Shared by Kristopher
I love entertainment.

Windows Phone 7 is a post from Chris Pirillo

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First, if you have any questions for the Windows Phone 7 Series team, I'd be more than happy to ask on your behalf (as I do live around the corner from Redmond's campus and will be meeting with the team again at some point in the future). Post a comment and/or video response.

I was invited to a behind the scenes look at elements of the Windows Phone 7 Series developer platform. At Mobile World Congress (covered earlier in this channel), Microsoft provided a first look at Windows Phone 7 Series and I'm pleased to offer you the opportunity to see a live demonstration up close.

Yes, I got to play with the phone, too. It works as advertised even as a prototype. Unfortunately, we could not adjust the brightness settings in this particular device. The Metro interface is a bucket of win in my book.

Charlie Kindel partner group program manager, Windows Phone App Platform & Developer Experience was hosting an intimate reception this evening in San Francisco. I wasn't able to make it, but Microsoft arranged a somewhat more private meeting with Greg Sullivan from the Windows Phone team a little closer to home.

I met Greg a few years ago through the Longhorn Labs project (back when Microsoft Windows team leads worked actively with their most vocal community supporters). I'm not sure if I can reveal any more device details at this point, but suffice it to say

I want one.

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Bits:
You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in Minority Report' Hollywood imitates life. And sometimes life imitates Hollywood. John Underkoffler, who led the team that came up with the interface that Tom Cruise's character used in the 2002 movie Minority Report, co-founded a company

We Americans like to think of ourselves as trendsetters for the rest of the globe, but when it comes to cell phones, we're still playing catch-up with countries such as Japan and Korea.

In general, Asians use their cell phones in more robust ways than the typical U.S. resident as TVs, wallets, GPS devices, and music players. Japanese cell phones can double as a house key, a credit card, and an ID. Users can even use their cell phones to send their vital signs straight to their doctors.

In recent years, U.S. companies have made baby steps toward incorporating more advanced cell phone features, particularly in the areas of mobile banking and video broadcast. Meantime, the Asian cell phone market continues to be a good predictor of features that could soon be included in American cell phones. For example, Japan had cameraenabled cell phones two years before Americans ever went gaga for them.

Curtis Schenck, a manager of corporate relations at NTT DoCoMo USA, gave TechNewsDaily the scoop on the hottest features in the Japanese market right now. Try not to be too jealous.

1. Personal Butler

Customers don't have to Google for information, since i-Concierge acts as their butlers or personal assistants and caters to their every need. Users can input their food preferences, neighborhoods they like, and entertainments that they enjoy. When new information is downloaded into the system, they get push notifications that are based on their preferences. For example, if they like Thai food and a new Thai restaurant that is opening nearby, their cell phones will notify them.

2. Investigative Visits

This takes the Verizon commercials to a whole new level. If a users' five-bar reception signal drops to three bars or if they have a dropped call, they can call customer service and a team will be sent out to investigate the problem.

3. Barcode Reader

Japanese phones can read QR marks, which are sophisticated barcodes for businesses. If an Asian cell phone user is walking down a Tokyo street and walks past a restaurant that isn't open, they can point their camera to the QR mark and their phone's browser will automatically be routed to the restaurant's Web site.

4. Free TV on the Phone

Subscribers can surf 13 free TV channels on their phones. DoCoMo has also launched their own channel called BTV to air programs that are filmed specifically for the mobile phone.

5. Phones as Payment Systems

Osaifu Keitai, also known as the mobile phone wallet, lets users load up credit card information onto their phones. If stores have a reader, users can swipe their phones over it to pay for their purchases. Cell phones can also be used to pay for subway and train tickets.

6. Send Money to Other Subscribers

Some Asian countries allow users to send money using their cell phones. Users simply input another person's phone number and the amount they owe them and like magic, the money is transferred.

7. Internal Wi-Fi Spot

Japanese cell phone users can download a movie onto their mobile phones and show it on their TVs. This is another way to get entertainment on demand. A femtocell base transceiver station (BTS) in the home hooks up mobile phones to the DoCoMo network through a broadband line such as an optical fiber. The femtocell BTS lets a person with a cell phone download videos and music files. Through femtocell BTS, a person can set up a private wireless network for their home appliances, entertainment systems, and other devices.

8. Home Security Service

Japanese cell phone users can lock their doors and manage their home security systems remotely using their mobile devices. They can also adjust appliances and set environmental controls, so their lights and heat can be switched on before they get home.

9. Environmental Awareness

DoCoMo has deployed environmental sensors throughout Japan and people are now able to monitor air quality, temperature, and UV rays around them using their cell phones.

