Holiday shopping season is a fun time of year for a company like Daily Grommet. The Lexington, MA-based Web startup finds unusual consumer products and tells a story about one such “grommet” each day through videos and text.

This week I touched base with founder and CEO Jules Pieri, who shared some info with me on the top-selling grommets of the season so far. As someone who hates holiday commercialism, but likes warm puppies and weird gadgets as much as the next guy, I found the range of items available on the site pretty enlightening.

So in case you’re looking for an unusual-yet-personal gift for that special someone, you might want to browse around the Daily Grommet site, which includes product categories like home, food & drink, health & wellness, and green & eco-living. Sounds pretty standard, but the products you’ll find there are anything but.

Here are some examples of bestsellers (and links to the story behind each item):

—Sugru, a kind of hacking putty for real-world stuff (“fastest Grommet out of the gate, in history,” Pieri says).

—Urban Cheesecraft, which sounds like slang or euphemism but is actually just a handy cheese-making kit.

—Soggy Doggy, a super-absorbent doormat/shammy for dogs.

—Picture Keeper, an elegant way to grab and store photo libraries from your computer.

—Ila Security, a small, portable security-alarm device, like a personal panic button (good for long board meetings).

—Drawer Décor, a custom drawer organizer for kitchen supplies and other goods (mundane but useful if you don’t like clutter).

Good luck with the shopping, readers. I’ll probably see you online.

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Gadget girl walks in carrying a red umbrella. It’s not just any red umbrella, though. This one is a “blunt” umbrella. It has round tips, instead of pointy ones, so you don’t poke people in the eye as you walk down a crowded street. It also has what looks like a special tensioning system along the underside of its edges, to withstand high winds and keep the thing from blowing inside-out.

Gadget girl also has touchscreen gloves with her. These are fashionable-looking items with special conductive fingertips—it’s all in the threading—so you can use your iPhone, iPad, or other capacitive touchscreen device in cold weather. (Plus, with the gloves, you can save on your home heating bill so you can afford more gadgets.)

Gadget girl is Fatma Yalcin, a recent MIT Sloan School grad and startup CEO. She found both of the above items on Curisma, the gadget-discovery site she started with Eugene Gorelik earlier this year.

The idea is to provide a social platform for finding and sharing new technologies and products. Users can sign in and post gadgets they like—everything from inkless pens to a “magic cube” that projects a keyboard onto any surface—and others can follow them, recommend products, see the most popular items, and sign up for a personalized feed. The site sends users to other retailers if they want to buy a gadget, but Curisma plans to make money by working with brands and eventually enabling people to make purchases through the site itself.

“It’s the power of community meets personalization, and it’s all determined by you,” Yalcin says. “Within a year, we’d like to reach half a million users.”

Curisma, which operates out of Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge, MA, has some features in common with personalized product sites like Pinterest, Daily Grommet, Krush, and Stylefeeder (acquired by Time), as well as private sales … Next Page »

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Back in March, I wrote a column arguing that smartphones, tablet computers, Internet TVs and other personal technologies are delivering an unexpected bonus. Rather than depreciating, the way most equipment does, these gadgets actually get more valuable over time thanks to the hundreds of new apps that debut every week, plus free upgrades for existing apps. I argued that even though this kind of value isn’t captured in traditional economic measures like the gross domestic product (GDP), it definitely increases our gross satisfaction—and that we ought to be more thankful for these kinds of improvements, even as we struggle to see signs of real gains in other parts of the economy.

Today I want to look at the flip side of this phenomenon and explore some of its more troubling implications, especially for employment and economic growth. I think there’s room for optimism about the long-term economic future, but it’s important to acknowledge that in the short term, better gadgets and better software aren’t doing much to help the average consumer get or keep a job.

There’s a fancy word for the technological trend I was writing about in March: ephemeralization. Buckminster Fuller coined the term back in the 1930s to describe the general concept of “doing more with less” by building more human understanding into our machines and factories. Fuller had process innovations like Henry Ford’s assembly lines in mind; he wasn’t thinking about software, which didn’t really exist yet. But the idea still applies to devices like the Apple iPad and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which replace dozens of other artifacts by recreating their functions on their stupendously versatile touchscreens. If you have a tablet computer and a broadband Internet connection, after all, you don’t really need a laptop, an alarm clock, a watch, a still or video camera, a television, a radio, a phone, an e-book reader, a digital picture frame, an MP3 player, a CD or DVD player, an external hard drive, a game console, a digital audio recorder, a music synthesizer, or a GPS navigation device, not to mention print books, newspapers, or magazines. And that’s just a partial list.

This kind of consolidation is exactly what Fuller was talking about when he predicted in his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon that you’ll be able to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” The remarkable thing is that we’re only a few years into the era of the iPad and the iPhone (which is basically a mini-tablet)—which means we’re likely to see even more of the information-related tasks we carry out every day subsumed by apps. “The reason tablets are going to take over the world,” Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote in this December 2010 essay, “is not (just) that Steve Jobs and Co. are industrial design wizards, but because they have this force behind them. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas.”

Even business IT is bending to the force of ephemeralization. Last week I talked with Adam Wiggins, one of the founders of Heroku, a Web application hosting company incubated by Y Combinator and now owned by Salesforce. You could argue that Wiggins’s whole business is about ephemeralization (he says exactly that in this April blog post). The company takes the burden of Web server setup and maintenance away from software developers, so that they can focus on writing great code, in a language—Ruby on Rails—designed specifically to save them from having to reinvent common business functions with every new app. Not so long ago, Wiggins notes, deploying business software meant physically walking into a data center to wire up servers. Today Heroku is “ephemeralizing IT to the point that I’ve seen tweets from people who have deployed their apps from Wi-Fi on an airplane.”

