Dotgo: The Web via Text Messaging

Lots of Web sites use SMS short codes to let users retrieve quick hits of information–movie listings, weather, and the like–via text messages on their mobile phones. Which is cool, except for the fact that the codes (short though they may be) are tough to remember.

Here at DEMOFall, a company called Dotgo is launching a service that aims to make SMS text services more powerful and usable. Instead of texting an individual service (such as Google’s GOOGLE, or 466453) you text the name of a site to DOTCOM (or 368266). It responds with instructions on accessing the service in question–for instance, you can get Fandango movie listings by texting Fandango + your Zip code.

And it looks like Dotgo isn’t fazed by sites that have made no provisions for text-message access. Such as, oh, Technologizer–it lets you read our posts via SMS (albeit in pretty unwieldy form–it has to chop them up into 160-character chunks, sans graphics):

Why would you use Dotgo on a phone with a capable Web browser, such as the iPhone? Well, you probably wouldn’t. Dotgo says it wants to bring the service to the millions of phones out there–especially in developing nations such as Africa–that have SMS capability but no real Web access. Makes sense to me.

Zorap: A Fun Twist on Video Chat

Some interesting DEMOfall companies impress on the strength of their basic ideas, even though their user interfaces are rough around the edges. With Zorap, it’s the other way around. On paper, this video-chat service–with built-in sharing of photos, videos, and music–sounds like it’s pretty similar to numerous existing products and services (including Apple’s iChat). But the interface, with multiple windows that glide about and resize themselves, looks like a lot of fun. It reminds me of the look of Apple’s Exposé window-management feature, applied to an entirely different purpose.

Here’s a video demo:

Zorap’s been around for awhile as a stand-alone service; its DEMO news is that it’s releasing a Facebook app version. It doesn’t seem to be live yet, but should be worth checking out.

Best Buy, Verizon Team on New E-Book Reader

Move over, Amazon Kindle. Best Buy and Verizon have unveiled a new e-book reader Wednesday that will sell for $399 and is built by iRex Technologies. The reader like the Kindle would be able to purchase content over the 3G network, and will be sold in about 100 of Best Buy’s locations by October.

Barnes and Noble’s e-bookstore would be used to supply the device with content, the companies said.

Verizon stands to benefit from this new device as it would receive a portion of the revenue to pay for the use of bandwidth by these devices over the network. Best Buy benefits from a device that is a direct revenue stream for them: the company is so serious about e-readers that it is specifically training its associates on how to sell the devices.

The two companies may be getting on the bandwagon at the right time. After only selling around a million of these devices in 2008, over five million are expected to be sold this year according to research firm iSuppli. Much of this increase has to do with the success of the Kindle, which has continued to sell very well by all accounts.

Regardless, the issue of price still looms large. As we reported here on Technologizer at the beginning of this month, e-readers are still too expensive for most consumers. At $400, iRex’s new reader seems to be more than twice what consumers would consider paying for a device.

These companies still need to address this issue if they plan to continue growing sales of these devices well into the future.

The Video Game Bundle Wars of 2009

Evidence that the Wii will become a $200 console is piling up, with the latest rumor coming from Best Buy management. Engadget scored a screen grab of a company letter, warning that the price drop will happen on Sunday, following an official announcement this Friday.

Alongside price cuts for the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360 Elite, this is great news for anyone looking to buy a gaming console this holiday season. But even if you’ve got the itch now, consider holding out for the inevitable software bundles that will follow.

The Best Buy letter notes that stores should “use bundle bands to create bundles that tell a story and truly meet customers’ needs.” I’m not exactly sure what it means to tell a story with products, but I’ll bet Best Buy will try tacking on games and extra controllers to get you spending a little more. Those deals can work out in your favor if you are, in fact, buying the same things you planned to purchase a la carte.

Another thing to watch for are official bundles from the console maker. Ars Technica has a rumor that Xbox 360 Elites will include two games, Pure and Lego Batman, for the same $300 starting in mid-October. Sure, those wouldn’t be the first two games I’d choose, but for the same price tag they do sweeten the pot. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony and Nintendo started offering their own added incentives.

