The new augmented reality (AR) music video for John Mayer's single, "Heartbreak Warfare," puts Mayer virtually in the hands of fans. To launch the AR music video, fans hold a printable marker, or "glyph," in front of their webcam and then get to watch the dynamic experience unfold on-screen. As Mayer starts to sing, his fans can then play with the animated living room scene by moving their glyph around – spinning, rotating and even flipping John's virtual world upside down. The video can be played on John Mayer's website at johnmayer.com. You will need to download a PDF file and have a webcam installed on your computer to make it work. You can get an idea for what the AR looks like in the video from Blitz below. There's no sound in this video. Take a look:
Touchscreen technology is rapidly becoming the dominant smartphone technology. CNN/Money reports that a new study from comScore found that touchscreen smartphone adoption grew by 159% in the U.S. last year. The study also found 23.8 million of the 34 million smartphones (70%) Americans are carrying are touchscreen smartphones.
Touchscreen mobile phone adoption in the U.S. grew at a breakneck 159% rate last year, comScore reports, easily outpacing the 63% growth of the broader smartphone market.
By last August, nearly 34 million Americans were carrying smartphones, 23.8 million of them touchscreen devices. And of those touchscreen phones, 32.9% were iPhones.
"The iPhone clearly set the trend in the industry for touchscreen devices, so it's no surprise that it has the largest share of the market," said comScore VP Mark Donovan. "But as other players have entered the touchscreen market with compelling devices, competition is clearly heating up."
Apple dominates the touchscreen smartphone market which is not a surprise since it was the iPhone that ignited the trend to begin with. Data from comScore MobiLens indicates that the Apple iPhone has 32.9% of the market.
Tech companies are thinking green when it comes to tomorrow's technology. CES announced that it will expand its Sustainable Planet CE Spotlight showcase by 40% at the 2010 CES. The exhibit will have nearly 5,500 net square feet of display area at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
"Green technology is a huge business opportunity in 2010, and green tech companies know the International CES is the largest global platform for launching their innovative new products," said Karen Chupka, senior vice president, events and conferences, CEA. "Due to growing customer demand across the green spectrum, we've nearly doubled the space for the Sustainable Planet at the 2010 CES. This exciting exhibit area will showcase cutting edge technologies that will change the world – benefiting the environment, renewing resources and bringing new forms of sustainable energy to developing areas around the globe."
CES will be held January 7-10, 2010 in Las Vegas. You can find the website at cesweb.org.
Those looking for an iPod dock with a retro feel can't go wrong with the
Revo Heritage radio, which is a contemporary reinterpretation of
the classic European 1960's radio design. The Revo Heritage is made with aluminium and real walnut veneer. It contains the latest in multi-platform
digital radio technology including DAB, DAB+, FM and Wi-Fi internet radio. The Revo Heritage also provides wireless audio streaming and docking for your iPod. The price is 229.95 pounds, which is about $380 U.S. The iPod radio can be pre-ordered here.
Apple announced today that there are now over 100,000 applications available in its iTunes App Store.
"The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating."
"The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve," said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. "With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers."
"With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations," said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. "The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we're looking forward to an exciting future."
100,000 apps is a ton of applications but many of them are overlooked. ReadWriteWeb reports that data from Appsfire indicates that only about 20,000 of the apps in Apple's App Store are actually being used.
With so many apps available - an abundance of riches - it could get overwhelming for iPhone and iPod Touch users. GigaOm says the next thing for Apple to do with its store is to "focus on the discoverability of the applications." Apple does need to help its users find high quality apps and ignore silly ones that have little purpose or value.
Tidbits lists numbers from the app stores for different smartphones here. The Android app store is the closest to Apple's App Store with 10,000 apps.
You can find more discussion of Apple's growing App Store here on Techmeme.
Ebook readers are all the rage right now with a new device for reading electronic books appearing nearly every weak. Bridgestone is known for making tires but apparently they are also playing around with digital displays such as the flexible ebook reader pictured above. Crunchgear says the reader has a 10.7-inch-screen and is about half as thin as Amazon.com's Kindle. Bridgestone will not be putting its ebook reader prototype into production itself but they could license or sell the technology to another company that might mass produce the device.
Determined to win shoppers' hearts -- and wallets -- at Thanksgiving, Walmart is cutting prices on turkeys and other traditional fixings, as well as on flat-panel TVs.
U.S. stores are selling whole, 12-pound (5.4-kilogram) turkeys for 40 cents a pound starting today, Walmart said in a statement. That's a third of last Thanksgiving's average price in a survey by the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington.
Starting Nov. 7, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer will sell a Hewlett-Packard Co. notebook computer for $298; a 42-inch (107-centimeters) Sharp Corp. flat-panel TV for $498, down $270 from its regular price, and a 46-inch model, which usually sells for $1,158, for $698, according to Walmart.
The company will cut prices weekly as consumers, pinched by job losses, delay holiday purchases, John Fleming, chief merchandising officer, told analysts Oct. 21. Groceries accounted for 49 percent of U.S. stores sales last year, followed by electronics and other entertainment items, which generated 13 percent of revenue, according to an annual securities filing.
