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But it’s Apple’s fault that all this happened. The company is big on these events and it does its best to build up the hype around each of them. I can’t blame it–it’s in the business of good coverage and big profits and the best way to do that is to build up some serious hype.

So when Jobs takes the stage Tuesday, he’ll probably show off some nominal upgrades that the majority of the press will scoff at. But can we really expect Jobs to do anything more than that? He can’t come up with new, innovative products every few months and he has a vested interest in seeing existing products succeed.

But because it relies on these events so much, the very thing that makes it successful is also becoming a problem. How can you satisfy the press and make sure that they continue building the hype, while ensuring that the right products are made available at the right time? After all, doesn’t Apple have a responsibility to its shareholders first?

As Tuesday’s Apple event gets under way and journalists from all over the world are waiting with bated breath to see what Steve Jobs has to say, it’s abundantly clear that the vast majority of people going and those who read the news, will be disappointed.

What’s the solution to this dilemma? Evidently, Apple has already made the decision on how to handle it: keep building hype, keep holding these events, and don’t worry about some cynical posts about the released products. With a few major announcements every few years, the press will keep coming back.

See, the problem with Apple’s success is that it’s expected to keep up with it. How many times has the company announced a press event, carted Jobs onstage, who then announced a few minor upgrades, only to see less than shining press opinions later on because it wasn’t “newsworthy” enough? Probably more times than we can count.

Apple’s success over the past few years has revolved around these press events. The company has consistently made huge announcements at Macworld and other assorted locales over the years. But in recent years, it hasn’t. Not because it’s failing to release good products, but because it’s so difficult to create and release groundbreaking products every few months.

No, it’s not because Apple will waste time or that all those people are Windows fanboys and want nothing to do with Apple. Instead, it’s because Apple, unlike every other company in the technology industry, has created such a hype machine that unless it offers something major like a touch-screen
Mac or a new
iPhone, it’ll disappoint even the most giddy fanboy.

And who can argue with the logic? It’s worked so far and there’s no indication, judging by the coverage, that it’ll slow down anytime soon.

Telecommunications equipment maker Nortel Networks is dumping its WiMax business to focus on a more popular 4G wireless technology.

Sprint Nextel is the only major U.S. operator using WiMax. The company earlier this year joined forces with Clearwire and several other companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Intel, in a $12 billion joint venture to build a nationwide WiMax network.

The two largest U.S. operators, AT&T and Verizon Wireless, have already announced they plan to use LTE to build their 4G wireless networks. Vodafone, the largest worldwide wireless operator, also plans to use LTE for its next generation network.

Sprint, which has already been testing its WiMax network in some places, did not choose Nortel as one of its major vendors to build the new network. This was a major blow for the telecommunications equipment maker, which instead has been forced to focus on carriers in emerging markets. Relative to LTE, this WiMax opportunity is much smaller, which likely contributed to the company’s decision to ditch it.

Instead of sinking a lot of research and development into WiMax, Nortel plans to address this market through a relationship with Alvarion.

The company said earlier this week that it’s focusing its money and development efforts on Long Term Evolution, or LTE. Even though LTE hasn’t yet been standardized, it has more support from major carriers around the world than WiMax.

There were a few surprises as well as the usual cast of well-compensated characters. Second on the tech list was Nabeel Gareeb of MEMC Electronic Materials, a little-known silicon wafer manufacturing company in Missouri. Rounding out the top 10 were Cisco’s John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd, Nividia’s Jen-Hsun Huang, IBM’s Sam Palmisano, Corning’s Wendell Weeks, EMC’s Joe Tucci, Agilent’s William Sullivan, and Intel’s Paul Otellini.

It’s another big win for Ellison, who recently won a $3 million tax break on his $200 million estate in swanky Woodside, Calif. Ellison’s lawyers successfully argued that the house suffered from “significant functional obsolescence” because it turns out there’s a limited market for 23-acre estates built to look like 16th century Japanese summer palaces.

As a rule, executives (particularly the ones at under-performing companies) hate making these lists, because of the inevitable “are shareholders really getting their money’s worth?” questions they engender. I know this firsthand: I used to have the pleasure of calling people to let them know they made the grade for the top executive compensation list at BusinessWeek. Once, a well-known Silicon Valley mogul gave me an earful off the record. He said something along the lines of: “This is bull***t. And you know it’s bull***t. And you can tell your boss it’s bull***t.”

