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One More Reason Not to Sell Fake Chips: Prison

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:16:32 +0000

To the list of things including handbags, booze and pharmaceuticals that you can go to jail for counterfeiting, you can now add silicon chips. Today a federal judge in Florida sentenced a woman to three years in prison and fined her $166,000 for selling counterfeit chips around the world to more than 1,000 buyers, among them companies selling equipment to the U.S. Navy. It’s being described as the first federal sentence for selling counterfeit chips.

Stephanie A. McCloskey of Clearwater, Fla., pleaded guilty last November to a federal charge of conspiracy to traffic in counterfeit goods and to commit mail fraud, and ultimately cooperated with authorities. She was charged alongside Shannon L. Wren, now deceased, and together, they were accused of running a company called VisionTech Components LLC that between 2006 and 2010 advertised name-brand, trademark-protected chips on the Web. The chips were imported from China and Hong Kong and were improperly labeled as “military grade.”

The DOJ says that on more than 35 separate occasions, they sold some 59,540 chips worth about $425,000. When customers who bought them complained that the chips were fakes — they didn’t work — McCloskey and Wren took no action.

Fake chips aren’t trivial. The thrust of the problem is that depending on the chip, lives can be at risk. If the fake chip in question is used inside a system that’s supposed to, say, deploy an airbag during a car accident or warn a fighter pilot that a missile has just been fired at his plane, people die.

The charges rang a bell and reminded me of a BusinessWeek story on the subject from 2008. The story, Dangerous Fakes, traces chips that had been taken out of discarded motherboards in China and relabeled and ultimately sold to the defense contractor BAE systems. Some of the companies selling the chips were operated out of residential addresses, which you’d think would have triggered alarm bells somewhere within the Defense Department’s procurement apparatus.

Meanwhile, the DOJ thanked the Semiconductor Industry Association and a bunch of chip companies for helping out with the investigation: STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Intel, National Semiconductor, ON Semiconductor, Freescale Semiconductor, BAE Systems and Raytheon.

(Art via the Museum of Counterfeiting in Paris, which exists.)

Jawbone Nabs $70 Million in a Jammed Box of Funding

Kara Swisher — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:30:07 +0000

Jawbone, the maker of elegant mobile and wireless devices, has added $70 million in funding to its coffers, with a new investment from J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

The San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $170 million, which includes a recent $49 million venture round from high-profile Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz in March.

Jawbone also has raised money from Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and a number of prominent angel investors.

All are making a big bet on consumer electronics, an always dicey arena, and on Jawbone’s innovative products, such as its initial Bluetooth headsets.

The start-up has more recently expanded its offerings to the Jambox Smart Speaker, which has become a fast-selling wireless speaker.

Both have been particularly popular with Apple users, and Jawbone has been prominently featured in its retail stores.

Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman certainly sounds like Apple CEO Steve Jobs when he talks about an all-encompassing digital solution.

“We’re going to get into some new categories of products,” said Rahman, about what he plans to do with the new funding, especially around making smaller, embedded and wearable devices. “We want to be an end-to-end experience.”

While he would not be specific, Rahman said that this area of computing is changing to encompass the entire mobile lives of its consumers.

“We want to leverage the power of the tool in your pocket,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”

Here’s the official press release from Jawbone:

JAWBONE SECURES $70M IN GROWTH FUNDING FROM J.P. MORGAN ASSET MANAGEMENT

Jawbone to Expand its Products and Services for the Mobile Lifestyle

SAN FRANCISCO –- July 12, 2011 –- Jawbone, a leading innovator of products and services for the mobile lifestyle, today announced it has secured $70 million in funding from investors advised by J.P. Morgan Asset Management.

Jawbone is one of the largest privately-held, venture capital-backed consumer electronics companies in the world, and this round brings total investment in Jawbone close to $170 million to date. The funding will allow Jawbone to continue its rapid growth and expand into new markets and categories, building on its successful portfolio of premium mobile products and services.

