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Still, how many times a day does the average person drift off into a five-second-plus nonblinking daydream? Surely, this fogging device will boost productivity, not to mention help with those eye-straining headaches to which we’ve all grown begrudgingly accustomed.

Most of us spend several hours a day peering into a screen. Whether we’re working, gaming, chatting, or entering a semivegetative movie-watching state, we tend to blink about once every five seconds. If we grow bored, drowsy, or just less focused, that rate slows, which puts a serious strain on our eyes.

This begs the question: won’t the boss want to buy these for every employee, along with the office Coke machine and coffeemaker? It could bring a whole new meaning to that all-seeing eye, which something tells me does not fog over.

Of course, we all know that blinking too much can cost you a presidential election, so each person should probably weigh eye health (blink more) with professional success (blink less) on an individual basis.

(Credit:
Masunaga Optical Manufacturing)

Enter the Wink Glasses, comprising a USB-powered device (with an eight-hour charge) that fogs one of its lenses the moment the user hasn’t blinked in five seconds. This forces the other eye to focus instantly, which is one way to jolt someone back to wakefulness. Japan’s Masunaga Optical Manufacturing reportedly plans to release the Wink Glasses with their support frames to the Japanese market on August 10 for a total of just less than $430, or 40,950 yen.

I haven’t had a chance to try these out yet, and while I love the idea of the Wink Glasses, it seems reasonable to assume that they would be mildly annoying for typical users at best and frustrating for hypervigilant gamers at worst.

Somewhat paradoxically, news of this gadget has the video-gaming world all atwitter (or is it “ablinking”?). It turns out that we tend to blink less frequently not only when we have grown bored or sleepy, but also in the opposite circumstance, when we are hyper-focused, pumped with adrenaline, trying to see every movement of every supervillain dashing across even the most remote corners of the screen.

The USB-charged Wink Glasses are designed to keep you awake by making you refocus.

It’s been a long road already this year to get the Brit-mobile ready for a record run, now set for sometime between August 18-22 after a postponement or two and some technical and logistical challenges. But just today, the steam team proudly proclaimed that in test runs on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, their vehicle had–unofficially–bested the record, hitting a not-street-legal 131 mph.

In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine that there might be an automotive speed record left that’s only slightly north of 100 miles per hour. Heck, I’ve been passed by Audis on the autobahn that seemed to be going twice that fast.

Will they be cooking with, um, gas later this month when officials of the record-vetting Federation Internationale de l’Automobile join them in the desert? We’ll know soon enough.

Photos: Steam Car team eyes record

But then, we’ve grown accustomed to
cars with internal combustion engines. The record in question, which could finally fall this month after standing for more than a century, is held by a Stanley Steamer. In 1906, a gent named Fred Marriott drove a cigar-shaped steamer at Daytona Beach, Fla., to the then amazing speed of 127 mph.

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Now along comes a 21st-century contender called the British Steam Car, which looks about as much like a Stanley-built vehicle as an F-16 looks like a Sopwith Camel. Looking for a catchier point of reference, the car’s backers have taken to calling the 3-ton contraption, in at least one press release, “the fastest kettle in the world.”

(Credit:
Benchmark Capital)

The admiration is mutual. “Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open-source company in the world,” Benchmark said on its Web site.

“Why I like @benchmark: They consistently ask ‘What’s best for the entrepreneur?’ and they think big,” Mickos said Tuesday on Twitter.

Marten Mickos, the one-time chief executive of MySQL who left about a year after Sun Microsystems acquired the open-source database company, has joined Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur in residence.

Marten Mickos, surrounded by inflatable MySQL dolphin mascots.

Mickos joined MySQL in 2001, stayed through Sun’s 2008 acquisition, and left earlier this year. Mickos also is on the board of cloud computing start-up RightScale and Thunderbird e-mail software backer Mozilla Messaging.

On the processor front, new processors announced Thursday as part of AMD’s “2009 mainstream notebook” lineup–which range up to 2.6GHz in speed–use a 45-nanometer manufacturing process, matching the mobile chip geometries that Intel has been offering for about a year and a half.

Advanced Micro Devices is trying to assert its graphics technology advantage over Intel as part of a rollout of new mobile processors.

Consumers won’t be left in the dark about visual features this time, according to AMD. “When you look at two systems side by side in retail, you really can’t tell what kind of visual experience you’re getting,” Bob Grim, director of client product marketing, said in a phone interview. “You’re going to see us take a sharp turn and talk less about component specifications and talk more about the usage that those technologies enable.”

