Over on Twitter (where I’m @harrymccracken), I asked my pals to tell me what their favorite tech product they’d ever owned was. I got scads of responses–and while this wasn’t a contest, the iPhone/iPod Touch got more mentions than any other item. Take a look at the Tweets after the jump, then chime in by leaving a comment about your most-loved gizmo, gadget, PC, software, or service…
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Warner Music Signs Deal with eMusic
One of my biggest beefs with eMusic is its music selection. While it does have some tracks from popular artists, most of the tracks on the service are poorly done remakes. I could add to it that they way they label these tracks make you think it’s the real thing but I do digress…
Anyway, eMusic took a step forward Tuesday by striking a deal with Warner Music Group to bring 10,000 catalog albums to the service. Unfortunately, it does not include newer tracks, but it should come as welcome news to eMusic’s 400,000-plus subscribers.
In addition, the deal will allow eMusic to stream Warner’s music on the service, something the company has set as a goal for 2010. Sony Music is the only other major label on the service although CEO Danny Stein told Reuters that it is still working to strike deals with EMI and Universal.
No word was given on the progress of those talks.
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5Words: Watch Out For Rising Prices!
Free e-mail service on airlines.
LiquaVista’s e-reader screens do color.
Nexus One early termination: pricey?
Would you rent Windows, Office?
MagicJack’s new product is controversial.
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A Little Closer to Gdrive: Google Docs Stores Files of All Sorts
People have been talking about Gdrive–a theoretical online storage service from Google–for eons. It still isn’t here, but Google keeps tippy-toeing towards offering the functionality we all assumed it would have. Back in November, the company started offering additional storage for Gmail and Picasa at dirt-cheap prices. And now it’s announcing that it’s letting users of its Google Docs online productivity suite store any sort of file in their Google Docs Web-based repository, not just ones that work with the service’s applications. That makes Google Docs into a virtual hard drive/backup solution of sorts, for the first time ever. The new feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks.
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Join Me for a Webcast on Wednesday
Once again, I’ve been asked to be a guest Tweeter at a Webcast. This one’s an interview with James Surowiecki–author of the excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds–and the subject is “Powering Crowdsourcing: Technology’s Role in the New Way of Working.” It’s been held this Wednesday at 1pm ET. You can get more information, watch the Webcast (either live or in playback form), and Tweet it yourself here.
Hope to see some of you there! Here, incidentally, are the first three Webcasts from the series, all of which I watched and provided color commentary for:
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The (Not So Many) Games of CES
The Consumer Electronics Show is not a prime venue for video games, although it used to be, back before gaming had its own trade show, E3. But while some of my game journalism friends flew in and immediately started grumbling about how little there was to do, I enjoyed the scraps of stick time snuck in between checking out all the new tech toys. And unlike E3’s usual far-off fare, most of the games I played at CES are coming out in the next month or two. Here are the higlights of what I saw:
Heavy Rain: I played one scene of this PS3-exclusive adventure game at a party for bloggers, and despite the festive atmosphere, my heart was racing and palms were sweating as I tried to subdue an armed convenience store robber using smart dialog choices. No shooting galleries here, just pure dramatic tension. I can’t wait for February 23.
Splinter Cell: Conviction: I miss the game’s pure stealth roots, and being able to rely so easily on gunplay instead felt cheap, but if you do perform stealth kills, you earn the ability to execute, well, even easier silent kills. It’s out February 23 for PC and Xbox 360.
Lego Universe: It’s a third-person beat-em-up, due sometime this year, in the style of previous Lego Batman, Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, plus the ability to cooperate with people online. That’s worth a yawn, but I’m excited for the inclusion of Lego’s existing Digital Designer software. I’m told that you can build things in Digital Designer and put them in your home space within the game. Wait, a Lego game that actually encourages creativity? Cool.
Super Stardust HD in 3D: Sony’s 3D gaming kiosks didn’t make me want to buy a capable television right now, but I did enjoy seeing this pop out of the screen. The game’s out now in two dimensions.
