Apple Media Event Follow-up
September 2, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 1 Comments
Courtesy of GDGT
I am going to be completely honest. Yesterday, my idea for live blogging the highly anticipated Apple announcement came from my curiosity surrounding the next generation iPad.
I am in the market for an iPad, but one of my pet peeves is making a purchase only for it to go on sale or worse, having a better version released within the month of my purchasing it.
But, alas, if you followed my live blog (found at my twitter account: @kymalino), or watched the keynote speech via the live feed provided by apple, you would know that we all have to anxiously wait until November for news on the latest iPad developments.
However, all was not lost in watching Steve Jobs’ keynote speech. Amongst a bevy of Apple announcements, news, and an appearance by Chris Martin from Coldplay – there are some pretty cool and exciting developments coming soon from Apple.
Courtesy of GDGT
The first was the complete overhaul of their range of iPods. The Shuffle, Nano, and Touch will all be changing shortly both in design and software.
The Shuffle is seeing a design overhaul most notably by the re-introduction of control buttons. In his demo of the new Shuffle, Jobs commented that the feature missed the most by Shuffle users was the clickable control pad on the face of the device. Another addition will be “Voice Over,” or a feature that allows the device to announce the title and artist of which ever song you’re listening to. This development also enables the iPod to tell the user how much battery power is remaining and has 25 language capabilities.
The iPod Nano will see a smaller, lighter design overhaul with the addition of a touch screen and a clip (similar to the Shuffle).
Apple’s iPod Touch is basically being turned into an iPhone… just without the requisite cell phone carrier plan. The new Touch will come with not one, but two cameras. This will enable the device to record HD video and chat via the coveted FaceTime (presumably added because of the lack of iPhone4 users to find other iPhone4 users to chat with). The new design will also feature a higher-quality, Retina display.
Jobs’ keynote speech stayed right on cue with the music theme-pun intended-in his announcement of iTunes10 and Ping, Apple’s music social media community. Ping will enable iTunes users to follow each other and trade tips and recommendations about the media found in the iTunes store. Jobs described Ping as ‘Twitter and Facebook, meets iTunes.’
The majority of the developments announced yesterday are welcomed changes to the Apple line-up of devices. However, there was some news announced yesterday that just left me scratching my head.
- The Nano was cut down and thinned out essentially to the size of the Shuffle. In his speech, Jobs mentioned Shuffle users having missed the control buttons. My confusion is this: Why even bother having both the Shuffle and the Nano when the only thing separating them is price point and touch screen? Make a 2GB Nano or add a touch screen to the Shuffle and eliminate product and pricing disparity.
- The iPod Classic was mentioned briefly by Jobs and this model did not see any changes. Nevertheless, did you even know Apple still sells the iPod Classic? I didn’t. Now, I know there are some Apple purists out there but why would I spend $20 more on the 160GB iPod Classic than the smallest iPod Touch? Personally, the ability to carry 40,000 songs, 200 hours of video, or 25,000 pictures is unnecessary and trumped by the features and capabilities of the Touch.
- The new icon to accompany iTunes10 is ugly and cartoonish… a far cry from the sleek and minimalistic feel of Apple products.
- AppleTV. Jobs was not shy in announcing that this is his pet project. But frankly, I don’t know a single person with AppleTV, do you? Honestly, I don’t see why I even need an AppleTV if I have OnDemand features from my cable provider. Call me crazy, but I don’t anticipate spending $99 to be able to watch Netflix or Youtube on my TV… when a VGA cable is $7. In fact, when this product debuted in late 2007, Popular Mechanics announced it was in their “Top Ten Worst Gadgets” list. The effort spent on AppleTV developments could have and should have been spent else where… like on the next generation iPad.
-Kym
Today’s Apple Announcement and Live Blogging
September 1, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Well, it is neither Thursday nor three o’clock, to accompany this week’s live blogging from GlobalFoundries Technology Conference, Thursday at Three will attempt the same for today’s highly anticipated Apple Announcement; slated for this afternoon, September 1st, at 1:00 PM EST.
Photo: Kimberley White
Not one of the fortunate tech people or Apple fanboys/girls picked to attend this announcement presentation?
Don’t fret: Apple announced that they would be live streaming video of their September media event across the web. The news, however, was somewhat dulled by the fact that Apple announced that the stream will only be viewable on an OS X 10.6 Mac or an iOS device (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). The reason for the limitation isn’t entirely arbitrary, as Apple is using a new streaming technology called HTTP Live Streaming which was introduced alongside Snow Leopard’s QuickTime X and iOS 3.0.