10. Reads Vital Signs

In the same way that we might plug headphones into our iPhones, Japanese cell phone users can plug in equipment such as a blood pressure monitor to their phones and send vital signs directly to their doctors. This helps save some people a trip to the doctor.

• Mobile Phone Use Soars
• 10 Profound Innovations Ahead
• Americans Are Info-Junkies

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

I won't argue this to much but the Sony PSP is the original closed platform, shiny, black, movie watching, web surfing, game playing device.

It didn't have a camera when it was released or multi-tasking. The only way that the iPad has it beat is mulitouch . . . well, touch for that matter. Hell, both are even lacking a kick stand of any type that isn't an add on.

We had a first gen PSP kicking around the house until my son in a fury of play with MegaMan lost his grip and the screen shattered. It was like watching someone burn Washington's wig. Noooooooo!

But as I digress, there is something that brought these similarities to my attention today.

Sony has developed a program to live stream sporting events to attendees in the stadium for enhanced experiences via PSP.

Not only that, you can also get replays, statistics, player profiles and live results piped directly to the Sony PSP.

No one would deny that the live experience is the ultimate way to watch sport. What this new service offers is an even more immersive experience for fans, said Mark Grinyer, Head of Sports Business, Sony Professional about the new app.

The iPad does have the PSP beat in one area though if Apple of one of the developers were to hook this up using the iPad as a tray for game day beers. The PSP can slip into a pocket but the iPad can balance on the arm of your stadium chair and illuminate your beverage with the blur of color from a live playback. Fancy.

This product for the PSP is being tested at the Emirates Stadium in London. So I guess America will be up for grabs?

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Sony PSP, The Original iPad but Better is a post from: TechStartups.com

One of the great modern pastimes speculating and rumormongering about the Apple Tablet will come to an end today when Steve Jobs finally unveils his messiah device. It's a game few are ready to stop playing.

Our little Apple Tablet scavenger hunt has come up mostly empty-handed. Steve Jobs is gonna drop some knowledge on us today, and we're as in the dark (mostly) as we were weeks ago. And you know what? One of the main things we've learned from this little exercise is that the people who are most interested in today's announcement are also the least interested to learn anything in advance.

Here was one of the most fascinating and downright poignant responses our contest elicited, from a reader in India:

I want to make a kind request to you please to call your scavenger hunt off.

We all know why we are so intensely trying to find out the littlest morsel of information about the Apple Tablet and are hardly interested in any other company's slate device - only because Apple will create history with such a device.

I want to emphasize on the fact that Apple puts a lot of effort to building keynotes, which, for many people like myself, are like blockbuster movies. We never had the fortune of being at a live one, so we try to make the best of it being streamed online. Like you remember at the 2007 iPhone keynote, every other moment there was surprise. People had never seen anything quite like it before. And all of it coming from Steve Jobs made it a historical day in technology.

It is my earnest request to you, please let Apple do it again. We all want to know what the Tablet is going to be like. Your bounty offer may (and probably will) instigate people who want to sell their souls. I'm not blaming you or criticizing you. We don't want a few details or pictures to leak out before the official announcement. There's just a few more days left till Jan 27. Please let Steve Jobs introduce it the Apple way. Pretty please. It will be a lot more fun !

Would this guy have clicked through if we had received a real picture? Most definitely. Has he probably clicked on all of the hundreds of mocked up photos and videos? Almost certainly. But the fact that those were fakes was all part of the fun. Sure it's all a bit cynical in its consumerist frenzy, but the Apple's big, heavy-handed reveals are also a good time a bit of mystery, of (imagined) corporate intrigue, of envisioning suddenly-available outer space future products that were previously just the stuff of science fiction classics like Freejack and Demolition Man. (Classics, I tell you!) Remember the iPhone? When ol' Jobsy carted that thing out a few years ago it sufficiently blew most of our brain bones, and wasn't that kind of fun. I mean, rather than knowing all its details ahead of time?

Like blockbuster movies! That's sort of sweet in an irredeemably nerdy way, isn't it? There is something about the grandeur and anticipation of one of these keynote magic shows. Yes it's all nasty and capitalistic and cold and inhuman, but a little bit of excitement never hurt anyone, especially in these penurious times, when a Cosmo centerfold has assumed the regency and rules us all from his throne made of the bones of the New York Yankees.

That doesn't mean every scrap of purported "truth" about Apple's mystery tablet can't drive tons of pageviews (I mean, uniques!). But the real kick of feverish Lost guessing and obsessive Tablet rumoring is the pure joy of speculation with gleeful abandon. Here's the root truth of it all: No one actually wants to be proven right, because then it would all be over and we'd just return to our lives, the answer never actually being as big as we'd hoped, nay, dreamed.

