AllThingsD » Lauren Goode

Lenovo’s Horizon PC Turns Your Coffee Table Into a Touchscreen Game Center

Lauren Goode — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:20 +0000

What kind of computer comes with an explicit warning not to rest your coffee cup on it?

A computer like Lenovo’s new IdeaCentre Horizon PC does -– and with good reason. This 27-inch computer transforms from a standard all-in-one into a giant touchscreen tabletop display.

When the Horizon is upright, it’s running Microsoft’s Windows 8. Slide down the kickstand in the back and lay the thing flat on your coffee table, and it automatically jumps to “Aura” mode, a Lenovo-created interface for playing games with friends and family.

I’ll admit that I was quick to poke fun at the Horizon when I first saw it at the International CES trade show earlier this year. I enjoyed giving the games a test drive at the time, but I was wondering if a computer this size could really have a place in my small Manhattan apartment. I don’t even have a coffee table.

[ See post to watch video ]

After using the Horizon on a dining table for the past week and a half, I’ve been able to fully assess it. I like it, mostly because having a second large display at home is great for media consumption. But I still wouldn’t buy it. At the end of the day, it’s a niche product.

And, it’s pricey: Lenovo is currently selling its top model, which has a third-generation Intel Core i7 processor and eight gigabytes of memory, for $1,849. A slightly less powerful model, with a Core i5 chip, costs $1,699.

On June 23, Best Buy will begin offering the Horizon for slightly less: $1,599 for the Core i7 configuration, and $1,499 for the i5 model with only 6GB of RAM.

That’s still more expensive than the Sony Vaio Tap 20, a hybrid PC/tablet that starts at $880. And Asus’s 18-inch Transformer AiO, a similarly-designed computer that runs both Windows 8 and Google Android operating systems, costs $1,300. So if you’re looking for a PC that can also be used like a large tablet, there are more reasonable options.

And if you just want a tablet for game playing and watching videos, well, you can spend $400 and get a pretty good one.

Lenovo says there are a few reasons why the Horizon is so expensive. First, and most obvious, is the size of the display. Then, there’s the preloaded game software — nine games total, including three from Ubisoft, one from EA and five developed by Lenovo. Some of those games require accessories, like e-dice, joysticks and strikers, which are thrown into the mix. Lastly, it comes with a one terabyte internal hard drive.

Let’s say you’re willing to splurge for all this, and the family-centric games are a big draw for you.

As I mentioned, it’s running on Windows 8, and if you’re not super familiar with Microsoft’s newest operating system, there will be a learning curve as you adjust to all of the new swipes and gestures, designed with touchscreens in mind.

I tested the Core i5 model. It measures 27.2 by 16.9 by 1.17 inches, and weighs 18 pounds. Lenovo envisions that users will want to move this computer around the house, but I lugged it from room to room just once, and “lug” is the appropriate description here. It’s definitely not portable. I am not, for example, going to bring it to a friend’s house, or travel with it on a plane to the D11 Conference next week, as I would a tablet.

On the left side of the Horizon is the power button. The right side is loaded with two USB ports, an HDMI port, a media card reader and jacks for headphones and the power cord.

The 27-inch diagonal display is a full-HD multitouch display. It’s nice but not particularly brilliant. Games looked fluid and bright, but when I watched a couple episodes of ABC’s “Scandal” on Netflix, colors were a little washed out.

On to gaming, the main event: The Horizon has a respectable Nvidia processor and 2GB of processing RAM, enough for all of your needs with this computer, but not the kind of power you’d expect with a hardcore gaming machine.

Preloaded game titles include Lenovo Air Hockey, Lenovo Tycoon (Lenovo’s version of Monopoly), Lenovo Fishing Joy, Lenovo Texas Hold ‘Em, and from other publishers, the original Monopoly and Ubisoft’s Raiding Company. It also comes with BlueStacks, an app interface that lets you play Google Android games.

I laid the PC flat on the table, prompting the Aura desktop overlay to appear, and “convinced” my boyfriend to geek out and play games with me. We played a few intense games of Air Hockey, sliding the strikers along the surface of the PC to score. He got hooked playing Lenovo Fishing Joy. Then we started games of both Lenovo Tycoon and the much-better Monopoly.

Rolling the e-dice was, at first, pretty cool. A set of virtual dice in the game would spin and stop moving when the physical dice did. As we took turns in Monopoly, the game zoomed in to show us different spots along the boardwalk, then zoomed back to the whole game board again when it was the next person’s turn to roll.

But I encountered a glitch with the e-dice: When I rolled the physical dice, the virtual dice on screen kept rolling … and rolling …

After a minute or two of excitable dice, we finally unplugged the Bluetooth dongle to disconnect the dice entirely, then started over again.

Overall, playing the games was fun, and I’m sure I could entertain my young niece and nephew for awhile with this. I’d like to see more brand-name games on the Horizon. On a few occasions I went back to the Windows 8 desktop — which appears when you stand the computer upright again — to load up Angry Birds. Lenovo says that more Horizon-optimized game titles are in the works.

When it comes to non-gaming activities on this machine, the touchscreen on a 27-inch display creates a unique dilemma: Sit close enough to touch it, and you’re really, really close to a giant screen. Sit further back to avoid eye strain, and you might not be close enough to comfortably use the touchscreen.

Fortunately, the Horizon also comes with a wireless mouse and keyboard, which I did end up using for email and productivity apps, allowing me to use tactile keys and sit further back from the screen.

Finally, battery life is less than that of the similar hybrids I mentioned earlier, but this is a bigger machine. In the first test I conducted, I bumped up the display to full brightness, played iTunes and had an email application running, and the battery lasted two hours and 22 minutes. During the second test, I streamed videos and played a couple games, and it lasted two hours and 10 minutes.

Now that I’ve tried the Horizon, I’d like a bigger display in my living room. But I wasn’t blown away by the game experience, and I wouldn’t want to pay $1,700 for it.

Meet the Dudes Behind Dots, the iPhone Game of the Moment

Lauren Goode — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:16:48 +0000

By now you may have heard about Dots, the free mobile game that is singlehandedly responsible for at least a 27 percent decline in U.S. workplace productivity over the past two weeks, based on my very unscientific research.

If you haven’t heard of it, here’s the gist: You connect and swipe away rows of matching-colored dots to earn as many points as you can in 60 seconds. If you’re able to draw a square of dots of the same color, it’s like getting a raise on your birthday. You share high scores with friends — and by friends, I mean the Internet. And then you do it all over again. Immediately.

The iOS-only app, which was created by New York City-based Betaworks, has been downloaded more than two million times since it hit the App Store on May 1. Yesterday, I had the chance to catch up with the game’s creators, Patrick Moberg and Paul Murphy, to ask them about the inspiration behind Dots, who is playing the game — including a legion of “Dot-moms” — and what tips they can offer. Below are excerpts from our conversation:

Where did the idea for Dots come from?

Moberg: A lot of the early thinking was just looking at what was already out there, what was highly illustrated or cartoonish, and deciding we wanted to do something new, something that wasn’t out there.

But why dots? Why not coins, or squares, or birds flying through the air?

Moberg: Well, some of my inspiration for the design of the game actually came from the fine art world. I copied and pasted a bunch of fine art images from Google into my design documents and thought, if an app could be like fine art, maybe this would be it. But Dots was also inspired by board games. Old-school board games are fun and playful but have such — I guess the word would be neutral — such neutral personalities that anyone can approach them and play them.

You just crossed two million downloads on Tuesday. What are your engagement numbers like?

Murphy: It’s growing pretty well on its own, with very little marketing on our side. We’ve tracked that 100 million games have been played, so that means 100 million minutes, which is a lot of time. It probably doesn’t help the world with productivity. Every time somebody opens the app, they spend almost five minutes in there, and then tend to come back day after day.

At AllThingsD, some of us have this theory that Dots is a “mom” game. On Mother’s Day, I showed the game to my mom, who isn’t really into new tech or mobile games, and she couldn’t stop playing it. So I guess the question is, what does your audience look like so far?

Moberg: Yeah, my mom went to her Pilates class and said her friends kept telling her how addictive the game was. But she doesn’t have an iPhone. So now she’s thinking of buying an iPhone, so she can play Dots.

Murphy: But it’s not just moms. We started doing research on social networks and Instagram, and it seems a lot of young people are playing it, too. And we don’t have hard data, but we get a little bit of insight through the people that connect through Facebook. We know that it resonates heavily with women, but there are also a lot of men playing, too. So it’s really pretty broad right now.

What’s coming first, iPad optimization or Android?

