Glen White

A new service designed to let Twitter users make short, tweet-like phone calls to one another begins its beta testing period today. It's set up to allow Twitter users to launch two-minute, two-way voice chats with any other Twitter user - even without knowing the other person's phone number. Jajah, Inc. , an IP communications company based in Mountain View, Calif., launched the free service, called Jajah@call today.

To use the new service, people have to be users of both Twitter and Jajah, the person receiving the call has to be a Twitter follower of the person making the call. That will certainly be something to behold - and perhaps a sign of the apocalypse." Social networking seems to be leaving the realm of text-online behind. In a statement, Jajah said the system should work on any Twitter platform - from a computer to a mobile phone. "Essentially, this is adding Skype-like functionality to Twitter," said Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. "This is certainly a valid extension for the Twitter platform, but the one-to-one nature of the feature as it is now is a bit different than the existing Twitter model. "If this catches on," he added, "further developments might include the ability for Twitterers to call all of their followers, which would certainly make it a lot easier for them to stream their every thought and activity without even having to take the trouble to type. Earlier this week, Vivox, a Boston-based company, announced that engineers there are working on an application that should enable Facebook users - whether individuals or groups - to have voice chats online. Vivox said it's looking to add a new dimension to online reunions or meetings. "With Facebook adding much the same functionality, it looks like social networking is moving away from typing all of a sudden," added Olds. "These new mechanisms will be used, but voice probably won't prove to be a must-have feature for most users."

Micello is mapping the great indoors. The only way to chart new territory, they've found, is to start making maps detailing the innards of manmade buildings and complexes. Unlike the mapmakers of yore, who toiled for years perfecting maps of oceans, continents, and mountain ranges, today's mapmakers have found their outdoor frontiers taken away from them by satellite imaging.

Demo's biggest stars of all time13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 And this is where Micello comes in. This way, if you're stranded in an airport and craving a cup of coffee or are at a university looking for a particular lecture hall, you'll be able to look up your location on Micello and find out where you need to walk. The company's goal is to become the Google Maps of indoor spaces as its staff of six people is doggedly mapping large public indoor spaces in the United States such as shopping malls, airports and universities. The maps the company is developing even include a search engine, so you can type "coffee" into a box and have the map point out all the locations in your vicinity that sell coffee. You said today that you're making about 10 maps a day.

In this Q&A with Micello founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal, we discuss his company's passion for mapping, the use of crowdsourcing to make maps and where he plans to take Micello in the future. How many people do you have working on these maps nationwide? In all it takes someone about four hours to get one map done and each person would do around three or four maps a day. Have six people total, three people in design work and three people doing data collection using our tools. We're primarily mapping the [San Francisco-Oakland] Bay Area to start with and our initial focus has been on Bay Area colleges and shopping malls. We get the floor plan of a particular place, whether it's from someone going and taking a picture of it or the building itself gives it to us.

Where do you get your data for building these maps? We then convert the floor plan to a geo-coded, dynamic, personalizable interactive map, so that when you go to a shopping mall, the floor plan on the Micello map will interact with you. That's a somewhat basic version of the interactivity we'll be shooting for in the future. You saw in our demonstration today that we typed 'shoes' into the search engine and it found all the stores in the mall that sold shoes. In the next generation of search we're planning on making it really smart so it can get information on specific brands and models if you type them into the search engine.

For the time being we are designing the indoor maps ourselves. How does crowdsourcing play into your strategy of building these maps? Crowdsourcing comes in for updating information on the maps we've built. People can submit content describing who happens to be coming to give a lecture at a particular hall on campus, for instance, or Macy's can let people know that they're having a two-hour sale some afternoon by flagging it on the map. So people can share stories about what's happening in different locations on the maps.

Looking to the future, how do you plan to monetize this application? In the short term we plan to monetize this application through premium content. We have a short-term and a long-term focus. So to use the Macy's example again, so you want to promote a two-hour sale, you could pay to have information on it pushed out to all Micello users in the area whose profiles show they'd be interested in shopping at Macy's. In the long term we see ourselves as becoming the go-to company for designing interactive indoor maps.

