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Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Mystery of Sun's Superhot Corona May Be Whipped


Mystery of Sun's Superhot Corona May Be Whipped


Rippling magnetic fields finally spotted in the corona


New measurements provide the strongest evidence yet for wriggling magnetic waves that may explain why the solar corona is a good 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun: regular pulsations in the speed of charged, high-energy gas or plasma streaming from the sun combined with matching magnetic fields.


The findings point to magnetic field ripples known as Alfvén waves whipping plasma back and forth, releasing heat, according to a report published online by Science. Although the waves seem to be too tiny to transfer the energy needed to fully heat the corona, researchers say improved measurements may reveal that the waves are larger than they appear.


A central problem in solar physics is why the sun's atmosphere gets hotter as it rises, from about 8,500 degrees Fahrenheit (5,000 kelvins) at the photosphere (solar surface) to more than 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million Kelvins) in the corona, which extends for millions of miles. Without an outside force heating the corona, its temperature would plummet, says solar physicist Scott McIntosh of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.


A top candidate for that outside force: Alfv&eacutise;n waves, undulations in the corona's magnetic field liberating heat as the waves "break" and compress plasma.


To spy Alfvén waves, McIntosh, Steven Tomczyk, also of NCAR, and their colleagues used the coronal multichannel polarimeter (CoMP) instrument at New Mexico's National Solar Observatory to measure changes in light emitted by ionized iron in the corona, which told them how the plasma's outward velocity varied.


Pulses of 0.2 mile (0.3 kilometer) a second occurred every five minutes, the same frequency as convective currents in the photosphere that could trigger Alfvén waves, they report. The direction of coronal magnetic field lines also seemed to match the trajectories of the pulses.


The result comes close to solving one of the great mysteries in solar physics, says Viggo Hansteen, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oslo in Norway. Data from Japan's Hinode spacecraft, presented at a meeting in April, showed patterns deeper in the corona that seemed to finger Alfvén waves, but the new finding is much more definitive, he says. "They're not guessing. They're really saying, 'Okay, these things are obeying all the characteristics we expect of Alfvén waves.'"


The only hitch: the waves are less than a thousandth the mangnitude needed to explain coronal heating, but Tomczyk notes that CoMP has relatively low resolution, so much larger waves could still be hidden in the data.




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More vitamin D could mean fewer cancers: study


Cancer Defeated Vitamin D Pill For ...
More vitamin D could mean fewer cancers: study


Thousands of cases of breast and colon cancers might be averted each year if people in colder climates raised their vitamin D levels, researchers estimate in a new report.


A number of studies have suggested that vitamin D may be important in cancer risk. Much of this research is based on cancer rates at different latitudes of the globe; rates of breast, colon and ovarian cancer, for example, are lower in sunnier regions of the world than in Northern climates where cold winters limit people's sun exposure.


Sunlight triggers the synthesis of vitamin D in the skin, and people who get little sun exposure tend to have lower stores of the vitamin.


Complementing these studies are lab experiments showing that vitamin D helps prevent cancer cells from growing and spreading, as well as some clinical trials in which people given high doses of vitamin D showed lower cancer risks.


For the new study, researchers at the University of California used data on average wintertime blood levels of vitamin D and rates of breast and colon cancers in 15 countries.



They found that rates of the diseases tended to fall as average vitamin D levels climbed, according to their report in the journal Nutrition Reviews. The protective effect against colon cancer seemed to begin when blood levels of vitamin D reached 22 nanograms per milliliter (ng/mL); for breast cancer, that number was 32 ng/mL.


The average late-winter vitamin D level among Americans is 15 to 18 ng/mL, according to the researchers.


They argue that, based on their data, if Americans were able to maintain a vitamin D level of at least 55 ng/mL, 60,000 cases of colon cancer and 85,000 cases of breast cancer could be prevented every year. Worldwide, those figures could be 250,000 and 350,000, respectively.


