Technology posts

Now this is more like it. Assuming you exist, you’re by now doubtlessly familiar with Google’s imminent push into the frontier of your living room. But while we’ve all been made intimate with the idea of Google TV, I for one could go for a taste of the user experience, couldn’t you? Lucky us; Google has obliged by throwing us denizens of the net a reasonably meaty preview of what beef is. ‘Beef’ will hereupon be referred to as ‘Google TV’. Make sure you beatbox a wicked drum n’ bass beat while you click the hell out of this play button, because the internet is just more fun that way. “Watch videos on the web,…

In the past few weeks, the internet has worked itself into a state over one question: does the web make people stupid? It’s a discussion that in large part was started by Nick Carr, whose recent book The Shallows argues that the internet is changing the way our brains work for the worse. People like Clay Shirky have said, no the web is making us smarter, while others have responded by saying that the online world is not inherently good or bad – it’s just change. Who’s right? Well, they all are. But if the future is all about the web – and, make no mistake, it is – how is the internet changing how we think? The…

Earlier this week, the New York Times company forced the iPad Pulse News Reader app to be pulled from the App Store. The reason? It took the Times’ RSS feed and put it inside its own app. To be clear, the RSS feed in question was a headline, a one-sentence introduction and a link to the full story on the NYT site. That’s it. Worse? Steve Jobs highlighted the app earlier during his WWDC keynote – and the NYT itself wrote a glowing review of the app just a few days before. As mystifying as the move seems from the outside, it’s yet another sign that established old media entities are still really struggling to…

Thanks to a change in Apple’s iOS developer agreement , AdMob is now banned from iAd. But AdMob isn’t taking it lying down. “Let’s be clear. This is not in the best interests of users or developers,” says AbMob’s CEO, Omar Hamoui of the move. “In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.” That’s a pretty good point, Omar, and let’s be honest: between the App Store, the iPad, and now this, stalling technological progress sometimes…

So there’s an awful lot of dead people in Hong Kong, and I mean that with the utmost respect – burial really is a big issue due to overpopulation. To combat this, the Chinese government has opened a virtual cemetery. Yes. Yes, that is exactly what they have done. Mourners can register a departed loved one, upload photos and video, and give offerings in the form of emoticons including candles, flowers, roast pig, and most traditional offerings. Seriously, if I find a list of these emoticons, I will absolutely update this post with them. The site claims that its purpose is to “[facilitate] the public…

No one ever knocked Google for not keeping up to date. Despite only indexing, like, one a month, I’ve always been pretty impressed with how well Google organizes the web. But what do I know? Apparently, that’s not nearly fast enough. To keep up with the modern tide of user content (I guess ‘tsunami’ is more appropriate), Google has rolled out Caffeine, a new indexing system which updates layers of content continually, resulting in an up-to-the-minute web. “Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks,”…

CEOs of EA and Capcom respectively, John Riccitiello and Haruhiro Tsujimoto recently whispered some sweet nothings about Nintendo’s upcoming 3DS in interviews, giving us clues to the future of handheld gaming. “I will tell you, I’ve seen it; it’s cool,” teased Riccitiello, probably knowing full well he’ll be black-bagged and never seen again if he says anything useful before Nintendo’s E3 presentation. Yeah, we know it’s gonna be cool, John, what else? Tsujimoto, however, has been a bit more bold. “Of course, it allows us to do things that couldn’t be done until now, so the development…

Man, is it just me, or has gesture interface technology been a big thing lately, both Techi-side and abroad? Seems everywhere I look, tech manufacturers hither and yon are preparing some sort of gestural dealie. While that’s cool and all, and I like the idea of gesture being a possible future, this one in particular seems a little extraneous. This is eyeSight, and it has a really uninspired name. Nevertheless, eyeSight wants to be an interaction solution for Android-based devices. It’s a pretty simple concept: you wave your hand in front of your device, and the camera interprets your movements…

Oh, Yahoo, you’re this, you’re that, you’re everything and nothing. What are you up to now? Uh… David Beckham, you say? Then again, I guess the World Cup starts in… Oh, Jesus, three days?! The hell have I been? I guess Yahoo’s not exactly got a bad idea recruiting Beckham. But why? Beckham’s part of Yahoo’s latest effort to… uh… be, I suppose, and will be serving up exclusive World Cup and football content for 2010-2011, pimping Yahoo’s products all the while. The goal (ahem, goooooooooooal) of the campaign is “to drive more people to search, use and talk about Yahoo! through exciting and…

In this day and age, it’s often all too easy to complain about the problems plaguing social networking sites, overpriced computers, and the lack of viable applications available amongst various smartphones. It’s important, however, to remember where we came from and acknowledge how far technology has come. Before you throw your keyboard at the wall after your next Firefox crash, take a deep breath and try to imagine a time before browsers even existed… a time before websites existed. Allow us to take you on a stroll down memory lane and put it all in perspective. 1. Computers Given the variety…