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Spy Video TRAKR runs custom kid-built ‘applications’ for stopping snooping siblings in their tracks

We didn’t know the toy industry was ready to jump into the app store game, but apparently’ we’ve underestimated its fad-grabbing prowess. Wild Planet is calling its new Spy Video TRAKR remote controlled robot the first “app-enabled” toy, with special filters and routines that kids can program for the vehicle and share online. We sort of thought Lego’s Mindstorms beat them to the punch on this, but we’ll try not read too far into things. The bot itself is equipped with a camera that streams video to an LCD-equipped remote, and videos and stills of the TRAKR’s exploits can even be stored to an SD card. Sample programs include a routine to detect an intruder, shout a few choice words at the doomed sibling out of the TRAKR’s built in speaker, and scurry off into the night, but Wild Planet hopes kids will program even more imaginative routines and share them online. The bot will be available in October for $120.

Spy Video TRAKR runs custom kid-built ‘applications’ for stopping snooping siblings in their tracks originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looking back at 2009 console sales and ahead to 2010 trends

The final tally for console sales in the US for December was telling, but how did Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo perform for the entire year? Let’s take a look at how each system did on a month-to-month basis to find out.

Data Source: NPD Group

It’s quite a picture, isn’t it? There were skirmishes every month, and you can certainly see the price drops: check out the PS3 September market share. In fact, Sony’s redesign and $300 price point, along with a little game called Uncharted 2 getting Game of the Year from a good selection of publications, allowed Sony to have quite the end of the year.

The Nintendo DS stayed well above everyone else for the majority of the year, while the Nintendo Wii actually dipped below the PS3 in September. Check out the Christmas sales though, and the “Nintendo is a fad and only kids buy it” argument fails. Yes, you may know someone who doesn’t play their Wii anymore, but keep in mind Microsoft or Sony would kill for the type of consumer behavior we’re seeing in the sales numbers. 

The 360 has been in a tight race with the PS3 all year, and Sony eked ahead in the end. Again, price sells consoles, and a system with a Blu-ray player and some very compelling exclusives for $300 is hard to turn down. Microsoft does great things for its third-party developers, but unfortunately the system may not be as sexy right now as its competitors. Will Natal change that this time next year? We can’t wait to find out.

Finally, let’s take a look at the final sales information for the year. That should show you just how powerful Nintendo’s hold on gaming has become. 

Data Source: NPD Group; data for US only

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Microsoft and Sony will continue to fight for a distant second place in console sales in 2010, and Nintendo will continue to do what it does best this generation: make an insane amount of money. We’ve already seen Ubisoft all but admit it couldn’t make money on Nintendo hardware, so 2010 will be in interesting case study in what happens when one company changes the game so definitively. Will third-parties double-down on the 360 and PS3, or will they try again to make a dent in the lucrative Wii and DS market?

This year should prove to be a bumpy one for everyone involved.

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Best BigCo of 2009

In one of ReadWriteWeb’s longest-running traditions, every year we review the top Internet companies and their impact over the past 12 months. Today we’re announcing the 6th annual Best BigCo, a.k.a. big Internet company. Next week we’ll announce Best LittleCo and Most Promising Company.

In 2008 the Best BigCo went to Apple, due largely to the iPhone and App Store. Facebook won in 2007, Google in 2006 and 2004, and Yahoo! in 2005. Who will be Best BigCo of 2009? Will Apple be the first company to win it two years running? Will Google win the honor for a 3rd year? How about Facebook, which grew significantly this year. Let’s find out…

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Best BigCo of 2009

The ReadWriteWeb team has chosen Google as our Best BigCo of 2009! Google last won it in 2006 and this is the third time we’ve honored the Mountain View company.

Google is without question the predominant Internet company of our time; in large part because it continues to innovate and stay one step ahead of its competition.

In our Top 100 products list for 2009, seven Google products made the cut:

• Android platform
• Google App Engine
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome
• Google Maps
• Google Search Options and Rich Snippets
• Google Voice

And we didn’t even include Google Wave, its biggest launch of the year. We think Wave has a lot of potential, but it’s clearly at the experimental stage still.

The web browser Chrome was probably the Google product that had the biggest impact this year. Launched in late 2008, Chrome still only holds a small share of the browser market and doesn’t offer a stable version for OSX or Linux yet, however it has already changed the browser market. As we wrote in our Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 review, Chrome’s relentless focus on speed helped to reignite the browser wars and is changing the way developers and Google’s competitors think about browsers.

Chrome is also the basis for Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, designed for netbooks – a growing fad in computers. So expect to see a lot more of Chrome in 2010.

Runners-Up: Apple, Facebook

It’s been another good year for Apple and its iPhone platform. The iPhone is the leading smartphone in the market and the App Store now features over 100,000 applications. This year, as we mentioned in our Top 10 Web Platforms of 2009 review, Apple extended the SDK with version 3.0 of the iPhone OS. The updates included better support for 3D gaming, augmented reality apps, easier access to maps, in-app purchases and support for push notifications.

