Technologizer Around the Web

When I started Technologizer, I thought it would be a place…and it is, of course. But it turns out to be a place that has outposts all over the Internet, often at sites that are a lot bigger than this one. Here are two current examples.

First, I’m going to be watching another Webcast and guest-tweeting as I do so. This one’s a conversation with Richard Florida, the author of The Rise of the Creative Class. It’s at 2pm ET this Monday, December 14th. Here’s where you get more information or just show up at that time to participate. (All visitors can tweet the interview directly from the site, if they’re so inclined, and some tweets will be picked to show up right alongside the talk while it’s in progress.)

Second, I’ve written another guest post for BingTweets. As usual, the general theme is the future of search, and this time I wrote about how much I’d like to see search impact TV just as much as it has the Web. The post’s called “The Search for Something to Watch.”

If you like Technologizer, I hope you’ll check out these extracurricular activities.

Notable Mobile Apps of the Week

Google Goggles (Android)

Earlier this week Google Goggles launched to great fanfare. Yet I’m not so sure it’s currently “a huge leap forward in the field of visual search.” Basically, you snap a pic with your Android (1.6 or greater) device and Google does it’s best to identify it. Whatever it may be. However, in testing yesterday, Goggles kind of sucks. Evernote clearly beats it in OCR. ShopSavvy and RedLaser clearly beat it in product identification and research. But this is Google. And they’ve got more brain power and computing power than most. So it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on. In the meantime, Goggles supposedly does a good job with artwork and landmarks… if you happen to be lost in or near a notable museum.

Continue reading this story…

TomTom Puts the U.S. on Sale

GPS kingpin TomTom, which released its much-awaited iPhone version back in August for $99.99, has a new version out today for $49.99. The difference? The original edition (which remains available) covered the U.S. and Canada, and the new one is U.S.-only. It may not technically qualify as a price cut, since you get less for your money. But it does feel like a telling reaction to the extreme price sensitivity in iPhone appland, as well as the arrival of cheap GPS apps such as MotionX ($3.99 to buy, then $3.99 for any month when you use it).

Next question: What happens to TomTom and Navigon and AT&T and Networks and Motion and even MotionX if Google brings its free version of Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions from Android to the iPhone?

Office 2003 Rights Management Bug Locks up Files

UPDATED: It’s a nightmare scenario: Imagine coming into the office and not being able to access any of your organization’s vital documents. That scenario became reality today for an untold number of Microsoft Office 2003 customers who use Microsoft’s Rights Management Service (RMS), a technology for controlling access to documents.

Office 2003 users receive the error, “Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator,” when they attempt to open or save protected documents. The bug affects Office 2003 products including Excel 2003, Outlook 2003, PowerPoint 2003, and Word 2003. It does not affect Office 2007 or Office 2010 Beta, according to Microsoft.

A spokesperson said that the bug was caused by a Information Rights Management (IRM) certificate expiring.

Microsoft has posted a bulletin to TechNet alerting customers to the problem, and says that it is working “as quickly as possible” to provide its customers with a solution. Further announcements will be posted to the blog.

Microsoft released a hotfix on Saturday. The Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 3 update is required for hotfixes to be installed.

Two Google Search Enhancements

It’s been an uncommonly busy week for Google search. On Monday, the company unveiled its new real-time search feature and Google Goggles visual search. Now it’s ending the week with two additional meaningful new features. (And hey, it celebrated Popeye on its home page in between.)

New feature #1: Google Suggest, the feature that starts providing possible queries as you type, now provides possible answers in some cases.

The feature in its current form is fairly limited: It includes ten types of information (weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency, and unit conversions) and is only smart enough to figure out what you’re typing with certain phrasings of questions. (It seems to work best if you use as few words as possible rather than typing in wordy questions.) But at its best, it’s kind of eerie–Google gives you answers while you’re still typing.

New feature #2 is only for folks running the beta of Chrome 4 for Windows, but it’s also neat: It’s Quick Scroll, which auto-scrolls to sections of Web pages relevant to queries you’ve searched for–once you’ve clicked off Google onto a site in the results.

