Vaporware 2010: A Call for Submissions

It’s time again to inhale the fail.

Voting is now open for Wired’s 13th annual Vaporware Awards, our yearly showcase of the tech products pitched, promised and hyped, but never delivered.

Just like in years past, we’re relying on you to nominate your picks for the most notorious no-shows in the worlds of software, hardware, games and gadgets.

Our perennial chart-topper, Duke Nukem Forever — two-time winner of our lifetime achievement award and Vaporware’s official mascot — is actually ineligible this year for legit reasons. After Duke developer 3DRealms collapsed into a financial black hole in 2009, the project was handed over to Gearbox Software. Now, after 12 long years, Gearbox has tagged DNF with a 2011 release date. Seriously, it’s almost done. Thousands of PAX 2010 attendees got to play a working version. For real. Don’t worry though, we’re saving a slot for Sir Duke on next year’s list just in case.

The tech world is still filled with plenty of vape fodder, though. Chrome OS laptops. The mythical white iPhone 4. We snuffed wisps of stale vapor from all the major categories in 2010: iPad apps, set-top boxes, console games, web apps, mobile phones, planes, trains, and EVs.

Got a primo candidate you want to nominate for Vaporware 2010?
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Gowalla Set to Check In at Sundance Film Festival

Fresh off the release of the latest version of its software, Gowalla, the fast-growing location-based social networking service, is taking it to the slopes.

The slopes of Park City, Utah, that is.

Gowalla is teaming up with the Sundance Film Festival, the annual January retreat of Hollywood stars and movie buffs from around the world. The tie-up includes an assist from Southwest Airlines, which is flying 20 people to Utah for the festival. (If you’re interested, check in at any airport that flies direct to Salt Lake City between now and December 31st.)

“With hundreds of films to watch and just as many parties to attend and people to meet, it’s tough to figure out what to do or what the ‘it’ spot is,” Gowalla said in a statement accompanying the announcement. The company promises that users can “find out easily where to go and what to see, all while sharing your festival experience, discovering new places and uncovering awesome prizes.”

Gowalla is among the top players in the exploding market for mobile location-based services.

During an interview at Wired headquarters in New York Tuesday, Gowalla CEO Josh Williams detailed the Sundance partnership and described how the latest version of the service, called Gowalla 3.0, allows users to connect using their Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts.

Founded in 2008, Gowalla, which is based in Austin, Texas, has raised $10.4 million in venture capital in two rounds led by Greylock Partners and Founders Fund. It has 600,000 users, and 3,000 local businesses have claimed their location on the service, Williams said.

While not the biggest location-based service, Gowalla is carving out a niche for itself by combining the standard “check-in”-style features that early adopters have embraced, with a digital scrapbook that lets users keep a catalog of the places they’ve been, and then make recommendations to their friends. Users can leave notes for their friends — notes that are only revealed when the user checks in to a specific place — kind of like a Easter egg just sitting there waiting for your friend to find it.

“We’re creating a socially curated travel guide,” Williams said. Gowalla aims to be your digital passport, which is “stamped” when you check into certain locations. This “travelogue” feel is what Williams hopes will distinguish Gowalla from its larger rivals, which include Facebook, Foursquare and Yelp.

Another distinguishing feature is Gowalla’s well-regarded user interface, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given Williams’ background in graphic design. Williams said that the company’s location in Austin (“It’s the place young people go to retire,” he said, quoting Sufjan Stevens) offers a powerful incentive to lure engineers from the larger startup hotbeds in Silicon Valley and New York.

Chatting with the laid-back Williams, who is originally from Dallas, it’s clear that neither he nor his company are “of” Silicon Valley or New York. Quality of life and personal enjoyment are clearly important to Williams, who describes himself as “kind of a ski bum.” (Aren’t we all?)

“If you’re not having fun, then why do it?” Williams said at one point.

The company is on a path to profitability, but it’s not there yet, Williams said. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, Gowalla is not for sale. Although, Williams said, there is at least one scenario that would make him reconsider.

“If Google made us a $6 billion offer, we’d consider it,” he said with a smile.

