Gadgets Blog » 2010 » May

In case you haven’t yet had your weekly dose of irony, one of yesterday’s news stories will likely do the trick. As has been a problem for media-oriented companies in the days of the Internet, piracy has been detrimental to revenue and sales.

Warner Brothers, which has its fingers in both the movie and music industries, is certainly no exception. In order to counter much of the piracy going on in the 21st Century, companies are resorting to some drastic measures, including Digital Rights Management (DRM) and anti-piracy software in order to protect their intellectual property.

Of course, preventing piracy by utilizing pirated software seems to defeat the purpose. According to The Hollywood Reporter, that’s exactly what a lawsuit leveled against Warner Bros. by a German software company claims. The company, Medien Patent Verwaltung (or MPV), alleges that Warner has been utilizing their anti-piracy technology since 2004 without properly buying it.

Yesterday’s top story in the technology world generated a huge amount of buzz, which is perhaps to be predicted. First and foremost, it involved the Media’s Favorite Company, Apple. This in and of itself guaranteed that here would be a disproportionately large media coverage, but to make things even better, the story pitted Apple against Microsoft. Indeed, according to an article in Business Insider, there’s a new king of the computing world as Apple’s market capitalization finally overtook Microsoft’s.

Before we get into analysis, let’s take a look at the raw numbers. At the end of the day on May 26, Apple’s market capitalization was sitting at $222.12 billion. Microsoft’s was close by, but distinctly less at $219.18 billion. The companies are the second and third most valuable American corporations, behind only Exxon Mobile.

According to one calculation of enterprise value, Apple is worth $200 billion, with Microsoft worth $197 billion. Market capitalization is the value assigned to a company based off its equity. Equity, largely in part, is determined by stockholders. So the second numbers become more important, as other calculations take factors such as outstanding Assets and Liabilities into consideration. Still, Apple stands as the more valuable company.

While the iPad was the media darling of the technology world long before its actual release, consumers have perhaps been less willing to jump on board the Apple bandwagon than the company might have hoped. The iPad, for all its flaws, is certainly a unique gadget with the capability to really shake up the computing industry.

At the same time, it also presents consumers with a bit of a quandary: what are we supposed to do with something that walks and talks like an iPhone, but can’t make phone calls? Add in complaints regarding the tablet’s inability to multitask and the scenario seems ripe for competitors to step in.

On that note, Dell officially unveiled what could be a legitimate contender in not only the tablet market, but also the realm of smartphones. Unveiled yesterday and dubbed the “Streak,” Dell’s tablet is noticeably smaller than the iPad, and boasts several features that could make it an attractive alternative.

And a rhyming title, no less!

Few acronyms carry the same weight in the world of technology like HTML. The coding language has stood the test of time, enabling countless web developers to bring their pages to life ever since the very inception of the Internet. While developments in other programming languages have made HTML’s wordy commands seem redundant and needlessly complex, the growing presence of Web 2.0 technologies have been particularly unkind to the language. Advanced media integration, including video and audio, were difficult and buggy under older versions of HTML.

Enter HTML5, the much-touted 5.0 upgrade to the language recently released by W3C. The goal of the upgrade? Cut down on the amount of code needed to perform the type of actions most common in Web 2.0. Web app developers have a lot to be excited for in this new upgrade. For example, old versions of HTML required extensive coding to implement video, usually revolving around the successful implementation of video and flash plug-ins. UsingHTML5, this is no longer needed. HTML itself is capable of hosting and playing the video files. The same is true of audio, with a variety of formats working smoothly.

From a creative standpoint, there are several other upgrades that allow for some fantastic looking web pages. HTML5 enables users to drag-and-drop elements of the page to a new location, allowing for a strong visual element in website design. Similarly, the new HTML supports the JavaScript-enabled Canvas, which allows the designer to draw graphics.This does wonders for animated elements of the website. Graphic design can be done using HTML5 quite easily with minimal use of JavaScript.

