Spotify Deals Point to Worldwide Movie-Streaming Service

Spotify co-founders Daniek Ek and Martin Lorentzon

Spotify is set to add movies to its on-demand music service, according to AOL’s TechCrunch. The Swedish company has completed “a number of deals with major movie studios” which will allow it to stream movies to any of its worldwide subscribers.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has already denied the story, which came to TechCrunch via an “industry source.” In a post to Twitter, Ek wrote “No it ain’t true. Media these days are funny. Soon I’ll be reading that Spotify is launching a space rocket.”

Michael Arrington counters this counter with the simple fact that Ek has denied TechCrunch’s stories in the past. “Since he’s said that in the past about a number of our stories, all of which turned out to be accurate, we’re going to wait and see.” he writes.

The deals will let Spotify users stream movies much earlier than they are available on Netflix or iTunes, with release dates “Similar to [those] that hotel’s [sic] get for premium in-room movies.” These rights are also worldwide, which would avoid the limits which apply to Spotify’s music service, available only in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

Given that Spotify has so far failed to sign up all four of the big music labels in the U.S (only EMI and Sony are reportedly on board so far), it seems odd that worldwide movie rights have been negotiated so quickly.

Then again, maybe the film studios see this as a way to get to international markets more quickly. Warner Bros has already made the unusual move of bypassing iTunes’ country-specific movie distribution by putting Inception and The Dark Knight apps in the App Store. These apps, which allow you to stream or download the movie, are even available in countries where iTunes movies are not yet sold or rented.

What we don’t know is the payment model. Currently Spotify users can pay €5 per month to remove ads and stream unlimited music, or €10 to add offline storage and allow use of the Spotify mobile apps. Would movies follow this model, or would they be pay-per-view?

One thing is certain: Spotify movies would be huge in Europe. The UK has the Amazon-owned LoveFilm — a British Netflix — but the rest of Europe has to put up with dubbed movies in iTunes. Spotify is hugely popular already, and has great brand recognition. Adding movies could pretty much make BitTorrent obsolete.

Spotify Lands Major Studio Deals, Prepares To Launch Movie Service [AOL's TechCrunch]

See Also:

• Spotify Further Limits Free Service: Hint of U.S. Launch (Again …


• Spotify Radio Puts Playlists On Physical Disks


• Spotify


• Spotify Has 1 Million Paid Subscribers, But …


• Spotify Is the Coolest Music Service You Can't Use

Top 10 Things Sony Can Do to Make Up for PSN Hack

Following a massive security breach of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity online services, Sony says it is crafting goodwill gestures to make up for any inconvenience suffered by customers whose personal information might have been compromised.

“We are currently evaluating ways to show appreciation for your extraordinary patience as we work to get these services back online,” Sony said Thursday, more than a week after the “external intrusion” that led to the probable leak of personal information tied to 70 million PlayStation Network accounts.

Here are some make-good offerings Sony might be considering.

10. Two free UMD movies, one to apologize for downtime and one to apologize for first UMD movie.

9. Unpaid internship at Sony PR department, pending victory on upcoming reality show.

8. Sony customer service reps will co-op Portal 2 with you and not spoil the ending, which they saw on the Xbox 360.

7. Since PSP Go owners were hardest hit, Sony to give a free game to both of them.

6. God of War director David Jaffe comes to your house, hangs out until things get awkward.

5. In case you forgot your password during downtime, Sony will paste a list of everyone’s passwords into a public blog post.

4. Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, will make public admission that, in certain extreme situations, it is in fact possible to play a Nintendo 3DS while maintaining one’s self-respect.

3. Free download of “I survived the PlayStation Network outage and all I got was this lousy virtual T-shirt for this lousy virtual world” accessory for Home.

2. Sony promises to really knuckle down and get to work on The Last Guardian at some point.

1. Flowers on your birthday, sent by Sony and by the hacker who now knows when it is.

See Also:

• PlayStation Network Hack Leaves Credit Card Info at Risk


• PlayStation Network Hack: Who Did It?


• Sony Says It May Resurrect PlayStation Network on Tuesday

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame App Makes People Actually Buy Music

In its first two weeks, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame app for iPhone and iPad has done something remarkable in an industry where most news about music buying is about how people don’t do it anymore: It convinced people to pay for music.

The $2 app includes information about 600 “songs that shaped rock ‘n’ roll,” and the company behind it reports an aggregate sales conversion rate of 31 percent. That means that in this two week period, every ten app purchases has already resulted in approximately three song purchases — an impressive ratio that the developer behind the app, Sideways, expects to rise.

“There was a 31 percent aggregate conversion rate within just the first two weeks,” said Sideways spokeswoman Liz Bazini. “While the number of app downloads will decrease over time, the in-app purchase rate will increase over time. Our conclusion is that iPhone/iPad apps with in-app music purchases work really well as a means of increasing music sales, which should be of significant interest to both artists and record labels.”

I’ll say.

Of course, plenty of apps these days, including popular interactive radio apps, include purchase links leading to song downloads on iTunes, and they don’t report this sort of success. Something must be different about this app, and so far as we can tell, it’s the level of curation and context surrounding each song.

These songs, sortable by decade from 1920 to 2006, were hand-picked for inclusion in the app based on their degree of influence over the rock n’ roll genre. Users can’t stream them in their entirety, but they can hear samples — and, perhaps more importantly, read original text about why each one was included.

It may not be enough to show people a list of music they might want to buy — they may need to know why they should buy them, and to be able to wander through the list learning more about whatever piques their interest, rather than listening to songs in sequence, the way we do with radio-style apps.

Perhaps there’s some truth to the argument that people still want to buy and own music; they might just might need more curation and context before they’re willing to commit. Proportionally speaking, it might be easier to sell music from a catalog of 600 than six million songs.

Rumor: Ubisoft Accidentally Leaks Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Ubisoft might have accidentally spilled the beans on the next game in the Assassin’s Creed series, one in which you may jump back into the role of Altaïr.

Take this all with a grain of salt for now, but a developing thread on the NeoGAF message board says that Ubisoft posted a Flash file containing the game’s logo and the name Altaïr, in Arabic script, to the official Assassin’s Creed Facebook page.

The Facebook post is gone for now, but the evidence remains in the form of an image and a Flash file, both still sitting on Ubi’s servers, that reference an upcoming reveal of the game. Also in the Flash file, according to the original poster: a logo, shown above, naming the game Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

Interesting, that name: As another NeoGAF poster pointed out, in 2012 Konami will release the Silent Hill: Revelation movie, and Capcom’s upcoming 3DS game is Resident Evil: Revelations. Stop copying your neighbor’s paper, you guys!

