Topic - ReadWrite

Google's cloud-based ChromeBook never really went anywhere, selling and performing poorly. But that hasn't stopped Google from chasing its browser-as-OS future. With the recent introduction of Google Now to Chrome, Google looks set to install a Trojan Horse on Microsoft's and Apple's desktop home turf. This might seem farfetched if you're unfamiliar with Google Now. But if you've used it, you've experienced the almost magical foresight it has to anticipate the kinds of data you need before yo...

Guest author Ed Lee is lead architect for virtualized storage vendor Tintri. Virtualization and flash memory are disrupting the staid storage industry. First embraced in slick consumer products like the iPod, flash memory is now the new darling of enterprise IT. One reason is speed. Flash is more than 400 times faster than rotating disks. The other reasons are virtualization and cloud computing. Combined, these technology trends have strained the capabilities of traditional storage products. ...

Why do Americans overwhelmingly prefer iPhone when the rest of the world has overwhelmingly embraced Android? The numbers tell an incredible story. Worldwide, Android has 75% market share in smartphones, versus 15% for Apple, according to IDC. But in the United States the iPhone still rules, accounting for 63% of smartphone sales at Verizon and an amazing 84% of smartphone sales at AT&T. In Asia, affluent young buyers are dropping the iPhone and turning to Android devices, particularly those ...

Last week, when YouTube thought no one was looking, it apparently removed 156 million views from Lady Gaga's VEVO channel. The removal of the views appears to be part of a broad clean up of "botted" views. Botting is the practice of artificially increasing a video's views on YouTube using automated "bots" – a practice that began in December of last year. Spk Claims YouTube Paid Him To Inflate Views Since the purging of botted views began this month, a man who goes by the alias of "spk" and cl...

The much-anticipated biopic of Apple founder Steve Jobs - "jOBS" - starring Ashton Kutcher is set to make its debut tonight at the Sundance Film Festival. Today we get our first sneak peek in one minute scene of Kutcher and Josh Gads, who plays a beatnik-geek version of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, discussing the potential for the first personal computer. "Nobody wants to buy a computer, nobody," Wozniak says. "How does somebody know what they want if they have never even seen it," Jobs sa...

With an eroding PC market causing mayhem among its allies, Microsoft is reportedly talking about investing big in Dell to help take the troubled company private. (See Why Would Microsoft Invest $3 Billion Into Dell?) Such a dramatic move would inject Microsoft much deeper into the hardware business, giving it the chance to help drive the kind of innovation that has recently eluded the PC industry. But it would also blow up its longstanding partnerships with computer makers. Shaking Up The Ind...

Japan didn't just give us the quartz wristwatch, the DSLR, and the Playstation. It also gave us the Subway Sleeper, the Hay Fever Hat and the Kaba Kick Russian Roulette Toy for Kids! The country has long been a hub for wacky inventions you never knew you wanted, so in tribute to the keepers of the bizarre, here are some of our favorite devices to make you say それはクールだ! #1. Taily - "The Tail That Wags When You Get Excited" We're all fans of Necomimi, the "Brainwave Cat Ears," right? Right. I me...

Sadly, it's going to take a long, long time before we can shrink people and submarines small enough to be injected into an ill patient, a la Fantastic Voyage. But it turns out that shrinking the people isn’t necessary to realize the idea. Easy-To-Swallow Diagnostics A team of doctors and researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have created a pill-sized, tethered lab that patients swallow, and they are preparing to commercialize it. The 1-inch glass bead, in the shape of a typical multiv...

You dropped your phone into a puddle. Doom is upon you, right? Perhaps not. Maybe you spilled some water on your phone, or, God forbid, it fell into an open toilet bowl. What to do now, throw it away? Shell out some dollars and buy a new one? A new product, the Bheestie Bag, may offer a better, more economical solution than tossing out a seemingly bricked phone. At around $20 a pop, the Bheestie Bag is much cheaper than buying a whole new phone, and it's manufacturer claims it to be far more ...

In September, Microsoft filed a patent application for what was essentially a holodeck. Now, that technology is a step further to becoming reality. At the Consumer Electronics Show, people got a glimpse of a product Microsoft calls "Illumiroom," which the company describes "peripheral projected illusions for interactive experiences." Microsoft Research posted a video demo of the technology on YouTube a week ago, and in that time the video has received more than 3.6 million views. And for good...

In 1989, it was pure science fiction. Mere seconds after dictating cooking instructions into the oven, Marty's aging mother pulled a fully cooked pizza out of the voice-controlled Black & Decker contraption and served her family. "Boy oh boy, mom you sure can hydrate a pizza!" I'm referring, of course, to a scene from Back to the Future 2, but give or take a few details, it could have happened on the floor this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). From phones, tablets and TVs to cars and, ...

