Street View throws Japan for a loop

Does Google know judo? Maybe. Google Street View has pulled a sutemi--a judo throw in which you launch yourself at the ground, risking disadvantage, to topple your opponent--on the entire Floating Kingdom. Even though Japan knew that the controversial Google Street View was coming to Japan, the tech savvy country was caught off-guard by Google's willingness to involve itself in yet another privacy imbroglio.

The pattern is familiar. Cars mounted with the Google Street View cameras scoot through a neighborhood, taking 360-degree shots of all they surveil. When the feature finally goes live, amused Netizens find images of people in compromising positions, while others decry the end of innocence--uh, privacy.
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Super Talent Techonolgoy's Pico D series: Larger capacity thumbdrive, smaller size

Super Talent Technology, a manufacturer of Flash storage and DRAM memory modules, on Wednesday announced the Pico D, the newest member of world's smallest USB thumbdrives.

Though tiny in size, measuring only 1.4-inch in length and weighing less than 0.2 ounces, the new Pico D series are shock- and water-resistant.

According to STT, these drives can transfer data at speeds up to 30 megabytes per second. Like the Cosair Flash Voyager Mini, the Pico D achieves the miniature size by using chip-on-board technology. However, the Pico D series offers storage capacity up to 8GB, twice that of the Flash Voyager Mini.

Like all other USB devices from STT, the Pico D series is backed with lifetime warranty. The series will be available for purchase for about US$40.

Via CNET Crave

10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far)

We have been reminded several times lately that Web 2.0 is in no way a synonym for "reliable". Major services have crashed. Big product launches have fizzled. Users have raised their collective fists in the air. What's going on? Is the Web crumbling? Well, no, it's not. But users' expectations are rising, and Web companies often get themselves into trouble by promising far more than they can deliver.

Here's the timeline of offline:

Amazon S3 (Also: Google App Engine)
When: February 15 (Amazon); June 17 (Google)

What happened: These massive infrastructure services, Amazon's S3 especially, underpin many Web 2.0 companies. When they go down, big sites go down. When the sites go down, they lose money.

Corporate coping behavior: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels banished to the lecture circuit to explain why S3 is still more reliable than any servers you could run yourself.

The damage: Companies forced to re-consider their reliance on "cloud computing."

Twitter
When: April, May, June. July too? Who cares?

What happened: Twitter began to get unreliable. It's up, then it's down. Repeat.

Corporate coping behavior: During the bad spells, Twitter turns off key features of the service -- like access from Twitter helper apps, or the "replies" tab on the site -- to decrease the load. Twitter also buys the search engine Summize, which adds a new level of utility to the service.

The damage: Twitter was becoming part of the social fabric of the technology community. When it began to get flakey, marquee users abandoned the service and fled to rivals like Friendfeed. The problems appear to have been resolved, but the damage may never be repaired.
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EA inks two partnership deals, including Epic Games

Electronic Arts announced partnership deals with two independent games companies Thursday, including Gears of War publisher Epic Games.

The news of the two new members of the EA Partners program, which also revolved around Japan's Grasshopper Manufacture, publisher of games like No More Heroes, was part of EA's annual Studio Showcase event here.

During just over an hour of announcements and presentations, EA showed off 17 games it didn't show at E3 last month, as well as unveiled the partnerships.

Grasshopper Manufacture will create an all-new action horror game for EA. It will be produced by Shinji Mikami and directed by game designer Suda51.

It was too early, however, for EA or Grasshopper to go into any specifics about the title, and no launch date was given.
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We all love this Olympics, right? Not Adobe

Here's the way things work at Microsoft: After correcting shortcomings in the first and second editions of its software, version 3.0 of a Microsoft product usually silences the company's worst critics, allowing management to get on with business of crushing rivals. But I'll be first to acknowledge that Silverlight breaks with that pattern.

Since the start of the Beijing Olympics, I've been using the Silverlight 2 beta to access video over the Internet and it works just fine. As a loyal Flash user, I was surprised when Microsoft won the deal to supply NBC with video-viewing technology for the Olympics. There was the obvious old-school tie between Microsoft and NBC dating back to their collaboration building MSNBC. Still, this was Adobe Systems' game to lose. And lose it did--big time.

In the end, Microsoft was able to convince NBC it could do more by using Silverlight than by sticking with Flash. Rob Bennett, the general manager of sports for MSN, told me that it came down to a two-day meeting in November, where he brought in the Siliverlight team. I'm simplifying, but his pitch was that Flash's scalability had never been put to an Olympic-size test. Accurate or not, that argument left the desired impression. What's more, even though Silverlight was new on the surface, Microsoft argued that under covers, it was really based on very familiar Windows Media technologies.

"We talked about features like adaptive streaming, the ability to automatically keep checking how much bandwidth you have and deliver the appropriate quality stream and how to be smart about knowing what's coming up in the stream," Bennett said. He added that Microsoft made a point of playing up the scalability of the Windows Media format as well as the ways in which Silverlight could help NBC with copy protection of its video streams.
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