In this case, Mr. Kohler failed to meet his obligations and failed to honor the direction of this court. My hope is that he will use his time in jail to reflect upon his behavior.

– Oregon Judge Dennis Graves, who sent a juror to jail for two days for texting during a trial

Director Henry-Alex Rubin recalls Mr. Bateman half-jokingly remarking that he was making a silent movie. “There was a lot of having to sort of communicate and process the receiving of an answer without talking,” says Mr. Bateman. “It could have gone really bad with a lot of eyebrow acting.”

The revolution in communicating via text, often on tiny phone screens, is presenting filmmakers with a huge challenge: How do you show it on the big screen?

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With that action, Mr. Dijkland’s text joined the tens of billions of messages that are processed every day from a fast-growing crowd of mobile messaging apps.

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But Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter has a different interpretation. He thinks texting, with its abbreviations and odd constructions and novel usage, is “a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses.”

“A whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as batting around when they’re using their little devices,” he said in a talk at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., today.

The trick is realizing that there’s a difference between written language and spoken language, according to McWhorter.

“Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk,” he said.

It’s very natural to decry the decline of formal language — in fact, McWhorter found a citation as old as 63 A.D. of someone bemoaning the corruption of written Latin.

But textspeak, in fact, contains structural features of an emerging language.

For instance, the texting convention “LOL” doesn’t necessarily mean “laughing out loud” anymore. “Now it’s evolved into something much subtler,” McWhorter said. It’s become a marker of accommodation, used to fill gaps in a conversation. This is similar to “ne” in Japanese and “yo” among young black people in the U.S., McWhorter said. The technical term for it is “pragmatic particle.”

Another example is “slash,” which used in textspeak indicates changing the topic.

When young people can switch between the language of text and the language of the rest of their society, it’s actually a great thing, McWhorter said, because being bilingual is widely acknowledged to be good for your brain.

The company will launch an update to its Messenger app for iOS and Android on Thursday afternoon, allowing users to send short voice messages to one another inside of the application, up to a minute in length.

A clever addendum, bringing Messenger up to par with Apple’s iMessage service (which lets users send voice messages via the voice memo app) and BlackBerry Messenger, while giving it a leg up on basic SMS.

Which is really the service with the biggest target on its back. SMS, the 160-character message service ubiquitous in every country, dominates communication across the globe, from developing countries to the so-called “first world.” And all of the big mobile players like Apple, Google and Facebook want in on that sort of communication virality.

That virality is the key to growth, especially in developing countries inside of Africa, South America and Asia that Facebook is targeting as the next major areas of expansion. Find a way to break into those markets through free, easy communication services — like, for example, letting users access Facebook Messenger for Android without the need for a Facebook account — and you’ll find a way to grow your user base from the ground up via word of mouth.

Also particularly noteworthy: In Facebook’s update on Thursday, Canadian users on iOS can start using Messenger to make VOIP calls inside the app. That’s a pretty Skypey, Google Voice-y move by the social giant. I can only assume that if the test takes off in Canada, the next move down the line will be video calling.

In essence, owning the chains of communication is Facebook’s best path to growth. Now that the service has saturated most areas of the developed world, hitting the billion-user mark and seeing its growth curve begin to flatten, Facebook must think differently: What are the ways people communicate with one another outside of Facebook? And how can we own them, too?

Cloning Snapchat was just a drop in the bucket. Expect more in 2013.

Facebook plans to launch the app in the coming weeks, sources say, sometime before the end of the year.

Like Messenger and Camera, Facebook’s new app is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app. After the launch, this will bring Facebook’s app count up to four individual apps (five, if you count Instagram).

Facebook could not be reached for comment late Sunday evening.

Snapchat rose to prominence over the last year thanks to its capacity for sending private, “self-destructable” messages. A user can send a photo message to another friend inside the service, choosing the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing (usually a matter of seconds). After the user views the photo message for the allotted amount of time, the photo deletes itself from the sender’s phone and the receiver’s phone, and Snapchat deletes the message from its servers. Snapchat also recently added video message capabilities to its service.

