CEO launches ‘best browsing experience’ ever

Glenn Johnson And Kim Covert
Province

It looks like an oversized iPhone, and Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs is betting the world will be excited about the much-hyped and rumour-laden iPad tablet computer.

In introducing the new electronic gadget Wednesday, Jobs held up the touch-screen device, which is a little smaller than a magazine. “And we call it the iPad,” he told his San Francisco audience.

“It is the best browsing experience you’ve ever had,” Jobs said in front of a giant screen showing the new product.

The icons are like those on the iPhone, complete with a tray at the bottom, and the iPad runs on the iPhone’s operating system. Jobs spent some time showing off some of the iPad’s features, including email and web browsing. It will ship with iTunes installed.

It has a 25-centimetre display that can show full web pages and has an onscreen QWERTY keyboard that is almost full-sized.

“It’s half-an-inch [1.3 centimetres] thin and weighs just 1.5 pounds [680 grams],” Jobs said.

It’s powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, has 16GB to 64GB of flash storage and claims 10 hours of battery life with over a month of standby power.

Taking advantage of the more than 140,000 applications already available for iPhones and iPod Touch devices, the iPad will be able to run any application in Apple’s App Store unmodified. To date, more than three billion apps have been downloaded for iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

The iPad is “our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price,” Jobs said. The iPad will start at $499 US for the 16GB version. A 32GB model will cost $599 and a 64 GB model $799.

Versions of the iPad with built in 3G connectivity will cost an extra $130, ranging in price from $629 to $829.

“Because they’ve shipped 75 million iPhones and iPod touches, there’s 75 million people who already know how to use the iPad.”

While every iPad will come with WiFi technology, only some will be able to access next generation or 3G cellphone networks.

Jobs said the company hopes to have Wi-Fi models available within 60 days, and 3G models in 90. An international carrier arrangement will be announced in the June or July time frame, raising the possibility that the iPad could arrive in Canada this summer.

Video-game maker Electronic Arts also debuted games designed for the iPad, while Major League Baseball showed off how it plans to use the iPad to enhance its own digital offerings.

Apple also unveiled a new online book store, iBooks, which will allow readers to download digital e-books to their iPad similar to the way users of Amazon.comInc.’s Kindle device can download books over next-generation cellphone networks.

A note on the Apple iPad features page acknowledges that so far the iBook store is only available in the U.S.

In a move designed to position the iPad as a device for business users, Apple also showcased a new version of its iWork productivity software designed for the new device.

Jobs said the iPad will sync with a computer over a USB connection just like an iPod or iPhone.

© Copyright (c) The Province

The device disrupts the wireless carriers’ business model and even threatens the popular Kindle, observers say

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Apple’s new iPad is a game-changer for publishing, education and other sectors, including Canada’s wireless carriers will likely see consumers snap up the devices because they are not locked to any network service.

It could take some time for the full implications of the new device — which Apple CEO Steve Jobs described as “so much more intimate than a laptop” and “so much more capable than a smartphone” — to be felt, but industry watchers say it could change the way we work and play, just as the iPod brought MP3 music to the masses and the iPhone catapulted smartphones into the mainstream.

While Canada’s major carriers were mum Wednesday when asked if they have plans to introduce the iPad on their networks, Richard Smith, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s school of communication, said Apple’s move to end the subsidy model that locks customers into long-term contracts with telecom companies could change the way Canadians buy wireless devices.

“Apple is disrupting their business model, which is to lock people into three-year plans,” said Smith. “There is no subsidy. Apple is just selling it as it is.

“It could be a year from now people will say, ‘So you have a contract with your phone, what’s that all about?'”

Wayne MacPhail, a journalism professor at Ryerson University and president of the marketing and communications company w8nc, said he expects to see his classroom full of iPads within a year or two.

“I think I’m going to look out to a classroom of students who all have these things,” he said. “[Apple has] done an outstanding job on the price.”

MacPhail is also among those who see the iPad as a Kindle killer. “The Kindle looks like a one-trick pony on its way to the glue factory right now.”

In San Francisco on Wednesday, Jobs also took a shot at netbooks: “The problem is netbooks aren’t better at anything. The experience of running an iPad versus a cheap netbook running Windows XP — there won’t be any comparison.”

Apple’s addition of the optional keyboard to go with the iPad is the final blow for netbooks.

“If you can throw a keyboard on there, you basically have a baby iMac, so there goes the need for a laptop,” said MacPhail.

