08:33 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you happen to journey around Manhattan this weekend, don't miss the opportunity to meet the nice folks from Palm Addicts, who will be celebrating two get-togethers on Sunday. Here the details:

MEET UP 1/ SUNDAY 12 NOON, PRESS CLUB, NYC: Next we have the first, Palm Addict meetup at 12 noon at The Press Club in Midtown. There are places still available but you need to book today, it's free to attend although you just pay for your own brunch. Hit me with an email - sammymcloughlin@gmail.com and put NYC in the subject line.

MEETUP 2/ SUNDAY EVENING, WEST VILLAGE, NYC: Then we have a second Palm Addict Meet Up organised by Mark Quinn who is a real great guy and has organised this meeting with a number of readers who could not make the morning meetup and he has opened up his apartment in the West Village to the meetup happening taking place at 7pm, again on Sunday, which will last approx 2 hours. There will be a buffet available which his lovely wife has laid on. Again I have a few prizes for the meet up which is expected to end at 9pm. There is still room for a small number of you but again you need to hit me with an email today - sammymcloughlin@gmail.com and put NYCEVENING in the subject line please. First come first served basis on this one.

Too bad I won't be in town otherwise I would definitely be there!

08:26 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

eReader and Fictionwise are both offering specials this weeks to help you save a few bucks on e-books. Over at Fictionwise, you can buy any SciFi title and receive a 15% discount by using the coupon code SUMMERSF (good till 07/17 7am ET). And over at eReader, use the coupon code 27KDB at checkout and you'll save 10% instantly on any e-book title priced more than $3.00 (good till 07/19).

[via Palm Addicts]

08:10 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Skype protocol has been successfully reverse-engineered by a bunch of Chinese computer wizzes. Of course, this is complete unsubstantiated speculation, but it certainly isn't out of the realm of possibility. A guy claims that his Chinese friend has called him through Skype except that he wasn't using the original Skype client to initiate the call.

Today I received a call through Skype from a friend at a company in China, except he told me he was not using Skype to call me. His company has successfully reverse engineered the Skype protocol and he wanted to call me in the United States to see how it worked between physically distant IP addresses. We talked for a little over nine minutes before the call dropped. Then I called him back using my Skype and we spoke for another three minutes.

It doesn't require to be a genius to forecast the wrath of Skype company. The Skype network protocol is known to contain various methods of obfuscations (e.g. data is encrypted with RC4). Binaries of the official Skype clients are encrypted and contain various antidebugging and checksum tricks. In other words, until know, Skype preferred to keep its business in a total blackbox. Sure, the company may start to counterattack annoying hackers by preventing rogue clients from connecting to their networks. But do you recall Yahoo! when they tried to ban third parties from their Yahoo IM network? They failed miserably. And so will Skype.

07:07 PM by CommanderROR in E-Book Readers | Sony Reader

There is finally some news about the Sony Reader. Our valued member DiabloNL pointed us to this link where a nice video review of the elusive device was posted.

The video contains little new information apart from the fact that the shipping date is given as "September or October", but it gives a nice overview of the device, it's handling and it's features.

You can find the original thread here.

05:52 PM by Bob Russell in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

HP is making more progress with flexible TFT displays. "Roll-up electronic newspapers should be available in the future. In the shorter term, however, we're more likely to see the release of non-flat, flexible TFT displays."

Back in October of 2004, it was reported that HP had "unveiled prototypes of a new display technology today that they claim can lead to very large high resolution colour displays printed on plastic." An HP spokesman said at the time, "We feel this is a substantial advance in the development of the thin, flexible displays we're all looking for."

So it looks like we have more evidence of the march towards practical display technologies. It is advancing, despite our long wait for commercial products for the mass market. About the only real signs we have seen that new generation displays are coming are the new e-ink book readers that we are so anxiously awaiting.

Much more information on flexible displays, including an explanation of why LCDs don't bend, is also available separately at ComputerWorld's article on flexible displays.

Via LISNews.