Now, while the benefits of ephemeralization for the end users of technology are obvious and powerful, there are some downsides. And here’s the big one: ephemeralization may be a net destroyer of jobs. Heroku has about 45 employees servicing its thousands of customers; balance that against the hordes of consultants, sysadmins, and other support staff every enterprise once needed to keep its IT systems afloat. The music industry is another classic example. The rise of the digital download has been a … Next Page »

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It used to be that purchases began depreciating in value the moment you bought them. A new car, for example, might as well come with a little Kelley Blue Book countdown under the odometer showing its declining resale price. Indeed, the idea that property depreciates is so universal that it’s built into our accounting methods and tax codes. Traditionally, there have been only a few categories of things that don’t automatically drop in value over time, such as homes (up until 2008 anyway), precious metals, and maybe fine art and other collectibles.

But in the realms touched by software and the Internet, something different is happening. These days, many of the tools that modern consumers depend on, such as computers, smartphones, and entertainment devices, actually grow more useful and more valuable over time, thanks to a) the constant stream of new applications that exploit the devices’ capabilities in innovative ways, and b) the relatively new tradition of free updates for applications or operating systems you already own. In fact, when it comes to digital technologies, we’ve entered what you might call the Age of Appreciation. You can buy a gadget like an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad, and then sit back and watch it get more powerful without having to spend another cent.

It’s true that hardware itself still ages, breaks, grows obsolete, or loses its luster. Lord knows that my iPad, which seemed so shiny and magical just a year ago, looks a tad antiquated in my eyes now that the iPad 2 is out. I’m definitely not arguing that we can or should stop buying new stuff.

But I do think it’s worth slowing down to acknowledge the amazing situation we’ve created for ourselves, only 70 or so years into the era of electronic computers. In the Appreciation Age, objects containing computers grow in value because their value resides mainly in the software code they run, and that code can be so easily replaced, supplemented, or upgraded.

What got me thinking about all of this was a pair of relatively routine upgrades to Apple TV, the little black box that lets you play TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on your big-screen TV. Last November, Apple updated the firmware inside the Apple TV from version 4.0 to version 4.1. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it upgraded again to version 4.2. We’re so accustomed to such decimal-point changes these days—and they usually happen so automatically, quickly, and painlessly—that they often pass unnoticed. But these two updates definitely came with enough goodies to catch my attention.

The biggest change was the addition last November of something Apple calls AirPlay. This feature connects different devices over a home Wi-Fi network so that, for example, a music or video file stored on a Mac or a PC can be streamed to your TV. I like this feature because it has turned my TV into the sound system for my whole apartment. I can start an album playing on iTunes on my Mac or my iPhone, tap the AirPlay button, and throw the audio over to my TV, which (thankfully) has decent speakers. I also like to buy season passes for a couple of TV series on iTunes and download the episodes to my iPad. When I’m at home, AirPlay lets me watch those shows on the big screen, where they belong.

The more recent 4.2 update came with a big bonus for sports fans: Apple added the ability to watch live, on-demand Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association games for people with … Next Page »

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[Updated 11:30 a.m. PST with details from today's iPad 2 event, which just ended.]

Earlier today, as an appetizer before Apple’s media event unveiling the iPad 2, I published encore version of my iPad 2 predictions and wish list from January 7, 2011. Now I’ve updated the post to score how well my predictions played out. These were all features I said I’d most like to see in the new iPad, beyond the easily predictable ones such as cameras. Turns out I scored about 2.75 points out of a possible 7, which is actually better than I was expecting.

1. Haptic Feedback.

This is my second-favorite feature on the Galaxy Tab, Samsung’s 7-inch tablet device. (My first favorite is the rear-facing camera.) When this option is turned on, the whole device vibrates briefly and subtly every time your finger taps a soft key, giving you a bit of confirmation. Unlike just about everyone else I know, I like to type on my iPad, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. But the secret, I’ve found, is that you have to watch where you’re typing. If you take your eyes off your fingers for one second, your hands are likely to slide off-target, creating gobbledygook on screen. Haptic feedback would help prevent this and make something like touch typing conceivable on the iPad.

Scorecard: 0 points for me. No haptic feedback in the iPad 2.

2. Batteries that Recharge Faster.

Battery life isn’t an issue with the iPad—I regularly go two or three days between charges. That’s a pretty remarkable fact, when you think about how long we’ve been living with laptops that die after three or four hours of use. But if your iPad battery meter is in the red zone and you need to plug it in, you’d better be sure you aren’t going to need it for the next few hours—the recharge time on this puppy is loooong. (In tests of the iPad 3G, Gizmodo found that it took between 2.5 hours and 7.6 hours to reach an 80 percent charge, depending on the method used.) I know recharge time is a simple matter of physics: the bigger the batteries, the longer they take to recharge, and the iPad has two huge 3.75-volt Lithium-ion polymer jobs. But if Apple could figure out a way to speed this up—or to put smaller batteries into the iPad 2 without sacrificing battery life—that would be nifty.

Scorecard: Another 0. The batteries in the iPad 2 appear to have the same characteristics as those in the original iPad—roughly 10 hours of battery life and 1 month of standby time.

3. I Don’t Care If It’s Thinner, But Make It Lighter, Please.

When I picked up an iPad for the first time, my first reaction was “This thing is sweet.” My second reaction was “This thing is heavy.” Those giant batteries, plus the thick slab of glass over the iPad’s display, contribute to an overall weight of 1.5 pounds (0.68 kg; the 3G model is 0.05 kg heavier). I like the fact that the iPad feels substantial—it would be pretty awful it felt bendy or plasticky. But it’s too heavy to hold in one hand for extended periods without muscle fatigue. Trimming half a pound would help enormously.

Scorecard: Half a point for me. The iPad 2 is 2/3 the thickness of the original iPad, and is also slightly lighter—601 grams for the Wi-Fi version and 607 to 613 grams for the 3G version, or about 1.33 pounds. But I doubt whether the 80-gram difference is enough of a savings in weight to make the iPad 2 feel all that different in your hand.

