A quick scan of the reseller mentioned Acer’s release this morning–Best Buy, Circuit City, and CDW–reveals only the $379 and $399 models at CDW. It would seem that 6-cell batteries are still in tight supply. Given that a mobile Internet and communications device like the Aspire One is likely to spend much of its time away from a wall outlet, we’d hold out for a model with a six-cell battery.

The ever watchful eye of Crave spied Acer’s Aspire One Netbook on a few online resellers last week (while our British brethren got their hands on one last month), and today Acer makes it official by announcing the U.S. availability of its 8.9-inch Netbook. The company outlines three models, which range in price from a very low $379 to $449. By comparison, the latest Asus Eee PC 901 comes in at $599, while the MSI Wind is priced at $479.

Acer states the Aspire One weighs 2.17 pounds, which is a few ounces lighter than either the 8.9-inch Eee PC or the 10-inch MSI Wind. It’s available in blue or white currently, with golden brown and black options coming later in the year.

(Credit:
Acer)

All three Aspire One models use the 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor (which is what we saw in both the Eee PC 901 and the MSI Wind) and an 8.9-inch, LED-backlit display with a 1,024×600 resolution and a Webcam above it. You also get three USB 2.0 ports, two media card slots, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and 10/100 Ethernet.

(Credit:
Acer)

The “extremely critical” security vulnerabilities are found in Yahoo Music Jukebox version 2.2.2.056 and possibly other versions, according to Secunia. The heightened warning comes as exploit code has been made public, which could give malicious attackers a road map to follow should they want to compromise a user’s computer.

According to Secunia, users who have the Yahoo Music Jukebox loaded on their system and visit a malicious Web site could find themselves at risk. The security flaws are found in the way certain ActiveX controls in the Yahoo music player process information, which could cause a buffer overflow problem. An attacker could then exploit the vulnerabilities and execute arbitrary code from a user’s computer.

Yahoo was not immediately available for comment. But stay tuned.

Secunia advises Yahoo Music Jukebox users to set the “kill-bit” for the affected ActiveX controls, as a means to minimize any potential threat to their system.

(Credit:
Chord Electronics)

But that’s not to say Chord doesn’t also cater to the consumer high-end market. The CPA 3000 preamplifier and SPM 1050 power amplifier are the latest designs. When I was an audio salesman I sold Chord and I can tell you that even before I played the components a lot of customers were drawn to the products for their looks. Each chassis is machined from solid aluminum to provide rigid foundation for the circuitry and besides, I just wish more high-end products looked this good.

Chord Electronics aren’t exactly a household brand name, but the company has a strong presence in the pro sound field. The British company’s electronics have been used at George Lucas’ Skywalker Sound, BBC, Abbey Road, Sony NY, Decca, Quad, Dolby Labs, Toshiba-EMI Japan, MCA Studios, CBC, and The Royal Opera House London.

The CPA 3000 is the newest of Chord’s new generation preamplifiers. Utilizing innovative techniques and technology from the highly successful CPA 5000 reference preamplifier, the CPA 3000 features Chord’s Ultra High Frequency power supplies and an ultra low noise circuit to give the very best noise floor performance.

The Blu/DAC 64 CD player.

The SPM 1050 stereo power amplifier Chord’s latest low distortion amplifier circuitry and proprietary power MOSFETs, so the SPM 1050 can drive difficult loudspeaker loads with clarity and precision. The amplifier delivers 200 watts per channel into 8 ohm speakers.

The CPA 3000 retails for $12,300 and the SPM 1050, $9300; check with Chord’s US importer, Bluebird Music Limited to learn more.

While MyPunchBowl was one of the first of these services to really embrace that people using these services share their party media elsewhere, Coordinatr takes the process a step further by giving everyone with access to the event page a special tag to use. Adding that tag to photos (on Flickr) and videos (on YouTube) will automatically add them to the community page without requiring anyone with administrative access to the event to have to link up content manually.

There are all sorts of notifications options for Coordinatr. All of them can be toggled through various e-mail addresses and even SMS text messages to various phones. (click to enlarge)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Besides media sharing (usually an afterthought when the hangover wears off), the core part of the service–inviting and adding friends, is all handled through Plaxo, which lets you plug in your e-mail credentials and nab contacts without having to create an invite in each e-mail service. Pretty standard stuff really, but Coordinatr is smart enough to let you create custom groups of friends from those contacts that you can send out quick invites en masse.

Those same people on your quick lists can also elect to sign up to a mobile notification service that lets you send out SMS notifications, be it a quick location change or other important information. If I were to go back in time to my high school days, I could see this being a helpful way alert the rest of my fellow partygoers if the cops had just shown up.

