With millions of people, organizations and businesses now using the service, there is keen interest in keeping the little blue Twitter bird alive. The question has always been: How?

Costolo today supplied a partial answer: Ads. But these won't be your father's Chevrolet ads. Twitter ads will be "fascinating," "non-traditional" and "really cool," Costolo said. "People will love the ads when they see it."

Another potential source of revenue: Charging customers who want to see their Twitter data, such as how many people click on the links and who's following whom. In industry parlance, such data are called analytics, and they give users an idea of which of their tweets are more effective at reaching an audience and whether readers are acting on those tweets.

Costolo dropped another morsel when he singled out Foursquare's Dennis Crowley as a "genius." (Foursquare lets users broadcast their geographic location, along with what they are doing: "In Century City, looking for good Indian food.")

How does this fit in with making money? Costolo didn't say. But the ability for advertisers to know where people are and what they are in the mood for is incredibly valuable.

With $155 million in venture funding, Twitter isn't in a huge hurry, but Costolo promised that the ads will be rolled out in 2010.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Thing Labs in their San Francisco office. Chris Wetherell, middle left, and Jason Shellen, middle right. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

The mad scientists at Thing Labs have a very impressive track record.

On the sixth floor of a trendy building in San Francisco's recently renovated Mint Plaza, four former Google employees -- scratch that: five former Googlers, with today's addition of FriendFeed's (now Facebook's) Ben Darnell -- and a few others are working on things. Some very interesting things.

Founder Jason Shellen is purposely fuzzy with his description of ongoing projects. Whereas Google famously has "20% time," a policy that lets engineers spend one-fifth of their day working on anything they want, Shellen says his workers get "100% time."

For the last five months, the majority of that time has been spent building Brizzly, a Web application that combines your Twitter and Facebook profiles into a single interface.

After gaining some viral interest through its invitation-only sign-up system -- a strategy that has worked exceedingly well for Gmail and now Google Wave -- Brizzly is unlocking its doors today. Anyone can sign up and plug in their social network credentials.

But Brizzly remains in beta despite having tens of thousands of users. The product is ahead of most desktop apps in its stability and interface but is not yet a replacement for Facebook because you can't fully browse friends' profiles, view events or upload pictures. And the app currently lacks some newer Twitter features like geolocation, which is available in only a few programs anyway, and standardized retweet, a project originally spearheaded by Thing Labs' vice president of technology, Chris Wetherell.

So why should you care? There's plenty of websites and apps for accessing Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic, like Brizzly, can pull in Facebook as well. And while Brizzly is stuffed with potential even now in such an early stage, Shellen's track record hints that there's much more to come.

The Brizzly founder has a sharp eye for business. He was at Blogger at the beginning of the decade, helping to sell Twitter Chief Executive Evan Williams' company to Google.

At Google, Shellen steered development of the Atom format, now one of two Web-standard news feed technologies. He also championed the purchases of photo software Picasa, location-based social network Dodgeball (the precursor to Foursquare) and FeedBurner. He also urged Google to acquire Flickr, a photo-sharing site that was snapped up by Yahoo and remains its most-hyped property.

Joining Shellen from Blogger is Wetherell, who built Google Reader, a Web-based news feed app that almost instantly dominated the market. Reader lets you subscribe to your favorite news sites and blogs, aggregate those feeds into folders and sort through it all in a sort of e-mail inbox.

"Google Reader addressed the question, 'How do I keep up with all of it?'" Shellen said during an interview at his San Francisco office. "But now your friends are your filters."

Wetherell joined Thing Labs in June after a few months of leading projects at Twitter and before that, working on Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

Seriously, these guys can't stop betting on the winning horses.

Wetherell, left, and Shellen, right. Credit: Mark Milian / Los Angeles Times

They're hoping that the prize steed in the race to aggregate social networking profiles is a bear -- that is Brizzly's mascot, Phineas T. Brizzly (not joking).

There's a lot of Reader in Brizzly. When a tweet contains a link to a picture or video, the app displays the media inline so that users don't have to go to a separate page to view them.

Part of the reason Reader is so successful is that it's more than just news feeds. It watches users' habits -- how often they click certain news items, what time of the day or week they read certain feeds, which items they e-mail or share with friends, how they scroll down the list. It uses that information to help users find relevant stuff in their mess of data and from news sources they're not subscribed to.

"Twitter has a great opportunity to do this," Wetherell said. And if it doesn't do it quickly, Brizzly will. Usage info could help users rake through the endless stream of tweets and find others with similar interests.

"You find out a lot about somebody, and you can give that back to them as value," Wetherell said.

As was Reader's sort-of mission statement, Shellen says Brizzly is about "information and making more out of it." The app was one of the first to provide a brief explanation in its list of trending topics, the most-talked about keywords across Twitter. Recently, Twitter implemented a similar feature.

The Brizzly team is looking more closely at making sense of network-wide trends going forward. It has an open API that allows any developer to implement its Wiki-style explanatory system. And it may soon offer location- or topic-specific trends.

