CLAUDINE BEAUMONT
Sun

Analysts, bloggers and venture capitalists are always on the lookout for the next Google, YouTube or Facebook, and one of their prime hunting grounds is California’s annual future- tech jamboree, TechCrunch. It’s the brainchild of Michael Arrington — blogger, technology evangelist, and serial entrepreneur — and Jason Calacanis, a self- styled “ entrepreneur in action” and venture capitalist. Start- up companies submit plans of their venture to the TechCrunch panel, who invite a few to showcase their products. Exhibitors gain publicity and exposure, as well as having the chance to talk to investors.

If this year’s TechCrunch was anything to go by, it seems to be boomtime again in the dot- com industry after the lean years that followed the first dot- com crash in 2001. The conference panel received so many “ great applications” from new companies that they doubled the number of exhibitors from 20 to 40.

The revitalized fortunes of Internet companies are due in part to the endless appetite for all things “ Web 2.0”, the term for the next generation of technologies that utilize social- networking, peer- topeer sharing tools, and user- generated content. Even respected technology blogger Tim O’Reilly called Web 2.0 a “ business revolution in the industry”.

Judging by some of the start- ups on show at TechCrunch earlier this month, the panel agrees. Web 2.0- based initiatives dominated proceedings, and some of the ideas were so innovative that you could almost smell the money that will be thrown in their direction.

Mint ( mint. com), which scooped the $ 50,000 US prize, is the perfect example. It’s a browser- based personal finance application that allows users to track their bank accounts, credit cards, and other spending in one place. Similar banking tools have existed before, but it’s the aplomb with which Mint does it that marks it out. It can alert you to upcoming bills, unusual transactions and low balances; it will also suggest alternative deals that could get you a better rate of interest.

Flock ( flock. com) is a social web browser which aggregates all your socialnetworking information into a single window, while doubling as a conventional browser. It will pull your friends’ Facebook profiles into a sidebar, allow you to share content between blogs or websites, and alert you when friends have updated their entries on Flickr, PhotoBucket, Facebook, etc.

TripIt ( tripit. com) has the potential to be the next big thing. If you’ve ever organized a holiday with friends, you will understand only too well the mountain of information you generate; the e- mails, itineraries, and alternative suggestions for flights or accommodation. TripIt is a travel info- dump: set up an account, email all your travel plans and confirmations to the dedicated address, and it will help you to build and manage an itinerary that can be edited and accessed by multiple travellers. It even embeds Google Maps of where you’re going, Wikipedia entries on cities and sights, and airplane seat advice from SeatGuru. I’ve been using the test version for a couple of weeks, and can honestly say I will never plan a trip without it again.

Orgoo ( orgoo. com) is also in beta, but it promises to integrate all your instant- messaging, video- conferencing, text messaging and e- mail into a single portal, or, as they put it, “ communication cockpit”.

 

‘It’s our job to stop them,’ CEO says in launching the device in Britain

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Unlock that iPhone at your peril. Or at least your wallet could be in peril if you order on eBay or head across the border to score one of Apple’s coveted iPhones and try to use it on a Canadian cellphone network.

That’s the plan of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has promised to stamp out iPhones that have been unlocked by hackers to operate on networks outside of those that have deals with Apple.

In North America right now, that’s only AT&T in the United States.

Faced with a barrage of paid and free software available online that allows iPhone aficionados to use the phones on networks around the world, Jobs fired back by promising that Apple would try to outwit the hackers and render the hacked phones useless.

At the unveiling of the arrival of the iPhone in the United Kingdom, Jobs said: “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. We try to stay ahead. People will try to break in, and it’s our job to stop them breaking in.”

While Jobs didn’t spell out his battle plan, the expectation is that software updates could transform the unlocked iPhones into expensive bricks that won’t work on certain networks. And the warranties of the tampered phones would be useless.

The iPhone has flown right past Canada and into Europe, with Apple announcing launches in the U.K., France and Germany. In Canada, the phones would only work on GSM carriers Rogers and Fido, a division of Rogers, which so far haven’t formally indicated they will offer the iPhone any time soon.

