Hasta La Gadget!

Ben Heck (aka Benjamin J Heckendorn aka The Hackendorn) has topped himself, again, and we don’t mean that in the suicidal sense. His latest project is a Commodore 64 laptop.

After endless procrastination, Ben finally got started and completed the project in an astonishingly short week and a half. Inside the rather slick and beautifully retro box is an original C64 motherboard, a Gamecube power supply and a piece of hardware called a 1541-III, which tricks the C64 into seeing an SD card as a floppy drive.

You really need to check the video (below) to see the machine in action (despite the SD cards, the game load times are still tortuously long). The clip reminds us of something else, too — how the hell did we ever manage to use those awful Atari joysticks? I hated them the first time round, before my teenage years brought on incurable RSI.

Commodore 64 Original Hardware Laptop [Ben Heck]

See Also:

• Ben Heck’s PS3 Laptop
• Apple ][ GS Laptop From Ben Heckendorn
• Ben Heckendorn Shows Off XBox 360 Laptop Mk II

This article was written on July 13, 2006 by CyberNet.

Every year at the International Supercomputer Conference that is held in Dresden, Germany, the top 500 most powerful supercomputers are announced. These high performance computers are super impressive with unimaginable computing speeds. There are multiple big name companies building these computers like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM. Virginia Tech in the U.S. ranks 28th on the most powerful list with a self-made supercomputer. IBM dominates the top list with 240 of the 500 most powerful and more than half the total processing power.

First on the list is the BlueGene/L System which is installed at DOE’s Laboratory in Livermore, California. It has 131,072 processors and 32,768 GB of main memory. How impressive is that? Most hardcore gamers deck out their machines with around 4 GB of ram! It has an unprecedented sustained performance of 280.6 Tflop/s.
It is truly amazing to see the progress that supercomputers have made over the last 10 years. Just for a comparison, in 1996 the most powerful supercomputer was a Hitachi installed at the University of Tokyo in Japan. It utilized only 1,152 processors in comparison to the 131,072 processors in use by the top computer today. 299 of the top 500 supercomputers are installed in the United States with the United Kingdom next at 35.

Because I’m partial to Iowa State University, here’s some cool information about their supercomputer ranked 99th on the list of 500 (pictured above). It is an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that can handle 5.7 trillion calculations per second! IBM calculated that it would take someone 5 million years to make the same number of calculations plus it includes 11 trillion bytes of data storage. These supercomputers are great for some pretty serious research from astrophysics to nuclear physics. CyBlue(yes, they named it) is being used to help sequence the corn genome (it is Iowa after all) which is considered to be pretty complex.

Supercomputers are without a doubt pretty powerful to say the least! Who’s up for a game of chess against of these?

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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James Park and his partner Eric Friedman stood out like a couple of sore thumbs.

They were in the middle of a crowd of other entrepreneurs at TechCrunch50, a small conference for startups, held in San Francisco last September.

But unlike most of their peers, the duo weren’t touting a web-based mashup, a new advertising platform or a collection of 3-D avatars for customer service. They sought attention for their hardware company, which was building a fitness gadget called Fitbit that would be part pedometer, part wellness tracker.

"We have three full-time employees and everything else is outsourced," says Park. "But we have a great idea and we have a flexible work force, and we want to build the next big thing in the gadgets business."

Consumer electronics startups are the new frontier for enterprising entrepreneurs. Once thought to be an expensive business skewed in favor of large companies with nearly unlimited access to capital, giant manufacturing facilities and armies of engineers, the business is attracting entrepreneurs who think small and move quickly. And they’re changing the consumer electronics landscape: the Chumby, LiveScribe Pulse Pen, Roku media player and Pure Digital’s Flip camcorder all owe their existence to scrappy, independents, not big corporate R&D departments. In some cases, these gadget startups have led to multimillion-dollar paydays for their founders.

Fueling this change is the explosion of the PC and cellphone industries, which have created an ecosystem of boutique industrial designers, contract manufacturing shops and online retailers that support this new generation of guerrilla hardware entrepreneurs.

Neither Park nor Friedman have experience in consumer electronics. Consummate software geeks, they studied computer science in college. Their last company was the photo-sharing startup Windup Labs that was eventually acquired by CNET. But together they’re creating a consumer hardware company on the cheap. Fitbit has raised just $2.5 million in its first round of venture financing, and the company hopes to start shipping its $100 devices this summer.

"Today with a guy or two, a good idea and about $1.5 million you can get a contract manufacturer in Asia to do your gadget," says Gadi Amit, founder of New Deal Design, a San Francisco-based industrial design firm. "About 10 years ago that would have taken 20 engineers and $10 million."

