San Francisco is about to spend $25 million to answer a simple question: How much should a city charge for parking?

The price should be cheap enough that most of the metered spaces and city parking lots are always almost full.

But it shouldn't be so cheap that spaces are entirely full, leaving drivers frustrated and adding to congestion as cars circle endlessly looking for a place to park.

"It's the 'Goldilocks' principle of parking spaces," said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA who wrote a book called "The High Cost of Free Parking."

Shoup's work was the inspiration for a high-tech project San Francisco is launching today. Its aim: to set parking prices just right.

The system will use electronic sensors to measure real-time demand for parking spaces, and adjust prices accordingly. When there are lots of empty spaces, it will be cheap to park. When spaces are hard to find, rates will be higher.

"It's basic supply and demand," Shoup said.

The range in prices will be huge: from 25 cents an hour to a maximum of $6 an hour, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.

Eventually, drivers will be able to find open parking spaces by going online, checking their mobile phones or reading for new electronic signs that will be posted throughout the city.

Will this work? I'm not sure. It seems like a great idea, and for $25 million, I sure hope it does work. But I'm not convinced that people will actually have access to accurate pricing information in a way that will allow them to make rationale decisions. How many electronic signs are they going to have? Will the price be the same all over the city? There are just too many questions. If you leave your house in the morning, how will you know what the cost of pricing will be when you get to where you're going? Are you supposed to check before you leave? Will people be holding up their iPhones and driving around looking for the cheaper spots?

If the current cost of pricing was somehow integrated into the dashboard on vehicle GPS, then you'd really have something. As it stands right now, it just seems like this new system is going to be a total disaster. People are risk averse. They don't like change. I have a feeling that most people will hear, "between 25¢/hr and $6/hr," and think, "I'm not paying $6/hr to park—that's too much."

Here's an idea: Let people purchase a small device they can stick on their dash that shows the expected price of parking, and lets them pay for said parking automatically, without having to go to the machine. Turn city parking into a completely seamless experience that provides individuals with perfect information at all times. Now you've got a mechanic that can allow basic supply and demand to function properly.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation drove three deep wedges into the US prohibition on breaking DRM today. EFF had applied to the Copyright Office to grant exemptions permitting the cracking of DRM in three cases: first, to "jailbreak" a mobile device, such as an iPhone, where DRM is used to prevent phone owners from running software of their own choosing; second, to allow video remix artists to break the DRM on DVDs in order to take short excerpts for mashups posted to YouTube and other sharing sites; finally EFF got the Copyright Office to renew its ruling that made it legal to unlock cellphones so that they can be used with any carrier.

I wonder how far this will go. DVD ripping capabilities built into iTunes? Maybe not, but at least it's a start.

Hopefully this will put an end to SIM locking and all that other carrier-specific mobile phone nonsense.

Cool. Creepy. Google in your browser, in your email, in your phone, on your TV, in your car. 

I wonder at what point Google will start to face serious antitrust pressure from the Department of Justice. Would you bet on it? I would. It seems like it's just a matter of time now. Sometimes I wonder if their embrace of open source software is entirely genuine, or merely a strategic position to help mitigate antitrust pressure. I'm guessing it's probably a little bit of both, and I'm wondering if it will work.

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

For many people, their mobile phone—and access to the Internet—is always within reach. App Inventor for Android gives everyone, regardless of programming experience, the opportunity to control and reshape their communication experience. We’ve observed people take pride in becoming creators of mobile technology and not just consumers of it.

Pretty cool stuff. It's similar in many ways to what Palm did for webOS with Ares... only, you know, actually good.

Cisco may be the first vendor out of the gate with a successful Android-based tablet when its Cius portable collaboration and communication device—announced today—officially launches in the first quarter of 2011. 

The Cius ("see us," get it?), aimed squarely at business users, will integrate with Cisco's business applications such as WebEx, and it can dock into an optional phone base to connect to a user's corporate communications infrastructure.

The Cius is dominated by a 7" WSVGA touchscreen, weighs 1.15lbs, and appears to be much smaller than an iPad. It's also powered by a customized Android OS, though there has been no mention of what version of Android. 

With the heavy focus on real-time communication, the tablet comes equipped with a 720p HD front-facing camera for video conferencing, as well as a 5MP rear-facing camera that can stream VGA-quality video. 

It may be a decade or so late, but it seems like video conferencing is finally going mainstream. Ten years ago there was a push by quite a few companies to get video conferencing units into the home, over regular telephone lines no less.

Now with Apple leading the way for consumers with the iPhone 4, and Cisco leading the way for business, video conferencing may eventually become ubiquitous in the way that Kubrick and many others always thought it might.

Here's one way to get people to stick around for Frappy Hour — Starbucks posted a tweet this morning alerting followers that it'll be rolling out free WiFi in all stores to all customers. No registration, no strings attached. Previously, Starbucks card holders could hook up for two hours, while AT&T hotspot users could suck down all the free Internet they could handle. Now, everyone is getting in on the deal!

Took them long enough.

Looks like I can cancel my Boingo account now.

You read the title right. Motorola is working on a phone that would support a 2GHz processor – two! Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha revealed his plans for a supercharged phone yesterday at an executive event in Chicago. According to KnowYourCell, Jha signaled that he wants to have a new phone with a 2GHz processor released by the end of the year. This year.

It's like the gigahertz race on the desktop all over again.

Seriously though, what the hell is going on here? I don't want a 2GHz processor in a phone. I want a phone with a battery that lasts more than six hours.

You can add as many features as you want. I'm not moving away from a BlackBerry until someone builds a phone with better battery life.

HP has always been one of my favorite technology companies. Their consumer grade hardware is terrible, but their business/enterprise grade hardware is fantastic. I just hope that Palm has a place in HP's business roadmap. They'd be foolish not to include it. One of the advantages that RIM has over Apple's iPhone and [most] Android phones is that a BlackBerry doesn't break the second you drop it. It would be nice if future WebOS-enabled devices are built to the same standard as HP business notebooks—which are built like bricks.

That happened a lot faster than I thought it would. It's awesome to see. My next phone isn't even going to be a phone. I'm going to wait until Google rolls Gizmo into Google Voice and then get rid of my cell phone for good and just use my phone over WiFi. And with the $1000 I'll save every year in cell phone service charges I can just buy a new device every year... and still end up saving money. Is it odd that I'm actually excited to get rid of my cell phone? I just don't see the need anymore, really. The only time I can make a clear call is when I'm at home or at work, or at a quiet coffee shop; and all of these places have WiFi.

This is awesome. Ever since I decided to move away from the iPhone I've been waiting for an announcement like this. I bought the first iPhone on launch day and the reality is that, while revolution in terms of UI, the iPhone OS is terrible in terms of productivity. It's a toy. It was never designed to run native applications.

Here's hoping that Version 4.0 is an all encompassing operating system with multitasking, a proper file system, and the ability to create applications outside of the draconian rules set forth by the iTunes Store. It's going to be a major letdown if it's just a refresh of their current operating system.