Sony is closing factories and cutting jobs as part of its latest restructuring plan, announced in April
As part of its restructuring plan, Sony is closing a factory in Japan and will also cut thousands of jobs at its Tokyo headquarters.
According to Sony, it will shut down its Minokamo factory in Japan, which makes camera and mobile phone lenses. The factory contains about 840 workers that will lose their jobs at the end of March 2013.
In addition, Sony said it will invest in an early retirement plan that will reduce the employee headcount at its Tokyo headquarters by 2,000 — or one-fifth of the HQ’s workforce. This will happen by the end of fiscal year 2012.
Sony is closing factories and cutting jobs as part of its latest restructuring plan, which was announced by new CEO Kazuo Hirai back in April. The idea is to try to keep Sony afloat and competitive in the electronics market by axing about 10,000 jobs globally by March 2013. About 3,000-4,000 will be in Japan.
This restructuring will cost Sony $930 million during the fiscal year, but the outcome is expected to save the company $370 million annually.
When Hirai took over the sinking ship that is Sony back on April 1, he offered an entirely new plan for restructuring the company. A key idea behind the restructuring was to strengthen core businesses, including digital imaging, games and mobile. He also opted to take over the failing TV business, expand business in emerging markets, create new businesses and realign the business portfolio.
A lot of Sony’s issues have to do with its TV unit, which has seen eight straight years of quarterly losses. Last December, Sony decided to shake up its TV division by negotiating a buyout of its 50 percent manufacturing stake with Samsung in the LCD joint venture. It also split its TV division into three units consisting of sales of LCD TVs, outsourcing manufacturing to cheaper foreign facilities and developing future TVs.
More recently, in May 2012, Sony reported a record annual loss of $5.7 billion USD.
Created by the folks behind COLOURlovers, Creative Market has just launched after raising $1.3M from SV Angel and CrunchFund and teasing us with freebies. At its core, Creative Market is a place to buy and sell stock designs like icons, typefaces and themes, but there’s a interesting twist of humanity in the way the site was set up that actually makes it feel like a marketplace.
This was no accident, either. While announcing the launch, Creative Market quickly compared itself to “a local farmer’s market.” This may be marketing speak, but it has a genuine side to it, too: the creators of Creative Market are undoubtedly experts in community building — for god’s sake, they built a massive community around color palettes. That’s talent.
Diving into the specifics, Creative Market explains that designers selling on the site are guaranteed a 70% cut of all sales, and all designs are sold under a simple commercial-use license.
With 81,206 users already signed up on day one, the site is certainly poised to grow quickly. Building a great community that actually turns a profit will be a challenge, but if the Creative Market team keeps emphasizing creators and is able to entice enough talented sellers, the site certainly has a fighting chance to take on more established players like Envato.
Last weekend more than 115,000 people visited the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan for New York Comic Con, a four day celebration of science fiction, fantasy, gaming and all kinds of geek entertainment.
Many of the attendees participated in cosplay, dressing up in elaborate costumes to celebrate their favorite characters. Here’s a sampling of some of their great outfits.
Zombies were a popular costume choice –probably in part because of excitement over the third season premiere of The Walking Dead. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
Aleta Pardalis, left, as Wonder Woman, and Ann McManus as Supergirl. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Commander Shepard (left) and Samara, from the video game Mass Effect. (Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images)
Batman fights off a host of enemies –the Joker, Professor Pyg, the Penguin, Bane and the Riddler. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)
The Scarlet Witch and Emma Frost (Photo by Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images)
There was a point when director Julian Jarrold didn’t feel so comfortable shooting The Girl.
Tippi Hedren in The Birds
Based on Donald Spoto’s book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies and written by Gwyneth Hughes, the film, premiering on HBO Saturday, October 20, chronicles Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with leading lady Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. Hitchcock was relentless in his pursuit of Hedren and vindictive when she turned down his sexual advances, punishing the actress by forcing her to endure all sorts of unnecessary discomfort, according to Spoto’s book and Hedren’s recollection of that period.
Take the filming of the famous attic scene from The Birds. It needlessly stretched on for days as Hitchcock sat in his director’s chair dispassionately observing Hedren being pecked at and scratched by real birds.
And it was when he was recreating this scene for The Girl that Jarrold found himself sitting in his director’s chair “squirming and feeling a little bit like Hitchcock” as he watched Sienna Miller, who plays Hedren, crouching on the floor fending off an onslaught of birds continuously shooed at her by a bird wrangler.
“Sienna was fantastic. She just went on and on, but at a certain point we had to stop because it was absolutely exhausting and very unpleasant for her. It’s difficult as a director. You get very close to a line,” says Jarrold, who unlike Hitchcock, spent less than a day shooting the difficult scene.
Director Julian Jarrold and Sienna Miller
“There’s no doubt this experience did make me more sensitive to my role as a director,” Jarrold adds, noting that he is collaborative with actors, letting them in on his plans, while Hitchcock was known to be less communicative.
A British television and film director whose credits range from a modern television adaptation of The Canterbury Tales to the feature film Kinky Boots, Jarrold has, like any director, studied Hitchcock’s work. “I was sort of puzzled and fascinated by his later films because they often have a slightly strange relationship between the man and the blonde,” he says, citing Vertigo. “It has been a favorite of mine, but I never completely understood it. It was made before the instances [with Hedren] we’re talking about, but there are some strange similarities in the way Hitchcock treated her and in the way that the blonde in that movie is sort of created from scratch in the guise of what the man wants.”
As familiar as he already was with Hitchcock’s work, Jarrold wore out his DVDs of Hitchcock films preparing to shoot The Girl, which he says was daunting to cast. Miller entered the casting process late in the game, and the director recalls being won over by how she instinctively understood how to play Hedren. “A lot of the time she doesn’t say a huge amount in the movie, but what she does say has a lot of subtext to it. It’s a tricky part,” he says.
Toby Jones
Jarrold had met Toby Jones, who portrayed Truman Capote in Infamous, early on in casting, and the director was confident he could embody Hitchcock. But the actor had scheduling conflicts. Ultimately, the shoot was delayed so Jones could take on the role. “Toby is such a clever person in terms of playing real people. He’s not someone who slavishly tries to impersonate them. He brings his own qualities to the role on top of an immense amount of research,” Jarrold says. “He likes to disappear into the part. He transformed himself in four hours in makeup every day, and you may have heard that once he was on set, he was Alfred Hitchcock. He wasn’t Toby Jones anymore.”
The Girl was shot in 26 days in Cape Town, South Africa, and nearby coastal locations in part because Jarrold wanted to use a hot, sunny locale. “One thing I love about Hitchcock films is that murder often happens but it’s not always dark and gloomy. He shot in bright, searing sunlight,” Jarrold says.
Most of The Girl was shot on digital, but sequences in which you see Hitchcock filming were captured on 35mm film using vintage cameras, including a Mitchell like the one Hitchcock famously used, to achieve a Technicolor look. “We used the type of diffusion, the type of lighting, the type of stylish shooting that was very much late Hitchcock, the Hollywood style if you like, that he used in the early ’60s and just before that,” Jarrold says. “And within the film there are some nods to Hitchcock shots, sort of homages to Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds and all that.”
Toby Jones and Sienna Miller
It was crucial to bring the viewer into the unique visual world created by Hitchcock, but it was equally important for Jarrold to craft an intense psychological drama. “A lot of the film is about control–Hitchcock desperately trying to control Tippi, and she, in her own way, trying to resist that,” he says.
Hedren, who told attendees of an HBO panel at the Television Critics Association Press Tour this summer that Hitchcock, who blacklisted her in Hollywood, may have ruined her career but didn’t ruin her life, is not portrayed as a victim in The Girl. “A lot of people would have crumbled or cracked. But she was so interesting in the way she was able to stay strong. She was walking a tightrope really,” Jarrold says. “She had an innocent quality and yet a strong quality, and she was never, ever going to submit to him.”
While Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren was deplorable, Jarrold didn’t want to portray him as simply a monster. “I hope we haven’t done that,” he says. “I think perhaps in the first half of the film you might think that. Hopefully, as the film goes on, you delve into his psychology and begin to see his vulnerabilities and where he is coming from.”
As to whether he is concerned about rubbing Hitchcock fans the wrong way, Jarrold says, “Obviously, if you don’t want to hear this story, you may not like it. But, for me, it enriched the experience of watching his other films. He was unbelievably successful. He made these very commercially successful films, and yet he was showing relationships on-screen that were very odd and peculiar, and he was making the audience identify with them through his brilliance as a filmmaker.”
Thinking about starting a new small business or startup that is heavily technology-based? Or do you already have a tech-based small business or startup that you are actively working on growing? If you are in one of the two categories above, is design one of your priorities?
Chances are, it isn’t. For most tech-based small businesses and startups, the focus is often on the product and how it can serve prospective customers. That is where their focus should be. However, along with wanting to either make a profit or raise funding as a priority, maybe you should consider making design a priority as well.
“Wait, design? But I’m not a designer!” Yes, I hear you loud and clear. Most of those in the tech-based world who start their own business or are creating a startup are not designers, and I get that. This is even more of a reason why tech-based businesses/startups should make design a priority (even if it means hiring designers to help).
Making design a priority in your tech-based business or startup could make a difference in your marketing results, how customers view you, and in the end could help your profitability. If I was pushed to give a 5 second answer to “why should tech-based small businesses and startups make design a priority,” my answer would be:
Great design attracts and maintains attention through visual communication.
Much like body language is a form of communication when speaking with someone, design is a form of visual communication when providing information in print or web form. While your websites all have lots of words on them talking about your product/service, what is your website saying if all of the words were gone, or in a foreign language you don’t speak? Is it still saying the same thing(s)?
Your business should be saying the exact same things with the design as it does with the words you use, which is a great way to attract attention using design. With design being a form of visual communication, often the way we present ourselves means much more than what we say about ourselves. This holds true with tech-based small businesses and startups as well.
In a time where technology is constantly changing around us, new apps and websites are launched every single day, and new technologies are being brought to the marketplace for us to experience, more and more people are starting to see the same types of offerings, often designed in the same style, and are hearing and reading the same things (i.e. “this will make your life easy” and “so easy to use”).
What will set you apart is how well you can visually communicate the same things you are telling your customers in hopes to not only grab their attention, but keep it and evoke excitement. This attention leads to great things: buzz about your product/service, brand ambassadors who will start sharing your name, an overall pleasant impression by those who have or would like to purchase your offering, and ultimately more customers and higher profits.
When time, effort, and care are put into making sure every piece of your tech-based small business or startup is well-designed, it naturally demands attention through visual cues and, if done well, will keep and maintain that attention while communicating vital information. That last element is what most small businesses and startups want – to maintain attention. When any business is able to maintain attention for more than just a few seconds (which is often the time span most people give to anything online), then you have achieved what few other businesses have or can: excitement. Great design often evokes excitement as it communicates effectively what is already being said with any words used.
With making design a priority, you are telling your prospective customers and the general public that you are fresh, that you are different, that you are professional, and that you are serious and excited about your offering. It shows that you understand customers in the technology world who are often looking for the latest and greatest thing. It shows that you have spent considerable time in research and development and that your marketing efforts are focused.
While it was easy for me to give all of the reasons above, I think the best way to explain the importance of design in tech-based businesses is to show you a couple examples of such businesses who have made design a priority.
Square
Square is my favorite example when talking about making design a priority. For those of you who don’t know, Square is a startup whose mission is to simplify the process of accepting card payments. It changed the way small businesses can accept credit card payments by making it easy to accept payments in minutes using its smartphone or tablet app, and its free card reader. Square also made its fees simple to understand: one flat percentage per swipe – no hidden fees.
What is most attractive about its offering and how it deliver its service is the way they have handled design. With minimal investigation, it is evident that it made design a priority. Square developed a logo to match its name and took that logo shape and used it throughout everything: the card reader, the icons on their navigation of its site, even down to their packaging of its card reader and the rounded-corner square shape in their instructions and packaging. The packaging of Square’s card reader alone is so well designed that it was recently discovered that PayPal’s competing product’s packaging has taken many cues from it.
Other than Square’s packaging, the website is simple to navigate and informative — clean and very simple in design. Since a key selling point of Square is the ease with which users can start using the service, it has conveyed this in the website by keeping the site simple while providing information in concise but informative copy. Even down to their dashboard for users: it is very easy to navigate and see their financial information without overwhelming the users with tons of options and links.
Square has not only grabbed attention because of its radically new way of taking credit card payments, but has been able to maintain that attention with the use of design from its website, to its dashboard, to its card reader and to its packaging and marketing. Square went with a very simple but polished design aesthetic which not only matched its message, but also helped build confidence in prospective customers who are considering trusting their money and sensitive information with a new startup.
Foodspotting
For businesses and startups that have started business but didn’t make design a priority from the start, it is never too late to start making design a priority. Let’s take for instance Foodspotting, which recently redesigned its website. While I am not saying that it didn’t have design as a priority when they started, it is definitely apparent that design is a priority now.
Foodspotting redesigned its website to have a very clean and minimalist design. As the article linked above shows, it got rid of much of the “clutter” on the site and opted for a more simple design that focused more on the food imagery than on a map. It wanted the food to shine in its redesign by making the food imagery stand out and appear more appetizing.
The website redesign comes after it redesigned its app earlier in the year, which shows again it is making design a priority. Foodspotting felt the need to improve upon the app that is the heart of its business, and wanted to improve the service by providing a well-designed and great functioning app to do so. As founder Alexa Andrzejewski mentioned in her blog post (link above), her team wanted to unify the experience between the mobile app and their website, which was accomplished through design. Footspotting is grabbing attention as people are excited about the new redesign and are now introducing people (like me) to the service because of the buzz that it is generating.
Conclusion
With all of the money tech-based small businesses and startups are spending on marketing and getting their messages just right, some of that money could be used to make design a priority and visually communicate to customers the same things they are saying with their marketing copy. When design is made a priority, your customers see it and they react because you have gained their attention and maintained it long enough for them to start talking about it with friends and family and sharing it with people they know. Great designs make you look good and make your customers more attentive to your offerings, all of which in turn will help with your profits and sales. Great design attracts and maintains attention through visual communication.
There was a point when director Julian Jarrold didn’t feel so comfortable shooting The Girl.
Tippi Hedren in The Birds
Based on Donald Spoto’s book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies and written by Gwyneth Hughes, the film, premiering on HBO Saturday, October 20, chronicles Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession with leading lady Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. Hitchcock was relentless in his pursuit of Hedren and vindictive when she turned down his sexual advances, punishing the actress by forcing her to endure all sorts of unnecessary discomfort, according to Spoto’s book and Hedren’s recollection of that period.
Take the filming of the famous attic scene from The Birds. It needlessly stretched on for days as Hitchcock sat in his director’s chair dispassionately observing Hedren being pecked at and scratched by real birds.
And it was when he was recreating this scene for The Girl that Jarrold found himself sitting in his director’s chair “squirming and feeling a little bit like Hitchcock” as he watched Sienna Miller, who plays Hedren, crouching on the floor fending off an onslaught of birds continuously shooed at her by a bird wrangler.
“Sienna was fantastic. She just went on and on, but at a certain point we had to stop because it was absolutely exhausting and very unpleasant for her. It’s difficult as a director. You get very close to a line,” says Jarrold, who unlike Hitchcock, spent less than a day shooting the difficult scene.
Director Julian Jarrold and Sienna Miller
“There’s no doubt this experience did make me more sensitive to my role as a director,” Jarrold adds, noting that he is collaborative with actors, letting them in on his plans, while Hitchcock was known to be less communicative.
