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Wired’s iTablet Demo with Digitized Magazine Content

Arnold Zafra — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:29:19 +0000

Wired Magazine’s parent company Conde Nast seems to be taking the rumored iTablet PC seriously. A couple of days ago, the company was convinced by All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka to share a video demo of Wired’s iTablet PC.

The video doesn’t say much about the iTablet PC, but you can fairly observe how cool it’s going to be especially during the part where the iTablet PC’s capability to handle animated and interactive graphic was shown.

Wired’s plan about this concept seems to be all so real, that the company also revelead that they are currently working with Adobe to prepare previous issues of Wired magazine for its migration to digital format.

Sounds like fun, right? Anyway enjoy the video for now. It’s the closest thing you could ever get to the rumored iTablet PC from Apple. Who knows this might give Apple the idea and finally decides to push through with its Tablet PC – or is it already?

Wearable Minority Report Computer!

Mike Abundo — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 20:04:14 +0000

We’re getting closer and closer to the futuristic spatial computing seen in the movie Minority Report. Last year, somebody did it with clunky mittens and a roomful of huge monitors. This year, PhD student Pranav Mistry has miniaturized it all into a pendant. Yes, that’s right: it’s wearable spatial computing — or, as Mistry likes to call it, a wearable gestural interface.

Mistry’s technology, which he calls SixthSense, is built on an incredibly simple hardware combination: a projector and a camera. He even plans to open-source the software behind it. The best part: Mistry says the whole system costs only $300.

Sims 3 New Moon Machinima Parody

Mike Abundo — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 04:01:55 +0000

Video Games | The Sims 3: World Adventures | New Moon Parody

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Leave it to new media remix culture to expose the stupidity of old media manufactured culture. The inanity of The Twilight Saga: New Moon gets suitably butchered through the hilarity of The Sims 3: World Adventures, with this machinima parody featuring more drama and more lipstick.

This is why games outpace movies.

The Genius of Droid’s Geeky Marketing

Mike Abundo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:33:49 +0000

For weeks, I’ve been hearing Apple fanboys pan Verizon’s Motorola Droid ads as too geeky and unappealing for the mass market. I’ve been hearing fanboys claim that nongeeks can’t understand “open development”, that they’d be scared off by images of stealth bombers. Then I read an essay by Paul Graham about the abuses of the iPhone app store, and I suddenly realize the genius of Verizon’s nongeek-alienating marketing strategy.

At least we know now what it would take to break Apple’s lock. You’d have to get iPhones out of programmers’ hands. If programmers used some other device for mobile web access, they’d start to develop apps for that instead.

How could you make a device programmers liked better than the iPhone? It’s unlikely you could make something better designed. Apple leaves no room there. So this alternative device probably couldn’t win on general appeal. It would have to win by virtue of some appeal it had to programmers specifically.

The value of today’s smartphones is as much in the applications as it is in the hardware. By very specifically targeting geeks and apparently alienating normal people for now, Verizon is building developer and influencer loyalty. More developers using the phone means more cool apps for the phone; more influencers using the phone means more viral buzz about the phone. More than the iPhone’s shiny mass marketing, those two factors will slowly but surely lead to greater market share.

It’s a strategy almost as stealthy as the stealth bombers in the second Droid ad. As history shows us, wherever the geeks go, normal people eventually follow.

So go ahead, Apple fanboys. Call Android phones “too geeky”. Such anti-intellectual complacency will hasten the iPhone’s developer exodus and eventual downfall.

Google Chrome OS Demo

Mike Abundo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:46:04 +0000

Google’s recent demo of Chrome OS answered several important questions about how a browser-only OS would operate. One of those questions is how it would handle removable storage. As you can see when the demo unit is attached to a digital camera, using a Web browser as a file browser works pretty well. That should come as no surprise, since Windows has integrated Internet Explorer with its own file manager for the last twelve years.

While it’s fun to see a Microsoft Web app opening a file in Chrome OS, it’s rather telling that the demo game is Flash chess. This demo apparently came a bit too early for the launch of hardcore cloud gaming service OnLive. Let’s hope Web apps and games mature into far more impressive fodder for Chrome OS once it’s released next year.

How Google Chrome OS Will Handle Web Security

Arnold Zafra — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:07:08 +0000

Before you get drown into the waves of news items explaining what Google Chrome is and what it is not, let’s not forget one of its most important feature which might make it click among Internet security geeks, like us.

The Official Google Blog explains why Chrome OS is very a secured OS by saying that since all apps that you will use will be living within the Chrome browser, Google has made sure that security was given utmost priority.

So, unlike traditional OS, Chrome OS will contain each app within a security sandbox to make it harder for malware and viruses to get in. In addition, the Chrome OS is a self-fixing system, meaning it will automatically reboot and fixes itself once compromised.

For more details on how Google Chrome OS will treat security issue, watch the short video featuring Google’s Security Engineer Will Drewry.

What Chrome OS Will Look Like

Mike Abundo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:03:44 +0000

Google Chrome OS is designed to run nothing but Web apps, so a lot of OS UI concepts will have to be remapped. Your applications become browser tabs, your browser windows become multiple desktops, and your widgets become overlay panels.

Yes, it feels a little weird. With cloud computing services getting more and more robust, we may have to get used to these browser-based UI concepts by the time Chrome OS becomes available next year.

Google Chrome OS Unveiled

Mike Abundo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:38:52 +0000

Google gets extreme in its push to get users to the cloud with Google Chrome OS. It’s essentially a browser running on a very slim Linux build — so slim, in fact, that you can’t run any native apps on it. Instead, Google is counting on the HTML 5’s enhanced ability to access client machine resources.

The idea of having absolutely no desktop applications may come as a total shocker to some, but it does bring distinct benefits: Chrome OS takes only seven seconds to boot up, and the only security issues you have to worry about are all Web-based. Chrome OS is expected to hit the streets in late 2010, exclusively as an OEM bundle on SSD netbooks. For those of us who don’t like exclusive OEM bundles, the project will also be open-sourced as Chromium OS.

Considering that Web apps still have a long way to go before they completely replace every single desktop app, the one-year wait for Chrome OS should give the rest of the Web time to catch up with Google’s thin-client vision.

Google Adds Auto-Caption Feature in YouTube

Arnold Zafra — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:08:53 +0000

Video captions are useful not only for the hearing impaired and the deaf but also for video owners as well as it improves search findability of videos and machine translation. The thing is adding caption to videos before uploading them can be a pretty dauting task. The YouTube folks know this, and so they just rolled out two useful features – automatic caption or auto-caps and auto-timing.

Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice for automatically generating video captions. The captions are no where near perfection but since this is a new feature, it is bound to improve in time – hopefully.

Auto-caps is currently visible only on some of YouTube’s partner channels including – UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke,UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google &YouTube channels.

Auto-timing on the other hand, which is now available to English language videos on YouTube lets you add automatic captions manually. What’s good about this feature is that it makes the task of adding captions to videos easier. All you need to do is to create a text file with all the words in the video and YouTube will use Google’s ASR tecnology to identify which part the video the words were spoken – then create the appropriate captions.

Digg Founder and CEO Discuss Future Digg Features

Mike Abundo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:50:59 +0000

Before Facebook started counting shares and Twitter started counting retweets, Digg pretty much invented social news. Sensing more mainstream services encroaching upon its turf, the geeky pioneer is not content to rest on its laurels. At a Web 2.0 Expo keynote today, Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson discussed new and future Digg features.

Listen up for juicy tidbits on how to market your new media startup.

(Via Neal Rodriguez.)