Category: Tech news

Seemingly tired of being chewed out by every third traveler to step through their scanners, the TSA is trying something new to connect with the people: Instagram. And, uh… it’s actually pretty friggin’ effective.

Over the last few days, the TSA has been Instagramming some of the crazier things they’ve confiscated at their checkpoints from people who apparently didn’t get the whole “don’t bring things that can kill people on planes” memo. Guns! Grenades! Secret spy knives!

This one is probably the strangest so far, confiscated in Cleveland:

It’s like someone thought to themselves, “Well, they say I’m not allowed to bring a knife on the plane. I’m also not allowed to bring a gun on the plane. But no one said anything about a knife gun. LOOP HOLE’D!”

They’ve been posting one or two pictures per day, mainly focusing on the zanier stuff — from a knife hidden in a belt buckle to a stun gun disguised as a pack of cigarettes.

And yeah, as you might expect, the account is spreading fast. The old saying suggests that a picture is worth a thousand words; here, a picture seems to be worth about 1,600 followers. They’ve posted just 10 images so far since launching just days ago, but already have 16,000 people following the account. That’s already half of the following they’ve amassed on Twitter, and they’ve been tweeting for years.

Note that while the TSA clearly doesn’t love hidden weaponry, they do seem to have pretty strong feelings for hash tags. Hashtag knife! Hashtag TSA! Hashtag… photo? Really? #photo? On Instagram?

Anyway, You can find the TSA’s new instagram account and all of the crazy contraband that comes with here. (If you’re dubious that it’s really the TSA posting these, note that they’ve linked to the account from their verified Twitter account a few times)

(Confiscated, but sadly not pictured yet: thirty zillion bottles of shampoo.)

Glympse, the navigation tracking app that has made inroads into location-based services by inking deals with the likes of Ford, Mercedes Benz and BMW to integrate its app into their in-car systems, is today laying down ground in another direction: other cloud-based mobile platforms. Today it is announcing that Glympse users will be able to archive their “trails” directly to Evernote.

The feature is getting rolled out first on Android, with iOS coming soon, the company said.

The feature gives Glympse users a way of recording trips that they have made, either for practical purposes such as remembering a particular driving route, or just to be able to preserve a memorable journey, such as a vacation road trip. Bryan Trussel, co-founder and CEO of Glympse, says that this was one of the more demanded features from users: “Many of our users have requested a way to save a snapshot of their Glympse map trails so they can view road trips, keep runs and bike rides, archive a special trip abroad, or just remember an interesting location. We wanted to make this feature simple and easy.”

This is the start of a number of further integrations the company plans to put in place, and now that the company has released an API it will be easier to create more links in that web of connectivity and usefulness. And by tapping into services like Evernote, which now has more than 60 million users, it gives Glympse a glimpse of attracting new users. (The company does not disclose user numbers yet.)

“We’ve got a pretty long list of potential features and partnerships and customer requests,” a spokesperson says. Adding photos, trip details and logistics, calendar and social network integrations are all on the list. “We’re definitely going to be busy for quite a while.” Further integrations will be announced in the coming months. It plans to double the number of companies with which it is linked by the end of this year.

The Evernote integration will work like this: users will be able to sign into their Evernote accounts from the Glympse app, similar to how they would sign in to Facebook or Twitter to share a route with a friend. Then, they would be able to save a trail automatically from the trail window. When they do so, it will automatically go into a folder on Evernote called “My Glympse Trails.” The trails subsequently don’t appear as animated/video views, but as snapshots and details, which in records of who you shared a Glympse trail with, as well as the date, time, and duration of the Glympse as well as the destination if included) of each Glympse saved.

“Evernote helps people remember their lives, and a big part of living is traveling from place to place. With Glympse, those trips can be recorded alongside an Everote’s users other memories. It’s a natural fit,” said Rafe Needleman, director of developer relations, in a statement.

For now, all of these services will remain free, with no plans for premium, add-ons for the time being.

Doug Engelbart, an American inventor best known for creating the early computer mouse, passed away last night due to kidney failure. He was 88 years old.

Engelbart pioneered many early Silicon Valley technologies, mostly surrounding human-computer interaction, including the creation of hypertext and work on graphical interfaces.

In his own words in a 2004 Wired profile, Engelbart describes the early development of the mouse:

I first started making notes for the mouse in ’61. At the time, the popular device for pointing on the screen was a light pen, which had come out of the radar program during the war. It was the standard way to navigate, but I didn’t think it was quite right…We set up our experiments and the mouse won in every category, even though it had never been used before. It was faster, and with it people made fewer mistakes. Five or six of us were involved in these tests, but no one can remember who started calling it a mouse. I’m surprised the name stuck.

Engelbart is survived by four children, nine grandchildren, and his second wife, whom he wed in 2008. Engelbart’s first wife died in 1997 after 47 years of marriage.

One of my favorite memories is visiting Engelbart’s home in 2006 and using his old mouse and chord keyboard. RIP Doug pic.twitter.com/bTRMxa1MMP

— Joe Hewitt (@joehewitt) July 3, 2013

Below, you can see part of the December 9, 1968, presentation that Engelbart and 17 researchers gave at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park; among other things, Engelbart and the researchers displayed the mouse for the first time in the presentation.

