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January 19, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Another Stab at Electronic Books

In light of Sony’s poorly managed rootkit fiasco, the introduction of the Reader for electronic books offers the company an opportunity to redeem itself, and put some exciting new technology in the hands of consumers. (The Reader is an updated version of the Librie, which was released last year in Japan. The product received bad press because of its high cost and its digital rights management software that automatically deleted purchased ebooks after 60 days.)

January 17, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: Scientists "Backing Up" Grain Varieties

The facility would make the villain from a James Bond film envious — a concrete bunker with blast-proof doors carved out of a mountain on an island off the coast of Norway. Inside, the permafrost will provide a cool environment for storage of every known variety of crop seed.

The goal of the seed repository — construction is slated to begin next year — will be to ensure that a global disaster would not wipe out essential crop species. Currently, there are about 1,400 seed banks around the world, but many are located in politically or environmentally unstable areas.

January 17, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Our RSS Feed

We’ve made some changes to our RSS feed that might mean people who previously subscribed will need to resubscribe, we apologize for the inconvenience. However, if you’re reading this post right now in your favorite newsreader that means you have nothing to worry about and may proceed as usual.

Currently Sundog has two feeds you can subscribe to:

• Subscribe to our blog
• Subscribe to our jobs

For those still scratching your heads over what RSS is in the first place, FeedBurner provides a great overview of what it is and how to use it.

January 13, 2006 | Phil Leitch: AJAX Can Save Bandwidth

Macintosh rumor site MacRumors has published a report about the bandwidth saved by using an AJAX enabled page to update content during Macworld 2006 in San Francisco. Previously MacRumors, along with many other sites, would use page refreshing to reload the page every 30 seconds which of course causes increased server activity when thousands of people are viewing the site. By using AJAX to deliver updated content MacRumors was able to reduce the resources needed.

We peaked at approximately 103,000 simultaneous web visitors and 6,000 IRC viewers during the Keynote speech and transmited over 32 GB of data in a three hour period. If not for the efficiency of the MacRumorsLive AJAX update system, the same webcast would have required approximately twice as many servers and would have had to transfer almost 6 times as much data (196 GB).

AJAX really is more than fading yellow boxes or the latest buzzword, used correctly it can save bandwidth which in turn saves money.

January 13, 2006 | Cloy Tobola: The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be

By the 1980s, we were supposed to travel by jet-pack while robot housekeepers cooked our meals. At least that’s the high-tech view of the future that science fiction writers presented in the 1950s. Today, the future isn’t such a distant vision: it’s happening in our lifetimes.

The Lemelson-MIT Program, which celebrates innovation and inventors, recently polled high school students on their view of the future. Virtually all of them predicted dramatic technological advancements during their lifetimes and most felt comfortable dealing with those rapid changes.

January 11, 2006 | Greg Ness: Podcasting: Rags to Riches

This is another one of those exponential growth markets. The story is here. There were one million people in the U.S. downloading podcasts in 2004. There were five million in 2005. This is projected to grow to 9.3 million in 2006 and 20.9 million people in 2007. By 2010, this number is projected to be 62.8 million.

Exponential growth in markets creates exponential growth in marketing. It will get interesting. Oh, and by the way, anybody thinking this is a geeks-only market should read the story. The most likely to have listened to a podcast in the last week were women.

January 10, 2006 | Phil Leitch: Macworld 2006: What’s Steve Have Hidden in his Sleeve This Year

The Steve Jobs 2006 Macworld keynote begins in just a little under two hours, this is the day of the year that Mac faithful stop whatever they’re doing for about an hour to watch their screens refresh. Of course it wasn’t that long ago we could actually watch the event live via QuickTime but I guess Steve doesn’t like all that attention. Rumors this year span everything from gigantic 50” plasma displays with OS X built in to iBooks sporting Intel processors, but the one I’m hoping for is a new Mac Mini with DVR functionality built-in.

If you can’t wait for the rest of the tech news sites to post the new Apple gadgetry there are plenty of sites to keep open starting at 9 am pacific time. Mac Rumors, MacScoop, Gizmodo and Engadget have all been known to provide pretty good live coverage in the past.

January 06, 2006 | Greg Ness: Skype (Phoning For Free) Downloads Surpass A Quarter Billion

Skype, the free phone company, recently surpassed a quarter of a billion free downloads of their calling software. As recently as October of 2005,  170,000 people per day were accessing the download.

Skype is legal and it is free. Skype uses VoIP technology to place calls over the Internet. To use Skype for free you need the software and a computer, and the person you are calling needs the software and a computer, too. The easiest way to converse is to use a headset connected to the computers at each end of the call.

December 30, 2005 | Phil Leitch: Safari Gets the New RSS Icon

Some fine Mac enthusiasts have written a little application called the Safari Standardized Feed Icon Installer that replaces the default RSS icon with the new standardized one I mentioned yesterday. Now let’s hope the kind folks on the Safari team make the icon replacement official the next release.

December 29, 2005 | Phil Leitch: RSS Gains Some More Ground

While plenty of nerds, geeks and techheads around the world appreciate the beauty of RSS, it’s having trouble gaining the type of mainstream acceptance necessary to change the way people access their data streams and ultimately change the way the Web works. I believe two recent annoucements will help push RSS into the minds of the masses where it needs to be if it hopes to achieve what it’s capable of.

One of the biggest problems in the past has been the confusing array of icons and terminolgy used. Tiny orange buttons with ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’ on them have led to confusion or worse people ignoring it entirely. There hasn’t been a standard way to denote a feed or for that matter to even subscribe to one. Microsoft announced they will be using the new icon created by the Firefox team which likely means the cute new icon will become the de facto standard. Let’s hope Apple plays nice and implements it in Safari sooner than later.

December 29, 2005 | Cloy Tobola: Writely is the Word

A great example of “Web as Platform” — one of the foundational concepts of Web 2.0 — is Writely, an online word processor. The site doesn’t have all the features of Microsoft Word, but it will certainly work for most writing situations. Even more appealing, it’s free.

December 27, 2005 | Phil Leitch: WordPress 2.0 Released

WordPress released version 2.0 of it’s amazing and popular open source blogging platform over the holiday weekend. With a focus on easy installation, usability and web standards, WordPress is one of the best blogging tools you can use in my opinion. Available both as an install and a hosted option you can be up and running a site with WordPress in a matter of minutes.

Yahoo Web Hosting recently announced that WordPress will be included in their hosting packages as a simple install. If 2005 was exciting for WordPress, 2006 looks to be very promising as well.