There are caveats. A cellphone can be tricky for new entrants because it requires extremely sophisticated design, specialized chips and custom software. But smaller, simpler products like the Fitbit are easier, say industry watchers.

For engineers to switch between hardware and software companies isn’t new. But Park and Friedman are different, says Amit. "James is kind of the quintessential profile of the internet entrepreneur," he says. "Now he’s doing hardware and that’s a novelty."

So what are two dot-com era survivors doing in the hardware business?

Chasing the Dream

It’s no secret in Silicon Valley that almost every engineer, venture capitalist or dot-com executive loves gadgets. IT geeks rush to Fry’s and Amazon to get their latest cellphone, e-book reader or personal planetarium. Their homes are filled with gadgets, and showing off gadgets is as much a part of networking and social bonding as drinking beer and exchanging business cards. 

Park and Friedman are no exception. About a year and a half ago, the fitness junkies were casually tossing ideas around a gadget that would track not just physical activities (walking, biking) but could also log sleep patterns. In effect, they wanted device that would produce a complete picture of a user’s physical well being.

And just like that, they decided to build one. "We like gadgets and we like building things so we thought why not make a go of this one?" says Park.

But getting Silicon Valley VCs to fund a consumer electronics hardware startup isn’t easy. "Money flows where money knows," says Jason Krikorian, former founder of Sling Media. Krikorian, together with his brother Blake, founded Sling Media in 2004 and last year sold it to EchoStar Communications for $380 million.

"The consumer electronics space is one that a lot of VCs have a bit of an allergic reaction to," says Krikorian. "VCs see the gadget consumer as hard to predict. And when it comes to the product itself, they see a lot of challenges, from cash requirements to distribution and dealing with retail."

Sling Media ultimately raised $57.5 million in funding from DCM and Mobius Capital, among others. It’s a fair chunk of change but many software startups draw as much. Take the Marc Andreesen-backed social networking site Ning, which has raised about $60 million so far.

Park and Friedman knew the odds were stacked against them as they pitched a gadget company. But they were counting on a new kind of strategy. Instead of asking for millions, they would start low. All they needed was a modest first round to kick off operations.

That’s how they found True Ventures. A venture firm focused on early stage companies, True Ventures has funded companies such as tech blog Gigaom, web-based instant messaging platform Meebo, and online gaming company Hive7.

"We offered a pretty conventional business model," says Park. "We build something and sell it to people at a cost that is higher than what it takes to produce. And we don’t want too much money to get started."

Idea to Execution

Next step in their plan: finding an industrial designer to take their feature set and turn it into a hardware package.

In the last few years, a number of boutique industrial design shops
have sprung up focusing on consumer electronics. Fuseproject founder Yves Behar created the stylish Jawbone headset. MindTribe has helped engineer Pure Digital’s popular Flip Mino
camera.

Park and Friedman turned to Gadi Amit and his team at New Deal Design.
A former vice-president of design at Frog Design, one of the largest
and most well-known design companies, Amit broke away in 2000 to start
his own firm. Amit and his team of 15 engineers specialize in consumer
electronics startups. New Deal Design’s clients include Dell, Netgear,
Sling Media and electric-car service station company Better Place. 

Increasingly, says Amit, more entrepreneurs are looking towards
hardware for their next big idea. "Everyone can’t be the next Michael
Dell or Steve Jobs," he says. "But relatively speaking, there is still
a higher chance of success in consumer hardware than in yet another
social networking app."

Within two weeks Amit and his team drew the high level sketches for
Fitbit. In four months, they had the final renderings. Now it would be
up to the contract manufacturers to create the prototypes.

Building on an Idea

Electronics factories in China and Taiwan have changed manufacturing
in the same way that hundreds of software body shops in Bangalore have
reshaped the software world, by offering cheap, competitive and
high-quality labor.

"Five years ago, contract manufacturers would just be manufacturing
houses, nothing more," says Amit. "They would have major difficulties
with refinement of handheld products, difficulties working with colors,
materials and finishes, problems integrating hardware and software."

Now they are are sophisticated enough to create high-gloss products
on the cheap, he says. As compared to even five years ago, contract
manufacturers now are comfortable enough working with small volume
orders and startups. "The back end of manufacturing is relatively easy,"
says Amit. "But you still need a product manager and a lot of flights
to China."

