And so the Ultrabook advertising begins. Intel has rolled out one of the first of its campaigns, in which it does a flash-mob style “pop-up theater”. While entertaining, I don’t think that focusing on things that will never happen in the real world is the right idea for competing against the MacBook Air.

Let’s face it, the Ultrabook push is exactly that – something to compete against the Air. The sad reality is that Ultrabooks should have happened a few years ago and never did, so now Windows-based PC manufacturers are trying to catch up to a market where Apple has huge domination.

Take a couple of minutes to watch the campaign in action, then we’ll get back to the points at hand:

Marketing isn’t the only challenge that Ultrabooks have to overcome. Apple’s already knee-deep into forcing the hand of some Chinese manufacturers that are making notebooks which too-closely resemble the Air for Apple’s comfort. In an era where Windows-based PC sales are in steep decline, while Apple continues to thrive, that’s a heavy weight to bear.

Now before you go calling me a fanboy, let me state this very clearly: I want Ultrabooks to do well. I like Ultrabooks. I like Windows 7. I simply think that the transition should have happened earlier, before Apple had such the chance to ingrain itself as deeply as it has. Want proof of how deeply-ingrained it is? Everywhere you looked at CES, people were showing off Ultrabooks. Time and time again, I heard “it looks like a MacBook Air.” The Air is the standard by which Ultrabooks will be judged, and its purely the fault of the industry for allowing that to happen.

There was another great product, not so long ago, that died a fiery death because of poor timing and marketing. It was webOS. You can argue all you’d like that it’s still alive and viable as HP has it today, but the fact is that webOS is dead on any sort of large scale. The victim of delayed timing from Palm, Inc, as well as horrible advertising for the first webOS device, the Pre.

So Intel, I wish you well in this. I honestly do. I hope that we see a market flooded with high-quality, sub-$1000 Ultrabooks and I hope you guys make a mint from it. But your message sucks. It’s wrong. Change it now and show us things that we’ll really do. Show us impressive battery life, coupled with high performance in a slim and sexy package. Show us the things that we care about.

There are new trends in technology seemingly popping up every few weeks and one that has caught our attention are super-focused subscription shopping sites that fit a very narrow niche. We told you about one such company a few weeks ago called Love With Food that sends you a basket of snacks every month. Another service called GuyHaus lets men set up a simple shopping list to ship directly to their doorstep.

But what happens when tech entrepreneurs “grow up” and have families? They start sites like Wittlebee, which comes to you via former MySpace employee and current CEO and Founder of Fine Folks, Inc, Sean Percival.

Percival’s company is funded by the red-hot Science, Inc., a technology “studio” with former MySpace CEO Mike Jones at the helm.

Wittlebee is a subscription service for kid’s clothes, and as Pervical can attest to, kids grow fast thus needing new clothes almost monthly. Here’s what the CEO had to say about the Wittlee launch:

As a parent and a technology entrepreneur, I appreciate any product or service that makes my life easier and gives me more time to focus on my family. Parents today are already pulled in a million different directions, I saw an opportunity to automate shopping for basics by giving families access to our personal shopper mom squad who put together the ideal package of clothing for each child.

Automation Station

Automating purchases that we tend to make on a bi-monthly or monthly basis is all the rage and there’s no sign of slowing down. It’s a trend that Percival has been watching closely, so I asked him what caught his eye:

I have been tracking the subscription commerce trend for several months. I knew I wanted to make an entry into it with something for parents. I like these properties that have a narrow focus because it allows them to really super serve their audience. In most cases the result is a very compelling offering, something you won’t find in retail or on Amazon.com.

By paying $40 a month, you can fill out a simple questionare about the type of style that suits your little one, including their favorite colors and personality. Based on this “profile” of your child, the Wittlebee shoppers will curate a box of clothing for you and ship it right to your door every month. This style of site takes the browsing completely out of shopping and the trend is on fire.

