The father of an 11-year-old girl in the U.K. said Apple tried to keep him from speaking about his daughter's iPod after it exploded last month.
Speaking to The Times in the U.K., Ken Stanborough said after he dropped the iPod Touch, it began hissing and started to get hot. As a precaution, he threw the iPod outside and "within 30 seconds there was a pop, a big puff of smoke and it went 10 (feet) in the air," he said.
Apple agreed to give Stanborough a refund, but only if he signed a confidentiality agreement, agreeing not to disclose any information about the incident. Stanborough said he found the letter "appalling" and refused to sign it.
To be fair, letters from companies in situations like this are most likely standard procedure. However, this isn't the first time Apple has been accused of trying to stop people from reporting on faulty iPods.
Reporter Amy Clancy of KIRO-TV in Seattle said it took her more than seven months to get documents from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on iPods that mysteriously burst into flames. She said she had filed a Freedom of Information Act request, but Apple lawyers filed "exemption after exemption" with the commission to stop her from getting the over 800 pages of documents.
Clancy said the documents show 15 "burn and fire-related incidents" that iPod owners blamed on the device.
Apple declined to comment for this story.
A building at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus sustained unspecified damage overnight in a three-alarm fire.
Firefighters respond Tuesday night to a three-alarm blaze at Apple's Cupertino campus.
(Credit: KPIX)The blaze at the Valley Green 6 building, which appeared to have started under a ventilation and air-conditioning unit on the roof, was reported by workers at around 10 p.m. PDT Tuesday.
The location of the fire at the rooftop HVAC unit, where work was being done, offered a clue as the possible cause of the fire. "It lets us know it might have been an electrical issue, might have been a gas issue," Hal Rooney, deputy chief in the Santa Clara County Fire Department, told reporters on the scene Tuesday night.
No injuries were reported. About 66 firefighters were on hand to deal with the blaze, which was extinguished after about three hours.
Apple representatives were not immediately available for comment Wednesday morning.
San Francisco CBS affiliate KPIX has video from the scene Tuesday night, including Deputy Chief Rooney speaking and raw footage of fire crews at work.
Deputy Chief Hal Rooney of the Santa Clara County
Fire Department describes the fire and its aftermath
at Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus.
CORONADO, Calif.--This probably doesn't come as a surprise to most parents, but plopping a computer down in front of a student doesn't necessarily translate into academic success.
Don Helfgott of Inspiration Software, Tom Greaves of Project Inkwell, and Jeanette Hammock of True North Logic (left to right) discuss technology in education.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)We've heard a lot in recent years about the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and similar competing programs, which aim to improve educational standards in various parts of the world through computing power. But according to a panel discussion at the Future in Review conference, the computer itself isn't the issue; educators need to find meaningful ways to introduce computers into their day-to-day instructional process.
More than two-thirds of teachers surveyed in a recent inquiry said they were not getting any substantial improvements in academic progress from their participation in a one-computer-per-student program, said Tom Greaves, an education consultant and member of Project Inkwell. Project Inkwell was founded and is run by Mark Anderson, the organizer of FIRe and head of Strategic News Service, to help get technology into classrooms.
While that may sound dismal, last year it was even worse: only 17 percent of those surveyed said they were noticing substantial academic progress from one-to-one programs, Greaves said. The problem is that while computers are nice and all, they must be part of a teaching plan and a community's educational mission, and teachers need help figuring out the best ways to use the computers.
"Curriculum standards aren't written around having a computer" as part of the teaching process, said Jeanette Hammock, chief technology officer for True North Logic, which trains teachers on how to use technology in academically rewarding ways. There's a lot of pressure on teachers these days to follow lesson plans aimed at standardized tests, and it doesn't appear that many school districts have thought about how to integrate technology into those plans.
Don Helfgott, CEO of Inspiration Software, agreed. "It takes a teacher 5 years before they become facile in (a one-to-one) environment. (There's) hundreds of years of non-technology-based book curriculum that exists."
So while the debate over whether the OLPC should use Windows or the custom-designed Sugar interface is interesting, it obscures the real obstacle to technology-assisted learning.
No matter what technology they employ, teachers need support and training not just on how to use the computers themselves, but how to make them a useful part of the teaching process. That's not a technology question, that's an educational question.
Correction, May 25, 12:15 PM PDT: This post initially misreported the number of tuna that Hawaii Oceanic Technology aims to produce and the depth at which its Aquaspheres would be located. It has now been corrected.