Self-described “Apple fanboy” Warren Frey wasn’t overly impressed by the much-hyped iPad release. Even though he bought an iPhone in the U.S. before it arrived in Canada, he’s in no similar rush to get an iPad.

“I’m a little disappointed,” he said, adding that while the new iPad seems to be all about bringing content in, it is less about creating it.

“As a content producer myself, I do a lot of high-end video for the Web,” said Frey, whose company Freyburg Media is a video production boutique in Vancouver’s Yaletown.

The iPad isn’t up to the high-end video editing that Frey needs. And since he already has an iPhone, he doesn’t want to pay for another in-between device.

“I can do a lot of this stuff on the iPhone,” he said of the iPad functions. “It’s not ideal, but it’s also not another $600 out of my pocket.”

Alfred Hermida, a professor who leads the integrated journalism program at the University of B.C.’s graduate school of journalism, said while there may have been too much hype around the release of the iPad, its impact will be long-term.

“We have a tendency to underestimate the long-term impact of these kinds of devices,” he said. “What Apple does really well is combine form and function.”

It’s not only the device, but what people will be able to do with it that will deliver the long-term impact from the iPad. “It is less about the hardware, and much more about the user experience,” said Hermida.

Just as the iPhone has much less impact than the iPhone combined with Apple’s app store, it will be Apple’s e-bookstore, iTunes, its app store and other potential functions that will make the iPad transformative for behaviour. “I think this is where the game changer is,” said Hermida.

Content producers will have to adapt if they are to maximize the potential of the iPad, whether they are in the business of publishing newspapers — one area that is looking to Apple’s new innovation as a saviour from diminishing revenue and readership — or in the business of books.

For textbooks, Hermida said that means transforming them into dynamic multimedia products that can be updated and enriched with content that goes beyond basic text.

“It is not about replicating the print experience, but about creating new experiences,” he said.

Pete Quily, an adult ADHD coach and a longtime Apple fan and who once sold Apple computers, said aside from the name — which he predicts will elicit jokes for some time before people stop laughing — the new iPad “is pretty amazing.”

“Apple has really thought this out. They have worked with content providers, and anyone who is producing long-form content really wants to get a handle on this.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Chris Buckley
Sun

China widened its attack against U.S. criticisms of Internet censorship on Monday, raising the stakes in a dispute that has put Google in the middle of a political quarrel between the two global powers.

China has defended its curbs on the Internet nearly two weeks after the world’s biggest search engine provider, Google Inc., threatened to shut down its Chinese Google.cnsite after a severe hacking attack from within China.

The dispute could narrow room for Beijing and Washington to back down quietly and focus on other disputes such as trade, currency, human rights and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.

“The more this case takes on high-level political import for the Chinese government, the more likely it is to stick to its guns,” said David Wolf, president of Wolf Group Asia, an advisory firm covering Chinese media and telecommunications.

“The Chinese government can’t be seen as backing down on such a fundamental issue,” said Wolf.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week urged China and other authoritarian nations to pull down Internet censorship, prompting scathing commentary in Chinese papers.

The White House backed Google, while China accuses Washington of using the Internet for its own aims.

“This year, we’re seeing problems over trade, the Dalai Lama, and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan coming to the surface,” said Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at Renmin University.

“The politicization and ideological turn of the Google case could make it more difficult to work together. The basic need for cooperation, economically and diplomatically, hasn’t changed, but each of these issues could disrupt cooperation from day to day.”

In coming months, U.S. President Barack Obama may meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader who Beijing considers a separatist. Washington has also unveiled arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing regards as a renegade province.

In Riyadh, the CEO of Cisco Systems Inc, John Chambers, told reporters he was optimistic that Google’s dispute in China would be resolved through “give and take”. Chinese Human Rights Defenders said its website and four other activist sites were hit by denial of service attacks on Jan 23-24. It called the Chinese government the most likely culprit.

China‘s State Council Information Office said the nation “bans using the Internet to subvert state power and wreck national unity, to incite ethnic hatred and division, to promote cults and to distribute content that is pornographic, salacious, violent or terrorist”.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Robson Square interactive wall is B.C.’s celebration site for the 2010 Games

Gillian Shaw
Sun

It’s a digital show-and-tell for British Columbia technology.