“We seek to invest in the best high-growth companies,” said Larry Unrein, managing director of J.P. Morgan Asset Management. :Given the widespread adoption of smartphones globally, we are seeing a massive shift in user expectations around having a complete, high-quality and seamless experience wherever they are. Jawbone, with its long-standing expertise in mobile user experience, has been delighting customers by enabling them to get the most out of their smartphones through a combination of cutting-edge technology and great design. We believe Jawbone is poised to be the next great mobile computing company coming out of Silicon Valley.”

“Funding from J.P. Morgan Asset Management is fantastic for us as we continue to rapidly expand our business,” said Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone. “As people’s digital lives become increasingly centered around mobile devices, we see no shortage of opportunities for our technology and products to unlock the potential of a full mobile experience. The support of J.P. Morgan Asset Management will help us be even more aggressive in our pursuit of these opportunities.”

Jawbone’s innovation has resulted in unprecedented demand for its products and services on a global scale. The company is known for leading and disrupting categories with its breakthrough software, strong commitment to design, and award-winning products.

“Jawbone is one of the most important mobile companies with which Sequoia Capital has partnered,” said Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital and Jawbone board member. “Jawbone’s relentless building of great products that consumers love gives the company a unique ability to redefine established markets. We are delighted to have J.P. Morgan Asset Management on board.”

Jawbone first made its mark in the industry by creating an entirely new class of intelligent Bluetooth® headsets, and has successfully expanded its portfolio of products for the past decade. The JAMBOX Smart Speaker™ is one of the best-selling speakers globally, and the recently-launched Jawbone ERA™ headset is the first to include HD audio and motion sensors.

For more information, images and product demos, please visit www.Jawbone.com/Press, or follow @Jawbone on Twitter.

Progressive Insurance Taps AT&T to Get a Snapshot of Customers' Driving Habits

Ina Fried — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:00:49 +0000

If you’ve been watching TV any time in the last few weeks, you have probably heard about a new device from Progressive Insurance that lets users get a discount by agreeing to use a small device, called the Snapshot, that monitors how they are driving. At the core of the device is an embedded cellular module that uses AT&T’s network to send the data after each trip.

In particular, Progressive collects data on how far and when a user is driving as well as how fast they are accelerating or braking at any given moment. Braking data, in particular, is used as a way to assess how safely a driver is going.

“Braking gives an insight into the quality of your driving,” Progressive’s Richard Hutchinson told Mobilzed. “I can be going fast but (if I am in) open spaces with little traffic, that is a different risk than going fast in a very concentrated area. That will show up in braking patterns.”

While cars have been able to collect such data via sensors for some time, the information has largely remained trapped inside the vehicle–until the Snapshot came along.

The Snapshot is just one example of a fast-growing segment of the cell phone industry–the market for embedded devices that allow machines to talk to other machines. AT&T, for example added 1.5 million such devices last quarter and now has 9.3 million “connected devices” on its network including everything from Kindles to automated pill bottles to other automotive applications. Ford, for example, has partnered with AT&T to use the company’s network to allow Focus Electric owners control vehicle settings away from their car.

While there has been a lot of hype around the potential for cellular connections to revamp existing businesses, Hutchinson said that Snapshot shows that the technology is ready for prime time.

“We’re a good example of where it is moving from concepts and pilots to now it is real,” he told Mobilized.

Indeed, the idea behind the Snapshot has been brewing for about 20 years at Progressive when an unhappy customer asked why they company could charge based on how they actually drive as opposed to relying on complicated and sometimes unfair pricing models.

The company decided to look into how they might be able to create a service that monitored driving habits and priced itself accordingly. It was a decade ago before they could even try it out, initially via a device that had to be professionally installed and was hard-wired to the vehicle. A decade ago the company did a trial in Houston with about 600 cars that relied on satellite technology to get the data out of the cars.

It has taken until now to become truly commercially feasible, Hutchinson said, noting that the Snapshot costs under $100 to manufacture, with the cellular module being the biggest part of the cost. Cellular service is also an issue.

