The Technoverse Blog

While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin.   There’s lots of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.  Some are calling it a larger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.

Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone.  We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar.  It seems to me that the Tab will also be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8,  HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy.   Supporting both  2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, the Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.

The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted.  What struck me was that many of  the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the  FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.” Read more …

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Here I’ve been getting excited about  new user interface niceties such as voice rec in Windows Phone 7 and Android, while completely missing the bigger picture. The National Science Foundation has announced it will be funding a NeuroPhone, “the first Brain-Mobile Interface (BMI).”   This “high risk, exploratory research,” to be conducted at Dartmouth College, involves developing a consumer-level wireless EEG (electroencephalography) headset to interface with a mobile device.  From what I can decipher from the proposal abstract, they will study ways to digitize and interpret brain wave activity.

Does this mean in the future I’ll be able to directly think my emails, SMS, and tweets to a super smart phone?  (Hat tip to Nick Carr.) Read more …

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I’ve generally taken the train into  Manhattan to discover the latest social media startups to come out of our local tech scene.  Last week, I serendipitously came upon an intriguing company in my own extended New Jersey neighborhood.  Located in Montclair, Bubbalon is a rating website that asks its community to rate the value of restaurants, TV shows,  music, movies, politicians, ideas, and just about anything else in this whole wide world.

Sure, it is similar to other sites in this genre. Like Hot Potato, Hunch, and Foodspotting, Bubbalon banks on its members’ social altruism and cognitive surplus.  Ratings of friends (as supplied by Facebook) also give users a benchmark on which to gauge  judgments and potentially sway decisions. And there’s a Foursquare integration to boot.

Bubbalon, though, separates itself from other social sites in its emphasis on the emotional value assigned to rated objects— in other words, does it make you happy. Read more …

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For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.

The biggest difference between the ancient branches on the email-voice evolutionary tree and the latest VoIP creations from Google, Skype and others is the Web and mobile calling, coupled with improved codecs. In other words, the overall technology has evolved in steps, not with a giant leap forward. It is slowly but surely achieving greatness.

There are already tens of million of existing Gmail users to talk and video chat with in direct computer-to-computer fashion. Google’s announcement last week to unite Google Voice (the service that rings all your phones) with Gmail and to throw in free outbound calls will probably add millions more. Most significantly, this service, is or will soon be available on Android phones as well.

Over the weekend, I tried Gmail’s existing video chat and made a free landline call. Conclusion: the new and improved Gmail service is a big deal for a number of reasons. Read more …

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Another weekend, another hackathon.  But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata.

The winners were …  ChatterCast, which monitors 911 activity in your area and sends SMS notifications, and GeoCast, which lets you learn, also via SMS, about traffic conditions within a shape you draw on a map.

Tropo scripts  handled the telephony aspects for both these apps.

Congrats to the winners!

Read more …

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I was looking for a no-sweat way to introduce Flash presentations into my blog for all the usual reasons: richer interactions without web server intervention, more space efficient way to present photos and videos, and just the plain fun of embedding multi-media into my text-centric blog. When I saw Frontal’s presentation at New York Tech Meetup last month,  I was inclined to be very receptive to a free development environment, simple scripting language, and easy deployment scenario (also, free) for creating and rendering SWFs. Did I mention the whole thing is free?

There are other shareware Flash tools out there, and  so I wanted to take a quick peek at the competition before making my commitment to Frontal.  It didn’t take long during my survey to realize Frontal’s advantages.  Most of my issues with the likes of MiniBuilder, FlashDevelop, and a few others involved having to learn Adobe’s ActionScript, deal with compilers, or overcome my severe allergic reaction to integrated development environments.

I was sold.  On page two you can see an embedded Frontal photo slideshow I put together in under 15 minutes. Read more …

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This is the summer of the Android tablet. With all the gadget sites tracking products from Archos, Sony, Asus, et al., I thought I’d remind you of  an inexpensive ($199) Android 2.0  color e-book reader that is also a media player and has a browser.   Velocity Micro is now taking orders for their Cruz Reader 7″ tablet, which it plans to ship in early September.  I just plunked down my money.  Read more …

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What happened was that in less than a generation, a media landscape that should have been moving toward more diversity, more localism and more competition was transformed into a market controlled by a handful of players, too often providing little more than infotainment, canned music and program homogenization. … The apologists told us this was the natural result of changes in technology …  The facts told another story. The huge debts these mega-companies took on to curry favor with investors and hedge-fund operators overwhelmed broadcaster obligations to be good stewards of the people’s airwaves. The public’s right to know got lost in the frenzy of financial hyper-speculation.

Read more …

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You know it’s August when The New York Times makes front pages news out of five brain researchers taking a rafting trip in Glen Canyon, Utah. It was really a working vacation, as these high-powered scientists, accompanied by a Times’ reporter (great gig, Matt Richtell), pondered how our brain changes when disconnected from Google, email, and the whole darn Internet.

Leave it to brain scientists to discover that they feel different and better after three days of vacationing with nothing to do but row, chat, and drink Tecate beers in the evening.  Of course, this group’s idea of hanging around the camp fire involves light banter about  brain chemicals in the bloodstream, the neuroeconomic value of information, and a famous University of Michigan study showing that people are better learners after a walk in the woods than maneuvering a busy urban street.

Fortunately, Nick Carr was not on vacation and read the same article. Read more …

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Jonah Peretti explains viral marketing

HuffingtonPost founder and “viral media marketing hotdog” Jonah Peretti spoke at the NY Viral Media Meetup last week.

Sure enough the slides from the talk have now gone viral. Here are the key takeaways, things you already knew but you just didn’t have the sense to condense into a short deck. One, viral content is spread through a network of bored office workers. Two, you never can tell what will go viral. And three, the web is ruled by crazy people.

He also dispensed valuable advice on how to present serious news on the Web, which he perfected at Huff Post. It’s something I’ll be trying to put into practice. Hint: it has to do with mullets.

Peretti’s presentation can be found in its entirety after the link. Read more …

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