Cheap Thrills: Gadget Makers Bet on Budget Gear in 2009 (Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:00:00 GMT)

CES 2009 is the largest American electronics tradeshow, and it opens this week in Las Vegas. On tap: the industry's latest crop of budget gadgets, which manufacturers hope will offset an otherwise bleak economy.

  Apple Says Farewell to Macworld, Hello to the Big Time (Fri, 02 Jan 2009 05:00:00 GMT)

With Macworld 2009 around the corner, we take a look back and a look forward at the state of Apple, a company that has moved beyond cult status to become a dominant player in computers, music and mobile phones.

  Eleven Gadgets That Will Make New Year's Eve Fun (Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

From cocktail fountains to fireworks, LED Throwies and a mobile DJ rig, with a breathalyzer on hand for safety, here's all you need to add more bang to this New Year's Eve.

  12 Good Gadgets for Hard Times (Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

Which gadgets will be the most practical when times get really tough? We list 12 items that just might help you get through the economic crisis.

  Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008 (Fri, 26 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

The economy may be tanking, but innovation is alive and well.

When it came to products, incremental improvements were the name of the game this year. Phones got faster (iPhone 3G anyone?), notebooks turned into netbooks and pocket cameras went from recording standard-definition video to HD.

But the world's corporate and academic R&D labs were busy laying the foundations of some amazing future technologies in 2008. They produced concepts such as silicon chips you can swallow for personalized medicine from the inside out and a fourth fundamental element in electronic circuitry. And engineers cranked out a few less groundbreaking — but no less important — inventions, like a space-age swimsuit to help Michael Phelps slice through the water faster than a river otter on a jet ski.

Here's our countdown of what rocked our world in 2008 — and what will change yours in 2009 and beyond.

10. Flexible Displays

Flexible displays are likely to be a reality by 2010 or 2011.
Courtesy Phillip Spears

A sliver of the future can soon be tucked into your back pocket. For years, researchers have worked on thin, paperlike displays that can be folded, rolled or sewn into the sleeve of your hoodie. Flexible displays could change the way we interact with the info-universe, creating new kinds of cellphones, portable computers, e-newspapers and electronic books.

This year, the research moved from the realm of science fiction to plausible reality. With help from the U.S. Army, Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center has created a prototype for soldiers, and hopes to have the devices in field trials in the next three years. Startups like Plastic Logic and E-Ink have been developing similar technologies.

Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard announced a manufacturing breakthrough that allows the thin-film transistor arrays to be fabricated on flexible plastic materials, enabling manufacturers to "print" displays on big, newsprintlike rolls. Samsung showed off a mobile phone prototype with a flexible display that folds like a book.

Outlook: A Minority Report-style digital newspaper that you can roll up in your pocket isn't happening before 2010 at the earliest. But to quote science fiction novelist William Gibson: "The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet."

9. Edible Chips

Grandma's pillbox with the days of the week neatly marked is set to go high tech. Tiny edible chips will replace the organizer, tracking when patients take their pills (or don't) and monitoring the effects of the drugs they're taking. Proteus, a Redwood City, California, company, has created tiny chips out of silicon grains that, once swallowed, activate in the stomach. The chips send a signal to an external patch that monitors vital parameters such as heart rate, temperature, state of wakefulness or body angle.

The data is then sent to an online repository or a cellphone for the physician and the patient to track. Proteus says its chips can keep score of how patients are responding to the medication. That may be just the beginning, as the chips could improve drug delivery and even insert other kinds of health monitors inside the body. Now doctors may have a better answer to a common patient complaint — they will know exactly how it feels.

Outlook: If proven in clinical trials, edible chips could let physicians look into a patient's system in a way that could change how medicine is prescribed and how we take the drugs.

8. Speedo LZR

Michael Phelps. 2008 Olympics. Enough said. Phelps and others were able to log faster times because of Speedo's LZR swimsuit. It blends new materials and a dose of NASA rocket science to boost the speeds of elite swimmers — legally.

Viscous drag on a swimmer can be as much as 25 percent of the total retarding force. But Speedo's suit, with its ultrasonically bonded seams instead of stitches, low-drag panels and a mix of polyurethane layers, can cut resistance and help swimmers move through the water faster. It also has a rigid, girdle-style structure that helps position the swimmer's body in an optimal position. Did it have anything to do with Michael Phelps' amazing eight Olympic gold medals? Probably not, as nearly every swimmer at the Games was wearing a Speedo suit.

Outlook: We're hoping at least some of the technologies in the LZR will trickle down to the consumer level so we can slice through the water at the Y.

7. Flash Memory

When Apple blessed the iPod with flash memory, it gave new life to a technology that had long played second fiddle to hard disk drives. Now flash memory is a mainstay of most consumer electronics products, from ultralight notebooks to digital cameras and media players.

Next, the who's who of the tech industry — EMC, Sun Microsystems, Intel and Hitachi — are championing flash drives for larger business users.

The advantage? Solid-state flash drives offer faster response times than hard disk drives and they require much less power. The hitch is that they are almost eight times more expensive than hard disk drives. But with the star power behind flash storage, the prices have nowhere to go but down.

Outlook: More data centers are likely to move to flash storage in 2009, which is likely to drive prices down further. If this trend takes off, say goodbye to the hard disk drives in your house. It will be time to flash your drive.

6. GPS

The Global Positioning System is old, old, older than you think. The system has been operational since 1978 and available for commercial use since 1993, but for years its use was relegated to expensive personal navigation devices and the dashboards of high-end cars.

This year, suddenly GPS popped up everywhere else, from the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to notebooks such as Fujitsu's LifeBook series.