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Walmart said it reduced prices on seven items, including turkey, canned vegetables, cranberry sauce, stuffing, a five-pound bag of red potatoes, dinner rolls and a pumpkin roll cake, for a $20 dinner serving eight people. Thanksgiving, officially the fourth Thursday of November, is on November 26 this year.
The National Retail Federation conducted a poll in which 43% of respondents said that they will decide where to shop based on who has the best discounts this holiday season. Store loyalty is out the window: it's all about who has the best deals. Clearly, Walmart is determined to be the store with the best deals.
To celebrate the launch of the Droid this Friday, Verizon Wireless is creating an interactive experience that allows New Yorkers to control two of Times Square's largest digital billboards - the NASDAQ and Reuters signs - using voice commands. The billboards will instruct passersby to call a toll-free number (1.888.376.4336) to search for something in the Times Square area. Droid is a new smartphone from Motorola that is powered by Google's Android software.
You can read more about Droid here on an earlier post and here on the Motorola Droid website.
TechCrunch reports that Panelfly has partnered with Marvel comic books. Panelfly will be publishing some comics from Marvel in digital form for its mobile comics iPhone application. The first Marvel comic books that will be available for Panelfly's iPhone app include the original Spider-Man series, X-Men, X23, Age Apocalypse, and Iron Man.
You can download Panefly's app from the iTunes store here for free. It costs 99 cents to download each of the comic books. You can find out more about Panefly at panelfly.com.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journalreports a RadioShack subsidiary has set up mobile phone kiosks in nearly 100 Target stores in several states. The kiosks are part of Target's plan to outsource its mobile phone department to RadioShack.
Kiosk Operations Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Forth Worth, Texas-based RadioShack, took over mobile phone sales at about 100 Target stores in Minnesota, California, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Texas and Washington earlier this month. The Target kiosks have been branded as Bullseye Mobile Solutions and are run by Kiosk Operations employees who wear black shirts instead of the red shirts typically worn by Target's staff.
The article says the kiosks offerings are similar to what Target currently sells in its mobile phone department. Target plans to use the kiosks in all 1,700 of its stores in 2010.
Apple launched the iPhone in China, but the response has been tepid. When the iPhone launched in the U.S. customers lined up around the block to get them. But not the Chinese. They did, however, turn up in droves for the official launch party in Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Hundreds of people braved cold and rain to attend a Friday night party thrown by China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., the state-owned carrier selling the iPhone, at a Beijing shopping center. Still, the crowd seemed subdued compared with the thousands who turned up at stores when the iPhone was introduced in markets such as the U.S. and Japan, where it quickly sold out in many locations. As of Sunday night, stores around Beijing still had the iPhone in stock.
Apple and China Unicom, which is the only authorized Chinese carrier selling the iPhone, declined to disclose sales figures.
The iPhone's performance in China, where the 710 million mobile-phone subscribers are the most in any nation, is potentially important for Apple, which has a relatively meager presence in the fast-growing market.
Analysts have said that the Unicom iPhone's debut in China faces several challenges. Many potential customers have already bought iPhones from unauthorized sellers or brought in the phone from Hong Kong or other countries, putting an estimated two million iPhones already in use in China, according to research firm BDA China Ltd.
The iPhone is quite expensive in China, costing between $730 to $1,020. That is good news for Apple's competitors who are offering phones for less than that.
The other big problem that Apple has in China is that the Wi-Fi access to the Internet has been disabled on the phones to comply with the Chinese government's demands.
This image has been circulating the Internet to show what could happen if Net Neutrality legislation is not signed into law. They say that if Net Neutrality is not passed, ISPs will be able to start charging additional fees for bandwith usage by consumer users, which will lead to only the wealthy being able to access all of the Internet because they can afford to purchase the top tier of service and access to a wide array of websites. The phone and cable companies oppose Net Neutrality.
The graphic by a pro-Net Neutrality group shows new, additional fees being assigned for websites and web services. It's sort of like how cable companies assign different fees for bundles of cable channels, in addition to your basic cable bill. You can see a larger version of the graphic here.
Tech blogs are reporting that Creative is another company busy working on a device for reading ebooks. Creative's device called Zii will also offer other media including video and photographs. Engadget says the Zii is billed as a "MediaBook" device that will look "nothing like" the device pictured above. The Zii image is from an EpiZencenter.net post that says the Zii features a touchscreen, text-to-speech function and an SD memory card slot. For a device to work as an ebook reader the part of the screen that contains the electronic book's text needs to be as large as possible. The screen looks a little small for reading books in the photo.
The fashion brands have been slow to warm up technology, but that is changing. Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci and Ralph Lauren have released new iPhone apps that allow users to browse collections, watch runway footage, mix music, buy clothing and in the case of Chanel spy on the models backstage at the runway shows (they hid a camera in a model's hair). Each fashion house has a different idea about what should be in an app. Elva Ramirez of The Wall Street Journal reports on this very interesting trend. Take a look:
Robid is an amazing little robot from Tomotaka Takahashi. Robid makes moves that seem more like an animation than a clunky robot. Robid can jump in the air without falling to the floor. Robid's personality also comes through as he struts and stomps around showing off his moves. Robid is just a prototype but he will be hit with kids if he is ever mass produced and released as a toy.
You can see some more photos of Robid here (translated) on a Japanese robot website called Robot Watch.
Tech companies are thinking green when it comes to tomorrow's technology. CES 
Apple 
The Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal 
