At first, the Web was simple. It was a world so full of static pages with useless information that a GIF of a dancing hamster or (god forbid) baby could turn into an overnight sensation. It was an era so enthralled with its own existence that its purveyors, creators, and financiers never really asked if it was sustainable until it was too late. And, as we can all learn from South Park, without a Phase 2, Phase 3 can never equal profit.
Pop.
Web 2.0 is/was a bit different. If the defining trait of the first Web cycle was the stupid animated GIF, the current “It” sites all have one thing in common: They are, to varying degrees, reliant on user-generated content. Without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties. Without a horde of news junkies yearning to see their username in digital print, Digg would be an ugly page of yellow and white (and their new profile feature would be a joke).
And that is why the Web 2.0 era will come to end sooner rather than later. Because if there is one immutable law of humankind, it is that we are really, really lazy.
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I love me a SlingBox. And so will millions of Dish Network subscribers if this works out like I hope it will. The satellite TV provider is buying the privately-held place-shifting wonders to the tune of a cool $380 million.
Of course, EchoStar is no stranger to partnering with smaller companies that make great products. About a year and a half ago they teamed up with Archos for some mobile Dish products. Nobody really noticed, but it was a good partnership.
Sling Media is one of those amazing smaller companies that managed to gain a footheld in the marketplace by making a useful and innovative product, and making it well. Sony may have come out with place-shifting media products first, but Sling’s were simpler, cheaper, and could be used on screens that weren’t proprietary LCDs (a move Sony has since been forced to follow.) Of course, the one thing Sling was missing was money and marketing muscle. Now they’ll have it. So unless things get really watered-down and corporate over in Sling headquarters, I’m hoping this will give more people an opportunity to watch their shows on the road.
via NY Times
I just got back from Staples where I was faced with one of the worst examples of bogus fees I’ve ever seen. The ruse: If you have them print ANY file that is not in PDF form, they add on a $2 “Conversion Fee”, even if no file conversion takes place. It would be bad enough if they charged a fee for something that takes a single mouse click and costs them absolutely nothing, but this is ridiculous
Full details and story after the jump…
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Awhile back I put up a scathing critique of the Creative TravelSound portable speaker (the one that holds the Zen Stone Plus.) Anyway, while I stand by every single one of my criticisms as valid, I have to say I made a huge mistake: This product absolutely rocks, ESPECIALLY if you don’t own the Zen Stone Plus.
After the jump, I go over my criticisms one by one and show why, even if I was right about all of the problems, I was wrong about their effect on the overall experience in a big, big way. This is a product that really grows on you over time, and it took over a month of frequent usage for me to really begin to fall in love with it. And I have.
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About a year ago I was at a Bang & Olufsen store in Manhattan. Some guy with spiky hair and a Prada jacket walked in, and asked to try out the B&O A8 headphones. He put on the pair, listened to some extremely loud classical music, and, with a self-satisfied grin, said 30 seconds later say: “I’m sold. I’ll take them.”
Now the A8s aren’t the best headphones on the market, and the B&O price premium indisputably goes more towards design than performance. If I could shrink myself down Innerspace-style and enter this guy’s head, I imagine I would have not seen him processing the music he was hearing as much as the $160 price tag on the headphones (which is very, very low for a B&O product) and the $30,000 price tags attached to the speakers in the same room. In fact, I would wager money that you could have shoved $20 Sonys in this guy’s ear and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. What sold him was the environment, the imagery, and expensive suit on the salesperson. If you put any product in this environment and told somebody that it was premium, they would believe you. And if they are in the market for a high-end product, they might even buy it.
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Through the end of October, T-Mobile will be rolling out a MySpace Mobile app for the Sidekick 3 and Sidekick ID which, as they put it, will give you a “customized, real-time MySpace experience.” Seeing as the target market for the Sidekick and the MySpace Generation are essentially one and the same, a partnership like this seems to make a ridiculous amount of sense.
Full release after the jump
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The mysterious, elusive, and admittedly obsessive Dr. Amar Bose, founder and namesake of the Bose Corporation, made a rare appearance Tuesday to a select group of journalists. The occasion was the launch of their new Bose Computer MusicMonitor speakers, but the real treat was hearing the good doctor dish out secrets about the history of Bose, why they almost went bankrupt, and why they never, ever publish specifications for any of their products. As he put it, he spoke to us about “things never discussed outside the company, things that only people involved in the beginning know.”
Some of the words may be paraphrased a bit (I wrote this quickly as he spoke), and I cut out some of the fat, but for the most part, the following is straight from the mouth of Dr. Bose.
THE ORIGIN STORY: AN OBSESSION IS BORN
“I was doing my doctorate at M.I.T. I was a disciplined student. I only allowed myself to listen to classical music. Then I started writing pieces and I didn’t need as much concentration, so I thought I could go out and buy a HiFi sound system.
I went and checked the specifications. Like all engineers, I thought specifications meant everything. I believed that thoroughly. I had been brainwashed for years…
His story continues after the jump…
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The promise of the Kodak’s EasyShare V1253 is immense. As the world’s first compact cam with a video capture function that can pull high-def (that’s 720p, and no I’m not counting those Sanyo products), this could represent a rare case of digital convergence that carves out an entirely new niche.