Facebook’s competing app will do much the same thing. After users open the new app, they are presented with a list of current message threads between them and their friends. Hold a finger down on one of the threads, and a timer comes up to ask how long the message should be viewable. From there, users are able to send the message — which, just like on Snapchat, will only be viewable for a fixed period of time.

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

The new Facebook app comes on the heels of a potential new round of financing for Snapchat. Last week, Om Malik reported that Benchmark Capital will soon lead an $8 million venture round for Snapchat, at a rumored valuation of $50 million.

“We haven’t heard anything from Mark [Zuckerberg] about a Snapchat clone,” Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in an emailed statement on Sunday evening. “We’re big fans of Instagram and the Facebook platform and we look forward to watching Mark continue to innovate and grow his company.”

For any start-up, watching Facebook move deeper into your territory is certainly daunting. But not all of Facebook’s home-grown efforts have killed off the competition. Facebook Questions, for example, was supposed to signal the end of Q&A site Quora. However, Facebook retired its Questions product after it failed to take off.

To put it another way: May the best app win.

We’re headed to New York City for this gathering — our first one held in the Big Apple — with a lineup that is strongly focused on the globalization of mobile and its worldwide implications.

At the D10 conference, we announced Google mobile guru Andy Rubin, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, but now there’s more:

First up, we have Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of engineering.

Facebook is unquestionably a mobile superpower — with more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 2012. But mobile products and monetization of them are the company’s biggest weakness and potential source of competition.

No surprise — Facebook is currently in the process of transforming itself from a Web-first to a mobile-first mentality.

Schrep, who joined Facebook in 2008 from Mozilla, is a key steward of that shift, as Facebook builds its infrastructure, systems and engineering to be mobile-first.

With a couple of computer science degrees from Stanford, Schroepfer is on the board of Ancestry.com and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

We’ve also landed Jan Koum, the co-founder and CEO of blockbuster cross-platform messaging app WhatsApp.

As a free texting alternative, WhatsApp has insane global scale. It’s the No. 1 paid app in more than 50 countries on iOS. And it’s now one of the Top 10 apps of all time on Android, with more than 50 million installs.

As Ina Fried and I started planning Dive Into Mobile, we were cautious about committing to app makers early in the process, given that the market is so incredibly volatile. But it’s pretty clear that the story of WhatsApp will still be compelling in late October.

Just to give you a sense of the acceleration of this app: As of February 2012, WhatsApp said it was sending two billion messages per day — having doubled from one billion just three months before.

Koum, a Yahoo alum, has somehow managed to keep WhatsApp almost entirely off the press and speaker circuit radar — while fending off acquisition offers aplenty, from what we hear. He’s only ever spoken on stage about WhatsApp at Mobile World Congress, where WhatsApp took home the award for best overall app.

Schrep and Koum join an already strong lineup of timely speakers:

Android head Rubin returns to the D stage to talk about where things are headed. In addition to finding out what tasty dessert follows Jelly Bean, Rubin is likely to talk about the challenges of chasing Apple, bringing Android to ever-lower prices, and its latest efforts to crack the tablet market.

Nokia chief Elop is in the midst of a bold but difficult transition, as he aims to remake the Finnish phone maker. The company’s Windows Phone effort has taken off more slowly then hoped, while its existing Symbian phone business has tailed off faster than expected, adding financial pressure to the big strategic shift.

The result is that Nokia has had to cut jobs, close plants and make other moves designed to give the company the resources it needs. While some cutting was an inevitable part of the transition, the most recent efforts involved deeper moves, including the killing off of the company’s next-generation Meltemi operating system for low-end phones.

Mozilla leader Kovacs has grand ambitions of building a standalone operating system for the open Web. He’s working with Telefónica to release HTML5 devices, which should be a well-timed topic this fall when Dive Into Mobile kicks off.

There will be a lot more to come, of course, including some extraordinary demos, so we’ll update our speaker list as soon as we have more news.

As with all D events, tickets are selling fast.

