Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets.
Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com.
Alan Lomax single-handedly (and some would say, heavy-handedly) saved the folk music from oblivion. Son of John Lomax, Alan travelled across the US and around the world recording folk musicians in their natural habitat. Some of his most notable songs – work songs, cowboy songs, and ballads – formed the bedrock of the folk movement and the succeeding rise of the singer-songwriter in the 1960s and 70s. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Nickelback owe him a debt of gratitude.
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According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, Google spent approximately $390,000 (out of $3,760,000.00 total) on SOPA and PIPA lobbying including efforts to educate lawmakers on SOPA and the DMCA. The question, then, is whether the massive search and advertising giant was for or against the bill – and why so much money was spent to argue the case.
The document, available online in PDF here, is fairly succinct and covers a number of topics, thereby explaining the massive cash outlay. Here’s the specific mention of SOPA:
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If there’s been one complaint my contacts inside large CE companies have had, career-wise, it’s been the inability to rise far in the hierarchy. While there are clear exceptions to this rule, the complaint has always been that succeeding in Asian companies has been contingent on (literally) speaking the language and knowing the rules of the road, as it were, culturally.
When Sir Howard Stringer took the reins at Sony, it looked like this tendency had been bucked. However, with the appointment of Kazuo Hirai, it looks like Sony is going back to the old ways – but why? → Read More
This video is making the nerd rounds today and it’s pretty amazing. It shows a set of quadrocopters first righting themselves after a catastrophic failure and returning to a certain point (the scientists throw the little guys into the air and they turn over and fly back to their hands light frightened starlings) and then we see how these monsters can fly in formation around obstacles and through windows.
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They say news is what happens to the editor on his way to work, so here’s some news: podcast distributor Mevio has apparently pivoted right out of the game. The company hosted a number of well-known webcasts including, for a long time, the late GeekBrief.tv. I used the service for about two years to host my own podcast and was quite happy with the service, as were a number of other users I spoke to.
This weekend the Mevio suspended a large number of their “customers” (the service was free but there was no visible way to pay for service), asking them to request producer access in order to gain access to their show pages. This move locks down the podcast completely and there is no way to change the XML to move the podcast and set iTunes to point to a new server. → Read More
Welcome, kids, to TIL – Today I Learned. Today’s TIL is “Don’t post your correspondence with AppleCare representatives or Apple will totally tell the government on you.”
David Boles had a nice Apple monitor that died on him. He had a little trouble transferring AppleCare coverage to his new monitor after it pooped out and so he posted some advice on his blog. Nothing major, just “don’t forget to connect your AppleCare accounts.” Very innocuous.
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Guitar-maker Peavey has teamed up with audio electronics experts Anteres to create an auto-tuning guitar. While these things aren’t new – Gibson has had robotic tuners for a while – this system is unique in that it senses and corrects the pitch of the strings regardless of tuning, which means you can do all sorts of interesting tricks with vibrato even in what would amount to be an untuned guitar.
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Woothemes has just announced a new theme for musicians called Unsigned. To build the theme, the company worked with band managers and promoters as well as real, actual musicians in order to make a “rockin’” theme that is both “classical” and “jazzy” with a little but of “afro-beat” thrown in.
The theme includes modules for events, discographies, and SoundCloud comparability for uploading music. You can also use a sales widget to sell music and merch instantly. The theme supports “tours” and events separately, so you can plan your cross-country van trip and your tour of the Baltic states using the same system.
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For people who have been doing just one thing for a long, long time, it’s amazing how many content distributors get things so catastrophically wrong.
These last few weeks brought us quite a few unique situations, including the launch of Apple’s iBook Author software as well as a number of announcements from the studios to withhold streaming rights for Netflix viewers. Cory Doctorow points to a particularly delightful bit of DRM making the rounds in publishing right now, something that will be familiar iTunes users who found their real names embedded in music files a while back. → Read More
So you want to take a photo of you and your buds on the slopes or at the bar or at A&F or whatever and you know, just know you’re going drop that shnitz on the floor. So what do you need? A freakin’ Kevlar cord, Mr. Brojangles. That’s what you need.
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William Gibson is the defining author of our digital age. More than any social media pundit or Popcorn futurist, he has defined the dystopia we can expect once we escape the dystopia we’re in now. His fiction – a trilogy of trilogies that works backwards from the distant future to a world that is ours – is constantly approaching the present while exploring what it means to exist in a culture mediated by electronics. Although his early work owes more to Burroughs and Verne than anyone cares to admit, he was wildly prescient in his prediction that soon we would see the entire world – an entire world – through the lens of gadgetry. While the web isn’t cyberspace yet and the East Coast isn’t the Sprawl, we’re headed in that direction.