Every year at the Future in Review conference, organizer Mark Anderson and his staff pick 10 start-up companies as "FIRestarters," companies that are tackling problems in line with the conference's theme, but still require some kindling. Here's a look at three of them.
A rendition of the Aquasphere, which might be the fish farm of the future.
(Credit: Hawaii Oceanic Technologies)The pitch: Fish farming gets a bad rap from most seafood connoisseurs, but Hawaii Oceanic Technology wants to change that. Bill Spencer is trying to find a backer to let him construct three "Aquaspheres" that could be capable of producing 20,000 100-pound sashimi-grade tuna in the open ocean.
How it's done: Spencer wants to build a fish farm of Aquaspheres that resemble soccer balls; that is, 200-foot-wide soccer balls. Positioned 60 feet below the surface of the ocean in 1,300 feet of water, each unit is self-powered using a probe that extends way down into the depths of the ocean, pulling cold water up and converting that to enough energy to support a fish farm using a proprietary "ocean thermal energy conversion" system.
The catch: Spencer hasn't actually built an Aquasphere; he's looking for about $10 million to $12 million in funding to produce three Aquaspheres, which he says will produce enough of a profit to grow the business. Demand for high-quality fish is only going to soar as commercial fishing quotas decrease and farming methods continue to deteriorate, according to Spencer.
The pitch: It's high time the battery industry found some way to move past the somewhat unfair reputation it has garnered among the public: a purveyor of exploding devices that lose their usefulness way too quickly. Seeo, backed by Khosla Ventures, wants to develop a new electrolyte materials that can improve the stability and shelf life of lithium-ion batteries used in notebook PCs and mobile phones.
How it's done: Seeo's Ilan Gur says that battery companies have focused too much on trying to improve the electrode, or the part of the battery that either attracts or repels current. Seeo wants to replace the liquid electrolyte, where ions flow between the electrodes, with a solid polymer material that could improve the stability and reliability of batteries and allow battery makers to increase the capacity of their products.
The catch: Seeo hasn't settled on a material. The company is hoping to convince the battery industry to change the way it operates--by incorporating a new material--with a home-run material that can replace two separate ingredients in a battery: the electrolyte and the separator. With battery costs largely tied up in the cost of materials, removing some of that cost could prove an easy sell if the material is right.
Open Labs' Victor Wong demonstrates the TSE NeKo to a FIRe 2008 attendee.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)The pitch: Think Rick Rubin meets that guy at the karaoke bar who overperforms every song. Open Labs makes a recording studio in a box, allowing novice musicians to produce tracks like the pros in Los Angeles that are "radio-ready," according to co-founder Victor Wong. Timbaland, Lil' Jon, and Korn's Jonathan Davis are supporters. A group of FIRe attendees plunking around on bass, guitar, and keyboards produced a cacophony of noise before the recording was run through Open Lab's Neko product, after which it sounded like a second-rate smooth jazz band.
How it's done: Open Labs is basically building quad-core PCs inside synthesizers. Processing power has evolved to the point where off-the-shelf PC components can duplicate the horsepower previously found only in studios packed with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, Wong said. The company's TSE Neko keyboard costs $4,999 with 4GBs of memory and a Core 2 Quad Intel processor, and runs a modified version of Windows XP.
The catch: With celebrity endorsers, actual products, and star-making parents looking for an edge, Open Labs is in pretty good shape. The company manufacturers much of its own equipment, so scalability issues might come into play at some point, but that doesn't seem to be an issue right now.
CORONADO, Calif.--There's more than one kind of "green" in the eyes of the world's corporations.
Mark Turrell of Imaginatik and Prith Banerjee of HP Labs listen to Steve Di Biase of JohnsonDiversey (left to right) discuss sustainability at FIRe 2008.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)More and more companies are starting to realize that they can enjoy the PR benefits of turning "green," by reducing their carbon footprint through energy savings or changes to their products. But every CEO always has another shade of green somewhere in the back of his or her mind. Companies need to reduce their impact on the environment, but that doesn't mean they can afford to implement every single green idea, or that they even know where to start, according to panelists at the Future in Review conference.
The goal should be "sustainability," or the idea that individuals and organizations should be working on ways to make sure any environmentally friendly improvements or changes they make to their businesses should be sustainable over the long term, or they shouldn't be done at all. But developing and implementing sustainable ideas is harder to accomplish in real life than it is to discuss in luxury resort hotels yards from the Pacific Ocean.
