In the partnership with Wired, Target will offer “a custom-curated assortment of consumer electronics and gadgets” endorsed by Wired editors. The selections fall into four categories: Digital music, digital photos, productivity and body. Eleven of the products — including the Square credit card reader and Belkin WeMo switch — will appear in Wired-branded displays in Target’s 1,800 stores, and an expanded selection, including Fitbit products (see disclosure), is online at target.com/wired.

Wired gets a small percentage of sales revenue from the products, according to AdWeek, and the promotion will last for 12 weeks. ”We’re trying to push Wired out and beyond the four conventional walls of how it’s been defined its first twenty years,” Howard Mittman, VP and publisher of Wired, told AdWeek. “The ability to cross-pollinate opens [Target] up to affluent young men, and we get the opportunity to tap into their scale.”

Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent. (Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.)

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Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

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Wired‘s photos show a small plot of land tucked behind the data center with what appears to house concrete pads that could fit the fuel cells. It looks like the configuration I’ve seen for Bloom Energy’s fuel cells. The plot of land is next to a substation.

The solar farm across the street already has solar panels installed on it, too. When I tried to peer into the solar farm in June I only saw the poles to house the solar panels. But it looks like a sizable portion of the panels have been installed.

Workers building out the power lines around Apple’s data center

There’s all this speculation — and buzz — about Apple’s data center project in North Carolina because Apple is building an unprecedented amount of its own clean power to provide electricity for the data center. The Bloom Energy fuel cell project is planned to provide 4.8 MW of energy, which is one of the largest fuel cell projects in the world, and Apple’s two solar panel farms will provide 200 MW.

It also came out last month that Apple is building another smaller “tactical” data center next to the current data center. Tactical data centers like these are not uncommon and can enable Apple to do things like separate the servers for the various IT services and treat those servers differently, or run the separate servers on a different power source as well as helping Apple add on more servers in phases. These small tactical data centers are far cheaper and can be built more quickly.

If you want to know more about energy, data centers and clean power, check out my series:

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“It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he said.

Today blogger Edward Champion of Reluctant Habits found that Lehrer had also recycled his own previous material for use in his bestselling book “Imagine.” Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement:

Lehrer fully acknowledges that ‘Imagine’ draws upon work he has published in shorter form during the past several years and is sorry that was not made clear. He owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work.

Lehrer’s editor at the New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson, told Jacob Silverman at the Daily Beast, “He understands he made a serious mistake. He understands the rules. It’s definitely not going to happen again.”

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That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

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Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft and the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — most recently Node.js support in Windows Azure  and the decision to back Hadoop at the expense of an internal Dryad project, squarely at Gates’ feet.

The story recounts a meeting in the summer of 2008 where some (unnamed) top Microsoft execs argued against opening up more to open source while Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect, and Sam Ramji, the open source strategist, argued the opposite. According to Wired:

Then Bill Gates stood up.

He walked to the whiteboard and drew a diagram of how the system could work, from copyrights to code contribution to patents, and he said — in no uncertain terms — that the company had to make the move.

That was it: Microsoft had to be more open to open source. The story quotes a number of former and current Microsoft employees who might be trying to curry favor with their former or current boss, but the account rings true. Here’s why.

1: Microsoft is nothing if not pragmatic

The company will fight, fight, fight for its own agenda, but if it senses futility, it will declare victory and reverse course. I have heard Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer counsel a company that was engaged in a fruitless tussle with another company to do exactly that: “Declare victory and move on.”  And that’s why I wouldn’t be surprised to see Word and PowerPoint on the iPad or iPhone — not too long after Ballmer mockingly stomped on an iPhone at the company sales meeting. If Microsoft believes that the X86-based PC is on the losing side of history, it will do what it can to keep its money-making Office — if not Windows — on every device on the planet. The decision to support ARM architectures in the upcoming Windows 8 is just the beginning of that journey.

