The concept’s simple: connect miShare to two iPods (it doesn’t work with first- or second-generation iPods, nor with the Shuffle or Touch). Then set the switch to music, video, or photo, press the miShare’s button, and it’ll transfer the last-played audio or video file, or all the photos in a folder you pre-define, from the home iPod to the receiving one. You can also transfer entire On-The-Go playlists between the devices by holding the transfer button down for three seconds.

The
Zune has wireless song sharing built in, but it comes with a three-playback restriction and–let’s face it–most of the world has iPods. No worries:
iPod sharing is coming in the form of a $100 gadget available later this month.

(Credit: miShare)

Like Pacemaker, the folks at miShare are taking pre-orders for $99.95 now, and won’t charge your credit card until they ship you a device. They’re due to begin shipping Jan. 22.

Coming at the end of January, miShare will make it easy to swap files between iPods

Will you get busted for using miShare? It doesn’t have any provisions to get around DRM, so it wouldn’t seem to violate the DMCA. And it’s certainly legal to transfer files of songs you own the copyright to. (One of my big complaints about the Zune wireless sharing feature is that even if I transfer music from my own bands to you, it still expires after three plays.) But using miShare to transfer large quantities of music seems to exist in that same grey area as copying songs to a flash drive to give to a friend. Probably not strictly legal, but almost impossible to enforce, and probably not worth copyright owners’ time–if they’re going to sue customers, they’re going to try for the ones who are making thousands of files available to thousands of users simultaneously through file-trading networks.

I’ve seen previews of the upcoming miShare in Engadget and Gizmodo, but the device got some major publicity today in the form of a quick New York Times
review. (The company is based in Brooklyn.)

Simply put, Nokia and Microsoft are the equivalent of two St. Bernards that are forced to run in 90 degree heat and high humidity. They’re big. They’re winded. And they could knock you over–if they could only catch you.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

But Microsoft doesn’t wow in its traditional businesses. Surface, yes. Project Natal, yes. But there doesn’t seem to be much creative gas left in the enterprise computing tank.

And perhaps that’s the point. How much innovation can there be, really, in Office? Or the Windows operating system? These are old paradigms that don’t need window dressing: they need the window shattered and shifted to completely new methodologies of computing, similar to what Google (Web) and Apple (entertainment) are doing.

So Microsoft dresses up tired press releases like the Outlook on
Mac announcement “like they’ve been working in the lab for some time now and have had some technological breakthrough that allows them to bring Outlook to Max OS X,” as ZDNet’s Sam Diaz puts it. The breakthrough would be putting Outlook in the cloud, Google Apps-style. It would be creating products that wow in the same way that Apple’s do.

Apple offers a premium “desktop” experience that makes old feel new. Google replaces the “desktop” with the Web. Open source commoditizes and then innovates enterprise IT, as Accenture’s Alex Wied recently wrote. What does this leave Microsoft?

commentary

It leaves Microsoft desperately needing to refresh its approach to the market. Immediately. It can live off its billions for a long, long time, but it risks becoming like CA: ever-present but not very relevant.

I happen to compete with Microsoft in one area that it is growing from strength to strength (SharePoint), but for everyone else, Microsoft is becoming a footnote in the history of computing.

As news broke this week that Microsoft and Nokia would be partnering to (brace yourself!) port Office to Nokia phones, followed by the equally momentous (or not) news that (sit down for this one!) Microsoft will replace Entourage with Outlook for Mac OS X, I couldn’t help but agree with Larry Dignan’s assessment of the Nokia deal:

The desktop is a tired metaphor. This is why Google’s Chrome OS, while not necessarily manna from heaven, is a welcome change, and just the sort of thing that Microsoft should be investing in, but is structurally, financially incapable of promoting in the same way and to the same degree that Google does. Because Microsoft dies if it innovates its way out of its Office and Windows businesses too quickly.

Sure, it’s still big. Yes, it still competes vigorously. But with the odd exception (Bing, perhaps), Microsoft just doesn’t seem to have the energy to compete anymore. One indication of this is that most of the dirt that Roy Schestowitz digs up on Microsoft is from old court records. It’s as if Microsoft struggles even to be nasty anymore.

