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Notice any similarities between the Hewlett-Packard Voodoo Envy and its thin rivals, the Apple MacBook Air or ThinkPad X300? Yes, they're all very thin. But look inside and you'll see more common features.

To deliver reasonable processing power at low power the Voodoo Envy opted for the same special low-power processors used in the Air: the Intel SP7700 and SP7500.

You won't find these processors listed on Intel's processor pricing page. They were designed originally for the MacBook Air and use a special 22mm x 22mm package and have a thermal envelope of only 20 watts at 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz. Typically, Intel processors running at those speeds have a TDP (Thermal Design Power) of 35 watts.

Correction: The ThinkPad X300 uses an Intel SL7100 not an SP processor. It comes in the same small package as the SP processors but runs at a lower clock speed--1.2GHz--and uses less power: 12 watts versus the SP's 20 watts.

HP Voodoo Envy

(Credit: Voodoo)

Interestingly, these processors are older 65-nanometer "Merom" processors--not the newest 45-nanometer Penryn generation. But there are updates on the way, according to Intel. "You can expect to see later this year a 45nm small form factor Montevina," an Intel representative said.

"Montevina" Centrino 2 processors coming out later this year will include low-power models such as the SL9400 and SU9400, running at 1.86GHz and 1.4GHz with a TDP of 17W and 10W respectively. One processor, the SU3300, will have a TDP of 5.5W.

New versions of the SP "small form factor" processors are also expected later this year. Future versions of the Envy and Air will likely use these Montevina processors.

This isn't where the silicon similarities end. The Envy, like the Air and X300, uses Intel X3100 integrated graphics and offers either a 64GB solid state drive or 80GB hard disk drive (4200RPM), just like the Air.

Finally, though not related to silicon, all three notebooks have a similar form factor: 13.3 inches. All in all, making for strikingly similar designs in many ways.

Fulfilling a second major part of its promise to make the internal workings of its Web site more extroverted, Yahoo is opening the interface for its address book for outside use.

The move could mean that Yahoo, struggling under business pressures but still a stronghold of Web activity, could become more tightly tied to others' Web services. For example, a programmer starting up a social networking site could use the interface to send invitations to a member's list of contacts stored at Yahoo.

"Our address book has for a long time been one of the top things developers wanted access to," said Chris Yeh, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. That's because, over the years, Yahoo users have filled it with billions of individual records.

Yahoo users have stored more than 500 million address books, and the service is used by more than 150 million unique users each month, Yeh said. "A lot of our address books (are) constantly being updated. It's one of the biggest sources of contact information on the Web," he said.

Opening the address book API (application programming interface) is the second major step taken so far in executing the Yahoo Open Strategy that Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh announced in April. The first step, in May, was opening the SearchMonkey project so outside coders could make more creative use of Yahoo search results.

"The address book is the second proof point. This year, we'll show proof point after proof point," Yeh said.

Yahoo Open Strategy is an attempt to link the company more with other Internet activities rather than remain a sealed-off, if sprawling, Internet domain. Through its open strategy, the company envisions outside programmers building Web applications on Yahoo's site, Yahoo services being incorporated into outside applications, and social connection information within Yahoo being used more widely.

Whether Yahoo will succeed in capturing developer attention and becoming a more dynamic part of new developments remains to be seen. A lot of action--some complementary but much of it competitive--also is taking place at rivals such as Facebook, Google, and any number of small Web 2.0 start-ups.

From the outside looking in
The address book move means outside Web sites will be able to read and write address book information--if a user grants permission through a Yahoo authorization process.

A site with a gift registry could piggyback on the address book so that a person could tell contacts about a wish list of presents, for example, Yeh said. Or a site shipping packages to others could auto-complete the address fields on a Web form.

(And something I'd like to see happen: somebody please endow the address book with an interface that doesn't look like it dates from 1998. I have a lot of contacts stored away in the Yahoo address book, and I find it excruciating to update addresses, scrub out obsolete e-mail addresses, or update mailing lists.)

Explicitly opening the service is more secure than one alternative today, in which a third-party site asks a user for Yahoo log-in credentials so it can access the site and scrape the contact information.

"There's no control over what happens after a user gives that (username and password). The third party could use it to log in to mail or any other part of Yahoo," Yeh said. "It's not a real secure method."

Yahoo isn't opening up the interface for an address book creation, though, which means it won't at least for now be usable as a generic back end for a Web site's address book needs.

Social graph theft?
One interesting possibility raised by the openness is whether an outside company might use it to steal, in effect, a user's social graph--the collection of connections each user often must laboriously reproduce as he or she joins a new site. Social graphs are a key asset of Web sites with a social element, in part because it's hard to reproduce them elsewhere. So once a user constructs one, there's a strong incentive to remain loyal to a site.