Also to keep on your radar is our second annual D: Dive Into Media conference, next February in Laguna Niguel, which is being run by ATD media ninja Peter Kafka. The conference will delve into the extraordinary changes the media business is undergoing in every sector — from television and film to music and publishing.

And texting is increasingly becoming the communication application of choice for teens, while actually talking on the phone is on the decline.

The not-entirely-surprising data comes from the latest Pew Internet Research Center report, which included responses from nearly 800 U.S. teens, ages 12 to 17.

The study showed that the average number of texts sent by teens of all ages on a typical day rose from 50 a day to 60 a day between 2009 and 2011. Older teens, ages 14 to 17, showed an even greater increase, from a median of 60 texts a day in 2009 to a hundred texts a day in 2011.

And while 30 percent of teens said in 2009 that they used a landline to speak with friends, only 14 percent now say they talk on a landline daily. A third say they never use a landline (the study didn’t seem to offer data on those who asked, “What’s a landline?”). Even talking to friends on cellphones is edging down, from 38 percent in 2009 to just 26 percent in 2011.

Interestingly, though, the biggest texters were also the heaviest talkers, signaling that teens who are into their cellphones … are really into their cellphones.

In general, more teens now own some type of mobile device. Some 77 percent of U.S. teens now own some kind of cellphone, up 2 percent from a couple years ago. There’s no real difference in gender, it turns out, with boys and girls equally as likely to own cellphones, but younger boys — ages 12 and 13 — are the least likely to be early (early) adopters of cellphones.

Most teens are still using basic phones: Some 23 percent of those surveyed own smartphones, compared to 54 percent who own basic cellphones. But the patterns are shifting increasingly toward smartphones, especially among older teens.

Of course, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Just under half of U.S. adults now own smartphones, according to this recent report, outnumbering adults who own feature phones by 5 percent.

The new Pew study also shows that teens with parents who have higher education levels are more likely to own cellphones; teens in the ’burbs and teens who are very active on social media are also more likely to have mobile devices, Pew reports.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata)

Citing the fact that more than 3,000 people died last year in distraction-related crashes, the NTSB is calling on all 50 states to ban the use of personal electronics while driving. And, contrary to early reports, it is proposing there be no exception for handsfree devices.

“No call, no text, no update, is worth a human life,” Board chairman Deborah Hersman said in a statement on Tuesday. “It is time for all of us to stand up for safety by turning off electronic devices when driving.”

While many states have created their own laws outlawing talking and texting while driving, most allow the use of handsfree devices, such as bluetooth headsets or speakerphones.

The NTSB is proposing that devices that aid in driving, presumably navigation systems, be allowed, as well as emergency use of devices.

Although the NTSB is calling on the states to pass such laws, the U.S. government has been known to threaten the withholding of federal highway funds in order to get its way on issues such as speed limits or mandatory seat belt laws.

The carriers and cellular trade industry group CTIA have supported distracted driving campaigns as well as various legistlation, while Apple, Microsoft, Google and others have increasingly been building hands-free capabilities for both dialing and texting into their devices.

The CTIA offered praise for the notion of curbing distracted driving, though it only offered specific support for the notion of banning texting by hand.

“CTIA and the wireless industry agree that when drivers are behind the wheel, safety should be their number one priority,” CTIA CEO Steve Largent said in a statement. “Manual texting while driving is clearly incompatible with safety, which is why we have historically supported a ban on texting while driving. As far as talking on wireless devices while driving, we defer to state and local lawmakers and their constituents as to what they believe are the most appropriate laws where they live.”

There are also an increasing number of apps, some offered by carriers, that allow parents and drivers to shut off most cellular functions when a device is being used in a moving vehicle. In some cases, the device can automatically text a reply noting that the recipient is driving.

(Image credit: ©iStockphoto.com | lisafx)

What did it say? Absolutely nothing. Ms. Delano, a 29-year-old marketing account manager who lives in Miami, sent a blank text — on purpose.

Her husband wrote back immediately with a question mark. Ms. Delano asked him what he meant. He wrote again and asked if she had sent him a text. She feigned surprise. Then her husband called her.

