Category: Tech news

Two backups are better than one. It’s the only principle geeks follow more closely than the Prime Directive.

Back up your data to one drive, and make the second drive into an exact duplicate of the first — voila, a backup of a backup. In IT parlance, this is known as a redundant backup, and the most popular system for handling it is called RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

The PopDrive from DHK Storage intends to be one of the first inexpensive, consumer-level RAID drives. It comes with two separately packaged, Western Digital 2.5-inch hard drives, like those found in notebooks. The package with two 500-GB hard drives will cost you $250, for two 750-GB drives, you’ll pay $350.

You also get both a USB 2.0 cable and an eSATA cable. The drives, which pop into the two retractable slots on the PopDrive’s aluminum case, are hot swappable when using the eSATA cable, but not when using USB. Unfortunately, most computers these days don’t have the faster eSATA ports, but for those that do, the throughput performance is blazingly fast — you’ll get 3 gigabits per second over eSATA versus USB 2.0’s 480 megabits per second¹.

While the idea for the PopDrive is simple, setting it up is not. In fact, setting up the PopDrive is like getting stuck overnight at the airport in a blizzard. Even by the DHK Storage’s own admission, the process takes a plodding 10 to 15 hours. It took me 12, mostly while the drives mirrored and verified each other for the first time using the included, enigmatic SteelVine Manager software. The virgin discs then needed to be formatted and partitioned; another hand-holding exercise, but this time using native Windows or Mac utilities. Fortunately, the illustrated step-by-step guide that came on the install CD guided me through the process, but I kept wondering why a product aimed at consumers would come loaded with highfalutin’ mumbo jumbo. Like furniture from Ikea, the package should read “assembly required.”

But once this excruciatingly slow exercise is complete, the PopDrive is ready to rock ‘n’ roll. To prevent any confusion, the PopDrive sets up with just a single drive letter. We only backup to one drive anyway, the second drive being merely a slave of the first.

With the price of external hard drives in the 500-750 GB range now well under $100, what’s the big deal about the PopDrive, which costs about three times more? For one thing, while external hard drives are cheap, they offer no security if they crash or malfunction. You’re still left without that “fail-safe” backup. The PopDrive always contains a second, exact duplicate drive. And if one drive dies, you can easily stick in another one by popping open the door. The PopDrive accepts virtually any 2.5-inch hard drive, be it new or one from your notebook.

The real expense of the PopDrive is the effort it takes to get it up and running. Past that, it offers the peace of mind that the backup of your data has a just-in-case twin.

WIRED A portable consumer version of IT-style RAID drive with a set of two hard drives, one backing up the other simultaneously. Aluminum construction is light — about a pound — but sturdy. Works with either USB or eSATA, both cables included.

TIRED Spending half a day setting it up using an obtuse utility will try your patience. You could build your own for cheaper if you have the smarts.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired

1: The original version of the review misstated the speeds of eSATA and USB, citing gigabytes instead of gigabits, and megabytes instead of megabits.

Ultralights aren’t for everyone, but with the ThinkPad X220, Lenovo sure is doing its best to make the case that they can be.

This latest version of its super-slim executive standby is ThinkPad doing everything it does best. Still impossibly portable — at 3.3 pounds despite the bumped-up 12.1-inch, 1366 x 768-pixel display — Lenovo packs in everything a traveling professional (or just about anyone else) is likely to need.

The centerpiece is a new Core i5 Sandy Bridge processor, which upends the middling performance we usually expect from an ultralight. Benchmarks trounce just about everything we’ve tested of late — save for a few recent-vintage high-end machines — and they completely blow historical ultralight benchmarks out of the water, beating most machines with the last-generation chip by 30 to 40 percent.

What’s more remarkable is that the chip’s beefed up integrated graphics gave us a solid gaming experience on the machine, too, with performance clocking at or above what you’d normally get with a lower-end discrete graphics processor. Much has been said about the joys of Sandy Bridge already, of course, but to see it put to good use in such a compact machine is almost beyond words.

