Will developer anger at the Amazon Appstore kill the Amazon tablet before it's launched?

The Amazon Appstore has become the whipping boy of developers recently because of missing features, troubling practices, and an ecosystem that is designed more to benefit Amazon than the developers. The Amazon Appstore launched in March, and last month the troubles for developers got to the point where some began to leave. The first story to get circulated around was from developer Bithack, which pulled its physics game, Apparatus, from the Appstore because of a number of problems with the way Amazon ran its store. Now, just a couple days ago developer Shifty Jelly pulled its Pocket Casts app from the Amazon Appstore and posted a scathing review of the service. 

Developer issues

Both Bithack and Shifty Jelly have a number of issues which overlap. First up on both of the lists of complaints was the lengthy review process. Unlike the Android Market, which gets its own flak for being something of a wild west where anyone and anything goes, the Amazon Appstore has a slow approval process for both new apps and updates. Developers cite a 2 week long review process, and Bithack had to go through an extra week after its app was declined and had to be resubmitted. In a unified ecosystem like iOS, something like this wouldn't be a problem, but because submissions are instant in the Android Market, it means that there will often be a newer, updated version of an app in the Android Market as compared to Amazon. Many times, this may not cause much of a problem, but there have been some big troubles. For example, when UberMedia was tagged by Twitter for TOS violations, Twidroyd became unusable. The update was pushed to the Android Market immediately once the issues were fixed, but the Amazon Appstore was left with an unusable Twidroyd app being downloaded by unknowing users. 

Another big issue is simply a lack of communication. First of all, users cannot contact developers directly from the Amazon Appstore, users can only leave reviews on an app. Sometimes, this may not be an issue as developers can monitor comments and reply to users, but that is an awkward solution at best, and doesn't guarantee that users will see the replies. Originally, international developers like Bithack had no way to respond to user complaints, because you needed to have purchased the app in order to comment, which it couldn't do because the Appstore is US-only. Of course, a way to directly communicate with developers would help because another issue with Amazon is there are also no error reports, so developers again must rely on comments in order to identify bugs. There is a "Leave Feedback" option in the Appstore app itself which supposedly will eventually get to the developers, but it is buried a bit and is just underneath a "Contact Customer Support" option, and so is hardly easy to pick out as the way to contact a developer.

The biggest issue is simply a matter of control. With the Android Market, developers have control because Google is mostly hands-off unless issues of malware or other security problems arise. In the Amazon Appstore, developers have very little control. We have known for a while that Amazon reserves the right to set the price of an app as it sees fit, regardless of what the developer wants. But beyond that, according to Shifty Jelly, Amazon will also rewrite an app's description. With Pocket Casts, Amazon apparently changed the description that the app could "refresh 100 podcasts in the time it takes other apps to do 1" to being able to "add 100 podcasts". 

Also, there is still no way for developers to set device compatibility rules for their apps, or even offer multiple APKs like the Android Market. So, users can purchase and download an app only to find out that it is incompatible. Even when writing this, I was allowed to purchase and download Samurai II: Vengeance (a game only compatible with Tegra 2 devices) on my Nexus One. And, this leads to the last big complaint with Amazon, which is that there is no easy way to get a refund on a purchased app. You can contact Amazon Customer service, and usually get a refund, but the process is certainly not that transparent.

Overall, the Appstore is designed to be interconnected with Amazon, and link customers through to other Amazon sections to buy more things there. Amazon uses the free app of the day as a way to bring people in, but it doesn't exactly care whether users stay in the Appstore as long as customers are in the Amazon ecosystem. This leads to developers not getting paid when their apps are downloaded thousands of times in the free app promotion. But, this has also fostered a culture within users where people stop in for the free app, which devs don't get paid for, then leave without buying anything else. The Appstore has become more of a free app repository than full-fledged store.

Amazon's side of the story

After the ordeal with Bithack, Android Police talked to Aaron Rubenson, director of the Amazon Appstore for Android, and the day before Shifty Jelly posted about its issues, Venture Beat also talked with Rubenson. From these two interviews, we've been able to gather Amazon's reasoning for some of the issues developers have. 

