Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on March 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

Google has yet to score any big deals with major studios and networks, but they’re making progress with other media companies. In the beginning of February, YouTube felt a slap in the face as Viacom demanded that they remove 100,000 videos belonging to their networks.

Viacom recently announced that after the YouTube debacle, traffic to their networks rose over the last month, and that they’re “heartened by the broad industry support” for demanding that YouTube remove the clips.

YouTube is moving on, and according to The New York Times, they’re forming some smaller, and hopefully promising partnerships with other media companies. One such example is the National Basketball Association.  The NBA channel will show clips from different basketball games that fans will be able to go and watch.

According to YouTube, they say they’re partnering with 200 different media companies each courter.  Besides the NBA recently, they’ve also struck a deal with BBC.

BBC says that their deal with YouTube will be a “promotional vehicle” for them. There will be three channels, one for news, and two for entertainment, and BBC will get a portion of the advertising revenue generated from those channels.

So while YouTube hasn’t struck business with any of the major studios, they’re still taking steps (baby steps) towards providing quality, legal content.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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The Niyari Atari 400 keyboard mimics the design of the computer’s membrane keyboard (a spill-proof keyboard with pressure pads for keys), but adds some modern chiclet keys.

The Nook Color (center), flanked by Amazon’s Kindle (left) and the iPad. Photo: Tim Carmody/Wired.com

Barnes and Noble has touted its Nook Color as “the reader’s tablet” since the product’s inception. But after the company announced the launch of an Android OS update and extended features on the device this week, we’re not sure what to call it anymore.

E-reader? Tablet? E-Tablet?

Version 1.2 of the Nook Color’s firmware launched Monday morning, bringing Android OS 2.2 (Froyo) to existing users of the e-reader tablet. The software includes expansions to web surfing on the device, including Adobe Flash and Air support, as well as the ability to receive e-mail.

The company also announced the launch of the Nook App store. Customers are now able to download and use apps on their Nook Color devices, while still being able to purchase books from the Barnes and Noble reading catalog.

The Nook Color app marketplace will launch with a relatively scant 125-plus apps — less than the amount launched with RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which debuted with 3,000-plus apps, though more than Motorola’s 50-ish Honeycomb tablet apps available for the Xoom upon its launch. Barnes and Noble says its app market will grow, as over 5,000 developers have already registered for the Nook Color developer program, and hundreds of already-submitted apps are in line for vetting by Barnes and Noble before being released for purchase.

One big drawback: users of the Froyo-based Nook Color won’t be able to download Android apps directly from the Android Market. They’ll have to wait for developers to port versions of apps over to the Nook Color. That’s a gigantic ecosystem — approximately 200,000 apps — that’s completely out of reach for Nook users.

But Barnes and Noble says it’s easy to port Android apps to the Nook Color. “Our SDK [software development kit] is an extension of the standard Android SDK,” said Claudia Romanini, director of developer relations for the Nook Color. “Developers don’t have to do much other than remove features not supported by our hardware (GPS, camera, telephony), and then rescale the app in terms of font sizes and graphics, to make sure it works on our display.”

The Nook Color’s transition into an e-reader-tablet hybrid may be a smart move for Barnes and Noble. Gartner research forecasts sales of 11 million e-readers in 2011, but it’s a much smaller market than tablets, where IDC predicts 44.6 million units to ship in 2011 (IDC defines media tablets as iPads or Android tablets that don’t rely exclusively on E Ink displays).

The Nook Color also edges itself into a smaller market, both figuratively and literally. It’s a seven-inch device, on par with that of the Samsung Galaxy Tab (which also runs Android 2.2 Froyo) and RIM’s PlayBook, and significantly smaller than the 10.1-inch Xoom (Android’s flagship tablet product) and the 9.7-inch iPad 2. The smaller form factor could appeal to audiences that don’t want the unwieldiness that comes with extra screen real estate.

Barnes and Noble’s tablet falls short of other tablets in other respects. The Nook Color is running on an 800-MHz processor with 512 MB of RAM, inferior to the slew of dual-core, 1-GHz-plus processors featured in most 2011 tablet debuts. Also, the Nook Color is currently available in a Wi-Fi only version, but not 3G or 4G. And it’s not running the most recent versions of Android, Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” or the tablet-optimized Android 3.0 “Honeycomb.”

