Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Katango: Your Facebook Friends, Grouped Automatically

When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.

Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.

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Windows 8 in April 2012? Could Be!

ZDnet’s Mary Jo Foley is reporting on a rumor: Microsoft may be trying to finish up work on Windows 8 by April of next year. She thinks it’s plausible–or at least not obviously crazy. Me, too. For one thing, the conventional wisdom that the OS is likely to show up for the holiday 2012 season is, as far as I know, based more on history than on anyone knowing anything specific about Windows 8. For another, Microsoft has a huge incentive to get this thing out the door–not so much for its PC business, but for tablets, where it’s not yet really in the game and won’t be until Windows 8 is available. And Steven Sinofksy, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows, has a pretty good track record for exceeding expectations when it comes to shipping products in a timely fashion. (Enough so that I think that anyone who parrots the classic “Microsoft never gets anything out the door” meme hasn’t been paying attention over the past few years.)

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Rhapsody’s Demi-Milestone

Rhapsody, the longest-lived subscription music service–it’s been around since 2001–is celebrating the fact that it now has 800,000 subscribers. Its president, Jon Irwin, says that “exceeds the lifetime total of all new U.S. competitors combined”–by which I presume it means other services such as MOG, Napster, Rdio, and Slacker. That would mean that fewer than 1.6 million people in the U.S. subscribe to any of these services. Which, given that the companies who offer them have had a decade to try and get the world interested, may mean that the concept simply isn’t all that appealing.  (I like it–I happily pay for Rdio–but at what point does the industry stop insisting that subscription music will be a huge hit once everyone understands how great it is?)

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Philly Papers to Try Their Hand at Android Tablets

Adweek’s Lucia Moses is reporting that Philadelphia’s Inquirer and Daily News are planning to start selling a cheap Android tablet bundled with for-pay digital content from the newspapers. It’s unclear whether the plans involve an off-the-shelf tablet, but I assume that the papers’ owner isn’t planning to design a tablet from scratch on its own. Even hardware companies seem to be having a hard time pulling that off…

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Donkey Kong: Thirty Strange Years!

What’s the most significant arcade game of all time? Pac-Man, probably. But you could also make the case for Donkey Kong–a game that celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this month. It was wildly popular in its day. It remains iconic. And it was the breakout hit that put both Nintendo and Mario on the map–a team-up of game company and character that’s as important today as ever.

And then there are all the weird little Donkey Kong footnotes. Such as the fact it was almost about Popeye and Bluto. And the odd spinoffs (Donkey Kong hockey?). Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a bunch of them for Donkey Kong Oddities, our tribute to video gaming’s greatest ape.

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Tablet Sales: Bad. Nook Sales: Good

Research firm IDC says that tablet sales (the iPad excepted) are lower than expected–but that Barnes & Noble’s Nook is now outselling Amazon’s Kindle.

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