Archive for December, 2011

Image: Business Insider / Matthew Lynley

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Megaman X is a classic side-scrolling shoot-em-up game that has withstood the test of time even after it came out in 1996.

As in, please don’t screw the port to the iPhone up.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Capcom did with its port of Megaman X to the iPhone. Not only did they manage to make it an all-around badly performing game, they subsequently thrashed everything challenging and entertaining about it at the same time.

Nothing about the spirit of the original Megaman X is preserved in this port. It’s like they tried to upgrade a game that didn’t even need to be upgraded in the first place.

If you’re a newcomer to the series, you don’t want to buy this game because it’s just flat out bad. If you are a long-time fan of the series, you won’t want to buy it because it will basically crush your childhood.

• For starters, the game runs at a shoddy 12 to 15 frames per second. The screen literally flickers from time to time. Megaman X had the benefit of being one of the smoothest-looking games on the Super Nintendo, chugging along at 20 to 30 frames per second. This game runs like a snail and the animations look jarring.

• The levels aren’t continuous: they’re broken into discrete sections. Maybe it’s because the iPhone couldn’t handle the large levels, but I don’t think that’s the case, because the iPhone can very easily run Sonic CD and other games that have massive levels. Basically, there seems to be no reason to do this, but Capcom did it anyway. It breaks the continuity of each level and makes you lose sense of how big each level actually is.

• Megaman X sports a new look in the iPhone version, but it’s not a good one. Instead of the sleek high-resolution (ironically on the SNES) look of the original — which you can easily see on an emulated version of the game on Android phones — it has a cartoony style that just feels strange.

• The controls are also wonky. Your weapon charges up automatically, which removes some of the strategy of when to charge and when to fire away rapidly. It’s hard to move quickly through levels because the game is slow and the controls feel sloppy.

• Capcom has built at least a hundred achievements into the game, but they’re all ridiculous and unnecessary. I mean, you basically get an achievement whenever you take a step to the right. CONGRATULATIONS, YOU RAN RIGHT! Bam, achievement!

Seriously, there is nothing good about this game. Don’t waste your money.

Beyond Oblivion, a New York-based startup with an innovative take on the idea of unlimited music, has closed it doors before its product had even launched, the Financial Times reports [paywalled link].

The idea behind Beyond Oblivion’s Boinc service was that it would remove the need for users to have to pay a monthly subscription or listen to adverts, as with Spotify and its rivals. Instead, users would pay a flat fee for the service which would be bundled into the purchase price of hardware such as PCs and smartphones.

Users would get unlimited streaming and downloading access to Boinc’s music library for the lifetime of the device you bought it with. Social music discovery and sharing features were to be included as well.

Despite Beyond Oblivion having the financial backing of News Corp, the FT’s sources put the blame on the company’s failure on persuading labels to license their music, and electronics companies to include the service with their products. Manufacturers were supposedly worried that having to pay again for the service would put consumers off upgrading their hardware in the future.

Originally slated for release in 2010 but delayed, early 2012 was the most recent planned launch date for the service. Its closure shows that while the music industry is more receptive to digital innovation than it used to be, not every idea will fly. It’s also another music-related investment flop for News Corp, which sold off Myspace for $35 million this summer, after having bought it for over 16 times that amount six years earlier.

The brown bear (Ursus arctos) can be found across northern Eurasia and North America. It weighs from between 300 to 780 kilograms (660 to 1,700 lb) and its largest subspecies, the Kodiak Bear, rivals the polar bear as the largest member of the bear family. Although the brown bear’s global spread has shrunk, it is listed as a least concern species by the IUCN, with a population of around 200,000 worldwide.

But you certainly don’t see one everyday. Given that they spend many days hibernating underground in the winter season, you’ll be pleased to know that Volkswagen Sweden is sponsoring a live-stream of the birth of a litter of bear cubs.

Using live video service Bambuser, it’s expected that hundreds of thousands of people will tune in to watch Freja the brown bear in the final few weeks before she gives birth.

