Reality is finally catching up with Hollywood; Safe Gun Technology is close to beginning production of guns that use fingerprint recognition to restrict functionality of the weapon to only those users who have been given access. Considering that each weapon can store up to 20,000 fingerprints, potential applications are not limited to just homeowners; this technology could be of interest to military and police forces worldwide. Read more at Smartplanet.
Pebble Smartwatch – first impressions
Well it ended up being about six months late, but…my Pebble Smartwatch finally arrived! I backed this on Kickstarter knowing it might be a bit delayed (most projects there are), but wow, sure took ’em a while. So, was it worth the wait? To be honest, I’m still undecided. The build quality is very nice and the product is exactly as it’s been portrayed…except for one glaring omission. This is, at its most basic level, just a remote display for your iPhone…what makes it special are the apps it runs to help extend functionality of your phone. I figured that with such a long delay on the manufacturing side, the software would be further along and would blow me away, but that’s not the case. There are no apps. It’ll control the music playing on your phone, and display text messages and some other phone notifications…but its functionality doesn’t go much beyond that. I think this is a problem easily solved and I do expect that situation to improve…but this company can’t afford delays, there are very large competitors eying this market and contemplating a move into it. Pebble needs to move fast, extend their reach and dominate this market or else they’ll quickly be pushed aside by the 800-pound gorillas in the room. Their hardware is good…they need to quickly build their app ecosystem now.
RUSH trailer
I love racing…and can’t wait until RUSH hits the theaters this fall! Check out this preview, looks great!
Reeder – free for a limited time for Mac and iOS
My favorite RSS reader, Reeder, is free for a limited time on both the Mac and iPad platforms! They’re promising future changes to deal with the imminent demise of Google Reader (it currently syncs with your Reader account) so now’s a great time to check it out. You can find it in the App stores, just be sure to spell it correctly (note the double ‘E’s).
(via Lifehacker)
More cracks in the TV industry’s business model
The TV industry is moving ever closer to either collapse or a reinvention of their business model. They’ve been resisting change for years, but just like the music industry before them, technology is enabling inevitable change. A federal appeals court just ruled in favor of Aereo, a service which lets people watch over-the-air TV when they want, where they want, delivered over the internet to iPads or any device. TV networks fought this, naturally, but lost (they may yet appeal to the Supreme Court, but that’s their only option at this point). Read here for more on that.
The other story of late is season three of Game of Thrones debuted to record numbers of viewers. What’s significant though is that it also set a record for the largest BitTorrent swarm – people are downloading this in huge numbers, as HBO does not make it available to non-HBO subscribers for quite some time. Remember how Napster helped lead to the upending of the music industry? Something similar is happening with TV. The cost to gain access to a single show is so high that people are choosing the only other option (other than wait months to a year for it to be available on DVD). As iTunes showed when it debuted, people are willing to pay a reasonable amount for content, if delivered in a timely manner comparable to other options on the market. The TV business model is more complex, but is proving to be incompatible with consumers’ current desires and technologies.
Combine this with Netflix and Amazon producing their own shows, and we’re seeing an imminent collapse of the TV industry as it has been known…and the birth of something much more consumer friendly.