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Monday, April 8, 2013

Attack at Coptic Funeral Increases Interfaith Tension in Egypt

As my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported, violence erupted on Sunday after unknown assailants attacked a funeral at Cairo’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, killing one and injuring scores at the seat of the Coptic Church and home of its spiritual leader, Pope Tawadros II.

The clashes occurred during a funeral for four Christian victims of sectarian fighting that took place over the weekend outside Cairo, and were an escalation in the interfaith tension in Egypt since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak more than two years ago. The earlier fighting, in the town of al-Khusus, also killed one Muslim.

This weekend’s clashes represented the first major sectarian incident since Mohamed Morsi, a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood, became president last year. In response to the violence on Sunday, state news media reported that Mr. Morsi said, “I consider any aggression against the cathedral an aggression against me personally.”

But the violence has also revived anxieties over how religious minorities and Egyptians who do not share the religious and political beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood will fare under a government headed by a president from within their ranks. Several leaders and high-profile allies of the Brotherhood have demonstrated a willingness to engage in sectarian rhetoric, especially when video cameras are rolling. The group has also frequently highlighted what it has called attempts by Christians to undermine Egypt’s democratic process in Arabic-language materials published on the Internet.

One high-profile Brotherhood supporter who has frequently engaged in sectarian saber-rattling is Safwat Hegazi, a popular pro-Brotherhood speaker who introduced Mr. Morsi at his first presidential rally in the Delta city of Mahalla last year.

According to a video of that rally translated and subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, an Arabic media watchdog founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer, Mr. Hegazi introduced Mr. Morsi by telling the crowd that he would usher in a “United States of Arabs” and “Islamic caliphate” with its capital in Jerusalem.

As Mr. Morsi sat on stage nearby smiling, Mr. Hegazi continued: “Our capital will not be in Cairo, Mecca or Medina; it will be in Jerusalem, God willing. And our cry shall be, ‘Millions of martyrs march to Jerusalem.’ ”

A singer then serenaded the crowd, and Mr. Morsi, with a song whose refrain was: “Banish sleep from the eyes of all the Jews. Come, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas.”

A December video showing Safwat Hegazi sending a message to the Egyptian Coptic Church that supporters of President Mohamed Morsi would “spill the blood” of anyone who challenged his legitimacy.

As violent clashes took place outside of the presidential palace last December, Mr. Hegazi turned his ire toward Egypt’s Christian minority, which makes up about 10 percent of its 85 million people, sending a message by way of a large crowd of Morsi supporters.

Mr. Hegazi told the cheering crowd that 60 percent of those engaged in fighting outside the palace were Christians, sent there at the instigation of secular opposition leaders, and then issued a threat to the church: “We say, and I say, to the church: You share this country with us, you are our brothers in this nation, but there are red lines, and one red line is the legitimacy of Dr. Morsi. Whoever splashes water on that, we will spill his blood.”

During an interview on a Brotherhood-linked satellite television channel, another prominent Brotherhood figure â€" Mohamed el-Beltagy, a charismatic senior member who is popular with many of the organization’s younger members â€" repeated the claim that most of Mr. Morsi’s opponents outside the palace last December were Christians.

Mohamed El-Beltagy, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that Christians made up the majority of rioters outside the presidential palace.

Mr. Hegazi’s sectarian rhetoric predates the 2011 uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak and the 2012 election that elevated Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to power. In 2009, he used his television program on an Islamic religious network to urge viewers to boycott Starbucks Coffee, in part because of the religious and ethnic background of the woman he believed was portrayed in the company’s logo. Video of the segment has also been posted to YouTube by Memri, which has translated and subtitled it.

Video posted online showing Safwat Hegazi urging viewers to boycott Starbucks because its logo portrays Queen Esther, “queen of the Jews in Persia.”

“The girl you see is Esther, the queen of the Jews in Persia,” he said. “Can you believe that in Mecca, al-Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Kuwait and all over the Islamic world hangs the picture of beautiful Queen Esther, with a crown on her head, and we buy her products”

In 2009, Mr. Hegazi was blacklisted from entering the United Kingdom, but his star has risen since Mr. Morsi became president, and last September he was appointed to a seat on Egypt’s official human rights council.

In response to last weekend’s violence, Basil al-Dabh, an Egyptian-American reporter for The Daily News Egypt, an independent English-language newspaper, began translating articles from official Web sites affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and posting the translations to a blog, MBinEnglish.

He also initiated a Twitter feed to link to his translations, @MBinEnglish.

Among his findings have been multiple articles from Ikhwan Online, a Brotherhood Web site that has reported on acts of Christian trickery and sabotage at election time, during both the presidential race last summer and a referendum on a new constitution last December. The Web site accused Christians of destroying ballot boxes, disguising themselves in Islamic headscarves to stump for Mr. Morsi’s opponents and transporting dozens of nuns to a polling station to try to swing the vote.

Mr. Dabh said he had collected articles from Brotherhood-affiliated Web sites for several months out of a sense of “general frustration in the vast difference of rhetoric” between the group’s statements in English and Arabic. In an e-mail to The Lede, Mr. Dabh said he focused on articles “with strong sectarian undertones that the group wouldn’t dare publish in English.”

“It’s important to us that we only provide translations (as literal as possible),” he wrote. “This isn’t a platform for us to convey opinions. Our only goal is to remove the massive filter that exists between the Brotherhood’s Arabic and English media.”

