crystal-studios.com

Eisenberg, who turns 26 in a few weeks, is a decently big name himself: he’s also been seen in “The Squid and the Whale” and “The Village.” Timberlake’s musical reputation needs no introduction (he got his start, after all, in boy band ‘N Sync), but his best-known acting role might be the “Saturday Night Live” short “D*** in a Box.”

UPDATE at 11:11 a.m. PT: It looks like the casting rumors were first reported earlier this month by the blog Scriptshadow, albeit in a far less concrete context than Variety–and the report’s coincidence with the Labor Day holiday weekend likely kept it under the radar.

Production for Columbia Pictures’ “The Social Network,” which was written by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, is reportedly going to begin in October in Boston.

(Well, it’s the company’s early days as depicted in Ben Mezrich’s juicy and most-definitely-not-authorized “The Accidental Billionaires,” which some have criticized for being factually liberal.)

We heard a few months back that the producers were looking at some bigger names to play Zuckerberg: perpetually typecast nerd Michael Cera and “Transformers” star Shia LaBeouf. But it looks like they’re putting the real star power instead into the casting of Timberlake as Sean Parker.

The news was first reported by Variety, which added that actor Andrew Garfield will be playing Zuckerberg’s Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Garfield is perhaps best known for his role in the 2007 Robert Redford film “Lions for Lambs.”

Jesse Eisenberg, pictured here with 'Adventureland' co-star Kristen Stewart, will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in 'The Social Network.'

“Adventureland” star Jesse Eisenberg will be playing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and singer Justin Timberlake will be playing Silicon Valley mainstay Sean Parker in “The Social Network,” director David Fincher’s cinematic adaptation of the company’s early days.

(Credit:
Miramax Films)

Google on Tuesday launched a gallery of 29 themes for Google Chrome (requires Google Chrome 3.0 beta for Windows). But Mozilla, while refraining from sniggering, boasted it’s now up to 20,000.

Cosmetic changes are, well, cosmetic, but a lot of people like them as a way to add some flair to their machines. Many had been pestering Google to add themes support even though Chrome employs a Spartan user interface without much acreage for artistry. Last week’s developer version of Chrome added a “Get themes” button in the Options dialog box, and now Google has flipped the switch to activate the Web page that button points to.

Why so large? Themes can come with a background image that shows on Chrome’s new-tab page that offers a much greater chance for expressiveness, especially since that page is the default when Chrome launches. That could help Google with its attempt to recruit artists to supply their own themes, as some have done with the iGoogle customizable home page.

This theme is called Grass.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The collection of themes includes Legal Pad, Star Gazing, Transparent (it’s not, on my Windows XP machine), Dots, and Pencil Sketch. One monochromatic theme called Minimal downloads nearly instantly, but Grass, at 1.3MB, takes more time.

Mozilla has its own skinning technology in the works, a plug-in called Personas that launched on Mozilla Labs in March. That head start, coupled with its vastly larger and more engaged external audience, gives it a big lead over Chrome when it comes to getting gussied up.

Mozilla Labs announced Monday that Firefox now has 20,000 Personas, with 10,000 of them arriving in the last 10 weeks.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google now offers a gallery of themes for its Chrome browser.

Next up is cameras. Panasonic is introducing a new Micro Four Thirds camera, called the GF1, which is likely to set the standard in the interchangeable-lens compact category.
It will come in several colors–everywhere but the US–have 720p HD movie recording, and ship in a couple of kits all priced at $899.95. Plus, unlike its competitor the Olympus E-P1, it will have a pop-up flash and an optional electronic viewfinder. (For more details on the Panasonic Lumix GF1, see Lori Grunin’s in-depth preview.)

Now Yoshiiku Miyata, a senior executive at Panasonic AVC Networks, is here to explain. “Next year TV will change dramatically,” he said. The first Full HD 3D products will display two different 1080p projections, one to each eye, which special 3D glasses would then make look like one image. It will of course be on plasma, this being Panasonic.

Next year they’ll have several models of 3D TVs as well as a 3D Blu-ray player. He doesn’t say exactly when, nor does he provide photos or any specifications.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 photos

BERLIN–At Panasonic’s press conference, which officially opens press day here at IFA Berlin 2009, the magic number is three, as in 3D and thirds.

The new Lumix GF1.

In order to talk about the future of 3D film, Panasonic shows us the trailer of James Cameron’s upcoming film, “Avatar.” But they show it in 2D. Odd. At least Sony showed us 3D stuff in 3D.

Laurent Abadie, CEO of Panasonic Europe, is up first. He is talking up Full HD 3D, a new business for the company, with the goal of bringing 3D from the theater to the home. Sony said Wednesday it has the same goal.