"This could be best achieved with a combination of diet, supplements and short intervals -- 10 or 15 minutes a day -- in the sun," lead study author Dr. Cedric F. Garland, a cancer prevention specialist at the University of California San Diego, said in a statement.


No one is recommending that people bake in the sun to reach high vitamin D blood levels. According to Garland, spending a matter of minutes in the midday sun, with 40 percent of the skin exposed, is enough. For fair-skinned people, the researchers estimate that just 3 minutes in the sun can be adequate, while darker-skinned people may need about 15 minutes.


A lifeguard in Southern California, Garland said, may have little need for extra vitamin D to reach potentially protective levels, whereas a Northerner who tends to stay indoors much of the year may need much more.


Garland and his colleagues recommend that, in addition to modest sun exposure, adults get 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day -- which is the "tolerable upper intake level" set by U.S. health officials.


That limit exists because of the risk of vitamin D toxicity, which causes elevated calcium levels in the blood and problems such as nausea, weight loss, fatigue and kidney dysfunction..


.




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Northwestern University and NEC Labs America's CRAMES: Power-Packed Memory


Northwestern University and NEC Labs America's CRAMES: Power-Packed MemoryNorthwestern University and NEC Labs America's CRAMES: Power-Packed Memory



Power-Packed Memory

Northwestern University and NEC Labs AmericaCRAMES Memory compression technique doubles storage in embedded systems, such as cell phones

Small mobile devices are inherently limited in the amount of memory they can carry, thereby restricting what applications they can run.

"You will always have limited storage on mobile devices, because you want the device to be small and portable and very power-efficient," says Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group, a wireless and mobile consultancy in Ashland, Mass., and a Computerworld.com columnist. "Memory compression can help in that regard, multiplying the efficiency of the storage you do have."

This summer, Tokyo-based NEC Corp. will release a new software memory compression technique called CRAMES (Compressed RAM for Embedded Systems) on its N904i cell phones. CRAMES more than doubles memory capacity while limiting power drain and performance loss to only 2.7%.


Memory compression technique more than doubles usable storage in embedded systems, such as cell phones.


The company's research arm, NEC Laboratories America Inc., began researching compression technologies eight years ago. In 2004, lab consultant Haris Lekatsas and department head Srimat Chakradhar decided to explore integrating compression into the operating system. CRAMES was developed by Lei Yang, a doctoral student at Northwestern University, along with her academic adviser, assistant professor Robert P. Dick.

"The idea was to transparently compress and decompress selected regions of memory to drastically reduce the memory footprint of embedded applications," says Dick. "By carrying out online compression and decompression entirely in software, hardware platform redesign could be avoided."

Dick says researchers had previously tried compressing software but rejected that approach because it drained power and hurt performance. The Northwestern team aimed to find a way to run applications that required more memory, but without the drain.

To manage compressed memory, the development team decided to use the Linux kernel's swapping mechanism to determine which pages should be compressed. Initially, they were able to reduce the drain to 10% using the established LZO compression algorithm. To further boost performance, the team developed a new compression algorithm called PBPM (Partial Based Partial Match). Other refinements include compressing data only when memory is low, modifying the memory management technology to reduce fragmentation and modifying the Linux kernel so it can eliminate defunct processes when necessary. Together, these steps held power drain and performance loss to 2.7%.

"Embedded system designers and especially designers of cellular phones and [PDAs] need to pack more functionality on the devices every year to remain competitive," says Dick. CRAMES has allowed NEC to pack in more functionality without waiting for the next cycle of hardware design to catch up with the new increasing demands on memory."




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Firefox still vulnerable to attacks from protocol-handling bugs


 Firefox still vulnerable to attacks from protocol-handling bugs--


Firefox remains vulnerable to attacks exploiting protocol-handling bugs, even though it was patched twice in July, a pair of security researchers said this weekend.


Billy Rios and Nate McFeters, who spelled out design and functionality vulnerabilities in Windows' Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) protocol handling as recently as mid-August, said Saturday that they have uncovered another way hackers could send malicious code to users via browsers.