A large number of problems with new iMacs, especially the top-of-the-line 27-in. model, has prompted one user to create a site that tallies issues ranging from cracked screens to flickering displays. Core i7-based iMac arrived with a broken screen. Canadian Web designer Scott Pronych created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, in part because his new 27-in.

By digging through Apple's support forum, Pronych identified 343 different users who had reported problems with their new machines. On Apple's support forum, customers have reported receiving iMac displays with shattered glass, most of the time in the lower left corner of the screen. Cracked screens have garnered the most attention from bloggers and the media. The bulk of the cracked-screen problems have been reported by people who purchased a new iMac equipped with Intel's Core i7 quad-core processor . Apple unveiled the quad-core iMacs, along with revamped dual-core models in both 21.5- and 27-in sizes, on Oct. 20 as part of a broad product refresh that also debuted a redesigned MacBook and a new Mac mini-based server. Screen will go completely black for a second and then come back on. The cracked screen issue was actually low on the list, with just 54 incidents out of the 343, or 16%. The most widespread problem was a screen that flickered, "tore" or just went black: 179 cases, or 52% of the total. "That shocked me, too," said Pronych today. "But the thread is huge." The support thread Pronych referred to had more than 1,000 individual messages as of early Monday, with a view count of over 144,000, easily the most read of those on the iMac forum discussing problems. "I have been experiencing some problems with the all new iMac 27-inch display," said Jan Sampermans , who kicked off the thread on Oct. 27. "Screen distortion/flicker somewhere random in the screen (feels like it is more in the lower part) that looks like a horizontal bar of about 2-3inches just popping in and out of the screen.

Sometimes 2-3 times in a row." Although many users who reported the flickering said Apple had exchanged their iMacs, some noted that they had gone through as many as three machines before getting a defect-free system. In the first place, the best reason why I wanted iMac 27-in is the screen, so without this, why the **** would I spend money on this?" Kim was eventually given a third iMac, but that one sported shattered glass. Others complained about the solutions Apple support had suggested, or said they had run into roadblocks. "[The second] iMac had dust underneath the glass and a dead pixel," said Minsoo Kim Sunday on the "New iMac 27inch screen flickering/tearing/shutoff" thread. "Since it was a cluster of dust, I had a valid reason for it to be swapped and again, drove 40 minutes to the Apple Store. "There, the genius told me that without saying sorry for any inconvenience I may [have] had, 'Apple will not exchange any further iMac for minor screen problem like this.' I was shocked. Pronych, however, remained a loyal Mac user. "I got a replacement, and it's worked fine," he said. "I haven't encountered any of the other problems people have been reporting." The flickering display problem is not limited to the quad-core iMacs; of the 179 total cases Pronych documented, 94 involve dual-core iMacs, while 85 involve an i5- or i7-powered iMac. iMac have been posted on Apple's support forum.

More than 81% of all the problems he cited, however, were for the 27-in. model; relatively few reports of issues with the smaller 21.5-in. According to Pronych's analysis, more-recent iMac production runs have not exhibited as many problems as the Week 46 and Week 47 batches. Customers can log their problem with Pronych's Web site by filling out an online form . Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the iMac issues that Pronych collated.

Do you wish your iSight were more like the unblinking, ever-vigilant Eye of Sauron? RemoteSight can act as an integrated camera source for Ben Software's SecuritySpy, which aggregates video feeds from multiple cameras into a heads-up multi-video display. Then you might be interested in Ben Software's new RemoteSight, an application that turns an iSight camera into a CCTV-style security camera, accessible over a network via Web browser. RemoteSight captures both audio and video from the host Mac's iSight camera (or any attached video input device), and streams it out through an integrated Web server; video is accompanied by a live timestamp.

