25 October 2002

Criminals Hoisted by Their Own Palms AUSTIN, Texas -- Jennifer Lee writes in the NYT that the data contained in a hand-held says a lot about its owner, whether that person is a corporate tycoon or a petty thief. "It's an alter ego," said Larry Leibrock, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and has been a consultant in many forensic cases involving hand-helds. "It represents their aspirations, who their contacts are, where they spend their time, their tasks and objectives, and how they completed those."

Resource: GigaLaw Guide to Internet Law RESOURCE -- Web Reference reviews The GigaLaw Guide to Internet Law by Doug Isenberg. It's a good book on cyberlaw that shows the way through the legal minefield.

MMS Phone Demand in the Shadows for Vodafone Live! DUBLIN -- Vodafone Ireland launched their MMS services yesterday and although I can see compelling reasons to upgrade to a first generation camera phone, I can't say a wide variety of my friends have the money or inclination to do the same. Research by J.D. Power and Associates shows that renewal periods for handsets are gradually creeping upwards to 18 months, meaning any wholesale change to MMS capable phones is going to take time to reach a mass market. However, I also believe friends who bought a phone to avail of WAP may feel inclined to buy up now. I would bet on the Christmas 2002 mobile phone market generating more revenue than last year.

Adam Curry on Outliner Adam Curry -- We know Dave Winer is working on making his outliner better. Many of us want to blog in the outliner. Adam Curry is especially enthusaistic. It's how I think about my weblog, especially the homepage will be so much more fun to maintain when I'm able to promote or demote posts at will, without breaking comments, permalinks and other assorted CMS stuff. It will forever change the way I post to my weblog and it wouldn't surprise me if this type of tool catches on with bloggers and online publishers.

Steal These Buttons ANTI PIXEL -- Using these buttons means you're on the road to cross-publishable content grounded in validated RSS code.

Texting the TV ECONOMIST -- From some work done in the Xi Skunk Works, I know that people like sending text messages to their television screens. They like it even more when they can text to everyone's television screen. Gartner's figures show that 20% of teenagers in France, 11% in Britain and 9% in Germany have sent messages in response to TV shows [...] This has much to do with the boom in reality TV shows, such as Big Brother, in which viewers' votes decide the outcome. Most reality shows now allow text-message voting, and in some cases, such as the most recent series of Big Brother in Norway, the majority of votes are cast in this way.

Listen to the Sound of Space Plasma NASA and UIOWA -- Sounds converted from plasma waves in outer space will form the basis of a musical performance in the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium tomorrow. A physicist at the University of Iowa has been recording the waveforms for over 40 years with instruments on NASA's Voyagers, Galileo, Cassini, and over 24 additional spacecraft. Data was captured near Jupiter, Venus, and other planets, then transformed into sound patterns. The resulting tones became the conceptual basis of a musical composition called "Sun Rings," which the Kronos Quartet will debut October 26 at the University of Iowa's Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City. You can hear plasma wave instruments, Galileo in Ganymede's magnetosphere, and Voyager's passage through the bow shock of the solar wind against Jupiter's magnetosphere.

You Could Be Sued for Selling Online INFORMATION WEEK -- Joan Soat reports that PanIP LLC has sued more than 50 companies in the last seven months, claiming that their E-commerce Web sites infringe its two U.S. patents. The patents, No. 5,576,951 and No. 6,289,319, cover, respectively, an "automated sales and services system," and an "automatic business and financial transaction-processing system."

Updated UK Blogs TIME MACHINE GO -- Among the hundreds of sites sits dubberley.com, written in Dublin (or is it Dubberlyn) this week.

Sighting: Slablet MOTION COMPUTING -- I have a computer that looks and feels like a leather-bound diary. It's a TransNote from IBM. It's an older version of a Tablet PC and unlike the tablets, it has a touch screen. Motion Computing offers a Tablet PC and it features full Windows computing power with pen and audio input does not need a keyboard is portable, non-instrusive and wireless Like Tom Krazit at Infoworld and Russell Beattie, I think the Tablet PC is part of a natural evolution in personal computing, towards corridor workers. This is niche kit, targeted at health care and large sales organizations, that need usability above all else. But analysts interviewed by BBC Technology News don't agree. And Walt Mossberg cautions readers to wait a generation before buying this kind of product. Slashdotters are just about evenly divided between the detractors and the potential advocates. I would be wary of the Tablet PC supplanted the Gemstar or Hiebook e-book readers. Pesonally, I believe people buy dedicated readers, instead of paying out for all-in-one devices. I have written on the Compaq TC1000 and it felt just like paper. This is the best tablet computer on the market. It's the size of an American page (8.5 inches wide by 11 inches deep), 0.8 inches thick and lightweight. A base configuration including a 30G-byte hard drive, 256M bytes of RAM, USB 2.0 ports, and the GeForce2 Go 100 graphics card from Nvidia Corp. costs $1,699, and it is available directly through HP at its Web site. A version with a built-in 802.11b card also sells for $1,799. Slablet Pictures from Win Supersite. "Tablet PCs Seek Developers" by Ephraim Schwartz in Infoworld. "Gateway Takes to Tablets" by Michael Kanellos 18 Nov 02.