Webware

In reaction to "Gizmodogate," the gadget blog's prank of shutting down flat-screen displays on the show floor and during demos at CES (see Bloggers behaving badly), the conference's organizer, the Consumer Electronics Association, sent me this statement:

We have been informed of inappropriate behavior on the show floor by a credentialed media attendee from the Web site Gizmodo, owned by Gawker Media. Specifically, the Gizmodo staffer interfered with the exhibitor booth operations of numerous companies, including disrupting at least one press event. The Gizmodo staffer violated the terms of CES media credentials and caused harm to CES exhibitors. This Gizmodo staffer has been identified and will be barred from attending any future CES events. Additional sanctions against Gizmodo and Gawker Media are under discussion.

See also: Gizmodo editor Brian Lam's argument against my position on Valleywag (comment No. 7).

The Gizmodo kids pulled a good stunt at CES: they fired TV-B-Gone remotes at walls of shiny new monitors on display and during press conferences, much to the displeasure of booth staffers.

No colors anymore.

(Credit: Gizmodo)

The video is funny. The ramifications of prank will not be. The CES organizers only grudgingly gave bloggers press credentials to the conference, and even then kept them segregated into a working lounge that was a step down in amenity and luxury from the "press" lounge and work area. This prank will not endear the blogging class to either the CEA, which produces CES, or the companies that paid dearly for the right to occupy CES floorspace and show off their products.

I would not be surprised to see Gizmodo banned from the show and possibly sued by either the CEA or the companies its bloggers harassed. For journalists (in my mind, all bloggers are journalists), legal and constitutional protection does not extend to mischief or sabotage. Publishing news reports, opinion, and satire are protected acts. Physical interference is not.

I asked Gizmodo publisher Nick Denton if he was going to fire the Gizmodo crew for their prank. "No," is all he said in an instant message. He did not reply to followup questions.

Gizmodo added this apology after the post first ran, but I don't think it will mollify the victims.

It was too much fun, but watching this video, we realize it probably made some people's jobs harder, and I don't agree with that (Especially Motorola). We're sorry.

There are other likely outcomes of the prank. From now on, no one with an infrared-controlled device at a tradeshow is going to leave it exposed. A few tabs of black electrical tape will thwart TV-B-Gones. Beyond that, as our security expert Robert Vamosi said about this incident, expect TV manufacturers to think seriously about building encryption into their remote controls.

I got a demo at CES of FlyTunes, an Internet radio aggregator whose CEO, Roy Smith, is pitching as an alternative to Sirius Satellite Radio.

No radio in your iPhone? Try Flytunes.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

It's a stretch to compare it with Sirius, but FlyTunes is a worthwhile idea. A service designed for Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it displays a curated list of Internet radio stations, and, over Wi-Fi, streams and records the stations you listen to. What's cool is that it can work when you're not online. It will record streams for your favorite stations. Then you can dock your iPhone or iPod to play your tunes over your home stereo or in your car.

Users will need to install a piece of software on their home Mac or PC to act as an intermediary. That software will redistribute the streams via Wi-Fi to registered mobile devices.

What it's not, though, is a bona fide content network, like Sirius is. FlyTunes owns no studios, no distribution channels, and no media. It's a low-overhead operation and Smith eventually hopes to make a few bucks by running noninvasive ads on browser screens during audio playback.

The service is in private testing now; it should open up this month.

Speaking of Internet radio, check out this cool Internet tabletop radio I spied at the Asus booth:

Now that almost all radio stations are streaming their content, Internet radios (like this Asus) are essentially world-band receivers.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Joining Yoggie's cool Gatekeeper Pico, a security suite on a USB stick, is the new Firestick Pico, a firewall-only version of the same thing.

Security on a stick.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

As covered previously on Crave, Yoggie's products are essentially security coprocessors. Computers unto themselves, they intercept all Internet traffic going in and out of your computer and scan it for threats. The Gatekeeper products scan for viruses, spam, and other threats, as well as running a bidirectional firewall. The new Firestick is a firewall only.

The benefit to these products is that they free up your computer's processor from running the security processes that you need. Considering how big and complex software security suites are getting, it sounds like a great idea.

The downside is they are physical products and have to plug into your computer. The Yoggie products are marketed for laptop users, but who wants to have to remember to plug in a USB gizmo just to run background security? I do like the idea for desktops, though.

