animeclasicos.net

The article also goes on to say that the PC industry is basically on pins and needles as it waits to see what Apple puts out. According to the phantom analyst, PC makers have paused production on next-generation Netbooks until they see what Apple’s come up with.

Comments?

Interestingly, while there’s been a lot of talk about this being a media-centric device with a little Apple TV mixed in (what you’d expect from a giant iPod Touch), Barron’s quotes Jon Peddie, head of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon, Calif., as saying it will be a gaming machine as well.

Concept
art for an Apple touch-screen Netbook.

Now there’s a shocker. (I don’t think you’d have to be a veteran analyst to predict that).

“Gaming will be a big part of what this [the new device] is about,” Peddie said.

Via Engadget via 9to5Mac via Barron’s (subscription required to view full article)

As for concrete details about the device itself, the veteran analyst had only one thing to say about his or her hands-on experience: “The machine impresses with its display of hi-def video content. It’s better than the average movie experience, when you hold this thing in your hands.”

A “veteran analyst,” albeit a very anonymous one, has allegedly seen and touched Apple’s rumored “slate-style” PC, which we like to call the jumbo iPod Touch. According to Barron’s source, the new product will be announced in September, released in November, and carry a price tag of between $699 and $799. As previously reported, the tablet (or whatever Apple plans on calling) is ready to go but has been awaiting final approval from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

However, as far as we know, unlike the veteran analyst, he has not seen or touched the device.

(Credit:
Gizmodo)

If you’ve been following the Apple Netbook gossip along with us the last few months, here’s the latest tidbit, courtesy of Barron’s:

Here’s the real beauty of this calculation, though. You don’t have to limit yourself to 100. This optimization works for any population. So if you have a world of 26 potential life partners, simply divide by 2.72 and choose the next best one.

Mathematicians have racked their brains and abacuses, for the good of society, in order to help us all choose wisely the person who shares our king-size. According to New Scientist, the law of diminishing returns has long been thought to be a marvelous indicator of when to stick, rather than turn another card.

However, I would be interested whether any of you number-conscious geniuses out there have also used mathematical principles to choose your betrothed. Perhaps you have done it more than once, but we would still love to hear your number-based criteria.

The “Discard 50 then Choose the Next Best” method apparently gives you a 25 percent chance of choosing the best candidate.

So for a long time, mathematicians believed that, given 100 choices (each of which has to be chosen or discarded after the interview) you should discard the first 50 and then choose the next best one. (The assumption also is that if you don’t choose the first 99, you have to choose number 100, which, again, seems rather realistic to me. I know so many people who have chosen the last resort out of perceived necessity rather than, say, happiness.)

While the article begins by discussing the mathematical ways in which you can improve your chances in Vegas (or, if your taste and eyes have deserted you, Atlantic City), it goes on to discuss the marriage problem. Apparently, mathematicians have tortured themselves over marriage for some years. I did not know this. I figured that perhaps mathematicians only ever had one girlfriend, whom they married very soon after sex.

Were they each the other's 38th choice?

However, then along came John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller of Harvard University. I do not believe they were married. However, they came upon the idea that the magic number is, in fact, 37. Yes, you should stop after 37 candidates and choose the next best one. This number was apparently derived by taking the number 100 and dividing by e, the base of the natural logarithms (around 2.72). And it apparently increases your chances of the best choice to 37 percent.

May I go down on one knee and admit how wrong I was?

Perhaps I have been unnecessarily haunted since research revealed that Facebook destroys romantic relationships. Still, it was quite odd that a man whom I have chosen to follow on Twitter for his remarkable erudition in social psychology (oh, alright, his name is Dominic Johnson) passed along a quite extraordinary article from New Scientist, one that has made me ponder more deeply than I usually care to.

Naturally, scientific laws have certain suppositions. And at first glance, I considered the idea of having a mere 100 choices a little unrealistic.

Now, I know it is sometimes hard to know exactly how many potential partners are in your firmament. But it is surely not beyond some calculation.

We need a little more stability in this world. We need more happiness. And we need just a little more good judgment. It seems that only math can save us.

However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed a little more natural than it might have appeared. We march our way merrily through life, meeting people and declaring them a “yay” or a “nay.”

Perhaps the subject most fascinating to me at the moment is the gamble that is involved in choosing a life partner.

