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Inside tech: Gizmos, people and big ideas
Inside tech: Gizmos, people and big ideas
Yahoo | 2008.05.15 • 13:22 EDT
Over the past few weeks, Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor and troubled-firm troublemaker, has been buying up shares in Yahoo, looking for all the world like he was preparing to oust the company's board of directors. Turns out, yup, that was his plan all along.
In a letter to Yahoo's chairman, Roy Bostock, Icahn notified the company today that he'd be putting up a slate of alternate board members to replace current management.
Icahn's board members favor a deal with Microsoft; if shareholders approve them, they'd try to set up negotiations with MS, which walked away from a merger with Yahoo when Yahoo demanded a higher price.
It was that demand that got Icahn's goat. In his letter, Icahn says:
It is unconscionable that you have not allowed your shareholders to choose to accept an offer that represented a 72 percent premium over Yahoo's closing price of $19.18 on the day before the initial Microsoft offer. I and many of your shareholders strongly believe that a combination between Yahoo and Microsoft would form a dynamic company and more importantly would be a force strong enough to compete with Google on the Internet.
Icahn, who says that he has the support of other Yahoo shareholders, notes that he's recently purchased 59 million shares of Yahoo and has asked the Federal Trade Commission for clearance to purchase $2.5 billion more of the firm.
As the New York Times takeover expert Andrew Ross Sorkin notes, Icahn is often successful in his bids to change governance at companies, but he's had some failures -- he failed in his effort to change the board at Time Warner.
Moreover, even if Icahn's board gets in, there's no indication that Microsoft will be willing to deal with them. The company may simply have soured on Yahoo.
Column | 2008.05.15
But wait, the overachieving, high-ambition young stars who power the Web these days aren't irredeemably awful.
By Farhad Manjoo
I'll be honest: I was not especially looking forward to reading "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good," Sarah Lacy's new book about the phoenixlike rise of "Web 2.0" entrepreneurs from the ashes of the dot-com flameout. It wasn't that I had anything against Lacy, a journalist and fixture on the local tech scene, but her subject, Silicon Valley and its new best and brightest, seemed like homework.
For one thing, the Valley's resilience, its capacity for innovation, the alchemical way it turns introverted brilliance into billions -- these have been chronicled before, often, and very well. Two, the phrase "Web 2.0," now a generic label for any Internet venture, oozes blind optimism the way "dot-com" once did, even though there's little evidence, yet, that the scene's biggest companies -- Facebook, say -- have hit on a way to actually make money.
And also, there's this: Silicon Valley is an ugly place. Not physically, but, for all its gleeful output, socially. We're talking about the global mecca for antisocial, intensely competitive workaholics who aim to beat each other at achieving obscene wealth. Yeah, I want to read about that.
And yet, trust me, you do. Lacy, who's worked as hard to get her story as her subjects do to get their billions, manages to paint Silicon Valley's over-achieving, high-ambition young stars as people who aren't irredeemably awful. And it turns out that folks who are just shy of intolerable -- but not quite -- make for terrific entertainment.
By tunneling deep into their pasts, their paranoias and anxieties, their troubled romantic relationships, their outsized dreams -- and mostly by hanging out with them and getting great stories -- Lacy delivers a sophisticated psychological study of an ascendant economic class. "Once You're Lucky" becomes, in the process, something bigger and better than a chronicle of Silicon Valley. It's really about the peculiar personalities that all innovative economies demand -- the people who, in five or ten years, are sure to run the world, or at least your life.
Apple | 2008.05.13 • 12:47 EDT
Starting today, you can log on to iTunes and find episodes of "Deadwood," "The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Sex and the City," "Rome," and "Flight of the Conchords," HBO shows that have long been unavailable online. The shows, like all iTunes episodes, can be played in iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, and of course Macs and Windows PCs.
So what? Isn't Apple always adding new shows to iTunes?
Yes, but there's something different about these shows: Episodes of "Deadwood," "The Sopranos," and "Sex and the City" will sell for $2.99, greater than the $1.99 that's been standard for all shows sold by Apple.