Mr. Dabh is not the only person to notice a difference between the statements released by the Brotherhood in Arabic and English. Two days after protests at the American Embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11, 2012, and an attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the official English-language Twitter account of the Muslim Brotherhood posted an update expressing relief that no diplomats in Cairo were harmed. The Twitter account of the United States Embassy in Cairo responded with a sarcastic rebuke.



Attack at Coptic Funeral Increases Interfaith Tension in Egypt

As my colleagues David Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim reported, violence erupted on Sunday after unknown assailants attacked a funeral at Cairo’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral, killing one and injuring scores at the seat of the Coptic Church and home of its spiritual leader, Pope Tawadros II.

The clashes occurred during a funeral for four Christian victims of sectarian fighting that took place over the weekend outside Cairo, and were an escalation in the interfaith tension in Egypt since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak more than two years ago. The earlier fighting, in the town of al-Khusus, also killed one Muslim.

This weekend’s clashes represented the first major sectarian incident since Mohamed Morsi, a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood, became president last year. In response to the violence on Sunday, state news media reported that Mr. Morsi said, “I consider any aggression against the cathedral an aggression against me personally.”

But the violence has also revived anxieties over how religious minorities and Egyptians who do not share the religious and political beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood will fare under a government headed by a president from within their ranks. Several leaders and high-profile allies of the Brotherhood have demonstrated a willingness to engage in sectarian rhetoric, especially when video cameras are rolling. The group has also frequently highlighted what it has called attempts by Christians to undermine Egypt’s democratic process in Arabic-language materials published on the Internet.

One high-profile Brotherhood supporter who has frequently engaged in sectarian saber-rattling is Safwat Hegazi, a popular pro-Brotherhood speaker who introduced Mr. Morsi at his first presidential rally in the Delta city of Mahalla last year.

According to a video of that rally translated and subtitled by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, an Arabic media watchdog founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer, Mr. Hegazi introduced Mr. Morsi by telling the crowd that he would usher in a “United States of Arabs” and “Islamic caliphate” with its capital in Jerusalem.

As Mr. Morsi sat on stage nearby smiling, Mr. Hegazi continued: “Our capital will not be in Cairo, Mecca or Medina; it will be in Jerusalem, God willing. And our cry shall be, ‘Millions of martyrs march to Jerusalem.’ ”

A singer then serenaded the crowd, and Mr. Morsi, with a song whose refrain was: “Banish sleep from the eyes of all the Jews. Come, you lovers of martyrdom, you are all Hamas.”

A December video showing Safwat Hegazi sending a message to the Egyptian Coptic Church that supporters of President Mohamed Morsi would “spill the blood” of anyone who challenged his legitimacy.

As violent clashes took place outside of the presidential palace last December, Mr. Hegazi turned his ire toward Egypt’s Christian minority, which makes up about 10 percent of its 85 million people, sending a message by way of a large crowd of Morsi supporters.

Mr. Hegazi told the cheering crowd that 60 percent of those engaged in fighting outside the palace were Christians, sent there at the instigation of secular opposition leaders, and then issued a threat to the church: “We say, and I say, to the church: You share this country with us, you are our brothers in this nation, but there are red lines, and one red line is the legitimacy of Dr. Morsi. Whoever splashes water on that, we will spill his blood.”

During an interview on a Brotherhood-linked satellite television channel, another prominent Brotherhood figure â€" Mohamed el-Beltagy, a charismatic senior member who is popular with many of the organization’s younger members â€" repeated the claim that most of Mr. Morsi’s opponents outside the palace last December were Christians.

Mohamed El-Beltagy, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that Christians made up the majority of rioters outside the presidential palace.

Mr. Hegazi’s sectarian rhetoric predates the 2011 uprising that toppled Mr. Mubarak and the 2012 election that elevated Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to power. In 2009, he used his television program on an Islamic religious network to urge viewers to boycott Starbucks Coffee, in part because of the religious and ethnic background of the woman he believed was portrayed in the company’s logo. Video of the segment has also been posted to YouTube by Memri, which has translated and subtitled it.

Video posted online showing Safwat Hegazi urging viewers to boycott Starbucks because its logo portrays Queen Esther, “queen of the Jews in Persia.”

“The girl you see is Esther, the queen of the Jews in Persia,” he said. “Can you believe that in Mecca, al-Medina, Cairo, Damascus, Kuwait and all over the Islamic world hangs the picture of beautiful Queen Esther, with a crown on her head, and we buy her products”

In 2009, Mr. Hegazi was blacklisted from entering the United Kingdom, but his star has risen since Mr. Morsi became president, and last September he was appointed to a seat on Egypt’s official human rights council.

In response to last weekend’s violence, Basil al-Dabh, an Egyptian-American reporter for The Daily News Egypt, an independent English-language newspaper, began translating articles from official Web sites affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and posting the translations to a blog, MBinEnglish.

He also initiated a Twitter feed to link to his translations, @MBinEnglish.

Among his findings have been multiple articles from Ikhwan Online, a Brotherhood Web site that has reported on acts of Christian trickery and sabotage at election time, during both the presidential race last summer and a referendum on a new constitution last December. The Web site accused Christians of destroying ballot boxes, disguising themselves in Islamic headscarves to stump for Mr. Morsi’s opponents and transporting dozens of nuns to a polling station to try to swing the vote.

Mr. Dabh said he had collected articles from Brotherhood-affiliated Web sites for several months out of a sense of “general frustration in the vast difference of rhetoric” between the group’s statements in English and Arabic. In an e-mail to The Lede, Mr. Dabh said he focused on articles “with strong sectarian undertones that the group wouldn’t dare publish in English.”