Yahoo isn't concerned about that, in part because opening the interface will mean other sites will be able not only to extract contact information from Yahoo, but also to synchronize changes on their sites back with Yahoo, Yeh said.

"I don't think we're worried about losing control over our social graph. All the things we're doing now are trying to break down some of the traditional walls Yahoo has had to the outside world," he said. "Yes, absolutely some of our data will get pulled out and be used for benefit of other systems. (But) when people use our system address book APIs, there's just as much a chance somebody will load something back into our network."

One company making use of the Yahoo address book interface is Plaxo, which hosts 40 million users' address books already.

Yahoo itself maintains multiple social graphs--for example, the address book, the Yahoo Messenger buddy lists, and the Flickr lists of contacts, friends, and family.

"Not all this data is combined yet," Yeh said, though one key part of Yahoo Open Strategy is to unify these contact lists and the related user profile pages. "The goal of the next half year is to make sure we bring that together."

The Yahoo address book is the "place we like people to store all their contact information," he said, but it's not a terribly rich social graph. For example, it doesn't currently have a good way to distinguish which contacts would be appropriate to invite to a new social service or to receive gift registry notifications.

"One of the things that we have to do is give users and opportunity to activate their social graph a little bit--essentially, to make sure they can classify the people they're most interested in communicating with on a regular basis so we know how to create a social environment around them," Yeh said.

"Going forward, we'll have to have a better solution for people so we can classify inside our address book who we're closest to and who are at further distance from us," he added. "That's a function of the social work we're doing."

Sony is prepping a notebook based on Via's OpenBook reference design, PC World is reporting.

At the WiMax Expo taking place in Taipei, contract manufacturer Quanta Computer showed a mini-laptop based on Via's just-released design that will be out in the third quarter of this year. A sharp-eyed reporter spotted Sony as the listed manufacturer for the device. When questioned, Quanta representatives apparently clammed up, and it doesn't appear Sony will be commenting either.

The mini notebook has an 8.9-inch screen, at least an 80GB hard drive, will use a 1.6-Gigahertz C7-M processor from Via, and sports a VX800 chipset. The prototype on display was running Windows Vista Home Basic.

So has the Vaio maker finally caved? In February, a Sony exec said if the Eee PC started to do well, and major PC makers started to chase the low-cost laptop market, it was the beginning of "a race to the bottom."

Too late. Hewlett-Packard, Acer, and maybe even Dell, are joining the low-cost, lightweight computing fray. And those are just the big names. Asus continues to crank out Eee PCs, and similar devices from no-names like MSI are widely anticipated.

Sony likes to position itself and its products on the high-end. But it started producing a line of its Vaio notebooks last year that sold for as low as $800. At the time, the company said it wasn't interested in going any lower.

Things, of course, can change. And though low-cost laptops are still a tiny niche of the market, it is another way for manufacturers to differentiate their product lines as notebook prices and profit margins continue their inevitable decline.

Future versions of the MacBook Air will pack larger-capacity but lower-cost solid-state drives, emblematic of the next generation of flash storage that will make a quick descent from current stratospheric pricing.

STEC solid-state drive

(Credit: STEC)

Today, a consumer pays dearly for a solid-state drive (SSD). For example, for only 64GB of SSD storage on the MacBook Air, a consumer must pay a premium of about $1,000 over the 80GB hard disk drive model.

But the cost per gigabyte of solid-state drive storage will drop as notebook PC makers like Apple switch to solid-state drives with capacities above 100GB based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology. Adoption by notebook PC makers is expected to start in the third quarter, according to industry sources.

Virtually all SSD manufacturers have moved from single-level cell (SLC)--which is used in products like the MacBook Air, the ThinkPad X300 and HP 2510p--to MLC technology.

"Compared to the price you're paying today for a 64GB drive. You'll get a 128GB of storage for less than half the price (of the 64GB drive)," said Patrick Wilkison, vice president of marketing and business development at STEC, a supplier of MLC-based solid-state drives.

STEC offers solid-state drives with capacities up to 256GB in a 1.8-inch form factor, the same physical size as those drives used in ultra-light, ultra-slim notebooks today. These drives are based on MLC technology and offer better performance than hard disk drives.

Wilkison said that his company's drives offer read speeds in excess of 100 megabytes-per-second (MBps) and write speeds better than 65MBps. This compares favorably with standard 2.5-inch hard disk drives. The STEC products page lists enterprise SSDs with read/write performance of 200MBps and 100MBps, respectively.