Beyond the i5, the machine’s specs are totally up to code: 4 GB of RAM, 320-GB hard drive, SD and ExpressCard slots, and three USB ports (one chargeable). There’s no optical drive and while there’s no HDMI port, there is a DisplayPort socket, so plan your cabling accordingly. The keyboard is outstanding and typical of the ThinkPad brand. Audio isn’t particularly inspiring but it’s good enough for a machine of this stature.

Lenovo trumpets the X220’s better-than-average battery life, but in our testing, it hit a mere 4:53 using the six-cell battery. Hardly epic, but that’s still good. There are a few battery options available as upgrades if you want to stretch your work time.

I reserve just one complaint for the X220 and that is the touchpad design. The textured surface is pleasing to the touch, but Lenovo has foregone separate buttons in order to maximize the size of the touchpad in a very cramped area. The bottom portion of the touchpad wraps around the end of the palm rest, and to click you press on these corners of the pad. Unfortunately, something’s off with the engineering of this: The pad misses clicks all the time, and it makes the cursor stutter badly when you’re (subconsciously or not) resting a thumb on the pad as you prepare to click. Great idea, but the execution isn’t there.

At $1,300, it’s certainly on the higher end of prices for modern laptops, though it isn’t obscenely expensive. We’ve seen higher price tags for bulkier machines that didn’t come close to performance like this.

WIRED Insane battery life flirts with five long hours. Blazing performance outdoes your kid’s gaming laptop. Super-lightweight, but solidly built. Milspec tested (though not yet certified).

TIRED Half-baked touchpad design. Please, Lenovo, please swap the Fn and Ctrl keys once and for all.

Photo courtesy of Lenovo

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has finally decided to put an official end to its Zune media player line. “A person familiar with the decision” has informed them that Microsoft will not be putting out any new hardware in the line, and will be henceforward focusing on integrating Zune functionality with the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Not exactly unexpected; the Zune hardware hasn’t changed since mid-2009′s release of the Zune HD, although it has received several significant software upgrades. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but whether Microsoft would double down (again) or cut their losses was far from clear. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane.

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Mapping is a big boy’s game, with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest dominating maps on both the Web and mobile. But sometimes it takes a startup to push things forward. 3D mobile mapping startup UpNext is hoping to get on the map, so to speak, with its detailed 3D maps of cities and venues like the Super Bowl stadium. The New York city startup, which has been around since 2007, just raised a $557,000 series A round of preferred shares, according to an SEC filing. That amount includes $57,000 that converted from a previously-undisclosed friends-and-family round in 2009. The new round is $500,000 and investors include Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, David Cohen of TechStars (who invested individually), David Tisch and Oleg Tscheltzoff

Co-founder Danny Moon says the company will use the funds to expand its platform from its own mobile and iPad apps to become an underpinning technology for “travel guides, resorts, event planners, amusement parks, to name a few,” which can incorporate UpNext’s 3D maps into their own apps. UpNext allows a level of detail not seen in most mapping technologies, including directories of business inside specific buildings or the ability to zoom down to the seat level inside a stadium, as it showcased with its Super Bowl app.

UoNext will also keep pushing with its own iPhone app. “We’re creating exciting new technology to enable users to explore cities, visually. Think an interactive, social city model that changes in realtime,” hints Moon. Realtime, in 3D,—what more could anyone ask for?

UpNext On The iPad Introduces Fluid Labels For 3D Maps

Zynga is debuting its previously announced points program, RewardVille, today which adds a rewards layer across all of the social gaming giant’s games. Now, Zynga’s 250 million players can earn “zCoins” when they are playing Zynga’s games on Facebook and other platforms.

As you play more of Zynga’s games, you earn zPoints and zCoins which can then be used towards purchasing exclusive virtual goods on RewardVille. The new program is essentially tying rewards between all of Zynga’s games, including CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille, and Vampire Wars.

