The TV That Watches You

Many people surf the Web while they watch television. Soon­­­ the websites they visit could adapt in real time to the shows being watched?automatically presenting information relevant to the show, or even tuning their ads in response to what's on screen.

A new type of Internet-connected television, due out before the end of the year, has built-in software and hardware that send data about what is on-screen to an Internet server that can identify the content. Web pages being viewed using the same Internet connection as the TV set can then tap into that information. The system can identify any content onscreen, whatever the source, whether live TV, DVDs or movie files playing from a computer.

Flingo, the San Francisco-based startup that developed the technology, known as Sync Apps, says the new set is already being mass-produced by one of the top five television brands in the U.S. and will retail for less than $500.

"Any mobile app or Web page being used in front of your TV can ask our servers what is on right now," says David Harrison, cofounder and CTO of Flingo. "For example, you could go to Google or IMDB and the page would already know what's on the screen. Retailers like Amazon or Walmart might want to show you things to buy related to a show, like DVDs, or what people are wearing in it." Social sites such as Facebook or Twitter can use the service to connect viewers to a TV show's official page or stream. When a user flips channels, or a show ends, the Webpage being viewed knows about it and can instantly update to the new viewing.

Flingo has made available a public API (application programming interface), so developers can build mobile and Web apps that use the television's inside knowledge. The TV will also display pop-ups on-screen, offering further Web-retrieved information about a show, or links to apps on the set itself.

All of this occurs with the permission of the television's owner, says Harrison. The first time the TV is switched on, it asks users if they would like to opt in to the data-sharing service. If they say yes, it prompts them to accept a terms-of-service agreement. Individual sites and apps must ask for, and be granted, permission to access the data the TV makes available.

Ashwin Navin, Flingo's CEO and other cofounder, says he expects people to opt in because the service offers an automatic way to do what people are already doing manually. "People are doing the work to search for information to go with their viewing," he says. "We'll have all that information right there."

The data generated by a television with Sync Apps is also valuable to advertisers. Already, online ads can be targeted based on the content of a Web page and the viewer's browsing history. Navin says that his company will enable sites to match ads to a person's TV-viewing history too, at least on sites that have received permission to use the television's data.

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This week at Microsoft: Mozilla, Windows 8, and Office 365

It is Friday, dear readers, and that means that it?s time to sit down and take a look at the last seven days. This post, which is written every week, is also up for tweaking, so please do send in your comments. We read all of them.

As always, we are going to restrict ourselves to a mere four stories, so if you want to get a better look at the larger scope of everything that occurred over the last week, be sure and check out the archives.

Now, follow TNW Microsoft on Twitter and Facebook, and let?s get into the news.

Microsoft Sends Mozilla A Cupcake

The funniest, and funnest, story of the week was Microsoft?s gift to Mozilla. As always, when Mozilla ships a new version of Firefox, Microsoft sends the firm a cake.

However, Microsoft decided to take a swipe at Mozilla, in a playful way. What did the company do? It sent Mozilla not a cake, as usual, but a tiny cupcake. Why? Microsoft decided that the Firefox release was too small to warrant a larger desert.

While that was worthy of a laugh, how Mozilla handled the entire escapade was perhaps even better:

Perhaps ironically, Mozilla agrees. In their posting of a picture of the cupcake, the photographer said: ?Every time Mozilla releases a version of Firefox, the IE team sends us a cake. They?re cool like that. As the releases have gotten faster and leaner? so have the cakes.?

Mozilla is on a new schedule that should have the company sending out releases on an accelerated timeframe. Yes, that means we?ll get to see more hijinks. Get happy.

Windows 8: More Shakes Free

There has been a goodly number of Windows 8 news tidbits that have come out in recent days, mostly in relation to a new, public build of the future OS that is likely to be given to the world at the forthcoming BUILD conference.

Microsoft also made it plain that Windows 8 will contain an app store:

The truth came out in an entry that Microsoft posted on its new blog that focuses on Windows 8. While it has been generally known in the market for some time that such an app store was being built, today?s revelation is the first completely ironclad mention of the product?s existence.

In a list of the teams that are working on the coming operating system, Microsoft listed ?App Store? as one of the groups. The post promises that each group will eventually make itself better known through the blog.

Of course, this is only a slice of this week?s Windows 8 news. Check here for the rest.

