Nicholas Negroponte, the promoter of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, says that economic hard times have hit the OLPC effort & the group will cut its staff by half and remaining 32 will take a big salary cut. The work on version 2.0 continues but some of the software efforts are being passed on to the community. Over past 12 months, OLPC has been hit with problems including exodus of key OLPC team members. I was skeptical of OLPC from the very beginning. The irony is that the idea behind OLPC - small, rugged anytime lightweight computers - has taken hold. Netbooks were one of the hottest selling items this holiday season.

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Joyce Park (left) & Adam Rifkin (right) by Ifindkarma via Flickr

Renkoo built half a dozen apps — including Booze Mail for Facebook and MySpace — and got a lot of people (about 36 million) to use those apps, but it got bored because “these applications were not fulfilling to us because although they were entertaining, they did not help people help other people,” they write on their blog. With Facebook-app mania raging, the company was able to raise a whopping $6 million in a second round of funding in February 2008, bringing the total VC infusion to $9 million. Matrix Partners was one of its main investors.

Now it’s rebooting again. What is Renkoo 3.0? “We are currently working on a brand-new application that employs everything we’ve learned for the last four years — and enables a suite of voluntary actions that everyone can do in the United States and around the world,” they write on their blog. In other words a social app for charitable causes, in the mould of Sean Parker’s Causes effort. How that translates into a business is anyone’s guess.

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At a press conference at CES today, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers talked about the router maker’s push beyond routers and into the home. As Om has said before, this is a well-worn path trod by Cisco in its need to continue its growth, but it’s pretty hard to make it as successful consumer electronics company, even if those products are connecting back to the Internet where Cisco rules.

So today, Cisco tore the veil off two consumer products: a router that also provides music, akin to a Sonos player, and a media hub that will aggregate all your digital content and display it on whatever screen you choose — in the home or on the go through a browser. For the content companies, Cisco will offer its EOS software platform, which gives Big Media a way to create social web sites around their artists –kind of like a Ning for music or other publishers.

I’m surprised we didn’t hear more about Cisco’s video efforts. There was little beyond a new additon to its Visual Networking Index, which showed that U.S. newteevee viewers spend 2.5 times more time watching professional content than user-generated content. I suppose that most of the video news won’t come out at a consumer oriented show given that it’s geared more toward businesses and service providers. I will say that, no matter who ends up controlling the home network — whether it’s consumers buying their own gear and storing their own content, or a world in which service providers give access to content on set-top boxes — Cisco will have a product for them.

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Aside from slashing its sales estimates today, Intel said it would take a $950 million impairment charge related to its investment in Clearwire, citing a decline in Cleawire’s stock price (to $4.93 as of Dec. 31). Intel has invested millions into Clearwire, which is building a nationwide WiMAX network, with the hopes of selling more chips into web-connected portable computers. From Intel’s release:

The company now expects the net gain or loss from equity investments and interest and other to be a loss of between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion versus a previous expectation of a loss of approximately $50 million.

While Clearwire comprises a lot of that amount, there’s an extra $150 million to $250 million in there that is likely a result of the financial crisis forcing Intel to write down some assets. And it likely won’t be the only company reporting these charges. Under current accounting rules, a company has to test for “impairment,” or whether or not an intangible asset such as an equity investment has gone down, every year. And in the U.S., once an asset is impaired, it can’t get added back onto the books, even if the value does eventually rise.

With the 30 percent declines in the stock market over the last year, many companies will see the value of assets they bought following the market’s downward trend. Time Warner also reported a $25 billion impairment charge today. The U.S. accounting rules may be changing in response to the stock market decline leading to such large write downs, but in the meantime, Intel’s investment in Clearwire looks like a financial failure. We’ll still have to wait to see if it becomes a business success by helping Intel sell more chips.

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A few weeks ago Terry Gou, chairman of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world’s largest original equipment maker, warned that the troubles facing the technology industry (because of the global economic downturn) were much steeper than people realized. His comments were met with skepticism. Perhaps more should have listened. Intel today announced that the sales for the fourth quarter of 2008 will be at least 20 percent lower than its previous forecasts, which it had already slashed to begin with.