Shellen has several other experiments brewing in the laboratory. Plinky is one, which asks users to come back every day to answer a simple question.

But Brizzly is the company's main thing right now. And it's something worth watching.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

One way to score a big hit in technology is to come up with not just a new gadget, but a new category. Of course, that is also a recipe for failure, because there's a risk that consumers don't think they need what you're selling.

That's the risk for Cloud Engines, a San Francisco company that makes something called the Pogoplug. They're calling it a "multimedia sharing device," in the hopes that people are looking for an easier way to share all the videos, photos and music that are now defining their digital lives.

The Pogoplug sells for $129. You plug it into your router, and then you plug a storage device -- like an external hard drive or a flash drive -- into it. You have then created what company Chief Executive Daniel Putterman calls "your personal cloud." Given the way the "cloud computing" buzzword reached the stratosphere this year, he may be onto something.

The sharing part comes in letting you give anyone access to your stuff without your ever having to upload it or e-mail it.

Engadget liked an earlier version of the product but wished it had Wi-Fi and ports for extra devices. Today the company announces the extra ports, but still no Wi-Fi.

And I can report that photos and material shared with me from a Pogoplug device worked seamlessly, like looking at any website.

-- Dan Fost

Gabe Rivera, founder of news aggregator Techmeme. Credit: Mark Milian/Los Angeles Times.

Rather than visiting the front pages of every newspaper or choosing a few out of brand loyalty, as Murdoch hopes consumers will do, aggregators put all of the Web's big headlines of the moment onto one page.

There's no shortage in news aggregation. General news readers might go to Google News, a computer-generated engine that pulls in more than 25,000 newspaper websites and authoritative blogs. Left-leaning political consumers might visit the Huffington Post; right-leaning ones might go to Drudge Report.

For tech news, Techmeme, with its smart computer algorithm for culling interesting links, is at the top. A space once dominated by sites like Slashdot and Digg, Techmeme is now the undisputed top influence for the Bay Area tech elite.

Today Techmeme launched a mobile site that's formatted for smart phones to appease news junkies on the go.

It sounds almost laughable that a 4-year-old property, being such a powerful voice in tech, took this long to build a phone-optimized interface. But Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera is not trying to build a trendy, cutting-edge site with its own comment system and social media share features.

Rivera is, to an extent, mimicking the medium that loudly whines about his breed of aggregation. "It feels like a newspaper," Rivera said over lunch last week in San Francisco. "It feels like something you can rely on."

Techmeme became even more newspaper-like last year when Rivera hired his first editor. Fans groaned at the idea of trusting a human to select news in a fair and balanced way. But the site is doing just fine. Better, Rivera argues.

Now, Techmeme has three full-time editors -- including Los Angeles-based Rich DeMuro, a former Cnet reporter -- with contributions from Rivera and a part-timer. "We have people who mostly cover, at least during the week, all 24 hours," Rivera said.

However, Rivera's algorithm is still the backbone. It's the secret sauce that allows small, no-name blogs to reach the top of the pile every once in a blue moon. It does so based on a formula that takes into account who's linking to a page and how influential those sources are, Rivera vaguely explained.

But rather than code in small tweaks to the system in order to fix mistakes, as he had been doing for years, Rivera went with the human touch. He realized that "the most cost-effective thing would be to hire an editor," he said.

"The algorithmic changes continue," Rivera said. "But then once we started that, we discovered new opportunities for the two to work in tandem."

Rivera has similar projects covering politics, celebrity gossip and baseball. But Techmeme is the flagship. 

"Techmeme is the product that is the most valuable, that I'm most proud of, that pays bills," Rivera said. Indeed, it's profitable and has never accepted an outside investor.

But Rivera predicts that Memeorandum, "the unfortunately named political site," as he calls it, could be the next big thing. Watch out, Google News.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Google posted a video to explain its new operating system, Chrome OS, due out next year. Credit: YouTube.

The system, due out about a year from now, could eventually pose the first real competition for Microsoft's and Apple's consumer operating systems since the earliest days of home computers. Chrome's main difference is that applications and other materials that now exist on hard drive will instead live online.

It will be available, at least at first, only for the small netbook computers that use solid-state drives.

One of the main advantages of the operating system, as extolled by Google product manager Sundar Pichai, is speed. The entire online system popped up on the screen of a demonstration computer less than 10 seconds after rebooting.

Pichai compared it to hitting the "on" button of a TV. "You turn it on, and you should be on the Web," he said in a press conference webcast from company headquarters. 

Not surprisingly, the on-screen interface of the operating system looked much like a browser. On top were tabs showing programs for e-mail, documents, a chess game, a book e-reader and more.

Pichai showed how panels that popped up from the bottom of the screen (around Google, they've been nicknamed "moles") can be used to play music, instant message or show a quick video while browsing the Web or doing work.

The aim for consumers, Pichai said, is simplicity.  "We just want computers to be delightful and work," he said.

