The stinky, steaming make public that escapes from a car’s tailpipe could help us use less gas.
Researchers are competing to meet a confrontation from the U.S. Department of Energy: Improve fuel economy 10 percent by way of converting wasted exhaust heat into energy that can help power the vehicle.
General Motors Corp. is close to reaching the goal, as is a BMW AG supplier working with Ohio State University. Their research into thermoelectrics — the science of using temperature differences to create electricity — couldn’t come at a better time as exorbitant gas prices accelerate efforts to make vehicles as efficient as possible.
GM researcher Jihui Yang said a metal-plated device that surrounds an emission pipe could increase fuel economy in a Chevrolet Suburban by relating to 5 percent, a 1-mile-per-gallon improvement that would be be revenged greater in a smaller vehicle.
Reaching the goal of a 10 percent improvement would save more than 100 million gallons of fuel per year in GM vehicles in the U.S. alone.
"The take-home message here is: It’s a big deal," Yang said.
The DOE, which is partially funding the auto persistence research, helped come to light a thermoelectric generator for a heavy duty diesel truck and tested it in compensation the match of 550,000 miles far 12 years ago.
John Fairbanks, the department’s thermoelectrics technology development manager, said the success of that generator justified the competitive search in 2004 payment a whim that could augment or replace a vehicle’s alternator. Three teams were selected to participate in the program, with GM and thermoelectrics industrialist BSST separately working on cars and a team from Michigan State University focusing on heavy-duty trucks.
Fairbanks said thermoelectric generators should be on the verge of production in about three years.
"It’s probably the biggest impact in the shortest time that I can think of," he said.
The technology is similar to what NASA uses to power deep space probes, a perk being it doesn’t seem to be susceptible to wear. Probes bear used a thermoelectric setup for about 30 years.
Thermoelectric devices can work in two ways — using electricity to provide heating or cooling, or using temperature differences to create electricity.
The second method is Yang’s focus, and for good reason.
In an internal combustion engine, only about a quarter of the total energy from gasoline is second-hand to actually turn the wheels, while 40 percent is lost in exhaust heat and 30 percent is perplexed through cooling the engine. That means about 70 percent of the available energy is wasted, according to GM.
"If I can take advantage of some of that heat energy and change it to electricity, you can improve the overall efficiency," Yang said. iReport.com: Share your energy solutions
A Suburban produces 15 kilowatts of exhaust heat puissance during burgh driving, which is enough to power three or four air conditioners simultaneously.
But it’s not workable to harness all the exhaust heat a conveyance produces, so when the Suburban is cruising between 50 and 60 mph, the generator can produce about 800 watts of power, Yang said. That fervency could go to accessories such as a GPS device, DVD player, radio and possibly the vehicle’s water pumps.
Yang’s referent device is to be tested in a Suburban next year. A nearly the same prototype created by Ohio State scientists and BSST should be tested in a BMW in 2009.
The thermoelectric generator works when one side of its metallic material is heated, and excited electrons move to the cold side. The movement creates a current, which electrodes collect and convert to electricity.
While it’s not clear how much the device would add to the price of a vehicle, the whole tally of the research is to make it cost-effective, Yang said.
"There are several other steps that are required to commercialize the bodily, but we’re cautiously optimistic that these steps can be carried completely successfully," said Lon Bell, president of BSST, a subsidiary of Northville-based thermoelectrics supplier Amerigon Inc.
BSST also is working with Ford Motor Co. to develop climate control systems based on thermoelectrics.
Ford wants a system that would target a person’s extremities when it’s cold or the back of the neck in summer heat, rather than blow out a lot of air to change the temperature of the entire vehicle.
"We think we can make people feel cooler more quickly, feel comfortable more quickly, and that will translate into less power in the central AC system," said Clay Maranville, a Ford senior research scientist.
Honda Motor Co. also has supported university research into thermoelectrics, but a spokesman said the automaker doesn’t take its own research program.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif. (AP) — Intel Corp. said Sunday it plans to sell its new generation of chips for desktop computers under the established "Core" brand, with the first chips of the new form a line to be called Core i7.