Animal lovers will also be able to track every minute of the first few months of the young family’s lives via the live broadcast, filmed in a bear reservation in the Swedish town of Orsa. Viewers are also being given the chance to enter a competition to name the cubs and guess the date and time the family will leave their underground den.

“It’s going to get really exciting over the next few weeks when Freja gives birth to her litter of pups,” says Hans Eriksson, Executive Chairman of Bambuser. “They’ll start life tiny, naked, blind and helpless – they’ll be totally dependent on their mother. The campaign, initiated by Volkswagen Sweden and creative agency DDB, is a great example of how to utilize live video to boost engagement by reaching out with something totally unique. We’re seeing increasing numbers of brands and agencies taking this approach.”

If you didn’t know, brown bears fatten up on berries during the autumn season in preparation for hibernation. Once they’ve built up sufficient fat reserves to see them through the long Swedish winter, bears then collect moss and twigs to make their hibernation den, often in a disused anthill or at the foot of a large fir tree. Bears usually hibernate from early November to late March/early April.

Of course, this isn’t the first time the birth of bear cubs has been broadcast to the online masses. A black bear named Lily gave birth two years in a row in front of a live online audience in northern USA. The North American Bear Center and Whitewolf Entertainment teamed up to carry out some animal research, turning to Verizon Wireless to use its 3G broadband network which covers northern Minnesota.

The holidays for most people who read this site involve answering a cornucopia of tech support questions for their relatives. Honestly, I’ve watched friends field the most frustrating 45 minute IT department-level questions during holiday time with the family, which inevitably devolves into more of those types of conversations in between, “Pass the gravy.”

These conversations will only increase in frequency as the average consumer wakes up to smartphones and the app economy. According to Flurry, nearly a quarter of a billion app downloads this year occurred on December 24th and again this Christmas Day, more than 2x any other day thus far, ever.

If you’re building an app or another kind of tech service you better pay attention, as increasingly many of your users will be what investor Chris Dixon and others refer to as “Normals.” Or what I like to call, dumb people. JUST KIDDING.

So who are these “Normals”? Well the Normals are a group of people who don’t check into Foursquare, use Square or upload photos to Instagram, until they do. The Normals are more likely to know what Pinterest is than Quora. The Normals had no idea that ‘Angry Birds’ was a phenomenon when they downloaded it because it was a featured app in the App Store (true story). To Normals the name Michael Arrington rings absolutely no bell.

Sometimes you almost even envy them.

Introducing mom-in-law to Adele. Also trying to explain why Adele album isn’t on Spotify. And also, what Spotify is.—
Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 31, 2011

And sometimes they’re as annoying as all hell. Arguing for the 20th time with your Dad about the superiority of an iPhone versus a Blackberry is not fun — Neither is getting into an email race at the Thanksgiving dinner table, and winning like you knew you would. Okay, maybe that is fun.

So what are you supposed to do if you’re a techie faced with trying understand how a Normal would view a product? Well first of all pay attention: Normals above all care more about problem solving than acquiring the newest fanciest thing. And if you’re designing products for them, you should be painfully aware of that.

As a public service announcement I asked Quora, a product that is still fumbling around in the Normals department, how product designers gather insight into handling a Normal user’s needs versus a techie’s.

Techies are “driven by writing their blog post and voicing their opinions or by staying ahead of the curve,” answered Quora product designer Rebekah Cox, “Normal people don’t have those artificial needs which fuel a drive to discover something new for the purpose of discovering something new. They have actual problems to solve.”

Cox reveals the flaws in the ways that techies adapt their products for Normals with two different examples, one of a sample thought process that leads a techie into thinking they know what a Normal person wants [1] and then, what a Normal actually wants (versus what a techie thinks they want) at [2]:

[1] “There’s so much work involved in managing all my Twitter accounts, there should be a tool to manage that and Facebook and YouTube and my RSS feeds all in one place.”

[2] “My home theater isn’t great, but I’m not sure what I need to make it better. Tom has Blu-ray and is happy with it. Can your site help me with that?”

