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| Dell: The Tablet Market Is Still Wide Open | |  Speaking to Reuters in London Sunday, Dell’s chief commercial office Steve Felice said that Dell already has roadmaps in place outlining the launch of new tablets toward the end of 2012. Felice revealed that Dell is testing Windows 8 tablets, and stressed that the company may yet try again with Android-based slate devices, despite a perceived lack of success with the Android-driven Streak 5, Streak 7 and Streak 10 tablets. "We're very encouraged by the touch capability we are seeing in the beta versions of Windows 8," said Felice. "We have a roadmap for tablets that we haven't announced yet. You'll see some announcements for the back half of the year. We don't think that this market is closed off in any way." As to be expected, Felice claimed that Dell’s relationship with business customers will give the company a market advantage over Apple. "On the commercial side there are a lot of concerns about security, interoperability, systems and device management, and I think Dell is in the best position to meet those. When people put their computer to the side and take their iPad with them to travel, you see a lot of compromises being made." Dell is not the only PC vendor rumored to be working on a Windows 8 tablet. Lenovo, HP and Nokia are also expected to unveil their own Windows 8 tablets later on in 2012. |
| Startups Aim to Make Coding Fun | | 5:37:53 AM | Technology Review |
|  For Jacob Arriola, a business development manager for a Spanish media company in Los Angeles, learning to program wasn't a necessity. But figuring it might help with his job, he started using an online code-tutorial service called Treehouse in January. After three months with the paid service, he's earned several dozen badges for completing programming quizzes and challenges, and watching coding-related video lessons. More importantly, he's built his own website from scratch and made some simple changes to websites that his company runs. "I'm able to do it myself, which is pretty cool," he says. Arriola is one of a growing number of non-techies turning to Web-based sites to learn how to code, either for fun or in hopes of advancing their job prospects. And while the basic concept isn't new, the execution is. The addition of video-game elements like badges and points is helping startups such as Treehouse take off. Perhaps the most well-known of these companies is Codecademy, a New York-based startup with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to its free weekly JavaScript programming lessons through its Code Year program. Codecademy incorporates several gaming principles to keep users motivated: Users get points and badges for completing lessons and projects, such as building a simple blackjack or dice game. Cofounder Zach Sims says the site was created to solve two problems: The frustrations (which he himself encountered) that can accompany learning to program, and the challenges of educating many people at once. Codecademy encourages users to help one another to resolve problems by visiting the site's forum. Codecademy rolled out this past August. Over 200,000 people used the site within its first three days. It had another growth spurt early this year with the introduction of Code Year, which sends its now 400,000 users a weekly e-mail outlining a new programming concept they can learn on the site. Over a million people have signed up for Codecademy so far, and their efforts have started to bear fruit, such as an app a teacher built that allows students to digitally convert DNA into RNA. Though simple, Sims believes the gaming elements built into Codecademy's lessons—intended to stanch some of the boredom he felt when learning to program—are key to attracting users and keeping them motivated. Orlando, Florida-based Treehouse plans to take the idea of gamification even further. Treehouse—which charges a monthly fee for online lessons in Web design, Web development, and development of apps for Apple's iOS operating system—also offers badges that users earn by learning coding principles. But it also recently rolled out a free, simple game called Code/Racer that truly makes programming into a game, and it hopes to incorporate other gamelike elements into the learning process. With Code/Racer, two players race to complete small website coding tasks in short bursts of time—creating a header on a webpage that says "Frogarri 5000" and adding an image of a cartoon-like race car, for example—while zippy music plays in the background. Code/Racer is more like a proof of concept than a full-fledged game right now, and it's confusing if you're not familiar with some basic HTML. But playing it does make learning fast-paced and fun, and you can see how it might make it easier to pick up a topic like programming. Treehouse founder and CEO Ryan Carson believes that making the process of learning to program more gamelike is "tremendously powerful" because it makes learning addictive—something he says he's heard from customers. "Obviously that would be terrible if we were selling tobacco, but we're not," he says. "We're selling making yourself better." And people are buying into it. So far, the site has 8,000 paid users, most of whom it picked up since rebranding under the Treehouse name in November (before that, it was operating as a companion to a site Carson runs for Web designers and developers called Think Vitamin). Treehouse charges a monthly fee of $25 or $49, depending on the desired detail of instruction (for students, it costs $9 per month). Carson doesn't think avid subscribers will have to pay much to learn to code, though. He expects that in about six months, a user could get enough training to build a simple Web application, and after a year, he says, a user could get an entry-level coding job. "And you could do that the whole time living out of Pueblo, Colorado," he says. It's still too early to tell if this will happen, though—Treehouse is still working on its curriculum, so it won't be finished creating the most advanced lessons until September. Gabe Zichermann, who runs an annual conference called the Gamification Summit—focused on adding gamelike functionality