Gadgetwise Blog: Jildy App Sorts Your Facebook Friends for You

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AppId is over the quota

You’re in line for coffee. You really want to check your family’s Facebook posts to see if there’s anything you need to know about, but they’re lost among status updates from friends. You never did spend the time to create a group of just your relatives, so there you are, thumbing through your iPhone’s entire news feed.

You don’t have to live this way. A new app called Jildy, released for the iPhone last week and under development for Android phones, sorts your Facebook friends into lists of those who interact with one another, so you can read or post to just those people quickly.

There was an app called Katango that did this. But after a high-profile debut last July, Katango was bought by Google in November, and the app is no longer available in Apple’s App Store. Jildy also does a few things Katango didn’t.

Using Jildy is easy. Download it from the App Store and fire it up. The first time you start it, flick the switch to turn Facebook access from Off to On. If you already have Facebook’s app on your phone, you won’t even need to log in. You will be presented with a familiar screen that prompts you to grant permission for Jildy to access some of your Facebook information, just like any other Facebook app. Click Allow, and Jildy will spend a few seconds loading your friend lists and sorting them.

To read or post to Jildy’s lists, tap the Lists icon in the app’s lower left corner. The automatic grouping is surprisingly accurate, since most Facebook users tend to post or comment to one another in isolated groups. To fine-tune a list, tap it. Jildy will switch to a screen with icons of the most frequent recent posters. In the upper right corner is an arrow key. Tap that, and choose the List Info option. There, you can edit the name and membership of the group. That same arrow icon also lets you post an update or share a photo with just the members of the group.

An Internet pundit, Clay Shirky, has said that the problem with services like Facebook is not information overload, it’s filter failure. Jildy Inc.’s chief executive, Mark Drummond, who previously created the unsuccessful but technically impressive Wowd social search engine, says Jildy’s developers aim to solve Mr. Shirky’s problem by whittling down your Facebook feeds into chunks you will find usable on a mobile phone, where your attention span and screen size are much smaller than they are on a laptop or at a desk.

When you look at a list, Jildy presents screens of who is posting the most in the last 12 hours, and what words or phrases are appearing most. Are the gang from San Francisco talking about Burning Man in January? Maybe something is up that you need to check. Tap the on-screen box labeled “burning man,” and Jildy will show you the group’s posts on the topic, which it has already searched. It digs back more than a few days, so you can catch up on conversation topics you may have missed during the holidays.

Jildy also has a feature called PSI (it stands for “personal social intelligence”) that creates cutesy charts of the statistical distribution of your Facebook friends by age, gender, relationship status, and astrological sign. I was surprised to learn that the majority of my friends are married, and 40 percent of them are women. There are other ways I could have figured this out, but Jildy did it for me in a few seconds while I was poking through lists on my phone. That’s the idea: to present the information you probably want, ready to go on your phone. Until Google figures out what it’s going to do with Katango, Jildy is well worth a test drive.

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Gadgetwise: Publishing Your Own E-Book

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AppId is over the quota

I want to publish my own e-book and sell it online on a major Web site. Where do I start?

Writing, editing and proofreading your book manuscript is the first step. Once you have finished your book, perhaps one of the easiest ways to get it out there for sale is to use publishing tools from the major online bookstores like Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Amazon has a Kindle Direct Publishing service that lets you self-publish your own e-books and sell them in its online Kindle store. The site has tutorials for properly formatting and uploading your book file to make it compatible with the Kindle, Amazon’s own e-reader hardware. You need an account to use the service, but you can use your existing Amazon.com account if you already buy things from the site. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing Help page has the information you need to get started, including an explanation of the royalties you can earn and Amazon’s share of the profits.

Barnes and Noble has its own publishing platform called PubIt that can be used to upload and distribute e-books in its Nook online bookstore. The PubIt site accepts files in the ePub format, but it also has tools that convert Microsoft Word, RTF files, HTML documents and plain-text files into ePub. It doesn’t cost anything to use PubIt, but you do need an account, and Barnes and Noble takes a percentage of your book’s list price in exchange for selling your work. The PubIt Support page has information on prices, percentages and using the service.

If you do not want to use a publishing tool dedicated to a specific online store, an e-book distribution service like Smashwords can help you get your work out to a variety of online bookstores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple’s iBookstore and the Sony Reader store.

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DealBook: Despite RIM Takeover Talk, Hurdles Would Be High

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AppId is over the quota
Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesA selection of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry phones.

OTTAWA — For beleaguered investors in Research in Motion, the drastic collapse of the company’s share price through 2011 eventually became a cause for optimism. In December, shares of the BlackBerry maker spiked on reports that several technology titans could be suitors.

But the optimism has been fleeting; the company has grappled with service failures, weak product introductions and dwindling market share. Shares of RIM have dropped by 75 percent since February.

As the troubles mount and the stock drops, RIM is looking like a strong takeover candidate without suitable prospects.

“Before you talk about a buyer, you have to ask: do you have a seller?” said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners in New York. “That is the overarching question.”

Any potential suitors would most likely face stiff resistance from Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the co-chief executives. Collectively they own more than 10 percent, which makes them among the largest shareholders.

Eric Risberg/Associated PressMike Lazaridis, a co-chief executive of Research in Motion, co-founded the company in 1984.

RIM is also a point of pride for the Canadian government, which has been increasingly reluctant to let foreign companies buy major domestic corporations. In a recent news conference, Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister, offered a note of support for RIM, saying “we all know this is an important Canadian company.”

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, said it does not comment on “rumors and speculation” as a matter of policy.

Despite the company’s well-publicized problems, RIM remains an attractive target. Even as its market share erodes in North America, the company continues to expand its customer base overseas and now reports almost 75 million users worldwide. And the BlackBerry brand is the first choice for security-conscious users like law enforcement agencies and financial services companies. In the first nine months of the year, RIM reported earnings of $1.29 billion.

At Wednesday’s close of $14.87, the price is also appealing. Alkesh Shah, an analyst at Evercore Partners, estimated that the company was worth closer to $22.50 a share, even assuming that the handset business is essentially worthless. Mr. Shah said that RIM’s network, which carries global traffic worldwide and generates monthly subscription fees, was worth about $12.50 a share, while he valued the company’s patents at roughly $7.50 a share. The company also has $2.50 a share in cash, he estimated.

Still, RIM is a large acquisition to swallow, limiting the pool of buyers.

“You have to remember that this would take $10 billion, $12 billion, $13 billion,” said Mr. Gillis of BGC. “That’s a lot of cash. There’s not a lot of people willing to spend that kind of money.”

The most obvious suitor for RIM would be a Chinese cellphone manufacturer. Such companies, which typically act as contract manufacturers for prominent brands, lack a significant presence outside of Asia. ZTE, for example, is small, low-end player in North America and Europe. But it is the fourth-largest handset maker in the world, according to IDC, a company that tracks technology markets.

With RIM, ZTE would add a recognized brand to its portfolio, reflecting its global ambitions. This year, the Chinese company announced plans to produce high-end phones under its own name, focusing in part on Western markets.

But the regulatory hurdles would be high for a Chinese company. In recent years, Canada has been quick to block acquisitions under its foreign ownership laws. In 2010, the Conservative government stopped BHP Billiton, the Australian mining company, from buying Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. At the time, some politicians cited a foreign takeover of RIM as a worst-case outcome.

The American government could also scuttle a RIM deal. The country’s military personnel, law enforcement officers and White House officials rely on BlackBerry devices, making Chinese ownership difficult under the technology control restrictions in the United States. This year, Huawei Technologies backed away from acquiring technology assets from 3Leaf Systems, a server company, after the federal government raised concerns about the relatively small transaction.

A ZTE spokeswoman declined to comment.

Other potential RIM suitors have been rebuffed. Microsoft, which had previously tried to persuade RIM to adopt its mobile operating system, initiated deal talks this summer, according to one person with knowledge of the matter. The American technology company viewed RIM’s corporate business as a good distribution platform for its software. But discussions withered, as RIM pursued an independent course. Microsoft declined to comment.

Amazon also reportedly explored a RIM acquisition. Peter Misek, an analyst in New York with Jefferies and Company, said such a deal would allow Amazon to add phones to its Kindle line of tablet computers. While no deal materialized, he said that it remained possible that RIM might license its BlackBerry software.

Facebook is a dark horse candidate. Given that Google uses Android to promote its online services, Mr. Misek said that it was likely Facebook would introduce a rival mobile operating system, and RIM would offer Facebook a quick way into the business.

But even that situation is a long shot. RIM is struggling with its latest operating system, BlackBerry 10. An RIM acquisition would also be a costly way for Facebook to gain entry into a new area.

“For $10 billion they could subsidize a lot of Android phones,” Mr. Gillis said of Facebook.

Few deals are likely to pass muster with RIM’s chiefs. Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have remained steadfast in their strategy to reverse the company’s fortunes. The executives are focused on a new line of phone and operating system, which are not expected to be introduced until the end of 2012.

Adnaan Ahmad, an analyst with Berenberg Bank in London, said the pair seemed to have developed “founders’ syndrome,” a condition that makes them inflexible about taking their company in new directions and unwilling to yield control.

Both have reputations for being combative when challenged. In the middle of the last decade, the chiefs vigorously fought a patent case brought by NTP — actions that almost prompted a shutdown of BlackBerry service. RIM settled the matter for $612.5 million, a significantly larger sum than would have been necessary earlier.

While no major shareholder has spoken publicly about RIM’s management, some dissidents have privately expressed reservations. Big investors seem willing, for now, to see how the new operating system, BlackBerry 10, performs. Two top shareholders, the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank of Canada, rely heavily on domestic retail business and would be unlikely to push RIM to seek a foreign buyer — if only for public relations purposes.