Another trend that Wittlebee is capitalizing on is the rise of Pinterest, which we’ve noted has a huge female audience. Pervical told us that just by adding “pin-it” buttons to the site, the traffic coming back to Wittlebee has been immense. The site also offers a 50% off promo code for first time customers. The code is PINTEREST, of course.

By honing in on a niche audience of shoppers who would rather not have to hit the mall to do their very specific shopping, anyone with passion and vision can set up a site like Wittlebee. While curating these boxes isn’t easy work, it is a sign of the times that big e-commerce sites like Amazon might start losing their luster. Forget searching and long live curation!

➤ Wittlebee

The HTML5 Boilerplate has been around for quite a while now. In fact, it has a history with more than three years of iterative development. Just this past week, the HTML/CSS/JS template hit version 3.0 and is smaller and more useful than ever.

For those not in the developer circle, a boilerplate is simply an easy place to start the coding process. It’s a jumping off point for developers to use when they are starting projects, and the HTML5 Boilerplate in particular encourages standards compliant, cross-browser compatible code.

Certainly, one template can’t and will not work for every single project and developer, so it’s very important for you to feel free to cut up the template into something that works for you. Heck you could even develop your own from scratch.

With all that in mind, the HTML5 Boilerplate is valuable in so many ways. It’s a wonderful learning tool as long as you realize that what you see isn’t required, but recommended. More specifically, It’s cross-browser compatible (with IE specific classes for maximum cross-browser control) and HTML5 ready. It includes best practice site configuration defaults, features mobile browser optimizations, degrades gracefully and has optimal caching and compression rules for grade-A performance. Here’s more details to throw you through the loop:

• Console.log nerfing so you won’t break anyone by mistake.
• Never go wrong with your doctype or markup!
• An optimal print stylesheet, performance optimized.
• iOS, Android, Opera Mobile-adaptable markup and CSS skeleton.
• .clearfix, .visuallyhidden classes to style things wisely and accessibly.
• .htaccess file that allows proper use of HTML5 features and faster page load
• CDN hosted jQuery with local fallback failsafe.
• Think there’s too much? The HTML5 Boilerplate is delete-key friendly. :)

As the site explains, HTML5 Boilerplate “is not a framework, nor does it prescribe any philosophy of development, it’s just got some tricks to get your project off the ground quickly and right-footed.” The key feature of the 3.0 update is making Boilerplate smaller, which means it loads faster than ever and has cut out some of the mess. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’ve never heard of it before. If you have, I’d still recommend taking a peek to see what’s changed!

➤  HTML5 Boilerplate

If rumors are to be believed, then Apple’s next generation of the iPad should be announced on March 7th. iMore reports that a reliable source has spread the information to them and Loop Insight’s Jim Dalrymple has confirmed with a “yep” (as is customary) that the date lines up with what he’s heard as well.

So now, the rest of the speculation begins. Quad-core or dual? LTE or WiFi+3G? There are strong arguments for and against just about ever possible tech spec, but the one thing that we can almost bet on is a more dense display, within the specifications to be labeled as a “Retina Display”.

For the quad-core versus dual-core debate, as well as the LTE vs 3G, it really comes down to battery life. While some, myself included, don’t think that we’ll see an LTE iPad before an LTE iPhone, it could happen with what is rumored to be a larger battery than previous models.

Conventional wisdom, however, would say that Apple will hold off on LTE’s power-draining implementation until things are a bit more refined. With the expanded display you can bet that it’s going to take more battery power and there simply might not be enough juice left at the end of a day to support an LTE radio as well, while still maintaining the lauded battery life of the device.

As for the quad-core versus dual-core? That’s a debate that comes down to a flip of the coin. My money is sitting on a dual-core A6, rather than a quad-core. but we may well be surprised. Again, I’m hedging my bets against power in lieu of battery life and I’m not alone.

At any rate, we’ll be covering the event as closely as possible on the 7th, so mark your calendars. The next question that remains is this – will we see another Apple popup store at SXSW as we did for the iPad 2?