When Progressive began trying to develop Snapshot, pricing was still a challenge with cellular carriers wanting to charge for each car module as if it was its own phone and needed its own plan. These days, things are shifting to where companies can buy data in large amounts and pay for what they need.

The service is entirely optional, Progressive insists, and doesn’t collect location information or other data, though some customers remain concerned about privacy issues.

“That is the single biggest issue consumers have–fear of tracking their location,” Hutchinson said.

Progressive is also promising customers that use the device that their rates can only go down–as much as 30 percent. Most people do qualify for a discount, with the average user getting a discount of 10 to 15 percent.

One limitation still remains: The company still has to get state-by-state approval to offer Snapshot-based pricing. It’s now available in 33 states, but not in California, for example.

Google Deal for SayNow to Make Google Voice More Interesting

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 22:02:50 +0000

I’ve been a Google Voice user since before it was even called Google Voice. Back in 2007, I was fascinated by the potential of GrandCentral–the service Google acquired and transformed into Google Voice.

For one thing, once I gave out my new number to a handful of friends, I had this one goofy friend for whom I recorded a custom greeting. Every time he would call, I’d let it go to voicemail and he’d start every message laughing at some silly in-joke I’d leave for him in the greeting. Okay, I grant you not many people would go to the trouble to do that, but if you knew this guy, you just might. Update: A few readers pointed out in the comments that this feature is re-enabled in Google Voice, and they’re correct though it’s not exactly easy to find.

Ever since GrandCentral became Google Voice, it’s been a lot less fun to use. That custom-greeting feature is gone, as are some of the funnier Web calling buttons that GrandCentral had offered. Maybe that’s one of the reasons behind today’s acquisition by Google of SayNow.

Details are scant about what Google has in mind, but a source close to the deal tells us that the intent on Google’s part is to make Google Voice “even better in a world of Skype and Facetime,” which implies that the next step for Google Voice is some form of video calling.

SayNow made a name for itself by giving celebrities like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers (remember them?) and the cast of “Glee” a phone number for fans to call and hear the occasional message. And at the start of the football season, ESPN used it to send the message embedded below from former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka to some 1.6 million fans on Facebook. Another feature gave celebs a way to hold live conference calls that fans could dial in and listen to. The biggest SayNow client was the rapper Soulja Boy, who racked up 50 million calls totaling some 100 million minutes of call time. If nothing else, Google can learn from the team at SayNow how to promote the service and get people interested in using it.

SayNow also has a serious side, an enterprise application called Big Call, aimed at making conference calls for businesses easy. The company says it was built by an intern in a week.

The deal for SayNow comes on the same day that Google made its long-awaited number-porting feature official, suggesting that Google Voice is going to be the focus of a lot more time and attention in the coming months.

Ditka’s season-opening greeting for Facebook users is below.

D: Dive Into Mobile: The Full Interview Video of AT&T's Glenn Lurie

Kara Swisher — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:05:40 +0000

As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all.

Here’s the last of the onstage interviews–Glenn Lurie, the man who brought the Apple iPhone to AT&T (for better and worse).

As head of the emerging devices division, he forged its exclusive relationship with Apple, which has in the last few years meant a boon to AT&T’s bottom line. About 5.2 million new iPhones were activated on its network in its most recent quarter alone, but not without hurting AT&T’s reputation for wonky service, especially in key markets like New York and San Francisco.

But its exclusive arrangement in the U.S. with Apple is expected to end when Verizon Wireless is added as a carrier in late January.

Thus, Lurie is now focused on emerging and embedded devices–tablets, netbooks, laptops and embedded computing devices.

Here’s Lurie talking about all this and more in the video of the interview with Walt Mossberg:

[ See post to watch video ]

Next up: All the demos of D: Dive Into Mobile.

