Plugged in -- Next Big Tech Ideas May Be Small Ones. via [Linux Today 4/4/2005; 4:53:01 PM] Five years after the tech boom went bust, there's a dearth of million dollar or billion dollar ideas, or so some fret. But it doesn't mean that there is no smart new technology to wow consumers. It's just that people are finding more efficient ways to do it. Maybe that's because it has never been easier to create potent technology hybrids that mix-and-match hardware components, use a bit of borrowed software code, and require only a few thousand dollars of investment... By taking advantage of low-cost computers, freely shared software and high-speed Web connections, the next wave of innovations may not come from any venture-capital funded skunkworks or big business research lab. 4/4/2005 9:15:31 PM    

---

Dayton, Ohio: Free City-Wide WiFi [Slashdot: 4/4/2005; 2:53:38 PM]  The City of Dayton, Ohio announced a plan to make all of downtown a WiFi hotspot - and as of last week, the network is live. This makes Dayton the first Ohio city to offer free WiFi access. Approximately one square mile of downtown is now live. The WiFi project is a public/private partnership not funded by taxpayers, and comes at no charge to the end user. 

User Boon or Starbucks Devil?. [Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics 4/4/2005; 3:52:28 PM] The program, which the city estimates costs it a measly $5,000 per year, is paid for through advertising. And Cleveland boasts the world's largest free wifi area (so far) with an astounding 550 acres. Other cities with free city-wide (or at least zone-wide) wifi access include Hermosa Beach, California, and Seattle, Washington. But of course, free city-wide access raises some questions. Oh sure, there are the usual questions about security and responsbility. And there are the ever-present questions which arise with any free wifi service, such as do you really know how secure it is, and how to avoid wifi evil twins. But aside from those, what about poor Starbucks?... 4/4/2005 9:09:47 PM    

---

A Boost for Amazon's Book Sales?. [The Motley Fool 4/4/2005; 2:53:19 PM] The online bookseller purchases a print-on-demand concern. By providing print on demand, Amazon will be able to get copies of out-of-print books as well as foreign-language titles. The service also lets authors self-publish their works. It's an interesting time to delve into this arena. Given the democratic nature of the Internet and its ability to provide products and services on an as-needed basis, such a move has probably made sense since the year Amazon.com was born. On the other hand, you can't ignore that it's been suspiciously lacking until now. 4/4/2005 8:48:56 PM    

---

Experiencing the power of SQL templates. [TechRepublic.com 4/4/2005; 3:53:45 PM] SQL Server ships with a variety of templates designed to simplify the most common tasks. SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer (QA) has a library of templates that you can use to create stored procedures. The QA interface tends to hide this feature, which may be why so few developers know it's there. You’ll find them in the Program FilesMicrosoft SQL Server80ToolsTemplatesSQL Query Analyzer folder, which contains 13 subfolders that house templates devoted to a particular task (such as Create Table). Each folder contains several templates... 4/4/2005 8:41:43 PM    

---

Kadrey's latest novel as free PDF. [Boing Boing 4/4/2005; 5:52:33 PM] Richard Kadrey is one of the original guard of cyberpunk authors; his Metrophage is a classic of the genre. He's just posted the full text of his latest novel, Blind Shrike, to the web as a free PDF download.

The downloadable file has been designed for on-screen reading by the eminent typographer and bookdesigner John D. Berry and described in detail: Acrobatics -- Putting the Story on the Screen: "Few designers seem to have tried using PDF as a format for designing extended text that's comfortable to read onscreen... Nobody wants to read a long story in a Web browser... I felt that most people would rather read a serif face, if it could be made to look readable at screen resolutions... On a screen page, justifying the text just made it look busier; the effect was distracting, rather than comfortable. So I set the text ragged-right, and adjusted the line breaks as I needed to when I prepared the final layout... To ease the glare of reading onscreen, I gave the pages a subtle background color: a Web-safe tan, which I then lightened to a 50% tint in InDesign. This gave me something like the effect of an off-white book paper. The type was all black -- no messing around with colored text. This was for reading, after all." 4/4/2005 8:14:00 PM    

---

Is Google Too Generous?. [The Motley Fool 4/4/2005; 9:54:14 AM] Google has a good reason to give away as much email storage as possible. Advertising makes up 98% of Google's revenue. Using contextual technology, Gmail is able to get the gist of the email and serve up relevant text ads in a column to the right of the message itself. And lest you think archived correspondence isn't all that valuable, think again. Google's ads are always current. So, let's say three years from now, you are revisiting a friend's email asking about movie times. The ads generated by Google would likely be tied to what's showing at the local multiplex in 2008. Sure, email ads are going to have a low click-through rate. That's fine -- Google is aiming for incremental ad revenue. 4/4/2005 10:51:34 AM    

---

Sowing CoRM. [Doc Searls' IT Garage 4/4/2005; 3:54:22 AM] So The Head Lemur wrote this about customer service, got this response, and replied back. "Because we are on the phone, the last thing we need is to be reminded that the Dumb Product Company has a website." It's long, and good. Read the whole thing.
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is fine as far as it goes, which isn't very far. Approximately all CRM systems are silos that isolate the customer relationships to those only of a single vendor. They don't care what else the customer might be doing in the marketplace. For all their virtues as technological solutions, CRM systems in some ways cause more problems than they solve, in the form of lost opportunities made possible by relationships on the customers' terms. These may be far more rich and complex and potentiated than those contemplated by the vendor's sales and CRM systems. 4/4/2005 10:43:33 AM    

---

Star Wars III Midnight Madness: [Fark 4/4/2005; 6:52:53 AM] X-Entertainment joins a thousand rabid Star Wars fans as they rush Toys 'R' Us at midnight to get first dibs on "Revenge of the Sith" merchandise. Also starring Boba Fett and a guy in a gigantic "Darth Tater" costume. "Being a loser is easiest in numbers; none of us felt embarrassed as the tourists and snooty locals zipped by wondering aloud why grown men and women would wait on hideously long lines for action figures. We'd have time to reevaluate our lives later. This was the last of a thrice in a lifetime experience. You know, I don't care what corporate evils Toys 'R' Us is responsible for. If I'm going to see Darth Vader, M&Ms dressed as Darth Vader and Mr. Potato Head dressed as Darth Vader, I want it to be here." 4/4/2005 9:30:35 AM    

---