(Credit: MuleCon)
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MuleCon 2008

Vladimir Vukićević from Mozilla’s
Firefox team eventually managed to turn Firefox 3 into a speed demon on
Mac OS X. But Apple sure didn’t help with the process.

Apple may not have been trying to cripple non-Apple applications on Mac OS X, but the fact that it’s not open source means that the world is beholden to Apple’s whims, as Vlad writes:

I do not think that Apple is in any way trying to purposely “cripple” non-Apple software. I also do not think that undocumented APIs give
Safari any kind of “significant performance advantage” (as Firefox 3 should show!).

commentary

However, as I said, the undocumented functionality could be useful for Firefox and other apps to implement things in an simpler (and potentially more efficient) manner. I don’t think this is malicious, it’s just an unfortunate cutting of corners that is way too easy for a company that’s not fully open to do.

Full video after the jump.

One guy admits, “I was a normal human being until I was thirty five years old.” and then he found hi-fi, and he’s been obsessed ever since. It’s all about a love affair with exotic gear, sound, and yes, music.

Some guys are into
cars, some gamble, or blow the budget on high-end kitchens. Me, I’m an audiophile. I’ve met a lot of really intense tech geeks over the years, but this masterful YouTube video by Ken Barnes takes it to the extreme. The members of The Audiophile Club of Athens show off their stuff. It’s a truly gorgeous video, lavishly produced and the short interviews are well done.

Rear-projection is only popular in really big screen sizes.

(Credit:
CNET)

What do you think? Do love your RPTV? If you’re a big-screen shopper, is the price of a 58-inch plasma worth it, or is it projection all the way?

A press release describing a new report (PDF) says that rear-projection HDTVs, including DLP-based microdisplays, now serve only a niche market of people who want 60-inch or larger televisions. The report by Quixel research shows that in the second quarter of this year, the 60-inch and larger screen sizes accounted for 86 percent of sales of all rear-projection HDTVs; up from 32 percent in 2007. The firm’s spokesman says that the reason has to do value. “The market has changed and there is no value for 42-inch, 46-inch, and 50-inch MD RPTVs, but there is great value in the screen sizes above 60 inch,” said Tamaryn Pratt, Quixel Research principal.

Courtesy of dozens of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the past 13 years, Nuance now owns much of the speech technology on planet Earth. The company boasts a $3.5 billion market cap on annual sales that will likely top $800 million this fiscal year but, remarkably, has never been profitable. I can see why. Nuance has been so busy acquiring companies it hasn’t had a chance to worry about a little thing like profitability.

According to my math, the current incarnation of Nuance Communications is actually made up of 42 companies, with a $180 million acquisition of SNAPin Software in the works and an unsolicited offer of $40 million for Zi on the table. Got all that?

What I meant, at the time, was that I was disappointed that we’re not rid of all the keyboards, buttons, and remote controls by now. So I did some research and discovered that speech technology is indeed proliferating in some industries: defense, medical, call centers, and rudimentary capability for cell phones, edutainment, and high-end automobiles.

While all this was happening on the East Coast, Nuance spun off from Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1994. In 1996, the Menlo Park company deployed its first large-scale, call-center-based commercial speech application.

(Credit:
Nuance)

That said, I don’t really care that American Airlines can recognize my voice responses on the phone. The only speech application that actually benefits me on a day-to-day basis is on my cell phone, and that’s pretty basic stuff.

In 1999, a scanner software company called Visioneer bought ScanSoft and adopted the name. That seems to be about when current Nuance Chairman and CEO Paul Ricci entered the picture, and that’s when all the fun began.

As for its business strategy, Nuance seems to have done a good job of focusing its limited resources on the largest vertical markets where it can optimize profit margins. The company’s primary focus is on helping businesses improve efficiency and productivity while reducing costs.

Last November, I wrote a post titled “Top 10 technology flops.” One of the 10 was speech recognition. Judging by the feedback I got from all over the Web, you’d think I’d said Apple was a flop or Bush was a great president.

