I’m compiling the results of our Apple WWDC predictosurvey and will reveal ’em soon. But it just dawned on me that I should have asked you to guess what the name of the new iPhone–assuming there is one–will be.
So here’s a special election–could you please participate?
Thanks very much…
On Monday at 10am PT or thereabouts, Steve Jobs will take the stage at Apple’s WWDC 2010 conference and announce something. Maybe several somethings–including, just possibly, a new iPhone. I’ll be in the audience providing moment-by-moment live blog coverage at technologizer.com/wwdc2010, and hope you’ll stop by.
In the meantime, how about some predictions? Not by me–by you. Click here to take our short multiple-choice predictosurvey. [UPDATE: survey closed–thanks, everyone!] Before the keynote, I’ll publish your collective wisdom on what we’re likely to see. And then after Jobs has been heard from, I’ll revisit your guess to see how we did.
We tried this experiment at last year’s WWDC, and you guys made more accurate predictions than some big-deal pundits did. I have this weird feeling that you might find it even easier this year to figure out what’s in store, but let’s see…
The pessimistic gadget freak would expect that next Monday’s keynote at Apple’s WWDC won’t be exactly spine-tingling–chances are that it will center on an iPhone which we already seem to know quite a bit about. But an optimist–like, for instance, me–would be inclined to hold out hope that surprises remain. (I’d be willing to settle for small ones, although a shocker or two would also be welcome.)
Either way, I’ll be sitting in San Francisco’s Moscone Center watching events unfold, and I’ll be reporting them at technologizer.com/wwdc2010 as they happen, starting at 10am San Francisco time. Comments from the Technologizer community are part of the fun, so I hope you’ll be there…
I wasn’t in the audience for Steve Jobs’ appearance at the Wall Street Journal’s D conference this evening. I wasn’t even following along at home–I was having fun being part of a panel on social media for business in Palo Alto. So once my panel and subsequent hobnobbing were over, I hopped online to see what Jobs had to say–and even more than usual, the headlines on Techmeme neatly summarized the news.
You could read all these stories, but even if you didn’t, you’d get the gist of the Jobs interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher:
Apple has finally announced its WWDC developer event–it’s taking place June 7th through 11th in San Francisco. If 2010 is anything like 2008 and 2009, there’s therefore a very good chance that the new iPhone (this one?) will be unveiled at a keynote on the morning of June 7th.
I’m at Twitter’s Chirp conference at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts, in an auditorium crammed to the rafters with Twitter developers and other interested parties. The mood seems slightly subdued–maybe folks are concerned over Twitter’s encroachment into areas traditionally left to third-party companies–but there’s lots of news. Such as…
The Library of Congress is archiving every tweet ever tweeted. As much as I love Twitter, my impulse was to be jokey and dimissive–“what’s next, YouTube comments?”–but as I think it over, I’m glad it’s doing so. There’s an awful lot of our digital heritage that’s already gone, and it’s better to err on the side of saving everything than to let interesting stuff (like the most significant tweets) slip away. (The announcement doesn’t, however, explain precisely how people will be able to get access to these tweets, or find the ones that anyone will care about in, say, 2047.)
Must be a quiet weekend in the blogosphere: One of the major topics of discussion is how Apple chooses the times shown in stock images of its products–which happen to be 9:41am in photos of the iPad and 9:42am in ones of the iPhone 3GS.
As Network World and Fast Company noticed, Secret Lab developer Jon Manning blogged that he ran into iPhone software honcho Scott Forstall at the Palo Alto Apple Store, and Forstall said that the times are chosen to sync as closely as possible with the moment in Apple press events when the product is shown for the first time:
We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly…for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are – the secret of the magic time.
Mystery solved! What revealing proof of Apple’s perfectionism! Betcha that Microsoft doesn’t sweat details like that!
I’m at O’Reilly Media’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose. It’s a crowded and exciting confab on one of the hottest topics in tech: location-aware applications and services. There are a bunch of interesting demos going on, but the one that’s really knocked my socks off so far is one I’m watching right now, by a Swedish company called C3 Technologies. Mapping applications such as Google Earth include some painstakingly handcrafted 3D models of buildings, but C3 uses photos taken from aircraft to capture entire cities–buildings, trees, everything–and recreate them as photorealistic 3D models. We’re swooping through London, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and other locales, and it’s just stunning.
This video isn’t new, but it gives you a taste of what C3 does:
C3 says that its technologies requires no human intervention and can recreate an entire city in weeks. The company has recreated fifty cities to date. I can’t wait until stuff like this shows up in mapping programs, on GPS handhelds…everywhere there’s geography. Amazing stuff.
I’ve met everyone from Roger McGuinn to LeVar Burton to Morgan Fairchild at tech trade shows here in Las Vegas, but CTIA Wireless is mostly a pretty subdued, down-to-business event, without much in the way of opportunities for encounters with celebs. Chipmaker Marvell, however, invited snowboarding legend Shaun White to its booth, where he’s signing posters, playing video games, and generally attracting attention from attendees/fans.
He was nice enough to pose for a photo with me–he’s the one on the right, in case you weren’t sure…
I’ve been reporting on tech conferences at the Las Vegas Convention Center for close to twenty years–as well as ones at other conference facilities from Chicago to Monte Carlo to Tokyo. For about half that time–since the dawn of consumer digital photography–I’ve been not only scribbling notes but also snapping pictures.
Nobody ever complained until this morning, when a security guard (with dog) found it suspicious that I was taking photos at CTIA, followed me into the press room, and demanded that I explain myself. I got testy, he called for backup and seemed alarmed when I got up to complain to the CTIA folks running the press room, and it all ended semi-happily when a CTIA rep told him I probably wasn’t a threat. I gave him my business card and berated him (loudly) until he skulked away.
Like I told him, there are several hundred other people here covering the show in words and pictures–if my actions were alarming, he and his pooch are going to have their work cut out for them over the next few days…
