Same headline as two years ago, just a different company. In honor of Earth Hour, Bing will go with a darker version of the site this evening.
And just like Google two years ago, it’s an interesting gesture to support the cause, but it is akin to beating a baby seal to death to support a ban on seal clubbing. Or Al Gore taking a private jet to a conference to wag his finger and tell us not to drive our SUVs. Or Pepsi doing this. Or California doing this.
That’s because it uses more power to show black on a flat panel screen than it does to show white. → Read More
Go to Apple.com. See that search box, top right? Type “iThing” or “iStuff” and you’ll find that there are no shortcuts to product or related pages – evidently because there are no Apple products called iThing or iStuff to find on the website. Now, run a search for the term “iSlate”. Interesting, isn’t it?
At the end of last year, MacRumors discovered that Apple once owned – and likely still owns -the domain name islate.com, after which we ran a search for U.S. and European trademarks related to the term. Applications for the marks existed indeed, only they were filed by a company called Slate Computing, more than likely a shell entity set up by Cupertino in order to hide the associated documents from public sight.
Later, MacRumors found that Slate Computing also applied for a trademark for “Magic Slate”, further fueling rumors that Apple’s tablet device – which was still unannounced, unconfirmed and thus unnamed at that point – would be given the name iSlate. Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on to unveil the device in January 2010, named it iPad, and everyone sort of forgot about those other trademarks. This morning, we took another look at them. → Read More
Hope you got your iPad already pre-ordered because Apple has pushed back the shipping date for all new orders to April 12th. It’s really not that surprising seeing as there have been reports stating Apple may already have 500,000 iPads in the bag. It might be quicker at this point to start camping Apple Stores or Best Buy if you *must* have an iPad the moment it’s released. We know that retail outlets will at least have a small supply on April 3 to serve the Apple faithful. → Read More
We pay lots of lip service to Turing but has anyone actually seen or thought about what Turing did for computing? Aside from the Turing Test, Alan Turing invented his Machine, a “tape-based” system for digital computing. The machines have always been thought of as a “thought experiment” but on crazy man actually built one.
Although this Turing machine is controlled by a Parallax Propeller microcontroller, its operation while running is based only on a set of state transformations loaded from an SD card and what is written to and read from the tape. While it may seem as if the tape is merely the input and output of the machine, it is not! Nor is the tape just the memory of the machine. In a way the tape is the computer. As the symbols on the tape are manipulated by simple rules, the computing happens. The output is really more of an artifact of the machine using the tape as the computer.
The heart of the turing machine is the read-write head. The read-write head transports the tape and positions cells of the tape appropriately. It can read a cell determining what, if any, symbol is written there. The machine works on, and knows about, only one cell at a time. The tape in my machine is a 1000’ roll of white 35mm film leader. The characters, ones and zeros, are written by the machine with a black dry erase marker.
What if everything we did was a little more fun?
Ever since Foursquare burst onto the scene with its clever badges and simplified “mayoral” achievements, people have been going gaga for game mechanics (and Gaga videos, circumstantially). Its competitors and allies, from Gowalla and Yelp to Miso, Hot Potato and my own startup, beamME, have been evangelizing the value of points, badges, levels, challenges, leaderboards and achievements as an easy and powerful way to get consumers to engage with a product or service.
This use of game mechanics outside of games—also known as Funware—is taking the social web and mobile apps world by storm. Almost every aspiring startup—and many established brands, including Chase, NBC and the US Army—are turning to Funware to deliver results that traditional/social marketing simply cannot deliver. As I explain in my new book, Game-Based Marketing, game mechanics can make any service or community more fun; and when given a choice between two similar activities, consumers will always choose the one that’s more enjoyable.
