Month: June 2010

Adobe AIR has been a double-edged sword since it was first created. Developers can create beautiful applications quickly and easily distribute them to users. The problem has always been performance and resource usage. With AIR 2, Adobe has decreased memory usage by about 30% across the board and boosted overall performance. This is in addition to a slew of new features:

• Native Process API
• Open documents with the user’s default application
• Microphone data access
• Mass storage device detection
• Updated, faster WebKit with enhanced support for HTML5 and CSS3
• Multi-touch and gestures
• TLS/SSL sockets
• Global error handler
• New networking support including UDP and server sockets
• Screen reader support(Windows)
• Reduced CPU usage on idle
• .rpm and .deb installer packages for the runtime on Linux
• Native installers for applications (.exe, .dmg, .rpm, .deb)

Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It will also be coming to Android later in June, but you can grab the beta from the Android Market. This new version of Flash brings improved performance, power management and video. It also has multi-touch, private browsing capabilities, and a few tweaks to make it perform better on Macs.

With 10.1, Adobe focused on creating a single Flash runtime that could run efficiently across all devices. They were able to make changes that “directly translate to faster execution and reduced resource consumption.” Talking specifically about mobile devices, this ultimately results in Flash not sucking the life out of your battery. The garbage collector has also been improved, which means Flash will more efficiently release memory it is no longer using.

On desktops, Flash Player 10.1 includes hardware-based H.264 video decoding. This gives you smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead and offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance and reducing system resource usage.

Multi-touch is probably one of the more interesting new features. It supports pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. As it is trying to slim down, Flash is also becoming more mobile friendly. These changes probably won’t get Flash onto the iPad, but they are definitely a step in the right direction. As HTML5 becomes more and more popular, Adobe will need to continue to step their game up to remain relevant.

At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I didn’t notice anything special about the Google homepage because I never actually visit it. I search via Chrome’s location bar. Curious, I jumped over to Google.com and was greated by a very pleasing background image in place of the standard plain white. Everything faded in, probably due to some Javascript magic. I was impressed. Apparently, many others were not. Many were appalled, even. The question is, why are people so upset?

To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we‘ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage. Included in the collection are photographs of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (???), Kwon, Ki-soo (???) and Tord Boontje, as well as some incredible photos from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic. We’ll be featuring these images as backgrounds on the Google homepage over the next 24 hours.

Not only can you choose from a nice selection of high-quality background images provided by Google, but you can also choose images from your Picasa account or upload one from your computer. You can also choose to have no image, reverting back to the simple white that many are used to.

Many of the reactions border on the ridiculous. Some complained that Google is trying to be more like Bing. There is actually some merit to this complaint in that Google also recently updated the page to add a sidebar, much like what Bing offers. Some have said this “Bingification” of Google could hurt their business, but I think keeping things fresh on the back-end is more important.

Tweets from those associated with Microsoft indicate that they are amused and somewhat flattered that Google has gone this route. Others seem to hint at privacy concerns given that the backgrounds are opt-out instead of opt-in, much like the recent Facebook privacy debacle. Still others complain that the page seems to load slower.

In any case, I kinda like the new background options. I rarely visit google.com anyway, and the backgrounds don’t show up on the search results pages. If you have Opera or Safari, you probably have no clue what happened as they don’t show up in those browsers. Are you going to go customize your search page, or do you prefer basic white?

via Google’s New Look: Why is Everybody So Upset? – PCWorld

In what may be Apple’s worst security breach, email information from 114,000 iPad owners has been made public. This hack was discovered and exploited by a group calling themselves Goatse Security. It revolves around a simple feature that makes it easier for customers to sign up for their 3G service. By sending the ICC-ID number from the individual iPad, AT&T’s software could auto-fill the user’s email address in the form and save them from typing it. Goatse was easily able to exploit this feature and grab email addresses by guessing ICC-ID numbers. While this little feature probably saved users a few keystrokes, I doubt the benefits were worth exposing their email addresses.

Are You At Risk?

