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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2007-07c
News for when lightning strikes non-union clouds
NEW, MORE ECONOMICAL 3-CHIP 1080 EVERIO COMING
In September, the Everio line gets its second 3-chip HD camcorder
with a 60GB hard drive that holds up to 5 hours of uncompromised
MPEG2 1080i video & boasts a stabilized 10X zoom. The wires have
more details but there's one detail we can share now: its initial
price point is $400 less than the current GZHD7 (which it does
not replace). Challenge Chelsea to get you onto the reviewers
list. Contact: Chelsea Vander Groef, JVC COMPANY OF AMERICA
(Wayne, NJ) 973-317-5000x5312 mailto:cvandergroef@jvc.com
http://jvc.com
MEDIS PROJECTS IPHONE TIP AT SAME TIME AS RETAIL
The Medis 24/7 Power Pack 1Watt Fuel Cell ($20 plain, $30 with
full kit, 3Q07) supported gear roster should include (barring
snags; they're working on it now) the iPhone by late September,
when these fuel cells hit retailers. Adding one more phone or
player to the list that its power converters & adapter tips can
handle should be no big deal, but in the case of the iPhone with
its soldered-in battery, swapping in a spare is not an answer for
extending its run time in the field. If there's any specific gear
you want to ask about (in terms of the fuel cell being an
effective field charger for it), send a message to Michelle &
she'll get you its status. Contact: Michelle Rush, MEDIS
TECHNOLOGIES LTD. (Brentwood CA) 925-516-3837
mailto:mrush@medistechnologies.com http://MedisTechnologies.com
MOGO WEB SPILLS SECRETS
You may not have known about the Bluetooth headset that slips
into a notebook's PC slot to recharge; so far, it's been an OEM
(not retail) product from the house that brought you the MoGo
Mouse, but visit http://MoGoMouse.com & you'll see it's slated
for an upcoming intro. Ditto the new MoGo Dapter that barely
bulges out a USB port to add Bluetooth 2 support to a lot of
notebooks or desktops that may still be at lesser standards or
have no Bluetooth at all. It's also a place to check out the new
X54 standard & pro high-res MoGo Mouse multifunction models. Take
a look through, make up a wish list & see if Jack can't make it
come true. Contact: Jack Corrao, NEWTON PERIPHERALS (West Newton,
MA) 858-792-0944 mailto:jack.corrao@newtonperipherals.com
http://NewtonPeripherals.com
HOW TO GIVE WEATHER FOR CHRISTMAS
Here we are talking Christmas in July; what will we talk about
next, the weather? Yep. Ever since we found out the size of the
population of weather geeks (people who spend money to get more
than free reports, between 1 in 200 & 1 in 600 households), we've
been intrigued. And Justin tells us that they can buy year-long
subscriptions to the AccuWeather.com premium online weather
service for about $80. Nobody had to put a ribbon around that
idea for us; almost anything that makes us chuckle seems like a
good candidate for a story. Contact: Justin Roberti, ACCUWEATHER,
INC. (State College, PA) 814-235-8756
mailto:roberti@accuweather.com Http://AccuWeather.com
C2 IN SOHO: ROI IN JUST ONE WINTER, JUST ONE SUMMER
The new Herman Miller C2 personal comfort appliance ($285) uses a
solid state thermoelectric Peltier device to either heat or cool
a small bubble in a personal workspace, bringing comfort to an
area that might otherwise be too hot or too cold. It was designed
for modular office workspaces in big companies, home turf to
Herman Miller, but that's not the only place where it makes
sense. For people who work at home or in a small office, a C2 on
the desk lets you adjust the thermostat for the rest of the space
to something that costs you less; the difference of a few degrees
warmer before the air conditioner kicks in for the summer, or a
few degrees cooler before the furnace kicks in during the winter
can cover the cost of the C2 in just one season. Ask Mark.
