canadayonghsin.com

Delta Air Lines announced Tuesday that it will outfit its domestic aircraft with Wi-Fi over the next year.

The airline expects to have more than 330 aircraft complete by summer 2009. The full fleet agreement between Aircell and Delta will provide a consistent, convenient experience for customers traveling on the airline who wish to use the Gogo Internet service.

(Credit:
Delta Air Lines)

The Aircell Gogo service, which will be on the first planes this fall, will run $9.95 or $12.95 for trips under or over three hours, respectively, and will allow connection of any Wi-Fi device. It will be interesting to see what ports and applications they shut down–that is, Skype or other voice over Internet Protocol apps, and of course, porn.

Consider the idea of social networking or gaming across your plane. Kinda cool.

“Aviation has a perfect record–we’ve never left one up there. We will attempt to break that record,” DARPA Vulture program manager Daniel Newman told Flight Global. “We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft.”

The Vulture is expected to draw on spacecraft design.

The program faces a number of technological challenges, not the least of which is what Vulture is expected to run on. DARPA has ruled out anything radioactive or blimplike, so that leaves fuel cells or solar.

Not only will the new aircraft be required to drift aloft month after month after month, but it will have to do so carrying a 1,000-pound payload while maintaining sufficient speed to withstand the winds at 60,000 to 90,000 feet. In other words, it will operate like a satellite, but not be constrained by the rules of orbital mechanics.

(Credit:
NASA)

And unlike surveillance aircraft and other UAVs, the Vulture won’t be dependent on foreign bases. Hey, we’re saving money already.

Call it a “persistent pseudo-satellite capability in an aircraft package”–DARPA does. Documents from the R&D agency envision the Vulture as being able to loiter uninterrupted over an area for more than five years at a time while performing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and communication missions.

DARPA is close to awarding a contract for the initial development phase of an unmanned aircraft capable of staying aloft for five years at a time, according to the aviation magazine Flight.

Portables are especially expected to take off internationally this year, growing from 78 million in 2007 to 109.4 million units this year. That’s good news for the industry because notebooks and laptops tend to be pricier than desktop PCs, and they should keep average selling prices higher for a bit longer.

But inexpensive notebooks are stirring up the market too. A reason for the dramatic 40 percent bump in international portable shipments has a lot to do with how the numbers have been counted, according to IDC.

Those three manufacturers have some company in the consumer space. Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and perhaps Dell already have, or plan to release, their own tiny laptops.

Shipments of portable PCs should grow 34.5 percent this year, according to a PC shipment tracker that IDC released this week. That’s up from 33.9 percent in 2007 and way above the projected 13.4 percent for next year. By 2012, according to the firm, portables will increase by only 9 percent.

PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard are betting big on notebooks. The company this week released 17 new models, mostly for consumers.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

By the end of the year, PC makers will have shipped 310 million units, close to half (145.1 million) of which are notebooks. The rest are desktop PCs and servers, which together on a global basis still comprise the largest slice of the market, but the difference is disappearing fast.

Worldwide PC shipments are on pace to grow 15.2 percent in 2008, according to IDC. That’s above the analyst firm’s March prediction of 12.8 percent growth. But laptop shipments, which have become an increasing force in the PC market, will peak.

The firm said it had previously not included the rapidly growing low-cost mininotebook segment because of the “use of nontraditional PC designs, including the use of embedded or custom operating systems, (as well as) reduced processing power and storage,” IDC said. But now, due to the popularity and computing robustness of the Asus Eee PC, the Classmate PC platform from Intel, and OLPC’s XO, mininotebooks are included. Plus, the firm notes, the volume of units shipped are actually rising.

On Monday night, social-news site Digg took a new approach to its famously clamorous users: CEO Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose sat down in front of a Ustream-connected camera with their MacBook Pros and a couple of beers and answered questions that had been submitted by Diggers.

As a relative outsider to Digg culture, I was fairly dissatisfied.

All in all, the session highlighted quite a few of Digg’s strengths as well as troubles going forward–and additionally reflected a few common criticisms about the site as a whole. But in the process, the questions were inward-focused, dealing with the demands of an active but demanding user base. Very few dealt with Digg’s place in the Web’s landscape or new media industry as a whole.

