SAN JOSE, Calif.–Scientists at IBM Research say they have figured out for the first time how to record rapid changes at the level of individual atoms.

Until now, it has usually taken hours to get a picture of what is happening to a single atom. But according to IBM Research, scientists at Big Blue’s $6 billion R&D unit have figured out how to use a scanning tunneling microscope to record and study very fast changes at the atomic level. It is thought that the scientists will now be able to record atoms’ behavior at speeds of up to 1,000,000 times faster than was previously thought possible.

And while it’s not known what the practical implications of the innovation could be, it’s thought that understanding how long an individual atom can hold on to information could one day take Moore’s Law to its extreme and extend data storage much closer to the particle level. It is also thought that the advance could help in the creation of much more efficient photovoltaic cells, and with quantum computing.

The scientists will publish their findings (see video below) Friday in the journal Science.

The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously approved new rules for the use of unlicensed white space spectrum in a move that could pave the way for more unused wireless spectrum to be released in the future.

White space is unused spectrum that sits between TV channels. The 300MHz to 400MHz of unused spectrum is considered prime spectrum for offering wireless broadband services because it can travel long distances and penetrate through walls. The FCC unanimously agreed in November 2008 to open up this spectrum for unlicensed use. Even so, technical issues to allow device makers and service providers to use the spectrum still need to be worked out.

 The latest vote to approve the use of white spaces now paves the way for service providers and device makers to begin designing products that take advantage of the spectrum. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard have lobbied for years to get this spectrum open for public use.

The roll out of TV white space spectrum might also serve as a template for freeing other underutilized spectrum.

“About 90 percent of the licensed spectrum is unused,” said Joe Hamilla, chief operating officer at Spectrum Bridge, a company that runs an online spectrum license exchange. “What’s happening with TV white space is really the FCC’s first attempt at trying to make more efficient use of underused spectrum.”

As part of the new rules adopted today, the FCC agreed to set aside two channels for wireless microphone use to mitigate potential interference issues. But the commission said it would not require device makers to include geolocation spectrum sensing technology in new devices to ensure that these products don’t interfere with existing services already using the spectrum. This is a key win for device makers, because it means that they do not have to include the potentially expensive technology in their products.

Instead, devices will query a special geolocation database that makes sure no one is using that spectrum before it transmits. This database check is largely to prevent white space services from interfering with broadcast TV signals.

The FCC’s Office of Engineering and Technology will get the database up and running. It will also select companies that will manage the database going forward. Companies, such as Google and Spectrum Bridge, have submitted proposals for managing the database.

“This new unlicensed spectrum will be a powerful platform for innovation…When we unleash American ingenuity, great things happen.”
–FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has called the new wireless broadband services that could eventually operate over this spectrum “Wi-Fi on steroids.” Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spectrum that was opened up by the FCC in 1985, which was the last time the FCC allocated unlicensed spectrum. This high-frequency spectrum was originally used for cordless phones and garage door openers, but the spectrum later found broader use in high speed, in-home Internet connectivity via Wi-Fi.

The main difference between the white space spectrum and the spectrum used for Wi-Fi is that white spaces are at a lower frequency, which means they travel much longer distances and penetrate obstacles, such as walls, much more easily than higher frequency spectrum used for Wi-Fi.

Chairman Genachowski is optimistic that the new unlicensed spectrum will help create a robust ecosystem, such as the one that has developed around Wi-Fi.

“This new unlicensed spectrum will be a powerful platform for innovation,” Genachowski said. “When we unleash American ingenuity, great things happen.”

The FCC has said previously that the nation is facing a looming spectrum crisis, and if more spectrum is not made available in the next few years, there won’t be enough airwaves to keep up with growing wireless data demand. The agency has made opening up new wireless spectrum a top priority. In its National Broadband Plan, it said it would free up 500MHz of new wireless spectrum within 10 years for licensed and unlicensed use. The plan recommends that 300MHz of that spectrum should become available within the next five years.

White space spectrum is part of this plan. The FCC is also looking to reclaim or share spectrum from government agencies that are under-using their spectrum.

Hamilla said the same techniques used for mitigating interference in unlicensed TV white space spectrum bands could be used in other wireless bands as well. For example, he believes a database could be used to allow public safety officials and commercial users to share spectrum in the D block of the 700MHz band. This spectrum was not auctioned off when the original auction occurred in 2008, because it didn’t meet the necessary requirements. The government has been deciding what to do with the spectrum ever since.

“The database could instruct radios to vacate the channels when there is an emergency, such as a fire, earthquake or hurricane, so that public safety officials could get priority,” he said. “But when there isn’t an emergency, that spectrum is unused and it could be used for commercial use.”

If and when the FCC decides to open new spectrum using these methods, it will have to go through another procedural process to get comments to open the spectrum. But Hamilla hopes that the next time the FCC tries to do this, it won’t take as long. The procedure to open the TV white spaces began in 2002 under then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell.

