The US Department of Defense Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit is look for a few good coders to help build apps and an entire app store for bomb technicians and soldiers involved in ordnance handling. This is when sliding to unlock could mean the difference between life or death.

The request for proposals is as dull as dirt (you can read it here) but the requirements are clear: they’re looking for apps that will replace paper pocket guides and references used by the folks that blow up the big badda booms.

If you’re interested the funding can run as high as $750,000 and $1,250,000, according to an engineer familiar with the proceedings and all you have to do is ensure the product is encrypted and password protected and that it involves lots of cool, wire-frame graphics so it looks like all of those computer programs used by hackers in the movies.

The deadline is March 9, 2012, so get cracking. Don’t keep the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office waiting.

I rarely like to put my own little fetishistic watch reviews up here unless the watch is something amazingly unique or unless I think you, dear reader, will get a kick out of the quality or styling of a particular piece. That’s why I chose to write up this Benarus Megalodon Diving Watch, a huge monster of a timepiece that is water resistant to 2,500 meters or about 8,000 feet. Considering the deepest SCUBA dive was 330 meters while the deepest ADS dive was 610 meters, I doubt you’ll make it down to 2.5 kilometers in one piece.

Barring improbable diving capabilities, why is the Megalodon so cool? Well first it has a self-winding automatic ETA 2824-2 movement with date window and sweep seconds hand as well as a case the size of a small apple. The case and band are made entirely of titanium and so are surprisingly light and wearable although there were some fit and finish issues with the clasp and bezel.

The Megalodon comes in multiple styles and has a screwdown crown at four o’clock and a recessed automatic helium escape valve at 9 o’clock. The hands and pips – as well as the bezel pip at 12 o’clock, are slathered in bright Superluminova and light up blue in the dark. The clasp has a locking mechanism and the caseback and crown are signed.

Because this is essentially a big hunk of metal, I had a bit of a time unlocking the band clasp and turning the bezel. However, once you open and close the watch band a few times and give the bezel a few turns, the issues slowly begin to recede. I was, however, afraid that I’d break the clasp if I wasn’t careful.

For a watch this size – 49mm including the bezel – it’s surprisingly wearable. The lugs are turned down so even though the case looks like a praire hen egg you don’t notice much overhang. The band is quite comfortable and the titanium ensures you’re not wearing a pound of metal on your wrist.

I also like Benarus because it’s a small company based in Germany and the lead designer lives in Kansas City. Not unlike another favorite, Xetum, Benarus has always existed on the periphery of the high-end watch world, producing inexpensive pieces for forum fans and maintaining a presence in the enthusiast community. They are a “start-up” in the world of watches, which is something I love. For a long time Benarus has been making less expensive watches for watch nerds on the boards and forums, allowing them to maintain a successful indie brand.

I would wager that the Megalodon’s $1,100 price tag would turn off quite a few people and, as a rule, I rarely recommend non-complicated watches out of small houses at above $500 or so simply because often the value and craftsmanship aren’t there. At the low end (and $1,100 is at the low end, believe it or not) too many manufacturers resort to styling and snake oil to make the sale, tactics similar, in fact, to the tricks used by high end audiophile gear salesmen who promise the world and deliver little. However, I’m glad to report that the Megalodon passes the sniff test and is very well made. If you like a bold watch, this Benarus creation is, while polarizing, quite handsome and very wearable.

Product Page
Click to view slideshow.

Like most hacks, this discovery of a way to find an Android phone’s Google Wallet PIN requires a lot of initial access but is disturbing nonetheless. Google knows about the hack and is repairing it. Discovered by Joshua Rubin of Zvelo, the hack is one of the most interesting attacks on Google Wallet so far.

In short, this hack allows access to credit card data and purchase history and could, in theory, allow a hacker to use a Google Wallet freely in the wild. However, it does require the hacker to have unfettered root access to the phone. Using a small program, the exploit simply brute-forces a file found in the phone, thereby revealing the PIN and unlocking the wallet.

Again, the hack requires a rooted Android phone – a state that is trivial to achieve if your phone is stolen – and a bit of know how. Rubin recommends:

Google recommends that anyone with Google Wallet call their toll-free support line at 855-492-5538 to ask that their prepaid card be disabled. They also recommend setting a lock screen.