Elizabeth Hamilton, corporate communications director with Rogers Wireless, said she is not aware of any Rogers or Fido dealers selling the iPhone in Canada.

“We do not unlock the iPhone. We do not unlock grey market devices,” she said.

Hamilton said there are certain codes and specifications that would tip a dealer off if someone was trying to activate an iPhone on the network.

While iPhone users have been boasting online about successfully activating their phones with Rogers or Fido, Hamilton said the company wouldn’t guarantee the quality of the service, nor offer technical support.

Some critics of Canada‘s high cellphone costs in comparison to other countries say data plan rates here are the major deterrent to iPhones.

“Rogers needs to not just look at their Canadian competitors, but also other GSM carriers in North America, which offer higher data usage plans with a lower monthly service fee,” reads an online petition entitled Rogers Canada iPhone Data Plan, which calls on Rogers to offer an unlimited data plan “at a reasonable price, comparable to those seen in the United States.”

In his blog, Michael Geist, Canada research chair of internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, points to the discrepancy in pricing between U.S. and Canadian carriers.

In the U.S., iPhone users with AT&T can get 450 anytime minutes (with unused minutes rolled over to the next month), 5,000 additional night and weekend minutes, and unlimited data for $59.99 US, which today is virtually the same in Canadian dollars. Geist cites prices for a comparable offering with Rogers, which offers no rollover of minutes, only 10 per cent of AT&T’s evening and weekend minutes, and only 500 MB of data with no unlimited data available — and totals $295 per month.

“The barrier to the iPhone in Canada is not Apple,” writes Geist. “Rather, it is the lack of wireless competition that, as now RIM and Google both note, leads to pricing that places Canadians at a significant disadvantage compared with other developed countries.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Billed as the ‘$100 laptop,’ the aim is to transform education

Peter Hum
Province

OTTAWA — A cutting-edge “$100 laptop” computer, which is intended to transform education for the world’s poor, will be sold to North Americans — at a heftier price and with a philanthropic catch.

Canadian and U.S. consumers will have to spend $399 US buying one — with another to be donated to a child in the developing world.

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, a non-profit organization, is to announce today the philanthropic campaign running from Nov. 12 to 26.

The first OLPC laptop, a green-and-white model, is to begin production in November with 120,000 units to be made by the end of the year, said OLPC spokesman George Snell.

While the machine is still referred to as the “$100 laptop,” that figure for now remains a marketing slogan and a target.

The OLPC Foundation’s larger plan is to sell computers in bulk to governments, which would provide the units at no cost to schoolchildren. The OLPC website says that Rwanda, Uruguay, Libya and Nigeria have expressed interest in bulk orders.

A portion of the cost of the computers will be tax deductible. Orders may be placed through xogiving.org or 1-866-X0-GIVING.

The XO was designed as a child-friendly device for use in the Third World. It can be powered by pull cords, solar panels or hand cranks and operate for 12 hours on one battery charge. It is water-resistant and its screen can be read in direct sunlight.

The machine comes with a built-in video camera and custom, open-source software for making music, creating art, playing games, browsing the web and word processing.

The OLPC Foundation, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by Nicholas Negroponte, who also founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

© The Vancouver Province 2007

 

Latest in line from Panasonic offers 12.2-megapixel resolution

Jim Jamieson
Province

What is it? Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX100 digital camera

Price: $499

Why you need it: You’re looking for a versatile point-and-shoot that takes very good, croppable pictures but don’t want the expense of a single lens reflex.

Why you don’t: You’re waiting for SLRs to come down some more so you can jump in.

Our rating: Four Mice

It seems like camera makers are trying to pack more into smaller packages.

Panasonic recently added the DMC-FX100 to its Lumix line and the offering is impressive.

The combination of small size (54millimetres x 97 mm x 24 mm), a digital lens that is the equivalent of 28-mm to 100-mm and a whopping 12.2-megapixel resolution makes this camera and its Leica DC lens very intriguing.

