Technology Terkini

According to documents filed in a California court this week, Escom LLC, the former owner of the website sex.com, has reached an agreement to hand over the domain's keys (and handcuffs) to Clover Holdings Ltd. -- a mysterious company based in the Caribbean. The final price? $13 million.


This isn't the first time, of course, that the domain name has changed hands. Match.com founder Gary Kremen originally claimed the name in 1994, but conman Stephen M. Cohen wrested control away from him in 1996. A lengthy legal battle ensued, and Cohen was eventually forced to pay $65 million in damages. (At one point, though, he reportedly was earning $500,000 per day from the site's advertisements alone.)

As the Register points out, though, Escom originally purchased the domain in 2006 for somewhere between $12 million and $14 million -- meaning that it probably saw little profit, if any, from the exchange. Considering that the California-based company recently filed for bankruptcy, though, it'll probably appreciate any extra pocket change it can get.

Many of us here at Switched spend hours a day clicking around inside Google Reader, an essential part of our news-reading operations. Multi-touch gestures are great, but are the rest of our blogging bodies wasting away without more involvement? Matt Richardson's new Google Reader Pedal rips the guts out of a USB keyboard to create a foot-controlled button for moving forward to the next news item (usually activated by tapping your keyboard's 'j' key). Now, you can pursue your RSS-fueled dopamine fix with the tap of your foot! Watch Richardson's DIY how-to in the video after the break.

Eclectic composer Troels Brun Folmann has crafted a laudable, award-winning career through the ingenious musical manipulation of natural and unorthodox sounds. His all-star soundtrack and editing credentials include seminal video games ('Tomb Raider'), popular TV programs ('True Blood') and epic films ('Avatar'). While suffering from food poisoning, he once even reportedly transformed spaghetti-generated intestinal eruptions into "an awesome-sounding synth sound that made it into a couple of blockbuster movies."

Folmann drew inspiration from personal fears and phobias for his latest project, which he titles, 'Music Made from Bees.' Based on the hundreds of stings he has suffered through his life, Folmann believes he emits an alluring scent for the insects. He told Wired, "To test my theory and overcome my apiphobia, I deliberately placed myself in a bee garden and started noticing all the beautiful sounds they make."

The composer recorded those sounds with a Zoom H4N microphone, and then manipulated the buzzing in order to make individual wing flapping audible. Those flaps "create the bases of the rhythms" for a piece which is composed entirely of bee-generated sounds. Watch the corresponding video, because Folmann's finished piece serves an impressively artistic (and catchy) composition. In terms of technologically-driven bee remixes, though, it's still pretty tough to beat this timeless classic.

So it's true, we're living in an age where people would shamelessly line up for certain electronics and luxurious fashion items. Why? Just because they can, and for that reason, some swanky outlets -- namely Christian Dior, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, and Versace -- have attempted to exploit our gadget lust by offering self-branded phones at extortionate prices. In the eyes of every-day consumers, there's really not much appeal in these soulless devices except for the logo and some extra bling, but apparently these two factors alone are enough to make some aficionados drool a river.

On the other hand, Puma -- a less luxurious but naturally more accessible fashion brand -- has decided to do more than just slapping an OS skin onto its aptly-named Puma Phone. Priced at a comparably affordable £300 ($469), this Sagem-made featurephone packs a few unusual features such as a solar panel, a sports tracker, and even a virtual cougar named Dylan. Read on to find out if we could sense the Puma spirit in this device.

Stuart Hughes, the British jeweler known for his expensive remakes of popular gadgets, is at it again, this time with a diamond-clad iPhone 4 with a price tag of 5 million pounds, or roughly $8 million.

The handmade bezel contains approximately 500 individual flawless diamonds that total more than 100 carats.

There's 53 additional diamonds in the back, and the main navigation button is made of platinum, holding a single cut 7.4 carat pink diamond.

If you know diamonds, all of this probably means something to you. To us, it just sounds really, really expensive.

Only two of these will ever be made, so don't worry: if you buy one, the chances of bumping into someone who has the exact same phone at a party are quite slim.

As manufacturers work to drive down the cost of solar power, refining solar cells and panels to make them more efficient is only half the story. Another option is to incorporate newer electronics into the panels that could boost the power output of photovoltaic systems and make them easier to design and install.
Suntech Power, the world's largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar modules, based in Wuxi, China, has announced partnerships with Santa Clara, California-based National Semiconductor and other solar electronics makers to develop "smart" panels that would give the most power possible even if other panels are underperforming due to damage or to sunlight being blocked by shade or debris. This kind of system is useful because in conventional photovoltaic systems, one panel's performance affects the output of the whole system. "We think smart module technology is a clear path for the future," says Andrew Beebe, Suntech's chief commercial officer.

