Category: Tech news

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

The most distinguishing feature of the PlayStation Vita, Sony’s new portable game machine, may go unnoticed at first glance.

The thing Sony is banking on occupies a tiny little area on the face of the unit, roughly a square centimeter in size.

Do you see it? It’s the analog joystick, the one on the right side, sitting just beneath the familiar PlayStation buttons. This may seem a relatively minor distinction, but it’s the thing that furthest separates the Vita from the Nintendo 3DS, iPhone, Kindle Fire, or any other self-contained gaming platform. Two analog sticks means hardcore gamers don’t have to compromise; they can play Uncharted: Golden Abyss on a Vita the same way they’d play it on a PS3, using one stick to move and another to aim.

Absent some hypothetical and unlikely Nintendogs-style killer app, Sony doesn’t have a prayer of selling the $250 Vita ($300 with 3G connectivity) to the sort of erstwhile gamer who is perfectly happy playing on a tablet. So the company’s strategy would seem to be to double down on the hard-core crowd by aiming at the sort of person who feels anything without sticks and buttons barely qualifies as a videogame in the first place.

To that effect, the Vita works very well. The beefy processing power, stunning OLED display and console-like controls can come together to produce experiences like Uncharted that feel like miniaturized home games. The open question is whether software makers will want to invest the time and money into crafting exclusive Vita games that take advantage of all that capability.

The Vita will be released in the United States on Feb. 22. Wired got its hands on a Japanese unit, released in December, for this early review. (I tested the Wi-Fi version, as a Japanese 3G plan wouldn’t do me any good here.)

Your PlayStation Vita won’t exactly be going into your pocket. Its size is somewhere between a Nintendo 3DS and a smallish tablet. But it’s comfortable to play for extended periods of time, in large part because it’s so wide and flat. The sticks aren’t like the sliding pads of the PSP or 3DS; they’re joysticks that tilt. The power adapter can split apart into a USB cable for charging or transferring data, although you have to use the included proprietary cable to plug in the device since there’s no mini-USB input.

The Vita may be chasing after established gamers, but it’s hardly a traditional machine. Sony has (finally) bowed to the pressures of the market and added touch sensitivity to the screen. You use your finger to interact, not a stylus as with Nintendo’s machines. The menu screens all use touch: You swipe the screen to unlock it, touch to scroll through the icons on the menu, and tap them to open the software. Vita’s UI has a lot of cute little touches that make it fun to play around with. If you try to scroll the icons too far, they’ll stretch and bounce. Unlocking the screen or closing apps is done by peeling a “sticker” off the screen by swiping from a detached corner.

There’s another control option: Most of the rear of the unit is a large touch-sensitive panel, so you can control games by swiping your fingers along the back of the Vita. Sony seems to have added this without any sense of what it would be used for, though, and I haven’t played any games yet where it really changes things. The closest anything has come is Uncharted, which allows you to zoom your sniper rifle in and out by moving your finger up and down.

As the gazelle belongs to the savannah, the Kia Rio 5-door belongs to the stop-and-go traffic of the city streets.

It’s affordable, comfortable and fuel-efficient, attributes that have made previous versions of Kia’s premier commuter-mobile the darling of urban dwellers in their mid-20s to late-30s.

Completely redesigned and packed with new gadgetry, the 2012 Kia Rio SX is a solid contender among competing subcompacts, such as the Ford Fiesta or the Chevrolet Sonic. Much like Hyundai, the other big Korean manufacturer with a foot in the U.S. market, Kia’s come a long way since the days when it only offered entry-level shoeboxes with short life expectancies.

Slipping behind the wheel for the first time, I was transported back to the car racing arcade games of my youth. The steering wheel is smaller than expected, and the pint-sized dials are set deep in the console. Turn the ignition and the gauges animate: sweeping completely to the left, then back to the right in a friendly wave. I’m six feet tall, but I still had plenty of leg and headroom as both a driver and a passenger — though the last time I would have fit comfortably in the back seat was some time in the late 1980s.

Our tester was equipped with power steering and sport-tuned suspension, and once I got it out on the road, it was responsive and fun. Getting acquainted with the gas pedal took a few spins around the block. Touch the accelerator and the Rio leaps forward with as much enthusiasm as you could ask for from a direct-injection 1.6-liter, four-cylinder engine. It has acres more get-up-and-go than the similarly-spec’d late-90s Hondas some of us drive every day.

The 6-speed automatic transmission comes with an “Active Eco System” — hit a button behind the steering wheel and, in exchange for a few revs, save on gas. Fuel efficiency is a major selling point for compacts, and the Rio doesn’t disappoint. The 2012 redesign has taken the Rio’s mpg rating to 30 in the city and 40 on the highway, up from 27 and 36. Kia has also managed to boost the horsepower at the same time: it’s now 138, up from 110.