Murphy: iPad. It’s not that we don’t love Android, but we got a lot of feedback right away from people that want iPad, and our instinct is to listen to the users. On Android it’s a little bit trickier because of the different strategies. One is, just make your app for Android, and the other is, build from the ground up, take advantage of all the features of Android, and we want to do the latter.

When will we see the iPad app?

Murphy: We’re aiming to do something by the end of the month.

You’ve also said that you want to make the app color-blind-friendly. What does that involve?

Moberg: Yeah, that’s something that will be in the next version, but we want to get it right. We want to make it so users can enable a color-blind mode within the existing app. It involves modifying the hue saturation, which is something we’re going to have to test with a lot of people first. It’s a fine line between useable and beautiful.

What are your highest Dots scores?

Murphy: I’m at 380, which is sort of lame. Patrick is — hold on, let me check — 472. He’s done a bit better, but he has access to the leaderboard, so maybe he’s made tweaks to his score.

Moberg: I feel like I’m not that successful at it. I have friends who score much better than I have. It’s a tricky thing. One of my friends compared it to spotting a pitch in baseball. When you see the initial board, you can see whether it’s going to be flush with squares, or even one step away from the initial square. Some people are just good at that.

What is the best tip you can give Dots players? (Readers: Also see this helpful guidebook, courtesy of Quartz.)

Moberg: Other than squares? Finding environments that you’re most comfortable playing in. I find that if I play on the subway when I’m trying to de-stress, it’s not the best. I’m just sort of playing to pass time. I play my best games when I’m home playing Dots with my girlfriend.

Murphy: I’m a big fan of the expanders, so whenever I accrue a lot of points I usually use them to buy a pack of expanders. If you use these at the right time, you can get more squares. The best time is usually at the start of the game.

Are Dots players actually making in-app purchases?

Murphy: People are buying dots, kind of to our surprise. We did want to make the game so people didn’t ever have to spend money and could earn dots just by playing, but also so you can spend a little bit of money and get those features right away.

How much money have you made through the app so far?

Murphy: We don’t really want to share that. But we are making money, so that’s positive.

Can we expect to see any ads popping up in Dots?

Murphy: It’s not in our road map. The game feels different from other games, and I think we’re going to try to preserve that. So we don’t have any ads immediately planned.

When you look at other mobile games that quickly became popular and then sort of fell off — Draw Something comes to mind — what do you think you can learn from that?

Moberg: Well, not to sound silly about it, but we’re testing some of the assumptions around how you’re supposed to do this for mobile games. That might mean the falloff still exists, or maybe this game won’t have that falloff. I don’t know. I think the key is optimizing for longevity instead of optimizing for mobile. When you look at old board games, there were no in-app purchases, right? And yet we’ve been coming back to them for years.

Murphy: The rule book would say, throw a bunch of ads at people’s faces right now! Jack up the prices in the game! And we don’t want to do that. We’re just sort of focused on the game experience.

Google's Upcoming Maps App Includes Smarter Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting

Lauren Goode — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:50:12 +0000

It wasn’t that long ago that iPhone users were cheering about the release of Google Maps for iOS.

Now Google is readying its next update to the Maps mobile app, which will be rolled out for both Android and iOS devices sometime this summer. The app will be optimized for iPad and Android tablets, as well.

Shown off today at Google I/O by Brian McClendon, Google’s vice president of Maps, the upcoming app seems to take small slices from both Foursquare Explore and Waze, improving local venue search as well as live rerouting recommendations during navigation.

McClendon showed how a smart search from Maps for “Burmese food” or “pizza” in San Francisco will turn up a bunch of local results that include friends’ ratings — the way Foursquare does — but also utilize Zagat data to show places worthy of a Zagat badge. This is all part of Google Maps’ new “unified five-point rating scale.” Huh. Well in either case, there’s a seemingly cool swipe feature for swiftly browsing through search results in Maps rather than reading them in list format.

And Google’s Offers service was tied into the mix by showing venues with deals or discounts in results. The first of these offers will come from Starbucks, but as Google incorporates Offers more into mobile, we can likely expect to see deals from other businesses.

I/O attendees also got a sneak peek at the app’s “dynamic rerouting” feature, meant to give better, faster, real-time navigation updates. (Waze might want to look up from its acquisition talks long enough to take note of this one.)

Early in the presentation, Google took a jab at Apple’s map mishaps, with McClendon saying that Google Maps in iPhone has been a “success” due to the fact that the app is “sleek, simple, beautiful, and let’s not forget, accurate.”

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Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing

Lauren Goode — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:20:33 +0000

Chrome, Google’s homegrown Web browser, has seen a pretty big uptick in users in recent months. And, increasingly, those users are coming from mobile.

That was the gist of the Chrome-focused presentation given by Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android, and Linus Upson, vice president of engineering at Chrome,at the Google I/O conference earlier today.

Pichai announced that Chrome now claims more than 750 million monthly active users, with 300 million new users since ~~last month~~ the last I/O conference a year ago. (Google used to measure browser users on a weekly basis, but has since adjusted this to reflect industry standards.)

Pichai and Upson didn’t say exactly how many of those users are coming from mobile, except to say that, not surprisingly, that segment is growing. In an effort to nudge the browsing experience forward in a “multiscreen world,” Upson showed how a Chrome Web browser will mimic the experience as you’re running game applications from an Android tablet (Nexus 10, natch).

So the user starts a race or performs a function on a touchscreen Android tablet, and the same action will occur in the game on his or her desktop browser.

They also demoed Racer, a multiplayer Chrome experiment that uses Chrome across up to five devices at once.

Chrome mobile, Upson said, has been getting speedier, with performance improving by “more than 50 percent” on mobile, compared with 25 percent speedier on desktop.

Google’s browser, of course, serves as the foundation for Chrome OS, a computer system based solely on the Web — i.e., the $1,300 Chromebook Pixel — but Google only said that there would be “more to talk about” later this year in regards to Chrome OS.

Chrome has previously claimed the top-browser-in-the-world title, according to third-party analytics firm StatCounter, but other reports indicate that Internet Explorer is still the dominant Web browser in many parts of the world.

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One Robot Per Child? Former Googler, Apple Engineer Tackle Educational Bots.

Lauren Goode — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:00:18 +0000

There are apps that teach kids the basics of programming.

And then there are robots that get the job done.

That’s the vision of a group of four tech entrepreneurs who late last year formed a company called Play-i with the purpose of creating educational robots for kids.

The Bay Area-based company is still very much in the early stages of building out its bots and determining their form and functionality.

Vikas Gupta, Play-i’s founder and CEO, said the robots will be targeted at children aged 5 to 8, and will most likely work in conjunction with tablets. Using a tablet or other mobile device running compatible software, the child will be able to program his or her robot to perform certain actions.

Gupta said the company is aiming to keep the price point low — very low. Unlike the personal robots we’ve seen to date, Play-i wants to keep its bots at under $100, making it a direct-to-consumer play.

But Play-i is light on other details. It’s unclear how large or powerful the robots will be, whether they’ll have a humanoid shape or take on more of a mechanical form, and ultimately, which software they’ll run on or work with. And the robots won’t necessarily speak. (Although, one thing is certain: These aren’t the super-poweful robots that are going to do your chores for you.)

So, why robots, when there are plenty of lightweight and tablet-friendly apps now that teach kids how to program? The Play-i team believes that learning should be tangible and fun, and that bossing hardware robots around is more interesting than, say, instructing an animated bot to draw a line.

“We believe tangible interaction is what grabs children, something that’s much more engaging for them beyond just having a software screen in front of them,” Gupta said.

And what was cost-prohibitive a few years ago in robotics isn’t as pricey any more, Gupta said, with the increasing accessibility of sensors in the market and the advancements in processors.

Play-i is the brainchild of Gupta, who in his last role was the head of consumer payments at Google; Mikal Greaves, formerly of Frog Design; Saurabh Gupta, who led the iPod software team at Apple from 2006 to 2012; and Imran Kahn, previously the head of marketing at Eloan and Symantec.

The company just secured $1 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and individual private investors. Later this summer, Play-i will launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise more money for production.

(The photo above was taken at a museum in Moscow and is not indicative of Play-i’s product plans. Photo courtesy of Liza Azarova/Flickr Creative Commons.)

Three Battery-Boosting Cases for iPhone 5

Lauren Goode — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:00:33 +0000

As advanced as new smartphones are, battery life can still be an issue for people who use a lot of juice-sucking apps.

Sound like a familiar first-world problem? Luckily, the next generation of battery cases is here. They’re slimmer than earlier models, and they promise more.

They’re not perfect, but they’re pretty darn good.

Over the past week and a half, I’ve been comparing three cases for iPhone 5: Mophie’s $100 Juice Pack Air, the slightly less powerful $80 Mophie Juice Pack Helium, and MyCharge’s brand-new Freedom 2000 case.