Photo via Wikipedia.

On-demand ride-sharing startup Lyft is looking to make more of an impact in Southern California, with a launch in San Diego and increased community efforts in Los Angeles. That’ll open a new market for the company and hopefully quell some regulatory issues that it’s faced in another of the cities it operates in.

First, the launch: Lyft has officially opened for business in San Diego, which will be the company’s sixth market since launching in San Francisco a little more than a year ago. After a successful run here, the startup has been busy expanding into other cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Boston.

San Diego seems like a natural city for Lyft to be in — it has a bit of a car-centric culture but there’s a dearth of good transportation alternatives for those who don’t want to drive. As we pointed out a year ago, when Uber launched in San Diego, there are only 0.55 taxis per 1,000 people in San Diego, which is actually lower than in San Francisco. Having another option through a ride-sharing service like Lyft will likely be a welcome addition to residents there.

Meanwhile in L.A., Lyft is fighting to continue operating, after the city’s transportation department served a cease-and-desist letter to it, as well as to competitors Sidecar and Uber. The startup’s community members have been petitioning the local government there, and the new mayor, Eric Garcetti, met with a driver and passenger earlier in the week to discuss the service.

The L.A. regulatory battle is partly a battle over regulatory jurisdiction. All three companies receiving cease-and-desist letters there had previously been cleared to operate in California by the Public Utilities Commission. However, the local Transportation Department has demanded that those services cease operating what amounts to unlicensed taxi services in the city.

Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer will be headed there next week for a meeting with the community to help stir support for continued operation in the city. The goal of the community meeting will be for drivers and passengers to share their stories, which can hopefully be shared with regulators going forward. (Local L.A. Lyft users can sign up to attend the meeting here.)

For Lyft, getting regulators and community members on board is now just a part of its job when it comes to expansion. We’ll likely see more of this as it enters into new markets. To do that, the company has raised a total of $83 million now, including a massive $60 million funding round from Andreessen Horowitz that it closed in May.

A number of high-profile websites will be taking part in an online protest tomorrow against the National Security Agency (NSA)’s surveillance of online activity and phone calls. The protest is organized by non-profit organization Fight for the Future, and will see participation from thousands of sites, including WordPress.org, Namecheap, Reddit, 4chan, Mozilla, Fark, TOR, Cheezburger, Demand Progress, MoveOn, and EFF, among others.

However, none of the tech companies – like Facebook or Google – whose cooperation with the NSA was outed in the PRISM reveal will be involved in tomorrow’s events.

The online protest is being described as a website and media takeover, where visitors will see the 4th Amendment plastered over sites in banners. There are also a number of blog posts planned, as well as proposed TV ads (see below).

In WordPress’s case, the open source WordPress community will be involved, but WordPress.com users supported by Automattic will not be affected, unless they choose to participate themselves by blogging or posting banners of their own.

The online component to this project was built by Fight for the Future, which also runs related efforts at the Internet Defense League and the “take action now” site callforfreedom.org, which will serve as the main landing page for tomorrow’s campaign. The group has also helped build StopWatching.Us, a movement backed by a number of technical and political organizations, including also Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and the ACLU.

Fight for the Future likens tomorrow’s event to the previous anti-SOPA protests, which rallied Internet users against a misguided bill known as the “Stop Online Piracy Act” that had been criticized due to how it would harm existing web companies’ ability to do business in the name of fighting piracy. Those protests were more dramatic in nature, seeing complete blackouts of websites and other content on sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr and others before Congress dropped the bill.

No sites will be blacked out tomorrow, but rather the campaign will direct visitors to a website where they’ll be prompted to sign an online petition, call Congress, make donations to fund TV campaigns, or even join offline protests in the real world, put together by a group called Restore the Fourth. This organization, a grassroots, nonpartisan movement, is planning to hold protests in over 100 cities across the U.S., tying the July 4th holiday to the Fourth Amendment which states: “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

The StopWatching.Us campaign, which will benefit from the exposure raised by the online protests, has already gained over 539,769 signatures (as of the time of this writing) on its petition to U.S. Congress demanding that a special committee be formed to investigate the PRISM allegations. Its letter asks for “legal reforms to rein in spying and that public officials responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance be held accountable for their actions,” including specifically a reform of Section 215 of the Patriot Act (the section that allowed the NSA to get phone records from all the major U.S. phone companies) reform of the FISA Amendment, and changes to the state secrets privilege.

According to Fight for the Future co-founder Tiffiniy Cheng, the momentum from the related online movements will be combined. “We’re going to deliver [our signatures] to Congress, and combine the total number with the StopWatching.Us petition numbers,” she says. “There has been an in-person delivery early on with the StopWatching.Us numbers, we’ll probably do another.”

Israel-based startup 24me isn’t your typical to-do list app, since it’s designed to not only help you make a list of stuff that needs doing, but to actually help get that stuff done. The startup has partnered with crowdsourced errand services like TaskRabbit to make that happen, and today it’s also introducing a real-world gifting integration that lets you instantly cross special occasions off the list from right within the app. It’s yet another step in the startup’s continuing efforts to make a more piece of GTD software.

