The Demise of “Ten Blue Links:” Greatly Exaggerated

The New York Times’ Steve Lohr has an interesting post on Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington researcher who’s published a paper calling for greater innovation in search. He calls for new approaches to search user interfaces–especially on phones, which are fundamentally different from PCs and used for different sorts of searches.

Etzioni speaks disparagingly of search results in the form of “ten blue links,” and says “they don’t cut it any more.” “Ten blue links” is a code-word for “Google-style search,” and people–especially people who work for Google rivals–are always disparaging it. Yet nobody’s come up with anything radically different that consumers seem to like a hundredth as much as they like Google’s ten blue link.

I vote for lots of experimentation with new kinds of search myself. (Siri, the iPhone app that Apple bought last year, uses voice recognition and semantic parsing of your input to do something that’s very little like Google, and very cool.) But for now, to riff on a famous Churchill quote, it’s possible that ten blue links are the worst interface for search–except for all the other ones.

HP’s TouchPad Gets a $100 Price Cut, This Weekend Only

Did Tuesday’s $50 price cut on the HP TouchPad strike you as ho-hum? Perhaps this weekend’s $100 price cut will do the trick.

The instant rebate will be in effect from August 5 through August 7 on HP’s website, PreCentral reports.

The TouchPad debuted to lukewarm reviews, partly because there aren’t a lot of tablet apps on HP’s WebOS platform, and partly because the software was buggy and slow. HP has improved its software through a subsequent update, but the app deficiency remains.

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What do People Prefer to Sex? According to Tech Companies, Everything!

This week, GPS software maker TeleNav revealed the results of a survey it commissioned about Americans and their phones. The tidbit it chose to highlight: one-third of us would rather give up sex than do without our phones. The news didn’t shock me a bit. Tech companies love to commission surveys that give Americans (and Canadians, and Britons) a Faustian choice between giving up sex and giving up some gadget. (Or, sometimes, giving up sex to get a gadget. Or giving up sex to avoid something, such as PowerPoint.)

They keep on conducting these surveys, and news sites and blogs keep reporting the results as news. And somehow, the news is always that people would rather give up sex than give up gadgets–even when the surveys show that most people prefer sex to gadgets.

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India’s $35 Laptop: The Case Gets Curiouser

India’s $35 laptop/tablet, a concept that I’ve been skeptical about since its announcement a year ago, is close to completion — as long as you ignore a few signs that it’s not.

According to the New York Times’ Bits blog, the Indian government will deliver on its promise of a dirt-cheap Linux or Android device in several weeks. “All the naysayers will be unpleasantly surprised,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resource development.

But that’s pretty much all that Sibal is saying right now. Here’s why I still won’t believe it until I see it:

• Sibal claims that a version of the $35 laptop is already in his possession, but he wouldn’t show it to the Times because he apparently left it at home.
• Sibal’s office wouldn’t say who’s making the device, or whether production has begun.
• The Times’ story offers no further details on the $35 laptop’s specs or design.

The last time I wrote about the $35 laptop, the Indian government had run into some financial misunderstandings with its hardware vendor. Meanwhile, one government source told India’s Economic Times that the device’s component costs alone exceeded $125, and Gartner analyst Vishal Bhatnagar estimated that $35 wouldn’t even cover the cost of a touch screen and microprocessor. Skeptics may also remember India’s earlier promise of a $10 laptop in 2009, which turned out to be, well, not a laptop.

I’d still love to see India pull this off — the whole point of the project is to sell cheap computers to students — but empty promises don’t inspire confidence.

Gmail Gets a Preview Pane. Finally!

This might be the best Google-related news of 2011, so far: Gmail just added an optional feature in its Labs section that gives you a preview pane that puts the content of messages on the same screen as your inbox, letting you bop efficiently between messages without having to leave the inbox. It finally gives Gmail a capability that’s pretty much standard in the rest of the e-mail world: Outlook, Apple’s Mail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all have it. And so does the version of Gmail for the iPad and Android tablets. (I like that version of Gmail so much that I sometimes run Apple’s iOS Simulator on a Mac so I can use it instead of “real” Gmail.)

Incidentally, I’m not sure why this feature is usually called a “preview pane”–when you have the pane open, you can reply, forward, and otherwise do all the things you’d do with the message in question. It’s not previewing the message so much as squeezing it onto the same page as the inbox.

