Spotlight

Shining the light on a Los Angeles-based tech startup or innovation each week.

Earth… Wind… Fire… Water… HEART! Remember when Captain Planet’s team united as one for a strength greater than the sum of their parts? This is the super-power concept behind Combiform, a new multi-player gaming controller which literally locks into your friends’ controllers for a truly interactive gaming experience.

Eight games are currently being tested for Combiform, including Mesozoic Invasion: The Lost Dinosaur City by developers Juli Griffo, Tai An, Hye You, Melinda Yep and Lawrence Lee.

Listen to our interview with the Combiform team on Episode 6, but first…

Check out a sneak preview!

WTF

Do you miss the air guitar? Are regular instruments just not cutting it? Well, you’re in luck! The Airpiano (by designer Omer Yosha) is finally on sale!

Check out this demo:

Headlines

Los Angeles:

The L.A. Times’ Festival of Books is held this year at the University of Southern California. Organizers have released a new, free smartphone app with geo-tagging capabilities to help guests get the most out of their trip.

The L.A. Superior Court began trial this week for the next the long, nationwide string of Internet companies being sued by users. A 56-year-old woman is charging Match.com the company with neglect after she was matched with a registered sex offender, whom she claims, assaulted her on their date.

National:

Lawsuits don’t stop with Match-dot-com  A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Apple for reportedly tracking iPhone customers’ whereabouts without their consent. Apple claims they did it to improve their maps and GPS services.

HBO programs are coming to smart phones! The company announced plans to release their movies and popular drama series such as Big Love and The Sopranos on Android devices, the iPhone and of course, the iPad.

News Commentary

Sony Playstation Hacked

RFID Tracking at Coachella

Mac vs. PC

WTF

Credit: Alexander Heckel, by way of TechNewsDaily.com

Looking for a wedding ring but not big on size? Scientists at Goethe University may have a solution for you.

A professor and a doctoral student have successfully linked together two DNA bands to create, “the world’s smallest wedding rings.”

Headlines

Los Angeles:

President Obama’s Director of Science and Technology John P. Holdren visits Caltech on Tuesday, April 18 to give the keynote speech for the 2011 DuBridge Distinguished Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.

Caltech Events

National:

The Boy Scouts of America have announced a new badge… for building robots! In an effort to support education, science, tech, engineering and math curriculum, also known as STEM, the badge features NASA’s Mars Rover. To earn it, students must design, build, program and test a robot.

CNET.com – Boy Scouts can now earn robotics merit badge

Tuesday, April 12 marked a new type of New York Times newspaper game, one which encourages users to Google the answer using a stripped-down version of the search engine at agoogleaday.com. The bare-bones search engine is designed to reward the best, most finely-tuned search queries.

PCWORLD – New Googling game!

Beam me up, Scotty! The phrase never get old… Scientists from the University of Tokyo have successfully teleported small bits of light from one location to another. While the experiment has been done with more basic particles, this success marks the first time it was done using the quantum concept of entanglement.

Live Science – Light Teleportation!

News Commentary

Obama moves Internet ID plan forward.

NSTIC attempts to make online transactions safe

THE POKEN!!! As featured in Fast Company

Poken – Digital business cards… gotta catch them all? Maybe just one.

Microsoft’s MIX 2011 Conference

Microsoft's Mix Conference 2011

Geo-tagging comes to the USC campus

Foursqaure partners with USC

Show Notes

WTF

The mop’s gone 2.0. Check out what the SWITL robotic hand can do!

Headlines

Los Angeles:

A UCLA professor has developed a cell phone camera that works without a lens. The device could lower the current cost of microscopic medical cameras from hundreds-of-thousands of dollars to a low as just five-dollars.

Aydogan Ozcan’s new lensless camera.

MySpace went belly-up after going the Microsoft route instead of Apple and focusing on L.A. rather than Silicon Valley

MySpace's demise

Millennium Biltmore Hotel hosted top technology vendors and executives to examine the growing IT culture and business in Los Angeles sponsored by Verizon and CGI.