Monday saw the opening of one of the world’s largest interactive walls, and marks the finishing touch for the province’s signature celebration site for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Thousands of international business visitors are expected to make their way down a digital corridor where infrared sensors trigger a changing kaleidoscope of images on everything from B.C.’s interactive technology sector to green tech and more.

It’s a technology that could have many applications, from displays like the one at Robson Square to more personal ones — an umbrella that you could use to share thoughts and images as you walk down the street.

“When it comes to innovation, it’s always easier to show people than to tell them,” Iain Black, B.C.’s minister of small business, technology and economic development, said at the official opening of the digital gateway for the B.C. Showcase in Robson Square.

The interactive wall has 45 sensors that pick up on people passing by, creating cascading animations that are delivered randomly depending on the number of people walking by and their speed, so no two strolls down the hall may be the same.

“I particularly like the rain clouds morphing into a hydrogen bus,” said Black, adding that the image is timely given last week’s announcement that B.C. now has the world’s largest hydrogen bus fleet.

The Digital Gateway is the handiwork of Vancouver’s Switch Interactive, a small, independent studio that won the $600,000 contract to create the digital wall, which was funded by Ottawa through Western Economic Diversification.

Beside the skating rink at Robson Square, the 33.5-metre gateway has transformed what was a bleak and concrete corridor at the B.C. Showcase into an interactive space with 17 animated stories constantly changing as people walk by.

Black and other government and industry players are hoping the installation will trigger discussions that could lead to business opportunities for companies here.

“I think the most important thing that this wall does it is gives a very interactive and eye-catching view of the different industries that comprise British Columbia,” Black said in an interview. “This is meant to elicit questions on the part of people who are moving through here.’

The showcase is a venue offering B.C. businesses an opportunity to meet with potential business partners and investors and hosts will accompany visitors, explaining the digital wall.

Black said it is hoped that the experience will prompt conversations “that will lead to additional investment and opportunities for British Columbians.”

For Switch Interactive, the digital wall offers the company a chance to share its technology with the world.

“We looked at it as a new way for architecture,” said Catherine Winckler, partner and creative director of Switch. “We looked at it as a new opportunity to do things with walls that will relate to people.

“We can tailor the wall, it can be easily programmed within 24 hours to have a completely different ambience. We can change the mood, we can change the stories, we can do quite a bit with this wall.”

And it’s a technology that isn’t limited to wall installations. Winckler said it could be used in restaurants, so customers could choose the mood for their dinner dates.

Or it could even be applied to an umbrella, so you could share whatever images you choose to project to the world as you walk down a rainy street.

Black said the 2010 Olympics offer B.C. businesses opportunities to showcase their talents to the world.

“It is the ultimate in a business development, or if you will, a trade show opportunity, but instead of us going to a trade show they are coming to us.

“And it is the biggest one in the world.”

The B.C. Showcase totals 2,500 square feet and is built to LEED environmental standards.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Vancouver online gurus share tips in new books

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Vancouver is backing its growing reputation as a centre of excellence for social media by kicking off the new year with a bonanza of new books on the topic by local authors.

The bookapalooza offers an excellent social media primer, covering everything from creating a blog to saving yourself and your company from the most egregious socmed missteps.

Here’s a snapshot of the books:

Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro

Written by Tris Hussey — a self-confessed science geek who once ran a lab at Duke University and has since turned his attention to blogging, teaching and photography — this is a chatty and informative guide that is a perfect anecdote to a blogging phobia. I met Hussey, a charter member of the Professional Bloggers Association, through social media networks and soon learned– from our e-chats and meeting in real life — that he’s quick to offer help and great at translating tech garble for the less technically inclined.

It can be a challenge for geeks to deliver information at a level that the newcomer can understand, but with Create Your Own Blog, Hussey has delivered a template that makes sense, even if you can hardly set up your own Twitter account.

Hussey is a fan of WordPress, which is available as a free hosted online blogging service at wordpress.comand as wordpress.org,where you can download the files you need to install a WordPress blog on your own server. But he talks about other options and his instructions are applicable to different blogging platforms.

By the time you reach the end of Chapter 2, installing and setting up your first blog, you’ll be online and ready to take on the next challenge, which is figuring out your writing voice and how you are going to build a conversation and your online community. Good tips and advice include how to avoid bad domain names (like the Italian Power Generator, powergenitalia.com),how to pick a blog theme, how to avoid copyright infringement and many other issues that come up for beginner bloggers.

