So, are you enjoying the snappy, clean performance of Google Chrome since downloading yesterday? If so, you might want to take a closer peek at the end user license agreement you didn't pay any attention to when downloading and installing it. Because according to what you agreed to, Google owns everything you publish and create while using Chrome. Ah-whaaa?

Here are the juicy bits in question:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

11.2 You agree that this license includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services.

11.3 You understand that Google, in performing the required technical steps to provide the Services to our users, may (a) transmit or distribute your Content over various public networks and in various media; and (b) make such changes to your Content as are necessary to conform and adapt that Content to the technical requirements of connecting networks, devices, services or media. You agree that this license shall permit Google to take these actions.

11.4 You confirm and warrant to Google that you have all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.

Well, I guess I shouldn't have used Chrome to put some posts up yesterday, because I certainly do not have the rights, power or authority to hand over my work from Gawker to the Googe. Oops! You'll have to pry the rights to my posts from Nick Denton's cold, dead hands, Google.

In any case, it's a pretty unnecessary and unreasonable thing to put in the EULA for a browser, of all pieces of software, which makes it pretty questionable. Why in the hell would Google want ownership of every single blog post or email written in its browser? It's so unreasonable that it borders on the insane. I can't really imagine Google actually invoking this and suddenly publishing heavily edited entries from your LiveJournal for profit, but I think a lot of people would feel much better about hopping on board with Chrome if this little piece of sketchy legalese was axed.

What say you, Google overlords? [Tap the Hive]

With the real constitution withering faster than you can say "warrantless search and seizure," however, one might feel uneasy extending natural rights to cover every little irritatant in the game biz. We can route neatly around such concerns, however, by recalibrating the list just a smidgin. With no further ado, here is the Gamers Bill of Entitlements.

Alas, no ponies.

Seriously now, I love the progressive attitude that Stardock's original list embodies: if you haven't checked out Stardock and Impulse, its distribution site, you're the one missing out. Reward them, and you help transform Stardock's list from what it really is—conveniences marketed to gain a competitive advantage—into industry standards that few will dare not meet.

The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the $100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let's not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte's crazy idea hasn't only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world's largest notebook maker, it's also become a product most of Negroponte's opponents are now copying.

After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO.

Negroponte—generally Nicholas, occasionally Nick—is a man who is used to coming up with ideas that people laugh at, only to prove them wrong later. He established the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child organization after years of exploring the more general subject of providing computers for the youth in the world's poorest countries, and he is at the center of any attention that OLPC receives. He has billionaires and heads-of-state on speed dial, and likes to make unusual requests of them. (He may have lacked support from tech's most powerful, but Negroponte's venture had backing from Rupert Murdoch, AMD's Hector Ruiz and others from its inception.)

Sometime in the early spring of 2004, the Negropontes invited Nicholas' MIT colleague Michail Bletsas and his wife over for a dinner of wild turkey—the infrequently eaten northeastern bird, that is, and not the whisky. Shortly after burning Bletsas with the molten sugary part of a freshly baked apple pie during the dessert course, Negroponte announced a secret that had been burning inside him for months: He had dreamed up an ultra-cheap laptop for kids, and he planned to spend the rest of his life working on it.

To say Negroponte is arrogant is to say the Pope has a pointy hat: He founded MIT's Media Lab, for God's sake. He is one of the only people on earth who could have made the XO. But the larger mission of the XO, to become a stimulant of learning and creativity for the world's poorest children before they necessarily have access to electricity and internet connectivity—let alone clean drinking water—that idea has yet to prove itself, and possibly never will.

White Box Syndrome
Negroponte was convinced that you couldn't just go out and buy the kind of laptop he had in mind. Prices are always trending downward, but manufacturers are always countering that by upping specs and adding features. Profit margins remain super-tight, achieved only by reducing costs at the rate of 20% each year.

"There are two ways to make an inexpensive laptop. One way is to take cheap components, cheap labor, cheap design and make a cheap laptop," says Negroponte. "We decided to do the opposite: Cool design and very advanced manufacturing techniques where you pour raw materials in one end, and out come iPods out the other end. That approach is normally not the one taken in the developing world." Typically in poor rural areas, he says, "you see very inexpensive 'white boxes' that are near garbage, both in terms of design and manufacturing."

Negroponte says sending our used PCs to poor countries is the computing equivalent of sending old polluting, gas-hungry cars. Needless to say, computer companies and automakers alike don't generally spend money to design an intentionally cheap product geared for third-world deployment that makes use of the latest engineering breakthroughs and consists of green, easily recycled materials.

