toursforfree.com

Yes, there are other ways to get this data, but there are advantages to using Trackthis: First, you can attach a descriptor to your query (like “lamp shade”). Second, you can use Twitter to easily change your message delivery options: you can quickly turn on or off SMS updates for Trackthis alerts, for example. This may be useful.

90 miles to go…

While I try to get Web 2.0 Expo darling du jour Fireball working (still no luck), I thought it’d be worth covering another location service for Twitter: Trackthis. You tell it a package tracking number from FedEx, UPS, USPS, or DHL, and it will Twitter you back whenever there’s an update from the shipper.

Trackthis is from mashup master Phillip Brand, aka PB30, who also created the WatchBOL site that aggregates our uStream videos when we record podcasts like Buzz Out Loud and Real Deal.

The moves come a week after Liberty and IAC sued each other over IAC’s plans to spin off a majority of its business units into new companies. Under the restructuring, announced in November, search site Ask.com and its advertising business will remain inside IAC, while LendingTree, Ticketmaster, and others are spun off.

Liberty Media, which owns a majority voting stake in IAC, has filed a court action to remove Barry Diller and others from the IAC board and replace them with Liberty nominees, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

Decker’s stock and stock option compensation, as valued by Yahoo, dropped from $14.6 million in 2006 to $13 million in 2007, the company said.

The company also said Semel exercised stock options worth $37.8 million in 2007. Semel left Yahoo’s board on January 31, the day before Microsoft offered to acquire Yahoo.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Jerry Yang, who took over the top executive post from Terry Semel in June, got a $1 salary and no stock or new options. That figure is unchanged from the year earlier, Yahoo said.

Yahoo President Sue Decker saw her salary, bonus, and incentive play payment increase from $1.35 million in 2006 to $1.76 million in 2007, but factoring in stock and options, her overall compensation declined, the company said in regulatory filing Tuesday.

Susan Decker

(Credit:
Yahoo)

When the
iPhone 3.0 software comes out, and with it the new terms of service for developers that allow the release of turn-by-turn navigation products, we’re going to see several products competitive with standard dedicated dash-top navigators. Waze is different from almost every other navigation product I’ve seen, but I hope it succeeds, if only because I like the idea of a route navigation system that gets better as more people use it.

Bardin also belives that Dash’s problem was mostly on money side: The unit was too expensive, and furthermore, he says, “If you want to have a community product, you can’t charge the members.” He points to services like YouTube that take content from, and provide value to, their users, but that have to go to other routes, like advertising, to make money.

CEO Noam Bardin tells me that in Israel, Waze doesn’t even use commonly available street maps as its base layer of data. Instead, it tracks users (with their permission), and builds maps from those traces. Then it asks users to name the roads.

Israeli start-up Waze is at the Where 2.0 conference this week showing off its service for collecting real-time traffic and driving condition data from its users. Currently running on 80,000 smartphones in Israel, Waze shows you traffic flows on highways, and unlike other traffic services, it also shows it on side streets, and it creates routing advice based on that data.

In a technology utopia, this product makes beautiful sense. But the real world is messy. You can’t roll out a peer-to-peer traffic service and expect it to work perfectly from day one, since it needs a critical mass of users. Realistically, Waze is going to have to roll out its service, in big countries like the U.S., region by region. However, smartphone app stores are national, so there may be unhappy users from under-represented locations. (At least in the U.S., the company will use existing maps as a starting place.)

Waze, Bardin says, will be a free app for the smartphone users who get it from Waze directly. Revenues will come from selling ads, and from selling the technology other companies (like mobile carriers) to package or re-sell.

I’ll leave privacy and power consumption issues as exercises for the reader.

The service allows users to report accidents, speed traps, cops by the side of the road, and other traffic-related items. What’s cool is that these items fade automatically over time, and there’s also the possibility for the system to ping a driver as he or she passes a previously reported incident to see if it’s still there.

Then there’s the safety question. While the demo I saw, on an Android phone, had simple and big buttons on it like “speed camera,” it still represents a distraction, and in our society all it will take is one user causing an accident while reporting another to put the hurt on this feature.

In the U.S., Waze is in alpha testing now, for Android users only.

The Web app shows you all the Waze drivers.

(Credit:
Waze)

Waze on a mobile device shows you nearby traffic and incidents.

(Credit:
Waze)

It’s also worth noting that in-car navigator company Dash Navigation launched a product with a similar vision, and it hasn’t really worked as business. The company, which originally made navigation hardware, is now just in the software licensing business. The consumer navigation products were never price-competitive with the increasingly higher-powered run-of-the mill navigators from the likes of Garmin and TomTom.