Digg, like a handful of other social-media sites (Yelp and Vimeo come to mind), has become famous for a notoriously tight-knit community. On one hand, that’s a sign of success. It’s got a really dedicated user base. On the other hand, it invokes claims of cliquishness and complaints that it’s hard for an outsider to break in.

Watching the town hall, those complaints seemed pretty grounded. Right off the bat, the 20 questions selected were chosen because of the numbers of Diggs each question amassed in a thread about the town hall. True, that’s keeping it in the community, and Digg is all about the community. But it’s also a bit incestuous, and the questions could have fallen prey to Digg’s alleged insideriness–voting up a comment or story simply because of who posted it or submitted it, not because of the content of the stories.

And consequently, the vast majority of the stories were about the nitty-gritty details of the site, the sort of thing that would be of importance to a daily Digg user but which would be inconsequential at best (and potentially nonsensical) to an outsider. I’m not a top Digger, but I’m more than familiar with the site. Digg’s users, for better or for worse, also happen to be a tech-savvy bunch. That means a tougher job for Adelson, Rose, and the rest, as the users will be more likely to demand upgrades to the service, insist on a better user experience, and the like. That’s good; I’m tired of seeing Web 2.0 sites thinking that they can get away with perpetual beta phases and poor performance.

But on the other hand, Digg can’t simply look inward because legitimate competitors have begun to surface. One of them, Mixx, just raised several million dollars in venture funding. None of the questions addressed on Monday night dealt with Digg’s opinion of its competitors, plan for moving forward in a tough economic climate, or where Rose and Adelson see the site in five years. Granted, that’s not their fault; the questions about “super-users” and comment system upgrades were, after all, what the users Dugg. But I sat through question after question about minute upgrades to the Digg comment system when I really wanted to hear about Adelson and Rose’s collective vision for the site going forward.

One question did touch upon the constant gossip that Digg will get acquired. For obvious reasons, Adelson and Rose declined to comment. “We get asked this every day,” was Adelson’s response. “We are laser focused on the features that users want us to do, and frankly that is what we’re focused on as a business right now.”

Digg does have a great model for social news that, in my opinion, hasn’t yet been paralleled by any other site. But it’s in a bit of a Catch-22: ignore or deceive its community, and it faces mass backlash; but pander to its community too much, and it hinders its opportunities for growth as it focuses too far inward. I wanted to hear vision. I wanted to hear partnerships and developments and possibilities. What I heard instead was the gradual upgrading of the search algorithm. Maybe, because I’m not a hardcore Digger, I just don’t get it.

But I appreciate that Kevin Rose is a fan of Chimay Red ale.

Brightcove, the maker of online-video tools, released its new Brightcove 3 video publishing platform on Monday.

Some of what the new package offers is improved work flow for media companies, a video player that is easier to customize and greater bandwidth delivery, the company said in a statement.

Among the companies using Brightcove 3 are Showtime, Lifetime and FearNet. The platform serves 135 million visitors per month.

Google just concluded a press conference call regarding its new social widget strategy, Google Friend Connect (see “Google brings Friend Connect to the masses”). I was on the call and live-blogged it. See the live blog in the window below.

Caroline McCarthy is working on a follow-up post looking at where Friend Connect fits in an increasingly crowded market of social aggregation plays.

See also:

Facebook to open the gates with ‘Facebook Connect’
MySpace announces ‘Data Availability’ project with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, Twitter

 Live Blog: Google Friend Connect conference(05/12/2008) 
Powered by: CoveritLive   Close   9:37 David Glazer, an engineering director at Google: “Bringing users one step closer to ‘any app, any site, any friend.’”
9:38 Google: 99 percent of sites are not social networks, but they are social.

9:39 Friend Connect is designed to be a “salt shaker full of social.”
Let Webmaster add social capabilities to any site.