With these kinds of improvements, we expect Apple to continue its success on the Mobile Web in 2010 – despite increasing competition from Google’s Android platform.

Facebook had a stellar year too, passing the 300 million active user mark in September. It also continued to add features to the site, ranging from vanity URLs to a new sharing widget and a focus on real-time updates of its users news streams.

Facebook’s user base is increasingly diverse and it is now clearly the number 1 social network in the world, leaving MySpace in its dust. What’s more, Facebook’s user base is now bigger than the population of all but three countries in the world.

Next Page: Honorable Mentions & Also Rans

10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010

This time last year, I wrote about the 10 ways social media will change 2009, and while all predictions have materialized or are on their way, it has only become clear in recent months how significant of a change we’ve seen this year. 2009 will go down as the year in which the shroud of uncertainty was lifted off of social media and mainstream adoption began at the speed of light. Barack Obama’s campaign proved that social media can mobilize millions into action, and Iran’s election protests demonstrated its importance to the freedom of speech.

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This guest post was written by Ravit Lichtenberg, founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com – a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.

Today, it is impossible to separate social media from the online world. Facebook reached 350 million users last month — 70% of whom are outside the US — and it accounts for 25% of the Web’s traffic, nearly one in five people on the web use Twitter, and 94% of enterprises plan to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social media tools. The social media conversation is no longer considered a Web 2.0 fad — it is taking place in homes, small businesses and corporate boardrooms, and extending its reach into the nonprofit, education and health sectors. From feeling excitement, novelty, bewilderment, and overwhelmed, a growing number of people now speak of social media as simply another channel or tactic.

So what will social Web bring next? What will “being connected” mean? What will the next experience be for the 2 two billion people who are connected to the Internet? Here are 10 ways what we’ve called social media will evolve in 2010.

Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies

By this time next year, social media will no longer be “social media” — it will be an integrated, unquestionable component of your online and offline experience. Last year we spoke of cross-platform integration across media sites. Open APIs and OpenID made that possible, and even LinkedIn announced last month that it too will finally open its APIs. 2010 will be about integration and a single, cohesive experience across platforms as well as across products and devices — Web, mobile, TV, and video — will become near-inseparable experiences.

Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other. Publishers will create new kinds of content for the connected world, and the last years’ lull in good entertainment will finally be lifted. This trend will cut across all of our activities — from playing games to shopping to emailing and texting — nothing will be lost; everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool.

Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology

With Web technology maturing and the near-elimination of previous barriers such closed platforms and discrete logins, companies will now look to innovate the way they use existing technology, rather than focus on technology enhancements themselves. We will see a move to leverage existing assets — content and capabilities — in new ways, turning information to wisdom and insight to action. Whereas once user research required focus groups and usability tests, companies will utilize the Web’s capabilities to achieve the same. Naturally occurring conversations will be utilized in product innovation and design, and companies will create incentives for people’s attention and engagement while repurposing and analyzing content and engagement in new ways that will deliver valuable input.

Mobile Will Take Center Stage

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information. Our phones will be used as a central hub and beacon — enabling a slew of new capabilities and experiences.

Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content

2009 marked the year of open Web, and divergence of content, making content available anywhere, anytime, by anyone and to everyone; it was the year content exploded across the web, platforms and devices. The issue Google solved so magically — content find-ability — will become all but moot in the coming years. Instead, content relevance and quality will become the key focus. In 2010 we will start to see convergence as companies take measures to own their own content, its location and its cost. Last month, Rupert Murdoch announced he may opt News Corp out of Google, instructing it to de-index its publications from the search engine and giving exclusive rights to Bing for a fee. This means that content publishers will be able to determine where they make their content available and at what cost.

With the growth of user generated content and the dwindling relevance of search results, people will gradually shift their trust from large aggregators like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and move to searching and finding content at specific locations and, eventually, creating and integrating their own content hub into the rest of their personal digital experience. “People don’t realize that everything they do — on Facebook, Ning, Google and with their credit cards — is being collected, tracked, analyzed, owned and monetized by these companies who provide (so-called) free services. It’s not a healthy model.” Says John Faber, COO of af83, a Drupal development house and co-founder of the upcoming DrupalCon.

Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We’ve Called “Social Media”

It was easy to forget that enterprises and large institutions are the originators of some of social media’s pillars: listservs, forums, intranets and collaboration tools. As social media became a public domain, enterprises have been cautious participants, predominantly in the product space, with few visionary leaders like Zappos, IBM and Dell. But cautionary they are no more. With a reported average of 25% increase in funds allocation toward social media activities, in 2010 we will see a surge in adoption of social media across product, services and solutions companies.