Editor’s note: In this guest post, Gabe Zichermann argues that fun is good and that game mechanics will find their way into all sorts of products and businesses. → Read More
Here’s a quick look at the crazy cooking title, America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking. It’s essentially a very thorough cookbook with 300 recipes and a lot of very odd features – including voice control – so you can scroll through recipes almost effortlessly. It’s beguilingly strange to “play” a cookbook on the DSi XL. → Read More
Wakey wakey, eggs and a culturally accepted meat or vegetable product that can be diminutized to rhyme with “wakey!” Have we got a surprise for you. This weekend we’re giving away an HTC HD2 GSM phone for T-Mobile. If you recall, the HD2 is a glorious Windows Mobile 6.5 phone with lots of great things built-in including a huge, beautiful screen, Wi-Fi, and it even comes with two Transformers movies right on the handset. Seriously good stuff. I haven’t been a fan of Windows Mobile since 2000 and even I like it. How do you win? → Read More
Yesterday, Google product manager James Kellyposted a blog post stating that 600 communities applied to be a guinea pig for the search giants experimental fiber network. And 190,000 individuals wrote letters of support for their communities to be chosen. But the post was written with 5 hours until the deadline, so it was expected that more cities would apply to be chosen by the end of the day on Friday. Yesterday night, Kelly updated the post with the final tally: 1100 communities submitted applications, and 194,000 individuals posted letters of support for their communities.
Google also posted a map showing the locations of the applications and letters of support. Each small dot represents a government response, and each large dot represents locations where more than 1,000 residents submitted a nomination. It appears that applications centralized around both coasts, with a few of the central areas of the U.S. noticeably lacking in participation. → Read More
Ask any old-time IBMer, and you will hear stories of IBM’s legendary workforce-development practices. When a manager identified a manufacturing worker with promise, the company would teach him how to dress, how to speak to clients, and how to service products. These technicians would then be trained to be computer programmers, sales reps, or product managers. IBM president Thomas Watson, Sr., considered education so important that, in 1932, he started a mini-university for employees, the Endicott schoolhouse.
That was until the ’70s. IBM still provides good training, but try getting a job there today: unless you have just the right skills, you won’t even score an interview. New recruits don’t receive the year or so of training that was common; they get a few days of orientation, after which they’re expected to be productive. It’s the same at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and almost every tech company. Unless you have the alphabet soup of technologies on your resume, you’ll get nothing more than an auto-response to your job application. If you do get hired, it’s up to you to stay current or get booted out with the first dip in sales. American corporations consider their workforce to be disposable — like ball-point pens and cigarette lighters. Gone are the days when a company would train a factory worker to become a computer programmer or offer lifelong employment. It’s all about quarterly revenue and profits now. → Read More
Only 8 more shopping days to be completely wrong about the iPad. By this time a week from tomorrow, those of us who are confident that the iPad will be the same sort of enormous disruptive event will be busy enjoying the birth of a new millennium. Everybody else will just have to buy a clue. Is this about whether the tablet is a viable form factor? No, it’s about the percentage of time that the iPad and its brethren in waiting will suck away from existing media. Right now, that means the iPhone, laptops, desktops, TV, paper, and fireplaces (real or synthetic logs or gas.) In percentages diverted, that’s 25%, 45%, 75%, 20%, 60%, and 4%. That’s in Month 1. Month 2 will see an all-out running of the bulls, as publishers stampede into the marketplace with 2nd generation refactoring of their core data. The multimedia scaffolds of Month 1 will have done nothing other than establish an incumbents list, with little additional value attached to inline video from newspapers or analyst content being thrown over the wall in violation of the core value proposition. The cable news channels are already in turmoil because the cable and satellite big boys are reluctant (read: completely against as in Republicans and health care reform) to allow destabilization of their basic cable rationale for existence. If Comcast won’t let Netflix a la carte them to death, neither will CNN or CNBC. Once Month 2 shows up with the beginnings of the real new wave, the majors will switch from value add to value transfer. The pole position won by the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and selected social pubs (Vanity Fairish hybrids like Rolling Stone meets Wired) will translate from a fashion show to a metadata farm, where the iPad’s ability to capture the gesture stream in association with the social networks creates a pool of data with which to train the content developers into the new model. That is, not interactive but socially aware swarming and its signatures. Once there are enough unique cross-over streams of related data, the bidding can commence. This realtime market of social pooling metadata will produce a form of virtual value exchange, where the most attuned members of the audience (those with particularly acute sensitivity to social graph authority and a kind of viral leapfrogging talent) will achieve a new form of rank and the ability → Read More
Games like this are exactly why Microsoft Surface is going to be a compelling platform. Some students ported Texas Hold ‘em to Surface, but added the ability to look at your cards from a mobile device. Placing a bet is as easy as dragging a chip on to the playing field, and you can even split a chip’s denomination by tapping it. I’d be interested to see what the final version of this product. It’s also good to see Surface gaming used for more then just role playing games. [via Gizmodo] → Read More
Oh, iPad leaks. I just wrote up one of you less than an hour ago, and now there’s a better one. The life of a blogger is a hard one, friends. So anyways, it seems that Apple left the door open on the iPad app store screenshot warehouse, because everyone and their dog is now accessing shots of the various pages – I won’t duplicate their content here, just head on over to AppAdvice and check out the new leak. I don’t think these are final final, because as you can see in the shot above, there are some weird stretch issues going on with the app screenshots. I’m guessing the layout is pretty much set at this point, though. → Read More
There’s been a lot of buzz about the code-name Fermi series of cards NVIDIA has been cooking up. They’re the company’s first DirectX 11-compatible cards, and rival AMD has had the DX11 58xx series on the market for months now, giving them a definite head start. The hope (among NVIDIA fans) was that the Fermi/GF100 cards would blow AMD’s out of the water despite the delays. That doesn’t seem to be the case: although the new GTX 480 flagship card is competitive with AMD’s best, it doesn’t blow it away by any means, and the feature set ends up being the deciding factor.