LA tech industry and its growth

California:

California added nearly 100,000 jobs in February, many of them in the high-tech and green tech sectors

Tech jobs in LA are increasing reports LA Times

National:

Google has agreed to be audited for the next 20 years after violating the privacy of its users through the release of Google Buzz, its social network.

Google to face FTC consequence for Buzz

News Commentary

Amazon announces cloud storage service with music streaming service!

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/29/amazon-cloud-player-goes-live-streams-music-on-your-computer-an/

The L.A. City Council approved (Tues) two skyscrapers that will be lit-up, top to bottom with advertisements.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/26/local/la-me-wilshire-grand-20110326-162

User reports keyloggers on Samsung laptops

http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/sec/2011/032811sec2.html

Happy April Fools’ Day!

We’ll be posting fun online April Fools’ Day 2011 pranks across the Web as they pop up today. Looking forward to fake articles from Wikipedia and other shenanigans.

Leave a comment with your best prank! Online tech pranks, preferred. Be sure to check out the top online prank aggregator, too: April Fools’ Day on the Web to share the mischief.

In the meantime… check out last year’s top April Fool’s Day online pranks according to PC World Magazine.

*NOTE: It’s “TOP GUN”… not “TOP SHOT.” Before you write in, I (Jacob Chung) am well aware of the irony of it all… Thanks!

What’s the deal with mobile?

htmLA attends Business on Demand: Succeeding in a Social, Mobile and Real-Time World, sponsored by the USC Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) and the USC Marshall Alumni Association, Los Angeles Chapter.

“I believe mobile is going to squash everything.
It’s like a tsunami that’s going to wash over everything.”
-Travis Boatman, SVP, Worldwide Studios, Electronic Arts Mobile

Myths about Mobile: 

Myth: “One size fits all.”
Truth: Mobile apps thrive in various consumer bases. Facebook Mobile, iPhone apps may not work for all.

Myth: “Mobile users are on the run.”
Truth: Most use mobile devices at home (47%).
Myth: “Mobile brands don’t matter.”
Truth: Free is the new black!
Build brand before entering “paid app” market.

Hulu and the Future of TV

Consumer can watch whatever they want, whenever they want. Great market for brand advertisers.

Mission: To help people find and enjoy the world’s premium content – when, where and how they want it..

“My first hulu experience made my head exploded in a brain-spray of awesome…”
-early user testimony

The event featured speakers and executives from leading tech companies, including:

Sumir Meghani (director of business development, Groupon)
Lucy Hood, (executive director, CTM, USC Marshall School of Business)
Janee Poore (senior account executive, YouTube)
Hank Wasiak (media industry veteran; marketing faculty, USC Marshall School of Business)
Andy Kleinman (VP of strategy and business development, Metrogames)
Matt Hanover (head of business development, IMDb.com)
Clinton Schaff (VP of digital media, Golin Harris)
Steven Melnick (Senior VP of marketing, 20th Century Fox Television)
Gordon Paddison (CEO, Stradella Road)

Show Notes

Spotlight

Shining the light on a Los Angeles-based tech startup or innovation each week.

This week, we interviewed Bob Aholt, an angel investor and member of the Pasadena Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to funds startup companies in Southern California, many of them tech-based. The group cites lack of capital funding during the “critical early stages of development” as a prime reason for failure. To date, the Pasadena Angels have provided more than $25 million to startup companies.

Pasadena Angels Mission Statement:

Our mission is to create a unique investment community of successful business and professional leaders that identifies promising start-up ventures and provides the capital and counsel necessary for success.

Headlines

Los Angeles:

Sat., March 26, 2011
World-famous physicist Michio Kaku visits Caltech on Sat., March 26 to speak about how tech and science will shape human destiny over the next 90 years.

ADVISORY:
Thurs., April 7, 2011
The Technology Council of Southern California will host SMASH, a conference to help marketing and P-R professionals make better decisions about deploying social media campaigns. The event is sponsored by Communitelligence and Social Radius. Registration is still open on their website.

L-A-based company MobileTREC makes its services FREE for Japanese residents through the end of the month. The company develops mobile apps for safety and emergency preparedness, like a panic button and location-mapping to help identify safe zones.

