PAUL BOUTIN — Hold the phone. Take a closer look at the image that took over Apple's front door this week. It's 744 pixels wide and 420 high. Recognize that ratio? Those are the 16:9 dimensions of an HDTV screen, not the 4:3 of iTunes video downloads. Apple's teaser does recall the Monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose only readable information was the perfect 1 to 4 to 9 ratio of its sides.
Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, determined to offer FREE Super-Saver Shipping to the entire solar system, this week released photos and video of "Goddard," the first product of Blue Origin. The effort represents Bezos's attempt to offer reasonably priced space travel to the sub-billionaire income bracket. The project's Latin motto, "Gradatim Ferociter," translates approximately to "step fiercely," which sounds like something our gay dance instructor used to call out. (Feel free to correct that translation, Latin nerds, as if we could stop you.) Anyway, if you cared, the test flight was a success. Expect flights of conquering Bezos-pods to loom over your home town by Christmas 2015.
SCOTT KIDDER — Steve Jobs is one of the Valley's most famous comeback kids. Kicked to the curb by Apple in the 1980s, Jobs went on to buy The Graphics Group for $5 million — now known as Pixar, sold to the Walt Disney Company for $7.4 billion. He also founded NeXT computer, only to have it bought by Apple some ten years later for $402 million, bringing him back to the company that he had resigned from some ten years earlier.
NICK DOUGLAS — Forget RoboCop — the real bad dude in the '87 film is the massive ED-209. But this bumbling behemoth — its one weakness was stairs — couldn't beat Tom Servo in a battle of wits. Here they are, with video of eight other badass sci-fi robots. In the deleted scene below, ED-209 pumps some rounds into a businessman. Cathartic but not safe for work.
NICK DOUGLAS — The Wall Street Journal published a scare-story today on how handheld devices make parents neglect their children. Children "are fearful that parents will be distracted by emails while driving, concerned about Mom and Dad's shortening attention spans and exasperated by their parents' obsession with their gadgets."
Just discovered Drivl.com, a clever daily comedy site with articles like "The Worst-of-Web-2.0 Awards," "Workplace Kama Sutra" (tales of sex in Indian call centers) and "Seven Phases of Owning an iPod" (pictured). Its low Alexa rank indicates this site is an undiscovered gem. Steal the jokes for your water-cooler conversation before this site catches on.
• Apparently Apple made some sort of announcement yesterday. [Gizmodo]
• Is the White House spying on journalists? That's the kind of thing that can get you fired! [CBS]
• Hewlett-Packard Chairman forced out for investigation that spied on journalists. [USAToday]
• Of course, sometimes journalists act like spies. [NYO]
• NYT sells off its TV stations to focus on print newspapers, digital media, and launching new glossy magazines about sections that already exist every other month. [NYT]
So yes, a few developments here at Gawker. Let's chat.
It's Saturday, it's hitting 75 degrees in the Valley, and revelers have taken to the streets. Why the hell are you on the Internet?
Didja have some trouble loading Gawker yesterday? Well, apparently that was because of all the wham-bam gizmos on display this week in Las Vegas.
So remember yesterday when our generously craniumed masters held guns to our heads and made us write something about the awesomeness of Gawker Media's sports site, Deadspin? And remember how one commenter noted that Gawker Media had become a media industry unto itself? And then remember how ashamed we, your gentle Gawker editors, felt about the whole dirty affair?
Gawker's sibling blog, Gizmodo, reports that fashion and technology are once again attempting an awkward, fumbling hookup. The end result is a company called Inclosia that allows gadget makers to accessorize their products with any type of fabric. Guess that means we'll be seeing iPaqs in bright (!) Zac Posen (!) colors (!) soon.
Of fabric and gadgets [Gizmodo]
Pete Rojas, editor of Gawker's sibling blog, Gizmodo, points out a gadget New Yorkers may find handy: a PDA/cell phone/radiation detector. Says Rojas, "Radiation detection is something that'd be nice to have on a PDA, but it's definitely one of those features that you hope you never have the opportunity to find out how well it actually works."
Radiation detector PDA [Gizmodo]
Pete Rojas of Gizmodo (Gawker's sister blog) reports, "...not only was Benjamin Curtis, the 'Dude You're Getting a Dell' Dude, arrested for marijuana possession in New York last night, he was busted right in front of Gizmodo's offices, just as we were coming back from the US premiere of the new Larry Clark film, Ken Park."
Busted! [Gizmodo]
The Lower East Side is officially having its moment [Lockhart Steele]
Smoking Gun breaks Dell dude story [Daily News]
What was Dell dude doing wearing a kilt? [Daily News]
