cheatsheetstogo.com

This last idea is similar to the one above, but a little more space age. Based on the render, the support material seems to be some kind of finished metal. Again, we wonder about internal access, but it looks like there’s a seam on the back edge, like you might be able to pull out the whole motherboard tray. But then how do you connect the IDE and SATA drive cables?

Call us traditionalists, but we like the first design the best. Maybe it’s because the USB ports are higher up. Our hunch is that Maingear would love to hear your thoughts as well.

This next idea embraces its elevation even more. The body of the case seems to float inside that outer band. The vertical frontside slots and inputs are interesting, although we’ve come to love top-side USB inputs recently. We’re also intrigued by the fat beer-bottle silhouette. Maybe the bottom needs to be wider because Nvidia’s next-gen 3D cards will be twice as tall? With that band in the way, we presume Maingear has come up with a way to get inside other than the traditional removable side panel. Seems like a lot of brushed aluminum.

All we have are external shots, so we have no idea what’s going on inside. The exterior of this first one is pretty straightforward though. We like the slot-loading front panel optical drives, as well as what looks like the glossy black face. And as HP did with BlackBird 002 and Voodoo will do with its new Omen, the elevated chassis leaves room for underbody airflow. We’ll go ahead and call that a trend now.

(Credit:
Maingear)

You know how a vendor will “leak” product info ahead of time to drum up interest in a conspiratorial kind of way? We have a feeling that’s what’s going on with these Maingear desktop concepts that conveniently found their way to our in-box this morning. We’ll bite though, because they’re so weird-looking (and heck, if Dell can do it, why not Maingear?). From what we gather, Maingear is trying to narrow down a design for Q1 2009.

(Credit:
Maingear)

(Credit:
Maingear)

Vascular pattern recognition (VPR) uses near-infrared light generated from a bank of LEDs projected through the skin. The pattern recorded it then compared with the pattern on file.

At RSA 2008 on Monday, Hitachi announced its acquisition of M-Tech. Since last Wednesday, the Canadian ID management company has been using its new name, Hitachi ID Systems.

Hitachi is hoping to grow the software products it has acquired from M-Tech with joint offerings of its existing biometric, RFID, and smart-card security products.

Unlike fingerprint scanners or palm-reading biometrics, finger vein biometric devices represent a subset of hand geometry biometrics in that they look for unique vascular patterns in the customer’s finger tip.

Hitachi currently offers advanced IT authentication with its finger vein biometric devices. Finger vein biometric authentication is used in 80 percent of Japanese ATMs using biometric authentication.

(Credit:
Hitachi)

The technology behind finger vein pattern recognition.

Forrester Research predicts that the ID and access management market space will grow from $2.6 billion in 2006 to $12.3 billion in 2014, and Hitachi, long known for its security electronics, wants to be a player in the enterprise security market by offering a complete package.

With the acquisition, Hitachi now has ID management software to go along with its authentication hardware. Customers include Wells Fargo, Wyeth, Best Buy, Cingular, Wendys, Cisco, Sony, and Pfizer.

The headquarters of Birmingham, Ala., CBS affiliate WIAT-TV. As a cyberjournalist for Zatso.com, I covered news for WIAT from San Francisco.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.–Back in 1999, in the salad days of the dot-com economy, when anyone with a start-up could launch an IPO and see their stock hit $80, I took my first steps into the world of reporting on the Internet.

Living in San Francisco and trying to get my foot in the door, I took a job with a company called ReacTV. It was quickly renamed “Zatso,” as in “Is that so,” and its business was producing Web-based newscasts for the online sites of local TV stations around the country.

Those of us who were hired as reporters were called cyberjournalists, and each of us was assigned to one TV station, somewhere out there in the U.S. My station was WIAT-TV, channel 42 in Birmingham, and this city’s CBS affiliate.

I found myself driving through Birmingham on Sunday on Road Trip 2008, on my way from Kennedy Space Center, where I reported on the Space Shuttle landing Saturday, to Huntsville, Ala., where I’ll be attending Space Camp on Monday. And I realized I had to stop for a little bit of nostalgia.

The way Zatso worked was this: Each morning, I would call the station’s news director from my desk in San Francisco and get the rundown of the stories they were working on for that night’s newscast. We would pick five stories, and then I would go and basically do my own reporting on the stories, looking for additional angles to supplement what the channel 42 reporters were going to report on the news.

Then, once we were all done, my stories would go onto the WIAT Web site along with video from the five stories that we’d chosen. We did everything because back then, these stations weren’t yet capable of doing this kind of work themselves.