Given that Intel supplies chips to every major PC maker, it is a good proxy for the PC ecosystem and the troubles that will ensue. Dell, for instance, is bracing for a rough 2009. Other device makers aren’t immune either. Memory-chip makers are hurting as well. The slower PC sales also impact Microsoft as it impacts the total sales of Windows operating system and other applications. 2009 isn’t going to be an easy one.

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Verizon says it’s willing to provide access to its cellular network for wireless devices like the Kindle reader, according to Tony Lewis, vice president of open development at Verizon. He spoke to Reuters in the lead up to CES yesterday and said the public could expect e-readers comparable to Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle running on the Verizon Wireless network in 2009. If Verizon will offer wireless access to the Sony eReader, then economy be damned, I’m picking one up.

Aside from my own e-reader dreams, the news is welcome for those who have been curious as to how accessible Verizon’s open network will actually be. In November 2007, Verizon said it would open up its network to other devices. On Monday, the carrier released data showing its progress toward openness. I wasn’t impressed.

I thought we would have to pry Verizon’s network open with a crowbar, judging by the fact that in the last year it has certified two independent testing labs and fewer than 30 devices, all of which are tailored toward businesses. Not all of those devices are even commercially available. This is a far cry from being able to buy an unlocked phone and run it on Verizon’s network.

Even with the news that Verizon will offer wireless data for consumer devices, unlocked phones may never become a reality.  Products using data service only, and built by a major vendor responsible for customer service, are far easier to manage than a slew of unlocked devices running on the network. But the move to provide service for third-party consumer devices like the Kindle is a necessary one as carriers seek to grow their wireless data revenue and make full use of their networks. However, just because the network is open for products such as e-readers, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be used.

Amazon bundles its broadband costs into the price of books downloaded for the Kindle, while Dash navigation devices require a monthly subscription fee. Verizon Wireless’ network is awesome, but it’s pricey, and the company isn’t exactly keen on competition to its own services. We’ll have to see what kind of pricing model Verizon allows, and how much it will charge. As devices that access a cellular network become more common, it’s likely that a consumer won’t want to pay an ever-expanding number of wireless bills just to download books, music, real-time traffic, etc. And in the current downturn, they certainly won’t pay a lot for them.

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Americans, by nature, are an optimistic bunch. Even in tough times, there is something to be optimistic about. Where others see the glass half empty, we see it as half full. That is probably the only reasonable explanation for the findings of this survey conducted by Glassdoor, a Sausalito, Calif.-based startup that ranks employers by taking anonymous feedback from their employees.

Despite the dismal global economy, widespread layoffs and rising unemployment, 61 percent of surveyed employees would not be willing to take a pay cut if they discovered their job was in jeopardy. A whopping 40 percent expect a pay raise in the next 12 months, despite job cuts at their employer. Of those eligible for an annual bonus, 57 percent expect a bonus and 40 percent do not expect a bonus

The most amusing part? Four out of five employed adults say they are not concerned about being laid off from their job in the next six months. Just one in five employees are concerned they will be laid off during the same period. Perhaps the pessimistic 20 percent are reading the news.

Today, a report put out by ADP, a payroll services company, showed that 693,000 jobs were lost in December — 220,000 more than ADP was expecting based on a previous survey of economists. Of course, when it comes to others, job cuts are fair game. Forty-two percent of employees say they are concerned their company will lay off other employees in the next six months. As they say, bad things (and layoffs) happen to other people.

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The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES)— at which every new gadget debuting in the year ahead is trotted out for display in a football-sized stadium in Las Vegas — is upon us again. After spending days walking amidst rows of 82-inch flat screen TVs and pocketing useless tchotkes from hundreds of vendors at the show, you couldn’t imagine a more perfect event to embody the ultimate in consumerism and waste. But in 2008, CES introduced a “green” component, showcasing lower-power gadgets, solar-powered devices and recycled goods, in an attempt to make the show a little more palatable to the environmentally inclined. And in 2009, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the trade group behind CES, is expanding that green aspect even further, trying to adjust to both increasingly eco-friendly attitudes and leaner economic times.