New York (CNN) — Dennis Crowley was jogging across a New York bridge when he spotted something exciting: a cartoon mushroom, spray-painted on the sidewalk.

It looked like something out of Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros.,” which Crowley grew up playing. He stomped on the mushroom as he ran by and had a sort of nerdy realization.

“I was like, s—!” he recalled. ” ‘I should get a power-up for that!’ “

Since that moment several years ago, Crowley — a 33-year-old who’s always in a sweatshirt and wears an eyebrow-length mop of Justin Bieber-like hair — has sought to turn adult life into a whimsical game. In his world, people should earn points and prizes for making random discoveries like that one.

His latest venture, a popular smartphone app called Foursquare, lets players use their phones to “check in” to the various restaurants, bars, art galleries and friends’ apartments they visit in the course of their day. With each stop, they earn points; people who complete special challenges — like visiting 20 pizza joints, staying out past 3 a.m. on a “school night” or being a serial karaoke singer — get special merit badges, as if they were digital Boy Scouts.

Crowley sees these video-game-style rewards as reason enough for Foursquare users to make more effort to explore the real world — and, in the process, to have more fun with their daily lives.

That puts the app, which launched in 2009, right in line with what seems to be his personal philosophy: “Things shouldn’t be so super-serious all the time.”

But does the game-centered life Foursquare promotes lead to success and fulfillment?

CNN followed Crowley for 24 hours in New York to find out.

The answer seems to be located in the places he frequents, whether he “checks in” there or not.

@Play (the Scratcher): 209 E. Fifth St., New York

By his own count, Crowley has about 60 close friends in Manhattan’s East Village, the gritty and artsy corner of New York where he lives, works and plays.

He sees some subset of this group every day, since when he leaves the office about 8 p.m., he almost always goes somewhere besides home.

You’d think an out-every-night social calendar would require some intense forethought, but not for Crowley. He just looks at his phone. Opens the Foursquare app. And it tells him exactly where his close friends are.

Then he heads out to meet them, sometimes after sending a courtesy text message.

“I still call people, but if I’m at home on my couch on a Tuesday, I’ll check Foursquare to see if anyone’s out and nearby,” he said, “and I’ll send them a text and be like, ‘Yo! Can I meet up with you in a bit?’ “

Lately, Crowley frequently finds these friends at his favorite bar, the Scratcher, a basement-level hole-in-the wall on Fifth Street. Crowley has been there 49 times since 2002, when he started counting. That has earned him the Foursquare honor of being “mayor” of that venue, meaning he has checked in there more times than anyone else.

Even when he’s sick, Crowley feels hard-pressed to turn down a night at the Scratcher — partly because it’s fun but also because he has to keep going to the bar as often as possible to avoid getting beat out of his mayorship by another frequent patron. And it’s the only mayorship he holds these days.

Case in point: On a recent Tuesday night, when Crowley had a nagging cough and said he’d been sick for three weeks, he went out first to the Scratcher and then ended up staying out on the town, singing karaoke (“Patience” by Guns N’ Roses is his go-to song), until about 2 a.m.

He still made it to work the next morning, though.

“I’ve def been *less* hungover ,” he posted on his Twitter feed at 7:08 a.m.

Crowley said he’s the kind of person who will stretch his social schedule to explore the city but would go to the same places all the time unless he had a little “kick in the ass” to try someplace else.

Again, that’s where Foursquare comes in.

With badges and coupons, Foursquare has rewarded Crowley for doing simple things like going to Brooklyn frequently, traveling above New York’s 59th Street, going to work with a hangover (since the app knows how late he’s been out), visiting more than 10 playgrounds and going to Omaha, Nebraska. In all, he’s earned 51 digital badges through the app he created; he’s “checked in” with Foursquare nearly 3,500 times.

All this moving about gives some observers the sense that Crowley is everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. At dinner and at drinks, he’s often on his phone, updating his location and text-messaging constantly.

Alex Rainert, Foursquare’s product manager and a longtime friend, said these social interactions sustain Crowley.

“I think that’s what rejuvenates him,” Rainert said of Crowley’s social calendar.

“It’s very much the same spirit that drives the product,” he said. “You could go home and decompress, or you could go to that art gallery someone’s recommended.”

Crowley will always choose the gallery.

And, since he’s done so 10 times or more, he’s earned the “Warhol” badge.

@Youth: Medway, Massachusetts

Crowley’s obsession with games and rewards started early.

Growing up in Medway, Massachusetts, a town of about 12,500 people, Crowley wasn’t all that good at sports or academics, according to family members, but he was extremely competitive when it came to video games and practical jokes.

The oldest of three kids, Crowley used any chance he could get to assert his superiority over his younger brother and sister. Jonathan Crowley recalls a time when his older brother smashed two forts he had built in the backyard. When Jonathan built a third, he put the fort in a tree so Dennis couldn’t get to it.

But he came home to find that Dennis had cut the trees down in order to make the fort fall, he said.

