cost

If you're cranking the air conditioner a lot this summer, a product bundle using Microsoft Hohm will tell you a lot about your upcoming energy bills--maybe even more than you want to know.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it has tied its Hohm Web home energy-efficiency application to an electricity monitor called PowerCost Monitor. The combination, which uses a home broadband connection, lets people view home electricity from the Web or from the tabletop electricity monitor.

Whole-home electricity monitors show you how much electricity a house is using at a given moment and how much it's costing you--sort … Read more

Apple's App Store recently celebrated its second birthday, and a library of 250,000 apps. Most of these titles are games, which run the gamut from simple "hello world" touchscreen experiments to full-featured titles that took months or even years of development--and sometimes take just as long to play through.

Beyond all the development work is the cost of getting these items out there--something buyers rarely think about when hitting the green purchase button for titles that are often priced just below a dollar. In order to get an idea of what it takes to bring a game to market, CNET talked to a handful of successful developers, as well as with a company that helps people without the technical know-how to build a title connect with developers who can.

The short answer? It's expensive. And as with any other software project, as the list of things you want your software to do grows, so does the time--and money--it will take to finish the project.

But there's one bit of good news: The payoff can be big. "I could do nothing for a living, and live off it indefinitely," developer David Whatley told CNET. Whatley, who began his one-man development house, Critical Thought Games, as a side project to his main business, Simultronics, has three iPhone apps under his belt: Geodefense, Geodefense Swarm, and Geospark. The first two are simple tower defense games, while the last is a survival game that has players trying to match up moving pieces without letting them touch anything else.

"When I first got started doing this, everyone was saying that everyone who is going to make money has already made money. And then every year after that, someone would say it again," Whatley mused. "I would say, don't listen to that. It's an infinite shelf space. I still sell an amazing amount of software."

Part of the reason for that, Whatley explained, is that he's been featured by Apple several times, which in the world of app development is like getting your site on the front page of Digg or Reddit--but for an entire week. "During the last App Store anniversary [Apple] picked Geodefense as one of the apps they featured. It just constantly kept getting picked up again and again," he said. As a result, Geodefense Swarm (the sequel to Whatley's first Geodefense title), hit number one on Apple's top games chart last September, which in turn drove sales of the original game.

So how much time had Whatley sunk into building that app in the first place? "The original Geodefense--took six months to develop," Whatley said. "That was not full time, just nights and weekends--but not every night and not every weekend, just whatever I could give up." As for Swarm, which follows many of the same game mechanics as the first, Whatley explained that he was able to get it out the door much faster, since he could use some of the same code.

While Whatley went solo on his coding efforts, he did get a little help from others, including an outsider to pitch in on level design and strategy, as well as a PR company to manage press and promotion. "I don't like public relations, or I should say I'm not very good at it. I also farm out some of the ancillary art stuff." Whatley also collaborated with another developer, Imangi Studios for his third title, Geospark, which has yet to break into Apple's top 100.

Collaboration was, in fact, the name of the game for all of the developers we talked to. The number one thing that was outsourced? Music and sound. Both Backflip Studios, the makers of the popular Ragdoll Physics series and the hit game Paper Toss, as well as Venan Entertainment, which makes Space Miner: Space Ore Bust and Ninjatown: Trees of Doom, told us that the job of creating the music and sound effects was always given to outside contractors.

But what about going beyond that, and having outsiders create the entire game? For those that don't have a background in game development, or even in basic app creation, freelancers are effectively a magic bullet. There are places like Elance and Craigslist, and then there are companies like CenApp, which runs a ring of sites for the iPhone, the iPad, and Google's Android that all act as the middleman--connecting people with ideas for an app with developers who can do the dirty work. So far the company has helped create about 3,000 connections.… Read more

India on Thursday unveiled a prototype tablet computer that would sell for a mere 1,500 rupees, or $35, with the price possibly dropping even further as R&D efforts continue.

Kapil Sibal, the country's Minister for Human Resource Development, showed off the super-cheap touch-screen device in New Delhi as part of a push to provide high-quality education to students across the country. The tablet also comes with a solar-power option that could make it more feasible for rural areas.

