IT Spot

A couple of years ago, I wrote a story about a company called Edoc Laundry and its line of clothing that featured a built-in alternate-reality game.

On Friday, I read about a new line of T-shirts available at Target that feature images from experimental games and which come with free CDs on which are the games themselves.

Boing Boing blogger Cory Doctorow wrote about the new shirts Friday, and it reminded me of the Edoc Laundry experiment, which, while innovative, never quite took off.

A new line of T-shirts that features images from experimental games is reminiscent of Edoc Laundry’s clothing line with a built-in alternate-reality game.

(Credit: Edoc Laundry)

Apparently, the new T-shirt line comes comes from a company called EGPApparel, and each individual shirt has an image from one of the games developed under the Experimental Gameplay Project, in which participants have one week to create an all-new game all by themselves.

As a promotion, the shirts come with the games the images are based on.

What’s striking to me about this is that people are still pursuing the idea of putting original game-related content on clothing. I love the idea, especially when the imagery isn’t something everyday folks will recognize.

In the case of the Edoc Laundry line, I’ve been seeing clothes ever since I wrote about it that remind me of the company’s products but which ended up being just something that looked similar. And in the case of the EGPApparel clothes, I suspect these, too, will begin to take shape in many, many outfits that I see, few of which will actually be legit.

And as posed on Boing Boing, the very idea of taking images from obscure games and using them to sell clothes is rather fun. I don’t know that it will end up doing much for the designers of the games, but it’s worth trying.

CHICAGO–Many Chicagoans pride themselves on surviving extreme weather, and laugh when a rainy day makes headlines in California. (With snow falling at two inches per hour Friday, the second day of spring, can you blame them?)

The snowy scene in the Chicago area Friday isn’t pretty if you need to drive far.

(Credit: Elsa Wenzel)

Seeking more eco-friendly ways to clear the streets of snow and ice on more than 9,500 miles of roadways, the “windy city” is combining low-tech “green” chemicals with digital sensor systems.

Juice from sugar beets is key in a new formula tested here to prevent ice buildup on the roads. Chicago mixes a cocktail of 15 percent beet juice, a gelatinous liquid that resists freezing even in subzero weather, with 80 percent briny water, and sodium chloride.

Two days before the expected snowfall, city trucks released the mixture onto elevated bridges and overpasses that can become fatally slippery; blasted by winds, they also lack warmth from the ground.

Cheap and chunky rock salt, used for more than six decades in northern cities, effectively melts ice and provides traction. But it also erodes roadways and bridges and seeps into the ground, killing vegetation.

The brine “super mix” is better ecologically but imperfect because it still contains salt, according to Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Chicago Department of Streets & Sanitation. However, most alternatives remain less safe and more costly than salt, he added.

The city continues to experiment with other natural de-icing ingredients such as corn extract, as part of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s oft-repeated goals to make Chicago America’s “greenest” city.

Chicago has expanded its use of the beet recipe this winter, which counted some 60 inches of snow. Last year the city used 450,000 tons of rock salt and about half that amount of the beet juice cocktail in a test run last winter.

“It’s not just the substance that’s good but because we’re able to harness new technology, we’re able to put less wear and tear on the environment because trucks aren’t out there as much as they used to be” wasting fuel and contributing to potholes, Smith said.

The city has a fleet of 273 snow-plow trucks each holding 10 tons of salt, plus 24 smaller plows for side streets. During heavy snowfall, some 150 garbage trucks can be outfitted with temporary plows.

Helping to direct the vehicles is an emergency communications center receiving data from a few dozen environmental sensors scattered around the city.

Sensors embedded in the ground and atop laser-outfitted poles transfer real-time data about ground temperatures and moisture via wires and wirelessly to the center, where monitors display live street scenes from 600 cameras. (Chicago has one of the world’s most extensive and controversial anti-crime, public surveillance systems).

City officials pool that information with feeds from Doppler radar and the National Weather Service to send GPS-equipped snow trucks to areas needing the most attention.

“In the old days when a storm was coming through the area, the trucks were sitting there for hours and hours,” Smith said. “Now we save a lot of time in winter and probably save a lot of lives.”

Mobile applications are turning into big business, and Nokia is looking to launch a few startups on their way.