Having the need and the funds, enterprises will determine the next generation of social experiences. They will push enhancements that meet their needs, specifically around monitoring, automation, alignment with the sales cycle and integration with existing systems, expanding social “media” to encompass the ecosystem of social computing across solutions, and making them actionable for the company. Jive, blueKiwi, Remindo and Sharepoint support companies internally. Most recently, Salesforce.com released Chatter, designed to turn the corporation, and CRM, social. With its APIs opening later this year, “Chatter can become a new layer over its Force platform, already being used by 68,000 customers, enabling companies and developers to leverage the Salesforce infrastructure in a secure environment,” said Bruce Francis, VP corporate strategy Salesforce.com.

Next page: ROI Will Be Measured — and It Will Matter

Paul Graham: Priority Access to Twitter Is Practical Necessity

If hardcore hackers had any doubts whether the real-time web was a legitimate development environment, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham is dispelling them. In an interview with Graham, ReadWriteWeb learned that the entrepreneur-turned-investor issued a “Request for Startups” (RFS) asking for ideas from companies utilizing Twitter and Justin.tv’s live video API. Groups who are accepted to Y-Combinator and fall under these categories will be given “priority access” to Twitter and Justin.tv.

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Says Graham, “In the beginning people believed Twitter was a fad and they didn’t realize this was a new protocol…In some ways Twitter is a replacement for email. We’re not doing this to promote Twitter, we generally believe it’s important.”

It’s obvious why Y Combinator companies are able to gain special support from Justin.tv’s founders. The lifecasting site took on Y Combinator seed funding in 2007 and has since developed into one of the web’s leading online video destinations. The Twitter partnership is a different story. While it’s important that Y Combinator teams have Twitter’s support, the question on many people’s minds is, “If Twitter is an all-important protocol, then why should one group of investors get privileged access to its data-rich firehose?”

According to Graham, “This is a practical matter. They need to be able to keep ahead of growth technically… If thousands of startups want to talk to you, then you need to have filters. Even before publishing this Request for Startups, we had a dedicated guy at Twitter who answered Y Combinator questions.”

In the past, Y Combinator-funded real-time meta-search engine Scoopler worked closely with Twitter.

Said Graham, “Honestly, Twitter probably has a lot of filters on those who access them. The only thing special about this is that we formalized it with an RFS.”

After taking a $2 million dollar investment from Sequoia Capital in March, Y Combinator aims to increase its portfolio companies from 40 to roughly 60 per year. The “Request for Startups” offers companies direction in their applications.

Graham notes that when individuals apply for Y Combinator, they are asked to specify if they are applying with an RFS in mind. While he estimates that only 10% of applications are directly related to the RFS, he believes that many who might not apply are inspired to do so after seeing their ideas highlighted. The incubator’s first requests were issued in August with a call for alternative journalism and online retail ideas.

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Forget Gen Y: Gen X is Making Real Change

Sometimes even the best researchers forget that the answer you get depends entirely on who you ask. A new Forrester survey of 2,000 information workers has revealed that despite the hype, it’s not Gen Y that’s getting business to adopt collaborative technology. Gen X, those who are 30-43, are the ones leading the charge for social computing.

Forrester’s analysis is that despite their different view of technology, Gen Y, Millennials, or whatever you want to call those 29 and under, don’t yet have the clout within organizations to make real change. The same Gen X employees who are the fastest growing demographic in Facebook are the ones getting management to accept new technology as more than a fad.

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Just Ask Employees

A common method for researching about how people use technology is to ask industry experts and management about what they’ve provided to workers and how they think it’s being used. That’s how many market researchers go about their business.

But Forrester has decided to just ask the employees directly in their new “Workforce Technographics” survey. Despite the imposing name, it’s basically just asking people who work with computers about how they use technology, instead of going over their heads to IT and management. The survey of 2,000 individuals was conducted online in April, and was limited to those who work in companies with more than 100 employees.

It’s All About Influence

A favorite argument among those who talk about the gap between Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y is that the youngest demographic is more adept with technology. According to the survey results, that’s just not true.

Gen X employees contribute to discussion forums and social networks just as much as their Gen Y counterparts. The use of blogs and wikis was either equal or different by just a couple percentage points.

But the most significant difference was not in usage stats. It was how effective employees are at getting new software to be accepted. 22% of Gen X said they felt they have the “clout in their organization” necessary to introduce new technology, while only 13% of those under 29 said the same.

Even if Gen Y was significantly better at using social software, it wouldn’t matter at this point. Obviously younger employees will increase their stature within organizations as the years pass. But the idea of Millennials at the vanguard of innovation in the enterprise is a myth.

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Intel still won’t talk Core i5 details, but you can order one anyway

[Via PC World]

Read – Core i5 570 at Fad Fusion
Read – Core i5 570 at Computer Connection

Filed under: Desktops

Intel still won’t talk Core i5 details, but you can order one anyway originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 10:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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