“It’s important to us that we only provide translations (as literal as possible),” he wrote. “This isn’t a platform for us to convey opinions. Our only goal is to remove the massive filter that exists between the Brotherhood’s Arabic and English media.”

Mr. Dabh is not the only person to notice a difference between the statements released by the Brotherhood in Arabic and English. Two days after protests at the American Embassy in Cairo on Sept. 11, 2012, and an attack on the United States consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, the official English-language Twitter account of the Muslim Brotherhood posted an update expressing relief that no diplomats in Cairo were harmed. The Twitter account of the United States Embassy in Cairo responded with a sarcastic rebuke.



Microsoft Sheds Old TV Baggage to Focus on New Xbox

Microsoft is planning to reveal details about its new Xbox video game console at an event in May, as the games industry prepares for a new generation of hardware that it hopes will lift sales.

Microsoft is currently aiming to hold the event May 21, though it was previously scheduled for April and could change again, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans, who declined to named because the plans are confidential. The Redmond, Wash., company is eager to announce the new console before E3, the big video game conference in Los Angeles beginning June 11.

Paul Thurrott, a blogger who focuses on Microsoft, first mentioned the May date in a Web talk show last week, and the technology news site the Verge confirmed the event on Monday.

Wayne Hickey, a spokesman for Microsoft, declined to comment.

Details about the new Xbox, which is code-named Durango, are sparse so far, although people familiar with the product say it will advance the boundaries of realism in game graphics, as all new game consoles typically do. Microsoft plans to release the product in time for the holiday season this year.

The games industry is craving new hardware to help lift the business out of a multiyear sales slump. Sony, Microsoft’s closest competitor in the game console business, has already announced plans to release its new console, the PlayStation 4, which features a new motion-sensing controller, this holiday season. Nintendo’s new game system, Wii U, went on sale late last year, but sales have been disappointing so far.

When it introduces the new console, Microsoft is also expected to make a renewed push to make the Xbox the central hub for all forms of entertainment in the living room, not just games.

On Monday, the company broadcast its intention to focus on the Xbox as its conduit for television programming when it announced plans to sell Mediaroom, its technology for Internet-based television services offered by telecommunications and cable companies, to Ericsson, the Swedish provider of telecommunications and video equipment.

Mediaroom was the most recent incarnation of a long-running effort by Microsoft to claw its way into living rooms through partnerships with cable companies. Those initiatives stretch back to the mid-1990s, when interactive television was a big buzz phrase in technology and media circles.

Mediaroom wasn’t exactly a flop â€" it powers 22 million set-top boxes in 11 million subscriber households through pay television services like AT&T U-verse â€" but it never achieved anything like the grand ambitions that Microsoft once set.

Xbox, meanwhile, has shown far more promise as a way to consume Internet content on televisions. The company has sold 76 million Xbox 360 consoles and has 46 million Xbox Live members, a good portion of whom access video on the service through partners like Netflix, Hulu and an array of video channels that Microsoft itself has assembled directly from programmers.

In a blog post, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of marketing, strategy and business for Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, said the company’s decision to sell Mediaroom, “allows Microsoft to commit 100 percent of its focus on consumer TV strategy with Xbox.”



Footage of Bomb Blast in Damascus

Video from Syria shows the aftermath of the explosion that tore through central Damascus on Monday, killing at least 15 people and wounding more than 50, bringing the country’s two-year-old civil war to the heart of the city and its Central Bank, schools, shops and office buildings.

As my colleagues Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad report from Damascus, the bombing followed claims by the authorities that they had cleared the eastern Ghouta area near Damascus of rebels who are fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. No group immediately claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack.

Syrian broadcaster Ikhbariya’s video from the scene of the explosion.

Hosein Mortada, a Lebanese journalist working in Syria for Press TV, recorded this video:

Mr. Mortada of Press TV posted this footage online

My colleague Liam Stack collected other videos for Watching Syria’s War.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gave a higher figure of 19 casualties, saying 15 were civilians and 4 from the regime’s forces.

Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.



Updates: Reaction to the Death of Margaret Thatcher

The Lede is providing updates and reaction to the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on Monday.

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One on One: Jason Merkoski and the View of E-Books From the Inside

Technology companies will occasionally acknowledge they were wrong â€" just last week Apple had to apologize to its Chinese customers â€" but you hardly ever hear them express doubt about the glorious future they are building for us all.

So it is refreshing to see Jason Merkoski, a leader of the team that built Amazon’s first Kindle, dispense with the usual techo-utopianism and say, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.” And this: “If you’re willing to overlook the fact that Big Brother won’t be a politician but an ad man and that he’ll have the face of Google.” Mr. Merkoski even has mixed feelings about Amazon, which he left two years ago. “It’s hard to love Amazon,” he notes. “Not the way we love Apple or a bookstore.”

Those comments are from “Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading,” which Sourcebooks will publish Tuesday as, of course, an e-book. A physical edition will follow this summer. It’s a mixture of an insider’s tale, quirky analysis and informed speculation about our onrushing digital destiny, told with an appealing ambivalence that should give it a wide readership. What follows is an edited Q&A with the 41-year-old author.

Q.

You write that “Amazon, Apple and Google are a bit like medieval fortresses in their own ways. They’re secretive like China or Japan before they opened up to Westerners, or like Tibet or Mecca, closed to foreigners.” Are they afraid that if people knew what was going on, the peasants might storm the gates

A.