A British television and film director whose credits range from a modern television adaptation of The Canterbury Tales to the feature film Kinky Boots, Jarrold has, like any director, studied Hitchcock’s work. “I was sort of puzzled and fascinated by his later films because they often have a slightly strange relationship between the man and the blonde,” he says, citing Vertigo. “It has been a favorite of mine, but I never completely understood it. It was made before the instances [with Hedren] we’re talking about, but there are some strange similarities in the way Hitchcock treated her and in the way that the blonde in that movie is sort of created from scratch in the guise of what the man wants.”
As familiar as he already was with Hitchcock’s work, Jarrold wore out his DVDs of Hitchcock films preparing to shoot The Girl, which he says was daunting to cast. Miller entered the casting process late in the game, and the director recalls being won over by how she instinctively understood how to play Hedren. “A lot of the time she doesn’t say a huge amount in the movie, but what she does say has a lot of subtext to it. It’s a tricky part,” he says.
Toby Jones
Jarrold had met Toby Jones, who portrayed Truman Capote in Infamous, early on in casting, and the director was confident he could embody Hitchcock. But the actor had scheduling conflicts. Ultimately, the shoot was delayed so Jones could take on the role. “Toby is such a clever person in terms of playing real people. He’s not someone who slavishly tries to impersonate them. He brings his own qualities to the role on top of an immense amount of research,” Jarrold says. “He likes to disappear into the part. He transformed himself in four hours in makeup every day, and you may have heard that once he was on set, he was Alfred Hitchcock. He wasn’t Toby Jones anymore.”
The Girl was shot in 26 days in Cape Town, South Africa, and nearby coastal locations in part because Jarrold wanted to use a hot, sunny locale. “One thing I love about Hitchcock films is that murder often happens but it’s not always dark and gloomy. He shot in bright, searing sunlight,” Jarrold says.
Most of The Girl was shot on digital, but sequences in which you see Hitchcock filming were captured on 35mm film using vintage cameras, including a Mitchell like the one Hitchcock famously used, to achieve a Technicolor look. “We used the type of diffusion, the type of lighting, the type of stylish shooting that was very much late Hitchcock, the Hollywood style if you like, that he used in the early ’60s and just before that,” Jarrold says. “And within the film there are some nods to Hitchcock shots, sort of homages to Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds and all that.”
Toby Jones and Sienna Miller
It was crucial to bring the viewer into the unique visual world created by Hitchcock, but it was equally important for Jarrold to craft an intense psychological drama. “A lot of the film is about control–Hitchcock desperately trying to control Tippi, and she, in her own way, trying to resist that,” he says.
Hedren, who told attendees of an HBO panel at the Television Critics Association Press Tour this summer that Hitchcock, who blacklisted her in Hollywood, may have ruined her career but didn’t ruin her life, is not portrayed as a victim in The Girl. “A lot of people would have crumbled or cracked. But she was so interesting in the way she was able to stay strong. She was walking a tightrope really,” Jarrold says. “She had an innocent quality and yet a strong quality, and she was never, ever going to submit to him.”
While Hitchcock’s treatment of Hedren was deplorable, Jarrold didn’t want to portray him as simply a monster. “I hope we haven’t done that,” he says. “I think perhaps in the first half of the film you might think that. Hopefully, as the film goes on, you delve into his psychology and begin to see his vulnerabilities and where he is coming from.”
As to whether he is concerned about rubbing Hitchcock fans the wrong way, Jarrold says, “Obviously, if you don’t want to hear this story, you may not like it. But, for me, it enriched the experience of watching his other films. He was unbelievably successful. He made these very commercially successful films, and yet he was showing relationships on-screen that were very odd and peculiar, and he was making the audience identify with them through his brilliance as a filmmaker.”
NEW YORK – Funding for startups declined 12 percent in the July-September period as venture capitalists spent less money on fewer deals, according to a new report. Companies in the early stages of funding saw declines as investors stayed cautious and life sciences funding remained lackluster.
A report out Friday says startup investments totaled $6.49 billion in the third quarter. That’s down from $7.34 billion a year earlier, a period that preceded a slew of high-profile initial public offerings from Facebook Inc. and others. Excitement about the IPOs helped drum up excitement about other up-and-coming startups among venture capitalists.
There were 890 deals completed during the quarter, down 10 percent from 992 a year earlier. Companies in software, biotech and information technology received the most money, with software far outpacing the others.
“In general the industry is going through a period of ‘back to basics,’” said Jon Callaghan, founder of VC firm True Ventures. He added, though, that there is still a tremendous amount of innovation among startups and that the software and Internet sectors were still robust.
Investments for the first nine months of the year totaled $20 billion – below the $22.2 billion at the same point last year. This likely indicates that 2012 will fall short of last year both in dollar amounts and the number of deals, according to the report.
Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said that while tech investments continue to be strong, funding in life sciences remains low, “reflecting ongoing concerns regarding regulatory uncertainty, capital intensity and investment time horizons.” These investments require a lot of money, and venture capitalists may not see the benefits of their investments for many years.
The quarterly MoneyTree study was conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA, based on data from Thomson Reuters. The study tracked four stages of venture capital funding. Depending on how far along companies are in development, they received either “seed,” “early,” “expansion” or “later-stage” funding.
Blight was a long-standing problem in New Orleans even before Hurricane Katrina ransacked people’s homes and forced tens of thousands of residents out of the city for good, leaving their properties behind. And nature has always contributed to the trouble. An abandoned house in swampy New Orleans deteriorates under creeping vines and overgrown foliage much faster than a blighted property in Detroit or Oakland does.
This is the problem Code for America confronted when it sent a team of civic-tech fellows to work with the city earlier this year. In fact, New Orleans had two challenges with its renewable crop of blighted properties. These buildings were, quite visibly, marring neighborhoods. But the city also had a less visible information problem. Neighbors and community groups wanted to repair or demolish many of these properties–or at least find out where their owners had gone. But the city’s mechanism for reporting blight (or, in bureaucrat-speak: code violations) was messy and complex, involving multiple agencies, and no one could get any information from it.
“This meant that people were constantly poking the city, using whatever channels of communication they had to the city,” says Eddie Tejeda, one of the Code for America fellows. “It overwhelmed the city to the point where the city was paralyzed.”
Tejeda and the other New Orleans fellows spent months developing the first steps toward an answer: a web application called BlightStatus, unveiled just last week, that allows people in the city to identify blighted properties and track what officials are doing about them. This is admittedly a technological fix, not a hammer-and-nails one. But when actual change is slow to come, information tends to make people feel better.
“When we all came together, we realized New Orleans was a place where we’d be dealing with very difficult issues,” Tejeda says. “It was not a place where we’d be able to throw together a cool app and say ‘here’s our contribution.’”
The searchable mapping tool reveals when a property was inspected and just what its problems were (shattered windows, broken gutters, missing roof tiles). Residents can then track open cases all the way through their court hearings, judgment, and resolution. If you report a property, in other words, you can now see what happens to it over time. Ideally, these buildings meet one of three ends: the owner is found and pays for repairs, the foreclosed house goes on sale through the sheriff’s office (hopefully to someone who will repair it), or it’s ultimately demolished.
New Orleans isn’t a place where we’d be able to throw together a cool app and say ‘here’s our contribution.’
“Blight,” however, is a hazy term. It has one technical definition from the city’s point of view but often another in the language of how we talk about communities. Plenty of eyesores may never enter this legal process. And others that do may fall in and out of “blight” over time. The fundamental issue, though, is that one person’s property impacts a whole neighborhood.
“The part that was amazing to me was seeing houses that had been rebuilt, houses that had been finished, renovated and really looked great, right next to a property that had clearly been abandoned,” says Alex Pandel, one of the other Code for America fellows. “It was interesting to me to see how much it affected those neighbors that had put in the work, they repaired their properties, and their neighbors just disappeared.”
