The Power of Information

CES 2012: North Hall

Derek Alfonso — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:32:49 +0000

CES 2012: G-Form

Derek Alfonso — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 04:48:12 +0000

Derek Alfonso, host of The Power of Information gets a demonstration of the latest release from G-Form that is no longer focused on just protecting the body but now also your electronics (and my M&M’s)

CES 2012: Ar Drone

Derek Alfonso — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:56:34 +0000

Derek Alfonso from The Power of Information reviews the Ar Drone v2 from french creator Parrot at the Consumer Electronics Show 2012.

The Last Gadget Standing @ CES 2012

Derek Alfonso — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:22:39 +0000

Do you have the latest Gadget that will fascinate, captivate and become indispensable?

Enter the Last Gadget Standing Competition to find out.

Innovators of the hottest gadgets in the industry can now reach for fame and fortune, and a ton of laughs. The Last Gadget Standing Competition, in its eleventh year at the International Consumer Electronics Show, CES, will showcase the best and brightest stars in the industry. Plus our hosts Gary Dell’Abate and Jon Hein from the Howard Stern Sirrius network are this year’s hosts — back by popular demand. The live competition is scheduled for January 12, 2012 in Las Vegas, and now is the time to submit your entry.

Here’s How It Works

It all starts with your entry. Nominate the products that you think have what it takes to garner audience love. On the Last Gadget Standing website, you will introduce your product to our readers, encouraging discussion and opinion.

We’ll tally up the comments and our team of expert judges will narrow the field down to the Top 25. Our judges will then write an objective review of each of the gadgets.

Finally, our Top 10 finalists will be chosen by our expert judges. Finalists will move on to the big stage – a standing room only crowd at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Each finalist will have four minutes to introduce their product before a full-house audience. Presentations tend to be campy and fun, and through it all, the winner will be crowned. The press will be there to capture your moment of glory.

Audiences love the fun, quick-paced, tongue-in-cheek game-show format. Participants love the opportunity to show off their products as one of the best at the show. And everyone loves being part of the final vote to determine which product will be the Last Gadget Standing

Previous Last Gadget Standing winners include Acer Iconia, Eye-Fi Card, HP TouchSmart PC, Data Drive Tornado, Pioneer Inno, iRobot Roomba, Davis Car Chip, Dell Axim, GM OnStar, and others. Past participants and winners both have enjoyed the strong media coverage that the event attracts, and play to large crowds of attendees who want to see the very best products in action. You can expect coverage from TV, newspapers, tech journals, bloggers, and others.

Qualification & Nomination Requirements

To qualify for participation in the Last Gadget Standing Competition, your product must be available to ship publicly in 2012. If your product is under NDA until CES, please make these restrictions clear in your entry, and we can discuss details of how to handle the media embargo.

Here’s How to Enter

Go to www.lastgadgetstanding.com to fill out the entry form and pay the nominal entry fee. And feel free to pass this note along to any colleagues who may be interested in submitting a nomination.

We look forward to another season of great products!

Event Details:

Last Gadget Standing
January 12, 2012
10:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
LVCC North Hall

Covering CES12

Derek Alfonso — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 05:26:19 +0000

The video crew will be at CES 12′ covering the latest in gadgetry, stay tuned here for exciting updates as we learn more about what is coming at the show.

Show #127

Derek Alfonso — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 01:00:00 +0000

News

Military Issuing ITouch

$230 – vs. MUCH MORE for ruggedized specialized hardware
Sheathed in a rugged case for Military purposes
Soldiers = Swiss Army Knife
Translation software – word translator and gesture translation (VCommunicator)
Annotate Maps – In Dev – Take pictures of streetsigns and the Iphone will give intelligence about the location
BulletFlight (Ballistics Calculator)
Video Player
Camera
IPhone still a little too expensive for general deployment
Oracle Buys Sun

Oracle is the largest DB Vendor in the world
Sun owns MySql, OpenOffice, Java, Large portion of Unix world
Will Oracle still offer DB on Windows platform
Will OpenOffice and Java still be free?
Flash on TV’s

Software already written
Announcement at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention
Set-top boxes by end of year, embedded into TV later
TW admits defeat on Tiered Bandwidth

Retracting Pilots for tiered bandwidth that were to start in fall
Grass Roots, and Senators all went after Time Warner
Claims of “Stifling Creativity” and Monopolistic practices (inability to stream video without exhorbitant pricing) were cited
Last straw could have been when U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y got on board and threatened legislation
Competitor Frontier communications was already in the process of retiring a tiered plan
Will still provide tools so ppl can educate themselves on bandwidth
No promise that program won’t go into place in future
Google 3D Plugin

How many failures before they get hint that the Internet is a commodity?
They are still in WAAAAAY exploratory phase
Mozilla and Google presented different applications, not compatible
What level will it take before 3D will be acceptable on Internet?