It has the usual smorgasbord of features you would expect from a fully-loaded camera: f 2.8 brightness and a 4.8-millimetre LCD, optical-image stabilization — including a technology that fights motion blur by detecting if a subject is moving and and adjusts the ISO setting and shutter speed — and a high-speed burst mode that allows for eight shots per second.

Both still and video will also fit the ever-more-popular 16:9 wide screen-aspect ratio for displaying on the television.

The Lumix DMC-FX100 has the ability to offer ISO settings up to 6400, but there have been some quibbles regarding low-light shooting. Others, and these are niggling, is the lack of a zoom in video mode and that there is not facial-recognition feature.

Don’t think this unit will do everything an SLR will do, but for the size, convenience and array of features the DMC-FX100 is worth taking a look at.

Available at electronics and camera stores.

© The Vancouver Province 2007

 

Canada ranks second worldwide as top source of malicious Internet activity

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Trusted websites have become the patient zero for some viral epidemics in the virtual world with sophisticated cyber-criminals using them to lure unsuspecting computer users into spreading their malicious code.

And Canada is a key global player in the dark side of the Internet, now ranking second worldwide after Israel as the top source of malicious Internet activity.

These are among the findings of Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report Trends for the first six months of this year, released today.

“The Web is becoming patient zero for infections and we are now faced with situations where even the guys you would normally trust have an issue,” said Dean Turner, director of Symantec’s global intelligence networks. “The Web has really become the focal point.

“Instead of the bad guys going to you, you are going to them.”

The threat comes from the increasing number of trusted websites being hacked by the professional criminals who have sophisticated commercial tools that allow them to operate vast networks of infected computers.

Even government websites are not immune from the hackers.

“What we found was that governments are the targets and the victims of the same thing as enterprises are when it comes to hosting phishing sites,” said Turner.

Phishing is a technique used by cyber-criminals to acquire sensitive personal data such as credit- card and banking information.

Turner said 23 per cent of all government websites hosting phishing sites were on government domains in Thailand. And the study found that four per cent of all malicious activity detected during the first six month of 2007 originated from Internet Protocol space registered with Fortune 100 companies.

“Fortune 100 companies control seven per cent of all IP space worldwide, so it is pretty significant when we see that activity coming from the Fortune 100 – that’s a lot of IP space.”

Turner said that figure is likely explained by criminals capitalizing on the unused IP space of the companies.

“The bad guys know,” he said. “If they are looking for activity on this IP space and they are not seeing any, they know it is fertile ground.”

Turner said Canadians spend the most time online of any computer users in the world, a trend he said could explain this country’s high ranking in malicious Internet activity.

Among other findings of the report:

– Bot networks, networks of infected computers that are controlled by criminals, have a lifespan of 19 days in Canada, the longest lifespan of bot networks anywhere in the world.

– The U.S. was the target of the most denial of service (DOS) attacks, accounting for 61 per cent of all such attacks worldwide in the first half of this year.

– The U.S. also was the top country of origin for attack, accounting for 25 per cent of all global attacks.

– The education sector topped all sectors for data breaches that could lead to identity theft, accounting for 30 per cent of all such data breaches over the first six months of 2007.

– The theft or loss of computer or other data-storage medium made up 46 percent of all data breaches that could lead to identity theft in the first half of this year.

– Credit cards, at 22 per cent of all items, were the most common commodity listed in the underground economy and 85 per cent of the cards being sold were issued by banks in the U.S.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

ROB PEGORARO
Province

WASHINGTON POST

Microsoft Office is as much a part of the workplace as drawn-out meetings and bad coffee. But Microsoft’s combination of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is not the only way to write, crunch numbers or prepare slideshows. And for home users, it isn’t even the best way any more.

The newest non-Microsoft options look better in part because they no longer try to mimic the bloated, pricey Office, which costs $150 US for homes, $400 US and up for businesses.

