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  • Micropayments are like Flying Cars and Cities under the Ocean

    I once believed micro-payments would liberate a number of smaller Internet based ventures. Whether it was bloggers, podcasts or screencasts, DIY videos, someone would pay a fraction of a cent to watch something that really helped them out. But no matter how many people talked or wrote about micropayments, nobody took ownership of it and did anything about it. If it was do-able and profitable somone like PayPal, Google or Yahoo would have done something by now. Smarter and more connected people have gone through the list of reasons why micropayments haven’t worked. And yet, hope springs eternal and some silver tongued soothsayers are promoting micropayments as a solution to the decreased subscriptions for daily news. So just to let everyone know, micropayments will NOT save daily newspapers.

    Nieman Journalism Lab

    If you want to go back through some of the reams of text that have been written about micropayments for news, Clay’s essay from 2003 is a good place to start — especially since it lists the half-dozen or so attempts to create such a system that failed miserably. (Are you listening, Steve Brill?) There’s also a good roundup at the Freakonomics blog from awhile back that is well worth reading.

    via Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion? » Nieman Journalism Lab.

  • Lithium-Air Battery interest increasing

    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery
    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery

    Back on July 8th I posted an article talking about the benefits of a new battery technology I had read about on weblog called Technology Review (originally published on June 26th from MIT). It think it may have originally been linked to either Slashdot or The Register. The blog entry was essentially like a press release from a company in California named PolyPlus. They had just announced the project to create single use high energy density Lithium-Air batteries for the military (most likely for radio communications in the field). The key technology was a new way to wrap the lithium cathode in a waterproof seal while still exposing it to the surrounding air encapsulated in the battery. It seems now some other big monied interests have caught onto this new battery chemistry and are going to produce it as well, but maybe not as a single use battery but instead as a rechargeable battery.

    IBM is in the news touting the promise of the lithium-air technology as a potential technological nirvana for autmobile drive trains. Estimates are a 10X increase in energy density per kilogram of battery electrolyte material. If this can be achieved, watch out electric vehicles here we come.

    Lithium-ion batteries have the potential to deliver about 585 watt-hours of electricity per kilogram, while lithium-sulfur has a theoretical potential of about 2,600 watt-hours, and lithium-air batteries might reach targets well above 5,000 watt-hours.

    If they can be perfected, lithium-air batteries would be ideal for transportation applications, given their potential for high energy capacity and low weight. And, unlike zinc-air batteries, it should be possible to make them rechargeable.

    via Lithium-Air Batteries Seen as Hope for Electric Cars – NYTimes.com.

  • links for 2009-09-14

  • OS X 10.6 – 64bits? Meh.

    There is no doubt 64-bits is nice architectural change but it doesn’t mean you’re receiving all the benefits of the change. If Apple doesn’t quickly upgrade it’s vast stable of killer multimedia applications, it doesn’t really matter how good Snow Leopard is. Even after installing Snow Leopard it is hard for me to notice a significant difference. I would settle for some extra quickness or capability in iLife that wasn’t possible before Snow Leopard.

    Add to this the fact you need a full 64-bit clean environment to really guarantee you are in 64bit mode. The boot-up environment known as EFI was n ot 64-bit clean until after 2008. The Intel CPU wasn’t 64-bit clean until after 2007. Two strikes against me as I was an early adopter of the Intel Architecture and am relegated to good ol’ 32-bit compatibility mode. Unless I decide to upgrade of course, which isn’t going to happen because I have a sworn duty to first replace my wife’s old PC after Windows 7 is formally released. Once that purchase is done and out of the way, then I will consider getting a re-furbished post 2008 Mac Pro tower with a fully OpenCL compatible graphics card. There’s just so many considerations, you need to keep writing all of them down so you don’t lose track.

    Of course, Apple itself needs to deliver 64-bit versions of its own Logic Studio, Final Cut Studio, and Aperture, too. The company was previously outpaced by its third party developers in the move to PowerPC, and to a lesser extent, in the move to Intel Macs. Apple’s position as both a platform vendor and an application developer should help it to deliver practical, usable tools for its own developers.

    via AppleInsider | Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits.