On the highway, the car was enjoyable and easy to drive, if not thrilling. The drivetrain made some sounds of protest when I accelerated into ticket territory. But let’s face it, the majority of Rio drivers will spend most of their time commuting and running errands, so the fact that this isn’t a high-performance vehicle isn’t really a big deal.

Downsides? The brakes are a touch too grabby. The 15-cubic-foot cargo area is only grocery-haul roomy, not camping-trip roomy. Lastly, the SX’s 5-door design uses some fat C-pillars in the rear corners. This causes some blind spots and makes merging slightly tricky. But at least I always felt safe: dual front and lateral seat-mounted air bags are stanfard, as area the side curtain airbags which open along the length of the interior. Also, there’s an optional rear-facing camera which helps mitigate any potential visibility issues when backing up.

As the tablet space grows increasingly crowded, it’s high time somebody switched up the formula and offered some hardware we can really get excited about.

Cue the entrance of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime, the first quad-core tablet on the market and the first running Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich.

Not only do the quad-core processor and the all-new operating system do wonders for app performance and the user experience, but the tablet also shows off some innovative design features: just like the newest generation of highly portable ultrabook PCs, the Transformer Prime is remarkably lightweight, very thin and has long battery life. As a bonus, you can snap it onto a keyboard dock, extending the battery life by several hours and giving it a level of functionality approaching that of a laptop.

The Transformer Prime is as light and slim as Apple’s iPad 2: the aluminum body weighs 586 grams (1.29 pounds) and is 8.3 mm (0.32 inches) thick. I’ve been testing it for a couple of weeks, and I found it easy to carry with me everywhere.

The 10.1-inch Corning Gorilla Glass display offers plenty of room to enjoy books, web pages, and games. The 1280×800 resolution panel also utilizes Super IPS+ technology for maximum brightness and an extra-wide viewing angle — Asus claims the viewing angle is 178 degrees, and I found no reason to dispute that. The screen is also very bright. Outdoors, where you’d normally long for an e-ink screen, there’s an additional boost of up to 600 nits that helps overcome the glare of sunlight (if you’re wondering how much that is, the iPad 2 has a screen brightness of just 350 nits). Gloomy January might not be the best time to test this feature, but the unparalleled brightness of the Transformer Prime was surprising.

Though the physical dimensions and the brightness of the screen are the first things you’ll notice, the most outstanding features lie under the hood.

NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 processor, aka “Kal-El,” replaces the Tegra 2 found on last year’s original Transformer tablet. You can feel it really pushing the tablet at higher speeds. The quad-core processor is actually a five-core superchip, since there’s a separate, 500MHz “companion core” that’s optimized for tasks requiring lower power consumption. This helps save battery life when you don’t really need all that quad-core power. By keeping the display at 50 percent brightness, the 25Wh lithium-polymer battery keeps the Transformer Prime humming for around 11 hours. You can get six more hours of juice by sliding the tablet into the Mobile Dock (an extra $150), which has its own 22Wh lithium-polymer battery. But we’ll get back to the keyboard later on.

The 1.4GHz Tegra 3 processor is designed for hard gaming, detailed graphics, and heavy multitasking. Backed by 1 gigabyte of RAM, those features can actually show you how much different this tablet is from the first Transformer and all the other tablets already on the market. The user interface is screaming-fast, and graphics rendering times are significantly reduced. You first notice it when you browse the web. Page elements are loaded in moments, and page scrolling is very smooth.

To really test it, I took a look at the first bunch of games built to exploit the Tegra 3’s power. Playing Shadowgun: Deadzone, I noticed the amazing, fresh details of characters and environments, and I realized how much I was missing in the previous versions of the game. I added a wireless controller, effectively turning the tablet to a console. Action is rendered with outstanding console-quality fluidity, and I was impressed by the tablet’s realistic Stereoscopic 3D effects while playing Guerrilla Bob THD. I particularly enjoyed the dynamic lighting effects inside Pinball HD and Glow Ball, and I was surprised by the detailed motion blurring and advanced water effects hitting the screen while playing the jet-ski-racing game Riptide GP.

I also tested some multimedia software. Along smooth streaming video and decent sounding audio, there’s faster computing for editing applications. I edited some photos in Photaf THD Panorama Pro and the tablet blew through the files with outstanding speed. And if you’re among those who use a tablet to shoot pictures and videos, the 8-megapixel rear camera and LED flash of the Transformer Prime will let you snap bright, detailed shots and 1080p videos.

Hydration packs — backpacks with a built-in water bladder and a hose running to your mouth — are a huge convenience for those of us who like to spend all day on the trail. But they have a rather annoying design flaw.

Imagine you’re wheezing your way up a hill on your mountain bike. You’re parched, so you reach for the tube of your hydration pack. Now think about what it’s like to suck a drink through a straw while you’re desperately gasping for breath. That’s what we have to deal with.

