U.S. researchers closer to creating new solar cells

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have taken one step closer to creating high-efficiency solar cells using cheap plastic with a dash of silicon, it was announced on Saturday.

    The solar cells, being developed by researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), have significantly greater sunlight absorption and conversation than previous polymers, the university said in a press release on its website.

    The researchers want these easy-to-use plastic solar energy cells to be sold at local hardware stores, and then hung like posters on the wall, said the release.

    "We hope that solar cells will one day be as thin as paper and be attached to the surface of your choice," said co-author Hsiang-Yu Chen, a UCLA graduate student in engineering. "We'll also be able to create different colors to match different applications."

    The research team found that substituting a silicon atom for carbon atom in the backbone of the plastic markedly improved the material's photovoltaic properties, said the release.

    The new polymer solar cells use organic compounds to produce electricity from sunlight, are much easier to produce than traditional silicon-based solar cells and are also environmentally friendly, the release said.

    "Previously, the synthesizing process for the polymer was very complicated. We've been able to simplify the process and make it much easier to mass produce," said Jianhui Hou, UCLA postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study.

    "Though this is a milestone achievement, we will continue to work on improving the materials," he said.

    "Ideally, we'd like to push the performance of the solar cell to higher than 10 percent efficiency. We know the potential is there," he added.

Resource - xinhuanet

In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

"I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "It's very troubling."

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, announced late Monday he wanted to discuss 11 questions (.pdf) at Tuesday's hearing, one of which goes directly to the heart of the immunity legislation.

"Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision?," the judge asked.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says the immunity legislation, if upheld, "makes it possible to extend immunity to other areas of the law."

He agreed, for example, that it would not be far-fetched to imagine Congress immunizing ExxonMobil for the 1989 Valdez oil spill "for national security reasons." A jury awarded about $5 billion in punitive damages in that case, an amount the courts reduced to $500 million.

In the telecom immunity challenge, the government argues that the telecoms should not be punished, or suffer the threat of punishment, for a surveillance program that the Bush administration claims was designed only to fight terrorism. The government also denies the lawsuits' allegations that the surveillance was a broad dragnet that sucked down Americans' communications on a wholesale basis.

The administration also says the immunity is warranted because the lawsuits threaten to expose government secrets.

The EFF brought the original spying lawsuit in 2006 against AT&T, and has since been joined by dozens of others targeting the nation's telecommunications companies.

The EFF's case, which has been consolidated with the others in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco, includes so-called whistle-blower documents from a former AT&T technician. The EFF claims the documents describe a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco that is wired to share raw internet traffic with the NSA.

The government sought to dismiss the original EFF case, and others that followed, on the grounds that they threatened to expose state secrets. Judge Walker has ruled against the government, saying the case could proceed.

The government appealed. But before the appeal was decided, Congress on July 9 gave the president the power to grant immunity to the carriers.

The EFF is now challenging the immunity legislation on the grounds that it seeks to circumvent the Constitution's separation of powers clause, as well as Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights," the EFF's Cohn says. "You can't do that."

Two weeks ago, the administration told Walker in a court filing (.pdf) that the immunity legislation "represents the considered judgment of our nation's political branches that, in the unique historical circumstances following the 9/11 attacks, telecommunications companies should not bear the burden of defending against claims that those companies assisted the government in its efforts to detect and prevent further terrorist attacks."

Congress, the government continued, "concluded that those companies should not face further litigation if they provided such assistance pursuant to a court order or a written certification, directive or request from a senior government official, or did not provide the alleged assistance."

The immunity law allows the government to file a classified brief with Judge Walker activating immunity for a particular communication company. Walker then has little power to deny the request, unless the judge finds the immunity legislation is itself unconstitutional.

Oral arguments in Walker's courtroom are scheduled for 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday. Threat Level will cover the proceedings live.

Resource - Wired

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Resource - Gizmodo

US Consumers Cutting Back on Technology Purchases

Consumers plan to cut back this holiday season on consumer technology purchases, according to a new report by the NPD Group. The report examined consumer purchase intent for popular holiday gift categories including flat-panel TVs, desktop and notebook PCs, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS devices, and digital picture frames - although not mobile phones.

