David Lidsky's Blog, page 4594

Palm Refunds Developer Fees, Highlights WebOS Has a Future

Developer's fees to access the tools to build webOS apps for Palm's smartphones are being dropped, according to an official email. More than any other rumor, this confirms HP is serious about Palm's smartphone future.

When we learned that Palm was going to be swallowed up by tech giant HP, the rumor mills spun up to high speed about the company's future, both positively and negatively. Would HP merely strip the gems from Palm's webOS crown, and utilize them in a totally new smartphone...

Making of Touching Stories: Directors Jason Zada and Erich Joiner With "All Ends, Ends All"

Part video game, part immersive entertainment, Touching Stories is an app featuring four interactive films made for the iPad. We're focusing on each of the films and their directors this week. Next up, directorial team Jason Zada and Erich Joiner.

It takes a minute to realize what's happening in the opening scene of "All Ends, Ends All." It's dark, it's quiet...wait, you're in a trunk? Yes, you're trapped in the trunk of a car. A few minutes pass and the whole thing seems pretty hopeless...

What Every Guy Needs: Smart Balls

Memo to FIFA (and the England team, whose execrable performance in South Africa still has me shaking with anger). See what technology can do to your balls? Gearbox is a start-up that makes smart toys "how HTC/Android/Apple make smart phones," and the first element of their app-based stable is a smart ball that can be controlled by an Android handset.

It's a robotic sphere consisting of a 3-D printed spherical shell and a custom circuit board inside. But it's the apps that sound the most fun...

Infographic of the Day: New York City's Unmapped Food Regions

Using restaurant listings to uncover all the cultural microregions in New York.

New York's reputed to be the world's most intense cultural melting pot, but that can be hard to discern unless you're looking really closely--what's the difference between Hunanese and Cantonese, and what's the difference between Dominican and Puerto Rican?

That's what makes these maps created by Very Small Array fantastic. Using food as a guide, they managed to create what amounts to map of New York's dozens of...

Venture Capitalists Explain Foursquare's Juiciness, Join Sharing Revolution They've Funded

Foursquare has, as rumored, raised a chunk of venture cash that'll let it expand its business significantly, and fast too. But what exactly is so hot about this hot-topic location-based game tech? Unusually we have VC insight on the matter. 

We'd heard about the rumors last week, and they were immediately interesting as Foursquare seems to be busily rocketing to success in the location-based "check in" game that's got many a smartphone-owner playing along. Foursquare's business model is a...

Tesla Raises Shocking Amount in Nasdaq Debut

For all its ambitions to revolutionize the electric car industry, Tesla Motors has only posted a profit once, back in July 2009. It has released just one car (the Roadster), and sells 10 vehicles per week. And yet Tesla's first day of public trading on the stock market has been an indisputable success. Tesla Motors stock zoomed to $25 a share on its first day of trading, closing at $23.89, a fat 40.5% increase from its $17 offer price. The performance is remarkable given the otherwise...

iFive: Energy Change Law in Jeopardy, Storm Hits Deepwater Cleanup, Verizon Goes 4G and iPhone, SpiderKid!, Gaga Goes Homme

While you were sleeping, innovation was being held to ransom on Capitol Hill. Ah, frack it, it said, before shrugging on a suit and smoking a cigarette--all in the name of art.

1. Barack Obama's attempts to push his clean energy agenda through the Senate looks like it is on hold for the moment. Add that to a report in The Guardian, which claims that Americans, feeling the pinch of the downturn, are returning to their cars as public transport budgets are cut all over the States, then a...

YouTube is Finally Letting You Skip Ads, Later This Year

YouTube is to allow its viewers to skip ads on its videos later this year, according to a senior product manager. The firm has been experimenting with skipping pre-rolls since November 2009, but the new proposal, which consists of an ad-skipping button, will be in beta form toward the end of 2010, and it puts it more in line with Hulu's Ad Selector format, which lets people choose between one long ad at the beginning of the video, or several short ones during playback. But what about the...

Robyn's Interactive, 3-D Music "Video"

Robyn's new online music promotion gives a taste of what interactive videos might become.

Have you heard of the Swedish pop singer Robyn? Mix Ace of Base with '80s Chicago house music. Now you have.

Her new project to promote her latest album is something altogether fresher, though. Based around "Killing Me," one of the singles off the album, it's not a video--but rather a Web site in 3-D. Created by Mary Fagot of Blip Boutique and Stopp Web, the animation has a kind a Tron-meets-"Flying...

Lance Armstrong Last Tour de France Is a Victory Lap for Nike, Livestrong

The Tour de France kicks off this weekend, which means Nike's monstrous marketing machine starts to focus on something that isn't spherical. (Which is good news since Kotaku's Luke Plunkett posted a sneaky observation on Twitter that not one Nike face from its Write the Future campaign is through to the quarter finals of the World Cup.) The Fall collection of its LIVESTRONG range will be available from tomorrow in France, the UK and Canada.

And it's perfect timing. Lance Armstrong, the man...