But pre-orders are just the first step. Information Week reports:

Strategy Analytics suggested that T-Mobile could sell up to 400,000 units by the end of the year.

One possible hurdle to hitting this sales figure is T-Mobile’s relatively small 3G footprint. The G1 greatly benefits from having mobile broadband access, but the fourth-largest U.S. carrier only has 3G service in 13 markets.

To really succeed as a marquee device, the G1 must generate the type of buzz and desire that convinces people to switch mobile carriers – and sometimes incur costly early termination fees. The iPhone was great at that, as CNET reports:

Apple’s iPhone 3G apparently created a summertime switch itch: 30 percent of all the smartphone’s buyers bailed on their existing carriers in order to purchase the device, according to an NPD Group report released Monday.

That ’switch itch’ was scratched by many – including your two Innovation bloggers – because of the iPhone 3G’s innovative features and slick interface.

Those who didn’t yet make the leap, and who can’t wait until October 22 to get their hands on the G1’s full QWERTY keyboard and slide-out touchscreen, are in luck – sort of. T-Mobile has made available an online emulator that lets visitors explore the G1 with their mice. It’s clever, but not the type of thing that will get many would-be buyers off the fence.

That kick may not arrive until later this month, when the Android Market – the G1’s answer to  Apple’s much-maligned iPhone App Store – opens. Slate offers a good comparison of the two marketplaces, pointing out the Android Market’s free applications and absence of a sticky application approval process.

Jobs 2.0: How do bloggers make money?
“Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually – though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year.” [via Slate]

Telescopes: 400 years and counting
“Quick – name the invention that has done most to redefine our place in the universe. Hint: This invention was also the most seditious, blasphemous instrument of all time, shaking the very foundations of society. The answer, if you haven’t already guessed it, is the telescope. It’s hard to believe that this instrument, often sold as a cheesy toy in gift shops, is perhaps the single most important scientific instrument of all time.” [via Wired]
Part of a series that also covers: The extremely large future of the telescope, Gallery: giants of Earth and space, and Son of Hubble, prepare for a 2013 liftoff.

Silver screen: Coming to a theater near you: more 3-D
“Five Hollywood studios have agreed to help pay for a $1 billion-plus rollout of digital technology on about 20,000 movie screens in North America, a precursor to showing more movies in 3-D.” [via AP/CNN]

The list: The 25 Most Influential People on the Web
“Each year, we turn to readers and BusinessWeek staff for the Best of the Web list, asking them to contribute names for a list of the Intern­et’s movers and shakers. Take a look at the slide show to see which people have the most impact on the Web these days.” [via Business Week]

Green living: It comes in beige or black, but you make it green
“In a bid to secure your green bragging rights, you have the usual suspects covered, but what about your PC? After all, the machine that can provide you with information on how to lead an ecologically sound life can also be contributing to the environmental problem you are trying to solve.” [via NYTimes]

Hashem Akbari thinks so.

Global warming’s complexity and momentum have led to a try-everything approach by scientists. In that spirit, Dr. Akbari offers his simple yet profound innovation for slowing that warming way down.

It has long been known that a white roof makes a dwelling cooler. That saves energy and cuts carbon emissions. But until Akbari, a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, picked up a pencil to do the calculations, few realized the major climate effect that millions of white rooftops could have by reflecting sunlight back into space.

It turns out that a 1,000 square foot area of rooftop painted white has about the same one-time impact on global warming as cutting 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, he and his colleagues write in a new study soon to be published in the journal “Climatic Change.”

As sunlight pours down into Earth’s atmosphere, some of the energy is filtered out or bounces off clouds. About half the energy shines through as visible light and some of that hits the tops of houses. If a roof is white, most sunlight reflects back into space and doesn’t heat the earth. But if a roof is a dark color, the sunlight converts to heat rather than bouncing off as light. That thermal energy then radiates off the roof back toward space, where it is trapped by CO2 in the atmosphere, and then absorbed by this greenhouse gas. As a result, the world’s thermometer reads just a little higher than it did before.

If the estimated 360,000 square miles (less than 1 percent of the world’s land surface) covered by urban rooftops and pavement were a white or light color, enough sunlight would be reflected back into space to delay climate change by about 11 years, the study shows.

Put another way, boosting how much urban rooftops reflect, called albedo (al-BEE-doh) in scientific terms, would be a one-time carbon-offset equivalent to preventing 44 billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, Akbari says. It’s about the same as taking all the earth’s automobiles off the road for 11 years, the study’s authors say.

“What we have done are very simple calculations,” Akbari says, “but it is novel because, for the first time, we’re equating the value of reflective roof surfaces and CO2 reduction. This does not make the problem of global warming go away. But we can buy ourselves some time.”

