Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You

Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where they are?


Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.

Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at Stanford.

“Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone and said, ‘Where are you?’ ” he said. “People want to connect.”

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide.

“There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital society,” said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.

“We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching each other,” he said. “There are privacy risks we haven’t begun to grapple with.”

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt, offered by Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did. “People don’t have to ask ‘Where are you?’” she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are not invited to join — like her mother.

“I don’t know if I’d want my mom knowing where I was all the time,” she said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time alone and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may ask, are they doing that?

What if a boss asks an employee to use the service?

So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent — users number in the hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Helio, a mobile phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some small-business owners use it to track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

“There is a Big Brother component,” said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research. “The thinking goes that if my friends can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too.”

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such services could cause.

If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T’s wireless unit, “that is a negative for us.” Loopt and similar services say they do not keep electronic records of people’s whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome prying by, say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at random times, asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that person’s viewing ability is disabled.

Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis, says he uses Helio’s Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his friend Gregory Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a trip, Mr. Harris was happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a bar where he and some other friends had gathered.

“He had tried to reach me, but I didn’t hear my phone ring,” Mr. Harris said. “He just showed up and I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’”

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice before inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. “Most definitely a girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her,” he said.


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Bomb Attack Kills Scores in Pakistan as Bhutto Returns

KARACHI, Pakistan, Friday, Oct. 19 — Two bombs exploded Thursday just seconds apart and feet from a truck carrying the returning opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, narrowly missing her but killing scores of people and bloodying her triumphal homecoming after eight years in exile.


According to reports on local news stations late Friday morning, 134 people had been killed and about 400 wounded.

Ms. Bhutto, who had spent eight hours on the open roof of the truck waving to supporters, had climbed inside the armored vehicle 10 minutes before the blasts occurred just before midnight, said Rehman Malik, her security adviser and close associate.

She was immediately taken to Bilawal House, her home in Karachi. The parade through the city had been scheduled to end several miles away at the tomb of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

Ms. Bhutto’s arrival at 2 p.m. had drawn huge crowds, perhaps 200,000 or more, who danced on top of buses and surged forward as she inched her way for hours through her home city.

The strong outpouring provided an emotional homecoming for Ms. Bhutto and political vindication of sorts for a woman twice turned out of office as prime minister, after being accused of corruption and mismanagement.

It also demonstrated that she remained a potent political force in Pakistan, even after her long absence, and marked what supporters and opponents alike agreed was a new political chapter for the nation.

The violence that quickly followed showed it to be a treacherous one as well.

The explosions, caught on camera, gave off brilliant white flashes and set two cars ablaze. Survivors stumbled over bodies and debris in a haze of smoke. It was not immediately clear if the explosions were caused by suicide bombers, and there were no claims of responsibility.

“I can only say that I saw heaps of bodies lying over there,” said her adviser, Mr. Malik. He was standing at the front of the truck and was knocked down by the force of the blast, he said. His hair was burned.

“The damage could have been much worse had we not taken our own security arrangements,” he added.

The government had promised before Ms. Bhutto’s arrival to provide security. It had also asked her to delay returning. But Ms. Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party had fielded 2,000 of its own workers to form rings around their returning leader, guarding her with their numbers and preventing any vehicles or people from approaching.

Before the explosions sundered the celebration, thousands of supporters and workers from her party had lined Ms. Bhutto’s route, waving banners and surging forward for a glimpse of the opposition leader. Many danced in the road.

Ms. Bhutto waved as music pumped out from loudspeakers. The crowd was overwhelmingly working class. Many young men said they were unemployed, but had traveled hundreds of miles, paying their own way, and camping out overnight on the road to the airport to await her arrival.

In the crowd, Raja Munir Ahmed, 42, a real estate agent, said he had come from Mirpur in the Pakistani-administered part of Kashmir. “It was a journey of 1,500 kilometers, and all along we saw buses and cars carrying Peoples Party flags,” he said. “People want change. People want to get rid of inflation and unemployment.”

Then he shouted, “Long live Bhutto!” and disappeared into the crowd.

Such supporters were among the majority of those killed and wounded. But about 20 were also police and law enforcement officials, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said. Eight police vans were flanking the truck at the time and the explosions occurred on the left and right sides of the road, he said.

He denied that it was a security lapse, saying that the crowds and length of the route made it difficult to ensure security.

Earlier, Ms. Bhutto was clearly emotional as she took her first steps on Pakistani soil, having lived the last eight years in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai. She left Pakistan to escape corruption charges she contends were politically motivated.

She climbed down a metal staircase to reach the tarmac, and paused on the bottom step and prayed as friends held a Koran aloft. As an aide embraced her, Ms. Bhutto wiped tears from her eyes.

“The most important step — to be back on Pakistani soil,” she said, as cameramen swarmed around her.

On the plane from Dubai, supporters broke into repeated cheers and chanting of “Prime Minister Benazir,” standing in the aisles and delaying the flight for nearly an hour. Ms. Bhutto walked through the cabin to greet supporters and the news media.


“Very excited, very happy, very proud, a tremendous sense of responsibility as there are so many people at the airport,” she said when asked how she felt.

In words that later seemed prescient, she spoke strongly about terrorism and the need to save Pakistan from extremism. “The time has come for democracy,” she said. “If we want to save Pakistan, we have to have democracy.”

She has been outspoken against militants and Al Qaeda and repeated the same comments as she flew in. “The terrorists are trying to take over my country and we have to stop them,” she said.

Ms. Bhutto had made clear repeatedly that she was returning to Pakistan to lead her party in the parliamentary elections scheduled for January. If she can win a change in the law, she will run for prime minister for a third time, something now legally barred.

“The people are telling me the bread-and-butter issues are the most important,” she said. “They are saying that poverty has increased, the gulf between the rich and poor has increased. They say that people want change. They want a government that listens to them, will respect them, and will address the people’s issues.”

Senior members of the party traveling with Ms. Bhutto said the turnout made it clear the people wanted change after eight years of military rule.

“It is unprecedented,” said Aftar Rana, a senior party member from Punjab Province, looking down at the crowd. “I think we will sweep the elections. People have come from everywhere.”

The opposition leader’s return was made possible after months of back-channel negotiations with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, over a way for the two leaders to share power as Pakistan makes a transition from a military government.

Ms. Bhutto’s party did not join other opposition parties this month in boycotting presidential elections by the national and provincial assemblies. The move allowed General Musharraf to successfully engineer his re-election, though he still faces legal challenges in the Supreme Court over his eligibility.

For his part, General Musharraf issued an amnesty for Ms. Bhutto and others accused of corruption in recent years, and he agreed to resign his post as chief of the army staff and serve his next term as a civilian.

But the bombing upon Ms. Bhutto’s arrival made it clear that, deal or no deal, the country’s politics remained exceedingly tense, and dangerous. The explosions now seem certain to add fresh venom to relations between the Pakistan Peoples Party and the government.

General Musharraf, according to a statement released by state media, condemned the attack “in the strongest possible words,” calling it “a conspiracy against democracy."

The Bush administration, which has backed General Musharraf, noted his condemnation of the attack, as the State Department issued a statement saying, “Those responsible seek only to foster fear and limit freedom.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Bhutto’s husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who did not make the return to Pakistan with his wife, immediately pointed a finger at the government and said the Pakistan Peoples Party would have to rethink its understanding with the government.

