We all knew it was coming the minute we laid eyes on the Kinect. The wireless, motion-based controller for the XBox 360 was designed for gaming but its potential uses for other human-machine interactions were immediately obvious. We saw it in the way the device let users flow through film selections in the Netflix UI using only their hands. The Kinect's potential also wasn't lost on hackers and tinkerers, who wasted no time making the device do all kinds of things outside of the scope of the XBox.
Lastnight, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer officially announced the next step for the Kinect: your PC. A version of the device for Windows will be available in a few weeks for $249. The company says that the higher price point is necessary because unlike the XBox version, Kinect for Windows won't be subsidized by things like game purchases and XBox Live memberships.
Surprise! You know that free, unlimited Spotify account you eagerly signed up for when the service first launched in the U.S. over the summer? That was a six-month trial, in case you missed it in the fine print. Next week will mark the half-year anniversary of Spotify's long-awaited U.S., which means that those who were first in line to get a free account will start to see limitations fall into place.
Spotify's free accounts are normally restricted to ten listening hours per month. If you really, truly love a particular song, you'll only be able to stream it five times in a given month. These caps will come on top of the usual limitations of free accounts: You have to listen to advertisements and there's no mobile access.
The Stop Online Piracy Act. The mere thought of the controversial Internet regulation bill passing even one house of Congress keeps you up at night. You've already transferred all of your domains from GoDaddy, even after they flip-flopped on their SOPA stance. You instinctively click on every anti-SOPA story on Reddit and Hacker News, voting up the best of them. On the Internet, you've eagerly joined the growing army of digital activists opposing the law, but what about the real world? What about when you go to the store?
A new Android app called Boycott SOPA aims to help bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds and keep users in tune with which companies support SOPA and thus which products to avoid. The app scans barcodes on real-world products and then checks against a database of 800 SOPA supporters, letting you know if buying that box of tissues is going to ruin the Internet or not.
If you think anti-piracy legislation like SOPA and Spain's so-called Sinde law are as far-reaching as it gets, you obviously don't live in Tehran. Well aware of the disruptive threat to its power posed by the Internet, the Iranian government is beginning to implement a plan that would get rid of it all together.
Web censorship in the Islamic republic is nothing new, but this latest initiative cranks things up quite a few notches and paves the way for a government-approved domestic intranet that will be completely cut off from the public World Wide Web we all know and love. Iranians are already reporting painfully slow Internet connections and difficulty accessing certain sites or using VPNs, the Wall Street Journal reports. Soon, Internet cafes in the country will be required to videotape all Web users and gather personal information about them.
My main man Steve Myers over at Poynter has broken down the outcome of a brand new phenomenon in the coverage of elections. Google's U.S. elections portal, launched just ahead of the Iowa Caucuses on January 3, provided more useful data about the caucus results than the Associated Press did. According to the veterans with whom Myers spoke, it was quite an upset. The speed and portability, not to mention the $0.00 price tag, of Google's data made an impression on the news outlets covering the caucus.
Myers points to WNYC's coverage as a superb example of the advantages gained by incorporating Google tools into original coverage. There's no question that Google has built a useful platform for news organizations on top of its existing core services. Myers wonders whether Google could even compete directly with the AP for the lucrative business of reporting election returns, and his sources believe it could, if its leaders wanted to. But I think there's even more going on with these Google election initiatives. It looks to me like Google is searching for ways to disrupt the whole election news business.
Last night, I pulled out my phone, snapped a photo and began cycling through Instagram filters looking for the best one. Nothing unusual there. I chose to share this particular image on Twitter and Facebook as well (something many Instagrammers do somewhat judiciously, lest we be spammy), and a few moments later noticed something a little different. Suddenly, I was getting an uptick in Facebook notifications telling me that people liked my photo. Not my post but my photo. Wait, what photo?
For as long as Instagram has been around, it has published photos at unique, Instagram-hosted URLs, which were then linked to on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The link to the image could be retweeted or "liked" on Facebook, but the image itself remained off on a cold, lonely island on Instagram's servers. The only people that could interact with the photo itself were your Instagram followers who, of course, could only do so using the photo-sharing service's iOS app. Well, that just changed.
With each new iteration of Apple's iPhone, we expect to see the addition of new features like speedier processors and better cameras. What isn't necessarily expected is that each subsequent device will consume way more data than its predecessor. But, in fact, this is the case.
The iPhone 4S uses about twice as much data as the iPhone 4 and three times the data than the iPhone 3G, according to a new study by Arieso. What causes the 4S to hog so much data? Just ask Siri.
Last week, the Spanish government enacted a law containing provisions that allows copyright holders to have allegedly-infringing websites shut down within days of a complaint. The legislation, which sounds like a more extreme version of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) being debating in the U.S., had actually already been passed, but wasn't implemented until Spain's new, notably more conservative government took control.
The Sustainable Economy Law, which contains the anti-piracy provisions, was enacted in part to help encourage investment by U.S.-based media and technology companies. Today it was revealed that American interest in the law being enacted may have been more than casual. Spain was actually threatened by the US with being put on a trade blacklist if the law wasn't passed, according to cables released by WikiLeaks.
In a demonstration of its confidence in the future of HTML5, business newspaper The Financial Times has acquired the development firm that built its mobile Web app. London-based Assanka was purchased by the FT for unnamed sum of money.
The firm will presumably be absorbed into the FT's existing operations, allowing it to build mobile apps internally rather than outsource them. Whatever the price tag may have been, it represents a pretty significant investment in mobile for a newspaper company.
After years of struggling, photographic services giant Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the Wall Street Journal reported. The company, which was long known for selling film and other photography-related products, had tried everything from branching out into more modern offerings to using its trove of patents to sue others. Alas, the times have caught up with Kodak.
The news comes almost exactly one year after the last roll of Kodachrome film was developed and at a time when the most widely-used camera on Flickr isn't even one of the many digital point-and-shoots or SLR's that had already chipped away at Kodak's dominance; It's the iPhone 4.