Selling the idea
Geoengineers have had similar ideas: covering the Sahara with enormous sheets of white plastic, for instance, or painting the Black Hills of South Dakota white.

But because white roofs create an additional 20 percent energy savings by cutting cooling costs, some say this built-in financial incentive should propel urban rooftops around the globe to lighten up.

“Now that we know what a great help it is on climate change, we expect more utilities to give incentives for homeowners who go entirely white with their roofing material, not just ‘cool’ colors [like pastel blues, reds, and greens]” says Arthur Rosenfeld, a member of the five-person California Energy Commission.

To promote energy efficiency, Georgia and Florida already give incentives to owners who install white or light-colored roofs. Going a step further, California has since 2005 mandated that all flat roofs (mostly commercial and industrial) must be white. Some utilities also now offer homeowners an incentive of 20 cents per square foot on a tile roof that may cost $1.20 a foot.

Still, the cost of going with a “cool roof” usually isn’t much more than a typical darker roof. Asphalt shingles with a white or light tint are roughly the same cost as other shades.

Painting a black asphalt roof with the reflective white coating, however, is obviously more expensive than the black surface alone. But energy savings largely offset the price of painting through reduced air conditioning costs, Dr. Rosenfeld says.

In the southwest, cool-roof pastel colors or bright white tile can cost a bit more than the standard reddish color – although there are tile suppliers that charge about the same cost for cool colors, roofing industry experts say.

“I went through their calculations and got roughly the same numbers,” says Michael MacCracken, former director of climate-change research under President Bill Clinton. “Some of it is a bit idealized. But what they say is a valid thing to do for any single building … and seems valuable for an urban area to try to reduce heat-island effects while realizing some contributions for the globe as well.”

Still, not everyone is enthusiastic. Roofing contractors who specialize in solid black asphalt-based roofs and roofing materials have told Akbari they think the idea is for the birds. Even those who like the idea worry it will run into resistance from homeowners who don’t like white.

Right now in California the Old World “vintage look” in clay tile – dark reds or browns – is more popular, not the light greens, blues, and pinks that some cool-roof tile companies offer.

“I personally think all-white rooftops and walls are beautiful,” says Yoshi Suzuki, president of MCA Clay Tile in Corona, Calif. “But not everyone likes white…. Even with a rebate we are finding the cool-roof colors can be a tough sell.”

But that reticence will change in July 2009 when California begins requiring sloping rooftops (mostly residential) to be light-colored cool-roof colors, if not white, Rosenfeld says.

One reason: The mandate will be an economic boon to homeowners, he says. Past studies have shown that white roofs’ net energy savings (cooling-energy savings minus heating-energy penalties) are around 20 percent. Such savings would save the United States more than $1 billion a year on air conditioning, the study says. Getting the white-roof ethos rolling could be a challenge. But two paths could spread white roofs worldwide, Rosenfeld says. In the US, growing economic incentives for cool-roof standards to lessen homeowner cooling costs will promote the spread of California building standards. Outside the US, he and Akbari say they will push to develop a program at the UN or the Clinton Foundation.

Are the benefits ‘overstated’?
While geoengineers like Alvia Gaskill say the research was worthwhile to focus attention on the issue, the study “greatly overstates the benefits,” he wrote in e-mailed response to the study.

Mr. Gaskill, president of Environmental Reference Materials, a consulting firm in Research Triangle Park, N.C., argues that  something much larger and more direct is needed. For example, aircraft could spray sulfur-based compounds into the high atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space.  The effect would be similar to what clouds from volcanic eruptions have done over history. (He also had proposed the idea of plastic sheeting for the Sahara.)

“I’m in favor of doing these types of calculations and proposals,” Gaskill says. “But I’m not sure you can really apply a Los Angeles type model to Lagos, Nigeria, or places in China.”

But Rosenfeld says many obstacles will dissolve in the face of the profit motive.

India and China are already eligible under Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to be paid for projects that qualify as carbon offsets. Prices for CDM offsets for CO2 now run $25 per ton, Rosenfeld says. Putting cool-roof standards into building codes could mean CDM payments of $250 for every 1,000 square feet of white roof area. “That’s a pretty good incentive,” Rosenfeld notes.

Now, that’s not so surprising. I’ve been a little too tied to my new favorite gadget these past couple weeks, and, despite my better judgments, have fully bought into the Facebook craze.

What surprised me was that I wasn’t alone. Within minutes, four of my friends had done the same thing.

“Well, at least I’m not the only Facebook-politics nerd,” I thought to myself. But the status updates and wall posts didn’t stop when the debate started.

With moderator Gwen Ifill’s first address to the camera came another post: “Green? She’s wearing green?” And with the candidates’ first appearance, another round of comments: “Nice to meet you. Can I call you Joe?,” and “Her bangs are distracting me.”