The gift integration is called “Micro-Gifting,” and allows users to send real gifts to friends and family, prompted by reminders of upcoming events like birthdays, anniversaries and more. The Gift integration brings users to a new marketplace that includes items like flowers, chocolates, wines, cards and gift cards, which can be sent anywhere within the U.S. Expansion to other markets is in the works.

Virtual gift apps are not a new thing, but the tie-in with a robust to-do platform that also handles things like paying bills, finding people to run your errands for you and more is what sets 24me apart from the crowd. As 24me co-founder and CMO Liat Hertanu explained to me, the app is like a Siri that actually chips in, rather than just pointing you in the right direction.

“What’s so unique about 24me is that it’s connected to the user’s real life and like a real personal assistant, 24me anticipates what comes next and surfaces the information when you need it most,” she said. “Not only does it auto-generate your personal reminders and organize your schedule, 24me also takes care of things for you and auto-completes different errands such as: paying your utility bills, controlling your financials, sending gifts through 24me’s virtual store to your friends, and even finding someone to run your errands.”

The plan is to continue to roll out more partnerships in pursuit of even greater real-world interaction for 24me, and this is likely where monetization will come in time as well for the free app. Hertanu said that her company has already started to examine and explore the possibilities for monetization through their partnerships, and through the transactions completed in app, though it isn’t saying anything specific as of yet. Likewise with cross-platform availability for the iOS-only title: it’s in the works, but no specific timeline for Android or other apps.

In terms of engagement thus far, Hertanu revealed that 24me has “hundres of thousands of users” who are active daily on the service, and those users have created tens of millions of tasks taken together. Continued addition of new services should help keep engagement and new user growth high.

Razer gives us this pint-sized powerhouse — a near-ultrabook gaming PC in a case that measures just 20mm thick.

Vizio’s new system is inexpensive and efficient — it delivers the performance of a 5.1 system without a bunch of damn cords running everywhere.

Unlike the cheap, Chinese-made e-cigarettes at 7-11 or the martian sex toys coveted and customized by “vapers,” Ploom is doing something different.

At the 500 Startups’ PreMoney Conference last week, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham gave a presentation in which he suggested a new way for Series A investments to get done. Graham provided a few suggestions for innovative early stage investors to differentiate themselves. It basically comes down to: move fast, and don’t over-invest in startups just to get a certain percentage of equity.

“One of the biggest things investors do not get about the fund raising process is what an immense cost talking to them imposes on the startups that are raising money, especially when a startup consists just of the founders. Everything completely grinds to a halt during fundraising,” Graham said at the conference.

Graham suggested that as a result, there’s room for an investor to undercut the competition by moving more quickly with early stage investments. If there existed a reputable investor who would invest $100,000 on market terms within 24 hours, they would be able to corner the market on the best startups, he said. That firm would be approached by all the worst startups as well, Graham said, but at least they’d see everything. In contrast, firms which have a reputation for taking a long time to make their investments would be approached last.

Another way that venture firms could differentiate themselves is by breaking from the typical 20 percent in equity that they ask for during Series A investments. VCs are investing too much and startups are raising too much during that fund raising period, but that could change if someone were willing to break ranks and actually invest less, but for less equity.

“I think the biggest danger for VCs, and also the biggest opportunity is in the Series A stage,” Graham said. “Right now, VCs knowingly invest too much in the Series A stage.”

When there’s a lot of competition for deals, the number that moves isn’t the amount of equity that VCs take, but the amount that they invest and thus the valuation of the company, Graham said. In the case of the most promising startups, Series A investors force companies to take more money than they want to raise.

“Some VCs lie and say that the company needs that much,” he said. “Others are more candid and admit that their business models require them to own a certain percentage of the company, but we all know that the amounts being invested are not determined by the amount that the companies need.”

It used to be that startups needed to give up that much of their company to raise money, but those days are over. With that in mind, Graham thinks that the first VC who breaks ranks and starts doing Series A investments for the amount of equity that the founder is willing to sell stands to reap huge benefits.

“If there were a reputable top tier firm that was willing to do a Series A round for as much stock as the founders wanted to sell, they would instantly get almost all the best startups,” Graham said. “And the best startups are where the money is.”

I talked to him about that theory and about how Y Combinator has scaled in the video above. (Skip ahead to about 5:30 to hear his thoughts on changing equity structures.)

For all the attention this week about the cloud, it’s evident that it is pretty much a distraction when considering what is really happening. Developers are lifting the cloud, not the other way around.

The big guns of tech are aligning because they have to. It’s a defensive move to serve their existing customer base. It’s not like the old kings are showing substantial revenue increases for new software licenses. But consolidating power to offer legacy technology does show that the cloud is anything you want to call it.

In their new definition of the cloud, the IT-heavy enterprise gets a new version of that old-school database to run the software installed ten or 15 years ago. An operating system built for the desktop and client/server age can be recast as a cloud service. Older SaaS companies can work with former on-premise foes and happily proclaim that what worked for the past 14 years will be just fine for another two generations or more. Just like cowbell, there is never enough.

But these moves to align CRM and operating systems with legacy databases are not about innovation. They are simply meant to keep the status quo and offer the bread and butter business that have earned them billions in revenue.