Shed a Tear: The Age of Broadband Caps Begins Monday

Come Monday, AT&T will begin restricting more than 16 million broadband users based on the amount of data they use in a month. The No. 2 carrier’s entry into the broadband-cap club means that a majority of U.S. broadband users will now be subject to limits on how much they can do online or risk extra charges as ugly as video store late fees.

AT&T’s new limits — 150 GB for DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users (a mix of fiber and DSL) — come as users are increasingly turning to online video such as Hulu and Netflix on-demand streaming service instead of paying for cable.

With the change, AT&T joins Comcast and numerous small ISPs in putting a price on a fixed amount of internet usage. It’s a complete abandonment of the unlimited plans which turned the internet into a global behemoth after the slow-growth dial-up days, when customers were charged by the minute and thus accessed the internet as sparingly as possible.

Comcast’s limit, put into place after it got caught secretly throttling peer-to-peer traffic, is 250 GB — which the company says less than 99 percent of users hit. AT&T plans to charge users an extra $10 per month if they cross the cap, a fee that recurs for each 50 GBs a user goes over the cap. And while 150 GB and 250 GB per month might seem like a lot, if you have a household with kids or roommates, it’s not too difficult to approach those limits using today’s services, even without heavy BitTorrent usage.

(For those not accustomed to calculating their bandwidth usage, video streaming and online gaming use much more bandwidth than web browsing or e-mailing. For instance, Netflix ranges from .3 GB per hour to 1.0 for normal resolution movies and up to 2.3 GB per hour for HD content.)

And it should noted that U.S. limits are far from the world’s worst: Canada’s recently imposed restrictions prompted Netflix to give customers there a choice of lower-quality streams to keep their usage down, because users are charged up to $5 per GB that they exceed their cap. Caps are also worse in Australia.

But for the nation which has been key to a wildly expanding internet, the changing tide is both a practical and cultural letdown.

The drive to cap usage is ostensibly a way to reduce costs. But in reality, it’s not about the cost of data – bandwidth costs are extremely low and keep falling. Time Warner Cable brought in $1.13 billion in revenue from broadband customers in the first three months of 2011, while spending only $36 million for bandwidth — a mere 3 percent of the revenue. Time Warner Cable doesn’t currently impose bandwidth caps or metering on its customers — though they have reserved the right to do so — after the company’s disastrous trial of absurdly low limits in 2009 sparked an immediate backlash from customers and from D.C. politicians.

The real problem ISPs want to fix is congestion due to limited infrastructure. Cable customers share what are known as local loops, and the more that your neighbors use their connection, the less bandwidth is available to you — a situation that becomes painfully clear in the evening, when cable users see their throughput fall.

The blunt-force approach of a bandwidth cap does have the advantage of making users think twice about streaming HD movies from Netflix. That is, perhaps not coincidentally, doubly to the advantage of most big ISPs, because they’d rather have you spending money on their video services than paying a third party. Bandwidth-intense services threaten to turn the likes of Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner Cable into utilities — a dependable business, but not one that has the huge profit margins these companies have come to enjoy.

Indeed, the question of who gets to write the rules about the internet’s pipes is the major bone of contention in the net neutrality debate, both for terrestrial and mobile data networks. When the new net neutrality rules go into effect, ISPs won’t be able to block their online video competition, but there’s no rule against doing that with bandwidth caps or tiered usage pricing.

Moreover, as we all move towards more and more cloud services, whether that’s for backups, music or movies, it’s worrisome that ISPs are more concerned about reining in their most dedicated customers in service of meeting Wall Street’s expectations. Instead, they should be taking the opportunity to dig up the streets to create fiber networks that will make us a nation that’s top in the world’s broadband-ranking chart, rather than a laggard.

The real solution is adding infrastructure at the local level, though an interim solution could entail metering data only during peak times, much as mobile-phone calling-minutes plans apply only during peak hours.

But, that just goes to show, yet again, that what’s good for the Street often doesn’t translate into what’s good for the country.

Illustration: What a broadband meter might look like. (Todd Barnard)

See Also:

• Consumer Group Asks Congress to Investigate Bandwidth Caps


• Time Warner Cable Earnings Refute Bandwidth Cap Economics


• AT&T Puts Broadband Users on Monthly Allowance


• Satellite Net Service Sued for Caps, Paltry Bandwidth


• Netflix Profit Up 88 Percent With Nearly as Many Users As Comcast


• Comcast Discloses Throttling Practices — BitTorrent Targeted


• Comcast Is Trying To Whack Netflix: Sen. Al Franken


• FCC Passes Compromise Net Neutrality Rules

THQ Delays Red Faction, Shows Off Tie-In Film

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RED FACTION: ORIGINS -- Syfy Original Movie -- Pictured: (center) Danielle Nicolet as Tess De La Vega -- Photo by: Syfy

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THQ has pushed back the release date of sci-fi third-person shooter Red Faction: Armageddon, the publisher said Thursday. Originally slated for May, Armageddon will ship for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on June 7.

Perhaps to make up for the delay, THQ also released a barrage of photos from Red Faction: Origins, an upcoming feature-length film that will be screened on Syfy this May. Origins, which bridges the narrative between Armageddon and its predecessor Red Faction: Guerrilla, is the latest act in THQ’s transmedia initiative.

A free downloadable demo for Red Faction: Armageddon will be available May 3 for Xbox 360 (and for PlayStation 3 if the network is back online by then).

See Also:

• THQ Shares Drop After ‘Average’ Homefront Reviews


• ‘Deal-Breaker’ Kept THQ From Signing Call of Duty Creators at Respawn


• How I Learned to Stop Being Normal and Love the Sledgehammer

Sidekick 4G Brings Legacy Smartphone Up to Speed, Sort Of

You could say the original Sidekick was the first shot fired in the smartphone revolution.

With a flip of the thumb, you could expose the physical keyboard hidden behind the screen. It was aligned horizontally to make typing easier, but it wasn’t too bulky. And the large screen — bigger than most other phones in 2002 — made tasks like browsing the web and writing e-mails on your phone actually seem like ideas worth getting used to.

Over the years, the Sidekick and its successors ended up losing out to the newer breed of smartphones ushered in by the iPhone — devices with advanced operating systems and apps, and with touch displays in place of physical keyboards.

So, can the Sidekick make a comeback? Samsung hopes so: The latest iteration of the old classic, the Sidekick 4G for T-Mobile, stays true to its heritage while bumping up its specs and adding a host of media and entertainment perks.

It’s an Android phone built for the 4G now, but it has some hardware and software quirks that make it feel several steps behind.

Samsung stuck with the traditional Sidekick silhouette, with two buttons placed on either side of the 3.5-inch 480 x 800 resolution touchscreen. A Home button and Jump button grace the left side. A Menu key and Back key are situated on the right, with a small optical track button sandwiched in the middle.

