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Keen On… Tyler Cowen: Why The Internet Isn’t As Innovative As a Flushing Toilet (TCTV)

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:39:21 +0000

We are not nearly as innovative as we think we are. That, at least, is the view of Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason university and the author of The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better , a book which argues that we are failing to invent technology (like flushing toilets) that radically changes the world. I caught up with Cowen yesterday at David Kirkpatrick’s Techonomy conference in Tucson, where he conducted an excellent debate about the impact of technology on jobs with Race Against The Machine , author Erik Brynjolfsson (moderated by TC’s Erick Schonfeld). And he didn’t pull his punches in dismissing most of today’s supposedly innovative technology. Yes, the Internet might be “fun”, he acknowledged, but it isn’t having the same positive impact on society as the invention of the flushing toilet, or television or the automobile.This is my first interview from Techonomy. we’ll also post an interview today with Race Against the Machine’ s Erik Brynjolfsson and his co-author Andrew McAfee. And later this week, we will broadcast interviews with Microsoft Chief Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook and Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee.

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Keen On… Tyler Cowen: Why The Internet Isn’t As Innovative As a Flushing Toilet (TCTV)

Steve Case: It’s Crazy You Have To Be An Accredited Investor, But Don’t Have To Be An “Accredited Gambler”

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:49:42 +0000

AOL founder Steve Case has a three-point plan to get job growth back on track in America, and it all revolves around ways the government can spur more entrepreneurship. Over the past three decades, high-growth companies created 40 million jobs. “It accounts for all the net job creation,” Case tells me in the video interview above. I sat down with Case yesterday at the Techonomy conference. Case is the chairman of the Startup America Partnership and sits on the White House Jobs Council. He thinks the U.S. should: 1. Reform its immigration policy to make it easier for skilled workers and entrepreneurs to come to this country. “We are losing the global battle for talent,” he says. 2. Unlock access to capital by making crowdfunding legal and changing capital gains for certain types of investments 3. Change regulations and Sarbanes-Oxely to make it easier for smaller companies to go public. His crowdfunding proposal would require the government to relax the rules around accredited investors (i.e., wealthy individuals) being the only ones allowed to invest in private companies. Some crowdfunding proposals out there would allow anyone to invest up to $10,000 in a private company without being an accredited investor. “It seemed crazy to me that you have to be an accredited investor to invest in a company,” says Case, “but you can go to Las Vegas and lose $10,000 at the table in an hour but you don’t have to be an accredited gambler to do that.” More startups will create more jobs. Case also thinks the threshold for Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements for public companies should be raised from today’s $75 million market cap to only kicking in for companies with $1 billion or more of market value. When he took AOL public the first time twenty years ago, “80 percent of offerings were under $50 million.” Now it’s the reverse. Smaller companies simply aren’t going public, they are being sold instead. And that actually hurts jobs, because “job growth decelerates” after most acquisitions, says Case. He adds that “90% of job growth is after a company goes public.” In the video clip below, Case talks about the “Second Internet Revolution” and the sharing economy that he is personally investing in with LivingSocial And Zipcar. (He talks more about LivingSocial and Groupon in this third outtake here ). We also discuss why Internet startups haven’t yet had a big impact on sectors like education and healthcare. (TechCrunch is owned by AOL, although Case is no longer involved with the company).

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Steve Case: It’s Crazy You Have To Be An Accredited Investor, But Don’t Have To Be An “Accredited Gambler”

Siri Cracked Open, Theoretically Opening It Up To Other Devices (Or Even Android!)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:11:54 +0000