Add to that the resources used to attempt to filter the spam and it’s easy to understand the potential environmental impact. If every in-box had spam filters, according to the report, we could cut energy waste by 75 percent. But eliminating spam at the source would save even more.

PCs with ultra-fast processors and display adapters tend to use more power than somewhat slower systems. In general, notebook PCs are considerably more energy efficient than desktops, partially because they’re designed to run on batteries and also because they have built-in screens that are powered from the same power supply as the rest of the machine. All-in-one desktops are generally more eco-friendly than machines with an external monitor.

Earth Day, which will be celebrated on Wednesday, is a good time to look at the way electronics are using and wasting energy.

Many people leave their personal computers on 24 hours a day. If the machine successfully goes into sleep mode, the power drain is relatively low. But it’s not uncommon, especially for Windows systems, for the machine to run at full-throttle when it should be sleeping.

Some devices are designed to run 24 hours a day. Digital video recorders, for example, are always standing by to record your programs. About 18 months ago, I put an energy meter on some of the devices in my home and discovered that my TiVo was using 30 watts 24/7 and a Motorola Comcast PVR I was using at the time was sucking 40 watts regardless of whether it was recording a program.

Among the culprits are devices that suck power while not in use. I’m not sure how they arrived at this figure, but the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that “in the average home, 75 percent of the electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off.” The government advises unplugging devices or using a power strip to turn them off, but this is sometimes inconvenient as it will disable remote controls and, in some cases, require the device go through a time-consuming start-up.

The ICF report estimates that e-mail from the average business user accounts for 288 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, with 22 percent of that usage related to spam. More than half the energy wasted by spam results from users viewing and deleting it, according to the report.

If you do leave your machine turned on–even while at lunch–try to configure it to go into sleep or “stand by” mode after say 15 or 20 minutes of inactivity. In theory, it will wake up as soon as you touch the keyboard or move the mouse. Unfortunately, Windows sleep mode doesn’t always work properly. Sometimes it fails to go into standby. And if it does fall asleep, it sometimes fails to wake up properly. There are a variety of reasons for this, including some software that demands full power. But often the culprit is one or more device drivers or USB devices that either fails to let the machine sleep or interferes with its ability to wake up.

The process of getting spam from one place to another involves multiple phases–all of which consume energy. First, there is the scraping of Web sites to harvest e-mail addresses, followed by code and copy writing to initiate the spam campaign. Next comes sending the messages via the Internet to an army of infected “zombie PCs,” all of which use energy to receive and retransmit the messages. Then there is the impact on servers that store and send the spam, the routers and other Internet infrastructure, and, of course, the PCs that finally receive and display the junk mail.

Even though it doesn’t affect your own power meter, the electrical demands of Internet services also add up. Every time you do something online, a server somewhere might have to access a hard drive while routers throughout the Internet are using energy to transmit the data that you’re sending and receiving. I’m not suggesting you cut back on Internet use–just be aware that it’s not carbon free.

Little power bricks also consume electricity even when nothing is connected to them, so it’s a good idea to unplug items like cell phone chargers and
iPod chargers when not in use.

And speaking of carbon, a McAfee-commissioned report issued last week by ICF International found that 62 trillion pieces of spam sent in 2008 had the same environmental impact as 3.1 million passenger cars or 2.4 million U.S. homes. A single piece of junk e-mail adds 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide, which is like driving three feet.

In my limited experience as a beta tester,
Windows 7 seems to do a better job at sleeping and waking than Vista or Windows XP, but this is machine- and software- dependent. So until we see widespread deployment, we won’t know if Microsoft has solved the problem.
Mac OS X seems to be less prone to insomnia or failing to wake up, but it’s not exempt from these problems.

Screen saver software does not save energy. It’s much better to turn off your monitor when you take a break. CO2 Saver, a free program for Windows XP and Vista, can help you manage your PC’s sleep behavior.

“These sites are a departure from what we’ve done in the past and the next step in our mission to provide truly relevant local content to consumers on the media platform of their choice,” said John Wallace, president of NBC Local Media. “Our goal was to create a new type of user experience that’s less an extension of our TV stations and more of an online destination for the latest local news, information, and entertainment. These sites are about putting consumers first and giving them the content they’re looking for from the best available sources.”

The sites will roll out in four phases throughout the month. The first phase starts today in Chicago, followed by Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco on October 16. NBC will add Dallas, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. to the group on October 20, and New York and Hartford, Conn., at the end of the month. Each new site will replace the existing NBC local station’s Web site and feature a new domain name. If successful, NBC may roll out the localized sites in other markets sometime in the future.