The Freedom 2000 also costs $80, and yet it claims to give even more extra juice than the Mophie Juice Pack Air.

[ See post to watch video ]

While Mophie has been making smartphone-charging cases since the days of the original iPhone, MyCharge is a relatively new company, mostly making portable charging packs. Its iPhone 4/4S charging case never even made it to market.

The best part about this new MyCharge Freedom 2000 case is that it doesn’t add the additional junk to my iPhone’s trunk the way the Mophie packs do, with their slide-on bottom attachments. But it does have one notable design flaw: It renders the phone’s power button pretty much useless by covering it with a plastic “dummy” button that barely sticks out. I found it nearly impossible to power off the phone or take screen grabs with this case on the phone.

Still, after using the MyCharge, the Mophie packs felt big and long in comparison, especially when I was holding my phone in my hand during a long run outside. And the Mophie Juice Pack Air is expensive, at a third of the cost of the iPhone. The Mophie Juice Pack Helium is a little more reasonably priced, and still provides a good amount of extra battery life.

From left to right, the MyCharge Freedom 2000 (in gray and black), the Mophie Juice Pack Air and the Mophie Juice Pack Helium.

But let’s say you’re still considering one of the Mophies — it’s important to know the differences between the two cases I looked at.

The Air is Mophie’s top model, claiming 100 percent extra battery life that’s drawn from a 1,700 milliamp (mAh) pack inside the tough plastic case. The Helium, by comparison, promises 80 percent extra juice from a 1,500 mAh case. The Air, at 5.5 by 2.6 by 0.6 inches and 2.68 ounces, is just a little bit larger and heavier than the Helium, but the size difference is barely noticeable.

Both the Air and Helium packs split apart and then reattach to form a case around your phone. The bottom portion of each pack has a built-in adapter that connects to your iPhone 5 to charge it.

Another small but noteworthy difference between the two — the Air covers the entire band of the iPhone, whereas the Helium case has a gap on the side to let the phone’s buttons hang out. While Mophie likes to say the Air offers more “protection” than the Helium, I just don’t like plastic obstructing the phone buttons.

On the back of the packs, there are LED light indicators to let you know when each pack is charged. One light means low battery, and all four lights signal that the Mophie is ready to go. The Mophies also have a “standby” switch: Flick it to begin charging, and snap it back to put the Mophie in standby mode.

In my unscientific tests of these cases, I used my iPhone 5 as I would on a normal day, taking a handful of phone calls that lasted 30 minutes or more and running multiple apps, like Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and Gmail. I connected to both an LTE cellular network and a Wi-Fi network when available. The display was on about 75 percent of maximum brightness. This would normally last me from approximately 8 am to 5:30 pm, or nine-and-a-half hours.

I began using the Mophie Air in the early evening, when my phone’s battery dwindled to under 5 percent. Within an hour and a half, my phone’s battery had been boosted to 84 percent. Shortly afterward, the Mophie itself was out of juice.

I answered work emails, made phone calls and played mobile games. I went for a long run, using both streaming music and fitness apps, and used Foursquare to find dining options. In total, the Mophie Air got me just about eight hours of extra battery life — enough so that when I woke up the next morning, the phone still had some life.

In a separate test, the Helium boosted my 5 percent-charged iPhone to 78 percent before the pack itself died, and ultimately got me nearly as much extra juice as the Air.

So, given the choice between these two, I’d go with the less-expensive Mophie Helium.

But if you’re going to consider spending $80 on a battery case, and you prefer a case that lets your phone buttons hang out freely, that’s where the MyCharge Freedom 2000 comes in (hence the “Freedom”). This one has a 2000 mAh rechargeable battery, claiming 110 percent extra battery life. It’s a few ounces heavier than the Mophie Air pack, but is only 5.1 inches long compared with the 5.5-inch Mophies.

The MyCharge has a tiny tethered arm that extends from the bottom of the case and connects to the iPhone 5. I like this extendable arm: It’s small enough to go unnoticed, and yet I knew from a quick glance at my iPhone whether I was charging or not, depending on whether the connector was plugged in.

It also has a multicolored LED indicator light to let you know when the pack is charged (green), or alternately, when it’s dead (red). And, finally, it has a gap on the side to give the phone’s volume buttons some breathing room.

The first time I put the MyCharge through my test, the pack’s indicator light was green, leading me to believe it was ready to go, and yet it stopped charging my iPhone at 47 percent of its maximum battery capacity. In follow-up tests, however, it basically matched the Mophie Air in terms of performance.

If you don’t mind the extra length the Mophie packs give your iPhone 5, I can recommend the Helium as a reliable case. Otherwise, the MyCharge Freedom 2000 is a more wieldy option for the same price, despite the way it makes the power button tough to press.

Hotel Tonight Wants You to Snap Photos of Your Hotel Room (Selfies Not Encouraged)

Lauren Goode — Wed, 08 May 2013 16:00:44 +0000

Hotel Tonight, the iOS and Android app for booking last-minute hotel rooms, is adding an Instagram-like photo-sharing service — minus the filters — for hotel guests to snap pictures of their stays. Prior to this, Hotel Tonight only allowed “reviews” of hotels through a ratings system. The company will introduce photo scavenger hunts, assigning users to snap a group of photos from a partner hotel to redeem five dollars off their next HotelTonight booking. The app, which is currently available in North America and Europe, has been downloaded five million times, though the company hasn’t said how many bookings it has done.

If You Throw This Fitbit in the Washing Machine, It's Really Your Fault This Time

Lauren Goode — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:00:36 +0000

If you love your clip-on Fitbit fitness tracker but frequently put it through the wash cycle, or it seems to jump off your clothes like a flea, your gadget prayers may be answered.

Fitbit today began shipping the Flex, which packs all of that health-and-activity-tracking goodness into — you guessed it — a wristband. The San Francisco-based company first showed off the product at International CES earlier this year, adding to the growing list of wearable “smart” devices that aim to track all kinds of personal data from your wrist.

The Fitbit Flex measures your steps and your sleep, syncs with your other favorite fitness apps … okay, okay. Here’s what you really want to know: How is this different from other activity wristbands on the market, like the Jawbone Up and the Nike+ FuelBand?

First, at $99.95, it’s less expensive than the $130 Jawbone Up and the $150 Nike+ FuelBand. The Flex is also launching with both Android and iOS compatibility, while the FuelBand still works with iPhone only. (Jawbone just released an Android version of Up, about a year and a half after the iOS-friendly product first launched.)

The Flex uses low-energy Bluetooth to sync your data to a mobile app or Fitbit Web dashboard throughout the day, unlike the Jawbone Up, which must be manually plugged into the audio jack of your iPhone. The FuelBand also uses Bluetooth, but you have to press a button on the wristband to pair the two devices and sync your activity data. If you have a newer Android phone, you can also ~~sync your data~~ open the Fitbit app by tapping the Flex against your phone, because the Flex has an NFC chip.

Lastly, Fitbit claims that its clip-on tracker, the One, is the most accurate device of this wearable-fitness bunch when it comes to calculating how many steps you’ve taken, and the company says the Flex is just as reliable. Its competitors, of course, can be calibrated to improve their accuracy in certain areas, although the FuelBand uses a pretty arbitrary currency called “fuel” to measure your overall exertion levels.

In a nutshell, these are some of the features that Fitbit hopes will set this product apart. Keep in mind that this whole personal data-tracking category of tech devices is still pretty new; these companies and others are exploring how to make wearables even more sensor-laden and more precise.

And, fitness bands are good for getting your butt off the couch, but they won’t do the exercise for you. As Billy Joel once sang, you get more mileage from a cheap pair of sneakers.

Can These iPad Apps Teach Your Kid to Code?

Lauren Goode — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:00:20 +0000

The pillars of elementary education in the U.S. — reading, writing, math — have remained the same for a long time. Now another skill set is increasingly coming into focus: Computer programming.

This week, I tested two new mobile apps, Kodable and Hopscotch, that are aimed at teaching young children the basic skills necessary for computer programming. Both are for iOS — specifically, for iPad — although Kodable plans to introduce an Android version of the app. And both are free to download, but Kodable does include advanced levels that cost $1.99 to access.

What is programming, exactly? Also called coding, it’s the execution of different languages that make computer software, websites and mobile apps run. A series of symbols, like text, are grouped together to imply or prompt something else. A very common example of this is the use of a semicolon to signify a break in a line of code. There are also visual programming languages, which use graphical blocks of code.

Coding tools for kids and beginners are hardly a new thing, but many earlier applications are browser-based, while these apps capitalize on the gravitational pull that tablets seem to have on kids.

