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With former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller apparently out of the picture, Yahoo is close to settling on two other directors from Carl Icahn’s dissident slate.

Icahn, who had been seeking to grab control of Yahoo’s board, agreed ahead of a shareholder meeting to a deal that gave him just three seats on the board.

To make room for the new appointments, Yahoo is expanding its board from 9 to 11 members, while Icahn replaced Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick, who stepped down from Yahoo’s board. Icahn, who was pushing for Yahoo to rekindle deal efforts with Microsoft, owns around 5 percent of Yahoo shares.

Icahn himself was appointed earlier this month, with two other spots set to be announced Friday.

Correction, 12:15 p.m. PDT:
Fixes the backgrounds of Biondi and Meyer, which had been transposed.

AllThingsD reported on Tuesday that Yahoo is likely to choose two members of Icahn’s dissident slate–Frank Biondi and Edward Meyer. Meyer is a former head of the Grey Global advertising firm, while Biondi is a former Viacom CEO (I originally had their backgrounds reversed).

In August, I rented a Ford Fusion from Hertz. When I saw a Microsoft logo under the dashboard, I suspected trouble ahead. Sure enough, it seems that poor design choices, so common in the computing world, have migrated to Ford
cars.

The third strike was the rearview mirror. The interior of the car slopes up in the back. Thus, anyone looking in the rearview mirror can barely see an elephant standing behind the car.

When it comes to automobiles, I’m a newbie. While I can get from point A to point B, I wouldn’t know a carburetor if it sat next to me on the subway. But how much do you need to know about cars to play the radio?

The final answer? Push and hold the radio’s phone button for about 5 or 10 seconds. That turns off the radio. Being a techie, I had tried pushing in the power button on the radio and holding it for 10 seconds, but didn’t think to try it with other buttons too.

Things aren’t going well at Ford Motors.

I pushed more buttons, and more, and more. Nothing turned off the radio; in fact, nothing would get it to play AM or FM or satellite radio. I could put a CD in the dashboard, but couldn’t get it to play. The radio insisted on answers to the phone questions and without them it wouldn’t do anything else.

So, I called Hertz.

The automaker just reported that September sales were down 34.6 percent compared with the same month a year ago. For the first half of 2008, Ford posted net losses of $8.6 billion.

After listening to the radio a bit, something drove me to hit the phone button. Why? I don’t know. There were two cell phones in the car, but the phone section of the radio wanted something from me that I didn’t have. It was asking all sorts of questions that I didn’t know the answer to. So, I gave up and turned the radio off.

The last car I rented, a Toyota, had an input jack in the dashboard. With the right wire, it was a simple thing to plug one end into the dashboard and the other end into the headphone jack on the MP3 player. I was a happy camper in Toyota-land.

The nonfunctional radio was all the more annoying because I couldn’t play my MP3 player through the car stereo.

But, it didn’t go off.

Ford blames a weak economy and a tight lending market. But there may be another factor at work–unhappy customers.

The person at Hertz had never dealt with a radio that refused to turn off before. He went to search for the user guide (car people call it an owners manual) and called back. We got nowhere. He suggested turning off the car (rebooting to a techie), but I was in the middle of a crowded highway on a long trip so that wasn’t an option. Then the Hertz rep was nice enough to call a Ford dealer and call back.

The Ford Fusion user guide said the car could do the same thing and had a picture of where the input jack was. But the picture looked nothing like the dashboard. It didn’t look anything like any part of the car. I searched every inch of the dashboard and the entire front half of the car. No stereo input jack.

Next time I rent a car, no Fords.

Improved notifications and sync on iPhone. Reliability of new email notifications and syncing of contacts and calendar with MobileMe have both been improved. To get the best MobileMe experience on your iPhone or iPod touch, you should be running iPhone Software 2.2 or later.

Push was part of the initially tragic launch of MobileMe in 2008–a launch so poorly implemented that the word “push” was removed from descriptions of MobileMe until synchronization between computers and mobile devices (i.e.
iPhone and
iPod Touch) would perform at an acceptable level.

Easy file sharing. iDisk now makes it even easier to share files that are too big to email. Simply select a file in the iDisk web app and click the Share File button to generate an email with a download link. You can also optionally add password protection and set an expiration date for the link. For more details, view this tutorial.