Here are the major rumors heading into the event:
- Apple TV – A next generation Apple TV based on iOS, priced at only $99, as well as support for Apps.
- iPod Touch – Backside camera, mic, new shape, front facing camera, possible 3G and even a Retina display.
- iPod Nano – Smaller, square shaped design with a 3cm x 3cm touch screen. Case manufacturers have already been producing covers for the unannounced device (see above).
- Other updates to iTunes including TV show rentals and longer song previews.
Speculation
Meanwhile, here’s a collection of fun speculative content that we can’t verify, but in the run up to the event may inspire some interesting discussion:
- iPad 4.0? – We expect Apple will announce their plans for the deployment of iOS 4 for the iPad during the event. It’s unlikely Apple will be able to launch tomorrow as they still await developers to update their apps. So, hopefully we’ll get a roadmap and a developer beta of iOS 4 for iPad.
- 2.8″ iPod touch? iLounge suggests that perhaps we will see the long rumored 2.8″ iPod touch emerge to fill the gap left by the former iPod nano.
- iPhone as Apple TV Remote? iLounge’s Charles Starrett speculates that the rumored $99 Apple TV might actually require an iOS device to serve as a remote. Beyond his speculation, we’d actually heard unconfirmed whispers of the same, so it seems within the realm of possibility.
- iLife Mystery App is a Make Your Own App Tool? Rumors of iLife ‘11 suggested a brand new app would be introduced with the iLife ‘11 suite. We’ve heard an unconfirmed rumor that the new app could actually be a way for end users to create simple apps and deploy them directly (not through the App Store) to their iOS devices. Is Apple returning to their Hypercard roots? It’s hard to say how feasible this would be.
-Kym
Chatroulette: More Than a Creep Mecca?
August 26, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Chatroulette, the web site that pairs random strangers from around the world in web-cam based chats, is the brainchild of 17-year old Russian high school student, Andrey Ternovskiy… which slightly depresses me. Consider this conversation:
Andrey: What did you do in high school?
Kym: I played soccer and I swam.
Andrey: Oh, that’s cool, I invented Chatroulette.
What started off as a cool, innocent, idea to try to meet and talk to people, quickly grew into a worldwide mecca for creeps and the socially deprived. The results of one session on Chatroulette can be so unwarranted that my 20-year old brother refuses to participate in Chatrouletting with me.
Signing into Chatroulette can yield funny and sometimes scaring results. On my last Chatroulette adventure, I kept a tally of the total amount of X-Rated content exposed during my chats. For my 30 minutes of “Chatrouletting,” my tally reached 15.
Now, Chatroulette isn’t totally a waste. Lately, there have been reports of companies using this video chatting outlet as a form of free marketing and advertising. In fact, all of Chatroulette’s revenue comes from advertisements. The most recent ad to run on Chatroulette was from Lionsgate Movie Studio.
Lionsgate is an independent film production company whose next film, The Last Exorcism, is slated to be released this Friday, August 27, 2010. For the last few weeks, Lionsgate has been surprising the chatters of Chatroulette with their latest marketing campaign.
If you encountered this advertising stroke of genius, you would have been met with a young, attractive woman smiling back at you. After some time passed and you tried to talk with said lady, she would tease you by pretending to take her top off, and then, without warning, she would transform into the demon that presumably lives inside of her.
Lionsgate tracked the responses of those chatting with this demonic chick and what they deem as the best reactions can be found on The Last Exorcism’s YouTube page.
Lionsgate Studio isn’t the only group or person using Chatroulette to gain notoriety. A man by the name of “Merton,” who looks and sounds suspiciously similar to hipster-rocker Ben Folds, has used Chatroulette as a platform to expose his uncanny capacity to preform songs on the fly accompanied by his playing the piano. In fact, Ben Folds himself has also streamed his concerts on Chatroulette to replicate videos similar to that of “Merton.”
In both of their Chatroulette endeavors, both Ben Fold and “Merton” perform improv piano songs, inspired by those they are chatting with. Not only are the songs catchy, but the fact that these two men (or one guy playing two parts in my opinion) can formulate songs about the weirdos they encounter while chatting in entertaining and enviable to say the least.
You can find a chronicle of both Ben Folds’ and “Merton’s” videos on YouTube.
Sadly, in attempting to link Chatroulette to this post I have discovered that the “Experiment #1” has ended and Chatroulette will be relaunched soon.
