David Lidsky's Blog, page 4830

Govt Considers Free(ish) Broadband for All. Err...

Next week sees the release of the Government's National Broadband Plan, in which it briefly outlines a "broadband for all" idea (something that our U.K. readers might remember from the British Government's Digital Britain report of 2009.) The FCC is proposing that free or low-cost wireless spectrum be set aside in an attempt to get the 93 million or so Americans who are currently without broadband in their homes. In an effort to keep the costs low, they're looking to the private...

Cleanteach: Can David Learn to Love Goliath

Traveling around Silicon Valley last week, I heard the David vs. Goliath story over and again, but in surprisingly different versions. In some, David (in the form of a cleantech start-up) aims to kill incumbent market giants, in others they end up in bed together. Yes, this was San Francisco, but it seems we are seeing a seismic shift in the cleantech industry's underlying narrative.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the sixteenth Cleantech Forum. After trekking through the Valley of...

Green Teeth? Dentists Embrace Sustainability

Ever ponder the green credentials of your dentist while getting your teeth scraped until they bleed? No? Regardless, dentists around the world will soon be able to show off their sustainability savvy with the new GreenDOC Dental Office Certification Program, sponsored by the Eco-Dentistry Association.

According to the EDA, a green-certified dental practice has to meet eight qualifications:

Sustainable Location, which pertains to
the building housing the dental practice. Considerations...

Test-Drive Your Porsche Using Google Maps--But Watch Out for Cyclists

Porsche has come up with a nifty little marketing campaign for its Cayenne models, using a couple of Google APIs. It's basically a virtual test-drive where you can plot yourself a nice little route--I plumped for the Golden Gate Bridge, followed by a spin in the Cumbrian Pennines, in the North of England--and sit back and enjoy the German carmaker's spiel about how its torque is second to none while dramatic music is piped through your speakers.

The two minute-or-so flash movie segues...

Google Aims at Small Business Software Market, With Cloud-Connected Apps Store

Google's up to its old tricks again, extending software tentacles in new directions to capture or subvert entire markets: This time it's aiming at business software by launching Google Apps Marketplace, which does clever cloud-connecting stuff.

Digging through Google's slightly obfuscating explanation in its blog post on the news, it seems that the App Marketplace has been conceived to make it super-easy for "Google Apps administrators" to find, enable, and distribute to their users all of...

Please Exit in an Orderly, Well-Designed Fashion

Slate editor Julia Turner explains why American exit signs need to be shown the door.

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Over at Slate, in her epic six-part series on wayfinding, deputy editor Julia Turner explains the exit sign: designed to stand out, but ignored by designers -- at least in the US -- for 75 years. In America, we have the commanding, red EXIT, standardized in the '30s and '40s. But most everywhere else, it's the ISO standard: a green man bounding out the door, developed in the late '70s by the Japanese...

The Freshwater Factory: A Bubble-Shaped Skyscraper That Desalinates Sea Water

Why would you ever put a skyscraper in the countryside? In the case of Design Crew for Architecture's Freshwater Factory skyscraper, the idea actually makes sense. The skyscraper, designed for the 2010 eVolo skyscraper competition, isn't meant for human inhabitants. Instead, its series of bubbles are filled with water-filtering mangroves that desalinate seawater without using any electricity.

The system works with a series of circular tanks filled with brackish water. The water is pumped...

Former Sun Microsystems CEO: HTC Isn't the First Company to Face Legal Threats From Steve Jobs

Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, has stepped up to defend Google (in a roundabout way, via HTC) from the patent attacks recently levelled by Apple. If you want to be truly disturbed at how virulent the patent litigation scene is in the tech world, read on.

Sun, which is perhaps best known for its creation of Java, OpenOffice, and its development of the UNIX core, apparently suffered a threat of patent litigation directly from Steve Jobs back in 2003. Schwartz explains that...

Facebook to Add Location Data, Encourage Epic Levels of Oversharing

According to the New York Times, Facebook is set to introduce location sharing into their arsenal of social networking tricks this April at the F8 conference. I predict that 98% of my Facebook updates will read "My bedroom."

This is unconfirmed, but according to trusted sources, Facebook has been developing this location-based feature in-house for awhile now, tinkering until it's completely ready for release. There are to be two main aspects to the update. First is what you'd expect, a simple...

Twitter Steps Up the Fight Against Spam and Scams

With popularity comes trouble. Ask any Windows user, or the Notorious BIG. As Twitter's popularity has skyrocketed, it's become the target for various scams, and the Twitter team is now taking action to stop the abuse.

The fight against spam is a consistent one for the Twitter team, but recently, phishing scams have started gaining in popularity. Spread mostly through direct messages (or email notifications about those messages), these scams offer a malignant link that, when clicked, can...