Monday, May 21, 2007

HP storage blade coming soon

Hewlett-Packard announced the SB40c storage blade October 31. It can supplement a blade server's built-in storage with as much as 876GB more capacity. The storage blade starts at $1,599 and will be available November 14.

SB40c storage blade

The StorageWorks SB40c blade, available Nov. 14 for a starting price of $1,599, plugs directly into HP's new BladeSystem C-class chassis. It houses up to six SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) or SATA (Serial ATA) drives in a half-height blade; a system with the maximum capacity of six 146GB drives costs $4,233.

Blade systems typically house several independent servers within a chassis that supplies shared power and networking infrastructure. Adding storage opens a new chapter in the blade server story of modular design.

But HP's approach isn't a complete replacement for the ways servers use storage today. Each storage blade can connect directly to one server blade, HP spokesman Jason Treu said. That means it doesn't connect over the server's communications backplane, which links all the servers.

It also can't be used as network-attached storage or connect with storage area network technology, though Treu didn't rule out such directions in the future.

Google creates uber search site

Google creates uber search site

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--In its biggest revamp ever to its home page, Google on Wednesday launched its version of universal search, a redesign that will list in one place search results from a variety of media.

Combined with its other new features, universal search not only makes it easier to find relevant information in one place, it will put even more pressure on Google's competitors.

Instead of using separate search pages for photos, video, news, archived news, scanned books and other sources relevant to, say, "Steve Jobs," Google's universal search users will find links to all of those sources in a single search attempt.

"Now with universal search we can provide a more holistic answer," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, said during a "Searchology" media event at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

To illustrate further, Mayer searched for the classic black-and-white horror film Nosferatu. The first result was a link to a popular film site, IMDB, and the second was a link to the actual movie, which can be played on the page in a window. A search for "I have a dream" will display results related to Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous civil rights speech, as well as to a video of the speech. The results also will include video from other sources such as video-sharing site Metacafe.

Other Google features were retuned. Some Google Oneboxes, which offer an instant result at the top of the search results to things like weather, will still be displayed, Mayer said. More significantly, the Google home page eventually will have ads featuring more than just text: some will include video and display, Mayer said in remarks to reporters afterward. "That door has always been open," she said. "We don't have a particular timeline in place."

This is the first major revamp of the site and its underlying architecture in several years, said Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The work began about two years ago and more than half of the company's search efforts were devoted to it, he told reporters after the event, adding that the site will continue to evolve. The changes will expose to more people some "underutilized" Google services, such as Book Search and Video search, and they will help boost Google's already huge market share, Brin said.

"Our data says we not only are the best (search engine) but we're widening the gap," Brin said. Google has about half of the market and even is the top Web property globally, according to comScore.

Google launching 'Universal Search'

At Google's Searchology press event right now, Marissa Mayer just announced a feature we're all going to appreciate: "Universal Search." Google is finally going to display results from various "silos" of search on one page. In other words, you'll no longer have to search books, videos, pictures, and the Web separately. The new Google search will display everything on one page.

Mayer also showed how videos from Google and YouTube will even play in the Google search results. Very cool.

You'll still be able to drill into data types ("corpuses"), but Google will only display links to the most relevant ones for each search.

The first silos to be brought into Universal Search: Books, Local Search, Images, News, and Video. Plus Web results, obviously. Mayer says the new feature will be rolling out today.

Speaking of Universal, a new "Universal navigation bar" will appear on Google services. It lets you quickly navigate between services, like Search and Gmail.

And if you want to always get the latest Google experiments in your engine, check out www.google.com/experimental. There's cool stuff there, like timeline and map views of search results.

Watch CNET News.com for more news; Elinor Mills is at the Searchology conference.

From the Searchology event: Marissa Mayer demos Universal Search.

(Credit: Google)

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Intel Quad-Core Notebook Spy Shot

Intel Quad-Core Notebook Spy Shot

Techwarelabs claims to have acquired a spy shot of a Intel quad core enabled notebook that boasts compatibility with upcoming 8XXX Nvidia cards and much more.