The trend with HTML5 is simple, yet a vital step forward for the language. By simplifying the language while simultaneously allowing for more customization, HTML5 makes the programming language more self-sufficient. In the past, in order to adequately design a web page, designers would need experience not just with HTML, but with a variety of other languages needed to patch the page together. However, HTML5 allows users to perform a variety of operations within just the one programming language. The net result? A more stable and easier-to-use platform that allows for even greater usability. The path to a gorgeous web page just became more accessible to all of the Internet.

Some days, it must be hard to be number one. Undoubtedly Rockstar Games, developers of the critically-acclaimed Grand Theft Auto series, feels the continual pressure that goes hand in hand with their past success. While the company has several different studios spread throughout the United States, each is expected to put forth a quality product worthy of the Rockstar brand name. Rockstar San Diego, the studio behind Red Dead Redemption, hadn’t previously attempted a game of this magnitude. Known primarily for the Midnight Club street racing games, something along the lines of the newest Rockstar title had never come from the jewel of the west coast.

Red Dead Redemption, however, is a triumph of a video game, one of the best available on this generation of consoles. While comparisons with GTA are perhaps inevitable, the originality and atmosphere of the Wild West are present within Red Dead Redemption in an all-encompassing sandbox. Never before has the western genre played out so well in a video game. You play as a rugged and gun-toting cowboy, returning to the West for reasons that aren’t clear in the game’s steadily-paced opening act. While some might fault the title for starting a bit slow, this patient story telling brings out the true star of the game: the vivid world itself.

Yesterday we featured three excellent releases from Google that had incredible potential to lengthen the company’s lead in the world of cloud computing. Earlier this week we featured YouTube, the revolutionary video site owned by Google, as they celebrated their landmark fifth birthday. As if all of this Google-related news wasn’t enough to begin with, today (May 20), Google announced something capable of topping all prior announcements. Partnering with Sony, Logitech and Dish Network, Google is attempting to bring us a solid product where so many before have failed: our televisions.

Google TV, which was announced with one of the company’s trademark stylish videos, looks to synchronize all sorts of video media into one source for viewing on the television. The technology, at least in the video, looks fairly straightforward. With an Internet-connected television (or adapter box, for those of us without the brand new TV models), the user can search for media in a Google Chrome-esque bar. The video in question turns up from a variety of sources, including NetFlix, YouTube, and other online options. Sony and Logitech have plans to incorporate the system into televisions, while Dish Network will provide a small adapter box serving the same purpose.

While it’s an amiable goal on the part of Google, their success here could very much be a game-changer. For one, virtually every other company who have attempted such a thing have failed. AOL had AOL TV, which fell through. Microsoft’s Windows Media Player showed a lot of promise, but was brought down by difficulties in video formatting and relative difficulty of use. Even Apple has failed at this endeavor, with an Apple TV option that was closely related to your iTunes video library. While Apple’s incarnation was perhaps the best, it still suffered from limited video selection, primarily because videos had to be purchased from their official store.

If Google can manage to succeed in this endeavor, then they will be treading upon, not just other Internet companies, but also posing a threat to the entirety of television. While Internet-based TV may very well be the way of the future, there are some serious doubts for the time being. For one, high quality broadcasting would require a large amount of bandwidth, and YouTube videos could look grainy and poor on a high-resolution TV screen. Nonetheless, I suppose Google knows what they’re doing. Keep your eyes open for Google TV in the near future!

Google is on its way to a banner week in the computing world. Google, longtime proponent of computing in the cloud, did more than its fair share this week to improve the internet as we know it. With a trio of online releases aimed at serious online applications, Google is attempting to re-assert themselves as the company to beat on the world wide web. Today on the Smarter Gadgets Blog, we’ll be taking a closer look at this release, showing how each of these unique developments has the potential to transform the way you use the Internet.

