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As the holidays draw nearer, we’ll probably start to see a lot more Blu-ray players dip below the $200 mark (where they should have been a year ago). Is this price low enough for you to pull the trigger?

As you’ll see in the video, CNET had mostly good things to say about the BDP-S300, though the complete review dings it for slow load times (true of most Blu-ray players) and lack of Dolby TrueHD decoding (which has been remedied via a firmware update). Although CNET readers rated it 3 stars out of 5, Circuit City buyers gave it 4.2 out of 5.

If you were smart enough not to spend $500-plus on a Blu-ray player during the last year or so, your patience just paid off: Circuit City has the Sony BDP-S300 Blu-ray player for $199.96 shipped (plus sales tax in most states). It’s new, not a refurb, with no rebates required.

If you’re keeping score, analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial expect, on average, earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $1.324 billion.

Yahoo releases financial results sometime after 1 p.m. PDT, but the conference call with financial analysts–where the juicier quotations usually surface–starts at 2 p.m. PDT.

Attention Microhoo watchers: We’ll be live-blogging Yahoo’s conference call for the company’s first-quarter results.

Apple appears to be working on the concept of a Mac tablet again, based on a recent patent application.

A number of Mac sites on Thursday are pointing to a U.S. patent application granted for what would appear to be the mythical
Mac tablet. AppleInsider has a description of the device discussed in the application, which appears to bring a lot of the
iPhone’s multitouch functionality to a slate-like tablet computer.

The thing is, Apple’s explored this territory before: I found one patent reference dating back to 2005, and other sites are reporting that the current application is similar to technology Apple patented two years ago.

Rumors of Apple working on a touch-screen Mac have been circulating for years, and will only grow with the revelation that the company is hoping to patent similar technology.

Tablet PCs in the Windows world haven’t sold very well, and the concept has almost completely fallen off the radar screen of the PC industry. That reluctance may be the result of software that isn’t quite advanced enough to match the hardware, but few people seem to want a handheld computer the size of a piece of paper and the weight of a regular laptop.

(Credit:
U.S. PTO (via AppleInsider))

Given Apple’ focus on multitouch user interfaces over the past year, there has been a fair amount of speculation that the company wants to do something similar with a larger, more powerful computer than the iPhone or
iPod Touch.

Akamai, which operates a global server network that helps distribute and accelerate rich media across the Internet, released its first quarterly “State of the Internet” report on Thursday.

The most common attacks were associated with Microsoft Windows. About one-third of the attacks were on port 135, which is used for remote procedure calls using the Windows operating system.

The country with the slowest Internet speeds was Rwanda with 97 percent of its connections under 356 Kbps. The Solomon Islands, Ethiopia, and Cuba were also among the slowest countries.

Not surprisingly, South Korea had the highest levels of high broadband connectivity, which is defined by offering broadband download speeds greater than 5 Mbps. Japan cam in second and the U.S. ranked seventh.

One of the key findings of the report revealed that China and the U.S. were home to the greatest percentage of Internet attacks, such as denial of service attacks and hacking attempts for the first quarter of 2008. Almost 17 percent of this traffic originated from China, while the U.S. trailed close by with 14 percent of this traffic coming from computers based here.

Within the U.S. the tiny states of Delaware and Rhode Island had the highest concentration of “high broadband connectivity.” Delaware had more than 60 percent of its connections providing more than 5 Mbps per second. About 42 percent of Rhode Island’s connections offered speeds of 5 Mbps or more. Washington state ranked as the slowest state in terms of high speed connections. About 21 percent of its connections were under 256 Kbps. Other slow states included Illinois, Virginia and Georgia. Washington, D.C. also ranked low.

China and the U.S. lead the world as the two biggest sources of Internet attack traffic, according to a report published by the content distribution company Akamai.

Some other notable findings included some interesting statistics on broadband speeds throughout the world.

Akamai pointed out that a lot of the attacks came from “worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago.” The company hypothesizes that this might indicate that a lot of the attack traffic could be coming from “a large pool of Microsoft Windows-based systems that are insufficiently maintained, and remain unpatched years after these attacks ‘peaked’ and were initially mitigated with updated software.”

In total, 10 countries in the list accounted for nearly 75 percent of all attacks, Akamai said. These countries included Argentina, Brazil, Japan, India, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This was the first report issued by Akamai. The company plans to publish further reports each quarter.