Google’s implementation is nicely done: you can put the message pane to the right of the inbox or below it, or toggle it off altogether. The only issue I’ve found is that Rapportive, a cool Gmail plug-in that shows you information about your correspondents, doesn’t seem to work with the pane. I suspect that the Rapportive folks will fix this soon enough. And I like the pane so much I’ll cheerfully live without Rapportive for the time being.

Chrome OS: Hacked!

Well, somebody’s finally done it. Google’s been selling us for quite a while on just how secure Chrome is, and they haven’t really lied to us. Getting into the OS or the browser for that matter has proved pretty darn difficult. But at the Black Hat security conference two researchers with White Hat Security have gotten into Chrome OS.

The flaw is in ScratchPad, a Chrome app that allows users to compose text files and then save them to Google Docs. Through it, the attacker can gain access to a person’s e-mail, contacts, and Google Docs and Voice accounts. Give Google some credit here though, the two redarchers working on this – Matt Johanson and Kyle Osborn — said they spent months looking for a hole, and must have only found one now.

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Google Shows How Not to Complain About the Patent Mess

Yesterday, Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond blogged about the patents arms race that has major tech companies building gigantic portfolios of pricey patents, then using them to launch lawsuits or extract licensing fees (or, sometimes, to defend themselves against other companies launching lawsuits or extracting licensing fees). He called his post “When patents attack Android,” and accused Google competitors such as Apple and Microsoft of conspiring to buy patents and use them to damage Android in the marketplace.

And then something unexpected happened: Microsoft released an e-mail from a Google executive which seemed to prove that Microsoft had invited Google to join it in bidding on some of the patents in question. Google declined to participate. Some conspiracy!

Drummond’s post has accomplished something which you might have thought was impossible: it’s leading to blogosphere coverage which largely sides with the patent aggressors. And while I agree with at least part of the gist of the post–patents on questionable “inventions” are stifling innovation rather than aiding it–the post doesn’t make a convincing case that Google is being persecuted.

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In the West, No PS Vita for the Holidays

Apparently Sony needs more time to prepare for handheld gaming’s last stand, as the Playstation Vita won’t launch until 2012 in America and Europe.

At a press conference in Tokyo, Sony Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the company needs more time to ensure a strong software lineup for the PS Vita. Sony’s not calling it a delay – the company never promised a 2011 release across all regions — but there’s no guarantee that the PS Vita will launch in Japan in time for Christmas, either.

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Editions by AOL: A Most Magazine-Like Magazine App for the iPad

I’m not sure what to call the category of news app–mostly, but not exclusively, seen on the iPad–that includes Flipboard, Float, News 360, Pulse News, Taptu, Zite, and other contenders. All I know is that it’s booming–and that AOL’s Editions, which debuted this week, is the newest example. (Also the first one I can think of from a big company rather than a spunky startup.)

Like Flipboard and its rivals, Editions pulls together news stories from all over, and then stitches them together into a personalized magazine-like digital publication. It takes the “magazine-like” part very seriously: Each edition of Editions has a cover (complete with mailing label) and sections that apply a halftone-style to photos to make them look like printed material.

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Borderlands, the Farmville of First-Person Shooters, is Getting a Sequel

In a first-person shooter landscape dominated by rehashes and regurgitation, one shooter that did things differently is getting a sequel of its own.

2K Games has announced that Borderlands 2 is in development, and will be released at some point in fiscal year 2013, which begins April 1, 2012. That’s a long way off, so there’s not a lot of details right now, but Game Informer magazine is supposed to have the scoop in its next issue.

The original Borderlands launched in October 2009, and at first I couldn’t shake the feeling that the game didn’t entirely deserve its plaudits. Its post-apocalyptic setting, while intriguing, never fleshed itself out, and nearly every mission followed a similar routine of flushing out a bunch of similar-looking bad guys, collecting some items and/or killing some kind of target.

But as I sank my teeth deeper into Borderlands during a dull stretch of 2010, I realized why the game became an unexpected hit: This is the first-person shooter equivalent of Farmville. Now seems like a good time to explain.

