Technologizer

I’ve been playing with Flook, a clever new program that’s now available on Apple’s iPhone App Store. Conceptually, it’s very, very simple: You use it to capture images with your phone and attach brief titles and captions to them. Flook then turns the image, title and caption into a full-screen combo it calls a card, uploads them to its servers, geotags them, and lets other Flook users browse through them.

The most obvious way to browse through Flook cards is to peruse ones that are near your location, in case they give you an idea of something nearby to see or do. But you can also view ones from people you follow, or new ones, or the whole shebango of cards from around the world. Flook also creates some local-information cards of its own, by sucking in content from sources such as Upcoming.org and formatting it. Zipping your way though cards is easy, fun, and addictive–the experience has a StumbleUpon-feel of serendipity to it.

Even more than just browsing other folks’ cards, I like the idea of using Flook for tiny acts of photojournalism. The service can can automatically send out tweets about your new cards. Which means that I can consider using it to tell the world about quirky stuff I run across and photograph as I travel around town, throughout the country, and around the world. (Up until now I’ve just been uploading my pictures to TwitPic.)

Flook (which is also available in a traditional Web-based version for PCs and Macs) is free, and currently free of ads. Like every other company involved in geographically-aware apps, the one behind Flook thinks there’s lots of potential in eventually targeting its users with ads that know where they are. In the case of Flook, one of the company’s founders told, those ads might be in the form of sponsored cards that tell you about things like discounts at stores you’re near.

This service could use something like Facebook Connect integration to help you find friends who are already using it. But it’s entertaining as is–and easier to show than explain. After the jump, some images from the iPhone app.

Continue reading this story…

Back in September at the DEMO conference, public-information company Intelius launched DateCheck, an impish iPhone app that ran an instant background check to tell you if prospective dates had criminal backgrounds or other undesirable qualities. Now DateCheck has a competitor: Intelius rival PeopleFinders is introducing Stud or Dud?, another impish iPhone app that runs instant background checks on prospective dates. Ones that look for criminal records, sex-offender status, address histories, marriage status, property ownership, and more.

By way of introduction to Stud or Dud, a PeopleFinders representative sent me a report on…me. It seemed to say I sometimes go by the name Samuel McCracken (nope–that’s my pop!), had me at an address I haven’t lived at in seventeen years, and listed three phone numbers, none which were current. It had me as single, which is correct, although it was (logically enough) unaware of the relevant fact that I’m engaged. At least it got my age right.

Continue reading this story…

Like many media moguls, Rupert Murdoch keeps accusing Google of unfairly monetizing his sites’ content by indexing and selling ads next to search results that contain links to it. Now he’s talking about fighting back, by taking the simple step of instituting fees for access to News Corp. online properties and then blocking Google from indexing them.

As Staci Kramer of PaidContent points out, it’s not entirely clear what Murdoch is talking about, or even that he knows what he’s talking about. He says this strategy would be similar to what the Wall Street Journal does, but while the Journal does indeed have a pay wall, it actually lowers it for visitors who arrive from Google.

As far as I know, no major media sites are currently actively preventing Google from crawling their content or otherwise trying to prevent the company from helping people find stories and making money along the way. (A half a decade ago, some publishers–including IDG, where I worked at the time–checked to see if visitors were arriving from Google and told ones who were to come back via the home page–but the experiment was futile, self-destructive, and short-lived.)

I’m probably in the the minority among my media-industry peers here–and it may be a minority of one–but I (A) think Murdoch’s plan is a silly, self-defeating idea, and (B) hope that he does indeed put it into action.

Here’s why:

