intoqinzhou.com

The company also has a paid support line. Smart.

It's like a custom manual for your particular home entertainment setup.

I enjoy wiring things together and tinkering until everything works, but the consumer electronics challenges that I like working through would probably send most people back to Best Buy with their purchases. But even for CE geeks like me, there is good advice in Wirewize.

I did not find all my AV equipment listed in the Wirewize database, which did not surprise me since some of my gear is no longer sold, but I was surprised to find some manufacturers left out entirely. The site is still young, though.

Bonus tip for the Wirewize team: Talk to Logitech. Both your service and Logitech’s popular Harmony remote controls require that the user enter the inventory of their AV gear. It’d be great if you could coordinate, for those people who have Harmonys and want to also use Wirewize.

Good idea alert: A newish site, Wirewize, tells you how to connect the gizmos in your home entertainment center. You tell it what you have, and it tells you which cables you need and then, very specifically, where to plug them.

Wirewize makes money by selling cables, currently through Circuit City. I give the service big props for not pushing those ridiculously overpriced Monster Cables, although I would still chafe at paying $45 for the 100 feet of speaker wire the system recommended to me. You can get the same wire at Radio Shack for $20, and probably for even less at a hardware store.

Monster would be a natural to buy this company, of course. But I hope it doesn’t. Come to think of it, CNET should buy it. Let me look into that.

It’s a great idea, since most entertainment systems are unique in one way or another, and the manuals that come with AV gear rarely cover all the bases, not to mention that they’re written at varying levels of clarity. To remind you of that, the service also provides the PDF manuals for your products.

Via: WayTooEarly. There’s also a video pitch on Center Networks.

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I’m not paranoid but I’m with Nick Carr on this one: we’ll never know just what is being monitored, or how, or why.

All we have right now is the fact that the authority has yet to be granted to monitor such networks. Again, I’m not a privacy freak but I’m a wee bit concerned once the government starts to spend an inordinate amount of time looking inward rather than outward.

That’s a bit worrisome.

Why does this matter? Consider:

It’s partly of concern because it’s only a matter of time before the power is expanded to monitor all domestic networks. After all (and as the article points out), much of the most dangerous Internet activity would be against private enterprises. Bringing down or stealing data from Visa, American Express, and other such companies could do much more damage than launching a denial of service attack against the Environmental Protection Agency.

Allowing a spy agency to monitor domestic networks is worrisome, said James X. Dempsey, policy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “We’re concerned that the NSA is claiming such a large role over the security of unclassified systems,” he said. “They are a spy agency as well as a communications security agency. They operate in total secrecy. That’s not necessary and not the most effective way to protect unclassified systems.”

Earlier this month President Bush signed a directive that gives the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies to monitor Internet traffic to protect all government computer systems. As the Washington Post reports, this is causing particular concern because the NSA’s focus has traditionally been on overseas activity, not domestic.

Also in the works is application localization for different countries. Facebook’s grand scheme is to use specialized markup tags to let users localize applications by language without having to do any of the translation themselves. The result would be making one application work in every country Facebook can be found. The company has already been using a similar system on its own international sites by having users do the heavy lifting when it comes to translation. Morin didn’t give a time frame on this feature, but noted that it would come later on.

As it stands Morin and company seem to be quite happy with Facebook’s open yet closed platform that’s has more than 300,000 applications. Morin nostalgically noted that when he was first brainstorming the platform project with others on the Facebook team, he had hoped they’d get 5,000 applications in the first year, and had no idea it would grow to be what it is today.

Coming back to what Morin said about OpenSocial, I honestly don’t expect Facebook to join the newly created OpenSocial Foundation or movement anytime soon. The company has a very powerful upcoming strategy of letting people spend money quickly and easily with micropayments (a la iTunes), and spreading the Facebook’s presence internationally with the help of users who are willing to do the work for them when it comes to translation.

Morin shrugged the question off saying simply “It’s pretty interesting. We’ve made some pretty interesting commitments to openness as well.” Not to cut off the chances of Facebook joining the project in the future, Morin followed by saying that Facebook would continue to “evaluate OpenSocial and Facebook’s potential place in it.” Audience members let out a few sighs and Morin ended the Q&A session immediately.

Opening up Facebook user to data, or giving up the system that’s clearly been working very well isn’t in the company’s interest at the moment. In the meantime it’s worth watching developers of both platforms closely, as they’ve got two big platforms to launch applications, and the opportunity to attract users and make money is only getting bigger.

There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook’s development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.

An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of the largest social networks not a part of OpenSocial, an initiative that was designed to compete with Facebook’s system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API.