"Once again, these URI payloads can be passed by the mailto, nntp, news, and snews URIs, allowing us to pass the payload without any user interaction," claimed Rios in a posting to his blog. "Although the conditions which allowed for remote command execution in Firefox 2.0.0.5 have been addressed with a security patch, the underlying file type handling issues which are truly the heart of the issue have NOT been addressed," he added.


URI bugs were a hot topic throughout July, when Norwegian researcher Thor Larholm showed how a browser could be tricked into sending malformed data from other applications. Although Larholm initially blamed Internet Explorer for the flaw, others quickly pointed out that Firefox suffered from the same bug. A finger-pointing debate ensued.


Rios and McFeters didn't divulge technical details of how an attacker could exploit the new-found URI flaws, saying that they are giving Mozilla Corp.'s security team time to plug the hole. However, they did post a screenshot that they said showed how they used the mailto URI -- the string used on Web pages that, when clicked, open up the user's default e-mail client with an address already inserted -- to eventually call up any desired malware.


Although Mozilla was not immediately available for comment Tuesday, the vulnerability could not have come as much of a surprise. In the 2007-027 security advisory -- one of two issued in the update to version 2.0.0.6 on July 30 -- Mozilla presciently noted that more bugs might be hidden in protocol handling.


"The Firefox 2.0.0.6 release contains fixes that prevent the original demonstrations of this variant, but it is still possible to launch a filetype handler based on extension rather than the registered protocol handler," stated the advisory. "A way to exploit a common handler with a single unexpected URI as an argument may yet be found."


For its part, Microsoft has repeatedly said that protocol handling problems are up to individual applications to address, not Windows itself. In August, Mark Griesi, a security program manager with Microsoft, told IDGNews that Microsoft was free of blame. "Security is an industry responsibility and this is certainly a case of that [principle]," said Griesi then. "It's not Microsoft's position to be the gatekeeper of all third-party applications." Microsoft modified documents on its MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) site around the same time to reflect that stance.


Although some security experts said hackers would turn to these unorthodox attack tactics, no evidence of their use in the wild has yet surfaced.






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Custom-built botnet steals eBay accounts


Custom-built botnet steals eBay accounts


Online auction site eBay has been targeted by identity thieves, who are wielding a botnet that uses brute force to uncover valid account log-in information, a Tel Aviv-based security company said Monday.


The attacks against eBay Inc. may have started as long ago as early August, said Ofer Elzam. He said that he and other researchers at Aladdin Knowledge Systems Ltd. have not been successful in notifying eBay of their weekend findings.


According to Elzam, the product manager of Aladdin's eSafe threat-protection line, the brute-force attacks are launched by a large botnet that the identity thieves have built using a sophisticated, multistage campaign that begins with compromised legitimate Web sites.


"My best estimate is that there are at least 300 compromised sites," said Elzam, who noted that they are spread worldwide and in several languages. Two sites are based in Israel, he said, including a price-comparison Web site and another operated by one of the country's largest unions. Other sites identified in a search run with information provided by Elzam included scores of real estate Web sites in Florida and Massachusetts, and a Microsoft security message forum in Italian.


Seeding genuine Web sites with malware is nothing new, but the practice has been gathering steam this year. In June, for example, hackers launched a massive bot-building attack from more than 10,000 hijacked Web sites, most of them hosted in Italy.


"These sites are compromised by SQL injection vulnerabilities, and then IFrame attack code is inserted," said Elzam, describing a common method of hacking legitimate Web sites and infecting their visitors. "The IFrame code redirects visitors to other sites which host a Trojan," he added. The Trojan horse hijacks the PC and turns it into a zombie, or bot.


"This is a very sophisticated, very complex attack," Elzam claimed, ticking off obfuscation techniques, multipart malware downloads and encryption among the tactics used by the thieves.


The resulting botnet is being used to call an eBay application programming interface (API) with pairs of possible usernames and passwords, said Elzam. The API allows the Trojan horse-infected PC -- the bot -- to communicate directly with the eBay database using XML-formatted code. If the database contains the username-password pair, it responds, which the Trojan horse notes, then later transmits to a hacker controlled server.


