styled-designs.com

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

An anonymous Apple employee says company executives are in talks with Immersion to license its haptic technology for use in the
iPhone, according to a report at Palluxo.com.

In separate news, Immersion on Thursday named Clent Richardson its new president and CEO. According to Immersion’s press release, Richardson has previously held prominent positions at TiVo, Nortel, T-Mobile, and a little company called Apple. From that release:

The current iPhone does not give sensory feedback when a person presses keys on its touchscreen.

Haptic technology gives people sensory feedback–in the form of a vibration or pressure–when they use a touchscreen. Essentially, it makes touching a key on a touchscreen more akin to pressing a real button. Right now, the iPhone interface does not have that kind of interactivity, which can make using the touchscreen more challenging because there is no sensory indication that a key has been touched and the phone has registered it.

So it wouldn’t be too surprising if it turns out Richardson is getting back in touch with old friends and forming ties between Apple and his new company.

Immersion’s VibeTonz feedback technology is already in use in more than 10 million mobile phones, including the LG Voyager VX10000 and Samsung SCH-A930, according to the company. And its medical division creates tactile feedback technology for virtual surgery systems that help train surgeons.

Previously, at Apple, he reported to the co-founder and CEO as vice president of worldwide developer relations and worldwide solutions marketing and built and led a global team that established and strengthened developer and customer relationships around the world. During his more than five years with Apple, Richardson was also senior manager of evangelism, responsible for building and leading a worldwide team that managed global strategic relationships with Adobe, AOL, IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Sun, and other industry leaders for all Apple divisions.

The paid .tel product will allow its subscribers to control which networks their contacts reach them on, if I understand the preview info I saw correctly. Telnic also has a plan in place to allow people to claim their name — a critical function, since there can be only one BobSmith.tel.

Two domain-based identity sites will be in the media this this week: Telnic’s .tel, which launches at DemoFall, and Chi.mp, whose team will be holding court across the street from the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday (clever strategy, that). I think these two companies make a trend, but I’m not convinced it’s a long-lived one.

While I think the idea of using a top-level domain with a vanity URL as personal calling card is a gimmick — unless there’s only one TLD, which there clearly won’t be — the idea that every person can have a permanent location on the Net that’s about who they are and not what they do does make some sense. And maybe we need that destitation to not be a social site like Facebook. Maybe it needs to be, basically, unsocial. My site, by me, for you — under my control. Social site profiles do allow that, but they don’t feel the same. But it’s also quite possible that the subtle difference between appearing to own a site and owning a slice of another site isn’t enough to sustain this new idea.

For my part, I bought rafeneedleman.com ages ago (I don’t update it anymore). I’m also holding the .com domain names of my wife and son in reserve, just in case. These personal .coms don’t t have the functionality of the services I discuss here but perhaps that points to a workable alternate business model: Provide contact and aggregation features that people like me can use from domains they already have.

I would not be surprised if both of these sites also became OpenID authenticators (Chi.mp already is). It’s convenient for users. Chi.mp founder Tony Haile’s vision for Chi.mp’s utility is quite similar to the promise of OpenID and to the concepts in DiSo and the Social Graph API, emerging protocols for sharing social network data between sites.

See also: .name.

The simple concept behind both companies is this: You’ll get your own name in a domain, a .tel or .mp, and then use it as a hub for your online identities and content. The sites will offer some blend of a business card function, like Plaxo, and personal feed aggregaton, like Friendfeed. The pitch from both is similar: Instead of sending people to a page that’s heavily branded by someone else (for example, Facebook), you can give out your domain. Keep that updated with your contact info, and then as long as people know your domain, they’ll have a way to reach you.

Chi.mp is a free service.

I had never seen an operation like this before, which surprises me. I heard afterward that this is something that’s popular on river-rafting routes, but I’d not seen it on popular highways. And being from the San Francisco Bay Area, which is of course close to the Pacific Coast Highway, that surprised me.

But it’s the extreme popularity of this stretch of US-129 with motorcyclists that makes Cannon’s business possible. These are riders who travel great distances to make their way through the Dragon, and enough of them seem to like the idea of buying a picture of themselves doing so to create a business. I suspect the same is true in other parts of the country that bikers frequent.

Known as “The Dragon,” the road is a longtime favorite, especially among motorcyclists, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people navigate its windy curves every day.

Darryl Cannon of Killboy.com takes thousands of pictures daily of drivers and motorcyclists on U.S. Route 129 on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. The road is popular, especially with motorcyclists, and Cannon and others in his company make full-time livings selling the images they take. At least three other operations do the same thing in the area.

Cannon and others park themselves at strategic curves along the famously windy road to best capture drivers coming from either direction. They will also position a vehicle with a URL on its side so drivers can see where they can go to find their picture.

