Putting technology aside, unless you’re an obese incumbent, why would you ever try to open a new market with proprietary software?

Having been a part of the JBoss success story, I can speak personally about the thousands of applications that would never have used enterprise Java had not JBoss existed. Certainly JBoss did not get paid by 95% of the user base, but the market that was created by JBoss was what supported the eventual financial success of JBoss.

A myth has made the rounds for several years that open source is only good for commodifying tired old markets. Bob Bickel brings it up on the Ringside Networks blog today, and suggests a few examples of open-source innovation (like, err, the entire Internet .

commentary (Credit:
Matt Asay)

Adoption is a new entrant’s biggest challenge, not intellectual-property protection. Open source is an effective means to cast a wide net on distribution.

Thunderbolt, which was founded by San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Carmelo Amarena as a strategy for dealing with a stressful commute, hopes that technological improvements within a year will enable up to 35 minutes of flight.

First Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo unveiling and now a new jetpack? Somebody forgot to tell me that it’s Worldwide Wacko Futurist Pipe-Dream Week.

The market price for the dual-fuel Thunderpack is expected to be in the $100,000 range, with the high test peroxide model selling for $90,000.

With further development, though, Thunderbolt hopes that its jetpacks will ultimately be used for a “host of defense, commercial, and personal purposes, including support of military missions, disaster relief efforts, border patrol assignments, and even overcoming those snail-paced commutes.” That’s good, seeing as most of us live farther than 3,600 feet from our offices.

(Credit:
Thunderbolt Aerosystems)

Oh, please. For just twice that, I could spend a whole four-to-five minutes weightless in space aboard Richard Branson’s suborbital party plane.

A company called Thunderbolt Aerosystems announced this week the release of the Thunderpack, which “represents more than a decade’s worth of effort to apply modern rocket fuels and propulsion technologies to create a practical and economical personal air vehicle.” It’ll fly you around for a total of 75 seconds. That’s certainly an improvement over a jetpack at the Wirefly X Prize Cup in 2006 that could stay aloft for a mere 30 seconds.

Zoom…

We’ve been spilling a lot of virtual ink about the popular 7-inch Asus Eee PC lately, but the real buzz is about that system’s follow-up, a slightly bigger 9-inch version Asus has been teasing us with since last year.

The 7-inch Eee PC sold more than one million units in its first five months, so expectations are high for the new version, especially with Dell and HP offering new competition in the suddenly hot netbook market. We expect the Eee PC 900 stateside sometime in May for about $500.

(Credit:
CNET.co.uk)

The new 8.9-inch display has a native resolution of 1,024×600, which is a big improvement over the original’s 800×480 screen. The CPU is still the same 900MHz Intel (non-Atom), but the RAM has been bumped up to a more reasonable 1GB, from the original’s 512MB.

According to Asus, the new system adds more than just a larger display. The most interesting new feature is something called FingerGlide, essentially a version of the mouse gestures used in Apple’s MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, where you can use two fingers in a pinching movement to zoom in and out of images.

It’s now officially called the Asus Eee PC 900, and the first reviews are starting to trickle out in the U.K., where the system has a set release date of May 1, although we don’t have an official U.S. price or release date yet.

‘Star Wars’ creator George Lucas made a surprise appearance Monday night at the launch event in San Francisco for the new video game, ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.’ Click the image above for a full gallery of game launch photos.

But maybe my favorite moment of the evening was seeing a man putting on his Chewbacca outfit outside the store.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Pugh said he tends to be a fan of everything Star Wars and added, “I think (the game) is going to be good. Even the bad Star Wars games, I like.”

And second is what is known as digital molecular matter, a technology meant to bring more realistic consequences to things like a door breaking, or something smashing into a big piece of metal.

However, he did not elaborate on that intriguing comment, and he was not available afterward for questions.

But a LucasArts spokesperson wrote me later to say that the number of available tickets had been arbitrary and that, in fact, pre-orders for the game had been high.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

For Lucas, the event was an opportunity to show up, be seen by the faithful, and say a few words. Really, though, the only interesting thing he said was a line explaining that, “This is the first example of what we’ve been able to accomplish by putting (Industrial Light and Magic) and (Force Unleashed developer) LucasArts in the same building in (San Francisco’s) Presidio,” Lucas said. “So it was a great collaboration between the two of them.”

He got an autograph from Witwer and co-star Adrienne Wikinson, and said, “Oh, yeah, you know it,” when asked if he was going to go straight home to play the game.