In late December, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis made it clear that they intended to remain in control of RIM, even after announcing another delay in the new operating system.

“It is important for you to know that Mike and I, as two of RIM’s largest shareholders, understand investor sentiment, and we are more committed than ever to addressing the issues at hand,” Mr. Balsillie said before announcing that, as a good will gesture, they had cut their salaries to $1 a year.

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Northeastern University Expands Its Geographic Reach

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AppId is over the quota

Northeastern, known for its co-op program in which undergraduates spend significant amounts of time in the workplace, opened its first satellite campus this fall in Charlotte, N.C., and is planning a second in Seattle next year; outposts in Austin, Tex., Minnesota and Silicon Valley are under discussion.

The goal is to offer master’s degrees in industries like cybersecurity, health informatics and project management, matching programs with each city’s industries and labor needs, through a mix of virtual learning and fly-ins from professors based in Boston (tuition will be the same as at the main campus).

While higher education has long been seen as a local enterprise, with universities deeply enmeshed in their communities, the explosion of online institutions, particularly for-profit career colleges like the University of Phoenix and the Education Management Corporation, has changed that dynamic. Northeastern, which is spending $60 million to support the expansion, is perhaps the most ambitious of a handful of brick-and-mortar institutions looking to broaden their footprint in new markets and with new methods of instruction.

“This is a time of huge transition in an industry that hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages,” said Charles P. Bird, a former vice president of Ohio University who helped develop the institution’s online offerings and now works as a consultant. “Higher education is going from traditional face-to-face delivery, and the unexamined assumption that that is good, to thinking about delivering a high-quality online experience, whether fully online or hybrid.”

Northeastern has hired 261 tenured and tenure-track professors in the last five years, about twice as many as in the previous five, and plans to add 200 more in the next three years — all of whom will be based at the home campus in Boston.

“There’s been a real knowledge explosion that has created new industries with new needs for expertise,” said Joseph E. Aoun, the university’s president. “We don’t want to make the mistake the railways did. They didn’t think of themselves as being broadly in the transportation industry, so they missed the opportunity to build air travel. We’re in the business of higher education, and where there’s a new space, we want to step in.”

Until recently, most universities looking to expand have gone overseas, starting branches in regions where American-style higher education is a huge draw: first in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, where oil revenues have paid for elaborate buildings and hefty bonuses for American faculty members, and more recently in China and Singapore.

But Cornell University just won an international competition to build a $2 billion graduate school of applied sciences on Roosevelt Island in partnership with Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Last month, Emerson College in Boston announced plans for an academic center in Los Angeles. And the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania offers its weekend executive M.B.A. program in San Francisco as well as in Philadelphia.

Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor who writes about higher education, said such expansions were “symptomatic of the significant anxiety by institutions at all levels of higher education about their sustainability.”

Some experts are skeptical that an institution entering new territory can compete with the existing local colleges and universities.

“If I were looking to move into a new region,” said Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, “I would prefer to partner with someone who knows and understands that market and already has a name brand there.”

So far, Drexel University has come closest to Northeastern’s approach — and not without difficulties.

Drexel, a century-old research university of about 18,000 students in Philadelphia that also has an extensive co-op program, opened a graduate center in downtown Sacramento in 2009, offering degrees through the hybrid online and fly-in model. That juggling act turned out to be “a lot harder than anyone thought it would be,” said John A. Fry, who became Drexel’s president last year and has since called off a plan to build a full undergraduate campus in California.

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DealBook: Ahead of I.P.O., S.E.C. Pressed Groupon On Accounting, Disclosures

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AppId is over the quota

Ahead of Groupon‘s highly anticipated initial public offering in November, the Securities and Exchange Commission repeatedly pressed the daily deals giant to defend its business model and its accounting measures, according to comment letters recently disclosed.

The letters, sent by the S.E.C. from June 29 to Oct. 3, provide an interesting window into the back-and-forth discussions between the Internet company and its regulators in the months leading up to its I.P.O. In the letters, the S.E.C. seemed somewhat skeptical of Groupon’s business model and called on the company to balance its bullish statements with additional disclosures. Regulators also asked Groupon to address comments made by executives during the so-called quiet period, which seemed to defy S.E.C. rules.

Shares of Groupon slipped nearly 2 percent on Wednesday to close at $22.62 per share.

In the first letter, dated June 29, the S.E.C. outlines 73 comments, spanning 14 pages. Among the comments, regulators called on Groupon to list specific risk factors for its international operations, provide additional data on consumer attrition and repeat merchants and temper certain statements about the company’s growth prospects. In one section, for instance, the regulators advise the company to reframe a comment made by its chief executive, Andrew Mason, who had said in a filing that “Groupon is better positioned than any company in history to reshape local commerce,” to include the company’s “net losses and competitive landscape.”

In response to another statement made by Mr. Mason, that “our customers and merchants are all we care about,” the regulator reminded Groupon of its responsibility to its investors:

“Please balance the statements regarding the premise that your customers and merchants are all you care about with a discussion of your fiduciary duty to shareholders.”

As evident in the letters, the S.E.C. spent a lot of time parsing the statements of Groupon’s executives on and off the prospectus. In its first comment letter, regulators called on the company to address a Bloomberg News interview, during which Groupon’s co-founder, Eric P. Lefkofsky, said the not-yet-profitable Groupon was going to be “wildly profitable.” Several months later, the S.E.C. also asked the company to provide the full text of an internal e-mail sent by Mr. Mason, which was somehow leaked to the media.

Notably, the S.E.C. was particularly clear about its reservations on Acsoi, or adjusted consolidated segment operating income, an uncommon financial yardstick Groupon introduced in its first filing. In the June 29 letter, the S.E.C. said Acsoi — which is essentially operating profit stripped of marketing and acquisition costs — was somewhat misleading to prospective investors:

It appears that online marketing expense is a normal, recurring operating cash expenditure of the company. Your removal of this item from your results of operations creates a non-GAAP measure that is potentially misleading to readers. Please revise your non-GAAP measure accordingly.

The exchange between the S.E.C and Groupon, reveal the company’s initial resistance. In a July 14 letter to the S.E.C., the company tried to defend its math, arguing that Acsoi does include some expenses related to marketing for existing subscribers. The S.E.C. was not swayed, and in a subsequent letter, simply asked for its removal. On Oct. 10, Groupon complied in a revised filing.

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Workstation: For Multitaskers, 2012 May Be a Year of Revenge

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AppId is over the quota

DEVICE BACKLASH As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.

More devices also harbor more vortexes of distraction, like Facebook, shopping sites and cute animal videos. Maintaining focus may well be one of the biggest daily challenges that workers will face this year, now that smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous.

More workers will probably revolt against the idea that they must be “on” all the time, recognizing that both their work and personal lives will improve if they create stricter boundaries. Sometimes this expectation is self-imposed; at other times, it’s part of the corporate culture. Look for more companies to address the issue directly. Last month, for example, Volkswagen agreed with labor representatives in Germany to limit work-related e-mails on BlackBerrys during off-hours.

THE TRAINING ADVANTAGE More technology necessitates more training. During the recession, too many workers learned new technology imperfectly, on the fly, or not at all. Fortunately, corporate spending on training rose in 2011 over the previous year, according to a report in Training magazine.

The pace at which new technology emerges and becomes paramount is quickening as never before. Last year, HTML 5 for the Web was the hottest skill that a job seeker could have; now it’s a knowledge of apps, said Alison Doyle, a job search specialist for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company.

Both the employed and the unemployed cannot be complacent about their skills, and must be assertive about keeping up with the latest computer languages and applications, she said.

THE RISE OF THE INDEPENDENT WORKER Both by necessity and choice, more workers are deciding to go it alone as consultants, contractors, freelancers and other independent operators. Look for that trend to intensify this year.

Thanks to technology, it’s easier than ever for “people to find projects and projects to find people,” and they aren’t restricted by geography, said Gene Zaino, president and chief executive of MBO Partners, which deals with issues surrounding independent consultants.

That’s great for people who seek flexibility and autonomy. But working alone can be lonely, and a lack of structure can slow productivity. That’s why the phenomenon of co-working — where independent workers in a range of fields gather in one room to conduct business and drink lots of coffee or tea — is likely to spread.

Of course, not everyone chooses to be independent. Many people have been forced into becoming contractors as more companies with limited budgets hire on a project basis, Mr. Zaino said. Often, these workers’ pay is lower than it would be if they were full-time employees, and benefits are nonexistent.

Now enter the federal government, which doesn’t like how these fuzzy arrangements affect tax collection. Expect a big government push to classify contract workers as employees, Mr. Zaino said.

THE UNEMPLOYMENT DIVIDE The overall unemployment rate is 8.6 percent, but break down the number by educational attainment and the picture looks different. Those with college degrees are the lucky ones: the jobless rate for them is 4.4 percent. That compares with 8.8 percent for those with only a high school diploma and 13.2 percent for those with no diploma at all.

Consider, too, that less than 30 percent of the United States population age 25 or older has a bachelor’s degree or higher. Large groups of Americans will continue to be unemployed or underemployed unless more training and educational opportunities become available.

Another disadvantaged group is the long-term unemployed, who are having trouble rejoining the work force as employers show a preference for hiring people who currently hold jobs or have been laid off only recently.

More than 30 percent of jobless Americans have been unemployed for a year or more, according to federal data. Congress will continue to wrestle with their plight, and their benefits, this year. Without help, this group risks falling so far behind that it can’t catch up.

