Their MOTIV platform offers programmers and carriers a new way to add vibrational feedback to phones. For example, instead of a curt buzz when something explodes on screen, you can add special “macro” vibrations that turn the motor on and off at various frequencies, recreating the vibrations associated with an explosion. It’s a bit hard to describe, but think of an audio editor for buzzing motors.
Hot off the heels of the talk that Apple is planning to release the iPad 2 in a few weeks — and then another new version of the iPad in the fall (something which we’ve heard from a very good source), here comes another one. Today, Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is working on a smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone. And here’s the thing. Once again, we’ve heard this as well.
Not to play second fiddle to Bloomberg’s story, but we’d previously heard from a source (different from the iPad one) that Apple was definitely at work on a device that could be thought of as an “iPhone nano”. We’d been trying to dig for more, but had yet to come up with anything substantial. But it looks as if Bloomberg has, in a similar vein.
So here are the details: Apple has been working on a way to sell a secondary, smaller version of the iPhone at a cheaper price. While they already offer a version of the iPhone that is cheaper than the standard $199 and $299 rates for new models, it has always been last-year’s model simply marked down more steeply, to $99 — and more recently, to $49 as a new iPhone model nears. So does Apple really want to go below $99 or even $49? Well, perhaps not.
The key is that the $99 price point is still carrier subsidized. What Apple apparently wants to do is release a version of the iPhone that is cheap without any subsidization. In other words: they want to sell an iPhone for under $200 without a contract.
The ramifications of such a move would be potentially huge. With the launch of the initial iPhone in 2007, Apple was able to take a dominant carrier-controlled U.S. market and turn it on its head. A year later, the App Store pushed this new order even further. But the truth is that the carriers still have way too much power in the U.S., where customers are slaves to the subsidies. And in some ways, Apple is too. Most of their money comes from what AT&T (and now Verizon) pay them upfront for each device.
Remember that when Apple first started selling the iPhone, it was at an un-subsidized price. And when wasn’t working so well, just a few months after launch, Apple had to drop the price by a couple hundred dollars. By the time the second iPhone came around, Apple happily took AT&T subsidy offer instead of getting a piece of every contract. The price of the iPhone dropped to $199, and sales caught fire.
But if Apple could make a different version of the iPhone that is significantly cheaper to manufacturer, they could potential move it on their own without the carriers. And the key to this may be a carrier-crippling SIM that would allow customers to buy the phone and hop from network to network as they saw fit.
Of course, the carriers would likely put up roadblocks in an attempt to stop Apple from doing this, in the same way they put up roadblocks to stop Google from doing something similar: a super cheap phone paid for by search revenue. But Apple has more control than Google did at the time when they chickened out. And they have one very important thing that Google does not: retail stores.
Google tried to sell their own phones through a website. It didn’t work. Apple has hundreds of the most highly-trafficked stores in the world that will allow them to do it.
But that obviously doesn’t mean they will. It’s perfectly possible that Apple is just toying around with this idea for now (as they do with many ideas). Bloomberg says that Apple had hoped to unveil such a device “near mid-year”, but they also say that may be “delayed or scrapped”. We had heard about a fall timeframe for such a device as well. But as always, again, this is Apple. It may not come at all.
All of the above makes varying degrees of sense, but the one thing that I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is just how Apple will make the device smaller. We hadn’t heard any specifics on size, just that it could be thought of like an iPod nano to the iPod. But Bloomberg says it could be one-third smaller than the iPhone 4. I suppose that could mean “thinner”, but it more likely means the screen would be smaller. How that would work given Apple’s so-far strict adherence to certain resolutions isn’t clear.
Another interesting bit is that it’s believed Apple could make the device cheaper by using components previously made for older iPhone models. That makes sense, time moves on and costs for old parts drop. But again, it would likely have to be a new screen. Though, Apple is very clearly investing heavily in those.
And some people thought this may be a relatively dull year for Apple rumors…
City of Industry, California - February 9, 2011 - Thermaltake, the market's most trusted brand in D.I.Y. computer cases and max-performance power supplies, announced today the immediate availability of the highly anticipated Level 10 GT super gaming full-tower computer case. The Level 10 GT case was introduced during 2011 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) held at Las Vegas, Nevada. Level 10 GT is the successor to the original Level 10, the design collaboration between Thermaltake and BMW Group DesignworksUSA.
