Apple unveils iLaunch

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From The Onion

The iLaunch runs Keynote-formatted presentations in high definition through a built-in projector while displaying a 3-D rotating image of the product. Voice-recognition software, Apple’s most advanced to date, can recite a speech highlighting the features of the device while injecting several clever digs at competitors. Should a product demonstration experience a glitch or malfunction, the iLaunch boasts a complex algorithm that can automatically produce humorous and distracting quips.

Described in its patent filing as a “hype-generating mechanism with fully integrated Mac compatibility,” the iLaunch is powered by Intel dual-core processors optimized to calculate a product’s gravitas. Apple claims the iLaunch can garner the same amount of press attention as a major scientific discovery, high court ruling, celebrity meltdown, or natural disaster at 200 times the speed of a traditional media-fostered launch.

“If you want to condition the public to liken your product to the telephone and the internal combustion engine in importance, that’s now possible with iLaunch,” Jobs said. “And it’s so easy, even an intern can use it.”

Mon chapeau est arrive!

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Before Christmas, I lost my fedora. My colleagues unkindly attributed its disappearance to the fact that I had been obliged to eat it. In fact I had left it in the back of a London taxi-cab on the way to an OFCOM dinner. Since then I’ve searched high and low for a replacement. I could only find an equivalent in the US; it seems that British hatters don’t do crushable headgear. Anyway, it arrived yesterday. I am overjoyed, but not half as pleased as the cats, who are indifferent to the hat but think that the box in which it was Fedexed is just dandy.

Pictures by Pete.

It’s out!

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Following the runaway success of A short history of tractors in Ukranian, here is my own modest contribution to the genre: A Brief History of the Future — in Lithuanian. The first copies arrived from my agent this morning.

Wonder how you say “Hooray!” in Lithuanian?

Update: Kevin Cryan tells me it’s “Valio!”

Overheard

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Cycling through town this afternoon, I passed a mother and her 8/9-year-old daughter on their way home from the daughter’s prissy, expensive private school. As I came level with them the girl said,

“Well, if you can’t be bothered to cook, I shan’t eat anything”.

Google Ink

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Scott Grieder, Ask.com Group Product Manager, was taking notes on an important conference call when his (free) Google Pen ran out of ink without warning. The lapse in this fundamental Google product/service forced him to switch pens at a critical moment, resulting in considerable inconvenience and loss of data.

“I should have known better than to use a free Google product for business purposes.” Scott told us in a recent interview. “Google Pen is fine for home use, but not when my company’s productivity is on the line. I had to switch pens in the middle of taking notes. There’s no telling how much data I lost.”

But then he received a nice handwritten letter from a Google person. “We note your suboptimal experience with our Google pens”, it said, “and are pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set. Fortunately our pen architecture is based on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff [warning: embedded geek joke] . If any component fails, a quick recovery is ensured”.

Thanks to James Cridland for spotting it.

Microsoft stakes claim to moral high ground; audience dies laughing

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Ho, ho! From today’s New York Times…

SEATTLE, March 5 (Reuters) — The Microsoft Corporation, the software giant, has prepared a blistering attack on rival Google, arguing that the Web search leader takes a cavalier approach to copyright protection.

In remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday to the Association of American Publishers, the associate general counsel of Microsoft, Thomas Rubin, argues that Google’s move into new media markets has come at the expense of publishers of books, videos and software.

Mr. Rubin’s comments echo arguments at the heart of a 16-month-old copyright lawsuit against Google brought by five book publishers and organized by the Association of American Publishers, an industry trade group.

“Companies that create no content of their own, and make money solely on the backs of other people’s content, are raking in billions through advertising revenue and I.P.O.s,” said Mr. Rubin, who oversees copyright and trade-secret law.

“Google takes the position that everything may be freely copied unless the copyright owner notifies Google and tells it to stop,” Mr.Rubin said. Microsoft, he said, asks the copyright’s owner for permission first…

Danny Sullivan has posted a nice dissection of Microsoft’s high-minded cant.

Our exploding dataverese

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From today’s Guardian…

Last year enough digital information – from emails and blogs to mobile phone calls, photos and TV signals – was generated to fill a dozen stacks of hardback books stretching from the earth to the sun, according to research published today.

The proliferation of digital cameras and mobile phones that can take pictures, coupled with the popularity of online video services such as YouTube and BitTorrent, has caused an explosion of images. This pushed the world’s total digital content last year to 161bn gigabytes. That is the equivalent of 161bn iPod Shuffles or 161 of so-called exabytes.

The sheer amount of data that has been created by the digital age becomes clear when comparing it with the spoken word. Experts estimate that all human language since the dawn of time would take up about 5 exabytes if stored in digital form. In comparison, last year’s email traffic accounted for 6 exabytes.

The survey, conducted by the technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by the IT firm EMC, shows that growth in the digital universe is being driven by the switch to digital imagery; the move from traditional phone calls to digital telephony such as mobile and voice over the internet calls, and the rise of digital TV.

Roughly a quarter of the digital universe is original – such as pictures or emails or even phone calls – while the other three-quarters is replicated material including forwarded emails, movies on DVD and pirated music.

Much of this digital information is being produced by individuals. YouTube, for instance, hosts about 100m daily video streams, while more than a billion songs are shared over the internet every day.

IDC estimates that by 2010, more than 70% of all the digital information in the world will have been created by consumers…

More… From GMSV:

From the Department of Unreproducible Results comes word that we are in a new space race and we are losing. Tech research firm IDC took a whack at calculating how much digital information the world is generating and came up with a figure of 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — for last year, factoring in the multiple copies of files like songs and videos. To put that in perspective — well, I don’t know … does saying that would fill 2 billion top-line iPods help at all? Luckily, says IDC, total available storage last year was 185 exabytes, leaving room for a big swap file. But the trend looks threatening. IDC figures we’ll have about 601 exabytes of storage available in 2010, but we’ll be producing 988 exabytes (closing in on 1 zettabyte) of new information, creating an overflow situation that will result in headlines like “Toddler swept away in raging data stream.”

This, as Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher notes, raises some interesting questions — like how does all that extra 2010 data get “produced” if there’s no place to store it. But don’t spend too much time worrying about it. This sort of extrapolation is usually rendered moot by real-world developments. Now that it’s been noted, go ahead and delete.

Copyright greed alive and well in US

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From SaveNetRadio.org…

On Friday March 2nd 2007, the Copyright Royalty Board announced new royalty rates for Internet Radio stations. The rates are retroactive to January of 2006.

The new rates are far higher than any industry experts expected. In fact, if they remain unchanged, bankruptcy looms for many online radio stations.

The new rates essentially levy a tax of $0.0011 per performance. Now, that doesn’t sound bad does it. But consider this. Each hour, the average radio station plays 16 songs. So that’s about 1.76c per hour, per listener. A station with 500 listener average would be hit with fees of $211 per day, $6,336 a month or $76,000 a year.

This amount of money is beyond the resources of all but the very wealthiest of corporations. Many of the internet radio stations are run by enthusiasts and hobbyists. These small stations are the ones bringing new music, and old favorites to you every day. Music you can’t hear on corporate-owned terrestrial stations.

Could this be the day the music died?

Thanks to Rex Hughes for the link.