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App Smart: The Top 10 Apps for Android Phones in 2011

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AppId is over the quota

But this year, with devices using the Android operating system reaching a dominant position in the world’s smartphone market, deeper-pocketed developers turned their full attention to them. The result was a slate of new apps that can more seriously challenge Apple’s best.

Note that this list does not include seasonal standouts like MLB.com’s At Bat 11; nor does it include games, which I’ll cover in a post on the Gadgetwise blog.

GOOGLE MUSIC (free) Google’s music service lets a user upload 20,000 songs from a PC or Mac to the cloud; the Android app instantly syncs those tunes and playlists, so there’s no longer any worry about plugging a mobile device into the desktop computer to pick up the latest purchases for the next workout or commuting trip. Wireless syncing is also available through Apple or Amazon, but with less free storage. Google Music is nicely integrated with the Android Market, which in recent weeks has featured popular songs free, as well as millions of other titles for 49 cents each.

WEBROOT SECURITY AND ANTIVIRUS (free) One unsettling thing about Android phones is that their apps often reach the market without any testing for malicious software. That is not the case for Apple apps, or Android apps offered by Amazon. Attacks have been infrequent, but with Android’s huge rise in popularity, security analysts say consumers should take precautions. Webroot is a good place to start. The app’s free version automatically scans a phone for viruses and blocks malicious Web sites and SMS messages. It includes a device locator feature, which is activated from the company’s Web site.

SWIFTKEY X ($3) If your thumbs don’t fly on a touch-screen keypad, and newfangled typing options like Swype do not work for you, SwiftKey X is a great option. The app offers corrections and predictions as you type, and it can scan your Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and SMS accounts to refine its predictions. In some cases, if not many, it will even stay one step ahead by suggesting the correct next word.

ANY.DO (free) There is no Web component to this reminder service yet, but Any.Do is still a tremendously useful and smart way to manage one’s to-do list. Those needing Web synchronization might try Wunderlist, which is also free. Any.Do includes an auto-fill feature to save keystrokes, and tasks can be rescheduled by dragging entries from one day to the next. Reminders come reliably on schedule, and when a task is complete, the entry can be crossed out with a swipe of the finger. Everything about Any.Do feels elegant and efficient, as a personal assistant should be.

8TRACKS (free) This is my new favorite app for listening to other people’s music. Spotify is great online, but it is greatly limited on a mobile phone unless you pay $10 a month. With 8tracks, strangers are your D.J.’s. Type the name of an artist or genre, and it delivers related playlists from other listeners. You can fast-forward only through two songs per hour, but it is nice to hear playlists built by real people, not algorithms, and to keep those people on a list of favorites. It is like having a virtual army of college D.J.’s arrayed before you, ready to indulge your musical tastes.

PAPER CAMERA ($2) Too often, camera filter apps are not nearly as fun as they initially appear, since loading the special effects takes time, and the results frequently fail to impress. Paper Camera suffers from neither shortcoming. When you point the camera, it applies the chosen filter to the viewfinder, so you know exactly what shot you will get. Don’t like what you see? Just press a button and the screen quickly displays the next effect; there are 12 in all. Paper Camera includes multiple sharing options as well, but does not yet provide for a front-facing camera.

TEXTONLY — BROWSER (free) People who are watching their data limits can cut corners with TextOnly — Browser, which works as advertised for most of the well-known news sites. It is far from flawless, since users must type in the precise Web address rather than searching with keywords, and some important sites seem immune to the technology. The Huffington Post and ESPN.com, for instance, repeatedly failed to load pages last week. Still, it works smoothly on most sites. Think of it as the anti-Flipboard, where aesthetics count for nothing. But when you tally your cellphone bill at month’s end, it may count for a lot.

BEWEATHER (free). A lovely, nimble little weather assistant, BeWeather delivers quick, essential information with a flick of the thumb. The data is wrapped in an animated skin that adds elegance, or drama, to the experience.

One of its better competitors, MyWeather (also free), has more raw information and more precise forecasts, but it is slower and less refined- looking than BeWeather. BeWeather’s forecast data is from Weather Underground, a service that has built a loyal following and a good reputation for reliability.

GOOGLE CURRENTS (free) Google isn’t about to let Flipboard run away with the mobile market for newsreaders. The company this year released Google Currents, an attractive and efficient way to view all news sources in a single magazine format. Google Currents makes it easy to customize your news feed, although it may sometimes cause frustration by offering articles and sources that sit behind pay walls. A bigger flaw is that the app does not yet include Twitter or Facebook feeds, but it still scores big points by identifying “trending” articles in various genres, which is great if you care deeply about particular topics.

SPEAKTOIT ASSISTANT (free) The closest thing on Android to Siri, the personal assistant for iPhone 4S owners, Speaktoit isn’t quite as sharp as Siri, but is useful in many situations. You cannot get an answer for a query like “I feel like sushi,” as you would with Siri, but if you ask Speaktoit to find a nearby sushi restaurant, it obliges. As with Siri, if the app cannot find an answer, it opens a Google search with a few key words from your request, which is often faster than typing. Speaktoit’s humanesque voice is also roughly similar to thatof its Apple counterpart, and you can choose different voices if a perky woman isn’t exactly your type.

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Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed

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AppId is over the quota

Long depicted as slovenly cranks who dodged growling dogs and tracked mud on the living room carpet, cable guys (and gals) these days often have backgrounds in engineering and computer science. That kind of training is now required — along with a new dress code for some, calling for button-down dress shirts and slacks — as cable companies and their telephone rivals try to lure customers and increase revenue with a suite of products like cloud-based cable boxes and iPad apps that let subscribers set recording times remotely.

All that means added pressure for installers and new requirements for a job that traditionally appealed to high-school graduates looking for reliable blue-collar work.

“Back in my day, you called the phone company, we hooked it up, gave you a phone book and left,” said Paul Holloway, an area manager based in Denton, Tex., and a 30-year employee of Verizon, which offers phone, Internet, television and home monitoring services through its FiOS fiber optic network. “These days people are connecting iPhones, Xboxes and 17 other devices in the home.”

Robert Kolb, a 33-year-old installation and service supervisor for Comcast’s Xfinity television, phone and Internet service, has a one-year certification in network engineering. He wore pressed slacks and a sporty fleece jacket on an Internet upgrade job in the Philadelphia suburbs recently, where he worked on a company-issued MacBook laptop and had a waterproof hand-held computer that could withstand a five-foot drop.

He was checking the family’s existing Internet service, which had been spotty, strained by the home’s six computers and multiple iPhones.

“My genius husband had the router in the basement,” joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters. Mr. Kolb helped Mrs. Hassinger set up her digital cable box while his colleague, Byron Smith, installed a “wireless gateway,” transforming an unused stairwell into a control room for the modem and router that can handle at least 24 devices at 22 megabits per second.

Mr. Kolb sighed slightly as the job was almost complete. “What I learned yesterday could be outdated tomgorrow,” he said.

To make sure he stays up to date, Comcast requires him and other installers to take classes at an in-house training facility known as Comcast University.

The surge in high-tech offerings comes at a critical time for cable companies competing in an increasingly Internet-based marketplace. Today, more than 90 percent of the 115.9 million homes with televisions in the United States subscribe to basic cable, either from a cable operator or a satellite or phone company, according to Nielsen.

The nearly saturated marketplace means growth for cable companies must come from all the extras like high-speed Internet service, home security, digital recording devices and other high-tech upgrades. In 2011 Comcast introduced 16 products, more than the previous two years combined. Time Warner Cable, which used to offer one or two models of cable boxes, now has 20 models.

“We think the consumer wants a state-of-the-art experience,” Brian L. Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and chief executive said, as he showed off the company’s forthcoming partly cloud-based cable box with the internal code name of Xcalibur. Remote control in hand he added: “We have to factor in Androids, iPhones, tablets and any other device in your life.”

All this trickles down to the cable technician. “Even though we get training, we have to learn as we go,” said Wing Lee, a 32-year-old foreman at Time Warner Cable. He has a degree from New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and has reached the company’s highest ranking for technology certification.

The adjustment to new technology doesn’t come as naturally for other longtime employees. “A lot of the old-timers have a hard time keeping up,” Mr. Lee said as he drove to a job at a housing project in Brooklyn.

For years, as he plugged in the family lifeline known as the cable box, the installer held a farcical place in popular culture. In the 1996 comedy “The Cable Guy,” Jim Carrey poked fun at the job as a manipulative installer. The cable guy on “The Simpsons” gives Homer illegal service, then breaks into the family home to sell them home security.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An article on Friday about the enhanced stature of cable installers misstated the speed of the Internet service that was set up in the home of a Comcast customer. It is 22 megabits per second, not megabytes.

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Disruptions: Resolved in 2012: To Enjoy the View Without Help From an iPhone

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Nick Bilton/The New York Times

Last week, I drove to Pacifica, a beach community just south of San Francisco, where I climbed a large rocky hill as the sun descended on the horizon. It painted a typically astounding California sunset across the Pacific Ocean. What did I do next?

What any normal person would do in 2011: I pulled out my iPhone and began snapping pictures to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent 10 minutes trying to compose the perfect shot, moving my phone from side to side, adjusting light settings and picking the perfect filter.

Then, I stopped. Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen.

“What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.”

Hence my New Year’s resolution: In 2012, I plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone. Without Internet, Twitter, Facebook and my iPad. Spending a half-hour a day without electronics might sound easy for most, but for me, 30 unconnected minutes produces the same anxious feelings of a child left accidentally at the mall.