Microsoft Plans to talk Windows on ARM at CES, but Products a Ways Off

Ina Fried — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:42:02 +0000

After many months of working in secret, Microsoft is nearly ready to start talking about its plans to bring Windows to ARM-based processors.

However, while the company is set to discuss the effort at next month’s Consumer Electronics Show, there is still a lot that must be done before such products can hit the market.

Among the steps needed is for hardware makers to create ARM-compatible drivers, a time-consuming effort that explains in part why Microsoft is talking about the initiative well ahead of any products being ready.

It took Microsoft years, for instance, to move mainstream Windows users from 32-bit versions of the operating system to 64-bit versions, in large part because it took that long to get all of the necessary hardware drivers to enable the shift.

Microsoft has scheduled a press briefing for 1 pm PT on Jan. 5, ahead of Steve Ballmer’s keynote later that night. The event is expected to be the forum where Microsoft will discuss the ARM effort. A Microsoft representative declined to comment on the reported ARM move.

However, speculation about such a move has been increasing since the two companies signed an expanded licensing agreement back in July. Microsoft was deliberately vague at the time regarding the impact of the new agreement, making reference to then-existing efforts such as Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile.

“ARM is an important partner for Microsoft and we deliver multiple operating systems on the company’s architecture,” Microsoft general manager KD Hallman said in a July statement. “With closer access to the ARM technology we will be able to enhance our research and development activities for ARM-based products.”

Moving to ARM processors as an option for full-fledged Windows could pave the way for machines with significantly longer battery life–an issue that has become more important as competing mobile devices, especially tablets and smartphones, have been able to best the PC in that regard.

While much of the speculation regarding ARM-based Windows machines has centered on the impact this could have on tablets, the move is said to be as much about netbooks and low-power notebooks as it is about slates.

Though the Windows tie to Intel-architecture chips is legendary, it’s not the first time that Windows has run on chips other than the standard fare from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. Windows once ran on chips from Digital Equipment, and Microsoft has also done server versions that supported Intel’s Itanium chip. However, such efforts are expensive and time-consuming. The fact that Microsoft is going ahead with the undertaking highlights the size of the threat posed by devices running on the lower-power-consuming ARM chips.

Although CES is an unusual venue to reach PC hardware makers, it does provide a big stage for Microsoft to reconfirm that it is serious about playing in the ultramobile device category.

Bloomberg first reported Microsoft’s plans to bring Windows to ARM earlier on Tuesday.

Top Docs on Scribd in 2010: Prop 8, P ? NP, GOP Pledge

Liz Gannes — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 06:00:25 +0000

Document-sharing site Scribd has compiled its own year-end list for 2010, ranking its user-uploaded docs by the number of times they were shared, commented on, liked, starred and embedded.

In the No. 1 spot was the California District Court ruling on gay-marriage voter initiative Proposition 8. Uploaded by GoodAsYou.org shortly after the ruling came out in August, the document was Scribd’s most viral ever. The start-up provided a timeline showing how it was spread (image embedded; click to enlarge).

We should note that Scribd did not provide a list of docs ranked by number of views. CEO Trip Adler said such a list would be dominated by random items that have good search engine optimization, like a scan of an Indian phone book that has long been one of Scribd’s most-viewed documents of all time. Scribd, which now has 60 million monthly uniques, attributes much of its growth to its improvement of social sharing features.

The No. 2 most-shared doc on Scribd in 2010 was the surprising claim of proof of the computer science problem P ? NP from earlier this year. Uploaded by Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs in August, the paper seemed to show that a class of computationally intensive problems could not be solved using simple algorithms.

In the third spot was the Republican political platform “GOP Pledge to America,” uploaded in September by CBS News. The draft lays out policy principles on the economy, healthcare and national security.

I find it interesting that Scribd’s most social documents are more often notable for newsworthiness than timelessness. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments earlier this month appealing the Prop 8 decision that was posted on Scribd. And as for P ? NP, while many computer scientists believe the claim in the paper on Scribd is correct, the proof itself is not seen as conclusive.

