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Posts Tagged ‘Exaggeration’

Week in review: Displax turns any surface into touchscreens, Facebook launches redesign

Here’s our rundown of the week’s business and tech news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Displax plastic film can turn any surface into a touchscreen — Displax revealed a new plastic film with multitouch sensing. It can be placed over any display or even non-display surfaces, making them into interactive devices. If the film works as billed, it could become an easy way to retrofit passive surfaces — glass, plastic or wood — so that they become interactive.

Engadget editor: Why I turned off comments — Gearhead megasite Engadget, which attracts millions of readers every month, sometimes millions in a single day, disabled comments on its posts earlier this week. We interviewed Engadget editor in chief Joshua Topolsky about the decision, which he said was a response to a barrage of “trollish” comments in the wake of Engadget’s extensive iPad-related coverage.

Why iPad will sell despite “missing” features — Since Apple announced its forthcoming iPad tablet device, there’s been quite a bit of banter about its shortcomings. The device has no camera, no phone, no Flash support, and doesn’t allow multitasking, just to name a few of the issues. But writer Saad Fazil reminds us that this is exactly how the company launched the iPod Touch.

Siri launches an iPhone personal assistant that actually works — The “personal assistant” label gets attached to a lot of websites and applications, but it’s always an exaggeration. A new iPhone application called Siri has limitations too, but I argued that it’s already further along than the competition, and it has the potential to become a true personal assistant.

Stephen Colbert shows off an iPad at the Grammy’s (video) — Apple always gets an leg up on its competitors with the glamour factor of its products. The process is starting already with the iPad. At the 52nd annual Grammy Awards tonight, Stephen Colbert whipped an iPad out of his coat pocket (must have been a big pocket!) while on stage giving an award for Song of the Year.

And here are five more stories we thought were important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Live-blog: A rundown on Facebook’s new redesign — Facebook rolled out a redesign to 80 million users on Thursday night. We reported from the Facebook offices as the company explained the changes.

BioWare’s Mass Effect 2 is one of the first great games of 2010 — Dean Takahashi declared that the new game is a masterpiece of storytelling. The game’s success should help BioWare’s owner, Electronic Arts, dig itself out of a hole of losses and bad bets made on original titles.

Apple’s A4 chip: Engineers correct stupid journalist — The “stupid journalist” in question is VentureBeat writer Paul Boutin, who asked readers to explain how Apple’s switch from third-party chip manufacturers to its own in-house design makes the iPad better, either for Apple or for iPad customers. Former Apple employee Prabhakar Kotla responded with an impressive 10-part answer.

Glam raises $50M at whopping value of $750M, prepares IPO — Glam Media, the fast-growing online media company catering to mostly women, has raised another $50 million from investors. More impressively, the company is now valued at $750 million by its investors.

San Francisco to funnel $171M into green transit center — San Francisco has long had plans to extend the Bay Area’s Caltrain line into the heart of its Financial District. Now, recent designs show that the transit facility could be extremely (and uniquely) green — which makes it even better news that the project landed a $171 million loan from the federal government under the banner of the Transportation Infrastructure and Innovation Act.

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NSFW: 1200 words absolutely, definitely not about Rupert Murdoch and Google

One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.

Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.

Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.

In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.

The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect. Apparently my criticism of the aborted Microsoft adverti-raping of Family Guy means my views on Microsoft and Murdoch somehow matter a damn, and the fact that I’ve worked for old and new media means that I have some unique additional insight. Also, I swear a lot when I talk about Rupert or Microsoft, and people dig that shit.

After the eighty-six-millionth email dinged into my inbox, I did almost consider surrendering to popular pressure and dedicating an entire column to my analysis of whether such an arrangement is ever likely to happen and what it would mean for Google, and the wider world. But then I realised that I’m paid to write long, and that a column like that would read as follows (in its entirely)…

Will News Corp Remove Its Content From Google, And If So What Will It Mean For The World?

No.

And nothing.

…which feels lazy, even for me.

The fact is, as a Brit, I’ve seen Murdoch pulling this crap countless times before. The News Corp-owned Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in the UK, and second biggest-selling English language newspaper in the world. In every national election for as long as anyone can remember, the candidate backed by the Sun has gone on to win. (And not just in the UK – the paper backed Obama for President, even though Murdoch also owns Fox News.)