For years, Office rivals tried to match Office feature for feature in the hope that nobody would find anything missing. Corel’s WordPerfect Office and the free OpenOffice.org accurately emulate the Office experience, but they haven’t made things much easier.

A few new competitors are taking a different approach, providing only the features most users are likely to use. They can’t replace Office in every office but can stand in for it in many homes.

Two of these Office alternatives are free websites that you can use in any new browser: Google Documents and Zoho Office.

The other, Apple’s $79, Mac-only iWork ’08, is a traditional program that incorporates some refreshing changes to the standard productivity bundle.

Google and Zoho’s chief advantage is not making you install anything to get started: Visit docs.google.com or zoho.com, log into your account and you’ll see a page that works shockingly like a traditional program. You can select commands off menus and drag and drop text and numbers, without any wait for parts of the page to reload or redraw.

Google provides only a word processor and a spreadsheet, though it is working on a presentation program, while Zoho offers all three types of applications. These programs leave out some features needed by more advanced users of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, such as footnotes. Forget writing an academic paper with them, but you’d be fine jotting down a letter or calculating the costs of a new loan.

On the other hand, Google and Zoho provide a feature that Microsoft Office users can only get if they work in an office running Microsoft’s server software — they let you invite other people to comment on and edit your documents from within their own web browsers.

Both these programs can save your work as Microsoft Office-compatible files, but you may never need to bother with that, when sharing it on the Web is so simple.

Google and Zoho need a broadband connection to work well, but Zoho can also function without any Internet connection if you first install extra software called Google Gears. This offline mode only lets you read your Zoho word-processing documents. This Pleasanton, Calif., company says it will soon let users edit work offline as well, making this Web application usable on a plane and other places beyond Internet reach.

Compared with the wizardry of Google and Zoho, Apple’s iWork ’08 can seem much less interesting. But the Pages word processor, Numbers spreadsheet and Keynote presentation programs in this bundle bring notable improvements.

iWorks outdoes Microsoft Office most notably by helping you make more use of the information already on your computer. Apple has also made these features easier to discover than the tools in Microsoft Office, thanks to a set of prefab templates ready to be filled with your data.

iWork’s Numbers program is the most fascinating part of this bundle. There hasn’t been a new spreadsheet program in years, much less one that could be described as “fascinating.” Numbers ditches the traditional, intimidating graph-paper look and instead invites you to mix multiple tables, slick 3-D charts and graphics on a single page.

Gillian Shaw
Sun

. Bang & Olufsen Beo5 remote control, $660 Cdn

If you’ve read this far after seeing the price tag on Bang & Olufsen’s futuristic remote control, you’re definitely among the home entertainment aficionados who are always on the search for the single perfect remote control. An elegant answer to that confusing array of remotes, the Beo5 boasts that the 15 years of research and development behind it will let it operate any product combination, even products with features and functions that haven’t been thought of yet. That’s a tall order, and one that is delivered in a device with a colour LCD display with a programmable touch-sensitive screen.

2. Barbie Girl MP3, $70 Cdn

A new way to play with Barbies, this fashion doll plays MP3 music and doubles as a “key” to unlock play features on the not-surprisingly saccharine BarbieGirls.com virtual world. Unlock the beauty club, adopt a pet — it’s all in an online community for girls at BarbieGirls.com with a Canadian beta version at www.barbiegirls.ca. The 11-cm dolls have only 512 MB of internal memory, but they have a mini secure digital memory card slot to expand that song storage by another two gigabytes. Targeted at girls up to age nine, this could be one of those Christmas list panic items for parents, with four million users already registered on the BarbieGirls website — and that number grows by 45,000 a day.

3. RoboQuad, $100 US

Not just your ordinary robot, this arthropod being released this fall comes courtesy of Wowwee, a Hong Kong-based entertainment robotics company that encourages its customers to hack their gadgets. Its robots come with colour-coded wires and plastic bodies that can be removed without damaging them, making them an irresistible challenge for buyers. The animated robot RoboQuad interacts with his environment, is programmable with up to 40 moves, and comes with three personality settings. One RoboQuad owner posted a hack that transformed the robot into a Robospy, using Skype to call up the robot which had been outfitted with a head-mounted video camera to stream live video back.