There are two issues about secrecy here: social responsibility and intellectual property. As far as social responsibility goes, let me just say this: These companies have entire buildings filled with lawyers. They aren’t there to come up with new lawyer jokes. They are there, in part, to keep people like me from even answering this question. That said, I think if people were given a chance to spend a day looking inside Amazon or Apple’s veil of secrecy, most of them would be fascinated â€" although some might boycott.

Q.

And with intellectual property

A.

The biggest tech companies are secretive to the point of clinical paranoia because there’s an all-out arms race in innovation. If one company knew what another was doing, it could one-up the other with newer, better, cheaper features. That said, tech companies cross-pollinate all the time, with their ideas and worker-bees who flit from hive to hive, from Apple to Amazon to Google.

Q.

You also say, in discussing the tech companies’ power: “What moral or literary sensibilities do the executives at Amazon have What about the retailers at Barnes & Noble or Google or Apple You have to ask yourself whether you trust these men.” Well, do you

A.

There are three dimensions of trust here. Do I trust retailers not to censor books, do I trust them with my personal data, and do I trust them to curate great books for me to read Frankly, I don’t trust the executives at any e-book retailer when it comes to censorship. I know many of them. If push came to shove, I think most of these execs would rather pull e-books from the store, effectively censoring them, if that would avoid bad press. These are major retailers, not your quirky corner bookstores. They’re manned by former management consultants in clean shirts and pressed Dockers, not eccentric book-lovers with beards and cats.

Q.

And your personal data

A.

I do trust them with my identity. These companies are obsessed with safeguarding privacy. The worst they’re going to do is show me more ads.

Q.

And to recommend things

A.

Not yet. When it comes to book recommendations, retailers have the literary sensibilities of a spreadsheet â€" they’ll just recommend the most popular books to me, or books that other people also bought, but they know nothing of the soul and sparkle of a great book. I hope this changes over time.

Q.

For an e-book developer you certainly seem attached to your physical books. Even after trying to cull them, you still have thousands of them.

A.

I’m a sentimentalist. I’ve got many more books than friends, and I think I always will. Some are such a part of my life that I can’t get rid of them.

Q.

In some ways, “Burning the Page” is a celebration of the physical book even as it is looking ahead to its extinction.

A.

Reading is great, but I don’t know whether you need paper and ink for it. You’re going to get so much more from e-books because they bring your friends and family into the margins of your reading experience. They will be literally on the same page with you.

Q.

That gives me the creeps.

A.

We can lament the older experience of reading, because that’s what we were raised with. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Technology has a way of shifting, and we’re adaptable. That’s our genius: we do adapt.

Q.

Physical books were convenient, cheap, easy to use, attractive, practically indestructible. What will the great advantages of e-books be

A.

In 20 years, the space of one generation, print books will be as rare as vinyl LPs. You’ll still be able to find them in artsy hipster stores, but that’s about it. So the great advantage of e-books is also their curse; e-books will be the only game in town if you want to read a book. It’s sobering, and a bit sad. That said, e-books can do what print books can’t. They’ll allow you to fit an entire library into the space of one book. They’ll allow you to search for anything in an instant, save your thoughts forever, share them with the world, and connect with other readers right there, inside the book. The book of the future will live and breathe.

Q.

You also write about what will be lost.

A.

I found a book at my grandmother’s house that was inscribed by my great-grandfather. I learned what his original last name was â€" before he changed it. That was an interesting link to my past. We’re going to lose that sort of trace of ourselves if we go all digital.

Q.

Another surprising thing you said was, “E-books aren’t ready for children yet.”

A.

Giving children an e-book at this point might not be that much better than plunking them down in front of a TV, especially if they’re reading the e-book on a multifunction device with instant messages, games and other distractions. Better they should be outside and engaged with the world.

Q.

Why did you leave Amazon

A.

Working at Amazon was like getting an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. at the same time. It was an incredible education. These were the smartest people I ever worked with. But Amazon had a dark side as well, as if it were the mean stepmother in a fairy tale. There was this push to get great products out to consumers. It makes a lot of teams very haggard. Amazon is held together by adrenaline, spreadsheets and people running around like crazy.



One on One: Jason Merkoski and the View of E-Books From the Inside

Technology companies will occasionally acknowledge they were wrong â€" just last week Apple had to apologize to its Chinese customers â€" but you hardly ever hear them express doubt about the glorious future they are building for us all.

So it is refreshing to see Jason Merkoski, a leader of the team that built Amazon’s first Kindle, dispense with the usual techo-utopianism and say, “I think we’ve made a proverbial pact with the devil in digitizing our words.” And this: “If you’re willing to overlook the fact that Big Brother won’t be a politician but an ad man and that he’ll have the face of Google.” Mr. Merkoski even has mixed feelings about Amazon, which he left two years ago. “It’s hard to love Amazon,” he notes. “Not the way we love Apple or a bookstore.”

Those comments are from “Burning the Page: The Ebook Revolution and the Future of Reading,” which Sourcebooks will publish Tuesday as, of course, an e-book. A physical edition will follow this summer. It’s a mixture of an insider’s tale, quirky analysis and informed speculation about our onrushing digital destiny, told with an appealing ambivalence that should give it a wide readership. What follows is an edited Q&A with the 41-year-old author.

Q.