The case's announcement during 2010 CES attracted high-volume of media coverage and quickly trickled down to the PC enthusiasts and gaming communities with approvals of the Level 10 GT's breakthrough in design and innovative features.
Commenting on the Level 10 GT during the CES launch, Overclockersclub, an independent news media had this to say," This year Thermaltake upped the ante in its chassis line up with the introduction of the Level 10 GT chassis at CES. The level 10 was a piece of art in the form of a computer chassis and the level 10 GT takes all of these styling cues and puts them in a chassis that comes with improvements to the airflow through the chassis with the use of 200mm fans in addition to the 140mm rear fan. You get the latest technologies with the addition of USB 3.0 connectivity, hot swap drive bays and a fan speed control built into the switch panel. Like the original Level 10 it's the small things that are not obvious that really make this case, things like the removable fan filters, large directional airflow from the side panel fan and room for the biggest video cards out right now up to 37cm in length. The Level 10 GT is an improvement in form and function for the gamer all at a more appetizing price point."
"[Level 10 GT] is a revision of the [Level 10] that is meant to be more affordable ($269 MSRP), but still keep the same styling as the original Level 10. This case has a ton of great features. The first is that there are 5 internal hot-swappable bays, each of these bays can fit 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives. These bays are easily removed by pressing in a button on the side and sliding them out. This case is designed to be a gaming case so there is a pull out headphone holder, which is perfect for LAN parties." Commented Bob Buskirk, owner of Thinkcomputers.org.
Feature Highlights
Unmatched Cable Management - While many cases on the market claim to have cable management, it simply means those cases have enough room on the opposite side of the case to "hide" the excess cables. With Level 10 GT, users will be amazed at how well the cable management system works. Instead of hiding the cables, users can properly separate cables and channel them through the grooves strategically placed on the back of the case. When adding graphic card or hard drives, users will no longer need to untangle the power cables that had been "hidden" away. All hard drives' power connectors are pre-wired eliminating the need for rerouting. Not only does a properly cable managed computer perform better through improved airflow, but also makes the system neater.
Convertible Top-Vent 240mm Water-Cooling Design - With the popularity of performance water-cooling solution for PC, Level 10 GT features a removable top meshed panel with included true 200mm exhaust fan. Should the user wish to integrate 120mm or even 240mm water-cooling, the fan can be easily removed and the water-cooling radiator can be quickly installed. The removable top also enables easy cleaning of the dust build-up on the fan or mesh.
Hinged Side-Panel Door with Plug&Play Fan Power - For power users who frequently upgrades graphic cards, memories or simply performing maintenances, the hinged side-panel door design eliminates the hassle of having to awkwardly sliding the side-panel off. In addition, the side-mounted oversized 200mm intake fan's power connector automatically disconnects itself without any user intervention.
Hot-swappable Hard Drive Caddies - Want to add additional hard drive to boost your overall storage capacity? Need to take the hard drive out to move large amount of data? With Level 10 GT's true hot-swappable hard drive caddies, user is able to quickly remove the hard drive without having to open up the computer systems and unscrewing it from the hard drive cage. And thanks to Level 10 GT's embedded hot-swap backplane, user can remove the storage hard drive without having to shut-down the system. The hard drive caddies also provide native support for all 3.5" and 2.5" SSD. The hot-swappable hard drive caddy design opens up a whole new world of possibilities where power user can enjoy running multiple operating systems simply by swapping the system hard drive to cloning numerous hard drives at any given time.
Massive Airflow & Quiet by Design - Building a high-performance gaming rig is not simply putting together the best graphic card(s), CPU, memories or hard drives / SSDs. What's more important is ensuring all the critical components are properly cooled. Being the industry-leading brand in PC thermal management, Thermaltake incorporated not one or two, but rather three true 200mm fans into the Level 10 GT. An additional 140mm TurboFan is also embedded into the back of the case. Each of the 200mm fans can be controlled via the ColorShift control on the top of chassis. ColorShift enables user to take full control over the color LEDs on each fans to match the gaming or working environment. Fan speed control acts as a turbo boost control which users may increase the fan speed to properly exhaust heat build-up during gaming session or to lower the fan speed while working or simply browsing the web.
