Google’s hot searches for 2010: Chatroulette, iPad, Justin Bieber – CNN.com

Apparently the naughty bits on Chatroulette didn’t deter Web surfers so much this year. And whether people agreed or differed with Steve Jobs about Apple’s “magical” iPad, they still wanted to learn more about it.

Internet users quit worrying so much about swine flu this year, though, and the memories of Michael Jackson’s death started to fade.

That’s all according to the hottest Google searches of 2010.

Google to take on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble with new e-book store | Technology | Los Angeles Times

Google Inc. is penning the next chapter in the story of electronic books.

Today the Mountain View, Calif., technology giant is unveiling its long-expected “Google eBooks” platform, an e-book store that contains 3 million volumes, most of which are free public domain works.

But hundreds of thousands of Google’s e-books will be paid titles from major and minor publishers.  Those will include many bestsellers and, Google says, the vast majority of books already commercially available in electronic form.

By opening its eBookStore, Google is pitting itself squarely against established digital booksellers, including the market leader Amazon.com and relative newcomer Apple Inc. Google’s stated aim — captured by the slogan “buy anywhere, read anywhere,” is to allow users to purchase and read books from as many devices as possible.

The books can be read online — through a new Google reading interface also launching today. They’ll also work on a number of tablet and e-reader devices, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone, Android-based smartphones and tablets, and e-ink devices from Sony and Barnes & Noble.

Amazon Kindle users will not be able to purchase new books from Google, though the Kindle will be able to display some of Google’s public domain (non-copyrighted) books.

Google will sell the books via two main online channels: the first is its eBookStore, where it will sell directly to consumers and share the proceeds with publishers.  The second is by way of online bookstores who will add a Google e-book sales widget to their web sites, and split the retail proceeds with Google.

Books sold by most of the large U.S. publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Simon and Schuster — fall under the so-called “agency model,” in which the publisher sets the list price, takes roughly 70% of the sales revenue, and the retailer — in this case, Google — takes the remaining 30%.

For all other (non-agency) books, Google will use an algorithm to choose a price based on a number of bits of market data (not including competitors’ prices, Google says). Google then keeps the proceeds from that sale, minus approximately 52% of the publisher’s original list price.

Google representatives said the proportion of the revenue split can vary somewhat depending on the specifics of deals with inidividual publishers.

Google has also done deals with hundreds of independent bookstores such that, if customers buy Google e-books through stores’ web sites, the stores split the proceeds with Google (after the publisher’s cut).  Google said it made deals individually with each store, and has not disclosed the proportion of the revenue sharing.

Copy protection has been a concern among publishers of e-books, who worry that the digital book files can be copied and widely circulated online.  Google will use a variety of copy protection mechanisms,including a patented copy protection scheme for books displayed on the web, encrypted files for iPhone and Android devices, and Adobe Inc.’s ACS 4 system for e-ink devices.

Google’s system will automatically keep track of where in a book a reader left off.  This works across devices, so that if you pause on a given page while reading on the Web, you can continue on the same page if you continue reading the book on a smartphone or tablet.  This mechanism will not initially work for e-ink devices.  Nor will Google’s Web interface allow for highlighting or note taking.

Google has scanned 15 million books as part of the large-scale book digitization project it started in 2004.  Many of those books, however, are still under copyright and subject to a lawsuit still awaiting resolution in a New York federal court.  Until that lawsuit is settled, most of those books will remain out of the Google bookstore.

Google to take on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble with new e-book store | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

Santa’s List Day: December 4th

Today is Santa’s List Day. Have you been good all year? Have you been Naughty? Or, have you been nice? Santa knows.

Santa’s Elves have been everywhere, checking up on children all over the world, to see who has been naughty, and who has been nice. Thanks to the hard work of his elves, Santa now has two lists. The short list contains the names of a few children who have been naughty. A much longer list is filled with the names of children who have been good all year long.

Which list are you on?

Kids….. make sure to be especially good around the holidays. That’s when parents need children to be on their best behavior, as they are busy preparing for the holidays.

Happy Santa’s List Day!!!!

5 Holiday Tech Scams to Avoid – Yahoo! News

The holiday shopping season is a great time to get tech products at discounted prices, but it also creates a golden opportunity for the Web‘s scam artists. The FBI, McAfee, the Better Business Bureau and F-Secure are all warning about cybercriminals who will try to take you for a ride this holiday season. Here are their most pertinent warnings and tips for staying safe:

The Infamous Free iPad

Bogus free iPad offers started popping up immediately after Apple’s tablet went on sale, and they’ve since been banned from Facebook. Still, you might see similar offers around the Web, McAfee says, prompting you to buy other products as a condition of getting the free iPad. By now, you should realize it’s too good to be true.