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Time Commits Big To Tablets for Its Magazines

Time Inc. is sticking its neck out in a big way, announcing Wednesday its intention to make available tablet versions of its entire U.S. magazine lineup available by the end of the year. If the plans are successful that would be 21 titles in all, and it would also be the first publisher to bring its entire catalog online.

The company makes mention of “leading platforms,” which leads me to believe that it’s referring to iOS and Android. It has also made  some of its magazines available on HP’s TouchPad — which runs WebOS — but it isn’t clear whether Time is including that in the guarantee.

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Targus Lap Lounge: A Nifty Accessory for Couch Potatoes

Since buying my iPad 2, I’ve found myself consuming more digital video than ever. This is especially true in the mornings, as I lay in bed trying to catch up on the news of the day (and watch Al Jazeera through its awesome iPad app).

Enter Targus and its upcoming Lap Lounge, an iPad 2 stand that is meant to do exactly what its name suggests: sit comfortably in your lap when you’re lounging around in the house, on the plane, and so forth.

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Zune HD Gets A Few New Apps

Microsoft may never build another piece of Zune hardware, but Microsoft is still moving forward with software for it, at least. On Wednesday, the company released nine new apps for Zune HD users, which owners can grab by heading  to the Zune Marketplace.

The apps include eight games: Finger Paint, Trash Throw, Slider Puzzle, ColorSpill, Splatter Bug, Vine Climb, Decoder Ring, and Tug-O-War. Microsoft has also released a calendar app. Updates for Email, Echoes, Zune Reader and Penalty! Flick Soccer were also part of the update.

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RIM’s Osborne Special Edition BlackBerries

AT&T is going to get three new “4G” BlackBerry models: a Bold with a touchscreen and two Torches, including one Torch with a large-ish 3.7″ display. They’ll run the new BlackBerry 7 OS, which RIM says offers “a much smoother and faster BlackBerry experience.”

I wanna give the phones and BlackBerry 7 a chance–and a BlackBerry with both a big display and a slide-out keyboard could be cool. But the new models have a whiff of the Osborne effect about them: RIM is already talking about even newer handsets that sport dual-core processors and software based on the potent QNX-based OS that debuted in its troubled-but-has-potential BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

BlackBerry fans who remain largely happy with the platform might get excited about BlackBerry OS 7. But I suspect that everybody else–phone shoppers who are at least as likely to consider an iPhone, an Android, or even a Windows Phone or WebOS handset–is reserving any potential BlackBerry-induced excitement for the future QNX models. Which aren’t available yet. (At this point, 2012 seems likely.) Why get too emotionally attached to a next-generation platform that we already know will become a last-generation platform before too long?

My personal barometer remains simple: We’ll know that RIM is in solid shape when there’s a new BlackBerry that Lance Ulanoff is enthusiastic about.

IE Users: Not So Dopey After All

That story about a new survey proving that Internet Explorer users have low IQs? Fake, says the BBC.

EA Props Up GameStop With $25 “Season Ticket”

File away Electronic Arts’ “Season Ticket” as evidence that video game publishers are in no rush to bury brick-and-mortar retail game stores.

The $25 per year program gives EA Sports fans three days of early access to the label’s biggest games — Madden, NHL, FIFA, Tiger Woods and NCAA Football — via download, plus exclusive web content and 20 percent discounts on downloadable content. (Kotaku’s Owen Good has a nice explainer with all the nitty gritty.)

But here’s the catch: Once those three days of early access are over, the game’s downloadable copy self-destructs. Players’ progress through the game will remain intact, but to keep playing, Season Ticket holders will have to buy the game on a disc at full price. Incidentally, GameStop is the program’s official retail partner.

That’s not to say EA and GameStop aren’t separately planning their own disc-free futures. GameStop owns the Flash game portal Kongregate, the streaming game technology company Spawn Labs and the game download service Impulse, and has talked about getting into the tablet business. EA has pushed into smartphone and tablet gaming and recently bought PopCap, the maker of Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies. Surely, both companies know that Season Ticket, as it stands, isn’t built for the long haul.

But for now, if they can milk a few extra bucks from sports game fanatics who crave early access to Madden 12, more power to them. I’d rather see publishers encourage new game sales with perks like this than discourage used game sales by withholding features — although EA still seems interested in doing the latter.