One of my favorite blog reads has been The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs penned by Forbes’ Dan Lyons, known to most of us as Fake Steve Jobs or FSJ. So, like many regular readers, I wondered what was going on when last month he wrote that he was “sailing away” and would be writing as “Real Dan” instead of “Fake Steve”.

Well, here’s what happened. After 10 years, Dan is leaving (or has already left) Forbes to fill the vacancy at Newsweek left by Steven Levy, who is moving on to Wired. Dan’s new blog, Real Dan, is up and running. Check it out. If “Dan” evolves as did “Fake Steve”, it’ll be a fun read.

Apple Inc. said Monday that it sold 1 million of its new 3G iPhones over the weekend amid high demand for the device that was greeted with long lines and long activation times around the world. In a statement, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said the new iPhone was “clearly off to a great start,” as it took Apple 74 days to sell 1 million of the first version of the iPhone. …

Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray said Apple’s iPhone sales exceeded his estimates of 425,000 units for the weekend, and that global demand is better than expected. “This trend will likely continue,” Munster said, as Apple plans to roll out the iPhone in 70 countries over the next few months. Munster estimates Apple will sell 4.1 million iPhones in the current quarter, and sales could reach 45 million units in 2009. Full story

As for Apple’s new online AppStore during the same weekend, users downloaded more than 10 million applications! AppStore has more than 800 native applications for iPhone and iPod touch. Of that number, more than 200 are offered for free and more than 90% are priced at less than $10.

The new 3G iPhone goes on sale worldwide today at 8 a.m. And just like last year, when Apple introduced the first iPhone, eager buyers are lined up to gear up. At our local Apple Store in Arden Fair Mall, there are already more than 500 of the faithful waiting for the doors to open. Many spent the night.

But most seem unaware of a new AT&T calling plan they’ll encounter when the buy their new piece of technology They’ll have to sign up for it at the time of purchase and it will cost them $20-$40 a month more than the old plan. Ouch! But there’s apparently an alternative: They can trade in their old iPhone for a shiny new 3G model (presumably remaining on their old calling plan) for $175.

I reported on this a few months ago. At the time, it was being described as a $400 iPhone that could be bundled with a 2-year calling plan for $199-$299. I think that’s essentially what they’re still doing, albeit with a twist on the presentation.

Coincidently, I believe my contract with Verizon ends this month. Dawn already has an iPhone… I’d like a new phone… hmmmm.

The incandescent light bulb is a quintessential American invention, discovered by Thomas Edison more than 125 years ago, but its future seems to be fading to black amid an ever-greening society. As Americans become more environmentally conscious, consumers are being pushed to buy more earth friendly products including compact fluorescent lights, or CFLs, the latest help-the-planet issue du jour among concerned citizens.

At the federal level, President Bush signed an energy bill in December that, among other changes, will require all light bulbs sold in the United States by 2014 to be at least 70 percent more efficient than today. For those of you that haven’t already connected the dots, the mandate means that, without major improvements, incandescent bulbs will disappear from store shelves by 2014.

After Congress delivered its comprehensive energy bill to the White House in a Toyota Prius hybrid car, U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, waxed poetic about light bulbs, noting that little had changed since Edison and his glass tube and filament. “When it comes to illumination,” Harman said, “we still live in a cave.”

Click to read more ...

Oil prices are at record highs. The overwhelming dependence of our cars and trucks on oil strains family budgets, threatens our national security and contributes to global warming. Plug-in electric vehicles have the potential to significantly reduce the United States’ dependence on oil. Yet can this potential be realized? If so, how? Is there a national interest in putting millions of plug-in vehicles on the road soon? How should policymakers in Washington, D.C., respond?

On June 11 and 12, the Brookings Institution and Google.org hosted a conference titled “Plug-in Electric Vehicles 2008: What Role for Washington?” The conference placed a spotlight on plug-in electric vehicles, examining their potential, their viability, and the pros and cons of different federal policies to promote them.

Transcripts and videos will be posted on the site soon. Meanwhile, I’ve been checking into available electric cars as a possible replacement for my gas guzzling Range Rover. Honda’s Civic Hybrid delivers an estimated 45 mpg, but with a gallon of gasoline approaching $5, it’s not as attractive to me as it might have been when a gallon ran a mere $3.25. There are several concept electrics in the pipeline, but none seem quite ready for prime time. However, I think I’ve settled on this one…

Click to read more ...

When we vacationed last July with Cindy and Ray, Cindy had just bought a mobile GPS to help her navigate our Sacramento>Carmel>Yosemite>Folsom road trip in case our cars became separated. As I recall, she had some problems with it… beginning with getting it to stick to her windshield and later with its disagreeing with the fancy schmancy GPS in our car. So when I saw this Randall Munroe ‘toon, I immediately thought of them… and the wonderful memories came rushing back.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that, along with April Fools’ Day, yesterday marked the 32nd anniversary of Apple, Inc. In its 80th Anniversary issue, Time Magazine revisits a 2003 story titled, “80 Days that Changed the World” that includes a piece about how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ushered in the personal computer with the founding of Apple on April 1, 1976:

They were two guys named Steve, so Steve Jobs was called Steve and Steve Wozniak went by Woz. At 25, Wozniak was the technical brains. Jobs, 21, was the dreamer with a knack for getting others to dream along with him. They had gone to the same high school, and in the hazy years after graduation - both were college dropouts - a shared interest in electronics brought them together. Jobs didn’t yet have his own place, so when their formal partnership began, the decision was made in a bedroom at his parents’ ranch house in Los Altos, Calif.