With enough username-password combinations -- the brute-force part of the attack -- the criminals can uncovering a limited number of real credentials.


"Each bot may be using as few as six pairs of usernames and passwords" in an attempt to come in under the security radar of eBay, said Elzam. "I don't think that eBay is even aware of the attack. The distributed nature of the attack may make it look like a merchant sending confirmations to buyers," he said.


Although Aladdin pieced together the evidence only today, Elzam said that clues indicate it might have started in early August.


It's unknown what the identity thieves have done with stolen eBay log-ons. One eBay user, however, may have offered up a possibility today in a blog post.


"I woke up this morning to a nightmare," wrote a Texas-based book collector identified on his blog only as Sam Houston. "Someone in England hacked into my personal eBay data and changed it to reflect a completely fraudulent identity with an English mailing address. That person than proceeded to send out at least 25 e-mails to individuals in the U.K. who are trying to sell Sony laptop computers on the site. He offered them more than they are asking for the laptops and wanted them mailed to him as soon as possible."


According to the blogger, the attacker has also compromised his PayPal account and tried to pay for the 25 notebooks using funds from the checking account linked to PayPal.




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Money at your fingertips as digital payments hit German stores


Money at your fingertips as digital payments hit German stores


For those who frequently arrive at the supermarket check-out only to find they have left their wallets at home, help is at hand.








A new system that scans customers' fingerprints and deducts the grocery bill from their bank accounts has taken supermarkets in southwestern Germany by storm and is being picked up by hardware stores, school canteens and even the country's ubiquitous beer gardens.

"Almost a quarter of our customers pay with their fingers," staff at the headquarters of the Edeka supermaket chain, which became the first retail business in Germany to use the new system, told AFP.


Edeka has installed the fingerprint payment system at 70 of its outlets and say some 200 others will soon follow because it has proven a hit with clients.


"At first we thought that only the young who really keep up with the latest technology would be interested, but we were wrong," said Stefan Sewoester from IT Werke, one of the pioneers of fingerprint payment software in Germany.


"Almost two-thirds of the people who use the fingerprint system are 40 and older."


IT Werke has furbished around 150 shops, canteens and pubs with fingerprint scanning machines at a cost of 2,000 euros (2,730 dollars) each.


To sign up for the service, customers must have their fingerprints taken and leave their addresses and banking details with the shop, who can then charge purchases directly to the client's bank account.


"It is a godsend for elderly clients because they do not have to remember their pin-code to pay with their bank cards, or to scratch around for their glasses or cash," Sewoester said.


Georg Meisberger from Globus Warehouse, a hypermarket in St. Wendel near the French border, said he had "customers well over 70 using the system."


The stores believe that it saves more than time in the check-out line because it also cuts out the hidden costs of accepting electronic cash card payments.


If an electronic payment "bounces" because there is not enough money in the customer's account, the bank can charge the shop up to 15 euros for supplying them with the customer's address.


Legal issues tied to fingerprint paying have nonetheless generated a few clouds on the horizon.


Retailers have mulled using the information they get from registered customers for advertising purposes, setting off alarm bells in a nation obsessed with privacy rights.


But a spokeswoman for the data protection authorities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Bettina Gayk, told AFP that the system posed no legal problems as long as it operated on a voluntary basis.


"As long as customers are free to take it or leave it, there is no legal impediment," she said.


"We naturally advise clients not to give out personal data unconditionally."


There are safety concerns too, however, as experts have pointed out that fingerprints can be forged with the help of silicon.


But Ulrich Binneboessel from the Confederation of German Retailers noted that the shops do not use a full set of fingerprints, making the information useless elsewhere.


And it is unlikely, he said, that thieves would painstakingly forge somebody's fingerprints just to buy bread and milk on his account.


"It is probably easier and more lucrative to empty out an ATM machine in broad daylight."