[ See post to watch video ]

Kodable, which launched late last year, is aimed at kids in kindergarten through second grade. It takes a levels-based game approach, reminding me in some ways of a popular app called Cargo-Bot, which lets you move cartoon robotic arms using commands. Or, think Angry Birds, except instead of slinging birds through the air using your finger, you’re moving a fuzzball using arrow commands. Kodable also sprinkles game coins throughout the app as an incentive.

I found it easy to get the hang of Kodable, which is based on Basic, an early and simple programming language. But to say it teaches “coding” is a stretch. It more or less teaches kids how to think logically to get an object moving.

Hopscotch, on the other hand, is more advanced, aimed at kids age 8 and up. It’s based on Scratch, a visual programming language created at MIT. Hopscotch offers colorful blocks of code with which to execute a program on what is basically a blank slate. This means Hopscotch can be as easy or as difficult as you make it, but it also works under the assumption that you already know some programming basics.

Since I’m a few years beyond fourth grade at this point, it’s tough for me to approach these apps exactly as a child would. But I’ve never learned to code, so I can claim beginner status there. Hopscotch was definitely more challenging for me than Kodable was. But I learned more about actual coding from Hopscotch.

Let’s start with Kodable, and then “graduate” to Hopscotch. Once you get past the intro animation with ambient music (maybe meant to lull kids into a total state of relaxation and quietude? Parents and teachers can only wish …), you’re asked to enter your name. From there, you’re taken to a “Smeeborg” of unlocked levels.

Kodable’s main character is a blue fuzzball with eyes and a mouth. There’s a short course laid out for you, littered with coins; as the levels progress, the course gets more maze-like. On the upper right there is a toolbox with arrow keys. On the left, there’s a “script” area where, using the iPad’s touchscreen, you drag the arrow keys to create a command. With each new level of difficulty, a small cartoon hand will simulate the commands for you to give some guidance, but that’s all there is in terms of tutorials.

I dragged a sequence of arrows over to the script and hit the play button. My fuzzball made it through the course, and I went on on to the next level.

I made it through about a dozen levels on Kodable, even unlocking a new fuzzball named Simon Fuzz — he’s green and wears hipster glasses — before I found out that by swiping to the left I could skip to new areas in the game. These are called Function Junction and Bugs Below. Each costs $1.99 and contains 30 new levels of varying difficulty. For example, Function Junction teaches you to create a second sequence of arrow commands under the one you’re already using.

Kodable says it plans to add more curriculum-like education features to the app in the next couple months, including vocabulary exercises, so kids can learn programming words. I think Kodable on the whole could be a bit richer, but I like the app, and there’s no cost to download it and try it.

On to Hopscotch: This app takes you through a quick tutorial at the start, showing how to put together blocks of code to program a little monkey to draw a line. At the top of the app is a plus sign that allows you to choose from one of 10 different cartoon characters, including the monkey. Then, there are “method blocks” of programming on the left, including commands like “move,” “rotate,” “leave a trail,” “repeat” and “scale by.”

You drag these blocks to an empty script on the right, building them on top of one another and squeezing commands in between other commands the way you might play Tetris. Then, you can choose different prompts from a dropdown menu. So, for example, I could tell the app to execute the program I built when I tap the character, or when I shake the iPad, or when I simply press play.

For my first project, I attempted to make a space pod draw a line. I got the space pod to move across the screen, but it didn’t leave a line trail as I thought it would. I tried the same thing with a cupcake character, but still, no line drawn. In another project, I made a gorilla run around the border of the app, scaling up in size every time he turned a corner, but again, I was missing something.

This is where a “debugging” mode — something that lets you see the code being executed in real time to help you pinpoint your errors — would help; Hopscotch says it’s considering adding this feature.

I finally asked the app’s co-creator what I was doing wrong. It turns out that I was putting certain movement-specific blocks outside of the C-shaped “leave a trail” block, instead of inside of it. This kind of troubleshooting might be obvious to some people, but it just didn’t click for me without some basic knowledge of how visual programming languages work. In addition to the debugger, Hopscotch plans to build out more tutorials for this exact reason.

After I completed projects, I could save and share my work with others via email. I still need to hone my Hopscotch skills before I deem anything shareable, but I’ve seen projects by others that are pretty creative, including a chess game in which the Hopscotch characters represent different chess pieces.

These are just two apps in the growing area of coding apps for kids, but both offer value for beginners at varying stages of their learning processes.

Social-Shopping Website OpenSky Relaunches as Full-Fledged Online Marketplace

Lauren Goode — Wed, 01 May 2013 11:00:39 +0000

OpenSky, the two-year-old e-commerce site that took a stab at social shopping by allowing members to follow celebrity and expert curators, has relaunched as a full-fledged marketplace for small businesses. Merchants can open up their own “stores” on the site for free, and can sell to OpenSky’s 2.5 million members, with OpenSky taking a commission on items sold — like Etsy, but with a social twist, more established sellers and a much smaller community of shoppers. Items listed range from cosmetics to clothing to kitchen supplies. OpenSky is based in New York and has raised nearly $50 million in venture capital funding to date.

Along With Mayer, Jawbone Set to Announce Warner Music's Wiesenthal Will Join Board

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:51:59 +0000

According to sources, Warner Music’s Rob Wiesenthal will join Jawbone’s board of directors, alongside Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Mayer’s appointment was previously reported here by AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Wiesenthal, Warner Music Group’s COO, just joined the company in January 2013, following a role as executive vice president at Sony Corporation of America.

Exclusive: Eye-Fi CEO Yuval Koren Steps Down; Roxio Exec Matt DiMaria Takes Lead

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:00:31 +0000

Eye-Fi’s Yuval Koren has stepped down as CEO of the company, and will be replaced by tech industry veteran Matt DiMaria, who most recently was executive vice president and general manager at digital media software company Roxio. Koren co-founded Eye-Fi in 2005 along with three others, and has had two stints as CEO of the company, most recently taking on the role in May of 2011. He will remain an advisor to the company. DiMaria joins Eye-Fi, which makes Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards for cameras, at a time when more digital-imaging products are coming out with built-in WiFi, forcing a reevaluation in strategy at the Bay Area-based startup.

LeapFrog's Latest Gadget for Kids: Magic Pen for Both E-Reading and Writing

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:17:36 +0000

If you can tear your kid away from the iPad long enough, you might want to hand him or her the latest gadget from LeapFrog Enterprises.

The California-based company, known for its educational-based LeapPad tablets for kids, has just introduced a new device aimed at helping youngsters learn to read and write.

Called the LeapReader, the pen-like tool reads audio books aloud and teaches basic writing skills, reciting letters and words aloud as the child is writing them. It will also offer games and other incentive-based learning tools.

If you’re familiar with LeapFrog’s product line, the LeapReader will remind you a lot of the Tag and Tag Junior audio pens. The Tag systems, however, are limited to electronic book-reading, and don’t include the writing tutorials, which LeapFrog says will offer a more complete learning solution.

The rechargeable device has an expected battery life of five hours and can hold up to 40 downloaded titles, available through LeapFrog’s library. LeapFrog says there will be 100 digital content audio titles — like audio books and trivia challenges — available by year’s end, including titles in the Clifford series, “The Velveteen Rabbit” and Little Golden Books. These range in price from $5 to $10.

The LeapReader itself costs $50, and will come to market in July. It supports English-language learning only. Oh, and there’s another cost to factor in: The LeapReader works with “interactive learning paper” and Learn to Write workbooks — about 35 to 42 interactive pages — that cost $20.

Jawbone Acquires BodyMedia for More Than $100 Million, as Wearable Tech Gets More Intense

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:00:45 +0000

Looking to gain even more traction in the wearable health and fitness market, Jawbone is snapping up another health product company.

The Bay Area-based private company has acquired BodyMedia, Inc., a 14-year-old Pittsburgh-based company that makes health-monitoring armbands.

The move comes just a couple months after Jawbone, which makes the wearable Up fitness band in addition to popular audio devices, acquired data and digital-design companies Massive Health and Visere.

Jawbone acquired BodyMedia for more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the deal, although both companies declined to give more specifics about the financials of the deal.

So what’s the appeal of BodyMedia for Jawbone? Unlike the Massive Health and Visere buys, which were mainly for talent acquisition, BodyMedia’s value lies in both the team and the company’s patents. BodyMedia has had more than 80 patents issued over the years, many in the area of multi-sensor technology. As a combined entity, BodyMedia and Jawbone will have over 300 patents issued and filed.

While the $130 Jawbone Up wristband does many things — it tracks activity levels and sleep patterns, and works with a compatible mobile app for Android and iOS to log food consumption — it lacks some of the high-tech sensors that BodyMedia’s products have.