“We’re super-competitive in everything we do,” said Jonathan Crowley, 30, who laughs when he talks about his childhood fights with his older brother. “Our dad raised us to be competitive — for better or for worse.”

Their father also raised his kids to be independent. Dennis Crowley, who goes by the same name as his oldest son, started his own communications business, which later became part of General Electric. He told his kids that if they really wanted to succeed, they had to work for themselves, not for someone else.

By early high school, the younger Dennis had taken this advice to heart.

When he wasn’t playing video games, skateboarding or following around graffiti artists, he was writing, editing and printing a video-game-centered magazine called Dystopia, which he sold in local video game arcades and stores.

“We played video games as well, but he would take it to another level,” Jonathan Crowley said. “He’d be like, writing down the codes, writing down the moves and figuring out a way to share that with people.”

Dennis Crowley carried that same vigor and industriousness into many activities, whether they were serious or not.

In 2008, when the Crowleys were picked to be on the television game show “Family Feud,” Dennis and Jonathan devised a rigorous — but fun — practice schedule for the entire family. In the family ski house in Vermont, they set a microwave timer for 20 seconds and practiced answering questions for the show’s final round, which is called “fast money.”

They quizzed each other in person and over e-mail for four or five months before the show was taped, Jonathan Crowley said.

During the actual competition, Jonathan Crowley recalls a moment when he and his brother froze, unable to comprehend the hugeness of the fact that this was a real game in real life, with real money at stake.

But then they locked eyes on the set, and everything was OK.

“We’re both like, ‘holy s—! This is no microwave-timer anymore. This is the real deal … and we can do it!’ ” he said.

The family walked away as winners, with a $20,000 prize.

@School (New York University): 721 Broadway, New York

After graduating with a communications and advertising degree from Syracuse University and working for a time at tech investment and research firms, Dennis Crowley had one big reason for wanting to go to graduate school: to play.

For that, he picked the perfect place: the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, which he described as “Alice in Wonderland” for adults, “a playground where you get these crazy tinkerers messing around; it’s a fantasy land in some ways; it’s art school.”

Walk through the school today, and you’ll still see evidence of Crowley’s playful and game-themed grad-school projects:

In a large workspace, for example, there’s a foosball table where some of the plastic players are wearing knit shirts and numbers. It’s hooked up to a microprocessor and sensors that automatically record goals and, in Crowley’s day, posted wins and losses on a tournament-style leader board on the wall.

“I had, like, problems with my wrist from playing a lot,” he remembered fondly.

Obsessed with the idea that life should be more like a game, Crowley also took these ideas out of the classroom. With a group of other NYU students, he helped organize a real-world game called PacManhattan, a combination of the arcade game “Pac-Man” and the New York borough.

The students dressed up like the games characters — Crowley was Pac-Man during the first test — and ran through the streets of New York, as if the city were their arcade board.

Because GPS technology was clunky at the time, they called in their locations to a central processing station by mobile phone. An operator manually input their whereabouts in a computer program and tallied the winners and losers.

“I just like building tools that make the city more interesting,” he said.

The next logical step was to make everyday interactions more game-like.

As his NYU thesis project, in collaboration with Rainert, Crowley upgraded a long-time project of his called Dodgeball, a text-message-based social network that, in many ways, is the precursor to Foursquare.

People used Dodgeball to tell a central computer at NYU where they were. Friends got text updates on their whereabouts, and all of a sudden, this system was holding together Crowley’s large social network in the East Village.

The system got so big that, in 2005, Google bought Dodgeball from Crowley for an undisclosed sum of money (enough to buy an “old-school” Range Rover, like the one from older Beastie Boys music videos, which Crowley loves).

That might seem like a success story.

But, for Crowley, it wasn’t. Soon, everything fell apart.

@Work (Foursquare): 36 Cooper Square, New York

Foursquare shares its 2,000-square-foot office space — on the fifth floor of the Village Voice newspaper building — with two other start-up companies.

Workers sit side by side at long tables that look like they belong in at an elementary school cafeteria. Crowley says the place is starting to get the feel of a “sweatshop” as Foursquare adds workers, seemingly each week.

But if Foursquare is a sweatshop, it seems to be a happy one. Even though everyone seems to work long hours in crowded, hot conditions, Crowley does his best to make work life into a game, just like in the app.

The office bookshelf does contain some books: “Jamie’s Food Revolution,” “Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide To Living Cheaply in New York” and “I Won’t Give Up,” which chronicles the life of rocker Pete Doherty. But those are side-by-side with bottles of vodka and Cabernet Sauvignon, plastic cups and board games like Clue. Michael Jackson playing cards and meeting notes with titles like “Product Dreams,” “Next” and “Fantasy Use Cases” are tacked to the walls.

On a Wednesday afternoon in late May, Crowley had his Nike sneakers up in a chair as he talked with Rainert, Foursquare’s product developer, about the future of the company. They started off discussing to-do lists in the app, which let players keep track of tips and suggestions they find in Foursquare.

