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Is tablet PC the future of publishing?

Here's a neat little vision of the future of publishing, from Time Inc's Sports Illustrated magazine.

It's all very touch-screen and interactive, and raises all sorts of questions about video rights, interactivity and the way everything is going.

Basically, it's the next stage of development from the e-zine, similar to the ones we at Times Online already publish for our monthly lifestyle supplement Luxx and our science magazine Eureka.

Most of all, though, we want to know: what is the machine that the animated hand is playing on?

Looks an awful lot like the much rumoured and anticipated Tablet Mac from where I'm sitting.

Google roll out a dictionary

 

It’s really hard to keep up with every last Google feature. Here’s one that they just launched with a minimum of fuss.

A dictionary. A simple, easy to use, dictionary. Try it here.

The L.A. Times Tech blog points out that this is not great news for web dictionary rivals though:

The company that might be hurt the most by Google's new product is Answers.com. Previously, the "definition" button at the top right of all Google searches for words would direct users to entries on the Wikipedia-like Answers.com site. Now those links go to Google Dictionary, a less colourful, less cluttered interface.

Sony to film 2010 World Cup in 3D

Sony and FIFA have just announced that next year's football World Cup in South Africa will be filmed in 3D by Sony.

It's all sort of exciting, and good to know that a 3D record of the world's biggest sporting competition will be available to future generations.

Personally, I'm not yet convinced that 3D TV will take off in a domestic environment, despite Sony's confident press release. Then again, I bet they once said that about colour.

And when you re-watch the 1966 final (as all loyal English citizens are forced to do at least once a year as a condition of holding their passport), I bet you watch the colour footage that was shot for newsreel, even though it's the black and white BBC version that contains the classic commentary.

Sony is promising all manner of new 3D kit coming our way in 2010 and beyond, but take-up won't take off, they say, until at least 2013.

For the time being, the only people on the planet able to afford the £7,000 or so a 3D TV currently costs are the millionaires who disport themselves on the football pitches of Europe.

Star Trek Online: new teaser trailer

Set phasers to Scotty. Beam me up, stun.

Star Trek Online, the forthcoming role-playing game, will be with us in Europe on February 5, and here's the latest teaser trailer. The new game will plunge players right into the Star Trek universe, and some, we imagine, will never leave it again.

Despite our customary weary cynicism, we are quite curious about this one.

Debra Craine, the Times's respected dance editor and (not so) secret Star Trek obsessive, is dusting off her costume (yellow, not red) as we speak, and will be heading into interplanetary conflict at warp speed as soon as we give her the go-ahead.

Microsoft launches Streetside maps and improves its search engine

First the good news. It looks like Google has got itself a decent rival in Microsoft's Bing search service. Today Microsoft unveiled a string of new features for its new(ish) search engine and launched a series of shiny new updates for its mapping service.

Overall it was pretty impressive and it can only be counted a good thing that search innovation is really hotting up at the moment. We'll get back to details in a moment but now the bad news (for those who don't like Google's Street View): one of the innovations Bing is introducing is its own version of Street View called Streetside.

It is only available for 100 metropolitan areas in the US for the moment but it will be rolled out internationally soon - which means that there will shortly be Microsoft Streetside cars equipped with those four-way facing cameras coming down a street near you.

Personally I have no problem with Street View so this news does not bother me too much but given the controversy about Street View and privacy in the UK, I suspect that there will be a good many people thinking of manning the barricades again, like those villagers did in Broughton.

What is amusing is the prospect that sooner or later a Streetside car is going to pass a Street View car on a B road somewhere and we will get to see photos of photos being taken.

The new version of Bing Maps, released in a "beta" mode, offers pretty slick technology so users can zoom in more smoothly from the high-up graphical map to the close-up views showing actual streets from a pedestrian or driver's viewpoint.

The transitions between the different map formats is much smoother than Google's at the moment. In the background is Microsoft's Silverlight technology, the company's answer to Adobe's s Flash, so a small plug-in available for most Mac and PC browsers is required.

Bing Maps also offers a series of new "apps" that tack on tweets, traffic and other location-specific data to the map. Being a newspaperman, I particularly like the feed of front pages supplied for cities around the world. The feed comes from the Newseum website in Washington and so I shall blame them for not having many UK papers on there. The only London paper is the, ahem, Guardian.

Anyway this open approach to allowing outside apps to enrich the map service is an interesting development for Microsoft - the Twitter app which puts geo-located Tweets on the map is a good example of how this will work.

On the search front, Microsoft is trying to outflank Google by attempting to redefine what search is. Execs at the launch in San Francisco were pushing the idea that it is no longer enough to understand the search terms and provide a series of blue links to where the (Google) search engine thinks you might find what you are looking for.

Bing is meant to understand better the intent behind the search term and get you to a page of content, often created by the Bing engine itself, where you will find the information you are looking for.

So Bing is offering what Microsoft calls “entity cards” (the basic categories of information related to a topic) and “task pages” (what you see when you click through) for all kinds of topics from Tamiflu to universities to bands. The topics are still limited but more will be rolled out in time.