The microprocessors are based on a blueprint the suite has code-named Nehalem and are expected to be in production the pattern three months of this year. Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) says the new design will deliver both elevated performance and energy efficiency.
Santa Clara-based Intel indicated that the Core name, already used for other chips including the popular Core 2 Duo processor, will be its flagship PC processor brand.
"Expect Intel to focus orderly more marketing resources around that name and the Core i7 products starting now," Sean Maloney, general manager of Intel’s sales and marketing group, said in a news release.
The first chips in the new brood of processors, including an "Extreme Edition" version, will carry an "i7" identifier. The identifier will be the first of several to come as different chips are launched past the next year, Intel said.
Intel is the world’s No. 1 maker of microprocessors with about three-quarters of the worldwide market.
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When the Jabra BT160 came out last year, we praised it in return being one of the in the first place Bluetooth headsets to come with interchangeable cover designs.
It doesn’t add anything to its features or performance of course, but it’s a nice touch for those who are keen on personalizing their gadgets.
Jabra has released its successor, dubbed the BT3010.
The BT3010 has pretty much the same features and sound quality as the BT160, but it has a slightly contrasting mould, with as many as 33 different design covers included in the classify.
You can even design your own cover by visiting Jabra.com. However, we were not pleased with the tiny controls.
If you don’t sit with these slight drawbacks, the Jabra BT3010 is a fun little Bluetooth headset with passable sound quality close by for about $29.99.
Aside from the interchangeable cover designs, the BT3010 looks like a normal Bluetooth headset. Measuring 2.0 inches long by 0.9 inch wide by 0.4 inch mucilaginous, the BT3010 has a very simple all-black bogus casing.
The front cover is see-through, which you can take nutty to replace the design faceplates. At the very top of the design deal with are three buttons — the multifunction button in the middle and two volume buttons on either side.
We thought all three buttons were a little too small for our liking, even though they are all sufficiently raised above the surface of the headset. The two volume buttons are especially microscopic. The multifunction button also houses the LED indicator light.
Turn the headset over and you’ll think a simple rubberized earpiece plus an optional discrimination hook. We found that the earpiece fits a little loosely in the ear, so we needed the ear hook to keep it in place.
The ear hook can be rotated to fit on either ear. However, we were defeated that the ear hook is not nearly as flexible as the ones on other Jabra headsets, such as the BT125.
The earpiece itself fits comfortably within the folds of the ear scarcely outside the ear canal. However, it’s not the most comfortable headset we’ve worn, but it’s good enough for short time periods.
We tested the Jabra BT3010 with the RIM BlackBerry Pearl. Call quality was decent, but nothing spectacular. Callers reported that our voice sounded a tad muffled and there was a bit of hiss and static in the offing.
They could still hear us just fine, but only in quieter environments such as in a car or the office. For us, we could hear them without a problem, though again, there was more distortion in noisier situations.
Other features of the BT3010 include the regular answering, ending, and rejecting calls, last company redial, voice dialing support, call waiting, three-party calling, and the potential to carry calls from the headset to the phone and vice versa.
The BT3010 also comes with a carrying strap.
It has a rated talk time of 8 hours and a rated standby time of 12.5 days.
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Hanny van Arkel was poring over photos of galaxies on the Internet in August 2007 when she stumbled across a strange object in the night sky: a bright, gaseous mass with a gaping hole in its middle.
"It looked a bit like an irregular galaxy, but I wasn’t sure what it was," Van Arkel said. So she posted a query on the Web site of the Galaxy Zoo project, which encourages members of the public to join in astronomy research online.
Van Arkel is a 25-year-old schoolteacher in Heerlen, The Netherlands, not an astrophysicist. But her startling find — a mysterious and unique object some observers are calling a "cosmic ghost" — has captivated astronomers and even caught the attention of the people who run the Hubble Space Telescope, who have agreed to flee to a closer look next year.
"This discovery really shows how citizen science has be shown of age in the Internet world," said Bill Keel, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Alabama and a Galaxy Zoo conspire member. "There was a time when I spoke pejoratively of armchair astronomers. And I’ve gotten up at a star social gathering and publicly apologized because of that."