That's where "innovation software" companies like Invention Machine and Imaginatik come in. Mark Atkins, president and CEO of Invention Machine, helps manufacturing companies develop clever ways to make their products more environmentally friendly without killing their cost structure. Some of his clients are starting to realize that they'll have to overhaul as much as 70 percent of their products within the next five years to meet sustainability goals, he said.
Imaginatik CEO Mark Turrell described a project his company did for Wal-Mart helping it unlock sustainable ideas from its own employees. Wal-Mart is notorious for its laser focus on cost reduction, and has started to realize that it can save money by reducing energy consumption in its stores. But the company was having trouble recognizing simple, achievable ideas suggested by employees.
After adopting tools developed by Imaginatik, Wal-Mart was able to collect thousands of ideas from employees that were getting lost in the old "suggestion box," and wound up implementing $38 million in cost savings from just four days of idea gathering, Turrell said.
Hewlett-Packard is using Imaginatik's software to help make improvements to the company's Labs division, said Prith Banerjee, the new director of HP Labs. Sustainability research is one of the new core components of HP Labs' research, and it shows up in products that help HP and its customers reduce cooling and power in their huge data centers.
This is a classic example of sustainability: reducing the amount of power used in data centers helps conserve energy, but it also reduces the costs to operate those data centers. For all the talk thrown out there by corporations as green thinking has become trendier, everything still comes down to the bottom line, said Steve Di Biase, senior vice president and chief scientific officer for JohnsonDiversey, a cleaning products company.
"If you can't be profitable, sustainability doesn't make sense," Di Biase said.
CORONADO, Calif.--The secret to tech industry success might just be Larry Brilliant's favorite ashram in India.
Kamran Elahian and Google's Larry Brilliant (left to right) discuss Google's response to disasters and ashrams in India, among other things, at Future in Review.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)The director of Google's philanthropic efforts told attendees of the Future in Review conference here that during the 10 years he spent in India, he lived in an ashram that has hosted some of the tech industry's luminaries.
Apple's Steve Jobs heads the list, but in recent years, Brilliant has taken Larry Page, eBay founder Jeff Skoll, and the most recent visitor, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, to the ashram.
While he took many interesting detours in a 30-minute session, Brilliant spent the largest chunk of his wide-ranging discussion with Kamran Elahian of Global Catalyst Partners talking about the recent natural disasters in Myanmar and China.
Google set up a link from its home page to a landing page where visitors could donate proceeds to relief efforts, collecting $1 million in two days and even more from Google employees. The company also tried to get the money directly to relief organizations in the field as soon as possible, rather than waiting for it to cycle through traditional channels.
That was especially needed in Myanmar, where the ruling junta has frustrated relief efforts.
"I can't recall a time when the greatest obstacle to getting food in was the very people who were empowered to support that process," Brilliant said.
Brilliant is also working on longer-term problems, such as detecting the emergence of the next epidemic. His group is currently funding a program in Africa, where blood-testing kits are distributed to hunters in equatorial Africa.
After a kill, the hunters are directed to take a drop of blood from the animal and a drop of blood from themselves, and send the samples back to a lab for testing. The idea is to detect new viruses in animals before they jump to humans, which is a serious problem in rural areas where humans live in close contact with livestock, he said.
CORONADO, Calif.--Reducing greenhouse gases isn't enough for EcoVerdance and Accelegrow Technologies; why not tackle world hunger, too?
This year's Future in Review conference has chosen to spotlight a company called EcoVerdance, which is using a product developed by Accelegrow to promote carbon trading by using the proceeds from selling carbon offsets to purchase a chemical called Accele-Gro-M that dramatically improves the yields of existing farms and makes it possible to grow plants in places previously thought impossible.
I have to admit, the first time Future in Review organizer Mark Anderson described the scheme, two things popped into my head: the fable of Jack and the Beanstalk and the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer covered a barren farm with nuclear waste to produce a tobacco/tomato hybrid plant. But Dennis Knight, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Accelegrow, says his company's product is legit.
Accele-Gro-M is an all-natural chemical fertilizer that consists of hormones, proteins, nitrogen, urea and two proprietary ingredients for which Accelegrow is seeking patents. It overrides a plant's natural response to a stressful environment, which is to shrivel up in order to protect itself. Instead, Accele-Gro-M encourages the plant to open up and accept moisture from whatever sources are available, such as dew. And despite the stressful situation, it somehow encourages the plant to keep growing, Knight said.
