Geek News and Musings

It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It’s sensual. It’s tactile. And it’s a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is pausing a few breaths before hitting the “on” switch, and just let the thing rest there against skin.

Flick the switch and the novelty hits. Just as the iPhone, Palm Pré and Android phones scratched an itch we didn’t know we had, somewhere between cellphone and notebook, the iPad hits a completely new pleasure spot. The display is large enough to make the experience of apps and games on smaller screens stale. Typography is crisp, images gem-like, and the speed brisk thanks to Apple’s A4 chip and solid state storage. As I browse early release iPad apps, web pages, and flip through the iBook store and books, the thought hits that this is a greater leap into a new user experience than the sum of its parts suggests.

Remember The Elements series of books we featured here at Boing Boing and Boing Boing TV? There's an iPad version, and it's dazzling — it makes science feel like magic in your hands. I called the guy behind The Elements, Theo Gray, and asked him to put into words the UI magic that iPad makes possible for creators of books, games, news, and productivity tools.

“The Elements on iPad is not a game, not an app, not a TV show. It’s a book. But it’s Harry Potter’s book. This is the version you check out from the Hogwarts library. Everything in it is alive in some way.”

Indeed, the elements in this periodic table seem very much alive. The obvious way to examine static objects — say, a lump of gold (number 79) or an ingot of cast antimony (number 51) is to rotate them, to spin the specimen with your fingertips. And that's exactly what you do here. You can view them in 3D if you wish, with 3D glasses you buy separately online. Tap here, and live data from Wolfram Alpha pops up (the thermodynamic properties of molybednum, perhaps, or the current price of platimum) Some elements are presented with little video clips you can play, too.

When you get a chance, compare it to the tiny screen of an iPhone or Droid, or the less responsive touchscreens of an all-in-one desktop PC such as HP’s TouchSmart: it’s a completely different experience.

“A stereo 3D video of a static object that you can rotate in real time,” Theo says over the phone. “Honestly, I’m not sure where you go from there. Smellovision? Not a whole lot more you can do.”

The Elements presentation for iPad (those spinning samples of elements you twirl with your fingertip) makes use of openGL textures, compressing visual data in a way that can be compressed in the graphics chip, so the data can be read without hogging CPU resources. By making use of hardware native to iPad, you can can “play” a spin forwards and backwards with no hiccups or performance lags — even spin 3, 4, 5, 10 views of an element at a time. This ain’t Flash video over WiFi, folks. You’ll feel sad going back to chokey http embeds.

Each app for iPad can’t be more than 2 gigs in compressed archive form (a limitation imposed by the zip compression standard at work here, not something of Apple’s own design). Data-dense applications like The Elements buck right up against that limit, but future iterations (this and others that go live Saturday were developed with great haste) will likely take advantage of the ability to do background downloading to supplement data.

Tapping and swirling my way through iBooks (the store includes free, public domain titles in addition to the $9.99-$12.99 bestsellers), and iPad native apps provided at launch such as the spectacular, game-changing Marvel Comics app (crisp, lucid art, the ability to navigate frame-by-frame, rendering spoilers down the page obsolete), the Epicurious recipe browser, and the news browsing app by Reuters (in which video is, again, a seamless delight), the idea hits. This is what we wanted e-books to be all along. Rich, nimble, and dense with image and sound and navigability, right there inside the flow of the story. And this is what we wanted the web to feel like all along. We just want it to work, and we don’t want to be aware of the delivery method while we’re enjoying what’s delivered.

Theo’s been thinking about all of this, too. “The Kindle is a great device, and I own several,” Theo says. “But the concept of an e-book has always been that it’s like PDF. Imagine if the web standard was PDF instead of html, if everyone’s web pages consisted of what you can do in PDF? That would be a really boring world. I hate to see ebooks as being pigeonholed as these static, PDFlike things, in which the biggest ‘a-ha’ you can have is an exciting pageturning animation, or search. What could an ebook be? Let’s draw a line in the sand out in the future and say, this is the greatest aspiration, if the limitations of code and hardware were no object.”

Draw that imaginary line in the sand, and you’ve sketched out iPad.

Manic, nonstop use revealed a number of things: battery life is better than I anticipated. I got a full day of constant internet-connected use (it barely left my hands) on one charge. It fits well in my lap when eating, and it’s easy to wipe off stray noodles and arugula leaves and get right back to Twittering. When we began developing the Boing Boing iPad presentation, we used a simulator and tapped into a lot of JQUERY, thinking that snazzy transitional animations would delight. They didn’t: it worked great on the Mac simulator, but were sluggish on iPad, so we aborted and went simple. When you’re redesigning a site for iPad, you start to think in terms of a visually rich ‘zine, not a website. Given Boing Boing’s ‘zine roots (25 years and counting since the first Xeroxed copy), the close of that evolutionary circle is something that makes me smile.

