According to reports, Apple's ridiculously successful iPhone has stuttered badly in its attempt to conquer the Chinese market. Because conquering is very far from what's going on: It's sold just five units. But Apple probably doesn't mind.
The dismal sales figures apparently represent two weeks of sales through the official Taobao.com online sales portal, and equate to two 8GB and three 16GB units. Though network China Unicom is also selling iPhones through its own store, and keeping those sales figures quiet, the Taobao figure should be taken seriously since the e-Bay-like site is where many Chinese do their online shopping--it's the country's top online sales establishment. Five phones sounds like a disaster, when you look at rocket-powered sales of a million units in just one weekend for the iPhone 3G S on its global launch, and when you consider exactly how big (and how ridiculously lucrative) the Chinese cell phone market could be.
But the discussions about this inside Apple's executive meeting room probably aren't even that heated. Why not?
1. China Unicom is probably selling a fair number of phones all by itself--it reported around 5,000 units went off its shelves in the period shortly following the device's launch. Given the extremely high actual price (around $1,000 for a 32GB 3G S with no contract) and the sky-high relative price of the device, given China's low cost of living, early sales figures were never going to be enormous.
2. China's grey import market for the iPhone is pretty enormous. In Hong Kong you can get hold of a 32GB 3G S unit for around $200 less than the official price at China Unicom. This is going to seriously impact sales of the official units until the price comes down--a move Apple would be crazy not to make at some point soon, particularly since it changed its mind about the original iPhone's price shortly after launch.
3. Credit card use is still not ubiquitous in China, affecting the success of the App Store--one of the iPhones biggest selling points. Apple will be wise to this, and will likely launch a different payment system that fits in with the usual Chinese practice of using pre-paid cards--they're not too different to its iTunes Gift Card system after all.
4. The illegally-imported iPhones have Wi-fi, the official ones don't. That's thanks to an over-protective Chinese maneuver in favor of its own wireless standard that occurred during the deal-making between Apple and China Unicom, and resulted in the new Wi-fi-free version of the iPhone dubbed "China Brick" inside the iPhone 3.0 software. This ban on Wi-fi tech was repealed recently, opening the way for 802.11 Wi-fi capable iPhones to be sold. Smart Chinese iPhone buyers will know this, and will be waiting before plonking down such an enormous sum of cash on a fully-capable Apple device.
In short, though the sales figures are dismal, they probably don't accurately reflect the genuine short- to medium-term sales prospects of the device. China Unicom's execs certainly feel differently, and fully expect the phone to capture 10% of the 3G user market there. It's just going to take time, and some careful and well-orchestrated business moves...luckily that's something Apple is great at.
Help Rename Sapporo's Beer Brewed From Space-Grown Barley
Though it didn't break out the Intergalactic Proton-Powered Electrical-Tentacled Advertising Droids, Sapporo breweries is definitely selling the World's first beer made from barley that's been on a trip into outer space. Outer space, guys, outer space!
Now, given the monumentally exciting (in a mega-geeky sense) nature of this stunt, you'd think the stuff would be called Space Beer, Galacto-Beer, Lightsaber Lager, Pan-Galactic Beeroblaster or something, wouldn't you? (Suggestions in the comments section, please!) Sadly Sapporo has chosen to call it, um, Space Barley. Sorry about that, it must be a Japanese-English translation thing.
Still, the very limited edition beer is most definitely brewed from fourth-generation barley grown from Haruna Nijo variety seeds that were whisked into the starry void by the Russian Academy of Science and Okayama University in 2006. It was a five month experiment aboard the Zvezda module of the International Space Station presumably to look at the issues relating to growing plants in space and other good sciencey things--not a publicity exercise at all. Apparently the resultant drink has a "mellow fragrance with a distinctive taste of roasted barley."
If you're a Japan-living beer fan, and you fancy trying a space brew irrespective of whether remnants of space radiation will transmogrify you into a pseudo-Hulk like being, then you have until Christmas Eve to place your order, and delivery is expected by the end of January 2010. But you'll have to be lucky: There are just 250 six-bottle sets available at a whopping $113 per set. If there are more than 250 interested bidders, and we suspect there will be, then it'll turn into a lottery to decide who'll get to actually own some. But if you do win one, at least you'll be able to sink the lovely liquid with the warm knowledge inside you that all the proceeds are going to charity to promote science education for children and the development of space science in Japan and Russia.
