Technologizer Throws a Party

If you live in the Bay Area and are a FoT (Friend of Technologizer), read on: We’re throwing a party next Tuesday, May 12th from 5:30pm to 8:00pm at Nectar Wine Lounge and Restaurant, a very cool venue in Burlingame. We’re calling it Technologizer’s Tweetup, but Twitter newbies and skeptics are as welcome as hardcore Twitter addicts. The main goal of the night is simple: to relax, enjoy some good food and drink, and talk gadgets, the Web, social media, and all the other stuff we cover on this site. Consider it a sort of in-person edition of Technologizer.

If you’re reading this and can make it, you’re invited–although admittance is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis. Head to TTweetup.com to register.

Technologizer’s Tweetup is sponsored by eHow and by TWTRCON SF 09; the latter is the cool conference on Twitter and business that’s happening on May 31st in San Francisco. (I came up with the idea and will tweet the whole event.) You’ll have the opportunity to learn more about both at the Tweetup.

Can’t Get Free Food? Blame the Internet.

The other day, I was browsing through my Twitter feed and spotted a link to a free meal coupon from KFC. Needing dinner, I printed out the coupon and took it to my local restaurant for some free grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit. I also retweeted the link and told some friends through e-mail.

To put it another way, I helped the offer go viral. As demand soared, KFC began experiencing difficulties. Not everyone was getting their chicken, and some angry would-be diners went so far as to protest en masse.

It didn’t help that the Internet made it easy to exploit the system. Getting the coupon required downloading and installing a program that ensures you’re only printing one, but it didn’t take long for people to find the PDF version, which was offered to viewers of Oprah on the night of the show. I believe this is how the promotion started, but it certainly wasn’t how it ended.

A variation on this theme occurred earlier this year, when Quizno’s decided to give away one million subs for free. Not more than a two days after the promotion began, customers reported being turned away or subjected to bait-and-switch from franchise owners. In a memo, Quizno’s corporate noted the impressive speed with which the campaign spread and increased the reimbursement level to each franchise as a result.

That information spreads quickly over the Internet is no revelation, but these examples show how quickly the Web can motivate people to get their free lunch. That leads to store owners getting overwhelmed, which leads to backlash. Fast food chains, consider yourselves warned.

Sirius XM Bleeds Customers, Blame the Programming.

Despite the company’s best efforts to sugar coat it, Sirius XM is in trouble. The company shed just over 404,000 subscribers in the first quarter, as far as we can tell the first ever where the company combined or separate has done so.

Losses also widened to $236.6 million, more than double the $104.1 million loss a year earlier. Pro forma revenues clocked in at $587 million. The company did report a $108 million profit from operations, its second quarter of doing so.

The loss came as a surprise to Wall Street, which expected the company to continue adding subscribers on a much smaller loss. Miller Tabak & Co analyst David Joyce told CNBC that he believes subscriber loss will offset any gains from cost-cutting measures, a problem for the company.

We’ll give some credit to the company for reducing its costs, such as the subscriber acquisition costs, down to $61 from $82 a year earlier. However, the signficant loss of subscribers is very troubling.

Sirius XM is quick to blame the automobile industry’s woes for its problems in attracting customers. While yes, the auto industry slowdown is exacerbating the problem, it is not the cause. It’s the company itself.

For all intents and purposes this company is being horribly managed, especially in the programming department. We’ve already covered the hot mess that is the DSquared show, but there’s more. It’s as if the service has hired complete novices to program its channels.

I’ve watched the fan boards for awhile, and over and over again its the same story. Music on a channel that is either completely off format or just plain bad, or DJs who make the stations sound like FM.

That is the central problem for Sirius XM, not the automobile industry. Start running your programming department correctly, and you won’t have such a problem keeping people.

Hijacking a User’s Default Browser is Never Acceptable. Repeat, Never.

The standard “Express” installation of the Windows 7 RC does something I thought software had stopped doing years ago:

If you upgrade from a previous version of Windows, and choose the “Express” option when installing, your default browser will be changed to Internet Explorer. Needless to say, this behavior has immediately sparked complaints from Mozilla and Opera, and rightfully so, because it’s shady at the very least.

This sounds so cheesy that I wonder if it’s a unwitting gaffe by Microsoft rather than an intentional ploy. Can we all agree that this needs to be changed for the final version of the OS?

Windows Genuine Advantage: A Lousy Microsoft Name No More!

Back, in March, I wrote an article for PC World on the worst Microsoft product names of all time. One of my nominees was Windows Genuine Advantage, the anti-piracy technology that’s suffered at least a couple of major breakdowns that caused woes for paying customers. I wondered what exactly was advantageous about it for anyone but Microsoft, and groused that it was a patronizing moniker. And I suggested that Microsoft change the name to “Windows Anti-Piracy Technology.”

