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iPhone App For Worshipping Ronald Reagan

2009-12-03T19:10:01Z

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has come up with a new way for Reaganites to bask in the glory of Ronaldus Magnus: A free iPhone application!

I just spent the last few minutes downloading and fiddling around with the app. It has a gallery of pictures of Reagan in all his glory, for an admirer to cycle through with only the swipe of a finger.

eBook Apps For Smartphones

2009-12-03T14:15:04Z

IF you're a book lover who has a smartphone and you're not ready to spend the $260 you might on an electronic book reader, try starting with an e-reader app. Best of all, they're free.

Major Chinese Online Store Sells Just FIVE iPhones In Two Weeks

2009-12-03T14:08:48Z

An official iPhone store on Taobao.com, the biggest Chinese e-commerce Web site similar to eBay, has sold just two 8GB iPhones and three 16GB iPhones, according to figures on the site. The store launched in the middle of last month, a few weeks after China Unicom began offering the first official iPhones in China.

Spotswitch iPhone App Finds Parking Spots For New Yorkers

2009-12-03T12:28:18Z

Spotswitch, a new iPhone application, hopes to use crowdsourcing to help with an eternal New York problem: How do you find a parking space in New York City?

iPhone Orchestra To Premiere Mobile Phone Music

2009-12-03T12:26:35Z

Given that the iPhone offers more processing power than the original iMac, this next story had to happen: December 9 will see a live performance by an orchestra, each and every one of whom will be using an iPhone to make the music happen.

Anis Shivani: "Don't Be Evil": How Larry Page and Sergey Brin Really Think and Should We Worry About Google's Dominance

2009-12-03T11:26:38Z

INSIDE LARRY & SERGEY'S BRAIN
By Richard L. Brandt
Portfolio, 244 pages. $24.95

'Searching and organizing all the world's information is an unusually important task that should be carried out by a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good."
--Larry & Sergey's statement to Wall Street in their 2004 IPO filing.

The challenge for any chronicler of a Silicon Valley company is to distinguish between hype and reality. In Google's case, because of its indisputable financial success, the task becomes harder. After all, when Google has cornered $20 billion of advertising revenue a year--revenue that has come from struggling newspapers and other traditional producers of "content," which are in danger of losing their footing altogether--the vast flows of money can hide many simmering problems. It is remarkable that after ten years of escalating market dominance, Google's one truly successful innovation remains its search engine; it has developed more than 150 other applications, but they're either not as popular as competitors' products, or have failed to generate revenue.

The first question Richard L. Brandt addresses is Google's ambition to be the world's librarian. Google has always been very clear that it wants to digitize every bit of information. This raises obvious questions about the power Google possesses over this information. Why is it that the world's governments are not organizing and digitizing this information? Obviously, it's natural to worry about a single corporation becoming the potential gateway to everything that has ever been written or said. Since Brandt did not have personal access to the Google founders, one might have expected greater skepticism toward the self-proclaimed ethical motivations of Google's founders--embodied in their ubiquitous motto, "Don't be evil." This ethos must be seen in the context of the period of Google's emergence; the great computer giant of its era, Microsoft, was being assailed from all corners--the public, competitors, and governments alike--for being the epitome of evil.

Libraries, it is to be noted, do not charge for their content. So far, neither does Google. But we are at a very early stage yet in the life of the Internet, and it remains to be seen how this evolves. That the gatekeeper should be a single private entity, which moreover imposes its own model of advertising (which may or may not work for every content provider), should provoke concern. It is the business model inside Google's algorithms--Google's own brain--that we should be concerned about, rather than the degree to which Larry Page and Sergey Brin's brains might be virtuous and ethical.

Google is the single greatest force currently putting pressure on existing business models for publishing, broadcasting, communications, and entertainment. Google, with its Android phone software, has entered the telephone business. The way Google looks at it, all forms of communication can be redefined as search--search according to Google, that is. Google is wary of competing portals--such as Facebook, or the iPhone, or anywhere else users congregate and feel most comfortable--posing a challenge to its preeminence as the Internet's homepage of choice. It has tried to keep the homepage simple, free as it is of clutter and distractions, and has not shown any inclination to be a portal, such as AOL, paradigmatically, tried to do.

But as time goes by and we get more and more used to Google as the homepage, it becomes more and more difficult for any competitor to pose a challenge. Inertia is a large part of the explanation, but so is ease of use--in that sense Google harkens back to the revolutionary Mosaic and Netscape browsers, which made the Internet accessible to all. Undoubtedly, Google's search produces better results than any competitor's, which is partly due to the self-reinforcing nature of Google searches. The more consumers use Google search (yielding cookies that refine future searches by the same user), the better it gets at what it does. In all these ways, Google gives us what we need, with the least friction possible; yet in all these ways Google also poses a potential danger of a monopoly using the wealth of the world's knowledge and information for its commercial purposes.