Yesterday marks a small but significant moment in history: Test pilot Markus Scherdel flew the Solar Impulse aircraft for the first time. It's amazing because Solar Impulse is entirely solar-powered, and took to the sky through simple light from the sun.
The flight was nothing more than a short 350-meter hop a meter off the ground, but with the four props spinning under electric motor power, it's an amazing triumph that marks the beginning of the end of 10 years of work. Solar impulse HB-SIA was, for this short flight, not garnering its energy from the sun--the solar cells are going to be connected up for the next series of trials--but the significance is undiminished, since now the research team knows its vehicle is air-worthy, all it needs is to perfect the solar charging system.
The flight, despite its similarity to the Wright brother's first short hop, is unlikely to be as transformational. Solar Impulse will, after an extensive flight- and technology-testing phase take part in an amazing feat--flying around the world. It'll start with solar-charging, then day and night transition tests, a 36-hour duration test next summer and ultimately project leader and pilot Bertrand Piccard will circumnavigate the globe. But it's all to prove a point--that solar power could make a difference in the aviation industry, rather than to turn us all into solar-plane fliers.
Inklings that Google's growing up into a more sensible beast aside, the computer tech giant is still expanding and tweaking its business. With recent improvements it's clear that soon, Google will be everything, and everything will be Google.
Google Spells it Out With Google Dictionary
Over at the L.A. Times they note that Google has "quietly rolled out" a totally new feature--Google Dictionary. It's simple: When you google a word or phrase inside the Dictionary page, Google returns search answers that gives you the definition of your search phrase drawn from its own database, academically approved sources and Wikipedia.
Sounds easy, doesn't it? And it marries with Google's previous efforts to expand its services very neatly--particularly since Google is now the world's expert on "looking things up." But the potential effects are pretty huge. Because the big dictionary makers each have their own effort at capturing an online audience to supplement falling sales of their ink and paper copies--a change caused by automated spell-checkers and the rise of the Net. And now they're simply going to lose some of their online business to Google without Google having to make much of an effort. Of course those with an academic bent will probably want to know the authoritative definitions and etymology of particular words, and they'll continue to be big-name dictionary customers. For now. Because you can bet it won't be long before Google's mastery over the dictionary is total.
Google Makes Multi-Lingual Googling Easier
Sorry France, but the Web has made English the de facto global second language. That doesn't mean that us Anglophone Web users have it all our way, obviously, and there are billions of Web pages in foreign tongues that might contain relevant info in response to our search engine queries. Until now, though it was possible to translate them using the engine inside Google, it was a few extra clicks of effort. Which is why Google's new tweak is handy: In addition to searching for a phrase in English language Web sites, if you click on "show options," then "translated search" Google will automatically find the translation matches in non-English sites and return them to you in the search list. Anglo-centric jokes aside, the really good bit is that this system works in multiple languages within the same search query, and will translate English sites into French ones if that's how you like it.
The upshot? Google's tweaks make it even more of a globally-useful tool...boding well for its attempts to capture more business in Japan, where it's curiously second-fiddle to Yahoo. We can expect more language tool tweaks like this in the future too, meaning Google could eventually insinuate itself into the very mechanisms by which everyone around the world accesses everyone else's content online.
Gmail to Rule Email
Expert Photoshop users will sometimes talk about the benefits of those silicon keyboard overlays that help you find the relevant keyboard shortcut among the thousands of potential ones. This peripheral makes sense. Now, check out this peripheral:
Though I'm by no means an expert or extensive Gmail user, I can't imagine anyone would consider themselves enough of a Gmail geek to justify a whole USB plug-in Gmail shortcut keypad, would they? Are there even that many functions to play around with? Will spammers delight at the reduced risk of carpal tunnel syndrome this add-on may or may not offer? Impossible to say, but the thing is still on sale right now for $20.
There is one thing positive about the Gboard though: Gmail is surely set to expand. This is a given as Google's dominance grows, and if the future of Google Voice and Google Wave is to entwine with Gmail and create some sort of new hybrid voice-IM-email communications medium, then Google could even end up defining the future of digital communications.
So soon we'll be using Google to translate all our foreign Web surfing, manage our email and even define the meanings of words in our own tongues. Is there anywhere Google won't extend to in the future? Will we one day walk into our GoogleAutomatedHome and have our GVoiceEMail read out to us by a synthetic persona named, uh, Sue-gle? Possibly. If Google learns how to do proper front-end design, at least.
