Filed under: Features, Misc. Gadgets

Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

Previously on Movie Gadget Friday, we traveled across war-torn galaxies in the 1978 version of Battlestar Gallatica. Moving forward a few years to 1982, we'll take a look inside the computational arcade culture of TRON. Saturated with neon suits and Pac-Man blips and bleeps, the sci-fi cult Disney film has achieved pop culture status over the years.

The ENCOM Digitizing Molecular Laser
Using a matter transform sequence and a grid matrix, the ENCOM Digitizing Laser is able to transport physical matter into a digital space. The laser is able to lock on a target and dismantle the molecular structure on a cubic grid. When used for its original intentions, the molecules remain suspended in the laser beam. However, the Master Control Program is able to deviate this sequence into transporting the restructured molecules into a digitized computer game world where TRON resides. The molecules can then be shifted back safely into the physical world by selecting the run mode through the laser system. Surprisingly, the only side effects the laser has on humans is minor disorientation and temporary memory loss. Phew. More after the break.

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Filed under: Wearables

Oh sure, we've seen gadgets used as motivational tools before, but Sega Toys is apparently banking on you not being a hothead. Otherwise, you just might fling its Body Trainer headset from your dome as soon as you hear "please exercise a little bit harder" over your incessant panting. Nevertheless, those with oodles of self-control may actually benefit from having a personal trainer (of sorts) in their ear while working out, and by monitoring the wearer's heartbeat via a sensor, it can blurt out messages at the appropriate time to help users through their session(s). Reportedly, this nifty exercise buddy is set to launch in Japan this April for ¥5,775 ($54), and while we've no idea if this thing is destined for US soil, we can definitely see it being used more so for its musical abilities and less for its steadfast encouragement.

[Via CNET]

 

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Today was the last day of early voting in Texas’s primary election. Historically, I have never voted in a primary election. I’ve never felt I identified enough with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates. Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed me to make a legitimate claim to being “non-partisan.” (While some election officials, political scientists, and others who you might perhaps prefer to be non-partisan do have explicit partisan views, many more make a point of similarly obscuring their partisan preferences like I do.)

In Texas, you are not required to register with a party in order to vote in their primary. Instead, you just show up and ask for their primary ballot. In the big city of Houston, any registered voter can go to any of 35 early voting locations over the two weeks of early voting. Alternately, they may vote in their home, local precinct (there are almost a thousand of these) on the day of the election. There have been stories of long lines over the past two weeks. My wife wanted to vote, but procrastinating, we went on the final night to a gigantic supermarket near campus. Arriving at 5:50pm or so, she didn’t reach the head of the queue until 8pm. Meanwhile, I took care of our daughter and tried to figure out the causes of the queue.

There were maybe twenty electronic voting machines, consistently operating at between 50-70% utilization (i.e., as many as half of the voting machines were unused at any given time). Yet the queue was huge. How could this be? Turns out there were four people at the desk in front dealing with the sign-in procedure. In a traditional, local precinct, this is nothing fancier than flipping open a paper printout to the page with your name. You sign next to it, and then you go vote. Simple as can be. Early voting is a different can of worms. They can’t feasibly keep a printout with over a million names of it in each of 35 early voting centers. That means they need computers. Our county’s computers had some kind of web interface that they could use to verify the voter’s registration. They then print a sticker with your name on it, you sign it, and it goes into a book. If a voter happens to present their voter registration card (my wife happened to have hers with her), the process is over in a hurry. Otherwise, things slow down, particularly if, say, your driver’s license doesn’t match up with the computer. “What was your previous address?” Unsurprisingly, the voter registration / sign-in table was the bottleneck. I’ve seen similar effects beforehand when voting early.

How could you solve this problem? You could have an explicit “fast path” for voters who match quickly versus a “slow path” with a secondary queue for more complicated voters. You can have more registration terminals. You could have roving helpers with PDAs and battery-powered printers that try to get further back into the queue and help voters reconcile themselves with their “true” identity. There’s no lack of creativity that’s been applied to solving this class of problems outside of the domain of election management.