Certainly, reading about Google's success story is a restorative counterpoint to the legends of evil committed in the recent past by Wall Street, Detroit, and other American corporations, which created little value yet rewarded executives extravagantly. Google has fundamentally altered the world, probably far exceeding the capacity of any single government to do so. Politics is now potentially more transparent and accountable than ever before. Users can find information cheaper and quicker and better than ever before. There is no aspect of our lives that hasn't shifted, sometimes crucially, in response to the revolution of information Google has been instrumental in bringing about. Yet Google aims to be all-encompassing, and that always has to bring its own hazards. As Brandt notes, Google claimed it wasn't interested in developing a browser, but it did, with Chrome. Google is posing a direct challenge to Apple's iPhone, with its Android telephone software, available through Verizon. When Google introduced Gmail, it was revealed that information compiled from emails would be used to target advertisements to users.

Brandt, like other chroniclers of Google, emphasizes Larry & Sergey's similar intellectual upbringing, their common Montessori background, and their shared experience at Stanford graduate school, all of which are generally said to be the source of the free-flowing environment at the company. Yet this is too banal to be given much explanatory credence when it comes to Google's eventual success. There is nothing particularly new in this, as far as Silicon Valley goes. The challenge for a chronicler of Google is to separate the corporate mythology--the way the Google founders talk about the 20% time engineers are allowed to devote to their own projects, or the way the company has bent over backwards to provide food and daycare, and even massages, on campus--from the corporate business philosophy.

To the extent that Larry & Sergey are math prodigies--or computer geeks, if you will--and lack the humanistic dimension, we are carried forth into the brave new world on the wave of their shortcomings. They both seem to display a cavalier disregard for the value of content, as Brandt suggests at numerous points. Why would authors write books for free? Only to enrich Google with advertising dollars? What would be the quality of free books? If the existing publishing, journalistic, and broadcasting environments entirely collapsed tomorrow, one suspects Larry & Sergey wouldn't be too unhappy. Content--some sort of content--can always be procured. Free, as Chris Anderson recently pointed out in his new book, can work for authors, musicians, and other content producers, but why should advertising be the sole support for creative work? Surely that would have an effect on the quality of journalism or writing, if that were the case. Yet Google's brain knows no other dimension than to capture advertising dollars through the greatest possible numbers of clicks.

Outside Google, the talk may all be about controlled chaos, yet hierarchies obtain--as they must--within Google. Engineers are a cut above nonengineers. The company makes no bones about it. Again, this reflects Larry & Sergey's bias that data drives everything, that there is no other calculus for decision-making. One might argue that this dilutes the quality of Google's search. It's better than anything else out there, but what is out there is pathetic, as measured by the utterly soulless efforts of Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL, which wanted to serve as portals where users were captured and walled-off from other options, rather than as neutral arbiters of information. So Google search is an advantage over these barbaric early manifestations of what search never should have been, yet the vaunted PageRank algorithm often fails to value quality over quantity. And moreover, Google doesn't seem particularly interested in measuring the quality of, say, a New York Review of Books article on a particular subject, or of a scientific journal's, compared to the random musings of some uninformed ignoramus, should that have succeeded in getting the most views. The elevation of the engineer's data-driven, linear, antihumanist mind might have something to do with this manifestation in search results.

PageRank, Larry's great innovation, we learn from Brandt's interviews with Google's competitors, might not have been such a great innovation after all. The technology was open and available to others to exploit; the fact that they didn't do so speaks to Google's competitors' disinterest in making the Internet experience pleasurable and efficient and quick for users. Yet the public mythology of Google's discovery of its magic algorithm needs to be brought down a few further notches. CEO Eric Schmidt--who was brought on with some reluctance at first, after insistence by Google's venture capitalists--is variously seen as not being particularly effective, or as the genius who produces the first part of the "controlled chaos" equation. Actually, it doesn't take a genius to be the CEO of a corporation in as dominant a position, relative to its competitors, as Google currently is.