And that is why a company with a CEO who once likened Linux to cancer can now with a straight face bring Node.js, Hadoop, even Linux itself into the fold. There are now reports that Microsoft is recruiting Linux experts whose mission it will be “to identify, define, scope, implement and drive to completion software projects that promote full, transparent interoperability between Windows and Linux in Microsoft virtual and cloud environments.”

2: Once it gets the memo — often late — Microsoft goes all out

Microsoft is often late to the party, but once it gets there, look out! It was late to spreadsheets (after Lotus); it was late to word processing (after WordPerfect); it was late to PC databases (after dBase, Foxpro, Paradox.) It was famously late to the Internet — but once Gates decided to turn the ship around — as Netscape Navigator posed a huge threat — that ship was turned around. Gates’ 1995 memo on the Internet tidal wave is one example of this. Anyone remember Navigator now? Or even Netscape? Years later, Gates even had the good grace in one speech to claim to have “discovered the Internet”  (wait for it) after everyone else did.

It’s tempting now, with iPhones and Android phones tearing up the market, and more businesses flocking to Apple hardware,  to write Microsoft off. Word to the wise: don’t be hasty.

3:  Microsoft works best when it’s under the gun

And the corollary is that Microsoft works worst when it’s dominant. Ask most shops why they upgrade Office (or Windows) and it’s typically because they want to stay legal — not because they’re dying for new features. It’s hard to remember in this age of Google Chrome and Firefox and Opera, that Internet Explorer was once the upstart browser. It left Netscape Navigator in the dust because Microsoft had to make it better than Navigator or no one would use it. On the other hand, many people feel that Microsoft Office, the undisputed leader in productivity software suites, remains fat and feature bloated. In short: Office could still use a good competitor. (Pre-emptive apologies to the Open Office, Google Apps fans out there.)

The Microsoft SQL Server team remains scrappy and innovative. Why? Because they have a dominant competitor (still) in Oracle. As Cade Metz, the reporter who wrote this article says: Microsoft is “a company that’s at its best when it’s freaking out.”

To be clear, Microsoft had an open source strategy before this 2008 meeting. For example,  it had already worked with Samba, an open source effort to foster interoperability between Windows clients and Linux servers — although cynics said much of that peaceful coexistence came about because of legal anti-trust action.

But the Wired account holds that it was Gates’ statement at that meeting that blew away any lingering obstructionism in the ranks and forced Microsoft to get off its duff when it comes to open source. Given the boundless regard that Microsoft employees hold for Gates, only he could get the famously fractious product groups to get on board with open source.

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EPB stakeholder meeting

“Chattanooga is what the Internet will look like in 10 years. We’re 10 times faster 10 years sooner than the goals established in the National Broadband Plan.”  Harold DePriest, President – EPB.

Last September, Chattanooga, Tenn.’s public utility (EPB) announced the first gigabit broadband service in the U.S. To fully grasp the economic power of true broadband, community leaders and broadband champions need look under the hood to get the inside scoop. Luckily, over 130 community-owned fiber networks besides EPB’s are pumping out great service, including Pulaski, Tenn., Powell, Wyo. and Santa Monica, Calif. This month, I did a broadband site visit to Chattanooga to see the future unfolding there firsthand. Check out what I found!

The Grid Rocks!

Since launching their network, the smart grid application is paying dividends. Gigabit speed is enabling EPB to rapidly deploy intelligent switches that instantly re-route electricity on the grid so homes and businesses experience much shorter outages when natural disaster strikes. After eight tornadoes touched down in one day in Chattanooga recently, the smart grid saved 730,000 outage minutes. This grid is so smart that in some cases it detects problems even before they even occur. “We expect big potential economic gains here,” said one EPB official. “Just a brief flicker in service can cost Chattanooga businesses collectively a million dollars. Reliable electricity is a key factor in businesses deciding to move here.”

Survivor Meets Gigabit City

Co.Lab is a business incubator that provides start-ups with resources from advice and workspace to valuable business connections. One major resource is its 48Hour Launch, a pressure-cooker weekend in which over a dozen would-be Steve Jobs compete to see who can create the most viable business.