Crowley is notoriously critical of his own work.

“People love it, but [the to-do lists] suck,” Crowley said. “Things that you want to do should be, like, super-pure.”

Of one potential fix, he said: “God, that’s so f—ing hot.” The next was “half-baked.” Another was “too wonky” to go in the app, he decided.

When Crowley leaves the office on business, he takes this uninhibited aura with him. At the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, for example, Crowley “swam” an annual backstroke race across a hotel lobby — flailing about on his back on the marble — in the wee hours of the morning.

Even when he’s making a pitch for his company, a bit of playfulness is always at the ready. At a May technology conference in New York, a blogger asked Crowley whether he planned to sell the company, as is widely rumored.

“Oh, I already sold. We sold to Nabisco [the cookie maker],” he responded. “We think it’s going to be a good fit.”

Crowley’s dad and brother have worried that his uber-casual and playful persona won’t go over well in the business world.

And as Foursquare continues to get more popular — it now has nearly 1.5 million users — it’s clear that Crowley is feeling pressured. His e-mail inbox is overflowing. His iPhone blinks, at times, like it’s a strobe light.

He also has the fact that Dodgeball failed staring him over the shoulder.

“None of my stuff works. It’s all been broken. I’ve never not had a failure,” Crowley said. “We just haven’t made this fail yet.”

@Unemployment (Tompkins Square Park): 500 E. Ninth St., New York

When Google bought Dodgeball, it seemed like everything was going right. He’d sold his company to the world’s search-engine giant. And he had landed a job at the company, too.

But in 2007, Crowley left Google in a huff, publicly complaining that it hadn’t given him the resources he needed to make Dodgeball succeed.

With his intellectual baby out of his hands, he went into a deep funk. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he traveled the world a bit and spent much of his time reading magazines in Tompkins Square Park, near his apartment in New York.

Then one of his worst fears became reality.

In January 2009, Google shut down Dodgeball’s servers for good.

His social network had dissolved.

But he didn’t mope forever. The Dodgeball shutdown ended up being just the kick-start Crowley needed.

He met up with another unemployed tech geek, Naveen Selvadurai, the same month Dodgeball became extinct. They drew up the blueprints for Foursquare in Crowley’s kitchen and in coffee shops and then founded the company.

Crowley says he started Foursquare for his circle of East Village friends. He never intended for it to become this successful.

He just needed a new social glue.

He has that back now. And as it turns out, failure may have been one of the better things to happen to Crowley.

On his Twitter account, Crowley lists “unemployment” as one of his interests:

“I like snowboards, foursquare and unemployment,” his online bio says.

@Home: Near Tompkins Square Park, East Village, New York

There are no winners and losers in the game of Foursquare.

And that’s intentional.

As Rainert, Foursquare’s product manager, put it: “It’s not about winning; it’s about doing more stuff.”

Crowley put it more bluntly.

“You don’t want to tell people they’re winning at life or they’re not,” he said.

He says he doesn’t define Foursquare’s success by the number of people who use his app or by the amount of money it makes. He wants some people to use it — and for it to be a life-enriching experience for those who do.

Maybe the app will inject a bit of Crowley’s carefree spirit into the daily grind.

If anything, Crowley seems most adamant about seeing this project through to the end — and on getting as many of the ideas that are boiling in his head out into the real world. That’s something he can’t say about Dodgeball.

As his dad said, “He tells me that what they’re doing [with Foursquare] is just the tip of the iceberg.”

At his spare, IKEA-decorated apartment in New York’s East Village, Crowley has a shelf that’s home to board games and a vase full of Legos.

On top, next to a picture of a car, there’s also a soccer trophy.

The trophy shows a side of Crowley that he doesn’t let most people to see.

“Don’t read too much into that,” he said. “That’s the trophy they give to every kid that plays. It’s like, you show up and you get it.”

In a way, playing is as important to him as winning.

(CNN) — Saying it will “change the future of television,” Google on Thursday rolled out Google TV — the internet giant’s venture into web-TV integration.

The application, run by Google’s Android operating system, lets users search for content from their television, DVR and the web.

“Here we are folks — the multimillion-channel TV,” said Google project director Rishi Chandra during a two-hour keynote on Google’s Android operating system at the company’s annual I/O conference in San Francisco, California.

Even as sites like Google-owned YouTube have emerged as viable entertainment options, the move is a nod to a basic truth of leisure time: The estimated 4 billion television users worldwide is still a much bigger customer base than those using the internet.

“There’s still not a better medium to reach a wider and broader audience than television,” Chandra said.

The platform will let users search for content, from the name of a TV show to the name of a network, in much the same way a Google search works. They’ll get results from TV and the web and be able to watch either on their TV screen.

It also will have voice recognition, letting users speak the name of a show or other content and have it pop up on their screens.

“Videos should be consumed on the biggest, best, brightest screen in your house,” Chandra said. “That’s your TV.”

