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Deal of the day: Free same-day gadget delivery (SF only)

Seattle gets groceries from the Amazon(.com)

Also worth noting is that the company hasn’t spent a dime on advertising, and doesn’t plan to until it raises its first round of funding. In the meantime, it’s expanding into other areas of New York, including Brooklyn and Queens, before launching in two more major cities later this year.

The system works by matching you up with businesses that deliver within a certain geographical threshold. After plugging in your address, you can view an entire listing of these businesses, as well as their menus, delivery charges, hours of business, and estimated time of food arrival. Many promise delivery within half an hour, although others simply list the nebulous “ASAP.”

Since launching less than two months ago, creator Robert Rizzo says the site’s user base has increased weekly by more than 100 percent. He also says that one of the things that makes his system so potentially powerful is that it tracks what items are selling for each retailer, so they can stock up on items that are popular with the home delivery crowd.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

With services like Wakozi around, the movie Half Baked likely would have been about 15 minutes long. The home delivery service has been designed with people of leisure in mind, linking up New Yorkers with local eateries and convenience stores that get solid and liquid nutritional goodness to their doors within the hour.

New Yorkers can order all the essentials on Wakozi, a service that links people up to local shops that deliver at all hours of the day. (click to enlarge)

Whoever mentions this blog post will get a squeezy Mule until I run out of the few I can carry.

I am on the “Integration Behind the Fire Wall – Take II” panel tomorrow at 1:30pm at the OpSource SaaS Summit here in SF.

Seesmic gets N95 support. But you don't get Seesmic.

Also, there’s now a mobile application (Nokia N95 only so far), from which you can create and view Seesmic posts. Mobile Seesmics aren’t streamed live like they are with Qik or Flixwagon, but it does make it easier to play in the network.

See my previous review, Seesmic: It’s video Twitter and then some.

As promised in an earlier version of this post, I have secured more invitations to the Seesmic private beta. Send an email to rafe@seesmic.com (which is not me; I won’t see these). The first 100 emails will get access codes. Good luck!

Seesmic, aka video Twitter, is still in private beta, but CEO Loic Le Meur is here at Demo 2008 anyway, showcasing a few new features. Nothing revolutionary, just a few nice tweaks. First, you can now easily see video responses to a video post, and in fact play all the responses in a continuous stream. It’s like Friend TV.

Amen. Proprietary software is all about vendor-driven innovation. Open source is all about user-driven innovation, collaboratively married to vendor innovation. It’s a two-way street, and it’s much, much better for both vendors and users.

CIO.com suggests that open source may be the future of enterprise innovation, echoing the Bank of New York Mellon’s comments on the subject last week. The question is not why use open source, but how to best use open source.

[I]f you develop in an open source model and other companies adopt what you develop, you have a higher chance of longevity in the code base. In other words, you can develop a custom solution to a unique business problem with less fear that your solution will turn into a dead-end legacy system when things, inevitably, change in a few years. Milinkovich also sees more CIOs banding together with industry peers to develop common open-source solutions to standard industry processes, thereby saving money by sharing costs and ensuring interoperability.

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For a full list of the SSIDs used in the attack check out Hiner’s blog. He suggests that the best way to make sure you don’t fall victim to an attack is to never click on an ad-hoc network, which is the icon with the two laptops. And users should stick to paid public Wi-Fi hot spots, such as ones offered by companies like Boingo.

Once someone is infected with the bogus SSID, anyone who knows of the attack can use the connection to access shared files on the infected laptop. The open wireless connection could also allow hackers to access confidential files on a laptop.

When a user tries to connect to one of these supposedly free wireless networks, Windows automatically adds the SSID to the preferred networks list. The vulnerability spreads as the fake SSID is automatically broadcast to other users, who then try to connect to it. These laptops then become infected.

Jason Hiner, executive editor at CNET News.com’s sister site TechRepublic, wrote a blog on Wednesday about the new study published by a company called AirTight at the Gartner Mobile and Wireless Summit in Chicago on Monday. AirTight Networks, which sells wireless-intrusion-prevention software, conducted its study in 11 U.S. airports and three airports in the Asia-Pacific region between January 30 and February 8 using standard Wi-Fi cards and packet tracing software.

AirTight, the company that conducted the study, found that 10 percent of all wireless users it scanned in the airports it surveyed were broadcasting at least one bogus SSID. In some airports the percentage was higher. At the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, almost 22 percent of laptops were transmitting one of the viral SSIDs. About 17 percent of laptops surveyed at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International airport in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Pittsburgh International Airport had one or more of the viral SSIDs.

In his blog post, Hiner said that there is no payload or tricky code involved in the attack, so it’s virtually impossible to track. But because the exploit essentially creates public access to a laptop, anyone who knows the laptop is infected can also exploit the vulnerability.

