Apple tablet won't be just an e-reader, argues analyst

Analysts split today in their take on recent reports that Apple's long-rumored tablet will stress the device's e-book capabilities, saying that the company's plan for the "iPod Touch on steroids" would depend on the price tag. It certainly will be an e-reader, that will be part of its ecosystem, but that won't be all it is." Gottheil, who six months ago touted the idea that Apple would deliver a tablet best described as an "iPod Touch on steroids," stuck to that reasoning today. "It will use the iPhone OS, or a modified version of it," Gottheil said, echoing something iLounge.com said it heard from a reliable source this week. Earlier this week, the popular gadget blog Gizmodo cited unnamed sources who claimed that Apple was in talks with several media companies, including the New York Times , to negotiate content deals for its unannounced-but-expected tablet. "[Apple isn't] just going for e-books and mags," Gizmodo's Brian Lam wrote Wednesday. "They're aiming to redefine print." Not so fast, said one analyst. "It's more than just an e-reader," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research who follows Apple's moves. "It's an application platform, it's a game and social gaming platform.

The App Store, which Apple said this week had delivered its two billionth application, is crucial to the tablet's success, said Gottheil, which means that the device will be more than a one-trick pony. "Apple will market it as 'one more thing' nested inside 'one more thing'," Gottheil said, a move possible because of the App Store's broad library. "They'll [cast] it as able to do several increasing cool things." Gottheil's reasoning relies on the $800 price he expects Apple to slap on the tablet, a price tag much too high for a media reader-only device. "I don't think Apple has any particular interest in just creating another Kindle," he said, referring to Amazon's $489 Kindle DX . "Apple enjoys skimming the top of the market by making something hot and getting a nice margin out of it." Brian Marshall, a Wall Street analyst with Broadpoint AmTech, had a much different take, largely because of his price expectations. "I think $500 is the price," said Marshall today, adding that he agreed with Gizmodo that the tablet will focus on its e-reader capabilities. "I actually think that's how they'll promote it," he added. "They'll pitch [e-books] as a big segment, but they'll also say, 'We're gonna do this in color and much better than the Kindle'." Amazon's Kindle DX features a 9.7-inch grayscale display; according to reports out of Taiwan, component suppliers building parts for the expected Apple tablet are assembling 9.6-inch color, touch-enabled screens. Most analysts have pegged the first half of 2010 for a tablet rollout, although some have proposed that Apple will craft a two-stage introduction, as it did with the iPhone in 2007, by announcing the hardware several months in advance of availability to give developers time to create applications or tweak existing iPhone programs for the larger device.

Former Microsoft open-source chief joins cloud startup

Former Microsoft open-source chief Sam Ramji has joined cloud-computing startup Sonoa Systems, taking over product strategy and business development at the Santa Clara, California-based company. Last month he also took a position as interim president of the CodePlex Foundation, an open-source group formed out of his work at Microsoft. In his last job at Microsoft, Ramji was responsible for fostering more interoperability and collaboration with the open-source community as head of its Platform Strategy Group. However, when the foundation and Ramji's role in it were unveiled, he said he was leaving Microsoft Sept. 25 to join a cloud-computing startup, though he did not specify which one.

It also provides visibility, management and governance to make cloud services and the APIs (application programming interfaces) that connect to them as robust, policy-compliant and scalable as on-premise applications, according to the company's Web site. Sonoa offers technology called ServiceNet that helps companies manage their cloud-based services by setting policies for them, acting as a proxy server between service providers and the consumers of those services. In addition to ServiceNet, Sonoa also has released an analytics tool for API developers called Apigee as a free way to monitor and manage how their services are being accessed in the cloud. Sonoa's customers include MTV and Guardian Insurance. In an e-mail, a company spokesman compared the tool to Google Analytics.

Sonoa's CEO is a former BEA Systems executive, Chet Kapoor. The foundation also was formed by Microsoft to inspire other proprietary software companies to participate more in the open-source community, though eventually it is meant to be run as an independent group. Microsoft has not named anyone to take Ramji's role but said when the CodePlex Foundation was unveiled that the Platform Strategy Group will remain intact and will continue to promote collaboration with and participation in open-source projects.

Scammers auto-generate Twitter accounts to spread scareware

Scammers are increasingly using machine-generated Twitter accounts to post messages about trendy topics, and tempt users into clicking on a link that leads to servers hosting fake Windows antivirus software, security researchers said Monday. The accounts, which use variable account and user names, supposedly represent U.S. Twitter users. The latest Twitter attacks originated with malicious accounts cranked out by software, said experts at both F-Secure and Sophos. In some cases, the background wallpaper is customized for each account, yet another tactic to make the unwary think that a real person is responsible for the content.