Being right handed, it took a while to get used to this button placement. I really wanted the Home button to be on the bottom right when it’s held in landscape orientation, with the Back button above that and the Menu and Jump keys on the left. My thumbs got lost often.

The phone has about the same heft as an iPhone 4, but is slightly longer and about 50 percent thicker. It fits in a front pocket, but it is a bit chunky. That thickness comes from the physical keyboard under the screen. The Sidekick’s screen slides out using a unique “pop-tilt” mechanism, revealing the display’s sassy pink underside, after it’s snapped into a comfortable viewing angle.

Sliding the screen out takes a bit of practice: You need to use both thumbs, applying pressure to the crack between the screen and keyboard. But all you have to do is nudge it free of the body, and the screen springs out the rest of the way on its own. You can’t apply the force horizontally, which is a departure from other slide-out keyboards, and from the swivel screen on older Sidekicks.

Also, the volume rocker and power button sit just a hair below where you need to place your thumbs to push the display out. This leads to a lot of unintended volume adjustments, screen shut-offs and other accidental button-presses when flipping the screen up. Sliding the screen back in without pressing any of the buttons also takes some getting used to.

For my dainty lady thumbs, the QWERTY keyboard was a little uncomfortably spaced out, dropping my texting speed a few notches. Male friends with longer — normal-sized? — thumbs thought the keyboard size was just right.

The Sidekick 4G comes with Samsung’s Kick UX skin for Froyo onboard. It’s less than intuitive — there are three ways to access just about every app or feature of the phone, which can be a little confusing. But it’s fine once you find one method you prefer over the others.

The Jump key (a Sidekick legacy) was particularly handy in this respect: It lets you switch from one recently used application to another while bypassing the home screen. It’s not exactly multitasking, but it is a timesaver.

Once inside an app or widget though, you lose those options. With some apps, like the Facebook widget, you have no choice but to use the Back button (heavily) to navigate. That’s a bit of a shame on a touchscreen device. And although the handset is clearly meant to be used primarily in landscape mode, several apps and functions require it to be in portrait orientation.

The Sidekick 4G stays true to its chat roots with a slew of messaging options, including Google Talk and the phone’s signature Group Text and Cloud Text Features. Group Text provides functionality similar to that of other app- or web-based group texting services like GroupMe, allowing you to create and manage a group of contacts and send mass SMS messages. This is great for getting a message out to a specific group of people (your family, your co-workers, a circle of friends) speedily and easily.

But those subscribed to limited texting plans may not appreciate the barrage of texts that result from the reply-all nature of the service. Cloud Text is similar, but works across platforms, so you can text from your PC or the Sidekick.

There’s a VGA front-facing camera you can use to video-chat through Qik’s service. Around the back, there’s a heftier 3.2-megapixel camera. That’s subpar by today’s standards, but the software offers multiple settings that photo geeks can use to tweak images. You can shoot photos in black and white, sepia and panoramic modes, and adjust the exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation and sharpness. Video quality is nothing special.

If you actually use your phone to make calls, you’ll be happy to hear that the call quality is superb. The phone’s noise cancellation is so well-implemented that during a lull in conversation with my dad on my bus ride home, the line became so silent that he thought the call had been dropped.

During my testing, I found T-Mobile’s network speeds — HSPA+ 4G or otherwise — to be generally good. The latest episode of 30 Rock downloaded in minutes, and web pages loaded at least as quickly as on comparable smartphones. T-Mobile says you’ll get 5-to-10-Mbps download speeds wherever it can connect to 4G, and I found no reason to dispute that claim. The Sidekick will also act as a mobile hot spot for up to five devices.

Overall, the Samsung Sidekick 4G gives a modern update to the traditional look and feel of the old Sidekick handsets, but it suffers a bit from some odd hardware-design choices, and from software quirks. Viewed as just another Android phone, it’s tough to recommend it over other Android handsets out there. However, longtime Sidekick users or Blackberry owners transitioning to Android will like the Sidekick’s big keyboard, and they should be pleased enough with the user experience.

WIRED Physical keyboard will keep thumb warriors happy. Tons of media options and chat features keep you entertained and connected. Speedy 1-GHz Hummingbird processor gets things moving: Games like Angry Birds Rio don’t stutter in the slightest. Battery life easily lasts all day for normal mixed usage. Background noise? What background noise?

TIRED Screen-popping mechanism is a bit tricky. Button placement is downright poor. The mix of onscreen-touch and physical-button navigation is perplexing and redundant. It takes a lot of work to get a good photo –- if I wanted to mess with that many settings, I would have gotten an actual digital camera.

Photo by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• Samsung’s First Droid Smartphone to Drop on April 28


• Speed Bump: Samsung’s Galaxy Phone Gets Upped to 4G


• Very Few Bones to Pick With Samsung's Big Beautiful Phone


• Samsung’s Windows Phone 7 Packs Intuitive, Visual Punch

Groupon Distances Itself From Guns, Abortion And Trump (Sort Of)

In a lighthearted statement which stresses it has never knowingly done any advertising with “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Groupon says it has nevertheless received enough backlash from customers who thought the site did business with Donald Trump that it is saying it will never to do so — just like they would avoid offering deals on “guns or abortion.”

Ouch.

The issue is, of course, Trump’s potential presidential candidacy, unceasing self-promotion and embrace of the “birther” issue (put to rest for everyone but the most ardent of conspiracy theorists by the release of President Obama’s so-called “long-form” birth certificate two days ago).

“Someone online began a petition to boycott Groupon because they believed we were a sponsor of the Apprentice, a show that is in the middle of some political criticism at the moment,” the company said in a blog post. “Then, just like that, it was announced we were pulling our sponsorship and boycotting the Apprentice and NBC. Pulling a fake sponsorship that didn’t exist….”

Groupon said its web ads, placed by an ad network, do appear on NBC.com, and appeared at some point on the Apprentice’s page. That’s not surprising given how many sites sport Groupon’s daily deal ads.

“Enough consumers have contacted us to warrant ensuring that we don’t place ads on the Apprentice homepage in the future. It’s the same reason we don’t run deals on guns or abortion…this isn’t a political statement, it’s avoiding intentionally upsetting a segment of our customers.”

Groupon surely acted quickly and proactively in part because it is no stranger to bad publicity. A series of ads it previewed during the Super Bowl — in which actors made faux pitches for real world problems, only to segue awkwardly to a Groupon deals pitch — drew such fire that the company pulled the the campaign within days, apologized and fired the ad agency whose work it had approved.

Given the sensitivity of all this, someone should tell them that there is least one Trump-related deal available from Groupon right now — for a stay at a Trump-owned Atlantic City hotel.

Groupon should probably also expect lots of calls from people offering deals on abortions and guns. And perhaps complaints from both pro-choice and 2nd Amendment groups who, each for their own reasons, might object to the implication that abortions and guns have any equivalence.

