Google Dashboard: Good–But More Explanation, Please

Just how much Google do you have in your life? Now Google is giving you a tool to help answer that question: Google Dashboard, which puts personal information relating to twenty Google services you may be using on one page.

Dashboard includes everything from the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox to how many people are following you on Google Reader to the most recent task you completed with Google Tasks. Icons indicate if you’ve made a piece of information (such as your age) public; links let you go to the originating services and manage settings relating to them. It puts scads of information about you in one place, which is why you need to enter a password to get to it–even if you’re already logged in.

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The 20 Greatest Tech Underdogs of All Time

Rocky. The Chicago Cubs. Charlie Brown. Avis, back when its whole schtick centered on being America’s #2 rental car company. America loves its underdogs–and the technology business has always been home to a disproportionate number of exceptionally lovable underdogs. They may never achieve market leadership, but without them, the tech in our lives would be less interesting, innovative, and inspiring.

So what is an underdog? Merriam-Webster says it’s a “loser or predicted loser in a struggle or contest” or a “a victim of injustice or persecution.” For this list, I’m using a somewhat different, tighter definition. Continue reading this story…

Verizon’s Droid and the Importance of Pinching

When I compared the Verizon Droid to the iPhone 3GS last week, I said that the Droid didn’t have multi-touch input–based on the fact that I’d used it a lot and encountered no instances when it did. A commenter said that the phone did indeed support multi-touch, and I tweaked my item. Essentially, the phone is capable of multi-touch; it just chooses not to use it.

Today, Rob Jackson of Phandroid pointed out that the Android image editor Picsay uses multi-touch, and serves as proof that the Droid can do it. He’s right, and Picsay shows the power of controlling your phone with more than one finger at a time. As with iPhone applications, it lets zoom in and out of images by pulling and pinching them. It’s wonderfully fluid–at least as good as the iPhone’s multi-touch.

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Art, Game or Trojan? Don’t Be the Judge!

The folks at Symantec have looked right past the artistic intent behind Lose/Lose, a computer game that deletes your files every time you shoot an alien, because they’ve just classified the game as a Mac Trojan.

Lose/Lose is described by its creator as “a game with real life consequences.” It’s a standard space shooter in the spirit of Galaga, except that each alien is assigned to a file on your hard drive. Blast the alien, and the file is gone forever, for real. Getting hit by an alien crashes the game, never to be played again. Here’s what creator Zach Gage says about the project:

By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions?

When I read about the game on Make a couple months ago, I chuckled at the concept, watched the video and wisely skipped trying the game for myself.

Symantec, on the other hand, dubbed the game a Trojan, gave it a name (“OSX.Loosemaque”) and created a threat assessment. Most amusing is how Symantec employee and blogger Ben Nahorney acknowledges Gage’s intent: “What’s interesting is that the author of this ‘game’ flat-out says what it does on his Web site,” Nahorney writes. “Reading through the author’s description, it seems that he has created this game/threat as some sort of artistic project.”

Still, Nahorney follows with a valid point, that someone with truly bad intentions could modify Lose/Lose’s code and distribute a game that doesn’t pronounce its file-deleting capabilities outright. So next time you download some obscure, simplistic alien-shooting game from the Internet, consider yourself warned.

5Words: Bring Back Windows Vista UAC!

Windows 7 UAC: insufficiently annoying?

Verizon hikes early termination fees.

Gizmodo gets more Courier details.

iPhone apps hit 100K mark.

Can’t sell Beatles without permission.

More antitrust trouble for Intel.

More on Droid pinching, zooming.

Tethering coming for Verizon Droid.

Second Life launches business version.

More Nvidia x86 CPU rumors.

What’s up with the CrunchPad?

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Google Friend Connect: More Ways to Connect Friends

Google has rolled out a major update to Google Friend Connect, its service that lets small Web sites (and some not-so-small ones, such as the Huffington Post) easily add community features such as comments, reviews and ratings, and the ability to friend other visitors.

There are a bunch of new features, all of which you can add to a site by pasting in code that creates gadgets on your pages.

Continue reading this story…

The Beatles and (an) Apple: Together at Last!