Since he is a lifelong fan of all things Star Wars, I asked Witwer if a video game was the right medium to choose for the newest chapter in the overall story line.

Indeed, Witwer said that his deep knowledge of the Star Wars universe was a major factor in his being hired to play the lead role in the game.

The game is also highly anticipated because of two innovative technologies it incorporates.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO–George Lucas was the “surprise” special guest at the official launch party Monday night here for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the new video game that marks the latest chapter in the epic story line. And despite his only making a two-minute speech, most on hand were excited at the rare opportunity to see him.

“So long as the stories are good,” he answered, “I think any medium is the way to go.”

Another fan, Alan Morales, a 35-year-old from Fairfield, Calif., had also come to the Best Buy to be among the first to purchase The Force Unleashed.

In the new game, the main character, played by actor Sam Witwer, is an apprentice of Darth Vader, and the story line centers on that apprentice’s path to redemption.

A man puts on his Chewbacca costume at the launch event for ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed,’ the new video game that is the latest chapter in the ‘Star Wars’ story line.

“He was the guy who put the bugs in the games,” Lucas joked. “He put in 432. The testers only found 327. So for an extra 50 bucks, just send it to him, and he’ll send you a list of the bugs he found.”

I started to take his picture, and he asked if I wanted him to put on the beast’s head first.

First is a new form of artificial intelligence called Euphoria, which is designed to ensure things happen differently each time in the game, even if they begin the same way.

Throughout the evening, fans like Morales and Pugh mingled with people hired to play various Star Wars characters. There were R2-D2s, and every now and then you would hear the iconic beep and bloops of an R2-D2.

“I’m a big Star Wars fan, and I like making outfits,” Pugh said, adding that he regularly dresses up in Luke Skywalker or Boba Fett outfits at events like WorldCom or ComicCon. “I made a Clone Trooper outfit, but I didn’t quite finish it.”

For many of the fans who turned out for the event, the biggest excitement was getting a chance to meet some of the actors who made the characters in the story come to life.

Witwer said he decided to play the scene as if it was a difficult task, and when asked by the game’s director, Haden Blackman, why he was doing so, he answered that such a task for a Sith apprentice–which the character is, according to the story–would be much harder than it would be for a Jedi apprentice.

Each person intending to buy a copy of the game was given a numbered card and told that the card would guarantee them a place in line once the store closed.

The new game, known by many simply as The Force Unleashed, is the first Star Wars game to be considered by Lucas an actual chapter in the overall story line that begins with the three prequel films–The Phantom Menace; Attack of the Clones; and Revenge of the Sith–continues with this summer’s animated film, The Clone Wars and then, of course, concludes with the original three films, Star Wars; The Empire Strikes Back; and Return of the Jedi.

No, those are not new Best Buy security guards. They’re people dressed in stormtrooper outfits to celebrate the launch of ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.’

One fan at the launch event who seemed inclined to agree was Ian Pugh, a 25-year-old from Porterville, Calif., who was dressed as Darth Vader’s apprentice from the game.

He also joked that his son had worked on the development of the game for a little while.

He explained that when he auditioned, he was asked to play out a scene in which his character is assembling a light saber with his mind.

“At that point, Haden said, ‘OK, this is the guy,’” Witwer said.

Indeed, Lucas doesn’t venture into public very often, so for many of the people who had come to line up to buy the new game when it went on-sale at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, his appearance and quick talk were a treat.

Haden Blackman, the director of ‘Star Wars: The Force Unleashed,’ left, jokes with Sam Witwer, the lead actor in the game at its launch event in San Francisco Monday night.

A man dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi makes some of the guests at the launch event smile.

Update 12:27 p.m.: This story has been modified to reflect comment from LucasArts about interest in the game, as evidenced by pre-sales and number of sales at retail.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

As of 9:36 p.m. Monday night, just 24 minutes before closing, only 227 tickets had been taken out of around 1,000 that were available. And while it’s not clear whether that means that interest in the game is lower than expected, it struck me as possible evidence that there wasn’t massive amounts of interest in the game.

“I don’t remember when I saw the first film,” Witwer told CNET News. “It’s just (always been) part of my life since I was recording memories.”

No, I told him. At an event like this, it’s better to know that, in fact, there is a human underneath the fur.

“That was a real fanboy thing,” he said.

On the other hand, the place was packed, something that one store employee said was a very unusual occurrence. So, all in all, the energy generated may have been worth it for Lucas and his crew.

