Xbox 360 with Kinect shows off new tricks at E3

Microsoft on Monday added YouTube, voice commands, television shows and more to its Xbox 360 with Kinect as the hot-selling videogame console matures into an entertainment center for all.
Studios joined Microsoft on the eve of a premier Electronics Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles to unveil blockbusters such as "Mass Effect 3″ that let players use body motion or voice to execute tactics once the exclusive duty of toggles or buttons in controllers.
"Kinect is a natural way to converse with characters," said BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka, whose studio is behind hit videogame franchise "Mass Effect."
"In a game that already reacts to every decision you make, you will feel even more connected."
Microsoft was intent on broadening the array of Kinect titles to appeal to the traditional "hard core gamers" devoted to shooter games as well as the "casual" audience happy with virtual darts or bowling.
Microsoft ramped up voice capabilities in Kinect to allow Xbox users not only to give commands to in-game characters but to speak Bing searches for games, movies, television shows, music and other entertainment content.
"This is an incredible time of growth and innovation for our business leveraging technologies that see us, hear us and connect us all together," said Microsoft president of the Interactive Entertainment Business Don Mattrick.
"This year by bringing together the power of Kinect for Xbox 360 and the intelligence of Bing, we are transforming how people enjoy entertainment."
Microsoft has sold more than 10 million of the gesture-sensing Kinect accessories for the Xbox 360 consoles worldwide since they hit the market in November of last year.
Kinect uses a 3D camera and motion recognition software to let people play videogames on the Xbox 360 using natural body movements and voice commands instead of hand-held controllers.
More than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles have been sold worldwide.
Microsoft has teamed with television operators in Britain, France and Australia in the past two years to bring television shows to local audiences through an Xbox Live online entertainment service.
Executives from the Seattle, Washington-based company said Monday they are making alliances to do the same in the United States and other countries.
Microsoft was also adding Google-owned online video-sharing service YouTube to an Xbox Live line-up that includes Hulu Plus, Netflix, and Zune.
"We feel that we have all the great momentum," said Dennis Durkin, chief operating officer of Microsoft's interactive entertainment business. "With our hardware, Kinect sensor, and Live services we feel we can go from being Number One in North America to being Number One worldwide."

iCloud is free, iTunes Match is $25 a year

As expected, Steve Jobs said Monday that Apple's iCloud service will offer a feature called iTunes in the Cloud that replicates users' music collections (instead of copying the files from their hard drives into the cloud) for free.

And, as reported by The Times before Jobs' announcement, a $25 annual subscription option will be made available. The Apple chief executive called it iTunes Match.

For $25 a year, an iTunes Match user will be able to add music not purchased from iTunes to his or her iCloud music collection. The number of songs an iTunes Match subscriber can store is unlimited, Jobs said at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday.

"Here's how it works," Apple said on its website. "iTunes determines which songs in your collection are available in the iTunes Store. Any music with a match is automatically added to your iCloud library for you to listen to anytime, on any device. Since there are more than 18 million songs in the iTunes Store, most of your music is probably already in iCloud. All you have to upload is what iTunes can't match. Which is much faster than starting from scratch."

Songs with a match in the iTunes catalog are all replicated in a user's iCloud library at 256-kbps quality, which audiophiles should appreciate, even if the user had lower-quality files.

Matching a user's iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks, Apple says. By contrast, Google's Music Beta and Amazon's Cloud Player services require users to upload song files to "cloud lockers" themselves and offer no matching options.

In order to pull all this off, Apple reached large contracts with major record labels, agreeing to give them a share of the revenue from iTunes Match subscriptions.

If iTunes Match users let their subscriptions run out and don't pay to re-up, their iCloud libraries would revert to just the songs they've bought from iTunes.

Apple released a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud on Monday for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users running iOS 4.3. ITunes Match will arrive this fall.

The cloud efforts will be taxing on Apple's servers, but the company says it is prepared for the increased traffic.

"Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, N.C.," the company said in a statement. "Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services."

Last-minute iOS 5 Rumors: Notifications, Widgets, and More!

Nothing like an 11th hour WWDC rumor, right before the main event! TiMN has a source claiming to know what Apple's iOS 5 will feature. Here are the tasty (albeit not totally surprising) tidbits:

Messaging: This one looks like a strike right to the heart of BBM (BlackBerry Messaging). Apple will presumaby launch its very own native MMS/SMS protocol capable of automatically identifying iOS messaging recipients. (If you're familiar with the Textie application, this should feel familiar to you, just more simplified).

Notifications: Annoying pop-up windows, your days are numbered! Word has it, notifications are indeed getting a makeover. Alerts will show up in the top banner that disappears subtly or be pulled down with a single downward swipe of the finger (sort of like the jailbroken Mobile Notifier, pictured). The notifications will stay housed in the drop-down list, plus…

Widgets/notification window: The pull-down will also hold widget-like items for weather, stocks, and more. Unfortunately, the weather widget's icon won't be live-updating, though.

