American Geek : Hello World

Delay Tactics: Congress Votes to Postpone the Digital TV Transition. Again.

N'Gai Croal — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:36:45 GMT

A week after the Senate voted to extend until June 12th the date for TV stations to switch their broadcast signals from analog to digital, Congress yesterday followed suit. Even though broadcasters have said that they were prepared to make the switch on the previously mandated February 17th, lawmakers and consumer advocates have argued that citizens need more time to figure out which set-top boxes they'll need to ensure that they can keep watching their shows.

That sounds reasonable in theory. But in practice, the way that this delay has been structured could make this transition more confusing than it would otherwise have been. According to the Los Angeles Times:

TV stations will be allowed to seek a federal waiver to turn off their analog signals before the new deadline. So instead of nearly all broadcasters making the switch Feb. 17, stations now may do so at different times over the next four months....Several broadcasters have already stated their intention to make the switch Feb. 17, regardless of whether Congress moves the date.

Some stations will maintain their analog signals for a while; others won't. Some will switch early--in fact, 143 of the nation's 1800 stations have already gone all-digital--others will wait. All of this will only serve to befuddle TV watchers and frustrate TV stations, some of which are now facing added costs to maintain their analog signal for another four months. Only time will tell whether the cure was worse than the disease.

Is That 1.5 Million Books In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

N'Gai Croal — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:55:49 GMT

Google Book Search is no longer tethered to the PC. Earlier today, Google announced that its service, which provides free access to scans of public domain books, would immediately be available to users of iPhones and Android mobile phones. I tested it on my 3G iPhone by pointing my browser to http://books.google.com/m, where I perused William Shakespeare's play "Titus Andronicus" and Victor Hugo's novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."

As one would expect of Google, the service is quick and responsive. There's a dialog box that lets you search for new books, links to books that you've recently viewed; a short list of featured books; and a list of categories ranging from Adventure to Travel. Once you've made a selection, you'll be dropped into the start of the book. Each Web page contains 10 or so scanned pages' worth of text; you can advance Web page by Web page, or navigate via a table of contents. You can even click on individual paragraphs to load in the original scanned image of that paragraph.

Even so, Google Book Search mobile isn't perfect. It would have been nice if Google had reformatted the text to better suit the iPhone screen's dimensions. Or let me change the size of the fonts. Or download the entire text for offline reading. Nevertheless, it's a nice first step, and I'm curious to see what Google will do next with it.

Up North, ISPs 'Throttling' Practices Go Under the Microscope

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:58:34 GMT

The Canadian flag as seen through a microsocope. Photo courtesy of wisforworlddomination.

It's no secret that certain Internet service providers have made a practice of 'throttling' broadband access--reducing the bandwith available to heavy users, especially during periods. What's often more challenging to figure out is which ISPs are doing this and when. That's because the negative PR associated with throttling makes many ISPs reluctant to disclose such activities.

Canadians, however, now have more insight into which of its telcos throttle, thanks to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission's (CRTC) recent hearings into this issue. According to Ars Technica, a graduate student at the University of Victoria pored over the ISPs submissions to the CRTC, extracted their throttling practices, and combined them into a handy PDF. As a journalist and a Canadian, I applaud this kind of transparency, as us consumers should know exactly what we're paying for. Kudos.

Can Obama's New Web Site Deliver All That It Promises?

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:30:17 GMT

A link to photos of the new First Family mistakenly leads to a gallery of Presidential pets

Change certainly came to Washington Tuesday, but change.gov did not. President Obama's former transition Web site is now defunct, with a note sending visitors to whitehouse.gov. The official presidential Web address relaunched as a shiny social-media hub at 12:01 p.m.—even before Obama took his delayed oath into office.