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While U.S. cellphone users sent and received more than one trillion texts in the second half of 2010, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, that was just an 8.7 percent increase from the prior six months. It was the slimmest gain since texting exploded last decade.

Text traffic will come under more pressure in the months ahead. This week, Apple Inc. showed off an application that will allow iPhone and iPad owners to bypass carriers and send text messages over the Internet to other people with Apple devices.

Google Inc., whose Android software is the most popular operating system on smartphones, has also recently worked on a messaging application, a person familiar with the matter said.

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Distracted driving is a big worry for many parents, but one start-up is betting that its technology will help alleviate some of those concerns. California-based Location Labs is selling a tool that detects when the phone is in a moving car and limits the owner’s ability to make calls and texts.

The system locks the driver’s cellphone screen, redirects calls to voicemail, blocks text message alerts and lets parents log on via the Web and see what is happening with the device while the teen is driving. In case of emergencies, parents can set three key contacts who are allowed to get through. And teens can override the system if they’re a passenger rather than a driver, but Location Labs will alert their parents when that happens.

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If you had to pick the hotsy-totsy start-up to win the media darling of South by Southwest award for 2011–following in the precious footsteps of Foursquare and Twitter from years past–it would probably have to be GroupMe.

The group messaging/conference call/location/photo sharing service has, as these things tend to, garnered a lot of heat since its debut less than a year ago.

That has, of course, also meant the requisite big venture funding–$11.5 million in total–for the New York-based GroupMe, including from SV Angel, betaworks, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Khosla Ventures.

And, no surprise, the dead-simple idea now has many start-up rivals, all vying to use combine mobile, texting, social, location, groups and smartphones into some unholy megatrend.

Still, GroupMe has built a slick little offering, which is likely to get scooped up by some bigger entity (or perhaps just copied, which is the sincerest form of flattery in tech).

Until then, its Co-founders Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci are enjoying their day in the sun–quite literally, at their free grilled-cheese-and-beer giveaway at SXSW this weekend in Austin, Texas.

Here is my video interview with their-future-is-so-bright-they-have-to-wear-shades pair:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110314/video-groupme-dudes-talk-group-messaging-phenom-and-drink-beer-at-the-same-time/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110225/early-adopter-think-that-restaurant-looks-shady-donteat-at-lets-you-know-for-sure/ http://allthingsd.com/20110225/early-adopter-think-that-restaurant-looks-shady-donteat-at-lets-you-know-for-sure/#comments Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:01:48 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=36812

It’s happened to everyone–the terrible fallout from eating at that unfamiliar restaurant with the spoons that were a little too greasy, or the chicken that was served a little too rare.

My worst was bad dim sum.

Max Stoller obviously knows the feeling.

So, this computer science junior at New York University has developed donteat.at, a Web service that saves New Yorkers the pain caused by an unclean restaurant, one Foursquare check-in at a time.

To understand how the app works, one needs a little background.

In New York City, the health inspector grades restaurants on a golf-style points scale, where less is better.

More than 28 points will land the restaurant on a flagged list that triggers frequent inspections, or even a shut-down, if the score does not go down.

Stoller’s app, donteat.at, parses the weekly-updated public data set for those flagged establishments and keeps an updated list of violators.

From then on, if a donteat.at user ever checks in via Foursquare to a restaurant that has been flagged, they receive a text message alerting them to that fact.

“In under a minute–I worked very hard on that,” said Stoller.

To activate the service, users visit www.donteat.at, authorize the link with a Foursquare account, then continue to use Foursquare normally.

There is no additional user interface.

“It’s just there.” Stoller said, “Most users just come to the Web site once.”

Stoller’s application of the data and the always watching over you user experience turned a relatively simple data mashup to something more like a public service.

Stoller developed donteat.at for the NYC Big Apps competition, a contest sponsored by the NYC Economic Development Corporation and the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication.

NYC Big Apps challenges developers to build new use cases for New York City’s massive public data mine, which includes almost 400 separate structured data sets, ranging from bike rack locations to the city’s full financial data.

“The idea is just to make all that data more accessible,” Stoller said.

