Yahoo’s personalized reading app for tablets, called Livestand, is expected to launch this week.
“More than Flipboard and Zite, Livestand looks and feels like AOL’s Editions app for iPad,” reports ReadWriteWeb. “It functions as a personalized, magazine-like publication with dynamic content and sleek, often video-based advertisements.”
Propeller, the code name for Google’s challenge to Flipboard, is expected to integrate with Google+ and include several media partners. AllThingsD describes the app as “an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android.”
Yahoo and Google may be arriving on the scene a bit late to compete with the immensely popular Flipboard. However, the two companies may have an advantage with the development of cross-platform support, potentially gaining an audience among smartphone users.
Despite the cross-platform advantage, ReadWriteWeb points out that, “applications like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse have proven very popular among consumers. To compete, the big players will need to offer something truly unique to readers, publishers and advertisers alike.”
Andy Setos was honored with an Emmy Award last week — the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
The award is a special engineering honor recognizing “an individual whose contributions over a long period of time have significantly affected the state of television technology and engineering.”
Setos was at Fox for 23 years where he was responsible for “guiding the company through the digital transition, the adoption of HD technology, content and standards issues and the regulatory landscape,” reports TVB.
“Andy Setos not only led some of the industry’s important technical efforts but contributed significantly to standards that ensure equipment and infrastructural interoperability and go-forward integration paths for new devices and technologies,” said SMPTE president Pete Lude.
HP announced this week that it is keeping its PC division, despite recent rumors to the contrary.
The company’s Personal System Group was the world’s leading manufacturer of personal computers for fiscal year 2010.
“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” explained Meg Whitman, HP president and CEO, in a press release.
The decision followed a data-driven evaluation that indicated PSG’s deep integration across the supply chain, IT and procurement. “It also detailed the significant extent to which PSG contributes to HP’s solutions portfolio and overall brand value,” suggests the release. “Finally, it also showed that the cost to recreate these in a standalone company outweighed any benefits of separation.”
Forbes contributor John Furrier has been railing against HP getting rid of its PC division, citing its strong potential to “morph into smartphones, tablets, future laptops, etc.”
A newly uncovered Apple patent suggests 3D gesture control may be in the works for the company’s mobile devices.
“Forget relying solely on touch to control your Apple device,” writes Wired. “On future iPads, you may be able to control your tablet from across the room using 3D gestures, such as a swirl or swipe of the hand.”
Employing a front-facing camera, it may be possible to use 3D gestures to control graphical elements such as icons, media files, text and images on an iPad or iPhone. A toolbar would teach beginners pre-set options as well as allow users to customize their own gestures.
Another Apple patent indicates the company is working on an integrated projector for iDevices that would incorporate gesture controls for manipulating projected images.
According to The Official Google Blog, Google+ has unveiled four new features this week.
“What’s Hot” refers to a narrowed stream feature that allows users to see the posts that are trending on Google+.
“Ripples” is a new analytics tool that allows users to track the flow of posts across a network, see who shares it and who it reaches.
“Creative Kit” is a photo editing tool that goes beyond the regular cropping and tweaking to add interesting effects quickly and easily (the post includes a short video demo).
And finally, Google+ is now available to all Google Apps customers worldwide.
Ars Technica reports: “Forty-one percent of enterprises do not allow employee-owned Macs access to any company resources, even Web-based e-mail, according to the results of a new Forrester survey of IT executives at North American and European companies.”
Some companies will offer a stipend to employees to buy Macs if they prefer, but the enterprise seems to stay away because of higher prices and ingrained IT Microsoft traditions.
Forrester suggests that productivity is linked with the freedom to choose personal computers. Many employees prefer the “uncluttered Macs — especially those with solid-state drives, which are more responsive and boot in seconds,” according to Forrester analyst David Johnson.
Problems arise with the need for Mac-specific management software and file sharing, but Johnson points out tech departments that stand in the way “will eventually get run over.”
There was a time when Apple was a consumer electronics company, Google was a search engine, Amazon was an online retailer and Facebook a place to connect with friends. Now each of these companies is growing into the space of the others as they compete for new and expanding markets in mobile, social and cloud services.
Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire tablet will compete directly with Apple’s iPad. Google+ has taken on Facebook. Android and iOS are direct competitors. And Facebook has been considering its own mobile phone while it also looks to offer content, advertising and retail services.
Fast Company analyzes the “future of the innovation economy” in this regard, with a particular emphasis on the inevitable war and its major players.
“Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will not last forever,” the article suggests. “But despite this oncoming war, in which attacking one another becomes standard operating practice, their inevitable slide into irrelevancy likely won’t be at the hands of one of their fellow rivals. As always, the real future of tech belongs to some smart-ass kid in a Palo Alto garage.”
According to the new “Global Internet Phenomena Report” from broadband solutions provider Sandvine, North Americans have officially embraced the “post-PC” era.
The report suggests that for the first time, U.S. consumers are using their gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets more than PCs for entertainment.
“[We have] entered a post-PC era, in which the majority of real-time entertainment traffic on North America’s fixed access networks is destined for devices other than a laptop or desktop computer,” Sandvine reports. “Game consoles, settop boxes, smart TVs, tablets, and mobile devices being used within the home combine to receive 55 percent of all real-time entertainment traffic.”