4. XLink, $160 Cdn

Aimed at the growing number of phone users who want their cellphone to double as a home phone, the XLink can simultaneously connect three different Bluetooth-enabled cellphones to standard home telephones. When one of the cellphones rings, the regular landline phones ring as well. It lets you hold onto those familiar home phones that may have special features or headsets while losing your conventional land line.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Sun

WASHINGTON — DigitalGlobe, provider of imagery for Google Inc.’s interactive mapping program Google Earth, said a new high-resolution satellite will boost the accuracy of its satellite images and flesh out its archive.

The new spacecraft, dubbed WorldView I, is to be launched on Tuesday.

Together with the company’s existing Quickbird satellite, it will offer half-metre resolution and will be able to collect more than 600,000 square kilometres of imagery each day, up from the current collection of that amount each week, chief executive Jill Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Smith said the launch, to be broadcast live on the Internet at http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/space/bls/missions/world

view-1/, and the planned launch of a second Worldview II satellite in late 2008, were critical milestones for the company.

Privately held DigitalGlobe is still working toward an initial public offering in the next few years, Smith said. She declined to say this could come before the launch of the second WorldView satellite.

“The business is as strong as we had hoped,” Smith said, adding, “The key is to continue to hit the milestones that we’ve set.”

Once its third satellite is launched, DigitalGlobe said it will be collecting more than one million square kilometes a day of high-resolution imagery.

Smith said WorldView I would allow far faster collection of imagery, and add more quickly to the company’s archive, already the world’s largest commercial archive of satellite images. The library contains more than 300 million square kilometres of satellite and aerial imagery.

The new satellite will also provide far more accurate data, including the ability to pinpoint objects on the Earth at three to 7.5 metres.

Using known reference points on the ground, the accuracy would rise to about two metres, Smith said.

DigitalGlobe built the satellite in part with $500 million US in funding from the Pentagon’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), but it can sell the images commercially as long as their resolution is no sharper than a half-meter.

Its publicly traded rival, GeoEye, is also due to launch a new high-resolution satellite this fall.

DigitalGlobe continues to expand sales and partnerships rapidly, Smith said, noting that one of her goals was to expand the ability to deliver images online to an increasingly broad customer base.

Smith said the U.S. military increasingly viewed commercial satellite imagery as a “core part of the military infrastructure,” although there would always be a critical role for purely military satellite systems.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

 

Software takes 30 to 90 seconds to give notification of an ATM withdrawal and balance left

Marke Andrews
Sun

When Darren Stevens became a victim of identity theft last March, he was notified almost immediately on his cellphone by MySpy, software he and business partner Gordon Ross had invented.

Problem was, he didn’t have his phone with him that night, so he only learned the next morning that someone had taken $200 out of his bank account through a Lower Mainland ATM.

Lesson learned: Stevens now keeps his cellphone close by.

“If I had my cellphone with me that night, I could have called the police and given them the bank machine number, and they could have sent a car over and picked someone up while the crime was in progress,” said Stevens, who believes more illegal withdrawals were made at the same ATM that evening.

The identity theft occurred at Delta’s Scottsdale Centre Mall, where thieves stole information from a debit-card machine and duplicated credit cards. Stevens wasn’t the only victim — more than 100 people were robbed through the scam, some losing as much as $1,000 –but he was the only one with MySpy, which not only notified him about the withdrawal, it gave the location of the ATM where the illegal transaction occurred.

Through their company, Virtual Perception Systems Inc., CEO and chief system architect Stevens and president Ross developed MySpy and launched it last March. For a $19.95 annual fee, users download the software to their computer, cellphone or BlackBerry from my-spy.com., and register which bank or credit-card accounts and which institutions they want to monitor. All client information is secure and encrypted to prevent it from being hacked. Whenever a debit happens on any of the client’s accounts, the client receives a notice within moments listing the size of the transaction, where it occurred (including the location of an ATM), and how much is left in the account. If the client has a cellphone, the message goes to the phone, and they would be notified by whatever message tone they use.