NBC’s new plan will eliminate the link between its TV stations and their respective Web sites and will target a city’s specific online community to help locals stay on top of the latest news and information in their area, regardless of the source. In fact, much of the content on the sites will be gathered from outside content providers or contributed by the audience itself through videos, blogs, and text.

According to NBC Local Media’s senior vice president, Brian Buchwald, the new sites will target a group of people NBC is calling “social capitalists” who are passionate about their city and want to “stay ahead of the curve and influence others in their peer groups.”

NBC Local Media announced today that it will launch Web sites that target “locals only” by providing news, entertainment, and information from around the community. The sites will feature content from print and online publications in the area, as well as local bloggers and TV stations to provide visitors with all the information their city has to offer.

Once again, the music industry has shown its true colors. It doesn’t really care about going after the pirates, it only cares about recouping its investment by any means necessary.

Hopefully the music industry’s annual tax idea will die a quick death. But if it doesn’t and it becomes a “success” in the eyes of the labels, look for it to spread across Europe and the United States until we’re all being charged cash for something we don’t do.

Does that seem fair to you?

And perhaps that’s where I have the biggest issue with this. It’s not that the music industry is actively seeking ways to stop pirates–I expect that–but that the music industry is showing here that it really doesn’t care if you’re illegally downloading music as long as it doesn’t impact the bottom line.

Doesn’t that seem a bit ironic considering the RIAA and the rest of these wacky organizations always try to claim that “it’s just not right to steal?” They don’t care if you steal, they just don’t want you to steal if it costs them money.

“If you get enough people paying a small enough amount of money you can turn around the wheels of the music industry,” music industry veteran Peter Jenner told the publication.

Want to know what Don is up to? Follow him on Twitter and FriendFeed.

“U.K. Culture Secretary Andy Burnham is supporting calls from sections of the music industry for a yearly levy of 20 pounds ($40) to 30 pounds ($60) to be imposed by ISPs on customers who want to share music,” The Independent reports.

A levy on all users of $60? Are you kidding me? You mean to tell me that from now on (if this bill were to pass), you would be forced to pay your ISP $5 per month to address the so-called “rampant” file-sharing issue on the Web? What if you’ve never illegally downloaded a song in your life? What if you don’t even know where to find illegal songs? You should be penalized because someone else does and the music industry has no idea how to stop them?

An annual levy on Internet use is both foolhardy and representative of the sad state of affairs in the music industry. Instead of embracing the Web and trying to find ways to exploit it, the music industry continues to show its desperation and try to find ways to make you lose out. In the process, the innocent are being victimized for something someone else did.

“Both ISPs and the music industry need to take responsibility for this issue. But we need action as the industry is suffering,” another industry insider told The Independent.

According to The Independent, Internet users could face an annual tax of 30 British pounds (about $60) to download music over the Web in an attempt by the music industry to use Internet service providers to stop illegal downloading.

Sorry, but that’s not right.

In its infinite wisdom, the music industry has once again conjured up a plan to ensure that you become the victim regardless of whether you’re illegally downloading music. The way I see it, this isn’t a tax designed to stop piracy, it’s a tax to use the Internet, and to me, that’s totally unacceptable.

Obviously blind to the implications of this arrangement, the music industry believes it could actually help a larger portion of the public, who would have otherwise been criminalized at the hands of illegal downloading. Not to mention, it could recoup the industry’s estimated $2.4 billion in annual losses at the hands of illegal downloading.

Try as it might, the music industry won’t simply solve its problems by trying to tax us into oblivion. Instead, it needs to denounce its foolhardy plans of attacking college students and individuals and start addressing the biggest concern: piracy cartels overseas that make up the lion’s share of those billions in losses.

Yikes. Is this really where the music industry is going next? Sure, it’s just in the U.K. right now and there’s no indication that it’ll go elsewhere, but don’t you think that if it works there, it’ll come here?

Once again, the low-hanging fruit is the victim.

There are times when I read the news in the morning and I can’t help but wonder what some people are thinking when they announce something new. Usually, that amazement revolves around weird products or dumb deals. But today, it’s something entirely different: a tax on Internet use.

As I’ve written about previously, we’re starting to move beyond the familiar keyboard  and mouse/touchpad, and two-handed game controller as ways of interacting with our computer systems. In the gaming world, the motion-sensing
Nintendo Wii remote is the most obvious innovation. Elsewhere, multi-touch screens, either on the large scale (Microsoft Surface) or small scale (Apple iPhone) have been garnering a lot of attention.