One of the keys to Chrome OS' success likely will be how much users can actually do with it, given that it won't be using much of the software in common use now. To that end, Pichai announced that, as of today, the company was making the system's computer code public so that outside developers could start making applications for it.

Google released an animated video on YouTube (which it owns) to explain Chrome OS to the public.

-- David Colker

We'll spare you the obvious "there's an app for that" joke. But you can get a library's worth of books on your phone.

Questia, an online research portal for students, announced its application today for reading books, articles and periodicals on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

The app costs 99 cents for 5,000 public-domain books and a week of unlimited access. After that, users can buy a two-week subscription for $9.99.

There are so many things wrong with this we don't know where to start.

For one, students don't like to buy things. Especially digital things. Many strapped-for-cash college kids aren't buying songs at a dollar a pop. Why would they buy books they can find free in their university library or on Google Books?

But you get the convenience of reading and browsing on your iPod, right?

C'mon, have you ever tried reading anything substantial on that tiny screen? The Kindle app is great, but we can't get through a chapter without our eyes bursting into flames.

Two universities recently rejected the Kindle DX device as a replacement for textbooks, in part because it lacks features like advanced notation and text-to-speech. (Considering that the alternative is a paper book, their issues are kind of absurd, but that's for a different discussion.)

If they didn't like the Kindle, imagine what they'll think of a device that's about a quarter of the size.

The Questia app is a decent implementation of a very niche idea. If you're planning to actually do research with dozens of sources, you'll be better off with more fully featured alternatives, which includes Google's academic offerings and Questia's own desktop-friendly site.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

One other interesting sidelight: Seth Greenstein, outside counsel for the CEA, said the rules would bar many hotels and hospitals from buying televisions because such centrally controlled sets can't meet the new limits on power consumption when they're turned off. Philips Electronics warned the commission about this issue, to no apparent avail.

Read more about the possible unintended consequences of the new rule at the Times' opinion blog, Opinion L.A.

Corrected, 4:31 p.m.: In my haste, I incorrectly identified Seth Greenstein as Seth Greenspan in the original version of this post.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

Admittedly, I also liked Uplister, Echo and dozens of other ill-fated online music services. But Guvera, which is expected to announce a licensing deal this morning with Universal Music Group, has at least one thing going for it that SpiralFrog didn't and Qtrax has yet to demonstrate: a model that's friendly not just to consumers, but also to advertisers.

Guvera isn't due to launch in the U.S. until early next year, and its website offers little more than a vague outline of how the service will function. Loberg described it in an interview Tuesday as a tool that matches advertisers with the consumers most receptive to their messages. When users register, they're asked for the usual personal details (location, age, gender), as well as for insights about their tastes (their favorite music, movies, sports, holidays, countries, that sort of thing). They then enter the name of a band, song or genre to search for, and Guvera returns a list of advertiser-sponsored channels that provide the matching tracks. Once they pick a channel, they can stream or download other music paid for by that brand.

Advertisers can sponsor multiple channels, each with a set of tracks chosen to appeal to a different target audience -- for example, women ages 24 to 40 who like outdoor sports and comedies, or men in California who love fast food, computers and video games. Every time a song is streamed or downloaded from their channel, advertisers pay a fee that Guvera shares with the copyright holders. The amount of music played in a channel is limited by the amount the advertiser wants to spend per visitor.

The idea, Loberg said, is to replace the usual approach to advertising -- bombarding people with disruptive commercial pitches -- with a sponsorship model that encourages people to associate a brand with a type of music they like. "The brand becomes like a cool new tool or a way of discovering new content," he said. For example, if a visitor searches for a few tracks and finds they're sponsored by Levi's, the next time he uses Guvera he might skip the search and go straight to the Levi's channel to see what's new there. "They'll think of [that] brand when they're thinking of that type of content."

The matchmaking works in both directions. Guvera's algorhythms also help advertisers identify the songs they should sponsor in order to reach the audience they're targeting. Companies can also use Guvera to reward prized shoppers with extra music, concert tickets and other items.

The benefit for consumers is simple: free music. And unlike SpiralFrog's free tracks, Guvera's downloads are MP3s, untainted by DRM. And for advertisers, Guvera promises a way to connect with consumers who have become adept at skipping or tuning out commercials. "The whole model of ... trying to stick your ad somewhere and hoping someone will notice doesn't make any sense," Loberg said.

The major record companies have long been wary of services that gave away MP3s, fearing that it reduced the perceived value of music. But David Ring, executive vice president of business development & business affairs at Universal Music Group's eLabs, said the hope is that Guvera will attract people who simply won't pay for music online, rather than the ones who are happy to buy songs from iTunes or Amazon. "What I think is incumbent on us in the new world that we're living in is to make sure we try to segment the market," and have something to offer the segment that's getting its music free -- and illegally -- online, Ring said.

But given the track record of advertiser-supported download sites, why would Universal bother with another one? Ring said Universal doesn't try to judge whether a service will succeed, just whether its business plan is reasonable and capable of generating enough money to keep everyone in the value chain happy. "We want to err on the side of empowering new services to go out there and find various market segments to try to serve," he said.

