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Sony: World’s first TransferJet-compatible LSI for fast data exchange are ready

Posted: 30 Nov 2009 12:25 AM PST

sony_lsi

TransferJet is a close-proximity wireless transfer technology that was introduced by Sony in 2008. Toshiba announced during IFA in Berlin this year they are planning to use the technology in their products soon. The idea is to let two electronic devices quickly exchange data, theoretically at up to 560 Mbps, just by bringing them close together (touch is possible, too).

And today, Sony announced in Tokyo [press release in English] that the first LSIs supporting the standard will be shipped to manufacturers before December starts. The “CXD3267AGG” (pictured on the left) and  the “CXD3268AGW” will cost $17.45 each. Sony says they managed to optimize the technology so that TransferJet can now be integrated into smaller electronic devices, too. The LSIs can be used by makers of cell phones, digital cameras, computers and HDDs.

Toshiba and Sony are just two of the 19 companies of the so-called TransferJet Consortium Promoters. Other members include powerhouses such as Panasonic, Sharp or Samsung so it’s possible we’ll get to see a slew of new TransferJet-compatible electronic devices next year.


Real time, real discussion, real reporting: choose two

Posted: 29 Nov 2009 12:07 PM PST

choosetwo
As you likely know, Tiger Woods was in an accident under apparently mysterious circumstances early Friday morning. Predictably, the reports and reactions thereto pertaining varied somewhat in quality and timeliness, and predictably, this has led to paroxysms of futurist glee in some and sullen condemnation by others. Now that the smoke has cleared, we can examine the event, which is certainly worth a little inspection despite its obvious triviality, with a little perspective.

I’m not going to speculate on Woods’ injuries, the cause of the crash, or rumors of fights and affairs. I don’t care, personally. But how the information proliferated makes for interesting dissection. And the fun part is that there’s something for everybody’s agenda! Many will choose to ignore or emphasize unduly one party’s role in this drama, but the fact is that it very neatly exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of both traditional and so-called new media. I hope you’re sitting comfortably.

First, let’s establish some facts about yesterday’s little fracas. Woods crashed his car at around 2:00AM (all times are Eastern unless otherwise specified). A police report was filed at 2:25AM, and 12 hours later the information was released, probably at 2PM. The Orlando Sentinel reported the information, though it has since revised its story, and the referring links from yesterday now point to one filed early Saturday morning. The original story is nowhere to be found, but it is reasonable to presume that, being a local news outlet, it was the first to report — likely within 15 minutes of the press release being issued. BNO News tweeted at 2:24PM that he was seriously injured, which was a reasonable summary of the police report and likely all that the Sentinel reported. CNN posted a blurb 15 minutes later, at 2:39. Interestingly, Local TV news station WFTV had a team on the scene obtaining obtained from an eyewitness truly awful photos of the accident within what must have been an hour or so, since the photos show it is still night and the car was towed away shortly thereafter. (Update: my mistake. They acquired the photos later in the day.)

Thus far fact. Now, you recall the headline: real time, real discussion, real reporting — choose two. My idea, which that punchy little epigram roughly approximates, is that there is only so much a given source of information can provide, and that if it has certain attributes, it by definition cannot have certain others (with exceptions, of course). Don’t get me wrong, however: each source is valuable, but we must be careful not to assign one qualities it does not possess.

Since this is a blog ostensibly covering tech and Web 2.0, we should probably talk about Twitter first.

Twitter: real-time discussion

twit

MG has already lionized Twitter in this affair, and rightly so. It deserves a pat on the back for doing admirably what it was made to do: propagate a meme as quickly as possible. However, his stronger assertion that Twitter is the real time web’s Walter Cronkite warrants a dissenting response, though I don’t think it is, as some suggested, an insult to the late, great journalist so much as a mischaracterization of Twitter.

Twitter’s mode of operation is a lot like that of fire. A spark is struck elsewhere; in this case (and, let’s be honest, in many cases) it is a piece of celebrity gossip. Whether it catches and spreads, and how fast it does so depend on the conditions. This particular spark landed in a bed of tinder and flared up almost instantly. The fact that the entire story (such as it was then) could be contained in 140 characters helped, of course. Its spread was practically instantaneous.

But that’s where Twitter’s role ends. Consider that local TV news was on the scene quickly enough to take pictures of the accident site before the car was towed, though these were likely not widely reported because at the time, a statement had yet to be released. This kind of coverage is obviously impossible for a decentralized news mechanism like Twitter or Google News. Yet it is the source for a large proportion of the coverage which spreads via those mechanisms. Before a fire can spread, it must be started. And it is very rare that Twitter starts any fires.