The Utah-based company Geigerrig has eliminated the need to suck on the hydration hose with its Rig line of hydration packs. These packs have a pressurized reservoir, so the water is forced out, like a fountain, when you bite the valve. This not only makes it much easier to drink, but it allows you to share water in a less-disgusting manner — you can fill a buddy’s bottle or your dog’s water bowl.

The reservoir is pressurized via a hand pump. The pump bulb (just like the one used in blood pressure tests) nests inside one of the shoulder straps. It fills a separate air chamber within the reservoir, pressurizing the water chamber. The two separate chambers are a great bit of engineering; rather than pumping air into the water chamber, the separate air compartment puts pressure on the water without it giving it room to slosh around in the pack.

For the backcountry hikers, Geigerrig offers an in-line water filter that snaps into the hose. In-line filters haven’t been possible before because of the added resistance the filter causes. The pressurized reservoir pushes the water through the filter and out the valve. The company’s activated coconut shell carbon filters will remove Giardia, Cryptosporidium and other nasty protozoa, making any water you come across on the trail a viable source of hydration.

This is a huge win for me, personally. I’ve been out of water and dehydrated on long runs, crossing streams without daring to drink the water I was wading through. There could be a dead cow a hundred yards upstream, and taking even a small sip just isn’t worth it.

I tested Geigerrig’s Rig 500 Ballistic pack ($110). On a 14-mile test run up Northern California’s Kanaka Peak, the pack’s 2-liter reservoir ran dry at about mile nine. I was able to refill the pack at a creek crossing and give the filter a try. You pull the bladder out, unzip the top like a Ziploc baggie, fill it up, then zip it closed. To use the filter, you have to switch to the hose with the filer attachment, so there’s an extra cost involved — the filters are $27 each, and the extra hose is $15.

The filter reduces the spray volume, but the water still dribbles out, just not as forcefully. And the filter seems effective enough — it’s been five weeks and there’s no diarrhea yet, so I think I’ll be OK.

The dual-chambered reservoir sits inside a reinforced sleeve, but you can still feel it bulge as it inflates. It’s a good idea to fill the storage pockets of the Rig 500’s 11.5-liter pack before pumping up the air bladder, since the expanded reservoir would make less room for packing food, gadgets and socks.

WIRED Best way to drink on the run (or bike). Share water without sharing saliva. In-line anti-microbial filter cleans water on the go and is good for 50 gallons. Good price point.

TIRED Filter slows the force of the flow. This writer got sick of finding alternatives to the phrase “sucking on a hose.”

Photos by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Here at the World Economic Forum in Davos, among the banking, shipping, steel and transport magnates of the global economy, there are a number of technology entrepreneurs floating around. As they rub shoulders with the likes of Eric Schmidt, Sean Parker, Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble, it’s possible to peel them off from the crowd. I managed to catch Jose Ferreira, CEO and Founder of Knewton a startup which is aiming a silver bullet at the education problem with something that one might even call an audacious platform.

How so? Well, Knewton, a technology company based in NYC, currently has an application being tested with 10,000 college student in the US and is described as an “adaptive learning platform”. What does that mean in English? Well, the idea is that it customises your average educational content to meet the unique needs of each student. This is personalised education on steroids. Using thousands of data points — concepts, structure, difficulty level, media format — and data on how the person uses it, it’s like having a super smart teacher analyse everything you try to learn and suggest ways to make the process easier.

Ferreira has raised $54M to achieve this, which is quite a sum. Despite that, he is openly critical of VCs who do not think in such word changing arenas as education.

Writing for the WEF blog, he says “The venture capital industry in the United States is the envy of the world.. But it’s been getting a bit stale of late. As VC ranks have swelled with recently-minted MBAs over the last 10-20 years, venture capital has become more financial and less inspirational. These new VCs are obsessed with de-risking venture investing.”

Check out the video above for more thoughts on this.

The Megaupload troubles make for interesting discussion because there is much to be said on both sides. Whether the illegal aspects of the network “outweigh” the legal aspects is a question that will be discussed for months and perhaps years.

But one thing can’t be disputed: after the two-year investigation by the FBI, the site’s takedown was swift and perhaps over-thorough. Thousands and thousands of users who had legitimate and often critical files hosted on the site have been left behind, their legal files hosted on a simple file-hosting service. A coalition of Pirate Party organizations, led by Pirates of Catalonia, are planning to sue the FBI over what they say are “huge personal, economic and image damages to a vast number of people.”

The group leading the charge contends that the FBI may have violated Spanish Law, and at any rate,

Hard words to disagree with, whether you think Megaupload is a patsy being taken to school by IP mongers or a den of thieves getting what was coming to them. Either way, you have to agree that the wholesale takedown of the site harmed a lot of people totally unconnected to the alleged crimes performed by Megaupload.