The basic tenet of Amazon seems to be "unify, curate, and discovery." As far as communication, Rubenson stated that Amazon wants a unified experience across the site, which is why all feedback goes through Amazon, and there are no links directly to the developer. This unification idea is also supposedly behind the way refunds are handled, although the logic gets a little fuzzier. The idea is that Amazon wants to be the one providing the service, and not just be a listing platform for developers. There is no return window like the Android Market, because Amazon doesn't want to hurt developers. This is a very Apple-ish approach, but obviously it does have its own flaws. As mentioned, it makes the refund process far more opaque, and one could argue that a bad review from a customer forced to keep the app could be more damaging than having a return window.

The review policy and length falls under the idea of curation. This should be one of the biggest benefits of the Amazon system. The Android Market has hundreds of thousands of apps, but that includes thousands and thousands of instances of spam, copyright infringement, clones, and just flat out useless apps. Amazon wants to have a curated experience to avoid all of those issues. Again, this is a very Apple-ish idea, and could work well, but it may still be a bit too soon to judge. The Appstore has already grown to around 14,000 apps, most of which are games, and aside from the issues with updated versions mentioned before, the curation has worked well. Curation is also the main reason for the app review process, because while Amazon does use it to weed out spam, it is also used as a testing period to supposedly combat any potential compatibility issues. Amazon also claims there are warnings when purchasing an incompatible app, but I certainly didn't see any.

Curation is of course the main piece of discovery, which is another benefit of the Appstore. Google has redesigned the Market a number of times, and introduced the Web Store in efforts to help people discover new apps. Of course, even with the review process in the Apple App Store there are similar troubles with discovery simply because of the sheer number of apps. Discovery is much better on Amazon right now mainly due to the small number of apps. Discovery seems to also be behind the ideas of rewording app descriptions and changing the price, but it seems like there must be other ways to feature an app aside from cutting the price without developer consent.

The future of the Amazon tablet

There are certainly a number of issues with the Amazon Appstore, and there is also plenty of time to try sorting out some of the issues before the release of the rumored-but-certainly-real Amazon tablet. Because this will be an Amazon branded tablet, that means there will not be any Google Apps. As per Google's TOS, if you remove one Google App (the Market), you can't have any of them (Gmail, Maps, GTalk, etc.) This means that Amazon will have to find ways to populate those features through partnerships, proprietary apps, or its Appstore. Amazon could potentially have both the Android Market and its own Appstore on the device, but that would create confusion for users, which is something Amazon wants to avoid. Additionally, in order to have the Android Market on a 2.x device, there are much more strict rules for having certain features like: camera, GPS, and mobile data. As of right now, the Appstore simply doesn't have enough in it to cover all of the use cases of a tablet. Given that the Appstore has grown from about 4,000 apps at launch to 14,000 today, it seems reasonable that it will have at least 25,000 by the time the Amazon tablet launches. But, given the proportion of games, will that even be enough?

As with many cases, success of the Amazon tablet seems to be highly dependent on how you frame the aims of the tablet. Many people in the tech world want to frame the Amazon tablet as an iPad-killer, but what exactly needs to happen for it to "kill" the iPad? Will sales be enough, or will features be a big part of the equation?

My feeling is that the Amazon tablet will be an extension of the Kindle. At heart, it will be an e-reader, but an e-reader with benefits. Amazon has learned from the Nook Color. Consumers want a full screen e-reader with apps and extra features, but Amazon doesn't want to foster the rooting community that has sprung up around the Nook Color. Amazon, like Apple, wants to control the experience, and this means giving consumers what they want, but it also means likely alienating the more tech savvy crowd. However, given that the Amazon tablet will be based on Android 2.x, the tech savvy crowd was already most likely alienated.

