TECHNOLOGY REPORT

The world’s premier consumer electronics event – CES 2011 – is still 99 days away, but the keynote lineup already reflects the influence of this huge technology showcase, attended by legions of professionals working in the technology arena.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft will Keynote the “Preshow” on Wednesday, followed by CES’ CEO Gary Shapiro, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, and Samsung President Boo-Keun Yoon.

CES Keynotes often release some of the tech industry’s most important news, especially as it relates to upcoming innovations in consumer electronics, automotive technology, and the rapidly expanding field of green technologies and high tech appliances.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011
6:30 p.m. Las Vegas Hilton, Hilton Center

Steve Ballmer
Microsoft CEO

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer will deliver a preshow keynote address at the 2011 International CES.

“As leader of one of the world’s most innovative technology companies, a keynote address from Steve Ballmer is the perfect way to kick off the 2011 International CES,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CEA. “Microsoft’s entrepreneurial spirit and drive have been major forces behind the success of the company and its impact on the global consumer technology industry. We look forward to hearing Steve’s strategic vision for the future of Microsoft and our industry.”

Steve Ballmer will kick off the 2011 International CES with a preshow keynote address at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 5, in the Las Vegas Hilton Center. In previous years, Microsoft has used the CES keynote stage to launch major products including Xbox, Windows Vista and its Sync technology partnership with Ford.

The full lineup of 2011 CES keynote addresses will be announced in the coming months.

Thursday, January 6, 2011
8:30 a.m., Las Vegas Hilton, Hilton Center

CEA President and CEO, Gary Shapiro and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg

Ivan Seidenberg, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Verizon, has led Verizon since its inception in 2000 following the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. He has transformed the company into a premier global network company by building a nationwide wireless network, deploying high-speed fiber broadband direct to homes, and expanding its global Internet backbone network around the world. Verizon’s leadership in network innovation has earned the company numerous awards, including Fortune’s 2010 “World’s Most Admired Companies” list at No.1 in the telecommunications sector.

“Ivan is a terrific leader who has positioned Verizon as a top global provider of communications, information and entertainment across a wide variety of platforms,” said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CEA. “Verizon embraces innovation and its vast broadband networks touch all facets of the technology ecosystem. We are pleased to welcome Ivan to the CES stage for his debut keynote and look forward to hearing the vision for Verizon’s next generation of products and services.”

Seidenberg will deliver his CES keynote address following a State of the CE Industry keynote address delivered by Gary Shapiro, president and CEO, CEA.

Thursday, January 6, 2011
4:30 p.m., Las Vegas Hilton, Hilton Center

Boo-Keun Yoon
Samsung President and General Manager of Visual Display Business

As President of Samsung’s Visual Display Business, Boo-Keun Yoon oversees all activities surrounding a broad portfolio of devices, including TVs, monitors, Blu-ray players and other connected consumer digital products. Under his leadership, the division has maintained its No.1 status in terms of global market share for TVs, monitors and Blu-ray players. In addition, he has successfully led several efforts to commercialize market-leading innovations such as Samsung’s LED TV in 2009 and, most recently, the company’s total 3D entertainment solution – a full product suite consisting of TVs, Blu-ray home theater systems and glasses that make it possible for consumers to enjoy 3D content in the comfort of their homes.

Data from Wikipedia’s entry on “Domain Name Speculation”

* The number of registrations of .com domain names grew from 23,662,001  in  January 2003 to 80,759,835  in January 2009.

Wiki goes on to note that a quirk in the registration rules led to a surge in the practice of “Domaintasting” where a huge bulk order of domain names would be registered for a short time.   Only the names that created click revenue from pay per click ads would be kept.    This led to new domain hosting companies set up simply to filter for marginally valuable names that could be set up to get click revenue, and then to a new rule in June 2008 from ICANN, the body that oversees domain registrations.  ICANN started to limit the number of domains that a registrar could delete in the ICANN “grace period” where no fees were charged.   These grace period deletions fell by 99.7% the following year as the practice of “domain tasting” became less profitable.

Verisign Domain Brief in June 2009 identified  92 million COM and NET domain names, 24 percent with one page websites, 64% have multipage websites and 12% have no associated websites.

These last numbers suggest to me that the speculation is not as rampant as most seem to think – ie most sites are multiple page implying content and not speculation.    Of course systems like the one I’m testing now at Godaddy that auto-generate several pages of content make it even harder to distinguish between  sites that are driven speculatively vs those that are driven more by a passion to communicate or quality initiatives.       As the quality, sharable content online increases and systems become smarter I think we may see that it will be impossible to distinguish between sites created by humans and those made automatically.