It's a childish thing this entity we call imagination just turned a bit hard and practical by adulthood. No longer do we imagine whole unknown worlds existing in wardrobes or cupboards, but we can be fascinated with the possibilities of that ABC show starring the dude from Party of Five and the potentiality that Penny's computerbook from Inspector Gadget might sort of be real. The minute those youthful fantasies are quelled and quieted by cold hard facts, well... the whole activity loses a bit of its sparkle.

It's the kind of thing the internet can ruin too often. Take another small pleasure: movie previews. Remember movie previews? Oftentimes they were the best part of the whole moviegoing experience. What fresh new hell awaited us come springtime? What joys would poet-scholar John Woo soon be foisting upon us? It was nice to see some new things, things you'd never heard of!, before settling into your seat and getting progressively more bored by your feature presentation. They made movies seem big, eventful, singular. If you wanted to see what was coming up, you had to go sit in the dark and wait for them to show you. But now! Now you've got internet web sites all over the highway that'll show you a teaser sneak trailer for a movie that won't be out until Armistice Day 2014. They've got previews for everything, those internet people. And it ruins all the fun.

Sure it's still sort of exciting when they pop up on the online, but it ruins some of the formality, it just spreads and bleeds the thing out so everyone can see it. Movie previews aren't as controlled and specific anymore. By the time they're up on the flickering screen there, I've already seen them three times over. It's boring, it's vaguely sad to have basically ended this tiny pleasure I enjoyed as a kid. I don't know why I do it to myself. And yet I do.

Though I suppose the whole ruined movie trailers thing isn't the same as a spoiler. A spoiler would be, like... someone telling me about Lost, I guess. Well, I haven't spent five sweaty years emotionally invested in just what the fuck the iTablet or iPad or whatever is all about, but it's still the same giddy joy of anticipation. In the end, what do we get out of either thing? Nothing, really. We're either $700 poorer or we're in six years of emotional debt to friends and family for being unbearably annoying about What Is In the Hatch. But screw it, we gotta take fun where we can get it and I appreciate it not being squashed.

So thank you Apple robot security guards for taking your whirring steel pincer claws and strangling that lab tech who was trying to smuggle an iNewspaper out of the office. That entrepreneurial fellow (he'd have been a hundred-thousandaire!) didn't die in vain. A not-so-well-kept secret is kept so for a few more hours, which will give me (and all of youuu) some dull sort of pleasure in an otherwise bleak and windswept wintry state of the union. Surprises are good almost always better than knowing even when it's about electronic products I don't understand and can't afford. Maybe even especially then.

Shared by Kristopher
After making a silly mistake, it's not uncommon for a person to say, "Oops I was on autopilot." In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there's actually a lot of truth to that.

Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR's Steve Inkseep conscious and unconscious, pilot and autopilot and we are constantly switching back and forth between the two.

"The problem arises when we [switch] without our awareness," Vedantam says, "and the autopilot ends up flying the plane, when we should be flying the plane."

The autopilot mode can be useful when we're multitasking, but it can also lead us to make unsupported snap judgments about people in the world around us. Vedantam says that when we interact with people from different backgrounds in high-pressure situations, it's easy to rely unconsciously on heuristics.
'The Hidden Brain' book cover

The Hidden Brain
By Shankar Vedantam
Hardcover, 288 pages
Spiegel & Grau
List price: $26
Read An Excerpt

3-Year-Old Bigots?

Racial categorization begins at an extremely early age. Vedantam cites research from a day-care center in Montreal that found that children as young as 3 linked white faces with positive attributes and black faces with negative attributes.

"Now, these were children who are 3 years old," Vedantam says. "It is especially hard to call them bigots, or to suggest that they are explicitly racially biased or have animosity in their hearts."

Vedantam says the mind is hard-wired to "form associations between people and concepts." But he thinks that the links the children made between particular groups and particular concepts were not biologically based those judgments came from culture and upbringing.

"We tend to think of the conscious messages that we give children as being the most powerful education that we can give them," Vedantam says but the unconscious messages are actually far more influential.

He says that for every 50 times a year a teacher talks about tolerance, there are many hundreds of implicit messages of racial bias that children absorb through culture whether it's television, books or the attitudes of the adults and kids around them.

"And it's these hidden associations that essentially determine what happens in the unconscious minds of these children," Vedantam says.

'Take Back The Controls'

In American society, colorblindness is often held up as the ideal. And though it's a worthy aspiration, Vedantam says it's a goal that isn't rooted in psychological reality.

