More on Verizon/Alltel, Virgin/Helio, Philly Wi-Fi
Other stuff I recently wrote or chipped in on:
Alternative energy: the movie
It’s not often I get to reference “Donnie Darko,” pig poop and Michael J. Fox in a single story:
Getting the dog and the Roomba/Roboquad/Pleo to co-exist
“I wanted not a single tooth mark on the dog,” says Ms. Turbeville, 54. Her solution: a paste of cayenne pepper and Cholula Hot Sauce, which she painted on its tail. The cats still sniff the Aibo’s backside. “They just can’t help it. But they never, ever bite him anymore.”
Many owners have found robotic pets attacked by their “bio-pets” when they aren’t home, she says. People on some online forums suggest getting rid of the flesh-and-blood pets with territorial issues. “Obviously, they’re feeling threatened,” Ms. Turbeville says. “They retaliate. They retaliate hard.”
On Page One: When Dogs and Robots Collide, Somebody Needs a Talking To (Thanks, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Jezebel and Wonkette!)
(This story also ran in the Arizona Republic, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Charleston [W.V.] Gazette, Houston Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press and the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star.)
Citizen paparazzi
Hunger for Celebrity Gossip Helps Create a Market for Amateurs, But Not Everyone Is Happy
Erin Horgan is more than a casual John Mayer fan. When she learned about a Caribbean cruise being offered earlier this month with the singer as the featured entertainment, the 22-year-old worker at a Hyannis, Mass., scrapbooking store didn’t hesitate to drop $1,000 for a ticket.
As it turned out, she got even more contact with her favorite singer than she expected: Mr. Mayer, hamming it up for fellow passengers, donned a neon green thong-style swimsuit as Ms. Horgan and others furiously snapped photographs. In a blog post after returning home, Ms. Horgan joked that she was going to send the pictures to celebrity magazine Us Weekly.
She didn’t have to. Within days, Ms. Horgan heard not only from Us Weekly, but also from MTV, VH1, Rolling Stone, Blender and Newsweek. She ended up selling photos to Newsweek and VH1 - she says she was offered “a couple hundred” for each photo, but declines to be more specific.
CES blogging
Leaving Las Vegas
What is it with bathroom technology, Jerry?
Belly Dancing with 8×8’s Tango
It’s late in the day on Day 3, and CES attendees practically need a Tasering to notice an exhibitor at this point. Enter belly dancers.
The Other, Sexier Tech Expo
Attracting plenty of curiosity among CES-goers (and disappointment at the strict admission policies) is AVN’s Adult Entertainment Expo, which started today just down the corridor from one of the main CES exhibit halls.
2007 by the numbers
Google Inc. crossed $700, IAC/InterActiveCorp split itself into five pieces, and Apple sold more than one million iPhones. Here’s a look at some of the numbers behind the year’s tech happenings.
Read Ones and Zeros
The art on, and about, the Internet
The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.
To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.
“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.
“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”
The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.
Apple’s gravitational pull
Many Apple retail stores are madhouses on ordinary weekends, so it’s no surprise they were crowded on Black Friday. But according to analysts, some of whom are studying the company’s holiday traffic for the first time, Apple’s performance is worth paying attention to.
According to Piper Jaffray, Apple stores exert “what can best be described as a gravitational pull” on mall shoppers. A shopper walking within 25 feet of an entrance has a 27% chance of going in, said analyst Gene Munster, whose firm spent six hours monitoring foot traffic at Apple stores this weekend. Most of them don’t buy anything, he added, and Apple stores are often in high-traffic parts of shopping centers, but this signals a possible shift in buying intentions to Macs from PCs.
Read Holiday Sales Blog: Do Apple Stores Exert ‘Gravitational Pull’?
Bloggers on Kindle
Amazon.com Inc.’s new e-book reader, Kindle, has only been on sale for a few hours, but the blogosphere already has a lot to say about it.
Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo are buzzing about the device’s free wireless capability and odd design. Media and publishing bloggers, some responding to Newsweek’s nearly 5,000-word advance look, are discussing what Kindle means for the e-books industry and reading itself. Other tech bloggers are hashing out its price tag ($399) and the notion of having to pay for blog feeds.
And everyone has an opinion, mostly negative, about how it looks. A sample description: “like a prop from an old sci-fi horror flick.”
Amazon customers have weighed in, too, with more than 100 reviews already online. Kindle, so far, is rated 2.5 stars out of 5.
Dealing with porn on your user-generated-content site
When a group of college students launched the document-sharing Web site Scribd.com, they envisioned it as a place where they and others could publish term papers online.
Scribd, which allows anyone to upload documents much like YouTube lets users post videos online, has grown quickly since its September 2006 debut. Users have added more than 350,000 documents in various languages, ranging from instructions for solving a Rubik’s Cube to the sheet music from Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Ave Maria.” Groups dedicated to sharing everything from Federal Communications Commission reports to Japanese comic books have sprung up.
