Jeremy A. Kaplan.

VIDEOS: On location at Cannes

2021-03-24T13:14:00.008-04:00

Jeremy Kaplan on CNN 5-26-2016

2016-05-31T09:54:00.002-04:00

Jeremy Video Highlight Reel 2016

2016-03-13T15:01:00.001-04:00

PlayStation, Xbox Live networks hacked -- and who's to blame?

2014-12-29T09:31:00.000-05:00

For two full days (plus a portion of a third), starting with Christmas, an army of people trying and failing to use their new consoles for the first time wanted just one thing: answers. And that’s exactly what they weren’t able to get for a good 48 hours after this whole mess first started.

Yes, hackers are utterly responsible for the incident, which was silly and reprehensible all at once. But. Neither Sony nor Microsoft addressed the situation in a public statement — to press or through one of their own brand editorial channels — until December 27. What gives?

I joined Tom on the Fox Business show Varney & Co. to discuss. Watch the clip here.

4 Tech trends that will blow up at CES 2015

2014-12-29T09:22:00.000-05:00

For geeks around the world, the annual Consumer Electronics Show is like Christmas wrapped up in a present and given to you a few weeks after Christmas. Miles and miles of gadgets, an early look at stuff that won’t be available for months, a taste of tech to come.

It’s awesome.

It’s also astonishingly overwhelming, with tens of thousands of visitors, miles of exhibitors, and thousands upon thousands of things. But there are common threads. Here are the big ones I expect to make headlines at the show.

Read my predictions at Digital Trends.

The future of wearables gets weird

2014-12-16T09:48:00.001-05:00

For the early adopters on your gift list, forget smartphones and tablets, think biometric shirts and life-trackers. Our wearable tech gift guide is filthy with 'em, including wearable shirts and shoes and even socks.

But what's in the future for this type of tech? Will these things deliver medical grade data that our doctors can use? Will they save us from car crashes? Will they be -- gasp -- miniaturized and encapsulated and injected under a skin?

I joined Larry Mantle on KPCC's AirTalk to discuss just where the tech will go. Listen to the full show on the KPCC website.

Blackberry offers you up to $550 to ditch the iPhone

2014-11-25T12:25:00.000-05:00

BlackBerry is going after iPhone users this holiday season, offering owners of Apple’s handset up to $550 if they swap it for the recently released BlackBerry Passport, the business-focused smartphone noted for its square display.

The deal, which kicks off on December 1 and runs till February 13, is valid for U.S. and Canadian shoppers only. In addition, the phone has to be purchased at shopblackberry.com in the U.S. and Canada, or shipped from and sold by Amazon.com in the U.S.

Really. I joined Charles Payne, filling in for Stuart Varney on Varney & Co., to talk about the questionable offer. Watch the video below or at Fox Business.

Facebook moving into your office?

2014-11-17T11:49:00.000-05:00

Facebook wants you to spend more time ... on Facebook.

The social networking giant is reportedly working on a new site tailor made for the office called "Facebook at Work." It's like an alternative to LinkedIn or Microsoft Office's social networking tools, and despite the popularity of Facebook, it faces an uphill battle against some well entrenched websites.

To discuss the new development, I joined Gerri Willis on Fox Business. Watch the clip below or at Fox Business.

2014-11-12T11:46:00.000-05:00

I’ve been wearing the Microsoft Band for over a week, complaining bitterly every quantified step of the way about this device, which resembles and feels like a high-tech manacle. A flat, color touchscreen sits on one side, longer than my ordinary-sized wrist is wide. It dwarfs my female colleague’s wrist. The other side has a quirky metal clasp, opposite a sensor — a bulky combination.

In sum, wearing this thing is a labor in itself. Imagine wrapping an ordinary rubber band snugly around your wrist. Not bad, right? Now make it fat and weighty, with weird bulges in various places to accommodate the bewildering array of sensors. Less fun, right?

I joined Stuart Varney on Fox Business to talk about the pros and cons of Microsoft Band. Watch the clip below, or at Fox Business.