Just missing the top 10 were Apple’s Steve Jobs at No. 11 and Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz at No. 12. Being named on a tech exec compensation list is probably the last thing Schwartz needed Friday, given that Sun’s share price dropped more than 22 percent in one day of trading, thanks to very disappointing earnings news.

Congratulations, Larry Ellison, you’re No. 1!

This methodology can lead to wild fluctuations from year to year. Jobs topped the 2006 list with $646 million thanks to a stock package. But he slid to 11 in the 2007 with $14.6 million in annual compensation.

Forbes, as it does every year, has released its list of top executive salaries. In the overall list as well as the technology category, Ellison, the Oracle chief exec and billionaire yachtsman, was tops with total 2007 compensation at $192.9 million.

Why was he so angry? The methodology for measuring executive compensation tends to vary from publication to publication. That makes some sense, of course, since the methodology (or rationale) for lavishing millions on executives tends to vary from company to company. Forbes’ list relies on “calculating the overall compensation for the past year for executives, factoring in salary, cash bonuses, vested stock grants, stock gains and exercised stock options,” according to the magazine.

2007 was a very good year for Larry Ellison.

Take what you will from the Forbes list: You can argue some of the execs earned their money, you can say many of them didn’t. But all of them probably make far more money than you and me.

In many data sets you zoom into deep detail on your information. You can also build charts, for data sets with information over time, and generate pre-configured “community reports” for particular regions or any areas you define.

PolicyMap can drill deep into demographic information. This image shows unemployment stats from a four-square-block area.

After the Where 2.0 conference, I had a chance to catch up a bit with Jaron Waldman, the CEO of Placebase, which makes the demo site Pushpin that I covered from the conference. He had another demo to show me, but this one is a bit more useful: PolicyMap.

Unfortunately, despite all of the data and all the options to display it, a few useful views are missing. For example, while you can easily see the percentage of people per census tract within a certain age range (such as 18 to 34), there’s no report that I found that can help you visualize average age. And here’s a tip: Don’t press the back button to try to undo a mapping step; it doesn’t work as you expect and will just get you lost.

It’s a lot of data.

Made for Placebase customer The Reinvestment Fund, it’s a collection of real estate, civil, and financial built into a mapping and charting engine. It can locate superfund sites; show you crime stats; tell you about mortgage originations (including things like subprime mortgages to various demographic groups), and age and educational background. The data is at a variety of resolutions (some is per ZIP code, some by census tract) and timeliness (census data, obviously, is only current up to 2000).

See also: Cyberhomes, Zillow, Trulia, and Swivel (BYO Data)

PolicyMap is free to use for public data. Some data sets, such as home sale statistics, require a paid membership, for $200 a month.

Unlike my mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer, Pausch’s journey lasted nearly two years. This is incredible given the fact that only 20 percent of all people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer make it through the first year, according to the American Cancer Society. And only about 4 percent live five years post-diagnosis. My mother, who was diagnosed a week before my younger sister’s college graduation in May 2002, died about three and a half months after her diagnosis.

Pausch’s family has requested that donations on his behalf be made to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, 2141 Rosecrans Ave., Suite 7000, El Segundo, CA 90245, or to Carnegie Mellon’s Randy Pausch Memorial Fund.

I first heard about Randy Pausch last year when my older sister forwarded me The Wall Street Journal column written by Zaslow, who had attended Pausch’s last lecture. We had lost our mother to pancreatic cancer almost exactly five years earlier, so Pausch’s story hit particularly close to home for me and my sisters. As I read about Pausch’s lecture, my heart immediately went out to him and his young family as I envisioned the struggle they faced.

But Pausch, whose oldest child is only 6-years-old now, clearly had strong incentives to endure recovery from the painful surgery to remove tumors from the pancreas and grueling months of chemotherapy.

With the help of Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Zaslow, Pausch turned his words of wisdom into a best-selling book, which was published this spring.

Pausch is survived by his wife, Jai, and three young children: Chloe, Dylan and Logan.

I am glad for Pausch and his family that they were given as much time as possible. But I am still saddened at the loss of such an incredible and inspiring man. And I am saddened even more that his children will grow up without him in their lives.

