techie

Earlier today, Harvard University and New Enterprise Associates announced the Experiment Fund, aimed at making sure that future Mark Zuckerbergs and Bill Gates can stay on campus and innovate without having to head West.

The irony of the pair of legendary entrepreneurs dropping out — decades apart — of the even more legendary university to start two of tech most significant companies, Facebook and Microsoft.

No longer, apparently.

The early-stage incubator, which will award funding to four to six start-ups in amounts from $250,000 to $500,000. It will focus on early stage ventures in the area around Harvard, which includes many other schools such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The Experiment Fund was co-founded by Cherry Murray, the dean of Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Its faculty members will advise for the fund, but the university has no financial stake.

In an interview NEA’s Patrick Chung said the intent was to enable talented students to “build a company here in Boston rather than have to go elsewhere.”

NEA will have full-time staffers working on the fund, investing in a wide range of companies. It has already backed a health app company, as well as a live Internet television offering.

“There has been an envy of the left coast, certainly,” said Chung. “Now, these talented engineers don’t have to leave when they reach the boundaries of the university where the ideas are formed.”

Added Chung: “They can walk right out of class and into a place that can make those start-ups real.”

Let’s hope the third time’s a charm.

Here’s the map and official press release:

XFund press release

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told investors today that the Wii U, the company’s long-awaited successor to the Wii gaming console, will come equipped with NFC capabilities that will be used to transfer gaming data and will open the potential for micropayments through the gaming system. Satoru also said the company was readying an online game network for the Wii U system, citing lessons learned from the tepid launch of the 3DS.

“Web company has a video.” I know. But this one, posted this week by Foursquare, is worth thinking about for a second. It’s directed at new users, but anyone who visits the homepage and isn’t logged in will see it.

“Save money and unlock rewards” based on stuff you and your friends like. Now that sounds like a pretty interesting service.

And one that makes a whole lot more sense than “You’re supposed to ‘check-in’ when you go some place. And also you might get a ‘badge’ or something,” which is where Fourquare has been for most of the past three years.

Of course, during that time Foursquare has racked up plenty of gaudy growth statistics, and big piles of VC money, and seems to have fended off would-be competitors from Gowalla to Facebook to Google. So you could argue that they’ve been communicating just fine, thank you very much.

But even though everyone you know knows about Foursquare, 15 million users — and a much smaller, and undisclosed, number of active users — isn’t close to a full-on mainstream service. So this kind of messaging is important as the company tries to grow into something much bigger.

Also important: Actually delivering on the promise of the video above. The idea is that you give Foursquare lots of data about what you like and what you do, and it offers up value to you in return, in the form of suggestions, or deals, etc.

We’re starting to see glimpses of that now, but my sense is that this is still more aspirational than anything else, and that Foursquare’s management and backers agree. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, in a meta post where he comments about someone else’s comment about his video, hints that there’s much more to come. Fun to watch.

Last week, I wrote about how touchscreens are forcing the reinvention of keyboards, looking into how touchscreen keypads are easily updateable, yet can be cumbersome to type on. The post also highlighted a few solutions that tech companies are working on in this area.

The piece elicited a variety of reactions — even Roger Ebert seems to think it might be too late to learn a new keyboard. I also received a fair amount of follow-up emails pointing out some interesting technologies that I’d missed.

So here are some other options for the touchscreen-averse:

Talk Emo to Me

A company called Siine is trying make touchscreen typing even quicker by replacing words or entire phrases with emoticons.

The Siine Writer app is based on editable icons. Each icon, or “Siine,” is supposed to convey three different words or phrases, depending on how many times the user taps it.

So, instead of typing out a text-laden message, users tap a series of visual cues that send the message to the person on the receiving end.

Users make the Siines by downloading the app from the Android market, going to the emoticon screen, holding down an emoticon and selecting “create,” to assign a new picture, a name and the corresponding text for the emoticon. After that, the Siine emoticon will appear on the user’s keyboard.

It’s a pretty nifty idea, though there would likely still be a need to enter text for more random words, and words used less frequently.

Siine is based in London and Barcelona; the company launched in 2007, and received funding last February from Atomico, the VC firm of Niklas Zennstrom, best known for co-founding Skype.

The free app is available in both English and Spanish for devices running Android OS. There’s also a tablet version of the app, available exclusively from Samsung Apps; at the moment, there isn’t a Siine app available for iPhone or iPad.