It's only a dollar more, but the price marks a big backroom breakthrough.
See, last year, NBC tried to get the same deal from Apple: The network, wary of Apple's growing power in digital sales, wanted to be able to name its price when it put its shows on iTunes. NBC wanted to sell some at less than $1.99 per episode, and others at more than $1.99 per episode. Some reports suggested NBC aimed to price some episodes for as much as $5 each.
Apple wouldn't budge. The company, in all its products, often strives to reduce choice as a way to reduce confusion; selling different shows at different prices, Apple reportedly worried, would mess with the simplicity of its store.
So NBC and Apple parted ways, with NBC taking its shows to Amazon.
But apparently Apple was willing to make an exception for HBO. While "The Wire" and two other HBO shows will go for $1.99 each, the more in-demand HBO series will fetch $1 more.
Is HBO simply special? Should other networks expect the same concession when they renegotiate their contracts with Apple? You can bet they'll demand it.
And so, perhaps soon, expect to find many pricier shows on iTunes.
2008.05.13 • 10:40 EDT
If you're near the Haight in San Francisco on Wednesday evening, you're welcome to stop by The Booksmith, where I'll be discussing my book, "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." And if you work at Google, I'll be at your Mountain View HQ on Monday for an Authors@Google reading.
In the book I examine the psychological forces that push us to conceive of "reality" as something personal -- to see truth filtered through our own perceptions.
This trend, I argue, has been exacerbated by digital media, and plays a part in many of our controversies -- for instance the Swift Boat Vet campaign, Global Warming and AIDS denial, and theories regarding what really happened on 9/11 or during the 2004 presidential election.
Do you agree? Or, better, disagree? Come by, we can chat.
Wed. May 14, 7 p.m.
The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, Calif. 94117
and/or
Mon. May 19, 1 p.m.
Mountain View, Calif.
2008.05.12 • 15:24 EDT
Research in Motion has finally unveiled its much-anticipated next BlackBerry, called, now, the BlackBerry Bold (aka the 9000).
The name's meant to tell you the thing is pretty, as if you needed someone to tell you. It's self-evidently very slick, and I don't mean in a graded-on-a-curve, pretty-good-looking-for-a-BlackBerry way.
Look at the indentations on the keys, the blazing display, the comfortable hand-sized form factor. It's so nice you might as well call it iPhony.
Not that I got to see and touch one. Only a few very special tech reporters did, CNet's Bonnie Cha among them. She was blown away by the Bold, especially its 480 x 320-pixel, 65,000-color display:
I can pretty much say I've never seen a better-looking display on a smartphone. Colors pop off the screen, and it's really amazing how sharp and crisp everything looks on the display.We watched a couple of videos, and for the first time, we didn't notice any of the pixelation or blurriness that you typically get with phones. In addition, the menu interface has been revamped with a much more modern look and icons.
The Bold, whose price is still a mystery, will also include many wireless technologies -- Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and EV-DO and HSPDA networking (read 3G, faster-than-iPhone wireless Internet).
It's also got integrated GPS, which allows for geo-tagging your photos.
All these features fit in a package 4.5 inches tall, 2.6 inches wide, 0.55 inches thin. It weighs 4.7 ounces.
PC Mag, which also got to try out the Bold, notes:
One feature the Bold doesn't have is a touch screen. [CEO Mike] Lazaridis said BlackBerry's core corporate customers were cool to touch screens, preferring physical keyboards. But some sort of touch screen could potentially appear on a future model."People tell us, don't futz around with your keyboard," he said. "They say, whatever you do, don't get rid of that keyboard. But I don't think anyone could accuse us of not reinventing ourselves all the time, and you're going to see different devices from us."
AT&T announced today that it would offer service for the Bold, which will likely go on sale sometime this summer.
Note: I'm going to delete any comments that refer to the Blackberry as "crackberry." I understand the urge; you want to sound coolly anti-, better than those folks who need to check in every 5 minutes. But make your point without using that lame word, which was cool for at most five minutes back in 2002. I'm serious.