Besides, he added, Guvera "found an innovative and new way of connecting brands with consumers." And there is evidence that consumers are much more receptive to ads when they have a say over what's pitched to them. The ultimate question for Guvera, though, is whether the audience it's trying to reach will find the sponsored free collections more compelling or convenient than the many other sources of free music online. That's assuming they find Guvera at all.

Loberg said the company has deals signed with one other major record company and a large independent label (both of which he declined to name), and that it planned to have all four majors signed by the time it launches in the U.S. Even if it accomplishes that feat, it will take time for Guvera to build up a library as broad as its more established competitors in the free-music market, including MySpace Music, iMeem and Lala.

The landscape is littered with failed online music services, and the recession has been tough on advertiser-supported businesses of all stripes. Yet Loberg is so confident about Guvera's chances -- and its backers, who Loberg said have put $10 million into the firm -- he's already in discussions with television and film studios to do the same thing with their content as he plans to do with music. The reality check starts Dec. 15, when Guvera's music service is scheduled to launch in Australia. It's expected to make its U.S. debut, Loberg said, at the end of January or in early February.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

The DTV channels are extremely valuable, and broadcasters have tried for several years to find ways to use them for more than just high-definition TV signals -- for example, by transmitting a version of their programs that's customized for mobile devices, or leasing part of their channel to data service providers. They've also fiercely resisted the high-tech industry's push to allow unlicensed uses of empty TV channels -- the so-called white spaces -- in areas where it might interfere with local broadcasts. (The FCC sided with the tech firms last year, but the decision is under appeal.) But the FCC is under orders from Congress to develop a national plan for increasing the supply of broadband connectivity, and Chairman Julius Genachowski has said that the demand for wireless broadband will soon be an order of magnitude greater than the supply (a situation that Genachowski has called the "looming spectrum crisis"). So the commission may be unusually receptive to the idea of forcing TV stations to share more of their spectrum wealth.

But then, the National Assn. of Broadcasters has some powerful friends on Capitol Hill. Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), former chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and still a formidable player, sent a letter to the FCC yesterday expressing concern about any move to devote digital TV airwaves to other uses. Quoth Dingell: "I believe that a further loss of spectrum by broadcasters may have an adverse effect on consumers by limiting their choice in available broadcast television."

Meanwhile, NAB officials started meeting in the Capitol today with representatives of the Recording Industry Assn. of America and musicians' unions to discuss a compromise approach to performance royalties -- which the NAB refers to as a performance tax on radio stations -- under the auspices of the chairmen and senior members of the House and Senate Judiciary committees. Members of the Democratic leadership are expected to drop by the sessions, raising the heat on the NAB to capitulate. Although the broadcasters' lobby has lined up 252 House members and 27 senators behind resolutions opposing new royalties for performing music publicly (on the air or at a business, such as a bar), both Judiciary committees have passed bills that would have a federal arbitration panel set royalties that local radio stations would have to pay. The bills also would set limits on the annual royalty payments for smaller businesses, public and religious broadcasters.

Looks like the broadcasters' lobbyists will be stuck playing defense for a while.

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division. Follow him on Twitter: @jcahealey

A.J. Bowen of Schupp's Line Construction works on fiber-optic installation in Norton, Vt. Credit:  Toby Talbot / Associated Press.

Federal programs to bring broadband Internet service to areas without it lack basic information and adequate safeguards to ensure that the money isn’t wasted, a new government report said.

The Commerce and Agriculture departments were given $7.2 billion to expand U.S. broadband availability as part of last February’s federal stimulus package.

But they have been scrambling to review a crush of grant and loan applications while facing tight deadlines to distribute the money, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Monday.

The first allocation of funds, originally set for Nov. 7, has been delayed until December.

The agencies have had just two months to review 2,200 applications for the first round of funding alone, the report said.

By comparison, the California Public Utilities Commission took four to six months to review just 54 applications in a $100-million broadband program.

Under Congress’ mandate, all $7.2 billion must be distributed by Sept. 30, 2010.

The programs “present risks of waste, fraud and abuse,” the GAO said, due to the compressed timetable for distributing the money and because of inadequate data on what areas actually lack broadband service.

Officials “will be awarding loans and grants before the national broadband plan or broadband mapping is complete,” the report said.

Program funds are intended to be spent on expanding broadband network wiring, developing public computer centers in places such as libraries or schools, and “innovative projects to stimulate demand for, and adoption of, broadband.”

To prevent waste and fraud, the GAO urged the two entities responsible for distributing the money – the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service – to develop a way to review and measure the effectiveness of fund recipients beyond the year 2010.

The full report can be viewed here.

Two teens listen to music and send text messages on their cellphones in a coffee shop. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times.

Whereas most new technologies tend to favor the early adopter -- a generally male-skewed, try-everything, fad-friendly crowd -- Linner is focusing on a different audience: hot girls.

