88648864.net

(Via Israel 21C)

The gadget comes courtesy of Israeli developer Yoav Ben-David and his partner, Zvi Kanor of American Express Travel in Tel Aviv. It consists of a circular receiver on a keychain and a credit card-size transmitter that goes around the handle of your baggage.

The pair also developed a less sophisticated, less expensive gizmo–a $4 strip that fits onto a suitcase and flashes LEDS in four different colors once it hits the carousel. The owner of the baggage sets the light combination.

The Easy-2-Pick, expected out this fall for $15 to $20, is a handheld device that lights up, beeps, and vibrates once your suitcase makes it onto the carousel and within 40 to 50 feet of where you’re standing. The heads-up gives you a chance to stand away from the crowd, possibly avoiding an elbow in the gut as you try to locate your lookalike bag.

(Credit:
Israel21C)

I wish I’d had the Easy-2-Pick electronic luggage tag in hand Sunday night. I was just off a long-delayed flight that appeared to transport the entire population of Southern California to San Francisco. And wouldn’t you know it? Ninety percent of the seemingly millions of passengers jostling for their suitcases seemed to have the same black bag.

At some point over the last few months, the community began to feel a sense
of ownership of and membership in the entity CCIF. Until this week, we had
not fully appreciated that the CCIF had become the de facto membership
organization for interoperability stakeholders.

While sifting through this week’s enthusiastic and well-argued posts, one
issue rose to painful clarity: There is not, and has never been, an agreed-upon definition of the CCIF. As organizers, we have “announced,” at various
times, conflicting statements on how “our members” should view this forum.

As I noted Saturday, I think the failure of the manifesto to launch as a secretly crafted, but complete, fully endorsed statement of principles is a sign of the expectation of open process we all expect these days.

It is with an eye toward an open future that we address the many apt
criticisms levied at the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and
the difficult circumstance in which this community finds itself.

Knowing what we know now, we certainly would have lobbied harder to open the
document to the forum before this uproar ensued.

Knowing what we know now, we certainly would have lobbied harder to open the
document to the forum before this uproar ensued.

*An Apology*

*Governance and the Future of the CCIF*

Formal mission statement, laws and articles
Formal membership structure
A board or other defined leadership structure
Formal decision-making mechanism
Committees and/or formal interest groups
Goals, deliverables, and activities
Wikis, Web sites, and other properties governed by our laws and
articles
Financial backing and/or formal associations with industry

This surprising move means not only that the list of signatories is shrinking further–I have confirmation that Google has refused to sign, along with the already well-known Amazon.com and Microsoft declinations–but that the only open alliance of any kind and one of the chief proponents of the document has backed out.

If the community coalesces around formalization, CCIF’s organizers will go
to the greatest possible lengths to ensure the process unfolds openly and in
the best interests of the cloud-computing community at large, not for the
benefit or self-aggrandizement of any specific member or interest group.

To this end, when the Open Cloud Manifesto is officially released on Monday,
March 30, the CCIF’s name will not appear as a signatory. This decision
comes with great pain, as we fully endorse the document’s contents and its
principals of a truly open cloud. However, this community has issued a
mandate of openness and fair process, loudly and clearly, and so the CCIF
can not in good faith endorse this document.

Regarding the specifics of the outcome, we are not prepared to propose or
oppose any plan. If and when the time is right, we will create a wiki or
other mechanism to hash out details. For now, let’s start discussing whether
this is the right direction for the CCIF.

In a post to the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (copied in full below), the original organizers of that group–Reuven Cohen, Sam Charrington, Jesse Silver, and David Nielsen–have announced that the CCIF will no longer be a signatory of the controversial Open Cloud Manifesto to be presented Monday:

Thank you and best wishes to all,

The post goes on to discuss the need for better tools and processes to identify and support the CCIF’s core principles, and proposes a formalization of the organization to enable that.

When the Open Cloud Manifesto is officially released on Monday,
March 30, the CCIF’s name will not appear as a signatory. This decision
comes with great pain, as we fully endorse the document’s contents and its
principals of a truly open cloud.

