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The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3).

In 2008, I attended a meeting in Madrid, Spain that featured the coolest demonstration I had ever seen. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to talk about what I had seen because the company was still in stealth-mode. More importantly, several governments, including the U.S. government were still exploring various parts of the technology for next-generation computing systems, so parts of this were very confidential. By the end of that year, Oblong Industries had revealed itself, but still little was said about its project. Finally, people are starting to talk about it.

While we may not have been at this year’s TED conference, apparently, Oblong was. And apparently, it wowed the crowd. And it should have. If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report, you’ve seen the system they’re building.

No, really. The co-founder of Oblong, John Underkoffler, is the man who came up with the gesture-based interface used in the Steven Spielberg movie. And now he’s building it in real life.

The demo I saw a couple years ago was stunning, but it was still just a video. Apparently, at TED, the audience got to see it in action. NYT’s Bits blog detailed some of it in a post yesterday. For those not at TED, Oblong has also made a few demo videos in the past, which I’ll embed below. Again, this is Minority Report.

Oblong’s coming out party couldn’t come at a better time. Following the unveiling of Apple’s iPad, there has been a lot of talk about the future of computing at a fundamental level. That is to say, after decades of dominance by the keyboard and mouse, we’re finally talking about other, more natural, methods of input. The iPad is one step to a multi-touch gesture system (as is this 10/GUI awesome demo), but this Oblong system is the next step beyond that.

Other systems, including Microsoft’s Project Natal for Xbox, are promising similar types of gesture interaction as soon as this year. But the reality is that a system anywhere near this solid is probably still years out. Minority Report, the movie, takes place in 2054, for example. And while that is just a movie, Spielberg instructed the people working on the tech for it to really try to come up with what they thought we’d be using in that time. That said, Underkoffler told Bits that “I think in five years’ time, when you buy a computer, you’ll get this.” Of course, that’s the entrepreneur talking.

For now, I’ll just have to continue to dream about using a computer like they do in Minority Report. But the dream is getting closer, it seems.

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Code copypasta increasingly common in CS education

The New York Times Bay Area Blog recently took a look at the issue of plagiarism among students in computer science classes. The widespread availability of code on the Internet makes it easy for computer science students to find solutions to common assignments. Computer science professors retaliate by devising increasingly sophisticated automated systems to detect instances of code plagiarism.

The NYT cites a recent incident where a Stanford student was suspended and resigned from his position as student body vice president after he was caught doing the copypasta routine. According to the San Jose Mercury News, roughly 22 percent of Stanford’s honor code violations relate to plagiarism in computer science.

Some readers might remember that we looked at the other side of this issue last year when a student at San Jose University was disciplined for publishing the source code of his own solutions to class assignments. His professor contended that making the source code available constituted an honor code violation merely because it would enable other students to cheat.

As we pointed out at the time, sharing code and repurposing existing code are increasingly standard practices in professional software engineering. Collaborative development is common and very little code that is produced today is written in a complete vacuum. Some computer science professors are attempting to bring this trend into the classroom by encouraging students to share code and participate in open source software projects.

Our readers have generally voiced strong opinions on issues of this nature in the past and there seem to be a lot of different viewpoints. As computer science enrollment continues to drop, it’s more important than ever for professors to find ways to modernize their teaching methods and find ways to balance the need to encourage collaboration with the need to accurately test individual knowledge.

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The iPad Runs Flash?

Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it’s all political.

Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad. If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box.

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WSJ: Apple tablet to have books, games, music, TV, will make sandwiches
The Wall Street Journal just laid out a doozy of an Apple tablet rumor piece, all from anonymous sources, “people familiar with the matter,” and the like. There’s a lot to go through, so without further ado:

• The tablet will come with a virtual keyboard — kind of a no-brainer if it’s gonna be a keyboard-less tablet and not, say, another laptop.
• Apple’s been talking with The New York Times, Conde Nast, and HarperCollins / News Corp. over how they could collaborate. When asked, NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger would only say “stay tuned.”
• Electronic Arts has been working closely to prep games for the tablet. We know of a number of gaming journalists who’ve gotten invites to next week’s event, and given Apple’s heavy games push over the past year or so, this wouldn’t surprise us in the least.
• A reaffirmation of earlier murmurings about potentially swapping Google for Bing as the de facto search engine.
• Those TV subscription rumors? Apparently the gang in Cupertino have been pitching a “best of TV” service that would package the best four to six shows per channel.
• A web-based version of iTunes, tentatively called iTunes.com and potentially launching in June, for buying music outside of the dedicated app. Additionally, there’d be a new initiative “to populate as many webs ites as possible with ‘buy’ buttons, integrating iTunes transactions into activities like listening to internet radio and surfing review web sites.” No mention if music will be downloaded or streamed from the cloud, but we can definitely see how Apple’s recent Lala acquisition would play into this in the future — in fact, we’ve already seen it start to bear fruit.
• Here’s a weird one: Apple has supposedly designed the tablet “so that it is intuitive to share.” One such experiment is virtual sticky notes that launch for the intended recipient by facial recognition via built-in camera.