Following close on the heels of CNN's Web site overhaul, Reuters has completely revamped its home page. The new effort is startlingly spartan in its minimalism--and it's absolutely designed to appeal to a broad consumer audience. Reuters is chasing extra cash.
Why did Reuters re-invent itself quite so dramatically? For one its old Web site was looking more and more jaded, with too much clutter, articles buried in small fonts amid adverts and embedded pictures. Secondly, the old site placed not enough emphasis on drawing attention to new stories. Compared to other online news portals, it was impenetrable and unattractive to the average Net surfer. And as advances in Net technology gradually erode Reuter's business model, it's looking to John Q. Public.
Hence the reinvention, "a year in the making" according to Reuter's editor in chief David Schlesinger. The make-over was crafted in consultation with the site's audience in "extensive discussions" and the upshot was a design that is "faster and easier to use, whether you want a quick glance at the top headlines or a longer deep dive into a topic that's important to you." That's an unashamed admission that the new-look site is trying to appeal to both news professionals and the public.
Of course the look and feel will appeal to advertisers too--with any luck, from Reuter's point of view, they'll be increasingly attracted to place Web ads in a modern-looking site that appeals to the public more. It's all about the money, of course. And it's just about plausible to argue one final thing: With its super-clean looks, enhanced navigability and lots of paper magazine-esque white space, is the new site almost ripe for casual surfing on a tablet PC?
What if you could wire up your nervous system to a robotic hand so well that it actually felt like your own? Would you be a real-life cyborg or Six Million Dollar Man? Yup. It's not only the future of prosthetic limbs. It's the present. It was done last year.
Doctors in Rome's Campus Bio-Medico university hospital did the experiment in 2008 with a post-accident amputee called Pierpaolo Petruzziello but didn't reveal the amazing results until Wednesday. The experiment lasted a month, and during the tests Pierpaolo wasn't actually wearing the robot hand--it remained desk-bound, but was connected to his body by electrodes implanted in his arm.
The team is calling it the first time a patient has been able to make genuinely complex movements with a robotic limb using just mind control via direct nervous-system links. It's distinguished from other efforts in this direction--like Dean Kamen's astonishing Luke Arm project--by actually attempting to use the same nerve routes into the patient's brain previously used by his own flesh and bone.
To make the robot fingers move, Pierpaolo had to re-learn the sensations of waggling fingers he is now missing. Tough as that may have been, it was simpler than the tricky mental gymnastics involved in training other nerves to actuate the hand. He noted it was just "a matter of mind" over matter, and reported that after a month it felt almost the same as a real hand. To the point he could make a "vulgar" gesture apparently.
If this sounds familiar, it's because the team is also working on Smarthand, an EU-led and funded experiment to create next-gen implantable prosthetic limbs. The Rome experiment is an amazingly positive sign that Smarthand will produce a useable synthetic hand since the implants responded to 95% of the patients' commands, and it represents the longest time the necessary electrodes have remained implanted in a patient without long-term damage. Next steps: Doing longer tests and developing more sophisticated robotic hands.
After that? Genuine cyborg tech on the market, helping people's lives.
Ever wondered if there's someone out there right now who looks like you, and who just happens to be drinking a Coke? Well...no, neither have I. But Coke is dipping its toe into social network and face recognition tech to tell you this info.
Coke's new advert/application is called the Facial Profiler, and it works a little something like the existing FindMyDoppelganger.com Web site. FMD's system has an established database of photographs though--it compares you to celebrities--whereas Coke's system is designed to match up your features with other Facebook users. To work, Coke needed to build up a critical mass of images before the official launch, so it had been privately soliciting them.
Now it's gone public so all you have to do is join the app on Facebook, upload an image of your Face and let the app's face recognition algorithm do its job. When it finds someone who looks like you (but not exactly you--it's clever enough to avoid matching you with yourself) it'll display the match, and you can vote on the accuracy, which will help improve the algorithm. It also prevents security problems by being a strictly opt-in system, and it'll delete your pics if you remove the app.
Why all this cleverness? It's to pair up people who are almost exactly the same--supposedly like Coke and the sugar-free alternative Coke Zero. Geddit? A bit thin, I'll admit. But it'll appeal to the teenage generation, you can bet your bottom dollar...which is exactly what Coke's doing. One thing's for sure--when a giant like Coca-Cola gets intrigued by social networking and high tech, it's only a matter of time until everyone else does too.