Anyone who bought an iPad 3G could potentially be at risk. While AT&T has since shut down the exploit, there is no way to tell if your specific information was shared. Gizmodo made reference to a list of 114,000 emails that they received, but they are not sharing this list. Goatse Security may have shared information with others. The only way you can really tell if your information was compromised would be if you saw an increase in spam activity.

Does This Really Matter?

In this case, only email addresses were leaked. Besides a little spam, is there anything to worry about? It’s not really about what was leaked here, but that information was leaked at all. Work email addresses from “dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians” were made public. AT&T knows much more about you than your email address. This breach could indicate deeper issues at AT&T in regards to privacy. In this case, they set up a server which held your private information and was accessible by anyone with an Internet connection. That server freely gave away your private email address in exchange for a number that is plainly on display on the outside of your iPad. Who is to say they haven’t made this same mistake elsewhere?

In an interview with Gizmodo and a statement released later, AT&T seems to want to avoid some of the blame. They try to play up how Goatse Security didn’t disclose the breach to them first and play down the fact that is was “only” email addresses that were leaked. Their statement follows.

AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device.

This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature that provided the e-mail addresses.

The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T.

We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC IDS may have been obtained.

We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologize to our customers who were impacted.

PicClick is a search engine that only includes a few sites, but that’s all it needs to make your shopping life easier. It is the first visual shopping interface for eBay and others. It’s a really unique and pretty awesome way to find things you want to get. Whether it be a handmade bag from Etsy.com or a new way to make curry from AllRecipes.com. You can even use it to find someone special using PlentyOfFish.

PicClick currently supports eBay, Amazon, Etsy, PlentyOfFish, AllRecipes.com, and Google. Yelp is still in the works. These appear as tabs across the top of the page. Once you’ve decided what you might be looking for, you can enter your search terms or simply start narrowing things down by clicking through the categories. The images you see as results will update accordingly.

As part of your search, you can specify a minimum or maximum price where applicable. A slider on the right lets you choose how big you want the thumbnails to be. Once you narrowed things down a bit, you can use this to see things clearer. Visual search fits really well with shopping. Usually, we find ourselves hunting around the page for the photo showing what the item looks like. With PicClick, you can get right to the point. When looking for things in real life, we are usually attracted to what catches our eye, so online shopping should work the same way.

“With PicClick you can see hundreds of products on one page, you can maximize full-screen for even more, infinite scroll, and zoom slider on the top right. It just allows you to find things 100x faster.”

Not sure about the 100x figure, but it will definitely speed things up a bit. PicClick also lends itself very well to touchscreen devices like the iPad and most of the mobile phones coming out these days. Why go through the standard method of searching and scrolling through a small number of items at a time when you can quickly browse hundreds of items at the same time?

PicClick plans to release a new section every month starting with Yelp. It looks like PicClick has found a very interesting niche that will possibly blow up. What do you think?

via RWW

Sounds like AOL will be doing their part to help the economy this year. They are focused on being able to churn out massive amounts of content all in-house and will be hiring hundreds of new content creators. David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division, studied the numbers and came to the conclusion that this is the most profitable route for the company to take. Yahoo just recently reached a similar conclusion, which was part of the reason they acquired Associated Content.

“Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period. The content driving our traffic is home-grown, and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.” – David Eun, president of AOL’s media and studios division

AOL is already home to 500 full-time editorial employees and content creators. Eun says that this number could double in the coming year depending on the marketplace and that AOL will be “the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year.” The goal of this operation is to attract advertisers. The content operation involves over 100 brands, which will be reorganized into 17 separate content networks.

They’ve done their homework and have not only represented all types of content that attracts users, but also content that advertisers want to spend money on. These huge networks will range in topics from finance and sports to music and communities like AOL Latino and Black Voices.

500 more full-time employees is apparently not enough to turn the company from a dial-up ISP into a media giant. AOL is also looking to expand their network of 40,000 freelance contributors. As part of this, they are working on a system that will judge the value of a piece based on traffic, visit length, and the ad revenue associated with it.