Nokia’s developer arm, Forum Nokia, announced the results of its Mobile Rules contest Wednesday night at San Jose City Hall. Nine companies were chosen, representing four application categories, best business plan, and four winners of the best technology innovation.

The winners were judged by a panel of Nokia executives, venture capitalists, and media representatives. They’ll get a chance to pitch their ideas to Nokia’s higher-ups and the venture capital community. With smartphones and mobile phones growing more and more capable, most companies in this market are looking to court developers for their platform. Apple will get around to it eventually.

Without further adieu, the winners:

Best Application - Multiplayer and Connected Games:

Gamica. The Sumo Sumo game is a multiplayer Tetris-like game where you have to build “clusters of colored blocks before you get squashed by a giant spike wall,” according to the program description.

Best Application - Multimedia:

Mystrands. This company is building a social-networking music player, of sorts. They say they have 6 million songs available and help people discover new music by hooking them up with other users that share similar tastes.

Best Application - Enterprise:

Upcode. UpCode is building a mobile parking payment system that uses an optical scanner on a cell phone like a parking ticket. Instead of pushing the button for the ticket, and losing it later on, the idea is that you’d scan your cell phone to gain entry, and then pay later from your phone on the way out. Parking businesses then get the ability to track their customers’ habits more closely and adjust to peak demand, offer specials, or change pricing.

Best Application - Infotainment:

Earthcomber. These guys are working on ways to exploit GPS technology in mobile phones. Their winning entry involved a partnership with the Travel Channel where a visitor to Chicago could choose to be informed of attractions and sites around their current location.

Best Business Plan:

MedApps. MedApps is developing a product that lets patients with chronic diseases submit their most recent vital stats, like heart rate or blood sugar levels, wirelessly over the Internet to a heath-care provider.

Best Technology Innovation:

Four winners were chosen from the 12 finalists in this category. Genusion has developed a type of NOR flash memory called B4-Flash that is supposedly faster, cheaper, and more reliable than what’s currently available. Kannuu’s lookup application combs through databases to find likely results.

Kareline came up with a natural and earth-friendly composite material for mobile phones than today’s plastics. And Tiki Labs is probably thinking about iPhone 2.0, having developed a system for interacting with a touchscreen using different combinations of thumbs and fingers.

Much has been made of Dell’s retail make-over, but it’s actually part of a larger trend toward experimentalism.

The company that has largely avoided unproven product categories is jumping all over them suddenly. Case in point: Several years ago, when Microsoft was pushing tablet computing, Dell was fairly adamant that, no thanks, tablet PCs weren’t something the company was interested in making.

“I think it is really unknown at this point how big the market is,” CEO Michael Dell, said in a 2002 interview about tablet PCs. “Dell, of course, likes to participate in high-volume markets, and until we can determine the size of the market we are not ready to decide at what level we will participate.”

The Latitude XT is Dell’s first foray into tablet computing.

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

Fast forward to late 2007, when Dell introduces its first tablet PC, the Latitude XT. Tick forward some more to this week when the second version, the Latitude XT2, was leaked on to the Web. Tablet computing, to Microsoft’s chagrin, still has never really taken off–tablets comprises 3.25 percent of the worldwide notebook market in 2007, according to market research firm IDC. Yet, Dell’s staking out its claim in that category.

So what’s changed? Well, almost everything.

“The old Dell was about how everything had to improve with scale. In other words, any fixed cost investment had to get more profitable with volume,” said Roger Kay, analyst and president of Endpoint Technologies. But after the leadership change a year ago, “Michael (Dell) said there were no sacred cows when he took back over.”

Now Dell can’t seem to stay out of niche markets. Besides the Latitude XT, in the last year Dell’s launched a ruggedized laptop, a consumer-friendly all-in-one desktop, and began offering Linux pre-installed on some PCs. Plus, there’s constant chatter about the company re-entering the handheld market.

The PC industry is moving toward increased mobility, so tablets, and rugged notebooks are part of a larger trend. But they also represent opportunities that Dell can’t afford to miss anymore.

In Dell’s heyday, its mammoth commercial computing clients would choose a variety of machines it wanted Dell to supply, if one of them was too much of a niche product, Dell would simply partner with a manufacturer who did make it.

“But now they’re saying, we don’t want to keep giving away those opportunities because that’s decent margin (being left) on the table,” said Richard Shim, PC analyst for IDC. Now, “they go out and create their own versions of these products.”

