Adaiah blog

Acer 10-Inch Android Tablet: Hands On

As expected, Acer announced not one, but , though even the company's CEO, Gianfranco Lanci, admitted that the 5-incher it also unveiled is . All these devices were in scarce supply at Acer's downtown Manhattan product unveiling, but we managed to grab a few moments with the still-unnamed 10-inch Android tablet.

Roughly a half-inch think and somewhat long longer (or narrower—it has a 16:9 aspect ratio) and heavier than the , the Acer tablet runs Android, though it wasn't clear which version. Acer execs said its release schedule for these Android tablets is dependent on when the tablet version of Android (code-named Honeycomb) is ready.

The device offers no front button, but does have power and screen lock on one side, an SD slot on another, and a docking port for the optional, full-sized keyboard dock. There are two cameras, one on the back and another on the front. Acer didn't announce the resolution, though we know the camera on the 5-inch smartphone is 8 megapixels, so it might not be a stretch to assume the same about this device's primary image capture hardware. The company also left out details on the exact screen resolution, though we can report that it's bright, sharp, and highly reflective. There's also a mini HDMI port for playing back content on your . The gray, brushed metal device is easy to old and, unlike the , didn't feel as if it might slide out of your hands.

Powered by an Nvidia Tegra 2 CPU, the tablet has some serious graphics chops. We saw it play a 3D game during the on-stage demo and then watched as it effortlessly handled 1080p HD video streaming from a nearby Acer laptop. Both devices feature DLNA-enabled Clear.fi, Acer's new Wi-Fi-based content streaming and sharing technology. Acer execs said Clear.Fi. will help users create a "personal cloud."

I touched the screen to pause the movie and realized that there was no obvious way to return to the very-Android-like home-screen. Acer representative's explained that there will be a software-based home button when the product ships next year.

The few gestures we were allowed to try on the tablet worked well, but the Acer representative watching over us as we held the device seemed particularly anxious. Before we knew it, he had snatched it back and our time with the Acer 10.1-Inch Android Tablet was over.

J-E-L-L-Uh-Oh: Gelatin, pudding cups spill in Iowa

RUDD, Iowa – Northern Iowa authorities say they've cleaned up a slippery mess after a tipped semitrailer spilled Jell-O and pudding cups across a county road.

The Floyd County sheriff's office says 52 pallets of gelatin and pudding fell from the trailer when its top ripped open near Rudd early Tuesday. It took crews three hours to clean up the debris.

The sheriff's office says 39-year-old semitrailer driver Eric Young of Charleston, S.C., wasn't able to make a turn and went into the ditch where the rig rolled onto its side. Young and 32-year-old passenger Martin Brandon, of Bridgeport, Conn., suffered minor injuries.

The Globe-Gazette in Mason City Damage reports damage to the semitrailer is estimated at $50,000.

___

Information from: Globe Gazette,

B-School Startups: Stationery for the Forgetful Gentleman

Editor's Note: This story is part of Bloomberg Businessweek's occasional series on the world of startups. The series focuses on MBAs and undergraduate business students who developed their ideas or launched their businesses while still in school, and the many ways their schools helped them get their new ventures off the ground. For a look at some business students trying to build their own businesses, check out our slide show.

At the beginning of each semester at the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business (Darden Full-Time MBA Profile) professor Saras Sarasvathy tells her Starting New Ventures class the same thing: "The next seven weeks will be the first seven weeks of your life as an entrepreneur," she says. "It doesn't matter if that is the only seven weeks, but get started on something doable and worth doing." When Sarasvathy gave the familiar lecture in the spring of 2009, Brett Nicol and Nathan Tan werelistening.

At the time, the two were in the midst of on-campus job interviews. After each interview it was common courtesy to send the interviewer a note thanking him or her for the interview opportunity. As they met with more and more potential employers, the list of required thank-you notes grew. "My first thought was 'Mom would be so disappointed in me,' " Nicol says of having a stack of half-written notes on his desk at home. "My second thought was 'There must be a better way.' "

Using Sarasvathy's "seven weeks" lecture as a pep talk, Nicol and Tan started developing an idea for a high-end line of stationery tailor-made for men. They designed a set of cards, found a local printer, and ordered the first round of 50 sets. To ensure the stationery would be masculine enough, they drove to every cigar store in Charlottesville, Washington, and Baltimore, and bought the stores' leftover wooden cigar boxes to use asholders. They called their venture Forgetful Gentleman.

Just>

According to Sarasvathy, whose research of expert entrepreneurs inspired her hands-on teaching style, the best way to start a business is to just start selling. So Nicol and Tan set up a table in the main hallway at Darden and sold to classmates and faculty. Later they sold the sets at the Charlottesville Farmer's Market on Saturday mornings.

