tequila bomb

I hope it lives up to the video. And Richard Branson’s always loveable spin…

When my daughter Holly, who is Special Projects Manager at Virgin Group, first told me that she had agreed to sponsor an iPad-only magazine idea from one of our young entrepreneurs, Giovanni Donaldson, I thought she was talking double Dutch!

I wish Mr. Branson had an “older persons entrepreneur” scheme. I’d like to apply.

It wasn’t until Anthony, Gio and Holly showed me the amazing, innovative editorial and advertising in PROJECT that I ‘got’ how groundbreaking digital publishing can be. To be frank it blew me away.

Apparently the touch controls for the magazine require an instruction sheet. Which is worrying if this is aimed at your typical iPad user.

But content that updates throughout the month that each $2.99 issue is current sounds like a lot better deal than Murdoch’s 99 cent “Daily“.

UPDATE : Richard Branson Interview with CNN…

Wide ranging interview with Julian Assange of wikileaks… Well worth reading.

We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

[I]t could take down a bank or two.

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

One thing is very clear in this interview. Assange is not just about going after the US, as some would have us believe. And his primary concern is exposing massive corruption that affects people’s lives.

So from my perspective Assange’s stated motivations are admirable…

[S]pying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions.

I don’t know how long Apple’s ad will run for. So go visit espn.com right now.

You can still access all of the site’s menus even when the advert is running, and portions of the website seem to have been cleared out of the way. Seamless, non-irritating, responsive, intuitive, and a very attractive advert to watch on top of all that. Simply awesome. Oh, and it’s Flash-less!

Any company that shows this duty of care to an audience it is trying to attract is one that I am going to buy stuff from. Simple as that.

Take note Wired, and other crappy ad laden sites. This is what you should be doing when you do your huge banner adverts.

Oliver Kreylos has done what many thought were impossible – using multiple Kinects to capture different angles of an object simultaneously. Interference between the different IR-dot grids is a problem, but it is a much smaller problem than expected.

From KinectHacks.

I love this kind of hacking around with gear. Impressive initial results. Source code will apparently be forthcoming soon…

The Game Developers Conference™ China (GDC China) returns to the Shanghai International Convention Centre from the 5th-7th December 2010 and continues to serve as the definitive game developer event in the East. It will provide a forum for local and international developers to explore business opportunities, expand their reach to a unique market, and discover the on-going trends emerging in this region.

Apple’s latest acquisition is the longtime Cupertino campus of rival tech giant Hewlett-Packard, the Mercury News learned Wednesday. HP announced over the summer that it planned to move out of that site, which it had occupied for decades, as it consolidates operations at its Palo Alto headquarters over the next two years.

Via cdespinosa :

“Full circle: Apple buys HP campus where Woz worked while he was inventing the Apple I.”

BARCELONA (Dow Jones)–Microchip designer ARM Holdings PLC (ARM.LN) has an “active technical dialogue” with Google Inc. (GOOG) that extends to Google TV, Chief Executive Warren East said Thursday.

East’s comments come after Dow Jones Newswires reported late Wednesday that ARM was in preliminary discussions with Google on a potential cooperation deal linked to Google TV, which lifted its stock.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecoms conference in Barcelona, East said: “It’s well known that all the Android phones that are out there at the moment are running on ARM, and so clearly Google are active users of ARM.

From  The WSJ.

This explains ARM‘s stock price jump over the last few days.

If I was Intel I would be very concerned about the future of Mobile, and more specifically my role in it.

This also perhaps explains why certain brand leading TVs with Google TV built in are put together in what looks more akin to prototype grating than something that rolled off a final unified production line.

French gadget enthusiast blog Nowhereelse has reportedly received a copy of an invitation to a mysterious press event early next month. The event, as the invitation states, is supposedly “the most awaited event of the past 10 years.” While the authenticity of the invitation is anything but confirmed, the implication is clear: Sony Ericsson will supposedly unveil its PlayStation Phone on December 9th. While no specific mention of the PS Phone is made on the invite, the standard PlayStation icons accompanied by a matching phone icon speaks loud and clear.

If you remember we had some possible details on the “PlayStation Phone” at the end of October.

I have a horrible feeling this is just going to be an Android handset with some co-branding, and we’ll see some crappy ports of retro Playstation titles, at high prices.

AirPlay Video is part of a public framework called MediaPlayer. This is the same MediaPlayer framework that developers use to show video in their applications. The current movie players ship with an AirVideo selection option built right in. The problem is that when you select AirVideo in a non-Apple application, the video continues to play on-device; only the audio is re-routed through the server to Apple TV.

That’s a big bummer, especially when applications like AirVideo and VLC are crying out for this kind of functionality.

But…

self.movieController = [[[MPMoviePlayerController alloc] initWithContentURL:[NSURL fileURLWithPath:CINDY_PATH]] autorelease];
[movieController setAllowsWirelessPlayback:YES];
movieController.view.frame = self.view.bounds;
[self.view addSubview:movieController.view];

Yes, it still won’t be App Store safe, but it’s jailbreak friendly, works flawlessly, and suggests only a single item that Apple could move to a public API to open up this functionality to developers. What’s more, with a little screen scraping or off-screen layer manipulation and a clever use of AVFoundation, you can probably have games working out to Apple TV almost immediately.

There is more background on this in the original article at TUAW.

Sony’s Networked Application Platform is a project designed to leverage the open source community to build and evolve the next generation application framework for consumer electronic devices.

The foundation upon which this project is base comes from the GNUstep community, whose origin dates back to the OpenStep standard developed by NeXT Computer Inc (now Apple Computer Inc.).  While Apple has continued to update their specification in the form of Cocoa and Mac OS X, the GNUstep branch of the tree has diverged considerably.

Interesting choice from Sony.