October 3, 2005
NY Times: Google Bids to Help San Francisco Go Wireless. The proposal, which is one of a range of proposals being submitted both by large communications firms and small start-ups, is in response to a TechConnect program proposed by the city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, this year. Mr. Newsom has positioned the program as a way to offer universal and affordable broadband Internet access to the city's residents and businesses.

Useit.Com: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. There's value in reminding ourselves of past findings and raising their priority on the agenda of things to be fixed. Because these mistakes continue to be so common, it makes sense that people continue to complain about them the most.

October 4, 2005
NY Times: Korea's High-Tech Utopia, Where Everything Is Observed. A ubiquitous city is where all major information systems (residential, medical, business, governmental and the like) share data, and computers are built into the houses, streets and office buildings. New Songdo, located on a man-made island of nearly 1,500 acres off the Incheon coast about 40 miles from Seoul, is rising from the ground up as a U-city.

October 5, 2005
IBM developerWorks: Watchen das blinkenlichten. In software design, as in other areas, ideas that seem brilliant at first can be disastrous in practice. In this month's THe cranky user, I'll point out software features that are little more than a flash in the pan, and suggest a functional alternative.

October 6, 2005
News.Com: Australian high court: PS2 chip mod OK. But the Federal Court ruled in favor of Stevens in a 2002 decision, which found that mod chips were not in breach of copyright because they did not circumvent measures Sony had put in place to prevent illegal copying of their games. Simply put, while mod chips could allow you to play copied games or overseas titles, they did not actually make the copying of PS2 games possible.

October 7, 2005
NY Times: Online Pioneer Sets Out to Shake Up TV. Set in an office building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brightcove will offer three interrelated online services. It has tools that let television producers load their video onto its servers, arrange them into programs and display them to Internet users.

October 11, 2005
Useit.Com: R.I.P. WYSIWYG. For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles.

News.Com: IBM Research turns 60. While IBM remains a major center for nanotechnology research, the company's push toward services and software has prompted it to dedicate more of its laboratories toward solving business process problems: supply chain management, application integration and transactional inefficiencies.

October 12, 2005
Technology Review: Yahoo Aims To Be Research Powerhouse. But for Yahoo, having a research operation that helps to invent emerging information tools has never been a major priority. Indeed, until two years ago, the company didn't even have its own search engine -- it rented Google's. But now that's changing -- and fast.

News.Com: Yahoo, Microsoft link IM services. Consumers using the Yahoo Messenger or MSN Messenger programs will be able to exchange instant messages, see the presence of their contacts, share emoticons and add friends from either service, the companies said. Interoperability is expected to kick in during the second quarter of 2006.

October 13, 2005
Economist: Building a better battery. In February, Altair Nanotechnologies, a small firm based in Reno, Nevada, announced a new kind of lithium-ion battery, the technology that powers many portable devices. Its prototype has three times the capacity of existing batteries and can be fully charged in six minutes.

News.Com: Mystery donor gives Stanford free Yahoo music. Unlike some other universities, Stanford has declined to pay for students' subscriptions itself, or use student fees to subsidize the costs. But during the program's first year, which the college regards as a pilot project, the costs will be covered by the outside donor's money.

October 14, 2005
News.Com: RSA to test new Web authentication service. The security company's new RSA Authentication Service is designed to let consumers securely access multiple Web sites using a single RSA security credential, such as the company's password-generating hardware tokens. RSA plans to test the service starting next month with four financial services companies...

October 17, 2005
NY Times: At Microsoft, Interlopers Sound Off on Security. Last Thursday and Friday, the company held its second Blue Hat briefing, a meeting with a small group of about a dozen independent computer security specialists invited to the company's headquarters here to share detailed research on vulnerabilities in Windows software.

October 18, 2005
InfoWorld: The importance of interaction data. Jon Udell. The back-and-forth chatter between an application and its host environment can be a drag when connectivity is marginal and it precludes offline use. But when this communication flows freely, it paints a moving picture that shows how individuals and groups are using the software.

October 19, 2005
Wired News: DVD Jon Lands Dream Job Stateside. In a posting to his website late Tuesday, Robertson said he'd snapped up Johansen to work on a "significant new project" called Oboe at his digital music company MP3tunes. Oboe will "bring digital music into the 21st century," Robertson wrote.

October 20, 2005
EE Times: H-P makes appeal to bridge Blu-ray, HD-DVD formats. One technology is Managed Copy, which enables consumers to make legitimate copies of their HD movies. The other technology, iHD, provides consumers enhanced content, navigation, and functionality for HD films to provide a higher-level interactive experience

October 21, 2005
Technology Review: Digitize This. On October 4, Yahoo and ten partner organizations announced the formation of the Open Content Alliance, which plans to build a free, permanent online repository for a wide range of print and multimedia content, including both copyrighted works and those that have passed into the public domain.

October 24, 2005
Adaptive Path: Is Your Homepage Immature. So how can you tell if your company isn’t using its homepage to best advantage? One symptom is a failure to trust your own navigation and architecture systems to direct customers to valuable information.

SD Times: With Rich Internet Apps, You Can’t Mix Metaphors. Experts in the field of human behavior and user interfaces agree on two things when it comes to implementing these Web-based applications: Tread lightly in creating new user experiences, and team your Web developers with your desktop application developers to offer an experience that makes sense to the user and for your organization.

InfoWorld: VeriSign settles ICANN lawsuit. In the settlement, VeriSign and ICANN reached an agreement on a framework that establishes processes and and provides business clarity for top-level domain name registry operators and for registrars, VeriSign said. ICANN agreed to make a decision about proposed new services within 90 days...

October 25, 2005
WIRED: Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone. Motorola and other companies have been selling phones that play music in Europe and Asia for a couple of years now - handsets with lots of memory and serious audio capabilities. And with the iPod, Apple showed how to turn an ordinary MP3 player into a great one. Put it all together and you get - the ROKR? How does a great idea get this botched?

PC World: Canon Readies Wi-Fi Camera. The Ixy Digital Wireless is Canon's first camera with built-in Wi-Fi and will offer users the ability to automatically transfer pictures to a personal computer via the wireless link as the pictures are taken. It will also be possible to remotely control the camera from the PC.

October 26, 2005
InfoWorld: Re-engineering life interruptions. Jon Udell. People are the exception handlers in all automated workflows, and intelligence and judgment won’t be automated anytime soon. What does worry me, though, is how we’ll connect people and services.

October 27, 2005
Technology Review: ROKR is for SUKRs. It seems that many people who purchased ROKR phones -- which come with a mobile version of Apple's groundbreaking iTunes Music Store -- feel dissatisfied. According to research by Albert Lin, an analyst with American Technology Research, people are returning their ROKR phones at a rate "six times" the average for returns.

October 28, 2005
Schneier on Security: Preventing Identity Theft: The Living and the Dead. A company called Metacharge has rolled out an e-commerce security service in the United Kingdom. For about $2 per name, website operators can verify their customers against the UK Electoral Roll, the British Telecom directory, and a mortality database.

October 31, 2005
Useit.Com: Incompetent Email Marketing = Lost Future Opportunities. The airline knows all its users' addresses and the airport(s) they usually fly out of. It's therefore a trivial programming exercise to send each recipient a personalized message listing trips they might actually want to take.

PC World: Samsung Expands LCD Manufacturing. The new factory is situated in Tangjung, South Korea, alongside a similar factory that began operating in April this year that is owned by S-LCD, a joint venture company of Samsung and Sony. Like the S-LCD line, the new factory will produce 40-inch and 46-inch LCD panels for television sets...