The company found that hackers can gain access to information on a laptop hard drive by setting up fake ad-hoc or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networks in airports. The SSID (service set identifier), which is used to identify nearby wireless networks, appears as an icon with two laptops connecting to each other and is often named something appealing, such as “Free Public Wi-Fi” or “Free Internet!”

Public Wi-Fi hotspots in airports can be a lifesaver for many business travelers, but a new study released this week suggests that road warriors could be vulnerable to hack attacks if they aren’t careful about which networks they connect to while waiting for their flight.

Opting for the Satellite P305D-S8818 will save you 100 bucks and will buy a 2.1GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-62 processor and just 2GB of RAM. The P300 series also incorporates Toshiba’s Regza Link technology, which is basically HDMI-based control codes designed to better integrate TV and A/V sources using a single remote control.

And finally, Toshiba’s gaming line will get a refresh with the 17.1-inch Satellite X205-SLi5 ($1,999), which includes:

For $200 less you can purchase the Satellite U405-S2820, with an older 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5550, just 2GB of RAM, and 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi.

2.2GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-64
Integrated ATI Radeon X1250 graphics
3GB RAM
250GB (5,400rpm) hard drive
DVD burner with Labelflash
Built-in Webcam and microphone
802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi
Four USB ports
Fingerprint reader
Harmon Kardon stereo speakers
One-year standard limited warranty.

The 13.3-inch Satellite U405-S2830 ($1,149) includes these specs:

The $1,149 Satellite A305-S6839 swaps the AMD processor for a 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 CPU, 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 discrete graphics, and a 320GB hard drive. And the $1,299 Satellite A305-S6845 provides a 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 CPU, 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 discrete graphics, and two 200GB hard drives.

The 14.1-inch, 5-pound Satellite M305-S4822 ($949) includes:

The 15.4-inch Satellite A305D-S6831 ($949) includes:

2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100
Integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics
3GB RAM
250GB (5,400rpm) hard drive
DVD burner with Labelflash
Built-in Webcam and microphone
802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi
Three USB ports
Fingerprint reader
Stereo speakers (NOT Harmon Kardon, as on other Satellites)
One-year standard limited warranty.

Throw down another $500 and you can get the Satellite X205-SLi6, with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300, 400GB worth of storage, and a USB HDTV Tuner. The Satellite X205 series also boasts HDMI and S/PDIF connections as well as Dolby Sound Room for near-5.1 stereo surround sound.

For $100 more you can get the Satellite M305-S4826, which features a 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor but otherwise identical components.

1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5550
256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphics
3GB RAM
320GB (5,400rpm) hard drive
DVD burner with Labelflash
Built-in Webcam and microphone
802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi
Four USB ports
Harman Kardon stereo speakers
One-year standard limited warranty.

The 17.1-inch Satellite P305-S8825 ($1,049) includes:

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T8300
512MB NVIDIA SLi Dual GeForce 8600M GT graphics
3GB RAM
320GB (2 x 160GB, 7,200 RPM) hard drives
DVD burner with Labelflash
Built-in Webcam and microphone
802.11a/g/n Wi-Fi
Four USB ports
Fingerprint reader
Four Harmon Kardon stereo speakers with sub-woofer
Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
One-year standard limited warranty.

1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5550
Integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics
3GB RAM 250GB (5,400rpm) hard drive
DVD burner with Labelflash
Built-in Webcam and microphone
802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi
Three USB ports
Harman Kardon stereo speakers
One-year standard limited warranty.

Last week’s announcement focused on the new Satellite look (which Toshiba describes as “gray pinstripes set upon a field of black” and my colleague Dan Ackerman describes as “a distinct metallic sheen”), and the new Sleep and Charge feature, which lets you charge USB devices even if the laptop is powered off. This week’s news listed the full specs of 11 preconfigured Satellite models that are available at Toshiba’s site. We’ve listed all the details after the jump.

Speaking of iPods, Apple just announced a price cut on the 1GB iPod shuffle: $49, down from $79. If you can’t make do with a measly 240 songs, cheer up: Apple also announced a new 2GB shuffle, though it won’t be available for a couple weeks. That model will sell for $69, meaning anyone who just paid $79 for a 1GB shuffle will be crying into their beer.

(Credit:
Apple)

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

One additional note: The price-cut shuffle doesn’t qualify for free shipping, which applies only to orders over $50. I feel a tiny bit better.

Apple has a message for its customers: let us make it up to you.

At the Intel Developer Forum, more than a dozen ultramobile computers, powered by Intel's new Atom CPU, were on display. Click on the image to see more of the gadgets.

