Hasta La Gadget!

Sony had an event today and as expected, it introduced the PlayStation 4. The next-gen platform is designed to shift focus from the living room to the gamer, Sony said, and overall, PlayStation’s approach is meant to make it possible for gamers to play wherever they want, whenever they want.

PS4 lead system architect Mark Cerny talked about how the evolution of the PS4 came about, saying it began five years ago, earlier on in the life of the PS3. The PS3 was a first step, which was designed to connect to a variety of services, but it was limited because of how early it launched in that world, Cerny said.

“Much less value is found today in blast processing or a system-on-a-chip,” Cerny said. He suggested tech could interfere with design innovation. The tech remains important, he stressed, but the idea was to create a platform that was all about experience. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s a tune Apple and Steve Jobs started playing years ago when they realized the spec race was a nonstarter in the mobile phone world.

“By game creators, for game creators. It is a powerful and accessible system,” Cerny said on stage, suggesting that this time around there was a strong emphasis on ease of development, hence the use of a standard x86 PC CPU. The GPU is designed for use with “practical tasks,” he said, with the overall goal of making development a painless experience.

Essentially, the PS4 is an advanced, x86-based personal computer, which means that it should be easy for developers to build. All of this is clearly an answer to a major complaint from studios about the previous generation, which was infamously tricky to master from a software perspective.

Sony also unveiled a redesigned DualShock 4 controller, which has the Vita-style touchpad depicted in rumors, ad works with a 3D “stereo” camera accessory to track its movements in a loose approximation of what’s possible with Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect.

The hardware is clearly also borrowing some tricks from mobile games. It has save states that allow users to quickly freeze and resume gameplay, without having to save just by switching on and off the console. There’s also background downloading, which allows digital titles to be played before they’re even completely on your local drive.

Social is another key tentpole for the PS4, according to Cerny. He described a new function that allows you to quickly pause and upload gameplay videos as easily as you might have done with static screenshots in the past. There’s also spectator functionality for watching “celebrities” gaming, something which seems to have been borrowed from Twitter’s success with famous members. Networking will also be based around real names and profile pictures, instead of strictly on gamer tags and avatars, too, and all of this will plug into mobile apps to help gamers stay in touch.

The war for your living room is about to heat up. While Microsoft is still keeping its own next-generation console under lock and key, rival Sony is gearing up to take the stage in New York City and show off exactly what it’s been working on for the past few years. Naturally, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing starting at 6PM Eastern/3PM Pacific tonight.

Like nearly every other major hardware release in recent memory, the PlayStation 4 (or whatever it’s going to be called) has been the subject of scads of questionable rumors and clandestine leaks. Curious code name? Check. Preliminary glimpses at hardware? Check. Unnerving (and hopefully unfounded) reports that the console won’t play nice with used games? Sadly, check.

Even now, the rumor mill persists — Sony may push its next-gen console out the door as soon as November (with the ability to control it via smartphone, no less) if a new report from Kotaku holds water. Still, for while we know (or think we know) about Sony’s plans for tonight, expect the company to whip out a few surprises to keep the masses planted firmly on the edge of their seats.

That said, at this point it seems highly unlikely that Sony will pull back the curtain on everything it’s working on, if only because of its sketchy track record with keeping promises made on stage. One need only look at the company’s original PS3 announcement to see that some of the experiences that Sony promised it would bring to the table just haven’t materialized (or at least, haven’t materialized in the way we had hoped).

Either way, Sony’s little shindig in Gotham tonight is going to be one to worth listening in on. To stay abreast on all of Sony’s big announcements, keep your eyes on our PlayStation Meeting event tag here.

Toronto’s Upverter is a startup that’s poised to effect change that could reshape the landscape of entrepreneurship. That’s not something you can say about most of the businesses we cover on a daily basis, whether or not they have good ideas. But it’s definitely true of Upverter, the company that’s hoping to build a cloud-based hardware engineering platform that can match and overtake its desktop-based counterparts within the next few years.

