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If the idea of buying a print publication for technology news seems anachronistic today, during the height of its run, PC Magazine was a star of the magazine world, regularly printing 400- and 500-page issues. Throughout the ’80s and most of the ’90s it was the most influential source for technology product reviews and it set the standard for objective, lab-based computer and technology testing.

If you follow the media or technology industries (or the global economy in general), it’s perhaps not surprising that PC Magazine has turned its attention exclusively toward the online realm. And while it may no longer round up 100 printers over a summer, or 100 desktops in the fall, its tradition of rigorous lab-based testing and insightful technology industry analysis lives on at PCMag.com. We know it will keep up the good work.

PC Magazine Volume 1, Issue 1, January 1982.

That heritage remains alive in its current lab, as well as here at CNET, which employs several former PC Mag staffers, myself included. Pretty much any Web site that runs a technology benchmark has PC Magazine to thank for its work in establishing legitimate consumer technology testing methods.

(Thanks to PaidContent, which had this story first.)

(Credit:
Magmaweb.com)

Silicon Alley Insider reported Wednesday morning that after 26 years in circulation, Ziff Davis Publishing’s PC Magazine will issue its last print edition in January 2009. Going forward, all of its publishing efforts will shift to the online edition, PCMag.com. We’re told the majority of the magazine’s content editors will remain on staff, however, members of the print production, ad sales, and circulation staff have been let go.

I’ll also confess to a personal affection for PC Magazine. It gave me my first freelance assignment, a review of the 1993 CD-ROM game Voyeur. Back when it relied heavily on freelance writers, PC Magazine employed both of my parents steadily for years as contributing editors. Several of my best friends work there, including the best man at my wedding.

Wal-Mart won’t have the iPhone at every location come the end of December, if a report from the Boy Genius Report is accurate. But Apple will have iPhones in 2,500 stores in the U.S. and an additional 69 Sam’s Club warehouse stores on December 28, according to the report.

Apple could soon have another distribution channel for the iPhone: Wal-Mart.

See also:
• Sources: Apple, music labels talk DRM-free songs

But what’s surprising about this report is the timing, however: three days after Christmas? Perhaps Wal-Mart wouldn’t have been able to get ready or train their staff in time for the holiday season, but with iPhone sales expected to decline slightly off last quarter’s totals, you’d think Apple would have wanted a major distribution channel on line during the holiday rush.

(Credit:
CNET)

Apple has shown a willingness to embrace the big-box types over the past few years. iPods can be found at retail stores across the country, and electronics behemoth Best Buy devotes significant space for all of Apple’s major products inside many of its stores.

The largest retailer in the world could be getting the
iPhone.

It’s not clear what price will be charged for the iPhone inside Wal-Mart, but it would be hard to imagine Apple embracing the idea of significant discounts even though CEO Steve Jobs has talked of needing to stay aware of lower-priced competitors. Wal-Mart also offers T-Mobile’s Android G1 phone, and though CNNMoney.com had reported that the famously low-price retailer would be offering the G1 for a $30 discount, a Wal-Mart store in San Leandro, Calif., was selling the G1 for the standard $179 on Wednesday morning.

The cornerstone of Ford’s sustainability strategy–a more efficient engine design called EcoBoost–will be available for the first time in the coming weeks.

But in the short term, EcoBoost is more attractive as the smaller engine that EcoBoost allows offsets the added cost, Kapp said. Meanwhile, hybrids cars have a longer payback, on the order of 8 to 10 years depending on gasoline prices, he added.

In the coming years, Ford also envisions combining EcoBoost with hybrids although there would need to be significant modifications to get more than incremental improvements, he said.

“EcoBoost kept rising to the top as the most effective way to get fuel economy improvements over competing options such as hybridization and diesels,” said Dan Kapp, director of advanced power trains at Ford. “It very quickly went from an effective performance improvement option on big vehicles to something to build our strategy around.”

Ford is still developing alternative power train technologies, including diesels and hybrid cars. It recently released a hybrid version of the Ford Fusion sedan and has plans to introduce both plug-in electric hybrids and all-electric vehicles in the next two years.

The elements of Ford’s EcoBoost technology are already built into vehicles from other manufacturers. What’s significant about Ford’s plans is that it plans to make it available on half of a million vehicles by 2013, making it an option on 90 percent of its car models by then.

In its first incarnations, EcoBoost will be offered with high-end versions of Ford’s midsize sedans and crossover SUVs. Over the coming months, the technology will be including the 2010 Lincoln MKS, Lincoln MKT, Taurus SHO, and Flex.

