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Engadget Podcast 388 - 3.14.14
This week's podcast begins with some behind the scenes perspective of SXSW before Ben's allowed to get all Titanfall on us. That said, there's a melange of topics under discussion, from the Game of Thrones/HBO experience to tales of a 6-year-old Chelsea Clinton and her kitchen table opinion coaching. Joseph exposes his vicious nature while playing the real-world SXSW version of Mario Kart and Terrence reflects on the addictive nature of his recently acquired Android version of Threes. Finally, Ben gets to tell us that Titanfall is definitely worth the $60 and after some verbal judo, Joseph adds that penny loafers will get you across the river Styx (if you have the penny, apparently). It's all pure info and entertainment, so please join us for this wild episode of the Engadget Podcast! Hosts: Ben Gilbert, Terrence O'Brien, Joseph Volpe Producer: Jon Turi Hear the podcast:
SXSW 2014 wrap-up: Snoop Dogg, stun copter, Snowden, Mario Kart and more!
SXSW Interactive can hardly match the significance of CES, MWC or IFA when it comes to consumer electronics launches, but there's always a ton of awesome gear to see. This year, Chaotic Moon's "CUPID" stun copter was perhaps the most shocking innovation, but IBM's Watson-powered food truck, a Leap Motion-equipped Oculus Rift and Neil Young's PonoMusic player also dominated on the gear front. In between hands-on demos, we caught up with Aereo, BlackBerry, Shaquille O'Neal and even Snoop Dogg, while also sitting in on SXSW sessions featuring the likes of Edward Snowden and 23andMe's Anne Wojcicki. We say farewell today, but South-by 2014 will live on for a few days to come, with hundreds of concerts and other events dominating the seemingly countless performance venues in Austin, Texas.
Appmethod lets you code native Android, iOS and desktop apps simultaneously (hands-on)
With different requirements and countless other incompatibilities, building applications for multiple platforms can be a tremendous chore. Embarcadero Technologies is setting out to simplify that process a bit with Appmethod, a multi-device development platform that lets you create apps for Android, iOS, Mac and Windows simultaneously. The WYSIWYG tool lets you drag and drop buttons, connectors, databases and other design elements into one emulated platform, then easily duplicate the app onto another.
Tinder wants to verify celebrities so you know they're really into you
Tinder, the iOS and Android app that matches people by how close they are from one another, has a celebrity problem. While signing up to a dating app is probably the last thing you'd expect any privacy-conscious alphabet-lister to consider, Tinder already counts a few famous faces amongst its millions of users (Ashton Kutcher and Lindsay Lohan reportedly are fans), but they aren't racking up matches because people believe their profiles are fake. According to Hollywood Reporter, the mobile startup wants to remove all doubt from that equation by introducing a verification system for celebrity users that could use Twitter-style checkmarks to signify that an actor, actress or musician (etc.) is who they say they are. Tinder CEO Sean Rad also says that the company could drop the requirement for stars to sign up using Facebook, where they'd have to use their real name instead of an alias, allowing them "to enter Tinder in a different way." We don't yet know when the new system will be implemented, but if it does lure famous users to the service, you never know, you could only be five right-swipes away from Kevin Bacon.
Snoop Dogg gives us a tour of his SXSW 'man cave'
What better way to wrap up SXSW 2014 than with a picnic with Snoop Dogg? We stepped inside Snoop's own mini-apartment, which he designed in partnership with Airbnb, to talk about his favorite gadgets. He's apparently a huge fan of the Avegant Glyph virtual-reality headset, though his temporary pad also includes essentials like a Samsung flat-screen and an Xbox One. One other must-have, which you won't see in our video tour: Snoop's special breakfast sandwich, with Texas toast, eggs, bacon, sausage, cheese and grape jelly. (It's surprisingly good!)
BlackBerry's identity crisis continues
To say that BlackBerry's had it tough these past few years would be putting it mildly, if not too delicately for a company emerging from a period of willful ignorance. The Waterloo-based outfit, formerly known as Research in Motion, played an embarrassing game of catch-up in the mobile space it once dominated. An uphill rehabilitation that saw it acquire QNX to build a new operating system, release a half-baked tablet, rebrand as BlackBerry in search of a new identity and, tellingly, hire Alicia Keys as a creative figurehead. And none of it mattered -- not even the forced infusion of Ms. Keys' questionable zeitgeist-y influence. The BlackBerry of today has so far failed to resurrect sufficient interest in its fledgling mobile platform and devices, leading to the ouster of former CEO Thorsten Heins, the very recent installation of John Chen and a redoubled focus on the enterprise set that once was core to the company's business. So why does the company still seem to be engaged in an internal tug-of-war over its identity? I had a chance to speak with Gary Klassen, longtime BlackBerry employee and principal architect, here at SXSW in the hopes he could shed some light on what the Blackberry of today stands for and where it's going.
