This is My Next Name

First there was Gizmodo. Then its founding editor left and started Engadget. Years later, much of the staff of Engadget departed for a (really good) placeholder site called This is My Next. And now, according to All Things Digital, there will be The Verge.

Borders is Toast–But Don’t Blame E-Books

And so it ends. Borders, which went bankrupt and announced plans to close hundreds of  stores last February, is going to finish the job. Hilco Consumer Capital and Gordon Brothers are buying what’s left of the chain, and plan to liquidate the 399 remaining stores and lay off 11,000 employees. (The companies specialize in buying up once-mighty brands: they also acquired Polaroid and The Sharper Image.)

It’s tempting to blame e-books for Borders’ death. Amazon released the first Kindle in 2007; Barnes & Noble, while slow to respond, came up with the Nook two years later. Borders, however, only dabbled in e-books–selling Sony e-readers at first (via kiosks that shoppers always seemed to ignore when I checked) and more recently partnering with Canadian e-book company Kobo. The last time I was in a Borders, which was last week, the first thing I encountered when I entered was a great big table of Kobo readers. But it was clearly far too little, far too late.

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A World Without Borders?

I wish Borders well, but it sounds like it might be about to join Circuit City, Tower Records, and other once-mighty retailers as a tenant in the great mall in the sky. I wonder how it would be doing today if it rather than Amazon.com had come up with the Kindle in 2007?

iPhone 5 Rumors: Cut. It. Out.

PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan has a simple plea: “Stop the iPhone 5 Rumor Insanity.”

Comcast Chat Transcription

I don’t doubt that there’s a human being providing customer support in this Comcast chat transcript–but that doesn’t make it any less weird and robotic-sounding. It’s also eerily similar to the tone of the chat-based service I’ve received from a bunch of major companies.

Android Uncertainty: Apple Wins a Round Against HTC

On Friday, Apple won a round in its court battle against Taiwanese phone maker HTC, when an International Trade Commission judge ruled that HTC’s Android handsets violate two Apple patents. HTC is appealing the judgement.

My two favorite tech/law bloggers are FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller and This is My Next’s Nilay Patel. Mueller thinks this court decision could be a big deal:

I have looked at those patents before and they appear to be very fundamental. They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android. It’s telling that those two patents are also at issue between Apple and Motorola (and the ’263 patent was also used by Apple against Nokia). A while after Apple started suing HTC, Motorola filed a declaratory judgment action against a dozen Apple patents including those two. Apple then counterclaimed by asking the court to determine that those patents are valid and infringed by Motorola. So the relevance of this goes way beyond HTC!

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Ubisoft Joins the Used Game Punishment Party

The act of charging $10 to play a used video game online is slowly spreading through the video game industry, with Ubisoft becoming the latest publisher to sign on.

Starting with Driver: San Francisco, Ubisoft will require a voucher, cutely called a “Uplay Passport,” to play its most popular new console games online. One voucher is included with each new copy of the game. Buyers of used games will have to pay $10 for a new voucher.

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Chromebooks: Not Flops!

It’s been exactly one month since the first Chromebooks–netbooks powered by Google’s Chrome OS–became available for purchase, and so far, sales seem to be holding up.

Over at CNet, Brooke Crothers checked Amazon’s list of best-selling laptops, and found the number four spot occupied by Acer’s 11.6-inch, $349 Chromebook. (It’s in fifth place as I type). Only Apple’s MacBook Pro and a pair of Toshiba laptops ranked higher. Samsung’s Series 5, a 12.1-inch Chromebook with built-in 3G service for $499, is ranked 10th.

Amazon’s sales charts don’t necessarily signify that Chromebooks are a hit. There are lots of other places to buy laptops, and PC makers tend to sell many different models, reducing the chances that any particular one will dominate. But the chart does at least prove that Chromebooks aren’t a failure. People are actually buying them.

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Sorry, Blockbuster, It Doesn’t Sound Like You’re Rescuing Netflix Customers to Me

It isn’t easy being Blockbuster. When the company’s in the news, the news is usually lousy–like in September of last year, when the once-mighty video rental chain went bankrupt.

This, however, has been a good week for Blockbuster. Sort of. At least if you assume that a bad week for Netflix is automatically a good one for Blockbuster.