Rather than get a V8 engine with the “performance” models, consumers will get a six-cylinder engine with the EcoBoost, which improves performance as well as fuel economy, said Kapp. For example, Ford will offer a six-cylinder F-150 pickup with EcoBoost in 2010 as an alternative to a V8 model.

Over time, the engine will be fitted into smaller cars. Instead of a V6 engine, the high-end model of sedans will have a four-cylinder engine with EcoBoost. “It’s an enabler to downsize our engines,” Kapp said. The carbon dioxide emissions from EcoBoost engines are 15 percent lower than comparable engines, according to Ford.

The EcoBoost technology combines direct fuel injection and a turbo charger to improve the fuel efficiency of comparable
cars between 10 percent and 20 percent. Ford decided that it’s the cheapest route to improved mileage, noting that consumers will recoup the additional cost of the EcoBoost option in two years.

Drives are also offered in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities and are built on a 43-nanometer manufacturing process using multi-level cell (MLC) technology. MLC technology allows drive makers to increase capacity while keeping production costs under control.

Toshiba is not alone in announcing commercial shipments of large-capacity SSDs. Micron Technology’s Crucial Technology unit has begun selling 256GB drives listed at $599, which beats Toshiba pricing at that capacity.

On the performance front, Toshiba said it is using an advanced controller chip that enables a maximum sequential read speed of 230 megabytes per second and maximum sequential write speed of 180 megabytes per second. These read-write speeds are typically many times that of a hard disk drive. Toshiba did not specify random read and write speeds, which are also critical benchmarks for everyday data access.

Back in December of last year, Toshiba said sample quantities ranged from $220 for the 64GB drive to $1,652 for the 512GB drive–though these prices have likely come down, as the drives are now shipping commercially.

For businesses up-front pricing may be less important. Over the lifespan of an SSD total cost of ownership may be lower, according to Gregory Wong, president, Forward Insights. Potential savings are particularly relevant to business laptop users, said Wong. And Intel recently did some in-house testing that showed that failure rates of SSDs are lower than hard disk drives.

Toshiba said in December that it would begin shipments of a 512GB drive this year. And this drive became available exclusively on Toshiba laptops in May.

Toshiba has begun volume shipments of solid-state drives ranging up to 512GB in size, as these hyper-fast storage options bulk up on capacity.

Note: Intel has found a bug in the new SSDs cited above that affects users who set a BIOS drive password. When disabling or changing the password followed by powering off/on the computer, the SSD becomes inoperable. The root cause has been identified and a fix is under validation. Intel expects to post an end-user firmware update to fix this bug in the coming weeks.

All drives come in either a 1.8-inch enclosure, typically used in ultraportable laptops, or a 2.5-inch housing, the standard size for mainstream laptops.

Intel has recently begun shipping a 160GB solid-state drive that offers improved random write performance. The chipmaker was able to get up to a 2.5X improvement over previous versions of its SSDs.

SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts.

But SSDs are still hobbled by a distinct price disadvantage. Toshiba’s own Web site offers vivid proof. A Toshiba Portege R600 laptop is priced at $2,099 with a 160GB hard disk drive. Adding a lower-capacity 128GB SSD hikes the price to $2,499. Add the 512GB option and this goes to $3,499.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I was one of them for 25 years. In fact, I hadn’t been anywhere near a computer for a year until I got this iPhone.”

My silence must have appeared somewhat noisy to him, as Oliver (not his real name) picked up his
iPhone and began to explain:

(Credit: CC Yutaka Tsutano/Flickr)

Oliver said he was heading up north because he’d never really been there.

Unsure as to what he was evaluating–my beauty out of 100, perhaps?–I turned toward him very slowly.

“So what are you doing now?” I asked.

“I just couldn’t do it any more. All the things I really wanted to do, I couldn’t. Because the machines always took priority. The machines always had to be looked after. Without the back end systems, nothing at Apple could have happened.”

“It’s an app that tells me exactly how much I should eat every day,” he replied. “But it’s a bit of a problem to be honest, because when it tells me I’m 300 calories under my limit, I then order a dessert, even though I don’t actually feel like eating a dessert.”

“Your drink is an 8. Normally they pour you a 6,” he said.

“So you were at the mercy of the machines?” I wondered.

“How did it go?” I asked, three ounces in my hand.

I grabbed at my now 6 ounces of pinot noir a little too hastily as I listened to him explain: “I worked at Apple for 25 years. Huge machines. Back end stuff. Loved working with those machines. Loved being able to tell them what to do.”

As he thought about it, he told me that he had gone to a music school which, at the end of the course, gets its students to form a band and gets them to play live at a San Francisco venue.

“What’s a calorie app?” I said, dumbly.