Familiar Mac fundamentals like Calendar, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers are presented thoughtfully with the kinetic and tactile specifics of iPad in mind. Pinch-zoom the preview image for an iPhoto album you’ve saved, and watch the contents scatter out accross the screen, so you can be reminded of the shots you’ve stored inside.

Gaming possibilities are profound. Accelerometer-driven games like the RealRacingHD iPad app available at first release thrill in a new way, like when I first held a Wii. There’s something about tilting and steering and braking with a device you hold in your hands, just like a steering wheel, that’s so much more viscerally pleasing than a big old shelf-bound console.

Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren’t here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.

I like it a lot. But it's the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it.

This really is not a huge surprise, but in the IsoHunt case the judge has now ordered site operator Gary Fung to magically stop anyone from infringing. It is, as Fung notes, effectively a shut down order. There’s no legitimate way for Fung to magically know what content is infringing and what is not, since his system is really no different than a search engine. While the original ruling concerned a few of Fung’s actions that the judge claimed were inducing, it looks like the judge won’t even give Fung a chance to try to set up a non-inducing search engine.

There are some odd statements in the ruling, including the judge claiming:

“It is axiomatic that the availability of free infringing copies of plaintiffs’ works through defendants’ websites irreparably undermines the growing legitimate market for consumers to purchase access to the same works,”

There’s just one (big) problem with that. It is not at all axiomatic. We’ve seen many content creators embrace file sharing as part of a legitimate market, and in doing so, make more money. So the judge is claiming something that is a universal truth that is false. That seems quite troubling.

Separately, the ruling seems to suggest that a keyword filter might stop the infringement. That takes me back. Judge Patel in the original Napster case made the same demand, and it was a disaster, because a keyword filter is useless.

But the bigger issue is that the judge seems to have gone way beyond what the law actually says and allows in this situation. The site can be barred for inducing infringement, but that doesn’t mean a site automatically must block anything that might be infringing.

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Well, this is a bit of a surprise. The Liberal Democrats in the UK, who had previously pushed to add some troubling language to the Digital Economy Bill, are now not only skeptical of the bill, but fighting the plan to rush it through the House of Commons. As you may recall, the plan was to zip this through the Commons via a wash up procedure, which doesn’t allow for debate. The goal was to get it done before the election is held. However, the LibDems apparently have heard (loudly) from their constituents:

On Tuesday afternoon, the party’s chief whip Paul Burstow tweeted that he had told the government the Liberal Democrats will not support the bill as it is drafted because there is “not enough time for MPs to examine it in detail”.

That said, it seems like there’s a lot of rapidly changing views on the Digital Economy Bill. With more and more opposition growing, the government amended one of the more controversial clauses, so that it’s greatly watered down. The clause that previously could have shut down legitimate sites based on some infringing use now requires courts to take into account those legitimate users. It also makes it so ISPs won’t have to pay court costs, meaning they’re less likely to shut something down just to avoid court.

Meanwhile, reader Phatnobody notes that according to some copyright holders, the Digital Economy Bill doesn’t go far enough.

Given all of these shifting and changing views (and shifting and changing provisions in the bill), it seems like it would be a really dangerous move to simply rush the bill through with no debate. These are major issues that impact a very large percentage of the population. Not allowing for an open debate on the issue seems very, very questionable.

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How do you tell the difference between art and written language?

Oh, yeah. It’s math.

[Rob Lee] and colleagues Philip Jonathan and Pauline Ziman analyzed the engravings, found on the few hundred known Pictish Stones. The researchers used a mathematical process known as Shannon entropy to study the order, direction, randomness and other characteristics of each engraving.

The resulting data was compared with that for numerous written languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese texts and written Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Ancient Irish, Old Irish and Old Welsh. While the Pictish Stone engravings did not match any of these, they displayed characteristics of writing based on a spoken language.

There is, sadly, not a lot of detail about what specific characteristics make language stand out from decoration. I’m guessing it has something to do finding patterns in the choice of symbols, or the way symbols are oriented, or how the patterns repeat. Wish there was more though. For the record, even if this is language, nobody is even close to deciphering what it means.

On a side note: Shannon entropy is a measure of the amount of information that we get from knowing one English letter. It's kind of the Entropy of Wheel of Fortune—how many guesses does it take to figure out all the letters of a sentence using only the information provided by the letters previously guessed. Besides identifying ancient scripts, it makes for a fun, time-wasting applet game.

Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini announced today that the startup founded five years ago has finally made it to profitability. The site has seen a lot of changes since then. It began as one of the original Web 2.0 personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards.