Not so yearn ago, the term "unskilful astronomer" conjured images of stargazers peering through backyard telescopes. But today’s are as likely to be analyzing reams of sophisticated data collected by observatories and posted on space-related Web sites.
Armchair observers like van Arkel increasingly are making significant contributions to science, said Steve Maran, spokesman for the American Astronomical Society, a group of 6,500 professionals. Amateurs have been invited to present papers at recent AAS conferences, "which wouldn’t eat happened years ago," he said.
A successful example of amateur-professional collaboration, the Galaxy Zoo project was launched pattern year by Yale University astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and Chris Lintott at the University of Oxford in England.
The pair were looking in the interest of help in cataloging archived photographs of galaxies — one million images — taken by the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in remote southern New Mexico.
Knowing that the defenceless eye is sometimes more sensitive than a computer at picking out unusual patterns — and that they didn’t have time to do all the work themselves — Schawinski and Lintott posted the images on the Galaxy Zoo Web site last summer.
The professors then invited amateur astronomers, with the help of a brief online tutorial, to classify the galaxies as spiral, elliptical or something else. Online galaxy-sorting might not fiord as fun as, say, surfing YouTube, but it was an immediate hit.
"We were overwhelmed by the retort. It truly melted the server," Schawinski said. "People tell us it’s addictive. Some of [the volunteers] are professional astronomers, but most of them are not. They’re just regular people who got excited respecting the project."
During the past year, more than 150,000 armchair astronomers from all over the beget volunteered their time, submitting more than 50 million classifications.
The public’s collective wisdom — the same tenet that guides jury trials or Wikipedia — proved remarkably astute, Schawinski said. For example, if 33 of 36 volunteers thought a galaxy appeared elliptical, then astronomers could be confident the classification was correct, he said.
Van Arkel had been classifying photos on Galaxy Zoo for about a week when she came across the image that quickly became known as "Hanny’s Voorwerp," Dutch for "object." The primary school teacher does not own a spyglass — "my [astronomy] background doesn’t really go further than looking at the stars when walking outside in the evening," she said — but when she posted her finding August 13 on the Galaxy Zoo forum, the astronomers who run the site began to investigate.
They soon realized van Arkel force have found a new class of astronomical fact. The Galaxy Zoo team asked scientists working at telescopes around the over the moon marvellous to take a look at the mysterious Voorwerp.
Their best guess: The Voorwerp is probably a cloud of hot gas punctured by a chief hole 16,000 light years across and illuminated by the "dying embers" of a nearby quasar, Schawinski said. Quasars are distant, highly luminous astronomical objects powered by black holes; scientists suspect that light from the quasar still illuminates the Voorwerp even though the quasar itself burned out in the erstwhile 100,000 years.
"It’s this light mimic that has been frozen in time for us to abide by," said Lintott, the Oxford scientist. "It’s rather like examining the scene of a crime where, although we can’t see them, we be aware the culprit must be lurking somewhere adjacent in the shadows."
Galaxy Zoo leaders are eagerly awaiting images from NASA’s orbiting Hubble, which is scheduled to trail its powerful instruments on the Voorwerp in 2009. In the meantime, van Arkel is enjoying the fuss over her contribution to astronomy.
"It’s amazing to think that … unpaid volunteers can help by spotting things as if this online," she said. "What excites me the most is that all of this leads to more interest in science."
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Don’t judge Brett Favre in "Madden NFL 09" by his cover.
When the latest edition of the football video game franchise is released Tuesday, it will still feature the quarterback in his Green Bay Packers uniform — despite the fact Favre was traded to the New York Jets.
But publisher Electronic Arts said it was releasing a downloadable update to make Favre a Jet in the game, as well as new cover dexterity for anyone who wants it.
"We do not method to reissue packaging but will furnish a free downloadable cover in the coming days on easports.com featuring Brett Favre in a Jets uniform," EA Sports said in a statement released Thursday. "Fans can print this new cover out and interpolate it into the case of ‘Madden NFL 09."’