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Local Government Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Innovation

Thoughts on a Smarter Planet is a special blogger series in partnership with leading IBM experts. Join the conversation as these experts discuss the innovations in science, business and systems like transportation that are helping build a Smarter Planet. About this program.


thoughtssmarterplanet_ibm_bugLocal government – the 89,000-plus governing bodies that run America’s cities, counties and schools –may not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of a hotbed of innovation. But you might be surprised. A tough economy coupled with easily available new technologies is driving a growing transformation among local governments that means the next major change agent could be your city’s mayor or school superintendent.

There is certainly no question that local governments are bearing the brunt of a tough economy. Two of their primary sources of revenue – sales tax and property taxes – have been pummeled by an economic climate that has posted the worst performance since the Great Depression. And local governments, like state governments, are not allowed to run deficits, so they have to deal with shrinking revenues by looking for parallel levels of cost cuts.

One target is technology. According to the Center for Digital Government’s annual Digital Counties Survey, 78 percent of counties are dealing with the economic downturn by consolidating data centers, servers, applications and staff – a 10 percent increase over 2009 – and 72 percent plan reductions in staffing and operating hours.

There is a silver lining to this scenario. The need to introduce significant change is proving to be a catalyst for innovation among local governments, and they are harnessing technology advances to help drive this change.

Cloud computing is a prime example. This new IT delivery model can significantly reduce government IT costs and complexities while improving workload optimization and service delivery to constituents. The savings can be substantial: according to Brookings Institution estimates, government agencies that have transitioned to cloud computing have saved between 25 and 50 percent on their IT operations.
For several local governments, moving to the cloud is not just a future goal. Consider these examples:

• The New York Conference of Mayors (NYCOM) and the Michigan Municipal League (MML) are participating in a pilot for the IBM Municipal Shared Services Cloud, which will give them more cost-effective software as a service, analytics-driven dashboards for greater transparency, and cross-government collaboration

• The Dubuque 2.0 sustainability initiative recently kicked off a smart water meter project that uses cloud computing to handle near-real-time data (consumption is monitored every 15 minutes) and a portal through which city officials can see aggregate water consumption (including potential leaks) and energy management data to conserve water and reduce costs

The potential for government to reduce costs using cloud computing is significant and should not be overlooked. But because government agencies, unlike private-sector organizations, do not compete with each other, they can collaborate in the clouds and safely share data in ways that the private sector will probably never achieve.

Economic necessity may be primary reason that local governments are currently moving to the clouds, but the ultimate benefit will be innovation. So the next time you think about your local City Hall or county government office, keep an open mind – you could be looking at the next leaders of the charge in IT innovation.

Juhnyoung Lee research interests include cloud computing, e-government, service engineering and management, business and IT modeling, and model-driven business transformation.

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Microsoft Builds Online Tracking Blocking Feature Into IE9

Microsoft is building an anti-tracking function into its upcoming version of Internet Explorer. The new feature will let users easily keep lists of websites that track what they do online, and block any site from logging their web activity, the company announced Tuesday.

The new feature, called “Tracking Protection,” will be bundled into IE9’s next beta release early next year, and is intended to give users control over what widgets and scripts display — and pull in data — when they visit a given website.

The announcement comes just a week after the Federal Trade Commission castigated the online-ad industry for not regulating itself and dragging its feet on being transparent with users about the data they collect and how they use it.

The FTC also called for browser makers to build a “do not track” feature that, when turned on, would send a “no tracking, please” message to every website you visit. While the FTC lacks the authority to force companies to obey the flag, it called on advertisers to comply, with the veiled threat that it could get the power from Congress, if need be.

IE9’s Tracking Protection feature would work differently, by blocking websites and third-party plug-ins outright. People who wanted the blocks could subscribe to a “tracking protection list.” So, for instance, if the blocking list you subscribe to bans Google’s Analytics tracking service or Facebook’s Like button when you visit a webpage using those features, your browser will simply not load them and pass no information to those companies.

“These are complementary approaches, and different ways to get to the same goal of helping consumers block tracking,” said Dean Hachamovitch, the company’s vice president in charge of IE development. “This path is different in that it actually blocks the tracking now.”