And devices that couldn't or didn't include true GPS made do with cell-tower triangulation or geolocation based on Wi-Fi hotspots. Now getting lost is no longer an option.

Outlook: With widespread GPS capabilities throughout the gadget world, services that make use of geographic data, like Loopt and Yahoo's Firebird, will be able to build critical mass.

5. The Memristor

It's not often that a fundamental tech breakthrough has the potential to change how we compute. Nearly 37 years after it was first described in a series of mathematical equations, researchers at HP Labs proved that the fourth fundamental element of electronic circuitry is for real. The "memristor," or memory transistor, now joins the three other widely known elements: the capacitor, the resistor and the inductor.

The discovery will make it possible to develop computer systems that remember what's stored in memory when they are turned off. That means computers that don't need to be booted up and systems that are far more energy efficient than the current crop. Researchers also hope the memristor can help develop a new kind of computer memory that can supplement or ultimately replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — the type of memory used in personal computers.

Outlook: Memristors are still primarily confined to the lab, so don't expect commercial products based on this kind of circuitry for at least five years.

4. Video-Capable SLRs

Video-capable SLRs will meld high-def moving and still images.
Courtesy of Nikon

For years, high-end single-lens reflex cameras have been unable to do what even $100 pocket cams can do: Shoot video. That's because of the type of imaging chip used by SLRs.

This year, the camera industry overcame that limitation. Two new cameras, the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D Mark II capture top-notch still images, but let the photographer to shoot high-definition video. No longer do SLR users have to stand by, while friends mock them for their expensive camera's inability to shoot video.

Outlook: Shooting high-def videos with an SLR is cheap compared to using professional video equipment — and it gives photographers access to a wide range of lenses. In 2009, we predict this will lead to an explosion in arty, high-def videos shot by professional still photographers.

3. USB 3.0

Fasten your seatbelts. The data-transfer freeway is set to turn into an autobahn. The Universal Serial Bus, or USB, a popular standard for transferring files to your PC or charging your iPhone, got its first major update in eight years. USB 3.0 will be 10 times faster than the current USB 2.0 standard, and will increase the amount of electrical current that can be delivered through a USB cable.

Users need the increased speed — 4.8 gigabits per second, to be precise. Digital cameras and pocket-size HD video recorders generate a torrent of bits, all of which need to be transferred quickly to computers, so they can be uploaded to YouTube, adding to the internet video that only a handful of people will ever watch.

And as consumers carry around more devices, charging them off a PC using a USB cable will be much easier than carrying multiple chargers. With the USB 3.0 specifications nailed down this year, the standard will bump up the power output to 900 milliamps from 100 milliamps, allowing more devices to be charged faster.

Outlook: We expect the earliest USB 3.0 products in mid-2009.

2. Android

Handset makers from Motorola to Sony Ericsson are rushing to add Android to their lineup.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com

There were many reasons to dislike the T-Mobile HTC G1 phone: its color, poor battery life and a touchscreen that isn't super-responsive. And the numbers reflect that. Only about 1.5 million units of the G1 have been sold since its October 2008 launch. Compare that to the 3 million iPhones that sold when it debuted.

But the G1 scores with its operating system. It runs Android, the free mobile operating system from Google. It's the first mobile OS to make its debut in years and the G1 is just the first of what will be many phones that use it. With its open source base, growing developer community and dozens of cellphone manufacturers pledging to make Android phones, Android has the potential to reshape the wireless industry in significant ways.

Outlook: At least half a dozen manufacturers are likely to release Android phones in 2009, increasing the pressure on other smartphone operating systems. The iPhone is likely to remain the top-selling smartphone through the end of the year, however.

1. Apple's App Store

Until this year, mobile app developers lacked an easy way to get their software into the hands of consumers, forcing them to make deals with finicky and power-hungry carriers if they wanted to get any distribution at all. Apple's App Store changed all that. It made creating and distributing mobile applications for cellphone users easy — jumpstarting the mobile-app development market and creating clones such as the Android Market. It even forced Research in Motion to offer a BlackBerry Application Storefront. For thousands of programmers, the cellphone is the new PC.

Outlook: App stores have changed forever the way we use our phones, turning them into personalized devices filled with utilities, handy tools and copies of Tap Tap Revenge.

  USB Stake Helps Brown Thumbs Turn Green, Monitors Soil Conditions (Thu, 25 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

This little gizmo tells you what plants will do well in your little patch of earth (and what you're doing wrong if they're not). It measures soil conditions, sunlight, temp and humidity, and checks your data against an online database. You still have to water the plants you stick in the ground or plunk on your windowsill.

  ISP Ad Snooper Phorm Loses Top Execs (Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:32:00 GMT)

Two top executives from the British web snooping firm Phorm resigned Wednesday. The move adds to the woes facing ad-serving companies that want to install web tracking technology inside ISPs in order to profile every move users make on the web.

  Build It. Share It. Profit. Can Open Source Hardware Work? (Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:00:00 GMT)

Check this out," Massimo Banzi says. The burly, bearded engineer wanders over to inspect a chipmaking robot—a "pick and place" machine the size of a pizza oven. It hums with activity, grabbing teensy electronic parts and stabbing them into position on a circuit board like a hyperactive chicken pecking for seeds. We're standing in a one-room fabrication factory used by Arduino, the Italian firm that makes this circuit board, a hot commodity among DIY gadget-builders. The electronics factory is one of the most picturesque in existence, nestled in the medieval foothills of Milan, with birdsong floating in through the open doors and plenty of coffee breaks for the white-coated staff. But today Banzi is all business. He's showing off his operation to a group of potential customers from Arizona. Banzi scoops up one of the boards and points to the tiny map of Italy emblazoned on it. "See? Italian manufacturing quality!" he says, laughing. "That's why everyone likes us!" Indeed, 50,000 Arduino units have been sold worldwide since mass production began two years ago. Those are small numbers by Intel standards but large for a startup outfit in a highly specialized market. What's really remarkable, though, is Arduino's business model: The team has created a company based on giving everything away. On its Web site, it posts all its trade secrets for anyone to take—all the schematics, design files, and software for the Arduino board. Download them and you can manufacture an Arduino yourself; there are no patents. You can send the plans off to a Chinese factory, mass-produce the circuit boards, and sell them yourself — pocketing the profit without paying Banzi a penny in royalties. He won't sue you. Actually, he's sort of hoping you'll do it.

