Illustration: John Hersey

Bill Nguyen sold his first company, Onebox, in 2000 for $800 million. Then he built a mobile email provider, Seven, into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, leaving in 2004 as majority owner. Next he did what any unemployed rich guy might do: took vacations in St. Tropez and Vail, went surfing in Costa Rica, acquired a garageful of very fast cars.

One day in the winter of 2004, Nguyen was having dinner in San Francisco with friends Chris Collingwood and Brian Young of the band Fountains of Wayne. They had known each other since the group played a corporate event at Seven a few years earlier. The conversation turned to child-rearing. Come on, they implored, don't let your kid grow up with a self-indulgent dad on permanent vacation. Nguyen replied that he had nothing left to prove in the software industry. Why don't you fix the music industry, then? they suggested half seriously.

Nguyen could think of a bunch of reasons why he shouldn't go near the music industry. CD sales had dropped almost 20 percent since 2000. Peer-to-peer transactions — dominated by pirated media — accounted for almost 60 percent of North American data traffic. Tower Records had just filed for bankruptcy. The industry was in free fall. Yet the more Nguyen thought about it, the more intrigued he became.

Nguyen's complaint with the way music is sold online — whether it's CD purchases or downloads — is that there's no easy, legal way to listen to a song before you buy it. A 30-second snippet on Amazon.com or iTunes is rarely enough to form a good impression and certainly not enough to get a tune stuck in your head. Nguyen's solution: Give the music away. Later this year, his new company, Lala, will begin streaming any track or album the user selects, for free, betting that the chance to explore the sonic landscape will get listeners excited. As they take in artists and genres they might otherwise never hear, music fans are going to want to own the songs, Nguyen says — and Lala will be right there to make that possible, via whatever channel and format the customer prefers: downloading tracks, trading discs, or even (gasp) buying the CDs. It's a model he believes will revive the music industry.

Lala.com's Plan to Give Songs Away Could Upend the Industry

here's absolutely no reason you should be waiting the three-plus minutes it takes your computer to boot up Windows, says Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix Technologies. And indeed, if Hobbs has his way, you may not have to endure those waits much longer.

Phoenix says its new technology, HyperSpace, will offer mobile PC users the ability to instantly fire up their most used apps -- things like e-mail, web browsers and various media players -- without using Windows, simply by pressing the F4 button.

"As Windows gets more and more complex, we've seen startup times get longer and longer," says Hobbs. "If I go to the airport and try to connect to a Wi-Fi network, I'm waiting for five minutes just to connect. That's ridiculous -- people usually just give up and use their cell phones or PDAs."

Phoenix Technologies is the company responsible for many computers' basic input/output system, or BIOS, the firmware code that runs when your PC starts up. Usually, the BIOS identifies the hardware on your PC and initializes components, then lets the operating system handle everything else, from storing files to connecting with networks to running applications. In essence, HyperSpace is a simple operating environment, a layer on top of the BIOS, that runs side-by-side with Windows and can efficiently implement some of the most commonly used apps on a PC.

Chipmakers and PC manufacturers have been trying to liberate themselves from lengthy startup times for a while, according to Hobbs, but the experience has been "controlled up in Seattle." Indeed, Hobbs says Microsoft regards HyperSpace as "outside their sphere of influence," and is not too happy with Phoenix's offering, which adds yet another voice to the already loud chorus of voices complaining about operating-system bloat.

Hmm is this a rip off of the LinuxBIOS project?

Phoenix HyperSpace Bypasses Windows With Fast-Boot Technology

Less than two weeks after a team of scientists created a nanoscale radio component, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have gone one better -- announcing the creation of the world's first complete nanoradio.

The breakthrough nanoradio consists of a single carbon-nanotube molecule that serves simultaneously as all the essential components of a radio -- antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier and demodulator. Physicist Alex Zettl led the development team, and graduate student Kenneth Jensen built the radio.