Now, these voter registration systems are not subject to any of the verification and testing procedures that apply to the electronic voting machines themselves. Any vendor can sell pretty much anything and the state government doesn’t have much to say about it. That’s both good and bad. It’s clearly bad because any vetting process might have tried to consider these queueing issues and would have issued requirements on how to address the problem. On the flip side, one of the benefits of the lack of regulation is that the vendor(s) could ostensibly fix their software. Quickly.

To the extent there’s a moral to this story, it’s that the whole system matters. For the most part, we computer security folks have largely ignored voter registration as being somebody else’s problem. Maybe there’s a market for some crack programmer to crank out a superior solution in the time it took to read this blog post and get us out of the queue and into the voting booth.

(Sidebar: Turns out, the Texas Democratic Party has both a primary election and a caucus. Any voter who casts a vote in the primary is elgible to caucus with the party. The caucus locations are the same as the local polling places, with caucusing starting 15 minutes after the close of the polls. Expect stories about crowding, confusion, and chaos, particularly given the crowded, small precinct rooms and relatively few people with experience in the caucusing process. Wikipedia has some details about the complex process by which the state’s delegates are ultimately selected. There may or may not be lawsuits over the process as well.)

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Jeremy Jaynes, considered one of the biggest spammers in the US was sentenced to nine years in prison for violating a Virginia anti-spam law. As part of his appeal, Jaynes claimed that the anti-spam law itself was unconstitutional, as it violated his right to free speech. It would appear that argument hasn't worked out, as a somewhat divided Virginia Supreme Court has ruled against him, upholding the conviction. It does raise some interesting first amendment questions -- but most spamming activity involves so many other things that could be considered illegal (such as computer trespass, identity fraud, false advertising, etc., etc., etc.) that you would think spammers could be convicted on charges that have little to do with free speech issues.

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Baidu has decided to enter the IM space today, announcing plans to launch something they’re calling “Baidu Hi.” According to CenterNetwork’s Allen Stern, they’ve been working on the project for about a year, and they’re currently anxious to get the thing out the door, ramping up their hiring efforts to get it done (though they haven’t yet disclosed when exactly that is going to be).

Baidu is the Chinese search engine with the most market share there, and much like all the American search portals, they specialize in site search and multimedia search. They’ve also got the Chinese version of Wikipedia pegged down with their own collaborative encyclopedia named Baidu Baike.

Most recently, Baidu has made headlines for getting sued for the ability for users to come to the site and search for unsecured MP3s on public servers (something you can do with just about any search engine in the world). The lawsuit [PDF] names numerous infractions and is seeking 7 million yuan ($1 million USD) in damages.

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I’ve seen this one crop up several places today, but most recently from Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat. Its being described as a stealth startup and its called Fididel, named after a Mexican restaurant the CEO went to this one time. The CEO is Hal Wendell and he is a ‘veteran’ of companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Nortel. This $1 Million is in addition to it’s $761,250 already previously raised from private investors.The website is sparse, and indicates very little of what it plans to do or how it plans to do it (though it bills itself as ‘the future of e-commerce’).

The only thing I can find on the web indicating any further details is that an employee called Kelly Williams is trying to recruit powersellers currently boycotting eBay to give the system a shot (with a free trial for six months - no listing fees!).

We give no reccomendation to the site (as we haven’t seen anything but their splash page), but if you want to take Kelly up on her offer, you can email her.

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The White House has and many other governmental organizations that deal regularly with the print media press have a term - it’s called “Take Out the Trash Day.” It refers to the fact that newspapers only have so many column inches with which to print stories, and if a bunch of bits of news are released on a Friday, less of those stories will see the light of day due to that limited space.

Enter the Internet.  We don’t have pesky limitations like column inches.  Yet it is still fun to call it take out the trash day - because a lot of these stories we wanted to get to, but other stuff got in the way over the course of the week - so we’re lumping them all together in the SMCB post.