(Credit:
Randy Pausch)

Pausch went on to become an award-winning professor and helped pioneer virtual reality research. He was a key member of Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and co-founder of the Entertainment Technology Center, a master’s degree program that brings artists and engineers together. He also helped create Alice, an interactive program that helps teach young people computer programming.

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who inspired millions through his “last lecture”, died at his home in Virginia on Friday of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Pausch playing with his three young children.

(Credit:
Randy Pausch)

Throughout the talk he shared insights about the power of helping others and always going after your dreams even when you’re faced with obstacles. A graduate of Brown University and Carnegie Mellon’s computer science Ph.D. program, he confessed that he had not originally been admitted to either school. But unwilling to accept these roadblocks, he managed to get in anyway.

Pausch was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006. And his popular “last lecture” at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007 became an Internet sensation, viewed by millions throughout the world. The lecture was part of an ongoing series at many universities that asked professors to think deeply about important life lessons.

He clicked through photos of himself as a boy, one of which showed him at the beach in my hometown of Rehoboth Beach, Del. in 1965. He also shared pictures of his own PET scans depicting several large tumors devouring his organs. And there were pictures of past students, co-workers, and bosses who played major roles in his life.

While no one would ever doubt my mother’s own passion for life, she was definitely in a different phase of her life than Randy Pausch. And thus, she decided to forgo palliative chemotherapy and let her illness take its natural course. She had beaten breast cancer nearly 15 years earlier at the age of 45 and was thankful to fulfill her greatest wish of seeing her youngest child graduate from college. (I joked with her when she was given her terminal diagnosis that she should have aimed for a higher goal, such as the marriage of her middle daughter. I’m 35 and still single.)

In his lecture titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch humorously recounted his efforts to achieve his childhood dreams, such as becoming a professional football player, experiencing zero gravity, and working with the Walt Disney Company’s Imagineering department to develop virtual reality rides for the amusement park.

I can attest to the fact that it sucks to lose a parent at any age. But I was 29-years-old when my mother died. I have many wonderful memories of her that I replay in my mind almost daily. Unfortunately, Pausch’s children will most likely not have any memories of their own of their dad. And that is tragic. While there could never be any replacement for the time they have lost with him, I hope the enduring legacy of his lecture and the book that followed will provide some comfort to his children as they grow up.

“What we have here, with some exceptions, are two responsible energy programs,” Woolsey said. “Centralization and central control is a difference here.”

On fuels, he said the U.S. should adopt a low-carbon standard, in which ethanol and biodiesel are measured on the total carbon emissions, from production to consumption. Corn ethanol has been criticized because its net carbon emissions are similar to gasoline, while ethanol from wood chips, grasses, or wastes is better in that regard.

Digging one level down

Unlike the sharp attacks in the presidential and vice-presidential debates, Monday’s debate on energy policy at MIT with Woolsey and Grumet was more congenial.

Another difference is McCain’s choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as vice presidential candidate. Palin has touted her experience in introducing more competition into oil and gas company operations in Alaska.

Later, McCain said the United States should have a more diverse set of energy sources:

McCain supports a transition to alcohol fuels such as ethanol, as well as battery-powered
cars, to replace oil as the fuel for transportation. He has proposed a $300 million contest for the best electric-car battery.

On Monday night, a separate debate focused specifically on energy policy was hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Former CIA chief and clean-tech investor R. James Woolsey represented the McCain camp. Jason Grumet, founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center, spoke for the Obama side.

(Credit:
Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)

In the Tuesday debate, Obama came out stronger on nuclear energy than he has in the past, according to FactCheck.org. He also agreed with McCain on the need for more domestic drilling but noted that the United States holds a small percentage of the world’s oil reserves and that the country “can’t drill our way out of the oil problem.”

In response to a question about climate change, McCain touted his early commitment to the issue, plus a climate change bill he proposed with Sen. Joe Lieberman. The bill ultimately failed to become law.

“We can work on nuclear-power plants. Build a whole bunch of them, create millions of new jobs. We have to have all of the above: alternative fuels, wind, tide, solar, natural gas, clean-coal technology. All of these things we can do as Americans, and we can take on this mission, and we can overcome it.”

Obama

At the federal level, Grumet said Obama supports a renewable portfolio standard, a mandate already in place in several states that would require utilities to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources such as solar, wind, or geothermal by 2025.