I had a one-line contribution to this book with Hussey quoting me from a speech in which I suggested, “Don’t put something online that you don’t want to see it printed on the front page of the paper.”

From there, Hussey goes on to the more advanced lessons, like video blogging, business blogging and others, including the question many ask: How to make money through your blog.

The book is laid out with highlighted tips and definitions, so it makes a great blogging textbook — not surprising coming from one who is an excellent teacher.

www.sixbloggingprojects.com

Sociable!

Some time ago when I was interviewing Stephen Jagger for a story on businesses using social media, the Vancouver entrepreneur and cofounder of Combustion Labs Media, which operates the popular real estate software company Ubertor.com,laughed when I told him my Twitter account was protected from new followers because I worried who else besides my family would care to read my 140-character ramblings.

“You write for hundreds of thousands of people every day and you’re worried about what people will think reading your tweets,” he said.

Good point. And delivered in Jagger’s joking kind of way, that is more encouraging than critical.

It’s a mentoring trait he has carried out in the new book he co-authored with Shane Gibson, a Vancouver entrepreneur, speaker and sales performance specialist. The pair walks the talk in the book, which they created by recording their conversations and discussions, sending the recordings overseas to be transcribed and editing the transcript into Sociable! Working mostly out of downtown coffee shops, they had the book published through Amazon.

Illustrated with some very funny cartoons by Vancouver’s Rob Cottingham of the social media marketing firm Social Signal, it is a rapid-fire read that comes across like you’re sitting in Blenz with Jagger and Gibson.

While I don’t quite agree that with their “old media is dying” as one argument for engaging in social media, they are right in their assessment that new channels are opening up and companies must learn to be comfortable with them or they risk being left behind in the digital rush.

Consumers and businesses are engaging across multiple platforms and you must be ready to meet your readers, your clients and your customers where they are.

While Jagger and Gibson are master networkers, they understand the importance of creating and engaging in online communities, not seeing them merely as a sales channel. Their book should be required reading for the business person who leaps onto social networks, blasting out, “Buy my product,” messages that do nothing but ensure they’ll be regarded as online pariahs.

Their No. 1 rule is to stop pitching and start connecting. “Not unlike someone trying to sell insurance at a dinner party, many will shun the social media marketer that solely talks about their product and does not add value. … If you are there for the short transaction, you are going to be on peoples’ blacklist very, very quickly.”

www.sociablebook.com

Friends With Benefits

For those of you who thought social media might be a little dull, Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot, co-founders

of Vancouver’s Capulet Communications, are spicing it up with this tell-all book. A followup to their earlier book, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, Friends will prove lucrative for readers, not lurid for its delivery of a comprehensive guide to an often bewildering and growing area.

Shel Israel, author of Twitterville, compares Friends to The Boy Scouts Handbook of his youth, a useful guide that teaches preparedness, ethical behaviour and “useful how-to stuff on a whole lot of subjects related to social media in business.”

It starts off with strategy and once you’ve read those first eight chapters, you’ll be ready to move on to the last four chapters, which take a look at the tools of the trade and how to use them.

This is a book that shouldn’t only be read by the front-line workers; it needs to be on the boardroom bookshelf. For the decision-makers in a company, what they don’t know about social media can hurt them and their brand.

It can also turn traditional crisis management on its head, as Szabo and Barefoot point out in their chapter “Damage control in the digital age.”

“As well as hastening the blow, the Web amplifies a crisis because everyone seems to be getting in on the action,” they write.

They even share their own story of blogger backlash, when a pitch they were making for a company drew the ire of a blogger who lambasted them in a post that remained on the first pages of a Google search for their company for months to come.

Barefoot and Szabo draw on case studies to emphasize their points and include Q and A sessions with some online influencers like ReadWrite-Web’s Marshall Kirkpatrick on how to make a successful pitch.

Among their lessons: be honest, don’t fib. If you don’t know what astroturfing and sockpuppeting refer to, maybe read up on it before someone in your company makes those mistakes. Barefoot and Szabo explain them — the first referring to faking grassroots support, while sockpuppeting is creating fake web profiles to promote or advocate for a company or organization.

“Exposed examples of astroturfing are legion,” they write. “In 2006, science journalist Antonio Regalado exposed a YouTube video critical of Al Gore as being product by DCI Group, a public relations firm with Exxon-Mobil and General Motors on its client list.”

capulet.com/friendswithbenefits

Blogging to Drive Business: Create and Maintain Valuable Customer Connections

Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bollwitt, known online as Miss 604, has teamed up with Eric Butow, who runs web design and e-marketing firm Butow Communications Group, to write this business blogging primer.