That's because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use, modify, or sell. Banzi and his team have spent precious billable hours making the thing, and they sell it themselves for a small profit — while allowing anyone else to do the same. They're not alone in this experiment. In a loosely coordinated movement, dozens of hardware inventors around the world have begun to freely publish their specs. There are open source synthesizers, MP3 players, guitar amplifiers, and even high-end voice-over-IP phone routers. You can buy an open source mobile phone to talk on, and a chip company called VIA has just released an open source laptop: Anyone can take its design, fabricate it, and start selling the notebooks.

Banzi admits that the concept does sound insane. After all, Arduino assumes a lot of risk; the group spends thousands of dollars to make a batch of boards. "If you publish all your files, in one sense, you're inviting the competition to come and kill you," he says, shrugging.

Then again, Linux sounded pretty insane, too, back in 1991, when Linus Torvalds announced it. Nobody believed a bunch of part-time volunteers could create something as complex as an operating system, or that it would be more stable than Windows. Nobody believed Fortune 500 companies would trust software that couldn't be "owned." Yet 17 years later, the open source software movement has been crucial to the Cambrian explosion of the Web economy. Linux enabled Google to build dirt-cheap servers; Java and Perl and Ruby have become the lingua franca for building Web 2.0 applications; and the free Web-server software Apache powers nearly half of all Web sites in the world. Open source software gave birth to the Internet age, making everyone—even those who donated their labor—better off.

Can open source hardware do the same thing?

Every open source project begins with an itch that needs scratching. Linux was launched when Torvalds decided he didn't like the operating systems available to him. The top three—Microsoft's DOS, Apple's operating system, and Unix—were all expensive and they were closed; Torvalds wanted a system he could tinker with. As it happened, a lot of other geeks wanted the same thing. So when Torvalds began working on Linux and sharing his code, other hackers were willing to pitch in and help improve it for free—creating a virtual workforce that was infinitely bigger and smarter than Torvalds himself. That is the central benefit of open source projects: They're like a barn raising in which everyone gets to use the barn. Somebody has a problem and creates a tool to solve it. And once the tool is created, hey—why not share it? The hard work has already been done. Might as well let others benefit.

Team Arduino: Gianluca Martino, Massimo Banzi, and David Cuartielles
Photo: James Day

Arduino began the same way. Banzi was a teacher at a high tech design school in Ivrea, Italy, and his students often complained they couldn't find an inexpensive, powerful microcontroller to drive their arty robotic projects. In winter 2005, Banzi was discussing the problem with David Cuartielles, a Spanish microchip engineer who was a visiting researcher at the school. The two decided to design their own board and enlisted one of Banzi's students—David Mellis—to write the programming language for it. In two days, Mellis banged out the code; three days more and the board was complete. They called it the Arduino, after a nearby pub, and it was an instant hit with the students. Almost anyone, even if they didn't know anything about computer programming, could use an Arduino to do something cool, like respond to sensors, make lights blink, or control motors. Then Banzi, Cuartielles, and Mellis put the schematics online and spent 3,000 euros to make the first batch of boards.

"We did 200 copies, and my school bought 50," Banzi says. "We had no idea how we'd sell the other 150. We didn't think we would." But word spread to hobbyists worldwide, and a few months later there were orders for hundreds more Arduinos. Turns out there was a market for this thing.

So the Arduino inventors decided to start a business, but with a twist: The designs would stay open source. Because copyright law—which governs open source software—doesn't apply to hardware, they decided to use a Creative Commons license called Attribution-Share Alike. It governs the "reference designs" for the Arduino board, the files you'd send to a fabrication plant to have the boards made.

Under the Creative Commons license, anyone is allowed to produce copies of the board, to redesign it, or even to sell boards that copy the design. You don't need to pay a license fee to the Arduino team or even ask permission. However, if you republish the reference design, you have to credit the original Arduino group. And if you tweak or change the board, your new design must use the same or a similar Creative Commons license to ensure that new versions of the Arduino board will be equally free and open.

The only piece of intellectual property the team reserved was the name Arduino, which it trademarked. If anyone wants to sell boards using that name, they have to pay a small fee to Arduino. This, Cuartielles and Banzi say, is to make sure their brand name isn't hurt by low-quality copies.

Members of the team had slightly different motives for opening the design of their device. Cuartielles—who sports a mass of wiry, curly hair and a Che Guevara beard—describes himself as a left-leaning academic who's less interested in making money than in inspiring creativity and having his invention used widely. If other people make copies of it, all the better; it will gain more renown. ("When I spoke in Taiwan recently, I told them, 'Please copy this!'" Cuartielles says with a grin.) Banzi, by contrast, is more of a canny businessman; he has mostly retired from teaching and runs a high tech design firm. But he suspected that if Arduino were open, it would inspire more interest and more free publicity than a piece of proprietary, closed hardware. What's more, excited geeks would hack it and—like Linux fans—contact the Arduino team to offer improvements. They would capitalize on this free work, and every generation of the board would get better.