The report found that among the consumers who plan to come out and shop on Black Friday, a good deal on a specific item is what they are looking for. Fifty-four percent of consumers who said they will get up and shop early on Black Friday are more interested in deals on specific products rather than just overall bargains.

Then there are some consumers who are rethinking making a big-ticket consumer technology purchase for the holidays. Of the 23 percent of consumers who were considering buying a flat-panel TV (40”+), 33 percent said because of the economy now they definitely are not going to buy one. DSLRs were on the shopping lists of about 12 percent of consumers, but now 25 percent of that group said they probably won’t go ahead with purchasing a higher-end camera.

But there will still be plenty of consumers going ahead with planned purchases; they just may be a less expensive brand, or less expensive model from their manufacturer of choice. According to the report, brand loyalty will play a big part in DSLR purchases, but consumers said they will be looking for a less expensive model. More consumers said they won’t be as brand loyal for their digital picture frame or MP3 player purchases, with price being the driving factor.

“The extraordinary economic turmoil we have seen will have a tremendous impact this season as consumers have said that they will probably or definitely hold off on products that have grossed the highest revenue over the last several holiday seasons,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. “To take the best advantage of the consumers who still plan to buy these products, retailers will need to consider where consumers are cutting back on features and where they are switching bands or simply skimming on accessories.”

Resource - cellular-news

Mozilla has IRS breathing down its Google branded neck

With the release of the Mozilla Foundation’s 2007 financial report, questions have been raised by the IRS who are due to perform an audit on the non-profit organisation behind the massively popular Firefox browser.

Last year the Foundation received $66 million of its total $75 million revenue (88 percent) from search engine maestro’s Google, so the IRS are looking for blood over the organisations tax exempt status. Back in 2006, Mozilla got $59.5 million from Google – around 85 percent of the organisations revenue.

Google and Mozilla are part of a “you scratch my back, I’ll pay your bills” sort of agreement with the Google search bar firmly placed in the toolbar, and on the default homepage. Things were a bit rocky a couple of months back when Google unveiled the Beta-run of its Chrome browser, but Mozilla and Google hugged it out and sealed a deal that will last for a further three years. That deal will expire in November 2011.

In 2003, Mozilla received tax exempt status, which meant it didn’t pay any taxes in 2004’s revenue of $4,422,674. The organisation said the agreement with ‘a search provider’, “facilitates the dissemination of the Foundation’s browser, thereby increasing the accessibility of the internet.” Do I know exactly what they mean by that? Well not really if you must know.

In 2005, Mozilla created a for-profit operation, whereby multiple search engine contracts were transferred to the new Mozilla Corporation. When they made the change, Mozilla say they have a “tax reserve fund” set aside in-case the IRS come looking for the tax from 2004/05 – which they are.

The IRS has stated that they are launching a review: “We are early in the process and do not yet have a good feel for how long this will take or the overall scope of what will be involved.”

In the finance report, Mozilla claim that its search revenues should be classed as royalties, and therefore not be taxed, however, they are well aware that the IRS could see things differently. Mozilla has a bit of spare cash in its tax reserve - $14,832,000 at the end of 2007.

The report also says that an inquiry into the organisations tax exemption has begun due to Google supplying a large chunk of the Foundation’s revenue.

“While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33 per cent of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10 per cent,” said the report

If the IRS finds Mozilla hs not been taxed correctly, the organisation says it will become a private charity, and release around 100,000 in taxes.

Resource - Linux Solutions

The YouTube Presidency

Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Yesterday, transition co-chairman Valerie Jarrett recorded a two-minute video that summarized the goings-on in the past week. "President-elect Obama adopted the most sweeping and strict ethics rules that have ever been in place in the course of a transition," said a bespectacled Jarrett, looking directly at the camera in a video that's yet to be posted.

President Bush, too, has updated WhiteHouse.gov, which offers RSS feeds, podcasts and videos of press briefings. The site's Ask the White House page has featured regular online chats dating back to 2003, and President Bush hosted one in January after a Middle Eastern trip.