HP dv2 laptop uses AMD ultrathin processor

Notebooks featuring the 2009 AMD mainstream notebook technology became available on September 2 in certain Asian countries. Broad global availability of more than 50 designs is scheduled to coincide with the forthcoming release of Windows 7, AMD said.

Notebook PCs with Vision Technology are expected to be widely available during the holiday buying season timed to the release of the Windows 7.

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

And AMD now officially lists four processors for the “ultrathin” laptop segment, though some of them are already used by PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard. Processors for thin laptops typically use less power than mainstream silicon. In AMD’s case, those categorized as ultrathin draw between 15 and 18 watts compared to 35 watts for the mainstream.

The Intel rival on Thursday introduced new processors for the mainstream laptop segment while stressing the visual prowess that its ATI graphics unit offers.

The mainstream notebook chips offer an “active battery life” of nearly two hours (1 hour, 55 minutes) and a “resting battery life” of nearly five hours (4 hours, 55 minutes), AMD said.

The AMD graphics chip-based “Vision” technology complements Microsoft’s DirectX, a multimedia programming interface built into
Windows 7. As an example, transcoding, in which one video format is converted to another, is done on the graphics processor for faster conversion, AMD said.

According to Thursday’s Bloomberg story, which cited unspecified “communications” between the two executives, Colligan in August 2007 said that Jobs’ proposal was ill-considered. Jobs was worried about losing key Apple employees to Palm and said “we must do whatever we can to stop this,” reported Bloomberg.

There’s no love lost of late between the companies, with the Palm Pre a new up-and-comer for smartphone market share against the Apple iPhone. The two have most recently been squabbling over the Pre’s compatibility with iTunes.

In June of this year, Palm named Rubenstein as its CEO, replacing Colligan.

A number of top figures at Palm once worked at Apple. Two months before the August 2007 communications cited by Bloomberg, Palm had announced that former Apple CFO Fred Anderson would be joining its board of directors and that Jon Rubenstein, who retired as head of Apple’s iPod division in 2005, would join as executive chairman of the board.

Tensions often run high between tech companies over executives moving between potential competitors. Apple last year got into a high-profile scrape with IBM over its hiring of Mark Papermaster from Big Blue.

“Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” Colligan told Jobs, according to the communications reviewed by Bloomberg.

Two years ago, Palm’s then CEO, Ed Colligan, rejected a proposal from Apple chief Steve Jobs to promise not to hire each other’s employees, according to Bloomberg News.

The Bloomberg story comes as the Justice Department is reportedly checking into possible hiring collusion among leading technology companies.

In August, former Apple staffer Jeff Zwerner became Palm’s brand design chief. Other Apple execs who have jumped ship to Palm in recent months include Senior VP of Product Development Mike Bell and PR head Lynn Fox.

Google thinks that by obtaining the right to digitize orphan works, it will stimulate demand for digital book scanning that eventually forces Congress to act. Any law passed to loosen restrictions on the use of orphan works would take precedent over Google’s settlement.

Clancy argued that the vast majority of rights holders have every reason to work with Google, given that books that have copyright protection but have fallen out of print can be given a new lease on life if they can be searched, read, and eventually purchased over the Internet. Book publishers lose interest in printing a book if demand is low, but the Internet makes it possible for books to be distributed at extremely low cost.

That’s why a legislative solution that fixes the problems concerning orphan works is the best outcome for everyone with a stake in book digitization, and Google is leaning on Congress to get such a law passed, Clancy said. Given the pressing issues before Congress at the moment–not to mention the complexity of copyright law–finding champions for such legislation has been difficult, he said.

Under the settlement, the Books Rights Registry is allowed to cut deals with other companies or organizations looking to digitize books, but they are not allowed to extend the same privileges Google enjoys with respect to orphan works, which Clancy estimated as about 10 percent of the books that are out of print but still protected by copyright.

The Internet Archive has been one of the more prominent critics of Google’s Book Search settlement, and distributed a statement prior to Thursday’s event saying just that. “…no one else has the same legal protections that Google has. Would the parties to the settlement amend the settlement to extend legal liability indemnification to any and all digitizers of orphan works? If not, why not leave orphans out of the settlement and compel a legislative solution instead of striking a private deal in a district court?”