In the first case [1], the early adopter is extrapolating that a normal person would have the same problem that they do but at a lower frequency, based on the (wrong) assumption that normal people just have less complex versions of the problems held by techies (lots of RSS feeds). In fact normal people just don’t have unmanageable quantities of social accounts and most likely don’t even know what RSS is. All they care about is that their home theatre is up to snuff [2].

“I would advise that you orient your UI around the job to be done — around the problem — and not the person,” says 37Signals product manager Ryan Singer echoing Clayton Christensen. The issue with this argument is that many problems have much narrower use cases than a given product designer could aim  for, for example, Cox’s [1] above.  And hitting the widest use case possible is a sweet spot that is essentially the holy grail of technology — as it basically means traction.

Hoping that my friends returning to Silicon Valley have had a very Merry Annual Normals Market Research With The Family.—
Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) December 27, 2011

YouTube product manager Hunter Walk holds that the differences between scaling big and scaling small are subtle yet super important especially considering the nuances of user interface design. He uses his experience with Google an example …

“The notion of using certain keywords such as adding ‘weather’  to a location query in order to display a forecast on the results page (eg New York City weather) was something us geeks did early on and many normals learned to do over time.

On the other hand, search operators (such as using an * as a wildcard) are totally geeky and will never cross over to normals who don’t need a command line language for Google. Instead operators are aimed at power users who when they are especially satisfied with a service are more likely to generally recommend it to normals.”

It’s sort of tricky. In order to figure out how to entice Normals to use their products, many technology entrepreneurs have to serve as “aimchair technology anthropologists.”  Normal adoption can mean the difference between success or failure, 10 million downloads versus 100k.

Startups like Wolfram Alpha and Friendfeed have learned hard way that you can’t ignore Normals just because you’re really smart. You can be a tech industry darling like Foursquare, Quora or even Google+ and be completely blindsided by something like Pinterest — which got way more press coverage in mainstream (and female focused) media before it ever really resonated with the tech press. Pinterest has an approachable personality and it’s easy to use. Learn from it guys.

Techies can’t see the forest for the trees, and Normals can only see the forest. The solution may lie in applying that metaphor to a famous Oscar Wilde quote, “We’re all in the forest, but some of us are reaching for the trees.” Or maybe remembering that you once were (and in some ways are still) a Normal, even if you’re now a techie.

Image: Via

Whilst Apple TV owners have their own frustrations with the lack of certain features on their Apple TV set-top boxes, perhaps the biggest frustration was that Apple hadn’t upgraded its latest release to run a number of iOS applications.

Showing the true spirit of the iOS development community, this particular feature has been delivered, in part, after developers Steven Troughton-Smith and another developer going by the name TheMudkip, rewrote parts of the Apple TV software to enable the installation and execution of certain iOS applications on the platform.

9to5mac posted a video of the proof-of-concept, which has a little while to go until it is ready for public release, demonstrating both the iOS calculator and Safari apps running — in unique side-by-side windows:

According to the developers, the software that is behing the application launcher, the iOS Springboard, had to be completely rewritten. TheMudkip’s MobileX window manager for iOS and Chpwn’s MobileLaunchpad launcher were then loaded, allowing multiple iOS apps to be run natively on the Apple TV, without AirPlay.

As it stands, there will not be a public release of the Apple TV hack, but we imagine it is in development. With specific milestones already achieved, the developers will be working to outfit the Apple TV with more functionality, greater control and support for more iOS applications.

Just hours after it emerged that “official” Siri for Android applications had made their way onto Google’s Android Market, the search giant has not only pulled the offending app but has also removed all apps by controversial app developer “Official App”.

If Android device owners perform a search for the application, a number of Siri clones and third-party solutions still appear in the search results but Siri for Android is now no longer to be found. The developer’s other app “Pinterest”, which was a mobile wrapper for Pinterest’s own mobile website, has also been removed from the listings.

Yesterday, we revealed what was described as an official Siri port for Android named ‘Siri for Android’ had launched on the Android Market on December 28, using Apple’s own Siri icon to function as a shortcut for Google’s own Voice Actions. At the time of writing, the app had been installed on more than 1000 devices.