HBO pushes the boundaries of virtual reality to sell you Game of Thrones
The frost-crusted wooden cage was carrying me to my death. I didn't know that for sure, but something just didn't feel right as the winch kicked into gear and the empty square of Castle Black retreated from my feet. My knees buckled as I began to ascend the 700-foot Wall. The floor rattled beneath my boots and I had to reach out to steady myself against the side of the ramshackle elevator. There was nothing beyond the stone battlements that the Night's Watch calls home. Well, not nothing exactly. There were a few towering pines and squat rocky mountains whose lower reaches were blanketed in thick featureless snow. Their peaks, if you could call them that, were black stains smeared across the blinding white expanse of the Kingdom of the North. As I climbed higher, the cool breeze turned into an icy gale and my collar flapped against my neck like a sail in a storm.
Temple Run in first-person, courtesy of Epson's Android glasses (hands-on)
We saw Epson's Moverio BT-200 glasses back at CES, and while not much has changed on the hardware front since then, the company dropped by SXSW to demo a few new games. There's also a new homemade camera rig, so it's now possible to share the excitement here. Moverio supports the full version of Android 4.0, but unlike smartphones and tablets running the same OS, these glasses include a pair of embedded transparent displays, which provide a surprisingly usable view, while also preserving some of your field of vision -- we absolutely would not recommend walking, driving or interacting with humans while wearing them, though.
Snowden says encryption and oversight are key to protecting the public from surveillance
Speaking to a packed exhibit hall through a Google Hangout, Edward Snowden said the keys to protecting the public from government surveillance is encryption and civilian oversight. The world's most famous whistleblower has said it before, but reiterated it for the SXSW crowd, that end-to-end encryption would go a long way towards protecting user data from both spying and attackers. Many current communications systems, like the aforementioned Hangout, encrypt data at either end, but companies often decrypt your information in between because it needs to harvest data in order to serve up ads. If communications are encrypted the entire time, mass surveillance of the sort that the NSA has engaged in becomes extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive. Of course, if you're a target of the NSA, encryption won't be able to protect you. However, breaking through those protections would require a much more targeted attack, rather than a broad collection of data.
Watch Edward Snowden's SXSW virtual conversation right here (updated)
At SXSW today, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden will make his "first appearance front of a live audience" since he unveiled the under belly of the government surveillance program. Snowden will speak with the ACLU's Ben Wizner and Christopher Soghoian, but as the name suggests, this is a virtual conversation and he will not be appearing in person for the festivities in Austin. The ACLU is liveblogging the entire affair here at 12PM ET and a livestream will be posted over at The Texas Tribune. If you miss out on the live coverage, the ACLU will post a video of the interview afterwords. Update: We've embedded the livestream after the break. Update 2: Well, things have wrapped up, but you can relive the conversation after the break.
Shaquille O'Neal talks Fitbit, Google Glass and smartphones at SXSW
This is Shaquille O'Neal's second SXSW, and this year he stopped by Austin to talk about wearables. In a panel with Rick Valencia of Qualcomm yesterday, Shaq touched on the importance of activity trackers in keeping us fit. He's personally a fan of Fitbit, which he uses to help meet the goal of 10,000 steps per day, though he told us he's all for any device that keeps users active and motivated. We had a chance to pick his brain about wearable tech in general -- he's all for Google Glass -- and asked him about the other gadgets he relies on when he's on the road. (Spoiler: he carries both an Android handset and an iPhone.) See what else caught his eye at SXSW 2014 in our video interview.
One of Facebook's biggest science pages is becoming a TV show
Science TV shows are enjoying a small renaissance, it seems. Virtually in sync with the first episode of the Cosmos reboot, Facebook page and stand-alone website I F-ing Love Science (yes, we know how that's really written) has announced that it's getting a TV show on the Science Channel around the third quarter of the year. Late night talk show host Craig Ferguson will present the series, while page founder Elise Andrew (shown at center) will contribute behind the scenes. The TV deal is a testament to IFLS' online influence -- its Facebook page alone has over 10 million likes, and over 50 million people get the site's social updates every week. The show may only reel in a portion of that internet audience, but it still represents a victory for those who want more science in their living rooms. [Image credit: Elise Andrew, Twitter]
Neil Young's music player for audiophiles reaches Kickstarter on March 15th
We now know how Neil Young plans to make his dreams of high-quality digital music come true: crowdfunding. The artist's company PonoMusic is launching a Kickstarter campaign on March 15th that will let you reserve the PonoPlayer, Young's long-teased, audiophile-grade portable jukebox. The 128GB device will set you back a whopping $399 when it goes on sale (less with the Kickstarter discount), but its creators are promising audio fidelity worthy of the price tag. The hardware will offer natural-sounding digital filtering from Ayre Acoustics, ESS' most advanced digital-to-analog converter and "perfectly flat" frequency response with most any set of headphones. As you might expect, there will be a matching online store that delivers high-resolution tunes. The PonoMusic team hasn't said just when its media player will reach your pocket, but it shouldn't be too long before you're listening to a pristine version of Harvest while on the move.