Harold DePriest, President of EPB (left) and Craig Settles

On a Friday last month, over 200 marketing executives, developers, financial experts and general business managers gathered in an abandoned building to listen to 21 entrepreneurs with various tech product demos explain why they were potentially the next Microsoft (s msft). Potential mentors in other states video-conferenced into the event. EPB had wired the building with a separate fiber line and wireless access points.

Those entrepreneurs who gave a great two-minute presentation made the first cut. The rest either sat on the sidelines or joined a surviving company. In another weeding-out process that night, anyone sitting in the audience could join with an entrepreneur to create a management team. Those who couldn’t build a team were eliminated from competition, leaving 10 hopefuls. Working non-stop from Friday to Sunday night, these teams built their products and business plans. The products were mainly web-based or mobile applications, so everything was done online by teams in the building along with those connected remotely: programming, buildouts, trials, research, business and financial modeling and of course, consulting.

On Sunday night, the teams presented their businesses and management teams to an on-site panel of investors and entrepreneurs. The event was web-cast live. Several days later, two of the teams were in serious negotiations with investors, and one was offered a term sheet. The entire event couldn’t have happened as it did without the network.

Incubating a Local Industry

According to the Entertainment Software Association, U.S. computer and video game software sales generated $10.5 billion in 2009. Chattanooga aims to grab a piece of that action by creating a mini gaming industry ecosystem. EPB’s network will be the digital glue holding together the process of creating a digital game.

The city recently conducted a proof of concept when several dozen gamers collectively accessed the digital infrastructure built into a downtown theater to show the potential for linking this group via EPB’s network to theaters in other cities. This event also gave gaming industry representatives a preview of what happens if developers, animators and consumers are all linked via the network to the production, marketing and use of gaming products regardless of individuals’ physical location in Chattanooga. Chattanooga State Community College started a gaming degree program last fall. EPB’s network will be the digital engine driving the process from creating and refining the human capital to facilitating the technology and business elements vital to this industry.

Fleshing out Gigabit Success

Is tech company incubator Lamppost grooming the next Facebook?

Whereas incubators such as CoLab take someone with an idea and creates the skeleton of a future company or product, Lamppost Group puts the meat on the bones. It provides angel investments, facilities and a strong push out into the market.

Lamppost is recruiting 15 students from prestigious colleges nationwide for a special build-a-gigabit-app summer internship. The intern with the best app wins $50,000 from Lamppost. Interns also receive training and mentoring in eight core business skills, including sales, marketing, prototyping and design. All interns with good ideas can maintain their network accounts and relationships with Lamppost. The company and city undoubtedly will welcome them back after graduation.

Muni Wireless Comes Full Circle

Using its gigabit network for backhaul, Chattanooga is living the wireless dream. Its mesh network delivers 16 Mbps symmetrical Wi-Fi service for government-only use, and EPB is adding WiMAX and LTE capabilities that all local governments in EPB’s 600-mile footprint can use.

The city has implemented 56 applications, with many more on the drawing board. Two of these really have city workers abuzz. The first is a fleet of wirelessly-controlled helicopter drones, each with dual wireless video feeds. These allow workers to view remote, inaccessible and/or highly dangerous situations from the safety of their vehicles. Additional software analyzes video images to distinguish between, say, ducks on the water and floating trash without workers having to monitor the video feeds.

The second is a special imaging program that can scan and upload 3-D images, then create static holograms similar to those in the Star Trek episodes. Within 10 minutes, a portable device scans 300 yards in all directions vertically and horizontally, and wirelessly uploads one aspect of a building, crime scene, etc. All aspects of a “target area” are combined into one file. Chattanooga’s City Hall, for example, required six scans to capture the entire building, and the combined file held seven billion data points.