Meet Microsoft Band: The terrible wearable that’s kinda awesome

2014-11-11T18:44:00.000-05:00

The Microsoft Band is meant to be worn all day and all night, and will give you incredible insight into your health as a result. But — and it’s a really big but — you’ll grow to hate wearing it as much as I have.

I’ve been wearing the Microsoft Band for over a week, complaining bitterly every quantified step of the way about this device, which resembles and feels like a high-tech manacle. A flat, color touchscreen sits on one side, longer than my ordinary-sized wrist is wide. It dwarfs my female colleague’s wrist. The other side has a quirky metal clasp, opposite a sensor — a bulky combination. In sum, wearing this thing is a labor in itself.

Read more in my full review at Digital Trends.

Motorola's Turbo lets you live life away from the wall

2014-11-04T18:52:00.000-05:00

Portly phones like the Apple iPhone 6 Plus and Google Nexus 6 get all the attention for a good reason: Some are so big that they actually overshadow their competition. But not everyone wants a gadget they’ll struggle to shoehorn into a pair of Levi’s. And for anyone realizing bigger isn’t necessarily better, has Motorola got a phone for you!

How does two-day battery life sound? And a 21-megapixel camera that can record 4K content? And a screen that can survive a drop in the sink (or God forbid, toilet) without issue? With powerful features and battery life for days, the Motorola Droid Turbo is one helluva great phone.

Read more in my full review at Digital Trends.

HP's New 'Sprout' Gets Creative with Touch Technology

2014-10-30T11:32:00.000-04:00

There's a good chance if you visit an electronics store within the next few weeks there will be a device on display that'll make you think, or say out loud, 'What the heck is that?' And chances are, the device about which you'll be speaking will be the new HP Sprout, the tech giant's vision for how you'll be using a computer in the very near future.

"From a hardware standpoint the magic is taking five devices into one: A projector, a keyboard, a scanner, an amazing canvas with touch properties, and a 3D camera, all into one beautiful device," explains Ron Coughlin of HP.

After HP unveiled its new system, I spoke with NY1's Adam Balkin about the funky new system. Watch the video at NY1.

A tech-heavy safety suit or first reponders

2014-10-22T17:27:00.000-04:00

Bob Griffin, the Deputy Under Secretary for the department, announced his wearable vision for first-responder safety at an appropriate venue: the Wearables + Things conference, a two-day developer show in Washington D.C. featuring everything from Google Glass to work-out gear to magic slippers.

Griffin, himself a former fire chief, knows firsthand what it takes to run into a burning building – and it’s not always fortitude and courage. “Sane people don’t run into buildings. I recognize that. But I need data that’s actually going to help me run into buildings,” Griffin said. “You need data at the speed of thought. And mechanisms that can receive that data.”

I joined Stuart Varney on Fox Business to talk about the new Apex program for bringing wearable tech to first responders. Watch the clip below, or online at Fox Business.

With the next-gen Apex suit, running into a fire has never been smarter

2014-10-21T19:02:00.000-04:00

Bob Griffin’s turnout gear has been into 1,700-degree fires and the Pentagon after 9/11, through anthrax scares and Hazmat situations, bled on and vomited on. People have died in its arms.

Bob Griffin’s jacket has been through everything — except the 21st century.

That’s will soon change, Griffin said, to address one simple question: “How do we bring wearables to the first-responder community?”

On November 17, The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology division will kick off a program to develop a Next-Generation First Responder suit that incorporates wearable tech, Internet and cellular connectivity, and an array of environmental and biological sensors to better protect the firefighters, policemen, aid workers, and others who daily risk their lives for ours.

Read more in the full story at Digital Trends.

Magic slippers, a watch that recognizes exercises, and more

2014-10-20T19:07:00.000-04:00

No need for ruby slippers: Three clicks of your heels in our modern world can trigger a phone call, text your friends, or heck, order a pizza – if you’re wearing the latest wearable gadget, that is.

Called Dorothy (what else?), the gizmo is a tiny Bluetooth-powered gadget that sits in your shoe and can connect to your phone via a microcontroller. Built by DJ Saul and Taylor Guidon from iStrategyLabs, the device is a still a prototype, and admittedly a little large. They’re working on better prototypes, Saul said, and a way to embed it into an insole. But it’s got massive potential.