He said the government felt threatened by the power of Ms. Bhutto and suggested that the intelligence agencies were behind the blasts.

“I blame the government,” he said in an interview with Geo, an independent television news channel, from his home in Dubai. “The intelligence agencies are spreading terrorism,” he said. “Those who are sitting in the government feel threatened by us.”

Ms. Bhutto earlier said in the interview atop the truck that she was concerned about her security and that she had told General Musharraf that she suspected people in his administration and the security forces of supporting the militants and terrorism.

“This is not the same Pakistan it was in 1996 when my government was overthrown,” she said. “The militants have risen in power. But I know who these people are, I know the forces behind them, and I have written to General Musharraf about this. And I’ve told him there are certain people I suspect in the administration and security.

“Unless there is some thought given to that, this is what emboldens the militants,” she said. “They’ve got some covert support from sympathizers within the system.”

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A Laptop That Lets Students Take Notes Two Ways

Parents and students seeking a back-to-school computer may want to consider a tablet PC. These convertible devices, which allow switching from keyboard to pen input, are ideal for note-taking.


The Lifebook T2010 is Fujitsu’s latest entry among tablet PCs. As a laptop, it has all the standard features: a 12.1-inch display, 1 to 4 gigabytes of memory, a hard drive of up to 160 gigabytes, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.

On the tablet PC side, the T2010 comes with the Vista version of Microsoft’s tablet PC operating system, which was developed for handwriting recognition and also some voice recognition. Both systems become more accurate the more you use them.

The machine comes with the note-taking program OneNote, but can handle the full version of Microsoft Office.

The T2010, which starts at about $1,600 and is available at fujitsu.com and most major retailers, weighs less than four pounds.

To keep the weight down, there is no built-in CD/DVD drive, though a docking station, which adds the drive and several other ports, can be attached, adding a pound.

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Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 — Silicon Valley’s math is getting fuzzy again.


Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.

Consider Facebook, the popular but financially unproven social network, which is reportedly being valued by investors at up to $15 billion. That is nearly half the value of Yahoo, a company with 38 times the number of employees and, based on estimates of Facebook’s income, 32 times the revenue.

Google, which recently surged past $600 a share, is now worth more than I.B.M., a company with eight times the revenue.

More broadly, Internet start-ups are drawing investment based on their ability to build an audience, not bring in revenue — the very alchemy that many say led to the inflation and bursting of the dot-com bubble.

The surge in the perceived value of some start-ups has even surprised some entrepreneurs who are benefiting from it.

A year ago, Yahoo invested in Right Media, a New York-based company developing an online advertising network. Yahoo’s investment valued the firm at $200 million. Six months later, when Yahoo acquired Right Media outright, the purchase price had swelled to $850 million.

What changed? According to Right Media’s chief technology officer, Brian O’Kelley, very little, except that Yahoo’s rivals, Microsoft and Google, were writing billion-dollar checks to buy online advertising networks, and Yahoo thought it needed to pay any price to keep up.

“I have to say I giggled,” Mr. O’Kelley, 30, said of the deal that earned him millions. He has since left Right Media and is starting another company. “There is no way we quadrupled the value of the company in six months.”

The trend is described as a return to madness (by skeptics) or as a rational approach to unlimited opportunities presented by the Internet (by true believers). Greed, fear and a desperate rush to pick the next big winner are all adding fuel to the fire that is Silicon Valley’s resurgence.

“There’s definitely a lot of betting going on, and it’s not rational,” said Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter and book publisher.

Mr. O’Reilly is credited with coining the phrase “Web 2.0,” which refers to a new generation of Web sites that encourage users to contribute material. His Web 2.0 conference, which begins Wednesday in San Francisco, has become a nexus for the optimism around the latest set of society-changing online tools. But that has not stopped Mr. O’Reilly from worrying that the industry is minting too many copycat companies, half-baked business plans and overpriced buyouts.

When the bubble inevitably pops, he said, “there are going to be a lot of people out of work again.”

Putting a value on start-ups has always been a mix of science and speculation. But as in the first dot-com boom and the recent surge in housing, seasoned financial professionals are seeming to indulge in some strange instinct to turn away from the science and lean instead on the speculation.

This time around, people indulging in that optimistic thinking are not mom-and-pop investors or day traders but venture capitalists whose coffers are overflowing with money from university endowments and hedge funds. Many of those financial professionals say that this time, everything is different.

More than 1.3 billion people around the world use the Internet, many with speedy broadband connections and a willingness to immerse themselves in digital culture. The flood of advertising dollars to the Web has become an indomitable trend and a proven way for these start-ups to make money, while the revenue models of the dot-coms of yesteryear were often little more than sleight of hand.

“The environmental factors are much different than they were eight years ago,” said Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital and an early backer of YouTube. “The cost of doing business has declined dramatically, and traditional media companies have also woken up to the opportunities of the Web.

“That does open up the aperture for a different outcome this time,” he said.

Some trace the start of the new bubble to eBay’s $3.1 billion acquisition of the Internet telephone start-up Skype in 2005. EBay’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, reportedly outbid Google for the company. This month, eBay conceded it had grossly overpaid for Skype by about $1.43 billion, and announced that Niklas Zennstrom, a Skype co-founder, had left the company.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube last year for $1.65 billion, under similarly competitive bidding, might have accelerated the transition to loftier values. Google executives and many analysts argued that YouTube was well worth the price tag if it became the next entertainment juggernaut.

It still might. More than 205 million people visit YouTube each month, according to the research firm comScore. Still, Citigroup estimated that YouTube would bring in $135 million in revenue next year. At that rate, YouTube would have to grow considerably to account for just 5 percent of Google’s annual revenue of nearly $12 billion.

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, an Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability,” he said.

The Skype and YouTube windfalls helped to give the newest batch of Internet entrepreneurs dreams of improbable wealth. They also brought back practices that had seemingly been discredited during the first boom. For example, in the first dot-com gold rush, Internet companies did not have to make money to acquire serious investments dollars. Now that once again is true.

Twitter, a company in San Francisco that lets users alert friends to what they are doing at any given moment over their mobile phones, recently raised an undisclosed amount of financing. Its co-founder and creative director, Biz Stone, says that the company was not currently focused on making money and that no one in the company was even working on how to do so.

“At the moment, we’re focused on growing our network and our user experience,” he said. “When you have a lot of traffic, there’s always a clear business model.”

That is not necessarily illogical in the current climate. A European competitor, Jaiku, which is similarly devoid of a mature business model, was acquired last week by Google for an undisclosed sum. With the competitive logic that prevails at the major Internet companies, the deal might have further raised Twitter’s appeal to Google’s rivals.

The high value placed on many start-ups and minimal requirements for financial performance are raising expectations of other entrepreneurs. Sharon Wienbar, managing director of Scale Ventures Partners, an investment firm, cited the $100 million valuation that investors gave to the Internet genealogy site Geni.com, founded last year in Los Angeles by a veteran of PayPal.

“Now every entrepreneur thinks he should get that,” Ms. Wienbar said. “I have a feeling a lot of entrepreneurs are secretly meeting for beers on the Peninsula, saying, ‘Hey, look what I got.’”

Mr. O’Kelley, formerly of Right Media, said other entrepreneurs had begun to think that the financing game is best played by avoiding actual revenues — since that only limits the imagination of investors. “It’s a screwed-up incentive structure, just like you had in the first bubble,” he said.