UPDATE – Google responded, reminding folks that they don’t support Google Wallet on rooted phones and that:

The Pirate Bay, in many ways, is disappearing. It is one of the most popular torrent sites on the web and its database of millions of torrent files – essentially pointers to pieces of files hosted elsewhere – has long been the go-to spot for budding pirates around the world. While it still exists in spirit, the admins are now moving all of the torrent files off the site and are instead offering magnet links. This is an important distinction that will move the locus of general piracy from a single site to any number of sites, reducing the Pirate Bays importance as a source.

First, let’s talk a bit about torrenting in general.

A torrent file is a document containing a number of pieces of information about a file including the names of its various component parts as well as pertinent identifying information. Torrent files do not point to specific files on specific servers but instead point to codes that identify chunks of a file. These files are actually quite large – a few kilobytes to a few hundred – and most BitTorrent feeds have used them exclusively for the past few years – The Pirate Bay included.

There’s a problem with torrent files, however, that has to do more with perception than reality. To the average politico – and to the average media lobbyist – Torrent files are “files” that point to pirated content. It doesn’t matter that there are legitimate uses for Torrents and that torrent suppliers don’t actually know what those files contain. The idea is offensive to many, and so lots of legal muscle has been flexed to attack targets that pirates have already abandoned. The pirates snicker while authorities torch ghost ships in the night.

Before going further, understand that I find the process of making money on piracy abhorrent while I consider the act of piracy to be a what amounts to a perfectly lubricated market. For example, a newsman in 1990 or so would consider what you are doing right now – reading a bit of news and opinion that you didn’t pay for – piracy. Granted that simplifies the matter considerably (you do pay for it indirectly through your attention and advertisers capitalize on that attention) but I doubt TechCrunch in its earliest form would have been very popular if it was a paid newsletter sent to Mike’s parents and close friends.

That said, as a content producer, I find general “free” piracy to be a valuable tool, even an asset, in getting the word out. There is no clear reason why I should, for example, make an out-of-date book available to folks who may want to read it. I consider this a free form of advertising and the more people who like or dislike my work, the better.

What the Pirate Bay did (and still does, just using a different record locator format) is offer links to files that may or may not be pirated content. Devin wrote a great piece on this concept last night.

What the Pirate Bay also did was popularize torrents in the same way Napster popularized peer-to-peer sharing and the same way MegaUpload popularized massive file storage and the performance upsell.

But what the Pirate Bay really did was put a snarky face on the pirate, moving the average pirate out of the realm of Neo or the evil, evil kids in this video:

In general, we hear little about piracy but the tales of happy-go-lucky antics of the Pirate Bay and the associated groups, including the politicized Pirate Party. The MPAA and RIAA would love to associate piracy with terrorism, massive theft, and the decay of Western Civilization and, in a way, that’s their right. Their goal is to sell as many widgets as possible. A pirate’s goal is to see content that is otherwise unavailable to him or her.

Not to get all Cory Doctorow here, but the Pirate Bay made pirating silly and the attacks by outside authorities made it look even more enticing. The site, with its jolly roger and swift ship tilting into the waves, makes it a Magic 8 Ball of piracy. You type something in, find it, wait, and if the stars are aligned you can grab the file you wanted. More often, however, you grab nothing because the swarm has moved on.

As I said during the SOPA hubbub, there is no way for anyone to enforce anything. There are ways to make things uncomfortable for content sharers and there are ways to arrest people for soliciting pirated content, but in the vast panoply of the Internet there’s very little chance any dedicated enforcement agency can perform its duties with any effectiveness, China’s easily-avoidable Great Firewall being one example.

The Pirate Bay changed piracy by becoming the Google of content. As of this writing it is no longer hosting torrent files and in fact you can download the entire contents of the site in a few minutes, proving that the Pirate Bay is essentially a guide and not a repository.

The attacks against the Pirate Bay have given it far more popularity than it really deserves and through a combination of excellent branding and nearly non-stop coverage, everyone with an Internet connection knows of that Jolly Roger waving endlessly in the digital winds while the real business of piracy – counterfeiting, fake DVD sales, and fraud – are going on in the shadows. Whichever side you’re on, you have to admit the Pirate Bay asks for nothing and expects nothing in return. We feed the beast that is the pirate underground and, no matter how hard we try or how many times we seize a bunch of Swedish servers, we will never tame it.

Amazon used to be able to sell the Kindle based on its readability in sunlight. That’s a fair comparison to make and the old advertising featured little more than people being happy reading. To wit:

But the commercial above takes a different tack. The old “it works in the sun” line is still is still in there, but I assure you that Amazon is most interested in getting the more expensive and potentially more lucrative Kindle Fires out the door. What do they do? They suggest that the kids can hang out in the shade with their Fires while mom schools an old fool and his iPad. And all three of those devices still cost less than an iPad (or similarly outfitted tablet). Sneaky, sneaky, Amazon.