Quick Scroll is clever and useful. It’s interesting, though, to see it debuting as a Chrome extension–even though vastly more folks could take advantage of its goodness if it was a Firefox one. Google’s blog post on the new features doesn’t mention if the company plans to make it more widely available, but this is the most recent evidence that Google is starting to favor its own products in a way it hadn’t in the past.

Apple Sues Nokia. Who’s Next?

““We’re very, very comfortable with where we are competitively…we like competition, as long as they don’t rip off our [intellectual property]…and if they do, we’ll go after them.”

–Apple COO Tim Cook, January

Early this year, there was much speculation on the Web about the possibility of Apple suing Palm over the Pre’s use of an iPhone-like multi-touch interface. So far, the two companies have stayed out of court. But Apple has now responded to last month’s Nokia lawsuit over networking patents by countersuing the Finnish giant. It denies that it’s infringed Nokia’s patents–but says that Nokia has violated a passel of Apple user-interface patents. Intentionally. And unashamedly.

Continue reading this story…

Should Microsoft Abandon Phones?

Over at the New York Times’ Bits blog, Steve Lohr is reporting on a shocking recommendation from tech analyst/writer Mark Anderson: Microsoft should abandon the phone business. Anderson says that Microsoft doesn’t get consumers–with the exception of game-playing consumers–and it’s time for the company to focus on business customers.

As Lohr says, the chances that Microsoft will give Windows Mobile a respectful burial and move on are slim. Very, very slim. If I were Steve Ballmer, I sure wouldn’t: Even if the company’s phone strategy is in crummy shape, some chance of getting back on track is better than no chance. Phones are the future of personal computing: To exit the business would be the equivalent of Warner Bros. giving up on TV in 1950, or the New York Times shuttering its Web site in 1998 or so.

So I’m not advocating for Microsoft to give up–and in fact would be happy to see Windows Mobile 7 turn out to be something worth getting excited over.

What say you?

Gaming’s Flop of the Year is Tony Hawk: Ride

Even as skateboarding legend Tony Hawk mechanically read from the teleprompter during Microsoft’s E3 press conference in June, I got the sense that he was genuinely excited for Tony Hawk: Ride, which uses a motion-sensing, skateboard-shaped peripheral instead of a traditional controller.

Turns out, gamers didn’t share his enthusiasm, as Tony Hawk: Ride sold only 114,000 units across all three current-generation consoles in its November debut, according to IndustryGamers.

It’s actually surprising that the game performed so well. On the review aggregation site Metacritic, the game has an average score of 48, and aside from a few glowing reviews, the general opinion is below average or downright negative. The controls didn’t work, critics said, and the game itself felt sloppy and rehashed from a dozen other Tony Hawk skating games.

But I like Patrick Klepek’s theory over at G4: Ride was doomed from the start, he argues, because it doesn’t offer the easy fantasy that makes games like Guitar Hero or Wii Sports so compelling. At worst, it only frustrates the player into understanding the difficulty of real skating, but you get none of the thrill in the process.

This reminds me of what I’ve previously written about music games: Even to musicians, they’re fun because they encourage a shared obsession over the nuances of music, even among people who aren’t aficionados or fellow musicians. In other words, Guitar Hero and Rock Band offer an experience that even real instruments can’t duplicate. The same can’t be said for Tony Hawk: Ride. If you can ride a skateboard, you’ll get very little out of the game, and if you can’t, you’ll get even less.

I should’ve known Tony Hawk: Ride would flop when I saw the game’s E3 Trailer. “If you’ve had an interest in skating, but maybe didn’t want to put yourself in a position of getting injured, here’s your chance,” said pro skater Paul Rodriguez. When a game’s primary reason for existence is avoiding injury, that’s a bad sign.

Cybercrooks use Amazon to Run Botnet

Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service is reporting that cyber criminals gained access to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, and used Amazon’s cloud infrastructure to manage and run its botnet. Expect more cloud-based attacks such as this one in the future.

The botnet was a Zeus bot (Zbot) variant. The Zeus trojan is a  program that criminals use to gather personal and financial data from its victims.