At first glance I was quick to dismiss Coordinatr as a late entrant to the events planning game, but it brings to the table a few handy features that innovate the space. Whether that’s enough to push it into people’s minds when they’re planning events might be a stretch. I often run into a lot of resistance urging some of my friends to try out some of the newer events services we write about. Many are simply ingrained in old systems such as Evite, with too much fear to try some of the next generation planning services like Socializr, MyPunchbowl, and Crushr to avoid confusing their guests.

The best way going forward may simply be a convergence app for all of these events services, similar to what we’ve seen with tools like FriendFeed, Profileactic, et al. People want one place to view all this information, and there’s still not a service that does it.

Your party start page has your events, plus events your friends are taking part in. (note: we'd never have a Webware party on a Monday)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

As Apple announced results that beat expectations, Microsoft had its first ever year-over-year dip in sales .

As Apple announced a billion app downloads, Microsoft gritted its molars with a view to finally shaking a little of the smugness from Apple’s chops.

So you might be wondering, as you sip your weekend cocktail and ponder why the NBA playoffs are even longer than the regular season, just how much each company’s advertising might have contributed to these slightly diverse results.

In recent weeks, Microsoft has turned to a strategy of death by a thousand cuts (or, well, at least two) on the Apple brand. Macs are expensive. They’re cool for drooling fools. Oh, and did we mention they’re expensive?

While Apple has kept on steadily associating Microsoft with turgid, virus-infested slop made by the poorly dressed and pitiful.

It could have been a contender. Is the advertising to blame?

(Credit: CC Robert Nelson/Flickr)

But the difference between Apple and Microsoft advertising–and their brands–can only be told partially through these campaigns. The John Hodgman/Justin Long nipple-tweaking campaign is merely a portion of Apple’s advertising. It doesn’t define the brand. It enhances one aspect of it.

On the other hand, because Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” campaign is aggressive and timely, it could become the only advertising output by which the brand is defined: We’re cheaper, we’re angry, and we’re just not going to take it any more.

Microsoft unfortunately abdicated from giving its brand lasting positive emotional values when it walked away from the potentially forward-thinking and moving “Where Do You Want To Go Today?” campaign in 1996.

For reasons many, varied, and probably political, the company never found a campaign to better it. Advertising came and went. Consistency was non-existent. Contrast that with even the Hodgman/Long ads–they maintain the clean white backdrop enjoyed by so many other Apple ads. Whatever they say, they say Apple immediately.

If you asked anyone in the wider beyond to tell you about just one striking piece of Microsoft brand advertising in the last 13 years, you might find them looking as if they’re trying to recall the name of their twelfth one-night stand.

In fact, the most memorable and, in my view, brilliant effort since then, was the second Seinfeld and Gates ad. Again, Microsoft walked away far too quickly.

In that same period, the Apple brand seems to have gained a strength that not everyone might have predicted. But how much is simply down to Apple’s advertising?

It depends what you call advertising. Apple’s whole culture is built around the understanding that its very best advertising isn’t TV spots or print ads. It’s the products.

Apple products are seen far more often than any of the company’s ads. They can be admired, touched, played, and stroked. And the majority are visually striking.

The majority of Microsoft’s products don’t enjoy the same quality of exposure. And certainly not the same quality of design. Which means the onus on Microsoft’s advertising should be to create far more drama and positive emotion around the brand. It hasn’t happened.

The onus on Apple’s advertising is largely to say: “Look at this. Isn’t it cute? And cool. Apple? Of course, it’s Apple. Who else did you think it was? Toshiba?”

Many of Apple’s ads are nothing more than simple product demonstrations. Beautifully executed, celebrating their own simplicity, with often superbly chosen music. But still simple product demonstrations.

As different products are launched, each ad adds to the style and simplicity of the whole brand. And the values that Apple embraces–simplicity and style being just two–are ones that last through time. They matter to the customer.

It is difficult to name two Microsoft campaigns that actually built on each other. It is difficult to name two Microsoft campaigns that even reflected the same spirit, the same ethos, the same sense of a defined brand.

In fact, when Microsoft has been involved with brilliant pieces of work–such as this example for
XBox (and, yes, I know this one was banned)- the viewer would be hard-pressed to feel that XBox is anything to do with Microsoft at all. There isn’t even a Microsoft logo anywhere near it.

Can one imagine Apple launching any product, in any category, without its advertising identifying it, tonally and visually, as being an Apple product?

