Category: Editorials

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Anyone Can Buy Google Glass on April 15th, but Should You?

google glass cameraOn April 15th at 6am PDT Google will open up the Explorer program to anyone interested in owning their own heads up display.

Here’s the deal though, it’s still a BETA product, and it’s still fairly expensive. While it’s currently our best hope for a consumer, wearable, eye-level computing solution, you’ll have to pony up $1500 + Tax to grab one of your own.

I’m very positive on Glass, but it’s fairly apparent that Google hasn’t handled the launch of this project well. The general public is still fairly ignorant as to what Glass can and can not do, resulting in dramatic interpretations of privacy abuses. People have been written tickets for wearing them while driving, restaurants have asked customers to leave for wearing them, and an Explorer was even physically assaulted by a mob of people.

Google should be praised for pushing the envelope, but the Explorer experiment was flawed from the beginning. When it’s an invite only program for geeks, and the cost of entry is north of $1500, you have to expect that a statistically significant number of participants wont be the kind of people that you’d want as ambassadors for something so new. This has resulted in the coining of the term “Glasshole” to represent people who use Glass in a rude fashion. Unfortunately that term is starting to generically describe anyone with Glass, as it only takes one bad apple to taint the whole bushel. Continue reading “Anyone Can Buy Google Glass on April 15th, but Should You?”

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For the Traveling Geek trying to pack light… ish…

On our recent vacation to Vancouver, I wanted to pack as minimally as possible. I have a rep in my family for packing an obscene gadget backpack, and using very little of the gear I bring. I wanted to see how minimally I could pack and still participate digitally.

Goodbye backpack.

WP_20140413_20_42_05_ProMy first task was whittling down the bag I travel with. Instead of my normal Canon backpack, or one of my Booq pro bags, I opted for a small travel camera sling. I love all the pockets and dividers you get with a camera bag, even though I wasn’t packing my DSLR.

The nice thing about a sling, it keeps everything cinched down pretty tight, while allowing me to have the use of both of my arms. I’ve started using them over my old messenger bags when I’m on the go.

Only ONE phone?!?!?

WP_20140413_20_45_04_ProEven near home I tend to have two phones on me at any given time, so leaving the country with only one phone already had me feeling a little vulnerable. I opted for the Nokia Lumia Icon for a couple reasons. Even though it’s a Verizon phone, it’s completely unlocked. It also allowed me to leave my point and shoot camera at home, as the only compromise I’d have to make is not having a zoom lens.

After landing I grabbed a Virgin Mobile SIM card with a meager amount of data, but I pretty much relied on WiFi during my visit. Using a Nokia worked well for travel as I was able to download maps directly to my phone and use them offline with HERE Maps to get around town.

Only my Google+ usage suffered because stupid Google still won’t let us Windows Phone users upload pics and videos or use Hangouts. Pretty much every other social network was included in my touristy food pic uploads, even VK. No Google+, but I could upload to VK. How messed up is that… Continue reading “For the Traveling Geek trying to pack light… ish…”

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Just for Fun: When Tech PR Get Into a Twitter Fight – HTC Edition

htc pr twitter fightCompanies keep such tight reigns on their marketing and messaging, that when the occasional “human” moment leaks through it can be oddly refreshing. One of the top fights in smartphones right now is the HTC One M8 vs the Samsung Galaxy S5. You can expect a little A LOT of smack talk from these respective camps over the coming months, though it’s rare to see a company wade into a fight directly

Fanboi flame wars are tiresome, but coming direct from corporate, this was kind of fun. Here’s HTC Senior Global Online Communications Manager Jeff Gordon (@urbanstrata),  taking the bait.

Click here to enjoy the carnage.

 

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Select AT&T Phones Now Supporting Google Wallet Tap & Pay, But Is It Too Late For NFC?

Google wallet on ATT LG G2The saga of mobile payments continues.

I woke up this morning to find my LG G2 had an update ready to install. I couldn’t find any changelog for what was being updated or what bug fixes were included, but I went ahead and ran it. Immediately following the procedure my phone had a new notification from Google Wallet.

Tap & Pay functionality is now supported on my LG G2.

Google tried to shake up mobile payments almost two years ago introducing the idea of NFC backed mobile payments. The first devices supporting it were the Nexus line, for me personally, the Nexus 7 tablet. I tried it out exactly once, as trying to pay at CVS with a mini-tablet tethered to my phone’s data connection was cumbersome to say the least.

Since then we’ve seen something of a feud over mobile transactions between Google and various carriers. Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T worked together on creating the ISIS platform, which is slowly starting to find support on the phones sold by those companies. Over this time period they largely blocked any momentum for Tap & Pay by banning Google Wallet on the devices they sold.

Is it too late for NFC?

Almost two years where consumers could have been getting used to the idea and building an infrastructure were essentially lost.

Recently it was announced that Best Buy and 7-Eleven would be getting rid of their NFC supported mobile payment machines. Credit card terminals which are more expensive to install, require more cashier training, and often can result in higher fees from banks.

More competition in this space is looming  from the Merchant Consumer Exchange. Like Best Buy and 7-Eleven, other companies such as Target, CVS, and Sears are a part of the MCX and are considering their own payment protocol based on barcodes like the ones used at Starbucks. A system like this could gain traction quickly as NFC payments require a special radio which the iPhone lacks, but barcodes only need to display on your screen.

The knowledge of this outside competition might be just the pressure needed to ease some of the entrenched cold war between Google and the carriers, but their squabble has cost them a considerable lead.