In other words, search for Microsoft is a much more an interactive browsing experience rather than simply typing words into a box. It also offers the possibility of more ads being served inside the search engine - and more profit for Microsoft.

Since its launch in May Bing has been gathering plaudits and marketshare. Microsoft said that in the US Bing's number of unique visitors had risen by 16 per cent to 83 million and its share of search had risen by 1.9 points, to 9.9 per cent. And that does not include the share that Yahoo! has which will be effectively owned by Microsoft when their search partnership deal goes through next year.

There are still areas where Google beats Bing hands down - Google News being one of them - but Google knows it has a proper fight on its hands. In fact it is launching a new series of innovations next Monday. I shall be wandering along.

IKEA launches catalogue as iPhone app

Chucking out the chintz? There's an app for that.

Yes, IKEA, the Swedish purveyors of self-assembly cupboards, cheap meatballs and subcutaneous bruising, are on the point of releasing their very own iPhone app.

The whole catalogue for 2010 will appear on the app, we are told, when it launches on Thursday. It's free, so pick it up.

In the true spirit of IKEA, the app's not quite finished yet, and when you get it home you may find it's missing a few pieces. That's where you come in.

IKEA invites your whinges about the app via e-mail, to ikeaappideas@cakegroup.com, by telephone to +44 20 7307 3132, or on Twitter with the hashtag #ikeaappideas

Just Dance on the Wii: shameful video review

The idea behind Just Dance on the Wii seems to be to make players look like dancing fools. It's also lots of fun.

You must mimic the movements of an on-screen dancing character who appears to have popped straight out of an iPod advert. The Wii remote in your hand senses how good your timing is.

As the videos we made while reviewing Just Dance attest, it's not necessarily the best dancer who wins, but the player with the best timing. The inclusion of songs such as Eye of the Tiger and MC Hammer's U Can't Touch This, suggests that the market for this game is party-goers rather than serious music lovers.

Just Dance isn't without its faults. It picks up movement much better on some songs than others, which is annoying if you're a serious competitor.

This is essentially a fun piece of video game tomfoolery, reasonably priced for the casual crowd it's designed to attract.

As you will see on the video, Emma lost fair and square, even though she's still e-mailing me complaints.

Below: Arion McNicoll, our online Driving Editor struts/flails his stuff with Emma Clarke, our in house trained actor/singer/dancer/sore loser.

Tiger Woods 2011: we've got an idea

Anyone who's played Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (above) knows that Electronic Arts have gone just about as far as they can in bringing the feel of real golf to a console. I mean, you can spend as long playing one course here as you can playing the real thing.

What's needed, surely, is an extra element, and we're delighted to see that Tiger himself has decided to provide a bit of inspiration with his erratic parallel parking style.

So, here's our suggestion to EA. Next time, incorporate a driving level into the game, with the option to reverse over fire hydrants and use your golf club in a way that its makers never intended. Perhaps as an epee. Sales will soar.

Xbox to offer in game solutions

If you've been stuck in a game with no clue how to solve a puzzle/beat the boss/find the emerald goblet, then Xbox is about to offer some much needed in-game help.

A patent that's just appeared online details a system where other players might offer advice and solutions to tricky points in a game, which you would be able to access while playing.

Hopefully this will see the end to thrown controllers and frustrating fruitless Google searches. Sounds great to me, but I could really use it on the PlayStation as well, as I still haven't managed to kill Radec, the final boss in Killzone 2.

If you want to read the whole patent, you can find it here.

Wikipedia responds: is the project really falling apart?

The Wikimedia foundation, the not-for-profit organisation that maintains and finances Wikipedia, has responded to the news coverage this week about the dramatic fall in the editors on the site.

The Times was among the newspapers who covered the findings of a Spanish researcher, Filipe Ortega, in detail. The foundation has a few quibbles with Mr Ortega’s research - namely, what the definition of an “editor” is, and when they are considered to have gone “dead”.

On a blog posted today, Erik Moeller and Erik Zachte from Wikimedia said:

it’s important to note that Dr. Ortega’s study of editing patterns defines as an editor anyone who has made a single edit, however experimental. This results in a total count of three million editors across all languages.  In our own analytics, we choose to define editors as people who have made at least 5 edits. By our narrower definition, just under a million people can be counted as editors across all languages combined.  Both numbers include both active and inactive editors.  It’s not yet clear how the patterns observed in Dr. Ortega’s analysis could change if focused only on editors who have moved past initial experimentation.

Mr Moeller and Zachte also argue that:

it’s impossible to make a determination that a person has left and will never edit again, there are methodological challenges with determining the long term trend of joining and leaving: Dr. Ortega qualifies as the editor’s “log-off date” the last time they contributed. This is a snapshot in time and doesn’t predict whether the same person will make an edit in the future, nor does it reflect the actual number of active editors in that month.

The second part of this argument is weak in my opinion, if you look at Dr Ortega’s research. It counts the net loss of editors in a given month – the difference between the amount of editors lost and the number of editors gained. In effect, it takes into consideration situations when editors return to the site. Put simply, not enough people are coming back.