Author Archive | Harry McCracken

Google Puts Old Newspapers Online in Their Entirety

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2008 at 3:30 pm

I’m having a good time here at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego, but there’s stuff being announced at the TechCrunch50 back in San Francisco, too–and TechCrunch scored a coup this morning when Google’s Marissa Mayer used the conference to announce that the company is working with newspapers to make millions of pages of old newspapers searchable in their original form.

When I was in college, a few years before the Web came along, I spent lots of time in the library reading old newspapers in microform form, and what Google is doing here instantly reminded me of those days. In fact, it looks like Google’s newspaper archive is the somewhat grainy black-and-white photographs of papers I remember cranking through. Except now, you can do full-text searching of a vast repository of ’em.

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Plastic Logic’s Reader: Electronic Paper That’s the Size of a Piece of Paper

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2008 at 9:16 am

The first morning of demos here at DEMO has begun, and the second product unveiling of the day looks potentially cool: A company called Plastic Logic previewed an e-book reader that uses electronic paper technology similar to that of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader–but in a larger, thinner form factor with a full touchscreen.

Plastic Logic says that unlike the Kindle and Sony, its product is aimed at folks reading business documents and magazines (the demo involved a copy of The Economist). The reader includes markup and annotation features that leverage the touchscreen, and the 8.5″-by-11″ screen size obviously makes sense both in terms of providing more real estate and mimicking the typical size of business documents printed on plain old paper.

I have and enjoy using a Kindle, but I’m still something of an electronic paper skeptic: The displays are monochrome, with gray text on a gray background, and there’s not enough grayscale to do decent photos. (I remain baffled by hype for electronic paper that touts it as looking like real paper or being wonderfully legible.) And while the Plastic Logic reader has some advantages over a notebook–it’s a third the weight of a MacBook Air and the electronic paper technology lets it run for days on one battery charge–I’m curious whether the business types that the company wants to cater to will buy and carry both a notebook and an electronic reader.

So far, I’ve only seen the Plastic reader from my seat in DEMO’s demo hall; I’m looking forward to seeing it up close. The company didn’t mention a price or a shipping date–actually, even the product name is TBD.

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An Absurdly Busy Week for Technology

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 8, 2008 at 8:58 am

I’m in San Diego for the DEMOFall conference, where more than seventy new products and services–mostly from startups–will debut over the next two days. You’d think that would be enough new stuff for one week in September, but DEMO is going head to head with TechCrunch 50 back in San Francisco, with 52 other debutantes, all of a Web 2.0 nature.

Did I mention that Apple is holding an event tomorrow in San Francisco at which it will unveil new iPods and possibly other items?

I’ll be blogging highlights from all three tech events here at Techologizer, and will cover even more news–albeit briefly–in my Twitter feed. Should be a fun, exhausting, and extremely newsy three days–join me, won’t you?

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Real DVDs Ripped to Your PC. Legally. Really?

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 11:30 pm

Have you ever ripped a commercial DVD to your PC? If so, you’ve probably used a product like Handbrake whose legality is at best sketchy, since it breaks copy protection and therefore violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Chances of the copyright police breaking down your door and hauling you away are slim. But starting later this month, you might be able to copy all the DVDs you want without fear of legal consequences.

The New York Times is reporting that Real Networks will announce RealDVD tomorrow at the DEMO conference in San Francisco. (Which is where I am–I’ll be in the audience when it does.) Real is presumably betting that it’s figured out a way to make a DVD copying program that won’t be sued into oblivion in a nanosecond. And even if they bet wrong, it’s going to be fascinating to watch it come to market.

RealDVD doesn’t sound like total DVD-copying nirvana: It won’t produce DRM-free copies of DVDs that you can copy at will, download to your iPod, or upload to BitTorrent, according to the Times. Rather, its copies will retain copy protection; you can play them on only up to five PCs, and only if you’ve paid for the $30 software on each of those machines. That’s a significant set of limitations, but it would still allow you to store a library of movies on your hard drive for playback. (I’m not sure offhand whether you’d be able to keep them on a networked hard drive for playback via multiple computers around the house, but I sure hope so–it would be nifty.)

The Times quotes a technology exec at a studio who sounds skeptical about RealDVD, which isn’t surprising; it’s hard to imagine anyone in Hollywood speaking positively about it, at least for the record. But the real question isn’t whether Hollywood is thrilled with the idea of RealDVD–it’s whether it’s legal. If it is, this is great news, and other companies will presumably jump into the market with similar products once Real has tested the legal waters.

I’m looking forward to learning more at DEMO tomorrow, and even more so to trying RealDVD once I can get my hands on it. Keep your fingers crossed: If it is indeed a real way to put DVDs on your PC easily and legally, it’ll be very good news for consumers with DVD collections that they don’t want to be forced to repuchase as digital downloads…

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Apple Monopolistic? Maybe. Control Freaks? Definitely!