Oh, we have some supposed criteria in our heads about what makes a “yay”- body type, nose shape, or some such nonsense. But commitment is a very hairy creature, one that barks at us more often than it sings.

(Credit: CC Simon Shaw/Flickr)

There is a small word of warning, however. Some psychologists, such as JoNell Strough at West Virginia University, believe that the more we invest (in a gambling and, one supposes, marriage context), the more likely our decision will be attached to disaster.

Check out Don’s Facebook profile, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

Apple did not respond to requests for clarification as to why it demanded that Free Memory be removed from the app. At this point, I’m just as much in the dark about how iStat’s Free Memory feature might have violated App Store policy as Bjango says it is.

That sentiment of frustration and bewilderment is growing in the iPhone developer community. A recent demand from the Federal Communications Commission has forced Apple to shed a bit of light on its app approval policies, but much more light could stand to be shed on it. In its current state, the apparent inconsistencies and outstanding questions appear to be hurting all parties involved–including Apple.

The iStat app’s killer feature has been killed.

When pressed for more insight over Apple’s ultimatum, Gale had, much to her chagrin, little to say. “Apple really hasn’t given us any information,” she said. “We simply don’t have much we can say.”

Bjango, which focuses on developing apps for the iPhone, felt that it had no other choice but to create a new version sans the Free Memory feature. iStat 1.1, $1.99, offers only iPhone monitoring. Among other things, users can see battery life calculations and how much memory and disk space remains.

(Credit:
Bjango)

To maintain the application’s availability on the App Store, Bjango had been told by Apple that it had to remove what was arguably the most compelling feature of version 1.0: Free Memory, which enabled people to clear wired and inactive memory to increase the iPhone’s battery life. It also improved the device’s performance.

This is far from the first time Apple has kept developers and the media at arm’s length over an App Store rejection that has caused some head-scratching. More recently, Monday’s publicized approval of an iPhone game from a controversial franchise–Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, which follows the rejection of an official “South Park” app over “objectionable” content from the show–has people wondering whether the company even has a standard playbook for app approvals.

“Apple would not say why we needed to remove the ‘Free Memory’ feature,” Tori Gale, support manager at Bjango, wrote in an e-mail. “(Apple) simply demanded that it was removed, or (it) would delete (version 1.0 of) the app from the store…Nothing iStat did violated the terms of the developer contract, as far as we know, and Apple didn’t say that it did.”

The version 1.1 release of developer Bjango’s iStat application for the iPhone last week was marked with disappointment.

For its part, Bjango said it has “enjoyed creating iPhone applications, but we are disturbed at some of the recent decisions by Apple, both in this case and in cases with other developers,” Gale wrote. “The dictatorship of the App Store is limiting the creativity of developers and is resulting in users missing out on software that has been allowed on other, more open platforms.”

Gale’s comments echo gripes other developers and application backers have had over Apple’s App Store policies. Among many others, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor expressed disgust when his band’s app was originally rejected for objectionable content. “Apple rejects the NIN iPhone update because it contains objectionable content,” he tweeted to his followers. “Not even sure where to start with that one.”

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they’ve been tagged. It’s currently rolling out to members’ profiles.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook’s failed attempt to buy Twitter, the “real-time stream” upgrades to the social network’s home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

(Credit:
Facebook)

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word “BREAKING” in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it’s yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter’s territory in its attempt to own the Web’s trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it’s enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

It’d also be a formidable rival to the “analytics dashboard” that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company’s first concrete revenue model.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook’s fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn’t yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged–for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot–and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who’s talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members’ profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter’s “@-replies.”

While the addition of Excel support brings this app back into direct competition with the Quickoffice suite, what’s true in both cases is that it’s infinitely easier to edit an Excel document on the iPhone than it is to create one fresh. However, if you must put your tapping fingers through the pages, then the opportunity is now, finally, here.

In addition to viewing Excel XLS and XLSX documents, both Documents To Go apps can now also create new spreadsheets and edit existing ones. After taking a quick spin through the features, we can say it looks as if publisher DataViz, like Quickoffice, has been able to cram a lot of core features into a small space. There’s support for multiple spreadsheets, and the capability to resize rows and columns and search cells (the Find feature). There are also formatting and typeface tools, and support for older, even password-protected, worksheets.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Filling in a blank spreadsheet is an uphill battle, but one you can win.