Throughout the city, Pandel and Tejeda say, people seemed to be relieved when BlightStatus was launched. The site, simple as its interface appears, conveys that city government is tracking residents’ problems, right down to the peeling paint on a house next door. But even more crucially, the app also proposes a new kind of more productive communication between the two groups that moves past angry and frustrated citizens on one end, and a paralyzed city on the other.
There’s nothing more formulaic than karting games–but in the new LBPK, gamers are encouraged to take that formula and blow it up. We talk to the game’s creators to see why creativity can spring from restriction.
The LittleBigPlanet series has always prided itself on creativity; the motto was, in short, build the game you want. So when I heard the newest game in the series would be called LittleBigPlanet Karting, I was wary. Karting, where you take a bunch of cute characters, put them in easy-to-control go-karts, and race them around colorful tracks with obstacles and weapons, is one of the most formulaic of genres. It’s the kind of genre that’s perfect for a lazy, soulless adaptation of a kids’ movie–fill in the blanks with your characters and your weapons and your track themes, and done. What I didn’t consider is how those boundaries can set you free.
LittleBigPlanet, up until now, has been difficult to shoehorn into a genre. The first entry was, mostly, a platformer: Your little anthropomorphic sack character jumped its way through surreal, exotic, imaginative locales, solving puzzles to move forward. LBP 2 was another step ahead, and spun not as a “platform game” but as a “platform for games.” (I’d think that was too-clever PR if the game wasn’t so fun.) Its level-creation tools became not just a fun bonus, but the real enduring value of the game itself. A cultish community built itself up around it, using the level creation tools to forge their own interpretations of the game and let other fans play them. That became LBP 2‘s triumph: The game was handed over to the players, and they brought it forward more than a single creative team ever could. It was a game that didn’t fit snugly into a genre; it was whatever the contributors wanted to contribute and whatever the players wanted to play. And key to that is that the platformer is also a formulaic genre, also, oddly, well-suited to licensing from Dreamworks Studios for their newest awful Shrek movie. Jump from thing to thing. Don’t let a bad guy touch you. Present game as gift to child at holiday.
LBP isn’t the first game to toy with a level-creation idea, and it won’t be the last. In the PC gaming days of yore, level creation meant building something–your coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, your character in The Sims–then watching what you make unfold. Now we have something more interesting: What we make we can share with other people, then have them explore it themselves by actually being a moving part (a playable character) in a level. In modern games, Minecraft and LBP are two of the best-known examples. But here’s the difference: In Minecraft, you’re given completely free reign; you get the tools and get to build what you want. That’s an amazing thing, but there’s a reason a competitor like LBP gets the full weight of Sony thrown behind it for releases. You get all the tools you need from the start, of course, but it’s built around something you know. The platformer (or in this case karting) really is a platform to create a level, or even a whole game, that’s unique.
* * *
It seems hard to respin something into an open-source gaming platform when it has a well-established genre latched onto the end of the title like an oversized caboose. (Up next: LittleBigPlanet: Cyberpunk.) At a PlayStation event last week, I ran through the opening level of LBP Karting to get a feel for the controls. It felt like a lot every other racing game in its style, more in line with the Mario Kart series–in aesthetics and controls–than the LittleBigPlanet I’d remembered. You race through a track, picking up weapons to slow down your opponents or speed yourself up on your way to the finish line. It was fun, sure, but felt like a step back. What were the developers, United Front Games, thinking? Did Media Molecule, the original LBP team that signed on to help, think this was a good move?
So I talked with Jenny Timms, a producer, and Mark Riddell, a game designer who worked on LBP Karting, about the best way to cede control over to the players. They explained how expectations that seem like a door end up being a window.
LittleBigPlanet Karting: Sony
The way Timms explained it, it’s tough to create a truly open experience without some grounding. LBP Karting is easier to stomach than LBP Whatever You Want We’re Not Your Mother. “First and foremost it is for making karting adventures,” Riddell says, but if someone wants to make a lunar lander adventure (someone did), that’s cool, too. In other words, Timms says, the barrier to entry needs to be low, then the people who make truly creative, unexpected things will come out–make “their masterpiece,” as Riddell puts it. There are certain things you expect when playing a racing game (if you don’t expect those things, you’ll pick them up quickly) and that creates a framework. Understanding the rules of the game is important to throwing out the rules of the game, and everyone understands karting.
One of the first steps to enabling new level-creators, Riddell says, was to build a level playing field. The developers made the tools, then everything they created in the game, including the single-player story, was made with those tools. Not just the tracks, mind you–even the cinematic sequences can be constructed using the tools. That means the players can do everything the developers do, whether constructing a brief mini-game or a full narrative with camera transitions and animation. A player could, if they were so inclined, remake the developer-built single-player mode of LBP Karting–then tweak it to suit their needs. The developers were in the exact same position as gamers will be, creating with tools they’ve never used before. The developers found that that grounding set them up to create unexpected, imaginative things.
The tools start off simple, but grow more complex. If you start off with a framework like karting that everyone understands, it encourages players to mess around. Then as they grow more advanced, they’ll reach for the more complex tools and start disrupting the whole system. Sure, it could’ve been a completely open experience, but basing the game on something familiar and waiting for someone to create a first-person shooter version of it is more effective–and, so much weirder and more satisfying. (Someone did that, too.)
The crew saw that idea in action when they passed it onto to players for testing and watched the results unfold. At first, they needed to adjust to creating the world, but after a while they got the hang of it. By the end, Timms says, the developers would sometimes think, “We didn’t even know we could do that in this game.” In that sense, it’s a game that isn’t shipped “finished”; it ends when contributions stop being made to it. What is shipped in it is something the player (the potential creator) already understands.
For a lot of people playing, this is just going to be a pretty good kart game. But, if you want, it doesn’t have to be: the restrictions of a karting game can be the “stepping stones” (Timm’s words) that lead you to something else that you might not have anticipated. You don’t have to look far to see that idea in action, even past the videogame world. You can see it in the punk-blues of the two-piece The White Stripes, who give themselves crazy restrictions when recording an album, or in the stanza requirements for a sonnet, or even in Twitter’s 140-character limit.
If I hadn’t seen the karting levels before it, I wouldn’t have suspected the other levels had anything to do with racing.The results of this idea shined through in some of the developer examples I saw, which is where my assumptions popped like the sack-y heads of so many LBP protagonists. By tying themselves into a genre, the creators were eventually able to break themselves out of that genre. Case in point: Some of the developer-created levels had nothing to do with racing. For the most part, they didn’t have anything to do with weapons, either. One used the level-creation tools to build a Plinko-style game: A player drops a ball down past a series of pegs and racks up points as they go. No rocket launchers; no competitors speeding by; no end in sight except the satisfaction of your score. Another developer created a tower defense-style game. A stream of enemies makes its way through a door, and by setting up a series of automatic, turret-type weapons, you halt their progress for as long as you can. If I hadn’t seen the karting levels before it, I wouldn’t have suspected the other levels had anything to do with racing. They started those levels with the same tools everyone gets in the game–tools used for building racetracks.
I can’t say if what I saw will be similar to what players will do with LBP Karting when it’s released in November–what I saw were creations by the creators, and they’ve spent more time with the game than most any player will. Still (and LBP might not be the game to do this) it shows how we’re heading in a direction where the creators, if they want to, don’t matter much at all–as long as they provide a ladder for the players to climb up as high as they want. You can take that as a slightly scary outlook (what about artistic intent?!), but it’s also an exciting one. LittleBigPlanet isn’t the first game to toy with this idea, but it’s one of the most visible, and LBP Karting could make for an especially interesting experiment: With this setup in place, could the creators alter the conversation for their game even if they wanted to? The creators have deemed it LBP Karting, but if the LBP faithful want, they could veto that idea. (I don’t think most will do that, but I suspect at least some will.)