EA Sports will circulate a free downloadable update to the game with the Favre character as a Jet — and any other player who signs as a free agent or moves teams — before the start of the regular season. But "Madden NFL 09" make be released Tuesday with the Favre in keeping as a Packer on all-time greats team.
The Packers traded their three-time MVP and Super Bowl-winning quarterback to the Jets on Wednesday, ending months of speculation over Favre’s tomorrow after he announced he was retiring in March. EA Sports originally unveiled Favre as the cover athlete to go to the 20th edition of the "Madden" game in April.
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(Fortune) — It’s been the talk of the music industry suited for months. Perhaps as soon as September, MySpace, the huge social networking site with 120 million users, will unveil an ad-supported music waiting with free songs from three of the four major record labels: Universal, Sony (SNE) and Warner Music (WMG). MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe has promised it will launch "a new chapter in the story of modern music."
There’s only one incorrigible with his grandiose prediction: Imeem, an ad-supported social network based in San Francisco, already allows its members to pay attention to to the same songs – and many more – for free. Imeem, with 27 million users, has secured deals with all four big music companies, including EMI, MySpace’s missing major. And it has no interest at all in being eclipsed by its larger, News Corp (NWS, Fortune 500).-owned rival. "We’re number one in social music," says Imeem founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell. "We like that."
MySpace declined to make executives convenient for interviews.
The ad-supported music business is tough. The major labels control 86% of all album sales in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. They generally want to be paid about a penny each time someone listens to everyone of their songs at a website in the same trail as Imeem.
That would pretend it hard for Imeem to make much money. Social networks don’t command premium ad rates, essentially because advertisers worry about having their messages possibly appearing alongside user-generated cat videos and less savory fare.
People on Madison Avenue assert Imeem is getting about $4 in ad revenue recompense every thousand page views. If the company is paying a penny to SonyBMG every heyday someone listens to a Bruce Springsteen song, it’s in trouble. After all, users possibly listen to at least one song when they visit someone else’s page on Imeem. Your typical Springsteen fan all things considered listens to many more if he winds up on the page of another fan of the Boss.
MySpace Music starts out in an ordered weaker position. Ad agency people say it charges about $1 less per thousand page views than Imeem. But Donnie Williams, director of digital strategy at marketing firm Horizon Media, says that MySpace is improving its ad-targeting abilities. "That means they’ll be able to sell more ads," he says. "And it makes it harder for the Imeems of the world to maintain their rates." MySpace, it should be noted, also plans to make money by operating a music download have faith and a music subscription service.
Imeem executives decline to reveal their presence’s ad prices. Nor are they interested in shedding much light on the financial terms of their deals with record labels – except to say they are "ad revenue-sharing" arrangements moderately than the standard penny-a-song contracts.
Caldwell says Imeem has yet to turn a profit. But he argues that his company is in a strong position because it is smaller and more innovative than MySpace.
Well, that’s what every technology industry underdog says, isn’t it? But in this case, there’s some truth to it. Imeem employs a bunch of geeks who worked on the original incarnation of Napster. They have developed technology enabling its users to export their Imeem music and video playlists as widgets to other social networks like Facebook and, yes, MySpace, too.
Gene Munster, superior analyse analyst at Piper Jaffrey, says the widgets are part of the reason Imeem isn’t round to be blown away by its bigger competitor. "MySpace is circumscribed to people who use MySpace, whereas these widgets can be used on any platform. So they have access to a broader audience. We are also starting to see ads within those widgets."
That must set some people’s teeth on crabbed at MySpace. Wouldn’t you be a teeny-weeny miffed if your competitor was selling ads on your own website?
As you might expect, MySpace is watching its rival closely. Erin Pennington, national senior vice president of digital marketing firm Moxie Interactive, has run ads for Puma and Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) on Imeem. She also patronizes MySpace. She gets a lot of Imeem queries when she visits MySpace’s offices. "I definitely think MySpace has been paying attention to what they are doing," she says. "They are tough to learn from Imeem’s success."
