麻豆官网首页入口

Can XO 2 reignite OLPC?

• Darren Waters
• 20 May 08, 21:32 GMT

The One Laptop Per Child program has unveiled the design for its second generation laptop, the XO2 or XOXO.

The excitement that once surrounded the project, only to be deflated by with Microsoft/Intel and slow orders from governments, has been reignited - thanks simply to the design of the new machine.

And at the moment, it's just that - a concept.

Joanna Stern of website wrote:

Negroponte didn't share many details about the XO 2.0's hardware, but the new system has two touch-sensitive displays. As you can see from the video and the pictures, the XO 2.0 will be much smaller than the original machine (half the size, according to the press release) and will have a foldable e-book form factor. "The next generation laptop should be a book," Negroponte said.

There's not much detail about the inside of the new e-book/laptop but the design is an extension of .

Nicholas Negroponte believes he can sell the machine for $75 by 2010.

He's made ambitious claims before. The $100 laptop, for example, remains a goal and not a reality.

But the project has moved on both structurally and philosophically since it was first launched - and is now embracing Windows, as well as Linux.

The project has so it will be interesting to see if it can relaunch and attain those original goals.

with typical hyperbole says it "totally blows the original away".

It does look good though....

UPDATE: The more I look at the design and read about the more I'm struck by how "commercial" the XO2 is.

It seems clear the OLPC is attempting to do two things at once - create a device which has practical value and use in the developing world and can also exploit consumer interest, possibily in an attempt to offset costs.

But somewhere something has to give. I'm just wondering where the compromises lie....

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The 麻豆官网首页入口 Sound Index

• Darren Waters
• 20 May 08, 13:04 GMT

I've just stumbled across a cool 麻豆官网首页入口 website, thanks to . (I know, the irony).

The Sound Index produces a top 1,000 index of the most talked about music artists by crawling the discussions taking place on Bebo, Google Groups, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube.

The service works by leveraging technology developed by IBM at its labs.

According to IBM: "A variety of content ingestion techniques are employed to continuously gather user comments, listens, views and other interest indicators across multiple sources on the internet.

"This content is then processed through an analytics chain, which is comprised of advanced linguistic and natural language processing (NLP) technology. Comments are transliterated, de-spammed, and analyzed for relevance, and listens and views are aggregated at the band and individual track level."

In other words, the more references, posts, views, plays of a particular artist, the higher ranking it gets in the Sound Index.

At the moment Coldplay is at the top of the index. The index accompanies a 麻豆官网首页入口 programme on weekends.

TechCrunch appeals to the 麻豆官网首页入口 to release the data it processes to create the index back into the web so that other firms can use it.

What do you think?

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DRM is dead, long live DRM

• Darren Waters
• 20 May 08, 12:43 GMT

I've just had a fascinating conversation with , an analyst with Jupiter, on the subject of and music.

His view, and one that might trouble some, is that DRM on music isn't going away anytime soon.

Now that might seem odd, given that has just announced a major online service offering six million MP3 (ie DRM free) tracks, and that already offers something similar.

But Mulligan believes that the appeal of services offering the sale of music on a per track, or per album, basis will always remain niche.

The "lost generation" of music listeners who have become accustomed to getting music for free - either through illegal downloads, or social services like or Pandora - are never likely to be seduced by stores like iTunes or Napster's MP3 service, he feels.

So new models of consumption are emerging - among them pseudo-subscription services in which you buy the right to listen to as much music as you want at the point of purchase of a particular device.

This is the business model for , which is due to be launched later this year.

It offers as much music as you want, but access is limited to a particular Nokia device and a limited number of computers.

Services which give all you can eat options on a monthly or annual subscription basis will also continue, says Mulligan.

He says the music industry has realised that the old model, which saw a single new format replacing an incumbent format, is giving way to the emergence of many contemporaneous formats for many different types of consumers.

And in order for these services to work, DRM is still needed - either to tie you to a particular subscription or a particular device.

In other words, the world of DRM is about to get more complicated than ever.

And the risk, says Mulligan, is that music services could become Balkanized around specific devices in the future.

For example: If I invest in a Nokia phone that brings with it an unlimited supply of music, what happens when I decide to buy a Sony Ericsson phone in a few years' time?

Will I be able to transfer my music? Possibly not.

At the moment, say Mulligan, such concerns are not on the radars of consumers.

In the short term, it looks likely that the DRM-free model will be the most expensive. If you want complete freedom of choice, then you'll pay for it on a per track, or per album basis.

The radical position and one that no record company is discussing right now, says Mulligan, is an all you can eat model that is also DRM-free.

And what about iTunes?

Mulligan says iTunes is in danger of looking somewhat old hat, with its one size fits all download model.

It's not threatened by competitors at the moment in a real sense, but there are threats on the horizon.

Mulligan predicts iTunes will offer an all you can eat model in the future - but one tied to its iPods, and at a price that is added into the device at the point of purchase.

So... would you like your iPod for $300 with no music, or $400 with as much music as you want, on the assumption you can never move it to a rival MP3 player.

And DRM? Don't plan the funeral just yet.

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