No matter where you stand on copyright issues, it's hard to argue that the current system is working. In few places are the flaws of modern copyright law more apparent than when it comes to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests. Sure, plenty of legitimate DMCA are received and honored by sites like YouTube, Rapidshare and Grooveshark all the time. But every now and then we hear about a takedown notice that leaves us scratching our heads: Is that really a copyright violatio...

Making a living on YouTube is a tough business. It takes real entrepreneurial spirit. Most YouTubers make money wherever they can: from the ads that run on their mostly homemade videos and merchandise (like bobble head dolls). The big news is that few of the more intrepid YouTubers are making real money by taking their acts beyond of the virtual world and onto physical stages. And they're actually selling out big concert halls. The latest case in point: John and Hank Green of the Vlog Brother...

Pity the poor computer mouse. What with touchscreens and trackpads, mice are no longer the input devices of choice. And things are about to get a lot worse for the once-dominant computer controllers. If I had to name my personal Best of Show for the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it would be Tobii, an eye-tracking startup that does one single, amazing thing: it lets you use your eyes to move the cursor around the screen. As I thought about it a bit more, I realized that many of the comp...

Top YouTuber Ray William Johnson has been dethroned as the most popular YouTuber by Smosh, the manic comedy duo comprised of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla. It took 6.8 million subscribers grab the crown, which Smosh achieved over the weekend. Skewing Younger! The secret to Smosh's success? Make content for viewers under 18. Like every YouTube act that has owned the coveted #1 spot, Smosh's YouTube content is decidedly aimed at a younger teen and tween audience. Johnson, who riffs jokes on vir...

A new study has discovered a very exploitable flaw in Cisco's popular Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, which could put millions of users in the enterprise and government at risk of remote eavesdropping. Cisco VoIP phones sit on some 50 million businesses and government office desks across the country and around the world. Take a peek in the Oval Office or on Air Force One, you'll find them there, too. VoIP phones use the Internet - instead of a standard phone network - to transmit ...

Kids will be kids, it seems. And these days, that apparently means perpetuating hoaxes on Twitter and joking about cutting themselves on social media. The hashtag #cutforbieber that trended globally on Monday is just one more sign of boredom and ennui in the digital age. First things first: No teen girl has actually cut themselves in an attempt to get Justin Bieber to stop smoking marijuana after photographs of him smoking a joint at a party were heavily circulated over the weekend. It was al...

A Russian company called Displair is pitching a 3D display that's made up of air. No glass, no screen, no keyboard. They claim it is coming to the United States later this year, initially in some kind of business-to-business application. Is this another step toward the world of Minority Report? Or just a cool idea that will come to nothing? Check out the video below, plus a bunch of others in Displair's YouTube channel. Video and image courtesy of Displair.

It's official. Long after the XBox 360 is relegated to scrap heaps and Gamestop bargain bins, the Microsoft Kinect – the XBox peripheral that lets you control the action with body movements alone – will be going strong. A Mediocre Game Controller To tell the truth, the Kinect is a pretty ho-hum video game controller. It works with a fairly weak selection of game, given how long it's been on the market, largely because blockbuster games generally require the kind of pinpoint control you can ge...

Oh, the horror! Google is so evil it's making everyone use its stupid social network. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier this week, Google+, the social network all about the circles, is now inescapable. Besides Google employees being forced to use it (and now bitching about using it to the Journal), YouTubers, companies, restaurant reviewers - anyone, really, that wants to maintain a presence on the Internet - has to use Google+ in some capacity. Heck, anyone who signs up for Gmai...

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has never been one to think small. Walking down Oxford Street in London a few years back, he told me that one thing his money gives him is the ability to "see into the future a few years," buying things today (his example was blisteringly fast Internet service) that will be commonplace tomorrow. Not content to simply see the future, however, Shuttleworth is now trying to invent the future, elevating Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution from the sexiest nun...

Things keep getting better for Leap Motion, the little startup whose 3D motion controller gizmo could be one of the hottest products of 2013. The San Francisco-based company has struck a deal with Asus, which will bundle the Leap Motion controller with laptops and all-in-one PCs. Also, Leap Motion has raised a third round of venture capital, this one worth $30 million, from existing investors, including Founders Fund and Highland Capital. “Our investors really love the progress we’ve made ove...

Canonical, the makers of the Ubuntu open source operating system, first hinted that it would be making firmware for smartphones in late 2011. The technorati were dubious at the time, knowing full well that smartphone OSes are difficult to produce and that Ubuntu may be ill-suited to small form factors. Really, isn’t Ubuntu supposed to be for geeks on specialized workstations? Canonical shrugged off the criticism. Today it showed off some early previews of Ubuntu for smartphones in a video key...