I’ve been a fan of the original SpaceNavigator for a while now. It makes a huge difference to navigating through Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. I tried out the new SpaceNavigator for Notebooks with these applications. All other things being equal, I marginally prefer the larger size and greater heft of the desktop model. However, if I were regularly using a 3D application on my notebook while traveling, the new device’s design strikes me as a reasonable tradeoff for the weight and bulk savings.

6DOF refers to the fact that you can use the controller to generate six different motions. Pressing it front/back and left/right are the two motions that correspond to moving a mouse around the desktop. Pressing down and pulling up translate you vertically ("z" dimension for the mathematically inclined); this corresponds to altitude or zooming in Google Earth. The other three motions are those familiar to joystick users: rotation around the three perpendicular axes, i.e. yaw, pitch, and roll (or spin, tilt, and roll as 3Dconnexion calls them).

commentary

At least for me, actually using the controller feels intuitive even if it’s a bit hard to explain how it works. It’s a fun toy even if you don’t have a serious need for one. (One hint. For Google Earth, I prefer to turn off tilt in the controller’s customization panel. The tilt rotation is the one that lets you look at the surface of the earth from an angle. I typically prefer to keep the view from straight over head and, if tilt is on, it’s hard not to shift it a bit while you’re moving around the surface of the globe.)

(Credit:
3Dconnexion)

Another interesting category is the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) controller. These aren’t particularly new but, until recently, they’ve been targeted primarily at 3D CAD professionals and have been priced in line with relatively expensive engineering software. If you’re spending thousands of dollars for a CAD package, spending a few hundred for a piece of hardware that lets you use it more easily is pretty much a no-brainer. (Devices of this type are also a good match for controlling robotics.)

However, more recently, 3Dconnexion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Logitech, has pushed down the price point considerably with its SpaceNavigator line. The SpaceNavigator PE is $59 (MSRP) for a non-commercial use license with online support and the SpaceNavigator SE is $99 (MSRP) for a commercial use license with full support. (The two differ only in licensing and support; they’re otherwise physically identical and support the same software.) The company has now updated its lineup with the SpaceNavigator for Notebooks, priced at $129. It’s a bit smaller than the standard SpaceNavigator and, at .55 pounds, weighs about half as much. It also includes a small case.

The company calls the SpaceNavigator a "3D mouse" but that’s a misnomer. It’s only a mouse in the sense that it’s roughly the same size as a mouse and you operate it with one hand. If anything, it’s closer to a trackball. However, it’s really its own class of input device and does not, in any case, replace a mouse except for navigation (specifically) within about 120 supported 3D applications. But it’s understandable that "6DOF controller" might have been a wee too geeky for the general population.

A similar service from Freewebs called fotowoosh has been around since last April. Although, it doesn’t have a clear front end for consumers to publish their own photos. Also worth mentioning is Microsoft Live Labs’ Photosynth project, which creates a 3D environment using a matrix of photos.

Here’s a video of the tech in action. There are two more after the break.

Ever wish you could recreate the effect of those neat multilens 3D cameras without having to buy the hardware? Lucky for you there’s some cool 3D technology coming out of Stanford called Make3D. The service uses machine learning to go over your photograph and recreate depth and perspective in three dimensions.

I uploaded about half a dozen photographs earlier today and only got one to go through the seemingly stringent processing requirements. However, the results on a picture of a beach were fast and impressive. The technology is not quite perfect, but there’s already a huge gallery of user-uploaded images that have been run through the process and come out the other side with an extra dimension that makes them wonderful to explore. You can view pictures on the gallery without having to sign-up. Just keep in mind, you’ve got to have Adobe’s Shockwave player installed on your browser to get the 3D goodness.

Make3D is a project lead by Ashutosh Saxena, who is joined by Min Sun, and Sung Chung along with Stanford faculty member Professor Andrew Ng.

Once photographs have gone through processing, you get a flyover that does a quick back and forth over the rendered scenery. You also get a 3D environment that you can walk though using the keyboard’s arrow keys. Users can download both of these files to their desktops for later viewing.

(Credit:
NASA) The idea behind Climos is to grow large amounts of plankton by pouring iron into the ocean.

The practice of ocean iron fertilization, which has been experimented with since the 1990s, has been condemned by some environmental groups and remains controversial.

Iron stimulates the growth of plankton, which consumes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Once the plankton sinks several hundred meters, it is considered sequestered from the atmosphere.

Climos CEO and founder Dan Whaley said Thursday that the company will announce funding early next week.

Only a few weeks after ocean iron fertilization venture Planktos folded, rival Climos is set to announce a first round of venture funding totaling $4 million.

Read the full story on Climos here at CNET News.com. For more background on Climos, here is a longer interview with Whaley.

The green area is a natural plankton bloom in Lake Titicaca, South America.