Japanese phone maker NTT Docomo is hoping consumers will be interested in its Grip UI technology, which offers functionality through squeezing and pinching phones.
“Consumers have gotten used to pinching and swiping,” reports Fortune. “Soon phone makers may be adding bending, folding and squeezing to their repertoire.”
The primary goal of Grip UI is to create a mobile phone that is easier to control with one hand, freeing up the user’s other hand for carrying a briefcase, for example, or holding on to a pole in the subway.
NTT Docomo’s Android-powered handset has 270 sensors in the phone’s body that enables users to execute operations by squeezing the bezel.
“It is the latest in a range of emerging technology haptic gadgets — and even bendable phones — that promise commercialization soon and that exploit our innate love of manipulating tactile, responsive objects,” explains the article.
“Pressure sensitivity is a very interesting direction for phones so this is great technology,” says Ivan Poupyrev, haptics researcher at Disney’s labs in Pittsburgh.
Flexible objects and haptic interfaces could eventually lead to innovative products such as thin bendable media cards, interactive maps, mini photo albums, advanced OLED screens and various malleable electronic devices.
Apple’s mobile software head Scott Forstall and retail chief John Browett will leave the company in a sweeping management overhaul. Forstall will leave next year and serve as an adviser to Cook until then.
Forstall was responsible for Apple’s recent problems with its Maps app and Siri which has been met with criticism. Moreover, there were reports of friction between Forstall and other senior Apple execs. The final straw may have been his refusal to sign an apology for the Maps app which was eventually signed by CEO Tim Cook.
Browett who joined Apple in April oversaw the retail operation. His plans to reduce staff, cut hours and limit store transfers was reversed as a “mistake.” He was seen as a bad fit since his arrival.
Apple execs Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Bob Mansfield and Craig Federighi will take on added management responsibilities. Ive will now oversee responsibility for the user interface design. Cue will inherit Siri and maps which puts all the company’s online services in one group. Federighi will take over iOS development and the Mac operating system, merging the mobile and desktop teams. Mansfield’s new Technologies group will combine Apple’s wireless teams as well as the semiconductor groups.
Google unveiled the new Nexus 10 tablet with an impressive 2560 x 1600 resolution, 10-inch screen. This 300ppi display competes directly with Apple’s high-res Retina display.
The Nexus 10 will be available in 16GB or 32GB models and will be Wi-Fi only. It will include a dual-core ARM Cortex-A15 chip, 2GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera on the rear and a 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera, a 9,000mAh capacity giving it up to 9 hours of HD video playback, front-facing speakers for audio, microUSB, Micro HDMI and two NFC chips.
Running Android 4.2 will allow it to support multiple users with personalized homescreens and apps.
The Nexus 10 will be priced at $399 for the 16GB version and $499 for the 32GB version. It will be available on November 13th in the Google Play Store in the US, UK, Australia, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. In the US, the 32GB model will also be available in Walmart stores.
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in stock and cash which the New York Times says “gives it a commanding position in the world of fantasy movies.”
Disney is planning to revive the Star Wars franchise. It will release a seventh feature film in the series in 2015 and have new films every two or three years thereafter. Disney’s CEO Bob Iger said the company had also acquired a detailed treatment for the next three “Star Wars” films as part of the acquisition.
While founder, George Lucas, will step down from day-to-day operation of the company, he will be a consultant on future film projects.
Lucasfilm will continue to be run by Kathleen Kennedy who will become its president reporting to Alan Horn, Disney Studios chairman.
The acquisition includes Lucasfilm’s live-action production business, the Industrial Light & Magic effects business, Skywalker Sound and its consumer products unit.
When you Google a song title, often guitar chord information will show up in the results. And say you don’t know a chord for that song, search it on YouTube and you’ll probably be able to find numerous guitar lessons online.
Today, the opportunity to learn how to play musical instruments no longer requires expensive private lessons or going to a class. This phenomenon is likely to spread to other areas of study.
“The current hype is that ubiquitous Internet connections and tablet devices will emerge as a competitive threat to real-life teachers, kill the textbook business and bring low-price learning to billions around the world,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
“There will be big business opportunities for a select group of star teachers and a handful of companies, too,” the article continues. “The downside: Schools and teachers will have to adapt to lower-cost competition from around the country and the world. And they may have to acknowledge that technology might be better at many tasks done today by a fidgety teacher and a metronome.”