Comedy Central’s Indecision2008:
Barack Obama’s Website Assassinated
“As if we needed another reason to doubt Barack Obama’s ability to keep us safe from insomniac Islamofascists, at appears that now he can’t even keep his website safe from cyber-terrorists…”

When a domain, such as hope.net (the one used in the joke) is registered, the person or organization that pays for it, identifies themselves in a public directory known as WhoIs. Some registrars offer a privacy service, where they instead register the domain in their name, preventing the general public from learning the true owner of the domain.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

CNET didn’t run the story, but others did, not to mention the 84 votes the story got on Digg.

SayAnything:
Barack Obama’s New Website Hacked, Redirected To Hillary Clinton’s Site. “Apparently Barack Obama’s campaign recently registered the domain “Hope.net,” presumably to finally explain to everyone what we’re all supposed to be hoping for. But unfortunately for Obama, the website has been hacked and all the links redirected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign website.”

Then they tried to publicize the fact that their hope.net site was connected with Barack Obama, playing up his campaign theme of hope. Hope, in this case, really stands for Hackers On Planet Earth and is the name of the convention run by 2600.

Wonkette:
Obama Site Hacked?. “A super-secret Wonkette operative informs us that Obama’s campaign recently purchased Hope.net and was set to launch the site before getting foiled by MALICIOUS HACKERS … We are not cybersleuths here, but it sort of looks like this domain does indeed belong to Obama for America.”

Off The Hook runs for an hour, but you can listen to the 14-minute discussion of their joke here.

It’s an excellent exercise in skepticism.

They went so far as to re-direct their hope.net site to Obama’s real website for a period of time (for more on this, see One Web site, many names: an introduction to domain forwarding). Then they made a phony copy of the real site, scribbled all over it and added links to Hilary Clinton’s web site.

The latest illustration of this was an April Fools joke pulled by Emmanuel Goldstein and the gang at 2600. As they explained on their show, Off The Hook, on WBAI in New York, they started by hiding the true ownership of one of their domains.

This is the last known photograph of Wrex the Dog.

(Credit:
Robotsrule.com)

While we covered WowWee’s Wrex the unruly robo-dog a couple months back, he is finally available at U.S. e-tail stores. I know we’ve all been waiting for an unruly, uncouth, ill-behaved robot dog to complement our unruly, uncouth, ill-behaved real dogs, so wait no longer.

Amazon.com has him for $141 and is currently listed as in stock.
Buy.com has him for $150, but currently lists him as out of stock.
Hammacher Schlemmer has him listed for $130, but has an expected ship date of September 26.
Major retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart don’t yet have him.

I have to say, Wrex is pretty frakin’ freaky, especially when he does his cat impression as seen in the video. He’s definitely no “Lucky” in the cute department, but he actually has does have a few more features, including more than 18 different tricks (some of which are detailed here). One trick is that he breaks down…on purpose. OK, that part of the video was actually quite endearing; the farting part, not so much.

Still, I can’t wait to terrorize my cats with this guy.

(Credit:
Motorola)

Motorola H620

(Credit:
Motorola)

Motorola introduced a couple of new Bluetooth headsets today; the Motorola H560 and the Motorola H620 respectively. Both headsets have noise reduction and echo cancellation technology, but the H620 has additional automatic volume adjustment to adapt to road noise while driving. The H620 also comes with an in-car charger. Both headsets have a rated talk time of 7 hours and a rated standby time of up to eight days. They’ll be available in Q3 of this year.

The AP reports:

Music Copyright Society official Qu Jingming said in a statement posted on the society’s Web site Friday that Baidu.com provided “music listening, broadcasting and downloading services in various forms on its Web site without approval, and through unfettered piracy, earning huge advertising revenue on its huge number of hits.”

The copyright society said its lawsuit, filed in a Beijing court in January, claims Baidu used 50 songs illegally and demands compensation. The alleged piracy forced legitimate online-music providers to shut down, the industry group said.