Just remember that your brand new gaming console is worthless without at least one game, and it’s not as fun without two controllers. As the holiday shopping season approaches, keep an eye out for bundles that will save you from spending too much beyond the console’s initial price tag.

Symform: A Peer-to-Peer Take on Backup

I’m still in the audience at the DEMOFall conference, and still taking in demonstrations of new products and services. One of the cooler ideas this morning is Symform, a small-business remote-backup service. Technically, it’s utterly unlike services such as Mozy and Carbonite: Those services store everything in massive server farms, but Symform is farm-free–it uses peer-to-peer technology to store backups on the PCs of other Symform users. If you wanna back up 10GB of data, for instance, you agree to devote 10GB of disk space to other folks’ backups–and to leave your computer on 80 percent of the time.

Does that sound like it involves big questions about availability and security? Well, a lot of obstacles leaped to mind as I heard the Symform people explain what they’d come up with. But they say that they break everything up into tiny chunks, encrypt it, and distribute it among multiple computers in a redundant fashion–in theory, at least, your data will be protected from snooping eyes (such as those of the people whose computers store it) and will be there when you need it. It’s kind of like a private, secure BitTorrent for your own data; I’m still wrestling with the whole concept of storing confidential data on the computers of random strangers, but it’s an interesting idea on a technical level. (Symform is pitching it as, among other things, a greener approach to disaster recovery–those massive server farms cost a fortune to build, and consume massive amounts of energy.)

Symform is aiming its service at small businesses, and plans to sell it through the independent IT professionals who small companies tend to call on for help; it’ll charge the IT pros about $15 per month, and let them decide how much they charge their customers. At the moment it’s for Windows users only, but the company says it hopes to release a Mac version at some point.

So would you trust your data to a peer-to-peer network?

Google Toolbar Adds Sidewiki

If we wait long enough, I’m convinced, every single idea from the Web 1.0 era will come back. Such as the idea of browser plug-ins that let folks attach comments to specific Web pages that can be read by anyone else who uses the plug-in. That was the idea behind such products as Third Voice, and it’s back today in the form of Google Sidewiki, a new feature in the Google Toolbar.

Continue reading this story…

iTune Sync for PalmPre: Once Again, It’s Over

New development in the ongoing saga of the Palm Pre’s Media Sync feature, which has let Pre owners sync directly with iTunes by tricking iTunes into thinking the Pre is an iPod: Palm’s attempt to get the USB Implementers’ Forum to intervene has failed. All Things Digital’s John Paczkowski is reporting that the USB-IF has told Palm that the Pre’s masquerade seems to violate the organization’s policy, which is that a manufacturer can only use the USB IDs it’s been assigned. (Palm has been using one assigned to Apple.)

This is not a startling development: I woulda put ten-to-one odds on it happening all along. The Pre has pretty much been using somebody else’s driver’s license to get into a bar–or, if you prefer, somebody else’s invitation to get into a party.

What’s Palm’s next move? I keep thinking that it’s got no options left but to surrender, but who knows? I do notice that the Palm site still touts Media Sync:

Here’s the footnote:

No matter how you slice it, this is misleading and out of date: We already know that iTunes 9 breaks Media Sync, so whether or not Palm “guarantees” compatibility is irrelevant. And iTunes 9 isn’t a future version, it’s the current one. I guess “Plus, use the Palm media sync feature to transfer your DRM-free iTunes music, video, and photos to your Pre…as long as you’re using an old cersion of iTunes” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I wanted Palm to win this fight, and I think everyone, including Apple, would win if iTunes had some level of built-in support for non-Apple devices. But it’s surely time for Palm to either eliminate references to media sync as a selling point or introduce a Media Sync 2.0 that uses a bit of middleware to do the syncing, a technique which works just fine. If I’d bought a Pre in part because Palm told me I’d be able to sync with iTunes, I know I’d vote for the latter option…

[UPDATE: PreCentral is reporting that an upcoming WebOS update will re-re-enable Media Sync, and that Palm wants the cat-and-mouse game to continue indefinitely. Doesn’t sound like much fun for anyone involved if it involves Media Sync breaking then working then breaking then working ad infinitum…)

Yahoo’s New Search: Good Today, Gone Tomorrow?