Hachamovitch, along with the company’s top privacy strategist Peter Cullen, announced the feature in a webcast for reporters at the same time Google was unveiling the Chrome web store and Chrome OS. Microsoft has tried to portray itself as better on privacy than Google, which many fear knows too much about them.

Tracking protection lists can be created by anyone and published on the web, using a format that Microsoft is publishing under a Creative Commons license. So, anyone is free to make a list and other browser makers could use the lists as well, without infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property.

The service will be turned off by default in the browser, but once it is on, users can choose to subscribe to a list, and when the creator updates the list, the browser will automatically sync with it. Lists can include both approved and verboten sites.

Microsoft said it will not ship IE9 with any lists built-in, and hopes to see a wide swath of groups and individuals create lists.
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With Chrome OS, Google Doubles Down on the Cloud

SAN FRANCISCO — Google unveiled a beta version of its Chrome OS and an early test version of its branded netbook Tuesday morning, a big bet by the search giant to help drive computing to the cloud — and to the popular web-based services that are its bread and butter.

Google’s release of the new OS, related but separate to its mobile OS Android, comes after a year of development and at a time when cloud computing — and the simpler machines that access applications on distant servers rather than running them on a hard drive — seems to have passed a sort of tipping point of respectability. It’s no coincidence, surely, that Microsoft is touting its own cloud-based approach in a huge marketing campaign.

Google is giving out netbooks to journalists at a press event to widen their beta and is also handing out a few of the pilot laptops to its Facebook fans. It also launched a pilot program to get hardware running Chrome OS into developers’ hands. Early adopters can sign up to get a black, unbranded Chrome OS notebook (codenamed Cr-48).

Also making an appearance at Tuesday’s press event was the Chrome Web Store, which we expected to see.

Chrome OS relies entirely on web-based applications for basic productivity tasks like mail, document editing, photo sharing, social networking and reading news. Its inner workings are based on Google’s own Chrome browser, which has been available for nearly two years. The idea is that you no longer have to install software programs on a general-purpose personal computer and instead use web apps running on top of a lightweight and fast OS.

To get around the connectivity problem inherent to web-based apps, Google says every Chrome OS laptop will ship with both Wi-Fi and cellular connections. The company has partnered with Verizon — when you buy a Chrome OS laptop, you get 100 MB of free data per month for two years. There are no long-term contracts. If you want to upgrade, you only pay for what you need. Chrome OS users can buy a day pass from Verizon, or choose from a few long-term plans starting at $10 a month.

Acer and Samsung Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011, with more OEMs to follow, the company says.

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai held up a “Cr-48″ netbook during the event — it’s a full-sized laptop with a 12.1″ screen, an Intel Atom processor, a world-mode 3G radio, a flash memory drive, and it has a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it.

From what we’ve seen so far, Chrome OS is extremely fast (the demo we saw was running on the Cr-48 laptop) and, provided you already have a Google account, it literally takes under a minute to get up and running.

Pichai, who has been using ChromeOS for six months, continuously gushed about its speed, which was evident during the demos.

“By building an experienced based totally on the web, we’ve made all of the user experiences instant,” he said.
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Google Launches Online Bookstore, Challenging Amazon

Google says its mission is to organize the world’s information, but that statement should be probably updated to include the verb “sell” now that Google is launching an e-bookstore on Monday.

Google’s long awaited e-book-only bookstore, Google eBooks, puts the company in competition with Amazon, Apple and Borders for the burgeoning electronic-book market. The move, limited at the start to U.S. customers only, also marks the first real retail venture for the search and online-advertising behemoth, if you don’t count the Android app market.

“The fundamental idea is buy anywhere and read anywhere,” said James Crawford, an engineer for Google eBooks, who emphasized that the system makes it easy to read the same book on multiple devices. “The fundamental architecture is cloud-based, and you never wonder where to put your books.”

The company claims that it will have more books in its catalog than any other online bookstore — more than 3 million titles, but only about 200,000 of those are books licensed from publishers. About 2.8 million of the books are books no longer under copyright in the United States that Google has scanned from university libraries as part of its controversial Google Books project. Started in 2004, Google Books has scanned millions of books, mostly without permission from copyright holders, making them searchable online.