It seems that both Yahoo and AOL have chosen the same path. AOL already has a base of writers to work with while Yahoo had to get most of theirs through acquisition. It remains to be seen if simply flooding the web with content and throwing ads on top of it will be a profitable strategy for either one, but the strategy of monetizing other people’s content has worked just fine for most major players on the web to this point.

Caffeine is a complete redesign of Google’s search index. While they reign as the #1 search engine, they have never been known to stop innovating. The web has changed and we have come to expect things to happen immediately. When we search, we want the most relevant and freshest results. When we publish things on the web, we want them to show up right now. Google has taken steps to make their search more realtime by integrating with the social web, but they have decided to go much further than that.

The results you see when you search Google come from their search index, which is a representation of the web as they see it stored in a database somewhere. Every so often, Google’s web crawlers go out and try to figure out what has changed. The web is now a rich ecosystem of data, going way beyond simple text and images, so this strategy doesn’t quite fit. It’s also slow to update. If you’ve ever published something and then waited and waited for it to show up in Google, you know how annoying that can be.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Caffeine is a fresh take on an old idea and should go a long way in keeping Google at the top of their search game. It’s also an investment in the future, providing a strong, scalable, and faster base for future developments in search. It seems that this is just the beginning. This back-end change should bring users some nice benefits on the front-end, making search more useful and relevant in the months ahead.

FaceTime is Apple’s new standard for video calling. It comes along with the release of iOS4 and the iPhone 4. At the moment, it only works from iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 and only over WiFi. FaceTime was demoed at the WWDC yesterday by Steve Jobs himself. Even though 570 WiFi base stations in use by various bloggers threatened to bring the demo to it’s knees, Jobs made a video call to Jony Ive to demo the product.

11:34AM – Jony: “I did, too — I used to love the optimistic view of the future. And it’s real now, isn’t it?”
“It’s real now. Especially when people turn off their WiFi.”

11:34AM – “Hey Jony how you doing?”
“I’m doing okay — except for these guys who aren’t turning their WiFi off. You know, this is amazing… I grew up with the Jetsons and Star Trek communicators. I grew up dreaming about this stuff…”

– “In 2007 when we launched the iPhone, I got to make the first public call on the iPhone…” Jony’s face shows up on the screen. “Hey Jony! This never freezes up, so you haven’t turned off all the WiFi — let’s get it off please!”

At the moment, the whole thing seems pretty limited. You have to first have an iPhone 4, then you have to be near a WiFi hotspot. The person you’re calling also needs an iPhone 4 near a WiFi hotspot. On the plus side, there is no configuration necessary. It simply works right out of the box. The software automatically switches cameras for you (front or rear) and the video and audio quality are said to be good.

Jobs says they are working with cellular carriers to “get things ready.” They are also planning to turn FaceTime into an open industry standard. This will bring this video calling technology to other handsets and carriers, which should make it much more useful. The possibilities and use cases are many and the demo video showed most of the ones you would expect: people talking to babies, since people love babies, even for get them the babyzoom’s budget baby girl wear from stores online. Maybe this could be the push needed to take video calling to the mainstream.

photo and video via Engadget

While the HTC Evo 4G is a formidable Android phone, it didn’t really have any competition when it was first released. It set the bar pretty high for what a smartphone should be capable of. Now that the iPhone 4 has been announced, the first thing we want to know is how they match up. How do the two best phones from Android and Apple compare? The Evo 4G and the iPhone 4 are pretty evenly matched except for a few key areas. These are the camera capabilities, battery life, and the displays.

The Cameras

The iPhone 4 bumped the camera from 3 megapixels up to 5 megapixels over previous versions. It also includes a backside illuminated sensor and Jobs points out that the size of the sensors was not decreased in order to boost the megapixels. This is all in an effort to increase the number of photons that are captured by the camera, thus increasing photo quality.

The HTC Evo 4G has an 8 megapixel camera. This should mean it takes better photos, but all this talk about the sensors from Apple casts a shadow of doubt. Is it really all about the megapixels, or does Apple know something we don’t?