Sarasvathy was an early supporter of Forgetful Gentleman. "I truly loved the idea because it was so doable," she says. "I knew from the first moment they walked in with the product that it would work."

In spring 2009, the two applied to the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership/Batten Institute at Darden and by that summer they were part of the 10-week incubator program. The incubator provided office space and equipment, and that summer Forgetful Gentleman officially formed as an LLC.

Darden also providescompanies in the incubator with grants to help start the business. Nicol and Tan received a $1,700-per-month stipend for three months and an $8,100 expense budget. With that funding, the company was able to expand nationally, and in November 2009 the e-commerce store officially launched.

Quality>

The biggest challenge, according to the co-founders, has been finding quality suppliers that meet their expectations for the product. A Forgetful Gentleman stationery set -- ranging in price from $35 to $75 -- includes 12 letterpress-printed cards made out of 100 percent cotton paper, 12 envelopes on paper from the same 15th century Italian paper mill used by Napoleon and Picasso, and four pre-stamped envelopes, all encased in a heat-branded hardwood box with a velvet interior that is modeled after authentic cigar boxes.

Additionally, each set comes with access to an online personal reminder system with customizable text-message and e-mail reminders, and acopy of A Forgetful Gentleman's Guide to Articulate Writing. The book uses a fill-in-the-blank format to make writing notes as easy as possible.

Neiman Marcus began carrying the line in May and the set was selected as a "Top Gift for Him" for the 2010 holiday season. The Forgetful Gentleman stationery is sold in 62 stores, both department stores and specialty boutiques, across 22 states.

In 2010, the first full year of operation, Forgetful Gentleman -- still a two-man operation -- expects to earn $100,000 in revenue. Nicol and Tan are planning to expand the brand to include men's clothing, accessories, video tutorials, a gift-giving service, and an e-magazine. They have also started writing a book. Needless to say, they have great expectations for the company. Says Tan: "We envision Forgetful Gentleman eventually providing a product, service, or educational tool to help bridge the gap between good intentions and action in anyarea of a man's life."

UK Retailer Pulls Toshiba Folio 100 Tablet From Stores

U.K.-based consumer electronics vendor Dixon's Retail on Monday confirmed that is has pulled Toshiba's Folio 100 tablet from store shelves because of high return rates.

The Folio tablet, which started shipping to consumers earlier this month, has been pulled from the shelves of retail stores owned by Dixon's such as PC World. The tablet .

"We have taken the Toshiba Folio off sale temporarily as we have had a high level of returns and we do not want to give our customers a bad experience of what is actually a very good product," wrote Simon Branney, a Dixon's spokesman, in an e-mail.

"We are working with Toshiba to identify what the issue is and hope to have a resolution very soon," Branney wrote.

When contacted, Toshiba Europe could not elaborate on the issue resulting in heavy return rates.

"Toshiba is aware of reports regarding customer returns of Folio 100 in the U.K. We are currently working with Dixon's Retail to evaluate the situation," said Gianluca Dianese, head of strategic marketing for the Europe and Middle East region at Toshiba Europe, in an e-mail.

Toshiba started shipping the Folio 100 tablet in Europe earlier this month. The Folio includes a 10.1-inch screen, and runs Google's Android 2.2 OS. It is powered by Nvidia's Tegra chip, which includes a dual-core Arm processor and a graphics core capable of playing 1080p high-definition video. Depending on the features, Toshiba said the device is priced between €399 and €529 (US$546 and $723).

This is a big setback for Toshiba, which is pushing the Folio 100 as an iPad competitor as it tries to grab share in the fast-growing tablet market. Research firm Gartner has projected tablet shipments to reach 58.4 million in 2011.

The Folio 100 tablet will not ship to the U.S., a spokesman for Toshiba America said in an e-mail on Monday. The company is planning different form factors for the U.S. market, the spokesman said, without providing further details.

Why the Dems Could Lose the Senate Next

NEW YORK –The Democrats’ most unorthodox senators are up for reelection in two years—and all of them could go down to defeat. Samuel P. Jacobs on what would be lost, and the possible death of the big-tent party.

Political obituary writers, sharpen your pencils. The next election cycle could put to death a breed of Democrat, the sort most comfortable on the seat of a tractor, the kind that is willing to attack sacred cows like affirmative action, or balk on the Democratic dogma of being pro-choice. Three of the more colorful examples—Montana’s Jon Tester, Virginia’s Jim Webb, and Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey Jr.—are among the 21 Democratic senators up for reelection in 2102. And their fortunes may well determine whether the party, which already lost a lot of moderates and conservatives this fall, folds its big tent once and for all.