The Next Productivity Killer at Work

Here’s a familiar sequence of events: You’re typing away at your desk, and your phone pings — loudly — alerting you and the rest of the office to the fact that you’ve got a message. You’re in the middle of doing work, so you ignore it. But you don’t, really: You glance at your phone’s interface, quickly, just to check. But, wait — it’s your friend, asking if you want in on tickets that are going to sell out in exactly 47 seconds. Or it’s your significant other, asking if you could meet the handyman at the apartment. Or it’s your mom. Either way, you have to respond.

What if you could just keep typing on your desktop keyboard — and still respond to your urgent calls?

That’s the kind of keyboard Matias has come up with.

The Canada-based company uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly connect your phone to your keyboard and toggle between your desktop screen and phone — you’re still typing on your keyboard, but the text is appearing on the screen of your smartphone. (Here’s a video from CES that shows how this works, courtesy of Engadget.)

There are three Matias models — the $79 Slim One Keyboard, the $99 One Keyboard and the $199 Tactile One Keyboard — and all of them work on both PCs and Macs. The One and the Slim One are available now; the Tactile One will begin shipping in May.

The cheapest model, the Slim One, does not include a hub for your phone. The $99 One Keyboard includes a USB 2.0 hub and in-keyboard stand to hold your phone. The $199 Tactile One Keyboard has all of that, plus Alps mechanical key switches, which means there are real switches under each key.

And for those of you who wrote to me and suggested the Dvorak style of keyboard as an alternative to the traditional keyboard layout — Matias also makes a Dvorak keyboard for PCs and Mac computers.

Projecting Into the Future

We’ve seen at least one example of a laser-projection device that can create a keyboard out of any opaque surface. But what if you could make a keyboard out of any surface? What if you could make a keyboard … out of thin air?

MicroVision, a company specializing in laser-display technology, announced earlier this month the availability of its new laser-display engine, the PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display (the company’s patented display, PicoP, is actually the tech behind OmniTouch, mentioned in the previous article.)

The Gen 2 display takes it a step further: MicroVision’s PicoP Gen 2 can turn any projected image into a virtual touchscreen, regardless of the surface it’s being projected onto — or whether there’s even any surface at all. The PicoP Gen 2 HD laser display engine boasts 720p HD image projection and interactive displays up to 200 inches diagonal. MicroVision also announced technology for 3-D projectors, which could project 3-D images from a small display device.

While this kind of technology might have a more obvious place in the gaming market, it can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices to allow users to “step away from the screen.”

The company is emphasizing that this is still a prototype; MicroVision expects to begin sending early samples to selected manufacturers for testing sometime early this year.

(There aren’t any images of this technology being deployed, so you’ll just have to imagine that keyboard in thin air for now.)

Forget the Keyboard — It’s All About Voice

Still other readers threw the four-letter word at me. Not that one. They were talking about Siri — and her competitors — saying they believe that touchscreen technologies, tactile or otherwise, are all moot because of the emergence of voice-command technology. Voice recognition is now in smartphones, gaming consoles and “smart” TV sets; is it only a matter of time before we’re dictating everything to our computer screens?

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These fun posters from Beat Down Boogie that promote their newest Mario Warfare web series are so well done! Princess Peach is looking like a serious badass with her updated sexy style and pink guns. In the first video below, director Micah Moore explains where he got the inspiration for each of these costumes.

Mario and Luigi’s style is a combination of a plumber and a military look. He took inspiration from Hong Kong, James Bond and The Matrix to create the costume for Toadstool. I never knew how much went into these types of web shows until I read about this. It’s quite an endeavor, and the filmmaking process is really fascinating.

When you see the number of hobby guns they used and how long they practiced for the fight scenes, you really get a feel for the amount of time it takes to put something like this together. If this new series follow in the footsteps of the previous one, it will be very successful. If you’d like more information about it, or if you’d like to be updated about their progress, you can visit Beat Down Boogie or like them on Facebook.

Via: [Geeks Are Sexy]

Who is Amazon’s biggest competitor? It may be a Japanese company you’ve never heard of.

Rakuten is set on challenging Amazon’s global dominance by appealing to the third-party merchants Amazon works with today and by growing it’s digital content business to compete with the Kindle.