Devices for Google TV will be sold at Best Buy and on the market this fall, in time for the lucrative holiday shopping season. No prices were announced on Thursday.

The system will allow Android smartphone applications to be displayed on television screens and such integration as being able to watch a show on TV and a Twitter stream of people talking about that show at the same time.

A Google TV home screen will let users organize their content, like shows they’ve recorded on their DVR, and integration will let users view photos from such sites as Flickr and Picasa on their TV screens.

In addition to Best Buy, other partners include Sony, which will launch a line of TVs that optimize the Google service, Intel, Logitech and DISH Network — which also will offer features specifically for Google TV.

Developing for the system will be open, a fact that let Google’s top brass take several shots at Apple’s iPad and iPhone. They pointedly noted that Adobe’s Flash media player will be integrated into the system’s Web browser.

Adobe and Apple have been feuding publicly, and loudly, over Apple’s refusal to run Flash on its products.

“We’re thrilled to be part of the Google TV initiative with other industry leaders who share a common vision of enabling access to the best web experiences possible,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who attended the event.

Googleisn’t the first company to meld web and TV content.

In March, TiVo rolled out TiVo Premiere, which lets subscribers pull internet content, music and movies onto their televisions more easily.

The Boxee Box, a cubelike device that shares internet content with your TV, was awarded the title of “Last Gadget Standing” at January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

And California-based company Roku also offers a digital video player that integrates television, Web content and a video library. It retails for about $100.

Palo Alto, California (CNN) — Hewlett-Packard says it’s developing a next-generation wristwatch for the U.S. military.

The printing and computer company says the watch will have a flexible display that shows maps and other strategic information to soldiers in remote combat fields. The watch’s screen will be made of plastic and it will run on solar energy, making it less likely to malfunction or run out of power in a tense scenario.

“We call it a Dick Tracy watch,” said Carl Taussig, director of information surfaces at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, in a reference to the comic-strip detective whose high-tech wristwatch doubled as a two-way radio.

HP expects a prototype of the watch to be ready within a year.

The U.S. military plans to use the prototype with a small group of soldiers first before deciding whether to expand its use of the technology, Taussig said. The watch may eliminate the need for soldiers to carry cumbersome technological gear and backup batteries.

A U.S. Department of Defense spokeswoman said she was not familiar with the project, so it’s unclear exactly how the watch would be used by the military.

HP makes the watch’s display screen out of plastic, rather than the glass that is the norm for most computer displays on the market today.

“It doesn’t break. It’s thin. It’s potentially flexible,” Taussig said of the plastic display.

Flexible solar panels also will be printed onto the watches, using a technology developed by a company called PowerFilm. That company also has developed solar-powered tents for the military, according to its website.

All kinds of consumer electronics may start incorporating plastic instead of glass screens in coming years. The plastic screens have the advantages of being light, using less power and being less destructible. They also use 40 times less raw material than glass displays, Taussig said.

HP said its plastic-display technology could also be used in laptops, e-readers and commercial signs.

Other companies are working in this space, too.

More than 20 million flexible plastic displays are on the market today, according to Sriram Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink, the company that developed the low-power display technology for the Amazon Kindle and many other e-book readers.

So far, all those screens are very small. “These go into wristwatches, they go into memory sticks, they go into shelf labels — things like that,” he said.

Peruvemba expects flexible plastic displays to get larger in coming years, to the point that they can be used in e-book readers and laptop computers.

Taussig said the military watch will be one of the first real-world tests of the technology. He expects the next commercial applications also to be relatively small in terms of screen sizes. Grocery stores, for example, may use plastic screens to display vegetable and fruit prices in the near future, he said.

The screens don’t use much power, and store managers could update them more quickly than paper price tags, he said.

HP Labs has been developing a process to “print” the plastic display components for 10 years. The company originally intended to use the technology in portable memory drives, but creating larger screens out of plastic turned out to be a more economical and feasible venture, Taussig said.

The secret to the screens is in what’s behind them: a thin strip of metal-coated plastic that’s only 50 microns thick — about half the width of a human hair — and wraps around a spool.

That layer of material is printed with transistors, the components that tell the screen to display certain images. It is treated with various acid and metal coatings to make it conduct electricity and create clear images. In some ways, the system mimics newspaper production.

“We had to actually build all of the equipment to do this stuff, and that’s because no one’s ever done it before,” Taussig said.

(Wired) — One of the challenges for the newest generation is how to gain fluency in online networking without being able to draw on large, diverse social networks of their own. On Tuesday, Togetherville announced the open beta launch of a new online community for kids and their caretakers. The site brings parents into the same virtual space as their children to help them mentor kids to be good digital citizens.

“We built Togetherville using the spirit of the neighborhoods most of us remember when we were kids,” said co-founder, CEO, and parent Mandeep Singh Dhillon, “where everyone knows everyone else and watches out for each other. In Togetherville, parents have peace of mind that their kids are playing with people they know and trust and kids have fun while learning the tools they need to become good digital citizens.”