Fingerprint data profiling has long been used for to control access and for other security purposes in Germany's airports, laboratories and nuclear power plants.


IT Werke plans to keep refining the retail use of the system.


It wants to introduce fingerprint payment in school canteens with an additional feature that might appeal to parents -- they could disable their children's access to junk food





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Money at your fingertips as digital payments hit German stores


Money at your fingertips as digital payments hit German stores


For those who frequently arrive at the supermarket check-out only to find they have left their wallets at home, help is at hand.








A new system that scans customers' fingerprints and deducts the grocery bill from their bank accounts has taken supermarkets in southwestern Germany by storm and is being picked up by hardware stores, school canteens and even the country's ubiquitous beer gardens.

"Almost a quarter of our customers pay with their fingers," staff at the headquarters of the Edeka supermaket chain, which became the first retail business in Germany to use the new system, told AFP.


Edeka has installed the fingerprint payment system at 70 of its outlets and say some 200 others will soon follow because it has proven a hit with clients.


"At first we thought that only the young who really keep up with the latest technology would be interested, but we were wrong," said Stefan Sewoester from IT Werke, one of the pioneers of fingerprint payment software in Germany.


"Almost two-thirds of the people who use the fingerprint system are 40 and older."


IT Werke has furbished around 150 shops, canteens and pubs with fingerprint scanning machines at a cost of 2,000 euros (2,730 dollars) each.


To sign up for the service, customers must have their fingerprints taken and leave their addresses and banking details with the shop, who can then charge purchases directly to the client's bank account.


"It is a godsend for elderly clients because they do not have to remember their pin-code to pay with their bank cards, or to scratch around for their glasses or cash," Sewoester said.


Georg Meisberger from Globus Warehouse, a hypermarket in St. Wendel near the French border, said he had "customers well over 70 using the system."


The stores believe that it saves more than time in the check-out line because it also cuts out the hidden costs of accepting electronic cash card payments.


If an electronic payment "bounces" because there is not enough money in the customer's account, the bank can charge the shop up to 15 euros for supplying them with the customer's address.


Legal issues tied to fingerprint paying have nonetheless generated a few clouds on the horizon.


Retailers have mulled using the information they get from registered customers for advertising purposes, setting off alarm bells in a nation obsessed with privacy rights.


But a spokeswoman for the data protection authorities in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Bettina Gayk, told AFP that the system posed no legal problems as long as it operated on a voluntary basis.


"As long as customers are free to take it or leave it, there is no legal impediment," she said.


"We naturally advise clients not to give out personal data unconditionally."


There are safety concerns too, however, as experts have pointed out that fingerprints can be forged with the help of silicon.


But Ulrich Binneboessel from the Confederation of German Retailers noted that the shops do not use a full set of fingerprints, making the information useless elsewhere.


And it is unlikely, he said, that thieves would painstakingly forge somebody's fingerprints just to buy bread and milk on his account.


"It is probably easier and more lucrative to empty out an ATM machine in broad daylight."


Fingerprint data profiling has long been used for to control access and for other security purposes in Germany's airports, laboratories and nuclear power plants.


IT Werke plans to keep refining the retail use of the system.


It wants to introduce fingerprint payment in school canteens with an additional feature that might appeal to parents -- they could disable their children's access to junk food





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''Face pass' is latest security system for NEC laptops


'Face pass' is latest security system for NEC laptops


NEC has launched two new series of laptops with a unique security feature called "face pass" -- or, in Japanese, "kao pass." The LaVie C and LaVie L series will both include the new facial recognition software, which enables only a programmed user to log on to the computer.



NEC's software, called "NeoFace," is a biometric system that uses a combination of eye zone extraction and facial recognition to identify the computer's user. To program the system, a user sets up a profile with three photographs of their face. Then when a user tries to log on, an integrated 2.0 megapixel camera scans their facial characteristics.


The NeoFace system then uses a matching procedure to determine the identity of the user. NEC says that the system performs accurate matching even when people wear glasses and hats, have different haircuts or facial hair, and show different facial expressions. The ability to distinguish between identical twins is still speculative.