Serving as a stark reminder that there are people on the Internet who are way, way too damned clever, the guys over at the iPhone design/development house Applidium claim to have cracked open Siri to take an unsanctioned look at its ( her? his? ) inner workings. In a rare (but quite welcome. I mean, by us. Probably not by Apple) move, they’ve gone on to do a rather detailed debriefing of how they got through. So, what does this mean to you? Theoretically , it means that support for Apple’s voice-powered portable assistant could be hacked not only onto devices like the iPhone 4, but to anything from laptops to Android phones as well. As the italics on “theoretically” imply, though, there’s a bit of a catch. The catch: in the end, anything attempting to communicate with Siri’s backend needs to have a valid iPhone 4S identification string, unique to each 4S. In one-off experiments like this one, spoofing that string with one pulled from an actual 4S is somewhat simple — Apple wouldn’t (/couldn’t) ever really notice. If someone were to hack together an Android app and distribute it, though, the massive influx of requests all originating from the same unique ID would almost certainly trigger a blacklisting. Unless the app had a massive pool of authentic unique IDs to rotate through, the fishy activity would be pretty easy to discern. I’d highly recommend reading Applidium’s full rundown of the process, but here’s the tl;dr breakdown: By connecting Siri to a local router and then dumping data as it came through, they realized that Siri was sending all of its data to a server that we’ll refer to as “Guzzoni”. All trafic sent to Guzzoni was sent through the HTTPS protocol. With the “S” in HTTPS standing for “Secure”, this traffic wasn’t subject to simple packet sniffing. So they had a new idea: make a fake Guzzoni server, and see what came through on the other end. After a good bit of ridiculously clever SSL certificate trickery, they got Siri sending commands to their fake server. With each command comes the “X-Ace-Host” string, which appears to be unique to each iPhone 4S. After figuring out how Apple was compressing (read: not encrypting) the data, Applidium was able to decompress it and parse out a rough sketch of exactly what was being sent (including which audio codec Apple was using), and what Siri expected in return. With that process done, Applidium attempted to talk to Siri without any iPhone 4S in the equation. Their first challenge? Speech-to-text from a laptop running a custom script. Sure enough: it worked. Siri chewed through the sound file (a recording of them saying “autonomous demo of Siri”), didn’t bat an eye (as their tool was using their iPhone 4S’ actual unique ID), and returned a mountain of data detailing what Siri heard and how sure it was about each word. Incredible. The Applidium guys have provided a few tools for others to recreate their steps — but, as it currently stands, there’s not much that can be done to take this beyond a rather cool proof-of-concept.

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Siri Cracked Open, Theoretically Opening It Up To Other Devices (Or Even Android!)

Herman Cain’s 404 Page Is Actually Rather Clever [Politics]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

I see what you did there, Herman Cain. Sneaky and hilarious, but for what it’s worth, your 404 page is probably getting more hits this week than your entire site. Even though you’re probably not going to be president, you, sir, win Internet of the Week. Now let’s go and celebrate with some manly, meaty pizza . My treat. [ Copyranter ] More »

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Herman Cain’s 404 Page Is Actually Rather Clever [Politics]

Best Buy Preps $249 Asus Transformer For Black Friday

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:01:22 +0000

The ratio of awful tablets to good ones in this year’s Black Friday ads doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence, but there are some good deals to be found even at this early stage. Case in point: Best Buy’s leaked Black Friday circular has the first generation 16GB Asus Transformer for $250, a respectable $150 drop from its current price. Much like with Staples and their bargain-basement BlackBerry PlayBooks , this doorbuster deal is only for people with the guts to wait in line for it. The big question though, is whether or not it’s worth risking life and limb to acquire. Let’s not forget, after all, that the Transformer Prime is barreling down the pipeline with a better processor and camera in tow as we speak. Still, the Transformer’s solid Tegra 2 chipset and 10.1-inch display make it one of the better tablet options available during the post-Thanksgiving mayhem. Better one of these than a Coby Kyros or a “ Polaroid Internet Tablet, ” after all. I’m sure the temptation of a low price already has some bargain hunters working out their Black Friday logistics, but here’s a thought — why not stay at home as see what Cyber Monday has to offer instead? Call me lazy, but in this case, I’d rather my credit card and clicking finger get a workout instead of schlepping around in the cold with 1,000 other people.