On Monday, Yahoo unveiled significant revisions to its search engine, as detailed in this blog post. I like the new stuff–especially the embedded YouTube videos (despite owning YouTube, Google doesn’t embed it in search results) and the overall performance (as Yahoo claims, the new engine feels fast). But given Yahoo’s plans to turn its search infrastructure over to Microsoft’s Bing, feeling good about Yahoo search paradoxically leaves me kinda uneasy.  It’s still not clear whether Yahoo touches like the Search Pad research tool will survive the Bing takeover. On the other hand, it’s also not completely clear that the feds will approve the Microsoft deal.

This I do know: Yahoo search is still stuck in an odd limbo. If it’s going to be Binged, I hope it happens expeditiously. But as a mere user of Yahoo rather than an investor, I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t prefer to have Yahoo and Microsoft continue to duke it out with each other as well as with Google to build the best possible search engine.

Goby, a Search Engine For Activities

Looking for something to do? Starting now, you can look to Goby, a new search engine that launched Tuesday night. Rather than trying to beat Google at its own game, Goby is trying to be really good at one thing: helping you find places to go and activities to participate in–whether they’re in your own backyard or halfway around the world. That includes everything from trails to hike to museums to visit to hotels you might want to stay at.

Goby’s search field is actually three search fields: What would you like to do, Where, and When. Fill in the first two (and, optionally, the third) and Goby will come back with Web results, including photos, map locations, and a “What’s Nearby” button.

How is this better than using Google? Goby, unlike Google, understands the concept of a general area; if you search for hiking trails in San Francisco, it’ll alert you to ones in Marin, too. Unlike Google, it can figure out the dates in results–if you’re going to New York over a specific long weekend, you can search for gallery shows taking place then. And Goby does a good job of winnowing out Web pages that don’t relate to activities and events–in my tests, it never returned results out of left field.

Much of the time it works quite well, but this debut version of Goby is interesting as much for its potential as for its current state. It asks you “What would you like to do?”, which implies that it wants you to answer with a phrase like “ride a bike” or “see a concert.” but when I entered those phrases for San Francisco, I got zero results. (Entering the terser “bike” and “concert” worked well.) When you enter a date or date range, Goby doesn’t sort the results by date, which means that its first results may not be for the period you specified even when it has ones that are. And I found it sometimes returned dupes–multiple links to the same event or locale. (In some cases, these were for activities that occurred on multiple dates, but you’d think Goby could roll up all the results into one entry.)

Goby’s default geographical range for results was also sometimes way broader than I expected–when I searched for museums on Cape Cod, for example, many of the results were in Boston. Using the embedded Google Map to pinpoint the area I was interested in helped a lot.

Unlike sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, Goby isn’t primarily about helping you quickly judge the quality of places you might go–it’s more of a traditional search engine, aggregating links that take you off to other sites when you click them. The basic idea’s full of promise, and the company is full of plans to expand up on it (with versions for mobile phones, for instance). I’m sure I’ll check it out when I’m planning to travel–or just looking for ways to fill a quiet weekend around town.

[UPDATE: I just encountered another Goby limitation I didn't catch the first time around: It doesn't work in Safari. You get a message saying it's working to support all browsers, and a link to download Firefox. Certainly a major gotcha for Mac users...]

Google Burrows into Internet Explorer

Today, Google announced a plug-in for Internet Explorer that usurps the IE browsing engine’s role, rendering pages with Google Chrome instead. The plug-in, called Google Chrome Frame, targets Web developers who must program around IE 6′s proprietary quirks.

Internet Explorer remains the world’s dominant Web browser, but many of its users are running archaic versions of the software –to the frustration of Microsoft and its critics alike. Older versions of the browser do not support the latest standards, hindering what users can do on the Web.