I chatted with Mini today, who says that the company is profitable on a net income basis. He won’t go into details on revenues, but the company has 40 employees and two offices. Just to cover salaries, it’s got to be pulling in a few million dollars a year. Mini did break down the revenues by product line, however:

Netvibes for Enterprise: 50%
Netvibes Premium Dashboards: 40%
Widget Distribution: 10%

The enterprise version, which accounts for half of the company’s revenues, lets employees customize their intranet homepage with a mixture of company and personal widgets. Think iGoogle for businesses. The dashboards are more for advertising and PR agencies, who can use them to push media on an opt-in basis to interested consumers. Netvibes also recently launched a Dashboarding Guide, which is a “dashboard of dashboards,” says Mini. It pulls together different monitoring and analytics tools (such as Google Trends, Compete, Yelp, Hootsuite, and Trendrr) all into one dashboard.

The consumer-oriented homepage now has 3.5 million visitors a month, and Netvibes continues to improve that experience with its new realtime stream reader Wasabi, but that the paying customers are businesses.

Following Kleiner Perkins’ iFund “Doubling Down” event today, I got the chance to speak with iFund managing partner Matt Murphy. Simply put, Murphy, who also managed the first iFund, thinks the opportunity with the iPad will be huge — potentially bigger than the first iFund. Obviously, Kleiner wouldn’t pump another $100 million into the fund if it didn’t believe that, but Murphy offered some insight into the firm’s thinking.

While much of the focus has been on what the iPad will do as a consumer device, Murphy makes the case for how well it should work as a revenue-generating machine for the companies developing for it. He noted that of the 14 companies that are currently a part of the iFund (3 of which are in stealth mode), four of them are already profitable just two years after the fund’s launch. He attributes this to three main things: the freemium model, Apple’s payment structure, and micro-payments.

One of those profitable companies is Shazam, the mobile music discovery service. The service noted today that it has seen over 15 million downloads on the iPhone (and iPod touch). Most of those are downloads of the free version of the app, but that free version has served as a gateway drug of sorts to get users hooked and eventually buying the premium version with more features. At $4.99, that paid version, Shazam Encore, is cheap enough that many users feel it is well worth the price.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s so easy to download thanks to the App Store’s built-in payment structure. It’s one click, and the app is yours. And Murphy thinks we’re on the verge of an explosion in in-app payments thanks to that structure.

One company, Booyah, which makes the popular location-based game MyTown (which we’ve covered quite a bit), is making good use of these in-app payments, Murphy notes. While the app is completely free, it allows users to buy upgrades within the game for small fees (ranging from $0.99 to $9.99). This is starting to take off, according to Murphy.

He notes that while free apps on the Facebook platform convert users to paying customers at a 3% to 5% conversion rate, the iPhone is seeing that conversation in the 12% to 15% range. That’s a massive difference. And Murphy attributes it to the way payment ideas are presented in apps in combination with Apple’s easy payment structure that happens behind the scenes (the App Store tied to your credit card). When you see a new cheap feature in an app, “for $0.99 i’ll try that out,” Murphy notes. Those purchases are an afterthought.

And the iPad will simply be an extension of all this, with the added potential benefit of even more in-app immersion. That’s what he sees as the iPad’s big benefit over the iPhone. ”We want someone who cracks the code on a more immersive experience,” Murphy says.

And it’s important to note that this new iFund isn’t iPad-only.  Before the end of this year, Murphy says there will be some 100 million devices running the iPhone OS (currently, there are around 75 million), Kleiner will continue to look at all types of companies doing both iPhone and iPad apps to invest this money into.

So what is he particularly excited about with regard to the iPad? Murphy reiterated John Doerr’s excitement about potential healthcare uses for the iPad and notes that they’re looking at one company in particular now that could come into fruition relatively soon (he wouldn’t say what it was). He also says that education is a potentially huge market for this new device.

When I asked about the buzz surrounding old school media companies coming to the iPad, Murphy said that he was reluctant about some of the companies being hired to work on these solutions because it’s not long-term defensible. That said, there is at least one pure content play in stealth mode that Kleiner has backed with the fund. It involves a well-known entrepreneur, but Murphy wouldn’t say anymore.

I asked why, given the success of the first iFund, Kleiner was “only” going with another $100 million for the fund? Why not go higher? Murphy noted that it’s likely just a starting point. For example, the original $100 million funded companies have seen some $330 million more pumped into them from outside the fund (yes, this is a bit skewed by Zynga, which just raised a massive $180 million new round). Murphy notes that this second iFund could be gone in as little as 12 months. It all depends on the quality of the companies sprouting up around the iPad (and continuing to sprout around the iPhone).

Finally, I asked Murphy about an area both him and I are excited about: location. Murphy notes that three of the 14 iFund companies, Pelago (the makers of Whrrl), Booyah, and Shopkick (makers of CauseWorld), are location-based at their core. He went on to note that all the companies in this space are doing exciting things with check-ins because it’s ultimately important data. “Foot-streams are more valuable than click-streams,” Murphy notes, taking a line from Whrrl’s playbook.