Therefore, though this is simply a proposal to get us started considering
next steps, we feel that it is time for some degree of formalization. This
means governance and, of course, some or all of the following components:

Sam Charrington, Reuven Cohen, Dave Niesen, Jesse Silver (alphabetical)

Dear Friends,

Under this new premise, it is clear that our direct and private engagement, in the name of the CCIF, vis a vis the Open Cloud Manifesto, may be viewed as a breech of this
community’s norms. For this oversight, we take full responsibility.

These definitions range from “cloud advocacy group,” which implies
membership and organized offline activity, to the much narrower “e-mail
discussion group.” Due to our failure to better define our project, each
community member has been left to his or her own devices, latching onto any
number of definitions.

Therein lies the problem. Consider this: even if we had secured the OK to
open the manifesto for discussion before signing in the name of CCIF, there
would have been no mechanism by which to formally make changes or give
approval. This is, or at least in our opinion ought to be, unacceptable to
most of the community.

As the organizers of the community, we would like to make our intentions
clear. The following letter is not an edict or decree. It is a heartfelt
attempt to reach out to our fellow community members so we might begin to
move past recent events and together discuss our options.

Here is the post in its entirety:

*Open Cloud Manifesto*

Cohen et al note above that they still “fully endorse the document’s content and its principals of a truly open cloud.” However, they also acknowledge that they failed to grasp the sense of community ownership of the CCIF and that their independent actions were not consistent with the goals of the community.

However, this community has issued a
mandate of openness and fair process, loudly and clearly, and so the CCIF
cannot in good faith endorse this document.

Evri profile pages show five top connections as a starting point for drilling down into the related content and concepts.

Seattle-based Evri has 36 people, mostly engineers, and is wholly funded by Vulcan Capital. So far Vulcan has poured about $8 million into the company, including the acquisition of some technology and engineering talent from Insightful, Roseman said. The company plans to go for Series A funding round this year.

Click here for full coverage of the D: All Things Digital conference.

Evri has a new twist on content navigation and discovery. Debuting Wednesday at D6, Evri is not a search engine, according to CEO Neil Roseman, but a “data graph of the Web” that leads to “incremental content engagement.”

The profile pages are somewhat like what you get from Mahalo, which is human-powered, but closer to Powerset, Hakia, Twine, and and other new services that leverage semantic and natural language processing technologies to map concepts and meaning rather than keywords.

Evri is expected to go into beta testing in a month, Roseman said. Some of the processing will be done via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud facility. He noted that scaling to cover more of the Web is very hard. Evri will be ad-supported and will not charge content partners. “We will give partners all the revenue,” Roseman said. “We want to build the network and get people to use Evri.”

Evri creates profile pages, which are like search results, that include a variety of lenses for an entity, such as top connections (entities most closely associated with the target entity), people, location, products, organizations, and events.

“What doesn’t work well is when you get to other places on the Web,” Roseman told me. “We read sentences, extracting the subject, objects and verbs, and map to other content on the Web.” Evri uses entity extraction, natural language processing, statistical analysis, and other technologies to create relevant connections based on meaning and concepts without human intervention.

Evri also is planning to offer content publishers widgets that produce related content for a particular page, similar to what Sphere (recently acquired by AOL), Inform, and Aggregate Knowledge provide.

Roseman is focusing Evri as a consumer product. He spent 10 years at Amazon working on several projects, including searching inside books, the MP3 store, and the server side of the Kindle reader. Currently, Evri has parsed less than 1 percent of the Web, working with 20,000 to 30,000 top-level domains and some full-text providers. “Once we distribute the widget to content providers, we will incrementally add more to our deep parsing, and figure out what drives the most page views on a daily basis and build the network over time,” Roseman said.

“We are starting development on it right now,” the AMD source added. The first meeting of members of the alternate “open” specification is slated to take place next week, a source close to Nvidia said. “We fully intend to productize this spec.”

“If you have an incomplete spec and give it out to people, these people will build their chipsets and you’ll end up with chipsets that are incompatible with devices. That’s what (Intel) is trying to avoid,” the Intel source said.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

A source close to Intel said AMD and Nvidia are being disingenuous about what they’re actually seeking. In short, AMD and Nvidia are seeking technology–referred to as the “host controller” specification–that Intel says is beyond the USB 3.0 specification. “Think of it as a guide to building hardware for USB 3.0. This is the part that Intel invests dollars and engineering man hours in and then licenses to the industry (so far, for zero dollars). We will give this out as soon as it is finished (or close to finished),” the Intel source said.

