Whatever your motivation, creating your own audiobook isn’t that difficult. The following will walk you through the steps necessary to record the spoken word, capture it in digital audio, and convert it into the audiobook format.

Choosing a sound location

Finding an acoustically sound location to record your reading sessions is probably the single most important decision you will have to make in this process. Annoying ambient noise, room echoes and outdoor wind can make for a poor recording. Provided you do not have your own private recording studio, a large closet packed full of clothes will prove to be your best bet. The material in the clothes will absorb most of the unwanted background noises as you record.

Record with Apogee MiC and an iPad

Choosing a decent microphone that can produce the sound results you are looking for is the second most important decision you will make. Considering the fact that you will be retreating to your closet to do most of your recording sessions, choosing one that works well with your portable iOS devices is recommended. The Apogee MiC ($199.95, Accessory) works extremely well with both the iPad and the Mac, and has a really great sound to it.  Using any external microphone is preferred over the onboard mic that comes with the iPad.

To record your voice Apogee recommends using Apple’s own GarageBand for iOS ($4.99, Universal). When you first create a project in GarageBand, be sure to select Audio Recording as your instrument. GarageBand can also be configured to record in the background, which comes in handy when you are reading a book from your iBooks library.

Offload recordings to iTunes

As things progress and you continue to read your book you will want to offload your recorded sessions as GarageBand project files organized for each individual chapter. Follow a naming convention that makes sense to you from the start so you don’t get your recorded sessions out of order. To offload your recording from GarageBand on the iPad, you tap on the recording you want to save and then choose to share the file to your iTunes Library on your Mac.  Once the process is complete, you then must tether your iPad to your Mac and open iTunes on your Mac.  Select your iPad and navigate to the Apps tab.  By selecting GarageBand in the File Sharing section, you should see the individual recordings you shared.  Simply save them to your music folder on your Mac.

Edit recorded audio with GarageBand on a Mac

When you are recording, you may have extended sessions of brilliance. But not every session will be so great. Cutting and splicing your recordings together can best be accomplished with GarageBand ($14.99, Mac) on your Mac.  In GarageBand you can cut and splice your recorded sessions to remove any unwanted audio.  So you don’t have to worry too much about being interrupted or flubbing a sentence or two when you are making your original recording.  You can always cut it out later.

Share each chapter’s project as a song

GarageBand is a great tool when it comes to editing multiple tracks, one song at a time, or in this case one chapter at a time. But it is not so great when it comes to organizing multiple songs into an album, or in this case multiple chapters into a book.  Each GarageBand project should be thought of as an individual song.  This means that each book will need to have multiple GarageBand projects, one for each chapter.  Once a chapter is complete, you need to click Export Song To Disk, which is located under the Share menu item.  Repeating this process for each recorded chapter will produce a series of audio files, one file for each chapter.

Bind the chapters into a single audiobook

Audiobook Binder (Free, Mac), available in the Mac App Store, can be used to combine all of your individual chapters into a single audiobook. Simply drag and drop the audio files into Audiobook Binder in the proper order. Once in Audiobook Binder, you can change the chapter titles to be whatever you want them to be.  If you happen to have multiple audio files that comprise a single chapter, you can even combine them at this point. Be sure to edit the author information, book title and add your own cover artwork.  Once everything is set, you simply click on the Bind button to produce the audiobook music file.

And there you have it, you have just learned that GarageBand may have an equally promising future being known as ClosetNararator. Try a practice run through the steps and actually listen to your first chapter before moving forward.  Finding the ideal location and microphone for your needs will prove to be the most difficult aspect of this endeavor. When doing recordings, it pays to invest as much as you can afford in the initial recording, rather than try to fix things later. There is nothing more annoying than to listen to a constant hum when you are trying to hear someone speak.

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A new video mash-up culture

Vine exists because of new smartphone technology but it also replicates older forms of mashup culture. In particular, it mirrors what pioneering hip-hop artists started to do in the 1980s — taking sounds from myriad sources and sharing them through records like Paul’s Boutique and Ready to Die. Those hiphop records are aural tapestries that today stand as monuments to a new form of music and community. In the 2000s, however, copyright collectors came along and sued the rappers — resulting in a drawn-out debate over where to draw a line between culture and intellectual property theft. Hip-hop  largely prevailed but was damaged in the process. Now, a fight over a Vine video last month suggests history may repeat itself but this time, on the video front. The dispute involved the musician Prince using a law called the DMCA to force Vine to take down six-second concert clips posted by a fan. The fan didn’t oppose Prince’s takedown demand, meaning no has ruled on whether a six-second clip actually infringes copyright. But if a court did look at the Vine case, the decision process would lead right through hip-hop.