The venture is yet another attempt by Google to diversify its money making. That’s key for the company’s long-term health since it derives nearly all its revenue (nearly $5.5 billion in the third quarter of 2010) from online ads, with the majority of that coming from text ads on its own properties.

Use the Find feature to search a Google eBook on the iPad.

Google is seeking to differentiate itself from Amazon and its popular Kindle reader by selling books that can be read on a wide range of devices, from iPhones, iPads and Android-based devices, along with computers running any browser that can use JavaScript. Books can also be read on Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Sony’s E Reader, but not on Amazon’s Kindle — because of compatibility issues with the Adobe copyright management DRM attached to the e-books, Google said.

Book buyers will have all their books tied to their Google account, and the service will use Google checkout for payment.

Google’s inclusion of scanned books (those in the public domain) from its Books project could rile Amazon. Amazon told a federal court looking into the project that allowing Google to scan and sell millions of out-of-print books whose copyright owners can’t be found gives Google an unfair advantage. That objection comes despite Google’s offer to let Amazon and other booksellers resell the orphans, as well.

The fate of these so-called orphan books remains in the hands of a federal court judge in Manhattan, and are not available in the bookstore launching Monday.

Google is also partnering with independent bookstores, including Powell’s, to let them sell e-books on their website and share in the revenue from the sale. Independent and local bookstores can drop technology from the American Booksellers Association onto their sites to enable them to sell e-books through Google.

Google also hopes to create book-selling widgets that will let books be purchased through its service on any site on the net. It’s starting one such partnership with Goodreads, a leading site for book clubs. Starting Monday, users of that site can click on a book for their reading group straight from Google.

“The idea is that you buy where you are and read on devices you already own,” Crawford said. “We are committed to open structure, and building up a wider and wider retailer network.”
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Facebook Profiles Get a Facelift

A large percentage of net users’ online identities will be getting a facelift in the coming weeks as Facebook is rolling out a new profile page with more visual elements and, you guessed it, more pictures of faces.

The new design is currently opt-in, but Facebook says it will roll it out to the world by early 2011. Those who want it immediately can go to the new profile explainer, which will walk you through the new pages and let you adopt it now. But be cautioned, there’s no undoing the choice.

The top of the page will now include a basic intro to a user, such as location, job, school, partner, etc. And directly underneath that is a bar of photos that you have been “tagged” in, increasing the number of pictures of the person’s face you see on the page. In fact, the photo algorithm doesn’t just show the photos you are tagged in, but zooms in on your face to make it fill the small square.

Here’s hoping you are ready for your close-up. You can choose to remove photos by clicking on them, and the option remains to “untag” yourself from any photo, no matter who took it.

Nearly everything on the page gets the same, more visual treatment.

You can now add lists of friends, such as “Roommates,” “Touch Football Teammates,” “Best Friends,” “College Buddies”. This is done using the recently revamped “Groups” function, and is clearly intended to get more people to create groups — perhaps as a pre-emptive strike on Google’s upcoming social network service, which is rumored to rely heavily on segmenting your friends into sub-groups.

You can also now “see friendship,” a feature that shows things you have in common with a given friend, including “mutual friends” and similar interests.

The change also makes Facebook’s ads more prominent on the page, with all four ad units being visible even on small laptops without having to scroll.

The change is in keeping with Mark Zuckerberg’s ardent belief that people are hard-wired to look at faces, so now the page will be filled with them. The new system also turns things you like, such as a band or a company, into an images. Clearly Facebook is learning from becoming the net’s largest photo sharing site that people like to look at pictures.

Facebook has also expanded the number of things you can share on the site, including classes you are taking at school, projects you are working on at your job, turning Facebook into a LinkedIn, Jr. for the internship set. In keeping with the post-literacy theme, these get the visual treatment as well.

Facebook users seem to be divided on the change, as you can read in the comments on the announcement, but for once, at least, there’s no real privacy issue, other than more people will be seeing more photos of you.

But the redesign does re-emphasize one thing: Facebook, not you, controls your online identity, and whether they like the redesign or not, hundreds of millions will accept it and use the service daily.

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Online Tracking Firm Settles Suit Over Undeletable Cookies

zombie_andy330Online tracking firm Quantcast has agreed to pay $2.4 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging it secretly used Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash plug-in to re-create tracking cookies after users deleted them, the company said Saturday.