One of them was Witwer, who spoke before Lucas showed up, and who got the crowd fired up by talking about his life as a Star Wars fan.

“It’s not a movie, but it has to do with the story in general,” Morales said. “It pieces together certain parts you don’t know of the story.”

In addition to playing Darth Vader’s apprentice, Witwer also asked for and was given the opportunity to play the role of Emperor Palpatine, which he said most people didn’t know.

He added that he’d been a Star Wars fan since moving to the United States as a kid from Guatemala, and said that from what he’d heard about the game, “it’s a big turning point for Star Wars.”

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

So on Monday, Star Wars fans were given the opportunity to be among the very first to get their hands on the game. But it was an unusual midnight-madness kind of launch event in that instead of having everyone line up outside the Best Buy first, everyone was allowed inside the store while it was still open in order to mill around, listen to MCs talking about the game, get autographs from the game’s voice-over actors, and just get revved up.

Smartphone customers keep flocking to the BlackBerry, and there are signs that it’s not just harried executives signing up for service.

If the company has problems there, like it did earlier this month, e-mail to something like 85 percent of the lawyers in the U.S. gets screwed up. In a way, maybe that’s not a terrible thing for the rest of us, but it’s not good for RIM, and rivals are starting to use that against the BlackBerry.

Perhaps more interesting, however, will be the response of RIM’s current customers and potential customers to the widespread network outage of last week. The BlackBerry service works remarkably well most of the time, but has a crucial Achilles heel in the form of RIM’s network-operations center.

Long the smartphone of choice for the U.S. businessperson, the BlackBerry is making inroads into the consumer market, and overseas as well. According to Canalys, RIM is the second largest smartphone vendor in the world behind Nokia, having more than doubled shipments of BlackBerrys from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the same period last year. In this country, it has 41 percent of the “smart converged device” market, which isn’t exactly a standard term but generally means a phone capable of more than basic texting and browsing.

Research In Motion announced Thursday that it expects to have added 15 percent to 20 percent more subscribers than it initially forecast for its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends next week. The company originally thought it would add a net total of 1.82 million subscribers during the period, but strong holiday sales and the absence of a usual seasonal drop-off are credited with the surge.

RIM noted that the increased amount of subscribers didn’t change its financial guidance for the quarter, which is somewhat interesting. Reuters quoted analysts from UBS who think that means RIM anticipated the surge and built inventory ahead of the period, burning through it as the quarter evolved. It’s also important to note that subscribers includes people who don’t necessarily buy a BlackBerry handheld, but run the BlackBerry software on other phones.

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Gamespot)

Fans of the Sonic the Hedgehog series have been clamoring for a traditional 2D Sonic game in the vein of the lightning-fast titles from the Sega Genesis age. With Sega officially answering that call, we’re left wondering if “Needlemouse” will be a traditional $60 boxed game or a download-only title.

While details are slim, the teaser trailer (see below) indicates that the new game will be an HD title built entirely from the ground up. It’s also unclear whether Sonic will be the main star of the game, as Gamespot is reporting that the project’s codename is “Needlemouse.”

With today marking the 10-year anniversary of the Sega Dreamcast, news from the company reveals that a brand-new 2D Sonic game is in development and slated for a 2010 release.

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HowardForums)

LG Glimmer ad spotted on HowardForums

Through a rather circuitous route, Acer finally brought home the prize it had long been eyeing: European PC vendor Packard Bell.

Acer has been the fastest growing PC company in the world over the last year, rising through the ranks to become the No. 3 PC vendor at the end of 2007, with 8.9 percent of the overall market, according to research firm Gartner.

It’s also set about making its presence known, scooping up U.S. PC maker Gateway in August for $710 million, and declaring its intentions to snatch Packard Bell even when rival Lenovo also publicly expressed interest. Buying Gateway was key for Acer to get the much-smaller Packard Bell, since Gateway possessed the right of first refusal, or right to make any counter offer if another company tried to buy it.

Why Acer wanted the small PC maker with a negligible market presence outside Europe so badly seemed puzzling to some initially. Now the move is seen as a smart defensive strategy to block any attempts by rival Lenovo from increasing its presence in Europe.

Microsoft is hoping a new tool can help make the testing process more methodical and, by doing so, speed things up. The company calls it the Experimentation Platform.

Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet had the scoop on this. Essentially, it is based on the longtime premise of A/B testing, that is giving one set of users one option and a second set another option and seeing which they like better.

A new feature has to be tested to make sure it is better than the old way of doing things and that it doesn’t mess anything else up.