Any Web browser has the ability to connect to the Web server across an internal network, and Internet remote viewing should be possible if the nonstandard additional ports used by the Web server are opened on the router to allow this traffic. The Web server also provides an option to remotely view what is happening on the Mac's monitor as well. Administrative users can turn off monitoring feeds individually, and you can protect all connections to the Web server by username and password registration. RemoteSight costs $27, and a fully functional demo is available as well, so you can give it a try. RemoteSight runs as a faceless application, with no indication in the Dock that it is operating; however, a menu-bar item appears that cannot be easily removed, and (where available) the iSight LED light is turned on to indicate that the camera is in use.

System requirements call for OS X 10.4.11 or later, 512GB of RAM (I'll assume that's a typo and you only need 512MB), and a video input device, such as a built-in iSight camera or external FireWire or USB camera.

Microsoft late last week said it won't patch Windows XP for a pair of bugs it quashed Sept. 8 in Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. The news adds Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and SP3 to the no-patch list that previously included only Windows 2000 Server SP4. "We're talking about code that is 12 to 15 years old in its origin, so backporting that level of code is essentially not feasible," said security program manager Adrian Stone during Microsoft's monthly post-patch Webcast , referring to Windows 2000 and XP. "An update for Windows XP will not be made available," Stone and fellow program manager Jerry Bryant said during the Q&A portion of the Webcast ( transcript here ). Last Tuesday, Microsoft said that it wasn't patching Windows 2000 because creating a fix was "infeasible." The bugs in question are in Windows' implementation of TCP/IP, the Web's default suite of connection protocols. In the revised advisory, Microsoft explained why it won't patch Windows XP, the world's most popular operating system . "By default, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition SP2 do not have a listening service configured in the client firewall and are therefore not affected by this vulnerability," the company said. "Windows XP SP2 and later operating systems include a stateful host firewall that provides protection for computers against incoming traffic from the Internet or from neighboring network devices on a private network." Although the two bugs can be exploited on Windows 2000 and XP, Microsoft downplayed their impact. "A system would become unresponsive due to memory consumption ... [but] a successful attack requires a sustained flood of specially crafted TCP packets, and the system will recover once the flood ceases." Microsoft rated the vulnerabilities on Windows 2000 and XP as "important" on Windows 2000, and as "low" on XP. The company uses a four-step scoring system, where "low" is the least-dangerous threat, followed in ascending order by "moderate," "important" and "critical." The same two bugs were ranked "moderate" for Vista and Server 2008, while a third - which doesn't affect the older operating systems - was rated "critical." During the Q&A, however, Windows users repeatedly asked Microsoft's security team to explain why it wasn't patching XP, or if, in certain scenarios, their machines might be at risk. "We still use Windows XP and we do not use Windows Firewall," read one of the user questions. "We use a third-party vendor firewall product. All three of the vulnerabilities highlighted in the MS09-048 update were patched in Vista and Server 2008. Only two of the trio affect Windows Server 2000 and Windows XP, Microsoft said in the accompanying advisory, which was refreshed on Thursday.

Even assuming that we use the Windows Firewall, if there are services listening, such as remote desktop, wouldn't then Windows XP be vulnerable to this?" "Servers are a more likely target for this attack, and your firewall should provide additional protections against external exploits," replied Stone and Bryant. Windows Server 2000 SP4, for example, is to receive security updates until July 2010; Windows XP's support doesn't expire until April 2014. Stone's and Bryant's answer: "We will continue to provide updates for Windows 2000 while it is in support unless it is not technically feasible to do so." Skipping patches is very unusual for Microsoft. Another user asked them to spell out the conditions under which Microsoft won't offer up patches for still-supported operating systems. According to a Stone and Bryant, the last time it declined to patch a vulnerability in a support edition of Windows was in March 2003 , when it said it wouldn't fix a bug in Windows NT 4.0. Then, it explained the omission with language very similar to what it used when it said it wouldn't update Windows 2000. "Due to these fundamental differences between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and its successors, it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability," Microsoft said at the time.