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Sunday, December 29, 2013
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cinema

I love going to the movie theater. Seriously, I love it.


I just hate all the other people that go.


Quite early on, my parents taught me that there was but one rule for going to the theater: silence is golden. If the theater was a moviegoer’s church, talking or otherwise ruining the experience for others was sin. If I talked, we’d leave. Simple as that.


Sometime in the past few years, though, it’s like people have forgotten how to do the movie theater.


I’ve tried going at different times. I’ve tried going to different theaters. No matter what I do, no matter where I go, the shitty moviegoers follow. They talk. They crack jokes that no one but their friends laugh at. They muck with their smart phones, blinding everyone in the rows behind them so they can blast out a Facebook update about being at the movies that literally no one will care about.


I went to probably 10 movies this year; 9 out of 10 had at least one person who happily paid their $12 just to go in and crap on the movie for everyone else. I’ve given up.


But this… this gives me hope. Hope for a next-best-thing. And man does it make me want an HD Oculus Rift like right now.


VR Cinema 3D is a movie theater… simulator. It’s a movie theater without the lines, the massively inflated concession prices, or the crappy people. It’s a full-sized movie theater in the comfort of your own home, beamed straight to your eyeballs.


You strap on the Rift, load up your favorite movie (by naming it “movie.avi”, regardless of what sort of video file it actually is. Hurray, beta software!), pick any seat in the house, and kick back. The “in-theater” lights dim, and the projector starts rolling — complete with a bit of ambient light reflecting off the screen and back into the room.


Don’t like your seat? Walk to another, or bring up the UI to instantly warp across the room.


It may seem silly, at first glance. Why simulate the environment? Why not just play the video directly onto the Rift’s display?


Once you try it, though, it all makes sense. The familiar environment helps it all feel very, very real, allowing you to quickly lose yourself in the movie. Meanwhile, simulating the screen at a realistic distance gives it all a massive sense of scale.


cinema 3d


Just imagine this with a bit of networking magic added in. You and your friends could catch the latest flicks while sitting side-by-side, even when you’re thousands of miles apart. And if one of them starts talking a bit too much? Boop! Muted.


Of all the Oculus Rift demos I’ve tried, this one might actually be my favorite. They hooked me with the promise of great, immersive games; they sold me forever with the promise of private theaters.


If you have a Rift, you can find the early (and occasionally buggy) build of VR Cinema here. Sorry, Mac users – it’s Windows only, for now.


Still not getting it? Here’s a slightly longer video of the app in use by Youtuber/Rifter emart:


(If you’re not familiar with the Rift: the reason that it shows two of them same thing is that one image is in front of each eye. When you’ve got the Rift on, your brain combines into one seamless image)







2:24 PM

I love going to the movie theater. Seriously, I love it . I just hate all the other people that go. Quite early on, my parents taught me tha...

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marco polo

A smartphone app called Marco Polo aims make it easier for users to find and meet up with their friends.


The basic mechanic of the app is pretty straightforward, and is indeed reminiscent of the children’s game Marco Polo. Instead of text messaging back-and-forth with your friends to find out where they are, you hit the “Marco” button to share a pin showing your location. Then the app shows you a list of your friends, and you choose who to share it with. (You can also add an image or a message to the pin.)


Once other users get notified about your location, they have the option to share their location back with you. And if someone hadn’t downloaded the app, you can still send them a link to your location.


There are, of course, many other location-sharing apps, and a broader category of similar apps under the horrendous buzzword “SoLoMo”. However, I haven’t seen anything with that works exactly the way Marco Polo does.


Co-founder Aneel Ranadive argued via email that the app “is more low key and less formal than texting, and less invasive than, say, turning on Apple’s Find My Friends or broadcasting to your entire network on Foursquare or Facebook.” Unlike Find My Friends, you’re not sharing your location on a persistent basis, and unlike Foursquare, you choose who you share with each time. (I’ve certainly had moments where I realized that I didn’t really want to share a given location with someone — but I didn’t have the guts to unfriend them on Foursquare, so I just didn’t bother sharing at all.) He also pitched the app as part of a trend of people wanting to share more privately, for example with Snapchat.


The app actually represents a shift for the startup, which was previously known as Pinchit, and which started out as a daily deals site with seed funding from investor (and “Six Californias” advocate) Tim Draper, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and others.


Marco Polo has actually been available in for iOS and ANdroid for a little while now, but Ranadive said it’s only with the most recent update that the team trying to go beyond a small group of testers.


I tried the app out myself — none of my close friends are on it, so it didn’t have much utility in terms of actually meeting up, but it was still fun to see where Ranadive was at a given moment. And it’s as simple and “low friction” as he said, with only a couple of taps needed to share your location.


If you’re interested in trying it out for yourself, you can download the app here.







2:09 PM

A smartphone app called Marco Polo aims make it easier for users to find and meet up with their friends. The basic mechanic of the app is p...