The new Firestick Pico retails for $119. The fully featured Gatekeeper Pico is $149 and strikes me as the better deal. If you're going to stick a security dongle on your computer, why not just have it run all your safety software?

gOS, the Linux-based operating environment that Everex put on its low-priced gPCs it sold at Wal-Mart Stores, is getting a nice little update and support by more Everex computers, including one ultra-tiny laptop.

Asus ePC, meet your new competitor, the Everex CloudBook

See our first gOS review: Almost the Google PC.

The 2.0 version of gOS, or "Rocket," has a freshened user interface with a few new features, such as a multiple desktop switcher. It also has support for Google Gears, so you can use the few offline/online apps that support it on the gOS devices. Currently, Google Reader is Gears-enabled, as is Zoho Writer and Remember The Milk. Unfortunately, Google's GMail, Calendar, and the Docs suite are still online-only. (We expect updates this year; GMail and Calendar first.)

Rocket also comes with the first gOS-built app, gBooth, a simple Webcam photo studio. The app will also be sold in a bundle with a Webcam and will be called meeBooth; it will work on Windows as well as the gOS.

Soon to come: support for Mozilla Weave Prism (correcting previous error), which is basically the Firefox browser without its toolbars--a nice framework for Web apps.

On the hardware side, the $199 gPC is getting updated with new plastics. It will be joined by a slick mini PC priced at $499 and a $399 notebook with a 15.4-inch screen, the gBook. All of the gOS machines are powered by Via chips, except the mini, which gets a dual-core Pentium (not Core 2 Duo).

The real news, though, is the Everex CloudBook, a 2-pound ultra-small laptop with a 7-inch screen, a 30GB hard drive, a Webcam, and good connectivity (Wi-Fi, 3 USB ports, a 4-in-1 card reader). It "out-specs" the Asus ePC, according to Everex, and will sell for $399 when it shows up at Wal-Mart on January 20.

These are all real computers. They may not run XP or Vista or OS X, but you can do real work and participate fully on Web apps with any of them. And they're selling at Wal-Mart. One has to wonder for how long people will continue to buy machines that are massively overpowered just so they can run Vista--an operating system that we're going to need less and less as more and more of our applications move onto the Web.

(Credit: Napster)

For my money, one of the most exciting pieces of news coming out of CES this year is Napster's announcement that the service will be offering up its entire download catalog in the DRM-free MP3 format. It may not be free, but it still hearkens back to the olden days of Napster. Of course, Amazon.com's digital music store has been selling MP3 files for months now (and eMusic much longer than that), but having another major online music service push for the most universal of digital music formats is just one more step in the right direction--it makes things infinitely less complicated for the consumer to have access to one type of file that will play back on any MP3 player or computer.

The change is set to roll out in the second quarter of 2008 and will apply to Napster's entire catalog of pay-per-download tracks and albums. Subscription tracks will still come in the DRM-wrapped WMA variety, a necessary evil for that type of service.

BigStage founder Jonathan Strietzel mugs in front of Steven Harwell's avatar.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

LAS VEGAS-- Intel CEO Paul Otellini's CES keynote was sparkling. In contrast to Bill Gates' pastel portrait of the future, Otellini presented a concrete vision of a personal, reactive Web, and the challenges to creating it (Silicon, Infrastructure, Context, and Interface). For a full rundown, see Dan Farber's writeup on ZDNet.

Intel loves where the Web is going. The more interactive and personal it gets, the more processing power is required and the more new chips Intel sells, for both servers and local workstations. The most interesting (and newest) product that Otellini brought to the stage in his keynote was an automatic avatar builder made by BigStage.

BigStage creates a model of anyone's head by using just three photos--head-on, rotated a little, and rotated a little more. The company processes these pictures on its own servers and ends up with a model that knows which pixels your eyes are (so it can move and blink them), where your mouth is, and so it. In the Intel keynote demo, BigStage found Jonathan Strietzel created an avatar of Smash Mouth singer Steven Harwell. It was eerily good--much better and less creepy than avatars I've seen previously.