Immediately, the twitterati and tumblr set were abuzz over the site, noting how similar it looked to the campaign's previous sites (with its twilight blue background, Gotham font and a YouTube video highlighting the president-elect's train journey this past weekend) and marveling at the new chief executive's continued technological prowess. But it's worth wondering how many of these observers had ever actually looked at President Bush's site. It also had news updates (much like the blog on Obama's White House site), an "Interactive White House," a newsroom-like "Setting the Record Straight" feature, and slideshows—and oh yes, that famous Barney cam.

So the real difference is that the new site glosses with the buzzwords of social media and pristine politics: transparency! Participation! RSS feed! All these look good on paper (or, in this case, on screen) but delivering on the many promises won't be easy—making the Web site a near-perfect metaphor for the entire Obama presidency. The premier blog post, written by the director of new media, Macon Phillips, introduces a framework full of features, few of which are ready to use. Things that do work, like the slideshows, are rife with bugs. Early Tuesday evening, Obama's new site still referred to him as the president-elect in some places, and a link to a gallery of first families shows you pictures of presidential pets. "[Phillips's] first message was just about openness," says Rex Sorgatz, an online media consultant who runs fimoculous.com. "But you can't just crack open a wiki and say, 'Go at it.' Even forums or comments won't produce anything meaningful. You need to have a filter in order for productive discussions to rise to the top."

READ THE FULL STORY HERE.

BlackBerry to Boldly Pick Off a Cherished iPhone Feature?

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:48:58 GMT

A purported image of visual voice mail on the BlackBerry Bold. Photo courtesy Boy Genius Report.

If the folks at Boy Genius Report are correct, it would appear that sometime this year, visual voicemail will be coming to users of the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T's wireless network.As one of the signature features of the iPhone since its debut--it allows you to select and play back individual voice messages rather than forward through your entire list of voice mails--it's a welcome addition to non-iPhone gadgets like the Bold. The only reason that I'm not more ecstatic is that I have a BlackBerry Pearl, with no intentions to surrender the diminutive device anytime soon. So if anyone from AT&T and RIM is listening, don't forget about us Pearl users. We like up-to-date features too.

Who Will Publish My Pictures Now?

N'Gai Croal — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:08:15 GMT

Several covers of the now defunct JPG magazine. Photo courtesy of Graham Ballantyne.

One of the most interesting (social) media ventures of the past couple of years has been San Francisco-based 8020 Publishing. Here's how it worked: anyone could submit pictures and articles via the Internet for the company's two publications (JPG, devoted to photography, and Everywhere, which focused on travel); online readers voted on their favorite submissions; and a small staff of 10 assembled the layouts into a magazine available for free as a downloadable PDF or at newsstands for $6.

Backed by C|Net founder Halsey Minor, the concept of a crowdsourced magazine was so ingenious that University of Mississippi professor and Mr. Magazine blogger Samir Husni told the New York Times in 2007, “You’re going to see more of this....I don’t think it’s just about getting cheap content into a magazine. Seeing their own work in print makes people feel like part of a community.”

Today, it would appear that such a community was not enough. Reporter Brad Stone posted on the New York Times' Bits blog that 8020 publishing is shutting down, taking with it JPG and Everywhere. Stone wrote:

JPG had a circulation of around 50,000 and had recently secured some prominent space on newsstands around the country.

But ultimately the money ran out, and Mr. Minor declined to invest more, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. 8020 was attempting to either raise more money from other investors or to sell itself to big media names, including the Meredith Corporation and Conde Nast, but with no success. Mr. Minor could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

The 18 employees who worked for 8020 were given the holiday week off. On Tuesday, they received individual telephone calls and e-mail messages telling them that the company had exhausted its options and was shutting down.

Given the small size of the magazine's staffs., I'd have to think that it was the economy more than the concept that is to blame for 8020 Publishing's collapse. Regardless, amateur and semi-professional photographers and writers must all be shedding a tear for the untimely passing of these two mags.

Lights! Camera! Admissions!

N'Gai Croal — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:08:38 GMT

A Logitech webcam attached to a laptop. Photo courtesy of Mofetos.