Investigators sitting in their cars can wirelessly access a crime scene file, interview a witness and based on the witness’ details, accurately plot the witness’ location in the file for the district attorney to pull up in court. The application also creates a 3-D hologram.

Check out the second part of this story, coming Monday, to read other highlights of Craig Settles’ site visit and lessons learned.

Craig Settles is a broadband industry analyst and Co-Director of Communities United for Broadband and can be found at @cjsettles on Twitter.

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More and more magazine publishers are signing up with Apple to offer subscriptions through their iPad apps, including Conde Nast — which rolled out in-app subscriptions for Wired and GQ today — and Hearst. The appeal of that method is obvious: Apple handles the details, and publishers get to keep (most of) the money. But there also seems to be a growing wave of interest in doing an end-run around Apple and using HTML5 and the open web to offer a magazine experience. As other tablets emerge in the market, will more publishers decide to keep their options open and go with the web instead of Apple’s walled garden?

We’ve already seen some magazines experiment with web-based apps instead of the Apple version: Playboy was the most recent example — but its choice was likely dictated as much by the adult-rated content in the publication as it was by any commitment to the open web vs. the closed app economy. Fortune magazine has also announced an HTML5 web version of some of its content, although it is only a specifically targeted feature and not an entire magazine.

There have been other experiments as well, including a “Chrome” version of the New York Times’ web app, which effectively duplicates the user interface of the full app but inside a browser, and a beta feature The Huffington Post launched called NewsGlide that offers something similar for that site. And some publishers are also apparently interested in working with OnSwipe, a startup we profiled recently that offers an easy HTML5 platform incorporating touch interface elements and other features. Founder Jason Baptiste’s motto is that “Apps are bull****” when it comes to content.

Meanwhile, Jeff Sonderman at Poynter reports that a German design team has come up with a full HTML5-based magazine prototype called Aside, which offers an app-like experience in almost every way, but inside a user’s browser:

The Aside “app” has all the elements you would expect from a magazine app, including videos that play inside the content, fly-out menus, page-flipping animations, swipe effects and so on. Unlike many apps, the images can be zoomed as well — and the magazine doesn’t require a gigantic download that takes hours to complete, the way some apps such as Wired’s do. There is some lag in the Aside demo, but it is only a prototype after all, and it is almost indistinguishable from an iPad app in look and feel.

Whether any of these solutions will appeal to mainstream publishers remains to be seen, however. There’s no question that getting into bed with Apple has some fairly substantial benefits for content owners — for one thing, apps are a potential revenue generator, something many publishers are desperate for (although actual subscription numbers have proven to be fairly lackluster for most). And subscribers have also proven to be surprisingly willing to divulge useful marketing information about themselves via these apps, something that was a bone of contention when Apple first launched subscriptions.

All that said, however, a partnership with Apple can be a Faustian bargain for content owners. Not only does Apple get to keep 30 percent of the subscription revenue, which for some smaller publishers can mean the difference between life and death, but it also gets the ultimate say over what content can appear in an app and what can’t. The creators of the Aside prototype mention this specifically as a selling point of using the open web to publish: no one can tell you that your content is not suitable.

For now, the benefits of an Apple relationship arguably outweigh the downsides. But with Android and other platforms becoming a bigger proportion of the tablet and mobile market, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more publishers dipping their toes in the open web as a publishing platform, if only to hedge their bets.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

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Here are seven lessons I gathered from his talk:

Know what kind of company you are: Hastings said the company has thought about launching live video streaming but sees no point in streaming events like the President’s address when CNN can do the same thing. He said it goes back to the core principal of Netflix’s identity, which is as a personalization and user choice company, not as a streaming company. That has helped the company focus on what the user wants, not just pushing out features because it’s possible.

Time your opportunity: He said when the company got started in 2000, they knew there was no way they could steam movies over a 56k connection. So they went with DVD distribution first while planning for a future of 14 megabits per second in home connections by 2012, which is roughy where we’re at. Hastings said the turning point happened in 2005 with the rise of YouTube and Netflix hasn’t looked back since. It was this good grasp of the timing of technology improvements that helped the company get started with one model while preparing for the future.