Still, the next time you get off the phone with an automated call-center that communicates eerily well, only to fumble around with the myriad of keyboards, buttons, and remote controls in your own life, at least you’ll know what name to curse: Nuance Communications.

For the most part, we’re still banging away on computer keyboards and drowning in a sea of proprietary consumer electronics devices and remote controls.

And now I know why. When it comes to speech technology, one company is holding just about all the cards: Nuance Communications.

ScanSoft went on to acquire about a dozen other companies, including some that were themselves made up of acquired companies.

The fact that the company says little about aggressively driving its technology into the consumer space is telling. That’s simply not its business plan, and I can certainly understand why. The consumer electronics market is highly fragmented with thin margins and high support costs. And if Nuance wishes to avoid that, well, there really isn’t much competition left to twist its arm.

I’d say Ricci is a shrewd businessman.

The company’s history is a tribute to M&A gluttony. Let’s see if I can get this right. In 1980, Xerox (so many of these stories begin with Xerox) bought inventor Raymond Kurzweil’s optical character recognition (OCR) company and ultimately renamed it ScanSoft.

In September 2005, ScanSoft merged with Nuance and the combined company adopted the Nuance Communications name. Since then, Nuance has gobbled up another dozen companies, the largest of which being Dictaphone for $357 million and eScription for $400 million.

In late 2001, ScanSoft bought Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgian company that had previously acquired a host of other companies including Berkeley Speech Technologies and Dragon Systems. Amazingly, L&H–the leader in the speech technology field–was bankrupt so ScanSoft got it for a song: $39.5 million.

(Credit:
Asus)

At the time, Microsoft also announced that computer makers in emerging markets could sell Windows XP Starter edition until June 2010.

News.com’s Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.

MIAMI–As I predicted last week, Microsoft has decided to extend the life of Windows XP, although only for a limited class of machines.

For Microsoft, Wednesday’s announcement is an acknowledgment of two things. First, that Starter Edition alone does not fulfill all of the emerging market demand, and second, that developed markets are also showing interest in low-power, low-cost laptops.

Dix said that Microsoft is confident that it can discontinue Windows XP at the end of June for mainstream PCs. “We have received affirming feedback from partners that they are ready to make the transition,” he said.

A Microsoft representative on Thursday reaffirmed that the company expects to ship the successor to Vista roughly three years from Vista’s January 2007 debut.

Microsoft said on Thursday that it will continue to allow Windows XP Home edition to be sold for a class of computers it calls “ultra-low-cost PCs.” It’s a category that covers machines with slower processors, smaller screens, and in many cases flash memory for storage, rather than a traditional hard drive.

Microsoft will give PC makers the option of using Windows XP or Vista on ULCPC devices, said Michael Dix, general manager of Windows client marketing.

Computer makers will be able to sell XP Home on new ULCPC machines through June 30, 2010, or one year after the launch of Windows 7, the next major release of Windows, whichever is later, Microsoft said.

Still, the minimal hardware used in ULCPC systems might make Vista ill-suited to such a task. The decision to discontinue Windows XP might have driven even more device makers into the hands of Linux, hence the extension.

Microsoft has already extended the Windows XP sales deadline once. In September, it said that computer makers would be able to sell Windows XP until June, rather than the original January 2008 deadline.

Microsoft is also publishing a set of guidelines Thursday designed to make it easier for makers of flash-based computers to use Windows. Many of these initial devices have launched running Linux, though some, such as the Eee PC from Asus, are also being offered in Windows versions.

The Asus Eee PC.

Carbon sequestration of fossil fuel burning, which Lewis says may not be available in time or at the volumes necessary to have significant beneficial impact on climate change.

“Powering the Planet” is the title of an extraordinary speech that is regularly given by Nate Lewis, Professor of Chemistry at CalTech. It is a bit long and detailed, but very much worth reading, as it elegantly frames the scale of the worldwide energy/environmental challenges to be faced in the coming decades.