“I think the first phase of this market has been about accelerometers and what those can do,” Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman said in an interview. “Now it’s about getting even more granular, and also, how we can get all that tech into an efficient form factor.”

To that point, BodyMedia’s armbands, which will continue to be sold for the time being, contain four different types of sensors, which measure your skin temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin response (GSR) and overall movement.

But compared with the wristband form factor of the Jawbone Up, the BodyMedia bands are bigger, bulkier products. Earlier this year, BodyMedia introduced a slimmed-down version of its health-tracking band, called the Core 2, to compete in the growing category of barely noticeable, 24/7 wearable fitness devices.

So can we expect to see a Jawbone wristband with GSR sensors anytime soon? “We’re working on lots of things,” was all Rahman would say, adding, “We’re exploring where we would see sensors working, and how we can put more and more on top of the body.”

The BodyMedia team will stay in Pittsburgh and will remain intact, both companies say. BodyMedia’s Chris Robins will no longer serve as CEO of the company, and will instead become the general manager of BodyMedia and a vice president of business development at Jawbone.

Jawbone also said today that it’s opening up its Up mobile software to ten different fitness-app makers, including RunKeeper, MyFitnessPal, LoseIt, Withings, Sleepio and IFTTT (for workout prompts). Jawbone Up users with iOS devices will now be able to share data to and from these partner apps with the Up app.

Which Messaging App Is Right for You?

Lauren Goode — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:00:11 +0000

Smartphone messaging apps are all the rage these days.

But for some people they’re a mystery. Why would you use a messaging app when your phone’s SMS text messaging function is fine enough for photos and text, or if you use iMessage on the iPhone?

The point of these new smartphone messaging apps is to go beyond that, by letting you send different kinds of media, connect easily and cheaply with international friends, and even send pictures of yourself that will self-combust a few seconds after they’ve been opened. They also create new, mini social networks that companies hope make users stick around.

These apps, for the most part, use data to send the messages, so they won’t add to your tally if you have a monthly limit on SMS through your wireless carrier.

This week, I channeled my inner teenager and dove into a handful of different messaging apps, including WhatsApp, Snapchat and a new one called Burn Note. I see some of the benefit to using these apps. Some features are useful, like being able to loop in friends who own various phones on the same messaging thread. Others are just fun, like the app that let me doodle on a Google search pic before sending it off to a friend.

[ See post to watch video ]

But their usefulness depends a lot on whether your friends and family are using the same apps. Otherwise, the conversations in the apps stall, which happened to me. And it can be a little distracting, to say the least, to have messages flying through a second or third app on the phone.

Here’s a guide to help you evaluate how they work before you commit to using one.

Adding Multimedia to Messages

One of the most popular message apps available is WhatsApp, which has been around since 2009, and runs on iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows phones. It costs 99 cents to download, and WhatsApp has said that it plans to introduce a small annual fee to users in some countries.

WhatsApp is super simple in design, and yet it goes beyond regular old text messages with options to send — in addition to photos and videos — audio notes, contact cards and an active map image that pinpoints your location. It pulls in local business data, so I was able to get specific and message a friend my location at a Subway sandwich shop.

WhatsApp has a big international user base; two of my most active WhatsApp friends included a regular international traveler, who was in Vietnam at the time, and a friend from Canada.

WhatsApp worked fine for me, and I’ve continued to use it with at least one friend who regularly pings me through the app. My only gripe about the app was that the photos I took and sent through the app weren’t saved to my iPhone’s camera roll.

Another new app for multimedia is called MessageMe. MessageMe launched last month, and is available on iPhone and Android phones. Unlike WhatsApp, MessageMe is free to download. And MessageMe lets you doodle on the images you send. I sent an ailing co-worker a picture of chicken soup I found through Google search, and scribbled on it: “Feel better!”

MessageMe also allows you to send song excerpts directly through the app. From there, the recipient can buy the song from iTunes or Google Play.

Of the two, I used WhatsApp more, mostly because I had more friends using the service. But I prefer MessageMe’s design and features.

Making Your Messages Disappear

A growing trend in messaging is sending images and text that will vanish after the recipient has had the chance to view them — something that addresses some privacy concerns and raises other issues, like illicit-photo sharing among teen users.

A well-known app with this core feature is Snapchat. Free to download, it’s available on iOS and Android devices.

With Snapchat, you snap a picture or video from the app, and then determine the length of time the viewer can see it, from one to 10 seconds. You send it off, and shortly after the recipient opens the message, it disappears. If you want to get creative, you can also doodle or scribble text on the photo message. One friend sent me a Snapchat of his poker hand with the text “Not Winning.”

I just don’t understand why I’d use this on a regular basis, although I see the appeal for people leaving digital footprints they are worried about others seeing. Usually if I share a smartphone photo with friends, it’s because something made me think of them, or it’s a particularly cool image. And I’m okay with those people having that picture.

And, let’s say I did want to share a self-combusting pic: Snapchat users still have the ability to capture a “screen shot” of the image sent to them, if they’re quick enough.

A newer app that offers disappearing messages is Burn Note, which was spawned from an email service of the same name. These are text-only messages with a view time of up to 120 seconds. The messages first appear as black boxes. Pressing on your phone’s touchscreen will unveil the text within the boxes.

Burn Note lets you create a password for conversations as an additional layer to ensure privacy. There’s also a checkbox at the bottom of the app that’s meant to prevent messages from being copied, but I was still able to capture a screen shot of these messages.

The bottom line is, even if a messaging app promises to erase your messages for you, there are still ways in which they can be saved.

Payments and Group Messages

Remember GroupMe, the app that made group messaging easy and then was acquired by Skype (which was acquired by Microsoft) in 2011? This app is still around, and despite the fact that others have crowded into the same space, it has some new features that are worth checking out.

The main feature of GroupMe, which is free to use, is that friends with different devices can all be on the same thread. So, even if you have an iPhone, one friend has an Android device and another is using a feature phone, you’ll all get the messages. Whether GroupMe uses data service or SMS, however, depends partly on the kind of device you’re using.

Prior to doing research for this column, I hadn’t actively used GroupMe for about a year, and I was surprised to find that I liked it better than before. This time, I started a group with three friends to organize upcoming weekend plans. It worked well for us, except for one friend who said that the deluge of messages used up all of the memory allowed for texts on her flip phone.

GroupMe now lets you create a tab among friends — let’s say you’re out to dinner, and someone comes up short — and charge everyone’s credit cards from the app, provided that they’ve attached their payment information to the app.

This isn’t a new concept. An app called Venmo, to name just one, allows shared bill payments via text message. But it’s new to GroupMe. I created a bill on the app and sent it to my friends, but I’d have to wait for two or more people to “split in” before I could collect from them.

GroupMe also has a new feature for photos, provided you’re using the GroupMe app and you’re not on a feature phone. If you and your friends share a series of photos during your group conversation, you can conveniently swipe to the left to see all of the pictures arranged in a gallery on the side, instead of swiping up through the conversation to find that one shared photo you liked.

A lot of these messaging apps are stepping on one another with feature sets: WhatsApp offers group messaging as well, and the creator of MessageMe says the company plans to introduce bill-splitting to the app.

So, is it worth it to use another messaging app aside from your phone’s built-in capabilities? It ultimately depends on how valuable the extra features are to you — and whether the people in your work or social life are using them, too.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that both MessageMe and WhatsApp have indicated they will introduce bill-splitting to their apps. While MessageMe plans to do so, WhatsApp’s co-founder has said the company believes mobile payments to be a possible area for monetization in the future.

Wi-Fi, Voice Calling Come to More New York City Subway Stations

Lauren Goode — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 16:15:53 +0000

Busy New Yorkers are about to get even more distracted.

Today, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the body for New York City’s arteries of public transit, had completed the first phase of a citywide project to install Wi-Fi and voice-calling service in its subway stations.

Service is now expanded to 36 subway stations, including the six that were tested last year. Major stations, including Times Square and Rockefeller Center, are included in the expansion.

The project allows for voice calling, text messaging and Internet browsing from the station platforms — not on the trains themselves. And you’ll have to be a customer of participating wireless services to access voice and data.

Carriers AT&T and T-Mobile have already signed on to provide service for wireless voice and data for their customers. Executives from Verizon and Sprint were also in attendance at Gov. Cuomo’s press conference, as the two carriers say they plan to be a part of the network down under.

Wi-Fi is available through Boingo, and Transit Wireless is providing the infrastructure for the five-year project. Currently, the Wi-Fi is free through a sponsorship by HTC, which requires that the user watch an ad for the company’s new flagship smartphone before accessing the Wi-Fi.

The original plan to have the major stations wired by the end of 2012 was delayed in part by Hurricane Sandy.

