News Blog

Google users are starting to see an updated interface to the iGoogle home page, according to the Google Operating System blog.

iGoogle lets users select various modules such as mail, photos, games, or a to-do list; it competes chiefly with My Yahoo but also with sites from rivals including Netvibes and PageFlakes.

As expected, the revamped iGoogle provides a navigation bar on the left edge of the screen that lets users select iGoogle gadgets and perform other functions. Another feature could mean more dramatic changes to the site, though: a "canvas view" that lets gadgets fill up the whole page also will permit ads on iGoogle.

The change is on schedule: Google said it would start switching users to the new iGoogle look this month. In a blog entry this week, Google said canvas view would be available to more users in July.

Google also is working on changes that will accommodate gadgets that run on the OpenSocial foundation, which at least theoretically will enable them to run not just on iGoogle but on other OpenSocial sites, too.

If you live near one of 117 Best Buy stores and are desperately in need of unloading your rusty, broken-down gadgets, you're in luck.

Beginning Sunday, Best Buy began allowing customers to bring two items per household per day into some stores in Baltimore, San Francisco, and Minnesota for free. But if you're looking to unload that mammoth front-projection TV--not so fast, there are some restrictions.

Unclutter your life--for free--courtesy of Best Buy.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET Networks)

Best Buy says they will take computers, phones, cameras, PC peripherals, and more, but only TVs and monitors smaller than 32 inches diagonal. TVs larger than that, as well as air conditioners, microwaves, and large household appliances, aren't eligible.

Cost is often an issue for recycling programs. Almost all states have electronic waste recycling laws, and most of them put the cost burden on the manufacturer or retailer that actually does the recycling. That's why though other electronics retailers have programs to take back undesired electronics and PCs, there's often a fee for their trouble.

Over the long weekend, some of us were slouching down in plush movie theater seats (flanked by a 24-ounce Icee and a tub o' popcorn ) and enjoying the latest adventures of Indiana Jones. Others, however, were setting off on an actual adventure.

Roz Savage, shown here in 2007, aims to reach Hawaii in the next few months, the first leg in her solo journey rowing across the Pacific Ocean.

(Credit: Roz Savage )

British rower Roz Savage pushed away from San Francisco and set off under the Golden Gate Bridge just before midnight Saturday, in her second attempt to become the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. Last summer, Savage set off only to be foiled by bad weather some two weeks into the trip. She was rescued by the Coast Guard about 90 miles off the California coast.

Savage, who also aims to raise awareness about the effects of pollution in our oceans, is rowing across the ocean in three stages over three years. She expects to reach Hawaii in a few months. In all, she plans to travel more than 7,000 miles, ending up in Australia.

Among the safety gadgets she has aboard her 24-foot boat is a positioning beacon from Marine Track. Find out her latest position by going to her blog. Information includes latitude, longitude, and speed. Even better, if you want to develop some virtual sea legs, you can subscribe to Savage's podcast.

On Day 2 of her blog, Savage writes about meeting a couple of marine biologists out by the Farallon Islands. They offered her beer, bananas, and M&Ms. She declined the beer. "I traded them a business card for the food. Don't ask me why I have business cards onboard. You just never know who you're going to meet when you're mid-ocean, and I hate to miss the opportunity to make a new friend."

Compelling gadgets are the key to consumers' hearts--and wallets--during a recession, according to a consumer spending study.

Of those surveyed, 37 percent of U.S. consumers say they plan to cut back when it comes to entertainment purchases this year, according to an upcoming report from The NPD Group, "Entertainment Trends in America." Just under half of the 11,000 interviewed for the study said they'll likely spend the same amount this year as in 2007.

But what's more interesting is that 18 percent say they plan to spend more, despite widespread concerns over an unstable economy. More specifically, respondents in that group say they see themselves buying gadgets more than content.

"These are the people who tend to be in a higher economic situation so the cost of technology may not be such a barrier for them, whether it's a Blu-ray player or a gaming console or a new iPod," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD. "Those are the things they seem to be anticipating purchasing...That's not to say they're not going to buy movies or music, but their expectation is if they're spending more, they're spending on devices and consumer electronics."

In the recession in 2001, spending on entertainment devices and content remained relatively steady, but this time around, as the price of gas and food continues to climb, the landscape of the consumer electronics industry is very different.

In 2001, there was a new PlayStation game console, and DVD and CD sales were still on the upswing.

