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(Credit:
Apple)

Earlier Monday, reports surfaced that Apple was getting ready to release an updated version of the iMac and the
Mac Mini next week. But a company representative told Macworld, “our holiday lineup is set,” in a rare move to dampen the speculation regarding the new products.

As Macworld’s Jim Dalrymple points out, the iMac and Mac Mini seem overdue for a hardware update, making it quite plausible that new versions would be along some time soon. But Apple appears to be saving those updates for a later date, perhaps at the annual Macworld conference in January.

Apple did just release new MacBooks and MacBook Pros to bolster the Mac lineup heading into the holiday season, which is generally the busiest time of the year for the computer industry.

Apple has taken the rare step of denying speculation that new Macs are on the way.

Apple has quashed the rumor mill’s latest obsession, declaring that no new Macs will be released before the holidays.

Adopting existing building-efficiency products alone could potentially eliminate the need to build any new power plants, although some may be needed to address regional supply imbalances or upgrade existing power plants. Broadly applied in transportation, buildings, and industry, efficiency technologies could reduce energy use by 15 percent in 2020 and 30 percent by 2030, compared to the Energy Information Administration’s “business as usual” reference scenario.

The authors of “America’s Future Energy” said that emerging technologies need to go through pilot tests in the next five years to demonstrate that they can be commercially viable and done at large scale 10 years from now.

The National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering, on Monday released a report called “America’s Energy Future” that seeks to focus the country’s discussion on energy and draw attention to the most promising technologies.

(Credit:
Energy Information Administration, 2008.)

“Actions taken between now and 2020 to develop and demonstrate several key technologies will largely determine options for many decades to come. Therefore, it is imperative that the technology development and demonstration activities identified in this report be started soon, even though some will be expensive and not all will be successful: some may fail, prove uneconomic, or be overtaken by better technologies,” according to the report.

Planning ahead

In assessing the transportation sector, the study’s authors concluded that petroleum will continue to fuel the country’s cars and trucks in the next three decades, although maintaining domestic petroleum production will be challenging. Once again, the best near-term option to cutting oil consumption is better vehicle efficiency.

In the short term, the study’s authors concluded that efficiency is the easiest and lowest-cost option for “moderating” national demand for energy in the next decade.

If changing the U.S. energy supply to be more secure and sustainable is like steering a massive ship, then the direction we set it on today won’t be fully felt for 10 or 20 years.

(Credit:
Lawrence Livermore Lab, Department of Energy)

However, to take advantage of more renewable energy and run the system more efficiently will require modernizing the electricity system with smart-grid technologies, which the study says is “urgently needed.”

Coal power plants with carbon capture and storage technology, where carbon dioxide would be stored underground, could replace the entire coal fleet by 2035 through retrofits or new construction. “Evolutionary nuclear technologies” could supply up to 850 terawatt-hours of electricity by 2035 by modifying existing plants and building new ones.

The report said the most high-priority “demonstration stage” technologies are carbon capture and storage, evolutionary nuclear, cellulosic ethanol, and advanced light-duty vehicles. Long-term research and development is required for producing liquid fuels from renewable resources, advanced batteries and fuel cells, large-scale electricity storage, enhanced geothermal, and advanced solar photovoltaics.

Making liquid fuels from biomass, such as wood chips, and from coal with carbon capture and storage could replace about 15 percent of today’s fuel consumption. But both approaches still have significant technical barriers. Also, there are potential environmental problems from using large amounts of land for biofuels and coal-to-liquid fuels would increase emissions without carbon capture and storage, according to the study.

Because the U.S. has good resources, renewable energy from wind, solar, and geothermal could provide an additional 500 terawatt-hours per year by 2020 and 1,100 terawatt-hours per year by 2035. Total U.S. electricity consumption is now about 4,000 terawatt-hours per year.

To overcome technical and other barriers, the study said that policies and regulations and other incentives need to put in place.

One of the messages from the report is that long-term problems require sustained strategies and a break from business as usual. Technology has a big role to play, but none of the academic and business experts who authored the study expects a single fix.

The U.S. has a number of good options for diversifying power generation as well but developing the products to do this will likely raise the price of electricity.

Where your BTUs come from. This graphic shows the delivery of energy from primary fuel sources shown on the left.