“Er, excuse me?” I muttered, squinting at the man’s long, straggly hair and rather kind-looking face.

“So you trust your iPhone to tell you precisely when to stop?” I asked.

“I’m trying to find a life beyond the one I used to have,” said Oliver. “I’m traveling, seeing things, having new experiences, learning to play the guitar. I’ve got a great new business idea, too.”

“I love metal,” he said. “And so for my song, I chose Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’.”

“So what happened?” I asked, becoming increasingly fascinated by Oliver’s openness.

I had just been poured a drink at a bar Saturday night, when the man to my left tapped me on the shoulder.

As we said our good-byes I asked Oliver again whether he really needed those iPhone apps to tell him how much to eat and drink.

“You see, I’m running an app on my iPhone that tells me how much I can drink before I get into my
car. And the lady behind the bar has poured you 8 ounces, not 6.”

“So you let these apps tell you what to do and how to live?” I asked, feeling a weird frown forming above my shades. “Don’t you realize that half of this techy stuff was designed by people who barely see the light of day, adore only numbers and secretly want you to be a little more like them?”

Still sober, at least according to his iPhone app, he said: “Information is fun, isn’t it? But I guess I’m traveling to see what else is fun in this world.”

“Yeah. I loved them. But I just couldn’t take it any more. If I’d stayed another 5 years, I would never have had to work again. But I couldn’t do it. So one day I just walked,” he said, a curiously guilty joy in his eyes.

“The best feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. I also run a calorie app,” said Oliver, a little too enthusiastically.

“That’s an 8,” he said.

Tuesday’s achievement still awaits official confirmation from the certifying agency, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.

After holding onto its land speed record for 103 years, the homegrown Stanley automobile from the early days of motoring has been overtaken by a late-model import. The British Steam Car team said Tuesday that, earlier in the day, in the two runs required to be considered for the record, the Steam Car averaged 139.843 mph over a measured mile.

In each of its runs, the Steam Car, driven by Charles Burnett III, actually traveled more than 6 miles on a dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. On either side of the measured mile, it requires a 2.5-mile stretch for acceleration and deceleration. In going for the record, the vehicle had to make the second run within an hour of the first–the steam team says it made the turnaround Tuesday in 52 minutes.

(Credit:
The British Steam Car Challenge)

(Credit:
The British Steam Car Challenge)

Charles Burnett III behind the wheel of the Steam Car.

The British Steam Car spouts off as it gets ready to make a run at a 103-year-old land speed record.

The Stanley Steamer may have finally been dethroned.

Photos: Steam Car team eyes record

The vehicle’s peak speed in the first run was 136.103 mph, and in the second, 151.085 mph.

The British Steam Car, a project 10 years in the making, is no jet, but it does have its share of modern trappings, including carbon-fiber construction. The 3-ton, 25-foot-long vehicle has 12 boilers, and its steam gets superheated to 400 degrees Celsius before being injected into the turbine.

The steam-powered mark to beat was 127 mph, set in 1906 by Fred Marriott, driving that Stanley Steamer at Daytona Beach, Fla. (According to the FIA, the overall World Land Speed Record is 763 mph, a supersonic speed reached in 1997 by a jet-powered car, the ThrustSSC.)

Zappos, which made a name for itself based on outside-the-box customer service principles, will stay independent from the Amazon.com brand and will continue to operate out of its Las Vegas headquarters.

Numbers released by J.P. Morgan Research in conjunction with the acquisition announcement predict that Zappos will post moderate, single-digit growth for the 2009 fiscal year after raking in $635 million in revenues last year.

Amazon’s acquisition of shoes-and-more retailer Zappos is complete, the e-commerce giant said in a release Monday. The company in July had announced its intent to make the purchase, for about $850 million in cash and stock.

Kiosks
Although Blockbuster plans to close several stores, the company’s kiosk business is expected to grow.

“All these stores are candidate stores,” Hargrove said. “Although we may in fact close that many stores, if we can renegotiate leases or remodel stores to make them more profitable, that number might go down.”

But Blockbuster’s closure story doesn’t quite end there. Further down in the filing, Blockbuster indicated that 275 to 300 stores are subject to the company’s “lease mitigation/termination efforts.” Another 250 to 300 stores might be converted into outlets. If successful, that would bring Blockbuster’s grand total of rental store closures to 1,335 to 1,560, or up to about 22 percent of all the stores currently in operation.

Although that might be a silver lining for Blockbuster, closing about 1,000 stores can’t be good for business. And considering the company’s stock price is hovering at about $1.40, while Netflix’s price is over $44 per share as of this writing, it might only spell more troubles for Blockbuster’s market appeal.