In fairness, two Fires and a standard Kindle are still cheaper than an iPad, but I suspect the kiddos in that Daiquiri-stained sloth tent would still rather watch videos and play games on a more capable device. But this is Amazon’s version of price-conscious Club Med, and who are we to judge?

You’d be excused for not paying much attention to Thismoment or Position2. They do the dirty work a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do, namely run marketing promotions and, in their wake, figuring out how many people actually paid attention to those things. In a world of “organic eyeballs” and viral va-va-voom, there’s little place for Mad Men style commercial promotion… or is there?

Thismoment just paid an undisclosed sum for Position2 and will begin folding Position2′s technology into its offerings. Thismoment began life as a photo-sharing site (“It was Facebook Timeline before Facebook timeline,” said founder Vince Broady) and pivoted do supply content management tools for major brands.

“With our Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) platform, we’ve focused on social content management, and the creative layer – the app, promotion or campaign – through which the content is delivered,” said Broady. “With the Brand Monitor acquisition, we complete the picture by adding conversation monitoring and advanced analytics – including sentiment analysis – both of which provide real-time feedback on the success of social content and creative initiatives. So now, you cannot only execute a program, but actually see if it’s working and react in real-time.”

By connecting content delivery – essentially sites dedicated, say, to a specific promotion – and Position2′s brand awareness tools, users can create a branded page and then watch as users respond through multiple channels including Facebook, Twitter, and on the web.

If there’s anything we can learn from this acquisition it’s that brands are looking more closely to social media and following the feedback loop from eyeball to Tweet to Facebook rant with an intensity heretofore unrivaled. We can scoff all we want about ham-handed attempts at social media interaction, but Thismoment works with over a hundred Fortune 500 companies and those guys, as they say, aren’t fooling around.

Details are sparse and we have calls in, but the two execs at Klarna, Jens Saltin and Niklas Adalberth, were arrested at the W Hotel in New York for alleged molestation. The victim was a 19-year-old tourist from Texas.

Saltin and Adalberth are currently out on $10,000 bail. According to the report:

Klarna is a Sequoia-backed start-up and was a runner-up for Best International Start-up at the Crunchies.

UPDATE – Updated with information supplied by Niklas Adalberth’s lawyer.
UPDATE – Updated with information from the police report.
UPDATE – We have received a statement from Klarna:

We are aware of the alleged incident in New York City involving Niklas Adalberth and Jens Saltin. Both Mr. Adalberth and Mr. Saltin maintain their innocence and have taken temporary leave from the company while the matter is being investigated.

Call it a sort of a bear hug: Sprint, the also-ranniest of the also-rans in the carrier world, lost money selling phones that, on the aggregate gained them subscribers. It’s also Catch-22, a blindside, and a mess.

According to Sprint, the company reported a net loss last quarter while still selling 1.8 million iPhones and increasing their subscriber base by 1.6 million. How? The costs associated with provisioning and supporting these new phones drove operating losses to $438 million, up from $139 million in Q4 last year.

The company reported increased subscriber numbers – 55 million this year. Forty percent of Sprint iPhone buyers were new customers. They nearly doubled capital expenditures this year.

Sprint is in a strange place. Like T-Mobile, the company has always been overshadowed by the bigger guys and never gained traction after acquisition. While using ostensibly the same hardware, Verizon has roundly trounced Sprint by advertising improved coverage and reception.

However, unlike T-Mobile, Sprint has the iPhone. This move – beyond any network improvements or handset acquisitions – is what’s keeping the company afloat. The net loss shown this year happened because Sprint was supporting the iPhone, a wild situation in which a company’s best-seller is actually dragging it down.

If the iPhone taught consumes anything it’s that mobile broadband is a right, not a privilege. The right to Instagram, Yelp, and browse all day and night is seemingly god-given and that same god knows that the iPhone hasn’t been useful for making calls these last few years. In short, we’re looking at a product that would upend any carrier’s view of the world, not just Sprint’s.

For decades, carriers worried about getting calls from point A to point B. Now they have to worry about tethering, massive data downloads to small devices, and always-on connectivity. They have to worry about angry Tweets, upset Facebook posts, and maintain gear that is cutting edge and prone to failure. So, in the end, it didn’t make financial sense to go the popular route, but hopefully it will buoy Sprint’s prospects in the long term.