“We view this a physical trigger for the If This Then That [IFTTT] universe,” Saul said.

Read more in the full story at Digital Trends.

This is the future of wearable tech

2014-10-15T19:17:00.000-04:00

Smart insoles, inseams, and inner layers. Smart swimwear and underwear.

Wearable technology is exploding. So why is it all so ugly?

The first annual FashioNXT Wearable Technology Contest, presented by Digital Trends in partnership with Nike, Intel, and Project Runway, concluded last week in Portland, Ore. Through the contest, we sought to push the boundaries of wearable tech, merging fashion with features to avoid the chunky, sometimes preposterous designs that characterize nearly all contemporary wearable tech.

Read more in the full story at Digital Trends.

Intel Inside … everything? Here’s the glue that holds the Internet of Things together

2014-10-02T10:32:00.000-04:00

When the iPhone launched in 2007, it came with an iBook app that let you sift through The New York Times best-sellers list prior to picking your next beach read — much to the surprise of The Times.

How did that happen? “Because of what we did,” Oren Michels explains. Likewise, Apple’s iPad came with a news app from USA Today.

Why? “Because they had an API. That was huge. That transformed the company. Completely transformed the company,” he said.

Michels is co-founder and CEO of Mashery, and Apple isn’t a customer. Michels is fine with that. They don’t have to be. To build The Times’ best-sellers list into the iPhone app, the company got a key through the terms of service of the API and just plugged it in. Simple as pie.

Read my full interview with Michels at Digital Trends.

Sony’s creating ‘Inception Glasses’ that will bend city streets and buildings around you

2014-09-24T10:34:00.000-04:00

Here’s one way to make the mountain come to Mohammed.

In the 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page create impossible dream environments by folding whole city blocks in upon themselves. It’s remarkable to see – so remarkable that Sony Computer Science Lab researcher Yuichiro Takeuchi decided to make the science fiction conceit into a reality.

On Monday he unveiled the technology, running at present on a tablet but with plans to release a wearable version that runs in glasses. Takeuchi showed a video in which the giant arch in New York City’s Washington Square Park shimmied and rippled in the breeze like a belly dancer. He followed up with a video showing various buildings growing and collapsing like Shrinky-Dinks.

Read more in the full story at Digital Trends.

Phablet reviews before and after iPhone 6 Plus (everyone got it wrong)

2014-09-22T11:16:00.000-04:00

Bigger is better. No, wait, bigger is worse. Well, which is it?

Apple’s newly supersized 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the jumbo, 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus are a marked departure for the company, which has clung to the same, small screen size for years. It has gone so far as to publicly deride larger phones from competitors, notably Samsung, even as their sales grew to record highs.

Tech reviewers over the years have tended to side with Apple, in general saddling reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note — a 5.3-inch device that kicked off the phablet push in 2012 — with asides about how big the darn thing was. To be fair, I’m one of them; I called the 6.3-inch Galaxy Mega “preposterous” last year. I also think the iPhone 6 Plus may be more phone than most people will be comfortable with, although the skyrocketing sales seem to point otherwise.

But does Apple have something special? Can its phones succeed where others have … well, already succeeded? To find out, read the full post at Digital Trends.

A smartass to match your smartphone and smartwatch

2014-09-18T11:21:00.000-04:00

Earlier this week, a complete stranger asked me to take off my underwear.

I was at a hotel, preparing for a workout after waking at the coffee-can’t-help-you hour of 5:00 a.m. to test out the newest wearable. This class of product doesn’t wrap around your wrist, however, nor do you wear it on your face or in your sneakers.

“It’s like a personal trainer in your pants,” explained Jake Waxenberg, head of marketing and business development for Athos. His company makes wearable tech in the form of compression shorts fitted with sensors to measure your physical activity. By accurately measuring how your body performs during a workout, Athos can fine tune how you move, lift, spin and more, improving form and honing abilities. Voila: your ass just got smarter.

Read more in the full story at Digital Trends.