There's no denying that Google's corporate vision includes making things as easy for the user as possible. After all, the dominant late-nineties Internet portal was AOL, and we all remember how user-friendly that was! And we all remember the horrendous banner advertisements flashed on MSN. Google has insisted on not including advertisements on its homepage. Advertisements, when they do appear to the side of search results, are unobtrusive. Yet, again, there is a sense in which advertising--because it is so effective in the form Google uses it--has become the engine of growth, rather than being the outcome of the growth of valuable information on the Internet. It makes no difference to Google what viewers view, as long as it results in advertising dollars. AdWords, borrowed form GoTo (later renamed Overture), which places advertising on search pages, and AdSense, which places ads on other Web sites, are the two key innovations. In response, competitors like Microsoft have eyed Yahoo to try to develop a counter to Google's dominance of the advertising market, but nothing has come of it so far. The logical conclusion to what Google is doing would seem to be the eventual end of all forms of middlemen, so that advertising becomes completely automated, without the human touch. Not everyone will lament the end of the advertising executive or salesman, but there will be other consequences for content should that happen--consequences we ought to think about.

We have let Google slide on many things--its China censorship, to allow it to remain viable in that huge market (though nothing Google does seems to stall the rise of Baidu, the local search engine); its occasionally cavalier public posture toward privacy; and its indifference toward copyright laws--because we feel good about Google. That is both the most tremendous asset (unmatched by, say, Microsoft) and also perhaps the weakest foundation on which to build the world's greatest library. On the other hand, Brandt is right to wish that Google might become an ISP. Our experience of accessing the Internet would probably become much better. We shall see if Larry & Sergey's collective brain can keep up with the spontaneous evolution of the Internet, as embodied in the worldwide community of users. That is the greatest logic of all, and it may supersede the planning and visionary capacities of any Internet corporation--even one as sanctified and mythologized as Google.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer Laughs At The iPhone In 2007 Interview (VIDEO)

2009-12-03T10:30:47Z

*See video below*

Back in a 2007 interview with CNBC-TV, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is asked about the iPhone, his first reaction is to burst out laughing.

Queried about his first reaction to the iPhone when Steve Jobs debuted it at MacWorld, Ballmer "explodes" with laughter and looks almost incredulous that the interviewer's brought up what Ballmer describes as "the most expensive phone in the world", one that "doesn't appeal to business customers."

See him crack up at the iPhone in the video below.

Think he's still chuckling? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

(Via Gizmodo)

WATCH:

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Drunk Driving iPhone App: Colorado Launches App To Determine Whether You're Over The Legal Alcohol Limit

2009-12-02T14:47:13Z

Have you had too much to drink?

There's an app for that.

The Colorado Department of Transportation has created a free iPhone program that lets users calculate their blood-alcohol level.

iPhone: T-Mobile May Get Apple's Phone Next, Not Verizon

2009-11-30T16:41:50Z

Apple's (AAPL Quote) path to U.S. smartphone dominance may take an abrupt detour as the iPhone's next destination may be Deutsche Telekom's (DT Quote) T-Mobile and not Verizon (VZ Quote).

AT&T (T Quote) will lose its exclusive agreement to sell the iPhone sometime next year and Verizon has been the leading candidate to take on the popular Apple phone next, but Thomas Weisel analyst Doug Reid disputes that assumption.

iPhone Users Most Likely To Pay For Digital Content, Study Shows

2009-11-26T09:24:35Z

Owners of Apple's iPhone are more likely than any other consumer to pay for digital content across a range of content types, including newspapers, a new study has found.

Apple Fights Back With Two New iPhone Ads (VIDEO)

2009-11-24T09:39:13Z

Two new iPhone ads have debuted, both touting the smartphone's ability to handle simultaneous voice and data connection in different scenarios.

The two ads (see them below) have been launched on the heels of the Verizon / AT&T "ad wars" that began with Verizon's "There's a map for that" commercial, which took aim at AT&T's spotty service, and mocked the iPhone app tagline, "there's an app for that."

AT&T responded with its own ad, featuring Luke Wilson and a side-by-side comparison of the two carriers. (See it here.)

Dueling ads aside, the new iPhone commercial is also well-timed for the holiday shopping season.

Apple's iPhone ad steers clear of taking sides with either carrier, and instead highlights the positive features of its phone, explaining how helpful the iPhone can be when making plans with friends, or doing business.

See them for yourself below.

WATCH:

Apple iPhone Ad - Did You See My Email? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

WATCH:

Apple iPhone Ad - What Time's The Movie? from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

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Apple, Android Dominate Smartphone Web Traffic

2009-11-23T11:57:30Z

When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob's October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks.