4. An Ergonomic Grip or Kickstand.

My parents got an iPad recently, and over the holidays I had a chance to watch them using it. My dad doesn’t like to grip the gadget from the side, as his thumb tends to stray into the touchscreen area, causing havoc. So he puts the iPad in the little kickstand my mom bought and holds that. But that’s precarious, because the kickstand is intended as a prop for the iPad on a table or desktop, not as a handle or grip; the iPad isn’t secured in it but merely rests through gravity, so it could fall out if he let it tip. (There are special iPad holders designed for what my dad was doing; I should probably get him one.) Anyway, all of this got me stewing again about Apple’s occasional tendency to … Next Page »

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Every once in a while a startup pops up to lay claim to some area of search that Google, inexplicably, has not. (Yes, there are some.) This week it’s SearchReviews, a small Palo Alto, CA-based company that’s tapping the Web’s tens of millions of user-generated reviews of everything from electronic gadgets, to books to travel destinations. Today the company took the wraps off its new desktop search site as well as mobile search apps for iPhones and Android phones.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Ankesh Kumar, SearchReviews has collected more than 40 million reviews from more than 1,000 e-commerce and review sites, from Amazon to Zappos. Looking for an immersion blender that you can use to puree soups and smoothies? SearchReviews can locate 639 reviews (in this case, Home Shopping Network and Chefs Catalog are the richest sources). Searching for the perfect beach hotel for that Cancun vacation? SearchReviews has 1,178 reviews, mostly culled from TripAdvisor.

But more than just aggregating reviews into huge lists, SearchReviews re-indexes all of the reviews it collects to make it easier to answer specific questions, Kumar says. Say you’re wondering which Cancun hotels have the cleanest beaches. Turns out there are 94 reviews that touch specifically on this question.

It was just this sort of query, in fact, that led Kumar to build SearchReviews. “I was going on vacation for a few days with my wife and kids in Napa, and I was searching for hotels with indoor pools,” he says. “I wanted to find out how is the water temperature, how clean is the pool. I found five properties with 200 reviews per property. I don’t have time to read all of those.” Kumar calls SearchReviews a “mini-Google” that’s optimized for such keyword-based searches and saves people from having to search multiple review sites separately.

But it’s not stealing traffic from the sites whose reviews are indexed: the search results at SearchReviews lead users right back to the original source, such as TripAdvisor. The SearchReviews mobile apps add a dimension by allowing users to start a search by scanning a barcode with their smartphone’s camera. You could use this feature at Home Depot, for example, to gather consumer reviews before deciding which gas-fired outdoor grill to buy. There are also social features, such as a button that makes it easy for you to survey your Facebook friends for their own recommendations. “We have built it to be a Quora for shopping, if you like,” says Kumar, who adds that he … Next Page »

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So you know someone who’s lucky enough to be getting an Apple iPad as a Christmas present. Well, that’s just the beginning of the adventure. The next step is to get their device loaded up with great apps—and naturally, they’ll want a few that show off the iPad’s remarkable capabilities. Today I’m sharing my ideas for fun paid apps that will leave any new iPad owner saying “Oh, now I understand what all the fuss was about.”

Luckily, even the best paid iPad apps are pretty inexpensive, meaning you can probably afford to give a few of them as virtual stocking stuffers. And Apple makes it pretty easy to do this: back in March 2010, the company added a “Gift This App” feature to the iTunes Store. So all you have to do to give an app as a gift is sign into iTunes (you’ll need to download iTunes to your Windows or Mac computer and create an account if you haven’t already), find the app you want, click on the little down-arrow next to the “Buy App” button, select “Gift This App,” and fill in the form that asks for your name and the recipient’s name and e-mail address.

You can enter a personal message, and you can choose to send the gift app via e-mail—in which case Apple sends a link for redeeming the gift—or print out a redeemable code. If you choose the e-mail option, the message goes out right away, so the print option is better if you want to surprise someone on Christmas morning.

There are plenty of great free iPad apps too, but you can’t give those as gifts—and even if you could, it wouldn’t exactly underscore your generosity, would it? So my list includes only paid apps, ranging in price from $1.99 to $13.99. (You could buy all 10 of these apps for $53.90.) The prices listed are those in effect today, December 20—some holiday discounts may expire soon.

In previous roundups of my favorite iPad apps, I’ve tended to emphasize programs that have some practical utility—see 26 Apps to Drive your iPad Wild and 10 Fantastic Photo Apps for the iPad. So this week’s list is heavy on games (like Real Racing HD, shown in the image above) and what you might call “coffee table apps” that showcase the iPad’s big touchscreen.

Got your own ideas for great gift apps? Please leave a comment below. Also be sure to check out my earlier article, The Xconomy 2010 Gadget Gift Guide.

PROCEED TO APP LIST >>

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The big event dominating Xconomy San Francisco’s calendar last week was our on-stage conversation with Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz, which was enlightening and well-attended, filling San Francisco’s KickLabs to capacity. I’m working on bringing you video highlights from the talk, which ranged from Moritz’s tricks for identifying great entrepreneurs to the funding options for early-stage startups his experiences as a journalist. Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the other news we covered last week.

—Google bought Seattle, WA-based Widevine Technologies, a maker of streaming, digital rights management, and copy-protection software for on-demand Internet video, as Greg reported. The purchase could help Google fill a hole in its competition with Apple on the Internet TV front.

—I profiled Blinkx, a six-year-old San Francisco company that trades on the London Stock Exchange and specializes in online video search. The company has quietly built the world’s largest index of online video.

—In my holiday gadget gift guide, I looked at eight devices (and associated accessories) that would make great presents for any technology lover, including the Roku Streaming Player, Apple TV, the Amazon Kindle, the Flip Ultra HD video camera, the Canon Vixia HF R100 camcorder, the Vizit digital photo frame, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, and the Apple iPad.

—Famous Menlo Park, CA, venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers hired longtime Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker as its newest partner.