Already, some online guitar instructors have been able to make a comfortable living through YouTube videos, like Justin Sandercoe who accumulated 170,000 subscribers. He now travels the world giving in-person lessons to fans or $100 personal sessions online.
“The business problem with such media models is that production can be ramped up only so much — it largely relies on one person’s available time,” the article notes. The piece acknowledges other efforts that leverage computing power to “teach.” For example, one system can track how well students follow streaming sheet music.
Online systems can be much more distracting for some students, and ultimately, motivation and discipline determine the student’s success. In the future, teaching may become more about motivating than explaining.
The U.S. Copyright Office reauthorized circumvention of certain copyright encryption techniques for jailbreaking mobile phones and e-books, but the group remained unmovable when it came to game-console modifications and copying DVDs for personal use.
“The ruling hands yet another loss to digital rights groups who are waging an ongoing campaign to chip away at the scope of a law that limits citizens’ rights by treating copyright owners’ encryption techniques as sacrosanct,” reports Wired.
Every three years, groups can submit requests to the copyright office to change aspects of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This year, the regulators argued that controls on DVDs and consoles are necessary to prevent piracy.
“The record demonstrated that access controls on gaming consoles protect not only the console firmware, but the video games and applications that run on the console as well. The evidence showed that video games are far more difficult and complex to produce than smartphone applications, requiring teams of developers and potential investments in the millions of dollars,” the copyright regulators state.
Regulators backed the Motion Picture Association of America in keeping DVD duplication illegal. Users can, however, legally circumvent encryption “to make use of short portions of the motion pictures for the purpose of criticism or comment,” regulators say.
They are allowing jailbreaking for smartphones, but not for tablets. “When the only difference between a Galaxy Note and a Android tablet is an inch and a radio that can handle voice and data channels, it’s a pretty odd line to draw,” Wired writes.
While some consider e-books “tablets,” authorities allow circumvention for e-books to enable read-aloud functions for the sight impaired.
Fans of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” could see their likeness used for characters in the new Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC game.
Activision Publishing has teamed with developer Terminal Reality for the eight-week “Dead Giveaway” contest, giving fans the opportunity to be a part of the upcoming game, a prequel to the show.
“Clues will be revealed during new episodes of ‘The Walking Dead’ season three on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on AMC,” The Hollywood Reporter explains. “Fans can enter the clues online at www.amcdead.com and each week one lucky winner will be chosen to appear as a character in the game.”
“Terminal Reality will then use photos of his or her facial likeness to create a unique character whose backstory and chilling death scene may be encountered by players during ‘The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct.'”
“‘The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct’ is a do-whatever-you-need-to-survive first-person action game that brings the deep, character-driven world of AMC’s Emmy Award-winning TV series onto console gaming systems and the PC in a frightening new way,” the article explains.
In the game, survivors will be able to learn about these characters and their horrific ends; there will be a special task to discover all the contest characters.
From now until December 2, 2012, every new episode of the show offers a new chance to win.
With the advent of e-readers and tablets, people aren’t reading less and authors aren’t searching for new jobs. In fact, by many reports, consumers are reading more and, as this fall publishing season demonstrates, there is a great range of books still being produced.
“The notion that books are somehow less of a factor in the cultural or information ecosystem of our time doesn’t hold up to the evidence,” suggests The Atlantic.
Trade sales increased 13.1 percent to $2.33 billion in the first six months of 2012, according to the Association of American Publishers, which looked at 1,186 companies.
“The most important indicator is the continuing boost in e-book sales, up 34.4 percent, to $621.3 million, which makes it competitive with the totals for hardcover print sales,” explains the article. “When you consider that it was only with the appearance of Amazon’s first Kindle reader in 2007 that e-book sales took off, the pace of change is stunning.”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently revealed that his company doesn’t make any money on selling Kindle devices. “What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle,” said Bezos. “But they don’t stop buying paper books. Kindle owners read four times as much, but they continue to buy both types of books.”
Amazon notoriously makes hard bargains with publishers and they in turn have become dependent on Amazon and other tech companies.
“Instead of the competition among traditional booksellers for the attention of readers that was for so long the way books were sold,” The Atlantic writes, “publishers now must confront the immense power and reach of tech giants and adapt to their influence.”
