Later this year you could witness the mobiles which can be charged wirelessly using the electromagnetic induction charging technology thus eliminating the wires to charge up the mobile device. Singapore based smartphone company MWG has reportedly announced its plans for wireless charging handsets. To charge the mobile phone you just have to place the mobile in the vicinity of the charging device for a period of time.

The wireless charging principle works on the electromagnetic induction phenomenon in which the charger device will create an electromagnetic field with alternating polarity using a coil of insulated copper wire, a similar coil will be placed inside the mobile device which will convert the E.M field back into electric current thereby charging the battery.

With the invent of wireless charging devices the crappy cables could soon be a thing of the past, well for now you can fancy the wireless chargeable mobile devices by the end of year 2008

Suggested reading:

MIT invention: Wireless Charging Technology

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Online T-shirt vendor Threadless has partnered with an artists’ community called Society6 to offer visual artists a new opportunity to make some cash.  Threadless() will select a limited number of Society6 artworks and put them on T-shirts that will be sold through its new “Artist Shoppe.” Some of the sales revenue goes to the original artist, who just needs to post his or her work with a free Society6 account to qualify.  Society6 uses a newsfee … Read More

via Twiappleface

(CNET) — Let it be known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted a book to be written about the company he founded.

At the top of the acknowledgments for journalist David Kirkpatrick’s new book about Facebook, “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World,” Kirkpatrick makes it clear. “Had (Zuckerberg) not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened.”

“The Facebook Effect,” which will be available for purchase Tuesday, is the most extensive work written about the ubiquitous social-networking site and the people who lifted it from late-night college project to Silicon Valley powerhouse.

It commences with a single story of Facebook’s sheer brawn: the Facebook-based organization of Colombian activists against paramilitary guerillas that culminated in protests attended by hundreds of thousands.

Then the book plunges into Facebook’s flip-flops-and-Red-Bull days as a start-up headquartered out of a Harvard University dorm. By the end, it’s setting up Facebook as, rightfully so, the most formidable rival to Web giant Google.

The cover of the 300-plus-page hardcover tome is the silhouette of a face made of mirror-like, reflective paper. Pick the book up, and you’ll see your own face, set against a background of the same soft blue color that Facebook uses on its own site.

You can, already, judge a bit from the cover of this book: This is the Facebook that Facebook wants you to see — both the glamorous and the ugly sides of one of the most successful, fastest-growing companies in recent memory.

The reporting by Kirkpatrick, a longtime Fortune magazine technology editor, is meticulous and exhaustive. The reader learns precisely what percentage of equity Facebook’s biggest shareholders have, exactly which major technology and media companies have courted Facebook over the years for both investment deals and potential acquisitions, and the story behind Facebook’s random inclusion of the “Wedding Crashers” quotation “I don’t even know what a quail looks like” below its search box in the social network’s early days.

In the process, Kirkpatrick interviewed a first-rate who’s who of Facebook insiders, from Mark Zuckerberg himself to executives like Sheryl Sandberg and Chris Kelly, co-founders Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes, and investors Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer.

It’s an unprecedented level of depth and perspective into the company. And it has Facebook’s seal of approval.

“The Facebook Effect” can be considered, then, the counterpoint to last year’s “The Accidental Billionaires,” author Ben Mezrich’s unauthorized, hormone-fueled panty-raid of a Facebook creation tale.

With no cooperation from Facebook (in fact, outright antagonism), Mezrich penned “Billionaires” largely from the perspective of spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin; the founders of would-be rival site ConnectU, who had a longstanding lawsuit against Zuckerberg and Facebook; and former Facebook executive Sean Parker, who resigned in the wake of boardroom friction and a drug-related arrest.

(Saverin is the only one whom Mezrich has explicitly confirmed that he worked with as a source.)

In “Billionaires,” Zuckerberg is painted as calculating and ethically challenged, ruthlessly severing ties to people who threaten his authority.

And it’s Mezrich’s, not Kirkpatrick’s take on Facebook that forms the basis for “The Social Network,” the David Fincher-helmed film starring Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake as Zuckerberg and Parker, scheduled for a release in October.