“CES is going greener this year,” says Jill Fehrenbacher, creator of the Greener Gadgets conference, which CEA purchased last year for an undisclosed amount. (Disclosure: she’s also my sister, and I organized a panel at the first Greener Gadgets). CES is folding “Greener Gadgets” content into the show in various places, including a panel on Jan. 10 that will feature Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and founder and former CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project; and Jeff Omelchuck, the executive director of the Green Electronics Council.

Since last year’s trial run, CES has also doubled the number of companies in its (newly renamed) Greener Gadgets Tech Zone, and the section has grown from just 520 square feet last year to more than 3,000 square feet this year. Exhibitors will include Better Energy Systems, which makes the Solio solar charger; Fuji, with its Enviromax batteries; Horizon Fuel Cell; and even cell phone maker Motorola. In addition, expect to see more eco-themed announcements from some of the CES headliners this year. CEA spokesperson Jennifer Bemisderfer tells us that industry-watchers should look out for environmental news and products from the likes of  Toshiba, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic and HP.

While it’s clear that the show, and participating companies, are promoting a greener agenda, the depressed economic climate has definitely put up some hurdles to doing so. CES is reportedly expecting significantly fewer attendees this year. That means the show is trying to be leaner, which is crimping some of its environmental aims. In 2008, CEA reportedly spent more than $110,000 on carbon offsets. While Bemisderfer says CEA is spending a similar amount on green aspects this year, she also confirmed that the group has no plans to purchase carbon offsets for the 2009 show.

Instead, CEA is concentrating on things like decreasing print production. (Planet Metrics, an exhibitor at the show, has partnered with CES to identify opportunities for the show to reduce its carbon footprint.) “There was a feeling here at CEA that, given the current economy, a better strategy would be to look for ways to reduce carbon emissions first,” Bemisderfer explains.

Beyond the current financial turmoil, though, CEA thinks green gadgets will be a money maker. From a business perspective, “going green” can give consumer electronics makers the ability to diversify on more than just price, says Jill Fehrenbacher. The trade group is holding the second annual Greener Gadgets conference in New York in February (the first since it was acquired by CEA), because CEA thinks the greener gadgets trend is here to stay. And consumers are increasingly starting to care about the life cycle of their gadgets, from factory floor to end-of-life recycling, and — as they have with organic food — those consumers will pay extra for more sustainable goods. While the green premium may fade in bad economic times, we’re guessing that, even if the downturn doesn’t let up, CES 2010 will look even greener than 2009.

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New Yorkers, long used to getting free Wi-Fi Internet access in some of their bigger parks, will no longer enjoy the connectivity. WiFi Salon, a company that was offering free Wi-Fi in 10 parts of four New York City boroughs, shut down because of a lack of financing. The city is in budgetary doldrums and didn’t want to spend any money on free services. Marshall Brown, WiFi Salon’s founder, hasn’t given up on the dream and started a new company called Wired Towns that offers free Wi-Fi in partnership with Business Improvement Districts. Union Square is already up and running. Bryant Park still has a functioning (and free) Wi-Fi network. Glenn Fleishman, the Wi-Fi guru, shares his views and ponders on why the service got shut down.

The New York situation is not unique. Across the country, the aftershocks of the credit crunch are impacting municipal broadband projects. City- or municipality-wide broadband efforts depended on cities’ ability to sell bond to fund these projects. The booming economy allowed cities to garner extra tax revenues, which allowed them to easily raise the bonds to raise funds to spend on various projects — including MuniFi.

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Sometimes you can’t make this stuff up:

“Music companies aren’t tech companies, although we depend on tech innovation for the evolution of our business,” Michael Nash, Warner Music Group’ s executive vice president for digital strategy and business development tells The Wall Street Journal.

The fight with Apple’s iTunes for selling their products, suing kids and their moms, accusing customers and calling them thieves…I don’t think the music industry even knows the meaning of the word innovation. It is more like forced evolution of an industry that is made up of technophobes and known to make intellectually challenged moves!

As Hunter  S. Thompson once said:

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. (via)

Apparently, I am not the only one who is hating on the bonehead moves made by record labels. Steve Knopper has written a book about it, “Appetitie for Self Destruction.” Check out the New York Times review of it.