to all sorts of activities, in order to increase engagement— says that while these startups don't include typical video-game tropes like throwing bombs or killing Orcs, they are creating a positive experience that takes users' minds off the fact that they're learning something new and difficult. "They're unpacking that and making it significantly more engaging," he says. Codecademy and Treehouse can be useful to those who already know how to code, too. Amanda Rae Arseneau, a programming student in Toronto, signed up for Code Year in January and has been following along faithfully each week. Arseneau, 32, says the program is helping her learn new skills and refresh old ones. And unlike with her three-year-long vocational school program, she says, completing a Code School lesson gives a sense of immediate gratification, and game-related tasks like building a blackjack game are fun. "It's much more engaging than a textbook," she says. |
| 5 Questions For Rep. Darrell Issa, SOPA Opponent and 'Internet Defender' | | Sunday, March 18, 2012 7:06 PM | Alex Fitzpatrick |
|  Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, describes himself as an "Internet defender." When the technology community rallied together in opposition of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Rep. Issa was at the front lines of Congress fighting to kill the bill. And as a former electronics company CEO, he's one of the few Congressman who seem to "get it" when it comes to technology (Fun fact: Rep. Issa lent his voice to the alarm system for the ultra-sleek Dodge Viper). Mashable spoke with Rep. Issa about his crusade against SOPA, his alternative plan for protecting intellectual property (the OPEN Act, hosted by the Madison Project) and what he sees on the horizon for technology and politics. Good morning Chairman Issa, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. First question: What do you credit most with the defeat of SOPA? "Time. More than anything else, the time it took for Wikipedia to gets its board to agree to the blackout and the momentum built that led to 7,000 websites responding (to SOPA). The reason I gave you that answer is because we don't always have time. Time was the enemy of the people who tried to rush SOPA through the House. "We started with four people who were adamantly against (SOPA). We lost every early vote, but we won time for the Internet (community) to react. In our business, sometimes we have to brag about our defeat. We lost every single vote in the markup, but we took days of their time -- and that became one of our tactics to help let people know just how radical this bill was." Do you think the tech community can rally once again if it feels threatened by a new piece of legislation? "It can, but you don't always get the time to figure out the impact of a bill. There are steps being taken by a number of technology companies to hire lobbyists and have more eyes and ears in D.C. to find out what's being earmarked into bills at the last minute when there really may only be a few hours' warning (before a technology bill is passed)." Tell us about the OPEN Act, your alternative intellectual property bill. "I think every country has a right to protect its internal intellectual property. If you go to Russia and you try to stop piracy of American movies, that's beyond the ability of U.S. law. If I hold a copyright in the U.S., I should have protections against internal piracy and external piracy. Our courts can already protect us against internal piracy. "The only thing that needed to be addressed by SOPA is this: What ifcountry were pirating from the U.S.? The OPEN Act applies only tothat have been found to be violating U.S. copyright after a trial. Under after that trial it would enable other means to be used but not the draconian means, like DNS blocking, that SOPA called for. "Our view is that if you follow the money and prevent companies like Mastercard, Visa and PayPal from allowing the sales of pirated content, it doesn't close off the Internet but it does stop these foreign traffickers." The debate around SOPA and other technology bills doesn't divide neatly along party lines. Do you think technology issues are, in a way, bipartisan? "Intellectual property and how we deal with that is always bipartisan ... Sen. Wyden (D-Ore.) was particularly helpful in this entire debate, he brought his own versionto the Senate floor.Poliswas great to have as somebody else who knew the Internet and what it could do." You put the draft version of the OPEN Act online for the public to read and comment upon. Do you think that kind of transparency is the future of politics and technology? "I do believe it is the future. Congress has to be willing to fund it. The Madison project had to be done at an external site because that kind of interactive exchange isn't allowed under the House's firewall rule, so we went to an outside storage facility. "We don't like to call the people who make the rules in the House and the Senate "Luddites," but they're pretty close. They're very ultra-conservative on what (new technologies) they're willing to adopt. Congress only went to Outlook Web a year ago -- and it was still only a belt-and-suspenders type of access ... our whole infrastructure is built around not getting hacked rather than getting access. "The technology systems in the House are quite archaic, and if you're dealing with members that have been around for a long time, it's harder to adopt new platforms than if you're in the private sector and more comfortable with new platforms. A big part of the House's bandwidth is actually used for an off-site redundancy, which duplicates every one of our sites for Outlook and all of our servers. We use so much bandwidth for that, I'm still fighting to get (Voice over IP) telephones installed in the House." Chairman Issa, thank you again for taking the time out of your schedule to speak with Mashable today. "Thank you. My message to the 7,000 websites that blacked out last January and other members of the tech community: How would you react if you only had 24 hours to react to a bill? There's no system that would guarantee they would know and react in that short a period." BONUS: Rep. Issa Calls the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) 'More Dangerous Than SOPA' Images courtesy of Flickr, Congressman Darrell Issa |