Notification of an ATM withdrawal takes 30 to 90 seconds to show up, depending on your network servers. Use of a credit card can take up to 24 hours, depending on the clearing house that posts transactions.

Contacted at his Delta home office, Ross said he and Stevens met with the RCMP two years ago to discuss other crime-fighting software.

“We had some high-end, CIS software that was location-based,” said Ross, who in 1994 developed Net Nanny, the first Internet filter. “They recommended we start looking at the financial institution issue. So we put our other things on hold, took the underlying technology, and started working on MySpy. We felt it was important because of the whole issue of ID theft and financial fraud that’s going on.”

Since launching MySpy in March, Virtual Perception Systems has been building its client base, but banks and credit unions have been slow to accept it, a fact that puzzles Stevens. “I don’t know why they’re not jumping on it, because this is really a win for them as well,” said Stevens. “We’re looking to refine our message and let them know what they need to do to monitor the use of MySpy, partner with us and push it out to their members.”

RCMP spokeswoman Const. Annie Linteau said the idea is a sound one.

“Anything that would enable someone to find out right away that they’ve been defrauded would be an asset, because often it is weeks before people know,” said Linteau. “You could call your credit card company or the bank card company or the police right away.”

© The Vancouver Sun 2007

Features include Wi-Fi, web browser

Province

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc. yesterday rolled out an iPod with a touch screen that can browse the Internet wirelessly, as well as improvements to its iTunes web store.

Apple’s stock price fell 3.5 percent. It had been on a tear since the company said it would be making an announcement on this day, rising 13.5 per cent over the past week.

The company is fighting to maintain its lead in the digital media business at a time when the company faces renewed attacks from rivals including Microsoft Corp., which cut the price of its own wireless music device, the Zune.

Chief executive Steve Jobs, who also showed off an iPod nano with a video screen, said the company was refreshing its entire line of music players. In addition, Apple’s iTunes web music store will begin selling songs over wireless connections, he said.

This means that for the first time, people can download songs directly to an iPod rather than through their computers.

Commenting on the stock move after the iPod changes were announced, Paul Foster, options strategist at web information site theflyonthewall.com in Chicago, said: “Buy the anticipation and sell the reality. I guess investors were anticipating something more positive from Apple.”

Apple shares, up about 70 per cent this year, fell $5.00 to $139.16 US.

Apple will also update its iTunes online music store to let customers turn songs into ringtones for the iPhone and to allow customers to buy songs while connected wirelessly.

The new touch-screen iPod will have many of the features of Apple’s hit iPhone, including a touch screen, the ability to connect to the Internet wirelessly using Wi-Fi technology, and a mini web browser.

“We’ve built in Wi-Fi and we’ve made it usable,” Jobs said, in what could be seen as a dig at Microsoft’s Zune, which beat the iPod to market with Wi-Fi but has not enjoyed the iPod’s popularity.

Microsoft cut the price on its Zune by $50 to $199.

“Microsoft looks like it is entering Apple’s territory in a larger way, which would lead to lower margins down the road in Apple products,” said Tim Biggam, lead options strategist at online brokerage thinkorswim in Chicago. “But the long-range impact of Microsoft on Apple products remains to be seen,” he added.

Apple also said it had struck a deal with Starbucks Corp. to let customers buy music from Apple’s wireless iTunes music store while they are at one of the chain’s coffee shops.

Apple also sharply cut the price of its iPhone.

Apple said the price of the iPhone model with eight gigabytes of storage was cut to $399 from $599 and that it would discontinue a model with less memory.

“Apple has always been aggressive with price cuts to keep the competition at bay,” Shannon Cross of Cross Research said.

Jobs’s goal is to sell one million iPhones by the end of September, taking customers from Canada‘s Research In Motion Ltd. and Motorola Inc. Jobs said yesterday that he still expects to meet that target.

© The Vancouver Province 2007