Topic - ReadWrite

Google Glass just got a little bit more real. If you were worried that Google’s augmented reality glasses were a pie-in-the-sky concept that might not ever become a real product, you can relax. That is not going to happen to Google Glass. Google released the tech details to Glass this week - along with everything that developers need to know to build apps for the specs. Called “Glassware,” the Google Mirror API is designed to let developers create innovative, useful and fun apps for the forth...

Many website owners say to themselves, “I want my site to look great on mobile, but I don’t know where to start.” If you are in the business of building and designing websites, you cannot ignore the fact that many people are going to be visiting your sites on their smartphones and tablets. The Web and the mobile browsers remain one of the top ways that users interact with websites and if they have trouble on their smartphone, there is a good chance they are not coming back. That’s where respo...

Two explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon have killed 2 and injured more than 100, with reports constantly changing as new updates flood in. As is now par for the course, news of the disaster broke first on Twitter, and the microblogging service remains an unparalleled source of breaking news and first-hand accounts — not to mention media criticism of news outlets who jumped ahead of the facts in their reporting. The presumed attack since been documented in thousands upon thous...

Mark Zuckerberg is now wading into that thorniest of political issues: immigration reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week, the Facebook CEO told the story of a young "aspiring entrepreneur" who may not be able to attend college because the boy is residing in the U.S. illegally. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memor...

If Mark Zuckerberg is to inherit the mantle as the next Steve Jobs, he's going to have to do better when it comes to advertising. These new Facebook Home ads, for example, don't make me want to rush out and get Home on my phone. Rather, they make me think that we would all have much more fun if we turned off Facebook entirely and lived our lives like those we follow. This seems like exactly the wrong message. The first ad, "Airplane," features a man on a plane, away from home - get it? Only, ...

The bar was empty as I waited. Outside it was snowing and dark, another typical evening of what seemed like of what was an endless blanket of snow. Or, as we call it, February in Boston. "Can I get you a drink?" the bartender asked. "I am meeting someone," I said. "I will wait until ... the person I am supposed to meet shows up." I glanced at my phone for the time. It was the same phone that set up this date. Why shouldn't it tell me the time? It was 5:08 ... she was late. I've been down this...

The White House doesn't support the amended version of CISPA, the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act that would let companies and the feds monitor and share your online communication without a warrant. But while President Obama remains opposed to the bill's latest iteration, he's apparently hedging on whether he'd veto it. The bill, aimed at data sharing between the public and private sectors, is a security nightmare for its vagueness and privacy oversight. Last year,...

I get asked what the next big thing is a lot. I haven't had a good answer in a while. So much of what I see in technology feels iterative, or worse, derivative, especially in the social Web. All the interesting niches have been mapped out. Lately, though, there's one big concept that seems really exciting, and that's anticipatory systems. We're starting to see glimmerings of these new, smarter systems in everything from check-in services like Foursquare to calendar apps, advertising and even ...

M$: Short for Microsoft, used to imply Microsoft cares more for money than it does for security, stability, and anything else that could make a good Operating System." - Urban Dictionary, 2004. "Microsoft sucks." Too many times, the conversation stops there. Yes, Microsoft gets plenty of criticism, much of it justified, on everything from its nasty attacks on Linux to the failings of its latest operating system. Along the way, Microsoft has helped write its own narrative as a money-grubbing m...

Just looking at ads is bad enough, so who would want to talk to them? While many people would likely answer "no one," voice-recognition software maker Nuance says the opposite is true. What Is A Voice Ad? Wanting in on the booming mobile ad market, Nuance developed a way for people to chat with ads much as they do with Siri on the iPhone. Called Voice Ads, the technology works off the Internet connection of any iOS or Android mobile device. Voice-recognition software has been around for years...

Just as consumer technology invades the enterprise, business-class technology is becoming available in the home market. A great example of this counter-trend - call it "the enterprization of the consumer" instead of the consumerization of the enterprise - is Skydog, from Palo Alto-based PowerCloud Systems. Skydog is a dual-band Wi-Fi router that also incorporates patented cloud-based intelligence to enable homeowners to optimize their network resources and manage bandwidth remotely from their...

These remain the post-glory days of the nerd. From Larry Ellison, island-owning-cutthroat-businessman-billionaire, to Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire-coder-CEO-visionary, the once-lowly nerd — with Silicon Valley serving as his Xanadu — is now creator of much of the world's riches, seer of the world's future, and the person to whom Presidents and hopefuls come for money, anointing and benificent manipulation of Big Data. It was not always thus. Even while Bill Gates was destroying the competitio...