I wonder what the creeps and socially awkward people of the world, who find Chatroulette as a sanctuary, are doing in the meantime?
-Kym
Social Media Takes a Note from Media Theorist
August 19, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Marshall McLuhan was a communication theorist whose concepts are considered a corner stone of media theory.
“The medium is the message,” is one of McLuhan’s better known aphorisms in which he stresses that the medium itself influences the message; in fact, in McLuhan’s view, the message would be obsolete without an effective medium to transmit it.
However, this meaty phrase and corresponding media theorist would have been lost in the abyss of things I learned and subsequently forgot in college – right along side Linear Algebra and Calculus based Physics – if not for nearly daily reminder of the truth of this this basic, yet profound theorem.
As designers re-invent and tweak web sites and user platforms, it is certainly obvious that the medium used to transmit a message is not only important, but ever-evolving and changing, both to maintain the engagement of established users and lure in new consumers as illustrated just this week with several evolutions in the world’s most popular social media ‘mediums.’
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Facebook debuted a cleaner birthday posting announcement for your news feed. Nothing is really more frustrating than having your newsfeed inundated by birthday wishes from individuals wishing someone else a happy birthday – especially if you’r not a fan of the celebrator to begin with. Well, Facebook now has a solution to this problem, and it looks like this:
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The “Check-In” craze initiated by FourSquare has grown a bit as well. Not only can you use Foursquare to alert friends to your locations, but new applications like Meso, Philo, and GetGlue now provide users the power to tell the world what TV show you’re watching, what book you’re reading, even what wine you are drinking. And, never one to miss out an opportunity to breach privacy, just this morning Facebook released it’s iPhone check-in application entitled, “Places.”
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Of course, Twitter is a shining example of “the medium is the message”. Most notably, this microblogging service has penetrated a country that even world leaders can’t… North Korea. Uriminzokkiri – one of the only North Korean local media outlets to syndicate in English for an international audience- has officially made a Twitter account: @uriminzok.
There is no doubt that North Korea runs one of the most secretive governments in the world, but could Uriminzokkiri’s Twitter account (and their one-month old YouTube account) be a sign for a change in North Korean Policy? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no – one glance at the Twitter and YouTube postings and you can’t get past the latent propaganda-esque material pumping out of these state-controlled mediums. However, you can’t fault Kim Jong-Il for taking a page out of Marshall McLuhan’s book and figuring out for himself that the best way to blast his message worldwide was via the medium of social media.
-Kym
YouTube Campaign Helps Double Sales of Body Wash
July 29, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Look at your man, now back at me. Is this the star of the best YouTube campaign in recent history?
Isaiah Mustafa, better known as the “Old Spice Guy” is quickly becoming a viral video king.
Mustafa plays “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” in a trio of Old Spice shower gel commercials and was recently featured in a wildly popular campaign found on the Old Spice YouTube channel.
The campaign featured Mustafa reprising his character, while responding to over 100 posts left on the Old Spice Twitter, Facebook Fan Page, and YouTube channel comment section, left by prominent bloggers, celebrities, and random fans a like.
An article at BrandWeek features a Nielsen report stating Old Spice sales have increased over 55% in the last three months, correlating with the release of the first “Old Spice Guy” ad and sales have increased 11% since the beginning of the YouTube response campaign.
But how popular are these videos anyways? Well, video analytics company, Viable Measures released a report that may shed some light.
Visible Measures compared this Old Spice campaign to three other popular viral video sensations: President Obama’s victory speech, President Bush’s speech in Iraq when he dodges a shoe, and British singing sensation, Susan Boyle. Within the first 24-hours of posting, Old Spice has over one million more views than the second place Obama speech.
Facebook now the third biggest country in the world!
July 23, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Facebook surpasses yet another milestone – 500 million users. Quite the accomplishment for a company launched out of a Harvard dorm room six years ago. Forget the hoopla surrounding the books, movies, and lawsuits, amazingly enough, Facebook has room to grow. In fact, while the number of U.S. users has begun to plateau, the site is spreading like wildfire across South America and Europe. Experts say with the international progress made in recent months, the site could potentially eclipse 1 billion friends.
In honor of the 500th million user Facebook is producing a special called “500 Million Stories” which offer users the opportunity to share their best experiences with the site. So, what’s your Facebook story?
