lost?

Google told me that it currently has tens of thousands of merchants listed in Google Product Search for free. I asked if the company had any idea how that might change when payment is required or if there would be an impact on comprehensiveness?

“We really want all kinds of merchants to participate,” Samat said. But he also said, ”It’s hard to speculate on how this will play out. Our objective here is to deliver a better experience. We are doing a number of things to help the users’ experience get better.”

Going Forward

In the end, Google is shifting to what’s been the industry standard when it comes to shopping search, to have a paid inclusion program. The curious can take a look here at SingleFeed for a rundown on who offers paid plans or here at CPC Strategy. Most shopping search engines do. Even Bing, which is listed as being free, also does paid inclusion through a partnership with Shopping.com, saying that doing this will increase visibility.

One thing about the change is that it will probably cause all the shopping search engines out there to better disclose the paid relationships they have. As I covered in my column yesterday, the FTC has seemed to ignore that some don’t have any disclosure at all, as required. Google’s move has the potential to raise the bar here, and that’s sorely needed.

For searchers, Google’s trying to find the balance between having incredibly comprehensive results and the noise that can harm relevancy when there’s too much junk and not enough signal, it seems. As I said, it remains to see if they’ll get that balance right.

For publishers, there’s a whole lot of worry here. If Google can turn one search product to an all-paid basis, nothing really prevents it from doing the same for others. Could Google News only carry listings from publishers that want to pay? Will Google Places, already just transformed into a part of the Google+ social network, be changed to a pay-or-don’t play yellow pages-style model?

Even web search could be threatened. All the arguments about wanting to get better data and filter out noise are just as applicable to web search. The main reassuring thing here is that there’s little likelihood that Google could get hundreds of millions of web sites to do paid inclusion at the risk of not being listed. Pure paid inclusion works better in the world of vertical search, where there are only thousands of companies you’re dealing with.

Meanwhile, with Google Play selling content, will Google eventually decide that Google Shopping should make the next logical step and provide transactions, the way that Amazon does? At some point, Google the search engine that is supposed to point to destinations may turn into too much of a destination itself.

Related Articles

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: Product Search | SEO: Paid Inclusion | Top News

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Cheap Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Moves toward Commercialization

Cheap Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Moves toward Commercialization

Cheap Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell Moves toward Commercialization

Printable photovoltaics could become viable, thanks to a new advance.

• Wednesday, May 30, 2012
• By Peter Fairley

Solar to dye for: The colored windows at left in a government building in Seoul, South Korea, generate power using technology from Australian dye-based solar developer Dyesol.
Dyesol

Easy-to-make solar cells that capture light with dyes have garnered an impressive string of scientific awards, including the Millennium Technology Prize in 2010. Yet they’ve had little commercial impact since their invention in 1988.

A novel design reported by Northwestern University researchers last week could change that, delivering a device that eliminates the dye-sensitized solar cell’s inherent liability: its leak-prone and corrosive liquid electrolyte.

Unlike thin-film and silicon panels, dye-based panels can be produced in cheap roll-to-roll processes akin to printing. So even if they are less efficient than silicon solar cells, they could prove cost-effective.

The Northwestern development is just the latest in a string of advances in what Michael McGehee, director of Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics, recently dubbed a “renaissance” in dye-sensitized cells. Recent advances in the field could finally transform these elegant scientific curiosities into practical energy-generation devices. 

In a dye-sensitized solar cell, incoming light excites a porous layer of titania coated with a dye, generating negative and positive charges. The negative chargesâ€"excited electronsâ€"flow out of the cell through the titania, while positive charges flow into a liquid electrolyte. As with electrolyte-filled alkaline batteries, leakage is an ever-present danger, especially in solar panels subject to extreme weathering. Electrolytes heated to 80° C (on a rooftop, for instance) can expand and rupture the panel’s seal. The dye cells’ iodine-based electrolyte is also corrosive enough to eat through even rust-resistant metals such as aluminum and stainless steel.

Northwestern University chemist Mercouri Kanatzidis, materials scientist Robert Chang, and two graduate students replaced the dye cells’ liquid electrolyte with a solid iodine-based semiconductor. While prior solid-state designs have reduced the power output of dye cells, the Northwestern design actually boosts performance, the researchers say, because the cesium-tin-iodine semiconductor that replaces the liquid electrolyte also absorbs light. “Our material actually absorbs more light than the dye itself,” says Kanatzidis.

In a report in Nature last week, the Northwestern team claims its cell converts 10.2 percent of incoming light to electricityâ€"far higher than the 7 percent efficiency of the best existing solid-state dye cells. Sean Shaheen, an expert in organic photovoltaics at Denver University, says that the Northwestern cell’s efficiency would be closer to 8 percent under standard measurement conditions. But Shaheen says it is still an important development for dye cells.

