Bing Maps gets taxi fare calculator
How much will it cost to grab a cab from my apartment to a favorite seafood restaurant? How about from my friend's hotel to another friend's apartment? Thanks to a new submission to the King of Bing Maps competition, users can calculate taxi fare between any two destinations within major metropolitan areas on Bing Maps. In our testing, the feature works quite well.
When you load the app in Bing Maps, you have to first choose a region and then get directions between two addresses. Since cabs (and fares) are usually regulated by the cities in which they operate, as they are here in Chicago, it's not hard for Bing to get in the general ballpark of what you can expect to pay.
I commonly take a cab between two specific addresses (hey, there are adult beverages involved and no nearby L stops at the destination), so I ran a test on the new tool. The result was just about what I typically pay, not counting tip.
Not only can this feature be useful for locals, it would also be appreciated by out-of-town visitors who want to know what to expect when checking out a new city. Other nominations for the King of Bing Maps are outlined on the Bing blog, but Taxi Fare Calculator is definitely the most useful of the bunch.
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OLPC's Negroponte offers to help India realize $35 tablet
In an open letter to the government of India, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project founder Nicholas Negroponte expressed enthusiasm for the country's recently announced $35 tablet effort and offered to assist by making his organization's technology and expertise available.The offer of collaboration is the latest odd twist in OLPC's erratic relationship with India's Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD). The real significance of Negroponte's offer, however, is that it reflects OLPC's evolving views about the value of collaboration.
OLPC designs low-cost education computing devices for developing countries. The project aimed to produce a ubiquitous $100 laptop that would bring constructivist learning theory to the developing world. The project has fallen far short of fulfilling its initial goals due to serious setbacks, ranging from technical and logistical failures to divisive ideological conflicts. OLPC was forced to reorganize and downsize much of its development staff last year as its funds dwindled. Despite these cuts, the organization was able to continue moving forward by narrowing its focus and pursuing a less ambitious strategy.
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Kid Icarus on the 3DS: game design can reduce eye strain
It's hard to sit through a 3D movie without experiencing some eye strain, if not an outright headache. Project Sora's Masahiro Sakurai—who is working on the upcoming Kid Icarus on Nintendo's 3D system—answered some questions about what we can expect from Nintendo's 3DS screen when he sat down with CVG, and the insights are certainly interesting. It seems you can decrease eye strain from within the design of the game itself."The screen on the 3DS is a really beautiful screen and achieves very nice effects," he said. "In my experience of development and actually using it, when you have a lot of objects flying towards the user I find that it's more likely to cause eye strain, so during development I'm using objects moving away from the user which doesn't have that effect."
He also brings up another one of the system's strengths: the 3D effects can be adjusted in real time, and each game will work perfectly in 2D or 3D mode. Start getting a headache? Just hit the slider.
"It's a case of personal preference of how you like to use the 3D. With the 3D slider you can switch the degree of depth and people who have adverse effects to 3D—they might get tired eyes—they can switch it off entirely," he explained. "It just adds that extra flexibility for gameplay richness."
This is why the 3DS is such a smart bet in the race to get 3D in the hands of consumers. With a uniform design, developers know exactly what their games will look like for every player. You don't have to adjust for larger or smaller screens, different designs of glasses, or different technologies on different displays. The ability to switch back to 2D at any time or to lessen the depth effect is also a big plus. The entire interview is fascinating, so go give it a read.
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Connecticut AG calls Amazon, Apple to woodshed over e-book deals
Looks like the Attorney General of Connecticut is ready to stir things up over what he calls "anticompetitive" deals between Apple, Amazon, and various prominent publishers on the e-book market. That state's Richard Blumenthal says that he wants representatives from both on-line giants in his office ASAP to discuss what Blumenthal calls their "most favored nation" arrangements with big book companies like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster.The crux of the MFN concept is that a given product maker must offer a given distributor the lowest price it's offering anyone. If a competing distributor gets a price break, they get it too.
"The net effect is fairly obvious," Blumenthal warned in his letter to Amazon, "in that MFNs will reduce the publisher's incentive to offer a discount to Amazon if it would have to offer the same discount to Apple, leading to the establishment of a price floor for e-books offered by the publisher."
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Cell phones and WiFi set to invade NYC's subways
After years of negotiations, a plan is afoot to wire New York City's subway platforms for both cellular and WiFi service, a move that may see service extend into many of the subway system's tunnels. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been looking for a contractor to perform the service for a number of years, and has finally reached an agreement with a company called Transit Wireless which would see Transit sell access to major carriers. Although many of the city's perpetually connected residents will welcome the opportunity to keep their BlackBerrys and iPads online through the commute, a fair number are likely to resent the intrusion of loud cellphone conversations into what is one of the last refuges from half of other people's conversations. According to a report in The Daily News, Transit Wireless will have two years to set up technology testing sites in a handful of the city's 277 underground stations. Once the testing is complete, another four years will be allotted to hook up the rest.
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Windows 7 overtakes Windows Vista in market share
Last month, Windows 7 passed Windows Vista in market share, according to Netmarketshare.com. One year after Windows 7 hit RTM and nine months after it was released, Microsoft's newest OS managed to acquire more users than its predecessor. The operating system reached the 10 percent market share mark four months ago, and just last week Microsoft announced it had sold 175 million licenses so far.
If we take a look at the last 12 months, it's very clear that Windows 7 is surging forward. Meanwhile, Windows Vista has lost about four and a half percent in the last year, while Windows XP has lost almost 10 percent. Mac OS, meanwhile, has gained almost a fifth of a percent and Linux last month lost its recent gains.
Mac OS has dropped the least: 0.10 percent (from 5.16 percent to 5.06 percent). Linux also dropped 0.14 percent (from 1.07 percent to 0.93 percent)—its biggest change in 12 months. The main reason that all the major PC operating systems are declining is that mobile operating systems are counted separately and are growing very quickly.
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Researchers craft algorithm to turn mesh networking green
The energy costs of IT equipment have become a major concern, leading to a variety of creative ideas about how to keep power use in check. Most of the challenge has been finding ways to make sure that the equipment that's in use gets fully utilized, while anything that isn't gets put into a low-energy state. A paper in the Journal Of Lightwave Technology suggests that, under the right circumstances, the same thing can be applied to wireless networks, producing significant energy savings.The focus of the research is on "last-mile" connections, which take network traffic from the local phone company's exchange to businesses and residences. After dismissing fiber-to-the-home as "cost-prohibitive," they suggest that a wireless mesh is the best way to solve many of the last-mile problems. In an appropriately dense environment, a few fiber-fed access points, either 4G or WiFi, could allow the signals to be propagated out through the networking hardware of individual users.
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IE gains market share at the expense of Firefox, Chrome
Now that we're past the halfway point of 2010, it's starting to become apparent that the browser trends we've noted over the past several months are no longer holding. Sure, Safari and Opera are still slowly gaining share, but the three big guys are restless. Firefox has started declining, Chrome's growth spurt seems to have been put on hold, and Internet Explorer experienced gains for the second month in a row.
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Inside Microsoft's internal IE8 privacy battles
A bid by the Internet Explorer team to automatically block the tracking systems used by online advertisers was itself blocked by others within the company in order to protect those advertisers, the Wall Street Journal wrote over the weekend.The InPrivate Filter feature, introduced in Internet Explorer 8, could have defaulted to "on." This would result in the tracking scripts used by advertisers such as Google being disabled, and in turn, reduce the ability for those advertisers to target the ads they show.
InPrivate Filtering works by tracking any scripts, images, and other resources that webpages reference. In particular, it tracks resources that come from a different domain than the page being viewed. If one of these resources is used by more than ten different sites, InPrivate Filtering deems that resource to be a tracking device and will block subsequent attempts to download it.
The WSJ story describes how the Internet Explorer group built the feature without consulting other groups in the company who might take an interest in such a change—in particular, Brian McAndrews, who had been CEO of advertising firm aQuantive until Microsoft bought it in 2007.
McAndrews and others pushed back against the Internet Explorer team and its manager, Dean Hachamovitch, fearing that the feature would damage both Microsoft's own advertising business and its relationships with other advertising firms.
In the end, the marketers largely won the battle. Though InPrivate Filtering is part of Internet Explorer 8, it was scaled back. It is not enabled by default—indeed, it cannot be made to be on by default without modifying the registry—and an advanced subscription feature, one that would enable privacy groups to provide blacklists of companies known to breach privacy, did not ship at all. Lists of privacy offenders can be manually imported, but they can't be updated automatically.
