Author: Wilson Rothman

Today is my last day at Gizmodo. It’s with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to all of you amazing readers. More »










Shopping – Twitter – Mark Wilson – Joel Johnson – Heroes

HP is killing its Windows 7 “slate” tablet project, says TechCrunch, citing a source “briefed on the matter.” More »

Cut past the nerdy hipster schtick, and—if you’re not trying to DIY—the technical orientation. Starting at 5:20, these guys bust a surprisingly palatable mashup of Prince, Vampire Weekend, G’N’R, Eurythmics and… I Dream of Jeannie. More »

I applaud Serious Eats for attempting sous vide in a beer cooler, but the adventurous article didn’t convince me that the mass sous vide revolution would come via Coleman or Igloo. More »

A front-facing iPhone camera means video calling, but it’s also a sign of something bigger. Combined with other recent leaks, it means that Apple is bringing iChat to the iPhone. Everything about voice calling may be about to change. More »

Dumbphones are dead, right? So why—at the time of the great Windows Phone 7 resurrection—is Microsoft pushing a totally separate phone platform that doesn’t even run apps? The answer is borderline insane, but just might work. More »

Everybody’s talking about Amazon retaliating against the iPad with a multitouch, multimedia, app-heavy Kindle 3. But it’s not as obvious a move as you think. In fact, it’s a bad idea. More »

The iPad may seem like Apple’s move to cockblock Amazon in the Ebook Wars, but Amazon’s Kindle app makes it part of Amazon’s larger ebook ecosystem. In many ways, the iPad is the best Kindle yet. More »

Some fanboys may have assumed that yesterday marked the rebirth of their savior, but many more believers celebrate that notion today. Fortunately, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. More »

At least eight people got iPads from Apple pre-launch, three usual suspects plus some new faces. Their approaches are different, but the take-home remains the same: It’s good. Here’s the easiest way to digest all the iPad reviews at once: More »

Talking with Bill Nye the Science Guy is like meeting your favorite HS science teacher in a bar—the conversation might flail wildly, but you learn something at every twist. This week, I picked his brain about, well, brains. More »

“The cloud” isn’t some nebulous thing existing just beyond your computer’s consciousness. As Microsoft showed us, it’s stacks of hard drives packed into shipping containers, parked in secret data centers all around the world. Physically real, but still beautiful. More »

When chipmakers slim down their silicon, they need finer and finer tools to organize all that circuitry. With MIT’s latest self-assembling chips, the detail work is handled by molecular strands that, freakishly, just know where to go. More »

Spring Design‘s Alex, the $399 not-necessarily-a-Nook dual-screened Android ebook reader, is available for pre-order now, ships April 14, and will be in Borders and Books-A-Million stores this June. A 3G version’s on the way, too, but don’t hold your breath. More »

Sony’s newest catchphrase, “make.believe,” is a fitting reminder that Sony ads make no sense. Laptops take flight, PlayStations become monsters, and pitchmen state plainly that Sony TVs make you better at playing sports. Most of all—look! Play-doh bunnies!

Back when Sony had only electronics to sell, they sold them like no other—to borrow a more sensible slogan that the company recently retired. You bought a Trinitron TV because it was the best, you bought a Walkman because it was the coolest, and you told everyone else they were dumb if they didn’t do the same. “It’s a Sony!” you’d shout at any half-witted amigo who was reluctant to pay the Sony premium.

Sony worked hard to make you a part of its marketing team. They even went so far as to indoctrinate the children. When the My First Sony line was launched, it actually made sense, because it reinforced what you already believed: that you would buy in and keep on buying. Brand did matter, but only by standing for specific, high-quality products. There were 170 different Walkman models released during its first decade, sure, but this was before MP3 players, cellphones, PDAs, laptops, portable game consoles and pocket-sized camcorders. Besides perhaps a 35mm compact camera, this was the only portable gadget to buy. You knew you were getting it, so choosing which one became a connoisseur’s dilemma. Even gorillas knew this.

By the time Sony got into the movie and record business, and the iconic cassette Walkman gave way to the less iconic CD Walkman, the Sony brand became bigger than the gadgets. With the eventual exception of PlayStation, the electronics lost their own identities. That’s not to say the gadget well dried up. On the contrary, Sony released more and more, jazzing up tried-and-true businesses with progressive industrial design and catchy-sounding sub-brands. It’s not a clock radio, it’s a Dream Machine. Sony’s brand momentum carried it successfully into new areas where they really could make a superior product. In addition to the videogame consoles, this included digital cameras, portable computers and dog-shaped robots.