Both Plazes and Praized are based on leveraging their own proprietary databases. Plazes is collecting the data of Wi-Fi access point locations (based on coordinating MAC addresses with user reports of location) as well as matching location coordinates with the places that users hang out at (for example, the Starbucks at SFO). Praized’s database is one of physical location and associated reviews. Both look like useful infrastructure plays for emerging online geo businesses, but it’s unlikely either will (or should) remain an independent company for very long.

I’m at the Where 2.0 conference, looking forward to the Launchpad session tonight where I hope to see several cool new geo companies. Ahead of that I had a chance to meet with some other firms building new geo services: Plazes and Praized.

See also: Yelp (location ratings, but not private).

Praized: Local reviews

Plazes is for recording your location intentionally and episodically. It’s not like Whrrl (story), which is designed to track you passively. The idea is that when you land at a location you want people to know about, or get set up at a location where you want people to find you, you click the big “locate me” button on whatever device you have handy, and then your location goes out to the people you want to see it.

Who sees it? That’s part 2 of the changes in Plazes. Right now, your location is updated on Plazes.com and in your widget, if you’ve embedded one on your site. In a few weeks, Plazes will also update Twitter when you want, as well as sending your data to Fire Eagle, and to Plazes’ own API, which other apps can use to grab your location from.

Plazes: Location reporting

After talking with Plazes’ Petersen, I caught up with Sylvain Carle, co-founder of a brand-new geo company, Praized. This firm is building a database of locations and a rating system for them. It’s designed so that Wordpress and Movable Type site managers can plug the system into their blog, giving their reader communities a Digg-like rating system for the locations mentioned on the site.

Download Flash plugin

Praized's Digg-like ratings and reviews are local to the site they run on.

While the Praized database content is hosted, Praized itself is not a destination site. Web managers put some code in their blogs, and the Praized content will then appear locally on the site and adopt the site’s native styles. Furthermore, the ratings that people leave for locations and businesses will be specific to the site where Praized is installed. So if the users on a ballet blog leave reviews for a restaurant near a concert hall mentioned in a post, those reviews and ratings won’t get mixed in with reviews for the same restaurant left by readers of a site for wrestling fans. Good thing.

Plazes has been around for a while. It’s a service that helps you report your location so your friends and followers can see it. The latest updates revolve around new input and output methods for the service, according to Plazes’ co-founder, Felix Petersen. On the input side, an
iPhone app is coming (when the new iPhone app store goes public in a few weeks). It will let you update your location just by pressing a “locate me” button on your phone. This method will join the PC,
Mac, and Linux software app that locates you based on the unique fingerprint of the Wi-Fi access point you’re connected to (if you’re not connected to an access point, you have to locate yourself manually, by entering a place name or address).

See also: Brightkite (review).

At that point, Apple will need to make a decision. Will it want to go to court and fight each company that crops up or will it want to kill each of them off as quickly as possible? The decision won’t be an easy one. If it chooses the former, it risks losing and spending millions on lawyers that weren’t able to get the job done. If it chooses the latter, it’ll need to totally change its Mac business strategy in favor a software-first mentality.

Psystar, the hackintosh developer that’s selling
Mac OS X on its own machines, is finally getting some backlash from Apple over its claim that Steve Jobs and company is a monopoly. Apple claims that it’s not, that it has numerous competitors, and that Psystar’s complaint should be dismissed with prejudice.

And that’s exactly why we should support Psystar through all this. It’s not because we have a soft spot in our hearts for the company or that we want to see it succeed over the long-term. It’s because a licensed Mac OS X on computers from other companies will appeal to the greatest number of consumers, force Microsoft’s hand to create a better operating system, and create a real competitive environment in the OS market that will force each and every company to offer better products.

But what else can he do? Will he be content making little off small companies that are trying to grow at his own expense or would he rather license Mac OS X to the major companies and bring in some considerable revenue, while killing the small companies off? Granted, this may or may not hurt hardware sales, but given its leverage, there’s no reason why Apple can’t recoup those losses (and then some) on its software.

And if Psystar is successful in its case against Apple and is able to continue selling Mac OS X on its own brand of machines, I think you’ll see a significant shift in Apple strategy that will have a lasting impact on all of us. Of course, the one casualty in all this is Psystar itself.