In the end, Microsoft, a brand that has considerable strength in the marketplace, seems to have become something of a diffused, defused blur in projecting its image. Microsoft built a business machine. But its brand advertising became like your demented auntie at Christmas: there, but not there.

Perhaps
Windows 7 will be launched with a campaign that will lift the spirits and entice the parts that Microsoft advertising has mostly failed to reach for quite some time. Perhaps.

However, somewhere, somehow, the potential strengths of the Microsoft brand have not been projected by advertising. There seems to have been no consistent strategy, no sense, even, of what emotional values the brand should represent.

And now a company that has such a large market share is playing image catch-up. Which is really quite odd.

As I’m occasionally reminded, MySQL didn’t start out as open source. In fact, MySQL’s original license was very similar to what it is trying to achieve today: Free for noncommercial use, but not-so-free for commercial use. It didn’t decide to go open source (GPL) until 1999.

So for those of us that get caught up in MySQL’s decision to keep some extensions closed to paid subscribers, perhaps a refresher course in MySQL history will make it seem a bit less shocking. (Also be sure to check out the early 2001 brouhaha over trademark violations surrounding MySQL.org. Fascinating stuff.)

With that said, there’s an ongoing tension between commercialization and adoption that MySQL (and all commercial open-source projects) have to manage. As a friend noted in an email to me yesterday:

Remember that Monty [co-founder of MySQL] chose to go open source only after the world totally ignored his work. There is a real value that goes along with being open source that lends itself well to adoption. If you have to pay, then that will deter adoption of immature products in ways that it won’t with free products.

His take on Monty’s reasoning is a bit strong, and I don’t agree that MySQL had been ignored, but still he has a point: Open sourcing one’s code can lead to far greater adoption in a short period of time than proprietary source.

The question, however, remains for all open-source projects: Is it fair or productive to close off the code after open source has made it popular?

It’s not as if the grass is brilliantly green on the commercialization side of the fence, either, as my friend goes on to point out:

This is the crux of the MySQL/Sun commercialization problem: They can’t make the enterprise version diverge or they lose the adoption benefit, and enterprise sales are still long, high ceremony and costly.

Perhaps a little empathy, rather than blame, is therefore in order for the MySQL management team as they try to figure out how to trade in some of MySQL’s popularity for a bit more cash. It’s a fair desire but it’s by no means obvious that closing off some extensions will accomplish this. The MySQL team is experimenting, as they’ve said. Let’s cut them a little slack (while still remaining open-mouthed and open-minded).

Commercializing open source is a tricky balancing act, as open-source Funambol’s name suggests (It means “tightrope walker”). For MySQL, it’s a “tightrope” it has been walking for more than 10 years, which decade has seen the company on both sides of the open source/proprietary divide.

Ultimately, the only thing we know is that Marten, Monty, Zack, and team mean well and generally do well. They seem to balance better than most.

The firm now projects that 2008 online ad spending in the U.S. will be $25.8 billion, down slightly from the $27.5 billion it had forecast for 2008 in October.

The growth rate for online ads, which was nearly 35 percent in 2006 and 25 percent last year, is expected to be 23 percent this year, then drop to around 16 percent or 17 percent for a few years until rising to 24 percent in 2012, when online video advertising is expected to boom amid a larger economic recovery, the report says.

The report, titled “U.S. Online Advertising Spending: Resilience in a Dicey Economy,” will be released later this week. It reflects 2007 online advertising figures from the major portals, which receive 57 percent of the total spending in the U.S., according to eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman.

“Over the next few years, (there are) indications of continued economic problems,” he said. “Paid search will be hurt as consumers shop less.”

In addition, popular sites on the Internet have had difficulty monetizing their traffic; “for example, the most popular sites in social networking where the amount of traffic and the amount of ad dollars don’t match up. Maybe they won’t,” Hallerman said.

“While a foundering economy will certainly affect online ad spending, accounting for the revised estimate, the Internet will support continued ad spending growth even as other media may falter,” an eMarketer statement says.

Still, there are positive growth rates for online ads and “far more” than any other media because advertisers will want to spend money on more measurable marketing, Hallerman says.

(Credit:
eMarketer)

Nikon D80

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Photography Bay seems to be cranking on its reputation as rumor central for the photography community. In addition to today’s intimations about new Canon dSLRs, and a suggestion that Sony is discontinuing the DSLR-A700, the blog deconstructed a post on DPReview to hint at a new midrage Nikon full-frame dSLR targeted to compete with the Canon EOS 5D, and quotes speculation from bythom that a Nikon D90 and D3X will appear some time between May 12 and June 16. Nikon USA’s comment: “You will be absolutely the first to be NDA’d if there is any legitimate product news coming from Nikon. Until then, everything you see about new products is an unsubstantiated rumor, and as you know, we’re unable to comment on rumors.”