But due to arrogance, an obsession with proprietary formats and a lack of stick-to-itiveness—coinciding with the rise of unexpectedly tough competition from Korea, China and Cupertino, California—the magic wore off. The “buy the brand” message lost its grip on shoppers, but to the increasingly out-of-touch executives inside the company, it seems to have become a rallying cry.

Sony started losing Number 1 positions in TVs, cameras and even videogame consoles, and found themselves unable to get the market leadership they assumed they’d easily grab in other areas, such as PCs or ebook readers. As they slipped, their advertising just got weirder and weirder. Ads now ranged from purely artistic—products saw hardly any airtime—to trippy—products were shown, but not in a way that a buyer could relate to—to sarcastic—where pitchmen and pitchwomen spouted nonsense and openly mocked customers, as if consciously parodying Sony’s own classic advertisements.

Thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we can see how all three of these categories failed to hit their targets.

Artsy Fartsy

What can you say about this category, except that who doesn’t like rainbow-colored Claymation bunnies hopping to late-’60s Rolling Stones?

Who doesn’t like bubbles falling from the sky? Or the spontaneous proliferation of several million bouncy balls? Who among you doesn’t like sound/vision experiments by avant garde directors cut to ADHD-friendly 3-minute lengths?

If you answered “no” to the above questions, you are lying. But to drive the point of failure home, let’s hear from one of YouTube’s commenters: “It’s visually interesting but it comes across as some kind of dystopian vision of the future. An Orwellian kind of hell sponsored by Sony.” Hell. By Sony. And I am not entirely sure I ever saw anything I could actually buy.

But Will It Bite?

Another batch of ads featured real Sony products, but not in any way that helped the consumer decision. We begin with the PlayStation 3, according to this video, a dangerous, volatile and ugly beast that does… something:

Somehow they manage to convey all the tension of gaming without any of the fun. It’s violent through and through, except for that quick bit with the butterflies.

Here is the Bloggie camcorder, whose simple demonstration has been so perverted, it would cause Steve Jobs—or even Steve Ballmer—to shoot the director between the eyes:

Never mind that, on this complicated-looking copy of a Flip camera, the 270º swivel lens is the only thing everyone would figure out immediately, why does the product have to be man-sized? And what’s with the fingers guy?

In this whole mess, the most organic ad I could find was for Rolly, the short-lived zany Bluetooth music robot. I love the ad, but I actually know the product. The ad, to a lay person, would be confusing at best, and at worst would suggest a degree of interactivity that the product simply didn’t have:

F*** You, Buy a Sony

The ads that Sony should really be ashamed of, though, are the so-called expert ads, some of which ran on our own site this past holiday season. I will admit to being a fan of Peyton Manning and Justin Timberlake, but they’re not experts, and I wouldn’t trust them any more than I trust any of the other people on the so-called panel.

In the Sony Reader ad, when the poor actress has to ask the incredibly dumb question “Can I read a lot of books on this thing?” Amy Sedaris says yes and holds up her book, I Like You. It’s worth noting that unlike her brother’s works, Amy’s book is highly visual, with color photos and lots of sight gags. It’s excellent, but you would never ever read it on a Sony Reader—or on a Kindle.

In the camera ad, when the actress mentions that all the cameras look the same, baby-seal photographer Nigel Barker explains that “the technology in their cameras and camcorders makes it easy to get the best shot.” This is something every camera maker would say about their cameras. It doesn’t differentiate, and it can never be proven wrong.

During the TV ad, Peyton and Justin play pingpong. ESPN’s Erin Andrews says to a bewildered family, “You can’t fake Sony quality.” Justin chimes in with, “The more sports you watch on a Sony, the better you get. At sports.” And then a TV appears with the words HDNA scrawled across it, though the announcer says it’s called a Bravia. I don’t know what HDNA is, and I was there when they unveiled it.

In a rather ironic twist, these ads got remix treatment by the Gregory Brothers of Auto-tune the News fame. This isn’t some Gray Album bootleg, but a viral video sanctioned by Sony’s marketing department, an approval that shows Sony can make some daring choices when they want to. But was it the right move? I enjoy this remix more than any of the original ads, but it doesn’t clear up any frustration either. It is a distortion of a distortion of a message.

Don’t you feel like the Gregory Brothers know this? They openly mock the customers, and they repeat “these all seem the same” over and over—and over. I couldn’t help but flash a knowing smile when Julia Allison explains that the Sony PC is different because it has a Blu-ray drive and an HD screen. Like every other Windows laptop in that range.

