TechCrunch’s MG Siegler is excited over what might be the most Minority Report-like interface to be commercialized to date.
Author Archive | Harry McCracken
Google Phases Out Google Health, Google PowerMeter
Even Google can’t use information to change everything about life all at once. It’s discontinuing Google Health (which has made little or no news since it launched more than three years ago) and the power-management service known as Google PowerMeter.
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Benj Edwards’s Oddities: The Box Set!
Yesterday, we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series by publishing Benj Edwards’s Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities–a retrospective not of the speedy little critter’s greatest moments, but of his oddest ones, from his ill-fated collaboration with Michael Jackson to his work as a spokesbeast for ketchup and canned pasta.
You might almost have been able to predict that Benj would compile such a tribute and that we’d publish it–for more than two years now, we’ve been marking major anniversaries of big-name products (especially game-related ones) this way. They’re among the most popular things we’ve ever published. So here’s a box set for you–with all of Benj’s Oddities slideshows to date. Click on the images below to enjoy them again for the first time…
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For Wi-Fi, PCs and Macs are Now a Minority
It’s a big week for interesting stats relating to Internet usage breakdowns by device. Comscore has released numbers that say that the iPad accounts for 97 percent of tablet usage on the Web–no shocker there. And cloud networking company Meraki has published some data based on device usage numbers from its customers networks:
Whenever I look at numbers like these, I try to remind myself that we don’t know how precisely they map to the world at large. But they’re still fun to ponder.
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A Supercar for Gadget Nerds
For my latest TIME.com column, I got to spend time with Audi’s new A7. It has a supercharged V6 engine, an eight-speed Tiptronic transmission, and all-wheel drive. That’s great, but what got me excited was the Google Earth-based navigation, dual SD slots, handwriting recognition, and onboard Wi-Fi hotspot…
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Shoot. Then Focus.
I’m wary of digital-photography breakthroughs until they’ve proven themselves in the real world–anyone else remember Foveon?–but Lytro’s technology for cameras that let you focus after capturing an image does sound amazing.
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Happy Birthday, Sonic
He’s Avis to Mario’s Hertz. Or, if you prefer, Pepsi to Mario’s Coke. He’s Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog, and he turns twenty on Thursday. And even if you know more about him than I do, you don’t know everything there is to know about him. But you’ll learn a lot by exploring Benj Edwards’ “Sonic the Hedgehog Oddities,” which covers two decades of Sonic sidelights: his strange Sonic adventures, his mysterious work with Michael Jackson, his controversial contribution to the science of human genes, and much more.
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Pogoplug Goes Software Only (and 200 Technologizer Readers Get the Premium Version for Free)
Pogoplug is a clever $99 gizmo that lets you plug USB hard drives into your home network, so you can access their contents–photos, music, movies, and more–across the Internet. As anyone who’s used it knows, much of the cleverness lies in the nicely-done Web-based interface (and mobile apps) you use to connect to the drives and get at the stuff on them. And today, Pogoplug is releasing a software-only version for Windows and Macs that lets you experience that cleverness without investing in the gizmo.
Pogoplug’s software-based version works just like the hardware device, except the drive it’s putting on the Web is the one inside the Windows PC or Mac the software is running on. Once you installed the application on a computer and let it index your files, they’re available to you from any Web browser and from PogoPlug’s iPhone/iPad and Android apps.
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Nokia’s N9 Video
Once upon a time, Nokia’s future–or part of it, at least–rested on an operating system called Meego. The company has released information on the N9, an upcoming phone that originated in that era.
Here’s a very Apple-style video showing it off:
It’s always a bad idea to form any firm conclusions about a gizmo based on a video demo, but…it looks pretty good! But with Nokia’s plans to emphasize Windows Phone 7 moving forward, it’s less of a sign of things to come and more of a freeze frame of an era that ended before it began.
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Talking Tom and Friends Aim for the Big Time
Outfit 7's Talking Ben
Characters from video games have been showing up in other media since…well, at least since Hanna-Barbera’s dreadful 1982 Pac-Man TV series. Now Outfit7, whose apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android have been downloaded 135 million times, is getting in on the act. It’s signed up William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency headed by superagent Ari Emanuel, to represent Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog, and the other characters from its programs.
Outfit7, which was founded in Slovenia and started releasing apps last year, doesn’t make games, exactly–its apps let you interact with puppet-like digital creatures by poking them, petting them, and speaking to them (they repeat what you say in their own voice). The programs are fun, the quality of the animation and the quality of the animation is good given the devices it runs on. The company has aspirations to become a Pixar-like powerhouse whose creations appear everywhere from movies to books to toys.
The most iconic characters to debut in a phone app to date are, of course, the Angry Birds. They’re already licensing superstars. The Outfit7 troupe hasn’t seeped into the public consciousness to that degree. But they were meant to be personalities from the beginning (unlike the Birds, who–let’s face it–are weaponry more than characters). I’ll be interested to see whether their appeal transfers to other media, and whether it’s possible to give them a bit more depth so people keep on caring for them throughout a film or storybook.