Intel is set to move into the high-capacity SSD market on the back of its multilevel cell technology and current SSD manufacturers such as Samsung and Toshiba have also moved from single-level cell to multilevel cell.

MLC is a more sophisticated technology than current SLC. Its advantages are not only lower cost but higher capacity. Instead of the relatively small-capacity 64GB SLC-based drives being offered today in notebook PCs, manufacturers are targeting MLC-based drives ranging up to 256GB by the end of this year or early next year.

The disadvantage is more complexity, which can result in lower performance. "Inherently, MLC is slower and inherently (has) less write cycling endurance," Intel has stated in the past.

Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, sees it that way too. "You lose some speed and you lose some reliability when you move to MLC," he said. "Errors per cell with MLC is an order of magnitude worse than SLC, which isn't that great to begin with," Cohen said.

But manufacturers like Intel and STEC say they mitigate the reliability problem and boost performance with proprietary controller chips. "We spend 85 percent of our time grappling with this reliability issue" when talking to customers, said Wilkison. "NAND (flash memory) will forever have limitations...It will be subject to a finite number of program and erase (record and delete) cycles," he said.

"There's a lot of background operations happening to manage the media. Moving the data around to make sure you're evenly wearing down the drive. You're not necessarily pounding on one specific spot and then killing a (memory) cell prematurely," Wilkison said. "This is all controller intelligence."

The kind of technology to optimize the longevity of the drive is generally referred to as wear leveling. Error detection and error correction technologies are also used, Wilkison said.

Wilkison said he believes these techniques result in solid-state drives that are just as reliable as hard disk drives. And he expects a surge in adoption of solid-state drives in notebooks. Whereas today there is only one notebook model per company that comes with a solid-state drive, the number of models offered with such drives will increase exponentially in the second half of the year, he said.

"Today it's a very boutiquey option. Volumes are very trivial," according to Wilkison. "It's one thing I do have visibility into" (because STEC is in talks with a number of computer makers). "It's an exponential number of platforms that are moving forward with SSD," he said. "What was one platform (model) per company in the first half of the year is going to be six in the second half of the year."

There will still be a "price delta" between hard disk drives and solid-state drives but that will continue to come down with MLC technology, he said. Reports have cited Intel pricing as approaching $1 per gigabyte.

Solid-state drives have no moving parts. Hard disk drives, in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, solid-state drives avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard drives. Therefore, solid-state drives are generally faster and in some respects more reliable.

Chip designer Via Technologies unveiled its OpenBook Mini-Note reference design on Monday, in a move that throws some open source into its core business of developing chips for mobile devices.

The OpenBook design aims to aid PC makers in creating ultra-small notebooks based on Via's Ultra Mobility Platform. Last year, the company trotted out its Via NanoBook reference design, a prototype designed to compete against rivals in the small-computer market but at a lower cost.

"By making the CAD files of the external panels for the OpenBook available for download, Via has simplified design customization. You can now download these open-source files from the (Via) Web site and individualize the look and feel of your OpenBook devices," Via states.

Via, in providing the source files for download, aims to deliver local Wi-Fi, long-range WiMax, and speedy data delivery via 3G mobile connectivity.

With its Via OpenBook design, the Taiwanese company is hoping to ride potential growth in the mini-notebook market, which currently ranks in the small niche category. But as 3G becomes more pervasive and users become more adept using smaller devices to carryout computing and communications functions, demand for mini-notebooks may rise.

Calling it the iPod of the book business, CitiGroup analyst Mark Mahaney says the Kindle e-book reader will generate three-quarters of a billion dollars for Amazon.com in less than two years.

That should account for up to 3 percent of Amazon's business. See his chart and reasoning here.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

His calculations assume that unit sales will grow from 189,000 by the end of this year to 2.2 million units in just two years. By then he assumes the price of the device will be just below $300. Mahaney also points out that Amazon does have the largest selection of e-book content.

Sure, Amazon has the e-book/e-book reader synergy going on, but still, his projections seem more than a little optimistic.

Besides the fact that the design leaves more than a bit to be desired, and it's expensive ($399 currently), his reasoning assumes people will completely change their reading habits, and that they'll be up for buying a separate device to do it.

More people would likely be onboard with the concept if it were rolled into their current device of choice, like a portable music player or smartphone with a decent-size screen.

The MacBook Air, IdeaPad U110, and ThinkPad X300 are the three hottest ultraportables out there. They all sport unique styling outside. And Intel blue inside.

The IdeaPad U110, like other ultraportables, uses an Intel low-voltage processor

(Credit: Lenovo)

Styling and design are now so crucial in notebooks that when a model arrives in pink the color change alone is news.