New York City already offers free Wi-Fi service in 20 parks across five boroughs. And Google earlier this year brought free Wi-Fi to the Chelsea neighborhood (where the search giant has offices, marked by a giant sign), spanning a 13-block coverage zone.

So how does New York City stack up to other major metro areas? Surprisingly, it lags behind some in terms of underground Wi-Fi installation. Last year, London’s transportation authority introduced Wi-Fi service to 120 Tube stations, powered by Virgin Media, although it is mostly pay-as-you-go service and doesn’t include wireless calling.

In Asia, the JR East line in Tokyo is dotted with Wi-Fi hotspots, although, again, many require a prepaid pass; Hong Kong currently offers limited daily sessions of free Wi-Fi in 14 MTR stations. Indian Railways also just launched a pilot for free Wi-Fi Internet service on trains on the New Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani line.

But it’s often better to get it right than to get it first, as evidenced by the Wi-Fi service in San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. BART commuters were promised that Wi-Fi would be widely available three years ago, but service is still notoriously unreliable.

(Feature photo courtesy of Leone Fabre/Flickr Creative Commons. Photo of girl in subway station courtesy of Hernan Seoane/Flickr Creative Commons.)

An iPad Dog-Whisperer (And Other Crazy Pet Apps)

Lauren Goode — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:45:43 +0000

If you’ve ever said the mobile phone is man’s new best friend … who are you? No, really. You’ve replaced a drooling fluffernut that barks (or mews) with excitement every time you walk through the door with apps? Would your smartphone ever wear a shark suit and ride on a Roomba to the delight of the Internet?

Well, if you’re so inclined, now you can combine your two favorite things. There are a number of mobile apps that cater to pet owners, many for monitoring purposes, but some just for sheer fun. Here are a few to consider:

Reward your dog when he’s stuck in the house alone. Ever use the iPad to appease your child? A new app called Pavlov Dog Monitor aims to do the same thing with Fido. This $4.99 iPad app uses audio-sensor technology to listen for your dog’s barks when you’re away from home. It then triggers prerecorded videos — with you saying, “Bad boy!” or alternately, “Good boy!” — to help quiet the dog. For an extra $1.99, you can have the barking updates sent to a Facebook message folder, helping you monitor your dog’s agitation throughout the day. The entrepreneur behind the app is also working on a Bluetooth-equipped treat-dispenser that will give your dog an actual treat if he hasn’t been barking for awhile.

Don’t have a dog? You can test it out yourself by barking at the app. I tried this for about 2.5 seconds and then came to my senses.

Finally, get a good picture of your “active” pet. You know how when small children are having their portrait taken, the photographer coos and shakes a rattle to get them to smile? That’s what this app, called PetSnap, does for Whiskers. It costs $1.99, and is available for iOS devices only. There are more than 25 sound effects to choose from to grab your pet’s attention. Then, just when their ears perk up and they’re all, like, “Squirrel!” you can snap a photo, which is saved to your phone’s camera roll. There are even sound effects for your pet Space Llama or your exotic Zoo Frog.

Want to know what your dog is really thinking about you? That’s where Cross Tuner for iOS comes in. Using this app, you point your iPhone camera at your dog or cat (or zombie, or teddy bear, which for some reason are also options), and then talk to your pet. The app responds with a thought bubble for your pet, complete with an audio recitation. “If you’re not going to talk, at least change my litter,” was one of the thought bubbles I got when I briefly tested it. You can also record footage of your pet doing that adorable thing, and share it to Facebook or YouTube. But this free app is better in theory than in delivery. For example, you can’t import already-shot videos of your pet and attach fun audio captions to them.

Bonus app: This app makes Grumpy Cat look content. It’s the Angry Cat Simulator, available for iOS and Android. The free version has a limited number of angry cat characters; the “plus” version, which costs 99 cents, includes more than 60 angry animals — they aren’t limited to just cats. The ads on the free version are super irritating, though, so if you feel like spending a dollar on a mindless app today, I recommend the upgrade. Bear in mind that this app won’t turn pictures of your actual pet into angry cats (which I was hoping for when I first downloaded it); it merely simulates an angry cat, one that becomes more irate as you “pet” it on the screen, or shake your device.

Yes, this app encourages you to scratch a virtual cat’s chest. I rest my case.

Nest, Now Working With Utility Companies, Will Pay You to Meter the A/C This Summer

Lauren Goode — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:30:22 +0000

Nest Labs, the Bay Area-based startup that has made thermostats cool,* is promising to send you a check this summer if you’ll just keep your excessive air conditioning usage in check.

Yup, an actual check, ranging from $20 to $60. You just have to have a Nest. And sign up for certain plans with certain utility companies. And let the temperature at home creep up a little bit during “high-traffic” A/C hours.

Nest today announced that it’s going to be working with a handful of utility companies across the U.S. to sell its thermostats and offer immediate rebates like this one to potential customers.

If you sign up for a “Learn and Conserve” plan with Reliant, an NRG Energy company in Texas, the company will provide a Nest for you. Green Mountain Energy Company, also part of NRG, is going to offer a Nest for free to customers who sign up for certain plans in New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

National Grid, a utility company that serves the Northeast, is offering $100 rebates on Nest thermostats purchased through its website, bringing the cost down to $149 per device.

In addition, Nest is rolling out the aforementioned “Rush Hour Rewards” program in conjunction with some utility companies. If customers agree to adjust the Nest thermostat by a few degrees during the hours of peak energy usage, they’ll be rewarded with a seasonal rebate. The customer will be alerted to an impending “rush hour” via the Nest mobile app, and a pre-cooling setting is supposed to help adjust your home temperature ahead of time to keep the place comfortable. (Plus, if you get really hot, you can always manually adjust the temperature again.)

But what’s more interesting than the check you could potentially pocket is Nest’s move to partner with utility companies to sell and promote the product. Other, larger appliance makers have taken this tack before, and Nest is hoping it will lead to a bigger footprint in U.S. homes.

Nest, in case you’re not familiar with the product, is the brainchild of Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell, who oversaw the creation of the iPod at Apple. The thermostat first hit the market in the fall of 2011 and received many positive reviews from users, who praised its sensor-driven, Wi-Fi-connected, smart-energy capabilities in the home. It costs $249 and works with an app on iPhone, Android phones or desktop PCs.

Nest has declined to say how many units it has sold since launch, except to say that the second-generation version is “definitely appealing to more customers.” In January, GigaOM reported that Nest had raised $80 million in funding from existing and new investors.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Nest. In February of 2012, Nest was slapped with a lawsuit from Honeywell International, which identified seven patents it believed Nest infringed on with its hot new thermostat.** That suit is continuing.

And the company is going up against industrial giants that have been making thermostats for decades. Honeywell also recently introduced a new Wi-Fi-capable smart thermostat that improves upon the company’s previous “smart” thermostats.

* It is nearly impossible to write about high-tech thermostats and not use at least one terrible hot/cold pun.
** Crap, I did it again.

Can Travel Reviews Be Sexy? Triptease Thinks So.

Lauren Goode — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:00:53 +0000

If you’ve ever written a review on a travel website like TripAdvisor or Orbitz, you know it’s not exactly a thrilling experience.

Maybe you’ve just come back from the best vacation of your life, or maybe it was a horrible experience and you want to warn others never to book that hotel. In either case, you fill out a standard review form, press “submit” and send it out to the Internet without a second thought.

A new app called Triptease wants to change this whole process by making it easy to write concise reviews with large, eye-catching images that look like they’re straight out of Travel + Leisure, or National Geographic Traveler. In doing so, this London-based startup company hopes to become a destination where people not only write reviews but also spend significant time researching and booking travel plans.

[ See post to watch video ]

Triptease, which is free to use, is available on the Web and also as an iPad-only mobile app. The company says an Android app is also in the works.

I’ve been using Triptease for the past week, writing and sharing about half a dozen travel reviews. I’ve accessed it from both the iPad app and the website. There weren’t any notable differences between the website and mobile app, except that I prefer to type on a laptop over an iPad.

Triptease does what it promises to do: It makes travel writing fun, and the results are slick. I really liked composing reviews, whether it was for Central Park or a hotel in Tokyo, and channeling my inner travel photographer to find the right photo or photos to illustrate my reviews. Triptease requires that you get at least three “likes” on each review before you can write another one, so the app really encourages social sharing in order to get eyeballs on your write-ups.

The problem is that Triptease doesn’t offer much more than that — at least not right now. It’s okay for browsing, and there are around 3,000 reviews currently on Triptease. But the reviews don’t go very deep: Each one is just one person’s opinion of that spot or location, and is limited to 1,200 characters, which results in a short write-up that doesn’t include much detail.