A number of Facebook’s critics and rivals, each with their own agenda, indeed appear to have been cut out entirely from the development of “The Facebook Effect.”

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two of the three co-founders of ConnectU, say that they were never contacted for comment or an interview. Neither was Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard computer science student who built a social-networking project around the same time that Zuckerberg did and who later claimed ownership of the concept behind Facebook.

The differences between the treatment of Facebook’s early scandals in Mezrich’s book — which Facebook has openly discredited — and Kirkpatrick’s are stark.

In “The Facebook Effect,” co-founder Saverin was “in effect, demanding to be CEO of Thefacebook without even making a full-time commitment” and that his “business skills didn’t impress his colleagues.”

While Kirkpatrick characterizes Zuckerberg’s treatment of the ConnectU situation as “rude” and that “he certainly should have alerted (the ConnectU founders)…earlier about what to expect,” he implies that ConnectU was significantly different from Zuckerberg’s initial conception of Facebook.

And Sean Parker, whom Mezrich implies in “The Accidental Billionaires” may have been surreptitiously forced out of the company, is acknowledged in “The Facebook Effect” to have been a lightning rod and a liability, but also a crucial early player in the company’s success whom Zuckerberg “continues to this day periodically to consult” on business matters.

There’s also no comment in “The Facebook Effect” from the founders of Twitter, which Facebook attempted to acquire in a $500 million stock deal that Twitter subsequently turned down and which certainly influenced a handful of Facebook product development decisions in late 2008 and early 2009 (both of which Kirkpatrick details in the book).

“I’m not sure if David had any questions for us regarding this project or if he was interested in talking to anyone here at Twitter,” co-founder Biz Stone told CNET in an e-mail. “I’ve not personally spoken with him.”

To an extent this is commentary on Kirkpatrick’s part on what really matters to Facebook’s history: Interpret it as his way of saying that Twitter’s alleged rivalry to Facebook, as well as the ConnectU kerfuffle, were drops in the bucket compared to the ways in which the company is affecting international affairs, global communications, and the public’s interaction with the digital world.

But it would have been useful and added a bit of color to hear from Facebook’s critics and rivals, particularly if the intent of this book is to be a complete account of the company’s early days. Neither Kirkpatrick nor representatives of Facebook were available for comment.

That’s not to say that “The Facebook Effect” whitewashes Zuckerberg’s rebellious streak. He’s still, proudly, the captain of a pirate ship (a phrase that Kirkpatrick uses).

He still hacked into Harvard servers to launch his controversial “Facemash” project in college, carried business cards that read “I’m CEO…bitch,” oversaw the company’s operations out of a Palo Alto, California, “frat house” that his employees subsequently trashed over the course of a summer, and gave the middle finger to investment firm Sequoia Capital by showing up for a meeting in pajamas and giving a mock presentation.

(“It’s not a story I’m very proud of,” Zuckerberg told Kirkpatrick regarding the Sequoia incident.)

This is Zuckerberg the adventitiously crowned boy-king of the social Web, both cocky and naive, prone to pensive episodes of teeming thought as well as verbal matches armed with a fencing foil.

This is the Digital Age’s version of a globe-conquering young renegade, an Alexander the Great in Adidas sandals — but still an ultimately benevolent visionary, Kirkpatrick asserts, writing about Facebook’s disastrous handling of its Beacon advertising program in 2007 and saying that it’s a “fundamental misreading” of Zuckerberg to attribute the “poorly designed alert service” to insidious intentions on Facebook’s part.

But whatever side Kirkpatrick takes, at its core “The Facebook Effect” is an insight not only into Facebook itself but into the complicated process behind the growing pains of a company whose roots were as amateurish as they get.

This is a story about how deals were made, how executives were hired, how internal disputes ebb and flow. It’s fascinating. It’s well-written and masterfully reported.

Still, one is left wondering if anything more sordid was missed.