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Best Buy Preps $249 Asus Transformer For Black Friday

WhereIsTheCool.com: A Lazier Pinterest for Men

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 03:08:11 +0000

With its pink and white color scheme and emphasis on self expression, Pinterest has found a rapidly growing audience of women, and investors are lining up. But guys might not find content for them on Pinterest’s home page. Hell, even its Cars & Motorcycles channel is filled with hot pink Hummer limos. Enter WhereIsTheCool.com , a black and red site of photos showing off the lifestyle men aspire to — speed boats, surfboards, and slick tuxedos. It’s designed for laid-back browsing like a men’s style magazine, rather than something you have invest time in like a girlfriend. Originally, founder Jack Archer (even his name is stylish) tried to translate GQ into a iPad magazine with monthly editions. Turns out the market wasn’t ready for an all digital mag in 2010, so he redesigned it as a photostream website that constantly updates. This feeds the content addiction of the modern man, and now the site has over a million page views a month and 27,000+ Tumblr subscribers. Where Is The Cool’s home page displays roughly 20 penthouse apartments, rugged actors, and the women those come with. Another page of what’s crave-worthy is a click away. An infinite scroll option would be faster, but so much vivid content could get overwhelming. Visitors can click through the photos to view them full size, share them through social media, and check out where they were first posted. That’s it, no flashy tech, just good taste and good design. Archer has it tough. His job is to scour the internet for what’s cool, and sift it out of user submissions. The “Contribute” page features an ugly, old-school web form that should really just let you enter URLs of photos, as most entries on the site don’t include any text. While he’s got a team providing support, its essentially a one-man, bootstrapped operation. To monetize, Archer sprinkles in the occasional sponsored photo from men’s fashion retailers like Mr. Porter whose products could just as easily hit the site organically. Where Is The Cool has also signed big buys for banner ads with brands like Land Rover and Banana Republic. Even if its visitors can’t afford the fighter jets or vacation home it shows, just activating desire for such objects can be a satisfying, masculine experience. In a culture of men lusting for distraction, Where Is The Cool wins with simplicity.

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WhereIsTheCool.com: A Lazier Pinterest for Men

How To Be An Optimist In A Pessimistic Time

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:35:12 +0000

Editor’s note : Contributor David Kirkpatrick the author of The Facebook Effect and founder of the Techonomy Conference , taking place Nov. 13-15 in Arizona. It’s no secret to most readers at TechCrunch that technology is changing the world. Unfortunately, there are a surprising number of people who don’t get it. Many of them, even more unfortunately, are important leaders in business, other powerful institutions, and⎯most⎯governments. To meet the challenges that face us⎯whether as leaders of organizations, as leaders of countries, or as the global community addressing our collective challenges⎯we will only be successful if we unreservedly embrace technology and innovation as essential tools. For those of us who believe in the vast potential of technology to solve problems, it is both an exciting and a frustrating time. The world’s people are embracing cellphones. More than two billion people use the Internet. Facebook continues its extraordinary user-empowering spread, and the Weibos fill a similar role in China. Advanced companies around the world are redesigning their systems and management to accommodate the new realities of a flattened, technologized business environment. The people of the world have recognized that technology can alter and improve their lives. Those tech-empowered billions in the developing world will not be satisfied languishing in second-class status. They know about what we have in the developed world and they want more of it for themselves. Fair enough. But how can they get it? How can access to food, shelter, transport, healthcare, and education expand rapidly enough to satisfy the justifiable demands of the world’s people? How can we produce enough energy for a globally-rising standard of living without choking on the fumes? And if we do not succeed in doing so, what are the consequences for global stability? What happens to the world if the scales of wealth do not begin to balance? At present we are not leveraging our resources quickly enough⎯or efficiently enough⎯for all the planet’s people. Worse, the world lacks enough leaders who understand the potential for new, technology-driven solutions for global problems. To the degree that there is such leadership, it is concentrated in the business community. But even there, an understanding of tech’s potential is disturbingly uneven. Some companies thrive by embracing new methods of marketing, managing, developing products, and engaging with society. Others, by contrast, steadfastly operate in the old ways. Compounding the complexities is a growing geographic disequilibrium. The U.S., Western Europe, and Japan dither over how to address their severe economic problems, often beset by political gridlock. China, by contrast, with almost one-fifth of the world’s people, forges ahead, installing high-speed trains, energy-efficient power plants, and planned cities. China just does it, democracy be damned. This is unnerving to the rest of the world, which cannot help noticing that China’s economy, along with India’s, Brazil’s, and a few others, isn’t enduring the same economic malaise. Despite all, there is great cause for optimism: technology writ large—not just IT and the Internet but energy tech, biotech, civil engineering, and science-based progress generally—can revitalize growth and help create a more just, interesting, and prosperous world. In effect, the fastest-growing resource in the world is computing power and storage. At a time when resource consumption is growing faster in general than resource production, it is incumbent upon all leaders to take advantage of the resource that technology presents us. The countries where that is understood are the ones investing aggressively in technological R&D and in education, especially for science, math, and engineering. It is in large part the fear that existing resources cannot match human needs that drives the thick cloud of pessimism that prevails today in the world. The Greeks may no longer be able to retire young, enjoy their social democratic benefits, and still pay their bills, because there is not enough wealth to go around. Italy may follow, and some say France could be next. What if we closed ranks around what we know technology can do to improve the efficiency of literally everything? What kind of world could we create? Technology-driven progress is rapidly reducing the global economic divide. This has in fact been true for a long time. If you doubt it, go to gapminder.org and look at the data. (Load Gapminder World , watch the animation of “Health and Wealth of Nations,” and be amazed at the progress.) Those of us who are technological optimists also see plenty of ways that tech can help enormously with our other grave challenges⎯climate change, cultural misunderstanding, food shortages, inadequate housing, antiquated transportation, and reliance on unsustainable energy sources. Change from now on is likely to be bottom-up—driven by people empowered by iPhones and Android devices, and by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google. It is a new environment for business and for government, and our transition into it is fitful, incomplete, and sometimes frightening. But people are not going to accept the old answers. It is an enormously exciting time. Tunisia was exciting. The cost-of-living protests in Israel were exciting. And both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are exciting. All these developments show that ordinary people are paying closer attention to what’s happening in the world, and demanding more from their ostensible leaders. People no longer feel powerless and they are taking action. The most exciting thing about technology-based development is that it is not zero-sum . Rapid progress in other parts of the world does not mean a decline in already-developed countries, though that is what is more or less happening at present. We have been given a great gift by the exponential rate at which technology improves, undergirded by that old standby, Moore’s Law. As the speeds and power of hardware improve, we can do more with software. With better software we can design better and more efficient vehicles and buildings and cities and healthcare systems and chemical plants. Despite all our optimism, tech is no panacea. There are real and troubling questions emerging globally about the impact of tech on jobs, for example. It seems more and more likely that while technological progress improves productivity, global GDP, and aggregate social wealth, it will replace more jobs than it creates. Separately, security concerns are growing almost as fast as new technological capabilities. We can see a new world of efficiency and connectedness coming into view. But there is the real risk it could be undermined or even stopped by those who do not want global prosperity⎯be they criminals, terrorists, or renegade governments. But if all of us who believe in technology’s promise organize our voices more effectively, and work together to understand and exploit its macro impact, there should be wonderful days ahead for the world. Our job is to keep pointing a big neon arrow towards technology as an underutilized tool. There are plenty of reasons to be an optimist in a pessimistic time.