Within the overall trend toward mobility, commercial clients, and even consumers, are demanding more and more specific usage models, and Dell it seems is trying to adapt.

“The market is evolving beyond generic solutions. There are new opportunities in more specialized products,” said Shim.

Evolution seems to be the name of the game down in Round Rock, Texas these days. The company has undergone a major transformation of its business plan since Michael Dell stepped back into the executive suite as CEO.

Along with that has come this marked shift toward experimentalism at the 20-year-old company. Though Dell’s hallmark for its first two decades in business was its sharp, efficient supply chain, and direct-to-customers sales model, now you can find a Dell almost anywhere you look: Best Buy, Staples, Wal-Mart, and more.

Its product choices are different too. “In the past, Dell would adopt new technologies faster than most, but new products more slowly,” noted Kay. While it was happy to move from one processor generation to the next fairly rapidly, Dell was far more circumspect about getting into a niche market like PDAs or music players. Of course, Dell’s expertise has always been in the enterprise market, which isn’t particularly fast-moving. But targeting consumers is a different animal–they expect more product innovation, and faster product cycle times.

Dell’s ruggedized laptop, a first for the PC maker.

(Credit: Dell)

In trying to garner more consumer attention, Dell’s also been more adventurous there, with firsts for them like colored laptops last summer, the stylish design of the XPS laptop line, and the XPS One, an iMac-esque all-in-one PC. Dell even went as far as co-branding the XPS gaming line with World of Warcraft, the MMORPG.

“It’s more like they’re dropping a lot of bait in the water to see what works,” Kay noted.

Sure, they’re trying a lot of new things, but they’ve got to do something different. No longer the largest seller of PCs overall, it’s also recently fallen behind the Acer-Gateway-Packard Bell behemoth in notebook sales.

“They have to be risky to reverse their misfortunes here,” said Shim. “That takes time, when you’re trying to change your personality. I’m sure they’ll make missteps along the way because everyone does. But the positive is that they are making these changes. The writing is not just on the wall, it’s in neon.”

I’d like to thank licensed ship captain and editor of gCaptain.com blog John A. Conrad for this one: a ship that floats on a curtain of bubbles.

The Bubbling Ship is a concept devised by Yoshiaki Kodama, director of the Advanced Maritime Transport Technology Department at Japan’s National Maritime Research Institute (NMRI) in Tokyo. The ship would blow bubbles from slits near the bow of the ship. The bubbles would travel along the hull, reduce friction and hence increase gas mileage.

Is it feasible now? No, but that’s what research grants are for. Ships are one of the largest consumers of diesel fuel in the world.

In any event, Captain John has assembled a list of his top ten green ship concepts. Among the ideas: putting a parachute like sail on a ship, an idea being championed by KiteShip and SkySails. SkySails in fact recently completed a two-month voyage and found that the sail cut fuel consumption by 20 percent.

There’s also a boat with a giant wind turbine as well as the Solar Sailor from Australia.

The site also features and interesting collection of clips about nautical mishaps. Check it out, sailor.

Blowin’ bubbles, Matey.

(Credit: NMRI)

Could satellite TV provider Dish Network be planning to build a mobile TV service with its newly won 700Mhz spectrum?

That’s the question that many analysts were asking after it was disclosed this week that the company, also known as EchoStar Communications, spent $711 million for a block of licenses in the auction that is ideal for offering mobile broadcast TV, according to a Reuters story.

The much-talked about auction ended Tuesday raising about $19.6 billion for the government. Wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon Wireless won the bulk of the spectrum.

The licenses that Dish bought were in the 6MHz sliver of spectrum called the E-Block. Because these licenses cover such a narrow band of spectrum, it would be hard for Dish to build a broadband wireless service to transmit two-way communication. This means that building a cellular phone or wireless broadband service using this spectrum is nearly impossible. But the spectrum could be used to send communications one-way, making it ideal for services such as broadcast TV.

Qualcomm already owns spectrum that is adjacent to the spectrum that Dish bought. Qualcomm uses its spectrum to deliver its MediaFlo TV mobile broadcast TV service. Qualcomm had also been bidding in the auction and was attempting to get the E-Block licenses. The fact that it wasn’t able to get those licenses is a negative for the mobile technology company.

“It makes more sense for one provider to operate both pieces of spectrum,” Steve Clement, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities told Reuters.