Sure enough, that's what happened. Within months, geeks suggested wiring changes and improvements to the programming language. One distributor offered to sell the boards. By 2006, Arduino had sold 5,000 units; the next year, it sold 30,000. Hobbyists used them to create robots, to fine-tune their car engines for ultrahigh mileage, and to build unmanned model airplanes. Several quirky companies emerged. A firm called Botanicalls developed an Arduino-powered device that monitors house plants and phones you when they need to be watered.

In one sense, Arduino's timing was perfect. There's a resurgence of DIY among geeks interested in hacking and improving hardware, fueled by ever-cheaper electronics they can buy online, build-it-yourself publications like Make magazine, and Web sites like Instructables. In recent years, hackers have been aggressively cracking consumer devices to improve them—adding battery life to iPhones, installing bigger hard drives on TiVos, and ripping apart Furby toys and reprogramming them to function as motion-sensing alarm bots. Inexpensive chip-reading tools make it possible to reverse-engineer almost anything. That's how Chinese hardware copycats rip off products so quickly.

This is the unacknowledged fact underpinning the open hardware movement: Hardware is already open. Even when inventors try to keep the guts of their gadgets secret, they can't. So why not actively open those designs and try to profit from the inevitable?

"Apple never open-sourced the iPod, right? But if you go down to Canal Street in Manhattan, there are copies all over the place," says Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, a Manhattan company that makes and sells open source hardware ranging from the Arduino board to devices Fried designs herself. "It doesn't matter anymore whether your product is open source. Someone in another country is going to open it up and reverse-engineer it anyway."

The open source Arduino circuit board is cheaper than non-open source microcontrollers.

Like the Arduino team, Fried has found that when people have access to the plans of her inventions, they suggest improvements; they almost can't help themselves. In 2006, when Fried released the design for MintyBoost—an Altoids tin crammed with AA batteries you can use to recharge your MP3 player or phone—some users complained on her forum that it wouldn't charge their devices. Other posters jumped in to analyze the problems and devise fixes; some even sketched out replacement circuitry. (MintyBoost is now Fried's most popular invention; she has sold 8,000 of the gadgets for about $20 each.) In essence, her customers are also her tech support—available 24/7, at no cost to her.

"But how do you make any money?" Whenever Banzi or Cuartielles describe their Arduino strategy, they're inevitably asked this question. And it's a genuine puzzle, because open source hardware isn't quite like open source software. Software costs almost nothing to reproduce; Torvalds didn't need to spend money every time someone downloaded a copy of Linux. But the Arduino team has to pay to produce its boards before it can sell them. Under traditional economic logic, this requires a patent; nobody is going to risk money inventing and selling hardware unless they can prevent competitors from immediately ripping off their designs and pouncing on their market. So how do you make money in a world of open hardware?

Right now, open design pioneers tend to follow one of two economic models. The first is not to worry about selling much hardware but instead to sell your expertise as the inventor. If anyone can manufacture a device, then the most efficient manufacturer will do so at the best price. Fine, let them. It'll ensure your contraption is widely distributed. Because you're the inventor, though, the community of users will inevitably congregate around you, much as Torvalds was the hub for Linux. You will always be the first to hear about cool improvements or innovative uses for your device. That knowledge becomes your most valuable asset, which you can sell to anyone.

This is precisely how the Arduino team works. It makes little off the sale of each board—only a few dollars of the $35 price, which gets rolled into the next production cycle. But the serious income comes from clients who want to build devices based on the board and who hire the founders as consultants.

"Basically, what we have is the brand," says Tom Igoe, an associate professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, who joined Arduino in 2005. "And brand matters."

What's more, the growing Arduino community performs free labor for the consultants. Clients of Banzi's design firm often want him to create Arduino-powered products. For example, one client wanted to control LED arrays. Poking around online, Banzi found that someone in France had already published Arduino code that did the job. Banzi took the code and was done.

Then there's the second model for making money off open source hardware: Sell your device but try to keep ahead of the competition. This isn't as hard as it seems. Last year, Arduino noticed that copycat versions of its board made in China and Taiwan were being sold online. Yet sales through the main Arduino store were still increasing dramatically. Why?

Arduino gadgets: WineM coaster; Snail Light Seeker; interactive embroidery with conductive threads; and Botanicalls, which tells you when your plants need water.
Photos: James Day

Partly because many Asian knockoffs were poor quality, rife with soldering errors and flimsy pin connections. The competition created a larger market but also ensured that the original makers stayed a generation ahead of the cheap imitations. Merely having the specs for a product doesn't mean a copycat will make a quality item. That takes skill, and the Arduino team understood its device better than just about anyone else. "So the copycats can actually turn out to be good for our business," Igoe says.

NYC Resistor,a club for hardware hackers in Brooklyn, looks like a madscientists' lab, strewn with motorized doll parts, hot-rodded electric guitars, and Tupperware containers crammed full of electronic junk. I'm here to meet with Raphael Abrams, a cofounder of the group. Abrams, 33, is well known in open source hardware circles for developing the Daisy, an open MP3 player. It earned him so much acclaim that he now works more or less full-time designing open projects and customizing audio hardware for other businesses, including hunting companies that hire him to develop duck and deer calls. ("I'm the go-to guy for digital animal-caller designs," he says. "It's the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.")

Abrams is deep in conversation with Alicia Gibb, a grad student who hacks hardware in her spare time. She's talking about a matchbox-sized widget that museums use to monitor humidity and temperature in their galleries. It's made by Masterpak and retails for $115 (similar devices can cost $400). A single institution might need hundreds of them, so it's a lucrative little market.

But as Abrams and Gibb pick apart the gadget, they realize that the price carries a huge markup.