The real innovation is in the new genre of databases, developer frameworks, social coding services and the APIs enriched with context through data analysis.

It’s not to say the cloud lacks value. It has plenty of that. The cloud is really all about value. Prices continue to drop for compute and storage. On Joyent, a developer can now pay by the second.

But look deep into the infrastructure and there are signs even there of the developer’s work. Hearing more about this idea of the software defined data center? It’s this concept that software, not metal switches, do the work with APIs connecting it all together. The APIs connect networks, data stores, all forms of clients and databases, etc. It’s the act of the network going to the app instead of the other way around.

So all the machines and the pipes are getting abstracted and the developer, arguably, is driving that change. The smartphone is a server. As again illustrated by Joyent with Project Manta, the big storage and network machines are now becoming part of the operating system. Compute and storage are coming together and in-memory databases make for split-second analytics.

Just.me Founder Keith Teare (who is also one of the original TechCrunch founders), said on The Gillmor Gang this week that the cloud is a constant, but it does nor constantly do the same things. The place for change is looking at how it is used. The real shift is how the cloud is consumed. Some of it is apps, some of it is devices  while some data is pushed and some of it is pulled. The cloud is a data integrator (Message Bus) and a data store but not necessarily meant to be consumed just through a browser.

Andreessen Horowitz Partner Peter Levine said in an interview this past week that 15 to 20 years ago it was all Microsoft with the WinAPI. Every program and every API call was done to Windows. Now we see the entire disaggregation of the API. Companies now expect APIs. All of that has helped accelerate development.

It is the year of the developer, and that is evident with GitHub, which now has about 10,0000 subscribers signing up every day, Levine previously said.

For the past few years, the developer crescendo has lifted the cloud. The cloud players are interested in what the developers are doing. As Levine said, developers make it possible for us to have functioning super computers in our hands.

And so take another look when the news hits about more big legacy players happily talking about the greatness of the cloud. Sure it’s awesome, but it would be meaningless if it were not for all those developers using it to make all the cool things we use everyday on those supercomputers we have ready in our pockets to connect us to the world.

In some ways the Qwerty-packing Q5, with its throwback BlackBerry looks, is a far more important device for BlackBerry than its current flagship, the all-touch Z10. Or the premium-priced Qwerty-clad Q10. The mid-tier Q5 should be priced to shift — because that’s what BlackBerry needs to happen to start regaining the ground it lost when it was forced to pause and reboot its OS to play catch-up with rivals. That’s what the Q5 should do, but will it?

The problem for BlackBerry is it may already be too late to turn things around. BlackBerry’s latest results, out late last week, made grim reading as the company missed analyst expectations, and its share price took a battering. It shipped just 2.7 million BlackBerry 10 handsets in its Q1. But it has only had two BB10 devices to sell, one of which (the Q10) only made it to market in the U.S. earlier this month. Which makes the Q5 even more important: BlackBerry needs more handsets in its portfolio attacking different price points to have a chance of ramping up sales.

The problem is the Q5 doesn’t feel like a saviour. It feels closer to a kludge. Likely it isn’t going to be cheap enough to really hit Android where it hurts (it’s mid-tier, not budget after all). Nor does it feel like enough of a leap forward to convert a new generation of users to BlackBerry. BB10 is still Blackberry playing catch-up with competitors, rather than streaking ahead in the innovation stakes.

Of course many Blackberry loyalists and long-time users aren’t going to be unhappy with the Q5′s old school Qwerty form factor. But that staid staple means it necessarily offers a crimped OS experience versus the full-touch Z10. On the Q5 — as with the Q10 — the touchscreen has had to be squashed into a square to accommodate yesteryear’s physical Qwerty keys. Which is a problem because BlackBerry’s new platform needs room for the user to manoeuvre.

BB10 is built around gestures and layering content — and that whole “peek and flow” dynamic comes into its own on a full touchscreen. But on the Q5′s small square it’s inevitably constrained. Yet, despite this squeezed screen, the Q5 is surprisingly big for a Qwerty BlackBerry. Certainly compared to past generations of RIM hardware — those ever-so-popular Curves and Bolds it apparently succeeds.

As well as being constrained by having to make room for the keyboard, space has to be found to accommodate the bevels where BB10′s gestures have to start. This makes the overall front footprint a bit, well, hefty. It looks like an oversized, top-heavy BlackBerry, which will feel like a step backwards to those accustomed to BlackBerry’s traditionally highly pocketable handsets. And who else is this Qwerty-packer really trying to woo?

Android users have so much choice when it comes to keyboard software that even if they don’t get on with the stock Android virtual keyboard they can switch to Swype, or Swiftkey or any one of the growing number of Qwerty alternatives cooking up interesting new ways to type. The Q5′s immutable plastic keys feel terribly dumb phone in comparison.

Even the BlackBerry exec demoing the Q5 at the press event I attended to pick up a review device described the physical keyboard as “infamous”  (Freudian slip?). And said he found typing on it “a bit strange” because “I’m used to typing on the [full touchscreen] Z10.” That says it all really.