This laptop will supposedly support dual 8800 Video cards, a 17" screen and chassis, two internal Hard Drives up to 160GB each, and the new quad core Intel CPU all using a 975 chipset.








Hide your firewalls! Adobe's CS3 may try to disable them

Creative SuiteThere are a lot of users out there who don't like to use the firewall included with OS X for various reasons. It does, however, provide at least a decent amount of protection, especially for those who aren't behind another, perhaps a hardware firewall. The firewall also doesn't do much if you think you have it on, and it gets disabled thanks to some software that hasn't been tested for quite long enough.

If you are using the OS X firewall, and you've recently installed Creative Suite 3, you should probably be checking your firewall right about now. That's because the Adobe Version Cue CS3 installer will shut off your firewall. More specifically, during the installation for Version Cue, the installer has to turn off the firewall in order to set up some TCP ports. These ports need to be open for communication to and from the Version Cue server, and the firewall would otherwise prevent the installer from tinkering with them. The problem occurs once Version Cue setup is done. Rather than turn the firewall back on at the end, the Version Cue installer inexplicably leaves it turned off, opening your Mac up to all sorts of nastiness. There's no word on if it's a bug or just a curious omission, but if you buy any of the affected versions of CS3 in the next few months, it would be a good idea to check your firewall after installation.

The bug happens with any of the Design or Web versions of the Creative Suite, so there's a fairly large number of systems that are potentially affected by this. If Version Cue CS3 did turn off your firewall, all you have to do it go to the Sharing pane in System Preferences, find the Firewall tab, and start the firewall yourself. It's not a particularly malicious bug or a particularly hard fix, but it's definitely a bit sloppy, especially for a big release from a company like Adobe.

Tamanoi Vinegar Robot

Robot to promote vinegar -- On May 18, buildup Co., Ltd. unveiled the Tamanoi Vinegar Robot, the world’s first robot designed to make presentations about vinegar. The robot is scheduled to go to work at the Tamanoi Vinegar Corporation’s Osaka office in July.

Relying on pre-programmed speech and gestures to communicate its knowledge of vinegar, the robot features a system of pneumatic servos that control 24 points of articulation in the upper half of its body. The 180 cm (nearly 6 ft), 100 kg (220 lb) machine has a mouth that moves in sync with its voice, as well as a fiber-reinforced plastic outer shell that is colored black — like Tamanoi’s black vinegar — with an iridescent coating that changes hue according to the viewing angle.

The robot’s first duties will be to entertain guests at Tamanoi’s “Cyber Trip” amusement theater located in the company’s new head office in Osaka. In addition to the robot, the theater will feature a 12-minute high-definition video on vinegar, also produced by buildup.

Watch video of the robot HERE.

Dell Tablet PC

There's been some chatter about a Latitude Tablet PC coming from Dell. Check out what Jeff Clarke has to say.

<a href="http://media.dellone2one.com/dell/May2007/Tablet.flv"><img src="http://direct2dell.com/photos/my_photos/images/15247/300x225.aspx" border = "0" width="300" height="225"></a><br /><a href = "http://media.dellone2one.com/dell/May2007/Tablet.flv">View Video</a><br />Format: flv<br />Duration: 0:58

Format: flv
Duration: 0:58
Downloads
WMV MP4 OGG

Friday, May 18, 2007

Dull combat drags down 'Spider-Man 3' game

Flying high above N.Y. is great, but button-mashing battles are a bore


Peter Parker's gig as Spider-Man comes with one big perk: Joyful swings between Manhattan's towers of glass and steel. Dealing with an endless supply of villainy in the Big Apple is the downside of the superhero job description.

Unfortunately, that reality holds true in Activision's new "Spider-Man 3" game, timed for release with the blockbuster movie starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Thomas Hayden Church. Taking a high-flying tour around New York City's bustling boroughs is always good fun, but the game is decidedly brought down whenever you have to fight the bad guys.