© 2010 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. CNET, CNET.com and the CNET logo are registered trademarks of CBS Interactive Inc. Used by permission

Cnn: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/06/02/cnet.facebook.effect.review/index.html

Editor’s note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of “Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.” Read more of his writing at http://www.schneier.com/

(CNN) — Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn’t that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated — we knew that already — it’s that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.

In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.

Google’s system isn’t unique. Democratic governments around the world — in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example — are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.

Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.

Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

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Video: China-Google battle heats up //

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Official misuses are bad enough, but it’s the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don’t.

China’s hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won’t be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?

These risks are not merely theoretical. After September 11, the NSA built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the U.S. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn’t match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and notables such as President Clinton.

But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government: the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown — A rival political party? Organized crime? Foreign intelligence? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

And surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens and Nokia built Iran’s surveillance. U.S. companies helped build China’s electronic police state. Just last year, Twitter’s anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents, anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.

In the aftermath of Google’s announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don’t understand that their own government is on the list.

This problem isn’t going away. Every year brings more Internet censorship and control, not just in countries like China and Iran but in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and other free countries, egged on by both law enforcement trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals and by media companies trying to stop file sharers.

The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier.

CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html

Threadless() will select a limited number of Society6 artworks and put them on T-shirts that will be sold through its new “Artist Shoppe.” Some of the sales revenue goes to the original artist, who just needs to post his or her work with a free Society6 account to qualify. 

Society6 uses a newsfeed and Digg()-like group promotion to help artists get attention for their work, both in the form of eyeballs and monetary grants from generous users. It’s quite similar to the way Threadless decides what goes in its stock of T-shirts using public submissions and social voting, so the match seems appropriate. 

The Artist Shoppe is just the first of several planned collaborations between the two companies, and you can be sure the others are coming; Threadless plans to buy a significant stake in Society6, though they’ll both continue operating independently. 

The app, which works in partnership with ticket-buying websites like Fandango.com, lets users pre-order tickets for the show and then invite others to join them. Users can also post what showing they are going to on their Facebook news feed.

This is the type of campaign that is a perfect fit for social media. Not only does the ability to buy tickets without leaving Facebook make impulse ticket buys more likely, but the social aspect makes group planning that much easier.

The nice thing about the Facebook app is that you can view what types of theaters are showing the film in your area (meaning 3D, stadium seating, IMAX 3D, etc.) and you can also invite along non-Facebook friends by entering in their e-mail address.

Tickets aren’t available for pre-order at all theaters but many more will be added next week.

As we noted yesterday, movie studios are increasingly using social media — and especially Facebook — in the promotional campaigns for feature films.

Toy Story 3 has already used social media, setting up a college tour using Facebook and uploading faux-vintage toy commercials to YouTube(). What is different about this campaign is that it has a direct monetary link. This is a way that the studios can use social media to directly increase and promote ticket sales.

We hope that Disney employs this app for more of its films and that other studios take notice. What do you think about how Disney is using Facebook to sell movie tickets? Let us know!

If you love your cat so much that you can’t stand to be away from it — even for a hot second — you’re in luck: Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Inc has developed a liveblogging device for Mr. Mistoffelees and friends.

This revolutionary new toy, which was created with the help of the University of Tokyo, comes all pimped out with a camera, an acceleration sensor and a GPS, which monitors kitty’s every move, translating actions like walking, eating and sleeping into tweets. Sadly, there are only 11 fixed phrases currently available (I’m guessing, “I left a lovely hairball in your sneaker” is not among them), but Sony CSL is hoping to improve Fluffy’s conversational skills soon. 

The device fits easily onto the cat’s collar, so as to avoid hindering its movement, which means your cat can tweet all over the neighborhood. 

We’ve seen an influx of novel Twitter functions of late: tweeting trees, tweeting beds and even tweeting cows. While the tech may seem kind of, well, silly, we could see it being of use to people besides lonely cat ladies. For instance, such a collar could be exceedingly useful for zoologists and the like. 

What do you think of the tweeting cat collar? Genius or cat-astrophically ridiculous? 

[via Tech-on!]

[img credit: herefordcat]