The Display's the Thing
The display is the costliest element in a laptop, especially one targeted at $100, so Negroponte knew it needed to be the priority. One of his earliest confidantes (and OLPC board members) was Joseph Jacobson, the man behind E-Ink, so it's no surprise that the highly efficient display tech was an early contender. It failed on three orders, however: Its price never came down—one early target was apparently $12 per screen, eventually revised up to $35—its refresh rate was, and is, too slow for a graphic user interface and color, a user requirement for this dare-to-be-creative contraption, just didn't look right.Another alternative display option quickly failed as well. In 2004, microdisplay chips like TI's DLP were heralded as the Next Big Thing in rear-projection TV technology, a low-cost, lightweight competitor to plasma and LCD. Intel had just invested a lot of money in a DLP competitor called liquid crystal on silicon, and Negroponte wanted to use that for a cheap pop-up rear-projection screen (shown above). Almost as soon as it was announced, however, the LCOS initiative crashed and burned in a spectacular failure, though not before the LCOS-based $100-laptop prototype was mocked up. (CE companies have discontinued most microdisplay TV lines, though they still use LCOS in many high-performance home-theater projectors.)

Team Up
The best thing to come out of the failed Intel mindmeld was Mary Lou Jepsen. She had spent a lot of time working on screens, but had never before designed a laptop. In 2005, Negroponte named her CTO and charged her with developing the screen—a new kind of LCD—around which the processor, keyboard, memory and network would wrap.

At that same time, Negroponte hunted for other ninjas of computer engineering to complete his dream team.

Walter Bender, one of Negroponte's closest MIT collaborators, signed on as president of OLPC, concentrating on the software side and its innovative Sugar user interface. (Owing mainly to its own all-too-dramatic arc, we do not delve into the software history at length in this story.) Mark Foster, a former VP of Apple's notebook division, co-captained the hardware initiative; Bletsas managed the innovative wireless network; and others—Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, Richard Smith and Ivan Krstic to name just a few more—all joined in to work countless hours on this radical, ambitious project.

As the technical plan was being hashed out, Negroponte hired industrial designers—first, a firm called Design Continuum, and then, a bit later, Yves Behar—in order to shape both the brand and the aesthetic of the XO itself.

The US team was set; now all Negroponte had to do was find a company willing to manufacture the sucker. It seems it's one thing to persuade a bunch of wild-eyed technologists that it's time for them to try to change the world, but another thing altogether to get corporations, especially ones with stockholders, to drop everything for a charity.

Though the number of advanced degrees gathered together could fill a phonebook, the amount of ego pressure building up in OLPC HQ proved, eventually, enough to blow the roof off.

One Factory, Many Brands
"Early on," Jepsen recalls, "I tried to get one of the largest laptop brands to sponsor the program. They said no. They looked at my design and said, 'This design would require at least 15 miracles and we have this rule around here, one miracle per product. We're going to pass, but keep in touch!' It was a very nice sort of rejection." She adds, "They were dead right, one miracle per product was a pretty good rule for a product. But this wasn't a product, it was a global humanitarian effort."

Today, a handful of companies in China and Taiwan make pretty much everything. One of the names that frequently pops is Quanta, attributed (often unofficially) with building flagship products for Apple, Dell and others. It makes around 40 million laptops per year, at profits of around $20 per machine.

On one hand, this promotes a sort of malaise. Cookie-cutter manufacturing makes sense to Quanta, since less retooling and larger manufacturing lines spell more profit. But these contract manufacturers increasingly design the products they make for others, at least as far as the engineering goes. As one of the world's hottest melting pots for new ideas, Quanta's design center was the perfect place to take a radical new idea for a laptop. Negroponte knew they might be a little booked, but he had a plan.

Made in Taiwan
Barry Lam is as successful a soothsayer as you can be in modern times. In the late 1980s, he parlayed a small fortune he made from the personal-calculator boom for a venture in the burgeoning industry of laptop computers. Today, he is easily among the 500 richest people in the world, and Quanta, his baby, is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world.

When Quanta announced in fall 2005 that it had won the contract to build Negroponte's $100 laptop, the phrasing seemed a little strange. Quanta had, according to some reports, turned down the project twice before agreeing. Yet the Taipei Times reported that it was OLPC who said "yes" to Quanta: "The decision was made yesterday after the OLPC's board of directors reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies," naming contract manufacturers Compal, Inventec and Wistron. How could a total charity case have been at the center of a corporate bidding war?

The company went on to reassure stockholders that this wasn't a money-losing endeavor. The company said it would benefit by "reinventing cost-saving production" through R&D collaboration with AMD and other companies—a clear indicator of losses in the immediate future.