So what would that mean for the messy, expensive business of hardware prototyping and product creation? Nothing less than the beginning of a new era, according to Upverter CEO and co-founder Zak Homuth.

“The three of us that founded the company all kind of come from a mixed hardware/software background, we all studied electrical engineering, we all worked co-op jobs at startups all around the world, did a little bit of hardware and a little bit of software,” he explained in an interview. “And then we got together to try to improve the rate of innovation with hardware. We all ran away from it, because it was easier to build software than to build hardware, and we wanted to fix that, because we wanted to build hardware personally.”

The idea was to make tools that would allow Homuth and his co-founders to build a hardware company as their next startup venture, so they quit their jobs, sold their possessions to get some working capital and moved to Homuth’s parents basements, with the nascent idea of building an engineering platform that lives entirely in the cloud. For the fledgling startup, the question was whether or not they could build a GitHub for hardware, how cloud-based it could be, and whether that was something anyone even wanted. Flash forward four months.

“Then we got into Y Combinator, picked the company up, moved it down to Mountain View and got this shitty little townhouse across from YC,” he said. “By that time we’d figured out that the solution to the version control problem, the innovation problem, the crowdsourcing problem was to move it all to the cloud, and specifically the tools. Because if you move the tools to the cloud you make it possible to control the file format, so that you can do version control, you can control consumption, you can control the viewer.”

Upverter launched a very simple version to a very controlled group before coming out of YC, and then took that MVP-style product into something that could be used by the general public in September of 2011. “It couldn’t really do much,” Homuth admits. “But it was the line in the sand that allowed us to say ‘Does anybody wanted to do engineering this way, instead of the way you’ve been doing it for 30 years?’ and we got enough ‘yesses’ that we kept working on it.”

The company has since been tracking down money, building out its tools to a point where they actually compete with existing design tools, via a release just a few short months ago. Upverter has raised $650,000 so far from angel investors, including YouTube founding team member Christina Brodbeck, and Xobni co-founder Adam Smith, and that has managed to allow them to build a software tool that begins to be able to compete with existing tools. But there’s still a long way to go, Homuth says.

“It’s not at parity by any means, it can’t do everything that $100,000 software can do yet, but you can do non-zero stuff,” he said. “You can actually get stuff manufactured, you can actually simulate, you can actually manage a product’s life cycle, you can actually design. And that was step one in our three step plan to change engineering.”

Step two is to get the platform to parity with existing tools

Step two is to get the platform to that parity point, where it can compete with existing tools on an equal footing with legacy software. Getting to a point where they can design equally well in a browser as with a desktop tool is around six months away, according to Homuth, at which point Upverter will be able to start building out its sales and marketing team. Once it gets there, Upverter will have built in a little over three years what legacy CAD companies have taken 30 years to create. The next goal, beyond that, is to become the “Rosetta Stone of engineering,” meaning that no matter how you come at engineering, no matter what tools you’re using, it’ll translate and you can work with anyone else in the world on the same files and on the same projects.

Upverter’s ultimate goal is still at least a couple of years away, Homuth says, and the time it takes to get there will be dependent on what kind of money the startup can raise. He’s actively looking for fresh investment now, while also continuing to add to the 10,000-strong user base it has managed to attract so far.

The rise of Upverter means a potential explosion on the horizon for hardware startups, which is why the company is hosting a hardware hackathon with Y Combinator on February 23rd. Making hardware engineering collaborative, affordable and easy to access can have a tremendous impact on the cost of doing business and risks associated with creating new hardware, which is why Upverter achieving its goals could lead to a new revolution for hardware startups, incubators and investors alike.

If you happen to be one of those hardware startups, Upverter is offering free team accounts to TC readers. Just follow this link to sign up.