"NeoFace uses a technology called 'adaptive region mixed matching,' which focuses on 'segment regions' with a high degree of similarity for matching," explained Atsushi Sato, a head researcher at NEC. "Other makers' products make judgments based on a number of combined characteristics, such as the distance between the eyes and the nose, or the nose and the mouth. But this creates a problem, because if even one of these segments is missing, the accuracy drops dramatically.

"In contrast, NeoFace divides the input image and the registered image into small segments, and focused only on the segments that are highly similar," he continued. "This enables the system to achieve higher authentication accuracy than out competitors' products, even if a part of the subject's face is hidden, for example by a mask or sunglasses."

NEC originally developed NeoFace for security applications, such as border control, prison management and corporate security, to eliminate the need for fingerprints. In July 2007, NEC announced the first automated border control system to use facial recognition technology that can identify people inside their cars. At checkpoints on the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border, the system reads a car's license plate, and compares the driver's face with the registered driver's micro-chipped ID.

"The main advantage to face authentication is convenience," said Kazuyori Miyaoka of NEC's
Business Promotion Department. "A number of other authentication methods are currently in the research stage, for example using the shape of the ears or the patterns of blood vessels on the back of the hand, as well as a person's walk, smell, DNA or keystroke habits when using a PC keyboard."

As for the consumer laptops, both the LaVie C and LaVie L series are expected to be available in the Japanese market in late September. Besides the face pass system, the laptops will have mostly standard features: 15.4-inch displays, Core 2 Duo processors on the top-end LaVie C model or the option of either Core 2 Duo or Celeron processors on the LaVie L model. Blu-ray is also available for the high-end model. The price is expected to range from ¥150,000 to ¥310,000 (or about $1,300 to $2,675).





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Google's Newest Role: Venture Capitalist


Google's Newest Role: Venture Capitalist


Just as it has done to companies in the software, publishing, and advertising industries, Google is becoming a thorn in the side of venture capitalists. The owner of the world's largest Web search engine is scooping up young tech outfits for a relative pittance, giving itself first dibs on hot-growth technologies and in some cases boxing VC funds out of potential big-bang acquisitions and initial public offerings.


Google (GOOG) has begun making VC-style investments to the tune of about $500,000 or less in promising startups, often buying those companies afterward, according to partners at Silicon Valley VC firms who spoke on condition of anonymity. In an effort to keep spotting promising deals, Google has been hiring a stable of finance pros. And it has invested more than $1 million in a Mumbai-based investment firm called Seedfund to gain access to technology such as automatic translation software that could help spur growth in India.


"Google has easy money," says Pravin Gandhi, a managing partner at Seedfund, which also has raised some of its $15 million from Motorola (MOT) and VC firm Mayfield Fund. So far, Seedfund has taken $500,000 to $750,000 stakes in four companies, including an online news site. On the horizon could be investments that help Google add specialized channels, such as information about autos, to its Web site or cultivate technology that can translate Web content from English into Indian languages, Gandhi says. "It's a somewhat less risky way to participate in the Indian growth story," he says.


Beating VCs to the Punch
By staking startups, Google hopes to avoid paying the higher prices companies can fetch once they take funding from traditional VCs. It's possible that some of its investments are conditioned on Google having first-acquisition rights should a target opt to sell, some VCs speculate. Google didn't respond to calls requesting comment. Making investments in startups also can help Google use more of its $4.5 billion in cash to cultivate tools that complement existing products. Google recently started a program called Gadget Ventures to fund entrepreneurs who build online tools using Google's technology.


The zeal for dealmaking at Googleplex mirrors an increase in corporate venture investing to its highest level in years. "They're back, like the swallows returning to Capistrano," says Paul Maeder, a managing general partner at Highland Capital Partners. "We're in a wave now where corporate venturing is increasing again."