Where Do They Go From Here?

When criticizing advertising, the easiest thing to do is to point to Apple as the counter example. “Well, Apple would’ve done it this way.” But truthfully, Apple achieves what most companies strive to pull off, an entertaining but earnest look at the product being sold, or a comedic vignette that drives a single sales point home. (Say what you want about Justin Long, but Hodgman’s Eeyore of a PC sure sells Macs.) Like everything else, Sony needs to focus. Instead of hiring 20 different artists to conceive of crazy shit, why not create a global ad campaign that focuses on specific actual products, and portrays their standout features in a way that doesn’t sound like it’s mocking the products or the customers? My only fear is that as Sony has less and less to brag about, this strategy will be harder to work out. Still, it’s worth a shot: Pick your best products, get closeup shots, play some baby music in the background, and tell us why we should buy them. No psychedelia, no anthropomorphic gimmicks, and no smirking.

The complete “We Miss Sony” series
• Video: Describe Sony In A Word
• How Sony Lost Its Way
• Sony’s Engineer Brothers
• Infographic: Sony’s Overwhelming Gadget Line-Up
• The Sony Timeline: Birth, Rise, and Decadence
• Let’s Make.Believe Sony’s Ads Make Sense
• The Return of Sony

[Lead image]

I love my P3 Kill-A-Watt power meter, so when I spotted the Kill-A-Watt power strip at CES, I immediately knew its value: Track all your earth-killing home-theater gear with a single tool. It works, but “simple” is good and bad.

At a glance, anyone who’s used a $30-$40 Kill-A-Watt knows how to use this $75 power strip, and anyone with a basic understanding of the watts and volts used to power your home should have a decent grasp of what it’s doing: At any instant, you can see how many watts are being drawn to light up whatever’s plugged in. Tap the Watt button to see the biggest hit taken, as well as the smallest. (You can check voltage and amperage in the same way, though the results there don’t tend to get too dramatic.)

The Green Button (That’s Not Green)

The most useful reading here is the kilowatt-hour tracker. Knowing that your car can get 32 miles to the gallon—or that it’s getting 24 MPG this very second—doesn’t help you budget for gasoline. The kWh tracker is like a gas gauge and average MPG tracker in one: By counting kWh over time, you instantly have a number that directly relates to your electric bill. After each billing period, you just jot down the final kWh count, and reset it.

I can imagine this might come in handy in a roommate or rental situation, where disputes over who pays what could be mollified at least in part by Kill-A-Watt’s hard data. A fun thing to do is multiply your kWH by your city or state’s carbon emission factor. (In 2006, Washington’s was 0.5 lbs. per kWh, as opposed to the national average of 1.4 lbs per kWh.) Eventually, you could win a Nobel Prize, or an Oscar (though you’d have to share it with Melissa Etheridge).

Protection in Freaky Power Situations

Power geeks and generally paranoid people will find some subtle tools here that justify the extra expense: There’s a “Max Amps” switch that lets you set the point at which the auto-shutoff engages. When it does go into “over current mode,” the red light will flash, letting you know that you’ve had a surge. It also has an “over load mode” that automatically cuts out at 15 Amps, as well as an EMI filter and a self-test.

What’s Not Happening Here

I mentioned that there were some problems with this simplicity. There’s no way to track a single gadget without removing all the others—and that would mess up a lot of ongoing metering. It’s probably easier to plug a standalone Kill-A-Watt into the Kill-A-Watt power strip, to monitor, say, just your TV.

You can’t save or export a history in any way, so you are forced to—God forbid!—actually write or type in readings manually. Once you reset the counter, there’s no looking back. Obviously, it would be great for there to be a whole energy-tracking computer inside. But then what would you use to monitor its drain on society’s precious fluids? [P3 International]

Automatically starts counting kWh energy usage


Easy at-a-glance read of home theater’s current energy demands, plus highs and lows


Custom settings not seen on other power strips


$75 is more than you would spend on many power strips


No way to check energy draw of individual appliances


No way to store history, or set specific periods of kWh use, tied to your bills

In his first time speaking at University of Washington—the giant Microsoft-endowed school in the company’s backyard—Steve Ballmer explained “the cloud.”

