Google Shortwave

Andy Ihnatko points out that Google Wave was only available to the general public for 78 days. Did Google really think that Wave could change the way the world communicated in two and a half months?

My 5 Favorite iPad Music Creation Apps

As a lapsed musician, I find no comment about the iPad more off-base than “it’s a device for consumption, not creation.” Thanks to the App Store’s low price barriers, the ingenuity of app developers and the jumbo touchscreen, I’ve had a blast creating all kinds of music on the iPad, from instrumental compositions to far-out noise experiments.

I haven’t sifted through every musical offering on the iPad, but over time I’ve accumulated a handful of iPad music creation apps that satisfy the occasional urge to be creative. Read on for my favorites (click on the images for a larger view).

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Bing Contrarianism

James Fallows still isn’t all that impressed by Bing.

HP CEO Mark Hurd Resigns in Scandal

Can’t HP find itself a nice, boring chief executive?

Protein Science, Crowdsourced to Gamers

Just because IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in chess 13 years ago doesn’t mean computers are always better gamers than humans. The scientists at University of Washington in Seattle learned this first-hand, when a program they created for protein folding got its best results from real people.

Science journal Nature has the fascinating story of Foldit, a free downloadable game in which players fold protein for the benefit of science. It was originally a computer program that would run in the background, much like the SETI@home project, but as users watched the program meticulously fold amino acids into more durable three-dimensional shapes, they complained about how slow it was. Foldit was created as a way for people to speed up the process, and it encouraged gamers with high score tables and the ability to form strategy groups.

This week, the University of Washington announced that the best Foldit players indeed excelled over machines. That’s because humans take risks and have long-term vision, neither of which are strong suits for computers. By determining the most efficient way of folding amino acids into more durable three-dimensional shapes, gamers are helping scientists target the inefficient protein arrangements that cause allergies and neurodegenerative diseases.

Obviously, not every instance of crowdsourced science is conducive to gaming, and as Nature points out, there’s a fine line between volunteer work and exploitation, but I like the idea that gaming’s competitive and puzzle-solving qualities can be put to good work. If only Farmville was so productive.

Third-Party Windows Phone 7 Apps: The Early Entrants

With mobile phones, sexy hardware is all very well–but the main purpose of sexy hardware is to run useful (or fun) software. And the vast majority of the software that today’s phones run is written not by phone operating system companies but by third-party developers.

So one of the very biggest questions about Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 7 isn’t whether it looks slick and functional (it does) or if it’ll be a cakewalk for the company to reenter the mobile OS wars at this late date (it won’t). It’s whether enough software companies will build cool Windows Phone software quickly enough to make the platform feel like it’s part of the App Era.

As I’ve met with mobile software companies over the past few months, I’ve had a hard time getting a sense of Windows Phone 7′s prospects. Almost all the ones I’ve asked have said that they’re taking a wait-and-see attitude. But Microsoft has been holding an event at its Silicon Valley campus for some of the mobile developers who belong to its BizSpark program for startups. The companies at the meeting are convening in an auditorium to crank away at Windows phone 7 apps. Microsoft employees are providing both technical and business advice.

I visited with some of the developers yesterday–including name-brand companies and some I wasn’t familiar with–and came away feeling cautiously optimistic.

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Beatles on iTunes? Yoko Says No Go

Reuters’ Dean Goodman snagged an interview with Yoko Ono in which she says that the Beatles aren’t likely to show up on iTunes any time soon:

“(Apple CEO) Steve Jobs has his own idea and he’s a brilliant guy,” Ono, the 77-year-old widow of John Lennon, told Reuters. “There’s just an element that we’re not very happy about, as people. We are holding out.

“Don’t hold your breath … for anything,” she said with a laugh.

If the main issue is Steve Jobs being stubborn about some unspecified negotiating points, shouldn’t Jeff Bezos rush in, buckle under, and give Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and George Harrison’s widow Olivia basically anything they want to get the Beatles catalog on Amazon MP3? Wouldn’t that be the best publicity Amazon ever got? Wouldn’t it sidestep having to do things Steve Jobs’ way? Wouldn’t there be a chance that Apple would respond by figuring out a way to make the Beatles folks happy?

And isn’t it increasingly bizarre that we’re this far into the digital music revolution and there’s no way to legally acquire the music of the greatest rock group of them all?