But online political observers say President-elect Obama's innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House--the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats" between 1933 and 1944,

"The Obama team has written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns. Not only have they achieved impressive mass -- uploading over 1800 videos that have been viewed over 110 million times total -- but they've also used video to cultivate a sense of community amongst supporters," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. "Obama told us in a YouTube interview last year that he plans to have 'fireside chats' on video, and we expect his administration will launch a White House YouTube channel very soon after taking office."

Added Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for government transparency: "We're living, after all, in the Internet era. This is an individualized version of the 'fireside chats.' It's not delivered between 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. but whenever anyone wants to see it. I don't know if it necessarily creates transparency -- it's still a controlled, one-way message. But it creates the aura of a much more accessible presidency."

So what's next from the Obama White House?

A behind-the-scenes online video exclusive of the State of the Union Address? A text message reminding us to turn in our taxes? Who knows...

This is one in a series of online columns on our growing "clickocracy," in which we are one nation under Google, with e-mail and video for all. Please send suggestions, comments and tips to
Resource - Washington Post

iPhone becomes top handset in U.S., passing RAZR

Move over, Motorola. The iPhone has shaved away your lead in the mobile phone market, passing the RAZR to become the top handset purchased by U.S. adult consumers in the third quarter of 2008, according to the research firm NPD Group. The RAZR had held onto the top spot for 12 quarters.

Consumers are buying more iPhones than RAZRs because there is a "watershed shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality," said Ross Rubin, NPD's director of industry analysis. That means consumers don't care only about looking cool anymore -- they want to look cool with a phone that doesn't have an 18% failure rate.

Research In Motion's Blackberry Curve came in third in NPD's ranking. A different report last week, from Canalys, found that the iPhone had passed RIM and Motorola to gain a 17.3% share in the smartphone market. That report showed Nokia still hanging onto first place globally. RIM could be hurting because the Blackberry has twice the failure rate of the iPhone.

Still, according to NPD, the jump in iPhone sales wasn't enough to stave off a slowdown in U.S. phone sales overall. Phone purchases declined 15% in the third quarter from the same period last year. Revenue fell 10%.

It's unclear if the iPhone rush will continue: NPD said mobile phones with QWERTY keyboards saw the greatest year-over-year rise in sales. About 30% of handsets sold in the third quarter had QWERTY keyboards. And as all of us fat-fingered people know, a tactile keyboard is not one of the iPhone's many assets.

Resource - latimes

19,683 Tech Layoffs And Counting

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

That is the equivalent of about 57 startups with ten people each. And those are just the ones that we or other news outlets have been able to confirm. Our list of tips is much longer than that and we are working through it to confirm as many as we can. For instance, Cake Financial has laid off 30 percent of its staff, or 6 people.

Another company with unreported layoffs earlier this week was Meraki, which I’ve confirmed let go 20 percent of its staff (10 people). That makes Meraki the third Sequoia-backed company to announce layoffs this week. (The other two were Mahalo and imeem). Sequoia urged all of its portfolio companies to make cut-backs earlier this month.

At least most of these startups are already done with their layoffs, unlike Yahoo which announced a 10 percent cut is coming but won’t say who exactly is losing their jobs for another few weeks. Layoffs are bad enough, but don’t prolong the misery.

This past week alone, tech companies have laid off 13,809 people:

Company–––––––––Layoffs

Xerox————3,000
Daptiv————–21
Haute Secure———3
Cake Financial——–6
Mercent————-6
Dell————-8,900
imeem————-20
Mahalo————-6
TicketMaster——300
Eons—————8
Veoh————–15
Yahoo———-1,500
Wikia—————3
Meraki————-10
Break.com———-11

Total———-13,809

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

Resource - TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker

After Silicon Valley woke up to the economic crisis last week and VCs rang the alarm bells, startups are starting to heed the call and tighten their belts for a long winter. As the slide above from Sequoia Capital illustrates, belt-tightening now may be the most prudent thing a startup can do. While nobody likes layoffs, least of all the employees losing their jobs, it increases a startup’s chance for survival by reducing how much cash they burn each month.

