Lonnie Lazar - page 6

Boxee, the innovative software solution that puts the Internet on your television, has long been among the brightest lights in the strange hinterland inhabited by users of AppleTV.

Friday, the company announced a new partnership with Wolfgang’s Vault, the virtual motherlode of live music recordings, that immediately sweetens the pot for those intrepid souls who dare to invite the Internet into the living room.

Lest one mistake Wolfgang’s Vault for a sparkly bauble dangled at aging Boomers and Hippies lost in nostalgia for the Summer of Love, the company also offers access to plenty of current music, including high-fidelity recordings from artists such as Death Cab for Cutie, Ani Difranco, Sean Hayes and Vampire Weekend.

Are you ready to get vooked? You know you want to. And a little company called Vook, with offices in Alameda and New York, is more than happy to show you how.

Vook began with a mission to unite the disparate worlds of books and videos into one complete, blended story. With an innovative platform where all forms of media come together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts, vooks weave together content from talented writers with professionally shot and edited video to give readers/viewers/users a whole new way of experiencing creative output.

And what better vehicle to deliver the experience of this new medium than Apple’s iPad?

Ever since the master strategists in Cupertino bought and (predictably) killed off the only genuine competitor to ever rise against iTunes, the question has hung like a pall over the online digital music marketplace: what will replace Lala?

Perhaps Jobsian worker bees are buzzing about as we speak, crafting an iTunes portal to allow users access to their digital music libraries from anywhere on the Internet, one which will sell them web-only versions of their favorite music for as little as one thin dime per cut.

Until that happy day dawns, or until some other independent outfit comes along to offer something as interesting and valuable as Lala was, one might consider checking out a newish Facebook mashup called Friends and Music.

Just days after crowing about giving people “Freedom from porn,” Steve Jobs must be cursing the gods of prurience with the news that YouPorn (NSFW) is busily encoding its entire library of films into HTML5 format.

Soon iPad owners the world over will be able to view vids of hairless young things in flagrante delicto to their hearts’ content.

And while YouPorn may be leading the pack, who can doubt the rest of the Adult Entertainment industry can be far behind in adopting HTML5’s video codec? In many things web-related, purveyors of porn have long been in the vanguard of trends that eventually go mainstream.

Steve Jobs may be wrong about Apple’s ability to “give” people freedom from porn, but it looks like he may be backing the right horse in the Flash vs. HTML5 showdown.

Kyle Buckner has come a long way from sketching fantasy Apple accoutrements for school projects, though even he admits he’s set “a fairly big price” on his latest work – an elegant iPhone docking station that’s part art piece and part kick-ass speaker system.

After making inquiries about getting his prototype design mass produced for more economical sale, Buckner has decided for now to let his one-of-a-kind item fetch what it will on eBay, with a starting bid just shy of $3K.

But making and selling pricey one-offs isn’t the talented designer’s idea of success. “I would love to design new products for companies,” he told us in an email exchange. “I love making prototypes for my ideas but with no way of easily mass producing them, I’ll never make it.”

So Bucker’s focused his attention on looking for work with manufacturers on product design, industrial design, furniture design….anything that would put his talents to more effective (and less risky) use.

Say hello to Goober, the next in a long line of applications aimed at becoming the unified communications solution to bridge your highest aspirations for chat, SMS, VoIP and videoconferencing.

A far-flung diaspora of those disenchanted with legacy voice providers has been champing at the bit promised long ago when engineers at Cisco perfected devices for turning voice into 1s and 0s — and Goober offers a promising stab at something close to 21st Century communication’s reach for the Holy Grail.

Close. But no cigar.

Update: the original version of this piece failed to identify Clintprints.com as the website for poster artist Clint Wilson. We regret any confusion the omission may have caused.

Rock Show, the music poster marketplace developed especially for Apple’s iPad by Neutrinos, received an update in the iTunes App Store Wednesday that should help the Portland-based startup gain recognition for its innovative business model as well as for the creative designers behind the posters in its inventory.

Rock Show leverages the iPad’s screen real estate to deliver high resolution views of limited edition fine art print concert posters from artists and designers such as Darren Grealish (The Killers, Stevie Wonder, Brian Jonestown Massacre and Lee Scratch Perry) and Lil Tuffy (Dead Weather, Sonic Youth), which makes it a nice vehicle for showing off the iPad’s graphics chops.

Users can also buy posters from within the app, a model Neutrinos founder Rob Banagale hopes will make Rock Show the best digital marketplace for art prints in history.