9:39 Easy Wizard for people to add social apps (from the Google Gallery) into the social app on the site.
9:41 Product manager:
Friend Connect has three main parts:
1. Place for people to sign in
2. A source of friends
3. Apps
9:41 1. Sign in:
Friend Connect uses OpenID–from any OID provider
9:41 Can also use Google account. Benefit–hundreds of millions of users already have access
9:42 2. Site users OAuth for sources of friends
9:42 3. Apps: Any Open Social app can run on Friend Connect-enabled site.
9:43 Any activity on an FC site can be reflected on any other FC site.
9:43 Launching tonight: Preview release. A few demo sites.
9:44 Also: IngridMichaelson.com. She’s a singer. Demo will put iLike on the singer’s site via Friend Connect.
9:44 Will start off by “whitelisting a small number of sites.”
9:45 Got a question? Ask here. I will post interesting questions and comments. (They don’t go automatically)
9:46 [Comment From Joshua Tretakoff]
Will it allow interoperability with other OpenID services? Specifically, Plaxo? 9:46 Commentary: Web is becoming more open, more social… FC is possible only through progress in open standards, like OpenID and OAuth.
9:46 Yada yada
9:46 Google looking forward to rapid evolution in the Web. “Things will look different every six months.”
9:46 [Comment From Chris]
Is Friend Connect for personal use or will it have any application toward business? 9:47 Questions from other callers now… I am in queue.
9:48 Q: When will this be available?
9:48 A: Demos will be out in a few days.
9:48 Q: OK, so if I have my own Web site, when do I get to try it?
9:49 A: Joe Kraus: “On the order of months, but certainly not six months. Probably a couple.”
9:49 [Comment From Dossy Shiobara]
How is Friend Connect more than just OpenID+OAuth+FOAF? What’s the magic here? Why should we care? 9:50 Q: 1: Open Social, how will it integrate? 2: What about Facebook?
9:51 A: Friend Connect supports OpenSocial, but OSoc apps take a few hours of integration work.
9:51 A: No plans to support “running Facebook apps this way.” Business relationship with Facebook: “We have no special relationship. Facebook has a terrific API.”
9:51 [Comment From Aaron]
Do you like the technology? 9:52 @aaron. Yes. Very cool concept.
9:52 Google is taking questions from conference attendees right now. I am reporting those questions. Hope to be able to ask my (and your) questions in a second.
9:53 Q: (Marshall from ReadWriteWeb): Why have there been three different announcements in the past week? Why doesn’t everyone work together?
Also, why isn’t data passsed to the site, just held in an iframe?
9:54 Also: Why do you think my friends on one site make sense on another?
9:54 A: 1: Social is “in the air.” It’s the blossoming of a lot of work by a lot of people. We don’t move in lockstep and don’t need to. We “converge on interoperable technology.”
9:56 2: There’s more than one way to connect a site to the social Web. With Friend Connect, “we’re confident” it’s a good step forward. “I’m sure there will be more ways to do that than what Friend Connect does. We wanted to start with easiest and safest starting point.” (itals mine)
9:56 [Comment From James]
But how do you define “interoperable technology”? 9:57 3. Clearly, there is no “one size fits all” of friendship. The user decides if they want to link in their friends. “It has to come down to putting the user in control.”
9:57 Our questions:
1. Social Graph API?
2. Dossy’s question about OpenID
9:58 1. Don’t read anything into it. We just didn’t think it’s what users were asking for
9:59 2. How is this more than gluing together OpenID + OAUth+ FOAF?
A: It’s not different at all. Nothing that nobody else couldn’t have engineered. But we think it’s easier for sites to paste in the work that we do.
9:59 [Comment From Keith from CoveritLive]
I think you need to load up a ‘Gong Show’ sound effect for some of these answers… 10:00 Hah! Really.
10:00 [Comment From Kyle]
What are we talking about? 10:00 Kyle: This is a conference all about: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9941411-2.html
10:01 Q: Regarding OpenSocial, please talk about enabling third-party sites to be true OSoc containers.
10:02 A: “It’s about more than just having frinds with you, it’s about having things to do with your friends.”
10:03 Any Webmaster can run OSoc apps on their site. Google Friend Connect just makes it easier.
10:04 “We found OpenSocial spec was up to the challenge of supporting the rest of the Web.”
10:04 That’s it for the questions!
10:04 Standby for wrapup.
10:05 Friend Connect URLs going live tonight.
10:05 Here were the good comments from people in this liveblog that I didn’t get to:

