CES 2012 highlights that matter

Posted by Brian Warmoth – January 10, 2012

Ubuntu TV

Unfortunately, my work did not take me to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year. I’ve been forced instead to keep up with announcements and displays through CNET, GigaOM and the Chicago Tribune’s Wailin Wong on Twitter, as well as a few other places. As I touched on a few weeks back, the intersections of mobile, TV and identity recognition are places that I am paying close attention to this year. Thus far, the attention-getters at CES have largely corroborated those expectations.

• Ubuntu TV was an interesting development, however. It’s true that I am forever going to associate mainstream awareness of Ubuntu with a shameful 2009 story out of Wisconsin that you may remember. (Basically, a girl dropped out of college and blamed the operating system.) This story will forever make me cringe, but if the Ubuntu brand is lucky, attention for its TV endeavor will outgrow the attention it received for that bizarre tale.

• The Roku Streaming Stick seems like something completely logical that was a long time coming. True to the trend of digital content boxes getting smaller and smaller, this thing is basically a box that’s the size of a thumb drive.

• I am mostly uninterested in control peripherals for the iPhone and tablets. “Super Crate Box” on iPad has recently made be reconsider that stance, though. Ion’s iCade Mobile is a sort of solution to button needs, even if it does make your device look like an Atari Lynx.

• Elsewhere, Razer unveiled its Project Fiona tablet, which I’m not sure I entirely understand. But hey, it’s got an i7 processor.

• Samsung has their new 55-inch Super OLED TV, meanwhile. It’s a little hard to appreciate much more than the product design through pictures on the Internet, and few things interest me less that 3-D TV capabilities, but I think it is notable that we’re now at the point where we’re talking about real TV sets with quad-core processors.

The best comics of 2011 and other links

Posted by Brian Warmoth – January 6, 2012

Since Christmas, I’ve taken a 24-hour Amtrak ride out to Washington, D.C., upped my freelance output and generally been on a wild ride (which has even included red pandas!). Here are a few other items of importance.

• It has been somewhat of an annual gig for me the last few years to contribute to CBR’s “Top 100 Comics” lists. Kiel Phegley always does an amazing job wrangling all the votes and write-ups together for this feature, and he came through once again. For 2011, you’ll find me making my cases for Michael Kupperman’s Mark Twain “autobiography,” Chris Ware’s “Touch Sensitive,” “Morning Glories” and “Detective Comics” and “Uncanny X-Force” in the final ten.

• Tom Spurgeon has a great interview up at The Comics Reporter with my ComicsAlliance editor Laura Hudson.

• Google TV turned out to be quite a flop out of the gate last year, but Google is getting ready for a second go at it at CES. As Staci D. Kramer at paidContent points out, there’s been some partnership shuffling.

• As a regular reader of The Verge and a former daily collaborator with Russ Frushtick at MTV Multiplayer, I’m really excited to see what Vox Media has in store for games journalism.

• I’m glad Rick Marshall is continuing to post sketches from his Hunter S. Thompson collection.

Interviews and digital solutions from my team’s project at Medill

Posted by Brian Warmoth – December 19, 2011

Population data as it can be viewed in our interactive Disparity Map display.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my team at Medill recently completed our project with The Chicago Reporter, developing digital solutions and recommending business strategies to help the magazine be more effective online.

It was a real pleasure to work on. We conducted user research, talked to journalists at news sites and mapped out a thick set of ideas that we believe can help strengthen one of Chicago’s best investigative news sources.

There are three great places you can visit now to learn about the work we did, and they are:

• Medill’s website, where you can read an interview with me about our research and final proposals.

• Our Disparity Map, which is an interactive tool we developed to display race, education, income and housing information about Chicago communities.

• And of course, a live recording of our final presentation at the McCormick Tribune Center, where you can see everything explained. It’s about an hour and a half long, though, so find a comfortable chair.

Where Microsoft is catching up with Apple and vice versa

Posted by Brian Warmoth – December 19, 2011

My personalized cover to Flipboard this morning, featuring an Instagram photo from Sean Dove.

2011 was an exciting year for consumer tech developments. As Apple continued to devour market share in the PC market, Microsoft got behind their Kinect controller and got together with Nokia to give the Windows Phone platform a bigger push. I don’t think that you’ll find too many critics willing claim that Microsoft has been ahead of the game in the mobile or desktop OS markets over the last few years, but some notable apps and news stories have percolated recently that offer a little perspective on the battlegrounds and cross-pollinations that will be worth watching in 2012.

• First is the insurgence of Windows Phone-looking design concepts that have been making their way onto the iPhone. Like Bing vs. Google, Windows Phone interface designs have differentiated themselves from traditional iPhone dev schools of design. When I think of Windows Phone screens, I think of tight grids with big, sharp-edged boxes and icons that often just sink into the nav bar, rather that bubbling up on additional shapes. Both the Flipboard and Xbox Live apps have introduced such things to my daily mobile experiences recently, and I think that both work marvelously overall.