Solar manufacturers are finding it difficult to eke out additional increases in how efficiently crystalline-silicon solar panels convert sunlight into electricity--so solar innovation has shifted to back-of-the-panel electronics. "Every incremental power advantage brings down cost per watt, and electronics are where the improvements are going to be," says Matthew Feinstein, a research associate at Lux Research.

National Semiconductor's power-optimizing device is already on the market. Tests on customer installations have shown that it can squeeze 25 percent more energy from a photovoltaic system, says Kevin Kayser, a marketing manager at the company. Independent tests by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Photon International have demonstrated power gains from arrays as high as 39 percent.

Solar modules operate at various current and voltage levels. Panels are traditionally strung together in a series, and their combined DC power is sent to a large inverter. The inverter does two things: it converts the power into grid-ready AC electricity, and its control circuit constantly searches for and sets the operating voltage and current levels for all the panels based on the total power output of the array. But if one panel's current drops because of shade or debris, the inverter lowers the current of all the other panels, bringing down the array's power output. "Ten percent shade on the array means a 50 percent power loss," Kayser says.

National Semiconductor's power optimizer does away with the central control circuit in the inverter, instead placing a separate control circuit behind each panel. This allows the optimizer to wring the most power from each panel. In addition, Kayser says, while some power-optimization products either increase both current and voltage or decrease current and voltage, theirs can increase and decrease both current and voltage, squeezing out even more power.

DETROIT--The future of autos is electric. Or is it?

Even though the new big thing in the auto industry is electric cars, there is not a clear consensus on how big of a role electric vehicles will play in the coming years.

Auto and utility industry executives at the Business of Plugging In conference here today took pains to point out the significant hurdles to adoption that plug-in vehicles face in becoming mainstream.

In addition to the higher cost of components, such as batteries, there is also the question of building a charging infrastructure in public places and the customers' overall experience with electric cars.

That's not to say that electric vehicles aren't real. Aided heavily by government incentives for consumers and manufacturers, electric cars designed for everyday use, such as the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, will start to be delivered in the coming months, with many more types of plug-in vehicles planned for release in the next two years.

But whether plug-ins will inhabit a niche, as current hybrids do, or reach beyond the two percent of "early adopters" is the open question today.

On a panel discussion, a Toyota executive projected that sales of EVs will be at most two percent of sales by 2020, while Nissan said that 10 percent of all car sales is possible. Regardless of the projected percentage, nobody seems to think that EV adoption will be quick and easy.

"Whether it's 3 percent by 2020 or 10 percent still has to be seen...but there is a very long way to go before we get a significant percentage of pure plug-in vehicles in the market," said Neil Armstrong, president of Mercedes-Benz research and development in North America.

U.S. computer sales were pretty disappointing during the past three months, unless you're talking about Macs.

According to the Quarterly PC Tracker Survey released by IDC today, Apple shipped 1.99 million Macs in the U.S. during the third quarter of 2010. That's good for 10.6 percent of the 18.9 million PCs shipped in the U.S., putting Apple's share at its highest in the U.S. in the company's history, according to IDC.

While that's still far behind Hewlett-Packard's 24.3 percent share and Dell's 23.1 percent share, both of those companies' shipments remained relatively static over the last year. Apple saw its shipments grow 24 percent from the same quarter a year ago.

And it's not just the sales growth of HP and Dell it's besting: the entire U.S. PC market during the third quarter grew just 3.8 percent from a year ago (even though it was forecast at 11 percent), meaning Apple shipments of Macs grew at eight times the rate of everyone else. It's fairly remarkable considering the lingering weakness in the economy and the company's computers having been saddled with the "too expensive" label--whether accurate or not.

So why is Apple doing so well selling computers now? IDC analyst David Daoud says the iPad may actually be one of the reasons.

"It is very possible that the iPad's marketing right now is impacting [Apple's Mac] business as a halo effect, just like we saw several years ago with the iPod," he said. "The momentum went on with the iPhone, now it appears the iPad is playing a similar role, stimulating sales across its product line."

Apple sold more than 3 million iPads between April and June, and it's very likely we'll get an updated number for sales over the last three months when Apple reports its quarterly earnings results on Monday. What is interesting is the suggestion that the iPad is not taking away sales of Macs, but helping them. Unlike the iPod which has a completely different use case than a Mac, there's been discussion over whether the iPad can in some instances replace a notebook computer.