That, to me, is what makes this an interesting case study in level-creation games. Being able to create your own worlds, with only some guidance offered by the creators, is something unique to games as a medium. But, paradoxically, it seems like the way to make that an option for a mass audience is to start out with formula and structure, and trust that users will not only master the tools but use them to break that very formula. Rules to break rules. I just hope the game lives up to its potential.
Apple is expected to announce a smaller, 7.85-inch iPad mini next week on October 23, and early orders are rumored to be in the hands of buyers by November 2, according to a couple recent reports.
Just after Apple announced this week that it was holding a special media event to show us “a little more,” a source within a major UK retailer told Geeky Gadgets that the “iPad mini” would be available in the US and UK, “and possible other countries,” on Friday, November 2. The same source, who had correctly identified the ship date for the iPhone 5 ahead of its release, also suggested that pre-orders would begin on Friday, October 26, following the device’s expected unveiling on October 23.
TechCrunch echoed that information on Friday. Citing a source “close to Apple’s supply chain,” the site corroborated Geeky Gadget’s information that the device would indeed be shipping to pre-order buyers on November 2.
That timeline is similar to the one Apple employed for the launch of the iPhone 5 last month. The device was announced on September 12, with preorders beginning on the following Friday. The first devices began shipping to consumers a week later.
Apple likely expects the device to be a popular gift for the holidays, with rumors suggesting the company expects to produce more than 10 million units in the fourth quarter. Apple likely doesn’t want to waste any time getting it on store shelves for the busy shopping season that kicks off in earnest in late November.
In late june when Google introduced the Nexus Q, an Android-powered device that ports music and video from the cloud to home theaters, critics immediately set to tearing it apart. They called it “baffling” and “overpriced” and generally decried its lack of features. But, as so often happens with something truly unusual, the critics may have missed the point.
The Nexus Q creates a unique home-theater experience. Users connect the 4.6-inch sphere, which has a 25-watt amplifier, to a set of speakers or a TV. Each member of a group taps the top of the orb with his Android phone or tablet, and an NFC chip signals the device to automatically open Google Play, the app for the company’s cloud-based media storage. From there, group members can cue up songs saved to one another’s Google Play accounts. The Nexus Q pulls those tracks from the cloud over Wi-Fi and pipes them into the home-theater system. Members can also send YouTube videos to the TV. It’s the first time several people can build playlists collaboratively.
People have been using the Web to listen and watch communally for some time. Services such as Spotify and iTunes Ping let users see what their friends are listening to but without any real interactivity. Turntable.fm, a popular iPhone and Web app, allows users to share their favorite tracks in group listening “rooms.” Google Hangouts, a service that links up as many as 10 people in a video chat, does the same with YouTube videos.
The Nexus Q sets itself apart in two ways. Unlike sharing services that allow friends to listen to the same thing when apart, the Q creates a shared experience for friends who are physically together. And the Q is a hackable platform. The device has a dual-core processor and open-source Android Jelly Bean operating system, common components in tablets and smartphones, that are capable of much more than relaying playback commands. Within days of the release, hackers figured out how to run any of the Google Play store’s apps—500,000 and counting—through the device and onto a TV set, as well as stream Netflix, play a version of pong, and render high-def games.
Because the Q is only a couple of months old, hackers have just begun to explore what the device can do. In the two years since the launch of the Microsoft Kinect, for instance, hackers have adapted the motion-capture game system into a sign-language translator, a diagnostic tool for autism, a motorized-skateboard controller, and hundreds of other things. And now that Google has sent out the first round of Q preorders for free while the company expands the device’s core features, coders will have the opportunity to develop apps and games specifically for the Q. Where the device goes from here will be entirely up to them.
AOL’s hoping to shake up the email market by offering a new service that works with your existing webmail accounts, rather than replacing them completely. After you sign in with your Yahoo, Gmail, AOL Mail or .Mac address, AOL’s Alto transforms the traditional list-focused email experience into a visual experience designed around organizing your email into “stacks.” Basically, it’s a pretty way to cut through inbox clutter.
Stacks arrange your emails according to their contents; emails with photos go into one stack, emails from retailers or social notifications go into another and so on, as you can see in the screenshot above. Alto sorts emails into a handful of preset stack types by default, but users are free to whip up Stacks of their own, or hide existing stacks if you’re looking to Get Things Done and don’t want daily deals sucking away your focus.
If you want to see what your social pals are up to online, you can also connect an Alto account to your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles to receive up-to-the-minute updates from your network.
Alto seems like an intriguing take on Gmail’s Priority Inbox feature and its aesthetic could fit in nicely with Windows 8′s look and feel, judging by the screenshots. If you want to give the cloud-based service a whirl — each Alto account can integrate five different email addresses, by the way — head over to the Alto website and register to join.
A Samsung Galaxy tablet.(Photo: Sean Gallup Getty Images)
Story Highlights
Court says Apple must publicize its ruling in favor of Samsung
Samsung Galaxy tablet deemed ‘not as cool’ as iPad
Ruling speaks to Samsung’s originality, if not its design
3:36PM EDT October 18. 2012 – LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Court of Appeal has backed a judgment that Samsung’s Galaxy tablet computer is “not as cool” as Apple’s iPad — and therefore doesn’t infringe Apple’s rights.
The panel’s upholding of the findings of by a lower court endorses the U.K. judgment which made headlines around the world when it was handed down in July. Judge Colin Birss had then gushed over Apple’s design, while knocking back the company’s case against its rival.
“The extreme simplicity of the Apple design is striking,” Birss wrote at the time, enthusing over its “undecorated flat surfaces,” its “very thin rim” and “crisp edge.”
“It is an understated, smooth and simple product,” Birss wrote, saying that Samsung’s products “are not as cool.”
On Thursday, the Court of Appeal agreed unanimously with Birss, with Judge Robin Jacob ordering Apple to publicize the court rulings to make sure consumers knew that Samsung wasn’t a copycat.
“The acknowledgement must come from the horse’s mouth,” Jacob said. “Nothing short of that will be sure to do the job completely.”
Kim Walker, a partner with English law firm Thomas Eggar LLP, said that the ruling was an endorsement of Samsung’s originality — if not its design.
“It appears that you don’t have to be cool to be original when it comes to intellectual property rights,” she wrote in an email. “You just have to be different!”
The British case is just one of several in Apple and Samsung’s international copyright battle, which has raged across Europe and the United States.
Earlier this month, the Court of Appeals in Washington overturned a judge’s order blocking Samsung from selling its Galaxy Nexus smart phone pending a patent lawsuit by Apple. A jury in September agreed with Apple and ordered Samsung to pay $1 billion. Samsung has moved to set the judgment aside.
In September, a German court dismissed Apple’s claim that Samsung and Google Inc.’s Motorola Mobility infringed patents used in touch-screen devices.
Apple applied for an injunction in the Netherlands last year regarding all three Samsung Galaxy models, the 10.1, the 8.9 and the 7.7. The court refused, Apple lost on appeal is now petitioning the Supreme Court.
Samsung went to court in Spain last year seeking a declaration of non-infringement. Apple is challenging Spain’s jurisdiction, and the case has not resulted in any ruling so far.
Despite ties to China’s PLA, Chinese company did not actively engage in spying, yet
A fiery Congressional report singled out two top Chinese equipment manufacturers – ZTE Corp. (SHE:000063) and Huawei Technologies Comp. (SHE:002502) — as a national security threats. However, new details are emerging which suggest that the worst case scenario — China leveraging its influence on the telecoms to steal U.S. commercial secrets — has not yet happened.
I. White House Probe: No Spying by Huawei, but Lots of Security Holes
In Huawei’s case, suspicion is heightened by the fact the company’s founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei is a former PLA officer, and subject to contractual relations between Huawei and China’s People’s Liberation Army.