Gamer’s Corner (Conferences, New Developments, Game Reviews)

New Fallout IP game, New Vegas

Intarweb Goldmine

Reference

New Adult Swim GI JOE!!!

Show #126

Derek Alfonso — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 02:00:00 +0000

News

Twitter Slammed by Phishing Malware

Usually manifest by a tweet: Visit DailyStalk, better than twitter, with pictures
If you visited the profile of that person, you were infected too
You began to send the same messages
Different variations, happened twice
Twitter “claims” to have fixed the problem
shortened urls are just ripe for taking you to sites you don’t want to go to.
TinyUrl has a feature called “Preview” that will ask you if you want to visit that site
Only go to links from twitterers that you trust and fit what they usually tweet (limits mass blast take-overs, can’t target individuals and their prefs)
Broadband Cap from Time Warner Draws Lawmaker’s Ire

U.S. Rep. Eric Massa of New York
Lawmakers looking to legislate out the ability to cap in monopoly markets
TW’s response: $150 unlimited fee? (ridiculous)
“Time Warner’s decision has the potential to more than triple customers’ current rates, and I think most families will find this to be too taxing to afford,”
South Korean Blogger Arrested for Blogging about Failing Economy

18 Month jail sentence
falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency.
Google Losing 1.65 million a day on YouTube

Bandwidth, Servers, Support, Bandwidth
$1-2 per visit per user
Loss Leader for keeping Google on the tongue?
Investment for future. getting in early and being #1,
Cost will go down, Bandwidth only becomes cheaper
Facing more competition with places like DailyMotion, blip.tv, Hulu (diff. model but still online video entertainment), etc
DiggBar Stirs Controversy, Unveils Compromise

Diggbar acts as a URL shortener and disguises the site url in a frame
Your URL is your identity on the Internet
Companies have been writing programs for years that “break frames”
A LOT of ppl have complained so Diggbar came halfway, they made it an “opt-out” service

Talk Points

20 Twitter Apps
People are organizing politically on Twitter: #teaparty and #teabag

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/04/15/live-tea-party-twitter-feedsopen-thread/
#teaparty: Used to protest government’s intervention into businesses / combat socialism
#teaparty used the hashtag to organize demonstrations across the US and even has signage
#teabag: organized in opposition to #teaparty / Basic tenet of group is that #teaparty is organized by a bunch of Obama haters and are currently happy with the changes in gov’t
Freedom of speech is a good thing right?

Sponsor
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Here is the code: POI

This will give the customer free ground shipping in the continental U.S.

- New System – Under $1000 – Still handcrafted with care
DoghouseSystems VS

-Performance in WoW is still great: 40 Frames / sec @ 1920 x 1280
-Don’t forget their laptop which has 2 graphics card built in, the mobius, at a mid-line desktop price
-If you want all the bells and whistles, they can handcraft that too, just call them up during normal business hours, they’ll talk with you, find out your needs, and recommend the system that you need (not the one that costs the most)
-877-DHS-DHS2 (347-3472)

Gamer’s Corner (Conferences, New Developments, Game Reviews)

WoW: 3.1 hit with a thud on day 1, downloads were slow, finding the MAC patch was even harder. I personally chose to stay away for a couple days away

Just goes to show that no matter how good your infrastructure is, its really hard to get out large content pushes to 10 million ppl all at once on the Internet.
“Braid” comes to PC, Level Editor Included

Very popular puzzle game that works on a time mechanic
Unique Look-n-feel
Was on consoles, now on PC (steam, etc)
Hidden Level Editor included for PC version only
Later support for imports from Photoshop
Burnout Paradise reveals Cops and Robbers Mode

Not much is known but it but introduces a chase mechanism
There’s a trailer out there, just follow the link in our shownotes
Criterion is looking to continually change the way ppl play their popular racer by download packs, instead of releasing whole new games.
I WANT A CRASH MODE (as seen in previous versions of Burnout)

Intarweb Goldmine

Show #125

Derek Alfonso — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

News

The Conficker Worm

Removal Tool
New Twitter Client for the Mac Desktop: Nambu

1 for full featured but unresponsive
Time Warner set to introduce tiered pricing for bandwidth

5GB: $29.99/month
10GB: $39.99/month
20GB: $49.99/month
40GB: $54.90/month
100GB: No information yet
Biggest argument by Cable companies: small percentage of users forcing caps
(my argument: If such a small percentage, target those users because the 98% doesn’t need a cap)
Test-beds for this cap structure going into markets where no competition is available
Homework assignment for users: Find out how much you use per month and then compare it to the pricing structures
T-Mobile / HP to use Android OS for netbooks