Another company benefiting from the exuberance is Ning, which allows users to create their own MySpace-style ad-supported social networks. It was recently valued by investors at more than $200 million, mainly because its main backer and founder, Marc Andreessen, has a successful history with the Internet hits Netscape and Opsware.

Mr. Andreessen argues on his blog that there is no bubble and that the high prices represent a rational desire to stake a claim in the potentially huge markets of the future. But he acknowledges that a seemingly inexhaustible flood of capital into Silicon Valley is helping to power the boom. Venture capitalists are flush with cash from institutional investors, eager for Internet-style returns on their money.

“The upward valuations pressure is the result of decisions being made by people wearing suits in cities like New York and Boston who would never ever meet with start-ups,” Mr. Andreessen said in an interview. “If that ever goes away, it will have consequences. But it doesn’t look like they will change their minds.”


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73 and Loaded With Friends on Facebook

WHEN Amy Waldman first signed on to Facebook last year and started to send joking messages about good grammar back and forth with a new 18-year-old friend, Ms. Waldman’s 19-year-old daughter, Talia, upbraided her for not revealing that she was actually in her 40s.

“You have to tell her you’re old,” she explained, “because on Facebook, that’s creepy.”

Ms. Waldman created a Facebook group to commemorate the incident: “over 40 is ‘facebook creepy.’”

It’s no secret that Facebook, which started as a networking playground for college kids, is graying, and that the percentage of active members who are over 25 years old and out of school has risen to some 40 percent of the overall population of about 45 million.

The influx raises questions. Will the loss of the campus sensibility and the youthful gestalt dilute the Facebook experience? And will the newcomers use the site — and change it? Or is it just another example of the fact that Americans age, but never seem to mature?

Joe Uppal, a University of Michigan undergraduate studying anthropology and philosophy, said the age wave “does kind of undermine the ties between Facebook and the college community.

“If everyone and anyone is able to go on Facebook, then belonging to it no longer indicates a college-student identity,” he added.

Similar sentiments have been heard whenever Facebook has expanded, said Matt Cohler, the company’s vice president for strategy and business operations. When the fledgling company first expanded beyond its roots at Harvard to include Yale, he said, “The people at Harvard complained about it and said, ‘Hey, this used to be just for us!’” The fretting subsides each time, he said, “as soon as they go back to using the program and realize this hasn’t done anything to deteriorate their experience.”

FOR the most part, in fact, the entry of millions of people with, you know, jobs and stuff, has been greeted with an epic “whatever,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program. “The average Facebook user isn’t going to care that people utterly unlike them are doing things they utterly don’t care about on some other corner of the site,” he said.

Facebook can avoid its “there goes the neighborhood moment,” he said, as long as it allows people to stay in their silos and gives them control over who can peek at their profiles. “As long as the individual users still feel their culture is preserved in their corner of Facebook, the growth won’t bother them.”

But the grown-ups are everywhere.

Take a look, for example, at Carl Kasell’s page. Mr. Kasell, the 73-year-old announcer on the NPR news program “Morning Edition,” sends up his own stodgy image on the weekly news quiz show “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!” and he now has 1,602 “friends.” Under personal information, Mr. Kasell gives his favorite quote as: “For NPR News, I’m Carl Kasell.”

Don’t worry, though, if you, gentle reader, don’t have a Facebook page of your own yet; Mr. Kasell isn’t that much hipper than you. He does not actually maintain the page himself. He reads the messages and comes up with responses, and Melody Joy Kramer, the 23-year-old associate producer for the show, enters them onto the page, in a cross-generational partnership.

Ms. Waldman — she of the creepy 40s — finds herself using Facebook in many of the ways that younger people do, except for the sexual cruising: she keeps up with old friends, makes new ones and uses the network to, well, network.

For instance, it turned out that Ms. Waldman’s age, 48, was just fine with the young woman, Lisa Szczepanski, with whom she traded grammar jokes. Ms. Szczepanski lives in Queens and Ms. Waldman lives in Milwaukee, but they have become as close as electrons allow. Ms. Waldman calls Ms. Szczepanski “My Facebook kid,” and got a Mother’s Day card from her last spring. (“Even my own kids don’t do that!” she joked.)

Ms. Waldman also used Facebook in her volunteer work. She leads 12-week family education programs through the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and last spring, she needed a speaker for one of the classes. She posted a request on a Facebook page about mental health, asking for “someone with a mental illness who has experienced breakdown and recovery to talk about their experience with the class.”

She soon heard from Megan Banner, a 20-year-old who had suffered a bout of mental illness in her high school years, recovered and now attends college in Milwaukee. Ms. Banner said she had been thinking about getting involved with advocacy for mental illness issues when she saw Ms. Waldman’s note, and “It was as if it was meant to be.”

They chatted over Facebook and met at a local Starbucks. Ms. Banner spoke to the class and, in a message via Facebook, recalled, “I had the crowd crying.” She said she believed that she “gave some people the hope to continue.”

Since then, Ms. Banner has engaged in more advocacy and speaking about mental health. The evening with Ms. Waldman’s class, she said, “just changed my whole life.”

Young and old will inevitably use the technology of Facebook differently, said Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor in the telecommunications, information studies and media department at Michigan State University.

Students define themselves through membership in many social networks in the real and virtual worlds, including classroom, dorms, extracurricular activities and hobbies. “There are fewer of those for adults,” Ms. Ellison said, who “will not be as interested in sharing their love of R.E.M.”

To some extent, a generation gap is already apparent in the Facebook population, said Mr. Shirky, of N.Y.U. Younger people will use it more naturally and differently than older folks, who for the most part will see a Facebook page as something like the dreaded Christmas letter, with its prosaic updates on one’s life events, and less the sense of “living your social life online, hammer and tongs,” the way younger people tend to.

That is only natural, he said, because “People our age are going to find uses for the tool that have to do with the maintenance of life already in process, rather than making one up out of whole cloth” — in part, he added, because “our social lives are more boring.” And that, he said, is only logical: “We’ve made the mistakes we’re going to make, God willing, and we’ve settled down.”

Some longtime observers of technology also wonder if Facebook will hold the interest of adults. Paul Saffo, a technology consultant who teaches at Stanford, said that Facebook’s rapidly multiplying programs and widgets might compromise the simple, clean design that made the site popular in the first place — which could be especially irritating to adults. “We want fewer steps, not more,” he said.

Worse, he said, is that social software means “we all get to be in fourth grade again,” renegotiating the rules of engagement with others. Do you respond to every friend request? Is it rude to cut someone away as part of a friend-list pruning? Once again, he said, “You have to worry about bruised feelings.”

Each new technology for communication, from the telephone to e-mail to Facebook “poking,” goes through a similar cycle, he said. “First we invent the technologies, then we figure out the social norms that tame the technology and allow it to occupy a nondistracting part of our life.” In other words, for Facebook to truly succeed, he said, it will have to recede.


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Enjoying Life Outside the Bubble

THE last time I talked to Kevin Landis was over lunch at Le Bernardin, the haute French restaurant in Manhattan, back in the fall of 2000. At the time, the air hadn’t yet gone out of the Internet bubble, and as manager of the tech-focused Firsthand family of mutual funds, Mr. Landis was feeling pretty good about the fact that assets under management had gone from $2 billion to more than $6 billion in a matter of months. In fact, he was more than a little cocky. (So was I — reporters don’t eat at Le Bernardin anymore, at least if their publisher is paying.)