When Facebook introduced its “News Feed” in 2006 there were shouts of protest and calls for the feature’s repeal. The instantly updating log of your friends’ updates to their profiles was called an invasion of privacy. But once people learned to control their personal privacy settings, so that their relationship status updates, photo comments, or wall postings didn’t get advertised to 300 of their not-exactly-closest friends, the fervor died down. And last night the News Feed brought us together. (more…)

Even before this product reboot (which will hit Japan in November and elsewhere next year), the portable gaming device had been an international hit. Nintendo has already sold 77.5 million DS systems worldwide – ahead of Sony’s PSP, which has sold 41 million. One out of every six people in Japan own a DS. And it was the No. 1 selling video game system in the US this August, even beating out Nintendo’s other cash cow, the Wii.

Now that the new system – called the DSi – is even more impressive, a lot of analysts are pondering: Who should be afraid of this updated handheld?

Perhaps Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Business Week says:

With the DSi’s Wi-Fi and SD card features, Nintendo pushes further into the digital platform business. That puts it squarely in competition against Apple, which has been luring big-name studios to sell downloadable blockbuster games for the iPhone through the App Store. Studios that might have had second thoughts about manufacturing cartridges for the DS now have an online distribution channel that costs far less than if they were to sell through major retailers.

Or, Nintendo could try to replace traditional PDAs. DS titles have expanded beyond traditional games to include dictionaries, planners, how-to guides, yoga training, and brain teasers targeted at both kids and their parents. This “causal” selection could greatly expand with the introduction of the DS store.

Or, the DSi could be a shot at PSP. The new edition will be more expensive than the current DS, but still cost less than Sony’s rival portable device. The PSP is also going through a redesign this winter – its big improvement will be a new screen, which is already much more visually impressive than the DS’s displays.

Or, maybe brick-and-mortar stores should be fretting. Goldman Sachs analyst Matthew J. Fassler writes that the online marketplace is a “tangible early threat” to Best Buy, Circuit City, and GameStop stores. Nintendo is actually a little behind in this regard. All the big consoles and the PSP already have digital shops. But with Nintendo’s large user base and better access to broadband Internet, more users will be temped away from physical stores, he says. “While content will be limited at first, we believe it will likely ramp very quickly,” Mr. Fassler writes.

UBS’s Ben Schauchter says pishposh. The DSi features are only a “minor” improvement, he writes, and “as such are unlikely to expand the … user base.” That doesn’t mean it won’t sell, but most purchases will be people trading in their old systems for new ones. “Additional functions may extend the software line-up but not by enough to further boost consumer spending,” he writes. “Body size will be smaller, but not enough to change convenience dramatically.”

All things considered, though, Nintendo is doing just fine. Between the DS, the Wii, and many successful games, “Nintendo makes more profit per employee than Goldman [Sachs],” according to a recent Financial Times article. “Before tax and before pay, the average Goldman employee generated $1.24m in profit last year, based on the company’s accounts. But after Nintendo upgraded its earnings forecast recently, the FT estimates each staff member will produce more than $1.6m in profit this year.” Doing just fine, indeed.

.

.

.

.

.

Now scientists have uncovered the mechanism behind the high hops. Essentially it’s nature’s version of a technology the armies of King Tut and Genghis Khan would use to great effect – the compound bow.

Back in the day, a compound bow had a wooden core laminated with materials like horn and sinew. The different materials were located in just the right places to give the weapon far more release energy than wood alone could provide. For the spittlebug, also called a froghopper, the “bows” are part of its skeleton.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in Britain and Nova Scotia’s Dalhousie University analyzed the bug’s version of these structures, called pleural arches, and found that they too are a composite.

In this case, the materials include a hard cuticle and a flexible protein known as resilin. As the bug gets ready to soar, its muscles bend the arch. On release, the froghopper launches skyward with a force that can rise to more than 400 times the bug’s body mass. And, the scientists say, it can sustain it’s “crouch” for long periods and make repeated jumps without damaging itself.

The results appear in the current issue of the online journal BMC Biology. Now, about that contract with Nike shoes.

So what does Chrome actually mean for the everyday Web surfer? Right now, not much – but a few years out, Google’s browser could mean a whole lot more.

The reason: Chrome was built to be the browser of the future, or, more specifically, the browser for a Google future. The search-engine giant expects a global shift toward Web-based applications – services that are nearly identical to Microsoft Word and Excel, but that tap into the concept of “cloud computing,” where programs operate exclusively on the Internet.

“The process of moving to Web-based applications is well under way already,” says Rafe Needleman, editor of CNET’s webware.com. “The number of people relying on Web-based e-mail, for example, is really high. This all just sort of happened.”

Everything about Chrome is designed to spur and support online applications. The biggest change is invisible. Many of today’s Web applications use a programing language called JavaScript. Chrome churns through JavaScript faster than other browsers, according to Google.