The price, however, is hard to beat. At a paltry $250, the Nook Color’s bottom line bests the priciest of the new tablet debuts, many of which start at upwards of $500.

“The Nook Color with its new Froyo upgrade is not an iPad,” Gartner analyst Allen Weiner wrote in a blog post, “not even close. But those who are looking for a great cross-media reading device with some nice new multimedia bells and whistles, it remains a go-to device.”

To install the new firmware, you can download it from Barnes and Noble’s site and then sideload it onto their device. Or you can wait for an over-the-air update that will be pushed to all Nook Color customers next week.

Apple claims turning Location Services to ‘Off’ will cease all transmission of geodata from a device to Apple. Independent tests show otherwise. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The iPhone continues to store location data even when location services are disabled, contrary to Apple’s previous claims.

The Wall Street Journal did independent testing on an iPhone and found that even after turning off location services, the device was still collecting information on nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points.

This discovery challenges some of Apple’s claims. As Wired.com reported last week, the company explained in a detailed letter last year that it deliberately collects geodata to store in a comprehensive location database to improve location services. In the letter, Apple noted that customers can disable location-data collection by turning off Location Services in the settings menu.

“If customers toggle the switch to ‘Off,’ they may not use location-based services, and no location-based information will be collected,” Apple said in the letter (.pdf).

That doesn’t appear to be the case from WSJ’s testing, as well as multiple independent reports from customers who had the same results.

The controversy surrounding Apple’s location-tracking stems from a discovery by two data scientists, who found that a file stored on iPhones and iPads (“consolidated.db”) contains a detailed history of geodata accompanied with time stamps.

Apple claimed in its letter last year that the geodata is stored on the device, then anonymized and transmitted back to Apple every 12 hours, using a secure Wi-Fi connection (if one is available).

Although it’s thorough, Apple’s explanation does not address why the stored geodata continues to live on the device permanently after it’s transmitted to Apple, nor does it address why geodata collection appears to persist even when Location Services is turned off.

Google does similar geodata collection for its own location-services database. However, it notifies Android users clearly in a prompt when geodata collection will occur, and it also gives users a way to opt out. Also, Android devices do not permanently store geodata after transmitting it to Google.

Meanwhile, a MacRumors.com reader claims he sent an e-mail to CEO Steve Jobs asking him to explain why Apple tracks geodata, threatening to switch to an Android device.

“Maybe you could shed some light on this for me before I switch to a Droid,” the reader wrote. “They don’t track me.”

The CEO shot back a terse reply, defending his company and attacking his competitor Google, according to the reader: “Oh yes they do. We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.”

Apple has not commented on the authenticity of the e-mail.

The purported e-mail is similar in nature to many e-mails that Jobs has sent to customers in the past: It’s concise and still manages to pull off some word play. Jobs would be accurate to claim that Apple is not tracking customers directly — but instead it is using iPhones to gather information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi stations, occasionally combined with GPS data. In other words, Apple is tracking geodata from mobile devices, as Google is also doing.

Apple has not commented on the location-tracking issue since the story broke last week.

While the collected geodata doesn’t reveal specific addresses for locations you’ve visited, it can still leave a pretty rich trail of a user’s movements. Combine this data with other pieces of information on the iPhone, like your messages and photos, and you’ve got a device that knows more about you than you do yourself, says The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal.

Madrigal tested an iPhone forensics program called Lantern, which stitches together contacts, text messages and geodata into a neat interface that reconstructed a timeline of his life.

“Immediately after trying out Lantern, I enabled the iPhone’s passcode and set it to erase all data on the phone,” Madrigal said. “This thing remembers more about where I’ve been and what I’ve said than I do, and I’m damn sure I don’t want it falling into anyone’s hands.”

See Also:

• Why You Should Care About the iPhone Location-Tracking Issue
• Why and How Apple Is Collecting Your iPhone Location Data
• iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That