Elissa Altman: Move Over Slow Food: Introducing Slow Media

2009-11-23T10:24:48Z

When my father died in 2002, I inherited his thousand-album music collection which ran the gamut from The Red Army Choir Plays Kalinka to a chortle-inducing bit of vinyl called Port Said, the cover of which involved a belly dancer wearing what appeared to my once very embarrassed young eyes to be pasties of a sort of Levantine variety. Over the years, Dad migrated from his prized Garrard teak-cased turntable to a Teac cassette deck to a Bose whole room CD system, and with every passing year, his beloved record collection gathered more and more dust. I finally dipped into it a few months after I lost him, extracting Moishe Oysher Sings Kol Nidre; I put it on my ancient record player, fired it up, and remarkably, it drew the attention of our cat, Neville, who planted himself in front of the speakers and refused to move until it was time to turn it over to Side B.

Most of my father's albums are still sitting in the closet in the box they were moved in, but these days, I'm seriously thinking about bringing them into the den, and housing them in a nice Danish modern credenza, much like the one they lived in when I was a child. I've been trolling eBay for a vintage Garrard turntable just like his, and if I find one, you can be certain that the next iTunes audiobook I buy won't actually be digital and won't actually be on iTunes: it will be David Sedaris's Live for Your Listening Pleasure, which Hachette is releasing on January 5th 2010.

On vinyl.

According to the New York Times:

Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group, said she was drawn to the idea [of the format] precisely because it was quirky. Mr. Sedaris's "audience is very attuned to irony and is going to find this funny," Ms. Thomas said.

That said, the Times also reports that:

albums are enjoying something of a renaissance, posting $57 million in sales in 2008, more than double the previous year and the best for the format since 1990, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The format is so rare for audiobooks, however, that the Audiobook Publishers Association has never even tracked its sales.

Which, among vintage-loving, Slow Media geeks may not even be the point (although it certainly is to bean counters). What is the point, exactly? The fact that there are a lot of us out there, and the grass roots reaction to universal hyperdigitization (perceived or otherwise) is omnipresent, and extends far beyond the audio world.

Consider: a close family friend ditches his 12 megapixel camera for a Leica M6 Rangefinder. Culinary anthropologists Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford shoot only film for their magnificent books. The Fountain Pen Hospital on Warren Street in Manhattan is selling a 1918 Stars and Stripes model Conklin for a little over $1000. One of my close friends, a trader in Chicago, mans his stock exchange desk with nothing but a small pad and a Bic pen. I regularly keep my eyes peeled for an Ericsson rotary Cobra phone to match the one that used to sit on the desk in my childhood living room. Letter press printing communities are emerging everywhere, creating original cards and posters in response to their mass-produced counterparts. The guitar of the minute (if you're a hipster) is not a brand new Taylor (or Martin or Gibson or Breedlove) but an old Epiphone beater that you maybe picked up at a tag sale. Serious cooks are eschewing microwaves and food processors for pressure cookers and mortar and pestles. And the only book publishers who seem, in these days of Kindles, Nooks, and Readers, to be doing passably well for themselves are low-overhead, specifically traditionalist houses who specialize in, let's see....BOOKS....meant for the long haul, printed on better paper, and produced with loving care and attention. It's like comparing McDonald's to Chez Panisse, only with flap copy and royalty rates. Food photographer/stylist Christopher Hirsheimer and editor/writer Melissa Hamilton gave a big, fat Bronx cheer to the cookbook industry, and instead, they now make their own. From scratch. Like a cake.

Sure, this whole Luddite, reactionary, writing-with-a-quill, back-to-basics thing may be an oversimplification. And admittedly, I, myself, am waiting with baited breath for the arrival of the much heralded Apple Tablet; I am changing phone plans and will be buying an iPhone in the coming weeks; I even want to wire the house with a Sonos system so that I can simultaneously hear Bach in one room and Coleman Hawkins in the other, the latter digitized by my banker friend from his father's collection of 1950s Blue Note recordings. What goes around comes around, it seems.

The fact is that new media, love it or hate it, is never about usability. That's not its point. It's usually about getting there first, and changing the media lexicon; it's about selling us, the consumer, the next big thing, which will be obsolete by the time it hits the stores so that we want the next thing after that. And after that. The only answer? Go Slow. Listen to your father's albums. Write a letter and stick a stamp on it. Make dinner from scratch. Read a book. A paper one.

I only hope that I can make Slow Media work in my house; I look forward to sitting back in my Eames knock-off lounger, sipping a cocktail, and listening to vinyl, until the meditation gong goes off on my Blackberry and tells me that I've got mail.