Hands on: We couldn’t tear our eyes away from the spectacular new iPhones

2014-09-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

After squirming through 1,000 of my closest friends and a battery of Apple reps to the iPhone 6 demonstration models on display after Tuesday’s unveiling, I was disappointed.

I thought they were fakes, with printed plastic screens simulating the iPhone experience until working units could be cobbled together. I confess, I was fooled.

The new screens are real, and they’re spectacular.

It’s not just the larger bodies on the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus that will impress iFans, nor the slew of new features designed to expand the company’s platform and do more with all that extra real estate. It’s the already top-notch screen, which Apple has taken to a new level. It’s simply astounding.

Read more in the full review at Digital Trends.

Hands on: Apple’s Watch changes everything. Or does it?

2014-09-09T11:25:00.000-04:00

To see one smartwatch is to see them all: rectangular, chunky, too-big, plasticky. Why the heck would I wear that, much less plunk down a few hundred bucks for it?

Apple’s new family of smartwatches are both the exact same thing and something completely different. No, they aren’t round, nor do they wrap around or curve or flex or look like any of the countless fan-boy drawings you’ve drooled over for the past three years, hoping and praying that Apple would transform this space once and for all.

Instead, Apple’s entries – Apple Watch, Apple Watch Sport, and Apple Watch Edition – are rectangles that look at first blush exactly like every other watch from LG or Google or Asus.

For my full take on the Apple Watch, visit Digital Trends.

Making wearables bearable: Introducing the wearable tech fashion show

2014-08-14T09:37:00.000-04:00

Hot or not? We’re about to find out.

Every major technology company is pushing into wearable devices, with futuristic visions of tech such as Google Glass, to the usable and everyday gear from companies like Fitbit and Samsung. But like a new restaurant in New York City, many are struggling to find an audience. Why? Today’s bulky smartwatches lack proper fashion sensibility. Heck, some of them are straight up ugly.

Making wearables wearable is one reason people keep asking about this rumored Apple iWatch: The company has a penchant for taking ordinary products and designing the hell out of them, until they become so beautiful and iconic that you simply have to have one. But does it exist? Or will Samsung’s next model hit it out of the park? Who will get there first with wearables?

We'll know for sure shortly. Read more to find out why.

Users give ‘thumbs down’ to Facebook Messenger

2014-08-11T17:41:00.000-04:00

The social network has begun forcing mobile users into downloading the Facebook Messenger application on iOS and Android if they want to send messages to their friends and family. The company is accomplishing this by removing the ability to send messages within the main application that allows users to browse the feed.

To ease users into transitioning over to Messenger, users saw notifications within the main app encouraging people to download Messenger. This happened multiple times before the chat option was completely eliminated in the main app. Nevertheless, users ain't happy.

I joined Cheryl Casone on Fox Business to talk about the user anger over the change. Watch the clip below, or online at FoxBusiness.com.

How Sony is helping West Africa with renewable energy

2014-07-25T09:47:00.000-04:00

Meet the blue sky guys.

Most major technology companies have major R&D arms for “blue-sky” research: deep theoretical science and wild new creations. Microsoft Research — 1,100 strong in labs all around the globe — built a mood-sensing “smart bra” and a holographic desk and is working on Windows 9. Amazon’s R&D arm is called Lab126. They recently came up with the Fire Phone, and a wacky bar-code scanner called the Dash. And reporters have written tens of thousands of articles about Google X, the company’s blue-sky, moon-shot research arm that’s dabbling in anything and everything from self-driving cars to robot moon landers to a cure for death itself.

But Sony? I didn’t even know Sony had a research arm until last week.

That’s because the R&D guys have maintained almost exactly zero U.S. presence, only recently announcing plans for the first ever symposium on U.S. shores later this year.

With an office in Tokyo and a satellite arm in Paris, Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) is a much smaller operation than any of those, explained Hiroaki Kitano, Director of Research, President, and CEO. It likewise has a much narrower goal: saving the world.

“We want to go for big ideas, we want to contribute to society,” Kitano, 53, told Digital Trends. “There’s a LOT of blue-sky stuff.”

Read more in my full interview with Kitano at Digital Trends.