“One of the committee’s conclusions is that there is no technological ’silver bullet’ at present that could transform the U.S. energy system through a substantial new source of clean and reasonably priced domestic energy. Instead, the transformation will require a balanced portfolio of existing (though perhaps modified) technologies, multiple new energy technologies, and new energy-efficiency and energy-use patterns,” wrote Harold T. Shapiro, the chair of the committee on America’s Energy Future.

Although there isn’t one solution, certain technologies deserve more research than others, both in electricity and in transportation. Successful development and deployment of them can reduce greenhouse gases substantially in both sectors in the next 30 years using a portfolio approach.

Meanwhile, making large numbers of electric light-duty vehicles will require advances in battery performance and fuel cells as well as smart-grid technologies to manage the demand.

Carbon-heavy: the source for energy in the U.S. The pie chart breaks out sources of electricity generation.

IDC’s Kevorkian agrees that until now, ad-supported music has failed, but she sees some possibilities.

By the time SpiralFrog compensated the labels and music publishers, the company’s managers figured that 66 percent of their revenue went to the music industry, records show. SpiralFrog’s deal with the major labels was different from those negotiated by most music-streaming Web services, which pay penny-per-play rates. Their agreements are to pay a cent, or some fraction of a cent, each time a song is played.

Click the image above to read the lead story of our series on SpiralFrog. Stories on SpiralFrog’s internal strife and customers’ private information will appear Tuesday.

There’s no doubt now that the much-hyped SpiralFrog was never among the front-runners. The service offered music from only two of the four top recording companies. Users couldn’t download SpiralFrog’s tunes to their iPods. And documents show that the start-up spent millions of dollars on marketing but never attracted a loyal following of significant size.

Ruckus and SpiralFrog have closed their doors. Imeem faced a financial crisis earlier this year, until receiving new funding from investors and price concessions from the music labels. A year after Qtrax obtained licenses from all four of the top recording companies, the company appears to be struggling to pay its bills and has yet to launch.

CNET News has recently completed a two-month examination of SpiralFrog, the now-defunct download service that was among the pioneers of the ad-supported model. The review provides an unprecedented view of the many challenges facing companies in this sector. SpiralFrog’s tale sheds light on the kind of rates advertisers are willing to pay and the licensing fees the top music labels charge. None of it is very promising.

The start-up would offer music free of charge to consumers and attempt to hand the bill to advertisers. Since then, we’ve seen a dozen companies make names for themselves by offering their own twist on the ad-supported music model, including MySpace Music, Imeem, and Pandora. But regardless of how anyone has tweaked it, not a single service in the still-nascent sector has proven that it knows how to offer consumers a compelling free-music service while providing advertisers an effective way to deliver their messages.

That hasn’t stopped the complaining, however. The people who run digital-music stores continue to quietly argue that licensing fees charged by big record companies are still too high for stores to eke out a profit. Music industry insiders say it’s not their fault that the start-ups have failed to win over advertisers. What are they supposed to do–give their content away? That won’t happen, executives say.

That may be true, but iLike is among the companies discussing downloads with the music labels.

SpiralFrog, for its part, never came close to covering costs, documents show. The start-up lost more than $26 million in 2008.

“We’ve built a self-sustaining ad-supported business–positive cash flow over the past eight-month period,” Partovi said. “That’s with only one full-time ad salesperson. What’s our secret? It’s simple: we’re not trying to help consumers get unlimited music without paying for it. Instead, we’re focused on music discovery. We deliver all the other things that music consumers love without risking a lawsuit or paying high royalties.”

Nonetheless, the behemoth record labels are willing to work to help ad-supported sites survive. Imeem is the poster child for how the labels have changed their approach to these services. Founded in 2004, Imeem came very close to running out of money until it found new funding and also negotiated better licensing deals with the labels earlier this year. Some of Imeem’s rivals asked and received similar concessions, industry sources said.

Music fans generally refuse to pay to listen online and resent on-site advertising. The hard truth is that to this point, ad-supported music as a standalone business has failed.

Ali Partovi, iLike’s CEO, argues that the ad-supported model works for music, but not when you’re giving songs away.

Although SpiralFrog managers never secured deals with Sony Music Entertainment or Warner Music Group, the music service budgeted $5 million and $3.3 million, respectively, to acquire licenses from those services, records show. Those figures were all minimums. Under the agreements reached with Universal and EMI, had SpiralFrog made revenue above those minimums, the company would have been required to split that revenue 50-50 with the labels.