Capcom Goes Retro: At an off-site suite, Capcom had a few old-school offerings on display. Final Fight Double Impact, due for Xbox 360 and PS3 in April, is the same beat-em-up as ever, plus achievements, a virtual bezel that looks just like the old arcade machine and a lesser-known 1990s arcade title, Magic Sword, packed in. But the real attraction was Mega Man 10, out in March. Yeah, it’s the same jump-and-gun platformer I’ve been playing since childhood, but I always come crawling back.
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PrimeSense: Remote Control Without the Remote Control
Was it really only three years ago that Nintendo’s Wii controller seemed mindbendingly innovative? Before long, the fact that the Wii involves a controller at all may feel a tad retro.
One of my favorite CES demos this year was in a little private room on the periphery of the show floor. PrimeSense is an Israeli chip designer that’s building a processor to enable consumer-electronics devices of all sorts to accept gestures as input. It uses a cameras/infrared sensor to spot people and figure out their movements–even subtle ones like a wave of the fingertips. And then it can use those movements to control consumer-electronics devices, games, and maybe even eventually cars.
Here’s a video the company prepared showing the basic idea:
The video doesn’t show the use of the technology that really knocked my socks off when the company showed it to me: a TV-based photo viewer that’s reminiscent of the one offered by Microsoft’s Surface tabletop computer. Except PrimeSense’s version doesn’t make you touch anything–you just move your hands around in middair to move, rotate, and resize pictures on the TV. It’s multi-touch without the touch.
It’s also the closest thing to real-world Minority Report I’ve witnessed so far:
PrimeSense isn’t new (it also previewed what it was up to at CES 2008) and doesn’t lack for competitors trying to do vaguely similar things (such as Canesta). And the example of controller-less control that’s grabbed the most attention so far is Microsoft’s Project Natal for the Xbox 360, which is supposed to show up by the 2010 holiday season. But PrimeSense is finally talking about its technology showing up in commercial projects–the first of which is a new version of CyberLink’s PowerCinema movie player for Windows which will let you use gestures to control playback.
One way or another, I look forward to the day when the only universal remotes we’ll need are our own ten fingers…
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Motopalm? Or Palmorola?
Om Malik thinks that Motorola should buy Palm. My heart is with Palm staying independent and thriving, but (A) it’s hard to be a relatively small smartphone company; (B) Motorola could really, really use an operating system as impressive as WebOS that it controls; and (C) I suspect that Palm’s investors intend to seek a return on the money they put into the company by selling it sooner or later.
If Palm must be sold, Motorola is the most logical buyer I can think of–and some neat phones could emerge from the deal.
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5Words: The Next Firefox Nears Completion
Firefox 3.6 release candidate available.
Is the Android Marketplace secure?
Definition of “e-reader” is changing.
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Why Adobe’s Bum Rush of the iPhone Doesn’t Matter
Apple has done all it can to keep Flash off the iPhone. It has used about every excuse in the book — too memory intensive, a drain on battery power, what have you — even though Adobe has pretty much addressed most of these issues. Flash is ready for the iPhone but Apple is not ready for Flash.
Either way Adobe is not going to wait much longer. It’s Creative Suite 5 product, now going through private beta, is going to include functionality that will automatically convert Flash applications to ones that are compatible with the iPhone.
This has the potential to be quite the step forward in iPhone development. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld seems to even go as far as suggesting this as some kind of game changer. CS5 has the potential to expand the developer far beyond the 125,000 iPhone developers out there today, considering there’s about two million Flash developers worldwide.
I hate to rain on anyones parade, but not so fast.
For all that we know of this functionality, it appears to just be a port. Essentially the Flash code is translated into what the software believes is the closest match in iPhone code and goes with it. Like we’ve found out in the past with “WYSIWYG” HTML editors such as Microsoft’s popular FrontPage product, this isn’t always a good thing.
What’s the result? Bulky, slow running applications. In the dog-eat-dog world that has become the App Store, that’s just not going to fly.
I highly doubt that Flash developers that have gone to great lengths to create great Flash apps would allow these same apps to become subpar just to get on the iPhone. While no doubt there will be a subset of Flash developers that will use this feature, it’s not going to be as many as people think.
Bottom line? If these developers want to develop for the iPhone, then they should do it the right way.