"Guys will go where the hot chicks are," Linner said over lunch a few months ago. "The target demographic is a girl in college," he reiterated in a recent phone interview.

How do you get girls in high demand to cozy up to a social network that asks users to pull out their phones and check in multiple times a day? Linner employs what he calls "the ladies' night approach."

"Bars do things to make women come there -- reduced-price drinks or free drinks," he said. "So we do things in our system to make it more inviting to women."

Brightkite's landing page is bubbly and colorful with cute cartoon characters and an emphasis on words like "simplicity."

Compare that to competing location-based network Loopt, with its shiny, sleek buttons and big map overlaid with widgets. Or the smaller but much-hyped website Foursquare, which is quick to highlight that it plays nicely with high-end smart phones.

When adding new features, Linner and his 32 or so employees have to take care not to tick off Brightkite's pioneering female users.

For example . . .

. . . Foursquare has a very popular feature called "mayors." If a user checks in on Foursquare from a place repeatedly, he or she can be crowned "mayor" of that bar or restaurant or store. But when Linner workshopped the idea for Brightkite, girls shrugged at the competitive aspect and worried that if they truly got into the spirit of the game, they would shun friends in order to discourage them from checking in at the same places.

Recurring focus groups are key to these types of insights. "Our focus groups are almost entirely based on having women come in," Linner said. "I'm sitting with underage girls all day."

Brightkite CEO Jonathon Linner. Credit: Brightkite

In the end, "the biggest and heaviest users are women," Linner said. (He means women are the most active, not the fattest.)

DailyBooth, a photo-sharing social network, unintentionally grabbed a majority of female users, which its founder Jon Wheatley says is "working out really well." About 67% are women.

"Apparently females like taking photos of themselves," Wheatley wrote in an e-mail. And "if there's lots of pretty girls to look at, men are more likely to sign up," he wrote.

But when a site isn't targeting the cutting-edge crowd, adding or changing features can be a slow and dangerous process.

When Brightkite was rolling out version 2.0 recently, the team planned to add a relationship dynamic similar to Twitter's, where friendships aren't necessarily mutual. But the company ultimately decided to call them "fans" rather than "followers" -- the latter, it found, has a particularly creepy connotation, especially for a location-focused social network.

Brightkite attracts college students by recruiting on-campus reps (two each at USC and UCLA) and by sponsoring sorority parties with Brightkite-branded ping-pong balls (naturally, for beer pong).

But it has a fine line to walk with privacy. The company simplified its privacy features in the newest version. Facebook is working on a similar revision.

"We let 13- to 17-year-olds use the service," Linner said. "But you can't search for them. You can't really find them."

Since launching in January 2008, Brightkite is still struggling with what it internally calls "Hot Girl Syndrome." Linner has heard numerous complaints from attractive girls whose profiles have attracted some unwanted followers -- er, fans.

But the new, simpler privacy controls hope to give users added power. "It's the bouncer in the bar," Linner said.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Tony Hawk, the renown skateboarder who landed the notoriously difficult "900" maneuver a decade ago at the X-Games, next Tuesday comes out with Ride, the latest title in the blockbuster video-game franchise that bears his name.

This time, the 41-year-old is adding a new trick to his virtual routine — a skateboard controller that looks like the real thing -- but without the wheels. Loaded with high-tech sensors, the controller gets players off the couch and doing flips on the floor. Hawk gives a demo that you can watch by clicking on the video above, composed by Times videographer, Don Kelsen.

Will it be enough to revitalize the 10-year-old series?

Hawk’s past titles have sold about 43.5-million units worldwide, generating more than $1.5 billion dollars in sales for its publisher, Activision Blizzard, according to market research firms NPD Group and GfK Chart-Track. But sales and critical scores slipped for the last two iterations, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground and Tony Hawk's Project 8.

So, two years ago, both Hawk and Activision decided to take a different path. They switched from the franchise’s longtime developer, Neversoft Entertainment in Woodland Hills, to Robomodo in Chicago. And they added a sophisticated controller.

Hawk, whose home in Encinitas, Calif., has a custom-built 4,000-square-foot skate park, spoke with us today about his latest title and whether he thinks players will spring for the $120 game when it comes out on Tuesday.

Tell me about what you went through to create the skateboard for the game.

With one of our first prototypes, I tried to do a kick flip on it. It’s a maneuver where you jump in the air and make the board do a full rotation. The board snapped in half.

How does the skateboard controller compare with the Wii Fit Balance Board?

The Balance Board only measures weight distribution. Our controller captures every motion. Every time you...

... lean, kick it up or step off the board, it knows that. It has two accelerometers in it to track motion, and it has an infrared sensor so it knows if your hands are near the board or if your feet are off the board pushing alongside it. But I hate comparing it to a Wii Fit, because I don’t think they’re the same at all.

I brought this idea to Activision a couple of years ago. They put a whole team together just for this project. We first had to design a controller for the game. Once we got the board designed, we built the game around that. It was a backward process for me. And it was too much to do in one year.