Stoller was looking for something productive to do over his winter break while home in Long Island, and heard about the contest.

“I don’t have any real hobbies other than food, so this is what I went with,” he explained.

In some ways, Stoller has poked a hole in a problem that media organizations and advertisers have been picking at for years now–how to deliver highly relevant information to the right people at the most opportune moment.

The key seems to be tapping into the user, not the data.

Stoller’s application, rather than putting a map mashup of geographically-coded data at the heart of the app, focuses on the user’s activity as the trigger.

People get the data when they need it, because they are asking for it, albeit passively.

Stoller said the next upgrade would include coverage of San Francisco, although he expected implementing a comprehensive data set for the city would be a major barrier.

He also discussed other features that could be added to donteat.at, like texting users when a place they’ve been notified about has made it off of the naughty list.

“The data is there,” he said. “But it’s not always clean, well formatted, or even clear.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110225/early-adopter-think-that-restaurant-looks-shady-donteat-at-lets-you-know-for-sure/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 18:17:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=40488

One of the more interesting pieces of news that got pushed deep down in stories in the noisy swirl around AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post was the move of its CEO Eric Hippeau back to the investor side.

He’ll be going to Lerer Ventures, which is run by HuffPo co-founder, chairman and major investor Kenneth Lerer.

(In case you wondered: Yes, everyone is interconnected.)

Before landing at HuffPo in mid-2009, Hippeau was a high-profile venture capitalist at SoftBank Capital for many years, starting with his involvement in the legendary $100 million investment in Yahoo at its start.

Hippeau went to SoftBank Capital after selling Ziff-Davis to its parent SoftBank Corp. for $2.1 billion in 1995.

Now he is headed to Lerer, where Hippeau has been an adviser. It which has been run by Lerer and his son Ben–as well as VC and entrepreneur Jordan Cooper–as an angel investing at early-stage seed level.

About a year ago, the New York-based investment fund raised $8.5 million, all from friends, and has focused on 35 start-ups in the city.

Those have included GroupMe, a group texting service, and ad service AdKeeper.

Now, with the addition of Hippeau as a general partner, while still spending down the initial fund, Lerer Ventures is considering a second fund of up to $50 million to allow it flexibility to invest in later stages.

That’s an increasingly common strategy of late, most prominently at Andreessen Horowitz.

“I am really glad to be getting back into investing, since the New York area is especially vibrant at the moment,” said Hippeau in an interview today, who noted that Lerer Ventures also has some investments in Silicon Valley. “And we are really determined to look at changing the way funds are organized.”

And now that he’ll not have a job with the AOL buy–”It has a very good CEO in Tim Armstrong,” joked Hippeau–and having just also stepped down from the Yahoo board, he will have plenty of time to consider all that.

Hippeau listed social, mobile and commerce as big investment arenas, as well as companies related to tablet devices.

“At the Huffington Post, we could see the changes happening to how we distribute our content were becoming profound,” Hippeau said. “It’s a completely different experience.”

I also talked to Ken Lerer, who said that the fund–started off pretty simply–will be trying to define itself more in the coming months before fundraising begins.

“Ben and Jordan are especially plugged into the New York scene–these start-ups were created by their friends,” he said. “And Eric and I bring a different skill set and perspective on top of that.”

Lerer also expressed interest in commerce, as well as local and real-time technologies.

“While it is always an interesting time on the Internet,” he said, fresh from the AOL sale of the HuffPo, in which he was the largest individual shareholder. “But right now is a really interesting time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/lerer-ventures-considers-new-fund-with-hippeau-addition/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110119/dont-read-this-while-driving-t-mobile-launches-safe-driving-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110119/dont-read-this-while-driving-t-mobile-launches-safe-driving-app/#comments Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:10:59 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=2657 If technology created the problem of texting and driving, it is only natural that we look to technology to solve the problem.

After all, we can’t just put our cellphones out of reach and just not answer the things for five freaking minutes. No, we can’t. Trust me. I’ve been to L.A.