So with the 16 percent rise in the Nasdaq this year, not to mention the meteoric rise of stocks like Google, which recently passed $600 a share for the first time, Mr. Landis is again feeling good. His flagship Technology Value fund is up 27 percent this year and has had an average annual return of 26 percent over the last five years. But he’s no longer so cocky — that got knocked out of Mr. Landis the hard way, when Firsthand suffered huge losses as the bubble finally burst early in the decade.

“You don’t want to ask for those numbers,” he jokes. “It’s still painful and it always will be, and not because my mom’s in the fund. It goes on your permanent record, like in school.” In 2001, the Technology Value fund dropped 44 percent, and then plunged 56 percent in 2002. Firsthand’s total assets under management, now about $750 million, are still a small fraction of what they were in 2000.

With the fund’s record of being up, down and up again, it seemed like a good time to ask Mr. Landis if tech investors are enjoying Web 2.0 or Bubble 2.0, as many commentators put it.

He says that while individual names like Research in Motion and Apple have begun to get pricey, the broader tech sector “has got plenty of room to keep running.” And unlike 2000, when the likes of Dr.Koop.com and Webvan went through the roof, no longer can just about any dot-com stock win investor enthusiasm. As for Google, he says “it’s pricey, but not hugely so.” Google is “a one-trick pony,” he says, referring to the fact that most of its revenue is from search-related advertising. “But it’s a hell of a pony.”

More established tech names like Intel and Cisco — both of which still trade well below their bubble-era peaks but are up more than 20 percent this year — have become mature, almost old-fashioned blue chips, with steady, if not exceptional returns, he says.

That other tech giant, Microsoft, has a cloudier future, he predicts. It’s flat for the year, and Mr. Landis says “they’re going to have a hard time generating much more growth.”

“Microsoft conquered the desktop and then the server room,” he adds, “but what the heck else is out there for them?”

Back in the fall of 2000, Mr. Landis was excited about the tax-cut plans of George W. Bush, then running for president, and less than enthralled by Al Gore. Today, though, he says he has a new appreciation for Mr. Gore, who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and his green agenda, at least when it comes to alternative-energy companies that might gain from development of solar power.

One favorite is SunPower, which makes solar panels that are much more energy-efficient than their predecessors. SunPower’s shares have doubled this year, but Mr. Landis’s preferred way of playing it is by holding Cypress Semiconductor, which owns 53 percent of SunPower but trades at a more reasonable price-to-earnings multiple.

Another pick on this theme is Applied Materials, a semiconductor play. “These new solar panels are an offshoot of semiconductors,” he says.

OF course, this sector has enjoyed a spectacular run already, with First Solar now at $136, up from $30 at the beginning of the year. But Mr. Landis is hopeful. “Alternative energy isn’t where the Internet was in 1999,” he assures me, with a touch of the exuberance that made him a regular on CNBC years ago. “It’s where the Internet was in 1980.” Old ways die hard, I guess, and in Silicon Valley, where Mr. Landis grew up, the next big thing is always just around the corner.

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In Some Schools, iPods Are Required Listening

UNION CITY, N.J., Oct. 8 — A ban on iPods is so strictly enforced at José Martí Middle School that as many as three a week are confiscated from students — and returned only to their parents.



But even as students have been told to leave their iPods at home, the school here in Hudson County has been handing out the portable digital players to help bilingual students with limited English ability sharpen their vocabulary and grammar by singing along to popular songs.

Next month, the Union City district will give out 300 iPods at its schools as part of a $130,000 experiment in one of New Jersey’s poorest urban school systems. The effort has spurred a handful of other districts in the state, including the ones in Perth Amboy and South Brunswick, to start their own iPod programs in the last year, and the project has drawn the attention of educators from Westchester County to Monrovia, Calif.

The spread of iPods into classrooms comes at a time when many school districts across the country have outlawed the portable players from their buildings — along with cellphones and DVD players — because they pose a distraction, or worse, to students. In some cases, students have been caught cheating on tests by loading answers, mathematical formulas and notes onto their iPods.

But some schools are rethinking the iPod bans as they try to co-opt the devices for educational purposes. Last month, the Perth Amboy district bought 40 iPods for students to use in bilingual classes that are modeled after those in Union City. In South Brunswick, 20 iPods were used last spring in French and Spanish classes. And in North Plainfield, N.J., the district has supplied iPods to science teachers to illustrate chemistry concepts, and it is considering allowing students in those classes to use iPods that they have brought from home.

“It’s an innovation,” said Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, which selected Union City educators to speak about the iPod classes at the group’s annual conference in Atlantic City Oct. 24-26. “Most people think of the iPod as just entertainment.”

At José Martí, the silver iPods, with built-in video screens, cost about $250 each and are passed out at the beginning of class along with headsets and Spanish-to-English dictionaries. The iPods are collected at the end of class, and school officials said that none have disappeared or been broken.

In one recent class, eighth-grade students mouthed the words to the rock song “Hey There Delilah” by the Plain White T’s as they played the tune on the iPods over and over again. The braver ones sang out loud.

“It speaks to me,” said Stephanie Rojas, 13, who moved here last year from Puerto Rico and now prefers to sing in English. “I take a long time in the shower because I’m singing, and my brothers are like, ‘Hurry up!’”

Pedro Noguera, a sociology professor at New York University who studies urban schools, said that more districts were using new technologies like iPods to connect with students. For instance, he said, teachers have designed video games around history lessons and assigned students to re-enact novels and plays on YouTube.

“You know the No. 1 complaint about school is that it’s boring because the traditional way it’s taught relies on passive learning,” Mr. Noguera said. “It’s not interactive enough.”

In many affluent communities, iPods have evolved into an essential accessory for students. In 2004, Duke University led the way by outfitting its entire freshman class with iPods that were preloaded with orientation information and even the Duke fight song. While Duke no longer gives away iPods, it maintains a pool of them that are lent to students for classes. Last spring, 93 of the 2,000 or so courses at Duke required iPods.

The Brearley School, a private girls school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has used iPods to supplement foreign-language textbooks and its music, drama and English classes. Every Brearley student in seventh through ninth grades is required to buy or rent an iPod.

Here in Union City, the iPods are a splurge for many of the immigrant families who live in this densely packed urban center, once known for its embroidery factories. About 94 percent of the district’s 11,000 students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

The Union City district, which has a $197 million annual budget, places a priority on bilingual classes because more than one-quarter of its students are learning basic English skills. District officials said the stakes are high; 4 of the district’s 12 schools have been identified as needing improvement under the federal No Child Left Behind law, largely because not enough bilingual students have passed the state reading and math tests.

Grace Poli, a media specialist at José Martí, said that she approached district officials about buying 23 iPods for an after-school bilingual program in 2004 after being struck by students’ passion for them. Spanish-speaking students seemed bored by their English-language textbooks, she said, which they found outdated and irrelevant.

The program became so popular that it was added to the regular school schedule the following year, and in 2006, Ms. Poli received 60 more iPods. Last May, the district decided to buy 300 iPods to expand the program to other schools this fall.