For prospective college students, the interview has long been one of the most nerve-wracking parts of the admissions process. Now, according to a recent Associated Press story, colleges are beginning to bring the admissions interview into the 21st century by conducting them online via webcams. As the story explains:

Wake Forest uses a webcam version of Skype for their online interviews. The technology allowed [Avery] Cullinan and about 30 other hopefuls to use a computer-mounted video camera and microphone to speak with an admissions officer through the Internet, "face to face" on a computer screen.
After a successful round of Web-based interviews in the early admission process, Wake Forest offered the program to its entire undergraduate applicant pool--a decision that doubled the number of requests for such interviews.
"We decided this would be a wonderful alternative to the face-to-face interview," [Wake Forest admissions director Martha] Allman said. "We have to stay attuned to how students receive information and how they communicate."

While this is a new development at the undergraduate level, the story says that a dozen or so graduate programs have already been using webcams to interview prospective students for years. With cameras increasingly becoming a standard component on laptops--to say nothing of how popular online video is among teens--I predict that this practice will become standard within ten years.

The Criterion Collection Takes to the Web

N'Gai Croal — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:40:53 GMT

Cover art for the Criterion Collection edition of Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm"

Back in my DVD buying heyday, scanning The Criterion Collection section of Tower Records (R.I.P.) or the Virgin Megastore was an essential part of movie shopping. Some of the movies I'd already seen ("Dead Ringers") and others I hadn't ("The Seven Samurai"), but the care and dedication of the folks at Criterion always added a little extra something to my viewing experience. So it's welcome news that the company has started streaming some of its movies online. Here's how Laurence Lerman wrote up the news for Video Business:

Titles will be available online as streaming video for $5 for a one-week rental. The rental fee can be applied toward the purchase of that film on DVD or Blu-ray Disc when it is bought online at www.criterion.com. Criterion also initiated a "frequent flyer" program wherein every dollar spent earns the purchaser a point; 500 points yields a $50 gift certificate redeemable at the Web site.
"The rental fee counting toward the purchase of the DVD or Blu-ray was a direct response to the fact that, even though we've spent a huge amount of time developing an encoding workflow and a set of compression standards that we truly believe is the most film-like streaming experience on the Web, we still feel we can't offer video worth buying over the Internet," said Becker. "If you love these movies and really want to see them in high quality versions, you should buy the DVD or the Blu-ray disc."

Kudos to Criterion for implementing a loyalty program that should encourage movie lovers to sample an even broader array of films than they might otherwise. There are presently 26 of the company's 450 titles available for streaming, including such movies as "Solaris," "Au Revoir Les Enfants" and "Lord of the Flies." Criterion has also partnered with The Auteurs, a social network for cinephiles, to offer a monthly free, advertising-supported online film festival. I really don't want to be enticed into buying any more DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, but this is certainly tempting.

Scraping the Bottom of the iPhone's Barrel

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:40:45 GMT

Cover art for the Blondie single "Call Me"

Some iPhone apps are useful. Others are entertaining. Over at Ars Technica, Jeff Smykll takes a shot at a series of paid apps whose value is highly questionable: the speed dial apps from JerryBeers.com. Smykll writes:

In what could be considered the least imaginative get-rich scheme in the history of the App Store, developer Jerry Beers of JerryBeers.com has created a slew of speed dial applications that allow users to dial a phone number by touching an icon on the iPhone's Home screen. The catch is that the developer is hard coding names into the apps; so while the number can change, the name cannot, allowing Beers to sell a plethora of applications with the only difference being the name on the icon, as well as a pink or blue icon based on the sex of the name.