Hip hop, copyright and six second samples

In the 1990s, hip-hop artists called the sounds they use “samples.” Copyright owners, however, called it theft instead and sued the musicians. The conflicts led to important court decisions about music, but whose principles apply equally to Vine. As the Disco Project explained in a thoughtful analysis of the Prince case, the most relevant precedents involve the Notorious B.I.G. and the Beastie Boys. Both were involved in famous cases involving short samples. In the case of the Notorious B.I.G., a Tennessee court shut down store sales and radio plays of the late rapper’s “Ready to Die” album, and a jury awarded $4 million in damages — all over a three note horn riff. An appeals court, which had earlier written “get a license or do not sample,” upheld the verdict in 2007. As law professor Tim Wu explained at the time, the case and others like it were especially absurd because the copyright owner was not even a musician but a one-man corporation who had obtained the music rights under shady circumstances. Fortunately, in the case of the Beastie Boys, a California appeals court took a more rational approach to the issue and ruled that a six second (the same length as a Vine video!) flute sample on the song “Pass the Mic” didn’t infringe on copyright. The Supreme Court, in 2005, refused to reconsider the decision. The upshot, however, is that today we still don’t know for sure how long a sample can be before it infringes copyright. Twitter declined to comment on whether it believes Vine videos are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” exception, but a source familiar with the company told me that the decision to make the videos six seconds long was not a coincidence.

Chilling our new visual culture

The trouble with Prince’s request to take down the Vine videos is not so much the disappearance of the videos themselves — but instead that Vine and other forms of visual expression could meet the same fate as early hip-hop. When the Beastie Boys released their sample-stuffed 1989 masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique, the law was still in a gray area and no one was suing hip-hop artists. That’s no longer the case. As copyright scholars have explained, the threat of lawsuits and the astronomic cost of clearing samples means, today, no one could make an album like Paul’s Boutique in the first place. And that’s the danger posed by Prince. Right now, we’re enjoying a rich new age of images — everything from Vine videos to BuzzFeed cat GIFs that are shared, recast and then shared again. If lawyers began to throw copyright grenades into this mix, these splendid strains of creativity could be quickly snuffed out. Does this mean that all Vine videos should be fair use? It’s hard to say. People are already using the platform to produce clever and original works of art — the sort of thing copyright law is meant to reward. Likewise, big companies who use Vine for marketing have a case for using intellectual property law to protect their brands. It seems inevitable that these issues will get resolved sooner than later. The biggest task for now, though, is to find a way to do so without resorting to the harsher tools of copyright law, including the $150,000 damage demands that are a common feature of cease and desist letters. Congress is right now reviewing the Copyright Act. The process presents a perfect way to protect and foster this emerging age of visual culture — rather than try to smother it like hip-hop. But let’s give the last word to the rappers (click on the Vine vid below) : (Image by R. Gino Santa Maria via Shutterstock)

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Most of the base components are the same between the two tablets: An Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, IPS display with 1280 x 800 resolution, 1 GB of memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.

The Hisense model only comes with half of the storage capacity as the Nexus 7 — 8 GB vs 16 GB — but does include a microSD card slot for storage expansion. Both devices have front facing cameras while the Hisense model adds a rear, 5 megapixel camera. It also supports mini HDMI out for external displays while the Nexus 7 doesn’t.

I’m planning to check out the Sero 7 Pro at my local WalMart and compare the build quality to a Nexus 7. Assuming it’s comparable, I could see many people picking up one of these tablets at this price.

My other concern would be software updates going forward. Since Hisense isn’t known for Android devices, I’m wondering how quickly the tablet will see Android upgrades in the future. You definitely some piece of mind with this for the Nexus 7 since Google provides the updates directly and quickly.

That same question comes to mind when talking about “Google Edition” phones. Samsung has already announced a $649 version of its Galaxy S 4 that will run stock Android without Samsung’s customizations. Now sources suggest that an HTC One handset will be offered in a “Google Edition” as well. Since Google is selling such devices in the Google Play Store, my guess is that Google itself will push future updates. That hasn’t been made clear, however.

Regardless, many who like the HTC One hardware but don’t like HTC Sense software may have the best of both worlds available soon. We’ll find out this coming week, when HTC is expected to announce an HTC One “Google Edition” smartphone.

With Samsung, and possibly HTC, offering “pure” Android devices, Google’s Nexus line will be interesting to watch. I have a feeling the new Nexus devices will be kept at lower prices with fewer cutting edge features and components if these “Google Edition” phones sell well.