But according to two sources which spoke with Reuters, an 18-month U.S Intelligence review on behalf of the White House found no evidence that Huawei had spied on U.S. companies. White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden released a carefully worded comment, remarking, “The White House has not conducted any classified inquiry that resulted in clearing any telecom equipment supplier.”
But the Reuters sources concurred — Huawei was not cleared of being considered a security risk, but critically it was not for the spying question. According to the sources Huawei was instead considered to risky for the government to use as a contractor due to vulnerabilities in its firmware and software, which could leave its telecommunication equipment vulnerable to hacker intrusions.
Describes one source of Huawei’s code, “We found it riddled with holes.”
Networking expert Felix Lindner agrees, saying that Huawei’s problems appear to be more than likely due to sloppy coding rather than deliberate sabotage. He reveals, “I’d say it was five times easier to find one in a Huawei router than in a Cisco one.”
The supposed classified investigation involved interviewing over 1,000 telecommunications equipment buyers asking them questions regarding Huawei and other top Chinese OEMs.
China’s government, as well as Huawei and ZTE, attacked the Congressional report and the suggestion that the Chinese OEMs should be banned from the U.S. market. A ZTE spokesperson pointed out that most American electronics firms also manufacture their electronics in China. Huawei’s U.S. spokesperson Bill Plummer commented, “Huawei is a $32 billion independent multinational that would not jeopardize its success or the integrity of its customers’ networks for any government or third party. Ever.”
The Congressional report suggests its recommendations were based partially on a “classified annex”, a source Reuters suggests is likely the 18-month intelligence probe.
II. Possibility for Future Spying is Still Strong
It’s important to note that the report does not completely clear Huawei. One source, who investigated Huawei’s products between 4 and 6 years ago on behalf of the intelligence community, claimed to Reuters that he had observed code snippets that appeared to be so-called “back-doors” — deliberately inserted security flaws that would allow later exploitation. Huawei has repeatedly denied such holes exist, amid rumors.
Chris Johnson, a form China analyst for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency tells Reuters that even if the unconfirmed classified report did clear Huawei of any obvious deliberate spying, that it still represents a major threat in the future tense.
That line of logic has led Canada and Australia to join the U.S. in banning Huawei’s telecommunications equipment from government networks. However, Britain recently offered up a dissenting take when its government security experts declared Huawei fully vetted and capable of bidding on government contracts.
Facebook’s IPO filing on Wednesday offers investors, bankers, analysts, journalists and anyone willing to read the massive S-1 document a deeper look at the business and financial side of the world’s largest social network than we’ve ever had before.
Our team of tech and business reporters has been digging into the filing, reporting on the Menlo Park, Calif., company’s $3.7-billion revenue, rivalries with Twitter and Google+, perspective on China, social mission and hacker ethos, Zynga accounting for 12% of Facebook’s revenue, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s pay cut from $600,000 in 2012 to $1 in 2013 and even what the IPO could mean for the Winklevoss twins.
But that wasn’t all the S-1 had to say. Here are some other highlights from Facebook’s IPO filing before the company actually goes public in May:
Users: Facebook has an average of 845 million monthly active users, 483 million of whom log into the social network daily.
Workforce: At the end of 2011, Facebook had 3,200 full-time employees, up 50% from 2,127 employees 2010. In 2009, the company had 1,218 employees.
Worldwide: Facebook’s plan, unsurprisingly, is to continue to grow by gaining more users in countries around the world. But the company also said in its S-1 that it plans to grow its workforce worldwide as well. “We plan to continue the international expansion of our business operations and the translation of our products,” Facebook said. Currently, Facebook is offered in more than 70 different languages, and the company has data centers in more than 20 different countries.
Popularity: Facebook said that about 60% of the online population in the U.S. and U.K. is registered on the social network. But Facebook is more popular in Chile, Turkey and Venezuela, where the company has “penetration rates of greater than 80% of Internet users.”
There are more than 2 billion Internet users worldwide and Facebook said its goal is to connect all of them through its social network.
“In countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 20-30%; in countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration,” the filing said.
Money in the bank: Facebook said that it had $1.5 billion at its disposal in a mix of “cash and cash equivalents” as of Dec. 31, as well as $2.3 billion in “marketable securities.” In 2010, Facebook had $1.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents and no marketable securities. Total assets on hand amounted to $6.6 billion in 2011, while Facebook had a total of $1.4 billion in liabilities.
R&D: Facebook’s research and development efforts have seen massive growth over the last few years. In 2011, the company spent $388 million, or about 10.5% of its revenue, on R&D. In 2010, Facebook spent less than half that amount, with $144 million going toward R&D. In 2009, the company spend $87 million on R&D, up from $47 million in 2008 and $81 million in 2007.
Patents: Faceook said a major factor in whether or not the company will be able to maintain the huge success it’s had thus far will ride on its ability to “protect our core technology and intellectual property.”
To do that, Facebook will “rely on a combination of patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, including know-how, license agreements, confidentiality procedures, non-disclosure agreements with third parties, employee disclosure and invention assignment agreements, and other contractual rights.” The social media giant ended 2011 with 56 patents and 503 patent applications filed in the U.S., along with 33 corresponding patents and 149 patent applications filed in foreign countries.
RELATED:
Facebook’s S-1 already has a (fake) Twitter account
Facebook IPO: Winklevoss twins could reap big payday
Facebook IPO: Mark Zuckerberg’s salary falling to $1 in 2013
– Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Nathan Olivarez-Giles on Google+
Facebook.com/nateog
Twitter.com/nateog
Photo: Visitors pose in front of a sign at the entrance of Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Wednesday. Credit: Kimihiro Hoshino / AFP/Getty Images
There’s gonna be some rockin’, but not really much else.
In 2011, Apple largely left 2010′s iPod nano alone, though it did slightly tweak the software to embrace a popular use of the tiny touchscreen device as a watch replacement. A small cottage industry spring up to design and sell all manner of iPod nano “watch bands,” but Apple has now abandoned that idea in favor of giving the seventh-generation iPod nano a larger, 2.5″ touchscreen capable of playing videos.
Beyond the new screen, the addition of Bluetooth 4.0, and the switch to Apple’s smaller Lightning connector, however, very little of the internal hardware changed in the 2012 iPod nano. Software remains largely the same as well, with a similar collection of “apps” all provided by Apple.
Apple has a history of moving in interesting (if odd) design directions with the smaller iPods, and then changing its mind. Remember the buttonless third-generation iPod shuffle? That design didn’t fare too well, it seems, and Apple again sells an iPod shuffle with buttons. How about the third-generation “fat” iPod nano? Apple thought a sideways screen would be a good way to add compatibility with video and then-new downloadable iPod games, but the fourth-generation nano returned to the taller “candy bar” design.
What’s most odd about the changes Apple made with the seventh-gen nano, however, is that it took an existing, seemingly popular design and got rid of the very elements that made it unique. The integrated clip—handy for those that used the nano while working out—is gone. And the larger size means it won’t fit on a handy wrist strap.
Enlarge / The new iPod nano looks like a mini iPod touch, and is still quite small (seen here with an iPhone 5) despite its larger 2.5-inch touchscreen.
What’s left is a fairly simple music player that doesn’t—at least on the surface—seem all that appealing. And given the iPod’s increasingly dwindling sales figures since the introduction of the iPhone, that could end up being a liability in the market. Does the new iPod nano have what it takes to make waves in the current marketplace? Let’s find out.
Hardware
Enlarge / The iPod nano now has a “home” button.
As we noted earlier, the internal hardware is largely the same as the sixth-gen nano from 2011. iFixit’s usual thorough teardown revealed a nearly identical architecture, including an NXP ARM-based processor, Toshiba NAND flash, and various support chips. The main changes include a Broadcom Bluetooth + FM radio module, support chips for Lightning, and a larger, double-size battery.