Companies that aren't full-time investors pumped $1.3 billion into 390 venture capital deals in the first half of 2007, up 30% from the $1 billion invested in about 350 deals a year earlier, according to an Aug. 30 report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Assn. (NVCA), based on data from Thompson Financial (TOC). That's the most invested since 2001, just before the bottom fell out of the tech industry. The big spenders include Intel (INTC), which invested $112 million in U.S. startups in the first half of 2007, vs. $79 million a year earlier, and Motorola, which invested nearly $30 million in the first half of the year and says its overall 2007 investments should top the record set in 2006.


VCs Seek Alternative Sources
The incursions don't sit well with many VCs. Combined with the predilection on the part of many entrepreneurs to fund their own ventures, investments by Google and other corporations leave even fewer opportunities for VCs to take big, early stakes. That's especially problematic when venture firms have raised record amounts of cash and need to find places to invest it (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/5/07, "Venture Capital's Growing Aspirations").


"There are a lot of entrepreneurs who aren't making the trip to Sand Hill Road," says Ray Rothrock, managing general partner at Venrock Associates, referring to the Menlo Park (Calif.) thoroughfare that is home to many venture capital firms. "They're going elsewhere." Venrock, which funds Web startups including women's blogging site BlogHer and search engine ZoomInfo, is considering launching a startup incubator as a way to counter corporations' ability to buy the same companies it wants to fund.


A partner at another large VC firm says a tendency by corporate venture arms to buy startups not long after investing in them is "very inconsistent with the venture community's strategy" of providing guidance and making several rounds of investments over the long haul.






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Digital Cameras' Second Wind



Mad for Megapixels
High-end DSLRs are also a good barometer of features that will often migrate down into less expensive cameras. Case in point: Wi-Fi access on cameras. Several high-end professional-grade DSLR cameras allow users to connect to wireless home networks in order to quickly upload their pictures to computers. And while the feature has appeared in a limited way in some mid- to high-end consumer models, it's far from popular. "Wi-Fi is really not going anywhere yet," Haueter says. "But there's still a future for it."


One feature that's still popular with consumers is megapixels. Rightly or wrongly-and opinions vary on that-consumers are still equating higher numbers of pixels on a camera's imaging sensor with higher-quality pictures. Vendors, sensing opportunity and the ability to charge more, are happy to oblige. This year has seen the onset of compact consumer-grade cameras that can shoot pictures at resolutions of 12 megapixels. Sony, Casio, Panasonic (MC), and Kodak have all launched 12-megapixel cameras aimed at consumers. But there are pitfalls.


First there's the extra cost. The 12.1-megapixel Sony Cyber-shot W200 lists for $400; the W90, which is rated at 8.1 megapixels and has similar features, costs $300. The same goes for Casio's $400, 12.1-megapixel Exilim Zoom and its $300, 10.1-megapixel cousin.


Picture-Taking Frenzy
Is it worth the extra $100 for an extra 4 million pixels? Probably not, experts say. "Most people don't need more than 6 or 8 megapixels, and manufacturers are doing them a disservice by telling them that they need more," says Katrin Eismann, chair of the digital photography department at New York's School of Visual Arts.


There are other trade-offs. The more pictures, the bigger the file size of the picture. In turn, the bigger the file size, the faster your memory card fills up. It also takes longer for the camera to save the file to the card, meaning a longer lag time between shots. Finally, the pictures will take up more space on your PC's hard drive.


However, professionals are certainly just as eager as consumers to get all the pixels they can. On Aug. 19, Canon unveiled its latest high-end DSLR camera, the EOS 1Ds-Mark III, a 21.1-megapixel monster that will set its owners back a cool $8,000.


One thing is certain: All these digital cameras are being used a lot. InfoTrends reckons that 45 billion pictures will be taken in the U.S. this year. But of those, only 15.2 million, or about one-third of one percent, will ever be printed. Such is the state of photography in the Digital Age




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The Desktop Takes Center Stage Again


Rumors of the demise of the desktop have been greatly exaggerated. In recent years, bloggers, reporters, company executives, and others have exulted in the apparent obsolescence of the vast space on computers set aside for software. Why clutter a desktop with pricey programs for word processing, spreadsheet creation, and the like when many of those tools are becoming available, often at no cost, over the Web-or so the argument ran.