We recently learned about the company’s strategy through the eyes of Neel Grover, the CEO of Buy.com, Rakuten’s online shopping subsidiary in the U.S.

For now, Rakuten is admittedly Amazon’s much smaller competitor, though it is dominant in Japan.

The publicly held company is worth $14.5 billion compared to Amazon’s $85 billion market capitalization, and it pales in comparison to Amazon’s mass in the U.S. Buy.com is ranked 410th here versus Amazon’s sixth-place standing, according to Compete.

But Grover said Rakuten has a two-part plan for going up against Amazon.

First, it will target and partner with third-party resellers and merchants.

Amazon does this, too, but often ends up competing with the merchants because it has its own warehouses and products that it is selling, he said.

“Oftentimes Amazon will compete with the retailer. [Third-party merchants] teach Amazon what to buy and sell, which is ultimately not good for the merchant,” he said.

Rakuten, on the other hand, does not own any warehouses or any inventory itself and instead gives retailers — brick and mortar or e-commerce — the tools and traffic to support their own businesses.

In May 2010, Rakuten acquired Buy.com.

“I sought out Rakuten. … I thought their model was one that would give us a unique differentiator in the U.S. and we could learn and bring their model to our site and customers,” Grover said. “We are still in the final stages of transforming, and it’s taken a bit of time to get it transformed.”

But, he confidently added, “It will win out in the long-term.”

A similar approach is being taken by eBay, another e-commerce giant in the U.S.

The second part of Rakuten’s plan is to go after Amazon’s growing digital business, spanning music, e-books and other content.

In November, the Japanese company purchased Kobo, a runner-up in the e-reader race behind the Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. It paid $315 million in cash for the Canadian company.

Rakuten is banking on the Kobo in assisting with its move into providing downloadable media to consumers, starting with e-books.

At the time of the acquisition, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis told All Things D that Rakuten will give Kobo the financial backing to grow internationally, as well as compete in the U.S.

“The U.S. is absolutely important. It’s fundamental. We have millions of U.S. users today, and we plan to grow that substantially, and internationally it represents a big opportunity as well,” he said.

Earlier this month, Buy.com started linking to Kobo from its site, so that consumers have the option of buying a physical copy of a book or a digital version. Other integration efforts are also under way.

It also wants to get into other digital content, like music. Back in 1999, Buy.com was one of the original sites to have a digital music store, but Grover said it was a pretty poor experience because of all the restrictions that record labels were mandating. A lot of that has now changed.

“We are definitely looking as a group at all digital content. … We are looking at different solutions, but today we have not continued on with our initial music store,” he said.

As with Kobo and Buy.com, acquisitions are always an option, he said.

“We’ll continue to look at everything that would make our business better. It hasn’t been shy over the past two years. We have a global vision to create an e-commerce marketplace offering all goods, and we continue to see that grow.”

And going up against Amazon, some serious growth is what Rakuten and Buy.com will need.

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How many times have you walked into your home, set down your keys and then hours later couldn’t remember where you put them? Come on…we’ve all done that.

Or think about the number of times you’ve left your house with your cell phone on the kitchen table or in your home office. Again…guilty as charged.

Obviously, the development group at Kensington has misplaced their keys a time or two or left their phones behind because they’ve figured out the perfect solution: the BungeeAir™ Power Wireless Security Tether™ for the iPhone. It’s the ideal gadget for those of us who are memory challenged or who are going too many miles per hour to remember where we’ve put our phone or keys.

The BungeeAir fob attaches to your keys, and when you walk away from your iPhone, the fob beeps and locks your iPhone screen automatically. There’s also a free app available that helps you find your keys (with the fob attached). The last part of this 3-in-1 system is the battery case that will give you four hours of iPhone talk time power.

If you’ve ever lost your phone or if someone has helped himself to the one you left behind during your last coffee run, you know it’s a hassle to get a new one. Don’t forget about the extra hundreds of dollars you’ll have to spend to replace your phone. You can’t control your memory and cure absentmindedness — your mind is absent when you do something like set down your keys — but this pint-size product can make it easier to keep track of your iPhone.

Facebook Inc. could file papers for an initial public offering as early as next week and is close to picking Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter for its IPO, said people familiar with the matter.

Facebook could file papers for the IPO as early as this coming Wednesday, but that timing is still being discussed, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is currently looking at a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion, this person said.

