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General Motors and eBay will start a trial program Tuesday to let Californians buy cars online.

eBay said that its eBay Motors site for selling used cars has been getting 12 million individual visits per month.

The site will allow people to compare prices, arrange financing, and check a used car’s eligibility for the Cash for Clunkers trade-in program. There is the “Buy It Now” option where people agree to pay the advertised price or can make an offer using eBay’s auctioning system.

The trial will be started with 20,000 GM models from 2008, 2009, and 2010. After purchase, cars will be picked up at the dealership.

Dealers at 225 locations in California will participate in the program, which will run from Tuesday until September 8. It will be available at the co-branded Web site, gm.ebay.com.

“As the dealer showroom expands from the parking lot to the laptop, this makes it easier for a customer to browse available new-car inventory, make an offer, buy it now, or send a message asking for more information from a dealer,” Mark LaNeve, GM vice president of U.S. sales, said in a statement.

One car dealer in California, Inder Dosanjh, told the Associated Press that he already sells used cars on eBay and plans to put his new vehicle inventory on the new site this week. “I think they should have done this a long time ago,” he told the AP.

Gathering information online when buying a car has become commonplace in the United States. GM and eBay cited a J.D. Power & Associates study that found that more than 75 percent of people did research online while buying a new vehicle.

In addition, the WD RE4 2TB enterprise drive features 1.2 million hours mean time between failures (MTBF) and other power-saving, speed-enhancing, and fail-proofing technologies.

The WD RE4 drive

(Dual actuator technology is a head-positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track. The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.)

The new drives are the WD Caviar Black and the WD RE4. According to the company, the former is designed for desktops while the latter is suited for servers and network storage devices.

Other features of the two drives include:

These two new hard drives are based on WD’s 500GB-per-platter technology. They both combine 7200rpm spin speed, 64MB cache, dual-stage actuator technology, SATA 2 (3Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor.

IntelliSeek, a technology that calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration. StableTrac, a mechanism that makes sure the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations. NoTouch, a ramp-load technology that keeps the recording head from ever touching the disk media to significantly reduce the wear and tear of the recording head and media as well as provide better drive protection in transit.

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Western Digital)

The WD Caviar Black 2TB (model WD2001FASS) drive is available now for $299. The WD RE4 2TB (model WD2003FYYS) drive is currently being qualified by OEMs. Both drives are covered by a five-year, limited warranty.

After releasing relatively low-performance 2TB hard drives a few months ago, Western Digital announced Tuesday that it’s now shipping high-performance versions of these top-capacity drives.

Previously: Revamped Google Picasa site identifies photo faces

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One big thing Google is bringing to the table with this release over something like Apple’s iPhoto (at least for Mac users) is the capability to tag items that are spread out across your entire computer, as well as external drives. In that regard, it does a much better job than iPhoto when it comes to automatically importing and organizing photos–all without disturbing where they’re stored. Considering it now does much of what iPhoto is able to do with faces, with the added bonus of grabbing that contact information from your Google address book, it makes for a very seamless experience.

As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful. And unlike Picasa’s albums feature, name tags let you quickly sort all of your photos by who’s in them–not when they were taken or how you’ve personally organized them. It also continues to do this with any photos you add to your library in the future.

That’s not to say Google hasn’t included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you’ve got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive–and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.

Just as it does on the Web, Picasa scans your photos for faces, then groups together photos of specific people. It’s then your job to tell it who they are as well as confirm its guesses. If someone you’re tagging is in your Google address book, you can also look them up very quickly with auto-complete. Otherwise, Google gives you the option to add them as someone new; this information then gets synced back up your Google address book.

The system worked very well for me, but it was slow going. I had to leave the program running overnight for it to finish processing my 3,700 or so photos for faces. It also had my processor humming, since it was doing all the work on my machine instead of Google’s giant server farm.

