Peon's Place

Vizio looks to start where Logitech dropped off. The Google TV box sets weren’t exactly popular, for a number of reasons, largely including the fact Google had a hard time getting media companies to feed TV shows, movies, etc through.

At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, the company announced the VIZIO VAP430 Stream Player. The new box doesn’t just stream any old web content. It actually adds the VIZIO Internet Apps Plus (V.I.A. Plus) smart TV platform and Google TV into the mix. That basically means that users can tap into a hoard of movies, songs, photos and more, as well as a Chrome browser. It also allows users to stream photos, music and video from any networked computer, hard drive or smartphone, as well as from cloud services. If you’re needing even more entertainment options, the box can tap into the Android Market.  Read the rest of this entry » Vizio + Google TV, built ...

So I went out and purchased my first tablet — the Vizio that I’ve wanted since January. Benefits?

• Vizio kicks ass
• It’s the only tablet with Hulu installed
• It’s one of the lowest priced tablets available in the market

I’ll let any interested parties know how I like it, once I’ve played with it for a bit. I’m still awaiting the Vizio phone, hoping it’ll be 4G…

While I’m on the topic of Hulu,.. Yahoo, Google Inc, DirecTV and Amazon.com have all expressed interest in purchasing the company. The price will be going from $500 million all the way up to $2 billion, and the end of this week will give a substantially better outlook as to which company seems to be the one in charge.

How will all of this change the TV shows and everything else you love about Hulu? If Google wins, you can expect some sort of Hulu-YouTube merger in the future. That might have the potential for a poor, cluttered user experience. However, I can honestly say that it would be a better way to go than in the hands of Comcast, where Hulu currently resides.

I recall the days when MySpace was “the place to be”. We all had our profiles, decorated the way we liked, with our favorite songs starting up whenever anyone went to our profile page. Some profiles would never finish loading since people decided that 500 sparkly animated images about how cool things are was simply too awesome to pass on up, and they wanted to share them all with the world. Of course, this is one of the reasons MySpace died. Mass advertisements (removed by AdBlock, thanks very much!) and slow loading profile pages.

This is when Facebook began to flourish. Simple, clean pages, fast loading times, and you could easily find what you wanted to: your friends and their updates, all in one neat looking spot. Then began the now real of Facebook, with the online free gaming system, one Facebook application at a time. And as such, continued on went the days of slow loading pages, clutters and messes and not finding what you really want to see, and the needing of sorting through trash to again find meaningful updates from those you associate with.

It feels to me that every 4-5 years we are in need of a new social media connection. Google tried and failed with Wave, Buzz, and now their new toy is out, Google Plus. Will this finally be the magic trick that Google succeeds with?

I’ve taken a run through of the new Google+. For now, with limited friends, it does feel like Facebook, but reinvented for our new decade. More ajax framework, more ability to easily move and sort and group content and friends in the ways that you like. Classify any bit of your online life, how you choose. That’s how I would sum it up so far.

You can see the official website here: https://plus.google.com/

Google+ is designed around “Circles” that allow users to group people within their social sphere into different categories. Google says that the people you tend to meet up with on Saturday nights, for example, can be grouped into their own category, while parents can be placed into another. You can then decide to share only certain information with different Circles.  Read the rest of this entry » Google+ Trumps Facebook?

Just like the prevention of forest fires, improving your vehicle’s efficiency and fuel economy falls squarely upon the driver — the way you drive, when you drive, and where you drive all factor into how much fuel your vehicle drinks. Ford thinks a bit of technology could help, and as a result, the automaker has partnered with Google to use the search engine giant’s Prediction API to the vehicle adapt to your habits.

Although the idea is still in its infancy, the partnership theoretically allows Ford to collect data about your vehicular use, including when you drive, how far you drive, how long you drive, and where you drive. Over time, the cloud-based system can trace habitual patterns, and optimize various systems for the type of drive.

Read the rest of this entry » Ford & Google are he...

It’s worked for Microsoft with their Kinect unit, why not with Google?

It’s a new way to communicate. The mouse and keyboard were invented before the Internet even existed. Since then, countless technological advancements have allowed for much more efficient human computer interaction. Why then do we continue to use outdated technology? Introducing Gmail Motion — now you can control Gmail with your body.