10:05 [Comment From Joshua Tretakoff]
Will it allow interoperability with other OpenID services? Specifically, Plaxo? 10:05 [Comment From Chris]
Is Friend Connect for personal use or will it have any application toward business? 10:05 [Comment From James]
But how do you define” interoperable technology”? 10:05 [Comment From Dossy Shiobara]
Friend Connect sounds like “site-to-site messaging”–it’s SMTP-over-HTTP all over again. 10:06 [Comment From Vikas Goel]
Would i be able to make my blog intercative through freind connect? 10:06 [Comment From Dossy Shiobara]
How has Google solved the “trust problem” of interoperable data? What happens if an application leaks trusted data? Who owns the liability? The user who naively volunteered the data in the first place? Google? Trust problem is hard to solve. 10:06 That’s it!
We’re working on more coverage of Google Friend Connect. Stay tuned to Webware!
10:06 Thank you for reading today.              

Thousands of users.
Millions of readers.
Free and simple to use.
Try CoveritLive today.

You know social networking has jumped the shark when Starbucks gets into the act.

Starbucks has launched My Starbucks Idea, an electronic suggestion box where people can offer up their best ideas for making the already ubiquitous coffee retailer even more successful.

You could say the company is as aggressive with its Internet campaigns as it is with its prices. There is Wi-Fi in the stores, they let you log onto iTunes to see what song is playing in the store and download it, let you use text messaging to find the nearest store, and they gave away free digital songs for a month last year.

You can offer up ideas, vote on other peoples’ ideas, and get feedback from Starbucks employees. The company says it will consider implementing the most popular ideas.

Suggestions range from offering weekly coffee specials and holding coffee classes to selling books and having “more coffee smells.”

I’ve got one: charge less for soy milk!

At My Starbucks Idea site, you can make suggestions and vote on other people's ideas, which may or may not be used by the coffee retailer.

(Credit:
Starbucks)

Summer is the season for sequels, and Intel’s hoping to match the blockbuster success of Centrino Duo with the latest iteration of its mobile platform, Centrino 2. Essentially a marketing term, Centrino 2 (code-named Montevina) is used to describe a raft of new technologies from Intel, including a handful of new Core 2 Duo processors; a new chipset with a faster front-side bus; a new graphics solution with support for high-definition content and switchable graphics; and updated wireless and wired connectivity.

But do you need to run out and buy a Centrino 2 laptop? What are the expected benefits? After the page break we run down the new features and what they’ll mean to you.

New processors: The processors launching with the new platform are built on the same 45nm Penryn architecture that debuted earlier this year, though the new chips now all support the faster, 1,066MHz front-side bus.

Three of the processors are part of a new class of energy-efficient CPUs designed to enhance battery life; these are designated with a part number ‘Pxxxx’ (think P for “power optimized”). The energy-efficient CPUs have the added advantage of staying cooler than their more power-hungry counterparts, a development that should bring about even smaller, thinner laptops.

The remaining processors–part number ‘Txxxx’ and ‘Xxxxx’–prioritize performance. All six new processors and pricing (per 1,000 units) are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz): $209
Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (2.4GHz): $241
Intel Core 2 Duo P9500 (2.53GHz): $348
Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 (2.53GHz): $316
Intel Core 2 Duo T9600 (2.8GHz): $530
Intel Core 2 Extreme X9100 (3.06GHz): $851

Faster overall performance: The new Mobile Intel 45 Express chipset increases the frequency of the front-side bus to 1,066MHz, which helps all the components of the system communicate more quickly. The point is moot if you’re using DDR2 memory, which currently tops out at 800MHz. But the new chipset also supports DDR3 memory, which has a higher peak throughput than previous memory technologies. Intel is always reluctant to quantify performance improvements, but company representatives have promised “dramatic” performance gains.

More flexible graphics. One of the big developments with Centrino 2 is support for switchable graphics. The new chipset enables systems that switch–either automatically or user-controlled–between integrated Intel graphics (to conserve battery life) and discrete graphics (for more powerful performance). Lenovo and Sony have already promised this feature in some of their latest models.

Also notable with Centrino 2 is built-in support for high-definition video playback, HDMI, and DisplayPort.