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How To Be An Optimist In A Pessimistic Time

In Defense Of The Stylus

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:06:00 +0000

A little while back, I got an email from Atmel, one of the leading touchscreen makers, asking if I wanted to check out their latest creation: a new active stylus that works with an improved touchscreen, for stylus actions alongside normal finger-touches and technologies like palm rejection. I passed, because to be honest, it didn’t sound very exciting. It has shown up at a few other websites, though, and I thought (slightly apologetically) that I should at least watch the video. I did. And — it’s not very exciting . Yet despite being a third-class citizen in our world of capacitive touchscreens, being publicly ridiculed by Steve Jobs, and generally being considered a nuisance, the stylus isn’t something we should relegate to the company of floppy disks and CRT monitors just yet. Here’s why we can’t write it off. The first styli, strictly speaking, were used by the Romans, since they invented the word. But cuneiform writing was performed with a primitive stylus as well, and certainly it was used before then, though they were probably used more for scraping marrow from mammoth bones or the like. The point is they’ve been around for a long time because they have always offered certain advantages. They still offer them now. First, a stylus amplifies your input. With a stylus you can make quick and precise movements of a number of sizes. Ever wonder why nobody writes longhand with their finger? By amplifying small but precise movements that can be done rapidly, handwriting was made possible in the first place, as well as things like detailed drawings and paintings. Even if you’re drawing in the dirt, you do it with a stick. Second, it dampens your input. This seeming contradiction is at the heart of why a stylus, pen, brush, or what have you is so powerful. While it allows you to amplify the movements you make by extending their effective range, it also allows for more precise control by utilizing the gamma motoneuron system. This is (if I remember correctly) a sort of global tension control in your motor system that allows you to ratchet up the tension in lots of muscles in order to have more precise control over them. Have you ever noticed that you were unconsciously clenching your jaw or tightening your neck muscles while performing an action that required great precision and concentration? That’s the gamma system’s effects spilling over onto adjacent systems while it ups the quality of your hand’s movements. We use this system while we write and draw; haven’t you ever noticed how tightly some people grip their pen or pencil? By overshooting the tension required, the gamma system allows for tiny adjustments and quick but exact actions. The fine controls of our hands and fingers, however, are designed more around gripping and applying various amounts of pressure, not making tiny movements. Third, you can see what’s under the stylus. This is essential to artists, of course, but it also completes a simple visual feedback loop in which you can tell what you’re touching. With a fingertip, past a certain point it’s guesswork. You see the button, you move your finger, and then you hope. But with a stylus, pen, or cursor, you see the button, you see where your control point is, you move it closer, you see it’s closer, you move it on, you see it on, and you click, or write a check mark, or tap. You can see that these advantages aren’t just, say, 20th-century advantages, for generations that needed pen and paper to record things. A surgeon uses a sharp stylus to perform surgery. A painter uses a soft stylus to make strokes. We all use stylii with special tips to screw in screws, flip eggs, eat chinese food. The stylus isn’t a holdover from an earlier age; it’s a fundamental add-on to human physiology. So why did Jobs mock it and leave it behind? For some time before the iPhone came out, the stylus was used because it was the only option. Capacitive screens were too expensive, or not precise enough. Resistive screens offered a compelling alternative to d-pad-based navigation, and the best way to interact with resistive screens is a stylus, not your fingertip. Jobs wasn’t ragging on the stylus, he was ragging on an old solution to a problem, a solution people hadn’t bothered updating. The uses and form factors of mobile phones are such that a stylus isn’t the best solution when it isn’t the only solution; a fingertip serves much better in most cases. But there are just as many cases, as with the mouse and the trackpad , where the opposite is true. Think about the Courier and the Noteslate , both of which generated a froth of enthusiasm despite not being real. The idea was a sort of next-generation paper notebook, stylus and all. You wrote things, you circled things, you touched them with your finger if that worked, you used the stylus if that worked. Some might