What gave you the idea?

I felt it was the next step in interactivity. I felt the technology wasn’t ready for it in the past. They tried to create peripherals for existing games, and that wasn’t the right approach. In the past, you had the controller in your hands and you were doing the Simon Says thing with the buttons. Then I saw the success of Guitar Hero and the ability to hold on to a peripheral to play the game in a way that’s closer to the actual thing.

You switched developers for this title. Why?

Do you worry that a $120 game may not sell well in the current economy?

I feel once people get on it and try it, they’ll understand it’s not a gimmick. We also created a hardware platform for other games to be developed around. Knowing that, people will understand its value.

Are you planning a sequel?

Were you trying to get kids to do more exercise with this game?

The initial goal was not to do that. But once we figured out the board, we learned that it is a physical activity. If you play a level over and over, you will get your heart level up. It is fun to think that we’re getting kids to get up and get active.

Congratulations on your new daughter, Kadence. Think she’ll grow up to be a skater?

What does she think of that?

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Sezmi keeps its costs down by relying on other companies' infrastructure -- phone or cable companies' broadband pipes and local broadcasters' digital transmissions -- to deliver programming to people's homes. It's also counting on as-yet-undisclosed retail partners to cover some of the cost of acquiring new customers. And rather than having to send installers out to set up the service, Sezmi asks people to install the two required pieces of equipment themselves -- a task the company says is painless and brief. Those two pieces of equipment are a "smart reception system" the size of a bookshelf speaker that tunes in programming from the air and the Internet and a set-top "digital media player" that delivers that programming to a TV screen or records it for later viewing, à la TiVo. Customers can lease the equipment for an undisclosed monthly fee or buy it for $299 (participants in the L.A. trial will get a 50% discount). At this point, though, Sezmi users will need to obtain a set-top box for each TV in their home, which suggests that most customers will rent equipment instead of buying.

I saw a brief demonstration of Sezmi last week and was impressed by the picture quality and the user interface. The brains of the service reside in the set-top box, which makes aggressive use of its 1-terabyte hard drive to record shows automatically that its users like or might like. The service also expects to have well over 10,000 movies and TV shows available on demand -- some of them on a pay-per-view basis -- when it formally launches. The result is that the "My Shows" section of Sezmi's on-screen guide should have plenty of personalized on-demand programs to offer in addition to whatever happens to be airing live. Among the other nice features: the box integrates programs from the Web into its recommendations, and it can create separate profiles for each user in a household so that Dad's affection for news programs doesn't pollute Junior's lineup of sci-fi fantasies. The company also plans to give networks and advertisers room in the program guide to create expanded lists of content that can be viewed on demand, although that feature won't be included in the local trial.

Now for a few reasons to be skeptical about Sezmi's prospects:

The trial lineup doesn't include any of Disney or Fox's cable networks, or any regional sports networks or premium movie channels. Company co-founder Phil Wiser said the trial offers just a snapshot of what will be available when the company does its official launch, and that it's still in talks with content providers. I have trouble seeing how Sezmi could compete with ESPN and the Disney Channel, Fox's news and sports channels, FX, HBO and Showtime. But I also wonder, if they add those channels, how they could stay at $25 all-inclusive price.

The service transmits cable networks over the air, through digital TV frequencies leased from a few local broadcasters. They can use those airwaves much more efficiently than broadcasters can, enabling them to transmit multiple high-definition streams in a single channel. But Sezmi doesn't have nearly as much bandwidth at its disposal as cable operators do, which means the amount of high-definition programming may be more limited. The company wouldn't say how much HD it would deliver, just that "the most popular content on the most popular networks will be in HD as available."

The reliance on over-the-air transmissions for much of the programming means that homes with poor TV reception may not be able to use Sezmi. Company officials say that the "smart reception system" is the highest- performing over-the-air receiver ever built, using multiple technologies to grab signals more reliably than the typical antenna. In fact, Chief Executive Buno Pati said, the company expects to be able to serve 80% to 85% of the customer base in Los Angeles. That's important because the city is a key market for Sezmi, with the country's highest number of households that do not subscribe to cable or satellite.

The service takes the walled-garden approach to the Internet, providing access only to the sites it chooses. And at this point, the lineup consists only of YouTube, Crackle, OnNetworks and an array of podcasts. That's far too thin a sampling of the bounty available online. Company president Phil Wiser said that, as with Sezmi's selection of cable channels, the lineup of Web programming will be broader at launch.

Finally, the company may emphasize personalized program guides and on-demand viewing, but when it comes to pricing, Sezmi sells channels in bundles that cannot be customized. That's not much of a change from cable or satellite services, although Sezmi's prices are far lower. Pati and Wiser put a more positive spin on the company's approach, saying Sezmi planned to offer only the most popular cable networks in its streamlined bundles. The advantage that Sezmi has TV-over-the-Internet competitors, Wiser said, is that it offers networks "economics that are in line with what they have today" -- a cut of Sezmi's subscription fees, in addition to the revenue the networks generate from advertising. That's something Hulu can't do, at least not yet.