The humor of the situation, of course, was doing the actual reporting. More often than I can recall, I would find myself reporting on some small crime story, and would have to call the dispatch center for some small sheriff’s office way out in the country, miles and miles from Birmingham.

I’d get a deputy or the dispatcher on the phone and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Daniel Terdiman, I’m a cyberjournalist calling from Zatso in San Francisco, and I want to talk to someone about the drunk driver you arrested last night.”

There’d be a pregnant pause, and then they’d say, “You’re a what? With who?”

Can you blame them? It would be like an alien arriving at your doorstep and announcing that they’re there to talk about the election for school board.

Well, Zatso was a good idea. Sort of. The problem was that the business model depended on working with stations in cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and other smaller places. We hadn’t managed to sign on any clients in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

And the service really required high-speed Internet to work.

So, as you can imagine, there weren’t that many people in Birmingham or our other cities with high-speed in 1999.

Suffice it to say, Zatso didn’t last, though for a few months there it was considered a high-flying company with a bright future.

That was partially because we had some real talent there. Besides myself, there were two other Zatso reporters who ended up working for CNET News.com, and an editor went on to work for PBS’ Frontline.

Now, though, barely anyone remembers what Zatso is, and I’d be surprised if many of the WIAT folks do either. Since it was Sunday evening when I rolled through town, I decided to just stop and take a picture of their building and then live-blog this, but not to stop in and say hi.

After all, if I showed up at the door of a TV station in Birmingham and said I was a reporter from San Francisco doing a road trip project driving around the South, the likely response would be, “You’re a what? With who?”

Please stay tuned to Road Trip 2008 here on this blog, as well as on Twitter and on my Qik channel.

Despite some anticipation of weakening U.S. consumer confidence, PC shipment growth here nearly doubled between the third and fourth quarters of 2007, to reach 8.8 percent, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report released Wednesday.

Dell actually expanded its market share in the fourth quarter, after a string of disappointing quarters while it reshuffled its ranks and its product lineup. Dell used momentum derived from its new retail push to drive its shipments up by more than 15 percent in the quarter–growth far ahead of the rest of the U.S. The Texas PC maker finished the year with 29.6 percent of the total PC market in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, IDC said.

“From a Dell perspective, part of going from minus-5-percent to 15-percent positive (growth) this quarter is the fact that year-ago shipment was pretty low,” said Loren Loverde, director of IDC’s quarterly PC report. “So some of that is factoring in, but they have also launched a lot of new products, and lot of new (retail) channel arrangements.”

Acer also made a big push in retail this year, continuing the rapid gains in the U.S. (it’s grown 294 percent since the same quarter a year ago), and appears to have finally nailed down its coveted No. 3 spot in the worldwide ranking of top PC vendors. When combined with Gateway, Acer shipments achieved 9.6 percent share worldwide in Q4, compared with 6.9 percent a year ago.

Though Lenovo has been nipping at its heels, Acer’s most direct competition in the U.S. is the two big guys–Hewlett-Packard and Dell. “HP has a lot more experience with consumers and is going to try to defend that turf. It’s a pretty dynamic competitive space all around,” Loverde said.

HP, the worldwide PC leader for more than a year now, saw its shipments rise both at home and abroad, though it was somewhat affected by stagnating growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to IDC. It now has 19 percent of the worldwide market.

Lenovo has been going strong for three straight quarters. It ended the year behind Acer with 7.5 percent of worldwide PC shipments. It’s not in the top 5 of vendors in the U.S. market, but recently introduced its new IdeaPad consumer notebook line, which the company hopes will follow in the tradition of its business-oriented ThinkPad line of laptops.

Rival analyst firm Gartner ranks the companies in the same order as IDC, according to findings also released Wednesday: the worldwide leader is HP (with 18.2 percent market share), followed by Dell (14.3), Acer (8.9), Lenovo (7.4), and Toshiba (4.0) to round out the top 5.

In the U.S., it’s Dell (31.4 percent market share), HP (26.1), Acer (9), Apple (6.1), and Toshiba (5.3). Apple has stretched its share of the U.S. market to 6.1 percent, from 5.1 percent a year ago. Gartner also notes that for the second consecutive quarter mobile PC shipments exceeded those of desktops.

Though the market for computers–and both business and consumer technology across the board–appears healthy, it could drop off next year. But thus far, there are no signs of it in the PC space.

Though there’s been ample hand-wringing over interest rates, credit problems, and weak retail sales, the computing industry is staying immune so far, according to Loverde.

