Sony buys Gracenote, Interesting buy (moishe thinks)

From MacWorld

Sony Corp. of America will buy Gracenote, which made its name with software that identifies digital music files, for about $260 million.

Sony will keep Gracenote as a wholly owned subsidiary and use its technology in its own digital content, service and device offerings. But Gracenote’s current business will keep operating separately and developing new technologies, and its management will remain, Sony said. It will pay $260 million plus “other contingent consideration,” the company said.

Although it pioneered portable music players with the Walkman cassette player and jointly developed the CD, Sony’s digital and online music efforts have fallen short of competitors such as Apple. The company shut down its Connect music store last August after trying to compete against Apple’s iTunes Store for three years.

Gracenote, formerly CDDB, maintains a database of information about music and uses it in a variety of applications, including identifying tracks, finding similar songs and presenting lyrics and other relevant content. Its customers include iTunes, Yahoo Music Jukebox, and companies in the mobile music business, such as Sony Ericsson, Japanese carrier KDDI and Europe’s Musiwave. Consumer electronics suppliers, including Sony, also use Gracenote technology in their products. The company is based in Emeryville, California.

The companies expect the deal to close in late May.

Bill Gates - "Keyboards Suck," Moishe agrees

PITTSBURGH (AP) -- People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.
"It's one of the big bets we're making," he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced.

"They're dealing with so much information that ... the need for machine learning to figure out what's going on with that data is absolutely essential," he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with reseachers in other scientific areas "to help us understand where new inventions are necessary," Gates said.

Gates plans to retire as Microsoft's chief software architect in July and focus on philanthropy.

More tech m&a - Google buys Plaxo

Google will announce plans to acquire Plaxo, the company that stores online business contact details, by March 15th.

Wired recently reported a rumor to this effect, suggesting that Plaxo may accept an offer from Google in the $200 million range.

Yet more examples of technology M&A, Moishe is telling you keep eye on this (cnet news)

Plaxo, Bebo acquisition rumors run amok on the Web

Posted by Caroline McCarthy | Post a comment

"Who's going to buy Yahoo?" isn't the only big question in mergers and acquisitions this week. Over the past few days, rumors have circulated that social-networking site Bebo and contacts management site Plaxo are either in negotiations or already sold.

Nobody's commenting, obviously.

First, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote on Tuesday that a source told him that a Bebo acquisition was "definitely happening." The company was in the process of negotiating a $1 billion sale, he said, but didn't know who the buyer was. Arrington speculated it could be Google, considering that Bebo's user base has "very little overlap" with that of Google's in-house social network, Orkut--the former has a youth-skewing base and is extremely popular in the U.K., whereas the latter is geared more toward adults and is big in Brazil and India. But with its OpenSocial developer initiative, Google seems like it would rather have influence across the entire social-networking landscape rather than choose one to operate. (Orkut was created by Google engineers, not acquired.)

But Arrington also noted that the Bebo buyer, if there in fact is one, could be just about any big name in media or technology, from CBS to Viacom.

The second rumor is a bit more detailed: tech gossip blog Valleywag reported on Wednesday that Plaxo has been sold to cable conglomerate Comcast for $175 million. Last week, the rumor was that Google had bought Plaxo. But Comcast, Valleywag's Owen Thomas pointed out, already has a deal with Plaxo to handle address book applications for its Internet customers.

All we need now is another Digg acquisition rumor, and then I'm about ready to call it a week.

Using nanotechnology - a shirt harnesses bodies movement to create power - GENIUS!

From New Scientist Tech

A piezoelectric fabric that generates power through the bending of its component threads could harvest useful amounts of power from a wearer's body motions.

In 2007 Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, US, developed a generator composed of a forest of piezoelectric zinc oxide nanowires topped by a flat conductive plate. As the plate is pushed down, the wires bend, producing a voltage that induces current to flow into the plate.

Now Wang has turned this idea into an electricity-generating thread, which he plans to weave into a fabric. His team figured out how to grow the nanowires on a strand of Kevlar fibre instead of a flat surface, so that the wires stick out from the fibre like the bristles on a pipe-cleaner.

When two of the bristly fibres rub against one another, the nanowires deform, causing a current to flow through a thin layer of metal coating on one of the fibres.

No prickles

In tests with just two short fibres, Wang's team was able to generate a few picowatts of power, but they found that the power output increased 50-fold when three pairs of fibres are twined together into a yarn, increasing the area of contact.

Wang estimates that the fabric should be capable of generating about 80 milliwatts of electricity per square metre, enough to charge a cellphone battery or other personal electronics from the ordinary motions of a shirt or a curtain blowing in the wind.....

The model T of cell phones - $20 mobile - India

Selling cheap commodity products to the billions of people in the world who don't make a lot money is how you make a lot of money. largest market.

From Times Online (UK)

India has already built the world's cheapest car — the £1,200 Tata Nano — now the country has delivered the telecoms equivalent: the £10 "people's phone".

The mobile handset, developed by Spice, an Indian conglomerate listed in Bombay and worth £1 billion, is angled at the lowest end of the market.

This means that it has jettisoned all "non-essential" features — such as a screen.

"It is just a phone," Bhupendra Kumar Modi, the Spice chairman, who hopes to sell about ten million in the next year, confirmed....