Which is one way of saying, it’s hard to be snarky once you’re no longer a spunky startup.

See Also:

• Google’s Daily-Deal Groupon Clone Now Live


• Bargain Junkies Are Beating Retailers at Their Own Game


• Discount Vendor Groupon Eyes Full-Priced $15 Billion IPO


• Facebook Boards the Daily Deals Gravy Train


• Best Unsubscribe Ever

Prolific Comic Writer Bendis Tackles Marvel Universe MMO

Players will be able to use Marvel's extensive cast of characters in the upcoming Marvel Universe MMO game.
Image courtesy Marvel

Comic scribe Brian Michael Bendis will head up writing duties on the upcoming massively multiplayer online PC game Marvel Universe, the comic book publisher said Thursday night at an event in San Francisco.

Bendis is best known for his work on a variety of Marvel comics, including Avengers and Ultimate Spider-Man. He also co-wrote the 2005 beat-em-up game Ultimate Spider-Man, a multi-platform title that was relatively well-received.

Marvel also dished some more details on the MMO, which will be free to play as has become trendy among massively multiplayer online games that are not named Warcraft. Marvel Universe will allow players to take on the personas of classic comic book characters like Captain America and Spider-Man, which should make for some interesting interactive match-ups. The game’s main villain will be Dr. Doom.

Though Marvel has not yet deigned to explain how the game will justify a world filled with thousands of Wolverines, the comic giant noted that Marvel Universe is still a long way away: There’s no release year, let alone a release date. We also don’t know exactly how Marvel will approach the micropayment system that will be required if anyone is going to make any money off of this.

Gazillion Entertainment is co-developing Marvel Universe, and Diablo creator David Brevik is heading up development.

See Also:

• Review: Super Smackdowns Fuel Marvel vs. Capcom 3


• First Photo From Marvel’s The Avengers Set


• Diablo Creator Heading Up Marvel Universe MMO

Kid-Tested: Three Projectile Weapons for Indoor Warfare

Editor’s note: Zing Toys sent us several boxes of its newest office weapons this week. We took advantage of “Take Our Children to Work Day” to kid-test the toys with the children of various Wired employees. These are their unedited reactions.

Z-X Crossbow ($26)



“I think it’s awesome and I really want it. It shoots hecka far and it sticks to stuff.” –Jude, age 7

“It can’t stick to people. That’s what makes it suck.” –Luc, age 8

“It’s interesting. It shoots for you, so you don’t have to worry about getting your hand whacked.” –Clara, age 10

“This is awesome. You just trigger it, and it goes really far, and it sticks.” –Isabel, age 11

“The trigger is stuck.” –Clara, age 10

Zip-Bak Bow ($20)



“This thing is awesome! It gives you really good aiming. I also like how light it is and easy to carry. It’s made from really light materials so it can go a long distance.” –Isabel, age 11

“The fact that you have to pull it back so hard to get a good shot.” –Isabel, age 11, when asked about any downsides

“When it shoots.” –Ophelia, age 4, when asked what her favorite thing about it was

“Easier.” –Sadelle, age 3 3/4

Zing-Shot Launcher ($10)



“The slingshot’s cool.” –Clara, age 10

“Yeah.” –Ophelia, age 4, when asked if she liked it

“When you let go.” –Ophelia, age 4, when asked what her favorite thing about it was

“This thing’s hard on aim. The chances of me breaking something are about 48 to 100.” –Isabel, age 11

“The shooting part.” –Ennio, age 4, when asked what his favorite thing about it was

Nerf Dart Gun (not actually being reviewed)

“The shooting part.” -Ennio, age 4, when asked what his favorite thing about it was

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• Wage Office Wars With These Workplace Weapons


• Most Dangerous Object in the Office: Garden Games Outdoor Darts


• Nerf Swarmfire Dominates the Backyard Battlefield


• You Want Darts? The Nerf Raider’s Got ‘Em

April 29, 1964: Godzilla, Mothra Clash for First Time

1964: Mothra vs. Godzilla makes its screen debut in Japan. Or was it Mothra Against Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Mothra or Godzilla vs. The Thing?

By whatever name you choose — and it went by all of them at one time or another — for those of us who grew up watching these entertaining romps, this is the quintessential Godzilla movie.

See Also:

Photo Gallery

Mega-Monsters Make Magnificent Movies

It had everything you could ask for: wonderfully cheesy special effects (acute halitosis never looked so good); great dubbing (in the English-language release, the talking went on after the Japanese actors had stopped moving their lips); a couple of hot Japanese twins (albeit a pair of faeries scarcely a foot tall); wanton, widespread destruction (Nagoya, rather than Tokyo, took the hit this time); and a monster to root for (the big moth).

The Godzilla-Mothra imbroglio wasn’t the first time these two had courted trouble.

Godzilla had already been around for a decade, rising from the sea in the 1954 film Godzilla to ravage the Japanese mainland following a hydrogen-bomb test gone awry. Godzilla evolved over the years, his dinosaur-like appearance always changing. But he never lost the atomic breath that, along with his sheer bulk, served as his main weapon of destruction.

As for Mothra, she (yes, Mothra was all woman) made her original cinematic bow in the 1961 flick bearing her name. Maybe because fictional lepidopteran Mothra originated in a novel before coming to the screen, she was more nuanced than her troglodytic antagonist. Unlike Godzilla, Mothra possessed an intellect, which she put to use in a series of films.

The plots for what are loosely called “Godzilla movies” follow the same simple formula: The monster — usually our man Godzilla — is awakened from its slumber, either by man’s folly (nuclear testing) or man’s greed (there always seems to be an evil capitalist lurking in the weeds, eager to exploit a lost culture or a slumbering monster). Fully awake now, the monster wreaks vengeance on the hapless Japanese, whose soldiery, never fully recovered from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, lies prostrate before the rampaging beast.

The soldiers do know how to die dramatically, though, which makes for some entertaining cinematic moments.

In the end, the movie’s alpha monster is finally overcome, either by a few plucky scientists who dream up some goofy formula that works, or by another hairy, scaly or wing-flapping opponent, who — for reasons never adequately explained — decides to temporarily ally itself with the perfidious two-legged mammals that stirred up this hornet’s nest in the first place.

Simple and repetitive as the story lines may be, the ‘64 film began a complicated relationship between Godzilla and Mothra, who, over the course of several movies, died and were reborn, were alternately vanquished and victorious, and lined up both as friend and foe. Their relationship with humanity was equally complex: Mothra could be punishing but was ultimately benevolent. Godzilla, usually the heavy, occasionally emerged as a kind of antihero, earning our sympathy in his role as avenging angel.