Matt Graves, Imeem’s spokesman, said his company is trying to be innovative and not solely rely on traditional online advertising, such as on banners and display ads. The company is trying to mix things up with in-stream audio ads and custom-tailored campaigns. The music service recently promoted a download giveaway from Wal-Mart Stores and offered users a chance to remix songs from artists such as rapper Flo Rida.

Overpaying for music

CNET News’ review of SpiralFrog showed that in 2006, SpiralFrog agreed to pay $3.2 million to Universal Music Group, the largest of the top four recording companies, in up-front fees. Documents indicate that in 2008, SpiralFrog set aside $3.5 million to license music from EMI, the smallest of the major labels. That deal triggered a “most favored nation” clause in Universal’s contract, and SpiralFrog ended up paying an additional $1 million to Universal.

“If it’s all about displays, then users will get ad-blind,” Graves said. “We’re enabling advertisers to do a deep integration.”

A copy of a $1.8 million bounced check written by Qtrax to Oracle, which filed a breach of contract and copyright lawsuit last month against the yet-to-be-launched music service.

There may be a temptation to dismiss SpiralFrog’s problems as unique to the company. That would be a mistake. There’s no question that some of the same factors that stymied SpiralFrog are bearing down on many of the company’s former rivals. “This version of ad-supported model is certainly on life support,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at research firm Gartner. “I think we can say this round didn’t quite work.”

From a SpiralFrog June 2008 expenditure list. Note: SpiralFrog had no licenses with Warner or Sony. Figures represent amounts the start-up expected labels to charge.

Imeem, which has mostly focused on streaming ad-supported music to users’ PCs, has recently begun testing a download store. Music industry sources told CNET News last month that iLike, which powers Facebook’s most popular music service, was in talks with the major record companies over licensing downloads.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Greg Sandoval/CNET)

Is there any hope?

One bright spot is that some investors are sticking with the sector.

In addition to Imeem, Spotify and Pandora found new funding. Investors including British venture capital firm Wellington Partners were part of a $50 million round of financing for Spotify, according to the Financial Times. And Pandora last month announced that it had raised $35 million of additional funding.

Pandora’s popular iPhone app, meanwhile, has helped spur user growth, but the company has also opted out of ad-supported music for the site’s heaviest users. The company said last month that those tuning in for more than 40 hours a month must pay 99 cents to continue listening.

It appears that it made little difference whether the record companies got their money before or after a sale. The rates they charged forced ad-supported companies to generate big ad revenue in order to cover costs.

For two years, Imeem has posted links to Apple’s iTunes and Amazon.com’s MP3 service on its site to enable visitors a means to buy songs. MySpace Music, YouTube, Pandora, and Spotify do the same. But Imeem is testing how effectively it can sell a limited number of tracks from Warner Music Group and several independent labels directly to consumers.

Another gripe that advertisers have is that many ad-supported sites don’t reach big enough audiences. Mel Schrieberg, SpiralFrog’s former CEO, said SpiralFrog couldn’t get in the “tier 1″ advertising door with fewer than 5 million users. To generate this kind of traffic, SpiralFrog spent $11 million in 2008 on search engine and affiliate marketing, which gobbled up the little revenue the company was able to generate.

But Susan Kevorkian, a digital-music and mobile-entertainment analyst at IDC, points out that a large audience doesn’t mean instant success. Although MySpace Music has access to the social network’s shrinking but still large audience, she said the service still “hasn’t performed to industry expectations.”

Three years ago this month, the Financial Times and The New York Times chronicled the emergence of an untried but promising new digital-music service: SpiralFrog.

In May, CNET News reported that MySpace Music’s performance has underperformed. Several music sites have overhauled their business models (Lala) or are trying to do so (iLike).

Advertisers are simply unwilling to pay the music sites a premium rate. In order to charge advertisers $10 for 1,000 impressions, ad-supported sites must operate their own sales teams, which is expensive. In SpiralFrog’s case, the company’s salespeople were successful at signing a few marquee advertisers, including McDonald’s and Microsoft, but much too often, the company found itself selling excess ad inventory through remnant ad networks, which typically pay 50 cents or less for 1,000 impressions.

Some of the hurdles that contributed to SpiralFrog's spiral out of the sector are the same confronting former rivals.