(Credit:
Erica Ogg/CNET)

It will be interesting to see how Dopplr as a service fits into Nokia’s strategy. It’s unclear at this point if it wants the business as it exists, its technology, or its talent. Dopplr has a fairly small, but hardcore user base and has intense competition from companies like TripIt, so it is a curious acquisition choice. If it keeps the service intact at all, look for Nokia to roll out a mobile version of Dopplr out as an exclusive app on their devices.

In an effort to stop the bleeding at the cell phone giant, Nokia has been acquiring a string of smaller companies. With intense competition from Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia has been struggling to keep pace in the mobile industry. Om Malik compares the acquisition spree at Nokia to what we have seen at Yahoo in the last few years.

Dopplr's CEO, Marko Ahtisaari

(Credit: Dopplr)

TechCrunch is reporting that Nokia has just acquired social travel start-up Dopplr. The rumored acquisition price is between 10 million and 15 million Euros, which is around $15 million to $22 million.

But here’s what’s good about it: After a year and a half of public scrapping, behind-the-scenes drama, and dysfunctional communications through leaks to the press, Microsoft and Yahoo now can get back to business.

The companies also gave themselves two full years to fully implement the deal, too, so there’s time to work out such details. In the meantime, Yahoo can’t afford to stand still. SearchMonkey is one element of a new hybrid search page that Yahoo said it will start testing with its users starting in August.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Nobody will notice any difference immediately from the outside. First comes regulatory scrutiny, with the companies hoping for approval in early 2010. But already, the deal provides a framework that should make it easier for the companies to establish their new identities.

There’s some important context for these changes and for the Microsoft-Yahoo deal: search results are growing beyond the plain list of 10 hyperlinks with accompanying snippets of text. Google, for example, blends in ever larger quantities of “universal” search results such as maps, YouTube videos, photos, and news.

Investors panned Yahoo’s search and advertising deal with Microsoft on Wednesday, sending Yahoo’s stock down 12 percent. IDC’s analysts called it a “strategic mistake.”

Yahoo’s new search results page include not only SearchMonkey, but also display advertising and the key element of its new home page, a customizable list of applications down the left side. The search results themselves become just part of a broader package, so Yahoo outsourcing the actual search engine duties to Microsoft isn’t giving away as much of the core business.

Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new chief executive, has shown herself to be a pragmatist who prefers picking her battles. With the Microsoft deal, she’s chosen to sit a big one out, freeing the company from having to out-Google Google. What the company sacrifices in ambition it gets back in goals that are actually attainable.

For Microsoft, though, the struggle against Google becomes more intense. The combined search market share of Yahoo and Microsoft still is half what Google has, and the fact that Wednesday’s Yahoo pact is smaller in scope than some earlier possible incarnations means Microsoft has that much more hard work before it.

Some awkwardness remains where those two visions overlap. One is the work Yahoo has done to augment search results through a program called SearchMonkey, which can interpret tags on others’ Web sites so they can be spruced up with new information when those pages appear in search results. To work, it requires the cooperation of the Web crawlers that index the contents of Web pages and the servers that present the search results.

The Microhoo concept has been reduced from a giant cloud of uncertainty hanging over both companies to merely a complicated partnership between two rivals with Google as a common foe. The range of possibilities for Microsoft and Yahoo, which ran all the way from nothing to Yahoo disappearing altogether, has been pruned back to a much more manageable scope.

Outsourcing search has a cost, of course. The partnership means Yahoo will get only 88 percent of search-ad revenue on its sites for the first five years, down from 100 percent today. Yahoo, though, also gets lower operational expenses and thus, it expects, greater profitability over the long term. Yahoo expects $275 million more each year in operating cash flow.

Yahoo plans to make its search pages more like its main page.

To me, that looks like the sort of chore that will require Microsoft and Yahoo to work together in search. Fortunately, Microsoft and Yahoo have a 100-page playbook that had better address such aspects, and Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi declared Wednesday he likes the SearchMonkey approach.

With Microsoft acquiring license to Yahoo’s search technology, applying its search-ad auction process to both companies’ searches, and offering jobs to many Yahoo employees, it appears Redmond is carrying more of the Ph.D.-intensive fight to Google. Yahoo, keeping its display advertising business and focusing on its home page redesign, becomes more of a hub for people’s online activity and platform for outside Web sites’ developers.

The company clearly wants to make a third big business out of its online operations to complement its Windows and Office cash cows. Getting Yahoo’s search technology and Web site traffic gives it a better stronghold but by no means a victory.