The new version of the software should appear as an update for users of Picasa v3.1 the next time they start the program. It can also be forced to update by clicking the “check for updates online” option in the help menu.

Along with facial recognition, the new version of the software integrates Google Maps–a much-wanted feature among geotagging fans. Just as you’re able to do in Picasa Web Albums, you can search for a location in Google Maps, then amend that geographic data to your photo. You can also view groups of photos by place by clicking on little red map markers that show where individual photos have been placed. Unlike the facial recognition feature though, this is still largely a manual process of doing a search for each location then adding it to a photo, or group of photos, at once. That is, unless you have a camera with GPS (which most people don’t).

And for photos it thinks contain people you’ve verified as contacts, it gives you quick “yes” and “no” buttons that can add or reject name tags. Oftentimes, clicking “yes” adds a few more suggestions for photos of that person that the program feels is safe enough to recommend. There’s also a way to group accept or group decline its suggestions, which saves time you would have otherwise spent clicking the buttons one at a time.

Roughly a year after rolling out facial recognition on its Picasa Web Albums site, Google on Tuesday is introducing an updated version of its Picasa software (for Windows | Mac) that can recognize faces in photos stored on users’ computers.

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CNET)

Users can now geotag their photos right in the Picasa, just like they can in Picasa Web Albums.

Picasa's software can now scan for faces, and offer up recommendations of people it thinks are your contacts.

Version 2 of the JamBase iPhone app, which was released on Thursday, brings JamBase up to speed with its own GPS feature–you don’t have to enter a ZIP code unless you’re searching for results in another location. You can limit search results to shows within a certain distance of your current location, or within the city limits of your town. Plus, it’s much better integrated with the JamBase site: you can sign up for a free JamBase account right from the app, then add favorite bands to keep track of and even add particular shows to your calendar; all changes are synced between the iPhone app and the JamBase site.

The one place it lags is in synchronization with other apps. Here, I prefer iConcertCal because it uses your iTunes library to build a list of artists you’re interested in. JamBase makes you enter them manually. iConcertCal’s app has a “Listen” feature that launches the iTunes Mobile app to let you listen to 30-second samples and, if you like them, buy the tracks. JamBase features audio samples from LaLa on its Web site, but no equivalent on the iPhone app.

JamBase, one of the first and certainly most famous online concert-listing services, released its free iPhone app last October. It was a simple affair: you entered your ZIP code and the app returned a list of live music shows in your area over the next few days. If you had a list of favorite artists stored at the JamBase Web site, it would track those artists for you. Since then, competing apps like Bandloop and iConcertCal have upped the ante with more sophisticated interfaces and GPS targeting, which lets them find nearby shows without forcing you to enter any data.

JamBase's updated iPhone app lets you track favorite artists and add their shows to your JamBase calendar.

SAN DIEGO–It’s been very clear for a long time that the American patent system is deeply flawed.

That’s where Article One feels it can make a difference in stopping patent trolls from trying to make fortunes by suing companies for infringement.

So, in a case like that, a company would put in a request for research on Article One, at which point the advisers can respond with supporting evidence. And the company said it is paying out as much as 5 percent of its profits to the advisers, who are paid if their work helps to invalidate a patent.

The company’s model is to farm out potentially invalidating research to a community of “advisers,” all of whom can get paid for doing research that makes a difference in investigating applications or existing patents. The company has had its system in beta for about a year and it said that a third of the research done by its advisers has resulted in invalidating evidence.

But again, because official patent investigators have only so much mental bandwidth, it is simply not possible for them to come up with the evidence themselves that can help out companies like RIM.

According to information provided on stage at DemoFall 09 here Wednesday by a company called Article One Partners, as much as 45 percent of all litigated patents are eventually found to be invalid. But the U.S. Patent Office is obviously overwhelmed by the sheer workload it faces, and its investigators’ inability to keep up with the research that would help them reject many applications.

