SFist Tech Roundup: My AIBO Ate My Homework
Steady on, San Francisco! The city, if not the entire blogosphere, is still reeling from the lack of a SFist Tech Roundup post last week. But we have a very good excuse. All right, actually we don't have a good excuse at all. It's an incredibly dull excuse that involves southern California, spotty Internet connections, no outgoing e-mail access, and no good way to synch bookmarks between a desktop PC and a laptop.
But good excuses are what the tech industry is all about. As a public service, here are some excuses to use for your next blog post, staff meeting, Nobel acceptance ceremony, malpractice hearing, or just for fun around the house:
I was responding to negative feedback.
Online crap vendor service eBay made its API available to developers for free this week. For those who don't pride themselves on knowing all their TLAs: an Application Programmer's Interface allows external programmers to develop applications using someone else's data — in this case, it means that programmers no longer have to pay eBay's licensing fees to develop their own websites that access the site's auction data with a new interface. For example, listing your currently running auctions from the front page of your vendor site, without requiring customers to do a search. Considering that eBay extensions and front ends have become something of a cottage industry, it's pretty remarkable for the company to make their data public.
(More about eBay, EA, Sun, Sony, Fox, and snakes, after the jump).
Look for more of the Web giants to follow the lead of Amazon, Flickr, and Google. The Chronicle ran an article this week heralding the new "era of the mash-up." While we don't expect anything as cool to come from the eBay APIs as all the stuff people are doing with Google Maps, we still acknowledge that this is the kind of thing the Web was designed for in the first place. We in the labs give it A+++ Great Seller Would Totally Buy From Them Again.
I was battling the forces of Magneto.
Electronic Arts announced this week that it was cutting prices on some of its popular games. Since the chosen titles are fairly recent releases (instead of "greatest hits" editions, or games that have reached the end of their shelf lives), the speculation is that the price cut is in preparation for the next generation of videogame consoles, which is due to start in about a week.
Still, we remain unjustifiably optimistic that the price cuts will trigger at least a minor ripple in game pricing, which has gotten out of control. The latest evil marketing trend has been the "special edition" release, which puts the game on 1 DVD instead of multiple CDs, shovels a making-of video on the disc labeled as "bonus content," and charges an extra ten bucks, knocking the price of some PC games up to over $60. It's difficult enough to justify a frivolous hobby without the added expense.
The sun was in my eyes.
Sun Microsystems has been making the press rounds with the official announcement of its newest processor, designed to be more energy efficient. At first we were concerned that yet another large computer manufacturer was going all tree-hugger on us, but Sun has been marketing the new processors as a way for corporations to cut down on electricity and cooling costs.
I was plagued by a Black Eyed Peas-borne virus.
Sony BMG has been dealing with the backlash against the copy protection scheme used on some of its audio CD releases, after virus writers managed to exploit the software to distribute malicious code. The company has stopped production of the CDs using that form of copy protection and will now get to enjoy the ensuing PR battle.
I blame Fox.
We join SFist Rain in lamenting the imminent cancellation of "Arrested Development." As soon as any television show gets cancelled, it's invariably followed by an outcry around the Internet from a bunch of shut-in nerds with too much time on their hands starting pointless petitions and letter campaigns and over-emotional whining on Web sites. But this is completely different. This is a show that we like.
But no matter whether the show in question is some stupid little show about spaceships or whatever it is you Poindexters watch, or if it's the most ingenious situation comedy ever aired on television, each cancellation makes a stronger argument in the case against traditional broadcast media and in favor of on-demand video. NBC and CBS announced that they're following the lead of Apple and Disney in making episodes of some of their popular series available for purchase on a per-episode basis. They're charging 99 cents as opposed to the iTunes Music Store's $1.99, and they're going through more traditional providers (DirecTV for NBC, Comcast for CBS).
Fox is making the claim that in the case of AD, they gave the series two and a half seasons to find an audience, and that they're simply out of room on their programming schedule for a series that doesn't get the ratings they need. Considering that Fox has had such a hit with their DVD releases, such as the "Family Guy" and "Firefly" collections that SFist Rain mentioned, and that the "grassroots movements" in support of these shows were strongest on the Internet, it's feasible that these are niche programs that fit better in online distribution than over broadcast or even pay cable. The current pay-per-episode schemes are all test runs, obviously, as the networks and distributors try to find a business model that works. But we wouldn't be surprised to see networks doing direct-to-Internet series by the end of the decade.
Snakes on a plane, man. Snakes on a plane.
The perfect excuse for when nothing else works.