In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110119/dont-read-this-while-driving-t-mobile-launches-safe-driving-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/mac-app-store-lacks-social-apps-save-for-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/mac-app-store-lacks-social-apps-save-for-twitter/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:43:41 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2015 Social apps are few and far between for the grand opening today of Apple’s Mac App Store, meant to be a desktop app marketplace equivalent to the highly successful app stores for Apple devices.

The only big-name social app joining the “social networking” category at launch is Twitter, which contributed an app that it says is designed for the “mainstream” user and is three times faster than the previous version of Tweetie for Mac, the independent app that Twitter acquired. The new Twitter app is quite elegant, with the rounded corners and UI accents of an iOS app rather than something from the desktop world. Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski says that based on his positive experience with it this morning he’s already deleted the two other Twitter clients on his desktop.

Other than that, the category contains an app for Mashable, the blog about social networking. There are some independent Twitter apps such as Tweetings for Twitter and Itsy. There’s an app for MarsEdit, the desktop blogging software.

That’s slim pickings compared to the social networking category for iPhone apps, where the top free apps are Skype, Facebook and Textfree. Meanwhile, the free iPad social networking app category is led by a couple of off-brand Facebook apps and the official Twitter app.

Facebook has neglected development of its own apps on the iPad and other platforms, so it’s not a surprise that the company hasn’t built something for the Mac app launch. And Skype, as you can understand, already has its own desktop app. Various texting and voice services perhaps make more sense in a phone situation. But you’d think there would at least be a LinkedIn, Tumblr or Myspace Mac app.

Maybe they’ll come later–today’s launch included just 1,000 apps. Or maybe the desktop just isn’t a very social place.

(Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I can link to the Mac apps themselves, as accessing the store requires a software update available only to users of the latest Mac operating system.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110106/mac-app-store-lacks-social-apps-save-for-twitter/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101112/would-facebook-email-gmail-google-me/ http://allthingsd.com/20101112/would-facebook-email-gmail-google-me/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:21:44 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=296 Facebook this Monday is reportedly set to announce a “full-fledged webmail client” with integration of Microsoft Office Web Apps at a press event the company is holding in San Francisco.

As displayed by its policy of declining to give Google a way to extract user email addresses–which Google called it out on last week–Facebook is clearly worried about Google extending its excellent Gmail product with a rocket booster of emails imported from Facebook for a competing social tool. The timing of all this is coming to a head as the companies seek to release products before the end of the year.

So, is a social network that adds email better or worse than an email service that adds social?

Put another way, if you had to give up your Facebook or Gmail, which would go first?

An email service from Facebook would almost certainly have novel social features and the company’s trademark opt-out viral hooks. The Facebook emails will supposedly include @facebook.com addresses (and probably be the unique usernames that people have set up through Facebook’s vanity URL program). They would also be integrated into other Facebook products along with Office.

Meanwhile, a social product from Google, if done well, is one of the only things that could knock the young Facebook out of its dominance in the category. So many people today already depend on Google (you may have heard of its search product) and trust its brand.

Will Facebook email have Gmail’s hallmark feature, conversation threading? Will some young people who only use Facebook and texting for communication even notice a difference? Will Facebook finally release a better calendaring tool alongside email? We’ll let you know as soon as we find out.

By the way, this comment from Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal explaining why Facebook doesn’t want to export email addresses to Google (even though it already sends them to Yahoo and Microsoft) looks a bit different four days later:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101112/would-facebook-email-gmail-google-me/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20101006/ford-drives-digital-dashboards-to-next-level/ http://allthingsd.com/20101006/ford-drives-digital-dashboards-to-next-level/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 01:03:22 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1558 Americans spend vast amounts of time in their cars, where many feel cut off from the digital world. Using a cellphone or digital music player, even in a legal manner, can be clumsy. And a car’s user interface for non-driving functions can seem ancient compared with how other devices are controlled outside the vehicle.

So, auto makers have been trying to bring some of the feel of computers and consumer electronics to the dashboard, making it easier to use phones and music players in a safe way, through big screens and voice-command systems that allow the use of these devices without handling or seeing them. Ford placed a large bet on this trend in 2007 with a system called Sync, which I liked when I reviewed it then.