Jose Antonio Vargas: Unplugging -- Turn It Off! (VIDEO)

2009-11-23T07:48:17Z

We can't turn it off -- we just can't. Our relationship with our phones (BlackBerrys, iPhones, Sidekicks) have gotten so eerily co-dependent that, as the New York Times noted in a must-read story, we're solving "a problem caused by technology with more technology." Instead of simply turning the phone off, some of us go to a free site like ZoomSafer to disable our beloved cell phones. And, as if texting or talking on our phones aren't enough, some of us want to type in our cars, too -- hence the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. Thankfully, the product's seller warns: "For safety reasons, never use this product while driving." No kidding.

Because here's the biggest challenge of our hyper-kinetic, always-connected, tech-powered daily lives: Unplugging. A few weeks ago, we asked some of the biggest names in the tech and online world how they slow down. Recently, for a video for CNN.com, I spent an hour or so at Times Square in New York City -- the capital of TWW (texting while walking) -- asking people when they turn off their cell phones. "A text message is more important than my health," a 16-year-old told me. "Radiation, like, it's not gonna do that much."

Well, we've got a long way to go.

Ed Zitron: Road Wars: Arming for the Subway Commute

2009-11-19T11:00:16Z

My commute is far from gruesome. I've seen worse - hiking up hills in
Aberystwyth or cross-country marching at 8AM to an early-morning class in
University Park, PA were far worse.

However, short and sweet as the morning PATH journey is, it lacks the stability
of my own two feet, and commonly throws my fellow passengers and I to-and-fro,
making anything more than listening to music difficult. And, frankly, I grow
very tired of listening to music in the morning.

It's something individual to the NYC/NJ commute, too - the rough-and-tumble
ride isn't in effect in London, Paris,
Japan, or even riding in a
taxi along the winding turns of Sardinia's
hills. The controlled chaos that we deal with requires a certain steely will -
and a plethora of entertainment means that fit those hanging on for dear life.

Please keep all naughty jokes related to one-handed anything to a
minimum.

The Kindle
and iPhone/iPod Touch are the most
generic choices, mostly because they’re built to be held, navigated and used
with one hand. More importantly, you can also get a significant grip on them
if, for example, the train judders wildly from side-to-side at an unexpected
opportunity. This is where phones like the Droid lack in finesse - the
proud inclusion of the keyboard in a tight package makes for a hard-to-wield
device when supporting yourself on the morning rush.

Road warriors trying to eek out that last email on the train will prefer the
Droid's
physical keyboard which is far more reliable than shakily stabbing at the
iPhone's on-screen keyboard. I fail to mention other e-readers simply because,
at present, the Kindle is reliably better for anyone trying to read with one
hand. You can do everything with a firm grip with most of your fingers, deftly
clicking between the menus using your thumb. This may seem somewhat of a trite
point, but Sony's awkward clicky-wheels and touchscreens, or the oncoming glut
of Tablets don't seem like they'll be too useful for anyone standing.

Neither the Nintendo DS nor the PSP
are particularly friendly for a bumpy subway journey without a seat. Playing
the PSP with one arm wrapped around a bar will work briefly, but a wrong turn
will send it hurtling out of your hand. The DS is just too fiddly to be used by
anyone destabilized.

The iPhone features plenty of games that are totally and utterly
unsympathetic to the road warrior yet remains arguably the best gaming tool for
the job. However, Bookworm ($2.99), Crush the Castle ($1.99) and Civilization:
Revolution ($6.99) can all be played effectively either with a nimble thumb or
in small, controlled doses - between stops, calm moments on the journey, or
when the train decides to stop for no reason.

In fact, here's my little tip to the print industry for its next
technological leap; whatever you use to display the news on next, please make
it usable with one hand. The New York
metro will thank you for it.

If you have any great ideas for how to keep oneself entertained while being
flung about in a tube full of sweaty individuals, feel free to leave a comment.

eReader Gift Guide

2009-11-18T13:53:15Z

We've rounded up a few of our favorite devices, though be warned: with a market this much in its infancy, there's always going to be something just a bit more exciting right around the corner.

Blower App Blows Air From Your iPhone, For Those 'Too Lazy To Exhale' (VIDEO)

2009-11-18T12:15:12Z

iPhones can move. They can make noise. They can play pictures.

But did you know they could blow air, too?

Using the new iPhone app "Blower," you can "unlock the new mind-blowing secret feature on your iPhone" and "turn your iPhone into a real Air Blower," according to the app's description on iTunes.

Blower promises that once you install the app, you can turn your phone into a mini-fan:

Switch on your app, turn the iPhone volume to the max and feel the air flowing from the speaker opening.

For $.99 cents, you can ensure you'll never have to blow out birthday candles again.

Discover calls it the app "for those too lazy to exhale."

See it in the video demonstration below:

WATCH:

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