"What you're looking at now that's different, especially in music is CD sales have been down pretty significantly. DVD is starting to look like a mature product category," said Crupnick. "The willingness of people in bad times to collect things is less than it was five, six, seven years ago."

Correction: the original article misattributed comments to the two Google executives I interviewed. The attributions have been changed.

Google's move on Wednesday to open up an online shop for third-party Google Apps add-ons, called Google Solutions Marketplace, may make more people take Web widgets more seriously--even enterprise developers.

Widgets, or gadgets, allow people to embed small applets within a Web page for things like displaying the weather, or set alarms on a PC or other Web device.

A motion chart made with Google gadgets, a way to customize Google Docs.

(Credit: Google)

But Google Gadgets is also one way that Google encourages software developers to customize Google Apps.

In March, Google launched a visualization API (application programming interface) for its Google Docs and a gallery of gadgets that use the API. With it, people can display data from a Google Web spreadsheet in a variety of ways, like a pie chart, map, time chart, or funnel chart.

But that visualization API is the beginning of more to come, Google executives told me back in March. And gadgets allow you to tap those APIs to customize Google applications.

The ability to tailor applications for a specific purpose or industry is very important to businesses, and thus any company trying to sell to them.

Microsoft refers to Office as a "platform" that can be customized with its flagship Visual Studio programming tool.

Salesforce.com has invested heavily in AppExchange and its Force.com hosted development platform to create an ecosystem of third-party add-ons and hosted applications.

The advantage of the gadgets approach is that it's relatively simple--a Webmaster could put something together. Also, gadgets are portable to other Web pages, like iGoogle's customized home page.

"Gadgets are a very approachable coding model and you can do surprisingly useful things very quickly," said Sam Schillace, the engineering director who oversees collaborative applications at Google. "We haven't been shy about talking about programming the Web in smaller pieces and gadgets work really well."

Another benefit to the gadget approach, from Google's perspective, is that they are "native to the Internet," in that they are written using Ajax and designed to run in the "cloud."

Google is hosting its second developer conference in May, called Google I/O, to encourage developers to write more applications for the Web. On Monday, it launched Google App Engine, a place where they can test and host those applications.

Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager who manages the spreadsheet editor at Google Docs, said he wrote a gadget to translate content in Google Docs. Another simple example is creating charts for soccer team statistics, he said.

But in the context of a business, one could imagine more complicated applications. For example, a business could mash up information from an order management system and customer database and then present it in a Google spreadsheet for its customers to view over the Web.

How far Google's gadgets approach will go into business is not clear yet as it's early on. But it's obvious that gadgets makes sense for businesspeople--even SAP is doing it.

Now it's a question of how far developers can push the limits of this gadget business.

Because of various glitches, government officials plan to scrap plans to use handheld devices, like the one shown during a test phase here, to collect data from households that don't mail in their 2010 census forms. The GPS-enabled gadgets are still expected to be used, however, to help compile accurate address lists before the decennial tally begins.

(Credit: U.S. Census)

So much for a "high-tech" census in 2010.

Department of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez plans to tell Congress on Thursday that the next constitutionally mandated count of the U.S. population will be taking place, once again, via old-fashioned pencil and paper, according to a report by National Journal's NextGov blog.

Census officials had been hoping to introduce handheld computers into the process of collecting and transmitting data, but numerous glitches along the way have stymied those plans.

That means, in part because of "recent increases in gas prices, postage, and printing" and the need to hire more census workers, Congress will need to allocate as much as $3 billion in additional taxpayer dollars for the 2010 census, Gutierrez was expected to tell a House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees such spending matters. That means the entire price tag for the decennial process could climb to as much as $14.5 billion.

In mid-March 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau plans to send out forms to all American households, Gutierrez said in prepared testimony obtained by NextGov. Then, from April through June, some 580,000 census "enumerators" will go door-to-door in an attempt to interview those who haven't mailed in the data.

After the 2000 census, government officials started plotting ways to make that "non-response follow-up" process, as it's called in bureaucrat-speak, more efficient, and they settled on the idea of outfitting census workers with handheld computers. But that project, managed through a 5-year, $600 million contract with Harris Corporation inked in 2006, has since "experienced significant schedule, performance, and cost issues," Gutierrez said in prepared testimony.

The Commerce Department, which houses the Census Bureau, decided after conferring with a panel composed of independent consultants to scrap the handheld-computer method this time around and go with paper. Gutierrez said the department has since made "substantial management changes" in an effort to keep the census on track.