The Sun’s endorsement of winners is, according to some, evidence of Murdoch-as-kingmaker; a man with the ability to shape opinion and to win (or lose) elections. Sure enough, the Sun’s recent shift from supporting Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to Conservative rival David Cameron coincided with a spike in opinion polls for the latter to become the next Prime Minister.

But to assume that Murdoch’s backing of Cameron lead to the spike is to flip cause and effect. Murdoch doesn’t create winners, he’s simply adept at spotting where public opinion is heading – waiting until he’s absolutely certain who the winner of a fight will be – and then endorsing them so loudly that when they inevitably win, he can share all the credit. “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”, the paper once declared after an election, when in fact a more accurate headline would be “it’s the Sun wot noticed it”.

The idea that Murdoch removing his content from Google will be the beginning of the end for the latter’s dominance is just nonsense. Sure a few smaller news rivals might be dumb enough to heed his rallying cry for a mass-boycott of Google News, but that will just be an added bonus to Murdoch. The numbers show that most searchers wouldn’t even notice if the Wall Street Journal and every other News Corp publication vanished from their results. What would definitely happen, though, is a huge drop in eyeballs and ad revenue for News Corp, which would certainly cost Murdoch far more than he could hope to recoup from a deal with Bing. Again, anyone familiar with the Sun (and its New York-based cousin, the Post) will know that Rupert will always put his hunger for eyeballs above his insistence that people pay for news – to the point where he is happy to slash cover prices to economically-suicidal levels to win readers.

But fortunately Murdoch doesn’t need to make that decision: unlike in politics where you can’t endorse both candidates, there’s really no reason for him to pick a horse in the search race. His ideal scenario is to continue to make News Corp content available via both Google and Bing, but to encourage both to display it in a way that drives the maximum monetizable eyeballs. Which is exactly what his current strategy will achieve.

By convincing Bing that there’s a chance he might drop Google – for the right price – Murdoch suddenly has a new partner falling over itself to give him prominence in their search results, on his terms. Sure enough, Microsoft has just agreed to help fund the next-generation search crawling protocol, ACAP, which gives content owners like News Corp more control over how their news is indexed.

Meantime, Google might not be worried about a mass exodus to Bing, but as more publishers start to consider alternative search services they have to at least begin to take ACAP seriously. After all, if you want to index the world’s information, you have to accept that a big chunk of that information belongs to Rupert. Again, this is win-win for Murdoch who can keep his content on Google, but with the option of locking some of it away behind un-indexable walls in future.

And that’s where we see Murdoch’s real genius: he has managed to use his illusion of influence to get all of these benefits without having to commit himself to anything, or expose himself in any way. There is no way in hell that News Corp content will vanish from Google and yet with every headline asking whether Google should be worried or suggesting that other companies might follow Murdoch’s lead, his image as a kingmaker is strengthened. It’s bad enough that he has millions of readers and viewers for his own outlets, without the rest of us doing his dirty work for him.

And it’s for that reason that I won’t be swayed by the recommenders and the trusters, no matter how many emails they send. I know Murdoch’s game, and unlike my poor misguided TechCrunch colleagues, I refuse to play it.

So, sorry Rupert, I don’t know what my column will be about this week, but one thing’s for sure: it won’t include a single word about you or your….

…oh.

Damn you’re good.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Using FireWire to help speed up the iTunes Home Sharing process

Filed under: Tips and tricks, iTunes

One of the new features of iTunes 9 is Home Sharing. The feature allows you to manually browse, import, and automatically add iTunes content from up to five authorized computers in your house. While Home Sharing is certainly a welcome feature, it’s so slow that you may not live long enough to see all of your content transferred.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

Given the trend toward larger file sizes of digital media — higher bit rate music and videos, in particular — iTunes Home Sharing may take quite a bit of time for some. However, some FireWire shenanigans should shorten this time significantly.