Gift Card Scams

That free $1,000 gift card offer you saw on Facebook? Bogus, of course. McAfee says that cybercrooks lure people into giving away their personal information or taking quizzes in exchange for these cards, which never arrive. The information is then sold to marketers or used for identity theft.

The FBI also says to use caution when purchasing gift cards through auction sites or classified ads. These can be fraudulent, and you won’t get your money back. Buy directly from retailers instead.

Bogus Auctions and Classifieds

Here’s a particularly tricky scheme pointed out by the FBI: On auction and classified sites, fraudsters use their own order forms to get payment details from holiday gift buyers. Then, they charge the victim’s credit card and use a stolen credit card to buy the actual item, which is sent directly to the victim. In other words, you’ll still get the product, but you might be liable for receiving stolen goods. To avoid this scam, be sure to use legitimate payment services like Paypal instead of providing money directly to the seller.

The feds also warn of a related scam for free or reduced-price shipping offered on auction and classified sites. The fraudsters provide fake shipping labels to the victim, and the product ends up being intercepted in transit, never delivered to its destination.

Malicious websites

For cybercriminals, spamming Google with bogus holiday gift pages is a yearly tradition. These pages could be loaded with malware or payment forms intended to steal your identity. F-Secure has created a list of what it thinks will be the highly targeted search terms this year, including Kinect for Xbox, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad. Visit retailers’ websites directly when possible, use Internet security software if you must and always check for “https” in the URL bar before ordering online to ensure that the page is secure.

Wi-Fi Hackers

Public Wi-Fi networks will get a workout this holiday season as people travel, McAfee notes. This is especially true with Google offering free Wi-Fi on domestic flights from three major airlines. Check out our security tips from Google’s free Wi-Fi offer at airports last year, most of which are still relevant in the skies. Number one tip: Avoid shopping and paying bills over a public network.

5 Holiday Tech Scams to Avoid – Yahoo! News.

Kindle ipad – latimes.com

Flipping through e-readers, a skeptic becomes a believer

A Kindle version of the Lonely Planet guide to Germany lies next to the 844-page, 13.6-ounce printed version. (Richard Drew, AP / November 23, 2010)

This is the year e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Apple’s iPad are expected to break into the big time. So now may be the moment to offer a subjective buyer’s guide.

The last time I was stuck somewhere without a book to read was 1988. The place was Homa Bay, a village on the Kenyan shore of Lake Victoria that I wouldn’t be leaving for five days at the minimum, with lots of downtime in store.

After three days I’d finished both John Le Carre novels I’d brought with me. I was only saved from spending the endless hours watching scorpions skitter across the sand by the Gideons, whose geographic reach really is remarkable. After that experience, I never left home without a Dickens in my knapsack, on the principle that you can’t get stuck anywhere on Earth long enough to get all the way to the end of “Little Dorrit.”

But that wouldn’t be an issue for me today, because now I have my Kindle.

This is the year that e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook and Apple’s iPad are expected to break into the big time. This has been predicted before every Christmas buying season for years. But this time, thanks to the advance of technology and the decline of price (with one notable exception), we may actually move beyond hype and into reality.

So now may be the right moment for me to offer a subjective buyer’s guide on what’s good about these things and what’s indifferent. I come at this task as a lifelong voracious reader and adherent of the books-as-totems school of household design: One entire wall of our family room is a bookcase, floor to ceiling, and piles of books unstrategically decorate almost every other room too.

Yet over the last seven months I’ve become a convert to e-reading, to the point where reading something bound and on paper seems almost quaint. I never thought I would make this transition, certainly not so effortlessly. I say this in full awareness that this trend may do incalculable harm to traditional bookstores, places where I have spent incalculable hours of my life.

My guidance on electronic reading came initially from the author Nicholson Baker, whose wholly admirable fetish is the archival preservation of printed artifacts — newspaper morgues, cards from library card catalogs, books. Last year Baker deconstructed the Kindle for the New Yorker, intrigued by the prospect of being “pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption, like Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc.” (You gotta love Baker.)

Instead, he was put off by the Kindle’s pale gray screen — “It was a sickly, greenish gray … this four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon” — its “grim and Calvinist” typeface, its crummy treatment of illustrations and photos.

His was an older-generation Kindle. This summer, Amazon brought out several new models, smaller, lighter, cheaper and with vastly improved screens. On the new Kindle the type appears sharper, against a background that in certain light appears almost white.

