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PluggedIn Offers Free Music Videos
Tweet Share on Facebook April 17, 2008 Comment (5)Want your MTV back? For fans who bemoan the lack of music videos on TV, the Web offers a new alternative: PluggedIn.
The site has launched with what it says is a collection of 10,000 music videos from Universal Music, EMI, and Sony BMG, as well as indie labels. It also includes a raft of related features, including info on the stars, networking with other fans, suggestions of music you might enjoy, and, of course, options to buy the music and other merchandise.
But it's the videos that drive my interest in the site. PluggedIn uses its own media player, which it claims can play high-def video without hiccups on a typical broadband connection. The videos I played looked good, but the quality didn't strike me as high-def. And I suffered some stutters and stops.
The whole site, while impressive, seemed rough around the edges. Granted, the launch is as a "beta," so we'll have to see how things smooth out over time.
PluggedIn also promises other features, including integration with iTunes playlists. Upload the list of songs from your computer, and PluggedIn will find matching music videos. That could be useful, particularly as I fumbled to assemble a video playlist using the site's own tools.
It's all free to end users, with the site getting income from ads and helping to sell music and merchandise for partners like Amazon and Apple's iTunes. The price makes PluggedIn, early bumps aside, a good place to find and try new tunes. And you get a look at the performers behind them.
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Another Privacy Alarm on Health Records
Tweet Share on Facebook April 17, 2008 Comment (2)Another article has echoed concerns that new, online services that store patient records present serious privacy questions.
Calling them "patient-controlled health records," two Boston-area doctors point out that services like those from Google and Microsoft don't fall under federal privacy laws. That view has been voiced by others, including privacy watchdogs such as the World Privacy Forum.
Google, Microsoft, Revolution Health, and others say that protecting patient records from unauthorized access is crucial to the success of their services. But it's unclear what regulations, if any, will govern those promises.
The services can improve research and patient care, agree the two doctors in the article in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.
The free services also amount to competition for doctors and hospitals that have traditionally administered patient records. The authors of this week's study, in fact, developed Web-based electronic records for patients at Children's Hospital Boston.
Still, the doctors raise interesting questions about medical information once it's more firmly in the control of players outside the medical field. Should patients, for example, be allowed to sell their medical data, perhaps to researchers?
We shouldn't dally in considering the ramifications, says Isaac Kohane, one of the authors: "While PCHRs may seem futuristic, they are here now and will be widely adopted in the not-so-distant future."
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Is the New Apple Clone Just a Hoax?
Tweet Share on Facebook April 17, 2008 CommentSpeculation is rife that Psystar won't be shipping non-Apple computers with the Mac operating system. But the mere prospect has unleashed debate about the idea that a challenge to Apple might succeed, at least legally, including an interesting analysis from Bryan Gardiner.
But my favorite has to be the interview that Chris Foresman scored with none other than Stephen Wozniak, Apple's cofounder. Woz agrees that a renegade like Psystar might stand up to Apple, but the giant can simply break the upstart with operating system updates. Still, he adds, "I need another tower and I like the price, so I may get one."
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A Mac Clone? Get Them While They Last
Tweet Share on Facebook April 15, 2008 Comment (3)They probably won't last long, once Apple's lawyers get rolling, but a PC company is offering the first Mac clones that I've seen in more than a decade. If you want one, you'd better get them before Apple's lawyers drop a letter, or worse.
We shouldn't be surprised someone would try clones. Once Apple moved from Motorola to Intel chips, it was only a matter of time before somebody had the Mac OS running on non-Apple machines. And a number of people have done just that, after jumping through patches and other techie hoops.
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New Roomba Vacuums Leave the Fringe Alone
Tweet Share on Facebook April 10, 2008 CommentFringe is back. Not that it went away, but decorative edging on rugs fell out of favor in our household. Roomba, the automated vacuum that's otherwise been a big hit here, choked on the strings.
Some months ago, Roomba's makers at iRobot released the vacuum's next generation. Longer-life battery, more powerful vacuum, fancy new "virtual walls" to guide the robot around the house—and no snagging on fringe. I was skeptical on that last, and while the first three sounded good, they weren't enough to spend several hundred dollars to upgrade.
But in working on a story about personal robots, I had reason to try one of the new Roombas. And glory be, all the claims are true. It does run longer, the virtual walls can now guide Roomba to other rooms, and it sucks up more of the bad stuff. Most important, it sucks up less of the good, meaning no fringe hang-ups. It musses up the strings a bit but keeps on moving.
Now we've one less reason to pull out the push vacuum. We still needed the conventional model to clean the throw rugs. Now, while Roomba still can't clean as well as a plug-in vacuum, it can keep one idle for weeks at a time.