And if you’re waiting for the Swedes, in the form of white-hot music service Spotify, to come charging over the hill to show us how to make the model work, you needn’t bother. Three industry sources told CNET News last week that the service–expected to debut in the United States next year–is struggling to convert users into paying customers. Just like others on this side of the Atlantic, Spotify hasn’t figured out how to make money.

Advertisers aren’t willing to give the ad-supported sites top dollar because they know that people aren’t necessarily staring at a computer while listening to songs online. Instead, they tend to check e-mail or Facebook, do homework, eat dinner, or browse the Web in other browser tabs. In contrast with radio, Web listeners have become accustomed to music without audible ads embedded into the streams–and they don’t want those ads, according to Gartner’s McGuire.

“This model has some flaws that need to be addressed before it works as a standalone model,” Kevorkian said. “That said, there’s a possibility that it could be deployed in conjunction with a hybrid paid model to help generate revenue so that the music provider isn’t solely dependent on ads.”

Migration to downloads

One sign that some players in digital music are losing faith in the ad-supported model is the rise in companies looking to sell downloads, according to one music industry executive. “That’s become the fallback position,” the source said.

All four of the major music labels declined to comment for this story.

Selling downloads directly, rather than linking to another retailer, is more lucrative. A music site that sells downloads can make 30 cents from direct sales rather than the 5 cents that the so-called affiliate partners pay, according to an industry source. The trick for any upstart download store is to convince customers of Apple’s iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 service–by far the leading download stores–to try a new outlet.

The AirPort client update is recommended for users of 13-inch MacBooks from late 2007 and 2008, 15-inch MacBook Pros from 2008, and 17-inch MacBook Pros from 2008. Again indicating the problem was caused by Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8, the update is only required for those computers with the newest operating system.

It was a busy Tuesday for Apple’s software team. The company released updates for its
Safari Web browser, its wireless AirPort client, and the Multi-Touch trackpad for users who have Windows installed on their
Mac.

Several of the changes in Safari affect the security of the application, and are fixes for flaws that could allow hackers to execute code on the user’s machine.

Among the changes in Safari 4.0.3 are several stability improvements, including enhancements for Web pages that use the HTML 5 video tag, third-party plug-ins, and Safari’s Top Sites feature. The update also corrected a problem that prevented some users from being able to log in to iWork.com and fixed an issue that caused some Web content to be displayed in grayscale.

The final update, Multi-Touch Trackpad Update 1.1 for Windows, is for users who installed Windows XP or Vista on their Mac using Boot Camp. The update, according to Apple, improves performance of the multitouch trackpad.

(Credit:
Apple)

Safari 4.0.3 comes just six days after Apple released an upgrade for Safari 4.0.2 as part of its Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 update, indicating fixes were not implemented in the previous version or problems were caused by its release.

Yahoo’s search was second among listed companies, with a score of 77, while Microsoft’s former MSN search ranked 75. The survey was conducted before both the launch of Bing as well as the search deal that will see Microsoft taking over search on Yahoo’s pages, so next year’s results should be particularly interesting, Freed said.

That opens up opportunities for newcomers like Bing to win customers with a better product, Freed said. But they’ll have a tough time going up against Google because the company’s brand image is so strong and because the public continues to think highly of Google’s product, he said.

Americans are apparently quite happy with their Internet search options.

Overall, however, customer satisfaction with search is relatively high despite the fact that most search companies believe the experience could be greatly improved. “The simple definition of satisfaction is it’s a combination of what you get and what you expect. Consumers are used to not finding what they expect” the first time they go to a search engine, Freed said.

Google leads the industry in both market share and customer satisfaction, posting a score of 86. That’s one of the highest satisfaction scores recorded by any one company, said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which interpreted the survey results. “What’s interesting is that Google has really set an expectation with consumers and they’ve done a good job living up to it,” he said.

That’s the conclusion reached by a survey of U.S. consumers conducted earlier this year by the American Customer Satisfaction Index and scheduled to be released Tuesday. The Internet portals and search engines category–made up of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft–scored an 83 on the index, far ahead of the score of 75 amassed by the PC industry.

The Smart Cane uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) to detect obstacles and alert the user on where and how to navigate while walking, according to a news item published July 29 from Central Michigan University (CMU).

A speaker on the bag’s strap alerts the user when an obstacle is in the way and tells the person where to walk. For people who can’t hear, a special glove vibrates different fingertips to provide direction on where to navigate.

