News Summary for September 14th by Stefan Saroiu.

1. "News at Apple: Smaller iPods, Bigger Ideas". New York Times, Section C,
   page 10.

Summary: 
========
Apple has announced smaller iPods (as big as a clip), a new movie store
(based on iTunes), and a for-the-living-room box called iTV.

The movie store offers only 75 movies (from Disney) on 640x480 resolution,
for $13 a pop. Each take 1.5 hours to download, but you can start viewing
them  3 minutes after a request.

iTV is a $300 box that's visually appealing and well-designed. Apple tends
to be good at that :-)

Rant:
=====

People started talking about Internet movie downloads in 2002 (see
file-sharing P2P). They were talking about them in 2003. Then in 2004 and
2005. They're still talking about them in 2006. Internet movie downloads
haven't taken off for four years -- why would they take off now? What
changed?

Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research:
==========================================

- Is the Internet capable of delivering large content to everyone at the same
time? 

- Can broadband networks push 2GB a day to many homes at the same time?
  Should we batch these downloads? Should we do them at night? Should we do
  them from local caches? Or should we use long-hauled downloads at night
  over the Internet?

2. "Yahoo Names Executive". New York Times, Section C. Page 11.

Summary:
========

Hilary Schneider, previously with Knight Ridder, has been hired as "senior
VP for marketplaces" at Yahoo.

Background:
==========

Hilary Schneider is the person behind Topix.net a successful Craiglist-like
website. She's also brought contextual advertising to Topix.net

Speculation:
============

Yahoo will embark on contextual advertising heavily. One possibility is
that rather than targeting businesses' ads (like Google) they will target
personal ads. Whenever someone searches on Yahoo for "red Honda 2002",
Yahoo will return an ad saying "we have 10 people in your zipcode selling
four year old red Hondas!". Take that Google! :-)

Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research:
=========================================

- Click-fraud is a big problem for Google and it'll grow as a big problem
  for the entire Internet business model.

  Project idea for our class: Solve the click-fraud problem. Come up with
  several heuristics, implement, and evaluate them. 

3. "New Product by Nintendo for Holidays". New York Times, Section C. Page
   11.

Summary:
=======

Nintendo will be selling the Wii product during the Holiday season. Wii
will allow Web browsing on TV. Wii has a wireless game controller over
Bluetooth.

Relevant Questions/Ideas for Net Research:
=========================================

There are tons of devices, game consoles, PVRs, gadgets and so forth for
your living room all using wireless radio, 802.11 or Bluetooth in the 2.4
GHz spectrum. Expect massive interference problems :-)

- What's the effect of interference on the use of living-room devices?

- What's the right mechanism or protocol to negotiate and restrict the
  effect of interference among multiple radios?

- Security problems?