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So far, we’ve only seen prototypes of a cell phone running Google’s Android platform, but InfoWorld has some gossip on what the first real device might be. According to a source “close to the situation”, HTC may become the first company to manufacture an Android device. Yet it also appears that Samsung, which also is a member of the Open Handset Alliance, is not far behind.

Details are slim but the source reported the following specs. The HTC device will be called the “Dream” and will be about 5 inches long by 3 inches wide. What’s more, it will feature an alphabetic keyboard that will either slide or swivel out from under the display. There isn’t much more to tell at the moment, but the above details match rumors that Forbes reported last year. We apologize that we can’t offer any photos of the Dream but we can give you a look at an Android prototype that we examined last month at the GSMA World Congress. See the video for more details.

NBC has said it will use Silverlight to broadcast the 2010 Winter Olympics from Vancouver. The technology will allow the Games to be broadcast in 720p HD quality as well as provide a TiVo-like ability to pause and rewind a live stream.

The release, noted by enthusiast site Neowin, marks Microsoft’s latest effort to take on Adobe’s Flash.

Among the product’s new features is technology that allows the software to utilize a PC’s hardware to accelerate graphics processing. It also allows for programs that run outside a browser on both the PC and
Mac.

Microsoft detailed Silverlight 3 at the Mix09 event in March, releasing a beta version of the software.

The final version of Silverlight 3 has been released to the Web, a day ahead of the product’s launch event in San Francisco.

For now, those trying to find him and win the cash–and no doubt, bragging rights, as Ratliff said that to collect the prize, the winner has to agree to be interviewed on his or her methods–will have to do so without the assistance of his Twitter account. Then again, Twitter has been going through a rough time recently, with several periods of downtime.

When Wired recently launched its Vanish contest, a challenge to readers to locate reporter Evan Ratliff, who has gone on the “lam,” it suggested that a major source of clues would be Ratliff’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to find clues. One is another Twitter account that was set up as a clearinghouse for information (@EvansVanished). Another is a Facebook account called The Search for Evan Ratliff, where fans are posting clues and working collaboratively to solve the puzzle.

Of course, given that Ratliff is surely employing everything he can think of to stay below radar (theoretically not using credit cards or doing anything that might too easily give away his whereabouts) the Twitter account suspension might somehow be intentional. Then again, one would have to wonder what he would have had to do to get Twitter on board.

(Credit:
Twitter)

But as of Friday morning, his Twitter account (@theatavist) had been suspended for “strange activity.”

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information as to why the account was suspended.

Still, I really want to know what “strange activity” caused the service to take down the account. I’ll update this article if I find out.

This game, then, has many of the makings of a traditional alternate-reality game: online and offline components, widespread community involvement, clues spread across a wide swath of the Internet and a prize that may, in the end, have to be shared by a number of people who worked together.

Update (2:27 p.m.): The account is now back up. According to a Twitter spokesperson, it was “infected” for some reason.

Whoever finds Ratliff (and is the first to send his editor a photo of him) will win $5,000. And while there are a number of different ways to source up clues as to his whereabouts, one of them was supposed to be his Twitter account.

The challenge is an interesting way to draw attention to a recent article of Ratliff’s about the difficulties of disappearing from society. And in the original contest challenge, it was suggested that contest participants might draw some conclusions as to the methods the reporter would use–or wouldn’t, as the case may be–from that story.

Wired readers who want to try to win the $5,000 prize for finding reporter Evan Ratliff may not be able to use clues posted to his Twitter account, as the account has been suspended for ’strange activity.’

And as is often the case with ARGs, this game, too, is in the service of promoting something else, in this case, Ratliff’s larger article.

The services offer wildly different amounts of hand-holding, and at different layers in the stack. When this assistance works and lines up with your needs, it makes the services seem like an answer to your prayers, but when it doesn’t, you’ll want to rename it “iron-ball-and-chain computing.” Every neat feature that simplifies the workload does it by removing some switches from your reach, forcing you into a set routine that is probably but not necessarily what you’d prefer.

