An 'Entertainment Device' Is Expected From Google - New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is developing a home entertainment device, according to people with knowledge of the company’s plans.

The device, which exists as a prototype and will eventually be sold as a branded item to consumers, is the company’s most significant venture into hardware. While its initial purpose will be for streaming music, its eventual use could be much larger.

Larry Page, who last year took the reins of the company he co-founded, has been intent on moving into hardware. To compete with Apple and Amazon, Google thinks it has to have greater control over production.

Next week, Google is likely to complete its acquisition of the handset maker Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. That purchase puts Google into direct competition with the phone makers that use its Android software as well as Apple and its iPhone. The leader in desktop search, Google did not want to be left behind as computing went mobile.

Motorola, which made an earlier generation of home entertainment systems before stumbling, is the likely manufacturer of the new device. 

A Google spokesman declined to comment.

While Google has talked openly about its designs on consumers’ living rooms, news that the device was becoming a reality surfaced last week in an application the search giant filed with the Federal Communications Commission. In the application, Google said it would begin testing a device it labeled simply an “entertainment device.”

The device will have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and, as Google noted in the application, it will “connect to other home electronics equipment.” The application, which was first reported by the tech Web site GigaOM, said Google would test the device for stability in employees’ homes through the summer.

Analysts are wary of Google’s venture into the notoriously cutthroat hardware field. Apple has loyal, sometimes fanatical followers, and enviably rich profit margins. Amazon is willing to lose money on its devices and make it up on sales of content. Most other hardware makers have a much tougher slog.

But Google is seen as having little choice.

“Google’s future depends on extending its influence beyond the PC screen,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst. “They’ve made tremendous progress in the mobile phone business, but their attempts to do the same thing with the TV and tablet flopped because the hardware manufacturers they relied on were not able to move fast enough.”

But Mr. McQuivey noted that controlling manufacturing meant calling the shots. “It’s quite telling that Amazon introduced its tablet two months ago and is already the second tablet maker in the market,” he said.

Google’s larger goal, a person closely tied to the project said, was to connect everything in the home to the Internet, including light bulbs, speakers and TV sets. The initial version will all be controlled from an Android device.

The first version of Google TV was considered a disaster, both internally and with partners. Guerrino De Luca, chief executive of Logitech, which manufactured the Google TV set-top box, has acknowledged publicly that the Google TV was “a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature.”

Nick Bilton contributed reporting.

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Apple Faces Boycott Over Worker Abuses In China. It's Not Crazy Talk. - Forbes

Fair-labor organizers, Change.org and SumOfUs.org, delivered 250,000 signatures to Apple stores in six cities around the world on Thursday in protest of the company’s working conditions in China, according to a report in Mashable.

Last month, an excellent New York Times exposé ripped at Apple’s core, building on previous concerns about abuses at firms that Apple uses to make its bestselling iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The claims should be familiar by now as Foxconn in southern China, one of Apple’s primary suppliers, has repeatedly been the subject of accusations of worker mistreatment and unsafe working conditions. From Mashable:

Foxconn has been accused of making laborers work long hours without breaks, use dangerous chemicals that have caused severe health problems and exposing workers to dangerous conditions. The repetitive work and spartan living conditions have also been to blame for suicides at the factory.

Charlotte Hill, communications manager at Change.org, pleaded with Apple to use its creativity to “think ethically” and create an iPhone without using factories that have harsh working conditions.

“No iPhone is worth that cost,” she said.

At the same time, Apple has also generated billions of dollars in profits, in part due to the cheapness of Chinese labor. (Revenue last quarter surged 74 percent to a record US$46.3 billion and profit more than doubled to US$13.1 billion, blowing away Wall Street‘s expectations as Apple sold more stuff than in any quarter in its history.)

The Mashable report comes as rumors point to Siri, the much lauded iPhone 4S intelligent personal assistant, adding Mandarin Chinese support next month.

For perspective, read “The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing.”

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Zebra stripes discourage horseflies from biting - The State Column

The mystery of zebra stripes and horseflies has been revealed. A study published Thursday in the Journal of Experimental Biology provides evidence that zebra stripes may discourage horseflies from biting. Prior to the study, researchers thought the zebra stripes were designed to confuse predators. While this may still be the case, the deterring impact of zebra stripes appears to be aimed primarily at horseflies.

“We demonstrate that a zebra-striped horse model attracts far fewer horseflies (tabanids) than either homogeneous black, brown, grey or white equivalents,” the researchers write in the study’s abstract.

Horseflies, which can carry diseases and distract their victim from feeding or drinking, are unwelcome visitors to zebras and other animals that graze. According to Gábor Horváth, one of the study’s authors, horseflies are attracted to horizontally polarized light because sunlight that reflects off of water is horizontally polarized. When horseflies and other aquatic insects discover water they can mate and lay eggs. The female variety of horseflies, however, are also attracted to linearly polarized light that reflects from the hides of their victims.

Zebra embryos, which start out with dark skin and develop white stripes before being born, raised an important question with the researchers. Did the zebra develop stripes over time in order to deter disease-carrying horseflies and other insects?

In order to determine whether a zebra’s stripes really deter horseflies, the team traveled to Budapest and set up camp at a horse farm with plenty of horseflies. The team attempted to attract horseflies using black and white striped patterns that varied in width. Using oil and glue to capture the horseflies, the narrowest black and white striped strips attracted the fewest insects.

The team of researchers also measured the attractiveness of white, dark and striped horses to horseflies. Although the team expected the results to reveal that white horses were the least attractive, they found that the striped version captured the least number of horse flies.

“We created an experimental set-up where we painted the different patterns onto boards,” researcher Susanne Akesson of Lund University posited to BBC Nature. “We put insect glue on the boards and counted the number of flies that each one attracted,” Ms. Akesson added.

While researchers have not eliminated the possibility that zebra stripes might have benefits besides the deterrence of horseflies, they believe that a zebra’s striped coat pattern is a key factor in repelling disease-carrying insects.

“We believe that escaping biting flies, which are annoying to their hosts and transmit lethal diseases, would be a very important selection factor, which may have a much stronger effect than the benefits of striped coat patterns suggested previously,” Ms. Akesson told LiveScience.

Until recently, zebra stripes were thought to be primarily designed for camouflage in the wild. Scientists believe that zebra stripes act as camouflage in two ways. First, the wavy stripes help the zebras blend into the grasses around them. A lion, one of the animal’s natural predators, is colorblind which means that it is unable to tell the difference between the grass and the zebra. Second, scientists believe that a zebra is able to use its stripes to blend in with other zebras in a herd. When a predator spots a herd of zebras, it sees a mass of black and white stripes instead of individual zebras. Although these uses for zebra stripes are still relevant, the study’s authors believe that they are no longer the primary reasons that a zebra has stripes.

“We conclude that zebras have evolved a coat pattern in which the stripes are narrow enough to ensure minimum attractiveness to tabanid flies,” the team of researchers posited in the Journal of Experimental Biology, adding that “the selection pressure for striped coat patterns as a response to blood-sucking dipteran parasites is probably high in this region [Africa].”

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