The handheld gadget project isn't entirely a lost cause, though, Gutierrez plans to say.

Workers enlisted by the Census Bureau to validate and update the location of every household in the country still plan to use GPS-enabled Harris computers to do that work during the year before the decennial count, which Gutierrez says will permit "the most accurate and comprehensive address list in the census' history."

Best Buy reported its fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday and the results were surprisingly good.

The largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. posted earnings of $737 million, which comes out to $1.71 per share. Analysts were expecting $1.65 per share. Fourth-quarter earnings per share were also significantly better than the $1.55 posted the same quarter a year ago.

For the fiscal year, revenue was also up 11 percent over a year earlier to reach $40 billion, which Best Buy said was aided by the opening of 137 new retail outlets worldwide.

Wednesday's results sent Best Buy shares up 8 percent in pre-market trading, but they fell back down the same day that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said a U.S. recession "is possible." But for CE makers and analysts watching consumer spending habits, Best Buy's earnings must be somewhat comforting since it appears, at least through the end of March, that people are still shopping for what are essentially luxury goods--TVs, GPS systems, cameras, phones, and notebook PCs.

But it's only a slight comfort because Best Buy's chief competitors aren't handling the current situation nearly as gracefully. Circuit City is having a rough time of it, and CompUSA was killed off late last year, only to be resurrected in January by Systemax.

Best Buy does have some things going for it that its rivals don't. For one, it's cornered the market as the place to shop for a PC at retail. It's the only big-box retailer that offers every single major PC brand--Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, and Acer.

A new report on the tech habits of women shows that the female of the species is edging out the male in the areas of DVR use and ownership of portable game devices.

The study, done independently by Solutions Research Group, and released Thursday, was undertaken to explore the "digital lifestyles" of American women. Data was collected from more than 2,000 respondents between October 2006 and February 2008.

What the final tally shows is that women are as comfortable with popular consumer technology as men (not really a surprise), and that they're making significant inroads into the gaming lifestyle, which has long been dominated by men.

Women who own DVRs spend more than half of their TV viewing time watching time-shifted content.

(Credit: TiVo)

For example, SGR characterizes women who own DVRs as much "more enthusiastic" about them than men. That's because women spend 56 percent of their TV-watching time viewing time-shifted content on their DVR. Men spend 42 percent of their time using their DVRs. The discrepancy between the two has much to do with the type of shows men and women watch, according to Kaan Yigit, SGR's director of syndicated studies.

"Men are more likely to watch sports, which has more impact live, obviously," he said. Women are more likely to watch half-hour comedies and 1-hour dramas, he said. Because of those same content preferences, women are also more likely to stream television shows from network TV Web sites.

In the gaming realm, men continue to lead in playing video game consoles--half of all men had played a console game in the previous month, whereas 38 percent of women had--but women are demonstrating a taste for portable game devices. Fourteen percent of women who describe themselves as "gamers" own a PSP (PlayStation Portable), compared to 11 percent of men who are gamers.

"It's a marginal difference, but in every other category, men or boys are slightly or substantially higher, as in the case of Xbox 360 ownership," Yigit said. "We find in general that girls and young women are more likely to skew to (owning) portable units, like the Game Boy Advance for the convenience and portability."

What do you do when some of the biggest names in consumer electronics might be in violation of your patents?

Why, try to take away their right to sell their products in the U.S., of course.

Blu-ray players like this one from Samsung uses technology a former Columbia professor claims she patented.

(Credit: Samsung)

Columbia University Professor Emeritus Gertrude Neumark Rothschild says 30 companies are infringing on her patent for laser and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). In response, she wants the U.S. government to ban those companies' imports to the U.S. that are in violation. A lot of companies use LEDs and laser diodes for a variety of reasons--Sony uses blue laser diodes in its Blu-ray players, for example, and LEDs are used as light sources in TV and notebook computer screens.

But the list of 30 companies includes many of the giants of the industry: Sony, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Toshiba, Panasonic, Motorola, Nokia, Pioneer, and Samsung.

Sounds like a bit of an uphill climb, right? (Something she probably knows a bit about--Rothschild was the first woman to be named a chair of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science department at Columbia) Well, the U.S. International Trade Commission gave Rothschild a boost when it recently agreed to investigate all 30 companies over her claim.

She also has a history of standing up to the man: Rothschild sued two companies in 2005 over similar semiconductor patents and settled with them out of court.