"This is worth about $15 in parts," Abrams says, whistling as he pokes at the tiny electronics board inside. "It has a really cheap low-end chip. And they charge $400 for this? Someone is getting robbed." He tosses it on the table. "You could sell it for $80."

Gibb gets a playful look in her eye. "I'm gonna do an open source version of this thing," she says. "Wait a minute," I say. "That means any museum will be able to take your free design and fabricate copies itself? Or someone who isn't even an inventor—like me—could send your design to a Chinese factory, produce a couple of thousand devices for $20 apiece, and sell them to museums for $50?"

"Sure," she says, grinning.

I hear the sound of a thousand business models crumbling.

If Gibb actually pulls this off without violating any patents, the company that makes the overpriced widget is in for a shock. No more easy profits based on the obscurity of its intellectual property. It will immediately have to offer a better product or improved service—or risk going out of business.

This may be destruction—but it's creative destruction. Business models will crumble, sure, but others will be born. Open source methods illustrate a hard, cold fact about hardware: It's increasingly becoming a commodity. It is not merely that China has massively decreased the price of producing goods. It's that the price of designing goods is dropping through the floor. As Eric von Hippel, an MIT professor of entrepreneurship, points out, that drop is the result of the emergence of cheap or free tools for chipmaking, 3-D modeling, and online collaboration.

"In a sense, hardware is becoming much more like software, up to the point where you actually fabricate an object," von Hippel says. "That's why you're starting to see open source techniques in hardware. Design is largely going to shift out from manufacturers to the communities."

To thrive in this next wave, hardware manufacturers will have to switch their thinking. Their job is no longer just to dream up ideas—it's equally important, maybe even more vital, to seek out innovations from users. Manufacturers used to have to guess what their customers want, but the customers already know what they want, so it's more efficient to have them design it. The value of manufacturers isn't in cool designs but in economies of scale: They produce high-quality objects cheaply or offer superb shopping and support experience.

I can't help but think there are limits to this. Passionate amateurs can create an MP3 player or a synthesizer. But what about a jet engine? Or a car? To pass regulatory tests, these products require expensive laboratory equipment, like wind tunnels for car shapes and airplane parts, or crash labs. That can't be accomplished by a bunch of loosely connected designers surfing on their laptops in a Starbucks.

Yochai Benkler isn't so sure. The Harvard professor and author of The Wealth of Networks predicts that smart commercial firms will share resources with open source communities. "If you want to design a car in an open source way, maybe you'll work with a corporation that has access to an expensive wind tunnel," he says. This sort of cooperation has become common for open source software. IBM and Sun Microsystems pay staff members to contribute to Linux because it's in the companies' interest to have the software grow more powerful, even if competitors benefit.

Consider the WRT54G wireless router made by Linksys. It was released in 2002 as a simple $150 router for home use. But hobbyists quickly discovered that its firmware—the software that determines the device's abilities—was based on Linux and thus legally open source. Within months, hackers had written new code that gave the device radically new features: They boosted the antenna power, turned it into a signal repeater, and constructed self-healing neighborhood mesh networks. Most of these capabilities are normally found only in devices that cost 10 times as much. Suddenly, the WRT54G market expanded. Based on the free work of amateurs, the router is now one of Linksys' all-time best-selling products.

Mani Dhillon, director of product marketing for Linksys, says the hacking has boosted the router's sales by opening up new uses. "It's a pretty strong and vocal community," he says. "We definitely credit a certain amount of the success to them."

Still, while open source hardware may be exciting, it's also confusing—even terrifying. Pioneers in the field admit they have no idea how to make the jump from small boutique hardware to mass-market devices. Banzi occasionally wonders whether he is simply being a fool by giving away some of his best work on the Arduino.

"If the Arduino chip gets bigger and better and more well known, someone in China will make it for 50 percent less. That is clear," Banzi says over dinner at a late-night Milanese restaurant famous for its coastal Italian cuisine. He stabs at his enormous bowl of orecchiette and sips some red wine, half smiling, half wincing as he imagines his work being plundered by a cut-rate offshore outfit.

"I think there's a fine line," he says, sighing, "between open source and stupidity."

It's possible that open source hardware buffs will ultimately focus not on competing with the for-profit world but in filling niches otherwise ignored.

That's what David Rowe did. Rowe is an Australian engineer who founded and then sold an Internet telephone business. He decided he wanted to help the developing world produce low-cost, high-quality telephone routers. He wanted something that would allow a company to plug in cheap, old-fashioned analog phones and place calls on inexpensive voice-over-IP networks.

"It's a huge need in Africa, but all the hardware that currently does this is, like, $2,000 a pop," Rowe says. "African companies can't afford that." He wanted to design a device many times cheaper than that, but no existing phone-router company was interested in servicing such a low-margin market.

Rowe didn't think he could do it alone, so he organized it as an open source project. In 2005, he found a cheap chip that managed voice and data, and he wrote software for it. Sure enough, once he put the schematics online, word spread and interested hackers in Canada and Bulgaria began offering improvements. Some optimized the software; others figured out how to tweak the hardware to handle extra phone lines or how to collapse the box into a single super-powered phone line.

"We'd get stuck on a problem, and I'd hop on instant messenger and talk to the other guys and say, 'What's going on here?' I discovered that the community can figure it out a lot more quickly than I can," Rowe says.

When the time came to manufacture the device, Rowe didn't know how to find a factory. But it turns out he didn't need to. Early last year, he received a message from a Chinese firm saying it had read about the project and was interested in producing it for him. A few weeks later, the routers arrived in the mail and worked practically perfectly. Rowe commissioned the plant to begin making batches of 50. He was able to keep the unit price down to $450 and still turn a small profit on each one. By summer 2008, he had sold a few hundred of them.