The iPhone taught carriers that it wasn’t enough to dump out a feature phone or two and keep the power on in the switch room. Sprint’s troubles – masquerading as opportunity – is the finest example of the change that is currently rolling over the operator landscape.

photo credit: ucumari via photopin cc

Say you, like me, wrote a book about the two Lithuanian lovers who find themselves trapped in a basement and have to solve mysteries and learn magic to escape the traps set by them by an evil wizard robot using their brawn, brains, and a little sultry lovemaking. How would you publish and sell it?

Presumably you would visit the Kindle, B&N, and Apple book stores and upload it, making it available on all of those platforms and raking in the dough. Now, however, you can just use Booktango.

Before we get too deep into the “Whys” and “Wherefores” of this thing, I’d like to riff a little bit on Booktango and it’s parent company, Author Solutions. Author Solutions runs a number of what were once called “vanity presses” including iUniverse, Xlibris and the like. A few years ago I would have told you to stay as far away from these guys as possible and that their services were, at best, predatory and at worst rapaciously bad. My buddy Scott was excoriated for daring to say self-publishing wasn’t great six years ago but, on the aggregate, vanity presses usually took your money and left you with a crate of sad, unwanted books. However, as the rise of digital self-publishing shows us, everything changes and it’s fascinating to see the company move into the epub world with services like Booktango.

That said, how does this service work? You upload your book and a cover and prepare it for sale. The company offers a tablet-based editing suite so you can do a few touch-ups on the fly, but the real magic happens after you upload. You can sell your book on the Booktango website and receive 100% of the “royalties” or 90% of the sale if you sell through any other ebookstore including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.

The “free” service includes a full editing suite, cover designer, and ISBN assignment. Then, as you sell your book, the company tracks your sales and pays out royalties based on “net sale.” You can also pay $49 for a bit of hand-holding in terms of book upload and management and $189 for assistance with the book as a whole as well as copyright protection.

Now net sale gets a little tricky. Booktango, for example, takes $1.50 per book as a retailing fee but then you’d get the remainder of that sale. If you sell through Amazon et al, you have to deal with their fees and then Booktango gets 10% of that net sale, leaving you with 90%. It’s not a horrible deal, to be fair, but it’s not quite clear unless you read the FAQ.

There are plenty of sites out there like this and there are plenty of good ways to get your content into ebook stores. However, Booktango might make a good tool for the technologically maladroit to upload and sell their masterpieces without much fuss. I tried it today and it was a bit confusing and the editor a bit underpowered, but presumably you’re going to do most of your work offline and upload it when you’re done. While I doubt I’ll see my Lithuanian love story on the site (I’m holding out for a huge advance), I would publish my other beautiful work including my epic, 100,000-line adventure poem featuring Andy Dick and King Arthur and my advanced guide to sandwich making. Look for them wherever fine ebooks are sold.

An interesting thing is happening in hardware marketing these days and I think Devin noticed it yesterday when he pointed out that Samsung, in their marketing of the Samsung Galaxy Note, is changing the script when it comes to gadget advertising, a tendency that is becoming more and more apparent in newer ads from many big players.

First, let’s look at the history of CE advertising. For most of the 1980s, computer marketing didn’t really exist. Take a look at this gem from a 1984 issue of Analog:

This is a true classic: an advertisement that tells nearly everything about the product in 10 point type. Similarly, you had games advertisements like this:

Here the “renders” (really acrylic on cardboard) take center stage while the actual game screens appear amazingly small in the lower left corner. The sale was about the sizzle because the customers knew that they weren’t getting much steak.

This continued for most of the 1980s and then into the 1990s. Let’s call this “nerd-to-nerd” advertising. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but if you were reading Analog in 1984, you probably were hurting for a prom date.

Suddenly, in 1996, however, Sony created a parallel message to their standard advertising by featuring futuristic scenes of models walking into cyberspace while holding Vaio computers. This was, to the best of my recollection, the first time that CE marketing was aspirational (I could be wrong, but this is the first time in my memory that a CE manufacturer didn’t talk at a demographic and instead suggested you could attain a demographic through their products.) Nerds, it seemed, were suddenly cool.