If nothing else, we’re really looking forward to next week putting a large clamp on the torrent of tablet rumors that have have propagated the internet for the last few months.

WSJ: Apple tablet to have books, games, music, TV, will make sandwiches originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New York Times to Charge for Online Content?

According to internal sources, the New York Times may soon be charging users for its online content.

In a move that would bring the publication parallel to the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the Financial Times, the New York Times seems to have settled on a system that would allow online readers to sample a certain amount of content before being prompted to subscribe. This decision would be a landmark in the ongoing cultural debate on whether online content should be free or not and could represent another fundamental shift in how users expect to access and consume news, depending on which news organizations follow suit.

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NPR’s membership system, the WSJ’s walled-garden system – which left some parts of the site free and others available only to paying subscribers – and the Financial Times’ system of metered access, with a certain amount of free content allowed per user, were are reportedly considered by the NYT, doubtless the nation’s flagship newspaper.

This news also comes in the wake of a stern statement from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who recently took umbrage at and announced his intentions to block search engines’ indexing news media content. In November of last year, Murdoch said that News Corp sites will begin charging users for access to content around June 2010, at which time content will be de-indexed from all search engines.

According to sources at the paper, the decision to make New York Times content available on a paid basis could be made within days, announced with in weeks, and executed in a few months.

As the American economy slowly emerges from the depths of a crippling recession – and as old-school news organizations begin to cope realistically with the demands of modern media – one can’t fault the Times for taking such a step. The world-class coverage it provides and the journalists and photographers it employs certainly can’t be sustained on advertising revenues alone, especially as print circulation (with higher ad rates) decreases and more readers turn to online versions (which much lower ad rates).

What do you think – Will the Times truly begin charging online readers for access to content? And if so, will more print/online hybrid publications follow suit? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

To read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of newspapers’ struggle in the 21st century, check out our Newspapers and Journalism archive.

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Apple Has Acquired Lala

Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it’s a done deal. He writes, “Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story”. You can find the NYT story here.

This could be bad news for Lala users. It’s unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We’ve reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back.

Likewise, this may well affect the Lala music gifts that have been recently offered by Facebook, and it could also harm the Music OneBox service Google recently launched (though Google can still rely on MySpace/iLike for its song streams).

Stone writes that Apple is interested in Lala because of its engineering talent and technology, and that it was Lala that initiated the discussions. From the Times:

One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes.

This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.

The deal makes sense. It seems inevitable that Apple will eventually launch its own cloud-based streaming music service. And that’s exactly what Lala is — an iTunes in the cloud, with some interesting pricing mechanics.

A few other interesting things to note. This acquisition comes a little more than a month after Lala was integrated into Google’s OneBox and Facebook’s gift store. Lala may well have been viewing these launches as last-chance efforts to find a path to profitability. Given these reports that Lala’s “prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim”, it looks like those launches may not have gone as well as Lala hoped.

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Your Favorite Mobile Apps of 2009 (Reader Survey)

A year ago we polled you, the ReadWriteWeb community, on your favorite mobile apps. It’s become an annual tradition to run this survey, so in this post we’re collecting your top 5 lists for 2009. To get you inspired, the ReadWriteWeb team have listed their personal favorites below.

We first ran this poll in November 2007, before Apple’s App Store opened on July 10, 2008 and when Android was but a twinkle in Google’s eye. At that time, the 5 most mentioned mobile apps were the Gmail Java app, Google Maps, Opera Mini, Fring and Shozu. In November 2008 we began to see popular web services being mentioned as favorite mobile apps too: Facebook, Twitter, last.fm, FriendFeed. Also newer mobile-focused apps like Evernote and Brightkite. Read on for the 2009 edition of this reader survey…

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Note: ReadWriteWeb’s iPhone app is coming soon! To be notified as soon as it becomes available, email notify@readwriteweb.com.