One of the neat features of FireWire is its networking capabilities. Similar to how you can connect crossover Ethernet cables to directly connect two computers, you can use FireWire to directly network (or daisy chain, if you have more than two) your computers. Doing this with iTunes Home Sharing, however, requires a bit of trickery, and here are the steps, assuming that your network config is set to Automatic:

1. Turn on iTunes Home Sharing on two computers. Let’s call them Computer 1 (which we’ll call the target) and Computer 2 (which we’ll call the host).
2. Connect the two computers via FireWire.
3. As you’ll need an Internet connection to authorize your iTunes account on both computers, leave your Internet connection on for both computers.
4. After authorizing, turn off the Internet connection (whether it’s via AirPort or Ethernet) of the target computer (Computer 1). However, the Internet connection of Computer 2 should remain on. I’ve found that leaving on an Internet Connection on Computer 1 will result in Home Sharing using its Internet connection (either AirPort or Ethernet) to transfer the file within your LAN.

Now, Computer 2 should be able to import the files from Computer 1 via iTunes Home Sharing using a FireWire transfer, which will likely save you a lot of time.

Note: Using FireWire for iTunes Home Sharing is not bi-directional, so you’ll need to repeat these steps if you want Computer 1 to import content from Computer 2.

Although these steps are a bit of a hassle, you’ll likely only need to do them once, as subsequent uses of Home Sharing will more likely be incremental in nature, for which AirPort or Ethernet should be adequate.

TUAWUsing FireWire to help speed up the iTunes Home Sharing process originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Do You Speak Global Innovation?

We at ReadWriteWeb believe that innovation is a global business (as we noted in an earlier post on the Global Innovation Graph). The “death of distance” – the notion that the Internet makes location irrelevant – may be an exaggeration. Face to face always matters, and that will happen where hubs of expertise and capital emerge. Silicon Valley will likely remain the uber-hub for a long time. But the Internet does dramatically make it possible for an entrepreneur to start from anywhere and assemble a dream team of experts, partners, and customers from anywhere else. Innovation is not just a Valley story or a US story: it is a global story. And we want to write more about this exciting story. In this post, we’ll tell you a bit about how we are starting to do that.

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Language Matters

English is the de facto lingua franca of global business (pardon the Latin). If you want to do business globally, you have to be able to speak and write English. But most of the world’s conversations occur in other languages. We want ReadWriteWeb to be a venue for conversations about innovation not just in English but in all major languages. We want to hear stories about innovation in those languages by people who live and work in those countries. We also want some of those stories to be translated back into English for a global audience – English serving as the hub, as it were.

Our Trailblazing Site in France

ReadWriteWeb France is blazing a trail that we want to follow into other countries. Web innovators in France can now read a selection of posts from ReadWriteWeb in French. Fabrice Epelboin and his team translate ReadWriteWeb posts into French, localize the stories, adding bits that make them relevant to France, and create new stories specific to France. Some of these stories are clearly important to readers outside of France, and we will be bringing these to our global audience. One example is Fabrice’s crusade against the Hadopi law. The law is specific to France, but the issues are global, and other governments are working on similar issues that could have alarming outcomes. We hope that ReadWriteWeb becomes both a local and global voice on issues such as this.

5 Other Country Versions in the Pipeline

Versions of ReadWriteWeb are currently being created for:

• China
• Korea
• Spain
• Holland
• Brazil

In each country, we are working with an entrepreneur who is passionate about Web technology.

These countries are all large economies. We already know how many people from these countries read our content in English. Many more will read and engage if the content is in their local language.

Engagement is critical. Reading is easier than writing. Many people are comfortable reading a post in a foreign language: even if they don’t understand everything, they at least get critical information that is not available in their native language. But writing a comment and engaging in a conversation is much harder in a foreign language.

Why We Naturally Take a Global View

Many people assume, looking at our content, that ReadWriteWeb is based in Silicon Valley. We are not. We do have writers in the Valley, and we congregate there frequently for major events. But ReadWriteWeb’s founder and editor, Richard MacManus, is based in New Zealand. Our COO, Bernard Lunn, is based in New York but is a Brit who was born in Berlin and has lived and worked all around the world. We are a networked business, with no single location, using the online tools that we write about to run our business. So viewing anywhere in the world as a good place to report from and not regarding any place as “foreign” comes natural to us.

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