So users can now earn zCoins and zPoints by playing Zynga games. You can spend your zCoins on cool in-game items in Zynga RewardVille!For some users, Zynga has already enabled them to earn the points. Other users will have to go to RewardVille’s website and activate the program. Once you’ve activated RewardVille, earning zPoints lets you advance your Zynga level, gain zCoins, and just as in the games, unlock different RewardVille items along the way. You can earn as much as 80 zPoints per game or 300 zPoints total in one day. You’ll be able to see how many points you’ve earned on your Zynga Game Bar on Facebook. The more you play Zynga games, and the more Zynga games you play, the faster you’ll level up and earn rewards in RewardVille.

In order to redeem your zCoins, you have to visited RewardvVille’s site where you can sign in with Facebook Connect. Zynga will automatically tally how many points you’ve earned and you can use redeem points for limited edition virtual gifts, such as the “Stepped Skyscraper” in CityVille or a “Ring of Fire” in FrontierVille (you can only redeem virtual gifts with points, not cash/credit card). And you can send mystery gifts across games to friends playing other Zynga games.

The idea behind the program is to get users to start playing multiple Zynga games so they can earn more rewards. It unifies the gaming portals rewards and incentivizes users to play Zynga games on Facebook, so they earn these rewards.

So how does Facebook Credits fit into this? The reason Zynga is not using real money with RewardVille is because of Facebook Credits. Facebook recently mandated that Credits will be the exclusive way for users to get their ‘real money’ into a game, but developers will still be allowed to keep their own in-game currencies. I’m assuming RewardVille’s zPoints and zCoins will be considered an in-game currency.

Of course, RewardVille also gets users to start interacting with Zynga games off of Facebook, which is interesting considering the two company’s tumultuous history. Things seem to be peaceful now, but I’m curious how RewardVille will effect the relationship.

The dust has finally settled on the Sheen media hurricane from the past couple of weeks and bloggers have pretty much moved on in expectation of the next easy content fustercluck. Internships.com however, who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign (in the guise of a social media intern job post), is reaping the benefits of the two Sheen tweets, and have revealed their related traffic totals to TechCrunch in the wake of the blitz.

According to its internal Omniture data, Internships.com saw 1,035,021 unique visitors (almost two uniques per link click) as a result of the tweets and the subsequent shares and media attention (Representative Todd Leeloy tells me they subtracted out normal and affiliate traffic to get these numbers).

Between the campaign’s run of 1:03pm PST on Monday March 7th and midnight on Friday March 11th, the original bit.ly link received over 475,375 clicks and over 82,148 people applied for the internship, which Internships.com CEO Robin Richards tells me will be boiled down to 50 highly qualified candidates (eliminating all the reporters who applied as an experiment for example).

While internships.com says Sheen is “absolutely not” their spokesperson, in my opinion jury’s still out on what you call someone who is paid to tweet (hint: “spokesperson” would be a good word for it). But whatever you may call it and what ever you may think of Sheen’s lifestyle, these numbers are another bit of evidence proving that Twitter as a marketing tool can no longer be ignored.

In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry–Lugar legislation. That’s because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money—even in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen jobs.  Yet our political leaders would have claimed “Mission Accomplished”, and we would have lost a valuable opportunity to stem the brain drain.

I was delighted to receive an e-mail, last week, from Garrett Johnson, who works for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Garrett said that the Senator had read my articles and asked his staff to consider my comments. After consulting with Bob Litan, of Kauffman Foundation; Brad Feld, of Foundry Group; Eric Ries, of the lean-startup movement; and other champions of the visa, Garrett had revised the legislation. He sent me a draft of the bill that was introduced today.  This new legislation is even better than I had hoped for. If it gets through both houses—and doesn’t have bureaucratic constraints—I expect it to unleash a flood of entrepreneurship.