Both phones have secondary cameras and are capable of recording HD video. The difference here is in the software capabilities of the phones. You can get iMovie for the iPhone 4, which lets you edit your HD movie right on the phone and then publish it wherever you need it. Both phones offer some form of video calling, but the iPhone is limited to WiFi-only in this department.

Battery Life

The HTC Evo is known to have serious battery life issues. According to Matt Burns at Mobile Crunch, this is the deal breaker. Even with features like 4G WiMax turned off, the battery life is apparently still miserable. Even the HTC CEO agrees that this is an issue.

The iPhone 4 made more room in it’s design for a bigger battery. The A4 processor it uses is also very good at power consumption. This makes for a device with some pretty competitive battery life stats (7hours 3g talk time). We won’t know until more people get the device in their hands, but I suspect the iPhone 4 won’t have a problem outlasting the Evo 4G.

The Display

The HTC Evo 4G, with a display size of 4.3 inches, definitely has a bigger display than the iPhone (3.5 inches). It’s not all about size, though. The iPhone display has a resolution of 960×640 while the Evo comes in at 800×480. Higher resolution means better viewing quality and Apple has also added Retina Display technology, which puts 78% of the pixels you would find on an iPad right in the palm of your hand. Which display comes out looking the best is probably a matter of opinion given the 1-inch size difference.

Given the engineering and technology involved in these devices, it’s difficult to simply compare them on paper. Once we see them being compared in the wild, I’m sure their individual quirks will become clear. For now, it looks like the iPhone 4 may have a slight lead. Of course, we also have to keep in mind the existing issues with the AT&T network. Worst case scenario, you either end up with a device that can’t hold a charge or a device that can’t keep a data connection.

photo via Engadget

At WWDC 2010, Apple brings us iOS4. No, it’s not a completely new Operating System, but they’ve decided to drop the Phone part and make things simpler. According to jobs, this is their “most ambitious release to date.” It sports over 1500 developer APIs and over 100 new user features. The most obvious of these new features being multi-tasking. This has been a huge issue for many potential iPhone users and detractors and Jobs sticks with the same talking points as to why they’ve taken so long to implement it, saying “Some people were saying you weren’t first with multitasking — the same was true with cut/copy/paste. But we took some time to figure out how to do it right.”

During the iPhone 4 presentation, Jobs was unable to pull up a web page. Apparently, there were 570 WiFi base stations in the room and they were messing up the demos. Before he began the iOS4 presentation, he actually said “All you bloggers need to turn off your base stations, put your notebooks down.” Many blogs actually did stop live blogging, but GDGT was hearing none of that.

11:06AM – And yes, we’re still here. Sorry Steve.

11:06AM – People are jeering… “come on guys.” Oooookay. “Are we done? So, number six: iPhone OS4. The most advanced mobile OS in the world.” Big applause.

11:06AM – “I’ve got time…” laughter. “This is a testament to how far we’ve come, isn’t it?”

11:05AM – “If you want to see the demos, there’s no way to do it. Set ‘em on the floor.” This is really awkward.

11:05AM – Wait, Steve is seriously asking everyone to stop liveblogging? They’re serious!

In any case, the show must go on. One of the primary uses for multitasking that I’ve heard was for streaming music while doing other things. This is the first thing we see during the keynote, Pandora streaming music while Jobs checks his mail. That alone is probably worth some applause. A few other iOS4 features to note:

• Folders – easily keep things organized and categorized
• Retina display integration
• Mail – unified inbox & threading
• Enhanced Camera & Photos apps
• Deeper enterprise support – this includes features like better data protection, wireless app distribution, and multiple Exchange accounts

Another interesting point is the addition of Bing as a search option. It’s an HTML5 presentation of Bing done by Microsoft. As Google and Apple move directly into competition, some speculated that we might see Google removed from the iPhone. It looks like simply adding another option was as close as Apple was willing to go. Google still remains the default, though.

Apple will sell the 100 millionth iOS device this month. That includes iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads. A pretty awesome number to think about and Jobs ends by saying, “There is definitely a market for your applications.”