The question of a grace period while the law does its work doesn’t seem to apply here: if, say, a cache of drugs was found in a public storage facility you used, you wouldn’t be surprised if the whole place shut down for a couple days while the law did its work. In this case the takedown may be permanent; having arrested the main actors in the company and seized many of their assets, chances are the site couldn’t be restored to working order without a fair amount of work. Not that that hasn’t happened before: The Pirate Bay relocated some servers last year to an actual secret cave after repeated raids and takedown attempts. And plenty of other favorite targets of law enforcement have proven more tenacious than expected.

The point is it’s not much of a stretch to suggest that files hosted on Megaupload will never again be accessible. If they are restored, it will still have been a clumsy and potentially illegal action that made them inaccessible, and the Pirate Parties hope to call out such actions for what they are and perhaps cause authorities to think twice before taking them again.

Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last!

There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. The other is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries.

In a way, it’s a good solution: countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. But, on the other hand, countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter.

Of course, they were always able to, in a way: a tweet that fell afoul of restrictions could be removed globally. Not an ideal solution, as people in countries without official limits on free speech would be unable to hear what was being said. Now the censorship will be limited to the bounds of the country that requests it.

The problem is that in a way, that is worse. Twitter, and the net in general, are by nature a global communication platform. National conflicts on the internet (for example, an album being released in October in the UK and December in the US) are strange and illogical. Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that “have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is built around the idea of free communication, is troubling.

Unfortunately, it’s a logical step for a platform that wants to be accepted worldwide. Some companies have to make serious concessions in the way they do business in order to satisfy the whims of local business magnates, secret police, and religious leaders. Twitter has just made one of these concessions; perhaps they think of themselves as the willow, bending that it might not break. As the new method has not been applied yet, it is difficult to say exactly how complete, or perhaps how merely symbolic, the block will be.

A meta-national community like Twitter must both transcend and respect its constituent parts, and that requires some tough decisions. Let’s hope they made this decision with the promise of better global communication in mind.

Sure, your mom carried you for nine months. And yeah, she wiped your bum for years, put clothes on your back, and made sure you got a decent education so you could move to California and rock a hoodie and work somewhere where there’s always beer in the fridge and go-karts to be ridden. But can you really be expected to call her from time to time to let her know where you are? Time is money, Mom. Get on Foursquare or something.

Looking to ease the anxiety for the mothers of the world whose brats kids are too busy to call is #hashtagmom. You check-in somewhere on Foursquare with the titular #mom hashtag, and it’ll do all the talking (or texting) for you.

To begin, you punch in your mom’s phone number and then login to the service with Foursquare (from which it’ll grab your first name, determine whether to call you “Son” or “Daughter”, and monitor your check-ins). From there, any check-ins with the “#mom” hashtag will be relayed to her by text or phone call. As their example, the check-in “Landed! #mom” could ring up your mom and say “Hi! Your [son/daughter] [Your name here] asked us to let you know he is safely at JFK airport. He said, “Landed!”

According to the guys who built it (Jeff Weinstein and Steve Pike), the service was built as a “fun side project” to help them wrap their heads around the Twilio/Foursquare APIs that power it.

(And don’t ask me what the mom is doing with her non-phone-holding hand in that picture. I have no idea.)

Finding the right cofounder is often the hardest part of doing a startup, as most anyone with experience will tell you. As a personal example: the cofounder of my first company, Phil Kast, was an old high school buddy employed as a whitewater rafting guide in Colorado when we started talking about working together. He happened to be hitting the off-season right when I was trying to get started — and everything went from there.

FounderDating has been working to solve the cofounder connection problem by running regular meetups in San Francisco and Seattle. Today, it’s expanding on the effort by launching a web site that screens then connects those looking for colleagues, and by announcing meetups in new cities including New York, then Boston and Los Angeles.

The new site is designed to be like a private LinkedIn for entrepreneurs, founder Jessica Alter explains. It lets users create profiles about themselves and what they’re interested, and includes search filters for finding people by event, city, interest area, skills, desired starting date, and overall status. A Founder Talk section lets users post messages about what who they’re looking for and what they’re trying to do.

A variety of other organizations loosely try to connect potential cofounders, including SVForum, First Tuesday and Hackers and Founders. The FounderDating site, as with the events, has a special focus on screening for qualifications and experiences — in particular to make sure that people are committed, and are actually recruiting cofounders not employees. The goal is to provide a 50/50 split between technical and business types.

“One of the reasons that a lot of startups fail is because they’re the wrong founding team. I mean, people are leaving all the time.” Alter has been in the community for awhile, having been a business development leader at Bebo, and she’s seen quite a bit — “I just had lunch with one friend who just left their team, and got a text from another at the same time who had done the same thing. One of the things we want to do in the future is figure out how we can provide suggestions for matches, or give warnings if we think things won’t work out.”