Activision's "Spider-Man 3" appears on every viable console. The flagship editions are the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games, followed by lesser efforts on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and the Nintendo Wii. This review is primarily focused on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, which are rated Teen.
The game is loosely based on events from the third film. Parker does indeed don the black suit that eventually transmogrifies into the thrilling nemesis Venom. The sympathetic villain Sandman must be brought to justice. And Harry Osborne's daddy issues culminate in him vengefully assuming the Goblin mantle. But while these story elements can fill a two-and-a-half-hour movie, Activision needed to pad the video game with extra activities for Spidey. So gamers are funneled into hundreds of encounters ranging from run-ins with two-bit gangs and secondary Spider-Man foes like The Lizard and Kingpin.

Between missions that further the story, players can take on several dozen smaller missions at their leisure, giving the game a bit of sandbox appeal. How you approach Spider-Man's daily routine of cleaning up Manhattan is entirely up to you, and as a reward for pursuing common thugs or saving citizens in peril you earn increased super-moves and extra talents.

This is a great idea in theory — Activision carried it over from "Spider-Man 2" — but the dull combat brings the entire game crashing to earth. Dealing with these low-level thugs and secondary super-villains is composed of boring button-mashing and an over-reliance on spider-sense, which temporarily slows time and gives Spider-Man a complete advantage. Yes, as a super-hero, he should be able to handle mere mortals, but video games are supposed to offer a fun challenge — and, too often, "Spider-Man 3" does not.

From time to time, the game uses contextual events similar to "God of War," relegating you to near-spectator status as Spider-Man performs a heroic feat. You control the action only by tapping specific buttons as they pop on-screen. When events that require minimal input from the gamer end up being more fun than the main combat, you know the game is in trouble.

It is important to note the borderline unfair amount of time the game makes you wait to get the black suit (which later becomes Venom) — arguably the biggest appeal of both the game and the movie. Who doesn't want to play as a superhero unhinged, drunk on heightened strength and teetering on giving in to the dark side? Regular players must wade through several hours of tedious combat against lesser villains like The Lizard before getting the thrill they paid for and finally getting some face time with marquee baddies like The Sandman.

Where "Spider-Man 3" succeeds, though, is recreating the freedom of Spidey's web-slinging. Developer Treyarch, responsible for the Xbox 360 and PS3 editions of the game, has done an admirable job with the scope of New York City: It's huge and, more importantly, alive. The streets are crowded with yellow cabs and New Yorkers going about their business. Soaring through the city is easy, thanks to simple controls. Players will likely spend at least a good hour or two just exploring the sights, crawling to the top of skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, just to drink it all in.

Even though the size of the city is amazing, the rest of "Spider-Man 3" doesn't look the part of next-gen. Character models — especially in cinematic cut-scenes — are awkward to the point of distraction. Parker looks particularly odd. Cars and regular citizenry are rough-looking. The camera requires constant adjusting if you want Spidey to remain the focal point of the action.

Save for Dunst, all of the film's actors reprise their roles for the video game. Nobody sounds like they were really that jazzed to record their dialogue, and the interminable looping of many quips and comments quickly becomes grating.

Three ways to adjust your HDTV

Good calibration still seems to be the domain of professionals

Tech test HDTV Calibration

High-definition TV sets are big sellers these days, and no wonder, since the picture can be amazing.

But a lot of people seem to care more about how cool the flat panels look on the wall than what the picture looks like: It's common to see the image stretched horizontally to fill the screen, giving even the most attractive anchor a bloated look, or the color is off, giving everyone the reddish skin tone of the recently boiled.

The fact is picture quality varies quite a bit among HDTV sets, and calibration is often necessary to make the image look the way it should.
I tried three different ways of doing this: two do-it-yourself methods, and one professional calibration.

Sadly, the DIY options were hit-and-miss. They helped a few sets, and screwed up others. A good calibration still seems to be the domain of professionals — a surprising situation in our age of smart machines.

The "HDTV Calibration Wizard" DVD, from Monster Cable Products Inc. and Imaging Science Foundation, was the cheapest option, listing at $30. It's also the least thorough. It's simply a DVD that shows video loops with voiceover narration that tells you how to adjust your set's image using the basic controls accessed with the remote.