Contact: Mark Schurman, HERMAN MILLER, INC. (Zeeland, MI)
616-654-5498 mailto:mark_schurman@hermanmiller.com
http://HermanMiller.com
TREND SETTER FOR SPREADER DREADERS
If you think lawn care begins & ends with mowing, that just
doesn't cut it. You have to feed, sometimes seed, prevent weeds &
address other needs, which can be expensive, sometimes
unnecessarily so. If you have a lawn, are there bags of leftover
lawn care stuff in your garage? Buying the right amount is
tricky, in large part because we all keep guessing at the actual
lawn area we have to cover. It's easy to cut the guesswork with a
digital camera & iPhotoMeasure software; place its target in each
shot & see accurate lateral measurements of everything that is
lawn & everything that isn't (like your house, which we assume
you don't seed, weed or feed). Do that for the front, back & side
yards & you can know the area of your lawn down to square inches.
Pester Paul for a copy. Contact: Paul Minor, DIGICONTRACTOR INC.
(Tarzana, CA) 818-888-3687 mailto:paul@iphotomeasure.com
http://iPhotoMeasure.com
SECTOR SNOOPING PREVENTS LENGTHY LOOPING
What you can restore is a lot more important than what you back
up, but most backup software is not good about letting you
restore everything. The challenge others have yet to beat
involves open files & files not yet written to disk. Double
Image-O uses sector snooping & the same approach to life as
Windows Explorer to get past that. In the first 15-45 seconds of
the file copying phase at the start of a new backup session,
before its snapshot point (a key element to its ability to back
up open files), Double Image-O is reading the disk sectors of
open files that Windows needs to (but has not yet been able to)
write; that snags the most complete possible state of the file.
Sector snooping remains active for the remainder of the backup
session, a necessity to cover any new file writes. Since you
don't know of any other backup software capable of doing that,
isn't it time to take a look at Double Image-O? Bug Bryant to set
you up. Contact: Bryant Kittelson, HOST INTERFACE INTERNATIONAL
INC. (Marysville, WA) 425-746-4361 mailto:b.k@hostinterface.com
http://hostinterface.com
EMBRACING BRACES WITH A CLEAN TEEN MACHINE
We can't yet tell you about a major study that's about to begin
on this subject, but we can tell you that HydraBrush is raising
eyebrows in terms of its effectiveness at improving the hygienic
status of kids with braces. Even perfect brushing habits
(unlikely as they are) can leave food trapped in the wiring; the
bristle pace & positioning of bite-surrounding HydraBrush heads
seems to be doing a significantly better real-life job of leaving
fewer decay-starters behind; the study will establish to what
extent that's true & how HydraBrush results compare to
alternatives. One point that we as parents should acknowledge:
anything that, like HydraBrush, gets the job done faster is
likely to see more effectiveness in the hands of the kids. Ask
Bill. Contact: Bill Dendiu, ORALBIOTIC RESEARCH INC. (Escondido,
CA) 702-736-6536 mailto:bdendiu54@cs.com http://HydraBrush.com
BACK TO SCHOOL WITH DOCUPEN
Since it's time to prep all that back-to-school coverage, here's
a fast briefing on all the ways a DocuPen portable color scanner
can fit. For the early years, it's more of a fit for parents than
for kids, with a handy way to scan the artwork, report cards &
other mementos of that era. As soon as the middle school
research-based papers begin or any other reason for investing
hours into or hauling freight out of the library, the freight
loses weight when those critical pages all get scanned into a
DocuPen; even photos & charts remain usable. To get even more
dramatic, DocuPen can scan & capture what's displayed on a
monitor when those research resources are mostly online. Crank
the usefulness of all that up a notch in high school & college,
where it's also an extremely convenient way to share class notes.
And as the business end of a scanner, DocuPen is also the capture
end of a copier; any time you want a hard copy of the pages it
harvests, just let the PC print it out. Or attach the scanned
page files to e-mail messages to share with classmates. Ask Doug.
Contact: Doug Verkaik, PLANON SYSTEMS SOLUTIONS, INC.