Hackers that create trojans such as Zeus are becoming increasingly organized and function like corporations, according to a security recent report published by Microsoft. That structure enables regular malware release schedules, and gives criminals the ability to exploit complex vulnerabilities in software–even as operating systems become more secure.

Law enforcement has made some progress toward shutting down the data centers that criminals use to host their infrastructure, but the crooks are seemingly one step ahead, and have now migrated to Web-based services. IDG reports that unnamed law enforcement officials have begun to worry that stolen credit cards could be used to purchase cloud computing services such as AWS.

That’s a given. I hope that cloud providers take action to discover malware on their server, and have the capacity to shut it down before serious damage can be done. They have a responsibility to do so.

Too Many Next-Generation Wireless Standards

This I know: We need faster wireless home networks. The Roku box hitched up to my TV works fine most of the time, but it’s also prone to unexpected pauses and freezes–and sometimes gets the video and audio out of sync in an amusing fashion. The moment I try to do something else that involves shoving a lot of data across my network–like performing an online backup–things get really gnarly.

So even though the ink is barely dry on the document making today’s 802.11n standard official, I’m happy that major technology companies are pooling their resources to come up with faster wireless technology more suited to HD video and other demanding applications. But the thing is, there isn’t one consortium figuring out what’s next–there are three of them.

As Dean Takahashi reports on VentureBeat, the Wireless Gigabit Alliance is announcing its WiGig standard, which combines Wi-Fi with 60-GHz networking that’s theoretically ten times faster than 802.11n. WiGig joins WHDI (Wireless Home Digital Interface) and Wireless HD in the next-generation wireless race, inevitably bringing to mind that old saying: “The great thing about standards is that there are so many of them.”

As Dean notes, WiGig, WHDI, and Wireless HD aren’t trying to do exactly the same thing, and there are arguments in favor of all of them. But the fact that the industry’s pursuing a trio of related, overlapping standards still reminds me of the long, tedious, counterproductive squabbling that bogged down 802.11n’s progress–not to mention the equally pointless Blu-Ray/HD-DVD wars.

So I’m left with visions of consumers buying networking gear and gadgets that are doomed to obsolescence, and worrying that it’s going to be awhile before it’s clear which of these standards has legs and which doesn’t. Anyone want to make the case for competing standards being healthy? And is there anyone out there who knows more about these three than I and can outline their pros and cons?

Amazon Disc+ on Demand: The Best of Both Worlds

Watching movies over the Internet offers instant gratification. DVDs and Blu-Ray feel more permanent, and look consistently good even if you have the world’s most sluggish network. So Amazon is offering a pretty clever combo deal: Disc+ on Demand, which gives you a free video-on-demand version of a movie when you buy the DVD or Blu-Ray edition. You can watch the on-demand version on a PC, a Mac, or an Amazon-compatible device (such as a TiVo, a Roku, or certain Panasonic and Sony TVs).

It’s only available for certain titles, and there’s no new technological magic involved–Amazon’s just throwing in access to the streaming version. But it’s an attractive package, and Amazon, as a purveyor of both shiny discs and on-demand video, is one of the few companies in a position to offer it.

Amazon is pitching the offer as a bonus for disc buyers that gives them immediate access to the movie they just purchased. But in some cases the DVD or Blu-Ray costs the same as purchasing the stand-alone streaming version–the Terminator is $9.99 on Blu-Ray or as an on-demand purchase. So you can also think of Disc+ on Demand as providing a nice, permanent copy of the movie you bought in on-demand form.

Of course, it would be even cooler if you could go for the trifecta and buy a movie as a disc, a stream and a download you could put on a phone or other mobile device. There are DVDs that come with iPod/iPhone versions, but I don’t know of any that are part of Disc+ on Demand.

Make Predictions for 2010, Get a Shot at an Olive Digital Music Server

Good grief, it’s almost 2010! For the second year, we’re asking you to make bold predictions about where tech-related products, companies, technologies, and people will go in the coming year–and are offering a prize to encourage your contributions.