For example, it shows a man in a white shirt, and tells you to adjust the contrast so that you can make out the buttons and folds of the shirt. This got me into trouble with a plasma flat-panel set I tried it on. I couldn't get the details to show using the contrast setting, so I went into a more advanced menu and changed the "Input Level." That made the shirt look great, but when I later played a regular DVD, it was obvious that I'd reduced the contrast so much that everything looked gray and dull.

The DVD does get points for including scenes and instructions that help you adjust the image's sharpness, size and the ratio between length and width.

The SpyderTV color meter from Datacolor, which lists for $229, is a kit that comes with a light sensor that attaches to the TV screen. It's connected by a cable to your computer. The cable is short, so a laptop is recommended. An accompanying DVD shows test patterns, which are measured by the sensor and recorded by software on the computer.

This is a considerably more technical method than the "HDTV Calibration Wizard," and it's tricky. My results were mixed. It improved the image on one LCD set, but didn't take away an unpleasant greenish tinge to dark areas.

On another LCD set, it correctly identified weak colors, but exaggerated the correction, giving everyone a sunburned look (I can't rule out an error on my part here — the calibration is quite complicated). When I pulled back the color saturation a bit, that still left the image much improved. In one scene in "The Holiday," what I previously saw as just colorless overcast sky was now clearly a sunset with pastel hues of peach and blue.

"I feel bad that I watched all those movies that way!" exclaimed my wife, when she saw the difference. (In my defense, let me say that the most recent movie I watched on that set was "Downfall," about the last days of Hitler, and it was quite reasonable for me to expect a bunkerfull of Nazis to look pale.)

The SpyderTV sensor doesn't correct problems with sharpness or the shape of the image, but there are images on the DVD that can be used for the purpose.

To really get the job done, you may want to call in a professional calibrator, like Lee Richman of New York-based Nu Sound Concepts. Richman charges $275 and up for calibration, depending on the type of set (plasmas and LCDs are the simplest) and the complexity of the entertainment center.

I had Richman tackle a plasma set that the SpyderTV left looking quite yellow and low in contrast. His calibration also left it with a warm image, but a more natural-looking one, with cleaner colors. It wasn't a dramatic improvement over the default settings, but it was noticeable.

Richman said most sets are sold with the picture too blue and too bright, a setting known as "torch mode." It looks great in the store, because we perceive a blue image as being sharper and punchier.

Plasma screens in particular benefit from having the brightness turned down, because it extends their lifespan and cuts power consumption.

The professional calibrator has a number of advantages over amateurs. One is access to hidden menu settings for fine-tuning on some sets. Another is a signal generator that allows calibration for inputs other than a DVD, like a broadcast signal.

A Fire-Breathing Laptop Powered Up for Entertainment


f you nickname your company’s new laptop the Dragon, it had better be impressive. The Hewlett-Packard Pavilion HDX lacks wings and scales, but it does have a 20-inch screen and can handle HD DVD discs and HDMI video.
The Pavilion HDX, which will start at $2,999 and is expected July 25, includes an HD DVD reader and DVD burner as well as a 5-in-1 media card reader, 802.11n wireless, Bluetooth and surround-sound speakers. The screen tilts slightly for easier viewing. The included HDTV tuner allows you to pull in HD channels over the air.

This configuration also includes 2 gigabytes of memory and a 240-gigabyte hard drive, enough for movies and games galore. There is even a removable remote control that lets you pick shows to watch and record as well as skip through music and video. The built-in battery will last about two hours on one charge.

Don’t expect this dragon to fly, however. It is 19 inches long, 13 inches wide and weighs 15.5 pounds, which means its home is probably a desktop and not an airplane tray table.

A Point-and-Shoot Camera That’s Quicker on the Shutter


Some pocket point-and-shoot cameras may skimp on extras, especially when compared with pricier models aimed at professionals, but Canon’s new PowerShot SD850 IS Digital Elph packs in quite a few features.

The new eight-megapixel SD850 IS includes optical image stabilization to help smooth out shaky situations, as well as technology that can keep faces in focus while automatically adjusting the flash and exposure settings for better shots of people.