Google’s quest to convince the world it has nothing to fear by its settlement with publishers came to the Computer History Museum Thursday where Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search, defended the settlement before a few hundred attendees who submitted written questions to John Hollar, president and CEO of the museum. Last year, Google settled a lawsuit filed by publishers with an agreement that gives it the right to scan books that have copyright protection but are out of print even if the rights holder of the work can’t be located to grant permission: rights holders have until September to opt out of the settlement and forbid Google from scanning their books if they so choose. The settlement is not final, and a final hearing is scheduled for October to approve the settlement.

The problem is that Google’s settlement makes it the only organization in the U.S. with the legal authority to scan and publish so-called “orphan works,” or books that are still under copyright protection but whose rights holders can not be located. Google was sued when it began scanning books in general, and the thinking is that anybody else who tried to scan an orphan work and compete with Google’s offering would be forced to follow a similar legal path to obtain the same freedom.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–If those organizations attacking Google’s book search settlement with publishers spent as much time lobbying Congress for better laws concerning those issues, perhaps the controversy would go away, Google’s chief Book Search engineer suggested Thursday night.

Dan Clancy, Google Book Search head engineer, defends Google's Book Search settlement Thursday.

(Credit:
Tom Krazit/CNET)

What’s your data usage?
Golvin admits that the usage cap on the lowest tier of service seems low. He postulates that subscribers of the 25MB plan will be able to check e-mail and access some Web pages each day without going over their limit. But he said that anyone uploading pictures or downloading big e-mail files will likely chew through that bandwidth quickly.

Meanwhile, he thinks the 75MB plan is likely to satisfy the daily needs of subscribers who frequently check e-mail and social-networking sites and use mobile search tools. But heavy users uploading pictures or video will have to be careful.

Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney confirmed the change in pricing. She also confirmed that Rogue customers will be required to sign up for one of the two plans. But she emphasized that today the new data plan requirement only applies to Rogue customers, and not to customers using other phones. She also said that the new pricing model would not affect customers already subscribing to the Vcast VPak plan.

What this means is that subscribers will actually be paying more money for less data, since the retired VCast VPak service included unlimited e-mail and Web usage in addition to the video and music offered through VCast. It also means that feature phone users could also pay more for data than smartphone users if they go over their limits. Remember, the smartphone data service costs $30 a month extra for up to 5GB of data usage per month. Verizon is now charging its non-smartphone Rogue customers $10 for 25MB and $20 for only 75MB.

“Voice revenue is declining for the carriers,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “And the vision for the future is to use data revenue to make up for the shortfall and to kick ARPU (average revenue per user) into growth mode.”

New tiers of data service
But as the price of voice services falls, and more feature phones offer better Web-surfing capabilities, carriers are realizing that they need to create new tiers of service in the high-growth data service segment to make money.

“We will identify the (phones) that require a data plan,” she said in an e-mail. “And we are not making anyone with a similar phone today purchase a plan. Regarding the requirement of a data plan with the Rogue, you have to have a data plan if you get that phone.”

“Anything that leads to higher bills for consumers is bad in the eye of the consumer,” Golvin said. “So I am sure this will largely be perceived as a negative by consumers. But with more tiers of service, there could be more choices. And maybe cost-conscious consumers could find a right-sized plan at the right price for them.”

To make up for the shortfall in revenue, these analysts also predict that wireless operators will start reconfiguring Internet data service plans to make up the difference.

“The trend that is inescapable is that carriers are trying to put more pricing tiers in place to offer a wider range of services,” Forrester’s Golvin said. “The model of paying a flat $30-a-month rate for data service on a high usage device like the iPhone is likely going away. Carriers are trying to find ways to introduce more tiers and more premium services.”

While text messaging is still a big component of data revenue, which carriers also charge a premium for, Web access is also on the rise. This growth is likely being driven by the sale of more smartphones. Smartphone sales increased 27 percent in the second quarter of 2009, while total handset sales fell 6 percent, according to Gartner. But it’s also due to the fact that more people want to do more things with their phones. CCS Insight concluded after a recent survey that the biggest drivers for Web use on mobile devices is accessing social networking sites like Facebook and microblogging sites such as Twitter.

“The model of paying a flat $30-a-month rate for data service on a high usage device like the iPhone is likely going away. Carriers are trying to find ways to introduce more tiers and more premium services.” –Charles Golvin, analyst, Forrester Research

It’s no secret that the price of voice services for cell phones is falling. Just last week Sprint Nextel announced it was offering a new $69.99 a month, Any Mobile, Anytime plan that allows subscribers to call any cell phone in the U.S., regardless of the carrier, in addition to such things as unlimited text messaging and data services.