Lock screen: Here's another reboot - notifications will also be housed on the lock screen. There will be a small icon, swipeable to open/launch the related app for the alert.

So how accurate is this? Only mere minutes until we find out for sure! Stay tuned to TechnoBuffalo, as we dish out all the little goodies from the keynote.

Apple's iOS 5 and the cloud

With iOS 5 and iCloud, Apple is re-orienting its mobile devices. Subtly, its shifting the locus of the "mobile experience" from the personal device by itself, or as an adjunct to a personal computer, to a networked personal device leveraging cloud-based services. In some respects, it's catching up to Palm's webOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone 7, as a range of pundits have argued. But that's not the point.

The point was made in a startling admission by Apple CEO Steve Jobs talking about his company's first iOS cloud service, MobileMe, introduced almost exactly three years ago as an Internet service for pushing email, contacts and calendars from the cloud to the family of Apple hardware products. In his introduction of the iCloud services, Jobs said told his audience that iCloud will store all their content off the device, wirelessly push it to all their devices, and be an automated service that's completely integrated with all their apps.[See "Three things you need to know about Apple iCloud"]

And then he said, "You might ask, why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought me MobileMe." At which point, according to one liveblogger, "huge cheers" broke out. "It wasn't our finest hour," he said. "But we learned a lot." And indeed they have.

There aren't many companies, let alone many CEOs who are willing to introduce a new product by acknowledging the failures of its predecessor. The reason it's important now, is that Jobs, and Apple, explicitly acknowledges that they as well as their customers are still part of the process of figuring out what the terms digital, mobile, Internet, and the cloud mean when used together.

So, the point of Apple's iOS 5 changes coupled with the new, free iCloud services is that Apple's move in this direction is erasing or at least weakening a boundary -- between personal mobile devices and the wider world -- in a way that's going to be highly intuitive and effective for millions of iOS users and thousands of iOS software developers.

The new Notification Center is a case in point: apparently Apple hasn't changed the underlying Apple Push Notification System that makes remote alerting possible. But it has dramatically changed the way iOS users receive and interact with realtime alerts. For the first time since 2009 when push notification was introduced, the iOS user experience isn't "broken" by an interruption that suspends whatever the user is doing and forces him to acknowledge the alert.

Now, alerts are brought to the user's attention in a way that lets users see what the alerts are about, and act on them based on what importance or urgency the user decides is relevant. I'm not sure of the details of all this yet, but on the surface it seems somewhat similar to what Microsoft introduced with its Live Tiles, each of which represent an application and can show on its "surface" that updates, alerts, changes are pending, without having to open the app.

The "PC Free" feature, which technically is the "PC and Mac Free" feature, now cuts iOS 5 device free from having to rely at all on a personal computer: iOS software updates can be delivered directly from the cloud to the iPhone or iPad or iPod touch, via a SSL-secured Wi-Fi connection. And, smartly, they can be delivered incrementally -- only the code or content that's changed is downloaded.

Apple is also leveraging the "network effect" of multiple types of mobile devices running the same OS, with iMessage: a messaging client extended from the iPhone to iPad and iPod touch with iOS 5, so any and all of them can share messages and content easily.

iCloud replaces MobileMe, redesigning its calendar, contacts and mail applications and adding new ones including App Store, backup and "documents in the cloud." The latter is used not only by Apple's various document-creating apps, but also by third-party apps that output documents and want to have them stored on iCloud.

Again, that's not new in and of itself. It's how Apple can leverage its device OS, and the apps that run on it, with its own cloud-based services on behalf of the enduser.

The cloud services and Notification Center and the other changes mentioned above somewhat obscure the fact that Apple apparently has made very few changes to the iOS UI, where as developer Kevin Hoffman has said, the individual, standalone app is still the "main unit of work." I think Palm's webOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 show that the app-centric UI has some inherent limitations that are going to become more apparent as the enduser's mobile digital world becomes more complex. And Apple's moves toward greater app integration and reliance on the cloud are an early attempt to deal with those limits and reshape the user experience.

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet

There are no two ways about it: E-books are here to stay. Unless something as remarkable as Japan's reversion to the sword occurs, digital books are the 21st century successor to print. And yet the e-book is fundamentally flawed. There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can't replicate (at least not easily) - yet.

Let's put this into some context first. Amazon sparked the e-reader revolution with the first Kindle a mere twothree-and-a-half years ago, and it now already sells more e-books than all print books combined. Barnes & Noble, the century-old bricks-and-mortar bookseller, is being pursued by Liberty Media not because it has stores all over the place but because its Nook e-reader is the Kindle's biggest competitor.

Reasonable arguments that the iPad would kill the e-reader seem laughable now, as both thrive and many people own one of each. One thing E-books and books are equally good at: In their own ways, they're both platform agnostic.