Office 365 Takes A Dive

Office 365 suffered from some very embarrassing downtime this week. Unlike a free consumer service, whose users might tolerate such interruptions, the business customers that suffered during the outage have little patience.

Such downtime is bad for more than just Office 365, as it harms all cloud services that are attempting to court business customers. Early this morning, Microsoft released a statement on the cause of the outage:

Preliminary investigation indicates that a networking interruption in one of our North America data centers caused Office 365 Exchange Online to be inaccessible by some customers. This incident lasted from approximately 11:30 AM PDT to 2:40 PM PDT, during which time customers were not able to access the Outlook Web App or send and receive email through Exchange Online. The Service Health Dashboard was updated regularly during the event to notify customers of the problem, though there was a brief period of intermittent access issues to that dashboard.

Office 365 is such a new product that its customers may chalk up the mistake to growing pains, but Microsoft needs to ensure that for at least the next year the sky is cloudy, but clear.

Xbox 360?s Coming Dashboard

Microsoft is working on a refreshed dashboard for the Xbox 360 that briefly made an appearance on YouTube. The videos have subsequently been pulled.

Also in the world of Xbox this week a string of LIVE titles that were popular on the WP7 platform were pulled. Why? The game?s licenses had expired. But what about people who had already purchased the games? They could have issues later if they change phones or reset their current handset. That is a problematic scenario.

That is all for this week, folks. We will be back before you start to miss us.

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U.S. Plans First Sale of Offshore Oil Leases Since Gulf Disaster

The proposed sale, encompassing more than 20 million acres of the Western gulf, is scheduled for Dec. 14. It will be the first sale in the part of the gulf bordering Texas since the summer of 2009 and the first sale of any kind in the gulf since March 2010.

President Obama suspended leasing in the gulf after the Deepwater Horizon accident in April 2010, which killed 11 workers and spilled an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. He announced earlier this year that lease sales would resume later this year, but all drilling will be conducted under stricter environmental and safety regulations.

?This sale is an important step toward a secure energy future that includes safe, environmentally sound development of our domestic energy resources,? Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary, said. ?Since Deepwater Horizon, we have strengthened oversight at every stage of the oil and gas development process, including deepwater drilling safety, subsea blowout containment, and spill response capability.

?Exploration and development of our western gulf?s vital energy resources will continue to help power our nation and drive our economy,? he added.

The lease offering includes parcels from nine to 250 miles offshore and in water depths from 16 to nearly 11,000 feet. The Interior Department estimates that the tract could produce 222 million to 423 million barrels of oil and 1.49 trillion to 2.65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The agency is raising the minimum bid on leases in water deeper than 1,312 feet to $100 an acre from $37.50 to encourage companies to actively explore those areas and to compensate for the higher costs of dealing with a spill. Obama administration officials have complained that oil companies have locked up millions of acres of onshore and offshore oil resources but have not produced oil from them.

Officials said the change was based on an analysis of the last 15 years of lease sales in the gulf, which found that leases that received high bids of less than $100 an acre have experienced virtually no exploration and development. Regulators said they concluded that raising the minimum bid would discourage companies from purchasing leases and then sitting on them for years. 

Officials of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said they could not yet gauge industry interest in the parcels to be offered. Nor could they estimate how much money the government would reap from the auction, known as lease sale 218.

The last western gulf sale, held in August 2009, covered 18.4 million acres and brought in $111 million.

The last lease sale before the BP blowout and spill was in the central Gulf of Mexico. It covered almost 37 million acres and yielded $920 million.

The ocean energy management bureau ?has taken aggressive steps to renew our commitment to the responsible stewardship of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf,? said Michael R. Bromwich, director of the agency, which is responsible for monitoring offshore operations. ?The decision to hold this sale was made after careful analysis of the best scientific information available and consideration of all public comments received.?

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The Evolution of Motorola?s Wireless Business

1930 First Motorola brand car radio (reproduction), model 5T71

With the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google this week, we took a look at the significant technology milestones in the company?s history. Motorola, founded in 1928 as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, was pivotal in advancing communications from business to space and government. Achievements included everything from releasing the world?s first commercial handheld cellular phone to introducing one of the first commercially successful car radios in 1930, reproduced above.