A legitimate objection to this idea is that of citizen journalism. Hasn’t Twitter enabled Iranians to broadcast their discontent? Wouldn’t it be handy in an emergency situation, provided it was accessible? To some extent, yes. But in the first case, what reason is there to think, even taking into account how well it was applied in Iran, that Twitter is somehow immune to censorship or outright ban? It’s new, is all, and once someone in charge takes it seriously enough to decide it must be stifled, you can be sure Twitter will have no further use there. An earthquake situation provides a better opportunity for Twitter to be used by itself to report; tweets from around the city saying “gas main broken at 13th and Pine” or the like could certainly be of use to a fire department. It’s questionable, however, whether a hashtag could reliably be established in good time, whether the authorities would be able or willing to sort through the noise, and whether such content as could be found would be capable of being transmitted to those who need it. Still, I’m happy to admit its possible utility in such a situation.

The question, really, is whether one has valuable information to report. If so, then for a moment, one becomes a reporter. And that information is welcome, if it can get where it needs to be. But the truth is that the bulk of users rarely have content to contribute; their role is promotion and discussion. Compare this to a journalist, who makes it his business to either be present at or go immediately to wherever news occurring, then broadcast it via established methods and outlets. More on them later.

Lastly, it’s troubling that what news is spread depends on the population at large. This is more of a personal objection. I have commented that Twitter is the perfect vessel which which to sate the public’s appetite for sensational minutiae. What spreads on Twitter is what’s popular, not what’s important. The last few years have been calamitous for mainstream news integrity for several reasons, but among them is the increasing emphasis on color stories and special interest news, which Twitter seems tailor-made to propagate.

This is also the reason why Twitter is not Walter Cronkite. Cronkite may have worked in real time, and he may have reported unconfirmed information, but the reason he was trusted to do so was because he was the exact opposite of Twitter. His personal discretion and experience made him a trusted individual. Wisdom is not arrived at by consensus, nor the truth, no matter if ten people weigh in or a thousand. No synthesis of opinion or automated sifting of information is a replacement for a discerning, informed, and familiar human being.

Broadcast media: real time reporting

mainstream

The mainstream (i.e. broadcast) media is supposed to be formed of such human beings. This is, of course, not the case. However, that does not mean the model is broken. The companies comprising it — that’s another matter. The current deplorable state of mainstream news is more, if I may venture a guess, due to a continued financial investment in an obsolete ratings and advertising structure than any real decay of principle. Or rather, the only principle that is really decayed is the networks’ independence from private money. The BBC presents a partial solution in a state-sponsored network, but private bankrolling is simply replaced by public, but that’s not an ideal solution to say the least. I don’t have a better proposal, but I’m happy to point the finger, and our mainstream journalists aren’t doing a hell of a lot of journalism.

That said, the mainstream media were the first on the scene at Woods’ house, and the fact is they will always be the first on the scene. What would Google News or Twitter aggregate if there was no journalist there in the first place? Citizen reporting can only go so far; the idea of a completely decentralized press is hopelessly naive. Access to the public’s information is increasingly important, but there will always be someone, many people in fact, whose job it is to work at something that, if it’s not a local news station, will look a hell of a lot like one.

What will be the source for firsthand news if we don’t have a journalist class? Local news teams, mainstream media at their most mainstream, are the only ones with the experience, the resources, and the staff to cover anything of magnitude. Doubt that? Don’t confuse the death of traditional media distribution with the death of traditional media. The former is happening; the latter is an illusion.

What the mainstream and local media lack is scope and perspective. Imagine a thousand little rooms, each with its own goings-on and a person broadcasting live from each one. They see what’s around them and report it, but their scope is limited. Their first responsibility is to their “room,” their community — hence their journalistic myopia. They know they can’t cover everything in the world, but they don’t have to. Because the world relies upon them when something like this Woods incident occurs in their vicinity. It’s centralized decentralization.

Print and other delayed media: reporting and discussion

dailt-tel-newsroom

What’s left is the news you read the next day in the newspaper — or, really, the next hour on CNN.com or BBC News. These, the most traditional forms of media of all (essentially newsprint or a virtualized version thereof), provide comparatively complete, one-stop reporting and analysis of the event in question. I don’t mean to suggest that the AP, New York Times, or other article outlets are infallible, far from it. But they provide the perspective and context that Twitter (or your favorite social news aggregator) and broadcast news usually lack — and from individuals that have an interest in accurate reporting. Of course, this comes at a cost of timeliness, which may or may not be critical.