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Apple’s announcements at Macworld may have lacked some of the flair and sizzle that CEO Steve Jobs usually brought to his keynote, but there was one announcement that, arguably, will wind up changing the playing field considerably. That announcement is the news of DRM-free sales from all of the major music labels through iTunes, and the addition of variable pricing. As rumored during the run up to Macworld, the world’s largest online music store will soon start selling songs for 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 each.

The only question now, as Peter Kafka notes in a post at MediaMemo, is whether anyone will care or not — and whether it will help to fix any of the music industry’s systemic problems.

Amazon (among others) has had DRM-free songs from the four major record labels available in its online store for almost a year now, and it sells many of them at a lower price than Apple does. But so far that hasn’t helped Jeff Bezos and his team loosen the stranglehold that Steve Jobs has on the portable music market. The reality is that while DRM may be a big hobbyhorse for geeks, it isn’t really a big concern for most iTunes shoppers. The vast majority of buyers are happy to buy songs from Apple regardless of what format they come in — provided they can play them on an iPod. Anyone looking for DRM-free music can already find it pretty easily.

The more important part of this news, at least from a music industry point of view, is the introduction of variable pricing — or at least a three-tiered approach, which is as close to variable pricing as the record labels are likely to get (for now). Jobs has resisted the pleas of the industry for several years now, and Apple appears to have done a straight swap of DRM-free music in return for the tiered offerings. But as veteran music-industry observer and gadfly Bob Lefsetz describes in his latest letter, those concessions could wind up doing the record labels more harm than good — at least if the industry sees them as a solution to their larger problems. Lefsetz calls it “fiddling while Rome burns.”

The labels may be hoping they can sell the bulk of their hits for $1.29, but the reality could be very different. As Adrian Kingsley-Hughes points out in his column at ZDNet, they could easily wind up conditioning the market to expect even lower prices for most of the music they buy, apart from the mega-hits. That will make the labels even more desperate to pump up mega-brands like Britney, but the result could be an even thinner revenue stream from the bulk of their catalogues. Don’t be surprised if you see a lot of record executives thumbing through the Cliff’s Notes version of “The Long Tail,” with a fevered look in their eyes, while staring down a spreadsheet with some big holes in it.

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A new report from Pike & Fisher should strike fear in the hearts of telecommunications companies. First, it posits that broadband growth will decline by 12 percent in the U.S. (although subscriptions themselves will grow by 8 percent), and that of the 5.7 million new broadband subscribers anticipated in 2009, three fourths of them will choose cable. That’s certainly not good news for carriers hoping to stem landline loss (P&F estimates landlines will decline almost 16 percent next year to 86 million). It also puts a crimp in plans to offer converged services across televisions, mobile phones and computers — something both AT&T and the cable guys are itching to do.

Wireless subscriptions have helped carriers along, as the incredible growth of wireless data adoption has somewhat offset the loss of landlines and the slow growth of DSL. However, those new subscriptions may also wane. Pike & Fisher estimates that 60 percent of wireless subscribers will have a 3G handset, but the report didn’t make any guesses about wireless data subscription growth.

Fears of a wireless subscriber slowdown led yesterday to a downgrade of Verizon’s and AT&T’s shares from Craig Moffett, the communications analyst at Sanford Bernstein, who has also been less than impressed with Verizon’s investments in fiber. Anyhow, new subscribers on the wireless side don’t fill in the revenue gap incurred when landline and DSL subscribers leave. As for television services from the carriers, they’re growing rapidly, but still will likely have a mere 6 percent of the market, according to the Pike & Fisher report.

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IBM readies free Symphony productivity suite for Mac. [OStatic]
How to get paid better in 2009. [WebWorkerDaily]
Adobe marches into your TV. [NewTeeVee]
Scan and turn books into audio files. [jkOnTheRun]
Skype 2.8 Beta Goes Live. It is Good. [theAppleBlog]
Smart grid could create 280,000 smart jobs. [Earth2Tech]

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If I had to name one collaboration application that I to use on an almost daily basis, with the exception of Google Docs, my answer would be Cisco’s WebEx. A lot of companies make pitches to me using WebEx. Despite its patchy performance on the Mac, it is still an easy way to get through a PowerPoint. Well, WebEx just got better, thanks to the new WebEx for the iPhone app. It also works on the iPod Touch.