Velcro’s great, but for when you need that extra hold, there’s a new hook and loop fastener made from spring steel in Germany that can pinch together loads of up to 35 metric tons, according to researchers.

Although Velcro and its knockoffs have been used on everything from shoes to space shuttles since its invention by Swiss engineer George de Mestral 60 years ago, it has limitations. Weak spots include hospitals, where aggressive disinfectants are used, and the construction and auto industries. “Temperatures of several hundred degrees centigrade can arise around the exhaust manifold,” said lead scientist Josef Mair, explaining why a garden variety synthetic hook and loop will not do in some situations.

(Credit:
TUM)

The uber-Velcro, dubbed Metaklett, is also chemical-resistant and can withstand temperatures of nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, according to developers at the Institute of Metal Forming and Casting, Technical University Munich (TUM).

And what of that iconic scratch Velcro makes as it is undone? The sound of Metaklett being unzipped has been described as “metallic, like a glittering chain,” TUM’s Patrick Regan said. Sounds like an improvement.

“The animal names arose as a way of differentiating between the multifaceted models. The hook forms of the two systems are vaguely reminiscent of a duck’s head and a flamingo standing on one leg,” Mair said. Metaklett is a portmanteau of Metall and Klettverschluss, which is the German generic for Velcro.

After testing, the institute settled on two variations–the “Flamingo” and “Entenknopf” (or duck’s head) models. Both start out as less than one inch thick metal tape, but the Entenknopf uses fine steel hooks and loops, while the Flamingo uses wider hooks that snap into openings in the tape. “They are bent in such a way that they deform elastically under light pressure and glide into the holes like the synthetic buckles on backpack straps. Once inserted, they return immediately to their original form and, thanks to their sprung splaying arms, they resist back-pull like an expanding rivet,” the literature explains (PDF).

SAN FRANCISCO–The fall season has officially begun. Starting Monday morning, the annual TechCrunch50 conference took over the San Francisco Design Center for two days of start-up pitches and presentations; the conference’s angle, as co-hosts Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis reiterated, is that all 50 companies on the roster are completely new and launching for the first time.

So what did the judges think overall of the “Youth & Games” category at TechCrunch50? Calacanis asked them which of the five companies they’d take an investor meeting with, and it looks like there was a clear winner: Dodge and Vardi both preferred ToonsTunes, and Conway said he’d take a meeting with either ToonsTunes or Story Something but ranked them about even. Zachary, meanwhile, said “I’d put ToonsTunes at the top, Story Something a distant second, and the others are off the map.”

The Sealtale of approval
The last company of the “Youth & Games” round was a little different: Sealtale, a Korean company that lets users create personalized badges (or “seals”) to embed on their blogs to identify themselves and express their affinities–as an iPhone user, a supporter of a certain cause, a fan of a band, for example. Clicking on a “seal” can bring up related blog posts from other bloggers with the same seal. It’s one part self-branding service, one part blogroll, and one part Google Friend Connect-like networking service.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

When asked by conference host Jason Calacanis whether they’d invest in it, judges said they’d consider it. Veteran investor Ron Conway said that it could benefit from some partnerships with other companies. “I would consider, but I wouldn’t write a check until it’s in English,” Don Dodge said of the currently Spanish-only site. “English is where the money is.”

So it was appropriate that the first pitch of the session, kicking off the TechCrunch50 conference as a whole, was pretty far out in left field: an iPhone app created by comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller. At first, their developers came onstage and apologized that the entertainers couldn’t actually make it to the conference, and proceeded to demonstrate a text-messaging magic trick app. But then Penn Jillette stepped out to formally demonstrate the app, which has the aim of (ideally) fooling the iPhone user’s friends into thinking that they’re actually playing a guess-the-card trick with Penn and Teller via text messaging.

Sealtale lets you claim products or services you use, then stick a logo of them on your blog.

The third start-up in the round was the Mexico-based Clasemovil, a start-up that offers game- and video-based online educational exercises for kids in areas like math, science, and history. Clasemovil uses a format much like trendy kid-focused virtual-world services–its virtual currency, for example, is used to teach personal-finance lessons. The executives were accompanied by an on-staff teacher who vouched for the company’s platform as a classroom tool, demonstrating progress-report tracking features.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Most of the questions from the judges pertained to business model and the intellectual-property rights associated with the stories published through StorySomething. Judge Don Dodge called it “a lottery-ticket investment” for an angel investor, given the relatively low overhead costs and likelihood that such a company could scale without much additional investment.

Start-ups presenting at the conference, which were chosen through a behind-the-scenes elimination process, were grouped into categories. The first of the day was “Youth & Games,” with an array of kid-focused and entertainment start-ups.