As you'd expect, Chinese competitors have already begun to manufacture routers that compete with Rowe's. He doesn't care; on the contrary, he's happy about it, because his primary goal for the devices is for them to be as cheap as possible, and fierce competition will accomplish this faster. (He and his competitors also share advice on how to improve the hardware.) A group of high tech consultants have begun selling support services to anyone who buys the router. Ideally, Rowe would like to see factories in African countries manufacture the routers, since this would bypass the punishing tariffs that make importing hardware so expensive for Africans.

Meanwhile, Rowe has become a star in high tech international-development circles, getting flown around to speak at conferences. "There's no way I would have gotten this far—and so quickly—had it been closed," he says. "This would have been a typical $4 million or $5 million startup if we had done it the usual way." Rowe isn't sure how the project will evolve. Will he wind up getting outcompeted, pushed out of business? Will some major hardware company offer to make the product on a massive scale?

"A lot of people got scared when I told them I was going to do this open. They were like, 'Is this going to work?'" Rowe says.

His answer: "I'm not sure."

Contributing editor Clive Thompson (clive@clivethompson.net) wrote about the making of Halo 3 in issue 15.09.

  The Hungry Scientist Handbook: A Lab in Every Kitchen (Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:00:00 GMT)

Think your kitchen is just a food production/consumption facility? Luddite. Equipped with running water, open flame, and a versatile array of tools and chemicals, it's perfect for testing out ideas and assembling inventions. "If you have an experimental-science attitude," says Patrick Buckley, "the kitchen is your home laboratory." Buckley, an MIT grad and mechanical engineer, along with Lily Binns and a few other co-chefs have compiled their (sometimes) edible experiments into a book called The Hungry Scientist Handbook. Here are a few of our favorite dishes. Bon appè9tit ... and always wear safety goggles.

Edible Undies

Fashioned out of heated sugar and milk, this lip-smacking lingerie will spice up the end of any meal. Further impress your sweetie with a lesson on the Maillard reaction: The carbs in the sugar combine with the amino acids in the protein molecules of the milk to create toasty goodness. The browning on meat, the crust on bread, the roast on coffee — all the result of the Maillard reaction. Smoldering!

Smart Coasters

Contributors Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman devised this solar-powered, heat-sensitive coaster that lights up on contact with hot (red) and cold (blue) libations. Just add methyl ethyl ketone peroxide catalyst (careful, it's explosive) and a can of polyester casting resin to the shopping list for your next cocktail party. No doubt you already own the necessary diodes, solvents, and soldering tools. Tip: Resin is like bacon grease; if you pour it down the sink, it'll clog.

Wonton Origami

A little digital dexterity is all you need to make these attractive, crunchy cranes out of wonton wrappers. You can microwave your flock for a quick-'n'-easy snack, but they'll taste a little bland. For a more satisfying oily goodness, toss them in the deep fryer. Once you've perfected your folding skills, see what other flyers you can make. X-wing wonton, anyone?

Pomegranate Wine

Yeast + sugar = booze. Every self-respecting kitchen chemist should be able to implement this crucial piece of alchemy. (It's also a boon if you ever find yourself in jail — stuff your pockets with Fleischmann's before you're sent up.) This recipe uses antioxidant-rich pomegranates, but pretty much any fruit juice will work. Just don't expect to get soused immediately: Fermentation, distillation, and aging can take a month or more.

Salt and Pepper Scooter

The Hungry Scientist crew eat at a very long table laden with comestibles and, at times, combustibles. It's so lengthy, in fact, that passing the salt and pepper got to be a bit of a chore. To expedite matters, they epoxied the shakers to a modified windup car. Now, instead of passing the salt, the salt passes you!

  Times Square Gets Ready to Ring in 2009 (Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

: Photo: Jesse Quinn

New York City is hard at work getting ready for the countdown to 2009. About 1.6 million people shuffle in and out of Times Square every day, but on Wednesday night, they'll all be there at the same time, along with Ryan Seacrest and over a ton of confetti.

Wired.com took a behind-the-scenes tour of the preparations.

Left: Close-up of Billy Elliot sign above Times Square.

Manhattan's Theater District came to be known as "The Great White Way" because of all of bright lights on the area's theater marquees. Today, most signs are powered by LED lights, which are both brighter and more energy-efficient.

A video feed of the night's events, sponsored by Countdown Entertainment, will be beamed onto the many screens in the square. Each sign will display different advertising spots during commercial breaks.

Controls for the Spectravision sign sit atop the ninth floor of the W hotel on 47th Street. Clear Channel owns the rights to the space above the building, which explains why the structure is accessible only by a series of ladders and sits on concrete blocks to avoid directly touching the W property.

Together with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Disney Corporation helped turn Times Square from a rather shady part of town into a major tourist hub. New buildings facing the square are now required by law to boast illuminated signage, and the density of neon in the area rivals the Las Vegas Strip.

Spectravision has been experimenting with interactive games, live feeds and Bluetooth all year. The company also coordinated a live broadcast of CNN?s election-night coverage into the square, which ran into trouble when President-elect Barack Obama?s acceptance speech ran past midnight. ?We lost the feed for three minutes,? says Dale Langdon, systems engineer at D3 LED. ?When we got it back up, I could hear the cheers from the street up in the control booth with the door closed.?

The first LED billboard was installed in Times Square in 1999. It was composed of mostly red and green lights, because blue bulbs were then prohibitively expensive. As the price of LED lights has gone down, their efficiency and resolution have increased exponentially. Today's signs have 25 times the resolution of that first billboard.