But Murphy notes that each of these companies is still searching for the Holy Grail: highly targeted location-based advertising. Once you understand that someone goes to Starbucks at a certain time everyday, you start to understand their behavior, and then ads become really interesting, he notes.

In terms of the iPad, Murphy wonders what uses people will come up with with regard to location. After all, it’s not a phone that you have in your pocket, and you probably won’t be taking it to dinner (unless you’re really rude). Again, he thinks a company like Booyah, with its heavy game element that will drive the immersion idea could come up with some cool things. But he feels there will be new types of apps that give you a different reason for why you check-in with the iPad.

In general, even within Kleiner Perkins, the iPad seems to be the undiscovered country. And that’s breeding a lot of excitement. Among the partners, there is no doubt that it won’t be long before there’s the first huge app for it. But it’s hard to base that off of pitches without the device itself out there. “You won’t know it until you see it,” Murphy says.

As we wait for the Bilski ruling in the US (which my gut feeling tells me will have the Supreme Court totally punt on the issue of software patents), it seems like politicians down in New Zealand have figured out that software patents are a real problem. As a whole bunch of you sent in, a bill is moving through the process for patent reform that explicitly says software should not be patentable:

We recommend amending clause 15 to include computer programs among inventions that may not be patented. We received many submissions concerning the patentability of of computer
programs. Under the Patents Act 1953 computer programs can be patented in New Zealand [...] Open source, or free, software has grown in popularity since the 1980s. Protecting software by patenting it is inconsistent with the open source model and its proponents oppose it. A number of submitters argue that there is no “inventive step” in software development, as “new” software inevitably builds on existing software. They felt that computer software should be exluded from patent protection as software patents can stifle innovation and competition, and can be granted for trivial or existing techniques. In general we accept this position.

This is a welcome development, certainly. Even more impressive is the general realization (often missed by politicians) that too much patenting is a bad thing and can seriously stifle innovation:

[the old act] has a low threshold for patentability compared with most other countries. This low threshold can lead to broader patent rights being granted in New Zealand than in other countries, which can disadvantage New Zealand businesses and consumers[...] This can discourage innovation and inhibit growth in productivity and exports.

Now if only New Zealand would recognize similar problems with copyright law as well…

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Technology lover John Pozadzides isn’t just a whiz at hacking your weak passwords. When his MacBook Pro’s sharp edge dug into his wrists one too many times, he made quick work of that annoyance. Here’s how: More »

Google has acquired a company that has created a new process for highly efficient isotope separation, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. The primary use of this technology, say experts we’ve spoken with, is uranium enrichment.

Enriched uranium is a necessary ingredient in the creation of nuclear energy, and one source we’ve spoken with at Google says that this is part of the Google Green Initiative. The company will use the new technology to enable it to design and possibly build small, mobile and highly efficient nuclear power generators. “Google has already begun building an enrichment plant,” says a high ranking IAEA source.

As GreenBeat points out, “Google finally decided to launch a dedicated unit of the company for designing and building its own solar panels, wind turbines, energy efficiency devices, etc. So far, its green efforts have been pursued by separate projects within the company. Nuclear is an obvious next step for the company.”

GreenBeat first broke the story (first titled Google Has A Big Alternate Energy Announcement Forthcoming) after seeing multiple tweets about the impending announcement.

But other sources we’ve spoken with say Google has no real intention of pursuing nuclear energy, despite the fact that the company has promoted the use of alternate energy sources for years.

Of particular concern is the fact that the company Google acquired is based outside of the U.S., and little is known about the new enrichment technology they’ve developed.

Nuclear power generation is a highly regulated industry. And enriched uranium is a particularly sensitive topic and creation and distribution of the substance is highly controlled.

Enriched uranium can also be used for nuclear weapons production, which is why the industry is so highly regulated.

Says one source: “The story Google is putting out there is that the new technology will be built for clean energy production. But all of the research and development they’re doing in this area is being conducted outside of the U.S., and the enrichment facility is also outside of the U.S.”

And more chillingly: “It would be trivial for anyone with this technology to build a nuclear weapon.”

Google, which has been shaken by its inability to counter Chinese censorship and hacking efforts, may be engaging in enrichment research as part of a new effort to simply protect itself from outside threats.

One source pointed out that if Google were its own country, its revenues would place it at 74th on the list of countries sorted by gross domestic product. “The U.S. government clearly won’t protect Google from China, so Google is taking the logical step of protecting itself with a physical deterrent.”

To be clear, most of this is speculation. All we’ve confirmed is that Google has acquired a company with a new enrichment process and that they have begun researching small, nuclear portable generators. But there is real evidence here that Google may be working on something much more sinister to counter the China threat. More as this develops.

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