You write that “Amazon, Apple and Google are a bit like medieval fortresses in their own ways. They’re secretive like China or Japan before they opened up to Westerners, or like Tibet or Mecca, closed to foreigners.” Are they afraid that if people knew what was going on, the peasants might storm the gates

A.

There are two issues about secrecy here: social responsibility and intellectual property. As far as social responsibility goes, let me just say this: These companies have entire buildings filled with lawyers. They aren’t there to come up with new lawyer jokes. They are there, in part, to keep people like me from even answering this question. That said, I think if people were given a chance to spend a day looking inside Amazon or Apple’s veil of secrecy, most of them would be fascinated â€" although some might boycott.

Q.

And with intellectual property

A.

The biggest tech companies are secretive to the point of clinical paranoia because there’s an all-out arms race in innovation. If one company knew what another was doing, it could one-up the other with newer, better, cheaper features. That said, tech companies cross-pollinate all the time, with their ideas and worker-bees who flit from hive to hive, from Apple to Amazon to Google.

Q.

You also say, in discussing the tech companies’ power: “What moral or literary sensibilities do the executives at Amazon have What about the retailers at Barnes & Noble or Google or Apple You have to ask yourself whether you trust these men.” Well, do you

A.

There are three dimensions of trust here. Do I trust retailers not to censor books, do I trust them with my personal data, and do I trust them to curate great books for me to read Frankly, I don’t trust the executives at any e-book retailer when it comes to censorship. I know many of them. If push came to shove, I think most of these execs would rather pull e-books from the store, effectively censoring them, if that would avoid bad press. These are major retailers, not your quirky corner bookstores. They’re manned by former management consultants in clean shirts and pressed Dockers, not eccentric book-lovers with beards and cats.

Q.

And your personal data

A.

I do trust them with my identity. These companies are obsessed with safeguarding privacy. The worst they’re going to do is show me more ads.

Q.

And to recommend things

A.

Not yet. When it comes to book recommendations, retailers have the literary sensibilities of a spreadsheet â€" they’ll just recommend the most popular books to me, or books that other people also bought, but they know nothing of the soul and sparkle of a great book. I hope this changes over time.

Q.

For an e-book developer you certainly seem attached to your physical books. Even after trying to cull them, you still have thousands of them.

A.

I’m a sentimentalist. I’ve got many more books than friends, and I think I always will. Some are such a part of my life that I can’t get rid of them.

Q.

In some ways, “Burning the Page” is a celebration of the physical book even as it is looking ahead to its extinction.

A.

Reading is great, but I don’t know whether you need paper and ink for it. You’re going to get so much more from e-books because they bring your friends and family into the margins of your reading experience. They will be literally on the same page with you.

Q.

That gives me the creeps.

A.

We can lament the older experience of reading, because that’s what we were raised with. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. Technology has a way of shifting, and we’re adaptable. That’s our genius: we do adapt.

Q.

Physical books were convenient, cheap, easy to use, attractive, practically indestructible. What will the great advantages of e-books be

A.

In 20 years, the space of one generation, print books will be as rare as vinyl LPs. You’ll still be able to find them in artsy hipster stores, but that’s about it. So the great advantage of e-books is also their curse; e-books will be the only game in town if you want to read a book. It’s sobering, and a bit sad. That said, e-books can do what print books can’t. They’ll allow you to fit an entire library into the space of one book. They’ll allow you to search for anything in an instant, save your thoughts forever, share them with the world, and connect with other readers right there, inside the book. The book of the future will live and breathe.

Q.

You also write about what will be lost.

A.

I found a book at my grandmother’s house that was inscribed by my great-grandfather. I learned what his original last name was â€" before he changed it. That was an interesting link to my past. We’re going to lose that sort of trace of ourselves if we go all digital.

Q.

Another surprising thing you said was, “E-books aren’t ready for children yet.”

A.

Giving children an e-book at this point might not be that much better than plunking them down in front of a TV, especially if they’re reading the e-book on a multifunction device with instant messages, games and other distractions. Better they should be outside and engaged with the world.

Q.

Why did you leave Amazon

A.

Working at Amazon was like getting an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. at the same time. It was an incredible education. These were the smartest people I ever worked with. But Amazon had a dark side as well, as if it were the mean stepmother in a fairy tale. There was this push to get great products out to consumers. It makes a lot of teams very haggard. Amazon is held together by adrenaline, spreadsheets and people running around like crazy.



Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm

Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm

WHEN he was a Yale Law School student, Reuben Grinberg wrote one of the first academic papers about Bitcoin, a novel virtual currency that uses sophisticated cryptography to validate and secure transactions that exist only online.

Bitbills are physical representations of the virtual currency known as bitcoins.

When Mr. Grinberg, now a lawyer in the financial institutions group of the Manhattan law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, first learned about bitcoins, they were selling for 10 cents. Now, after the latest price surge that began in January, the cost of a bitcoin on an exchange that converts them to dollars is something like $140, and the collective value of all bitcoins has passed a billion dollars.

That is a lot of coin in any form, and the billion-dollar milestone has turned the once-obscure online currency into a media sensation. Had Mr. Grinberg invested just $100 back then, today his investment would be worth ...

Ah, but that way madness lies. “People are buying bitcoins because the price is going up,” he said in an interview. “That is the classic indicator of a bubble.”

The question of whether the increase represents real value or is simply evidence of a bubble is at the heart of the current media frenzy. Bitcoin began in January 2009, a project introduced by a programmer or group of programmers who worked under the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

The project represented a breakthrough in using software code to authenticate and protect transactions without resorting to a centralized bank or government treasury. In that way, Bitcoin became a peer-to-peer system. That comes in pretty handy for people who do not want their transactions monitored.