23andMe's Anne Wojcicki envisions the future of preventative medicine
Anne Wojcicki and her genetic sequencing company 23andMe are locked in a battle with the FDA. Even though it can't report results to customers right now, Wojcicki isn't letting herself get bogged down in the present. At SXSW 2014 she laid out her vision of the future of preventative medicine -- one where affordable genome sequencing comes together with "big data." In addition to simply harvesting your genetic code, the company is doing research into how particular genes effect your susceptibility to disease or your reaction to treatments. And 23andMe isn't keeping this information locked down. It has been building APIs that allow it to share the results of its research as well as the results your genetic tests, should you wish to.
Android lead says wearable developer tools coming in two weeks (updated)
We've got very few details at the moment, but Sundar Pichai is preparing to lead the Android charge into the wearable space. He announced that the company will launch a new wearable SDK for Android at SXSW Interactive. The tools will be available to download in roughly two weeks time and will expand the efforts to put Google's mobile OS on smart watches or fitness bands. Pichai definitely didn't limit Android to those two particular implementations, however. He focused heavily on expanding developers' ability to harvest data from sensors of any kind... so long as they're mounted on your body. He even suggested a future where your jacket is loaded with sensors and powered by Android.
Tales From The Borderlands first details emerge from SXSW vault
A panel at the SXSW festival has shed new light on Tales From The Borderlands, the story-driven adventure game collaboration between Telltale and Gearbox. Polygon reports that the two main characters, Rhys and Fiona, will narrate the story from a future perspective - in other words, what you play is what the characters say happened. Telltale President Kevin Bruner told the panel's audience, "You never really play what actually happened, you're playing this Big Fish version of what happened." Given that Rhys works for megacorporation Hyperion (which is led by Borderlands 2 villain Handsome Jack) and that Fiona is a con artist, that's shaky ground to stand on. The characters' backgrounds also means that they won't be world-saving heroes; these are people motivated primarily by greed. Unlike Telltale's The Walking Dead or The Wolf Among Us, which often force players to choose between bad and worse, Tales From The Borderlands will present players with two extremely desirable options. The game's tone will also set it apart, as it will be a lighter, more humorous affair than Clementine or Bigby's misadventures. Tales From The Borderlands is due later this year. [Image: Telltale Games/Gearbox Software]
Electronic Arts is exploring virtual reality
When you're the CEO of the second largest video game publisher in the world, people have a tendency to take what you say seriously. Case in point, Electronic Arts' Andrew Wilson recently revealed his company's plans for virtual reality. At a South by Southwest panel, Wilson said that his company is less focused on the technology of VR, and more interested in exactly how people consume it. As he sees it, we interact with games in three different ways: leaning back, leaning in and looking over -- relating to console, PC and mobile gaming, respectively. With VR, he thinks there will be a fourth: getting in. He says that this could happen either via a headset or even a hologram popping up from your living room floor, and he's pushing his team to explore it. Think of this along the lines of Amazon (hypothetically) announcing that it'd accept Bitcoin for payment and you're on the right track; that there's another major player in the VR space helps validate the medium. While this could all be taken as pie-in-the-sky speculation, the fact that EA is clearly invested in the virtual reality isn't anything to write off -- just look at what the company's done with mobile gaming.
Aereo's not for sale ... not now, anyway
It's a bittersweet day in Austin, Texas, for Aereo. The company's remote DVR service, which allows users to stream or record over-the-air broadcasts, just launched in the city this week against the backdrop of SXSW, making it Aereo's fourth market in the state. But there's a storm cloud hanging over this celebration; a recent legal hiccup with the state of Utah that saw it shut down service in Denver, Colo., and Salt Lake City, Utah. Aereo, however, is no stranger to this courtroom drama. The company's been engaged in a copyright battle with broadcasters that'll either cement it as a content licensee (along the lines of a Netflix), and potentially cripple its business growth, or as a provider of cloud DVR storage. It's a fight Aereo's waging all the way to the Supreme Court and has so far been winning, except for today.
NYT Now is a mobile news platform with a dedicated staff curating stories
SXSW is a veritable playground for journalists, with panels catering to media professionals and -- most importantly -- no shortage of free food. We're not surprised, then, that The New York Times chose Austin as the venue for an announcement this week. Perhaps "tease" is more apt than announcement, though, since we aren't allowed to capture any pictures of the upcoming NYT Now app at this time (the bar menu above was the only documentation we're permitted to publish).
IBM puts Watson in charge of its SXSW food truck, we taste-test (video)
We know Watson has some Jeopardy skills, but putting IBM's supercomputer in the kitchen? That's a little different. Here at SXSW, the company's set up a "Cognitive Cooking" food truck in partnership with the Institute for Culinary Education (ICE). Using Watson's recipe system, which combines three elements (ingredient, cuisine and type of dish) to create unconventional new fare, chefs here in Austin are churning out delicacies such as ceviche fish and chips and Vietnamese apple kebabs.