Here’s something to think about. What if MySpace decides Imeem is too much of a distraction? Could it persuade its music company partners to dump the smaller social network? After all, MySpace Music will be a joint speculation with SonyBMG, Universal and Warner Music. The music guys have a lot at stake here.
But as usual, their loyalties are divided. Warner Music is also an investor in Imeem along with Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures. Warner sounds lucky about the way things are going at Imeem. In May, Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. told investor he had "a lot of faith" in the performers: "Our original investment is worth a great deal more than [what] we paid for our original investment."
Perhaps Imeem is getting better ad rates than people assume on Madison Avenue. Caldwell should enjoy it while it lasts. Starting in September, he’ll locate out what Imeem is truly worth. First Published: August 8, 2008: 8:05 AM EDT
From: rss.cnn.com
One of the biggest problems with the alleged Web 2.0 movement has been its encouragement of oversharing — which often means underestimating security risks. Adding doodads of varying quality to a home page can add a lot of pizzazz, but can also be fraught with danger, since they can open a door for hackers.
It’s a threat even for the biggest Web companies, including Google Inc., whose "gadgets" — little programs like calendars or daily photo feeds that users can implant onto their personalized Google lodgings pages — are increasingly juicy targets for hackers, two security researchers said Wednesday.
It’s not that Google is designing insecure programs.
The exit is that users building their own customized applications, and distributing them wholly Google, might have evil intentions and try to profit from those programs once they’re installed on users’ pages. Many users are inclined to inherently trust what they download from Google.
Robert Hansen, chief supervision of security consultant SecTheory, and Tom Stracener, senior security analyst with security testing software maker Cenzic Inc., demonstrated an attack Wednesday at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas. They used a malicious gadget to break into a person’s Web browser and assume from their searches in real time.
Malicious gadgets — if a user were to download one of them — could be used in a variety of other attacks, including story where one doodah steals information from another, a valuable attack against gadgets that store personal user information, Hansen and Stracener said.
"How do you know it’s a legitimate contrivance?" Hansen asked. "Because someone uploaded it? There’s no moderation. There’s no way to guarantee it won’t turn bad."
Google isn’t alone.
The company is fighting a common problem facing social-networking Web sites and other sites that encourage users to spruce up their pages with little knickknacks that reach out to the surface world to deliver pictures or other volume. The applications all things considered code on the page that can be used for good or evil.
Google disputes Hansen’s characterization of its vetting procedure for gadgets.
The company said in a disclosure that it scans all gadgets regularly notwithstanding malicious code, and in the "very rare" instance in which one is found, it’s immediately blacklisted.
Google added that since November 2007 no new "inline" gadgets — which have access to user account information — have been created. And the authors of existing "inline" gadgets can’t remake them further.
The company defended its program and said gadgets are created by developers from around the world and "demand a at one’s fingertips way for users to view information collected from around the Web in one place."
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Teachers and textbooks beware — your future could be under threat from a quickly developing and very smart technology.
At the center of this technology is a curb who recently turned his face into a remote hold back – Ph.D. student Jacob Whitehill, of the University of California’s Machine Perception Lab (MPLAB).
More than just a wacky stunt, Whitehill’s accomplishment marked a major step forward in the way people could one day learn by establishing facial expression recognition in robot teachers.
The teaching robots, or, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) are computer systems that provide personalized instruction and feedback to students without human intervention.
Using facial expression recognition — which allows a computer to react according to expressions a drug makes, Whitehill made a video change speed before altering his expression.
He told CNN that the system employed software created at the university, and was an important development in improving learning systems.
Whitehill said it was about students interacting with their robot educators.
"Classical ITS typically have a somewhat rigid architecture of ‘first I ask a question; then I wait for a response; then I talk some more; then I wait for another effect.’ Facial expression appreciation, I believe, will allow the feedback from student to teacher to happen while the robot teacher is talking," Whitehill said.
Experts agree the latest developments in ITS open a plethora of new possibilities for how people could learn. The consensus number most is that further advancements in active, participatory systems, is where the following lies.
University of Memphis researcher, Dr Andrew Olney, who recently received a US$1.3 million grant to develop an ITS called Guru, said the key to future learning will be enabling interactive, one-on-one instruction.Do you think robots could one day replace teachers?