Over at Cnet, Ina Fried is reporting that Microsoft is dumping “Windows Genuine Advantage” for a name that’s close to my recommendation: Windows Activation Technologies. And it’s making activation slightly less annoying:

In Windows Vista, if a user does not activate their software immediately, they get a warning that they still need to do so. The dialog box offers two options, to activate immediately or to do so later. However, the activate later box cannot be checked for 15 seconds.

Microsoft decided this was a bit too annoying. With Windows 7, users can click activate later immediately, but then get a dialog box touting the benefits of activation.

I suspect I haven’t squawked about Windows’ copy protection for the last time. But to be fair to Microsoft, most of the changes it’s made to activation in the last couple of years have been to make it less annoying, and it’s suffered no recent meltdowns. And at least I won’t feel like my intelligence is being insulted every time I hear its name.

5Words for May 7th, 2009

I’m moving to southeast England!

Really fast Internet in England.

Your own personal Wi-Fi hotspot.

Yet another OS for netbooks.

Anonymous? You can’t watch Hulu.

Indian hacker’s Facebook-compromising tool.

Windows 7 requires no RAM.

WiGig: Short-range gigabit wireless.

Windows 7: no speed demon?

An aluminum EeePC: pretty swanky!

The Senate vs. Google News.

Interesting Changes for Twitter Search

Cnet’s Rafe Needleman has a scoop on ambitious tweaks that Twitter plans to make to its search feature:

…Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages…Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that.

That’s ambitious stuff, epecially for a service that didn’t do search at all for much of its history and only rolled it out to the bulk of its user base a few days ago. I’m not ready to get all wild-eyed and declare Twitter to be a Google killer, but the better it gets at helping Twitterers find information in something close to real time, the more it becomes a resource that does fascinating and useful things that Google doesn’t. Already, I’m turning to Twitter to get answers to some questions I would have Googled for in the past, such as “Which Windows IM client looks and works the most like OS X’s iChat?”

Xerox’s New Take on Color Printing is Solid. Literally.

At $23,500, I’m reasonably sure Xerox’s new ColorQube 9200 multifunction printer is the most expensive product I’ve written about on Technologizer–but trust me, it’s neat. This “hallway” device for use by large groups of users for printing, copying, and scanning (it pumps out up to 85 pages a minute) competes with high-end color lasers, but uses Xerox’s unique solid-ink technology–which has meaningful advantages over laser when it comes to simplicity, cost of printing, and environmental impact.

Solid ink is nothing new–it’s been around since 1991, and originated in Tektronix’s Phaser printers, a line later acquired by Xerox. But this is the first time that Xerox has scaled the technology up from desktop and workgroup printers to print at higher speeds and in greater volume. The basic idea’s the same: The ColorQube uses crayon-like sticks of ink which it melts and sprays onto a drum, then transfers onto paper. The ink sticks are relatively compact for the amount of pages they can produce (the ColorQube can run for 55,000 pages before you need to replenish ink). And you can just pop them into the printer as it’s convenient to do so–there are no toner cartridges to try and use until every speck of toner has been squeezed out.

Xerox says that solid ink is kinder to the planet than laser: Over four years of use, the ColorQube’s consumables will involve 88 pounds of packaging waste, vs. 815 pounds for a comparable color laser printer. The company even points out that the compactness of the color ink sticks means that it doesn’t need to send as many trucks out onto the road to deliver consumables for the ColorQube.

The printer’s other major news involves a hot-button issue with color printing: cost. Companies that lease color printers often pay by the page: a penny for black and white printing and eight cents for color is typical. The Xerox printer’s cost for pages with lots of full color will remain eight cents, but pages with less color will cost about three cents–and ones with just a splash of color will cost a penny. The idea is to get companies worrying less about color being too pricey and letting employees pump out Word documents, spreadsheets, and the like without increasing the per-page cost by 800 percent. We’ll see how it goes–every color-printer company has been working hard to make color more pervasive for years, but monochrome shows no signs of going away.

When it comes to print quality, solid ink’s pros and cons have historically been quite different from those of laser printer: the ink works well with a variety of media, but the output has sometimes been waxy-looking and duller than that of a good laser. However, Xerox provided me with some print samples from the ColorQube on various types of paper stock that looked quite pleasing.

This article is not, of course, a review or a recommendation–but after spending some time talking with Xerox staffers about the ColorQube,  I do know that if I were in the market for a multifunction device in the class that it competes in, I’d want to check it out. The folks within business who acquire equipment like this tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, though, and it’ll be interesting to see if color ink’s real advantages versus laser prove enough to make this printer a hit.