• I’m tired of hearing media executives whine about Google without doing anything about its alleged misconduct. It’s extremely easy to configure a Web site to prevent Google from crawling it. So why don’t these sites that are so nonplussed about being in Google’s index opt out? If Murdoch blocks Google, he’ll at least be safe from charges of inconsistency and/or hypocrisy.
• I’m in favor of multiple business models for content sites. Technologizer is doing fine as a mostly ad-supported enterprise, thank you very much, but the media business will ultimately be healthier if there are multiple potential revenue streams–ads, monthly subscriptions, maybe even pay-per-use for some stuff. You know, kind of like TV. If News Corp. goes through with this, I’ll at least give it credit for experimenting rather than dithering.
• I’m willing to pay for some stuff. Yes, that attitude is colored to some degree by the fact that I’m in the media biz myself, and no, I can’t think offhand of any News Corp. properties I’m dying to shower in money. (I don’t even have a WSJ subscription at the moment.) But I’d rather live in a world in which some consumers get used to paying for some online content than in one in which sites are doomed if they can’t make a go of things based on advertising alone.
• Watching other people gamble is constructive. If the Murdoch paywall flops as spectacularly as most folks think it will, it’ll be a useful confirmation that everybody was right in the first place. If it’s disappointing, but less so than everyone expects, that’s useful information, too. And if it somehow pays off, other media sites can claim they knew it would all along, and rush to imitate the News Corp. approach.

But enough about my reaction to Rupert’s ruminations. You?

Roku’s little video player is one of my favorite ways to get movies and TV shows off the Internet and onto a TV: It’s cheap, inconspicuous, and ridiculously easy to set up and use. And the content providers–Netflix, Amazon, and Major League Baseball–make for a nice lineup of entertainment.

Today, Roku is announcing that its lineup of players is expanding from one box to three. Don’t get too excited–the boxes all look the same, have the same remote, and are more similar than different in terms of features. But the new top of the Roku line is the Roku HD-XR, a $129.99 version with 802.11n Wi-Fi  for better performance and range (the previous model maxed out at 802.11g). The HD-XR also has a USB port for unspecified future use.

Roku lent me an HD-XR box to try. Here at Technologizer World Headquarters, it did indeed deliver better wireless video than the original Roku–as long as nothing else terribly heavy-duty was going on over my broadband connection, I was able to stream high-def video wirelessly and reliably. That’s an improvement on the first box, which works reasonably well but hiccups occasionally even when streaming standard definition programming.

The new Roku did, however, get bogged down when it had to compete for network bandwidth–such as when I watched YouTube on my laptop, or copied files from one machine to another. If you’re able to use the player’s Ethernet port rather than depend on wireless, it’s still the best option. (I sometimes use powerline networking for this purpose.)

The existing Roku player is sticking around, under the new name of the Roku HD; it’s still $99.99. The company’s also releasing a stripped-down model called the Roku SD–it only has composite output and therefore can’t do high definition at all. It’s $79.99, but I’d spring for the HD model (or the HD-XR one) unless you’re absolutely positive you’ll never own an HDTV. (And if you are, I’m surprised you’re reading this.)

Roku tells me that it’ll have news soon about additional channels of content that it’ll offer to folks who own its boxes; if it’s good stuff, it could be at least as exciting as today’s hardware developments. And my colleague and fellow Roku fan Dave Zatz’s list of five ideas to improve the company’s players remains unfulfilled. Here’s hoping that Roku implements at least some of Dave’s proposals…

Zensify, makers of a social-network aggregator app for the iPhone, released a free new app today called ZenNews. It uses a similar interface for a whole new purpose: to help you learn what’s going on in the world as reported by a bunch of high-profile news sources.

The app pulls together stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, USA Today, TweetMeme, BBC News, CNN, and Al Jazeera, and displays them in tag clouds that attempt to indicate the relative importance of the news items they link to, both in a general view and individual ones for each news source:

Continue reading this story…

Shopping search engine TheFind has relaunched with a bunch of new features. It claims to cover 350 million products, and I believe it–I got tons of results when I searched for everything from cameras to camera accessories to specific books to baby products to condiments.

TheFind isn’t like a comparative pricing engine such as PriceGrabber, which returns results in a grid with lots of comparative info; nor is it like the review-centric Retrevo or Wize. Instead, it feels a little like a Google-style general-purpose search engine, except with extra features tailored to shopping–and all the results point to pages at e-commerce sites where you can buy stuff.

Continue reading this story…

A month ago, HP unveiled a bunch of new Windows 7 PCs, but ones with touchscreens were conspicuous by their absence–and given that HP has been selling TouchSmart models for close to three years now, it would have been startling if it didn’t continue to do so once the touch-enabled Windows 7 debuted.