“There’s some risk of having an impact on PCs, but a certain amount of it is because we just went through the holiday season and Wall Street is under pressure,” he said.
“If you look at the broader technology trends…some recovery in 2007, commercial Vista adoption, pretty strong portable (PC) adoption, (and) we’re still getting lower prices and new users…A number of tech environment factors that suggest we should expect still some pretty solid growth. The risk that we might not maintain double digit growth in the next couple years would be if we had a recession and consumer spending really started to cut back.”

commentary

A friend pinged me a few weeks ago with a Very Good Question, one for which I still don’t have a good answer and so I thought I’d throw it out to the larger community. The question?

How can a company best preserve its customized code…when there’s no guarantee that future management will support open source?

It’s a big question, and one that an increasing number of companies will face as they learn to innovate again. Here’s the same question with a bit more context:

I’ve been thinking about the source base we have on Sourceforge and who should really hold the copyright. I’ve spoken with [my CIO] and both of us agree that [we] may not be the best copyright holder. [We] are not a software company and when [the CIO] and I are gone the company may lose its stomach for open source….

I asked [the CIO] if he on behalf of the [company] would consider (if appropriate) signing a charter for some sort of organization or group that could hold the copyright for the source. He said he would but neither of us really know what is actually needed and what would be appropriate. A lawyer — right?

See the dilemma? It’s one thing to talk about open source, but source code without community is largely impotent.

Here are a few salient points from my friend’s scenario to consider:

Small organization;
The company does development, but isn’t a software company and doesn’t want to become such;
They have internal support for open source now…but forever? Who knows?
At the moment management understands the power of open source, but no one here sees value in a lot of custom code locked up inside the company’s walls with only the company to support it.

So what do they do? Well, to get community interested, they would need to take steps to make the source code/product valuable. They’d then need to attract a diverse group of code committers to ensure spread and depth of development. Part of this involves work that they’re doing now: cleaning up and generalizing the product with multiple use cases. Then there’s formalization of build processes, creation of documentation, etc.

Suddenly open source doesn’t look as easy as a legal license, does it?

Open source is not a panacea. At its most basic, it’s a way to ensure permanent escrow for your code. But code without community is sterile. Any suggestions as to the least-difficult way to build sufficient community around a project like this to maximize the code’s odds of enduring beyond the creator’s interest in the project?

Smells like a business opportunity in this. In fact, it sounds suspiciously similar to what Stuart Cohen is up to at the Collaborative Software Institute. There is far more software out there built for use rather than for sale, as Eric Raymond most famously pointed out. How can companies protect the freedom of their code beyond an open-source license?

Shares of Evergreen Solar shine after $1 billion contract news–Xconomy

Evergreen Solar gets good news from big orders from Germany.
AltaRock breaks new ground with geothermal power–Greentech Media
Geothermal power is an under-funded renewable energy source, according to MIT. Tyler Hamilton profiles Kleiner Perkins-backed AltaRock and discusses enhanced geothermal systems (EGS).

(Credit:
Envision Solar)

Greening parking lots with solar trees–EcoGeek

A company is building solar roofing for parking lots.
Wrightspeed to challenge Bugatti Veyron–Greentech Media
Whoa, that’s fast! The all-electric Wrightspeed SR-71 will go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. Talk about torque.
Water monitoring technology gets $8M boost in San Francisco, with more funds to come–VentureBeat
The area of water typically doesn’t attract a lot of investment. This project aims to establish a water monitoring system
Biofuels and food prices: Running the numbers–CNET News.com
New Energy Finance finds that biofuels production is one, but not the primary factor pushing up food prices.

Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.

Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.

There’s more than one ‘app exchange’ in town. Coghead launches Gallery for third-party applications.

(Credit:
Coghead)

The applications, written with Coghead’s visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems’ Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.

At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead’s software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople.

Although far smaller, its approach is similar to that of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, where people can find more than 800 customized applications written for Salesforce’s development platform.

Hosted development platforms and tools, also called platform-as-a-service, are where a lot of software development is going, according to Web entrepreneurs. Rather than purchase a rack of servers and a software stack to run applications, developers can rely on a hosted platform to offer on-demand applications.

For platform providers, building the largest ecosystem of online Web developers helps accrue business, much the way Microsoft woos users of its development tools to drive sales of Windows and other stack software.

Although not a complete development environment, the latest entrant to this platform-as-a-service category is Google, with its App Engine, still in beta test version. Google now lets developers run their Python applications on the company’s massive computing infrastructure.