Duke Nukem Forever No More?

Shacknews reeled in a monster scoop this evening, reporting that 3D Realms, the development team that has worked on Duke Nukem Forever for 12 years, will shut down. If this is the truth, it could put to rest a legendary example of computer game vaporware.

The story quotes “a very reliable source close to Duke Nukem Forever developer 3D Realms,” but has since confirmed the story with a named 3D Realms employee, publisher Take Two Interactive and spinoff labels Deep Silver and Apogee Software, which will continue to work on the separate Duke Nukem Trilogy for the PSP and Nintendo DS.

When I first heard the news, I imagined three possible scenarios:

1. 3D Realms reveals the news to be a hoax, and announces a ship date for Duke Nukem Forever. And it’s tomorrow.

2. The entire existence of Duke Nukem Forever was a myth created by 3D Realms — or at least a concept that departed from reality many years ago — and the closure will ultimately lead to the truth. (I’ve had my doubts ever since the release date of “when it’s done” emerged)

3. Duke Nukem Forever’s tale of development hell is the honest gospel, and we may finally see some closure, even if it’s not the ideal outcome.

But in the latest update at Shacknews, webmaster Joe Siegler ruled out option number one. “It’s not a marketing thing,” he said. “It’s true. I have nothing further to say at this time.” Take Two said it retains the publishing rights to the game, but does not fund its development, so there’s a path to market if the game somehow gets completed.

Really, though, this is just me blabbering over a bit of gaming news that’s hard to swallow. For all the games and technology layoffs and cutbacks we’ve seen over the last year, Duke Nukem Forever didn’t seem like a target simply because of its persistence. I always thought the perpetual generator of punch lines would be around, forever.

If you want to see what might have been, here’s an old video and a new video. And here’s a great chronology from Shacknews.

WinPatrol: A Must-Have Free Tool

WinPatrol is a free tool you just must have on your Windows PC: It gives you a way to stop unwanted programs from loading (and tells you which apps are safe), watches out for spyware and keyloggers, keeps your System tray uncluttered, and when you boot, can get you to the desktop quickly.

At its core, WinPatrol raises a flag when something suspicious happens within critical parts of your system. For instance, you’ll get an alert when anything is added to any of the Registry’s Startup locations and you’ll have the option of blocking it or disabling it later. WinPatrol watches almost 20 functions, including when a browser plug-in is added, a file type association is changed, a scheduled task is created, your HOST file is touched, or a new ActiveX component is installed.

Continue reading this story…

BitTorrent Search Aggregator Filters Copyrighted Content

In a win for big media companies, Mininova, a popular torrent search Web site, today deployed a content recognition system that removes any file linking to allegedly copyrighted content, and will permanently ban those files from being re-uploaded.

Torrents are a terrific way to distribute large files, but let’s face it: the technology has been used largely for piracy, despite its many merits. People don’t go to sites like Mininova to download Linux faster.

While sites that aggregate torrents are not hosting illegally gotten content themselves, certain ones know full well that they are facilitating it. They are just hiding behind the BitTorrent architecture.

There are various esoteric arguments made in defense of torrent search Web sites such as “a crime can be committed with product X, but the people that sell it are not responsible for the action Y.” I don’t buy that. There is a correlation between content piracy and torrent search sites, and everyone knows it. Pirate Bay is the perfect example.

Pirate Bay has infamously flaunted the fact that people could go to its site to locate copyrighted content, but argued that it was not engaging in any illegal acts due to the decentralized nature of torrent file distribution and the relative permissiveness of Sweden’s national copyright laws. The courts ruled otherwise.

The letters Pirate Bay has published from a gaggle of angry attorneys are oftentimes hilarious and amusing in a punk rock “stick it to the man” sort of way, but are also wildly adolescent. Web sites that profit from posting torrents files should perform due diligence to ensure that copyrights are not being violated as a consequence–period.

Mininova is cooperating with an unnamed association that represents copyright owners. It is doing the responsible thing, even if it was induced into taking action by the threat of lawsuits. The Web can’t be the wild wild west forever, and a business should not exist simply to enable illegal acts.

Android Notebooks From Dell?

Engadget is reporting that mobile software company Bsquare issued a press release saying it was providing software for Dell netbooks running Google’s Android OS. It’s hard to see how a company could do so unless it was, indeed, working with Dell on such products. But Dell hasn’t said anything about Android, and I’m not seeing the press release Engadget republished on Bsquare’s site.