Blockbuster seems to think so. After Netflix ticked off customers by raising the cost of subscribing to plans that include both streaming and DVDs-by-mail, Blockbuster issued a press release which it titled “Blockbuster Rescues Furious Netflix Customers.” Oozing schadenfreude, it quoted Blockbuster’s president saying that Netflix’s price hikes were “shocking” and pointed out some advantages of Blockbuster over Netflix, including Blu-Ray rentals at no extra cost, the availability of game rentals, the ability to return discs to a brick-and-mortar Blockbuster location, and no 28-day delay before new titles arrive.

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Hey Microsoft, There’s Nothing Wrong With “Windows”

Microsoft laid out some lofty goals at its Worldwide Partner Conference this week. As Nilay Patel reports, Microsoft envisions a future in which all of its devices — phones, tablets, PCs and even the Xbox — draw from the same software ecosystem.

Sounds interesting. But being weirdly obsessed with tech nomenclature, I’m fixated on a side note in Patel’s report: Microsoft has considered throwing out the Windows name once all this unification is complete. It’s a longshot, and probably won’t happen as long as Steve Ballmer is in charge — he loves the name — but the option is at least on the table. I think that’s a mistake.

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Spotify vs. Rdio

I’m trying out Spotify–the much-loved music service from the UK that debuted in the US today. I’m still forming opinions. In the meantime, TechCrunch’s Matt Burns has a good comparison of it with my current favorite, Rdio. (Spoiler: He likes ‘em both, but prefers Rdio overall.)

Hotmail Bans Password You Shouldn’t Be Using

Is your e-mail password “password” or “123456?” It shouldn’t be–and Hotmail has decided to make sure it isn’t.

New Sony Readers

Sony pretty much invented the modern e-reader. But it was Amazon that perfected it–and Sony’s models have generally felt like they delivered too little for too much money. But Cliff Edwards of Bloomberg says that new Sony Readers will arrive shortly.

Jawbone Tries Its Hand at Something That Doesn’t Involve Audio

Jawbone (formerly known as Aliph) started out as a company that made neat headsets. Then it made a portable speaker and released an app for sharing audio notes. Yesterday, it announced that it’s working on its first product that isn’t centered around sound. It’s called Up–which makes me think of Carl Fredricksen–and Jawbone really isn’t saying much about it other than that it’s a smart wristband that talks to your phone and helps you monitor your well-being:

UP leverages Jawbone’s expertise and partner ecosystem integrating robust computing and sophisticated sensor technology in the form of
functional jewelry. UP by Jawbone is a new system that tracks your movement, sleep patterns, and nutrition so you can live a healthier life.
This new end-to-end system consists of a small wristband that monitors your activity 24/7, a mobile app that analyzes the activity, and an open platform that motivates you with personal and social recommendations and challenges tailored to your goals.

The company says that the product will be available later this year, at a price yet to be announced.

I Still Hate the Buzzword “Cloud”

My latest Technologizer column for TIME.com is on four ways to put your stuff in the cloud.

Dragon Go! Voice Search for iPhone is Surprisingly Intelligent

The other day I received a package, or I should say what in hindsight seems a waste of one: a large box, inside which lay a jumbo-sized cardboard egg, from within which I plucked a tiny rectangular piece of colored paper slightly larger than a business card. On the card, a picture of an iPhone, a greenish tongue of flame, and the words “Introducing…. Dragon Go!”

This is apparently someone’s savvy marketing idea to get my attention (or squander cardboard), perhaps hoping to conjure some latent connection to the dragon eggs featured in HBO’s recently completed (and as of today, multi-Emmy-nominated) first season of Game of Thrones. Intentional or no, I’m making my way through the HBO series now, and here I am, writing about Dragon Go!. Mission accomplished, outsourced PR person!

Dragon, as many of you may know, is the call sign for a suite of speech-recognition tools, the forerunner of which, DragonDictate, was released in the early 1980s for DOS. It’s since been recognized as perhaps the most accurate of the consumer-grade speech recognition utilities (at one point, employed as a computer systems engineer, I provided tech support to a quadriplegic who used Dragon Naturally Speaking—as it was called by 1997—to run his entire home office).

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