Google me and I'll sue you

The world has officially gone crazy. A couple in the US are sing Google because they say pictures of their house that appear on Google Maps “Street view” function caused them mental suffering….oh, and devalued their property as well. According to their law suit: a "considerable sum of money" was spent and "A major component of their purchase decision was a desire for privacy."

Google have offered to take the images down, but that apparently doesn’t under the damage – remember, that mental suffering part? As you can imagine, Google are a bit perplexed by the whole thing.

MyTake – Personal privacy on the web has long been an issue, but this is probably taking it a bit too far. The nature of the web today allows for a high-level of collaboration and we’re all able to help content that directly affects us, we shouldn’t abuse that.

MySpace pokes Apple in the iTunes

So, MySpace comes out and tells the world that it’s set to take on iTunes and Apple does the cultural equivalent of bending down and patting it on the head. The men in white wasted no time in telling the world that Apple iTunes sales have now exceeded that of Wal-Mart stores, putting them in the number one spot in the US – some of you may have read my last post on the Apple Vs Wal-Mart battle where Apple came off in second spot.

Back to the MySpace offering - MySpace Music is a partnership with Universal Music, Sony BMG and Warner Music and although they aren’t talking money, they did say that it would be ad-supported to some extent. In terms of making money, they were quite forthcoming with that detail, stating that they would be selling digital music downloads, ring tones, concert tickets and t-shirts.

MyTake – MySpace is a massive network and the different content flying around is amazing and obviously very appealing to its audience. As for taking on iTunes, I reckon that’s a bit of a stretch. iTunes can be anything to anyone and the important thing is that it acts as your library and your music store. If you think about the demographic for MySpace and then the penetration of iTunes, I think you’ll agree, it’s a bit of a redundant debate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s awesome that MySpace is doing this, the more interesting and appealing content the better. As time goes on, I think we’ll see more and more individual ways of searching, finding and consuming content.

Megabytes for pearly whites

I had to post about this, as the father of a (nearly) 2 year-old I know how hard it can be to get them to brush their teeth. At the moment, my daughter is going OK, but to be honest there are some days that she loves brushing her teeth and others when she doesn’t. We try a lot of things to get her brushing regularly – encouragement, letting her do it all on her own…

But, our tooth brushing prayers could be answered thanks to some researchers at the National Taiwan University, who have invented a cool webcam based video game. Using a camera mounted above your bathroom mirror and a toothbrush with LEDs on the handle, the game uses the camera to sense where the movement of the child’s hand through the LEDs and integrates the movement into the gameplay via an LCD display – check out the video.




MyTake – Cute, perhaps a bit of an over-teched solution to a traditional problem, but at least someone is thinking about it. It’s quite cool to think that practically anything can be turned into a piece of personalised content – even if it is just brushing your teeth.

Out of Wile E Coyote's league, that's for sure

You remember that joke from the 80s – “High five, up above, down below! Uh-oh, you’re too slow!” – that’s Australia when it comes to Broadband. It really is dreadful – I recently read somewhere that we have even slower broadband than Brazil. But, the point of this post isn’t to bash Aussie Broadband, it’s to talk about something called “The Grid”. Sounds awesome what is it? Well, it’s a high-speed Internet connection that is more than 100,000 times faster than your average broadband connection, to put this into perspective movies, music and games could all be downloaded in seconds, not hours and hours….and hours….

“The Grid” is based on a series of fibre-optic cables and routing centres and can handle huge amounts of data. There are already more than 55,000 servers out there with 200,000 expected by 2010. The really awesome thing about this technology is what we could do with it – according to the boffins that invented it, we could be storing gigabytes of info on the net as well as transmitting holographic images and getting high-def video calls for the price of a local call.

MyTake – I read that one of the guys behind it said that it could revolutionise society. It could. Look at what we’ve done with web 2.0 and broadband, you’ve got to wonder how the traditional record store or video hire chains are going to survive with the speeds they are talking about for “The Grid”. True content-on-demand AND content that people want – “The grid” could be more than just an evolution of the Internet, it could be the biggest and most powerful distribution channel and outlet ever seen.

N-Gaging times ahead

First-up, I wasn’t that big of a fan of the Nokia N-Gage device(s), but I am a massive fan of mobile gaming – whatever form it takes. The guys over at Nokia have stuck with the market for quite a while now and I think they’ve come good with the N-Gage service. If you remember the original device and have a few dubious memories, think again, the device is no more but the games remain as a service.

Gamers can log on to the N-Gage site and download a software link that connects them to Nokia’s library of games, which they reckon will be around 30 by the middle of 2008. They already have the likes of EA, Gameloft and Glu Mobile making titles for the service, and who knows, they could get a few killer franchises on board – Spore maybe?

MyTake – Nobody really “owns” mobile gaming, it’s an open field for any brand to go in and do something great. Sure, we have handhelds from Nintendo and Sony, but a solid content-based system with some appealing titles? Not yet. With Apple getting further and further in to the mobile space, I think a true games service isn’t far off for them either. Nokia beat them to the punch on this one – can they make they most of it?

What the future holds?

An awesome piece of future punting from the BBC based on a Microsoft-backed report. According the article, in 2020 we'll be more integrated with computers and terms like "interface" and "user" will be obsolete.

So what do they reckon the future holds - no more keyboard and mouse as there will be a more sophisticated interface. In addition, computers could be embedded in our clothes and even our bodies. Well worth a read, check it out here

Xbox to trim the waistline and go Blu?

The Blu-ray train rumbles on with rumours that Xbox 360 is about to get its very own Blu-Ray drive. Even though Microsoft has constantly denied such claims, the rumour mill is once again running hot. One such claim is from a manufacturer called Lite-On, who is supposedly developing built-in Blu-ray disk drives for the “next generation” of the Xbox 360 console. Personally, I don’t know which bit is more exciting – the fact that Blu-Ray is coming to Xbox or the fact that we could be getting a slimmed down 360 sometime soon.

MyTake – Never forget that success in the games console industry comes through mass-market saturation – obvious right? But, you only get that when you get the console to a price that is right for the average Joe/Josephine and that’s just what Microsoft could be doing here. As the PS2 and the PS1 before it underwent a face lift and price drop, so too could the Xbox 360. The genius part will be if they can get Blu-Ray drives in a slimmed down machine and still come in at a lower price point than the PlayStation 3 – then we’ll have a fight on our hands!