Fully compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Togetherville is intended for kids who are too young for Facebook, officially, but have parents immersed in that culture. The 6- to 10-year-olds are invited to engage with their real-world friends, play games, watch videos, and create art. Grownups act as the gateways for new contacts, assuming the responsibility for inviting other families to join each child’s online neighborhood. Experiencing online networking together, grownups can guide their kids through the age-appropriate content in an ad-free environment.

The project was developed by people trained in child development, learning, and online safety. Developers worked with officials from Connect Safely and the Family Online Safety Institute to include the social and technical activities that serve as the core competency for online interaction. Three key areas — self-expression, entertainment, and education — are emphasized. “Togetherville is social-networking training wheels for families,” said Anne Collier, co-director of Connect Safely. “It models safe social-Web use for kids and shows even parents who are already keen Facebook users how social networking works best in the family context.”

One aspect of the site that is still pending is an Allowance, a feature expected later this summer. Grownups feed an account for their children, and the kids draw from those funds to purchase virtual goods, games, and gifts. There are learning opportunities possible in this dynamic, including understanding how to budget or cultivating a sense of philanthropy in how kids choose to use their online currency. It seems clear that the financial success of the company is tied to being able to create a strong in-world economy funded by adults but driven by kids.

Kid-Tested

My 10-year-old son gave the site a test drive after the private beta opened up to the public. He’s at the top side of target audience for Togetherville, already well familiar with Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and creating YouTube videos. His literacy with social networking sites is strong, but his strong social connections remain firmly offline.

The signup, initiated by a parent, uses Facebook authentication to verify the adult’s identity and leverage his or her existing social network. The parent then creates accounts for each kid, customized with a photo and name that reflects who they are in the real-world. To increase accountability and trust in subsequent interactions, anonymity and pseudonyms are discouraged. The accounts are verified via e-mail to ensure that the kids are firmly tied to the grownup’s online identity.

From the moment they first sign on, kids are encouraged to get involved with activities on the site by earning stamps in their Togetherville Passport. This can be done by watching a video, creating new art, playing a game, sending a gift, or posting a “quip” (the equivalent of a Facebook status message). Additional badges are designed to recognize and reward positive behavior for certain types of activities.

My son opted to play a game to start, choosing Fission Balls from among the six initial offerings. It was a short-lived game (he fired a single shot), but he then moved on to creating a logo and giving a gift to a new friend. He rejected the featured videos — Hannah Montana, Justin Bieber, and the tempting “Fart Dance” — but watched a “Toy Story” trailer from YouTube just to satisfy his Passport stamp. For someone well-versed in internet memes, the video content wasn’t that engaging. (“It feels like they are trying to get Cartoon Network or Disney to sponsor them,” says my young curmudgeon.)

One strength of the site — moderated content — is also a potential drawback. There are numerous Quips and Comments from which to choose, but they are all canned responses approved by Togetherville administrators. The few opportunities to freely create text require review and acceptance by staff before they will appear on the site. This was a turnoff for my son: “It’s like they are saying that kids don’t have the ingenuity to come up with their own posts.”

The grownup’s experience centers around managing the parameters of a child’s neighborhood. Their profile simply shows the associations to other kids, and content contributions are largely in support of kid activities within the site. The favoriting mechanism in Togetherville — a “trunk” — can serve as both a digital memory book and a monitoring tool to see what kinds of important items float to the surface. For adults, activity can be piped into their Facebook news stream to share with friends in that environment.

At its best, Togetherville has the potential to both fulfill its mission as a training ground while also increasing interaction with trusted adult mentors outside of the family. A broader support structure can help kids critique ideas and develop additional methods for information gathering. At its worst, Togetherville will suffer from over-reliance on users with access to strong extended networks, presenting too many barriers to grow online networks organically. Without a lifetime of changing jobs, schools, and hometowns, kids may see value in the site limited to what they can do online by themselves, rather than with others.

CNET) — In an attempt to move beyond drab typography on the Web, Google on Wednesday released 18 freely usable fonts and an open-source tool designed to smooth over browser issues in displaying downloaded fonts.

A number of Web designers — if not all readers — are excited that newer browsers support downloadable fonts so sites can use more than the handful that it’s safe to assume are installed already on people’s computers.

For every eyeball-searing grunge font and blood-pressure-raising instance of Comic Sans, there’s a tasteful use of an artful logo or distinctive text.

But font licensing rules mean a Web designer can’t necessarily upload any old font for a site. This is where Google’s move, announced at its Google I/O conference, comes in. The company released 18 fonts and also announced an interface that lets Web sites use them.

“Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory,” said Raph Levien and David Kuettel of the Google Font API team in a blog post. “With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers.”

The way to Web fonts was paved with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) formatting standard and more recently the Web Open Font Format technology that helped encourage Web typography support from traditional font licensing companies.

But even with those foundations, there are copyright concerns that might put off Web developers.

Google’s fonts are free of copyright restrictions, though.