Obviously newspapers are having a lot of trouble, and the herd is being thinned, but delayed media (my term), whether distributed as inky tree pulp or otherwise, will continue to have a place in the party. The skills of newspapermen are still required, whether you like it or not, and will be for a long time to come.

Think of the recent story in which President Obama bowed to the Japanese Emperor when visiting that country. Twitter could alert instantly you to the fact that this event occurred, but little more, and only if you’re glued to it. Mainstream media will be the source for the story and video, but is capable of only basic commentary. Delayed media would give you the event, the reactions, the context, and anything more required to make a complete story — but not for at least a few hours.

Which of these methods you use depends on your profession, location, age, and a hundred other factors. Whether such trade-offs as each offers are welcome to you is a personal decision — but it’s unwise to write off a category altogether (as I catch myself doing with Twitter). To use one and not another may forgo or convey an advantage in some situations, but none embodies every aspect of news — content, promptness, and analysis.

Nor will any of the three worlds of information distribution go down without their essence being absorbed, Mega Man-like, into the being of the others. Will Twitter wither without the substantial content of delayed media? Not likely. Will delayed media croak if it doesn’t learn some lessons from Twitter? A little more likely, but that lesson is being learned. Will mainstream and broadcast media go extinct? Not for decades, though they will certainly have some adaptation to do.

The myth of medium

chimaera

The truth is that there is no old media. And no new media. There is only the present media, its aspect as confused and shifting as any compound creature from legend. I have to quote Hawthorne here:

According to the best accounts which I have been able to obtain, this Chimaera was nearly, if not quite, the ugliest and most poisonous creature, and the strangest and unaccountablest, and the hardest to fight with, and the most difficult to run away from, that ever came out of the earth's inside. It had a tail like a boa-constrictor; its body was like I do not care what; and it had three separate heads, one of which was a lion's, the second a goat's, and the third an abominably great snake's. And a hot blast of fire came flaming out of each of its three mouths! Being an earthly monster, I doubt whether it had any wings; but, wings or no, it ran like a goat and a lion, and wriggled along like a serpent, and thus contrived to make about as much speed as all the three together.

That sounds about right! Now, if you can stomach the unbearable pretension of likening of the complex media world to a monster (be grateful I didn’t quote Lovecraft), you can see that it is unlikely that one head will just up and consume the other, though they may quarrel and gnaw on one another frequently. One significant difference: while the creature Hawthorne described combines the speed of all three, the present media finds itself limited by its own strengths. There is no popular discussion that does not cause sensationalism, for instance, and there is no expert inspection that does not cause delay. The nature of the beast, however, does change over time, and you may safely lay your bets on Twitter (social media in general, really — any “real time discussion”) being an important (but limited) part of it.

Finally: blogs are the real wild card here. The issue is that they qualify for each category but aren’t fundamentally limited to any — which makes them both versatile and unreliable. This blog, for example, has pieces that fall under every category: tweet-like posts about some Apple rumor, rehashes of press releases, and interminable editorials like the one you’re just about to finish. Yes, the credibility (and readability) of the blogosphere is still questioned, puzzlingly enough, but who knows — the Chimaera may grow a fourth head yet.

[Note: For anyone confused: I chose the three outlets shown in the top diagram as visible representatives, and am not necessarily talking specifically about each one; you'll notice that there are shots from MSNBC, Fox News, and the newsroom photograph is of the Daily Telegraph.]


Sunday Giveaway: See the world with your very own Vue camera system

Posted: 29 Nov 2009 11:34 AM PST


It’s Sunday and I want you to be happy. That’s why I’m offering you your very own Vue Personal Video network so you can keep an eye on Santa as he sneaks up to your back porch and steals your garbage cans.

We reviewed this kit a few months ago and were impressed. It’s completely wireless and the cameras are battery powered.

The kit is worth $299 and it can be yours for the price of a comment below. We’ll pick a winner on Tuesday.