  • links for 2009-09-03

  • Acrossair on the iPhone

    It looks like the iPhone OS 3.1 is going to do nothing more the open up the video feed on the camera so that you can overlay data on top of that video. In essence, the Augmented Reality is using your iPhone’s video as a “desktop” picture and placing items on top of that. Acrossair’s iPhone App, Nearest Tube uses the OpenGL libraries to skew and distort that data as you point the camera in different directions, thus providing a little more of a 3D perspective than say something like Layar which I have talked about previously on this blog. Chetan Demani, one of the founders of Acrossair also points out going forward any company making AR type apps will need to utilize existing location information and pre-load all the data they want to display. So the nirvana of just-in-time downloads of location data to overlay on your iPhone video image is not here,… and may not be for a while. What will differentiate the software producers though is the relevancy, and accuracy of their location information. So there will be some room for competition for a quite some time.

    He went on to say that it’s pretty simple to do AR applications using the new 3.1 APIs, due out in September. ” It’s a pretty straightforward API. There’s no complexity in there. All it does is it just switches on the video feed at the background. That’s the only API that’s published. All we’re doing is using that video feed at the back. It just displays the video feed as if it’s a live camera feed.

    via Augmenting Reality with the iPhone – O’Reilly Broadcast.

  • If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing | Wired.com

    Wired has an interesting survey of current state of the art in Augmented Reality. They are finally taking notice of this killer app for Smartphones. Let’s hope location data becomes useful worldwide. And let’s hope some enterprising iPhone developers create the Killer App for the iPhone as soon as humanly possible.  There needs to be a mashup with the iPhone video camera, Google Maps and Google Search. All done in a nice seamless iPhone App interface.

    Smartphone Augmented Reality - Simlar to Layar
    What if you could see data?

    Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby.

    via If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

  • Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com

    SDXC is yet another memory format all manufacturers will have to adopt. Isn’t it frightening how much the removable memory market has fractured into mico-formats for memory cards. About a week ago I was playing with an Olympus voice recorder at work. It had it’s own funny shaped memory cards you had to buy from Olympus if you wanted to increase the storage size. One positive thing I will say though is this. SDHC at least has consolidated some of the mindshare around a commonly supported form factor for removable storage. Compact Flash once enjoyed a similar amount of support. But nowadays you cannot even find a laptop with CardBus slots anymore. Many add-ons for laptops are installed on internal PCIe busses now.

    I hope all the device manufacturers get onboard with the SDXC format only because of the limits on the FileSystem on these cards has needed to adapt to the vagaries of long form video shooting. I remember the painful days of 4GB file size limits for video. That took a long time to dissapate on the desktop computer. It’s high time it disappeared on digital video cameras as well.

    Toshiba says all three new cards will bring a maximum write speed of 35 megabytes per second and a read speed of 60 megabytes per second. For videophiles, the new SDXC format will enable video files to extend beyond the current limit of 4 gigabytes.

    via Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com.

  • AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99

    Apple Insider reports this morning that the TomTom GPS application has appeared in the U.S. AppStore. And if you decided to get the external antenna you can even use your iPod Touch as a GPS. That is way cool and way more useful than I had previously thought this was going to be. Kudos for TomTom to make the thing more widely available on the iPhone platform.

    The product works with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which include an integrated GPS receiver. It will reportedly also be compatible with the first-generation iPhone and the iPod touch once the separate combo hardware kit is made available. TomTom has not yet announced a price for the hardware package.

    via AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99.

  • AppleInsider | Apple’s tablet

    Theres no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone
    There's no way the tablet will be as hot as the iPhone

    Market projections are a black art. How big is the market for an as yet unreleased product? Marketing departments always have to do the  research and focus groups and test marketing to see what the projections are. But even these can be wrong or misleading. Based on this article one Wall Street analyst firm bases their projections on the market for the Apple TV a niche product if there ever was one. In the first year of it’s production the Apple TV sold 1.2million units. Given the appeal of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the projections are the Mac Tablet will sell far better than the 1.2 million units of the Apple TV. And with a list price of ~$600 US then the revenue generated would be approximately 3% of total revenue. This is all pad on paper estimates based on the up take of a somewhat less successful product, so it could be way off the mark. I’m hoping there’s something new, something nobody has guessed at so far that Apple will include in this device that will help really, really differentiate it. It should be unlike other tablets, and unlike its little brother the iPod Touch.

    We believe an Apple tablet would be priced 30%-50% below the $999 MacBook, and would offer best in class web, email, and media software,” the report reads. “In other words, we believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook.”

    via AppleInsider | Apple’s tablet will be more than a niche product – report.