In hopes of soothing privacy fears about radio-frequency tags on consumer products, a manufacturer of retail product labels plans to give consumers a way to dramatically cut the tags’ wireless range.
Marnlen Management Ltd. is the first RFID company to adopt the “clipped tag” technology developed in IBM Corp.’s research labs.
Marnlen will produce labels with RFID circuitry stretched across perforated paper. Consumers who buy clothing or other products with such a label can tear it like a ketchup packet, separating the tag’s radio antenna from the chip that stores product information – and thus shrinking the chip’s wireless range from several feet to a few inches.
IBM developed the clipped tag to create a compromise in the debate over RFID.
Advocates of the technology – which for now is used mainly on cases of items in warehouses, not individual products – laud its ability to speed inventory and checkout. Opponents say that because wireless chips can be read from afar, people and their purchases could be surreptitiously tracked.
RFID companies contend those fears are overstated, saying that the limited information on retail chips will make them relatively useless instruments for surveillance. Data on chips also can be encrypted.
Treo gets big plug in new Crowe movie: The acclaimed film director behind the classic “1984” television commercial that launched Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh computers will soon promote yet another gadget icon. This time, however, the marketing will be incidental, not intentional.
Palm Inc.’s Treo smart phone will play about as prominent a role that a gadget can play in Ridley Scott’s new film, “A Good Year,” according to the filmmakers.
The romantic comedy opens Friday. Russell Crowe plays an investment banker from London who winds up in Provence tending to a small vineyard he inherited.
In the film, the multipurpose phone appears dozens of times, its signature ring sounding off repeatedly. It’s used for phone calls, photos, video conferencing, e-mail and even wine selection – akin to its real-world capabilities.
Although companies typically pay thousands of dollars to get their products featured on-screen, Palm said it does not pay for its TV or movie appearances, relying instead on the Treo’s reputation.
Memorable movie and show clips online: Memorable scenes from Sony Pictures movies and television shows will be shown on a video-sharing site that the company bought in August, marking yet another effort by a traditional content producer to experiment with new forms of distribution.
At Grouper.com’s new “ScreenBites” channel, launching Thursday, movie fans will be able to watch clips such as Cuba Gooding Jr.’s “Show me the money!” scene from “Jerry Maguire” and the “You talkin’ to me?” performance by Robert De Niro from “Taxi Driver.” Visitors can embed links to those clips on their blogs as well as personal profile pages at News Corp.’s MySpace and other social-networking sites.
Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures Entertainment will also provide links for consumers to easily buy DVDs or digital downloads of the full-length shows.
“The concept obviously is to get our content in front of as many eyeballs as possible and hopefully remind those people when they see those clips, remind them of all the gems and drive them to buy that content,” said Sean Carey, executive vice president for digital services and distribution with Sony Pictures.
He said about 100 clips – each about a minute or two long – would initially be available, mostly from classics that already have memorable lines.
NBC already has partnered with another video-sharing site, YouTube.com, to distribute promotional clips for its current shows.
Summit’s summary: The Net is hot, hot, hot: Although conditions haven’t returned to the feverish levels of the dot-com boom, the Internet’s business atmosphere is clearly heating up.
The latest symptoms of the escalating exuberance bubbled up this week at an elite gathering called the Web 2.0 Summit – a 3-year-old event billed as a mere conference until the organizers renamed it this year to underscore its exclusive status.
The San Francisco shindig attracted so many movers and shakers that more than 250 Internet entrepreneurs jostled for a chance to show off their Web sites at a 90-minute session devoted to startups. The demand for on-stage presentations more than quadrupled from last year.
An advisory board winnowed this year’s field of applicants to 13 lucky startups, which paid $10,000 apiece to take center stage. Each demonstration was limited to five minutes, a constraint that required some presenters to wrap things up before they had a chance to show off all their whiz-bang technology.
“It’s a little nerve-racking, but it’s very exciting,” said Nicole Morris, who highlighted 3B.net, a London-based startup that provides tools to construct three-dimensional settings around Web pages.
Morris ended her five-minute pitch by reaching out to venture capitalists – a group of financiers that is becoming more aggressive about pursuing investment opportunities.
Through the first nine months of this year, venture capitalists had invested $455 million in Web startups, more than doubling the amount from the same time last year, according to research firm Dow Jones VentureOne.
Want to wiki it over for a week or two?: Think of it as Wikipedia for the workplace.
Intel Corp., the world’s largest computer chip maker, now wants to provide businesses with software to create blogging, wiki and news feed services to connect employees on collaborative projects.
The firm announced this week that it is partnering with five software companies that specialize in so-called “Web 2.0” tools, which allow users to easily publish and share information.
The result is SuiteTwo, a software package targeted at small- to medium-sized businesses and work groups within larger companies. It promises to help improve communications by providing one-stop shopping for the hottest Internet publishing tools.
NewsGator Technologies Inc. and SimpleFeed Inc. are providing the tools for Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, a technology for notifying users of new entries on their favorite news sites and Web journals, or blogs.
Six Apart Ltd. is providing blogging tools and Socialtext Inc. the technology for wikis, which let groups jointly add, edit and even delete documents, similar to Wikipedia’s collaborative online encyclopedia.
Rounding out the group assembled by Intel’s venture capital arm is SpikeSource Inc., which develops open-source applications.
It’s got to meet our criteria: An organization that monitors Web site privacy and e-mail practices for businesses has launched an initiative to certify advertising software as consumer-friendly and non-invasive.
The idea behind the Trusted Download Program is to create a list of acceptable applications to help companies like Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. make decisions about where to advertise and with whom to partner.
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