That version, Documents to Go 2.0, is now here. The update brings Documents To Go back to fairly equal footing with rival Quickoffice Mobile Office Suite, which added Excel creation and editing support a month before.

Ever since Documents to Go came out on iPhone–both the standard version and with Microsoft Exchange Attachments–the publisher has been keeping our interest with promises of a version that could edit Excel documents and create new ones in addition to just viewing them.

Somehow, the presence of yet another machine in my already messed-up world might make me entirely unserviceable.

Has it really turned Tiddles on to Mark Twain?

I’m sure I caught the wife giving a look that suggested she had longed to smarten up her husband a little. I didn’t have the guts to ask, but I’m sure he only used to buy books about macho detectives who murder people mindlessly and sportsmen who have recovered from alcohol dependency and significant injury.

“Now, I just choose on the basis of what sounds good, not what looks good,” he said. “Any covers on Kindle are black and white and grainy. They just don’t seem significant when compared to the book’s content.”

Could it really make me try Danielle Steel? You see, those gaudy pink covers have always put me off.

However, an increasing number of literate beings are finding themselves rather aroused by their Kindle experience.

The wife, a suave, cool lady of aristocratic bearing, decided to buy her more bullish husband one of Amazon’s little inventions.

I confess I have not yet been warmed by the kindle of Kindle.

Still, now he has discovered, or even dis-covered, his literary freedom.

I must admit that, for a nervous second, I looked his wife’s way. She is a handsome woman, and I feared she might have sensed too great an allusion to her own self in the husband’s words.

Could Kindle be a way to re-educate the world? Could it help us to bypass those scheming, artsy book designers and finally be true to our own genuine interests?

(Credit: CC Notratched/Flickr)

I wonder how many people have not only fallen for the sheer alleged convenience of Kindle, but because it has filled their minds with works they would not otherwise have touched.

Tuesday, seated at a rather friendly bar sipping something Spanish, I was regaled with the story of a rather happily married couple who believe that Kindle has changed not only the convenience of reading but actually their choice of books.

Thankfully, she didn’t even flinch as he explained that he was so influenced by the way books had been designed in the past that he would ignore certain tomes if their superficial tones didn’t appeal.

Before I could pause for Spanish sustenance, he also explained that he used to stand in bookstores and see if he could read a couple of pages without ruining the book.

“Here’s what I learned,” he explained. “I really did used to buy a book by its cover.”

Now, Kindle offers him a sample chapter, which is enough to decide whether to buy or flee, without the risk of guilt through the accidental fracture of a spine.

Baskin: And you communicated that to the board?

Baskin: What methodology did you use to come up with that number?

Mancini objects to characterization of the testimony.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in May, "I believe YouTube was worth somewhere around $600 million to $700 million."

Baskin: And am I correct that you were asking your board to approve an acquisition price of $1.65 billion; correct?

Baskin: And how was that communicated to the board?

Schmidt: My judgment.

The following is an edited excerpt of Schmidt’s deposition:

Schmidt: Again, to help you along, I believe that they were worth $600 million to $700 million.

Mancini objects.

Later…

“This is a company with very little revenue,” Schmidt said while being questioned by Stuart Jay Baskin, a Viacom attorney. “(YouTube was) growing quickly with user adoption, growing much faster than Google Video, which was the product that Google had. And they had indicated to us that they would be sold, and we believed that there would be a competing offer–because of who Google was–paying much more than they were worth…We ultimately concluded that $1.65 billion included a premium for moving quickly and making sure that we could participate in the user success in YouTube.”

Stuart Jay Baskin, a Viacom attorney: And what was management’s valuation?

The blockbuster acquisition for the 18-month-old start-up played a large role in sending valuations in the tech sector skyrocketing. Although YouTube made little revenue, the all-stock transaction gave Google control of a company many believed would change the face of mass entertainment. It also led to criticism from skeptics who thought that Google would never get its money back.

Whereas Hollywood executives once called YouTube a “rogue company,” the video site can now boast numerous partnerships with top entertainment companies, including as Walt Disney, CBS (publisher of CNET News), Sony Pictures, and Metro Goldwyn-Mayer. YouTube also has deals with all four major music labels. And YouTube’s finances may finally be turning the corner: company representatives have hinted in the past several months that it’s on the road to becoming the kind of revenue generator that Google always envisioned.

Schmidt: It’s just my judgment. I’ve been doing this a long time.

Schmidt: I did.