Google argues that Chrome’s Webkit and JavaScript engines will seamlessly bring IE up to par, awhile preserving the interface that people are accustomed to in IE 6 and IE 7. Microsoft has largely solved its issues with standards support with IE 8, but Google Frame targets it as well.

Of course people will have to install the plug-in, which requires a 10MB download. Web developers will also have to modify their HTML code to invoke the plug-in. Nonetheless, it’s a new approach to getting people to upgrade their browsers.

Google is using an attrition strategy to bring IE users on board with Chrome. I could not imagine why any corporate IT folks would install this plug-in; they keep IE installed for compatibility reasons. Microsoft has also enabled legacy support in IE 8.

Google Chrome Frame is a neat technology, but I don’t expect that your mother will end up using it unless it is bundled with software that people widely use. Google might attempt to leverage its Web properties, but many people are a creature of habit. My father is still using AOL, and my attempt to move him to Gmail failed.

Microsoft Does Tablets. Yes, Again

Gizmodo is reporting on what it says is Microsoft’s prototype for a new sort of tablet computer–one with dual screens bound up like a book, and an interface that involves both multi-touch (like an iPhone) and a stylus (like a Tablet PC). It’s supposedly code-named Courier, and Gizmodo has a video walkthrough–which is done in animation, so this could be a concept rather than a product that’ll ever be available for sale. Here’s a still image:

Nobody’s going to look at Gizmodo’s video and come away saying “Gee, that looks like a boring, me-too product.” I do remain skeptical about products based on the notion that people want to use styluses to input handwritten text that won’t be converted into accurate, editable ASCII into a computing device. That was the notion behind the Tablet PCs which Microsoft unveiled with absurd pomp and circumstance back in 2001–the company said that most notebooks would be tablets within a few years. I thought that tablets were unsatisfactory technology in search of real-world problems back in 2001, and wasn’t the least bit surprised when they didn’t go much of anywhere.

I was, however, kind of startled that Microsoft seemed to give up on tablets rather quickly–other than some modest software updates, it never did much to improve the idea. If Courier’s the real deal, maybe it hadn’t given up so much as skulked away and decided to quietly work on the idea when technology had progressed a bit.

But Courier, if it ever appears in a form that comes close to Giz’s video, may still suffer from Newton’s Conundrum: Really good handwriting recognition still doesn’t exist, and it’s impossible to convince consumers that they don’t really want it. If Apple’s tablet exists and has a chance of finding a large audience, I’m guessing it’ll sidestep the issue by doing very little that involves textual input at all.

Note also the unwieldy way that the hand in the above image is doing two-finger multi-touch while keeping a stylus tucked under the forefinger. On the other hand, Courier would presumably run some form of Windows, and it’s nice to see that in the demo, at least, it’s Windows with an all-new user interface designed for the device at hand. Microsoft may argue differently, but I think the familiar interface elements in both Tablet PC and Windows Mobile were a mistake, since they were familiar elements originally designed for desktop PCs you drove with a keyboard and mouse…

Are You Sure You Want That New Zune HD?

A former Sling Media colleague and current blogging ally picked up the Zune HD at launch, as that’s how us gadget fiends roll.

I’ve been tracking Microsoft’s hardware refresh as well, but given the capabilities of current flagship smartphones, I just don’t have a place (or pocket) in my life for a portable media player (PMP), web tablet, or gaming device that doesn’t integrate ‘cellular’ connectivity. I also find fault with Microsoft’s ability to more tightly integrate the Zune experience throughout their product lineup – Windows Media Center, Xbox 360, and Windows Mobile. A missed opportunity for sure.

“Right now our product roadmaps didn’t line up perfectly” is how MS describes the current state of affairs. Contrast that with Apple’s more harmonious ecosystem. However, whether or not Zunes are sold out, post-launch improvements are coming. And Microsoft’s new hardware platform is beautiful – both the OLED screen and physical design. In fact, I prefer its looks over the iPod Touch and iPhone (although I’d appreciate physical volume controls).

