[LINK] Pogue: Best Tech Ideas of the Year

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

State of the Art

The Pogies: Best Tech Ideas of the Year

By DAVID POGUE  www.nytimes.com Published: December 29, 2010

Welcome to the Sixth Annual Pogie Awards! 

Yes, it’s time once again to recognize the best tech ideas of the year.
Not the best products — sometimes, a Pogie award-winning feature crops up 
in a product that, over all, is a turkey. No, these awards go to the best 
ideas in products, clever twists that make life just a little bit better. 

First, however, let’s get a few things straight: These are fake awards. 
There’s no trophy. There’s no ceremony. There’s no $500-a-plate dinner. 
It’s just me, quietly making notes all year long. (Every year, a few 
earnest P.R. people write me to ask about the deadline for submissions. 
If I had any brains, I’d tell ’em it’s Aug. 15 — and I’d tell ’em about 
the $300 application fee.) 

Here we go. Keep hands and feet inside the tram at all times! 


FACE-AWARE ZOOMING (BEST BUY INSIGNIA FRAMES) Like many digital picture 
frames, Best Buy’s can add an attractive transition effect between slide 
show photos. It offers the Ken Burns effect as one of the transition 
styles. With this effect, the photos are constantly in motion, gradually 
zooming in while cross-fading from one to the next. 

The trouble with the Ken Burns effect, of course, is that the computer 
generally has no clue what part of the photo it’s zooming into. You often 
wind up with a beautiful, graceful, professional-looking zoom — into your 
mother’s knees. 

Best Buy, however, built in face-recognition software. If it detects a 
face in a photo, it zooms into that, or from one to the next if there are 
several. It even removes red-eye on the fly. Tiny details, yes — but 
smart ones. 


IMOVIE MOVIE TRAILERS Plenty of software makes you more productive or 
more efficient — but Apple’s iMovie ’11 actually makes you laugh. Its new 
Movie Trailers feature gives you a choice of 15 professional-looking 
movie trailers: action, documentary, drama, romantic comedy and so on. 

Each is a template into which you insert clips from your own home videos; 
a storyboard screen recommends dropping an action shot here, a group shot 
there. The software provides the rest, including titles with very 
Hollywood animated effects, stunning backgrounds and, above all, 
hilariously on-target movie music, recorded just for iMovie by the London 
Symphony Orchestra. 

Then it spits out a thoroughly convincing movie trailer in the style you 
chose. It’s amazing to see how scenes from your own mundane life can be 
transformed with a little help from some epic music and eye-catching 
credits. If anything can persuade visitors to sit through your home 
movies, this is it. 


WORD LENS When a reader sent me a video of this iPhone app, I wrote 
back: “Very funny!” I was convinced that the video was fake. 

But it wasn’t. You point the iPhone’s camera at anything written in 
Spanish — say, a sign, headline or restaurant menu — and you see, on the 
screen, the English translation. 

The crazy mind-blower is that you see the original sign — same angle, 
color, background material, lighting — with new writing on it! Somehow, 
the app erases the original text and replaces it with new lettering, in 
the same type size and spacing, but in English. (Spanish-to-English and 
English-to-Spanish are each $5. The free version demonstrates the 
fundamental magic by rewriting the sign’s text sdrawkcab.) 

It’s a word for word, literal translation; don’t expect poetry or even 
perfect grammar. And complicated backgrounds or fonts confuse it. But 
this is software magic. 


WINDOWS PHONE 7 CAMERA BUTTON Microsoft Windows Phone 7 is a rival to the 
iPhone and Android phones, but with a genuinely fresh, smart design. One 
example: You can use the phone’s camera even when the phone itself is 
turned off. Just hold down the shutter button to turn on only the 
camera “side.” You spend less time fussing, waiting and missing photo 
ops. 

FASTMAC U-SOCKET With every passing month, more gadgets can be recharged 
from a U.S.B. jack: music players (including iPods), cellphones 
(including iPhones and Android phones), cameras, GPS units and so on. 
Which means that to charge them, you typically need a computer that, 
itself, plugs into a power outlet. 

Not anymore. This $20 wall plate includes two regular three-prong power 
outlets — and two standard U.S.B. jacks. Now you can plug gadgets 
directly into the wall to recharge, no computer needed. 


SAMSUNG TWIN VIEW REMOTE The Samsung 9000 series is a family of 
shockingly thin, chrome-backed flat LED TV screens. Terrific picture, 
excellent blacks, 3-D capable, Internet widgets, blah-blah-blah. 

But the coolest part is the remote. It’s a responsive, compact color 
touch-screen remote (about the size of an iPhone) — and it offers Twin 
View. That’s where the remote’s screen shows whatever the TV is showing. 
If you take the remote to the kitchen or bathroom with you, you can take 
a break without missing anything. Or you can surreptitiously monitor what 
your kids are watching downstairs. 

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SONY A55 TRANSLUCENT MIRROR In a regular S.L.R. camera (single-lens 
reflex — those big black pro cameras), light enters the lens, hits a 
mirror and is bounced up to your eye and, simultaneously, onto a focusing 
sensor. Unfortunately, when you take the photo, the mirror has to flip 
out of the way so that the light falls on the image sensor (the “film”). 
At that point, the camera can’t focus. That’s why most S.L.R.’s can’t 
change focus during burst-mode shots, or while filming video. 

Sony’s A55 camera ($850) solves that problem by using a translucent 
mirror. It splits light between the focusing sensor and the image sensor. 
The mirror never moves, so the autofocus never goes blind. The camera can 
take 10 shots a second, refocusing all the way — no other camera can do 
that — and change focus as you pan or zoom, gorgeously and cinematically. 
No wonder this was Popular Photography’s camera of the year. 


SAMSUNG PL90 FLIP-OUT U.S.B. When you want to transfer photos from your 
camera to your computer, you probably hunt for the U.S.B. cable. The 
masterstroke here: this camera has a flip-out U.S.B. jack, just like the 
Flip camcorder. So you never need to pack or find a cable or a card 
reader when you want to transfer pictures; the camera connects right to 
the computer. 


CABLE COMPANY WI-FI ALLIANCES Last year, America’s cable TV companies 
began installing regionwide wireless Internet hot spots, free for use by 
their cable Internet customers. Your laptop, phone or Touch is always 
online when you’re in public places around town. It was supposed to be an 
irresistible bonus, a freebie that their phone company rivals couldn’t 
match. 

This year, some of them had an even better idea: team up. In New York, 
New Jersey and Connecticut, for example, Cablevision, Time Warner and 
Comcast decided to merge their Wi-Fi networks. Now any customer of any 
one of those companies can enjoy the Wi-Fi hot spots provided by the 
other two as well — free. Competition makes strange bedfellows, eh? 


CHECK DEPOSIT APPS If you rate Pogie nominees by the number of hours, 
miles and headaches saved, surely this one should walk away with the 
Pogie Ultimo. 

Any customer of Chase Bank (and some customers of USAA, which had the 
idea first) can deposit a check just by taking a picture of it with an 
iPhone or Android phone. That’s right: sign the back, use the app to 
photograph the front and back, type the amount, and tap send. 

You’ve just made a fully legitimate deposit; at this point, you can 
actually rip up the check. No deposit slip, no driving, no A.T.M. 
envelopes. It’s good technology that benefits the environment, the 
parking lots and you. 

And that, friends, is a beautiful thing. 

Happy high-tech new year!

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Cheers,
Stephen