    

With Google employing little-to-no checks on its marketplace, developers such as “Official App” did not have contend with application approvals and could launch copyright/trademark infringing applications in minutes.

The app looks to have been removed as a result of Google removing Official App’s developer account, pulling its apps with it. By using the developer name, Android Market users could be fooled into thinking that the app was indeed an official port, when in reality it was the creator of the app itself.

We highlighted that Google faces issues with running an open marketplace but with an extraordinarily quick turnaround time with its removal of the offending developer account, the search giant appears to be taking a hard line with fake and misleading apps (at least high-profile ones) and wants to ensure its marketplace remains as relevant as possible.

So here we are — the last day of 2011 and the end of the first year of me writing my occasional newsletter, Om Says. Being on a break, I decided to not read the web and instead go analog and read a lot of books to nourish my mind. For me, it was an enjoyable year of writing these newsletters and I have picked out 12 stories from the archives that I feel are something you might want to revisit during the New Year’s weekend. Happy 2012, everyone.

The top story of 2011 that impacted me personally:

• Steve Jobs and the sound of silence

Steve Jobs left a big hole not only for his company, but also for the tech industry. In a time when so many companies focus on short-term decisions, Jobs taught us that real success is in taking the long view. (Also, The Tao of Steve.)

My thoughts on media:

• Old Media Is Being Unbundled, Just Like Telecom Was

The unbundling of telecom resulted in the free-ing of the last mile, which in tandem with rise of the Internet resulted in the destruction of the voice-minute economy. The media landscape is going through similar unbundling, thanks to the Internet, which takes away controls over distribution networks.

• The Distribution Democracy and the Future of Media

Unless media corporations stop defining themselves by their products, they are going to be unable to navigate the big shift that is changing the rules of the game — what I call the “democratization of distribution.”

• Why the Medium Is Not the Message

One of the biggest mistakes we as a society in general, and this industry in specific, make is that we mistake the medium for the message. Those who can keep their eye on the message — Amazon and Netflix for example – profit handsomely. On the flip-side you…[MISSING REST OF SENTENCE]

Some trends I see emerging:

• Why the Future of Hardware Is Services

There is a re-definition of the consumer electronics landscape and we are seeing a future for hardware that combines hardware, software and connectivity with specific services. Without services, the devices may lose our attention and end up at the back of the proverbial drawer.

• How iPads, phones sensors will redefine our homes

An Internet-connected, sensor-based and iPad-managed terrarium — a microecosystem — by London-based product designer Samuel Wilkinson is an artful marriage of physical living and digital worlds and it could be a precursor for what homes and gardens could become in the age of connectedness.

Observations on the “apps” and app revolution:

• iPad May Be Magical. Apps Aren’t. Here’s Why.

Steve Jobs called the iPad magical. Fast forward to today, and I (and about 15 million others) agree. However, if iPad, the device, is more magical, the applications (apps) for the device are anything but. Where are the apps befitting the device and its hardware capabilities?

• Money Can’t Buy You Love: Why Some Apps Work, Some Don’t

The crowded consumer Internet has made it difficult for startups and services to get attention from the people who really matter: the end users. The question is: How do you get that much-needed attention? Not with VC dollars. Instead it is something less tangible.

• Why Apps Need Some Sense and Sensibility

The biggest frustration I have with my iPhone is when the phone switches between Wi-Fi and 3G networks and just hangs. In solving this problem, MIT researchers used motion sensors, showing how mobile devices need to become an extension of us.

• What Makes Apps Delightful?

With over 650,000 apps seeking our attention, it is not an easy task for apps to get it. In order to be successful and stand out, mobile apps have to have little friction, and in the process overcome smartphones’ and the mobile web’s three limitations.

And some random musings:

• The Economics of Attention: Why There Are No Second Chances on the Internet

The economics of attention are much more ruthless and unforgiving than the real economic underpinning of a product. Just as it is hard for a movie to recover from a bad opening weekend, today’s apps lose if they don’t make a good first impression.