Kanatzidis says it could be possible to commercialize the design if the efficiency of the cells can be pushed above 11 percent. That is lower than the 12 to 16 percent efficiency of commercial thin-film solar panels and far below the efficiency of silicon panels. But the cost of manufacturing dye-based cells should also be lower.

Australian solar developer Dyesol is seeking to exploit low-cost processing to commercialize conventional dye-solar technologyâ€"liquid electrolyte included. Its strategy is to integrate dye-based solar into building materials such as glass high-rise panels and steel roofing sheets. This March, Dyesol’s South Korean joint venture partner, Timo Technology, installed glass panels on a building in Seoul. And Dyesol is partnering with India’s Tata Steel to develop dye-solar-coated steel roofing.

Damion Milliken, Dyesol’s research and development manager, insists that liquid electrolytes can be contained. “Dyesol and others have produced devices with excellent long-term stability which have been subjected to accelerated testing equivalent to 25 years’ life and beyond,” Milliken says. “The technology is commercially viable.”

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Paralyzed Rats Walk Again

Paralyzed Rats Walk Again

Paralyzed Rats Walk Again

Spinal stimulation combined with assisted walking therapy generates new neural circuits and restores voluntary leg movement.

• Thursday, May 31, 2012
• By Susan Young

Stair master: After training in a supportive robotic device while receiving spinal stimulation, a rat paralyzed by a spinal-cord injury regained enough control of its hind limbs to climb stairs.
EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

Rats paralyzed by spinal-cord injury can learn to control their hind limbs again if they are trained to walk in a rehabilitative device while their lower spine is electrically and chemically stimulated. A clinical trial using a similar system built for humans could begin in the next few years.

Researchers in Switzerland used electrical and chemical stimulation to excite neurons in the lower spinal cord of paralyzed rats while the rodents were suspended by a vest that forced them to walk using only their hind legs. The rehabilitative procedure led to the creation of new neuronal connections between the movement-directing motor cortex of the brain and the lower spine, the researchers report in Science.

Previous research has shown that it is possible to reverse some of the effects of spinal-cord injury by circumventing the normal connection between the brain and legs, which is broken by the injury. For example, walking can be triggered in spinal-cord-injured rats if their spine is stimulated. But until now, such movement has been involuntary. This new research shows that with a specialized training system, similar rats can regain voluntary control over their legs.

A report published last year showed the proof of principle “that this kind of approach can work in patients,” says Grégoire Courtine, senior author of the rat study. In May 2011, 25-year-old Rob Summers, who had been paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident, was reported to stand on his own for a few minutes with electrical stimulation of his spinal cord. He could also take repeated steps on a treadmill with the stimulation, which activates regions in the lower spinal cord that control walking. The locomotion resulting from this kind of stimulation is automatic and involuntary and is thought to require no direct communication from the brain.

Courtine had previously shown that this type of automatic walking could initiate walking patterns in the hind limbs of spinal-cord-injured rats that were spinally stimulated while on a treadmill. Because the spinal column could control the walking pattern, Courtine suspected that only a weak signal from the brain would be necessary for the animals to start walking voluntarily.

To test whether the rats could recover brain-directed control of these movements, he and his team developed a robotic support system that suspends rats in a bipedal standing posture and helps with balance but does not provide any forward momentum. Ten paralyzed rats were trained daily to walk with stimulation both on a treadmill and in the robotic system. After two to three weeks, the rats took their first voluntary steps. “This is the first time we have seen voluntary control of locomotion in an animal with [an injury] that normally leaves it completely paralyzed,” says Courtine. 

Key to this recovery was the active role of the rat’s brain in wanting to move forward. The electrical and chemical stimulation puts the rat’s nervous system in a state where walking is possible, says study co-author Janine Heutschi, and “then you need to make the rat to want to walk.” The rats’ desire to walk was motivated by chocolate rewards and vocal encouragement from the researchers (which you can hear in this video from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). The robotic suspension system forces the rodents to use their dormant hind limbs and not drag themselves forward with their still functional forelimbs.

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Looks Like Pinterest, Takes On Evernote: Clipboard Launches Its Web Clipping Service To All (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Looks Like Pinterest, Takes On Evernote: Clipboard Launches Its Web Clipping Service To All (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

At first glance, you might mistake Clipboard, the impressively-backed web clipping service, for yet another Pinterest clone. But any similarities are only skin deep. Clipboard’s real rivals are things like Evernote’s web clipper, SpringPad, Delicious, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneNote. That’s because, explains Clipboard CEO Gary Flake, Pinterest is about expressing an aspiration, but Clipboard is about getting things done.

For half a year, the company has been trucking along in a private, invite-only beta. But today, it’s open to all with a fresh redesign in tow and a new button for website owners.