Thus was born a dual marketing message. The first message appeared in the trade press – in PC Magazine and Laptop and the like – the advertisements were a step removed from the two ads above: for geeks, by geeks. I remember, for example, the Laptop magazine ad sales team marketing the magazine as the one title that will ensure an advertiser that the reader will come out of the issue ready to buy a laptop or accessory. Interestingly, this sort of advertising has actually been supplanted by the gadget blogs who, in fact, do a lot of the nerd-to-nerd dialogue in their reviews. Who needs to buy ad space when someone will write a 2,000 word article about your product and you can expect thousands of people to read it in a famished frenzy?

The second message appeared in the glossy magazines and on TV. This was a lifestyle message, a message that swept much of the technology under the rug and instead focused on how the technology would fit in your home. For example:

Nintendo was selling “fun” and not hardware. Or take a look at this oddly prescient Lisa ad:

Or this downright embarrassing iPod ad:

The message here was one of utility. It said “You will have fun/work better/be able to rip music” with this product. In short it was “You can do X very well and we know you absolutely love doing X.”

For years you had two synchronous marketing plants. The script was simple in most cases: speeds, feeds, an image of the product. Aside from a few odd examples like the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercials, most nerd-to-nerd CE advertising focused on hard claims. This sort of marketing appeared in magazines and newspapers and was focused on a crowd that, upon seeing a specific item, would immediately grasp its utility. The other side of the coin was the more esoteric lifestyle ad focused on non-adopters who knew they probably needed a computer but didn’t want to get bogged down. Thus was born an amalgam of the two, the “speeds and feeds” ad, allowing manufacturers to compete on nebulous claims of speed and memory sizes. For example, check out:

What do you notice? Numbers, numbers, numbers. You have prices, you have screen sizes, you have (in the Macs’ case) a clock speed. More is better, right? In fact, this style of advertising offered a false sense of safety for confused buyers. The Speed and Megapixel Wars drove manufacturers to crow mostly meaningless numbers until recently when the chip industry essentially flatlined. In the days when 800MHz vs. 1GHz meant something, it was fine to share those numbers. Now, when many more aspects of a PC are considerably more important, they don’t mean much at all.

In terms of television ads the focus was on “Us vs. Them:” Mac vs. PC, PC Hunters, iPhone vs. Everyone else. For example, you could argue that the recent Samsung ads maintained this nerds-to-nerds messaging but with a soupçon of ridiculousness, culminating in Superbowl Sunday’s wildly aspirational street party ad:

Additionally, marketers have gone in a very weird direction when trying to differentiate multiple Android products. When everything is a tablet, how do you stand out? Last spring there was a short push to grab the “early adopter” with tactics familiar with the speeds and feeds consumer yet with a bit of tongue in cheek. The best example of this? A nice little Verizon fantasy made for the Xoom last May.

As markets converge, there is less need to worry that the audience won’t understand a particular product. The fact that Verizon used the words “Tegra processor” on national TV points to the assumption that the watcher a) knows what a processor is at all and b) is aware that there is something called a Tegra. Intel pull off brand awareness with a cute jingle. Nvidia has a long way to go before “Tegra Inside” is a household name.

So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in the enviable position of being talked to like intelligent consumers and it leaves marketers grasping at how to market their products to a less sophisticated consumer. One solution is luxury branding. Take, for example, the above photo of Edward Norton and some woman holding a Prada phone by LG. Now, to be clear, the only people I know who own Prada phones are my niece and sister-in-law who bought them because they were on sale. LG knows that the hard-core geek wouldn’t look twice at a Prada phone in the wild. Therefore, they need to add a bit of glamor. In fact, Norton(‘s PR representative) writes in the press release:

Amen, guy who played a skinhead in American History X and a schizophrenic sociopath in Fight Club! See also: Lady Gaga working as creative director of Polaroid (a position that didn’t last past the duration of CES 2011, but at least she got benefits), Ashton Kutcher:

And so on.

I also saw a move towards luxury branding at CES when Tumi (the luxury bag brand) show some iPad cases and other junk behind a red velvet rope. Tumi gear, to be clear, is actually made by Jasco, the same guys that license the GE brand to sell cut-rate electronic components. Rather than just show their wares, they kept things behind a roped off door, suggesting an exclusivity that is, in truth, quite alien at CES. Their booth was more similar to one of the booths I visit expensive wristwatch events than anything at CES I’ve ever seen. This sense of exclusivity is quite disheartening, especially in an industry that revels in open dialogue.