As Vista shows, status quo just isn’t working. We need a catalyst to spark change and maybe Psystar is it.

When I say that I support Psystar, I should note that I don’t really care if it succeeds or not. See, I look at Psystar as a necessary evil; a company that matters little and will probably never have any real impact on any of us directly. More than anything, I look at Psystar as a company that can help Apple fill a void that’s growing more significant in the marketplace each day: the need for a more ubiquitous robust operating system.

The only way to kill all these small companies is to license Mac OS X to major companies like Dell and HP. Both vendors are chomping at the bit to have Mac OS X offered on their computers because it makes perfect sense from their standpoint: Apple is the most popular company in the industry right now and a slew of people want to get their hands on anything made by Apple. Even better, it puts Microsoft on notice and gives the vendors some leverage on the Vista front.

If nothing else, Psystar has shown that Apple’s control over the market isn’t necessarily best for consumers. Sure, it serves Apple’s purposes well as the company continues its climb in the hardware market, but it locks us down into machines that we may not want.

Check out Don’s Digital Home podcast, Twitter feed, and FriendFeed.

If Psystar wins its case against Apple and is allowed to license Mac OS X and stay in business, a slew of Psystar clones will pop up across the globe. Realizing that there is now a precedent in place to ensure their success, companies will start licensing Mac OS X and sell the OS on their own brand of computers.

And although that may not be in the cards now, I think that strategy — choosing to kill off these small companies — is the best way to go about it. And if it does follow that advice, you and I will benefit.

From Apple’s perspective, that may not be the most ideal move. Steve Jobs has constantly said that he views his company as a hardware organization first and he’s the reason Apple doesn’t license its OS anymore.

I can’t help but agree that, yes, Psystar’s complaint of an Apple monopoly is total and utter garbage, but I think the company should be supported in its fight against Apple. I know that may not be the popular opinion in Cupertino, but the way I see it, supporting Psystar could lead to significant changes at Apple that will benefit all of us.

News of Nintendo’s move into broadcasting is likely to fill executives of many traditional television companies with dread. One senior executive at Fuji Television, Japan’s biggest commercial broadcaster, told The Times that if plans by Satoru Iwata, the Nintendo president, to make the Wii “the centerpiece of the living room” took off in a meaningful way, Nintendo’s ambitions were “the stuff of television producers’ nightmares”.

Nintendo announced in December that it was working with Japan’s Dentsu to bring video to the
Wii video game console. And not just any video, but cartoons and original programming. Strategically, this a great move–trying to get the Wii to become the center of the digital living room.

While I am sure producers will initially be concerned, this would seem to be a huge opportunity for them to deliver content and advertising. The big question mark is whether or not Nintendo will open the Wii up to content outside of their own network.

The Times Online
reports “the Wiinoma channel is expected to deliver a family- oriented blizzard of cartoons, “brain-training” quizzes, cookery, educational and other lifestyle shows: all of it original content produced exclusively for Nintendo.”

The prospect of content deliberately tailored by Nintendo for its audience, he said, could cause a deep dent in prime-time viewing figures and comes as Japanese broadcasters are being pilloried for relying too heavily on repeats and celebrity formats.

Researchers have projected widely varying figures for the event’s attendance, based on satellites circling above the clouds, aerostat balloons tethered blocks away, television coverage of the crowd, and good old-fashioned mathematics calculations.

(See more satellite images from GeoEye here.)

(Credit:
AirPhotosLIVE)

(Credit:
Digital Globe)

GeoEye collected a high-resolution image of Washington, D.C., at 11:19 a.m. EST from 423 miles in space, said Mark Brender, GeoEye vice president of marketing and communications.

(Credit:
GeoEye Satellite Image)

“Crowd counting is an art,” said Curt Westergard, president of Digital Design and Imaging Service, which took photos of the event with 360-degree spherical panoramic cameras attached to balloons bobbing 500 feet above and a few blocks away from the White House. Fiber-optic cables tethered the balloons to a special launch trailer, which transmitted live shots to CNN.

Fixed-wing planes and even helicopters usually can be used, but were prohibited from coming near the event for security reasons.

“It’s actually fairly simple math, getting the square footage and dividing that by some number of feet per person,” he said. “A scary mosh pit is 2.5 square feet per person. That’s about as tight as you can pack people, where they can’t move–elevator tight.”