Google Font API

Perhaps the least exciting of these advances, but still important, is the release of the Google Font Lab. While this tool won’t apply to anyone but serious web designers, it does provide a great opportunity for improving the look and feel of a website. The available fonts, which are open source, are high-quality and come with a host of subtle effects. If you select the link above, you’ll see Google showing off its “Tangerine” font, which curls delicately with a built-in ever-so-slight shadow in the background. While it’s still in beta, the database provides the needed code for developers to employ a variety of these fonts.

There’s been a growing controversy involving Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg and the status of Facebook’s seemingly ever-evolving stance on user privacy. Over the past year, users of the social networking site have seen the terms and conditions of their use modified several times, including once earlier this year where backlash forced the company to re-think it’s position. Well, with the most recent wave of Facebook redesigns comes a whole new host of issues. Namely, people are unwittingly sharing their information with the Internet, thanks to the “Share with Everyone” option on Facebook. While it could easily be interpreted as sharing with everyone in your social network, the answer, unfortunately, is that the whole world is exposed to this information.

This initially was an issue that was known only by a few, but suddenly, the whole world has been exposed to the website Openbook, which conducts searches of open Facebook profiles for all sorts of embarrassing stuff. Anything you’d like to search can be typed into the Openbook search engine, which then rifles through those poor souls who have their profiles set to open. All sorts of secrets are revealed, including people voicing complaints about work, significant others, and even the most intimate details of their personal lives.

Openbook, which had been circulating through websites such as Reddit and Digg earlier this week, officially went mainstream today thanks to a brief posting on Huffington Post, prompting even more attention on the Internet. The website states that its goal is to call attention to the security deficit on Facebook, hopefully to encourage enough of a reaction out of users in order to promote change. While it’s possible to better-secure your profile on Facebook, the average user seems (based off of search results…) to think they are entirely safe.

As always, when using a social networking site such as Facebook, discretion is the better part of valor. While setting your privacy settings to their most restrictive is a good way to protect yourself from unwanted profile views, users need to take responsibility for the things they are posting online. If you don’t want the entire world to know about it, why would you post it on the Internet? Such is the difficulty with the 21st century. The Internet never forgets, so make sure you’re not telling it something that will be embarrassing down the road!

Over the last five years, YouTube has become so much more than just another Internet address. From its humble beginnings to its purchase by online powerhouse Google, YouTube has become synonymous with online video, utterly dominating the video-on-demand market. Now, as the website celebrates a landmark birthday, YouTube faces an unknown future of a peculiar sort. While no one holds the longevity of the website in question, YouTube has several paths it could go down over the next several years.

First and foremost, YouTube has yet to to actually turn a profit, which has thusfar been the greatest weakness of the venture as a whole. While advertising revenue has certainly increased over the last several years, the immense amount of video that is hosted by the website makes it difficult to entirely compensate their costs with their income.

There are over 24 hours of additional video uploaded to YouTube every minute, and those numbers continue to grow. Some YouTube videos are beginning to have advertisements prior to the video itself, but it’s likely that widespread use of such a tactic would anger users; part of YouTube’s strengths is that they haven’t resorted to this tactic.

Oh, and did we mention that they’re all free?

As a first-time Mac owner, I’ve been slowly adapting to the difference between Mac OSX and Windows, and I must say that the transition hasn’t always been a smooth one. While both Mac OS and Windows come with their own suite of programs intended to give the user a solid base to work with, Windows benefits from having a better selection. The content-management system on a Mac is built around the program that are initially included, which is great for beginning computer users, but annoying for someone who knows what they’re doing. At any rate, today we’re looking at three great apps for Mac that will streamline your computing!

GIMP

Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP is the Mac answer to Microsoft Paint. Except that it’s light years better. Gimp is used primarily for simple and straightforward image manipulation, including cropping and retouching pictures. This is an excellent addition to your Mac if you don’t want to shell out the big dollars for a more powerful program such as Adobe Photoshop. The user-interface is straightforward and intuitive and should be familiar to anyone with other image-manipulating experience. It can also combine multiple images into an animate GIF format, which is a great option to play around with.