Overheard - Energy Star 5.0

Only 25 percent of PCs could qualify for Energy Star 5.0 compliance. Andy Patrizio,  Dell Goes Green With Energy Star 5.0 Push

The changes from Energy Star 4.0 to 5.0 are in three main areas:

- minimum power supply efficiency was raised from 80 percent to 85 percent.

- the formulation of criteria changed to get a measure of annualized kilowatt hour power usage based on typical energy consumption metrics.

- the AC power conversion rises to 87 percent efficiency.

Overheard - Google’s patent for Ringback Advertising

A patent assigned to Google describes how the search giant can monetize its Voice service: play ads while a call is dialing or placed on hold. John Timmer, Google patent could bring ads into your phone

The patent application, called “Ringback Advertising,” is assigned to Google. In general terms, it describes a system for delivering ads to any sort of phone system, including IP, cellular, or landline phones. The idea is to place software somewhere within the flow of telephony data that can identify when a given call is not active, then request audio ads for delivery during that time. Although this obviously pairs nicely with Google’s Voice service, there’s no reason it couldn’t be rolled out to telcos that choose to partner with the search giant.

Overheard - Origins of Amazon Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed…Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages.” Jason Pontin, Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.

If you haven’t heard about ChaCha yet, it’s a free voice search service for mobile phones. It’s interesting that one of ChaCha’s investors is Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.  According to marketing literature:

ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2ChaCha™ or text questions to ChaCha (242242™) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-performance opportunities for advertisers to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations.

Aha! So maybe Mechanical Turk isn’t so much about enterprise search — it’s really about mobile voice search!  Makes sense. Amazon would have a revenue stream by serving highly targeted ads along with the search results.

Overheard - JeOS and VM sprawl

“If you are feeling the pangs associated with VM sprawl, I strongly suggest a healthy slug of JeOS each morning and once again in the afternoon to clear your system of the painful bloating that is brought on by virtualizing the general purpose OS.” Billy Marshall Is JeOS a Tonic for VM Sprawl?

JeOS is an acronym for “just enough operating system.”  It’s pretty much what it sounds like and it’s handy for building virtual appliances.  You include just the parts of the operating system that are required to support a particular application. The idea is to make the appliance smaller and more stable than it would be if it was running under a full-sized general purpose operating system.  It’s pronounced “juice.”

Overheard - application streaming

Centralizing the desktop image does not magically protect it from viruses, intrusion attempts, system compromises, or operational failures. It does, however, allow for rapid recovery or return to homeostasis if an event warrants such action. Amrit Williams, Client-Side Virtualization Part III: HAL 9000, Hosted Virtual Desktops, and the Death Star

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seems to be the generic umbrella term that gets slapped on any initiative that involves centralized desktop management. There’s a lot of lingo being tossed around. Today’s Word of the Day is application streaming. In this distribution model, software is housed on a centralized server and is streamed to the client upon demand.

Overheard - Computer hardware visual reference

“This idea grew out of the need of a visual aid for customers while I worked at CompUSA.” Sonic84, Artist’s comments

Today we’re featuring Sonic84’s excellent fast reference chart for hardware.  He’s created an illustrated cheatsheet for RAM, hard drives, ports, slots and connectors.  Sonic told me he took most of the photos with a Canon Powershot A630. Sonic says “the thing has a great macro.”   When asked where he found all the hardware, he said:

“I collect old computers and for a while my local Goodwill had a lot of vintage stuff going through it. Combined with the techshop I worked in, I had a lot of diverse hardware at my disposal.  Sometimes I’d find hardware eBay.  I had to do that when I was searching for rare stuff like a PAC418 socket and 32Bit RAMBUS chip.”

Overheard - Augmented reality in Amsterdam

“If you want to inject real wow factor into your mobile campaigns, you want augmented reality (AR). The customer points a camera phone at a barcode image on a billboard or magazine, and they see a 3D image – of your new product, perhaps – appear on the screen, while the real world remains in the background.” From a white paper at MobiThinking

Augmented reality - an overlay technology for mobile devices. It’s being tested in Amsterdam. You look through your phone’s camera and see information about nearby stores or restaurants, ATM machines, etc. Very cool!

When I used to think about the future of mobile marketing, I envisioned a time when my phone would be spammed with promotional text messages IN ADDITION to emails. Augmented reality paints a much nicer picture. It’s pull, not push.

So what’s the worst thing that can happen?  When I use the app on my iPhone, I’ll see a screen jammed-packed with text or hear a bunch of audio messages all at one time? I can live with that.  It’s a much better prospect than hearing my phone constantly dinging as spam comes in.

From the L.A. Times

When Apple announced the addition of a compass to the iPhone 3GS, shortsighted onlookers responded with a yawn. Yay, we can find magnetic north.

But iPhone app developers quickly saw an opportunity, and a new breed of “augmented reality” apps are about to be born.

Holding the phone in front of you, locations are plotted on a live view of the world in relation to where you’re standing. The apps combine the phone’s key features — camera, GPS, compass and Internet connectivity — to create a sort of heads-up display reminiscent of first-person shooter video games.

Overheard - Defining parameters for data encryption

From 201 CMR 17.00: STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF RESIDENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH / Definitions section

“Encrypted,” transformation of data through the use of a 128-bit or higher algorithmic process, or other means or process approved by the office of consumer affairs and business regulation that is at least as secure as such algorithmic process, into a form in which there is a low probability of assigning meaning without use of a confidential process or key.

Overheard - BIOS attack

“Until now, common wisdom has been that the large variety of BIOS implementations means it is unfeasible for attackers to create portable, widespread BIOS malware. Core’s researchers proved this wrong.” Sherri Davidoff, BIOS can become a source of malware

According to Core’s CTO, Ivan Arce, the researchers identified a specific section of BIOS code — a decompression routine — used in the majority of motherboards. BIOS code is stored compressed so that it takes up less space, and code must be decompressed before it runs. The decompression routine is exactly the same in many different motherboards. This gives attackers a single snippet of code that they can target in order to compromise many different BIOSes. The result? For the first time, researchers showed that BIOS-level malware can practically infect a wide variety of hardware.

Overheard - Distributed denial of service attack

There are a lot of statements being made by people who are not involved in analyzing these attacks, and a lot of inappropriate rhetoric about ‘cyberwar.’ Dave Dittrich as quoted in Latest DDoS attacks extremely unsophisticated, experts say

DDoS attacks were aimed at several U.S. government sites this past week, including sites for the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Transportation.  The New York Stock Exchange, the Nasdaq electronic exchange, the Washington Post and South Korean government sites were also attacked.

Researchers from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) and the Korea Internet Security Center are busy analyzing the traffic packets and it looks like there might be a “command and control server” out there giving orders to a zombie army.  If that’s true, it should be easier to catch whoever is behind the attacks. Hopefully.