Be on the wave or under it™

• Phone Pix Not Too Bad: If you’re like me (and I know I am) you’ve been wondering how good those cameras are that come with the new wave of cell phones. Well, take a look for yourself. The pictures at the link below were taken by a Nokia 7650 camera phone and I think they look pretty good. Of course, we’ve no idea how long each picture would take to send to a friend, or how much it would cost.
  Brand2Hand
  
  
• MovieLink Update: In a previous SNS, I related the sad story of Intertainer, which claimed to be forced out of business due to collusion among the major motion picture studios. Intertainer’s suit claimed, among other things, that the studios delayed previously-agreed-upon licensing plans with Intertainer to give them time to launch a competitive site, MovieLink. The suit also claimed that two studios reneged on deals in order to stymie Microsoft, an Intertainer investor.
  
  Well, lookie here: MovieLink has announced that their service will use Microsoft’s video-streaming encoding, decoding and media player technology, and digital rights management (DRM) technology. So I guess the software giant hops off the losing horse, and comes home smelling like roses again.
  News.com
  
  
• Musician Barred From Selling Own Music: Once again reality has become a parody of itself. Musician George Ziemann was barred from distributing CDs of his band on eBay because of provisions of the truly horrific Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Ziemann, operating on a shoestring, recorded his band’s music on recordable CDs, known as CD-Rs. Turns out eBay runs an automated Verified Rights Owner program that sweeps their site looking for miscreants who are selling other people’s music on CD-Rs. Ziemann was caught in the dragnet, several times, due to lack of coordination among eBay’s minions. After much back and forth emailing, Ziemann gave up in disgust, although he finally has made his peace with eBay customer service. Only in America.
  Wired
  
  
• NanoVoyeurism: You can watch an actual nanoscale machine, known as a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS), do its thing live on the Web. The microengine at Sandia National Labs is magnified by a 200-power microscope to which an automated-zoom/pan video camera has been attached. The gear teeth of the machine are about the size of red blood cells and it is powered using electrostatic forces. One really cool thing about small machines is, they have virtually no inertia, and so Sandia has been able to attain speeds of over half of a million revolutions per minute (RPM) for up to 7 billion revolutions. As a comparison, your car engine would turn about the same number of revolutions if you drove to the moon and back 5 times. Your tax dollars at work!
  Sandia Labs
  
  
• Wireless Mirages: IBM researchers have described an effect they call a quantum mirage. Using a nanoscale elliptical ring of 36 cobalt atoms, 5,000 times smaller than a human hair, the researchers have observed that some of the properties of a single cobalt atom (the tall purple peak) placed at one of the two focus points of the elliptical ring suddenly appear at the other focus (the purple spot in the lower left), where no atom exists.
  
  Researchers think the quantum mirage effect may lead to an efficient way of moving information within future atom-scale circuits and computers. The science behind all this is pretty dense, but the scientists likened this effect to the two “whisper spots” in the Old House of Representatives Chamber (now called Statuary Hall) in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Faint sounds generated at either of the spots can be heard clearly far across the chamber at the other whisper spot because the sound bounces off the ellipse of the domed ceiling.
  
  The speed of the quantum echo effect wasn’t reported, but it made me wonder if this effect was at all related to the replication of information encoded on a laser reported in a previous SNS. Australian scientists recreated a laser beam from across a lab at 100 times the speed of light.
  IBM Almaden Lab
  IBM
  
  
• Shout Yahoo to AT&T Subscribers: Users of Yahoo’s instant messenger (IM) application can now IM subscribers on AT&T Wireless' network, even if they aren't Yahoo registered users. The new Yahoo service is free, although AT&T charges cell phone users every time they send or receive a text message.
  
  Perhaps this development will spur the adoption of cell phone text messaging, known as Short Messaging Service (SMS), in the US. Fewer than 10 million of the nation's 140 million cell phone users use their handsets for anything more than voice calls whereas Europeans send more than 1 billion text messages every day. For more information on the SMS phenomenon, see the article I wrote for the Taylor Harkins newsletter entitled, Wherever they go, there you are.
  News.com

Just the Right Stuff™

If you subscribed to CTOMentor’s Just the Right Stuff™ newsletter, over the past few months, you’d have received news nuggets like the following, along with expanded analysis. Your personalized Information Needs Profile determines which of these items you’d receive. For more information, check out CTOMentor. Although we usually include only items that are three months old in this section, here’s an early Thanksgiving present: These infonuggets are fresh, from a recent newsletter.

• October 30, 2002
  Sprint backpedals on Handspring add-on
  Sprint is going back on a promise to upgrade Handspring PDA users who bought their phone add-on. There are only 1,000 of them.
  News.com

• October 27, 2002
  Dell bearish on PDA sales potential
  Michael Dell said his company would soon launch a personal digital assistant in the United States but he sees limited near-term growth opportunities in that market.
  C|Net
  
  
• October 25, 2002
  Bill paying online exploding
  Jupiter Research says the number of households that view or pay at least one bill online will grow 23% annually through 2006, to 50 million and 52 million, respectively. The total number of bills paid online will balloon 41 percent to 3.5 billion or 32 percent of all consumer bills. That’s up from last year, when 643 million bills were paid over the Internet, 6 percent of the total.
  Dallas Business Journal
  
  
• October 31, 2002
  IDC Throws Cold Water on Web Services
  While Web services may be useful for integrating heterogeneous systems in decentralized organizations with multiple locations, using them to deliver software as services will not be a mainstream practice for at least a decade, according to IDC. IDC thinks Web services may never be able to achieve the full-scale magnitude envisioned by their proponents.
  eBizQ

Return to Mike’s Take