One way or another, it’ll be fascinating to see if Android (or other contenders, like Palm’s WebOS) does end up on netbooks, and if so, whether it finds success. It isn’t every day that a new consumer client OS arrives and finds success–in 2009 as in 1984, the major players are Microsoft and Apple, and other players are tiny potatoes when it comes to market share (sorry, Linux, I love you just the same). But with more and more of everyday computing happening in the browser, it’s never been more plausible that a new OS might make sense and gain traction. Although it’s still not entirely clear to me why Android would be a more compelling netbook OS than something like Ubuntu already is…

What if Apple Did Buy Twitter? Ten (Un)likely Scenarios

Okay, so the chances of Apple buying Twitter seem nearly as remote as the odds that Twitter will buy Apple. It’s still fun to think about what might transpire if it did:

1. Macs would show the Failwhale when they felt a Kernel Panic coming on, and Twitter would display the Sad Mac when it was over capacity.

2. Already-bizarre terms like Tweet, Tweep, and Twoosh would become iTweet, iTweep, and iTwoosh.

3. Apple would air ads with a hip guy pretending to be Twitter and a nebbish claiming to be Facebook. Facebook would respond with snarky claims about the Failwhale swimming in a sea of unicorn tears.

4. FriendFeed users would continue to contend that FriendFeed was superior to Twitter–but they’d resemble Linux advocates even more than they already do.

5. The Internet would soon be overrun with blurry screen shots of alleged new Twitter features.

6. The new iPod Nano would let you tweet by using the scroll wheel to enter alphanumeric information. There would be no known instances of a Nano owner’s tweets being as long as 140 characters.

7. People would get really excited when @stevejobs responded with a quick direct message to their questions.

8. Actually, Steve Jobs would pause occasionally to tweet during keynotes. Possibly at the intervals where he currently chugs bottled water.

9. A $169 Twitter AppleCare protection plan would entitle you to get in your car and drive to an Apple Store to get expedited service from the Genius Bar whenever Twitter flaked out on you.

10. People would spend untold hours wondering if Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would ever sign up for Twitter.

Any possibilities I’m missing here?

5 Reasons Apple Should Not Get Into Gaming

When rumors of an Apple takeover of Electronic Arts arose, I steered clear of reporting on it, but it’s hard to ignore Apple’s recent hiring of an Xbox executive and its previous investment in a UK-based chip maker. I can’t help but ponder what the computer and gadget trendsetter might gain from gaming in the first place.

Today, there’s an article from ChannelWeb’s Brian Kraemer on why Apple should get into gaming, arguing that Apple should develop its own game console. After reading Kraemer’s bullet points, I’m not convinced this is a good idea, and here are five reasons why:

1. The Best Ideas Are Already Taken: The notion that Apple can do to video games what it did to music only works if there’s a void in gaming that needs to be filled. While MP3 players were certainly lacking until the iPod came along, most gamers can find what they’re looking for these days. Before the Wii, it might have been a different story.

2. A Console Wouldn’t Play to Apple’s Strengths: Apple is known for creating easy-to-use technology, and while some people need books like Wii for Dummies, the average consumer can figure out how to put a disc in a tray. Beyond that, Apple is renowned for its products’ sleekness and quality materials, but those features don’t have the same cachet in gaming. Fancy-looking set-top boxes won’t impress the ladies.

3. It’s Expensive: Microsoft’s Xbox division endured an entire console cycle, and then some, of financial losses before turning a profit, and I need more than two hands to count the number of companies that have failed at making consoles entirely. With Apple already profiting on the strength of the iPhone, why make such a risky investment?

4. The Field is Too Crowded: When Sega’s hardware division bit the dust and discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001, Microsoft’s Xbox filled the gap, but is a four console market necessary? I don’t think so. If anything, gaming needs fewer consoles so developers won’t have as many headaches trying to port between them all.

5. The iPhone and iPod Touch: This is the biggest reason of all. Apple already has two capable game consoles that are also multimedia and communications devices. Even the most gaming-averse users can try an App or two, and that crossover appeal is exactly why games are already so successful on these gadgets. If Apple indeed plans to advance in gaming, it will be through existing devices that do other things.

Twitter Cofounder: We’re Not For Sale

That doesn’t mean that it won’t sell, of course, but doesn’t sound like supporting evidence for the idea that Apple is about to buy Twitter. Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:

Stone and co-founder Evan Williams were making an appearance on the morning talk show The View when host Barbara Walters asked about the recent flood of rumors that the likes of Apple, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. all are vying to buy Twitter. Stone said, “No. We are not for sale.”

5Words for May 6th, 2009

Here’s what I’m reading today:

Dell adds Wimax to notebooks.

Free iPhone apps make money.

Will Pre multitasking work well?

An AT&T app for iPhone.

South Carolina goes after Craigslist.

The prehistory of today’s Internet.

Windows 7′s XP compatibility: incompatible!

Rock Band’s Lennon, Harrison guitars.

Swedish NASA hacker is indicted.