But for all of the benefit they clearly bring, e-books are still falling short of a promise to make us forget their paper analogs. For now, you still lose something by moving on.

It isn't always that way with tech: We rejoice at cutting the phone cord, we don't fret that texting causes lousy penmanship and we are ecstatic that our computers, tablets and phones are replacing the TV set.

I'm not resorting to variations on the ambiguous tactile argument ("The feel and smell of paper is an integral part of the reading experience….") that one hears from some late-to-never adopters. And - full disclosure - I have never owned an e-book reader, because I have an ingrained opposition to single-purpose devices. But since getting an iPad on day one, I haven't purchased a print edition of anything for myself.

I am hooked - completely one with the idea that books are legacy items that may never go away, but have been forever marginalized as a niche medium. With that in mind, however, here are five things about e-books that might give you pause about saying good riddance to the printed page.

Fix these problems, and there really will be no limits to the e-book's growth.

Continue reading …

1) An unfinished e-book isn't a constant reminder to finish reading it.

Two months into 2011, The New York Times tech reporter (and former Wired reporter Jenna Wortham) wrote excitedly that she had finally finished her first e-book - how is such technological tardiness possible for someone so plugged in? Wortham had an excellent explanation: She kept forgetting to pick up any e-book she had started reading. It took the solemn determination of a New Year's resolution to break that spell.

E-books don't exist in your peripheral vision. They do not taunt you to finish what you started. They do not serve as constant, embarrassing reminders to your poor reading habits. Even 1,001 digital books are out of sight, and thus out of mind. A possible solution? Notifications that pop up to remind you that you've been on page 47 of A Shore Thing for 17 days.

2) You can't keep your books all in one place.

Books arranged on your bookshelves don't care what store they came from. But on tablets and smartphones, the shelves are divided by app - you can't see all the e-books you own from various vendors, all in one place. There is simply no app for that. (With e-readers, you are doubly punished, because you can't buy anything outside the company store anyway).

Apple doesn't allow developers to tap into root information, which would be needed to create what would amount to a single library on an iOS device. If that restriction disappeared, there would still be the matter of individual vendors agreeing to cooperate - not a given since they are competitors and that kind of leveling could easily lead to price wars, for one thing.

But the way we e-read is the reverse of how we read. To pick up our next physical book, we peruse bookshelves we've arranged and pick something out. In the digital equivalent, we would see everything we own, tap on a book and it would invoke the app it requires - Kindle, Nook, Borders, etc. With the current sequence - open up a reader app, pick a book - you can easily forget what you own. Trivial? Try to imagine Borders dictating the size and shape of your bookshelf, and enforcing a rule that it hold only books you bought from them, and see if that thought offends you even a little bit.

3) Notes in the margins help you think.

It's not enough to be able to highlight something. A careful reader wants to argue with the author, or amplify a point, or jot down an insight inspired by something freshly read. And it has to be proximate to the original - a separate notebook is ridiculous, even with a clever indexing system that seems inventable but is yet to be invented.

Books don't offer much white space for readers to riff in, but e-books offer none. And what about the serendipity of sharing your thoughts, and being informed by the thoughts of others, from the messages in shared books?

Replicating this experience will take a new standard, adopted universally, among competitors whose book tech, unlike paper, is proprietary. For a notion of what this might look like, check out OpenMargin.

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren't priced that way.
This one is simple, and also easy to oversimplify since people still have to get paid. But until e-books truly add new value, the way Hollywood did with DVD extras, it's just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental. E-books cost virtually nothing to produce, and yet the baseline cover price, set by publishers, is only fractionally below the discount price for the print version of new releases.

E-books can't be shared, donated to your local library shelter, or re-sold. They don't take up space, and thus coax conflicted feelings when it is time to weed some of them out. But because they aren't social, even in the limited way that requires some degree of human contact in the physical world, they will also never be an extension of your personality. Which brings me to …

5) E-books can't be used for interior design.

Before you roll your eyes at the shallowness of this gripe, consider this: When in your literate life you did not garnish your environment with books as a means of wordlessly introducing yourself to people in your circle? It probably began that time you toted The Cat in the Hat, trying not to be dispatched to bed during a grown-up dinner party.

It may be all about vanity, but books - how we arrange them, the ones we display in our public rooms, the ones we don't keep - say a lot about what we want the world to think about us. Probably more than any other object in our homes, books are our coats of arms, our ice breakers, our calling cards. Locked in the dungeon of your digital reader, nobody can hear them speak on your behalf.

It's a truism that no new medium kills the one that it eclipses - we still have radio, which pre-dates the internet, television and movies. So it would be foolish to predict the death of books anytime soon. And we haven't seen the end of creative business models - there is no "all access pass" in book publishing, as is the trend now for magazines and the newspapers which have put up paywalls. Getting an e-book along with your print edition (or, the other way around) could be the best of both worlds, or the worst.

It would certainly solve my unexpected home decor problem.