Some of the tweets exploit Twitter's current "Trending Topics," the constantly-changing top 10 list of popular tweet keywords that the micro-blogging service posts on its home page. Tweets from those accounts are also automatically generated, said Sean Sullivan, a security advisor with the North American labs of Helsinki-based F-Secure. Others are repeats of real tweets. The defense, however, has regularly been subverted by hacker-built software, or by humans who contract to decipher the characters manually. "There's nothing cookie-cutter about these accounts," noted Sullivan, who added that scareware scammers aren't afraid to spend money to make money. All the tweets include links to sites that try to dupe users into downloading and installing bogus security software, often called "scareware" because they fool users with sham infection warnings, then provide endless pop-ups until people pay $40 to $50 to buy the useless program. "As fast as Twitter can shut down the accounts, [the scammers] create new accounts," said Sullivan. "Somehow they're getting around the CAPTCHA, but how they're doing it, whether with a bot or by CAPTCHA farms, we don't know." CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is the technology that uses distorted, scrambled characters to block automated registration of accounts. There's a lot of the latter to be had.

Because the scareware tweets use a URL shortening service - as do most tweets to crowd as much as possible into Twitter's 140-character limit - it's impossible for users to tell exactly where the link will take them. Last year, botnet researcher Joe Stewart of SecureWorks said there was evidence some hackers were making as much as $5 million a year shilling scareware. "A lot of these scareware campaigns don't last 24 hours," said Beth Jones, a threat researcher at U.K.-based Sophos. "By the time a [distribution] site is blocked, they've already moved on to something else." The servers hosting the phony security software behind the Twitter attacks are located in Toronto, said Jones, who said Sophos had been monitoring those systems since June. Jones suggested that users access Twitter with a third-party application, such as TweetDeck, which offers a URL previewer to show the actual destination. Unfortunately, the scammers are using the Metamark shortening service ; TweetDeck doesn't support previews for Metamark. "Scammers are using Twitter because it's a new conduit for spreading their scareware," said Jones. "They go where the money is, which means where people are, and people are on Twitter." By late Monday, Twitter had deleted the machine-generated accounts spreading scareware that Sophos and F-Secure had revealed, but some tweets with the same malicious URL were still available on the service.

Moore's Law has decades left, Intel CTO predicts

Moore's Law will keep going strong for decades, Intel CTO Justin Rattner predicts. Predictions of the demise of Moore's Law are routinely heard in the IT world, and some organizations are trying to find a replacement for silicon chip technology. Why we're hard-wired to ignore Moore's LawRead the Intel CTO's take on why machines could ultimately match human intelligence Moore's Law, in force for more than 40 years, says that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will double every 18 to 24 months.

But Rattner says that silicon has plenty of life left and said there is no end in sight for Moore's Law. "If Moore's Law is simply a measure of the increase in the number of electronic devices per chip, then Moore's Law has much more time to go, probably decades," Rattner said in an interview with Network World. Separately, IBM scientists are building computer chips out of DNA.  Rattner, who is CTO of the world's biggest chipmaker and the head of Intel Labs, the company's primary research arm, predicted that chip architecture will "undergo dramatic changes" in the coming decades but that silicon itself will remain the core element for the foreseeable future. The National Science Foundation is already preparing for a post-silicon world, having requested $20 million in federal funding for research that could improve or replace current transistor technology. Intel is now moving to a 32-nanometer process for chip production, an upgrade over the existing 45-nanometer process. "There's plenty of life left in silicon," Rattner says. "We're well along in our 32-nanometer development and I think we'll show some significant product-level results at 32. Right now, in terms of silicon technology we don't feel like we're at some point of demise in any sense. Beyond the search for ever-greater performance and efficiency, Intel's researchers today are striving to make chips more compatible with server virtualization technologies, such as the VMware and Xen hypervisors.

