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Boxee Box for Your TV, Beta Software Unveiled

Posted by David Worthington on December 7, 2009 at 8:29 pm

A rowdy crowd of 650 gathered at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn for Boxee’s highly anticipated unveiling of its set top box tonight.

Boxee creates open source software that brings on-demand content from the Internet and home networks to TVs, and while the software has just reached beta, it is enlisting hardware partners to embed it on their devices. (Until now, it’s been available for OS X, Windows, Linux, and as a hack for Apple TV.)  The $200 Boxee Box is the company’s first branded hardware device, manufactured by D-Link. It will become available in the second quarter of next year.

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The Video Games Your Kids Shouldn’t Play

Posted by Jared Newman on December 7, 2009 at 5:32 pm

Common Sense Media has spoiled the fun of teens and ‘tweens everywhere, releasing a list of 10 games parents should avoid giving their kids as gifts this holiday season.

The list includes 10 alternatives, but that’s of little consolation when most of them are third-tier or year-old releases. For instance, Assassin’s Creed 2 is swapped for last year’s Mirror’s Edge. Battlefield: Bad Company is recommended in place of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Some of the alternatives don’t even resemble the original, like the platform puzzler Braid instead of the fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins. I also got a kick out of Demon’s Souls’ downvote partly because of its “depressing vibe” and brutal difficulty that can “break the spirit of even the most seasoned gamer.” How true!

I don’t want to rag on Common Sense’s list too much, as I like anything that helps parents be smart about media, but in general I tend to be wary of “play this, don’t play that” recommendations. One reason is that some of the games mentioned have parental restrictions built in. Brutal Legend, for example, asks at the start of the game whether you want to see gore and hear curse words. It’d be too bad if some teens, especially if they love metal music, missed out on that game, so a more valuable list would say which of these games has parental controls.

But the bigger issue is that the rating isn’t necessarily the be-all end-all. The teen-rated Infamous, for example, lets players become forces of evil (or good, if they choose) and kill innocent people. The game’s not as gory as Borderlands, but it stands on trickier moral footing. Left 4 Dead 2 is a bloody game, for sure, but it demands teamwork with real people online to defeat a common foe.

I’m not saying a 10 year-old should necessarily play either of those games, but a little more understanding of what the games entail, regardless of their rating, can go a long way towards making decisions that keep everyone happy.

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CrunchPad, JooJoo, Whatever

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2009 at 1:52 pm

I like writing about gizmos a lot more than soap operas, so when the dream that was the CrunchPad crumbled into a spat between former partners, I sort of lost interest. For the record, Fusion Garage, which decided to pursue the Web-tablet project without TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, announced its plans today. The CrunchPad is now the JooJoo. It’s $499 rather than $300. And the company will be taking preorders at TheJooJoo.com starting on Friday. That’s assuming that Arrington’s “imminent” legal action doesn’t put a crimp in the release schedule.

If you had high hopes for the CrunchPad, what we’re witnessing is the equivalent of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak squabbling on the eve of the Apple II’s release, and Woz firing Jobs. Or something like that. Anyhow, it’s kind of embarrassing. Bad JooJoo, you might say.

Fusion Garage unveiled the JooJoo this morning in a Webcast which I missed–but which was apparently made up of equal parts product demo and sniping at Arrington. The device has a 12.1″ touchscreen and Wi-Fi (but no 3G). I wish the company well. But what do you think the chances are that the JooJoo will be remembered as anything other than “that gadget was going to be the CrunchPad, and which never amounted to anything?”

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Google Search Goes Real Time

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2009 at 11:45 am

Google announced several interesting things at its press event today, including Google Goggles, a vision-assisted search app for Android phones that lets you snap a photo of a real-world item, then get information about it. But the big news turned out to be Google Real-Time Search, a new search feature that gives you the very latest results for your search queries. As in ones that are seconds old.

It’s not a replacement for Google search as we know it–in fact, it’ll be embedded within standard Google search results, in a scrolling window that updates automatically and lets you backtrack to see what you might have missed. You’ll also be able to view real-time results all by themselves, via a new “Latest” option in Google’s Search Options menu. That gets you a page that mashes up items from Twitter, news sites, blogs, and other sources–and Google announced today that it’s struck deals with Facebook and MySpace to bring public information from their users into Google Real-Time Search.

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I’m at Google’s Search Event. Join Me on Twitter!

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2009 at 10:01 am

Greetings from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Google’s about to announce something relating to search–I don’t know exactly what yet, but a Google representative just told me it was a big moment for the company. I’ll blog about it here soon, but for the fastest updates, check out my Twitter feed.

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New Ways for Local Businesses to Get Social

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2009 at 2:42 am

Google and Citysearch have made announcements that have very little in common except for one big thing: They both involve simple new ways for local businesses to interact with their customers via social sites.

First the Google news: The company is snail-mailing window decals to 100,000 restaurants, stores, and other local spots that are well-reviewed by real people on Google Maps. That’s no huge whoop–Yelp decals already fill the windows of interesting eateries and storefronts, at least here in the Bay Area. But Google’s stickers have QR codes–those square bar codes. Scan one with any phone app that can do the job, and you’ll go to that business’s Place Page on Google Maps, where you can read (and write) reviews, look for coupons, and more. (QR code apps are plentiful: Google recommends beetagg, neoreader, QuickMark and Barcode Scanner.)