When it comes to energy policy, both presidential candidates want carbon regulations, better efficiency, and more renewable energy. The biggest differences lie in emphasis–drilling, nuclear energy–and what role the federal government should play.

During the presidential debate (transcript) on Tuesday, energy was a frequent topic and tightly linked to a hoped-for economic recovery around new energy industries.

McCain once again came out strongly for rapidly expanding domestic offshore drilling and a massive build-out of nuclear power.

Grumet’s criticism of the McCain plan is that it lacked enough information to truly judge. He said its “drill, baby, drill” slogan is focused on the past, not the future.

“We have to pull these technologies forward with neutral performance standards, like a renewable portfolio standard that doesn’t say how you have to make low-carbon energy. But it does say that you must make it. And we have to support those regulations with significant incentives,” Grumet said.

Obama’s response to the climate change question:

Both events provide a bit more clarity on what the candidates might do, once in office.

On the whole, Grumet cited planks from Obama’s detailed energy plan, which the Illinois senator unveiled earlier this year. Woolsey spoke in broad strokes on McCain’s energy plan, as well as on his criticisms of Obama’s plan.

During the second presidential debate on Tuesday, Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama both cited the need for more clean, or green, technologies to reduce the country’s oil consumption and address climate change.

“Sen. McCain believes in general direction,” he said. “It should stick to a general direction, such as cap and trade, and leave the detailed manifestations of standards and so forth–which type of renewable fuels and so on–up to local decision making.”

As part of the recently passed bailout bill, subsidies for renewable energy were extended at the last minute. The law renews tax credits for solar power for eight years and for wind for one year. Also included is a tax credit for people who purchase a plug-in vehicle, an idea that both candidates had previously backed.

Obama has proposed spending $15 billion per year for 10 years on energy programs, such as efficiency and research. This would be paid for by auctioning polluting rights in a federal cap-and-trade carbon emissions regime. Grumet also said Obama believes that scaling back subsidies to oil companies should help fund clean-energy industries.

“Sen. McCain’s assertion that his vice president, Gov. Palin, would be handling energy policy in this country is a profound difference because Sen. Obama would make this a personal priority,” Grumet said, adding that an Obama presidency would respect the scientific process when making environmental policy.

McCain

When describing McCain’s policy, Woolsey said the top item is a cap-and-trade program in which large polluters such as utilities would need to purchase pollution rights, which can be bought and sold.

“It is absolutely critical that we understand this is not just a challenge; it’s an opportunity because if we create a new energy economy, we can create 5 million new jobs, easily, here in the United States. It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades. And we can do it, but we’re going to have to make an investment.

He has called for the construction of 45 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years–a goal that Woolsey admitted is difficult to achieve.

McCain adviser James Woolsey argues a point while Obama adviser Jason Grumet listens during an MIT-hosted debate on energy policy.

Woolsey said Obama’s plan is more detailed. But he said that reflects the overall philosophy of McCain, who intends to give states leeway to implement policy.

Woolsey cited examples of the federal government favoring energy-related technologies, or companies in research projects, that failed.

“Now, how–what’s–what’s the best way of fixing (climate change)? Nuclear power,” he said.

One designer storefront worth checking out is Woody’s Minifig Shop, which supplies tiny costume add-ons for LEGO characters:

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

This new storefront system goes head to head with Ponoko, which also offers a printing and shipping service for user-designed goods. Where the two differ is that Shapeways lets purchasers tweak a design before ordering, something that gives them a higher level of control over what they’re buying.

This might be quite appealing for small-time designers who want to sell their creations without having to set up a shipping operation out of the garage. The company is also taking care of the customer service, which keeps designers from having to worry about customer e-mail and phone calls.

3D designers looking to sell their creations have a new place to do so with Shapeways. The site, which launched in July 2008 as part of Royal Philips Electronics’ Lifestyle Incubator formerly acted only as a virtual 3D printing service. Designers could use the service to print out a single design, or a large batch without leaving their house.

Designers can sell their goods without worrying about production or shipping using Shapeways new store system. The items with the pink shopping cart on them mean they are available for purchase.

Now the service does the dirty work of packaging and shipping out what it creates to people who buy designed items. 3D designers simply put together which items they want in their shop, set the prices, then direct potential purchasers there. Meanwhile, Shapeways gets a small cut based on its end of the production and shipping.