All Android devices saw the Chrome beta browser get a substantial update this week. Note that the beta version is different from the generally available version of Chrome and both can co-exist on your Android smartphone. The beta edition gained full-screen browsing, a new graph showing bandwidth savings when using Google’s data compression feature and automatic language translation when browsing pages in non-native languages.

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The Journal, citing unnamed sources, said Google plans to make use of white spaces, the spectrum between TV transmissions that many governments are allocating for wireless broadband use, as well as satellites and aerial transmitters located on balloons or blimps. Finally, Google is developing low-cost devices and processors that will allow even the most resource-limited populace to take advantage of those networks.

The Journal states Google aims to connect a billion or more people to the internet through the effort. That strikes me as a big exaggeration. If Google is working with the types of technologies the Journal listed, it would be working with very limited capacities. Satellite broadband provides a finite bandwidth at extremely high cost, and aerial platforms would be constrained by their backhaul – you can’t run fiber to a tower suspended in the sky.

White spaces definitely show promise, and Google has already begun trials of the technology in South Africa. Google may even be weighing the use of white spaces in its U.S. broadband strategy. But in most countries there’s a limited amount of spectrum available for white space transmission, and in general its use is limited to rural areas where there’s less chance of it interfering with TV signals. The Journal stated that Google is focusing its efforts primarily in rural areas, but if Google really plans to connect a billion unconnected people, it would also need to hit urban centers.

Still, even if Google’s plans is a quarter as ambitious as the Journal claims, it could have an enormous impact on the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 3G and 4G cellular is practically non-existent, which has led carriers like Airtel to invest heavily in cheaper unlicensed technologies like Wi-Fi, and wireline broadband available only commercial centers.

Using these technologies, Google won’t be able to provide the broadband connections we in the U.S. accustomed to at home, work or on wireless networks, but for millions of people Google could provide their first internet connections.

White space image courtesy of Flickr user Cillian Storm.

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VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger

Both execs, Javier Soltero and Kevin Henrikson, joined VC company Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneurs in residence.

Soltero joined VMware by virtue of its acquisition of SpringSource in 2009 — after having joined SpringSource by virtue of that company’s acquisition of Hyperic. At VMware he was the CTO of SaaS and application services.

Henrickson was senior director of R&D for Zimbra, the open-source email product VMware acquired from Yahoo also in 2009. The dual departures were first reported by TechCrunch.

It was clear last year that VMware was scaling back on applications — which had been a key part of former CEO Paul Maritz’s strategy. It subsequently spun off the Java-based Spring framework along with Cloud Foundry and other assets to Pivotal where they will be part of that company’s universal PaaS push.

Selling off the non-essentials

It’s fairly clear that VMware would like to divest itself of Zimbra, which doesn’t fit into its new IaaS worldview, just as it sold off SlideRocket to Clearslide and Wavemaker Java technology to Pramati, both in March. (Pramati just announced Cloudjee a new company pushing a cloud development platform incorporating Wavemaker technology.)

Early this month, Patrick Chanezon, who led developer relationships for both Spring and Cloud Foundry efforts at VMware, joined Microsoft as director of enterprise evangelism.

We can’t say that VMware didn’t warn us. In January, CEO Pat Gelsinger clearly stated the company’s need to focus and eliminate distractions. At about that same time CTO Stephen Herrod left the company for General Catalyst. Oh, and by the way, Gelsinger will be on hand at Structure 2013 to discuss VMware’s IaaS plans.

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The idea of a operating a quantum computer with a quantum bit — or qubit — based on a phosphorous atom harks back to a vision articulated by Australian Bruce Kane in research published in Nature in 1998. “The realization of such a computer is dependent on future refinements of conventional silicon electronics,” Kane explained in the abstract to his paper. Researchers in Australia have been striving to put Kane’s concept into practice for more than 10 years, the MIT Technology Review article notes, and their latest step is to get information from an agitated electron:

These guys implanted a single phosphorous atom in a silicon nanostructure and placed it in a powerful magnetic field at a temperature close to absolute zero. They were then able to flip the state of an electron orbiting the phosphorous atom by zapping it with microwaves.

The final step, a significant challenge in itself, was to read out the state of the electron using a process known as spin-to-change conversion.

The end result is a device that can store and manipulate a qubit and has the potential to perform two-qubit logic operations with atoms nearby; in other words the fundamental building block of a scalable quantum computer.

Still, the Australians have work to do, according to their paper, which they submitted on Monday:

Future experiments will focus on the coupling of two donor electron spin qubits through the exchange interaction, a key requirement in proposals for scalable quantum computing architectures in this system. Taken together with the single-atom doping technologies now demonstrated in silicon, the advances reported here open the way for a spin-based quantum computer utilising single atoms, as first envisaged by Kane more than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, researchers in England have done work of their own on quantum entanglement involving phosphorus atoms.