This is definitely a business based on direct-mail type of response. After all, there is a steady stream of traffic, and there’s a lot of competition. Yet Cannon said he’s been doing this since 2003, so I guess he sells enough $6 CDs of digital images–as well as more expensive coffee mugs, prints, and other manifestations of peoples’ ride along the famous road–to make it worth his while.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

For me, when I find myself being photographed without my consent, I usually make a gesture that I hope will render the picture worthless. It’s not what you think. And I guess I’m not the only one who does things with his hands.

I stopped at one of the curves along the way to talk with him about what he was doing and why.

Cannon says that every day he sets up in a different place, something that’s not hard, given that this stretch of road has seemingly thousands of tight curves offering the kind of two-way vantage point he needs. He’s looking for good lighting and good background, so that he “might get a tight shot, but still get some of the background.”

He said he works about 100 hours a week.

FONTANA VILLAGE, N.C.–If you’ve got a fancy digital SLR and have been wondering how you could make money with it, I might have just the suggestion for you.

He said that he routinely shoots thousands of pictures a day and sometimes, if there’s a motorcycle rally in the area, can take as many as 17,000 in one shift.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

At first, as I drove along this stretch of highway as part of Road Trip 2008, I was confused as to what was going on. But after seeing two such vehicles at corners, each of which had a URL emblazoned on the side, I figured it out: the photographers were taking pictures of the riders and drivers, and then later posting them online, hoping that people will visit their sites, see pictures of themselves on the famous road, and decide to fork over a few bucks for a high-res image.

And how?

After he and his team finish taking their pictures–he uses a Canon 40D and has “whole pockets of” 4GB compact flash cards–they go home and laboriously sort them and post them. They organize them by date, and then by category: “Cars-Trucks,” “Motards-Dirtbikes-Trikes-Scooters-Sidecars,” “Touring Bikes,” etc.

Cannon said that plenty of people do that, some just to say hi.

Head on out to the border region between Tennessee and North Carolina, just on the edge of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. There, you’ll find a never-ending supply of people riding their motorcycles and driving their
cars along one of the most famous and beloved stretches of road in the South.

“It would be better if they wouldn’t,” he said, ever the photographer.

As a result, people like Darryl Cannon of Killboy.com have proliferated. They park their cars at strategic curves in the road where they can shoot pictures of drivers coming from either direction, and then they sell the drivers–at least some of them–the pictures.

That’s what Cannon, his wife, and a couple of friends are doing. Full time, he said.

Terms of the deal, which is part of IAC’s Consumer Applications and Portals division, were not disclosed.

Late last year, the company announced that it would be splitting into five separate corporations as an attempt to center its operations on ad-supported media rather than retail or financial services. And after lying low through the spin-off process and a boardroom battle, the Barry Diller-helmed IAC appears to be back on track with its historically aggressive acquisition strategy.

“Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products and companies that complement our core competencies,” John Park, president and CEO of IAC Consumer Applications & Portals, said in a statement Tuesday. “Adding Girlsense.com to our existing teen-targeted product portfolio provides us with broader teen mindshare and access to the coveted tween demographic.”

Other teen-oriented properties in IAC’s arsenal, with which GirlSense will likely be intertwined, include virtual world Zwinky and profile customization site Webfetti. GirlSense counts its registered users at 13 million.

The ad-supported GirlSense–advertisements are currently served by women’s-focused ad network Glam Media–is also aligned with IAC’s broader restructuring.

Last week, IAC’s Ask.com division acquired the parent company of Dictionary.com.

Sprawling new-media conglomerate InterActiveCorp on Tuesday announced that it has acquired StarNet Interactive, an Israel-based company that operates GirlSense, a social site for teen girls. More specifically, GirlSense describes itself as “online dress-up games for girls with fashion sense.”

So much for being everyone's darling

But that’s ancient history now and Facebook is coming off badly since it began blocking Google’s Friend Connect last week. And just to make sure that we didn’t forget that Google was on the side of the angels, the company’s put up a detailed primer over the weekend of how its code doesn’t do any evil. (We’re from Google and we just wanna help.)

If feels like almost yesterday that Leslie Stahl was cooing over Mark Zuckerberg. And how about the crowd rallying behind their boy when Sarah Lacy tried to ego-hog his keynote interview at South by Southwest.

He’s got that right. I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it’s plain to see that Facebook is letting the conversation slip away. We’ve seen this before. This is just another chapter in Silicon Valley’s endless saga of power grabs and some guys are getting painted with white hats, others with black hats. Right now, COO Sheryl Sandberg ought to be holding her lieutenants’ feet to the fire. When billion-dollar enterprises like Google or Microsoft have no trouble painting themselves as being on the side of the people, you know you’re in trouble. Meanwhile, yesterday’s fan fave is now widely portrayed as a clueless bully. As Loren Feldman’s sock puppet send-up is wont to say, “fascinating.”

