Hasta La Gadget!

Google Glass continues to show up among celebrities, with the latest to don the wearable being musician Jon Bon Jovi. The singer played with the loaner headset backstage, before keyboard player David Bryan opted to wear it while playing on-stage in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. They’re not the only ones to talk Glass’ potential in the real-world recently, either, with the headset getting put through its paces on the mean streets of Manhattan and Istanbul.

“Glass and wearable-technology is an example of another step in consumer-facing innovation that will change how we share the music experience with our fans in the future,” Bryan told Mashable. “This is relatively uncharted territory for the quick-moving developer community and I am excited to see what is created.”

The wearable’s appeal has generally been among developers and augmented reality researchers, though Google hasn’t shied away from chasing celebrity appeal. As part of its #ifihadglass promotion earlier this year the company offered Explorer Edition units to Alyssa Milano, Neil Patrick Harris, Imogen Heap, and LeVar Burton, among others.

Another recipient was author Gary Shteyngart, who took to the New Yorker this week to write about his experiences roaming Manhattan with the headset. “I hear that in San Francisco, where these devices are far more in evidence, the term “Glassholes” is already current,” he writes, explaining how children follow him in the street and strangers call out to him unexpectedly, “but in New York I am a conquering hero.”

Meanwhile, in slightly more dangerous settings, Glass has been showing its potential as a first-person video reporting tool. Journalist Tim Pool described using a modified version of the headset – hacked to run general Android apps – to cover the Istanbul protests at ground-level to the Guardian, live-streaming the footage to audiences of hundreds of thousands.

The common theme between all three experiences is the immediacy Glass offers, whether that’s of being able to see a first-person view of a 55,000 sell-out crowd in concert, the view from a therapist’s couch, or running through the streets trying to avoid tear-gas. There’s more on Glass’ potential as a wearable camera in our hands-on report.

Glass outings: Bon Jovi, Gary Shteyngart and journalist Tim Pool talk wearables is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Today in an SEC filing, Microsoft revealed a very interesting fact: Its Surface tablet hybrid line brought in revenue of $853 million in the company’s fiscal 2013. However, the Surface line didn’t become available for sale until October 26, giving it 247 days in the market during the financial period.

That places Surface revenue on a per-day basis at $3.45 million. Extrapolated for a one-year period, that financial rate puts the Surface line on a $1.26 billion per-year run rate. However, I would wager that revenues for Surface were highest at launch of the Surface RT and Pro, and lower in between, so the per-day and per-year estimates could vary.

Reviews of the figure have been decidedly negative. The Next Web’s Josh Ong flatly stated that the revenue figure confirmed that the tablet line is a “financial failure.” Tom Warren over at The Verge noted that the total revenue for the devices is less than the $900 million writedown that Microsoft took during its last quarter. And Todd Bishop of GeekWire underlined that the $853 million in revenue is again less than the $898 million in new costs that Microsoft called “primarily with Windows 8 and Surface.”

If Surface were a standalone business, it would be dead. However, as a Microsoft division, it is anything but.

Microsoft as a company has tectonic financial wealth in the form of past profits stored as cash. It has decided to enter the OEM world, and has, to my knowledge, continued with the Surface project, slow initial sales be damned.

There is a firm, recent precedent for the company to continue to invest in this way: Windows Phone. It took two full years of hard scrabble work to get Windows Phone to a point in which it was healthy enough to walk a bit on its own. Put another way, until Windows Phone 8 and the recent Nokia handsets, the smartphone line was sucking air.

Perhaps not as much as Surface, given that the line of tablets has caused material damage to Microsoft’s short-term profits — the $900 million charge was $0.07 in lost EPS for the company in the last quarter.

However, Microsoft has the money, and if it wants to can continue to pour it into Surface, as it did with Windows Phone, and Bing, and other properties that it finds to be strategically important. Does Microsoft want to cede complete hardware primacy to its OEM partners that have failed for so long to demonstrate innovation and forward-looking thought?

I don’t think so, no. Naturally, Microsoft would prefer if Surface lost less money, but I don’t think that Microsoft is done with this project yet. A decent test: If the rollout of the next-generation Surface line is muted, we could be watching the door close.

Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan

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It’s a frankenstein monster of efforts, this computing rig appearing this afternoon, one that connects a MacBook Air to graphics it has no business running on its own – but certainly has the ability to roll with, it would seem. This amalgamation of bits and pieces starts with a Thunderbolt to Express Card adapter, moving on then to an ExpressCard to PCI-Express adapter, then connecting in the end to an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 graphics card. This beast then – after all that – brings what very much appears to be a high-end gaming experience to the Apple notebook.

The only caveat – other than an exposed set of fans, if you don’t wrap it all up – is the fact that you’ve got to use Apple’s Boot Camp to run Windows to make this all happen. Inside Boot Camp, Windows can bring the driver requirements needed to work with this high-powered graphics card, and the adapters seem to do the rest!

This setup is able to be plugged and unplugged with ease, making the MacBook Air an at-home beast of graphics delivery when you’re sitting down, a mobile computer as it’s marketed as when you’re not in the mood for gaming.

“You’ll get faster performance with an external monitor, but you’ll lose the convenience of not needing a giant monitor. This becomes relevant as people make better eGPU cases where your eGPU will be portable. Why bring a monitor to your friend’s place when your laptop already has one?” – Larry Gadea

Larry Gadea is the creator of this rig, and his original post to the Tech Inferno forums has more details on benchmarks and build options than you’ll ever care to sift through. Instead you’ll probably just want to kick this rig out yourself.

Meanwhile we’re reveling in the fact that someone saw things similar to Chris Davie’s column from earlier this year: Dear Apple, here’s what I want from the new Thunderbolt Display, complete with display-based GPU. Keep it powerful, and Apple – keep considering it!

VIA: MacRumors

MacBook Air rigged with NVIDIA GeForce GPU for Thunderbolt super-build is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Dying to get a first-hand look at some of the greatest exhibits places like the Museum of Flight, Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, and Tillamoook Air Museum have to offer, but don’t have the time or money for a cross-country flight history tour? Thanks to ACI Cockpit360, that last part won’t matter in the slightest.

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