Tonight, the company announced a second round of Windows 7 machines, including multiple multi-touch TouchSmarts. The new all-in-one touch PCs include the 20″ TouchSmart 300, starting at $899, and the 23″ TouchSmart 600, starting at $1049; the company is also introducing a refreshed version of the TouchSmart tx2, a $799 laptop with a flip-around 12.1″ screen. Those systems are all aimed at consumers, but HP is also going after businesses with the TouchSmart 9100, an all-in-one that starts at $1299 and is meant for applications such as kiosks in public places. It’s even launching the HP LD4200tm, a $2799 touch-screen LCD TV meant for use as digital signage.

I reviewed a nicely loaded $1600 configuration of the TouchSmart 600 for PC World– it runs Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and has a Core 2 Duo CPU, Blu-Ray, a TV tuner with remote control, a 750GB hard drive, and a lot of other features–basically, it would be a very nice all-in-one PC whether or not it had a touch interface.

Continue reading this story…

Here’s what DoubleTwist was talking about in its Steve-Jobs-is-an-evil-overlord ad from last week: The company has released a new edition of the Mac version of its media-management software with Amazon’s MP3 Downloads store built in. That makes it a more formidable alternative to iTunes–and DoubleTwist’s key attraction remains the fact that it supports hundreds of phones, media players, and other devices rather than just iPods and iPhones:

As with the rest of DoubleTwist, the store feels like a minimalist, defeatured iTunes. There’s no information about the artists or albums, no listener reviews, and no links to concert information. DoubleTwist also doesn’t provide access to Amazon’s video download store (it does, however, let you manage and convert unprotected videos you already have, as well as photos).

Basically, all you get is a search box and the ability to listen to samples and purchase tracks and albums:

In some ways, DoubleTwist’s extreme simplicity is a pleasant break from the bursting-at-the-seams behemoth that iTunes has turned into. Other than the expansive gadget support, the best thing about it is its pure speed: You can be in and out of the music store with a purchase far faster than in Amazon’s browser-based interface or in iTunes’ Music Store. (Every time I click the iTunes Store link in iTunes, I gird myself to mentally drum my fingers while it loads.)

All in all,the new DoubleTwist doesn’t justify an ad which seems to suggest its significance is worthy of comparison to the original Macintosh, or that users of iTunes (which DoubleTwist largely mimics) are zombies. But it’s well worth checking out, especially if you’ve got a Mac and a device that comes with poor vendor support for OS X, or none at all. (DoubleTwist says that the Amazon store will come soon to its Windows version.)

Wize, a shopping research site that attempts to be a one-stop resource for finding out what folks think about products of all sorts, officially unveiled a major redesign on Tuesday. It’s a useful upgrade to a powerful reference tool, although I encountered a number of quirks as I explored the wealth of information it contains.

Wize reminds me of Retrevo, but that site goes deep on a specific range of consumer electronics products, and Wize covers stuff of all sorts, including a broader range of tech items, video games, home appliances, food and wine, toys, baby products, perfume, toys, and more. It aggregates millions of user reviews (and some professional ones) from all over the Web, coming up with overall ratings, letting you browse individual reviews and find merchants, and letting you see how products compare–including Wize Choices (well-reviewed items) and Unwize Choices (poorly-reviewed ones).

Continue reading this story…

Last week I told you about Sling’s MediaCatcher, the device that’s ideal for viewing streaming videos on your TV, as well as MediaGate’s MG-800HD, the other gizmo for watching downloaded movies on your TV. (See “Stream Movies from Your PC to Your TV.”)

This week I’ve got a score of spots where you can watch legal movies and TVs shows, some streamed, others downloaded, and a few sites with illegally pirated movies. I’ll also review MediaGate’s inexpensive, portable media device.

Next week I’ll spend a little time showing you how to capture streaming video.
Continue reading this story…

Lots of Web sites use SMS short codes to let users retrieve quick hits of information–movie listings, weather, and the like–via text messages on their mobile phones. Which is cool, except for the fact that the codes (short though they may be) are tough to remember.

Here at DEMOFall, a company called Dotgo is launching a service that aims to make SMS text services more powerful and usable. Instead of texting an individual service (such as Google’s GOOGLE, or 466453) you text the name of a site to DOTCOM (or 368266). It responds with instructions on accessing the service in question–for instance, you can get Fandango movie listings by texting Fandango + your Zip code.