"The technology can facilitate these more advanced learning scenarios," he said.
Although robot teachers of varying abilities have existed for more than 30 years, ITS developments such as Whitehill’s and Olney’s are pushing beliefs that robots could soon be as effective — if not more effective — than human teachers.
"The ITS which prepare been developed are already better teachers than people who have no experience," Olney said.
So, what is the future for today’s teachers, classrooms, and textbooks?
Olney felt that human teachers would ever after have an important role, but said the current classroom set-up faces change.
"The traditional emulate of learning is devotedly shown as one of the worst ways to teach people. It’s much greater for a disciple to have one-on-one interaction.
"I see textbooks falling away and students having large numbers of software packages," he said.
Co-head of the Future of Learning Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, David Cavallo, said technology would eventually lead to rule shifts in learning.
"In time, we will socialize with the end of the monopoly of classroom instruction with age segregation. We force see many contrasting types of learning environments… we can absolutely close educational completion gaps through constructive use of the technology."
Cavallo told CNN that from a holistic perspective, the unborn of learning meant escaping the "mass-production" type scenario in many schools.
"Children in the future will be able to explore and learn about domains at paralytic younger ages and with far greater results through computational approaches. They will be able to work with and learn from people around the far-out through connectivity. They force be skilled to learn without boundaries," he said.
A critical advantage that ITS hold in the future is that they can be very cost-effective, said Jim Ong, from intelligent software producer Stottler Henke Associates.
Ong’s company produced training programs for the U.S. Defense Force. He said participatory virtual worlds would eventually become more effective than real life training.
"In life not every moment is a learning experience. This gives the students ten times more experience compared to established methods."
According to Ong, the future of learning is about harnessing the use of natural language between students and robot teachers.
Ong believed the technology could assist human educators, acting as an intelligence system giving information about the students’ needs.
So, is this a case of technology driving new learning concepts, or technology meeting existing instructional methods?
The answer appears to be a bit of both.
While callow technology provides a cost-effective means for one-on-one instruction, Whitehill said interactive models have always been a part of learning — and he is simply refining those.
"My goal in this research is not to change how people learn, but rather to adapt computer and robot interfaces to how people learn. I’m trying to bring the robot teachers to us, not the other way in all directions from."
Cavallo said computers were only a means to the upshot of a signed, interactive learning system.
For a new way of learning to be rightly realized it would require a mutate amongst educational institutions.
"The technology is not the most difficult part. Helping institutions to metamorphose and adapt to enable the new possibilities is the most difficult element. What is needed is vision and political wish," he said.
Either way, all of the experts agree technology holds the ultimate mood to how scholarship can progress, and they expect the role of robots to increase.
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(Fortune Magazine) — I am sitting in a meeting room at the San Francisco offices of Twitter, chatting with the fast-growing startup’s 31-year-old CEO, Jack Dorsey, when a wave of déjà vu washes over me. The youthful vibe, the puckish decor, the funky South of Market loft space – I’ve been here before. In 2005, Mark Zuckerberg earnestly explained to me the importance of Facebook as we sat in his similarly appointed office in Palo Alto. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen walked me through YouTube’s growth story the following year in their tight order above a San Mateo, Calif., pizza parlor.
Facebook and YouTube have yet to gush profits – a in reality that is the talk of Silicon Valley. Yet here I am again, in July 2008, listening to yet another boyish entrepreneur discuss a quirky, compelling – and nearly revenue-less – startup.
I invite Dorsey, a 31-year-old NYU dropout whose slender build and mop of hair evoke the pre-psychedelic Beatles, when Twitter will start making money, known around these parts as "monetization." "We’ll monetize when the time is right," he says, as the backfire of a motorcycle on the circle cheaper than roars through the room’s open windows. "We raised enough money [$22 million] to get to that point through experimentation."
Only in the tech business are companies born with neither a clear saneness for being nor a clue as to how they’ll produce profits. Then again, rejoice: The U.S. pecuniary system may be imploding as you know this, but the Bay Area startup culture is alive and opulently. Oodles of Web startups are gaining traction which makes this a accomplished perpetually to examine the star of the class.