Best Buy's CEO was quoted last month saying that the iPad had cut into notebook sales by as much as 50 percent. Though he later backed off that statement, he only said the 50 percent figure was a "gross exaggeration." He didn't say there wasn't any cannibalization effect.

Either way, it's good news for the Mac business, which doesn't get nearly the attention it used to, with the iPhone and iPad raking in huge amounts of revenue for the company, and the clear trend in the industry toward highly mobile devices. But we know for sure that next week we'll hear more about the Mac and Mac OS X, when Apple holds a special event at its headquarters to talk about hardware and the next version of the Mac operating system. Here's what CNET expects we might see on the Mac front.

Though overall consumer sales weren't so hot, enterprise computer sellers did a decent business during the third quarter, IDC says. Lenovo, which sells heavily to large businesses, grew 32.9 percent in its worldwide sales. The long-awaited "commercial refresh"--the cycle of companies replacing employee computers and IT equipment en masse--continued on schedule.

Perennial worldwide market leader HP saw little change in volume, claiming 17.7 percent of the 89.3 million computers shipped in the third quarter. Acer reclaimed its No. 2 spot with 13 percent of shipments, Dell dropped backed to third place with 12.5 percent, Lenovo claimed 10.3 percent of shipments, and newcomer Asus stayed firmly in the top five with 5.4 percent of shipments.

Gartner released its market share results today as well, and saw similar numbers: HP with 17.5 percent of shipments worldwide, Acer 13.1, Dell 12.2, Lenovo 10.4, and Asus with 5.4 percent.

Adobe Systems Inc.’s (ADBE) Photoshop is famous for helping photographers extract the most out of their shots in a digital darkroom. But at $699, Photoshop costs as much as a new camera and takes a graduate course to master. Moreover, Photoshop was designed to edit a single photo at a time, not for sorting through a collection.
A new generation of software from Adobe and Apple Inc. (AAPL) has emerged to fill the gap between Photoshop and entry-level photo-management software like Apple Inc.’s iPhoto and Google Inc.’s (GOOG) Picasa. For people who have graduated from point-and-shoot cameras, Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299) and Apple’s Aperture 3 ($199) offer tools to organize large collections and tackle the nitty-gritty of digital developing and re-touching.
I’ve been testing Lightroom (for Mac and PC) and Aperture (for Mac only) to organize, process and share photos I took at my friends’ recent wedding. While both programs were designed with professional photographers in mind, I found they were effective at helping a hobbyist like myself whittle 400 photos to just 40 in less than an hour.
The programs also let me edit photos far beyond the basics of brightness and contrast. One shot moved from the reject to the favorites pile after Lightroom let me take advantage of my Canon camera’s advanced image format to boost the exposure of an image taken during a dimly lit reception.
Many professional photographers have a strong preference for one of the two programs. I preferred the overall aesthetic and photo-editing tools in Lightroom for extracting the best from my photos. Nonetheless, Aperture’s strengths lie in some nifty organizational tricks, and I would recommend it for people interested in three specific uses: upgrading from a large iPhoto collection; taking video with an SLR; or tagging photos with locations.
At their core, both Lightroom and Aperture are databases, but don’t let that scare away your inner Ansel Adams.
Lightroom’s database gives you tools to organize your photos into folders on your computer, create collections from across folders, and tag photos with keywords, star ratings, and other features. For people like me who are lazy about applying tags to describe photos, Lightroom offers a spray-can tool to virtually “paint” keywords on bunches of photos at one time.
Aperture’s approach to cataloging is borrowed from iPhoto. You put your photos into “projects” (known as “events” in iPhoto), which the software will suggest when you import images from your camera based on groups that were taken around the same time. You can also add keywords, ratings and other tags.
But Aperture has two more tricks up its sleeve. You can tag photos based on the people in them, using the same technology Apple built into iPhoto to recognize faces. While that’s a good idea, I found that Aperture (like iPhoto) didn’t do an ideal job at distinguishing faces, especially in profile.
Apple says the face-recognition function works best if you identify both a couple of front-on and profile photos for any person, and also let it finish going through your whole collection before using it.
More useful is Aperture’s ability to tag photos geographically. Some new cameras collect GPS data with each shot and Aperture charts that info with pins on a giant world map, making it fun to track a journey or search for all the photos taken in one place.
Unfortunately, the majority of cameras don’t capture GPS data, but Aperture does offer some tools for adding in location data after the fact, such as importing it from a photo taken by an iPhone at the same site. Lightroom can also record GPS data for photos, but you have to work with third-party plug-ins to get the same functionality as in Aperture.
It’s in the digital darkroom that both programs earn their keep. The biggest reason an SLR-owner should upgrade beyond a basic photo editor is so he or she can work with so-called RAW files, sort of digital negatives that use extra data from the camera’s sensor to give you artistic control over factors like exposure long after you’ve shot the photo. Both programs work well with RAW, and moreover, editing photos on both programs is nondestructive, which means you can undo any changes you make—all the way back to your original photo—even after the photo has been saved. Sometimes the sky really can be too blue.
I found Lightroom’s editing features to be the most intuitive. It uses a three-paned screen clearly showing all of the available adjustments, your photo, and a history of the changes made to the image. I felt Aperture made me hunt for some of those features, but some users may prefer its optional floating palettes to Lightroom’s dense panels of options, and also its elegant system for brushing changes onto an image.
Lightroom boasts some cutting-edge editing features, such as the ability to adjust photos based on profiles of the lenses used to take them. That’s especially useful if you are working with a wide-angle lens that can distort images. With the click of a button, a warped wall at the edge of a wide-angle photo is made vertical again. The lens profiling wasn’t automatic with my older-model Canon SLR, but still worked.
To be sure, there are well-known Photoshop tricks that neither of these programs can do, such as stitching two or more photos together. They also can’t digitally cut your ex’s head out of photos. But if you really need to do that, finding the right photo-editing software is the least of your problems.
And to my disappointment, both programs are missing an increasingly popular service called HDR, or high dynamic range, where you merge photos taken at different levels of exposure into a new photo that takes the best aspects of them all. To make these sorts of images, you have to download external plugins. That’s the occasion I most missed Photoshop.
Finally, the programs both offer tools to showcase shots in professional-looking books and prints as well as on websites like Facebook and Flickr. Lightroom has the most options for producing Web galleries.
Aperture will appeal to users with cameras that do the newest trick in digtial SLR photography: take video. Such videos, which can feature beautiful photographic characteristics like short depth of field, can be imported and edited right in Aperture. The videos can be included in the software’s handsome mixed-media slideshows without the need for a separate video-editing program.
Either Lightroom or Aperture is a worthy upgrade for any semi-serious photographer. Both are available to download for free limited trials and I’d suggest testing the workflow of both before committing your photo collection.