“Since all the fonts are open source, you can use them any way you like. We also have a separate project hosted on Google Code for downloading the original font files. Since they’re open source, they can be used for just about any purpose, including for print,” the Google font team members said.

In addition, Google announced an open-source project called WebFont Loader to supply Web developers with code to deal with differences in how browsers handle downloaded Web fonts.

The software, a collaboration with Small Batch’s TypeKit project, includes JavaScript code to control how Web pages display types for a uniform experience across different browsers, Google said.

Six tech industry CEOs don’t often appear in the same place at the same time. Google, the dominant search company of our time, has clout in consumer electronics as well. 

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)
 
SAN FRANCISCO–Could the long-awaited marriage of the television and the Web be blessed by a search company? 

Google is at least going to make an attempt, unveiling the signature announcement of Google I/O 2010, Google TV, before a crowd of developers at the Moscone Center Thursday. While Google will need developer support to make Google TV happen, the message wasn’t entirely aimed at them. 

Instead, in convening a panel of some of the most important CEOs in the world of consumer electronics–Sony, Best Buy, and Intel, among others–Google declared its intention to shake up the world of consumer devices the same way it has disrupted countless other industries in its 12 years as an organization. Google is attempting to do what the PC and consumer electronics industries have tried–and failed–to do for years: bring the nearly unlimited content of the Web to the large-screen TV while preserving the tried-and-true television experience that has enraptured three generations of Americans. 

If this effort succeeds, there will be a new power broker in consumer electronics. And Google will have found a way to move past its identity as The Search Company in order to focus on a future based around Web-connected consumer-oriented software. 

It’s far from a slam dunk: powerful entrenched industries tend to not like it when Google comes knocking on their door. And tech conference demos alone–especially buggy ones–do not sell a product. But after the failed attempts of the Wintel duopoly (remember that?) to accomplish this goal in the last decade, Google is pushing ahead with its own take on the problem at a time when people might be finally ready to listen. 

So what is Google TV? Essentially, it’s an Android-based operating system for televisions and set-top boxes that fulfills one of the key goals that eluded the PC industry years ago: seamless integration of Web content and cable or satellite content. 

Intel and Microsoft wanted to put PCs in living rooms, attempting to dress them up to look like cable boxes or DVRs. However, people didn’t want to buy another full-fledged PC simply to sit in their entertainment centers and drown out the movie with the sound of the cooling fan. And the Windows brand did not resonate with the consumer electronics set, who didn’t want long boot times or PC weirdness when trying to fire up their favorite show. 

Apple waded tentatively into these waters with Apple TV, providing a smaller and less obtrusive box for the living room but walling off the content experience to the iTunes Store and putting few resources behind the project. More recently, a host of other devices like Boxee, Roku, and Slingplayer have tried to deliver Internet content to the television, but they force the user to choose between “Internet mode” and “television mode,” and it’s amazing how reticent people are to hit a button to switch between input modes. 

Google CEO Eric Schmidt (right) and vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra think that if they play their cards right, they could be a player in consumer electronics. 

(Credit: James Martin/CNET) 

So could Google TV break this logjam? The promise is certainly there: offering bored TV viewers a better way to search for things that interest them seems like a winner. And layering the Internet over existing television is an idea that has shown some promise, in things like Yahoo’s work on TV widgets. 

There are more than a few challenges. For one, nobody has any idea what these TVs and set-top boxes will cost relative to existing devices. People might be convinced to pay some sort of premium for this experience, but how much? These are uncharted waters. 

And how will Google’s search technologies be implemented in this product? Mark Cuban, founder of Broadcast.com and HDNet, and avid NBA playoff spectator (as opposed to participant), nailed it when he said Thursday “the success of Google TV will come down to one thing…PageRank. Can you imagine the white hat and black hat SEO battles that will take place as video content providers try to get to the top of the TV Search Listings on Google TV?…How Google does its PageRank for this product will have a bigger impact on the success of the product in the TV market than anything else it does.” 

But aside from the questions about Google TV itself, the announcement once again reveals Google’s limitless ambition. This is a company that honestly thinks it can provide better technology products and services than anyone else in the world. 

People laughed when Google got into mobile operating systems, wondering how a search company could break into a market dominated by old hands like Nokia and RIM as well as new upstarts like Apple (which at least had the benefit of decades of world-class software development). That seems to have worked out well for Google: it’s the second largest smartphone operating system supplier in the U.S. at the moment, behind RIM and ahead of Apple. 

There are few companies that could have assembled a CEO roster like the one Google put together Thursday. Coordinating the schedules of six major consumer electronics and computer industry CEOs must have taken a huge effort behind the scenes, and they weren’t even all in Las Vegas in January for CES. It was quite a list: Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, Logitech CEO Jerry Quindlen, Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen, Best Buy CEO Brian Dunn, and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. 

As we alluded to earlier in the week, Google is reaching a point in its evolution where it is bringing the tech industry into its own orbit. Consider this: Intel and Sony played second fiddle to Google Thursday in an announcement that highlighted their own failures to produce such a product. 