Ms. Poli scoured the music charts for songs that appealed to students, compiling an eclectic mix of tunes by Shania Twain, Barry White, U2 and the Black Eyed Peas. She downloaded their songs to the iPods and typed out the lyrics. Then she deleted all the nouns — and in turn, the verbs and adjectives — forcing the students to fill in the missing words and learn their meaning.

In class, they sing or recite the completed lyrics back to her.

“A lot of our bilingual kids are very shy, and they feel like outsiders,” said Ms. Poli, whose parents immigrated from Ecuador. “You have kids who never said a word in English, and now they’re singing Black Eyed Peas. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.”

Ms. Poli has also downloaded audio books, including the Harry Potter series, and added recording devices to the iPods so that students can listen to their pronunciation as they read poetry or talk with one another.

While the iPods have been used mainly in bilingual classes, the district plans to try them with students who have learning disabilities and behavioral problems as part of the program’s expansion, which is set to begin next month. Last year, Ms. Poli helped an alternative education class create podcasts of test-taking tips that were shared with the entire school.

Ms. Poli said her Spanish-speaking students — known around the school as Pod People — have been able to move out of bilingual classes after just a year of using the digital devices, compared with an average of four to six years for most bilingual students.

Geri Perez, the principal at José Martí, said parents have requested that their children be enrolled in the iPod-equipped classes. Ms. Perez, who does not speak Spanish, said that bilingual students who once shied away from talking to her have gained self-confidence and now come up to her in the hallways.

Dianelis Cano, 13, who moved here from Cuba less than two years ago, said that she had learned so much English that her mother, a saleswoman in a clothing store, bought her an iPod over the summer as a reward for good grades. Dianelis loads her own songs onto the iPod to practice English outside school, though she also includes Spanish music.

“I’m going to check your iPod to make sure there is English music there,” Ms. Poli teased her. “I’m going to make home visits.”

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Google to Put YouTube Videos on Its Ad Network

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 8 — Google is taking the first steps toward turning its powerful advertising network, which places ads on hundreds of thousands of Internet sites, into a system for distributing content — and more ads — across the Web.

The Internet search giant is expected to introduce a service on Tuesday to allow Web sites in its ad network to embed relevant videos from some YouTube content creators. A Web site or blog specializing in hiking, for instance, might choose to embed hiking videos from YouTube.

The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense. Since the videos will be surrounded by ads, the service is another way for Google to cash in on the huge number of video clips stored on YouTube.

Several other networks distribute videos and ads on the Web, but none reach as many Web sites as AdSense.

Google said it would share revenue from the ads with the creators of the videos and with the Web sites that embed them, though it declined to specify what percentage of the revenue will be kept by each party.

“We are creating incremental distribution for our content providers,” said Christian Oestlien, product manager for AdSense. Mr. Oestlien said the system would also allow publishers to make their Web sites more compelling and give advertisers a new way to reach customers.

While many Web sites already embed YouTube clips in their pages, this system would allow them to make money from the clips. They would not, however, have the same level of control over what clip gets embedded.

For now, the system’s scope, and its potential to deliver new revenue to Google, is limited, because only about 100 media companies that have created YouTube videos will be participating.

Google declined to give a full list of participants, but of those it listed, none were large media companies. They include Expert Village, a producer of how-to videos; Ford Models, a modeling agency; and Extreme Elements, which creates videos about extreme sports. Over time, Google expects to use AdSense to syndicate other types of content besides video, the company said.

Other similar attempts to syndicate video, however, suggest that success is not assured for Google’s new service. For instance, the video technology start-up Brightcove, which has been syndicating videos from various media companies since early last year, said that the adoption of its service had been largely limited to small Web sites.

“Any Web site that is medium to large typically doesn’t want arbitrary content showing up,” said Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove’s chief executive. “The sites that take it are typically very small sites with limited traffic,” so the system can generate only modest revenue, Mr. Allaire said.

The videos distributed through Google’s system will include small text ads that will be overlaid on the bottom of the video player or graphical banner ads, but not, for now, the video ads that the company began using on YouTube recently. Advertisements will aim to match the content of the video and the Web page where they are played.

This year, Google said it was working on a plan to use its AdSense network to distribute video from media powerhouses like Condé Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Dow Jones & Company. That program is still being fine-tuned, Google said.

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For Google, Advertising and Phones Go Together

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7 — For more than two years, a large group of engineers at Google has been working in secret on a mobile phone project. As word about their efforts has trickled out, expectations in the tech world for what has been called the Google phone, or GPhone, have risen, the way they do for Apple loyalists ahead of a speech by Steven P. Jobs.


But the GPhone is not likely to be the second coming of the iPhone — and Google’s goals are very different from Apple’s.

Google wants to extend its dominance of online advertising to the mobile Internet, a small market today, but one that is expected to grow rapidly. It hopes to persuade wireless carriers and mobile phone makers to offer phones based on its software, according to people briefed on the project. The cost of those phones may be partly subsidized by advertising that appears on their screens.

Google is expected to unveil the fruit of its mobile efforts later this year, and phones based on its technology could be available next year.

Some analysts say that the Google project’s effect on the wireless industry is not likely to be as profound, at least initially, as that of Apple’s iPhone, whose revolutionary look and features have redefined consumer expectations for mobile phones.

“The iPhone was a milestone in terms of how people use a mobile device,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC. “The GPhone, if it does come out, will help Google with distribution for their online services.”

At the core of Google’s phone efforts is an operating system for mobile phones that will be based on open-source Linux software, according to industry executives familiar with the project.

In addition, Google is expected to develop mobile versions of its applications that go well beyond the mobile search and map software it offers today. Those applications may include a Web browser to run on cellphones.

While Google has built phone prototypes to test its software and show off its technology to manufacturers, the company is not likely to make the phones itself, according to analysts.

In short, Google is not creating a gadget to rival the iPhone, but rather creating software that will be an alternative to Windows Mobile from Microsoft and other operating systems, which are built into phones sold by many manufacturers. And unlike Microsoft, Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for the software.

“The essential point is that Google’s strategy is to lead the creation of an open-source competitor to Windows Mobile,” said one industry executive, who did not want his name used because his company has had contacts with Google. “They will put it in the open-source world and take the economics out of the Windows Mobile business.”

Some believe another major goal of the phone project is to loosen the control of carriers over the software and services that are available on their networks.

“Google’s agenda is to disaggregate carriers,” said Dan Olschwang, the chief executive of JumpTap, a start-up that provides search and advertising services to several mobile phone operators.

Google declined to comment on any specifics of its mobile phone initiative. But its chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said several times that the cellphone market presented the largest growth opportunity for Google. “We have a large investment in mobile phones and mobile phone platform applications,” Mr. Schmidt said in an interview this year.

Industry analysts say that Google, which has little experience with complex hardware, faces significant challenges.

“Running a Web site and a search engine is one thing,” said Mr. Weide of IDC. “But developing a phone is a whole different game. It will not be easy for them.”

Mr. Weide added that Google’s impact on the industry will depend to a large extent on its ability to sign deals with wireless carriers that distribute hundreds of millions of phones each year and often control what software and services run on them.

Some carriers, especially in the United States, are likely to give Google a cool reception. Companies like Verizon Wireless and AT&T have spent billions of dollars building and upgrading their networks, establishing relationships with customers, subsidizing handsets and creating their own mobile Internet portals. Now they want to make sure those investments pay off, in part, through mobile advertising, and they see Google and other search engines, who are after the same ad dollars, as competitors.

