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POPSMIT Finds Cure For Fear The social benefits of an anti-fear drug are huge, but I also wonder about its abuses... what if we forced soldiers in the field to take it? -David M. Ewalt
8
POPSSecond Life Shuts Down Gambling Shutting down gambling in Second Life is like banning popcorn from movie theaters. Slot machines and gross cybersex account for pretty much all the activity in the virtual world. -David M. Ewalt
7
POPSFast-Forwarded Ads Just As Effective Perhaps digital video recorders aren't doing as much damage to the advertising world as previously believed. This story also makes me wonder about the prospects for deliberately fast-forwarded commercials... anyone remember Max Headroom's "blipverts"? -David M. Ewalt
6
POPSiPhone Scalpers Get Their Comeuppance These "entrepreneurs" who show up at big tech launches and buy merchandise just to resell it are no better than scalpers, and I'm glad the scheme isn't paying off for them. Consumerist had a story earlier this week about a woman who paid $800 to skip to the front of an iPhone line, thinking she'd buy out the whole stock, and resell them... only to have her plans ruined by Apple's two-phone maximum. She lost the dough and I bet she hasn't even sold the two she did get. This is pleasing to me. That's what you get for trying to rip off gadget-fiending geeks! -David M. Ewalt
6
POPSFaster, Laser-driven Hard Drives Exponentially faster hard drives would be a good thing. But I can't help but think the PC of the future will ditch hard drives entirely in favor of some sort of optical memory, or even high-speed flash. -David M. Ewalt
6
POPSGoogle Buys GrandCentral So Google's bought phone consolidation service GrandCentral (which several geeky friends rave about). What's it mean? Think one point of contact for absolutely everything: I send you an email, it goes to your inbox and gets left as audio in your voicemail. Or, for that matter, if you could have voicemail for your GoogleTalk service. -David M. Ewalt
5
POPSHouse Looks At File Sharing I'm amazed that the House is just now looking at the practically-dead KaZaA. We knew services like that were a security risk years ago, and most people don't even use them anymore... what's next, congressional hearings on whether you can find people's home phone number on HotBot? -David M. Ewalt
4
POPSNintendo Wii Hurts TV Ratings This is staggering, if true. It's also completely inevitable. Video games are a mammoth, global industry, and it's only natural they'll compete with --and increasingly, beat the pants off of-- television, movies, and other forms of entertainment. -David M. Ewalt
4
POPSGecko Beats Duck Will geckel, a super sticky, super strong substance that mimics the properties of gecko feet and mussel goo someday make our beloved duck tape obsolete? The fender on my '87 Chevy Nova sure hopes not. --Ann Rafalko
4
POPSNBC Ditches iTunes I'm continually amazed by the shortsightedness of NBC and other content creators. Why on earth would you pull your product from the top retailer? This would be like Coca-Cola pulling its drinks from Wal-Mart, because Wal-Mart hasn't been able to completely stop shoplifting. Even if that's true, you're still going to lose way more money in lost revenues than you ever did from theft. Now NBC will push hard to sell its shows through Hulu, its new online video venture with News Corp. But Hulu's new and untested and certainly not where the customers are. Bad move, NBC. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSSony Cuts PS3 Price. Will Gamers Care? Sure, the price of the PlayStation 3 is now down below $500. But expect Microsoft to follow up with a cut of their own, putting the Xbox within just a few bucks of the Wii, and leaving the PS3 still far and away the most expensive option. More important for Sony: where's the games that are really going to drive ownership? Keep an eye open this week to see what else comes out of the E3 conference, the gaming landscape could change quite a bit. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSApple iTunes Sales Top 3 Billion Before the iTunes Music Store launched in the spring of 2003, who would have possibly thought that in four years, Apple would become such a huge force in the music world? Today only Wal-Mart and Best Buy sell more music. It's absolutely fantastic growth, particularly considering how the overall music industry is in a slump. It's a testament to the company's foresight --and should give serious pause to any iPhone naysayers. Steve Jobs has a way of getting in front of trends, and if he could make a music store work, maybe he can find success in the telecom world, too. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSTim Berners-Lee Looks At The Next Web This is a clip from a long Q&A with Berners-Lee, one well worth clicking through to read. The Semantic Web is one of those technological pipedreams people have been talking about for nearly a decade, but we're actually getting closer and closer to its realization. This is the next really huge thing to happen to networking, and its implications are pretty profound. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSCable's Bandwidth Crunch If you're a cable modem user, expect more traffic shaping (limiting transmission speeds for certain kinds of data) as well as higher prices. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-ah! Grab the "Hammer of the Gods," and channel your inner Viking Kitten in front of a live audience at one of the Guitar God nights springing up in bars around the U.S. RAWK! --Ann Rafalko