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder and editor (iPhone user):

• Diamedic; diabetes data input and monitoring tool that I use multiple times a day.
• Encamp; new Basecamp project management app that the RWW team has just begun using.
• Shazam; amazing song discovery app that I use regularly, e.g. holding up my iPhone to the car radio to identify cool songs!
• Evernote; notes service which I was late adopter of, but it’s since become essential.
• Tweetie 2; my current Twitter app of choice on the iPhone.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger and VP Content Development (iPhone and Android):

• Aardvark
• Tweetdeck
• SuperSearch
• Regator
• Appsfire

Sarah Perez, feature writer and RWW’s resident Mobile Web expert ("Only 5?" she replied to my Basecamp message…Sarah uses iPhone):

• Facebook
• Tweetie 2
• Yelp
• NYT Mobile
• Bump (app for swapping contact details)

Frederic Lardinois, writer (iPhone):

• Tweetie2
• Beejive, for IM
• Notifications
• picposterous
• Pandora

Jolie O’Dell, writer and RWW Community Manager (Blackberry):

• TwitterBerry
• Flickr

Jolie notes (and you can sense the frustration!): "The BlackBerry user of the group has few options and fewer
favorites. In fact, I’d almost post a response rant about how
the development for BlackBerry devices AND the OS make enjoyable
user experiences a near-impossibility."

Dana Oshiro, writer (iPhone):

• Foursquare
• Tweetie
• Breaking News Online
• Aardvark
• Yelp, or
  OpenTable

Alex Williams, ReadWriteEnterprise editor (Blackberry, who notes that "the experience is just awful."):

• Yelp
• Slandr
• Facebook
• Gmail
• Google mobile

Jared Smith, RWW webmaster (Blackberry and iPod touch):

• RadarScope; weather radar viewer for iPhone and iPod touch.
• TouchTerm; on-the-go SSH for iPhone and iPod touch.
• MyKite; BlackBerry Brightkite app.
• Yatca; BlackBerry
  microblogging client that supports Twitter and identi.ca with
  seamless inbox integration.
• Google Sync for BlackBerry; "while
  not true push, it works so quietly and seamlessly I don’t give
  it a second thought."

Now, RWW readers, it’s time for your feedback!

Let us know in the comments below what your favorite mobile apps are and what mobile device(s) you use. Please limit this to 5 apps, so we can identify trends more easily and report back on them in an upcoming post.

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5 O’Clock Roundup, the 7 O’Clock Edition

Yes, Twitter does save all your tweets – - ReadWriteWeb asked Biz Stone about Twitter’s backup policy, and whether the company plans to stick to a pledge not to store GPS tracking info.

“We definitely save all the tweets although you’re right in noting that our search focuses more on newer content right now. And yes, the plan is to drop the coordinates after 14 days.“

Palm Pre now $99 at Amazon — I’m the guy who called out “ninety-nine-dollars” when Apple’s Phil Schiller asked his audience to guess the new price of the entry-level iPhone. So yeah, a Pre for $99 is a Pre I can praise.  Sprint network service should be good enough let you mock iPhone owners in New York and San Francisco.

AT&T plays gotcha with Google Voice – AT&T filed a letter with the Federal Communications Commission claiming Google is improperly blocking consumers from calling certain phone numbers, in violation of federal call-blocking rules. Google claims it doesn’t have to follow the same rules as AT&T. The NYT’s Bits blog links to the relevant docs.

Pandora proves pundits prematurely predicted profitabilitypromise pretentious – Sarah Lacy caught up with Pandora founder Tim Westergren, who claims the company will be profitable by the end of the year:

Most interesting were Westergren’s comments about advertising. As you can see in the clip below, the show’s host, Scott McGrew, and my co-panelist, NPR’s Laura Sydell, claim to be huge Pandora fans but couldn’t seem to remember hearing many ads. Said Westergren: That means we’re doing it right.
Pandora also has more creative ways of advertising. Westergren also talked off camera about a recent gig in LA for Aimee Mann. Pandora sent an email to users in driving distance of the club that it knew loved her music and the venue quickly filled up. “Can we do this every night?” the club owner panted.

New VentureBeat reporter snags the coveted NYT/Valleywag simultaneous appearance — Kim-Mai Cutler (pronounced “Kim My” not “Kim May”) had her reporting cited in Brad Stone’s big Twitter story, less than 24 hours after Valleywag reblogged her zingy “you guys need to shut up” post from DEMO. Welcome to the club, Kim!

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