One of the reasons that software development takes so darn long is the amount of testing it takes.

It’s certainly useful for the Times to periodically remind us all of how analysts develop their opinions, but it isn’t so useful to provide a view of the process that is as biased and misleading as this one.

The New York Times ran an article over the weekend (here) describing efforts by the Pentagon and the Bush Administration to influence the opinions of military analysts, primarily retired military officers, who contribute to coverage of the Iraq War and other topics by newspapers and TV news programs.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

A wise analyst is aware of these blind spots and simply refrains from offering opinions on them. For example, I doubt the Pentagon gave the analysts in the Times story any statistics on unauthorized corporal punishment of detainees by Guantánamo staff, and I doubt any of the analysts interpreted this lack of data as indicating such contact never happens. (I certainly have no idea whether it happens, so I’m not saying it does or doesn’t.)

Does the New York Times really believe that this was inappropriate? The article doesn’t attempt to claim that these briefings, or the opinions later voiced by the analysts, were misleading or wrong. Apparently the Times believes it’s damning enough that the analysts accepted the Pentagon’s claims. But I have seen few if any cases of outright deception in my experience with analyst briefings (literally hundreds of them over the years). More commonly, spin is applied by withholding unfavorable facts and by withholding briefings from analysts who hold fixed and unfavorable opinions.

Sources– whether in the public or private sectors– have a very limited ability to influence these biases. Their best way to influence an analyst’s opinions is to make sure the analyst is aware of all the facts that are favorable to the source’s position. That’s what the Times says the Pentagon did in this case. For example, in attempting to counteract bad publicity generated by criticism of the Guantánamo facility by Amnesty International:

Within any community of analysts, there will be some who can be bought, some who can be brainwashed, and some who can be bamboozled. Any given analyst will have some ability to think clearly and independently; each analyst decides whether to exercise that ability or simply regurgitate the spin offered by his or her sources.

(Credit:
US Department of Defense)

Now, the mere presence of such a quote from an analyst who was part of these Pentagon briefings should make it obvious to anyone that no amount of influence can turn every analyst into a puppet. The Times article was hopelessly, breathlessly hysterical over a simple fact of life… a fact that is familiar to everyone who deals with analysts in politics or the private sector.

There are similar biases among military analysts. For example, some believe Islamic extremism and anti-American terrorism ought to be met with military force. Some believe the US ought to reserve the military option for more immediate or substantial strategic threats. I don’t even know any military analysts, but I can see their biases. Presumably military reporters at the New York Times see them too, and shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Ultimately it has to be up to the reader to critically evaluate every line of every news story. Readers shouldn’t assume analyst opinions are unbiased any more than they should assume that the facts in the story are complete or truly representative. But facts and opinions usually do have some basis in reality, and a critical reader can usually learn something about the truth of the matter in spite of all the biases that went into the story.

And it usually doesn’t even matter what opinions an individual analyst holds. Reporters simply find analysts who will deliver the kinds of opinions they want. This “quote shopping” is inevitable and ubiquitous, and I’m not even going to say it’s wrong; reporters have to have this freedom. But it means that reporters– including David Barstow, who wrote this piece for the Times– are trying to influence their readers the same way this article claims the Pentagon is trying to influence military analysts. Barstow included dozens of quotes in his article to support his position, and only twice did he quote a military analyst defending his objectivity– although I’m pretty sure most would have done so if Barstow had given them the chance.

The Times article also suggests that it’s inappropriate for analysts to try to help their sources craft their public messages. Given that analysts are paid to have opinions, it should come as no surprise to the Times or anyone else that analysts like to share these opinions with everyone around them– sources as well as reporters. That’s the difference between analysts and reporters, after all; analysts are held to have enough relevant experience to justify having and expressing opinions. Reporters are not.

Analysts also bring in certain biases and preconceived ideas. I have my own, of course. I believe the companies I cover (or work for!) ought to do useful new work, respect the intellectual property of other companies, and deal honestly with its customers, partners, and competitors alike. I approve of technical monopolies– those created when a company is first to develop a technology– and I don’t approve of monopolies created by predatory trade practices. That still leaves room for plenty of hard competition, and I approve of that, too.

(Thanks to my friend Elf Sternberg for bringing the Times story to my attention, although I don’t think the story is anywhere near as significant as Elf does.)

On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The Times article claimed that the Pentagon’s influence turned these analysts into sock puppets, a claim supported by this quote from Robert S. Bevelacqua– a military analyst himself: