JOSSIP IN-DEPTH — You can watch YouTube on your iPhone. You can watch obnoxiously encoded video file formats on your BlackBerry. You can watch live TV on your Sprint or Verizon phone. But no matter your smartphone or service provider, mobile television is generally a terrible experience, even for the most diehard Jets fan who isn't satisfied refreshing ESPN's mobile site every 12.5 seconds. The experts are speculating about mobile TV's future — namely, that it's in jeopardy given the economic recession we're confronting, where Americans don't have the $10 or $25 to put toward premium mobile services every month. Or, another theory: CONTINUED »
Sure, everyone was impressed by how 21st century this election has become: Those CNN undecided voter squiggle lines, to those amazing "magic" electoral maps, and perhaps the most impressive feat of all, Barack Obama's promise to text his VP choice to interested citizens, landing him the largest bank of volunteered cell phone numbers in history.
But in describing how great it is that Barack Obama has harnessed the power of new technology for his campaign, Slate's Farhad Manjoo inadvertently brings up an unasked question: Why are you giving Obama anytime access to your free text minutes? CONTINUED »
Friday was the national holiday one degree more meaningful than Flag Day: Talk Like a Pirate Day. You are sad that you missed this chance to show your patriotism by stealing things. Thus, you are invited to push this button to celebrate belatedly. [Open Salon]
Much like Al Gore inventing the Internet, the prospect that John McCain invented the BlackBerry is something the liberals are going to latch on to, even though, technically, they're taking the assertion out of context. Speaking to reporters on the campaign trail, McCain's top economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin responded to a question about what his candidate did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets — by holding up his BlackBerry and pronouncing, "He did this. Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
Indeed, manufacturer Research In Motion might beg to differ, as might McCain himself. But what Holtz-Eakin did wasn't just throw seasoned bait to the left-wing attack dogs, but he also connected John McCain with DESTROYING AMERICAN FAMILIES!!! CONTINUED »
If you are one of those Esquire readers who pays an annual subscription fee to keep the magazine afloat, by now you've realized the Hearst men's book doesn't value your reliable dollars enough to send you one of the blinking "21st century" E Ink editions of its 75th Anniversary cover. Instead, you got this. Door prize? The editor's letter begins not after 55 pages of Gucci and Calvin Klein ads, but on page 3.
You're standing on the north side of 14th Street, watching a man take a tire iron to an electronic store's display window and then begins looting the place. Or some drunk girl thinks throwing a traffic cone at on-coming cars in front of Pianos would be amusing. This is what your 5 megapixel camera phone is for! Snap that jappy bitch and text it to 911. The emergency line, and 311, is now accepting your cell phone pics and video, which means your iPhone doesn't just mean you can become a citizen journalist, but also a citizen crimefighter!
But be forewarned. This does not mean you should start sending 911 pictures of the sandwich that Subway screwed up your order on. And 911 operators have shown a tendency to reprimand those who waste their time by uploading unnecessary emergency phone calls to YouTube, so prepare to see the pictures of you mooning the camera that you sent as a joke posted to Flickr. And if you do send in an emergency-worthy photo, and a dispatcher messages you back "I don't give a shit about the man holding the serrated knife to the woman's throat," know that you do have recourse.
Microsoft spent $10 million lure Jerry Seinfeld away from his Macintosh-using television character to star in an advertisement with the company's most well-known face, Bill Gates. The ad showed the pair squishing shoes together and walking in a parking lot. It did not mention Windows Vista, the software giant's very expensive fuck up to get the world's business and consumers to keep dumping money into their pockets. The point of the ad was to reverse the tide of negative feelings toward Microsoft. While Apple is championed as the design-friendly underdog, Microsoft is the 800 guerrilla with fangs. So it might be bad, then, that tech bloggers the web over have thrown Microsoft in an outhouse and loaded a wrecking ball aimed squarely at the porta-pooper. CONTINUED »
Barack Obama promised supporters he would tell them his VP pick before anyone else if only they would hand over their cell phone number and agree to download five ringtones a month for the low price of $9.99*. (* This last part is not true.)
Too bad the Times and the rest of the MSM broke news that Joe Biden was Obama's choice before anyone received their super-special 3 a.m. text from Team Obama. That, and pranksters managed to fool some into thinking Michael Phelps and Mickey Mouse was Obama's running mate, thanks to 1) the ease of sending texts; and 2) the gullibility of Americans.
When the text finally did go out, a whopping 2.9 million people got Obama's note, which would've cost the average thumb puncher some $290,000, assuming a 10 cent-per-TXT fee. Maybe Barack got a discount; maybe he had a bunch of people in his campaign send out the message and then let them use it as a tax write-off.