The SD850 IS, which measures 3.6 inches by 2.2 inches and is about an inch wide, will have a list price of $400 when it goes on sale through major retailers next month. Like other cameras in Canon’s popular PowerShot line, it uses the Digic III image processor, which helps cut down on common point-and-shoot annoyances like shutter lag and poky autofocus. Full specifications can be found at www.powershot.com.

In addition to its still-picture abilities, the SD850 IS has six different modes for shooting minimovies, including a time-lapse setting that records frames at long intervals. This sped-up effect might even make your sunset shots interesting.

In Game of Games, Wii Outshoots PlayStation

Erich Schlegel for The New York Times

Chad Manning, foreground, played a game on Nintendo’s Wii, while Derrick Casey tried his hand at Sony’s PlayStation 3 at a Game Stop store in Austin, Tex. The Wii is outselling the PlayStation 4 to 1.


The sales gap between the Nintendo Wii video game console and Sony’s competing PlayStation 3 widened during April, according to industry performance figures released yesterday.

During April, American consumers bought 360,000 Wii consoles, according to NPD Group, which compiles sales data. That was more than four times the 82,000 PlayStation 3 consoles sold, NPD reported.

The ratio has widened from the first three months of the year, when the Wii outsold Sony’s new console 2 to 1.

During April, Microsoft sold 174,000 of its Xbox 360 game consoles, NPD reported.

The sales figures indicate that Nintendo has continued momentum since it introduced the Wii late last year. At the same time, Sony, which introduced the PlayStation 3 around the same time, continues to struggle to build its own momentum, in part because of its higher price, industry analysts said.

The Wii costs $249, while the PlayStation 3 costs $499 or $599, depending on the model. The Xbox 360 costs $299 or $399, depending on the model.

“I doubt you’ll see an acceleration of sales until you see a price cut or better software lineup,” said Evan Wilson, an industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, speaking of the PlayStation 3. “The question is how big of a hole has Sony dug itself into.”

But Mr. Wilson and other analysts said it was too soon to determine whether the hole would be too deep for Sony to climb out. The battle for dominance among console competitors can take years to play out, and this one is only a few months old.

Over all, NPD reported, Nintendo has sold 2.5 million Wii consoles in the United States, compared with sales of 1.3 million for the PlayStation 3 and 5.4 million for the Xbox 360, which went on sale in November 2005.

David Karraker, a spokesman for Sony, said that his company expected to attract consumers by increasing the number of games available for the PlayStation 3. He said that Sony and its partners planned to publish at least 105 games by March 2008, more than doubling the current library.

He declined to discuss the possibility of pricing changes or the growing gap in sales between the Wii and the PlayStation 3.

Sony continues to own the second best-selling game console — not the PlayStation 3 but its predecessor, the PlayStation 2. In April, it sold 194,000 units, for a total of around 38 million in its lifetime.

WordPress 2.2 Has Been Released

WordPress Version 2.2 is now available for download, with the following new features:

  • ‘Widgets’ are now built in, no longer requiring a separate plugin.
  • A new Blogger importer means that you can import all of your old posts and comments from Blogger just by entering your username & password. This is fantastic, and means that if you’d like to give WordPress a try it’s easier than ever. Remember too, that this doesn’t mean you have to delete your Blogger site, you can always go back. You won’t though ;-)
  • It is now allegedly impossible to activate a plugin or edit a file that would break your blog.
  • The code has been further optimised for speed, along with a range of other improvements under the hood.
  • Full Atom support for those that want to use it.

Will I upgrade to 2.2? Oh yes, but I will wait a week or two as usual, just to see what falls out of it’s pockets when it’s given a good shake….

Remember that if your webhost offers ‘Fantastico’ under scripts, you can upgrade with one click. Just take a database and theme files backup first.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Does Higher Bit-Rate Music Sound Better?


