.::REALITYRECALL::.

Utah State’s Winning Team! Losing Team! Chant wins the century.

Look close. You may be staring at the end of cancer. Those tiny black dots are nanobots delivering a lethal blow to a cancerous cell, effectively killing it. The first trial on humans have been a success, with no side-effects:

Gmail launched a new feature this morning designed to detect suspicious activity in your account and notify you when a suspicious login has occurred in your account. More »

The ultimate guy’s action flick has just released its first trailer in all its testosterone glory. 

James Harrison, 74, has an antibody in his plasma that stops babies dying from Rhesus disease, a form of severe anaemia. He has donated 984 times since he was 18 years old, saving an estimated 2.2 million babies so far. He made a pledge to be a donor aged 14 after undergoing major chest surgery in which he needed 13 litres of blood.

Google is expanding its popular Street View mapping service to “nearly all of the country,” and is heading back for a reshoot of Windsor, Ont.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

The state of the news media is this: Gossip and rumors are rapidly replacing factual reporting — in large part driven by the Google economy. No company is benefitting more than Apple, and most recently with the launch of iPad. But rumors are no surefire way to sales success. Big hype will energize early iPad sales, but can it sustain them? I wonder, and perhaps you have the answer. I’m not looking for a scientific answer, just your story to tell — more on that in at the end of this post.

The Mac-obsessed blogosphere, news media and social crowd is a frightening but  exhilarating phenomenon. Marketers and public relations companies across the globe are watching the Apple-hype phenomenon and trying to guess how they can imitate it. They can’t. There is inherit bias in the products bloggers, journalists and socialwebites are using, or the companies that they invest in.

The pattern follows Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when so much tech reporting was one-sided in favor of the company cofounded by Bill Gates. I remember when Corel released its first major WordPerfect suite (late May 1996) after buying the product from Novell. Microsoft countered (two weeks later) with a press preview of Office 1997, which release was at least six months away. The hype about Office 1997 overshadowed WordPerfect 7 Suite for Windows 95. Microsoft hype had marketing might. Anything new from Microsoft could overshadow any existing competing product.

How similar the situation is with Apple today. The hype is in part driven by the large number of bloggers and journalists using Macs — the same kind of inherent bias (from Windows users) benefitting Microsoft a computing generation ago. In the 2000s, many high-profile journalism schools recommend — or even require — students to use Mac laptops. Reason: Content creation is supposedly easier on a Mac because of iLife. Microsoft should have released an iLife-equivalent product long ago. Sorry, Microsoft defenders, but Windows Live isn’t it. If not using a Mac, who doesn’t have an iPod?

Back to inherent bias: There are the investors and Wall Street analysts who recognize how much rumors can lift (or collapse) Apple’s share price. In December I asserted that the sudden and large number of Apple tablet rumors were meant to drive up the share price. Hype has share-price might, too. Something else: Like Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is enough reader interest in Apple — huge chunks of it investor driven, I presume — for bloggers, journalists and socialwebite gossips to scramble to post anything first; rumors are just fine. Being first with news (gossip or rumor) means higher Google News ranking, more pageviews and so more ad revenue.

If the iPad preorder numbers were truly good, Apple would tout them. Apple loves to use sales numbers for marketing advantage. Thanks to rumors or gossip, Apple gains some marketing punch without revealing how good — or even bad — are early iPad preorders.

Just five years ago, Apple frowned on rumors and aggressively discouraged them. Am I the only person who remembers Apple suing several rumor sites, which resulted in the closure of ThinkSecret? Apple worked hard to quash rumor sites. No more. There are too many, and they are too beneficial. Apple-obsessed bloggers and journalists amplify Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field.”

Some of the gossiping seems oh-so factually based. There was the Apple 2.0 Blog’s first-day iPad sales analysis of 124,596 iPads sold. This huge number, which was picked up and re-reported seemingly everywhere, was “based on a sampling of 99 orders (for 110 iPads) over 19.5 hours, and not counting units that were reserved but not ordered, the Sanity team estimates.” Say, what? Ninety-nine iPads preordered is basis for estimating unit sales into the hundreds of thousands?

The news media next went wild over another sales estimate — with some good math, I might add — from Daniel Tello. To boost his credibility, many blogs and news sites referred to Tello as a “blogger-analyst.” To his credit, Tello clearly discloses: “Long AAPL shares.” The Apple Blog’s March 15 headline about Tello’s post was typically misleading: “Analyst Estimate: 150,000 iPads Pre-Ordered Already.” Tello actually did a good analysis, which quality wasn’t reflected in most of the blog posts or news stories citing the data. They hyped the sales number, which is hugely uncertain.

Apple hype is simply out of control. I could write another post on the ridiculous conclusions made last week about Apple’s market capitalization exceeding Walmart’s. Missing: Share valuation is Wall Street’s measure of public company valuation. Inherent value based on real world fundamentals is something else. Walmart is an inherently more valuable company (based on reach, real estate assets, infrastructure, distribution, number of employees, local tax contribution, etc. etc.) than Apple.