In other words, you don’t need to be in the office to get going — you can totally do meetings from anywhere — as long as AT&T’s temperamental 3G network is working. Your WebEx system needs to be iPhone compatible at the back end, though, and for now you can view the presentations but not start them from your iPhone. I think that, despite all the reservations about iPhone in the enterprise, apps such as WebEx for iPhone indicate that it will find footing inside corporations.

To find out more, check out the FAQ and download the app from the iTunes apps store. Let me know what you think about the application.

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It wasn’t quite the same lively Macworld keynote without Steve Jobs, but it looks like self-deprecating Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of worldwide product marketing, did an admirable job of introducing a whole slew of products, including the new Macbook Pro (17-inch version) and the new DRM free iTunes music store, without so much as mentioning Steve Jobs. Of all the product launches, I was most impressed with Apple’s new software – iLife ‘09 and iWork ‘09. In this day and age, when it is widely assumed that all apps are moving to the Internet, Apple has done the opposite and given its desktop apps a big boost. What I was impressed by is how the company has brought the Internet into these applications. The new version of the iPhoto application now allows you to seamlessly upload photos to Facebook and/or Flickr. Without much effort, it also allows you to geotag the photos, helping bring “location” into the desktop.

• iPhoto ‘09 automatically scans photos to detect people’s faces, and when you assign a name to any face iPhoto will automatically find more pictures of that person in your desktop library. It also lets you easily publish photos to Facebook or Flickr. The Places tool automatically imports photo location data from a GPS-enabled camera or iPhone, and you can manually assign a location to any photo, group of photos or event.
• iWeb ‘09 allows publishing to any hosting service, and it can also automatically send updates to your Facebook profile.
• On GarageBand, you can download music lessons from famous artists like Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan, using the new GarageBand Lesson Store, available inside the GarageBand ‘09 application.
• Apple also launched the in public beta of iWork.com, a new service Apple is developing to share iWork ‘09 documents online.

Essentially, Apple has adapted its applications to accomodate new user behaviors that involve web services like Flickr and Facebook. In doing so, it is giving people a reason to keep using their desktop applications longer, for tasks that are more complex than, say, typing out a quick document. With these upgrades it has stayed true to its philosophy of focusing on user experience and usability.

This Internet-in-the-desktop approach is something we have talked about for a long time — probably too long. Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie, in an interview with me, extolled the virtues of a hybrid environment and said that in the future, Microsoft Office is going to live both on the desktop and in the cloud. Apple’s new iWork.com is an attempt to do just that for the iWork productivity suite.

In bringing Internet into its desktop apps, Apple is also trying to overcome its lack of web savviness. A case in point is iWork.com, which carries the beta tag but is more like an alpha. For now, you can’t edit other people’s docs; you can only leave sticky notes on them or chat about them. On the issue of collaboration, as hipsters would say, iWork.com is an epic fail, considering that even tiny startups are able to offer those features. It seems that, in order to actually edit the document, you have to download it and make change offline. If they want to be taken seriously, they’ll have to get it up to par with Google Docs; I hope they do.

That said, Apple’s newest upgrades show that, with enough creativity and the right functionality, desktop apps can still live on. As Tony Bennett sang to close the 2009 keynote, “the best is yet to come.”

With reports from Josh Pigford and Liz Gannes at Macworld in San Francisco

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Today, Clearwire unveiled the WiMAX network in Portland, Ore., that we covered last month. Portland is the first city to get WiMAX service under the Clear brand since Clearwire closed its WiMAX spectrum merger with Sprint last month. Portland joins Baltimore, Md., as Clearwire’s only pure WiMAX network in the country.

Clearwire plans to upgrade its 46 pre-WiMAX markets in the coming years. Meanwhile, it looks like other pure WiMAX deployments, such as Chicago, are getting pushed back. Clearwire has said it may slow its WiMAX deployments in response to the financial crisis, but CEO Ben Wolffe said in December that decision would be made at a January board meeting, the date of which has not been set as of today. Pricing for the Clear service in Portland runs from $30 per month for 200 MB to $50 per month for unlimited data for wireless service and from $20 per month for 768 kbps uplink to $40 per month for up to 6 Mbps up for home service.

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