Caveat emptor, right? Yes...were it not for the fact that these apps clog up the store, which potentially makes it harder for more dedicated developers to rise to the surface. While I'm sympathetic to Smykll's complaint, I'm not sure that it's really in anyone's interest for Apple to clamp down on such apps. However, it does drive home the point that the App Store is going to become less like a retail outlet and more like the Web. There will be a wide variety of content--some useful, some entertaining, and some whose value is highly questionable--for all of us to choose from. And in time, we'll come to see that diversity as a strength, not a weakness.

The Year In Vaporware

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:33:46 GMT

Train tracks shrouded in fog. Photo courtesy of vsz.

According to Wikipedia, vaporware is "a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product." Every year, the tech industry gets us journalists all wound up about its new products, so we in turn wind you up, but a lot of them don't make it to market; hence the term vaporware. Wired has been handing out its Vaporware Awards for eleven years; you can see its 2008 list here.

My thoughts? While the recently released Home virtual chat room for Playstation 3 is certainly deserving of criticism, its inclusion on the list violates the spirit of the Vaporware Awards. After all, if a released product's beta status were enough to make it eligible, shouldn't Gmail (yup, still officially in beta) get a Lifetime Achievement Award? Other entries, like the Zap-X all-electric SUV (#7), GPS-maker Garmin's Nuvifone mobile phone (#5) and Blizzard's real-time strategy game StarCraft II (#4) are all worthy of the honor. As for the #1 choice--the twelve-years-in-development videogame Duke Nukem Forever (most games are completed in 12-36 months)--all I can say is, hail to the king.

On a more serious note, if I'd had a vote, I would have found a place for Toshiba and Canon's SED (Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Displays) flat screen television technology. Imagine a large TV with the vivid colors and deep blacks of your old 4 by 3 TVs, but only as deep as a plasma televison--while being cheaper than plasma and LCD to boot. That was the promise of SED when Toshiba demonstrated it at the 2006 Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas. My fellow journalists and I were blown away, and since then, nada, thanks in part to a lawsuit over patent rights. Now that the lawsuit has been resolved in Canon's favor, I'm hoping that SED sets will finally make it to market next year so that you can see for yourself.

A Patents'-Eye View of Videogame History

N'Gai Croal — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 19:38:00 GMT

An image from Atari's original patent application for its "video game control unit"

The folks over at Technologizer have put together a gallery of images taken from patent applications for electronic gaming systems ranging from the original Television Gaming Apparatus in 1969 to the Nintendo Game Boy in 1989. The text of the applications is rather geeky, but the images therein make for memory-prompting journey through our not-too-long-ago interactive past. Enjoy.

An Amusement Park for Boys of All Ages

N'Gai Croal — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:09:31 GMT

At a certain age, every boy outgrows his toys and his sandbox. The Central German amusement park Männerspielplatz says no, you just need bigger toys and an even bigger sandbox. For 219 Euros, or around $280, customers can spend and entire day driving front end loaders and backhoes, playing with jackhammers and firing all kinds of weapons. Here's how Andrew Curry described it in Wired (you can also see the magazine's photo slide show here):

The brainchild of Alexander Bammer, a former IT honcho, Männerspielplatz (literally "men's playground") began seven years ago as a one-off corporate promotion with a handful of rented earthmovers at a construction site near Kassel in central Germany. The event struck a chord with pasty execs who loved getting in touch with their inner ditchdigger. "Most men these days don't work on a construction site; they work at a desk," Bammer says. "They dream about experiences like this." So in 2004, he decided to open Männerspielplatz, just outside Kassel, as a 17-acre one-stop shop for man fantasy (slogan: "We fulfill men's dreams!"). Most of the customers, it turns out, are actually women buying tickets as gifts for husbands or boyfriends as an alternative to one more tie--or perhaps something else. After all, Bammer says: "I hear 'It's better than sex' a lot."

Having never been to Männerspielplatz myself, I'll have to refrain from further comment.