We just got our hands on this pore-revealing pocket shooter. A full review will come later, but here’s some pics and a quick overview.
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Few—rather, no other—companies stir up the same fool’s game of me-too as Apple. I feel sort of ridiculous saying it, and perhaps sound like a bit of a fanboy, but Apple makes products that work in ways most CE products don’t. When playing with an iPod or iPhone, it’s almost easy to take for granted the fact that most things we buy just aren’t user-friendly. A top exec at Research In Motion (that would be the guys who make BlackBerrys) told me a few months back that about 30 percent of Windows Mobile phones were returned–presumably because their buyers are so frustrated with their atrocious battery life/molassis-slow processors/impossible-to-navigate GUI/propensity to freeze. I’m not sure how many iPhone buyers are returning their gadgets in frustration, but I’d guess it’s a statistically insignificant number.
In general, as the cliche goes, Apple products are known for being simple, pretty, easy-to-use, and fun. And this is exactly why they are bad for progress in the tech world.
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There is no more archetypal a small living space than a college dorm. Sure, us New Yorkers have to deal with closet-sized apartments, but next to the squalor of a freshman quad, crashing in the Lowest East Side is living in luxury. Such cramped conditions call for thin and light gadgets. When I was in college, I made the mistake of lugging a mini-tower to my dorm. Big mistake. A laptop not only takes up less precious mini-fridge space, but it can be hauled to classes for mid-lecture notetaking, Minesweeper-playing, and Facebook-squatting. And college campuses are custom-made for the devices. These days, the hallowed halls of higher education are some of the most wired corridors on Earth.
So, here we go. The best cheap laptops for toting to campus. With one exception, we’ve stuck to machines that start at under a grand. After all, college kids are poor and break and lose things. Of course, since virtually all laptops are customizable, all prices are approximate — a few extra gigs of memory or a sweet new HD-DVD drive will boost any price.
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I haven’t been privy to the private conversations of Steve Jobs, but listening to his keynote the other day, it’s difficult not to pick up on at least some antipathy the man seems to hold towards the entire mobile phone industry.
“Steve Jobs’ entire keynote was a series of middle fingers directed at AT&T and their carrier brethren,” says Sascha Segan, lead cell phone and PDA analyst at PC Magazine. “Notice that he dropped the iPhone’s price without mentioning AT&T; that he’s introducing the iPod Touch into Europe before the iPhone, which will depress iPhone sales there; and that he had a long chat with a Starbucks exec without once mentioning T-Mobile, who operate all of the Starbucks hotspots that he’ll be selling his music through. Never mind that the song he decided to demo on the iPod Touch was Beck’s ‘Cellphone’s Dead.’”
Perhaps he is merely sharing the frustrations of millions of Americans fed up with carrier-locked phones, draconian contracts, poor customer service, and ludicrous fees, but it would appear that, a little more than two months after bringing Apple into the cell phone game, he is already sick of it.
Click the jump to read more…
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Over at the Times, they’re reporting that, in a rare admission of defeat, Motorola is acknowledging a deep slump stemming from their oft-reported inability to follow-up on the ridiculous success of a certain ubiquitous handset. Their response: “introducing a series of innovative new cellphones rather than a ‘one-hit wonder’ like the RAZR.”
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The official line from Nintendo is that the Wii Wheel steering wheel accessory will be available in the beginning of 2008, along with the Wii version of Mario Kart. However, I just got back from Europe, where I happened to spot that very product for sale in an electronics store within the Amsterdam airport for 20 Euros, or about $26. Check it out.
And if your first thought is “Oh, it’s a third-party knock-off”, then I ask you to check out the official-(looking) Nintendo logos on the bottom corners of the box. They don’t do it like that on Canal Street.
Another day, another Apple announcement. Fortunately, this was no “Lets take another look at Leopard” letdown. As far as product unveilings go, this one was absolutely a doozy. We saw them (almost) completely revamp the entire iPod line, add a new (but still familiar) face to the mix, and bring frowns to the faces of Sony and HP, who had the misfortune of announcing products on the same day.
So lets take a look at what some of what they’ve done, and what it all means:
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Nokia just announced a new American-ized N-95 (the one on the right side in the photo). The big deal is that it is optimized to latch onto our GSM 3G networks, so you can get your HSDPA or EDGE on stateside (it does the dance with both AT&T and T-Mobile.) It also has a few cosmetic changes—like the camera lens, as you can see. It’ll hit the states in September, and the price is an iPhone-esque $699 (mainly because it’ll only be sold unlocked, without carrier subsidies.)
Click the jump to see more side-by-side of these two cross-continental twins.
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In hindsight, the original N-Gage was doomed from the start. It’s games were simply spectacular for a mobile phone, but the device itself was bulky, had a pretty small screen, and looked more like a Choco Taco than either a phone or gaming handheld. A Nokia executive today said that they feel a company needs to ship 6 million devices in order to create a financially sustainable gaming ecosystem. Worldwide, Finland pushed 3 million of the tacos, leaving them far short of their goals
Still, the N-Gage, which was always more popular overseas than in the US, never really died. It’s had a sustained presence at trade shows and, remarkably, N-Gage Arena, the device’s online gaming platform, has been continuously running the whole time.