Child’s play for start-ups
The next presentation couldn’t have been more different: Story Something, “which makes the personalization of children’s stories simple and easy,” founder Jim Rose said. The Web company uses Mad Libs-like text fields for a parent to personalize a story with their children’s names and other attributes, and new stories can be sent on a schedule–for example, every evening before bedtime–as part of a paid-subscription model. There’s also an iPhone app for easy reading to kids.

The fourth start-up was another kid-focused one, ToonsTunes, a virtual world focused on teaching kids about making music. Players can record music through a mixer interface, network with other users, and sign up for “concert” spots at virtual “clubs.” They can share their creations on social networks like Twitter and MySpace, or download them as ringtones. There is, of course, also a virtual currency involved for micropayments like purchasing samples of pop songs.

Other judges’ questions were a bit sillier.

“It’s not so much a moneymaker for us as a public service to get guys laid,” Jillette said when asked if there was a revenue model to the app, which sells for $1.99 and is now in the iTunes Store. “If there’s a Nobel prize for getting guys laid we’d definitely be in the running for it.”

It’s launching first in Latin America (in the U.S. next year, apparently) but its founders hope that it ultimately will allow elementary-school students from around the world to learn by interacting with one another. ClaseMovil, which hopes to make money from subscription fees from both individual users and educational-institution subscriptions, has already raised seed funding and is looking not just to investors but also grant money from governments and organizations.

Comedian Penn Jillette demos his new iPhone app.

Calacanis asked the judges what they thought of Sealtale, which he called “Webring 2.0″ in an allusion to the ’90s-era blog network start-up. “We’d have to see how the product took off and how the acceptance was in other countries (besides Korea),” Conway said. Hirschhorn said he liked the user interface but wasn’t totally sold how it was needed in a world of MySpace pages and Facebook fan pages.

ClaseMovil lets you wander around a virtual world and spend microcurrency. It's also got an education tools, but is currently for Spanish-speaking users only.

(Credit:
CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Two judges, investor George Zachary and MySpace exec Jason Hirschhorn, said that they’d turn the investment opportunity down outright, with Zachary citing “so much competition” and “huge brand and marketing challenges” when it comes to making a splash in the education market.

“How profound is the assumption that parents will continue to make kids?” judge Yossi Vardi asked facetiously.

Obviously, virtual worlds for kids are hot in the wake of the success of companies like Club Penguin, which sold to Disney for $350 million two years ago. And the graphics-heavy ToonsTunes received a pretty warm reception.

“I like it very much,” George Zachary said, calling it “GarageBand meets Club Penguin.” Don Dodge said that “the quality is absolutely amazing.” Hirschhorn questioned the company’s ability to compete with the likes of “Guitar Hero.” Vardi called it “very, very impressive,” considering especially the fact that the company was privately funded and employs only five people.

Hirschhorn–the lone entertainment-industry member on the panel, it should be noted– was the dissenter, ranking Story Something at the top and ToonsTunes behind it, sticking to his instinct that it’d be tough to get a music games start-up off the ground when there are already so many big players in the industry.

Ron Conway said that the makers of Guitar Hero would love a product like this, but Hirschhorn remained the skeptic and said that it would be easy for the likes of a huge player like Electronic Arts to create a similar product with far better resources and connections.

Jillette also announced that the app’s alpha tester is a stripper from Philadelphia who has raked in extra tips by demonstrating the app alongside lap dances. Unfortunately, the array of judges didn’t seem terribly impressed at its long-term business prospects.

The day had already begun with some theatrics: the news was broken (unsurprisingly, by TechCrunch) that a previous TechCrunch50 winner, personal finance start-up Mint, had just sold to Intuit for $170 million in cash. Mint CEO Aaron Patzer took the stage on Monday to formally confirm the announcement.

Engineers also have a lot of choices at Google. “We didn’t control what environments our engineers work in,” said Merrill, who is writing a book due out next year titled “Organization in the Google Era.”

“Larry Page pushed us to add that feature. We all thought it was dumb, but he’s writing our checks, so we did it,” Merrill said.

But “it’s not security’s responsibility to go out there and say, ‘Users want to use Gmail. Let them use it,’” Johnson added. “If we decide to use Gmail, we need to have a project and treat it in a formal way and pay money to do it right.”

That might be a strange message to give to a group of security professionals, but it fit with a larger theme of the importance of innovation to companies, including innovation and practices driven by users with consumer software. That’s effectively a Google mantra.

One feature in particular that seems to be helping users is a link at the bottom of Gmail that provides information about the activity on their account, such as Internet Protocol addresses used to access it and when.