Hello World: American Geek's Roundup for December 19th, 2008

N'Gai Croal — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 17:36:30 GMT

FLAT: "Sales Growth of Flat-Panel TVs Is Expected to Slow" is the headline of Eric A. Taub's New York Times story on what's happening to the centerpiece of any worthwhile man cave. The story quotes DisplaySearch senior vice president as saying "There was an unnaturally high growth in sales due to the transition to digital TV and the replacement of picture tube TVs....You would expect a reversion to the mean, but this is beyond that."
BOOHOO: The layoffs at super-portal Yahoo! have to results both tense and funny. Tense, according to a blog post Valleywag's Owen Thomas, are comments made to Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang during the company's Southern California holiday party (sample remark: "You laid off my husband in February, we just had a baby, I got laid off on Wednesday. Now you at least can put a face with some of the people you put out on the street.") What about funny? That would be this YouTube video here.
FLASH: Traditional hard drive manufacturers can't rest on their laurels, because solid state drives (SSDs) are breathing down their necks. Ars Technica's Jon Stokes writes that Sun and Micron have found a way to increase the lifespan of Flash memory-based drives. But that's not all. "The other big SSD news today is Toshiba's announcement of a half-terabyte (512GB) SSD, the price of which hasn't been revealed. The new drive has a maximum sequential read speed of 240 [megabytes per second] and a max sequential write speed of 200 [megabytes per second], making it plenty fast, especially relative to its 2.5-inch magnetic competition." Which means quieter computers that consume less power. Nice.
3-D: Stereoscopic imaging for laptops and iPhone is what Wazabee is showing off at MacWorld 2009. Engadget's Darren Murph posted about the company's 3DeeShell, an "autostereoscopic overlay for the MacBook Air and other 13.3-inch notebooks," and 3DeeFlector, "a special protective skin with an integrated removable lens that can display 3D content on the Apple iPhone." Perhaps 3-D pictures of that not-going-to-be-keynoting Steve Jobs will help ease attendees' pain.

Hello World: American Geek's Roundup for December 17th, 2008

N'Gai Croal — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:35:30 GMT

SAYONARA: We don't need no stinkin' Macworld, says Apple, which revealed yesterday that a) Steve Jobs would not be delivering the keynote at the January 2009 conference (senior vice president Phil Schiller will, um, fill in); and b) Apple would no longer be participating in Macworld following that event. And if Valleywag's Owen Thomas is correct, the way the news came to light was interesting. He says: "When [BusinessWeek's Arik] Hesseldahl published a story on Monday with the headline 'Steve Jobs Will Be at Macworld,' all hell broke loose. Kent called back, saying he meant that the show would go forward, not that Jobs was a sure thing. Hesseldahl changed 'will' to 'may' in his headline and updated the story--but Kent's PR firm kept calling to backpedal. The story spread, and the drumbeat of speculation grew ever louder. Then, late Tuesday, came Apple's announcement that Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at Macworld, a tradition he's maintained since he returned to the company a decade ago." Oh, and one more thing: The cover story was plausible enough: Trade shows were an outdated way to sell Macs and iPhones. But Apple investors didn't buy it, sending the stock down in after-hours trading."
IPTV: Phone giant AT&T crosses a major threshold with its U-Verse online television service: 1 million subscribers across 79 major markets in 16 states. Writes Ars Technica's Nate Anderson: "The numbers remain below those of competitors like Verizon, and much further below those of cable companies like Comcast. But getting to a million subscribers for AT&T is a remarkable achievement given its use of new technology (it's the only true IPTV operator among the big US players), the regulatory and legal climate (the company got state laws changed across the country), and the fact that's it's all happening through DSL on twisted-pair copper wiring over which AT&T continues to sell Internet and phone access."
SERVED: If you've got legal woes, you may want to consider ditching your Facebook account, in Australia, anyway. As Canberra Times legal affairs reporter Noel Towell writes of a couple that had defaulted on its mortgage, "[A]fter 11 failed attempts to find the couple at their Wyselaskie Circuit home between November 8 and December 6, the lawyers tried a change of tack. Lawyers Mark McCormack and Jason Oliver convinced the court the Facebook profiles for the defendants were those of Ms Corbo and Mr Poyser. 'The Facebook profiles showed the defendants' dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,'' a spokesman for the firm said. This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants." Gives a whole new meaning to the relationship status "It's Complicated."
WEEZY: Can Lil' Wayne (and Merge Records and Kid Rock) save journalism in the Internet era? That's the argument being made by Alissa Quart in the Columbia Journalism Review. Quart says, "The first thing that writers might copy from musicians—even more than they do already—could be called the Free Culture Method. In music, one prong of that is mixtape giveaways. Despite recent miseries in the music business, Lil Wayne, the rap artist, sold more copies of his CD in one week than anyone this year, having built an audience by sending free mixtapes into the ether. Mixtapes, at least these days, are pressed CDs or downloads containing demos or raw mixes of tracks, as well as collaborations. Lil Wayne’s mixtape method is the musical equivalent of writers who give away original material on their blogs, writers like Alan Sepinwall, otherwise just another television reviewer at a mid-size metro—The Star-Ledger in Newark. Sepinwall writes an elaborate, trenchant, and heavily commented-upon blog (check out his 2,023-word analysis of the television show Mad Men’s 'Maidenform' episode) in addition to his print column, and the blog has extended his reach. Or consider Andrew Revkin’s sharp New York Times blog and vlog on global warming, through which Revkin made himself a brand."