Ditto for the styling imperative for some of the sveltest, lightest, and most impressive of notebooks: the Air, X300, and just-released U110.

Scratch the surface (or lift up the keyboard in this case), however, and you'll find that their unique exteriors house similar Intel core electronics.

Does this have anything to do with nefarious strong-arm tactics on Intel's part? Or just that AMD and Nvidia don't have competitive offerings in this space? The evidence points pretty convincingly to the latter.

Graphics--an increasingly important differentiator in any computer--is the same across all three notebooks: Intel X3100 integrated graphics. No Nvidia option here. No AMD-ATI. Intel across the board. The reason for this is strictly practical. For heat and power consumption purposes, these ultrasmall designs cannot accommodate an extra graphics processor. (It should be noted also that Nvidia and AMD-ATI integrated graphics are typically not used in ultra-low-power designs.)

The processors are all Intel too with some differences. Again, a practical consideration since AMD doesn't offer ultra-low-power x86 processors with relatively high performance.

The newest 11-inch U110 IdeaPad has gone with the Intel Core 2 Duo L7500 processor. It runs at 1.60GHz and integrates 4MB of cache. The low-voltage L7500 has a thermal envelope (referred to as Thermal Design Power or TDP) of only 17 watts. Much lower than the typical 35-watt Intel mobile processor. AMD mobile processors have similar above-30-watt thermal envelopes.

The 13.3-inch ThinkPad X300 uses the Core 2 Duo SL7100 LV chip running at 1.2GHz. This is a 60 percent package "shrink" of Intel's original Core 2 Duo design and draws a mere 12 watts. Why the shrink? These variants consume less power compared to larger counterparts, giving laptops longer battery life.

The Mermon package shrink featured in the X300 debuted with great fanfare in the MacBook Air. The Air uses 1.6- and 1.8-GHz versions of this Intel chip with a 20-watt TDP.

Similarities between ultraportables extend beyond Intel to storage options too. The Air, X300, and U110 all offer either 4200RPM hard disk drive options or 64GB solid state drives. The 4200RPM drives in the U110 and Air can be real performance bottlenecks if a user pushes the usage envelope. The X300 only comes with a solid state drive.

The solid state drives, while expensive, have proved to be able performers, even bettering high-end hard disk drives in some benchmarks.

Amazon.com posted Wednesday stronger than expected first quarter results, in part driven by strong sales in its electronics and general merchandise categories.

The online retailing giant also issued a forecast for the current quarter and year that shows greater strength than Wall Street's current estimates.

Shares of Amazon, however, were down roughly 4 percent in after-hours trading to $77.77 a share.

During the first quarter, Amazon generated net income of 34 cents a share to $143 million, up 30 percent compared with the previous year. Revenues jumped 37 percent to $4.13 billion in the quarter, verses the same period a year ago.

Wall Street was expecting the company to report earnings of 32 cents a share on revenues of $4.08 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

The online retailer got a large leg up from its worldwide electronics and general merchandise sales, which soared 56 percent to $1.48 billion in the quarter, compared with year ago figures.

Amazon's global media sales rose a sharp 28 percent to $2.54 billion in the quarter, compared with last year.

"Our sales growth this quarter was driven by low prices and millions of in-stock items available for immediate shipment," Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chief executive, said in a statement. "We're grateful to our customers."

And in forecasting its second quarter and year-end, Amazon expects to generate greater revenues or stronger earnings than a consensus of analysts, according to Thomson Reuters, which tracks analysts projections.

Although Wall Street expects Amazon to post revenues of $3.84 billion in the second quarter, Amazon gave guidance it expects to exceed that level - with expectations of generating between approximately $3.88 billion to $4.1 billion.

And while analysts expect Amazon to post operating income of $125.3 million in the quarter, the company said it expects to do between $120 million to $160 million.

The online retailing giant expects its year-end operating income will outstrip current year-end estimates, saying it expects to raise between $740 million to $940 million in operating income. Wall Street had been expecting Amazon to do $662.3 million for the year.

And on the revenue front, Amazon expects to generate $19.1 billion to $20 billion, compared with Wall Street's projections of $19.3 billion.

Like some of the luckiest people in high tech, John Buckman made a mint on his first company and now dabbles in passion projects.

But one of his latest companies may prove he's more than just lucky, at least if you buy the Silicon Valley adage: Strike it rich once, you're lucky. Twice, you're smart.

