Toy trains 'Star Wars' fans to use The Force - USATODAY.com

Toy trains 'Star Wars' fans to use The Force - USATODAY.com

The Force Trainer (expected to be priced at $90 to $100) comes with a headset that uses brain waves to allow players to manipulate a sphere within a clear 10-inch-tall training tower, analogous to Yoda and Luke Skywalker's abilities in the Star Wars films.

Oh yes, I need this.

The Last Physical Movie Format

Daring Fireball: Macworld Expo 2009 Predictions:

"I’m not going to say that Blu-ray is dead because it isn’t. But if DVD isn’t the last mainstream physical medium for home movie distribution, Blu-ray will be. The future, obviously and inevitably, is in downloads. I’m already there, and you, dear DF reader, probably are too, but for the mass market, downloadable movies for the living room remain in the future."

Let's pray Gruber is right on this one. Blu-ray will get big because HD-DVD got the knife. If that hadn't happened then we'd be looking at another year of fighting over a shrinking pie. Even so, I'm hanging back with 1080p-upscaled DVD for the next half year at least. I've no desire to start buying new disks yet, and I'm still hoping I'll never have to do that ever again.

Too Late for Palm

Palm Pins Its Hopes on Nova - BusinessWeek:

"Rubinstein and others say the goal is to create products that bridge the gap between Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple's iPhone, oriented to fun. 'People's work and personal lives are melding,' Colligan says, adding that Palm is aiming for the 'fat middle of the market.'"

A worthy aim for sure, but in the meantime iPhone OS keeps moving towards that centre and there's not going to be any room left there. In hindsight the critical moment might have been when Palm refused to sell to Apple, and when Steve Jobs realised the future of the PDA would be in the evolution of a media player into a primary personal computing device.

Sony Ericsson get on Android

Good for Google I'm sure. Good for Sony Ericsson? Not so certain. Sony's history in terms of customising platforms and adding value is not so great, and they lose some of their differentiation. Bad for Microsoft? For sure.

Originally posted as a comment by sharl on mediabistro.com: MobileDevicesToday using Disqus.

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

Awesome, terrifying story of how we got into this mess:

And short Eisman did—then he tried to get his mind around what he’d just done so he could do it better. He’d call over to a big firm and ask for a list of mortgage bonds from all over the country. The juiciest shorts—the bonds ultimately backed by the mortgages most likely to default—had several characteristics. They’d be in what Wall Street people were now calling the sand states: Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada. The loans would have been made by one of the more dubious mortgage lenders; Long Beach Financial, wholly owned by Washington Mutual, was a great example. Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000.

The End of Wall Street's Boom - National Business News - Portfolio.com

Technorati Tags: finance, screwed, crash

Technology as Leveler

Ray Ozzie Wants to Push Microsoft Back Into Startup Mode :

One incident in particular introduced Ozzie to the magic that comes when people connect via computer. He had taken a part-time assignment helping a professor finish writing some courseware. The prof lived on the other side of town, so Ozzie collaborated with him remotely. Ozzie came to know and like his boss, save for one annoyance. "He was the worst typist ever," Ozzie says. "He was very eloquent on email, but on Term Talk it was just dit-dit-dit, sometimes an error, but agonizingly slow." At the end of the project, the man threw a party at his house, and Ozzie discovered the reason for the typing problem: The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored.

I remember an experience myself back in about '95 when someone I was swapping 2600 cart sources with on Usenet turned out to be similarly disadvantaged. One of Darian System's first consultancies for setting up a cybercafe was with a registered blind entrepreneur. Both personal wake-up calls to how technology could change things for the better, and key to understanding why I remain, at heart, an optimist when it comes to this business.

Breaking Radio Silence

I won't even attempt to go into the myriad reasons for my extended absence here. I'll simply say sorry and move on. More soon.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]