In addition to the features highlighted, Level 10 GT comes standard with every premium features a PC enthusiast or hardcore gamer would want. High-speed data transfer can be achieved with two SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports on top as well as an eSATA port. Four additional USB 2.0 ports are located on the front bezel. Each intake fans comes with dedicated filter system and can be easily removed for cleaning without having to open the system. Locking systems for both hinged side-panel door and hot-swappable hard drive caddies are embedded to prevent theft when the system is brought to LAN events or public areas. Eight PCI slots to support NVIDIA SLI or AMD CrossFireX multi-graphic card setups. Fully black-powdered interior is perfect for anyone wishing to showcase the impressive components.
Inveni is a free web service that serves up movie and TV recommendations based on a user’s unique tastes. How does it work? Think of it as technology akin to that which drives Netflix’s personalization and recommendation features. Inveni’s software assists you in creating a customized “Taste Profile” by enabling you to share the preferences you’ve already established on sites like Amazon or Hulu. Speaking of Amazon, Inveni founder Aaron Weber told me that the startup is being advised by former NetPerceptions executives, the makers of the collaborative filtering software that drives Amazon’s recommendation engine.
Though Inveni’s technology draws obvious parallels with Netflix and Amazon, Weber said that the two services essentially rely on an algorithm to aggregate taste preferences and serve recommendations, and Inveni differs from this — sort of. The service has used a bot to crawl other sites on the web that offer user-generated content recommendations (i.e. sites that let users recommend movies and TV shows to each other) and it’s incorporated this data into its own database. Which doesn’t really sound Kosher, but we’ll let it slide. Just this once. And unlike the fully automated algorithms, Inveni users can publish the TV shows and movies they’ve watched, which leads the site to ask their friends and other Inveni members what they should check out next.
Update: Weber says that this crawling is one component of the recommendations and explains that staff, contractors, and the site’s users establish the majority of connections. The crawling is intended to help Inveni staff make recommendations faster.
The startup will initially remain focused on movies and TV, but says plans are in the works to expand beyond Hollywood — potentially to books and music.
Founded in 2008, Inveni debuted its service at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September 2010. Since then, it has remained in beta, but Weber told me that he hopes to launch officially this spring.
Yahoo this morning unveiled Livestand, a tablet-friendly personalized ‘digital newsstand’.
Yahoo Livestand is slated to be available to consumers as iPad and Android tablet apps in the first half of 2011. No word on pricing, however.
For publishers, Yahoo promises that they can use Livestand to develop their publication once and easily deploy it on most popular tablet devices, but in a highly personalized fashion.
Advertisers, on the other hand, will be able to “create personalized brand experiences with ads that adapt and respond to user interaction and combine the interactivity of a tablet with a brand building, TV-like, ad experience.”
From the sound of it, the Livestand platform will not remain tablet-only long, but should be getting a version that’s fit for modern smartphones and mobile browsers in the near future.
Yahoo content – which includes Sports, News, Finance but also services like Flickr as well as the Yahoo Contributor Network – will initially power Livestand. Content from other publishers will evidently join the line-up, although who and when remains to be seen.
We’ll be looking for a demo and hopefully more information at next week’s Mobile World Congress, where Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is scheduled to speak.
Truth to be told, there’s a lot of room for improvements in personalized content delivery on smartphones and tablets, so I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing how Yahoo thinks it cracked that nut.
Blake Irving, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Yahoo, sure sets the bar high:
With Livestand from Yahoo!, what you’re reading will be personalized based on your interests, your location and even the time of day. Your experiences, which will begin on tablet form factors, will include intuitive touch interactions and an elegant design that focuses foremost on the content.
Propelled by a separate electric motor on each of its rear wheels, the Nissan ESFLOW is a two-seater that can zip from 0 to 60 MPH in less than 5 seconds. It debuts next month at the International Motorshow in Geneva, the same venue where that spectacular Pagani C9 Huayra car we showed you last weekend will roll out.
Even though the ESFLOW is designed from scratch according to GizMag, it’ll use key components from the Nissan Leaf, such as its lithium-ion battery packs. Price wasn’t mentioned, however, the Nissan Leaf lists for $32,780, and this sportier Nissan will have a lighter and more expensive body made of aluminum and composite materials, driving its price higher.
