Now isn’t this one of the niftier bottle openers you’ve ever seen? Dubbed the iDrink, it comes in the form factor of an iPod courtesy of internal design firm Sonic Design. Not only that, the iDrink opener will be compatible only with bottles purchased from the iDrink store (retailing for $0.99 each). An integrated battery pack in the iDrink is proprietary, so you can only change it from the manufacturer themselves. Sonic Design has not yet mentioned whether it will sell these on an official basis or not, but word on the street has it they will go for $5.99 a pop at this point in time before a $2.00 price drop is introduced a couple of months’ after its release. I love allusions, and this is definitely one of the better ones to surface on the Internet in a long while.

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Filed under: News

Yoichi Wada, the President of Square Enix, stated publicly that Sony has to find and stick with a more solid marketing strategy for the PS3. Remember those “Play B3yond” commercials? Don’t worry — not a lot of us do, since they were practically nonexistent after launch. Anyway, Wada told reporters “Sony first unveiled the PS3 as a mighty home electronics product. Then, after some badgering from game companies, it shifted the position of the console closer to a game machine.”

It is odd, but Wada has a point: Sony does need to get it together when it comes to marketing their product. It’s more expensive than other game machines (compared to the Elite, not by much), but it can do so much more. As a game machine, it’s struggling to get its namesake: games. Until November, when at least a dozen great titles will be released or will have been released. Do you think Sony will unleash a bevy of PS3 marketing ploys for this holiday season, or will they try to keep those costs at a minimum and do something else? Either way, Square Enix seems anxious about the system, especially with something like FFXIII on its way.

[also via Joystiq]

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Filed under: Action & Adventure, Drama, Thrillers

First we heard that Robert De Niro and Al Pacino would be teaming up (for the first time since Heat) on a crime thriller called Righteous Kill. And we were intrigued. Then came news that Carla Gugino was also on board. And then we got really excited. Now comes word that a few more names have joined the Jon Avnet film … most of ‘em pretty cool, too.

According to a press release over at ComingSoon.net, the Righteous cast will also include Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Donnie Wahlberg, Dan Futterman, Trilby Glover (yowza), and professional skateboarder Rob Dyrdek. Written by Inside Man scribe Russell Gewirtz, Righteous Kill is about two veteran detectives who aim to track down a vigilante killer in New York City.

The press release indicates that Leguizamo and Dennehy will play cops; Futterman and Glover will be lawyers; and Dyrdek will be a punk kid who somehow figures into the story. Production on Righteous Kill gets underway this week in Connecticut and New York. Expect more reports soon.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Features, Interviews, Portable Audio

At this week’s Apple event we got a rare chance to speak with one of the most well regarded and tight-lipped veeps in the biz, Apple’s Phil Schiller. It’s never fun knowing you have to throw half your questions right out because of how good these guys are at keeping mum, but we did get Phil to tell us a little about what he thinks of the iPhone unlock market, 3rd party iPhone apps, the future of hard drive based iPods in an increasingly flash based world, and how he expects iTunes to fare after the departure of NBC. Read on!

Thanks for meeting with us…. So let’s get into the product stuff. Steve on stage today kept insisting that the iPhone is still the best iPod that you guys make.

Yes. It’s the top of the line.

Well, the touch now has more storage, sans the phone. I mean it’s basically exactly the same device. It has all of the same media software and has the browser and YouTube and all that. So why is the iPhone now still the best iPod?

Because it also has the phone. So you get the internet device and an iPod and a phone all in one thing. So you’re right. Its not that it can do anything more than an iPod, except that you can certainly do your internet surfing also on the cellular network in addition to WiFi — so that you have that part of it. It does a little bit more in terms of an internet device because of that access and it has a phone and both they are both as capable in terms of iPods. So, for that reason it’s still the top of the line. But if your focus is primarily a touch iPod then sure we have something that’s just as good and has added benefit of being amazingly thin. Look at the thinness!

Continue reading The Engadget Interview: Phil Schiller, Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

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When Farah Khan and Shahrukh come together you can sure expect the unexpected! The latest is that Farah has a surprise SFX scene in her film Om Shanti Om. As you know the film is also about Bollywood in 70s, the director and SRK’s technical team has come up with a sequence in which Deepkia […]

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Filed under: Computers

The next time you fly, avoid having a Michael-Douglas-‘Falling Down’ kind of day with the newly launched Orbitz TLC Traveler Update, an online service that mixes elements of a standard travel update site with peer-to-peer and social networking technologies.

Along with the info on delays, cancellations and weather provided by the TSA, which you can get from any one of a hundred different travel sites, Orbitz TLC Traveler Update incorporates info from fellow travelers who are actually at the airport. So, when the TSA says there’s a 20-minute delay at security, a person who’s actually in line might post an update saying it’s more like a 45-minute delay. This extends to weather, traffic, parking, Wi-Fi availability and almost anything else airport related you can think of. You’re also likely to get notifications of flight delays and cancellations before any official announcements are made. Of course, all of this information is accessible and updatable on a computer or cell phone.

The above video won’t tell you what took so long for someone to finally invent this service, but it will give you a nice walkthrough of how it works.

