Hasta La Gadget!

Take a deep breath. Actually, you may want to sit down for this news. In fact, if you’ve got a seatbelt and a helmet within arm’s reach, you’ll want to put those on as well. It turns out that members of the tech press are writing about Apple more than any other company. And then Google. And then Twitter and Facebook and Microsoft.

These numbers come from Pew. The organization issued a report yesterday stating that 15.1 percent of all tech stories written between June 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010 focused on Apple. Google was next up, with 11.4 percent. The once almighty Microsoft trailed with around three percent of the total conversation.

These rankings likely don’t come as much of a surprise to any who follows the tech press even peripherally–nor does the fact that Pew found the coverage of those two dominant companies to be largely positive.

Anecdotally, from where I sit, at least, while there does seem to have been a marked backlash in the way the tech press has covered Apple and Google, with outlets going after the companies hard over issues like the iPhone death grip and Street View privacy concerns–issues worth column space, no doubt, but it’s hard to imagine outlets going after the companies so hard, had they not been regarded as industry darlings for so long.

Ah, “premium” video-on-demand. Media controllers have been fighting the inevitable forever, but now it seems they’re finally coming around to the future — letting users watch silver screen gems (or duds, for what it’s worth) in their home shortly after release in the theater. Before you bust out the golf claps for these dudes and dudettes, you should know that they’re planning to ding you for around $30 for the privilege, so it’s only remotely of interest if you happen to have a family of eight. According to a new Bloomberg report, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., and Walt Disney Co. are all in talks with major cable systems to “offer films for as much as $30 per showing soon after they run in theaters.” Disney’s also thinking of streaming its content to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, with Warner expected to begin testing an offering later this year that lets consumers watch new(ish) release material for “$20 to $30 per viewing.” Of course, we guess it can’t hurt to throw the option out there and see exactly who is desperate enough, but we’re guessing this won’t exactly be the demise of the cinema. Or Redbox.

Sony, Warner and Disney mulling $30 at-home viewing option, we laugh and wait for the $100 option originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Today, Toshiba will announce its entry into the e-book market with Toshiba Book Place, a Windows application developed by K-NFB, to both purchase and read enhanced e-books. The application will be bundled with all of Toshiba’s laptops, and will also be available as a free download from their website. The library will initially offer 6,000 e-books for purchase. K-NFB also launched its own application, Blio, described below.

Wired.com interviewed Terry Cronin, a vice president for Toshiba America. While e-books for dedicated e-readers and other devices have been successful, he believes e-books for laptops can offer something unique for particular kinds of reading — especially those that benefit from immediate access to other media.

“It’s a device that people already have,” he said. “If you’re traveling or bringing a bag, you’re already bringing your laptop with you. You don’t need to bring another device.”

Cookbooks, children’s books, and textbooks all benefit from the greater storage space and graphics capabilities of a laptop, Cronin said. The goal a library of e-books enhanced with 3-D viewing and embedded video, audio, and online search and web browsing.

Toshiba developed the application with futurist Ray Kurzweil’s K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc., a joint venture with the National Federation for the Blind. K-NFB is working with publishers to encode the books in the XPS e-book format and add video and audio enhancements to the e-book library.

UPDATE: Today, K-NFB is also announcing Blio, its own e-reader application with a built-in bookstore, available for immediate download (Windows only). It appears to be essentially identical to Toshiba Book Place, and the books available are the same format and selection; you could say that Book Place is a Toshiba-branded version of Blio.

It’s not clear to me whether this will work. There are already e-book applications from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others available for Windows laptops with a much wider selection of books and portability across devices. The Amazon Kindle marketplace contains 700,000 e-books for sale, for instance, while Barnes & Noble’s offers over a million.

The hope is that XPS will catch on, and emerge as a standard alongside EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and other electronic document formats. Then the store will be able to expand to support other outlets. But right now, that looks like a long shot.

Toshiba Book Place [ToshibaBookPlace.com]

Image credit: Toshiba

See Also:

• Toshiba Dual Screen PC Folds Like a Book
• Why Metadata Matters for the Future of E-Books
• Stephen Fry and Our Transmedia Reading Future
• E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde
• Apple iPad Raises the Stakes for E-Readers
• Video Boxes, ‘Notbooks’ and E-Books to Dominate Gadgets in 2010 …

It’s been decades, in internet years, since we caught wind of a 4.3-inch, 1.3GHz HTC Mondrian via a leaked Windows Phone 7 ROM. The sun rises, the sun sets, life returned to normal, and yet… here we are again. This ROM comes care of a purported Vodafone leak and sports the name (so much as the filename hints) HTC Spark, a render of which bears striking resemblance to the Trophy we espied last week. Spark itself popped up as recent as early August on a sheet that claimed a 3.7-inch 480 x 800 display, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB RAM, and a 5 megapixel camera. Can all these loose threads tie together to form one cohesive smartphone sweater? Not yet, but it’s getting there.

Purported HTC Spark Windows Phone 7 ROM leak suggests Vodafone home, Trophy doppelganger originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Sep 2010 10:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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An elephant never forgets. To hunt and destroy Sarah Connor.

Engineers have often molded their robotic creations on existent animal physiology. Nature has had millions of years in the R & D lab known as evolution to tweak its designs, so it makes sense for engineers to build upon this tried and tested groundwork.

One new example of Wild Kingdom-inspired robotics comes from German automated technology company Festo. They recently unveiled a robotic arm they’ve dubbed a “Bionic Handling Assistant.” The robotic arm is inspired by the natural world’s representatives to the
Republican party, the Elephant. The swaying cyber-trunk is a product of Festo’s inter-disciplinary Bionic Learning Network which was created with the specific aim of incorporating existent designs of the natural world into modern robotics.

The robot arm is able to move in a variety of directions and pick up small objects. The robotic trunk is also revolutionary in that it is complete free from any metal parts. Festo hopes the arm will find a role in medical technology, agriculture, and
“institutes of learning” (I don’t know if they thought that last one through).

So, anyway, yes, we now have robot elephants.

Videos of robo-Dumbos in action after the jump.

via SingularityHub