Hello World: American Geek's Daily Roundup for December 15th, 2008

N'Gai Croal — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 15:05:00 GMT

Can Palm find its mojo again? As someone who's still rocking a Palm T|X--along with a BlackBerry and a 3G iPhone--I'm pulling for them. Thankfully, this Business Week story centered around ex-Apple guru Jon Rubenstein gives me hope. Peter Burrows writes: "On Jan. 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm is due to unveil the long-awaited operating system, code-named Nova, as well as the first of a family of products that will run on it. While Palm has protected its plans with Apple-like secrecy, Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple's iPhone, oriented to fun. 'People's work and personal lives are melding,' [Palm CEO Ed] Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the 'fat middle of the market.'"
Microsoft's Live Labs group has released its "deep zoom" mobile photo application called Seadragon first for the iPhone. Why? Says Alex Daley, the division's group product manager, to TechFlash's Todd Bishop: "The iPhone is the most widely distributed phone with a (graphics processing unit)....Most phones out today don't have accelerated graphics in them. The iPhone does and so it enabled us to do something that has been previously difficult to do. I couldn’t just pick up a Blackberry or a Nokia off the shelf and build Seadragon for it without GPU support." The article says that we can expect to see other iPhone apps from Microsoft next year.
Just as video killed the radio star, Steve Jobs snuffed out the album. That's the word from Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, sort of. When interviewer Greg Kot asked Corgan if "Zeitgeist" was his last album, Corgan replied: "We're done with that. There is no point. People don't even listen to it all. They put it on their iPod, they drag over the two singles and skip over the rest. The listening patterns have changed, so why are we killing ourselves to do albums, to create balance and do the arty track to set up the single? It's done." This Smashing Pumpkins fan hopes that Corgan will reconsider.
Looking to bring in some extra coin during "The Great Depression II: Electric Boogaloo"--and satisfy passengers who start jonesing without their broadband connections--Delta is rolling in-flight Wi-Fi service on a number of its flight. Here's how the Washington Post's Alejandro Lazo describes it: "The service will allow customers traveling with WiFi-enabled devices such as laptops, smartphones and personal digital assistants access to the Internet, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. Voice calls still will not be allowed. The service will be offered for free on local shuttle flights through the end of the year. Next year, it will be $9.95 on flights of three hours or less and $12.95 on longer flights." Once I get my hands on a gaming laptop and a copy of Left 4 Dead, I'll be able to train for the coming zombie apocalypse just about anywhere.