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If you’re looking for a cheap and easy stocking stuffer, this beats the heck out of shelling out for a new DVD or jewel case. Not to mention that if you already have one, you can simply cut out the paper and slip it in.

Liquid Mongoose, the purveyors of the do-it-yourself DVD and music CD sleeves has put out a new version of its bookmarklet that supports Picasa Web albums. Now, if you’re planning to burn a compilation photo CD or DVD, you’ll be able to sleeve it in paper packaging that features thumbnail previews of what’s on the disc.

I just gave it a spin on one of my recently uploaded albums and it worked flawlessly. Users with the existing bookmarklet won’t have to upgrade since the JavaScript has stayed the same. The only confusing part is that the tool still requires you to first click the bookmarklet, then manually print out the page. I’d like to see an option where it automatically skips to the print dialogue.

I talked about this and some of the other challenges and opportunities for Windows 7 as part of a Daily Debrief video. What do you think? Take our poll or sound off below in TalkBack. And click here for our photo gallery of Windows 7’s multitouch features.

And, when you do get to put your hands on Windows 7, it certainly is a much different experience than Windows Vista. For those who missed it, here’s a video of the touch features in action, taken at the PDC.

The question is, will touch be any different?

With Vista, for example, Microsoft was touting the notion of a secondary display, a feature known as SideShow, that could offer a quick look at upcoming calendar appointments without having to open up a laptop. I know of only a couple instances of SideShow actually being used. The biggest factor I heard was the cost.

But I might be in the minority here. Apple users seem to crave innovations, even those that come at a price. Windows users, meanwhile, tend to have a different cost-benefit calculus, one that makes it hard for pricey extras to reach the necessary volume where they are no longer pricey.

But PCs that use that multitouch technology are bound to cost more than their traditional counterparts. And I’m just not sure how many people will actually fork over extra cash for that experience. Personally, I like touch. I’d probably pay more for a laptop or desktop that had touch-screen controls.

View results

As many people have noted,
Windows 7 is a lot like Windows Vista. But by adding multitouch abilities, Microsoft is hoping to create an operating system that, quite literally, feels different from Vista.

News.com Poll Is touch too much?
One of the big features in Windows 7 is multitouch, which is bound to cost extra.
I don’t want it even if it costs no more than a regular PC.
I’d pay a little extra, but no more than $50 .
I’d pay $75 or $100 more.
Heck, a Surface PC costs more than 10 grand, so I’ll pay a few hundred bucks more for touch on a PC.

But on Thursday I read at Macworld.com that iTunes is now enabling users to upgrade on a per-song basis. What are the odds?

I passed on Tribe and paid the 60 cents for the two Kasabian songs. The upgrade menu now looks just like the standard iTunes purchasing interface. A buy button sits next to each song.

If I would have just waited a few hours, I wouldn’t have had to pay that 30 cents for “The Shock of the Lightning” by Oasis, a song I once loved but have been oppressed by lately as the tune is now played everywhere. But just before I started writing this, I checked out the upgrade feature on the iTunes front door and it offered me the chance to receive higher-quality versions of three new songs: two by Brit band Kasabian and one by A Tribe Called Quest.

I know I’ll probably be able to hear it with better earphones or listening on good speakers. I just wish I could notice something with my stock Apple earbuds.

On Wednesday, I paid $30 to upgrade some of my iTunes music. That’s the only way iTunes Plus allowed me to do it: swap out all the songs in my library eligible for upgrade or forget about getting any of them at the higher bitrate.

Here’s the rub: I still can’t notice the quality difference at 256 Kbps.

File this under: now you tell me.

But now, McCaw and Clearwire face a potentially huge headache. Bloomberg is quoting Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff acknowledging the impact of the recession on credit (and investors.) The upshot: Clearwire may be forced to put its network expansion plans on hold if it can’t raise another $2 billion.

This serial entrepreneur wasn’t as fortunate with his next venture: the construction of a satellite-based broadband communications system. Before it flopped, though, McCaw received financial backing from Bill Gates and a bunch of other well-heeled backers, who invested more than $292 million into the venture.

Until now, Craig McCaw was most famous for starting the eponymous cellular company that he sold to AT&T in 1994 for $12.6 billion.

After the dot-com bust, McCaw set out to offer portable wireless high-speed Internet service. His company, Clearwire, clearly qualified as one of those BIG IDEAS: WiMax is said to allow for wireless Internet service that’s five times faster than 3G networks.

So it was that a senior Intel executive today shot down any suggestion it was planning to bail out Clearwire.

That’s putting it mildly. In the last year, Clearwire’s investors have watched their shares lose more than 75 percent of their value. Clearwire’s management needs to sell its partners on sticking around, let alone putting more money into the pot. McCaw knows how to sell an idea-but even he’s running into a brick wall called the recession.

“They’ve got enough money to keep going for quite a while,” Sean Maloney, the company’s sales and marketing head, said during a conference call. “They’ve got a pretty fat piece of capital to go out and build the network.”