04:00 PM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Announcements

Roland, also better known as CommanderROR, has joined our ranks here at MobileRead. If you haven't already heard, like you know, if you've been living under a rock for the past 30 days, the iLiad e-book reader is heading to our shores, and it's thanks to CommanderROR's impressive "communication work" with iRex that many of us are soon happy iLiad owners (well, things tend to get lost in mail, but let's remain optimistic).

Welcome to the team, Roland. Glad to have you with us!

01:23 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Palm Insider noticed about a month ago that Cobalt 6.1 was listed at the PalmSource web site as "under development." Now, Palm Addicts has followed up and tells us that it has now been moved to "new release."

That's a set of exciting observations. And it leaves us with some questions... * What does this mean?
* Is Cobalt about to be released to a community of PalmOS users, desperate for a new upgraded major version of PalmOS?

While I hate to disappoint, I'd have to say the answer is a clear no. For a number of reasons:
* Cobalt really was released, so it makes sense to list it that way on the web site. In fact, that update might have even been inspired by the Palm Insider story.
* The PalmSource web site tends to have some outdated material on it, such as the expert guide on e-books, which is clearly out of date based on their omission of MobileRead.com as a web resource!
* Access owns PalmSource now, and they have clearly devoted resources to their new ALP (Access Linux Platform), not Cobalt.
* We haven't heard any other rumors about a release of Cobalt, and other device makers are very unlikely to release a Cobalt device at this late date. The only possible exception is that Asian phone maker that had already almost had one ready, who could, I suppose, decide to release that product for some reason. Sorry, don't remember that company name, but they even had a working Cobalt phone at the last, and final, PalmSource developer's conference.
* There are new people involved with the PalmSource web site in conjunction with the Access takeover. It's natural that they would be making updates that seem unusual or oddly-timed.

So my conclusion is simply that the PalmSource Cobalt 6.1 OS is still destined to remain a theoretical exercise that will never see the light of a real-world commercial product. The OS might have been ready to use, but product makers were not. The window of opportunity slammed shut very quickly because Garnet (OS5) remained very viable and capable, and Access has new direction for the future. It's a shame to see that effort go down the drain, but you can be sure much of the work will show itself in ALP.

Until then, we must still wait for the next generation/revolution for PalmOS. Let's just hope that this next version catches on better than Cobalt did. There are a lot of other competitors out there who are hoping to close this window of opportunity as well, including some suspicions that Palm, Inc. is working on a Linux platform of their own. Maybe even to support that new generation of devices that we have been teased about by Jeff Hawkins.

But no matter how it evolves, we know the mobile device explosion is sure to continue. Eventually, maybe even on the e-book and e-ink front!

01:35 PM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The value of Google advertising currently depends pretty heavily on the ratio of "real clicks" to false clicks from click fraud. If advertisers are paying money for falsely generated clicks, then they are likely to balk at continuing to pay advertising fees. This is a threat to Google's revenue generation as awareness of click fraud rises.

Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, and his team have come up with a couple of ways to propel advertising. The first solution is to move from a pay per click model to a cost per action model. The idea is that advertisers don't pay for every click. They pay for the bottom line result, such as "whenever a site visitor clicks on the ad on your site AND performs a specified action, such as generating a lead or purchasing a product." (This text is taken from a Google AdSense e-mail via SearchEngineJournal.)

This would seem to be an ideal alternative for advertisers. You have very little hope of such a system in magazine ads, for example. There was a failed attempt to barcode such print ads, and tie results to ad responses, but it required the reader to have a barcode reader, and swipe the barcode as part of their response mechanism. I guess at the time, that sounded reasonable!

The second reason that Google says advertisers should believe in their online advertising was discussed recently at an event held at Stanford University. Eric Schmidt argued that the fraudulent clicks will be integrated into the pricing anyway, so the market will solve the issue, and there is no need to worry about the future. Specifically, he said, "Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen."

Makes sense, right? And if advertisement hosts (and therefore Google in partnership with them) takes the hit, there really is no reason for advertisers to worry. Surely all is well, and Google only has its competitors to worry about, not click fraud, right?