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As you probably know, we feature a lot about Star Wars and Star Trek on Bit Rebels. Even though we’ve mentioned before that it seems like there are more creative Star Wars designs than Star Trek designs, that is not necessarily true when talking about furniture, or at least that’s what I’ve noticed. Artists and builders seem to really enjoy creating Star Trek inspired decor.

For example, did you know you can make your own air-powered Star Trek door (the kind that goes woooooosh) for your home? How do you like this Klingon LED coffee table? What the heck, you could even go all the way and completely pimp your pad so it’s a whole Star Trek inspired apartment.

This is the Starship Enterprise coffee table. It’s a handcrafted replica of the old NCC-1701-C. It took Barry Shields over a month to make this badboy, and it’s truly stunning. If you’d like to add a little Star Trek to your life without having to change the entire decor of your room, this subtle design might fit into your home nicely. You can learn more about it on Etsy where it’s listed for (gulp) $3,100. Considering it would give you geek cred for a lifetime though, I suppose it’s worth it. Being a geek ain’t cheap!

Via: [Technabob]

It’s been called the tablet that just won’t die: After refurbished Hewlett-Packard TouchPads became available for a discount on Woot.com, the 16 gigabyte model — which was being sold for $169.99 — is apparently sold out again, The Verge writes. Earlier this week, HP published a road map for open-source development on webOS, the mobile operating system behind the TouchPad, six weeks after the company first said it was opening up the OS to the developer community.

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So you’re married to the biggest Star Wars geek out there. What do you get him (or her) for Valentine’s Day? You’ve probably already done all the regular cutesy paper valentines with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. How about a custom-designed mug that you make yourself?

Design-your-own pottery places are growing more popular and the variety of items you can design are really amazing–think plaques, bowls, lamps and well, probably toilets! Making something is simple. All you have to do is come with an idea, and they will provide the paint and tools. If you happen to design your own line of digital stamp images, you have an advantage, of course, but anyone could try this idea at their local pottery place.

What I love about this mug is that Melyssa, the creator, has a line of digital stamps that she draws and he fits right in. So not only is this a tribute to her hubby’s love of all things Star Wars, it incorporates her personal style. I, on the other hand, would have to trace the image onto the mug and it STILL wouldn’t come out half as nice. This mug was created by Melyssa at Clay Cafe in Truro, Nova Scotia.

Image Credit: [Melyssa MacIntyre-Connolly]

Jon Rubinstein, the former Apple executive who took over handheld maker Palm and moved with it to Hewlett-Packard in a 2010 acquisition, has left HP effective today, AllThingsD has learned.

Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12-24 month commitment to stay with HP after the acquisition. “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.

Best known for his work on Apple’s iconic iPod music player, Rubinstein left Apple in 2006 and joined Roger McNamee as a partner in the private equity firm Elevation Partners, following its 2007 investments in Palm.

In 2009 he replaced longtime Palm executive Ed Colligan as its CEO, and oversaw a dramatic restructuring of the company’s products, including a significant rebuild of its smart phone operating system. Gone was the legacy PalmOS that had been used in so many popular devices like the Treo that for a time compete seriously against Research In Motion’s Blackberry.

PalmOS was replaced by WebOS, which first appeared on the Pre smart phone, then later on the Pixi and Veer devices. After HP acquired Palm, WebOS was also used on the abandoned TouchPad tablet, and is now an open source operating system overseen by HP.

Rubinstein’s departure is no big surprise. Sources said he hadn’t been seen at HP’s offices following the decision by former CEO Léo Apotheker to get out of the business of making WebOS-based hardware. His future plans have been the subject of speculation for some time.

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I get it. Sometimes we want a little light reading in the bathroom. I’ve got a couple of trashy magazines in my bathroom, but when I’m in the bathtub, I prefer to tweet instead of read. I’m sure some people in the world like to do some heavy-duty reading in the bathroom. They might even like to read this American classic novel originally written in 1851 in there.

After all, the bathroom is a cozy small room with a relatively comfortable place to sit. Speaking of sitting on the toilet, did you read the story about the woman who lived on her toilet for 932 days? Seriously, she wouldn’t get off. I’m sure she would have appreciated this special toilet paper.