“It’s clear that capital markets are closed for either borrowers or companies that are trying to raise capital, regardless of what kind of company it is,” Wolff said. “We’ve seen challenges across the board.”

So far, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks have ponied up $3.2 billion in Clearwire and its operating subsidiary (for about 22 percent of the company.) Each of those investors has an obvious interest in facilitating a wireless Internet outside of the phone companies, which are adopting Long Term Evolution format, a rival technology expected to become available in 2010.

Wolff declined to say whether Clearwire would have to delay the project, but he nonetheless did acknowledge the obvious:

That’s not the news Clearwire wanted to hear. But given current events, where so many companies are pushing the reset button, Intel’s message only restates what’s now obvious to everyone. It really is a new world order.

Craig McCaw

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland, CNET News)

I took a premature look at PlanetEye in June. I found a conceptually interesting product that wasn’t ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It’s now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.

Travel Packs can be private, or you can borrow a public one.

However, the system doesn’t do enough for you once you’ve built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there’s no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I’d like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.

The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the “Travel Pack,” which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you’re going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack’s items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I’m thinking of creating a “Rafe’s S.F. Visitor Guide” pack to send to people who come to visit our home.

Activities, restaurants, and hotels get useful summary pages.

Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they’ll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it’s a very attractive site–more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.

(Credit:
PlanetEye)

(Credit:
PlanetEye)

Check your online status and access other options by clicking the Offline icon in Gmail's main window.

The first thing that struck me post-sync was how fast my mail searches had become. Having your mail on your hard drive makes fast work of archive searches that can take several seconds when interacting with Gmail’s servers.

After you install Gears, you’ll see an Offline option under the Labs tab in Gmail’s Settings. Choose the Enable button, and when you restart your browser, you’ll see an “Offline 0.1″ link in the top-right corner of the main Gmail window. Click this link to begin the installation. (You’ll also be prompted to download and install Gears, if you don’t already have it on your PC.)

Your initial synchronization may take quite a while, especially if you retain as many old messages as I do. The fact is, I was ready for the first sync to take all day, but just an hour and 15 minutes later, my store of Gmail messages–including attachments–was ensconced on my laptop’s hard drive.

(Credit:
Google)

Wrong again. That’s what I get for trying to outthink Google. Unfortunately, there are still only a handful of Gears-enabled Web apps (Google Calendar isn’t one of them).

Gears lets you store Web services data on your local PC, among other functions. Gears and Gmail are such a perfect fit, I was sure that it would be just a few short months until I was rummaging through my Gmail archives while disconnected from the Internet.

Ever since Gmail became my primary e-mail service in 2006, I’ve been waiting for the ability to search my voluminous message archive without a network link. My hopes jumped with the arrival in 2007 of the Google Gears plug-in for
Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The Google Labs folks warn that Gmail’s offline capability is still experimental, so you may encounter some features that don’t work as expected. Still, after using Offline Gmail for a few days, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. Thanks, Labs guys!

The wait for networkless Gmail access ended last week, when Google Labs released Offline Gmail.

After the initial sync completes, click the Offline icon to the left of the Settings button to check your online status and view your options (choose Show Actions to see all available options).

Click "Offline 0.1" in the main Gmail window to install the Offline component.

(Credit:
Google)

In the past, Demo has received hundreds of applicants for its coveted on-stage spots. While have complained that the show’s format is pay-to-play, there’s no doubt been an overabundance of companies willing to pony up for the chance at the exposure the show generally nets presenters.

Spotting likely success stories
To be sure, you can tell right away that some of the companies that present here are going to do well, or are going to fail. Sometimes their presentations just wow the audience, and sometimes you can feel the discomfort in the room. This is my sixth Demo and I’d have to say that the percentage of companies in those two categories this week feels about the same as it has in the past.

PALM DESERT, Calif.–How does one measure the effects of economic meltdown?

“There’s a suspension of disbelief that goes into start-ups…You have to have a certain suspension of disbelief if you’re going to quit your job, anger your spouse, and work 14-hour days. You have to have a certain Pollyanna vision.” –Christine Herron,
First Round Capital

What does this all mean? Clearly, that the salad days are over. We all thought that after the dot-com bust, only companies with viable business models could get funded. In reality, I think we saw that the lessons learned in the tech industry really had more to do with the levels of funding VCs were willing to put into companies. In the 2003 to 2007 years, as the stock market rebounded and Google millionaires started impacting real estate values throughout the Bay Area, companies could still get funded. They just weren’t getting $50 million just because they had a badly-spelled URL like in the pre-2000 days.

Last week, I wrote a story asking the question, do we still need Demo and conferences like it when the economy is falling apart and when companies have more choices than ever to promote themselves and their products. My conclusion? We do, but only some of them. As Eric Faurot, whose TechWeb company puts on the Web 2.0 conferences, put it, “In the event business, the stronger events, the really healthy events that have a real purpose to them, will emerge stronger, and weaker events will just die. They just won’t survive.”

After the last company finished its presentation here, I asked Christine Herron, a principal at San Francisco-based First Round Capital, what she thought of the event, especially given the smaller size.