Apple distributed an e-mail recently to MobileMe subscribers that detailed some improved features, but the biggest news from that e-mail was the fact that push is back.

Faster syncing with Mac and PC. Changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac (Address Book and iCal) or PC (Microsoft Outlook) are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. As a result, your contacts and calendars update faster across all your devices. To take advantage of faster syncing, be sure you’re running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (Mac) or MobileMe Control Panel 1.3 (Windows).

Over the past few months, we have been working hard to make MobileMe the best service it can be. Here is a summary of the improvements and performance enhancements that have recently been completed.

Better web app performance. We have also improved the overall performance of the web apps at me.com including faster start time in Calendar and searching in Contacts. For more details, see this support article.”

Read Apple’s letter to MobileMe subscribers below and note the additional information about file-sharing using iDisk, which was previously announced a few weeks ago.

Now that push is in business again, syncing with Macs or PCs is faster. Any updates that you make to contacts or calendars on your
Mac in iCal or Addressbook, or on your PC using Microsoft Outlook are automatically and rather quickly pushed to the cloud. Conversely, any updates made to MobileMe data at me.com, or on an iPhone or iPod Touch is pushed back your Mac or PC. Finally, all your contacts and calendars will update across your devices much faster than previously.

“Dear MobileMe member:

In order for all of this to work properly, you must be using Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 or the MobileMe PC Control Panel 1.3. The iPhone or iPod Touch must have firmware 2.2 or later.

The Technical Support Working Group (TSWG) , a group funded mostly by the Department of Defense, awarded a contract to Black-I Robotics on July 1 to provide two working versions of the robot to be tested out by the military and one version to be used in a Homeland Security capacity at Logan Airport in Boston, according to a report from the Associated Press.

The tragedy catalyzed Hart to speak out publicly about the lack of proper body armor and other defensive equipment available to military men and women in Iraq. Since 2005, Hart has also maintained a blog chronicling the failures and successes of the Iraq war, as well as injustices going on elsewhere in the world.

(Credit:
Black-I Robotics)

Black-I Robotics makes an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) called the LandShark that can be used as a platform to disable bombs, provide reconnaissance, and carry wounded soldiers from the battlefield. The LandShark robot can also be used at home in the U.S. as an aid to first responders for search-and-rescue, firefighting, Hazmat, and SWAT efforts, and even in agriculture, according to a company statement.

The LandShark UGV robot.

“We believe UGV chassis should be thought of as Jeeps which can then be modified for specific missions,” the company said in a statement.

To that end, Black-I Robotics uses some open-source software and off-the-shelf hardware in conjunction with its own proprietary technology. The different modules that customers can have added to the LandShark platform include plows, radios, arms, and trailers (demonstrated in this company video).

The Tyngsboro, Mass.-based company was founded in 2006 by Brian Hart, whose son, John Daniel Hart, was killed in an unarmored Humvee near Taza, Iraq, in 2003.

A robotics company founded by a father who lost his son to the Iraq war has garnered an $800,000 contract with the U.S. military.

But he took his concern one step further by trying to develop a robust robot that can be made cheaply and thus be provided to more soldiers for protection.

That’s a tenet the 23-year-old Michigan native–who recently climbed the YouTube charts with a rap video on the Large Hadron Collider–embraced long ago in choosing a career as a science writer. She tips the hat to her dad, who was annoyed by the results of her career aptitude test in high school that sought to place her in a particular field.

“I had hoped this (rap) would go a little farther than the last and people would learn something about the LHC,” she said. “But no way did I expect it to go this far.”

Further determined to bring together the worlds of art and science (and the cool kids with the geeks) McAlpine, aka “alpinekat” started writing rap songs to help explain scientific principles, a sort of School House Rock meets Bill Nye the Science Guy with a hip-hop twist.

“I guess that’s probably the highest honor,” she said, adding that she’s made the video downloadable from both YouTube and TeacherTube.

Her first rap was about Michigan State’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, where she was a summer intern. She notes that it was loosely based on Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” mostly for the “Back to the lab again yo” line. She wrote the second one on neurochips while working as an intern for the American Physical Society. She turned that rap into a video and put it up on YouTube.

(Credit:
Cristina Jimenez )

McAlpine, who splits her time working for CERN between London and Geneva, put the Large Hadron Rap up on YouTube at the end of July. But its viewership numbers didn’t take off until about a week or so before the LHC’s September 10 launch date. (The LHC has since been shut down until spring due to a malfunction that caused a helium leak.) YouTube put the rap on its home page as a featured video and then CNN and a flood of other media outlets started to notice, she said.