Sezmi's investors don't seem to mind any of these issues. The company just announced that it has raised an additional $25 million from previous funders Morgenthaler Ventures, Omni Capital, TD Fund, Index Ventures and Legend Ventures, as well as one undisclosed new backer.

Images courtesy of Sezmi

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Google Map's Street View of Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue. Credit: Google Inc..

Hanspeter Thuer, data protection commissioner, announced today in a statement that he plans to bring a suit against Google in the Federal Administrative Tribunal, according to an Agence France Presse report.

Thuer said Google rejected many of his recommendations after it went online in August.

Street View is a feature that lets users pick a point on a map and see a panoramic street-level image of the surroundings. By adjusting the location of the point, a user can take a virtual walk down the street. Google constructs the images from panoramic photos taken by cars it has equipped with cameras.

Faces had not been sufficiently blurred, and people were concerned about being shown near "sensitive locations, for example outside hospitals, prisons or schools," he said.

Google argues that it provides measures to protect privacy by making it possible for people to contact Google and ask to have pictures of their property removed from Street View. The company also said it spoke with privacy regulators and gave them an opportunity to raise questions.

“We’re proud of the blurring technology we’ve developed for Street View, and are confident the product is completely legal, but we wanted to go the extra mile to address Herr Thuer’s concerns,” the company said in a blog post.

Google ran into a similar problem in the U.S. this year when a Pennsylvania couple took the company to court, saying the feature was an invasion of privacy. A judge threw out the case in February, siding with Google, which said "complete privacy does not exist" and argued that photos and building plans of the couple's home were already available to the public on local government websites.

In the blog post, Google indicated it planned to fight the Swiss case as well: “We will vigorously defend Street View in court and we’re committed to continue bringing the benefits to Swiss users.”

Lining the curbs from 4th Street on down are a caravan of parked food trucks, part of L.A.'s growing army of Twitterized mobile eateries, originated by the now-famous Kogi Korean BBQ truck.

But now the roving bands have expanded to such variously named rolling restaurants as Nom Nom Truck, Let's Be Frank, and the upcoming FrySmith, a "truck with fries that eat as a meal." 

There are sushi trucks, ice cream and shave ice trucks, Indian food trucks, Philadelphia cheese steak trucks (couldn't find the Twitter address but I saw it with my own eyes), coffee and sweets trucks, and even a food truck for vegans!

No doubt I have omitted a few trucks from this list, but the L.A. Metblog listed more of them a few months ago, and there's even a page that tracks tweetin' trucks.

-- David Sarno

Ouch! Sales of video games and consoles in the U.S. fell 19% in October compared with the same month last year, putting the industry on the path for a decline in 2009 sales over last year, NPD Group said this afternoon.

"The industry is on track to generate full-year revenues in the range of $20 billion to $21 billion in the U.S., which would put it just below last year's sales of $21.3 billion," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

As for the holiday season, which in past years is when game companies rack up as much as 40% of their sales, it seems people are becoming nervous as they watch the unemployment rate hit double digits. According to NPD's Economic Tracker survey, consumers' "personal outlook continues to erode."

If October is any indication, the industry may be headed for a grisly holiday. Console sales crashed 23% to $380.7 million, compared with last year's $497 million. Game software sales fell 18% to $572.7 million, down from $698.4 million a year earlier.

"You're seeing the effects of the recession," said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, who two weeks ago predicted that U.S. game sales would be down 5% this year.

Sales of music-based games, such as Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5, have lagged behind last year's numbers as the beat begins to fade for some, Pachter said.

With mainstream players, the heroes of last year's soaring sales, missing in action this year, guess who's riding to the industry's rescue? It's hard-core gamers. Yes, those insane enough to stand in line for hours to be the first to get their hands on games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The Activision title, a gritty combat game that's not for the faint of heart, took in $310 million during its first 24 hours of going on sale Tuesday in the U.S. and Britain. It's on track to bring in more than $1 billion in retail sales worldwide within a few months of release, according to a report by Lazard Capital Markets, putting it in the same entertainment blockbuster league as the movie "Titanic" and the album "Thriller."

October's results also confirm the reliability of avid gamers in tough times, with three of the top titles squarely in the hard-core category and another four spots going to sports titles generally purchased by loyal fans. To see the top 10 titles, click on the "continue reading" link below.

Top 10 U.S. Video Games for October 2009

1. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PlayStation 3) 537,000 units sold
2. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) 441,000
3. Borderlands (Xbox 360) 418,000
4. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) 314,000
5. NBA 2K10 (Xbox 360) 311,000
6. Halo 3: ODST (Xbox 360) 271,000
7. NBA 2K10 (PS3) 213,000
8. Forza Motorsports 3 (Xbox 360) 175,000
9. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (Nintendo DS) 169,000
10. FIFA Soccer 10 (Xbox 360) 156,000

Source: NPD Group.