If you expect the Amazon tablet to be an Android experience, or even a full-fledged tablet, it feels like you're setting yourself up for disappointment. If you live outside of the US and want an Amazon tablet, you're likely to be very disappointed. If you expect the Amazon tablet to compete on features with the iPad (aside from handily beating the iBookstore), again that may lead to disappointment. However, if you expect an entertainment device, and more importantly a shopping device, that seems to be where the Amazon tablet is headed. It will most certainly have deep ties into the Amazon store, it will heavily feature the Kindle store and Kindle magazine selections, and there looks to be an impressive array of games available through the Appstore. There is a very good chance that the Amazon tablet, especially the 7" variant, will come in as one of the cheaper tablets on the market.

Amazon has already been toying with ad-supported Kindles, so it seems pretty likely that there would also be ad-supported variants of the Amazon tablet in order to get the 7" model down to the sub-$200 sweet spot. Amazon has the name recognition and Kindle following to quickly become one of the top tablet sellers if the price is low enough. The trouble is that those of us who truly care (maybe a bit too much) about the mobile world will almost undoubtedly be disappointed, because the Amazon tablet will more likely not be made for us. Compared to Honeycomb tablets that will be out this fall, and the rumored iPad HD, the Amazon tablet likely will come up short for many, but the price will sway people towards it. The features will be limited to keep cost down, and as well stocked as the games section may be in the Appstore, it seems unlikely to have the variety of apps and basic options we crave, especially with developers taking a backseat to Amazon's goals.

Control your home with your phone: are we there yet?

We remember reading a couple of years ago about Bill Gates's fully automated, yet cosy mansion, with its 40 miles of optical fiber, floor sensors that can track your location with up to six inches accuracy, and a hot tub, which can be set for the desired water temperature before you get home.

We were then just drooling, sad that we can't outfit our own cribs like that. Well, in a few short years, the field of home automation (HA) received a significant boost, the technology is within the reach of many, and now smartphone owners have the perfect tool to carry the control unit with them at all times.

Home automation can be divided into a few broad categories, depending on what you are trying to control – lighting, HVAC, appliances, security, entertainment or others, like sprinklers or a cat feeder. We won't be delving into the hundreds of brands and ways to adjust your home environment from afar, since there are currently more than 10 competing standards, but barely a thing you can get from Home Depot on the cheap and drive home to install yourself - we are just looking at how HA relays to your smartphone or tablet.

Puffin Web Browser review: Flash for the iPhone/iPad

Introduction:

Apple's ecosystem offers plenty of possibility, but when it comes to Flash support, iOS seems more like a golden cage rather than a place of free choice. Puffin Web Browser promises to set you free with Flash support on both the iPhone and iPad, but this promise comes with pitfalls. 

For a meager $0.99, this web browser brings Adobe Flash in almost all of its glory – heavy Flash websites, videos and banners (we just knew you'd care about seeing those) are now all viewable. 

Puffin is optimized to work with the iPhone, iPad and Android phones."

Interface and Performance:

The rest of its browser functionality is pretty standard, and that's why we'd rather focus on its performance. It's sluggish when loading pages, but its biggest drawback is navigating around them. Even though it supports pinch-to-zoom and double taps, those gestures are terribly laggy making zooming nearly impossible. These two combined render it pretty useless for casual surfing of the web in our opinion, so for that you'd better turn to any other browser. Then copy the URL of the page with Flash content you want to see and paste it in Puffin. 

How it handles Flash:

Puffin doesn't support Hulu and ABC's websites, but every other website we tried loaded. Those include shows like Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, South Park, sites like Jokes.com, but also major news outlets like BBC and sports events streamed on venues like NBA.com.  

Videos worked best when played in the full screen mode, much better than in alternative solutions. You could also watch them in page, but in that case framerates get really choppy, often to a slideshow rather than a video.

One word of caution - Flash games are not supported.

Flash video is best viewed in full screen mode.