The Godzilla franchise was born in the Toho film studios in the 1950s but has been spun off so many times that it’s impossible to chronicle the monster’s lineage here. Suffice it to say, Godzilla has appeared on the screen — both large and small — in comic books, videogames, novels and myriad other places as a pop culture icon.

OK, so maybe Mothra vs. Godzilla wasn’t Kurosawa. But it was a fine way to kill a Saturday afternoon.

Source: Various

Photo: 1964’s Mothra vs. Godzilla is seen by many as the ultimate Godzilla movie. (Toho Kingdom)

This article first appeared on Wired.com April 29, 2008.

See Also:

• April 7, 1933: King Kong Opens Wide


• Think Godzilla’s Scary? Meet His Lawyers


• New Godzilla Movie Will Reboot Franchise — Again


• Complete Underwire coverage of monster movies


• Jan. 29, 1964: Duck and Cover


• March 13, 1964: No One Helps as Kitty Is Slain


• April 17, 1964: Ford Mustang Starts Galloping


• April 7, 1964: IBM Bets Big on System/360


• May 1, 1964: First Basic Program Runs


• June 19, 1964: Twilight Zone Fades Into Twilight Zone


• July 31, 1964: Ranger 7 Keeps Shooting Until the Very Last Second


• Dec. 11, 1964: Dr. King Warns About Science Without Morality




• April 29, 1873: Railroads Lock and Load


• April 29, 1882: Trackless Trolley Starts Rolling

Amazon Profit Down 33 Percent on Higher Spending

Tell me if you’re heard this one before.

Hugely successful internet company reports solid quarterly sales numbers, but because it is investing heavily in people and infrastructure, Wall Street slaps them down for missing Street earnings expectations.

It happened last week with Google, and it just happened again.

Amazon.com, the number one online retailer, reported sales of $9.86 billion — a 38 percent increase — but because the company only earned 44 cents per share — well below the Street’s 60 cent consensus — investors briefly pummeled the stock after hours, sending it down over five percent immediately after the earnings announcement. (Major indices hit multi-year highs on Tuesday, so some investors may have been a little trigger-happy.)

But the stock quickly bounced back, perhaps because investors remembered that for a growing company in a competitive market, investing in people and infrastructure is, in fact, a good thing over the last term.

Wall Street’s main problem was with Amazon’s operating expenses, which increased 42% in the quarter from $6.7 billion to $9.5 billion, in part because the company hired 4,200 people over the last three months. As a result, the company’s profit declined 33 percent, Amazon said.

Also, Amazon added 13 fulfillment centers — corporate-speak for regional warehouses — last year, and said that the company would add at least nine more this year, officials told Wall Street analysts on a conference call after the release.

Now back to our tracking:  Ninety minutes after the bell, Amazon shares were trading up one percent. Two hours later, two points down …

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• Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player — or Else


• Amazon Takes On Netflix With Movie Streaming Service


• Amazon Launches Kindle Singles, Saves Long-Form Journalism


• Living Social Gambles on Half-Price Amazon Gift Certificates


• Lessons From a Cloud Failure: It’s Not Amazon, It’s You

Free 3-D Excitebike When You Update Your 3DS

Image courtesy vgmuseum.com

As an incentive to get users updating their Nintendo 3DS system software, Nintendo will give everyone who does so a free 3-D version of the classic Excitebike game, it said Tuesday.

“For the system update, we need to have consumers voluntarily go online with their Nintendo 3DS,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata at a Tokyo briefing for investors and media. “We are planning to do some promotional activities in order to urge them to do so.” The game will only be available for free for a limited time, Iwata said.

(I prefer this plan to Sony’s method of “urging” users to upgrade their PSPs, which is to lock them out of playing any new games until they do.)

Excitebike will be part of Nintendo’s “3D Classics” line of games for its digital eShop, which will launch with that same system update at the end of May. These are classic games from Nintendo’s retro hardware with depth effects added, so that the 2-D sprites now appear to be sitting on separated planes. Wired.com got a demo of this visual trick at E3, where Nintendo showed several classic NES, Super Nintendo and arcade games with 3-D upgrades.

The 3D Classics line will launch with the eShop, as will the Virtual Console service, which features unretouched games from the Game Boy and Game Boy Color hardware. Sega’s Game Gear and NEC’s TurboGrafx will be added at a later date, Iwata said.

A “prototype” demo version of Capcom’s 3DS game Mega Man Legends 3 will also launch with the shop.

April 15, 1726: Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From Physicist

1726: Isaac Newton tells a biographer the story of how an apple falling in his garden prompted him to develop his law of universal gravitation. It will become an enduring origin story in the annals of science, and it may even be true.

Newton was apparently fond of telling the tale, but written sources do not reveal a specific date for the fabled fruit-fall. We do know that on this day in 1726, William Stukeley talked with Newton in the London borough of Kensington, and Newton told him how, many years before, the idea had occurred to him.

As recounted in Stukeley’s Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life:

It was occasioned by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways or upwards, but constantly to the earth’s centre.

See Also:

Photo Gallery

Exhibit Documents Newton's Pull

Newton (like Ben Franklin and his kite) may have indulged in some self-mythologizing here. Surely, the puzzle was not that things fell down rather than sideways. Isn’t that what the concepts “fall” and “down” are about?

Newton’s breakthrough was not that things fell down, but that the force that made them fall extended upward infinitely (reduced by the square of the distance), that the force exists between any two masses, and that the same force that makes an apple fall holds the moon and planets in their courses.

John Conduitt, Newton’s assistant at the Royal Mint (and also his nephew-in-law), tells the story this way:

In the year [1666] he retired again from Cambridge on account of the plague to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made an apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought — Why not as high as the Moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a calculating what would be the effect of that supposition but being absent from books & taking the common estimate in use among Geographers & our sea men before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude his computation did not agree with his Theory & inclined him then to entertain a notion that together with the power of gravity there might be a mixture of that force which the moon would have if it was carried along in a vortex, but when the Tract of Picard of the measure of the earth came out shewing that a degree was about 69½ English miles, He began his calculation a new & found it perfectly agreeable to his Theory.

A much finer tale: It shows one of the great minds of the millennium entertaining proper scientific doubt about his hypothesis, before better measurement and better data ultimately provide confirmation.

Voltaire also wrote of the event in 1727, the year Newton died: “Sir Isaac Newton walking in his gardens, had the first thought of his system of gravitation, upon seeing an apple falling from a tree.”

Note that no one, from Newton on down (so to speak) claims the apple bopped him on the bean. Makes a good cartoon, sure, but such an event, if it happened, might have set the guy speculating instead on why — and how — pain hurts.

Source: Various

Image: Isaac Newton was 83 when he told a biographer the tale of observing an apple fall at age 23. He’s 46 in this 1689 painting by Godfrey Kneller.

This article first appeared on Wired.com April 15, 2009.