The Q5 is a deeply conservative device. It continues to look backwards to BlackBerry’s legacy keyboard-chained past — a compromise between old technology and new software. And like most compromises, it’s unlikely to entirely please anybody. It’s not that it’s terrible, it just doesn’t feel good enough to make an impact — and that means it’s not good enough because BlackBerry needs something remarkable to stand out in this crowded mid-tier segment.

Yet you can see exactly how and why BlackBerry has arrived here. In its current shrunken state, as its user base and revenues have diminished, the company has had to retrench. It can’t afford to lose any more users, yet it can’t afford to ramp up the number of devices in its portfolio quickly enough — making it super important that it retains its one remaining heartland: corporate users. Those are the last really sticky BlackBerry users, even as fickle consumers have wandered off elsewhere.

So BlackBerry can’t cut its ties with the past as it’s now even more dependent on its most conservative demographic. Its focus has to be on servicing that existing corporate user-base — because their loyalty is locked up far more than the average consumer. Some 90 percent of the Fortune 500 are BlackBerry customers, according to the company. And some 60 percent are apparently trialling BB10. BlackBerry needs those bulk-buyers to migrate to BB10 and continue pumping money into its coffers. If they abandon ship BlackBerry really will be an adrift ghost ship.

Selling mobile email to corporates is how BlackBerry built its original mobile empire. And selling to corporates is where BlackBerry has had to retrench to now. An army of cheap Androids is sweeping away its other former stronghold: teens. While free, over-the-top messaging apps like WhatsApp have eroded the appeal of BBM (BlackBerry’s licensing of BBM to Android and iOS this summer also feels like too little, too late). Now, with the mid-tier-priced Q5, BlackBerry is apparently hoping to woo those kids back. But the Q5 compromises on target demographic, too.

On the one hand BlackBerry says it’s aiming the Q5 at younger users. But it also cites SMEs and corporates as targets — flagging up the Balance feature that allows segmentation of work and personal content on the device. Little wonder then that, design-wise, the Q5 looks like it’s trying not to be too much of anything, so no one feels like disowning it. If I had to use one word to describe it, it would be generic. Or plasticky. It’s as if it’s been deliberately left as blank as possible to be as inoffensive as possible — to try to appeal to as wide a group as possible. In other words: another compromise.

The other problem BlackBerry has is that corporates are famously conservative about technology upgrades, which explains why it has no plans to sunset BB 7 any time soon. Corporate investments in BES 7 “have to be protected,” as one BlackBerry spokesman put it. Which means the company has to keep supporting BB 7 and producing devices running that last-gen OS for the foreseeable future. Which stymies change, and hampers BB10′s progress as a portion of resources have to go on the old platform.

Plus, if BB 7 devices are still on offer, why should corporates risk the upheaval of upgrading to a device like the Q5? They’ll stick with what they know, and leave this compromise on the shelf. So while BlackBerry youth users are going — or have already gone — elsewhere to check out shinier hardware, its business users are foot-dragging and in no hurry to move on. Talk about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. No wonder turning this tanker is so hard.

Pricing will of course play a key role in whether the Q5 sits on shelves or not. The mid-tier is where the largest Android army roams. But carrier tariffs for the Q5 are going to need to be a lot lower than the early EE pricing of £26 a month to be competitive enough to win over consumers. That price is pitting the Q5 against iPhone 4S or Galaxy S3 tariff prices. Which makes BlackBerry’s mid-tier offering a tough sell, whichever tech camp you prefer to sit in.

Regardless of whether this middling handset ends up selling well or not, it may make little material difference to BlackBerry’s prospects. The perception that the mobile maker is now locked in a death spiral will only increase shareholder pressure on the management team, and make acquisition a more likely end. BlackBerry would need to sell an awful lot of Q5s to calm that spin.

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

There are regular people who like music on their phones and maybe listen to the radio or Spotify. For them, music is just a back track of daily life. Then there are interested people, who like good headphones, pay for a Spotify subscription or attend the occasional concert. Beyond these two groups lie the passionate 5%, the audiophiles. They follow bands, hunt down vinyl records, read blogs or magazines about music and spend serious coin on their habit.

In the games market the picture is surprisingly similar. You have the mildly interested who play free games on their phones and social networks and the moderately interested who buy one gaming machine and a couple of games over a few years. Then you have the self-described gamers, the ludophiles (ludo- as a general term means play). They follow franchises, hunt down retro cartridges, read blogs or magazines about games and spend serious coin on their habit.

What sets them apart is just as interesting. Music fans have no issue with the status of their medium. Music is art, music is cool, music is culture. Gaming fans, on the other hand, have lots of inferiority issues. A key dynamic that recycles is the idea of the game that proves that games are as good as movies. Last year that was The Walking Dead, so far this year it’s The Last of Us.

Another difference is the relationship with technology itself. Audiophiles are very much into both the sound and experience with their music. Formats like vinyl endure because audiophiles believe they sound better (whether they actually do is a question for the ages, but the point is that they believe it). Album art, memorabilia and visibility of collection are also important. History matters. So does the ability to pull out a greatest hit from 40 years and play it. Interoperability is key.

