Kalamazoo wraps up TechTour 2005 with tons of cool stuff: My ancestral homeland (well, close enough) of Kalamazoo was the fifth and final stop on the TechTour 2005 of Michigan technology, sponsored by Walt Michal RV Center and Wireless Oakland. And what fun it was. The day began with a visit with M. Kathleen Johnson, director of the RFID Technology Center, housed at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. The center's mission is to promote West Michigan as a research and development center in RFID, which essentially is the use of tiny radios printed on tags to send, receive and store a variety of data on a variety of objects for a wide variety of purposes, many having to do with inventory control -- they're eyed a next-generation for the bar code. The RFID Technology Center in Kalamazoo was established about a year ago mostly under the urging of Blue Granite Inc., a veteran Kalamazoo tech firm that's working with the region's blueberry farmers and bedding plant growers to use RFID to keep track of inventory and prevent food and flowers from spoiling in transport and storage. Blue Granite hosted an early RFID user group, but decided to move it to KVCC and make it a nonprofit in order to obtain more funding for research, and to provide a structure that would allow multiple companies to participate. Right now, the center has three pilot research projects under way, including a study on how RFID tags that transmit temperature and humidity information can be used to prevent spoiling of fresh fruit. Western Michigan University also has a terrific RFID lab, which we'll get to in a minute. The RFID Technology Center is also planning an RFID summit with Automation Alley in October. More at a nifty Web site, www.rfidtechnologycenter.com. 

Several errors in ProQuest earnings report: I can only blame Tech Tour fatigue, but there were several boo-boos in last week's report on the earnings of Ann Arbor-based database marketers ProQuest Co. So, to wit: the earnings guidance I cited, 35 to 45 cents on revenue growth of 20 to 25 percent, is for the second quarter of this year, not the full year, and it was given for the first time on last week's call. ProQuest also reiterated its full-year guidance of $2.20 to $2.40 per share on revenue of $590 million to $610 million. Also, the company's first quarter ended April 2, not March 31. More at www.proquestcompany.com. 

Napster for news? The Associated Press has it all wrong, according to an executive with E.W. Scripps (SSP), operator of the Food Network and 21 daily newspapers. Charging members for content, as the AP announced it plans to begin doing, is an act of self-destruction , wrote Bob Benz, general manager of print Web operations for Scripps, and Mike Phillips who is the company's newspaper division editorial director, in an article for the Online Journalism Review. They counter a better idea would be a true cooperative, much like Napster was for music, with publishers making available all their digital content to let "local operations drive cost out of their nonlocal news packages, divert resources to local Web content creation and operate on a level playing field with bloggers, citizen journalists and Internet pure plays." Sharing of content would be monitored and a balance would be necessary. "The more you make available to the network, the more you can take out," the two wrote. Phillips and Benz credit the Associated Press for recognizing the importance of the Web, but faults it because "the AP is like any business confronted with a disruptive technology. Its first inclination is self-preservation, not cannibalization." They said Scripps is ready to host an organizational meeting for such a consortium of news providers.

Bloggers search for a business model: So how do you make money with Web logs? MarketWatch says the question is being asked more frequently as bloggers-turned-entrepreneurs search for a financial reason to keep posting. Two of the latest efforts are from Roger L. Simon, the mystery author, and John Battelle, the former chief executive of Standard Media International (which published the Industry Standard magazine), who is finishing a book about Internet search. Simon hopes to launch the Blog News Service, aggregating content and selling advertising across the network of publishers. An editorial board including Web loggers Glenn Reynolds and Lawrence Kudlow is already in place. "We invite you all to join us," Simon wrote on his blog. "We would be delighted to place ads on your blog and pay you for them." Read the open letter from Simon. Battelle's venture, FMPublishing, is also in startup phase, revealing little about its business model as he searches for financing. He intends to partner only with blogs that already have their own business models, according to a report in Business 2.0. Battelle plans to offer "back-room" tech services to online publishers, as well as sell category-specific advertising on the sites. He's been providing some of this for BoingBoing.net for the past six months, and is said to be generating $40,000 a month in ad revenue. See Battelle's blog about FMPub.

Inmates use intermediaries to go online: Keith Maydak's jail cells are roomier than most. Must be all that cyberspace. State and federal prisons don't let inmates use Internet computers behind bars - and the Allegheny County Jail doesn't either. Yet Maydak has answered a reporter's e-mails from the Pittsburgh jail, and later an Ohio lockup, while he awaits sentencing for violating probation on a 900-number phone scam that cost AT&T $550,000. Thousands of other inmates access the Internet indirectly using inmate telephone and mail privileges and a network of family, friends or activists. Maydak, 34, told The Associated Press he uses a network of toll-free phone numbers and friends to access the Internet for him. He was inspired as a teen by the 1983 movie "War Games" in which nuclear war almost results when a teenager hacks into a military computer. And that's precisely why state and federal prisons keep inmates away from the Internet, said Joe Weedon, a spokesman for the American Correctional Association in Lanham, Md. "There were a few jurisdictions that allowed it on a limited basis, but they ran into problems with offenders contacting their victims or inmates running scams of some sort." More.

Apple unleashes Tiger: Apple Computer has unleashed the Tiger. The latest major update of Apple Computer Inc.'s (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Mac OS X operating system, code-named Tiger, went on sale around the globe on Friday. At a cost of $129 and available at Apple's own retail stores, authorized Apple resellers and on Apple's online store, the upgrade is the fifth major refresh of Mac OS X and includes more than 200 new features. Toward the top of the feature list is Apple's Spotlight search technology, which scours the Mac computer's hard disk drive to find documents, e-mails, pictures, music and other files, similar to the way Google searches the Internet. More.