Common Paradox Tech Blog

Looking ahead to the new year, Asus plans on unveiling three new business notebook lineups, the B, PL, and P series. And just for good measure, the company will also introduce a series of all-in-one PCs.

Starting at the top of the alphabet, the B series will consist of high-end models and include a docking station and unique industrial designs to attract enterprise customers. At the other end of the spectrum, entry-level models will comprise the P series, while mid-range models and ultra-thin notebooks will make up the PL series.

And then there’s the all-in-one series, for which Asus has lofty plans. The company says it will use its touchscreen-based Eee Top series to slice into the enterprise desktop market.

adeelarshad82 writes “The Federal Communications Commission has released an outline of what might be included in its upcoming national broadband plan, and encouraging competition was a top priority. The FCC statement said ‘Competition drives innovation and provides consumer choice. Finding ways to better use existing assets, including Universal Service, rights-of-way, spectrum, and others, will be essential to the success of the plan. The limited government funding that is available for broadband would be best used when leveraged with the private sector.’ The stimulus plan provided $7.2 billion in broadband grants and $350 million for a broadband mapping program, but also directed the FCC to deliver a national broadband plan to Congress by February 17, 2010.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This video of the Festo CyberKite shows exactly how we’ll arrive at our dystopian future. Robots will do our jobs and play our games. Eventually, completely devoid of feeling, we’ll all…say, look at that kite go! [IEEE Spectrum]

Lexta writes with an interesting tidbit from IEEE Spectrum: “‘Karsten Nohl, chief research scientist with H4RDW4RE, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based security research firm, is mounting what could be the most ambitious attempt yet to compromise the GSM phone system.’ The intended approach is to create an open source project to spread the computation of a giant look-up table across more than 80 machines. Interestingly, they’ve openly stated that nVidia’s CUDA technology will be used to execute parallel elements of the problem on GPUs as well.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in July, “Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers” presented 8 basic techniques for adding popular features to the front end of a WordPress-powered website. The premise was that WordPress has become an elegant, lightweight content management solution that offers the fundamentals out of the box, atop a modular core that offers incredible potential in the hands of a capable developer.

WordPress does not try to be an “everything to everyone” CMS right out of the box. Many systems do an average job incorporating 99% of what the potential CMS market might need, even if the last 15-20% is used only by a fraction of the market and adds considerably to the system’s overall “heft” (or bloat). At the other end of the spectrum are completely custom solutions that are finely tailored to exact needs, at the cost of reinventing wheels like polished content editing with media management and version control.

That previous “Power Tips” entry scratched the surface, covering a handful of API calls mixed in with some simple PHP code and configuration tips intended to help beginner WordPress template developers kick their game up a notch. This article takes power tips to the next level, expanding on some of the topics in the first article, and introducing more advanced techniques and methods for customizing not only the front end, but the content management (or back end) experience.

Somewhere on the App Store spectrum, between the travel phrasebooks and those apps that replace your mouth with a slightly weirder mouth, you’ll find iLingual, an app that steals your lips, and uses them to speak three different languages.

Here’s how it works: you snap a picture of a mouth—yours, your girlfriend’s, or just a photo from a magazine—which iLingual then analyzes and converts for animation. Then, you choose a phrase from the app’s 400-strong library, hold your iPhone over your mouth and there, you sort speak French, German or a little bit of Arabic, with a disconcertingly segmented, animated pair of lips. Félicitations!

This really shouldn’t be more useful than a standard prerecorded phrasebook, but it definitely is. Nobody likes tourists, and the genius of iLingual is that by using it, you’re making fun of yourself; you’re giving people something—a small amount of your dignity, or if you’re lucky, a laugh—in exchange for their help. iLingual is a sponsored app, so it’s completely free. [iTunes]

Yesterday we wrote about the soon to launch Google Phone, a Google branded Android phone that we believe will hit the market in early 2010.

Lots of people are saying there’s no way Google will enter the phone market directly and compete with all these handset manufacturers who have bet on Android. Daring Fireball, PC World and IntoMobile are among the doubters. And a lot of people are pointing to a Tom Krazit/CNET article last month that quoted Google’s Andy Rubin: “We’re not making hardware…We’re enabling other people to build hardware,” and “Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would “compete with its customers” by releasing its own phone.”

Normally I’d just point to the fact that many companies deny the existence of products until the day they announce them. Apple scoffed at the notion that they’d ever build a phone until they announced the iPhone, for example. The last thing Google wants is a lot of confusion among handset manufacturers just when those manufacturers are putting the finishing touches on their own Android phones.

But there may be another way Google will argue that they aren’t “competing with customers” by launching their own device – technically, it may not be a phone.

The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.

AT&T announced it’s invested nearly $65 million in upgrading their 3G network in San Francisco through Q3 2009:

“More than ever before, customers look to wireless communications to stay in touch with family, friends and business colleagues,” said Terry Stenzel, AT&T vice president and general manager for Northern California/Reno. “The additional spectrum helps to [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

AT&T Invested $65 Million in 850Mhz 3G Upgrades for San Francisco

Think about your workspace and imagine if your furniture or your desk or cubicle could automatically reconfigure for different applications with a simple wave of the hand. Now check out the reality of Clemson’s Animated Work Environment (AWE).

Essentially, AWE is a programmable wall with varied displays that can switch between six configurations just by activating a proximity sensor. For example, when the wall is hanging overhead like a ceiling, the act of standing up triggers the sensor and instructs the wall to move out of the way. The project is in it’s infancy, but it is easy to see how future applications could lead to a whole range of dynamic, multi-functional furniture that automatically reacts to its environment. [AWE Project via IEEE Spectrum via BotJunkie]

Yesterday, PayPal launched the PayPal X developer platform at its PayPal X Conference. Its goal: to become the medium in which financial transactions occur across the web. The eBay subsidiary hopes to do this by wooing developers into integrating PayPal into their apps.

Today, on the second day of the Innovate conference, the Chief Technology Officer of eBay, Mark Carges, took the stage. While he didn’t make any major announcements, he did reveal that PayPal has a very interesting ambition it hopes to realize, and that Facebook Connect was part of the inspiration. In fact, eBay may soon be challenging Facebook’s sign-in platform.

During his talk, Mark began discussing eBay’s goal to become the “consumer identity provider” of the web. Under the project, which for now seems to be called “PayPal ID,” users can use their PayPal login to identify themselves securely on e-commerce websites and web apps across the spectrum. Unlike Facebook, where you can easily create a fake ID and masquerade as someone else, PayPal ID would not have the same problem.

As to when it will launch: the eBay and PayPal team are currently building the back end of the system as well as speaking with government and regulatory agencies. Sometime next year, PayPal ID should enter testing.

The audience reaction was mixed – some think it makes sense, but others worried that PayPal ID would be too “closed” of a system. Regardless, a PayPal ID system would be big news and pose a direct challenge to Facebook, whose ambitions not only include Facebook Connect, but also focus around making Facebook Credits the payment platform of the web.

PayPal is trying to spread its platform across the web with urgency. It may very well be because of the threat Facebook poses on its business. PayPal ID could be an even bigger weapon than PayPal X in that fight. This could dramatically affect the business of ecommerce.

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: ebay, facebook, facebook connect, paypal