See Also:

• Nov. 28, 1660: Hey, Guys, Let's Found Britain's Foremost Scientific Academy


• Feb. 24, 1664: Steam Power Is Newcomen In


• Oct. 29, 1675: Leibniz ∫ums It All Up, Seriesly


• Feb. 25, 1723: He Built His City With Rock and Rule


• April 15, 1452: It's the Renaissance, Man!


• April 15, 1912: 'God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship'

Wired.com Q&A: New MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito on ‘Context and Connection’

Joichi Ito, tapped as only the fourth director of the MIT Media Lab, says having a bio that seems “scatterbrained” will make the 25-year-old institution — already famous for its unorthodox research approach — seem just like home.

Ito is a well-known thinker, writer, venture capitalist and entrepreneur, with a broad record of achievement across disciplines. He’s also a college dropout — and there is something appropriate about this as well.

After all, many of the most celebrated figures of the digital revolution — from Steve Jobs to Bill Gates to Paul Allen to Larry Page to Sergey Brin to Mark Zuckerberg — left school for pursuits that would define digital culture.

Ito — who is known as Joi, pronounced “Joey” — replaces Frank Moss, who stepped down last year. The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicolas Negroponte, who played a key role in the early days of Wired magazine.

A former CEO of Creative Commons, Ito sits on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation, the international human rights group Witness, and Global Voices — a network of bloggers from around the world shedding light on under-reported regions.

It’s this eclectic background — and a track record as an activist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist — that made Ito a compelling choice to run the Media Lab, where the mission is to apply “an unorthodox research approach to envision the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life.”

Wired.com caught up with the 44-year-old Ito, who is currently in Jordan, for a Skype interview Tuesday. Ito said he’s going to focus on “context and connection” as he oversees a diverse group of scholars, researchers and students at the Media Lab. Ito currently lives in Dubai, but will be moving to Boston full-time in the fall.

Wired.com: Why did you join the Media Lab?

Joichi Ito: If you look at my bio, it looks like I’m completely scatterbrained and unable to focus on anything. The Media Lab has institutionalized this “interested-in-everything,” interconnected, “the more out-of-bounds, the better,” interdisciplinary approach, together with a crazy, open way of thinking about everything.

It felt like home.

It felt like something I’d been trying to hack out a way to do on my own, and then I found a place where it was OK to do it. The fact that MIT appointed me, even though I don’t have a college degree, shows a certain amount of flexibility on their part, and that made me feel safe.

Wired.com: What’s your goal at the Media Lab?

Ito: I try to surround myself with really smart people who are really deep at what they do, and my value is to provide context and to connect them to other people. It’s about connecting really specific people with really specific things and other people, in the right context, at the right time. You can only do that if you’re working with people who are really deep at what they do and are open to being connected.

Wired.com: In traditional science, we’re taught to do one thing and do it very well. You’ve done a lot of things very well. What’s your view on the balance between specialization and generalization?

Ito: What you don’t want is a bunch of people who read the headlines of all the newspapers and just consume everything that everyone else is consuming and then call themselves generalists. That’s not useful.

They know everything that everybody else already knows and they’re probably going to come up with the same thoughts. When you go deep on anything, you start to find nuances that other people don’t know. And it’s those nuances that really start to help you open black boxes and say, “Wait a second, can we think about it this way?”

For example, it turns out that if you use material other than silicon crystals you can completely change the behavior of a computer chip, but we don’t open that black box anymore because we’re so stuck on the engineering of chips. Or have you ever thought about connecting tissue specialists with prosthetics robotics? There’s a kind of alchemy that goes on.

There is a general spirit of interdisciplinary work at the Media Lab that makes it very different.

We have one of every kind of really important academic that we think we need, and we’re going to add more. The idea is that each of these academics is responsible for being deep enough in their own fields to be able to contribute to the interdisciplinary work that we do. But they need to be connected to their field, because they’re the conduit to their particular network.

Wired.com: It’s been 25 years since the Media Lab was founded. What is its role in society in 2011?

Ito: Right now Silicon Valley is really good at risk-taking and being agile, but not that good on being long-term, because the nature of venture capital and the public markets forces you to think about revenues and exits quite early. So you can have a great idea and knock it out of the park, but very quickly you’re going to be focused on revenues.

By contrast, the Japanese railway system is proud that they were able to build Tokyo station 100 years ahead, so that 100 years later they can still add more lines. They’re all about long-term planning. But they can’t really take risks and can’t really innovate themselves out of a box in the short-term.

What the Media Lab has is the ability to be agile but long-term.

Photo courtesy Joi Ito/Flickr.

See Also:

• VC Trending: Joi Ito Photos Show Up In NY Times


• Investigating Web 2.0 In Japan: Joi Ito Speaks


• The Connectors


• The Dragon Ate My Homework


• ‘Singularities Effect’ Drives Josh Harris’ Dream for MIT Media Lab


• The Media Lab at 10


• Being Nicholas


• Building the Next Big Thing: 25 Years of MIT’s Media Lab


• Video: Robots Take Over MIT Media Lab


• TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense — Video


• The Lab that Fell to Earth


• Creating Creating

Hallelujah: Wii Rhythm Heaven Free of Waggle

Image courtesy Nintendo

One bright spot in the Wii’s otherwise barren lineup is Rhythm Heaven, and the best piece of news out of Nintendo’s recent investor briefing is that the game will be done right.

“I tried out a near-final version of the game, and felt that this (version), playable with a TV monitor, never loses the uniqueness of the original… (It) is intentionally designed to be played only with buttons,” said Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on Tuesday.

Fantastic. While Nintendo might have been tempted, in an earlier age, to force motion controls onto Rhythm Heaven, that ship has long sailed. Buttons are the perfect control scheme for a game that requires on perfectly accurate rhythmic inputs. This was the method of control for the original Game Boy Advance Rhythm Heaven, perhaps the single best game that Nintendo has never released outside Japan.

The Nintendo DS version was also brilliant, but one of the only things that dragged it down a little was that buttons simply would have worked better than the touchscreen.

Rhythm Heaven for Wii will be released this summer in Japan; hopefully Nintendo of America will see fit to bring it to our shores as well.

April 18, 1906: Mother Nature 1, San Francisco 0

1906: San Francisco is destroyed by an earthquake so powerful that it is felt from Coos Bay, Oregon, to Los Angeles, and as far east as central Nevada.

What became known as the San Francisco earthquake and fire struck at 5:12 a.m., when the San Andreas Fault gave way, tearing the earth wide open from Humboldt County, near the Oregon border, to San Benito County, a hundred miles southeast of San Francisco. The epicenter was on the fault line just offshore from the San Francisco–San Mateo county line.