The rest of Scribd’s 2010 social docs list is a similar mix of newsworthy documents and research, as well as a little levity, including a list of 25 macaroni-and-cheese recipes.

California Prop 8 Ruling (Good As You)
PNP 12 pt (Angelica Lim)
GOP Pledge to America (CBS News)
Scribd in HTML5 (Scribd)
A Statement to the Viewers of Countdown (Brian Stelter)
Marijuana Is Safer (Chelsea Green)
Cognitive Biases–A Visual Study Guide (Efern211)
Using Facebook to Move Your Business Forward (Facebook)
25 Mac & Cheese Recipes (Gooseberry Patch)
Influence and Passivity in Social Media (Hewlett-Packard)

25 Mac & Cheese Recipes by Gooseberry Patch

Intel Offers Silicon With New Packages, Deals

Don Clark — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:00:02 +0000

Most personal computer makers buy chips the way Intel wants to offer them. But the technology giant has learned it needs to be more flexible in other markets, as an unusual arrangement with another Silicon Valley company shows.

Intel on Monday detailed plans to begin offering a version of its Atom microprocessor–best known as the calculating engine inside millions of low-end portables called netbooks–that the company is packaging along with a different sort of a chip supplied by Altera. The combination is designed for what industry executives call “embedded” applications, a loose term that refers to office equipment, cars, medical devices, industrial machines and just about anything that is not a computer.

Companies designing such products are a key focus for Intel as it tries to diversify beyond PCs. They often need special circuitry to handle chores that aren’t easily carried out by general-purpose microprocessors, like Atom.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

YouTube Offers a Diet Option for Pudgy PCs: "Feather"

Peter Kafka — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:17:49 +0000

Stuck with a slow computer or lousy broadband access, but still want your fill of dogs on skateboards? Check out YouTube Feather, a lightweight version of Google’s (GOOG) video site.

YouTube is rolling out the option today, via its TestTube collection of beta trials. The idea is straightforward: Make the site work better for people who lack high-powered PCs or robust broadband.

Feather users get the same clips, but with fewer options; Feather doesn’t appear to offer the “high-quality” large-screen option, for instance, and many commenting and sharing options have been removed or stripped down.

But if you’re just interested in watching YouTube, none of that is going to matter to you, and you may very well not notice the difference anyway. I might try it whenever I have to use my slow and unreliable Sprint (S) wireless modem.

I don’t think you’ll be able to tell the difference by watching this embedded clip–pretty sure you have to opt-in to the beta for this to work–but worst-case, you get to see Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson chew up the furniture for the umpteenth time.

Eolas Sues Internet

John Paczkowski — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:29:45 +0000

Three years after squeezing a settlement out of Microsoft for alleged infringements of its controversial patent on embedded Web applications, Eolas Technologies hopes to do the same to a bunch of other big tech outfits.

This morning, the research and development company filed suit against nearly two dozen companies, accusing them of violating two of its patents–U.S. Patent No. 5,838,906, the same one Microsoft allegedly ran afoul of, and No. 7,599,985, an extension of the 906 patent that covers embedded apps using AJAX. Among the companies named in the suit: Adobe (ADBE), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), eBay (EBAY), Google (GOOG)–including YouTube–Sun (JAVA) and Yahoo (YHOO).

“All we want is what’s fair,” Eolas Chairman Dr. Michael Doyle said in a statement. “We developed these technologies over 15 years ago and demonstrated them widely, years before the marketplace had heard of interactive applications embedded in Web pages tapping into powerful remote resources. Profiting from someone else’s innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair.”

Sadly, “what’s fair” in this case threatens the very fabric of the Web, as Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web argued back in 2003 when Eolas was pursuing Microsoft (MSFT). “The ’906 patent will cause cascades of incompatibility to ripple through the Web,” Berners-Lee said in an appeal to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “[It] is a substantial setback for global interoperability and the success of the open Web.”

