Your Predictions For Wednesday’s Apple Event

Twelve hours from now, Apple’s music event will be underway, and I’ll be  sitting in the audience providing liveblog coverage right here. The big news won’t quite have come yet, but by noon we’ll know all. For now, though, it’s still predictin’ time–and here are some from you guys.

Yesterday night, I posted a quick survey about the event, asking you to pick which items would happen from a list covering some things that have been rumored or predicted, or which just sound logical. If we define a prediction as something which more than fifty percent of the folks who took the survey think will occur, only three made the grade: You think we’ll see an iPod Touch with a camera, that Steve Jobs will make an appearance, and that there will be a new version of iTunes with social networking features. It now looks like the Beatles won’t show up on iTunes tomorrow; you made an almost-prediction that they would, with exactly fifty percent of respondents predicting their arrival.

Here’s everything you voted on. (I should have also asked about Apple’s reported “Cocktail” format for digital albums, but didn’t).

I also asked whether Apple will discontinue the iPod Classic tomorrow. You predicted it would, in a squeaker: 51 percent versus 49 percent.

Thanks for voting, everyone; I’ll check back in tomorrow with a final tally of how we did…

Obama Praises Tech Giants

U.S. President Barack Obama heralded the technology industry in a speech today about the importance of education. The speech, which was given to school children across the country, emphasized personal responsibility, hard work, and perseverance.

In his remarks, Obama told school children that students sitting in classrooms a generation beforehand had grown up to produce Facebook, Google and Twitter –changing the way Americans communicate with one another. Those successes would have been hard to come by without an education, the President noted.

Obama successfully leveraged social networking in his campaign to become President, building a large grassroots following on the Web. His campaign leveraged Web services to rapidly convey his message and to respond to political attacks.

Despite the President’s praise, technology didn’t get a free pass in his speech. He cautioned against too much of a good thing, and asked parents to manage how much time their children spend watching TV and playing Xbox. (Obama singled out Microsoft’s game console rather than mentioning the PlayStation and Wii as well, a fact some folks noticed).  He also told children to be careful about what they post online (which was a world away from President Eisenhower’s generic appeal for students to study math and science).

Here’s the speech in its entirety, in two chunks–thank you, YouTube:

Controversy aside, the President gave common sense advise that it would behoove every child to follow. Maybe the inventor of the next big thing was listening in, and became inspired by the President’s words.

Reimagining the Future of Digital Games Distribution

With Sony launching the download-only PSP Go next month and Microsoft recently launching premium game downloads over Xbox Live, the seeds are planted for a fully digital future.

For the most part, I’ve viewed this as a good thing, but an editorial by Jim Sterling at Destructoid today gave me pause. Entitled “Fearing the future of digital distribution,” Sterling argues that digital distribution, for all its convenience, will come at a price. Game publishers will dominate the marketplace, Sterling writes, offering no refunds, no used game sales and “no accountability whatsoever,” merely because they can. I disagree.

The current behavior of Microsoft and Sony make for inviting red flags in Sterling’s argument. The Xbox 360′s Games on Demand — downloadable games that also sell at retail — are often more expensive to download than they are on disc. And Sony will sell downloadable PSP games that cost more than their boxed counterparts. “The games industry will set its own price at whim, and without any more alternatives, consumers will have no choice but to pay whatever they’re told to pay or simply stop buying games altogether,” Sterling writes.

The problem with this is that it’s based on limited examples. Though Sterling acknowledges that doom-and-gloom is only one possible outcome, it’s hardly the most likely.

Downloads won’t dominate unless consumers endorse the idea, and that requires incentives. Without a reason to go digital — for instance, better value over a hard copy, or rewards for loyalty — consumers will stick with Gamestop. Publishers, in turn, won’t fully commit to digital because there’s no market for it.

Even if console makers slowly grab more market share with downloads, to the point that physical media is out of the equation, it won’t mean the end of competition. In fact, it’ll create more of it. I see a future where a gaming console isn’t only about the best graphics and most exclusive games, but how much value exists in the digital marketplace.

The store that treats its customers the best and offers the most incentive to shop will prosper, while the oppressor will find a smaller audience overall. That’s nothing to be afraid of.

Sprint: The Pre is on Sale. No, Wait, Forget It!

Well, this is weird and embarrassing: All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski, who reported earlier today on a $100 discount for new Sprint customers who bring their phone numbers from another carrier that brought the final price of the Palm Pre to $99, has posted a new story saying that Sprint has decided to pull the offer a few hours after it announced it. The deal was supposed to last through October 10th; instead, it turned into an Incredibly Limited Time Offer.