Conclusion:

Let's make it clear – the Puffin Web Browser's main benefit is displaying Flash content. For all the rest it's pretty laggy, almost unusable. If you've looked at other Flash solutions like Skyfire, though, there's one other thing that you wouldn't expect to see – the price. Puffin is comparatively cheap with its $.99 price and availability for both iPhone and iPad, when compared to Skyfire's costly browser (currently $1.99) or the Skyfire VideoQ Flash solution (currently $2.99). Used only as Flash player though, it is better than these two.

At the same time, we find it hard to recommend. We hope we will see it improved with better performance and the functionality to be used as a stand alone browser with Flash support.

Head-to-head doesn't necessarily mean competition

As we've already seen with the Motorola Xoom, releasing head-to-head doesn't mean competition, and even less so with the Nexus device which we all know will launch Ice Cream Sandwich into the market. The Motorola Xoom had more advertising behind it than any Nexus device, and probably more consumer excitement as well, but it still fell flat when compared to the iPad, mostly due to low developer support. The story will be a bit different for the Nexus Prime, but not markedly so.

Keep in mind that Nexus devices have always been niche devices. They are designed for developers, early adopters, and a generally more geeky crowd. No Nexus device has ever officially been sold by either of the two biggest carriers in America - Verizon and AT&T. Nexus devices have been offered through Google that run on AT&T, but that's a far cry from seeing it sold in the official stores across the country. The Nexus S, which had far better marketing and availability than the Web Store-only Nexus One, only sold approximately 500,000 units in its first two months in the market (based on Gingerbread OS share in February, when the Nexus S was the only phone running Gingerbread.) If the iPhone 5 sells less than 500,000 just in pre-orders, let alone half of launch day, every analyst in existence would call it a failure. 

And, that's the real point, even if Google rushes out Ice Cream Sandwich to launch in October, it'll still only be running on the Nexus Prime. The Nexus S and Gingerbread launched at the beginning of December last year, and even the Nexus One had to wait until the middle of February 2011 for the official update. Even today, a full 8 months after its release, Gingerbread is still less than 25% of the Android ecosystem. Even if Google pushed out ICS in time for October, the upgrade turnaround for manufacturers kills any illusion that ICS will ever really compete with iOS 5 at any point in its life cycle. The only possible incentive for Google to push out a product that may not be ready is the hope that other manufacturers could then have ICS devices available for the Christmas season, but that is a pretty big reach.

Rushing software means rushing hardware

Much like with the iPhone, we have to keep in mind that Google rushing Ice Cream Sandwich has impacts both on hardware and software. To rush Ice Cream Sandwich, also means to rush the Nexus Prime, and the Android ecosystem has already seen what rushing out an OS can look like, twice actually. First, while Gingerbread wasn't rushed out, it certainly felt like the Nexus S was rushed in order to launch in time for the holidays last year. This meant, that unlike the Nexus One, which drove improvements around the Android ecosystem, the Nexus S was actually a generation behind within a few months of release, because of the coming of Tegra 2 phones with qHD screens. So, instead of the Google Experience phone being the pace car for users, manufacturers and developers, the Nexus S quickly became an afterthought. 

Then, we saw Honeycomb was rushed out in order to compete head to head with the iPad 2, and because Honeycomb was rushed, so was the Motorola Xoom. As a result there, the Xoom was a little too heavy, too bland in design, and too expensive, while Honeycomb was buggy and lacking in natively designed 3rd party apps. Imagine that instead of pushing the Xoom so hard, Google had simply seeded the developer community with Honeycomb, and tested longer. The, start the Honeycomb party a few months later with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Android 3.1 at Google I/O? Imagine erasing the Xoom from the board all together, and having the Android tablet charge begin in May with the $400 Asus Transformer, and the sleek and sexy Galaxy Tab 10.1. The three month head start for Apple seems like a reasonable trade-off for having better developer support and more consumer interest that would have come with not having an $800 beast be the first impression of Honeycomb.