Hargrove believes kiosks will help his company turn a corner. He pointed out that even though some stores will close, the company’s kiosks “will increase the points of distribution, thus getting our product in front of more people. This whole plan is part of a multiplatform strategy to get those additional points of distribution,” he said.

In a separate filing with the SEC, Blockbuster reported that it currently has 497 kiosk units available to consumers in the U.S. It plans to have 2,500 units available by the end of 2009. By mid-2010, it hopes to have 10,000 kiosks available to compete with Redbox.

Updated at 4:14 p.m. PDT to include Blockbuster spokesperson Randy Hargrove’s statements.

According to the company’s filing, it plans to close all unprofitable stores, while refocusing its efforts “to improve four-wall profitability.” To do so, the company first analyzed its over 7,000 stores to determine if they were profitable or not. A whopping 18 percent of Blockbuster’s stores are unprofitable. The remaining stores are profitable.

Unfortunately for Blockbuster, the bad news just keeps on coming.

A Securities and Exchange Commission filing has revealed Blockbuster’s plans to close up to 960 retail store locations by the end of 2010 as it attempts to makes its operation more financially stable.

Prior to making the decision to close some of its unprofitable locations, Blockbuster planned to close 280 to 300 stores as part of a grouping it calls, “normal closures.” Stores added to the “accelerated closures” category will also be closed by the end of this year. According to Blockbuster, the number of accelerated closures will equal 300 to 385 locations.

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

As troubling as that might sound, Blockbuster spokesperson Randy Hargrove said in a phone conversation that a certain amount of measured skepticism should be exercised. According to Hargrove, these figures are not guaranteed.

Of course, there’s a financial side to Blockbuster closing so many stores. The company claims that if it’s successful in closing up to 960 locations, it can increase its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) by $50 million to $60 million.

Next year will be a slightly less active year for store closures. Blockbuster indicated in its SEC filing that 2010 will bring 100 to 125 normal closures and 130 to 150 accelerated closures. By the end of 2010, it expects to have closed 810 to 960 retail locations.

PowerReviews said it believes that it’s that social element that could significantly improve its clients’ ability to drive traffic to their sites. The company makes BrandConnect available to retailers and brands on Tuesday.

Williams told me that PowerReviews encourages its clients to keep negative reviews in place to maintain credibility, but ultimately, that decision rests with those clients.

BrandConnect showing reviews in real time.

Listener then examines the data gathered from each review and aggregates responses for the client. Williams contends that the tool’s statistical data helps deliver actionable content to PowerReviews’ clients.

Updated at 12:01 p.m. PDT on September 21 to include information on positive reviews.

(Credit:
PowerReviews)

BrandConnect showing advocates and detractors.

PowerReviews, a company that provides white-label customer review tools for retailers and brands, is preparing to release a service called BrandConnect.

Megaphone
BrandConnect will also feature a tool called Megaphone. The company’s Megaphone feature gives customers the option to syndicate their reviews to Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs.

BrandConnect features two elements: Listener and Megaphone. According to Darby Williams, the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews, “Listener will help brands track and understand what their customers really want out of their products.”

While they’re writing a review, consumers are notified by Megaphone that they can share it when it’s complete. They can either use Facebook Connect or log in to Twitter to syndicate their review to the respective social networks. A snippet of about two sentences will be displayed on Facebook, followed by a link to the review. That same form will be displayed on the user’s blog, if they choose to syndicate it there. A message will populate Twitter’s input box, giving users the option to introduce their review to followers.

(Credit:
PowerReviews)

Listener
To do so, PowerReviews first asks users to review a product in more detail than they might be accustomed to. According to Williams, the process will first ask consumers what the pros and cons were of a particular product. It then asks them to describe how they use it.

Williams said in a phone interview on Wednesday that most companies are averse to negative customer reviews. PowerReviews employs a two-level moderation process. It first analyzes reviews containing “at least one word in the comments and three checked tags” to ensure that no profanity or unnecessary content is included in a respective review. From there, reviews are sent to the client, giving them the option of removing negative reviews or allowing them to stay on the site.

While Microsoft didn’t have anything new to announce at its first annual Open House in New York on Tuesday, it spent a lot of money turning the huge New York Armory into a showcase for its fall product line.

Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division, delivered a 30-minute opening presentation highlighting everything from
Windows 7 to Windows Phone to
Xbox Live and
Zune. But the Open House was really intended to be an open house, with a heavy emphasis on lifestyle applications for the company’s various products.

Microsoft Open House 2009

There was also some rather funky stuff (read:weird) that included women dressed up in bird costumes. So check out the slideshow below–and Natali Del Conte’s video report, above–to get the full flavor of the event. And as always, feel free to comment.