i-eclectica.org

An article from PCWORLD:

“As expected, Palm on Wednesday introduced a new mobile computing device. It’s radically different than the company’s popular line of Treo smartphones, and it’s called the Foleo. It’s designed to work in conjunction with a Treo, but it offers users a large screen and full sized keyboard — it looks like a small laptop. Palm expects it to cost $499 (after a $100 rebate) when the Foleo is released this summer.

Palm CEO Jeff Hawkins claims that Foleo is the beginning of a new line of companion products aimed at smartphones — not only Palm Treos, but smartphones made by other companies as well. Hawkins unveiled the new device at the D: All Things Digital event in Carlsbad, Calif.

Prior to the unveiling, Palm indicated it would announce a new product, but gave neither the industry press nor analysts an advance look at what it planned to introduce.

The Folio isn’t a computer unto itself — it’s designed as a complementary product for the Treo, providing users with a 10-inch widescreen display and full-sized keyboard with built in scrolling tool, connecting wirelessly to the Treo using Bluetooth. Any changes you make using the Foleo are instantly displayed on the phone.

Using the Foleo, you can respond to e-mails, view attachments, look at Web pages and photos. You can edit and create Microsoft Word and Excel-compatible documents, view PDF files and display PowerPoint presentations, as well. Foleo can also drive an external display or projector using a VGA adapter.

You can surf Wi-Fi hotspots wirelessly using the Folio’s built-in Wi-Fi capability. Outside of Wi-Fi range, you can alternately or connect over your cell phone provider’s data network by using a Bluetooth connection to the phone.”

Looks pretty boring and sounds unexciting too - I wonder whether Palm has run out of ideas …

for some reason i love clocks, watches and other time pieces. here’s another cool clock design from Japan’s I.D.E.A. International via technabob. the actual clock is a projector projecting a functional analog clock face onto any wall. the projection clock is housed in a see-through acrylic shell which shows off the unique optics and mechanical components that generate the clock image.

sub-studio always has some interesting designs, and here is a small collection from that site, all referring to exhibits at this year’s ICFF (19th annual international contemporary furniture fair) …

wall coverings are more or less absent in australia but they were always big for example in germany; the same might be the case in other place in the northern hemisphere. here’s a nice example: Words Spoken Quieter Than Actions by Rollout was apparently a favorite at the ICFF - lots of thought bubbles that just asking for interaction and collaboration…

this is the beautiful beetle shelf system by Amaridian; the concept seems to have been around for a while because this model apparently has larger pattern and newly interpreted beetles …

this is quite a gorgeous piece: the Tio chair by Conscious Design. it comes in a range of fantastic patterns and colors on interchangeable covers …

i remember using plenty of discarded materials to decorate my living diverse living spaces when still being a student, so i quite like this approach by Tord Boontje and Artecnica. pity our house is too small for displays like this one …

I have been using eMusic as a digital download service for five months now and I have to say I am not exactly wrapped. The compression rate is pretty mediocre with 192Kbps VBR on average. Even though they focus on independent DRM-free music (which are the only pluses for me), their selection is not as great as their marketing spin suggests; most of their titles are at least 1-2 years old; it actually is almost impossible to get new releases. But what annoys me most is their pricing.

When you get to their home page and there is no link to their pricing structure. You are bombarded with cues to buy music but you can’t easily check how much you’ll need to pay for or what the compression rate is. “Buy first and ask questions later” seems to be the motto. To get your questions answered, you actually have to go to the very top of the page or scroll right down to the bottom and select ‘help’ (!). Then you’ll have to click your way through a FAQ menu to finally get to the information about eMusic’s pricing structure (same for information on music quality). That whole approach to me suggests business greed, not customer care.

And this feeling is not been shaken off by studying eMusic’s prices. I think it would be wrong to compare them to the likes of Apple: paying almost the CD price for 128kbps DRM songs is a total rip-off. So, instead of making an unreasonable comparison, I would suggest to look at overheads as a consumer price gauge. I have to admit of course that I don’t know what eMusic’s are but given that you’ll just need some hardware and bandwidth, make some royalty payments plus have a few people on your payroll, these overheads can’t be high. So, having to pay US$0.27-0.33 per song is not exactly a bargain. And discounts? For a two year subscription you pay between US$180-360 which brings the price down US$0.22-0.25 - nothing to rave about for that advance outlay.

But it’s not only the pricing which does not make me exactly jump up and down over eMusic. One thing that really irks me is that unused downloads do not roll over - that is not only very user unfriendly but a total rip-off. Unless you just focus on downloading single songs, you’ll always have a few songs left in credit, and it’s annoying to either let go of them (which makes your download costs and eMusic’s profits higher) or to look for some odd songs to bring your credit down to zero.