And one of Triptease’s biggest drawbacks is that it doesn’t include very many negative reviews. About 95 percent of the reviews on the site have a rating over five (out of 10). Call me a cynical traveler, but when I look up travel reviews, I tend to go to the one-star write-ups first. I want to know about the deal-breakers — reports of bed bugs, cold-water-only, terrible service, icky stains on the carpet and hotels featuring photos that are far off from reality, like a bad online dating profile.

Occasionally, I saw a critical comment attached to an overwhelmingly-positive Triptease review. For example, in a review of Balthazar in London, one commenter said, “I think Brasserie Chavot is the better place to eat. Not sure this warrants such a high mark.”

But that brings me to my other gripe about Triptease: Currently, the only way you can add upon an existing review is by leaving remarks in the comments. You can’t contribute to the overall rating of the place. In this way, it’s more like an online magazine than it is a reviews site that values each contribution equally. The most visible opinion of any reviewed location is that of whoever wrote about it first.

Let’s say you’re not dissuaded by this, though, and you still want to dive into Triptease.

When you download Triptease on the iPad, you’ll be prompted to sign up or log in by either connecting through Facebook or creating a new Triptease account. The main page has three options: Editor’s Pick, Following and Popular, a good way to filter out some of the thousands of reviews. Following shows you the reviews of the other “teasers” you are following (fortunately, they’re not called “trippers”).

In the upper right-hand corner of the screen, you’ll see three, smaller bits of text: Explore, Add Review and You. Explore is Triptease’s search function. Here you can search for a hotel, the zoo, that Italian restaurant you heard was good, or a landmark. The reviews are generally attractive, often featuring one large photo and an elegant block of text right next to it.

I liked that they included personal touches and first-hand experiences. “It was a bumpy ride, and we were very glad we had the GPS in the car” is much more helpful to me than, “This hotel is located approximately two hours from the airport.”

Creating my own travel review was easy and addictive. First I identified where I traveled, and when. Then I was prompted to upload a photo, either from the iPad’s camera roll or from my computer (most photos are supplied by the reviewer, although Triptease does offer a database of photos to choose from for popular locations). Using the iPad’s touchscreen, I could edit and move my photo. I then added my sub-1,200-character text component.

You can choose from six “themes,” which give the write-up some visual pizzazz. Five of these themes allow for just one photo, but a theme called Tripfive lets you upload four small additional photos, which I used for my review of a hotel in Costa Rica.

Finally, I assigned a rating to my reviews, ranging from 0 to 10, with 10 being the highest possible rating. I gave mostly high ratings. The one exception was a sushi restaurant here in New York that I feel is, well, overrated.

From there, I shared my reviews via Facebook and email. I received enough “likes” to continue writing reviews, and fielded some comments from other members in the Triptease community.

Triptease isn’t the first app that aims to make travel reviews “pretty” on the iPad. Earlier this year, I wrote about a new iPad app called Desti that not only encourages crowdsourced reviews, but promises better search results when you use natural language, such as, “Where can I find a restaurant near here that’s dog-friendly?”

Last year, I reviewed another travel app for iPad, called Stuck on Earth, which contains beautiful, user-captured photos to offer a travel guide around the world. It bases these recommendations on your personality type. But it’s more inspirational than actionable.

True jet-setters should be aware that none of these apps, including Triptease, allow you to search for or book flights. Triptease says, however, that it wants to position itself more toward the booking end of travel. It currently has a limited number of pages for hotels that allow you to book rooms directly from the app.

Triptease is a fun app for creating good-looking travel reviews. It has potential. But right now it’s still luring consumers to the app, and is mostly a travel app you go to after the fact, rather than the main squeeze you rely on for all your travel needs.

Lenovo's Really Ridiculously Big-Looking Table PC to Ship in Late June

Lauren Goode — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:06:13 +0000

Remember this guy — the giant “table PC” Lenovo showed off at International CES this year?

It’s now this much closer to your coffee table — or, replacing your coffee table. Lenovo today announced the Horizon is available for preorder and is expected to ship in late June. Prices start around $1,700, right in line with what Lenovo indicated in January.

In case you missed the news around CES time, this is a 27-inch, all-in-one “desktop” that can be propped up or laid flat on the table, and is geared toward game playing in addition to regular old computer activities. And in case its size didn’t give it away, the Horizon is meant to be used in the home, not on, say, an airplane tray, although Lenovo points out that it includes a built-in battery so it can be easily moved around the house.

The multi-finger touchscreen PC is running Windows 8 and comes with an Intel Core i7 chip and Nvidia GeForce graphics capabilities. Lenovo says the customized games include Raiding Company, Draw Race 2 and King of the Opera from Ubisoft, as well as Monopoly from Electronic Arts.

I played a quick game of air hockey on the device back in January, and I’ll admit that it was pretty fun. And it’s easy to see why some families might like a tabletop PC for game playing and picture browsing.

But this is a behemoth of a device, and it’s not alone in the big-screen market. There’s also the Sony Vaio Tap 20 and the Toshiba Excite 13 — a much smaller tablet, but one that is, again, meant for the home.

And as we know, PCs are hurting a bit these days. It’s likely going to take more than giant screens to fill the giant gap in the market.

Six Cool Apps You Need to See From D: Dive Into Mobile (Video)

Lauren Goode — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 17:34:43 +0000

At this week’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference, we were feeling particularly app-happy, as one might expect at a mobile-phone-focused event.

But the apps showcased as part of our App Marketplace weren’t your average location-based-layered-photo-sharing, “like Instagram-for-pets” apps, as far as features go.

CellScope, which will officially launch later this year, was the most interesting of the bunch. It turns your iPhone into an otoscope — the device doctors stick into your ear to diagnose ear infections — with the help of an attachable speculum.

Heatma.ps, which last year introduced an app of the same name, gave us a first look at Wisdom. This new product offers easy A/B testing for app developers looking to get feedback on design changes before they take the plunge and redo their apps. Then there was Fresh Paint, a Windows 8 app that makes Bob Rosses (“happy little clouds”) out of all of us — but instead of a palette, you’re using a tablet.

Zappar lets anyone create an augmented-reality “skin” over physical objects: Point your phone at a poker chip, or a photo of a band, and it will cue a video clip or other media. GoBank wants to make banking entirely mobile, and Lulu has created a ladies-only app in which women are supposed to rate the men they know and alert each other to bad eggs.

And those were just a handful of the app companies that were there. This video from the conference offers a quick glimpse of what some of these apps can do:

[ See post to watch video ]

Hopscotch for iPad Makes Coding Kid-Friendly (Video)

Lauren Goode — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 21:06:32 +0000

More and more schools have been ramping up STEM education — science, technology, engineering and math — in the classroom. Even the White House has thrown its weight behind STEM initiatives for kids.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean STEM learning is bundles of fun for kids, so one entrepreneur is putting a kid-friendly face on a common programming language.

Called Hopscotch, this iPad-only app uses visual programming language, in which users drag “blocks” of code into a scripting area in order to build programs. Aimed primarily at girls age 8 and up, Hopscotch is meant to utilize the touch-friendly tablet and eliminate the frustration common with code syntax.

Hopscotch was created by Jocelyn Leavitt, who, along with her co-founder, was inspired by a lack of female engineers at her previous job. “So many iPads are going into schools, and a lot of teachers don’t know what to do with this iPad. This gives you some control over a programming language,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt joined AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes onstage at D: Dive Into Mobile today to demo the app. Using an iPad, Leavitt grabbed color-coded blocks within the app that said “scale by,” “move distance,” “rotate degrees” and more, to create a somersaulting dinosaur. Leavitt also sought the help of the audience to develop Hopscotch code that would make a cupcake draw a square.

Another interesting feature: Hopscotch includes iPad-specific motion controls. When a user shakes or tilts the iPad, a programming function is performed. Lastly, Leavitt demonstrated how projects can be shared from Hopscotch via email.

The app hits the App Store tomorrow, and is free to download.

Hopscotch is hardly the first product to address the kid-education market with a new visual programming language. Years ago, Microsoft introduced a product called Kodu, originally created for the Xbox, that let teens create their own code. Last year, Google introduced Blockly, which lets users create applications by stringing together graphical blocks of code.

In fact, Hopscotch is based on a popular visual programming language called Scratch, which was created at MIT back in 2006.

But Scratch is a browser-based visual programming language, and Leavitt says she just wanted “to do more with it. We wanted to build an interface that was aesthetically appealing, designed for mobile and with kids — specifically girls — in mind.”

[ See post to watch video ]

(Stock photo courtesy of Flickr/Creative Commons)

Can a 24/7 Medical App Save Your Life? Better Thinks So.