Kudos to Google for sponsoring the Project 10 to the 10th contest which winnowed down about 150,000 ideas to five great ideas, all of which will receive millions in funding from Google:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Enhance science and engineering education

FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST

Make government more transparent

Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Drive innovation in public transport

Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting

Provide quality education to African students

Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

http://www.project10tothe100.com/

I love the innovative spirit in contests and project like these, and also believe funding from deep pockets like Google is critical because I think in general innovations …. fail…. even in the for profit sector.     However in that sector we reward success hugely, so we get a fair number of entrepreneurial “players” who are looking to win the innovation lottery, and these players tend to spin out a few good ideas among mostly bad ones.

The current USA system tends to dramatically reward success and ruthlessly kill commercial failure, which is probably a good approach to optimize business success.  A common mistake by those who argue that “innovation is golden” is to only look at the few innovative projects that have had huge success  (Apple Computer, Google, etc) and ignore the *thousands* of failed innovations, most of which most of us never hear about.      One of the big lessons that should have been learned from the internet and real estate bubbles is that innovation does NOT foster success – it simply fosters new ideas.     Most internet companies that were spawned during the bubble have failed where a few like Google have become global economic powerhouses.

But as usual I digress.   THANKS Google for helping to spawn new ideas to do good.   That’s cool.

In recent Senate Commerce Committee  hearings about privacy policies the talk was breathlessly serious but – as usual – much of the dialog and most of the legislation are clearly years behind the internet realities.

The *most important issue* in my opinion is generally overlooked, and that is the *fact* that what most of us believe to be “our private information” is now scattered across the internet, easily retrievable.   The privacy ship sailed long ago, so by far the major issues left are how to remedy *abuses* of privacy.

I would suggest that the abuses are generally caused by lack of transparency in terms of identities of business entities and that the solution should revolve around market driven sales transparency and legally driven identity transparency.

I personally don’t object to having all online sales activity legally required to disclose the name of the purveyor – either a registered business or an individual so they can be identified by the consumer and by authorities.   However there are probably various reasons – free speach and otherwise – to limit this disclosure to the ISP level.    But a huge mistake in my opinion is that we are not requiring enough responsibility on the side of ISPs, online advertisers, and (very importantly) the big online ad agencies like Google who are not required to disclose spammers to authorities.

This is a complex issue for many reasons, but we’ve erred on the side of letting non-disclosure trump common sense, and this has led to the massive level of online commercial abuse we see now all over the internet.      From legal scamming like overpriced self help books and ringtone sales to illegal phishing attacks, much of the trouble would disappear if Google, ISPs, and authorities simply made sure that  all legal online transactions could be traced to a legally responsible party.     e.g. if you sell online, you must be identifiable as an individual or business, much in the same way we expect any offline business to be accountable to a variety of checks and balances in place in the offline world.   Online efficiency has eliminated many of the normal “barriers to entry” for businesses.    That’s a great thing overall, but it means we need more in place than the current relaxed systems and standards that facilitate too much abuse.

These are test posts after a spam attack against us. … thank you for your patience.

Thanks to Twitter I quickly learned that the problem we were experiencing here at Technology Report with strange post descriptions at Google in the search results.   It is known as the “pharma hack” and is the latest in a long line of WordPress spam hacks perpetrated for commercial gain through creation of incoming links to junky websites.    It has a fix here at Sucuri.net , and thanks so much to  @dremeda for the heads up on this pesky problem which has infected a large number of WordPress blogs all over the internet.

I think Godaddy (the host of this blog) may already have run some corrections for this blog as the posts and HTM seem fine.  However the description problems remain and hopefully will go away with new Google updates of the search results over the next few days.

This is a post testing “Zemanta”, an interesting tool for blogs that automatically suggests content that matches the context of the article.    Let’s see how it does for “CES 2011″:

Technology Report will have live coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – CES 2011.     We’re looking forward to bringing you the kind of simple insights into the new technology that can help make daily decisions.    Of course we’ll also have some product reviews and a lot of news about the conference as well as links to sources that have more detailed information about the many products debuted and featured at CES 2011.

Zemanta website

Google Instant is a new feature at the search giant, and as it catches on it’s likely to change the way people interact with search as well as the way advertisers strategize to collect more eyeballs for their websites.

Google Instant presents you with many more options than before, and they are based on the initial letters / words you type into the search query box.   It’ll take some time for all of us to decide if we *like* the idea of constant prompting for search refinements, but it’s usually a good idea to assume the Google routine is smart – smarter than we are at determining the best sets of searches to drill down to what we need to find.  Obviously you don’t have to choose from the options presented, but it’s best to assume that the results you get from these options will form a more relevant list of results than if you choose otherwise.

It’s this last aspect of “Google Instant” that may create some interesting new issues and  opportunities for advertisers and SEO specialists, as Google’s searchmeister Matt Cutts pointed out over at his blog.

As search becomes more personalized – using input from social networks, user created content, past searches, and other personal information collected over time – we are likely to see shifts in the way advertisers try to reach us, and hopefully in the appropriateness of the advertising appeals.

More on Google Instant from … Google.