Technologizer

Fortunately, I don’t need to come up with the perfect “Ads of Super Bowl 44″ lede as NewTeeVee pretty much nailed it: Beer solves lots of problems, women hold men back from their dreams and this year, pants are optional. But I can’t say there are any commercials we’ll remember beyond this week. My personal fave was the Kia ad (above) – fun, engaging, not crass, and it made me think about their product. (What does Go Daddy do again?) Speaking of crass, the most entertaining pantless commercial didn’t even make it on the air. And I’m bummed Denny’s Nannerpus nemesis has been replaced by chickens.

In what’s become an annual tradition, TiVo determined the top ads of Super Bowl 44 “using aggregated, anonymous, second-by-second audience measurement data about how 30,000 TiVo subscribers watched the game, and for the first time, determined not just the most viewed commercials, but instead the most engaging ads throughout the game.”

1. Doritos – “House Rules”
2. Snickers – “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”
3. Focus on the Family – “The Tebows Celebrate Life”
4. Doritos – “Underdog”
5. 2010 Intel Core Processors – “Jeoffrey the Robot Gets Hurt”
6. E*Trade Financial – “Baby Love Triangle”
7. Bud Light – “Observatory”
8. CareerBuilder – “Casual Fridays”
9. TruTV’s NFL Full Contact – “ Punxsutawney Polamalu”
10. Hyundai Sonata – “Brett Favre MVP, Still Playing at 50”

If you missed any of the commercials, or just want to catch them again, hit Hulu, CBS, or YouTube. What were your favorites?

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

Google is holding a press event on Tuesday morning at the Googleplex. It’s saying only that it involves “innovations in two of our most popular products.” Rumor (as first reported by the Wall Street Journal) has it that it involves new features that give Gmail Twitter-like capabilities. (Sorry, I’ve sworn off describing any tech product as a “killer” of any other tech product.)

I’ll be at the confab and will provide live coverage of the news at it happens at technologizer.com/google. (If you attended our iPad coverage a couple of weeks ago and were frustrated by our CoverItLive problems, I apologize again–and yes, we have a backup strategy this time.) Hope to see you there…

Thanks to Gizmodo, I got wind of Sky Siege, an augmented and virtual reality game for the iPhone, and I plunked down $3 at the App Store so you don’t have to.

Using the iPhone 3GS to look around, you must track down little helicopters, blimps and fighter jets, taking them out with a machine gun or missile launcher before they get you. You can either play the game with its own grassy field background graphics, or switch on the camera to use your real life surroundings as the battlefield. The game plays the same either way. Here’s a video showing the action:

After playing Sky Siege for about 20 minutes, I’m a little bit dizzy from all the spinning and twisting, and believe me, 20 minutes is all you really need. The virtual reality target practice is amusing at first, but it’s a one-trick pony. It wasn’t long before I had enough of the augmented reality gimmick, cool as it was.

Seeing as Sky Siege is the only augmented reality video game I could find in the App Store, it comes off more as a tech demo than a fully-realized game. Other than using your room as a backdrop, there’s no actual interaction with the real world, which might’ve added some nuance to the experience.  There’s also no dodging or other movement required besides spinning and twisting to aim. As a game, Sky Siege doesn’t stand on its own; if it used virtual thumbsticks instead of an orientation-tracking algorithm, I certainly wouldn’t recommend it.

But there is potential here. I want to see more games that take the real-world theme deeper, like the upcoming Ghostwire for the Nintendo DSi. Sky Siege proves augmented reality gaming is possible on the iPhone — and if you’ve got $3 to burn it might be worth getting just to impress your friends — but it’s not the definitive example of what augmented reality can do.

Cloud services like Facebook and Gmail might be “free,” but they carry an immense social cost, threatening the privacy and freedom of people who are too willing to trade it away for a perceived convenience, according to Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center.

On Friday, Moglen was the guest speaker at a seminar at New York University that was sponsored by local technology organizations. Moglen criticized the hierarchical nature of the Web today, and called for a return to peer-to-peer communications.

“The underlying architecture of the Net is meant to be about peerage,” Moglen said. “…There was nothing on the technical side to prevent it, but there was a software problem.”

The client/server architecture has been locked in over the past two decades by Microsoft Windows, Moglen claimed. “Servers were given a lot of power, and clients had very little.”

Control has been moved even further away from the client (people) by cloud services, which can be physically located anywhere in the world where the provider chooses to operate, Moglen said. Privacy laws vary widely from country to country.

There was so discussion of social consequences on the part of computer sciences as they created technologies that comprise the Web, Moglen said. “The architecture is begging to be misused.” Cloud providers are the biggest offenders, in Moglen’s view.