• The television market is another place that’s going to be fun to observe in 2012. I looked at a Google TV last year at about this time, and I’ve been testing out an Apple TV over the last couple of weeks. The Wall Street Journal reports that voice commands will likely be a part of the next generation of Apple TVs. Apple already has Siri out in the wild on the iPhone 4S, which no doubt means that they have been gathering lots more user data to funnel into a better voice interface for home entertainment systems. Microsoft began experimenting with a limited set of voice commands when it launched Kinect, so both companies are obviously looking at similar issues and looking for ways to distinguish themselves.

The Apple TV, from what I’ve experienced thus far, differentiates itself by emphasizing AirPlay, the ability to stream content directly from iPhones and iPads. Additionally, Apple seems to have been thinking about things from a Nintendo Wii U perspective, allowing developers to implement two-screen gaming experiences.

I think the Google TV largely failed out of the gate due to some poorly executed (and in many cases, un-executed) partnerships, but I’m sure it will remain a player to some extent as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what other trends and developments appear in 2012. Although, I won’t lie to you; in the voice-recognition race, I care a great deal more about who will finally bring me some software that does a halfway decent job of transcribing interviews.

3DS Wi-Fi, a PS Vita copycat and ‘Diablo 3′ in gaming news for Monday morning

Posted by Brian Warmoth – December 12, 2011

Just catching up on games industry headlines from the weekend:

• Nintendo made a smart partnership decision business-wise when they brought free Wi-Fi for the DS into McDonald’s restaurants. Airport visitors probably know who Boingo is and recognize why free Wi-Fi for 3DS users at Boingo access points could also be a wise move. (via Joystiq)

• As many of you know, I’ll soon be out in Washington, D.C. The timing for The Smithsonian’s “The Art of Video Games” exhibit couldn’t be better. I don’t know about these fan pictures though.

• This Chinese PS Vita knock-off is just laughable—or at least it would be if it weren’t so sad.

• The Spike TV Video Game Awards took place over the weekend. I didn’t tune in, though I did keep up with the winners (Skyrim came out on top). Based on the years when I have watched the show, I tend to agree with Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann, who suggested that a better name conceptually for the event would be “World Exclusive Mania: Game Trailers You Ain’t Seen Before: The TV Show.” I should note that I do love new trailers. But I often prefer watching them on the Internet if the alternative requires setting aside an evening at home.

• And speaking of VGA debuts, a cinematic trailer for Diablo III showed up. I have to admit that I was rolling my eyes throughout much of the first half. It picks up and gets much less abstract toward the end.

And if you’d like to catch up on other trailer reactions, I suggest checking out Rick Marshall’s commentary.

Science reporting from the past year

Posted by Brian Warmoth – November 21, 2011

I’ve added a few links to the right sidebar today. The year at Medill has allowed me to explore some specialized areas of reporting, including a lot of breaking science news last spring. As you can see, a few of the highlights included:

• A piece on the arsenic-based life debate

• An article published in the Northwest Indiana Times about the Obama administration’s new labeling system for fuel efficiency standards

• ChicagoQuest’s game-based approach to education

• A new theory on a one-dimensional universe

• The theory behind “virtual water”

• Atomic clock improvements

White paper goes live, final presentation to follow

Posted by Brian Warmoth – November 21, 2011

I feel obligated to mention on here that my group at Medill is in the final weeks of our client-based project looking at non-profit news companies and making recommendations accordingly to The Chicago Reporter. Part of that has involved a great deal of research that has been summarized in a white paper we unveiled last week. So definitely have a look at “Non-Profit Watchdog News: What’s Working?” if that’s the kind of thing that interests you.

The information contained in there addresses revenue, publishing and audience engagement issues that everyone in the news industry faces, but we came out on the other end of our conversations, reading and number-crunching with a list of goals and strategies that can lead to sustainable news operations.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll be making our final presentation, which I’ll also post a link to, as soon as it’s live.

What will Federated Media’s WordPress deal offer bloggers?

Posted by Brian Warmoth – October 21, 2011

As someone who designed his first website with little to no HTML knowledge and a copy of Dreamweaver that was required for an undergraduate class many years ago, WordPress had a profound impact on how I understood website architecture and what was possible without in-depth familiarity with databases and PHP. I knew how to fiddle with a theme on my Blogger account to change banners, colors and column widths, but WordPress caused me to see content in a much different way. I’ve never used Google AdWords or Amazon ads personally, but I’m aware of how they work, and I generally perceive them as having had a similar impact on rookie desktop publishers’ access to advertising dollars (even on a micro level).