El-Baz explained how he arrived at his figure this way: The area between the steps of the Capitol Building and the Lincoln Memorial is 2.2 miles. The width of the National Mall is half a mile and there is another one mile along the western greens, he said. “If this area is nearly full it can accommodate at least 3 million people,” he said.

“I just watched the event in the American embassy in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates!!” Farouk El-Baz, a Boston University professor who is considered the leading authority on providing crowd estimates, wrote in an e-mail. “I do not have the pictures yet, but the video images show nearly 3 million people!”

“There were high, wispy light clouds, but one could clearly see throngs of people, especially gathered around the large JumboTron televisions spread along the National Mall,” he said. “The satellite collects imagery at 41 centimeter ground resolution, so one is able to see an object the size of home plate on a baseball diamond.”

The U.S. National Park Service, threatened with a lawsuit over its crowd estimate for the Million Man March in 1995, stopped doing crowd projections as a matter of policy. But the agency changed its mind for the Obama inauguration, although it won’t release a figure until later in the week, according to USA Today.

Others made estimates based on video images.

“We’re trying to contribute some of the oblique-angle photos of the scene that might see things under trees that satellite photos might miss (or) people standing in alcoves,” he said.

Satellites owned by Digital Globe also took shots, from 300 miles up following the polar orbit at a speed of about 17,000 miles per hour, said company spokesman Chuck Herring.

An image of the inauguration crowd shot by a camera attached to a balloon 500 feet above the ground.

If people up and down the Mall were crammed that tight, there could have been 2 million, he said.

U.S. President Barack Obama was sworn in on Tuesday in Washington. But the number of people who braved the frigid D.C. weather to watch the historic event could have been anywhere between 800,000 and 3 million, depending on who you talk to.

With the images, Doig tries to figure out how many people there might be per square foot and then factors in the surface area.

This image shows the inauguration scene from more than 400 miles in space. You can see the dark clusters of ant-like people gathered around the Capitol and in front of JumboTrons along the National Mall.

Imaging technology also was being used to help the U.S. Department of Interior keep track of crowds for security, public safety, and traffic purposes, according to the GIS Cafe Web site. The Interior Department uses a wall-sized display of high-resolution flat-screen, tiled LCD monitors called the “OptIPortal” that displays 35-megapixel aerial imagery, the report said.

Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University who specializes in crowd counting, said he is estimating there were 800,000 people in attendance, based on a satellite image taken by GeoEye about 40 minutes before the swearing-in ceremony.

The cameras took the shots between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m. EST, when they were forced to shut down due to air space regulations. The balloons, which measure about 12.5 feet in diameter, only rose to 500 feet instead of 800 feet because of issues with President Bush’s helicopter, according to Westergard.

This shot was taken from a satellite 300 miles high.

Estimates have put Johnson’s inauguration attendance at 1.2 million, but Doig said he thinks that figure is inflated.

“The space-based image is fascinating because all the low-level shots make you think the crowd is much larger. (In the satellite images), you see the very dense clots of people in front of the JumboTrons, but then the wide open spaces elsewhere,” Doig said. “I’d still suspect this crowd was larger than the Lyndon Johnson one, which wasn’t estimated with the benefit of an image from this excellent viewpoint.”

But many of the economic and social barriers that existed in Colombia have also manifested themselves in Miami. Despite the wealth on display on Miami’s beaches and a wave of investment that has modernized the downtown skyline, the city of Miami remains one of the nation’s poorest.

“It shortens the distance,” she said.

“When we’ve looked in some of our particularly disadvantaged neighborhoods, we see computers in less than a third of houses,” said city of Miami CIO Peter Korinis. “We see Internet connections in less than a quarter. Clearly these families and these households are going to have an uphill fight to take advantage of all that a computer has to offer, whether its education or health care or jobs.”

MIAMI–In the basement of a Catholic church, a woman loudly shouts the word “three,” and a chorus of seniors repeats the word several times as part of their regular English lessons. A few yards a way, a small flea market features a display of clothes and other items. But next door to the flea market is the crown jewel of the Gesu Senior Center: its computer lab.

The most important things the parks offer is proximity to the people who need computer access most. “That’s why we chose these places,” Korinis said. “It’s safe and its close.”

“These are not sumptuous computer centers,” he said. “In many cases, these are multipurpose rooms. They roll out the mats and do gymnastics, then they role back the mats and roll out the computers.”