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sd card

The hardware hacker Bunnie Huang gave a talk at the Chaos Compute Club Congress where he offered some good news and some bad news. The good news? SD cards contain powerful, handy micro controllers that are useful to hackers and hobbyists. The bad news? SD cards are woefully insecure.


In a detailed and readable post, Huang describes the exact problems with Flash memory. In order to reduce the price and increase the storage space, engineers have to fight a never-ending form of internal entropy that slowly but surely scrambles the data on every Flash drive.


Huang writes:


Flash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions. This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale.

To take up arms against these errors, SD cards are essentially over-engineered to ensure an acceptable level of data retention. They also contain firmware that can, for example, change the visible available space on the card without changing the actual available space. This means you could sell a 2GB card as a 4GB card – your computer wouldn’t notice a difference until it started filling up that fake space. You can, incidentally, check your cards with this tool.


Here’s the worse news: because these cards contain firmware, this firmware can be updated. Huang reports that most manufacturers leave this update feature unsecured. In other words, don’t ever assume a Flash device is empty after you wipe its contents. For example, the card could make a copy of the contents in a hidden memory area or it could run malicious software while idle.


And the good news: Huang also notes that these cards could be reprogrammed to become Arduino-esque open source microcontroller and memory systems. “An Arduino, with its 8-bit 16 MHz microcontroller, will set you back around $20. A microSD card with several gigabytes of memory and a microcontroller with several times the performance could be purchased for a fraction of the price,” he writes.


So, in short, destroy your SD cards if you have any dirty info on them and keep your eyes peeled for ultra-small, ultra-fast Arduino hacks.







1:23 PM

The hardware hacker Bunnie Huang gave a talk at the Chaos Compute Club Congress where he offered some good news and some bad news. The goo...

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Via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1883#comic

The perennially ongoing discussion about women in technology is in high gear once again, this time after remarks made by Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham made about the relative dearth of female tech founders and the perks of starting to code at a young age in an interview with subscription-only tech publication The Information were picked up by Valleywag.


Discussions about career, gender and age with a dash of the inherent class associations that often accompany them are always dicey topics, so it makes sense that this interview hit a nerve. For his part, Graham (who, it should be mentioned, in interviews with TechCrunch has always expressed a very strong interest in funding more female founders and voiced pride in shifting the gender ratio in Y Combinator’s founder classes) says he’s been misquoted and misunderstood, and there are some very eloquent arguments being made that at least some of the pile-on seems to be unwarranted. That said, people on all sides of the debate are making good points, and will probably continue to do so for a while.


The real upshot of all this may be that more people are talking about solutions to the inequalities in tech. Because putting the controversy aside, there is one thing that isn’t really up for debate: There are still far fewer females in the technology industry than there are men. As Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson wrote in a very good blog post this morning,



“The brouhaha that [Paul Graham's comments] unleashed about women founders, women coders, and women hackers is a good thing because we ought to be having a broader conversation about these issues.


Paul asks ‘God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?’ and that is a damn good question”.



Wilson offers up some examples of initiatives tackling the problem full time, including Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code. He also referenced TechCrunch’s interview from this past October’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with Dr. Maria Klawe, who has nearly closed the gender gap at the elite Harvey Mudd computer science department since she joined the college as president in 2006.


In fact, the Hopper conference was teeming with women who had fallen in love with computers and engineering, and anyone interested in learning how to welcome more women into tech should make it a priority to attend. While there this past fall, I asked a number of Hopper attendees to talk about what they love about the act of building things through code, and we’ve edited a number of those responses together for the video embedded at the bottom of this post. It’s interesting to watch today in relation to the current discussion about girls in tech, because many of the Hopper attendees I talked to had discovered their interest in computer science around the age of 13 or younger.


The thing that’s most striking about all of these responses is that there’s really nothing overtly gendered about them. They could have just as easily come from a group of males.


So perhaps the best way to get a girl interested in computers is simply to put them in front of her as often and as early in life as we do for her male counterparts — and even more importantly, encourage her to approach computers as a producer, rather than as a consumer. As Maria Klawe put it in the video, “One of the things I hate about the current state of things is people think of technology as something you use, but not something you create.”


Indeed, that’s a mindset people of all ages and genders would do well to change.



Feature cartoon image via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal







11:09 AM

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One of the most successful authors in the world, Walter Isaacson, is seeking the wisdom of the crowds for his new book about the technology industry’s major inventors.


Crowdsourcing books isn’t new, but it is, as far I as can tell, the first time a writer of Isaacson’s caliber has opened up the writing process in such a way. In an email interview, Isaacson gave me some more detail on how it’s working. “It has been surprisingly helpful. I have made dozens of factual changes, plus I have sketched out a few more substantive additions I plan to make in the final version,” he said.


Though only two chapters are online, it’s already gotten attention from an impressive group. Stanford Professor of Political Theory Rob Reich thought the role of government in funding the early Internet got short shrift, and recommended Isaacson give it some attention. Isaacson responded in kind, “Yes, I will add a section on govt research at MIT, Stanford, Lincoln Lab, BBN, SRI, etc. Very important. I’m a fan of Leslie Berlin and her Noyce bio is superb.”