The D80 is certainly ripe for replacement, and “D3X” might make a nice name for a midrange full-frame model.

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

Electronic Arts’ much anticipated evolution game, Spore hits store shelves Sunday in North America, and for those that have been on the project since the beginning, it has been a long road from concept to completion.

The game’s creator, Will Wright, who is famous for previous games like SimCity and The Sims said recently that the game has been seven years in the making, meaning the project was getting under way not long after The Sims launched and became the best-selling PC game of all time.

Wright has talked at length about how Spore’s origins lie in the SETI project and other flights of his fancy.

“The original concept was sort of a toy galaxy you could fly around and explore,” Wright told me last month. “As we thought about, it became apparent that evolution was a very important component. Some of the very first prototypes involved how you would move around and visualize the galaxy.”

In the highly anticipated lead-up to the Spore’s release from EA studio Maxis, in Emeryville, Calif., almost all the attention has been on the game itself or on its Creature Creator, which gives users an easy and sophisticated way to create complex beasts and which was made available in June as a free download.

But for many people, an equally exciting element has been the series of prototypes available for free download on the Spore Web site, each of which provides a look at the origins of a small piece of the larger game.

In fact, the prototypes were a crucial part of making Spore a reality. For example, since the procedural animation of the creatures in the game is one of its most-heralded elements, it’s notable that before the system was ever built into the game, it started as a prototype.

“The earliest prototypes were making strange topology creatures and seeing if we could teach the computer to make them move plausibly, and later, show emotion and behavior,” Wright said. “We had to find out whether the project was doable or not, or if some part of it wasn’t doable, where we have to scale it back.”

The first programmer on the Spore team was a Maxis veteran named Jason Shankel. Prior to joining Wright on his evolution project, he’d been working on a project known as SimMars, which was essentially a Mars terraforming game that was supported financially by NASA before the plug was finally pulled.

‘GonzagoGL’ is the last of the prototyping systems built for ‘Spore.’ The prototype, which took nine months and five full-time programmers, ‘places the player in an environment with predators, prey, shelter and vegetation.’

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

“Even though SimMars never quite jelled for us, much of the technology we developed there made it into the early efforts on Spore,” Shankel said. “We had systems for simulating planetary climates and things like that.”

All told, Maxis produced between 30 and 40 prototypes, of which Shankel said between 10 and 20 are “unique and interesting.”

And they’re essential for the development of games like Spore because, as Wright noted, they can help the designers figure out exactly what works and what doesn’t as they move forward with a larger project.

“Game design prototypes are small, lightweight applications designed to explore specific questions or risks in game development,” Shankel said. “You can think of them as screen tests in film, or sketches in art.”

The value of making the prototypes is that they provide a way to inexpensively test out whether an idea works or doesn’t. As Shankel points out, the creation of a large-scale game like Spore is tremendously expensive, and there’s not much room for error in a finished product. But along the way, there’s plenty of opportunity to break out small ideas into prototypes.

“Prototypes can be developed by small teams working rapidly,” he said. “We don’t typically worry bout things like bullet-proof stability, cross-platform issues or compatibility across multiple PC configurations. They’re just little toys that help us decide what we’ll really want to do when we roll out the big guns.”

The practice of prototyping along these lines is not unique to Spore. But this project differs from most in that the folks at Maxis and EA decided to make some of them available to the public.

Currently, there are 11 available on the Spore site, and among them, they explore things like “the behavior of large bodies of water on uneven terrain,” “the evolution of complex behavior from simple components,” “a SimCity-like simulation of the spread of life and culture across a planetary surface,” “gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud” and more.

Asked how his team decided what prototypes to build, Shankel said the answer was quite direct.

‘ParticleMan,’ another ‘Spore’ prototype, ’simulates gravitational attraction between particles in a cloud. This system was used to study such gravitational dynamics as orbits, nebula formation, star formation and particle streams from sources like pulsars and black holes.’

(Credit:
Electronic Arts/Maxis)

“In the first phase, which I think of as the research phase, our criterion was simple,” he said. “Build what Will (Wright) wants.”

Of course, he added, sometimes Wright didn’t know exactly what he wanted and the work then tended to follow the logical conclusions of discussions.

“What I tried to do was just listen to the things that he thought were interesting,” Shankel said, “think about how to synthesize two or three of his biggest ideas and present them back to him. This was the era that gave us (the prototypes) ‘ParticleMan,’ ‘GasLight,’ ‘WaterBoy’ and ‘BIOME.’ In each of these cases, we were modeling a specific dynamic that Will was interested in exploring, such as gravitational systems, star formation, wave propagation and galaxy formation.”