say it was more of a throwback than a look forward, a product that clung to outdated notions of how we interact with information. Outdated as opposed to when – now? Does this imaginary interlocutor think that in 20 years, we’ll all still be using 10-inch glass screens, running our fingers across them, doing pinch-to-zoom? This excellent “brief” rant on interaction design points out just how shortsighted today’s devices are: entirely abstract, using next to no natural inputs or gestures, and totally inflexible. Seeing the things cooked up with a Kinect suggest a fusion of the virtual and the real that makes a tablet’s flat, static window look positively primitive. But clearly, to return to the topic at hand, Atmel’s state of the art touch solution isn’t what we’ve been waiting for. An improvement to be sure, but it’s a far cry from the level of detail possible with a Bic and a sheet of paper, and until the stylus and screen pass that level of usefulness, the applications are limited (though it will likely work nicely with Windows 8). What needs to happen before the stylus becomes truly relevant again? One thing I saw earlier this year at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was a touch system by Atmel’s arch-enemy Synaptics that fairly blew me away. A capacitive screen that could detect both conductive and non-conductive items (say, a gloved hand or stylus), but passively, unlike Atmel and others’ active solutions (this has its own substantial shortcomings). Latency was also reduced by integrating the touch sensor with the display sensor. You have probably noticed that when you write something with a pen, the line appears immediately. The fact that it doesn’t do so when you use a stylus on a touchscreen is probably more disorienting than you think; you can’t error-check your own small movements at your own rate, you must wait for the machine to catch up. Low latency is a step in the right direction, and it’s one place where high-Hz display rates could be truly useful. Resolution is also important, as in so many other things to do with exactness and design. When I draw a short line and the aliasing makes it look like a tiny lightning bolt, I feel like giving up. The rumors of an iPad with a vastly higher resolution are nice, but they don’t help the stylus, since Apple has inoculated itself, rightly or wrongly, against stylus support for the rest of time. But Apple doesn’t make the displays, and these mega-resolution screens could help make the stylus worth using again. The touch ecosystem and the people within it need to realize their limitations, as well. Right now finger-based interaction is still novel, still being fleshed out (so to speak), optimized, still being applied to different models. But we’re already bumping into the borders beyond which this kind of touch, the iPhone kind of touch, will be useless. For typing, it has already proven a painful technology to use — so we have an accessory, not unlike the stylus we have mocked, for this basic act of computing. For any kind of actions that require precision, such as illustration, the capacitive screen is also useless, failing as it does to provide that feedback loop. Our interactions with tablets and phones are for the most part coarse and inexact, and entire UIs (witness iOS, which some would argue falls more on the side of simplicity than elegance) have been designed around this fact. We’ve gotten around some of these problems with clever little tricks , and we’re constantly trying to invent new ones to expand the capabilities of what must be recognized as a very limited interaction method. Sooner or later someone will stand on a stage, as Jobs did, and ask “why are we still pointing and jabbing at our icons and applications like kindergarteners doing finger-painting?” And maybe he’ll show us, as Jobs did, how long we’d been rationalizing our poor choice in interface. Will it be Atmel on stage? Synaptics? E-Ink? Microsoft? Whoever it is, it won’t be for a while. The stylus today, let us admit, is impractical for a number of reasons, both design and technical, as Atmel’s video and every device available shows. But as touch goes from novel to normal to mundane, the angst of users stymied by its limitations will grow, and with that angst, demand for something new. The mouse rode a wave in the 80s. The iPhone rode the wave a few years ago, leaving the mouse behind. The next one will leave the iPhone behind, an artifact of the late aughts. What of the stylus? If we have truly exhausted the its applications, it won’t return, but I think it’s manifest that we have not. That was a long and winding rationalization for a perhaps irrational love of the stylus. But I firmly believe that its days are not done. Its weaknesses became a problem before its strengths were given a chance to shine. The stylus is as ageless as the wedge, the wheel, the projectile. We’ve reinvented all these multiple times. When technology catches up yet again to the pen, the pen will be ready.