BookMooch founder John Buckman

(Credit: BookMooch)

BookMooch, Buckman's 20-month-old service that lets people trade their used books for the cost of postage, is making a small impression on a giant online retailer, Amazon.com. Even though BookMooch is free to members, the site generates an estimated half-million dollars in annual book sales for Amazon because of a browser plug-in called the Moochbar, which matches members' book wish lists to Amazon's retail inventory. For every 25 books swapped on BookMooch, at least one person buys a new book on Amazon through the Moochbar. BookMooch collects 8.34 percent on each of those Amazon sales.

"We're making money by accident," said Buckman, who spoke recently at a technology luncheon near his home in Berkeley, Calif.

Apart from still-negligible sales, what should be more of a wake-up call to the book industry is how the site is tapping into the so-called long tail of book retail with a social, free service. The long tail, as the theory goes, accounts for as much as 60 percent of the goods sold in an industry, or all those unpopular works that find a home with only a few. It's said that the lion's share of Amazon's book sales come from works that have a low sales ranking.

What's more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books--distributed among its members--that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company's 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said. BookMooch's decentralized warehouse of books serves the long tail the same way that centralized warehouses like those of Ingram's serves the top of the tail.

"This is meant to be a noncommercial business, with no ads and no fees. We're just trying to do something fun and huge--like be the biggest bookstore on the planet," said Buckman, who sits on the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and European equivalent, the Open Rights Group. "It seems to me we should be able to trade more books than Amazon sells."

BookMooch isn't alone in appealing to people's desire to trade books or consume in a more earth-friendly way. Novel Action, Bookswap.com, and Swaptree.com are just a few of the sites that let members trade books. And while none of them is rivaling the traffic that Amazon and Google Books garner per month, they are collectively proving there's demand in the long tail. Eco-online book retailer Better World Books, which resells used books and donates some of the proceeds to global literacy projects, recently raised $4.5 million in its first round of financing to grow its business.

Buckman is a true Internet veteran. In 1994, he founded the e-mail software company Lyris with his wife, Jan. During a recent talk, he said Lyris was originally designed for groups of like-minded people to easily exchange e-mail. But, he said, it eventually became known as a spam company when it started selling to larger marketing clients that would use the software to send mass e-mails to customers. For him, the company was "desperately difficult and boring to run."

Four years later, he sold Lyris to J.L. Halsey Corp., but continued to head it for seven more years. During the luncheon, Buckman said his goal was to earn at least $3 million from the deal so that he could live comfortably on the $90,000 in annual interest. But he ended up with $32 million after 11 years with Lyris, more than enough to fund Magnatune and BookMooch.

Influenced by Buckminster Fuller
Long inspired by the inventor Buckminster Fuller, Buckman wanted to change the world by creating a company for which people would want to work for free, if they could. That's when he turned his sights to the music industry.

In 2004, Buckman started Magnatune, an Internet-era record label that would take on the major labels. Designed in the Linux model, in which developers can help improve the back-end of the music site, Magnatune is a music label that signs largely unknown artists and lets Web surfers decide how much they want to pay for their music, starting at about $5 for a record. Magnatune splits the sales with the artist 50-50.

Despite the promise for artists, Buckman said that Magnatune hasn't taken off. After five years in operation, it now breaks even with four employees. One reason for the uphill battle, he said, is that much of the $12 billion in annual sales from the U.S. music industry comes from music licensing. And because those licensing deals largely get done between two friends at a bar in Los Angeles, Magnatune artists are left out of the big music label conversations.

"Big companies don't want to do business with small fish," he said.

However, he learned a larger lesson with Magnatune. He created the service with the same construct as old-media: push something out to people and they will consume it, he said. He failed at creating a participatory environment in which people buy into the service, or have a personal stake in it.

BookMooch accomplishes that by asking people to put up 10 books of their own to receive one point, which will allow them to get their first book for free. In that deal, the new member must be willing to send off three of their own books to other BookMooch members. Unlike Lala.com and Peerflix.com--sites which have fallen down on paying postage for members--BookMooch requires that members pay to send the book. People who have more points than they can use on BookMooch, known as power moochers, can donate their points to charity groups on the site.

So far, BookMooch members have swapped as many as 700,000 books. The average member swaps 3.5 books per month, up from one book per month a year ago. The most-traded books on the site, whose membership consists largely of older moms, include Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (traded 780 times) and The Kite Runner (traded 585 times).

It's a sizable accomplishment considering that the Berkeley-based company has only two employees, and the project is funded solely by Buckman.

"If you want to change the world, find a better way to do something and have everyone follow it," Buckman said. "I'm not looking to generate revenue because I already made my $32 million."

When asked if he would entertain a buyout offer of his company for another $32 million, he said he would definitely have a conversation.

Even if he doesn't strike it rich with BookMooch, he may do something more valuable...like prove there's another way to tap into the book business.