The new legislation provides visas to the following groups under certain conditions:

1. Entrepreneurs living outside the U.S.—if a U.S. investor agrees to financially sponsor their entrepreneurial venture with a minimum investment of $100,000. Two years later, the startup must have created five new American jobs and either have raised over $500,000 in financing or be generating more than $500,000 in yearly revenue.
2. Workers on an H-1B visa, or graduates from U.S. universities in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, or computer science—if they have an annual income of at least $30,000 or assets of at least $60,000 and have had a U.S. investor commit investment of at least $20,000 in their venture. Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.
3. Foreign entrepreneurs whose business has generated at least $100,000 in sales from the U.S.  Two years later, the startup must have created three new American jobs and either have raised over $100,000 in financing or be generating more than $100,000 in yearly revenue.

The investor must be a qualified venture capitalist, a “super angel” (U.S. citizen who has made at least two equity investments of at least $50,000 every year for the previous three years), or a qualified government entity.

The really good news is that this enables foreign students and workers who are already in the U.S. to qualify for a visa. The requirements for them are very reasonable—they must show that they have enough in savings not to be a burden to American taxpayers, and get a qualified investor or a government entity such as the Small Business Administration to validate their ideas by making a modest investment.

Yes, there is a risk for holders of this visa that, if their venture fails or doesn’t go anywhere, they must start again or leave the U.S. But that’s entrepreneurship—there are no guarantees. This won’t appeal to everyone, and it is not meant to. The Startup Visa is for risk takers.

This version of the bill will, I expect, encourage tens of thousands of workers trapped in “immigration limbo”, and foreign students who would otherwise return home after graduation, to try their hands at entrepreneurship. Many of these people would not otherwise have considered entrepreneurship; they will now have the incentive to take the risk.

Even though the bill doesn’t allow visa holders to work for any company other than their own, I have no doubt that the anti-immigrants will rally against it. They always do, regardless of what is good for the country and of what is good for them. They fear competition and will make claims that these startups will, somehow, take their jobs away.

But the fact is that skilled immigrants create jobs; and recipients of the startup visa will not be allowed to stay in the U.S. permanently unless they do. Right now, these job creators have no choice but to take their ideas and savings home with them and become our competitors. This legislation allows them to create the jobs here.

A lot of hard work has gone into this bill, over the last two years, by tech notables Brad Feld, Eric Ries, Dave McClure, Manu Kumar, Shervin Pishevar, Fred Wilson, and Paul Kedrosky. This group is launching a campaign to gain the bill political support. It is using social-lobbying tools powered by Votizen to take tweets, Facebook posts, and SMS messages and hand-deliver them to Congress. The Startup Visa website details how you can get involved and help the bill to succeed. Now it is your turn to speak up and help us revitalize the economy.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions, more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app (iTunes link) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video).

It’s a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year’s subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin’s rockstar photo shoots. But it’s also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin’s music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them.

The one thing that always bugged me about music mags is that the writers sing the praises of bands, or alternatively trash them, and it all sounds convincing enough, but you buy an album based on their suggestion and it’s awful. Or they dismiss the songs that speak to you. Music is so subjective anyway. Now you can actually play some of the songs they are writing about, while you read the review. And you can decide immediately which music reviewers share the same musical taste as you and which ones need to clean the wax out of their ears.

Are 60 streaming-only songs a month worth $1.99 when you can get millions of songs on Rdio or Rhapsody for $4.99 or $9.99 a month, respectively? If you get the $7.99 annual subscription, it comes to less than 75 cents per months, but you can’t really compare the two. Spin is offering a highly curated playlist. If it’s editors really do have better music tastes than the rest of us, then it could be like getting the best mixed CD every month from your friend who is in a band. If the music is meh, then people are not going to renew their subscriptions.