Interesting stats from the “Beyond Bytes” infographic: 96 percent of broadband subscribers use real-time entertainment each month, 83 percent of broadband users access YouTube videos each month (compared to 20 percent for Netflix), and real-time entertainment as a percentage of peak period downstream traffic has doubled since 2009.
Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak is predicting record sales of the Kindle and Kindle Fire. However, the company also anticipates a lag in revenue after initial sales of the devices, as consumers get acquainted with their machines before purchasing content for them.
“Much of the profit from these products would come from digital purchases by consumers post-sale,” reports The Next Web.
“Once a customer has purchased a device, what else do they buy? We certainly have some data now that we didn’t have prior to the launch [of the ad-based Kindles]. Once the customer purchases the Kindle and are carrying around this massive selection at their fingertips, they buy more content,” said Szkutak.
In a related Geek.com post, it was noted that the Kindle Fire may become the best-selling Android tablet ever, as pre-orders continue to flood in.
Amazon is producing “millions more” tablets to match the demand that has overwhelmed the company since announcing the slate a month ago.
The Fire will sell for $199, possibly making it an attractive alternative to Apple’s iPad, which starts at $499.
Tech analyst Tim Bajarin says both Google and Microsoft have been downplaying the significance of Apple’s Siri because they know it could seriously impact their core search businesses, especially as it gains access to even more online databases.
“You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone,” Google mobile chief Andy Rubin told Walt Mossberg at the recent AsiaD conference.
Microsoft’s Andy Lees suggested that Siri “isn’t super useful” and added that the voice interactivity of Windows Phone 7 when connected to Bing harnesses “the full power of the Internet, rather than a certain subset.”
Bajarin counters that, “Apple has just introduced voice as a major user interface and that its use of voice coupled with AI on a consumer product like the iPhone is going to change the way consumers think about man-machine interfaces in the future.”
Siri is not just a voice UI, but a gatekeeper to natural language searching of online databases that may eventually make Apple the third major search company worldwide.
Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has reiterated his take on the issue of piracy. Valve is the creator of game platform Steam that distributes games to a global community of 35 million players.
Newell believes that DRM does not work and pirates are not necessarily always seeking free content.
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” he says. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
“Most games available on Steam are easily found in pirated form on the torrent sites,” writes ETCentric contributor Nick Nero. “Even if you buy the game, many users download the torrent because most DRM requires the disc to be present which slows down the game startup and level load/access times.”
“What keeps me as a Steam customer is their cloud service,” adds Nick. “I can download any of my games to another PC, I can backup my games to encrypted physical media, my game saves are stored in the cloud, and I can easily find my friends for mulitplayer. The service layer is what brings in the customers.”
App downloads on Google’s Android platform now top iPhone and iPad combined, even in the absence of any competitive Android tablets.
The OS accounted for 44 percent of all app downloads for Q2 of this year, according to a recent study by New York-based ABI Research.
In the new Steve Jobs’ biography, the Apple founder rails against Android as a “stolen product,” one that he vowed to go to “thermonuclear war” in order to stop its success. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently derided the OS as well, adding you need to be a “computer scientist” to understand Android phones.
“But a flood of low-priced handsets this summer has catapulted Android ahead of Apple for the first time in terms of app downloads,” reports the Daily Mail.
However, Apple still leads in the per user category. “Android’s app downloads per user still lag behind Apple’s by 2 to 1,” explains Dan Shey at ABI.
Google’s music download store is expected to link with Google+ within the next two weeks. However, the service may prove disappointing if the company cannot secure deals with the four major music labels.
Tentatively named Google Music, the service would follow in the footsteps of Spotify, which earlier this fall linked with Facebook to promote its music service.
The Google+ integration would allow users to recommend songs to Google+ contacts, who could then listen to those songs once for free. MP3 downloads would then be available, most likely for 99 cents each.
Music labels have shown hesitation about the service’s propensity to allow piracy, in addition to the lack of revenue for record companies, as the music locker is free.
The Groundbot spherical surveillance robot from Sweden “can roll through mud, sand, snow, or heck, float on water if it need be — while using its pair of cameras to deliver its remote operator with a live live video feed — in stereoscopic 3D, no less,” reports Ubergizmo.
This is a great simple design for a device that could be used in many hazardous situations such as combating crime and detecting potential terrorism.
The Groundbot can travel up to 6 mph and features knobby tire treads for all-terrain operation. The robot includes sensors for “radioactivity, gas, humidity, fire, heat, smoke, biological material, explosives, or narcotics.”
“One controls the Groundbot remotely or through a programmed autonomous GPS-based system, where the Groundbot works like your regular DSLR — you can opt to include a wide-angled camera (for 360-degree vision), or if the situation arises, use a night vision (IR) camera instead.”
Digimarc moves beyond ‘watermark’ to a ‘desireable consumer experience’ with its new Discover app that “lets users capture visual and audio input with a smart phone and search for related information,” reports MIT’s Technology Review.
“Discover combines a variety of media search functions into a single app that will allow users to scan images, audio, video, and even barcodes or QR codes (two-dimensional versions of barcodes) — all without switching between apps.”
The CE manufacturers historically objected to installing watermark detectors because the content industry wanted to use them to stop undesired consumer behavior.
This app and others like it offer consumers a positive experience that could make that argument moot, and it could support new business models.
The free app is available for iOS and Android phones.