Quantum computers from Canada have seen some commercial adoption, with Lockheed Martin and a Google-initiated lab signing up for D-Wave Systems quantum computers. If competitors from England and Australia come onto the scene, further innovation could follow and cause prices to fall.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user isoga.

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In the eight years since John Ioannidis dropped the bomb that “most published research findings are false,” pockets of activist scientists from both academia and industry have been forming to address this problem, and it seems this year that some of those efforts are finally bearing fruit.

The research auditors

One interesting development is that a group of scientists is threatening to topple the impact factor, which ranks studies based on the journals in which they appear. This filter for quality research is based on journal prestige, but some scientists and startups are beginning to use alternative metrics in an effort to refocus on the science itself (rather than the publishing journal).

Taking a cue from the internet, they are citing the number of clicks, downloads, and page views that the research gets as better measures of “impact.” One group leading that charge is the Reproducibility Initiative, an alliance that includes an open-access journal (the Public Library of Science’s PLOS ONE) and three startups (data repository Figshare, experiment marketplace Science Exchange, and reference manager Mendeley). The Initiative isn’t trying to solve fraud, says Mendeley’s head of academic outreach William Gunn. Rather, it wants to address the rest of the dodgy data iceberg: the selective reporting of data, the vague methods for performing experiments, and the culture that contributes to so many scientific studies being irreproducible.

The Initiative will leverage Science Exchange’s network of outside labs and contract research organizations to do what its name says: try to reproduce published scientific studies. They have 50 studies lined up for their first batch. The authors of these studies have opted in for the additional scrutiny, so there is a good chance much of their research will turn out to be solid.

Whatever the outcome, though, the Initiative wants to use this first test batch to show the scientific community and funders that this kind of exercise is value-adding despite the costs, which are estimated to be $20,000 per study (about 10% of the original research price tag, depending on the study).

Gunn likens the process to a tax audit: not all studies can or should be tested for reproducibility, but the likely offenders may be among those that have high “impact factors,” much like high-income earners with many deductions warrant suspicion.

A stumbling block may be the researchers themselves, who like many successful people have egos to protect; no one wants to be branded “irreproducible.” The Initiative stresses that the replication effort is about setting a standard for what counts as a good method, and finding predictors of research quality that supersede journal, institution or individual.

The plumbers and librarians of big data

While the Reproducibility Initiative is trying to accelerate science’s natural self-correction process, another nascent group is working on improving the plumbing that serves data. The Research Data Alliance (RDA), which is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, is barely a few months old, but it is already uniting global researchers who are passionate about improving infrastructure for data-driven innovation. “The superwoman of supercomputing” Francine Berman, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, heads up the U.S. division of RDA.

The RDA is structured like the World Wide Web Consortium, with working groups that produce code, policies for data interoperability, and data infrastructure solutions. As of yet there is no working group for data integrity, but it is within RDA’s scope, says Berman. While the effort is still in its infancy, the broad goals would be to come up with a way to make sure that the data contained in a study is more accessible to more people, and also that it doesn’t simply disappear at a certain point because of, say, storage issues.  She says with data it’s like we’re back in the  Industrial Revolution, when we had to create a new social contract to guide how we do research and commerce.

The men who stare at data

You can build places for data to live and spot-check it once it’s published, but there are also things researchers can do earlier, while they’re “interrogating” the data. After all, says Berman, you’re careful around strangers in real life, so why jump into bed with your data before you’re familiar with it?

Visualization is one of the most effective ways of inspecting the quality of your data, and getting different views of its potential. Automated processing is fast, but it can also produce spurious results if you don’t sanity-check your data first with visual and statistical techniques.

Stanford University computer scientist Jeff Heer, who also co-founded the data munging startup Trifacta, says visualization can help spot errors or extreme values. It can also test the user’s domain expertise (do you know what you’re doing and can you tell what a complete or faulty data set looks like?) and prior hypotheses about the data. “Skilled people are at the heart of the process of making sense of data,” says Heer. Someone with domain expertise who brings their memories and skills to the data can spot new insights, and in this way combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets. Context, in the form of metadata, is rich and omni-present, Heer argues, as long as we’ve collected the right data the right way. Context can aid in interpretation and combat the determinism of blindly collected and reported data sets.

The three-pronged approach — better auditing, preservation and visualization — will help steer science away from the iceberg of unreliable data.