2008.05.09 • 15:17 EDT
I just got off the phone with David Havanich Jr., president of Green Machine Solutions, a company in Jupiter, Fla., that promises to increase your car's gas mileage by as much as 60 percent.
The product is called Hydro 4000, a $1,200 device that sits under your hood and uses electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. The hydrogen and oxygen are then fed into your engine, and the mixture causes gasoline to burn more efficiently, Havanich says.
"Instead of having anywhere from 5 to 15 percent of your fuel not getting used and going into your catalytic converter, you can burn all your fuel," he told me.
I learned about the Hydro 4000 from a local news report on WPTV Channel 5 in West Palm Beach. Jamie Holmes, the reporter there, was skeptical of Havanich's claims, so he tried the Hydro 4000 on the channel's Dodge Durango news van.
On a dynamometer -- basically a treadmill for a car -- the news van, running at 55 miles per hour for 20 minutes, got an average of 9.4 miles per gallon before installation of the Hydro 4000.
Holmes reports:
We then ran our truck on the street for close to a month with the Hydro-4000 running. The owners said this would give the device time to clean out the engine. We then put our vehicle back on the dynamometer, and did the same test all over again.And guess what? With the device on, we were now averaging 23.2 miles to the gallon. That's 61 percent better than the gas mileage we were previously getting.
Channel 5's math is off there; a jump from 9.4 MPG to 23.2 MPG is actually a 147 percent gain in gas mileage. Which sounds amazing, doesn't it?
Havanich told me that Channel 5's results were ideal, and that more typical driving conditions -- i.e., not on a dynamometer -- would yield something closer to a 20 to 60 percent efficiency gain.
But if gasoline prices keep going up, even the smaller gain could make a Hydro 4000 a good investment.
Unless, of course, the whole thing's bunk. Which could be true: Hydrogen-injection devices aren't new, and as in many debates about energy, there remains fundamental disagreement about whether they work.
The basic problem is this: The device uses electricity produced by your car's alternator to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. Does the energy it uses for electrolysis exceed the energy it saves by making your engine consume fuel more efficiently -- and is it, therefore, phony?
Depends on whom you ask. There's at least one trucking company that swears by hydrogen boosting. And in online forums, some people report getting better gas mileage after installing such devices (just as WPTV did).
But there's skepticism that drivers may have adjusted their driving styles after installing the hydrogen boost, and that the adjustment might be the true reason for the savings.
Many online point out that the Discovery Channel show "Mythbusters" once investigated hydrogen boosters and pronounced them busted: The booster device failed to produce much hydrogen at all, "Mythbusters" found.
But others criticize "Mythbusters'" methods there, and say that a more conventional test -- such as WVPT's -- would have proved that the thing works.
So, the question still seems up in the air. Havanich offers a 60-day money-back guarantee on the device, so if you're interested, you risk little by ordering it (you need to have it installed -- and, if necessary, removed -- by a mechanic).
I'm going to ask my bosses here at Salon to buy me a Hydro 4000 to review. If they go for it, I'll let you know whether it works.
MySpace|Facebook | 2008.05.09 • 12:06 EDT
Among the tech set, Facebook's the social network that gets all the love. It's Facebook that allowed outside developers to create applications on the site, Facebook that's hiring off all the execs from Google, and Facebook that gets profiled by the likes of "60 Minutes."
And yet it's MySpace, still the world's largest social network, that has recently been acting like the Internet-ethics nerd. And I mean that in the best way: On Thursday MySpace announced Data Availability, a project that will let users move their data to sites across the Web.
This is a long-standing Web community request, not to mention a hobbyhorse of mine. When you put your data -- a list of your favorite movies, of your friends, your relationship status, all of life's coordinates -- into a Web app, there ought to be a way for you to easily, automatically move that stuff around to other places. After all, it's your data -- what right does Facebook have to tell you what you can do with it?