This comes at a time when Google, which is hoping to catch up to Baidu in the Chinese market, is working with record companies to provide legal links to music for searchers.

One of the games to best take advantage of this is Bethesda’s Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game that topped many best-of-2008 lists. To augment the game’s 50-plus hours of content, Bethesda has previously released two downloadable expansions, called Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt, both of which add several hours of new storylines and characters to the game (both are available for around $10 on Xbox Live or the Games for Windows marketplace).

The third, and most ambitious expansion, called Broken Steel, will be available May 5, and we sat down with Bethesda recently for a preview to find out what we can expect.

Taking one of the biggest complaints about Fallout 3 to heart–the abrupt ending that comes after completing the game’s main quest–Broken Steel instead rewrites that ending, allowing players to continue to explore the game’s world at their leisure. The plot is an epilogue to the original game’s main story arc, and has you mopping up some of the left-over villains (remnants of the evil Enclave army), and adds the opportunity to go to new locations, find new weapons, and fight new monsters (such as the imaginatively named Super Mutant Overlord).

More importantly, the Broken Steel expansion makes it possible for characters to continue to gain experience and new skills in the game (if you’re conversant with RPG lingo, the level cap has been raised from 20 to 30). The open-ended design that removes the game’s hard ending also leaves the door open to further expansions.

From what we got to see of Broken Steel, it looks like the most ambitious of the three Fallout 3 expansions, and fans will be especially pleased that it takes place in the actual bombed-out Washington, D.C., ruins Fallout 3 is set in, rather than a smaller, stand-alone area, as in Operation: Anchorage (which took place in a virtual version of Alaska), and The Pitt (set in Pittsburgh).

Note: if you can’t get enough Fallout, Bethesda promises an entirely new game in the series sometime next year, called Fallout: New Vegas.

Though the general buzz inside the Makuhari Messe convention center here is generally buoyant, the people and companies here aren’t immune to what’s happening outside the walls.

Attendees stream toward Ceatec 2008 just outside Tokyo.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET News)

Just today as I was reading The Daily Yomiuri on the train ride from Tokyo to the convention center where the show is being held, one of the front page stories caught my attention: “Confidence at Japanese companies falls sharply.” The quarterly Bank of Japan survey of businesses’ impressions of economic conditions revealed that “major Japanese manufacturers are the gloomiest they’ve ever been in five years.” Japan is the world’s second-largest economy, and lowering profit forecasts and a slowdown in capital spending appears to be on the rise here, according to the survey.

While major companies are sure to feel the pressure of a global credit crunch brought on by the failure of several Wall Street banks in the past few weeks, I decided to find out if or how it’s affecting smaller regional companies too.

Speaking with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese manufacturers and service providers here revealed that while they’re not panicking yet, there’s definitely some worry over a lack of credit and the turbulent markets.

Obtaining credit will be harder for Japanese wireless provider E-Mobile in the current environment, said Hiroyuki Yokoyama, an employee in the company’s enterprise sales division. “We can’t (borrow) money from banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and UBS” as easily, he said. Yokoyama added that he anticipates the current crisis to be an issue for him and his company for at least the next two years.

Sarah Yoo, who manages overseas marketing for Seoul-based SBNTech, a maker of VoIP video phones, expressed frustration with the financial turbulence.

“The up and down currency is too crazy. We have to buy chips (for our product) from Texas Instruments. It’s harder to buy when currency is not stable,” she said. Plus, the U.S. is a major market for SBNTech’s products, and a depressed economy in there could lead to fewer sales for them.

Still others, like Masashi Sakaoka, a sales manager for mobile phone software maker Multisoup, expressed confidence in Japan’s economic system for companies like his employer.

“My company is very small, so the damage is very little,” said Sakaoka. He credits Japan’s more stable banks as the reason he doesn’t have to worry as much.

Of course, not everyone was very talkative. Wang Xuan, of China’s Kepo Electronics, maker of alarm security systems, said only that he remained confident in his company’s ability to do business in the U.S.–they have an office in Detroit. He did allow that his company is indeed “concerned” about the conditions on Wall Street.