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Big news here in London. It’s no secret Nokia’s moving more into the content providing phase these days: offering mapping services, games, and a music store. In order to keep their scattered offerings under one umbrella, they’ve announced the upcoming launch of Ovi. A sort of cross-platform portal, Ovi will let users log on from either their Nokia phone or interneted PC to download their music (to phone or PC), N-Gage (!) games, and nav maps.
Today it’s mostly just a concept, but it keeps their offerings together, and allows them to easily roll out more content down the line.
And that word Ovi? It’s Finnish for door. Naturally.
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N-Gage had some decent games. The main problem with the old platform, of course, was that you had to buy one very specific Choco-Tacoy phone. They only pushed about 3 million of these suckers out the door in the entire world, which meant they were far shy of the terminal velocity needed to create a profitable gaming ecosystem. Well, there are already tens of millions of N-Series phones scattered throughout the world–Not a bad place to start out their new platform, eh? And because some of these N-Series phones have as much as 8-gigs of memory, they are relying on more of a download-and-play style system, rather than the old cartridge-based days of yore. Games will cost from 6 to 10 euros a pop (that’s 90 to 170 dollars, with current exchange rates), and will be available for daily or weekly rental or totally free demo play.
Remarkably, Nokia has kept the N-Gage Arena online gaming service alive this whole time, so N-Gage fanatics should be happy for the update.
And, of course, all of this downloading will come through the brand-new Ovi platform.
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Photos and video by Peter Ha
We love the Nokia N-Series. If you can handle a bulky pocket and don’t insist on a real keyboard (or multi-touch screen), there really is no better way of of converging everything you’d ever want to do in your pocket. Enter the N81. It hits in two versions: One’s got 8-gig of flash, the other relies on your microSD card. Both have got stereo speakers, killer music format support (MP3, AAC, WMA, etc…), suppot for N-Gage games (!), an FM reciever, a sweet “Navi Wheel”, and play video via RealPlayer. All in all: Very nice! No clue on price, but you can bet it won’t be cheap (especially since Nokia is a fan of selling non-contract GSM phones, which means no carrier subsidy.)
Nokia chose to introduce us to this sweet sucker using a boy band-style song. Oh, and look for it in Q4. Hands on pics after the jump.
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The N-95 gets 8-gigs of memory, and a few (mostly cosmetic) updates today, like a nice black shell, and some other minor body mods. Still, the lack of any real internal innovation shouldn’t be too troublesome–the N95 is already a bit ahead of it’s time, if you ask me, but considering that the original came out before the most-hyped phone in history, and their entire reponse at the top-of-the-line appears to be a few gigs and a black coat–now that’s a bit worrisome. As I said: The N95 doesn’t necessarily NEED anything new to be an insanely amazing phone, but a black cover won’t do much to suck from the hype teet. Of course, the whole media machine is a bit burnt out on phones, so they’d probably have to throw in some teleporting and wireless power action to really accomplish that. And it hits in Q4.
Oh, and the President of Nokia just said that his favorite album was Signals, by Rush. I love the Finns. I really do.
In an unintentional laugh line at today’s press conference, a Nokia video demonstration touted the new “full-screen” touch interface on upcoming phones. The video showed a little hand flick through an interface in a way that was a little too reminiscent of another little phone . Note to Nokia: We love you, and you keep us giggling. Just check out the photo.
The city: London, England. The location: Old Billingsgate. The thing: Nokia press conference. My path happens to converge here with CrunchGear correspondent Peter Ha, so we’ll be tag-teaming this one. Stay tuned for the latest live happenings as we show you the latest GSMs out of Finland. We’ve got some idea as to what they’ll be showing, but we’re always expecting some surprises…
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Creative’s TravelSound speakers should have been a great product. The speaker dock baggage buddy to the Zen Stone DAP sounds good enough, is incredibly light and portable, and looks pretty decent to boot.
Unfortunately, it was as if Creative’s designers were asleep at the assembly line. This is a product with so many glaring mistakes that it really feels like a study in bad design. Lets go over them one at a time…
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It works! But let’s put it this way: Maybe that “Made For iPod” label is worth something after all. And just because there’s a headphone jack there waiting for you to plug your iPod into it doesn’t mean you should. But hey, it works, even if it’s the clumsiest speaker setup since the telegraph.
Quick question: As of today, which company is the top-selling flat panel HDTV brand in the US? Sony? Nope — your Bravia may be nice, but it’s not number one. Panasonic? Nah. And nope, it’s not Sharp, LG, Samsung, or Philips either.
The answer: Vizio.
A company that didn’t exist 4 years ago and, unlike all of the companies above, is actually based in the United States.
According to the market research firm DisplaySearch, Vizio was ranked number 15 just 2 years ago. So how did a no-name brand based in California beat out the giants of Seoul and Tokyo? Really, in hindsight, considering all of the factors blowing behind them, it would have been remarkable if they didn’t.
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