If it works on a broad scale, this seems like an extremely important addition to the patent landscape, though certainly not the only one. But as is abundantly clear, the system is broken and needs as much help as it can get, regardless of whether it’s nonprofit or profit-based. And given how valuable such work is to large companies, there’s definitely a lot of money at stake.

An example of featured patent studies that Article One Partners has put out to its adviser community to help research.

There are some solutions in the works, including Peer-to-Patent, a nonprofit system that would spread out the investigative work to a wide ecosystem of subject-matter experts. But clearly, some believe there’s money to be made by putting some of this work–at least when it comes to invalidating patent applications or even approved ones–in the hands of a large community.

It aims to incentivize its advisers by paying them as much as $50,000 to do research and write up sophisticated studies. And this can be deeply valuable work, the company argued. For example, it said, even though RIM paid out more than $600 million to settle an infringement lawsuit, the patents in question were subsequently found to be invalid.

Now, Article One is formally launching its service, and attacking what it said is a $1 billion market in fighting potentially invalid patents.

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Article One Partners)

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Previously, GE began testing its smart appliances in select homes in Louisville, Ky., in conjunction with the Louisville Gas and Electric Company.

Masdar City is under construction in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. It aims to be the first carbon-neutral and zero-waste city. It’s also home to the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology. The post-graduate research center, a collaborator with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began offering courses and research facilities in alternative energy and sustainable technology for graduate students in September.

The installation, to be completed in early 2010, will include a communication system between the appliances and Masdar City’s utility grid that will allow the appliances to transmit real-time data and run nonessential functions during off-peak usage hours. Since Masdar City is not scheduled to be fully inhabited until 2013, the city’s grid will simulate peak usage strains in order to test the system.

GE’s Consumer & Industrial division announced in October 2008 that it was developing home appliances that could ease the strain on electrical grids by coordinating with a grid’s off-peak hours to perform flexible functions.

The two-year pilot project with GE appliances will include refrigerators, stoves, and European-style washer/dryer machines that run on 220volt/50HZ platforms and will be installed in 10 residences.

A refrigerator equipped with a “smart” meter, for example, communicates with the local power utility. That refrigerator then waits to run its automatic defrost cycle until it has received a signal from the electrical grid that it’s an off-peak period.

Abu Dhabi’s planned green community, Masdar City, will be testing General Electric’s smart appliances in a handful of residences and coordinating them with its power grid, GE said Monday.

A smart meter on a refrigerator at GE's labs.

For the victim, examining her computer after the burglary, noticed that her computer was logged into someone else’s Facebook account. This might seem strange in itself. However, the person who logged on (perhaps to update his status to “feeling lucky today”?) also seems not to have logged off. That led intrepid sleuths to the figure of Parker, whose Facebook page it is indeed alleged, was the one that lay open.

Facebook may have 300 million members, but a news story this week makes one particular member stand out from the crowd.

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Is he at home? Or is he a burglar?

Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., is alleged to have burgled a house of two diamond rings. However, according to the Journal of West Virginia, Parker is alleged to have done something of a highly modern nature during this burglary.

It would be churlish to suggest that our obsession with networking socially will get us into trouble. However, after a Florida case in which a man allegedly stole a laptop in order to check his Facebook page, shouldn’t we really consider whether the Facebook habit might be leading some to difficult and damaging behavior?

Parker has been charged with one count of having an impressive and excessive ego. I’m sorry, that’s not quite right. He has been charged with one count of felony daytime burglary.

It’s also requiring job applicants to pay 99 cents per job to apply.

The company said it’s got tools on its road map that will help employers sort through applications by skill set, educational background, and more. For now that’s something they have to keep track of on their own.

So which of these three would I use? Considering I’ve got a car that needs selling, Mota Motors doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. And as a soon-to-be buyer of a used car, I really dig the idea of having a system of verifying a used car to let me know what work it needs done. Of course the caveat with Mota Motors, as well as the others is that they’re currently limited by location. For Local Bacon, it’s the greater New York area, while Red Beacon and Mota Motors are limited to Northern and Southern California respectively.