Enabling InPrivate Filtering is not without some risk. Commonly used JavaScript libraries are available from specially created content delivery networks (CDNs) so that Web authors can more easily include them in their pages. Using CDNs in this way allows browsers to cache the scripting libraries and use their cached copies across many different sites, leading to better performance for users. InPrivate Filtering has no way to distinguish between "desirable" scripts like these and "undesirable" ones used for tracking; it is prone to blocking them all.
As such, the decision to disable the feature by default might make sense technically—even if made for quite non-technical reasons.
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A free MIT science education? Yup, and Science loves it
MIT's OpenCourseWare, possibly the best place to go if you want to study physics in your pajamas, has been awarded the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE) by Science magazine. OpenCourseWare receives close to 1.5 million pageviews a month, with traffic from educators, students, and especially independent learners.The SPORE prize was created to honor innovations like OpenCourseWare, a site that makes much of MIT's curriculum available to anyone with Internet access. It's best known for the depth of many of its course resources, particularly in the sciences. Many classes, like introductory physics with professor Walter Lewin, include videos of all the lectures, as well as items like course syllabi and assigned readings.
The award gave OpenCourseWare's contributors an essay spot in the magazine, which they used to note that 50 percent of the site's visitors identify themselves as independent learners, unaffiliated with a university. This fall, OpenCourseWare will roll out a new section of the site geared toward independent learners, containing more problem-solving and self-assessment opportunities.
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Most Internet time now spent with social networks, games
Just in case you needed further confirmation that blogs, social networks, and games are overtaking everything else on the 'Net, Nielsen has released its latest statistics. They show that Americans now spend almost a quarter of their PC/laptop days and nights on social networking sites and blogs. That's a 43 percent jump from a year ago.Social networking now has a 22.7 percent share of the PC pie, while online games get a 10.2 percent share (up 10 percent from last year).
Meanwhile, the jury is still out on e-mail—which now commands a paltry 8.3 percent of consumer time, a drop of 28 percent from June 2009.
But the media survey company notes that at the same time computer e-mail use is in decline, mobile users are ramping up the activity—e-mailing now consumes 41.6 percent of all US mobile Internet time.
"Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the Web, 40 percent of US online time is spent on just three activities—social networking, playing games and emailing," noted Nielsen research analyst Dave Martin, "leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie."
Those "other sectors" include Portals (4.4 percent), Instant Messaging (4 percent), and search (3.5 percent).
Top 10 Sectors by Share of US Internet Time [PCs and laptops] | ||||
Rank | SubCategory | Share of Time June 2010 | Share of Time June 2009 | % Change in Share of Time |
1 | Social Networks | 22.7% | 15.8% | 43% |
2 | Online Games | 10.2% | 9.3% | 10% |
3 | 8.3% | 11.5% | -28% | |
4 | Portals | 4.4% | 5.5% | -19% |
5 | Instant Messaging | 4.0% | 4.7% | -15% |
6 | Videos/Movies | 3.9% | 3.5% | 12% |
7 | Search | 3.5% | 3.4% | 1% |
8 | Software Manufacturers | 3.3% | 3.3% | -0% |
9 | Multi-category Entertainment | 2.8% | 3.0% | -7% |
10 | Classifieds/Auctions | 2.7% | 2.7% | -2% |
| Other | 34.3% | 37.3% | -8% | |
Source: The Nielsen Company | ||||
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An edu-game that entertains? Inside The Curfew's dystopia
Labeling something as an "educational game" is usually the kiss of death. The recently released The Curfew is instead described as an "adventure webgame with a political thriller theme." Commissioned by Channel 4, designed by LittleLoud, and written by Kieron Gillen, the game plays out like a point-and-click adventure crossed with a Sega CD FMV game. It's not the most appealing description, but thanks to some excellent writing and a fully realized dystopic future, it's an experience that's well worth your time.Read the comments on this post
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Verizon top Capitol Hill lobbyer on Internet laws
The big telco and cable ISPs are always busy beavers over at Capitol Hill, lobbying Congress on a wide variety of issues. But our perusal of the relevant public disclosure databases suggests that Verizon wins the prize for money spent on convincing Senators and Representatives to see broadband- and mobile-related matters the wireless giants' way. According to the latest data provided to the US House of Representatives' Office of the Clerk, during the second quarter of this year, Verizon forked over $4,440,000 to its team of crack buttonholers, who talked up every issue from net neutrality to the proposed Distracted Driving Prevention Act.
To offer some perspective, however, at the same time last year, the company spent $1,120,000. That's still a lot of money, but less than a third of the latest sum.
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