And that’s just his fiction.
Gibson’s non-fiction writing is a peanut in the bland Cracker Jack of the dead tree publications where they first appeared. He’s often graced the otherwise leaden pages of Wired with his unique style and many of the pieces in this book appeared elsewhere, whether in magazines or at public talks. His non-fiction is rare enough that we definitely want more, but do we want a whole book’s worth? → Read More
Wisdio, a social QA site like Quora, has decided to up the social QA ante by adding something they’re calling WAR – Wisdio Authority Ratings. These ratings allow folks to recieve answers from authorities on their subject of choice, thereby reducing the number of incorrect answers and, one would hope, increasing the utility of the site.
Founded by Sebastian Zontek, Wisdio aims to help “find the right people to answer questions quickly and reliably,” not unlike many of its competitors. However, the WAR score offers a one-stop shop for folks trying to figure out who to trust and, one would assume, listen to. For example, I can say I’m an expert in Social Media (which I am. I have LOTS of followers on Orkut) but in order to increase my score I need to answer questions about social media. This prevents gadflies from answering questions willy nilly and reduces useless responses. → Read More
These things are pretty old but sometimes it’s nice to see two dudes really happy about a piece of technology that really works. This ornithopter is made by the guys at FlappingFlight and comes in multiple models including the Park Hawk with “instant glide” feature that allows you to stop flapping and swoop around like a bird of prey at the touch of a button.
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We get a lot of PR pitches (“Write about our social media network for fish lovers! If you don’t, we’ll take our exclusive to TetraLover.blogspot.com,” “We’ll give you a private jet if you write good things about Apple – Sincerely, Tim Cook,” “Take a look at these iPhone gloves!”) and there are few I’ve dreaded more than writing about the aforementioned iPhone gloves mostly because the founders kept emailing me about these damned gloves. These things come from a Dutch company called Mujjo and they purport to allow you to interact with your iPhone with any part of your hand, including your wrist, knuckle, and palm. The founders must have used them to punch out emails on the icy Hague metro every day of the past month because they were pretty darn persistent.
The question when dealing with these sorts of pitches, really, is two-fold: a) does the product advertised work? and b) will I write about the product after being literally hounded for three weeks by these guys? In answer to both, I would respond with a resounding (literally) “Yes.” They work and yeah, what the heck, Mujjo, people like gloves, right? Also a post will get Mujjo to stop emailing me. → Read More
The future was supposed to be all about swooping through pixellated cities, the crepuscular computer ghost-light arcing through the Aurignacian canyons of Neo Tokyo as we trailed our enemies into the dark. Instead we get some of the coolest map visualizations I’ve ever seen with a few social media tricks thrown in to make a very cool mapping platform called UpNext. You win some, you lose some.
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Are you ready to destroy the Dragons of Skyrim with your trusty orcish arrows and shortsword? Do you wish to hop on your trusty horse and ride endlessly up steep slopes and through wooded glens? Do you have a TI-84 graphing calculator? Well you’re kind of in luck.
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Foxconn responded to yesterday’s kerfuffle about the CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou, commenting that he cared for “a million animals” – namely his employees. They said it was an off-the-cuff remark, similar to saying that managing is like “herding cats” as opposed to suggesting that Foxconn employees walk on all fours and root in the mud. Big difference, clearly.
The statement is below. I love the line “Mr. Gou’s comments were directed at all humans and not at any specific group.”
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Thrillist-owned JackThreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by Fueled Mobile Design and Development using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases.
I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected. → Read More
While we’re on the subject of publishing, Sarah Lacy found a great monologue on the current state of publishing and how, in short, Amazon is tearing old publishing houses a new one.
Publishers, like music producers, don’t make money piddling around with 50 mid-list books. They make money buying (for millions) and selling (a few) books by human black holes like Snooki and the Kardashians. They make money selling Stephen King novels and Newt Gingrich screeds. They make money, to mix industries, by betting on big budget dramas and reality TV. Sometimes a gem sneaks through, but it’s rare. → Read More
The days of the $500 college textbook bills are, it seems, over. With Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2, the world of textbooks is changed forever.
Education is a hard nut to crack. There are bright spots and clever new ideas, but technology hasn’t quite figured out how to do a better job than the “old ways.” That’s why Apple’s decision to launch iBooks 2 and the attendant editing tools is so important: it tears down a number of entrenched technologies while maintaining the scaffolding of familiarity. It leaves the stuff that works and saves the schools, students, and parents money and time.
In short, it stabs the publishing industry while it embraces it, ensuring that its old methods are no longer profitable but offering it new tools to go forward. Whether they survive the initial thrust, though, is anyone’s guess.
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