I made this resolution out of a sense that I habitually reached for the iPhone even when I really didn’t need to, when I might have just enjoyed an experience, like the sunset, without any technology. And after talking to people who do research on subjects like this, I realized that there were some good reasons to give up a little tech.

For example, I was worried that if I did not capture that beautiful sunset and stuff it into my phone, I’d forget it.

“Even with something as beautiful as a sunset, forgetting is really important as a mental hygiene,” said Viktor Mayer-Sch?nberger, a professor of Internet governance at Oxford University and the author of the book “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”

“That things in our past become rosier over time is incredibly important,” he added. “As we forget, our memories abstract and our brain goes through a cleansing process.” Mr. Mayer-Sch?nberger said that keeping a perpetual visual diary of everything could slow down our brains’ purging process.

Constantly interacting with our mobile devices has other drawbacks too. There are more pictures in my iPhone of that 45-minute hike at Pacifica than most families would have taken on a two-week vacation before the advent of digital cameras.

As a result, I had no time to daydream on that hike, and daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems.

Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and the author of the soon-to-be-released book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” said in a phone interview that our brains often needed to become inattentive to figure out complex issues. He said his book discussed an area of the brain scientists call “the default network” that was active only when the rest of the brain was inactive — in other words, when we were daydreaming.

Letting the mind wander activates the default network, he said, and allows our brains to solve problems that most likely can’t be solved during a game of Angry Birds.

“Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara who has focused his research on daydreaming, put it this way: “Daydreaming and boredom seem to be a source for incubation and creative discovery in the brain and are part of the creative incubation process.”

I don’t intend to give up my technology entirely, but I want to find a better balance. For me, it’s that 30 minutes a day for daydreaming.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and tell my Twitter followers about my New Year’s resolution.

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The Lives They Lived: Dennis Ritchie, b. 1941

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Novelties: Wordnik’s Online Dictionary: No Arbiters, Please

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Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.

No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company.

Then, when you search for a word, Wordnik shows the information it has found, with no editorial tinkering. Instead, readers get the full linguistic Monty.

“We don’t pre-select and pre-prune,” she said. “We show you what’s out there now. Then we let people decide whether to use a word or not.”

At one time, she was the head of the pruners, as principal editor of the New Oxford American Dictionary. She is also an author and columnist. (She wrote “On Language” columns for The New York Times as a substitute for William Safire.)

But Ms. McKean has chosen a different path at Wordnik. “Language changes every day, and the lexicographer should get out of the way,” she said. “You can type in anything, and we’ll show you what data we have.”

When readers ask about a word, Wordnik provides definitions on the left-hand side of the screen. But it is the example sentences, featured on the right-hand side, that are crucial to a reader’s understanding of a new term, she said.

“Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete,” she said. “Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”

To do this, the site processes a vast reservoir of language, keeping tabs on more than six million words automatically, said Tony Tam, Wordnik’s vice president for engineering. “But the numbers change every second,” he said. “It’s not a static list.”

Where does all this text come from? “You’d be amazed how fast people write articles on the Web,” he said.

Wordnik does indeed fill a gap in the world of dictionaries, said William Kretzschmar, a professor at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Dialect Society. He provides American pronunciations for the new online Oxford English Dictionary.

“It takes time for words to get into the more formal, published dictionaries,” he said. “Wordnik is sensitive to what people are interested in now.”

Wordnik, which has raised $12.8 million in venture financing, plans to use its vast database of words and word associations at the site and in many business partnerships to be announced this year, said Joe Hyrkin, the president and C.E.O.

The products will be similar to recommendation engines, but more powerful, he said. If you like a particular book, for example, Wordnik can recommend a similar one based on its understanding of words used to describe the book, he said.

“We’re not just using tags and descriptors,” he said. “Our system understands and identifies matches at a concept level.”

The company is already providing many other word-based services, including one used on the Web site of The Times to define words in articles. Wordnik is also providing a financial glossary for SmartMoney.com.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a?linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who talks about language on “Fresh Air,” the NPR program, appreciates Wordnik’s breadth. “There’s a lot of useful information here,” he said. (He has also written commentaries on language for The Times.)

But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries.

“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy,” he said. “Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”

To illustrate his point, he noted flaws in a number of Wordnik’s definitions. The first definition of “davenport,” for instance, in three of the?fives?sources used by Wordnik is?a kind of small writing desk. “It hasn’t meant that since Grandma was a girl,” he said.

People use a dictionary to find out what is correct, and what is incorrect, he said. “If I were a journalist looking to see if a word was being used correctly,” he said, “I wouldn’t put my eggs in the Wordnik basket.”

Mr. Tam of Wordnik said the site was constantly improving.

“We discover these words with algorithms, but they are never perfect,” he said. “We constantly have to make them better.”

WORDNIK and other new linguistic databases have come about largely because of the vast body of text on the Internet and improved algorithms for searching it, said Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We now have an archived shadow universe that contains almost everything we’ve written — trillions of pages of text of published books, and now, broadcast archives as well,” he said.

Readers could always tap this reservoir by looking up examples of new words in Google Books or Google News. “But what Wordnik is giving you is not as raw as a Google search of examples,” he said, “because Wordnik sorts and clusters the examples into different senses of the word.”

Another innovative database is at Brigham Young University, where Mark Davies, a professor of linguistics, has amassed a collection, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 1990-2011, containing millions of words of running text from articles, transcripts of conversations, and other sources. The collection, which indexes 425 million words of text — 1,000 may be from a newspaper article, for example — has been built over the last three years. It shows how often a word is used, and the types of discourse in which it is found, be it conversational speech or academic prose.

The collection also lets users see words found near a new word. “If you want to see how a word is used and what it means, the best way is to look at words nearby,” Dr. Davies said. The words are called collocates. To look up collocates of “fantasy,” for example, see http://bit.ly/rImCuH.

Dictionary builders have come a long way since the days of Johnson and Webster, said Dr. Kretzschmar at the University of Georgia. “But we have computers,” he said. “We can manage this vast network of words online and appreciate it in ways that Johnson and Webster never could.”

E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 31, 2011

An earlier version of this article misspelled the given name of Wordnik’s chief executive. He is Joe Hyrkin, not Joel.

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Bits Blog: Questions About Motives Behind Stratfor Hack

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When hackers used the Christmas holiday to attack Stratfor, a security group based in Austin, Tex., they initially said they were aiming to steal the credit card numbers of its clients and use them to make $1 million in donations to charity.

But by Tuesday, it was unclear who was actually behind the attack, and whether the real goal was to play Robin Hood or release a trove of Stratfor e-mail correspondence.

On Saturday, hackers claiming to be members of the collective known as Anonymous defaced the Web site of Stratfor, which puts out a newsletter on security and intelligence issues, and posted a file online that they claimed was the organization’s confidential client list, along with credit card details, passwords and home addresses for those clients. The clients were affiliated with organizations including Bank of America, the Defense Department, Doctors Without Borders, Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Nations.

The hackers claimed to have obtained 2.7 million e-mails from Stratfor’s servers, a number they later increased to 3.3 million. They said they were able to obtain the e-mail and credit card details because Stratfor had failed to encrypt its data — a basic first step in data protection.

IdentityFinder, a data protection software maker, found that hackers had released 47,680 unique e-mail addresses and 50,277 unique credit card numbers — of which 9,651 were not yet expired. Of the 44,188 encrypted passwords, IdentityFinder said 50 percent could be easily cracked.

Stratfor has not clarified whether its data was encrypted, and did not respond to repeated requests for comment. But on Sunday, with its Web site still down, it took to Facebook to respond to the attack. There it said that the published list of “private clients” was “merely a list of some of the members that have purchased our publications and does not comprise a list of individuals or entities that have a relationship with Stratfor beyond their purchase of our subscription based publications.”

By then, hackers had already begun posting receipts online that it said were for donations made with Stratfor subscribers’ stolen credit card details to organizations like the Red Cross and CARE.

In an interview on Monday, a Red Cross spokeswoman, Laura Howe, said that because her organization sees an uptick in giving around the holidays, it was difficult to ascertain how much of its weekend donations online were related to the Stratfor breach.

“We’re aware of the issue and our online giving team is looking into it,” Ms. Howe said. “If someone believes an unauthorized charge has been made, they need to contact their credit card company and we will work with the credit card companies on refunding the donation.”

Contacted Monday, Brian Feagans, a CARE spokesman, said he had not heard about the Stratfor breach. But on Tuesday he issued this statement: “We are looking into this matter and will work with any Stratfor hacking victims who did not intend to give to CARE to assure they get reimbursed.”

Computer security experts began weighing in on Stratfor’s breach Monday. Mikko Hypponen, an influential security expert, pointed out in a blog post that the hack was likely to do charities more harm than good. “When credit card owners see unauthorized charges on their cards, they report them to their bank or credit card company. Credit card companies will do a charge back to the charities, which will have to return the money,” Mr. Hypponen wrote. “In some cases, charities could be hit with penalties. At the very least, they will lose time and money in handling the charge backs.”

In a statement posted online on Monday, Barrett Brown, an Anonymous spokesman, said that the goal of the Stratfor attack was not to donate money to charities.

“Rather, the operation was pursued in order to obtain the 2.7 million e-mails that exist on the firm’s servers,” Mr. Brown wrote in a post on the Web site Pastebin. “This wealth of data includes correspondence with untold thousands of contacts who have spoken to Stratfor’s employees off the record over more than a decade.”

But by Tuesday, hackers had released only limited e-mail correspondence. They posted one e-mail from Stratfor’s chief executive, George Friedman, to a Stratfor senior programmer, thanking him for his help in promoting Mr. Friedman’s recent book.