Microsoft claims they have 98% of netbook market despite no rise in sales
Netbooks are about cost saving, why pay premium for a low feature item
Microsoft should be giving this OS away (like they did with Win95) in order to corner market
.69 songs a missing commodity on ITunes now that new Price Structure implemented

Promoters decide pricing structure, which give no incentive to lower prices
most older songs stayed put at .99 with some raising price to $1.29
(derek open up itunes and get me some supporting numbers)
MLB dumps Silverlight

War inside browser being waged, who controls the media delivery mechanism
Microsoft = Silverlight, Adobe = Flash, RealMedia = dead
Olympics dumped Silverlight, now the MLB?
last year plagued by glitches, admin needed to install, etc.
Big hit because MLBAM also streams NCAA tourney and 2009 Masters

Sponsor
Doghouse Systems

Here is the code: POI

This will give the customer free ground shipping in the continental U.S.

Don’t just take our word for it…

Blizzard Game Designer User Experience

Gamer’s Corner (Conferences, New Developments, Game Reviews)

Beatles: Rockband and Canon CD simultaneous release Sept. 9

Notable because the younger generation of soldiers is choosing a medium that they are comfortable with to tell their story (not movies)
Will feature all sides of the conflict: Soldier, Villager, Insurgent
Konami promises that this will be realistic
Free Game: The Power of Paint
WoW note: 3.1 forthcoming

End-Game furthered – Ulduar: Dwarves gone wild (NE Stormpeaks)
DUAL SPEC – BIIIIIG game changer, only ooc and cast time to change your whole build
No equipment manager – got pushed
New holiday “Noble Garden” was pushed also
Jack Thompson’s unconstitutional bill gets vetoed in Utah, takes fight to airwaves

Disbarred Florida Nut that really is just into grand standing and has chosen his target as gaming
Wanted law in place that forced M games to be put under lock and key and was giving stiff penalties if this didn’t happen.
Stupid because rating system is voluntary and would force ppl away from rating their game
Claims on radio that Doom was a trainer for Columbine, Germany shooting was CS and Far Cry 2′s fault

Intarweb Goldmine

Wii Dumbells

Show #124

Derek Alfonso — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 19:00:00 +0000

News

Steady iterations of Beta. Now at 7068
Will Windows 7 help re-establish stranglehold on consumer market and buzz gallery?

Mobile Media (i.e. cell phone) Internet Usage on rise

50% of Mobile phone internet usage happens from IPhones
Touchscreens: The top handset on each carrier is a touchscreen. T-Mobile has the Android device, the T-Mobile G1, Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) has the BlackBerry Storm; AT&T (NYSE: T) has the iPhone and Sprint (NYSE: S) has the Samsung Instinct.
Top five smartphones: Globally they are: iPhone (above, top), Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N70 (above, left), BlackBerry 8300 (above, right), Nokia N80, and Nokia N73. In the U.S.: iPhone, BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Pearl, Palm (NSDQ: PALM) Centro, and HTC Dream (G1).
OS Breakdown: Symbian lost market share in February, but is still number one worldwide with 43 percent of requests; the top Windows Mobile device is the Samsung BlackJack II, but six of the top 10 Windows Mobile devices are from HTC; Android accounts for 5 percent of the US smartphone market; iPhone generated 33 percent of worldwide traffic and 50 percent of US traffic.

Recharge your electronics via movement

Scientists working on nanogenerator
Uses tiny nano wires that react to vibrations to generate electricity
Electricity can then be used to fuel electronics
Being studied and prepared for military applications but personal devices also targeted

Kitchen PCs – The wave of the future?

At about $600 to $800, kitchen PCs could be to desktops what netbooks have become to notebooks today: cheap, cheerful alternatives to overpriced, overpowered machines.
Kitchen PCs offer a stylish form factor, a touchscreen interface to get to e-mail, weather forecasts, calendars, news or recipes — all wrapped up with an attractive price tag.

The Computer Work That Played an April Fools Joke on the World

Like Y2K the Conficker virus was set to “wake up” this past Wednesday on April fools
And it did, but no commands came down — it was a dud.

Google Ventures

Google ammasses a $100MM venture fund (news story)

Blu-hoo-hoo: Blu-ray No More: Netflix Increases Blu-ray Cost by 500% and I quit!

