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Daily Dispatch: Scoble calls Siri the future of the web; FBI wants ISPs to record your activity

Feb 8, 2010 News Leave a comment

Blog_badge_DigitalDirk

Combing through hundreds of blog posts and news articles daily, Dirk Klingner, our technology-trend watcher, sifts through the noise to bring you the tech news most important to consumers. If you have a tip on a story you want to share, leave a comment below.

Why if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web (Scobleizer)

…No, the real secret sauce and huge impact on the future of the web is in the back end of this thing. A few months back the engineers at Siri gave me a secret look at how they stitch the APIs into the system. They’ve built a GUI that helps them hook up the APIs from, say, a new source like Foursquare, into the language recognition engine.

FBI wants records kept of Web sites visited (Cnet)

The FBI is pressing Internet service providers to record which Web sites customers visit and retain those logs for two years, a requirement that law enforcement believes could help it in investigations of child pornography and other serious crimes.

Foursquare Passes 1 Million Check-Ins A Week. Rate Doubled In The Past Month. (TechCrunch)

…Today, the company has some new big news to share via a tweet: they’re now doing over a million check-ins a week.

AT&T FamilyMap App Launches on App Store (AT&T)

…The AT&T FamilyMap app brings a streamlined approach to helping families stay up to speed on each other’s whereabouts by locating wireless devices within a shared family account. The app provides iPhone users with access to FamilyMap’s popular features, which until now, were only accessible through a computer.

Nearby places you might like… (Google Lat Long Blog)

…Now on Google Maps, you can get these types of suggestions automatically. Just look up a place that you know or love, and we'll provide a set of "Nearby places you might like.

Winter Olympics to demo lighting controlled by thoughts (CNN)

…A Canadian company has created what it calls the "largest thought-controlled computing installation." It's an experiment that lets visitors to the Olympics use their brainwaves to control the lights at three major landmarks in Canada, including Niagara Falls.

Lighter Side: Ashton Kutcher Pays Homage To Twitter With Tooter (TechCrunch)

…It’s up to you to decide how funny the sketch is, but it’s certainly an entertaining poke at the celeb’s love for the microblogging network and social media.

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DIY: Creating a music video on your iPhone

Feb 8, 2010 Technology Leave a comment

Creating and performing music and video on a computer is so 20th century. Many artists routinely do so using specialized hardware and digital music software from companies such as Native Instruments and Cakewalk.

How about doing it on something a little more current, and challenging, like, say, an iPhone 3G S? Now that's a task worth tackling…and tackle it I recently did.

Pros and Cons of iPhone apps

Some cameras and camcorders let you construct slide shows or edit what you've captured. But none let you create your own music. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) lets you do all of these, but first you need to download apps (software) from the iTunes App Store. Such apps offered a couple of advantages, I found:

Simplicity. Most apps' user interface made it easy to use. And I didn't need to read lots of manuals, or books, the way I generally do with computer software.

Cost. Compared to most software for PCs or Macs, which can cost hundreds of dollars, apps are cheap. The most expensive one I bought was about $20. Many years ago, I bought a $500 TASCAM four-track, analog cassette recorder, which let me create separate recorded tracks that were in sync with each other in order to create music as if I was playing with an entire live rock band. With a $5 app, I was able to create superior-sounding music.

Of course, apps also have their disadvantages:

No multiple or background apps: On an iPhone, there's no multitasking, meaning you can only run one app at a time. In multimedia, this can pose a big problem.

Limited features: Quite often, I found myself searching for a way to do something and finding out that the app didn't have such a feature. For example, in the video-editing app, I had to work around the problem of not being able to turn off the audio on my video clips (I'll discuss this, and how I got around it, in a future post).

Some apps have confusing interfaces: Although most apps are pretty straightforward, some had counter-intuitive interfaces.

In my next post, I'll describe how I used music apps to create the song I wrote for this project, "Hey Ma, Look What I Can Do." (Video embedded above.)

Have you created rich content on a device like the iPhone or an Android phone? If so, share your experience below.

—Terry Sullivan

The 3 best Super Bowl electronics ads

Feb 8, 2010 Technology Leave a comment

To me, the biggest surprise of yesterday’s Super Bowl—after New Orleans’ underdog victory, of course—was the plethora of ads (well, eight by my count, not including those for Web sites) for electronics products and services.

I can’t remember a Big Game where advertising for gear was quite so prominent. And, to me, all of the electronics ads were entertaining, even if few conveyed real news or even any hard information.

Here were my three favorites, with links so you can watch and judge them for yourselves:

1. Google: Parisian Love. A clever way to reinforce Google’s ubiquity in our lives, this ad was an extended video screen shot of a succession of searches, leading the searcher from visiting Paris to meeting a mate to marriage to parenthood. Where most Superbowl ads are frenetic and last for mere seconds, this ad offered a full minute of poetic calm. (Video after the jump.)