Gaming fans, on the other hand, tend to spend their money on the latest technology and forget interoperability. Backwards compatibility is generally not a strong motivator, with the most-dedicated preferring instead to own dozens of gaming machines and play the games of a certain year on the machines for which they were intended. A bit like if Universal Music Group didn’t just develop talent and publish music, but also made devices that could only play UMG music. Ludophiles are relatively comfortable doing this.

The really interesting thing about the ludophile mindset is the ways in which it doesn’t want games to change. Ludophiles do not like mobile games. They feel pretty ambivalent about tablet games. They regard that kind of future somewhat askance and prefer to cheer for stasis than progress. This is because they buy into the story of the medium itself. Games as a hobby are as much about participating in the story of the medium itself as having fun and playing games. To the true believer games are on an evolutionary path toward somewhere, a final destination of infinite perfection, and this is to be promoted and defended at all costs.

One of my favorite teaser trailers is the one for Halo 3 from 2006. It shows the Master Chief emerging onto a desert scene. He looks to his left and the shot pans out to reveal huge starships moving over to a basin. There is an ominous rumble, cracks appear in the landscape and megalithic doors rise up to reveal a bright light. The light reaches upwards in an awe-inspiring sight before the scene blanks out and we hear the line “This is the way the world ends.”

If you wanted to find a metaphor for how the ludophile views the threat against games, it’s a bit like this. It’s high dudgeon and drama and shouts of glee when changes are averted. The ludophile wants the amazing, the epic and the awesome. The Citizen Kane of gaming. But he also wants a console to be a console, a device with a type of controller that feels like it’s heading toward perfection. He’s not enamored of divergences from the path.

While the world loved the Nintendo Wii, plenty of console gamers always got hung up on its lack of HD. The news that OUYA sold out, that Towerfall is actually rather good, that Google may be working on a microconsole and that GamePop has released a free machine tend to fall on deaf ears. Where many observers like myself think that this interoperable Android-driven approach will yield big returns for the game console in the long run, today’s console gamer is a bit nonplussed. He gets hung up on the fact that Android is for phones, and phone games are “weak” for some reason. The microconsole doesn’t fit the ideal of aiming for perfection. Like the netbook or the tablet, it seems like a big step backward.

And that would all be fine if it seemed that the console sector was a viable market. But I don’t believe it is in the long term. I think it’s merely in a new-hardware exuberant phase, but its overall prognosis is starting to look awfully like the market for record players. There will always be loyalists, but the question becomes whether there are enough of them to really shift the needle.

Ludophiles are a fixed audience with fixed ideas of what the future should be. The perfection they aspire toward feels just out of reach, but it always seems to get closer. The Last of Us, for example, really is breathtaking. But that kind of game is also enormously expensive to develop, and is now at the point where it needs to sell 4 or 5 million copies to prove its viability. The technology required to power these advances is also incredibly expensive, so much so that neither Microsoft or Sony make any money from being in the games business. Nintendo does (well, bar lately) but Nintendo makes all its own content too, so there’s greater scope for margin there.

With the next generation bringing yet more increases on the development spending side (historically, this is what tends to happen), the risks inevitably go up. So do closures, high profile failures and a reduction in diversity. There are not enough ludophiles out there to satisfy that kind of price tag indefinitely, and so decline is inevitable. However decline will not happen dramatically, all at once.

“This is the way the world ends” is taken from TS Eliot’s The Hollow Men. The line that follows it is “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.” Not with the big supernova-esque explosion of ultimate victory and defeat, but with a slow decay. The death by a thousand cuts from phones, tablets, microconsoles, PCs, social networks and wearables. And what’s fuelling that is an end to the power advantage and a large leap forward in convenience.

The other 95%, the regular and the interested, always tend to gravitate toward good-enough rather than perfection, convenience over fidelity. They bought into DVD because it seemed much better than video, but not Blu-ray. They plumbed for digital streaming instead. They bought into HDTV, but not 3DTV, and likely have very little interest in 4KTV. They bought into iPads because they’re much simpler to use than PCs, and don’t care about some of the lost potential that they’ve given up. They prefer to subscribe to Spotify because who has the room to devote acres of wall space to albums. Or books.

And the same is true for games. Tablet gaming may not adhere to the lofty goals of the quest for perfection, but it’s cheap and super convenient. Microconsoles may be powered by relatively underpowered processors but this is only really their first year. 2-3 years down the road they’ll pack enough punch and get their messaging right that they’ll start to sound irresistible to everyone bar ludophiles. What happens when the world realizes that it can play good quality games, complete with game controllers, on its tablets? What happens when we can play games, either casual, deep or anything in between, from our phones and simply stream them to our TVs?

Not with a bang…

Facebook is not working on an RSS product, we hear, but it still has a huge and truly social opportunity in news discovery. Facebook could turn what links we share with friends into an automatic Digg for the world. Over a billion people are on Facebook, and many share links to news stories and offsite content along with their commentary.

Yet rather than post publicly like on Twitter, most posts are shared semi-privately with friends and acquaintances.

Right now there’s no way for people to gleam the collective opinion of Facebook users on what’s important. Only Facebook’s algorithms sees what the most popular links and words are across the entire social network. If Facebook took data on what people shared and used it in a privacy-safe, anonymous, aggregate form, it could create a list of the world’s most popular web pages at any given moment. Conveniently linked to from the Facebook home page and mobile app, the list could become an an informative and addictive window it our collective consciousness.