Intel, meanwhile, says it’s moving with all due speed.

A separate specification–though designed to be compatible with the Intel USB 3.0 spec–has the potential to create incompatibilities, the source close to AMD said. “This is not good for users. But we have no choice.”

As a result, AMD, Nvidia, Via Technologies and others (not yet specified) could be driven to create their own USB 3.0 specification. “We are going to be forced to create a secondary specification” that would be introduced along with the Intel spec, the source close to AMD said. “To create a new open host controller standard for USB 3.0.”

UPDATE: AMD and Nvidia aim to wrest control of a crucial PC specification from Intel, arguing that the chip giant is trying to box them out as they move to a new era of faster peripherals.

Nvidia and AMD are offering no official comment.

The AMD source described USB 3.0 as “essentially PCI Express over a cable. And that intellectual property came from the PCI SIG”–the point being that Intel does not have a large intellectual property stake to defend. PCI Express is a data transfer specification for add-in card slots in desktop PCs today. The PCI SIG (Special Interest Group) promotes the Peripheral Component Interconnect specification, a standard used in all PCs today.

“Just as with previous generations of USB, Intel is working hard to get the complete spec to the industry with as little delay as possible in order to drive the wide adoption of USB 3.0,” the company said in a statement.

“Intel only gives it out once it’s finished. And it’s not finished.” said the source. “If it was mature enough to release, it would be released.” (AMD and Nvidia claim that Intel has working silicon and thus the part of the specification they are seeking is mature enough for release.)

Intel formed the USB Implementers Forum in 1995 with other industry players, including Microsoft, “to support and accelerate adoption of USB-compliant peripherals,” according to an overview of the specification on the chipmaker’s Web site.

In play is the USB 3.0 specification, a next-generation high-speed connection standard due in 2009. It is significant not only because all future PCs and devices will use connectors based on the standard but because it will offer 10 times the speed of USB 2.0–used in virtually all PCs introduced in the last few years–or roughly 5 gigabits per second.

The USB 3.0 specification is hammered out in the USB 3.0 Promoters Group, in which Intel is a working fellow. Other members include Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, NEC, and NXP Semiconductors.

“We’re not doing anything differently now than we did with USB 2.0 and USB 1.1,” he added.

Intel countered that AMD and Nvidia are not willing to do the hard work that is necessary. “They could spend the time, engineers and money developing their own host controller spec,” the Intel source said. “In the past they have chosen to let us do the work and then benefit from the fruit of our labor.”

The problem, as AMD and Nvidia see it, is that Intel would virtually own the USB 3.0 market–a powerful competitive advantage–for many months if they waited for Intel to release the host controller specification. “Tack on six to nine months. Then we get USB 3.0,” the AMD source said.

“The challenge is that Intel is not…giving the specification to anybody that competes with CPUs and chipsets,” said a source close to AMD who is familiar with the dispute.

Intel showed off a prototype USB 3.0 connector and an add-in card last year.

One possible reason for the frustration, the source said, is that Intel is “a little bit behind and that’s what might be causing some of the resentment. You could take the opinion that Intel is giving stuff out for free and people are complaining because (Intel) isn’t giving it out fast enough,” this person said.

AMD rejects this argument because people at the company were around when the earlier 1.0 USB specification came out and claim that Intel stonewalled back then too. Intel denies the assertion.

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges?

If you really like a tune you heard from a subscription service do you buy it? Do you buy individual tracks or complete albums?

What have I left out?

What percentage of your physical music collection did you get for free (ripped CDs, gifts, etc)?

Do you regularly buy used CDs or LPs? And rarely buy new CDs or LPs?

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

Is sound quality a factor, would you pay more for higher quality downloads or subscriptions?

What about DRM, do you care?

If so, do you buy them from Amazon or other online retailer, brick and mortar chain store, or local “record” shop?

How do you discover new music? Radio, friends, online, record stores?

Or do you get your tunes from a P2P like Morpheus or Blubster?

Do you buy CDs, burn ‘em, and them sell them?

Do you subscribe to a subscription service, if so, which one? Rhapsody, Yahoo, Napster, etc?