The decade-old tech innovation competition TR35 is expanding to Colombia, MIT’s Technology Review has announced. As we reported, TR35 is also open to applications in Mexico, and will award ten innovators under the age of 35 in each country.

According to its organizers, this new call for applications will run until April 16th, and is open to any young Colombian national or resident working on pioneering tech and innovation projects.

Among its ten winners, the competition will highlight an ‘Innovator of the Year’ and ‘Humanitarian of the Year’. All of them will also have the opportunity to compete in the TR35 global awards next October in Boston.

Opinno, from events to open innovation

While TR35 Colombia is the local edition of MIT’s well-known TR35 awards, it is actually managed through a separate entity, Opinno, which is also the publisher of the Technology Review in Spanish and Portuguese.

With TR35′s expansion to other regions, including Spain and Latin America, MIT hopes to find tech talent that was under its radar, for instance in Colombia. According to Opinno’s founder Pedro Moneo, this country is “one of the most interesting emerging economies in terms of talent and business opportunities in the hi-tech sector.”

“Through TR35, we want to identify the leaders that will guide the rapid technological  transformation of Colombia,” he said. Significantly, the competition is supported by Colombian projects such as the co-working space HubBOG and the local chapter of the Founder Institute (see our previous post).

It is also worth mentioning that TR35 is only one of several initiatives Technology Review and Opinno are launching in the region. Its two-day conference on emerging technology, EmTech, will gain an edition in Latin America in 2012, Moneo hints. Beyond its events, Opinno, also operates several co-working spaces across the region.

According to Moneo, the best way to define Opinno is to describe it as an open innovation network. While events are perhaps the best known part of its activities, its ultimate ambition is to build intelligence hubs to bring talent, startups and corporations closer to help the latter innovate.

Earlier today we reported that the European Commission blessed the Google-Motorola Mobility deal, and we’re learning that the United States has also given its final seal of approval making the deal complete.

According to a Reuters reporter, the approval has been given a few moments ago:

All clear! Google-Motorola deal approved by Dept of Justice. $GOOG

— Poornima Gupta (@PoornimaGupta) February 13, 2012

The deal has been waiting approval since it was first made in August of 2011. There were concerns that the acquisition would give Google an unfair advantage in the mobile space, especially since it would be grabbing over 17,000 patents currently held by Motorola Mobility.

The price for Motorola’s handset division? A cool $12.5B. Google’s CEO, Larry Page, said in August that this acquisition would help “supercharge the Android ecosystem”:

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.

The combination of Google and Motorola will not only supercharge Android, but will also enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences. I am confident that these great experiences will create huge value for shareholders.

Along with Motorola Mobility, Google will be acquiring a few active lawsuits, one of which coming from Apple over a Qualcomm wireless transmission patent license. Apple is being sued by Motorola Mobility as well, over technology used in six of its products.

Covering how Microsoft covers itself is always a fun game. The company’s ad campaigns tend to have extreme qualities. By this I mean that they are either fantastically good, or perfectly laughable. Today we have the second variety.

We’ll start with the following tweet:

Don’t be the guy who screwed up Valentine’s Day. Treat your lady right this holiday by switching to @Office Web Apps ow.ly/92NYA

— Why Microsoft (@whymicrosoft) February 13, 2012

I honestly thought that Microsoft was making a very meta joke – using the holiday to mock the use of the holiday as a talking point. I was wrong. They are serious. So serious that they actually put together a commercial to explain their message. That message, by the way, is that Office Web Apps handle Excel files better than Google Docs. That should have been the tweet, we think.

But they put out the video so that it would be watched, so who are we to rob you of the experience? Enjoy the awkward:

Now, Microsoft is right. Office Web Apps do a fine job at handling Excel files. Google Docs can have issues. Why they decided to make that point in this way, however, baffles. The last piece to this is that the post that Microsoft wrote as a companion to the video, is perfectly fine. To wit: “Don’t lose your mojo by using Google Docs to share documents. Share your information and ideas with Office Web Apps.” Very reasonable.