This is…odd. The Beatles are finally releasing their remastered catalog in digital form–both high-quality FLAC files and 320-Kbps MP3s. But they’re not selling it on iTunes or any other online music merchant. They’re releasing it as a limited edition of 30,000 16GB USB drives that fit into an “exquisitely crafted” commemorative apple.

The box set includes fourteen albums, fourteen short documentaries, cover art, and expanded liner notes, and will go for $280. That’s more than the recent CD release, and more than you’ll pay when this stuff does become available for online purchase. (Most of the Rolling Stones’ albums go for eight bucks a piece as downloads.)

The ordering page for the apple doesn’t  say anything about whether it’s easy to get the music onto an iPod or other device. I hope it at least doesn’t do anything to make it difficult…

Why the unorthodox means of going digital? I can think of a few reasons.

The lads are used to commanding a premium price for their music, which is tough online. (Sticking it on a USB drive lets them hawk it as a limited edition, but every digital download is, by definition, an unlimited edition.)

Their business model as a corporate entity essentially consists of selling their fans the same music over and over–for more than forty years now! The limited-edition apple gives ‘em the ability to do it at least one more time before it goes online. I’m already suspicious that some sort of non-limited edition USB version is on its way.

Not being available for download has become a Beatles trademark. The apple lets them go digital while keeping the tradition alive. And the longer they string out the saga, the bigger a deal it’ll be when they do go online.

A couple of predictions:

The Beatles’ music will be available from the major download stores within eighteen months–and maybe a lot sooner than that.

Tragically, the fabled Apple press event in which Steve Jobs’ ‘one more thing” is the Beatles and Paul McCartney and/or Ringo Starr take the stage to make music won’t ever happen. One day, the music will just be there, and we’ll eventually forget it hadn’t been all along.

So would you spend $280 for USBeatles?

Eliminate Pro: Is This the iPhone’s Quintessential Shooter?

A new game called Eliminate Pro surfaced in the iPhone’s App Store yesterday, and it finally delivers everything the iPhone’s OS 3.0 update and faster 3GS model were supposed to provide.

Eliminate Pro is a free-to-play first-person shooter. The plot is minimal — you’re a test subject at a weapons development company — and the play is basic, pitting you against a few other players in simple deathmatch arenas. You need at least an iPhone 3G to play, but you get better map rendering on the iPhone 3GS. Graphically speaking, the game has a solid presentation and looks a bit like Quake 2 in terms of detail.

But what’s most interesting about Eliminate Pro is the business model, made possible with OS 3.0. There aren’t any ads, and it never costs you anything to play, but if you want to gain experience points and in-game currency for buying and upgrading gear, you’ll need “energy.” You only get enough energy for roughly a half dozen rounds, after which you’ll either need to buy more with real money or wait for about four real-world hours. A basic unit of energy costs $1 and lasts you for another half dozen rounds or so, though you can buy the stuff in increments of $10 or even $40.

So this is the iPhone’s new free app with in-game purchases model, but does it work? Sort of. I’m happy to keep the game on my iPhone, but I’m not tempted to buy more energy. The cost to keep earning experience and credits is simply too high — games go fast, so you could easily burn through $10 in a day — and there’s no option to pay once for all-you-can-play. The controls also need more customization, as I couldn’t quite get comfortable enough to achieve the lightning-quick response needed to feel like I’m playing a legitimate first-person shooter.

But for now, this is as good as it gets on the iPhone (disregarding Doom Classic and Wolfenstein 3D, which get special classic status). Eliminate Pro uses a business model that’s in line with the iPhone’s dirt-cheap economy, and it’s perfectly serviceable for a few minutes of fun. It may not be a great game, but it’s a good snapshot of where iPhone gaming stands right now.

AT&T Sues Verizon Over “There’s a Map for That”

Verizon Wireless has been bashing AT&T and its products lately, in both its “There’s a map for that” ads snarking about AT&Ts 3G coverage and the “Droid does” campaign that says the iPhone is a bag of limitations. Now AT&T is bashing back–in court.

As Engadget is reporting, the company is saying that “There’s a map for that” misleads consumers with coverage maps that show what seems to be great swaths of the U.S. with no AT&T coverage, when in fact most of those areas have 2G coverage, but no 3G.