As a result, most carriers in the United States have chosen to shun the major search engines for now. Instead, they have promoted the search engines and ad systems of small technology companies like JumpTap and Medio Systems, whose services they can stamp with their own brands.

Most carriers declined to comment on Google’s plans. But Arun Sarin, the chief executive of Britain’s Vodafone Group, which offers the Google service on its phones, said it was not clear what compelling functions Google would offer that are not already available.

“What is it that is missing in life that they are going to fulfill?” Mr. Sarin said. “It is not a no-brainer. You can reach Google already through a number of devices. You don’t need a Google phone to do that.”

Google’s desire to loosen the carriers’ control over their networks has hardly been a secret. The company recently lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to impose rules on any carrier who wins a coming auction for valuable wireless spectrum. The rules, which the F.C.C. adopted despite opposition from Verizon and others, require that the network using a portion of that spectrum be open to any handset and software applications from any company.

Google said it is considering bidding for some of that spectrum. But regardless of who wins it, phones based on Google’s software would be able to take advantage of it.

Google’s lobbying, as well as its work on a phone software platform that would be open to other applications, represent an effort to bring to the mobile Internet the dynamics of the PC-oriented Internet, which is free of control by network operators. Google is hoping that it can beat competitors in an open environment.

The mobile phone project at Google was built in part around Android, a small mobile software company it acquired in 2005. An Android co-founder, Andy Rubin, had founded Danger, which created the popular T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone. Mr. Rubin works at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, but another part of Google’s team is reported to be in Boston, where Android’s co-founder, Rich Miner, another veteran of the mobile phone industry, is based.

Some analysts say there are no guarantees that Google will be able to replicate its online success in the mobile world.

“The wireless market does not have the same global scale and scope efficiencies, nor the lack of transactional friction, of software on the Internet,” said Scott Cleland, a telecommunications industry analyst who recently testified before the Senate against Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick.

“It is a completely different world and completely different set of economics,” said Mr. Cleland, who has opposed Google on a number of policy issues.

Microsoft, whose mobile operating system has been available for years, has distribution agreements with 48 handset makers and 160 carriers around the world. Still, only 12 million phones sold this year will be based on Microsoft’s software, giving it 10 percent of the smartphone market, according to IDC.

Microsoft declined to comment on potential competition from Google. “The market is huge, and our partners are really motivated to bring Windows Mobile phones to market,” said Doug Smith, director for marketing of Microsoft’s mobile communications business.

Mahesh Veerina, the founder and chief executive of Celunite, which makes cellphone software based on Linux, said Google’s offering was likely to be attractive to small carriers, who may see it as a competitive weapon.

But if Google-powered phones prove to be a hit with consumers, other carriers may feel pressure to follow suit, said Richard Doherty, director for the Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm.

“No one wants to be the last carrier to endorse Google,” Mr. Doherty said.

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It May Be a Book, but You Can Read It

Books are for pantywaists. Or at least that’s how “Stephen Colbert,” the excitable commentator played to rock-star perfection by Stephen Colbert, viewed them before he became a published author. Now comes the flip-flop, as Mr. Colbert brings the gale-force power of his promotional talents to the hawking of “I Am America (And So Can You!),” a booklike object with his face plastered on its cover. Books are still for pantywaists, but now they’re for souvenir-seeking denizens of what is modestly called the Colbert Nation.


The fans are primed because the energy level of Mr. Colbert’s television show is soaring. “The Colbert Report” — with a title that’s eponymous, the way Mr. Colbert prefers everything — currently beams with irrational exuberance. The show is sharp and innovative in ways that could have followed it to the coffee table, but that hasn’t happened. The full-monty Colbert television brilliance doesn’t quite make it to the page.

“I Am America (And So Can You!)” certainly has its moments. (“You Can’t Hurry Love — but you can certainly take the shortcut. Instead of paging through Match.com, try flipping through the family photo album.”) They expand upon the Colbert persona, that of a self-loving loudmouth perched on the famous fine line between stupid and clever. The book is divided into chapters on big topics (“The Family,” “Religion,” “The Media,” “Race”) and stresses the exclusive Colbert pedigree of its thoughts on each of them. “You won’t find these opinions in any textbook,” he says, “unless it happens to be one I’ve defaced.”

“America (the Book),” the “Daily Show” spinoff that is the prototype for “I Am America,” was also the collective effort of television staff writers trying to replicate their on-the-air style. But it was neither inspired by nor tethered to a single stellar character. That gave it room to maneuver through a wide range of subjects, as well as a gleeful, anything-goes spirit of adventure. The narrower “I Am America” sticks to ravings suitable for a mock Colbert memoir and further limits its range by avoiding explicit talk of government or politics — though it culminates in a reprint of Mr. Colbert’s blistering political speech delivered at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“I Am America” describes “heroes” as “people who did not skip ahead” to that speech “but read the book from start to finish as intended.” Heroism aside, to experience the speech in print is to understand what “I Am America” is missing.

Mr. Colbert and his staff write for a particular character with impeccable, deadpan delivery, and there is no book-worthy equivalent of what happens when the real McCoy gets near a microphone. The printed speech falls surprisingly flat. Neither this chapter nor the rest of “I Am America” is helped by little red annotations in the margins, though these, too, mimic a tactic that happens to be funny on TV.

Still, the sharp-elbowed Mr. Colbert will deservedly work his way toward the top of best-seller lists, no matter what he has to do to current competitors like Alan Greenspan, Ann Coulter, Oprah Winfrey, Eric Clapton or Mother Teresa. His book may not replicate a winning formula, but it’s certainly a valentine to his proven success. Its tone is typically dictatorial (this, to him, means a person whose book is dictated), as when it warns readers that “no image of me should ever be removed from this book for any purpose, including, but not exclusively: book reports, decorating walls, or placing in your wallet to imply our friendship.” Not for nothing does this book’s reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man feature Colbert eyeglasses and enlarged testicles as bonus features.

Among the funnier sections is the “Higher Education” chapter. It includes what purports to be Mr. Colbert’s college application essay, featuring ripe malapropisms, overuse of a thesaurus (“the apex, pinnacle, acme, vertex, and zenith of my life’s experience”) and the lying claim that his great-great-uncle’s name is on a building at Dartmouth. There are also fake course selections with student annotations, among them “Ethnic Stereotypes and the Humor of Cruelty” (“A professor will tell you a bunch of hilarious jokes, and you’re not allowed to laugh”) and “Dance for Men.” (“Go ahead. Break your mother’s heart.”) Heterosexuality that protests too much is a big part of the official Colbert attitude.

A glossary on science is another high point. (On cloning: “No free labor source is worth all of this trouble.”) And it well suits Mr. Colbert’s opposition to all forms of progress. (The smallpox vaccine “may have saved a few thousand lives, but it also destroyed the magic amulet industry.”)

The “Sex and Dating” chapter also heavily emphasizes science, since Mr. Colbert is in some ways the Tom Lehrer of his day. Mr. Lehrer’s sharp satire and erudite academic stunts, like his classic musical rendition of the Periodic Table, are forerunners of Mr. Colbert’s subversive whiz-kid humor. “I often think back fondly on the memories I haven’t repressed,” the book says in this sneaky spirit.