This is the entire Moby Dick story typed on toilet paper. According to eBay user the_heppcat, “There are four full rolls, one roll (epilogue) is about 1/5 of a roll and one half roll.” The rolls that have a few tears in them are from when he was trying to pull the paper through the typewriter. If you’d like to adorn your own bathroom with this very unique (and very expensive) toilet paper, you can pick it up on eBay for $200. The auction ends in about one day, and as of now, there are no bidders.

Via: [Geekologie] [Metro]

This Jimmy Kimmel mocking of Facebook’s requirement that everyone move next week to the social networking site’s Timeline profile is simply hilarious and unmissable.

The “friend your momma” requirement in the video is my favorite:

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This past weekend I was browsing a few timelines on Twitter, and I came across this tweet by @A4XRBJ1 that said “Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs.” I thought that this was simply hilarious!

Then I started thinking about the truth behind this tweet. Could it be that this wasn’t meant to be funny at all? What do we do with the power we have at our disposal? Did you know that in 1946, ENIAC (the world’s first computer) could perform 385 multiplications per second. Today, the iPhone 4 can perform 2,000,000,000 instructions per second (The iPhone 4S is even faster). It reminds me of Peter Parker’s grandfather telling him that “with great power, comes great responsibility.” How responsible are we with what we have today?

Technology can aid the human race to accomplish so much more. Take for example a company called Emotiv. Their slogan is “You think, therefore, you can.” Simply put, using one of their wireless neuroheadsets, you can interface with your PC by using your mind. Yep, you read right. What is even more incredible is that they have developed an SDK for developers to use to create apps (written in C++, C#, VB.NET or Java – Coming Soon, Mac OS X and Linux) that can be controlled with your mind.

The possibilities for incredibly useful and life changing software has just gone stellar. Forget speech recognition because nothing trumps this. Developers can put the power of communication in the hands of so many people with speech impediments. Just see how technology has changed our world already. A hundred years from now (if we all survive the 2012 doomsday predictions) we will have a perfect record of our family tree preserved in Facebook. There will be a collective conscious of the human race all tied up within Twitter.

Technology is ever evolving. Its future could hold untold treasures and new discoveries. One thing is for certain though, that it is every day people like you and me that make it happen.

Via: [ENIAC vs.iPhone 4] Image Credits: [Wikipedia] [Fancy]

Twitter Inc. says it can now make content selectively available to users based on geography, and plans to use that ability to enter countries with “different ideas” about freedom of expression as a human right — reflecting the difficult ethical questions facing Internet companies.

The announcement, published on the official blog of the microblog operator, said Twitter is now able to withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

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It’s been a while since we heard any rumblings from the super-secret stealth networking start-up Nicira. When last seen, the company — backed by investments from, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA, plus personal investments from VMWare founder Diane Greene and venture capitalist Andy Rachleff — had just hired Alan Cohen from Cisco Systems as its vice president of marketing.

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research-and-development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

Apple cares about every worker in its supply chain, and any suggestion to the contrary is untrue. That’s the gist of the all-hands email sent to Apple employees today by CEO Tim Cook, who’s taken exception to a New York Times report claiming working conditions at the company’s overseas manufacturing partners are still sorely lacking.

In the message, first published by 9to5Mac, Cook says Apple is not “ignoring the human cost” of its supply chain, and dismisses accusations that it is complicit in worker abuse as mendacious.

“We care about every worker in our worldwide supply chain. Any accident is deeply troubling, and any issue with working conditions is cause for concern,” Cook wrote. “Any suggestion that we don’t care is patently false and offensive to us. As you know better than anyone, accusations like these are contrary to our values. It’s not who we are.”

And for evidence of that, one need only look at Apple’s supplier-responsibility efforts. If there are problems at overseas suppliers, says Cook, no one is doing more than Apple to prevent them.

“Every year we inspect more factories, raising the bar for our partners and going deeper into the supply chain,” Cook explained. “As we reported earlier this month, we’ve made a great deal of progress and improved conditions for hundreds of thousands of workers. We know of no one in our industry doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people.”

Which is probably true. Apple has been conducting supplier-responsibility audits and issuing reports on them for years now. And it recently became the first tech company to join the Fair Labor Association, which will serve as an independent auditor for its supply chain.

That said, there’s still a lot more to be done, and Apple could likely do it. With the $13 billion in profits it reported earlier this week, and that $97 billion in cash it’s sitting on, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

As a former Apple executive told the New York Times, “Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

An overly simplistic argument, I suppose. The solutions to these issues are far more complex than threats over contracts. But again, more could be done.