All the while, Facebook’s mostly missing in action. After issuing a vaporware post briefly describing the features
Facebook’s leadership has remained in a veritable bunker while the blog echo chamber continues to scream with rage.

Facebook finally has a real problem to deal with - an exceptionally rational and well-thought-out strategy by Google that puts the leading social media cloud in the path of a wave of angry users. The only thing Facebook has going for it is that said users don’t yet know they’re angry.

In the latest bloviation-fest (see Techmeme) over how to integrate user profiles and friends lists from social networking sites, Facebook’s getting creamed.

Steve Gillmor makes it plain in the first paragraph of his post about this novella:

Even a Microsofter like Dare Obasanjo is getting into the act with a sniffy comparison of the (apparently insufficient) approaches adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Google. (You know things are getting bleak when a guy from Microsoft starts tut-tutting about interoperability.)

Google: Google Friend Connect only reads a small amount of user data from Facebook, and does so using Facebook’s public APIs. We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.

(Credit:
Wikimeida Commons)

SeaWorld's Shamu Cam has the videocamera under the surface of the water.

(Credit:
Ustream.tv)

For the puppy fans, the Web cam gives them an escape from larger world issues and from the monotony of their own lives.

American Museum of Natural History has a Live Butterfly Cam.

I’ve been wanting to write about the phenomenon of animal Web cams for several years when I first learned that my good friend Susan was addicted to the sea otter cam at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

From alpacas and chinchillas to elephants and waterfowl, Animal Webcam Locator links to animals and habitats around the world. Another list of Web cams is here.

If Shiba Inus or sea otters aren’t your thing there are numerous other animal Web cams that might help keep your mind off the economy:

National Geographic’s WildCam Africa requires a Real Player plug-in.

“I was feeling a little lost and bored after the election-I really needed a dose of puppy love! Thanks so much for sharing their lives with us…,” wrote a viewer named Sarah in a comment on the Ustream.tv blog.

When I visited the San Diego Zoo animal cam site the apes were active but the polar bears weren’t around.

I asked Susan to explain her obsession with Toola and the other sea otters. “I think I find it comforting that no matter what horrible things are going on in the world, the animals follow their own private rhythms,” she wrote in an e-mail.

A little bit later, Amy e-mails me: “that puppy thing i sent you is LIVE@@@@ and they are going nuts right now!” Sure enough, the dogs were all playing, three of them tugging on the same toy, others play fighting and falling over each other.

Africam bills itself as “the world’s first virtual game reserve,” and offers live “safari” cams. However, the time difference means that what I see during my work day in San Farncisco is dark landscapes. The chirping crickets were nice though.

Later that night I got a text message from her: “ALL the puppies are sleeping! All of them.”

Then last week, my friend Amy sent me a link to a Web cam trained on a litter of six Shiba Inu puppies. Initially, it didn’t seem to be working, probably because the site was getting inundated with traffic as the link went around the Internet.

The Smithsonian National Zoological Park has Web cams trained on giant pandas, naked mole rats, orangutans, kiwi and octopi, among other animals.

You can see cats at The Oregon Humane Society’s Portland Petcam and dogs at the Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

(Credit:
SeaWorld)

Two of the six Shiba Inu puppies featured in the Ustream.tv live Web cam.

The latest Internet celebrities, 5-week-old Shiba Inu puppies.

Every time I would see Susan she would regale me with information about her favorite sea otter, Toola. Toola, who often serves as a surrogate mother to stranded otter pups, doesn’t like to be weighed on the scale, she only leans on her right side and grooms her fur with both paws and feet, and she is very shy despite assuming center stage in the exhibit.

(Credit:
Ustream.tv)

SeaWorld’s Shamu Cam offers cool underwater footage.

Amy, a busy nursing student, says she keeps the puppy cam playing on her computer in the background so she can hear the sounds of their toenails on the ground, their grunts and growls and the soft rustling of them chewing on and moving around on blankets.

As an added bonus, social networks may be part of the reason that low-income students are largely just as technologically proficient as their peers, contradicting parts of a 2005 Pew study that detailed an economic “digital divide.” According to the new study, a full 94 percent of students use the Internet, 82 percent use it at home, and 77 percent have social-networking profiles.

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher from the school’s College of Education and Human Development, said in a release Friday.

“Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout,” Greenhow continued. “They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology.”

The “digital divide,” obviously, goes far beyond Facebook profiles, and social networks come with a whole host of new problems like cyberbullying, but at least there are signs that it could be leveling the playing field a bit.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace have reputations as time-sucking procrastination tools, but a new study from the University of Minnesota says au contraire.

Data from the study came from teenagers ages 16 to 18 in about a dozen urban high schools in the Midwest.