One hundred fifty four days after acquiring Lucasfilm — and the rights to everything Star Wars — for a cool $4 billion, Disney has shut down LucasArts, the Lucas division long responsible for making video games. The tech press had two immediate reactions to the news, both of them wrong. Some greeted the news with sadness and longing. Per TechCrunch: While the move was not unforeseen (the company’s last few games haven’t been very successful, and rumors of projects being shuttered have trickle...

When it comes to video games, the death knell is rung loudly and frequently. In an industry so intrinsically tied to technological innovation, we won't stop hearing any time soon about what former trend or gaming mainstay has its head on the chopping block. The most recent forecast from worried gaming circles: original, story-driven, triple-A games are too bloated and risky to survive in a cheaper, stripped-down and more mobile world. Unfortunately, there's a lot of evidence backing this clai...

When I talk to marketing executives about the Smart Body, Smart World paradigm — how sensor-laden devices like wearables give us access to new domains of information and what we can do with that information — they always bring up the movie Minority Report. The 2002 sci-fi crime thriller has become the reference point people imagine when they think about the future of advertising: specifically, the scene in which Jon Anderton (Tom Cruise) walks through the mall and billboards show him ads base...

Everybody can agree that Apple’s next couple of iPhones need to be more than just iterative updates. From the design to the hardware to iOS, Apple clearly needs to do… more. But some people like to take that idea of "more" to ludicrous extremes. Usually it is some obscure blog trying to make a name for itself (if ever so briefly). Other times it happens to be the founder and CEO of one of the largest and most respected industry analyst groups in the world. Forrester's Chief Wants Smartphones ...

Well, that didn't take long. Two months after its launch, the social video-sharing app Vine has received its first copyright takedown notices. The complaints were sent by NPG, the record label owned by Prince, whose music appeared in a few six-second videos on Vine. This is absurd. Uploading an entire Prince album to YouTube is one thing. But six disjointed seconds in smartphone camera quality? Something tells me four clips of that nature aren't going to eat into Prince's album sales. Prince,...

This Fusion-io video (Whiteboarding With The Woz — Virtualization: The Basics) stars Apple co-founder and Fusion-io chief scientist Steve Wozniak explaining the little-understood concept of server virtualization. (Go ahead and click on that link to see why virtualization is little understood. It's not really that complicated, but not exactly intuitive to the layperson, either.) Server CPUs keep getting more powerful, but they can't get enough data to keep them busy. So, as Woz explains it, an...

As All Fools' Day continues, more reports of tomfoolery are coming in, so here's a quick video update. Scope Releases Bacon-Flavored Mouthwash WestJet Loves The Pets AerLingus: Flight Boarding By Clan Sony Features Products For Non-Bipeds Womp Rats Are Easy If you find any more humorous attempts to tickle, post them below in the comments! Lead image courtesy of ThinkGeek.

Find some buried treasure, fly in a glass-bottomed jet or mock the Caped Crusader… these are among the many ways you can be fooled thus far on this April Fools' Day, 2013. The media and technology sectors have been busy already this morning, coming up with some new and clever ways to pull the wool over our eyes on the one day of the year when all the stops are pulled out to deliver the laughs. Of course, some gags are funnier than others, but we'll let you decide in this morning roundup of th...

In less than 20 years, experts predict, we will reach the physical limit of how much processing capability can be squeezed out of silicon-based processors in the heart of our computing devices. But a recent scientific finding that could completely change the way we build computing devices may simply allow engineers to sidestep any obstacles. The breakthrough from materials scientists at IBM Research doesn't sound like a big deal. In a nutshell, they claim to have figured out how to convert me...

I love my iPhone. I take it with me everywhere. But I am starting to fear it may be killing my creativity. Numerous studies and much accepted wisdom suggest that time spent doing nothing, being bored, is beneficial for sparking and sustaining creativity. With our iPhone in hand - or any smartphone, really - our minds, always engaged, always fixed on that tiny screen, may simply never get bored. And our creativity suffers. Peter Toohey, author of Boredom: A Lively History, told the New York Ti...

Interacting with Big Data is daunting enough that, for most people, a search engine query is about as far as one is willing to go. But for those willing to get their hands dirty, Microsoft is quietly working towards fully integrating public data sources into Excel, eventually baking it into a future version. This month, Microsoft shipped a "preview version" of Data Explorer, a tool to integrate all sorts of data sources within Excel. Microsoft's vision is "self-service business intelligence,"...