The company has been studying the use of the fertilizer in drought areas, and has seen yields grow from 40 bushels an acre to 180 bushels to 190 bushels per acre, Knight said. Only 8 ounces of the product are required per acre of farmland, and the cost to the farmer is around $8 to $11 per acre, depending on the crop and the area of the world in which it will be used.
But EcoVerdance thinks it can use the promise of Accel-Gro-M to encourage carbon trading. The idea is to sell carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon output, either voluntarily or as part of government regulation. Then, EcoVerdance will use that money to purchase Accele-Gro-M and donate the fertilizer to farmers in developing countries.
This will have several effects, according to David Morris, director, chairman, and president of EcoVerdance: crop yields will be enhanced on the same plots of land, and previously unusable plots can generate food. Additionally, the more plants that grow, the more carbon dioxide that can be taken out of the atmosphere.
EcoVerdance is still working out the kinks, and further testing of the product is required, but that's the idea. Knight claims that Accele-Gro-M has no side effects, either in the food that people eat grown with the product, or in any run-off into the groundwater.
CORONADO, Calif.--It's the mid-1990s for the mobile industry: lots of walled gardens, lots of fragmentation, and lots of promise.
We've been writing about the future of mobile computing for years now, and it's no surprise that panelists at the Future in Review conference are eyeing the same space. There's a clear shift going on toward mobile computing, seen both in the PC space, as notebooks overtake designs, and in the evolving handheld/subnotebook space with a surge in interest in smartphones and things like the Eee PC.
Moderator Chetan Sharma, Telestra's Hugh Bradlow, and Yahoo's Gary Roshak (left to right) listen to a fellow panelist discuss mobile computing.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)The current mobile situation reminds Jonathan Bulkeley, formerly of AOL and currently CEO of ScanBuy, of his days at the once-ubiqituous ISP in the mid-1990s. Companies like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe offered metered access to the Internet in those days and strictly controlled what the user accessed on those networks; just as mobile ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint have done for many years until recently.
By 1996 or 1997, however, the entire market had changed to meet demand for flat-rate pricing, again mirrored by the recent actions of the carriers to provide all-you-can-download plans. Once subscriber revenues were fixed at a certain number, the ISPs needed to find advertising and service revenues to keep growing. And that's what the current mobile industry needs: "The next phase is advertising and commerce growth--who's going to get the $1 trillion in value (that's up for grabs)?" Bulkeley wondered.
Before that comes to pass, however, a few things have to change. Hugh Bradlow, chief technology office for Australian carrier Telstra, bemoaned the current fragmented state of the mobile software industry. "The handset industry is in an absolutely shocking state," he said, noting that mobile application developers are faced with way too many competing platforms for their products.
Yahoo is trying to completely bypass that issue by focusing on mobile widgets, said Gary Roshak, vice president of mobile advertisers and publishers at the company. "The world doesn't need another phone operating system. We don't really care if you run on (the various operating systems). We want to fuel these mobile-first experiences."
The devices themselves also need to change, Bulkeley said. "These devices aren't meant to navigate a portal page, but they are best suited when you know what you want to get and you go right to it," he said. Bulkeley's new company is trying to get the mobile industry to support bar-code scanning, where mobile users can take a snapshot of a bar code in a store and get instant information regarding a product or service.
But the trends are undeniable. Rajeev Chand, managing director and wireless analyst at Rutberg & Co., noted some statistics that ESPN released just after the end of the last NFL season. On the last weekend of the season--when football fans were captivated by the thrilling New England Patriots-New York Giants game--ESPN's mobile site recorded more hits than its regular site.
However, it's just not enough to capture the traffic, as any ex-AOLer knows.
"We learned from the first phase that whoever controls the traffic and monetizes it, wins," Bulkeley said.
CORONADO, Calif.--Looming energy problems present noteworthy challenges for the world, but big thinkers in science, business, and technology know they have to compete with the status quo without a helping hand.
The Future in Review conference has always been about sketching a picture of the technology and business landscape five years into the future. But this year, attendees and presenters are focused on a more pressing issue: the need for alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels sooner, rather than later.