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

Among the first seniors to use the lab when it opened was Maria Rico, 77, who moved to the United States in 1978. As a volunteer at the church that houses the senior center, Rico heard about the class and signed up without hesitation.

But the city was careful where it put its dollars, Korinis said.

In another corner of the room, Beatriz Gomez signs in to check her e-mail. The computer allows her to connect with her brother, nieces and nephews, and many friends back in Colombia.

Maria Rico, who moved from Colombia to the United States in 1978, was only allowed to go to school for six months as a child, but has been an avid participant in the computer classes at Gesu since the lab opened last year.

For the PCs, the city found a willing donor: itself.

“I always was afraid,” she said. “Today you have to do it, to feel alive, to feel younger.”

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

Irma Orfila, another of the regulars at the Gesu senior center, said she had never used a computer until the lab opened.

Despite having only received six months of formal education, Rico has been one of the lab’s most dedicated users, relying on it to keep in touch with her grandchildren in Colombia, who pay to use an Internet cafe to respond to her notes.

What began last year with only a couple computers in a corner, now consists of two enclosed rooms packed with PCs. This past Friday, about thirty Spanish-speaking seniors learned how to use the computers to make greeting cards. Seniors come to the lab three days a week for the lessons and two other days a week the lab is open for people who want to send e-mail and keep up with friends and family.

In the past, the company had auctioned off its outdated but working machines for as little as $5 apiece. Microsoft provided new software for the machines, while AT&T and Comcast are providing Internet access for the parks and senior centers.

In 2004, Miami wired the first of its city parks for Internet access. The city had planned to add parks methodically, but the demand proved tremendous and it connected more than 20 parks that first year with anywhere from a single PC to labs with a dozen or more computers. As of January, the city had 43 parks hooked up with 293 computers in total.

Click here to read all of the stories in The Borders of Computing series.

The senior center is one component of a citywide program called Elevate Miami aimed at offering educational opportunities to citizens of all ages. Another part of the program called “Rights of Passage,” offers all sixth-graders in the city the opportunity to earn a free computer, provided they maintain decent grades and maintain the respect of their teachers. Parents are also required to complete a session.

A number of seniors look on as they get computer training at Miami's Gesu Catholic Church and Senior Center.

commentary

In this way, I see Mashery opening up the Web to development in similar ways to how open source works “offline.” Mashery is helping to break down barriers between Web sites, enabling savvy customers to extend their reach far beyond their .com site to envelop and enrich others’ Web services, and take a share of the sales in the process.

The next phase for Best Buy? Open up its shopping cart, as well, so that each of these corner stores becomes not only a place to browse but also a place to buy Best Buy products, taking a share of the sale in the process. Best Buy everywhere…even more than it could hope to achieve offline.

The key to it all is the API (application programming interface), as The New York Times describes, which “lets Web sites make their content easily available to other Web developers, who can import it, display it on their own sites and mash it up with other material.”

Best Buy doesn’t think so, and is doing some exceptionally interesting work with San Francisco-based Mashery to effectively replicate and extend the local shopping experience online.

Online, we still somehow believe that it’s acceptable to build one store (e.g., BarnesandNoble.com) and expect the world to beat a path to the vendor’s door.

In sum, MTV’s Mashery-enabled API opens up its content to the world to consume, with huge benefits going back to MTV as a consequence: visibility, adoption, and downstream revenue-sharing opportunities.

In Best Buy’s case, this means making its product catalog available to the world. No big deal? Consider that this essentially opens up a Best Buy store on every niche Web site on the planet (that chooses to use the Best Buy Remix API, of course). Perhaps I’d like to provide detailed information about scanners that I want to sell. Best Buy’s Remix lets me leverage its catalog (along with product reviews and more).

Build a music video gallery of MTV, VH1, CMT, or LOGO artists
Create an application to send music video dedications to friends on Facebook, MySpace, Flux, or just about any other social network
Mine our expansive music video archive to create the music application of your dreams
Fashion a WordPress plug-in to dynamically pull music videos into blog posts

Best Buy, however, isn’t alone in this. Mashery is also working with MTV, which suggests the following services with its API as a starting point:

Offline, vendors recognize the importance of moving products as close to the would-be consumer as possible. Retailers, fast food chains, and other vendors therefore build physical locations all over the world, seeking to be physically proximate to potential customers.