And like the events, which FounderDating has done around a dozen of so far in the past year or so, the site stresses privacy. Many of the people, after all, have full-time jobs that they don’t want to compromise while they consider if and how to strike out on their own. Alter compares it to Fight Club: “We tell people that what happens in FounderDating stays in FounderDating.” The events are so founder-focused that not even investors are allowed in the door.

So far, FounderDating has been going well. ”The more we talk to people, the more demand we see” Alter says. “Incubators are sending applicants to it who need cofounders, saying things like ‘come back when you have one.’” A couple examples of successful matches include the team behind Y Combinator-backed referral platform Curebit, and inventory matchmaking site Sorced (whose cofounder, Elizabeth Knopf, has a longer post about the experience over on Women 2.0)

FounderDating isn’t necessarily a business right now — it doesn’t charge for anything currently. But she adds that she could see it becoming more of one if it expands beyond tech startups. Anyone starting anything, say, a restaurant, a local craft store, or a farm is going to want to see who good business partners might be.

In the meantime, Alter is running it as a bootstrapped operation. “Managing Directors” — people with deep local connections — help run the events in each city. A “Friends of FounderDating” program includes well-known seed and incubator investors who help promote the program: Dave McClure (500 Startups), Hiten Shah (KISSmetrics), Phin Barnes (First Round Capital), Dave Schappell (Teachstreet) and Chris DeVore (TechStars Seattle). Charles River Ventures provides financial support. You can also check out its blog, which features advice from entrepreneurs and other industry leaders, here.

If you’re looking to attend one of the events, there’ll be one here in San Francisco on March 1, another in Seattle on March 6, and the first New York one coming up on February 16. Applications are due a week before each, and you can find out more here.

It looks like publishers and advertisers are warming to mobile ad startup Moolah Media. The company says that in 2011, it generated 7 million leads for its advertisers — and 1.9 million of those leads (27 percent of the year’s total) came in December.

Also in December, Moolah says its ads reached 45 million Americans. And interest in the company is growing — Moolah projects that traffic to its website will triple this month, as pictured in the chart above.

The company first launched in November 2010. At the time, CEO Shawn Scheuer said that no one had effectively brought the “performance-based” ad model into the mobile world. Even now, Scheuer says most ad companies are interested in paying publishers based on impressions or clicks, rather than the form submissions, inbound phone calls, and mobile app installs that Moolah tracks and pays for. So Moolah’s approach is bringing more direct-response marketers into the mobile world — 50 advertisers so far.

Last fall, Moolah tried to improve its ads with the launch of SmartMoolah, which gathers more data about user behavior after the click. Since then, publishers have seen significantly higher payments, and are now willing to hand more of their inventory over to Moolah, Scheuer says.

He also revealed that 65 percent of Moolah’s ads get served on Android devices, compared to 19 percent on feature phones and a lowly 14 percent for iOS devices. That’s because certain products or services do better on certain carriers or devices, and it’s possible to target ads at that level on Android by not iPhone.

“We’re a small team, so we have to focus on where see the highest response rates, and right now that’s Android,” Scheuer says. “Apple has been clamping down on the user ID tracking, and they’re kind of spooking a lot of people about that. That’s really hurt advertising on the iPhone.”

Motorola Mobility released their fourth quarter and year-end financials today, and now we can see why they made it a point earlier this month to downplay analyst expectations. The company’s new figures reveal that while Motorola raked in $3.4 billion in Q4 2011, they also incurred a net loss of $80 million.

Things don’t look much more promising when we shift our attention to their mobile offerings. Motorola’s myriad mobile devices accounted for the lion’s share of their revenue — $2.5 billion to be precise, a year-over-year increase of 5%.

Still, despite pushing out devices like the Droid RAZR and their XYBOARD tablet in time for the holidays, Motorola didn’t see a notable jump over their performance last quarter when during which their mobile devices netted $2.4 billion in revenue.

Also interesting to see is how Motorola stacks up to their mobile competitors when it comes to device shipments. Motorola announced earlier this month that they shipped 10.5 million mobile devices in Q4 2011, down from 11.3 million back in Q4 2010. Of those 10.5 million units shipped 5.3 million were smartphones, which doesn’t sound too shabby until you realize that Android-loving rival Samsung sold 35 million smartphones.

Taiwan-based HTC would probably be the closest in terms of performance — while they didn’t release specific device numbers along with their unaudited quarterly results, Bloomberg’s estimates pegged them at roughly 10 million devices shipped. Coincidentally, both Motorola and HTC have made known their intentions to streamline their smartphone portfolios going forward, and I’m looking forward to seeing how their earnings change as a result.