CODING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS REDDIT

There are places to get a peek into what the world is sharing or interested in today, but none with Facebook’s data set or mainstream user base. Reddit is amazing. It’s a wildly diverse community of people picking the day’s most important content across a near-limitless array of categories. Their votes surface what’s most interesting, and their voices are arranged into intelligible threads and conversations. It’s threaded design is so good, in fact, that I think we’ll see other less-formatted comment systems move towards Reddit’s style with time.

You could argue whether it’s an advantage or disadvantage, but Reddit is based on active submissions. For something to appear on Reddit, someone must have the initiative and take the time to purposefully post it. Once there, it’s only the Redditors who vote and comment that determine a post’s rank. That makes what tops Reddit’s homepage more of a reflection of the Reddit community than the web as a whole. Sure, there are R/’s for everyone, but as a whole, Reddit carries a bit of a proudly nerdy attitude mixed with doses of skepticism and humor. Facebook’s opportunity comes from the potential to scan everything shared on it and use a wider, more mainstream definition of popularity to rank a list of what’s interesting. No one would have to actively vet the list. It would simply evolve organically based on how frequently things were shared on Facebook, and maybe how many clicks, likes, and comments they received. Offering lists by country or international region could make sure the content is somewhat localized.

TWITTER TRENDING TOPICS

The Facebook news discovery experience I’m imagining shares some similarities with Twitter’s Trending Topics. It too doesn’t have to be actively vetted by users. People just go about their days tweeting, and popular words and hashtags bubble to the top of the list. But do you find yourself addicted to checking Twitter’s trending topics? No. At least I sure don’t. They can be briefly shocking or amusing but they rarely teach me much or spur me to click.

Twitter Trends don’t even have their own web page. They’re just stuck on the left rail of Twitter’s home page. On mobile they’re lumped into the Discover tab. In what I see as their critical shortcoming, they have no context. No way to understand why they’re being shared. Clicking them simply opens a search for that word or hashtag, which can produce results that are a mess, tough to decipher, and don’t provide any definitive answer to what the trend is about. For obvious things like sporting events and huge international news, these streams can offer a fascinating insight into what the world is thinking. But even a Google search couldn’t quickly tell me that #FOTunis referred to the Freedom Online conference in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.

Organizing news discovery around individual words or short phrases doesn’t seem very efficient or easy…at least not with this design or without context. If Facebook centered a news discovery product around links, it could make it much clearer what people are discussing. Links typically come with some combination of a headline, a photo, and some text that can be used as a blurb. All Facebook would need to do is show a list of links with this info, just like it does when you websites to the news feed, and people could get the pulse of the planet in a quick skim.

While we’re on the topic of Facebook hashtags, signs indicate the company will eventually create a list of trending hashtags. Facebook launched hashtags, similar to Twitter’s, earlier this month, and on Thursday launched Related Hashtags, which displays other tags frequently added to the same post as a hashtag you’ve searched for or clicked on. I believe Facebook is rolling the hashtags product out slowly so it can learn to slice and dice the data in order to create a trending hashtags product.

FACEDIGG

Let’s be clear. A Facebook news reading product wouldn’t replace Reddit or Twitter, or necessarily even compete with them directly. But it could take the theme of surfacing what people care about, make it less subjective, and house it in an easy to use and accessible design. I personally think I would visit this “Facebook Trends” page frequently. Whenever I read through my news feed and started getting bored, I could click to it for inspiration. I’d skim through it, clicking through to different links and then going back to Trends page for more. If it had lists based on geography, or a personalized list that tuned itself to my behavior, interests, and what people similar to me enjoy, I might visit even more.

From Digg to Reddit to 9Gag to Techmeme, great lists of trending content have proven addictive. Yet there hasn’t been one with a truly mainstream focus.

If Facebook nailed this, it could generate a ton of traffic. I think some people would click to refresh it and see what’s happening in the world often — almost as often as they read the news feed for content from their friends. The two could be seen as parallel pillars of information — that which is interesting specifically to you, and that which is interesting to everyone. Private and public. Subjective and objective.

A Facebook trending links section could also spark high quality conversations within Facebook. If it shows me something that resonates with me, I might not just click, but share and talk about it with my friends. Ideally, if friends had already shared it, I’d see that and the conversations that followed in-line on the trends list.

Facebook already has a nifty way of doing this in the most recent design of the news feed. It shows a stack of profile pictures next to a shared link and you can hover over each to see how that friend described the content and what their friends replied. Using that design for Trending Links my friends had already shared could be a great alternative to one long, messy comment thread of strangers.

If you’re thinking “I don’t need this. My friends already share great links and clue me in to what’s happening in the world”, you’re lucky, and you’re probably in the minority. Remember that the average user had around 180 to 250 friends last I heard. I worry that great swaths of Facebook’s user base, especially in emerging markets and countries where the service bloomed later, are missing out on one of the great joys of the social web — the instant, collective conversation surrounding the day’s news, tragedies, and triumphs. It would just take one person perusing Facebook Trends to enlighten an entire social cluster.