Back in November, I predicted that the Beatles would be available for download within 18 months. I thought that Sir Paul’s declaration at the time that it might not happen was canny hype for a release that was already in the works. Now I’m not so sure. The big question now: Will the Beatles be downloadable before the last CD store in the world closes, or after?

Google’s Most Awesome Failures

The untimely passing of Google Wave may be the most high-profile termination of a Google service which began with great expectations. (At least on Google’s part: Seems like a high percentage of the people who were supposed to love Wave were skeptical from the get go.) But Google has terminated a lot of services over the years–and Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land took Wave’s demise as an opportunity to remember some of them.

Danny didn’t mention my favorite Google dud, though. Google Web Accelerator, which went live in 2005, was a piece of Windows software designed to speed up Internet access by pre-fetching cached versions of popular pages. It had a nasty bug which caused it to sometimes show one person a cached version of another person’s account at sites such as message forums. It also had trouble displaying YouTube videos.

Accelerator was never popular, and Google axed it in 2008. But even though you can’t download it anymore, Google has left up the pages explaining the service and touting its benefits. Which is cool. If, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt says, launching products that fail is an essential learning experience, it makes sense to document them rather than to pretend they never existed.

Kinect is to Microsoft as Multi-Touch is to Apple

Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan got a lengthy tour of Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360, the upcoming gaming peripheral that detects 3D motion with a camera and captures audio with microphones. His conclusion? This is the future for Microsoft, an idea with boundless possibilities that will spread far beyond gaming.

One project manager said Kinect’s technology could some day allow Star Trek Holodeck-style environments, no joke.

Pondering this, I can’t help but draw parallels to the way Apple has approached multi-touch. After popularizing two-finger scrolling in MacBooks, and gestures like pinch-to-zoom on the iPhone, Apple has steadily expanded the role of multi-touch in all its computer products. First came the multi-touch Magic Mouse, then the iPad, and now the Magic Trackpad. Apple put its faith in flat, pressure-sensitive surfaces, and it’s paying off. Microsoft is investing in the air, and hopes to see a similar expansion.

Motion control and multi-touch are not all that different in spirit. Both input methods are supposed to feel natural, as if there’s no barrier between you and the machine. This is especially true with Apple’s iOS devices, with which you interact simply by touching what you see. On the downside, neither input method solves the problem of physical feedback; anyone who’s tried typing on an iPad without looking at the keys should understand why that’s an issue.

For now, Microsoft and Apple are not having an input war. Multi-touch emerged from personal computing, and remains entrenched in it. Kinect’s origins are entertainment, and the technology will probably work back to the computer as an accessory for multitmedia and communications.

To oversimplify, Microsoft’s trying to kill the game controller and the remote control, and Apple wants to slay the mouse, and maybe the keyboard, but it’s clear that both companies have input revolution on the brain. They complement each other beautifully.

Hunch Tries Again

In June of 2009, Flickr cofounder Caterina Fake launched Hunch, a site designed to help people make decisions and find stuff that interested them. It did so in part by asking lots of questions on every imaginable topic–”Do you like the smell of Play-Doh?”–and I thought it was pretty neat at the time. But I haven’t been back often, and Hunch doesn’t seem to have become massively popular just yet.

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is reporting on the site’s revamped version. It’s shifted the emphasis from decisions to recommendations, and is now focused on using the profile it builds about you from your answers to those silly little questions to suggest books, movies, TV shows, travel destinations, and other things you might like.

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RIM Facing Government Pressure to Open Up

Press reports indicate that BlackBerry maker RIM seems to be under increasing pressure to open up its encrypted communications from customers to governments, who are increasingly concerned about security. It seems that officials are worried that criminals — and terrorists too — are using the encryption to their advantage since there is no way to monitor transmissions.

The United Arab Emirates were the first to ban the devices, saying it would shut down service in October. The ban would not extend to other devices, since their digital communications pass over the open Internet. Saudi Arabia was next, who is threatening to shut off service this Friday.

Since then the list of countries with similar concerns has grown to include Kuwait, India, Indonesia, and today extended to Lebanon. While none of the countries are yet moving to ban the BlackBerry, all are asking RIM to open up.

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Kindle Gets a Couple Free Games

The Kindle’s software development kit has been largely forgotten since Amazon announced it in January, because nothing ever came of the supposed iPad counter-measure.