Stepping back to look at their yearly performance, we find that Motorola Mobility shipped a grand total of 42.4 million mobile devices, which includes 18.7 million smartphones and 1 million tablets. Those in tandem with their (less interesting) home segment offerings led Motorola to pick up net revenues of $13.1 billion, albeit with a net loss of $249 million. Of course, Motorola Mobility’s on the precipice of some drastic change, what with their pending acquisition by Google still churning along. With the transaction expected to finish early this year, we could be looking at a completely different Motorola before too long.

The New York Times has published a long article on Foxconn which, while it doesn’t provide much in the way of new information, does act as a sobering reminder of just how companies like Apple can make so very much money. When our own John Biggs visited Foxconn, he focused on the company itself, its scale, its intentions. When I wrote about Apple’s suppliers failing to meet environmental standards, it was more about the laxity of regulators within China. Today’s NYT piece depicts Apple as prime mover and potential catalyst of change — but its actions and information from insiders suggest that it is simply unwilling.

There is a certain genius to negotiating down the price of every screw and wire, and never paying a yuan more than is absolutely necessary. As in design and build quality, other companies aspire to Apple’s accomplishment in this area.

Something the article only fleetingly acknowledges is that Foxconn is used by most of the major electronics brands in the world. Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest all contract with Foxconn to manufacture, assemble, or finish their products. The threatened mass suicide the other week was, in fact, at an Xbox production facility. The author suggests that HP and Nike “push” their suppliers, presumably in a good way, but Apple does not.

The comparison is made without much in the way of evidence. But it doesn’t appear that Apple is being unfairly targeted: people from within Apple confirm the company’s attitude towards suppliers, and acknowledge that they rarely back up their threats with action. This is for the reason that has been making the rounds over the last week: the suppliers they have are the best in the world, and they are barely able to keep up with Apple’s demands.

There’s a sort of power inversion going on there. Here is Foxconn, which celebrates whenever a client like Apple comes by to make a big order. And here is Apple, which dictates the terms and is, to some extent, the money in the relationship. But which one of these two could fare better if the other backed out? Foxconn would have to spend a few billion reconfiguring its factories to pump out Galaxy Tabs and Kindle Fires. Apple, which has come to rely on Foxconn’s guarantee of millions of products being manufactured at will, and to specs that may change by the hour, would be adrift.

So it has never been a surprise to me when I hear that Apple, and others, only do so much to change the situation in factories and factory towns in China. The simple fact of it is they’re not the ones at the reins. Foxconn and China have our all-important tech companies by the scruff of the neck, and bear the big bad audits by Apple (more likely by people representing people representing Apple) like they’d bear a kitten swiping at their face. It’s a high stakes game, and Foxconn and its like hold all the cards.

Well, not all the cards. As I wrote once, the reason Apple does the things it does is to please us, the consumers. We demand a new iPhone every year that must be better and cheaper. We insist that a thousand dollars is too much for a state of the art computer. We want bigger TVs and external hard drives and slim cameras. And we, almost without exception, fail to care when our demand for more iPads drives Apple to double its orders, driving Foxconn to push more overtime, driving poorly-maintained ventilation systems to their maximum, driving a spark to ignite an aluminum-dust explosion. It’s not our problem, it’s Apple’s or it’s Foxconn’s or it’s China’s. Very reassuring.

One dreamer quoted in the NYT article says: “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.” Yes, and at the same time, it would transform Apple into a bankrupt company. A conflict free iPhone would cost far, far more and would in all likelihood not be as well-built. Apple knows this. The system we and they have in place works, unfortunately, at least for everyone but the workers coated in N-hexane. And at a twelve to a hundred thousand dollars a pop, they aren’t worth rocking the boat for, especially when you’ve got record profits coming in.

Just don’t forget that we’re in that boat too. Unlike many other companies whose profits come largely from ads, enterprise products, or components, the vast majority of what Apple makes comes straight out of a consumer’s pockets, more or less willingly. More than any other mega-corporation you and I deal with on a daily basis, we are fully in control of our contributions to this company. We’re part of this. Some would say the biggest part.

7 of the world’s most powerful tech companies have been accused of forming an antitrust conspiracy to suppress the compensation of their employees by entering into “no poach” agreements. Today, a San Jose judge will heard a motion to dismiss a class action civil lawsuit in which former employees seek damages from defendants Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm.

The damning evidence against the defendants from a 2010 Department of Justice investigation that I first uncovered last week, as well as the plaintiffs’ opposition statement indicate there is more than sufficient evidence for the dismissal to be denied and the case to proceed towards trial. If the defendants lose to or settle, tens of thousands of full-time employees with the companies between 2006 and 2009 could be compensated.

[Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2011: The judge says “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” That means the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case will almost surely be denied when the judge files her official ruling soon. She mentioned “It’s hard to make the inference that there was no conspiracy”. Read on to find out why and what that means for the companies. More details from the hearing at the end.]