Gmail Motion uses your computer’s built-in webcam and Google’s patented spatial tracking technology to detect your movements and translate them into meaningful characters and commands. Movements are designed to be simple and intuitive for people of all skill levels.

Read more about it here! It’s the best April First since.. well.. since last year, probably.

While I love Google, I do not love their need to compete with Apple in terms of number of applications their phones have, so that they can compare with the iPhone. I mentioned a year ago that there was going to be problems with them allowing pretty much every app to be auto-accepted and put up onto their marketplace.

Now Google has pulled 21 applications today, more on the way, that have been found to contain a Trojan virus, collecting information and data from your phone and sending it onto private servers for whatever they feel the need to use it for. Your number, your friends’ numbers, your web browsing habits, all owned by random companies that will do nothing short of misuse and abuse your calendar appointments and schedules, addresses, etc.

The applications in question on the Android Marketplace contain an exploit that, when downloaded, automatically root the Android handset. Not only that, they also contain an embedded .apk file that can accept remote code and upload device information (like your IMEI) to a server in California. The malicious bundles were published by user Myournet and some of the individual applications have been downloaded over 50,000 times each. Once alerted of the potential malware, Google investigated and removed the code from the Market and users handsets. Unfortunately, that doesn’t have any effect on data already compromised by downloaders of the rogue applications. Google has yet to publicly comment on the incident.

Google Chrome OS (operating system) is around the corner, but it appears as if this isn’t something you can install on your own – you’ll need to purchase a Chrome Notebook to run the OS. Phooey!

However it seems as if most things you can do on it, you can already do with the plethora of Google applications on-line, or with other devices (Windows Cloud, Dropbox, etc).

Chrome UX designer Glen Murphy demonstrates some advantages of using a Chrome notebook. 25 computers were harmed in the making of this video. Fortunately, no data was lost. Find out more at google.com/chromenotebook.

Here’s another cool update from Google that came out this past week – Google calling! And this isn’t like Skype where you’re limited to where you can call, Google calls allows you to call cell phones, land lines, etc. Check it out here!

Call anywhere in the US and Canada for free and get low rates for other countries with this small plugin — right from within Gmail.

View a cool little video:

Google is set to begin covering a cost that gay and lesbian employees must pay when their partners receive domestic partner health benefits, according to a report in the New York Times. The increased pay is largely to compensate these workers for an extra tax that heterosexual married couples do not pay. The increase will be retroactive to the beginning of the year, the newspaper said.

Google is not the first large company to make up for the extra tax, the Times reported, adding that Google’s move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, as they compete for the same talent. Right now Google offers benefits to the spouses or partners of both straight and gay employees.

Under federal law, employer-provided health benefits for domestic partners are counted as taxable income, if the partner is not considered a dependent, the newspaper said, noting that the tax owed is based on the value of the partner’s coverage paid by the employer. Citing a study, the Times said employees with domestic partners will pay about $1,069 more a year in taxes than a married employee with the same coverage. Google will essentially cover those costs, the newspaper said, putting same-sex couples on an even footing with heterosexual employees whose spouses and families receive health benefits.

Do you remember the playable Pac-Man on Google.com that I posted last week? Apparently a ton of people played it for the two days that it was up. For about five million hours.

The Pac-Man game proved so popular that Google has now made it permanently available on its own page. The statistics on how many people played and for how long were gathered by software firm Rescue Time. It makes time-tracking software that keeps an eye on what workers do and where they go online.

On a typical day, it suggests, most people conduct about 22 searches on the Google page, each one lasting about 11 seconds. Putting Pac-Man on the page boosted that time by an average of about 36 seconds, the firm said based on the browsing habits of 11,000 Rescue Time users. Extrapolating this up across the 504 million unique users who visit the main Google page day-to-day, this represents an increase of 4.8 million hours – equal to about 549 years. In dollar terms, assuming people are paid $25 an hour, this equates to about $120m in lost productivity, the firm said. For that money, suggested Rescue Time, it would be possible to hire all Google’s employees and put them to work for about six weeks.