CE marketing is constantly in flux but recently it has been trending towards the vacuous. While I don’t long for the days of full page ads featuring reams of techspeak, I think that, as Devin noted, these marketers are trying too hard. Our generation has been raised on marketing and intense pressure rarely works anymore. Just because you can hire Ashton or Ed doesn’t mean you should and just because The Darkness wasn’t doing much this year doesn’t mean they should represent a product that is, at its heart, a very complex piece of machinery. Respect us, CE manufacturers, and we’ll respect you.

If you’re just waking up out of your post Super Bowl stupor, a crumble of Doritos dusting your chest and beer cans littering the coffee table, floor, and dog, you’ll be excused for not knowing that all the greatest entrepreneurs in the world (and Om Malik) are wearing colorful socks. See, apparently dudes in the Valley wear sassy socks. It’s something that’s done. But why? Well, apparently wearing colorful socks helps you stand out in the dressed-down, always-on, loosey-goosey, fancy-dancing world of Silicon Valley. In a land where no one can see your bespoke suit with working cuff buttons, how are you supposed to show your power? With socks, people. With socks.

In fact, fancy socks are like a gang sign.

OK, so now you know how to get funded: wear funny socks. But where can you get those socks? You’re in luck. The guys at 80stees emailed me to offer a set of every sock on this page to two lucky TechCrunch readers. That’s 16 pair each for two lucky ducks. How would you wear them? Well, think about the use case. Headed out to talk to Sequoia? Wear the Batman socks. Interviewing a programmer? Wear the Wonder Woman socks. Pivoting? Wear the Superman socks. Easy.

To win, comment below describing what you secretly wear to meetings for good luck. Thanks to 80sTees for helping all us nerds stay at the height of fashion.

If you don’t know a resistor from a Mister Mister, this is the app for you. Built by Adafruit, creators of DIY Arduino gear, Circuit Playground is a $2.99 app designed to help you identify and understand various electronic components. For example, the app includes a resistor identification system based on the colored bands painted on the casing as well as a field guide to many electrical components.

The rest of the tools – including converters, calculators, and datasheet storage systems – just makes things a little bit easier when you’re building an electronics project. I’m terrible at this stuff so it would be a boon for me and my slow-witted monkey mind.

The app is available now for the iPhone and iPad.

Product Page

According to GoodEReader, Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I’d be circling the wagons right now.

To be fair, Amazon’s own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven’t been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Seth Godin and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that’s not why publishing has to worry.

The Kindle was Amazon incarnate, a way for Amazon to bring its online presence into the real world. A physical Kindle store – one that exists in a mall or popular area, even for a short period – is like the third coming. It’s basically a chance for Amazon to grab every else they have missed during the initial run up in Kindle popularity. We’re talking older folks, luddites, grumps, and folks who claim that “reading it in paper” is better. To have them walk up to a display of working Kindles, newly minted and displaying the latest Stephen King book, is the only way Amazon will convince them that going digital is the only way to go.

This will also encourage the movement from the agent-publisher-distributor model of book publishing into a direct to consumer model that Amazon will spearhead. By showing potential authors that they can get their books bound in handsome Kindle editions, they’ll be more likely to go that route instead of pounding fruitlessly against the gates of big publishing. It’s obviously a no-brainer to many of us, but old paradigms die hard.

As I said before, the Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. However, rather than the wary hold-outs bringing in Amazon’s market by buying the fire, Amazon will bring the Trojans to their own branded stores.

The store will appear in Settle in the next few months and presumably be the first of a nation-wide roll-out. I suspect it will be a bit of a loss for Amazon but hopefully it will convert the last hold-outs to the benefits of ereading.

My Dad, bless his heart, spends all day on the Internet and, like a reverse Cat’s In The Cradle, my dad is just like me in that he loves to find wild junk that he thinks is interesting. To wit: he just found the Brinno Peephole Viewer, an electronic system for looking through a peephole.

To be fair, this is definitely something people need. My parents are getting up in years so they’re getting both blind and paranoid, so anything to assuage those two situations is a plus. This thing attaches to your normal peephole and then displays the scene behind the peephole on an LCD screen. It runs on two AA batteries and costs about $90.

The viewer also reduces fish-eye distortion found with regular, non-LCD peepholes.

It’s definitely not new nor is it particularly high tech, but if you, like me, are dealing with a set of parents who are getting up there in years and need a leg up, it might be a nice investment. Besides, it’s fun to say peephole.

Product Page

So in the interest of supporting unique publishing methods and ideas, I thought it might be interesting to talk about Verdant Books and something they’re calling an “interactive novel.” Now my idea of an interactive novel is Choose Your Own Adventure, but this is something fairly unique.