Then they’d move onto the second phase.

There, he explained, the team directed the prototypes more towards elements of game play that would hopefully make it into Spore.

“In this phase, we had more people on the team, and we had a definite goal of creating a game design complete enough to enter production.”

The higher the degree of uncertainty in a game design element, the more need for prototyping, Shankel said.

“Most prototypes were developed by one or two programmers (in) a few weeks to a few months,” he explained. But “GonzagoGL,” the last of the Spore game play prototypes, which confronts the player with predators, prey, vegetation and shelter, required as many as five full-time programmers and nine months of development time.

“‘GonzagoGL’ was a bridge application,” Shankel said, “between the prototyping stage and full Spore development. In these prototypes, we began to see the elements of the final Spore design first start to coalesce.”

While a good deal of actual science, like exploration of the dynamics of cosmic and biological systems, went into the prototypes, Shankel said that focusing on core game play was more important.”

“We don’t subject ourselves to anything like the rigor or real scientific research,” he said. “Scientists are interested in what’s real, not what’s fun. But at Maxis, we think science can be a lot of fun…What we’re really interested in showing is how dynamic, how alive, many of these systems are. We look at those amazing pictures from the Hubble (telescope)…and we want to show not just how those cosmic structures look in snapshots, but how they evolve and change over time. The galaxy isn’t like an oil painting, it’s more like a weather system. The galaxy is alive.”

Indeed, the “BIOME” prototype is based on research into the evolution of the spiral arms of galaxies, where Shankel said there are many competing theories on how they form.

While it might seem that the prototypes would eventually make their way directly into Spore, Shankel said that’s not the case.

“Prototypes are intended to be throw-away code,” he said, “and we intentionally avoid developing them in our production framework. We need the freedom in prototype code to put in ugly hacks or to tear things apart and reconnect them in ways you wouldn’t do in a production codebase.”

Still, “GonzagoGL” actually did make it into the full game, and Shankel said that’s the prototype he’s most proud of.

“Here, we felt that we’d seen so much good clarity come out of previous, smaller prototypes,” he said. “It was a real validation of the process and it was confirmed when our game play development teams were able to hit the ground running when we entered full production.”

For Shankel, the time spent on Spore represents nearly 20 percent of his life, and as a result, he is hopeful that in the prototypes, Spore fans will get some insight into how the game was made.

But another gratifying element of leading the prototyping project has been working with Maxis development interns.

“Prototyping is an ideal project for interns because there’s so much individual contribution, the time windows are short and it’s easy to avoid getting bogged down in the bug-fixing cycle,” he said. “I (also) regularly speak to college students who want to know how they can fill out their portfolios and, after seeing how our interns responded to this part of the project, I always advise them to develop prototypes of their ideas.”

And perhaps more important, he said, he sees prototyping as crucial to the evolution of the video game industry itself.

“We’ve had a renaissance in production over the last decade and I’m anticipating a renaissance in design to follow,” Shankel said. “Just as advancements in hardware-accelerated graphics and 3D engine design have elevated our technical quality, so too will advancements in prototyping and other areas of creative collaboration elevate our design quality.”

Personally, I think “La La Love You” by the Pixies (2:43) is closer to the ideal song, but my own collection does reveal a remarkable number of good songs at 2:42. Without further ado, my 2:42 Muxtape.

The Beatles–”Back in the U.S.S.R.”, The White Album

Animal Collective–”Leaf House”, Sung Tongs

Pavement–”Gold Soundz”, Crooked Rain Crooked Rain

Jack Logan–”Just Go Away”, Bulk

Frank Black–”Big Red”, Teenager of the Year

Magnetic Fields–”A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”, 69 Love Songs

Neko Case–”Fox Confessor Brings the Flood”, Fox Confessor…

Johnny Cash–”Folsom Prison Blues”, Johnny Cash At Folsom Prison

X–”Motel Room In My Bed”, Beyond & Back

The Pretenders–”Stop Your Sobbing”, The Pretenders

Otis Redding–”Ole Man Trouble”, The Best Of Otis Redding

Elmer Bernstein–”The Street (Main Theme)”, Crime Jazz: Music in the First Degree

(Note: some of these songs were recorded from an LP, so while their “official” length on the CD may not be 2:42, and they may not have registered as 2:42 on Muxtape, they all showed up as 2:42 in my library.)

My Zune library has 23 songs clocking in at 2:42.

(Credit:
Screenshot)