In the last six months, Park has visited Singapore and Indonesia about
four times to meet with Fitbit’s contract manufacturers. Still, he
says, it has been a fairly smooth ride. "There are still differences,
especially with the nuances of the language — we have to be extremely
detailed in our communication and can’t just assume they understand
some things," he says. "But they seem to be pretty familiar in dealing
with Western companies."

With the first few prototypes in hand, Fibit has started wooing some retail buyers.

The rise of online buying, especially for electronics, has changed
the game for them. Old big-box stores such as CompUSA and Circuit City
have given way to online retail shops such as Amazon and Buy.com. And
the shift has brought with it changed attitudes. Online retailers have
lower joint marketing demands and lower margin requirements, so
products can be priced cheaper.

Products now get distributed from two or three central locations,
which means smaller firms need fewer distribution points. "All this
helps companies get to market with less cash," says Krikorian.

But that’s just half of the story, says Jim Marggraff, CEO of
LiveScribe. To go beyond the enthusiast market, consumer electronics
products still need to get on retail shelves. And that means old-fashioned retailers like Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy still hold
considerable power. "For something really new, there is a huge
credibility boost associated from being on retail shelves," says
Marggraff.

When the LiveScribe pen first appeared on shelves on Target, it
exploded into consumer consciousness in a way direct retail couldn’t
have accomplished, he says. "We had lots of impulse buys from Target,"
says Marggraff. "Being on their shelves made our product feel real."

Retail sales and distribution still remain the biggest challenges
for consumer electronics startups, says Tim Twerdahl, vice president of
consumer products for Roku. For example, products have much higher
return rates through retail than when selling direct. Manufacturers
also have to pay a big premium to the retailers for shelf space, and
are often held hostage to big box stores’ timelines when it comes to
launching new products. "All this can become quite expensive for a
small company," says Twerdahl.

For Fitbit, that’s something to worry about later. They have
more pressing problems. Fitbit, which was scheduled to launch in
spring, has been delayed to summer. "We have some electrical and
mechanical bugs that we have to resolve," says Park. And that can be a
tricky business. Every bug fix requires a new prototype and it can take
up to two weeks to produce a new unit. The costs can add up quickly,
since every new Fitbit prototype can take $3,000 to $5,000 to create.
"We have to be very aggressive about testing," says Park. "Every time
we need to make a decision about what can wait for later revisions."

But if Fitbit’s founders can get their product out to market, they
hope to leverage the worldwide community of gadget blogs and online
forums to carry it forward. Hardware-obsessed gadget heads offer
powerful word-of-mouth marketing and they can turn unknown
products into mainstream hits inexpensively, says Krikorian, pointing
to Sling’s strategy of courting bloggers and online enthusiasts.

If Fitbit can carve a successful niche for itself, there could be a
pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Last week Cisco acquired Pure
Digital, makers of the Flip video camera, for $590 million.

"An acquisition in consumer electronics is not like winning a
lottery," says Park, ever hopeful. "If you build a good business with
strong cash flows, there are enough big companies out there interested
in you."

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

This article was written on July 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Lately I’ve been what I like to call a "patent stalker enthusiast" because I find it interesting to watch what companies have in store for us. On my daily scavenger hunt I came across an Apple Patent that is pretty blatant in its purpose. First it says that an iPod can be used to control the audio on a computer running iTunes. Then it goes on to say that you would be able to wirelessly send a song from the computer to the iPod.

Here’s what the patent has to say in the technical mumbo jumbo:
Note: I’ve stressed certain portions, and highlighted words used in the diagram below.

A portable multimedia player (such as the iPod.TM. manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. of Cupertino, Calif.) is used to wirelessly access and control a media server (such as a personal computer running iTunes software) that is streaming digital media by way of a wireless interface to a media unit (such as a stereo/speakers in the case of streaming digital audio).
…
In yet another embodiment, a method of providing wireless remote control of a remote media unit through use of a portable multimedia player and a personal computer is described. The method is carried out by wirelessly receiving at the personal computer a multimedia file indication from the multimedia player, identifying a multimedia file stored on the personal computer using the received multimedia file indication, accessing the identified multimedia file; and wirelessly sending the identified multimedia file from the personal computer to the remote media unit.

The images that they included with the patent don’t show anything of much importance, but this is the general sketch of the setup:

So there you have it. There is indeed an iPod coming with wireless capabilities, and it is going to be doing more than I expected. I really like the idea of carrying your iPod around the house and being able to control your stereo, and this is yet another way that Apple shows how creative they can be.

Now we just have to wait and see whether this is going to be the iPod that’s expected in August.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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The Mac Mini is the greatest Mac that never was, always just a little too expensive and/or a little too underfeatured to be perfect. This time it’s closer than ever to perfection—but still falls short.