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Local Bacon, Red Beacon, and Mota Motors, three newly announced start-ups have a very similar aim: doing something better than Craigslist, and making money off it. In Local Bacon’s case, it’s helping job seekers and employees find each other by simplifying data. For Red Beacon, it’s helping people more easily find service providers, then get them to execute a job. And for Mota Motors, it’s about linking up car buyers and sellers while offering some hand-holding to make the process a little easier.

Companies that want to be included have to manually add their information, something that will later be verified by Red Beacon to weed out any false ones–although that’s not yet available. The service will also be limited to the Bay Area until the company sees how well it does.

Out of the three, Local Bacon is the most risky. It’s asking employers to work with a uniform format for job listings, so that all submitted jobs look the same and are easier to parse and search in Local Bacon’s job finder. This is great for people trying to find based on certain qualifications, although it requires employers to reformat their listings, which can be a pain if they’re sending it out to several job listing sites at once, or have certain qualifications that may not fit into Local Bacon’s template.

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For people looking for someone to a one-time job and those who want to do it, there’s Red Beacon. It helps people request a local service, then compare prices from local providers. It has a scheduling tool that lets you put out an order for whatever you need; its system then goes out and finds people to do it for you. On the other end, service providers can put out a quote for how much they would do the job for, then you as the service seeker can you get to pick the one you want.

Local Bacon simplifies job listings by having all its employers work with a standardized job description format.

For buyers, Mota Motors offers tools that offer advice and suggestions on questions to ask, or things to check before making a purchase. This includes a partnership with Pep Boys that has Pep Boys repair technicians doing a standardized inspection that gets posted to the car’s info page to help you make sure it’s not a lemon and warn you on any work that needs to be done.

Red Beacon connects you with service providers–even if you need them right away.

SAN FRANCISCO–At the TechCrunch50 conference (coverage), I’m a little surprised we haven’t seen any dating sites yet. After all, the economy may be in shambles, but the Internet never ceases to come up with new ways to help people meet. Matchmaking is still in the air though–and this time there’s money involved.

The third matchmaking service, Mota Motors, aims to make car buying and selling easier. It asks straightforward questions about your car’s condition, then scans an index on the Web to give you a recommended sale price. It’s hooked up to a number of service providers to help sellers get their car certified or fixed up before a sale. It can also write a description for you, including any selling points, meaning that you don’t need an English degree to write elegant prose about your 1987 Honda.

Local Bacon hopes that fee will help focus who applies for jobs, as well as keep the company afloat. It also helps provide tools for both applicants and employers to monitor and manage applications. For instance job seekers can get notified when their application has been looked at by the employer. That’s something you don’t usually find out until you get called in for an interview.

To help users choose providers, companies get ratings and reviews from previous consumers, along with any photos they’ve taken to back up that work. Red Beacon also pulls in the aggregate rating from Yelp’s API.

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Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Workscore, set to launch tonight, lets you build a “social resume,” a profile of your skills, with ratings from the co-workers you’ve invited to comment on them. Once you have enough ratings, you can send private Workscore links to the people at the companies where you want to work.

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Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

The procedure for reviewing people is clear and comprehensive. The people you're reviewing cannot see your raw entries.

As with LinkedIn,gucci bags, you can also ask friends for commendations. Those you can read, and delete if you don’t like them.

Creating standard Workscore profiles will be free. The company will make money by selling analysis tools on the data it collects. Companies will be able to track how users perceive them; individuals will be able to benchmark themselves against peers.

Workscore asks about your relationships with the people who are reviewing you, though, to figure out how much to weight individual scores. If you say that a reviewer is both a close contact and fair-minded, then the review will be weighted heavily. If you ask someone to review you who you know as a hothead,chanel bags, you can say they’re not all that fair-minded, and their rating will count less (unless you’re desperate, you’d probably be better off just not asking them to review you).

