Nick Bilton/The New York Times At first glance, the first-run white iPhone, at left, doesn’t look too different than the newly released model.

For almost a year, the white iPhone has been as elusive as a double rainbow. Sure, we knew they existed, but few people had seen one. Now this sought-after device is available in stores. But their existence just provokes more questions.

Like, what took Apple so long? The company that usually introduces products with the perfection of an Olympic diver halted production of the white iPhone even before it hit store shelves.

Several news outlets reported production problems with the device and that Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, was unhappy with the coloring, which contained a slight hint of yellow. Rumors also circulated that a light leak occurred with the camera’s flash and there was apparently a problem with the phone’s proximity sensor.

For its part, Apple has only said that there were  production problems.

Rex Sorgatz, founder of Kinda Sorta Media, purchased one of the first-run white iPhones for $1,000 from a “guy who had connections to the factory that made the phone in China.” I met with Mr. Sorgatz to compare the differences between the original white iPhone and the model now for sale in stores.

As you can see from the image below, there was clearly a discoloration on the first-run white iPhone that is visible between the home button and the phone’s exterior shell. Read more…

This is the year that billions of dollars in government incentive payments are set to begin flowing to the nation’s doctors and hospitals to encourage them to adopt computerized patient records. The goal, of course, is to help improve the quality of care and curb costs.

But what about the environmental impact? That was the question asked by researchers at Kaiser Permanente, a giant health-care group, which covers 8.7 million people in nine states and the District of Columbia.

Kaiser used its own system — 454 clinics and 36 hospitals, using electronic health records — as its laboratory. The answer, published Wednesday in the journal Health Affairs, is that the potential environmental benefit is to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 1.7 million tons a year. That’s the pollution equivalent of taking more than 300,000 cars off America’s roads.

The upside estimate, to be sure, is mostly wishful thinking today. Only about a quarter of the nation’s physicians use electronic health records.

And, as so often the case, the payoff from digital records comes not from the new technology itself, but from the changed work practices that the new computer tool makes possible. In fact, the researchers found that if electronic records simply replace paper records — without changing how things are done — the national impact would be to increase carbon dioxide emissions by 653,000 tons. (Or putting more than 100,000 more cars on the road.) Read more…

Adrenaline-pumped online shopping, popularized by so-called flash sale sites like Gilt, has arrived at Amazon.com.

Amazon introduced its flash sale site, Myhabit, on Tuesday. Myhabit sells high-end apparel for men, women and children at deep discounts. The sales, like those on similar sites, start at the same time each day, and shoppers must make their purchases before the clock — or the quantity — runs out.

Amazon is late to a crowded field. It joins private flash sale sites like Vente-privee, Gilt, HauteLook, Ideeli and Rue La La, as well as a host of smaller start-ups and big retailers like Saks. But with its large customer base, it has an advantage that start-up flash sale sites don’t.

Myhabit is also Amazon’s biggest step into designer fashion, setting it up to compete with high-end e-commerce sites like Net-a-Porter.com in addition to its traditional, lower-end competitors like Walmart.com. Read more…

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, sent a follow-up letter to Sony on Tuesday after the company said it had discovered that more company servers had been breached during a catastrophic hacking attack last month.

Sony said the newly discovered problem was with its Sony Online Entertainment servers, which stored information about 24.6 million customer accounts and 12,700 credit and debit card numbers. These servers were shut down on Monday after the company learned that hackers had also gained access.

“I am deeply concerned about the egregious inadequacy of Sony’s efforts thus far to notify its customers of these breaches or to provide adequate protections for users whose personal and financial information may have been compromised,” Senator Blumenthal wrote in the letter. “Sony’s failure to adequately warn its customers about serious security risks is simply unconscionable and unacceptable.” Read more…

Bobby Yip/Reuters Stolen credit card numbers can sell for up to $10 each in online underground markets.

Last week, after the Sony PlayStation Network was attacked by a group of unknown hackers, Sony’s 77 million customers, along with security specialists and government officials, were surprised by the amount of information that might have been stolen from the company.

But there was another group that worried about the attack: other hackers who steal credit card numbers and personal identity online and then sell and trade this information in underground markets.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the Sony story as it would drastically affect the resale of other cards,” explained an experienced hacker based in Europe who declined to share his name due to the nature of his work.