This year, the prize is a biggie: It’s Olive’s Olive 4 Hi-Fi Music Server, which lets you convert your entire collection of CDs into high-quality digital form for listening over your stereo or across your network.The Olive has a color touchscreen; a 500GB hard drive and a built-in CD drive; and Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and digital and analog audio outputs. It’s a $1499 value and is provided courtesy of Olive.

Continue reading this story…

EA is All About the Pirates

Electronic Arts chief executive John Riccitiello is no hard-liner when it comes to software piracy, and in an interview with Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo, he’s back on the stump for pirate-as-potential-sale.

“They can steal the disc, but they can’t steal the DLC,” he said, referring to downloadable content that’s often sold after a game’s release.

Riccitiello’s tone is less extreme than it was in June, when he told IndustryGamers that “if there are any pirates you’re writing for, please encourage them to pirate FIFA Online, NBA Street Online, Battleforge, Battlefield Heroes…” but the idea is the same: If you don’t demonize the bootleggers and illegal downloaders, there’s a chance they’ll purchase some extra content, and that’s better than nothing. They may even go legit as a way of showing support for developers.

Minus that last part, it’s essentially the same view Riccitiello — and much of the games industry — takes towards buyers of used games, from GameStop or other second-hand sources. Even if EA didn’t make any money off you for the base purchase, they can still get you on the optional extras.

I like Riccitiello’s dovish stance, but there’s a dark side in just how much DLC has become available, to the point where it seems like legitimate buyers are eating some of the costs of piracy and used games. Where extra content was once an afterthought that came months down the road from release, it’s not uncommon now to see additional content available on the day of purchase. Dragon Age: Origins, published by EA, is a recent example, where some of content was free, but some cost money. At least the publisher rewarded buyers with some free content as well, which pirates or second-hand purchasers would have to pay for.

Still, it’s hard to argue that you’re not getting your money’s worth from a game like Dragon Age, which boasts over 100 hours of play. And Riccitiello says that when customers are offered more DLC, they lap it up. He may be on to something.

Mysterious Random SMS Tweets: Still Mysterious!

Earlier today I blogged about widespread instances of folks getting random tweets delivered to them by SMS for no apparent reason. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler has written about the same issue, and notes that Twitter has acknowledged the problem. But it looks like Twitter hasn’t yet completely diagnosed the problem–it’s asking for people to post information on the mystery tweets they see, (As of a couple of hours ago, I was still getting them.)

Both MG and Twitter’s items indicate that some people are seeing the tweets online as well as via SMS, and MG says that some of the tweets are from users who have protected their accounts so their items are (theoretically) private. Oops!

5Words: Watch Out, AT&T Data Hogs

AT&T CEO: data metering coming?

Apple tablets in production now?

Skyfire upgrades Windows Mobile browser.

Facebook beefs up privacy options.

Live video streaming from iPhones.

Chrome for Mac first impressions.

Mobile Firefox to arrive soon.

________________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

Parrot’s new Wi-Fi Picture Frame and Wireless Speakers

(This post is part of the Traveling Geeks tech tour of Paris. David Spark (@dspark) is the founder of Spark Media Solutions and a tech journalist that blogs at Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio and on John C. Dvorak’s “Cranky Geeks.”)

At a visit at phone-accessory and gadget maker Parrot in Paris, I interviewed Parrot’s CEO, Henri Seydoux, about a couple of new products: Grande Specchio, a wi-fi picture frame that just came out a few weeks ago, and some giant wireless speakers.

Grande Specchio has a few fun features such as retrieving geo-tagged photos from Picasa and the ability to send photos to the frame. In the video demo Seydoux tries to send a picture of me to the frame. He didn’t succeed at the moment. For a pricey 500 Euros ($750 US) you would hope it would be a little easier. But to give him a break, it wasn’t a prepared demo, and he wasn’t already connected to a network at the time.

As for the wireless speakers they’re only wireless in the transmission of music, not power. I haven’t seen a good solution to wireless power without lots of batteries. My feeling is if you have to drag a power cable, then the “wireless” aspect really isn’t that attractive because you’re still physically tethered. At 1200 Euros ($1800 US) it’s definitely only for audiophiles.