Choose the right niche: A lot of the company’s success has been in choosing the right area to compete in. By providing movies and last season’s TV shows, it puts Netflix in the market for pay TV and syndication, a big enough market to grow in but not so ambitious as to incite World War III against incumbents. Even now, Hastings said he doesn’t believe he’s affected the profits and losses of any company though I suspect Blockbuster thinks otherwise.

Have good relationships with content providers: Netflix has been fortunate to scale on the back of its DVD business and be in a position to write big checks to content providers for streaming movies and shows. Though Hastings said those same providers could turn their back on Netflix, he sees that as unlikely because the company has worked hard on its supplier relationships, which he said is a killer skill for a company like Netflix.

Test a lot: While companies like Apple pursue a singular vision of one man, Hastings said Netflix does a lot of A/B testing, trying out new concepts on 10,000 users at a time. If something sticks, it eventually gets rolled out to Netflix’s 24 million subscribers. Janko also wrote about Netflix’s interest in testing everything.

Price the product well: At $8 a month, Hastings said the streaming service is priced so that people who use it once or twice a month will still find value and come back. And those who use it once or twice a week will rave about it to friends. Netflix could have met a different reception if it was a lot more expensive. But Netflix focused on the user experience including making sure the service was an easy buy for consumers.

Promote creativity from within: Netflix promotes creativity with its own culture, summed up in the company’s culture guide, a sort of “constitution” for employees. The guide provides workers with no tracking of vacations and increasing freedom for good work. Hastings said the culture allows Netflix to create a platform for innovation, rather than a stifling one that ultimately engenders bitterness. That can mean the difference between a company that comes up with one innovative breakthrough and one that can repeat its success over time, Hastings said.

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The former design director for the New York Times has written a blog post giving his thoughts on magazine apps for the iPad (something he clearly gets asked about a lot). The bottom line? He hates them. With a passion. Why? Because, Khoi Vinh says, they’re “bloated [and] user-unfriendly” and because they are largely a result of a “tired pattern of mass-media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms, without really understanding the platforms at all.”

The new app from New Yorker magazine comes in for particular derision from the designer, who says it took too long to download, cost him money even though he already subscribes to the print edition, and was a walled garden without any connection to the web: a point I made in a recent post about the new Esquire magazine app. As Vinh describes it: “I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied.”

It’s unfortunate that Vinh doesn’t say much about news apps like the one his former employer has for the iPad. The designer says that news-based apps “are really a beast of a different sort, and with their own unique challenges. There is a real use case for news apps (regardless of whether or not any players are executing well in this space).” Magazines, however, are in danger of losing the battle for readers in a digital age by making their apps so closed and monolithic, Vinh argues.

Even with an Apple-operated newsstand, I’m just not sure I believe these people will turn to publishers’ apps to occupy their tablet time. It’s certainly possible that a small number of these apps will succeed, but if publishers continue to pursue the print-centric strategies they’re focused on today, I’m willing to bet that most of them will fail.

Too many publishers, he says, are looking at media consumption in the old-fashioned way (something Om described in a recent post), rather than taking advantage of the more social forms of media available online. This makes virtually no sense at all on a digital tablet that is connected to the web, he says.

In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city — with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you — these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.

Vinh doesn’t just blame publishers though — he blames Adobe as well (which recently took over production of all of Conde Nast’s magazine apps) for “doing a tremendous disservice to the publishing industry by encouraging these ineptly literal translations of print publications into iPad apps.” Who comes in for praise in Vinh’s review? It’s a short list, including one of the few apps to take a creative tack on the iPad magazine: Gourmet Live, which has turned the magazine into an interactive game of sorts. In the long run, says Vinh, traditional magazines will lose out to apps like Flipboard, which are “more of a window to the world at large than a cul-de-sac of denial.”

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rego Korosi