MySpace is allowing just that. Users will be able to choose among other sites -- Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter for now -- that they'd like to connect with their MySpace data. If you connect to Yahoo, for instance, then anything you change on MySpace will be reflected at Yahoo, too.
Facebook has been much more reluctant to allow other sites access to your data (with your permission). In a famous flap a few months ago, tech-blog wag Robert Scoble tested out a script to copy his Facebook contacts to the online address book Plaxo, only to have Facebook temporarily suspend his account.
Chris DeWolfe, MySpace's CEO, told reporters yesterday that the new project "is open to any site out there that wants to work with us, so we're happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project."
Let's hope they will. Facebook's unofficial mission is to build the world's social graph -- to map out all the connections between human beings on the planet. To do so, the company will need a lot of our data. The least we can expect in return is some control over it.
Column | 2008.05.09
With a fictional universe of astonishing cleverness and complexity, this is one of the smartest video games ever created.
By Farhad Manjoo
"Grand Theft Auto IV" wears its reputation on its sleeve, most likely in an ambidextrous shoulder holster with a double-mag pouch. Fans of the series come to this latest game, which was released last week, with high expectations: that its landscape will be lush and flexible, offering endless opportunities to wreak havoc over a tyrannized virtual populace -- but also intricate and clever, stamped with in jokes, futuristic absurdities and wry references to pop culture and politics.
Detractors, too, keep a checklist handy for any new "GTA" release. In a game that aims to re-create the underside of urban life, there'll be guns and crooks and prostitutes and sex and drugs and booze. The combination, under the thumbs of 14-year-olds and re-created in high-def right in your living room, has proved a recurrent boon to the nation's concern industry.
Video Games | 2008.05.07 • 15:28 EDT
Grand Theft Auto IV
Take-Two Interactive, the publishers of "Grand Theft Auto IV," announced today that sales of the game topped $500 million in the first week, more than what many analysts had expected. On its first day on the shelves -- April 29 -- 3.6 million copies were purchased, a retail value of $310 million.
The huge take boosts Take-Two's position in its wrangling with Electronic Arts, the video game behemoth that's put forth a takeover bid for the "GTA" publisher.
But there's another stat worth noting -- "Iron Man" took in more than $100 million at the box office over the weekend. There'd been some speculation that "GTA" would cause young men to stay indoors this week, lowering the take at the cinema. As Ars Technica notes, that didn't quite happen. Looks like movies and games can coexist.
Microsoft|Politics | 2008.05.07 • 12:47 EDT
Here are three quick morning items:
"Years' worth of internal Pentagon memos, military talking points and interview tapes and transcripts with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are all now posted to the Pentagon's website," Noah writes. He's asking his readers to go through the stash in search of the fishiest, juiciest bits.
Already, people have found something interesting, if unsurprising: Talking points and a conference-call transcript show that the Pentagon was feeding inflated estimates of Iraqi troop strength -- and a promise that the insurgency was in its last throes -- to the generals, just as it was to the public.
One of Smith's readers imagined the IM transcript:
TheRodster42: lol ur toast
WolfieSweater69: stfu, we won IN
TheRodster42: lol NC pwned u
WolfieSweater69: rev wright said wut?
TheRodster42: lol typ white person...
Actually, according to one of the Baudboys, they're just one of the a cappella groups at MS. There's also the Microtones, and a theater group, The Microsoft Theater Troupe, which does Christmas shows (such as, recently, "Grease.")
Of a cappella groups at rival tech firms, Baudboys bass Dave McEwan tells Mickey,
We sang the national anthem for the Microsoft Hockey Challenge -- where they play the teams from Sun Microsystems or Google. Someone from Sun said, We have an a cappella group that would kick your ass! But then they disbanded. Groups come and go at Google. We think they're running from us.... I'd love for someone from Google to hear that and challenge us.
Watch a Baudboys performance here.
Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer covering technology and tech culture. He lives in San Francisco.
E-mail Farhad at
machinist@salon.com
Farhad’s new book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” examines propaganda on the Web, cable news and talk radio.