Planet Mars’s next visitor, the rover named “Curiosity,” will hang out at JPL for the next month in a lab that simulates the Martian landscape. The chamber will include a harsh combination of sub-freezing temperatures and severe, bright lights to imitate the sun. Curiosity will launch next year from Kennedy Space Center to continue the search for evidence of microbial life.

National:

The Washington Post reports the U.S. government has been funding tech companies that help people to use the Internet undetected by their governments, including protesters across the Middle East. This indirect support puts the U.S. in an awkward position when establishing strategies across the multiple countries experiencing uprisings.

And domestically, Apple is suing Amazon.com over their use of the term “the app store.”

News Commentary

AT&T announces its plans to buy T-mobile USA. (Picture Credit: Engadget.com)

AT&T plans to buy T-Mobile

Imaging DNA 2011 hosted in Pasadena

BlackBerry’s new Playbook to run Android apps

Quora: Why Haven’t More Successful Tech Startups Emerged from Los Angeles?

WTF

Flying Saucer Developed in Iran

Fars News Agency reports the flying saucer was developed by the Iranian Aviation and Space Industries Association (IASIA) and the Farnas Aerospace Company to conduct aerial imaging missions. Complete with GPS and real-time HD 10 MP camera!

And aliens. Maybe.

Photo: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons (This isn’t the one in Iran, because we don’t know exactly what it looks like!)

Show Notes

Spotlight

Shining the light on a Los Angeles-based tech startup or innovation each week.

“The New Quill”

Creator Michael Morgan talks to us about a new interactive reading app that allows students to create and share their own interpretations of classic novels using their cell phones.

Some highlights:

SXSW Interactive

htmLA podcast co-host Jacob Chung travels to Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest Festival this week to cover tech news and cool stuff at the Interactive portion of the events!

Check out his preview story for Neon Tommy here.

Some panels he plans to check out:

Augmented Reality for Marketers: Future of Consumer Interactions

NFC and RFID, How It Will Change Mobile

Headlines

Los Angeles:

Fiber Optics Conventions held at L.A. Convention Center

Companies convene in Los Angeles to show off speeds of up to 40 GB/sec over 6 miles using a fiber the size of a human hair.

On-demand video buffering and broadband Internet relies on fiber optics.

National:

LimeWire settles lawsuit with 30 music publishing companies

Top six book publishers agree to Apple’s “agency pricing,” takes away retailers’ ability to discount e-books

Software Updates:

Google Chrome update
includes password synching, search engine-like preferences

Apple iOS Update 4.3 for iPhone, iPads and newer versions of iPod touch

News Commentary

Facebook to stream movies

AOL buys HuffPo

YouTube Next to promote higher production value

Motion-activated movie theater seats released

WTF?

Mark Zuckerberg doll complete with freckles, Adidas

Check out our pilot episode and first foray into the tech podcasting universe.

Show Notes

Spotlight

Shining the light on a Los Angeles-based tech startup or innovation each week.

Aderra.net

Aderra engineers record audio at concerts, cut songs into different tracks and burn them onto USB bracelets for fans to purchase after the show. Afterwards, Aderra pushes out new content for consumers to update their device with new songs, video, photos and more.

Aderra CEO Ed Donnelly spoke with us about how he developed Aderra and what this could mean for the concert-going scene. The company combines the talents of programmers, audio engineers, record producers, video technicians, social media experts, tour merchandise professionals and “one overused coffeepot.”

Headlines

Los Angeles:

TED Conference 2011 held in Long Beach, Calif.

Former JPL physicist inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame

National:

“Visual Effects” Academy Award goes to Inception

Google international crises aid to New Zealand earthquake and other international crises

Facebook co-founder to sell $70 billion in company stock

Software Updates:

Android 2.3.3 Gingerbread
breaks Google Voice

News Commentary

iPad 2 announced

Gmail Meltdown Ends

Webtop for all Motorola phones by June 2011

WTF?

Human-Shaped Phone Tickles When It Rings