Along with advice on launching a blog, it deals with the broader questions of online strategy and why and how blogs can fit into a business plan.

It includes a number of case studies, from Molson Coors Brewing Co. to the Canucks, using the challenges and successes of companies that use blogging and social media to explain best practices.

A bigger picture look than Hussey’s book on blogging, it deals with such issues as who should write your company’s blog and how blogging fits into an overall marketing strategy.

“Blogs are not a panacea for your business challenges,” Bollwitt and Butow write. “You can’t just post a message saying ‘Hello, world!’ or something to that effect on your blog and expect people to come beating down your door.

“Your blog should complement your other marketing tools to help drive business.”

While a lot of companies, as you’ll be able to read about in the book, have successfully launched blogs, others are still questioning their value and debating whether or not they should join in.

Bollwitt and Butow answer those questions and more. bloggingtodrivebusiness.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

1. Chargepod V2, Callpod, $200 US

A multi-charger that will charge both mobile devices and your PC or Mac laptop. One side charges your computer, another will charge up to three devices such as cellphones, MP3 players or Bluetooth headsets and the third side has a three-USB 2.0 hub for transferring music, data and other files or for connecting peripherals to your laptop, like a keyboard or mouse. You can customize it to fit your device with adapters. It comes with a carrying case, a PC/Mac data cable and some adapters. You can buy others if your device isn’t among the ones included. Just announced this month. Check the website at www.callpod.comand sign up for updates on availability.

2. XtreaMP3, FINIS, $150 US

Waterproof and sweatproof, the recently announced 1 GB MP3 players from FINIS provides training equipment for the U.S. Olympic swim team is completely submersible. Also shock-resistant and skip-free, it’s made for everything from surfing to snowboarding and comes with waterproof earbuds. It also has a neoprene arm strap so it stays secure. www.finisinc.com.

3. MHS-CM5 and MHS-PM5 bloggie cameras, Sony, $250 and $200

Announced this month and expected on store shelves in March, these ‘bloggie‘ cameras from Sony won’t be out in time for you to capture the Olympic action if you’re lucky enough to be visiting Vancouver in February. However, the cameras, which do high definition 1920 x 1080 MP4 video and five megapixel stills, are coming into a market where there is growing consumer demand for pocket cameras that make it easy to capture and share video and photos on blogs, Flickr, Facebook and the many other social networking sites. The cameras have embedded software and a USB arm for uploading files on your Mac or PC laptop or desktop computer.

The PM5 has a rotating lens that swivels 270 degrees to capture all angles. Sony also has the MHSPM5K bundled kit option that includes a lens for 360-degree videos. www.sonystyle.ca

4. Battalion Touch CZ-10, iBUYPOWER, from $900 US, customizable

With a 15-inch screen, the CZ-10 is billed as the wor ld’s first multitouch gaming notebook and first in a new line of multi-touch gaming notebooks from iBUYPOWER. The line takes advantage of Windows 7 multi-touch features. www.iBUYPOWER.com.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Julie Fortier
Sun

While cutbacks and the economic downturn overshadowed technology trends last year, 2010 will see leaps and bounds in how Canadians use mobile Internet, according to Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions report released Tuesday.

“This year’s Canadian TMT Predictions demonstrate that consumers and enterprises want to access data anywhere, anytime and on any screen — but want to do so economically,” the report says.

Now in its ninth year, Deloitte’s TMT Predictions highlight emerging global technology, media and telecommunications trends based on research from more than 6,000 Deloitte TMT member firm practitioners.

“Canadians and Canadian companies are at the front lines of the battle between demand for data and the realities of pricing,” Duncan Stewart, director of Deloitte Canada Research wrote in a release. “We may not have been the first country in the world to get the iPhone or the Amazon Kindle reader, but our companies, our people and our regulators are facilitating the mobile Internet revolution and changing the ways that technology, media and telecommunications are bought, sold and used.”

However, one of the main problems emerging is that Canada’s infrastructure can’t keep up with consumer demand, according to John Ruffolo, national leader of Technology, Media & Telecommunications Industry Group at Deloitte.