Granted, there are several similarities between Pinterest and Clipboard. For starters, its collections are also called “boards.” And they’re laid out graphically, with a heavy emphasis on the image associated with the clipped content. But Clipboard isn’t just for clipping an inspiring or pretty picture â€" it can clip all kinds of stuff, including slideshows (like those from SlideShare), audio, a functioning web app (like an online calculator), an online game, and more. And the clips are functional, too. The calculator works, the games play, you can click the links in the copied text.

Given the competition, why another clipping service, you may ask?

“When you think about how people organize things,” explains Flake, “the thing that has 90% market share is pasting into an email client or Word document,” he says.

That is, people’s preferred method for finding and saving information from the web hasn’t evolved much over the years, Flake believes. However, he adds that we’re now seeing the emergence of a new type of service for saving items. This is where things like Evernote or Pinterest come into play. Some of these (like Pinterest) are so simple that they’re more about expression, while others (like Evernote) are “almost accidentally social,” Flake explains. Clipboard is aiming for a sweet spot by being simple, social and functional all in one.

Like any good bookmarking/clipping tool, Clipboard’s clips can be private, allowing you to transition from your preferred system, if you chose to do so. In fact, personal use appears to be the favored way to interact with Clipboard, as currently 80% of the beta users’ clips are private.

There are also indications of fairly good engagement for a pre-public product. 48% of users are clipping (as opposed to browsing the public clips from others), and the average user has 14 clips. More active users have around 30 clips each. 55% of the clips are also annotated by the user and 20% are hashtagged. (Clearly, some folks were never ready to give up social bookmarking, despite Delicious’ implosion then somewhat fizzless relaunch.) Clipboard will eventually support importing tools to pull in bookmarks from other services, like Delicious, as well as your own browser, which could help some users transition completely from their current systems.

Also new today is a developer-facing tool which allows site owners to integrate Clipboard buttons onto their website, so visitors can easily clip and save content.

Clipboard, which recently acquired two competitors, Amplify and Clipmarks, is backed by something of a who’s who of startup investors: Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, CrunchFund (disclosure â€" CrunchFund investor Mike Arrington founded TechCrunch), DFJ, SV Angel / Ron Conway, Betaworks, First Round Capital, CODE Advisors, Founder’s Co-Op, Acequia Capital, Vast Ventures, Ted Meisel (former CEO of Overture and now at Elevation Partners), Blake Krikorian (former CEO of Sling and now an Amazon board member), and Vivi Nevo.

Interested users can now sign up to try the revamped Clipboard here.

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Top 5 Coolest Projects by MIT Researchers, Students

Top 5 Coolest Projects by MIT Researchers, Students

MIT, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for its strong emphasis on scientific and technological education as well as research. So, it’s no surprise that many of the school’s students have created some cool projects over the years. Continue reading to see five of the coolest.

5. One Trillion FPS Imaging System

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

4. CityCar

The City Car. A concept proposed for dense urban areas, the City Car is a stackable car for two passengers. By placing stacks at key points of convergence, such as bus and subway lines, the system offers travelers the flexibility to combine mass transit with individualized mobility. Each stack receives incoming vehicles and electrically charges them, then users simply remove a fully-charged vehicle from the front of the stack just as they’d pick up a luggage cart at the airport.

3. Siftables

Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

2. Mouseless

Mouseless is an invisible computer mouse. It provides the familiarity of interaction of a physical mouse without actually needing a real hardware mouse. Mouseless consists of an Infrared (IR) laser beam and an Infrared camera. Both IR laser and IR camera are embedded in the computer. The IR camera detects those bright IR blobs using computer vision. The change in the position and arrangements of these blobs are interpreted as mouse cursor movement and mouse clicks. As the user moves their hand the cursor on screen moves accordingly. When the user taps their index finger, the size of the blob changes and the camera recognizes the intended mouse click.

1. BiDi Screen

The BiDi Screen is an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them. This thin, bidirectional screen extends the latest trend in LCD devices, which has seen the incorporation of photo-diodes into every display pixel. Using a novel optical masking technique developed at the Media Lab, the BiDi Screen can capture lightfield-like quantities, unlocking a wide array of applications from 3-D gesture interaction with CE devices, to seamless video communication.

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Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE launching June 2 (Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Sprint’s HTC Evo 4G LTE launching June 2 (Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

After a patent-based delay, the HTC Evo 4G LTE is ready for its spotlight.

(Credit: CNET)

After a delay, Sprint and HTC have a launch date locked down for the HTC Evo 4G LTE, Sprint’s new flagship device: June 2.

A patent spat with Apple slowed down shipments of the Evo 4G LTE — and of the HTC One X — but Sprint assured customers last week that it would be able to fulfill pre-orders of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich handset starting May 24.