Sprint is saying that it’s yanking the promotion because it was “put into the system in error,” but there’s just gotta be more of a backstory here.

Paczkowski notes that the offer is still live on Sprint’s site–and yup, it’s still there as I write this.

The whole story points out a basic issue with the Pre: By introducing the iPhone 3GS at $199 (with a two-year contract) and knocking the original iPhone 3G down to $99, Apple succeeded in making the $199 Pre (which has 8GB of memory vs. the 3GS’s 16GB at that price point) look a tad pricey. I imagine it’s inevitable that Palm will need to release a 16GB Pre for $199, or work with Sprint to get the price of the 8GB down to $99. Or both.

I continue to find the Pre to be the most impressive iPhone rival that’s actually on the market–upcoming Android phones could change that–and to hope that it’s a hit, both because it deserves to be one and because Apple needs the competition. For what it’s worth, I’ve been surprised by the number of folks I’ve encountered lately who have bought Pres recently–and all of them have told me they’re pleased with their purchase. Of course, I live in a hotbed of phone geekery, so my random encounters with Pre owners may or may not be representative…

The Beatles (Not) For Sale. Again!

It looks all but certain that the longest-running soap opera in digital music will run at least a little longer. The obligatory annual rumors that Apple was about to announce the availability of the Beatles on the iTunes Store have given way to disappointing sound bites from some pretty knowledgeable sources.

Sir Paul McCartney told NME, not very convincingly, that the appearance tomorrow of the Beatles version of the Rock Band game is a satisfactory alternative to Beatles downloads:

We’ve kind of bypassed that [download problems] because now you can do it in ’Rock Band’,” he said. “I always liked that, when you’re told you can’t do something and suddenly there’s a little route round the back.

Meanwhile EMI’s global catalog president told the Financial Times that the company wants to make the Fab Four’s music available for download–eventually:

“Conversations between Apple and EMI are ongoing and we look forward to the day when we can make the music available digitally. But it’s not tomorrow,” Ernesto Schmitt, EMI’s global catalog  president, told the FT’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

(In this case, I’m assuming that “not tomorrow” means both “not September 9th, 2009″ and “not in the immediate future.”)

The word of Sir Paul and EMI isn’t enough for you? MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka seems to have found a third source with bad news:

The Beatles estate, Electronic Arts (ERTS) and Viacom’s (VIA) MTV will be releasing a new version of “Rock Band” that features the band’s songs tomorrow. And on the same day, EMI Music Group will release all of the band’s music on remastered compact discs.

But that’s it, a source familiar with the band’s plans tells me. For now.

As Kafka says, the theory that Apple would coordinate its announcement with tomorrow’s other Beatles news always seemed a tad unlikely: Why would it want to promote Rock Band, a game that doesn’t run on Apple hardware?

I’m not going to entirely discount the possibility of a surprise tomorrow until the event (which I’ll be liveblogging) ends and Paul McCartney hasn’t emerged from behind the curtain. I’m not sure why I care, since I long ago ripped the music I wanted from CD. Like most Beatles fans who have gone digital. Perhaps the band and EMI wants us to buy the music one last time on CD in these new remastered versions before it gives us the chance to purchase it yet again in downloadable form.

This whole saga is as old as the iTunes Store: It began with the news that the Beatles were suing Apple over iTunes and the lads’ Apple Corps trademark, segued into musings on whether digital Beatles were in the offing after the spat was settled, and in recent years has involved repeated rumors that a deal had already been struck and was about to be announced. After the jump, a recap of the last six years of developments.

Continue reading this story…

Flickr Hits the iPhone, Winningly

I’m not even sure if I was aware that there was no official Flickr app for the iPhone–it’s such a natural that you’d kinda think it would have shown up eons ago. But the app didn’t show up until now. It’s good, with all the features you’d expect (including the ability to upload both photos and videos) and a decidedly Flickr-y feel. One unexpected feature: When you launch it, you get an animated slideshow of photos from your contacts and others that’s kind of addictive. (It makes me wish that the iPhone supported screen savers–this would make for a nifty one.)

I tend to take Flickr for granted except when I need to post photos, which is probably a good thing for my schedule, since it’s so easy to lose yourself in the embarrassment of photographic riches it contains. But I’m rediscovering it all over again on the iPhone. A few screens after the jump.

Continue reading this story…

Eventbrite is Dark

Event-planning site Eventbrite is one of the gems of the Web 2.0 world: It’s what Evite would be if it was a whole lot better and had evolved a whole lot more over the years. That’s why it’s become the de facto standard for coordinating everything from tweetups to conferences to plain ol’ parties here in Silicon Valley. Every time I use it, either to plan an event or attend one, I’m impressed.