It’s not an irrational point, although I’m not sure if Verizon’s spot is any more deceptive than all those AT&T ads that say the company has the nation’s fastest 3G network. It does, but that 3G network is nowhere near as widely deployed as Verizon’s, so slow connectivity is far more of an issue for AT&T customers than for Verizon ones. (I wonder if Verizon’s ever flirted with suing over those spots?)

As Engadget notes, there’s an easy fix here: If Verizon tweaks its maps to show AT&T’s zones of 2G-only coverage, its ad will be just as compelling as the current version–and it’ll be tough for AT&T to claim that there’s anything inaccurate or confusing about the claim. Here’s hoping that this happens quickly, and that everyone involved goes back to spending money on improving their networks rather than legal wrangling.

A Dream Car for Tech Lovers

Is there any part of our lives that’s more backwards from a digital-technology standpoint than the hours we spend in the second homes known as cars? Interesting exceptions such as Ford Sync aside, automobiles seem to routinely run about half a decade behind the rest of the world when it comes to personal technology. (I felt positively triumphant when I recently installed an adapter that lets me listen to my iPhone in the car–woo hoo!)

So the concept car being announced today by nG Connect–a consortium of companies involved in the next-generation LTE wireless broadband standard–is, indeed, a dream machine.  Designed by LTE infrastructure company Alcatel Lucent, Atlantic Records, infogizmo maker Chumby, kid site Kabillion, real-time operating system developer QNX, and Toyota, the modified Prius sports large multiple Net -connected touchscreens (including separate ones for the driver and front passenger) that deliver information services such as GPS navigation, car diagnostics, and home monitoring; music and movies (not to the driver, I assume!); networked games; shopping, and more.

It’s also a rolling hotspot so you can use laptops and Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones and other wireless gizmos.

When will we be able to park something like this in our own driveways? Well, LTE should start to matter next year. Judging from past history with network rollouts, I’m assuming it’s going to be awhile until it’s available everywhere I want to drive. (I rode in the passenger’s seat down California’s Highway 1 this weekend, and even plain old EVDO often disappeared on me.) I figure it’s also going to be awhile before car companies build even a fraction of this stuff into real vehicles–and once they do, it’ll be awhile longer before it’s priced for mere humans.

All of which is fine by me. I’m nowhere near ready to retire my trusty 2004 Mazda3, so if it’s a few years before this concept car becomes affordable reality, I can wait.

Does it appeal to you?

Ribbit Introduces a Google Voice Competitor

VoIP company Ribbit is girding itself to compete with Google Voice, with a new service that’s quite similar in some ways and quite different in others.

Like Google Voice, Ribbit Mobile is a sort of virtual receptionist: It can ring multiple phones at once, gives you Web-based access to voicemail, and can transcribe messages into text and alert you via e-mail or SMS. But Ribbit works with the phone number you already have (Google Voice recently introduced a no-new-number option, but it’s missing lots of features).

Other stuff that’s interesting about Ribbit Mobile: It has a “Caller ID 2.0″ feature that integrates your address book with feeds from sources like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in order to show you stuff about the people who have called you. It provides embeddable widgets that let people call you from within blogs, Facebook, and other sites. It lets you opt for premium services from third-party companies (such as those who do voicemail transcription with humans, not just machines). And unlike Google Voice, it’s an open platform, so other companies may build apps and services that connect to it and incorporate its features.

Continue reading this story…

5Words: Sony Ericsson Does Android

Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone.

Microsoft slashes hosted Exchange price.

An imaginary Google Maps town.

Hands on with Firefox 3.6.

This handheld only does Twitter.

New Chrome syncs browser bookmarks.

Opera Mobile 10 for Nokia.

Sprint: Pixi has Wi-Fi. (Not!)

Spotify: the future of music?

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PC vs. Phone: Which Matters Most?

Virtual file server company Egnyte is releasing BlackBerry and Android clients for its service, letting users of those smartphones get to the files in their online storage from their handsets. (The service already works on Windows PCs, Macs, and iPhones.) As part of the new rollout, the company commissioned a survey of small businesses about their smartphone usage.

Many of the results are pretty much of what you’d expect from a survey conducted for a storage company that’s announcing smartphone support: 74 percent of respondents, for instance, said that “accessing and sharing file server data via their smartphone would lead to increased productivity and better business decisions.” More surprising: 48 percent of the people who took the survey said that RIM’s BlackBerry is the most innovative smartphone, vs. 29 percent who said the iPhone is.