Enhanced network connections: The two wireless options available with the new platform support the 802.11n standard, and Intel promises you’ll be able to roam up to twice as far as you could with the company’s previous Wi-Fi chip. It’s also poised to start offering WiMax support in the fall.

On the wired side, support for high-speed Gigabit Ethernet–a feature that’s likely to appeal to business users–is standard with Centrino 2.

Other goodies: Centrino 2 can support 2GB of Turbo Memory, flash memory designed to speed up commonly used applications. Also, Intel continues to woo businesses by offering Centrino 2 with vPro, which incorporates a handful of additional technologies for remote management and configuration.

Overall, Centrino 2 has all the hallmarks of a box-office hit. Every component of the platform–processor, chipset, graphics, wireless–has seen at least modest enhancements designed to increase performance, decrease power consumption, and add functionality.

And while it’s too early to speak in general terms, our preliminary test results seem to back up at least some of Intel’s claims. The first Centrino 2 systems to hit CNET Labs have all included P-series Core 2 Duo processors, and while the performance gains are modest, all have demonstrated impressive battery life.

We expect Centrino 2 to come into clearer focus throughout the summer as we test more of the latest laptops to include the new components. Stay tuned to Crave and our laptop reviews page as we highlight and review even more systems built on the new platform.

I saw Iron Man (cool Web site) on Sunday, joining the hordes who contributed to the $100 million dollar plus opening of the film. The movie was a blast so to speak, and Robert Downey Jr. was outstanding in the lead role. It has plenty of digital special effects and great production design, especially the futuristic computer usage scenarios.

(Credit:
Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment)

Minority Report has some interesting computer usage scenarios, but Iron Man is far more sophisticated. It’s difficult to describe the digital systems, but they are artificially intelligent (pass the Turing Test), and allow Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, to design, fabricate, and control very complex gear, with voice commands and hand movements, in matter of weeks, not decades or centuries.

There were some old-fashioned keyboards and command line screens along with advanced 3D user interfaces and heads up displays, but no Google searching, Twittering or iPhoning. The
cars (Audi paid for the new R8 to have featured role in the movie) were very ordinary but fleet.

A note to movies goers: the jumbo popcorn with the free refill has been suspended due to the rising cost of corn and production of ethanol, at least at my theater.

See Metacritic for reviews of Iron Man.

Music players are losing out in popularity to phones that pull double-duty, according to a market research report released Monday.

More than 500 million music phones were shipped worldwide in 2007, which puts that category of device 300 million units ahead of regular old portable music players, according to the report released Monday by MultiMedia Intelligence. The company is forecasting that by 2011, of the 941 million handsets that will ship worldwide, more than half will be music phones. (The report defines a music phone as a handset that plays music files, and has a memory card slot.)

The Walkman-branded W980 phone from Sony Ericsson is a phone but looks like a music player. Phones that play music are quickly outpacing standalone portable music players.

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

As the developed world begins to be saturated with cell phones, handset manufacturers and wireless operators are forced to look elsewhere to keep their profits up. For leading handset maker Nokia, its secret to staying on top of the competition is its growing business in emerging markets, like China, India, the Middle East, and Africa, according to my CNET News.com colleague Maggie Reardon.

The operators of wireless networks also need ways to increase revenue. So, though not everyone has a need for a data plan if they don’t want e-mail on their phone, music is something almost everyone can relate to. Right now the most promising driver of profits on cell phones is music-playing capability.

“Music has been the first ‘killer app’ for the operators to drive the consumption of premium content on the handset,” said Frank Dickson, chief research officer for MultiMedia Intelligence. To that end, MMI predicts the mobile music market will be worth $6 billion by the end of this year. “With such significant revenue and customer demand at stake, the operators’ and handset providers’ concerted efforts (will) use music as a central part of their handset strategies,” the report says.

Update 1:55 p.m. PDT: As several commenters have pointed out below, buying a music phone doesn’t necessarily mean it’s used for playing music. (Case in point: my own Verizon enV has a 2GB microSD slot, and I’ve never transferred MP3 files to it. But that’s mostly because my
iPod earbuds don’t work with the enV and I refuse to buy a separate set.) Music-playing ability was formerly a feature reserved for high-end phones, but as the technology gets cheaper, that means that those features will start to filter down to more inexpensive phones, which have always been the majority of the market.