There were also questions as to whether the Stratfor attack was really the work of Anonymous. On Sunday, someone claiming to represent Anonymous posted a message on Pastebin denying responsibility for the attack: “The Stratfor hack is definitely not the work of Anonymous.”

The confusion escalated Monday night when a separate note on Pastebin claimed that the authors of the first post were Stratfor employees and that the post “claiming the Stratfor hack is not the work of Anonymous is not the work of Anonymous.”

“With these sorts of operations, there will always be objections from one quarter or another that it’s not really an Anonymous op,” Mr. Brown said in an e-mail on Monday. He said that the denial message had been posted by someone “who has a history of putting up such things under false pretenses.”

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Op-Ed Columnist: A Time to Tune Out

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The agreement for now only affects about 1,150 of Volkswagen’s more than 190,000 workers in Germany, but it’s a start in encouraging employees to switch off, curb the twitchy reflex to check e-mail every couple of minutes, and take a look out at things — like family and the big wide world — without the distraction of a blinking red light.

Now I know we’re all supposed to be grown-ups and switching off should be a simple enough decision, but the fact is addictions to BlackBerries and other hand-held devices are powerful and nobody expects addicts to self-administer the right medicine without some help. The Volkswagen decision reflects growing evidence of stress-related burnout tied to employees’ inability to separate their working and private lives now that developed societies live in a 24/7 paroxysm of connection.

Employee burnout has become an issue in socially conscious Germany — the object of a Spiegel cover story following the resignation in September of a prominent Bundesliga soccer coach, Ralf Rangnick of Schalke, who complained of exhaustion. A Volkswagen spokesman in Wolfsburg told Bloomberg News the company had to balance the benefits of round-the-clock access to staff with protecting their private lives.

Inside those German private lives, I’d wager, couples are experiencing the now near-universal irritation of finding conversations interrupted by a familiar glance toward the little screen, or conversations deadened by the state of near-permanent distraction from their immediate surroundings in which people live. Device-related marital rows must now be running close to back-seat driving and how to raise the kids as the leading cause of domestic discord.

Connectivity aids productivity. It can also be counterproductive by generating that contemporary state of anxiety in which focus on any activity is interrupted by the irresistible urge to check e-mail or texts; whose absence can in turn provoke the compounded anxiety of feeling unloved or unwanted just because the in-box is empty for a nanosecond; whose onset can in turn induce the super-aggravated anxiety that is linked to low self-esteem and poor performance.

Inhabiting one place — that is to be fully absorbed by and focused on one’s surroundings rather than living in some diffuse cyberlocation composed of the different strands of a device-driven existence — is a fast-dwindling ability. This in turn generates a paradox: People have never traveled as much but at the same time been less able to appreciate the difference between here and there.

To be permanently switched on is also to switch off to what takes time to be seen. A lot of good ideas, as well as some of life’s deeper satisfactions, can get lost that way.

Companies are beginning to perceive these costs. Volkswagen is not alone in its move, which does not affect senior management or employees’ ability to make calls. Thierry Breton, the chief executive of Atos, the French information technology services giant, has said workers are wasting hours of their lives on internal messages at home and work. He plans to ban internal e-mail altogether from 2014. A survey found Atos’s 80,000 employees were receiving an average of 100 internal e-mails a day of which only 15 percent were of any use.

Henkel, the manufacturer of Persil detergent, declared an e-mail “amnesty” between Christmas and New Year, saying mail should only be sent in an emergency.

One interesting recent case of employee burnout came at the very top, with the stress-induced absence for a couple of months of António Horta-Osório, the chief executive of Lloyds Bank. The Portuguese banker, who will return to work Jan. 9, came after he was afflicted with what Sir Win Bischoff, the Lloyds chairman, called an “inability to switch off.”

Inability to switch off (ITSO) is a modern curse.

Horta-Osório has said he made the decision after not sleeping for five days in late October and realizing that there was, according to his doctor, such a thing as “getting close to the end of your battery.” He has now been pronounced fit by the Lloyds board but has said he will change his work habits, presumably in ways that will lower ITSO risks.

I’ve just returned to work after a few days with my 90-year-old father in Scotland. He lives without any access to e-mail or hand-held devices. It was interesting observing the effects of this vacuum on my teenage children, suddenly unable to center their lives around their laptops (and the screen-lowering gesture that seems to accompany the entry of an adult). They started to read voraciously. They were communicative. They got up earlier. To be fair, they also had a Dad with them who was not device distracted.

It’s the start of a new year, a time for resolutions. To each his own, but I know this: Nobody will ever lie on his or her deathbed and say: “I should have kept my device on longer.”

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.

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Online Retailers Home In on a New Demographic: The Drunken Consumer

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“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany Whitten, of Dayton, Ohio, whose most recent tipsy purchase made on her smartphone — a phone cover — arrived from Amazon much to her surprise. “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”

Shopping under the influence has long benefited high-end specialty retailers — witness the wine-and-cheese parties that are a staple of galleries and boutiques. Now the popularity of Internet sales has opened alcohol-induced purchases to the masses, including people like Ms. Whitten, who works in shipping and receiving and spent just $5 on the cat-shaped phone cover.

Chris Tansey, an accountant in Australia, went shopping online after drinking late one night (to be precise, it was well into the morning). By the end of the session, he had bought a $10,000 motorcycle tour of New Zealand.

“The hang-ups of spending your hard-earned cash are so far removed from your life when you’ve had a bottle of wine,” Mr. Tansey said in an e-mail. The New Zealand trip was terrific, he said. But a pair of $3 sunglasses on eBay “turned out to be horrible fakes, with $17 of postage that I obviously didn’t see with beer goggles.”

Online retailers, of course, can never be sure whether customers are inebriated when they tap the “checkout” icon. One comparison-shopping site, Kelkoo, said almost half the people it surveyed in Britain, where it is based, had shopped online after drinking.

But while reliable data is hard to come by, retailers say they have their suspicions based on anecdotal evidence and traffic patterns on their Web sites — and some are adjusting their promotions accordingly.

“Post-bar, inhibitions can be impacted, and that can cause shopping, and hopefully healthy impulse buying,” said Andy Page, the president of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer that is adding more sales starting at 9 p.m. to respond to high traffic then — perhaps some of it by shoppers under the influence.

On eBay, the busiest time of day is from 6:30 to 10:30 in each time zone. Asked if drinking might be a factor, Steve Yankovich, vice president for mobile for eBay, said, “Absolutely.” He added: “I mean, if you think about what most people do when they get home from work in the evening, it’s decompression time. The consumer’s in a good mood.”

Nighttime shopping is growing over all. ChannelAdvisor, which runs e-commerce for hundreds of sites, says its order volumes peak about 8 p.m., and that shoppers are placing orders later and later: in 2011, the number of orders placed from 9 to midnight increased compared with previous years.

A recent array of nighttime offers sent to a shopper’s e-mail inbox included: from 6 to 9 p.m., a limited-quantity sale on fashions at Neiman Marcus; at 7:38 p.m., a promotion for three-day stays at Loews hotels; at 8:44 p.m., a promotion by Gilt for macaroons and faux-fur blankets; and at 2:23 a.m., an offer by Saks for a $2,000 gift card with purchase.

At QVC, the television shopping channel, traffic and viewers rise around noon, then quiet down until after 7 p.m. Then items like cosmetics and accessories sell briskly. “Call them girl treats — they seem to attract a really strong following once you get past dinnertime,” said Doug Rose, senior vice president for multichannel programming and marketing for the company. “You can probably come to your own conclusion as to what’s motivating her.”

Still, the nighttime spike requires delicacy among retailers: for reasons of propriety, they do not want to be seen as encouraging drunken shopping, and many people who inadvertently buy products in that state would most likely return them at high rates. On the other hand, a happy customer can lead to higher sales.

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Art and Design: Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation

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Theft or fair use? A collection of pieces by artists who appropriate images created by others. A key to the works above is available here.

ONE recent afternoon in the offices of the Midtown law firm run by David Boies and his powerful litigation partners, a large black clamshell box sat on a conference table. Inside were raucous, sometimes wildly funny collages of photographs and magazine pages handmade by the artist Richard Prince, works of art that have become the ur-texts of one of the most closely watched copyright cases ever to rattle the world of fine art.

Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

Richard Prince's "Inquisition," which uses the Rastafarian pictures taken by the French photographer Patrick Cariou.

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. (“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.)

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used — or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the most famous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a possibility of fair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.

In the Prince case the notoriously slippery standard for transformation was defined so narrowly that artists and museums warned it would leave the fair-use door barely open, threatening the robust tradition of appropriation that goes back at least to Picasso and underpins much of the art of the last half-century. Several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, rallied to the cause, filing papers supporting Mr. Prince and calling the decision a blow to “the strong public interest in the free flow of creative expression.” Scholars and lawyers on the other side of the debate hailed it instead as a welcome corrective in an art world too long in thrall to the Pictures Generation — artists like Mr. Prince who used appropriation beginning in the 1970s to burrow beneath the surface of media culture.

But if the case has had any effect so far, it has been to drag into the public arena a fundamental truth hovering somewhere just outside the legal debate: that today’s flow of creative expression, riding a tide of billions of instantly accessible digital images and clips, is rapidly becoming so free and recycling so reflexive that it is hard to imagine it being slowed, much less stanched, whatever happens in court. It is a phenomenon that makes Mr. Prince’s artful thefts — those collages in the law firm’s office — look almost Victorian by comparison, and makes the copyright battle and its attendant fears feel as if they are playing out in another era as well, perhaps not Victorian but certainly pre-Internet.