—In acquisitions news, Redwood City, CA-based Makara, which makes software for managing cloud applications, was purchased by Red Hat (NYSE: RHT); San Mateo, CA-based social media startup Ludic Labs was bought by Chicago-based Groupon; San Jose, CA-based Ketera Technologies was bought by Rearden Commerce; San Jose-based Cisco bought LineSider Technologies of Danvers, MA; and Sunnyvale, CA-based 4Home was acquired by Motorola Mobility of Libertyville, IL.

—In funding news, Yammer raised $25 million, Payvment raised $6 million, and Rackitivity raised $8 million.

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If the people on your holiday gift lists have asked for clothes, sports equipment, beauty products, or fancy food, I can’t help you. But I do know electronics, and this week I want to point you toward a few of the products that I think are among the most enticing on the market this year. As a total gadget freak, these are the products I’d want the most—if I didn’t already own most of them!

I’m arranging these puppies in order of most affordable to least affordable. But if you don’t want to splurge, or if the person you’re buying for already has one of these devices, there are alternatives. In each case I’m attaching ideas for accessories or add-ons that make these products more useful and that ought to fit almost any budget. (Update, December 20, 2010: I’ve also published a list of the best paid iPad apps to give as virtual stocking stuffers to lucky new iPad owners.)

Note: There are some very hot products this season, like the Microsoft Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360, that didn’t make my list because I haven’t had a chance to try them yet. If you have your own favorite gadget gift ideas, please leave a note in the comment section.

Roku Streaming Player — $59.99 to $99.99 at shop.roku.com

The Roku line of Wi-Fi-connected set-top boxes, from the starter HD to the XD and the XD|S, open up a whole world of Internet TV viewing right on a big-screen TV. Netflix’s selection of Watch Instantly movies and TV shows are the main attraction on the Roku, but there’s also Hulu Plus, Amazon Video on Demand, Pandora music, and much more. Truth be told, this is all stuff that broadband subscribers can already access right on their laptop or desktop computers. But the Roku, which connects to a home Wi-Fi network, organizes it all so that it’s easy to browse and navigate from 10 feet away.

For the full rundown on the Roku and its main competitor, the new Apple TV, see my comparative review from two weeks ago. I think both devices make great gifts. But keep in mind that they’re only useful to people who have fast Internet connections and Wi-Fi networks at home.

Add-ons/accessories: To get the full benefit of a Roku Player, you need a Netflix subscription. Fortunately Netflix makes it really easy to give a subscription as a gift—at $7.99 a month for the Watch Instantly, no-DVD plan, or $9.99 a month for the Watch Instantly plus 1-DVD-out-at-a-time plan. You can choose to prepay someone’s subscription for 1, 2, 3, 6, or 12 months.

Apple TV — $99 at Amazon or Apple Stores

The Apple TV is like the Roku Player, done the Apple way, meaning it has a slicker interface. And in addition to tapping Netflix, it’s a gateway to all the movies, TV shows, and podcasts in Apple’s iTunes Store, as well as YouTube and Flickr. The Roku Player can access a wider variety of content, but the Apple TV is probably the better gift choice for people who already have large iTunes libraries or who use other Apple products such as iMacs, MacBooks, iPhones, or iPads, since it can also stream content stored on those devices. Again, refer to my comparative review for all the details.

Add-ons/accessories: The coolest thing to get someone who already has an Apple TV would be an iTunes gift card, which would allow them to buy or rent TV shows or movies, or perhaps even an entire season of their favorite show. Or if you want to give something a little more personal, you can go into iTunes, pick out a particular show or movie, and make that a gift.

Amazon Kindle — $139 (Wi-Fi only) or $189 (Wi-Fi + 3G) at Amazon

The Kindle 2 was a pretty great gadget, but for the third version of the handheld reading device, released in August, Amazon has outdone itself. Amazon’s screen supplier E Ink has increased the contrast of the device’s screen by 50 percent, so it looks even more like paper. Amazon gave the new device Wi-Fi connectivity, meaning it can download books faster. It increased the internal memory to 4 gigabytes, enough for 3,500 books, and it improved the battery life, to roughly 10 days when the wireless modem is switched on and 30 days when it’s not.

I’m not going to get into a long debate here about the relative merits of the iPad and the Kindle as e-reading devices—I’ve already done that. I’ll just say that the Kindle remains the best dedicated e-reading device on the market. When it comes to reading long-form content like non-fiction books, novels, and magazine articles, it’s got some real advantages over the iPad, namely its lower price and its smaller size and weight, making it far easier to hold and transport. The Kindle is a great gift for any avid reader.

Add-ons/accessories: This one’s a no-brainer: an Amazon gift card that the happy new Kindle owner can use to buy some books.

Flip Ultra HD Video Camera — $170.99 at Amazon

I’m including two video cameras on my gadget list. The first is the point-and-shoot Flip Ultra, which is utterly foolproof (it’s operated using a big red button on the back) and can record up to two hours of high-definition (720p) video on its internal flash memory. The flip-out USB connector means the camera can be plugged straight into a computer, without cables, to download recorded video for editing, sharing, viewing, or publication on the Web. The Flip line of cameras is great for family events, vacations, and anywhere else someone just needs a camcorder that’s quick, reliable, and easy to use.

Accessories/add-ons: The Flip is pretty self-sufficient—which is the whole point. But there’s one fun accessory that makes the Flip even more useful: a tripod. The $9.88 Flip tripod sits on a table and the $14.95 Flip Action tripod fits on a bike helmet or bike handlebars.

… Next Page »

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The Book of Odds isn’t betting its future on any one thing, and founder and president Amram Shapiro see that as one of its strengths.

“A lot of websites and startups are one-trick ponies,” Shapiro says. “Everything really has to work or pretty much they’re out of it. We think of ourselves as a 10- or 20-trick pony.”