First Bluray and HD DVD was a free add-on to your existing Netflix service, I was in love with Netflix and was enjoying the spoils of Hi-Def — but I knew it couldn’t last forever.
Then Netflix moved with the industry and removed HD DVD and stuck only with Bluray, they even vowed to get all of the latest releases, and that they have. As far as customer service I have no complaint!
Then the first e-mail came, they were adding $1 to my subscription, a sigh of relif, no biggie, that made sense, the discs were a little more expensive than DVDs, the demand was not super high at the time, but as demand increased the $1 would make a big difference for Netflix, or at least I thought
This past week I received the e-mail that made me change my mind, Netflix (NFLX) decided to raise the Bluray cost from $1 to $5 for me added on to my already $20ish/month subscription, that’s 5X the previous cost!
Now I can say that on more than one occasion my wife and I have experienced a Bluray come in with a crack in the actual disc, Netflix I assume pays to replace these — one would assume not at full cost, but still if this occurs a lot (and I have to assume it does, because as I said, its been more than a few times) this could be part of the price increase, or it could just be inflation.
The price increase is also not the same across the board, the more expensive (or more discs you have out at a time) the higher the increase. It’s $1 more than the number of DVDs out at a time, so if you have a 4-DVD plan like me, its $5 extra dollars ($28.99 instead of $23.99), if you have a 8-DVD out plan, it’s $9 extra dollars ($56.99 instead of $47.99)
If you have Netflix and you have Bluray enabled and this sounds too pricey for you all you have to do is click ‘Your Account’ at the top right, and click ‘Change Bluray Access’
About 10% of Netflix’s subscriber base has Blu-ray enabled, and on average Blu-ray costs as much as 30% more in stores, but this demand for Blu-ray is new on Netflix and has risen to this level through a 60% increase over the last six months, I am curious how many people are going to jump ship.

Skype now LIVE on the IPhone App Store for Free

Sound quality reportedly pretty good
News of this going Live hit Twitter first
Will this change the face of cell phone usage? (probly not since your paying premium price for at&t service)

Talk Points

Dilbert Moment:
My boss walks in, says his boss can’t use my report due to crappy pc. Not my report I say, fix his pc. “No, i can’t tell him that. U need to fix report”. So I’m “fixing” a non-broken report.
Will spam be the death of Email?

Easy to codify
No cost whatsoever to send en-masse(except marginal programming costs)
According to Google, 94% of all email is spam
Possible solutions:

Paid
Black Lists
Opt-In feature (i.e. Facebook and myspace)

Sponsor
Doghouse Systems

Promo Code: POI

This will give the customer free ground shipping in the continental U.S.

Gamer’s Corner (Conferences, New Developments, Game Reviews)

PS2 Price Drop

Now $99, going on 9th year
2500 titles out for this console
Looking to compete with Wii, but not sexy or casual friendly enough
Where is our PS3 price drop?

Intarweb Goldmine

NASA contemplating naming toilet on Space Station after Stephen Colbert.

Stephen Colbert won Internet Voting for Rights to name latest module of space station
NASA threatens to name toilet after him, Colbert threatens succession if the whole module doesn’t carry his name
Funniness abounds

The Ultimate Button Masher

Show #123

Derek Alfonso — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:00:00 +0000

News

OnLive Cloud Gaming Console

Video Demo from GDC
1 milisecond lag
VOD for gaming
Future gaming

Crysis Wars
GRID
Mirror’s Edge
Burnout Paradise

Dell Having Troubles entering Phone Market

Lackluster PC sales eating into its profit
Phone OS really is the next-gen profit cow (see IPhone)

It’s more likely the hardware that is the profit cow
Even Apple gives away the latest version of their OS to their users
Right now it is because it lacks features other phones take for granted
But they are setting the precident, and Android has promised even before iPhone to be the OS that is upgradable for free
So getting the hardware that works, and maintains the functions and battery life you want will be the future of phones.

Its really the hardwareOr has the boat been missed because

PocketPC not glitzy enough, despite its utilitarian roots

Will they buy Palm to get PRE?

Twitter announces Pro account

Facebook, Yahoo, Aim all jumping on Twitter craze

Facebook was one of the first there
Yahoo Updates is coming soon and will likely be integrated into Y!’s very popular e-mail service
AOL Site Social

Skype now #1 International Phone Provider

International calls via Skype grew 41% in 2008
That made Skype 8% of all of the International traffic combined last year

IPhone Hits 17 million sales Landmark

Sucker born each day
Great device but it feeds the monopoly

The devices do come locked to specific networks
That is the work of the networks, not of Apple
And lots of people have successfully unlocked their phones to use with other providers

Article on why Carriers rule the market

Talk Points

15.1MP up from 12 in XSi
HD Video (no autofocus)

1080p @ 20fps (unusable)
720p @ 30fps

3.4fps burst shooting (170 JPEG buffer)

Thanks to Canon for letting me play with it ($899 kit/$799 body)

What would make the IPhone a perfect device? (This discussion at the top of the show during the iPhone segment)

Slideout Qwerty keyboard
Non-locked device
No Data plan option

Sponsor
Doghouse Systems

Here is the code: POI

This will give the customer free ground shipping in the continental U.S.

Gamer’s Corner (Conferences, New Developments, Game Reviews)

Steam counters with “Steamworks”

Intarweb Goldmine

How many Hard Drives does it take to stop a .50 caliber round?