Analysts are predicting a price war in the mobile market as national wireless carriers will soon be forced to offer more minutes of voice service or unlimited voice services for equal or lower prices to compete with each other.

Data usage is already on the rise, and wireless operators are cashing in. For the second quarter of 2009, AT&T reported a 37.2 percent increase in wireless data revenue to $3.4 billion, more than double the total for the same period two years earlier. This usage included messaging, Internet access, access to applications and related services. Verizon Wireless said that its data revenue jumped to over 52 percent to $3.9 billion during the second quarter of 2009.

The first indication that this trend is on its way, is Verizon’s announcement last week that it is changing pricing on its non-smartphone data plans. The company introduced the new Samsung Rogue, a phone that is not considered a smartphone, but comes equipped with a QWERTY keypad and is able to access 3G data services. As part of the Rogue launch, Verizon changed its data pricing for non-smartphones, and said that customers who buy the Rogue will be required to purchase a $9.99 monthly data plan that provides 25 megabytes worth of data usage per month, or a $19.99 monthly data plan that offers 75MB of data. If customers go over these caps, they will be charged 50 cents per MB if they have the 25MB plan and 30 cents per MB if they subscribe to the 75MB plan.

It’s standard practice for wireless operators to require smartphone subscribers to sign up for a hefty flat fee for a data usage plan. AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA all require customers purchasing a smartphone to also get a data plan that costs $30 a month in addition to a selected voice plan, which typically starts around $40 a month. Sprint Nextel has been bundling its unlimited data service in its new Simply Everything plans. These data services are called unlimited, but each of them has capped usage at 5GB per month. After that, subscribers are usually charged extra fees.

“The problem is that people know what a minute of voice is like,” he said. “But they have no idea how much data they are using. Unless there is a clock that is running or fuel gauge that shows that you are down to half a tank in the first week of the month, users will have no idea they are going over their limit.”

Prices for cell phone voice services may be dropping, but consumers are likely to be forced to pay a lot more for mobile Internet data plans in the future.

“This practice highlights once again the complete lack of transparency and the lack of logic that consumers face when they sign up for wireless data plans,” Joel Kelsey, a policy analyst for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports. “Anything that herds consumers into plans or into phones that offers them a lack of choice has been problem for a long time in the wireless market.”

Meanwhile, data packages for non-smartphones have been priced much lower. In addition, wireless operators have not required customers sign up for these plans for most of the data-capable feature-phones they sell. There are a few

Meanwhile, the wireless industry contends that it is trying to offer consumers more choices. But the reality is that even though consumers may soon see lower voice pricing, it’s very unlikely their monthly bills will decrease at all. And it’s quite likely they will continue to rise.

For example, AT&T offers a $15 a month package for unlimited e-mail and mobile Web access for customers who have feature phones. T-Mobile charges $9.99 per month for unlimited Web access and e-mail on most of its non-smartphone devices.

But she did say that the data plan requirement along with the new pricing scheme will apply to other new phones that Verizon Wireless introduces in the future. But she declined to provide details as to what types of phones would require data plans.

Now as part of Verizon’s change, Rogue customers and all new data customers looking for a data service package for Web use will have to choose between the two offered packages. And if they want VCast video service, they will have to pay an additional $9.99 per month.

Previously, Verizon Wireless subscribers who wanted to use a data service with their regular cell phone, would either pay $1.99 per kilobyte of data. Or they could sign up for Verizon’s VCast VPak service for $15 extra a month to get access to video clips, sports highlights, news updates, and unlimited e-mail and mobile Web usage.

Verizon’s justification for requiring the new data service plan with the sale of these phones is that it doesn’t want customers to be upset if they rack up a big bill from data charges because they didn’t realize they were using wireless data service.

But consumer advocates believe that Verizon and other carriers are simply trying to lock subscribers into lengthy data contracts and are over-charging them for services that they may or may not use. For example, there are some smartphone users who say they’d rather forgo the $30-a-month data plan and only use the data services on their phones when they are in a Wi-Fi hot spot.

AOL CEO and former Google sales exec Tim Armstrong.

We get it, Tim Armstrong. We know the still relatively new AOL CEO is all about reinventing the once-mighty online access company into a digital publishing powerhouse. But that didn’t stop him from really hammering the point home at The Atlantic’s First Draft of History conference on Thursday morning.

“I think consumers are smart. I think that if the content is really good, people will pay for it,” he said. “I do think there’s cases where I think if you can add enough value to content, people are going to pay for it. I think The Wall Street Journal’s a good example of this.”