More than $1 million of the settlement will go to fund privacy groups chosen by the plaintiffs, and 25% will go to the lawyers who filed the suit. It’s unlikely that any money will go to the class, since it essentially includes every internet user in the U.S.

UC Berkeley researchers first noted the behavior in August 2009, calling the behavior “zombie cookies,” since unique ids handed out by Quantcast would return in a user’s browser even after deleting the company’s cookie. Quantcast is used by thousands of sites to measure the number of unique visitors and to get information on the kinds of people visiting their site — athletic, older, interested in food, etc.

The company’s clients include of the net’s biggest websites including ESPN, Hulu and MTV.com.

“We chose to settle the litigation to bring clarity and certainty to our customers and to avoid the burden and cost of further litigation,” the company said in a blog post announcing the proposed settlement, which will have to be approved by a federal court judge in Central California.

The announcement comes just days after federal regulators called for browser makers and online ad firms to collaborate to create a “Do Not Track” browser feature that does not rely on cookies or a centralized opt-out list. In announcing the recommendation, the FTC specifically said it was working with Adobe to address abuses of its Flash technology. Continue Reading “Online Tracking Firm Settles Suit Over Undeletable Cookies” »

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Chrome Store Possibly Launching Dec. 7

You may be able to buy your nieces and nephews some Chrome apps for the holidays this year.

We just received this invitation from Google to attend a Chrome-centric event Tuesday. It arrived in our e-mail inboxes early Friday afternoon.

Our guess is this will mark the public debut of the much-anticipated Chrome Store — Google’s directory where users can browse and install Chrome extensions, web apps and downloadable apps that run in the browser.

The “store for web apps” opened up to developers in August. And Chrome 8, which arrived Thursday, is the first version of Google’s browser with the ability to plug in to the Chrome Store — although, at this point, there’s nothing there yet to install.

It’s likely that could change Tuesday. Unless of course Google is going to start selling HTML5 Christmas ornaments or hardware-accelerated menorahs.

Engadget, citing an unnamed source, is speculating the event will be used to launch a laptop running Chrome OS. Of course, the event could see the arrival of both some hardware and the store you can browse to fill it up.

“Installable web apps” may sound like a contradiction in terms. After all, don’t web apps get served to a client from a web server? Well, yes, there’s that kind, and then there’s the kind you download and install. Google describes an installable web app as “a normal website with a bit of extra metadata.” The app is packaged, then downloaded and installed by the user, where it runs in the browser (online or off) and can access local storage.

The excitement around this new software-distribution model has of course exploded ever since the iTunes Store and the Android Marketplace proved it works well for native apps on mobile devices. Now others are shifting the model to cloud-based services built in web standards that run in the browser.

Mozilla, which makes the Firefox browser, is also developing its own store for installable web apps based on its nascent Open Web Applications platform.

Epicenter’s Ryan Singel contributed to this report.

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CALM Act Passed, Will Quiet Loud TV Commercials Within A Year

Though Congress still bickers over net neutrality, spying on Americans, and universal health care, at least Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing: TV commercials are too damned loud. After approval by the House, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act is now on its way to President Obama’s desk. It was passed by the Senate earlier this year.

Rep. Anna Eshoo’s (D-CA) bill will require commercials to be at the same decibel levels as programs during which they play. Once signed, the CALM Act will give the FCC a mandate to regulate and enforce volume limits on commercials, ensuring that their maximum loudness does not exceed the average maximum loudness of the program they’re accompanying. Advertisers will have one year to implement technology to keep the volume levels in check.

Rep Eshoo noted that the FCC has received complaints about loud commercials since the 1960s, and that the issue has been the number one consumer complaint about TV in 21 of the last 25 FCC quarterly reports.

“Consumers have been asking for a solution to this problem for decades, and today they finally have it,” Rep Eshoo said in a statement. Thanks to the CALM Act, “consumers will no longer have to experience being blasted at—it’s a simple fix to a huge nuisance.”

Those in the Orbiting HQ still subjected to commercial TV (Netflix, anyone?) are already celebrating.

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