The earthquake had a magnitude measuring anywhere from 7.8 to 8.3 — a precise method of measuring seismic activity did not exist in 1906 — but it was enormous by any standard. There have been larger earthquakes recorded in California, but none so near a major population center. And damage was widespread all along the fault line. The town of Santa Rosa, 50 miles north of the Golden Gate, was flattened. Stanford University, in what was later to be named Silicon Valley, suffered severe damage.

But turn-of-the-century San Francisco was, by far, the most populous and important city in California — the cultural and financial hub of the entire West Coast, in fact — and almost all the attention was focused on the carnage there.

Even without the fire that followed, the damage was severe. The earthquake kept shaking for a full minute. By the time it subsided, a number of buildings in town had collapsed. Brick buildings with foundations of unreinforced masonry, especially those standing on land fill, proved especially vulnerable.

But the quake also ruptured gas and water mains, causing fires to break out and leaving the fire department with no water to fight them. San Francisco, then as now a tightly compact city with a lot of wooden structures, burned well.

The result was a conflagration lasting nearly four days. To stop the great fire, mansions lining the broad thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue were dynamited by Army engineers to create a firebreak by robbing the flames of something to burn. By the time it was over, the heart of San Francisco lay in ruins. In all, 508 city blocks had burned to the ground.

Anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 people were killed, most of them as a result of the earthquake itself, making this one of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. history.

A new city emerged quickly (a little too quickly, some historians would say) on the ashes of the old. Also emerging was a new emphasis on seismological studies and new regulations regarding building construction. In order to guarantee a water supply in the event of another major fire, San Francisco constructed a network of reservoirs, underground cisterns, fireboats and sea-water pumps.

San Francisco today also has some of the toughest building codes on earth — and yet remains vulnerable to both earthquake and fire. In San Francisco, it’s not a question of whether the next big one is coming, only of when.

Source: Bancroft Library

Photo: San Francisco’s Mission District burns in the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (H.D. Chadwick/National Archives and Records Administration/Wikipedia)

This article first appeared on Wired.com April 18, 2008.

See Also:

• How to Prepare for an Earthquake


• Earthquake Is Biggest in Japan’s Recorded History


• Haiti Quake Occurred on Previously Unknown Fault


• Complete Wired.com coverage of earthquakes


• May 21, 1906: Research on Motion Creates Tire Rim


• April 18, 1915: Aerial Warfare Is About to Make a Quantum Leap

Fail to Succeed: Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford

“Twitter itself was a bit of a side project. You could say it was a mistake that worked out very well for us.”

So begins Biz Stone’s master class to MBA students at the Said Business School in Oxford. It’s a dark Monday afternoon in November, and, as part of the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford program, and alongside other accomplished founders such as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, mydeco’s Brent Hoberman and Plink’s Mark Cummins, the Twitter creative director is inspiring the audience by openly admitting to having failed.

“It turns out other people had been thinking of this. It’s called podcasting, but we thought we were geniuses,” Stone says in a self-mocking tone. “We worked on it for about a year but we realized something that was a bad sign. We didn’t like podcasting. We didn’t listen to podcasts and we didn’t want to make podcasts.”

Then fate, or rather Steve Jobs, dealt a blow. Apple made podcasts available directly from iTunes.

“We were like, ‘Well, that’s a good place for it. Probably a better place than some website with a pink logo.’”

Stone and co-founder Evan Williams used some Google logic: everybody take some time and develop something you want to see in the world. “I had become very close friends with one of the engineers at Odeo called Jack Dorsey,” continues Stone. “Jack had a long history in writing software for dispatch. For bicycle couriers and ambulances and these sorts of things…. And he knew that I had all these years of experience at building social networking/blogging systems that allow people to express themselves and communicate. We started talking.”

Then building. A prototype for what would become Twitter was born within two weeks. “We showed it off to the rest of our colleagues at Odeo. They weren’t that impressed. They were saying, ‘So that’s all it does? You send a message and it goes out to other people and if they want it, they can get it?’ And we were saying, ‘Yeah!’ They said, ‘Can’t you add video or something and make it more complicated?’ One person called us ‘the Seinfeld of the internet — it’s a website about nothing.’ I thought, ‘I love Seinfeld.’ We put that on our front page as a testimonial.”

Stone says he realized they were on to something while ripping up the carpeting in his new house during a heatwave.

Continue reading …

Rockstar’s L.A. Noire Wows Movie Buffs at Tribeca

Rockstar wants its upcoming L.A. Noire to appeal not just to gamers but to film buffs, too.
Image courtesy Rockstar Games

NEW YORK — A lot of games have tried to create cinematic experiences, but few have actually made it to the cinema.

L.A. Noire, which will be out for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 May 17, took that leap Monday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. Rockstar’s detective story is the first videogame to ever make an appearance at Manhattan’s renowned film celebration, a recognition of its movielike presentation.

The event kicked off with a screening of “The Red Lipstick Murder,” one of L.A. Noire’s chilling homicide cases, as played by a Rockstar representative. The game was blown up on the big screen and demonstrated to a sold-out crowd of over 250 people. Afterwards, the Rockstar reps fielded questions from the audience.

Tribeca’s crowd seemed to react well to the game, which was particularly important to L.A. Noire’s lead writer/director, Brendan McNamara. The head of Team Bondi told Wired.com after the screening that one of the studio’s biggest challenges was making the title appeal to casual observers, movie buffs who don’t play many games.

“One of the things we wanted to do was take exposition away from cut scenes and make that part of the game,” McNamara said. “We didn’t want to do ‘exposition, game, exposition, game.’ It’s all part of an attempt to address a potentially bigger audience.”

While many games separate story and gameplay like colors and whites in the laundry, L.A. Noire turns every conversation into an involving challenge. You’ll have to figure out whether witnesses are lying to you based on a series of subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints, a mechanic that McNamara thinks will appeal to mainstream crowds.

“We wanna get out of science fiction, fantasy in the back of the bookstore,” McNamara said. “We want to get into the front, the more general section, and bring that audience in.”

Tribeca CCO Geoff Gilmore and Rockstar Games' Rob Nelson and Simon Ramsey presented L.A. Noire at the Manhattan film festival Monday evening.
Photo: Jason Schreier/Wired.com

While developing L.A. Noire, Team Bondi and Rockstar were inspired by the point-and-click adventures of Sierra and LucasArts. McNamara says these games were filled with humanity: Games like King’s Quest might not hold up to Rockstar’s high aesthetic standards, but still manage to get audiences caring about their casts of characters.

As apropos to the Tribeca setting, McNamara also pointed to cinema as a huge inspiration for L.A. Noire, noting that his studio isn’t run much differently than a Hollywood set. As L.A. Noire’s primary writer and director, McNamara oversaw almost every decision during the development process. He believes that this kind of sole creative vision helped make the game work.