2. Flo TV: Spineless. Sure, an ad (in this case for Qualcomm’s mobile TV device) that portrays a male sports fan as captive to his girlfriend’s weekend shopping expedition is sexist and sophomoric. But to me, this added enough wit to forgive those themes and extract humor from its political incorrectness.

3. KGB: Sumo Wrestling. Introducing a new cell-phone service that answers your questions for 99 cents, this ad pitted a KGB user against a Web surfer, as both tried to get a Japanese translation of “I surrender” in time to avoid a pummelling.

(The ad succeeded, in that I couldn’t resist texting a question to KGB this morning. In less than two minutes, the service successfully identified Ollie Halsall, the dazzlingly brilliant guitarist in the ultra-obscure ’70s English band Patto, and even added the fact that he was also played keyboards and sang.)

I liked the other electronics ads, too, includingVizio’s ad for its suite of Internet apps, with its image of a still-singing Beyoncé being dropped into the maw by a giant mechanical arm; Intel’s lunchroom spot, in which a table-serving robot has his feelings hurt when new Intel chips are touted as the best product the company’s ever created; and an ad in which Megan Fox snaps and sends a photo of herself in the bathtub with a Motorola phone, triggering a series of disasters involving distracted men—even though my enthusiasm for the latter was deemed (lovingly) by my wife to be “slightly pathetic”…

What were your favorite ads from last night, electronics or otherwise?

—Paul Reynolds

Coming this spring: Four new Canon point-and-shoots

Feb 8, 2010 News Leave a comment

Canon Powershot SX210 IS
Photo: Canon

With the PMA camera trade show two weeks away, Canon just introduced four new PowerShot digital cameras—a superzoom and three subcompacts.

The priciest, the 14-megapixel PowerShot SX210 IS superzoom, $350, includes a 14x zoom, 3-inch LCD and dedicated video record button. The subcompacts are the 14-megapixel PowerShot SD3500 IS Elph, $330, which has a very large 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD and 5x zoom with wide-angle capability; the 14-megapixel PowerShot SD1400 IS Elph, $280, which has a 4x zoom; and the 12-megapixel PowerShot SD1300 IS Elph, $230, with a 4x zoom and wide-angle capability.

Canon Powershot SD3500 IS Elph
Photo: Canon

All models include a new FE flash exposure feature that not only automatically adjusts the aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings, but also changes the strength of the flash’s illumination. All but the SD1300 Elph include new scene modes, including fish-eye and miniature effects, and can shoot HD-resolution video. Plus, like the newly announced Panasonic point-and-shoots, the PowerShots will support the new higher capacity, SDXC memory cards, which will eventually be able to store as much as 2 terabytes of data.

All cameras will be available this month, except the SX210 IS, which will be available next month.

—Terry Sullivan

Next Steps

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Connection Meter 7.9.3 (Windows)

Feb 8, 2010 Free Downloads Leave a comment

Connection Meter is features a collection of tools you can use for every connection to the Internet.

Download here:
Connection Meter 7.9.3 (Windows)

Fast Windows Hider 3.9 (Windows)

Feb 8, 2010 Internet Leave a comment

Fast Windows Hider is a protective tool designed to help you hide any windows (applications) at one moment. Just press the hotkey or click icon. You can hide Internet Explorer or another Internet browser, ICQ, AIM, IRC, Word, movies, games, e-mail, photos, or any other window you wish to keep private.

Go here to download:
Fast Windows Hider 3.9 (Windows)

Ashampoo UnInstaller 4 4.04 (Windows)

Feb 8, 2010 Internet Leave a comment

Windows is famous for getting more sluggish the more you use it.

To download go here:
Ashampoo UnInstaller 4 4.04 (Windows)

Global Network Inventory 3.0.0.2 (Windows)

Feb 8, 2010 Internet Leave a comment

Global Network Inventory is a flexible software and hardware inventory system that can be used as an audit scanner in an agent-free and zero deployment environments. If used as an audit scanner, it only requires full administrator rights to the remote computers you wish to scan. Global Network Inventory can audit remote computers and even network appliances, including switches, network printers, and document centers.

Go here to learn more:
Global Network Inventory 3.0.0.2 (Windows)

Hidetools Spy Monitor 6.3 (Windows)

Feb 8, 2010 Internet Leave a comment

Hidetools Spy Monitor is powerful spy software that secretly monitors your children’s or employees’ computer activity: typed keystrokes, visited Web sites, screenshots, opened windows, applications run, passwords.Our Spy Monitor can automatically create the log reports and send them to your e-mail address. This allows you to monitor any PC from any place where you could check your e-mail

Go here to learn more:
Hidetools Spy Monitor 6.3 (Windows)