So what’s next for the platform? Commerce. More specifically, integrating a payment system into the developer tools so application developers would be able to get cash from users instead of just advertisers. Morin says the tools will be in the hands of developers within the next two quarters. Facebook users have already been christened into the idea of giving Facebook money with its first-party gifts service, which lets users spend real world money on virtual gifts friends can display on their walls. The service represents a very early play on what developers would be able to do with their applications using upcoming commerce tools.

Heavy hitters in the renewable-energy business have scheduled a press conference on Tuesday to publicly lobby for long-sought policies, arguing that the industry and U.S. competitiveness are at risk.

Meanwhile, President Bush is scheduled to address WIREC conference attendees on Wednesday morning.

If the industry isn’t developed, “green collar” jobs will go to other countries, and American consumers may end up importing more renewable-energy products than they already do, ACORE argues.

The American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) organized the press conference, which will include well-known energy investors and business people from General Electric, Credit Suisse, Google, and clean-tech venture capital firm Nth Power. It will be held at the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC), which is hosted by the U.S. government.

Called in to make a public case for renewing the investment tax credit and production tax credit at the press conference are: Credit Suisse Vice Chairman John Cavalier; energy venture capitalist Nancy Floyd from Nth Power; the head of GE’s renewable-energy financing division, Kevin Walsh; former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman; and Dan Reicher, director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org, who is also co-chair of ACORE.

The renewable-energy industry has been thwarted at least two times in efforts to renew an existing federal tax credit for renewable-energy projects that is set to expire at the end of 2008. Projects include solar energy, wind, biofuels, and other renewable sources.

Even the head of the Solar Energy Industry Association of America, Rhone Resch, predicted that paying for tax incentives by trying to pull back oil company tax breaks is unlikely to succeed.

The House earlier this month passed another bill which, like previous attempts, proposes paying for the tax credit by closing an existing tax incentive on oil and gas companies. The Senate has twice failed to pass the measure, and President Bush threatened to veto such a measure late last year.

Why? Because they are losing money.

At an investor conference last month, Resch said that the solar industry is trying to create a coalition of utilities, homebuilders, and environmentalists to get a long-term set of financial rules in place. Worst case scenario is to try to get a one-year extension at the end of this year, he said.

The president signed an energy bill with large incentives for the production of biofuels, but at this point it’s unlikely he’ll have good news for renewable-power backers.

But for all the high-powered pressure, prospects are not looking very good.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen called the policy uncertainty “really embarrassing.”

And at this point, industrialists appear to be getting downright irate over the prospect of that tax credit lapsing.

ACORE sent a letter to Congress, signed by 500 “industry leaders,” calculating that 42 gigawatts of renewable-energy projects are in jeopardy because of the uncertainty around the investment tax credit and another production tax credit. That’s enough power for 16 million homes.

(Credit:
Dave Rosenberg)
In a recent interview with Laptop Mag, ASUS CEO Jerry Shen provided some highlights of the existing product sales and what we’ll see in the future.

Full interview on Laptopmag.com

Kevin's hand vs. Eee PC

The future includes laptops starting at $250, touch screens and more.

With the exception of some early battery issues, I still love my Eee and use it almost every day to read news and such while watching TV. It’s incredibly stable and easy to use, making it the ideal machine for new computer users (and your parents.)

• Four million Eee PCs have been sold to date. He plans to reach the goal of 5 million Eee PC sales by the end of 2008.
• Touch-enabled Eee PCs are on the way and will be here by early 2009. Shen didn’t share the details of the form factor, though he said they are exploring a convertible mode and a regular laptop form for touch-enabled Eee PCs. They will also run
Windows 7 as early as mid-2009.
• Several skus of the Eee PC give customers numerous choices and allow them to find the Eee PC that best fits their needs.
• The Eee Family continues to grow with the EeeTop this month (that has an Easy Mode for Windows XP) and more products that will be announced at CES in January 2009.

Sinnot has since closed down the Web site to avoid receiving any more of the e-mails.

At one point, Sinnott received information about a presidential flight, so he contacted the Air Force again and an official, as expected, “went nuts,” he told the BBC.

Gary Sinnott had created a Web site, Mildenhall.com, in the 1990s to promote his hometown. But not long after that, he reportedly began to be bombarded with e-mails from Air Force members who were trying to contact people on the base, according to the BBC.

The U.S. Air Force accidentally sent e-mails that were meant to go to its base in Mildenhall, England, to a tourism Web site with a similar address.

Sinnott contacted Air Force officials, who told him not to be concerned about it and assured him they would tell their staff to use the correct address. But what started off as some personal e-mails and jokes later devolved into some pretty classified information, including military procedures.