And it looks like Dotgo isn’t fazed by sites that have made no provisions for text-message access. Such as, oh, Technologizer–it lets you read our posts via SMS (albeit in pretty unwieldy form–it has to chop them up into 160-character chunks, sans graphics):

Why would you use Dotgo on a phone with a capable Web browser, such as the iPhone? Well, you probably wouldn’t. Dotgo says it wants to bring the service to the millions of phones out there–especially in developing nations such as Africa–that have SMS capability but no real Web access. Makes sense to me.

If we wait long enough, I’m convinced, every single idea from the Web 1.0 era will come back. Such as the idea of browser plug-ins that let folks attach comments to specific Web pages that can be read by anyone else who uses the plug-in. That was the idea behind such products as Third Voice, and it’s back today in the form of Google Sidewiki, a new feature in the Google Toolbar.

Continue reading this story…

Looking for something to do? Starting now, you can look to Goby, a new search engine that launched Tuesday night. Rather than trying to beat Google at its own game, Goby is trying to be really good at one thing: helping you find places to go and activities to participate in–whether they’re in your own backyard or halfway around the world. That includes everything from trails to hike to museums to visit to hotels you might want to stay at.

Goby’s search field is actually three search fields: What would you like to do, Where, and When. Fill in the first two (and, optionally, the third) and Goby will come back with Web results, including photos, map locations, and a “What’s Nearby” button.

How is this better than using Google? Goby, unlike Google, understands the concept of a general area; if you search for hiking trails in San Francisco, it’ll alert you to ones in Marin, too. Unlike Google, it can figure out the dates in results–if you’re going to New York over a specific long weekend, you can search for gallery shows taking place then. And Goby does a good job of winnowing out Web pages that don’t relate to activities and events–in my tests, it never returned results out of left field.

Much of the time it works quite well, but this debut version of Goby is interesting as much for its potential as for its current state. It asks you “What would you like to do?”, which implies that it wants you to answer with a phrase like “ride a bike” or “see a concert.” but when I entered those phrases for San Francisco, I got zero results. (Entering the terser “bike” and “concert” worked well.) When you enter a date or date range, Goby doesn’t sort the results by date, which means that its first results may not be for the period you specified even when it has ones that are. And I found it sometimes returned dupes–multiple links to the same event or locale. (In some cases, these were for activities that occurred on multiple dates, but you’d think Goby could roll up all the results into one entry.)

Goby’s default geographical range for results was also sometimes way broader than I expected–when I searched for museums on Cape Cod, for example, many of the results were in Boston. Using the embedded Google Map to pinpoint the area I was interested in helped a lot.

Unlike sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, Goby isn’t primarily about helping you quickly judge the quality of places you might go–it’s more of a traditional search engine, aggregating links that take you off to other sites when you click them. The basic idea’s full of promise, and the company is full of plans to expand up on it (with versions for mobile phones, for instance). I’m sure I’ll check it out when I’m planning to travel–or just looking for ways to fill a quiet weekend around town.

[UPDATE: I just encountered another Goby limitation I didn't catch the first time around: It doesn't work in Safari. You get a message saying it's working to support all browsers, and a link to download Firefox. Certainly a major gotcha for Mac users...]

I can never quite tell if Google considers its free Picasa image organizer/editor to be a Major Google Product–it doesn’t update it all that often, or promote it as energetically as it might. But it’s announcing Picasa 3.5 today, which should be available for Windows and OS X by the time you read this or soon thereafter. Google let me get my hands on it a bit early; Picasa fans should like it, and it gives those of us who haven’t checked out the app in a while new reason to revisit it.

Continue reading this story…

This is a long article. It’s technical and at times downright complicated. [I never knew I had attention deficit disorder until I started reading about media streaming devices. --Tech Edit.]

I know some of you are going to skipit. At the same time, I get e-mail kvetching that I’m not writing enough about technology. So there it is: I ain’t gonna satisfy everyone. And in a way, that’s the pleasure in doing my own stuff: I write for myself, sharing with you what gives me a kick in the pants, and take delight when some of you enjoy coming along for the ride.

Enough editorializing. Here’s my long, tedious, sometimes boring story about the new way to watch TV.
Continue reading this story…