Continue reading this story…

What’s Palm founder Jeff Hawkins–one of the few so-called tech visionaries who really is visionary–up to these days? For the past several years, he’s been concentrating on a startup called Numenta that’s attempting to bring intelligence modeled on the human brain to computers via something it calls Hierarchical Temporal Memory. Another startup called Vitamin D–also founded by early staffers at Hawkins’ Palm and Handspring–is the first company to commercialize Numenta’s research. And it’s releasing the first official shipping version of its first product, Vitamin D Video, today. The software is available as a free download for both Windows and OS X.

Continue reading this story…

Last June, I wrote about RealPlayer SP, a cool new version of the venerable, not-universally-beloved media player that shifted its emphasis. Instead of primarily being about playback, it served as a hub for easy conversion of Web video for playback on a bevy of devices–MP3 players like the iPod, smartphones, gaming consoles, and more. At the time, RealPlayer SP was a Windows-only product, but Real said it would bring it to Mac users by the end of 2009.

It took a little longer than the company thought, but a beta version of RealPlayer SP for OS X is available for download now–Real gave me a sneak peek last week–and is largely similar to the Windows version. A utility runs in the background and watches as you view videos at YouTube, DailyMotion, MetaCafe, and others that offer DRM-free content. As in RealPlayer 11, SP’s predecessor, you can download video files to your Mac for later playback in Real itself. But now you can also transfer them to forty-plus gadgets with a couple of clicks. RealPlayer chooses a format and settings, does the conversion, and even places the resulting video in the proper location for syncing when possible. For instance, it dumps video destined for an iPod or iPhone into iTunes, so it’s transferred the next time you sync.

Continue reading this story…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite fictional characters was Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm, the ultimate absent-minded professor. His inventions were brilliant, but always ended up causing immense trouble for anyone who used them. The one I remember in most vivid detail is an automatic translating machine, which let tourists speak one language into a microphone and have any other language come out the other end. As I recall, it ended up wreaking havoc, but I still thought it was about the neatest idea I’d ever heard.

Fast-forward almost forty years, and Professor Branestawm’s gizmo is no longer the stuff of playful science fiction. Times Online is reporting that Google is working on phone software that does precisely what his creation did–with, one hopes, better results. The company thinks it should have it working reasonably well within a few years.

That doesn’t sound like an irrationally exuberant expectation. Voice recognition already works really well; text-to-speech voice synthesis isn’t bad these days, either. The tricky part is the translation. But I saw a Google translation research project almost half a decade ago that knocked my socks off. And if the company focused on the sort of simple things that travelers might want to say to locals (“Can you tell me how to get to the Louvre?”) it might get better results more quickly than if attempted to provide a perfect rendition of every idea that human beings are capable of expressing in words.

As someone who loves to travel but lacks the gift that several of my relatives have for learning foreign languages, I can’t wait. And I’m sorry that Norman Hunter, who died at 95 three years before Google’s debut, won’t be around to give it  whirl.

Credit Suisse analysts met with Apple executives, and has come out of those meetings with an interesting point of view: that Apple’s pricing on the iPad may actually be fluid, and the company may be ready to bring prices down if it’s not selling to the company’s expectations.

Such aggressiveness seems to indicate that Cupertino is very serious about carving out a market for its newest device. It also comes as a shock to much of the technorati, who for quite awhile expected the tablet to have a price of at least $700 if not much higher.

“While it remains to be seen how much traction the iPad gets initially, management noted that it will remain nimble,” Credit Suisse analyst Bill Shope was reported as writing in a Sunday research note by the Wall Street Journal.

It’s not all too clear how well the iPad will do. While netbooks in general have sold quite well, Apple’s device (while not exactly a netbook) is priced above the average price of its competitors. Add to this that getting the most benefit (adding the 3G capabilities) will set you back $629, it may be a bit above most people’s price range.

Personally, the magic price for me with this device (which includes the 3G) would be under $500. I’m curious: what’s yours?

You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.

Even the best designers make mistakes…but this article isn’t about them. We’re about to, ahem, celebrate the worst consumer electronics designers through the lens of their faulty creations. Since I’m far from an all-knowing technology god, I’ve limited our survey to fifteen design problems that have not only bugged me through the years, but that are widespread enough to have bugged many of you too. These problems aren’t limited to current technology, but they all fall into the nebulous realm known as “consumer electronics.” You know: TVs, telephones, VCRs, DVD players, MP3 players, and more.

Continue reading this story…

[Here's another column I wrote for FoxNews.com. In this one, I try to summarize some of the major things that non-geeks need to know about the iPad.]

When Apple finally announced its iPad tablet computer at a San Francisco press event last week, we learned that it was “magical.” And “revolutionary.” And that the price was “unbelievable.”

That’s the truth according to Steve Jobs, at least. As usual, the facts are a bit more complex. The iPad is an ambitious product that’s hard to sum up in a few words, or to assess at all until it’s actually available for sale, which won’t be for weeks. Herewith, some early answers to major questions about the device, based on what I learned at Apple’s launch and the hands-on time I got with one after the great unveiling concluded.

