Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s some interesting tech reading, ‘The Man Who Lied to his Laptop.’ This book, by Sociologist Clifford Nass, looks into how people treat their technology and maps out these interactions to help build effective human relationships.

With a degree in Computer Science and Sociology, Nass has discovered an interesting relationship between man and machine and why certain technologies succeed and fail. Nass talks about one technology people tend to interact with most, your GPS.

In an interview with NPR Nass explained, “BMW put a female voice in their GPS, and they actually had to have a product recall, because German drivers would not take directions from a woman. And what was particularly striking was, even after the helpdesk, when people were calling in angry, tried to explain that in fact it wasn’t a real female in the car and in fact that all the people who had designed the GPS and the directions were male, nonetheless people were unfazed and insisted on changing the voice.”

In a test, drivers using a GPS were presented with two voices a happy, upbeat voice to start their journey and a down, morose voice.

“Most people, when they hear that second voice, think, my goodness, I’d fire anyone who would ever use a voice like that. But, in fact, in our research it turned out that happy drivers drove much better with that first voice. But upset and angry drivers actually drove much better, felt much better, thought the voice was better when it was that second depressed, almost morose voice.”

Clifford Nass’ book is currently available in hardcover for $25.95 (list).

Image from DataViz.com.

With its flagship mobile office suite Documents To Go, software company DataViz makes some of the most popular productivity applications for Blackberry, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Mobile, and Android. Now that RIM has bought the better chunk of DataViz to work for Blackberry, its days as a cross-platform mobile superstar might be numbered.

The deal had been reported as done on Friday by Crackberry.com, reportedly for $50m in cash, shortly after DataViz had announced that they were cancelling development for Palm. RIM confirmed the acquisition yesterday in a statement: “RIM has acquired some of the assets of DataViz and hired the majority of its employees to focus on supporting the BlackBerry platform.” Translation: it’s all ours, now.

Even if RIM just lets its client apps for other platforms drift along for a while, they’re still a good business: as CNET’s Jessica Dolcourt points out, “fifteen dollars a pop for iPhone business professionals buying Documents To Go for iPhone isn’t a business to quickly pull from.”

Still, having Documents To Go in-house offers RIM terrific leverage. They can use its InTact cloud-syncing software for all media files on the Blackberry; offer the premium version for free to enterprise customers; and package a new suite of productivity and enterprise apps for its forthcoming BlackPad tablet. By buying Documents To Go and its software team from DataViz, RIM just solidified its position as the “serious” and “productive” smartphone company.

See Also:

• Documents To Go: Finally, an Office Suite for the iPad
• Research In Motion Bites Back With BlackBerry Torch
• Dropbox for Blackberry Now in Beta
• RIM BlackBerry Torch
• BlackBerry Maker Overhauls Phone Operating System
• BlackBerry Tablet 'BlackPad' Readies to Take On the iPad

If you’re planning on showing off your awesome gaming skills with Apple’s new Game Center, you’d better have a nice new iOS device to play on. Apple has released compatibility details for the fancy high-score table, and you’ll need to have an iPhone 3GS or 4, and second-gen iPod Touch or better.

People who have the second-generation iPhone 3G can run iOS 4.1 (including HDR and bug fixes), but won’t get the Game Center. (Also, as with iOS 4.0, it won’t get the multitasking features newer phones have.) If you’re still rocking the original iPhone, you can’t have iOS 4.x at all — but you knew that already, and clearly you don’t care, you pathetic Luddite.

Game Center was demoed by Steve Jobs at last week’s iPod event. It’s kind of a social network for gaming, allowing you to compete against your friends and compare results on the leader-board, and even invite people to play multiplayer games head-to-head. Right now the most common way to taunt your friends is to share your results via Twitter or Facebook, but that requires a log-in for each and every game.

Of course, that old iPod might not have the guts to actually play some of the more demanding games available, but at least you can excuse yourself when you limp in at the bottom of the league-table by blaming your old, weak iPod’s stuttering frame-rate.

Game Center [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Announces New Versions of iOS
• Apple Unveils Next-Gen, Multitasking iPhone OS

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Verizon Wireless is introducing this Android smartphone with a buy-one, get-one-free deal. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20015785-17.html” class=”origPostedBlog”The Digital Home/a/p

Northern California artists Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector built a 65-foot-tall, 10,000-pound obelisk out of around 340 bicycles — and one tricycle.

The monumental sculpture, called “Cyclisk,” has been installed on a streetcorner in Santa Rosa, California. Perhaps ironically, given its composition, the obelisk is right in the midst of a bunch of auto dealerships.

A tribute to the way car culture has sacrificed more eco-friendly bicycle culture? A memento mori for industrial civilization? A reminder that riding your bicycle is both healthier and cheaper than driving a car?

Not necessarily any of the above, says Grieve.

“The statement is up to the viewer and hopefully the work is an intersection of ideas, so it can keep growing with the community,” Grieve said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “When a person brings to a piece his/her own interpretation, the piece is ‘working’ for the community.”

The $37,000 piece was built with funds from Nissan, which is building a $3.7 million dealership in the city. Santa Rosa’s “1% for art” law dictates that 1% of major construction projects be devoted to public art.

Grieve and Spector collected the hundreds of bicycles they needed for the project from community donations.

“The parameters of the assignment, spearheaded by Santa Rosa Art in Public Places Program, dictated the site, budget and other requirements, and we complied as best we could,” Spector said in an e-mail.

It’s not the first bicycle sculpture by Grieve: he has sculptures made of bicycle parts in San Rafael, Santa Barbara, and San Francisco.

Click through for a mini-gallery of photos showing the Cyclisk obelisk.