“We are one of the first to research the use of RFID technology outdoors,” said Kumar Yelamarthi, a CMU assistant professor of engineering and the project’s leader. “This project started as a way for me to teach students to see and understand the ways that engineering can be used for the greater good. We wanted to do something that would help people and make our campus more accessible.”

Equipped with an ultrasonic sensor, the cane works in tandem with a navigational system inside a bag worn by the user. Together, they detect RFID tags mounted on small flags that stick out of the ground.

Since the cane requires RFID flags along the path to navigate, its use in the real world is limited for now. But the students see this as just the first step of a much larger project.

A volunteer tests the Smart Cane.

The students who designed the system set up a test with volunteers who used it to navigate around campus. CMU said the volunteers found the system to be effective, especially with navigation.

“The project has immense potential,” said CMU senior Wil Martin, who worked on the student team. “This was a preliminary effort that I believe will pave the way for future projects and ultimately result in a device that will help the visually impaired move with the same ease and confidence as a sighted person. It can happen if the project continues. I am confident in this.”

A new “smart” cane developed by students at Central Michigan University may be just the first step in helping blind people more easily get around by themselves.

(Credit: Central Michigan University)

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The mobile browser version of Google Voice is a cruel, cruel joke.

Google Voice on the Blackberry is a very important app, however, since it gives corporate users of locked-down Blackberrys access to a second, perhaps personal, line on their phones (assuming their handset isn’t so locked down that they can’t install the app). It saves people who want to keep personal and work lines separate from having to carry two phones. Details for calls placed via the Google Voice app don’t show up in the Blackberry phone logs.

Let’s look at how the platforms stack up for Google Voice, in order from good to bad…

Close second: Blackberry

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

For computers, Google Voice is a Web site. It’s not a VoIP app. It can’t turn your computer into a phone. But it can make whatever phone you’re sitting next to into an extension on your Google Voice account, and that’s one of the things I really like about the service.

There are no native Google Voice apps for Windows or other smartphone platforms, but there are third-party apps. GVdialer, for example, lets you place calls on your phone that appear to come from your Google Voice number. iDialer is similar, and also works with JaJah accounts. I haven’t tried these apps, and neither is available for the iPhone. (If you have experience with these apps, leave a comment below.)

The Android app gives you the cool “karaoke” feature of Google Voice, in which it will highlight words in transcribed voicemails as it plays them.

Google Voice dialers for other platforms

A real computer’s big screen is the best place to manage your Google voice contact list and review old messages. And if you are a big text messager, it’s great to be able to read and write them on the PC, and then finish your SMS conversations on your mobile when you step away from your desk.

You can — sort of — dial out from your Google contacts, that show up in the Web app, and from a “quick call” option on the main screen of the mobile Web site that lets you enter a phone number. In either case, when you want to make a call, the service calls you on your iPhone and also the person you’re calling, and it connects you. You need a data connection for this to work. This makes sense when you’re using Google Voice from your desktop computer, but it’s a poor experience on a mobile phone.

Google Voice on the Android phone is better than Visual Voicemail on the iPhone.

Not surprisingly, it’s Google’s own mobile phone platform, Android. The iPhone has great potential, but until Apple pulls its head out of its Apps Store, it’s denied to us as a Google Voice platform. You can still use Google Voice in the iPhone, sort of, via the Safari browser, as I’ll explain below.

There is a Blackberry version of the Google Voice app, which is not as full-featured as the Android app, but that has certain important advantages for corporate phone users. Finally, there’s the old full browser-based Web app, which is highly useful even when you’ve got a Google Voice-equipped mobile phone sitting on your desk.

The Google Voice app for Android is fully integrated with the Android mobile phone operating system. It’s the only Google-supported platform that lets you use the phone’s native dialer to make outgoing calls that appear to be coming from your Google Voice number. What I really like, though, is an optional feature that makes the app ask you, when you’re making a call, whether you want to place the call from your mobile phone’s number or from Google Voice. Or you can set it to dial from just the Google Voice number, or the phone’s. Basically, you get two numbers in one phone, and it’s up to you which one, if any, is the main number. That’s handy.