When it refers to the American family as “a Mom married to a Pop and raising 2.3 rambunctious scamps” or to a cat named Professor Snugglepuss, “I Am America” gets lazy. The same goes for a sophomoric crack about why books are scary: “You can’t spell ‘Book’ without ‘Boo!’” And this book is capable of better witticism than: “Now I’m not the smartest knife in the spoon.” But it doesn’t take the smartest knife in the spoon to understand the point of this undertaking. If “I Am America (And So Can You!)” had nothing but its title, its Colbert cover portrait and 230 blank pages instead of printed ones, it would make a cherished keepsake just the same.

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A Musical Smartphone, Aiming to Increase the Cool Quotient

A funny thing happened when Motorola first introduced its Q smartphone. It found that many buyers were casual users, not BlackBerry converts itching for an e-mail fix. The company decided to make the Q look a little cooler and added music and easy-to-use messaging features — thus the new Q Music 9M.


The 5-ounce 9M, which costs $249 with a two-year contract and discounts, has a 2.5-inch screen and rubberized keys and back panel. It runs on Verizon’s high-speed data network and works with the V Cast music service, so you can wirelessly download songs for $1.99 over the air — although you can also put your own music into the phone’s 64 megabytes of memory or a supplemental mini SD card (not included).

The phone also has a unique user interface that focuses on many of the music- and media-playing functions and hides most of the complex features. A small program automatically connects to many standard e-mail services, including GMail and Hotmail. Meanwhile, the red-and- black color scheme will help in your efforts to look cool and casual.

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Halo Games Maker to Be Independent of Microsoft

Microsoft said yesterday that it was giving up its controlling ownership of Bungie Software, the video game subsidiary that developed the hugely popular Halo franchise, including its latest iteration, Halo 3.


Bungie, based in Kirkland, Wash., said it planned to return to its roots as an independent game studio, a move that eventually will cost Microsoft exclusive ties to one of the most successful and sought-after teams of game developers.

Harold Ryan, president and studio head of Bungie, said that he had been working for months on a plan to separate the studio from Microsoft, based in nearby Redmond, Wash. Mr. Ryan said that the companies had a good working relationship, but that developers at Bungie yearned to work for themselves, not a corporate owner.

“It’s an emotionally creative point of view,” he said of the decision to take the studio independent. “That’s the state we wanted to be in.”

Neither Mr. Ryan, nor Shane Kim, the head of Microsoft’s game studios, would discuss the financial terms. Microsoft originally acquired Bungie in 2000 for an undisclosed amount.

Bungie’s Halo games have been of singular significance to Microsoft in the development of its video game machine business.

Halo has been available exclusively on Microsoft’s Xbox video game consoles. That has meant the game’s popularity has helped drive consumers to the Xbox consoles rather than to competing systems made by Nintendo and Sony.

Microsoft said that since Halo 3 hit the market last week, it had rung up more than $300 million in sales. It has been selling at a faster pace than Halo and Halo 2, which combined sold nearly 15 million copies, Microsoft has said.

Mr. Kim said the separation furthered Microsoft’s aim of getting blockbuster hits for its consoles. “It was in our best interest to support Bungie’s desire to return to its independent roots,” he said.

At least initially, important aspects of the relationship between Microsoft and Bungie will remain intact.

Mr. Ryan said that Bungie planned to continue to develop games exclusively for the Xbox platform. He said that at some point, Bungie would have the right to develop games for other platforms, but he declined to say when.

Bungie has 113 employees. Evan Wilson, a video game industry analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, said that leading employees of Bungie had bought out majority ownership from Microsoft. “Bungie and Microsoft clearly had different creative directions,” Mr. Wilson said.

He added, “Bungie lost some key employees over the years, which while not uncommon for studios, may be an indication of that.”

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The Conflicted Life of the Modern Immigrant Doctor

For all the griping about the sad state of the medical profession, immigrant families have never stopped propelling their children firmly in its direction. North American hospitals are increasingly staffed by these obliging children, some greeting patients with the exotic inflections of the newly arrived, some already assimilated into the pure vernacular.

They are doctors like Ming, Chen and Sri, who, along with their colleague Fitzgerald, grow from pre-med students into veteran doctors in Vincent Lam’s collection of intertwined short stories. Published in 2006 in Canada, where it won the Giller Prize for fiction, this lovely book breaks ground on several fronts, not the least of which is its depiction of the tentacles of obligation and expectation encircling these young people.

Doctors who write about medicine tend to dwell on the big themes: life, death, suffering, hope and the rest. Dr. Lam, a Toronto physician, covers that territory, too, but he also takes a pioneering look at the particular situation of the modern immigrant doctor, suspended by strong and often opposing ties to profession, cultural heritage and family, with patients who may seem as alien as if from Mars.

Thus, early in the book, Ming, Chen and Sri, medical students in Toronto, contemplate the tattoos over the biceps of their medical school cadaver with detached concern, as they would the hieroglyphics of an ancient civilization. They can decipher “RCAF — 17th Squadron” and the crude cartoons of Spitfire planes etched beneath it without much problem, but “The Lord Keeps Me — Mark 16” on the shoulder has them perplexed.

“‘It’s one of the four books in the second half,’ said Chen.

“‘What is that part?’

“‘Umm ... I don’t know...’

“‘It must mean something,’ said Sri.

“‘I’ll look it up for you,’ said Chen ...

“‘The manual shows,’ Ming said, ‘to cut here.’”

Ming is the classic pre-med overachiever, a plodder who specializes in brute memorization as she strategizes to ace exams. She votes to cut right through the tattoo, because that is where the textbook says to cut. She becomes an obstetrician; we glimpse her years later, a seasoned professional, thrust into a once-in-a-lifetime emergency that gives her no alternative but, for once, to break all the rules.

Sri, soft-hearted beyond all necessity or common sense, votes to preserve the tattoo. “You should respect a man’s symbols,” he says. “My mother told me that. Look at his arm. These are his symbols.” Even after years of training, Sri’s intractable kindness leads him away from the beaten path, as he wanders alongside patients more like a guardian angel than a medic.

Chen, a bland, pleasant, responsible guy, is descended from Chinese expatriates in Vietnam (like Dr. Lam himself) with an extended family scattered over the globe. As a medical student, he spends a summer in Australia, trying his best to minister to his dying grandfather, a vice-ridden, womanizing patriarch as colorful as Chen himself is colorless. Chen becomes an E.R. physician (again like Dr. Lam), working shifts that vary between stultifying and terrifying. He commutes to work in a fast, expensive car, playing an aggressive game of chicken with the drivers in the next lane, the kind of reckless risk-taking behavior he cannot indulge in anywhere else.

All are recognizable types, drawn with precision and affection. Fitzgerald, though, is a little different: he is more a novelist’s creation, a real tragic hero. The only Anglo among them, an incompetent with chopsticks, he is the true outsider in the group, an obsessive philosopher always just a little out of step with his colleagues and his profession.

The others never question their place in medicine; Fitz never stops questioning his, until he is plunged directly into the SARS outbreak that gripped Toronto hospitals in 2003. The rest of the world may have forgotten those few months of terror, but hospital workers in Canada glimpsed the apocalypse, as we clearly see here.

This is not a perfect book. It has its share of blood-and-guts cowboy medicine suitable only for network TV, and a few too-facile resolutions of various improbable plot twists. Still, Dr. Lam, whose mentors include the author Margaret Atwood, has enough talent to sculpture a story considerably more nuanced than the usual thinly disguised autobiography doctors like to call fiction. Presumably much of the book is, in fact, memoir, but the joints between the imagined and the recalled are seamless, and the fiction does its job of turning mirror into magnifying glass.