The Linux-based computer at first glance resembles an Apple iPad and features basic functions you'd expect to see in a tablet--a Web browser, multimedia player, PDF reader, Wi-Fi, and video conferencing ability. It has 2GB of RAM (but no hard disk, instead using a memory card) and USB ports and could be available to kids from primary school up to the university level as early as next year.

Students from several branches of the Indian Institute of Technology co-designed motherboards for the computer, which the ministry would like to see dropping to $20 and possibly getting as low as $10. … Read more

iSuppli, the outfit that makes it a habit of tearing down products as soon as they're released and splaying out their components for all to see, has already done an analysis of what it will cost Apple to build the $500 base model iPad. Not surprisingly, the number comes in at a good 50 percent less than the sales price--and it gets even better (for Apple anyway) as you move to the 32GB and 64GB models and add the 3G wireless component.

Remember, of course, this is only an estimate of hardware and manufacturing costs and doesn't factor … Read more

Like the iPhone, Apple stands to make a greater profit on the iPad when consumers choose models with more memory, according to an estimate released by iSuppli on Wednesday.

The $729 version of Apple's iPad is estimated to carry a bill of materials (BOM) and manufacturing cost of $287.15, making it the most profitable iPad model, according to iSuppli. The iPad is expected to go on sale as early as next month.

The firm did not have an iPad in hand when doing its analysis but based the virtual teardown on an in-house cost model that includes commodity components that are used across many devices.

Though the estimate does not account for non-hardware costs, as the price of different models increases, other costs will stay the same, according to Francis Sideco, an analyst at iSuppli. "Regardless of the configuration, software and licensing is going to stay the same. The only thing that's going to change are the hardware costs and primarily the memory," Sideco said in an interview.

That memory-based pricing scheme has become standard practice for Apple when pricing its iPhone and iPod, for example. For the iPad, the 32GB model will be the most profitable, costing only $29.50 more to produce than the 16GB versions, but the retail price gap is $100, iSuppli said. After the display, the NAND flash memory is expected to be the most expensive item. In the mid-range 3G model, the 32GB of NAND accounts for 21.4 percent of the total BOM, iSuppli said. … Read more

Although PlayStation 3 sales have been on the rise and Sony has a rosy outlook for the console's future, it turns out that the company is still losing money on every PlayStation 3 unit it sells.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which examined Sony's fiscal third-quarter financial performance, the company loses 6 cents on "every dollar of PS3 hardware sales." Considering the PlayStation 3 current retails for $300, we can safely assume then, that the company loses about $18 per unit.

Admittedly, losing money on console sales is typical in the gaming industry. But Sony'… Read more

Data breaches at U.S. companies attributed to malicious attacks and botnets doubled from 2008 to 2009 and cost substantially more than breaches caused by human negligence or system glitches, according to a new Ponemon survey to be released on Monday.

The incidence of malicious attacks rose from 12 percent in 2008 to 24 percent last year, according to the 2009 Annual Study: U.S. Cost of a Data Breach survey conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by PGP Corp.

The cost per compromised record involving a criminal act averaged $215, about 40 percent higher than breaches from negligence … Read more

Job Timer promises an easy way to track billable hours. Its cluttered layout threatens to derail its good intentions, but its features and performance make it worth the effort.

The program's biggest hurdle is a messy interface that will have many users scratching their heads. With several fillable rows for billing amounts, a running clock, a financial tally, and more, the program almost has too much going on at once. Luckily, a trip to the Help file and a little experimenting will clarify most questions. The Start button initiates the timer, which operates like a stopwatch, with Start, Stop, … Read more

Damaged by lower sales, huge operating losses, and a falling market share, Nokia Siemens Networks is pinning its hopes on a major reorganization.

The network equipment maker, jointly owned by Nokia and Siemens, announced Tuesday that it will lay off 5,700 employees and cut its five business units to three as part of a plan to slash expenses by 500 million euros ($740 million) by the end of 2011.

The layoffs will represent around 7 percent to 9 percent of the company's 64,000 global employees and is likely to be felt across all countries in which Nokia … Read more