Are you currently using an NFC payment system like ISIS or Wallet? Are you more likely to try one in the future? Leave us a comment below!

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Office for iPad hits 12 million downloads, Microsoft still relevant…

BkUaUk-IMAAv3bJIt’s the thing about tech blogging which most gets under my skin, the confirmation bias. I love a little snark and editorial with my news, but the reality distortion field surrounding certain topics can be suffocating.

The Office for iPad roll out had a taste of that in the tech community. There was the expected gnashing of teeth over how long it took to port the suite over to the iPad, criticisms I also shared reflecting an older Microsoft which grossly underestimated their competition. However, it was some of the social media backlash I found most interesting. The idea that we just didn’t need Office anymore, that there were Office solutions available on the iPad which were “good enough”, and that Microsoft was so late, they weren’t relevant anymore.

Yesterday Microsoft announced via a tweet that Office for iPad had been downloaded 12 million times. It’s easy to get big numbers when you put out something for free, but that’s 12 million devices which now will potentially start converting more Apple users into Microsoft customers.

If anything it’s a small sign that Microsoft is starting to figure out that being a services company means having to make your services available to popular platforms. It’s another babystep out of the pit of irrelevance they were crawling into, and hopefully it means this tech game will get a bit more interesting this year…

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Corrupting User Moderated Web Sites: Reddit – r/Technology bans Tesla stories?

reddit bannerAn interesting meltdown happened this weekend on social news site Reddit. The popular site is divided into different categories, and the subreddit dedicated to Technology let slip they had banned stories related to the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla.

Reddit’s reputation is based on an almost obnoxiously user-generated democratic etiquette. On the ground level, users submit stories, and other users vote up or down for those stories to become more or less visible. With each subreddit, users also comprise the “governing bodies” responsible for maintaining order. This allows the people who actually own Reddit and keep the servers running to have a somewhat hands-off approach to Reddit’s daily operations. It also paints Reddit as being “pure”, a meritocracy, not owned by a corporate interest pushing some kind of commercial or political narrative.

Of course people are fallible and corruptible.

Reddit user canausernamebetolon posted that he had discovered an odd quirk in r/Technology, that stories with the word Tesla in the title were not showing up on the subreddit. Asking a moderator why that was, he was told “Battery cars aren’t ‘technolgy’ any more than normal cars are” [sic]. After pushing for more clarification, the user was banned from r/Technology with the following reply:

Car stories should be submitted to car-related subreddits. Please inform your supervisors in the Tesla Motors Marketing department.

Continue reading “Corrupting User Moderated Web Sites: Reddit – r/Technology bans Tesla stories?”

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The HTC One (M8) shipping experiment – Making up for lost time…

BjlVMumCUAAdNS6There used to be a time when a company would announce a new product, and that product would be available to purchase roughly around the time of the announcement. In the every increasingly visceral pace of tech advancement, now we hold previews to announcements, and once a gadget is announced it can take weeks or months before it’s actually available to consumers.

With the unveiling of the M8 yesterday, HTC launched an agressive campaign to make the phone available to consumers. Critical timing as Samsung has already taken the wraps off of the Galaxy S5, but hasn’t yet started shipping it.

Working with AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, HTC is already selling and shipping the phones through carrier websites. Those signing up on Big Red can walk into select stores and see the phone in person. How refreshing. Announcing a product which is actually ready to ship. Continue reading “The HTC One (M8) shipping experiment – Making up for lost time…”

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Your New Reality Is Ready – A look at the newest VR and Augmented Reality from GDC

As I take in the sights and sounds of Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2014, and the occasional suspicious smell, which I overhear someone claim is that of hot dogs, a deep feeling of suspense starts stirring within me.  A merciless coup is forming poised to strike with undaunted ferocity.  The harbinger, a very specific new trend with the capability of completely disrupting everything we think we know about gaming.  No, more than that.  Reality itself.

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Virtual and augmented reality is about to mount a full-scale invasion on your sense of “the real.” It is about to change the way you consume interactive and passive content.  An assault, amassing so much power and such allies, before it even lands upon the shores of our consumer collective consciousness, it is doing everything in its power to win the war before a single shot is fired.

At every recent tech convention, the absolutely longest line, by far, to experience the latest and greatest in entertainment and gaming is not at any long-established heavyweight veteran’s booth.  It is, instead, snaking along the perimeter of a brand new, fresh-faced, hyper-ambitious startup’s booth.  The banner reads, “Oculus.”  And this phenomenon is repeated at every other booth showcasing their wares via a “generation one Oculus developer’s kit.”

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Having taken the Oculus experience for a spin at CES a few months ago, I will not be waiting in the hour-plus line to demo a couple minutes of the developer’s latest generation Rift, sporting 1080p displays, much wider field of vision, and low-latency buttery goodness.  I will say, at CES, it lived up to every shred of hype I had heard prior, even exceeding my unfairly high expectations.  But here at GDC, what I was more taken in by was the very fact that I was staring at a booth filled with dozens of people jacked into Rift headsets, lost in a world separate from this one, truly immersed and interacting inside in a virtual sphere.

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Then… the trumpets sounded, the heralds cried, and Sony announced Project Morpheus.  Their own version of a totally immersive, HD, virtual reality headset, complete with infrared head-tracking, stylish blue LED-glowing trim, and tailor-made to be a bold companion peripheral to their own Playstation. Continue reading “Your New Reality Is Ready – A look at the newest VR and Augmented Reality from GDC”

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