The Facebook Movie
July 8, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Seemingly overnight, Facebook transformed from a dorm room dream of a couple of college kids into a multi-billion dollar company. Unsurprising, the meteoric rise of Mark Zuckerburg’s company has not been without controversy, the latest surrounding the social networking site’s apparent disregard for the privacy of its 500 million users around the world.
While there have been several books written on the site, only the most recent, Ben Mezrich’s “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A tale of sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal” has been tapped to transform its story into a major motion picture. Tentatively called “The Social Network”, the movie will certainly not be short of star power. Beyond up-and-coming actors Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield, the film boasts writer Aaron Sorkin, director David Fincher, and producer Kevin Spacey. If you don’t think Facebook is a household name by now just wait until October 1, when the film is released nationwide. You can check out a trailer here.
Samasource’s mission worthy of applaud, One small step in the war on piracy
July 1, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Samasource, a San Francisco-based non-profit founded in 2008 by Leila Chirayath Janah, vows to help women and refugees in developing countries earn a living through the use of the internet.
Many people throughout Kenya, Uganda, India, Pakistan and Haiti are barely surviving on their $3 per day income. Samasource is helping to improve quality of life in these countries by paying $1 to $10 per hour to workers willing to complete simple tasks such as database cleanup, translations, transcriptions, etc.
The company currently employs roughly 800 people and donates nearly 15 percent of its total gross revenue back to it’s employees.
The government crack down on the illegal pirating of movies continued over the past few days as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency shut down nine websites: TVShack.net, Movies-Links.tv, Filespump.com, ZML.com, Now-Movies.com, ThePirateCity.org, PlanetMoviez.com, NinjaVideo.net and NinjaThis.net.
While each of the nine ad-based sites were registered in the U.S., some were being run out of foreign countries. I think it’s safe to say government policy seems to be directed toward attacking the source – the sites themselves – as opposed to the user.
Unfortunately for Hollywood, perhaps the only guaranteed result of the pirate crackdown is that more pirate competitors will emerge to take their place. As they say in “The Wire” – the players may change, but the game stays the same.
Liz
Victory for not only Google but for internet service providers alike, Watch out iPhone 4 here comes Droid X
June 24, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
After three years of nasty fights and lawsuits a judge finally threw out Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google-owned YouTube.
Judge Louis L. Stanton of United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sided in favor of the streaming video site, arguing that the company would not be held responsible due to a “safe harbor” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The lawsuit came about after Viacom-owned material was uploaded to YouTube by its users. The provisions in the D.M.C.A protect websites from any and all copyright infringement lawsuits if the material was uploaded by users and not the company itself.
Not only is this a big win for Google and a huge sigh of relief for all internet service providers that allow users, to upload content without first gaining permission.
Today Apple released yet another iPhone, the iPhone 4. And, you know what? I’m over it. Between leaked phones, lawsuits, police raids, and wireless meltdowns, I’m ready to read about anything but the forbidden fruit company.
Fortunately, perhaps, I may get my wish as Motorola and Verizon held a top secret press event to announce the Droid X – set for a July 15 release.
The new Droid is quickly making a name for itself in the fast paced superphone competition, but for now, let’s focus on the facts: Droid X will feature a 4.3” screen, an 8-megapixel camera, 720p video offering a super slow-mo feature, 3 microphones, GPS, and Bluetooth. The phone will retail for $199 after the $100 mail-in-rebate and will be sold exclusively on the Verizon network. I’m in.
Liz
Lawsuits, Leaks, and Lots of Anticipation, The iPhone 4 is Finally Here, Thousands of Leaked Email Addresses Affect iPad Users
June 10, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
On Monday, Steve Jobs, the Chief Executive of Apple announced the release of the much anticipated iPhone 4.
Apple has faced heavy scrutiny these past few months, undoubtedly in part to pending lawsuits with the likes of HTC, Nokia, and NetAirus and their Orwellian handling of Gizmodo following the “accidental” bar slip up with the new iPhone.
Despite all the drama, initial analyst reports seem to indicate that Apple has produced yet another superior product, even offering a front-facing 5 megapixel camera for video chatting. The new phone is also styled differently; it is much thinner and has a more angular look to it. The price ranges from $199-$299 depending on storage size. The phone will hit U.S. stores June 24 and by September 2010 it will be available in 88 different countries.
AT&T faced a major breach of security this past week when hackers broke into one of their customer identification scripts and stole 114,000 iPad owner email addresses.
Goatse Security is the group responsible for hacking the system, however, no major customer information was revealed other than the addresses. AT&T has released a formal apology to its costumers and announced they have fixed the problem.