And that’s why this app is notable. Spin’s iPad magazine won’t live or die based on the quality of the writing or the photography or even the “behind the scenes” videos (who really cares about those anyway?). It will live or die based on the musical taste of its editors and how good or awful those playlists are. The main reason people read music magazines are for the recommendations anyway. With the iPad app, now you can just listen to the song recommendations and judge for yourself. It’s a music magazine in its purest form.

Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday and to commemorate the occasion, is revealing a number of stats showing its growth over the past five years.

It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day from the first Tweet to get to the billionth Tweet. In a given week, users send a billion Tweets. Users are now sending 140 million Tweets, on average, per day, up from 50 million Tweets sent per day, a year ago. The all-time high in terms of Tweets sent per day was 177 million sent on March 11, 2011.

In terms of Tweets per second, the all time high was 6,939 Tweets per second after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day. This compares to the previous record of 456 Tweets per second when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009.

Twitter says that 572,000 accounts were created on March 12, 2011, with 460,000 new accounts per day over the last month on average. Mobile users are up 182 percent over the past year. And Twitter currently has 400 employees, up from 8 in January 2008.

If you care about the well-being of the Internet, you care about net neutrality. You just might not realize it yet.

This morning, Senator Al Franken took to the stage at SXSW Interactive to talk about the issue in front of a crowd of tech-savvy entrepreneurs and creatives, where he urged them to reach out to their representatives in Congress and let them know just how important net neutrality is to keeping the web healthy. Franken has previously described it as the most important free speech issue of our time, and he’s worried that the equality we’ve come to expect on the web may soon be undermined by major corporations.

Just before he gave his speech, we had the chance to sit down with Senator Franken to discuss the current status of the ongoing debate around net neutrality, and why it’s important that the public becomes involved in the campaign. We also touched on Franken’s recent letter to Facebook over the social network’s plans to grant third parties access to user phone numbers and addresses. And yes, we even got to know a little bit about his morning workout routine — which sounds rigorous. Tune in to the video above to learn more.

Franken closed out his talk at SXSW with the following message:

Let’s not sell out. And let’s not let the government sell us out. Let’s fight for net neutrality. Let’s keep Austin weird. Let’s keep the Internet weird. Let’s keep the Internet free.

San Francisco-based ad platform, BoostCTR, announced today that it has closed a $1.64 million seed funding round led by a group of institutional investors and angels, including Javelin Venture Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, Founder Collective, WGI Group, and 500 Startups. Managing Director of Javelin Ventures Jed Katz and Metamorphic Ventures Partner David Hirsch will be joining the company’s board of directors.

BoostCTR is a text-ad optimization tool designed to help advertisers boost their click-through and conversion rates by crowdsourcing ad content to a stable of expert copywriters. It works like this: Advertisers sign in to BoostCTR’s dashboard and authorize it to connect with their AdWords account. They then choose the ads that you want to optimize and create contests based on your selections, in which BoostCTR’s bullpen of copywriters compete to write targeted text for those ads.

From there, the company’s automated testing software manages the entire contest process, using advertisers’ AdWords analytics to find the most lucrative ads and setting those ads as the baseline against which new ideas are compared. Advertisers can accept, reject, or modify new ads created by BoostCTR copywriters at any time.

To address security and privacy concerns, copywriters aren’t allowed access to client accounts, they only see the contest pages created for the ads the advertiser chooses to optimize. The writers can then opt in to the contests and, if the ad the writer creates outperforms the ad’s prior iteration, they get paid based on the price set by the contest, usually around $25 per contest.

The BoostCTR model is based on the understanding that advertisers — especially enterprise — wants to be able to test their ads frequently, based on performance, but often lack the resources to do so. BoostCTR allows enterprise advertisers, search engine marketers, and small businesses to outsource and optimize the creation and testing of ads in realtime without having to devote a lot of time or resources to the process.