Every day, the Spectravision HD sign on 47th Street displays a live video feed of the opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange. That video feed is monitored on this 3-by-5-inch screen in the control room.

This year, Mars Snackfood is promoting its 3 Musketeers Mint brand by collecting "wishes" that will be written on pieces of confetti and showered down on Times Square at midnight. Individuals can submit wishes in person at the Times Square Information Center or online.

?No advertiser in Times Square wants to be an also-ran,? says Meric Adriansen, managing partner of systems and engineering at D3 LED. Each new sign in the square has some form of bragging rights, he says. The Walgreens signage, completed in November, is the largest outdoor-advertising space in the world. The sign wraps three sides of the building where the ball drops every year, featuring a 17-story continuous display of video and animation produced by 12 million LEDs and numerous giant plasma video screens.

A 30-second animation takes about 150 gigabytes of bandwidth to deploy on the signs outside. "That's like emptying out five iPods every 30 seconds," says Jason Barak, managing partner of sales and marketing at D3 LED.

The 2009 ball is double the size of last year's, weighing in at 11,875 pounds. It is covered in 2,668 Waterford crystals and powered by 32,256 Philips Luxeon Rebel LEDs. For those worried about the energy efficiency of an illuminated, 12-foot geodesic sphere, this year's ball uses more than three times the number of LEDs of the 2008 ball, but will be 10-to-20 percent more energy efficient.

  Playlist: Animation Verite, YouTube's 'Final Countdown,' Animal Collective (Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT)

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To explore his grim experiences as an Israeli soldier during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, director Ari Folman eschews the standard tropes of war documentaries (talking heads, vintage newsreel footage) and instead deploys an innovative and far more engaging genre: animation vérité. With a budget of less than $2 million, Folman and a team of animators churned out 3,200 hand-drawn illustrations and used Flash—a staple technique for YouTube videos—to translate the harrowing accounts and haunting memories into a powerful, disturbing alloy of the real and unreal.

The laws of rock 'n' roll typically allow artists just one sprawling, arty, hash-hazy album. Animal Collective, headed up by Baltimore-bred experimental musician Panda Bear, has churned out two ear-bending efforts in less than two years: late 2007's Strawberry Jam and Merriweather now. With soaring harmonies, twinkling keyboards, and funky hand-claps, it's avant-garde you can almost cuddle with.

It's a busy time for Wired writers. Contributor Brian Raftery's Don't Stop Believin': How Karaoke Conquered the World and Saved My Life reminds us that belting out tunes with all your heart can be fun, wrenching, and ultimately very satisfying. In Arcade Mania, Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow tour the innovative, sometimes bizarre, and never dull world of Japanese game centers. And Steven Johnson recounts how scientist Joseph Priestley put a mint plant in a jar and discovered oxygen in The Invention of Air.

As science geeks, we first loved the novelty of these wines from Washington state vintner Substance, with labels inspired by the periodic table of elements (just like Wired's Play section IDs). But the actual wine appeals to our more bacchanalian side: The syrah (Sy) is rich, spicy, and not too fruity, tasting as smart as it looks.

How much energy do you really use? Your electric bill isn't especially, uh, illuminating. WattzOn lets you create a personal energy- consumption report (right down to what it took to make the books on your nightstand) and see how you stack up against the site's other users. You can then take steps to cut back, tracking the results along the way.

The '80s track "The Final Countdown" by Europe was a paragon of dopey arena-rock bombast, which makes YouTube's current glut of bedroom-shot covers all the more delightfully absurd. Stuart Crout's "kazookeylele" (kazoo, piano, ukulele) version is by far the most badass. The two-hand-band fart-alongs and SpongeBob mashups turn the awesome up to 11.

Spending the holiday season cursing at hard-to-open packages didn't exactly make our yuletide bright. That's why we're stoked about Amazon's "frustration-free packaging" effort. The etailer is urging manufacturers to wrap products in fewer materials and make them easier to open. (What will comedians complain about now?) For videos of particularly egregious packages, see the Gallery of Wrap Rage at amazon.com/frustration.

We held tight during the writers' strike and after that what the frak?! midseason cliff-hanger last summer. On January 16, the final batch of Battlestar episodes finally hit the Sci Fi Channel for what's sure to be a bittersweet 10-week swan song. Things we will learn: The identity of the final Cylon, why Earth resembles an apocalyptic wasteland, and the fate of everyone's favorite ragtag fleet.

Carrying your little one Swedish-style is so last century. Instead of a BabyBjörn, today's savvy parents tote their tots in the American-designed Ergobaby. It balances the munchkin's weight across your hips rather than your back and lets you lug kids (up to 40 pounds!) in front, on the side, or behind. Of course, no carrier can eliminate a child-induced pain in the neck...

It's tough to steal the iPhone's thunder, but RIM has managed to rain on Apple's parade with the Storm. Sure this device has multifinger touch like the Jesus Phone, but it trumps Cupertino's wunderkind with cut-and-paste functionality, a 3.2-megapixel cam, and zero input ambiguity—you physically click the screen like a mouse button whenever you type or select an app.

  Top 10 New Organisms of 2008 (Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

: Photo: Carlton Ward/Smithsonian Institution

The world's smallest snake, a prehistoric ant and microbes that may be 120,000 years old: These are just a few of the species revealed to the world in the last 12 months.

With animals going extinct at rates unseen since the dinosaurs disappeared, it's nice to be reminded that some species haven't even been discovered.

As Smithsonian Institute ornithologist Brian Schmidt said after finding the olive-backed forest robin: "It is definitely a reminder that the world still holds surprises for us."

Left: Stiphrornis pyrrholaeumus, also known as the olive-backed forest robin, was found during a biodiversity expedition in Gabon. Scientists know little more about S. pyrrholaeumus other than it exists.