This radio was the first product to carry the Motorola brand. It was designed to be mass-produced, affordable, and easily installed. The components, as shown in this reproduction, included (left to right) radio receiver, tuning control, and speaker.

Credit: Motorola Archives

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Gaming 31 ? OMFG Hats

Blizzard is "very serious" about bringing Diablo to consoles

Blizzard roused suspicions last November when it posted job listings pertaining to a "Diablo-related concept for consoles." When questioned, the developer quelled that brush fire by suggesting that nothing was official and it was simply exploring the possibility of developing a Diablo title for consoles -- an initiative that may be underway. At Gamescom today, Blizzard all but confirmed that it's preparing a Diablo title for consoles.

Diablo 3 lead designer Josh Mosqueira said that Blizzard "is very, very serious about bringing the Diablo 3 experience to the console," noting that the developer is already assembling a team to tackle the project. "We're looking for programmers, designers, artists who think their dream job would be to bring Diablo to the console. Trust me, it is a dream job," Mosqueria said. "All I can say is, it's going to be awesome. Stay tuned."

Based on EuroGamer's report, Mosqueria didn't elaborate on what the project might be, but Blizzard suggested last year that it wouldn't directly port the PC version of Diablo III to consoles because it might degrade the title's quality. Instead, the developer said it was more likely to produce a spinoff in the same universe. Despite expressing interest bringing Diablo to consoles, Blizzard stressed that its core focus remained on PC.

The long-awaited dungeon crawler is still lacking an official release date for PC, but it's expected to enter a public beta phase sometime this quarter, possibly coinciding with Blizzard's annual Blizzcon event in October. A few weeks ago, we learned that the game will require a permanent Internet connection to play, and it will have an in-game auction system that allows players to exchange digital content for real-world currency.

During the same Gamescom press conference, cofounder Frank Pearce also explained that Blizzard has no plans to develop a StarCraft MMO as it's too busy with existing projects. "We definitely feel like all the worlds we create would lend themselves well to multiple genres and multiple forms of media," he said, adding that Blizzard would consider backing an in-house team that was passionate about creating a StarCraft MMO.

"Right now?we've got our hands full with everything we're doing, so we don't really have any plans to do anything beyond the StarCraft RTSs and the expansions right now. But anything's possible, because we have created such rich and cool universes." Earlier this year, a group of modders unveiled an ambitious project to create a WoW-like StarCraft game originally called World of StarCraft, but later renamed to StarCraft Universe.

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Obama Presses His Case in Crucial Iowa, but Perry Is Close on His Heels

Eleven miles away, a more colorful, less-fortified campaign bus deposited Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, the newest Republican presidential candidate, in Dubuque, where he told another audience of business leaders over lunch, ?I guess we?ve kind of got competing job tours, if you want to know the truth of the matter.?

The governor was quick to contrast his style with that of the president.

?His approach is to study these things,? Mr. Perry said. ?We know what the problem is. We?re being overtaxed, overregulated and over-litigated.?

Earlier, he said he wanted to restore military respect for the commander in chief.

Mr. Obama brushed off the remarks in an interview with CNN as beginner?s errors. But the spectacle of a beleaguered president and a swaggering new rival circling each other in the cornfields of Iowa vividly illustrated the contours of 2012 election. And it may signal battles to come, as Mr. Obama fights to hold on to the region that put him on a path to victory in 2008.

The president faces a new, more challenging political and economic landscape in the Midwestern states that formed an early and deep core of support during his primary and general election campaigns. Unemployment has increased across the region, while his approval ratings in Iowa have sagged to below 50 percent.

In Peosta, on the second day of the three-day bus tour of Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois, Mr. Obama defended his economic record and fired back at Republicans in Congress. He said they had stymied his efforts to revive the economy by refusing to put ?country ahead of party.?

?I don?t care whether you?re a Democrat or Republican, independent, if you?re not registered with any party,? he said before the conference. ?I need your help sending a message to Congress that it?s time to put the politics aside and get something done.?

The visit by Mr. Perry to this patch of northeast Iowa ? terrain that is often more fertile for Democrats ? may have represented a bit of gamesmanship by the governor, who is seeking a bold start to his own campaign. But it was also a reminder of the president?s changed political fortunes.

?We don?t have to settle for our current circumstances,? Mr. Perry said. ?We have the power to change that.?