Ok. Here’s the premise:

Yeah, you read that right. Old Hiram and Sibyl are watching Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s. Hot stuff, right? So here’s where things get really weird. The author, Laird Harrison, is going to update a blog featuring the characters talking about things important to the story. Now, to be clear, I think this is the worst implementation of interactive function I’ve ever seen (especially since all of the “blog posts” (did they have blogs in the 1970s?) are password protected). But here’s what I’m really concerned with.

So it’s going to get easier and easier to publish books. It’s already ridiculously easy, but soon everyone with an idea and dial-up will be able to upload an epub. There will be some good books and some terrible books and there will be varying methods for marketing these books, from the traditional display ad on Amazon to gimmicks like the one above. I do see the value in a sort of “meet-the-author” kind of website where you ask the author questions about his stuff and I do expect publishers to create more and more of this gimmickry in order to sell bits to an audience that is already wildly distracted, but I worry that, like the site that was going to sell soundtracks to books, this is a Bad Idea (TM).

There are ways to change the monetization systems around the distribution of long-form writing. Selling 10,000 word articles about Afganistan for 99 cents a pop is a great model to bring monetary incentive back into reporting and journalism as well as non-fiction writing and editing. We are fast approaching a time when the devices we use to read books will be far more distracting than they even are today. I, for one, always intend to open iBooks or the Kindle reader on my iPad and instead check Twitter and email. It’s a sad, sad day when I long for a standalone, e-ink Kindle over a fully-featured Kindle Fire because I want to read more.

So anything that will pull me out of the book experience is a negative, anything that keeps me reading is a positive. Gimmickry and “viral efforts” work maybe once in a thousand times. Good writing works every time. So let’s hear it for old Hiram and Sibyl and their blog and here’s hoping Harrison sells a few books. But I’d really like to raise a glass to good writing. It will save publishing, even if the publishers thwart it at every turn.

Good Old Games is running a $4.99 sale on multiple Sierra titles including Space Quest and Kings Quest. The games come in packages of three and are compatible with Windows (sorry, Mac users, but here’s a consolation prize).

Each package includes three parts of each series, including Police Quest, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. This includes such hits as the original King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown rendered in beautiful 16-color CGA, a game that literally made my jaw drop when I saw it boot up on my friend’s XT computer in about 1985. That, my friends, was true gaming, before the days of rail shooters and endless RPGs.

Product Page via The Verge

The CEO of Micron Technology, Steve Appleton, died in a small plane crash today in Boise, Idaho. He was 51.

Appleton worked at the company since 1983, starting on the night shift production line. He died piloting a Lancair experimental aircraft around Boise.

He is survived by his wife Dalynn and his children.

Micron is a major semiconductor supplier and most notably built a number of memorable laptops and hard drives during the early days of the dot com years. The company currently produces the Crucial and Lexar memory lines, among other hardware.

via Micron

Remember those little Zen rock gardens they used to sell for desks? So you could take a minute of your busy day to contemplate the void? Thanks to the magic of Kickstarter, you can build your own automatic, desktop-based Zen garden that will rake itself into endless patterns.

The toy is a little pricey – $999 for the “table” kit, half that for the desktop version – but the concept is pretty cool. It’s basically a robotic Etch-a-Sketch with a few tricks built in. To wit:

Hello? This is Zen Table?

The coffee table version is 56″ x 39″ x 19.5″ while the desktop version is 13″ x 9.5″ x 2 1/2″. Created by video game developer Simon Hallam, the Zen table lets you draw nearly anything into the silicone sand, allowing you to complete your mandala without having to get off from work. They’re about $4,000 below their funding goal, so get over there and get zenning!

Project Page

Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.
- Tao De Ching

There’s a carousel in a small Cape Cod town that we visited this summer and the kids rode it a few times. The carousel is quite old and quite handsome and it makes a great diversion of an evening. I’m reminded now of trying to take pictures of the kids while they rode the carousel. For a while I’d wave and try to get their attention as they roared past, their laughter dopplering around the edge of the curve, and then, after four or five tries I’d give up and just watch. It’s a wheel, an endless circle, designed to delight and enthuse and distract.