“Nailing this idea has meant discussions with designers and careful design for users,” Banagale said. On the designer side those discussions led to the creation of a dealer backend for the app that allows designers to upload and maintain which of their posters are made available while also tracking their sales and inventory. “The posters are made by individual artists and design studios from the United States, Canada and the UK,” Banagale explained, saying, “Some of these folks do their own printing and many of them handle shipping posters personally.”

I am all for the Federal government funding and deploying a robust and relentless antitrust division. I don’t wish to go into detail or name examples here and now, but I believe the emasculation of antitrust and restraint of trade investigation and prosecution over the past 30 years has meant a great disservice to the public and to the economy. If that arm of the Justice Department gets revived under Obama it will be a good thing for the country and for the world.

With respect to antitrust claims against Apple related to either the iPhone Developer’s Agreement or the iAds program I don’t think Apple has a thing to worry about.

Happy Sex with Maryline, a sexuality coaching and education guide for adults from La Roche Communication hit the iTunes App Store Tuesday, intimating a new, more comfortable, perhaps an even more mature approach to Apple’s understanding of the relationship between the iPhone and Sex.

After nearly two years of sophomoric inconsistency regulating which kinds of sexually charged material could legally be powered by its iPhone OS, Apple seems prepared to grow beyond the “Whose Boobs” era into one in which iPhone users might legitimately ask, “is that a sex coach in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

Blue Microphone’s Yeti – a versatile $150 USB device from the company behind the legendary Snowball and the must-have Mikey – would be an absolute steal at twice the price.

In applications from podcasting to studio recording the Yeti delivers intimacy and clarity rivaling the output of some of the best microphones from better known companies such as Shure and AKG – all from a single package with setting versatility neither can touch for such little money.

The Yeti has been loose in the wild for a while now so the info and conclusions in the following review may be old news to some. But the quality and value of such a well-made, high performing product deserves an encore.

Microsoft and its upstart search engine Bing have partnered with mobile music system developer Melodeo to bring iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users 100 great songs from every year between 1947 – 2009 – for free. Since coming out earlier in April at $1.99, the app Top 100s by Year has taken on sponsorship by Bing, been transformed into Top 100s by Year by Bing and is now free “for a limited time” on the iTunes App Store.

The app allows users to pick any year from ’47 – ’09 and hear 100 “songs that have stood the test of time to become the greatest songs for any given year” (according to the app description), streamed in random order over WiFi, 3G or Edge networks. Users can view a list of songs for any year and listen to a short preview of each, as well as buy the song on iTunes — but listening to songs in their entirety requires listening to the randomized stream. If a distasteful song comes up in the stream users can tap to move on to the next tune.

Bing, of course, offers up ads promoting its search engine every four or five tunes, though ads can be disappeared with a tap.

Another downside is that, unlike listening to songs from an iTunes library on the iPod app, Top 100s won’t permit other apps to run on a user’s device while it’s playing, at least not until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out and Melodeo upgrades the app to take advantage of the new OS’s multitasking functionality.

But hey, what do you expect for free?

Rally Up, the newish location based social networking app, released an update for iPad Thursday that immediately puts the upstart application ahead of the game for people who want to keep track of and interact with their friends on the iPad.

Taking full advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate, Rally Up’s unique map-based canvas gives the app a level of functionality and makes it interesting in ways that market leaders Foursquare and Gowalla have yet to achieve. By designing the app to take advantage of iPad’s support for popping info out and overlaying things on the same screen, Rally Up manages to let its users interact with the app in fewer taps and screen changes, allowing for more time to browse and interact with the content being constantly generated by users’ friends.

Because iPad usage patterns are likely to skew towards more time spent lingering over applications than the quick, get-in-and-get-out experience many desire from the iPhone, Rally Up’s focus on content — and the way it presents all of a user’s friends and their feeds in a single, map-based global view — makes using it a decidedly more immersive experience than other social networking apps can so far provide.

“The iPad really changes the experience of a [location based social app],” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “It becomes less of a push app and more of a pull app, in my opinion. You want to sit and explore, not just wait until your friend tells you what they’re up to.”

Had you bought stock in Apple Computers when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, you’d have received quite a nice return on your investment over the past 25 years. Had you bought Apple stock in 2001, when iTunes was introduced, your nine-year ROI would look pretty stellar, too. Heck, if you’d bought some AAPL in 2007, when the iPhone came out, chances are you’d have doubled your money in three short, mostly lackluster stock market years.

But what about now? Is 2010, the year of the iPad’s introduction, time to buy or time to sell shares in the company Steve Jobs founded?

Self-described mobile industry enthusiast, author and chronicler Tomi T Ahonen is unequivocal: “[Apple’s] time of ascendancy has come to an end.”