In conversations about the project with scholars who study it, the word that comes up as often as “bubble” is “genius.”

For one thing, though bitcoins are software code, you can’t simply copy them like a music file. The process of creating the coins â€" “mining” them in the project’s allusion to something tangible like gold or silver â€" involves computer work that, crucially, verifies Bitcoin transactions.

“It is the most successful digital currency already right now,” said Nicolas Christin, the associate director of the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Even if bitcoins become worth nothing, it has succeeded more than any academic proposals for a digital currency,” he said in an interview from Okinawa, Japan, where he was attending a conference on financial cryptography that included a number of papers on bitcoins.

People buy the coins for cold hard cash on exchanges. Completing those purchases, as well as cashing out, typically involves re-entering the world of traditional financial transactions, with fees and loss of anonymity.

But Bitcoin’s managers say the currency has proved so secure that despite the fact that exchanges and virtual wallets, where people keep their bitcoins, have been hacked, the coins themselves have not been forged.

So why the sudden run-up in value Some point to the recent crisis over Cypriot banks, which made a currency beyond the control of governments more tempting. And as with a run-up in anything tradable â€" tulip bulbs, dot-com shares â€" there is also the hypnotic logic that says the price went up today, so that means it will go up tomorrow.

Some observers and investors also make the case that bitcoins are in fact undervalued. Their argument goes like this. The total value of the world’s economic activity is enormous. There are certain transactions that are ideal for bitcoins because the currency is relatively anonymous and does not need to be processed by a financial organization or a government.

If bitcoins become the dominant currency in some small niche of the world economy â€" that is, those people who do not want their transactions easily tracked or who want to send money back home from abroad â€" then they will become quite valuable indeed. This outcome has been neatly summarized by the financial blogger Felix Salmon as making bitcoins an “uncomfortable combination of commodity and currency.”

The price increase becomes a question of supply and demand. Unlike other currencies that can adjust the money supply depending on economic conditions, bitcoins have a supply that is fixed. The amount of new coins that can be minted was plotted at the outset with a finite number of coins at the end, roughly 21 million in the next century. Today, the rate is 25 new coins every 10 minutes; for the first four years, it was twice as many, 50 every 10 minutes.

The slowdown in the rate new coins are added, which was programmed into bitcoins, may also help account for the spike in prices.

So far, excluding investors and day traders, the main use of the currency appears to be illicit activity. There are the online gambling sites that use bitcoins. And the anonymous online marketplace Silk Road, which accepts only bitcoins, is “overwhelmingly used as a market for controlled substances and narcotics,” according to a paper on Silk Road written by Mr. Christin of Carnegie Mellon.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 8, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Bubble or No, This Virtual Currency Is a Lot of Coin in Any Realm.

H.P. Shakes Up the Server

Hewlett-Packard is planning to commercially release a new kind of server. With the server, it is angling for an entirely new look at how this multibillion-dollar business runs, by creating products more rapidly  and having more semiconductor companies provide chips.

Plans for the server were announced 16 months ago as Project Moonshot. H.P.’s chief executive, Meg Whitman, has talked about it as a major source of new growth many times since then. Until now, however, the scope of H.P.’s ambition has not been clear.

The server uses low-power Intel chips. H.P. says it uses 89 percent less energy and is 80 percent smaller than today’s typical server. It is also said to cost 23 percent as much overall.

But this is not the only reason it is noteworthy. Instead of using chips from only Intel or one other supplier, as it has in the past,  H.P. is partnering with many chip suppliers. Besides Intel, representatives of Advanced Micro Devices, Applied Materials, Texas Instruments and Calxeda, which makes low-power chips normally used in mobile phones, were at an event in New York where H.P. showed off the machine.

And instead of coming up with a new version of the server every couple of years, H.P. envisions making new versions of this one every three to six months.

The servers are shaped like cartridges that snap into an enclosure. Each kind of server will have different performance characteristics, and customers â€" mostly companies with very large data centers â€" will be able to mix and match servers to suit their needs.

Forty-five of the cartridges fit into an enclosure, and anywhere from 10 to 40 enclosures can be fit into a standard server rack.

“It’s a software-defined server, with the software you’re running determining your configuration,” said David Donatelli, the general manager of H.P.’s server, storage and networking business. “The ability to have multiple chips means that innovations will happen faster.”

H.P. is addressing a growing market as more computing takes place online, either through cloud computing, watching videos on phones or making and sending documents. This market has already eaten away at H.P.’s margin in servers by offering alternatives. Facebook, among others, has been pressing H.P. to come up with designs that reflect changing realities.

Savvis, a big corporate cloud computing company owned by Century Link, is one of the first customers, along with several educational institutions. H.P. is also running many of its own Web sites on the servers.

“This is built to a new world,” Mr. Donatelli said, adding that he expected to see other manufacturers enter the market with variations on the theme of lower power machines that are configurable to many sorts of chips. The company would maintain its edge, he said, through innovations in things like networking, control software and configuration inside the enclosures.

Mr. Donatelli, who sold more than $12 billion of older servers in 2012, said he did not think the old models would go away soon. Sales in volume of the new versions may not even occur until 2014, he said. But he was clear that a change was under way.

“It’s the Web changing the way things get done,” he said.



The OpenDaylight Project Is Open Source Networking, Corporate Style

Now, this is news: A bunch of big and powerful companies may have something in their common interest that also benefits their customers.