Dear readers: We are testing a new commenting system, JS-Kit’s Echo, in this post. In addition to providing a more comprehensive sign-on system and real-time updating, Echo also collates comments on this story from other Web sources, such as Twitter. Check out the action at the end of the post. –Rafe

Advice

It's great to have a full-screen version of your voicemail and SMS archive when you're at a computer.

There is no Google Voice for the iPhone. Hopefully the FCC’s investigation (see also: results) will encourage Apple to approve the app so this is changed. Meantime, if you want to use the service on the iPhone you’re stuck with the unattractive mobile version of the Web site.

At least it’s possible to sync your iPhone address book with your Google contacts, even if you can’t place Google calls from the address book app on the phone. Neither can you dial out from your iPhone’s recent call list, nor the built-in dialer.

A load of crap: iPhone (and other platforms)

Nits include the necessity for the phone to have a good data connection (not just a voice signal) to use Google Voice. There’s some handshaking that goes on over the Internet, apparently, and if the phone doesn’t have a connection, it will either fail to dial out or it will dial from the phone’s own number. Also, you might have to do some work in your address book, as numbers have to include a “1″ and an area code in front of them, or the phone will, again, use its native dialer.

The Blackberry app runs a close second to Android.

Highly useful: PC or laptop and the Google Voice Web site

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman/CNET)

It’s quite pathetic. It’s ugly and slow, and when you want to play your voicemails, the Web browser gives way to your phone’s media player, which is a disruptive interface switch (and it didn’t always work in my testing).

Google Voice is a breakthrough telephony product. If you are moving your telephony and text messaging activities to the platform, and you need to do it today, you want an Android phone. If you have a corporate Blackberry, you, too, can get a pretty good Google Voice experience. iPhone user? Sorry. But you might not want to throw the phone out the window just yet, since it is likely that the Google Voice will make it to the platform. That’s my belief, and it’s why I’m hanging on to my iPhone for a little while longer.

The Winner: Android

I’ve been a fan of Google Voice since I started using it in earnest back in March. I now give out my Google Voice number (get yours here, but be prepared to wait a bit before it arrives) more than my mobile phone or my desk phone, and even have it on my business cards now. The features are great, but what I really like is that the number is truly portable: I just point the service at whatever phone, or phones, I want to use that day and my calls arrive there.

The Blackberry version of the Google Voice app gives you all the main features of the service, including the karaoke feature, but it’s not fully integrated with the phone — more like, maybe, 85 percent. While you can dial from your phone’s address book using Google Voice, you have to select the “Call using Google Voice” option each time. Pressing the phone’s green “call” button will always dial from the phone’s own number. And you cannot use Google Voice from the missed call list.

With Google Voice apps for mobile phones, I can also make calls from cellular phones that show the Google Voice number in the Caller ID displays of the people I’m calling. That is the killer feature of this killer app. But the experience is not the same on all phones. I’ve tried Google Voice on four different platforms — iPhone, Blackberry, Android phone, and PC — and one clearly stands out above the rest.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

BrandConnect features two elements: Listener and Megaphone. According to Darby Williams, the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews, “Listener will help brands track and understand what their customers really want out of their products.”

BrandConnect showing reviews in real time.

Listener
To do so, PowerReviews first asks users to review a product in more detail than they might be accustomed to. According to Williams, the process will first ask consumers what the pros and cons were of a particular product. It then asks them to describe how they use it.

(Credit:
PowerReviews)

PowerReviews, a company that provides white-label customer review tools for retailers and brands, is preparing to release a service called BrandConnect.

BrandConnect showing advocates and detractors.

Listener then examines the data gathered from each review and aggregates responses for the client. Williams contends that the tool’s statistical data helps deliver actionable content to PowerReviews’ clients.

(Credit:
PowerReviews)

Updated at 12:01 p.m. PDT on September 21 to include information on positive reviews.

PowerReviews said it believes that it’s that social element that could significantly improve its clients’ ability to drive traffic to their sites. The company makes BrandConnect available to retailers and brands on Tuesday.

Megaphone
BrandConnect will also feature a tool called Megaphone. The company’s Megaphone feature gives customers the option to syndicate their reviews to Facebook, Twitter, and their blogs.

Williams said in a phone interview on Wednesday that most companies are averse to negative customer reviews. PowerReviews employs a two-level moderation process. It first analyzes reviews containing “at least one word in the comments and three checked tags” to ensure that no profanity or unnecessary content is included in a respective review. From there, reviews are sent to the client, giving them the option of removing negative reviews or allowing them to stay on the site.