We're impressed and have already ordered our own Roomba 500 series. That'll give us two Roombas (or would that be Roombae?), meaning we may have one upstairs and one down. But with tassels lurking on both levels, I suspect we'll find another, fringeless home for the old model.
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Microsoft's Online Maps to Steer Around Traffic
Tweet Share on Facebook April 10, 2008 Comment (2)Almost lost amid news about its bid for Yahoo, Microsoft today released a promising upgrade to its online mapping service. The Live Maps service added traffic monitoring with an extra zigzag—around bad traffic, that is.
The software giant says that new Clearflow technology will suggest better alternatives to traffic jams. Rerouting congestion itself isn't new to many high-end GPS devices, which get wireless traffic reports and suggest alternatives.
But Microsoft says it's using sophisticated calculations, based on several years of observing traffic, in charting the alternative routes. That might help drivers avoid taking side roads that themselves are more bottled up than the original. The feature is now available for 72 cities.
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Flickr Adds Videos
Tweet Share on Facebook April 9, 2008 Comment (1)A new competitor, of sorts, has emerged to YouTube now that Flickr has added video uploads. But the photo-sharing site apparently wants to stay just that by allowing only short, 90-second clips to supplement the still shots that are its core business. The Flickr folks say the idea is that video can serve as "long photos."
They've also told beta testers like Paul Stamatiou that they want to make sure clips on their site remain "the kind of authentic, personal moments already being shared on Flickr."
In other words, as Stamatiou points out, they want to discourage the copyrighted, commercial video that gets YouTube into hot water. Or, as Larry Dignan puts it: "Is a media giant going to bitch if you take 90 seconds of video? YouTube's 10 minutes can raise a ruckus, but 90 seconds isn't worth the effort."
Unlike YouTube and others, Flickr is also keeping the video club exclusive. Only premium-paying members ($25 a year) can upload clips. But for the price, as Michael Arrington points out, Flickr is offering an "extremely clean" player with the ability to embed videos, as well as all the standard Flickr features, such as tags and descriptions.
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The Music Disk Isn't Going Away Soon
Tweet Share on Facebook April 9, 2008 CommentA prediction: By 2012, we'll be downloading 40 percent of our music, say market researchers at In-Stat. That would be up from 10 percent last year worldwide and 6 percent in 2006, the firm says.
Those numbers seem low, given the advantages of digital downloads. They're fast and convenient, and consumers can buy a favorite track instead of albums. But many people won't make the switch yet, saying digital still carries too much risk—that songs won't play on whatever device they want to use for listening. That's because the music studios demanded copy protections before they would begin selling digital downloads.
Now those copy protection schemes, and how they make it hard to move music around, remain a major hurdle to digital music's growth, says In-Stat analyst Stephanie Ethier.
The studios are starting to drop the protection rackets. But it's confusing as to where, and when. So decades-old disks are still more portable than modern, digital files. What a mess.
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Zillow Adds Mortgage Loans
Tweet Share on Facebook April 3, 2008 Comment (4)Zillow has launched a mortgage-finding service to complement its online real estate service. And unlike other online mortgage services I've tried, Zillow promises to keep me hidden from pushy lenders.
The service is perhaps best known for its real-time estimates, known as "zestimates," on home values. Zillow execs say their service will stay out of the lending process and not take a cut of the business. The site will stick to making money from ads, including, by the way, from lenders.
Zillow bemoans the fact that borrowers spend more time researching a car loan (eight hours on average) than a mortgage (five hours), according to a recent survey it commissioned. Borrowers would do more if loans were easier to research, Zillow says.
The site will register lenders and relay applications, returning loan offers in a standardized form for apples-to-apples comparison. Borrowers won't have to provide any personal information, such as name and—thankfully—a phone number. The last time I tested online mortgage offers, I dodged phone calls for several weeks from overanxious lenders.
Of course, mortgage lending has slowed amid the credit crunch. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of offers come back when I try the Zillow service—I might be in the market for a refinancing. That's "might be." No calls, please.
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Location-Based Service Set to Explode
Tweet Share on Facebook April 3, 2008 Comment (1)After years of hype, services that depend on your location are finally taking off. The first big success is the navigation service that cellphone companies offer, mostly using the GPS chips that ship inside most handsets these days.
The next big hit will be "friend finder" services, predict analysts at ABI Research. That's where my cellphone tells friends and family where I am, and I get to see where they are. A related category is family tracking, which aims specifically at parents wanting to know the whereabouts of kids.
Several carriers, including Sprint and Verizon Wireless, already offer some of the tracking services, as well as personal navigation. They and other providers also offer navigation for companies, including workforce tracking and fleet management.
Americans spent about $515 million last year on location-based services. That could mushroom to $13.3 billion by 2013, ABI says. First, though, the services need to work universally across carriers. That's likely to come soon, much as it did for text messaging.
Bottom line: It's going to get a lot harder to get lost, even if you want to.
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