Meanwhile, Armstrong expects the digital advertising industry to continue to mature, despite the fact that revenue has still been dampened by the recession. “When I came from Google to AOL the first meeting that I did was in Baltimore, at our Advertising.com (offices),” he related, referring to the ad network that AOL acquired in 2004. “One of the employees said, ‘How many ad campaigns do you think we should be running?’ and I said, I don’t know, 500,000, and the audience went blank.”

But there are still plenty of issues at stake. Armstrong said that the ultimate answer to one of the biggest controversies in new-media publishing–do you charge for it or not?–will be that the Web will gravitate toward a mix of free, ad-supported content and paid offerings.

Part of achieving that scale, he explained, involves getting pretty deep into local advertising markets, something that AOL sees as an untapped resource for both audiences and ad dollars. At the Atlantic event, he showed off some visuals from Patch, the local-news start-up that he invested in prior to his arrival at AOL; AOL ultimately acquired it. The start-up is currently restricted to about a dozen towns, mostly in New Jersey, but a gradual expansion is on the road map.

Armstrong has reason to believe in content. AOL acquired a solid portfolio of blogs when it purchased publishing network Weblogs Inc. in 2005, and the titles it’s launched since then have largely been well-received–even though Armstrong promptly did away with the “MediaGlow” branding that had been established for the company’s content division soon into his reign as CEO.

AOL has reach: 100 million visitors in the U.S., and 275 million globally. It’ll soon be wholly independent from parent company Time Warner. Plus, the traditional print publishing industry is so beleaguered that it’s about time a digital power stepped up to the plate.

(Credit:
Google)

One of his goals at AOL, he said, is to evolve and simplify the display advertising industry in a manner inspired by the success of search advertising. “When you have millions of advertisers that can sign up online in 10 minutes and run a global search campaign,” he explained, “the same thing needs to be brought to display.”

He continued, “The number was a few thousand, and for me that was shocking because I came from a place where we went from having a few hundred customers to having a million customers. And why hasn’t AOL thought in that direction and that scale?”

“In the town we’re covering every single thing that a consumer in that town should be concerned about,” Armstrong said of Patch, which employs a professional journalist in each town as well as aggregates local news from other sources. “The thing you don’t see from the surface here is (that) we built a massive structured database underneath this. We’ve digitized the entire town.”

“What is the future of the company?” Armstrong, who previously served as a high-profile sales executive at Google, said in his talk, which was streamed live online. “If I had to describe it in one word, I think it’s content, and I think it’s content because there’s an opportunity to marry what the content’s already done with what the content can do.”

Microsoft, as Hilf explained Thursday in announcing Ramji’s departure, is far more advanced in its open-source activities than it once was, which suggests the ideal replacement for Ramji:

Then came Ramji, who brought open-source credibility to his role at Microsoft, having used it extensively at a previous start-up. Ramji helped to kick off CodePlex, Microsoft’s open-source code hosting site and has actively educated Microsoft on open source as much as he has worked with the open-source community to understand Microsoft. (Ramji is also becoming interim president of Microsoft’s newly created CodePlex Foundation.)

Now, with Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy and Microsoft’s point man on open source, officially leaving for a Silicon Valley-based start-up at month’s end, Microsoft has the opportunity to select someone who will ramp its open-source engagement to the next level.

Should Microsoft choose a pragmatist or an anarchist?

Microsoft doesn’t need a talking head, someone to fill panels at every open-source conference and pontificate on the immaculate conception of open-source code. Rather, it needs someone to help motivate Microsoft’s rank-and-file to get involved in such events and to intelligently explain Microsoft’s diverse and sometimes seemingly contradictory positions on open source–a fact that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has worked at a big company.

Microsoft has had some exceptional people driving its open-source strategy over the years.

Sam Ramji

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Rather, Microsoft needs a thoughtful mediator to deepen its engagement with the wider open-source community while continually reminding its employees to consider open source in product and business decisions.

In short, Microsoft needs someone who can credibly advocate for open source without being consumed by mindless rhetoric. Someone, in other words, very like Matusow, Hilf, and Ramji, but probably with a shorter Microsoft tenure (similar to Ramji). Any ideas? Send them to Hilf.

Initially, it was Jason Matusow who took the bullets for Microsoft (and protests/pickets) as it cut its teeth on open-source engagement. Later, Bill Hilf took the reins and moved Microsoft’s open-source involvement from discursive engagement to practical deployment: the company opened its open-source interoperability lab, and Hilf lobbied to partner with a variety of open-source companies.