CNN: We Don't Need YouTube and Twitter to Tell Us What's Going on in Iran–We've Got iReport

Peter Kafka — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:06:35 +0000

The “Iran is Twitter’s defining moment” meme is losing momentum to the “Iran is YouTube’s defining moment” meme. But CNN has a different spin. Time Warner’s (TWX) cable news channel wants us to know that it isn’t dependent on either the micromessaging service or Google’s (GOOG) video site to report what’s happening in Iran–it has iReport.

For those of you who don’t watch CNN or visit CNN.com with any frequency, iReport is the news service’s attempt to create its own user-generated news hub. It’s supposed be to be able attract eyeballs on its own and in some cases, feed the Web site and the cable channel with free content donated by viewers.

To date, iReport is best known as the place where someone posted a bogus item about Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs. But CNN says it has been using the site heavily to augment its Iran coverage. From a press release it sent out earlier this week: “Since last week, we’ve received 4555 iReport submissions related to Iran–including more than 1600 this past Saturday and Sunday alone, and an additional 689 just yesterday. To date, 150 of the Iran-related iReports have been vetted and verified by CNN producers for use on CNN air or online–something the likes of YouTube or Flickr just aren’t equipped to do given their lack of newsgathering infrastructure.” (Yesterday CNN told me it added another 399 Iran-related iReports, and that seven had made it onto air. Presumably those numbers are still increasing.)

The breast-beating seems a bit much given that CNN, like every other cable network, has been happy to play up any bit of social media it uses in its Iran reporting. But the point about the vetting and verification is interesting.

I checked with CNN rep Jennifer Martin, who spelled out what that means: That CNN producers have contacted the people who sent in all of the Iran-related iReports it has featured on the network and at least verified that they are who they say they are. That in itself seems worthwhile, and maybe even worth bragging about.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV has more, including an interview with CNN.com producer Lila King.

Here’s an example of some the “verified” footage the network has used so far. For some reason the play/pause/etc. controls don’t show up on these embedded videos, but I’ve been able to get them to start and stop by clicking on the image:

Iranians shouting “Allah O Akbar” at night:

A pro-Mousavi rally:

The Akamai Presidency? [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:20:24 +0000

So much for the “YouTube Presidency.”

The Obama administration is no longer using Google’s (GOOG) video player to deliver the President’s weekly addresses online. Instead, it will use an Akamai (AKAM) player. No reason has yet been given for the abrupt switch, although some speculate it was inspired by privacy concerns over the video-sharing site.

As many privacy advocates noted when the White House first began relying on it, YouTube uses cookies that can track visitors even if they never actually play the video. “Whenever you follow a link, or download an embedded or off-site resource, your browser sends a referer header (sic) that tells the Web site what Web page you came from,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains. “And whenever you load any document, your browser may send cookies that show whether you’ve visited the same site before, and that may even identify you directly. For instance, if you’re logged into YouTube and you watch an embedded YouTube video on some other site, YouTube can still recognize you because your browser will still send a personalized YouTube cookie. This means that loading an embedded video from within a blog could enable the video hosting site (and, in some cases, its advertising partners) to compile a history of which blog entries you were reading and when–even if you didn’t try to play the video.”

And this was the case with the President’s weekly addresses as delivered via YouTube. Not an ideal situation for the administration, and one that it quickly sought to remedy. Shortly after the initial outcry over the issue, the White House rolled out a technical fix that limited that tracking ability only to those who watched the President’s weekly address. But that was really just a band-aid. This latest move seems far more definitive, as the Akamai player uses no tracking cookies whatsoever.

UPDATE: The White House says it has not abandoned YouTube. It’s simply testing a new player.

“As the president continues his goal of making government more accessible and transparent, this week we tested a new way of presenting the president’s weekly address by using a player developed in-house,” a White House spokesman said in a statement. “This decision is more about better understanding our internal capabilities than it is a position on third-party solutions or a policy. The weekly address was also published in third-party video hosting communities and we will likely continue to embed videos from these services on WhiteHouse.gov in the future.”