Specifically, the senior executives of the defendants, including Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt, are accused of entering into a network of identical, interconnected illegal agreements not to recruit each other’s employees. Each agreement by itself may be a violation of antitrust laws including the Sherman Act, the Cartwright Act, and other California laws.

The plaintiffs also claim the agreements constitute an overarching antitrust conspiracy because each was made with knowledge of the other agreements, and relied on the other agreements to achieve a common goal of reducing compensation and mobility for highly sought-after skilled tech employees.

According to the plaintiffs’ statement (PDF), the chronology of some of the  agreements is as follows:

• January 2005 – Pixar senior executives (which include Steve Jobs) draft written terms for a no-poach agreement and send them to Lucasfilm
• May 2005 – Apple and Adobe make agreements
• 2006 – Apple and Google make agreements shortly after Eric Schmidt joined Apple’s board of directors
• April 2007 – Apple and Pixar make agreements
• June and September 2007 – Google enters into agreements with Intuit and Intel that are identical to the agreements between Apple and Google, Apple and Adobe, and Apple and Pixar

Additionally, Steve Jobs personally contacted Palm’s CEO Edward T. Colligan to propose an unlawful agreement, writing “We must do whatever we can” to stop competitive recruiting efforts between the companies.” Colligan declined Jobs’ offer, writing “Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal.”

The plaintiffs request “The Court should deny the motion, lift the stay of discovery, and permit Plaintiffs ‘to secure the just, speedy, and inexpensive determination’ of this action.”

The defendants claim that the agreements were isolated and not interconnected. They claim the agreements were pro-competitive parts of legitimate collaborations between the companies, many of which had executives on each other’s boards or started as the same company as with Pixar and Lucasfilm.

The defendants also claim “The alleged bilateral arrangement provide no support for the overall conspiracy that plaintiffs have alleged in order to name the defendants in a class action”. They motion for continuation of the partial stay of discovery and for the case to be dismissed.

However, my research and sources indicate the defendants’ claims are false, the plaintiffs case is plausible, and so there are no grounds for dismissal. Furthermore, the only reason more evidence about the interconnection between the agreements isn’t available is because they were made so secretively.

The case should be allowed to proceed because the plaintiffs have produced “smoking guns” indicating a deep conspiracy. Specifically, “Do Not Cold Call” lists which defendants used to implement the agreements, and the written terms of Pixar’s agreement with Lucasfilm. These signal that today’s joint motion to dismiss the case should be denied because if discovery is permitted to continue, there’s a reasonable expectation that evidence of illegal activity will be revealed.

Finally, the precedent is that motions to dismiss are “viewed with disfavor and are properly granted only in exceptional cases…A complaint satisfies Twombly [is only eligible for dismissal] if the allegations, taken as a whole, are not ‘facially implausible’” according to the plaintiffs’ statement. Therefore, it would take a very strong presentation by the defense for Judge Lucy Koh to dismiss the case.

If the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case is denied, the case will move towards a trial by jury in June 2013. Rather than leave an assessment of damages to the judge and jury, the defendants may try to settle the case, similar to how they settled with the Department of Justice’s federal case in 2010. In the defendants lose or settle, full-time employees of the defendants could be compensated for the 10-15% of lost wages estimated by the plaintiffs’ law firm Lieff Cabraser.

I’m currently sitting in the courtroom waiting for the hearing to begin. Check back soon for the judge’s decision of whether to dismiss the case.

Update 4:30pm PST 1/26/2012: The judge has lifted the stay of discovery, saying “This case is moving forward…this case is going to survive the motion to dismiss.” Though her official statement hasn’t been filed, she’s likely to deny the defendants motion to dismiss the case. She also ordered Google to produce draft emails in addition to sent emails, and designate which are drafts and which were sent.

During the hearing, the judge asked if the plaintiffs would consider breaking up the case to focus on each unlawful agreement separately. The plaintiffs claimed the agreements were all interconnected and that they are confortable with pursuing a joint, overarching antitrust complaint.

On June 28th, the court will convene to hear class certification to define what employees are eligible to be represented by the class action lawsuit. The plaintiffs plan to assess evidence surfaced during discovery and determine if only software engineers, software engineers and scientists, or all of the defendants’ employees will be represented by the class action lawsuit.

The head attorney representing the plaintiffs, Joseph R. Saveri of Lieff Cabraser, gave reporters a conservative calculation of the possible damages that employees could be compensated for. He said software engineers make $100,000 a year (they make more), their compensation was “suppressed between 5 and 10%” and “tens of thousands of employees were affected”. That means for each year an entry-level full-time software engineer worked at one of these companies, they might be entitled to damages of $5,000 to $10,000. Higher paid veteran engineers could be entitled to much more. The total damages could therefore be at least $150 million if just 10,000 entry-level engineers were affected.

