Earlier this month we got the chance to shoot some questions at several of the stars and crew of The Amazing Spider-Man, one of these talks being with Emma Stone, who played comic legend Gwen Stacy in the film. She spoke about how she got to know the character Gwen only after having spoken about playing Mary Jane as well as how the big change in working on her first big-name effects film is really in the press tour action. Have a peek at this un-cut interview below.
As evidence of the fact that high-end technological platforms are still vulnerable to the same trials and tribulations as everyone else, a series of severe storms rattled service at a few of the biggest online services this weekend. Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest were among the most notable companies to suffer outages as a result of the weather.
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This week as the fuzzy teddy bear toting R-rated Seth MacFarlane movie Ted comes out, we got the chance to interview Jenny Fulle of The Creative-Cartel, the group responsible for overseeing the visual effects for the film. As it is with many of the films The Creative-Cartel works with, Ted presented them with the challenge of creating a set of effects that were top-notch with a budget that was less than your everyday average blockbuster effects film would present. The result was no less than a perfectly legitimate looking transformation of MacFarlane to the body of a toy bear stuffed into a comedy with essentially no other visual effects to speak of. It had to look real, and it certainly does.
When Google sent BASE jumpers hurtling from a blimp as part of the first day Google I/O Keynote presentation, I was barely impressed. The jumpers were demonstrating the Project Glass wearable computer that Google is developing, and which I and just about all of my friends are lusting over. I had seen plenty of skydivers jumping with wearable cameras strapped to them. Then the Googlers landed, and another team started riding BMX bikes on the roof of the Moscone center, where the conference is being held. Yawn. Finally, climbers rappelled down the side of the building. Ho-hum. The point seemed to be that Google Glass was real, and that the glasses would not fall off your face as you fell onto San Francisco from a zeppelin. But then Google showed something that blew my mind.
Happy Saturday, everyone. It's the final day of June, which means the first full month of summer is just around the corner. For now, though, let's end the month with a bang of all the biggest tech news of the week. Of course, the big news over the past six days came from Google I/O. Yes, it was chock full of announcements, including hardware from Asus – Asus CEO: Building Nexus 7 is like torure. Here’s another nugget from the show – Google Offline Maps update now live, YouTube adds preloading. And yes, Project Glass also made an appearance – Are $1500 Google Glasses a bargain? Keep reading for more I/O news…
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Google knows that it'll take some education before we're all wearing Google Glass headsets, and so the company has kicked off what it's called Glass Sessions: slices of real life augmented with Glass. First up is persistent video and camera functionality from the perspective of a parent, with Glass being used to capture fleeting moments and share milestones across continents. Check out the video after the cut.
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Stream TV is a company specializing in an area of consumer tech that others are either passing off as only in the research phase right now, or as something that's so expensive, it isn't worth going after mainstream crowds yet. We're talking about glasses-free (also known as "autostereoscopic") 3D television sets. While Stream TV can't offer its sets at affordable price points yet, it has the next best thing.
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Just a matter of days after first teasing that it was readying an online beta version of the newest Sackboy adventure, LittleBigPlanet Karting, Sony has posted an online form for gamers to sign up for the anticipated first look at the title. Gamers can fill out that form here.
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Motion-controlled gaming does function pretty well in many applications, but one area where it leads to nothing but confusion and frustration is in racing games. People hated Microsoft's Kinect-powered hands-free racing mini-games, Nintendo's Mario Kart on Wii only works well if you have a Wii Remote wheel attachment, and now Sony is going down that same path.
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It’s the iPhone’s five-year anniversary, and I’m proud to say I was there from the start. In fact, I was number eight in the line outside the New York Cube Apple Store, camping out for nearly five days to be one of the first to get my hands on the new smartphone. Spending that time wasn’t just about recording history from the front line, but also taking part in an historical event. The iPhone has long been treated as a watershed moment in smartphones, and it’s fair to say that in its shadow just about all of the devices that came before it fell well short in more than a few ways. I knew, after handling a whole lot of smartphones prior to the iPhone, that this one device would change the entire mobile industry for the better.
One of the biggest new content partnerships to be announced for Google TV this year is the deal that Google has secured with cloud gaming service OnLive. At the time, it was announced that LG's upcoming Google TV sets would incorporate the OnLive app to allow users to have instant and seamless access to triple-A video games directly on their TV. Vizio also decided to come on board, but so far there's been no news from Sony.
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It seems like in this current environment, there is a brand new entry in the mobile credit card payment market every day. It started with Square, and now everyone wants a piece of the action. The latest one to enter the fray is mPowa, which admittedly does bring some functionality and accessibility that Square and others have failed to offer. It's also cheaper.
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