“Clearing the network traffic jams created by new mobile devices will not be easy and will have serious ramifications for customers and carriers alike,” Ruffolo wrote in a release.

Some of the trends identified in the report include:

– E-reader sales will stall in 2011, but e-books are expected to do well and will mainly be read on smartphones, PCs and tablets.

– Net tablets, which fill the gap between the smartphone and the net-book, could generate well over $1 billion in global sales in 2010 and create a new way to consume magazine, newspaper and television.

– Pay walls and micropayments are emerging as a way for newspapers and magazines charging for online content, but in reality, the majority of Canadian publishers will not implement these methods, as they could negatively impact traffic, and therefore, advertising revenue.

– While online ads only make up about 10 per cent of global ad sales today, online sales will continue to steal share from traditional media in 2010 and disrupt the ad market.

– And as smartphones and PCs create a mobile data traffic jam, carriers will use short-term tech quick fixes to make the mobile Internet work faster and handle more customers, with some players profiting greatly.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

1. IdeaPad U1, Lenovo, $1,000 US

Need a laptop but want a tablet? Lenovo has come up with a two-in-one device, describing it as the

world’s first computer hybrid that combines a conventional laptop computer with a detachable screen that doubles as its own separate tablet computer. Each part has its own processor and operating system, giving the one computer multi-functionality. They also synchronize to work as one machine with the base a hub and docking station and the tablet the mobile device. 3G wireless is built in. The U1 components each support more than five hours of 3G web browsing, 60 hours of 3G standby. The U1 also has a video camera. The entire duo-purpose machine weighs in at 1.7 kilograms with a 29-cm (11-6 inch) HD LED screen, with Windows 7. Announced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, it is expected on store shelves starting this June in the U.S., with Canadian availability not yet announced. www.lenovo.com.

2. PowerPak XT, $50 US, PowerPak Duo $60, Technocel

Portable battery and home charger all-in-ones introduced at CES by Technocel. The PowerPak Duo has dual USB ports and the PowerPak XT has a single USB port. Both have LED indicators to show how much battery reserve is left in them and include interchangeable tips to work with most hand-held USB devices. www.technocel.com.

3. DSC-W370 ($280 Cdn) and DSC-W350 ($250 Cdn) Cyber-shot cameras, Sony

Among the new lineup Sony showed at the CES were two new 14-megapixel Cyber-shot cameras.

The new models incorporate Sony’s “sweep panorama” technology, letting users capture wide landscapes or tall building with one ‘press and sweep’ motion. The pictures are automatically stitched together for panoramic shots. www.sony.ca.

4. Eee PC Touch Series T91MT, Asus, $530 US

A convertible tablet netbook with a touch screen with support for Windows 7 multi-touch gestures.

The screen swivels, making it handy for sharing displays and information, and you can write on the 8.9-inch screen with your finger or the stylus that comes with it. Works as an e-reader, only one of many offerings expected to fill this market demand in the coming year. http://eeepc.asus.com.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Many websites offering programs that allow access while watching TV

Chris Lefkow
Sun

Spend a lot of time on the Web while watching television? Maybe not. But a lot of companies are betting you will.

All of the top television manufacturers at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here are offering Internetenabled TV sets and most of the popular web brands have built the programs known as “widgets” to run on them.

Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter and YouTube, to name just a few, are among the web titans which offer the miniature windows that pop up on TV screens while shows are on.

“They’re really popular,” said Jeila Foroozani of U.S. television maker Vizio. “If you want to keep up with your Facebook account or your Twitter account you can just call it up anytime while you watch your shows.

“Right now we have 25 to 30 widgets,” she said. “By the end of 2010, we should have about 100 and then we’ll just go up from there.”

Vizio, LG Electronics, Samsung and Sony use the Yahoo! widget platform for their TV applications and Yahoo! used CES as a stage to announce widget partnerships with Hisense, ViewSonic, MIPS Technologies and Sigma Designs. ViewSonic’s VMP80 media player will allow high-definition TV owners to view movies, TV shows, web videos and photos and go shopping and play games with TV widgets.

“Consumers can enjoy the greatest Internet content while simultaneously viewing their favourite programming,” said ViewSonic Americas vice-president Jeff Volpe.

Jean-Pierre Abello, director of product management for Yahoo!’s connected TV group, said Yahoo!’s widget gallery is “very much like the iPhone app store.”

“We’ve done a lot of research to see what usage models work on television and what don’t,” he said.