“Satellite radio seemed like a good idea a decade ago,” writes Wired. “But today, paying for satellite radio has become much less appealing, as gigabytes of music fit in the palm of your hand and smartphones with streaming services flood into vehicles.”
Satellite radio provider SiriusXM is now looking to telematics to supplement the flailing radio service. The company will provide 24/7 emergency support for accidents, stolen vehicle tracking and roadside assistance to select Nissan models.
“Customers will also enjoy the simplicity of a consolidated bill for their audio entertainment and a central site to manage subscriptions,” SiriusXM said in a press release.
The company says it will incorporate both satellite and cellular networks to “expand coverage beyond traditional cellular-based telematics services” and “create the potential for personalized services and next-generation audio offerings.”
“And while having a satellite connection to the car could give SiriusXM an advantage over cellular-based telematics services by allowing wider coverage — when you’re out of cell range with most systems, you’re out of luck if you need help — the company’s satellites currently only beam information one way,” explains Wired. This means that satellite signals can transmit to connected cars but not visa versa.
Because SiriusXM is already available in multiple vehicles and it has a strong brand name, the company has the ability to add services to stay relevant — although what these services will be is still uncertain.
Roger Lanctot, an analyst at Strategy Analytics, says the SiriusXM weather, news, sports and traffic services are less competitive now but adding a cellular connection will allow the company to deliver premium content in an IP manner “with potentially more personalization and maybe with some social aspects.”
Online digital music sales growth has dropped off substantially in recent years, causing record companies and Apple to look for new ways to encourage music discovery and purchase.
According to anonymous sources, Apple could secure deals with music companies as early as mid-November to create an ad-supported music streaming service.
Positioned as a radio service to rival Pandora, Apple’s music offering will be available on its iPhone, iPad and iPod touch as apps instead of using a Web browser. It could reportedly come to devices in the first three months of 2013.
Apple is pushing hard in licensing discussions, trying to get more flexibility and earlier access to new releases, which could provide an edge over Pandora.
“Apple’s negotiations with record labels have centered around advertising, the [sources] said. In addition to an upfront fee, record companies are seeking a percentage of ad sales and the ability to insert their own commercials for artists,” Bloomberg reports. “Apple sees the service as a way to grow its iAd mobile advertising platform, and is exploring ways to integrate iAd with iTunes to steer customers back to iTunes.”
“If Apple offers a radio product, it will be far superior to anything else on the market,” says Rich Greenfield, a BTIG LLC analyst who recommends selling Pandora shares. “They’re seeking direct licenses to avoid all the restrictions that come with a compulsory license.”
Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft CTO who currently runs Intellectual Ventures, has been issued a patent for a system that could prevent people from printing objects via 3D printers using designs for which they have not paid.
“The patent, issued [October 9] by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, is titled ‘Manufacturing control system’ and describes methods for managing ‘object production rights,'” reports Technology Review.
“The patent basically covers the idea of digital rights management, or DRM, for 3D printers,” explains the article. “As with e-books that won’t open unless you pay Barnes & Noble and use its Nook reader, with Myhrvold’s technology your printer wouldn’t print unless you’ve paid up.”
However, there is a caveat to consider since manufacturers are not required to use DRM.
According to ETCentric staffer Phil Lelyveld: “The patent appears to be incredibly broad, but as the article says it only applies to 3D printers that implement DRM technology.”
The patent goes beyond 3D printing to include additive manufacturing. “It also covers using digital files in extrusion, ejection, stamping, die casting, printing, painting, and tattooing and with materials that include ‘skin, textiles, edible substances, paper, and silicon printing,'” notes the article.
In a discussion of the IP implications of the maker movement, Wired editor Chris Andersen said, “I can tell you with certainty I’m going to be sued. I’m going to be sued sooner or later — hopefully later.”
“That inevitability, though,” the Atlantic writes, “is part of the organic disruption the Internet has brought about. ‘This is what the web does,’ Anderson said: ‘You’re incentivized to try things out, to iterate, to throw it out there and see what happens.’ And that kind of freewheeling invention is bound to butt heads with a system that stridently emphasizes the ‘property’ aspect of ‘intellectual property.'”
The article continues, “In forums where makers — ‘hobbyists turned entrepreneurs turned, you know, megalomaniacs’ — discuss IP issues, Anderson said, one thing becomes clear: ‘The simple answer is no one knows what the rules are.'”