It’s just another way to fill their bank accounts - and they are quite creative at it. I mentioned already how hard it is to find information on pricing on eMusic’s homepage, how the prices are not exactly low, how stingy they are with discounts and how they don’t carry over credit. Another eMusic strategy is that they make it easy to upgrade your plan with just a few clicks, but you can’t downgrade. eMusic likes to lock its users in. If you do wanna downgrade you’ll have to write to their customer service centre or, if you can’t be bothered waiting for a response, cancel your account and reopen a new one. On the other hand, if you don’t feel like upgrading but just want to have a few more songs on top of your monthly allowance, you’ll have to pay for a so-called booster-pack between US$.0.53-0.60 per song - which is an utter rip-off.

So, eMusic for me is the last resort if I can’t find anywhere else what I’m looking for. eMusic provides mediocre sound quality and music selection, user-unfriendly service and it is too much focused on the bottom line. I really like to support smaller players, but they need to earn it. With eMusic claiming they are “the world’s second-largest digital music retailer overall”, maybe they already have become too big to need support.

Why not to join Facebook was about the question whether information in Facebook stays in Facebook; it linked to a site that talks about the relationship between Facebook and government agencies with an interest in collecting citizen information. That was 2006. Today, ZDNet’s Digital Market blog uses a similar starting point (privacy concerns) to explain Why Facebook is scarier than Google. It’s another argument against joining that community.

Facebook has just opened itself to every human on this planet, and its feted 23 year old creator Mark Zuckerberg has an ambitious vision: he wants Facebook to be what Windows is for the desktop: the social operating system of the web. That’s scary. In the above mentioned blog Donna Bogatin rightfully asks: “Why should ANY one company rule the Web? Why would it be a good thing for a for-profit corporation’s closed Web-based application to achieve worldwide Internet domination?” Especially if that rule will be based on total ownership of information provided by its users; it smacks of companies like Monsanto collecting crop plants in the so-called developing world, slapping patents on their genetic code, and then forcing the poor farmers to buy them if don’t want to infringe on Monsanto’s new copyright.

Gathering information and using it in a non-transparent way purely for profit is what makes Google powerful and dangerous. I am not sure whether to follow Bogatin’s argument in this context that Facebook is more evil than Google, but I do agree that Zuckerberg & Co have no qualms with going down the path of ‘doing evil’. Bogatin lists quite a few excerpts from Facebook’s newly released Privacy Policy, and it reads like being asked to sign your life away - certainly your cyber life, which of course in such community setting is merely a reflection of your flesh space life.

The policy names two kinds of information that Facebook collects: one is voluntarily provided and the other is behind-the-scenes collected site usage data. But that’s not all. “Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service …”. Two questions arise: what is Facebook doing with this data, and how is it guaranteeing privacy?

Let’s look at the second question first: is all of this information secure? No! The policy states that Facebook is “not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site.” So yes, you can choose your privacy settings, but if Facebook is lax securing them - bad luck for you.

So, what about the utilisation of that information? “Facebook may use information in your profile … for purposes such as … personalizing advertisements and promotions…”. In other words: personal information is passed on to third parties. They are not just businesses that want to flog their wares and government agencies, but also so-called platform developers. The policy states: “Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information that they may obtain in connection with Platform Applications.” Again: privacy settings are no guarantee for privacy, and Facebook does not seem to be very concerned about the absence of safeguards; it almost sounds like it is giving those who are trying to get around them a free ride. Plus, of course: Facebook gives itself a license to do with private information as it sees fit - it owns it. After all: it commercially benefits from platform development!
What happens to data that has been removed by a user? Is it wiped? No! “Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of Facebook.” But it remains available to the company for its for-profit purposes. Can all information be ‘removed’? No; information shared with other users is excluded. Facebook keeps data; it let’s go of it as little as possible because it wants to commercially exploit it.

With Facebook not being college bound anymore, its ambition is clear: to collect data from hundreds of millions of users (after all: it wants to become bigger than MySpace with its 180 million users) and mine it for profit. The process of data gathering and mining totally lacks transparency, of course. All of this is similar to what Google does. The big difference though is that the information users provide on Facebook is often very personal and highly intimate, and even those who might have read the privacy policy (and formally agreed with it) would most likely not want their information be shared - neither with government agencies nor because Facebook likes to cash in on it. The problem though is: they have given their consensus.

But it is not just the individual as such whose privacy finds little respect. Like with Google it’s the size of the data pool that is a concern. A lot of knowledge translates into a lot of power. Just imagine what the beneficiaries of this knowledge base (big business, politicians and government) could do with it in terms of manipulating public opinion and consumer desires as well as developing effective methods of social control. That’s the real Big Brother stuff.

And it is interesting that Facebook’s privacy policy states that “[by] using Facebook, [users] are consenting to [having their] personal data transferred to and processed in the United States”. Centralisation of control in general should make us wary; centralisation of control over information should make us highly suspicious; centralisation of control over information in the US should lead to outrage.