• Is the Internet the “Paris” of the new millennium?

I started my recent European tour with a visit to Loic Le Meur’s annual celebration of the Internet, Le Web. If attendees were an indication, startup culture is everywhere. Perhaps it’s the setting, but this celebration of technology and startups reminds me of another creative age.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Imagine logging into any service on the web and being told that it’s probably a good idea to stop using a browser extension that you’ve installed. That’s what happened to one of our faithful readers, Derek.

The Missing e Chrome extension, which has a name that pokes fun at Tumblr’s lack of a second vowel, adds a ton of functionality to your experience on the social blogging platform. It’s quite popular too, with the Chrome Web Store reporting 258,408 users.

When Derek logged into Tumblr today, he was greeted with this overwhelming pop-up:

In the prompt, the company says that it loves developers who create add-on experiences for its site, but it creates issues that are a “burden” on its support staff. In particular, Tumblr says that Missing e may cause data loss, privacy, and performance issues that it can’t support. It sounds like one of those TV commercials for medications where they rattle off all of the side-effects they may cause.

Third-party extensions and hacks are a part of the web, perhaps Tumblr should focus on building new features or its own official “app store” instead of whining about support and server issues.

If you haven’t yet visited Honda Civic UK’s YouTube channel, you’re in for a surprise. As the page loads, you’re greeted with the explanation: “We took a 360 degree camera off the grid. Now it’s your turn to explore.” When it’s ready, click the arrow and “venture into the unknown”. The experience mirrors that of traveling through Google Maps, except with video (something that should definitely be in Google’s plans).

You start by exploring a canyon and then arrive in a junk yard. From there you continue to explore in a way that makes you feel as if you’re really there. This interactive ad might showcase exactly what we should expect from YouTube’s plans to greatly improve advertisements in 2012.

The ad was created by Wieden and Kennedy, the team that brought us the viral Old Spice video, “Smell Like A Man, Man.” If for some reason you’ve been living under a rock for the past year and haven’t heard of it, you owe it to humanity to see for yourself. Clearly, these guys know what they’re doing, as their entire portfolio is worth a look.

➤  Honda Civic UK via YouTube

People have many different opinions on the role technology plays in their daily lives. Some believe that social networks cheapen friendships, while others find that they stay closer with friends than ever before, thanks to Facebook and Twitter.

The controversy is sure to spread amongst couples, likely because lovers have never had a social network or app made just for them. This may now be about to change, as four emerging startups show off the potential technology has to make relationships stronger than ever before.

Kahnoodle

Besides having the best name ever, Kahnoodle is a mobile game that makes it fun and easy for busy couples to build and maintain intimacy. The app allows you to become more aware of how well you’re satisfying each others’ core relationship needs, while gamifying the entire process. You can give your partner “kudos” for doing things you love, set goals and then win badges and discounts on date nights for succeeding.
➤  Kahnoodle

Duet

As we said in our review earlier this month, Duet hopes to bring the romance back to one-on-one communication, serving as a starting point for doing things with the people you love. The most special aspect of Duet is what happens as you use it. Going against the grain of traditional messaging, your Duets grow into a list of dreams, goals or desires as a couple.
➤  Duet

Tokii

Tokii is the world’s first relationship management platform. It allows you to trade favors, learn about each other and play games together. It’s designed for the busy couple, and looks like an interesting way to make sure you are always communicating with your significant other.
➤  Tokii

Between

Like Duet, Between is a mobile service that provides a secret place for lovers
to communicate and keep their precious moments. With this app, you can build a 1:1 archive that includes chat history, photo albums and customized message board with your partner. It definitely beats sending private messages back and fourth on Facebook!
➤  Between

Of course, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. There are plenty of sites out there that might not be the best thing for couples. An example of this is Sidetaker, which allows couples to turn to the masses for the solution to their arguments — it’s as entertaining as it is damaging!

What do you think? Does technology help or harm couples as they build their relationships. Can our phones be anything else other than distractions? Let us know in the comments below!