Who knows how the iPad will ultimately be used? Certainly no one at this early date.

Is it merely an ebook reader, or is it a gaming device? Could it be an honest-to-goodness tool for business?

Like so many things, it all depends on your expectations.

It’s well known by now that early impressions of the iPad find it pooh-pooed by the technorati and generally lauded by the great unwashed as a fantastical window (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the future of mobile computing.

The highly regarded founder of Daily Kos, one of the Internet’s most widely read blogs, weighed in Sunday with a wide-ranging, detailed review of Apple’s latest creation and pronounced the iPad a gadget that “scored big as … a device that makes my life easier,” calling it “better than a laptop.”

The introduction of the iPad is a clarion call for major music labels to finally recognize the future of the music industry and embrace the development of applications made to run on Apple’s new device, according to a feature article in the latest issue of Billboard Magazine, which officially hits news stands Saturday.

Once the province of industry insiders, filled with reams of stats and reportage on music industry minutiae, behind-the-scenes comings and goings and gossip, Billboard is now a smart and snappy magazine with its finger on the pulse of the larger forces at work in the music industry, with articles seemingly targeting a more general audience while remaining the go-to source for the numbers that drive the industry.

The cover of the current issue promises a look at The Next Killer Apps, though what the article inside actually suggests is that – generally – the next killer apps on the iPad are going to be music-related offerings tied to artist branding that will give consumers something more than the aural experience provided by CDs and music downloads, and will provide the industry new realms of revenue producing products that go well beyond the marketing value of the web content and promotional aspirations of most mobile offerings produced to date.

OK, class, weekend playtime is over. Time to get to work. More than 300,000 of you have had fun since Saturday playing games, watching movies and lazing around in bed with the Sunday New York Times on your new iPad. Now it’s Monday morning and the question is: can you justify bringing Apple’s new gadget into the office and putting it to work as a productivity tool?

Well, should your work involve producing graphs, flow charts, schematic designs or anything similar the answer is a resounding yes if you’re hip to the productivity apps from Omni Group.

iFixit, perhaps the premier gadget tear-down shop on the web today, dissected photos Friday of a pre-production iPad provided by Apple to the FCC, which inexplicably leaked the photos somehow, despite Apple’s desire that they be kept under wraps until August.

With standard caveats about the photos being lower-resolution quality than those iFixit will publish Saturday during its own teardown of a commercially available unit, the company uncovered a few interesting tidbits shedding light on Apple’s suppliers, manufacturing processes and thinking behind the design of the highly anticipated device.

From the iFixit review of the FCC photos:

* It looks like there is a LOT of epoxy holding these chips down to the board. More than we’ve seen before— Apple is really serious about durability on this thing.

* Apple didn’t solder the battery! The iPad uses the same battery attachment system as the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

* Notably lacking from the RF/data cable is anything GPS related.

* Dual speakers provide stereo sound. Two small sealed channels direct sound toward three audio ports carved into the bottom edge of the iPad.

There’s more at the ongoing iFixit review, as well as plenty of info on the iPad hosted by the FCC. And of course, stay tuned for the deluge of information and opinion about Apple’s newest revolutionary device set to wash over the shores of Cyberia just a few hours from now.

More pics after the jump.

Rally Up, a new location-based iPhone and iPad app from the innovative Santa Cruz, CA team behind 12seconds apps, made its debut in the iTunes App Store Wednesday, hoping to capture the attention of a growing fanbase for apps that leverage mobile communication technology to let people connect with one another.

For the past year the social networking game has been dominated by two players: New York-based Foursquare and Gowalla, out of Austin, TX. With loyal adherents numbering in the hundreds of thousands each, both companies have raised millions in investment funding and explored media partnerships with the likes of Bravo TV, Zagat and the Travel Channel to position themselves for a future in which everyone owns a smartphone and GPS technology allows their location to be pinpointed on a mythical matrix of Coolness.

Enter now Rally Up, which looks to capitalize on privacy concerns that have led many to remain skeptics of social networking apps. Rally Up touts itself as a unique vehicle for letting “real” friends share their wisdom and discoveries about the places they live and visit. “Foursquare and Gowalla are mainly broadcast apps,” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “You check in somewhere and tell the Facebook and Twitter universes about it and there’s very little interactivity or real communication about the experience.”

Rally Up’s focus is more on combining microblogging with location, providing its users a platform for sharing text, videos and direct messages with one another. With an emphasis on the quality of a user’s friends in the Rally Up network, the app doesn’t support mass ‘Friend’ imports from Twitter or Facebook, rather it draws from the phone’s contact list or address book to populate the app with people a user is more likely to be interested in sharing with.