I have written my share of blistering articles about Microsoft over the years, but I just read this one by market research analyst Roger Kay and all I can say is, "Wow." Kay has been around for a long time. He used to run the PC research group at IDC, and now has his own firm, called Endpoint Technologies Associates. The point is, he knows his stuff. And he knows Microsoft incredibly well. And boy did he just go ballistic in a column published on Forbes.com. The gist of his article is, Let's ...

Back in October, 26-year old British artist and taxidermist Adele Morse sold her badly mangled fox on eBay for 330 pounds ($536, or 16,000 Russian rubles). The fox died of natural causes, and the job wasn't perfect... but he has character, Morse wrote in the eBay post, complete with multiple photographs of the failed attempt. Soon after, Morse found her inbox flooded with messages from Russia. Her old side project had become an Internet celebrity and meme almost over night, now known as the "...

Apple store robberies may not be the crimes of the century, but they should get consideration for crimes of the year. Especially the latest one in Paris on New Year's Eve, which followed others at the beginning and middle of 2012. A Dumb Beginning On January 2, 2012, in Scottsdale Arizona, six teenagers smashed in through the front door of the Scottsdale Quarter Apple Store. The armed teens made off with around $80,000 worth of iPads, MacBooks and iPads. Well, three of them did anyway. A taxi...

2012 saw a lot of great new web series from surprising new sources. For what seemed like the first time, tech companies invested big money - and pulled big names - into original online video programming. In this digital programming horse race there was one clear, seemingly from left field, winner: Yahoo. Specifically Yahoo! Screen, the company’s version of Google’s original programming initiative. Yahoo! Screen’s web series had high production values, famous names and compelling, relevant wri...

2012 was a big year for music. No, I'm not talking about Adele, Call Me Maybe or the Tupac hologram. The big news this year were the shifts at the intersection of music and technology that occurred as the industry continued to figure out its digital future. Indeed, the biggest moments in music tech this year all had to do with piracy or the tricky evolution of a business model to replace the one that started dying a decade ago. 1. The Death Of SOPA / Megaupload Raid These two events were not ...

In a blow to civil rights, and seemingly the Fourth Amendment, the Senate this morning voted to approve a bill that reauthorizes a foreign surveillance program that keeps tabs on peoples' emails and phone conversations, all without a warrant. While the whole country waits on pins and needles for the Fiscal Cliff to fall out from under us, this could be even more important, as our freedom of liberty is truly threatened, all in the name of national security. It's called FISA, the Foreign Intell...

T’is the end of the year and all across YouTube, videos - primarily music- are being scrubbed clean of fraudulent views. Except one set of channels. VEVO, the one with a special partnership with YouTube, has remained untouched. Obvious VEVO power-play much, YouTube? YouTube has long had issues with botting - the practice of paying for fake views, much in the same way people buy fake Facebook likes or fake Twitter followers. In a bold move before the Christmas holiday, the Google-owned site st...

Interwebs drama of the day: Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark Zuckerberg, threw a fit when someone tweeted a copy of a Zuckerberg family photo (see above) that Randi herself had posted to Facebook, the confusing-to-use social Web site created by her strange, reclusive brother. Randi was furious because she wanted the photo to be seen only by her friends, but someone who is friends with Randi's sister saw the photo on Facebook, assumed it was public, and spread it on Twitter. Randi complained t...

Games are perhaps the most important category of mobile apps. Good games sell smartphones and tablets, keep grownups entertained and small children quiet. Dominating the app-store charts, a good game can make mobile developers millions of dollars, or at least keep them in business to take a stab another stab at greatness. Another positive factor for mobile games in 2012 is that most major independent and major game studios now release games on both iOS and Android - and sometimes other platfo...

At the end of 2011, the mobile industry believed that HTML5 was on the cusp of ubiquity. Everybody would be using it to build apps and mobile websites and we would finally see real operating systems based on HTML5 start creeping towards acceptance. HTML5 was to become the dominant development stack, taking the mantle from all those native apps that had come to dominate the iOS App Store and Android’s Google Play. What actually happened is that HTML5 more likely took a step back in developer a...

Velocity Of Mobile Adoption The overall velocity of smartphone adoption may be starting to slow in the United States and other first world markets like Western Europe, but the rest of the world is starting to see extraordinary mobile adoption rates. For instance, according to analytics firm Flurry, China’s growth rate of iPhone and Android devices was 291% between October 2011 and October 2012. Countries like India and other populous Asian states are starting dip into the smartphone pool in f...