Google's got two new announcements: It's pairing up with Twitter for Friend Connect login purposes, and it's done the unthinkable and re-designed its home page. Both moves are surprising...do they mean the curly-haired youth of search is growing up?
Google's clinch with Twitter is ostensibly to bring "Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together" from Google's point of view. The search giant goes on to explain that "now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login." There's also the usual blurb about being able to Tweet your new-found Google powers when you sign up for the joint service.
This feature is going to be darn useful, basically reducing the burden of having to identify yourself in different ways at so many different sites. But there're two odd, strange, nay weird little facts to think about behind it. Firstly, as John Battelle points out at SearchBlog, the real shocker here is that Google's made a deal with Twitter, not Facebook. Though Twitter's hot, up and coming, and potentially a long-term winner, it's still very much a second place in the social-networkosphere to Facebook. But Facebook was just snapped up by Yahoo for a similar purpose...meaning Google's not quite the leader in this game (a bit like trailing Yahoo in Japan, but worse.)
Secondly, though there's been fierce speculation about Google's interest in social networking for its potentially rich real-time data mining powers, and rumors have swirled about Google buying Twitter (which beats Facebook in this field), Twitter has remained stubbornly independent. And now Google, which of course has its own user login system, has had to acknowledge the power of the Twitter phenomenon by co-opting its login system to Google's own services. It's a bit like Goliath suddenly admitting a need for some stones for his rockery, and buying them from David.
As if this seeming turn-around wasn't intriguing enough, then check out what Google's just done: It's redesigned its iconic splash-landing home page. And, though normally Google seems to have its eyes firmly shut when designing its UIs, it's actually done a good job. The driving force has been toward simplicity, because when you first arrive at Google.com now all you get is the big G's logo, the empty search box, and the familiar "Google Search" and "I'm feeling lucky" buttons. All of the other bits to do with image searching, your Google login, settings, and Google's ad program only appear when you move your mouse over the page. With this small tweak Google's actually focusing user attention on Google's raison d'être--search--by going for almost Zen minimalism. And it works...though I do wish there were a way to permanently switch Google to this clean mode for every time you visited.
Taken together you could be forgiven for thinking that these news pieces imply Google is kind of growing up. For years its basically done whatever the hell it likes, extending tentacles in all sorts of weird and wonderful business directions, ignoring even basic design principles and the developing look and feel of the rest of the Web, trying to seize whole marketplaces by offering for free what other companies charge for, and so on. It's basically been a rowdy, self-confident teenager--one that burst onto the scene with a good idea, and then rolled with it. Now it might just be time for the company to smarten up and think a little more carefully. We can but hope so...in the long run, it's probably in the consumer's best interest.
It's hard not to be excited about Augmented Reality since it's a dream sci-fi tech that's actually real and growing before our eyes--led in part by the AR Browser Layar, which has just been updated. Its new powers show the future of AR really is everywhere.
Hidden in the typical version-to-version improvements of Layar 3.0 are a few gems that will transform the system. The first is 3-D objects--which we wrote about before--adds a rich virtual reality-like capability to the augmented reality experience. The second is auto-triggered actions which will enable a whole host of novel exploitations of AR tech, particularly if you're talking about AR-enabled games which require you to navigate yourself to a particular point. And the final feature is a point of interest-to-point of interest system. This could transform many of the apps within Layar from being a mere list of nearby geotagged reference points to a way to guide people through a location--picture yourself taking part in an augmented city tour on your next vacation, complete with interesting pop-up data on the buildings you're walking past.
If that technobabble is all a blur, then check out the examples below for what this means for the real app on your smartphone:
Virtually Augmented Locations
If you happen to be in Rotterdam and switch on Layar when you're at the site of the new Market Hall building by MVRDV architects, you'll be able to wander around inside its strange hollow arch-shape and check out how the novel building fits into its environment.
And that's pretty amazing, since it's not scheduled to be built until 2014. Augmented reality with 3-D powers will let architects, designers, games designers and so on plop virtual objects into the AR view of the real world. It'll likely be an extremely useful tool for many such people...but I suspect the really clever uses of the tech haven't been dreamed up yet.