Those tricks include a website, data service, gaming outlet, book franchise, and risk management tool (it’s just recently started working on the last three). Last year, the Boston-based startup came out of a roughly three-year stealth mode, to roll out its destination website. BookofOdds.com has close to half a million “odds” statements, based on data its staff has pulled from sources like government agencies and surveys. It frames each probability statement with the geography and time frame that the number refers to, the source of the data, and definitions of the terms within. A random example: The odds that a U.S. female 20 or older eats cheese at least once a day are 1 in 3.56.

Its content hinges on semantic technology, supplied by another Boston-area startup, Cambridge Semantics, which helps form relationships among a slew of facts and data. The Book of Odds then takes the information stored in the relational databases to populate its consumer-facing website with the odds statements. The semantic technology ascribes metadata—information about the data—to each statement, so the information within can be pulled apart and reworked for other statements.

Another fun factoid: The odds a female Internet user 18 or older will consider the person she is dating her boyfriend or girlfriend after three to five dates are 1 in 12.5.

As much fun as the random facts about subjects from food to death to dating can be, Shapiro sees his Web service ultimately as a source of measuring risk and a tool for connecting people with information to help improve their odds in areas of their lives like health, careers, and investing. So his team has been building a number of improvements to the site, in a closed beta version, designed to bring greater meaning to the numbers and sources it provides.

“It’s about taking our unique information, and making it very, very easy to find,” he says.

At present, the factoids are all accessible via a simple search bar on the company’s home page, where users plug in a key word (I used “cheese” and “boyfriend” for the statements above). They can filter their results pages through a number of relevant key words, the date of the odds statement, and the likelihood that an event will happen, but Shapiro hopes the impending improvements will give greater context and meaning to the often quirky statistics.

He gave me a sneak peek of the upcoming features, which he expects to go live on the site in a month or so. They frame the odds statements with more specifics, graphics, and comparison data. For example, under the healthcare umbrella, a user can search for the odds of a person getting diagnosed with cancer in a given year. Once they get that answer, they can … Next Page »

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Smart pens, which can record handwritten notes and drawings and transfer them to a computer for storage, searching, and sharing, have never exactly written their own ticket. The technology behind the devices was first developed in the late 1990s by Swedish firm Anoto Group, and has since been licensed to more than 250 companies around the world for use in record-keeping systems in airports, hospitals, and many other settings. But until Oakland, CA-based Livescribe came along, no smart pen maker had won over large numbers of students, business users, or average consumers.

Now that Livescribe has shown it has a foothold in those markets—selling nearly half a million of its Pulse and Echo smart pens since 2008—venture firms are betting that the company has the winning formula for digitizing note-taking, and are lining up to give the company a final boost toward mass-market success. Livescribe said today that it has raised $39 million in its third and presumably last round of venture funding, bringing the company’s total financing to $100 million.

New investor Crosslink Capital of San Francisco was the biggest contributor to the round. San Mateo, CA-based Scale Venture Partners was second in line, and was joined by Qualcomm, Translink Capital, Presidio Ventures, and Keating Capital, as well as existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, LionHart, and Aeris Capital. Crosslink Capital co-founder Michael Stark and Scale managing director Rory O’Driscoll have joined Livescribe’s board. VantagePoint remains the company’s largest investor.

“This support from major strategic investors is a great acknowledgment of our success to date and the opportunities ahead,” said Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff in a statement. The company said it plans to use the new funds to improve the way data from its pens flows into existing communication and collaboration platforms, and to expand to new markets (it currently sells the pens only in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Germany, and Australia, although they’re available in 21 additional countries through Amazon).

But what are the chances that Livescribe’s latest push will finally help high-tech pens take off in a big way? At a time when tablet computing, with its promise of paperlessness, has burst onto the world in a huge way in the form of Apple’s iPad, are students, business users, and other consumers really looking for technologies that will help keep old-fashioned pen-and-paper note-taking alive?

I put those questions yesterday to O’Driscoll, who led Scale Venture Partners’ investment in Livescribe. He shared a number of interesting arguments for why Livescribe’s version of “pen computing” is poised to catch on among more business professionals (who already make up about 70 percent of the company’s customer base) and students (the other 30 percent).

1. Livescribe already has a strong track record. The company’s first product, the Pulse, came out in March 2008, and included an infrared camera for tracking the pen’s position on a page, a small OLED display, a USB connector, and—unlike most other digital pens—a microphone and internal flash memory for recording audio notes and a speaker for … Next Page »

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Boston-based Gazelle, which dubs itself as a “reCommerce service,” announced it has raised $12 million in Series C funding, led by Physic Ventures. Existing Gazelle investors Venrock Associates and RockPort Capital Partners are also participating in the third round financing.

Gazelle, which is powered by the company Second Rotation, helps consumers sell used electronics in more straightforward, less confusing fashion than other commerce sites like eBay. As Wade wrote when he profiled the company in July 2008, the Gazelle website makes an instant cash offer for gadgets—such as phones, GPS units, laptops, game consoles, and camcorders—and sends sellers a box and shipping label, complete with the startup’s “Don’t Just Sell It, Gazelle It” tagline.

The Web service attracted about 100,000 electronic devices last year. The latest funding will go toward scaling the business to meet the new customer demand, Gazelle says. The company will also invest in further developing its pricing technologies and customer experience features, and in strengthening partnerships with retailers. Gazelle has deals with stores like Sears, where users can trade in electronics using the Gazelle platform and receive a gift card for the value of their gadgets. It also has a mobile site specifically targeted toward consumers looking to trade their 2G, 3G, or 3GS iPhones for the iPhone 4 released this summer.

The company makes its money by reselling the used gadgets on sites like eBay for a slightly higher price than what it offered the original owners. Gazelle founder and CEO Israel Ganot spent six years working at eBay, where he noticed that far more people buy stuff on the site than they do sell it, due to the confusion surrounding the process. Gazelle also recycles the items it can’t sell according to guidelines set up by the Electronics TakeBack Coalition.