Except for this morning, when I headed there to RSVP for an event and found that the site wasn’t responding at all. A bit later, it put up this message:

Judging from Twitter, there are lots of frustrated folks trying to use Eventbrite for lots of events this morning.

I tend to be sympathetic to the challenges of sites that suffer technical hiccups (Technologizer had some self-inflicted ones of its own on Sunday–my apologies if you showed up and couldn’t get in). But as with Gmail’s outage last week, Eventbrite’s troubles this morning are a sobering reminder that there’s no such thing as 100% uptime, and even really good Web services can break. And the more popular a site is, the bigger a deal even short outages can be. Despite competition such as Upcoming, Eventbrite is so pervasive around here that even a brief disruption feels like a rip in the social fabric of the Valley.

I’m hoping the downtime proves to be brief, and that Eventbrite does a good job of explaining what happened and ensuring it won’t happen again. I really like this service–and there’s this party tomorrow night that I really want to RSVP for…

[Last minute update: The moment I pressed Publish on this post, Eventbrite came back. Keep your fingers crossed...]

Would You Buy a Non-Windows, Non-OS X PC?

The IDG News Service’s Dan Nystedt has a report today that Taiwanese electronics behemoth Foxconn is planning to build “smartbooks”–even cheaper netbooks, basically–built around ARM processors. Their lack of x86 CPUs means they’ll run some flavor of Linux–perhaps Moblin (backed by Intel) or, eventually, Google’s Chrome oS. We know they won’t run Windows–not unless Microsoft comes up with a really cheap, ARM-compatible version of the OS.

I don’t think that Foxconn’s machines will be aimed at most of the people reading their post–they’re for folks in emerging nations for whom even netbooks are unaffordable. But all the recent news involving netbooks and netbook-like systems running Linux and variants thereof (as well as other alternative OSes such as Symbian) inspired today’s T-Poll.

For decades now, nearly all consumer PCs have run OSes from a grand total of two companies: Microsoft and Apple. (Yes, I know about the advances that Linux has made–I’m a Ubuntu fan–but the OS has yet to gain any permanent traction in the consumer arena and its market share remains tiny.) Either all this new activity relating to other OSes is going to amount to something, or the companies involved are wasting their time.

Queue the T-Poll:

Commodore 64 iPhone App Comes, Goes

Developer Manomio developed a fully-legal Commodore 64 emulator for the iPhone, struggled to get it approve by Apple, then succeeded when it disabled the BASIC interpreter. Except it didn’t. From Wired’s Gadget Lab blog:

In order to win Apple’s approval the developer Manomio pulled the BASIC interpreter form the application. It turns out that it was still in there and could be activated with a few keystrokes. It took all of a few minutes for Apple to hear about this and pull the application yet again. For a developer that went to such lengths to secure copyright permissions, this seems a bit dumb.

I can’t believe that there’s any drama associated with running an early 1980s BASIC interpreter on the iPhone in late 2009–can anyone explain to me a scenario under which sandboxed Commodore 64 BASIC could present dangers to iPhone users or to Apple? But if you wanna keep your app on the iPhone store, hiding a feature you’d told Apple you’d disabled as an Easter Egg does feel like an act that’s destined to backfire big-time. Wonder if Apple will simply approve the new de-BASICed version that Manomio says it’s re-resubmitted, or whether it ever penalizes developers for being sneaky?

Twenty-One Peculiar Portables

With laptops outselling desktops, the majority of today’s computers share the same design: They’ve got an LCD display and a keyboard, and a hinge in the middle, and they’re small enough to take just about anywhere. It just works. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of inventors from trying to top it. I’ve collected some notable examples from the treasure trove that is Google Patents. Would you have bought any of ‘em?

View Laptopia slide show.

What Will Apple Announce on Wednesday? You Tell Me!

Last time Apple had a big product rollout, I asked you to make some predictions. Collectively, you did better than some of the big-time Apple pundits. Now we’re just hours away from the company’s music event, which Technologizer will cover live beginning at 10am PT on Wednesday.

So let’s try this again, with another quick survey. I’ve listed some of the products that have been rumored or predicted for the event, and also let you predict whether the iPod Classic will get the axe or live on to play another day. I’ll close the survey Tuesday night and report on your verdict before the event happens–then follow up with a look at just how uncannily accurate you were.

Click here to take the Apple Music Event survey.