Readers will have become fully immersed in these characters before they realize that each has only one name. The students Ming, Chen, Fitz and Sri graduate from medical school to become Dr. Ming, Dr. Chen, Dr. Fitzgerald, Dr. Sri. Are they all going by their last names alone, a macho band in green scrubs? Are they icky-sticky first-name doctors like Oprah’s Dr. Phil? Do the Asians have the tongue-twisting ethnic names that have forced them to create short nicknames, yet one more sacrifice of identify? We never find out.

Perhaps it is simply a demonstration that a single name suffices for people whose other name quickly becomes “Doctor.” So the wily author both distances us from his characters, and draws us near.

Tags:Doctor,Life,medical,death

More about → The Conflicted Life of the Modern Immigrant Doctor

No Glamour, but Sandwich Is a Star

IS there any pain quite as sweet as the one caused by a steaming drip of cheese oozing from between slices of just-grilled bread and onto your lower lip?


Buttery, salty and enduringly simple, the grilled cheese sandwich stands unrivaled in the universe of simple gastro-pleasures. It is the gateway sandwich to the land of hot sustenance, the first stovetop food many children learn to prepare by themselves.

But in Los Angeles, the grilled cheese is less a starting place than a destination, an object of outright mania, not just at workaday coffee shops but also at any number of well-regarded restaurants, where it’s slathered with short ribs, decorated with piquillo peppers or topped gently with a quail egg.

Thursday is grilled cheese night at Campanile, a standard-bearer of Italian dining in Los Angeles, and the restaurant’s busiest night, when the tables bustle with families, hot daters, girls-night-out revelers downing prosecco, and divorced dads hoping to buy good will from their estranged children.

The Melt Down, a restaurant in Culver City devoted to the gooey sandwich, has lines out the door at lunch. Every April is grilled cheese month at Clementine, a lunch spot near Century City, with an elaborate new theme each time.

For the past four years, this city has also been home to the Grilled Cheese Invitational. Roughly 600 people show up at an unpublicized address, armed with frying pans and camping stoves, and are given 20 minutes to demonstrate their grilled cheese prowess. (One year, a contestant constructed an eight-foot grilled sandwich rendition of “The Gates” by Christo and Jeanne-Claude.)

Whether created with fresh-baked sourdough and enhanced with tangy green garlic, or slapped together with Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, the grilled cheese sandwich is nothing less than consolatory after you’ve spent a long day sitting in traffic on the 405 freeway.

Buck Down, one of the organizers of the Grilled Cheese Invitational, sees its appeal this way: “It may very well be the ultimate comfort food, and one thing Los Angeles is about is insecurity. If you have to live here for your job, your entire career is predicated on insecurity, because you’re either going to be replaced, fired or exposed as a fraud. What better way to get comfort than grilled cheese?”

Of course, Los Angeles is more than the entertainment industry, and the grilled cheese sandwich appeals well beyond its corridors, as three months of happy trekking through diners from Hollywood to Culver City showed.

The classic Los Angeles grilled cheese, like the $5.95 version served at the 101 Coffee Shop in Hollywood, begins with perfectly buttered sourdough bread, topped with cheddar and perhaps a nice tomato, grilled to tawny perfection, its contents stretching appropriately with each bite. It is perfectly paired with a Coke (not diet, thanks).

But high-end grilled cheese owes a debt to Nancy Silverton, who began grilled cheese night a decade ago when she was working behind the bar at Campanile, which she formerly owned. She wanted something to increase business on a slow night. “But more importantly, I love grilled cheese sandwiches,” said Ms. Silverton, who now runs Pizzeria Mozza and Osteria Mozza here.

“That goes back to the junior high school cafeteria in Tarzana, where I was addicted to the super-greasy ones. I have upgraded my cheese preference, but that is where my love of grilled cheese went back to.”

It wasn’t long before grilled cheese night became the hottest day of the week at Campanile, and it remains so, says its current chef and owner, Mark Peel, Ms. Silverton’s ex-husband.

On a recent Thursday night, my 4-year-old and her friend worked through a classic, a Gruyère (no mustard) perfectly pressed, while the two adults shared a version with chickpeas and tomatoes, more salad than grilled cheese, really, and a Gorgonzola number with spiced walnuts and honey (not for beginners).

Many other chefs have their own exalted version of the sandwich. At the Foundry on Melrose, Eric Greenspan has a grilled cheese that weds taleggio cheese with short ribs, arugula and apricot caper purée on raisin bread.

Mr. Greenspan served raisin bread with his cheese courses and thought it would translate well in grilled cheese sandwiches. He added the meat because, he explained, a chef with ribs on the menu tends to have short rib scraps lying around anyway. (I have provided a recipe that does not call for ribs, presuming that like me, you have a lack of short rib scraps in your kitchen.)


I ate one in near silence in his kitchen over a white linen napkin, unable to turn my attention from this slightly spicy (arugula), decidedly messy (cheese and short ribs) and pleasantly salty amalgam.

“Grilled cheese is basically fat on fat on fat,” Mr. Greenspan said cheerfully.

Just because a 9-year-old with mildly permissive parents can find grilled cheese nirvana on her first time at the stove, that does not mean there are no secrets to the perfect sandwich.

Chefs agree: butter, room temperature and lots of it, must be spread all the way to the crust, to prevent the bread from taking on a soggy center with dried edges. This is not toast!

Further, the sandwich must be minded so that it does not scorch, a common transgression. “Bread quality matters,” Mr. Greenspan said, “but butter quality matters more.”

Quinn Hatfield, the chef at Hatfield’s, prepares most of his restaurant’s signature croque-madame, made with raw hamachi and prosciutto on toasted brioche with beurre blanc and topped with a quail egg.

“I end up throwing away 30 percent of the sandwiches that other people make,” he said. “It’s really a tricky maneuver because you’ve got to fry the bread in a lot of butter but not let it get too hard.”

Plenty of home cooks have taken grilled cheese to a superlative form, as well. The grilled cheese invitational here started as something of a joke among friends, said Mr. Down, an organizer. By year three, he said, the event had become so competitive, the organizers had to stop publicizing it. And yet, it grew.

Grilled cheese artisans compete in three categories: missionary (bread, butter and cheese), kama sutra (sandwiches with meats or other ingredients and fancier bread) and honey pot (dessert sandwiches). On 50 feet of tables, contestants fry the sandwiches and then divide them into quarters. They are placed on paper plates with ballots stapled to them, which runners bring to the judging table.

Sandwiches are graded on presentation, taste, Wessonality (“What makes this sandwich special,” Mr. Down explained) and style. One recent winner featured polenta fried two times with Brie, prosciutto and pesto.

But really, let’s not get too carried away. I prefer to belly up to the counter at the 101 for a basic grilled cheese, pondering as I eat the whereabouts of my high school friend Joe Puleo, who whipped me up government-issue cheddar versions after my cocktail waitress shift at Cheek to Cheek in Kalamazoo, Mich. Because really, for any native-born American, the first thing grilled cheese tastes of is home. In that lies its true appeal.

Tags:Glamour,Sandwich,cheese ,Gorgonzola

More about → No Glamour, but Sandwich Is a Star