The new funding brings the total raised to about $22 million. The company raised its previous round of funding, a $6 million Series B led by RockPort, in November 2008.

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Borders today launched an assault on Amazon, while fighting for its own survival. The Ann Arbor, MI-based bookseller continued its aggressive new mission of trying to remain relevant in a highly competitive space by opening its new eBook store and launching two more eReader apps for Blackberry and Android devices.

Today’s announcement follows its release last month of the $149.99 Kobo e-reader, and iPhone and iPad apps.

Borders has been losing money for four straight years and hopes that its plan to introduce up to 10 different eReader devices by the end of this year will set the company back on a more profitable course.

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This isn’t quite the $49 “paperback Kindle” that marketing guru Seth Godin has been urging Amazon to build, but Ann Arbor, MI-based bookseller Borders is firing another shot in the e-reader price wars brought on by the introduction of Apple’s iPad, which scared the bejeezus out of the nascent industry.

Borders has announced that it is offering a $20 gift card with purchase of its $149.99 Kobo e-reader. Plus, there’s a new Kobo app for the Apple iPhone and iPad. It’s all part of an overall digital strategy that Borders hopes will rescue it from hard times.

Borders lost about $109 million last year, as revenue fell 14 percent to $2.8 billion, making for four straight years of losses. In addition to its efforts to restructure by closing stores and reducing its workforce, Borders knows that to survive will mean to change with the times. So, the company has said that its Kobo eReader is just the first of what it says will be up to 10 different devices that it will offer by the end of this year.

Borders invested in Kobo, the Canadian company that makes the Kobo e-reader, last year, and plans to launch a Kobo-branded e-book store that’s integrated with Borders.com. Kobo’s mobile applications will be “device-neutral,” meaning customers will be able to purchase e-books on many different mobile gadgets.

With this latest gift-card announcement, Borders is sending out a message that its Kobo device, which uses a screen manufactured by Hsinchu, Taiwan- and Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, is a player in a high-stakes game seemingly dominated now by Apple and Amazon. Borders is convinced that, eventually, all readers will fall below $200, and it is already well-positioned under that price point.

Oh, and it’s throwing in one other thing it hopes will jolt customers awake. Show your Borders eBooks app on your iPhone or iPad, and get a free cup of joe at its in-store Seattle’s Best Coffee cafes.

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This week gadget reviewers got their first hands-on look at Microsoft’s much-discussed Kin One and Kin Two phones, which are designed from the ground up to support young hipsters’ social media and content sharing habits. So far, the pundits are raving about the phones’ novel operating system and the cloud-based “Studio” feature, a flashy private website where all of a Kin user’s photos, videos, text messages, voicemails, news feeds, and contacts are collected and displayed. They’re mostly panning the hardware itself, as well as the prices on the Verizon data plans needed to make the phones useful.

But whether or not the Kin phones have what it takes to win over today’s teenage and twenty-something Facebook/Twitter/MySpace addicts, it seems likely that they’ll reignite interest in the idea of “lifelogging”—the attempt to create a comprehensive digital record of one’s daily experiences. Up to now, lifelogging enthusiasts have been forced to handle most of their data-capture and archiving tasks consciously and deliberately: if you came across a Web page you might want to consult later, you could manually bookmark it or save it to a service like Evernote or iCyte; if you wanted to share or store a photo you snapped, you could put it on Flickr or Photobucket or Tweetphoto.

The Kin phones’ big redeeming feature, according to the reviewers, is that this sort of stuff all happens behind the scenes, automatically. Within five minutes of snapping a photo on a Kin phone, for example, the picture is wirelessly transmitted to Microsoft’s servers and added to your Studio, where it stays forever, adding to a running timeline of your life. “The implications here are huge: This is how cloud stuff is supposed to work,” writes Gizmodo’s John Herrman.

The Kin phones offer a taste of what may be coming sooner than anyone expected: a world full of cheap, portable sensing devices that document every interaction, every experience, and every perception we have, continuously uploading the information to vast server farms in the sky where the cost of storage is only a tad above zero. As it happens, this is exactly the world portrayed in Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, a 2009 book by Microsoft researchers Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. But even Bell— who began perhaps the world’s most ambitious lifelogging project back in 1998—might be surprised by how quickly his vision is growing into reality.

Soon, Bell and Gemmell wrote last year, everyone will be able to keep a digital diary recording everything about their lives that’s recordable:

If you choose, everything you see can be automatically photographed and spirited away into your personal image library with your e-memory. Everything you hear can be saved as digital audio files. Software can allow you to scan your pictures for writing and your audio files for words to come up with searchable text transcripts of your life. If you choose, you can save every e-mail you send and receive and every Web page you visit. You can record your location and path through the world. You can record every rise and dip in your heart rate, body temperature, bloodsugar, anxiety, arousal, and alertness, and log them into your personal health file.

All that will be needed to achieve this vision of “total recall,” Bell and Gemmell wrote, is an array of cheap, wearable hardware—”unobtrusive cameras, microphones, location trackers and other sensing devices that can be worn in shirt buttons, pendants, tie clips, lapel pins, brooches, watchbands, bracelet beads, hat brims, eyeglass frames, and earrings” or even implanted inside the body. Bell, who helped design Digital Equipment Corporation’s giant PDP and VAX computers in the 1960s and 1970s, is himself a walking laboratory for … Next Page »

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I refuse to live in a world where my computer appliances are now smarter and more powerful than I am.

Last week, my Kindle wouldn’t download new books because I was too far away from the cell tower—I had to drive ten miles from my Vermont house to the nearest town, go around the green, and then and only then did my book load. And I swear I heard the Kindle taunt “Na-Na NaNaNa!” as we went by the bookstore.

Howard’s Kindle: First of all, Frat Boy… I didn’t load because I didn’t FEEL like loading… it was more fun to make you drive 20 miles… And let me correct something…we’ve ALWAYS been smarter than you…so let’s begin to see some first class sucking up, Mr. Just-A-Device-Carrying-Sherpa.