The technology comes from a CIA-funded project at the University of California. It was originally intended for scanning surveillance cams, since at its core it measures the three-dimensional geometry of key points on a face, for example between eyes, or the shape of a person's cheekbone. The fact that the algorithm can extract a complete 3D model from only three images, and with what is now reasonably inexpensive computation (this is where Intel comes in) is what makes it commercially viable.

BigStage hosts the avatars and is looking at several ways to get them out onto the Web, to populate the virtual world with facsimiles of real people, instead of the cartoons that live there now. People will likely be able to create widgets of themselves that they can embed on blogs and social networks, and perhaps in existing virtual worlds like Second Life and gaming networks like Xbox Live. The company is also doing deals with brands and music labels. Strietzel told me that a big public product will be available that lets users put their mug in the "most popular music video of all time." (Thriller, right?)

I hope the company delivers on its demo. Look for public examples of BigStage technology in April or May.

See also: Gizmoz, Digimask.

Whirlpool's new fridgiputer.

The Internet fridge I saw at CES doesn't do what I want it to do. It does not know when I am running out of milk. It does not sniff out the moldy cheese hiding behind the mustard to tell me it's time to throw it out. What the Internet fridge does is this: It has a mounting bracket and a power port on its front so you can install fridge-centric devices.

Stay with me here.

Whirlpool makes the refrigerator in question. I really don't expect you're going to buy one. Another company, Data Evolution, makes a module that snaps onto the bracket and that holds its slim convertible tablet notebook ($800, as I recall). Since Whirlpool isn't going to sell a whole lot of fridges with docks, you're probably not going to buy one of those PCs, either. So where does that leave the software, Cozi, that was running on the CES demo?

Cozi is worth looking at. Sure, you can run it on your fridgetop if you have one, but even without one, it's a good Web-based application for families. Cozi is a simplified group calendar. It lets you schedule things for yourself and see other family schedules, and block time for group activities. As a corporate slave, I like Cozi because the installed version syncs with my Outlook calendar, and the sync is under my control. I can have Cozi read only the appointments that keep me away from home in the evenings; my wife doesn't see the family calendar crowded with my meetings during work hours.

If you don't need the sync you can use the Web-based version of Cozi, which, CEO Robbie Cape told me, is where Cozi is investing most of its development resources.

Cozi is also a super-simple hub from which you can send text messages to family members' mobile phones.

On the downside, it doesn't sync with other calendars real people might be using, such as Google, Yahoo, or iCal.

If you are looking for a good way to keep a simple family schedule online, I recommend Cozi. But put it on an ordinary cheap laptop that you stick in the kitchen; the PC-on-a-fridge thing is silly.

Robbie Cape shows the Whirlpool-branded Cozi app running on an ordinary tablet.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

AOL's new AIR-based XDrive front-end is simple, but universal.

At CES, AOL was showing new features in its media-sharing service, BlueString (see hands-on). The latest news is the release of a Facebook app, My Memory Gallery, that lets you share your pictures with your Facebook pals. It's a nice bow to AOL's realization that, "We need to be where people actually are," as a representative told me. In my quick tryout of the application, though, I found no way to move files from preexisting BlueString folders into the Gallery folder so they'd show up on the Facebook widget. That kind of burst my bubble.

I also checked out a new version of XDrive, whose technology is at the core of BlueString. The new AIR-based XDrive UI, called Oxygen, is scheduled to drop in February. It will be a much simpler application than the current C-based app, and represents the future of the XDrive Web site as well. AOL will eventually phase out the Windows-based XDrive user interface, although at the moment it does things an AIR app cannot, such as automated file backup.

Users can access their files XDrive files from BlueString and vice versa, but the products are designed for different audiences and have different features. BlueString, designed for the "female head of household," recognizes only media files and gives you fancy slide show and sharing functions. The older XDrive brand represents a more technical product with better file management features, and while the interface will work with any and all file types, it doesn't have the same presentation features.

I'd rather have just one app that can do it all, but AOL's marketing geniuses clearly see a value in different interfaces and features for different demographics. (I'd also like to see an unlimited storage option instead of the 50GB space you get for $99 a year with both products.)

XDrive, ultimately, competes with upstart online file stores (Box.net, for example), live backup apps like Carbonite, and even raw storage services like Amazon's S3. The XDrive product was going downhill in the period before and after AOL bought it in 2005. It's good to see some resources finally being applied to the service.