Okay, maybe it isn’t exactly a “Spectacular” but J.D. does update the summer’s geek movie calender while El Kaiser hashes out the differences between an Image Macro and a Meme. In the news rumors abound that Apple is getting set to unveil new versions of their OSes; Windows Phone gains traction; Google debuts their virtual personal assistant software; and McDonald’s gets set to offer breakfast all day.
Tag Archives: Windows Phone
Episode 41: April Foolishness and Big Data
This week we go big on Pop Tech Jam! Technology expert and author Phil Simon talks to J.D. about his new book, Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data and Pedro reviews two new headphones in his never-ending quest for the perfect subway headphones. In the news, Amazon’s Cloud Drive service takes on Dropbox; Microsoft’s Windows Phone making inroads against Apple and Android’s dominance; Google’s new privacy czar; and mobile ads that talk back.
Episode 41 News: Game of Bacon
Tech companies do love the April Fool’s Day gags, don’t they? In general, some “jokes” work better than others, but everyone seems to be moving on and getting back to business as we ease into spring. Take Amazon — its Cloud Drive can now give your files that syncing feeling. The company just released a new desktop app for Windows and Mac gives that lets you copy files to your online drive by just moving them into a desktop folder, just as you can do with Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox and other services. (As Ars Technica and others have pointed out, the app requires Java, but not that worrisome browser plug-in.)
Microsoft is getting it out there: Windows Phone handsets seem to be getting some traction in the marketplace (right before BlackBerry has sold a million new Z10 phones already) and the Internet Explorer 10 almost doubled in market share, thanks to the Windows 7 version arriving in February as an automatic update. Windows 8 is still trying to find its place in the world, and has risen to claim 3 percent of the desktop operating system pie, according to Net Applications in its report for March.
Meanwhile, over at Google, Alma Whitten, the Director of Privacy, is leaving the job this summer. Lawrence You, an engineering director, will be taking over the privacy-and-security department in June. In other company privacy news, Google is facing new probes and possible fines for privacy violations in Europe. (And on the topic of international incidents, Apple CEO Tim Cook has written a letter of apology to the company’s Chinese customers. )
Talking back can get some results and Nuance, the speech-recognition company, is working on mobile ads that can talk back to customers. Hopefully, the ads will wait until they are spoken to before nattering on about the product.
Out in space, astronomers have discovered a new comet that could be one of the visibly brightest in decades. (But will it be as popular as Halley’s comet, which has turned up in song, story and tapestry for centuries? Eh, probably not.) Hopefully, the Mars rovers will get a few good shots of Comet Ison when it passes by the Red Planet — and US astronaut Buzz Aldrin hopes the United States will take a shot at sending astronauts to Mars. He lays out a plan in his new book, Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, due out May 7th.
And finally, spring is here on the northern hemisphere, on the calendar if not in the weather forecast. Baseball is back, and so are a few very popular TV programs, including the BBC’s Doctor Who (which featured a geektastic episode about scary Wi-Fi) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (which broke the BitTorrent Swarm record with more than a million downloads in less than a day). HBO, however, does not seem to be worried.
Fans of these two franchises can also take in David Tennant (the beloved 10th Doctor) in the BBC miniseries Spies of Warsaw this month, and enjoy John Lanchester’s 4,600-word essay on George R.R. Martin’s opus in the London Review of Books. Both might be a nice distraction for all those who were crushed to find out, alas, that Scope Bacon was not real.
Episode 40 News: Robocops and Robbers
Hate unauthorized robocalls on your cellphone that eat into your monthly minutes? The Federal Communications Commission has issued citations to two big political robocall companies accused of spewing audio spam to mobile numbers in 2011 and 2012. The firms could face up to $4.8 million in fines for this particular investigation. FCC rules and the Communications Act ban robocalls to mobile phones unless the recipient has given permission to be contacted by the company doing the calling or unless the call is part of an emergency information system. (Dirty tricks are an unfortunate part of politics and it appears there was even a cyberattack on the online election system last fall. )
Samsung finally whipped the veil off its Galaxy S4 smartphone last week and the fancy new model should be on sale by the end of April. The Android-based Galaxy S4 is bringing Samsung a lot of attention for its hardware design, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that some Google executives are getting worried about that because it may mean Samsung wants to horn in on mobile-search revenue. Samsung has been tinkering around with its own mobile operating system as well.