Now, Ford (F) is taking another big step, introducing a second generation of Sync that aims to redesign the entire user interface of the dashboard with color-coded touch screens, better voice recognition and five-way control pads on the steering wheel. This new system redefines the way you control in-car entertainment and climate settings; permits personalization of things like instrument-cluster gauges; and even lets you set up a Wi-Fi network in the car.

I’ve been testing the new Ford system, called MyFord Touch, for a couple of weeks on a 2011 Ford Edge Limited SUV, one of the first two models on which it is being offered. (The other is the Lincoln MKX, with a MyLincoln Touch system.) The Edge starts at $27,000, but the configuration I tested, on which the new interface is standard, lists for $36,000. On other versions of the Edge, MyFord Touch is available as part of a $1,000 option package.

MyFord Touch’s 8-inch touch screen, with function icons in the corners that switch the screen among four main functions: multisource audio entertainment, navigation, phone and climate control.

In general, I liked MyFord Touch, once I got used to it and configured its settings and its connection to phones and music players. The layout of most of the displays is clear and logical, and the voice-command system is still the best I’ve ever used in a car.

But Ford’s new user interface has so many options and functions that I believe it presents a challenging learning curve. Learning the new system can be distracting while driving, at least at first—even though Ford disables some functions while the car is in motion and even though voice commands are easy and plentiful, allowing you to keep your eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.

I urge caution, because this a very different dashboard than you may be used to. I only had the car for a short time, and put very few miles on it, so I can’t say how quickly the new features can become second nature and nondistracting. But anyone buying a car with MyFord Touch should always set up and configure it while parked, use voice commands whenever possible and avoid experimenting with new features and functions while driving. My advice is to learn these in the driveway, gradually.

Instead of the usual array of knobs, dials and passive screens, MyFord Touch is dominated by a giant 8-inch touch screen, with large function icons in the center and color-coded corners that you touch to switch the screen among four main functions: multisource audio entertainment, navigation, phone and climate control. There is also a “home” view, combining common functions that can be personalized.

The system also has several other elements. There are twin 4-inch screens on either side of the speedometer. The one on the left presents vehicle information, such as miles traveled, and allows you to customize some of the gauges so that, for instance, you can finally banish that tachometer you never use in favor of, say, a digital readout on gas-mileage efficiency. The one on the right replicates, in simpler form, the main functions of the center screen, so you can select and check things like audio and climate control without looking at, or touching, the main screen.

These smaller screens are controlled by five-way arrow clusters on the steering wheel, like controllers on iPods and other devices usable by touch alone. There also are some large, touch-sensitive buttons below the main center screen for things like setting volume and fan speed.

Finally, most, but not all, of these functions can be controlled by tens of thousands of available voice commands. And many of these commands can now be spoken without prefacing them with special terms. For instance, you can dial a contact by saying her name at any time, even if you’re not in the phone module on the screen, and even if you don’t first say “phone.”

This voice system worked very well for me, and is the crucial element of reducing distraction. But it wasn’t perfect. For instance, it had trouble with some names in my contact list with multiple entries, and with some streets in the navigation system.

Ford believes the combination of the touch screen, the instrument cluster screens and controls, and the voice commands provides a redundancy and ease of use that should allow both a familiar digital experience and safe driving. Of course, some believe doing anything but driving, no matter how those tasks are performed, is dangerous.

I tested MyFord Touch with an iPhone and an Android phone, which I connected wirelessly; and a standard iPod, which I connected via one of the two USB ports built into the car. I also tested a USB flash drive containing music and a couple of photos, since you can add a personal photo to one of the available views on the big screen. In addition, I tried a USB cellular modem lent me by Ford that creates a Wi-Fi network in the car, presumably only for the use of passengers with laptops and other devices.

All of these devices worked pretty well, but not without issues. The car easily recognized and used both phones for calling, and the iPod generally worked fine. But Bluetooth streaming of music from the phones, which is still an evolving industry feature, periodically failed and never displayed song or artist names. On the physically connected iPod, some album covers didn’t display.