In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved. But art lawyers say that legal challenges are now coming at a faster pace, perhaps in part because the art market has become a much bigger business and because of the extent of the borrowing ethos.

Dip almost anywhere into contemporary art over the last couple of years to see the extent. The group show “Free” at the New Museum in 2010 was built partly around the very idea of the borrowing culture, the way the Web is radically reordering the concept of appropriation, with works that “lift, borrow and reframe digital images — not in a rebellious act of stealing or a deconstructive act of critique — but as a way to participate thoughtfully and actively in a culture that is highly circulated, hybridized, internationalized,” as its curator, Lauren Cornell, wrote.

Christian Marclay’s wildly popular video “The Clock” from 2010 was 24 hours of appropriation, made from thousands of stitched-together fragments from films and television shows. Rob Pruitt’s show “Pattern and Degradation” at the Gavin Brown and Maccarone galleries in 2010 lifted designs from Lilly Pulitzer, from Web photo memes and from a couple of T-shirt designers, whose angry supporters staged a flash-mob demonstration to protest the use of the design without attribution.

Mr. Marclay and Mr. Pruitt were both born before the 1980s. But to look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 1, 2012

A cover article this weekend about the legality of visual artists’ appropriating the images of others misstates the action the Supreme Court took in a 1994 case regarding the group 2 Live Crew’s sampling of a Roy Orbison song. The court referred the case back to a lower court and, in the process, clarified the legal standard to be applied; the court did not find fair use in the case.

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Advertising: E*Trade’s Baby Creates the Most Online Buzz

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For the fourth consecutive year, Zeta Interactive, an interactive marketing agency, has released a report of which ad campaigns generated the most buzz online. Zeta uses a technology that monitors what consumers are saying about online ads that they see on blogs and on video sharing and social media sites.

Zeta Interactive gives ads scores reflecting the volume, or the total number of posts each ad had per day, and tone, or the number of positive or negative posts about the ad. The company analyzed more than 200 million online posts.

This year, of the top 10 ads, eight made their debuts during the Super Bowl. In 2010, only four on the list made their debuts during the Super Bowl.

At the top of the list was an ad for E*Trade Financial called “Enzo the Tailor,” which featured a baby being fitted for a custom-made suit and talking about how his tailor could retire in Tuscany. The spot was made by Grey New York, part of the Grey Group unit of WPP.

Both E*Trade and Snickers, whose “Logging” spot featuring Roseanne Barr and Richard Lewis was the seventh ad on the list, showed how some brands were able to have success in campaigns with recurring themes, said Mary Beth Keelty, vice president for marketing at Zeta. “They found something that worked and they are refreshing it,” she said.

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The Snickers spot was created by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group. Snickers was the only brand to have a repeat appearance on the list this year.

Automobile ads were popular with digital consumers as well, with Volkswagen’s ad featuring a young boy dressed as Darth Vader, and Chrysler’s ad featuring the rap artist Eminem and the city of Detroit, taking the second and third spots, respectively. The Volkswagen ad was created by Deutsch LA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, and the Chrysler ad was created by Wieden & Kennedy.

“Cars really were a big part of the top 10 here,” said Minna Rhee, Zeta’s chief executive. The auto ads were a “reflection of coming out of the recession and the car industry taking a bigger role in 2011,” she said.

Other car ads in the top 10 included Mercedes-Benz’s ad featuring the artist Diddy, in the ninth spot on the list, and an ad for Nissan’s Leaf in the eighth spot. The Nissan ad, called “Gas Powered Everything,” shows people using everyday items like alarm clocks and hair dryers that are powered by gas engines. It featured a new trend on the list — the eco-conscious ad. The spot was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.

An animated ad for Chipotle Mexican Grill, called “Back to the Start,” was the fourth most popular ad on the list. The ad, which was also shown in movie theaters, tells the story of the industrialization of farming. The film, which was more than two minutes long, was directed by Johnny Kelly and featured a Willie Nelson version of the Coldplay song “The Scientist.”

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The ad demonstrated that it is possible for brands “to break that top 10 with something that wasn’t necessarily with TV at the center of what the campaign was about,” Ms. Rhee said. The Chipotle ad also tied with an ad for the PepsiCo beverage H2oh! for the most positive tonal ranking. The H2oh ad, which was created by BBDO Argentina, was the first and only ad in Spanish to make the list.

Bud Light and CarMax rounded out the list in fifth and sixth place, respectively. Bud Light’s commercial, “Product Placement,” featured swashbucklers on a movie set, while CarMax’s spot, “Kid in a Candy Store,” promoted its selection of auto and money-back guarantee.

The Bud Light commercial was created by DDB Chicago, part of DDB Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group. The CarMax ad was created by Amalgamated New York.

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Bits: Google+ Gains Traction, Researcher Says

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Julian Staratenschulte/European Pressphoto Agency

Google’s mission to compete with Facebook in social networking may be gaining speed.

On Tuesday Paul Allen, a researcher, published an analysis saying that Google+, the company’s social networking service, has reached 62 million registered users. More important, one-quarter of all users signed up in December alone, he said, putting it on a path to sustained global growth.

Mr. Allen has an admitted self-interest in seeing Google+ succeed; he makes applications designed to be used on social networks. And his methodology in coming up with the number of users is innovative, and not exactly ironclad. He gathered from the United States Census Bureau a list of 400 surnames that are uncommon in the United States, like Distler, Wooding and Loup. Using Elance, a Web site where freelancers bid for jobs, he got a count of the number of people with those names on Google+, and extrapolated from his list what those numbers say about the overall population of Google+.

Over time, Mr. Allen has changed the mix of names to try to reflect the number of people on Google+ outside the United States, where some of those names might be more common.

Mr. Allen also tracks his estimates against information Google provides about the population of Google+ during its quarterly earnings calls. In July, Google said Google+ had 10 million members. In October, the number was 40 million. Google does not supply additional information about the population of Google+.

In Mr. Allen’s analysis, the high percentage of new users matters, because it would mean Google is getting people to join at an accelerating rate. “It’s gaining 625,000 people a day,” Mr. Allen said in an interview. “In the last week of November it was signing up 199,000 a day.” By the end of this month, Mr. Allen thinks Google+ will have 65 million users. When Google next announces its earnings in mid-January, he said, “I expect Larry Page will announce they have 75 million people.”

Maybe so, but a more important issue is whether an acceleration in sign-ups will continue. There is some reason to believe it will, because social networks tend to become more useful to people as more people they know join them, and keep them entertained with status updates and links to other things on the Web. Also, new versions of Android, Google’s mobile operating system, will have automatic signups for Google+. That will drive traffic, possibly along with some usage-killing resentment from being dragooned into yet another social network.

“Projecting my numbers linearly, they’ll have 293 million people by the end of 2012,” Mr. Allen said. But, he added that he thinks things will really speed up, to 400 million users. “I’m very bullish,” he said.

While that number is still less than the minimum of 800 million people that Facebook claims (and its total is probably much higher than that, because Facebook would like to file for its initial public offering with some kind of eye-popping number), it would make Google+ the second-largest social network within 18 months of introduction.

Mr. Allen’s analysis doesn’t look at the important statistic of total time spent on Google+ per user, and whether that is increasing. That number tends to show loyalty, and provides advertisers with more clues about what to pitch users while they are on the site. Facebook’s new Timeline feature, which allows people to insert older photos and mementos to create a narrative of their lives, will probably increase time spent on Facebook, as well as decrease the chances that people will leave that site. Timeline will also, Mr. Allen noted, enable more app discovery, as people see what games, sites, and social tools their friends are using.

Mr. Allen’s guess about the population in Google+ is not the highest one around. Last week the Global Web Index analysis firm claimed that Google+ had 150 million members. But it didn’t say how it reached that figure.

View the original article here

Verizon Wireless Abandons $2 Fee After Consumer Outcry

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

The consumer vitriol, which cascaded across Twitter and onto blogs and petitions all around the Web, struck a chord with a company that was clearly not expecting it.

“The company made the decision in response to customer feedback about the plan, which was designed to improve the efficiency of those transactions,” Verizon Wireless said in a statement referring to the reversal.

That a company with revenue of $15 billion in the most recent quarter would have to quickly change course over such a small fee suggests something particular about its business and others like it.

Similar to fee-bedeviled airline passengers with little choice on many nonstop flights, or bank customers who do not want to spend hours untangling automated payments so they can switch institutions, Verizon Wireless customers have limited options because they are locked into multiyear contracts. And they apparently did not like being told that it would cost money to pay money to the company.

The consumer outcry may also reflect the national mood — and some companies’ misreading of it, according to some analysts.

“I just think people are sick of being nickeled and dimed by big companies,” said Edgar Dworsky, founder of ConsumerWorld.org. “And it’s just baffling to me why a company like Verizon Wireless or Bank of America doesn’t do market testing on something like this first. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there is going to be a backlash.”

What was surprising about the Verizon Wireless rollback was how quickly it occurred. It took consumers about a month to persuade Bank of America to rescind its plan to charge a $5 monthly fee to people who used their debit card for purchases.

But with Verizon Wireless, the corporate change of heart took only a day, even though it is the week after Christmas when companies often drop bad news in the hope that fewer people are paying attention.

“The multiplication effect with things like Twitter is incredible,” said Ron Shevlin, senior analyst at the Aite Group in Boston. “And because of the national mood, it hits the boiling point really quickly.”

Verizon Wireless may also been have moved to change its mind when the Federal Communications Commission put out word earlier Friday that it thought the company’s actions merited closer scrutiny.