That brings us to Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime. We know that NVIDIA has already pushed back the expected release of the quad-core Tegra 3 chipsets, so if we're hoping for that to power the Prime, we'd have to wait until early 2012. Of course, the newly teased relationship between Google and Texas Instruments could mean that the Tegra 3 has already been removed from the equation. If it has, will we see the same fate for the Prime as for the Nexus S? A dual-core TI CPU would have to be really good to stand up against the first quad-core offerings that would come a few months afterwards. And, that's not even taking into account the 768x1280 screens from Samsung that we're already hoping to see grace the Nexus Prime. There's no guarantee that Samsung could bring that screen to market in time for October.

How Design Software Will Shape Manufacturing's Future.

Autodesk, a multinational software company based in San Rafael, California, makes 3-D design software used by everyone from automotive manufacturing giants to Hollywood studios. Now it is betting that those digital tools will have an increasingly powerful role in what happens on factory floors, enabling manufacturers to embrace more flexible strategies that deliver more customized products.
Buzz Kross, who heads the company's manufacturing industry group, says the manufacturers he works with see an opportunity in new technology at a time when they sense that the boom in outsourcing to China has run its course. "There have always been companies that differentiate based on their ability to manufacture most efficiently, and others based on design and invention—it's the difference between GM and Tesla," says Kross. "Now a lot of manufacturers are leaning more to the design model.

Welcome to a Faster Web The first commercial deployment of SPDY, a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launches today.

SPDY, a protocol Google revealed in late 2009, dramatically speeds up Web page loading by changing the way that browsers communicate with servers. Until now, Google has only tested the research project internally and deployed it on a few of its own sites. But today, the protocol launches as a commercial product.
Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site's code to make pages load more quickly. Strangeloop's customers will have the ability to turn the protocol on easily; in tests, the protocol has sped up websites by 10 to 20 percent.
At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google's Chrome browser (the only one that supports SPDY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android.
The speed with which a website responds to users is an increasingly important technical and economic issue. According to the content-delivery network Akamai, people only give a site three seconds, on average, to load before giving up and navigating away. Better performance often means more page views, and thus more interaction with users. For online shopping sites, this translates to higher sales.
It's not just individual sites that have an interest in speeding up the Web. Google has been working to make the Web as a whole faster, reasoning that the entire experience needs to be lightning-quick and smooth to keep people happily using its many services. Google also hopes to entice people to use more Web services and less desktop software (see, for example, its Chrome OS), and the company knows this won't be possible if they struggle with performance.
There are a lot of ways to speed up a website. Changing the protocols that determine how information gets sent over the Internet is potentially the most rewarding but also one of the trickiest. These protocols are fundamental to communication between websites and servers, so they can have far-reaching effects on website performance across all devices. However, to roll SPDY out to the entire world, all browser manufacturers would have to adopt it, and every server would have to support it, says Joshua Bixby, Strangeloop's president.

A Preview of Future Disk Drives A prototype disk drive based on phase-change memory can outperform an off-the-shelf flash hard disk .

A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage. The tests used a hard drive based on prototype phase-change memory chips.
Disks based on solid-state, flash memory chips are increasingly used in computers and servers because they perform faster than conventional magnetic hard drives. The performance of the experimental phase-change disk drive, created by researchers at University of California San Diego, suggests that it won't be long before that technology is able to give computing devices another speed boost.
The prototype created by the researchers is the first to publically benchmark the performance of a phase-change memory chips working in a disk drive. Several semiconductor companies are working on phase-change chips, but they have not released information about storage devices built with them.
"Phase-change chips are not quite ready for prime time, but if the technology continues to develop, this is what [solid state drives] will look like in the next few years," says Steve Swanson, who built the prototype, known as Onyx, with colleagues. It had a data capacity of eight gigabytes and went head-to-head with what Swanson calls a "high-end" 80 GB flash drive made for use in servers.
When it came to writing small chunks of data on the order of kilobytes in size, Onyx was between 70 percent and 120 percent faster than the commercial drive. At the same time, the prototype placed significantly less computational load on the processor of the computer using it. It was also much faster at reading data than the flash drive when accessing blocks of data of any size. The kind of large volume, small read and write patterns that Onyx excelled at are a hallmark of the type of calculations involved in analyzing social networks like those of Twitter, says Swanson. However, Onyx was much slower at writing larger chunks of data than its commercially established competitor.