The same can be said of Microsoft, which software is widely used by businesses, governments and non-government organizations across the globe. I laughed at Silicon Alley Insider’s March 14 Chart of the Week: “Only a Matter of Time Until Apple’s Market Cap is Bigger Than Microsoft.” There’s still plenty of spread between the valuations to make such an assertion, which also ignores inherent value by other more meaningful measurements.

I want to end by conducting an informal survey, asking simply: Did you buy an iPad?

If you preodered an iPad, please explain why. Were you wowed by the iPad’s aspirational marketing or Steve Jobs’ product introduction? Do you perhaps feel like you might be left out — “hey, everyone else I know wants one” — if you didn’t order? Maybe there is some must-have feature that your dumb phone, smartphone, ebook reader or laptop can’t do? Perhaps the reason is something else. Given the amount of hype, non-buyers’ reasons are just as important. The decision not to buy is more conscious than it might be for some other products. Please leave responses in comments.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

How many scientists does it take to properly install a lightbulb? When that lightbulb is an implant that stimulates retinal photoreceptors to restore one’s sight, quite a few — even if they disagree whether said implant should be placed on top of the retina (requiring glasses to supply power and video feed) or underneath, using photocells to channel natural sunlight. Now, a German firm dubbed Retina Implant has scored a big win for the subretinal solution with a three-millimeter, 1,500 pixel microchip that gives patients a 12 degree field of view. Conducting human trials with 11 patients suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, the company successfully performed operations on seven, with one even managing to distinguish between similar objects (knife, fork, spoon) and perform very basic reading. Though usual disclaimers apply — the tech is still a long way off, it only works on folks who’ve slowly lost their vision, etc. — this seems like a step in the right direction, and at least one man now knows which direction that is.

Subretinal implant successfully tested on humans, makes blind narrowly see originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Medgadget  |  Business Wire, Retina Implant  | Email this | Comments

When David DeVore first posted the now legendary video of his son’s backseat existential crisis, he never expected it would be the viral and cultural sensation that it has since become. With over 54 million views, the clip was the second most watched video on YouTube in 2009, bested only (and inexplicably) by Susan Boyle. Unlike most YouTube celebrities, though, the DeVores have found a way to channel the clip’s popularity into some pretty hefty profits — even in the face of controversy.

When David and his father aren’t making the rounds on American TV and radio, they’ve been busy creating a mini cottage industry based on their two minutes of glory, selling t-shirts on their Web site and speaking at events like this week’s SXSW. Vizio TV even used David’s voice in their commercial during this year’s Super Bowl. All along the way, of course, the DeVores have been raking in the dough. While he wouldn’t say exactly how much his family has earned off of his child’s drug-induced rant, David DeVore told CNN that the grand total is somewhere in the “low six figures.”

Continue reading ‘David After Dentist’ Family Pulls Six Figures From YouTube Fame

Filed under: Audio/Video, Web

‘David After Dentist’ Family Pulls Six Figures From YouTube Fame originally appeared on Switched on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper collected on his sudsy Olympic hockey bet with President Barack Obama as the U.S. ambassador to Canada delivered beer to 24 Sussex Drive.

Reputable Spanish publication Clipset has the first concrete report on pricing and internal specs for HP’s Slate. Seemingly obtained from HP itself, the €400 ($546) price tag positions the Slate a notch above netbooks and bodes well for the expectation that it’ll undercut the iPad’s entry level pricing. Straight currency conversations are inadvisable in such situations, so we’ll just have to wait until official stickers for the iPad in Europe are known or HP announces US prices for the Slate. Further info includes an Atom CPU, Flash support, USB connectivity, a memory card reader, and a back-mounted webcam (see it after the break). The launch of this Windows 7 device is slated for June, while retail availability in Europe is said to be expected at some point “before September.” It’s not clear what all that means for the US, but we doubt HP will be making its home turf wait longer than the rest of the world. Rest assured, we’ll be reaching out to HP HQ before they’ve had their first cup of green tea to find out.

Update: HP’s response to our queries has been typically tight-lipped. The company refused to discuss Clipset‘s specs and pricing, which would suggest that — even though they may be spot on — they are not yet official.

Continue reading HP Slate priced at €400 for June launch, Atom CPU confirmed?

HP Slate priced at €400 for June launch, Atom CPU confirmed? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 06:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Engadget Spanish  |  Clipset  | Email this | Comments

A huge quantity of water has been discovered in craters at the north lunar pole, enough water to supply a large US city for three years. Also, there also appears to be evidence for a lunar “hydrosphere”.

The New York Times is reporting that Google, Intel and Sony have all teamed up to create a new set-top box for in-home streaming, called Google TV.  The new project, which has been underway for several months already, is said to let consumers browse and stream the Internet right…

Firefox: Mozilla knows we often reach out to our contacts through our browsers. So the Firefox maker has crafted an experimental tool to make, for example, filling out “email this” forms easier by importing contacts directly into your browser. More »

A structure, possibly another universe beyond the horizon of our own, appears to be pulling at our world.

Fresh tensions between Canada and Russia emerge after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev tells a session of his Security Council that his country must be prepared to defend its claims to Arctic mineral riches.