Much of the hand-wringing about 2012 thus far has to do with geography. In 2008, Barack Obama captured conservative states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana, giving Democrats hope that theirhad permanently expanded. In 2010, those states voted for Republicans in droves. Further causing Democrats heartburn: The , long a party stronghold, sent a caravan of Republicans to statehouses, the House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate.

But what’s at stake is more than just the map. The party risks losing the very idea of a different kind of Democrat. If voters continue to punch ballots for the Republican Party in 2012 as they did in 2010—and that’s a big if with President Obama on the ticket next time around—the Democrats are in danger of losing some of their most iconoclastic members.

“If we are monolithic and liberal, then we won’t be the majority party,” says former Rep. Dan Glickman, who served as Bill Clinton’s agriculture secretary, and knows from experience what it’s like to serve as a Democrat from the red state of Kansas. And if Webb, Tester, and Casey are ousted, then the Democrats may be guilty of the same sort of ideological purification they tend to mock when Republicans are the ones doing it.

Tester, the farmer who rode his tractor straight out of Montana to Washington, beat three-term Republican incumbent Conrad Burns in 2006 by a mere 3,000 votes. Weighing in at 300 pounds and possessed of only seven fingers thanks to a childhood encounter with a meat grinder, Tester campaigned on the notion that Montanans should send him to the Senate because he doesn’t belong there. “I don’t look like the other senators, but isn’t it time the Senate looks a little bit more like Montana?” Tester said in one ad. His prairie-raised populism excited liberals from outside the state, who relished sending a man in overalls to Washington to stick it to big business.

Montana voters aren’t unfriendly to Democrats; see, for example, Gov. Brian Schweitzer. But while the state legislature was evenly split 50-50 the year Tester was elected, this fall, local Republicans seized a . Already a number of candidates appear poised to challenge Tester, from the state’s lone House member, Denny Rehnberg, to Bozeman businessman Steve Daines, whohis candidacy Saturday. State GOP officials say former Governor Marc Racicot could return to the state from Washington to run—despite having become a lobbyist in the meantime (after all, Dan Coats of Indiana proved this fall that being a member of that much-maligned profession is no barrier to office). According to Montana Republican Party Executive Director Bowen Greenwood, voters polled on Election Day favored a generic Republican candidate over Tester by a margin of 42 to 35.

In Virginia, Sen. Jim Webb has yet to commit to running for a second term. He toldlast week that he’s "still sorting that out… I'm not saying I'm not." It wouldn’t surprise anyone if Webb, who came to Congress with an Emmy and a number of well-received novels to his name, did step down. For one thing, he hasn’t done too well in the clubby world of the U.S. Senate. Upon arrival, he earned the clucking of , who called Webb a “pompous poseur” and a “boor” after the diffident senator-to-be lashed out at President Bush who had asked after Webb’s son, a soldier deployed in Iraq.

Since then, Webb has proven no less intemperate with members of his own party. This summer, he penned an explosive editorial in , decrying affirmative action and civil-rights legislation that he said unfairly harmed whites. Webb was Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the Navy and, at present, is one of the last Reagan Democrats of prominence in the party. Webb—or any Virginia Democrat—would be running into quite a headwind in 2012. Virginians just unseated three Democratic House members, and former , whose “Macaca” misstep cost him the race against Webb by fewer than 10,000 votes in 2006, would be a formidable opponent in 2012, according to Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling.

Bob Casey, another member of the class of 2006, is another example of the Dems’ endangered species. Casey, whose father was governor of Pennsylvania, is the country’s most prominent pro-life Democrat. Casey Senior famously challenged Bill Clinton’s health-care plan in 1994 because it would finance abortions. Like Webb, Casey is part of a dying breed of Democrat—those who support progressive economic policies but remain socially conservative.

Right now, Casey’sare awful; only 36 percent of voters view him favorably. Republicans just picked up five House seats in Pennsylvania, along with the governor’s office and a new Senate seat. Still, all is not yet lost for the Dems; the state’s weak GOP bench means Casey actually has a better chance than his iconoclastic colleagues of winning a second term two years from now.

The best-case scenario, Democratic strategists say, is that if the electorate is still in a mood to punish Obama, who will head the ballot in 2012, voters might be more forgiving of incumbents who have put some distance between themselves and the president.

“It’s more likely that [Webb, Casey, and Tester] are able to pull the party in their direction than the other way around,” says Joe Trippi, who guided the presidential campaign for Howard Dean, no one’s conservative, in 2004.

Samuel P. Jacobs is a staff reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and The New Republic Online.

Likeandfor updates all day long.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at .