Tech websites disagree on how much faster, but the consensus holds that Chrome speeds past rival browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE) – especially when it comes to Google’s own websites, such as Gmail and Google Docs. Of course, even major improvements in efficiency are often measured in seconds or milliseconds – far too small to make a huge difference in people’s lives.

Another big feature, and the one most important to casual users, involves the tabs many people create to open multiple websites within a single window. Whereas Firefox and IE treat each tab as a branch of the main browser window, Chrome runs as if each tab were a window all its own. So, if one of Chrome’s tabs crashes, it doesn’t take all of the other tabs down with it.

This is nice if you’re opening a bunch of YouTube videos simultaneously, or, say, editing a Google document and a spreadsheet in different tabs. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer have announced plans to include similar features in future versions.

Beyond that, though, the differences between Chrome, Firefox, and IE are mostly cosmetic. All three are generally regarded as safe, though Chrome, which is still in its “beta” testing version, has had a few bugs emerge in the days following its release. Some people prefer lesser-known browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome, over IE for the simple reason that fewer hackers bother to sniff out vulnerabilities in the less popular programs.

“[The upcoming] Internet Explorer 8 has some pretty cool new security features, and there will probably be even more new ones in the future,” Mr. Needleman says.  “Every new product learns from its predecessors and competitors.”

Perhaps the most telling statistic comes from Net Applications, which tracks browser usage. It estimates show that Chrome’s market share has barely bobbed over 1 percent in its debut month. And don’t expect a wave of converts anytime soon. For the past eight years, the browser war has been an incremental fight. Google doesn’t seem too worried. Even if people never download Chrome, its presence will inspire programmers to create more online application, the company hopes. So, if the company’s vision of the Web comes true, Google stands to reshape the online world in an even more drastic way than it already has.

“Chrome will have a fairly large impact on the robustness of Web-based applications,” says Needleman, “even if people don’t use Chrome itself.”

Humans have lived with trees for millennia. Yet two recent studies reveal that we still have a lot to learn about the subtleties of how they function. It’s knowledge scientists need to better understand how trees fit into Earth’s ecosystems. That understanding is crucial to estimating how much we can count on trees to soak up some of the global warming-related carbon dioxide humans are putting into the air.

One study involves listening to the ultrasonic complaints of drought-stricken, beetle-infested piñon pines, yielding new insights into the tree’s plight. In another line of research, investigators have solved the mystery of how trees produce low-level electrical power. This opens the way to using trees’ own electricity to power sensors that can provide early fire detection in even the most remote forest regions.
Shuguang Zhang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-workers recently explained tree electricity in the PloS ONE, an online journal from the Public Library of Science.

None of the obvious suspects such as tapping into emissions from power lines or broadcast radio waves turned out to be responsible. Trees generate electricity from an imbalance in acidity between a tree and the soil. As the MIT announcement last week noted, this is the same simple process that generates electricity from a potato or lemon at high school science fairs.

Dr. Zhang explains that, while tree power is weak, it can supply a “trickle charge” that “just like a dripping faucet, can fill a bucket over time.” Thus trees can be a reliable power source to recharge batteries in embedded sensors.

The US Forest Service uses a sparse network of automated weather stations to monitor forest conditions and help in predicting fire dangers. A wider, denser network of tree-powered sensors that didn’t need periodic battery replacement would be a major improvement. These sensors would relay data to the nearest weather station, which, in turn, would send them to the central processing center. Four instrumented trees per acre should do the job. An experimental 10-acre plot will begin testing such a system next spring.

The MIT group won’t be asking the trees’ opinion of that test. But James Crutchfield with the University of California at Davis and David Dunn, who heads the Art and Science Laboratory in Santa Fe, N.M., are listening to trees in their research into the effect of climate change on forest infestations. They described their ongoing work two years ago on the Santa Fe Institute website. The journal Leonardo will carry an updated version.

The two found that trees stressed by drought emit sounds pitched too high for human hearing. The researchers suspect that bark beetles detect these sounds and thus locate weakened trees to attack. The beetles also emit ultrasounds with which they communicate among themselves. This, too, may attract more beetles to a tree under attack. Dr. Crutchfield is quoted in Science News as warning that these hypothesizes now need to be thoroughly tested. If true, it may be possible to use ultrasound to divert and confuse the beetles and thus protect vulnerable trees.

Washington’s Copyright Royalty Board will decide Thursday how much music publishers may charge for each song downloaded through online stores. In this battle over slices of the pie, the National Music Publisher’s Association is pushing to increase the standard price-per-track royalty fee from 9 cents to 15 cents. This 66-percent hike is too much, says Apple. It wants the fee closer to 4.8 cents per song, bringing it back down to 1980s levels, according to Ars Technica. (more…)