Bradley heads to Toyota's U.S.A. headquarters in Torrance, CA to test drive the much anticipated plug-in hybrid Toyota Prius PHV. Will the plug-in Prius help Toyota stay atop the hybrid heap?

Sony's GT1 Google TV line should cost significantly less than expected if a leak is true. The 46-inch NSX-46GT1 would cost just $1,399, not the $1,899 originally expected. Many of the earlier quoted prices would be "several hundred dollars less," the Sony Insider source said.

The specifications for the Android-based sets themselves are still mostly unknown, other than that they will use a USB adapter for Wi-Fi and edge-based LED backlighting. At $1,399 for the largest set, it's doubtful that any of the sets will support 3D or more than a 120Hz refresh rate.

Sony will unveil the GT1 at its special event October 12 and may release them relatively quickly to seize on holiday sales.

 this is picture for electric racing bike concept by Peugeout

Microsoft will unleash the PC's latest trick on the world next year, according to reports

The Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) isn't a familiar topic to most casual computers users, but those familiar with its history recognize it as one of the PCs worst examples of burdensome legacy code.

Back in 1979 the BIOS were cooked up to provide compatibility for IBM clones. Due to legal issues they had to be designed through a bizarre process -- reverse engineering of IBM's code, and then re-design based on a specification produced by the reverse engineering team (as opposed to simply directly using the reverse-engineered code).

The results worked, but were hardly outstanding examples of firmware engineering. Today the primary role of BIOS in PCs is to load the Windows operating system's boot loader, in effect starting the OS load process, but modern BIOS retain much of the same ancient legacy code of that original BIOS -- and its many rough edges. And what was an ungainly code to start, only became worse with time -- BIOS' difficulty in handling new types of hardware like USB peripherals is a key factor in why PCs often take a half minute or more to boot.

But the days of BIOS are about to come to an end, as is their weak performance. Microsoft reportedly plans to force adoption of a new PC firmware interface called Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) in 2011.

