Google TV finally has a site to help those still confused about what the hell it is to get their learn on. If I wasn’t excited about Google TV before (I wasn’t), I’m incrementally more now. First of all, the branding and visual identity is slick as a leak at a dish soap factory. Typically, Google sucks completely beyond belief at all things designy, but I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed – they’ve really gone all-out to make Google TV do the opposite of be crap. Y’know, in the brand department, anyway. To be honest, the experience overall looks pretty ballin’, as well. Network channels get a sexy launch portal,…

You’re an early adopter, right? Remember that LCD HDTV you bought to replace that faulty, wooden, 27-inch console television? Remember the HD-with-built-in-HDDVD-player TV you bought to replace that? Remember the HDTV you switched back to, wisely purchasing a separate Blu-Ray player? Remember the 3DTV you bought six months ago, flippantly disregarding the complete lack of content and criminal cost of 3D glasses?  Good times. You’ve torn your wallet all sorts of new orifices, haven’t you? Well, don’t let it rest just yet. Toshiba, fancy folk as they are, are dropping a glasses-free line…

In what appears to be another shocking attempt to constrain and limit the functioning of the internet, US lawmakers are currently pushing an MPAA-backed bill that threatens to block American internet users from accessing sites that are deemed to be ‘dedicated to piracy’. What bill S. 3804 aims to do is twofold: first, for a site based in the US, it would force any US-based registrar (i.e. the people who hand out domain names) to shut a site down if it appears to be dedicated to piracy. And secondly, for sites not in America, it would insist that ISP’s block the domain from their traffic. So on its surface,…

“There is what I call the creepy line,” Eric Schmidt said last Friday at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” The statement was made in response to a question by The Atlantic’s James Bennet, asking if Google had any plans to implant technology into people’s brains. “I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line,” explained Schmidt, “at least for the moment, until the technology gets better.” Eric, I’m not gonna tell you how to do your job, but isn’t that something you shouldn’t say when…

After the reasonable success of Windows 7, and long after the train wreck that was Windows Vista, PC users are keeping it old school, sticking with Windows XP as their operating system of choice. If you use a computer for anything other than gaming or to see how many hertz you can eek out of the latest Intel CPU, you know the pain of change. Change means uncertainty, and the one thing people want from a device their business or personal communications rely on is certainty. As a nerd, Windows 7 is a modern, attractive and capable OS, but depending on the task XP is still more than enough for the majority of…

Twitter has finally began moving towards paying gigs, probably fed with being only worth a paltry $5 billion. But you might not like what they have in store. Currently, Twitter sells “promoted tweets” for around $100,000 each. These are sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results, although the general consensus is that the system is experimental and not worth the investment. Well, now they have a new plan. Twitter is going to sell spots in their “who to follow” recommendation list. Twitter insists that relevance will be the key here, although this is obviously going to be the weak…

Many have tried but all have failed to get an app approved that works with BitTorrent. All have failed, that is, until now. IS Drive by Derek Kepner likely made it through the screening process because it didn’t use the no-no word: “Torrent”. Instead, its description on the AppStore page is very innocent: This app allows you to check and manage the downloads in your ImageShack Drive account. For downloaded videos, you can even view thumbnails (if ImageShack is able to provide them). Reading between the lines, the idea is that it has capabilities that some people may use for illegal purposes, but…

What’s your kid wearing for Halloween? He’s not going as Batman, is he? I see, like, a trillion child Batmans running around every Halloween, all wearing that foam (plastic?) muscle bib chestplate deal, with snowpants so they don’t catch a cold. Parents, your child isn’t going to catch a cold. He’s the goddamned Batman. Anyway, the point is, your kid’s Halloween costume is stupid – muscle bib or no. If you really wanna have a pissing contest with the other parents on the block, you’ll consider the Kid’s Walker from Sakakibara Kikai. Obviously from Japan, the Kid’s Walker is a robot that… well,…

In 2008, many tech sites and bloggers pronounced that XM radio was dead. Today, Sirius declared otherwise. Mel Karmazin, CEO of SIRIUS XM Radio, announced that the company is projecting to break 20.1 million subscribers by the end of the year. It will be the first time an XM radio provider has achieved this mark and means that 2010 will net them approximately 1.3 million new subscriptions. Despite the increased adoption of digital music downloads in the “iPod Age”, XM is still proving to be a valid option. Growth in the 2nd quarter of 2010 was triple what it was in 2009. The question is: what is prompting…

A couple of weeks ago, a study came out of Toronto’s York University about Facebook and narcissism that suggested there was some kind of link between the social network and the psychological trait in which people are too concerned with themselves. The media ran with it. CBS said that “Facebook users were more likely to be narcissistic”. The Daily Mail suggested something even more extreme, by simply saying FB users were “narcissistic and have low self-esteem”. Even the university’s own press release “Facebook fiends tend to be narcissistic”. Trouble is, that simply isn’t true. Social Media…