The HTC Evo 4G LTE features a 4.7-inch screen, a dual-core processor, a great 8-megapixel camera and sells for $ 199.99. Despite its LTE-readiness, Sprint has yet to ignite its 4G LTE network.

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The Great Bandwidth Brawl

The Great Bandwidth Brawl

The Great Bandwidth Brawl

Wireless networks are scrambling to feed the growing hunger for mobile data and downloads.

• Wednesday, May 30, 2012
• By Tom Simonite

Flickr Creative Commons | Henry__Spencer

AT&T has a problem in Chicago. The city was one of the first to be upgraded to the wireless carrier’s next-generation LTE (long-term evolution) network, which packs more data into a radio signal and offers much faster download speeds. But independent tests published this month showed that AT&T downloads in Chicago are less than half the speed of those on Verizon’s LTE network there. The reason? A lack of radio spectrum. AT&T’s radio licenses allow it to use only a 10-megahertz chunk of the airwaves for its LTE network in Chicago, compared with the 20 megahertz it has in other cities

AT&T faces the same problem in Los Angeles, and it’s just part of a challenge confronting the whole mobile communications industry: how to reconcile consumer expectations of forever faster, cheaper downloads on mobile Internet devices with limited room in the airwaves.

Networks are not in danger of running out of capacity just yet. Carriers have spent large sums buying up rights to the radio spectrum, and they’re being creative about ways to squeeze more out of what they already have. (Exact speeds vary, but an LTE connection is typically 10 times faster than one provided by a 3G network.) The federal government licenses spectrum space, and wireless carriers and other companies have for many years bought up and hoarded licenses, anticipating the need to expand.

But the largely unforeseen explosion in demand for wireless bandwidth, driven by the appearance of tablets and smart phones, has made it more urgent to ensure a supply for future use.  AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel says network traffic and the company’s spectrum portfolio affect the kind of service that users receive in different areas. “We will continue to invest and innovate to make the best, most efficient use of available spectrum across our network,” he says.

Chances are it will be able to fix the problem before too long. The company is sitting on unused spectrum acquired in 2006 that it eventually plans to use for LTE. It recently paid $ 1.9 billion to mobile chipmaker Qualcomm for wireless spectrum to serve important markets including San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. Verizon is simultaneously trying to sell off one chunk of spectrum it has owned for years and to buy anotherâ€"one it thinks is better suited to LTEâ€"from a consortium of cable companies. AT&T and T-Mobile both have plans to recycle some of their spectrum currently used for slower, 2G data connections, upgrading it to serve LTE connections so it can carry more data.

Carriers are increasingly looking for creative tactics that will relieve pressure on their networks. “Spectrum is certainly a limiting factor, but carriers are also constrained by a number of other things, too, particularly backhaul,” says Bill Moore of RootMetrics, which gathers data on cell-phone network bandwidth and other performance measures that are freely available online. Backhaul refers to the physical connections that link cell-phone towers to the Internet and phone networks. All carriers are working hard to upgrade their backhaul, replacing copper cable with high-capacity optical fiber.

Getting the necessary permissions to replace or install underground fiber is a slow process, says Bryan Darr, CEO of Mosaik Solutions, which collects data on wireless network coverage. That explains Verizon’s alliance with a consortium of major cable companies to connect their networks, announced late last year. “The cable operators have an awful lot of cable in the ground that’s capable of handling a lot of traffic,” says Darr. “They also know themselves that they need to be connected to the wireless industry because that’s where the future of content like TV is.”

A way to sidestep bottlenecks caused by constraints on spectrum and backhaul is to have smart phones and tablets make use of Wi-Fi as much as possible, says Darr. AT&T is investing heavily in that strategy by installing Wi-Fi hotspots in stadiums and busy city areas in Manhattan and San Francisco. Newer AT&T phones automatically switch to using Wi-Fi when in range, reducing the load on cell towers. “Once that can work more seamlessly for data and calls, it is going to be a huge help,” says Darr. This February AT&T reported that it had worked with other carriers, including China Mobile, on a successful trial of special Wi-Fi hotspots that can recognize an authorized device and take over its connection without dropping calls or interrupting downloads in progress.

Experts say that the major carriers are so far keeping pace with the demands of their customers. “Out of the four major national carriers, three are getting faster,” says Moore of RootMetrics; the fourth, Sprint, is due to introduce its first LTE networks this year, which should allow it to speed up too. He believes there is enough spectrum to go around but notes that carriers are caught in something of an arms race with their own customers. “All I see for now is that speeds go up,” says Moore, “and that will encourage consumer demands to go up as well.” Partly as a result, almost all wireless carriers phased out unlimited data plans last year. That means they can cap bandwidth use or charge more for it if they find demand for data outstripping their ability to supply it.

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