Social networks build beneficial technological, creative, and communication skills, the study says, leading the researchers to actually describe social networks with the adjective “educational.” Who knew?

“The key foundation set of constructs, web services and APIs to support when building the mesh - is the area of profiles, personas, friendships, relationships, social graphs and groups. It all starts with humans and every construct, element and component of the open social web we’re building has to do with people.”

My friend Marc Canter has written a series of blog posts outlining the issues, constructs, technologies, and standards required to build out an “open mesh,” as he put it. It’s a kind of unified field theory for the Web.

ID is at the center of the open mesh.

“No one wants to give up control of their technology - so (by definition) the open mesh must be made up of a combination of open, free protocols and technologies with proprietary APIs and technologies.”

“Coming out of all this is an awareness of a new kind of infrastructure - which simulates the blood veins, nervous systems, skeletons, fire hose and neural networks of the open mesh. Its about RSS, Friendfeeds, XMPP, attention, two-way APIs, OpenID, DNS-like backbones and an international approach.”

(Credit:
Marc Canter)

Marc Canter

The open mesh is not Microsoft’s Live Mesh. The open mesh is “made up of vendors, standards, and glue code that connects a wide range of services, applications, and platforms together,” Canter said. And, it has identity at the center:

At this juncture the underlying plumbing, or mesh, for the social Web is under construction. It’s a good time to bring the issues to the forefront, before the mesh blocks out more than it lets in.

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Canter recognizes that a completely unified and open mesh is more theory than practice:

Canter has been an evangelist for a Web without walled gardens. He also has a financial stake in the open mesh. He runs a company called Broadband Mechanics that has developed a white label social network and Web site creation service that depends on open standards.

Requests from advertisers for mobile ads targeted to iPhone users rose to 236 million in October, more than doubling from the 103 million requests recorded in the previous month. Worldwide, AdMob’s mobile-ad requests for all device makers grew 13.8 percent in October, to 5.8 billion.

Fueling the iPhone’s October performance was particularly strong traffic outside the United States, which accounted for 37 percent of its ad requests, according to the AdMob report. Western Europe represented 17 percent of the iPhone ad requests, and Asia represented 8 percent.

AdMob delivers banner and text ads to mobile devices, and these figures were analyzed and aggregated as part of its monthly Mobile Metrics report. AdMob-served ads are seen by people visiting clients’ Web sites with their mobile phone. Advertisers can choose to have their ads appear on a certain type of device, or region of the world, and then AdMob places the ads on partner publishers’ mobile sites.

(Credit:
AdMob)

Mobile advertising is on a fast track, with research firms projecting market revenue to reach $19 billion per year by 2011, up from the approximately $3 billion seen for last year.

Requests from advertisers for mobile ads targeted to iPhone users more than doubled from September to October.

Apple’s
iPhone jumped to the top spot on the AdMob Network for the month of October, with 4.1 percent of the mobile ads requested from the network, according to the AdMob Mobile Metrics Report released Wednesday.

But in the U.S. market alone, the iPhone ranked No. 2, with 6.9 percent of the requests, while Motorola’s Razr V3 led the market, with 7.7 percent. The U.S. market accounted for 62.8 percent of the iPhone’s ad requests in October.

Other handset players following close behind included the Motorola Razr V3, which received 3.4 percent of the requests; Nokia’s N70, with 3.2 percent; and the Motorola Krzr K1c, with 1.8 percent.

Not so fast.

Sure, the Democrats and Republicans are eager to court deep-pocketed donors. But the power broker image exists more in the minds of the people living between San Jose and San Francisco than it does with the movers and shakers guiding the Obama and McCain campaigns.

Earlier Monday, I spoke with my colleague Declan McCullagh on the CNET News Daily Debrief about where the tech agenda fits in with the two campaigns. Declan’s back from covering the Democratic and Republican conventions for us where he had an extended opportunity to chat about technology policy with regulars from both parties. You can check out our conversation by clicking on the video link below.

If you reside in Washington for any length of time, it’s not long before you believe that the world revolves around the Beltway. The same can be said about Silicon Valley, where a similar fishbowl effect often fosters an exaggerated image of the high-technology industry’s impact on the larger culture and society.

Even more so when it comes to gauging the political influence of the technology business on the fall presidential campaigns. You might think the Democrats and Republicans are eager to raise the banner on behalf of their friends in Silicon Valley. The assumption is that the two major parties will cater accordingly. After all, the industry has so much money to spend and all those political action committees, and they naturally want to get their rightful share. Right?

With the candidates hitting the road after the wrap-up of the political conventions, this much is certain: The resolution of policy issues like Net neutrality may be near and dear to folks from the likes of Cisco and Google. But neither Barack Obama nor John McCain plans to give impassioned speeches urging passage or rejection of this, or other pieces of, tech-related legislation over the next couple of months.