In Search of Airness: Video of the Austin Air Guitar Preliminaries

Enjoy this brief glimpse into the world of competitive air guitar. Filmed by us last Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz Theatre in Austin, Texas, these guys are just the preliminary qualifiers for the international air guitar championship. Relive the only good part of the 1980s that’s still good today as the long hair flies. And yes, if you’re in the Austin area, there’s another qualifier coming up in a couple months so you, too, can compete.

If you’d like to see the video in HD resolution, just hit this link, which will take you to the video’s high-def page on Vimeo.


Star Trek Character or Erectile Dysfunction Pill?

quiz_head_startrekvsed

It doesn’t often happen that the funniest thing I’ve seen all day would be a mental_floss quiz, but that happened today. And I thought of you. Can you identify whether ten names are Star Trek characters or erectile dysfunction medications? I couldn’t; my score fell within the margin of error for random guesses, which is pretty much what they were.

Microsoft includes Apple stores in TV ad

Microsoft’s latest TV commercials take a stark step forward for the firm: it flat out acknowledges Apple.

In the past, Microsoft advertising had always focused entirely on its own products, unlike Apple which runs the direct comparison tactics of ‘PC vs Mac’. Even when Microsoft threw in a not-so-subtle reference in its ‘I’m a PC’ campaign, there was no sign of Apple.

That’s pretty standard practice in advertising: the largest firm in a market rarely acknowledges its rivals, while smaller firms use direct comparisons to try to overcome the perception that bigger is better.

But the latest Microsoft spot changes that. It features a character looking for a 17-inch laptop for under a thousand dollars. She goes into what is clearly an Apple store and, not surprisingly, fails in her quest, instead winding up getting an HP laptop from what appears to be Best Buy. Here is the commercial:

As well as focusing on the price, the ad takes a dig at Apple’s branding and marketing with the shopper declaring that “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person”.

That might be a risky tactic. It certainly fits in with the Microsoft argument that Macs are overpriced because they are fashionable, but the logical conclusion is that PCs are not cool products. Combined with highlighting that they are inexpensive (which can be read as ‘cheap’), and it’s not the type of branding most on Madison Avenue would advocate.

The Associated Press reports that the commercial was unscripted. The shopper, Lauren, was recruited through a Craigslist posting and told she could keep whichever machine she bought.

Microsoft explicitly advertising PCs as cheaper than Macs may be new, but it’s a point the company has made before. Last October Brad Brooks, who heads Microsoft’s consumer marketing, said there was an Apple tax: a series of costs such as limited choice and upgrades which make Macs even less value than their retail price would suggest.

Twitter hoping to tweet all the way to the bank

Bosses at Twitter think they’ve solved the site’s major problem: how to make cash without alienating the user base.

The company has confirmed it will offer premium accounts where businesses pay a subscription fee to access extra services, but maintains that the existing system of free accounts for all will remain unchanged.

Co-founder Biz Stone told Reuters he believed firms would pay to access services which will help them get “even more” value out of Twitter.

The firm isn’t saying anything else about what services a premium account would include. One possibility is that it would include getting priority access to Twitter’s servers, making such users less likely to see the dreaded “fail whale” that appears when the site is overloaded. That would be stretching the promise to maintain services to free account users: the functionality would remain unchanged, but the reliability would potentially deteriorate.

It’s also possible Twitter could be thinking of offering features such as an enhanced search or monitoring service. But it’s tough to see how the site would make those marketable without restricting the access that existing third-party services such as TweetDeck and Twirhl currently enjoy.

The news comes as Twitter announces it’s first significant revenue stream, a sponsorship deal with Microsoft. In return for its payment, the Microsoft branding will appear on ExecTweets, a site which carries a stream of Twitter posts from leading business executives.

Twitter has denied its received any cash from people who appear on ‘Suggested Users’, a list which appears alongside the site’s tools for finding existing friends on the service. As appearing on the list greatly increases the number of people following your messages, it would be a valuable opportunity for anyone using Twitter as a promotional tool.