3
POPSNintendo Says Lose Some Weight Other cool product debuts from Nintendo's E3 press conference: a Wii gun controller and much anticipated games including Mario Kart Wii. It's good to see Nintendo continuing to innovate, and properly exploiting the Wii's motion sensitive technology. Their competitors are struggling to catch up, and Nintendo's not giving up an inch. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPS:-) I hate emoticons, yet can't keep myself from using them. Fahlman's invention is an important part of computer history just because it's so insidious. -David M. Ewalt
3
POPSiPhone Users Overwhelmingly Happy It's hard to believe, but Apple actually seems to be living up to the garguantuan hype surrounding the release of this phone. Most users seem to have small complaints, and few naysayers have returned theirs, but far and away the iPhone appears to be a massive success. -David M. Ewalt
2
POPSNintendo's Trouncing Sony More evidence of Sony's missteps with the PlayStation 3, and Nintendo's killing blow with the Wii. Not only is the Wii a far bigger seller than the PS3, but Nintendo has actually passed Sony's market cap. What's really fun is to listen to the PR still coming out of Sony, about how they're happy with the system's performance, and how they're still going to win this latest round of the console wars. -David M. Ewalt
2
POPSRoam Where You Want To Could the open source revolution provide succor to globe trotting road warriors tired of paying exorbitant cell phone roaming fees? Might the OpenMoko be everything the iPhone promised, but is not? One Economist columnist seems to think so. --Ann Rafalko
2
POPSRadiohead's Nail In The Music Industry's Coffin Radiohead is certainly putting the music industry on notice. It's a huge deal, one of the biggest bands in the world promoting and distributing an album without any help from a record label. If it works, it will prove that artists don't need labels --and if that's true, why allow them to take big chunks of your hard earned cash? Many other bands would no doubt follow suit, and that would be a crippling blow for the labels. -David M. Ewalt
2
POPSIs This Your Next Hard Drive? We're rapidly reaching the physical limits of how much data you can store on a device -- but this tech, known as “racetrack memory,” changes the game by storing data three-dimensionally, not just on a flat platter. It could well replace both hard drives and flash memory, since it's faster and higher density. -David M. Ewalt
2
POPSKing Me! A Canadian computer has cracked checkers once and for all. Next up? Chess. --Ann Rafalko
1
POPSVideo Games Are Not Addictive I have a lot to say about this article, but it'll have to wait --I'm sooo close to getting my dwarf paladin to level 70. -David M. Ewalt
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POPSPogue's iPhone FAQ Mossberg, schmossberg. I found David Pogue's video review of the iPhone yesterday and FAQ today a bit clearer and more useful. Amazingly, after the nauseatingly enormous pile of stories about the iPhone that I've already read, I'd still never heard the answer to the question of why exactly Apple chose to uses a 2G instead of a 3G network. Also interesting were Pogue's response to whether the iPhone was really as fluid as it appeared in TV commercials, and whether it would work overseas.
1
POPSiPhone Hacked, Works On T-Mobile Unfortunately, the hack requires soldering and a considerable amount of electronics skill, so it's not accessible to the general public. But the doors are open to use an iPhone on any GSM network around the world. -David M. Ewalt
1
POPSOverlooking The Xbox 360's Flaws Lessons to learn from this article: 1) Give us good content, and consumers will forgive all kinds of sins. (This, incidentally, is where the Playstation 3 really went awry). 2) Halo 3 is going to be a mammoth, huge hit. 3) Stephano Nevarez needs to turn off the 360 and get out of the house. -David M. Ewalt
1
POPSNokia Relaunching N-Gage You've got to give Nokia points for persistence. And I think this makes a lot more sense than launching a game centric-phone: with handsets increasingly going the way of smart devices like the iPod and Treo, we don't need a half/phone half game device. Consumers who want more gaming power will just buy a PlayStation Portable or a Nintendo DS. -David M. Ewalt
1
POPS$100 Laptop Late And Overpriced Things are not looking great for the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Not only is it going to be late, but when it finally does hit, it will cost nearly $200... and who knows what kinds of hurdles they'll run into as they actually go into production. The final version of this thing may not be that much cheaper than just buying a low-end consumer notebook. -David M. Ewalt
1
POPSMissed Calls Dominate Cell Networks According to the article, missed calls account for 130 million of the 355 million calls made across Sudanese mobile-phone network Zain every day. That's a huge amount of missed revenue. It'll be interesting to see what phone companies do about it... maybe charge a micropayment, a fraction of a cent, every time you dial a number, whether it connects or not? --David M. Ewalt
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POPSFetch Robo-Rufus! The world's first bionic dog gets a prosthetic paw. No word yet on how it will effect his rabbit chasing skills. --Ann Rafalko
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