Leptotyphlops carlae was found in a patch of forest on the eastern side of Barbados. Thin as a spaghetti noodle and small enough to curl up on a quarter, it's believed to embody the evolutionary limits of snake smallness.

Only three specimens of Martialis heureka have been found, all outside the Amazon jungle city of Manaus — but that's all scientists needed to trace a direct evolutionary lineage to the last known ancestor of all living ants, a subterranean creature that lived 120 million years ago.

The first new elephant shrew in 126 years, the 18-ounce Rhynchocyon udzungwensis — also called the grey-faced sengi — is a giant in its family (which, technically, are not shrews, though they are distantly related to elephants).

Video: Trevor Jones/Anglia Ruskin University

Undiscovered parasites are relatively common, but Myrmeconema neotropicum does something no other parasite can: mimic fruit. The abdomens of infected ants swell and turn bright red, making them easy targets for berry-hungry birds who then spread M. neotropicum's eggs in their droppings.

Carpomys melanurus, or the greater dwarf cloud rat, was first observed 112 years ago, and never seen again. Until it was found again in the rain-forest treetops of the Philippines, scientists thought it was extinct.

Tridacna costata is the first giant clam species found in two decades, and not a moment too soon: Fossil evidence suggests it once made up 80 percent of Red Sea giant clams, and now accounts for just 1 percent.

When Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences collection manager Mark Sabaj Pérez needed to name a new catfish, he thought immediately of Frank Gallagher, who managed the Academy's mail room for 37 years.

"I wanted to honor Frank for his many years of dedicated service to the global community of taxonomists and systematists in handling the shipping and receiving of countless loans of biological specimens," said Pérez. "I was impressed by Frank's dedication, his love for fellow employees, and his keen interest in the science we do. I simply thought, here is a guy who should be honored with his own catfish." The result was Rhinodoras gallagheri.

Photo: Mark Sabaj Pérez/Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences

When biologists in New Zealand compared modern yellow-eyed penguins to centuries-old museum specimens, they realized that the birds were not the same species. Megadyptes waitaha is a brand-new species that's already extinct.

With only 8,000 of an estimated 3 million bacterial species identified, new bugs aren't hard to find. But unlike Chryseobacterium greenlandensis, they don't usually date from the late Pleistocene.

Thawed from ice recovered two miles below the surface of a 120,000-year-old Greenland glacier, C. greenlandensis appears unchanged by its time in deep-freeze. Its discoverers aren't sure whether it shut down or just slowed down its metabolism.

"There may be some metabolism occurring in the ice. If they have been dividing, it may be on a very low rate, on a scale we're not accustomed to — so slow, they could be dividing every 100 or 1,000 years," said Penn State biochemist Jennifer Loveland-Curtze.

Asked whether her samples may not have divided at all, and have survived in suspended animation for 120,000 years, Loveland-Curtze replied, "We don't know yet."

And there's more: 120,000 years could be the low end of C. greenlandensis' age.

"The bottom of the ice core had sediment where the glacier had rubbed against the earth," said Jean Brenchley, a Penn State microbiologist. "We don't know if the microorganisms were from snow that was deposited and became trapped, or were scooped up from the permafrost and there for millions of years."

Photo: Jean Brenchley/Penn State

See Also:

• What's Old Is New: 12 Living Fossils
• One-Organism Ecosystem Discovered in African Gold Mine
• Entire Genome of One Species Discovered Inside Another's
• 'Living Fossil' Ant Species Dates to Late Cretaceous
• Climate Change Produces (Icky) New Species

  2008's Best Contest Photos You Never Saw (Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT)

:

A lot of great photos were overlooked in 2008 in the slew images we received (an average of more than 500 submissions) for each of our twice-monthly photo contests. In celebration of the year coming to a close, we've gone back and pulled out some of our favorite contest photos that just didn't get the votes they deserved.

Click through the gallery to see these resurrected gems.

This is the first of a two-part series. Check back next week for more great photos.

Left:

Black-and-White contest

Home Sweet Home
by DSzwak

Photographer's comment:

"A view from the back patio of my childhood home outside of Limerick, Pennsylvania."

New Slang
by Ron Coloma

Photographer's comment:

"A neighbor's child looks on as my family arrives in my mother's hometown of Sison, Philippines."

Dust Bunny Thief
by Nick Wilson

Photographer's comment:

"Hey! That fly stole my dust bunny!"

Cupcakes
by Kim Hino

Photographer's comment:

"A sweet, afternoon delight!"

Summer Pastime
by Robby Petrullo (toolo on flickr)

Photographer's comment:

"Taken on June 5th, the big game when moustache Giambi crushed my dreams."

Moonrise in St. Kitts
by Leon L. Sandall

Photographer's comment:

"Moonrise while the sun sank. April '06."

JiaoZi
by MAB

Photographer's comment:

"Steamy JiaoZi served on every street corner."

Laying down parking-space lines on rue du roi de Sicile
by David Henry

Photographer's comment:

"Workers in Paris lay down those yellow lines, indicating that a parking spot in front of the restaurant Le Jardin du Marais is in fact a delivery zone."

Cow
by Meus McIntoshi

Photographer's comment:

"Hasselblad 503 CWD + Distagon CFi 4/50mm. 1/125s, f/4, ISO 100."

Boy at the Fort: Amber, India
by Grant Olsen

Photographer's comment:

"I was traveling through India with my sister, when we came to the city of Amber. It was one of the most amazing places I've ever been. At the top of the city is a majestic fortress. We were walking through it when this boy called out to us and said hello. This is the only shot I took of him. There was no posing or anything."