While they’re writing a review, consumers are notified by Megaphone that they can share it when it’s complete. They can either use Facebook Connect or log in to Twitter to syndicate their review to the respective social networks. A snippet of about two sentences will be displayed on Facebook, followed by a link to the review. That same form will be displayed on the user’s blog, if they choose to syndicate it there. A message will populate Twitter’s input box, giving users the option to introduce their review to followers.

Williams told me that PowerReviews encourages its clients to keep negative reviews in place to maintain credibility, but ultimately, that decision rests with those clients.

The site, best-antivirus03.com, is a so-called hijacker that uses fraudulent strategies to promote fake security software, according to security site GeekPolice.net.

“As soon as we were made aware of the situation, we took aggressive steps, suspending all third-party advertisements on the site,” Diane McNulty, executive director of Community Affairs and Media Relations, said in a statement. “We now know how it occurred and have taken steps to prevent a similar situation from happening.”

“They took me to an ‘antivirus site,’ which kept attempting to scan my computer and install software. Using the back button kept reloading the virus page,” the reader said. “It was not possible to close the page, necessitating a force quit.”

One CNET reader described how the pop-up ad essentially hijacked his browser, preventing him from navigating away from the site.

The New York Times said the offending ad was provided by someone posing as a national advertiser with a legitimate-looking advertising product. Over the weekend that ad being served up was swapped out so that the offending ad would appear, the Times said.

The rogue ad warns readers that their computer may be infected with a virus and redirects them to a site that purports to offer antivirus software, according to a note posted to the newspaper’s Media & Advertising section:

Some NYTimes.com readers have seen a pop-up box warning them about a virus and directing them to a site that claims to offer antivirus software. We believe this was generated by an unauthorized advertisement and are working to prevent the problem from recurring. If you see such a warning, we suggest that you not click on it. Instead, quit and restart your Web browser.

Update with explanation from The New York Times:

Updated at 5:50 p.m. PDT September 14 with explanation from The New York Times.

The New York Times’ Web site is grappling with problems created by an “unauthorized advertisement,” but it is unknown how the ads managed to appear on the site and whether the site had been compromised.

Beyond the question of what OpenOffice wants to be when it grows up, though, there is something specific about the prototype that bothers me.

However, I always found it more than a bit ironic that a lot of the same people who routinely claim that Microsoft doesn’t innovate were, in this case, suggesting this was a good opportunity to get users moved to OpenOffice where they could avoid such a disruptive change.

To understand why, it’s important to understand what Microsoft was trying to accomplish by introducing the ribbon. For the full story, I highly recommend this video by Jensen Harris of the Office User Experience Team from MIX08. However, in a nutshell, the ribbon essentially ripped out years of accumulating menu items and other UI elements and replaced them with something designed from the ground up. It was a bold choice but the nature of the problem meant that it didn’t lend itself to a piecemeal fix–indeed, piecemeal fixes were what caused the problem in the first place.

So I don’t see anything wrong, at least in principle, with OpenOffice introducing a ribbon interface. There are a lot of broader issues around OpenOffice and its future. These include Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, fragmented development by a variety of companies, and the lack of a clear mission at the level of the project as a whole. Part of the problem is that while a free/cheap, “good enough” word processor may be something that a lot of end users want, that’s not really a business for anyone. For its part, IBM has used OpenOffice to tie into document-related business processes. But that’s about something fundamentally different from OpenOffice, the word processor.

At the end of July, Sun posted a screenshot from “Project Renaissance,” an effort aimed at creating a new user interface (UI) for OpenOffice. The prototype includes a “ribbon” UI in the vein of the one that Microsoft introduced for Office 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the user comments were critical and devolved into Microsoft bashing.

The OpenOffice prototype, on the other hand, appears to add a ribbon while leaving the menu system extant. This way lays user interface madness even if it does provide more choices. Good design is often (indeed is usually) about constraining choice rather than expanding it.

(For a different perspective, see the CNET piece by Dong Ngo.)

For my part, I found the ribbon took some getting used to but now I like it for the most part. Like other Microsoft products, I find the design a bit garish but the mechanics generally work well enough for me.

I never got the ribbon-hate myself. Well, OK, that’s not really true. A lot of people don’t like change and a lot of people like ragging on Microsoft for whatever reason.