If the company had taken a different tack, it might have succeeded in convincing consumers that some kind of fee increase was necessary, Mr. Shevlin said.

“The easy thing would have been to be more explicit about what the costs were that were causing it to add this fee,” he said.

The company, for instance, might have explained how few people were going to pay the fee, which was supposed to be for one-time credit or debit card payments by phone or on the company’s Web site. It also could have explained how much higher the costs were, on a percentage basis, to accept payments in that way, versus regular, monthly credit card billing, which would have remained free.

Verizon Wireless declined a request for much of this information on Thursday and did not respond to follow-up requests on Friday.

Mr. Shevlin also said that Verizon Wireless, like Bank of America before it, said it was responding to customer feedback. But both companies seemed to have missed the opportunity to get accurate feedback before putting the fees in place.

“Why not post it on your Facebook page?” he said. “Maybe the feedback would have been just as bad, but then you’re seen as heroes for listening to feedback ahead of time. These firms are not reading the mood or living in the real world.”

Mr. Dworsky is on Verizon’s consumer advisory panel (and did not know about the fee ahead of time). But he said he chose to speak out about the move anyway, saying that he had a bigger concern about what the Wireless unit’s failed move portends.

“Who is going to try to tack on a fee next for using a credit card?” he said. “Is it the local grocery store? A department store? That is the bigger worry.”

Mr. Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general for consumer protection in Massachusetts, spent Friday morning reading credit card merchant agreements and various federal regulations in the hope that the proposed surcharge was actually against the rules.

“I’m glad this got killed in its infancy,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it. Hopefully, the collective consumer voice will be able to change the next company’s planned fee.”

View the original article here

Technology Headlines 2011

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

NOTE: This episode should be online Thursday afternoon.

This the last installment of the Tech Talk podcast.
Thanks for listening these past few years!

This week’s show features a recap of the year’s major technology headlines and a gear roundup that includes digital-audio amplifiers and a solar-powered keyboard.

Links

Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 for Mac
Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard K750
FiiO E10 USB DAC headphone amplifier
FiiO A1 digital amplifier
Times Topics: Steve Jobs
One on One: Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs
A sister’s eulogy for Steve Jobs
Social media gives protests a global reach
Arabic surges as a language for tweets [Wired]
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube’s role in Arab Spring [Social Capital blog]
F.A.A. approves iPads in cockpits, but not for passengers
Bits blog posts on the Kindle Fire
Media Decoder blog posts on tablet computers
Netflix 2011 coda: Blunders cost CEO $1.5M [IT World]
RIM’s year of misery
Biggest Loser: MG Global and Netflix [DealBook]
Adobe to kill mobile Flash, focus on HTML5
TIP OF THE WEEK: Flixster Movies for Google Chrome
Flixster mobile apps
Fandango mobile apps
Apple Movie Trailers app for iOS

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog

December 22, 2011

Nick Wingfield of The Times sorts out the recent patent ruling that favored Apple over phone-maker HTC, and Pedro Rafael Rosado offers gift ideas for audiophiles.

Segments (time on counter)
News (25:42)
Nick Wingfield (19:01)
Audio-gadget roundup (11:35)
Tip of the Week (4:27)

Links

HBO GO [TWCable Untangled blog]
Lightsaber rattling in an online galaxy
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Nuance buys Vlingo [Yahoo Finance]
Truckjackers steal 5,000 PlayBooks [TG Daily]
Skype offering free holiday Wi-Fi at select U.S. airports [Skype blog]
U.S. backs Apple in patent ruling that hits Google
Philips Fidelio docking speaker for Android
Sol Republic Tracks headphones
Sol Republic Tracks HD headphones
ThinkSound ms01 8mm studio monitor earbuds
SRS Labs iWow 3D
Cowon iAudio 10
TIP OF THE WEEK: Setting icon view options in Mac OS X [Dummies.com]
Shorten the Finder’s ‘‘Show Item Info’’ text [Macworld Mac OS X Hints]

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

December 15, 2011

Sarah Wheaton and Jonathan Ellis of The Times talk about the new Election 2012 smartphone app and Pedro Rafael Rosado takes a look at AirPlay-certified gear for streaming media.

Segments (time on counter)
News (29:39)
NYT Election 2012 app (16:01)
Media Streamers (8:27)
Tip of the Week (2:54)

Links

Elvis monkey and coloured gecko among 200 new species discovered in Vietnam [Telegraph]
New generation GPS satellite starts tests in Colorado [ABC News]
What the next-generation satellite upgrade means for you [PC World]
Pandora listenership continues to rise despite increased competition [TechCrunch]
APNewsBreak: Facebook aims to help prevent suicide
Giant space plane in the works [TechFlash]
Webroot Holiday Party Sobriety Test app
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 passes $1 Billion in sales
Election 2012 app
Denon AVR-1912
Nuvyyo JetStreamHD
TIP OF THE WEEK: Preview the Windows 7 desktop [Microsoft]

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

December 8, 2011

Daniel Mohan of ID Watchdog discusses identity-theft prevention and Will Lucas, creator of the app Thankyouagai.in describes how the program works to ‘‘collect the good.’’

Segments (time on counter)
News (29:39)
ID Watchdog (20:04)
Tech Term (12:52)
Thankyouaga.in app (9:46)
Tip of the Week (3:32)

Links

Facebook flaw lets you view someone’s private photos [CNet]
Online uproar as India seeks social media screening
Steve Jobs: From Garage to World’s Most Valuable Company [Computer History Museum]
Kindle Fire is the No. 2 tablet, trailing only iPad [Fortune]
10 billion Android Market downloads and counting [Google blog]
Android Marketplace tops 10 billion downloads
Programmer raises concerns about phone-monitoring software
Carrier IQ, carriers, manufacturers hit with wiretap lawsuits [InformationWeek]
Carrier IQ data technically legit, says researchers [InformationWeek]
Facebook acquires Gowalla
Cisco’s bigger bundle of networking
E-commerce sales are booming
The Future of Computing
ID Watchdog
Avoid ID Theft [Federal Trade Commission]
Thankyouaga.in
TIP OF THE WEEK: iTunes Remote app
About the Remote app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch [Apple]
Remote for iTunes [AppBrain Android Market]

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

November 30, 2011

Steve Lohr of The Times explains how a new software tool from Dartmouth researchers reveals just how radically digital photographs have been altered and Patrick Carter of Digital Folio discusses his company’s application for dynamic comparison shopping.

Segments (time on counter)
News (31:24)
Steve Lohr (17:49)
Patrick Carter (11:15)
Tip of the Week (3:46)

Links

Cyber Monday sales give retailers a holiday shopping boost
Asset sale may be next for AT&T
AT&T’s 11th-hour plan to save its deal with T-Mobile [DealBook]
iPhone almost goes boom on an airplane [The Register]
Seagate boosts speed, capacity of Momentus XT hybrid SSD [Seagate Technology]
What Fox effect? Hulu sees little downside from authentication [GigaOM]
Verizon Fios on Xbox [PCMag.com]
Linux Mint 12 ships [LinuxMint.com]
What’s new in Linux Mint 12 [LinuxMint.com]
Facebook agrees to F.T.C. settlement on privacy
Up to 4 million pages of historical newspapers now searchable online in British Newspaper Archive [British Library]
The British Newspaper Archive
Photoshopped or not? A tool to tell
Digital Folio
TIP OF THE WEEK: Google Mobile Voice Search
Voice Actions for Android
Cluzee is the Android Siri alternative [SlashGear]
Cluzee for Android
Voice Search for Google Chrome

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

November 23, 2011

The author Phil Simon discusses his new book ‘‘The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google Have Redefined Business’’ and Tanzina Vega of the media desk at The Times explains how BrightTag’s One Click Privacy button works.

Segments (time on counter)
News (42:35)
Tanzina Vega (29:21)
Audyssey (21:29)
Phil Simon (12:44)
Tip of the Week (4:38)

Links

Staples launches consumer electronics trade-in program with Gazelle [PR Newswire]
Best Buy E-cycle program
Windows 8 promises faster installation and 11 step upgrade [Ars Technica]
Improving the setup experience [Building Windows 8 blog]
Some Xbox Live users targeted in online phishing scam [BBC]
Penguin Books suspends e-book availability to libraries
‘‘Goodnight, iPad’’ by Ann Droyd
4.74 degrees of Facebook separation
EBay’s plans for Hunch: recommendations galore
A forward step on piracy in China, software makers say
Flipboard adds its first iPad catalog for Gilt Taste
Company offers Web sites a button for visitors’ privacy settings
Audyssey
‘‘The Age of the Plaform’’ by Phil Simon
TIP OF THE WEEK: Windows 7 desktop overview and auto-arrange [Microsoft]
Mac 101: The Menu bar [Apple]

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

November 17, 2011

Patricia Schultz, author of ‘‘1,000 Places to See Before You Die,’’ discusses the conversion of her well-known travel book into an iPad app by the creative team at the Wonderfactory design studio, and Quentin Hardy of The Times talks about new cloud-based employment opportunities.