At the moment, only one USB modem, an AT&T (T) model, works with MyFord Touch, and setting it up proved complicated. My general view is that, while operating the touch screen’s main functions is easy, the various setup and option menus are too complex.

The new Ford system can read text messages to you and let you send a limited number of canned responses—the idea being to make texting in a car somewhat safer. But I couldn’t try this as neither of my test phones supported this function.

Ford also has announced that the new system will support some third-party apps, like the Pandora music service, and will eventually have a Web browser for the big screen that would only work when the car is parked. But neither of these features is available yet.

For those who believe doing anything but driving in a car is dangerous, no amount of touch screens, voice commands or redundancy will do. But, for people who would like to enjoy some of their digital lifestyle in a car, MyFord Touch is worth checking out—as long as you take it slowly.

Write to Walt Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101006/ford-drives-digital-dashboards-to-next-level/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100917/modern-love/ http://allthingsd.com/20100917/modern-love/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:21:01 +0000 Nitrozac and Snaggy http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=29934

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100917/modern-love/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100823/casual-contestant-shatters-texting-speed-record/ http://allthingsd.com/20100823/casual-contestant-shatters-texting-speed-record/#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:29:41 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=28609 Melissa Thompson, 27, of Salford, England, was out shopping over the weekend when the folks at a Samsung booth persuaded her to have a go at texting the official 26-word sentence used in determining the Guinness World Record speed title. Despite proclaiming her fingers out of shape, Thompson took a Swype-equipped Samsung Galaxy S in hand, and when she was done, the existing record of 35.54 seconds–set earlier this year by Franklin Page of Seattle–lay in tatters. Thompson took just 25.94 seconds to type “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100823/casual-contestant-shatters-texting-speed-record/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100625/get-a-grip-with-apple-telling-us-how-to-hold-a-phone-heres-some-other-grip-tips/ http://allthingsd.com/20100625/get-a-grip-with-apple-telling-us-how-to-hold-a-phone-heres-some-other-grip-tips/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 16:19:26 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29774

BoomTown had no idea about how to properly hold a mobile phone until Apple (AAPL) told us yesterday, in regard to solving the antenna issues related to its new iPhone 4.

Since I had often been using my feet to do so, I am so glad someone schooled me that I had been holding it all wrong for all this time now!

Thanks, Steve Jobs!

So, in return and as a public service, here are some other important gripping techniques you might need to get you up to speed in a range of other arenas.

Car Steering Wheel: While in driver’s education classes, the instructor always told us to put our hands at 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, but experts say you should actually grip a steering wheel at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock. And no texting on the iPhone while doing so!

Baseball Pitch: Well, there are lots of different grips for different throws, but here is an example of the four-seam fastball method.

According to the CompletePitcher.com:

“To grip the four-seam fastball, place your index and middle fingertips directly on the perpendicular seam of the baseball. The ‘horseshoe seam’ should face into your ring finger of your throwing hand.”

Golf Swing: This is a very complex issue, as any golfer knows, and there are lots and lots of steps and ways to go wrong.

But fundamentally, according to About.com’s golf grip page:

“The grip is your only connection with the golf club. Placing your hands properly on the golf club helps you better control the position of the clubface at impact. During the swing your body turns to create power. Since the body is rotating, the golf club must rotate at the same rate. In other words, the body and the club must turn together as a team.”

Football Grip: Another dicey proposition! According to eHow, so much can go wrong, it is really stressful for quarterbacks.

And, so many rules: Don’t place your index finger on the nose of the ball! Grip the ball lightly! Watch for where you are holding the laces!

And, most of all, don’t forget the blind side!

Spiderman Grip: Well, first off, you will need to get bitten during a school trip by a radioactive spider and turn into a superhero with sticky hands and feet.

Also, you’ll need a tight suit made of indestructible material. Cue the internal agony over your secret and public lives.

Then, of course, you’ll need an archenemy with a name like Doctor Octopus or Green Goblin.

Most of all, don’t look down!

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