Continue reading this story…

Operating System Wars: The Technologizer Edition!

Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has posted a report on the operating system versions used by his site’s visitors. (The almost-brand-new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard already dominates.) I’m a longtime sucker for this sort of data. So here’s a quick report on the OSes that folks use to visit Technologizer.

These numbers are based on Google Analytics data for the past thirty days. Usage fluctuates enough that if I do this again in a few months–and hey, I probably will–the breakdown might be meaningfully different. But here’s what it is right now.

Sixty-six percent of you used Windows to visit the site:

• Sixty-one percent were on XP
• Twenty-nine percent ran Vista
• Ten percent were on earlier versions (I see no Windows 7 users reported–it may be that the OS doesn’t identify itself as Win 7 to browsers.)

Twenty-four percent of you use Macs:

• Fifty-four percent ran OS X 10.5 Leopard
• Thirty-four percent had OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
• Eight percent used OS X 10.4 Tiger
• Four percent had earlier versions
  (NOTE: The figures for Macs are updated from my original posting, which had eleven percent of Mac users on pre-10.4 versions of the OS: Eagle-eyed  John Gruber thought that sounded high, and he was absolutely right–I wasn’t accounting for Power PC users. More than ninety percent of Mac users were on Intel systems, incidentally.)

Five percent of you used Linux, and Google Analytics isn’t telling me how the distributions broke down, unfortunately. (It’s presumably safe to say that Ubuntu predominates.)

Three percent of you came to the site via an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Not a huge number of folks, but it’s double the figure from a year ago.

Other devices and OSes that people have used to visit Technologizer in the past month–none amount to more than one-tenth of one percent of visitors:

• BlackBerry
• Symbian
• Android
• Sun
• OS/2 (wow)
• PlayStation
• Wii
• Danger Hiptop
• PalmOS
• FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD
• Other Unix variants
• BeOS (double wow)
• PSP

A grand total of zero percent of you visited Technologizer on an Amiga in the past month, which makes me very, very sad…

Twelve Ways to Ace a Product Demo–or at Least Avoid Flopping

I’ve been a technology journalist for more than eighteen years now. A significant part of the job involves sitting through demos of new products and services I might want to write about. I’ve seen great demos. Good ones. Mind-numbingly bad ones. Bizarre ones. (Remind me to tell you about the time a product caught on fire in mid-demonstration.)

I figure I’ve witnessed at least 5,000 demos of hardware, software, and services so far, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen as many in so little time as I have over the past week as an attendee at both TechCrunch50 and DEMOfall, two conferences that both involve dozens and dozens of product launches. As I’ve sat here watching demos–including both really good ones and really bad ones–I’ve been mulling over the things that successful demos nearly always have in common. I’m documenting them here as a public service, or at least to get a few things off my chest.

Continue reading this story…

Picasa Gets Face Recognition, Built-in Google Maps

I can never quite tell if Google considers its free Picasa image organizer/editor to be a Major Google Product–it doesn’t update it all that often, or promote it as energetically as it might. But it’s announcing Picasa 3.5 today, which should be available for Windows and OS X by the time you read this or soon thereafter. Google let me get my hands on it a bit early; Picasa fans should like it, and it gives those of us who haven’t checked out the app in a while new reason to revisit it.

Continue reading this story…

Emo Labs’ “Invisible Speakers”

Back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, I got a preview of Emo Labs’ technology for building nice-sounding speakers into the bezels of HDTVs (and, eventually, notebooks, phones, picture frames, and other devices), providing a high-quality audio experience without the bulk, hassle, and expense of external speakers. Emo tied with Palm’s Pre as my favorite CES debutante, even though it wasn’t on the show floor and wasn’t widely covered.

The company just announced the technology more formally here at DEMO, and I’m still impressed. In January, representatives told me that they hoped the technology would show up in TVs for the holiday season, but it could slip into 2010. They didn’t mention a timeframe during their DEMO demo, so I’ll try to track ‘em down and get an update. Whenever it shows up, it should be neat.