Twitter, in case you’re over 25 and don’t live in a trendy coastal metropolis, is a "micro-blogging" site. It’s a free service that lets you send the briefest of messages to person in your network. It marries the mass fascinate of blogging with the rat-a-tat-tat of text messaging.
To use Twitter, first go to the site and sign up for a handle – mine, for example, is adamlashinsky – and then start typing in the entry-way react to. Maximum message size: 140 characters. Twitter refers to these missives as "updates"; its users prefer the term "tweets." Users "see through" one another and, if they choose, receive a notification when experimental messages arrive. Twitterers do their thing at Twitter.com as well as at hand cell phone and on sites like Facebook.
And what do Twitterers twitter apropos? Anything at all really, from the quotidian ("I’m hungry"; "going to bed"; etc.) to the substantial ("wildfires are spreading"; "Hillary unprejudiced conceded"). Like a lot of Web 2.0 applications, the best way to understand it is to just try it out.
Thousands of people are doing that every day. According to comScore, Twitter had almost three million monthly users as of June, which is triple what it had last November. Those figures are probably bawdy because they don’t measure mobile activity, which is a large part of the Twittersphere.
Whatever the exact tradition numbers, the service is right in the zeitgeist. The community was, ahem, atwitter when Jon Stewart mentioned the site on "The Daily Show" in June. In July, a congressman from Texas, John Culberson (R-Texas), had to be told by House leadership to stop Twittering his constituents from the floor of the chamber.
Other establishment types are getting down with Twitter. Barack Obama’s campaign (handle: BarackObama) has 51,620 followers and counting, who’ve requested updates on events. CNN distributes news alerts via Twitter, and JetBlue (JBLU) sends out customer-service updates. The CTO of Cisco (CSCO, Fortune 500), Padmasree Warrior, Twitters all day long. She recently took a moment to inform her 180 followers she was having "an aargh moment right now: forgot to pack my laptop power chord [sic]." Utility is in the eye of the betwittered.
In the midst of all that, Twitter raised a slug of new cash, landed its first acquisition, and repeatedly suffered embarrassing approach outages. (Twitter embraces the outages with humor by posting an image of the "Fail Whale," a smiling cetacean held aloft by eight cheerful birds. It’s well-advised b wealthier to laugh than to cry.) "Twitter is at the forefront of the real-time Web," says Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and partner at Union Square Ventures. "Blogs were the beginning of that, a progression from the static Web. Now with Twitter and other services there is this notion of smaller and ever more rapid bursts of information."
Dorsey created Twitter in 2006 as a project within a now-defunct podcasting company called Odeo, which was run by entrepreneur Evan Williams (who had sold a previous startup, Blogger, to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) in 2003). Dorsey, Williams, and another Odeo colleague, Biz Stone, spun out Twitter in August 2007, with Dorsey at the helm. Despite its tender age, Twitter is already spawning an ecosystem of new companies that feed off its service. Twitteriffic facilitates tweeting from Macs. Blippr users post microreviews of books, movies, and restaurants. Qik (unalloyed "quick") lets you Twitter cellphone videos.
But none of the above explains how Twitter – or its investors – compel make money. A hint at how the company wants to solve that problem is its recent buying of an even smaller startup called Summize for undisclosed terms.
Summize existed solely as a search engine suitable Twitter. Because users go to Summize to see who is commenting on set topics – "Dark Knight" and "iPhone" have been big of behindhand – Twitter can display relevant ads in much the same way Google does. As well, marketers might pay to assort their targeted messages to people who have without prompting agreed to be tweeted. Publishers may even use Twitter as a distribution platform. (As a Twitter newbie, I have 115 followers, whom I update on my articles and blog posts; TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington has 22,000-plus.)