In this issue:
Facebook Moderator Gets Subpoena in Wikileaks
You’re A Wanted Fugitive In The US And You Blog, Maybe Don’t Mention Plans To Travel To A US Territory
Facebook denies turning in Mourtada (more…)

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While a bunch of consumer groups have come out in favor of keeping the internet neutral, a bunch of civil rights groups are taking the opposing view. However, the reasoning is hard to follow, as it doesn't make very much sense: "The effective prioritization of P2P traffic would represent an altogether new type of 'back of the bus' second-class status for our speech on broadband networks -- and ought to be resoundingly rejected." Actually, it's the use of traffic management that would create a second-class status for some traffic. Preserving network neutrality does exactly the opposite -- making sure all packets are treated equally. What the groups seem to be saying -- incorrectly -- is that by not using traffic management, P2P traffic is prioritized. That's not true. It's treated equally with any other traffic.

It's completely fair to argue that treating all packets equally doesn't make sense -- as many have. However, to claim that treating all packets equally somehow makes some traffic "second-class" is an outright misrepresentation. No one denies (perhaps other than these civil rights groups) that traffic management is all about officially making certain kinds of traffic second-class. They just argue that this is necessary and reasonable. The filing by these civil rights groups is simply backwards.

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Filed under: Laptops, Storage

We know, we're getting tired of Apple Blu-ray rumors as well -- they're right up there with refreshed Cinema Displays in terms of rumor persistence -- but until Steve and the gang actually shove a drive into a machine we're stuck with them. The latest says that Apple is actively pressing Sony for slot-loading BD-R drives but quality control issues are gumming up the plan. Reportedly, this latest ho-hum MacBook Pro refresh was to feature BD-R drives, but all Sony could muster up were Blu-ray / DVD±RW drives, which Apple refused. That seems a little odd, frankly -- now that the format war is over and the competition's already shipping mid-range laptops with slot-load BD-R drives, you'd think Apple would want to cash in that Blu-ray Disc Association membership card with whoever can supply the drives. As always, we'll see when we see -- it's gotta happen sometime, right?

[Image courtesy of dadako.com]

 

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The SXSW extravaganza in Austin has been an application king maker for the last two years at least; Google's Dodgeball blew up there in 2006 and Twitter went from elite-chic to massively popular there in 2007.

Who's it going to be in 2008? We look at five possible contenders below, taking into consideration the special magic that is the SXSW experience. Lots of startups are hoping they'll go big next week in Austin, but in all likelihood only one, maybe two, actually will.

Why SXSW?

The event is huge, it's filled with creative people, the weather is warm and there's lots of parties. The panels are good enough to comment on but not so good that people aren't also communicating about a bunch of other things.

It's also more likely that someone will blow up at SXSW this year because of Twitter's high-profile success last year.

What does it take be a hit?

A winning app has to be easy for lots of people to use and has to provide clear value to conference and party-goers. It might seem valuable only at SXSW but end up proving itself afterwords due the scale achieved in Austin. That was the case with Twitter, which I and I'm sure others planned to stop using after SXSW. Photo by super-photographer Scott Beale/Laughing Squid

Buzz momentum leading up to the event is also very important. If a good number of savvy web lovers have just become power users of an app before SXSW, it stands a great chance of reaching critical mass there.

Finally, it has to perform reasonably well for a high-traffic week. Other than a underwhelming hallway demonstration, Twitter held up better at SXSW last week than it has at almost any time since.

So here are my favorites for possible breakout apps in Austin. What are yours?

The Contenders

Live streaming video
Qik, Mogulus, Ustream, BlogTV or Yahoo! Live

Live streaming video has built up a lot of interest in recent months, with the entry of big players and the announcement that Live YouTube is coming soon raising that interest to an all time high in recent weeks.

Live video is great for events because it leaves users feeling empowered and provides immediate feedback when you see how many people are watching your live feed.

Why this won't be it.

Live video is not easy for large numbers of people to use. Despite being easy to do, it's hard to do well and frequently. Most people aren't very good at it and anything but the right hardware equals fail in a public event setting.

AIR Twitter
Twhirl, Snitter

Third party Twitter clients built on Adobe's AIR are beautiful and compelling. They aren't believed until their seen. People in Austin will look over each others' shoulders and say "what is that?"

Twitter clients will probably grow in user numbers a lot before and after the conference sessions in Austin. I love Twitter and will be celebrating our first anniversary together in Austin.