Dish hasn’t said yet what it plans to do with the spectrum. Some analysts in the Reuters story speculate that it could cost the company between $3 billion and $5 billion to build a mobile TV network. The company said in a financial filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February that it might “make investments in or partner with others to expand our business into mobile and portable video, data and voice services.”

There’s also a possibility the company could work with Qualcomm.

Dish bid on the spectrum through its partner Frontier Wireless.

Microsoft is looking to an expensive new consumer advertising campaign to help improve its image.

Valleywag posted a report on Friday suggesting that Johnny Knoxville of Jackass fame may be the pitchman behind the new spots.

A Microsoft representative declined to comment on whether Knoxville was indeed on tap to pitch the software maker.

“Microsoft is in the early stages of planning a consumer advertising campaign. We have no other details to share at this time,” the company said in a statement. Microsoft has hired a new ad agency–Crispin Porter and Bogusky–for the assignment, which Ad Age estimated could be as high as $300 million, or perhaps higher.

Microsoft won’t say how much it is spending, but it is clearly aiming to spruce up its image. If they needed more convincing, CoreBrand put out a study showing Microsoft’s brand having dropped precipitously over the past two years, with the marketing firm saying that it believes Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads are partly responsible.

A lot of people appear to be bent out of shape about Apple using its auto-update service to distribute the Safari Web browser on Windows. The CEO of Mozilla, which makes the rival Firefox browser, calls it bad business.

In a blog on Friday, Mozilla CEO John Lilly criticized Apple’s practice, uncovered this week, of offering iTunes and QuickTime users Safari 3.1 on Windows through the Apple Software Update pop-up.

Lilly says that automatic updates are a good way to ensure people have the most recent and secure versions of software. It’s a practice that Mozilla uses with the Firefox browser.

What’s different in what Apple is doing is that it is adding a product to the auto-update list that users never requested. That means they could very easily install software unintentionally, he argued:

Apple has made it incredibly easy–the default, even–for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the Web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop.

Easy for users or a breach of trust?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

An Apple representative issued an e-mailed statement on the matter to Information Week: “We are using Software Update to make it easy and convenient for both Mac and Windows users to get the latest Safari update from Apple.”

Meanwhile, my colleague, Tom Krazit, in a post on Friday argues that people should become more aware of the software on their systems and think before they install.

Over at Wired, David Thier has a story up about theories being propagated by terrorism and intelligence scholars that virtual worlds like World of Warcraft could provide counterterrorism agents with a view into what real-world baddies are up to.

That’s because, the theorists posit, virtual terrorism and diseases spread in WoW might paint an illustrative picture of what terrorists like Osama bin Laden are thinking when they’re hunkered down, planning their attacks on the U.S. or other countries.

“People got really smart about figuring out how to cause the most damage to the largest number of people,” Wired quoted Robert Allen, a WoW player who created a bioterrorist attack in the game, as saying.

The article also quoted Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies deputy director Charles Blair as arguing that online games like WoW might give counterterrorist agents a view into how cells come together.

Last month the Office of the Director of National Intelligence indicated that it is planning on studying online games and “the emerging phenomenon of social (particularly terrorist) dynamics in virtual worlds and large-scale online games and their implications for the Intelligence Community.”

And every few months, we hear about some theorist or some academic who has determined that Al Qaeda is using virtual worlds like WoW to plot disaster. And every time that happens, a bunch of government officials probably get very freaked out and think that maybe it’s time to start running data mining projects in those environments, just like the Office of the DNI did.

But as I wrote last month and I will continue to write, just because someone theorizes it doesn’t mean it’s true.

It is true that scientists have studied how diseases spread in virtual worlds and the results have been fascinating, since virtual worlds present pretty sophisticated models of complex societies and how a virus might spread amongst large groups. But that just doesn’t mean that that orc you came across in EverQuest is a terrorist. Or is carrying a virtual virus.

For now, I think it’s worth thinking about these things as problems. And it certainly makes for interesting reading. But what I’d like to see is people not get so freaked out about the dangers of virtual worlds since no one has proven that the environments have been used for any kind of real-world dastardly behavior.

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A variety of new models and model updates are on display at the 2008 New York auto show, from a sporty new coupe by Hyundai to a clean diesel Mercedes-Benz SUV and a mini-van with a Volkswagen badge.

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