Since there aren’t real character limits on posts, and comment threads are clearly displayed, people would have plenty of room to voice dissenting opinions about the world’s most popular links. In that way, Facebook’s format and the way it diverges from Twitter could keep it from becoming an echo chamber. In fact, the aggregated “5 friends shared this link” design makes it quick to view a variety of perspectives on a piece of content.

With any discovery medium comes opportunities to monetize through sponsored placement. Brands could pay to have their links inserted within the list of trending links. This could become a premier channel for content marketing. Traditional ads might not work there, but links to branded content or apps, fun marketing stunts, or contests could do well when not jammed into the news feed where they don’t quite fit with organic content from friends. Top-tier advertisers have been pushing Facebook for ways to reach large audiences all at once, and this could be the ticket.

If Facebook wants to house our digital lives, it can’t just be about who we are and what we’ve done. It must also encompass what we think, and to get us to volunteer our thoughts, it should strive to inform us, inspire us, and seed our discussions with friends by surfacing what’s popular around the globe.

[Image Credit: Brian Shaler]

Barack Obama was never going to be a champion of civil liberties; he leads a growing sect of the Democratic party that prioritizes the collective good and mass innovation over individualism. This coercively inclusive political philosophy feels that every citizen, business, country, and institution has an obligation to contribute to the common good.

Obama will mandate universal health coverage but let private insurers run the programs, he’ll maintain middle-eastern wars but work with Russia on global nuclear disarmament, expand the education budget but give more resources to union-less charter schools, and build online tools to monitor stimulus spending while collecting phone records of every American.

The philosophy is a mix of fierce anti-individualism and anti-authoritarianism–what political scientists call “communitarianism”. “In the my wildest dreams, during eighteen years of championing communitarianism, I did not expect a presidential candidate to be as strongly identified with this political philosophy as Obama is,” gushed George Washington Professor of philosophy, Amatai Etzioni.

Established liberal institutions have always worried that communitarian optimism was blind to the damage government agencies and big business could exact on society’s most vulnerable. Since 9/11, the most prominent communitarians have generally defended mass NSA and FBI spying against the fears of their liberal cousins.

“The key issue is not if certain powers-for example, the ability to decrypt e-mail-should or should not be available to public authorities, but whether or not these powers are used legitimately and whether mechanisms are in place to ensure such usage,” said Etzioni, in regard to a series of high-profile debates with former ACLU president, Nadeen Strossen, during the post-9/11 ramp-up to the Patriot Act.

Communitarians are generally ok with privacy invasion, so long as there is sufficient public oversight to make sure the government is doing its job.

“For communitarians, public safety generally comes first,” University of Southern California, Professor, Brian Rathbun, writes to me in an email. ”A key element of Obama’s personal philosophy is on the merits of cooperation, that collective enterprises yield greater gains that individual action.”

The obsession with mass collaboration largely explains much of Obama’s failing civil liberties record, across the board, as he’s also been an unqualified proponent of experimental charters, which reject the job stability of traditional schools.

Obama is not the only rabid communitarian. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has distinguished himself as a collaboration and drone-happy public servant: he’s ok blanketing the city with law-enforcement drones and reportedly threatened to “F***cking destroy” the taxi industry over issues with Uber.

Bloomberg, first and foremost, wants innovation over protectionist policies. During a press conference, Bloomberg told me that taxi unions were part of “the old entrenched industries that try to use the shield of regulation…to protect them from the kind of competition that benefits society”.

Closing the door on civil liberties, however, has opened up some exciting opportunities for innovative policy making. For instance, in ObamaCare included a ”waiver for state innovation” that exempts any state from the new healthcare law, so long as states can can cover everyone without increasing costs. In essence, it’s like Google’s 20% time. Everyone has to innovate and hopes that someone will come up with the best solution to healthcare. It’s radically optimistic about the power of individual creativity, but refuses to allow citizens or states to be spectators (hence, the core of the name, “community”).

Notably, it’s quite easy to spot communitarians based on who Silicon Valley’s deep-pocked donors are supporting. While the Bay Area gave more to Obama to than either Wall Street (New York) or Hollywood (Los Angeles), they only give to a few candidates.

Newark Mayor and Senate candidate, CoryBooker, is a Silicon Valley favorite and has focused the $100 Million education donation he got from Mark Zuckerberg on controversial charter schools. It should no surprise that the union-less, privacy-skittish social network is itself a communitarian totem.

Facebook has aggressively fought FTC regulations to deny it’s ability to automatically enroll users in new products (“opt-in”). Facebook has argued that if users had been required to opt-in to the newsfeed the initial privacy hysteria would have blunted adoption of tool that is now a stable of social networking. Just like in a community, participation and sharing are the default assumptions; privacy and isolation is left as an inconvenient anti-social option.

Together with their friends in Silicon Valley, communitarians are becoming a dominate force in society. To the extent that readers optimistically believe that cooperation between foreign governments, big business, and everyday citizens can yield collective prosperity, the growing power of the communitarian Democratic is a welcome change. For those who fear that we live in a zero-sum world between the powerful and weak, communitarians are blindly leading us into an unequal, rights-free society.

If you’d like to learn more, read my full OpEd on The Daily Beast.