Peter Wayner at Infoworld published a good overview of Cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. The main takeaway: Cloud Computing is as nebulous as it is cumulus.

The first surprise is that the services are wildly different. While many parts of Web hosting are pretty standard, the definition of “cloud computing” varies widely. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud offers you full Linux machines with root access and the opportunity to run whatever apps you want. Google’s App Engine will also let you run whatever program you want — as long as you specify it in a limited version of Python and use Google’s database.

In related news, ValleyWag reported that Google is hiring 300 drivers to map Switzerland.

(Credit:
Google)

Cummins bases his conclusion on the use of Sick laser scanning equipment, which sends a laser beam back and forth to gauge distances to nearby objects. Laser scanners can produce a 3D model detailed map onto which imagery can be overlaid.

Google wouldn’t comment either on any European expansion or on 3D scanning, but both ideas are consistent with the company’s general plans for Google Maps and Google Earth.

First, evidenced by Google-branded cars traversing Milan, is the possibility that Google is acquiring European imagery for its Street View feature.

Google Earth and Maps could cover a lot more territory with a lot more detail soon, if some photos from Italy are anything to judge by.

Second is the observation, based on scrutiny of those pictures, that Google could be gathering 3D data along with the photos.

“With an automated solution, they could go for blanket 3D coverage,” rather than the more limited approach today involving user contributions of basic 3D models, robotics engineering student Mark Cummins observed on his Educating Silicon blog. Cummins also helpfully included links to work by start-up Earthmine and University of California at Berkeley researchers Avideh Zakhor and Christian Früh to show what others are doing with 3D street-view imaging.

Of the 3D work, Yu also was unspecific. “We want more 3D data in Google Earth. The latest release of Google Earth is where you’ll see the results of our effort to automate the addition of 3D data.”

“We continue to add more cities in Street View,” spokesman Larry Yu said. “There are of course laws and regulations to consider abroad, so we looking closely at that.” Yahoo has run into some privacy concerns with its street-level imagery.

A Google Street View look at CNET headquarters

That silver medal used to be a TV or keyboard.

Medalists at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will celebrate with circuit boards hanging from their necks.

More than 1,000 medals are currently being produced for the 2010 games. But geekiness isn’t the only thing that makes them distinct.

To acquire the metal for the medals (with great mettle, no doubt), Teck is recovering materials from cathode ray tube glass, computer parts, and circuit boards through smelting. The process involves shredding, separating, and heating electronic components, then combining the byproducts with metals from other sources.

(Credit:
Vancouver2010.com)

(Credit: Vancouver2010.com)

The 2010 medals are undulating rather than flat.

They feature contemporary Aboriginal artwork by Corrine Hunt, a Canadian designer of Komoyue and Tlingit heritage. Also, the medals are wavy rather than flat, a form inspired by the ocean waves, drifting snow, and mountainous landscapes found in the Games region and throughout Canada.

That’s right. Gold, silver, and bronze medals for the upcoming games will contain metal from recycled TVs, computers, and keyboards that might have otherwise ended up as e-waste. Vancouver metals giant Teck Resources is producing and supplying the medals along with the Royal Canadian Mint.

P.S.: No.

P.S.: If you want to talk about objects: one certainly needs something to light a fire.

Philippe Starck: The ability to love. Love is the most wonderful invention of mankind. And then, one needs intelligence. Mankind, as opposed to animals, has managed to create a civilization based on intelligence. For this reason, no human can afford to not work on their intelligence. And humour, humour is important.

ZEIT: You can’t be serious. Isn’t there so much else one needs in order to survive?

P.S.: We don’t need anything material. It is more important to develop one’s own ethic, and to stick to these rules. There is nothing else one would have to worry about.

Naturally, designers (and the watchdogs of ‘design thinking’ in particular) cried foul and tried to reconcile Starck’s design nihilism with their own beliefs. David Armano and Bruce Nussbaum, for example, refer to the democratization of design.