Within the app, any Rally Up contact can be set with a profile providing that contact with more or less access to a user’s comings and goings with Rally Up. The app also allows a user to choose between broadcasting his or her current location or letting contacts know where they are headed next to facilitate greater interactivity and social planning than other social networking apps allow. With 1.7 million points of interest at launch through integration with Open Street Map, Rally Up also has a look and feel distinctly different from the stylized GUIs of Gowalla and Foursquare, while also supporting many of the features that have made those apps so popular, including push notification, leaderboards and stamp/badge collecting.

With an iPad optimized version of the app also ready to go when the highly anticipated Apple tablet device launches April 3rd, Rally Up may be poised to turn the Check-in Wars into a three-front battle.

Rally Up went live as a free download on the iTunes App Store Wednesday.

If you’re wondering whether iPad is just going to be a big iPhone or iPod Touch, look no further than the preview released by iVerse Comics to see the depth and complexity of the iPad’s touchscreen features.

Comics and other traditionally text and image-based reading material have been somewhat less than satisfying to read on iPhones simply due to the size constraints of Apple’s smartphone display. With the impending release of the iPad’s significantly larger form factor all of that is about to change and it’s not too hard to predict the coming boom in digital book, magazine and yes, comic content optimized for the iPad.

“We’d all been waiting for Apple to announce the iPad, and once the specifics were finally known, our team began putting together our plans for the device the same day.” said iVerse Media founder and CEO Michael Murphey. Wanting to create a traditional comic book reading experience on the iPad, iVerse built “a completely new application from scratch, then [married] that to our existing app,” Murphey said. “The end result gives the user the best possible experience on whatever device they’re using.”

iVerse Comics features some of the biggest publishers in the comic book industry including Archie Comics, Ape Entertainment, Archaia, BOOM! Studios, IDW Publishing, titles from Image Comics creators, Marvel Comics, and many more.

Long time users of iVerse Comics will have the ability to download new, high resolution, iPad files of their previously in-app-purchased comics for no additional cost. iVerse Comics is available as a free download in the iTunes App Store now. The app includes 30 free comics with over 100 more available as in-app purchases.

When a pair of rugged adventurists decides to trek 700km across a frozen lake in Siberia, chronicle the expedition in a daily blog complete with photos and videos — and share it all on the Internet — it should come as no surprise when Apple hardware and software features prominently among their gear.

Vašek Sůra and Pavel Blažek set out from the southern end of Lake Baikal in Siberia on February 23 in temperatures dipping below -20℃ to become the first Czech team to make a winter crossing of the lake. They marked their crossing of 500km Monday in stylish fashion. “Please, don’t judge us too harsh,” Sůra wrote in their blog, “after all, we’ve been here for almost three weeks and we need to entertain ourselves somehow :-)”

Last Friday, they posted about the gear they are using on the expedition, undertaken by just the two men with no kites, dogs or outside support to assist the trek or help them with their nearly 200lbs. (each) of supplies. Among the Apple gear is a MacBook Air (128 GB, solid-state drive, 2 GB). They use a satellite modem operating on the Immarsat network to upload and download to the Internet. Their Apple software includes OS Snow Leopard, iWork and iLife tools, and to process the photos Sůra uses Aperture.

The day they were hoping to post a video commemorating the 400km point they ran into some problems getting the camcorder to communicate with the laptop. “Vasek thought that there’s something wrong with the laptop,” wrote Sůra, “but as we have a Mac here with us, I was sure it cannot be in the laptop – nothing can ever be wrong with Mac!”

Of course it was the USB cable.

Back in the mists of time at the dawn of the Gadget Age, Richard Thalheimer’s Sharper Image was one of the more highly regarded purveyors of well-made, interesting and sometimes even useful products for the discerning gadgeteer. Starting out as a catalog selling jogging watches in 1977, The Sharper Image eventually grew into a heavy hitting company selling high-end consumer gadgetry through dozens of retail stores throughout the US as well as its monthly catalog and website, before imploding in bankruptcy in 2008.

The end for The Sharper Image was drawn out over a couple of years and after being forced from his position as CEO in 2006, Thalheimer founded RichardSolo, an online venture completely unrelated to The Sharper Image, in 2007. Recently RichardSolo debuted its own line of portable charging solutions for iPhone, iPod and other smartphones, proving sometimes it’s smart to dance with the date that brung ya.