But having been beat by the press and been subjected to devious hoaxes, one might argue Obama's cell phone gimmick became a poorly orchestrated publicity stunt. Nope, it was so much more CONTINUED »
Just when you thought you had licked the cyber-terrorists that were ruining Facebook (MySpace is a lost cause now), you are hit by these bastards in your very home(page). A spambot called Rustock has been flooding inboxes with what appears to be CNN's top stories of the week. When people got wise to that ruse, the virus morphed from fake headlines at CNN to fake headlines at MSNBC. You will recognize these spam headlines because they are equally as sensational, but namecheck Michael Phelps.
Koobface is not the latest thingamajig in the arsenal of objects you can throw at other Facebook users. Instead, Koobface is a set of two new computer worms (like viruses, but more interested in spawning than infecting) that are spreading themselves all around Facebook and its lesser predecessor MySpace through the sites' comments sections. Users are tricked into involuntary computer infections when they click on links titled "Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street," which might've been a headline on TMZ but is actually a nefarious attempt to get people to download a video player "patch." And if you upgraded to the "new" Facebook, you probably deserve it. [D'Technology]
A Hollywood madame not named Heidi Fleiss accidentally hit "reply all" when responding to a john, alerting her entire email list to her client roster. "The list includes a well-known movie producer, prominent club owners, restaurateurs, real estate tycoons, a politician, a sex tape king, an owner of a major sports team and a Prince." The technological deficient whore ringleader is v. v. sorry about her mistake, but also, she's got a girl for $2,500. You want? [Scandalist]
Great news for lazy television viewers and soap opera addicts: Recording shows on your DVR is not a violation of copyright law! The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York even said so, dismissing claims from evil networks like Turner Broadcasting, 20th Century Fox, CBS, ABC, and NBC, which, back in 2006 when DVRs were just an ugly acronym, considered the technology an affront on their God-given right to make you watch terrible ads for local car dealerships and LavaLife.com. The television networks now have the option of appealing to the Supreme Court, instead of accepting the challenge of DVRs and producing better programming. [Photo: Chris Madden]
All that concern about Americans losing their TV signal when the government-mandated switch from analog to digital takes effect in February? Kinda not worth worrying about! "Nielsen Media Research now says that as of July, just 9.3% of U.S. TV households are completely unprepared for the changeover to digital TV signals come next February. This is down from a 10.5% number in January." Way to get on the ball, rural America.
Back in the good old days of the Internet, when you Googled "dumb motherfucker," the first result you got back was a link to a store selling George W. Bush tees. It was the result of a "Google bomb," where crafty blogger types gamed Google's search engine algorithm by linking specific keywords to a single site, to juice up the chances anyone searching for those keywords would be pointed to the site they favored. There have even been contests to see who could come up with the most creative use of search engine optimization tricks to get various phrases linked to specific web addresses. But now, no fun Google — who has long frowned on the practice — says it's disabled the loophole entirely. CONTINUED »
To pull off its blinking September cover, Esquire will implement microcapsules filled with pigment that are thinner than a human hair that, when juiced with a slight electrical charge, produce an image on the top of the surface. Just so you know how much trouble David Granger went through to make the most obnoxious magazine to hit newsstands ever.
It took only a six-figure investment, a Chinese engineer making a special battery, manufacturing gurus in Texas and Ohio, and sponsorship from Ford for Esquire to move forward with plans to turn your local newsstand into the flashing nightmare that is Times Square.
To celebrate his magazine's 75th anniversary, David Granger (claims to have) dreamed up the idea to produce an electronic cover. Now, it will be revealed, with 100,000 copies hitting newsstands in September with an embedded battery to power a slim display screen.
Reserving an exclusive license from E Ink (the same guys behind Amazon's Kindle), Esquire's flashing front will blink "the 21st Century Begins Now." Not only will the cover be 100 percent annoying, it'll also be eight years late — and, by the time you get around to fishing the issue out of a stack of unread magazines five years from now, vintage.
If you were going to sit around a conference room and brainstorm with some brilliant minds on what you could take away from the newspaper industry next, what would it be? No, not the fact that its product still makes a mess of your hands — we're talking revenue streams. Craigslist all but decimated their classified business. When Jeff Taylor started Monster.com fourteen years ago, he started what eventually would decimate their job listings business. So what's the next big idea that can usurp the struggling industry one more time? Dead people. CONTINUED »
To prevent kids from purchasing cigarettes at automated vending machines, the techno-geniuses in Japan are rolling out machines with face recognition technology, which aims to age verify a buyer to make sure he's of age. To circumvent the technology, kids who want to purchase cigarettes at automated vending machines can simply hold up a photo of someone that's of age. [PT]
Editorial Director