With the iPhone 4 camera, Apple realizes that one of the most important factors in the quality of your photos is your lighting. Rather than simply focusing on boosting the megapixels of the camera, they took steps to maximize the number of photons it can capture.

The iPhone 4 has taken the camera from 3 to 5 megapixels and has a backside illuminated sensor. Jobs notes that most manufacturers increase the megapixels at the expense of the pixel sensors, making them smaller to accommodate, but Apple has kept these sensors the same size as a way to capture more photons and give you better quality photos.

• 5 megapixel camera
• Backside illuminated sensor
• 1.75um size pixels
• 5x digital zoom
• Tap to focus
• LED Flash

The new camera also records video in HD (crowd went wild at that one). It can do full 720p at 30fps. “It’s REAL HD!,” says Jobs. Tap to focus is supported, along with built-in video editing, one-click sharing, and the LED flash will stay on while recording videos. To put this all into perspective, you can record HD quality video, edit it right there on your phone, and send it via e-mail, MMS, to MobileMe, YouTube, and others.

As if this wasn’t enough, they are taking things a step further by giving you iMovie for the iPhone. This will let you add beautiful transitions, titles, music, and intros from the palm of your hand. You can optionally include geolocation information for video clips. Record directly to the timeline, or choose from existing clips on your phone.

There is really nothing out there like this at all. High-definition video editing on your mobile device. This is something that video bloggers have probably been dreaming about. It could definitely change the video landscape. We are used to seeing choppy, low-quality videos with bad audio and no polish when it comes to real-time events. If it’s possible to carry iMovie around in your pocket, we may see the quality and presentation of videos on sites like YouTube shoot way up.

An HD Camera and iMovie could leave some video bloggers/journalists in the dust.

Apple has once again changed the cell phone game with it’s latest iPhone release at WWDC. It boasts 100 new features over it’s predecessors, including a sleek new design that many are already somewhat familiar with. Steve joked about the iPhone being leaked and many have thought that leak would make the entire WWDC event pretty boring, but seeing the iPhone in action is a different story.

• It’s 9.3mm thick. 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS.
• Front-facing camera
• MicroSIM slot
• Camera + LED flash
• Headset
• An extra mic for noise cancellation

Jobs talked about how extraordinary the build quality and structure of the phone is, especially for a device that many didn’t think could get much smaller. The phone’s antennas are integrated right into the phone, running along the perimeter. “It’s never been done before and it’s really cool engineering,” says Jobs. The structure of the antennae explains the odd lines around the edge of the phone.

The device is built with stainless steel for strength and has glass on the front and the back. Some had speculated that the surface on the back would be an additional touch-sensitive surface. One of the most obvious and stunning new features is the Retina Display. The Retina Display packs 78% of the pixels you would find on an iPad right in the palm of your hand. Jobs compared the iPhone 4 with the 3GS side-by-side on a projector and the difference is quite obvious. They had to bring in special projectors that could handle the detail. While the new display will make everything, including all your apps, look better, Jobs encourages developers to include higher quality artwork in the future.

“We think this is going to set the standard for displays for years to come. It may be the most important single component of the hardware, and we’ve got something here now that’s like the best window on the planet.” -Steve Jobs

The iPhone 4 is powered by the A4 processor. By using a microSIM among other things, they made more room for a bigger battery. This boosts your battery life quite a bit:

• 3G Talk – 7 hours
• 3G Browsing – 6 hours
• WIFI Browsing – 10 hours
• Video – 10 hours
• Music – 40 hours

Stay tuned as we bring you more news on the iPhone 4 and Worldwide Developer Conference 2010.

(photo via GDGT live coverage)

Klout, the gold standard as far as measuring influence on Twitter, will begin branching out from Twitter by launching the Facebird experiment later today. Facebird will be available the Klout Labs segment of the site. Klout has come a long way since we first covered it back in 2008. The site is much more polished and they’ve added better visual cues and badges to make it easier to understand what your Klout score means. Facebird will add another dimension to the service by letting you find influential Twitter users to connect to based on your Facebook interests.