Baskin: Of Google?

“In the deal dynamics, the price, remember, is not set by my judgment or by financial model or discounted cash flow. It’s set by what people are willing to pay.”–Eric Schmidt

Whether Google paid too much for YouTube then is a sort of barroom debate among media analysts, not unlike arguing whether the New York Yankees overpaid on free-agent ballplayers in the off-season. James McQuivey, a digital-media analyst at Forrester Research, said that if he were in Schmidt’s shoes, he would have made the same deal.

Google has revealed little about how it decided to pay $1.65 billion but CEO Eric Schmidt said under oath last spring that he was willing to pay a premium–a big one–for YouTube. Leading up to the acquisition, Schmidt told Google’s board of directors that his estimate of YouTube’s worth was somewhere between $600 million and $700 million, according to court records reviewed by CNET.

Schmidt: Much lower than we paid for it.

YouTube managers have toiled to find the right way to generate revenue, experimenting with a wide range of advertising methods and models–everything from prerolls to overlays. Perhaps most importantly, managers changed their approach to copyright owners.

Schmidt: That is correct.

Schmidt: I did.

(Credit:
Elinor Mills/CNET)

Schmidt: I told them.

Schmidt: Sure, this is a company with very little revenue, growing quickly with user adoption, growing much faster than Google Video, which was the product that Google had. And they had indicated to us that they would be sold, and we believed that there would be a competing offer–because of who Google was–paying much more than they were worth. In the deal dynamics, the price, remember, is not set by my judgment or by financial model or discounted cash flow. It’s set by what people are willing to pay. And we ultimately concluded that $1.65 billion included a premium for moving quickly and making sure that we could participate in the user success in YouTube.

Martin said that when Google priced YouTube, it should have deducted heavily for the legal liabilities, as well as for the company’s ability to draw an audience, if it couldn’t offer pirated content.

Since 2006, many observers have scratched their head over what prompted Google to pay $1.65 billion for the video site YouTube. We’re now a little closer to the answer.

McQuivey acknowledged that those focusing only on hard business numbers are probably not going to agree with him. Count Josh Martin among them. Martin, a research analyst, was an early skeptic of YouTube’s profit potential, arguing on behalf of Yankee Group Research that Google overpaid.

“You go back to the reason why YouTube was popular, and it was because of (the ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit) Lazy Sunday,” Martin said. “That is what put YouTube on the map. So it was popular because it had access to content that it shouldn’t have had and that you couldn’t get elsewhere because no one else was willing to put it up illegally…Clearly, (Google’s leaders) needed to understand what was driving momentum behind YouTube.”

Baskin: So you orally communicated to your board during the course of the board meeting that you thought a more correct valuation for YouTube was $600 million to $700 million; is that what you said, sir?

Baskin: I’m not very good at math, but I think that would be $1 billion or so more than you thought the company was, in fact, worth.

“I don’t think Schmidt is wrong in assuming that someone would have overpaid for YouTube. If Google was willing to overpay for it, then someone else would have too. But it was a bad business decision for Google.”–Josh Martin, research analyst and early YouTube critic

Mancini objects.

“It actually becomes worth the additional value because Google can tie all of its advertising expertise and search traffic into YouTube,” McQuivey said. “It’s not like it’s going to pay back that $1.6 billion any time soon, but what it does is, it ensures that these millions and millions of viewers are coming to a Google-owned site rather than someone’s else’s site…As a loss leader goes, if it never makes its money back, its still going to be worth it.”

A Google representative declined to comment about Schmidt’s valuation.

Schmidt had his reasons for asking his board to OK an offer of $1 billion more than what he thought the site was worth. The CEO made the comments during a deposition he gave in May as part of the copyright lawsuit Viacom filed against Google and YouTube in 2007. In short, he believed that Google had to offer that much, or competitors, presumably Microsoft or Yahoo, would walk away with the increasingly popular video site.

Schmidt: I did.

Baskin: Can you tell us what reasoning you explained?

Schmidt: I believe YouTube was worth somewhere around $600 million to $700 million.

Three years later, that user success continues: YouTube has grown from 12 million unique users (in May 2006) to more than 100 million users just in the United States. Every minute, more than 10 hours of video is uploaded to the site. But Google is also fighting a $1 billion copyright lawsuit with entertainment giant Viacom, which claims that YouTube encouraged users to violate its copyright. On top of that, the company is still trying to figure out how to turn its prize acquisition into a profitable business.