Essentially it lets you collect performance reviews from people you trust, and then share the results (the aggregate scores) when you’re looking for work. It challenges the traditional, top-down, by-the-book human resources organization in which workplace performance ratings are created (usually grudgingly) by managers, and collected by HR departments. Workers don’t own these reviews. When they leave a company, their reviews stay locked in HR. Yes, we can all take reviews with us but you can’t prove their veracity. And when we’re looking for a new job and want a reference from their previous employer, the most an HR person will say — or allow a manager to say — is usually along the lines of, “Yes, I can confirm that the person you’re interviewing did at one point set foot in this office.”

In addition to general performance reviews, you can also ask people to verify and rate work accomplishments,prada bags, such as “I saved the company $200,000 by managing our manufacturing process better.”

If anyone uses Workscore in the early days, I expect it will be gangs of contractors who use it to review each other and to collect reviews from clients. They’ll then use their Workscore pages as designed, as online resumes that have not just their skills listed but believable reviews of them. But I am not sure that Workscore can scale quickly into a trusted brand that stands for accurate work assessment. There is a lot of carefully designed social interaction in this service, and I fear users may go off the script and reduce its value.

With Workscore, you ask people you work with to review you. The reviews form is both thorough and simple (unlike most workplace forms, which are generally one or the other, but not both) and it generates a series of scores. Users who are reviewed cannot see the scores individually, nor edit them, so asking a co-worker to give you a review is a bit of a gamble. Once there are a bunch of reviews for you, you get a Workscore profile that aggregates the data from the reviews.

You get to decide how much weight each of your reviewers gets.

But it’s the semi-blind nature of the performance and accomplishment ratings that makes Workscore interesting and useful. And since the people who review you are kept anonymous by the system, you could ask a former manager to give you a review and he or she won’t get in trouble with the HR police at your company.

See also: Vault, Glassdoor, JobScore (review).

There’s another side of Workscore: You can review your own workplace, so when people come to your company looking for work, they’ll have a better idea what they’re getting into. Workscore validates users by e-mail domain, so you can’t ask your mother to review your performance at your current job, unless she also works at your company.

But I do hope it works, because it really could make information about skills and accomplishments transparent and portable, and it gives workers more control of their personal brands.

Apple’s support performance over the last few years, coupled with the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, have propelled Apple’s Mac sales. In its 2009 fiscal third quarter, Apple reported selling 2.6 million Macs, up 4 percent from the year ago quarter.

Comparing it to the other companies involved in the showdown, Acer received a C-; ASUS (B-); Dell (C-),gucci bags; Fujitsu (B-); Gateway (B-); HP (C-); Lenovo (B+); Sony (B+); and Toshiba got a “B.”

“Virtually no computer vendor–or retailer, for that matter–is immune from the wrath of users who have become intimately familiar with the ‘Blue Screen of Death,’ and other PC foibles,” the magazine said in its introduction to the tests. “But,chanel bags, it’s how manufacturers handle their customers’ hardware and software problems that ultimately determine their true reliability, and, you would think, future sales.”

If a top-notch customer support program is high on your list of features when buying a new computer, you should be looking at a Mac, according to a new ranking.

“Apple has consistently offered some of the best Web and phone support of any computer vendor, and this year was no different,louis vuitton handbags,” the magazine said in evaluating Apple. “Its Web site is brimming with well-ordered FAQs, query-based search, and PDF manuals, the latter of which quickly answered our external monitor question.”

Laptop magazine’s Tech Support Showdown 2009 rates 10 computer companies’ tech support, with Apple coming out the overall winner. Apple’s overall grade for 2009 was an “A,” scoring an “A” for both phone and Web support.

Apple also received “A” ratings in 2007 and 2008 from the magazine for its tech support.