Stephen Evans of the BBC, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Lyndon Rive of SolarCity (left to right) discuss solar power.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)As such, the early talk at the Hotel Del Coronado is all about alternative energy, whether that's cellulosic biofuels, photovoltaic panels, and carbon-reduction strategies. Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures kicked off the conference Tuesday night with an after-dinner speech urging the technologists, venture capitalists, and entreprenuers in attendance to focus on greener technologies that make economic sense, rather than crowd-pleasers like hybrid cars or Sheryl Crow's toilet-paper reduction strategy.
Khosla is plunging his dollars into technologies like enhanced geothermal, cellulosic ethanol, and efforts to improve the efficiency of products we already use, like engines and light bulbs. The key investment decision, in his mind, is whether these alternative technologies can work at utility-grade levels.
"(Alternative fuels) have to compete with the cost of fossil fuels without subsidies," he said, and they also have to be scalable. Technologies like food-based ethanol, wind power, and regular geothermal aren't scalable to meet the needs of a huge energy provider like PG&E, but if we could perfect ways to create ethanol from non-food sources, effectively store the energy generated by wind power, or drill geothermal plants anywhere on the surface of the planet, that goal of scalability comes into sight.
The other goal is that alternative sources of energy have to be price-competitive with current sources of energy such as oil, coal, and natural gas. The public will embrace cleaner, sustainable energy sources as long as they don't have to pay for it, Khosla said.
Martin Tobias of Ignition Partners, Erik Blachford of TerraPass, and David Morris of EcoVerdance talk about carbon-trading systems.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)Khosla is betting on the future, but he thinks that significant changes could arrive in the energy market as soon as five years from now. Other presenters on Wednesday morning discussed their current businesses, such as Lyndon Rive of SolarCity and David Morris of EcoVerdance.
Rive has a thriving business installing solar panels on California homes but is working overtime to try to ramp up the supply of solar technologies to meet demand, which illustrates Khosla's scalability issue: prices are way, way too high.
Morris' company is working on carbon trading by allowing businesses to purchase credits for a chemical called Accele-Gro-M, which is then given away to farmers in developing economies. This "all-natural plant growth enhancer," according to EcoVerdence's site, is used to boost crops yields; 1 gallon can treat 12.5 acres, Morris said. The increased yields not only improve the food supply in those areas, the additional plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Carbon-trading markets have a bad reputation because many people feel they don't work to actually offset carbon production and give carbon producers ways to feel better about their production without really solving the problem. Morris' co-panelist, Erik Blachford of TerraPass, agreed that carbon-trading markets aren't perfect, "but they work."
Morris agreed. "The most costly thing we can do is nothing," he said. The FIRe conference runs through Friday, and several more panels will discuss the energy opportunity from several different points of view.
AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.
The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the
The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast as possible, the cool kids are now adding paths so data can flow down multiple outlets. This allows the chip to run at slower speeds, and therefore
Graphics processing units (GPUs) have been doing this for years. The high-performance discrete graphics chips from companies like Nvidia and AMD's ATI division have been designed with parallel performance in mind for a very long time. Certain types of customers in labs and research facilities would love to be able to tap into that kind of processing power, but GPUs require special programming techniques.
AMD is trying to bridge the gap between PC processors that are easy to program and graphics chips that offer great performance with the FireStream 9170. Think of it as a high-end graphics chip with a lot more memory than usually ships with those products, said Robert Feldstein, vice president of engineering for AMD.
The performance will be there. The 9170 is essentially one of ATI's high-end discrete graphics chips that has been tricked out with more memory and double-precision floating point units, which apparently is better than single precision. It comes with 2GBs of memory, compared with 512MBs of memory on the most powerful ATI graphics chip.
But the programming is still a little tricky. You'll need a software developer's kit, and you'll probably only want to port limited amounts of your code to run on the 9170.
"You don't have a researcher that's trying to port over thousands of lines of legacy code. They have a particular algorithm that (the researcher) knows will run well on a GPU," said Patricia Harrell, director of stream computing for AMD. "You're not worried about changing code for something that gives you an order of magnitude increase (in performance)," she said.
The 9170 isn't going to be out until the first quarter of next year, as AMD's graphics priorities for the holiday season are discrete graphics chips for PCs that all of us can use. It will cost $1,999, which might seem like a lot, but this is something you should be able to add into an existing workstation or server for a performance boost when you need it, rather than buying a fancy server for just a few lines of code.
Eventually, AMD wants to integrate this type of technology directly onto a PC or server processor. It has already announced plans to integrate graphics chips onto PC chips as part of its Fusion project, but it hasn't identified a timeframe for putting its powerful stream computing technology on a PC chip.
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