With Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle, readers can squeeze hundreds of books into a device that is smaller than most hardcovers. For some, that’s not small enough.

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets–bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.”

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Inside a nondescript warehouse on a nondescript street of this Seattle suburb is a research laboratory that looks like it came out of a James Bond movie–had Q the gadget master been a gastronome.

Here Nathan Myhrvold, a former chief technology officer at Microsoft (MSFT), and his company, Intellectual Ventures, pursue an eclectic array of speculative and potentially world-changing ideas–inventing a new battery, taming hurricanes, defeating disease. And here, along with the laser designed to shoot mosquitoes out of the air (a high-speed camera counts the rate of wing-flapping to ensure that innocent insects are not vaporized), is the best-equipped restaurant kitchen anywhere that never serves any customers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site ]]> http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091118/after-microsoft-bringing-a-high-tech-eye-to-professional-kitchens/feed/ 0 http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091116/apple-wouldn%e2%80%99t-risk-its-cool-over-a-gimmick-would-it/ http://voices.allthingsd.com/20091116/apple-wouldn%e2%80%99t-risk-its-cool-over-a-gimmick-would-it/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:47:09 +0000 Randall Stross http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=17920 By Randall Stross, Columnist, Digital Domain, New York Times

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Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update–words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams–least of all Mr. Bradford–could have imagined.

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For many women, a $1,000 dress is something they admire in the pages of a glossy magazine or see draped on the frame of a celebrity–not an item hanging in their closet.

But a nascent Web site called Rent the Runway is hoping to make high-end fashions much more accessible and almost as easy as renting a movie from Netflix (NFLX).

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When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times (NYT) sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular around here, delivered a newsroom address on Thursday that touched on layoffs, efficiency, and charging for NYTimes.com.

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As news of the Fort Hood shooting rampage spread last week, media outlets and readers both put Twitter and its new lists feature to the test.

Just as the service was instrumental in providing updates during the summer’s election protests in Iran, Twitter feeds from Texas-based news sources such as the Austin-American Statesman and the Killeen Daily Herald provided a stream of local updates.

The Statesman’s feed amassed more than 3,000 followers by the end of the day Thursday, and soon larger news outlets such as Huffington Post, CNN and the New York Times (NYT) had tapped into it and other sources by using Twitter Lists, which lets users create groups of other Twitter accounts that others can view and follow.

“Lists proved a new way to follow breaking news on Twitter, with filtered groupings of local news outlets, military accounts, and local citizens,” Craig Kanalley wrote on Poynter’s E-Media blog.

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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Friday that the online encyclopedia aspires to be a higher-quality source of information but added that mainstream publications could learn from its disclaimers and community features.

“Our goal is to make Wikipedia as high-quality as possible. Britannica or better quality is the goal,” he said during a question-and-answer session at the ad:tech conference in New York.

One of the site’s strengths, however, is that contested entries–ones whose neutrality has been disputed, or that are lacking citations–are identified as such, Mr. Wales said. He wished that controversial New York Times (NYT) articles, for example, noted when they had prompted arguments among editors, he said.

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Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad.

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In the realm of Twitter insults, it was at the far end of mild. “Much as I admire and adore the chap, they are a bit…boring,” a Twitter user called brumplum wrote Saturday, speaking of the tweets of Stephen Fry, the British writer, actor and television personality.

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Two avatars, Leto Yoshiro and Enchant Jacques, met in the virtual world of Second Life in 2005. They married online the same year and built a house together on an island they had brought out of the waves that covered much of that world.

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Remember GateHouse Media? The regional news company sued the NY Times (NYT) for linking to it, claiming it was copyright infringement to include the headline and a brief snippet along with the link (you know, like Google…). Amusingly, it turned out that GateHouse Media was doing the same thing.

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For Jessica Gwozdz, a professional photographer and mother of two, Flickr was a blessing. It allowed her to share photos of her children, Grace and Henry, with distant, tech-averse relatives for whom a username and password would have been too great an obstacle. It even allowed potential clients to freely browse her gallery.

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It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s (GOOG) search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times (NYT), and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.

Aggregator sites like Huffington Post and online portals like Yahoo (YHOO) and Google have seen their readership, advertising revenue and influence increase. Meanwhile, traditional-media types have criticized these forces for unfairly leeching their reporting and hurting their business models. We’ll be alert for verbal sparring.

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A new electronic book reader is expected Tuesday from book seller Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS) that will challenge readers from Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) and Sony Corp. (SNE) with a color touch-screen and $259 price, according to a planned ad for the device.

The price for the reader, called the Nook, matches that of Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle controls about 60 percent of the burgeoning e-book market, according to Forrester Research.

Details of the reader appear in a full-page advertisement viewed by The Wall Street Journal in the New York Times Book Review section dated Sunday, Oct. 25. The advertisement says the Nook will enable its owners to “Lend eBooks to friends.”

A spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble declined to comment.

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