The RichardSolo lineup is eerily reminiscent of items that might have been found at The Sharper Image back in the day, updated of course to reflect technology’s advances: in addition to chargers, there are cases, speakers, docks headsets and personal stereo devices, all in the $29 to $199 range and all featuring a design aesthetic positioned to lend the buyer a claim to a certain degree of coolness. Beyond the realm of personal gadgetry the company offers everything from massage chairs to body monitors to travel and Earth Friendly items. And yes, even jogging watches.

Not long ago, up to 30% of App Store downloads belonged to the Games category, which — when the total number of games is counted in the billions — means a lot of games. Dedicated gamers, then, would stand to benefit from some way of organizing, tracking and getting information about all the games in the App Store, right? Hey, as the saying goes: there’s an app for that.

Well, not an app, actually, but a website. AppSpy.com is a nifty clearinghouse of information on all things mobile gaming for the iPhone, with a handy tracking feature that alerts registered users to price drops on their most coveted apps. In addition to being alerted when prices drop, users can read and watch quality reviews of all the hot new games and gather information on the latest iPhone gaming news. “We wanted to design an easy to use site that will improve user experience while shopping for Apps,” says founder Adam McKinnon. “AppSpy.com makes it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for.”

Up to six game reviews are released daily, including full video reviews which demonstrate actual game play. All videos are linked to AppSpy’s popular YouTube channel. Reviews include a list of pros and cons, verdict, screenshots and a 1 to 5 rating system.

Just this week Books overtook Games as the leading App Store category in terms of the number of offerings, perhaps heralding the dawn of the iPad era. But Games are sure to remain popular and may even grow with the introduction of Apple’s new device. Either way AppSpy.com should remain a great way for Apple’s mobile gamers to keep their eyes on the prize.

Apple’s App Store Porn Police or, perhaps the Puritanical Posse, if you prefer — has its work cut out if it’s to make Steve Job’s new decision stick and ban “overtly sexual apps” on the App Store.

As a previous post pointed out, some culling of the filth and froth has already begun, invariably taking down relative innocents in its wake. But the images posted here, snagged within the past half hour from the iTunes menu of available titles, give an idea of how thin the ranks may have to become before Apple’s online emporium has as squeaky clean a catalog as some might want.

Tellingly, too, it will be interesting (as some comments to the ongoing SEXGATE coverage have pointed out) whether Playboy and Sports Illustrated will ever be deemed too “overtly sexual” to have a place at the App Store table.

Hypocrisy, is thy name Apple?

What it is: Zinio, in partnership with major publishers of traditional books and magazines, offers subscription-based digital content over the Internet and via its iPhone/iPod Touch native app available free in the iTunes AppStore.

Why it’s cool: Zinio has spent the past 10 years helping people get digital access to the traditional magazine content they already love. Now, at the dawn of Apple’s iPad era, Zinio is poised to offer some of the most compelling content iPad users will see on the device — and just may help save the ailing traditional publishing industry in the bargain.

Many have wondered about Apple’s model for distributing e-reader content — how it will look, what it will cost, and what Apple’s percentage of the revenue take will be — when the iPad makes its market debut in March.

Jeanniey Mullen, Zinio Global Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, told us in a wide-ranging conversation at Macworld earlier this month such concerns make no difference to her, since Zinio’s own model will remain platform agnostic. “Our most important relationships are with publishers and readers,” she said. “Zinio revolutionizes the reading experience and we’re excited about iPad’s potential for making that a great mobile experience” but the company doesn’t sell its current content through the App Store and that won’t change when the iPad comes along.

UPDATE: The gentleman in the video above is Daniel Eran Dilger, author of the Roughly Drafted blog referenced in the post below. I regret any confusion my failure to identify him may have caused. – Lonnie Lazar

Don’t just take Steve Jobs’ word for it. Full-time Flash developer Morgan Adams articulates good reasons why Flash should never come to Apple’s iPad and anyone interested in the Apple-Adobe conflict on the matter of Flash would do well to pay attention to his commentary.

Adams, an interactive content developer, wrote to the Roughly Drafted blog to explain in terms more measured than those used by Mr. Jobs with editors of the Wall Street Journal last week why Flash won’t ever work well on any mobile touchscreen platform:

It’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.

Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.

Adams goes on to detail several fundamental incompatibilities between touchscreen operating systems and Flash content on the web, showing why current Flash content can never work well on a touchscreen platform.

In addition, workable alternatives exist for delivering the video content many wrongly believe is unobtainable without Flash, according to Adams:

imagine my embarrassment as a Flash developer when my own animated site wouldn’t work on the newfangled iPhone! So I sat down and made new animations using WebKit’s CSS animation abilities. Now desktop users still see Flash at adamsi.com, but iPhone users see animations too. It can be done.