"Our hidden brains will always recognize people's races, and they will do so from a very, very young age," Vedantam says. "The far better approach is to put race on the table, to ask [children] to unpack the associations that they are learning, to help us shape those associations in more effective ways."

Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures. ... I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself.

- Shankar Vedantam

Going back to the autopilot analogy, Vedantam says it's not a problem that the brain has an autopilot mode as long as you are aware of when it is on. His book, The Hidden Brain, is about how to "take back the controls."

So if the human psyche is just a big constellation of conscious and unconscious cognition which thoughts represent the real you?

"Most of us think of ourselves as being conscious, intentional, deliberate creatures," Vedantam says. "I know that I think of myself that way: I know why I like this movie star, or why I voted for this president, or why I prefer this political party to that."

But doing research for this book changed all that, Vedantam says.

"I have become, in some ways, much more humble about my views and much less certain about myself. And it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind's intentions."

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

I have been loathe to write this post due to the nature of the subject matter but feel I must for a few reasons.

Over the last week and especially the past few days many of you have probably become aware of Roger Avary the twitterer.

You know, the guy that is tweeting from the big house as he serves 1 year in prison to pay his debt to society for vehicular manslaughter.

There is debate as to whether it is really Avary tweeting to share his prison experience or if it is one of his friends. I'm sure that will shake out in the future and we can either roil in disgust and awe that he shared this experience or be flattened when we find out that it was a sham. Either way, at this point it doesn't matter.

What does matter is that the story of a convicted man is being played out on Twitter. Even if it is simply his likeness being played by a friend and the tweets are fabricated it is no less engrossing. It is also provoking us to ask if we would do the same in his position?

The emotions that are moved by this situation are plenty. More people than will every admit have driven while intoxicated. Everyone can imagine themselves in the shoes of the grieving family that lost a loved one in the tragedy that landed Avary in prison. And finally, Americans love prison shows on television and crime novels. Think Shawshank Redemption but now on Twitter in real-time.

It is like a prison house diary released one sentence at a time. The inherent drama of a man in peril moves the story along as he seeks to fit into a new culture that he himself has only written about in movie scripts.

My personal abhorrence to Mr. Avary's crime forced me to immediately unfollow his Twitter account after deciding to follow. However his story this story, that is going on right now is significant for the changes that it represents in our culture. It is a base desire to be curious about that which we don't yet know. And as those outside the prison walls can now see in through real-time updates we should strive to teach from it, not just be entertained by it.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Avary In The Aviary A Burden of Real-Time is a post from: TechStartups.com

By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

The gadgets are flowing and they've got both publishers and subscribers in a tizzy over their options. Are they 3g? Can I put my content on it? Just wifi? What services do they deliver? Do I need to build an app? Am I locked in?

All great questions but not the one that is at the front of my mind. That question being where is the personal media hub for all of this content? Each type of media that we consume has a disparative quality of some sort that requires another gadget or format transcoder to allow usage which means, users need a hub.

I just want to know where that hub will be. I'm not sure if it belongs in the cloud or can even exist there due to limitations placed on that content by rights holders. Which is a legitimate reason not to use the cloud since publishers need to eat.

A couple reasons to use the cloud would be transfer speeds, remote accessibility and backups. With increased gadget connectivity it would make sense to do this. An example of a gadget that needs to be fed from an outside source like the cloud is the PSPgo. It relies on connectivity to fetch games, video and browse the web.

The games on PSPgo arrive from a Sony controlled hub behind a firewall. If the cloud is too limiting due to rights management the other other solution would be to offer a private hub. Another gadget, but one that resides in the dwelling of an individual. Using the Sony model for control and privacy a device like this could be the next evolution of an inclusive hub. It seems to me to be the missing link.

Media management across multiples platforms and for varying devices would require some version of a standard protocol. The protocol probably already exists and could be as simple as HTTP with SSL. The device itself a web server that connects to cars, phones, tablets, computers, televisions, etc.

A device like this could also create new opportunities for rights holders to create new models for selling content. I'm thinking in the range of micropayments for ongoing usage or payments for amount of time used. An example would be a movie that instead of a 24 hour limit would allow the consumer to view it 2 times on any device before being crippled or offered for purchase for an additional few dollars.

My personal interest would be to have a media hub that I had control over and could add content to from any device like the PSPgo, Kindle, iPhone or computer. The ability for these devices to speak a common language for file storage and retrieval would increase consumption and sales as all of a users purchases become portable, even if lockedin to a device.

There are plenty of media hubs that exist today for personal use that can be net connected, but this device would find its niche in storing and delivering content without limitation.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Where is the personal media hub for ebooks, music and videos? is a post from: TechStartups.com