A new deal between Federated Media and WordPress.com that was announced this week made me curious about what kind of potential there is to approach that ad space on a different level, as well as how their partnership could affect how casual-to-intermediate-level desktop writers and publishers understand themselves and the content they are providing. I’ve heard accounts from blogger acquaintances of Google revoking AdWords privileges because of clearly articulated in-content calls for advertisement clicking (the idea being that such urges artificially affect reader behavior). This new deal would create a line of communication between anyone blogging on WordPress.com (not bloggers like me who have their content hosted elsewhere) and Federated Media, allowing three distinct activities to take place:

1) Advertisers will be able to pool curated content from bloggers. If I understand this correctly, it would mean that essentially brands would be able to appropriate praise and reviews from WordPressers, just as Facebook funnels Likes and Share activity out to its own advertisers and FB Page occupiers. 2) Bloggers will be given the opportunity to contribute “sponsored” posts. I’m not sure what the incentives will be, but this basically sounds like advertorial-for-hire work. 3) Brands will be able to target conversations. I’m the least clear on what this means, but it sounds like WordPress.com will someone be letting advertisers view actionable opportunities in terms of context and tone of discussions taking place in their network.

I’ll be anxious to see how sponsored posts appear and are tagged, as well as how such content gets viewed by Google in its search rankings. I would assume that if sponsorship could be identified, sponsored posts would lose a little value juice, but this is all hypothetical until the new initiative unrolls.

WordPress.com claims to have more than 25 million hosted sites, though. I don’t what their combined traffic numbers are, but I’d be eager to see those numbers as well.

The big difference here is the way advertisements and content will be related. Previously, AdWords and Skimlinks advertising provided relatively un-intrusive, fly-on-the-webpage-style placement to sifon clicks. Now, however, content-makers are going to have incentives to write on specific topics and cater to ad clients. Is there going to be scalable compensation that makes it worthwhile for bloggers to spend an extra 30 minutes cranking out an advertorial post? Are there going to be clear opt-in/opt-out agreements? The whole deal definitely seems like something that will be worth following.

Link Sausage: 10/16/2011

Posted by Brian Warmoth – October 16, 2011

• If there’s a new English translation of a Haruki Murakami novel coming out, chances are it’s already on my read it ASAP list. After reading this perspective piece by Yuka Igarashi at Granta today, I think the priority level for 1Q84 has been upped. The reworked and recycled motifs of Murakami’s writing are a big part of what keeps me coming back to him. Terror and religion are two topics I’ve wanted to see him explore more deeply, so I’m really looking forward to diving into this book sometime in the near future.

• I’ve been wrestling with Craig Thompson’s Habibi since I read it a few weeks ago, and Robyn Creswell obviously did in her New York Times review as well. I agree with G. Willow Wilson that the review discounted Thompson’s art to a huge degree, but I also share Creswell’s frustrations with the neo-Orientalist style and tone. For me, the underlying question at the end of the book was much the same as hers in regard to whose fantasies were being expressed and how to parse them.

• As far as I’m concerned as a reader, the announcement that there’s more of Geof Darrow’s Shaolin Cowboy on the horizon from Dark Horse was the finest news to emerge from the New York Comic Con weekend.

• If you’re a Wolverine follower and Sabretooth fan, you may have found the news that Jeph Loeb and Simone Bianchi are bringing him back to be a bigger deal.

• Oh, and then there was that new phone from Apple that came out. The premise of Siri is definitely something I can get behind, but when it comes to my capacity for skepticism, halfway decent voice recognition software rivals UFOs and Bigfoot. Nevertheless, this guy got Siri to run on an iPhone 4, which was fascinating.

‘Habibi’: A review in progress

Posted by Brian Warmoth – September 26, 2011

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund let a few copies of Craig Thompson’s new graphic novel, Habibi, out of the gate early at SPX, and seeing how I’ve been waiting to read it for the better part of the last decade, I hopped in line and snagged one. I was prepared for Thompson’s extravagant attention to detail and densely packed pages of storytelling, but Habibi surprised me in some ways that I’m still grappling with critically.

This is almost without question one of the most important graphic novel releases of the year. It overflows with elegant, elaborate and brilliantly composed hybrid imagery. Moreover, the story exists in an odd, isolated universe that feels like a fable but also teases the novel’s relationship to real world events and anchors.

The place where I’m still coming to terms with the book, though, lies in refrain of sexual violence that defines the main character. The economies of enslavement and survival that she lives through drive almost every major plot turn from beginning to end, and along the way they bring horrific moments and choices.

Habibi is a challenging and sobering read, and it’s one of those books that will make you feel like you’ve lived through a lifetime reading it. In the end, however, Dodola’s personality and humanity feel very distant and underdeveloped at times. There’s a tragedy in that absence that’s provocative, which may be the point. I’ll be interested to see some other takes though.