| New iPad Screen Under the Microscope Makes the iPad 2 Screen Cry [PICS] | | Sunday, March 18, 2012 6:30 PM | Stan Schroeder |
| | We know that the new iPad screen has a 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution, making it the most pixel-dense tablet screen available, but seeing the screen under a microscope really shows how tiny the pixels are compared to those used in the iPad 2's screen. UI designer Lukas Mathis has a digital microscope (a cheap one, he says) and the new iPad, so he decided to put up some screenshots of its screen, magnified 80x. He also has images of many other smartphone and tablet screens under the same magnification for comparison. As you can see in the picture above, the difference between the pixels of the iPad 2 and the new iPad is quite staggering. In fact, the only other two devices from Mathis's gallery which have smaller pixels than the new iPad are the iPhone 4S and Xperia Play, which has a 4-inch 854 × 480 pixel screen. Other devices included in the roundup are Kindle Fire, Google Nexus One (its OLED screen is quite different from the others on this list) and Nintendo 3DS. Seeing how the pixels rapidly shrink on new smartphones and tablets, one has to wonder when this trend will end. What do you think? How high a resolution do tablets and smartphones really need? Did Apple reach the limits, or will we see even tinier pixels on these devices in the future? Share your opinions in the comments. |
| The 16 Best iPad Photo Editing Apps | | Sunday, March 18, 2012 5:58 PM | AppAdvice |
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Whether you are professional photographer that likes to travel light (i.e. without a laptop) or a casual photographer that simply likes the convenience of using the Apple iPad, there are a number of apps in the App Store for editing photos. We have sifted through the bunch and selected some of our favorites. Please keep in mind that most of these have not yet been updated for the new iPad’s retina display, but we expect most of them to do so in the upcoming weeks. Photo Editing Apps For iPad |
| Top 10 Tech This Week [PICS] | | Sunday, March 18, 2012 5:10 PM | Charlie White |
|  It was a riveting week of "what if" here at Top 10 Tech, with one all-pervasive fact: Technology that once seemed like science fiction has now become reality. For instance, what if you put a Retina display on an iPad? What if solar panels cost half as much as they do now? What if you could build a race car that's so small you can only see it with a microscope? What if airplanes could fly at supersonic speeds without that sonic boom that makes them too annoying to fly over land? That's just the beginning of the wonders we uncovered this week, where we found the most astonishing iPhone dock ever built, took a brand-new laptop swathed in Gorilla Glass for a spin, found a way to indulge our kookyest desires with an MP3 doorbell and even discovered a way to use a Microsoft Kinect that we never dreamed of. SEE ALSO: Previous editions of Top 10 Tech This Week So don't miss the answers to all those crucial "what if" questions and a lot more right here on this edition of Top 10 Tech This Week. Here's last week's Top 10 Tech. |
| FAA Says it Will Finally Consider Updating List of Approved Electronics | | Sunday, March 18, 2012 3:38 PM | Geekosystem |
|  If you've ridden on an airplane some time in the last 15-odd years, you've probably noticed that the list of approved electronic devices is a bit limited. That could be changing soon. Most items need to be completely powered down and stowed during taxiing, take off, and landing. The reasons for this vary, but it can be pretty annoying for travelers whose personal electronics represent their only comfort in the nightmare that is coach-class travel. Now, it seems that the Federal Aviation Administration might be warming up to the idea of relaxing its rules about electronic devices. The New York Times quotes FAA deputy assistant administrator for public affairs Laura J. Brown as saying: "With the advent of new and evolving electronic technology, and because the airlines have not conducted the testing necessary to approve the use of new devices, the FAA is taking a fresh look at the use of personal electronic devices, other than cellphones, on aircraft." It's important to note that cellphones, despite their ubiquity, are still off the table. Other devices, like e-readers and possibly tablets, seem to be under consideration. The fact that individual airlines haven't been interested in testing new devices probably has something to do with the cost and effort required to perform such tests. The rules apparently require that every version of the device be tested in an empty flight on every plane in the airline's fleet. So, every possibly iPod would need to fly alone on every possible airplane just to see if iPods could be allowed. For airlines, who are strangers to customer comfort, such efforts are just not worthwhile. What will happen next is anyone's guess. To me, it seems likely that the rules will remain largely unchanged. While interference with airplane avionics is a concern, music players and reading devices without transmission capabilities are no doubt banned for use during takeoff and landing so as to prevent distraction and limit the number of items that might be flying around the cabin in the event of an accident. However, it's possible -- oh so tantalizingly possible -- that this could soon lead to a complete re-thinking of electronics on planes. After all, as distracting as electronic devices are, fighting with passengers about turning them off, or how "airplane mode" is not sufficient, is probably even more distracting. Also, the addition of Wi-Fi to most flights is a tacit admission that wireless transmissions really aren't screwing planes up. So here's hoping for a bright future where I can read my Kindle while the cabin crew explains which parts of the aircraft will serve as a flotation device. [NY Times via Techmeme, image is of an Alaska Airlines pilot using an iPad] |
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