(Mississauga, ON) 905-507-3926x225 mailto:dougv@planon.com
http://www.planon.com
WHY ILOAD SPORTS SO MANY PORTS
You can understand why iLoad would have one USB port (to connect
an iPod) & maybe the second (to do iPod-to-iPod sharing or
iPod-to-USB drive backups), but those aren't the only
connections. There are speaker/mike/line-in mini-jack sockets, a
mouse port, a keyboard port, an S-Video connection, an Ethernet
port, RCA A/V connections & more. What are they for? Ask Bernie.
Contact: Bernard Kaplan, WINGSPAN (Campbell, CA) 408-626-0009x237
mailto:bkaplan@iload.com
SPECIAL REPORT: MEDIA & THE EEK IN ECONOMICS
Once you hang around newsrooms for a few decades, memory has a
funny way of turning into little term papers of the mind; our
case in point is the newsroom itself. Half a century ago, when ad
dollars left an editorial budget worth managing, editors &
reporters & broadcast news producers were almost all educated
males, mostly with college degrees. A decade later, consolidation
reduced the field of competition for newspapers & ratings races
(which were good for fattening ad rates) made TV news healthy,
more women with degrees were competing for jobs & often got
hired. (Whatever other motives may have been afoot - and at the
time, they were definitely, wink-wink, afoot - these women would
accept jobs for less than their male counterparts were paid). A
decade after that, cable's competitive influence combined with
some weakness in the general economy in ways that actually helped
being newsrooms closer to a gender balance, more non-Caucasian
hiring was done (it was an era of pressures there) & the
competition for larger broadcast newsrooms, more bureaus for
newspapers, more magazine titles & other growth elements played a
role. There are always limits to any growth game; in the
following decade, between rapid growth in cable competition &
rapidly rising news operations costs (satellite news vans & whiz
bang weather radar & increased day-part coverage for TV, color
presses & computerization for newspapers), growth was likely to
slow anyway, but that was exacerbated by the downsizing or
disappearance of department store ad budgets as the fortunes of
those steadfast perennial advertisers were eroded by the
burgeoning growth of discount department stores. Then came the
dot-com boom & "new media" diverted huge chunks of ad budgets
away from traditional media while creating the additional costs
of trying to establish their own presence in this brave new
virtual world. Then along came the dot-com bust & the economic
doldrums of the post-Clinton era. The intensely dedicated
reporters of the Murrow era, their risk-taking producers, the
emperors of newspapers & other scions of that bygone era are
gone. The local TV station's producers today are often young
women without much outside experience, earning money that's
adequate to the needs of somebody not long out of school. Many
newsroom jobs remain empty, with no one willing to take them at
the small salaries they offer. Less-than-celebrity senior
journalists are compelled to cling to what job security they can
muster, since lateral career migration is next to impossible. We
know the pain of that. We can offer some small advice: your value
is in the people you reach. Demonstrate to your bosses that they
turn specifically to your work & your bosses can make sure that
this special appeal gets communicated to the advertisers who
nourish the food chain of media economics. And the best way to
get a bigger audience to turn to you is to ask them what it is
they love & especially what it is they hate when they do that.
SPECIAL REPORT BONUS REVIEW: MOTOROLA SURFBOARD SBG900
For people with cable modem service, choosing what you plug into
the cable makes a huge difference in how much you have to plug
into the cable & what you can get out of it. We've been on cable
modem service for years & the cable system's most recent cable
modem for us, already several years old, was a Motorola SURFboard
(5100 series), which we plugged into a Buffalo wireless router.