ZEIT: So this is the balance you strike of all your creating?

Here’s what Starck had to say:

ZEIT: So why, then, have you become an industrial designer in the first place?

ZEIT: So all the things you have created — unnecessary?

Armano: “No, design isn’t dead, especially the really good design that adds value to our lives. But the notion of design’s gatekeepers may need some additional thought as more of us begin to act like ‘professionals’ and take on the sacred role of design.”

ZEIT: And you can’t think of something material?

P.S.: If one is fortunate enough to have a good idea, one has the obligation to share this idea with others. That is how democracy works. When I started to design, a good chair would cost about $1,000. Should a family that needs six chairs and a table have to pay $10,000, just to be able to have dinner? What an obscene thought. Four years ago, I designed a chair that would cost less than ten dollars. If you just strike three zeros off the price you change the whole concept of a product.

ZEIT: Is there any object that you like, then?

ZEIT: And yet you recently designed that motor yacht for a Russian millionaire?

ZEIT: So what else would designers create then?

ZEIT: And you don’t want to stop designing?

P.S.: There won’t be any designers. The designer of the future will be the personal coach, the fitness trainer, the nutritionist. That’s all.

P.S.: It is accomplished! When I started out, design objects were but beautiful objects. No one could afford to buy them; design stood for elitism, but elitism is vulgar. The sole elegance lies in multiplication.

ZEIT: Please explain this.

Hmmm… this to me sounds like C is the next big thing after A and B, but hey, better a lukewarm notion of the future of design than no future at all, right? We get the message, anyway: Starck is wrong because “really good” design — in star(c)k contrast to “consumer excess” design, and defined as design by everybody for everybody, serving a good cause and solving a real human problem — is not dead, cannot be dead (because that would really mean the end of design, of human power, and all hope).

ZEIT: So you will only be switching the job.

And Nussbaum: “Design is wonderfully alive and well — and evolving fast. The tools and methods that were once the exclusive province of a handful of designers are now in the hands of millions of people who are shaping their own experiences on Facebook and MySpace, much less on the cell phones. This democratization of design, the open-sourcing of design is driving much of the field. Apple is pretty good at controlling the design of its products, but it too is giving in and opening up the design of applications to the
iPhone platform. I think the meta-trend is all of this is IDENTITY. It’s the next Big Thing after Experience and Emotion.”

ZEIT: Monsieur Starck, you have designed everything, from toothbrush to spaceship. What do humans really need?

ZEIT: You said that we are undergoing a transition towards Postmaterialism. What does this mean?

P.S.: That is an interesting question. And I haven’t found an answer to it for myself yet. Look, I have designed so many things without ever really being interested in them. Maybe all these years were necessary for me to ultimately recognize that we, after all, don’t need anything. We always have too much.

P.S.: I do want to, for sure. I am definitely going to stop designing in two years. I will be doing something else instead, I don’t know for sure. But I know that it will be a new way of expression; a weapon that will be faster, mightier and lighter than design. Design is really a terrible way to express oneself.

P.S.: Those people with more intelligence than me would have gotten to this point much earlier. Perhaps I wasn’t smart enough and had to learn it the hard way. Ever from the beginning I had the feeling that ultimatively, product design was useless. It is because of this that I have tried to change this job into something else; into something that’s more political, more rebellious, more subversive. So maybe the most important thing that I have created is not a new object, but a new definition for the word “designer.”

ZEIT: Can you think of anything else?

P.S.: Exactly. I have been a producer of materiality. I do feel ashamed for this. What I want to be instead now is a producer of concepts. This will be much more useful.

P.S.: Exactly this is part of my Robin-Hood concept. I do use such projects like a lab. It allows me to try out new technologies and render them useful for the mass market. For this particular yacht, I developed a hull that wouldn’t cause bow washes at 20 knots. I applied this concept to a solar boat, which in turn could be the prototype for a Venetian vaporetto.