I opted for the large-format, 9.7-inch DX model because I thought I’d like the additional screen real estate. My wife acquired the standard 6-inch model. Neither of us ever looked back. In our house, the rustle of pages has yielded to the rhythmic clicking of page-forward buttons.

There’s something liberating about a good e-reader. A large part of it is the ability to buy a book and have it delivered (by Wi-Fi or 3-G network) within a minute. There’s no question that I’ve bought more books, and read more, than I did in any equivalent pre-Kindle period. The two leading e-book merchants, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, allow you to download a free sample of any e-book. It’s usually a chapter or two — not always enough to be sure you’ll like a book, but often enough to know you’ll hate it.

Then there’s the devices’ huge capacity and the availability of inexpensive editions of great works in the public domain. Here’s just some of what I’ve currently fit on my Kindle: the haunting new Gary Shteyngart; the new Le Carre (a return to form); the new Alan Furst (so-so); two Christopher Moores (still the best: “A Dirty Job”).

Also, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of “War and Peace” (a new gold standard); the complete works of Charles Dickens ($2.99); 25 novels, stories and plays by Joseph Conrad ($4.69); the complete Sherlock Holmes (nine volumes, $3.60); and the complete works of Mark Twain ($2.99). Plus one of those Stieg Larsson things, which I wish I could unread. Have a suggestion based upon this list? Pass it along.

So which e-reader is best? Reading is a subjective sensation, so there’s no right answer. The main contest is between the Kindle and the iPad, but they are very different devices.

The iPad is not an e-reader as such. It’s really an entertainment device, optimized to deliver movies, games and other visual images with great clarity. But in my experience (about a week with a lent model) it was very difficult to read on for any length of time.

When you hold it at normal book-scanning distance — say, 8 to 12 inches from your eyes — it isn’t long before the back-lit screen delivers the sensation that you’re staring into a car headlight, even with the brightness turned down.

The iPad doesn’t have the resolution to display print fonts with comfortable crispness at close distances, and it’s too heavy to hold without propping it up. The iPad is certainly dazzling on first encounter, but its heart isn’t in giving you something to read.

The new color Nook, which I tested at my local Barnes & Noble, has a similar screen and the same shortcomings. That may be why the store takes pains to promote its suitability for children’s books, in which color images play a bigger role than the printed word. Still, if you must read in color, the Nook is a cheaper, lighter, smaller device than the iPad, though lacking the big guy’s vast array of digital applications.

The Kindle, by contrast, has been optimized as a reading device. The letters seem to sit on top of its matte black-and-white E Ink display, reducing eyestrain, their outlines razor-sharp. One good thing about the Kindle is it’s distraction-free — there is a Web browser, but luckily it’s almost useless. The iPad invites you to set aside your reading to play, Web surf, check e-mail, futz around in a million digital ways; the Kindle is solely for reading.

Not that it doesn’t have drawbacks. Amazon’s e-books seem rife with typos, odd hyphenations, words run together, as though the developers haven’t invested in proofreaders. Forget about checking footnotes and endnotes, as the process is agonizingly slow. The selection of e-books is large but inconsistent — most of Nicholson Baker’s books are available, but none by Thomas Pynchon, who now has held out against digital distribution of his work longer than the Beatles.

Yet the critical mass of e-readers means they will get better from here, and the market will make room for multiple formats. Publishers are already developing enhanced e-books for iPad-like devices, featuring useful add-ons such as video and animation. E Ink displays will get even sharper, and eventually acquire color.

Apple is intent on making the iPad an all-around entertainment device; Amazon on developing the best dedicated e-book. I can live with both, especially since for holdouts like Pynchon, there’s still something called the “book.”

Kindle ipad – latimes.com.

Apple’s iPad tablet eats into PC market | Technology | The Guardian

When Steve Jobs in January described the new iPad tablet computer as “magical”, PC manufacturers perhaps didn’t imagine that the magic would be to subtract money from their bottom line and add it to Apple‘s.

But that’s how it’s turning out. The research firm, Gartner, has slashed its forecast for the number of PCs that will be sold this year from 363.5m to 352.4m. And that higher figure was itself a downgrade from March, when the company thought that 366m PCs could be sold this year.

The reason for the downgrade is growing interest in Apple’s iPad and similar tablet computers, allied to shrinking budgets among consumers.

The abrupt drop is part of a trend that will become a long-term one, according to Ranjit Atwal, Gartner’s research director. “Over the longer term, media tablets are expected to displace around 10% of PC units by 2014,” he said, adding that the new forecasts reflect “expectations of weaker consumer demand, due in no small part to growing user interest in media tablets such as the iPad”.