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 6:14 pm

Dan Lyons, who used to be best known as Fake Steve Jobs but who now writes for Newsweek under the name of…Dan Lyons, has written a piece called “One Bad Apple” for his new employer. It makes the case that Apple is a would-be monopolist that’s beginning to resemble the Microsoft of a decade or so–the one that wanted to dominate every market it could, and which left smaller companies with only crumbs off the table.

Lyons’ piece starts with an example that that’s not that compelling: Apple TV vs. the nifty movie box from a small company called Vudu. He correctly points out that Apple TV has added features that resemble some of those in Vudu, and that Apple cut Apple TV’s price. But Apple TV predates Vudu and sold for less than it in the first place; you can’t blame Apple for competing in a market when it was there first, and I don’t think you can criticize it for improving its product.

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Googleversary: Our Coverage So Far, and a Poll

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 11:07 am

Tons of Web sites have chosen today to celebrate Google’s tenth anniversary. Google itself, as I write this, isn’t one of them. I assume it will mark the occasion at some point, presumably with a special logo on its homepage, as it’s done in the past. If it does, I’m sure it’ll be a far cooler commemorative logo than the one at the left, which I whipped up with the addictive Googlogo.

Until Google does something formal to acknowledge its birthday, this anniversary interview at the L.A. Times with the company’s Marissa Mayer is a decent substitute and a good read. And here’s a quick recap of Technologizer’s special coverage of a decade of Google:

Google 1998, Google 2008: A look at what Google looked like when it was just starting to be Google (amazingly like what today’s extremely experienced Google looks like, it turns out);

Twelve Bizarro Googles: A dozen weird Google variants, both official and unofficial…from Elmer Fudd Google to all-spam Google to backwards Google;

A World Without Google: Some thoughts on the company’s significance, and what the Web might be like if it had never existed.

Let’s end this with a T-Poll:

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A World Without Google

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 7, 2008 at 9:37 am

Ten years ago today, Google’s filing for incorporation as a business was accepted. It’s far from the only date one might choose to mark the company’s tenth birthday–and as I write this, I don’t see any celebrating going on at Google’s home page or corporate blog–but many Googlewatchers are doing their ruminating on Ten Years of Google right now. (I’ve already done some myself in my posts on bizarro Google offshoots and the company’s 1998 homepage.)

The first thought that jumped into my head when I pondered the anniversary was this: It’s only been that long? Google has become so core to how I live my life that I forget that I managed to spend thirty-four years without it–including twenty years of being online in one form or another. There just aren’t that many commercial products or services that have become anywhere near so pervasive. (Coca-Cola? McDonald’s? The Gillette safety razor?)

Once I started to think about life before Google, I began to toy with the idea of life without Google. What if the world had gotten to 2008 without the company ever being formed? (Maybe Sergey Brin and Larry Page had never been born; maybe they became Stanford professors; maybe they became fabulously successful at some other endeavor–I dunno.) Just how different would life–or at least life on the Internet–be?

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Twelve Bizarro Googles

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 6, 2008 at 1:05 am


When Google got going as a company–ten years ago this Sunday, by one method of accounting–it was an obscure latecomer in a market dominated by killer engines such as AltaVista and WebCrawler. It wasn’t all that long before it became an international obsession. And then it began inspiring what I like to think of as Bizarro Googles: Oddball alternate-universe parodies that, for the most part, actually function as search engines…usually providing real Google results, or subsets thereof.

Google has apparently been known to make trouble for Bizarro Googles when it feels that its trademark is being abused. But it is, among many other things, a company with a whimsical sense of corporate humor, and for the most part it seems content to let Bizarro Googles live in peace–and it’s even created some of its own.

So here, in humble tribute to a decade of Google, are my twelve favorite Bizarro Googles. Every one of them is ultimately a compliment to the world’s biggest search engine. After all, I don’t recall anyone caring enough to create Bizarro AltaVistas or Bizarro WebCrawlers-or, for that matter, any Bizarro AOLs, MSNs, or Yahoos…

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Guys, That’s Unlikely to Perfect Windows Vista

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 5, 2008 at 7:24 pm

It’s no secret that people who write for newspapers, magazines, and Web sites often don’t write the headlines that appear on their stuff–and are even less likely to be involved in the art associated with it. And Steve Lohr’s article over at the New York Times on Microsoft’s plan to breathe life into Windows Vista is a good read.

So I mean no disrespect when I say that the juxtaposition of headline and art on his story is pretty damn funny:

And it brings four thoughts to mind–my mind, anyhow:

1) Bill and Jerry are stretching those shoes pretty vigorously, but that won’t perfect Windows Vista;

2) Spending $300 million on quirky ads won’t perfect Windows Vista, either;

3) Actually, come to think of it, only making Windows Vista better will perfect Windows Vista;

4) Windows Vista is so far from perfect that the immediate goal just needs to be to make it into something that more people see as a compelling improvement on Windows XP.

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