Google itself it keeping busy and is said to be working on a new note-taking app called Google Keep that works a bit like the popular Evernote service and uses its own Google Drive cloud storage system. Some sources are also saying the company will soon be unifying its multiple messaging services — which include Google Talk, Hangout, Voice, Messenger, Chat for Drive collaboration, and the Google Talk for G+ — into one fresh new service called Babble that can go up against Apple’s iMessage service and BlackBerry Messenger. Google’s recent decision to kill off Google Reader has proven to be good news for the Feedly RSS service. The Los Angeles Times and others have reported that Feedly gained half-a-million users after Google announced it was dumping Reader and robbing the faithful of their favorite RSS software.
Electronic Arts says that customers who buy and register SimCity 5 before March 26 can choose a free game from a selection of EA digital downloads including Mass Effect 3, Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled 3. Since SimCity 5 arrived in early March, many players have blamed the “always online” requirement for causing bugs, in-game glitches, crashes and long waits to even get on to play the game. Electronic Arts is also investigating a security issue with Origin, its online distribution system. Security researchers have experimented with exploiting a loophole in the way Origin handles links to games users have downloaded and installed, and they’ve been able to make it run code that compromised a target machine. (On a happier note, visitors to New York’s Museum of Modern Art can now see SimCity 2000 on display, along with several other classic games in the Applied Design exhibit.)
Microsoft would like you to update your Windows 7 machine to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 if you haven’t already done so. If not, Microsoft will start doing it for you this week as part of Windows Update. Microsoft has also stamped an end of mainstream-support date of July 8th, 2014 for its Windows Phone 8 software, which has started speculation that Windows Phone 9 may be on the way soon. And over in Cupertino, Apple released iOS 6.1.3 this week to fix a pesky flaw that knowledgeable intruders can use to blow by the lock screen.
And finally, Verizon could be to changing up the way it charges its customers for channel subscriptions on its FiOS TV service. The company would like to charge subscribers just for the channels they actually watch. This move could potentially weed out little-watched channels from the lineup, change how Verizon pays networks for their shows and make for more stable pricing. It could also make room for newer, more interesting channels. (Yo, Disney, how about a 24-hour Star Wars channel?)
Episode 40: Robocalls and Broken Hearts
J.D. clues us in on some useful websites that help you navigate other websites to easily update complicated privacy settings, cancel subscriptions and lots more. El Kaiser’s heart is shattered by Google as they pull the plug on Reader, their Web-based RSS feed aggregator, but he pulls it together long enough to talk to Aaron Bernstein of the Texas-based SerialKickers about their new ArchMount iPad tripod mount and how online crowdfunding sites and 3D printing could give small startups an edge. In the news: Google frets over Samsung’s Android hardware dominance as the Korean electronics giant debuts a new flagship smartphone; the FCC takes on political robocallers; hackers target Florida’s online election system; and Verizon looks to pare down their FIOS channel offerings by tracking viewing habits.
Episode 31 News: “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”
Late last week, the Department of Homeland Security issued an alert about a flaw in Oracle’s Java software that could have potentially put 850 million computers at risk. Apple, Mozilla and other companies advised uninstalling or disabling Java until an update was available and Oracle put the pedal to the metal and rushed out a fix over the weekend. Security experts, however, were still dubious about patch, lingering security issues or even the need to still run Java in the first place.
Java security flaws are also suspected in a wave of cyber-espionage attacks on computer networks used by several international governmental, scientific and diplomatic agencies The attack campaign, dubbed “Red October” by security firm Kaspersky Labs, seems to have been active since 2007 and continues — albeit without the brawny Sean Connery-Alec Baldwin star power of the 1990 film that was made from the namesake 1984 Tom Clancy thriller, “The Hunt for Red October.” (The film version is available to stream on Netflix, and if you have a Nintentdo Wii, you can also watch it there since Amazon’s Instant Video service is now available on your game console.)
In case you have too many online friends and can’t keep track of their interests, Facebook just introduced a new feature this week called Graph Search. This future tool lets you match up people on your friends list with things you are looking for, like buddies with similar hobbies — as long as they’ve shared the info publicly. Graph Search is in the beta stage and may cut into LinkedIn’s territory more than Google’s as some have speculated. Also in the social-network news: MySpace made its redesigned site available to the public this week.
John Scully, a former Apple CEO, said the company needs to adapt to a changing world by overhauling its supply chain to meet demand for cheaper smartphones in emerging markets. Competition from Samsung, which has now sold more than 100 million Galaxy smartphones, is probably adding to Apple’s angina. (Some research has even shown that younger buyers consider Samsung’s phones way cooler compared to the iPhone, which may feel like the 1990’s in reverse for the longtime Applefolk.)