Other analysts think that growing user interest can already be quantified. Last week, Citigroup’s analysts forecast that 35m tablet computers, including 26m iPads, will be sold in 2011 – and that those will lop off 11m PC sales that would otherwise have been made by companies such as HP and Dell.

Craig Berger, of FBR Capital Markets, offers higher estimates for 2011 – of 40m tablets sold by Apple and 30m by other companies – and says that the economics of tablets “are not good for PCs”. He calculates that every five tablets sold means two lost PC sales. Berger’s numbers would suggest 28m lost PC sales – and given that Gartner has already trimmed its numbers by 10m this year since the iPad launched, Berger’s figure might not be fanciful.

Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts that worldwide PC shipments for 2011 will reach 409m units, a 15.9% increase from 2010 – but substantially reduced from its earlier estimate of 18.1% growth for next year. It’s entirely possible that further downgrades will follow.

Is this the end of the PC business that has sustained dozens of PC makers, and Microsoft in particular, over the decades since the launch of the very first version of Windows on 20 November 1985, just over 25 years ago? Microsoft makes its money from the licences for Windows on PCs, plus sales of its Office suite to a sizeable proportion of PCs that are used by businesses.

But if the PC sales engine starts to slow, so will Microsoft’s. And Gartner has bad news on the business front too: it predicts that by 2013, 80% of businesses will support tablet computers for their staff, and that rather than providing employees with business services and devices – that is, PCs – 90% will support corporate applications on employees’ own consumer phones, tablets and laptops.

Ray Ozzie, who last month stepped down as Microsoft’s chief software architect – a post previously held by Bill Gates – has already warned the company about this scenario.

In October, in an elliptical farewell email, which he also put on his blog, he urged its executives to look ahead to a “post-PC world” and warned: “Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.” Or, to put it another way, those who stick to the PC-centric view will get left behind.

The PC market’s growth is not uniform. It has almost stopped in the US and Europe. The only bright light at present is emerging markets such as Asia, which Gartner says are driving sales: by the end of next year such countries will make up more than 50% of the world PC market, while “mature” markets – especially the US and Europe – will face “mounting challenges” as both businesses and consumers put off new purchases and instead buy smartphones or tablets instead.

And even in emerging markets the story is not all good news for the traditional PC companies. “There is a good chance that consumers will simply leapfrog PCs and move directly to alternative devices in the coming years rather than following the traditional pattern of purchasing a PC as their first computing device,” suggests Gartner, blaming PC makers’ failure to innovate.

Chip speeds are not doubling as they once did; where a decade ago, faster graphics and processors were guaranteed every few years and made new PCs a must-have, most people now have more computing power than they need. And even though Microsoft can say that Windows 7 is its fastest-selling version of Windows ever, the reality is that many businesses are downgrading their licences and instead running Windows XP, from 2001, while many consumers are also sticking with XP.

That could mean that companies which usually head the PC sales numbers will see their revenues head south too, unless they can leap onto the tablet bandwagon. HP, Acer and Toshiba – which, along with Dell and Lenovo, make up the top five sellers worldwide – have all announced moves into the tablet market, although analysts predict they will find it tough amid brutal price competition.

Oddly, the only computer maker that seems immune to this cannibalisation of the market is Apple, which has seen its computer sales grow significantly faster than the market this year. Maybe Jobs was right. The iPad is certainly having a magical effect on his company – even if not on any others.

Personal computer timeline

1975: Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who offer BASIC computer language for the now-extinct Altair computer.

1976: Apple founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. They begin selling Apple I computer boards.

1981: IBM introduces the $1,500 IBM PC; Microsoft DOS available as an option.

1984: Apple introduces Apple Macintosh, with “windowing” interface.

1985: Microsoft ships Windows 1.0.

1992: Microsoft ships Windows 3.1.

1993: Total of 3 million people in the US connected to the net.

1995: Microsoft ships Windows 95, which sells 1m copies in four days.

1997: 100 million people worldwide connected to the net.

1998: Microsoft becomes world’s most valuable company, by market capitalisation

1999: Microsoft found guilty of antitrust behaviour over the browser market

2001: Microsoft introduces Tablet PC format. It doesn’t sell. It introduces Windows XP, which sells by the million.

2001: Number of PCs sold between 1981 and 2000 totals 835m.

2003: 1bn PCs shipped

2004: Microsoft found guilty of monopoly behaviour by European Commission.

2006: Intel estimates 1bn PCs connected to the net worldwide.

2009: PC sales fall for the first time since 2001.

2010: January – Apple launches iPad. May – overtakes Microsoft in market capitalisation.

Apple’s iPad tablet eats into PC market | Technology | The Guardian.