And however Google’s ruling triumvirate might feel about Apple CEO Steve Jobs and all he has accomplished over the years, Google could not have drawn clearer battle lines on Thursday: it wants to be as prominent a consumer electronics software company as Apple, and it is going about that strategy by marshaling industry support, rather than going it alone

 
Pressing ahead after another setback, British energy giant BP said it hoped to complete its latest effort to contain the huge Gulf of Mexico oil spill late on Saturday, while the company’s chief executive appeared to dismiss the disaster as “tiny.” 

The accident at the offshore oil rig is threatening an environmental and economic calamity along the U.S. Gulf Coast. 

While London-based BP moved forward with its tricky undersea efforts to redirect the flow of oil, the Obama administration demanded “immediate public clarification” from BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward over the company’s intentions on paying costs tied to the accident. 

With crude oil gushing unchecked from its blown-out offshore well a mile deep on the floor of the Gulf, BP was attempting to guide undersea robots to insert a small tube into a 21-inch pipe, known as a riser, to funnel the oil to a ship at the surface. 

BP’s initial attempt to insert the tube into the riser ran into trouble when the metal frame that supports the siphon shifted, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles told reporters in Robert, La., on Saturday. 

At Fourchon, La., workers on Friday place containment booms on a beach in a bid to prevent oil from getting into the nearby marsh at high tide. 

(Credit: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Patrick Kelley)
  

Suttles said BP hopes to get the siphoning tube inserted late on Saturday night and operational overnight. 

“We did have to pull it back to surface [Friday] to make some adjustments so that we could connect it properly to the pipework,” Suttles said. “We expect to begin operation of that equipment overnight tonight.” 

The company’s previous attempt to contain the oil using a giant containment dome failed last week. 

BP: A “tiny” amount of oil in “a very big ocean”
In an interview published in a British newspaper on Friday, Hayward appeared to play down what threatens to become the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. 

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water,” Hayward was quoted as saying in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. 

Hayward also acknowledged his job was on the line and that he would be judged by the company’s response to the disaster. BP’s shares have tumbled and wiped out $30 billion of market value since the disaster began last month. 

The spill began after an April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which killed 11 workers. It threatens to eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska as the worst U.S. ecological disaster ever. 

Officials said on Saturday that so far the spill has had minimal impact on the shoreline and wildlife. 

There have been questions about the implications of current U.S. law that limits energy companies’ liability for lost business and local tax revenues from oil spills to $75 million. 

In a letter to Hayward, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano cited statements by BP executives that the company was taking responsibility for the spill and would cover spill-related costs. 

“Based on these statements, we understand that BP will not in any way seek to rely on the potential $75 million statutory cap to refuse to provide compensation to any individuals or others harmed by the oil spill, even if more than $75 million is required to provide full compensation to all claimants,” Salazar and Napolitano wrote. 

A member of the Louisiana State Wildlife Response Team cleans oil off a pelican at a mobile wildlife rehab station in Plaquemines Parish, La., on Saturday. 

(Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Justin Stumberg) 

Earlier, BP spokesman Mark Proegler said oil washed up in Mississippi for the first time in the state on Saturday, when tar balls were discovered at Long Beach. Oil has now contaminated eight beaches in three states after it was also located at Whiskey Island, Louisiana, and several in Alabama. 

Seeking to curb the volume of oil reaching the surface, the U.S. Coast Guard and Environmental Protection Agency said they have authorized more undersea use of chemical dispersants at the source of the leak. Dispersants are designed to break the oil into small droplets more likely to sink to the sea floor. 

Some environmental groups and the Gulf’s shrimping industry have raised concerns about the effect of the chemicals, saying the oil might not sink all the way, but become suspended in the water column and ingested by fish and other wildlife. 

A statement by the EPA and Coast Guard sought to allay those fears, saying dispersants are “generally less harmful than highly toxic oil” and biodegrade more quickly. 

Cleanup crews continue attacking the oil slick using surface dispersants, skimming and controlled burns. 

Inland, BP contractors assisted by flotillas of hired shrimp boats continued to string containment booms around sensitive coastal areas, while National Guard teams with bulldozers and helicopters press on to plug gaps in booms protecting Louisiana’s storm-battered shoreline to prevent oil from reaching the fragile marshlands behind them. 

Scientists and shrimpers alike have said that contamination of marshes, the foundation for the region’s economy and way of life, would be devastating. 

The vast but dwindling marshes are the nurseries for shrimp, oysters, crabs, and fish that make Louisiana the leading producer of commercial seafood in the continental United States and a top destination for recreational anglers. 

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday gave a tongue-lashing to all the companies involved in the spill–BP, Halliburton and Transocean–and said he would not rest until the leak was stopped at its source. 

Estimates of the rate of escaping oil range widely from the official BP figure of 5,000 barrels per day, adopted by the government, to 100,000 barrels per day.