But rivaling Scribd’s growing collection of schoolwork, public documents and other miscellanea is a significant amount of adult content, which the start-up has taken pains to downplay while it decides whether the explicit material will stay or go. As other Internet destinations that rely on user-generated content have learned — from photo-sharing sites like Flickr to video sites like YouTube and Veoh — keeping the site “clean” while not alienating users is a central challenge.
Nasdaq loses 6.5% in a rough week
Google, RIM and Other Highfliers Lead the Retreat
The Nasdaq Composite Index sank 7% in three days and ended the week down 6.5%, as highfliers like Google and Apple reversed course midweek and dropped sharply for three straight sessions.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 68.06 points, or 2.5%, to close Friday at 2627.94. It was the Nasdaq’s biggest three-day drop in more than five years, as investors fled large tech stocks that had surged in recent months.
Midwest Teen Sex Show
Episode No. 4 of “The Midwest Teen Sex Show,” a new video podcast, opens with a shot of a young woman holding a crying baby. Nearby, two young boys are noisily scuffling and trading noogies. Looking into the camera, the obviously stressed-out mother of three says nothing, but her expression says: How did I get into this mess?
Seconds later, the episode’s title, “Birth Control,” flashes on the screen.
That sort of wry, pointed presentation has helped the show lure thousands of viewers since its debut this past summer. Some may have been attracted by the provocative title, but this isn’t pornography. Instead, it aims to teach teenagers about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators — host Nikol Hasler, the aforementioned woman, and Guy Clark, an aspiring filmmaker.
The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim — and boring — to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.
In “The Older Boyfriend,” which warns teenage girls against taking up with a guy in his 20s or 30s, Ms. Hasler says, “You may think you’re pretty cool for having an older boyfriend, but what you have to remember is he’s not cool for dating you. He’s a loser. And you can find plenty of losers to date at school.”
More than 50,000 people subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. The “Midwest Teen Sex Show” is listed under iTunes’ “Health” category, where it regularly is in the top 10. Yesterday, it was No. 7, compared with Discovery Health Channel at No. 20.
Along with growth has come controversy, particularly among sex-education teachers and therapists. While some praise it for tapping a hard-to-reach audience, others worry it’s too racy for younger teens, and still others say the podcast focuses too much on humor and not enough on the facts kids need.
The Lego-movie industry
Young Cineastes Find Lego a Congenial Medium for the Age of YouTube
In the three-minute film “Cognizance,” a hit man on his way to his next target wordlessly reflects on his life. He walks past shoppers browsing in stores, children on a merry-go-round, a young couple embracing. Finally, he spots his intended victim across a busy street, and, as the soundtrack music by Coldplay swells, he reconsiders and drops his gun in an alley.
As the killer turns and begins to walk home, he finds himself facing the barrel of another man’s gun. A subtle smile crosses his placid, yellow face as the screen fades to black.
One reviewer said he was “overwhelmed with emotion” by the film. Another called it “a gleaming gem,” adding that it was “required viewing for anyone interested in our little plastic world.”
“Cognizance” is one of hundreds of movies known as “brickfilms” that are getting attention on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Amateur filmmakers use Lego pieces to create characters and scenes, sometimes spending months painstakingly arranging and rearranging the blocks before the camera. Re-creations of famous moments in “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” faithfully rendered in the primary colors of Lego pieces and stitched together from thousands of stop-motion frames, have drawn hundreds of thousands of viewings. Many of the productions are original films with elaborate plotlines, soundtracks and voice-overs.
The growing genre is driven by a lively online community of would-be Spielbergs who swap tips on message boards about tackling the unique challenges of the medium.
Read In This Film Industry It Really Helps To Be a Blockhead
Q&A with Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow
In science-fiction author Cory Doctorow’s short story “Scroogled,” a woman shrugs when she sees “Immigration–Powered by Google” on an airport sign, but that’s just the beginning of the search giant’s presence in a not-too-distant future.
The story, published in Radar Magazine’s latest issue, envisions a world in which Google turns into Big Brother. Customs agents grill travelers about their search queries, public places are swept by Webcams and officials look for terrorist connections in social-networking sites. All of this is made possible by Google’s powerful search tools and the company’s willingness to share its trove of personal data with the government.
While a work of fiction, Mr. Doctorow, 36 years old, one of the editors of the popular blog Boing Boing, said his story builds on his real concerns about the amount of information that Google and others collect and store about Web users, including search histories, email and videos. Its publication has sparked online discussions about online privacy and the plausibility of Mr. Doctorow’s scenario.
Asked about the Orwellian story, a Google spokeswoman responded: “Google is proud to offer a range of innovative products that have proven to be both useful and trusted by our users. User trust is central to our business and that’s why we aggressively protect our users’ privacy.”
Mr. Doctorow spoke with me about “Scroogled,” why he’s fond of Google despite his dystopian tale and why it’s hard to get people worried about online privacy.