Top 10 Gamertell posts for the week of November 22, 2009 and more

Top 10 Gamertell posts for the week of November 22, 2009 and more


Top 10 Gamertell posts for the week of November 22, 2009

FROM GAMERTELL - Haven’t caught all of the Gamertell news this week?  Here's your chance to catch up on this week’s top 10 articles! Man marries Love Plus DS game“Maybe those Japanese dating simulation games are dangerous after all. Konami’s Love Plus DS dating sim has seen unprecedented popularity and creepy devotion since… MORE »

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Appletell interviews Ari, developer of iJailBreak

FROM APPLETELL - Ari Weinstein—commonly found around the internet as AriX—is the developer behind iJailBreak. We recently had the opportunity to talk to him about what’s next.
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Amazon's Black Friday game deals last until the end of the month

FROM GAMERTELL - Shop Amazon now through the end of the month and get some great deals on video games and accessories…
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Hong Kong Crunch: What’s up in China?

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 12:37 PM PST

china-hong-kong

Hey, guys. I, John Biggs, will be in Hong Kong and Guangdong next week (November 30-December 5) to visit some folks and would love to meet up with Web 2.0 and gadget purveyors in mother China. If you would like to chat, drop me a line at john @ crunchgear.com and let me know what’s up. I’m thinking about doing an informal meet-up on Thursday so advice on places to meet in Hong Kong are welcome.

Look forward to hearing from you all and “Ni Hao!”


This is why you should read CrunchGear every day

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 12:12 PM PST


Do you know what’s awesome? One of our readers won the Best Buy Black Friday VIP contest. Here’s his story via the Seattle Times.


The Zune HD will soon come in more colors

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 11:50 AM PST

The Zune HD has been kick’n it for a few months on retail shelves. But if you’re planning on buying one sometime soon and purple and magenta are your colors, you might want to wait until December 1st. On that day the portable will be available in those lovely colors in addition to the five that are already available. Of course you can customize your Zune HD even more with the signature Zune Original Artwork and through the holiday’s, free engraving. [via Gizmodo]


Nokia busted for showing off an SNES emulator on the N900

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST

nokia+n900

If you were a hardware manufacturer and your new phone was a ROMist’s delight you’d be all like “Our phone plays Doom and totally plays Super Mario Bros. 3.” Right? You’d be bragging from here to Scranton.

Well, Nokia tried to do that with the new N900 and got in huge trouble with Nintendo. They showed a video of an SNES emulator running on the device with this voiceover.

"There's already a bunch of great retro gaming emulator apps available for you to download," says the video, which shows buttons that appear to open emulators for systems including Nintendo’s Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES and SNES.

Ummm, right. Good choice. Nintendo is probably going to totally sue them out of business now. You know they should have just shown Altered Beast on a Genesis emulator and been done with it.

via EdgeOnline


Orbeos OLED lights are warm and round

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 11:40 AM PST

osram
So far, I’ve avoided the CFL and LED light bulb revolution. The savings, it seems, come around in the second year, which means that whoever has my apartment next will have a reduced power bill. I could always take my light bulbs with me, but that seems a bit miserly. Besides, my power bill is like $5 a month and 90% of that is my fridge and my desktop.

But these Orbeos OLED lights are as bright and efficient as any LED or CFL, but are both warm, diffuse, and dimmable. I might choose them over regular bulbs just because they have the best of all worlds.

They’re extremely flat, so they can go just about anywhere, but that same flatness means they won’t work to illuminate a whole area unless you have a few. Some OLEDs, however, are flexible, and once they can stretch the matrix into a light bulb-esque shape, you might be able to put them into your regular sockets.

[via OLED-Display.net]


You can install Chrome OS on your Dell Mini 10v right now

Posted: 28 Nov 2009 07:00 AM PST

dellmini10v

You can now run Chromium OS, the open source developmental version of Google Chrome OS, on your Dell Mini 10v. Don’t have one? Neither do I, so don’t feel too bad.

It make take some time to set up. For one, the download (an image file), as put together by a few of Dell’s Linux guys, weighs in at 7.5GB. Not only will that take a while to download, but you’ll also need a flash drive with at least 8GB of free space on there—another thing I don’t have. You’ll also need access to another Linux-based computer (well, any computer that can run the "dd" command) to get everything up and running.

Beyond that, it does appear to be fairly painless to instal. You download said image file then copy it from the Linux computer using "dd" to the flash drive. You take this flash drive, stick it into you Dell Mini 10, and away you go!

What’s your reward for going through all that? Running Chromium OS, of course. Think of it as Google Chrome OS, but way alpha.

I’m going to file this under the "Why would you bother doing that? Because you can" category.

via Liliputing