In a world of personalized, distributed information sharing, Techmeme and its sister sites have successfully gone the opposite direction. They’re machine-powered, human-controlled news aggregators that have readers — especially media types — following like drug addicts jonesing for another hit. The flagship site, Techmeme.com, has just gotten a big redesign that modernizes the look and feel of the interface, and emphasizes new social features. Here’s one junkie’s reaction.

The main aspects are the same as before. It still analyzes the web for popular articles, using factors like which article has the most inbound links, to provide an ever-shifting flow of top news. The stories are ranked according to popularity from top to bottom, with the input of its human editor team.

Almost everything else is different. It’s is the biggest change-up since the site looked like this back in 2006.

First off, links no longer have underlines, as founder Gabe Rivera says in his official post on the changes. This reflects a design preference seen on most of the web these days — except, as he notes on that old-school political news aggregator called the Drudge Report.

Perhaps more obviously for the casual user, the main feed of stories has had its width reduced by roughly 100 pixels by my count. Sponsored posts have been moved into a center column, which will appear above the fold on most computer screens. The feed of the newest stories has been moved to the far right.

“Sponsors weren’t complaining [about where they appeared on the site],” he tells me, “but I imagine some of them will like the new layout. One reason for three columns is it will make more room for other things near the top of the page. There’s space for ‘future expansion’. And yes, we’re not done filling that white space.”

Conversations, the collection of other stories under each main one, also has a convenient new dropdown feature — a downward arrow button that you can click on to see the extended list of articles. In the previous design, you could also do this, but you had to mouse over the story to get a small “+” button to appear for you to click on.

On the social side of things, the site is making sharing even easier by adding Twitter retweet and Facebook Like buttons at the top right of each main story. Mouse over any one of them and the buttons will appear, as well as an additional one that lets you quickly grab a unique URL for the story. The previous design had packaged all of the sharing options into a window you opened via clicking on the story icon.

“In most cases readers don’t want to bother editing the headline of the story they’re sharing,” Rivera says about the choice of the Retweet button in his post, “so we opted for the more natural retweet option.” I followed up by asking what sort of sharing stats he had available. “Now that you asked,” he replied, “I realize I haven’t done any testing or research at all to support going with a RT button. It just seemed like a cool idea. I suspect you don’t see these buttons much because, unless I’m missing something, it’s a little harder to implement (because your site needs to grab the tweet ID after you post to make the button work).”

I asked him about the lack of Google’s +1 button. “Well, we’re open to it, but just want to begin with a simple trio of buttons.”

A few other changes include a toggle button at the top to open all links as new tabs, a new About section, and new locations for links to sister sites, the archives, etc.

Most of the reactions so far have been positive, but some readers are wondering about the new Optima font. Rivera has a good explanation. “Optima (the font people see on Macs and iOS) is very good at allowing the eye to see the different pub names in “More” (formerly “Discussion”) as distinct. Also, it’s the font most people I spoke to preferred when presented with a few alternatives before launch. But indeed, I noticed some people dislike it. Maybe it’s a divisive font. But don’t assume the haters are the majority. See also.”

The new interface will eventually roll out to Mediagazer and other Techmeme sister sites, like gossip aggregator WeSmirch and my secret favorite, Drudge-replacing political aggregator Memorandum. But the refresh isn’t as urgent, Rivera says in his post. “Mediagazer in particular isn’t as afflicted with the uglies in the first place, given that its area of coverage leads to less link-heavy story clusters. But it will nonetheless benefit from a refresh. Techmeme’s redesign will not, however, extend into its past. One curious yet fun practice we’ve upheld here is that old archives maintain their old look.”

Rivera’s response when I asked about what to expect from the privately-held, boostrapped company in the future? “We’re going to do more stuff.” Prepare yourselves, addicts.

[H/t to Miguel Rios for the headline.]

As a gamer with admittedly poor impulse control, the newly-released Steam app for iOS and Android has me very worried. On the one hand, it seems like an ideal way to to keep tabs on the popular gaming service on the go.

On the other though, I could easily see myself going overboard on buying games I don’t need when I should be pretending to be a productive member of society.

The Steam app sports a set of features that should be familiar to many a PC gamer, including gaming news feeds and the ability to browse the extensive catalog. It’s also very geared toward communication, as it allows you to keep in touch with your fellow Steam buddies by poking through their profiles or kicking off a mobile chat session.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have no Steam friends, so the biggest threat that the new Steam app poses to people like me is that it provides up-to-date information about games on sale, which means that my loved ones will soon notice that I’m spending more time checking to see if Cave Story+ is on sale than, y’know, interacting with them.

Yes, I know I have a problem.

My only consolation is that the app is usable by people who have been invited to the beta, so I’ll be safe from the allure of buying cheap games from the park for at least a little while longer. If you’re lucky enough to be among the select few with beta access, the app is already live in the Android and iOS app stores. Download away, but please don’t tell me what I’m missing out on.