This week alone, we’ve seen layoffs at Zillow, Pandora, Zivity, AdBrite, Hi5, Jive Software, and Redfin (which laid off 20 people). The week before was Seesmic, and before that eBay. We’re hearing rumblings of more to come.

It’s hard to keep up with it all. So we’ve created a simple Layoff Tracker to keep count. We’ll add layoff data here for tech companies big and small going forward. Hopefully, all the companies on this list will come out stronger on the other end.

If you know of any that have been overlooked, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article.

Resource - TechCrucnh 2

Mobile Learning and the Connected Campus

Mobile technology is shaping the way we live, work and learn at ACU. Since education can now take place in the classroom or virtually anywhere, we are committed to exploring mobile learning technology that makes sense for our students and their future.

In the fall of 2008, ACU became the first university to distribute Apple iPhones and iPod Touches to the incoming freshman class, allowing us to explore a new vision for mobile learning. Now all freshmen and their teachers are able to integrate technology and learning both in and out of the classroom. The initiative began in the fall with the introduction of a portal, Mobile ACU , to help connect students to the campus through maps, news and events, and campus directories. Mobile ACU includes integration with campus email and file systems as well as in-class surveys and polls. For more information, take a look at the ACU Mobile podcasts to begin exploring the possibilities.

Resource - ACU Mobile Learning

Effect of the Depression on Technology

Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance on China for material goods unreciprocated by a reliance from China on American goods; and this adds up to difficult times for business in America for at least three years and possibly longer. From these premises, it's possible to cautiously guess at what the future will hold. (Bearing in mind that every day brings new revelations about the grim state of world finance, so the crystal ball is murky at best)

First, this recession will be good for innovation because recessions generally are. During boom times, companies direct development and occupy great talent with at best evolutionary improvements over the state of the art. Companies are great chasers of new things, but aren't great at making new things. A recession means technologists cease to be paid vast amounts to duplicate the work of others. The Great Tech Bust of Ought Two gave us 37Signals, Flickr, and del.icio.us and there's a strong argument to be made that many companies spent the next six years chasing what they created.

Second, this recession will be great for free and open source because of the shortage of cash. Last recession saw the mainstream legitimisation of open source operating systems (youngsters, take note: there was a time when it wasn't automatically okay for an IT department to use Linux) because it was clear and away the most cost-effective choice. The saying I use is, "come for the price, stay for the quality". Perhaps this recession will legitimise many of the applications (CRM, finance, etc.) higher up the stack. (However, I'm not about to stick my neck out and predict 2009 as The Year of the Linux Desktop)

Third, open source services and cloud computing will benefit from the tight financial situation where conditions will favour opex and not capex. It wil be nigh impossible to borrow to buy hardware or a major software license. An open source software product is free to get through the door, and services around it are delivered from opex not capex. Similarly, cloud computing lets a company pay a little to use someone else's enormous capital investment. It looks like, if the rumours are true, Microsoft will launch Windows Cloud just in time. Don't expect to see anyone else putting in new data centres any time soon—in fact, the days of deep-pocketed investors covering high burn rates are over for a while.

Most consumer apps will be a harder sell with the US dollar in the gutter while the country haemorrhages cash overseas. This is bad but won't make profit impossible, you just have to really be making something consumers need. Apps like Wesabe might find a whole new audience in a recession (disclaimer: O'Reilly is an investor in Wesabe). The conditions don't suit speculative acquisitions, so expect a return to the focus on the bottom line that (very briefly) characterised the fallout from the '01 tech bust. Sorry, dreams of getting people to pay for your toothpick collector social network may have to wait until the return of the stupid money in 2013.

As Phil Torrone said, people will have more time than money. This is good for open source software, but also for hardware and Make-style reconnection with the objects around us. The low-cost high-impact physical events we've created (Ignite, hacker meetups, coworking spaces, foo/bar camps) will thrive even as big-ticket conferences feel the effects of pinched pennies. The killer app in the "web meets world" space may just come from a Maker with spare time who sees a great need.

That's how I see the world and what I think it might favour and disadvantage. How do you see it? What am I missing? Share your views in the comments, and a Head First SQL fridge magnet set for the commenter whom I find the most insightful.

Resource - O’Reilly Radar