When you rip music from CD, you're asked to make many choices: compressed audio format and the bit-rate of the compressed file being the chief among them. This latter choice is a biggie: Do you want, as iTunes would have you believe, "good quality" at 128kbps, "high quality" at 160kbps, or "higher quality" at 192kbps? Or something even higher? Or do you want wholly uncompressed files, which keep every bit of data on the original recording?

This selection isn't just critical because it can affect the quality of the audio you ultimately hear. It's also a big determining factor in the size of the file. A four-minute song encoded at 128kbps will consume about 3.7MB of space. That same song at 192kbps will eat up 5.6MB and a whopping 10.5MB at 360kbps. On a 20GB iPod, that means you can store about 5,000 128kbps songs but only 1,750 360kbps songs.

So, the big question... what does bumping up the quality of a music rip get you? Maximum PC took a bunch of non-techies, outfitted them with headphones, and ripped their own music at 160kbps, 320kbps, and a lossless format. The editors then asked each tester to blindly listen and rate the tracks as good/better/best... the idea being that the lossless track should sound much better than the lowly 160kbps track.

How do you think they did?

Not very well. Each of the testers got some right and some wrong: But most testers were simply unable to tell the different between a 160kbps track and an uncompressed one at all. Whether that's because encoding works better than we all think or because our ears are universally busted, even lower-grade digital music is still good enough for most eardrums.

One takeaway from the Max PC piece: variable bit rate recording makes a huge difference. You can turn this on in iTunes by using a "custom" encoding setting and checking the "Use Variable Bit Rate Encoding (VBR)" box.

Try the experiment for yourself sometime and see what you think. In my experience, the quality of your headphones is much more important than the way the music was encoded.

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Google's Website Optimizer (beta)

Free landing page optimization tool

Website Optimizer, Google's free multivariate testing application, helps online marketers increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of site content (text and images).

Start testing today

Rather than sitting in a room and arguing over what will work better, you can save time and eliminate the guesswork by simply letting your visitors tell you what works best. We'll guide you through the process of designing and implementing your first experiment. Start optimizing your most important web pages and see detailed reports within hours.

Try Website Optimizer: Sign-ups are now open

Learn more about Website Optimizer and multivariate testing

View the overview demo View the overview demo

Learn why testing is important and how Website Optimizer can improve your business results.

Review quick-start guide Review quick-start guide

Learn how to design and plan your first experiment.

View a sample report View a sample report

See an example of the reports that will help you determine your most effective page content.

Google Webmasters - Very Helpful Tools For Webmasters

Our suite of webmaster tools provides you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly. They can show you Google’s view of your site, help you diagnose problems, and let you share info with us to help improve your site’s visibility.

Getting Google’s view of your site, and diagnosing potential problems
The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on Google is learning how our robots crawl and index your site.

  • Crawl info: You can make sure we have access to your site, and see when Googlebot last visited. You can also view URLs that we’ve had trouble crawling and why we couldn't crawl them. This way, you can fix any problems preventing us from indexing all of your pages.
  • Robots.txt file validation: See if we’re having trouble with your file, and test out changes to that file before you change it on your server.
  • Website content: View top content from your site and see the words that other sites use to link to it.

Seeing how your site performs
A second step is learning what drives traffic to your site.

  • Top queries: Find the top queries that drive traffic to your site and where your site is included in the top search results. This will let you learn how users are finding your site.
  • Indexing information: See how your site is indexed and which of your pages are included in the index. If we find violations in your site, we’ll give you the opportunity to fix the problems and request reinclusion of your site.

Sharing info with Google about your site
Since no one knows more about your site than you do, you can also share this info with Google and improve your crawlability.

  • Submit a Sitemap file: Tell us all about your pages by submitting a Sitemap file; help us learn which pages are most important to you and how often those pages change.
  • Specify your preferred domain: Tell us which URL to use when indexing your site; we’ll do our best to index the version you prefer.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Digital camera tries video sharing for dummies

Digital camera tries video sharing for dummies

Uploading video to the Web isn't second nature to everyone, and the makers of the new Flip Video understand that.

Much like the way easy photo-sharing applications like iPhoto, Flickr and Picasa offer simple editing controls and take some of the pain out of uploading and sharing digital photos, the video camera set to hit stores Tuesday is packaged with editing software that will upload video clips to video-sharing sites YouTube and Grouper.