There’s more exotica, including brake and gas pedals that adjust electronically to fit each driver, fly-by-wire steering and video cameras and screens instead of rear-view mirrors. Add up all these features, and the result is not going to be a cheap car. Like most concept cars, the ESFLOW is an ambitious design, but Nissan says it’s a “production-ready” vehicle.
We’re thinking it looks a lot like the Chevy Volt when it was a concept car, which became much more conventional by the time it reached an actual assembly line.
How do you like ESFLOW, readers? Does its styling beat a Tesla Roadster? Would you be willing to put up with a range of 150 miles so you could drive this little pocket electro-rocket?
But I don’t buy Scott’s concerns about the future of Silicon Valley. Indeed, I think he got it 95% wrong. While I live in Seattle, over the past year I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — helping to start one Valley company, investing in 2 others, and looking closely at a couple dozen more. My take is that Silicon Valley, and the U.S. tech scene in general, is more vibrant, exciting, and laden with big opportunities than at any time in my 30 years in the business.
First, the 5% where Scott’s right: When he says the valley “ain’t what it used to be,” he’s absolutely right. Nowadays, everything in the Valley — and in U.S. InfoTech in general — is software-driven. That doesn’t mean that hardware is dead – there’s plenty of Valley innovation in chips (e.g. Arm and Apple A4), Computers (e.g. the iPad), and other physical products. It’s just that winning products nowadays are fundamentally great software wrapped in either great hardware, or good & cheap hardware. In the past, it was possible to win big in hardware in the U.S., without being great at software, but no more. So yes, that’s a big change that has lots of implications.
But the 95% that’s wrong is when Scott seems to suggest that all of the opportunity in the Valley is focused around Social Networking (or unsustainable Government-funded Greentech). This is wrong in 2 fundamental ways:
First, it ignores many *huge* sectors where the Valley is thriving and indeed taking the lead in value creation away from other territories. Take operating systems for mobile phones: The #1 and #2 worldwide products – Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS – both come out of the valley. Their leadership has driven a massive shift in the geography of value creation in the mobile industry. In the 2000s most value creation in mobile phones happened in Europe or Asia – think Nokia, Ericcson, and Samsung. North American giants like Motorola and Nortel got left behind and struggled mightily. Now it’s just the opposite – Nokia is famously reeling, for instance, while Apple, Google, RIM, and other North American companies are thriving.
And because the OS is at the core of mobile platforms, the success of iOS and Android is creating a massive ecosystem of value creation in the valley – mobile advertising business like Admob; mobile applications like Flipboard; mobile chips like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, etc. While it’s possible to start great mobile companies anywhere in the world, Silicon Valley has become the single best place in the world to start most kinds of mobile software and services company.
Mobile Phone leadership is just one example where the U.S. is taking the lead globally. For another example, look at social ecommerce, where new companies like GroupOn, Living Social, and Etsy are taking off and creating a huge amount of value.
Scott’s second misguided thought about Social Networking is his dismissive attitude: “I’m not sure it’s really going to change the quality of life in a positive way,” implying that Social Networking is just some frilly consumer fad like a hula hoop. I couldn’t disagree more. Social Platforms are enriching and redefining how hundreds of millions of people work, navigate through information, and communicate. Yes Social Platforms are also great for playing games. But to imply, as Scott does, that the essence of Social Networking is gaming is as misguided as saying that PCs are just toys simply because they’re great for playing video games. (Of course, back in Scott’s day Sun used to take this position, but that’s a different matter…)
Look, the Valley’s not in perfect shape by any means. Regional unemployment is way too high, as it is across the Country. The new software-driven Valley is not as labor intensive as a manufacturing industry like cars. But that’s nothing new — IT manufacturing has been moving out of the U.S. for at least two decades.
Scott’s also right that the cost of doing business in Silicon Valley is high. But it’s been high for many years and that hasn’t stopped four generations of entrepreneurs from thriving and building great businesses for 40 years. And it’s not holding back the next generation of great entrepreneurs and great businesses.
Rob Glaser (Twitter: @RobGlaser) is Founder and Chairman of RealNetworks, and a Venture Partner at Accel Partners.