Segments (time on counter)
News (35:33)
Quentin Hardy (23:16)
Tech Term (17:41)
‘‘1,000 Places to See Before You Die’’ app (14:23)
Tip of the Week (4:52)

Links

Facebook blames porn attack on browser bugs [InformationWeek]
Rushdie runs afoul of Web’s real-name police
Google offers opt-out for Wi-Fi location database [PC World]
Google: Location-based services help files
Co-founder of Diaspora website dies at age 22 [CNN Money]
The 10th anniversary of the Microsoft Xbox [TG Daily]
The Xbox is now a TV box
iTunes Match arrives [Business Insider]
Cloud computing makes everything (and everyone) work harder
Big data, speed and the future of computing
The big business of ‘‘Big Data’’
‘‘1,000 Places to See Before You Die’’ [Workman Publishing]
The Wonderfactory
TIP OF THE WEEK: The best barcode scanner apps [Gizmodo]
RedLaser
PriceGrabber
Pic2Shop

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

November 10, 2011

Deborah Forte, the president of Scholastic Media, discusses how the company creates smartphone and tablet apps for children and Pedro Rafael Rosado tests out three new pairs of in-ear monitors.

Segments (time on counter)
News (37:44)
Damon Darlin (24:02)
Scholastic Media (20:12)
Earbud Roundup (11:39)
Tip of the Week (2:23)

Links

Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet [BarnesandNoble.com]
Nook Vs. Fire: 5 Comparison Points [InformationWeek]
A potential iOS app security flaw [Forbes]
Firefox 8 adds Twitter search [Mozilla blog]
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hits stores? [SFGate]
Verizon double data deal rules clarified [SlashGear]
Google Launches Google+ pages [ZDNet]
Scholastic apps
Screen time higher than ever for children
Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America [Common Sense Media]
Andrea SuperBeam Buds SB-205W
Polk Ultrafit 3000
Beyerdynamic MMX 101 iE
TIP OF THE WEEK: How to drag files to the taskbar to open them in Windows 7 [How-To Geek]

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

November 3, 2011

Claire Cain Miller discusses Google’s recent update to its Google TV product and Nick Wingfield reports on battery-life complaints from new iPhone 4S users.

Segments (time on counter)
News (35:52)
Google TV (23:27)
Tech Term (13:50)
iPhone 4S battery woes (10:48)
Tip of the Week (4:26)

Links

Samsung’s new phones will have flexible screens [VentureBeat]
Lumia means prostitute in Spanish [MSNBC]
Google begins indexing Facebook comments [Digital Inspiration]
Malware attacks designed to steal info from chemical companies [InformationWeek]
Anonymous to take on Mexican crime syndicate
HP TouchPad is back at Best Buy [PC World]
Amtrak adds free Wi-Fi to more trains [Amtrak]
Google tries again with Google TV
What’s really next for Apple in television
New iPhone faces battery complaints
TIP OF THE WEEK: Canned Responses in Gmail

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

October 26, 2011

Doug Andrea, the chief executive of Andrea Electronics, chats about his company’s long history in the audio industry and Quentin Hardy of The Times discusses ‘‘Big Data.’’

Segments (time on counter)
News (37:23)
Andrea Electronics (25:52)
Iomega external hard drives (16:58)
Big Data (11:56)
Tip of the Week (5:48)

Links

How Nokia can change the Windows Phone game (PCMag.com)
With new smartphones, high hopes for Nokia and Microsoft
Windows XP at 10: No life support (Informationweek)
Netflix loses 800,000 members
Tribute concert for Steve Jobs (Associated Press)
Apple quietly updates MacBook Pro line (AppleInsider)
Grand Theft Auto is back (CNet)
Computer scientist cracks 18th-century secret code (TG Daily)
The Copiale Cipher
The Voynich manuscript
Kryptos sculpture
Andrea Electronics
Iomega Helium portable hard drive
Iomega Mac Companion external hard drive
The big business of Big Data
TIP OF THE WEEK: Sorting and arranging bookmarks in Firefox

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

October 19, 2011

Claire Cain Miller of The Times talks about how people use Web search differently on mobile devices than on desktop computers and Miguel Penella, the chief executive of the Acorn Media Group, explains how his company’s Acorn TV video-streaming service is bringing in a new American audience for British television shows.

Segments (time on counter)
News (34:59)
Mobile search (17:27)
Acorn TV (9:57)
Tip of the Week (3:58)

Links

Emotion, music and humor at Steve Jobs memorial
Edgar M. Villchur, hi-fi inventor, dies at 94
Unwrapping Ice Cream Sandwich in the Galaxy Nexus (Google Mobile Blog)
Google unwraps Ice Cream Sandwich (Wired)
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich now official, includes revamped design, enhancements galore (Engadget)
The Razr is back (Engadget)
RIM offers free apps in apology
Cell phone bill shock warning
DeLorean returning in 2013 as an electric vehicle (PCMag.com)
Can mobile search be as big for Google as desktop search?
Acorn TV
TIP OF THE WEEK: Facebook Mobile Texts FAQ
Facebook Text Messages
Twitter: How to add your phone via SMS
Twitter: SMS commands
Google+: Post via SMS

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

October 12, 2011

Sam Grobart, the Personal technology editor, previews his latest article; the technology reporter Jenna Wortham speaks about the potential impact of free text-messaging services on wireless carriers; and the film director Tiffany Shlain, discusses her documentary, ‘‘Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology.’’

Segments (time on counter)
News (43:48)
Pioneer AppRadio (28:43)
‘‘Connected’’ (21:11)
Jenna Wortham (10:44)
Tip of the Week (4:41)

Links

Failure to launch: Google+ growth spurt short lived (Chitika Insights)
Facebook iPad app finally makes the scene (PCMag.com)
ORNL awards contract to Cray for Titan supercomputer (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Netflix nixes Qwikster (MediaDecoder blog)
AT&T releases five new Android phones (AT&T)
Kohler Numi
Free texting apps pose threat to carriers
Jenna Wortham on Twitter
Pioneer App Radio
‘‘Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology’’
TIP OF THE WEEK: Mac OS X Lion Recovery
OS X Lion: About Lion Recovery (Apple)

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

October 5, 2011

Alan Yacavone of the News Technology department at The Times discusses the new iPhone, iPods, and software announced earlier this week by Apple and Pedro Rafael Rosado explores the concept of a ‘‘virtual personal assistant.’’

Segments (time on counter)
News (31:08)
Apple fall announcement (21:56)
Tech Term (13:46)
Tales from the rumor mill (10:23)
Tip of the Week (4:00)

Links

Leonard Nimoy says goodbye to Star Trek conventions (TG Daily)
Facebook turns to Websense for malicious URL detection (PC World)
ABC News and Yahoo announce partnership
Microsoft aiming to clean up Hotmail user’s inboxes (CNet)
Microsoft says no more Zunes, it’s all about the phone now (PC World)
Kindle Touch 3G can’t touch most of Internet without WiFi (Ars Technica)
RIM shares drop immediately after Apple announcement (Chicago Tribune)
Apple introduces a new iPhone with a personal assistant
Hal9000 (Robot Hall of Fame)
Cyberdyne Industries (Terminator Wikia)
Majel Barrett / Star Trek Computer Voice (Memory Alpha)
Rosie the Robot (The Infosphere)
TIP OF THE WEEK: Getting to know Google Maps
Google Lat Long blog
Bing Maps
Yahoo Maps

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

September 28, 2011

Jeff Hardy and Derek Curtis of SmarterTools discuss the value of an e-mail address, Larry O’Connor of Other World Computing chats about the durability of solid-state drives and David Streitfeld of The Times talks about the efforts of tablet computer makers to topple Apple’s iPad.

Segments (time on counter)
News (34:20)
David Streitfeld (24:29)
Larry O’Connor (18:22)
Jeff Hardy/Derek Curtis (9:55)
Tip of the Week (3:44)

Links

Facebook tracks you, even after you leave the site
Facebook denies tracking users (ZDNet)
Spotify catches heat for Facebook ID requirement
Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 released (Adobe)
Microsoft rollout of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update begins (Windows Phone blog)
Firefox 7 released with better memory management (Mozilla blog)
Apple to announce new iPhone
Amazon has high hopes for its tablet competitor
Amazon Kindle Fire
Amazon unveils tablet that undercuts iPad’s price
Other World Computing
SmarterTools, Inc.
The value of e-mail (SmarterTools blog)
‘‘The Lesson of the Ten: Why Google and Microsoft Want Your E-mail’’ (YouTube)
TIP OF THE WEEK: Paste and Go in Firefox (Mozilla Links)
Save an extra click while pasting URLs in Google Chrome (Techie Buzz)
Microsoft: Internet Explorer 9 keyboard shortcuts

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

September 21, 2011

Stefan Gromoll, a co-founder of DOTGO, explains how his company’s technology allows users to browse the Web by SMS text messages, and David Perry of Trend Micro security discusses the work of a recent hacker who may have compromised many corporate networks.

Segments (time on counter)
News (35:41)
Stefan Gromoll of DOTGO (23:14)
Tech Term (15:05)
David Perry of Trend Micro (12:09)
Tip of the Week (4:56)

Links

Google Wallet makes its debut
Google’s virtual credit card can replace plastic (David Pogue)
Will your Google Wallet be stolen in 18 minutes? (PCMag.com)
Google opens its social network to everyone (Google blog)
GeekDad review of ‘‘Star Wars’’ Blu-ray box set (Wired)
Latest move gets Netflix more wrath
Online game Foldit helps anti-AIDS drug quest (BBC)
Fold.it
SETI@Home
Satellite to land, somewhere
Moving on, but running in first gear
Cellular South joins DOJ case to block AT&T/T-Mobile merger (CNet)
DOTGO
Soldier SpyEyes a jackpot (Trend Micro blog)
TIP OF THE WEEK: Safari Reading List
First Look: Safari 5.1 (Macworld)

The New York Times Personal Tech section
NYT Bits blog
NYT Gadgetwise blog
Bits: Tech Talk on Twitter
Bits: Tech Talk on Facebook

September 14, 2011

View the original article here