Google is slowly pulling down Google Glass’ veil of secrecy. With each announcement, the company reveals a bit more of its secrets. This time around, the video above shows Google Glass’ UI in real world situations — you know, real world as in jumping from a plane and swinging on a trapeze. Forget about the wide-eyed concept videos; this is the real deal.

Get ready for even more Glasshole sightings, Google is ready to hand out Google Glass units to non-developer types. But you have to apply. And still pay the Glass Explorer Edition’s $1,500 price tag. But Google Glass!

Using the hashtag #ifihadglass, take to Twitter or Google + and with 50 words or less, explain how you would use Google Glass. Photos and videos can be included as well. The deadline is February 27, and Google didn’t state how many Glass units will be handed out through this program, but the competition will be fierce.

The UI shown in the video is radically more subdued than in the original concept video. Gone are the little circles and VH1 Pop-Up Video-ish notifications. Instead, users interact with Google Glass through a single pane in the top right. Everything from Google searches to notifications to hangouts seemingly happen in this one space — rather than dancing around the field of vision like in earlier Google Glass videos.

The world seen through Google’s omnipresent eye but where are the ads?

Google has yet to announce when general consumers will be able to buy Google Glass. But that’s smart.

Google is slowly rolling out units to die-hard fans that can likely help the development and deal with first-gen bugs. Frankly, at this point, Google Glass isn’t ready for mass consumption. It
will be released when it’s ready and until then, lowly consumers like most of us will have to sit on the sidelines and enjoy the future vicariously through YouTube demo videos.

Apple’s iPhone 5 became the best selling smartphone globally in Q4, pushing past Samsung’s flagship Galaxy SIII, according to research by Strategy Analytics. The data comes from its Handset Country Share Tracker service. It’s the first time the iPhone 5 sales have topped Galaxy SIII shipments. According to the analyst, a “rich touchscreen, extensive distribution and generous operator subsidies have propelled the iPhone 5 to the top spot”.

Strategy Analytics estimates that 27.4 million iPhone 5 smartphones shipped worldwide during Q4, versus 15.4 million Galaxy SIII units. The iPhone 5′s share of the total global smartphone shipments was 13 per cent in Q4, according to the analyst, while Samsung’s handset captured an estimated seven per cent share.

Neither Apple nor Samsung break out quarterly per handset model device sales — although Samsung does report channel shipments for some smartphone models, and Apple has reported launch weekend sales of new iPhones — so it’s worth stressing that Strategy Analytics figures are estimates.

In addition, comparing the performance of Apple and Samsung’s respective flagships has another drawback. The different launch dates of the respective handsets make a direct sales cycle comparison a little unfair, since Apples iPhone 5 launched last September, positioned to fully capitalise on holiday sales, while Samsung’s Galaxy SIII is considerable older, launching back in May. The hype around its successor, the Galaxy SIV, is already cranking up, potentially dampening sales as consumers may be opting to wait for the next generation device — with a launch rumoured as soon as next month.

That said, Apple’s iPhone 4S launched in October 2011 – yet still managed to out-ship Samsung’s 2012 flagship in Q4. Apple shipped an estimated 17.4 million iPhone 4S handsets — two million more than Samsung’s Galaxy SIII shipments for the quarter — making the 4S the second most popular global smartphone model in Q4, with an eight per cent share (the Galaxy SIII was third).

Apple’s iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S together accounted for one in five of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the quarter, according to Strategy Analytics’ data. It described this as ”an impressive performance, given the iPhone portfolio’s premium pricing”, adding that the Galaxy SIII’s global popularity “appears to have peaked”.

Apple’s premium pricing strategy is matched by the use of premium materials in the construction of its handsets — with metal and glass the materials of choice for the iPhone 5 and 4S, rather than the plastic used in the Galaxy SIII. Apple is also able to deliver OS updates over the air, bypassing carrier testing requirements, which frequently impede Android updates — meaning some Android fans may choose to opt for a newer model of smartphone in order to get the latest version of the OS.