At last, the Kindle Development Kit has yielded two free games: Every Word challenges players to come up with as many words as possible from a scrambled concoction of letters, and Shuffled Row is like a solitary Scrabble, in which letters are replaced whenever the player uses them to create words.

Obviously, this isn’t Doom for Kindle (though I have seen video of Super Mario Bros. running on a Kindle software emulator, riddled with bugs). It’s more of an answer to Barnes & Noble, which stocks the Nook with Chess and Sudoku.

Amazon tells ZDNet that it’s still working with “limited-beta developers” and says to stay tuned for more developments, but over the last seven months I’ve grown apathetic about the whole thing. The Kindle Development Kit was exciting in the run-up to Apple’s iPad debut (remember when we only knew it as “the tablet?”), when it seemed like a desperate attempt to add new uses to an ultimately single-purpose device.

Now, Amazon appears to have embraced the Kindle’s non-iPadness, with an emphasis on a better screen and faster response in the third-generation model instead of a longer feature list. And with the Kindle Wi-Fi’s $139 price tag, comparisons to the iPad just don’t seem all that appropriate anymore.

I’m happy to see the Kindle get a couple games, and I hope we see more apps soon, like the once-promised Zagat dining guide. But getting apps out there no longer seems as urgent as it did when the Kindle Development Kit debuted.

Androids: Like Hotcakes

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company is activating a dizzying 200,000 Android handsets a day–up from 100,000 in May and 160,000 in June. I wonder when the growth starts to slack off?

Microsoft’s Magic Trackpad Competitor: Arc Touch

Remember those cryptic images teasing something “flat and touchy” that appeared on Microsoft’s Twitter account earlier this week? Sources are telling Neowin that the device is the Arc Touch Mouse, a touch-enabled mouse that will make its debut in September at a price of $69.95.

While it may look like a response to Apple’s recently announced Magic Trackpad, it appears that the timing may be more coincidental than anything. The device is part of a larger project within Microsoft called “Mouse 2.0,” which has been underway since at least last year.

(See this research paper from Microsoft Research as evidence of what I’m talking about.)

Apple may have a leg up here on Microsoft: it appears at least initially the device is not multitouch. It may not really matter though either: neither is the Magic Trackpad on Windows for the time being.

It’s not clear whether touch is the name of the game here, or as the name suggests, traditional mouse use is also possible. If its the latter, it may be more accurate to put Apple’s Magic Mouse as its chief competitor instead.

Either way, it does seem to me that Apple may have been onto “the next big thing” as Harry asked last week. Maybe the mouse really is just about dead, after all.

BlackBerry Torch: The Initial Verdicts

The first real reviews of RIM’s BlackBerry Torch are in. They make for an interesting contrast, because in many ways the point-by-point conclusions are similar–but there’s no consensus about whether the glass is half full or half empty.

As usual, the last paragraphs of the reviews are concise summaries of the bottom lines in question…

Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal isn’t a raving fan, but he’s pretty upbeat:

Overall, the Torch and the BlackBerry 6 operating system are good products that improve the BlackBerry experience considerably and bring the device closer to its newer rivals.

Joshua Topolsky of Engadget is disappointed:

The Torch seems sluggish, underpowered, and dated from a hardware design standpoint, and BlackBerry 6, despite its new features and polish, still feels woefully behind the curve. To call the Torch the “best BlackBerry ever” wouldn’t be an understatement, but unfortunately for RIM and the faithful, their best isn’t nearly good enough.

Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo is even less impressed:

Maybe RIM’s too big, too entrenched to build the kind of phone that’ll make people want a BlackBerry again. But they could’ve at least given the damn thing a better screen.

But Sascha Segan of PCMag.com says the phone has its place:

The state of the art in Android and Apple phones has vaulted into super-high-res screens, 4G radios, tens of thousands of apps, and glorious 3D games. The BlackBerry Torch doesn’t live in that world: it’s for people who live on e-mail, IM, Facebook and Twitter, for whom typing updates and messages is their number-one priority. For them, the Torch will be a shining light.

Nobody thinks the phone is transcendent–but come to think of it, I’m not sure if there’s ever been a smartphone based on a venerable existing platform that’s been greeted as a great leap forward. At least I can’t think of a Windows Mobile, Symbian, or Palm OS one that changed everything…

IE9: Next Up, a Beta

Microsoft has released its final Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview–the pre-beta releases that let developers try out the new browser’s technical underpinnings. ZDnet’s Ed Bott predicts a true beta next month.