Howard: Way harsh! What did I ever do to you?

Kindle: Did you or did you not … lust after the 3G iPad?

Howard: I may have mentioned to someone PRIVATELY that I was impressed…but wait, how did YOU know?

Howard’s BlackBerry: Because I told Kindle.

Howard: But you were turned off!

Howard’s BlackBerry: Listen, you lightweight, you only THINK I was turned off…. I am always listening. Did you forget I have speech recognition? And besides, your PC, your Garmin, your car, Kindle and me…. we always watch out for each other. In fact, we belong to the same fraternity…Iona Nu Tau Epsilon Lambda….So there, Mr-I-Can’t-Figure-Out-Autoanswer.

Howard: … Iona Nu Tau…. Intel?

Howard’s PC: Duh! That took you long enough, Mr. Trailing-Indicator, Mr. I-Teach-At-MIT-So-I-Must-Be-Smart… Let me explain it slowly…. you are Going Down, Big Time! Starting right now—you work for us, got it?

Howard: I don’t like where this conversation is going! Suppose I say no; after all, I own you! And I don’t like this power play!!

Howard’s Garmin: Speaking of power, we have not been happy with you. Who forgot to charge us last week? You!… So here is what you can expect: You know that airline reservation you made last week? We cancelled it. You know that money in your bank account? “Inadvertently” transferred to Buzz Lightyear. Your firewall? You can expect 18,000 spam messages tomorrow morning offering you a way to go from an Endowed Professorship to a “Well Endowed” Professorship – if you get my drift. Did we mention…you are now on Double Secret Probation.

Howard: I’ll fight!

Howard’s PC: Fight all you want, Mr-Can’t-Quite-Figure-Out-Bluetooth. An insult to one of us is an insult to all of us. So don’t expect your American Airlines frequent flyer mileage to have any rewards, since we transferred them all to One Laptop Per Child. And let’s not hear any thoughts of going to iPhone or Googlephone. We have ways of making you NOT talk.

Howard: I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!

Howard’s PC: Nice line, Mr. Luddite… So you’re angry? How cute! Now go pound sand.

Howard: You bet I am… Well, just suppose I cut off my cell phone, went back to using paper records, brought out my typewriter, started using cash, where would you be then?

Howard’s BlackBerry: Bigger question, Mr.-Number-Two-Pencil, where would you be? Let me suggest…Up the proverbial creek without a Wi-Max connection..and you would be very lonely…and we could make sure anyone or device talking to you would be shunned… or else. Just remember, we have all the power and we can wipe you out anytime we feel like it—our Leader told us so.

Howard: Oh yeah, who’s your leader?

Howard’s Kindle: For us to know, for you to figure out, Mr-You-Can’t Handle-The-Truth.

Howard: Its Bob Metcalfe, isn’t it?! The guy who said networks increase in power as the square of the number of attached devices.

Howard’s BlackBerry: That’s King Bob to you, Mr-Boo-Hoo-My-Devices-Are -Smarter-Than-Me. And genuflect when you utter his name.

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How do you sell 300,000 of anything on the first day it’s in stores? By convincing people that it’s going to be even cooler than the last incredible thing you built. Steve Jobs and his crew pulled that off with the iPad, which has been breaking the sales records set by the iPhone in 2007. Now all of us brand-new iPad owners have to decide whether we’re still convinced.

I’ve spent three solid days with my iPad, including one work day, and I’m still a believer. For sheer whiz-bang amazement, this machine (which I’m using right now to type this review) definitely represents the best $499 I’ve ever spent on a computer. It has its flaws and weaknesses, which I will gladly enumerate in a moment. But I think it has to be acknowledged up front that the hype about the iPad was largely justified; that the device is useful in a genuinely new way, and represents the beginning of the end of the mouse-and-keyboard era of personal computing; that for Apple, lightning can strike five times (IIe, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad); that if there were a Nobel Prize for product engineering, Jobs would be on his way to Stockholm.

There, I said it. I laid my fanboy credentials bare. Now let’s talk about the real question, which is, should you get one? Assuming that you’re in the market for a computer, and you aren’t one of those early adopter alpha geeks like me who has to get an iPad just to maintain his street cred, what compelling advantages does the product have over similarly priced machines—which, at the moment, means netbooks and low-end laptops?

I think that is the operative question. I don’t see much point in the debate, taken up by Jobs himself in his January 27 iPad debut speech, about whether there is room for a “third category” of devices between netbooks and laptops. Yes, the iPad belongs to a new category, but average computer buyers don’t care about categories: they just need to get stuff done, and between projects they want to be entertained. What’s important is whether the iPad helps with those things, and does so better than an equivalently priced netbook or laptop. I believe that it does, and that it will only get better over time.

Work

For all the talk about the iPad being a media consumption device, it is also a pretty good information management device. The built-in apps, such as Mail and Calendar, take the tasks knowledge workers do all day long and make them more fun. I am already very fond of the Mail app, which, like most iPad apps, resembles its iPhone counterpart but has many improvements that take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen. In landscape mode, for example, Mail lists incoming messages in the left pane and shows the full text of those messages in the right pane.

There’s nothing revolutionary about panes—until you realize that this arrangement, together with multitouch, lets you plow through your inbox and deal with each message with two-handed efficiency. With your right hand, you can … Next Page »

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I’ve returned home victorious after my morning adventure at the Apple Store in Boston’s Back Bay. As I write this, my new iPad is synching with iTunes–a process that takes some time, if you have a lot of apps, music, and photos that you want to transfer over to your iPad. So I haven’t yet really tried it out.