"I'm totally amazed that it works so well," says Zettl. "Making individual components are good breakthroughs, but the holy grail was putting it all together. So we're ecstatic that we were able to achieve that full integration."

The radio opens the possibility of creating radio-controlled interfaces on the subcellular scale, which may have applications in the areas of medical and sensor technology.

Nanoelectronic systems are considered crucial to the continued miniaturization of electronic devices, and it's becoming a hot research and investment arena. Two weeks ago, a team at the University of California at Irvine announced the development of a nanoscale demodulator, an essential component of a radio.

The number of consumer products using nanotechnology -- from the iPhone to home pregnancy testing kits -- has soared from 212 to well over 500, according to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies' online inventory of manufacturer-identified nanotech goods in March 2006.

The nanoradio is less than one micron long and only 10 nanometers wide -- or one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair -- making it the smallest radio ever created.

The researchers' paper was published at the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters website.

The first transmission received by the nanoradio was an FM broadcast of Eric Clapton's "Layla." (The lab has posted video of that moment.) The Clapton classic was quickly followed by the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" and Handel's Largo from the opera Xerxes -- the first piece of music broadcast by radio, on Dec. 24, 1906.

The nanoradio's amplifier operates on the same principles as vacuum-tube radios from the 1940s and early '50s, says Zettl.

"We've come full circle. We're using the old vacuum-tube principle of having electrons jump off the tip of the nanotube onto another electrode, rather than the conventional solid-state transistor principle," says Zettl.

The electronic properties of this electron-emitting nanotube function as the radio's demodulator -- making a complete radio possible within a single molecule.

The audio quality "can be very good," says Zettl, but if you listen closely, some unique effects of the radio's tiny size can be heard: an old-fashioned "scratchiness" that occurs because the device is working in the quantum regime.

"The amazing thing is that since we have such a sensitive nanosc... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

World's First Nanoradio Could Lead to Subcellular Remote-Control Interfaces

The site moderator of waffles.fm, the invite-only replacement to OiNK, on Friday tells THREAT LEVEL that the illicit music-sharing site already has some 1,700 exclusive members in less than 24 hours of sporadic operation.

Thousands of invitees are waiting in the wings, as registration is tentatively closed because of server capacity, says site moderator Dead1, who in an exclusive interview with THREAT LEVEL spoke on condition that his real name not be published. "We've closed invites due to the extreme amount of traffic," Dead1 says.

Many of those invited were former members of OiNK, he says, and thousands of torrents are being uploaded and seeded.

"We were getting upwards of 100 torrents a minute uploaded," Dead1 says.

The site, running on servers in Amsterdam's Ripe Network Data Center, was the subject of a denial of service attack following its initial launch Thursday, says Dead1. The DoS attack was at 90MB/s per second, he says.

"That's pretty big. Whoever did it was pretty pissed off, to put it politely," Dead1 says. "They said they were upset they weren't sent an invite."

The response to waffles from the BitTorrent community has been overwhelming, he says. When the site went live Thursday, it crashed after its servers were clogged by a barrage of 300 registration requests a minute. "It's unbelievable," Dead1 says.

The music-sharing-only site, launched nearly two weeks after British authorities raided and shuttered its predecessor OiNK, is a non-profit operation run by a network of 10 people in their twenties or younger, Dead1 says. "It's purely a hobby," he says. "It's for fun."

"Most of the staff is in Europe. A couple are in America. A few are in Canada," he adds. "They're scattered everywhere."

Dead1 says waffles will attempt to follow in OiNK's footsteps and is not affiliated with any other torrent-tracking site.

"When the link went down, everybody was pretty pissed," he says.

The site is looking to upgrade its servers again, Dead1 says. For now, the site runs off two server boxes, each with 3 gigahertz, dual core Pentium processors, and 4 GBs of RAM, he says.

"We're not doing this for the pirated material. You can get that anywhere," Dead1 says. "We're doing it to increase the popularity of artists everywhere no matter who they are."