“On TV, what we’ve found out is that a simple widget doesn’t take too much attention away from the TV and it’s easy to navigate with a remote,” he said.

“It’s off to the side and covers no more than a third of the screen,” he said. A viewer also has the option of seeing the widget and a full TV picture.

Christopher Rayner of Yahoo! partner LG said the growth of web-enabled TV sets is going to make widgets a “huge, huge hit.”

“It’s going to be a growing category because home theatre and computer online capabilities are just merging so fast,” Rayner said. “The customer’s going to be expecting to see this. The reason this hasn’t grown so fast before is because in the past you had to have a set-top box or a hard line to get it.”

LG offers web-enabled TVs across its range of LCD, LED and plasma sets and analyst Rob Enderle of Silicon Valley’s Enderle Group said “it won’t be long before every TV is web-connected in one shape or form.” He noted that much of the growth has been spurred by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Live, which allows users to play each other over the Internet on web-enabled TVs but also allows them to rent movies through services such as Netflix.

Yahoo!’s Abello said being able to access the Web through your TV has some distinct advantages. “You can now buy or rent the same movies from Amazon that you buy or rent on your PC,” he said. “The difference is that you can watch them on a TV where you have immensely better video capabilities than you have on your PC. The image is not only bigger, it’s better.”

With web video on demand, social networks, games and online shopping now available, Scott Steinberg, the lead technology analyst for DigitalTrends.com,said the TV is becoming “an interactive medium that everyone uses.”

“TVs are turning the living room back into the hearth of the home,” he said.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Company owner says officials don’t want a repeat of the Munich attack

Damian Inwood
Province

An Oklahoma company is shipping 830 vehicle-tracking devices to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics to help prevent terrorist hijackings of athletes’ buses or VIPs’ limousines.

“For the Olympics, we’ll be able to update the vehicles’ positions every three seconds,” said Jerry Hunter, CEO of U.S. Fleet Tracking.

“They haven’t told me what their primary purpose is, but I’m reasonably certain it’s to make sure they don’t have a repeat of Munich — or don’t have a bus full of athletes commandeered or something like that.”

At the Munich Olympics in 1972, 11 Israeli athletes and coaches and one police officer died after a hostage-taking by Black September, a Palestinian militant group. Five terrorists were slain in the rescue attempt.

The system uses up to 16 satellites to triangulate the device’s location, giving latitude, longitude, heading and velocity, Hunter said.

It takes six-tenths of a second for the tracking device to send the data by wireless transmission to an Oklahoma server and make it available on-screen.

The system gives the speed and direction of the vehicle and options include locking the doors, disabling the starter or honking the horn.

“It gives Olympic organizers the ability to follow those vehicles and make sure they’re where they’re supposed to be,” said Hunter.

Hunter said that there are three different devices available: a hard-wired version, a portable version and a navigation device that can send messages to drivers and direct them to their destinations.

Hunter said about half the devices will be the portable ones, which are the size of a razor phone, can clip on a belt and cost $399 US.

Monitoring costs about $1 a day, he added.

“We’ve got 830 units going to Vancouver and Whistler and they will be on buses, on security vehicles, limousines and dignitaries’ vehicles,” Hunter said. “We set up virtual fences and every time the vehicle enters or leaves the fence, it sends us text messages and emails.”

He said the maps showing the vehicles’ locations will be monitored by the RCMP, Vancouver city police and provincial officials.

“They’ll have screens up with all these vehicles, but if a vehicle deviates from its assigned route, it can send messages the minute that vehicle veers off route,” he said.

Hunter said it’s not just mega-events like the Olympics or emergency and police services that use the system.

“We’ve got small businesses using it, husbands tracking cheating wives, wives tracking cheating husbands and we’ve got parents tracking their teenage drivers,” he said. “A gentleman in San Antonio decided to put tracking on his vehicles after he came around the corner and saw four of his plumbing trucks, all lined up with their logos showing, in the parking lot of a topless club.”

He said drug-enforcement agencies have used the portable tracking device in bags of cocaine during sting operations.

“Eighty per cent of our business is commercial, seven per cent is parents tracking teens and seven per cent is cheating spouses,” he added. “The remainder is law enforcement and ambulance services.”

He said while the majority of the company’s business is in North America, the tracking system is also used in Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, New Zealand and Europe.

U.S. Tracking is sending six software engineers to Vancouver to help run the system.

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