Continue reading this story…

Over at TechCrunch, Michael Arrington is reporting that a source has told him that Facebook is working on a full-blown e-mail service. It’s supposedly known internally as Project Titan, or “Gmail Killer.”

The only details Arrington mentions are that the new version is said to offer POP3/IMAP access (so you can get into your Facebook messages from anywhere) and that your e-mail address will be in the format harrymccracken@facebook.com.

Sounds good–but one of the things I like about my Facebook inbox is that it’s a spam-free island unto itself, populated only by people who I’ve granted permission to contact me. Whatever Project Titan is, I hope it doesn’t turn Facebook messaging into…well, e-mail as we know it.

On April 15, Microsoft will kill online play for original Xbox games. Even if you own an Xbox 360, you’ll no longer be able to play original Xbox games online, including backwards-compatible discs and downloadable Xbox Originals. While it’s probably for the best — Microsoft is promising new, yet-unspecified features that weren’t possible while still supporting the old Xbox — some games are just irreplaceable. Here are 10 original Xbox games that have no equal on the Xbox 360 (which means no Halo 2 or Call of Duty 3):

Continue reading this story…

Siri, an ambitious new free iPhone application, is now available in the App Store–and it’s not Just Another iPhone Application. Based on $150 million of research by the Stanford Research Institute and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency), Siri aims to be a “virtual personal assistant” that understands your spoken requests–”best sushi in san francisco,” “remind me to order flowers,” “order tickets to a show at the Castro Theater”–and takes action on your behalf.

Retrieving information by voice on the iPhone is nothing new–Google’s Mobile App is just one of several that let you search the Web by speaking. But Siri isn’t Web search. It’s all about actions you want to take, and it returns information and opportunities to do things, not search results. And it uses the iPhone’s GPS to refine its responses to your local area.

(Right now, Siri is designed for the iPhone 3GS; versions for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch, as well as other mobile platforms, are in the works.)

Continue reading this story…

Apple is now advising App Store developers that it will reject any application submitted for review if the location-aware capabilities of the iPhone API is used to provide the user with location-aware ads, MacNN has reported. The move could be a signal that the company itself plans to move into the space, and that wouldn’t be that surprising.

Consider that Apple did look into a buyout of AdMob, which ended up being purchased by Google. It bought out mobile advertiser Quattro Wireless, and has said it wants to offer its developers advertising solutions within their apps.

Add this all up, and it certainly seems like Apple is ready to move into the mobile advertising space — and is clearing out any possibe competitors to do it. This is Cupertino’s M.O., so its not that surprising. Developers are certainly speaking out on the issue, such as Craig Hockenberry of Twitterific.

“Looks like Apple is going to keep location-based advertising to themselves,” he said- not surprisingly in a tweet on Wednesday.

I can certainly see why Apple would like to do this, but i certainly do view it as quite anticompetitive. If this is used as a way to give Quattro the leg up on advertising on the iPhone, I’d think it would be frowned upon by competition regulators. Then again, Apple has been doing things like this for years, and nothing has ever been done…

Droid gets (some) multi-touch.

E-book prices are going up.

Comics will rock on iPad

Sling? Us? Work with AT&T?

Malware sneaks into Firefox extensions.

_______________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

When it comes to trading in used games, there really is no stopping Gamestop.

Best Buy and Wal-Mart, who both experimented with used game kiosks last year, are pulling out, according to IndustryGamers. Both companies relied on a third-party, E-Play, to run the kiosks, and will remove the machines over the next few weeks. E-Play’s Web site has a sombre little message saying they’ve suspended operations, and thanking customers.

In addition to offering credit or debit card credit in exchange for used games, the kiosks rented DVDs (as long as there wasn’t a Redbox machine in the store as well), Blu-ray discs and video games.

A couple guesses why the pilot programs failed: Unlike Gamestop, where you can call to find out a game’s trade-in value, a kiosk is unpredictable, and the prices E-Play offered — $25 for new titles down to 50 cents for throwaways — isn’t better than anywhere else.  Marketing and awareness could’ve come into play as well. If you call Gamestop, you’ll likely hear, “Thank you for calling Gamestop, where we buy and sell used games” on the other end. Somehow, “Welcome to Wal-Mart, check out that kiosk over there” doesn’t have the same ring.

All’s not lost for trading games outside of GameStop. Toys R’ Us, which began buying used games in select markets last year, expanded the program nationwide in September. Amazon will buy your old games in exchange for online store credit, and Wal-Mart still sells used games online, but does not buy them. Still, none of these competitors offer the whole package of buying and selling used games. Local stores and smaller chains, such as Game Crazy, are still around (barely), and thrifty gamers will still rely on Craigslist, eBay and Goozex.

But for most of the United States, for quickly unloading a used game and getting another one in its place, GameStop’s got it locked down.