Reading the recent back and forth between Stephen Fry – an Apple apologist – and Mike Daisey – an Apple user/abuser – I’m reminded of that carousel. The gist is this: Mike Daisey woke up the NPR-listening world with his long piece of Foxconn for This American Life. It was a great piece – dramatic, educational, and eye-opening – but it’s definitely nothing we haven’t seen before. Some could say that it was The Jungle of Chinese manufacturing, a tell-all with just enough outrage to make us rethink a great horror. But the problem is this: Daisey is an actor and knows how to bring out the story, just as John Steinbeck was a writer and knew how to populate the Dust Bowl with Christ figures. That doesn’t make the story less effective – it makes it more so – but it does make the story less true.

The problem is the endless circle of blame and apology. Daisey is correct in many of his assumptions, but offers a way forward that is currently unenforceable. But if you argue against Daisey’s points, you’re an apologist. But, as Paul Krugman writes:

We keep going over the same ground here. The argument can be delineated like this: Foxconn is an evil sweatshop. Apple is a huge Foxconn customer. They should change things. Two of those things are true, a third is false.

To be clear, I’m with the crowd that says that Apple is, at best, ignorant of Foxconn’s problems and at worst ignoring them. I agree things must change and Apple is in a great position to do it. But I don’t agree with the first point. I’ve seen sweat shops and Foxconn is a factory. If many of the major brands (I recall that Ford was a customer at one factory I visited) knew that their promotional USB keys were made in a building that looked like a gulag, they’d be skewered. Here’s hoping they are, one day. However, Daisey’s Foxconn story – written outside of the factory – and my own research, written inside the factory – don’t jibe. His discoveries that people get sick or are injured in factories are naive and I suspect his sample size of employees who approached him is far smaller than we realize. To go into the Foxconn factory is to see a place staffed by college-age kids and engineers who work 10 or so hours a day building electronics. There is no great Dickensian work house nor are there sad-eyed madonnas of the assembly line chained to the soldering irons. This isn’t the mundanity of evil – this is just mundanity.

Nor am I saying that Daisey’s interviewees are malingerers with an axe to grind. I’m sure their lives are ruined or much harder thanks to Foxconn. The value of Daisey’s efforts is his ability to give these people a voice in an environment that would normally quash that voice. He’s doing what artists must do – reflecting a time and place through his own lens.

My own opinion is simple: Apple needs to do more for the people in its manufacturing chain. I will not pretend that Apple can simply wave a magic wand and make every Foxconn employee rich and happy, but it has the cash and the wherewithal to further disrupt the Chinese supply chain and improve the lot of Foxconn’s employees. But I also agree with what one Gawker commenter said: “I believe Tim Cook will do more good for those employees (and already has, in point of fact) than Mike Daisey ever will.” Apple on the aggregate couldn’t care less about our existence nor does it deserve our undying respect and admiration. On an personal level there are plenty of folks inside Apple working and worrying about worker’s rights in China, but as an entity we are talking supply chains and price management. Apple makes excellent tools for our digital age, that’s it. To defend or excoriate the company is like screaming into the wind. However, through their constant rejiggering and improvements, they have essentially created a Western, ISO-compliant factory environment in a corporate culture that used to force underperforming employees to stand outside wearing a sign that said “I am a bad worker.”

What Daisey did is made us think. Did he do it the right way, using the right tools? Absolutely not. Will he improve the lot of the workers he interviewed? I doubt it. But will his efforts – and the efforts of many who came before him – help bring the Chinese worker out of penury? Sure, eventually.

I opened this piece talking about a carousel in Cape Cod, a delightfully bourgeois setting for a piece on poverty wage labor practices. I get to go to Cape Cod and put my kids on a carousel because my job involves dicking around on the Internet all day (I suspect Daisey’s does too). My one wish is that every Foxconn employee, at some point in their lives, will be able to sit down to an unhurried meal, chat with family, and maybe ride a carousel. I think it’s in Foxconn’s best interests to ensure that that happens – and soon – and I think that we’re nearly there. Things will get better, I’m sure of it, and I also feel that they already have.

Upset that the Makerbot can’t produce solid, smooth objects for your home 3D printing pleasure? Why not give the iModela a look.

This CNC milling machine costs a little under $1,000 and uses a drill head to carve out 3D objects in solid plastic. The iModela is made by Roland DG (a subsidiary of the guys who make musical instruments) and has a very Japanese UI and aesthetic, which is pretty cool. They offer some interesting free models and a plastic sample kit for folks interested in getting started.

Some BoingBoing commenters are also recommending the DeepGoove1 CNC mill that can mill steel as well as wood and plastic. These things might not be quite ready for general home use yet, but the fact that you can grab a CNC machine for around a grand is pretty incredible in itself.

via BB