On the outside, Apple elongated the case to fit a larger, rectangular 2.5″ touchscreen and a small, iPhone-like “home” button. On the left side is a volume rocker, which also doubles as a play/pause button if you push it in the middle. On the top is a power/screen lock button. On the bottom, you’ll see the Lightning port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. A small white plastic strip hides the Bluetooth antenna as well.
Enlarge / Push the middle of the volume rocker to play or pause music.
The anodized aluminum shell is sleek and sturdy, and matches the look of the latest iPod touch. In fact, it seems as if Apple is trying to make the nano into something of a tiny iPod touch. The placement of controls, the overall shape, and the strange “home” button all serve to amplify that feeling.
Enlarge / As is the case with iOS devices, you can push the power button to lock or unlock the screen, or hold down to power the iPod nano on or off.
At 1.1 ounces (a scant 31 grams), the nano is still extremely lightweight, and easily tucks into a pocket. You probably won’t even know it’s there. But we miss the integrated clip of the sixth-gen nano; without it, you may need some kind of strap or case to hold on to it while exercising.
Enlarge / Apple is standardizing the new Lightning connector across all its portable devices.
Though the vertical dimension is essentially double the previous nano, the seventh-gen device is small, lightweight, feels solid, and looks nice. Our review unit is a pastel, pinkish purple color, but you can also get it in black, silver, blue, green, and yellow, as well as a special “Product Red” color. (Given my experience with the red iPod touch, I can whole-heartedly recommend that color.)
Software
Enlarge / The iPod nano still uses circular icons for its “apps” arranged on an iOS-like home screen.
The interface of the seventh-gen nano is mostly unchanged from the previous generation. Each “app” has a small round icon, differentiating it from iOS’s rounded square app icons. (This motif is continued on the “home” button, which has a circle on it instead of the rounded square of the iPhone.) Tap the appropriate icon to listen to music, podcasts, or the radio; watch video; view photos; check the time; access the fitness app; and change the settings. If you plug in a headset with integrated microphone, you’ll also see a voice memo app—but do note that the Apple “EarPods” included with the nano don’t have a built-in mic.
Enlarge / Photos look nice on the larger, 2.5″ screen, though resolution is not as sharp as a “retina” display.
All these functions are essentially identical to those from the previous iPod nano, with video being the sole addition. Yes, you can now sync videos and watch them on the tiny 2.5″ screen. We know some iPod nano fans missed this capability in the sixth-gen device, so now you’ve got it. Like the other apps, video uses a familiar, though shrunken, iOS-like interface. Videos are synced through iTunes, just like music and photos, a process any iPod or iPhone owner is familiar with.
Enlarge / “Let’s hit up Magnolia and mac on some cupcakes.”
Enlarge / The video UI overlay is like a tiny iOS video app.
Otherwise, this is the same iPod nano as before, just with a taller screen. You can dig through your music in the music app, browse photo albums in the photo app, track your steps or runs in the fitness app, listen to podcasts in the podcast app, listen to the radio with the radio app… well, you get the picture.
Usage
Enlarge / The iPod nano’s touchscreen works just as you might expect, including tapping and dragging to re-arrange playlists.
Like an iOS device, you can tap and swipe to move around the user interface. You can even rearrange the apps on the “home screen,” though there’s no way to add new apps, which seems like sort of a tease. Apple has yet to announce any way for third parties to develop “nano apps,” and this seems like a glaring omission.
You can still set the clock as your “lock screen,” so you can use the 7G nano as a sort of timepiece. But we don’t see accessory makers making cool watch bands for this new nano—it just won’t work.
Enlarge / Apple still includes a few options for the clock, but not near the number of “faces” it offered for the 6th-gen nano.
I used all the apps except for the podcasts app (I’m just not a big podcast listener), and they all work as one would expect. The interface for each essentially looks like a shrunken version of its similar iOS counterpart—I’d almost call it “cute.” In all, I was happy with how everything worked, and didn’t find anything confusing. Apple has certainly worked to make the nano as straightforward and intuitive as an iOS device.
With nearly identical hardware, audio quality is pretty much the same as previous nanos. The newer EarPods sound a bit better overall, with more bass presence, but discerning listeners (or folks like me with apparently tiny ears) are going to want better quality headphones. This isn’t an audiophile device by any stretch, but audio output from a 256kbps AAC file sounds the same as from an iPhone 5, iPhone 4, fifth-gen iPod touch, and MacBook Air.
Apple promises that the larger battery is good for up to 30 hours of playing music. After playing music constantly for three solid work days (about 25 hours), I still have what appears to be close to 20 percent capacity left. Apple only promises 3.5 hours of runtime if you play video, so you could potentially get in two movies on a single charge if you need to. However, we don’t expect many users would want to watch full-length movies on the nano that often.
The larger touchscreen is a bit easier to navigate than the previous nano’s smaller, square screen. Unsurprisingly, the resolution isn’t any sharper—no “retina” display here. It’s definitely a nice looking screen, but not iPhone 5 nice.
Unmet expectations
For what it is, the iPod nano is a decent device. It does exactly what Apple says it will do: play music and videos, show photos, track walking and running activities (which is surprisingly accurate despite the lack of GPS), show you the time, and even record voice memos. It works nice, looks nice, and feels nice.
But to be quite frank, the iPod nano is a disappointment. Perhaps we have been spoiled by the versatility of iOS devices like the iPhone and iPod touch; in 2012, the iPod nano seems unnecessarily limited. And it seems as if the problem is largely one of Apple’s own making—since the interface pretty much looks like and works like iOS, I expect it to be iOS. But it’s not; it’s just a facsimile UI laid over the original iPod’s Pixo OS.
Enlarge / Apple’s newest iPod nano is more like “buy me, maybe.”
And Apple isn’t doing itself any favors with the $149 price point. It seems the nano has largely become the go-to mobile device for younger kids or fitness buffs who want to carry around minimal weight. Dropping an iPod nano while jogging has less potential for disaster than dropping an iPhone, for instance. But for just $50 more, you can get the entry-level fourth-gen iPod touch. It’s bigger, sure, and heavier, but it has Wi-Fi and a camera, it can browse the Web and do FaceTime chats, and it can access iOS’s vast library of apps.
For just $50 more, you could get an entry-level iPod touch.
There’s so much more Apple could have done with the nano to make it more appealing. Adding GPS would make it more appealing to runners; adding a camera would make it more appealing to tweens; adding Wi-Fi would allow for streaming music and video; and adding a way to connect to iPhones via Bluetooth as a sort of remote for alerts would have made it a cool “smart watch.” Additionally, allowing third-party developers to make apps could potentially make it far more versatile.
Instead, all Apple gave us is last year’s nano with a bigger screen.
We criticized the newest iPod touch for its price, though overall it felt worth the money. At $149, the seventh-generation iPod nano is not that compelling. Younger users are increasingly becoming accustomed to the versatility of iOS by using mom or dad’s iPad or iPhone, so an iPod touch still seems like a better buy for kids. And fitness buffs are increasingly using more sophisticated fitness apps on iOS, which can track more information and share the data more easily (iPod nano data is still limited to syncing with the Nike+ service, it seems).
If you want a fairly simple media device or a really small, lightweight device, the iPod nano will likely fit your needs. But in today’s consumer electronics market—full of smartphones and other mobile, connected devices—$149 seems like too much to spend for what it offers.
The good:
Solid design
Long-lasting battery
Larger screen is usable for video and better for photos
The bad:
Too big to use as a watch replacement
Isn’t actually a tiny iPod touch
The ugly:
The combination of a $149 price tag and limited capabilities
Males and females both have the spikes – but only males use them
Believed to have evolved so that males can anchor themselves to a female during mating
By Mark Prigg
PUBLISHED: 11:41 EST, 18 October 2012 | UPDATED: 11:50 EST, 18 October 2012
Combat-ready spikes which shoot from fingers are a key weapon for Wolverine, one of the X-Men comic book heroes.