Kevin Stevens, senior threat researcher at the computer security firm Trend Micro, explained in an interview last week that there was a lot of discussion taking place in hacker forums about the Sony data breach. Several credit card dealers are worried that the distribution of millions of credit cards would flood the market and lower prices, he said. Read more…

Sony said Monday that it had discovered that more credit card information and customer profiles had been compromised during an attack on its servers last week.

In a news release issued by Sony, the company said that it had discovered hackers had gained access to the Sony Online Entertainment servers, which contain approximately 24.6 million customer accounts and 12,700 credit card and debit card numbers. Sony said the hackers might have stolen this information, but the company could not be sure.

Sony Online Entertainment is a division of Sony that creates multiplayer online games for the PS3 and PlayStation Portable gaming platforms.

The announcement of more compromised customer information was another black eye for Sony, which is facing international pressure to answer questions about the attacks on its servers, and to disclose exactly how many customers were affected by the breach.

Congress has asked Sony to respond by the close of business Tuesday to several questions related to the attacks.

Sony said it had decided to shut down the Sony Online Entertainment servers and Web site so it could upgrade its servers and add more protection to the service.

Sony also noted that information taken from the entertainment division of the site included customers’ names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birth dates, phone numbers and usernames and passwords. It also said that 10,700 debit cards from users in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain were compromised.

The New York Times A letter sent to committee members discusses the purpose of Wednesday’s hearings.

8:00 p.m. | Updated Added comment from Sony.

Sony has declined to testify at a Congressional hearing on Wednesday, “The Threat of Data Theft to American Consumers,” that seeks to understand how consumers’ private data is protected by corporations.

Last week Sony’s PlayStation Network was infiltrated by hackers who gained access to highly sensitive information about its customers. The gaming network has 77 million registered users. Representative Mary Bono Mack, the chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, asked the company to answer a set of questions and attend the hearing.

Ken Johnson, senior adviser and spokesman for Representative Mack, said Sony declined to testify at the hearing citing “an ongoing investigation” it is conducting with law enforcement.

The subcommittee sent a letter to Sony on Friday asking the company to answer a number of questions related to the attack by May 6. After Sony declined to testify to the committee, the deadline to respond to questions was pushed up to May 3. Read more…

Michael Dell built his company and his fortune in the personal computer business. But the company’s future is increasingly going to rest on services and the bigger gear used in data centers — server computers, storage and networking equipment.

That was Mr. Dell’s overall theme in a pair of interviews on Friday, one onstage at a health technology and investment conference in California and one afterward.

The company has changed considerably, especially since Mr. Dell returned as chief executive in January 2007, though its reputation is still as a PC company. “A lot of people think of Dell as what it was five or 10 years ago,” he said. “But we’ve moved much more into the core of information technology, into the data center.”

Services are big part of the shift. In fact, 44,000 of the company’s 103,000 employees are in its services business. And it was no quirk that Mr. Dell appeared at a gathering of health industry companies, start-ups, policy officials and investors, held annually by Health Evolution Partners, a fund that invests in health companies.

Dell is the No. 1 provider of health technology services, according to Gartner. The company’s big step into health came with Dell’s $3.9 billion purchase of Perot Systems, which had a large health consulting and services business, in 2009. Read more…

3:27 p.m. | Updated Added new figures from Twitter on the volume of tweets circulating through the site on Sunday as well as additional figures from Instagram.

An Instagram user captured the president’s speech.

When President Obama delivered the news of Osama bin Laden’s death late Sunday night, many of those watching were doing more than watching.

For example, users of Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application for the iPhone, flooded the service with photos of Mr. Obama speaking, snapped from television and laptop screens — as if to say, “We are all a part of this.”

Word that the president would be making a statement prompted millions to turn on their televisions, but plenty of people also grabbed their smartphones, cracked open their laptops and powered on their iPads.

Twitter was abuzz with speculation about what the president might say. Some people joked that he might reveal news of alien contact or a giant meteor hurtling towards Earth. Others bemoaned the interruption of their favorite television shows. Mostly, they waited, anxiously. Read more…

The online sample sale model that has helped bolster companies like Gilt, ideeli, HauteCouture and RueLaLa, isn’t limited to luxury clothing and jewelry.