The president has no nominating battle of his own to worry about, though his advisers are closely following the Republican debate under way here. For months, the party?s candidates have delivered a relentless day-by-day pounding of Mr. Obama, and his trip was intended to counterbalance that message.

The swath of the Midwest that Mr. Obama has visited in the last week ? he went to Michigan last week ? are four states that he easily won in 2008. But his popularity has flagged there, while Republican confidence has swelled after the party?s midterm election gains last year in local, state and federal offices.

If the president is fighting hard to hold these states next year, Democratic analysts here say, his bid for re-election could be significantly complicated and the race would represent more of a traditional battleground map, rather than the expanded set of states that propelled him to victory .

Mr. Obama?s senior aides insist that as difficult a situation as Mr. Obama faces, the Republican Party is in worse shape, with high disapproval ratings in the region. The White House scheduled the bus tour on the heels of the biggest burst of activity yet in the Republican campaign, with a televised debate last week, and both the Iowa straw poll and the addition of Mr. Perry to the race on Saturday.

?The administration tells us we?re in a recovery,? Mr. Perry said as his bus stopped at a roofing company in Cedar Rapids and a truck stop in Walcott, in addition to Dubuque. ?It sure doesn?t feel like a recovery.?

Mr. Obama acknowledged that the economy continues to sputter, but he blamed bad luck compounded by political dysfunction in Washington. As part of the White House-sponsored rural economic forum, he announced initiatives to help lift rural areas, like doubling government investment in small businesses and increasing job search and training programs for people in rural areas.

The president said his administration was trying to make agriculture an economic driver, speaking earnestly of cattle grazing next to fields of solar panels and crops used in biofuels. He drew laughter when he praised a former state senator ?who?s helping farms manage manure in creative ways.?

With no grand plans to offer, Mr. Obama is framing the race not as a referendum on his record but as a choice between competing visions for the country ? ?big and bold and generous,? he said, or ?cramped? and one that ?believes in a winner-take-all economy in which everyone else is left out in the cold.?

As the two men campaigned near each other, White House aides were not above their own digs at Mr. Perry, including his threat in 2009 that Texas might leave the United States.

?We should be able to disagree on important issues without questioning each other?s patriotism,? said the White House spokesman, Jay Carney. ?We may disagree with our political opponents, but we certainly believe they are all patriots, even those who wanted to secede from the union.?

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Making Bacteria Make More Fuel

A new microbe engineering trick could potentially make butanol, a promising biofuel, so cheaply that it could compete with ethanol. By tapping into a highly efficient metabolic pathway, scientists at Rice University engineered E. coli to convert sugars to butanol 10 times more efficiently than any other organism.

Butanol, which is typically made by fermenting sugar, packs more energy per gallon than ethanol and can be shipped via existing oil pipelines.

Several companies are now trying to commercialize biobutanol, including some seeking to retrofit existing ethanol facilities. However, the bugs normally used to produce butanol don't tolerate it well and so produce only small quantities. "You can get over 10 percent ethanol in the fermentation process from corn," says Jonathan Mielenz, a biofuels researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "Butanol is nothing near that level. It's typically not much more than 1 or 2 percent."

The new E. coli work faster than other fuel-producing microbes. They also produce five to 10 times more fuel from the same amount of sugar. That means they require less sugar feedstock and can be grown in smaller vessels, cutting capital and operational costs. Ramon Gonzalez, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor who led the work, says that several companies have shown interest in the technology, and he expects to see it on the market within the next three years.

Cobalt Biofuels, a biobutanol startup based in Mountainview, California, uses Clostridium bacteria to break down plant matter and convert the resulting sugars into a mix of butanol, acetone, and ethanol. Gevo, a company based in Englewood, Colorado is working with E. coli that are altered to divert some of their metabolites, which would otherwise be involved in synthesizing amino acids, toward alcohol production. And Butamax, a joint venture between Dupont and BP, is using genetically modified yeast.

Gonzalez and his colleagues outlined their new approach in a paper published online in the journal Nature. The researchers tapped into a pathway that microbes use to break down fatty acids, which are hydrocarbon molecules, to generate energy. They modified about a dozen genes in E. coli to reverse this beta-oxidation pathway so that the microbes build fatty acids.