Laptopia! The World’s Weirdest Portable Computers

There aren’t many pieces of technological design that simply can’t be improved upon, but the clamshell-style laptop computer case–introduced by Grid Systems in 1982–may be one of them. That’s why the vast majority of the portable computers built ever since have used it. But for more than a quarter-century now, inventors have been trying to top it, with folding screens, screens on stalks, folding keyboards, two-screen clamshells, tri-fold clamshells, and more. Most never even get off the drawing board. Herewith, a gallery of designs from Google Patents (click the filing dates to see the patents). There’s only one in here I might have considered buying, but on some perverse level I admire them all.

Virgin America Aircell Gogo In-Flight WiFi

While I’m a little late to this particular mile high club, I finally experienced the joy of in-flight WiFi last Friday. Unlike Boeing’s now defunct Connexion satellite solution, it appears that most domestic airlines are utilizing Aircell’s Gogo service – essentially 3G EVDO connectivity in the sky. On my cross country Virgin America flight, the prices for Internet access were more than reasonable: $13 for a laptop or $8 for a handheld. Although, as we discovered, we didn’t need to pay for each device, periodically swapping the connection between Macbook, iPhone, and Blackberry.

Not only were Gogo’s download speeds (and latency) perfectly suitable for typical web browsing, I also had no probs with SD YouTube video (above). In fact, after seeing how quickly the buffer filled, I gave HD a shot. Giving it a minute to build a buffer worked out fine as well. (In fact, I’m more stoked than ever about Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2. Come November 10th, you can safely expect a period of blog silence.)

Officially, in-flight VoIP is restricted. Which is probably a good thing given how loudly most folks talk into their cell phones. However, when Melissa connected her 8900 Curve to check for email, T-Mobile’s UMA service automatically kicked in. I wouldn’t say it was very usable, with frequent audio drop outs, but the fact that she could check voicemail from 36,000 feet was inspiring.

(This post republished from Zatz Not Funny.)

China Forcing News Sites to ID Commenters

News sites in China are now being required to obtain the true identities of their commenters, likely in an attempt to suppress and deter so-called “subversive” behavior. Previously, commenters had been offered a bit more anonymity where they could either post without registering at all or with much less personal information.

The new policy took effect last month and requires a real name and government issued identification number. This would positively identify every commenter on top of their already traceable IP address.

It appears from news reports that the government has tried to keep its involvement in the change under wraps, working to suppress reports on the matter in the media. It has worked for much of this decade on bringing a “real name” system to the Chinese Internet, and those in China say this is likely just the beginning.

There’s also another reason why the government didn’t want this publicized: it is unpopular and previous attempts have gotten a lot of blowback. China tried in 2006 to implement the policy on blogs, but after prominent bloggers in the country came out against the new policy and the public also overwhelmingly opposed it, the country backed off.

Local officials tried it too: Hangzhou officials wanted a similar policy for all who post on sites in the city earlier this year, however again public criticism killed the government’s plans.

It is certainly disappointing to see China once again working to curtail their citizens rights. The “subversion” tactic is something they use frequently: in most cases it’s an excuse to prevent free speech. Truly, there isn’t much that can be said that could truly disrupt the country.

What they’re paranoid of is the fact that there is a large portion of their population that wants freedom of speech and to be able to speak out. What China’s learning now is that in the digital age, that’s going to be much harder than ever to control.

(Cross posted from TechPolitik)

Google Digs Video Games, Not Aliens. Cool!

If you happened to use Google on September 5, you might’ve seen a UFO sucking up the second “O” in the company’s name.

When Google changes its logo, it’s usually to denote a holiday, or the birthday of a famous scientist or thinker. But this “Google Doodle,” as they’re called, had the ‘net puzzled. The answer started coming together when the company Tweeted a cryptic message that linked to a picture of the logo.

Translating the Tweet, “1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19,” into letters of the alphabet yields the following message: “All Your O Are Belong to Us.” From there, all it takes is a some encyclopedic video game knowledge (or in my case, cheating by reading this Telegraph story) to know Google was celebrating the 20th anniversary of Zero Wing.

This is the Japanese space shooting game turned European Sega Mega Drive release, whose butchered English translation resulted in “All Your Base Are Belong to Us.” The phrase turned into a viral phenomenon thanks to a video from the Something Awful forums.

Mashing up a bizarre techno track with supposedly real-world appearances of the game’s dialog, the video is nothing short of brilliant. I can’t say that All Your Base was the first viral video, but it was the first one that really caught my attention for the way it spread so thoroughly into pop culture, despite its obscure origins.

So, kudos to Google for acknowledging it.

5Words for Monday, September 7th, 2009

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Palm Pre dropping to $150?

Mac/Linux Chrome arrival hint?

Asus e-reader: cheap, two screens.

Is iPhone bad for carriers?

Record your entire life automatically?

Laptops in zero gravity: neat!

A cool-looking $85,000 speaker.