The Linux Foundation, which has managed the creation of that popular computer operating system, is working with a number of large technology companies to develop an open source project around software-defined networking.

S.D.N., as it is called, is important both in lowering costs and increasing the capabilities of the globe-spanning data center networks that have come to dominate the computer industry. These networks, which carry Internet traffic, hold personal and corporate data and manage cellphones, among other things, have largely been cobbled together from older equipment and use traditional practices.

S.D.N., which involves putting more complex software atop standardized components, would make it easier to improve network performance and create new applications.

Members of the group include Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, I.B.M. and VMware, along with Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Citrix, Microsoft, Arista Networks, NEC and Red Hat. Each company will contribute some of its technology to the open source effort, called the OpenDaylight Project. As with many other open source projects, the final specifications of the product will be determined by a steering committee elected by members.

In some ways, OpenDaylight looks like a more efficient version of the kind of industrial standards body that governs the creation of radio systems for cellphones. While ostensibly impartial, these bodies have often been highly political and could delay technology deployment for years while companies fought to have their technology incorporated into common use.

The companies in the project have spent billions of dollars already on S.D.N. VMware, for example, paid $1.23 billion for an S.D.N. company called Nicira, while Cisco has financed its own S.D.N. company.

The OpenDaylight participants may have decided it’s just more efficient to get to work, and work on the parts of their technologies that mean something to customers, than to fight each other over details. OpenDaylight could also lower customer resistance to adopting S.D.N., as there will be fewer concerns about incompatible technologies.

“We were contacted, based on our ability to structure the project,” said Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation. “These folks are pooling their research and development costs. The value is at the higher levels (of software), rather than who has the best file format.”

The first code for the project is supposed to be released in the third quarter this year. This will include basics like a controller, a virtual overlay network, and switch device enhancements. These are far from trivial creations: One contribution from Big Switch alone has over 200,000 lines of software code.

The real test of whether this works like an open source project will come over a longer time. It will depend on how well it attracts new members and independent developers and how fast it creates new products.



Daily Report: Thinking Like a Start-Up, at Yahoo

Since taking the reins at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer has been trying to convince customers and employees that there is still life in a company that Silicon Valley long ago left for dead, Jenna Wortham and Nicole Perlroth write in The New York Times on Monday.

Yahoo, an Internet pioneer, missed the boat on social networks and mobile devices as the new gateways for information and, in recent years, had been losing advertisers and employees to rivals like Facebook and Google.

Critical to Ms. Mayer’s turnaround effort is infusing fresh blood and ideas into the company by buying creative start-ups and integrating them into the company. So since she took over last July, she has been on a splashy shopping spree, spending tens of millions of dollars to acquire six start-ups.

But in many ways, it has been a tough sell.

In part, that is because of the past problems with acquisitions. Yahoo’s neglect of Flickr, a pioneering photo service that was the Instagram of its time, and Delicious, an early social bookmarking tool that predated Twitter’s rise, are prominent examples of the company’s mishandling of promising acquisitions.

These days, too, Ms. Mayer has to compete against the deep pockets of competitors like Twitter, Google and Facebook, which are also trying to buy great technologies and hire top talent.

Still, there is evidence that she is making inroads.

Increasingly, entrepreneurs say, she is getting personally involved in acquisitions, focusing particularly on mobile-minded engineers. She is also trying to reverse Yahoo’s reputation as a company that acquires talent and innovative technologies and then lets them wither.

Last month, Yahoo made headlines when it acquired Summly, a newsreading mobile app started by a 17-year-old in England, for an undisclosed sum. In October, it acquired Stamped, a mobile recommendation service.

Robby Stein, who sold Stamped to Yahoo, said he was willing to take a chance on the company given Ms. Mayer’s solid track record at Google, where she helped perfect Web search and was largely credited with the clean aesthetic of the Google home page.

“After conversations with Marissa and others, it became very clear that this was a unique moment in time where we could have a phenomenal impact and affect millions of people,” said Mr. Stein, a former Google employee himself, who worked alongside Ms. Mayer on Google’s mail products. “There are few opportunities like that.” (The New York Times Company was a small investor in Stamped.)

Mr. Stein said he was now concentrating on building a “major mobile development center in New York” for Yahoo. He is determined to imbue it with the ethos of an agile, lean start-up, not as an outpost of a large corporation.



Web Site Answers Question of What to Do

Seeking to Outdo Google in Searching for Events

Staying around town over the weekend and your dinner plans have fallen through Turning to the printed page might not turn up many attractive alternatives, unless you live in a big city like New York, London or Paris and have access to magazines like Time Out or Pariscope. A Google search could present the opposite problem: too many events in too many places at too many times.

That is the proposition behind a new Web site called Daybees, which went live in Britain last month and plans to expand to the United States and other countries soon.

Daybees bills itself as “the world’s largest events search engine,” with a database of more than 1.5 million happenings of all kinds, whether Bon Jovi concerts or bake sales.

Daybees is one of the growing number of so-called vertical search engines, which aim to carve out a niche for themselves in the lucrative online search business, an area dominated by Google and coveted by other Internet giants like Microsoft and Facebook.

In areas like online shopping, travel or real estate, vertical search sites are well established. But Daybees maintains it is the first site, at least in the English-speaking world, to offer such a comprehensive listing of entertainment options without being tied into any commercial arrangements with the organizers.

While 1.5 million might sound like a lot of events, Daybees lets people fine-tune their searches for things to do by keyword, by location or by time and date. And Daybees argues that its results are more focused than those turned up by Google.