And no wonder. The companies that present here pay well into five figures to do so, and most bring a group of people. The registration fee for non-presenting attendees is $3,000.

This year, however, word is that Demo Director Chris Shipley and her team simply didn’t have enough applicants that fit its criteria to fill out the normal-sized roster. Incidentally, Shipley recently announced she was handing off her leadership responsibilities to VentureBeat CEO and editor-in-chief Matt Marshall after this year’s DemoFall.

While Demo for years has featured about 65 to 70 companies, this time around there’s just 39. Everybody knows that, but it’s hard to actually see it. The main ballroom where Demo presentations are held is packed, with every seat at every table full. But that’s an illusion: the wall at the back of the room has been pulled in dramatically from a year ago when Demo 08 had several hundred more attendees.

Now, companies are still going to be getting funded, but seemingly only if they really do have a solid business model, and likely only if they’ve already convinced previous investors to get involved. Venture capital is only going to flow to companies that have demonstrated they know how to get to profitability without spending a fortune and without needing to be propped up because they don’t have any revenue.

Herron said that size really doesn’t matter that much at Demo. What matters is companies’ relative health and their funding situation.

In that regard, then, Demo looks like it could well be an interesting barometer of the state of the (technology) economy. Some companies will succeed. Many will fail. And those trying to make it are going to need to keep their eyes seriously on the prize, even as the grim reaper circles around.

At Demo 09 here, there are two ways, one that’s obvious, yet hard to see, and another that is both obvious and visceral.

“There’s a suspension of disbelief that goes into start-ups,” said Herron. “You have to have a certain suspension of disbelief if you’re going to quit your job, anger your spouse, and work 14-hour days. You have to have a certain Pollyanna vision.”

If so, this is good news. It seems to me that this is the only model that is going to succeed in coming years. A panel here on Monday about venture capital in the post-downturn era pointed out the obvious reality that VC investment is down significantly. Eric Tilenius of Tilenius Investments said, for example, that his firm’s investments are down 67 percent and that of those that are getting money, most are companies that have already gotten at least one round of funding. The number of new companies getting VC money, he said, “has dropped precipitously.”

The lessons of Demo
She’s talking of companies that can handle the five-figure presenter’s fee, as well as Demo’s criteria, without having taken significant investment from a VC. Herron seemed to be suggesting that this is a sign that even in this toxic economy, there are still a number of companies that have been able to get to the stage where they are qualified to present at Demo–including paying the fee–with very low costs. And that could well be a sign that companies, albeit a limited number of them, are seeing ways to weather the recession (or depression, if it gets that bad) by more quickly and efficiently getting products and services to market than has been the case in recent years.

“This year, there’s a lot of companies who have made it here without a big check, so that’s more interesting,” Herron said. “If you’re a venture capitalist coming to Demo looking for undiscovered investment (opportunities)…I’d like to see companies without a big check.”

Indeed, my colleague Rafe Needleman and I nominated seven products as the best of Demo, and just one worst of. With just 39 companies on hand, that’s a pretty healthy percentage.

Still, just because there are fewer companies presenting here this time around, doesn’t necessarily mean the quality of those taking the stage was any lower than in previous go-rounds. In fact, it’s always hard to accurately judge that quality until months later, since Demo is all about showcasing companies and products that are just getting off the ground. So, since it takes time build a business, the results are often not known for months.

Click either the “GeoIP: Server Location” or “WhoIs: Domain Owner” buttons to show this information in a small pop-up. The locations are also shown via icons on the map that Shazou generates. You can pan the map, or zoom it in and out (which is a handy feature for when the server and registrant are not located near each other) or switch to either a satellite view or a hybrid combining satellite and street views.

Shazou can’t match the CallingID toolbar’s ability to show the domain registrant’s location at a glance, nor do users get a color-coded indication of the site’s security rating. What users do get is a series of Google ads at the bottom of the map, but the ads are unobtrusive.

The Shazou add-on for Firefox shows the location of the current site's server on a map.

(Credit:
Seisan)

The add-on throws in a Submit as Phishing Site button, but when you click this, you see a pop-up window saying only “Submission Successful–Thank You.” I couldn’t find any information on the vendor’s site about what happens to these submissions. I also noticed on the download page that the add-on appears not to work with the most recent versions of Firefox 3, though it worked OK for me.

Last May, I described the CallingID add-on for the Mozilla
Firefox browser. It lets users see at a glance the address or location of the server hosting the site their visiting, and it even offers a color-coded security rating.

Still, I like being able to find the location of the sites with which I do business. I also have a soft spot for maps, so Shazou’s combination of the two works well enough for me, at least until CallingID starts working again.

Unfortunately, the add-on doesn’t work with Firefox 3, and the vendor’s site doesn’t offer any information on or help with this problem.

While looking for a solution to the CallingID glitch, I discovered Shazou, a Firefox add-on created by Chuck Durham at Seisan that goes one step further by showing the location of the site’s server on a map that pops up when you click its icon in the bottom-right corner of the browser window.