Hydro, geothermal, wind and ocean energy, which are all fine in Lewis’ view, but inadequate in scope to supply global energy demands

Bio-based energy, which Lewis finds to be highly inefficient and therefore unlikely to be able to provide more than a small fraction of worldwide energy requirements

The gist of the presentation is that aggressive pursuit of energy efficiency is critical — but we still need to supply the remaining human energy requirement in some carbon-free fashion, which leaves us relatively few viable options:

“In the United States, we spend $28 billion on health, but only about $28 million on basic solar research. Currently, we spend more money buying gas at the pump in one hour than we spend funding basic solar research in our country over an entire year. Yet, in that same hour, more energy from the sun is hitting the Earth than all of the energy consumed on our planet in that year. The same cannot be said of any other energy source.”

Richard T. Stuebi is the BP Fellow for Energy and Environmental Advancement at The Cleveland Foundation, and is also the Founder and President of NextWave Energy, Inc.

This leaves solar energy, which Lewis concludes is the best hope for the planet — technologically known to work, scalable with no binding supply limitations, at potentially reasonable economics with continued advancement. Then Lewis closes with the clincher: if we’re going to succeed with solar energy, our priorities need to change:

Nuclear power, which concerns Lewis not for safety/security reasons but because of inability to expand nuclear utilization quickly/sufficiently to meet the world’s needs.

In the book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations, which he co-authored with Ori Brafman, Beckström wrote about the power of decentralized networks in organizations. He has gone so far as to say the concepts he outlined in the book could help the U.S. government in its dealings with al-Qaida.

Rod Beckström, 47, is expected to be appointed to the post Thursday and report directly to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The secretive center was created by a national security directive signed by President Bush in January.

Beckström co-founded CATS Software, a derivatives and risk management software company, in his garage when he was 24, according to his Web site. He recently co-founded Twiki.net, a company that supports open-source wikis.

The chairman’s wife, Hong Ra-Hee, who is the director of the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, was also questioned by prosecutors earlier this week. She was asked whether she used money from the fund in question to buy works of art for the museum, which she denied.

South Korea’s largest company, Samsung operates in many industries, but is primarily known for its electronics. The company is one of the largest television manufacturers in the world, and is also a leading handset maker.

Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee appeared before South Korean special prosecutors to answer questions about his company’s alleged bribery of public officials, according to the BBC.

“Our discomfort stems from the fact that strong security is not always built into the (RFID technology) to begin with,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “Very often, it’s an afterthought.”

“Is it too early for a recommendation for a technology that is still evolving?” asked Paul Skehan, director of the European Retail Round Table. “Probably.”

Industry representatives, government officials, and consumer advocates met at a workshop on Tuesday hosted by the Federal Trade Commission to discuss how to resolve privacy and security concerns with respect to RFID without stifling the growth of the technology.

The European Union Commission is currently preparing a recommendation for member states on how to address privacy, data protection, and information security when implementing RFID technology. In the United States, the FTC is not pursuing any new policies or encouraging any new legislation to address RFID privacy issues because the FTC Act provides a broad mandate that allows for those issues to be addressed, said Katie Ratte, an FTC attorney.

Industry representatives, however, said the state of the technology made it difficult to anticipate security weaknesses. Furthermore, they warned, trying to impose broad security standards on the many uses of RFID technology could severely hamper its growth.

(Credit:
Stephanie Condon/CNET Networks)

Industry, government, and public advocacy representatives discussed RFID technology Tuesday.

All the participants at the workshop agreed on the need to educate the public about how RFID technology is used.

“If the public’s not ready for it, that could kill a technology,” said Tom Karygiannis, senior researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

There were security and privacy concerns when the U.S. government began issuing RFID-equipped passports. Evolving private-sector use, such as the migration of contactless payment to mobile phones, has also raised concerns.