Philippe Starck had an epiphany, after all these years: “Everything I have designed is absolutely unnecessary,” the French star designer admitted in a recent interview with the German weekly DIE ZEIT. I had the dubious pleasure of hanging out in the Starck-designed Volar club in Shanghai last weekend, and my initial reaction to his statement was: yeah, right! I’ve never really liked his pompose celebrity design. But then I read his quote again in the context of the whole interview and realized: he is right, actually. In fact, his thoughts are so poignant and humbling that it is worth reprinting them in full length here (below is an excellent translation from the German original, courtesy of the mademoiselle-a blog).

ZEIT: You have often stated that it was your goal to destroy design. How far have you gotten with that?

P.S.: Society is pursuing a strategy of dematerialization: it is more and more about intelligence and less about material. Take a computer, for example. In the beginning, computers were big as a house. Now there are computers in the size of only a credit card. In ten years from now they are going to be in our bodies - bionics. In fifty years from now, the concept of computers will have dematerialized itself.

(Credit: Microsoft)

P.S.: Everything I have created is absolutely unnecessary. Design, structurally seen, is absolutely void of usefulness. A useful profession would be to be an astronomer, a biologist or something of that kind. Design really is nothing. I have tried to install my designs with a sense of meaning and energy, and even when I tried to give my best it was still in vain.

P.S.: A pillow maybe, and a good mattress.

“A lot of DoubleClick’s customers consider Google a competitor,” says Frank Addante, chief executive of The Rubicon Project, which offers a dashboard for sites to manage the more than 300 online ad networks. (Addante was formerly with L90/adMonitor advertising platform, which was bought by DoubleClick in 2001.)

“Our clients on DoubleClick that have contracts expiring with DoubleClick are saying it’s a dead end,” that it will be eclipsed by Google technology, which will impact customers, said Ruben Buell, chief executive of AdShuffle, an ad serving company.

Google also has to figure out what the best business model is for ad serving. DoubleClick charges customers for it, but Google is testing a free ad management service called Ad Manager.

Now that Google has acquired DoubleClick–the display advertising feather in its proverbial cap–it’s time to see if the hat fits.

There’s another conflict Google bumps up against with DoubleClick–the fact that it risks alienating publishers who don’t want Google to have too much control. Google could integrate DoubleClick’s Dart ad management and serving technology into AdWords to offer one unified dashboard and see into even more Web sites across the Internet.

“Now, if Google owns all the technology they have access to that data, they know what’s being bought and sold. It puts customers in a tough situation.” –Frank Addante, The Rubicon Project

“Even if Performics is kept completely separate from the Google search team, there’s the impression that Performics might have some special ‘in’ with Google’s non-paid search results,” writes Danny Sullivan in a Search Engine Land blog post in which he urges Google to get rid of Performics.

There are some basic conflict-of-interest questions with some of the additions to Google. As the largest search engine, Google has kept its distance from search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the science of increasing a Web page’s rankings in search results. But with Performics, Google owns an SEO company.

Granted, Microsoft finds itself in the same SEO-owning boat after acquiring Avenue A/Razorfish and Sullivan poses this question to both companies: “You own the pie; do you really need to sell the pie cutters too?”

The $3.1 billion acquisition, which finally closed last week upon European regulator approval, gives Google a much needed boost in the market for display advertising.

Beyond the technical integration issues, the two merged companies face a culture clash. It’s “Madison Avenue hipsters” meets “Silicon Valley geek types,” according to Addante.

The merger “cements Google’s position as ‘frienemy’ with major publishers,” says Jim Barnett, chief executive of Turn, an automated online ad market.

Google’s AdSense serves up pay-per-click text ads to Web sites within its publisher network, while DoubleClick, which markets a product called Dart, places banner ads on Web sites. DoubleClick also runs an advertising exchange and a search-engine marketing business called Performics.