That news was revealed by an Intel employee as senior vice president Pat Gelsinger was delivering his IDF keynote, which included more specifics about Nehalem, the family of chips the company plans to begin rolling out in the fourth quarter. Gelsinger, the general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, showed the first wafer holding individual eight-core processors, detailed the power-saving features of the Nehalem processors, and confirmed future mobile Nehalem processors.

This new version, called the Widget Channel, will resemble the version that’s available for PCs, but will come with a different user interface to let programmers build widgets that can be controlled from a distance with a remote control, said Patrick Barry, Yahoo’s vice president of connected TV at Yahoo.

On the Web
A federal judge gave more weight to the concept of “fair use” when he threw a lifeline to a Pennsylvania mother’s lawsuit against Universal Music. The judge refused to dismiss Stephanie Lenz’s suit claiming that Universal abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when it issued a takedown notice to YouTube over a 30-second video of Lenz’s baby dancing to a Prince song. In the first ruling of its kind, Judge Jeremy Fogel held that copyright owners must consider fair use before sending DMCA takedown notices.

The lawsuit claims that Apple’s iPhone 3G advertising campaign is misleading. The charges in the lawsuit mirror widespread complaints about the iPhone 3G’s reception that have crisscrossed the Internet since Apple and AT&T released the successor to the original iPhone on July 11.

If you have a first-generation iPod Nano and you’ve noticed it has a tendency to smoke too much, Apple is willing to replace the unit. The company issued the following statement after reports out of Japan that some first-generation iPod Nanos, first released in 2005, have had battery problems that cause them to give off smoke or spark in rare cases:

Meanwhile, Intel is joining Yahoo in an effort to provide the software underpinnings of network-enabled TV, a move that could transform not only what it means to watch TV but also what it means to advertise on it. Yahoo hopes to spice up TV by bringing a version of its Yahoo Widget Engine, a software foundation that can run small applications called widgets, to network-enabled TVs.

Intel also will finally enter the high-capacity solid-state drive business with the goal of replacing hard-disk drives in both consumer and corporate markets. This comes 20 years after Intel introduced its first flash memory–a 256KB flash chip in 1988. The world’s largest chipmaker is announcing the line of solid-state drives at the Intel Developer Forum here.

Under the new pricing plan, sellers who offer fixed-price items in eBay’s “Buy It Now” format will pay only 35 cents to list an item for 30 days, a 70 percent reduction in upfront fees. The online auctioneer is also expected to announce that most customers will no longer be allowed to pay by check or cash–only a credit card or eBay’s PayPal payment service will be accepted to complete transactions.

Initially, Intel will have 80GB and 160GB solid-state drives based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology for the consumer and notebook markets, and 32GB and 64GB drives based on single-level cell (SLC) for the enterprise market. In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB.

In an e-mail sent to MobileMe subscribers announcing the extension, Apple acknowledged that the Web services suite needs more work:

Apple has determined that in very rare cases batteries in first generation iPod nanos sold between September 2005 and December 2006 can overheat causing failure and deformation of the iPod nano. Apple has received very few reports of such incidents (less than 0.001 percent of first generation iPod nano units), which have been traced back to a single battery supplier. There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod nano model.

Inside Intel
Intel plans to bring its first dual-core Atom to market next month, it was revealed during the Intel Developer Forum. The power-efficient processor will be targeted at Atom-based desktops called nettops. Currently, Intel offers the Atom N230 processor for nettops. This chip has a slightly higher power envelope than the Atom processors built exclusively for mobile devices.

Yahoo’s hope is the move will bring its clout on the Internet to a new domain.

Comcast reportedly plans to reduce Internet service to customers it deems to be using too much bandwidth, a move that comes on the heels of federal regulators ruling that the Internet service provider violated the law by throttling BitTorrent transfers. To keep service flowing to other customers, Comcast plans to impede Internet speeds to its heaviest users for up to 20 minutes, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services.

MobileMe allows subscribers to synchronize e-mail, calendars, contacts, photos,
Safari bookmarks, Dashboard widgets, and more, among Macs, the
iPhone, and the
iPod Touch. But from its launch in July, subscribers had trouble accessing the site, and some even lost e-mail. Subscribers also reported problems accessing calendars and contact information, which was caused by a misjudgment in demand, according to an Apple blog post.

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60-day extension. This is in addition to the one-month extension most subscribers have already received.

Video: CBS News checks in on Apple’s issues of late, with
input from CNET’s Natali Del Conte.

Lenz first filed suit in October 2007, after Universal requested that her video be taken down, and YouTube kept it off its site for more than a month. Lenz argues that the Prince song is barely audible in the short clip and clearly represents fair use, which allows for limited use of copyrighted materials without permission. In order to protect First Amendment rights, the DMCA allows for targets of illegitimate takedown notices to seek damages against the copyright holder.