The method is more efficient than others because it adds two carbon atoms at a time, rather than one, to the hydrocarbon molecules being formed. "What makes it really efficient is that the mechanism by which those two carbon atoms are added to the chain doesn't require [energy]," Gonzalez says.

By selectively manipulating genes, the researchers can program the microbes to synthesize many different fuels and chemicals. In addition to butanol, the bacteria can produce various useful fatty acids that existing processes derive from plant and animal oils.

Because the beta-oxidation pathway is found in nearly all organisms, it could also be engineered in yeast and algae, which might make it easier for many different companies to adopt the technology, Gonzalez says. He is looking at modifying various organisms with the goal of making the process even cheaper and more efficient. Yeast, for instance, are more tolerant to ethanol and butanol, he says?but E. coli grow faster.

However, in the end, cautions Mielenz, all biobutanol processes face the crucial challenge of requiring a switch from food sources such as corn, sugarcane or beets for their sugar feedstock to cellulosic biomass, which is more expensive to convert to fuels.

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Why so many Core i7-2600 flavours?

Why so many Core i7-2600 flavours?

Posted on 9th Aug 2011 at 11:35 by Clive Webster with 25 comments

There?s an interesting article over at Ars Technica, titled What processor should I buy: Intel?s crazy pricing makes my head hurt. That might seem a silly question at first: as the author points out, surely you just buy the most expensive CPU in the LGA1155 range. However, Peter Bright is no fool; looking closer at the specs and his requirements, the author struggles to make sense of Intel?s strategy with new features, performance and compatibility.

The problem is due to Bright?s desire to make a future-proof, fast PC that can run Visual Studio and Battlefield 3 easily. A Core i7-2600 is a no-brainer, but there are three flavours, with the S model even running at slower stock speeds to save 30W of power (it Turbo Boosts to the same 3.8GHz as the other i7-2600 CPUs, however).

Then there?s the toss-up between the i7-2600 and the i7-2600K ? the former has some interesting virtualisation and security features that Bright wants, but the latter has a better GPU and the ability to overclock. So which one is better? They both seem compromised and yet there?s a £10 ($23) price difference. The point is really, why has Intel disabled the useful VT-d and the potentially useful TXT logic from the i7-2600K?

Sure, TXT could be seen as a way to introduce hardware-based DRM to a home PC, but as Bright points out, it could also be very useful in preventing rootkits from slaving your PC to their nefarious desire (my melodramatic wording, not his).

Bright finds a solution to his quandary in the Xeon world, where there is a CPU that fits his needs, but then he?s stymied by the lack of Smart Response on official Xeon chipsets. So he?ll have to opt for the not officially supported combination of a Z68 motherboard with a Xeon processor. This should work fine, but for a PC you absolutely rely on for work (I assume) this isn?t a comfortable arrangement.

So why does Intel feel the need to disable potentially useful features from its supposedly top-end CPU when this will slow down uptake? And is the lack of Smart Response technology in any Xeon chipset a tacit admission that it?s not 100 per cent reliable? Conspiracy theories below please!

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Study: America's fascination with the cell phone

The latest mobile phone study affirms just how dependent many Americans are on their cell phones. Nearly 50 percent of young adults reported having trouble doing something because they did not have their phone nearby and 20 percent of all surveyed experienced frustration because their phone took too long to download something. The new findings come courtesy of Pew Internet & American Life Project and reveal a lot information about the average phone owner.

83 percent of Americans own some form of mobile phone and more than 50 percent of those have used a phone in the last month to retrieve information on the spot.

Remember that time you pretended to place or receive a phone call to avoid talking with someone nearby? Well you aren?t alone, as 13 percent of respondents have done the same thing.

70 percent of young adults between the age of 18 and 29 have used a phone for entertainment while they were bored.

Aside from entertainment and convenience, handsets can be a valuable tool during an emergency. 40 percent of everyone questioned said they found themselves in an emergency situation where having their phone was useful.

Data for the study was obtained via phone interviews of 2,277 adults over the age of 18. Calls were conducted between April 26 and May 22 2011. This is likely the same phone interview that was used to determine Internet activities of adults earlier this month which revealed that search and email remain the top online activities in the US.

It?s unfortunate that the survey didn?t poll people under the age of 18 as it would be interesting to see how younger teenagers would skew the results.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/45111-study-americas-fascination-with-the-cell-phone.html

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