While working as chief information officer and vice president of engineering at Google from 2004 to 2008, Douglas Merrill oversaw the search giant’s internal IT systems. He left to be chief operating officer of new music at EMI, marrying his professional ambitions with his love of music.

At EMI, employees used Exchange Calendar, which uses a “painful remote-access methodology,” he said in a keynote speech on Tuesday at the Black Hat security conference.

That innovation should be fostered by companies by allowing employees to work on their own projects. (Sound familiar? Google lets engineers work 20 percent of their time on special projects of their own design.)

“I’m for well though-out projects to promote innovation,” John Johnson, a senior security program manager at tractor maker John Deere, said during a chief security officer panel discussion.

It turns out, the feature gets a lot of users, as people realize that information can help protect them, he said.

“Humans are like rats. If you make it easy for them to get through the maze, they will,” Merrill said, acknowledging that the cynical viewpoint would likely end up as the main quote in news stories. (Sorry Doug.)

At least one IT security manager at the show disagreed with Merrill’s liberal attitude about security and the work environment.

“It’s just a lot easier to use,” he said of the free Web-hosted calendar his former company offers.

“I paid my admin to put appointments and contacts in my private Google Calendar,” said Merrill, who left EMI earlier this year. If he were in charge of IT security, he would have had to censure himself for violating corporate policies, but he didn’t care–he just wanted to access his appointments while waiting in the Hong Kong airport.

“The center of innovation is consumer technologies, not enterprise,” he said. “A lot of companies are doing consumer technology that is a lot better than what we have in the enterprise.”

Meanwhile, companies need to design security systems that will more readily and easily be used by people, and that eliminate the chances for human error.

LAS VEGAS–You can take the man out of Google, but you can’t take Google out of the man.

Douglas Merrill, ex-Google CIO who recently left EMI.

(Credit:
Elinor Mills/CNET News)

“Humans are like rats. If you make it easy for them to get through the maze, they will.” –Douglas Merrill

Posted online by Microsoft’s Hong Kong subsidiary, the quiz asks questions such as how long you spend in front of your PC and whether you watch videos online.

I also have a “hug standard of aesthetics,” which I think is both a typo and incorrect, as most of my friends and co-workers will tell you. Anyway, you can try it yourself by clicking here.

I’m not sure how large the crossover is between those who like the quizzes in Cosmo magazine and those seeking to learn more about Windows. That said, for those who fit in that category, there’s now a Windows 7 Personality Quiz.

Microsoft's Hong Kong subsidiary posted this "personality quiz" as part of the Windows 7 marketing push.

Since I own more than three PCs and spend more than five hours a day in front of my PC, I figured I’d score high, but then I realized it’s not that kind of quiz. In the end, the quiz rated me as “highly defined,” as one who is “open-minded and innovative.”

(Credit:
CNET)

(Credit:
CNET)

DynaVox Xpress begins shipping at the end of August.

My favorite part of the article, though, highlights how innovative not just the devices, but also their users, can be. Justin Birch, who lost his ability to speak in 2003, after suffering a brain aneurysm, initiates the phrase, “Please be patient with me while I am composing what I want to say,” as he preps his dialogue in situations that call for more than an automated reply.

Now, if only there were a way to reconstruct the voice he used to have. Of course, the synthetic version he relies on probably saved his hide that time he defeated a poker player and accidentally hit the wrong button to spit out, “Good game, you bitch,” as she surrendered her spot at the table.

Xpress, which begins shipping at the end of August at $7,500 a pop (funding is available through Medicare, Medicaid, and some private health insurance providers), is a dozen centimeters wide and less than 2 pounds, rendering communication by hand a potentially enjoyable experience. With Wi-Fi for Web access, Bluetooth, infrared remote control, and multimedia tools such as MP3 and video players, people are now able to share their personalities more easily.

Welcome to the next generation. In a great feature article in Scientific American, Larry Greenemeier weighs in on the latest gadget trend for the speech-impaired. The star of the show is Xpress by DynaVox.

A Texas hold ‘em player, Birch can tap out common poker phrases–calling, raising, folding–very quickly, and he blurts out sounds like Homer Simpson’s “Woo hoo!” when appropriate. Emoticons through recognizable sound clip? Brilliant.

Eight out of every 1,000 people have a lot of trouble communicating vocally, be it from a traumatic event such as a stroke or the onset of diseases such as Lou Gehrig’s (ALS). As recently as the 1960s, it was a big deal for those who were effectively mute to be able to type out their thoughts one key stroke at a time. (Stephen Hawking first used a DECtalk DTC01 voice synthesizer developed by Digital Equipment in the early 1980s.)

(Credit:
DynaVox)