Traditionally, only large corporations and online marketing agencies have had access to professional ad copy writers, so BoostCTR hopes to democratize ad optimization by giving everyone access to expert copywriters for a monthly subscription fee. The subscription fee is to purchase a number of credits, which are priced between $60 and $90 a month. Each credit starts an optimization contest for a new ad group. If advertisers don’t like the content BoostCTR’s writers are producing, they get their money back. And, if the company can’t produce a better ROI for a particular ad within 10 attempts, advertisers are reimbursed.

According to CEO David Greenbaum, the copywriters follow an application process and are required to take this test before being screened by the company. So, while the process is designed to allow both freelance and employed copywriters make some extra money on the side — and to free content creation up to a larger audience — advertisers won’t just be receiving content from any random person with a computer.

This screening process doesn’t completely allay my concerns that BoostCTR won’t just become a farm for search engine marketing and ad optimization — what Demand Media is for SEO content production. But, as Demand makes the Google search experience more cluttered and less targeted, BoostCTR is attempting to improve the Google search ad experience by providing more targeted ads than the typical, generic template.

Yet, if the company can live up to its claims that it provides advertisers with a 30 percent lift in click-through rates and sales volume, I’m sure they will find at least a few welcoming clients. It is an interesting idea and could become attractive to Google and Facebook down the road, as the company hones its strategy.

As to how BoostCTR will use its first round of funding, Greenbaum said the company is looking to expand to include the ad platforms of Bing and Yahoo and to integrate with bid management platforms. It also plans to build an API to allow third party developers to tap into its network of copywriters, as well as to further sharpen the algorithms that it uses to match writers to contests and track their performance. “We want to build the equivalent of Google’s ‘quality score’ for writers”, the CEO said.

Yeah, this round of funding is huger than huge. Well, at least for Europe. And while it may be nowhere near Groupon’s, like, billion-dollar-round, it is definitely amongst the bigger deals on this side of the Atlantic.

Multiple sources have confirmed that they are currently in discussion with Luxemburg-based Wikio Groupe, who is in the process of securing a very large round of funding.  While no official information has been released, the 8-figure number could easily hit 9-figures in USD given the current exchange rate. That would make it one of the biggest rounds of funding to take place in Europe this year.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — spent a rare Sunday session raking Twitter over the coals. Well, some of the Gang, that is. Scoble and Marks chimed in from Austin, while the others stayed behind in SIlicon Valley. But the split divided differently over Twitter’s move to lock down client development. Marks and Taschek thought Twitter’s move was heavy-handed and a mistake, while Scoble agreed with me that Twitter was in the driver’s seat.

South By Southwest seems to continue to grow in attendance and startup launches, with less impact due to the fragmentation of competitors bunched up in group chatting and other location-based features. Meanwhile, the rich get richer if we measure by adoption and extensions of metadata models in search of monetization opportunities. The age-old discussion of open v. closed may still capture its share of blogosphere attention, but behind the scenes the move from consumer cloud to the enterprise is changing the metrics to those of trust and stability.

One of the most eagerly awaited movies debuting at SXSW this year is the Swedish production Press, Pause, Play. It’s an examination of both the benefits and the downside of the democratizing power of the Internet, featuring interviews with Seth Godin, Scott Belsky, Sean Parker, Moby and (blush) myself.

Press, Pause, Play got its world premiere on Friday night in Austin and yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down in the AOL studio with its two Swedish co-directors, David Dworsky and Victor Köhler. Both guys seemed liked they hadn’t had any sleep for about six months; both, I suspect, had been enjoying the delights of SXSW rather too much.

The legal dispute between Apple Corps and Apple Inc. for the rights to the Apple logo are far reaching. Since the first case back in 1978, Apple Inc. has slowly whittled away at Apple Corp’s initial legal settlement banning Apple Inc. from entering the music industry. It wasn’t until a 2007 settlement when most of Apple Corps’ trademarks were given to Apple Inc. thereby paving the way to the November 2010 release of the Beatles catalog on iTunes. There was, however, one piece of trademark that Apple Inc. never got, until now: Apple Corps’ Apple logo.

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