But one tidbit intrigued me the most: A quarter of the survey respondents said that they use their smartphones more than they do their PCs for business use. I’m not sure if that sounds low or high, but as smartphones get smarter over the next few years, you gotta think that many of us will come to see them as our principal computing devices, and consider traditional PCs to be the secondary, special-purpose gadget.

In terms of hours logged with each device, my laptop is still more essential to my work (and play) than my phone. Emotionally, though, I’m at least as attached to my iPhone as I am to any full-blown computer I own. When it’s useful, it’s exceptionally useful–and I sure spend less time futzing with it than I do with any Windows or OS X machine. And it gets the opportunity to save my bacon more often than my laptop does, because I take it absolutely everywhere. (As you may or may not know, I wear my phone around my neck on a lanyard so it’s always within reach and I never lose it.)

Your take?

Best Buy Does Digital Movies

What happens to Best Buy when all of the content we rent and buy comes to us via the Internet rather than on shiny discs we buy in stores? The company won’t go the way of Tower Records or the Virgin Megastores, but it’ll surely miss the money it made selling CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray. And it’s clearly girding itself for the day when those racks of discs go away. Last year, it bought music subscription service Napster–and now it’s announcing a partnership with Sonic’s Roxio CinemaNow service to get into the digital movie business.

More details on Best Buy’s plans are yet to come, but Sonic told me that the retailing giant will create a Best Buy-branded version of CinemaNow, and will work with hardware manufacturers to build it into gadgets such as HDTVs and Blu-Ray players. A Best Buy representative told the New York Times’ Steve Lohr that the service will be available early next year, and that the goal is to let us pay for a movie once and then watch it on an array of devices: not just TVs and PCs but also media players and phones.

Sounds good to me. I’ve bought Walt Disney’s Pinocchio so often over the past twenty-four years, in so many slight variants, that I’ve lost track. I’d love to think that I could buy it just one more time and be done with it–if not for life then at least for a long, long time to come…

E-Ink Gets More Appealing

I’ve been writing about e-readers from the moment that Amazon released its first Kindle. And when I do, I usually express my reservations about the E-Ink screens used by the Kindle and all of its direct competitors. Yes, they’re glare-free and run for days on a charge. But the technology’s monochrome-only, the displays are slow, and the cost has kept e-reader prices high enough that there are plenty of book lovers who haven’t splurged on one yet.

Chipmaker Marvell announced a new processor today, the Armada 166e, that’s designed to let designers of e-readers build better E-Ink-equipped devices. Marvell’s system-on-a-chip builds an E-Ink graphics controller right into the processor, allowing for e-readers that cost less to make but yet which can refresh their E-Ink displays more quickly. (Earlier e-readers have used separate graphics controllers to drive their E-Ink screens.)

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E-Reader vs. E-Reader: Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble

Back on October 19th, a company called Spring Design introduced an e-reader called Alex. It had two significant features in common with Barnes &  Noble’s Nook, which was introduced a day later: Both sport a large monochrome e-ink screen and a smaller touch-sensitive color display below, and both run Google’s Android OS.

Spring Design is now saying that the similarity is too close for comfort, and that it’s suing Barnes & Noble:

Spring Design first developed and began filing patents on its Alex e-book, an innovative dual screen, Android-based e-book back in 2006. Since the beginning of 2009 Spring and Barnes & Noble worked within a non-disclosure agreement, including many meetings, emails and conference calls with executives ranging up to the president of Barnes and Noble.com, discussing confidential information regarding the features, functionality and capabilities of Alex. Throughout, Barnes & Noble’s marketing and technical executives extolled Alex’s “innovative” features, never mentioning their use of those features until the public disclosure of the Nook.

I’m not a lawyer, and have no insight into the backstory here–and while I’ve played a bit with an Alex, I’ve yet to see a Nook in the flesh. So I’m not taking sides. But the two e-readers do look similar (that’s the Alex on the left):

One way or another, I hope this is resolved quickly: The Nook is due to ship late this month, and is, for the moment, the Amazon Kindle’s most promising competitor. Spring’s press release doesn’t say whether its goal is to prevent B&N from shipping the Nook at all