In a spicier example, Stewart Brand, an early pioneer of online forums, disputed Isaacson’s retelling of his own history. The two had a lively exchange, with both agreeing to moderate their understanding of the events.


As the former CEO of CNN and Managing editor of Time, Isaacson is no stranger to soliciting feedback. “In the past, I have sent parts of my drafts around to people I knew,” he told me. “By using the Internet, I can now solicit comments and corrections from people I don’t know.”


Despite the fanfare of the Internet’s crowdsourcing potential, there’s really no quality and widespread tools for soliciting feedback. One of the websites he’s experimenting with, Medium, was never designed to help authors co-write books. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams began the blogging platform to shift our daily reading habits and inspire users to tell their most interesting ideas.


Unlike other news sites, however, Medium lets users comment in-line, which makes it a more suitable place for targeted feedback. If the experiment continues to be a success, Isaacson will not only have proved that many authors should crowdsource their works, but will have given Medium an extraordinary new purpose.


Medium, in fact, has a section for “book excerpts,” but it might take an author with some buzz to make the idea more mainstream among authors.


Of course, crowdsourcing won’t work for every book. Nick Bilton’s exposé on the origins of Twitter revealed a handful of sordid details; he didn’t lend out any early copies because the launch made news. Additionally, as the CEO of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson has an elite circle of supporters. Even if it works for him, it might not work for newbies.


It’s an ongoing experiment. The web has a pretty good track record of making industries, especially knowledge industries, more transparent and participatory. If I were a betting man, I’d say Isaacson is riding the cusp of what will eventually be a staple of modern authorship.


If you’re a fan of technology or Isaacson’s past work, you can read the drafts here.







11:09 AM

One of the most successful authors in the world, Walter Isaacson , is seeking the wisdom of the crowds for his new book about the technology...

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lawlercrunchweek



It’s the end of the year, which is always a time for reflection — auld lang syne and all that jazz. So for the next couple of weeks, CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few TechCrunch writers together to dish about the hottest tech stories of the past seven days, is actually going to be more like a CrunchYear. We’ll be talking about the biggest stories that really defined the state of the tech world in 2013.

In this first installment of our two-part year in review, Leena Rao, Ryan Lawler and I talk about the meteoric rise of Bitcoin, the digital currency based on an open source software protocol that seemed to capture the world’s attention over the course of the year as it hit staggeringly high valuations (amid lots of price volatility) and secured big-name supporters, and the revelations leaked in June by previously-unknown whistleblower Edward Snowden that the National Security Administration has been spying on the digital habits of millions of Americans — with the help of some of the tech industry’s biggest and most trusted companies.







9:08 AM

It’s the end of the year, which is always a time for reflection — auld lang syne and all that jazz. So for the next couple of weeks, Crunc...

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Saturday, December 28, 2013
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At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 minutes in France before letting a customer in the car. Back in October, the French government mentioned this piece of legislation as these new services would hurt traditional cab drivers. But nothing was set in stone until the AFP spotted the new bill today — and this news comes as a surprise.


In France, you have to pay a hefty price to get your taxi license. As a payback, the taxi industry is very regulated in this country, and drivers can expect to get a healthy influx of clients.


Yet, when the young and fearless startups appeared, many taxi drivers protested against LeCab, Chauffeur-privé, SnapCar, Allocab, Voitures Jaunes and Uber. While the French law calls these companies “VTC” services (car services), taxi drivers think that they are direct competitors — and smartphones certainly make Uber and others act like taxi services. That’s why the government sided with taxi drivers and talked about creating the 15-minute rule.


Shortly after that, Allocab, Chauffeur-privé, LeCab and SnapCar put together an online petition against the project. Then, nothing happened. It was like the government had forgotten about this idea.


In November, French heavyweight LeCab raised $6.8 million (€5 million) in Series B funding. At the time, I wrote that it was “a good time for it to raise” with the impending changes.


Last week, the Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) even wrote that the 15-minute delay was a bad idea.


“This competitive imbalance is not necessary to protect the taxi monopoly on this market. Moreover, it potentially contradicts the objective to improve free traffic flow,” the report says.


But all of this was for nothing as the new 15-minute rule will be enforced on January 1st 2014. Chauffeur-privé CEO Yan Hascoet already reacted to news agency AFP, saying that the French startups will comply with the law but will immediately contest the government’s decision — according to him, the startups have a good chance of winning.


On average, it takes 7 minutes for a so-called black car to come and pick you up in France. What will happen? Will the driver wait in the car on the side of the road? Drivers could spend hours waiting in their cars every day, losing potential income. Rides will take longer on average, meaning that less cars will be available for potential customers. With today’s bill, urban transportation companies are not the only losers — customers are losers too.


(Photo credit: Maxime Bonzi)







2:39 PM

At first, it was just an idea, but this bill is now very real — urban transportation services like Uber and LeCab will now have to wait 15 m...

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