Check out the reviews from our favorite hardware sites, and our take. → Read More
Last night dozens of entrepreneurs and investors met up in Palo Alto for Startup2Startup, a program founded by Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser that’s meant to help new entrepreneurs connect with their peers, and perhaps meet some potential investors. Each month, Startup2Startup invites a seasoned entrepreneur or tech executive to speak to the attendees; this month’s guest was Google VP Product for Google Apps Bradley Horowitz, who is charged with managing a big chunk of Google’s services, including Docs, Gmail, Calendar, Voice, and more. We’ve embedded the full video of the talk below.
During his talk, Horowitz spoke at length about Google’s new Apps Marketplace, which allows businesses using Google Apps to easily sign up for a variety of third party services like TripIt and Aviary, directly linking them to their Google accounts. → Read More
The rumor circulating around Silicon Valley yesterday: Walt Mosspuppet, the foul-mouthed and funny puppet version of the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg, is actually the brainchild of Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, AKA Fake Steve Jobs. Lyons, says the rumor, actually writes the scripts for all of the videos, and Brian Hogg acts them out with the puppet.
The fact that Lyons promotes many of the Mosspuppet videos on Fake Steve certainly suggests a strong connection.
The truth, at least according to Dan Lyons (I think I was talking to Dan, but it may have been Fake Steve. I’m never sure with him): → Read More
There’s still a lot to be said in the “games as art” or even “games as legitimate forms of expression and entertainment” debate, and articles like this will… probably work for both sides. Tom Bissell was a successful and prolific writer, but after a cocaine-fueled run through (ironically) GTA:Vice City, he found himself more and more a slave to the console.
He’s battling it as he would any other addiction in some ways, but what makes it different to him (different from, say, his coke habit) is that his experiences aren’t fleeting, chemical fantasies but episodes of true profundity and emotion. It’s an interesting story. → Read More
It had to happen some time: purported shots of the iPad app store have leaked onto the ol’ webbernet, and they’re pretty much what you’d expect. Big buttons, long vertical scrolling pages, and big versions of apps — the “HD” versions we saw leaked earlier in some cases. → Read More
Short version: The drive performs as well as any other, and the e-ink display is handy. It’s up to you to judge whether it’s worth the extra cost. → Read More
Image via A Homegrown Life We’re toying with the idea of having a weekly or monthly game night. You guys would pick the game and venue, and we’ll provide some sweet-ass prizes. Cool? But we need to know some details up front so click the link below for a four-question survey. Oh, and sorry, none of us have a PS3 so that’s not an option. Click here for the quick survey. → Read More
Whenever there’s a big event, like SXSW, we usually have people there to live-blog the important keynotes and/or write recaps of it afterwards. I’m not gonna lie, sometimes those are boring. You know what’s better? Rap songs that recap keynotes.
Hip-hop artist SaulPaul has released a video on YouTube which recaps the keynote Spotify CEO Daniel Ek gave at SXSW this year (here’s our more traditional write-ups of it). It’s awesome. I want all my conference recaps this way. Me and Jason Kincaid are going to have to learn how to freestyle for sure — or get SaulPaul to do these for us. → Read More