Lauren Goode — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:40:25 +0000

Imagine this scenario: You’re flying across the world for a business conference, and something goes wrong — with your health. You’re in a foreign country, and you’re not sure of your options for medical care.

You reach for your mobile phone, and instead of calling for help, you open up an app. A doctor is on call for you, 24 hours a day. Private care and a flight back home are quickly arranged.

That’s the world imagined by Better, a new company funded by the Social+Capital Partnership. Better has made a mobile app that taps into the vast database of the Mayo Clinic to provide immediate health care information and assistance.

Appearing onstage today at D: Dive Into Mobile, Better founder Geoff Clapp gave a demo and explained his vision for better health care through his new mobile app.

Feigning stomach pains, Clapp went through a “symptoms checker” on the iPhone app, which pointed him to celiac disease as a top result. He pressed a button to call a Mayo Clinic nurse (who, for the purpose of this demo, was waiting for the call — but Better promises nurses and doctors can be accessible in everyday situations, as well).

The nurse, Linda, asked him a few questions, then explained that celiac disease is a medical term for gluten intolerance. Her diagnosis was inconclusive over the phone, but she offered some suggestions. The Mayo Clinic knows that he’s traveling on the East Coast right now, so the clinic scheduled a blood test for when Clapp arrives back in California. The nurse also emailed him a list of gluten-free restaurant options nearby in New York.

“What happens when you Google this? You have celiac — or an aneurysm. This is unbelievably scary stuff for most people,” Clapp said.

Better is available as a beta app now, and is expected to officially launch this summer. It will be iPhone-only to start; the company also plans to create an Android app.

There is a free version of Better, but the pricing is where it gets interesting. For free, you get access to the Mayo Clinic website, and you can create health records for you and your family. The subscription plans are still being worked out, Clapp says.

One, for example, might include a personal coach for weight loss or quitting smoking. Another subscription level would include 24/7 access to a Mayo nurse, who can coordinate appointments, tests and prescriptions for you. The next level would include an always-on-call, Mayo-trained doctor — and emergency services that include travel bookings. That’s the “black card,” Clapp says, comparing it to the American Express card for high rollers.

This will all range from around $90 a month to several thousand dollars a month, although Better believes the sweet spot is between $100 and $500.

With health care costs in the U.S. increasingly getting pushed onto the patient, shelling out $100 to $500 a month might not be ideal. Clapp was quick to point out that Better is HIPAA-compliant and can be paid for using pre-tax health savings account dollars. And, he says, if Better isn’t something you feel you need for yourself — maybe you want it as a supplemental health care product for your family.

Even at the less-expensive levels, “You can send in a picture of your child’s rash, or research diabetes,” he said, knowing the data you get back is coming from the Mayo Clinic, not Dr. Google and every source on the Web.

Hands-On With Mozilla Firefox OS (Video)

Lauren Goode — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:15:55 +0000

Yesterday at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs made the case for a new, Firefox-branded mobile operating system (even taking Walt Mossberg’s introductory “What the f**k?” question in stride).

Afterward, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich — who is also the creator of JavaScript — gave me a demo of the upcoming Firefox OS on a developer phone, showing how it aims to improve app discovery and create an experience where app use and Web browsing are deeply intertwined. One bonus nugget: Eich showed off a native AppMaker app that lets almost anyone create a new app right from the mobile phone. Video below:

[ See post to watch video ]

Picturelife Tackles Simple Photo Storage

Lauren Goode — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:00:23 +0000

My digital photo life is a mess.

I have thousands of photos scattered throughout my computer, stored on backup drives, blasted to social networks and copied in different cloud services. There are currently 3,025 photos stored on my iPhone. And let’s not forget about the pictures in iPhoto.

It shouldn’t be so hard to get all of these photos organized in one place.

That’s what Picturelife, a recently launched cloud-storage service, aims to do. Picturelife, which was created by three startup entrepreneurs, wants to be Switzerland amid fractured photo-nations. It promises to do all the photo syncing for you when you’re not looking, to and from your desktop, mobile apps and various social network accounts. It also stores video clips.

[ See post to watch video ]

It works on both Mac and Windows computers. A full-featured version of Picturelife is available for iPhone and iPad, but the mobile app for Android is a limited version. There isn’t a Windows mobile app yet.

To start, Picturelife gives you five gigabytes of cloud storage for free; after that, it costs $7 a month or $70 a year for 100GB, and $15 a month or $150 a year for 300GB.

Maybe you’re more organized than I am, and you’re thinking: I’m already pretty committed to another media-storage service, like Flickr, or SmugMug, or the popular cloud service Dropbox. Or maybe you’re content with iPhoto.

Picturelife does have a lot of the same features as similar services. It also costs more than some (though less than Dropbox). And as a “freemium” service that is charging customers, it has some new-service kinks it needs to work out.

But it offers a few features the others don’t. It performs simple imports from your other photo sources, including iPhoto, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, SmugMug and iPhoto. It has pretty clear-cut privacy controls, which you might appreciate if you’re fed up with the way Facebook handles privacy. And it offers incentives like bonus storage space just for sharing photos with friends.

I signed up for Picturelife, selected my plan and downloaded both the Mac desktop app and the iOS mobile app. Picturelife then appeared in the top menu bar on my computer screen, and as a “droplet” icon on the desktop. Picturelife doesn’t compress photo files, and it supports RAW files, too.

The desktop app’s layout sort of mirrors iPhoto, but has a nice, modern feel to it. On the left-hand side is a list of photo categories: Timeline (photos sorted by date), Albums, Places and All Pictures. On the right are a bunch of photo thumbnails, which can be size-adjusted. While the photo thumbnails are loading, the pictures appear with cool-looking color bars.

When you first log in, Picturelife should ask you which folders you want to sync your photos from, like Pictures, Downloads, Desktop, iPhoto or iCloud Photo Stream. In my experience, Picturelife simply began indexing all of the photos that existed on my computer — including work photos, screen grabs and photos from really old backup drives.

I was a little irritated by this, because Picturelife just grabbed a bunch of photos I didn’t want there. It also led to some duplicates, which Picturelife promises to avoid. Picturelife said it has fixed a bug that caused the service to pull from certain folders — in my case, an old iPhoto folder I had stored on a backup drive — and said that users should and will be given more initial control over the onboarding process.

After uploading the photos from my computer, I set about transferring the 3,000 photos from my iPhone to Picturelife. I could do this via the Picturelife mobile app, provided I was connected to a Wi-Fi network, or by tethering my phone to the computer. Syncing via Wi-Fi would have taken a full day, whereas tethering only took about 10 minutes.

From then on, the Picturelife iPhone app automatically grabbed any new picture I took with my phone and synced it with my account. This isn’t particularly innovative: Apple’s Photo Stream does this, too, though there’s a 1,000-picture limit on the photos you can keep on your device in Photo Stream at a time. (And syncing across four products — Photo Stream, iCloud, iPhoto and iPhone — is admittedly a little confusing. At least Picturelife has one brand name.)

I also linked some of my other accounts to Picturelife to import and share photos. I did this by going first to Picturelife settings, and then to “accounts.” I connected to Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, but also had the option to connect to Google, Tumblr, Flickr and others. Picturelife quickly sucked up the photos from those accounts. It even imported photos in which other people tagged me on Facebook.

I liked Picturelife’s smart search function — which iPhoto doesn’t have — although it could be a bit smarter. When I searched for photos from “summer,” more than 600 photos came up that were from the past few summers. When I searched for photos from “Japan,” images from my recent trip to Japan came up. But when I searched for photos from a “New Orleans wedding,” a whopping 663 results came up, most of which were not from the wedding. Picturelife says it’s continually improving the search feature.

Sharing select photos from Picturelife to my social networks was pretty standard. Most photo services do this. But Picturelife makes privacy controls refreshingly simple. All photos are private by default. Should you decide to share a photo or an album, you can select, in the “Info” section of each photo, whether you want to send it to specific people, a group of people or a family member.

And even after you share it, if you change your mind, you can later go back and make it entirely private. I shared a photo to Twitter as part of my test, and later was able to adjust the settings so that Twitterers couldn’t see anything from the link I shared.

Picturelife’s app for iOS, like the desktop app, has viewing options for Timeline, Album and All Photos. In my experience, the app was fast and fluid, and offers some handy one-tap options like “Look for New Photos” or “Sync Entire Camera Roll.”

I did, however, encounter some minor bugs. Some of my pictures said “null” on them in my own Picturelife account, and the service misidentified the locations of some of my media in the “Places” map. And currently there isn’t an easy way to find imported video clips.

So Picturelife still has room for improvement. But I can definitely say that it has enough features to make it an appealing option for photo-happy consumers.