OK, I didn't really abuse my robot dog. Although I might, if only to test cultural limits. Would you? It's just a robot, after all. A gadget. If you spotted animal cruelty, would you react any differently if you discovered it wasn't really an animal but a robot? How about if it looked and behaved like a real dog — and even whimpered in pain? What if your daughter enjoyed pulling whiskers off the family cat — but it, too, was just a robot? Would that set off any alarms? Kate Darling, a lawyer ...

Apple has yanked the controversial game Sweatshop HD from its App Store -- a move rife with irony given Apple's own long association with questionable labor practices in China. Apple actually pulled Sweatshop last month, although the news just broke Thursday on the game site Polygon. The game put players in a managerial position at an expanding offshore clothing factory. Among other things, it offers the option to employ cheap child labor as everything from fires, longer work hours, and mutil...

Earlier today, Google launched Google Keep, a cloud-based note taking service designed to help people keep track of their thoughts, scribbles and notes. It's an obvious smack at the popular Evernote service. With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand. (See also: Google Wants To Driv...

Google has had a brainstorm, and now plans to use the collaborative and sharing features of Google Drive as bait — essentially to lure third-party apps into the Google fold. In a blog post, Google software engineer Brian Caims outlined how developers can integrate Google Drive features into their apps -- features like instantaneous saving in documents and spreadsheets, or multi-user collaboration on such files in real time. One of three services to debut with the Realtime API is Neutron Drive...

Feminist media critic and video blogger Anita Sarkeesian raised $160,000 in Kickstarter funds last summer after she publicized the online bullying she endured upon announcing the project. Earlier this month, to much fanfare, Sarkeesian finally delivered the first installment of her controversial Tropes Vs Women in Video Games video series. But Sarkeesian hasn't yet explained why that video still fell more than six months behind schedule — it presumably wasn't because of a budget shortfall — n...

On Monday, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad T431s, the first ThinkPad based on its new industrial design, founded upon what the company called "extensive research" with ThinkPad loyalists and other users around the world. So why does Lenovo appear to have got everything so wrong? Not Your Father's ThinkPad - Unfortunately Chiclet keyboards. Removing the buttons from the touchpad. Eliminating the removable battery. And loading Windows 8 without the benefit of an IPS (In-Plane Switching technology...

Theoretically, online services shouldn't ever get so mobbed by customers that they can't deliver a game or service, because it should be ridiculously easy to bring on additional capacity to meet demand. And yet here in the real world, exactly these sorts of failures seem to crop up with dismaying regularity. So it's time for these services to fess up: Why can't Johnny scale? Scale Fail The biggest such disaster recently was Electronic Arts's blinkered SimCity launch earlier this month. Becaus...

A new app from Yahoo Japan, called Face Stealer, is dastardly in how it has not only morphed my face - but sucked away an afternoon. The free Face Stealer app, which works on iPhone and iPad, describes its mission with blunt honesty: Do you ever want to look like celebrities? Who hasn't wanted to look like a celebrity? Only that's not what the app does. Not at all. Nor does it "steal" your face, oddly enough. Rather, it just adds rather disturbing effects to your photos. As the description ex...

Samsung stuffed a lot of features into its latest Galaxy S4. Enough to pack a Broadway play, apparently. With all the new apps, functions, gestures, camera controls and kittenkaboodles, it's plenty difficult just to figure out what's actually new and exciting about the Galaxy S4. There's a good chance that you're never going to use half of these apps. Others may make you throw your smartphone through a window -- say, for instance, if because every time you look away from your phone, the video...

Tomorrow, March 16, is Richard M. Stallman's 60th birthday. Stallman, also known as "rms," is the father of the Free Software movement and the creator of the GNU Project and the GNU General Public License, or GPL. Some of the GNU stuff ended up in Linux, which is why he insists that anyone who speaks to him must call the operating system "GNU/Linux." Stallman was once a prolific coder and self-proclaimed hacker, but now is more of an activist who spends much of his time traveling, giving spee...

What is it about this one irrational number that makes tech geeks go nuts? Every year on Pi Day - that's today, March 14 (you know, 3.14) - there are Pi parties, Pi recitation contests and, of course, pie for Pi. The whole thing really goes nuts on March 14 at 1:59 a.m. and p.m. local time - because, after all, Pi is 3.14159… The festivities - particularly the big mama of them all at the San Francisco Exploratium museum going on today - would make Archimedes proud. The ancient Greek mathemati...