However, Stone says spots on the list are not for sale. Instead the firm uses an automated program for identifying users with lots of followers who post regularly. Staff then check these results and pick out those which they believe people will genuinely be most interested in.

CallCatalog.com tries to throw the book at unwanted callers

By Sterling “Chip” Camden
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

I hate the telephone.  As far as I’m concerned, the only reason why it ever succeeded as a communication medium is because we didn’t have email (and the only reason we’re still using email is because we don’t yet have anything better).  You might argue that the phone is superior to email, because you can pick up nuances from the speaker’s voice — but I find that advantage outweighed by several other factors:

  • The phone is non-visual (at least, for now).  Even though email doesn’t show me your face either, it does show me your words.  I can run my eyes back over them as many times as I need in order to process your meaning.
  • Email is disconnected.  I don’t have to respond to your statement within seconds.  I can take my time to think about what I’ll say.
  • The telephone interrupts.  It demands my attention now (unless I turn the ringer off).

That last bullet is even more deadly when the interruption comes from someone you don’t want to talk to anyway.  And even (or maybe especially) if you add your number to the National Do Not Call Registry, telemarketers and other phone-spammers never tire of punching it in — and they seem to have a telepathic sense of when you’re eating dinner, taking a shower, or engaged in… um… other activities you hate to have interrupted.

A web site called CallCatalog seeks to provide some relief from the phone hounds.  It’s a crowd-sourced repository (that’s a fancy term for “users supply all the data”) of telephone numbers that originated calls that recipients didn’t want to receive.  You can then take the caller ID from your own harassing call and search CallCatalog’s database to get as much information about your caller as other users have supplied.  You can also add your own comments, or report a new number that’s not already in the database.

When reporting an incident, you’re asked for your name or nickname.  No sign-up is required, so these reports are essentially anonymous.  Seems to me that invites gaming — just key in your competition’s phone number and report them as harassing.

As you can see in the image above, CallCatalog uses a CAPTCHA to attempt to thwart spammers (wouldn’t that be ironic if they got spammed?).  Furthermore, I noticed that CallCatalog’s moderators have removed some external links that users put in the comments — which also discourages spam.

The site includes three blog-like pages (meaning, they get new items added periodically) related to telephone privacy: News, How To, and Videos.  Unfortunately, none of these pages offer a feed.

Optimistically, this site serves as an example of how the Internet can be used to aggregate information to empower users.  But realistically, I have to wonder how useful this information can be.  Most of the entries I perused were along the lines of “Who are these people?  Make it stop!”  Will finding out that you’re just one of ten thousand people whom a particular caller is hounding help you to take action against them?  Or will you have to be satisfied with the knowledge that at least you’re not alone?

Space shuttle Q&A leads to video game Discovery

If you asked 100 adults which question they’d most like to ask an astronaut, probably 95% of the responses would involve bodily functions. But American children have a different question: Do astronauts play video games in space?

That was the first question asked by a group of schoolchildren who joined Barack Obama for a live link-up with the crew of the Discovery shuttle which is currently orbiting Earth. The reply came from one crew member that:

We can, in fact. And in fact a few years ago when I was up here for six months I had a video game that I used to play in my spare time. Unfortunately, we don’t have much spare time. So we can, we have a lot of laptop computers. But for the most part we stay real busy doing real work.

The chat also revealed that the crew receives a daily electronic e-mail including all the latest NCAA March Madness results.

It will come too late for the crew of Discovery, but NASA is working on a game titled Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond. The CEO of one of the firms involved in the game, Information in Place, says it could help spark interest in sciences, mathematics and technology: “When [students] see that they can use these skills to build something – like a space shuttle or a greenhouse – then they understand why it’s important.”

NASA certainly seems happier dealing with children than adults at the moment. It’s still deciding on how to deal with the results of an online contest it ran to name a new wing on the International Space Station. The leading option suggested by NASA, ‘Serenity’, wound up 40,000 votes behind the top write-in suggestion ‘Stephen Colbert’.