Augmented City Tours
The Beatles almost regroup with another new layer in Layar that activates when you go to particular spots in London associated with the band. In particular the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing gets some magical AR love that makes John, Paul, Ringo, and George appear exactly in place as they did on the album cover.
The next part of the tour is enabled when you get to the previous spot--which lets the app developers choose your path around London. Just watch out for the traffic.
Virtual Art
This is the most amusing new power inside Layar--the ability to create virtual art in real spaces. Think of it as digital graffiti or electronic performance art: When you hold the AR browser up to an artistically-augmented location, it shows the digital art as if it were present in the scene. The mind boggles as to how this will get used.
Of course while Layar is impressive, there's plenty of other AR developments going on...and as each implementation becomes more clever it really highlights one fact: AR is so useful and comes with so many potential exploitations that it's going to be a part of the way we consume much of our digital info in the future. That's simply because, as the Layar team puts it, it's a whole new "rich, immersive" experience that you can't replicate on a map, in a normal Web browser or even a simple location-sensitive smartphone app. Plus, digital graffiti is way easier to remove.
This week the CrunchPad died. Writers all over the Internet sank their teeth into the meaty deliciousness of the fiasco. But it occurred to us that behind the gadgety sadness of the story, there're some very positive things to learn.
Why did the CrunchPad die? Well, that's going to remain a mystery for a little while, as we only have one side of the argument to examine--TechCrunch's Michael Arrington's. And since Arrington's a famously difficult character and biased by his own enthusiasm for his product, we can but wonder that behind his accusations of attempts of IP theft by partner company Fusion Garage lies a much more fiery story. At least until Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan tells his side of the story and demos the prototype for reporters in San Francisco on Monday.
Forget the pissing match, though. CrunchPad may never see the light of day as a real product (and yes, I know one should never say never), but there're a bunch of very positive facts behind the device.
1. It's technologically possible, for a very affordable fee
In very short order, Arrington's team pulled together the big touchscreen tech, processor, ancillary electronics, rechargeable batteries and software to make a super-slim, powerful and fun-to-use basic Tablet PC. It worked, it was well-designed with almost Jonathan Ive-levels of minimalism, and those that tested prototypes apparently liked it plenty. In the death-knell post itself, Arrington noted that the team was close to running Google Chrome and Windows 7 on the CrunchPad, meaning it probably shouldn't be considered a basic Tablet PC at all. And remember that this successful (well, 95% successful) team had diverse experience, enthusiasm and a charismatic leader--but it was very, very small.
The good news from this is that a CrunchPad-like device is certainly achievable by anyone committed enough, and if a manufacturing giant turned its efforts in this direction it could probably achieve an even more capable machine.
2. The public wanted the CrunchPad
Having the capability to make the CrunchPad would've been a pointless thing had no-one wanted to buy one. But considering the media excitement and public enthusiasm expressed at TechCrunch and elsewhere, there was definitely a public desire for the device.
You may even say there was a definite thirst for it. I would certainly have considered buying one for idle in-bed Web surfing before the work day started for real, or for in-flight movie-viewing--assuming it was powerful enough for this task.
The upshot is that the public seems to actively want a slim, super-sized iPhone-like device. And should someone else choose to make a gimo like this, it'll likely sell well. And possibly sell like hot cakes.
3. Industry wanted the CrunchPad
Perhaps the most surprising information revealed at the end of the CrunchPad affair was quite how enthusiastically the hardware manufacturing and sales industry itself embraced the ideas. Arrington speaks of a "major multi-billion dollar retail partner" that was ready to "sell the CrunchPad at zero margin to help us succeed in the early days." There were sponsors in the wings ready to help sell the gizmo "near our $300ish cost." Investors were champing at the bit, waiting merely for the final prototype approval before pouring in cash to make the venture work.
And, most fascinating of all, Intel was on-board. It assisted with engineering help during the design phase and was ready to offer Arrington's team a per-chip price for Atom CPUs that was "ridiculously generous" given the projections for first-year sales.
What we can learn from this is that many industry insiders looked at the future of the CrunchPad--which would've been an early format-defining machine, much like the Kindle for e-readers, perhaps--and saw that it was bright. So bright, they were willing to take significant risks in order to get the project off the ground.
Draw these three conclusions together, and what have you got? Tacit confirmation from multiple angles that slim tablet- or slate-format touchscreen PCs will soon be rolling off someone's production lines, for a netbook-like price. Dare I say iTablet? Yes, I dare.