First, there was a goofy video showing how stoned most UW students are, conducted by a gal with shockingly platinum hair and bronze skin. Then Ballmer says it’s something he’s betting his company on, and that every company is betting their companies on, and that it’s a $3.3 trillion industry. That’s pretty serious. Here are his five key principles:

1. “The Cloud Creates Opportunities and Responsibilities” (In fairness, Ballmer admits it sounds like “some blah blah blah business term.”) What he means is that creators don’t have to come from big-ass tech companies to market cool software now. He says “Apple’s done a very nice job” with the App Store, giving opportunities to developers, and that Microsoft is keen on providing those types of opportunities. How do developers who have worked on open-source or freeware apps finally get some money for their creations? (Does this mean Windows Phone 7 will follow a similar developer strategy? Who knows…)

He also says that the cloud is supposed to give more control to users, not just developers. Control over privacy and anonymity, that is. Ballmer doesn’t mention too many examples, but cites Facebook—obliquely—as an example of the challenges of cloud-related privacy.

2. “The Cloud Learns and Helps You Learn, Decide and Take Action” Machine learning is key to cloud strategy. Ballmer says that when you look out at 83 million websites and try to find something simple but hard to search for, like “What do we as a society spend on healthcare?” you can easily get nothing. “It’s only eight numbers,” Ballmer says, but they’re hard to find in one simple little chart. The cloud needs the intelligence to know what people are looking for, and know how to go and find that information on its own, or collaboratively with users.

Here, to drive the point, Ballmer invited a guy from the Bing team to demo Bing Maps’ explore feature. It’s live, so you can check it out for yourself. Drill down into the University of Washington, if you want a good representation of what they’re doing.

3. “Cloud Enhances Social and Professional Interactions” This Ballmer admits is kind of an obvious notion, as we’re already immersed in it, but he says that the innovations here will improve to a point where “virtual interaction through the cloud is as good as being here today.” He doesn’t mean “as good” in the sense of “as useful.” He means that one day, an entire auditorium of activity would be able to be captured on 3D video and streamed live anywhere, like Harry Potter diving into a Pensieve. (That’d be my Potter fanboy analogy, not Ballmer’s.) He also means, of course, that realtime data collaboration tools will get better and better. He didn’t mention that they’d have anything to compete directly with Google Wave, but if they do, hopefully they’ll focus on ease of use.

As a near-term social example, he brought a demo of Xbox Live TV, something already launched in England with the Sky Player. Imagine Mystery Science Theater 3000 done with Xbox avatars, under a screen playing a live show. In the Sky example, of course, sports are key. I am thinking there are very few live TV events anymore, but maybe a Lost episode or some (non-Olympic) sporting event would be a good example.

4. The Cloud Wants Smarter Devices This pillar of the Ballmer argument is the one that probably makes the most sense to Giz readers and people who have kept up with Windows Phone 7 (and Pink) news. As a student sitting near me just pointed out, the “smarter devices” angle is antithetical to what Google and others seem to preach, but Microsoft obviously cares about processing at the consumer end, and they believe that as long as processing is cheaper than bandwidth it makes sense.

Not surprisingly, his demo is Windows Phone 7, so I’ll spare you any crappy photo and just link you to our comprehensive coverage.

5. “The Cloud Drives Servers Advances That Drive the Cloud” We tend to ignore the hardware demands of the cloud, but obviously, Microsoft’s server business is a key part of Ballmer’s reason for promoting the cloud. He speaks of service issues—systems able to deploy software instantaneously worldwide, without a hassle. “If a machine breaks, that shouldn’t be your problem. There shouldn’t be people babysitting all these machines.” A call for QA, perhaps, and aimed as much internally as it is externally.

An example of the fruits of this is a UW project called Azure Ocean, which is constantly aggregating the world’s oceanographic data, expanding constantly with sensor data every day, noting that it must have been a “very exciting period in the last few weeks” with the earthquake in Chile. No doubt no one will dispute the need for research tools of this scope now.

Ballmer also says that part of this server business is people having their own clouds. Governments and companies want to buy their own systems. Sometimes this is obvious, like for military or strategic purposes, but sometimes it’s just a matter of preference, and Ballmer wants people to be able to buy “refrigerator”-sized water-cooled systems with net connections, if that’s their preference.

Ballmer concludes with the sentiment that “the Cloud fuels Microsoft and Microsoft fuels the cloud.” Take that as you wish.

My own quick take on this is that the cloud is as nebulous as you think, but at least these are areas worth thinking about more. The cloud isn’t anything new, but it’s taking shape, and clearly in the hands of only a few companies. Google is the biggest, and arguably Microsoft is #2. In other words, we need to listen to Ballmer, cuz he’ll be driving it, at least for now.