The popularity of user-generated video, particularly on sites like YouTube, is well documented. But the introduction of a device that does all the work of editing and uploading could open the Web 2.0 video experience to a whole new demographic--average users.

Consumers in the Digital Age often expect instant gratification with new gadgets. With Flip Video, consumers can plug the tiny camera--which takes up as much room as a deck of cards--directly into a computer, and with little or no video editing or transcoding skills, share the video with the world on YouTube or with select people on Grouper.

Flip Video

"Nobody is really addressing getting that (video) up instantly between when you take a video and when it gets posted," said Samir Bhavnani of Current Analysis.

Flip Video is a new brand from Pure Digital, a 5-year-old company whose business until last fall had been making one-time-use digital cameras and video cameras. The company's typical customers have mainly been technophobes who still want to document "casual moments" on video for posterity--the so-called soccer mom set. A preliminary version of the Flip Video camera was released last fall, but it didn't have the same software or hardware features as the gadget coming out this week.

Being able to put a smattering of video clips on the Web for public consumption isn't new, of course, but a camera that does it cheaply and easily is. The Flip Video comes in two memory capacities: a 30-minute version and a 60-minute version. The memory is not removable and requires two AA batteries. The smaller version will retail at $119 and the larger at $149.

A small USB arm flips out from the side of the camera and plugs directly into a Mac or PC. The video-uploading software, contained on the camera itself, launches and gives the option of editing clips of video you've taken, selecting clips to share with others, or sending video to YouTube.

The YouTube option automatically transcodes the video from its original MPEG-4 file format and converts it to WMV. Choosing to share clips with friends also transcodes and uploads the file right away. Recipients receive a private e-mail link to Grouper, a video-sharing site owned by Sony, instead of a bulky video file.

While the video quality won't get the attention of any hardcore videophiles, it's at least "acceptable," and a dramatic improvement from Pure Digital's disposable cameras, according to Ross Rubin, analyst with The NPD Group.

Plus, the price seems to be right. "Anything priced in the sub-$200 range is something that has a good chance of being adopted by consumers," said Bhavnani of Current Analysis.

A price floor like that could turn even the most unlikely demographic--average, non-tech consumers--into avid video bloggers, but is there a demand? As several analysts point out, it's not as if YouTube is lacking for users: about 100,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. "Most services such as YouTube have not suffered for lack of content up until now with most of the sources being digital cameras, camera phones that capture video, and camcorders," Rubin said.

Though 100,000 a day sounds like a lot, data collected by Jupiter Research shows that only a very small group of users are uploading video to the Web. In a survey conducted last September, 3.7 percent of online consumers said they upload videos from their computer to an online video site. That's compared with 27 percent who said they read comments posted to blogs and Web sites, and 21 percent who said they use the Web to listen to Internet radio.

A limitation to wide-scale video uploading could be that few people possess the know-how or patience to upload video to content sites. That basic lack of skills could turn some consumers toward the Flip Video, Bhavnani said.

"One big issue with YouTube is if you take regular videos from your digital camera, there's not an easy way to get them up there," he said.

At least one other hardware company is also looking to make it easier to post digital videos directly from camera to Web site. Last year, Logitech released a Web camera called the QuickCam that enables direct uploads to Grouper.

A service like Flip Video or something that comes after it could take video uploading into the mainstream. "It's been a struggle for camcorder manufacturers, when compared with the services and integration of services that have sprung up around digital cameras," said Rubin, citing Shutterfly, Kodak's online gallery, and Flickr. "We haven't seen something emerge for mainstream (video) sharing with friends and family."

Still, other analysts cast doubt on this type of hardware having any sort of impact on the user-generated content market.

"I don't think it will move the needle in a significant way," said Todd Chanko, an analyst with Jupiter Research. Though it could appeal to users without technical expertise, "I think it's a unit that's been developed in response to an overall phenomenon of individuals taking images and inexplicably wanting to share them with millions of strangers across the planet."