Twitter’s CEO won’t go into any detail on how it will evolve from hip technology to moneymaker. "A lot of people have ideas thither how to monetize this," says Dorsey. "And so do we." He does, however, divulge other steps he’s bewitched on the path to sustainable companyhood: He’s trying to look and act the part of the chief executive. For example, he retains a CEO tutor, with whom he meets once a week. He also got rid of his nose ring. (Still on his person: A forearm-length tattoo that he says represents an F-sharp, an integral symbol from mathematics, and a human clavicle – "the only bone with free arrange of motion.")
My final visit to Twitter falls late on a Friday, just in advance one of the company’s movie nights. On tap is the Hitchcock classic "The Birds." The avian symbolism is intentional: Birds twitter. Their tweets may be pointless to you, but they presumably mean something to other birds. And therein lies the latest flight of vagary dreamt up by ambitious entrepreneurs hoping to strike it rich.
Do you use Twitter? Is it the next Facebook? Tell us what you think.
Reporter associate Doris Burke contributed to this article. First Published: August 6, 2008: 3:24 PM EDT
From: rss.cnn.com
Cici confesses on her Web verso that she likes to greet everyone by licking their feet. Dolce admits to being a mamma’s boy. And Jake and Tycho posted a video that chronicles their adventures of rolling around on their backs.
It’s not on Facebook or MySpace, but the canine equivalent — Doggyspace.com.
A crossbreed between MySpace and YouTube, Doggyspace allows dog owners from all over the just ecstatic to come together, create profiles, and share photos and videos of their pups.
The Virginia-based site is part of a growing trend of niche, or content-focused, social networking sites that target interest groups looking to hook with like-minded people.
"It’s not so much social networking, it’s having a social experience around things that we care about, so pets are just such a great example of that," said Fred Stutzman, an Internet researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Stutzman said many people are using more general common networking sites but also signing up for sites like Doggyspace that offer a more focused experience that can equip help and support on specific issues and go beyond traditional message boards.
"Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are solve of about you and your friends and these very direct connections, but there’s all sorts of other types of connections," Stutzman said.
Since launching in mid-July, Doggyspace has logged more than 700 registered, active purchaser profiles — 73 percent of them created by females, said Levi Thornton, founder of the site and president of web development firm Mad Frog Productions in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He projects that Doggyspace will have more than two million accounts by the end of the year.
"There’s a lot of people out there with their dogs and we’re busy and we’re all working in the office all day prolonged and this is a way for us to bring our pets with us," said Thornton, who has a Yorkie named Nokie and a pit bull named Ein.
Standard accounts for the locate are free, but later this year Doggyspace plans to offer store accounts for a small fee that will give users extra features. A portion of that fee will go to an animal humanitarianism of the members’ choice.
Thornton, 30, said the site is a place for pet owners to share stories or learn about a specific produce. It can also help people form friendships based on a love of dogs, or connect people interested in finding a challenge date for their dog.
Connie Mandrozos found the site while searching in requital an eye to information for her 12-year-old golden retriever, Boomer, who has cancer. She received an outpouring of support from other dog owners with similar experiences and some told her they "have their paws crossed" for Boomer.
Mandrozos, 36, ended up spending more time on the site, creating profiles as regards Boomer as well as his "sisters" — a trough bull confound named Darla and another mixed kind named Violet.
"It’s been a goofy horror to do at the end of the day when you get home from work and you just want to talk to big gun in your dog’s instrument and say, ‘hey, how was your day? Woof,"’ said Mandrozos, who lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut and sometimes uses her dogs in her job as a behaviorist.
Most of the Doggyspace profiles include messages from other doggy "friends."
One profile is for a chocolate Labrador retriever named Guinness, who said her mom "couldn’t resist naming me after her favorite beverage" and said she is shy around other dogs and appalled of small, furry creatures because she lives with a "VERY MEAN CAT."
Postings on Guinness’ profile tabulate a message from Chico, a Chihuahua mix who offered to help with the shyness problem.
Dominique Cecchetti, a 20-year-old student from Pittsburgh, created a rake it in to share photos of her 12-year-old Maltese named Darren, who has more than 125 friends on the site.
For Cecchetti and other users, the site is very much a dog and owner effort: "My dog sits near the computer while I do the work for him," Cecchetti said in an e-mail.
From: rss.cnn.com
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