Baskin: So why don’t you tell us what you remember telling the board in connection with the valuation?

Baskin: Was it based on cash flow analysis? Comparable companies? What were you using as the basis for your judgment?

John P. Mancini, an attorney working for Google, objects.

Mancini objects.

“I don’t think Schmidt is wrong in assuming that someone would have overpaid for YouTube,” Martin said. “If Google was willing to overpay for it, then someone else would have too. But it was a bad business decision for Google. We said it at the time, and three years later, we have been proven right.”

Google began Chrome on Windows but has been gradually moving it to Linux and Mac OS X. Those versions so far are still only developer-preview incarnations not ready for prime time yet, though I find myself gradually slipping over to Chrome on my Mac system now that it’s getting mature enough for me. I suspect a beta version isn’t far off.

Google released an update for Chrome to fix compatibility problems with Snow Leopard on Monday, which along with other fixes shows the gradually maturing state of the Mac OS X version of the browser.

Google has been advertising the browser as well and is at work making it the foundation of its Chrome OS.

Google is fleshing out some basic features, though. One user-interface tweak enables support for command- and shift-clicking.

Chrome 4.0.203.4 for the Mac is only a couple notches up the version ladder than the version 4.0.203.2 it replaces, but there are some significant changes in the developer-preview software. For Snow Leopard compatibility, programmers fixed a garbled text bug, said Jonathan Conradt, a Chrome engineering program manager, in a blog post Monday.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The tab-to-search feature has arrived on Chrome for Mac OS X, too.

Tab-to-search also works with Amazon, Google, Google News, and Yahoo, The New York Times, but not Bing yet. I search a lot, and this saves me one step and waiting for a page to load just so I can click in its search bar.

Google is working hard to spread Chrome, though it has small market share at present. It’s now installed as the default browser on some Sony laptops, as Endgadget noticed in July with the Vaio NW, and I heard about earlier in August.

Another feature coming to the Mac is support for the tab-to-search feature in the omnibox. That lets you perform a site search directly from the address bar by typing a URL, for example news.cnet.com, then the tab key, then search terms.

The most annoying issue I’ve found–and let me know if I’m missing something obvious here–is that I lose the file-upload dialog box while using Gmail with Chrome on Mac OS X if I switch away from the application while halfway through. If I don’t attach a file immediately, that tab’s instance of Gmail becomes useless because I can’t get back to it.

Performance still is an issue with the Mac version, though. I was pleased to see some work on new-tab creation speed, with programmer Mark Mentovai using various changes to work the time from 1-3 seconds down to a fifth of a second.

The social network already uses “credits” to sell in-house and branded virtual gifts, a change it made last November (gifts had originally been listed in U.S. dollars). The extension of the system to third-party developers on Facebook’s platform has been talked about for quite some time now but finally appears to be nearing a wider launch.

The blog Inside Facebook reported last week that four online gift and greeting companies–American Greetings Interactive, GreetBeatz, Someecards, and Real Gifts–would be selling virtual gifts in the Facebook gift shop as part of a test of the new “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency.

Facebook first offered “charity gifts” for a 48-hour window to commemorate the milestone of 200 million members. A total of 16 nonprofits and advocacy groups participated in the initiative.

“I just received confirmation yesterday that…we’re going to be reopening up charity gifts in the Gift Shop,” said Zuckerberg (who is, yes, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg). “We are exploring ways for developers to use the Gift Shop to offer…virtual, real, and charity gifts.”

This will be rolling out next week with four test partners–Project Red, Kiva, Toms Shoes (which is not a non-profit, but a for-profit retailer that donates a pair of shoes for every pair sold), and the World Wildlife Fund–Zuckerberg said, and pending its success, “we may open to everyone really soon after that.”

NEW YORK–Four nonprofit organizations will be participating in a test of Facebook’s “credits” platform, marketing and outreach director Randi Zuckerberg said on Friday morning at the Social Good Conference presented by social-media blog Mashable.

(Credit:
CNET)

For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.

The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.

Related: Sites that help you find hot topics across the Web

Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.

When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.

But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.

The map view gives you an hourly playback of the popularity of multiple trends at once.

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CNET)

To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.

Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” (emphasis mine) which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.

Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.

Trend Tracker can give you a visual analysis of when each trend became popular, as well as its decline.