McAlpine prefers the Large Hadron Rap to her earlier works because she brought on a talented outsider–Will Barras, the brother of one of the CERN communications interns–to lay the beats. In all, the video took about 35 to 40 hours to write and produce, McAlpine estimated. Of course, that didn’t include the time it took to clear the filming of the video down in the LHC cavern. In response to her request, the head of the press office wrote, “I heard you were trying to bring rappers into the Atlas (detector) cavern.” She said she sent him back the lyrics for review and explained the “rappers” were mere interns, “no one really risque.”

Next up for McAlpine: a rap on the results of the LHC experiments, which she promises in the first LHC rap will “rock you in the head.”

It’s been “one of the best PR efforts attached to the LHC,” said James Riordon, media relations head and McAlpine’s former boss at the American Physical Society. Riordon, who encouraged McAlpine to turn the neurochip rap into an MP3 and video, added that not only is she a ham willing to “put her nerdiness out there,” but her raps and other writings are engaging, informative, and accurate.

And people apparently just couldn’t get enough. “When I put up the Large Hadron Rap, 600 people had seen the neurochip rap (embedded below),” said McAlpine, whose formal musical training is limited to high school band. “And now, last I checked, (the neurochip rap) had over 10,000 views.”

Response to the rap video, for the most part, has been overwhelming positive, even among physicists. A few, however, “think that particle physics is far too serious to be featured in a rap video,” McAlpine said. Many of the YouTube comments, she added, are from those worried about black holes.

Kate McAlpine poses for a shot inside the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector, which is now the focus of her communications work for CERN.

You can put Kate McAlpine in a giant particle accelerator 300 feet underground. You can even put her in a rap video. Just don’t put her in a box.

But the best responses, McAlpine said, have been requests from teachers who want to show the rap video in their classrooms.

McAlpine didn’t hit the big time, however, until the third aforementioned piece, “Large Hadron Rap,” which, in simple-but-not-dumbed-down terms, explains the particle physics experiments to take place at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, where McAlpine has been interning in various writing and communications capacities. The rap video–featuring her fellow CERN interns dancing in the gigantic particle accelerator some 300 feet underground on the French-Swiss border–has been viewed on YouTube more than 3.3 million times and has triggered almost 1,000 viewer comments.

“They’re trying to put you in a box,” she recalls her father saying. But they didn’t succeed. (Read: her dual degree from Michigan State University in professional writing and physics and an excerpt from her personal statement. “I have pitched my camp at a crossroads: the intersection of science and writing.”)

The more Apple continues to patronize Bill Gates, albeit gently and cleverly, the more it risks appearing to embrace just a tinge of smugness. (And what brand does that remind you of?)

If Microsoft manages to create at least an aura of underdoggery, the company and its ad agency will be seen as some of the brightest communicators to have ever survived the Large Hadron Collider Experiment.

As I said in my last post on this subject, this campaign is not aimed at techies. It is not even designed to sell products today. It is solely there to help you find some positive disposition toward the Microsoft brand.

The greater constituent of good communication isn’t information, but rather emotion. And the dominant emotional effect of this involving, funny, and distinctive piece of work is to give Microsoft the possibility of looking like a somewhat cuddly underdog.

Having bumped into each other at Shoe Circus, the two protagonists decide to walk the tightrope and make a road movie.

How many companies have been honest enough to admit their faults? How many would publicly declare they lost touch with the customers? How many would reach for self-deprecation in doing so? And would anyone have ever suggested Microsoft might be one of those companies?

But you have to be a little crazy to attempt a radical repositioning of Microsoft’s image. And no one at the company is sane enough to think the duckling will become swanlike overnight.

It isn’t just that they might not have created great products. They have lost sight of real, ordinary people–those who, like the family in this episode, have had slightly crotchety, loopy grannies wandering around their house for the last 12 years.

I still can’t quite get out of my head that one 30-second version of the greatest Apple ad ever made–not the “1984″ thing, but rather the utterly brilliant “Here’s To The Crazy Ones”–actually ends with a shot of Jerry Seinfeld.