Okay, now for Citysearch’s news. The granddaddy of local-information sites is working with Twitter to add tweets to the information it uses to help folks learn about local businesses. People who run such businesses can “claim” their page for free: Among the benefits of doing so are the ability to sign up for Twitter within CitySearch, a feature enabled using Twitter’s new sign-up API, which lets third-party sites enable their users to register as Twitter users. Makes sense for me: As trendy as Twitter is, is there any question that there are far more small business owners who aren’t on it yet than who are?

Citysearch’s Twitter integration also puts tweets about a business directly on its page, and lets visitors tweet about from that page, too. Which is also a logical addition, given that tapping out 140 characters about a business is a far smaller commitment than writing even a brief review.

Citysearch’s restaurant-centric sister site Urbanspoon will also begin pulling in tweets about the eating establishments it covers.

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Pearltrees: Bookmarking Program for Organization Lovers

Posted by David Spark on December 7, 2009 at 2:27 am

(This review is part of the Traveling Geeks tech tour of Paris. David Spark (@dspark) is the founder of Spark Media Solutions and a tech journalist that blogs at Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio and on John C. Dvorak’s “Cranky Geeks.”)

For the first stop for the Traveling Geeks trip to Paris, we stopped by the offices of Pearltrees, a Web bookmarking, organizing, and organizing tool. Sitting inside their offices I could have been sitting at any Web 2.0 company in Silicon Valley. Very open work atmosphere. Brightly fluorescent lit rooms with everyone worked around big conference tables.

I had met with Patrice Lamonthe, Pearltrees’ CEO, back in San Francisco. Now I was his guest in his office. When I first received a demo, I immediately started making comparisons to Delicious, a bookmarking program that I use heavily. I use Delicious because it allows me to quickly bookmark and tag sites that I see that I know one day I’m going to need and use. What I like most about Delicious is the speed of bookmarking, tagging, and organizing. I can quickly “file” something away without going through the arduous task of filing.

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ExecTweets: A New Place for IT Pros

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 7, 2009 at 1:55 am

I’m happy to report that I have a fun second job at the moment, and it involves helping to run a site you may be interested in. I’m the editor/curator/call-me-what-you-will at ExecTweets IT, an expansion of a popular existing site called ExecTweets. They’re both operated by my friends and business partners at Federated Media, and you may remember the splash that ExecTweets made when it debuted earlier this year.

ExecTweets’ original incarnation was aimed at business executives; ExecTweets IT is aimed at the IT pros who make technology work within those executives’ businesses. We’ve hand-picked a few hundred Twitter users of interest to IT pros–CTOs, CIOs, and tech experts of all sorts–and created a unified tweetstream. You can browse by topics (such as Virtualization or Security) or search on the IT-related keyword of your choosing.

We’ve also added some new features aimed at helping IT types share advice and opinions:

We also have an ExecTweets Twitter account that more than 1.1 million folks follow. Join ’em, and you’ll get links to worthwhile info at ExecTweets and elsewhere around the Web about IT and executive stuff.

If you’re an IT pro or other interested party, please check ExecTweets IT out and let me know what you think. We’re just getting started, and are itching to get feedback that can help us make the site even more useful. And here’s FM’s blog post with more information about the whole project.

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Your First Look at Nook: The Technologizer Review

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 6, 2009 at 9:01 pm

In retrospect, it was probably inevitable. Bookselling behemoth Barnes & Noble has spent much of the past decade and a half duking it out with online archrival Amazon.com. So when Amazon unveiled its Kindle e-reader two years ago, it pretty much demanded some sort of response from the 136-year-old merchant.

That response is the Barnes & Noble Nook, and its arrival this week signals the start of a digital transition for the bookselling wars.  The Nook has much in common with the Kindle, from its playful name to the paper-esque E-Ink display to built-in 3G wireless that lets you start reading a book seconds after you’ve decided to buy it. Even the prices–$259 for the device itself, and $9.99 for most bestsellers–are identical.

(Like Amazon and Apple, B&N likes to refer to its creation without a modifying article, and also dispenses with capitals–“nook lets you loan eBooks” rather than “The Nook lets you loan eBooks.” I’ve honored the lack of a “the” in the title of this article, but will blithely ignore it from here on out.)

For all their similarities, the Nook packs more pizzazz than Amazon’s e-reader, in the form of the color touchscreen it uses for much of its navigation. It aims to be more open, letting you read tomes you buy on PCs, Macs, iPhones, and BlackBerries–and even on e-readers from companies other than Barnes & Noble. And it brings back a virtue of dead-tree books that people have taken for granted for centuries: the ability to loan them to pals.

For this review, I got to spend some quality time with a Nook, running the software version which will be installed on the first Nooks to reach customers. As I was finishing up my review, B&N was racing to ready itself for the Nook’s debut this week–a few features weren’t yet up and running, or had rough edges that may be eliminated by the time the first consumers turn on their Nooks for the first time.

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