What recession? look at all the tech mergers and acquisitions being announced

Sun Microsystems has acquired Innotek, a Stuttgart, Germany provider of open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox, for an undisclosed amount.

VirtualBox is part of a hot group of companies allowing for much more efficient use of computers within large companies. VirtualBox enables desktop or laptop PCs running pretty much any operating system — Windows, Linux, Mac or Solaris — to run multiple, different operating systems side-by-side, switching between them with just a click of the mouse.

This is very astute and true

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, believes the US economy will not fall into a slump because technological progress will help it to grow, he said in an interview with a German newspaper on Thursday.

The Microsoft co-founder told Bild he believed the severe turbulence on the global markets sparked by concerns of a recession in the United States would calm down.

"The US economy has been very strong in the last 10 to 15 years. Unfortunately I don't have a crystal ball to see into the next few years," Gates said.

"But I am an optimist. The US economy could remain strong in the next few years because technological progress will propel it."

Gates denied he was anxiously keeping an eye on the Microsoft share price.

"I'm no expert on shares, I'm a software person," he said. "I look at the share price every couple of weeks.

"The important thing is that in the past it has gone up far more often than it has gone down."

Gates was in Germany to announce that Microsoft will spend 235 million dollars (161 million euros) over the next five years to introduce more computers into classrooms.

He was to address the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday.

Gates led the Rich List compiled by Forbes magazine for the 13th year in 2007 with an estimated fortune of 56 billion dollars.

Moishe is leaving on a jet plane - f the concorde!

In a hurry? Need to get from Sydney to Brussels in a dash? Not too far in the future you may be able to travel that entire distance in less than 4 hours - emissions free - thanks to an amazing hypersonic hydrogen jet project called LAPCAT. LAPCAT stands for Long-Term Advanced Propulsion Concepts and Technologie, and is funded by the European Space Agency. This type of hypersonic jet would put the Concorde to shame with it’s speed, and the best part is that it would not be powered by the typical fossil fuels, but instead by a much greener hydrogen alternative.

Supersonic aviation as a workable model may have ended prematurely with the death of the Concord, but that hasn’t stopped other people from attempting to bring back the concept of hypersonic civil transportation. The LAPCAT project is a study, funded by Europa General R&D, that seeks to determine whether or not it is possible to create a plane that can cover long distances in a very short amount of time. The result? The A2 Mach 5 Civil Transport Concept.

The concept has been developed by Reaction Engines, which was formed by Alan Bond, John Scott-Scott and Richard Varvill. It is made out of two different pieces of technology. The First one is a hydrogen powered engine concept which can power an airplane up to speeds of Mach 5, that is, five times the speed of sound. Why hydrogen? In order to achieve Mach 5, more power is needed than what would be commonly available from the common fossil fuels. The other innovation lies in the A2 Airframe. The Airframe is designed to withstand velocities that are five times the speed of sound, and carry up to 300 passengers. That’s a pretty remarkable feat if it actually manages to do that, and the environmental zero-emissions possibilities are just icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, too good to be true sometime is just that. But this might just be a case where a green dream is pretty close to reality. Needless to say, if this project comes to fruition it will change the concept of air travel forever.

Next Invention....a time machine

I know what Morty's dog would say about him - "look at this schmuck, picking up my shit"

What would a dog say if it could talk? "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play", according to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks.

The special programme analysed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations.

In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario.

America needs this, it will enable people to get fatter faster

Pizza Hut has joined rivals Domino's and Papa John's in implementing a nationwide order-by-text service, giving customers even easier access to its tasty-but-greasy fare. To take advantage of the "Total Mobile Access" feature, you have to visit the Pizza Hut website for a one-time registration of your mobile number, along with setting up your so-called "pizza playlist" to enable easier ordering. You can also satisfy your pizza jones by hitting up the same site on a mobile browser, which provides an optimized version of the desktop ordering system that has been in place for several years.

Leave it to a guy with a mustache to clone himself - figures, you want company

A scientist has achieved a world first... by cloning himself.

In a breakthrough certain to provoke an ethical furore, Samuel Wood created embryo copies of himself by placing his skin cells in a woman's egg.

The embryos were the first to be made from cells taken from adult humans.

Although they survived for only five days and were smaller than a pinhead, they are seen as a milestone in the quest for treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Nerd it up - Macworld bitches

Very Useful Link for Mac Users

Top 100 Mac Apps

Chris Pirillo:
I’ve compiled a list of my top 100 Mac apps for your perusal, since so many people have been asking for it. Thanks to Taylor Olson and Jason for helping me put all the icons and links in place! These apps are certainly Tiger compatible, and most of ‘em work inside Leopard (though the VNC utilities are now unnecessary). I did my best to avoid overly popular titles, but couldn’t avoid it in some cases.

As Heard on NPR This Morning

... the [Florida Gulf Stream] — which flows at 8 billion gallons per minute — could yield as much energy as several nuclear plants, providing one-third of Florida's power.

However, this is genuinely bad news...

One of Morty's pet grievances with the Bush administration is the utter lack of interest in scientific and technological innovation - the type of R&D that keeps the US' economy vibrant and progressive.