Sure, a $500 price tag would be great. But if we can’t get that, can’t we at least get an HDMI output? Dell, Acer and others now sell teeny desktops with HDMI outputs—some even have Blu-ray players. It’s pretty much the right thing to do at this time, but Apple’s not doing it. That’s not surprising: Apple is slower to adopt popular PC standards such as USB 2.0, the CD burner, and that Blu-ray drive. And the company itself is adamant that the Mini is seen as a desktop machine, not an entertainment PC. Some people believe Apple keeps HDMI out of the Mini to protect the HDMI-laden Apple TV. If true, it’s sad, because Apple TV just isn’t good enough to protect with the life of another product.

We can all agree that it’s nice to have a reasonably affordable Mac out there in the universe, and most of us can agree with Apple’s decision not to redesign the outer shell of the thing—it’s still attractively simple. But I want a Mac Mini in my living room, and I want it connected to a 50″ flat panel TV. With one cable. Why is that wrong?

The good news is, the new Mac Mini is a worthy little beast. In spite of its seemingly wimpy 2.0GHz dual-core processor, it keeps up with most of the basic stuff you can throw at it. The internal redesign of the Mac Mini is really about coupling that Core 2 Duo with Nvidia integrated graphics, and I have to say, it seems like that worked out nicely. It’s the same GeForce 9400M chipset we see in the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and, not coincidentally, the new iMac, and when it comes to rendering 1080p movies and playing a little Quake 4 on a 24″ monitor, it gets the job done.

It gets the job done when there’s enough RAM, that is. That extra 1GB stick actually doubles the 9400M’s shared memory from 128MB to 256MB, and when you’re playing games, you’ll notice that in the textures and motion smoothness. It’s hard to tell from the shots below, but textures appearing in Quake 4 on the 2GB Mini were much closer to those on the new iMac, which is far more powerful with a 2.66GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM.

Quake 4 Demo
Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM vs 2009 iMac



Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM vs 2009 iMac

Nobody is going to use the Mini as their primary gaming machine—as you can see in my Xbench and Geekbench testing, the two Mini configs always trailed more expensive Mac systems, and in many tests fared the same or worse than their predecessors—but between the Core 2 Duo and the 9400M graphics, it’s a solid computer.

Xbench test results


Geekbench test results


The better news is, there’s no good reason to buy the more expensive $800 one. The $600 config comes with the same processor and DVD burner. As I insinuated, you should up the RAM to 2GB for $50 extra, but even then, your total shouldn’t exceed $650. Unfortunately, judging by this teardown and a chat I had with Apple, they intentionally made it hard for people to upgrade it themselves.

At that point, all the $800 model has going for it is a 320GB hard drive, and nobody pays $150 for a paltry 160GB of bonus storage. Going from a 160GB drive to a 320GB drive is like going from 40mph to 50mph on a 65mph interstate. Go get an external drive—it just now took me four seconds to spot this 1TB Iomega Prestige external drive on Amazon for $117! That Mini only has five freakin’ USB 2.0 jacks—let’s don’t be afraid to tie up one or two.

My feelings on the Mini end somewhat mixed. It’s now powerful enough to be a nice iPod-syncable movie ripper/server with the Front Row experience I can control from the couch. I can still set this up without spraining my brain, but there would be lots of compromises.

For instance, it would either take a cheap Y-cable for analog stereo out, or a Toslink-to-mini optical cable ($2.24 at Monoprice) that could connect to a receiver for surround sound. It would also take a video adapter of some kind. Many TVs have DVI or VGA inputs, and all now have HDMI inputs, so there are plenty of adapters you can get. There’s a Mini DVI-to-HDMI adapter ($9.88 at Monoprice), or an even snazzier Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI plug, which Monoprice will sell for $14.25 sometime around March 15.

But you see where I’m going here, right? No matter how awesome Monoprice is when it comes to cables and adapters and crap, this is all spaghetti the Mini shouldn’t need. Apple: Where’s the flippin’ HDMI? You put not one but two video outputs on this thing, and yet I still need an adapter to plug it into anything but a $900 Apple monitor. Yes, thanks for including that Mini DVI to DVI adapter in the box, but I’m pretty sure that just proves my point. [Product Page]

In Summary
It’s nice and compact, just like its externally identical predecessors

The Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics do appear to make everything faster and smoother

Very difficult to upgrade by hand, but at least there’s a cheap RAM upgrade

No HDMI means it can’t be a great home-theater PC

Needs video adapters for most monitor or TV connection