Why this won't be it.

Don't count on anything Twitter working. Despite recent hires that were supposed to solve the scaling problems, Twitter will probably suffer extensive downtime during a week-long giant event. It is much, much bigger than it was last year, but you'll probably hear as much complaining about Twitter at SXSW as you will praise.

If Twitter can hold up that would be great, but desktop apps already have one strike against them at an event so dependent on mobile communication.

Alternatives to Twitter
Pownce

A more sophisticated but less used alternative to Twitter, Pownce could come in to fill the gap. It's already got a small but vocal fan club of web elite.

You may hear a lot of people saying in Austin, "that's it, I'm moving to Pownce."

Why this won't be it.

Twitter loyalty runs deep, even during the down times. Many people are unable to break the habit no matter how angry they (we) become. Pownce is a little more complicated and hasn't been experiencing a significant upturn leading up to SXSW.

Better conference resources
Sched.org

Sched is a just-released event schedule interface build by Taylor McKnight. The schedule part of the SXSW website is not good and Sched.org makes it a lot more usable. It's easy to dynamically plan out your day on Sched, selecting both official and unofficial events listed there. Then you can shoot the URL of your personal calendar off to a friend.

Sched creator Taylor McKnight is the man behind the geek-loved PodBop and the designer of version 2.0 of the Hype Machine. He and Sched co-creator Chirag Mehta also built Chime.tv, a feature rich video aggregator worth checking out.

These guys do smart little things, like letting you view group schedules by adding multiple usernames joined by commas in a Sched URL and offering a forehead slapping "why didn't I think of that" account creation and login proccess. A lot of people are already talking about Sched on Twitter and I expect it will get good traction in Austin. Here's my schedule, if you're interested. I haven't filled anything out yet.

Continued below screenshot

Why this won't be it.

Sched.org is more "wow" than it is seriously useful. People come and go from events at SXSW, schedules don't hold steady hour by hour. The site is also pretty slow and doesn't have the same social appeal or feature set as Upcoming does. Finally, nobody cares enough about what you're doing at SXSW to want a full copy of your scheduled panels and parties to attend. There are so many fun people there that it's better to just see who you get to see by chance. Except for you, Taylor McKnight, because you owe me a beer.

Activity feed aggregation/ Lifestreaming
FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a super simple way to view all your friends' activities on Twitter, del.icio.us, Mag.nolia, YouTube, Flickr and lots of other sites - all in one place. It's going to be great for SXSW. Flickr is a big part of tech events but FriendFeed is going to make it even bigger, with all of a photographer's friends seeing their photos - not just those that go to Flickr itself.

Friend discovery gets nailed in FriendFeed - plug in some accounts of yours around the web and it will recommend friends with similar interests all day long. That means rapid scale up in network effect and big ease of use. The "people who find you interesting" feature is really flattering and it's always good to appeal to the ego. Here's my ego on FriendFeed.

I've placed a link to FriendFeed in my browser toolbar and am already clicking on it throughout the day to see what my friends are bookmarking, what photos they're posting and to see a finite number of peoples' tweets. You can leave inline comments on any item's link in Friend feed or say you like a link of someone's with one click. It's already getting a lot of traction and I think it's going to blow up big in Austin.

More likely than Pownce, you're going to hear people saying that Twitter down-time is less of a bummer because the rest of FriendFeed is still available.

The service launched publicly this week, was founded by ex-Googlers and just announced $5 million in VC funding.

Smart, connected attendees of SXSW (and who doesn't want to be one of those?) are probably going to be dropping in at FriendFeed all week while half paying attention to panels. It's like Twitter but better in some ways; it's more expansive, more interactive and so far more stable.

Caveats and Pitfalls

FriendFeed might not scale well. There's not a mobile component. It's not the prettiest thing in the world to look at. There's no API so there's no ecosystem around it to make it more awesome - something that's been very important to Twitter's ongoing success.

Conclusion

The killer app in Austin might just be beer, it's hard to say. The time and conditions are right, though for somebody's service to prove itself on a big, important and informal stage though. Good luck to all the innovators looking for a good time at the conference.