Technology Futures

On behalf of all the engineers and scientists that invented and then perfected all the technology on display at the Super Bowl half time, let me apologize. The fact that you CAN suit up several hundred people in radio-controlled LED light suits and send them prancing around a football field does not mean that you SHOULD. And the fact that you can put lampshades on the heads of some of those, uh, "dancers" and have them prance around behind Black Eyed Peas does not mean that you should.

It is hard to decide what was worse: the abuse of technology, or the millions of gallons of ear bleach needed by those of us who perversely refused to turn the sound off during the half time performance. If nothing else, it is now established that all four members of Black Eyed Peas can't do that thing with their throat and lips that some of us call, um, "singing."

It was inevitable that someone would see a business opportunity by providing private search. Starting Page is a search engine that promises to keep your searches private, unlike Google, Bing, and others that build dossiers on what you search for. The search data is sold to third parties and is also used to target ads. I've written recently about how an hour of searching for camping items resulted in weeks of ads about camping stuff.

We are still in the Model T era of the Internet, with lots of evolution and innovation still to come. Starting Page is not the first search engine to challenge Google, and it won't be the last. But Internet time passes quickly, and if people decide they have had enough of Google, "enough is enough" will come quickly.

A few experiments with search phrases seems to deliver just a couple of pages of very relevant results, and those results are refreshingly free of link farms and "shopping" sites, which Google now seems to favor. That's my beef with the bigger search engines (Bing also favors link farms, although not quite to the extent of Google, in my experience). Most of these "make money on the Internet" schemes are focused on building sites on specialized topics that have a broad interest (e.g. "camping and hiking"), adding a thin veneer of content (frequently stolen from legitimate sites), and then larding up the site with ads and links to bigger shopping sites. In theory, you could make some money with this approach and provide some useful content, but most of the sites are rubbish. Nonetheless, since they are hawking ads, the search engines happily put them right at the top of the search results. What gets lost are the legitimate blogs and topical sites, which end up far down in the search results. So good luck to StartingPage; I hope it does well. We need it.

I wrote about this little device a while back, but it is now available for order. I'm thinking about getting a couple for the house, to replace existing wall sockets where we tend to drop our iPhones and iPods at the end of the day. This USB wall socket has two standard 120 volt AC outlets and two powered USB outlets. So you don't need chargers cluttering up your sockets. And of course, it can charge any device that has a USB charging option.

The Evoke Flow is a new take on what a radio ought to be. While it's nice to have fifteen thousand songs on your home computer, it is not always handy or convenient. Even if you have some of the gadgets that let you stream the music around the house, many of those still require fussing at your computer (some need more fussing, some need less). The Evoke Flow looks like an old sixties AM radio; the form factor includes a handle to encourage you to carry it around the house. It supports three kinds of content: traditional FM radio, Internet radio stations, and streamed content from local computers (e.g. iTunes music libraries). It has a mono speaker, so it's not designed to provide room-filling stereo. Instead, the emphasis is on portability--listen in the kitchen, on the deck outside, in the den, in the bedroom. It's a neat idea, and based on this review, the product still has a few rough edges. For example, it seems odd not to include AM radio, and it would not have been expensive to add a second cheap speaker and provide low fidelity stereo. And it would appear the attempt to provide a simplified "retro" look created some difficulties using the controls effectively. I think we will see more products like this, and the maker of the Evoke is a firm called Pure, which has several other similar products.