At SXSW 2013, Google took the wraps off of a new set of apps for the augmented reality visors that will soon be taking our faces by storm. Google didn't release any video of the proceedings, so I shot my own. Enjoy. Watch a demo video of thew new New York Times app, which allows you to skim headlines and listen to stories read aloud, and the Skitch image sharing app, which syncs with Evernote. Google Glass New York Times App Demo Google Glass Skitch App Demo All images and video by Taylor Hat...

Jaron Lanier helped create virtual reality, all the way down to "VR” headsets and handgear. Smithsonian Magazine called him an 1980s "Silicon Valley digital-guru rock star." Lanier was regularly featured in Wired Magazine, particularly during its early, glory days. Nearly 30 years before the introduction of Google Glass, Lanier saw deep into a future where individuals could access virtual worlds. Lanier’s sizable vision, however, appears to have resulted in few actual usable products - nor mu...

Is the pirate dead? When did Apple become the new IBM? How did the company that once sought to destroy our restrictive computer overlords wind up becoming so buttoned-down? How did Apple go from this: To this: And this: The short answer, of course, is success. Apple now makes the world's most popular personal computing products - the iPhone and iPad - and has created the most profitable ecosystem for our new mobile world. No longer the underdog, Apple is now the company everyone else is chasi...

A beautiful young systems analyst pulls back from her keyboard and stretches, yawns. It's late. Sliding into her coat, she taps out a text to her boyfriend: "Be there in 20." As she leaves the office, silence falls, except for the hum of florescent lights above. A squeak. A garbage can appears, pushed by an older, balding man, his eyes suspiciously alert. Setting down his mop, the man sits at the system analyst's desk and pulls a USB key out of the pocket of his stained overalls. The silent P...

A smartphone is probably the most advanced piece of technology most people own. We take these devices with us everywhere, we use them all the time. Odds are high we will drop them - onto the floor, into water or even onto hard pavement. Even if you got the phone for free with a contract, this tiny slip-up could cost you hundreds of dollars to replace or repair the device. (See also My Week With Android, Or Why I'm Buying An iPhone 5.) Meet The Indestructible Smartphone It doesn't have to be t...

Say what you will about Samsung, it sticks to its guns. Even if that means once again inflicting a whiny, snobby little brat on an unsuspecting world as its mascot and "secret messenger" for the upcoming Galaxy S4 smartphone. Yes, Jeremy Maxwell is back — and annoying as ever — in Samsung's latest Galaxy S4 teaser video. Almost as bad as that is the fact that very little about the S4 is actually teased here, except for the fact that a product with that name is on its way. Samsung is releasing...

The nerds are so excited. Our Internet-augmented, face-computer-wearing future is just over the horizon. Leading us there will be Google Glass, the first iteration of this particular sort of wearable, semi-immersive computing experience. If the product is successful, it will merely be the beginning. The anticipation is understandable. If having Internet-connected computers in our pockets can transform our world, just imagine what wearing them on our faces will do. The prospect of everything f...

One of the big promises of social networking is that it will inject your networking skills with PED (performance enhancing data), able to give you the biggest network on the block. If you're a believer in the raw power of oh-so many social connections, that's OK. But if you're like me, you'll already hearing Janet Jackson's hit, What Have You Done For Me Lately? playing in your head. The problem with most social media is that the quality of your network degenerates as it grows. At first, best...

What if all of your online communication could be monitored and shared without a warrant? That's what's at stake if the latest version of CISPA, the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is approved by Congress. After CISPA was shot down in 2012, a revised bill has been introduced that would let private companies and the government monitor Americans under the auspices of sharing intelligence about cyber threats. The intentions behind the bill may be noble, but the bill'...

As part of Women's History Month, Open Road Integrated Media has put together a video featuring several prominent female science fiction and fantasy authors talk about the genre, being a woman in the mostly male-dominated science fiction realm, and the women who inspired them. Open Road publishes and markets e-books across several genres. The video features writers Elizabeth Hand, Ellen Datlow, Patricia C. Wrede, and N. K. Jemisin. Check it out: Wrede writes fantasy and shared-world fiction. ...

Out of all the lines the press uses to describe Google’s interests in funding better content on its biggest social platform, the dominant one by far is: “YouTube is trying to compete with television.” Right. Yes, Google in all its infinite wisdom wants to compete with the decades-old giant that is the multi-billion dollar television industry with paltry investments of $100 million or so every couple of months. /sarcasm YouTube Cannot Replace TV The notion is just plain silly - it even made Ti...