And a research director for Panasonic’s advanced technology development labs was happy to talk about his work on 3D imaging, but clammed up when asked about his opinion on the current economic environment.

“I am not familiar with this financial crisis,” he said several times.

Don’t we all wish we could say the same?

Click here for more stories on Ceatec 2008.

It shines on the
iPhone, but has been set up to work with other smartphones, and provides a built-in map and shortcuts to call you up, with a small sticky note that goes on the top of your home page. When users click on this note, they’ll be taken right to that special contact page, letting them save time trying to hunt around your site for an address or phone number.

It’s aimed mostly at businesses, but could make a handy addition to your personal site or portfolio in case you want to make it easier for folks to contact you, while forgoing possible spam by keeping that information out of your page’s source code.

All you have to do to put one together is fill out a form with your business’ information. You can match this page up to the colors on your site, and when finished, it’ll spit it out into a few small lines of code that you drop in the header. Any changes you make on Schmap will be reflected back on that page since it’s hosted on Schmap’s site and not yours. There’s also a neat editor that shows you what that page will look like as you’re making the changes.

When turned on its side, iPhones will display contact information with a map, too–all without having to kick you off to another application.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

One way to build a product is to take the idea for it, and go out and try to get someone to fund its development. That’s the philosophy the venture capital economy is based on. But ideas and money can flow in different directions. Prizes, for example, can fuel amazing innovation. In this development model, a bucket of money is set aside to fund a goal, and the first team to achieve the goal gets the money. The X Prize suborbital flight–funded by an insurance bond–is the currently-famous example of this. Also, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic and won a prize.

Now there’s BigCarrot, a social site designed to help individuals create their own challenges, contribute to other challenges, and evaluate the contestants before the prize money is awarded.

Prizes range from social to technological.

Anyone can set up a challenge on BigCarrot and get other people to contribute to it. The site’s premier test case is the creation of a free, open-source .Mac competitor. A guy in Wisconsin, Ben Spink, won the challenge and collected the pool of money, $8,622, that 172 individual funders had put up for it. The average contribution to the “NotMac” fund was $25.

Prizes are awarded based on the votes of the funders. Every person who contributes gets one vote (the amount of money people put in is not a factor). Once the community decides they have a winner, the escrowed funds are transferred.

Here’s what prize funders directly get out of contributing to a challenge: Nothing. Yes, they can exercise their passion or beliefs by contributing money to causes that they like. And yes, if the challenge results in social change or the delivery of a product they like, they can benefit from it. But there’s no direct payback. Contributors don’t get shares in the inventions (at least not yet).

It’s important to note that contributors’ funds for a challenge are not pledged or earmarked. They’re actually paid up front. If you want to fund a project, you transfer your money to BigCarrot. Some other similar systems, such as ThePoint, use pledges, but BigCarrot CEO J. Kent Pepper said it would be too hard to guarantee pledge deliveries, especially for challenges that take a long time to win. The interest on the escrowed money is BigCarrot’s revenue stream, so if this concept takes off, the company will become filthy rich. Pepper said he’d like it to become philanthropic.

So contributors will never get their money out, even if a challenge is never won. Pepper told me that if a challenge has no activity (in the forums on the site, among other places) for more than two years, the funds earmarked for it will get redeployed to a newer, hopefully related challenge.

There’s also no simple way to put a time limit on a challenge, such as the one the X Prize had on it. I think deadlines are important, but having them would force the issue of returning money to funders on the unfulfilled challenges.

While I have strong doubts that BigCarrot will become the clearinghouse for incentive-driven invention and see a huge amount of cash flow through it, it a cool social experiment in direct action. Prizes can excite entrepreneurs to create clever solutions to any kind of problem, and letting individuals contribute gives them a piece of the satisfaction when the prize is won. I would hope to see more direct payback to the funders in the future, though.

Would you put money into a prize to encourage the development of a product or service you cared about?

( surveys)