On BP's "Response in pictures" site, one photo, purported to be taken on July 16, 2010, sat for days, unquestioned. The photo shows BP's Houston Command Center, a desk with some massive monitors, lots of complicated things happening on them, and employees monitoring the situation in the Gulf. But all is not as it seems.
Apple's called a press event for a select group of reporters on Friday July 16th. The corporate line is simply that it's about iPhone 4. But in all likelihood it's related to the furor over the new phone's antenna problems.
Facebook is partnering with MOL Global to deliver a new way to buy Facebook credits--in person at a MOL-connected store. It's a strange real world/virtual world crossover, and definitely a sign of the way future digital finances will work. MOL is a hot-topic Internet financial company, though if you haven't heard about it it's not surprising--while it operates in 75 countries, mainly its operations are centered in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Two partners, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) and the Huffington Post, announced the release of Foursquare location layers today. It's a new feature from Foursquare that could turn out very cool and useful, or ravaged by disingenuous ads.
Apple isn't doing as well as it could in China. Why? The chairman of China's tech giant Lenovo thinks it's largely down to Steve Jobs himself, as the killer quote in the Financial Times article which is the source of this discussion reveals: "We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble."
The worker's environment in Chinese electronics manufacturer Foxconn has been a sticky issue for Apple's PR department, but it's also highlighted one big fact: If Western firms stick with Chinese sources, gadgets will get more expensive. This is the thrust of a piece at the New York Times, which starts by looking at the reports about the new tear-down revelations concerning Apple's newest iPhone version: The smallest part of the cost of putting the thing together seems to be the manufacturing/assembly element, in China.
A while back, I posted a bit about a new augmented reality game called Zombie ShootAR. It is a shooter game where you kill zombies that appear only in the augmented reality of your mobile phone’s viewfinder. The game relied on some imaging technology that “watched” for horizon lines and therefore effectively planted the creeping zombies on the ground or in exact places (instead of having them float around in space if you moved your phone suddenly). It worked pretty well actually and I heard many responses about that game inquiring why it was only available for Symbian OS and not for iPhone.
Traditional removable batteries of the AA and AAA variety might be going the way of the dodo: Modern gadgetry that used to rely on them now use internal, rechargeable batteries. But there are still a good few items out there that need those defiantly old-school juice cylinders, like keyboards, mice, and remote controls.
Ten One is a New Jersey-based firm that deals with accessories for smartphones and tablets, with the odd bit of software thrown in for good measure. One of their products is the Pogo stylus, which can't have Steve Jobs that interested--the Apple CEO, after all, is a fan of the finger. However, they've come up with an idea for an app that, if given the thumbs-up at Cupertino, would make the iPad's drawing capabilities a whole lot more amazing.
Even as competitors are busy bricking paywalls around their newspaper Web sites, desperately trying to keep the old business models running, the U.K.'s Guardian is taking a wholly different path. The paper has just introduced a free story syndication tool. The tool is part of the paper's "Open Platform" initiative, and what it does is pretty amazing: If you're a publisher of a blog that uses Wordpress, you can now re-post Guardian articles directly on your blog. The Guardian is essentially giving away its online news content. For free!