Lot18, a company based in New York, is hoping to carve out a niche for itself with an invitation-only service that offers flash sales to members on hand-picked wines. Since the company was first unveiled in November, it has welcomed 200,000 members into its club, selling thousands of bottles each week, and generating more than $1 million in revenue each month.

On Monday, company executives announced that Lot18 has raised money to expand its business. They said Lot18 raised a $10 million Series B round of venture financing from the investment firms NEA and FirstMark Capital. In November, the company raised a $3 million Series A round, led by FirstMark Capital.

“There’s a huge pent-up demand for a better way to buy wine,” said Philip James, who founded the company with Kevin Fortuna. “Whether you buy it in a shop or a restaurant, there’s always this worry that the person is going to sneer at your choice. We have a curated selection, and we only put up stuff that we really, really like. Read more…

When Rent the Runway, a New York start-up hoping to make high-end fashion as accessible as renting a movie from Netflix, first introduced its service in late 2009, it wasn’t clear how successful the venture would be.

Would women want to rent designer dresses by mail the same way they do movies or books?

As it turns out, the answer seems to be yes.

In the past 18 months, since Rent the Runway came out of its beta testing phase, it has enticed a million members to join the service. Each week, another 40,000 new members sign up, the company said. The company has raised $16.5 million from venture capitalists, and grown from a few employees to 51 staffers, prompting a move to larger offices in downtown New York.

The company has also expanded its closet to 135 from 25 different designers, attracting larger fashion labels like Vera Wang and Calvin Klein, and adding jewelry and handbag offerings.

But perhaps the most important marker of success is that the company began generating a profit at the end of March. Read more…

United States Congress The letter sent to Sony. The full document can be seen here.

A House of Representatives subcommittee sent a letter to Sony on Friday asking for information about the attack on the Sony Playstation Network by hackers last week. The gaming network has 77 million registered users.

The letter, which was addressed to Mr. Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony, asked the company to answer a detailed list of questions related to the intrusion. It wants a reply by May 6.

In the letter, which was written by the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, the group’s chairman, Representative Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California, asked a number of security and privacy related questions that Sony has never disclosed to the public. They included when the intrusion occurred, if Sony knew who was responsible for the attack and when the company notified law enforcement.

The letter also asked Sony to explain what it knew about the type of data that was stolen by the hackers and if it included any credit card information.

Although Sony says it doesn’t have evidence that customers’ credit card numbers were stolen, on Thursday I reported that hackers on underground Web forums had claimed to have access to a database that included PlayStation customer names, addresses, usernames, passwords and as many as 2.2 million credit card numbers.

The PlayStation Network has been down for nearly two weeks and it is unclear when the service will be fully back online.

screenshot of a hacker forum Hacker forums discuss the type of data hackers supposedly stole from Sony.

Security researchers said Thursday that they had seen discussions on underground Internet forums indicating that the hackers who infiltrated the Sony PlayStation Network last week may have made off with the credit card numbers of Sony customers.

The comments indicated that the hackers had a database that included customer names, addresses, usernames, passwords and as many as 2.2 million credit card numbers, the researchers said.

Kevin Stevens, senior threat researcher at the security firm Trend Micro, said he had seen talk of the database on several hacker forums, including indications that the Sony hackers were hoping to sell the credit card list for upwards of $100,000. Mr. Stevens said one forum member told him the hackers had even offered to sell the data back to Sony but did not receive a response from the company.

Although several researchers confirmed the forum discussions, it was impossible to verify their contents or the existence of the database.
Read more…

Instagram app keepsy.com Keepys lets Instagram users create photo albums.

Instagram, the social-meets-photos app for the iPhone that transforms plain cellphone pictures into vintage-looking works of art, has attracted millions of users. In recent months, it has also begun to draw entrepreneurs who are eager to capitalize on its growing popularity.

In particular, people are creating services that revolve around bringing Instagram photos, typically viewed on a phone screen, into the real world.

Keepsy lets people quickly build a photobook of their favorite Instagram pictures and share it on Facebook and Twitter. They can then print a hard copy of the photobook for about $30.

There is also Postagram, which lets its users mail a postcard created from an Instagram photo to a recipient of their choice for 99 cents. Read more…