From Tech Crunch

Related Links:

• Caribbean Isle Bans Cell Phones on the Sand
• Travelocity Busted for Going to Cuba
• Pictures of America’s First Spaceport

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Filed under: Rumors, Products and services, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), AT and T (T), iPhone, Smartphones

The Boston Globe reports that Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google Phone pursues a radically different business strategy than Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone. But the tiny glimpses of the Google Phone revealed in this article suggest that the Google Phone will not pose a significant threat to the iPhone.

How does the Google Phone compare to the iPhone? Here are three points of comparison:

• Simpler. The Google Phone is simpler and less flashy than the iPhone according to one person who saw a prototype. He praised Google Phone’s ability to scroll through icons horizontally, making different features easily accessible despite the limited screen space.
• 3D interface. Another person who saw the Google Phone was struck by its three-dimensional, animated buttons on the screen. That prototype had a small QWERTY keyboard, like a Treo or a BlackBerry, rather than relying on a touch-screen, as the iPhone does.

• Open business strategy. Google won’t do everything itself and it won’t be locked into a single distribution partnership. Google will create distribution partnerships with different mobile carriers, unlike Apple, which is wed to AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) for five years. Through advertising shown on the Google Phone’s screen, consumers could pay in different ways — helping to subsidize the price of the phone itself or the consumer’s monthly bill. (Some of that ad revenue could also go to carriers that help market Google’s phone in their stores.) Finally, Google won’t manufacture the phone itself, but will offer an operating system and applications such as the e-mail and word processing applications it already provides to PC users.

Based on these rumors — which are admittedly a risky basis for an analysis — my overall assessment is that the Google Phone is not a significant threat to the iPhone. That’s because Google does not excel at the kind of consumer marketing at which Steve Jobs is an industry master.

Moreover, it is unlikely that Google really cares to make the Google Phone an iPhone killer. Google probably views the Google Phone as just another platform on which to sell advertising. By contrast, Apple’s strategy suggests that it views the iPhone as a significant source of revenue growth — and its stock has followed suit.

Nevertheless, the Google Phone open business strategy highlights two iPhone weaknesses: it’s expensive and its partnership with AT&T could be an important limiting factor. If Google can exploit these weaknesses to offer consumers a better value, its Google Phone could achieve significant market penetration — but probably not enough to threaten the iPhone’s future sales.

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in the securities mentioned.

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You know what, I really hate CAPTCHA.

The other day I was speculatively signing up for a Facebook account (I’m not particularly interested in being on Facebook, I just wanted to have a nose around its code), but signing up was a tricky process. You didn’t correctly type the text in the box, it said, referring to the security check image of two words you have to type-in to confirm you’re a real person.

Yeah sure, except I can’t see any words, all I can see is a message that says Loading….

Now admittedly that’s a bad example — presumably they’re using some dodgy Ajax which doesn’t work in Opera for Mac (my browser of choice), and usually such images are generated server-side without the need for scripting, hence this problem doesn’t occur.

But I still hate them because CAPTCHA tests are an accessibility black spot. What are you supposed to do if you have a reading or cognitive disability and simply can’t make them out? Man, I have perfect 20-20 vision, and more often than not I can’t read the damn things; it’s very common for me to have to make three or four different attempts before I get it right.

(I might also point out that a CAPTCHA is not a true Turing test — it only tests cognitive ability, not intelligence; so not only does it fail for some humans, it can be read by a machine with suitably sophisticated hull-scanning technology.)

Some CAPTCHA systems offer an audio alternative, and that’s certainly an improvement, but it’s still not good enough. What if you don’t have a sound card? What if you’re blind and deaf and can only receive information through a braille feedback device? What if, as with the visual test, you simply can’t make it out? CAPTCHA sucks because it creates a barrier for users where there needn’t be one.

Needn’t be one?, I hear you exclaim, how else do we protect against bots! Well, now I’m going to have to step back from the practical to the more conceptual point, which is the nub of why I really hate them so much. Using a system like this is making users take responsibility for our problem. Bots are our problem, not the users’, and it’s totally unfair to pass the buck.

A similar example is those email opt-in services, where before you can send a person email you have to go to some website and confirm that you’re a real person, give a reason why you want to contact them, and in many cases pass a CAPTCHA as well. This, again, is not fair — it’s passing responsibility for spam onto legitimate people who want to contact us, and forcing them to deal with a problem that’s actually ours, not theirs.

So please, let’s not pass the buck - don’t make users take responsibility for our problems.

This article provided by sitepoint.com.

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Filed under: Business, News

They’re worried, honestly. Though some may say PR people are a dime a dozen in any industry, Karraker had a lot of history at Sony and his recent departure from the team is going to make it a difficult holiday for Sony, says analyst Michael Pachter. Karraker always made himself available for questions and comments, putting himself forward especially after the shaky PS3 launch and subsequent waves of negative press. Can someone fresh really fill the shoes of that man?

Michael Pachter isn’t completely sure. “The other PR people at Sony are quite competent, but it would help to strengthen the team with someone as good as Dave to handle the schizophrenic press over the next 6 months.” Just because we always refer to ourselves as “we” doesn’t make us schizophrenic! Although we don’t consider ourselves press, either. As to further boost Sony’s fears, Pachter also claimed that the few PS3 exclusives and pricing disadvantage relative to other consoles will make this one difficult holiday for Sony. Things will shape up in Spring, he said, “with the release of Grand Theft Auto 4, Gran Turismo 5, and Metal Gear Solid 4.” We bet so, too!

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