Last week, Google opened up its own marketplace for listing third-party applications written for its enterprise products, including Google Apps and its search appliance. And on Monday, Google and Salesforce announced that Salesforce’s customer relationship management, or CRM, applications, will be integrated into Google Apps through the Salesforce development platform, Force.com.

Open source comes to platform-as-a-service

Coghead’s development service and gallery are specifically aimed at small businesses, both developers and customers. It is aiming to recruit value-added resellers or independent consultants with 2 to 20 people, according to company CEO Paul McNamara.

With a hosted development environment, they can write a Web application and get into the software-as-a-service business, he said.

“They used to sell their time for money by doing custom application development. It’s a tough business because you’re always chasing your next lunch, and if you take vacation, you aren’t billing,” McNamara said.

“Our value to them is that we let them transform the business by building an application for one customer and then selling it to other customers around the world,” he said.

Ultimately, this model is disruptive because many more companies can get off the ground without the need for a large capital investment from venture investors, McNamara said. He added that Salesforce’s AppExchange tends to focus more on large independent software vendors, or ISVs.

Developers on the Gallery can choose to take an open-source approach to listing, called the Open Definition model. They can make the template for their application available to others to copy, modify, and distribute–much like open-source projects allow people to tweak the source code.

Since most people don’t actually work with source code when they use the Coghead service, they aren’t actually using the source code. Another class of applications will be “IP protected,” which means that customers can’t copy and modify the applications.

Coghead plans to make money from Gallery by collecting a monthly fee for using the platform and listing the applications.

NEW YORK–Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, is known as a futurist, but his keynote address on Thursday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo was heavy on the realism in the wake of sobering news from Wall Street.

Web 2.0 evangelist Tim O'Reilly addresses the crowd at the last Web 2.0 Expo, in April.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News)

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

Global warming. The U.S. losing its edge in science and technology. A growing income gap. “And what are the best and the brightest working on?” O’Reilly asked, displaying a slide of the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, which invites you to, among other things, “throw sheep” at your friends.

“Do you see a problem here?” he posed, showing another slide of the popular
iPhone app “iBeer,” which simulates chugging a pint. “You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?”

He brought up examples like Google.org, the Omidyar Network, and even small companies that have decided to take on social and political challenges rather than the trendy social-network craze of the week. “Business is the engine of innovation,” O’Reilly said. “I really believe in markets, and I believe in the power we all have to build great companies that change things.”

As for the financial-services industry, O’Reilly implied that in a big sense, firms had it coming. “If you look at what went wrong on Wall Street, this is an industry that, in its heart, parades a lot of value,” he said. “Liquidity in markets is critical. But if you look at the last decade…these Wall Street firms captured a lot more value than they were creating.”

There’s an inherent irony in what O’Reilly said, given the fact that massive conferences like the Web 2.0 Expo are packed with the trendspeak and hype that birthed SuperPoke-like entertainment, and certainly aren’t helping the environment by distributing tons of press kits and swag–not to mention flying in hundreds of attendees in a massive spurt of carbon emissions.

To be fair, O’Reilly Media has been printing fewer event programs and encouraging conference goers to recycle, and it has used carpeting made of post-consumer material.

There is clearly a lot that needs to change, and perhaps the tech industry trend of large-scale conferences is part of it. We’ll see whether Silicon Valley’s leaders and moguls are willing to do what they think is right, rather than what they think is profitable.

But O’Reilly encouraged the audience to start small, and he offered them their first challenge: register to vote.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

(Credit:
Newton Peripherals)

Here’s the problem with most “travel” mice: power. If they’re not plugged into a USB port, they need batteries–which inevitably die at the worst possible time. Sure, there are rechargeable rodents, but then you need to remember the charging dock and/or cord. And let’s not forget: A mobile mouse is one more thing taking up space in your bag, one more thing you run the risk of losing.

Enter the ingenious MoGo Mouse BT, which operates wirelessly via Bluetooth and docks/recharges inside your notebook’s PC Card slot. How smart is that! Newegg.com has the MoGo Mouse BT for $29.99, plus $5.58 for shipping. That’s a pretty sweet deal, considering that most vendors sell it for around $70.

Check the user reviews before you buy, however: The MoGo lacks both a scroll wheel and a middle button, and it doesn’t come with a Bluetooth adapter for those notebooks that lack integrated Bluetooth. If you can live with those limitations and have a PC Card slot sitting around doing nothing, this looks like an ideal way to fill it.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

It’s Friday and that means I’m going to take a look at beautiful tech! This week, I take a look at the Asus Eee PC 1000H.

And as always, drop me a line or follow me on Twitter!