Now Motorola sent us a new SURFboard model SBG900 that includes
an 802.11g wireless gateway & an advanced firewall, both built
in. Comparing new to old is like looking at a slightly magnified
(about half an inch taller, a smidge wider) version with one more
light on the front, a rubber ducky WiFi antenna on the top &
absent the earlier model's Standby button. The way this thing
works is a "gimme" & it's the best solution on the consumer
sections of the Motorola Web site, but we've seen some other
goodies at trade shows & a little online hunting leads to a
strangely split recommendation. Note the Online description of
the SBG940, with all of these features plus a 4-port wired
Ethernet 10/100 router. We've also seen prototypes of beefier
packages that also include 2 lines of VOIP over house POTS wiring
& a built-in battery backup. So our mixed-review bottom line
about the SBG900 says: It's just about everything you've hoped
for, all in one box, but not quite as much as they can put in a
box; if you don't need VOIP or a wired router or an integrated
UPS, it's a perfect choice.
SPECIAL REPORT SECOND BONUS REVIEW: SODA CLUB FOUNTAIN JET
Is anybody else old enough to remember the Howdy Doody Show with
Clarabelle the Clown (played by Bob Keeshan, better known for his
later role as Captain Kangaroo)? Clarabelle had a big box over
his belt buckle; inside the box was a terrible weapon: the
seltzer bottle (aka soda siphon), which served as something of an
earlier decade's Super Soaker. The Seltzer bottle also appeared
in many movies, including several in the Thin Man series; a small
CO2 cartridge in its handle would make ordinary water effervesce
into seltzer (aka soda water or club soda) for Scotch & soda, for
example. The same technology is also behind the past 100+ years
of the soda fountain, though the carbon dioxide tanks in those
are far from small. We just tried a somewhat newer countertop
alternative, the Soda Club Fountain Jet Edition 1, somewhere
between the size of a coffee maker & the size of a milkshake
blender. This hides a salami-size CO2 canister in its base; it
doesn't plug in or use batteries. You place cold water in one of
its bottles, screw the bottle into a fitting, push the button a
few times to carbonate the water, remove it, add a cap-full of
flavoring, close the bottle, shake it a few times, then pour &
enjoy. In return for the counter space & these activities, you
get pretty good tasting carbonated beverages (in any of a variety
of flavors, including diet varieties), you consume a lot less
sodium, eliminate manufacturing & disposal of a bunch of plastic
bottles & maybe pay less. (Their site says 43 cents per liter).
We tried the orange mango & the diet root beer; they're both
pretty darned good. So where's the balance? The thing is
interesting to look at, but may be tough to stow away. The costs
are good but not exactly unbeatable; we sometimes see 2-liter
bottles at 69-79 cents. The rigmarole may be a bit much if you
just want a drink of something now. On the other hand, it's a bit
of an activity center that a family can enjoy together & it is
much more environmentally conscientious than disposable bottles
on store-bought soda pop, not to mention a great way to cut
pounds of sodium out of your intake every year. Bottom line:
bottom's up! It's worth keeping around.
NEW BRIEFING PAPER: THE ETHICS OF REVIEWS
Should you pay to receive a review product, to ship it back or to
insure it? We think there's a clear ethical standard here: no
reviewer should ever be compelled to invest in a company whose
product is being reviewed; these expenses amount to investment,
since they underwrite the company's cost of doing business. So
does any agreement to pay full list price if they don't get it
back the moment they expect it. All they really need to see is
that we understand that placing it in our possession doesn't give
us ownership & that they expect us to take reasonable care of it.
We added to our collection of advice briefings for PR pros with
"Sensitivity to Editorial Ethics in Managing Product Reviews";
it's on our Web site now & if you want, we'll be happy to send
you a copy. Contact: Martin Winston, NEWSTIPS (Novelty, OH)
440-338-8400; mailto:marty@newstips.com http://Newstips.com
THE BIG EVENT: HOLLYWOOD & HIGHLAND, FRIDAY OCTOBER 5
See http://TheBigEvent for all the details; by the end of the
weekend, we'll add the menu (high probability of drooling) & a
special discount arrangement with the Renaissance Hollywood
hotel. You can use the site or drop a line to RSVP. And come to
Las Vegas early next January so you don't miss Cherry Picks,
Sunday morning, 9-12, 1/6/08, at The Wynn.
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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