Oink Wannabe -- Waffles.fm -- Scrambling to Fill Membership Orders; Feeding Frenzy Underway

A subject of morbid but peculiar fascination. It's certainly unwholesome to relish the stories of those who are like us, and perhaps greater than us, but who come to spectacularly bad ends, yet such stories provide a certain satisfaction. As we make our way through our own careers in engineering, and deal with our own inevitable failures, there's some comfort in knowing that no matter how badly we screw up, we won't get killed for it. Unlike these guys.

So here's a list of the tragic and failed from newest to oldest. Most were brought down by their own characters, some by bad luck or malice. Biographies and pictures (when completed!) lie behind the links.

Kinda odd... good reading ... :)

Doomed Engineers

Guinness World Records has recognised folding@home (FAH) as the world's most powerful distributed computing network.

FAH has signed up nearly 700,000 PS3s to examine how the shape of proteins affect diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The network has more than one petaflop of computing power - the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

"To have folding@home recognized by Guinness World Records as the most powerful distributed computing network ever is a reflection of the extraordinary worldwide participation by gamers and consumers around the world and for that we are very grateful," said Professor Vijay Pande of Stanford University and a leader of the FAH project.

PS3 network enters record books

A brand-new laptop PC for $150 including a 1.5GHz Intel Celeron processor, 14” screen, 256MB of RAM, wireless connectivity and a Fedora Linux operating system pre-installed. If you think it sounds to good to be true, you’re not the only one – and its 6-week lead time on deliveries means the Medison Celebrity has almost 2 months in which to make blind sales before the first orders actually hit buyers’ doorsteps and we can find out whether the company delivers what it promises. Still, if it’s true, this has to go down as one of the most amazing pricing offers of recent times, and if positive customer reviews start coming in, you’ll have to get in line behind us!

Medison calls it “the laptop for everyone” – and at a frankly ridiculous price of $150, the Celebrity is certainly affordable enough to make that claim. The basic but functional setup looks like a very workable system – and at that jaw-dropping price, would be an absolute no-brainer.

The website, however, and the somewhat dubious Swedish company behind it, are yet to gain the confidence of many would-be buyers. The company history states that Medison is 11 years old, and all its previous work is in the internet, media and education fields – no mention is made of any prior manufacturing efforts.

How are they making such cheap laptops then? Let’s consult the FAQ: “We see this from a democratic point of view where we believe everyone should be able to afford to have a laptop. The other reason is that we have our own plants where we assemble our laptops.”

They’ve certainly got my attention, but I’ll personally be waiting until I hear from somebody who’s actually seen one before my credit card comes out

Bargain or baloney? Medison Celebrity, the US$150 “laptop for everyone” - gizmag Article

Another fun product for the SparkFun fans. This AVR based kit converts an X-Y analog oscilloscope into an analog clock! Easy to assemble through-hole kit. You will need to provide your own oscilloscope of course.

Dutchtronix AVR Oscilloscope Clock

The Spartan-3E Evaluation card is a full breakout of almost every pin of the Spartan 3E 500,000 gate FPGA in a PQ208 Package. Also provided are the 3 power supplies, an SPI prom to store the FPGA configuration image, and a RS232 level shifter for easy serial communications. RS232 and power board can be sheared off for a completely isolated breakout board.

Sparkfun has some cool DIY stuff for just about anything ...

Some where a while back I posted a story about using FPGA's to crack code...

Gavin

Spartan-3E Evaluation card (500,000 gate FPGA)

Wi-fi connectivity • access to the free Chumby Network • 3.5" LCD color touchscreen • two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports • 350 MHz ARM processor • 64 MB SDRAM • 64 MB NAND flash ROM • stereo 2W speakers • headphone output • squeeze sensor • accelerometer (motion sensor) • leather casing • AC adapter included

The Chumby is out for sale to limited users... I just was notified I could buy one...

Anyone else looking into this device?

G

The Chumby: $179 is out...