In this episode, Bill and Jerry decide that they will commune with normal human beings. A fine idea for many in the tech world, some might say. In the middle of some truly heartening and funny absurdity, the courage that went into the writing makes the eyes and ears commune with a strange sense of the unusual.

My Las Vegas 51’s baseball cap goes off to the people at ad agency Crispin, Porter and Bogusky who persuaded Microsoft, in the person of Bill Gates himself, to admit to at least some of the company’s lesser judgments.

In answer to Bill’s questioning why they’re attempting to reconnect with real people, Jerry says, “Why, Bill? Because as we discussed, you and I are a little out of it. You’re living on some kind of moon house hovering over Seattle like the Mother Ship, and I got so many
cars, I get stuck in my own traffic.”

Take a look at the 4.5-minute version of Gates and Seinfeld’s “Road to Somewhere 2.” In the first installment, the Kafkasesque “Shoe Circus,” Jerry Seinfeld looked as if he had really forgotten how not to act, but in this second installment, it’s hard not to warm to his buddy act with a new thespian who is clearly holding his own, Bill Gates.

Whisper it very softly, but they just might pull this trick off.

However, those involved in this singularly brave attempt just might achieve something many thought impossible. The success of a movie called Smart and Smarter.

I suspect that it’s no coincidence that Plastic Logic is talking about bringing its gizmo to market “through partners around the world.” Could this be how Barnes & Noble will take on the Kindle? I wouldn’t be surprised.

This particular gizmo is very attractive. It uses a large, flexible electronic paper display based on technology from E Ink (the same company that makes the displays for Amazon.com’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader), but the device overall is remarkably thin and light.

Overall, I think that this is the first of the third-generation e-book readers: as far beyond the Kindle and Sony’s Reader as those devices were advanced over first-gen products such as the Rocket eBook and Franklin eBookMan.

Pricing is said to be “competitive,” and battery life is described as “days”; we’ll have to see what happens to these estimates by the time the product ships. The Kindle has “days” of battery life, but sometimes, it’s just a few days, and I have been occasionally disappointed to find mine dead when I wanted to use it.

I’m hoping to talk with the folks at Plastic Logic about this gizmo and its other product and technology plans. I’ll be back with an update, once I do.

Other bloggers have overreacted somewhat by predicting that the Plastic Logic reader will kill the Kindle, but that isn’t going to happen. There’s more to providing a good e-book experience than industrial design. The Kindle is very well supported by Amazon, and it has that unique free-forever wireless-data link. But if Plastic Logic can find a partner with ties to the publishing industry and solve the wireless problem, the result would be a serious challenge to Amazon.

In fact, the prototype appears to have only a few physical controls; essentially all of the user interaction takes place through the touch screen. It’s just a smooth white rectangle, like a thin pad of writing paper: about 8.5 inches by 11 inches by 0.3 inches, with a 10.7-inch screen and a total weight less than a pound.

Interesting news from the DemoFall conference held this week in San Diego:

Plastic Logic–a company founded to commercialize electronics built on flexible plastic substrates–demonstrated a prototype e-book reader (not yet named) and announced that it plans to ship this product in the first half of next year. You can read the press release for yourself.

Check out this video from DEMOfall, in which Plastic Logic CEO Richard Archuleta demonstrates the prototype. I see some minor problems in the prototype’s display–some dead lines and odd drawing glitches–but nothing that should interfere with the scheduled launch.

(Credit: Plastic Logic Limited)

And the whole thing is somewhat flexible, so it won’t break if it gets slightly bent in a backpack or briefcase. Flexible doesn’t mean invulnerable, but it’s a lot better than the brittle glass displays of existing e-book readers.

Plastic Logic’s prototype e-book reader

More importantly, even as a prototype, the display’s contrast ratio seems to be better than that of the Kindle or Reader, mostly by virtue of the white being whiter–I’d have to make a direct comparison to be sure, though. I also see all of the critical features I want in an e-book reader: good display resolution, reasonable performance, and a touch-sensitive screen to support document markup and an on-screen keyboard. The Kindle’s keyboard just isn’t good enough.

At DemoFall, Plastic Logic spun the gizmo as a “business reader,” which may be an attempt to justify a premium price for the large display and superior physical robustness, but I think that it has more potential as a consumer product. Business users have laptops already. Plastic Logic may find ways to position its reader as a complement to the laptop–I can think of a few ways myself–but the consumer market opportunity is far larger.