-- Alex Pham

Follow my random thoughts on games, gear and technology on Twitter @AlexPham.

Advertising for flu shots at a clinic in New York. Credit: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Feel a fever coming on?

Now that flu season is in full swing, people are scrambling for a vaccine. And the rush is even more hectic because of the H1N1 scare.

To deal help with the high demand, Google Maps has launched a flu shot finder at google.com/flushot. It provides users with the locations of clinics that provide seasonal and H1N1 vaccines.

The site works like Google Maps. Enter a ZIP Code or the name of a city and the closest sites will pop up. Clinics offering H1N1 shots are blue. Those offering seasonal shots are red. And those providing both are half red and half blue.

Google worked in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Department of Health and Human Services on the project. The locater will eventually be linked on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Assn. website.

Be aware that many locations that are shown on the site are currently out of stock, Google said. So make sure you call ahead.

-- W.J. Hennigan

Clicker's focus on full episodes means that its search engine is more likely to turn up what you're looking for than, say, Google's video search would. Another strength is how well Clicker organizes information about the programs in its database. Searching for "NCIS," for example, brings up a list of links to episodes of that CBS program in reverse chronological order, followed by links to "NCIS: Los Angeles" episodes and clips from a variety of talk shows (online and off) that discussed either the TV programs or the real-life Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The results can also be sorted by popularity or date, and can be filtered to show only TV episodes, Web originals, music videos or movies.

It's fast and powerful, and it should grow in utility as visitors use the site's wiki features to elaborate on the programming notes. Another nice feature: In addition to free content, it indexes movies and TV shows that Amazon provides on a pay-per-view basis and Netflix makes available to subscribers. And rather than ignoring shows that aren't available legitimately online, it tells you when content providers are withholding them (that means you, HBO).

By excluding unofficial and unauthorized material (as did Modern Feed, the online guide Clicker acquired when it started its development work in January), Clicker isn't as comprehensive as Google or OVGuide. Lanzone said the company was taking the long-term view, and that means respecting copyrights -- and not irritating content providers. "We want to be the de facto standard source of navigation and discovery for the next generation of television. I just don't see how we could do that if we play with illegal content."

At launch, however, discovery isn't Clicker's strongest suit. It offers a few staff recommendations and some great tools for thumbing through programs, including a Trends page to see what other users have been checking out and the most comprehensive list of categories and subcategories I've ever encountered. (The company has divided its database into more than 1,200 subcategories, including 47 types of comedy, 33 types of documentary and 28 varieties of "health and lifestyle.") But there's no preference engine to suggest shows a user might like. Nor are its social tools as well developed as on sites such as TVLoop and First on Mars. Clicker enables each user to build and share a playlist of programs they find on the site, and to send links to shows via Facebook, Twitter or e-mail. That's about it for now, although Lanzone said that more is on the way, including Topics pages that assemble links to programs related to a hot news item or buzzed-about subject. He also said that social curation is "the next big feature that we're working on," with an announcement likely after Christmas. He offered few details, other than to say the feature was inspired by the way the original Napster enabled users to discover music by browsing through the songs collected by other people with similar tastes.

Because it doesn't host many of the programs in its database, Clicker often sends visitors away from its site to watch the videos they find. Lanzone argued that this approach gave his site an advantage over the likes of Hulu and Sling.com: It indexes (authorized) videos from all across the Internet, rather than trying to push users to the ones it hosts locally. Still, directing people to other online destinations limits Clicker's ad sales, and that's the company's main source of revenue today. Future sources, Lanzone said, may include payments from online services for providing leads to new customers and a paid version of the site that provides access to more features. 

Incidentally, Clicker is developing versions of its guide that will work on other devices and other screens. First up, Lanzone said, are implementations for Boxee, a platform for online video that's designed for living-room TVs, and the iPhone. 

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.

Texting could be bad for your health. Credit: Natalie Behring 

-- Peter Pae

A Sears store in Provo Town Center in Provo, Utah. Credit: Bloomberg News

Sears joins Costco and Walmart as the third major retailer in four months to engage in an electronics trade-in deal with Gazelle in hopes of generating revenue and promoting environmentally friendly practices.

To participate in the free program, consumers can go to www.sears.gazelle.com, fill out a questionnaire, and then ship their item to Gazelle. The company will inspect the item and determine payment based upon the type of product, its age and condition. Payment will be sent within seven days of inspection. (Consumers will not receive gift cards for items that are no longer functional, but those items will be accepted for recycling.)

According to Time magazine, every day Americans throw out more than 350,000 cellphones and 130,000 computers, making electronic waste the fastest-growing part of the U.S. garbage stream.

Karen Austin, president of Home Electronics at Sears Holdings, said the trade-in program is a good option to help conserve the environment.

"We are proud that through this partnership with Gazelle, approximately 90 percent of the home electronics items that consumers send in are expected to be reused and the remainder will be responsibly recycled," Austin said.

-- Melissa Rohlin