Microsoft doesn’t need a Che Gates, someone who believes open source is The One True Way and is afflicted with the unhealthy and unhelpful Microsoft-hating disease. Such a person will never be heard within Redmond and rightly so: the world has already figured out that open source is a powerful means to develop and distribute software, but it’s not the cure for global hunger.

Open source is, in other words, increasingly part of the standard fabric of Microsoft’s technology and business strategy. As such, it doesn’t need a missionary so much as a diplomatic, pragmatic messenger to discover areas within the company where open source can take greater root and to engage with the community outside Redmond.

commentary

The perspectives on OSS at Microsoft have evolved to the point where Microsoft’s open source strategy is no longer just locked in a single ‘lab’ on campus - now OSS is an important part of many product groups and strategies across the company. We have become increasingly clear on where we work with open source - development methodologies, projects, partners, products and communities - and where our products compete with commercial open source companies or platforms. Today, there are engineering and business leaders across the company, myself included, looking at how to drive interoperability for customers and as a lever for new growth.

It’s a provocative question, but one that becomes easier to answer when you consider the state of open source at Microsoft and how its various open-source leaders have managed it.

To end on a personal note…Sam, you have been incredibly generous to me, usually when I least deserved it. You have been patient and forbearing. I think the world of you. Your new start-up is lucky to have you. The only area in which you failed is I can’t remember a single Arsenall ticket being sent my way. But we all have failings.

In an interview with BusinessWire, Jen Sun, who is the director of the WhyEat project said: “It’s extremely alarming to see that the number of overweight children and adolescents is on the rise; in fact, the prevalence of obesity in children 6-11 years old is three times what it was in the 1970s,…It is pretty clear that lecturing kids about nutrition isn’t going to solve the problem. In Whyville, kids are given the tools to figure it out for themselves - with a little help from us, of course.”

(Credit:
Whyville.net)

One of the most interesting locations is the cafeteria, where Whyvillians can pick a food item, view its nutritional facts, and select a meal based on an educated decision. If their character eats more fattening, high-calorie items, the cartoon character will see the effects as it becomes fatter and unhealthy. Likewise, if the character doesn’t eat enough, he will become frail and sickly. A lack of vitamin C will cause scurvy sores, and a lack of calcium will cause weak bones and a bandaged head. As a result, the child may be advised that his Whyvillian should see the Whyville nutritionist.

In a time when answers are just a self-driven Google search away, it only makes sense that children and preteens can access these educational resources, too. In a study conducted by the MacArthur Foundation, researchers found that “New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largely self-directed, and the outcome emerges through exploration, in contrast to classroom learning that is oriented by set, predefined goals.”

That being said, it’s possible that children and preteens will develop this sad habit of creating a better, virtual version of themselves early on. Can such young minds make a fluid connection between their Whyvillian’s eating habits and their own? It’s unclear whether it’s possible, but there may be a way to make it happen.

Online activities are often self-directed–children are learning, exploring, and socializing because they choose to. So, are Dell and Whyville.net onto something?

Dell has partnered with Nickelodeon and Whyville.net to give life to its latest version of the Mini10v. According to Dell, the kids’ Netbook has been designed with safe computing, education, and entertainment in mind. At a glance, Dell is only trying to reach another market (children), but if you look a little closer, the Netbook may represent a change in the way the next generation of preteens and children will learn to socialize and develop their decision-making skills.

It is up to the parents to execute this process, exploring Whyville and other virtual worlds with their child. Most importantly, it’s up to them to help their child emulate their Whyvillian’s activities, like checking the nutrition label.

Perhaps this is simply giving the next generation a head-start in the digital world, or maybe now is our chance to teach the next generation that learning and education are best obtained from people, books, and hands-on activities.

Apples, French toast, or oranges for breakfast? Well, let's check the nutrition facts.

If it’s anything like the activity we’ve seen from teenagers and twentysomethings on MySpace and Facebook, where users create a semifictional version of themselves, existing only on these social networks, then Whyville may be a huge success. In a previous piece, I mentioned that profiles on social networks tend to reflect how the person wants to be perceived, rather than who they really are.

The Netbook comes with desktop animations which link to Whyville.net, a virtual world where kids of all ages chat, shop, and visit places in town that engage them in science, nutrition, art, and business activities.

The price of the 10.1-inch Nickelodeon Netbook hasn’t been announced, but it will be available for purchase at Dell.com and Walmart stores in October.

(Credit: Dell)

The answer lies in another question: Will these virtual decisions and educational activities translate into real-life skills?