Not so fast. Don't believe for a moment that this will make all advertisers agree with him that click fraud is no longer an issue once the market forces adjust pricing. And don't believe, either, that the only reasons Google is working to eliminate click fraud is "...because it is a bad thing, because we don’t like it, because it does, at least for the short-term, create some problems before the advertiser sees it, we go ahead and try to detect it and eliminate it."

But despite this slight exaggeration of the market's power to solve click fraud, we'll see below that it might actually reveal a bit more of Eric Schmidt's genius after all. First, the problem with his argument.

Just because click fraud is accounted for at a global level, doesn't mean it solves the problem. For example, here are two issues that are not solved:

1) The estimated amount of click fraud may not be the actual level of click fraud.

If this is the case, there is uncertainty about what is actually being bought by advertisers. They may still be overpaying if their estimates are wrong, or even if they are accurate but not timely and the click fraud rates show a structural change. Such an event could, for example, be due to a new click fraud technology that allows mass undetected fraud.

2) Everyone adjusts their pricing across the market for overall levels of click fraud, but click fraud is highly unlikely to affect all advertisers equally.

Hot topics may be more likely to attract click fraud because of efficiency. Or, conversely, maybe hot topics and major advertisers may be avoided by click fraud schemes in order to minimize their risk of being caught and prosecuted. Whatever the strategy of the click fraud schemes, the very fact that they will probably target certain ads means that some advertisers will be hit harder. That means that any particular advertiser may not be getting very much for their money. (Or maybe they are lucky enough to be getting a great deal if they face few false clicks.)

So, if click fraud is not solved by the market, what is important about the click fraud arguments coming from Google? Why do I say Mr. Schmidt might well be expressing genius in his statements? Again, two points:

1) The obvious advantage is that his statement about market corrections may help calm people's fears about paying too much for advertising. It turns the whole issue of whether click fraud can kill online ads paid for by clicks on its head, and replaces it with an argument about what the correct price shoul be.

2) While it may be true that the market can't fully correct for click ad fraud, there is another subtle point that may slip by the casual observer. Following Schmidt's argument, you still find that while the market adjustment only solve s the global price levels to a certain degree, it still changes the nature of the problem in a whole different way.

Specifically, it's no longer necessary to identify each false click. Now it's only necessary to identify the amount and locations of click fraud, not to stop it entirely. This is still a hard problem, but should be one less degree of difficulty. And it doesn't have to even be completely precise to be effective.

Aha, now it's starting to make sense isn't it? Google still wants to find and stop click fraud. Yes. But not because the Google engineers are just so very curious and find the whole thing interesting as a way to stop evil. In fact, it's at the core of the problem they still need to solve... how to identify patterns and levels of click fraud. To be able to estimate it for given advertisers so they know they aren't paying for worthless false clicks.

And also, of course, to minimize the click fraud in the first place, because it helps elevate revenues and advertiser confidence. Not as much as you might think, though, because all it really does is stop bringing in click events that advertisers shouldn't be paying for in the first place. Remarkably, click fraud is only bad for Google when advertisers avoid buying advertisements because of it. It's more of an advertiser confidence issue than a Google revenue-stealing issue.

So what's the bottom line? Google pretty much has things under control:
* Google is trying to limit click fraud, but as long as advertisers believe that have a handle on the percentage of false clicks that apply specifically to them, ad sales should stay strong.
* Google only has to convince advertisers that there is limited uncertainty about the levels of click fraud, not that click fraud doesn't happen
* If all else fails, there is a potential cost per action model waiting in the wings, and already being tested.

The tech and investment community may be increasingly suspicious of Google because they are so influential and successful, and may wonder how Microsoft will try to "head them off at the pass", and may think that there are still a lot of upcoming obstacles for the company to conquer. That may be right. But one seems to constantly be impressed at the level of talent they are building in-house, and the continual successes and well-executed business plans so far... even if they are winging it as they go!

From http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets...back.php?p=219.