Most computers in 1976 were room-size machines with Defense Department size price tags, but Wozniak had been tinkering with a new design, and his computer was different. It wasn’t much to look at—just a bunch of chips screwed to a piece of plywood—but it was small, cheap and easy to use, and Jobs had noticed the stir it caused when they took it to a local computer club. “He said, ‘We’ll make it for 20 bucks, sell it for 40 bucks!’” Wozniak remembers. “I kind of didn’t think we’d do it.” Jobs came up with the name, inspired by an orchard in Oregon where he had worked with some friends: Apple Computer. “When we started the little partnership, it was just like, Oh, this will be fun,” Wozniak says. “We won’t make any money, but it’ll be fun.”

They didn’t go out and celebrate that day. Woz wouldn’t even quit his day job designing chips for calculators at Hewlett-Packard until months later, after Jobs had sold his Volkswagen bus for seed money. Nobody, not even Jobs, saw what was coming next: that Apple would create the look and feel of every desktop in the world and start our love affair with the personal computer.

I didn’t become an Apple fan (I prefer “user” or “evangelist”) until the introduction of the horribly overpriced ($10,000) Lisa, the first personal computer to feature a visual desktop (GUI) and a mouse. And when Apple later introduced the Macintosh, well, I was hooked. Happy birthday, Apple!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and LONDON, England (April 1st, 2008) – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars. …

For thousands of years,
the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation.
Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

The question is, do you want to join us?
Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we’ve outlined here.

Interested? Complete the questionaire to see if you’re a suitable candidata. Questions? Check the FAQs. Read the hundred year plan. More

Google Australia has announced today the launch of gDay, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

The Pentagon announced Thursday that a Navy warship has been tasked with shooting down a failing United States spy satellite that, if left alone, was expected to hit Earth within weeks.

In a joint news conference, NASA administrator Michael Griffin and Gen. James Cartwright, the No. 2 officer at the Defense Department, announced that an SM-3 missile, designed to hit inbound ballistic missiles, will be fired from a Navy cruiser or destroyer as early as this Thursday to obliterate the inbound spacecraft. The idea is to break apart the satellite to rid it of toxic fuel onboard by smashing its tank, which is the largest intact piece left. If successful, it would be the first direct U.S. test against a satellite since 1985, when an F-15 climbed to 80,000 ft. to fire a three-stage missile at a defunct solar-monitoring platform in low-Earth orbit. More…

The odds were in favor of the satellite crashing in the ocean after losing much of its sensitive equipment during reentry. Perhaps the chance to use our ballistic defenses against a real-life target was just too good to pass up.

This is a particularly interesting self-portrait, in part because it was taken by an astronaut of himself in space, but even more so because of the reflection in the glass of his helmet. Visible in the image, working in from the outer borders, are the edges of the reflecting helmet of a space suit, modules of the International Space Station (ISS), the Earth, the arms of Expedition 15 astronaut Clay Anderson, and the digital camera used to snap the image. This picture was taken during the shuttle orbiter Endeavour’s mission to expand the space station last August.

Another comical skit from The Vacationeers…

The Auto Assault 12 Combat Shotgun is the first built from the ground up specifically for the military. “There’s no way that anybody within 200 yards can face this weapon and survive it. It’s just destroying everything in it’s path. …”

I’ve been watching HD DVD’s plummeting popularity since Warner’s decision to jump on the Blu-ray bandwagon, especially evident following CES. But Toshiba’s apparently not going down without a fight. In Bryan Gardiner’s article for Wired, he explains what may be their “Hail Mary” effort to stem the tide.

You’ve got to hand to Toshiba. Even now, when faced with overwhelming evidence that Sony’s Blu-ray has won the high def format war, the mortally wounded HD DVD backer just keeps on prolonging the inevitable.

First, Toshiba decides to dramatically cut prices on its HD DVD players in the U.S. following Warner Bros. Blu-ray defection earlier this month. Now, for reasons that also escape us, the company has decided to buy a 30-second Super Bowl spot for $2.7 million to advertise its desperation those marked down HD DVD players.

Of course, none of this is really convincing consumers. As Ars Technica recently noted, in the week following the Warner Bros. defection, weekly HD DVD player sales tanked big time, falling from 14,558 the week previous to a measly 1,758.

Meanwhile, Blu-ray saw a reverse trend, climbing from 15,257 to 21,770. In fact, the format ended up capturing approximately 93 percent of the market that week, according to NDP. …

We’ve watched the format war rage for nearly two years. The world’s apparently made its choice. Maybe it’s time for Toshiba to throw in the towel on this one.

Here’s some good news for AT&T broadband subscribers: Free Wi-Fi at AT&T’s 10,000 or so Hot-Spots! I haven’t read all the particulars yet but it appears that Premier and Basic service levels benefit. Key for me will be learning what “additional” locations are included since I don’t spend a lot of time at Barnes & Noble or McDonald’s. But hey, anything that adds to the puny number of free HotSpots in my area is a bonus!