It’s been a couple years since we last took a detailed look at the way your cable dollars get split up. Takeaway from our 2010 review: You pay a whole lot of money for sports TV, whether you like it or not.

Let’s take another peek, courtesy of SNL Kagan and Barclays analyst Anthony DiClemente, who has an updated list of wholesale prices by channel* (the list on the right is for ad rates, which we can ignore for the purposes of this story):

Takeaway from today’s chart: Nothing has really changed — you’re still paying a lot for sports, and you’re paying a lot for ESPN.

That’s why Disney’s sports channel is the most valuable asset on your cable dial. And it’s also why you’ve been hearing increasing grumbling — from both customers and ESPN’s non-sports cable competitors — about ESPN’s drag on your cable bill. (We’ll talk to new ESPN boss John Skipper about this topic next week at Dive Into Media.)

As I’ve noted before, the odds are that this doesn’t change anytime soon: Disney and ESPN can charge that much because the cable guys, like Comcast, think the programming is worth it to their customer base. And they’re signing up long-term deals that will keep that fee structure in place for the next decade.

But there is a chance that a “virtual” cable operator, using the Web, decides to offer a package that doesn’t include ESPN. They could either use that unspent money to lower customers’ bills, or plow it into other programming.

Again, this will also mean that subscribers couldn’t get any Disney programming, because Bob Iger has zero interest in splitting up the bundle. But I know of a few folks who have at least contemplated the idea.

So what about that “over the top” option, anyway? Some industry observers, like BTIG’s Rich Greenfield, are sure that someone — Apple, Google, Verizon, who knows — will offer one this year. Today, Bernstein’s Craig Moffett has a long essay describing why that won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said something similar this week, alluding to the fact that Microsoft has reportedly bailed on its Web TV subscription plans.

*The 2012 chart omits regional cable channels, which is why Fox Sports Net has disappeared in the new chart. I don’t know why the new one includes outliers like 3net, a 3-D channel that isn’t widely available (and/or relevant, as best I can tell).

[Image: ESPN]

On the heels of the news of his departure from HP Friday, Apple veteran and onetime Palm head Jon Rubinstein spoke with AllThingsD about the move and the fate of Palm’s webOS.

Why leave Hewlett-Packard now?

A few months before we shipped the TouchPad, I told Todd Bradley (executive vice president of HP’s Personal Systems Group) that once we shipped I wanted to move on. And he asked me to stay for a while in an advisory role and to help out with the transition to webOS and brainstorming about the directions of PSG, so I told him I’d stick around. And I did. And now there’s a path for webOS and PSG has its path and it’s time for me to move on. This has been in the works for quite some time.

What are your thoughts on webOS as it exists today? Do you think HP made the right call open sourcing it?

Do I think HP made the right call open sourcing it? Versus what? (laughs) You know, we always developed Enyo so it could be open sourced because we saw it as a very powerful cross-development platform. The future is clearly Web-based apps. And some people don’t get that, and I certainly understand, but that is the reality. And, frankly, we were way ahead of our time. WebOS is a great piece of work and really it’s just beginning.

Okay, assuming that’s the case, what does the future look like for webOS?

Well, if HP invests in it the way it says it’s going to and they can build a community around it — and that’s not just people developing for the platform, but other companies using it — it will do well.

Can anyone break through the Apple/Google lock on the smartphone market?

The smartphone market’s a tough one, because it’s controlled by the carriers in a lot of ways. So it really depends on what the carriers do. The route to market isn’t controlled by consumers, it’s controlled by carriers.

What went wrong with TouchPad? Clearly, it wasn’t the resounding success for which you’d hoped.

Well, it wasn’t exactly given much time to find out. But I really don’t want to rehash all that. There’s really no point.

Do you regret selling to HP?

This wasn’t something where I had an opinion. The process was very carefully crafted, as all aquisition processes are, and HP is the one that won the process. I don’t get an opinion on the subject; I never did.

What are your plans for the next year?

I spent the past few years working really hard on webOS and working really hard on turning Palm around and getting it into good enough shape where someone would want to buy it, so I’m going to take a break.

So are you retiring?

No. I’m going to spend some time with my family and think about what to do next. Who knows what I’ll do. Anything’s possible.