“I love Google,” said Gary Morris, the founder and chief executive of Daybees. “I use it umpteen times a day. But if I want to find an event that’s taking place at a certain time on a certain day, 2,000 feet from my front door or wherever, it’s impossible.”

“I was relying a lot on concierges and locals for information,” he added. “And what I found was that people’s knowledge of local events was not very good.”

While companies like Ticketmaster operate online listings, these tend to be limited to events with which the companies have commercial arrangements. Daybees says it is independent, and gets no commissions â€" at least not yet â€" though it does offer links to Web sites that sell tickets.

Independence comes at a price. So far Daybees, set up with an investment of about $1 million from Mr. Morris and Andrew Molasky, a partner and director, earns no revenue.

Not only does it not accept commissions, it also has eschewed advertising. Mr. Morris, a Briton with a background in the television business, and Mr. Molasky said advertising was a possibility, along with partnerships with ticket-selling firms, but added that they wanted to establish the site first.

“It doesn’t mean we don’t have a profit motive,” said Mr. Molasky, a Las Vegas real estate developer with a background in the entertainment business. “Our approach is, if you build it, it will come.”

That approach has fed the imaginations of countless start-up founders â€" and dashed the dreams of almost as many.

Vertical search is a hot area, with more and more ventures seeking to cash in on people’s desire to tailor search engines to specific needs.

The growth of vertical search has been driven by the spread of mobile Internet use, which has increased demand for customized, localized information, rather than the more extensive lists of results turned up by general search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing.

But Google has not stood still, fine-tuning its search engine and rolling out an ever-growing number of vertical offerings of its own, like online shopping and videos. Often, these are linked to other Google services like maps.

Analysts say that in Europe, where Google is especially strong, with more than 90 percent of the search market, compared with about three-quarters in the United States, it is particularly difficult for vertical search engines to establish themselves.

Indeed, the European Commission, in its antitrust investigation of Google, is looking into whether Google favors its own services in its search results, to the detriment of would-be rivals.

“Their ability to build scale or users has to be quicker than Google’s ability to innovate and incorporate such features,” said Chris Whitelaw, chief operating officer of the British arm of iProspect, a digital marketing agency. “I think Daybees probably has a window of opportunity, but they need to use it, otherwise Google will pinch their lunch.”

For many start-ups, including vertical search firms, getting on the radar screen of Google, Facebook or another Internet giant is exactly the point. That way, even if revenue proves difficult to generate, there is always the possibility of another way to cash in â€" a takeover.

“For some of these companies, the business model seems to be, How can we best annoy Facebook” said Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer of Greenlight, a search advertising agency in London.

Mr. Morris and Mr. Molasky say their focus for now is on building the business. They developed the algorithms that drive the search engine in-house, with a small team of engineers.

The site lists some American events, and Daybees plans to have an American-focused site within six months, Mr. Molasky said. The name Daybees, he said, comes from the fact that “we are all busy bees, and it’s about filling your day.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 8, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeking to Outdo Google In Searching for Events.

For the High Seas, a Better Floating Computer

Liquid Robotics, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of oceangoing sensor networks, on Monday releases a new model of its seagoing computer. It is larger, faster and can carry more sensors. Just as important, it incorporates lessons its engineers have learned about how to make the Internet function in the real world, and not just within the confines of pristine data centers.

The craft, called the Wave Glider SV3, is about 40 percent longer than its predecessor, and it can carry 100 pounds of gear instead of 40 pounds. That’s long enough to take another row of improved solar panels, so the robot’s ingenious wave-powered propulsion system can be augmented with a low-power thruster. Its predecessor, the SV2, could manage a maximum speed of 1.5 knots. The new model can do 2.5 knots, carrying in its horizontal computer rack a bigger array of sensors, computers and radios that send data back to shore.

The initial customers include oil and gas companies interested in mapping the ocean floor and monitoring oil leaks. Scientific researchers have used these kinds of computers to measure midocean algae blooms, changes in temperature and salinity on the ocean’s surface, and tracking sharks and whales. The Navy is also a customer, for stuff nobody is allowed to talk about.

The craft may be pokey, but they are relentless. Since launching the SV2 in late 2011, Liquid Robotics and its customers have sailed 200 of the floating machines 300,000 nautical miles, including a trip from California to Australia.

Both versions rely on computers and communications systems made from modified cellular telephone semiconductors. Some of the data they gather is processed on board, and they can also be sent instructions to change course or share information.

Liquid Robotics’ chief scientist is John Gage, the inventor of the Java programming language and a longtime luminary at Sun Microsystems. The most interesting advance for him in the new model is how the company is learning to link networks of Wave Gliders to work during hurricanes or when one craft floats off by itself for a couple of days.

“Networking is so different in the real world,” Mr. Gage said. “Bandwidth can be wide open or a soda straw. If something goes off in a data center, you assume it’s dead, or a human can come and fix it; that is not true here, where things can be working but away from the network. It’s a fascinating problem in ambiguity.”

Mr. Gage said he was giving many presentations to other makers of sensor networks, so the Internet can be better adjusted to the real world.



Today’s Scuttlebot: Not-So-Private Messages, and Facebook’s New Phone

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Friday, selections include speculation about Sheryl Sandberg leaving Facebook and where she might go, a Web site that may have been one of the Facebook chief's early efforts and investors giving Zynga a vote of confidence when it starts hosting online gambling in Britain.

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