And there are still new approaches to the way we build transistors and devices that will involve silicon and newer materials, like our high-k metal gate silicon technology." The high-k metal gate technology uses hafnium-based circuitry, which Intel adopted to create smaller processors that are faster and more energy-efficient. Just a decade ago, Intel had a hard time convincing its own chip designers that virtualization was an important feature, but times have changed quickly. "Virtualization has become mandatory," Rattner says. "We had a lot of work to do to convince the chip designers that this was a really important feature. What we think of today as supercomputer applications will ultimately move down to desktops, laptops and even mobile phones, Rattner says. At first they looked at it, kind of squinted and said 'really'? Now it's just about the most important thing in the product." Rattner, who will deliver the opening address at the SC supercomputing conference in Portland, Ore., in November, also discussed how supercomputing power is being packed into smaller and smaller form factors. Intel is building many new "system on chip" designs that will add new capabilities to a variety of Internet-connected devices, such as robotics, set-top boxes and various mobile Internet devices. Rattner says "mobile augmented reality" will become a part of everyday life, with cameras that you can point at an object – such as a famous ruin – and instantly receive detailed information about what it is. "That's augmented reality, where you take real world information, and you overlay the virtual information that informs you about the scene," Rattner says. "Beyond that, what we see happening is an increasing amount of what we call perceptual computing tasks, as small form factor machines have richer sensor capabilities."

FCC pledges public safety spectrum plan by February

Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski told Congress today that the FCC would have a new plan for auctioning off a key piece of public safety spectrum by February 2010. Speaking before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee today, Genachowski said that plans for the spectrum, commonly referred to as the "D block" on the 700MHz band, are part of the FCC's emerging national broadband plan due to be delivered to Congress next year. But while the total spectrum bids for the 700MHz band nearly doubled congressional estimates of $10.2 billion, no bidder met the reserve price for the D block, which was originally reserved for the construction of a high-speed public safety network that would bring America's emergency response system up to date with next-generation technology. Genachowski would not provide any further details on what form a new auction for the D block would take and only said that the commission was working diligently to get the block on the market. "The challenge is in getting this right and we don't want to rush into failed auction," he said. "The D block comes up often in connection with our broadband plan but don't have anything concrete right now." The FCC had originally tried to auction off the D block as part of its auction of spectrum on the 700MHz band last year.

When the auction ended, the top bid for the D block was less than half its $1.3 billion reserve price. Frontline Wireless, a start-up carrier that had planned to bid aggressively for the public safety block, announced that it was shutting down its business just weeks before the 700-MHz auction began. In the weeks leading up to the auction, analysts at the Yankee Group predicted that the "horrendous" ownership costs of the block, whereby prospective licensees would be responsible for building out a national public safety network with 75% population coverage within four years of getting the license, would deter companies from making significant bids on the spectrum. With Frontline out of the picture, the D Block received only one significant license bid, and the fate of the spectrum has been in limbo ever since.

Pantone releases iPhone App

If you're a designer whose inspiration strikes while you're on the go, Pantone has a new iPhone app for you: myPantone. The app provides the sRGB, HTML, and LAB values on each color swatch, and its cross referencing system lets users identify colors across color libraries. The app gives graphic, multimedia, fashion, interior, and industrial designers the tools to capture, create, and share Pantone color palettes while they're riding the bus to work, waiting on line at the supermarket checkout, or anywhere they happen to be. "MyPantone gives designers the freedom to access Pantone colors anywhere, without the need to be in their office or carry around cumbersome guides," said Andy Hatkoff, vice president of technology licensing for Pantone. "Now with myPantone's Portable Color Memory in their pocket, designers no longer need to agonize trying to recall an exact color." MyPantone gives designers access to all the Pantone color libraries, including the Pantone Matching System for coated, uncoated, and matte stock; the Pantone Goe System for coated and uncoated stock; Pantone Pastels for coated and uncoated stock; and the Pantone Fashion + Home Smart Color system. In addition, myPantone facilitates creation of harmonious color palettes by finding complementary, analogous, and triadic combinations for selected colors.

Once you create a color palette, you can view or share it with others. And, the app can extract colors from any image stored in your iPhone's camera roll or let you choose individual colors from an iPhone photo and match them to specific Pantone colors. For viewing color chips, you can use Pantone's slate of built-in backgrounds or you can use one of your own photos as a background. You can attach text notes or voice annotations, as well. Sharing options include sending color palettes via e-mail, sending palettes to other iPhone users, and sharing via Facebook or Twitter. You can e-mail palettes as color patches, or as application swatch files for use in Adobe Creative Suite, CorelDraw, and QuarkXPress.

MyPantone is available for $10 at the iPhone App Store. Designers can also share their color palettes with other designers by sending them to Pantone's hosted Web site. It is compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 or higher and can also be used with the iPod Touch.