Anderson is promoting his new book “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.” During Thursday’s talk, he discussed new partnerships forming between makers and established tech and manufacturing firms. Anderson also detailed what he considers the two approaches to patent litigation.
“You can either do a patent search and find out whether you’re going to violate a patent” — and “you probably won’t get a good answer.” Then, “if you do then violate a patent, the fact that you did a search first actually increases your liability.”
Or “you can do what we do, which is just: Do it. Wait for the [cease-and-desist] letter. When the letter comes, try to innovate around it,” Anderson said. “If the trolls come after us, one of us is going to be brave enough to fight back. And the courts will ultimately decide.”
Microsoft has been making moves to compete with Amazon and Apple in multimedia content, redesigning and ramping up its music and video offerings.
“The evolution of Music and Video begins up front, where the apps have shed their Zune branding. Instead, Microsoft chose to reuse the Xbox brand, as the company moves to expand the scope of the Xbox name from gaming to all media and entertainment,” Ars Technica writes.
At first glance, the Xbox Music and Video applications are very similar. “In both apps, the first/main screen is dominated by Microsoft’s attempts to sell to you,” the post states, introducing a reoccurring theme in Microsoft’s multimedia offerings. “Users are greeted by a mix of promotional areas that highlight ‘hot’ artists or movies, and entryways into the music, movie, and TV stores. Your own media are hidden out of view to the left.”
Browsing your own content in the apps is difficult. For video, there are a bunch of unscalable thumbnails and faulty filters that make searching difficult; for music, the spreadsheet layout is “extraordinarily slow” and lacks a “fast scroll” mechanism like an alphabetical sidebar.
“One smart feature: when Music is playing, the volume popup that appears when you use the hardware volume keys also includes playback controls and album art. It’s a nice touch,” the post states. “One not at all smart feature: the play/pause key on keyboards with media keys doesn’t control playback of the Music app. Want to quickly pause playback to take a phone call? You’ll have to go into the app to do it.”
Ars Technica also details Microsoft’s Pandora competitor: “Xbox Music offers free streaming of a claimed 30 million songs available through the service. The streaming is free and unlimited, albeit ad-supported, for six months. After six months, you’ll be restricted to 10 hours a month.”
Android will be running on 2.3 billion computers, tablets and smartphones by the end of 2016, according to a new report from Gartner.
By that same time, 2.28 billion devices are expected to be running Windows. “That compares to an expected 1.5 billion Windows devices by the end of this year, against 608 million using Android,” reports Reuters, noting a significant shift is anticipated for the future of this technology sector.
Android has seen rapid adoption as a smartphone and tablet platform. The operating system also helps Google push its main search business.
“Worldwide shipments of personal computers fell by over 8 percent in the third quarter, the steepest decline since 2001, as more consumers flock to increasingly powerful tablets and smartphones for more basic computing,” explains Reuters.
“Microsoft’s Windows has dominated the personal computer industry for decades, but the company has struggled to keep up with shift to wireless, and in smartphones its market share is around 3 percent.”
Google has a tradition of releasing research papers detailing the software it uses to drive its online services, allowing open source projects to take advantage of its ideas.
A relatively new project from Google called F1 is a regional database management system (RDBMS), which the search giant uses to run its online ad system in conjunction with Spanner.
Google only revealed F1 last May and has yet to release a paper on the technology, but Silicon Valley startup Cloudera has already created its own open source version, called Impala.
Cloudera hired Marcel Kornacker, one of the main engineers on the F1 project, and has been working on Impala for two years. “Impala is a means of instantly analyzing the massive amounts of data stored in Hadoop,” an open source platform for spreading and crunching data, explains Wired.
Hadoop is used as a batch processing platform for various data-crunching tasks. Cloudera has brought Hadoop to the business world and now aims to more efficiently use the platform with Impala.
“With open source tools such as Hive, you can also analyze Hadoop data in much the same way you would query a traditional database using the common Structured Query Language, or SQL,” notes the article. “Impala lets you query the same data ‘in real-time’ — i.e., in seconds. According to Cloudera, it’s 10 times faster than a tool like Hive.”
Cloudera is four years old, but is only just starting to build “what I wanted to build when we started the company,” says founder Jeff Hammerbacher.