But while Samsung and Apple duke it out in the profitability-and-popularity contest, Microsoft is still trying to get developers to write apps for its Windows Phone handsets. Perhaps in a whiff of reality-show excitement, the company launched a contest this week called “Window Phone Next App Star” that invites developers to create and submit their apps for judging and rating by public voters. Research in Motion is also in app-gathering mode and just got 15,000 new apps for the BlackBerry in about 37 hours thanks to a couple of Portathon sessions that invited developers to port versions of their apps for other systems to the BlackBerry OS for fun and prizes.
Meanwhile, up on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity Rover is rocking out and may be doing some drilling up on Mars. Yay, science!
Finally, we here at Pop Tech Jam note the passing of Internet prodigy and programmer Aaron Swartz, who sadly committed suicide at the age of 26 last week. Swartz, who helped create RSS at the age of 14, worked on other Web applications and was an advocate for freedom of information and open access online, was facing a Federal trial this spring for downloading millions of scientific journals, scholarly research and other documents from MIT and the JSTOR archive. While MIT has launched an internal probe of the events leading up to Mr. Swartz’s death, activists like the Electronic Freedom Foundation have called for an overall in computer crime law. Requiescat in pace, Mr. Swartz, and thank you for making the Internet a better place.
Episode 25: Planes, Trains and Cyber Monday Mania
Cyber Security expert David Perry of AhnLab phones in with tips on how to protect yourself online during the Holiday shopping season plus J.D. and Pedro discuss apps that might make holiday travel a little bit easier. In the news, Microsoft and Apple have up and down weeks; Google decides it doesn’t need the last month of the year and is rumored to be working on an Airplay alternative; and Nintendo debuts its new gaming console.
Gimme Some Space!
If NASA’s latest mission to Mars has you all hepped up on the space program again, you don’t have to go farther than your smartphone or tablet to touch the sky. The agency itself has several software goodies, including the official NASA app for iOS and Android so you can keep tabs on the Mars Curiosity rover and other projects in the works. (Speaking of Curiosity, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a nifty new iOS app last month called Spacecraft 3D that lets you virtually check out the rover up close.) Remember, if you don’t have a smartphone or tablet, you can also find most of this stuff on the official NASA Web site.
For real space heads, it’s not just about NASA, though. Just search for astronomy in your local app store, and odds are you’ll get plenty of hits (even the BlackBerry PlayBook has the $2 Stellarium app in the BlackBerry App World). For example, there’s the $3 Star Chart and the free, open-source Sky Map for Android, which had a lot of input from Google and Carnegie Mellon University. Deneb Software has a similarly named app called SkyMap for Windows Phone for less than two bucks.
On the iOS side, there are plenty of astronomical options, including a pair of slick apps from Vito Technology called Star Walk (for stargazing, $3 to $5) and Solar Walk (for a 3D solar system experience and on sale right now for a buck). Many advanced astronomers favor the $7 Luminos app for iOS for views of 3D textured planet and moons in detail. Space Junk Pro is a similar app — for $5 you can track satellites, planets, stars and other stuff floating high above your head and it’s available for both iOS and Android.
Need more astronomy apps? Check out these roundups and collections for Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone.
And while it’s not quite mapping the sky, the free Planetary app for iPad maps your music collection to a series of animated intergalactic visualizations. While the deep-space picture show may seem a little weird when listening to, say, banjo music (unless you have the right song), it really rocks the screen if you tap up a bit of Gustav Holst.
Gold Medal Apps for the 2012 Olympics
Need an app that lets you keep up with the 2012 Summer Olympic games in London? If you’re cruising the mobile Web on an Android or iOS device, quite a few await you. The London 2012 Organising Committee, for example, has three apps of its own, including Join In and Official London 2012 Results. The Results app is also available for BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 users. If you need to pass the time between events, there’s also a game app where you can actually play a few sports on the screen while you’re waiting to find out who won men’s single canoe slalom.
NBC, which has the U.S. broadcasting rights for the Games has a mobile Web site for phones with browsers, plus two apps for Android and iOS users. The NBC Olympics app offers live event updates, medal counts, video clips, photos and more. If you have a user name and password from your cable or satellite provider, you can use the NBC Olympics Live Extra app for real-time streams and full video replays of all 302 events in the Summer Games. (For those in the U.K., the BBC has its own app action.)
Want to know more about the athletes on the American squad? The United States Olympic Committee has a free app called Team USA. The USOC app takes a personal look at members of the US Olympic and Paralympic teams, with bios, photo galleries and video clips, plus social media connections for Facebook and Twitter. And if sports photography is your cup of tea, the Thomson Reuters news service also has its own London Olympics 2012 app for iOS devices. Now then, let the Games begin!
P.S. The official London 2012 mascots still kind of creep me out… Are they staring at you, too?