Facebird works by using Facebook Connect to access your Likes. Using the information about all the stuff you’ve expressed an interest in, Klout pulls up relevant influential Twitter users for you to browse through. It’s not just that simple, though. Klout defines 16 separate classes of users that describe their style of influence based on how they use Twitter. This goes a step further in helping you find the right people to follow. For example, you may not be looking for an expert on your favorite band or someone who talks about your favorite show, but you want to follow someone who just shares a lot of content related to something you like. In essence, you can find people who share your interests and also use Twitter the way you would like them to.

This is definitely a step in a new direction for Klout that could make the service much more useful across the board. Klout could put themselves in a position to build your social graph for you across all of your social media services based on all the things your actually interested in. This could make our lives much simpler and help cut out a lot of the noise we’re used to seeing. Most new services that you join offer the ability to connect with your friends from other services, but this isn’t always the best strategy. Your interests will mostly stay the same across the board, but that doesn’t mean you always want to connect with the same people.

Producteev is a task management solution born from the frustrations the team had with other available products and services. Many users trying to get their productivity game on point have run into the same issues. Some interfaces are entirely too complicated. You are limited in how you can access or add tasks. The application doesn’t connect with any of your existing tools. The list of grievances goes on and Producteev aims to address most of them out of the gate.

We wanted a fully-featured, social networking aware task management application with a user interface that made sense, something we didn’t have to devote a couple of hours to learning to use. We wanted to be able to get a clear overview of the status of any project, anytime and from any place. We needed to be able to collaborate effortlessly. We wanted to be able to update project information in many different ways : via email, online, mobile, IM… and we needed to be able to share information in real time with all our team members, no matter how computer-savvy they are … or aren’t.

We couldn’t find that perfect application, so we decided to build it.

You can add tasks on the Productive site, via Instant Messaging, or by email. Given the goals for Producteev to be ubiquitous solution for talk management, it’s interesting that they have not included any ability to add tasks via SMS as that would be the least common denominator. Android, iPhone, and Mac desktop applications are in the works, but some users may still be left out in the cold.

To set up the proper connections, you need to go to Workspace Settings on the bottom left and navigate to the Communication Preferences tab. Don’t bother with the Settings link on the top right near your name as that only leads you to your account settings.

To add tasks via IM, be sure to connect your instant messenger service of choice and then follow the directions that show up for adding Producteev as a contact. For GTalk, you have to add ‘improducteev@gmail.com,’ for example.

Adding tasks via email is as simple as composing or forwarding an email to task@producteev.com. No matter which method you choose, you can also tag tasks by adding a hashtag to include a date or direct the task to a specific workspace.

While Producteev doesn’t yet meet it’s goal of being a complete solution for task management that is available everywhere you are, it does pack a bunch of project and team management features that make it worth a look.

• Shared Workspaces – Workspaces allow you to separate tasks into groups or lists. You can use them to manage multiple projects and share them with family, clients, or colleagues. Useful for just about any use case.
• Automatic Prioritization – Producteev watches how you work and figures out what you need to do next based on your activity. Just check your Hot! filter.
• Google Integration – Sync your tasks up with your Google Calendar. Add a gadget to Gmail or iGoogle.
• Producteev Academy – Kick your team into high gear by adding an element of competition and fun. The Academy adds a social gaming aspect to your task management so that team members can earn badges and compete to be the most productive.

Producteev is still a young application with a lot of potential. In such a crowded space as the productivity game, their ultimate goal is what will help them stand out. What do you think of Producteev?

via ReadWriteWeb

Smokescreen Brings Flash to the iPhone/iPad…Kinda

Smokescreen is a new open-source project that makes it possible to do Flash without the Flash plug-in. It works by converting the Flash SWF file into Javascript/HTML5 on-the-fly. This means that you can view Flash content on devices that otherwise don’t support it, like the iPhone and iPad. Because all the work is being done by the browser, the process is very resource intensive and can be a bit choppy on some content. This is still a new project, though. I think we can expect to see improvements. Especially given the current climate around Flash support and HTML5. Check out the demo for yourself. (via Engadget)

Google Ditches Windows to Improve Security

Google has decided that Windows will no longer be allowed. For most of it’s 10,000 employees, Mac and Linux are now the only options. For those who really love the Windows OS, they will need permission from a CIO or other executive to use it. This comes after the China hacking attacks back in January of this year. Some have said that this move is bogus and won’t actually protect the company from attacks like the one in January, but sources say that the China hack simply stirred up an existing movement for Google to run it’s business using it’s own products. We must also remember that Google Chrome OS will be coming later this year and competes directly with Windows.