Meanwhile, Apple blew away its PC industry peers in this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index. The University of Michigan released its annual ACSI scores for the PC industry, and Apple took top honors for the fifth straight year. Apple was the only company in the PC industry other than Dell to post an increase in customer satisfaction in 2008 compared with last year.

Also of note
Recording industry and motion picture lobbyists are renewing their push to convince broadband providers to monitor customers and detect copyright infringements, claiming the concept is working abroad and should be adopted in the United States…Word is that Jerry Seinfeld will appear as a celebrity pitchman as part of a new $300 million ad campaign being developed for Microsoft…Google released the first beta version of its software developer kit for Android phones, a significant step in the company’s hope for “open” phone technology.

In an apparent attempt to make up for the problems that plagued MobileMe’s launch in July, Apple has announced that it will extend user accounts another 60 days for free–that’s on top of the 30-day free extension Apple gave users in July.

Instead of focusing on specific applications that may be hogging traffic, Comcast plans to determine “in nearly real time” whether a heavy user is causing congestion, Bowling said. The move follows the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling on August 1 that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful–the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules.

eBay will reduce the fees it charges to sellers to list fixed-price items. The move, which will take effect September 16, is intended to help eBay compete better with online retail rivals such as Amazon.com, as well as reduce its dependency on auctions.

But that admission is a day late and a few dollars short for an Alabama woman who filed a lawsuit against Apple, claiming the iPhone 3G’s network is slower than advertised. In a 10-page complaint, Birmingham resident Jessica Alena Smith charged Apple with breach of express and implied warranty and with unjust enrichment. Smith, who refers to the phone she purchased throughout the complaint as “Defective iPhone 3G,” is seeking class action status.

In another coup for Apple customers, the company finally acknowledged the iPhone 3G’s reception issues, confirming that the iPhone OS 2.0.2 software update was designed to fix those problems. A company representative told the Associated Press that the latest update “improved communication with 3G networks,” after weeks of silence regarding the reception issues reported by iPhone 3G owners around the world. Apple was reportedly working on such a fix last week, but Monday’s update was labeled with the briefest of descriptions–”bug fixes”–making it difficult to know exactly what was addressed with the update.

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I’m closing up my quarter today (Not sure who said open source is easy, but…. , but wanted to highlight a few of the more interesting stories I read today.

A good round-up. I’ll leave you to read the full versions. Great stuff.

We’ve also seen pure Open Source much touted as a viable business model. By "pure," I mean a model that doesn’t hold any software back for paying customers only. The hope is that enough users will elect to pay for support and other services to cover a company’s cost and profit. Red Hat, a profitable and growing company, is the poster child here.

At the same time, examples can mislead us. Often they turn out to be anomalies. Maybe a company is some sort of historical quirk, a product of a very specific time and place. Or maybe some technology approach is valid enough–but only for a very narrow set of needs. One warning sign is seeing the same tired examples trotted out for every discussion, every news article, and every conference.

The Long Tail, as popularized by Wired’s Chris Anderson is a hot meme of the blogging and Web 2.0 crowd. Simply put, the Long Tail states that bestsellers aren’t in the majority when you tally up the sales at Amazon or Netflix. Rather it’s the total of the far more numerous other 80 or 90 percent of content. From a business perspective, the significance is that there’s money to be made selling what’s in the long tail.

But Red Hat is exceptional really. It’s emerged as the unquestioned leader among enterprise Linux distributions, one of the most visible and core elements of the entire Open Source world. And its financial success is helped, in no small part, because it’s selling a value, ISV application certification against Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that doesn’t have the equivalent in layered software products. Other pure Open Source plays have also been modestly successful, but we’re certainly not talking Oracle or Microsoft levels of success–nor, indeed, Sybase or SAS levels. Even Red Hat pulls in well under $1 billion in annual revenues, and may also be starting to hit the limits of low-cost customer acquisition enabled by free downloads.

I love examples. They help give me confidence that something has at least a patina of reality. But, in the singular, they constitute anecdotes and not data. And anecdotes don’t really prove anything. In fact, they can mislead by giving the atypical more weight than it deserves.

I see some of that in all the following cases. I certainly won’t go so far as to say that the underlying trends or business models are illusory. But I do think they’re more limited or further away than their most overenthusiastic proponents suggest.

However, the number of true long tail businesses gets thin outside of aggregators of digital media–the companies who have minimal costs to acquire, inventory, and sell incremental low-volume products. Amazon, in particular, is a highly atypical, if not unique, retailer in terms of scale. In fact, we’re starting to see a body of evidence that suggests that the long tail is, if not necessarily wrongheaded exactly, more limited in applicability and degree than some of its proponents have suggested.

"Real world" examples of some trend or business model are great. Theory is fine up to a point but eventually it’s awfully nice to connect up with a concrete example that gives the theory some real cred.

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