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The Globes piece estimated that Better Place would need another four years and $500 million to reach break even. Better Place just raised $100 million back in November 2012, with much of it coming from Israel Corporation. Before that deal, Israel Corp owned about a third of the company and held a $160 million loss.

If Better Place files for bankruptcy, it will be a sober end for a startup that was founded by the charismatic Shai Agassi in an attempt to get the world’s drivers off of gas-powered cars. Better Place’s business model was built around an electric car with a swappable battery, and the installation of both battery swap stations and battery chargers around a designated area. Customers pay for the electricity to charge the car via a subscription service (like cell phone minutes) and the electric cars themselves were supposed to be highly subsidized.

However, the plan took more money and more time than originally expected. The company aimed too broadly, and when it finally decided to highlight its flagship roll out in Israel, sales to Israeli customers were slow going. Better Place ousted its founder and CEO Agassi late last year, and shortly after that Agassi left the company. The company’s following CEO also left after three months.

Along with Israel Corp, Better Place has raised money from GE, UBS, VantagePoint Venture Partners, Lazard Asset Management, Morgan Stanley, Agassi himself, and others. Agassi told me in February of this year that he still believed in the business model of swappable batteries and subscriptions for electrons.

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Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon.

AWS versus everyone else

While none of these rivals refer to themselves as AWS killers (smart move), they all see Amazon as the #1 cloud player and the top threat to their own cloud ambitions. When pressed, VMwarez senior vice president Matthew Lodge acknowledged that “everyone is competing for the same IaaS dollars.” Everyone meaning Amazon and the rest of the cloud contenders.

VMware, which saw, um, limited uptake of the vCloud Director that it pushed service providers to use as the basis for their own clouds, said its new vCloud Hybrid Cloud Services will compete with AWS on price, at least in some cases, but offer other enterprise-worthy goodies.

Said Lodge: when you factor in “hidden costs” in Amazon’s dedicated instances, the playing field levels out. “They charge for I/O and we don’t. They charge for VPN endpoints, load balancers and firewalls and we don’t,” he said.

Rackspace president Lew Moorman has a similar message. “Now that public cloud is 3 to 4 years old in reality, applications are bigger and more complex and people are starting to see tradeoffs to using public cloud only,” Moorman told me Thursday.

Structure 2012: Lew Moorman – IT Cloud Lead, Intel Corporation

“When public cloud came out and you could suddenly provision a server in a minute when it used to take 3 months, those were intoxicating advances … you get drunk on them but when things settle in there are tradeoffs,” he said.

For examle, what’s great for test-and-dev environments is not always optimal for production workloads, where public cloud costs quickly add up.

Once someone hits the $25,000-a-month milestone, “it’s time to rethink all-public-cloud deployment,” he said.

Joyent trumpeted a similar message this week when it announced a raft of new compute instances it says will be  competitive with AWS.  Joyent, like Rackspace, offers public, private and hybrid cloud options.

Corporate cloud purchases are about more than price and technology

Having said all that, almost every cloud vendor alive will also add that price isn’t the compelling reason to move to cloud. Face it: when it comes to IT-sanctioned technology purchases, it’s not just about the price or the technology. IT departments have established procedures and guidelines for deployment and cloud providers will have to accommodate them.

“Most public clouds — AWS etc. — don’t offer enterprise-class security, compliance or performance SLAs to users,” said Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream, which positions itself as an enterprise cloud provider. ”Some public clouds offer supplemental services that dedicate equipment to enterprises/government, but they are generally not multi-tenant  and so deliver less efficiency.”

That means they remain suited for test and dev, for backup, SaaS apps and apps with no performance criteria, Rogers said via email.

Is Amazon’s head start insurmountable?

Granted all of this is self serving talk, but having sat through a raft of CIO panels this week, it is clear to me that some of these points ring true with this constituency.  But, if we’ve learned anything from the past 6 years of its existence, AWS won’t stand still. It now offers several services of its own and through an alliance with Eucalyptus that break down some barriers between a customer data center and its cloud. But until you can run AWS instances on your own infrastructure, AWS will remain a public cloud provider in a world where more workloads could flow to a hybrid model.

Structure 2010: Werner Vogels – CTO and Vice President, Amazon

AWS has a huge head start and lots of customers. But we’re early in the cloud era. IDC says less than 5 percent of the world’s total IT budget is now devoted to public or private cloud. That leaves a lot of upside for Amazon and its competitors.

There’s time for Amazon to offer more hybrid options and for rivals to catch up. It’ll nothing if not an interesting market over the next few years.

Who wants to bet that this topic of hybrid vs. public cloud deployment will come up at Structure 2013 next month where both Moorman and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will take the stage?

Pretty safe money, I’d say.

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