Jobs Spills the Beans at D8

Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage at D8 and revealed some pretty interesting tidbits. The overall idea that he repeatedly returned to was that Apple is just trying to make a good product. This was part of his answer to a good number of questions, including whether Apple would remove Google from the iPhone/iPad (No), whether Jobs felt that Apple was in a platform war (Nope), and even in relation to the exclusion of Flash. He said Flash simply doesn’t make a good product and that’s why it was left out. He also mentioned that he never had beef with Adobe, but they kept talking and he couldn’t let it slide.

We didn’t set out to have a war over Flash. We made a technical decision. And it wasn’t until the iPad that Adobe raised a stink. They came after us….That’s why I wrote “Thoughts on Flash.”…We were getting tired of being trashed by Adobe in the press.

WWDC Begins Next Week

Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference begins next week. With everything that been going on in the tech sphere recently, it will definitely be interesting to see what Apple will announce. TNW offers up 5 Solid Bets for what we should expect. Arstechnica will be live blogging the event. All Things D suggests that we may see nothing much at all since the new iPhone was already leaked. Stay tuned here as we will be sharing highlights from the event.

Twitter Forces Password Updates

For some odd reason, Twitter has pushed out a bunch of password update emails. This was surprising to me since I rarely ever go to the site itself to login. I stick to one client and don’t give out my login/pw to third party services (they should be using OAuth anyway). This indicates to me that something more sinister than simple phishing could be going on, but it could also just be Twitter being extremely over protective. In any case, be careful out there.

“Password resets are a standard operating procedure if we see anything even close to fishy related to an account in an effort to keep people safe”.

Google Moderator is a feature that has allowed some pretty big names to have discussions with their audience without chaos ensuing. It provides a controlled environment where viewers on YouTube can ask questions and, if their question is popular among other Youtubers, get it voted up and answered. It’s like your own personal version of Digg…with video. Now, it’s available to all users.

Moderator is a versatile, social platform that allows you to solicit ideas or questions on any topic, and have the community vote the best ones up to the top in real-time.

Moderator was used in discussions on YouTube with Barack Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It’s also been used to facilitate discussion about the future of the African continent and who is the best slam dunker not in the NBA. While YouTube has made updates to the commenting system to make it more manageable and inviting, it’s still difficult to have any type of meaningful discussion within the comments. The noise easily drowns out the signal. Google moderator turns the tables in your favor.

Your first step is to add the Moderator module to your YouTube Channel. Just open the Modules drop down from your channel page and check the Moderator box (don’t forget to Save Changes).

The next step is to create your first series. This refers to the entire discussion thread. Your Title is where you ask your community for questions, ideas, or suggestions on some topic. The Description allows you to got a little more in-depth as to what you want from your audience. You can optionally include a link to a YouTube video here if you are more comfortable expressing yourself on camera or need to attach related video content. One thing to note is that you can actually specify whether users will submit mostly questions, ideas, or suggestions. You can also specify start and end times for the series if it coincides with an actual event or you just want to limit responses.

Each user response can also have a video link attached. There is no way to comment on individual post, which helps to keep things clean and focused. The only way a viewer can give feedback is by giving an item a thumbs up/down. Those items that get the most positive attention float to the top so that you can provide a video response.

Besides being a great way to get user feedback on serious issues, this is a great feature for YouTube personalities that thrive by entertaining or helping their audience. It will be easier to crowdsource your audience. Whether it’s a certain song they want to see performed, some problem that needs a solution, or some type of challenge they want to see completed. A great way to keep the good content flowing.

How will you use Google Moderator?