“Display is more brand advertising, more emotional,” he says. “I think it’s going to take Google some time to learn that side of the business because they’re so data driven.”

Google hasn’t offered many clues as to what its plans are with DoubleClick, other than to hint at layoffs. But Google pundits and executives at small ad outfits do have concerns and plenty of opinions about what the search king should do.

And there’s the question of whether Google will continue to restrict its customers from working with third-party ad servers. “Advertisers working with Google couldn’t use third-party ad serving, so a lot of people wouldn’t use Google,” says Michael Cassidy, chief executive of online ad network Undertone Networks.

“Now, if Google owns all the technology they have access to that data, they know what’s being bought and sold,” Addante says. “It puts customers in a tough situation.”

But for our purposes here I’m going to focus on one specific thread. I’ll be following up with further discussion of other points.

As a side issue, John also noted that, in the sciences, he does not recommend that work be limited to non-commercial use or to prohibit derivative (i.e. transformed) use of the work. He said that such restrictions have a very chilling effect on integration and federation. I’ve written previously about the Non-Commercial clause of some Creative Commons licenses in the context of photographs. Increasingly strictures against commercial use, an area that Open Source code licenses have largely stayed away from to their betterment, seem to be something that appear reasonable and fair but, in fact, have far more cons than pros.

Much of that background, the continuing areas of conflict that are part and parcel of it, hints at how Open Source may evolve, and some of the opportunities (and challenges) of bringing Open Source into domains other than code were on display at the Participate 08 panel discussion yesterday. The complexities of the many interweaving threads are neatly captured in these whiteboards drawn by Collective Next during the panel.

One of the reasons I attend O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference (OSCON) is that, more so than others I go to, it gets into the intellectual and–dare I say–philosophical underpinnings of things as well as the things themselves.

To be sure, this sort of thing may not be especially important if we’re talking about things like servers–although these too interact with long-term undercurrents such as massively multi-core programming  that are largely removed from day-to-day concerns but which are immensely important in the long view. In the case of Open Source, however much it has blended into the mainstream of software, is still also very part and parcel of the history and motivations behind it.

One of the panelists was John Wilbanks, who run the Science Commons project (within Creative Commons). He had some interesting perspectives on the concerns of scientists, as opposed to programmers. For example, in the Open Source code world, as it has evolved, attribution (at least formal attribution) isn’t a component of most licenses. But, in the academic community, it’s all about attribution. As he described it: “the motivation is to be associated with the publication of an idea… to own a fact.”

As open data, creative writing and media, and code merge, we’re going to increasingly need to reconcile the issues that matter most to the communities who own the copyrights to their respective bodies of work.

This is a potentially huge disconnect between the data/science world and the code world. This is especially so because attribution clauses are not a part of most Open Source licenses for deliberate reason. The problem is that attributions “stack”–that is, they acquire threads of contributors that may go back years. Thus, to have a legal requirement to preserve some list of all that historical accretion of intellectual property would get enormously unwieldy to implement in a practical way.

Academics deal with this sort of thing all the time. However, it’s handled within the context of social norms and customs and violations are dealt with largely by corresponding social censures rather than legal ones. Attribution is serious business in academia–but it’s not implemented through formal legal strictures that require literature searches for previously unknown Russian papers of 30 years past. (Of course, there are often bruised egos and perceived slights all the time–welcome to the world–but these are issues mostly resolved within a community rather than in a court of law.

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We’ll never know….

In an attempt to turn this blog into a gossip rag, I’m going to “start” posting unsubstantiated (Meaning, true or almost certainly true but with sources that I can’t reveal) rumors. Fiction is always more fun.

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In this case, however, it’s the truth. First in line to acquire SUSE back in the day was…Red Hat. Matthew Szulik decided to pass on the opportunity and, well, the rest is history. Ironic, isn’t it? With whom would Microsoft have done its patent deal had Novell not been around? Would Ubuntu have started sooner to fill the competitive Linux void?