That view is being challenged lately, though, as a number of companies, including well-trafficked online destinations such as eBay (EBAY), are finding ways to take their services outside the confines of the Web browser and place them squarely within the domain of-you guessed it-the desktop.


And companies such as Adobe (ADBE) and Google (GOOG) have released or are testing products that let Web developers build desktop versions of online services and sites. Google launched a group of Web-to-desktop developer tools known as Gears in May (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/07, "Google Gears Up to Take Web Services Beyond the Web"). "Everybody wants to be on the desktop," says Martin Kay, chief executive of online music site Finetune, which recently introduced a way to make the company's music-streaming and recommendation service available on the desktop. "People tend to forget about Web sites."


Window-Shopping with eBay


In recent days, eBay released invitations to a new test version of what it's calling San Dimas, a desktop application of its popular online auction and shopping site (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/18/07, "Going, Going…Everywhere"). San Dimas resembles eBay.com in color scheme and character, but it runs faster and focuses more on photos when displaying search results, making it more akin to window-shopping than scrolling through links and product descriptions. It is also more customizable and lets users shop offline and set up bids or sales to go live at some later time. "There are some specific things about the desktop where you can go a lot further," says Alan Lewis, who oversees San Dimas.


Adobe is helping companies like Finetune and eBay build desktop applications with a system called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which lets Web developers create feature-filled programs that can run offline but also sync up with information and sites on the Web (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/21/07, "Investors Anticipate Adobe's Ascent"). Since a limited release in March, AIR has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. "I don't think the desktop was ever quite as moribund as people said," says Pam Deziel, director of product management for Adobe's platform business unit. "The desktop gives you some additional benefits."


Among those benefits is access to files on the desktop. Typically, Web services in the browser can only gain access to what is uploaded to them, say, photos sent to a specific site. A desktop version could grab all the photos on a computer's hard drive, and then give users such options as sharing some on the Web and using the service to build slide shows that can be viewed only on the PC.


Fine-Tuning Personalized Playlists


Finetune's desktop tool reads music files on users' hard drives in order to better personalize the songs streamed from its music library to the user. On the Web version of Finetune, users have to enter their favorite artists and music genres. The desktop version can create personalized playlists simply by looking at the music a user has already downloaded. In the future, says Finetune's Kay, the desktop music player will integrate songs from the user's hard drive with Finetune's own library of streaming music to create personal music mixes.


Another advantage of parking programs on the desktop is that it can reduce some of the frustrations of having a service in a browser window. People like running Web services because they can easily multitask, jumping from Web window to Web window, says Adrian Ludwig, a member of the team working on AIR's release. But the more windows are opened, the more slowly each service tends to run, as the browser becomes increasingly taxed.


And if the browser crashes from the strain, the user can lose everything-from a half-finished e-mail in one window to the streaming music playing from another. "Flipping back and forth between a lot of things is not necessarily the way you want to operate a media player," says Adrian Ludwig, a member of the team working on AIR's release.


Getting an Icon on the Desktop


What's more, the desktop lets users retain a level of privacy that many fear is lost on the Web. Privacy was a major reason Adesso Systems opted for a Web-linked desktop application when designing its file-sharing product called Tubes, says Steve Chazin, Adesso's vice-president of marketing. The program lets users drag and drop files into folders, known as Tubes, that can then be automatically published to a Web site and shared among select Tubes users. However, the files are always live on the user's desktop, enabling them to be removed from other people's view at any time simply by dragging the file from the shared Tube folder and back onto the desktop proper.


Perhaps most important for developers, the desktop's advantage is that it is still the first thing users see when they turn on their computer. If your icon is there, it's more likely that a user will opt to use your product-rather than the myriad other programs on the Web. Says Kay of Finetune: "It's not in a browser window that might get closed."





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