Google Makes Web Pages Load Instantly The Chrome browser will soon silently fetch pages as you scan search results so that they load without delay.

Google is ready to make waiting for Web pages to load a thing of the past—at least for those pages found using its search engine and the company's Chrome browser. As a user peruses the list of results returned in response to a query, the browser will fetch and load in the background the page it considers most relevant. If a person does click that result, the page will load instantaneously.
The new feature, called Instant Pages, will appear in Chrome and Google's mobile browsers in "coming weeks" but can be experienced today in the developer version of the browser, or later this week in the beta version (the Chrome browser is automatically updated). A video showing the new feature in action has been posted on YouTube.
"We all have broadband, but loading a Web page is still nothing like flipping channels on your TV," said Amit Singhal, Google's head of search ranking, when he announced the new feature today at an event in San Francisco. "We will not be happy until loading a page is as fast as flipping pages in a magazine."
A year ago, Google introduced Instant Search, which loads results live as a person types into the search box. Google studies show that by reducing the time it takes to enter a query, the feature shaves two to five seconds from most searches, said Singhal. He added that Instant Pages could shorten the process of searching for and loading a Web page by a further five seconds.

New Language for Programming in Parallel Writing code for the latest multicore chips is notoriously tricky, but a new language could make it simpler, and make computers more efficient in the process.

A new programming language has been designed to get the most out of the latest multicore computer processors. If it finds favor among coders, it could provide more powerful software for many computers.
Over the last few years, as they've run up against the physical limits of miniaturization, microchip makers have shifted from increasing the power of processor cores—the part of a chip that handles data and instructions—to adding more cores to a single chip. For example, Intel's i3 and i7 processors have two and four cores, respectively.
This presents a challenge for programmers. Since most programming languages were designed for single-core chips, it can be tricky to divide tasks up and send them to each core in parallel. If a coder isn't careful, this can cause errors in the way that each core in the chip accesses the shared sections of memory.
Tucker Taft, the chief technology officer and chairman of the Boston-based software company SofCheck, designed the new language—called Parallel Specification and Implementation Language (ParaSail)—specifically for writing software for multicore processors. The language is intended to avoid the pitfalls that typically happen when working with multicore chips.
To a programmer, ParaSail looks like a modified form of Java or C#, two leading languages. The difference is that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can then be spread across cores—a trick called pico-threading, which maximizes the number of tasks being carried out in parallel, regardless of the number of cores. ParaSail also does the debugging automatically, which makes code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says.
Over the next decade, the number of cores on computer chips is expected to increase even further. "There are some machines out there with dozens or hundreds of cores now," says Taft.
ParaSail uses a number of other tricks, some that draw on languages developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s for supercomputers—machines running many individual computer chips networked together. "The design of the language itself is essentially complete," says Taft, who presented details of the language on Wednesday at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "The first version of the compiler will be released in the next month or so." The language will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
Microsoft and Intel are putting $20 million into adapting existing languages for multicore processors, so it's difficult to say if ParaSail will become widely adopted. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," says Taft.
Taft already has a proven track record in the world of computer language development, says Denis Nicole of the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Group at Southampton University. But he adds that "it usually takes companies the size of Sun to push new languages on the community."

Stick-On Electronic Tattoos A flexible electronic device stuck on the skin could provide irritation-free monitoring of heart, brain, and muscle activity.

Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.
John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has developed a prototype that can replicate the monitoring abilities of bulky electrocardiograms and other medical devices that are normally restricted to a clinical or laboratory setting. This work was presented today in Science.
To achieve flexible, stretchable electronics, Rogers employed a principle he had already used to achieve flexibility in substrates. He made the components—all composed of traditional, high-performance materials like silicon—not only incredibly thin, but also "structured into a serpentine shape" that allows them to deform without breaking. The result, says Rogers, is that "the whole system takes on this kind of spiderweb layout."
In the past, says Rogers, he was able to create devices that were either flexible but not stretchable, or stretchable but not flexible. In particular, his previous work was limited by the fact that the electronics portions of his designs couldn't flex and stretch as much as the substrate they were mounted on.
The electronic tattoo achieves the mechanical properties of skin, which can stand up to twisting, poking, and pulling without breaking. Rogers's tattoo can also conform to the topography of the skin as well as stretch and shift with it. It can be worn for extended periods without producing the irritation that often results from adhesive tapes and rigid electronics. Although Rogers's preliminary tests involved a custom-made substrate, he also demonstrated that the electronics could be mounted onto a commercially available temporary tattoo.
The prototype was equipped with electrodes to measure electric signals produced by muscle and brain activity. This could be useful for noninvasive diagnosis of sleep apnea or monitoring of premature babies' heart activity. It also might be possible, Rogers says, to use the tattoos to stimulate the muscles of physical rehabilitation patients, although this use wasn't demonstrated in the paper.
To demonstrate the device's potential as a human-computer interface, Rogers mounted one of the tattoos on a person's throat and used measurements of the electrical activity in the throat muscles to control a computer game. The signal from the device contained enough information for software to distinguish among the spoken words "left," "right," "up," and "down" to control a cursor on the screen.
The device included sensors for temperature, strain, and electric signals from the body. It also housed LEDs to provide visual feedback; photodetectors to measure light exposure; and tiny radio transmitters and receivers. The device is small enough that it requires only minuscule amounts of power, which it can harvest via tiny solar cells and via a wireless coil that receives energy from a nearby transmitter. Rogers hopes to build in some sort of energy-storage ability, like a tiny battery, in the near future. The researchers are also working on making the device wireless.
Ultimately, Rogers says, "we want to have a much more intimate integration" with the body, beyond simply mounting something very closely to the skin. He hopes that his devices will eventually be able to use chemical information from the skin in addition to electrical information.

Google's Vision for TV Proves a Turnoff

Google's hopes of becoming a force in television by releasing software that brings Web video and other online content—including ads—to the small screen appear to be fading fast. In recent months, stores and distributors selling one flagship Google TV device returned more of them than they sold as consumer demand fell.

That embarrassing statistic appeared in a July 28 earnings announcement released by Logitech. The announcement covered the fiscal quarter ending June 30. The company's Revue set-top box was announced in partnership with Google when the search giant introduced its TV software last October. Sony was also part of the launch, and sells television sets with Google TV built in.

But Google TV devices have gained little traction. They launched to poor reviews citing them as difficult to use, and met opposition from broadcast and cable networks wary of the Web content might undermine their hold on viewers. Competition from less expensive machines from Apple and Roku, as well as from game consoles, has been intense.

Logitech chairman and acting CEO Guerrino De Luca told analysts that Google TV has "not yet fully delivered on its own promises." His company had already cut the price of the Revue from $299 to $249. Now the price will be slashed to $99, on par with Apple and Roku's Internet TV devices. Logitech has other challenges, such as distribution problems in Europe that led to flat revenues. However the first Revue price drop and the returns cost Logitech $34 million, and contributed to the departure of De Luca's predecessor, Gerald Quindlen.

Google TV is not finished, though. Apple TV soared in popularity after a similar price drop last September, and Google says it's not giving up. "We launched Google TV with a firm belief that bringing the power of the Web into the living room will significantly enhance the television experience," a spokesman said in a statement. "We believe in this now more than ever."

A new version of Google TV will soon be released for new and existing devices later this summer. These devices may come with a simpler interface (consumers and reviewers have complained that the current version is too complicated).

Google appears to have long-term plans, too. It recently acquired SageTV, which makes software to turn a personal computer with a TV tuner card into a media center capable of recording, pausing, and streaming shows to devices around the home. Observers said Google bought the company more for the talent of its management team than its product, but it will take more time to apply that expertise to new software.