Sometime last night, Gangnam Style made YouTube history - yet again - by reaching one billion total views. The march to this digital milestone hasn't been quiet: it's been surrounded with hysterical speculation about what the video's incredible popularity “all means for society.” I am here to tell you that everything is going to be okay. Society is still fine, and Psy’s one billion views on Gangnam Style is not a sign of the Apocalypse as many feared this week. Nor is it a sign our society is...

It is now Saturday morning, December 22, 2012. We are still here. We at ReadWrite would like to congratulate the world for surviving its rumored apocalypse and offer a reminder that, really, the world was never going to end on December 21, 2012. NASA, which has been a reasonable, stabilizing voice through all of the hysteria around the so-called End, has posted a video explaining why we are all still here. It is a good thing we survived the apocalypse, because, as one commenter said, “I'm pre...

Author, entrepreneur and early Apple veteran Guy Kawasaki talked to ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons at the second ReadWrite Mix event about how he lived in fear of being publicly humiliated by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Far from being a Zen Master, Jobs ruled with an iron fist. "With hindsight," Kawasaki said, "Fear drove great accomplishment." See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book Business

Last week, Guy Kawasaki joined us ReadWrite Editor-in-Chief Dan Lyons in San Francisco for the second ReadWrite Mix event, he shared the secrets of his new book: APE – Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur. In the following clips, Guy discusses his unique writing process and how to leverage social media for promotion. Learn how he secured, within an hour of publishing, a bevy of five-star reviews on Amazon. Hint: You gotta trust people. See ReadWrite Mix: Guy Kawasaki Talks Apple, Google & The Book...

This time it's the so-called "pinch and zoom" patent getting rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and this is a big deal since that patent was one that Apple used to achieve that huge $1 bilion verdict against Samsung in a California kangaroo court last summer. Now what happens? Does the court in California go back and subtract all the damages that the jury awarded to Apple based on this patent that Apple should never have been granted? Apple took a big victory lap after th...

Back in January, NASA told us that the world was not going to end in 2012. The space administration was not really concerned with prophecies to the contrary. To NASA, this is about science and the science says that Armageddon is not likely to happen on December 21, 2012. This Friday = Doomsday? In case you haven’t checked your calendars, that’s this Friday. To its credit, NASA is sticking to its guns. The world is still not going to end on Friday - or likely any time soon. But you no doubt he...

What happens when you mash up all the important cultural video artifacts of 2012? Rewind YouTube Style 2012, complete with at least 27 Web celebrities and 21 Easter eggs via video annotations, of course. Similar in theory to Google’s Zeitgeist video, Rewind YouTube Style 2012 covers all the viral video basics, from the Olympics, Kony 2012, Felix Baumgartner’s supersonic fall, the rise of Overly Attached Girlfriend, the Obama vs. Romney rap battle, Walk Off The Earth's five-person-to-one-guita...

IBM believes technology's future lies in cognitive computing, which essentially means making computers think more like humans do. To IBM, that includes giving computers sensors that enable it to touch, see, hear, taste and smell - sensory input as one more piece in the puzzle to help solve problems. IBM's Five in Five IBM's progress toward cognitive computing is seen in the company's annual end-of-year predictions. Rather than its usual practice of prognosticating on where five technologies w...

I can't count the times I've wanted to film a video blog or upload a video to YouTube, but didn't because I was daunted by all the steps it would take to upload a video - including everything from editing it to locating a musical score. Not only are these steps daunting, but they take a lot of time. It seems I wasn't alone, because YouTube has responded on Monday with the launch of YouTube Capture, a free app "designed for speed." YouTube Capture not only makes uploading your video to YouTube...

Though Guy Kawasaki basically invented Apple evangelism, now he's an Android devotee. At last week's ReadWrite Mix event, Kawasaki explains his technology choices to ReadWrite editor-in-chief Dan Lyons.

Tech gadgets come and go. Some succeed, most fail. Most failures disappear without a trace, while others are so awful that we can't seem to forget them. And some failures set the stage for future innovations. This list of the 10 most epic tech-gadget failures is by nature subjective. Some of these epic fails just weren't yet ready for prime time, whether due to poor implementation or because the public wasn't fully aware of their usefulness. Others were simply absurd, and no amount of further...

Citing non-negotiable issues including Internet governance, content regulation and network security, the United States has refused to support a set of revised regulations at the U.N. backed International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Conference on International Communications (WCIT) in Dubai. This means that the telecom-turned-Internet debate will not receive the U.S. "seal of approval," and serves as a sharp reminder of how differently the U.S. sees the future of the Web compared to m...