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In Defense Of The Stylus

Why Mobile Flash Died: An Adobe Employee Speaks Out

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 21:53:31 +0000

Adobe’s mobile Flash efforts have recently gone the way of the western black rhino, and Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers isn’t too pleased with how the Adobe chose to broke the news. In fact, he feels so strongly about it that he’s offered up his own clarifications on the matter . “Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it,” he said on his blog today. Fair enough — the official Adobe announcement was pretty abrupt. So, now that everyone’s settled down a bit, why did Adobe really pull the plug? Well, for one thing, Adobe realized that Flash would never reach the same kind of ubiquity in the smartphone space that its enjoys on PCs. Adobe’s own statistics indicate that the company’s Flash Player is installed on a staggering 99% of all Internet-enabled PCs . Meanwhile, their smartphone penetration numbers were considerably less impressive . To absolutely no one’s surprise, the iPhone played a crucial role here. With Steve Jobs and company having fully turned their backs on Flash, further attempts by Adobe to push Flash onto other smartphones would mean that developers would have to craft online experiences for two opposing tribes. That’s where Adobe’s focus on HTML5 comes in. Mobile browsers have grown to be incredibly savvy in recent years, a far cry from the dumbed-down WAP views we previously had to deal with. Considering that most major mobile browsers pack support for HTML5, trying to shoehorn Flash into the mobile content mix is fighting an uphill battle. According to Chambers, “on mobile devices HTML5 provides a similar level of ubiquity that the Flash Player provides on the desktop. It is the best technology for creating and deploying rich content to the browser across mobile platforms.” There’s also the issue of how users consume content on their devices. Smartphone users have the concept of “apps” drilled into their heads before they can even take their phones home, so it’s no surprise that they’ll turn to their respective app stores if they want to play a game. I sincerely doubt that average customers knew (or cared) that their devices played well with Flash, save for a few highly specialized circumstances. Lastly, it was a simple matter of manpower. Adobe has been a fan of HTML5 for quite a while now , and it’s stronger position in the mobile space has become more and more apparent. Rather than devote time and energy to working on a platform that 1) needed to be tweaked for different OSs and hardware configurations and 2) would never be as widely-used as they would like, Adobe decided that those resources would be better spent furthering HTML5 development. So, there we have it. Mobile Flash died a quiet death, which is perhaps fitting because it never made much of a splash while it was alive. Here’s to Adobe moving on to bigger and better things.

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Why Mobile Flash Died: An Adobe Employee Speaks Out

Teach Your Lego Robot How To Tweet With A Dexter Industries WiFi Sensor

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:09:40 +0000

When I was a wee lad, Lego were dead simple: nearly every piece was a square or a rectangle, and if you were lucky, you could split two pieces off of each other without breaking a finger. Consider my surprise then when the tinkerers over at Dexter Industries managed to create a WiFi sensor for Lego’s Mindstorms NXT line of smart blocks. The Mindstorm NXT line, to be brief, is the Lego set you buy for the person in your life who’s just a little too obsessed with robots. Essentially, you construct a machine out of the included plastic bits, and use the NXT Intelligent Brick to feed your creation commands and programs. Now, with the inclusion of the WiFi sensor, Dexter Industries has opened up those piles of bricks to the power of the internet. To celebrate the sensor’s release, Dexter Industries has also outlined some basic projects for the fledgeling networking buff in all of us. Behold in amazement as your little robot sends a tweet ! Or set it up as a web server that can figure out what the weather is like! The possibilities are endless! Alright, I’m being glib, but these seemingly dull applications are just the tip of the iceberg. Once the Mindstorms community starts playing with these things, we’re sure to see some creative new usage scenarios. The WiFi sensor’s $99 price tag is far in excess of the rest of the sensors you can strap onto a Mindstorms robot, but it’s a neat way to teach youngsters and adults alike the basics of networking. And really, what better way to inspire the next generation of geeks than to let them figure out something complex and useful?

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Teach Your Lego Robot How To Tweet With A Dexter Industries WiFi Sensor