Microsoft is rumored to be coming out with the successor to Windows 7 next year, dubbed "Windows.NEXT". That successor, like the Windows 7/Windows Vista will support UEFI, but it reportedly will go a step farther, scrapping BIOS support and forcing OEMs like HP and Dell to adopt UEFI.

While UEFI is primarily the work of Intel, the world's biggest CPU maker, it is Microsoft which largely controls when UEFI mass deployment will become a reality. Motherboard makers will also play a key role, by deploying motherboards with flashed support for the new tech.

In a recent interview with BBC News, Mark Doran the head of the UEFI forum, the organization tasked with developing and deploying the new firmware technology, comments, "At the moment it can be 25-30 seconds of boot time before you see the first bit of OS sign-on. With UEFI we’re getting it under a handful of seconds. In terms of boot speed, we’re not at instant-on yet but it is already a lot better than conventional Bios can manage, and we’re getting closer to that every day."

The extensible nature of this new interface helps ensure that it will be capable of dealing with whatever new PC expansions hardware makers can dream up in the next three decades.

Between enabling faster boot times and paving an easier path for new hardware, UEFI may greatly enhance users' PC experience by doing away with a tired three-decade old interface. Even if they don't know their BIOS from their kernel, that's something most users should be able to appreciate.

Apple likes glass. A lot. You can tell that much from its many retail stores, and in its products where glass is used in displays, notebook trackpads, and both the front and back of the iPhone 4.

That last place, though is what might be causing the company some headaches.

That's according to a report today from Gdgt, which says that slip-on cases -- the kind that cover the back and sometimes front of the iPhone 4, have been the cause of serious cosmetic damage with the backside of the iPhone. Dirt and other loose bits of debris from your pocket end up in that space.

Over time, that can lead to a shattered backside as small scratches grow to become large cracks that travel across the back of the device, much like a ding on a windshield.

This has become a big enough problem, the report says, that Apple's engineers have been hard at work in "a quiet lockdown," testing various third-party cases to see how widespread the problem is, and presumably to make sure it does not happen with future iterations of the device.

The news comes at an especially interesting time given the recent expiration of Apple's free iPhone 4 case program (which included Apple's no closed-back bumper), and the reported beginnings of mass production for a CDMA version of the iPhone said to be coming to Verizon in early 2011.

If Apple is planning to bring any physical design changes to that version of the iPhone, a back that's susceptible to cracking could very well be holding up that process.

This wouldn't be the first time cracks have cropped up on Apple's hardware, or the iPhone line for that matter.

Both the Mac G4 Cube, which was introduced in 2000, and the iPhone 3G experienced reports from users that the outsides were developing "hairline surface cracks."

Similar blemishes had appeared on white versions of the company's MacBook notebooks, which Apple reportedly began acknowledging and repairing early last year.

You know, for a moment there, we actually thought we were past the point of pushing subsidized netbooks. Evidently not. Verizon Wireless has just revealed a tweaked version of HP's 11.6-inch Pavilion dm1 (the dm1-2010nr) that's designed to work on Big Red's oh-so-vast 3G network. Better still, Verizon has thrown in a SIM card in order to let it roam on networks outside of America, but the catch is one you probably saw coming: price. As with the company's international Wireless Fivespot, the data pricing options are patently absurd -- particularly so when you realize that you can never use the data you're paying for here unless you're using the netbook its embedded within. Other specs include a 1.3GHz AMD Athlon II Neo K325 processor, Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), 2GB of DDR3 memory, ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 4225 GPU, a 1366 x 768 resolution, inbuilt webcam and Altec Lansing speakers. Verizon's trying to hawk this thing for $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement on a Mobile Broadband plan, while the standard version sells for just $250 more; worse still are the data plans, which mirror those found earlier in the week on the Fivespot. We'd tell you that they're detailed in full after the break, but seriously, why would you voluntarily view something that would bring you to tears?

Additional features and specifications of the HP Pavilion dm1-2010nr notebook :

* HP Imprint finish with a woven design in champagne
* Operating system: Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
* Processor Speed: 1.3 GHz
* Memory: 2 GB DDR3 System Memory with one accessible memory slot
* Video Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4225 Graphics
* HP Webcam with integrated digital microphone
* Display: 11.6 inch diagonal high-definition LED BrightView Display (1366 x 768)
* Altec Lansing Speakers
* Dimensions: 11.4 inches (l) x 8.03 inches (d) x 0.78-1.20 inches (h)
* Weight: 3.24 pounds

Laptops HP's Pavilion

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