But the wrapper that Microsoft picked for this ruined the effect. Holidays are a bad promotional idea unless you sell chocolate. We now return you to your regurarly scheduled programming.

For the past hour or so, I’ve been playing with a new Web app called enThread. It’s a photo processing app, of sorts, that runs in your browser, features a drag & drop upload process and is probably powerful enough for the majority of your quick daily edits.

enThread is a new project from Quinton Pike, a guy that you might recognize as the developer behind the music-streaming service Mougg. It seems that Pike went back to the drawing board with enThread, and produced something that I believe will be considerably more useful over time.

The argument for enThread is one of accessibility. Mac users have Preview, which can quickly fix the colors in an image, but any editing that runs more in depth requires firing up iPhoto, Lightroom or some other piece of software. Chances are you already have a browser window open, so enThread is quick to use for simple fixes. For Windows users, the story is much the same. The native apps just don’t do a very good job of subtle edits.

To launch it, just go to the site. enThread gives you access to loads of features, and even a couple of post-process options:

• Hue/Saturation/Lightness
• Brightness/Contrast
• Colors
• Filters
• Process

WIthin each of these tabs you’ll find sliders that let you dial in the settings that you want, then you can choose to undo, compare your photo to the original, reset it to how it started or save and share it.

Saving and sharing gives you the options that you’d expect, but it does require that you’re a registered user. If you are, you’ll get a link to a page with your photo, then Twitter and Facebook buttons for social sharing. Interestingly, from the saved image, you can choose to further modify it if you so desire.

I find myself working from a Chromebook, increasingly. While there are some decent photo editing options online, most of what I need to do centers around quick color correction. Because of that, I can see myself using enThread pretty regularly. It’s a free app, so give it a spin and see what you think.

➤ enThread

It’s been a month since the FBI raid of Megaupload took place, shutting the site down and arresting many of its top employees. One of the released employees is lead programmer Bram van der Kolk, and he spoke with the Sunday Star Times in New Zealand, where he is awaiting potential extradition to the United States.

According to the programmer, Megaupload didn’t see the US-led raid coming but feels like it has a solid defense:

I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it … it doesn’t matter who the opponent is, if it’s the FBI or the American president himself, I’m still very confident we have a very strong case.

Van der Kolk, who is married with a two-year old-son and had never broken the law, told the Sunday Star Times that during his time in jail, he spoke to other inmates and encouraged them to get on the right track:

We were a little out of the ordinary in prison and it’s quite a harsh environment so [Corrections staff] tried to look after us.

Now that he’s out of jail, Netherlands-born van der Kolk is banned from using the Internet and only has access to a home phone to call his mom. While much has been documented about Megaupload CEO Kim Dotcom’s lavish lifestyle, the programmer describes himself as humble and hardworking. He’s also sad to see the site he worked so long on disappear.

The United States is currently going through proceedings to bring all of those arrested in New Zealand to its own soil, so that it can set up its case against the company for over $500M in copyright breach offenses.

Now that kids have traded pocket knives and board games for video games and smartphones, it’s time for the ever-classic Swiss Army knives to evolve into the modern age.

Aside from the 1 terrabyte SSD pocketknife by Victorinox (which makes us drool), the Steady Tool by Gerber is one of the most brilliant combinations I could have ever thought possible. That’s right. I’m talking about a traditional pocketknife with a full-fledged tripod for your smartphone.

Built for the weekend adventurer, the Gerber Steady combines the utility of a multi-tool and the functionality of a camera tripod. It comes equipped with an adjustable cell phone and screw-in camera mount and two foldable legs that serve as a tripod.

The rest of the tool is all Gerber ingenuity – a fine edge blade, a serrated blade, three screwdrivers, a bottle opener, pliers and wire cutters. Steady on down the trail.

As Core 77 notes, this tool really is a sign of the times. It’s a slick way to impress friends and secure a great shot on the fly. And since iPhoneography continues to grow in popularity, this is surely the first of many wonderful, niche gadgets to come.