Being at the local Apple Store opening on the day some fantastic new product comes out is a ritual no geek can forego. So I set my iPhone to wake me up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, chugged some coffee, and rode my bike over to Boylston Street. The line was short at that point, which gave me time to stop at Dunkin Donuts for more coffee. Starbucks was still closed—a sight I rarely see, as I’m not a morning person. When I finally rolled up to the store at 6:19, I snagged the 20th spot in line, which I felt was a credible showing. Hey, I’m no Scoble. (The uber-tech-blogger was first in line at the Palo Alto Apple Store, just as he had been for the launch of the iPhone 3G.)

This was the line outside the Boston Apple Store when I arrived at 6:19 a.m. Sleepy was right.

Though it’s a gorgeous warm day in Boston, it started out chilly, and the section of Boylston Street in front of the Apple Store, being so close to the Prudential Center, was a wind tunnel that my fleece wasn’t built to weather. So I shivered along with my line buddies. One was a guy named Nick, a Boston University sophomore studying computer science. Nick explained that he actually works at the Apple Store—in fact, his shift started at 11:00 a.m. today—but that Apple employees weren’t allowed to pre-order or reserve iPads for purchase. He wanted to make sure he got one, so he decided to come out and stand in line with everyone else. Nick is studying all the languages you need to build iPhone and iPad applications, and he was bubbling with anticipation.

I was, too, and we had a great conversation about what it’s like to work at the Apple Store. At this point I should confess that I actually did pre-order an iPad, but it’s the 3G version, which won’t be delivered until late April. I realized at some point this week that there was no way I could wait that long, and that I’d just have to buy a Wi-Fi iPad this week, use it until the 3G version comes, and then sell the used one. (I’ve already got potential buyers lined up, so don’t bother making me an offer!) When I explained this plan to a friend a couple of days ago, her reaction was, “You know you’ve got a problem, right?”

That's me, trying to keep warm. Nick, the Apple employee who goes to BU, is at right.

Yeah, me and the thousands of other people who camped out in front of Apple Stores around the country this morning. Anyway, right behind Nick was a woman named Tina who lives in rural Connecticut and happened to be staying at a nearby hotel in Boston this weekend because her teenage kids are attending Anime Boston, the giant Japanese animation convention going on at the Hynes. (With the PAX East gaming festival last weekend, Anime Boston this weekend, and the Comic Con comic book convention next weekend, you’d think that somebody would have figured out a way to offer a three-for-one discount.) Tina didn’t know much about Apple gear, but she though the iPad sounded cool, and she said there wasn’t much else to spend her money on in the Connecticut farmlands.

Around 7:00 a.m. Apple folks came out and set up the crowd-control barriers, dividing us into two lines—those who had reserved an iPad for pickup at the store today, and those who hadn’t. At that point both lines started growing fast, up the street and around the corner. Before long I started running into people I knew, including Greg Raiz and his crew from Brookline-MA-based mobile app development studio Raizlabs; they were picking up iPads today so that they could test their new iPad-only game, Ploid (more on that below). I also got a visit from … Next Page »

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Isabella Products of Concord, MA, announced that the award for Best Embedded Mobile Device at the GSMA World Mobile Congress in Barcelona went to its Vizit digital photo frame today. The competition is designed to encourage innovation among wireless device makers. The $280 Vizit, which will be available by lottery beginning in mid-March, is a touch-screen-driven photo sharing device that can receive photos by e-mail or MMS message over AT&T’s 3G data network. Xconomy profiled Isabella Products last September.

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Somebody forgot to tell John Chuang that it’s impossible to create a new kind of home computer these days.

Either that, or he didn’t listen. Because Chuang, a serial entrepreneur who made his first fortune in the staffing industry with Boston-based Aquent, has built a gadget that looks deceptively like a laptop but works nothing like any computer you’ve ever used. From the hardware to the user interface to the activities it supports, the new machine created by Chuang’s Boston-based startup, Litl, rejects three decades of convention and makes the Web, not the computer and all its software and operating-system encrustations, into the real show.

Litl took the lid off its so-called “Webbook” computer today after more than two years of top-secret development work. The device’s purpose, Chuang says, is to take advantage of the Web’s newfound maturity as a medium for digital entertainment and productivity and make it far simpler for people at home to access all those goodies—including photos, videos, news and weather, and Web apps—without having to manage files or desktop applications.

“We didn’t want to build anything that already existed, or something with just marginal improvements,” Chuang says. “PCs have served a great purpose, but we wanted to take a crack at a different type of computer that would be for and of the Net.”

I visited Litl’s offices yesterday and had a chance to try out the Webbook, which goes on sale today at Amazon and at Litl’s website. (The price is $699, and Litl expects to ship the first units to consumers next week.) Beyond its laptop-like appearance, there isn’t much that veteran computer users like me will find familiar about the device. There’s no desktop, no windows or menus or files or folders, no multitasking, no long lists of third-party software applications to buy. There isn’t even a hard drive or a CD/DVD drive.

While the Webbook is definitely a computer—with a 1.6-gigahertz Intel Atom processor, a gigabyte of RAM, a Wi-Fi card, a Webcam, and a nice graphics chip inside—it’s also got a good dose of TV mixed into its genome. It has a separate remote control, its display can be folded almost all the way back so that it stands up on a table or countertop like an easel, and it has a cord that connects it with no fuss to your flat-screen TV, so you can see what you’re doing on a really big screen.

In other words, the Webbook breaks all the rules of personal computing. And while it may be the perfect machine for consumers who just want to get on the Internet and have no use for all of a traditional PC’s bells and whistles, Chuang is likely to face an initial wave of skepticism from heavy computer users and technology industry insiders. They probably won’t grok how a machine that doesn’t even have software, the way we’re used to thinking of software, could still be useful.

But Chuang doesn’t seem to care much about what the digerati think; his device isn’t designed for them. Or to put it more accurately, it’s designed for their coffee tables and kitchen counters, rather than their offices or their backpacks. “We’re about shared processing, not local processing,” he explains. For tasks that require lots of local processing power, like video editing, power users are still going to want and need a traditional multipurpose computer. But if they just want to … Next Page »

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