However, Japanese researchers have found an unlikely animal with similar capabilities – a rare frog.
The researchers found the Otton frog uses spikes which protrude from a false thumb for both combat and mating.
A frog with a hidden secret: the Otto frog uses spikes hidden in a false thumb for both mating and fighting
The frog has a sharp spine sheathed in a false thumb which is used for mating and fighting
THE OTTON FROG
The Otton frog (Babina subaspera), is found on the Amami islands of Southern Japan.
Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests and freshwater marshes.
It is threatened by the destruction of its habitat, and is also hunted by mongooses.
The study, which is published in the Journal of Zoology, was conducted by Dr Noriko Iwai from the University of Tokyo.
The researchers studied the Otton frog (Babina subaspera), whose habitat is the Amami islands of Southern Japan.
Unlike most other frogs the Otton has an extra digit-like structure, a trait it shares with the five-fingered Hypsiboas rosenbergi frogs of Latin America.
‘Why these “fifth fingers” exist in some species remains an evolutionary mystery, but the extra digit of the Otton is in fact a pseudo-thumb,’ said Dr Iwai.
‘The digit encases a sharp spine which can project out of the skin, which fieldwork demonstrates is used for combat and mating.’
Dr Iwai has studied the rare frogs since 2004 in order to understand the species’ distribution, breeding habits and range; all factors which will contribute to any conservation strategy.
Once she began exploring how the Otton’s use their pseudo-thumbs Dr Iwai discovered that while both males and females had the spike, it was only used by males.
Males were found to have larger pseudo-thumbs than the females and Dr Iwai believes that the spikes evolved for anchoring to the female, known as amplexus, the Latin for embrace, during mating.
‘While the pseudo-thumb may have evolved for mating, it is clear that they’re now used for combat,’ said Dr Iwai.
The frog has a retractable claw – similar to the weapon used by comicbook character Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman.
‘The males demonstrated a jabbing response with the thumb when they were picked up, and the many scars on the male spines provided evidence of fighting.’
The conditions on the Amami islands make combat, and the need for weaponry, a key factor for the frogs’ mating success.
Individuals fight over places to build nests, while the chances of a male finding a mate each night are rare, thus the ability to fight off competitors may be crucial.
Perhaps unfortunately, the comic book hero image is slightly dented by the frogs’ fighting style.
Rather than dueling with thumb spikes the males wrestle each other in an embrace, jabbing at each other with the spines.
This fighting style helps confirm the theory that the spines were original used for embracing mates.
‘More research is needed to look at how the pseudo-thumb evolved and how it came to be used for fighting,’ concluded Dr Iwai.
‘The thumbs use as a weapon, and the danger of the frogs harming themselves with it, makes the Otton pseudo-thumb an intriguing contribution to the study of hand morphology.’
The hidden claw, seen here on the right, can be extended when needed
The researchers found that males use their thumbs to hold onto females during mating
A new way of mapping cities according to the benefit they give residents has the potential to change the way planners think about city design
Cities are vast, dynamic entities that are complex on a multitude of different scales. A visitor to any city can usually gauge within hours whether it ‘works’ on a human level. But it is famously hard to quantify the factors that make one city better than another.
Today, Luca D’Acci at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland suggests an interesting new way to visualise the benefits of certain kinds of factors of city living.
Conventional urban thinking holds that an individual’s choice of where to live depends on factors such as the cost of housing, the quality of the area, the distance from the work place, the proximity of friends and family and local utilities such as schools, shops and restaurants and so on.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this decision-making process. Many urban commentators argue that this decision is the single most important process that determines the spatial structure of a city.
If people decide to live elsewhere, a city dies. Exactly this has happened in America’s rust belt cities such as Detroit.
The standard model of a city is surprisingly simple. It consists of a central business district surrounded by concentric circles of progressively cheaper land. The assumption here is that being close to the central business district is the most important factor in anybody’s decision to move.
But many cities, particularly in Europe, are much more complex than this. And in recent years, city planners have begun to place more emphasis on developing additional centres within cities. So it’s increasingly common for a city to have several centres performing different functions.
D’Acci’s new model is designed to cope with this increased complexity. His idea is to calculate the benefit of a given location to a resident, taking into account the effect of all the city’s various amenities.Having done that, he calculates locations of equal benefit, connecting them with so-called “isobenefit lines”.
That gives a simple and immediate visual representation of the structure of the city in terms of the benefits it offers.
D’Acci’s approach is clearly a step forward. He points out that there is a strong correlation between isobenefit lines and property prices. That’s a good indication that the model captures some important elements of human behaviour.
But this approach also has limitations. Chief among these is determining the benefit of various amenities in an objective and useful way.
That’s particularly hard because a benefit for one person may be a disadvantage for another. Parents with young children need to live near good schools that young professionals might want to avoid like the plague.
So more useful for individuals, would be a way of rating the importance of amenities subjectively to produce a personalised isobenefit map of the city.
Then there is the changing nature of work. With the increase in telecommuting, the need to be close to a central business district is changing. This has the potential to dramatically reshape isobenefit lines, perhaps on a monthly or even daily basis as an individual’s needs change.
So D’Acci has made a useful step forward but clearly the process of modelling cities and their benefits is a work in progress.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1210.4461: Modeling Spatial Equilibrium in Cities: the Isobenefit Lines
HELSINKI – Nokia Corp. is expected to unveil more bad news when it reports its third-quarter results as the struggling cellphone maker faces increasing competition from rivals during its transition to using Microsoft’s software in its devices.
Analysts say sales and profits will plunge, with a further drop in market share for the former industry leader that lost its top position to Samsung earlier this year. Strategy Analytics expects Nokia to sell 8 million smartphones in the quarter compared with Samsung’s 55 million and Apple Inc.’s 27 million iPhones.
Markets will be watching keenly if the Finnish company’ teaming up with Microsoft Corp. last year has helped reverse its slide and raise the company’s profile.
A year ago Nokia reported a third-quarter net loss of (EURO)68 million on revenues of (EURO)8.9 billion.
Samsung is gearing up to deliver a tasty treat to Galaxy S III owners. Today, the company announced plans to roll out Android 4.1 Jelly Bean to its flagship phone over the “coming months”. But Samsung has more in store than Google’s update. The camera app will get three enhancements, and S III owners will enjoy lots of other new features.
The Galaxy S III already has a feature-rich camera, but a new low-light mode should let the phone perform better indoors. Other new camera goodies include live filters for spicing up stills and videos (Instagram style) and the ability to pause and resume while recording video. In other words, you can stitch together clips without complicated editing
Samsung’s TouchWiz enhancements will add the acclaimed Swype keyboard and a beginner-friendly Easy Mode to the phone, along with the ability to block incoming calls, notifications, alarms and texts for set periods of time.
The update introduces additional hardware support, as well. After a Galaxy S III gobbles down the Jelly Bean upgrade, it will be able to work with Samsung’s AllShare Cast Wireless Hub, which allows you to mirror your phone display on your TV.
Even if you don’t want to invest in the $99 hub hardware, sports fans will be able to beam video and content from the popular ESPN ScoreCenter app directly to their Samsung Smart TVs, thanks to a newly inked deal. Finally, the update adds NFC one-touch pairing support for Bluetooth accessories.
As expected, the over-the-air update will add Google Now, silky smooth “Butter”-powered frame rates and the rest of Jelly Bean’s improvements to the Galaxy S III.
It all sounds good, so when’s it coming? That’s the tricky part. Samsung can’t just push out the update to Galaxy S III owners; the software needs to be tested, validated and rolled out by the individual carriers. In other words, it’s up to AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and U.S. Cellular to announce specific timing details.
Tippi Hedren in The Birds
Director Julian Jarrold and Sienna Miller
Toby Jones
Toby Jones and Sienna Miller