“I think that as much as there are a lot of people working on a game, they are kind of personal statements in a way,” McNamara said. “If you have the opportunity to work on a big forum, you should have something that you want to say.”

Though Tribeca has embraced L.A. Noire, we’ll have to wait until next month to see how audiences react to its unique blend of investigative gameplay in an open-world setting.

“Ultimately, we’ll have to judge by whether the audiences buys into this — whether it’s a good game that they want to go out and buy, and a watershed-moment type of game,” McNamara said. “It might be hugely egotistical, but we’re hoping for both of those things.”

See Also:

• L.A. Noire Is Tribeca Film Fest’s First Game


• Video: Interrogating Seedy Suspects in L.A. Noire


• Solving the Silk Stocking Murder in Rockstar’s L.A. Noire

April 19, 1971: Soviets Put First Space Station Into Orbit

1971: Salyut 1, the first operational space station, is launched.

As they often were during the space race, the Soviets were out in front of NASA in concept and launch. But just as often, they were bedeviled by technical glitches and failures, and so it was with Salyut 1.

Beaten to the moon by the Americans, the Soviet space program turned its attention to the deployment of a working space station, which had been on the drawing boards since 1964. Salyut 1 was essentially a lash-up, its components assembled from spacecraft originally designed for other purposes.

The April launch went smoothly and Salyut 1 entered orbit, but it was all downhill after that. The crew of Soyuz 10, intended to be the first cosmonauts to take occupancy of Salyut 1, couldn’t enter the space station because of a docking mechanism problem.

The crew of Soyuz 11 spent three weeks aboard Salyut 1, only to be killed on the return trip to Earth when air escaped from their craft.

Finally, it was curtains for Salyut 1, which fired its rockets for the last time Oct. 11, 1971, to begin its planned re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere and disintegration over the Pacific Ocean.

Source: PBS.org, Wikipedia

Photo: Salyut 1/NASA

This article first appeared on Wired.com April 19, 2007.

See Also:

• July 25: Four Women Who Made a Difference


• Jan. 16, 1969: A Rendezvous, and a Rough Ride Home


• July 11, 1979: Look Out Below! Here Comes Skylab!


• Feb. 19, 1986: Mir, the Little Space Station That Could


• Complete Wired.com coverage of International Space Station


• Nov. 6, 1971: U.S. Tests Its Largest Hydrogen Bomb


• July 31, 1971: Astronauts Drive on the Moon


• Feb. 6, 1971: Astronaut Plays Golf on Moon


• Feb. 21, 1971: U.N. Cracks Down on Hallucinogens


• April 19, 1965: How Do You Like It? Moore, Moore, Moore

YouTube Founders Rescue Delicious, to Build ‘Information Discovery Service’

Delicious, the original king of shared online bookmarking, is now in the hands of YouTube’s founders, after a popular outcry saved it from being shut down by Yahoo.

Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, who sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion dollars in 2006, will integrate Delicious into their new company, AVOS, and start running Delicious in July.

Delicious, one of the pioneers of the idea of taking something users used to do privately and making it public, was snapped up by Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $30 million. But the product languished under its new master and its founder Joshua Schachter left in 2008. Afer a sting at Google, Schachter is now running a stealth startup called Tasty Labs.

Delicious appeared in December on a leaked Yahoo roadmap, alongside seven others including AllTheWeb and Buzz, as products that Yahoo was going to kill off. (Note: Yahoo says the plan all along was to sell Delicious, though other products on the sunset slide have just been shutdown, such as MyBlogLog.)

But the news prompted a groundswell of support from longtime users, promoting Yahoo to declare it had no intention of closing delicious. Still, the news sent many to a similar site called Pinboard, a pay site that can import Delicious links.

But Hurley and Chen say they aren’t buying the company for nostalgia’s sake and have big plans for it, saying they want to “take on the challenge of building the best information discovery service on the web.”

“We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web,” Hurley said in a press release.

That mission has them competing with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google search and the increasingly popular StumbleUpon.

User’s private and public bookmarks and tags will only be transferred for those who opt-in to the new ownership. Those who don’t care for that idea can export their data.

AVOS says building a Firefox 4 plug-in for Delicious is a top priority.

Hurley and Chen are both part of the so-called Paypal Mafia — former PayPal employees who are responsible for founding sites ranging from Yelp to Slide and funding numerous other ventures, including Facebook.

The two are setting up shop in San Mateo and “hiring aggressively.”

Photo: Steven Chen (R) and Chad Hurley, YouTube’s founders, on stage at the All Things D conference in 2007. Credit: Dan Farber

See Also:

• Yahoo Says Delicious For Sale, Blames Press for Confusion


• Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline


• Tag, You’re It: Best Bookmarker


• Replace Google Notebook


• The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online


• Xmarks to Continue Syncing Bookmarks, Thanks to Loyal Fans

Nintendo Didn’t Expect 3DS Sales to Drop Like This

Despite its revolutionary glasses-free 3-D technology, sales of the Nintendo 3DS have been slow.
Image courtesy Nintendo

Update: Analyst comment was added to this story at 5:09 p.m. EDT.

Nintendo was caught unawares by surprisingly slow sales of the 3DS, the company said Tuesday.

“Nintendo 3DS has not been selling as expected since the second week [of availability in the United States and Europe], and this is not just in the Japanese market but also in the United States and Europe, where no direct impact from the great earthquake has occurred,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said during an investor briefing in Tokyo. “Therefore, we recognize that we are in a situation where we need to step up our efforts to further promote the spread of Nintendo 3DS.”

Nintendo launched the 3DS, which features a glasses-free 3-D display, in February in Japan, and in March in the rest of the world. At $250, it is by far the most-expensive handheld the company has ever released.

The company said Monday it had sold 3.6 million units of 3DS worldwide through the end of March and expects to sell 16 million units of the device over the next year.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said in an e-mail to Wired.com that Nintendo needs to release better 3DS games or lower the price of the device.

“I think this could change if some compelling software comes out, but I am frankly surprised at the tepid reaction” consumers have had to the new handheld, he said. “I truly thought that the fanboys would snap these up at any price” based purely on the 3-D graphics, he said, although he now thinks the new technology is insufficient to justify the $250 tag.

Iwata acknowledged that impressing consumers with the 3DS’ array of features has been difficult. It is a challenge to get users to understand the appeal of the screen even when they get their hands on a unit, since improper positioning of the adjustable 3-D slider might cause them to not see the image properly. Iwata also said that not all Nintendo 3DS owners have been using onboard software like StreetPass Mii Plaza.

See Also:

• Opinion: Nintendo 3DS Is a Last-Gen Game Machine


• Buyer Beware: Rating Nintendo 3DS Launch Games


• Rating Nintendo 3DS’ Baked-In Freebies