Back at OLPC headquarters, the story makes a little more sense. Though Lam has yet to turn 60—a mere child by Asian business-mogul standards—he was apparently seeking something more spiritually rewarding than just being best laptop maker ten years running, and something about the proposal finally sunk in. "Lam was concerned with his legacy," says Bletsas. "He liked the product, and he didn't care about the financial aspects as much as he cared about the humanitarian cause."

Negroponte visited him in Taipei; they probably met up in the art gallery Lam set up on the top floor of his corporate headquarters, surrounded by magnificent works of Asian art. After a polite discussion, the billionaire-to-visionary tete-a-tete apparently concluded as follows: "He said, 'I don't care if I'm gonna get my money's worth out of it.' It took a strong founder"—that is, someone who could make an unpopular decision and not catch flak for it—"but he bought on the idea, and said, 'Let's work out the details.'"

It turned out to be a shrewd business decision by Lam. The question—one that may never get a straight answer—is whether or not he knew it at the time.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the OLPC Untold Story...

Continue reading Wii Balance Board used to control Roomba... for reasons unknown

Continue reading Engadget Cares: The state of Palm - checking in a year later

PRESS RELEASE: Hillcrest Labs Issues Statement About Legal Action Against Nintendo and the Wii

August 20, 2008 – Rockville, MD – Hillcrest Labs issued an official statement about legal action that the company has taken today against Nintendo(R) for patent infringement. The statement is as follows:

Hillcrest Labs has filed a complaint for patent infringement with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington, D.C., and a separate patent infringement suit in the U.S. District Court in Maryland against Nintendo(R) related to the Wii(TM) video game system.

Hillcrest's patents at issue are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,158,118, 7,262,760, and 7,414,611, which relate to a handheld three-dimensional pointing device, and U.S. Patent No. 7,139,983, which relates to a navigation interface display system that graphically organizes content for display on a television. Since 2001, Hillcrest Labs has pioneered technology that allows consumers to interact with digital media on television using motion-control and pointing techniques. The company holds 29 patents in this area worldwide, and has filled for more than 100 related patents.

Leading consumer electronics companies, not all of whom have been disclosed publicly, have already licensed Hillcrest's technology for use in their products. While Hillcrest Labs has a great deal of respect for Nintendo and the Wii, Hillcrest Labs believes that Nintendo is in clear violation of its patents and has taken this action to protect its intellectual property rights. Given the current status of the filings, the company will not disclose any additional details about the matter at this time.

Information about Hillcrest Labs and its products are available at www.hillcrestlabs.com

Apple spokeswoman Jennifer Bowcock on Tuesday said "The [latest] software update improves communication with 3G networks," according to a USA Today article. Albeit concise, the statement implies that Apple is admitting that widely reported problems with 3G performance are at least partly tied to the handset itself.

To date, AT&T and other iPhone carriers have not taken responsibility for any of the handset's reported network issues. Experts have pointed out, however, that problems do exist with younger 3G networks such as that of AT&T, who has yet to optimize towers for 3G performance.

Though Apple's statement doesn't tell us all that much, I'm relieved the company has publicly said something. At some point the finger-pointing needs to stop, and Apple and AT&T should focus on devising a solution. Perhaps with Apple's statement, that time has come.

Also see:

• Video: AT&T Blames iPhone 3G For Network Issues
• Opinion: Firmware Update to Fix iPhone 3G? I Doubt It
• Participate in Wired.com's Global iPhone 3G Study
• What's Wrong With the 3G in iPhone 3G?
• IPhone 3G Users Heated Over Network Issues

Apple tries to de-bug iPhone [USA Today]

(Photo credit: Fr3d.org/Flickr)

TomTom has launched their HD Traffic module in the Netherlands where they have users sharing their location in a network of GPS units acting as traffic probes; you help me and I help you. The FCC Site is showing the test results for the TomTom HD unit clearing the way for the module to be launched here. Usually by the time these are posted and publicly available, a launch is imminent. My hunch is an announcement soon with shipping for the holidays.

The TomTom HD Traffic Module is a cellular tranceiver that sends and receives traffic information so that you have the most up to date data available. Not only will it get information that is readily available to units with a TMC receiver, but it will also share the peer based information that other users of the TomTom HD system generate. So, if another user is stuck in a traffic jam up ahead, your unit will be aware of the jam and give you better route timing or routing options. This is similar to the Dash Express offering and how it works. Dash indicated that they needed about 2,000 units per metro area to get high quality coverage; I would imagine a similar number would be needed for TomTom also.

The TomTom HD module will be working on the GSM 850 and PCS 1900 bands and will most likely carry a monthly fee.

Via GPSPassion

Thanks Jeff for sending in.